begging them for time to pay back $1,000 that he owed them from his unearned retainer.
“The truth is that before these terrible times I had about $300,000, in what seemed perfectly good securities. They are not now worth more than ten and are not paying dividends,” Darrow told White, in what the latter called a “most pathetic” plea. “Paul had about the same but he owed quite a large amount and for a year I have been giving him every cent I could to save what he had. The debt is now reduced to about $10,000 but the value of his stock has been reduced much more.…
“I had intended returning $1,000, but it looks from here as if I was broke entirely,” Darrow wrote White. It took him until the summer of 1933 to refund all the money.21
Chapter 21
CLOSING
The old ghosts creep out of the dimming past.
Just before one a.m. on September 13, 1931, on the island of Oahu in the territory of Hawaii, a car full of late-night partygoers were startled to see an intoxicated young woman step out into the glare of their headlights on a desolate stretch of Ala Moana Road. She waved them to a stop. “Are you white people? Thank God,” said Thalia Massie. “Please take me back to my husband.”
Thalia’s face was badly swollen, as if she had been beaten. She told the Good Samaritans that she had left a party at a Waikiki inn and, as she walked along the sidewalk toward the beach, was grabbed by a group of Hawaiian men, struck in the face when she struggled, and dumped in a clearing on the side of the road. A lady in the car asked the obvious question, but tactfully. Had the abductors hurt Thalia in any other way? “No,” she said.
It was after Thalia Massie got home and was reunited with her husband that she declared she was raped. He was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, and the news moved quickly through the great base at Pearl Harbor. The rumors were lurid, and untrue. “They had violated her in every respect and … orifice,” one sailor recalled. “They kicked her and broke her pelvis and they bit the nipple practically off one of her breasts … They broke her nose. Blackened both of her eyes, of course. On her face was a perfect imprint of a rubber heel, where they stomped on her.”1
The navy and the Hawaiians had an uneasy relationship, dating back to America’s seizure of the islands in the 1890s. And then there was this: Thalia was white, and her alleged ravagers were brown. Admiral Yates Stirling, the southern-born commandant in Hawaii, was informed that the wife of one of his officers had been gang-raped by “dark-skinned … half-breed hoodlums.” He resisted his initial impulse, which was “to seize the brutes and string them up on trees.”
Thalia was twenty years old. Her parents were Granville Roland Fortescue, a cousin of Teddy Roosevelt, and Grace Bell Fortescue, a doyenne of Washington, D.C., society. Thalia had been but sixteen when she married Tommie Massie, a Kentucky-born Naval Academy graduate about to join the fleet. Her wedding photograph showed a doll-like innocent with large eyes and dark blond hair. When five Hawaiians were arrested and charged with Thalia’s rape, the news sent navy officials, members of Congress, and many of their constituents into an ugly fury. The islands were portrayed as a steamy hell where brown savages preyed upon the wives and daughters of American servicemen. Naval officials threatened to pull the fleet from Pearl Harbor, a move that would devastate the local economy. In Washington, Admiral William Pratt, the chief of naval operations, declared that indolent Hawaiian officials had sanctioned a plague of sexual assaults on white women—forty was the fanciful number that he cited.2
But there were elements of Thalia’s account that didn’t add up. At first, she told the authorities that she could not identify her abductors or their car. Yet when the boys were arrested and presented to her she claimed to recognize them, despite her shock and the haze of painkillers. As the night went on, and the police radio blared the number of their license plate, she “remembered” it as well. The recovery of her memory was convenient to the point of dubious. She had extremely poor vision and wasn’t wearing her glasses on that moonless night.
The crime had taken place amid a series of personal and family crises for Thalia. She was sullen, often drunk,