My guest is Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of “Sin in the Second City”, “American Rose”, and “Liar, Temptress, Soldier. Spy”.
She discusses her new book, The Ghosts of Eden Park, and the wild story of George Remus, the most powerful bootlegger in early Prohibition-era America. It’s a roller-coaster tale – his rise, his fall, and the strange love triangle he shared with wife Imogene and Prohibition Agent Franklin Dodge, which would ultimately drive him to such rage that he would shoot her dead and face a sensational trial.
Transcript (Edited slightly for time)
Welcome everyone to another episode of the Most Notorious podcast. I’m Erik Rivenes, and happy to have you here with me as always. My guest today is Karen Abbott. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City, one of my all time favorites, American Rose and most recently Liar, Temptress, Soldier Spy, and I interviewed her about that particular book about 3 years ago or so for those of you who remember. Her new book, The Ghosts of Eden Park is an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon Best Book of August and a top fall history title for Publishers Weekly, which in its starred review called it a real life page turner that will appeal to fans of Erik Larson. Thank you for coming on again!
Thank you so much for having me.
So how long have you been working on this book?
Well I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. You know I actually was thinking about this book even when I was working on Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy and that’s partly because I got the idea for this book from the TV show Boardwalk Empire, which probably many of your listeners know that was a TV show on HBO that ran for 5 seasons.
And it was this brilliant show that perfectly captured the dawn of the 1920s and how bootleggers were just beginning to circumvent prohibition laws, and nobody had yet heard about Capone, and there was this minor character named George Remus and he was this really odd and slightly menacing and he spoke of himself in the 3rd person and he stole every scene he was in, and I wondered if he was a real character, and indeed he was he was an actual person. The actual person also spoke of himself in the 3rd person and said things like “this is going to be a hell of a Christmas for Remus”, and “so many people want to kill Remus”. One of my favorite quotes of George Remus, the real person, was “Remus’s brain exploded”, and you would have to read the book to decide for yourself whether or not a brain explosion actually occurred.
(laugh) So George Remus was such a fascinating character. He was known as the “king of the bootleggers”. Was that a name bestowed upon him or one he gave to himself?
Um I think it was a combination of both. Remus was relentlessly self promoting and relentlessly reinventing himself and he was indeed “King of the Bootleggers”. This was somebody who was a German immigrant who rose from poverty to eventually, actually only after one year in the business, owned 35 percent of all the alcohol in the United States. Newspapers at that time are comparing him to Rockefeller and a Vanderbilt – you know – captains of industry, and when he got that moniker in the newspapers I think he wore it proudly. I never read any quotes by him saying that he was king of the bootleggers but I think he embraced it and quite enjoyed that moniker.
So his entrance into bootlegging, parallels with the beginning of Prohibition.
Exactly. So he was a lawyer in Chicago and he started getting clients who had a new type of violation. They were breaking the laws against Prohibition. And Remus looked at his client base, figured they weren’t very smart and that, he himself who was quite brilliant actually, had a chance to clean up. And he started scouring Prohibition – the regulations of the law, the Volstead Act, and he found a loophole that he could exploit which basically said that you could distribute alcohol for medicinal purposes. And to that end Remus quit his law practice and moved from Chicago to Cincinnati, because 80 percent of the country’s pre-Prohibition bonded whiskey was in a 300 mile radius of Cincinnati and he bought up those distilleries. He bought drug companies and then he got withdrawal permits so that he could, through the guise of these fake drug companies for medicinal purposes, withdraw all the whiskey from his warehouses. And the most brilliant part of this plan though was that he also organized a truck company, where his own employees would start carrying this alcohol for the curative medicinal market, ostensibly. And he had other people he paid, who went and then hijacked these trucks there by diverting all of that curative legal whiskey and putting it onto the illegal market. So he was basically robbing Remus to pay Remus, and he called this enterprise “the Circle”, and it was quite brilliant. Nobody else was doing it, especially not of this scale, and within a year, by 1921, owned 35 percent of all the liquor in the United States.
He went from an attorney’s salary to a multimillionaire, basically overnight. Just astounding.
Exactly. His estimates of his wealth fluctuate wildly but just to give you a wide range between twenty million and forty million. And that’s not adjusted for inflation. That’s in 1921 money.
So I’d love it if you could talk about George Remus more. What he looked like, his personality, his background.
Remus I have to say was one of the most bizarre, interesting and brazenly outlandish characters I’ve ever come across in history, which is saying a lot – I sort of specialize in outlandish and bizarre characters. But Remus takes the cake. I mean I spent about 4 months going through this transcript, which gave me very intimate details and insights into Remus his life and personality. Just to give you a few bizarre examples he did not like to wear underwear, which in the 1920s apparently was a great cause for concern – it was the sign of an unsound mind. He was very controlling. He did not like anyone telling him what to do. He was very athletic despite his stature. He was a short guy, he was stout, but he was very quick and swift and he often boasted about his swimming prowess. He had been a competitive swimmer in Chicago. He was very quick to anger he had no problems with physical confrontation. One of the instance I learned it was about how a man had done some business dealings with his 2nd wife Imogene, and he followed this man to Indiana and ended up nearly beating him to death with a cane. And he was also,you know, sort of sentimental and possessive and wrote these very unhinged letters to his wife, especially when she was beginning her affair with the Prohibition agent Franklin Dodge, who was, of course, the person who put Remus into jail.
He’s got kind of an Al Capone Mickey Cohen kind of build.
Yes, he absolutely does. But I think the really interesting thing about Remus was that – you know – Al Capone built his empire on systematic violence, and Remus was actually a brilliant guy. He was widely read – he was a voracious reader. He collected books. He was interested in art. He could converse with great intellect upon various subjects and he had social aspirations. This is somebody who wanted to belong to society. He wanted to sort of transcend his poor upbringing as a German immigrant and become friendly and on the same level with people like William Howard Taft and other prominent families in Cincinnati, and he, to that end, threw these very lavish parties. There’s a legendary party on New Year’s Eve 1921 in which he invited all of Cincinnati’s high society. None of them came, which gave him great disappointment but it was it was outlandish party. He lit guests cigars with one hundred dollar bills. He gave every woman of the party a brand new car. He slipped one thousand dollar bills under his guests’ dinner plates, and it’s rumored that this is one of the reasons why F. Scott Fitzgerald might have based Jay Gatsby on George Remus – these really lavish parties that he threw.
So he would end up being married twice, and had a daughter named Romola with his first wife, whom he would divorce before making his fortune, right?
Yes, they divorced when he was a lawyer in Chicago and he actually met his second wife while he was practicing law. She was a quote unquote dust girl in his office (so a cleaning person) in his office, and she told him about the terrible divorce that she was enduring with her own husband, who was philandering and sort of running around and not paying child support. And Remus also was mentioning the problems he was having with his first wife, Lillian. So they sort of bonded over that, and Remus offered to take care of her divorce, gratis. So, you know, she didn’t have to pay. She also could stop paying rent on her apartment in Evanston. He decided to pay all of her bills – he gave her an allowance. He moved in with her and they became a couple fairly quickly, and I think that Remus was attracted to Imogene’s sort of sense of glamour, and she also had the same social aspirations as he did, and I think Imogene was smart enough to know that she was hitching herself to a very smart man who was poised to make millions of dollars as a bootlegger.
Can you talk about their relationship? How they interacted, and the kind of things he confided to her?
Yeah, they were very close in the beginning. Remus didn’t trust any women I don’t think except for Imogene. He called her his prime minister, he involved her in all of his business actions. He let her read paperwork, he consulted her on deals, he sought her advice. He actually considered her an equal in that sense. I guess he sensed that she was sort of a savvy player in her own right, and he wanted her approval to a certain degree. And Imogene played this ingenue, although the newspapers of the time called her, quote, “a middle aged flapper” and they had their whole diatribes against middle age flappers. But Imogene was in her late thirties when she met George, and not too much younger than him, maybe 6 or 7 years, and she ended up calling him “Daddy” – that was her nickname for him, “Daddy”.
I know you mentioned that he personally had a temper, but in business he was a little bit different than his counterparts, in that he preferred paying people off with money, as opposed to automatically striking out in violence against people he wanted to influence.
Yeah, I think that’s true. Remus very successful, I think, because he tried to be discreet – as discreet a somebody with as large an operation as he had could possibly be – and he was willing to pay thousands upon thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably into the millions of dollars worth of bribes, at all levels of government. At one point he was partnering with Jess Smith, who was the right hand man of Attorney General Harry Daugherty. And also on a par with Warren Harding. The whole Ohio Gang in the White House was very corrupt and all, you know, in bed to one extent or another with bootleggers. And that was working very well for Remus, and I think he was sort of too smart in a way to messy things up with that with a bunch of murderers.
One of his smarter moves was setting up shop at this place nicknamed Death Valley Farm. Can you explain how he accrued the farm and the role it served in his operations?
Sure. Death Valley Farm came about because Remus feared whiskey pirates, which was a real problem for bootleggers at the time. And pirates – they weren’t pirates in the “ahoy matey” sense – they were basically fellow bootleggers who would, you know, go attack somebody’s supply, tie up any watchman, bound and gag people who were guarding the alcohol, steal everything and sort of spirit it away and sell it on their own markets. And Remus was attacked by a group of them once, and basically fought all of them off. They still managed to steal his whiskey that night but he held his own. But after that incident he consulted with a friend, his lieutenant really, George Connors, who becomes a very important character in the story, to ask him to find a secure place and Death Valley was the answer. It was in this little hamlet not too far from Cincinnati. You had to drive down a long road. It was down a hill. There were a bunch of outhouses, places where you could scatter weapons and watchmen, and it was a really well regulated and well guarded sort of encampment. And they named it Death Valley in honor of whiskey pirates who tried to enter and were never heard from again.
So every good bad guy needs an adversary. Would you say that Mabel Walker Willebrandt was the force of good in the story?
Yeah, she was a perfect protagonist and also a great foe for Remus, you know, because she was also such an unexpected and strange character in her own right. Mabel Walker Willebrandt was named by Warren Harding, the assistant attorney general of the United States, in 1921. Now women had only had the right to vote in America for 9 months at this time. Willebrandt was 33 years old and only 5 years out of law school and had never prosecuted a single criminal case, and suddenly here she was in charge of all Prohibiton cases all across the country including cases against Remus. And to make matters even more difficult for her she was almost wholly deaf, and used an elaborate hairdo to cover up the hearing aids that she had to wear before she went to court. And I can’t even imagine her how she handled her job; the pressures of her job, and the sexism she encountered. Many people – many men and even women, were not happy with the fact that, you know, women suddenly had the right to vote and here was this woman who was now the most powerful – one the most powerful people in the United States government, and she was incredibly thick-skinned. And one of my favorite anecdotes from her childhood, that sort of sums up how her personality formed, was when she bit a pet cat’s ear, and to teach her a lesson her father but her ear back.
(Chuckle) So one of the things that Willebrandt does, in focusing on Remus – she needs to dispatch Prohibition agents to investigate his operations. How did Remus first register on her radar and what methods did she use to deal with him?
That’s a good question. I should say that that is one of the reasons she was appointed by Warren Harding, you know, as I had mentioned, that that administration was in bed with a lot of the bootleggers, so they figured out who better to appoint, to be in charge of all prohibition cases than this little lady? She’s just out of law school, you know, she probably won’t really do anything and she won’t be a threat to the cozy relationship we have going with all these bootleggers, and of course the irony being that she gets into office and immediately starts kicking some ass.
And she you know to Harry Daugherty’s credit he did not impede her work. I think he realized to some extent that he had to at least keep up the appearance of conducting an office that was adhering to the law. And how she first became aware of Remus’s operations from a letter that Daugherty put on her desk, and it was from an attorney and a federal prosecutor in Cincinnati who was basically talking about the large scale whiskey operation that was running in the city, and it was so overwhelming they had never seen anything like it before, and they really needed Washington’s help to squash this whiskey ring. So that’s how George Remus got on her radar, and she immediately set to work trying to figure out what was going on there, and one of the agents she dispatched to investigate Remus’s empire was her ace of detectives, as he came to be called, Prohibition agent Franklin Dodge, which of course started a love triangle that would really unravel the whole situation.
What were Franklin Dodge’s credentials?
Well his largest credential was that his father was a very powerful politician in Michigan who had friends in high places. He was friends with Supreme Court justices and various other people, and he got Dodge a job in the federal government and he worked his way up to becoming an agent with the Justice Department. And Remus was his first major Prohibition case, and so I think that Dodge also figured he had a lot to prove, and invested himself in Remus’s life, and actually stationed himself outside of Remus’s mansion in Cincinnati to keep tabs on him day and night.
And at one point, before this love triangle begins, Remus thinks that he might be able to actually work with Dodge. He is so used to being able to payoff whoever he needs to pay off with huge amounts of money. He thinks he’s invincible…
So what happened, Willebrandt succeeds in getting Remus put behind bars. She helps the Cincinnati prosecutors build a case against him, and Remus finds himself at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. And at some point Franklin Dodge ends up there because he was sent by Willebrandt to conduct an investigation of the corrupt prison warden who was taking bribes, of course, from Remus and the other bootleggers, and Remus heard from a bootlegger friend that Dodge was amenable to bribes, he would be willing to have a quid pro quo for a certain exchange of money, and he was interested in trying to get his sentence reduced or or commuted altogether, and he told Imogene, his wife Imogene, who had been visiting him constantly, you know, getting down on her hands and knees scrubbing his cell, and basically doting on him in prison as she had doted on him back in Cincinnati at their home. He tells Imogene to “cultivate” Dodge, and Imogene, who was always looking for a new angle, of course did not have to be asked twice.
So Remus had what he thought was an ace in the hole, this guy Jess Smith. He was a fixer – getting paid 20, 30 , 50 thousand dollars every time he sat down with Remus. And in exchange Smith would see to it that Remus never saw the inside of a prison… So when Remus is targeted, and ends up in jail, he’s not too happy about it…
Right, yeah. Jeff Smith and Remus had a very cozy arrangement going for a while. They would meet frequently at hotels across the eastern coast and the Midwest, and as he said Remus would hand over vast sums of money in exchange for number one, withdrawal permits that would allow Remus to keep withdrawing whiskey from his his various distilleries, and these would actually be government withdrawal permits and not falsified permits so it sort of an actually a layer of protection there. And Smith also did promise protection against the law. He said that there would be no prosecution against Remus and if against all odds there was a prosecution Remus wouldn’t be convicted, and against even further odds if Remus was convicted he would never actually go to jail. Smith would be able to get him a pardon from Harry Daugherty, the Attorney General, and of course all of these promises fell through and Remus does end up in jail much to Remus’s anger and discontent.
And Jess Smith commits suicide…
Yes, that’s what people think. You know first there was all of this rumor and speculation that Smith was actually made to look as if he had committed suicide, and he was actually murdered, but all signs really point to his committing suicide.
So now that Remus is in jail – he has this hot and cold relationship with Imogene. When she visits, they fight a lot, they make up a lot, but meanwhile he’s living in the lap of luxury….
Yeah, I mean that was part of the reason that the warden of the Atlanta penitentiary was being investigated by Dodge, at Willebrandt’s orders. He was taking bribes from all these bootleggers and in exchange Remus and other men there were living high on the hog. Remus and this one bootlegger, Savannah bootlegger named Willie Harr, actually had dinner together every night in this dining room with complete with tablecloth and flowers, and a maid to cook their meals. Remus was able to redecorate a cell. They had a radio. They had sort of socialized opportunities, they had their own library, they had cushy jobs within the prison. But in spite of all this, Remus was miserable. He really desperately wanted to regain his freedom and so that’s where he started thinking about ways he might connect with Franklin Dodge.
So when in his mind does he stop believing that Imogene is on his side, and realize that she’s double crossing him instead?
You know I think that really Willie Harr, the bootlegger I mentioned, the Savannah guy who you know was Remus’s best friend in prison, I guess you could say, started warning him. He said, you know, I’ve been hearing rumors about Imogene. Rumors that she is conducting herself in an unbecoming fashion, and you know the delicate language they used back in the 1920s. And Remus was furious and he basically shot the messenger and attacked Harr for saying such a thing. Later they made up, Remus apologized. That was one thing – Remus always came back with a very gentlemanly apology after he had one of his outbursts. He apologized and then the evidence sort of became clear to him. When Imogene filed for divorce it accelerated what Remus called his “diseased mind”.
So I want to ask you about this “diseased mind” thing. What is your opinion on this? Do you think he was suffering from a mental illness or was it some sort of a physical ailment?
You know it’s such a good question and the short answer is I don’t know. There’s no way to really know exactly. I mean even the psychiatrist that examined him didn’t come to any one conclusive answer about what his mental state was and if he was suffering from anything and if so what. I will say this, I think that Remus was absolutely in the legal definition of the word, I think he was sane, but I also think that he couldn’t help himself in that he was he eccentric and strange and compulsive, impulsive, and sort of like I say he just couldn’t help himself. It’s kind of I guess this delicate balance between sanity and insanity and the sense that he knew right from wrong. But he could not in certain circumstances contain himself. It was impossible for him to do so. I am by far not in any way shape or form a doctor or psychiatrist so that’s my sort of lay opinion. I did read a lot about what was the thinking on insanity at the time, and what did it mean to different people and everybody had a different definition of it and I think even one of the doctors that examined Remus said that if you asked 50 physicians not one of them will come up with the same answer in terms of what insanity truly means.
While Remus is in jail things turn for the worse for him, if they couldn’t get worse already. As you mentioned his fellow inmate begins filling him in on his cheating wife and then the stories get more and more horrible for him. What exactly is going on? What are Imogene and her new beau Franklin Dodge doing behind his back?
Well that’s the thing. Remus’s fears were all justified. She absolutely was carrying on a torrid affair with a Prohibition agent who put Remus in jail. I do have to say, I mean that would infuriate anybody. I think it’s safe to say. She was plotting with him to steal Remus’s money, his possessions, his whiskey certificates. She said things like she would have him sent back to Germany. You know she threatened him with deportation and she sort of made inroads with the authorities on that front. So Remus’s fears were absolutely founded and he gathered evidence that she was conducting all these various plots against him.
Including murder. Imogene plotted to murder him.
It hadn’t done him any good either that just before he’d gone to prison, he’d transferred his assets into her name.
Yeah. You know it was a sign of his trust in her that he that he did that before he left. He figured, you know, they had this sort of loving conversation, at least in his mind, before he went to jail in which they promised that as soon as he got out they would retire. They’d go somewhere quiet, they would quote unquote live a life of peace, they would tour the jungles of Africa and sort of settle down somewhere out of the public view, and I think Remus truly believed this would happen. And it was something that sustained him when he was in jail. And to hear what was happening on the outside while he was stuck inside, without any means to do anything about it, was really sort of contributing to his mental condition, and you know spinning his own mind in dangerous ways.
And she would accuse him of physical abuse during their relationship as well, right?
Yes, she did, and to be fair his first wife also did, and Remus of course did have a violent temper and you know it’s easy to believe that there were some physical altercations and some abuse with his wives, although of course his first wife would come around to defend him in a very bizarre way, in my opinion.
And again, as things get stickier and stickier with them, Remus starts learning that Dodge is actually singling him out…
Yeah, there was a trial for the corrupt warden at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Remus, Willie Harr and a few other bootleggers were moved to Atlanta from Athens, they were temporarily housed in Athens, and they were moved back to Atlanta in case they had to testify against anybody in this trial, and some of the prisoners were allowed out at night into Atlanta sort of under a supervised watch, they had a curfew, they had to be back at a certain time. It’s kind of remarkable to think about today to just tell a bunch of prisoners of go out have some fun, just be back by 9. But Remus was the lone holdout and he asked around and figured out that it was actually Franklin Dodge who was ordering Remus to stay put inside his hotel room under supervision, while all of his colleagues his bootlegging colleagues were allowed to go roam around Atlanta, so that also of course heightened his suspicions about what Imogene and Dodge were up to.
So how long was he in jail for, the first time around?
So Remus, his sentence was divided into two parts. He was serving two years in the Atlanta penitentiary for violating the Volstead Act. And then he had to serve an additional year in an Ohio county jail for operating a nuisance, quote unquote. There was a violation about operating a nuisance at Death Valley Farm. And it was in this last year, serving the sentence in Ohio county jail, that Remus’s, I think his mental and physical condition really deteriorated. George Connors his friend and lieutenant was worried about him all the time. Connors actually traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with Mabel Walker Willebrandt, begging her to move him to a more hospitable facility where he might be treated a bit better and have some light and a chance to exercise and Willebrandt for once took mercy on him, but it’s fair to say at this time there were several incidents of brainstorms which was at the time a euphemism for sort of an insanity, these little sort of seizures or incidents that exhibited were signs of insanity according to the medical thinking of the time, and Remus for suffering brainstorms on a fairly consistent basis and alarming everybody who came into contact with him at the time.
There are so many instances in the book where he is just so devastated by her actions. One of the worst for him is when he goes back to the house and finds all the furniture gone, and even worse, a few things left behind that were meant to taunt him.
Oh absolutely. It was one of my favorite scenes to write actually, when he discovers how she and Franklin Dodge had ransacked the house. And there was various testimony about how Imogene had done things like change the lettering, the etched monogram on one of the cars had previously been G. R. for George Remus and that she had changed that to read F.D. for Franklin Dodge and she also did the same for a set of china that was that that they had purchased together. Also leaving a bunch of men’s clothing that was not Remus’s size and things like that just to taunt Remus, as he said, which further sparked his brain storms and his dangerous thinking when it came to Imogene.
Dodge gets fired right?
Dodge is eventually fired but I don’t think that really bothers him too much. You know Dodge was one of those guys that sort of failed upward, and he went right from being the ace Prohibition agent, to you know, cavorting around with bootleggers and stealing Remus’s money. In the end he doesn’t really pay for what he did, in my view.
So kind of the last straw for Remus is the divorce. She demands a divorce, but he still keeps trying to hold out. He obviously loved her tremendously and hoped against hope that she might come back to him, but once the divorce is asked for he completely falls apart.
Yeah absolutely. I absolutely think that he held out hope, but there were several instances where he offered to try to reconcile, and sometimes he wanted to reconcile under the guise of a settlement. He would lure Imogene over and say, you know, let’s work this out amicably. I will offer you a settlement so we can don’t have to have this messy divorce and hurt each other, but while he was offering the settlements his secret hope was that they were going to reconcile.
And you know it’s actually kind of heartbreaking even knowing what a bad guy Remus could be. You know, he would buy her flowers and candy, and his friends talked about how he beamed, and he was smiling, and very happy whenever he thought that he had the chance to reconcile with Imogene, and he definitely had that hope for quite some time after her betrayal.
So everything culminates on the first day of the divorce proceedings. Would you mind walking us through what he does when he spies her on that sidewalk?
Well I’d just like to say that he spies her, and he thought that he was going to catch Imogene with Franklin Dodge, but he sees Imogene with her daughter Ruth, whom Remus had actually adopted back when he and Imogene first got married, and he said the sight of her smile infuriated him. There was a car chase and he starts pursuing her through Eden Park in Cincinnati, and he also still at this time was worried that she was going to kill him. He had just received a visit the day before from a hitman who says that Imogene had hired him, so they have a showdown in Eden Park.
Things don’t go well for her. He ends up shooting her in the stomach. She doesn’t live long, and the details on how the murder went down are in the book. For all appearances it looks as though he has murdered her and many will argue that this is the case, but he doesn’t see it that way. And he doesn’t try to escape. He immediately turns himself in.
That’s true. He feels justified in what he did. He sort of proudly proclaims it at the police station, in rather horrifying language. I’ll let people who want to read the book see exactly what he says, but it was quite horrifying and it was really history’s most common defense. This was quote unquote an immoral woman, and she deserved to be removed for the betterment of society, so it just sort of was something that he carried around himself as a bit of a badge of honor in the beginning.
The trial is pretty amazing. One of the things he had despaired about when he had gone to prison, is that he’d lost his law license, which was really important to him, but suddenly he has the chance to become an attorney again. His own attorney this time, and he’s on cloud nine about it. He’s found a new reason to live.
Yeah I think that once he realized that he could defend himself – and he was such a brilliant man – I mean for how crazy and awful he was, he was also just undeniably brilliant, and sort of runs all roughshod all over the prosecution. He just outsmarts them in every step, and as soon as he is allowed, he gets the judge to allow him to start questioning his own potential jury members. They have to just let him continue on in the capacity as his own defense attorney, and he just sort of anticipates every move they’re going to make and, you know, in a very disturbing and perverse way has a lot of fun with it.
So what is his defense? How does he argue that he should not be found guilty for this?
Well his defense was quote unquote transitory insanity, which was a term at the time for temporary insanity, and he claimed that he was not well at the moment when he committed the crime, but as soon as the crime was committed he was immediately cured, and he stands before you now a sane and perfectly normal man. And I think that one of the important things about the trial is that Remus wasn’t the only one on trial. Prohibition was on trial. There were a lot of people in Cincinnati who had lost their jobs because of Prohibition, you know, brewers, bartenders, glass makers, bottle makers, barrel makers. All sorts of people who were employed in the alcohol industry lost their jobs and Remus was sort of a folk hero. He employed about 3500 people in Cincinnati during his heyday, and they did not think that Remus should have gone to jail in the first place. They were starting the trial from that standpoint you know. Here’s a guy who was already convicted of a stupid crime and now here is a crime that was born out of the first crime, and you know that was the lens through which a lot of people viewed that trial.
And you write that part of the problem for the prosecution was Imogene’s flapper lifestyle.
Yeah that’s the other thing. You know, as I was talking about in the beginning, people were not thrilled with the idea that their mothers and their wives and their girlfriends and their sisters and their daughters suddenly had the right to vote, and then they were suddenly in the workplace, and they were suddenly wearing shorter skirts, and were flouting conventional societal norms, and were smoking and dancing and being brazen, and they didn’t like this, and it was a way that women’s rights were also on trial. Imogene sort of symbolized a woman who dared to do what she wanted to do, be as a sort of brazen and as terrible as a man would be, and she dared to think that she could get away with it, and there were a lot of people who did not want her to get away with it.
In a lot of this book he’s slowly steaming in festering over Franklin Dodge. Even using this very colorful expression, “smash him”?
(laughs) There are a couple things…one of his favorite phrases was I want to crack a skull. I think he said that quite often. I want to crack a skull.
Right. Does he ever get a chance to confront Franklin Dodge?
He does not. Well, not at the end. Not after everything happened, but there are various instances where the two of them come into contact with each other, and there are people standing right there on guard to try to prevent any sort of physical altercations. But the two do have a few run-ins.
One of the other interesting aspects of the trial, among many, is that the prosecutor was the son of a former president of the United States.
Yes, Charlie Taft was the son of William Howard Taft, and he became a beloved figure in Cincinnati, but he was still sort of a novice as the city’s prosecutor when he took on the Remus trial, and I think that he
became aware very quickly of what he was up against, and Remus it should be noted, had a reputation in the courtroom as being very erratic. Weeping, pulling out his hair, jumping around, occasionally attacking opposing counsel physically. And I think that Taft really did not know what to handle him and Remus took advantage of that too.
So with all of these antics, and this defense of his, which wasn’t bought by everyone, but by the jury, he was ultimately found not guilty. What do you think is the reason for his acquittal?
Oh I think that sort of goes back to the idea of Prohibition being on trial. That’s what a lot of people had said at the end you know. He had already unjustly spent years in various jail cells and you know he had already gone through so much, and not only was he behind bars for these offenses that really shouldn’t have warranted jail time, in their view, he was also dealing with a woman who was, you know, going behind his back. And you know Remus had actually said before the trial began that he wanted a jury of all women, which was sort of a surprising statement, and then he clarified it by saying you know, there is no harsher judge than a woman, you know, standing in judgment before a woman who has betrayed her mate. Women are sort of their own harshest critics when it comes to betrayal, so that was his thinking and it ended up being I guess a very prescient way to view what was going to happen.
So what happened to him after the trial?
Remus sort of went about trying to regain his fortune. You know if Imogene succeeded at anything it was it was that she managed to bankrupt him. His money was never really recovered. If it was it wasn’t nearly to the extent of what he had once had the you know he had a pittance compared to his previous fortune, and he sort of lived out the rest of his days quietly and in obscurity.
Is there a moral to all of this?
You know if the book is asking any big questions, I would like to think, you know, what is the value of a human life, and sort of the capacity to deceive. Everybody in this book is capable in some degree of deception. Willebrandt deceives, Dodge deceives, Imogene deceives, Remus deceives, and they deceive others, they deceive themselves and it’s sort of just a question about to what extent can we do that and expect to get away with it, and if we do get away with it how how does it haunt us and do we ever truly get away with it if it stays with us on some level, so that’s where what was running through my mind went when I was detailing and writing and researching about these various plots that were percolating throughout the story.
Well thank you so much for your time.
And I thank you so much for having me.
Again I’ve been speaking to Karen Abbott. Her book is called The Ghosts of Eden Park.
