The Trial of the Century

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh. And I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: In the late 1860s, Henry Ward Beecher was, perhaps, the most famous man in America, a reformer, an editorialist, but most of all a preacher. Every Sunday, some 3,000 people would flock to hear the sermon at his mega-church in Brooklyn. He was a rock star.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: He’s writing novels. He’s appearing in advertisements. He’s traveling the world. He’s as wealthy as any minister ever needed to be.

ED: This is Debby Applegate, author of a biography of Henry Ward Beecher. She says Beecher also had a reputation as a bit of a ladies’ man. Rumors about affairs with parishioners had circulated for decades. But they had never quite been proven.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: I think people said, well, he’s overly friendly. Yeah, he’s a little flirtatious. Boy, don’t people seem to have a crush on that man? But how could he possibly be doing that? There’s no way that a man of that power and that fame with that many eyes on him could possibly be cutting those kind of corners.

BRIAN: In 1870, that began to change. A member of Beecher’s church, Elizabeth Tilton, told her husband Theodore that she had had an affair with Beecher. Pretty soon, the gossip spread within the church.

ED: At first, the pastor’s alleged affair wasn’t considered fit for public conversation. But that was about to change.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: Well, in 1872, a magnificent wild card enters the picture, a woman named Victoria Woodhull.

BRIAN: Victoria Woodhull was a radical. She wore her hair cut short like a man’s, had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and campaigned for women’s suffrage.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: But not just for the vote, but also for divorce, for birth control, for what was called then free love, which we now call American culture, I’m pretty sure, but the idea that you should be able to love who you wanted, whenever you wanted, without benefit of clergy or marriage. And these things were all anathema to most Americans. At the minimum, they were very, very controversial.

ED: In 1872, Woodhull was running for US president on the Equal Rights Party ticket. And since Beecher was a very prominent, liberal minded reformer, Woodhull thought he could give her campaign a boost. So she asked for his endorsement.

BRIAN: Now, Beecher was an advocate for women’s suffrage. But all this stuff about birth control and free love, well, that was just a little extreme for the pastor of such a prominent church.

ED: So Beecher refused to endorse her. And that’s when Woodhull got mad.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: She decides, to hell with this. She’s going to take Henry down. Because to her mind, he is the ultimate hypocrite. Here’s a man who seems to be practicing free love. Here was a man who preaches to 20 of his mistresses every Sunday, as people like to say. But he refuses to stand up for the principle of free love in the press.

BRIAN: Woodhull, in addition to being a presidential candidate and a clairvoyant also ran her own newspaper. And she desperately needed money. So in November, 1872, she published a salacious story alleging not only that Beecher was having an affair with Elizabeth Tilton, but that the two performed, quote, terrible orgies in front of the Tilton children.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: And when she does, it is like a bombshell has gone off. All the other papers can now pick it up. All the people in his church go absolutely out of their mind with frustration and anger. And then the whole thing explodes.

BRIAN: Today on the show, the American obsession with scandal. 15 years ago this month, President Bill Clinton was impeached following the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Though Clinton was later acquitted the trial sparked questions about the line between private misbehavior and public misconduct.

ED: Now Americans had been puzzling over just where to draw that line for centuries. So today’s show, we’ll explore some of the scandals that have so captured Americans’ imaginations. And throughout, we’ll be asking this question, why have Americans been so fascinated by sex scandals throughout our history?

PETER: But first, let’s return to the Beecher-Tilton scandal of the 1870s.

BRIAN: To understand just how explosive Victoria Woodhull’s allegations were, you have to understand who Henry Ward Beecher was in American culture. He was the son of Lyman Beecher, also a famous preacher. But while Lyman went in for fire and brimstone, Henry focused on the love of Jesus.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: It’s hard now to appreciate, now that we, of course, think of Jesus Christ as the center of Christianity. Well, Jesus was second, by far, to God in the older scheme. Now that we think of churches as supposed to be a place of love and joyous celebration. Well, that was not at all what churches were early in the 19th century.

And some people loved it, right? Some people thought this was a new vision of self-fulfillment. It was a new vision that religion was meant to make you happy here on Earth, not just to save you from a lake of fire after death.

ED: Not every one liked this new focus on love. Some called it the gospel of gush. They said that Beecher should spend a little less time on love and a little more time on God’s law.

So you can imagine what those critics thought when newspapers began printing stories about the alleged affair with Elizabeth Tilton. Here was the proof, they said, that Beecher’s re-imagined Christianity was a recipe for moral decline.

BRIAN: This whole disagreement about theology got a highly public airing when Theodore Tilton, Elizabeth’s husband, sued Beecher for what was then called criminal conversation and alienation of affection, basically adultery. When the trial opened in January, 1875, it was the biggest story since Lincoln’s assassination.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: Now this is where things really explode. Once you’re in the legal courts, well, then the press is there in packs. Every single day, hundreds and hundreds, sometimes even thousands of people crowding outside the courthouse trying to get inside. You had to have tickets. You have vendors. You have people hawking food, hawking little pictures of the various principles in this–

BRIAN: T-shirts? Are there t-shirts yet?

DEBBY APPLEGATE: Actually, I’d never thought about that one. And in fact, what’s funny is it becomes a tourist venue in its own way, that people come from out of town. Celebrities come.

In fact, one of the loveliest things about this as a story is how many people felt the need to comment on this scandal. I mean, there are widows writing into Henry to say they’re going to kill themselves if they find out that he’s guilty. There are people who are being committed to insane asylums because they’ve been driven mad by reading about the scandal. People are in fist fights.

BRIAN: And this is beyond Brooklyn and New York. This is national.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: Oh, it’s by far. It’s an international scandal.

BRIAN: International.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: It is covered in all the English speaking papers across the world. Clearly, people are very divided on it because the evidence, in fact, looks pretty damning. And yet his denials are so sincere and so heartfelt. And how can this lovable man done so wrong? So it really is quite a moment where people have nothing to go on except their faith. And whatever their faith was before, whatever they thought about Beecher before, that’s a big part of how they’re deciding now that he’s in trouble.

BRIAN: Debby, we don’t have a ticket, but we have you. So take us inside the courtroom. You’ve describe the scene outside, in the press. Take us through some of the most dramatic scenes in this trial.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: Well, every single day, Henry’s wife Eunice arrives. And that is clearly a big part of what works. If your wife shows up– I mean, I think we all–

BRIAN: Right. So nothing’s changed, right?

DEBBY APPLEGATE: Everyone who’s watched any scandals knows this.

BRIAN: You roll out the wife.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: Right. Exactly. If you’ve got the wife there looking adoringly at you, it really goes a long way. Henry himself, frankly, does not do very well on cross examination. He says, I don’t know, I don’t remember something close to 100 times. Of course, the press counts every time. He looks confused and befuddled in just that kind of suspicious way that makes you think they don’t want to remember.

But then, when he’s on his direct examination, where he gets to speak, he charms the room enough that it really seems like he has turned the tide. Whereas Theodore Tilton, he may have rightness on his side, but in the end he seems crabby. He seems vindictive. Americans don’t like– we may not like hypocrisy, but we certainly don’t like vengeance.

And in the end, that was what saved Henry. The trial jury could not decide on a verdict. In the end, it was nine in favor of his innocence, three in favor of his guilt.

ED: So that’s a hung jury.

DEBBY APPLEGATE: A hung jury.

BRIAN: Was Beecher’s reputation damaged by this scandal?

DEBBY APPLEGATE: Well, he lucked out in the sense of having a hung jury. That definitely gave enough room to those who wanted to have doubt. It allowed them to continue to have their doubts. To those who already had made up their mind that he was guilty, it allowed that to continue.

But what it really meant was that he could continue to go on almost as if nothing happened. He lives for 10 more years. He never loses the support of his church. In fact, his church grows during the scandal. In fact, he makes more money in the last 10 years of his life than he did prior to it.

This is really one of the lessons, I think, is that who really suffers in these scandals? When you think of a Jimmy Swaggart or– the ones who really fall are like the Eliot Spitzers, the ones who were the scolds, the ones who– the hypocrisy is, it just stinks out loud because all they were were the people who wanted to make everyone follow the rules.

Henry was the opposite. And this is probably why it worked for Bill Clinton. He never claimed to be a man of the law. He claimed to be a man of love. He claimed that, hey, we all have flaws. Let’s live and let live. And I am as flawed as any one of you. And it just makes it so much easier to forgive someone who has, from the beginning, always said, I am no better than you.

BRIAN: Debby, this scandal sounds like it was the scandal of the century, at least among non-political scandals. Why did it have so much resonance for Americans in the 1870s?

DEBBY APPLEGATE: I think because Henry Ward Beecher really represented in his personal life, and his family history a transition from an older, puritanical way of approaching morality, your relationship with God to what we would think of as a modern way of approaching all of those things. So that part of what it is is here’s a man who represents modernity. Here’s a man who represents the loosening of rules.

Is it true that that’s a slippery slope towards just being a libertine, being able to do whatever you want regardless? I don’t know that we’ve decided that. But at the time, it was very much undecided. That was very much a real, live debate. And so when he was accused of this, it was a chance for everyone to debate it out loud at the top of their lungs.

[MUSIC – “YOUR CHEATIN’ HEART”]

ED: Debby Applegate is a biographer and historian. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Henry Ward Beecher is called The Most Famous Man in America.

PETER: It’s time for a quick break. When we return, we get a crisis management guru on the line to give advice to some unusual clients– 19th century presidents.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.