by Brad Ricca
In the end, it was determined that there was no vast web of white slavers tailor-made for the newspapers, only deep, unknowable evil, now consigned to a cage.
23
Her Dark Shepherd
In 1919, Grace and Kron were still working together as the New Justice Detective Bureau. Grace had also put together a magazine called New Justice. Its purpose was “to call women citizens to their civic responsibility for young girls in every untoward condition of life.” They charged $1.50 a year for a subscription. In November, the New York Supreme Court, on appeal, ruled on Grace’s suit against Universal Animated Weekly. The court decided that the newsreel she had been featured in was different from a photoplay, another popular genre of the day in which real events were acted out by professional actors in magazines or on film.
A photoplay is inherently a work of fiction. A news reel contains no fiction but shows only actual photographs of current events of public interest. The news reel is taken on the spot, at the very moment of the occurrence depicted, and is an actual photograph of the event itself. The photoplay, as the result of fiction, retains its interest, irrespective of the length of time which has elapsed since its first production, whereas, a news reel, to be of any value in large cities must be published almost simultaneously with the occurrence of the events which it portrays. This news service, as far as it goes, is a truthful, accurate purveyor of news, quite as strictly so as a newspaper. While a newspaper account conveys the news almost entirely by words, the news service conveys the same by photographs with incidental verbal explanation.
If a newsreel was more like a newspaper, then it could print publicly taken photographs without permission. Newspapers were allowed this power because they functioned as the truth of the world. The initial judgment was thus reversed, and Grace was ordered to pay back the damages. The images that were being contested showed Grace walking out of the motorcycle store, smiling and bowing.
Now in her fifties, Grace Humiston was still taking cases, speaking at club luncheons, and writing the odd article here and there, but she was not nearly as popular as she had been. She was having money problems, too. Real estate deals and overspending on staff had thinned her resources. The Grace Club was now operating at 147 East 21st Street in Gramercy Park, where businesswomen and girls could rent comfortably furnished rooms for eight to twelve dollars a week. The building itself had thirteen bathrooms. But running such a facility had frequent unforeseen costs, and the club, Grace’s great idea, had to close. In late March, Grace petitioned the New York State Court to be paid for having represented Stielow all those years ago. She was seeking compensation for all the old business she had never had the time—or the need—to request before.
Grace never stopped reading the papers. In the summer of 1926, she saw a case that gave her pause. George Bittle was a taxicab driver condemned to the electric chair for the murder of Rufus Eller, a Buffalo jeweler. A man named Frank Minnick had hired Bittle’s cab. He was already dead for the crime. Grace quietly checked into the case. She then took a ride to visit Bittle in prison. The old excitement seized her again. She would set this man free. When she arrived, she told the man behind bars that she had new evidence that might help his case. But George Bittle knew who Grace Humiston was. He refused her help and sent her packing.
Grace disappeared into the shadows after that. Though she mostly stayed out of the crime limelight of the dailies, Grace was still outspoken about the city she loved. She railed against the city’s night court system, where judges had the power to imprison anyone who walked through the courtroom doors. She worked with the Morality League and the Girls’ Vocational Club, which had just two rules: Never mention your past, and Never stay out all night. She continued to express her strong thoughts on the police who had embraced and then abandoned her. The same went for the federal lawmen. When Hoover said that the nation should conserve food, Grace fired back that they should instead conserve girlhood. When a columnist asked her if smoking lowered the morals of a woman, Grace said no, and that any woman had a right to do so, though privacy would be ideal. “I do not like to set any standards for women,” Grace said, “for I think there should be a single standard in everything for men and women. But then, on the other hand, a ‘womanly woman’ is somehow more universally convincing and more admired by the best of both men and women.”
Grace was still getting mail from mothers whose daughters had gone missing. “How can girls disappear from the face of the earth in these days of civilization, Mrs. Humiston?” wrote one anguished mother. Grace quickly realized that she could not answer every letter. So she began a series of columns, titled “Our Missing Girls,” hoping to tell the rest of the nation what she had learned. As always, Grace fell back on stories—on cases—to get her ideas across. She wrote of a “well dressed confident Western mother” who walked into Grace’s office seeking help for her lost daughter. “You are the average American mother,” Grace said, “the woman who doesn’t know a tenth of what is going on around you in this very world you and your girls live in.” That is why she wrote.
“Every day of the 365 in the year,” Grace wrote, “two hundred and seventy-seven girls shut the doors of their parents’ homes in the United States and turn their back on the places where for years their lives have been molded. Two girls a day from Chicago. Two every three days from Detroit and Cleveland. One a day from St. Louis, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Kansas City and scores of other larger cities in the country. They leave no word. It is the last time. Whether the door which shuts be the white-painted wood one of the country farmhouse or the iron-grilled gate of the city apartment. For one of every three of these girls will never return. In many cases these girls are of striking personality, initiative, and business ability.”
Some of the papers printed photos of artifacts from Grace’s personal collection, including letters from girls begging for help along with actual missing person reports. One was for Esther L. from Akron, Ohio, a stenographer who was last seen at the Strand Motion Picture House in New York. She wore a dress from the May Company and had a graduation ring. She was sixteen years old. Some wanted Grace to find Dorothy Arnold next. The wealthy heiress disappeared on December 12, 1910, when she left a Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue. Grace said she would search out all possible clues.
Grace warned of the lure of the photography studios, where phrases—“Wonderful! Such poise! Such command! Who is the girl!”—could weaken a young girl’s resolve. She spoke of nightclubs and bungalows and “blackout parties.” Her “Rules for Avoiding Trouble” included “Don’t go out to dinner with your boss” and “Be a little cruel to yourself—remember that the movies are only reel life, not real life.”
Grace had files upon files of information on girls gone missing from five-and-ten stores, coin-in-the-slot restaurants, and the waiting rooms of large department stores. Sometimes, she got letters from the girls themselves, too terrified to come home. “Has anybody been looking for me in the last twenty years, do you know?” one girl asked. “Not a day passes,” said Grace, “but someone is seeking someone else. The search for the missing girls is an endless search.”
On holidays and odd Sundays, Grace would leave her apartment at the Vanderbilt at Thirty-fourth and Park and step over to the Osborne, on Fifty-seventh and Seventh, right across from Carnegie Hall. She would ride up the open shaft elevator to her sister Jessie’s new apartment. She went alone. Her nieces and nephews would stare and consider their Auntie Grace, a black figure framed against the high, corniced ceiling. Jessie, who always smiled and laughed, would welcome her in and talk about her plans to organize a trip to Connecticut to see the family sites or to travel by car across the country. Grace was a lawyer and detective; Jessie, a church lady whose husband, Harry, had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and blood ties to the founders of the Baptist Church in America.
Sometime after Christmas, during one of these family visits, Jessie pulled Grace into a room and sat her down. This was a
reversal of roles. Jessie had always been the helper, investing in real estate with Grace and cosigning loans for Grace’s many-titled ventures. But Grace could tell immediately that something was wrong. This wasn’t about money. Grace listened quietly to what her sister had to say. What Grace heard from Jessie that day were the kind of whispers she had heard during her entire career. This was a subject matter she had to approach very delicately. But Grace’s sister needed her help. That was all that mattered.
In addition to being a mother and wife, Jessie Day was an influential member of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church. She and Grace’s father had been active as a Baptist, and their sister Nelly had even married a pastor. The impressive church at East Thirty-first Street and Madison Avenue was cornered by four towers of dark brown wood and steep, fluid steps. The leader of the Madison congregation was the Reverend Dr. George Caleb Moor, who had come by way of Brooklyn, where he was pastor of the Baptist Temple there. He was a rising star in the clergy: a passionate, handsome family man with a wife and child. He was a very hard worker; he once had to stop during a sermon because he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown after part of his church had been destroyed by fire.
Moor did not shy away from the secular world in his work. As he delivered a sermon titled “Is the Kaiser the Anti-Christ?” two men in the front row ducked their heads and made a hasty exit. As they disappeared, Moor remarked that he hoped they would at least come back for his lecture on Russia and the czar. It was the first in a series of six sermons titled “Thrones and Dominions vs. the Throne of God.” But Moor was not all political brimstone. He also delivered a series of lectures titled “The World’s Great Rivers.” Moor was, by all accounts, a wonderful church leader.
On the night of February 19, 1922, a meeting of the membership was called by the trustees of the church. Held in Sanders Hall, the church auditorium, the meeting was closed to outsiders and press. Once everyone arrived and was seated, the doors were locked shut. A reporter for the Times stood outside, prepared to wait it out. Sometime later, a small group of elderly women emerged, flustered and fanning their necks. As more time passed, the reporter watched younger women leave in shocked states, their handkerchiefs to their mouths. “This is a disgrace,” one of them said. “We will not stay in there while she reads that statement, but we intend to go back and cast our votes when she’s through.”
When the doors were finally opened at twelve thirty in the morning, the Times reporter was told that during the meeting, Jessie Day had produced the diary of a young female parishioner. With Grace seated beside her, Jessie stood up straight and started reading it aloud. Some of the older members of the church left immediately. As Jessie progressed further in the diary, more women also found themselves unable to remain. Many withdrew, some so shocked by the narrative that they became hysterical. What Jessie was reading was disturbing because it implicated a church member in having an affair with this young girl. The man being accused was Reverend Moor, who was seated directly across from Jessie and her sister.
Once Jessie was finished, she quietly sat down. After heated discussion, the church voted to retain Moor. They then voted to expel Jessie Day with a vote of 64 to 43. A longtime deacon, W. S. Foster, who supported Jessie during the meeting, was also charged by Moor himself with “acts unbecoming a Christian and a church member.” Foster was also expelled 72 to 17. Moor’s wife had remained in the meeting the entire time. At its close, she said she was “tired, but very happy.” Moor was scheduled to preach later that day; the title of his next sermon was listed in the newspaper as “Feeling Gray.”
Jessie and Grace were stunned. They had actual physical proof—a diary!—that Moor was behaving indiscreetly, but they still knew that accusing him would be a gamble. Jessie had now been stripped of her church membership, one of the most important forms of identity a New York society woman could claim. But they were not going to give up. Another longtime church member, Dr. Hall, also called for Moor’s expulsion, so another meeting was held, with Jessie and Grace there to support his cause.
As Grace sat there with her sister, she watched as Moor and his people again came into the room. Grace saw someone in the back pushing a wheelchair. She felt Jessie’s hand press upon her arm in a very hard way. Grace looked closer as the man was wheeled in. Her shoulders fell. It was their brother, Adoniram Judson Winterton Jr.
There was shouting in the room. Grace stared at this white-haired man who looked like her father. She looked at this man, her brother, whom she once told a whole room of reporters was already dead.
Once things quieted down, Adoniram was given the chance to speak. He rose and denounced his sisters, saying that they were unfit to take communion and that he himself had been forced to withdraw from the church by the abuse of his family. When he sat down, his words still hung in the air.
Grace explained to the room, in a quiet voice, that Adoniram had been in a sanitarium and was very sick. She said that Moor “dug him up and brought him there” only “to embarrass her.” Grace asked that all of the remarks, including hers, be struck from the record. When they finally got around to Hall’s case, the church board offered him immunity if he retracted the charges against Moor. Hall thought for a second and responded. “If I had to meet my God tonight,” he said, “I’d rather be an expelled member of this church than to be a leader under its present administration.”
Four months later, on appeal by the Southern New York Baptist Association, the church was ordered to reinstate the membership of Jessie Day. The ruling didn’t concern itself with the charges against Moor. Madison could still bar Jessie if they wished, but she would still be considered a member in good standing if she wanted to transfer to another church. Which she did. Their brother Adoniram also wrote into the newspaper and said that he had been completely misquoted in the press about his sisters. His retraction was delivered by a typed letter.
Moor maintained his innocence. “How would I have been able to carry on my work for thirty years if I were capable of doing all these things?” he asked. He told his flock not to worry. “I’m going to stay right here until Hades freezes over,” he said.
* * *
A year later, on March 14, 1923, Grace was once again late to court. She was riding a trolley car with her new legal assistant, Marion Lithauer. Hannah Frank had moved on to her own successful practice, as had many of Grace’s female assistants. When the car stopped, Grace dropped down from the platform and took a quick look before crossing Third Avenue. A traffic cop was stationed there. He pulled in a breath and blew on his whistle for the crossing traffic, consisting of carriages, streetcars, and automobiles, to stop. Grace started to cross when a small truck pushed through the light and hit her. The driver pulled on the emergency brake and squealed the car to a stop. As he jumped out, Lithauer was kneeling over the fallen body of Grace Humiston.
The cop, W. E. Meier, ran across the intersection and bent down to look at Grace. She was doubled over but still alive. The front wheel of the truck had crushed her ankle. Grace begged the policeman to call a cab, which he did. Lithauer helped Grace into the cab, and they sped off. Meier arrested the driver, a man named William H. Heck.
Grace and Lithauer had the driver take them to New York Orthopaedic Dispensary, but they couldn’t find a specialist. Grace had seen too many clients who had relatives go into an emergency ward never to come out. She wanted a specialist. So they drove to Flower Hospital, where Grace was finally admitted. Two specialists from outside of the hospital were called in to consult. Grace was in great pain but still conscious.
Grace suffered a severe compound fracture of the left ankle. But the broken bones that had pierced her skin were the least of her worries. The doctors at Flower were trying their best to prevent blood poisoning, which they knew could cause amputation of the foot or death. They watched her carefully for four days and gave her injections of lockjaw serum with a long silver needle. Grace lay there, still on the white bed, her black hat on the table beside her.
When she was finally out of the woods, the doctors said it would be at least three weeks before she could leave the hospital. And months before she could walk. When Heck appeared before Magistrate Cobb, he said that he was “turning east onto Fifty-ninth Street when the accident happened.” Heck said he did “not see Mrs. Humiston in front of his truck, but stopped when he heard her cries.”
He was released on $500 bail. Heck also said that the policeman was able to easily see both the truck and Mrs. Humiston, with her sweeping black dress, stepping off the trolley. Heck said the policeman gave him the right of way.
During this time, as Grace recovered, the City of New York faced a new breed of murderer. This hunter didn’t lend itself to story or gossip. Its motive was utterly transparent: to sicken and kill anything that breathed. The influenza epidemic that had creeped into Gotham from a Norwegian boat in 1919 had so completely changed the city that, by 1920, the streets looked like an outdoor hospital. Schools were closed. People went to their jobs with cotton masks tied tight around their mouths. Movie theaters staggered their show times so as to spread out their crowds. As the great sickness, which would later be understood as the body’s unnecessary overreaction to virus, spread across the boroughs, victims transformed from printed names to empty, place-holding zeroes. Families grieved and cowered behind doors locked to quiet streets. By 1922, the fourth wave of the pandemic was finally ending. Since 1918, over forty thousand New Yorkers had died. The war had taken her sons; the flu had mopped up the rest.
After her accident, Grace stayed out of the public eye, for the most part. She still practiced mostly immigration cases (which were now fewer) and cases of patients with mental illness. She rarely left New York and lived in a series of apartments. When Amelia Earhart completed her solo flight across the Atlantic in 1932, Grace sent her a telegram. It read: “Congratulations.”
