Book Review

Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone, Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White, New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Pp. xiii + 301. $26.95 (ISBN 0-393-05013-0).

In Elizabeth Dale's The Rule of Justice and Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone's Love on Trial, the authors revisit cases that riveted public attention when they occurred but that have been largely forgotten over time. Dale recreates the 1888 trial of Zephyr Davis, a seventeen-year-old African American foreman in a Chicago sweatshop who admitted to murdering a fourteen-year-old white, female machine tender whom he had supervised. Lewis and Ardizzone focus on the 1924 "Rhinelander Case" in which Leonard Rhinelander, a white New York socialite, sought to divorce his light-skinned, mixed race wife Alice Jones Rhinelander because, he alleged, she hid the fact that she was one-half black until after he married her. Both trials received extensive coverage in the contemporary press, and Dale, Lewis, and Ardizzone skillfully utilize courtroom events and the tabloid portrayal of those events as means to explore the larger cultural, social, and economic issues that divided Americans during two tempestuous eras.	1
In The Rule of Justice, Dale reconstructs the trial of Zephyr Davis who allegedly murdered Maggie Gaughan in a storeroom in the boot heel factory where they both worked. Apprehended by a small mob in a cornfield in a Chicago suburb as he fled the city, Davis admitted initially to the crime. Chicago's tabloids called for swift punishment for Davis and fueled popular outrage by publishing sensationalized accounts of the murder. The angry cries for a speedy trial and execution only grew louder when the public learned that Davis's lawyers would pursue an insanity defense. In the end, the editors and incensed public got their wish as Davis was tried, convicted, and executed with startling alacrity. Arrested on February 28, 1888, he was hanged less than three months later on May 12, despite the fact that after his arrest he claimed that the mob that had apprehended him had coerced his confession.	2
As Dale contextualizes the Davis trial she paints an evocative picture of a rough and tumble Gilded Age Chicago, plagued by child labor, deteriorating race relations, and numerous other maladies that accompanied rapid urbanization. She also argues that the Davis case reveals a legal system that in 1888 still conformed to the "popular will" in ways reminiscent of the rough justice of the frontier. In an era where elites sought to teach the urban masses the importance of the "rule of law," certain criminal cases could still cause even conservative editors to portray the judicial system as an impediment to expeditious punishment. In the Davis trial, Dale suggests, popular anger led jurors to completely ignore instructions from the trial judge relative to the insanity defense that might have led either to an acquittal or a non-capital sentence. As a result, Dale argues, "the insanity defense, problems with the jury instructions, or weaknesses in the defense case did not matter much in the end" (81). The jurors, the press, and the white public wanted Davis executed quickly and had no patience for the evolving niceties of the legal system. The white press, moreover, cheered this result. "The Chicago papers that praised the outcome in [Davis's] case," Dale writes, "did not celebrate law, they rejoiced in its absence" (4).	3
Although many modern readers may not find it surprising that popular demands for immediate justice could influence a white jury in a nineteenth-century murder case that involved a white, female victim and a black, male defendant, Dale uses the Davis case to make an innovative point. The proceedings in the Davis trial, Dale contends, illustrate the fact that popular forces could still counter governmental authority even in an advanced capitalist metropolis such as Chicago where the criminal law, like the property law, "should have been firmly in the control of the State" (6). The proceedings in the Davis trial, she concludes, reveal the challenges Gilded Age reformers faced in their efforts to make the criminal law an instrument that could control the passions of the working classes. Despite efforts to make the criminal courtroom the province of rational judges who relied on precedent, in cases such as the Davis trial popular outrage could still overwhelm procedural safeguards. And "by demonstrating that as the nineteenth century came to a close, popular justice continued to play a determining factor in criminal law in a city like Chicago," Dale concludes, "the case invites consideration of the possibility that the same was true in other parts of the country" (9).	4
In Love on Trial, Lewis and Ardizzone turn to the melodramatic "Rhinelander Case" that became a national obsession in the mid-1920s. The case evolved from the unlikely marriage of Leonard Rhinelander, the scion of a wealthy white New York real estate family, to Alice Jones, a former nanny and the daughter of a black father and white mother. Although Alice and Leonard hoped to live outside of the scrutiny of high society, their marriage did lead to Alice's brief listing in the Social Register (although her name was later removed). Soon, however, the New York tabloids exposed Alice's racial background and Leonard's powerful father Philip Rhinelander, fearing the family name would be irreparably tarnished, successfully pressured his son to reconsider his marital decision. Less than two months after exchanging vows with Alice, Leonard left her and launched an annulment suit in which he alleged that Alice fraudulently hid the fact that she was black. Leonard made this claim despite his having met Alice's African American father many times before he married her.	5
The "Rhinelander Case"—as the trial came to be known in the press—captured the public's attention because of a series of dramatic twists and turns that included public readings of sex-laced love letters, revelations of premarital trysts in hotel rooms, testimony from vaudeville star Al Jolson, and Alice's being asked to disrobe for the all-male jury in order to show that Leonard must have known she was not white. Public fascination with the case also reflected Americans' fixation with defining racial boundaries in the 1920s, a decade during which Congress passed the infamous National Origins Act of 1924 and whites in the North and South joined the Ku Klux Klan by the tens of thousands.	6
In Love on Trial, Lewis and Ardizzone draw on recent whiteness studies in order to analyze the complex issues of race that permeated both the trial and the extensive newspaper coverage it spawned. In their hands, the Rhinelander Case becomes a vehicle for explicating the means by which Americans in the 1920s actively constructed race. The authors, for example, use Al Jolson's testimony to discuss the way many immigrant groups distanced themselves from African Americans as means of asserting their own ethnic acceptability. Leonard's lawyers asked Jolson to testify at the trial because Alice had claimed to Leonard during their courtship that the star had once flirted with her at an Adirondack resort where she worked. On the stand, Jolson testified that he had never met Alice, and Leonard's attorneys used this fact as evidence that Alice had deliberately misled their client as to her racial identity by claiming falsely that famous white celebrities pursued her. Although Jolson's testimony ultimately had little effect on the trial's outcome, Lewis and Ardizzone focus on its cultural significance. Jolson had gained great fame by performing on stage in blackface. As a Jewish-Lithuanian immigrant, Jolson was also one of the millions of new Americans whose own ethnic identity was in a state of flux. "In adopting blackface," Lewis and Ardizzone write, "Jolson, as one of those new immigrants, not only traded on a form that had grown in popularity during the nineteenth century, he also found the perfect means of becoming white" (113). And by testifying on behalf of a member of white high society who sought to annul a marriage that violated racial taboos, the authors suggest, Jolson further solidified his own racial identity. Jolson's testimony is just one of the many moments in the Rhinelander case that allow Lewis and Ardizzone to explore race as a cultural construction. And whether or not readers agree with all of Lewis and Ardizzone's conclusions, they will benefit from their refreshingly clear analysis of these themes.	7
Both Love on Trial and The Rule of Justice rely heavily on newspaper accounts for their evidence and, as a result, Dale, Lewis, and Ardizzone occasionally conflate editorial opinions with those of the wider public and by so doing may overstate some editors' influence and cultural acuity. Doing so, however, may be the unavoidable result of using newspaper editorials and reports to gauge popular reaction to trials that occurred in eras before opinion polls regularly tracked public sentiment. And these small missteps do little to undermine the authors' larger arguments, which are, on the whole, measured and persuasive.	8
In The Rule of Justice and Love on Trial, Dale, Lewis, and Ardizzone skillfully use once-forgotten cases to shed new light on questions of interest to present-day historians. Dale demonstrates how popular sentiment in a case containing the volatile mix of race, class, and murder could undermine state efforts to control the law and the legal system during the Gilded Age. Lewis and Ardizzone use a sensationalized 1920s trial that hinged on questions of racial identity to explain how Americans constructed whiteness during a decade of ethnic turmoil. Both books are engaging and clearly written narratives that address important themes and should find a wide audience among legal historians and nonspecialists.	9
Michael A. Ross Loyola University New Orleans

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