The Invisible Line (67 page)

52
Spencer v. Looney
(Va. 1914).

53
1930 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va.; “Melvin Spencer,”
Virginia Mountaineer
, May 6, 1982.

54
Hinds,
Geology and Coal Resources
, p. 193; R. L. Humbert,
Industrial Survey: Buchanan County, Virginia
(Blacksburg: Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1930), p. 36.

1
Henry Field,
The Track of Man: Adventures of an Anthropologist
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 199-200; see generally Patricia A. Morton,
Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

2
Morton quotes two French writers describing the Exposition in 1931 in
Hybrid Modernities
, p. 5.

3
Ibid., pp. 43, 45.

4
Field,
Track of Man
, p. 199; Joe Nickell,
Secrets of the Sideshows
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), pp. 189-90.

5
Field,
Track of Man
, p. 199; Morton,
Hybrid Modernities
, pp. 97-129.

6
Field,
Track of Man
, pp. 113-14; Ed Yastrow and Stephen E. Nash, “Henry Field: Collections, and Exhibit Development, 1926-1941,” in
Curators, Collections, and Contexts: Anthropology at the Field Museum, 1893-2002
, ed. Stephen E. Nash and Gary M. Feinman (Chicago: Field Museum, 2003), pp. 127-28.

7
Field,
Track of Man
, pp. 199-200.

8
Malvina Hoffman,
Heads and Tales
(New York: Scribner's, 1936), pp. 172, 174.

9
Field,
Track of Man
, pp. 191, 194. See also Hoffman,
Heads and Tales.

10
Hoffman,
Heads and Tales
, p. 150.

11
Field,
Track of Man
, pp. 132-33.

12
Ibid., p. 134.

13
Ibid., pp. 190-91.

14
Hoffman,
Heads and Tales
, p. 177.

15
Ibid., pp. 182, 332; Pamela Hibbs Decoteau, “Malvina Hoffman and the ‘Races of Man,'”
Women's Art Journal
10 (1989-1990), p. 7; Field,
Track of Man
, p. 198.

16
Field,
Track of Man
, pp. 14-15; “Henry Field Comes from London to Take Up His Abode Here,”
Chicago Tribune
, October 8, 1926, p. 35; Philip J. Funigiello,
Florence Lathrop Page: A Biography
(Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1994), p. 272n44.

17
“Gen. Gibson's Will,”
Daily Picayune,
April 5, 1893, p. 3; Mary Gorton McBride with Ann Mathison McLaurin,
Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana: Confederate General and New South Reformer
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), p. 257.

18
Preston Gibson, “The Human Side of the Late Chief Justice White,”
New York Times
, May 22, 1921, sec. 7, p. 2.

19
Leita Montgomery Kent to Hart Gibson, September 19, 1894, Pettit Collection.

20
“Baseball and Negro Minstrels were among his early delights, and the writer remembers him as a slim lad, playing ball all afternoon and being treated to Dockstader's Minstrels ... in the evening”: see “In Town and Country,”
Town and Country
, August 17, 1912, p. 17. See also Robert Neville, “He's Lieutenant Preston Gibson of the Marines ‘For Life!'”
New York World
, October 12, 1918, which notes, “His Kentucky Negro stories have gained great popularity.”

21
Preston Gibson,
The Turning Point: A Play in Three Acts
(New York: Samuel French, 1910), p. 53.

22
“Castles' ‘Half-and-Half Dance Ugly,' Says Preston Gibson, Giving Opinions of the True Stepping Art in the Ballroom,”
Washington Post
, February 24, 1914, p. 4.

23
See generally Preston Gibson,
S.O.S. and Five One Act Plays
(New York: Samuel French, 1912).

24
“Gibson Admits He Took from Wilde,”
New York Times
, March 1, 1910, p. 7.

25
Karl K. Kitchen, “He Has Achieved a Notable Record in Wedding a Procession of Wealthy and Beautiful Women, Who Subsequently Divorced Him, Yet His Popularity Is Unabated and His Re-engagement Is Rumored—The Story of a Man With the Fatal Gift of Charm,”
World Magazine
, July 20, 1924, in Preston Gibson Alumni File, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

26
Preston Gibson,
Battering the Boche
(New York: Century, 1918).

27
Ibid., p. 64.

28
“Preston Gibson, 57, Yale Athlete, Dies,”
New York Times
, February 16, 1937.

29
“Wife of Preston Gibson Starts Divorce Action,”
Chicago Tribune
, July 4, 1921, p. 10; Kitchen, “He Has Achieved.”

30
John Powell, “Preston Gibson, Social Lion, Faces Jail on Fraud Charge,”
Chicago Daily Tribune,
February 11, 1928, p. 3; “Free Preston Gibson, Charges Dropped,”
New York Times
, February 19, 1928, p. 23; “Fourth Wife Freed From Gibson,”
New York Times
, December 20, 1928, p. 17; “Preston Gibson Held in New York on Check Charge,”
Chicago Daily Tribune,
January 30, 1929, p. 3.

31
“Preston Gibson, Who Packed Ten Lives Into One, Dies at 57,”
Washington Post
, February 16, 1937, p. 1; Kitchen, “He Has Achieved.”

32
“Chicago Fair Opened by Farley,”
New York Times
, May 28, 1933, p. 1; Field,
Track of Man
, p. 211.

33
See Marianne Beatrice Kinkel, “Circulating Race: Malvina Hoffman and the Field Museum's Races of Mankind Sculptures” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2001), pp. 146-59.

34
Berthold Laufer, introduction,
The Races of Mankind: An Introduction to Chauncey Keep Memorial Hall
(Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1933), pp. 5-6; Kinkel,
Circulating Race.

35
Field,
Track of Man
, pp. 227-28.

36
Ibid., pp. 226-27.

1
Isabel Wall Whittemore, interview by author, August 24, 2008, South Tamworth, N.H.

2
Ibid.

3
Ibid.

4
1920 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C.; Whittemore interview.

5
Stephen R. Wall Personnel File, National Archives, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis; Whittemore interview.

6
Elizabeth J. Gates Personnel File, National Archives, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis.

7
“Pupils in Eighth Grade Win Promotions to High Schools,”
Washington Post
, January 27, 1918, p. 13; “Man Tries Suicide by Bridge Plunge,”
Washington Post
, April 25, 1933, p. 1; Whittemore interview.

8
Whittemore interview; “Wages and Hours of Labor in the Lumber, Millwork, and Furniture Industries, 1915,”
Bulletin of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
, No. 225, Wages and Hours of Labor Series No. 26 (1918), pp. 88-89.

9
Hudson [Mass.] City Directory (1941), p. 35; Whittemore interview.

10
Whittemore interview.

11
Ibid.

12
Ibid.

13
Ibid.

14
Ibid.

15
See “Amateur Actors on the Stage,”
Washington Post
, June 4, 1889, p. 4; “Graduates of Martyn College,”
Washington Post
, June 5, 1889, p. 7. “Miss Bel Irene Wall will appear in Junior Excelsior's Ovation, June 19, at the Metropolitan Church,” classified advertisement,
Washington Post
, June 16, 1889, p. 2; Edmund Shaftesbury,
Lessons in the Mechanics of Personal Magnetism
(Washington, D.C.: Martyn College Press, 1888), title page; and Isabel Irene Elterich, “Ebony, Ivory and Cologne,”
Roycroft
1 (1917), p. 121.

16
1900 U.S. Census, Queens County, N.Y. According to immigration records, G. Otto Elterich completed six trips to Europe between 1904 and 1906. See New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957,
Ancestry.com
.

17
“Drown in the Thames,”
Washington Post
, June 8, 1907, p. 3.

18
Ibid.

19
Isabel I. Elterich, Shield for Ladies Drawers, Patent No. 872,172; Isabel Wall Elterich,
The Girl of the Golden Future
(East Aurora, N.Y.: The Roycrofters, 1918), p. 45; see also Lara Freidenfelds,
The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

20
Elterich,
Girl of Golden Future
, pp. 13, 21, 23, 29-30, 44.

21
Ibid., pp. 5, 32, 34.

22
Elterich, “Ebony, Ivory and Cologne,” pp. 121-22; see also Ann Mikkelsen, “From Sympathy to Empathy: Anzia Yezierska and the Transformation of the American Subject,”
American Literature
82 (2010), pp. 361ff.

23
Whittemore interview.

24
Ibid.

25
Ibid.; see generally Lorraine B. Diehl and Marianne Hardart,
The Automat: The History, Recipes, and Allure of Horn & Hardart's Masterpiece
(New York: Clarkson Potter, 2002).

26
Whittemore interview; Marshall Berman,
On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square
(New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 204-5; Darcy Tell,
Times Square Spectacular
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 119-21.

27
Whittemore interview.

28
Ibid.

29
“Return District Boys to Face Theft Charge,”
Washington Post
, September 2, 1923, p. 6.

30
“Hit-and-Run Charge Nets 45 Days in Jail,”
Washington Post
, July 7, 1928, p. 16; “Langdon Held, Denies Part in Girl's Slaying,”
Washington Post
, January 4, 1931, p. M1.

31
“Roscoe Orin Wall ..., who also goes under the name of Stephen Roscoe Gates, has been sued by his wife for limited divorce and maintenance, ... and he is apparently avoiding service of process in that suit”: see Wilson L. Townsend to Register of Wills, Washington, D.C., August 25, 1934,
In re: Estate of Stephen Roscoe Wall,
No. 47085, photocopy courtesy of Thomas L. Murphy.

32
Record in
Murphy v. State
, 184 Md. 70 (Md. 1944) (No. 52), Maryland State Archives, Annapolis.

33
Thomas L. Murphy, interview by author, October 28, 2005, Hampton, Ga.;
Murphy v. State,
p. 80.

34
Murphy v. State
, p. 75; “Maryland Garage Operator Sentenced to Die for Rape,”
Washington Post
, April 29, 1944, p. 1; “Death Sentence in Rape Upheld by Md. Court,”
Washington Post
, December 14, 1944, p. 9.

35
“Maryland Garage Operator Sentenced to Die for Rape,”
Washington Post
, April 29, 1944, p. 1.

36
Ibid.

37
Ibid.

38
“Convicted Rapist Hanged in State Penitentiary,”
Baltimore Sun
, July 20, 1945, p. 22.

39
Whittemore interview.

1
Hart Gibson, “The Race Problem,” Pettit Collection.

2
Ibid
.

3
Ibid
.
; George M. Fredrickson,
The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 228-55.

4
Gibson, “Race Problem.”

5
Freda Spencer Goble, interview by author, August 29, 2005, Paintsville, Ky.

6
See, e.g., Edward Ball,
Slaves in the Family
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

7
For critiques of DNA ancestry testing, see Duana Fullwiley, “The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture' Technology and the New Genetic Medicine,”
Social Studies of Science
38 (2008), pp. 695ff; Deborah A. Bolnick et al., “The Science and Business of Ancestry Testing,”
Science
318 (2007), pp. 399-400.

8
Winthrop D. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,”
William and Mary Quarterly
, 3d ser., 19 (1962), pp. 183, 189-91; William LaBach, interview by author, March 4, 2009, Georgetown, Ky.

9
Thomas Murphy, interview by author, October 28, 2005, Hampton, Ga.

10
Goble interview.

11
Ibid
.

12
Ibid
.

13
Isabel Wall Whittemore, interview by author, August 24, 2008, South Tamworth, N.H.

14
Ibid
.

15
Ibid
.

abolitionists:

and civil rights

and Congress

and Fugitive Slave Act

in Kentucky

moving toward radical stance

and Negro Exodus

in New Haven

in Oberlin

Quakers

resistance to slave-catchers

Southern responses to

at Yale

Adams, Marian

African Americans:

assimilation of

black troops