Longview, Texas. Ellisville, Mississippi. Charleston, South Carolina. All were a long way from Massachusetts. But for Mabel Puffer and Arthur Hazzard, in the sizzling summer days following their hasty, high-profile exodus from New Hampshire and their return to Ayer, Massachusetts, such towns seemed all too close.
From the moment Puffer’s relatives and their attorney had arrived in Concord to put a stop to the “insanity of such a marriage” to the day in mid-July when Mabel Puffer might be declared “insane,” the names Puffer and Hazzard appeared in major newspapers nearly every day, often on the front page. Thus a frightened, bemused, cruel public watched as the courts eviscerated the couple’s lives. There were no invitations for this lynching, as there had been in Ellisville, but there was daily attendance to the apparently entertaining event of the slow death of Puffer and Hazzard’s relationship, conceived in innocence and aborted in shameful bigotry. “Ayer residents who enjoy a first rate legal battle are rubbing their hands in anticipation of developments,” wrote the Boston Traveller. There was even audience participation.
Consider the deluge of letters sent to Puffer in her lonely cell, or “detention room” as the police called it, in the basement of the Ayer city hall, and to Hazzard, out on $300 bail, at his mother’s home within view of the door to Puffer’s cell and directly behind the police station. Numerous white men wrote to Puffer, proposing marriage to “save” her from “the Negro.” Two or three black clergymen from Boston wrote with promises to marry her and her Negro fiancé. One offered shelter and help just in case the couple continued encountering difficulties. Hazzard received a letter from a white woman in Boston asking if she could meet him; perhaps she would be a better match in case the marriage to Puffer didn’t work out. And one of his well-heeled employers—someone for whom he had beat rugs and chopped wood for nearly as long as for the Puffers—sent him a large bouquet of red roses, which he took to his mother and placed in a large vase on the center table of the their parlor. “I’d take them to Mabel if I could, only they won’t let me,” he told a reporter.
Both were targeted for hate mail. During the last week of June, Puffer received a letter, unsigned, with a Providence, Rhode Island, postmark, in which she was warned that if she did not break up with Hazzard, then the author of the letter, “aided by certain others,” would “take matters into their own hands and see that Hazzard is dealt with in such a manner as to make the marriage impossible.” There were other letters of this type bearing postmarks from Ayer, Boston, Lowell, and Swampscott, among other locales. Some were addressed also to the local police alerting them to the possibility of mob action against Hazzard.
At the same time, soldiers at nearby Camp Devens showed particular interest in both the wealthy society lady and her handyman. On the 24th of June, in YMCA Hut No. 21, they held a forensic event on the question: “Resolved, that marriage of white women with colored men should be forbidden by law.” The discussion was led by the “secretary” or manager of the hut, who went to the court clerk’s office that day to research the case and find information to back his argument. The following day small groups of soldiers could be seen in downtown Ayer asking people questions like: Just how strong is the local police force? Is there any tradition of state police bolstering local law enforcement if there’s trouble? And how much interference would they encounter if they decided “to give Hazzard a taste of Southern persuasion.” There was one group, about half a dozen, who came into town almost every day from then on. They told the townsfolk that they were “from the Southern regions of the nation.” They were serious, they told the locals, and they wanted their presence to be known all around town, especially in the cell in the basement of the Ayer city hall and in the small house behind the police station. They were also looking for recruits for the “fun” they had in mind.
But they never had their fun—at least not in the way they had envisioned it. And while they did visit the courtroom on some days of the upcoming hearings and the trial, they eventually backed off from their bold flirtations with violence. Perhaps they were worried that Hazzard lived only fifteen feet from the back door of the police station. Perhaps in all their questioning, they had discovered that there were people in Ayer, some on the police force even, who had known Honey Hazzard for years, who were familiar with his habits of hard work, and who were not willing to watch him die at the end of a rope or amid the flames of a burning stake. Or perhaps they were just smart enough to realize that this black man would be destroyed by other means. This was a lynching of another sort—the Northern kind, they reckoned—and almost as good as what they could have done. It was all about using the law to scare the man away, destroying his reputation and his livelihood in the process. It was a legal lynching, so to speak. And in this case, it was a double one: the black man and his white fiancée.
“Miscegenation” was the technical word for interracial marriage and in America it had never been a very popular concept. The first colony to outlaw such unions was Virginia in 1691, ruling that any whites who married blacks, Native Americans, or mulattoes, would be forever banished. Then came Maryland the next year and, in 1705, Massachusetts, which was also one of the first to repeal the law, doing so in 1843. By 1919, forty-one out of the forty-eight states had at one time outlawed mixed race marriages, and thirty still had the law on the books. There had even been a push to make it a federal crime.
Indeed, U.S. Representative Seaborn Roddenbery, of Georgia, proposed to Congress on December 11, 1912, a constitutional amendment banning interracial marriage. “No more voracious parasite ever sucked at the heart of pure society, innocent girlhood, or Caucasian motherhood than the one which welcomes and recognizes the sacred ties of wedlock between Africa and America,” he told his fellow congressmen. The proposed amendment provided that intermarriage “between Negroes or persons of color and Caucasians or any other character of persons within the U.S. or any territory under their jurisdiction, is forever prohibited; and the term ‘negro or person of color,’ as here employed, shall be held to mean any and all persons of African descent or having any trace of African or negro blood.”
Opposition to Roddenbery’s proposal was strong, especially among black Americans. This was not because they necessarily wanted to marry white men or white women. Rather, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his opposition to it, it was because the amendment treated blackness as “a physical taint.” He and others pointed out that such a law clearly banned black men from marrying white women yet at the same time, it gave white men who had sexual relationships with black women an excuse not to marry them. By making it illegal to legitimate such interracial sexual relationships, the law thus relegated black women in liaisons with white men to the position of mistresses. As Du Bois put it, the law would make “the colored girl absolutely helpless before the lust of white men.” One letter written to Roddenbery suggested that “by all means let us have your resolution, but amend it so that if it is a crime for Negro men to marry white women legally in the north; it be a misdemeanor for white men to mate with Negro women illegally in the south.”
There were other proposals before Congress that year regarding miscegenation, all quite obviously provoked by the lascivious behavior of Jack Johnson, the first black man to win the world’s heavyweight boxing title. Johnson was outspoken about his preference for white women—and many of them. In fact he publicly denigrated black women, which thus made him unpopular with both races. In October of 1912, he was arrested and charged with the abduction of an eighteen-year-old white woman, Lucille Cameron, whom he said worked for him as a secretary at his nightclub, the Café de Champion. Cameron told police that “she loved Johnson and expected to become his wife.” Police, her mother, and the public could not conceive of such “lunacy.” Thus, Johnson was charged with violation of the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, known as the Mann Act. At his trial, Cameron, who was held in jail and not allowed to communicate with Johnson, would not testify that Johnson was running a prostitution ring and that she was called to Chicago to be part of it. Prosecutors thus had to drop the charges, release Cameron, and dismiss the case against Johnson. Once released, Cameron did in fact marry Johnson. The governor of New York called the marriage “a blot on our civilization. Such desecration of the marriage tie should never be allowed.” In the wake of this highly publicized case, Seaborn Roddenbery launched his 1912 crusade in Congress. That same year, the House did pass a law making racial intermarriage a felony in the District of Columbia.
Seven years later, not much had changed. In fact, it could be said that by the summer of 1919 as the “volcano” was about to erupt, the notion of a black man marrying a white woman, especially a wealthy white woman, might have been even more outrageous than it had been in 1912. When Puffer and Hazzard had first arrived in New Hampshire, they were not at all rejected. In fact, their candor, their friendliness, and their obvious affection for each other had seemed to grace them with that golden glow that humanity loves. Even the mayor had said that he would marry them. But when Puffer’s relatives arrived to stop the marriage and the buzz of a scandal grew louder, the townsfolk, as if snapping out of a trance, suddenly looked at the mixed race couple as pariahs and at their dream as shameful. The popular current washed over the town, crushing Puffer and Hazzard’s romance and sending both of them nearly into shock.
It was possible that Puffer and Hazzard’s everyday life was so contained, so sheltered behind the Venetian blinds and in the perfect garden at the cottage on Sandy Pond that neither of them ever once connected their own hopeful plans with any of the prevailing prejudices that plagued America in the summer of 1919. And that on warm summer nights the sounds of bull frogs and crickets and the wind rustling across the tops of trees prevented them from hearing their neighbors’ suspicious whispers. It was indeed probable that it had not occurred to either one that the very town they had both known for most of their lives could turn against them, that a city hall they might have passed thousands of times would hold one of them prisoner. That a vendor who for years had sold them newspapers would now avoid eye contact. And worst of all that their honesty and sanity, after years of building up strong reputations, could suddenly be questioned.
What did Mabel Puffer think about during those long isolated days in the basement of the city hall? Was she trying to place a calm, cool hand on the feverish present? Or was she anxiously bitter, comparing her situation to that of others and dwelling on the fact that there were white men, hardly as kind or as good as her Gar, who every day of the week married white women? And some of those white men married well-heeled white women like herself—for their money even!—but they were granted the privacy of such a decision. Did she wonder what her crime had been or why she was not allowed to see her fiancé? Did she even know of Hazzard’s many attempts to send her notes and flowers and boxes of her favorite chocolates? Had she seen him standing on the stoop of his mother’s house staring at the basement door of city hall waiting for it to open for her daily walk with the police matron who guarded her? And what should she do? Should she fake insanity to get the statutory charges dropped as she was told would happen if she was, in fact, declared insane? What could she do to be certain that Hazzard would be a free man? Did she know of the accusations against him, that he had stolen from her?
The challenge for the legal lynchers was that without the help of a federal law against miscegenation or such a law in either New Hampshire or Massachusetts, their case was weak. Hazzard’s lawyer, William H. Lewis, who was black and who was a dynamic former assistant U.S. attorney in Boston, informed the Massachusetts judge early on that he was fighting mad about the fact that he was certain his client and his fiancée had not committed any crimes whatsoever. Rather, their accusers had. There had been no extradition papers and thus, Lewis said, those who presented the warrant in Concord and filed the charges contained in it had committed the crime of kidnapping. The statutory charge in the warrant should be dismissed, he said. And although Puffer was not his client, Lewis would help to prove that she was not insane for wanting to marry a black man. The actions against his client and his fiancée, he said, were blatant violations of the Bill of Rights. Lewis told the court that “Miss Puffer wasn’t insane before she attempted to marry Mr. Hazzard. There was never any suspicion of misconduct between the two before her relatives learned that she proposed to marry a colored man. There is no law in this State that forbids a marriage between colored and white people. This is Massachusetts, not Mississippi. This is Ayer, not Atlanta. It makes no difference what Your Honor may think about a marriage of this kind, or what I may think about it. Justice must be done these two law-abiding people.”
The opposing forces clearly needed a plan. Perhaps they could keep Puffer isolated, bring in alienists—the psychiatrists of the day—to examine her and then make a deal with her lawyer—and perhaps with her—that if she is to be declared insane the statutory charges against the couple will be dropped? Then, just to be sure that nothing would change before her half-nephew could get legal guardianship over his newly declared insane half-aunt and her estate—the earliest time would likely be September—find other charges against Hazzard, ones that would keep Puffer away from him. After all, between the release of charges and the legal establishment of Puffer’s relative as her legal guardian, what was to stop the couple from running away to another state that did not have a five-day wait for a marriage license? Was this the strategy? It was clear that whatever the plan, it must induce Puffer to voluntarily reject Hazzard herself.
But by the end of the couple’s first week back in Ayer, it was also clear that neither the daily advice of the police matron, who was apparently urging Puffer to end the relationship, nor the long days in the detention cell, nor the separation from Honey had succeeded in destroying Puffer’s devotion to her fiancé. In an interview with a Chicago Defender reporter covering the story in late June—for an article that appeared in early July—Puffer had said firmly:
It seems to me that the judge, lawyers and the people who have been writing letters to me need a little mental examination. I never knew there were so many queer folks in the world before. They are simply losing time trying to adjudge me insane for the purpose of separating me from Mr. Hazzard….
If some of these people who are trying to interfere with our marriage were as intelligent as Mr. Hazzard all of this trouble would not have happened….
They have done everything in their power to discourage him, but he is not made of the material that melts quickly after fire. Although his face is dark, the heart is white and spirit purer than the men of my race who are trying to intimidate him.
The court date for the hearing at which Puffer’s sanity would be judged was July 11. During the two weeks preceding it, a flurry of events caused considerable confusion, for the townsfolk, for reporters, for anyone attempting to understand the drama. Nothing was as it appeared to be. Or was it?
For one thing, at a court hearing to judge Puffer’s state of mind, she pulled off the opal engagement ring Hazzard had given her and told the judge that she would send it back to Hazzard, registered mail. At the end of the hearing, she embraced the half-niece who had stopped her marriage. Her lawyer told the press that the engagement was off and because there was no longer any need to protect her from Hazzard’s influence, Puffer would be released from her cell at city hall. He said that she would be leaving town with a guardian for a few days and that she was planning to move to the Pacific Coast, perhaps California. He also said that there might not have to be an insanity hearing now, adding that Puffer had agreed to testify against Hazzard when he was tried for larceny.
Now that Hazzard was being accused of stealing Puffer’s possessions and money, the police, armed with a search warrant, searched Hazzard’s mother’s house. Some reporters used the word “ransacked.” And just as the police suspected, they found items that, as one paper put it, “had been removed from Puffer’s house and ‘taken’ to his house.” That was true. In fact, they were gifts from Puffer during the many months of their courtship. Around that time too, Puffer, in a conversation with her lawyer, said that two days before the wedding she had given Hazzard between $5,000 and $6,000 because he was soon to be the head of the household. She had also provided him the right to start a business at the front of one of her properties in town and to store tools and equipment in a nearby barn.
The quickly changing situation was baffling, at best. By July 5, when the Chicago Defender article came out, it looked like this: The couple is arrested on statutory charges of cohabitation. Hazzard is accused of enticement. Puffer’s sanity is questioned, legally. They are taken out of state, although there are no extradition papers. Puffer arrives back in Ayer on the night of the 20th, is detained in her cell for days, is examined by physicians, and is told she will soon be examined again by alienists from Boston. On the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th, Puffer proclaims love for Hazzard, who on the 25th is suspected of larceny, so say all of the newspapers. On that same day Puffer gives up the ring and breaks the engagement and two days later she is released, at which time the Chicago Defender interviews her. Hazzard is arrested on the larceny charges on the day before she is released, gets out on bail, and goes to his brother’s house to live temporarily, in Lowell. After the July 5 Chicago Defender article appears, Puffer is back in the detention hall until the July 11 insanity hearing, which has not been canceled, despite what her lawyer told the press.
After her brief release on June 27, Puffer was allowed to go only to the cottage at Sandy Pond and only with her shadow, the police matron, who reported that Puffer cried the entire time. By the time she returned to the detention hall, which she did without resistance, it must have been sadly obvious to her that what had begun as a struggle to be reunited with her fiancé and to reschedule a marriage had now escalated to a battle to avoid confinement in a prison or asylum and to prevent a tragic ending of some sort. Reports emerged that Mabel Puffer spent most of her time crying or staring silently at the walls of her cell.
After the alienists examined Mabel Puffer, they each reported to the court. One said: “Very talkative, but talks freely and apparently well oriented for time and place. She is contemplating marriage with an illiterate Negro of poor personal hygiene and appearance, and can see no difference between this man and the average run of man in any detail. She asserts that she will marry him at the first opportunity.” The other, Dr. Frank S. Bulkeley, said, “She is as sane as we are.”
Nevertheless, on the morning of July 11 in court, the judge declared Mabel Puffer insane. He then appointed her lawyer as her temporary guardian until her half-nephew could officially assume the post in September. And that afternoon, as her lawyer had promised, the statutory cohabitation charges against both Puffer and Hazzard as well as the charge of enticement against Hazzard were dropped. After the verdict, Puffer told the Chicago Defender, “It’s too bad in this so-called free country that people can’t marry whom they love.”
In The Guardian on July 12 an editorial drew attention to the fact that Puffer was wrongfully snatched out of one state and into another without legal cause and then detained for no legal reason. “Anyone who wishes is at liberty to believe the physicians’ statements that Miss Puffer is insane. We are equally at liberty to disbelieve the physicians’ assertions. But even if it were true that the publicly ventilated persecution of Miss Puffer did mentally derange her, what decent motive could any one have in so extraordinarily secreting her?”
The next day the preliminary hearing in the larceny case against Hazzard began in district court. The all-white jury consisted of a farmer, a paper maker, a construction worker, and a leather cutter from Shirley, Massachusetts, and a car inspector, two store clerks, and a machinist from Ayer. Hazzard had pleaded not guilty to the charge of stealing a total of $6,000 in property, cash, and gifts from his fiancée, Puffer. The prosecution’s star witness was expected to be Puffer, newspapers announced. And that was an invitation for what, by most accounts, was the biggest crowd ever to gather in that courtroom, increasing on the first day every hour until the throng spilled out into the halls and adjacent rooms on the first floor of the county courthouse.
Lovers testifying in court: one a Negro, and the other a white heiress. What a sensation! And what they heard—at least the ones who could hear—was even more entertaining than any of them could have imagined. Mabel Puffer testified that the man whom she was going to marry and who had received the gifts from her was not Arthur Hazzard. The man who had received the money and gifts was a man whom Puffer called Charles McKee. She had had no plans to marry a black man because Charles McKee, whom she believed Hazzard to be, she said, was a white man.
“Is McKee white or colored?” asked the prosecutor.
“White,” said Puffer.
“Is Hazzard white or black?”
“Black.”
“And you are positive that you gave the money to McKee?”
“Yes, I gave the money to the white man, not the black man.”
Was her behavior that of a sane woman sharp enough to have spent the days and nights in her basement cell dreaming up a plan to outsmart her enemies and to release herself and Hazzard from the tightening legal noose? Did she only pretend to be crazy to conform to the plan of her foes, win their confidence, and then betray them in the end? Did she ignore and reject her lover, simply to end the nightmare for them both? Or had the stunning speed at which her life was changing pushed her into an unstoppable spin of insanity?
Puffer’s story about the mystery man McKee had a dozen twists and turns that for the most part brought in Christian Science and metaphysics. It was odd, extraordinary. But it was a story she would stick to, consistently, for her long hours on the witness stand testifying supposedly against her former fiancé. Over and over she told the court that she had not given Hazzard the money he was accused of having deceptively taken from her. The deceiver was McKee. Thus, she fulfilled her agreement to testify against her former fiancée and yet she never once agreed that a man by the name of Arthur Garfield Hazzard ever received anything from her.
Other witnesses were called, including a local shopkeeper, a nurse who worked at a home near Puffer’s, and Sandy Pond neighbors. All agreed that Puffer had begun to look sickly and wan in late winter when they also recalled seeing Hazzard enter the Sandy Pond cottage frequently. Their testimony was obviously meant to demonize Hazzard’s character and intent. But had they asked Puffer why she was losing weight, they would have heard the obvious explanation: she wanted to look slim and sleek for her upcoming June wedding. Reporters too were called, mostly ones who had interviewed the couple during their days in Concord. Paul Harris Drake, a Boston newspaperman, talked about his conversations with Puffer in which she declared her love for Hazzard, and that on the way to Concord she had taken Gar to Hollis, New Hampshire, to meet her half-nephew. Puffer and Hazzard were respectful and polite to each other, he said. When Drake had asked if he could take their picture, Puffer asked Hazzard if he was comfortable with that and he said he was, but was she? And she said, there seemed to be “no good reason to keep their love a secret.” When asked if she had ever mentioned the name McKee or had referred to Hazzard as McKee, Drake said no.
In his closing arguments, Hazzard’s attorney, Lewis, said:
These two people were acting within their rights before God and man. I characterize the action taken as an invasion of their personal liberties. I charge that the complaints against them were pure camouflage, brought for the sole purpose of breaking up and interrupting the marriage. And for what? The niece, who had not spoken to Miss Puffer for two years, not to be diverted from her right as a prospective heir-at-law was the cause, alerted after the introduction to the nephew. The ridiculous charge of enticing Miss Puffer away against Hazzard has been dismissed. The ridiculous charge, the slanderous charge, of cohabitation has been dismissed. These were purely fictitious charges, a malicious abuse of the process, a malicious interference with the contract entered into between Miss Puffer and Mr. Hazzard. If Miss Puffer gave her money to this man, she did it just as any woman gives to the man she loves. The harpies who never gave her the comfort of her society since April 1917 thought they would lose a little change so made these false, malicious and slanderous charges against this couple who openly and above board, honestly and decently went away to be married. They made these awful, scandalous, scurrilous charges to get her back and get their fingers on some filthy lucre.
The prosecutor countered simply: “It was the intention of Hazzard to milk her of all she had in the world. He realized that Miss Puffer was weak mentally and conceived the idea of getting her money, it being either his own idea or devised by other schemers.”
On July 14, the judge presiding over the larceny hearing in district court found “probable cause” and set a county court date of September 2 for the grand jury to convene. The next day the attorney for Puffer’s relatives sought an injunction to restrain Hazzard and any member of his family from disposing of the money, gifts, or property that he allegedly stole from Puffer. Under the injunction, Hazzard could not even pay his attorney. The judge approved the injunction. At the same time, the Puffer relatives prepared to file a civil suit against the entire Hazzard family for conspiring to commit the crimes of which they were confident Gar would be convicted. The Hazzard family was working with Lewis and another attorney on charges against the Puffer relatives and police officials on the grounds of malicious prosecution and interference with a contract of marriage, among other allegations. Hazzard alone was filing a countersuit for damages regarding the enticement and cohabitation charges. He would also claim that his constitutional rights had been abused. And when the case was heard by the grand jury—which convened in August, not September, and failed to indict, Hazzard and Lewis would intensify the allegations in their countersuit. At the same time, the half-nephew was filing papers to assume legal guardianship of Mabel Puffer and her estate.
It had been only a month since the engaged couple sat on a divan in the lobby of the Phenix Hotel talking in devoted whispers about how many flower arrangements would be necessary to add a festive aura to the main room of the lobby where both the wedding ceremony and the reception would take place. How was it possible that now all of that was gone and in its place was a legal tangle reaching Dickensian proportions? From the Phenix Hotel to Bleak House in only a month. Whatever would be the final cost of so much legal action to the state of Massachusetts, all in pursuit of justice and truth? And what of the truth? In the end, as in the beginning, there was really only one truth—and it didn’t require evidence or witnesses or trials to prove it. And that was that what Puffer and Hazzard wished to do with their lives had been no one’s business but their own.