The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: SPENCER: HOME CREEK, BUCHANAN COUNTY, VIRGINIA, 1912

  1 Henry Hinds, The Geology and Coal Resources of Buchanan County, Virginia (Charlottesville, Va., 1918), p. 5; W. G. Schwab, The Forests of Buchanan County (Charlottesville, Va., 1918), pp. 4-6.

  2 “Virginia Stores Destroyed,” Washington Post, December 22, 1907, p. 6. “Buchanan county is about forty miles from the railroad and as the returns have to be sent to Grundy, the county seat, the result will probably not be known before to-morrow afternoon”: see “Third Senatorial District,” Richmond Times, November 8, 1901, p. 1. See also “Fight With Moonshiners,” Alexandria Gazette and Virginia Advertiser, May 4, 1904, p. 2; and “Avoided Capture for Many Years,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 1, 1910, p. 5.

  3 See, e.g., Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” Geographical Journal 17 (1901), pp. 588, 621; N. S. Shaler, “The Transplantation of a Race,” Appletons’ Popular Science Monthly 56 (March 1900), pp. 513, 519.

  4 “Anchored Post-Office to Trunk of Great Tree,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 6, 1908, p. 9; Helen Ruth Henderson, A Curriculum Study in a Mountain District (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1937), pp. 12-13; Spencer v. Looney (Va. 1912), No. 2012, Virginia State Law Library, Richmond, trial transcript, pp. 56, 58; 1910 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va.; George Looney, World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Card, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18, Ancestry .com; O’Quinn v. Looney, 74 S.E.2d 157, 157-58 (Va. 1953).

  5 Schwab, Forests of Buchanan County, pp. 7, 9; George W. Hilton, American Narrow Gauge Railroads (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,1990), pp. 540-41; Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), pp. 104-5; Brenda S. Baldwin, Buchanan County (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2007), pp. 8, 91.

  6 Hinds, Geology and Coal Resources, p. 2; O’Quinn v. Looney, 74 S.E.2d 157, 157-58 (Va. 1953); “Anchored Post-Office to Trunk of Great Tree,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 6, 1908, p. 9.

  7 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 93; 1910 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va.; Semple, “Anglo-Saxons,” pp. 594-95.

  8 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 49, 93-94.

  9 1900 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va.; 1910 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va.; 1920 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va.; Jack Spencer, World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Card, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18, Ancestry.com; Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 94-95; Tester v. Commonwealth, 160 S.E. 62, 62 (Va. 1931), where Spencer is described as “a member of the officer’s party and a witness for the Commonwealth.”

  10 See, e.g., “The Murder of Bud McCoy,” Baltimore Sun, November 13, 1890, supp. 2. On the Hatfield-McCoy feud, see Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

  11 Semple, “Anglo-Saxons,” p. 618; “Father and Sons Held for Murder; May Be Lynched,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 24, 1909, p. 1; “News Items,” Virginia Citizen, February 3, 1905; “Killed in Quarrel,” Washington Post, September 12, 1903, p. 4; “Charles Convicted of Manslaughter,” Washington Post, June 7, 1903, p. 6; “Testament Saved His Life,” Atlanta Constitution, April 29, 1901, p. 3.

  12 Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 102-6, 138-39; J. W. Williamson, Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films: Plot Synopses of Movies About Moonshining, Feuding, and Other Mountain Topics, 1904-1929 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994); Spencer v. Looney, 82 S.E. 745 (Va. 1914), No. 2012, Virginia State Law Library, Richmond, brief of counsel for appellee, pp. 5-9. See also Daniel J. Sharfstein, “The Secret History of Race in the United States,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003), pp. 1473, 1474-75.

  13 See Acts and Joint Resolutions (Amending the Constitution) of the General Assembly of the State of Virginia (1910), ch. 357, p. 581; see also Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, Race Distinctions in American Law (New York: D. Appleton, 1910), pp. 12-20; Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 4, 137-41; and Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 217-18, 238-43, 280-83.

  14 Semple, “Anglo-Saxons,” p. 594.

  15 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988; reprint, New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), pp. 11-18, 186-88, 300-303; and Shaler, “Transplantation of a Race,” p. 519. Shaler’s observations were undoubtedly colored by decades of theorizing black racial inferiority. See John S. Haller Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana-Champaign: Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. 166-87.

  16 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana-Champaign: Illinois University Press, 1993), pp. 143, 146, 282; “Four Negroes Lynched,” Columbia State, February 2, 1893, p. 1.

  17 Spencer v. Looney, 82 S.E. 745 (Va. 1914), No. 2012, Virginia State Law Library, Richmond, brief of counsel for the plaintiff in error, p. 6; Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 59, 107-8, 120, 128-29; 1920 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va.; Glenn Ratliff, World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Card, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18, Ancestry.com.

  18 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 51-52.

  19 Although the 1910 U.S. Census listed George Spencer as literate and Arminda as illiterate, George Spencer signed his World War I draft registration card with an X. The 1920 Census listed both George and Arminda Spencer as illiterate. On the place of schools in rural society during this period, see generally William A. Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). On Looney’s conduct upon returning from Kentucky, see Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 50-51, 99-100, 103-9.

  20 1910 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va.; Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 93-98; Williamson, Southern Mountaineers.

  21 1900 U.S. Census, Pike County, Ky.; 1910 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va.

  22 William Annan Daugherty, World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Card, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-18, Ancestry.com; Elihu Jasper Sutherland, “Meet Virginia’s Baby”: A Brief Pictorial History of Dickenson County, Virginia (Clintwood, Va., 1955), p. 279; and Report of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Virginia State Bar Association (1906), p. 49. The “fabled W. A. Daugherty” in the 1940s was “the best and most experienced criminal lawyer in [Pike County,] Kentucky,” according to Harry M. Caudill, Slender Is the Thread: Tales from a Country Law Office (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), pp. 54, 171. See also “Roland E. Chase,” Washington Post, September 15, 1948, p. B2; “Official Visitation,” Alexandria Gazette, November 26, 1906, p. 3; and Victoria L. Osborne, Dickenson County (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2007), p. 122.

  23 See, e.g., Watkins v. King, 188 F. 524 (4th Cir. 1902); “Busy Term Before Court of Appeals,” Richmond Times, November 7, 1901, p. 8; “Sues for Vast Estate,” Washington Post, September 8, 1899, p. 4. In a suit regarding ownership of fifty thousand white oak trees in Dickenson County, Roland Chase represented the defendants: “Big Timber Suit,” Richmond Times, June 13, 1901, p. 1. See also Baldwin, Buchanan County, p. 11.

  24 Spencer v. Looney (Va. 1914), record, p. 41.

  25 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 58-59, 91, deposition taken May 4, 1912; R. E. Horsey, “Bird Distribution in Eastern Kentucky,” Auk 39 (1922), pp. 79-84. Records for weather stations near Paintsville describe a calm and cloudy day with no precipitation. See, e.g., Pikeville, Ky., Precipitation Report, May 1912, available from the National
Climatic Data Center, U.S. Department of Commerce.

  26 “W.P.A. Graves Registration Part 6,” Highland Echo 15 (March 1998), online at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyjchs/highlandecho.html; Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 60.

  27 Carolyn Clay Turner and Carolyn Hay Traum, John C. C. Mayo: Cumberland Capitalist (Pikeville, Ky.: Pikeville College Press, 1983), pp. 75-86; Danny K. Blevins, Van Lear (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2008).

  28 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 59; William Elsey Connelly and E. M. Coulter, History of Kentucky (Chicago, 1922), pp. 4:560-61; J. Favill Capron, American Bank Attorneys, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1922), p. 149; Consolidated Coal Co. v. Baldridge, 179 S.W. 18 (Ky. 1915) (H. S. Howes for Consolidated); Millers Creek R. Co. v. Blevins, 167 S.W. 886 (Ky. 1914) (H. S. Howes for the railroad); Fluehart Collieries Co. v. Elam, 151 S.W. 34 (Ky. 1912) (Howes and Howes for the coal company).

  29 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 59, 61, 114.

  30 Ibid., pp. 59-60, 66.

  31 Ibid., pp. 59-62. See also Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 58-72.

  32 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 61-62, 64.

  33 Ibid., p. 63.

  34 Papers in the Case of Samuel McKee Against John D. Young, Ninth Congressional District of Kentucky, H. Misc. Doc. No. 40-13 (1868), p. 82.

  35 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 75-76, 78, 82; Sharfstein, “Secret History of Race,” p. 1485.

  36 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 63-64, 74, 89, 91.

  37 William Ely, The Big Sandy Valley (Catlettsburg, Ky.: Central Methodist, 1887), p. 90; Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 121, 132, 136, 139; Kentucky State Board of Health, Official Register, Medical Laws and Court Decisions, 1896-97 (1897), p. x; Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg, eds., Our Appalachia: An Oral History (1977; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), pp. 138-39; Turner and Traum, John Mayo, p. 11.

  38 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 126, 131, 141, 145. One witness thought the Spencers were “Black Dutch” (transcript, p. 136), a designation for racially ambiguous groups that was interchangeable with terms such as Melungeon, Ramps, and Brass Ankles. See the discussion of triracial groups in chapter 5; see also Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, pp. 132-35.

  39 Spencer’s testimony appears in Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 93-98.

  40 Ibid., pp. 93, 97.

  41 Ibid., pp. 96-97.

  42 Ibid., p. 113.

  43 Ibid., pp. 149-50.

  44 A Baltimore case involved a six-pronged physical examination by a team of Johns Hopkins doctors, an example of the growing prevalence of expert scientific testimony: see “Girl Held Not White,” Washington Post, February 28, 1911, p. 9. See also Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, pp. 211ff.

  45 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 149-50.

  46 Ibid., pp. 158-59.

  47 Ibid.; Spencer v. Looney, brief of counsel for appellee, p. 13.

  48 The celebrated Hatfield-McCoy feud, for example, had its roots in litigation over timber rights. See Waller, Feud, pp. 41-49.

  49 Spencer v. Looney, brief of counsel for appellee, p. 13. On the “racial integrity” movement in Virginia, see Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife, pp. 139-41; Paul A. Lombardo, “Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia,” U.C. Davis Law Review 21 (1988), p. 421.

  50 Spencer v. Looney (Va. 1914), petition, pp. 2-4, 14-31; brief of counsel for appellee, p. 9; trial transcript, p. 33.

  51 Spencer v. Looney, brief of counsel for appellee, pp. 9, 13-14.

  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.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: GIBSON: PARIS AND CHICAGO, 1931-33

  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, Ch
arges 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY: WALL: FREEPORT, LONG ISLAND, 1946

  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.