There will be a big story for you some day – maybe in a month, maybe in a year. But when it comes it will be a first-page story with big headlines.
Those were the words of Louise Suydam Noble, speaking
with an acquaintance in late January of 1912.
“You’re just blue. Your mood will pass,” he replied.
Of course, the big story had been dancing in the
headlines nationwide since Louise had left her millionaire husband to run away
with Fred Noble, a younger man of a much lower socio-economic class four months
earlier.
Louise’s mood did not pass, for she longed to be back
inside the social whirl. Yet her former friends now shunned her, and it all
became too much.
One evening she went uptown to spend the night at the
apartment of her mother and sent a message to the landlord of the building
where she and Fred, now her husband, lived. She asked the landlord to bring to her We-uns and
Dixie, two of her beloved Pomeranian dogs. Pluffles, the third Pomeranian,
stayed with the landlord.
In the wee hours of the morning, Louise secretly
returned to the apartment on Twelfth Street. She threw a kimono over her
lace nightgown and Fred dressed in a silk shirt, trousers, and silk stockings. They
turned on the oven and gas burners and bolted the windows in the apartment.
When Louise’s mother woke the next morning and found
her daughter missing, she frantically called the landlord and Louise’s
ex-husband Walter and headed downtown, arriving at the same time as Walter and Fred Noble’s father and a police captain with several lieutenants.
The cops broke the lock, barreled through the furniture
that blocked the entrance, and made their way to the kitchen where Louise and
Fred lay dead in each other’s arms beside the open stove.
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| The Nobles' double suicide joined a lynching, a drowning, a murder, and a fire in this newspaper report. |
***
Louise was the only daughter of Virginia Grace Hoffman
White and John Jay White, Jr. Jack, as he was known, descended from
Knickerbockers and listed his profession as a “broker” but lived largely off
inherited wealth.
Grace, as she called herself, was born in Cape Palmas,
Liberia, where her father, the Episcopal Reverend Cadwallader Colden Hoffman
and her mother Caroline devoted their lives to missionary work.
Reverend Cadwallader Colden Hoffman
After marrying in 1885, Grace and Jack moved to a
house on fashionable East Fifty-Seventh Street, and their daughter Louise came
along in 1887. Years passed; then suddenly in 1908 the couple left New York
City for Washington, D.C. When I discovered this detail, it struck me as an odd
move.
But it suited Grace. Ensconced in a limestone mansion
near Dupont Circle, she became involved in various charities and causes. After
her daughter’s scandal and death in 1911-1912, Grace plunged headlong into the Progressive
Era. She became active in the National Woman’s Party founded by suffragist
Alice Paul. After the nineteenth amendment was ratified in 1920, the NWP kept
pushing for an Equal Rights Amendment.
Grace further burnished her reputation when the
Chicago reformer Jane Addams, who established the social settlement Hull House
in 1889, invited the worshipful Grace to join the board of the Woman’s Peace
Party, established in 1915.
Evidently Grace gained a few enemies because of her
indiscretion. Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian-born activist, wrote a blistering
four-page letter to Grace after she became aware of catty gossip concerning her
own appointment as the International Secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
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| Grace stands fourth from right at a WILPF meeting in Zurich in 1919. |
“Before and after the organizing meeting in
Washington,” Schwimmer wrote,
I received press cuttings from all over the country .
. . representing me as a ‘person who had to leave England because she behaved
so aggressively.’ I don’t know whose interest it was to publish such
absolutely unfounded stories. I had to tell you all these things because we
cannot work for peace and harmony on the basis of mistrust and discord.
In 1934 while serving as chair of the New York City
branch of the WILPF, Grace was
described as suffering from a “Mayflower complex” and probably better suited to
the D.A.R. than the WILPF.
 |
| Grace is seated third from left in this 1934 photograph of NWP leadership. |
In keeping with the ethos of the “New Woman,” Grace became a poet and published Up Ship, Wings to
Dare, Christus, and other collections of verse.
During these years Jack White lived far away, having
moved permanently to London in 1914.
Grace died in 1937 surrounded by servants at The
Kedge, the White family home in Bar Harbor, Maine, overlooking Frenchman Bay
off Mt. Desert Island.
Photos of WILPF and NWP courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History at Smith College
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/09/louise-suydam-noble-her-mother-continued.html
