Man who rejected $1M has affair(s)
In late 1920, Charles “Barley” Garland, 21-year-old son of New England blue bloods with a dependent wife and baby, made national headlines by rejecting an inheritance. He waved away $1 million from his dead father’s estate.
He did not want to be part of the “organized selfishness” of a system that crushed the poor and caused suffering among the privileged. It didn’t matter how his family came by its money, he hadn’t earned it through his own labor — and he meant manual labor, the work of his hands.
“Private property is the main cause of all unhappiness,” he said.
Add in eloquence, gentle manners, a rower’s physique, and this unusual man attracted reporters like … like a big bowl of free shrimp on a banquet table. The Minneapolis Star declared him America’s most original man. Reporters diligent and lazy flocked to Buzzards Bay, Mass., to hear him explain himself as not a socialist, communist or Bolshevik but an “intense individualist” and also a Christian in the style of Leo Tolstoy.
Holding their 2-month-old baby girl, his wife, the former Mary Wrenn, assured these visitors that her husband had explained his concerns and she fully understood and supported him.
As things turned out, though, no, he had not, and what’s more, she did not.
If this sounds familiar, it could be because Old News wrote about Garland on Feb. 7 (see arkansasonline.com/214part). Or, maybe Friend Reader is a descendant of Tudors, as Garland was, and his legend is etched in family lore. Or, maybe Friend Reader knows a lot about 20th-century labor history. My sense is that this old story is not widely known today.
Where it is known, the once terrific scandal of it all is the least important part.
The mounds of archival accounts about Garland — and their contradictory assertions — make figuring out what happened next a tenuous task. Fortunately for those of us who are merely tourists of history, other researchers have devoted decades to it, including a diligent reporter named Richard W. Cowen (see arkansasonline.com/214cowen).
Dick Cowen retired as a columnist for The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 1996. In retirement, he continued to research Pennsylvania stories, like Charles Garland. Garland started out as a Boston/New York story, but he moved himself to
Pennsylvania.
When Cowen died in 2015, he left behind a 1,000-page manuscript about Garland, representing 40 years of interviews and reading. Cowen’s book is available online as a PDF courtesy of the Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library (see arkansasonline.com/214yale).
He interviewed four generations of the people involved, including Garland’s first and second wives and another mother of his children.
YOUNG AND NAIVE
In time, Cowen writes, Mary Wrenn admitted that she learned of her impending poverty in 1920 by overhearing Charles talking about it with some reporter on the telephone.
Suddenly, inquiring minds had to know what poison, anarchy or sainthood made an apparently honorable man educated at the best schools choose drudgery and peril over security for his wife and child. Married at 19, a mother at 20, Mary Wrenn didn’t wonder about that at first. They had a renovated home — Shore Cottage at Garland’s mother’s Buzzards Bay estate Bay End — with a maid and a stocked pantry, courtesy of his mother.
In a report I read in the Boston Post archives, special correspondent Marguerite Mooers Marshall of The Evening World described what she saw at Bay End:
“This man is extremely tall — several inches over six feet I should say — and stoops a bit, as persons of an immoderate height are inclined to do. He is slender and his face is colorless. His smooth, closely cropped inky-black hair grows in a widow’s peak on his forehead. His eyes are dark and soft and dreaming, and his face, with its straight, wellcut nose and pleasant mouth, would have been most attractive if only it had not so badly needed a shave. But perhaps he is trying to raise a Tolstoy beard.”
Reporters kept him talking, and he said, “Christ would not have consented to become a millionaire, so why should I?”
Another thing he said was, “I believe a love is free. If two persons tire of each other, they should separate. Marriage is only a legal technicality. It’s love that counts.”
APRIL FARM NO. 1
Even though he refused his big inheritance, Garland had an annual income of $15,000 from a trust set up by his grandfather, a banker. He used this to buy an overgrown, rocky farm at North Carver, about 30 miles from his mother’s place and five miles from the nearest telephone. There he set about creating a communal farm. Naming it April Farm, he hung a sign on the gate: “Be yourself.”
The main building was said to be a sparsely furnished shack, and he converted a chicken coup into living quarters. He could barely stand up in the coup.
Pregnant with their second child, Mary Wrenn and baby Margaret lived with him a few months before decamping back to Shore Cottage.
She wrote a poem about April Farm. It lists bare feet, flies, “discordant violins scratching trite tunes, souls strangling each other to express they known not what” and “words.”
But mostly she objected to the other women: “Would you like it to have half a dozen women around the house?” she asked.
This all went unnoticed by the press until early January 1922, when news broke (in a wildly inaccurate fashion we don’t have space to recite) that Garland was taking his inheritance. Furthermore, it had accrued interest and was now worth $1.6 million.
This time, reporters noticed young women, and Garland made announcements about these “soulmates.” Here’s how Mooers Marshall presented those in The Evening World:
(1) That he had decided to take his money; (2) that he was no longer living with his wife; (3) that he still cared for her, but that his spiritual development had demanded, and received, the satisfaction of his love for his mother’s private secretary, Miss Lillian Conrad; (4) that he expects Miss Conrad to join him, in the spring, on his farm at North Carver, Mass.; (5) that he does not expect to become reconciled with his wife.
Mooers Marshall added that Mary had said she still loved Garland and would welcome him back — but she would not agree to share him with Conrad.
Conrad — who also had left Garland — said she was willing to share him with Mary.
But there also was another woman, Mooers Marshall wrote, a Miss Doris Henson, who was studying agriculture at Amherst College. Henson had declared her plan to move in with Garland at North Carver, and she expected to find Conrad there, too.
Working on inaccurate information from other widely circulated reports, the Arkansas Democrat editorial writer decided that Garland had taken the money to support his kids, and Mary had returned to him:
We don’t blame her for coming back, any more than we blamed her for leaving him when she found she was married to such a simpleton.
She had not returned. It took her a while to divorce him. He paid her conjugal visits at Bay End, and they had a third child together. But divorce him she did, in 1926.
I cannot believe I’m hauling this not-Arkansas story across another week, but we’re in too deep to stop. Next Monday, we’ll learn about a love child buried on April Farm No. 2, and we’ll learn as Garland did, that in 1926, you went to prison for adultery in Pennsylvania.