The holiday season of 1897 was an unhappy time for Roland Molineux. First came Blanche’s rejection of his marriage proposal on Thanksgiving Day. Then, just before Christmas, his protracted feud with Harry Cornish reached a sudden and—from Roland’s point of view—exceptionally bitter climax.
The unwitting catalyst was a gentleman named Bartow Sumter Weeks. The son of a Civil War colonel, Weeks had gotten his law degree from Columbia University before going to work in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. In the fall of 1897, he had just entered into private practice with another former assistant DA, George Gordon Battle. Eventually, Weeks would become a New York State Supreme Court justice.
Besides the law, amateur athletics was the great passion of Weeks’s life. A long-standing member of the New York Athletic Club, he had served as two-term president, chairman of the Athletic Committee, member of the Board of Governors, and captain of the club’s athletic team.
He was also a close family friend of the Molineuxs and had known Roland for many years.
In October 1897, the pugnacious Harry Cornish had become embroiled in a dispute with Weeks, accusing him in print of an ethical violation. According to Cornish—who published his charge in Harper’s Weekly—Weeks, in his eagerness to win an international meet, had paid a track star named Bernie Wefers, holder of the world record in the 100-yard dash, to switch membership from the Knickerbocker Athletic Club to the NYAC. Cornish was incensed over this payoff, a flagrant breach (so he argued) of the amateur code.
Cornish was after Weeks, not Bernie Wefers, whom he considered a friend. So when the Amateur Athletic Union suspended Wefers from competition until a hearing could be held, Cornish backpedaled and refused to testify. The hearing was canceled, Wefers was reinstated, Weeks was exonerated, and Cornish himself ended up receiving an official reprimand for bringing “false and malicious charges.”
Afterward Cornish—seeking to mend fences with Bernie Wefers—sent him a letter on official KAC stationery. Though he apologized for the trouble he had caused the track star, he remained unrepentant in regard to Weeks. “I have got it in for Weeks,” he wrote, “for I consider him to be as far beneath me as one man can be with another. He has been guilty of a dirty piece of business.”1
Somehow, this letter ended up in Weeks’s possession. And Weeks lost no time in showing it to Roland Molineux.
Whether Weeks had any sense of Roland’s obsessive hatred of Cornish is unclear. In any case, the “Wefers letter” (as it came to be known) drove Roland to new heights of outrage.
Appearing before the Board of Governors, he demanded that Cornish be fired at once. After taking the matter under advisement, the board members—who were, on the whole, quite pleased with Cornish’s performance as athletic director—opted for little more than a slap on the wrist. The Wefers letter, they concluded, was Cornish’s private affair. He had every right to express his opinion of Weeks in however churlish a manner he wished—though not with the imprimatur of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. Henceforth, he would be deprived of the use of club stationery for his personal correspondence.
As a gesture befitting the gentlemanly code of clubdom, the board also voted to throw a dinner for Weeks, at which they offered their formal apologies and expressed their admiration for the leadership of the NYAC. Weeks was placated, and the whole unfortunate incident appeared to be settled.2
Roland, however, would not let the matter rest. Not long after the conciliatory dinner, he issued an ultimatum to the board: either Cornish must go or he himself would quit the club. On the evening of December 20, 1897, the board met again. After deliberating for half an hour, they let Roland know that, while they valued his membership and sincerely hoped that he would reconsider his position, they had voted to retain Cornish. With a little bow, Roland promptly resigned.
Back in his room, he composed a letter to the club secretary, John Adams:
My Dear Adams,
Although I have resigned from the K.A.C., do not for one moment suppose that I wish it other than success. I entertain the highest personal regard for its officers, but I have been a disturbing element in its counsels because, with the very best intentions, I have opposed what I am confident is a wrong policy, that of allowing an employee to use the club for personal advertisement and to get even with gentlemen who displease him. This I am not in sympathy with. Believe me, it is best that I resign, which I do regretfully. I hope you will show this to Mr. Ballantine, that he may know how I stand on this matter. Wishing you all the compliments of this happy season, I am,
Yours most cordially,
Roland Molineux3
He sealed the letter in an envelope. Then, descending to the main floor, he strode across the empty lobby to Adams’s office and slipped the envelope under the door.
As he returned to his room, he encountered Harry Cornish on the stairs.
“You son of a bitch,” sneered Cornish, who had just learned of the board’s decision. “You thought you’d get me out, and I got you out instead.”
These were, as Cornish knew perfectly well, fighting words. If any man had dared utter them to him, Cornish would have promptly answered with his fists.
Roland, however, did not rise to the bait. Instead, he merely gave his strange, enigmatic smile, waved his hand blithely, and said, “You win.”
Then he mounted the stairs to his room, where he proceeded to pack his belongings. By the following morning he was gone from the club, never to return.4
In the nineteenth century, the word molly (derived from the Latin mollis, meaning “soft”) was derogatory slang for a male homosexual, the Victorian equivalent of the later slur fairy. It was also, as it happened, phonetically identical to Roland’s nickname, “Mollie.”
On the evening of his climactic encounter with Molineux, Cornish, as was his custom, visited Jim Wakeley’s saloon. There, beneath the portraits of bare-chested pugilists and other athletic luminaries, he regaled his drinking chums with an account of his triumph over his longtime adversary.
As he repeated Roland’s submissive parting words, Cornish snorted with contempt. It was just the sort of response, he and his cohorts agreed, that a man would expect from the aptly named Mollie.