Born Losers
The Truth about Mary Beardsley
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Scott A. Sandage - Born Losers A History of Failure in America (2006) - libgen.lc
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- The Privilege of Privacy
The Truth about Mary Beardsley In the two decades since the Beardsleys had married in 1828, “pri- vate business” had taken on new meanings. In the Beardsleys’ day, public and private became labels for male and female spheres of life, symbolic divisions that braced underlying connections. Mid- dle-class norms wedded manly ambition to wifely domesticity (“true womanhood”) through fashions, spaces, and manners. “Lo- quacity,” warned an 1842 Ladies Repository article, “leads fami- lies to discuss their private business in the presence of strangers, which is improper.” The Beardsleys did exactly this to refute a li- bel. For the sake of a business, they discussed “private business.” 26 Telling trade secrets and family secrets had long irked the agency’s critics. “It is not a system of espionage,” Tappan asserted in an 1843 advertisement; yet even his supporters voiced abiding fears. Hunt’s assured readers in 1851, “We think ourselves incapa- ble of saying one word in defense of a system of espionage.” Two years later, underworld journalist George F. Foster’s New York Naked exposed “an organized system of espionage” at “the office of the central inquisition.” He described truly lurid “secret led- gers” detailing “the business, the family, and the personal habits of every man engaged in trade.” Worst of all, “no possible means of escaping it exist.” Polemics were met by puff like the New York Independent’s 1856 avowal “They should know everything that can be known about everybody in trade. . . . They should act as a de- tective police.” No wonder folks worried that “information” was simply gossip at so much per word. 27 The Mercantile Agency sold information, but early alerts re- quired prediction: facts not yet true that would become true. 174 Misinformation and Its Discontents “‘J[ohn] B.’s wife is about to file a bill for divorce,” clients heard in July 1848; and in August: “a divorce will soon be filed.” Despite hints of fraud, both the dossier and the discord focused on sala- cious details. “Mr. Tappan inquired very particularly about the circumstances and character of . . . John Beardsley,” Boalt testi- fied of their late July interview, “and about the report as to his infidelity to his wife.” But the entries said nothing about adultery; was this alleged remark in pencil? “I had heard reports against Mr. John Beardsley to the effect that he was unchaste,” Boalt con- ceded, adding, “I did not know of any fact to justify the charge.” He could say only one thing for sure: “I knew he did not live pleasantly with his wife.” Actually, he did not live with his wife at all. She left him (and their seventeen-year-old daughter) while he was away on a New York buying trip in June 1848—clearly the event that prompted the July credit report. Mary Beardsley moved in with her sister’s family around the corner, yet six months later she still had not filed for divorce. The agency’s pre- diction remained unfulfilled when her husband confronted Tappan in New York in November 1848. The only complaint filed that month was John’s—against Tappan, for libel. 28 Soon after, the stale prediction became “undoubtedly true.” Mary Beardsley v. John Beardsley was filed in Huron County Court on 5 December 1848. She accused him of affairs with seven women, including a mother-daughter pair; Elizabeth Beardsley (Horace’s wife); and Mrs. Ezra M. Stone, the wife of John’s di- vorce lawyer. John denied “each and every charge of adultry [sic].” Ultimately, this was not a case of “he said, she said”—but rather “he said, it said.” The husband and the agency both gathered de- positions about the wife and her intentions. Divorce testimony dominated the libel trial—as if the truth about John Beardsley and the truth about Lewis Tappan’s reports depended on the truth about Mary. 29 All agreed: it was a bad match. An agency witness said, “I knew his wife and daughter well; there was a difficulty between him and his wife for some years”—twenty years, according to Mary’s Misinformation and Its Discontents 175 siblings, who testified on behalf of John. Mary’s brother, Charles Rutherford, said that the couple left Massachusetts because she “had fits of phrensy (for I can call them nothing else)” whenever other women spoke to John, “and would call them whores and strumpets.” New to Norwalk in 1833, they boarded with Cornelia Mason, who told how John ran an errand on horseback and met “a company of young ladies riding in the same direction.” They were “respectable” maids, but Mary cursed John (“You smooth- faced devil”) and “commenced beating her head violently against the wall.” When he intervened, “she struck him about his head repeatedly.” He pointed out a scar on his forearm where Mary had stabbed him; she announced, “I wish it had been in your heart.” The landlady told John to leave his wife, saying they would never be happy together. 30 Scenes from a marriage revealed a trying but lasting union that had neither impelled divorce nor injured John’s local credit. Neighbors often heard Mary drive him from the house: “Now you can go out and see Mrs. Stone and Mrs. Beardsley” (the law- yer’s wife and Horace’s). On such nights, John would “sleep at the store, on a pile of sheeting on the counter” rather than ask for shelter. But the testimony revealed injuries deeper than social em- barrassments. Clerk Sam Skinner met his boss “coming to the store one morning with a black eye.” Another time, he saw Mrs. Beardsley strike her husband, “to provoke [him] to defend him- self.” He “always put up with it,” to his clerk’s dismay. “I thought at that time a good whipping would do her good.” No idle meta- phor, wife-beating was all but legal in 1848; states began to crim- inalize it during the next decade. But Skinner’s boss never lifted a finger when “she would lose all control of herself . . . in a per- fect phrensy.” He only “requested me after I had witnessed these scenes, not to mention them.” Rutherford agreed. “I have seen his face marked . . . his eyes black in two or three instances,” he testified, although his brother-in-law tried “to conceal these things, and not make them public.” 31 So why did Beardsley reveal these stories at the Tappan trial? 176 Misinformation and Its Discontents Why tell degrading secrets to refute a libel? Federal court would bring far more exposure than divorce court. To fight a “private memorandum book” that linked his standing as an economic partner to his standing as a domestic one, he opened the books on his troubled marriage. In line with contemporary beliefs that market and home were separate but closely linked spheres, this man and wife became a study in contrasts: she hysterical, he unflappable. “He has treated his family with kindness, and pro- vided for them well,” said Mary’s sister, Catherine Lapham. Her husband, Stephen, agreed, saying, “I believe it would be impossi- ble for any man to live with her any great length of time in peace.” John kept trying to do just that for twenty years. Testimonials to his integrity as a husband exhibited traits the agency said he lacked as a businessman. Who would not extend credit to one who honored his contacts so faithfully—even a marriage contract that was evidently a losing bargain? Predictions of a final break invited the obvious rebuttal: Reports of my divorce have been greatly exaggerated. 32 Nothing backed this claim more than what happened in di- vorce court. Sebastian F. Taylor, a longtime judge and legislator from nearby Milan, represented Mary. Oddly reluctant to prose- cute, it came out that he had never met his client. Deposed by John’s lawyer, Taylor admitted, “I saw a lady that was called Mrs. Beardsley some time ago”—two years ago. Did she hire him by mail? No, “I was spoken to.” By whom? “It was a man”—someone in Norwalk. His occupation? “I can answer no question tending to show his identity.” Was it “the Reporter of Lewis Tappan’s Commercial Agency”? Taylor knew nothing of that firm. How did he know for certain that the envoy really spoke for Mrs. Beardsley? Her lawyer replied, “I have no positive knowledge that she did authorize him.” When the divorce was heard in June 1849, Taylor withdrew straightaway, explaining that his client “refuses further to prosecute.” 33 Such irregularities fueled John’s theory that Mary had been used as a pawn to change libel into truth. Why had Mary waited Misinformation and Its Discontents 177 six months, then promptly sued for divorce after John’s libel com- plaint? Why had she never appeared in court at any time? Not one word of her own went “on the books” to tell her side of it all. Yet a suit she had no part in—her husband’s against Lewis Tappan—exposed her private business more intimately than any ledger. “Mrs. John Beardsley” in the documents was neither a “true woman” nor a real one. She was represented in both legal and literary senses—by an anonymous informant, by a lawyer she never met, by an agency that disclosed a wife’s business to dis- credit a husband’s, and even by a spouse who confessed insanity (hers) to deny insolvency (his). Betrayed wife or hysterical pawn? When debate focused on who really initiated the divorce, no one—neither her husband, nor her family, nor the agency—ever suggested that it was Mary Beardsley herself. 34 The Privilege of Privacy The libel trial uncovered a genuine conundrum: the emerging conflict between the businessman’s need to buy and sell confiden- tial information and the individual’s desire to control access to his private business. Charging the jury after nearly a month of argu- ment, Judge Betts began, “The time occupied by this trial may seem disproportionate,” yet it posed “a question of importance to the commercial community.” How to balance the benefits and drawbacks of modern ingenuity? “This agency saves expense, and tends to promote the business of the country,” but did it show “sufficient regard for the rights of others?” Legal privilege forgave good faith but not malicious error, he explained. Was it malice to keep circulating reports after receiving notice of mistakes? The defense conceded that the agency was unable to prove its facts. Yet having failed to deliver the truth, it withheld the source of a lie. Tappan exposed Beardsley’s secrets but expected to keep his own. Betts pointed out that “secret establishments are invidious in their nature. These agencies are increasing. They may soon be conducted by men of no responsibility, and unable to respond to 178 Misinformation and Its Discontents damages. The feature of secrecy must be guarded as not to in- fringe on the rights of others.” Thus charged, the jury awarded the Beardsleys $10,000 damages on 17 December 1851. 35 “heavy damages,” proclaimed the New-York Times. A trade paper declared “the perfect justice of the verdict,” adding that John Beardsley “appear[ed] ‘more sinned against than sinning’” in both his commercial and private life. The Norwalk Experiment reported the local man’s moral and legal victory over “the New York Secret Agency Association” under the headline “A Righ- teous Verdict—$10,000 damages!” 36 “It is a most unrighteous verdict,” Lewis Tappan wrote in his diary. The agency, not he, would have to pay the fine if it ever came to that; but, ever the moralist, he objected that “a most un- principled man, as I believe, has succeeded thus far in obtaining a verdict to wh[ich] he is not justly entitled.” Tappan was among the few who actually knew whom to blame. “The Correspondent, whose name we would not disclose, has behaved either corruptly or foolishly.” Firing off a letter to him, Tappan complained that the truth defense hinged upon “what you asserted over & over again could be proved,” adding that “the whole matter is involved in such mystery that you must satisfy me that you acted correctly.” Tappan expected fast communication. After a week, having re- ceived no response, he sent a warning: “If you do not reply to this promptly & satisfactorily, I shall consider that you consent to my disclosing your name.” 37 John Beardsley had already disclosed the name on this letter: Jairus Kennan, Esq. John’s divorce rebuttal spent two paragraphs on Mary and two pages on a conspiracy theory. “Jairus Kennan, of Norwalk,” he wrote, “is the secret informer and correspondent of the said Tappan in Huron County.” Beardsley charged that Kennan and Tappan “employed counsel and caused a petition for divorce to be filed . . . getting up a foul record to be used by them on the trial of the . . . suits for libel.” Kennan was an obvious choice for a local correspondent. A lawyer, he was also mayor in 1848—and a sometime Commissioner of Insolvents, school board Misinformation and Its Discontents 179 clerk, Whig committeeman, and master in chancery (in which office he sometimes foreclosed on Beardsley’s land speculations). Kennan’s brother, John, had gone broke in a silkworm scheme en- dorsed by Beardsley. Jairus himself (like Tappan) had failed in dry goods, going bust while Beardsley went ahead. Kennan married better, to a sister of the town banker, by whose grace theirs was Norwalk’s second-best Greek revival house. She had the money, he had the blood. Senior deacon at First Presbyterian, he came from a line of New England Scots longer than his patriarch’s whiskers or the pew their eight children filled at three services on Sunday. Tappan could not have found a better surrogate or keener watch- man. Not for nothing did Kennan’s many hats include the secre- tariat of the “Huron County Horse-Thief Detecting Society.” 38 Tappan’s threat drew two apologies from Kennan; although Kennan’s letters have not survived, Tappan’s response suggested their contents. “The suits, as it appears, should not have affected the credit of H. B. & Co. at all,” Tappan wrote. “John Beardslee’s putting his property into his brother’s hands was not an act to im- pair the credit of the firm.” Tappan mentioned “Mrs. B’s commu- nication to you,” noting that only Kennan and an associate had known of her plans. If so, divorce rumors had not swept Norwalk before New York reports filtered back. “The circumstances at- tending its commencement—the date—the non appearance of Mrs. B. &c: appeared to the Jury here,” he added, “as if my Cor[respondent] had invented what he reported & after wards tried to fulfill his predictions at Norwalk. The information you produced was, in my judgment, wholly insufficient to justify the report you made.” Refuting Kennan point by point left only one question: “If J. B., is, as you represented him how can it be that so many persons in various & respectable positions, testified so strongly in his favor?” The letter makes clear that Tappan and Kennan were not in cahoots. 39 And yet Lewis Tappan did conspire against Beardsley. If “the information” that Tappan got from Kennan was not true of Beardsley, neither was the notation in Tappan’s diary: “a most un- 180 Misinformation and Its Discontents principled man . . . not justly entitled.” Falsely reported, denied a correction and his accuser’s name, rumored from New York to Norwalk, defamed for three more years, and put to the cost and shame of a suit, “J. B.” had been wronged. Soon after the verdict, Edwin T. Freedley condoned “the generally just prejudices against these agencies.” His popular 1852 business manual warned of er- rors in the system: “all who believe in the golden rule should watch it with the most jealous scrutiny.” Untrue equaled un- Christian, in Freedley’s view (perhaps a dig at Tappan’s famous piety), judging others by means “subject to the errors of ignorance and mistakes of carelessness, with no guaranteed exemption from the influence of private malice, favoritism, bribery, or corruption.” Instead of owning up, Tappan and his heirs covered up. They buried the truth, shielded Kennan to his grave, and appealed “a righteous verdict” for twenty years. 40 In 1867, a federal judge rejected a retrial motion from R. G. Dun & Co. (née the Mercantile Agency), writing that to broaden legal privilege abetted “an organized system of espionage and inquisition”—and echoing old polemics word for word. The Beardsley case upheld, the New-York Times editorialized, doomed the “immense establishments, with numerous corps of clerks and with long rows of desks on which lay numbers of immense vol- umes in which could be learned a story, true or false, of every merchant in any part of the country whatever.” Abiding fears of evil twins—bureaucracy and secrecy—made Beardsley’s conspir- acy theory plausible to a judge and jury shown no hard evidence. Possibility outweighed probability. After a quarter-century, a profitable and powerful firm was still fighting for life. Without privilege for its “numerous corps of clerks” and “immense vol- umes,” the information system would shut down. In 1870, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Beardsley v. Tappan—now called Tappan v. Beardsley. The erstwhile defendant—at age eighty- three, a “testy, vigorous, obstinate, intrepid old man,” according to his obituary eighteen months later—became “plaintiff in error” when R. G. Dun & Co. challenged flaws in the 1851 trial. When Misinformation and Its Discontents 181 the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in 1870, the Brooklyn Eagle scoffed, “We seem to want the dead Dickens brought to life again, and another such novel as ‘Bleak House,’ . . . founded on the real case of Tappan vs. Beardsley.” Running down the par- ticulars, and calling the Mercantile Agency “a sort of volunteer espionage of other people’s business,” the Eagle could not resist evoking Dickensian nightmares of immense files and armies of clerks. 41 “An army of clerks! Yes, there is an army of clerks,” boomed Charles O’Conor in the great chamber; “but like all other armies, they are disciplined and regulated.” It was 16 December 1870, nineteen years (minus a day) since the verdict—and decades be- fore William Morris and Max Weber immortalized the phrase “armies of clerks” as shorthand for bureaucratic capitalism. O’Conor hailed Dun’s army as the vanguard of modernity, “acting in great haste, and with mighty machinery and vast ‘bureaus,’ as my learned friends on the other side suggest.” Beardsley’s team 182 Misinformation and Its Discontents Hundreds of patrons, messenger boys, and an “army of clerks” confer at the Mercantile Agency’s high desks in 1875. (Special Collections Re- search Center, University of Chicago Library.) [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] battled “this monster—this Mercantile Agency,” as if central ar- chives and surveillance networks equated to “an instrument of mischief.” In that light, the divorce depositions cast “Mr. Tappan as a thorough fiend,” directing a regime of truth. O’Conor pre- sented this as the main issue. Nobody liked a tattler, “particularly the tattler for pay,” he granted. “It is easy to excite disgust against this business on the ground of ‘espionage,’” yet “so far as it may be conducted discreetly and properly, without any undue violation of private rights, [it] is not in itself criminal or mischievous; nay, it is necessary.” Modern enterprise required choices between “private rights” and commercial privilege. Information was an essential commodity, and Beardsley was “a stumbling block in the path of a useful pursuit, a barrier against progress.” 42 The high court vacated Beardsley in January 1871, on narrow grounds. Associate Justice Samuel F. Miller’s opinion held that the divorce testimony tainted the libel trial; “the record of a suit is not evidence in another suit against one who is not a party to it.” The court was silent on privilege versus privacy, but two members were already on record against the firm. Justice Samuel Nelson had denied the 1867 retrial bid, and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase’s qualms were as old as the agency. Recruited by Tappan in 1842, Chase declined: “I entertain as you know doubts respecting the propriety of furnishing such information. We may mislead— and on the other hand we may be instrumental in doing uninten- tionally, great injustice.” Neither Chase nor Nelson recused; pos- sibly they swayed their brethren to rule on procedure rather than principle. Two days before the decision, the agency was indicted for libel in Philadelphia, where a judge wrote: “its operations are secret; everything is sent out under the garb of confidence, and thus the poisoned arrows which are launched in darkness, may strike down the purest and most solvent in the land; no business man is safe, if this can be recognized and protected by the law as a privileged communication.” The high court granted only a new trial, which Beardsley never pursued. 43 Who is a failure? The question weighed public shame against Misinformation and Its Discontents 183 private pain. The answers weighed privacy against information. An 1876 book castigated the agency system as “an enterprise which possesses the coercive power of rating every man in the com- munity as its managers or clerks may see fit.” Federal courts ruled in 1882 that credit reports were privileged communications (with a caveat against the agencies’ “meddlesomeness”) and gave them copyright protection in 1896. The law defined information as the property of the seller, not the buyer or the subject of a report. The strange case of John and Mary Beardsley raised early alarms about modern problems: the ordeal of arguing with an information sys- tem, the arrogance of bureaucratic error, the scope of commercial surveillance in public and private life, and the obstacles to limit- ing (or even learning) who knows what about you. Worries over what’s in “your permanent record” (compiled by others) began over 150 years ago. “The lines of communication are now so per- fected, that the movements of every trader within the bounds of the United States are chronicled with astonishing expedition,” an agency critic noted in Hunt’s in 1853, two years after the Beardsley verdict. “Your character, from such a source, is circulated by post and telegraph, east, west, north, south; while you are pursuing the equal tenor of your life, you have become notorious for some- thing. A thousand folios include a page or more about you and your affairs, without your knowledge or consent.” 44 Download 1.6 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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