by Susan Butler
The terms of the wills dealt the Earharts a stunning blow. There was no doubt that the change was directed at and had been caused by Edwin, no doubt that it publicly branded Edwin a ne’er-do-well, no doubt that it was a clear vote of no confidence in Amy. No matter what Edwin did, no matter what Amy did, there was no way for them to escape from this humiliating public condemnation of their character.
Up until now, Edwin had been able to hold himself together and hide his drinking from most people. Now the last vestiges of self-control went; he became a bitter, angry, sullen drunk, too far gone to have any regard for the proprieties. Not only did he drink in private, now he stumbled his way home for all the world to see.
The Prohibitionist sentiment erupting throughout the United States would culminate, in 1919, in the passage of the Volstead Act, the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution. Iowa was historically a strongly Prohibitionist state; since the 1880s laws had been on the books banning the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. Unfortunately for Edwin, Cottage Grove was the center of the state’s Prohibitionist activity; many of Cottage Grove’s most prominent residents—university officials, church leaders, politicians “of all stripes”—were actively involved in the movement. It made Edwin’s drinking particularly unforgivable. Muriel, many years later, would write, “All the old bitterness toward Mother’s family was accentuated, as Dad alternately brooded and raged.... He seemed to drink now with a distorted idea of punishing Mother because of Grandmother’s canny intuition, which made her regard the establishing of a trust fund for Mother as a safeguard, while he looked on it as an insult.”
The scene of Amelia’s great pleasure, the Saturday cowboy-and-Indians game, provided the denouement. It was a spectacular fall from grace that took them all down—a major public humiliation. Assembled were Amelia and Muriel and a group of their friends from the neighborhood. All were waiting on a Saturday afternoon for the beginning of the game, all were gathered in front of the house, killing time till Edwin came home. And then they saw him getting off the streetcar and raced to meet him. And saw that he was walking slowly, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, as if to keep from stumbling. He told them he couldn’t play because he didn’t feel well, walked past them, lurched up the steps. Amy opened the door with a smiling face. “Your Indian clothes are upstairs, Edwin,” she said, then looking at him, her face changed, her smile froze. She helped him over the threshold, then firmly shut the door. Ten children plus two daughters—Amelia and Muriel stood exposed to the shock and horror in public, in front of their peers, each of whom, knowing the ugly truth, would relay it back to their families.
Edwin did public penance, appearing, for a change, in church the next day. Privately he promised it wouldn’t happen again. And because they wanted to so much, at first they believed him. But his drinking grew worse. His work became so erratic that a supervisor came from Chicago, caught Edwin drinking in his office, replaced him (temporarily, he said), and sent him to a hospital that specialized in alcoholism. He stayed a month, and when he came home he was, they all hoped, cured.
As a welcome when he came back from the hospital, Amy bought him a carpenter’s bench and a set of tools for metal and woodworking. (She, as well as Muriel, must have been impressed with Edwin’s energy and happy state of mind when he had been working on his invention all those years before.) Amelia and Muriel, with three dollars they had earned picking cherries, purchased a jointed fishing rod with a reel on the handle. The homecoming scene, as remembered by Muriel, was poignant: “It was our ‘old’ Dad, bright-eyed and buoyant, who came up the porch steps two by two at a time to seize Mother around the waist and waltz her joyously a few steps down the front hall while Amelia and I laughed and applauded until we came in for our share of hugging.”
It didn’t last. No business would hire him, and given his history, it was not surprising. Indeed, one of his job-seeking letters reveals just how close he was to his next drink, for he saw his alcoholism as a function of his surroundings rather than of his own mind, and thus he wrote, rather ingenuously, to one possible employer (italics mine): “I am now safe in saying that I am free from this unfortunate habit, not unqualifiedly or absolutely, but I have been burned and suffered so much from it that I am safe in saying that I am safely and surely beyond any future danger. Of course environment and associates have and did have everything to do with my difficulties, but in Omaha I would have a clean slate. I make you the promise that there will be absolutely no offence or reproach as to my ever taking a drink while in your service. If upon any reliable authority you should hear of it, I will leave your office without delay, feeling myself wholly disgraced. This will enable me to walk the straight and narrow path and do a good job for you and the railroad.”
Before long, according to Muriel, Edwin was again “drinking a little at a time.”
In spite of the document Amy had signed agreeing not to contest the wills, she inevitably became embroiled in a fight with Mark, for upon going over the list of properties of the Otis Real Estate Company that he had given to the Northern Trust Company, she found what she was sure were serious discrepancies. She wanted an independent inventory.
Amy was a decent, moral person herself, and she believed her brother was “cut from the same cloth” as she was. She thought of him in terms of having poor business judgment (she and her mother had been of the same mind about that) and of keeping sloppy records—and she feared she was being shortchanged through his incompetence. She didn’t actually suspect Mark of deliberate wrongdoing.
To challenge the company records, Amy needed help. She turned first to Margaret, but Margaret and Mark were still close. Margaret had named one of her sons after Mark, and he had more than once appeared at the Balis home in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and swept her three boys off for a weekend in Atlantic City—which the boys adored and in which the two girls hungered to be included. To Margaret, who believed that Mark was carefully preserving her inheritance—her 249 shares in the Otis Real Estate Company—Amy’s demanding an inventory seemed like an act of war. The sisters became estranged.
Next, Amy turned to her Uncle Charles, whom she had met for the first time when he came to Atchison for Alfred’s funeral. As happens sometimes at funerals, there had been a reestablishment of family ties. Charles had been terribly moved by Amelia Otis’s deathbed letter to him, which she had dictated to Margaret.
Amy, particularly, had felt she had lost a father but gained an uncle; her feelings were reciprocated by Charles. Scarcely was he back in St. Paul after the funeral when he had written to Amy, “We did have such a delightful visit together in Atchison and I hope we will continue to keep in touch with each other as we have not properly done in the past.”
So now Amy decided to write Charles to see if he would help her. In her letter she laid out the sorry state of her affairs—how the enmity between her husband and her brother was making it impossible for her to get an inventory of her inheritance.
I cannot depend on my husband’s opinions in this matter as the feeling between Mark and himself is so bitter that an unbiased opinion would be impossible while when I ventured to ask Mark for explanations of certain things, he immediately felt that I had been incited to ask by my husband, and has been suspicious and angry ever since.
She assured Charles that she had no intention of breaking her mother’s will. She also explained that although Mark blamed her for an atmosphere of “seeming distrust” of his business abilities, that opinion existed in Atchison independent of her. The letter was long and well thought out, and her request was eminently reasonable. She was, after all, asking that “discrepancies” in Mark’s listings be investigated. Whether or not Charles thought she had a case, he was a good uncle and a careful corporate lawyer, and he would have seen an inventory as an eminently reasonable request—one that, once carried out, might settle the troubled waters in the family.
But Amy made what turned out to be a mistake of incredible consequence : she had Edwin
deliver the letter personally to Charles in St. Paul. Apparently Edwin fortified himself with drink for the encounter and threatened Charles with the specter of a lawsuit, for in her next letter Amy had to apologize for her husband, writing that she would never go into court, “preferring rather to lose every penny than to bring such dishonor upon the family. Mr. Earhart conveyed a very wrong impression if he gave you think otherwise.” Again she requested that he simply have someone go over the books with Mark for her.
This letter seems to have done the trick as far as restoring Amy to her uncle’s good graces. He unbent to the extent of inviting her to visit and to meet his children, Maribel and Jim, and by March the inventory was done. Amy wrote him a long letter, full of appreciation and love:
I know truly all you have done for me you have done for father’s and her dear sake. Thank you very much for your kind offer to have your door open to me wherever you are, and I can think of no place now where I would more gladly go for advice comfort or anything else.
“Plain, modest, and self assuming” were contemporary descriptions of Charles. It was also written of him, “His pure and innate integrity dominates his conduct, both in public and private life.” Charles had at various times been a member of the St. Paul common council, the school board, and the city library board, as well as district judge and president of the Minnesota Bar Association. He was widely respected for his work as special master in chancery in the Minnesota Railroad Rate cases in 1910. When he returned to private practice, he had taken in his son James as his partner. He was a careful man, and his word was law. He was undoubtedly gratified when the inventory revealed that all Mark’s accounts were in order. Amy accepted the result unquestioningly, and she wrote that she was happy that Mark was proving to be equal to the trust placed in him.
But following the law of unintended consequences, the immediate result of Amy’s request for an inventory was that Mark became closer to his uncle—for after the inventory Mark was vetted, so to speak, and for the foreseeable future, Charles would rely on his nephew for information and family news and accept as fact whatever Mark told him.
In March 1913, life in the Earhart household went on as before. Amy could still complain about “the combination of a sick maid and company” that made her life difficult. But Edwin hadn’t worked since the previous fall—her money was starting to run out. Again she began casting around for help.
Mark, in a preemptive strike, went on the attack to discredit her with Charles. He explained that Amy shouldn’t be having money problems, that she had received $3,000 from the sale of her house, that she was receiving the interest on $14,750 “in addition to her first of dividend of $500 which was paid her direct” (the interest on the $14,750 was paid by the Northern Trust Company), and further, that he was about to declare a dividend that would give her more. But given Mark’s propensity to lie about financial affairs, it is doubtful that Amy was getting even half the amount he said. Certainly it wasn’t true that she had sold the house on Ann Street; it remained hers at least through 1916, as is evident in the papers she filed in the Kansas court that year. The fact was that by summertime Amy was absolutely broke, but Charles, viewing her situation through the lens provided by Mark, saw what appeared to be merely a silly, improvident woman.
Mark couldn’t afford to have Charles think ill of him—he needed to shore up his business reputation with his illustrious uncle. He sent Charles a glowing letter from his “good” sister, Margaret. “I have just received and answered the enclosed letter from Margaret,” he wrote Charles. “While the same is on the order of an ‘unsolicited testimonial’ as we refer to it in the fountain business, still I want you to see it as it shows her attitude regarding the Otis Realty Company and my management of it.” Mark couldn’t bear the fact that as a result of Amy’s demand for an inventory—combined with the fact that the Northern Trust Company was keeping tabs from that moment forward—she had put the money her property represented beyond his reach. He wanted it to spend, as he was spending Margaret’s funds.
Mark had always had very grand, expensive tastes. Amelia referred to him as “The Magnificent.” Since he had married in 1910, his tastes had become even grander. He had led everyone to believe that his wife Isabel was “very wealthy” and the source of much of his opulent lifestyle, which was on a scale far beyond the rest of the family—its most visible sign the chauffeured Rolls-Royce he always appeared in for his visits. It was Amy who correctly assessed her brother, although not even she plumbed the depths of his duplicity. As Margaret would learn to her grief when Mark died, of all the Otis holdings their father had built up with such care, nothing was left—in five years Mark had dissipated it all—all, that is, except Amy’s portion, which had been watched over by the Northern Trust Company. Mark had spent on himself or lost on unwise investments Margaret’s whole inheritance; she would remember his Rolls with bitterness.
But that was still four years in the future. In the meantime, in 1913, foiled by Amy in his attempt to get his hands on all the family funds and forced to defend his business reputation with his uncle because of her actions, he struck back at her. He proceeded to destroy her reputation and her relationship with Charles. Diligently he did everything he could to cast Amy in a bad light, always at the same time painting himself as the generous, tolerant brother. It wasn’t that hard: she was married to an alcoholic, Edwin did squander her money, and she wasn’t, to begin with, a very good manager.
That summer Edwin was offered a job as a clerk with the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota. It wasn’t a great offer, but he was in no position to turn it down, and St. Paul seemed the perfect place to start over, because Charles lived there and Amy was sure he would help her, and because Amy knew from her family history that the Otis name was, if anything, more highly regarded there than in Atchison.
There had been an Otis law firm in existence in St. Paul since 1857. The first to move there had been George, the closest in age to her father, in his day the most respected railroad lawyer in Minnesota, who had been a member of the state legislature, the Democratic candidate for governor, and mayor of St. Paul. Then there was his brother Ephraim (Amy’s Uncle Eph), his law partner until the Civil War. George next had taken in brother Charles, who had moved to St. Paul to study law under him. When George died, Charles, following the tradition established by George, had taken in his youngest brother, Arthur, as partner. Ephraim was in Chicago and Arthur had left for Grand Rapids, but Charles, Amy’s helpful and affectionate Uncle Charles, the most important uncle of all, was in St. Paul and still practicing law—a pillar of his church, a pillar of society and, she hoped, a helping hand for her.
And so suddenly Edwin and Amy and Amelia and Muriel moved to St. Paul. It was only a menial job—clerk in the railway office—but Edwin hadn’t worked for almost a year. In the fall of 1913 they moved.
Their journey was most inauspicious; it was more of a flight than a move and was undoubtedly so disorganized because of Amy’s distraught frame of mind. Instead of informing her “Dear Uncle Charlie” that they were even thinking of moving to St. Paul, much less consulting him as to where to live, she simply literally arrived on his doorstep. He learned of her move to St. Paul only when she asked him to endorse the check to the movers.
Amy wrote Mark to tell him about their move, and unaware of his true character, told him how desperate their situation was.
September 3 1913
Dear Mark;
You will be surprised perhaps to hear from me at the above address and still more so perhaps to know unless Uncle Charlie to whom I had to go to endorse a check in connection with the moving expenses has written you that I have moved here. Something however had to be done as I was nearing the end of my resources and had to get somewhere where I might partly support the girls and myself.
I have tried to rent rooms as I had all my furniture which I did not want to give away, but have been unsuccessful so far as I dare not try to board people, fearing both the expense an
d the strength required to cook for boarders so today I have inserted an ad to take charge of two or three girls during the school year or longer promising careful motherly care, and hope I may be able to get an answer as I feel sure I can bring up and care for children properly though my own girls, owing to the great strain and anxiety of the last year are not so well and strong as they used to be, and Muriel frightened me somewhat a couple of weeks ago by fainting dead away and in falling struck her head against a table, which gave her such a headache she had to stay in bed for a couple of days. They are both in the High School, taking the teachers course and Millie hopes to finish next year.
Mark promptly sent this heartbreaking letter on to their Uncle Charles, at the same time cleverly blunting its impact by enclosing an explanatory letter of his own, in which he listed the funds Amy had so far received and informed his uncle “this will be supplemented by at least $2000 more between this [September 9] and October 1st”—funds that Amy undoubtedly never received. That letter, however, was merely a warm-up for his next letter to Charles. A week later, feeling on firmer ground, evidently emboldened by a letter he had received from his uncle, he carefully, nastily, and with surgical skill cut the ground out from under his sister:
Now, about Amy, pray dismiss any qualms you may have about your inattention to her; the mere fact of her taking up her residence in St. Paul imposes no social obligation upon you or Maribel and Amy has long since shown a marked preference to associating with E. and his ilk to any of her own family.
