The question at the center of the Rhinelander trial was this: Did Alice misrepresent herself to her husband as white and withhold her true racial ancestry?
Alice and Leonard first crossed paths in September 1921, when 18-year-old Leonard was enrolled at an inpatient clinic in Stamford, Connecticut, to undergo treatment for a speech impediment and shyness. After meeting Leonard by chance, Alice’s sister, Grace, introduced the soon-to-be couple, who spent the early days of their relationship going to the movies, taking drives in Leonard’s car and dining at the Jones household.
In the winter of 1922, a Rhinelander family lawyer interrupted the lovers’ two-week stay at an upscale hotel in New York. To end the relationship, Leonard’s father sent his son away for the better part of a two-year separation from Alice. Nevertheless, the couple continued their courtship by exchanging hundreds of letters. They reunited in New York in early 1924, when Leonard turned 21 and inherited $340,000 from his grandfather (around $6.3 million today). The couple kept their rekindled relationship—and subsequent marriage—a secret from Leonard’s family. After hearing a rumor that Alice and Leonard had secretly wed, Leonard’s father, Philip Rhinelander, sent a secretary to New Rochelle to inspect the marriage record in person. “The father’s sobs were heard plainly over the wire” when he received telephone confirmation, the Daily News reported.
Did Philip go to great lengths to separate Leonard and Alice just because she was from the lower classes? While the father may have been in the dark about Alice being “colored,” the family chauffeur would testify at trial that Leonard was not. The driver, who was present at many of his young employer’s dalliances, said he’d confronted Leonard about dating the daughter of “a colored man.” As the chauffeur later told the court, Leonard said he didn’t “give a damn.”
Modern observers might wonder why racial misrepresentation was a matter for the court in 1924. While New York wasn’t among the 29 states that prohibited interracial marriage at the time, the social stigma and eugenics-related fears surrounding such unions caused the public to view the non-disclosure of one’s “colored” blood as an omission that could cause real harm.
Elizabeth Smith-Pryor, a historian at Kent State University and the author of Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing and the Protection of Whiteness, says the judge and the parties involved in the case essentially accepted, on its face, that misrepresentation of one’s race was “the kind of [alleged] fraud that reaches such a level that it hits at the essential [core of] marriage.” If the evidence supported Leonard’s case, the public generally agreed that he “should be allowed to end his marriage” over the deception.