The Square Pegs (14 page)

Before his burial in Brooklyn, his physician, Dr. Carlton Simon, in collaboration with an alienist, Dr. Edward C. Spitzka, removed his brain for study. They found it was a remarkably heavy brain. It weighed 1,525 grains or 53.8 ounces. It was found to rank twenty-sixth among the brains of 107 famous persons. George Francis Train would have been pleased beyond measure to know that it was heavier, even, than the brain of Daniel Webster.

IV

The Free Lover Who Ran for President

“I advocate Free Love in its highest, purest sense, as the only cure for the immorality, the deep damnation by which men corrupt and disfigure God’s most holy institution of sexual relations.”

VICTORIA WOODHULL

When that greatest of Athenian orators, Demosthenes, after failing to lead his fellow Greeks in a successful revolt against the Macedonians, fled to a temple on the isle of Calauria and there took his life by biting off a portion of a poisoned pen, he could hardly have imagined how soon and for what purpose he would return to the earth he had so reluctantly left. Yet, a little more than two thousand years later, in the summer of 1868, in the unlikely city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Demosthenes returned to inspire another orator to undertake a revolt against puritanical convention which would rock America for a decade and more. The hostess to Demosthenes’ resurrection was an attractive, aggressive, outrageous young lady named Victoria Claflin Woodhull. For some years previous, Mrs. Woodhull, who had been raised on mesmerism and had been much addicted to trances, had consorted with an anonymous apparition clad in a Greek tunic. This friendly spirit-creature materialized frequently and made extravagant promises to Mrs. Woodhull of future wealth and power. He answered all her questions, except one. He would not reveal his identity.

But in Pittsburgh, where Mrs. Woodhull, her lively sister, and her zany family were earning a meager livelihood out of spiritualism, magnetic healing, cancer cures, and prostitution, the apparition in the Greek tunic appeared once more and at last revealed his identity. He traced his name, Mrs. Woodhull later related, on a marble parlor-table, and its eerie brightness illuminated the entire gloomy room. His name was Demosthenes. And, having overcome this final formality, the old Attic orator imparted to Mrs. Woodhull a crucial instruction that was to change her life. He ordered her to travel to a house at 17 Great Jones Street, New York City, and enter it, and occupy it, and know that thereafter only good and great events would befall her.

Apparently, and not unexpectedly, Demosthenes was sufficiently persuasive to send Mrs. Woodhull scurrying to the house on Great Jones Street near Broadway, in New York City. She entered it, found it furnished and to let, and explored it. In the library all was intact except one book lying loose on a table. Curiously, she picked up the book, glanced at the title, and what she saw, she admitted, was “blood-chilling.” The book was entitled
Orations of Demosthenes
. Mrs. Woodhull promptly rented the house, sent for her relatives, and prepared to make her mark.

Whether or not her next step was stimulated by one more visitation from the ether world is not known. More likely, Mrs. Woodhull took her immediate future into her own hands. Her Greek vision had promised her wealth and power. She was hardheaded enough to know that these she might obtain only through use of her natural advantages, which included sexual appeal, mystical experience, and unlimited audacity. At thirty Victoria Woodhull was a handsome, clever, brash woman, who looked chic and exciting in shirts and in shapely checkered dresses cut daringly short (to the calves). Samuel Gompers, first president of the American Federation of Labor, remembered her as “a slight, sparkling little creature, with expressive brown eyes and short brown hair.” Her

sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, a gay, somewhat coarse girl aged twenty-two, was even more beautiful, less intelligent, and certainly less inhibited.

In her own person, and in that of her younger sister, Victoria Woodhull saw sufficient assets for the founding of a fortune and a national reputation. The question was: where to begin? The answer came immediately: begin at the top. For in New York in 1868 the one person at the top was Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in the United States, whose principal interests in his seventy-fourth year were females of sexual appeal who were not too swift of foot and anyone else of mystical experience who would give him assurance of health and longevity. To reach him required only unlimited audacity.

Undoubtedly, the idea of meeting the bluff, bewhiskered old Commodore originated in Mrs. Woodhull’s fertile brain. She decided to effect the introduction through her male parent, Buckman Claflin, who, though a disreputable, one-eyed monster, was still her father and would lend the entire enterprise an air of respectability. Thus, Mrs. Woodhull and her hoydenish sister were chastely escorted to the mansion in Washington Place and announced as famous miracle-healers from the Midwest.

It is not surprising that they were promptly admitted. Commodore Vanderbilt was an ailing man who had become impatient with conventional medicine and was now employing the services of a Staten Island seer and an electrical wizard to give him hope and comfort. He was ready to listen to almost anyone. Mrs. Woodhull quickly explained that she was a successful medium, and that her sister Tennie was a magnetic healer who gave patients strength through physical contact. This last, as well as the provocative appearance of his fair guests, convinced the blasphemous old Commodore that he must put himself in their hands.

However, let it be remarked at once that Commodore Vanderbilt was neither an easy nor a pliable patient. He was

tough, he was ruthless, and he was nobody’s fool. He had pyramided possession of a single sailboat, purchased when he was sixteen, to the ownership of a hundred steamers servicing the East Coast and to the final control of the New York Central Railroad. Through instigating price wars, indulging in stock-market trickery, and bribing courts and legislatures he had accumulated $100,000,000 in his prime, and almost doubled the sum before his death. “Law?” he once bellowed. “What do I care about law? Hain’t I got the power?”

Obviously such a man would not be easy to please. Yet, by some miracle of understanding, Victoria Woodhull reduced this blustering giant to the position of intimate friend and patron. When she realized his need for sex indeed, few housemaids escaped his lust she fed him the willing and vigorous Tennessee. The magnetic treatments, whereby Tennessee laid her hands on the Commodore’s hands and passed electrical energy from her body into his, proceeded magnificently. Tennessee was soon in his bed, installed as his mistress. He called her his “little sparrow” and she called him “old boy.”

A year and a half of Tennessee’s special brand of magnetic healing softened the Commodore for Victoria Woodhull’s special purposes. The idea of how she might best use the Commodore came to Mrs. Woodhull from her lover of four years, a bemused Civil War veteran and fellow spiritualist named Colonel James H. Blood. It was the astute Blood who realized at once that the Commodore might aid his protegees in that art at which he was past master the art of making money by speculation. The Commodore possessed great stock holdings, manipulated shares by the thousands, dominated Wall Street as no other man did. Might he not be of greatest value in support of a brokerage firm?

On January 20, 1870, the
New York Herald
announced, incredulously, the opening of a new brokerage house Woodhull, Claflin and Company operated solely by two pretty and fashionable lady partners. Their headquarters, the newspaper continued, were in parlors 25 and 26 of the Hoffman House. Parlor 25 was furnished with reception chairs and piano, and decorated with oil paintings and a photograph of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, beside which hung a framed inscription reading, significantly: “Simply to Thy cross I cling.” To its description the Herald added a comment: “The notion prevails among the lame ducks and old foxes of Wall Street that Vanderbilt, the oldest fox of them all, is at the bottom of the experiment.”

If this announcement created a furor, it was as nothing compared to the excitement generated among investors and members of the exchange when Victoria Woodhull and her sister invaded Wall Street itself. For soon enough Hoffman House was found too confining, and the ladies opened new business quarters at 44 Broad Street. Seven thousand visitors, fascinated by the oddity and by the silent partnership of Vanderbilt, flocked to their offices in the first week. When the traffic did not abate, the proprietors were obliged to post a notice in their vestibule reading: “All gentlemen will state their business and then retire at once.” Gentlemen were admitted by a uniformed doorman to a front office furnished with leather sofas and walnut desks, which was separated by a glass-and-wood partition from a rear cubicle reserved for female customers. Mrs. Woodhull and her sister, fresh roses in their hair and gold pens cocked jauntily on their ears, were cordial to legitimate customers, but evasive with the press. They were in business for themselves, they said. They would not discuss their patron. “Commodore Vanderbilt is my friend,” said Tennessee, “but I will not say anything more concerning that matter.” The press was, for the most part, generous in its praise, and headlines referred to the sisters as the “Lady Brokers,” the “Queens of Finance,” the “Bewitching Brokers,” the “Vanderbilt Protegees.” Banks and financial firms respectfully came calling, and were impressed, and the new business boomed.

In three years, by Victoria Woodhull’s public estimate, the

new brokerage house “made seven hundred thousand dollars.” Where did these huge profits come from? One historian has been unkind enough to remark that “it is to be suspected they sold much more than railroad shares.” But even the Everleigh sisters of Chicago, more expert at handling fleshly commodities, had never been able thus to make almost three quarters of a million dollars profit in three years. It may be said with some certainty that the great bulk of the profits earned by Woodhull, Claflin and Company came not from sex, but from brains. And the brains belonged to Commodore Vanderbilt. For during those exciting financial years he constantly provided the eager sisters with inside market information. In 1857, the Commodore, having disposed of his steamships, became a director, and later president, of the New York and Harlem Railroad. The stock in this line, which went from central Manhattan to Albany, the Commodore purchased at $9 a share. By bribing the City Council to extend the line, then by outwitting Daniel Drew, who was selling short, the Commodore sent the stock rocketing up to $179 a share. Mrs. Woodhull, lady broker, was his spiritual solace during this coup, and her own profits in the Harlem were almost half a million dollars.

When the Commodore determined to acquire control of the Erie Railroad, which ran from New York to Chicago and competed with his own New York Central, he took Mrs. Woodhull along for the ride. It was a rocky road. Gould and Fisk reached the directors of the Erie first, had them issue $10,000,000 worth of bonds, had these converted into 50,000 shares of stock, and dumped the lot on the market. The Commodore bought and bought, while Fisk joyfully chortled: “We’ll give the old hog all he can hold if this printing press holds out.” When the Commodore learned that he had been tricked, he forced Gould and Fisk to make the stocks good and to buy back $5,000,000 worth of them.

Finally, on that September day in 1869 known as Black Friday, Mrs. Woodhull was able to profit once more with the Commodore’s assistance. Gould, after encouraging President Grant to keep the nation’s large gold-reserve locked up in Treasury vaults, bought $47,000,000 worth of free gold and drove its price up from the $132 required in greenbacks to purchase $100 in gold to $150 and to $162.50. The Exchange was in a panic. Angrily Grant released $4,000,000 in government gold, and Wall Street had its Black Friday as the price of gold plummeted down to $135. On that terrible day, the Commodore handed out loans of a million dollars to help settle the market. Through his advice, Mrs. Woodhull had sold at $160, and at enormous profit, before the final panic took place.

As time passed, the Commodore was being subtly, gently drawn away from the influence of Victoria Woodhull by his second wife, Frank C. Vanderbilt, a tall, dignified, religious Alabama girl. She barred entrance to all spiritualists, and surrounded her sickly husband with orthodox physicians and a Baptist pastor. Mrs. Woodhull did not mind. She already had what she wanted from the Commodore. She had wealth. Now she went after that which she desired even more power.

On April 2, 1870, in the pages of the
New York Herald
, she made a proclamation that amazed the metropolis and would soon enough make her a national figure. “While others argued the equality of woman with man,” she declared, “I proved it by successfully engaging in business. … I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised women of the country, and believing as I do that the prejudices which still exist in the popular mind against women in public life will soon disappear, I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency.”

It is unlikely that there ever existed, before the advent of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, a presidential candidate with a background so unstable, chaotic, and scandalous. She was born September 23, 1838, in the squalor of the frontier town

of Homer, Ohio. She was the seventh of ten children, and she was named Victoria in honor of Great Britain’s new queen. Her father, Reuben Buckman Claflin, was an uncouth conniver who earned a poor living as a surveyor and a postmaster. Her mother, Roxanna, was a strange, martial creature, probably of German-Jewish descent, probably conceived out of wedlock by a governor of Pennsylvania. Long years later, Victoria told the
Philadelphia Press
that she was raised “in a picturesque cottage, white painted and high peaked, with a porch running round it and a flower garden in front.” She was raised in a broken-down shack on an unkempt hill, and every room of the shack from basement to parlor was filled with beds for the squalling children and relatives.