The Trouble in Room 519

Money, Matricide, and Marginal Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century

Thomas Aiello

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807176030
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

At approximately seven o'clock in the evening on May 7, 1950, Gordon Malherbe Hillman filled an empty bottle with water, capped it, and walked into his mother's room in the pair's fifth-floor suite at Boston's luxurious Copley Plaza Hotel. He then edged up behind the semi-invalid woman and bludgeoned her to death. Hotel staff had planned to evict the two the following day after several weeks of unpaid rent. Mounting debts had finally broken the fifty-year-old Hillman, a now-struggling author of mixed success, but it had not always been that way, as Thomas Aiello shows in his study of the life and work of this forgotten midcentury figure.As a youth, Hillman attended the prestigious Noble and Greenough School near Boston. Pursuing a career as a writer, he published several dozen pieces of short fiction and a critically acclaimed novel, Fortune's Cup (1941). Hollywood studios purchased the rights to two of his stories and made them into films, The Great Man Votes (1939) and Here I Am a Stranger (1940). But Hillman remained, for the most part, a middling magazine writer like the majority of fiction authors working during the Depression. Although most did not resort to acts of manic violence, Hillman's tenuous position in literary circles, along with his gradual descent into financial ruin, proved a far more common tale than the stories of literary success often pored over by critics and historians of this period.In The Trouble in Room 519: Money, Matricide, and Marginal Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century, Aiello weaves a compelling true crime narrative into his exploration of the economics of magazine fiction and the strains placed on authors by the publishing industry prior to World War II. Examining Hillman's writing as exemplary of Depression-era popular fiction, Aiello includes eight stories written by Hillman and originally published in prominent midcentury American magazines, including Collier's, Liberty, and McCall's, to provide additional context and insight into this trying time and tragic life.

1. CHICAGO

Carolyn Piper was a child of New England. She was born in Concord, New Hampshire, on May 11, 1876, to Joseph Piper and his wife, Carolyn.1 It was an auspicious time to grow up in New Hampshire. The Civil War decade saw the state’s population decrease by 2.5 percent, from 326,073 to 318,300, the only decade in the century during which the area did not add population. It picked up again soon after, as the state benefited from the development of water power and improved transportation that gave New Hampshire a place in the Gilded Age Industrial Revolution. From 1873 to 1897, six new cities were incorporated as the rural state became slightly more urban. Its laws developed accordingly. In 1871, the state began compulsory primary education. In 1876, the constitutional convention removed the requirement that state officials had to be Protestant. Twenty years prior, such an effort had been rejected. In 1881, the legislature created a State Board of Health, and ten years later it created a library infrastructure. Such developments led to new immigration, particularly from Canada and Poland. By 1890, the state’s population had increased substantially to 376,530.2 It was, in other words, a state and state population that was small but aspirational, where anything seemed possible, and such was an attitude that would become a core part of Carolyn’s outlook, to the point where her aspiration turned into delusions of grandeur. The foundations of those later reveries were built in Carolyn’s youth, in a modernizing and urbanizing New Hampshire that was a constituent part of the Gilded Age economy, in which corporate growth and the robber barons who built it made the United States a global economic juggernaut even as they simultaneously created a new urban poverty. The worst horrors of the consequences of that economic blight, however, were happening far from Concord. Carolyn could become anything she wanted, just like the country, and the repercussions would be minimal.

And so Piper moved to New York for an acting career and was successful. It was there in the glow of her newfound fame that she met Frank, and in February 1899, she married him. Frank H. Hillman was an aspiring manager in the soap industry. He was an older man, born in New York in 1868, the youngest son of George and Mary Hillman, and thirty-one at the time of his marriage to the twenty-five-year-old Piper.3

Or such was the way that Carolyn liked to tell it. In a world where you could become anything you wanted, why not become a famous, successful actress? Such were the lessons of her Gilded Age New England upbringing, and her largesse would always be so much greater when filtered through her own imagination. From 1891 to 1895, for example, and against her own testimony, Piper was still in Concord teaching elocution and living with her father. By the time of her wedding to Frank, Carolyn had moved to the big city, but that city wasn’t New York. She was living in Boston at the Hotel Oxford in the city’s Back Bay near Copley Square—the same area where she would violently die fifty-five years later.4

Regardless of Carolyn’s time on the stage and the level of success she achieved there, after her wedding in 1899 the new couple moved to Chicago, where Frank took a job as a private secretary for the N. K. Fairbank Soap Company. Though Fairbank’s offices were housed in the Tribune Building in downtown Chicago, the Hillmans opted for a comfortable upper-middle-class life in the suburbs, moving around from Evanston to Oak Park to Des Plains and back as the first decade of the twentieth century passed. Soon after their first arrival in Evanston, on August 31, 1900, the couple had a child, Gordon Malherbe Hillman.5

Turn-of-the-century Chicago was a city adjusting to massive demographic upheaval. In 1850, Chicago had roughly fifty thousand residents. Thirty years later, it had five hundred thousand. In 1900, the city had 1.7 million residents, that growth built on eastern and southern European immigration and the development of industries reliant on the burgeoning post–Civil War railroad boom. At the end of the Civil War, there were 3,272 miles of railroad track west of the Mississippi River. By 1890, there were 72,473. The spread west of the railroads, combined with a growth in the mining and ranching businesses, expanded the country farther and farther west. And when the railroads came, the beef borne of that ranching could for the first time be efficiently transported back East. Cattle cars on railroads took cows to the intersecting points of the railroads, namely Chicago. It was this ranching boom that grew the infamous Chicago stockyards, making Chicago the meatpacking leader of the entire world and inspiring horror stories about the industry like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. It was Chicago’s growing meat industry, in turn, that prompted the 1870s innovation of refrigerated railroad cars, which could take the processed meat to retailers all over the country. That combination of railroad technology and electricity also helped Chicago develop a public transportation system that allowed its population to spread farther and farther from the city center. Immigrants and rural laborers coming to the city for work moved into cramped, stuffy tenement buildings, while white-collar businessmen and robber barons built giant homes and created the vision of excess that defined the Gilded Age.6

Those clear class lines, combined with the European origin of much of Chicago’s working-class population, made the city a hub of labor radicalism. Low pay, on-the-job injuries, and other problems sparked the growth of unions throughout the country in the era. The principal labor organization of the 1880s, for example, was the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia. It was a largely conservative group by any modern or European standard. Some branches admitted women, some, African Americans, but most did not. The Knights of Labor was very reluctant to strike, but others weren’t.7

In Chicago, in 1886, there were a variety of local labor organizations, made up largely of immigrants. Because of those immigrants, Chicago was the American hotbed of labor radicalism, and throughout the 1880s, anarchists infiltrated various unions in the city. On May 4, 1886, anarchists held a protest meeting at Haymarket Square in response to police violence against union organizing. The rally began peacefully, but when police showed up, someone in the crowd threw a bomb into the phalanx of police, and the police opened fire. The ensuing battle left fifty people wounded and ten dead.8 Chicago responded to what became known as the Haymarket Riot by cracking down on labor and anarchism. Eight of the protesters were convicted (without evidence) of conspiracy to commit murder, and four of them were hanged. “I arrived in Chicago on an awfully hot July day,” said Jessie Binford to Studs Terkel of her 1906 migration to the city. “Every other place was a saloon, the streets were dirty. The air was heavy. I had left the beautiful Iowa countryside, and I wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake.”9 With the labor unrest, the poverty, and the resulting blight, the middle class responded by moving to the outskirts of town, creating suburban communities.

Evanston, for example, Hillman’s birthplace, had been incorporated since 1863 but became a city in early 1892, just a few years before Hillman’s birth. Oak Park, another suburban home of the Hillmans, grew from a population of five hundred in 1872 to one of almost two thousand in 1890 and almost ten thousand in 1900. By 1910, it had more than twenty thousand residents.10

They were cities modern in their construction, as the last quarter of the eighteenth century had been spent rebuilding from the Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed much of Chicago and left a third of its residents homeless. It was the city of Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted, and despite its labor unrest, it was also the home of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, held to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. There were four hundred buildings across seven hundred acres on the south side of the city, home to many of those factories and tenements that had seen so much labor unrest. The exhibition grounds and buildings were known as the “White City,” a neoclassical monstro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION: The Life and Times of Gordon Malherbe Hillman
• 1. CHICAGO
• 2. NOBLES
• 3. THE TRANSCRIPT
• 4. THE CAPE
• 5. THE MAGAZINES
• 6. HOLLYWOOD
• 7. THE COPLEY
• 8. BEACON HILL
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index