Louise Suydam Noble & Her Mother (part 2)

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.   

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). 

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

The Sound of Four Shoes Dropping (part 1)

Louise White Suydam Noble
(1885-1912)

Sweet seventeen and manly nineteen – that was the verdict of fashionable society when Louise White wed Walter Suydam, Jr. on June 10, 1903.

“A boy-and-girl wedding,” everyone clucked. “The bride is still a school girl,” the papers reported.  

Louise and Walter were the youngest couple ever married in the Church of the Heavenly Rest at Fifth Avenue at 45^th Street, where most of the gowns and decorations were pink because the color had been the bride’s favorite since she was a little girl. That would have been around the time that she met Walter. 

Both descendants of old New York families, Louise and Walter grew up playing on the beach, walking and riding in Central Park, and frolicking at birthday parties in the grand homes of their parents. This era was one of the heydays of social exclusivity in the United States.

Central Park by Childe Hassam (1892)

While she was quite young Louise announced to her mother that she intended to marry Walter, and all seemed to go according to plan.

After their honeymoon, Louise and Walter settled into a house on the grounds of Manowtasquott, a quintessential Gilded Age estate that Walter’s father built in 1886 in Blue Point, N.Y.  The Queen Anne-style mansion overlooks the Great South Bay on land that originally belonged to the Unkechaug Indians.      

In 1905 a daughter was born to Louise and Walter but she died at the age of six months.  By then, Louise had become bored living at Blue Point year-round. She itched to return to the city and put on her dancing shoes.

Long Island Railroad map, circa 1900
Blue Point was one stop west of Patchogue, last destination
on the southern branch.

Alas, it turned out that Walter, once enrolled at New York University School of Law, had been advised to abandon his studies and take up an outdoor life. This fit well with his desires. Although he had been reared to take his place in society, balls and card games held little charm for him. What he loved most was sailing on his 42-foot yacht, Nemesis, and casting for sea-bass, flounder, mackerel, and bluefish. 

“While bluefish was good off Fire Island, fifteen miles away, during the summer,” Walter once explained,

I was in the habit of leaving on my sloop at sundown and staying away all night because that is the only time that one can catch bluefish successfully.  In the mornings I returned with my catch, of course, selling my fish in the market just as any other fisherman would. When I reached home, I never noticed that anything was wrong.

Indeed, Walter must have been fixated on the fish and not his wife, for Louise had become infatuated with Fred Noble, the 20-year old son of a Brooklyn plumber whom he had hired five years earlier to help around on the yacht. During the summer, Fred and his father lived in a cottage near the railroad tracks in Blue Point.

Now it was 1911, and Walter surprised Louise with her very own automobile. She taught herself to drive and before long she and Fred were taking trips together and, the servants gossiped, sharing milk and cookies in her bedroom.

To top it off, during the Blue Point Improvement Society’s annual fair, everyone observed Fred hanging around Louise’s booth paying her extravagant attention.

On Friday, September 8, Walter confronted Louise at their home. After they spoke, he moved to his father’s house because, he would state in court, he could no longer live under the same roof with her.

On Tuesday, September 12, Louise asked her maids to help pack her belongings and boarded a train to the city. The next day Walter announced that his wife was missing. 

“This trouble has come upon me like a thunderclap,” he said. 

I was convinced that my wife was supremely happy.  She had no wish that I did not immediately satisfy.  Only a few weeks ago I bought her a handsome new automobile for her own use.  She had her yacht, her horses, everything a woman could wish for.

Walter and newspaper readers nationwide soon learned that Fred and Louise were ensconced at the Regina Apartments on West Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village.  Dressed in a white silk blouse, black skirt, black silk stockings, and black suede slippers, Louise invited reporters into the three-room apartment for a conversation.

Mr. & Mrs. Frederick W. Noble

Reclining in a Morris chair with her head thrown back, wearing a smirk on her full red lips (according to an observer), Louise declared that she and Fred would not hide their love because they were unashamed. We are very happy, she said, and quite certain that the passion would last.  Society would have to accept their unconventional arrangement.

In the meantime, Walter moved like lightning to obtain a divorce. Just two weeks after Louise’s departure, his case was tried in New York State Supreme Court with testimony taken in 30 minutes. A late August rendezvous between Fred and Louise lay at the center of the servants’ accounts, with Mary O’Rourke describing the sound of four shoes dropping onto the floor of Louise’s bedroom above where she stood on the first floor of the Suydam house.

“All smiled at this and even the Court’s mouth was seen to twitch,” according to a newspaper account.

In January 1912, Louise and Fred married.  But all was not well.  They quarreled in public and Louise confided to Fred that Walter had been, in fact, her one true love.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/08/the-sound-of-four-shoes-dropping.html