#MeToo is Long Overdue: Guest MINDSETTER™ Renehan
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
A 1901 portrait of Evelyn Nesbit by Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. (1862-1932). PHOTO: National Museum of American History
The first and most obvious contender is of course JFK. While Kennedy’s dalliances with women of prominence and power, such as Marilyn Monroe, have gained the most notoriety, it is his relationships with young, impressionable, and subservient female White House staffers which most certainly would have in our day rung #MeToo bells, and done so rather loudly. Early on, JFK established a sexual relationship with 19-year-old intern Marion (“Mimi”) Alford – a relationship enabled by longtime Kennedy associate Dave Powers, who eventually became quite skilled at helping JFK seduce young women, especially young women in White House employ. According to author Larry Sabato, JFK’s other exploits in White House philandering extended to 21-year-old Pamela Turnure, his wife’s Senior Press Officer, as well as White House Presidential Press Office secretaries Priscilla “Fiddle” Wear (21) and Jill “Faddle” Cowen (23). (But as presidents go, JFK certainly pales in comparison to Thomas Jefferson. There were no female Executive staffers in Jefferson’s day, so he just banged his female slaves instead. Talk about harassing powerless underlings.)
Enough of politics. What about Hollywood? Errol Flynn once famously said “I like my scotch old and my women young.” He was aged 50 when he died in 1959 – doing so, by some reports, in the arms of his 18-year-old girlfriend Beverly Aadland, whom he’d started “dating” when she was just 15. In 1942, the 33-year-old actor had been charged with the statutory rape of two underage girls but was acquitted after an entire regiment of lawyers from Warner Brothers worked their magic. Another Hollywood hero, Louis B. Mayer, is said to have routinely groped the teenaged Judy Garland. Then we have the actress Tippi Hedren who recounted in her autobiography how screen director Alfred Hitchcock molested her during the filming of Daphne du Maurier’s story THE BIRDS.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTAmid the Gilded Age, the Society architect Stanford White and a cabal of his artist friends – including painter Thomas Dewing, sculptor Louis Saint-Gaudens (younger brother of Augustus), and painter Frank Lathrop – formed what they called the “Sewer Club” in a rented room on Manhattan’s Washington Square. Here they routinely gathered to enjoy orgies with young nymphs, many of them teenaged orphans recruited from the street or else teenaged performers recruited from chorus lines. White’s scandalous affair with model and dancer Evelyn Nesbit, begun in 1901 when she was 16 and he 48, resulted infamously with White’s 1906 murder at a restaurant atop the roof of New York’s Madison Square Garden. White was shot at close range by Harry K. Thaw, a psychologically unstable multimillionaire (and, as it turned out, wife beater) who’d married Evelyn in 1905. The tragedy eventually inspired a number of books and films, most notably E.L. Doctorow’s novel RAGTIME.
There were, it should be noted, occasional – albeit very occasional – moments in the past when men of power were called to account, albeit in less severe ways than White. During 1894, an early version of #MeToo occurred when young Madeline Pollard, of a modest background, sued 57-year-old Kentucky congressman William C.P. Breckinridge (nearly 30 years her senior and the scion of a prominent political family) for breach of promise. Pollard sought $50,000 in damages, of which she was eventually awarded $15,000 (at the time, still a hefty sum). Pollard had been Breckinridge’s longtime mistress and had borne him two children. (On both occasions, Breckinridge compelled Pollard to deposit the newborns in asylums for illegitimate infants, where facilities and attention were scant. Both, in their turn, died.) After Breckinridge’s wife passed away, Breckinridge reneged on his longstanding promise to marry Pollard should he ever be left a widower. (She was at the moment yet again pregnant, but soon suffered a miscarriage.)
Like so many men of his era, Breckinridge counted on the shame of Pollard’s status as a “fallen woman” to prevent her from going public; but Pollard did not hesitate. During the sensational trial, as the facts of the case came out and Breckinridge was revealed as a predator, many women across the country began to take Pollard’s side, and to do so quite vocally. After the end of the trial, women in Breckinridge’s home district mobilized against him. Students at a Kentucky college for women made a public pledge to refuse Breckinridge supporters as suitors. A group of prominent Lexington women staged an enormous picnic to raise money for Breckinridge’s opponent in the next election, with 30,000 people attending. Breckinridge subsequently went down in flames.
But such moments were rare until quite recently in our history. The #MeToo movement is many things – among them, long overdue.
Edward Renehan is a writer, ghostwriter, and publishing consultant living in Wickford, Rhode Island. His most recent book is THE LIFE OF CHARLES STEWART MOTT: INDUSTRIALIST, PHILANTHROPIST, MR. FLINT (University of Michigan Press, 2019).
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