IN EARLY APRIL 1897, passersby at Denver’s Union Station glimpsed a stylishly attired figure alight from an incoming train and hail a cab to one of the city’s premier addresses. The traveler’s destination was the Brown Palace Hotel, a soaring edifice of Colorado granite and Mexican onyx located in the heart of downtown. Even though he was a regular at the Brown Palace, the guest’s dramatic arrival—complete with multiple “boxes of cigars . . . and a large amount of luggage”—caused a minor sensation. Holding court in the hotel lobby before a large audience of curious spectators and reporters, he entertained various queries as to recent events in Latin America before retiring to one of the Brown Palace’s deluxe suites.
The newcomer was known throughout town as the enormously wealthy Mexican investor Guillermo Enrique Eliseo. According to rumors, he owned many mines, including several in Colorado, and was involved in a project with Armour and Company to export Midwestern corn overseas. His purpose in coming to Denver, however, was to advance a new project involving several financiers in New York and $10 million of capital. With progress on the massive, decades-long Panama Canal project stalled, Eliseo and his partners were planning an alternative: a high-speed railroad line across the isthmus, which would in turn connect to a fleet of steamships plying the Pacific Coast. “It is claimed,” enthused one commentator, “the scheme would be a great money-maker.”
SUCH SCENES, WITH minor variations, played themselves out in numerous locales at the turn of the century. Sometimes the mysterious new arrival would be Mexican, as during his visit to Denver. Other times he would be Cuban—or even Hawaiian. On occasion, he might blur the categories, as when he claimed to own “sugar estates in Hawaii, coffee plantations in Cuba, [and] copper mines in Old Mexico,” or to be “the son of a Cuban gentleman and of a Mexican mother.” His name, too, might blend together Anglo- and Latin America, ranging as it did from William Ellis to Guillermo Enrique Eliseo to Guillermo Ellis. The character’s one constant remained his role as a facilitator of investment in the American tropics. By the early 1900s, from his office on Wall Street (cable address: “Eliseo, New York”) Ellis was listed as the president of a welter of such firms: the Mexico and Toluca Light and Power Company, La Compañia Mexicana Consolidada de Hule de Palo Amarillo, Eliseo Gold and Silver Mining Company, Mexican Securities and Construction Company, Cuban Central Unidad Sugar Company, Two Brothers Gold and Silver Mining Company, and the America, Mexico, West Indies, and Puerto Rican Company.
That it was on Wall Street, amid the new skyscrapers probing up into the skies above lower Manhattan, where Ellis resurfaced after his disappearance from San Antonio speaks volumes about the United States’ deepening involvement with Mexico. By the close of the nineteenth century, the frenzy of American investment south of the border had caused the United States’ Gilded Age and Mexico’s Porfiriato increasingly to become one and the same. “Mexico is, in short, the coming country,” enthused one American investor. “The resources of the country are almost illimitable.”
Mexican officials took pains to advance the idea of the two nations as “sister republics,” twin American democracies engaged in a mutual endeavor. But beneath this rhetoric, older divisions lingered, with the United States serving as the standard of development against which Mexico reluctantly, if inevitably, measured itself. Even Romero, the leading proponent of the “sister republics” concept, was not immune from presenting Mexico as the provider of raw materials to its more advanced northern neighbor. “Mexico has the shape of a cornucopia, with . . . its widest end towards the north, or the United States, and this has been considered allegorically as a sign that it will pour its wealth and products into this country. I look forward to the time, which I do not think far distant, when we shall be able to provide the United States with most of [its] tropical products.”
Among US entrepreneurs, the imagined divide between a temperate, developed United States and a tropical, backward Mexico played itself out even more starkly, with the growing economic penetration of their southern neighbor invoking images not of “sister republics” but rather of conquest and domination. The monthly magazine Modern Mexico, headquartered just down the street from Ellis’s Wall Street office, spoke for many in casting Latin America as the newest arena for the United States’ fabled frontier:
So far the triumphs of modern civilization the world over have been chiefly in the temperate zone. . . . The scene is changing, however. . . . The amount of money, for example, that is being put into plantations and ranches, not to mention mines, in Mexico and Central America runs into hundreds of millions. All through those wonderfully fertile lands are plantations owned and operated by Americans with American agricultural machinery, fast displacing the antiquated methods of the natives. . . . The same pioneer blood that developed the great farms of the West and Northwest is to-day helping to clear and plant the tropical fields of the extreme South.
Nearly every facet of the United States’ booming consumer economy depended upon Mexico. The growing fleet of cars rolling along US roads did so on tires composed of Mexican rubber. The electricity and telephone calls flowing into US homes and businesses utilized wires of Mexican copper. Even the rising number of processed foods aimed at the American sweet tooth relied upon Mexican ingredients, from chocolate, vanilla, and sugar to the chicle used to make chewing gum. As the 1898 study The Control of the Tropics concluded: “If we turn at the present time to the import lists of the world and regard them carefully, it will soon become apparent to what a large extent our civilization . . . draws its supplies from the tropics.”
One result of this reliance on the tropics was a staggering growth in US-Mexico commerce. In 1880, annual trade between the United States and Mexico totaled $15 million; by 1910, it had multiplied more than ten times to $166 million. Not only did total cross-border exchange soar; each nation dedicated an increasing proportion of its trade to the other. Mexico persisted with its hopes of cultivating European partners as a counterweight to a potentially acquisitive United States. By 1900, however, the republic’s trade with the United States exceeded that with all of European countries combined; by 1912, the United States supplied 50 percent of Mexico’s imports and purchased more than 75 percent of its exports.
This commercial expansion triggered a geographic reorganization. No longer was it solely border cities like San Antonio that were deeply entangled with affairs in Mexico. Now, involvement stretched all the way to the very epicenter of North American capitalism, New York City. Turn-of-the-century trade directories listed 122 New York City–based companies—among them Ellis’s—dealing in exports to Mexico, far more than the next leading US cities: San Francisco with fifteen and New Orleans with ten. Direct investment in Mexico was harder to measure, but as the US State Department reported in 1895: “It is not extravagant to state that, in the last ten years, citizens of the United States have invested in Mexico, in mines, railroads, lands, and other undertakings, sums much larger in the aggregate than the whole amount of money in circulation in the [Mexican] Republic.” US consuls estimated that the amount of American capital invested in Mexico by the early 1900s ranged between $500 million and $1 billion. Among these investments was the Tlahualilo Corporation: in 1896, British and American creditors assumed control of the company, and James Brown Potter, a New York–based financier, replaced Llamedo as Tlahualilo’s director.
Given the vast sums and distances involved, some of this frenzy of US investment spilled over into fraud. The tendency toward questionable business practices emerged most dramatically in the era’s rubber bubble. As America’s mania for automobiles drove the price of a pound of rubber from fifty cents in the 1890s to over two dollars by 1910, US investors funneled millions of dollars into Mexican plantations, where the lowly rubber tree had long been used to shade coffee and cacao plantings. As promoters ripped out coffee and cacao bushes to increase their rubber plantings, overcapitalized new firms sprouted faster than new rubber seedlings, many promising staggering returns based on optimistic—or in some cases fabricated—yield assumptions. Even though few of these new companies met the accounting requirements necessary to list on the New York Stock Exchange, they could still market shares directly. Many firms targeted small-time investors who, lacking the means to inspect Mexico’s plantations in person, relied instead on the assurances of the US Interior Department and the Departamento de Fomento as to the surety of the rubber industry. Such buyers responded enthusiastically to prospectuses promising that “of all the countries of the world, Mexico offers the greatest advantages for profitable investment.” If the plantation did not yield as expected, however—or, as was sometimes the case, existed only on paper—the investors risked watching all their funds vanish like a shimmering tropical mirage.
With the relevant financial records having long since vanished, it is difficult to determine whether any of Ellis’s corporations participated in the less savory aspects of the era’s Mexican investment boom. The sheer quantity of firms in Ellis’s name, as well as their involvement in mining and rubber, two frequent areas of corruption, raises the possibility. So, too, does the fact that the capitalization of his companies exceeded most reasonable assessments (the America, Mexico, West Indies, and Puerto Rican Company alone carried a value of half a million dollars). Ellis did not appear averse to spreading distorted information about his other business dealings: none of the rumors about Colorado mines or a trans-Panama train and steamship company that shadowed his visit to Denver have any documented foundation in reality. R. G. Dun & Company’s credit report on Ellis from the turn of the century summed up the mysteries surrounding his new life on Wall Street: “He is either a Mexican or Cuban by nationality, and is otherwise known as Guillerine Enriques Elesio [sic]. . . . His operations in this city [New York] seem to be largely in the promoting line, principally in the organization of different Cuban and Porto Rican enterprises. . . . Authorities consulted apparently have no knowledge of his resources at this time and careful inquiry made could not indicate that he was a man of any definite standing and credit.”
At least some of Ellis’s misdirection, however, may not have been intentional. The line between deceiving others and deceiving oneself can be a blurry one—especially if a corporation’s director had long harbored images of Mexico as an unparalleled land of opportunity and shared in the runaway optimism of his outside investors. Ellis had already sunk years of his time and much of his money into colonization attempts in Mexico; there was no reason why he should not likewise possess an outsized enthusiasm for speculating in Mexican enterprises, particularly when so many other Americans did as well.
What we do know is that whatever income Ellis generated in Mexico during these years came from far more prosaic sources than long-lost gold mines, tropical plantations, or Pacific steamships. In 1896, Ellis purchased the mortgage on the Edward Butts Manufacturing Company, a factory located on Mexico City’s Avenida Balderas, only steps away from the capital’s alameda. Butt’s facility was the largest furniture factory in all Mexico, with a workforce of 120. Its chimney, reputed to be the tallest in the capital, served as a prominent Mexico City landmark. The firm specialized in making American-style beds, mattresses, desks, and other furniture for sale throughout the republic. Once more exhibiting his trickster-like tendency to hide in plain sight, the new owner boldly renamed the concern Ellis Manufacturing and promised to invest “a heavy amount of capital” in it over the next few years.
At much the same time as he purchased the factory, Ellis also became the Mexican representative for the Hotchkiss Arms Company, a French-based weapons manufacturer, apparently by charming the founder’s elderly, American-born widow. Hotchkiss had supplied arms to Mexico ever since the juaristas of the 1850s. By the early 1900s, the Mexican Army featured several units armed with Hotchkiss machine guns, presumably purchased with Ellis’s assistance. What Ellis was learning to cultivate in Mexico, it turned out, was not coffee or rubber plants but a different resource altogether: well-placed capitalists and politicians, a skill for which he had already shown great flair in his interactions with Mariscal, Pacheco, and Llamedo in the 1880s and 1890s.
ELLIS TOOK CARE to project a Hispanic persona from the moment he arrived in New York. In the Manhattan directory, he listed himself as “Ellis, Wm H broker” with offices at 29 Wall Street—conveniently next door to the era’s most powerful investment firm, J. P. Morgan & Company, based at 23 Wall Street—and, in a separate entry on another page, as “Eliseo, Guillermo E,” residing first at the Hotel Imperial on Broadway and then at 153 West Eightieth Street. These latter addresses placed him well outside the era’s African American neighborhoods: the community of “San Juan Hill” on the far west side of Manhattan and the newer cluster of black households taking root in Harlem. Although New York State had passed the Malby Law in 1895, prohibiting segregation in “places of public accommodation or amusement,” in Manhattan the law tended to be observed in the breach. It was the rare restaurant that denied African Americans entrance. But by offering desultory service, such establishments managed to communicate their hostility toward black customers all the same. By the early 1900s, W. E. B. Du Bois could only identify one place “where a colored man downtown can be decently accommodated”—revealingly, not Ellis’s haunt, the Hotel Imperial, but rather the Marshall Hotel, celebrated by James Weldon Johnson as “the headquarters of Negro talent.” Moreover, the Malby Law left untouched New York’s pernicious discrimination in employment and housing. Thousands of blacks squeezed into San Juan Hill’s few square blocks because of the limited number of rental properties available to them elsewhere. Outside such neighborhoods, African Americans often met hostile white mobs; in fact, it was to the frequent racial confrontations along its periphery that San Juan Hill allegedly owed its moniker.
In passing as Hispanic in New York, then, Ellis was once again eluding the racial barriers constraining African Americans. But unlike his earlier experience in Texas, in Manhattan Ellis was engaged in a process of reinventing not only himself but an entire ethnicity as well. San Antonio’s large Tejano population had given him a preexisting community to blend into. By contrast, according to the census, there were fewer than three hundred Mexicans living in New York City in 1900. The city’s Cuban population was slightly larger—just over two thousand—but it, too, remained a small shard in Manhattan’s sprawling ethnic mosaic. These modest numbers meant most Manhattanites possessed little if any direct experience of Mexicans or Cubans prior to their encounter with Guillermo Enrique Eliseo. It was therefore up to Ellis to embody Mexico and/or Cuba for his new acquaintances, a process that involved refashioning preexisting American stereotypes to fit the role he sought to play.
Foremost among these stereotypes was the perception of Latin America as a tropical wonderland of tremendous riches—an image that Ellis embraced almost to the level of parody through his carefully waxed mustache, impeccable tailoring, ostentatious jewelry, and lavish distributions of Cuban cigars and Mexican leatherwork. “With fingers bedecked with massive gold rings of odd design, set with apparently valuable jewels, a slight mustache and very good English,” noted the Washington Times, “Mr. Ellis . . . is a picturesque figure.” Ellis “wears rings on both hands with a heavy gold chain with an immense diamond pendant, makes a big splurge among white men, and retains their friendship by giving handsome presents to them and their wives of jewelry and valuable curio’s [sic],” added another observer. “In the mere matter of cigars he expends from $5 to $10 per diem.” As both Cuba and Mexico were lands of social extremes—in the US imagination and in reality—Ellis did not claim to be just any Cuban or Mexican but rather a member of Latin America’s upper class. Ellis modeled his exterior self on the elite Mexicans he had for years watched parade along the capital’s Paseo de la Reforma and alameda (figures who, for their part, were attempting to emulate the latest fashions from Europe). But his pose was also designed to appeal to the acquisitiveness of his American audience—especially those who hoped to discover in Guillermo Enrique Eliseo a well-connected entrepreneur who could facilitate their access to the hemisphere’s abundant natural resources.
The commercial undercurrent to Ellis’s persona explains why he flitted between Mexican, Cuban, and, briefly, Hawaiian identities. Together, these three composed what might be considered the United States’ late nineteenth-century imperial periphery: spaces on the country’s very borders that, ever since the era of the filibusters, had beckoned to expansionists as incipient new American territories, destined by the forces of history and progress alike to be incorporated into the United States. As such, they differed from more distant Latin American nations like Argentina or Brazil—a fact that may explain why Ellis never attempted to pass as being from either of these two countries, despite such convenient models of self-invention as the hit Broadway play of the 1890s Charley’s Aunt, which featured an American man masquerading as a Brazilian woman.
By the turn of the century, each member of this imperial periphery had assumed its own particular valence. Hawaii, dominated by American sugar planters from the mid-nineteenth century onward, would formally become part of the United States in 1898. Mexico limited US involvement to its economic sphere—although as late as 1903 Harper’s Weekly would advocate the purchase of “Chihuahua and two or three others of the northern and thinly-peopled Mexican States” as a destination into which the United States could deport its “negro problem.” The status of Cuba, however, remained an open question. One of the few remaining fragments of Spain’s once vast New World empire, Cuba had been racked by political turmoil for decades as the island’s population launched repeated campaigns for independence with the support of US-based clubs of Cuban émigrés. US audiences immersed themselves in events on the island, their motivations ranging from enthusiasm at the thought of displacing the final vestiges of European colonialism from the continent to a long-standing desire to annex Cuba to the United States.
These impulses came to a head in 1898, transforming what had been a localized rebellion in Cuba into a multifront war between Spain and the United States. American troops invaded not only Cuba but also the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. For the United States, the ten-week-long Spanish-American War—a “splendid little war” according to Ambassador John Hay—represented an overwhelming triumph for American arms, albeit one that raised unwelcome questions as to the United States’ status as an imperial power. For Ellis, however, the era’s sympathy toward all things Cuban provided an enticing new opening. Although neither Ellis’s name nor that of any of his alter egos appears on the membership rolls of the Cuban émigré clubs in New York City, he nonetheless adopted the mantle of the Cuban insurrecto. In 1897, he planted an article in the press that depicted him as the leader of an expedition of Mexicans that slipped out of the Mexican port of Tampico and “joined the insurgents,” bringing with them “a large quantity of arms and ammunition.” “Ellis has the rank of Captain in the insurgent army,” continued the account. “He will return to Mexico in a short time to plot another expedition to Cuba.” In interviews, Ellis expressed a deep engagement in Cuban affairs. “Cuba, ‘Cuba libre,’” he enthused, “is destined to be free. Her people are fighting with an idea that liberty is dawning on the horizon and we in Mexico extend our heartiest sympathy.” He placed a large portrait of the insurrecto leader Antonio Maceo in his office, and before long had the pleasure of seeing himself depicted in the New York press as “an enterprising Cuban, who has been successful as a banker and business man in Cuba and Mexico. He was a member of the Cuban volunteers under Maceo during the last revolution.”
Ellis’s dalliance with Cuba reflected more than the mere desire to harness himself to the United States’ most recent Latin American adventure. Racially, Cubans enjoyed a status as among the whitest of Latin Americans—a condition achieved by conveniently excluding peoples of African descent from the US definition of Cubanness. As the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization put it: “The term ‘Cuban’ refers to the Cuban people (not Negroes).” Echoing this erasure of Cuba’s African peoples—in reality, one-third of the island’s population—the US Immigration Commission’s Dictionary of Races or Peoples asserted that “in race . . . the population of Cuba is mainly composed of pure Spanish stock.”
By identifying himself as a Cuban or of partial Cuban ancestry (as when he insisted he was “the son of a Cuban gentleman and of a Mexican mother”), Ellis sought to affirm his whiteness in a way potentially even more secure than masquerading as a Mexican. After all, in recognition of Mexico’s mestizaje, the same US Immigration Commission’s Dictionary of Races or Peoples concluded that “the Mexican population, unlike that of Cuba, is mainly of Indian or mixed origin.” Further proof of the fragile racial status of Mexicans could be found in a controversial lawsuit that took place in Ellis’s onetime hometown at the very moment he was essaying his first efforts at Cubanness.
In 1896, Ricardo Rodríguez, a Mexican immigrant to San Antonio, made a routine application to become a naturalized citizen. The leaders of the local Republican and Populist Parties, however, opposed his bid on the grounds that Rodríguez—and by implication all Mexicans—did not meet the racial qualifications for US citizenship, which had been restricted to “free white persons” until 1870, when Congress broadened the law to include African Americans as well. Compelled to testify to his origins, Rodríguez parried all efforts to designate him a member of “the original Aztec race” by claiming he was a “pure-blooded Mexican.” Although the presiding judge, Thomas S. Maxey, ruled in Rodríguez’s favor, he did so using a logic that made manifest the tenuous place of Mexicans in the US racial order. Maxey concluded that since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 stipulated that Mexicans could become US citizens, Mexicans like Rodríguez were legally white, even though “if the strict scientific classification of the anthropologist should be adopted, he would probably not be classified as white.” Rodríguez’s victory was thus at best partial, for it slotted Mexicans into a new, nebulous category: people who did not meet a commonsense or scientific definition of whiteness but who nonetheless possessed its legal privileges.
Beyond his desire to craft the whitest persona possible in the shadow of the Rodríguez case, there was another, more subversive reason for Ellis to seek out a Cuban identity. Americans may have excluded Afro-Cubans from their definition of Cubanness, but many of the leaders of the Cuban independence movement, such as Antonio Maceo, were in fact of African descent (Maceo’s nickname was el Titan de Bronce, the “Bronze Titan”). Claiming to be an insurrecto gave Ellis license to celebrate an individual of African descent—indeed, put a large portrait of him on the wall of his Wall Street office, right beside a similarly impressive portrait of Porfirio Díaz—while simultaneously opening up the plausible deniability that since Maceo was Cuban rather than black, Ellis’s actions bore no connection to US race relations. Once again, Ellis had figured out how to exploit the ambiguities in the American racial order. Cuban or Mexican might be a nationality, and each country, like others in the Americas, might be composed of peoples of diverse backgrounds. But in claiming to be Cuban or Mexican, Ellis had discovered how to manipulate Americans’ limited knowledge of each country to make subtle assertions as to his racial status.
ELLIS’S LIFE OF reinvention in New York City was not an isolated case, as he learned in a jarring episode soon after his arrival. Among his earliest acquaintances in the city was an actress named Fayne Strahan. Like Ellis, Strahan was a newcomer to Manhattan, having grown up in Atlanta with her widowed mother. Ellis became enamored of the young white woman, whom contemporaries labeled “a ruinous beauty,” and wooed her with a sealskin coat and other expensive gifts. Little did he know, however, that all the time he was courting her, Strahan was sizing him up for the “badger game,” a grift designed for shallow men with deep pockets. After gaining the mark’s trust, the female member of the con team would lure her target into a compromising situation. At this point, a male accomplice would burst in and, claiming to be the woman’s husband (or in some variations, her brother or father), demand money to hush up the apparent outrage. In an age in which adultery carried considerable stigma, this “badgering” was often an effective ploy, securing money from the mark while discouraging him from going to the police, where he would have to confess to an awkward intimacy with the female member of the team.
After months of toying with Ellis, however, Strahan and her partner (and secret husband), William A. E. Moore, elected to spring their trap on Martin Mahon, the well-to-do proprietor of the New Amsterdam Hotel, instead. Apparently, Strahan and Moore had caught wind of Ellis’s masquerades long before he picked up on theirs. (Such skills of detection were important in their line of business: one of the other marks they cultivated and then abandoned, the supposed Hungarian count Aurel Batonyi, turned out to be nothing more than an impoverished riding instructor named Kohen.) Mahon, however, was that rare mark who pursued prosecution, perhaps because Moore gratuitously clubbed him on the head with a revolver upon surprising him with Strahan. The subsequent trial dragged a reluctant Ellis into the public spotlight, threatening to undo his Hispanic persona. Called into court as a witness, Ellis identified himself as “a Cuban and a broker in Wall street” and dazzled audiences with his refined appearance: a “long brown overcoat of costly texture, . . . [a] thick white silk handkerchief around his neck . . . fingers sparkl[ing] with many valuable diamonds.” Although trial testimony raised doubts as to Ellis’s background, it soon became clear that he was not the only figure in the courtroom with an interest in seeing his Hispanic identity maintained. Mahon recalled Moore declaring that at least it was the Irish-born hotelkeeper, rather than “that nigger,” Ellis, who had stolen his wife’s affections. But Strahan, no doubt anxious to preserve an image of herself as a proper white woman, remained adamant throughout the trial that Ellis was not her “negro friend” but in fact a “high toned Cuban gentleman.” So, too, did Strahan’s mother in her interviews with a New York press corps consumed with the scandal.
With Strahan and her mother serving as unexpected defenders of his Cubanness, Ellis managed to weather the trial. He returned to Wall Street, where he soon launched one of his greatest business successes—albeit one that, ironically, bore only the slenderest connection to either Mexico or Cuba. A few years previously, Ellis had crossed paths with a businessman named Moses R. Crow, most likely when the latter was in Mexico City to assist the Díaz administration with one of its signature programs, a massive public works project to drain the wetlands ringing the capital. Crow had previously dabbled in municipal water works in the United States. Upon his return from Mexico, however, he went on a spree, buying up a slew of water companies near Manhattan using funds advanced by the widow Hotchkiss—an arrangement set in motion by his new acquaintance, Ellis, who became the president of the resulting conglomeration, the New York and Westchester Water Company, in 1899. Crow and Ellis would fall out following Hotchkiss’s death as they struggled to unsnarl the convoluted stock deals behind their new enterprise. But in the meantime their actions created a corporation valued in the millions, complete with a sprawling network of reservoirs, pumping stations, and real estate holdings. Ellis was at last the wealthy, influential entrepreneur that he had long held himself up as being, rendering his stories of Latin American riches all the more believable to audiences in Manhattan and beyond.
FOR ANYONE INVOLVED in passing, one of the most fraught decisions involved marriage and children. Passing almost always involved distancing oneself from one’s birth family: those nearest and dearest were also a vulnerability, the people most likely to betray the origins that passers were attempting to keep secret. For this reason, many African Americans referred to passing as a death of sorts. “By inquiring . . . what become of the ‘Blank’ family or of Old Mr. X’s daughter,” noted Louis Baldwin, “information was obtained which when followed up, showed that the family or daughter . . . had ‘gone on the other side’ which did not mean that they had departed this life, but that they had ‘become white.’” Creating a new family, however, posed its own dilemmas. Should one tell a potential spouse about one’s hidden identity? Did one have children, knowing that offspring sometimes exhibited features phenotypically at odds from the race claimed by the passer?
After leaving Texas, Ellis, unlike most passers, maintained contact with his family, sending them money from time to time as well as requests to “place flowers on mother’s grave from her boy.” But he did so clandestinely: through the relative anonymity of the mail (as Langston Hughes once observed, “There’s nothing to stop letters from crossing the color-line”) and by meeting relatives in Mexico, far from his new acquaintances in Manhattan. From such ongoing family connections, Ellis learned of the controversy that had greeted his youngest sister, Isabella, when she attended Northwestern University in 1901. Perhaps because she was the darkest of her siblings, perhaps for other reasons, Isabella did not attempt to pass during her time in Evanston. She had initially been assigned a white roommate at Northwestern, but “when a shapely, handsome, and intelligent octoroon arrived and announced her identity,” all the other students refused to room with her. The following fall, “the faction in favor drawing the color line won by a decisive majority.” On the pretext that there was not enough space for her to stay by herself, as she was forced to do during her first year at Northwestern, Isabella was denied access to the university’s dormitories. Soon afterward, she withdrew and returned home to San Antonio.
Ellis doubtless compared Isabella’s humiliations with the contemporaneous experience of Anita Florence Hemmings at Vassar. A light-skinned African American, Hemmings, unlike Isabella, hid her black ancestry when she enrolled at the women’s college outside New York in 1893. Dubbed the “beautiful brunette” by her classmates, most of whom “supposed . . . that she was a Spaniard,” Hemmings flourished at the college, becoming a campus leader, prominent “at the Founders’ Day, Philalethian Day and commencement day exercises.” She was unmasked only days before graduation when the father of a jealous classmate dispatched a private detective to investigate her background. Seeking to avoid a scandal, Vassar awarded Hemmings her diploma, but news of her subterfuge still seeped out. “Society and educational circles in this city,” observed the New York World in the summer of 1897, “are profoundly shocked by the announcement in the local papers to-day that one of the graduating class of Vassar College this year was a Negro girl, who concealing her race, entered the college.” Despite all the unpleasantness Hemmings had to endure, however, Ellis would have noted that by passing, Hemmings, unlike Isabella, had managed to receive a college degree. And, as Ellis may have witnessed firsthand, Hemmings soon resumed her career as a passer. A few years after her graduation from Vassar, she married Andrew Jackson Love, a light-skinned African-American doctor. The two moved to New York City, where they lived out their days as upper-class whites, sending their children to the exclusive Horace Mann School and all-white summer camps.
It is tempting to picture Ellis and the Loves strolling past one another on Manhattan’s streets, a subtle flicker of recognition passing between them. But Ellis did not always exhibit the same caution as other turn-of-the-century passers, as his erratic route to matrimony underscores. In his thirties by the time of his move to Manhattan, Ellis appeared intent on selecting a fair-complexioned white woman for a marriage partner. Three years after his disastrous courtship of Fayne Moore, he made unwanted advances toward a young white stenographer with blue eyes and “light and wavy” hair named Frances Sauer. On the pretext of interviewing her for a job at his firm, Ellis invited her to his Wall Street address late one afternoon. After she joined him in his private office, however, he uttered a few “expressions of undying affection” and lunged for her. Sauer went to the police the following morning, accusing Ellis of attempting to assault her. In a stunning demonstration of both his financial resources and his ability to pass, Ellis hired one of Manhattan’s most prominent attorneys, George Gordon Battle, a white Southerner who had attended Columbia Law School, to represent him. Battle wasted little time in accusing Sauer of blackmail, while Ellis pled for “the newspapers . . . [to] treat me kindly.” “It is a shame,” he declared, “that a man’s reputation should be broken down in such a manner after he has struggled so hard to establish it.”
Although the police eventually dropped the charges against Ellis for lack of evidence, this disquieting episode casts in sharp relief the distortions passing imposed on the passer’s personal life. On his own in a new city, isolated from the family networks that under different circumstances would have facilitated introductions to young women, Ellis resorted to utilizing a routine job interview as a cover for his advances. Selecting a woman a decade younger than himself from a modest background, he no doubt hoped to overawe her with the trappings of his Wall Street milieu. If this attraction to the light-complexioned Sauer speaks to the erotics of the color line—especially the long-forbidden coupling of white women and black men—it fulfilled a practical purpose as well, ensuring that any possible children would be as light as possible.
As fortunate as Ellis may have been in avoiding attempted rape charges after his encounter with Sauer, his subsequent tactics seemed to have changed little, at least to judge by the woman he ended up marrying in May 1903: Maude Sherwood. In the press release that Ellis issued announcing the nuptials, he claimed that he and his bride had met in Great Britain on the estate of the Hotchkiss family and that Sherwood was descended from English nobility: “Bride—Only daughter of Thomas Clark Sherwood of Mayport, England . . . grandniece of Lord George Armstrong (deceased) . . . grandniece of Sir William Hy. Watson (deceased) at one time Baron of Exchequer. Related to Sherwoods of Nottingham, Clarks, Lightfoots and Watsons.” But the truth was considerably more prosaic. Census data reveal that Sherwood was not born across the ocean in Great Britain but across the Hudson River in the working-class seaport of Jersey City. It was true that her father was from England, having emigrated in 1870. But he was no aristocrat, working instead on the docks as a clerk and shipping agent for a steamship line. By 1900, around the time when Maude first met Ellis, she and her widowed father were living in a boardinghouse in lower Manhattan, and Maude’s profession was listed as “stenographer.” Given her profession, age (thirteen years younger than Ellis), and working-class, New York background, Sherwood and Ellis, rather than meeting at a soiree on the Hotchkiss estate, must have first encountered each other in his office or some other work setting.
New York did not have any laws barring marriage between blacks and whites in 1903, making it one of the few states not to draw the matrimonial color line. But intimate relations across the color line nonetheless remained fraught. As the North American Review explained, “Even in commonwealths where mixed marriages are lawful they are extremely rare, and are visited with the severest social reprobation.” Campaigns against Manhattan’s vice districts invariably focused their horror on the city’s “Black and Tan” clubs where black men and white women mingled with one another—a phenomenon, in the words of Police Commissioner William McAdoo, that ran “counter to violent racial prejudices and traditions . . . an unmitigated and disgusting evil.” In 1900, a ferocious race riot, sparked in part by questions of interracial intimacies, gripped Manhattan, with white vigilantes pursuing African Americans throughout the city. Ten years later, the New York State Legislature debated a measure that would have voided all marriages “contracted between a person of white or Caucasian race and person of the negro or black race.” Such incidents made Ellis’s Hispanic identity valuable for romance as well as business. On his and Sherwood’s marriage certificate, Ellis made sure to list the Spanish and English versions of his name and to give his parents’ names as Carlos Eliseo and Marguerita Nelsonia. During the ceremony, held at Grace Episcopal Church (even though, as a proper Mexican, Ellis publicly identified as Catholic), he insisted on being referred to as Guillermo Enrique Eliseo. Recalled the minister: “I had great trouble pronouncing Mr. Eliseo’s name, and we had a laugh over it.”
While Ellis managed to convince the minister of his Hispanic background, it is less certain whether Sherwood—whose pet name for Ellis was “Gerry,” an Anglicized diminutive of Guillermo—shared this belief. By most any measure, there was simply too much contact between Sherwood and the rest of Ellis’s relatives for her to remain unaware of his African American ancestry. Immediately after the wedding, Ellis’s sister Isabella made an extended visit to her brother and his new bride in New York City, and in later years, his niece Marguerite stayed with the couple for several summers while studying piano at Juilliard. Moreover, while it is not clear that Ellis and Sherwood ever visited San Antonio together, they nonetheless remained tethered to family affairs there. Shortly after his wedding, Ellis assumed the mortgage on his family’s home in the Alamo City. Then, using a Manhattan notary, he transferred the title to Sherwood (listed on the deed as “Maude Ellis [Eliseo]”). Why he did so is uncertain. Perhaps he thought that the house would be more secure in the hands of a person whose white status was less open to question than his own; perhaps he wanted to hide the asset from potential creditors. But the transfer does underscore that Ellis placed a great deal of trust in Sherwood—enough to put in her hands not just any piece of property but the one that linked him to his greatest secret: the African American family whose existence he had striven to keep carefully hidden ever since his move to San Antonio in the late 1880s.
And what about Sherwood? Ellis may have found her whiteness appealing for multiple reasons, but what did she hope for from the relationship? Much about matters of the heart, of course, resides beyond the reach of historians. Nonetheless, for a young woman with few resources, marrying an older, well-to-do businessman may have seemed like a step up in the world. Often the leading impediment to marrying across the color line—beyond state laws prohibiting such unions—was the resistance of family. But by 1903, Sherwood had few such ties: she was an only child; her mother had died years before, and her father of tuberculosis just three weeks before her nuptials with Ellis. (Ellis promptly interred his would-be father-in-law in style in Woodlawn Cemetery, the most elegant graveyard in New York City, where the onetime shipping clerk from Jersey City lay alongside assorted titans of the Gilded Age, including Ellis’s putative mentor and father, Collis P. Huntington.) One measure of Maude’s isolation can be found in the fact that her wedding ceremony included only two guests. The first was Ellis’s private secretary, the second—and Sherwood’s only possible invitee to the event—according to the minister, a “Miss Gilbert, from out of town somewhere.”
The story that arose around Sherwood as minor British nobility even raises the question of whether, as with Fayne Moore earlier, it was in fact Ellis the trickster who was tricked. If this appears unlikely, given their probable manner of meeting, it does suggest that Sherwood was far from passive in shaping how she and Ellis were perceived by the outside world. For most Gilded Age Americans, passing was limited solely to the move across the color line from black to white. Yet as Ellis discovered first with Strahan and now with Sherwood, New York bubbled with figures involved in various forms of self-shaping, all seeking to cross class or ethnic lines in pursuit of a more privileged position in Gilded Age society. “Because of America’s particularly fierce taboo on the Negro, we have come to think that ‘passing’ pertains only to him,” observed the Harlem Renaissance writer Heba Jannath. However, “it must be borne in mind that passing for something which one is not is a very common practice in America. Jews and Mexicans often pass for Spaniards (since to be Spanish is thought more desirable here). Jews, Russians, Germans, Italians, and Irish frequently change their names into ‘acceptable’ Anglo-Saxon.”
Making such forms of shapeshifting especially common in Gilded Age Manhattan was not only the city’s size—three and a half million souls, making it the largest city in North America and one of the largest in the world at the time—but also the fact that New York was composed overwhelmingly of newcomers from elsewhere. Forty-two percent of Manhattanites in 1900 were foreign born, with Germany, Ireland, and Russia the primary sources. A significant portion of the remaining inhabitants were either the children of immigrants or transplants from other parts of the United States. Among New York’s African American community—only sixty thousand in 1900 (less than 2 percent of the city’s population)—many had relocated from Virginia, North Carolina, and other states in the Upper South. As these individuals left the closeness of rural communities in Europe, the United States, or elsewhere for the anonymity of urban life, they were presented with an opportunity to attempt new narratives about themselves—to perform daily life as someone else, in front of an audience that, more often than not, was involved in a parallel process of reinvention. “The task of passing, especially in our great cities,” concluded Jannath, “is not so difficult as is supposed.”
Manhattan’s polyglot population offered particularly rich opportunities for African Americans to recast themselves as members of another ethnicity. “There are so many swarthy races represented in New York’s population,” reported Walter White, “that even colored people who could easily be distinguished by their own race as Negroes, pass as French or Spanish or Cuban with ease.” Many blacks discovered that by speaking accented English, “jabbering off some French,” or even resorting to gibberish and outlandish outfits, they could convince whites that they were not African American and thus gain access to venues that were otherwise closed to them. The ensuing dilemmas that black-white passing raised as to racial solidarity and individual freedom, exterior appearance and inner reality, animated the “New Negro Movement” taking shape in Manhattan in the early 1900s. Indeed, for many leaders of the emerging Harlem Renaissance, the predicaments surrounding passing were far from distant abstractions. As the literary scholar Ann Douglas has noted, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer, and other prominent artists in the movement were all light-skinned and “able to pass as white whenever they chose.”
There could be deep pain in such passing, as individuals severed connections to family, culture, and community to further their masquerades. But passing also offered liberation from artificial constraints and even the chance to ridicule prevailing conventions, as an incident that occurred with Ellis and Sherwood shortly after their wedding reveals. A prominent merchant from Victoria, Texas, in Manhattan on business, found himself relaxing at a racetrack outside the city one summer weekend. Not long after he took his place in the stands, a waiter showed up with a bottle of wine, explaining that it was being offered to him “compliments of W.H. Ellis.” Not initially recognizing the name, the merchant asked for clarification. The waiter pointed out Ellis, who was sitting nearby with Sherwood; Ellis responded to the shocked stare of the visitor from Victoria with a nod and a wave. (Although the name of the visitor is not recorded, poetic justice would make him one of the Weisigers who had wielded such vast power over Ellis and his family during slavery and Reconstruction—a not altogether impossible occurrence, given that many of the Weisigers dedicated themselves to raising racehorses after the war, entering their animals in events as far away as Saratoga Springs.) The distance Ellis had traveled from Victoria to Manhattan could be measured in many ways, but perhaps none more profound than this simple exchange: the ability of a onetime slave to sit next to his white wife and greet one of the leading figures from his birthplace as a social equal.
ONE MIGHT EXPECT relocation and marriage to transform Ellis. In the aftermath of his sudden disappearance from San Antonio, he had managed against great odds to fashion a viable new life for himself in New York—one that, with marriage, involved another individual in his deceptions more intimately than ever before. Yet rather than limiting himself to his new roles as a Wall Street entrepreneur and husband, Ellis once again dipped into African American politics. The first inkling in this direction came in the summer of 1902 when Ellis went to Great Britain during the coronation of Edward VII. While in London, Ellis crossed paths with Ras Makonnen, the Ethiopian general who was representing Emperor Menelik II at the British court. Menelik’s realm—also known at the time as Abyssinia—enjoyed great prestige in the African American community as the sole country in Africa to have defeated a European imperialist invasion (Italy in the 1896 Battle of Adwa) and retained its independence. Enthralled by his encounter with Makonnen, one of the heroes of Adwa, Ellis fastened on the idea of journeying to Ethiopia, at the time such a remote spot that reaching Menelik’s capital of Addis Ababa required a three-week camel caravan over hundreds miles of forbidding desert terrain. Nevertheless, Ellis remained undaunted. After reading every book he could find about the country and collecting what he deemed suitable presents for its emperor (an elaborately tooled bit, spurs, and saddle, all inlaid with silver, that he commissioned in Mexico City; a gold-plated, pearl-handled revolver; a pair of Hotchkiss rapid-fire cannons; and a picture of black US soldiers in Santiago, Cuba during the recent war with Spain), he departed for Abyssinia only a few months after his marriage—the first but not the last time he would leave his bride behind in New York while he ventured off to some distant locale.
If Ellis’s voyage reflected the same fascination with Africa that motivated his onetime mentor Bishop Turner, it was also shaped by his more recent experiences in Mexico. Like the Mexican republic, Ethiopia was in the midst of a conscious effort to modernize under a strong ruler so as to prevent possible dismemberment by outsiders—a process that in Abyssinia, as in Mexico, involved the construction of railroads, roads, and telegraph lines, the development of mines, and the export of such agricultural staples as cotton and coffee. Ethiopia’s isolation and the fact that Menelik came to power some fifteen years later than Díaz, however, meant these processes were not as far along in Abyssinia as in Mexico. For Ellis, such conditions offered the opportunity to become a key architect of Ethiopia’s economy in a way that he could only pretend to achieve in Latin America. He accordingly brought with him to Addis Ababa “specimen coins” for a new national currency and plans for a national bank—to be run, of course, by himself. He also sought to expand trade between the United States and Ethiopia, which at the time had no diplomatic relations with one another. Invoking the era’s familiar tropes of tropical abundance, Ellis portrayed Abyssinia as a storehouse of natural resources awaiting American capital and technology: “The soil is the richest on earth. It has been found by experiments that American cotton grows as well there as it does in the delta of the Mississippi, and the climate is adapted to the raising of everything that grows in the torrid zone. I also consider it the richest mineral country in the world. There are gold and silver, rubies and some diamonds, as well as graphite and hard coal in large quantities.”
Preoccupied with imperialist threats to his kingdom, Menelik ordered that the official chronicle of his rule include no records about foreign relations. We thus have scant documentation on how the Ethiopians viewed Ellis, the first African American to reach their homeland. But Ellis’s sense of Ethiopia as a land of new possibilities was such that while in Addis Ababa he evinced no need to pass. His African ancestry, so often a liability in the United States or Mexico, represented, in Ellis’s eyes, an asset in Abyssinia—proof of a common bond between himself and the Ethiopians that differentiated him from the other Europeans and Americans trickling into the region. Ellis enthused that “the Emperor and all the Rases received me like a brother” and that Menelik “was especially interested in the negro race.” But whether the emperor and his subjects believed they shared an ethnic tie with the light-skinned American black who had suddenly appeared in their midst is less certain. Menelik, who regularly had foreign news releases translated into Amharic so that he could stay abreast of world events, was too savvy a leader not to grasp the role white supremacy played in justifying the colonial projects ringing his kingdom. Yet he was also acutely aware of the divisions that could exist between peoples sharing the same dark skin. When not fending off European intrusions, Menelik had expanded his realm by conquering several neighboring peoples. This fact explained in turn one of the less appealing features of his realm: slavery, which was sustained through raids on communities along Abyssinia’s borders perceived as ethnically distinct.
Ellis was far from unique in casting Ethiopia as possessing a special tie to the African diaspora. Accompanying Ellis on his trip was the Haitian-born intellectual Bénito Sylvain. Sylvain had first ventured to Addis Ababa in 1897, envisioning Menelik as the potential leader not only of Ethiopia but also of a global movement to advance the rights of peoples of African descent. Menelik, accustomed to including educated outsiders in his court, soon found a place for Sylvain in his circle as an aide de camp. Sylvain’s new duties included representing Menelik at the first Pan-African Conference. In July 1900, thirty-three delegates of African descent from the United States, Canada, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and the British West Indies gathered at Westminster Town Hall in London “to deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and outlook of the darker races of mankind.”
The movement marked a new stage in the diaspora’s relation to Africa. The term “pan-African” was itself novel, having been coined just a few months prior by Henry Sylvester Williams of Trinidad, one of the conference organizers. Behind this neologism stood the realization that Bishop Turner’s dream of an independent nation for New World blacks in Africa had ceased to be feasible, for the recent frenzy of European imperialism had subjected almost the entire continent to white control. It was therefore necessary to shift tactics from colonization to ensuring civil rights for African and African-descended peoples wherever they might be found. The conference’s centerpiece was an “Address to the Nations of the World.” Authored by W. E. B. Du Bois, the address opened with the phrase “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line”—the first appearance of the concept that Du Bois would elaborate in greater depth in his 1903 opus, The Souls of Black Folk.
In Sylvain, Ellis found a figure that connected him to an emerging global movement—intellectuals of African descent grappling with the rise of a worldwide color line. But Ellis was also joined by an individual who linked him back to his roots in Victoria. His caravan to Addis Ababa, Ellis explained to curious reporters, included not only bodyguards, servants, and Sylvain (whom Ellis depicted as his secretary) but also “Carlos Eliseo Starns.” This was none other than Ellis’s nephew Charles Starnes, the son of his older sister, Elizabeth, and the physician Greene Starnes. Until recently, Charles had resided in San Antonio with the rest of his family. He shows up in the 1900 census as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. Census takers denoted his race—like that of the rest of his family and that of almost everyone else in his neighborhood—as black. Charles’s mother, however, died in 1898. Not long afterward, Charles fell under the influence of his entrepreneurial uncle, moving up to New York to work in Ellis’s Wall Street office. After traveling to Mexico with his uncle, he, too, set about crafting a Mexican persona, calling himself Carlos Eliséo Estarñez and claiming that he had been born in Monterrey, Mexico.
Ethiopia received Ellis and his nephew as honored visitors. Officials made a large, thatched-roof guesthouse available to them. Their quarters were connected via the emperor’s favorite new innovation—the telephone—to Menelik’s palace, a multibuilding complex surrounded by sycamore trees that crowned one of Addis Ababa’s most prominent hills. Although Menelik only spoke Amharic, Ellis, in a demonstration of his linguistic dexterity, seems to have picked up a working knowledge of the tongue by studying what he could find in English or Spanish about the language. But much of the communication between the two took place through one of the multilingual Greeks who served as translators for the Ethiopian royal family. Ellis found the emperor, who favored the loose-fitting white cotton garments of his countrymen (although in his case topped with a red velvet mantle and an imported felt hat), fascinated with the world beyond Ethiopia. He quizzed his visitor about Teddy Roosevelt’s life and career, and listened with apparent interest as Ellis told him how Lincoln “set the black man free and united the country.”
Ellis reached Addis Ababa only weeks before the first American diplomatic party, led by Robert P. Skinner of the US State Department. The proximity of these two expeditions was far from coincidental. Ellis had spent much of the prior year cultivating Francis Loomis, the assistant secretary of state and Teddy Roosevelt’s confidant, with an eye toward acquiring some sort of diplomatic imprimatur for his trip to Addis Ababa. Yet even though Ellis introduced Loomis to Professor Enno Littmann of Princeton, the sole American at the time able to translate documents into the Amharic language of Ethiopia, the only tangible reward he received from Loomis was a letter of introduction to US consular and diplomatic officers abroad. During their interactions, however, Loomis also let slip the schedule for Skinner’s trip. Ellis used this information to ensure that he preceded the American diplomat to Menelik’s court, thereby giving him some exclusive time with the emperor while also creating the perception that he was laying the groundwork for the diplomatic encounter to come.
Ellis’s efforts to blur the boundary between his undertaking and Skinner’s official mission does not appear to have deceived the emperor. Many Americans, however, came to link the two visits. Skinner, who believed that “the true Abyssinian type contains no negro blood whatever, and none of the negro qualities, either physical or mental,” took pains to excise Ellis completely from all accounts of the United States’ diplomatic mission to Addis Ababa. Contemporary press reports, however, regularly spoke of “Ellis . . . [, who] has played an important role in all American relations with Abyssinia” and of “William H. Ellis, who paved the way for the commercial treaty recently executed between this country and King Menelik.” Ellis had pulled off yet another masquerade, managing to pass this time as a diplomat on official US business.
The ensuing confusion as to private and public endeavors brings to the surface the central tension running through Ellis’s mission to Ethiopia and, indeed, his entire career: his ambivalent relationship to American empire. Ironically, even though it was the injustices of the United States that propelled Ellis beyond its borders in search of an escape from the color line, it was along the frontiers of American commerce where he found his greatest opportunities. The title that he claimed for himself on Wall Street—broker—could not have been more accurate: in the final analysis, he functioned as a middle man, one who translated between the fears, hopes, and desires of Americans and foreign populations. Because of Ellis’s background, the results of his efforts could be unique and unexpected, as in his attempt in 1895 to colonize African American sharecroppers in northern Mexico. But the contours of possibility within which Ellis operated were not of his own making. His gift lay instead in finding the unanticipated openings that the expanding American sphere of influence around the globe presented.
The opportunistic nature of Ellis’s endeavors could make for unlikely pairings. Several of his Mexican schemes had involved an uneasy combination of the most impoverished and alienated of the South’s African Americans and the most elite of Mexico’s entrepreneurs and politicians. In Ethiopia, Ellis managed to forge a productive relationship with Sylvain, one of the leaders of the Pan-African Conference, even though Sylvain was preoccupied with diminishing white dominance over Africa and Ellis was endeavoring to open up Ethiopia to American investment. To be sure, there existed potential points of agreement between the two: one could argue that Ethiopia, by expanding its trade with the United States, increased its ability to resist the more proximate threat of European imperialism. Moreover, Ellis took pains to portray Menelik in a manner that upended white stereotypes about the dark continent, insisting that the emperor was “an extremely intelligent man” and “there is nothing suggesting barbarism in Menelik’s court. The emperor wears European clothes and a felt hat of American shape. The empress and court ladies were dressed in Paris modes.” Even so, there remained deep schisms between Sylvain’s position as an anticolonialist and Ellis’s efforts to further the reach of a United States that, at the turn of the century, was one of the globe’s leading proponents of white supremacy. “King Menelik has got the impression that Ellis represents the intelligent Negroes of this country and that he is loyal to his race,” grumbled the African American journalist John Edward Bruce privately to a friend. “The fact is he represents the white capitalists and they are using him to work King Menelik.”
Thanks to his charm and charisma, Ellis managed to bridge the fissures between Sylvain and himself on an individual level. But he was unable to address such contradictions in a more systematic way. He never took the step, for example, of participating in the Pan-African Conference, of which Sylvain was such a prominent member and Menelik an honorary leader. Doing so would have not only removed the questions surrounding his racial background (all but one of the participants in the first meeting of the Pan-African Conference were of African descent); it would have also required him to clarify, for outsiders—and, potentially, for himself—the ambiguities surrounding his place in the United States’ emerging global presence. In the final analysis, Ellis’s business empire was too intertwined with American empire for the two to be completely disentangled.
HAVING BEEN APART from Maude for almost four months, Ellis returned to Manhattan in early 1904. Upon landing, he displayed to the reporters waiting at the dock several brightly colored flags from Menelik—said to be the first Ethiopian flags ever allowed to leave the kingdom—and a collection of agreements that paralleled the sorts of deals that he had been negotiating in Mexico for the past decade and a half. Ellis boasted that “I have obtained full concessions from the King for all the diamond mines in the country and 200,000 acres of land on the Nile to experiment in cotton growing. . . . I shall establish the Royal Bank of Abyssinia and control the financial affairs of the country.” He claimed to have also secured an agreement to construct a series of trading posts across Ethiopia and, in an echo of his earlier efforts in Mexico, to colonize thousands of African Americans in the empire.
Skinner followed not far behind Ellis, bearing the treaty of commerce that he had negotiated with Menelik. Seizing upon this new opening, Ellis lobbied Loomis to be allowed to carry the treaty back to Ethiopia once it was ratified by the US Senate, even offering to undertake the journey at his own expense. Loomis again demurred, awarding the mission instead to his younger brother. Kent Loomis was neither a professional diplomat nor the possessor of any particular expertise on Africa. But he had been complaining of the strain of his job as a newspaper editor in West Virginia, and so the Loomis brothers concluded that “he might be benefited by a change of scenery, diet and rest”—even though the rugged trip to Menelik’s capital would seem anything but relaxing.
Discerning yet another way to attach himself to the treaty, Ellis ingratiated himself with the younger Loomis, inviting him to combine his diplomatic mission with a “prospecting and hunting tour” in East Africa that Ellis proposed to organize. Soon, the two were constant companions, staying together at a whites-only hotel in Washington, DC, to which Ellis gained entrance by claiming to be a rich Hawaiian. In June 1904, the two shipped out on the first leg of what had become a joint journey to Ethiopia by boarding the Kaiser Wilhelm II, bound for France. On the steamer, the two roomed together, dined together, and by all outside appearances got along swimmingly. On the last night of their voyage, they shared a late supper, after which Ellis returned to his berth to pack for their upcoming landing and Kent retired to read in a favorite chair on one of the upper decks.
The next morning, as the Kaiser Wilhelm II steamed into port, Loomis was nowhere to be found. Despite a frantic search of the ship, he would not reappear until four weeks later, when his decomposing body washed up along the English coast. Upon examination, the corpse was found to possess a circular wound the size of a half dollar behind the right ear, likely produced before death.
To more than a few, these findings constituted proof of foul play; Loomis, so the argument went, must have been hit over the head and then thrown over the ship’s railing. Others, however, noted that the would-be diplomat could have struck his head on the boat’s fittings upon slipping or jumping overboard. Francis Loomis repeatedly dismissed any suggestion of suicide or murder in his younger brother’s disappearance, claiming instead that Kent must have climbed onto the hurricane deck of the Kaiser Wilhelm II to catch a glimpse of the English coast and lost his footing. But for those who sought a conspiracy, the culprit could only be Ellis. He was the one who had spent the most time with Loomis right before his death; he also possessed the most obvious motive. Hadn’t Ellis wanted to carry the ratified treaty himself back to Menelik? And hadn’t Loomis’s disappearance cleared the way for his doing precisely that? Indeed, following Loomis’s mysterious disappearance, Francis Loomis instructed authorities in Great Britain to open the safe on the Kaiser Wilhelm II, extract the special tin box containing the treaty, and pass it along to Ellis to bring to Addis Ababa.
Suspicion of Ellis only heightened as Loomis’s disappearance brought in its wake hints that Ellis was not what he seemed to be. “What greatly increases the mystery of the affair,” opined the Pacific Monthly, “was the presence on the vessel of one W.H. Ellis, a Hawaiian or negro, of fabulous fortune.” Added another commentator: “The whole affair is strange in the extreme. . . . Why should a messenger bearing a treaty paper from this Government to another choose for his companion and assistant a man of queer antecedents and ‘off color’ as to his skin?” Given the centrality of the color line in American life, many observers found it peculiar that Loomis, a white man, and Ellis, an individual with “a complexion so dark to make plausible the statement that he has been mistaken for a negro,” not only “were constantly together, and were known as intimate friends” but had shared a confined stateroom during their trans-Atlantic voyage.
Yet, as had happened so often before, there was a resistance on the part of those with whom Ellis had managed to pass to admit that he had deceived them. Seeking to defend his brother’s judgment, Francis Loomis found himself forced to defend Ellis, too. In public, Loomis insisted that “Ellis was Kent’s friend. Their relationship was sincere,” and dismissed all speculation that Ellis had killed Kent. In private, though, he admitted that not until Kent’s death did he have “occasion to go very thoroughly into his [Ellis’s] antecedents and to receive a very large amount of information about him.”
Ellis is a broker and promoter on Wall Street, and has been charged unofficially with some sharp practices in business matters, and I suppose he has the average morality or lack of morality in financial transactions on the street. He is said to be a man of considerable means and appears to have the confidence of some very well known businessmen in New York. It has been developed since this tragedy that he was implicated in certain woman scrapes prior to his marriage, and people who knew him in Mexico and Texas years ago speak of him as an adventurer, but how valuable their testimony is I have no means of knowing. I cannot see at this time, although I am searching for information on this point, that Ellis would have anything to gain by the death of his associate.
Those with a deeper knowledge of Ellis’s career found themselves amused at the consternation sweeping the halls of American power. “It seems that Loomis’ companion, W.H. Ellis, was formerly a negro politician and promoter in this section of Texas and was born and reared in Victoria,” noted the Fort Worth Telegram. “In these write-ups he is generally credited with being a Cuban, as in the reports of the past few days, but here he is known as a negro. . . . He is, in fact, quite dark, and it is a puzzle to Victorians why there should be any doubt as to his race.”
The black press’s coverage of the case likewise revealed that for many African Americans, Ellis’s race remained an open secret. The community had for years guarded the truth, in keeping with the observation in Nella Larsen’s novel Passing: “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ . . . We shy away from it with an odd kind of repulsion, but we protect it.” “Mr. Ellis resided with his parents, sisters and brothers at San Antonio, Tex. and for many years was known as a colored man,” noted Indianapolis’s Freeman. “Having learned the Spanish language, he went to New York, where he became known as a Cuban ‘gentleman of leisure.’” “The case of William H. Ellis has created consternation and chagrin in the nation’s capital, because of the discovery that he is an Afro-American instead of a Cuban, Spaniard or Hawaiian,” commented the Appeal, a “national Afro-American newspaper.” “Mr. Ellis is a man with energy and a peculiar ambition, who found his interests best subserved by an intimate association with Caucasian men of affairs. His wealth, his general appearance and business sagacity brought him within the ‘Enchanted circle,’ and he used his opportunities well, and, in the language of the street, ‘he got his.’”
For such observers, Ellis’s ability to pass in such rarefied company demonstrated that white society, despite its commitment to the color line, was in fact riddled with peoples of African-American descent. “Although not generally known,” continued the Appeal, “it is an interesting fact, highly incredible though it may seem to those whose intense race hatred precludes such possibilities, that there are men and women high up in the financial, social, political and education circles of this country, through whose veins course the blood of the despised race—not enough, perhaps, to show, but enough, if known, to cast a shadow of gloom over many a proud soul that believes itself ‘untainted’ or who has never included among their intimate friends or acquaintances a person of ‘Negro’ descent.” Not only did the achievements of passers such as Ellis or Anita Hemmings and her husband give lie to the myth of black inferiority; the inability of whites to discern these peoples’ racial background demonstrated how subjective and unstable the entire category of race truly was. For proof, one needed only ponder the absurdities that Ellis’s story had brought to the surface: race was of vital importance to whites, yet these same people could not differentiate blacks from whites—and, because of passing’s ubiquitous yet covert character, might even be of partial African descent themselves. As Du Bois put it: “The reason of all of this [white anxiety about passing] is of course that so many white people in America either know or fear that they have Negro blood.”
FOLLOWING LOOMIS’S DEATH, Ellis continued on to Addis Ababa, delivering the ratified treaty to Menelik “carefully rol[l]ed in an American flag.” In exchange, he assumed responsibility for a menagerie of animals—“the finest zebra in captivity, baboons, ostriches, [and] a Nubian lioness”—that the Ethiopian emperor sought to bestow upon President Roosevelt. Ellis returned to the United States in late October 1904. While the animals settled into their new home at the National Zoo in DC, Ellis engaged in lengthy debriefings at the State Department and at the White House with President Roosevelt himself. Hoping to avoid further scandal, all involved proclaimed afterward that Ellis had rendered exemplary service in the face of an inexplicable accident. “Mr. Ellis’s explanations were of a satisfactory nature,” proclaimed the State Department in its statement to the press. “No blame is attached to him in connection with the tragic episode which occurred on his trip from New York to France in June last.” Yet a cloud of suspicion continued to hover over Ellis, and he wondered whether the same US officials that had undone his colony in Tlahualilo were seeking to thwart his efforts in Ethiopia. “I have a great fight on hand, some of the Governments are doing what they can to block me,” he complained in a letter to his younger sister Fannie, who had gone on to marry Greene Starnes after the death of her sister Elizabeth. But, he added, “I am determined to finish my work and succeed in everyway so it makes no difference how hard the fight is or how difficult my task I will and must succeed.”
The irony of the moment was not lost on Ellis. For a man who had devoted his career to cultivating powerful patrons, his return to the United States should have represented a moment of singular triumph. He had served in a highly visible diplomatic function, gained an audience with none other than the president of the United States, and even managed to parlay his connections with Menelik into introductions to such notables as Andrew Carnegie and Robert E. Peary. Instead, he faced not only the whispered rumors of his involvement with Loomis’s death but also questions once again about his racial status. It was a situation that encapsulated one of the paradoxes at the heart of passing: only by obscuring his African American ancestry could Ellis realize his ambitions in a segregated society. Yet this same achievement brought increased scrutiny and a heightened possibility of being unmasked.
Even the African American community, the longtime guardian of Ellis’s secret, could not restrain itself from commenting on his predicament, albeit in an indirect way. Gilded Age New York possessed a vibrant black theater, and shortly after Ellis’s return from Ethiopia, black playwrights incorporated elements of Ellis’s recent history into two musicals. One, The Oyster Man, was the first Broadway show to star and be produced by an African American. The plot followed Rufus Rastus—an oyster vender in Baltimore, played by the African American comedian and musician Ernest Hogan—who became enmeshed in a colonization scam. (Rastus was a stock name in the era’s minstrel shows, usually designating a foolish, simple-minded character, although some representations hinted at the complexities beneath the stereotype.) Rastus sets sail for Africa at the invitation of a swindler who, it turns out, has sold him worthless shares in a colonization project. Once Rastus realizes he has been tricked, he throws the con man overboard and makes his way to the idyllic island of Blazasus, where after several misadventures he discovers gold and becomes the island’s ruler.
If Rastus, like Ellis, found wealth and a new life beyond the bounds of the United States, The Oyster Man also hinted that Ellis might have a less savory side. Colonization swindles, in which organizers collected funds from would-be colonists yet never delivered the promised transportation or supplies, were an unfortunate fact of life in the African American community at the turn of the century. Ellis had not stooped to this sort of behavior in his Tlahualilo venture, but the colony’s spectacular collapse had nevertheless fused itself in African American popular memory with other colonization scandals. Rastus’s tossing of the con man overboard served as a form of symbolic revenge on these false colonizationists while simultaneously summoning up images of the Loomis disappearance—thereby hinting that Ellis might not have been as innocent as he professed to be. After all, if he could mislead others by passing, what else might he be capable of?
Ellis’s experiences were satirized in a slightly different vein in the musical comedy In Abyssinia, staged by the black theater’s first superstars, George Walker and Bert Williams. This play featured another Rastus character—Rastus Johnson—who wins the lottery. To celebrate, he takes his family and friends to Ethiopia, where Emperor Menelik mistakes him for an American prince. In contrast to many other contemporary presentations of Africa as a land of unredeemed primitivism, In Abyssinia portrayed Menelik as a dignified and powerful ruler and posited that rather than the Ethiopians needing to be uplifted, it was in fact African Americans—especially the status-conscious members of the black bourgeoisie—who stood to learn from the inhabitants of the land, as one of the play’s songs put it, “Where My Forefathers Died.” To make sure no one missed the point, the actor playing Menelik delivered his lines in perfect English, while the buffoonish Americans spoke in minstrel jive.
As much as the play’s depiction of the encounter between African Americans and Ethiopia took its inspiration from Ellis’s recent visits to Menelik’s empire, In Abyssinia, like The Oyster Man, also conveyed a subtle critique. Ellis’s efforts to profit from his connections with Menelik rather than foster a more equitable exchange between Africans and African Americans were, the play hinted, misguided if not counterproductive, cheapening what should have been a deeper connection between the two groups.
It was oddly appropriate that the most in-depth reckonings with Ellis’s activities at the turn of the century came via the world of the theater. Not only was the theater a prominent arena of day-to-day efforts at passing, as African American audiences tried to bypass the segregation that confined them to the worst seats (the second balcony, or “buzzards’ roost”), when it did not bar them from theatrical venues altogether; the central drama of Ellis’s life—passing—was profoundly theatrical, requiring the passer to become akin to an actor playing a role. The theatrical quality of the African American experience was reinforced by the frequent (although by no means universal) tradition of blackface. African American actors such as Bert Williams regularly “blacked up” with burnt cork in an effort to transcend the minstrel tradition and evoke the humanity beneath the mask—to display that even when playing a black character they were inhabiting an invented and stereotyped role.
Best of all, because theater was a simulacrum of real life, it allowed for a discussion of passing at a safe fictional remove. For all their apparent humor, comedies such as The Oyster Man and In Abyssinia cast a doleful gaze on the painful reality that surrounded a trickster like Ellis—yet without unmasking him and leaving him vulnerable to the wrath of an unfriendly white world. (In a similar vein, the popular musical Jes Lak White Fo’ks featured a song entitled “The Vassar Girl” that alluded to Hemmings’s recent experiences without naming her directly.) Theater functioned, in essence, as a veiled manner of discussing a veiled phenomenon. As such, it was perfectly suited to William Henry Ellis/Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, who every day performed his life not only along the border of the United States and Latin America but also along the border where fact and fiction formed a reality all their own.