Apologies for getting this up so late, I ended up being knocked out with a bad migraine yesterday and did not get this up when I planned to.
This week we looked at the 1894 divorce case filed by the plaintiff Aaron Hershfield against his relatively new wife Dell (also spelled as Della) Hershfield. The two both were residents of Helena, Montana when they met in 1893. Aaron, brother of Lewis, ran a private bank with his brother and taught accounting at one of the local collages. Aaron was reported to be a very outgoing, if not the brightest, person and came from a Jewish background. Della, whose maiden name was Della Hogan, came from an Irish Catholic background and met Aaron during his work as a teacher by being one of his students; Opposites attract, as they say, and Della and Aaron soon fell in love. By September of 1893 they had gone off together to the world fair in Chicago and shortly thereafter gotten married in October. Within a year and a few short months, by November Della was pregnant with a daughter. Also around this time Aaron fills his divorce suit while residing in Cass, North Dakota. And thus the war of the Hershfields begins.
The story woven by Aaron, the plaintiff, was that Della was a woman without morals who coerced and threatened him into marriage (later he would add that her sister and relatives were in league with her machinations). Or, as an article in the St. Paul globe on Dec 3rd, 1894 put it, “plaintiff claimed, he said, that two armed men forced him to accompany the defendant to the office of a justice of the peace, where they were married under duress.” He further claimed that she did this with an eye towards his fortunes, had always had a bad character and loose, and that she was faking ill health and draining him via over abundant expenses. Della, the defendant, for her part claimed that Aaron had abandoned her, that she was pregnant and that the costs incurred could not be helped due to her powerlessness to support herself and state of her health. In her affidavit she further denied the charges against her character and goes on to blame Aaron’s brother and step sister in turning him against her.
John McConnell was the judge who presided over the case. Many witnesses testimony was presented during the case and the evidence produced ran the gambit from testimonies to telegraphs, letters and hand drawn maps. Going off newspaper accounts of the case, it seems that the telegraph evidence was never examined and was struck from the record because Judge McConnell felt the jury had enough evidence and had come to a conclusion such that reviewing the telegraphs was not worth the extra few days it would elongate the case (from a cursory glance it appears that the telegraphs would have aided Della’s storyline of events). The letters did not reveal much either, save that Aaron stuck to his claim against Della’s character within them and was show, via letters, to be trying to persuade others to this same conclusion.
The real interest of this case and its related evidence came in the form of the witness testimonies. Many witnesses were called both for the defendant and for the plaintiff. The witnesses for the plaintiff claimed that Della was in good health, as seen during the fair and other times. This can be seen for example in the affidavit of Fred B. Morrill and testimony of the bellhop L. E. Bailey who was also a room clerk during the World’s fair. The problem with these testimonies is that they are claiming Della is healthy a full month or more (one puts the fair during august) before the time period in conflict- in other words they don’t seem very relevant nor, with the discrepancy in times given, very credible.
Several of the testimonies, like Bailey’s, go on to claim that Della was certain places or met certain people that made her seem corrupt and “showed to me that she was a fast woman.” (Bailey testimony, page 27). The testimonies placing Della at shady locations often were accompanied by a photo being shown to the witness in question. What later was revealed, as the St. Paul newspaper points out as well as the testimonies of S. A. Billig, Max Stein, and the three men from the detective agency show, is that there was a question of authenticity; going by the testimony of the tailor S. A. Billig that the man claiming to be Max Stein falsified a photo of Della and schemed to make him give false witness. Furthermore, the testimony of the detectives showed that Max Stein may in fact have been Lewis Michaels in disguise, working for the Holzberg firm for the plaintiff, and whom had a bad reputation for using underhanded means to win cases. The judge ruled to strike the evidence given concerning this by claiming that it did not show “that the Hershfields authorized hiring of perjured testimony.” Going by the newspapers, to sum the situation up, “The defense took exception on the grounds that the plaintiff’s own witnesses testified they had been engaged by Holzberg, and thus the agency was established. Bee is a Helena gambler, who came here as witness for the plaintiff, but testified for the defense,” (Dec 3rd, 1894 St. Paul globe daily globe article). Even without this evidence counted, however, the fact also remained that no witness against the character of Della Hogan could be found from the city of Helena itself.
When all was said and done, Judge McConnell ruled in favor of the defendant who was awarded damages including of which required the plaintiff to pay her debts and legal counsel. The prevailing perspective became that Della Hogan’s marriage was valid and that she had been unfairly dumped by her husband, who employed character assassination in an attempt to be rid of her. Keep in mind that in the 1890’s a case such as this would be biased, as far as the public mind was concerned, towards the position of the women unless it could be proved she was not worthy of being seen as a “lady.” As the Grossberg book we read this week points out, the public perception of women’s weakness and dependence could work for them in divorce cases. Even the newspapers touch on this element when they state that “when he spoke of the character of Miss Hogan as a maid, and the fate that awaited her if the whim of a heartless man were to be granted, the court room was filed with the sobs of the aged mother and ladies who have from the outset espoused the cause of the young bride.” (Dec 3rd, 1894 article in the St. Paul daily globe).
So who was the victor of the war of the Hershfields? Undeniably Della was. But if all the evidence is taken into account, it seems that both sides had their own ambiguities. We may never know why this case was sparked, and so soon after the marriage was indulged, although I suspect from what I have read family involvement on both sides may have played a role in lighting the fuse. And while the case may have been closed and the marriage saved, evidence in newspapers suggests that the underlying animosity was still present afterwards and eventually boiled over into a bad outcome for both parties involved. All and all, this case was merely a prelude to a yet more tragic and ongoing tale, but it is important to study because of what it reveals about gender standards and perceptions of marriage during this time period when both were starting to become in a state of flux.
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