Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Strode’s father, Henry, attended the University of Virginia, where he won a medal in mathematics. After graduation, he taught high school and then moved into higher education, becoming an assistant professor of mathematics at Richmond College, in the state capital. In 1872 Henry Strode married Mildred Powell Ellis and bought Kenmore Plantation from her grandfather. He established Kenmore University High School, a preparatory school for boys, on the plantation. While he served as principal of the new school, he and Mildred began a family. Aubrey was born in 1873, and six daughters and another son would follow.

  The Kenmore School took a progressive approach to education. It focused on science rather than the classics that most southern schools favored. It also emphasized the health of its students, engaging them in a wide array of physical activities on the plantation grounds. The school became a respected training ground for talented young men from the region, and sent many of its graduates on to the University of Virginia.

  Aubrey attended the Kenmore School, studying under his father and living with his family in the antebellum plantation house. He graduated in 1887, one of a class of about a dozen boys. Aubrey enrolled at Washington and Lee, in nearby Lexington. Washington and Lee was a revered southern institution. After the Civil War, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had served as president of the college, which was then called Washington College. When Aubrey attended, Lee’s son was president of the school.

  Henry Strode closed the Kenmore school in 1889 and became a professor of mathematics at the University of Mississippi. The following year, he moved to South Carolina, to become the first president of Clemson Agricultural College, a small school that would become Clemson University. His presidency ended abruptly in 1893, but he stayed on as a mathematics professor.

  While his father was moving up in academia, Aubrey continued his own travels through secondary and higher education. He left college to teach high school in South Carolina, and a year later he enrolled at the University of Virginia. Aubrey studied political economy and moral philosophy and won a medal for oratorical excellence. When he graduated, he went back to South Carolina to be a high school principal.

  In 1896 both father and son returned home to Kenmore. Henry Strode, who was in poor health after several strokes, came back to retire. Aubrey, who was twenty-two, reopened the Kenmore School with a college friend, J. Thompson Brown Jr., so he could continue to work as an educator while being closer to his family, which needed him.

  Under Aubrey’s stewardship, the Kenmore School advertised itself as a quality preparatory school. The 1897–98 catalog trumpeted its location “in one of the most beautiful as well as most salubrious sections of Piedmont Virginia.” And it emphasized that boys who lived on campus would be under the supervision of “Mrs. H.A. Strode,” who would impart “the refining influences of a Christian home.” The school promised to protect its students from “those whose society would be contaminating.”

  In promoting the quality of the education at Kenmore, the catalog emphasized Aubrey’s erudition and teaching skills. It contained an enthusiastic endorsement from George F. Holmes, a professor of Historical Science at the University of Virginia: “Mr. Strode has been familiarized from boyhood with the duties, best methods, and habits of teaching—his father having been one of the most eminent instructors in Virginia.”

  While he was running the school, Aubrey began to study law. He enrolled in a course with the Sprague Correspondence School of Law in Detroit, which advertised, “Instruction by mail adapted to everyone . . . Takes spare time only.” It was not surprising that after studying political economy and moral philosophy at the University of Virginia, and winning a medal for oratory, Strode would be drawn to the law. But given his early interest in education, he may well have been attracted to a legal career because he was looking for a more financially rewarding and secure profession, especially as more of the responsibility of caring for his family was falling to him.

  In 1898 Strode enrolled in the University of Virginia School of Law. While he was there, he was not able to escape the burdens he had left behind at Kenmore. Strode’s father ruptured a blood vessel and declined into paralysis and dementia. Around the same time, his mother began her own decline. Strode had to commit his parents to mental institutions, and both died shortly after his arrival at law school.

  Strode rushed through his studies, and after less than half a year of classroom instruction, in January 1899, he was admitted to the Virginia bar. Strode closed the Kenmore School and dedicated himself completely to his new profession. He set up a law office near the Amherst County Courthouse and sent out cards announcing that he was available to take on legal work.

  Strode’s legal career got off to a fast start, and before long he opened a second office, in Lynchburg. In 1903 he married the former Rebekah Davies Brown, the sister of his college classmate and Kenmore School colleague J. Thompson Brown Jr. The daughter of a local judge, Rebekah was also an educator who had taught at girls’ schools.

  After the wedding, Rebekah moved in with Strode at Kenmore. Even as he was starting his own family, Strode continued to help care for his seven younger siblings. With both parents deceased, Strode was now the mainstay of the family. He helped his sisters and brother pay tuition and other expenses with the income from his thriving law practice.

  Strode’s practice covered legal matters large and small. He took on run-of-the-mill commercial cases, trust and estates work, and personal injury litigation. In one case, he wrote a letter for a client who was injured while walking down the street: “Miss Alice Burke thinks she is aggrieved because of your having a vicious horse hitched and standing on the sidewalk . . . causing her to leave the sidewalk for the street and then being bitten by the horse.” In her attempt to escape, Burke fell and injured herself on a pile of stones, causing her considerable pain and forcing her to miss more than two months of work. Strode informed the horse’s owner that if he did not compensate Burke she would sue.

  In 1903 Strode participated in a high-profile prosecution of a judge accused of grave misconduct. The Reverend C. H. Crawford, the superintendent of the Anti-Saloon League in Virginia, had written a newspaper article accusing Judge Clarence Campbell of taking bribes from businesses that applied for liquor licenses. Campbell did not take the accusations lightly. He had the minister hauled into court and demanded an apology. When Crawford refused, the tall and athletic judge followed the elderly minister into the street and declared: “I gave you an opportunity to apologize and you would not, now I give you this.” Campbell proceeded to beat the clergyman with a horsewhip. According to a news story headlined “Judge Cowhides a Minister,” Campbell inflicted “painful injuries and caus[ed] blood to flow from the head and face of the minister.”

  Crawford sued, but Campbell appointed a friend to sit as judge and arranged for a sympathetic jury. When Campbell was acquitted, local bar associations asked the legislature to impeach him. Strode helped represent the bar associations in the proceedings, which resulted in Campbell’s being removed by the legislature. The victory helped establish Strode’s reputation as an up-and-coming lawyer and a crusader against public corruption.

  While he was burnishing his reputation as one of the region’s most capable lawyers, the charismatic and well-connected Strode was also becoming a force in local politics. He gave his first political speech in 1896, to the Amherst County Democratic Club, and the following year he served as a delegate to the state Democratic convention. In 1904 Strode increased his influence by teaming up with a friend, Stickley Tucker, to purchase a local newspaper, the Amherst Progress. Tucker did most of the day-to-day work, while Strode wrote editorials and commentaries.

  In 1905 Strode announced his candidacy for the state senate from a district that included Amherst and Nelson Counties. He printed up campaign leaflets with a picture of himself in an elegant suit and tie, which showed off his natural good looks. Strode billed himself throughout his career as a
“Progressive Democrat,” and when he ran for office he presented himself as someone who believed in the power of government to solve problems and improve society. His campaign literature offered up a platform that included electoral reform and increased spending on highways. It also had a detailed discussion of “Rotation in Office,” which explained why he believed it was now the turn of a candidate from Amherst County, rather than Nelson County, to hold the seat.

  As a former teacher and school principal, it was not surprising that Strode made education a major issue. His campaign literature noted that the illiteracy rate among white male Virginians was one in eight, no better than it had been in 1850, and it pointed out that teachers’ salaries had stagnated since the founding of the state school system in 1870. Strode found both situations deplorable. “We are reaping in illiteracy what we have sown,” he warned. Although he had run an elite private school, Strode was a strong supporter of public education. He argued for increasing taxes on the wealthy to improve education for poor children, and he insisted that “the present demand upon the part of our people for better free school facilities should be promptly met.”

  Strode also called for improving Virginia’s roads, a popular progressive cause. Better roads required increased government spending, but they would help the state to move forward—a trade-off that progressives like Strode considered worthwhile. Strode argued for redirecting convict labor from private contracting projects to building and repairing roads and highways, which would keep the cost of road improvements down. Strode also supported election reform, or “purer elections,” as he called it in his campaign leaflets.

  Strode presented himself to the voters of Amherst and Nelson counties as a progressive on every major issue except one: race. In early-twentieth-century Virginia, white politicians, whether progressive or conservative, supported the Jim Crow system, and Strode was no exception. His fidelity to the old southern racial codes, which built subjugation of blacks into every aspect of daily life, was evident in every part of his life—even his professional correspondence. When a black man named Charles Clark, whose son was killed in a railroad accident, tried to retain Strode to represent him in a negligence lawsuit, Strode turned down the case. He addressed his letter to “Chas. Clark, Colored”—staying true to the Jim Crow rule that “you don’t use Mister to a Negro even on an envelope.”

  Strode was firmly opposed to civil rights for his black neighbors and constituents. When he was running for office, there was a debate over the “grandfather clause,” a legal subterfuge being used to prevent blacks from voting. During the Reconstruction Era, Virginia adopted a state constitution that gave blacks the vote—much to the regret of Virginia’s white power structure. In 1902, when Reconstruction was over and supporters of political rights for blacks had lost power, Virginia adopted a new constitution that imposed poll taxes and literacy tests for the express purpose of disenfranchising blacks. The 1902 constitution had a grandfather clause that guaranteed citizens the right to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had voted before the abolition of slavery. It was a loophole that ensured that poor and illiterate whites could still vote without paying a poll tax or taking a literacy test—but poor and illiterate blacks could not.

  The grandfather clause was an ugly reassertion of white supremacy, but Strode supported it. In his campaign leaflets, he noted that he had “always advocated and favored” the new constitution’s electoral rules, through which “the negro vote has been practically eliminated from Virginia politics.” He put a reform gloss on this mass disenfranchisement. As Strode saw it, denying blacks the vote made it easier to clean up elections—at least for white voters. When blacks went to the polls in large numbers, he argued, there was a considerable amount of corruption, including blatant attempts to buy black votes. And white political operatives rigged the system to reduce the influence of black voters. With the electorate essentially all white, Strode insisted, there was “no longer a vestige of excuse for doubtful election methods.”

  Strode won the primary and general election, and in 1906, at the age of thirty-three, he became a member of the state senate. Because his legislative duties were part-time, Strode was able to continue his law practice and his work for the Amherst Progress. Shortly after he joined the legislature, Strode suffered a great loss. His and Rebekah’s first child, William Lewis Strode, died of pneumonia at the age of two.

  One of the first issues Strode focused on in the legislature was mental health policy. It was a natural subject for him to champion. Progressives across the country considered the mental health system to be a troubled area, and they were bringing a “grand sense of mission” to reforming and improving it.

  Strode may also have been drawn to the issue for more personal reasons. Both of his parents had spent their final days in institutions for the mentally ill: his father in Western State Hospital in Staunton, and his mother in Southwestern State Hospital in Marion. Even though neither of Strode’s parents had suffered from classic mental illness, their hospitalizations had given him firsthand exposure to the institutions that few other Virginians had, and he had an opportunity to see just how deplorable conditions were.

  Strode was a strong advocate for establishing a state hospital for epileptics. He introduced a bill in the legislature—An Act to Establish an Epileptic Colony on Land of the Western State Hospital, in Amherst County—that made a powerful case for why a facility for epileptics was needed. According to the bill, “existing State hospitals for the white insane are now taxed to their fullest capacity” and contained 250 epileptic patients. Strode noted that the commissioner of state hospitals had recently issued a report saying that unless more accommodations were provided a large number of epileptics would have to be held in jails.

  Strode also emphasized that an epileptic colony could bring about improved treatments, more hygienic surroundings, and better employment opportunities, making it “the most economic, beneficial, and satisfactory method of caring for epileptics.” Strode’s bill passed the legislature and became law on February 20, 1906.

  Strode may have been sincerely concerned about the plight of epileptics, a cause that appealed to many progressives. There were also, however, political reasons for him to support the new facility. A colony for epileptics would provide a major boost to the economy of the area in which it was located, and there was a good chance it would end up in Strode’s district.

  The most likely site for the new facility was Amherst County. The legislature was looking at building it on land that Sidney R. Murkland had donated to Western State Hospital. Murkland was an Amherst County resident, and the land he left in his bequest was also in the county. When the Murkland land parcel turned out to be poorly suited, the state hospital board urged the legislature to sell it and find a new site. At Strode’s urging, in March 1908, the legislature amended the authorizing legislation to allow the epileptic facility to be relocated, on the condition that it remain in Amherst County. Strode helped to arrange the purchase of a new site in Madison Heights, just outside Lynchburg, keeping the new facility in Amherst County and in his legislative district.

  In 1907 Strode was involved in another high-profile legal case involving a local judge—and this one proved even more notorious than the Judge Campbell affair. On April 22, Judge W. G. Loving of Nelson, one of the two counties Strode represented, killed Theodore Estes, a twenty-six-year-old man from one of Virginia’s most prominent families. Estes, who was the son of the Nelson County sheriff, had taken the judge’s twenty-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, on a buggy ride during which she had gotten drunk on whiskey.

  Estes dropped Elizabeth off at the home of a friend later than she was expected. She told her father that Estes had drugged her on the buggy ride and assaulted her. Loving went out with his loaded shotgun and angrily confronted Estes, a short and slight young man who was described by those who knew him as intelligent, hardworking, and—in the words of one neighbor—“the most innocent boy I ever
knew.” Loving asked Estes if he had been out buggy riding and, according to an eyewitness, after Estes denied it, Loving shot and killed him. Loving said no power in heaven could have prevented him from taking Estes’s life.

  Loving was quickly arrested, and he turned to Strode to represent him. Whatever Strode might have thought of the facts of the case, the battle between Loving and Estes had strong political overtones. Estes was affiliated with the Martin Organization, a conservative Democratic machine that dominated politics in Nelson and Amherst counties, and across the state. The Martin Organization, led by Thomas S. Martin, a powerful U.S. senator from Charlottesville, supported business interests and was frequently accused of corruption. Loving and Strode were part of the antimachine opposition, which promoted more progressive, reform-minded policies. Loving, a Nelson County power broker, had played an important role in Strode’s election to the state senate in 1905—and the Martin Organization had not. “As might be supposed,” a local newspaper observed, “the Democratic machine leaders do not sit up at night trying to help the Senator from Amherst.”

  Strode was joined by lawyers from Lynchburg and Fairfax, a group one news account described as “three of the strongest criminal lawyers practicing in Virginia.” Loving’s attack on Estes was not entirely out of character—the judge was known for his temper. And he may have been motivated not only by what he believed was done to his daughter, but by the antipathy he had long harbored for the Estes family. Strode and the rest of the legal team decided early on, however, that to prevail they needed to present a simple case about fatherly duty—and the “unwritten law” that a man could not be condemned for rising up to defend the honor of his wronged daughter.