America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But, to some descendants of America’s oldest families, the weight of upholding such a gospel could be just too much to bear. It could sometimes seem as though one were being required to bear the weight of God himself. Added to this weight was the heavy onus of family traditions, the weight of ancient heroism, the weight of leadership, the weight of past achievements, of excellence, the weight of nearly three hundred years of proud American history. In some families, inheriting great wealth (the Kennedys are conceivably a case in point) can seem to bring with it a kind of bane. But in others, the curse can come from inheriting—and being expected to live up to—a prestigious ancestral name. When one was born, say, a Livingston or a Jay, so much was expected of one from the outset. The past cried out to a Jay heir to match or even transcend his ancestors, mighty, godly, patriotic deeds. Sometimes the results of bearing such inherited burdens would be positive in terms of strengthened character and backbone. But, to the frail or the uncertain or the neurasthenic, the results could just as easily be harshly negative. For the uncertain child, being born into a proud old family could be less a blessing than a family curse, as the struggle to uphold the family name and honor becomes unbearable and finally impossible, and the child turns from uncertainty to rebelliousness, from rebelliousness to eccentricity, and from eccentricity to madness—while, all the time, his family keeps insisting that this disaster cannot be happening to them. This, at least, is one explanation for the tortured life of John Jay Chapman. The burdens of aristocracy were more than he could shoulder. But who knows for sure?

  Henry and Eleanor Jay Chapman had raised their children in Manhattan and at Jay Farm, the thousand-acre family spread in suburban Bedford, New York, which the first John Jay’s grandfather Jacobus Van Cortlandt bought from the Indian chief Katonah in 1703. Jay Farm was—and still is—an idyllic place consisting mostly of rolling woodlands, old stone walls, and ancient bridle paths. From the crest of the highest hills, it was possible to see across the Kisco and Croton valleys (both turned into reservoirs now) to the town of Dunderberg on the Hudson River. It was to the farm that John and Sarah Jay retired after his long career in public life.

  In addition to the old frame farmhouse itself, there were stone cottages and outbuildings, a cider mill, an ancient rose garden, a pond, barns and haymows, and stables filled with horses, Shetland ponies for the children, old hacks, dog carts, sulkies, carriages, and tack that had been used by generations of Jays. At the same time, by the end of the nineteenth century, the farm had become a repository of old memories and, to the Jay children at least, a somewhat spooky place. The Jays were another family who never threw anything away, and there were more than two hundred years’ worth of family silver, furniture, books, mementos, trunksful of Revolutionary uniforms and the dresses Sarah Jay brought home from Paris, and, outside in the yard, the grave of Old Fred, the horse that carried Colonel William Jay in the Civil War. And of course there were the family portraits gazing down from the walls, by Stuart and Trumbull, of Washington, Hamilton, Egbert Benson, as well as the remarkable Stuart of the Chief Justice himself and a bust of him by Ceracchi, and the portraits of William Jay and his wife by Vanderlyn. Jay Farm had become more like a family museum, or even mausoleum, than a home, and even before John Jay Chapman’s departure for St. Paul’s, the boy’s head was filled with thoughts of darkness and death, of ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Still, more than anything else, this brooding, temperamental child wanted to play the violin.

  If there was one message conveyed by Jay Farm—particularly to the younger, more impressionable members of the family who gathered there every summer—it was: Excel, excel. You are a Jay, and we are your ancestors, and look what we managed to accomplish on less than you have inherited from us. It is up to you to do as well as we did, or better, and to bring more honor and glory to the Jay name. And there was also a religious message, as the family trooped off every Sunday morning dutifully to worship at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, where there were more reminders of the family’s long prominence in the region: stained-glass windows, pews, altar decorations, a reredos, all benefactions from the Jays. The Jays, the message read, had been generous to God, and therefore God had been generous to the Jays.

  There are several family theories about what was wrong with John Jay Chapman, other than that the clustering of Jay family genes over so many generations had resulted in too rarified a mixture—so rarified that it became explosive. “He was my grandfather’s first cousin,” says one of the contemporary Jays. “By then, there was a family tradition that one studied law, but one didn’t practice it. Instead, one was supposed to sit down and carpenter some great social document, like the United States Constitution, and pass into history. John Jay Chapman wrote … and wrote … and wrote, and nobody had the slightest idea what he was writing about. He became a professional dilettante, an aristocratic nut.”

  Another family member disagrees. “It was his mother’s fault,” this woman says. “She indulged him, encouraged him to be what she called an enfant terrible. Because he was a Jay, she assumed he had to be a genius, and because he was a Jay, he could do no wrong. She had heard about aristocratic English eccentrics. That was what she allowed her son to become. In today’s terms, we’d call him a spoiled brat. Whenever things didn’t go exactly as he thought they ought to go, for a Jay, he’d throw one of his fits.”

  Certainly aristocratic eccentrics were nothing new in the Jay clan. In a family of dedicated equestrians, one Jay—as a kind of reverse snobbery—insisted on riding a white mule and even taught the animal to jump fences. Eleanor Jay’s grandfather had raised eyebrows when he wore a bright red necktie to his wife’s funeral. This same old gentleman, when a visiting Englishman had innocently proposed a toast to the president of the United States (James Buchanan, of whom the host disapproved), had overturned his wineglass on the dinner table and announced, “I won’t drink it.” Even before it was fashionable, the Jays had been staunch abolitionists, and one Jay grandmother had startled her friends and social peers by actually inviting “Negro females” to her house and seating them at her table. Nonconformity, furthermore, was a trait that the Jays encouraged. As a result, when Eleanor Jay Chapman’s younger son John threw violent temper tantrums in front of guests when he did not get his way, this behavior was dismissed by his indulgent mother as simply “Jack expressing himself.”

  Another family member says, a little sadly, “All he wanted, really, was for someone to pay attention to him, someone to listen to him. He was like an Old Testament prophet—even looked like one after he grew that dreadful beard—roaming through the streets, crying, ‘The Messiah has come! The Messiah has come!’ But no one listened to him, not even his mother. He led a miserable life.”

  What John Jay Chapman was to become was a champion of lost, losing, or simply hopeless causes, or Causes.

  At St. Paul’s School, Chapman was not popular with his schoolmates. It was what seemed to be his excessive religiosity that was most off-putting. He had a habit of suddenly falling to his knees, in prayer, in the classroom or on the playground, and his classmates learned that in the woodlands behind the school John Chapman had created a secret shrine of his own to which he would repair for private religious rites. In his third year at St. Paul’s, he began to complain of mysterious physical ailments. He was losing his eyesight. His back was so weak that he could not stand up. He was examined by the school physician, who could find nothing wrong with him and who recommended “any employment which will make him forget himself.” But, in the end, this difficult student was too much even for the formidable headmaster, the Reverend Dr. Henry Augustus Coit. Writing to Chapman’s parents that their son was “very morbidly conscientious,” Coit recommended that he leave the school and return home. It was the beginning of one of the long series of nervous breakdowns that would plague Chapman for the rest of his tormented life.

  At home, he was lovingly nursed back to health by doting family servants, and it was decided that he would continue his
education, and preparation for Harvard, under the less stressful guidance of private tutors.

  There was never any question but that the boy would go to Harvard. Jays always went to Harvard. At Harvard, John Jay Chapman was expected to, and did, join the Porcellian Club, that famously elite institution that has, for its front window, a one-way mirror, allowing members of Porcellian to look out on the campus, while outsiders looking in can see only their own reflections. Chapman was taken into Porcellian not because he was well liked but simply because he was a Jay, an aristocrat or, as he himself liked to call himself, an “aristophil”—a lover of aristocracy. As he wrote later, “Come down to it and you find the paradox that only aristocrats are truly democratic in their social conduct and feeling. They only are simple—they have nothing to gain and nothing to lose, and have the freedom and simplicity of human beings.”

  At Harvard, because of who he was, Chapman was invited to the proper Bostonian homes of such Brahmin families as the Cabots and Lawrences and Lowells and Saltonstalls and Russells and Sargents and Searses. It was a milieu that Chapman seemed to enjoy for the first time in his life. As he wrote home, “Certainly it is not respectable not to have money, and all the tribute paid to wealth has its foundation in right. Not to have it shows a lack of force of character—either in yourself or in your fathers—coming sooner or later from vice or disregard of law. If this is not so, morality has no foundation.” It was the gospel of wealth, phrased another way.

  At Harvard, too, Chapman pursued his dream of becoming a great American concert violinist and at the same time displayed that recurring theme of violence and self-destruction that seemed periodically to haunt his thoughts. After hearing a child prodigy perform at a Boston concert, Chapman wrote to his mother:

  To play like that I’d cut off my foot with a hatchet, I’d pull off my ear by main force, I’d walk naked nine times around Boston, I’d swallow a fishing hook, I’d throw President Eliot out of his own parlor window sash and all—I’d go ten days without eating and before touching a morsel, I’d seize a violin and say, “Now! Listen!”

  Alas, many of his fellow Cantabrigians were forced to listen to his discordant scrapings on the instrument. They threw rocks and lumps of coal at his door and hurled alarm clocks through his window at Thayer Hall to get him to stop, but despite everything he played obsessively on. Excel! Excel! his ancestors were crying out to him. He also decided that he might become a great American playwright or perhaps a great violinist and a great playwright, and he wrote in his diary, “The English stage stands in great need of a Dramatist whether comic or tragic—something real, of definite character. Perhaps I am the man. I’ve always thought the stage my vocation.” It became another of Chapman’s obsessions that would recur throughout his life, with the onset of another period of frenzied and obsessive behavior, usually signaling the coming of another of his breakdowns.

  And it was at Harvard that John Jay Chapman committed the bizarre and grisly act that would indeed make him famous, in a limited sort of way, within his own circle, but for all the wrong reasons and not for anything he himself could have wished to be famous for. He had fallen madly in love with a young woman named Minna Timmins, the daughter of a wealthy Bostonian, George Henry Timmins. Minna, it seemed, had fallen in love with him. The two would eventually marry. But love, according to those who observed him that autumn of 1886, had made him moody, withdrawn, and forgetful—even forgetting dates with his beloved, which must have made Minna wonder how sincere his protestations of love might really be. He brooded and walked about the Harvard campus talking and arguing with himself over arcane matters no one could understand, while Minna’s parents (who were rich but not quite Brahmins) waited breathlessly for the romance to develop further. After all, their daughter was not exactly pretty and was a bit on the plump side, but she was being courted by a Jay. Yet to those who had observed Chapman’s behavior in the past, there were ominous signs that an explosion was coming.

  The occasion for it was a black-tie soirée at the Brookline home of Mr. and Mrs. Walter C. Cabot. John Jay Chapman had of course been invited and was already in attendance. Up the Cabot front walk strolled another male guest in full evening dress. He was Percival Lowell, aged thirty-two—seven years Chapman’s senior—handsome, urbane, and considered one of Boston’s great bachelor “catches.” His brother Abbott Lawrence Lowell would become president of Harvard, and his sister Amy would become a leading Imagist poet. Percival Lowell himself would go on to become a leading astronomer whose controversial theories about intelligent life on Mars would be widely circulated. All at once, out the Cabots’ front door and down the front steps charged John Jay Chapman, brandishing a heavy walking stick; to the horror of other guests who watched the scene from the doorway, he began beating the more slightly built Lowell over the head with the stick. When Lowell finally fell, bloodied, upon the walkway, Chapman ran off into the night.

  The attack, and the viciousness of it, seemed totally unprovoked. It was true that Lowell was considered something of a ladies’ man and belonged to the same dramatic club as Minna Timmins. But if it was jealousy that provoked Chapman’s murderous rage, there was no foundation for it. Percival Lowell had not been a suitor of Minna’s. In fact, he had not shown the slightest interest in her. Lowell was picked up and carried into the house, and his cuts and contusions were bathed and bandaged. As for Chapman, he had disappeared and for the next two days could not be found—two days about which, as he later recounted, he had absolutely no recollection.

  Naturally, no charges were pressed against Chapman for the assault, nor was the incident reported in the newspapers. It was written off as simply an altercation between two gentlemen of the same social class who were both members of Porcellian, though Mr. Lowell was no longer an undergraduate.

  Since the attack on Lowell seemed so mindless, it would soon be forgotten, but what happened in its aftermath would never be by those who knew John Jay Chapman. After his two “lost” days, as Chapman wrote almost matter-of-factly in his memoir, “Retrospections”:*

  The next thing I remember is returning late at night to my room. At that time I was rooming alone in a desolate side-street in Cambridge. It was a small, dark horrid little room. I sat down. There was a hard-coal fire burning brightly. I took off my coat and waistcoat, wrapped a pair of suspenders tightly on my left forearm above the wrist, and plunged my left hand deep in the blaze and held it down with my right hand for some minutes. When I took it out, the charred knuckles and finger-bones were exposed. I said to myself, “This will never do.” I took an old coat, wrapped it about my left hand and arm, slipped my right arm into an overcoat, held the coat about me and started for Boston in the horsecars. On arriving at the Massachusetts General Hospital I showed the trouble to a surgeon, was put under ether, and the next morning waked up without the hand.…

  Chapman added that he found himself the next morning feeling “very calm in my spirits.” In his macabre act of self-mutilation, he had had what amounted to a religious experience. It had been a rite of exorcism, and he had heeded the biblical injunction “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” Of course Chapman, who was right-handed, had cut off his left hand. In the course of his hospital stay, Chapman wrote, he was visited by “the great alienist Dr. Reginald Heber Fitz, an extremely agreeable man. He asked me among other things if I was insane. I said, ‘That is for you to find out.’ He reported me as sane.…”

  To his mother, Chapman wrote home about the amputation with the unlikely explanation that his hand had been run over by a streetcar. “I am perfectly well and happy,” he added. “Don’t mind it a bit—it shall not make the least difference in my life.”

  In his own, almost breezy account of the episode, Chapman omitted only one fact, which was that during his two days in an amnesiac state Minna Timmins had written him a letter demanding that he apologize to Percival Lowell. It may have been the effect upon him of this letter, more than contrition, that caused him to plunge his hand into the
blazing coals.

  Unfortunately perhaps, the loss of his hand, as Chapman had assured his mother, did not make the least difference in his life as it continued in its erratic course. Following his graduation from Harvard and its law school (as a Jay, he would be expected to practice law only in a most dilatory way) and his marriage to Minna, Chapman was still not ready to settle down. As for Minna, the advantages of being married to a Jay seemed to outweigh the vicissitudes of being the wife of a man who, from time to time, behaved like a lunatic. Her husband continued to be subject to emotional outbursts and tantrums. He still dreamed of lighting up the skies in some important and dramatic way. With only one hand, he had pretty much abandoned his hopes of becoming a concert violinist, though he would never give up trying to be a playwright. Then, in 1890, he had a new idea. He would become a great reformer.

  New York, in the 1890s, was very much in the political grip of the Tammany Hall machine, and to reform that situation became Chapman’s goal. With others of similar bent, Chapman helped form the People’s Municipal League, whose aim was to defeat the Tammany candidate in the 1890 mayoralty race. Though the league succeeded in exposing the huge bribes that the candidate had paid to Tammany’s chiefs, the result of their efforts was that the candidate was reelected by a sizable margin. In defeat, the league consoled itself with the fact that it had probably given the Tammanyites a good scare.