Cassie Chadwick died on her 50th birthday after a long period of declining health. The doctors blamed neurasthenia, an ill-defined condition that had entered the public consciousness less than 40 year prior. It was, they reasoned, a disease of farm wives and businesspeople, a condition that also found notable patients in the form of writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust.
It was also a profoundly American disease, caused by “the hurry, bustle and incessant drive of the American temperament,” per William Sadler. Fellow psychologist William James simply called it “Americanitis.” The Ontario-born Chadwick was none of the above, but was undeniably possessed by an entrepreneurial spirit. She had been struck by a nervous collapse some time before, rendering her blind. She suffered heart and stomach problems, struggled to sleep and shed 20 pounds.
Her illness earned a paragraph in The New York Times, her death a full column with the headline, “Began to Sink Early Yesterday – Son Telegraphed For.” It explained that she had died peacefully, but alone, after slipping into a coma hours before. The paper added matter-of-factly that “no friends or relatives waited at her bedside, only the prison physician and hospital attendants.” Traveling from Cleveland, her 20-year-old son, Emil Hoover, arrived at the Columbus facility a day later.
The prison had been skeptical about her claims of declining health. Ohio State Penitentiary told the press, “if it is found she is able, she will be put to work washing or other heavy work. If not, she will be placed in the sewing department.” It was a cold response to her health struggles, from a facility that had previously allowed her to hold onto trunks full of personal effects, owing to her celebrity status. Given her track record, however, a touch of skepticism was warranted.
Two years prior, she’d made headlines, displacing coverage of Theodore Roosevelt on the day of the young president’s inauguration. The media declared it the trial of the new century. For Andrew Carnegie, it was the first opportunity to cast eyes on the woman who had amassed a fortune pretending to be a secret daughter, born out of wedlock. The steel tycoon willing attend the case into which he had unknowingly been thrust.
“But if you are asked the direct question on the stand, Mr. Carnegie is Cassie L. Chadwick your daughter?” a reporter asked ahead of his court appearance. “What will you say?”
“I shall say as I am now saying to you,” Carnegie answered, “that this Chadwick woman is not my daughter, that she is not related to me, that I have never seen her to my knowledge and that I have never heard of her until her fraudulent acts were made public.”
For her part, Chadwick bookended the trial with fainting spells. It wasn’t her first legal entanglement, but it was by far the biggest. Her criminal career had begun in earnest at age 14, with a forged letter of inheritance . Within a few years, she was serving brief stint in an Illinois prison over fraud charges. In her early 30s, she received a 9.5-year sentence for forgery charges while working as a clairvoyant, but managed parole after only four, at the behest of then-Governor William McKinley.
The same year, she found herself running a brothel in Cleveland, soon making the acquaintance of Leroy Chadwick, a wealthy doctor who had recently lost his wife. She introduced herself as the widowed head of a boarding house. The widower noted the the building was, in fact, a brothel, a fact that triggered a fainting spell. She asked Leroy to take her out of the building, and within three years, he became her third — and final — husband.
During a trip to New York that same year, she arranged a chance encounter with James Dillon, a lawyer friend of her husband’s, at Manhattan’s upscale Holland House hotel. She walked by, grazing his arm. Anticipating his apology, Chadwick commented on the remarkable coincidence of running into him so far from home. Her plan set in motion, she convinced the lawyer to accompany her on a carriage ride to her father’s house.
Dillion was rendered speechless when they arrived in front of Carnegie’s mansion on 91st st. Knocking on the door, Chadwick managed to engage the housekeeper in conversation for half an hour, pulling a brow envelope from her coat as she left. As she sat down beside Dillion, he asked about the strange scene. She swore him to secrecy before explaining that Carnegie was her father. The tycoon had kept her existence hidden, paying her off in large sums, like the two promissory notes in the envelope she claimed were valued at a combined $7 million.
Over the next eight years, Chadwick secured $2 million in loans as the daughter of one of the richest men in American history. The banks, it seemed, were happy to oblige. When they needed a bit more convincing, she employed decades of forgery experience. Worst hit was the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin, which possessed a pair of notes ostensibly signed by Carnegie. One bore a $250,000 figure, the other twice that. Word of the scam got out, causing a massive run on the bank that resulted in bankruptcy.
“I am either an awful dupe or a terrible fool,” bank president T. C. Beckwith told the press between sobs. “I guess there is no doubt about my being a fool. I know I have done wrong and although crushed to earth myself, I do not propose to be made a scapegoat to shield the alias of others. Further concealment of the truth cannot help anyone.”
Chadwick managed to outmaneuver authorities for seven years, culminating in a horse chase through the Manhattan streets. U.S. Marshals believed she was fleeing the country, with plans to reunite with a stashed $1 million in Brussels. That she was accompanied in the carriage by her maid and teenage son only served to cement the notion. The trio exited, running through the rain to Broadway’s ornate Hotel Breslin. Chadwick entered her room and slipped into bed.
The marshals soon found the room, and in a final bid, Chadwick played sick. “I am very nervous and ill,” she explained meekly. “What shall I do? I am certainly unable to get up.” Her pursuers set up shop in a connecting room, waiting for the arrival of her doctor. He declared her fit enough to stand before a judge the following morning.
A two-page report the following day did its level best to drain all excitement from the perpetrator and her crimes,
This extraordinary performance was accomplished by a woman fifty years old, with neither physical beauty not personal charm; by one whose taste in dress is totally lacking in discernment, who is rather deaf and harsh-voiced, and who, when at all excited, speaks without regard to grammar. There is no romance in the Chadwick case. The doctor’s wife was not playing for any big and glittering stake; buying her way into palaces or corrupting prime ministers. All that she wanted the money for, apparently, was to fill her house in Cleveland with a conglomerate hodgepodge of stuff until it looked like an auction room.
Chadwick pled “not guilty.”
Sources:
Greed in the Gilded Age: The Brilliant Con of Cassie Chadwick by William Elliott Hazelgrove
Cassie Chadwick Dies in Prison https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1907/10/11/104997127.pdf
The High Priestess of Fraudulent Finance https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-high-priestess-of-fraudulent-finance-45/
Cassie Chadwick Scammed the Gilded Age Elite Out of Millions https://www.historyonthenet.com/cassie-chadwick-scammed-the-gilded-age-elite-out-of-millions-and-convinced-the-world-she-was-andrew-carnegies-bastard-daughter