18 Tiny Deaths, page 5
As students at Harvard, the two Georges were their own fire brigade. When the sound of clanging bells and the clattering of horse hooves barreled down the street, they gave chase to the fire wagons and pumpers on their bicycles. If his camera was handy, George Glessner might take photographs of the fire scene.
During breaks from school, the two Georges visited The Rocks or the Glessner home in Chicago, often with their classmate Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of Frederick Law Olmsted.
Before winter sports became a popular form of recreation, the two Georges and Frederick spent time by themselves at The Rocks, which was shuttered for the season. Despite the brutal winter weather that often occurred, the two Georges and Frederick trudged through the snow to their hideaway. The only building on The Rocks estate that could be heated during the winter was Fanny’s cabin. The wood-burning stove generated enough heat to comfortably warm the two rooms, where they drank alcoholic beverages and engaged in the shenanigans of young single men on college break.
June 25, 1893
Fanny, fifteen years old at the time, rode the Ferris wheel with the two Georges at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The fair, on 690 acres of Chicago’s south side waterfront, was an opportunity to display Chicago’s recovery from the great fire.39
The Glessners visited the World’s Columbian Exposition several times. John Jacob served on a steering committee of prominent businessmen that brought the World’s Fair to the city. The family had special access to the grounds during construction and for the duration of the fair and attended the grand opening ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland.40
Fanny toured the fairgrounds with her parents before the grand opening. The Glessners were accompanied on their preview tour by Daniel Burnham, the fair’s director of works. At night, Burnham took the Glessners on a tour of the lagoon on an open motorboat. The boat floated past the Women’s Building, an impressive two-story neoclassical structure near the Midway Plaisance.
The eighty-thousand-square-foot Italian Renaissance building was designed by twenty-one-year-old Sophia Hayden, the first female graduate of the architecture program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hayden was the first woman to design a prominent public building in America.
The Women’s Building contained the largest and most ambitious exhibition of women’s art ever undertaken—before or since. The World’s Fair was the first time women created public art. Women were thought unable to use the ladders and scaffolding necessary to work on sculpture and large-scale paintings. Critics and patrons were curious about the art women could produce.
Hayden and her building were intensely scrutinized. Other builders wondered aloud whether a woman could navigate a muddy construction site in a dress and heeled shoes. Critics and the public projected their own biases onto Hayden’s design, assigning feminine qualities to her architecture. They said the building was somehow less assertive, more reticent and demure than buildings designed by men.
The clearest difference between Hayden’s building and others at the World’s Fair was how much the architects were paid. Hayden earned $1,000 for her first commission. Men who designed comparable buildings at the World’s Fair commanded $10,000 for their work.
There was also much discussion in the Glessner household about the World’s Congress of Representative Women, a weeklong convention held in May in conjunction with the World’s Fair. The congress was the largest gathering of prominent women from across the spectrum of advocacy and activism to date. Nearly five hundred women, including representatives from twenty-seven countries, delivered lectures and participated in panel discussions during the congress. More than 150,000 participants attended sessions during the week.
Maud Howe Elliott was a houseguest at the Glessner’s Prairie Avenue residence for a fortnight. During the week of the women’s congress, she was joined by her mother, Julia Ward Howe.
George Glessner took numerous photographs at the World’s Fair. Frances Macbeth’s journal notes the evening that fifteen-year-old Fanny and the two Georges rode the Ferris wheel.
In France’s pavilion, Fanny and George likely encountered an exhibit from the Paris Police Department and a curious bearded man, Alphonse Bertillon. George would certainly have been intrigued by Bertillon’s odd photographic equipment.
A reliable way of identifying criminals was a long-standing problem. Police needed to know who they had in their custody so wanted men couldn’t run away from their deeds. Names could be changed and signatures faked. Appearances could be altered.
Even when police departments began using photography, creating rogues’ galleries of criminals, the images were often useless for identification. Photos were of poor quality, overexposed or blurred, or just a wide shot of the whole body that made identifiable features hard to see.
The son of a noted French statistician and anthropologist, Bertillon believed that no two people were exactly alike. He devised a system to record five primary measurements—the length and width of the head, the length of the middle finger, the length of the left foot, and the length of the forearm from the elbow to the extended middle finger.
Bertillon created a record that included these measurements and descriptions of physical characteristics such as hair and eye color. His record also included standardized photographs—a clear close-up portrait of the face and a second image of the subject in profile. The profile photograph was particularly important, Bertillon contended, since the profile changed less dramatically with age, weight gain, and facial hair.41
Bertillon called his system anthropometry, the measurement of humans. The system became known as bertillonage and was adopted by police departments throughout Europe and the United States.
In preparation for the World’s Fair, Chicago police compiled a massive database of known criminals and recent parolees from throughout the country, the largest collection of bertillonage records in the United States.
One name missing from the rogues’ gallery was H. H. Holmes—a physician, an entrepreneur, a devious liar, a skilled swindler and con man, and a sadistic murderer from the stuff of nightmares.42 Holmes was responsible for dozens of murders in Chicago during the World’s Fair, including many young women and children. He built a hotel with false walls and hidden rooms that became known as the “Murder Castle.”
By some accounts, Holmes may have lured two hundred victims to their death. Despite being in the hands of police numerous times in cities throughout the United States, authorities were completely unaware of his crimes until long after the World’s Fair ended and Holmes left Chicago.
Bertillonage was far from ideal. It could only be applied to adults, since the measurements of children continue to change until they stop growing. More problematic, the system required calipers and other measuring equipment that tended to bend and misalign. Bertillonage was difficult and unreliable and was abandoned when fingerprinting emerged in the early 1900s. All that remains of bertillonage today are the photos—the classic mug shot.
Upon graduation from Harvard in 1894, George Glessner spent the summer at the family’s estate in Littleton, New Hampshire, intending to return in the fall to begin law school. “Before summer was out however, I changed my plans, and went to work with my father’s company,” he reported to Harvard classmates. “I began at the bottom as a filing clerk, and for a time had good prospects of staying there, but owing to a fortunate combination of circumstances have been appointed to the position of assistant manager. I find the work much more interesting than I expected, but also more engrossing.”43
George remained with Warder, Bushnell, & Glessner through its merger into International Harvester, ultimately rising to the position of manager in the firm’s Utility Division. He was involved in a number of organizations popular with businessmen of means, including the Chicago Club and the University Club, and was a member of the board of trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago.
His friend Magrath remained at Harvard as a pathology assistant after graduation from medical school. He taught medical students and was a consulting pathologist for several hospitals in the Boston area.
Fanny came of age in 1896. As befitting her arrival to young adulthood, she was called Frances more often rather than Fanny. The occasion of her birthday was noted in her mother’s journal. “On Wednesday, Frances was eighteen years old,” Frances Macbeth wrote. “We had eighteen carnations, eighteen lilies of the valley, eighteen candles and a fine cake on the breakfast table. We gave her a lovely watch and chatelaine.”44
The Glessners celebrated their daughter’s milestone by sending her abroad with Frances Macbeth’s sister Helen. In May 1896, Frances and Helen departed on the steamer Etruria for London, where they stayed for several months. Their excursion included Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, and France. They returned fourteen months later, in July 1897.
Within months of Frances’s return, she began keeping company with a thirty-year-old attorney, Blewett Lee. They were introduced by Dwight Lawrence, Blewett’s legal partner and a Harvard classmate of George Glessner. Blewett visited the Glessners often during the later months of 1897, having dinner with the family and taking Frances out for carriage rides.
A native of Columbus, Mississippi, Blewett was the only child of Stephen Dill Lee and Regina Lilly Harrison Lee. Stephen Dill Lee was a venerated former Confederate military leader, the youngest lieutenant general of the Civil War. As a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the artillery service of the South Carolina militia, he delivered a formal demand of surrender to Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter on April 11, 1861. When Anderson didn’t surrender, Stephen Lee gave the order to begin firing artillery at Fort Sumter, launching the Civil War. Subsequently, he fought in the Second Battle of Manassas, the Battle of Antietam—the bloodiest single day of the war—and the defense of Vicksburg.
After the Civil War, Stephen Lee served in the Mississippi state senate and was the first president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of the State of Mississippi, now known as Mississippi State University. Some regard him as the father of industrial education in the South.45 He also remained active in Confederate veteran organizations.
Blewett Lee graduated in the first class of the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College, attended the University of Virginia for two years, and received his law degree from Harvard Law School. After clerking for U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Horace Gray for a year, Lee settled in Atlanta to practice law but found the business difficult to break into and not particularly lucrative.
Hungry for work, one day, Lee was visited by a man named Candler who asked the lawyer to draft the paperwork to incorporate a company. The client planned on producing a beverage based on a secret formula. He didn’t have much money, so he offered Lee either shares in the new company or $25 in cash. Blewett sipped the beverage, thought it tasted awful, and insisted on payment in cash money.
That man was Asa Candler, and his company was Coca-Cola.46
Lee moved to Chicago to teach law at Northwestern University. To supplement his income, he formed a practice partnership with Lawrence, who had flunked out of Harvard Law School but had extensive connections in the business and social worlds. This worked well for Lee, since he knew the law but had no connections in Chicago.
The engagement of Blewett and Frances was announced in late December 1897.
A notion persists that Frances didn’t go to university because one or both of her parents forbade it. There is no evidence for this. John Jacob and Frances Macbeth Glessner were loving, supportive parents who doubtless would have helped their daughter fulfill her dreams.
As a young woman of affluence, Frances was not supposed to be concerned about a career or higher education. She wasn’t expected to work outside the home. She would never have to earn a living but could look forward to a comfortable life of leisure and wealth.
Later in life, Frances told a reporter that she might have enjoyed being a nurse or going to medical school when she was young, but that sort of thing “just wasn’t done.” The truth is a little more complicated than that. Frances could have gone to university, even to medical school, if that was what she really wanted.
To be sure, the medical field was an unusual choice for women. It was a common belief that medicine was too indecent for a woman’s delicate sensibilities and that women shouldn’t know about the inner workings of the human body. By the end of the 1800s, however, there were hundreds of women practicing medicine in the United States and several women’s medical schools. Thanks to the efforts of five prominent Baltimore women to raise $500,000 to establish the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, three of the eighteen students in the first class in 1893 were women.47
Sarah Hackett Stevenson, the first woman accepted into membership in the American Medical Association, was a longtime friend of Frances Macbeth and often spent holidays with the family, so the concept of a female medical doctor wasn’t unfamiliar to the Glessners.48
Frances had options but not the choice that she really desired. There was only one university that she wanted to attend, only one medical degree worth pursuing, and that was irremediably beyond her grasp: Harvard.
She wanted to study at Harvard like her brother, like George Burgess Magrath, Blewett Lee, H. H. Richardson, and almost all the important men in her life. The Glessners were a Harvard family. Frances wanted to experience Harvard and belong to the St. Botolph Club like everybody else. But Harvard Medical School did not accept women as students.
Despite being unable to attend Harvard Medical School, Frances maintained an affinity for the university. After all, it was still Harvard. The best and the brightest. The elite of New England blue bloods. In time, her feelings for Harvard would become more complicated, but it would be several decades before the university became an important part of her life again.
Frances was a month shy of her twentieth birthday when she married Blewett Lee, who was ten years her senior. “We would rather have her a little older,” her mother wrote in her journal, “but Mr. Lee is so nearly everything in the world that is good and perfect that we cannot find it in our hearts to interfere with their complete happiness.”49
The wedding was at 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 9, 1898, in the Glessners’ Prairie Avenue residence. Men moved the grand piano to the second floor and removed all the furniture from the parlor and hall. The floors were covered with muslin and the parlor draped with lilies, wild smilax, and white orchids. Frances wore a satin gown with a deep, narrow flounce of double rose Venetian point lace and a tulle veil and carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley.
The ceremony was conducted by Reverend Philip H. Mowry, who had officiated John Jacob and Frances Macbeth’s wedding in 1870. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra played the Swedish Wedding March, “Call Me Thine Own” for the procession, and the Mendelssohn Wedding March after the ceremony.
At nine in the evening, Frances changed into her traveling clothes as the carriage waited to take the newlyweds to the train station. “Then they—the two—went out alone together, never to enter the home in the same way again.”50
3
MARRIAGE AND THE AFTERMATH
THE NEWLYWED COUPLE EMBARKED ON an excursion by railroad to honeymoon at Blewett Lee’s ancestral home in Mississippi, stopping along the way in St. Louis.1 The marriage seemed blissful. Frances appeared to be the perfect bride, dutifully fulfilling the roles expected of her. Within a month of their wedding, she was pregnant with their first child.
“I have never seen two young people more happily married,” Stephen D. Lee wrote to Frances’s parents after their visit.
Upon returning from a brief honeymoon, the Lees resided at the swank Metropole Hotel on Michigan Avenue. The Metropole, built in 1891 as luxury accommodations for the World’s Columbian Exposition, later achieved notoriety as Al Capone’s hangout during his heyday.2
After several months at the Metropole, the couple took an apartment at Indiana Avenue and Twenty-First Street, four blocks distant from her parents’ Prairie Avenue home.
Despite the happy outward appearances, friction soon emerged in the marriage. As individuals, Frances and Blewett had quite different constitutions. He was a church-going nondenominational Christian, while for most of her life, Frances was not religious. She enjoyed hiking and spending time outdoors, but he preferred reading and other quiet intellectual domestic pursuits. She was a northerner, raised in a progressive and cultured family; he was the son of a revered Confederate figure who espoused the supremacy of white males above all others.3
Blewett was unable to feign enthusiasm for his wife’s interest in needlework and crafts. Frances was prone to bursts of creative energy, sometimes seizing upon an idea and working all day and into the night. She likely felt unappreciated and unfulfilled in her marriage.
Neither Frances nor Blewett was used to the everyday adaptations and accommodations that are necessary for a successful marriage. He was an only child, while she was an only daughter who had not socialized in a school setting. Both of them had grown set in their ways.
As a Glessner, Frances had a certain style of living to which she had become accustomed and that her parents also expected for their daughter. Blewett’s salary could not afford the lifestyle Frances demanded, so it was necessary for the couple to depend upon the continuing financial support of her parents. The Glessners’ subsidy was gratefully accepted, but no doubt gnawed at Frances and Blewett for different reasons. Relying on the assistance of his in-laws likely undermined Blewett’s masculinity and his confidence as a breadwinner for the family. Frances resented the strings implicit with her parent’s money, the insinuation of their presence and control in her life. Anybody who has been a child may understand a parental love that is wanted and yet at times overbearing and smothering. Frances was frustrated that she did not enjoy the independence and autonomy she thought would come with adulthood.
