Mixed Race Studies

Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism
Volume 5, Number 2, 2005
pages 1-29
E-ISSN: 1547-8424
Print ISSN: 1536-6936
DOI: 10.1353/mer.2005.0013

Miriam Thaggert, Associate Professor of English and African-American Studies
University of Iowa

In Passing Nella Larsen seems to suggest that identity is a hazy fiction one tells that outward appearances and surface events only partly confirm. Rather than directly stating their thoughts, characters communicate through an exchange of looks—particularly her two light-skinned female characters, Irene and Clare. These subtle forms of expression heighten the sense of uncertainty throughout the novel. The reader never learns explicitly the reason for Clare’s fall out of a window, the reality of a homosexual longing between Clare and Irene, or the true nature of the relationship between Clare and Irene’s husband. This indeterminacy extends to the racial identity of Larsen’s characters, an identity not always easily discernible because of the characters’ mixed racial background and their inclination to “pass.”  Without adequate markings or clues, any reading, whether of identities or situations, is flawed or incorrect.

A brief, almost offhand, remark Irene makes refers to a legal trial in which these issues of knowledge, passing, and the gaze combined in a process to interrogate the race and veracity of a woman. The Rhinelander case was an annulment proceeding in which wealthy, white Leonard Kip Rhinelander sued his wife, Alice Beatrice Jones, for fraud. Leonard claimed he did not know that his light-skinned wife was “colored,” the daughter of a white woman and a dark-skinned cab driver.  Larsen’s reference to the Rhinelanders occurs only once, near the end of the novel, after Irene suspects that her husband, Brian, is having an affair with Clare…

Read or purchase the article here.

Review of Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor’s Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

History News Network
December 2009

Renee Romano, Associate Professor of History
Oberlin College

“Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

On a fall evening in 1921, eighteen-year old Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, the son of one of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families, met Alice Jones, a 22-year old maid. After a complicated romance, the two married in 1924. But only one month after their wedding, news reports began to circulate that Rhinelander’s new bride was “colored,” the daughter of a white British mother and a father of “colored” West Indian origins. Under intense pressure from his family, Leonard deserted his new wife and appealed to the New York courts to annul his marriage on the grounds that Alice had deceived him about her race. The 1925 Rhinelander annulment trial became a media spectacle, and as historian Elizabeth Smith-Pryor asserts in her fine new book, a “social drama” that revealed the anxieties of white northerners about racial instability in response to sweeping cultural and demographic changes during the Jazz Age.

Closely analyzing the Rhinelander trial in the historical context of the 1920s, Smith-Pryor explores why the public became obsessed with the tale of Kip Rhinelander and Alice Jones and what that obsession reveals about the expansion and strengthening of racial hierarchies in the North in the period after the Great Migration. Two migrations—that of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe to the United States, and that of southern blacks to northern cities—intensified anxieties in the North about how to determine race and how to uphold and maintain racial boundaries in the 1920s. Whites sought to find new ways to shore up the boundaries of race, and as Smith-Pryor ably demonstrates, although Alice ultimately won the case, the Rhinelander trial became an important site for reasserting notions of race that served to uphold and maintain privilege…

Read the entire book review here.

…This depiction of Alice [Jones Rhinelander] fell squarely into a white tradition of depicting mulatto women as sexually available, sexually victimized, and/or sexually predatory.  By the 1920s many white Americans, particularly northern whites, joined African Americans in blaming southern white men for the existence of the substantial mulatto population that now (supposedly) threatened the racial purity of white America both by its very presence and by the behaviour—particularly the sexual behavior—of its members.  Indeed, northern white writers continued to be fascinated with the supposed rituals of white-male-controlled interracial sex in the South, particularly exclusive “octoroon balls” at which light-skinned African American women competed to be the mistress of socially elite white men who would support them financially in return for sex and companionship, all in the name of romance.  Such depictions, however, painted the women as desperately competing for their shared goal: a rich white lover.  By the 1920 images of mulatto women focused even more directly on their supposed obsession with “landing,” either as a wife or a mistress, a rich white benefactor—and on using that liaison to appropriate white money, property, and even power…

Lewis, Earl and Heidi Adrizzone. Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White.  New York: W. W. Norton. 2002. Pages 166-167.

…Like many families of mixed ancestry and interracial families in the Northeast, the Joneses seemed to live in an ambiguous space in the American system of racial classification.  They seemed to be neither denying nor actively claiming a black racial identity.  Sociologists of the time and current historians have documented a number of cases—indeed a pattern—of mixed-race or mixed-marriage families living quietly in small “white” towns.  Unlike the model of “passing,” in with formerly black-identified individuals or families would become white-identified, many of these individuals and families simply lived in the spaces between absolutes.  Less consciously a political act of affirmation or denial of self, racial ambiguity enabled such individuals and families to embrace the multiple histories that constituted them.  They were black and white and other.  They understood that American society lacked a suitably dexterous category for those who defied the conventions of perception and boundary.  Former Kentucky politician Mae Street Kidd, born to a black mother and white father in 1904, summarized the sentiment of many when she wrote, “I never made an issue of my race.  I let people think or believe what they wanted to.  If it was ever a problem, then it was their problem, not mine.”…

Lewis, Earl and Heidi Adrizzone. Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White.  New York: W. W. Norton. 2002. Pages 36-37.

…Finally, Rhinelander teaches us about the limited spaces that are available in society for recognizing families that are multiracial. Like many multiracial families, Alice’s family, the Joneses, existed within an American landscape that had no recognized place for them and their lives. Just like the one-drop rule was applied to individuals, it was applied to the Jones family during and after the Rhinelander saga. In other words, Elizabeth Jones’s legal and social classification as a white individual became “implicated by [the] brownness” of her family members, and the reality of her family’s existence as one that lived between two worlds, one white and one black, was erased. It had no place in 1920s New York society, and it placed them nowhere within the spectrum of American families. Today, this sense of family as defined by race persists. The lesson is so clear that even young children understand it. Just ask my husband, who is white and who is often asked as he drops off or picks up our children, who are racially mixed, black and white children, “why he does not match.” Or ask my daughter, who even at the age four, understood that there was no place for her family, often declaring that she wanted to paint her daddy “brown like Davey’s dad.” As Heidi Durrow has explained about the continuing “spaceless-ness” of interracial families in our society, “[w]hen race acts as the primary kinship identifier, the reality of [the multiracial] family dissolves.” It is important that we continue to explore and study cases like Rhinelander case, which serve as stark reminder of this dissolving multiracial family, and our need to create spaces for it…

Angela Onwuachi-Willig,  “A Beautiful Lie: Exploring Rhinelander v. Rhinelander as a Formative Lesson on Race, Identity, Marriage, and Family,” California Law Review, Volume 95, 2007, University of Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper No. 07-27.

Kip And Alice Rhinelander Social Error

New York Daily News
1999-05-02 07:10Z

Jay Maeder, Daily News Staff Writer

From Germany to the New World came the Rhinelanders in the year 1696, and here they settled New Rochelle and begat. They were quite meticulous about it. For 200 years, naught but the proudest blood streamed through the veins of old Philip Jacob Rhinelander’s descendants as they amassed a real estate fortune second only to that of the Astors and assumed positions of importance at the most rarefied levels of New York and Newport society.

There was a bit of clucking late in the 19th century when young Philip R. Rhinelander married a Kip. Still, the Kips were only slightly less distinguished. It was not as if young Rhinelander had married, for example, a Vanderbilt. The Vanderbilts were nothing but Staten Island farmers.

In the year 1924, the last of the line was Philip’s son, 21-year-old Leonard Kip Rhinelander, and he was something of a disappointment, a graceless and awkward lad who was in and out of sanitariums for treatment of assorted nervousnesses and who was regarded as perhaps a little feeble. For all that, he still belonged to the Sons of the Revolution and the Society of Colonial Wars and the Society of the War of 1812 and the Riding Club and the Badminton Club, and he was heir to $100 million, and accordingly he was one of high society’s most eligible bachelors, fluttered at by the fairest of debutante flowers and even by a few hopeful widows. He was, after all, a Rhinelander.

But Kip’s heart belonged to pretty Alice Jones, a nursemaid and laundress, daughter of a New Rochelle busman, and on Oct. 14, 1924, he married his Cinderella in a civil ceremony so quiet that word did not get out into New York and Newport for several more weeks. Whereupon there erupted high society’s most shocking public scandal in generations.

For the bride’s father, English-born George Jones, was the son of a West Indian, and thus did West Indian blood stream through his own veins as well, and thus, too, did it stream through his daughter’s.

Or, to put it another way, Alice Jones was a colored girl…

Read the entire article here.

Love and Race Caught in the Public Eye

ND Newswire
University of Notre Dame
2001-05-31

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Notre Dame

Earl Lewis, Provost
Emory University

Lovers seek to create a place that they can inhabit together against the obstacles of the world. Marriage promises that they will live in that place forever. What happens, though, when love cannot keep out the world’s strictures? What happens when the bond severs, and the nation serves as a witness to marital separation? And what happens when a culture’s notions about love and romance come into conflict with the lines dividing races and classes?

In 1925 Alice Beatrice Jones and Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander found themselves painfully trapped in this conflict between love and family, desire and social standing. Their marriage had the trappings of a fairy tale — wealthy New York scion marries humble girl from New Rochelle — yet the events that led to their estrangement provide an unusual window into the nation’s attitudes about race, class, and sexuality. Their sensational annulment trial scandalized 1920’s America and opened their private life to public scrutiny, amid cultural conflicts over racial definitions, class propriety, proper courtship and sexual behavior, and racial mixing.

As a Rhinelander, Leonard was descended from several of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families. Had he followed in the family tradition, Leonard might have attended Columbia University, joined the Rhinelander Real Estate Company, and made his mark on New York society through philanthropy and support of the arts.

By contrast, Alice’s parents immigrated in 1891 to the United States from England, where they had both worked as servants. George Jones had had some success in his adopted country; he eventually owned a fleet of taxicabs and several small properties. Alice, her sisters, and their husbands worked primarily as domestics and servants — solid members of the working class.

Despite this pronounced class difference, Alice and Leonard met and began dating in 1921. Their love deepened over the next three years, tested by months and years of separation as Leonard’s father tried to keep them apart. Philip Rhinelander’s efforts were in vain, however.  From 1921 to 1924 the lovers exchanged hundreds of letters and visited when possible. As soon as Leonard turned 21 and received money from a trust fund, he left school and returned to Alice. In the fall of 1924, they quietly married in a civil ceremony at the New Rochelle City Hall.

Had reporters from the New Rochelle Standard Star ignored the entry in the City Hall records, the couple might have lived their lives away from the public spotlight. They did not. Someone eventually realized that a Rhinelander had married a local woman, and it was news. And once they discovered who Alice Jones was, it was big news. The first story appeared one month after their wedding, announcing to the world that the son of a Rhinelander had married the daughter of a colored man.

Or had he? Well, at least he had married the daughter of a working-class man, and that was enough to start a tremor of gossip throughout New York. Reporters rushed to sift through the legal documents and contradictory accounts of and by the Joneses and the newlyweds. Despite the confidence of the first announcement, there was confusion for quite some time as to George Jones’s — and therefore Alice’s — precise racial identity…

Read the entire article here.

Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness

University of North Carolina Press
April 2009
408 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 10 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN  978-0-8078-3268-4
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5939-1

Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Assistant Professor of History
Kent State University

In 1925 Leonard [Kip] Rhinelander, the youngest son of a wealthy New York society family, sued to end his marriage to Alice [Beatrice] Jones, a former domestic servant and the daughter of a “colored” cabman. After being married only one month, Rhinelander pressed for the dissolution of his marriage on the grounds that his wife had lied to him about her racial background. The subsequent marital annulment trial became a massive public spectacle, not only in New York but across the nation—despite the fact that the state had never outlawed interracial marriage.

Elizabeth Smith-Pryor makes extensive use of trial transcripts, in addition to contemporary newspaper coverage and archival sources, to explore why Leonard Rhinelander was allowed his day in court. She moves fluidly between legal history, a day-by-day narrative of the trial itself, and analyses of the trials place in the culture of the 1920s North to show how notions of race, property, and the law were—and are—inextricably intertwined.

A Beautiful Lie: Exploring Rhinelander v. Rhinelander as a Formative Lesson on Race, Marriage, Identity, and Family

California Law Review
Volume 95, Issue 6 (2007)
pages 2393-2458

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Professor of Law and Charles M. and Marion J. Kierscht Scholar
University of Iowa College of Law

During the mid-1920s, the story of the courtship, marriage, and separation of Alice Beatrice Jones and Leonard Kip Rhinelander astounded the American public, especially the citizens of New York and black Americans across the country.  Alice, a chambermaid and the racially mixed daughter of English immigrants who had worked as servants on a large estate in Bradford, England, had committed the social faux pas of falling in love with and marrying Leonard Kip Rhinelander, the son of a white multi-millionaire who descended from the French Huguenots.  Or rather, as certain arguments from Leonard’s trial attorney Isaac Mills and later the jury’s verdict would together suggest, Leonard had committed a social offense by “knowingly” loving and marrying Alice, a colored woman.

Scandal arose about the marriage of Alice and Leonard when a story with the title “Rhinelanders’ Son Marries Daughter of a Colored Man” ran in the Standard Star of New Rochelle on November 13, 1924.  Two weeks later, on November 26, 1924, Leonard filed for an annulment of his marriage to Alice. In his Complaint, Leonard alleged that Alice had misrepresented her race to him by improperly leading him to believe that she was white, “not colored,” before their nuptials. New York law did not ban interracial marriages between Blacks and Whites at the time; thus, Alice and Leonard’s marriage was not automatically void.  In the state of New York, the law did not identify interracial marriages as so odious to public policy that they were legally impossible; however, fraud as to a spouse’s race before marriage signaled that there had been no meeting of the minds between husband and wife. Given the importance of racial classifications and their corresponding status in society, New York courts readily accepted knowledge about a spouse’s race to be a factor so crucial to the understanding of the marital contract that fraud about it rendered the marriage voidable and thus eligible to be annulled from its start.  In other words, the primary basis for recognizing knowledge of a spouse’s race as a material fact that went to the essence of marriage, a requirement for annulling voidable marriages based on fraud after consummation, was racial prejudice and social opprobrium of intermixing. Additionally, although New York had not followed many southern states in adopting the “one drop rule,” many Whites in New York agreed that any taint of colored blood removed a person from the class of white citizens. In essence, because of long-held beliefs about racial genetics and community expectations about social barriers of race in 1920s New York, knowledge of a spouse’s race was considered to be as central to marriage as the ability to consummate it.  Thus, no question was ever raised about whether Leonard’s alleged basis for annulment, racial fraud, could legitimately serve as a reason for legally declaring his marriage to Alice to be void…

Read the entire article here.

Passing

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2007
584 pages
5.2 × 8.4 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-97916-9

Nella Larsen

Edited by

Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University

Nella Larsen is a central figure in African American, Modernist, and women’s literature.

Larsen’s status as a Harlem Renaissance woman writer was rivaled by only Zora Neale Hurston’s. This Norton Critical Edition of her electrifying 1929 novel includes Carla Kaplan’s detailed and thought-provoking introduction, thorough explanatory annotations, and a Note on the Text. An unusually rich “Background and Contexts” section connects the novel to the historical events of the day, most notably the sensational Rhinelander/Jones case of 1925. Fourteen contemporary reviews are reprinted, including those by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Griffin, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Published accounts from 1911 to 1935—by Langston Hughes, Juanita Ellsworth, and Caleb Johnson, among others—provide a nuanced view of the contemporary cultural dimensions of race and passing, both in America and abroad. Also included are Larsen’s statements on the novel and on passing, as well as a generous selection of her letters and her central writings on “The Tragic Mulatto(a)” in American literature. Additional perspective is provided by related Harlem Renaissance works. “Criticism” provides fifteen diverse critical interpretations, including those by Mary Helen Washington, Cheryl A. Wall, Deborah E. McDowell, David L. Blackmore, Kate Baldwin, and Catherine Rottenberg. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note on the Text
The Text of Passing
Backgrounds and Contexts
REVIEWS

1. Mary Rennels – “Passing” Is Novel of Longings (April 27, 1929)
2. Beyond the Color Line (April 28, 1929)
3. Margaret Cheney Dawson – The Color Line (April 28, 1929)
4. The Dilemma of Mixed Race: Another Study of Color-line in New York (May 1, 1929)
5. Alice Dunbar-Nelson – As In a Looking Glass (May 3, 1929)
6. W. B. Seabrook – Touch of the Tar-brush (May 18, 1929)
7. Esther Hyman – Passing by Nella Larsen (June 1929)
8. Aubrey Bowser – The Cat Came Back (June 5, 1929)
9. Mary Griffin – Novel of Race Consciousness (June 23, 1929)
10. W. E. B. Du Bois – Passing (July 1929)
11. Mary Fleming Larabee – Passing (August 1929)
12. Do They Always Return? (September 28, 1929)
13. “M. L. H.” – Passing (December 1929)
14. Passing (December 12, 1929)

CONTEMPORARY COVERAGE OF PASSING AND RACE

1. When Is a Caucasian Not a Caucasian? (March 2, 1911)
2. [Publisher’s Preface to the 1912 Edition of Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man]
3. Writer Says Brazil Has No Color Line (October 1925)
4. Blood Will Tell (July 24, 1926)
5. Don Pierson – Does It Pay to “Pass?” (August 20, 1927)
6. Juanita Ellsworth – White Negroes (May-June 1928)
7. Lewis Fremont Baldwin – From From Negro to Caucasian, Or How the Ethiopian Is Changing His Skin (1929)
8. Emilie Hahn – Crossing the Color Line (July 28, 1929)
9. Caleb Johnson – Crossing the Color Line (August 26, 1931)
10. Langston Hughes – Passing for White, Passing for Colored, Passing for Negroes Plus (1931)
11. 75,000 Pass in Philadelphia Every Day (December 19, 1931)
12. Careful Lyncher! He May Be Your Brother (January 21, 1932)
13. Blonde Girl Was ‘Passing‘ (January 23, 1932)
14. Swedish Negro Baby! (April 28, 1932)
15. Virginia Is Still Hounding ‘White’ Negroes Who ‘Pass’ (June 29, 1935)

THE RHINELANDER/JONES CASE

1. Mark J. Madigan – Miscegenation and “the Dicta of Race and Class”: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1990)
2. Selected newspaper articles on the case (list pending)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY

1. About Nella Larsen
2. Miss Nella Larsen Bids for Literary Laurels (May 12, 1928)
3. Thelma E. Berlack – New Author Unearthed Right Here in Harlem (May 23, 1928)
4. Mary Rennels – Behind the Backs of Books and Authors (April 13, 1929)
5. [Letter about Nella Larsen] Jean Blackwell Hutson to Louise Fox (August 1, 1969)
6. Thadious M. Davis – Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic (1989)
7. George Hutchinson – Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race (1997)
8. Larson on birth, Passing, and death
9. Davis on birth, Passing, and death
10. Hutchinson on birth, Passing, and death

Author’s Statements

1. Nella Larsen Imes, “Author Statement,” 1926
2. Nella Larsen Imes, Guggenheim Application
3. [In Defense of Sanctuary]

Letters

1. To Carl Van Vechten [1925]
2. To Charles S. Johnson [August 1926]
3. To Eddie Wasserman
4. To Eddie Wasserman
5. To Dorothy Peterson
6. To Dorothy Peterson
7. To Dorothy Peterson
8. To Dorothy Peterson
9. To Langston Hughes
10. To Gertrude Stein
11. To Carl Van Vechten
12. To Carl Van Vechten

THE TRAGIC MULATTO(A)

1. Lydia Maria Child – The Quadroons (1842)
2. Williams Wells Brown– From Clotel (1853)
3. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
4. William Dean Howells – From An Imperative Duty (1892 or 83?)
5. Kate Chopin – The Father of Désirée’s Baby (1893)
6. Mark Twain – From Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
7. Charles Chesnutt – From The House behind the Cedars (1900)
8. Georgia Douglass Johnson – The Octoroon (1922)
9. Countee Cullen – Near White (1925)
10. Langston Hughes – Mulatto (1927)
11. Fannie Hurst – From Imitation of Life (1933)

SELECTED WRITINGS ABOUT PASSING

1. Frank Webb – From The Gairies and Their Friends (1852)
2. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
3. Charles Chesnutt – From House behind the Cedars (1900)
4. James Weldon Johnson – From Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
5. Jessie Redmon Fauset – The Sleeper Wakes (1920)
6. Countee Cullen – Two Who Crossed a Line (1925)
7. Walter White – From Flight (1926)
8. Jessie Redmon Fauset – From Plum Bun (1928)
9. Rudolph Fisher – From The Walls of Jericho (1928)
10. George S. Schuyler – From Black No More (1931)
11. Langston Hughes – Passing (1934)

SELECTED WRITINGS FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

1. Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. – The Mulatto to His Critics (1918)
2. Countee Cullen – Heritage (1925)
3. W. E. B. Du Bois – Criteria of Negro Art (1926)
4. Nella Larsen [Pseud. Allen Semi] – Freedom (1926)
5. George S. Schuyler – The Negro-Art Hokum (1926)
6. Carl Van Vechten – From Nigger Heaven (1926)
7. From Negro Womanhood’s Greatest Needs: A Symposium (1927)

Criticism

1. Nathan Irvin Huggins – [Schizophrenia from Racial Dualism]
2. Mary Mabel Youman – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Study in Irony
3. Claudia Tate – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation
4. Mary Helen Washington – Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance
5. Cheryl A. Wall – Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels
6. Deborah E. McDowell – [Black Female Sexuality in Passing]
7. David L. Blackmore – “That Unreasonable Restless Feeling”: The Homosexual Subtexts of Nella Larsen’s Passing
8. Jennifer DeVere Brody – Clare Kendry’s “True” Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing
9. Helena Michie – [Differences among Black Women]
10. Judith Butler – Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge
11. Ann duCille – Passing Fancies
12. Kate Baldwin – The Recurring Conditions of Nella Larsen’s Passing
13. Gayle Wald – Passing and Domestic Tragedy
14. Catherine Rottenberg – Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire
15. Miriam Thaggert – Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

Nella Larsen: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography