Songs from the Stacks

Arthur Brown: Love and Politics or: The Crazy World of Arthur Brown

by Scott Sanders, Antioch College Archivist

From the daily Xenia Gazette, May 27th, 1902:

SENATOR ARTHUR BROWN AND HIS YOUNG WIFE Were Royally Entertained at Yellow Springs—Now Another Mrs. Brown Wants to Know About It.

A little episode which has been the occasion of a good deal of talk and comment at Yellow Springs has just come to light, in which Senator Arthur Brown, of Salt Lake City, Utah, is a central figure, and some of his friends who entertained him in a royal manner at Yellow Springs, would like to have him explain some matters connected with his recent visit there.

Mr. Brown is a graduate of Antioch and after finishing his school work went to Michigan to practice law. He finally drifted to Utah where he became prominent in public life and was elected as United States Senator from that State.

A few weeks ago he paid a visit to his old college and met a number of his old friends, and was handsomely entertained by the faculty of the college and others being introduced by President Bell to his class and shown every consideration. He was accompanied by a young woman whom he introduced as his wife and they spent several days at Yellow Springs.

A week or two ago Prof. Bell received a letter from a lady at Salt Lake City in which she stated that she had seen in the newspaper that Senator Arthur Brown and his wife had been entertained at Antioch. She said that as she had never been away from Salt Lake City while her husband had been absent, she would like to have a little light on the subject as she herself is Mrs. Arthur Brown, wife of Senator Brown.

There seems to have been a bad mixup somewhere in Senator Brown’s wives, and since the story has leaked out there is a good deal of fun being had over the matter by those conversant with the circumstances.

The Xenia Gazette of 27 May 1902 pokes fun at the College and the reception given to the other Mrs. Brown.

Arthur Brown was born in Schoolcraft in Kalamazoo County, Michigan in 1843. He moved to Yellow Springs with his family when he was 13 years old so that his sisters Marcia, Oella and Olympia could attend Antioch College, then one of the few schools open to both men and women. Arthur also attended Antioch, graduating in 1862. He went back home

and to study law, earned a Master’s Degree at University of Michigan in 1864, and was admitted to the Michigan bar that same year. He married a woman sources name only as “Mrs. LC Brown ‘’ and they had a daughter named Alice. By the mid 1870s he had built a highly reputable law practice in Kalamazoo, and yet...his reputation was in shambles. It seems he had become enamored of one Isabel Cameron, daughter of a Michigan state senator. When the affair became public (as they so often do), he found he needed a change of venue. He separated from his wife, and “Mrs. LC “reportedly tried to shoot Cameron when she caught her in Brown’s office one evening. He moved to Salt Lake City in the Utah Territory in 1879 for a more healthful climate, where he again built a successful law practice. There he married Isabel Cameron and they had a son named Max.

Antioch College Sophomore Class, 1860. Photo taken on the front steps of Main Building. Arthur Brown, second row, second from left.

When Utah became a state in 1896, Brown ran as a Republican for its first ever seats in the US Senate along with Silver Republican candidate Frank J. Cannon, and was elected by the state legislature. In a book Cannon co-authored in 1911 bizarrely titled UNDER THE PROPHET IN UTAH: The

National Menace of a Political Priestcraft, he recalled that “also, a Republican assistance was given [to Alfred W McCune] by my former colleague, Arthur Brown, who specialized as an opponent to my candidacy.” In order that both seats from one state do not come open in the same election, Senate terms are staggered into “classes” of two, four and six year terms for newly admitted states, something we’ve not had to think about since the 1950s. Brown drew the “short term,” serving only until 1897, when he was not renominated. In 1892 Arthur met Anne Bradley.

Anne Maddison Bradley was born in Kansas City, MO, in 1873. Her family moved to Salt Lake City in 1890. There she got a job at the municipal water

works. In 1893 she married an employee of the Rio Grande Western Railroad (can you tell I’m from Ohio?) named Clarence Bradley She quit her job and had two children. A woman of many interests, she was active in several organizations including the Salt Lake City Woman’s Club, the Utah Woman’s Press Club, the Poets’ Roundtable, and edited the Utah State Federation of Women’s Clubs’ publication. In 1900 she was secretary of the Fifth Ward Republican Committee and in 1902 for the

state Republican party. That was how she got to know Arthur Brown. The two developed a friendship that by 1900 had become a torrid romance which likely produced a child since she named him Arthur Brown Bradley. Anne and Clarence Bradley had already estranged in 1898. He left town to work on the Nevada, California & Oregon Railroad in 1900, where his life would take an exceedingly strange turn all its own.

In 1902 Bradley traveled extensively with Arthur Brown as Mrs. Brown, a ruse that amused many but fooled few, that is, with the exception of Antioch College, where they were received in a way befitting a distinguished alumnus (such as a Senator) returning to his alma mater. Counted among the titillated was The Xenia Gazette, as the preceding article suggests. Interestingly, no answer or defense can be found in The Yellow Springs News; maybe the local press did not wish to embarrass anyone further or was itself too embarrassed by the visit of Senator Brown and his mistress, and preferred to forget the whole thing.

And maybe Isabel Brown hadn’t just chanced on the story in the papers as claimed in The Gazette. She had already hired

a private detective to follow her husband and the other “Mrs. Brown.” She also had over 300 letters in her possession written by Anne to Arthur, which she threatened to make public unless he ended the affair. She denied him a much asked for divorce on the grounds that she expected to be received at court during an upcoming visit to England, an honor not open to divorced women, and besides, “she [objected] seriously to being divorced at all,” filing charges of adultery against her husband and Anne Bradley in September 1902.

In April 1903 the three met up in a dramatic confrontation in a Pocatello, Idaho, hotel where Arthur Brown had a ranch. Isabel attacked Mrs. Bradley on the spot and might have killed her had no one intervened. The eyewitness and intervener, Brown’s attorney Soren X. Christensen, described the incident in a deposition:

...Mrs. Bradley came up the stairs with...a grip in her hand... when Mrs. Brown said to her “How do you do, Mrs. Bradley? I have wanted to talk to you!” Mrs. Brown walked up towards her and grabbed her by the throat and threw her down, and intended to kill her, I took it...I separated them, they got up, and

I separated them, and Mrs. Brown says “Let me alone, I will kill her,” and I says, “Not when I am here.” Then Mrs. Bradley calls out and says, “Arthur, they are killing your Dolly—open the door.” There was no response from the Senator’s room. Finally Mrs. Brown rapped on the door and said “Arthur, open the door or I will mash it in.”

Brown relented and let the two women into his room, asking Christensen in as well so as not to be alone with both his “wives.” Christensen further reported that the “general conversation pertaining to their conduct” went on til 7:30 the next morning, and that amid the accusations and insults, Arthur denied being the father of Max Brown while admitting to fathering Arthur Brown Bradley. Nuts. In case the two women encountered each other again, Arthur provided Anne Bradley with a revolver for protection following the episode.

On the eve of their adultery trial, Bradley demanded that Brown acknowledge their son. She threatened to plead guilty, which would surely damage any future designs he had for returning to public

life. In what we surely by now have determined to be his characteristic fashion, Brown refused, pleading not guilty and once again reversing himself on the fatherhood of Anne’s son Arthur. He was tried and acquitted while Anne Bradley was never sentenced. Arthur resented Anne’s admission of guilt, and while it marked the beginning of the end of their tumultuous romance, that resentment did not preclude another child of hers that could reasonably be attributed to him, Martin MB Bradley, born in November.

The Washington Post reporting on the shooting of Arthur Brown, December 9th 1906.

In 1905 Isabel Brown died of cancer, and though finally free to marry Anne Bradley, the widower Arthur Brown still would not commit. Bradley herself divorced so that they could be married, and his recalcitrance drove her to desperation as she was now without support for herself and her four children, two of whom were probably his anyway. As if that wasn’t enough to put her over the edge, Arthur’s rewritten will surely did:

I do not devise or bequeath anything to the children of Mrs. Anna M. Bradley — I explicitly refuse to give anything to Arthur Brown Bradley, sometimes known as Arthur Brown, Jr., or

to the other son of Anna M. Bradley named by her Martin Montgomery Brown, and I refuse to pay or give anything to any child of said Anna M. Bradley. I do not think that either or any child born of said Anna M. Bradley is my child — but whether such child or children is or are mine or not, I expressly provide neither or any of them

shall receive anything from my estate, and I will and direct that no child born of Anna Madison Bradley shall receive anything from my estate…I have never married said Anna M. Bradley, and never intend to. If she should pretend that any relation ever existed between us to justify any such inference, I direct my executors to contest any claim of any kind (so) that she receive nothing from my estate.

His calculated disowning of Anne Bradley’s children would be the last of Arthur Brown’s assorted miscalculations. In December 1906 she tracked the former Senator down at the Raleigh Hotel in Washington DC to confront him once and for all to live up to his long held promise to marry her and make her child (or children) legitimate in the eyes of the law. Finding his room unoccupied, Bradley discovered letters between Brown and a prominent actress that revealed his intention to marry her instead (Whatta guy). When she finally saw him, she gave him a chance to make good on his pledge, but apparently not much of one. Though she later remembered none of it, Anne Bradley drew the pistol Arthur had given her years before and shot him in the stomach. Though he was rushed to the hospital, the bullet was lodged too deeply near his pelvic bone to be removed, and Arthur Brown died from his wound ten days later. Anne Bradley was tried for his murder but acquitted by reason of temporary insanity, and the aforementioned excerpt from his will provided the key testimony.

The Brown family was understandably scandalized by Arthur’s indiscretions. His far more famous sister Olympia, the first ordained woman minister in American history and an important suffragist, wrote him out of her autobiography Acquaintances Old and New Among Reformers, and his name does not appear in his sister Marcia’s obituary in the 12 Mar 1909 Yellow Springs News. Subsequent generations of Browns would hardly mention his name after his death.

Springfield Daily News reporting on the death of Senator Arthur Brown, December 13th, 1906.

Bibliography:

“SENATOR ARTHUR BROWN AND HIS YOUNG WIFE” Xenia Gazette, 27 May 1902.

“SENATOR BROWN WANTS DIVORCE,” Salt Lake Herald, Sunday, 28 Sep 1902.

“GRADUATE OF ANTIOCH COLLEGE,” Springfield Daily News, 11 Dec 1906.

“SHOT BY A WOMAN,” The Washington Star, Sunday, 9 Dec 1906.

“UTAH SENATOR DEAD,” Springfield Daily News, 13 Dec 1906.

“The Bradley Trial,” Racine Times, 6 Nov 1907, reprint.

“MARCIA BROWN HOWLAND DEAD,” Yellow Springs News, 12 Mar 1909.

Cannon, Frank J. and O’Higgins, Harvey J., UNDER THE PROPHET IN UTAH: The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft, Boston, MA, 1911.

Thatcher, Linda, “The Gentile Polygamist: Arthur Brown, Ex-Senator from Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly, Vol. 52, no. 3 (Summer 1984).

Schindler, Hal, “Utah’s Scandalous Senator: Utah’s 1st Legislator Left Sorry Legacy,” Salt Lake Tribune, 5 Mar 1995.