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You've probably never heard of him, but Clarence King was famous once. As a geologist, he helped map the American West, and he organized the United States Geological Survey as its first president. As a writer, he had a bestseller, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.
He dined at the White House and had a genius for friendship; among his intimates were writer and diplomat John Hay, historian Henry Adams and novelist Henry James. Hay, who in his youth was Lincoln's secretary and who in the fullness of his years was McKinley's secretary of state, thought King the best man of his time and was puzzled by the fact that King's talents did not make him rich.
"I fear he will die without doing anything," Hay wrote to novelist-editor William Dean Howells, "except to be a great scientist, a delightful writer, and the sweetest-natured creature the Lord ever made.''
The answer to the puzzle, Martha A. Sandweiss believes, lies in a duplicity of character so deep that it prevented King from focusing his energies and eventually sapped them. The sweetest-natured creature the Lord ever made was also a world-class liar.
He had to be. His friends always knew of his not-quite-kidding admiration for women of what he called "archaic" races — Mexican, Indian, Hawaiian. But they didn't know that as "James Todd" he courted, married and had five children with Ada Copeland, who was born a slave.
King died in Phoenix in 1901 of tuberculosis. He was 59. Ada Copeland Todd King died in Flushing, N.Y., in 1964, at 103, in the house that John Hay had bought for her anonymously.
A few years ago, historian Martha A. Sandweiss read in passing that Clarence King — a Caucasian male famous in the 19th century as a surveyor of the vast frontier and a best-selling author about the land west of the Mississippi River — lived a double life as a self-proclaimed African-American male.
During an era when many light-skinned blacks hoped to pass as white, King, who lived from 1842 to 1901, moved the other direction, passing as black for some of each year without the knowledge of his white friends.
The cause of the reverse passing? Love.
In 1888, King had met and married an African-American woman named Ada Copeland, 18 years his junior. Copeland, who had made her way to New York City from rural Georgia and found a job as a domestic, knew nothing about King’s fame in white high society. Instead, she knew him as James Todd, a name he had concocted. King/Todd, who was known for his brilliant conversation in high society, told Copeland he worked as a Pullman porter, with the long train trips accounting for his long absences. Although King did not look like somebody with even the remotest amount of African-American heritage, Copeland and her friends believed he must be black. Furthermore, why would any successful white male want to pass as black?
So for 13 years, until his death at 59, King carried on the deception as Copeland’s common-law husband and father of their children. He revealed the truth to Copeland near the end of his life. The revelation apparently did not shake Copeland’s love for her husband but, naturally, complicated matters during a struggle over his estate. The complications never dissipated completely for Copeland, who lived another 63 years, finally dying in 1964 at 103.
Sandweiss’ sleuthing has produced a fascinating dual biography of a man who left behind lots of evidence about his life, and a woman born into slavery who left behind little. Those same sleuthing skills led Sandweiss, a historian who specializes in researching the American West, to produce essentially a second book between the same covers, a contextual treatise about race and class in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.
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Wonders & Marvels most often profiles history and historical fiction on pre-1800 topics. But Martha A. Sandweiss' Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Decption Across the Color Line is just too good to pass up. And it's always a treat to help spread the word about well-written books by fellow academics. (Sandweiss is a Professor of History at Princeton.)
Passing Strange tells the story of Clarence King who is best known for his work as a geologist and writer. But King had a secret--a big one. In order to marry the woman he loved, he lived a double life as a black man. Sandweiss' book presents King's work, love, and life, in the context of racial politics from the late 19th century into the 1960s. An extraordinary story told by a writer with a keen historical eye and deep respect for her subjects.
In the late 1800s, Clarence King was a figure of public renown. He was a mining consultant with jobs all over North America. He had founded the U.S. Geological Survey, mapped part of the Sierra Nevada, argued in journals of geology about the age of the Earth, hobnobbed with the secretary of state and dined in the White House. He was also a white man who had a secret life in which he pretended to be black.
In "Passing Strange," Martha Sandweiss, professor of history at Princeton University, undertakes to tell the story of King's secret marriage to an African-American woman.
A modern reader will ask how a white man with light hair and blue eyes could pass as "colored" for 13 years. A reader of Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson," written in 1894, will know: Anyone with one drop of "African blood," no matter what he looked like, was considered colored. Such a person might pass as white, but he was breaking the "one-drop rule."
King undertook to pass as black. At 47, he met Ada Copeland, 28, a nursemaid, telling her he was a Pullman porter named James Todd. He married her and they became Mr. and Mrs. Todd, while his associates continued to know him as the famed geologist Clarence King, resident of a Manhattan hotel.
In an age with no TV, few published photographs and no worry about driver's licenses, bank cards or computer databases, he could get away with it. The America of that time offered less racial tolerance but more privacy.
Clarence King (1842-1901) was a well-to-do, Newport-born, Yale-educated geologist famous for mapping the Western United States after the Civil War. He drank tea with Queen Victoria, collected fine art, and counted the novelist Henry James as a close personal friend. But these worldly details function as a mere backdrop for Martha A. Sandweiss’s engrossing biography Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, which follows King’s extreme measures to attain true happiness.
For thirteen years, King led a double life as James Todd, a black Pullman porter. Under this assumed identity, he married a former slave from Georgia named Ada Copeland, avoiding the stigma of interracial marriage by inventing a life that placed husband and wife on the same side of the racial divide. And strangely enough, despite his blue eyes and fair complexion, his secret life was left undiscovered by everyone, including Ada, until his death-bed confession. It is a classic Romeo and Juliet tale of love overcoming all obstacles and bridging all divides—that is, if Romeo forgot to tell Juliet he was actually born a Montague.
The logistics of such deception are mind-blowing. The fact that King appeared unambiguously white only exacerbates an already labyrinthine tale of racial politics. How could a man with blue eyes and fair skin convince his wife that he was actually African American? As Sandweiss explains, the “one drop rule”—which stated that even one black great-grandparent defined someone as black—meant that the color line was surprisingly porous. By simply identifying himself as a Pullman porter, which was then an all-black career, “James Todd” could lead others to believe he was black without ever saying so directly. Though Passing Strange is essentially the legend of a world-class con-man, Sandweiss imbues the tale with so much pathos that we forgive King’s indiscretions. He is forced into the lie not for his own gain or self-interest but to avoid scorn for himself and the woman he loved.
Clarence King (1842-1901) was a distinguished geologist, famous as the leader of an exploration of the 40th parallel, “the man who mapped the West,” the first director of the U. S. Geological Survey. A son of Newport society (he is buried in Island Cemetery), he returned from his frequent rambles around the continent to lodgings in private clubs and residential hotels in New York City, where he charmed a wide circle of admirers and led the high life of a celebrity. With his intimate friends, John Hay and Henry Adams and their spouses, he bonded to form the Five of Hearts, and he wrote a classic account of mountaineering in California that earned him a reputation as a man of letters.
Ada Copeland (1860-1964), born a slave in western Georgia, emigrated to New York circa 1884 and took a job as a nursemaid in the downtown home of a white family. At some point, under unknown circumstances, the black domestic worker and the celebrated white scientist met and fell in love.
King had long lauded the attraction of dark-skinned women to his friends. But he knew that his relationship with Copeland would destroy his career and alienate his family if it became known. So he adopted an alternate persona. Presenting himself as James Todd, a black Pullman porter from Baltimore, he wed Ada in 1888. Todd installed his wife in a succession of homes in Brooklyn and Queens, far from King’s Manhattan haunts, and the couple had five children, four of whom lived to adulthood.
When Martha Sandweiss sat down to research the life and times of Clarence King, it took her 10 minutes to find out she had struck gold. She knew going in that King, a prominent 19th-century Ivy League-educated geologist, author and explorer, who counted U.S. Secretary of State John Hay and the writer Henry Adams among his friends, had an enormous secret he was keeping from his high-society friends.
What she didn't know, but quickly found out, was that this secret prompted him to live two lives: the first, as the first director of the United States Geological Survey, a gregarious friend of powerful people, who occasionally dined at the White House; the second, as a black Pullman porter named James Todd who was married to a black woman named Ada Copeland.
"I'm the first person to figure that piece of it out," Sandweiss says from her Amherst, Massachusetts home. "What people knew before was only that the famous Clarence King had a 13-year relationship -- whether it was a marriage or not -- with this African-American woman and that they had several children together."
Sandweiss, a professor of American studies and history at Amherst College, had been urging her students to look into the story of King's secret marriage, propelled by the indignity she felt upon reading a 1958 biography of King that barely mentioned Ada, or dismissed her as an undignified aberration. None of her students took her up on it, and this aspect of King's life kept gnawing at her. When she finally sat down and discovered his dual identity -- thanks to the recent digitization of American census records -- she decided this was a story she would write herself.
The result, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line , is a staggeringly researched, absorbing and page-turning account of a stunning deception carried out by a complex man who believed that miscegenation was where the future of the white race lay. As Sandweiss writes, King believed mixing the races "would improve the vitality of the human race and create a distinctly American people."
This post-Civil War history examines the boundaries of race through the remarkable story of Clarence King, a celebrated scientist of the Gilded Age who crossed the color line in reverse. Shortly after becoming famous for surveying the Western frontier, King fell in love with a former slave named Ada Copeland. For thirteen years, until his death, in 1901, King lived a double life—as a black Pullman porter named James Todd, married to Copeland, and as a prominent society man and a mining consultant. Sandweiss is a gifted historian, but there is a dearth of reliable documentation about Copeland, and, sadly, because King destroyed all of Copeland’s letters (urging her to do the same with his), his voice weighs heavier in the retelling.
For a book on a serious subject, Martha A. Sandweiss could hardly have chosen a more appropriately clever title than the slightly archaic phrase "Passing Strange." Its story of a white man strangely choosing, in our race-riven society, to pass as a black man is passing - that is, exceedingly - strange from beginning to end.
Clarence King, born in Newport, R.I., in 1842, was a Western explorer, a geologist of wide renown, a tremendous wit and an accomplished writer who moved in the highest societies of his day. Secretary of State John Hay and historian Henry Adams were among his closest friends; Hay called King "the best and brightest man of his generation."
But King, a bachelor, lived a secret double life as the husband of a black woman. His wife, Ada, was probably born into slavery, most likely in 1860, somewhere near West Point, Ga. Her last name, if she had one, might have been Copeland. Somehow she migrated to New York City, possibly in 1884, where she might have gotten work as a domestic.
As the previous paragraph indicates, much about their lives remains unknown and unknowable, mostly because of King's herculean efforts at secrecy, but in part due to Ada's humble origins. No stories or records of her early years survive. What her life might have been like can only be guessed at from research into others in similar situations.
The author's effort is well done and well worth it, and not simply because the story is compelling in itself. King, though no longer a high-profile historical figure, nevertheless has been the subject of several biographies, and all of them have ignored or given short shrift to this central aspect of his life. Sandweiss, a professor of history at Amherst College and author of other histories, has brought a lot to light through diligent digging.
In February, Black History Month, publishers release a flood of books about or by African Americans. USA TODAY recommends a dozen new titles for all ages.
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin, $27.95) by Martha Sandweiss is a fascinating slice of history: the double life of a socially prominent white geologist and explorer, Clarence King, who worked as a black Pullman porter so he could marry the black woman he loved.
“Passing Strange” tells an astounding true story that would beggar most novelists’ imaginations. It exposes the bizarre secret life of a well-known historical figure, but that secret is its least sensational aspect. The secret was hidden in plain sight until Martha A. Sandweiss, the deductive historian who pieced together this narrative, happened to notice it. Her great accomplishment is to have explored not only how the 19th-century explorer and scientist Clarence King reinvented himself but also why that reinvention was so singularly American. Best of all are Ms. Sandweiss’s insights into what King’s deception and its consequences really mean.
Clarence King has often been written about by historians, but mostly in academic books about the mapping and geological exploration of the American West. He also turns up in biographies and literary histories, since he moved in glittering circles and was once widely held in high regard. He was called “the best and the brightest man of his generation” by one close friend, Secretary of State John Hay.
Hay went even further: “This polished trifler, this exquisite wit, who diffused over every conversation in which he was engaged an iridescent mist of epigram and persiflage, was one of the greatest savants of his time.” Another admirer put it this way: “The trouble with King is that his description of the sunset spoils the original.”
King was a blond blueblood from Newport who distinguished himself at an early age. He traveled West in the 1860s, found work with the California State Geological Survey, helped to map the Sierras and became geologist in charge of the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel in 1867, when he was 25. He then became a familiar luminary in both New York and Washington. But his early years of roaming were just a prelude to what seems to have been a permanently rootless state.
Or so it seemed to his friends, who became used to his unexpected absences and thought of him as a perennial bachelor. Their impressions of him went no further. What they did not know was that when King was not living in various clubs and hotels, he was married and the father of five children. He was deeply devoted to his wife, Ada, a black woman 19 years his junior. This blue-eyed man, descended from signers of the Magna Carta, had successfully cultivated the impression that he was black too.
Clarence King was a famed explorer, scientist, and hero of late nineteenth century history. But the blue-eyed and fair-skinned King also led a secret double life passing as a black man. A historian examines the secret King only revealed on his deathbed to his black wife of thirteen years.
For decades, Clarence King lived a charming, public life. The notable white geologist and writer, who had helped map the American West, divided his time between White House dinners and social gatherings at Manhattan's most elite clubs. But in this excerpt from the new book Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (The Penguin Press), historian Martha A. Sandweiss reveals the riveting secret King kept from his family—and the world—and only disclosed on his deathbed in 1901: Clarence King lived a double life as a black man, James Todd.
PASSING STRANGE
A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
Penguin Press. 384 pp. $27.95
Passing Strange is one of those books with precisely the right title. It is indeed a story about passing, in every sense of the term, and historian Martha Sandweiss tells it with a scholar’s rigor and a storyteller’s verve. More specifically, it is a story about a white. nineteenth-century scientist and explorer, famous in his day, who both hobnobbed with the most prominent figures of his era and created a second, secret identity for himself as a working-class black man. In a word: strange.
Shockingly—at least from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, with all of its peering eyes—the twain never met. Not, at least, until the prominent white man who passed as an obscure black one was on his deathbed. Knowing just this much, the reader will be asking a good many questions, chiefly variations on the basic How? and Why? Sandweiss rewards us with answers. Not to every question, of course, given the number of details that have slipped between the cracks of time. Still, the author builds the solid framework of two lives: that of Clarence King, the explorer, and Ada Copeland, the black woman he loved, married, and all the while deceived.
The story of King and Copeland, who lived together as James and Ada Todd, is a blessing for a curious, talented writer like Sandweiss. Not only are its details fascinating in and of themselves, but they advance a larger social understanding. By tracing the curves and improbable intersections of two extraordinary lives, Passing Strange offers a fresh look at the racial and cultural landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.
History
Her husband was not black. He was not from the West Indies. He was not a steelworker. Even his name, James Todd, was a lie. Ada Todd was in fact married to Clarence King, an acclaimed public figure and the person Secretary of State John Hay once called "the best and brightest man of his generation." … [But] not until he lay dying of tuberculosis in Phoenix in late 1901 … did James Todd write a letter to his wife telling her who he really was.
--Passing Strange: a gilded age tale of love and deception across the color line by Martha A. Sandweiss (Penguin Press, $27.95)
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Sandweiss, Martha A. Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. Penguin Pr.: Penguin Group (USA). Feb. 2009. c.358p. index. ISBN 978-1-59420-200-1. $27.95. HIST
American West historian Sandweiss (American studies & history, Amherst Coll.; Print the Legend) utilizes archival, newspaper, and a panoply of digitized resources to analyze the personal and social complexity of the life of noted surveyor and geologist Clarence King (1842–1901). King, the scion of a storied white New England family, passed as the purported Pullman porter James Todd in order to espouse his African American common-law wife, Ada Copeland Todd King. Unlike previous King biographers (e.g., Robert Wilson, The Explorer King), Sandweiss treats in detail the challenges and dilemmas that King confronted in post-Civil War America, even in relatively tolerant New York City. Balancing scholarly exploration with readability, she focuses on King's 13-year secret (until he was on his deathbed, King kept the fact of his actual race from his wife), which produced acute psychological strains. History learned of it with a legal claim for his trust fund in 1933. Sandweiss demonstrates just how racial identity and inequality circumscribes behavior, adding both general background and individual perspectives on the conundrum of race in America. Her literary references add to a historical narrative that should catch the attention of both specialists and the reading public. A welcome choice for both academic and public libraries.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress
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