The Rhinelander case was a widely publicized scandal involving a young interracial couple who met in September 1921 and married in October 1924. Interracial marriage was neither usual nor remarkable in the 1920s; but the Rhinelander case was different. The scandalous marriage and the subsequently spectacular divorce trial that followed seized the attention of the masses and became fodder for the “jazz journalists” of the 1920s. Leonard Kip Rhinelander, the bridegroom, was the son of an elite family that was listed in the Social Register. His father, Philip Rhinelander, owned a real estate business and controlled millions of dollars. Alice Beatrice Jones was the daughter of mixed-race parents and of more modest birth. Her father, whose racial credentials were at issue, had been a manservant in England, and her white mother also earned her living through domestic service. Alice Jones had worked as a nanny before she met and married Kip. The dizzying ascent of a young mixed-race woman from domestic service to the Social Register, in whose pages she briefly appeared, was one reason why the marriage caught the eye of ambitious reporters; the other reason was how race played out in a public trial that became a national spectacle.
After World War I, race relations in the United States were becoming increasingly hostile and contentious. The Great Migration had changed the racial makeup of northern cities; workers competed over industrial jobs, and businesses actively encouraged competition among ethnic groups over jobs and wages. Returning African-American soldiers brought with them expectations of greater freedom, and many white southerners reacted violently to the sight of black men with guns. Race riots in several cities both during and after the war only intensified hostility and suspicion between groups. Nativism and anti-Catholicism similarly reappeared, a change in temper that increased demand for restrictive immigration laws and Americanization campaigns. The popularity of D. W. Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation, also contributed to the culture of racism, even as the Ku Kiux Klan reemerged in the rural South and began to prosper in the urban North as well. Other racial confrontations suggested that those African Americans who fought back against segregation and discrimination would be subjected to prosecution from white mobs but also from the authorities, who often shared the racial views of the crowd.
This heightened atmosphere of racial fear and antipathy was the context for Kip Rhinelander’s suit for divorce from his wife, Alice. Pressured by his father to end his two-week-old marriage, Kip Rhinelander filed for an annulment, based on the theory that he did not know his wife was not white until after they were married. The divorce trial quickly became a circus. Some reporters for the tabloids alternately portrayed Alice Jones as willfully duplicitous and Kip Rhinelander as a willful dupe while others viewed Rhinelander as a cad and Alice Jones as an innocent victim. The proceedings included the testimony of movie star Al Jolson, who denied having propositioned or even met Alice, after she had claimed he’d done both, and a ritualistic disrobing of the spurned wife, the purpose of which was to prove that Rhinelander must have known his wife was not white. The record of their relationship, including premarital trysts and visits to Alice Jones’s parental home, made the public question Kip Rhinelander’s story. An allwhite jury of men listened to the proceedings for weeks before rendering a verdict in two days of deliberation. They decided in favor of Alice Jones, who was awarded both immediate compensation and a lifetime annuity from Rhinelander. Neither remarried.
Needless to say, when the eugenics standard of “one drop” was sufficient to convict men and women of violating the Virginia Racial Integrity Act, the marriage of an elite white man to a mixed-race woman not only raised eyebrows but strengthened the resolve of those who fought integration on a larger scale. Rhinelander v. Rhinelander suggested that race was a deeply hidden secret in American culture, the signs of which were disguised in other forms. Race was also the major social conflict of the time. As W. E. B. DuBoiS wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, “the problem of the twentieth century [was] the problem of the color line.” While racial mixing stirred the imagination of novelists and filmmakers, sexual relationships and lasting marriages between blacks and whites intensified opposition to social integration North and South. The challenge would be whether Americans could move beyond the prejudices of the past and achieve a more racially egalitarian society.
See also JOURNALISM; RACE AND RACIAL CONFLICT;
Sweet trial.
Further reading: Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone, Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White (New York: Norton, 2002).
Rockefeller, John Davison (1839-1937) industrialist and philanthropist
Born in Richford, New York, to Eliza Davison Rockefeller and William Avery Rockefeller, an itinerant medicine peddler, John D. Rockefeller attended country schools and spent a year at Owego Academy before his family moved to Ohio. He attended high school for two years in Cleveland and started his business career there in 1855, when he obtained a bookkeeping job after three months’ training at a commercial college. When he was only 18, he became a partner in a commission house. In 1863, four years after oil was first tapped by a well in Pennsylvania, Rockefeller and two partners bought into the oil refining business. In 1865 Rockefeller and his partners established their own refinery, where Rockefeller could be “daring in design” and
John D. Rockefeller (Hulton/Archive)
“cautious in execution,” a formula he used throughout his career. From the beginning, he kept careful records of costs and profits that informed him where his business stood.
Setting out to monopolize the petroleum industry, the partners added a second refinery. In 1870 they replaced their partnership with a joint-stock firm, the Standard Oil Company (Ohio). In 1882 it became the Standard Oil Trust, with 40 allied firms controlling 90 percent of American refineries. Its monopoly was declared illegal by the Ohio Supreme Court in 1892. Starting that year and ending in 1899, Standard Oil operated as a community-of-interest combination of 20 firms. From then until 1911 when the Supreme Court declared it in violation of antitrust laws, Standard Oil acted as a holding company, the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey. Through the years, Standard Oil acquired its own warehouses, shipping facilities, tank cars, pipelines, and barrel-making plant and managed to cut the unit costs of refining oil almost in half, while extending the market for petroleum by-products.
The guiding genius behind Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller pioneered the modern corporation. He has been called the “greatest business administrator America has produced.” Although he often forced competitors to sell or to join his alliance, he seldom bankrupted them and occasionally treated them leniently. He paid his employees well and ruled his operation by consensus.
Efficient and benign within Standard Oil, Rockefeller’s passion to bring order out of chaos in the infant oil industry made him ruthless in eliminating competitors. Although well informed, he often feigned ignorance of the tactics of terror and espionage employed against rivals by his underlings. Rebating was the most effective weapon Standard Oil used to force competitors to join it or be ruined. The huge volume of its shipments enabled it to secure from competing railroads discounts of up to 50 percent of the published freight rates. At times it even got “drawbacks,” or rebates, on oil shipped by some competitors. Rockefeller’s marketing practices ranged from shrewd to unscrupulous. By the 1890s the company marketed 84 percent of all petroleum products sold in America and produced a third of its crude oil. Later those percentages were reduced by new oil fields, stronger competitors, and more effective federal anti-monopoly legislation.
Rockefeller was a man of contradictions. He was determined to be both rich and virtuous. He was both a predatory businessman, trying to prove he was the fittest by surviving his competitors, and a church-going Baptist who aimed “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” He was devoted to his wife, Laura Celestia Spelman, whom he married in 1864, and to their children, four of whom lived to adulthood.
Tooth and claw business practices, however, made Rockefeller extremely unpopular, and his reputation and that of Standard Oil was further damaged by Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894) and even more by muckraker Ida Tarbell in her 1902-03 series on Standard Oil, first published in McClure’s Magazine. Having ignored hostility and been anonymous in his giving (for example, he established the University of Chicago and gave it $35 million with no strings attached), Rockefeller hired a publicist to broadcast his good works and tag his gifts with his name.
No longer active in his company’s decisions after 1895, Rockefeller concentrated on his philanthropic work, giving away $550 million in his lifetime ($450 million of which went for medical research). Believing that the prevention of disease was more important than its relief, he was willing to fund pure research for generalized future benefits. In 1891 he endowed the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; the next year the General Education Board, which became the world’s foremost educational foundation; in 1913 the Rockefeller Foundation, the world’s largest grant-making foundation and the country’s main sponsor of medical science, medical education, and public health; and in 1918 the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. Many of these programs were later consolidated in the Rockefeller Foundation. The benefits of Rockefeller-funded research were mind-boggling, even surpassing those of the later World Health Organization. Among them were the actual elimination of hookworm, the virtual eradication of yellow fever, and the revitalization of medical schools and medical research throughout the world. Rockefeller outlived his enemies and his reputation improved when his giving became public knowledge. He distributed over a billion and a half dollars, making Rockefeller the greatest philanthropist in American history.
Further reading: Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (New York: Random House, 1998).
—Olive Hoogenboom
Roosevelt, Theodore (1858-1919) vice president, 26th U. S. president
The son of Theodore Roosevelt and Martha Bulloch, future president Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was born in New York City on October 27, 1858. Renowned as an advocate and exemplar of the manly virtues of physical fitness, military action, and adventure, he came into the world as a small, asthmatic, near-sighted boy. As the younger Roosevelt matured, he became an amateur naturalist, an interest expressed later in his conservationism. In 1876 Roosevelt entered Harvard, where he was unpopular due to his enthusiasm for studies in natural science. After graduating, he published a naval history of the War of 1812, the first of a long series of writings that would come from his pen. He was married twice, first to Alice Lee, the mother of
President Theodore Roosevelt (left) with John Muir (Library of Congress) his daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and later to Edith Carow, who gave birth to their five children—Theodore, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin.
In 1882, Roosevelt began his political career when he was elected to the New York State Assembly on the Republican Party ticket. He was a freshman representative but did not play the part. Roosevelt startled the assembly by calling for an investigation of the state’s Attorney General Hamilton Ward and Supreme Court Justice T. R. Westbrook, who failed to prosecute millionaire Jay Gould for manipulating stock of the Manhattan Railway Company. While the subsequent inquiry into the Westbrook scandal revealed no wrongdoing, Roosevelt earned a reputation as a reformer.
The emotional devastation caused by the death of his wife Alice and his mother on February 14, 1884, forced him to relinquish his seat and retreat to his ranch in the Dakota Territory. Politics called him back east in 1886, when the Republican Party, fearing that independent candidate Henry George might lead New York to a second Paris Commune, tapped Roosevelt to run for mayor. On Election Day, Roosevelt finished last in a three-way race, with many Republicans voting for the Democratic candidate and winner Abraham Hewitt. His candidacy, however, laid the groundwork for later political races. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Roosevelt head of the Civil Service Commission, where he championed the merit system over the patronage system. Amazed that border patrolmen were tested for their spelling and arithmetic and not their riding skills and marksmanship, Roosevelt revised the
Civil Service examinations to assess practical skills, rather than theoretical knowledge.
In 1891 Roosevelt published his History of New York City. Its publication attracted the attention of the reform mayor of New York City, William L. Strong, who appointed Roosevelt police commissioner in 1895. The New York Police Department of the 1890s was rife with corruption. To improve the force’s morale Roosevelt established the practice of handing out medals for exemplary service. He also modernized the police communications by developing a telephone call box system. His zealousness proved to be his undoing. In an effort to stop police extortion, he vigorously enforced the city’s blue laws, which forbade the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Many saw his efforts as a form of class prejudice and a war on working-class recreation. Public support evaporated. He was saved from being driven from office when the McKinley administration appointed him to the position of assistant secretary of the navy in 1897. At the Navy Department, Roosevelt was an ardent and unabashed expansionist. He took advantage of Navy Secretary John Long’s frequent absences to reorganize the administration of the navy in preparation for war with Spain. While President McKinley considered how to respond to the sinking of the USS Maine at Havana, Roosevelt told the chief executive that war was the only option “compatible with national honor.”
After the declaration of war on Spain, Roosevelt resigned his post and accepted the rank of lieutenant colonel in the First Volunteer Cavalry Regiment soon to be known as the Rough Riders. Although they were trained as mounted riflemen at their base in San Antonio, Texas, they arrived in Cuba bereft of their horses because of transport problems. After landing at Daiquiri, Cuba, they were instrumental in pushing the Spanish back in skirmishes at Las Guasimas and El Caney. Six days after landing, Roosevelt and his regiment distinguished themselves in action outside Santiago by helping to take Kettle and San Juan Hills. Due to heavy rifle fire, losses among the Rough Riders were heavy; but by that afternoon, the army was in possession of the two strategic hills. After the war ended, Roosevelt returned home a hero; and in 1899, he was elected governor of the state of New York. As the state’s chief executive, he ran afoul of his chief sponsor, Senator Thomas C. Platt, by supporting the Ford Bill, which placed a tax on any corporation owning public franchises. After thwarting efforts by Platt’s followers to bury the bill in committee, Roosevelt signed the bill into law. After serving one term as governor, Roosevelt was elected in 1900 as William McKinley’s vice president. The assassination of McKinley in 1901 elevated Roosevelt to the presidency.
Roosevelt’s administration was known for its strong stands in favor of conservation, regulation of the trusts, and an assertive FOREIGN POLICY. Repudiating the country’s tradition of isolationism, Roosevelt had lobbied for U. S. intervention in Cuba and the Philippines under McKinley’s administration. As president, he moved to show American strength in Latin America and the Pacific by issuing the RooSEVELT COROLLARY to the Monroe Doctrine, jockeying to build the Panama Canal, and sending the Great White Fleet to Japan. In addition, he mediated an end to the Russo-jAPANESE War (for which he won a Noble Peace Prize) and disputes in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Morocco; and he sought to guarantee American interests in Asia with the Root-Takahira Agreement and the Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan that assured peaceful relations by eliminating school segregation of Japanese immigrant children in the United States in return for a voluntary cessation of emigration from Japan.
Roosevelt preferred to work out national problems and needs through cooperative arrangements between private and public interests and to strengthen the hand of the federal government in domestic affairs, a political philosophy that he called the New Nationalism, echoing progressive Herbert Croly. Domestically, Roosevelt’s preference for a stable economy and a strong national government led to his intervention in the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, the prosecution of monopoly trusts such as the railroad holding company in the Northern Securities case and Standard Oil, and the passage of government regulation of industry in the Elkins Act and Hepburn Act, the Meat Inspection Act, and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Roosevelt’s conservationism expressed itself in the passage of the Antiquities Act, the National Reclamation Act, and the creation of the National Park Service.
During his nearly eight years in the White House, Roosevelt expanded the powers of the office and became a model for the modern presidency. While he refused to run for a second term in his own right, Roosevelt’s discontent with the conduct of his self-chosen successor, William Howard Taft, led to a failed presidential campaign as the Progressive Party nominee in 1912. The death of his son Quentin during World War I left Roosevelt devastated. He died in 1919.
See also Big Stick diplomacy; progressivism.
Further reading: Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (New York: William Morrow, 1994); Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).
—Timothy E. Vislocky
World History
