The most famous lawyers of an era are often forgotten a generation later. Howe & Hummel are two perfect examples. In 1891, they were as eminent as anyone in New York City; by 1947 (when this book was published) their celebrity had vanished. For what were they known?
“They were the attorneys for all the major brothel owners. When seventy-four madams were rounded up during a purity drive in 1884, every one of them named Howe & Hummel as counsel. Mother Mandelbaum, the leading fence of the age, paid Howe & Hummel a retainer of five thousand dollars a year to defend her and her army of thieves. The firm had the legal business of General Abe Greenthal’s Sheeny Mob, a nationwide syndicate of pickpockets; of Chester McLaughlin’s Valentine Gang of forgers; and of the Whyos, an organization of thugs and killers that was perhaps the toughest of all the nineteenth-century gangs. William Mosher, the professional thief, and his partner, Joe Douglas, who confessed, as he lay dying, that he and Mosher were the kidnappers of Charlie Ross, were Howe & Hummel clients. Howe & Hummel represented the Pool Sellers Association, the trade agency of the city’s policy-shop owners and bookmakers. Charles O. Brockway, a counterfeiter so adroit that the United States Treasury once had to withdraw an issue of its own hundred-dollar bills because they were indistinguishable from his, found it expedient to pay Howe & Hummel in genuine coin of the realm.”
(The New Yorker is no longer written with such adroit confidence, but some of the references – Charlie Ross, “policy-shop owners” – are mystifying to 21st-century readers.) It is a paradox – or isn’t it? – to be rich and famous for defending the lowly and the profane.
Men of this era were like characters in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, to which they were contemporary: dressing in tweed coats and bedecked with diamonds.
Howe & Hummel disprove Bob Dylan’s deathless dictum: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” After reading Rovere’s book, one must amend it to: “To live outside the law you must be honest, or have a talented lawyer.”
The shocking dénouement is their politics. When they weren’t defending prostitutes and crooked politicians, they focused their immense intelligence on anarchists and freethinkers:
“In 1873, they were counsel to Mrs. Victoria Woodhall, the great spiritualist, feminist, lady broker, and candidate for President on the Equal Rights ticket, who, along with her sister, Tennie C. Claflin, and been indicted for allegedly sanity is in their weekly paper, Woodhall & Claflin’s Weekly. The eccentric sisters, children of some snake-oil vendors in Ohio, protégés of Commodore Vanderbilt on Wall Street, believe that marriage was an obsolescent institution, and to expose it as such they had published in the November 12, 1872 issue of their newspaper a rather meaty account of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher’s supposed affair with Mrs. Theodore Tilton, the wife of a prominent journalist, and a description of the even more suppositious seduction of two underage young ladies at the French Ball, by Luther V. Challis, a married and well-known dealer in stocks and bonds. For reasons best known to themselves, neither Beecher nor Challis would sue for slander, so Comstock had Mrs. Woodhall and Mrs. Claflin indicted for obscenity, specifying in his complaint that the indecent words were “token” and “virginity.” Sale of the Weekly was stopped, and the sisters hired hope Howe & Hummel as their attorneys. Howe handled the case in a manner that has a genuinely contemporary flavor. He made it into a free-press campaign and introduced the familiar camel’s-nose-under-the-tent argument. ’Intolerance is on the march,’ he said. ’If we lose this battle, who knows but what the Holy Bible, Shakespeare, and Lord Byron will share the fate of this suppressed journal.’” [He won.]