Money, Honey - Marriages, Wills, And Legerdemain, The Road To Riches For An Ambitious Woman

Wilhelmina Jones didn't exactly put the arsenic into Uncle Filbert's drink, but she might as well have, given her canny and insidious campaign to encourage his suicide.  Given the changes in his will in gratitude for her solicitousness, care, and kindness during this long illness, she stood to inherit millions after his death, and by advancing the event by even a few months meant millions more in early interest. 

Uncle Filbert had never been a favorite of hers nor anyone in the family, niggardly hoarder of wealth that he was, a nasty man who had Barclay's bank to thank for the extremely favorable rate of return on his investments made possible through an inheritance from Great Uncle Barton Fowlkes.  Fowlkes was the last in an unbroken line of New England industrialists and businessmen who had invested in shipbuilding and the Three Corner trade - slaves, molasses, and rum - and made money a hundred time over.

The Taylor siblings who also profited from family investments, moved money out of Boston and into Wall Street where, thanks to the then unregulated New York exchanges, they entered the aerie of America's richest men - not Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan exactly, but in their company. 

Uncle Filbert was a hard nut to crack, for the older he got, the nastier, untidier, and bullying he became; but niece Wilhelmina was undeterred.  No one else in the family, as rich and well-established as they were, paid the old man any mind but Wilhelmina, a newcomer and outsider saw her uncle as a benefactor beyond her wildest dreams. 

She had married up and into the Fowlkes family thanks to her own canniness and ambition, helped by charm and a unique beauty, special and unusual even for the well-tended wealthy of Beacon Hill.  Harrison Fowlkes was by no means as rich as his uncle or for that matter his distant aunts and cousins, but for Wilhelmina, a woman of modest birth and education, marriage to him and into the Fowlkes family was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. 

After a proper and dutiful amount of time, she divorced him and questionable grounds, but legal enough to secure a generous settlement.  Harry Fowlkes wanted as little publicity as possible, had enough financial resources to withstand even the very sizeable amount to be do to his wife, and the couple parted company with little bitterness or spite. 

Old Filbert Fowlkes was fond of Wilhelmina.  He was completely besotted by her beauty, her feminine charm, and her irresistibly seductive ways.  Their friendship was recognized by members of the family who suspected her of illicit intentions, but they did nothing - nor could they, for Filbert was unmovable in all transactions, and this was one of his most prized. 

As his various ailments progressed and were unresponsive to treatment, Filbert became more and more despondent, and when he was told that his cancer was terminal, he began to talk about suicide.  Wilhelmina discouraged him, saying that she, the family, and society would be devastated by his premature death; but at the same time, she always left room for doubt.  Perhaps it would be better if he ended the pain and misery and the unmitigated agony of a slow death. 

It was during this time of growing physical disability and discomfort that he called his lawyers and amended his will to favor his niece.  The rest of the family would not know about the changes until the will was made public after his death.  As the disease progressed, so did Wilhelmina's suggestions of suicide and in a dramatic final scene, he took the fatal dose and died in her arms. 

Now, Wilhelmina was a very ambitious woman, and after a short period of mourning, she shed her weeds and returned to her very active social life of which she was the undisputed center.  Her newly acquired wealth added to the cachet of her charm, intelligence, and beauty, and she had no dearth of suitors, the most likely of whom were far wealthier than either she or her uncle were.  She knew that it was only a matter of time and patience before she married. 

She liked her new husband, Potter Phelps, great-grandson of Hiram Putnam of the Salem Putnams, themselves descendants of the Mayflower and the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Company, old Anglo-American stock high on the social register, founding members of the distinguished Society of the Cincinnati, and recognized men whose descendants were counselors, advisors, and confidants of the Founding Fathers. 

She liked him, but not enough to stay married to him. After all successive marriages and remunerative divorces were the centerpieces of her long term life plan.  Love, affection, and camaraderie were incidental to the well-planned chain of events which she had started long before.  The chain would continue until age modulated her ambition, and retirement as one of the wealthiest women in America was the next and final step; and so it was that she took her third and final husband, a man cut from the same cloth as her first two and as naive as his predecessors about his future wife's ambitious intentions. 

Once again, the couple was a feature in all the society pages of New York, Palm Springs, and Gstaad, and to all public intents and purposes, this was a marriage made in heaven. 

Of course it was not, and once again Wilhelmina was simply biding her time until enough evidence was in her hands to initiate divorce. This last husband's lawyers had had their qualms - they were not unaware of Wilhelmina's marital history - but the husband refused their advice, and because she was so wealthy and above any suspicion of nefarious intent, he took no undue measures to protect himself and his fortune. 

Wilhelmina saw the handwriting on the wall, knew that this marriage would be her last, and took steps to accelerate the process of dissolution. 

The saga of Wilhelmina Jones has no particular wider point to it.  Women have always been ambitious and the most savvy of them have understood how men so easily fall into their hands.  She felt herself no different from Rosalind, Viola, Portia, Shakespeare's Comedic heroines who bested men at every turn, or Ibsen's women, Rebekka West, Hilde Wangel, and Hedda Gabler who fashioned men to their will with ease and subtlety. 

There was no need to work, said Wilhelmina, when she could make her way without it - money without pain or strain.  Professions were overrated, feminist cant naive, the glass ceiling only a fanciful invention. 

No, the way forward was exactly as she had planned and successfully executed it.  Her life was happy, fulfilled and without want. She spent time at her homes in Palm Beach, St. Tropez, and Rimini surrounded, even as a matron, by Europe and America's best and brightest. 

Love? Also overrated, an invention of that sad sack Petrarch who pined over his unrequited love, Laura, and sent a generation of knights jousting after their fair maidens.  No, she could do without it, thank you. 

Callous, calculating, and deceptive?  Perhaps, but then again who of wealth, importance, and influence has not been?  It's America, after all, she reasoned, and without a second thought returned to her very satisfying life. 

Murder And Mayhem - The Cumbersome, Belabored Legal System And Time To Hang 'Em High

Frank P. Bailey was a Wyoming cattle rustler who had evaded justice for years, always out of reach of the law.  He was a canny thief, stealing from just the right herd at just the right time, moving across the state in mobile sweeps that surprised both the law and cattlemen alike. 

 

He was the kind of criminal that had a wide reputation, a folk hero among the cowboys and range riders, a man like Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, John Dillinger, and the famous gangsters of Chicago who roamed free, were frequenters of the city's best nightclubs, were doomed from the start, but led their lives with confidence and panache. 

Bailey operated in the old days of the Wild West before the law was organized and when prairie justice was the rule. If you were caught with another man's cattle, you were strung up, hanged by the neck, and left for the vultures.  What more proof was needed other than the telltale branding on the flank of the beeves to prove that they were stolen?  What mitigating circumstances, explanatory conditions, and other justifying conditions? None at all.  Hang 'em high. 

Bailey continued his rustling until he was finally corralled in a box canyon near Laramie.  The posse of ranchers and lawmen surrounded him but did not shoot, so intent were they to see him hanged and picked dry by the vultures of Dry Gulch.  He met his maker on February 3, 1858. 

The Wild West has been recalled by many during the current trial of a woman who has admitted strangling her three children to death but claimed temporary insanity due to postpartum depression. Despite the fact that she planned the murder, going online to see how long such strangulation would take, inventing a plausible reason to send her husband out on an hour-long errand in a decidedly premeditated act, the jury, but for one holdout, was ready to acquit her of first degree murder, a verdict likely to send her to the electric chair, and render one of insanity. 

As of this writing a mistrial has been called by the judge in the Lindsay Clancy case.  The foreman of the hung jury, eleven against one, has said that the one holdout has disregarded the judge's instructions, has violated his contract as impartial juror, and is obstructing the true cause of justice.  The holdout, however, a man defiantly standing his ground against eight angry women (two other men capitulated to their demands and voted for acquittal), is reported to simply refusing to give in to their demands. 

The woman in an admittedly premeditated way, barbarically killed her baby and two toddlers, one by one as the others watched.  This cannot stand, said the juror.  No matter what mitigating conditions - in this case it was severe hormonal dysfunction which caused the killer to hear voices and act out her violent fantasies - such a heinous crime must be punished to the full extent of the law. 

The insanity plea by serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, a psychopath who tortured and mutilated seventeen men and boy in grotesque, horrific ways was rejected by the jury.  The murders he committed demanded conviction, punishment, and retribution.  Dahmer was convicted of premeditated murder, spent years in federal prison until he was murdered by fellow inmates. 

The very idea that this evil, barbaric man could be sent to a mental institution, cured, and set free was unconscionable. The jury advocated the death penalty but was denied by state law. 

The Lindsay Clancy case is notable not for the evil nature of her crime, but that so many women - not just the eight on the jury but thousands in the American public- are on her side.  They have suffered postpartum depression, most often provoked by indifferent, emotionally abusive husbands, and sympathized with a woman who is a victim.  Since the holdout is a man the national debate has turned political, a test of feminism, women's rights, and male patriarchy. 

If there was ever a case that demands prairie justice, it is this one.  She admitted murdering her three children, and should be summarily strung up, hanged, and left for the vultures; and yet the cumbersome, laborious process of criminal justice continues.  Retrial is possible but so is a plea bargain.  The woman may get off far more lightly than ever deserved. 

In some countries were murderous violence was rife, El Salvador, Colombia, and the Philippines, their presidents turned to extrajudicial governance.  President Bukele of El Salvador when challenged over his roundup of MS-13, Mara Salvatrucha gang members and the deprivation of their civil rights, he responded with, 'What about the civil rights of ordinary Salvadorans to live in peace and security?' El Salvador is now one of the most peaceful countries in the hemisphere and Bukele enjoys overwhelming popularity.  

 

Had Bukele not done what he did, Salvadoran courts would have been choked with unnecessary trials, leaving accused criminals free on recognizance or bail, free to continue their bloody, anti-social acts. He refused the plaintive cries from the international liberal community, and never once capitulated to their demands. 

Former President Duterte of the Philippines did exactly the same thing and rid the country of Islamic terrorism in the south, and crime in Manila.  The newly elected president of Colombia has vowed to destroy the last remnants of the terrorist FARC movement, no questions asked. 

President Duterte ran on his tough stance on crime during his tenure as mayor of Davao. Popular with the locals due to his successful zero tolerance policies against criminals, he earned the nickname "The Punisher". Vigilante groups tied to Duterte are thought to be responsible for the execution of drug traffickers, criminals, gang members and other lawless elements. Over a period of 20 years, he turned Davao City from the "murder capital of The Philippines" to what tourism organizations now describe as "the most peaceful city in southeast Asia," and what was ranked in some analyses as the world's fourth safest place

Duterte focused on another problem often cited by Filipinos – corruption.  Transparency International ranks the Philippines near the bottom of its international list, and corruption is felt at every level of society.   Building on his reputation as a hardliner against crime, Duterte promised to apply the same no-holds-barred approach to corruption.

Islamist insurgency in the southern island of Mindanao has resulted in thousands of deaths, and Filipinos are weary of decades of civil strife.  Duterte, who comes from the region and has established lines of communication with rebel groups promises to bring the conflict to an end either through negotiation and reason or through force.

Colombia has been beset by insurrection, terrorism, and drug-related violence for decades, and new President Abelardo de la Espriella has vowed to end it once and for all and by any means possible.  The electorate is fully behind him.  

Brazil's federal police under former President Bolsonaro used similar extrajudicial procedures to rid or drastically reduce the endemic violent crime in Rio de Janeiro's favelas, violence which had necessarily spread beyond the borders of the slums and affected ordinary citizens. 

Donald Trump has spoken in similarly harsh and uncompromising terms about immigration and the Islamist threat.  While few Americans take him at his word about deporting all Muslims and forbidding any to enter the United States, they understand the meaning behind the rhetoric.  He is willing to take drastic means to keep illegal immigrants out of the country.  

Although some measure of due process applies to anyone residing in the United States, many Americans are crying “Enough”.  The shilly-shallying of self-serving politicians and their refusal to confront an issue which – like that in Western Europe – threatens not only jobs but culture, must end.  If the so-called ‘rights’ of those here illegally are abrogated, so be it.

Is due process an absolute right? Or is subject to conditionality?  Might a country's conditions be such that abrogation of such process to protect millions is right, moral, and ethical?  More and more besieged citizens are agreeing. 

And what of the famed American jury system?  In the Clancy trial it seems subverted by radical feminist polemics, and the immeasurable evil of her crime overwhelmed by a politically inspired righteousness.  An open and shut case was distorted into one about misogyny and women's presumed rights. If such a crime had been discovered in the days of frontier justice, the woman would have been strung up just as quickly and handily as Frank P Bailey. 

Politics and procedure have eroded the basic sense of right and wrong at the heart of the new American Republic two hundred a fifty years ago.  A society corrupted by identity and fractured into interest groups based on race, gender, and ethnicity has lost its moral sense of direction, and has changed the definition of 'rights' into a catch-all, facile one. 

Extrajudicial governance in all its forms might never have been considered by exceptionalist Americans, but the time to reconsider American-style democracy may well be here. 

The Sleepless Nights Of Lucy Galt - The Hellish Life Of A Displaced Woman Of Privilege

Lucy Galt lived in a well-to-do suburban neighborhood of Washington, DC.  Twenty minutes to the White House with no traffic she was fond of saying. Just because she had moved out of the maelstrom, the downtown K Street jungle of lawfare in political insiders, did not mean that she had abandoned her commitment to the cause.  It was just time to move, the city was unresponsive to her needs, the children needed light and air, and her husband, now able to work at home, wanted a place near the bike trails of Catoctin. 

 

Yet it did seem like abandonment.  The suburbs had always meant sedation, sameness, sedentarism, and a loosening of political ties. 

She had been born and brought up in the suburbs, John Cheever country of Fairfield County, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest counties in the land. easy commuting distance to New York but where large waterfront properties were the norm and an atmosphere of wealthy indolence, family legacy, and absentee Wall Street financiers prevailed.  An ideal place to live, to sail, to entertain and still be part of the cosmopolitan life of the city. 

Now, the Washington suburbs were a number of steps down from the tony, privileged existence she enjoyed as a child.  There were some - McClain, Potomac, and Great Falls which approximated Fairfield's wealthy cachet, but they were all new money.  Athletes, land developers, sports franchise owners, and speculators in bitcoin and offshore investments were resident there, not the Cabots, Lodges, Putnams, and Potters of Anglo-American colonial and post-Revolutionary history. 

Some of the Greenwich cachet was tainted by the behavior of Jeffrey Skilling and his cohorts who made and lost billions of other people's money in the Enron scandal.  The Skillings were a proper Fairfield family - private schools, large but tasteful manor on the Sound, contributions to the best charities - but it was all a charade, a fraud, a con; and when their dealings were exposed it not only sent Skilling and his cohorts to jail but besmirched the whole community which in the past had been homogeneously proper. 

In any case, Skilling or no Skilling, the Connecticut suburbs of New York were high-toned, sophisticated, and immured within walls of old wealth while the wealthy Maryland and Virginia suburbs were overdone - McMansions, four-car garages, and electronic fencing. 

Lucy Galt lived in Bethesda, a near-in Maryland suburb whose only distinction was proximity to downtown Washington.  Everything about the city was middle-brow, ordinary, and predictably suburban. Montgomery County was classically liberal except in its outskirts where workers - low-level federal bureaucrats,  middle managers, and skilled laborers - tended Republican. 

Lucy was a hodge-podge - child of privilege and wealth, sensitized to social reform in college, passionate activist for every cause in the progressive canon, and urbanite turned suburban matron. 

It was this last that galled and kept her up at nights. Mediocrity - she never in her wildest dreams ever thought that she would live on a cul-de-sac of bureaucrats and housewives.  There wasn't an ounce of sophistication in the community, not one iota of distinction, not a drop of scintillation or even scandal. 

 Bethesda to her was like Lewis's Gopher Prairie, the town on the vast Minnesota open spaces that Carrie Kennicott tried to civilize.  One would think that a near-in suburb of the Nation's Capital would be alive with political debate, intellectual give-and-take, and high-class amateur theatre, but nothing doing.  It was a clone of Gopher Prairie. 

 

Life and age have ways of trimming one's sails, lowering expectations, and conforming to community standards.  One is pulled in by mediocrity, a kind of soporific which after a while dulls the senses and gives way to a feeling of contentment. 

Lucy, perhaps because of her varied, often conflicted background, saw this coming and said she would never give in to that suburban homeliness and intellectual torpor.  Moreover she saw the near-in suburbs as fertile grounds for mobilizing dissent and turning it into aggressive political activism. 

Yet whereas in her youthful days on Dupont Circle - not exactly the East Village but still a potpourri of gays, tough girls, incensed blacks, and Jewish inheritors of their grandparents' liberalism - she felt a heady sense of can-do justice, out in no man's land she was starting from zero.  The women in her cohort were like her, middle age, wealthy individuals of good schooling, liberal intentions, but with a political diffidence which was hard to overcome. 

Progressivism reached out broadly, and while its heart still beat in the East Village, the Upper West Side, Bernal Heights, the Castro, and Cambridge, its reach extended to the complaisantly supportive. Men and women who supported all the items in the progressive shopping cart - climate change, the black man, transgenders, immigration, and the redistribution of wealth - but who did so through financial contributions and vote.  Passive supporters at best, but at least a starting point for Lucy's community organization. 

Where to start? Since everything happened chez soi in the suburbs, particularly for older residents - restaurants, bars, and clubs were for the up-and-comers - she thought to arrange informal gatherings around local art.  She would invite artists from the area who had never been given the attention they deserved.  The sessions would both champion these amateur artists and provide a forum for discussing the issues of the day illustrated by the artists' work. 

Felicity Ballard was Lucy's first choice, for her art - somewhat tortured black-and-white landscapes inspired by Anselm Kiefer but which had a less imposing and more approachable scenarios. These tableaux, she said, represented the state of the American union today, one in disorder and disarray thanks to the current regime - a racist, misogynist, greedy capitalist pseudo-monarchy which threated world peace and community. 

The paintings themselves were nothing to speak of, spontaneous undirected spatterings of paint a la Jackson Pollock which had nothing of his power, mystery and complexity; but Felicity was proud of them and saw things that no one else did.  

 

None of this mattered to Lucy, for the purpose of the gatherings was to discuss politics and begin the process of consolidated action for social reform. 

The group was respectful, courteous, and kind in their comments.  They had no idea what they were seeing or what was in the mind of the artist.  As unschooled as they were, viewers saw nothing but spattered paint, thicker in some areas, lighter in others; but all combined to produce a 5'x5' montage of wasted energy. 

'Lovely', said Amanda Evens who had eagerly raised her hand to be the first to comment in the question-and-answer session. 'I love the composition, and the color pattering'.  She sounded like the old Fifties tv dance programs where clueless dancers asked how they liked the music, could only come up with, 'I liked the beat'.  

The rest of the group, feeling obligated to congratulate the artist followed suit with aphoristic nothings, far from the penetrating social commentary that Lucy had hoped for. 

A local poet, Pamela Muldaur, read her poem 'On a Spring Day' celebrating the coming new age of complementarity, love, and community spirit - verses which hearkened back to the poet's old hippy Woodstock days but which in the interim had lost their verve, their relevance, and their reference. 

Bill Barton, the local artist known nor his wedding ice sculptures and an admirer of glass-blower Dale Chihuly brought in a soft plastic configuration in honor of Dolly Parton, meant to be adulatory and satirical in one go but which failed on both counts and ended up little more than a big doggie toy. 

Lucy was disconsolate and angry.  She couldn't believe the facile ignorance of the people she had numbered as her friends.  The doltish comments, the fawning, the yawning impatience to get to the hors d'oeuvres and Chardonnay were overwhelming. 

She gave it one or two more tries - this community organizational effort - and decided to toss the frills and get right down to brass tacks, but the group showed desultory interest in political issues at best, and turned every issue into some homespun, treacly anecdote. 

Although the the outside, objective observer, these seances were laughable, pitiful reunions of the same self-satisfied burghers Lewis found in his rural Minnesota towns, Lucy Galt was horrified, beaten, and discouraged.  She was tormented by her inabilities, her total lack of charisma, allure, and conviction. 

It wasn't her, she convinced herself, but that age-old, stereotypical notion of the suburbs as America's wasteland.  There was only so much you could do in an vacuous, bleak, soulless place.

She longed for her old life - not the activist one on Dupont Circle as a Senior Advocate at Scientists for Social Responsibility but the one in Greenwich where one knew who one was and never questioned it; where social change was to be avoided not embraced, and where family, legacy, heritage, privilege and the wealth that accompanied them was the ordre du jour. 

As old as she was, her family welcomed her back.  Her membership at Piping Rock was summarily renewed, invitations to all the upscale charity events assured, and life on the Vineyard, St. Bart's and Gstaad restored. 

A cautionary tale perhaps - don't go too far from home which is, after all, where the heart is.