Morons' Delight

Nearly 18 years have rolled by since a certain June night in 1906 when Harry K. Thaw slew Stanford White, famed architect of his time, at Madison Square Garden, Manhattan. In the months that followed, Thaw fought hard to escape the electric chair. His lawyers saved him by proving him insane and the Thaw fortune was said to have been diminished by a good round million dollars. In Philadelphia, during the past week, Harry Thaw began a new and expensive fight--a fight to be proven sane and so regain liberty.

The news value of a murder trial is undoubtedly great, but like all great things it can be so overdone as to assume the proportions of sheer imbecility. There is a moron class in every country to which the gruesome and exaggerated details of a murder case provide series of irresistible thrills, calculated to make little gum-chewers swallow their gum in a paroxysm of wide-eyed horror.

The press, which must to some extent be a reflection of public intelligence, varies in ratio to the mentality of the public which each newspaper serves. Thus, some 18 years ago, while some of the press gave restrained and sober accounts of the Thaw case, the gum-chewers' sheets ranted ad nauseum about the pitfalls on the Great White Way; the "wages of sin"; the wily, wicked life of White; the uselessness of Thaw; the warning to young girls; the eternal law of Justice which prompted Thaw to avenge his wife's honor; the pathetic face of Mrs. Evelyn, etc., etc.

Since that time the press has not improved. The facts of the case today are that Harry K. Thaw has begun proceedings to establish his sanity. The story is complicated by a petition for intervention on the part of Evelyn Nesbit, divorced wife of Thaw, declaring that "Harry Kendall Thaw has not fully recovered his normal mental condition and that he is still a lunatic, and that if he should be freed from restraint at the present time and his estate restored to him, he would dissipate and probably wholly destroy the interests which . . . Russell William Thaw* has . . . in the estate of his father and of his grandfather." The petition was granted and Evelyn Nesbit's lawyers will try to prevent Thaw's release.

Evidence at the trial brought out the fact that Thaw was in 1918 on intimate terms with rabbits at the Pennsylvania Hospital for Nervous Diseases, whence he was removed during the War. He kissed them often and called them "tweedledums" and "tootsies," then threw them 40 feet into the snow, exclaiming: "It didn't hurt them!" Despite this evidence alienists were of the opinion that Thaw is sane.

Additional factors are that Thaw is worth about $5,000,000; Evelyn Nesbit owns the Cafe El Prinkipo on the boardwalk of Atlantic City and is moderately wealthy.

The gum-chewers' press is more emotional, however, and the grim seriousness of its mushy slobberings, sounds the depths of bathos. The following are random excerpts:

P: "Evelyn Nesbit, Thaw's former wife, rose from the bed on which she had been sitting in her ill-furnished hotel room; shook off the four griffons and the Albino Pekinese which had scrambled about her lap while she spoke; dashed to the mirror, seized a large comb and ran it through her black hair, which hangs to her shoulders in a long straight bob.

"NERVOUS AS RACER

"She laid down the comb and picked up a crystal perfume atomizer; sprayed her yellow crepe sports frock and paced up and down. She was as nervous as a race horse; her voice high pitched."

P: "Harry Thaw is still a man of wealth--only that. To be free to come and go, to admire and to behold the many commonplace beauties of life, to watch the meeting of lovers as they pause in the crowded streets at this sweet time of year, to drop into a picture house at his will, to wander here and wander there, lingering at dusty book stalls or staring into shop windows, to have a little job and the capacity to get away with it, he would without doubt, be glad to start life all over at fifty without a penny in his pockets."

P: "Broadway was ready for him. Metaphorically, welcoming arches were thrown across the Great White Way from Fourteenth Street to Columbus Circle; and he accepted the welcome."

P: "Stanford White, connoisseur of beauty in art and women, already had won her. Her hair as black as smoke in the night, her eyes limpid and violet, her under lip full and tremulous, her bosom shallow as the chest of a growing boy, her experience that of a woman much older, she held out her arms to the wastrel Pittsburgher and he rushed into them."

P: "According to Evelyn's testimony under oath, he summoned her from her bed into a great baronial hall, suddenly drew forth a heavy whip and then began furiously to lash her. He would, and did punish her because she had not come to him as a lily of the fields. Harry Thaw wanted everything and thought he had enough money to get everything--even decency."

P: "And so, too, he would punish Stanford White, for having been the instrument of his deprivation. They came back to New York and plunged into its high-roaring surf of folly, after which bath he killed his man."

P: "Exhausted and wild with fever in the London Hospital, he demanded that his room be lined with blocks of ice. He had the money with which to build an ice palace. Why shouldn't he have a room of ice when his head was throbbing so and his whole body was burning up?"

P: "Once he gave a large dinner in Washington. One of his guests wanted a certain brand of Cairo cigarettes. He ordered them brought to the banquet table. They were not to be had in Washington. The host insisted that they be found and brought to his guest. It was impossible. Impossible! He excused himself and went to Egypt and got the cigarettes, returning months afterward satisfied."

*Russell William Thaw was born in 1910, five years before Thaw divorced his wife for misconduct allegedly in Germany while Thaw was interned in the Mattewan Asylum for the criminally insane in Manhattan. Thaw denies that he is the father; Evelyn Nesbit is equally firm in supporting the boy's legitimacy.