Here's Where It Gets Interesting - “The Scandalous Hamiltons” with Bill Shaffer

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Sharon sits down with author and historical researcher, Bill Shaffer, to learn untold stories of a Hamilton descendant in his gripping book, “The Scandalous Hamiltons: A Gilded Age Grifter, a Founding Father's Disgraced Descendant, and a Trial at the Dawn of Tabloid Journalism. Today, if an author pitched a book proposal with as many twists and turns as this true story holds, it would likely be considered too far-fetched to be believable. Learn how curiosity from a fountain in Riverside park led to a deluge of court records, newspaper articles, and this turn-of-the-Century scandal. Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Bill Shaffer Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A&W is now serving Pret Organic Coffee, and you can get a $1 small coffee, a $2 small latte, or like me, a $1 small coffee and a $2 small latte. Available now until November 24th in Ontario only. Woo-hoo! Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. Hello, friends. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. Oh my goodness. Today's guest

is Bill Shafer, and he has written a book called The Scandalous Hamiltons. And it is about a Hamilton descendant and a scandal that you are not going to believe. It's one of those things where it's just like, what? If somebody wrote this as a movie proposal, everybody would be like, that's not, no, that's not believable. We can't make that movie. So just buckle up. Buckle up. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon.

And here's where it gets interesting. Well, I'm very excited to be here's where it gets interesting. And I think the book is very, very aptly titled. It's called The Scandalous Hamiltons. A Gilded Age Grifter, a Founding Father's Disgraced Descendant, and a Trial at the Dawn of Tabloid Journalism. And that definitely, like, boy, that ticks a lot of boxes in my brain, Bill. Yeah. Let's start at the beginning. How did you become interested in this story? Because it is very scandalous. Yeah. I live on the west side of Manhattan. And I, about in 2017, I relocated to a new building and I was out for a walk in my sort of little three or four block area.

And I got to the end of 76th Street in Riverside Drive. And I saw this fountain. It's an old horse fountain. And it stopped me. And I thought, this looks like something you would see at Grand Central Terminal. And it was a very cold, cold January night. I quickly kind of ran over and scanned the Parks Department plaque. And sure enough, it was designed by Warren and Wetmore, who were the architects who designed Grand Central Terminal. They were very prominent architects at the beginning of the 20th century. And as I'm hustling home to get out of the cold, I'm wondering, why is Warren and Wetmore designing this little fountain in this sort of obscure corner of Riverside Park? So I sort of cursory Google search about the Hamilton fountain and some articles came up about Ray Hamilton and this scandal he was involved in.

about Ray Hamilton and this scandal he was involved in. And there were maybe 10 or 12 different entries and kind of went through the blog post, maybe a thousand words each or something, some of them more accurate than others. And I thought there's got to be a book about this out there someplace. It sounds like an interesting story. And when I realized that there wasn't one, I decided to take it on and give it a go to write it. So that's what sort of led me down that rabbit hole. And I was able to find all of the court records. There was criminal action, civil action, and it all kind of went to the New York State Supreme Court. And so all of the documentation was there, about a thousand pages of testimony and exhibits. Ray Hamilton's papers were at the New York Historical Society, which was

four blocks from my building. And then when I started looking for newspaper articles about it, that's when the deluge came. There were just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of newspaper articles. So I thought, maybe there's enough here for a book. And so that's how it all started. So interesting. And the other thing too, that I found interesting just listening to you talk about that is knowing that you have a background in like historical architecture and that you know about things like famous architectural designers in New York at the turn of the century. So that when you went to look at that fountain, it wasn't just like, oh, that's interesting. That's pretty. Huh? That's a cool fountain. You knew enough about

architecture to know why it was significant. Whereas somebody like me, I would have been like, well, that's a cool fountain. And then the story would have stopped there. So all of your background, all of your professional and educational experience led you to that moment. And I just, I think that's really interesting. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So you started digging into this story and most people who are listening to this will not have read the scandalous hamiltons yet they probably will when we're done talking about this or they'll go by i hope so but they haven't read it yet and they have no idea what we're talking about so can you give us a very high level overview? Don't give us any spoilers because

we want to read it, but a very high level overview about what exactly is so scandalous that it would result in a thousand pages of court transcripts and hundreds of newspaper articles. So the story begins with Robert Ray Hamilton. He was the great grandson of Alexander Hamilton. And who were his parents? Robert Ray Hamilton. He went through his life being called Ray. So Ray Hamilton's father was a West Point grad, a brigadier general in both the Mexican War and the Civil War. His name was Skylar Hamilton. Ray's grandfather was John Church Hamilton, who was a son of Alexander Hamilton and a biographer of his own father. And then, of course, his great-grandfather was Alexander Hamilton.

And the story takes place from sort of 1885 to about 1900, 1910s and 1910. In the 1880s, the Hamilton family, and I write in the book, is a little bit akin to the name Kennedy today in that it was 80 years past the Hamilton-Byrd duel. However, there were a lot of offspring. They were a very socially prominent family in New York. They were real estate developers, business people, philanthropists. So it wasn't uncommon at all to read about a Hamilton doing something for the good in and around New York. So Ray Hamilton, like almost all Hamiltons, graduated from Columbia University, Columbia University Law School. He was a New York State Assemblyman, was a real estate developer himself, and basically grew up in and lived a life of privilege. That class, that strata of people, they didn't want for

anything really. And so Ray had basically everything going for him. So he's the one central figure in the story. And the other is his wife, Eva. And Eva's story could not be more different than Ray's. Eva grew up in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania around Scranton, Wilkes-Barre. Her father was an alcoholic. He was an itinerant woodcutter. They moved from logging camp to logging camp, basically people clearing trees to lay railroad tracks to haul coal out of that part of the country. And she was the youngest of six children. And the consensus in the village that they spent

the most time in was that she, quote, wasn't going to be bright. And Ray and Eva met in 1885 in what was known as a body house. There were not a lot of opportunities for women in general at the time. And for women like Eva, who had no education, no sort of positive background to come out of, there were very limited opportunities. And one of them was prostitution. And that was Eva's profession. Her and Ray met in a body house and began a relationship. After four years, Eva really wanted to become Mrs. Robert Ray Hamilton and convinced Ray that she was pregnant with his child, although she wasn't, never was pregnant. But she convinced him that she was pregnant with his child and that he should do the right thing and marry her. And in January of 1889, they did. When you say relationship,

do you mean he was visiting her at this home? Or do you mean they were actually going out to dinner and he was introducing her to people as like, this is my girlfriend? He wasn't introducing her to people as like, this is my girlfriend. He wasn't introducing her to people, but they were seeing each other outside of the body house. Eva took a flat. Ray was in Albany quite often because of his work in the state assembly, and he also practiced law up there as well. So he was basically in the city on weekends. And when he was in the city, he saw Eva. He paid her rent. He bought her clothes, jewelry. They had a relationship. So did she stop working there then when they began their relationship with each other? That's a little bit of a mystery. I don't think she did, but it's never clearly stated one way or the other. So she convinces him, listen, I'm pregnant and you should do the

right thing and we should get married. And so what happens next? So Eva bought a baby instead of giving birth to one at something called a baby farm, which were illegal orphanages. And it was actually the saddest part of the research for me. Basically, a woman who gave birth to a child that she either didn't want to keep or couldn't keep for whatever reason, you could give that baby to a midwife. And midwives would take about anywhere from four to six babies at a time, and they would turn around and sell those babies for $5 or $10. $5 or $10? Right.

If the baby was kind of pink-cheeked and rosy-hued and looked healthy and et cetera, et cetera, unfortunately, babies that had some kind of physical issue or something that didn't look right, those babies were often, unfortunately, the victims of infanticide. So Eva bought a baby. Eva had no way of caring, didn't know anything about caring for a child, was unable to feed the child. Baby formula wasn't quite in existence yet. So the baby died after three days of malnutrition. Oh my goodness. And she did not think to herself, how will I feed this baby? You know, I just think it just never occurred to her that somehow she would have to be responsible

for that. She just wanted to present this baby to Ray to say, look, this is your child. You know, maybe we hire a baby nurse. People with money hired baby nurses at the time, but before she could even show the baby to Ray, the baby died. I'm sorry to keep interrupting you. This is obviously very interesting. So purportedly, was she like, oh, hey, while you were away in Albany, I gave birth and I have this baby now, rush home and see the baby. How does that work? That's a good question. So she announced to Ray in the spring of 1888 that she was pregnant, right? Then she said in the summer, so she's not showing in these early months. And she says to Ray,

I would like to go to Europe. I've never been. I would like to go by myself. This will be my last time before I become a mother. So Ray paid for her to travel around Europe for a couple of months during the summer. When she came back, he was in Albany quite often. She would use a well-placed blanket or shawl to kind of cover herself. And then in the last, basically the last trimester, Whitman had what was called a lying-in period. It was essentially bed rest. If you were a woman of means, you could do that in a hospital. If you were somebody like Eva,

you would go to your mother's or an aunt or an older sister, et cetera, et cetera. And so in September, she announced to Ray, I'm going to Elmira to my mother's for my lying in period. I will be back around Christmas time. And when I come back, I will present to you our child. So she bought the baby in Elmira. And on the trip back from Elmira to New York City, that's when the baby died. So now she's told Ray that this baby is born. So she gets to New York and she has to buy a second baby. I, this is so, it's just, you know, like one of the things that I read when I was getting ready to read your book was a quote from Booklist that said, if legal thriller star John Grisham thought up the story of Robert Ray Hamilton and Eva Steele one morning, by lunch, he would have abandoned the idea as too far-fetched. he would have abandoned the idea as too far-fetched.

And the deeper you get into the story, you're like, so she bought a second baby. It comes and it gets worse. It's downhill from the second baby. And it goes downhill from there. So that is the baby that Ray is introduced to as his child, Beatrice Ray Hamilton. Ray and Eva aren't living together. Ray says, wow, I've got a baby.

He goes back to his townhouse. Eva stays in her flat. Baby number two dies. She sends a mother, basically a family friend, out to buy a third baby. She comes back with a third baby, and Eva says, you idiot, this looks nothing like baby two. Ray will certainly know the difference. So Eva returns that baby and buys a fourth baby. Why is it so easy to buy a baby, Bill?

How can you just quickly get four babies? Because, as I said, it was actually pretty common. There were a number of them in Manhattan, in Brooklyn. There were estimated to be about 20 or 30 of them. So it was not difficult at all to do that. But meanwhile, she has no plans for how to feed the baby. Is this because she is like you mentioned earlier, like everybody in town was like, she'll never amount to much. She's not very bright. Does she legitimately not have any idea how to like, I'm going to have to get milk for this baby somehow? Well, by the time baby four

is on the scene, she convinces Ray that they need to hire a baby nurse, which they do right away. convinces Ray that they need to hire a baby nurse, which they do right away. So the baby nurse kind of takes over all of that. And the baby nurse, a woman named Marianne Donnelly, was a hard-drinking kind of lower middle class baby nurse. And after about eight months, she figured out something was going on because whenever Ray was away on business, Eva was visited by a kind of a shady character and his mother, a guy named Josh Mann. It turns out that Josh Mann and Eva had a common law marriage, which came out in the course of all this courtroom action. So the baby nurse kind of figures all of this out. They are in Atlantic City on holiday, and Ray, after now spending eight months with Eva full-time,

decides that he wants a divorce, that this isn't going to work long-term. After all, Eva absolutely says, no way, I am not divorcing you. They're fighting all the time. And the baby nurse inserts herself into the situation. And she tells Eva, I know what's going on with you and this guy, Josh. I'm going to tell Ray about the whole deal.

And Eva thinking the only solution that could come to mind in the middle of this argument with Mary and Donnelly is to stab her, which she did. And this occurs on Monday, August 26th, 1889. to mind in the middle of this argument with Mary Ann Donnelly is to stab her, which she did. And this occurs on Monday, August 26th, 1889 in Atlantic City. It happens at about noon. By five o'clock, reporters from Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, whoever could get on the train fast enough, have arrived in Atlantic City because the news has gotten out that a Hamilton is involved in a stabbing, possible murder, because the nurse was on her deathbed. And the next morning, it was front page news everywhere and stayed in the news on the front

page for weeks on end. Beginning in 1889, it would kind of move to the interior pages, and then Eva would do something, and it would come back to the front pages, and the whole thing just perpetuated for a number of years. is an all-new series based on the best-selling novel by Charles Yu about a struggling Asian actor who gets a bigger part than he expected when he witnesses a crime in Chinatown. Streaming November 19th only on Disney+. This episode is brought to you by Dyson OnTrack. Dyson OnTrack headphones offer best-in-class noise cancellation and an enhanced sound range,

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There was all of this stuff about Eva came out and she was definitely painted as a not very good person. On the other hand, though, people were shocked that a Hamilton was involved in this. And there was kind of a general consensus about how could somebody who's supposedly so smart and put together and a lawyer and a politician and a real estate developer, how could he get himself involved in something like this? So there was this sort of duality being played out, but it was also the beginning of, as the cover says, tabloid journalism. Joseph Pulitzer had bought the New York World, which he considered a real sort of working man's paper. And for his readership, he loved to print stories of basically rich people getting their comeuppance.

And anything that involved drunkards and violence and tawdry behavior and prostitutes, I mean, his readership just ate that stuff up. So Ray and Eva were just kind of a constant stream of tawdry subject matter for these people to just scream on the front pages. And so the newspapers loved it. And Eva was a bit of a fashionista, a clothes horse. She would make these courtroom appearances in these incredible outfits and would play to the newspaper men assembled, you know, on the perimeter. And if she thought the situation called for herself to swoon, she would swoon.

To be indifferent, she would be indifferent. She treated it like a performance. She would be indifferent. She treated it like a performance. And so the newspapers in a way, although they thought she was not a good person, loved to write about how Eva took center stage through all of this. Chicago, where it's like a woman of the night does something terrible. And then she hires Billy Flinn, the attorney played by Richard Gere, and they plan the entire performance. You'll pretend to be pregnant. You'll wear that outfit. You'll be like, I haven't eaten in four days. And then you'll faint on the steps of the courthouse because the press just ate it up. And of course, the tawdry sort of press, they were characters in the show Chicago as well. You talked about Joseph Pulitzer, how popular this type of journalism became, were there certain journalists who were just like,

this was their story and they spent all their time going to the courtroom? Did any journalists that in your research come to prominence because of their coverage of this story? Well, probably the most notable was Nellie Bly. If your listeners know Nellie Bly, she very much kind of invented investigative journalism. She spent eight days in an asylum as an undercover, exposing all that around the world in 80 days and all of these things that she did. So Eva was convicted of this stabbing and sent to the Trenton State Prison, and everybody thought that would kind of be the end of Eva. Nellie Bly talks her way into an exclusive jailhouse interview with Eva. The press basically sided with Ray,

even though they had misgivings about why he would do something, basically Ray was a good upstanding guy and she's a not nice person. So Nellie Bly worms her way into Trenton State Prison, convinces the matron to let her speak to Eva, and publishes over the course of two days these long articles with Eva telling her entire side of the story. And that just kind of fan the flames all over again. Eva was a storyteller. I write in the book, facts were fungible with her.

So whatever she, whatever she needed to say to kind of get by or get through a situation, she would. And so she told all these stories about Ray that the baby wasn't hers. It was a friend of Ray's who had gotten somebody pregnant and Ray didn't know what to do. So Eva volunteered to take care of the baby, all kinds of stuff. So Nellie Bly was certainly the most prominent of the journalists involved in it. And the chief of detectives for the New York City Police Department was a guy named Tommy Burns. And Tommy Burns is credited with, he kept a picture of known criminals on his desk called the Rogues Gallery,

which was kind of the precursor to the mugshot book that we know. He invented what we now know as the third degree. He's basically credited with kind of creating the modern police interrogation techniques. And Tommy Burns, the police department, was right across the street from a press office where all the newspapers would keep their reporters for police news. And if Tommy Burns summoned you across the street, everybody dropped what they were doing, drinking, playing cards and rushed over with their notebooks. And Tommy's the one who actually spilled the beans on this common law marriage, everything about the baby purchases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so between Tommy Burns and Nellie Bly, they're the ones who got the story out in the most full way. But what's interesting about it is today, if there's a scandal happening,

people think that we'll start tweeting that they have inside information about it, or somebody aligned with one camp or another will leak things to the press, right? That was all happening then. There were closed-door depositions that supposedly nobody was supposed to know about. And in the papers the next day, there would be Eva's side saying what her witnesses said, Ray's side saying what he said. So many of the ways that sort of modern media reporting plays out now was happening then. It's just the only vehicle was the newspaper. What happened to the baby? Beatrice essentially was taken by Ray's brother. A guardian was named in the court for her, et cetera, et cetera.

By the time she was 15 or so, one of my biggest holes in my research was whatever happened to Beatrice. I was looking for two years and I finally kind of stumbled across a piece that led me somewhere. And so I reached out to these people and said, by any chance, was Beatrice Ray Hamilton this person? And they came back to say yes, indeed it was, and I said, would anybody in the family care to talk to me, or if there are any artifacts, anything you'd want to share? And it came back that Beatrice had a very hard beginning to her life. She never wished to speak about it, and she kept nothing from the early days of her childhood. Essentially, she moved from New York about as far across the country as you can go. She lived a full and complete life, had children, grandchildren, and I write in the book out of respect for her family that they didn't want to talk about it. I left it there. She had

a very, very difficult beginning of her life, but from what I can gather, a pretty nice ending to it. Tell us a little bit more, because people who listen to this show are always very interested in the behind the scenes of how a book like this gets made. Right? So I love the origin story of I saw the fountain and I was like, what? That's weird. And I had a background in architecture and then I started Googling and then I was enamored with the story. And you mentioned that you had to get the court transcripts and the newspaper articles and the papers of so-and-so. What was the process like for you of sifting through these many, many, many thousands of pages of historical documents? How do you organize them? How do you decide what details to include in the book and which to exclude?

I'd love to hear more about that. So I found these court transcripts and I thought, you know what, I'm going to have to print these out, put them in a four inch ring binder and just go through them. And so I started just reading them, putting post-it notes when a new name or a new character came up. And what was interesting is when I then got into the newspaper article portion, there wasn't a lot of fact-checking going on in newspaper publishing at the time. It was a lot of sensationalism, even in the most respected newspapers. And so the newspapers would write that Eva broke down on the stand and threw herself on the floor and was sobbing hysterically. And then you would read the court transcript and

it would say, Eva asked for a five-minute pause so that she could take a drink of water. But the newspaper articles had a lot of color and a lot of sort of texture that could augment the drier court documents. So it was a constant kind of going back and forth between those two. And at the Historical Society, in this collection of Ray's papers, there was actually nothing in his hand that he had written. had written when the stabbing broke and all of this news of the scandal became public, all of these sort of noted attorneys in New York, his friends, Columbia classmates were all sending him letters and telegrams saying, if there's anything I can do to help you, please let me know. And there were a couple of letters from his father and a couple of letters from his brother. So it was just sort of a careful piecing of it all together and then structuring the book in a way that A, made it interesting, hopefully to readers, and B, advanced the story and so many sort of cameo characters that appear in it that I didn't want to sort of

go off on too many tangents and get away from the main thrust of it. At one point in the book, Josh Mann, Eva's common law husband, is thought to be insane. And so a doctor is brought in. He's the head of the alienist department, which was the forerunner to psychology departments at Bellevue Hospital in New York. And he testifies that, in fact, he thinks Josh is A, an alcoholic, and B, is insane. And he's a doctor. His name is Dr. Carlos McDonald. So, okay, let me look up Dr. Carlos McDonald. Well, not only is he head of this department at Bellevue, he's the co-inventor with Thomas Edison of the electric chair. The Hamilton family attorney was a guy named Elihu Root, a prominent attorney in New York at the time, went on to

become McKinley's Secretary of War, Roosevelt's Secretary of War and State, won the Nobel Prize working with Woodrow Wilson and blah, blah, blah. And so every time I kind of thought that I had it all, everything I needed to put the book together, you start finding out more about these sometimes peripheral or secondary characters. And it's like, boy, I got to get that in the book, you know? And so then it becomes a process of sort of self-editing. What's important to advance the story and what is just my own personal interest that might not be of interest to anybody else? The regular question of like, will other people find this interesting too? Or is it just me? Right. That is the million dollar question that I am very familiar with the struggle bill.

Yeah. Was this process, was it satisfying to you at the end? Were you like, that was a real good story. I'm real proud of how that turned out. Yeah, absolutely. It's a great point of personal pride with me. Quite honestly, once I had it together far enough with a manuscript and a book proposal and all of that stuff, I wasn't getting very far trying to get it published. That proverbial drawer of rejection letters, I'm in that club. So I'm grateful for it. I'm proud of the effort and it's been very rewarding. Well,

I, the, the story is just like, we gave like a bird's eye view, but there's a lot left that we did not talk about. There's a lot of scandalous details that, I mean, just the idea that one woman could quickly and easily buy four babies. You know what I mean, just the idea that one woman could quickly and easily buy four babies.

You know what I mean? Like just that alone is absolutely fascinating. We think about how, how lengthy adoptions are now today where you're like, you need 50 grand and it's going to take three years. And you know what I mean? Like the idea that in a couple of like a week or two, you could have purchased four separate babies and sent one back because it didn't look enough like the other ones. Do you know what I mean?

And that one would die and they'd give her another one. There's so many details that I think the reader will find interesting and a lot that we did not get into and that they're going to have to read to find out. Read the book and it will all be revealed. Thanks so much for being here today, Bill. I really enjoyed chatting with you. Oh, thanks, Sharon. I really appreciate you having me. I'm thankful for it.

You can buy Bill Shafer's book, The Scandalous Hamiltons, wherever you like to buy books. I'll give you a little plug for bookshop.org that supports independent bookstores. Thanks for being here. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.