Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White

Rating:
Summary: The "O.J. Simpson" case of its time!
Review: Alice Jones and Leonard Kip Rhinelander meet and fall in love. Alice comes from a modest family originally from England and Leonard comes from a wealthy New York family. After a quiet three-year courtship, Alice, age 23 and Leonard, age 22 finally marry.

It looks like this youthful couple has a promising life together ahead of them. That should be the end of their seemingly innocent love story. The couple lives happily ever after. Right? Wrong.

A few days after the wedding, it is discovered that Alice is from a mixed race background. Her mother is white and father of West Indian descent.

Upon the revelation of this news, Leonard quickly files for an annulment. He claims that he was unaware of his wife's racial background (a daughter of a black man) and that she tricked him into marrying her. Conversely, Alice maintains that her husband knew everything about her and she did not defraud her.

The year is 1924. What happens next is a fascinating and sensational trial. Known as the "Rhinelander case," it brings up several attention-grabbing issues that include how race is viewed in the U.S., especially at that time period - the 1920s.

I would have liked to read a little more about the Alice and Leonard. However, I understand that the book is not a biography on the couple but instead focuses on the trial. In the authors' notes, the reader is told that the families did not grant interviews and expressed no interest in the book. I also found the numerous footnotes within the book a little distracting. It sometimes felt as if I was reading a dissertation instead of a book.

Despite these minor complaints, the subject of "Love on Trial" is of interest. Authors, Lewis and Aridzzone have done an excellent job retracing the events of the case and reconstructing what occurred in the courtroom - this includes the interaction between the two strong-headed opposing lawyers, the examination of Leonard and a point where Alice has to partially disrobe for the jury. Photos are interspersed among the chapters, showing the litigants, crowded courtroom, judge and lawyers to envision the story better.

"Love on Trial" is well researched and detailed with the happenings in the case - from the trial, appellate and New York Supreme Court findings. It also includes the newspaper coverage and public reactions during and after the court case.

If you enjoy reading about trials, watching T.V. programs on court cases or lawyers shows, this is the book for you.

Fafa Demasio

Rating:
Summary: The "O.J. Simpson" case of its time!
Review: Alice Jones and Leonard Kip Rhinelander meet and fall in love. Alice comes from a modest family originally from England and Leonard comes from a wealthy New York family. After a quiet three-year courtship, Alice, age 23 and Leonard, age 22 finally marry.

It looks like this youthful couple has a promising life together ahead of them. That should be the end of their seemingly innocent love story. The couple lives happily ever after. Right? Wrong.

A few days after the wedding, it is discovered that Alice is from a mixed race background. Her mother is white and father of West Indian descent.

Upon the revelation of this news, Leonard quickly files for an annulment. He claims that he was unaware of his wife's racial background (a daughter of a black man) and that she tricked him into marrying her. Conversely, Alice maintains that her husband knew everything about her and she did not defraud her.

The year is 1924. What happens next is a fascinating and sensational trial. Known as the "Rhinelander case," it brings up several attention-grabbing issues that include how race is viewed in the U.S., especially at that time period - the 1920s.

I would have liked to read a little more about the Alice and Leonard. However, I understand that the book is not a biography on the couple but instead focuses on the trial. In the authors' notes, the reader is told that the families did not grant interviews and expressed no interest in the book. I also found the numerous footnotes within the book a little distracting. It sometimes felt as if I was reading a dissertation instead of a book.

Despite these minor complaints, the subject of "Love on Trial" is of interest. Authors, Lewis and Aridzzone have done an excellent job retracing the events of the case and reconstructing what occurred in the courtroom - this includes the interaction between the two strong-headed opposing lawyers, the examination of Leonard and a point where Alice has to partially disrobe for the jury. Photos are interspersed among the chapters, showing the litigants, crowded courtroom, judge and lawyers to envision the story better.

"Love on Trial" is well researched and detailed with the happenings in the case - from the trial, appellate and New York Supreme Court findings. It also includes the newspaper coverage and public reactions during and after the court case.

If you enjoy reading about trials, watching T.V. programs on court cases or lawyers shows, this is the book for you.

Fafa Demasio

Rating:
Summary: Very detailed historical account without being bogged down
Review: From the very start you want to know more about the lovers/litigants in this book. The authors unfold the story slowly and with great detail, as well as plenty of historical context, which only leaves you wanting more. Its a story that not all might be familiar with, but that everyone can understand. I highly recommend it to folks interested in real-life dramas!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and thought-provoking
Review: Hmm, I don't know if everyone reads the book carefully, but very clearly, one of the main arguments of this book is how american culture tried to portray something ambiguous (race) as something precise and scientific, and was caught in its own lie.

The book is human and interesting, but it lets that human interest come from the story. Many books of this nature are ruined by authors who want to make more of a novel, injecting dialogues and thoughts that the author has invented to flesh out the facts as they are known. We don't know exactly what the young couple were thinking or how their feelings might have changed over time, but the author doesn't pretend to know, either, and that makes the events more compelling and the book more truthful.

I like this book because it has been written with a soft touch, presenting facts, and allowing them to make the story.

We are not given a romantic, overdone cartoon of the case, but merely invited to see how absurd a love affair is when it is divorced from its personal nature, and how equally absurd the scientific classification of "race" is when it cannot even be measured with scientific precision.

Rating:
Summary: Author's comment--not a review
Review: I'm glad to see ongoing interest in this book (which is available in paperback now.) I'm even happier to see ongoing discussion of the issues it raises. That was one of the reasons we wrote the book. I'd just like to briefly correct a few misreadings in A.D. Powell's review. I am certainly not a proponent of one-drop racialism. While it is true that for much of American history, both blacks and whites assumed people of mixed ancestry to have more in common with their black peers than their white, much of my work actually highlights situations where this was not the case. People might certainly have black ancestry they are unaware of, but in the present context I don't advocate that they must identify themselves as black. However, in the 1920s, in some states, if a seeming white person were to be discovered to have a black grandparent or even great grandparent, that person's legal status would shift to black. Virginia was particularly well known for pursuing family trees and make such changes, although they allowed for some Native ancestry in a legally white person. One drop racialism was one of the primary ways white Americans defined race at the turn of the century. It was never the only way, and it was a system full of illogic and contradictions, which we state several times in the book. In fact we talk extensively about the ambiguity of Alice's identity and ancestry, and how that ambiguity challenged American efforts to eliminate an intermediary category between blacks and whites. It is that ambiguity that made the story compelling to us as historians and writers. We don't really know what her father's ethnicity was, and we say so quite clearly. But we do analyze the trial and the news coverage of it primarily in the context of "black and white" as the title suggests. This is because, while Alice and her family never identified themselves as black, the newspaper editors, journalists, and commentators who spun the story for public consumption routinely did. That is, Alice was treated in the press and (we argue) in the courtroom as if she were black.

Elsewhere Ms. Powell has suggested that I should be careful lest my own Italian ancestry lead me to be labelled a mulatto myself. I'm not sure why that would be something I should fear. In the book we discuss the racial ambiguity of the new immigrants, including Italians, Asians, Indians (who are determined to be Caucasian but not white by the Supreme Court in 1924 which may have impacted Alice's legal strategy), Southern Europeans, Slavs, and Mexicans. The mutability, inconsistency, and ambiguity of race in the 20th century reveals race to be essentially a political and cultural system, not one based in biology or logic.

NOTE TO AMAZON: I am the author of this book and would prefer not to have to rate it to have my comments posted. Thank you.

Rating:
Summary: This goes to show that America
Review: still has a problem with racial/ethnic/class mixing and multiracial/multiethnic people. This book tells all about the courtship and marriage of Kip Rhinelander and Alice Jones, the media scruntiny, Kip's father's disapproval of the match, the publicized trial, the humiliation of Alice Rhinelander in the courtroom(much like the humiliation of Anita Hill by the Senate Judiciary Committee back in 1991), and the troubling questions of race/ethnicity/class in the 1920s.

Even today, "black"/"white" relationships still arouse a great deal of controversy. Look at the O.J. Simpson case. That case has divided the nation into two hostile camps. Assorted incidents directed toward multiracial couples shows that we have a long way to go. Whites oppose such relationships because it weakens white privilege, while Blacks condemned them in the name of Black racial solidarity and unity.

Please buy this book now. If not, then go to your local library and borrow it. This is a very fascinating book that is very riveting in its telling of the long-neglected chapter of American history.

Rating:
Summary: A family that was mixed but not "black"
Review: This book is a history of the infamous 1920's "Rhinelander" case, in which a high society poor excuse for a man named Leonard Rhnelander tried to get his marriage to quadroon Alice Jones annulled because she allegedly "lied" about her "race."
Authors Lewis and Ardizzone are advocates of the idea that anyone who even might have a "drop" of the dreaded "black blood" is instantly a member of the "black race" and "African American" ethnic group. They want people to believe that you can be "black" without even knowing it. Non-black phenotypes and cultures are dismissed as unimportant. Note again that, through silence, they pay tribute to the greatest "passers" of all, the Latinos and Arab-Americans, by being careful not to mention their embarrassing relationship to the "race" they claim to champion.

In Love on Trial, Lewis and Ardizzone use their editorial perogative to continually describe Alice Jones as "black" and "African American" as if these were objective facts. Yet, Alice was the daughter of immigrants from England. She had no ancestors among American "Negroes" or even mulattoes. Her mother was described as "pure white" and her father's ancestry was actually unknown. He was the son of a working class white Englishwoman and a father who was presumed to be from one of the colonies of the British empire. To this day, Alice's paternal grandfather has not been identified -- racially or otherwise. Her father, George Jones, was darker than "white" but otherwise had no Negroid characteristics. Culturally, the Jones family (including two other daughters) did not consider themselves "black" or "Negro" and did not participate in "Negro" organizations. Like many mixed families, they varied their answers when completing the "race" question on official documents. Sometimes they were "colored" and sometimes "white." The authors admit that "colored" was not synonymous with "black" or "Negro," and the Jones family did not consider an admission of "colored blood" to be synonymous with accepting membership in the "Negro race."

The irony, again, is that the actual facts of the case show the ambiguity of mixed-race status. If Alice had been "black," she would not have defeated Rhinelander's suit. She would not have acquired massive sympathy from working class "whites" as a poor working class girl mistreated by a cowardly, high society cad who professed his undying love and them submitted to the authority of his aristocratic father. Also, contrary to the "passing" myth (upon which the "lying" about "race" accusation rested), Leonard was well acquainted with Alice's parents, her sisters, and even a really "black" brother-in-law. He often visited their home while he was courting Alice. The jury realized that Alice's husband didn't care about her ancestry until his father put the screws to him.

Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking yet....
Review: This book was recommended by my Dean, so of course I had to read it. The issues raised in this book are very thought provoking. What does it mean to be Black in America? Who is Black? Does the media influence or reflect the views of society? I enjoyed this book although the writing was at time sensationalized. Most of the information comes from newspaper archives which the writers then interpret, so we never really hear from Rhinelander or Alice in their own words. It was interesting that people in the North felt they were less racist than the South, yet they continued to provide coverage of the case along the same racial lines. Goes to show, same racism, new face. Overall, this book wasn't bad.