SYMHC Classics: Griffith Jenkins Griffith

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hello, and Happy Saturday. Griffith Jay Griffith was born on January fourth, eighteen fifty, or one hundred and seventy five years ago today. Griffith is probably best known for his donation of the land that became Griffith Park in Los Angeles, but during his lifetime he also became notorious after shooting his wife Tina in nineteen oh three. Our episode on All of This is Today's Saturday Classic, and it originally came out on January twenty fifth, twenty twenty one. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: So if you have spent time in Los Angeles, or have you even read about the city or heard about it in passing, you have probably heard of Griffith Park. That is a huge space. It's forty five hundred acres, incredibly large from municipal park in a city. For comparison, Central Park in Manhattan is eight hundred forty two point six acres, and more than three thousand of those acres were donated all at once for the founding of the park by a single man named Griffith J. Griffith. That name in and of itself makes Mighiel a little There you have it. There is a huge statue of Griffith at the park's entrance, and while his name today is associated with the park and the observatory, during his time he was associated with some other things real estate, social climbing, and a scandal that occupied columns and columns of newspapers around the country. Heads Up, this episode is going to talk quite a bit, particularly in the back half, about a pretty horrifying instance of domestic violence and the court cases associated with it, as well as the act itself. So just know that that's an episode.

00:02:01
Speaker 1: Griffith Jenkins. Griffith was born on January fourth, eighteen fifty in South Wales, and we don't really know a lot about his early years. We do know that the Griffith family was very poor. They had a subsistence farm and Griffith's father also took mining work to make ends meet.

00:02:20
Speaker 2: When he was still just a teenager, Griffith, who was the oldest child in the family, traveled to the United States with his uncle in eighteen sixty five. Griffith attended school in Pennsylvania, and after his education was complete, he started working as a reporter.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: In the eighteen seventies, Griffith traveled to the West Coast, making his way to San Francisco, California, to report on the mining industry there. Through his work covering mining interests, he started to be seen as really an expert on the subject, and this led to additional income. As he started working as a consultant. He offered his knowledge of the industry as a whole, as well as specific information about various operation to heads of different companies. He also started his own mining ventures, making decisions based on his wealth of knowledge, which turned to actual wealth pretty quickly as these operations were successful. Yeah, there's actually a lot of variation in the stories of how he made his money. Some will suggest that he made it all consulting, but really he didn't make as much as he claimed. Others say he had these side mining things going on. But basically, by the time he moved to Los Angeles in eighteen eighty two, he did have a pretty significant nest egg with him that he had amassed, and he used that money to establish a reputation as a powerful businessman. Because he primarily used that money to invest in land in the city. At the end of eighteen eighty two, Griffith purchased Rancho los Felies. Yes we know that Angelinos say Los Pilis. He bought this from a man named Thomas Bell. The land had been owned by a woman named Maria Ignacia Fili who had inherited the ranch after her husband died. She later remarried, taking the last name for Dougo, and at that point, Spain was still in the control of the region, having seized the land from indigenous Gabrielino Tongva peoples. The Felice family eventually lost control of the property and it changed hands several times before this purchase when Griffith acquired it, and.

00:04:23
Speaker 2: By the time GJ. Griffith purchased Rancho los Felies, it had a reputation as a cursed property, but he did not seem to mind. The large tract of land that he bought that made up the Rancho property included what they now call Lost Phelis, Silver Lake and a section of the Santa Monica Mountains. Griffith saw his property acquisition as the beginning of an entirely new venture. He truly intended to build a ranching business there. He imported livestock thousands of sheep, one hundred and fifty cows, and fifty horses. He built a railway around this huge property, and he also started an Ostrich farm. Yeah, he had a business partner in that Ostrich farm. But one of the reasons that he was buying this ranch land, setting up infrastructure and kind of developing it as as this little oasis just outside the city was that he was making a lot of money in the land boom, and he was actually selling off lots as neighborhoods from the southern portion of the land, so he could claim that he already had like some infrastructure and some business going there, and wouldn't you want to live here?

00:05:32
Speaker 1: At the time, Griffith's ranch was outside the Los Angeles city limits, but he definitely inserted himself right into the middle of the city's social scene. People saw him as a climber and an interloper, and he was referred to by a number of unflattering nicknames and descriptions, the tamest of which might be quote a roly poly, pompous little fellow.

00:05:56
Speaker 2: But Griffith was intent on becoming a prominent citizen of his new hometown. In one way that he saw to do this was through civic minded acts. So, for example, he sold the city of Los Angeles water rights along the La River at a very discounted price, and this was a really vital step in the city's developing infrastructure. He probably could have set a price that gouged the municipal budget because they really really needed access to that water, But through some combination of genuine desire to do good and also hopes that his generosity would be recognized and gain him some clout, Griffith went ahead and sold it at a financial loss.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: Griffith also knew the value that a well made marriage match could have on his reputation. Enter Lewis Mesmer and his lovely daughters. Mesmer was quote a pioneer resident and one of the best known citizens of Los Angeles. Mesmer, who had been born in France, was an industrious man who had worked as a baker and a miner, and ultimately settled in life Los Angeles. In eighteen fifty nine, the population was a mere three thousand, five hundred. He started built and sold a number of businesses in the city and laid some of the first Cement's sidewalk in La on the edge of one of his properties. By the time Griffith arrived in La, Mesmer was a well established, well respected businessman who had acquired significant wealth. Additionally, Mesmer's two daughters, Lucille and Christina, were named as inheritors of a huge fortune from a family friend who was Andre Briswalter. Naturally, Griffith went right for the first family of Los Angeles at the time and started a courtship with Christina Mesmer, whose full name was Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer, although she went by either Christina or often Tina. The two were married on January twenty seventh, eighteen eighty seven, and their wedding was covered in the papers as a quote union of two very wealthy Los Angeles families. But right out of the gate, even before the wedding there were issues between Griffith and the Mesmer family over money. After the invitations had already been mailed out, Griffith insisted that Christina sign over her rights to her inheritance to him. He initially thought she was inheriting all of Briswalter's landholdings, and was reportedly really angry when he found out that she was to split that real estate inheritance with her sister Lucy. That was when he insisted that he gained control of the inheritance, and this put Tina in a really terrible spot. She didn't want to call off the wedding, and while she acquiesced to his request, her siblings in particular found this whole thing really distasteful. They never really trusted Griffith after that. Griffith and Tina had a son the year after they married. They named him Vandel. That was their only.

00:08:50
Speaker 2: Child, and Griffith also adopted a number of rather pretentious characteristics during his ascension among the Los Angeles elite. So he started walking with a cane that he did not need, presumably because he thought it made him look distinguished. He wore very expensive, flamboyant clothes, and he started to refer to himself by the title of colonel, even though he had no military career to speak of, but people accepted it and started calling him Colonel Griffith. Historians have speculated that this was likely Griffith kind of overcompensating for a childhood of poverty, but for a lot of old money Angelinos, they just saw this all as really ridiculous peacocking. So as the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, Griffith changed Los Angeles forever with one grand gesture. And we'll talk about how Griffith Park was established after we pause for a quick sponsor break. In December eighteen ninety six, Griffith gifted the city of Los Angeles with quite a Christmas surprise, three thy fifteen acres of land from Rancho Los Pelies to be used exclusively as a park. That land had not been developed in any way, and Griffith wanted a lot of it to stay that way. This was an extravagant gift, and Griffith's motivations in making it have been debated over the years. For one, he continued to want to be seen as successful and important, and this gesture certainly went a long way in that regard. Additionally, the donation offered Griffith away to get out of paying taxes on the land, and the real estate boom was in decline, so selling off the land in parcels was not as lucrative as it once was. He did, though, also seem to have a fairly genuine interest in civic philanthropy, and he did want Los Angeles to have a park system. We have spoken before on the show about how places like Central Park and the Mall in Washington, d C. Were inspired in part by people wanting to establish those cities as cosmopolitan on a level that would match them the cities of Europe and their public spaces. And Griffith, who had traveled a bit by this point, was similarly influenced by the grand public spaces he had visited around the world and on the US East Coast, and that was part of his desire to donate the park land and griffithsone words quote, I consider it my obligation to make Los Angeles a happier, cleaner, and finer city. I wish to pay my debt of duty in this way to the community in which I have prospered. And the deed which transferred ownership to the LA City Council was very specific about the fact that the land was for a park and a park only. That deed is actually part of the LA Archives. They actually have it framed on the wall, and it includes the phrase quote to be used as a public park for purposes of recreation, health and pleasure, for the use and benefit of the inhabitants of the said city of Los Angeles forever. The city council also passed an ordnance that named the park after Griffith shortly after all of this began, so it is legally required to be named Griffith Park, even though Griffith had given up the land, though he kept feeling connected to it and retained a sense of ownership over it, even though he legally had no claim to it, but in his eyes he believed he did. There was a clause in the deed that he turned over to the city that mentioned, specifically that if the city did not maintain the land in a manner that upheld that mission statement, ownership of the land would revert back to the Griffith family, and it's possible that Griffith actually believed this was going to happen. He certainly frequently wrote letters to the city and the Park Commission stating that he felt things were not being done correctly regarding the acreage he had donated. He also served on the park's committee, so he had a little bit of say in that regard, even if he didn't actually own the property any longer.

00:12:53
Speaker 1: Griffith's vision was for the part to include both the esthetics of the European gardening tradition with manured and cultivated spaces, as well as the significant retention of the natural space. And that was indeed how the city designed the park.

00:13:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you ever visit Griffith Park, it's really sort of marvelous because it is a lot of a lot of space that is in its natural state. And then they had a zoo at one point, and there's like famous Mario go around we'll talk about in the Our Friday episode. But yeah, he managed to set this up and it has retained that identity that it was always intended to have per his instructions. So Griffith had at this point kind of accomplished what he set out to do in his bid to become an important part of the Los Angeles community, and at least in name. He remains so to this day. And if he had lived out the rest of his life peacefully after this, he probably would have a pretty good and tame legacy in history as a slightly eccentric but ultimately benevolent philanthropist who made and married a lot of money and then used it to better his sin. But the next chapter of his life took a very dark turn. Just as Griffith seemed to have gotten all that he wanted, he started to drink more heavily, and this started to impact his mental state as he developed a lot of paranoid ideas that started to govern his behavior.

00:14:18
Speaker 1: And reading through all this, and like the parts that we're about to get into, like I have thoughts about like the cause and effect cycle of all of this. Yes, an event that happened in September of nineteen oh three changed to Griffith's legacy forever. He and Tina went on a summer vacation to Santa Monica. They stayed at the Arcadia Hotel along with their son Van, who was fifteen at the time.

00:14:43
Speaker 2: And Griffith behaved strangely during the family stay in Santa Monica. He had decided that someone was trying to poison him, and he suspected that it could actually be the Pope. This concern about the Pope seems to have been rooted in a very anti high Catholic bias that he had, and it was manifesting in his paranoia. He would insist on switching the plates at the table settings during the trip because he believed that they might have poison residue on them. It has been estimated that Griffith, at this point in his life was drinking roughly two quarts of whiskey each day, that is sixty four ounces, just a little less than two leaders, so that was also governing some of this very strange behavior.

00:15:28
Speaker 1: Griffith's paranoia led to a horrific series of events on September three, and one version of this story, Tina was sitting at a desk in their hotel room writing out postcards to friends and family when Griffith entered the room, but then later testimony indicated that she was actually packing for their return home. Regardless though of exactly what Missus Griffith was doing. The portion of the story that's corroborated and consistent is that mister Griffith carried a revolver and a prayer book which was Christina's prayer book, into the room with him.

00:16:05
Speaker 2: And Griffith was a Protestant, but in his desire to move up in la society, he had married a Catholic. Tina was very devout, so in his mind, Griffith started to link his wife to his paranoid delusions about the pope and had started to believe on some level that she was conspiring with the head of the Catholic Church against her husband. So Griffith handed Tina the prayer book, told her to swear by it that she would answer his questions truthfully, instructed her to get on her knees, and then started interrogating her. He had written his questions down ahead of this conversation, so he was reading them from a card that he had prepared, kind of like a script. The was a menu card from the hotel, and he had written the questions on the back of it. And while this questioning was going on, he was also pointing his gun at her. He asked her if she had been involved in the death of Andre Briswalter, that was the family friend who left Christina and her sister their fortune, saying quote, did you ever know of Briswalter being poisoned in your house? Tina answered no. Briswalter had died of blood poisoning, which he had gotten due to an infected foot injury, and that was something that Christina reminded her husband of in this moment. Next, Griffith asked his wife if she was poisoning him by asking, quote, have you been implicated with or do you know of anyone having given me poison? Tina, who called Griffith Papa, replied, quote, why Papa, you know I have never harmed a hair on your head. His third question was whether Tina was a faithful wife, and she stated that she had never been untrue.

00:17:45
Speaker 1: Griffith had an additional question on his card, but he didn't ask it. He shot Tina after asking the third. He shot her in the face. The bullet hit the outer edge of her left eye, shattering the bone of her eyesiph and it was reported that upon impact with the bone, the bullet fragmented and a piece of it pierced her eye, so her left eye was destroyed, but the bullet didn't penetrate into the brain cavity. The rest of the bullet fragments passed under the skin of her temple and lodged under her scalp.

00:18:19
Speaker 2: Surprisingly, Christina Griffith survived this brutal attack. She lost that eye and had some facial disfigurement, but had been fast enough in just kind of reflexively jerking her head to one side that she thwarted Griffith's aim, so he did not hit her square in the forehead, and after asking her husband why he shot her. She next jumped out of the window onto the extended roof of the veranda below, and there are some versions of the story that indicate that the owners of the hotel saw her and pulled her into their rooms, but the version that the owners actually gave the press was that she crawled into an open window herself. So keep in mind that Tina at this point had just been shot in the face. She couldn't see, she was bleeding a great deal. She also broke her shoulder as she jumped out the window, so it was incredibly lucky that she was able to get to safety at all. Meanwhile, her husband was still in the hotel. He had called the hotel staff that there was an accident, and as a doctor was being called, he phoned Christina's sister to tell her that her sister had been accidentally shot. Missus Griffith was treated at the Arcadia Hotel by a doctor Crawford that was called by hotel management. She stayed there the rest of the night. She was given an opiate to help her sleep, and then as soon as possible the following morning, she was moved to a hospital in Los Angeles. She was still unconscious at that point.

00:19:43
Speaker 1: The headline that ran on September fifth in the La Times that detailed this incident was quote bullet in head of Missus G. J.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: Griffith.

00:19:52
Speaker 1: She declares that her husband shot her. Result may be fatal. Christina Griffith's account was included in this article, reported as having been told to her sister in a moment of consciousness, who then related to the paper. According to that account, when Griffith entered the room, he said, quote, get your prayer book and kneel down and cover your eyes. I'm going to shoot you, and I'm going to kill you. This version didn't include the information that came to light later on involving Griffith's aggressive questioning of his wife, because Christina had not been conscious long enough to give a more thorough account.

00:20:28
Speaker 2: Once she was in the LA hospital, Christina Griffith went into surgery so that the bullet fragments could be dislodged from her head. Her surgeon, doctor M. L. Moore, told the paper that while the situation was very serious, he believed that the patient would recover. So this ride up stated quote she either jumped or fell from the window of the room and dropped onto the roof of a porch on the level of the floor below. So at this point Griffith was claiming that this whole thing was an accident, and there was this whole idea that maybe his wife had just fallen. His account was that she had been packing a trunk when a revolver that was either inside of it or that she had been holding for some reason had accidentally discharged, and he said that they had not been quarreling at all. In an interview with a reporter, Griffith said that he and his wife never quarreled. The reporter, to his credit, did ask some very pointed questions about why missus Griffith would have had one of mister Griffith's revolvers in her trunk, how she would have accidentally made her way out of a window that was actually in a gable way that was away from the main part of the room where their belongings were, and whether Griffith was intoxicated at the time of the incident. Griffith kind of shrugged off the hard questions, I will say. The reporter at the end of that says like, do you say this is wholly untrue? And he's like, oh, yeah, Holy so Griffith kind of shrugs off the hard questions and then claimed that in fact, he had been sober for several weeks.

00:21:55
Speaker 1: But the Mesber family was adamant that this was not an accident. Tina's brother gave a quote to the press that said, quote, Missus Griffith did not shoot herself. The shooting was not an accident. In our opinion. We are sure there was no attempt at suicide. As yet, we make no accusations, but we believe that the shot was not accidental, nor was it fired with suicidal intent.

00:22:19
Speaker 2: That statement was given to a reporter, but before the article actually went to press, the Mesmer family contacted the paper again and they asked to have the following statement added. And it's kind of if you look at that newspaper, it's kind of in its own call out box to the side of the article, and that statement is quote that it be the consensus of opinion of this meeting that judgment be suspended until Missus Griffith is able to make a statement, but that a full explanation be demanded from mister Griffith, and that a full investigation be made. The family at this point believed that a conflict stemming from religious differences was at the heart of this whole matter, as well as Griffith's drinking to excess. At this point, Christina was still hospitalized and unconscious, and while her doctor thought that she would recover, nobody was certain whether she actually would. The Arcadia's landlords the Rights, also made a statement that they believed that this was an accident. And while the status of the griffiths teenage son van Dell during this incident had been a matter of confusion. Initially, people were like, where was Vandell and nobody knew, It was eventually discovered that he had in fact been outside when it happened. Initially, when asked if his son had been in the room during the shooting, Griffith said he did not know and that he was quote averse to asking the boy. Griffith had agreed to be taken into custody, still claiming that it was all an accident, but at the last minute he slipped away and went for a drink. This was actually several drinks. He moved from one bar to another, and a sheriff's deputy trailed him on a ten mile bar crawl before he was able to catch up with GJ. Griffith and make the arrest, and coming up, we're going to talk about how the legal ramifications of this assault played out. But before we get into that, let's all take a break and we will hear from one of the sponsors that keeps stuff you miss in history going This entire incident and case was huge news, and for the next several months leading up to the trial, newspapers across the country reported every development in the case. This included the fact that Griffiths's legal representation had offered Christina thirty five thousand dollars as a divorce settlement, which she would only get if she refused to testify in court against her husband. This was also a move that was intended to get legal blocks on griffiths properties removed so he could sell them if he wished. That included the property that Christina had inherited in the Briswalter fortune. She did not take this offer, and as an initial hearings had approached, Griffith's defense slowly shifted away from the story that the shooting was an accident and instead claimed alcoholic insanity.

00:25:09
Speaker 1: There were several preliminary hearings and the actual trial took place in February of nineteen oh four, when Christina Griffith testified, she wore a black veil that covered her whole face. The newspaper report of her testimony stated that quote, the lawyers made missus Griffith get down from the witness stand and show her sightless eye socket to each of the jurors, in turn holding up her veil in dark glasses, while each of the twelve looked her scars and deformities critically over it was not dramatic at all, but pitiful and one of the most painful incidents that ever happened in Judge Smith's court. Christina's time on the stand was unsurprisingly quite emotional. She told the court quote, he told me to take my prayer book and get down on my knees, that he had some questions to ask me. I begged him to please put the pistol away. Oh, I begged him to put it away. I saw that I was in the hands of a desperate man. So I asked him if I might have time to pray. He said I might, so I knelt and raised my eyes and prayed. She describes the questioning and what happens next and at the end of her account, she stated, my only thought was to get out dead or alive.

00:26:19
Speaker 2: That was a statement that Griffith's attorney asked to have stricken from the record.

00:26:24
Speaker 1: Griffith J. Griffith was charged with attempted murder. His attorney, Earl Rogers, tried to discredit Christina in a number of ways and use her testimony that Griffith had threatened to kill her on several occasions, as well as the account of fitzparanoia to bolster his clients in sanity defense. Former California Governor Henry T. Gage was Christina's attorney, and he and Rogers, as well as the other attorney's present, were so prone to arguing with one another that one reporter claimed the judge quote would be on the point of adjourning for the afternoon to let them fight it out.

00:27:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a very There's a lot of bickering going on. Christina had given testimony in several hearings leading up to the trial. At that point. They were always consistent, and she had said in all of them that she believed the real reason that Griffith wanted to kill her was because she had threatened to leave him due to his drinking, and that he knew that if that happened, all of his secrets would become public. The fact that he had this drinking problem was definitely something he had been hiding. She had told the proprietor of the hotel when the shooting happened that Griffith must be crazy, and she also spoke of how he had been paranoid about poisoning for years and years, and she had kind of just humored him when he did things like wanting to switch plates with her. And his defense seized on all of that as evidence that their defense their insanity plea was sound, and to some degree that approach worked.

00:27:50
Speaker 1: Griffith was found guilty not of attempted murder, but of the lesser crime of assault with a deadly weapon. He was sentenced to two years in prison and five thousand dollars fine and was incarcerated at San Quentin. And while this was believed by a lot of people to be a miscarriage of justice, Missus Griffiths divorce filing had a better outcome. The judge granted the request immediately and the whole thing was handled allegedly within five minutes, some say four and a half. So on November fifth, nineteen oh four. He was already incarcerated at this time when they had this hearing. The San Francisco Examiner ran the story of the proceedings around the divorce. After stating during testimony that she had been shot by her husband after he had instructed her to get on her knees and was allowed to pray, the judge interrupted and asked if this was deliberate, and she replied, quote, it was deliberate. He made me get down on my knees, I asked to pray, and then the judge asked, quote he then fired Christina. Griffith answered yes, sir, and Judge Allen's next words were decree granted. As part of the settlement, it was determined that Christina would retain custody of their son, Vandel, and that Griffith would pay for the boys education. Christina was also awarded sixty five thousand dollars. After the divorce was settled, she receded from the public eye and lived out the rest of her life with her sister Lucy Whipples's family until her death in nineteen forty eight at the age of eighty four. When Griffith finished his two year sentence, he was sober, repentant and really eager to rehabilitate his image, So after several years, he once again turned to grand gestures in an effort to re establish himself as a Los Angeles philanthropist. In nineteen twelve, Griffith offered the City of Los Angeles one hundred thousand dollars to be put toward building an observatory on Griffith Peak, which is known today as Mount Hollywood. But while the city council had been willing to take a huge gift of land from the man that a lot of people at the time believed to be a society poser, they were not so keen on taking a huge sum of money from him having been convicted of this felony, even if he had served his centen I mean, the nature of the crime also, I think would be a turrent.

00:30:04
Speaker 2: One hundred percent. And keep in mind, like these are very high level, powerful, wealthy families in the area, So it's a little bit tricky because the Mesmer family, of course was very very powerful and wealthy. But Griffith also kind of in some ways, you know, had had the city a little bit over a barrel, like he had those water rights that he had essentially given them. It was all a little bit weird, but they so they kind of put him off. It was like, we'll think about it. And then, in a similar move the following year, nineteen thirteen, Griffith offered the city fifty thousand dollars. This was to be put towards building a Greek theater in Griffith Park, and once again there wasn't exactly a no, but there wasn't any real movement to accept the offer. They kind of like went to operations, slow down with it.

00:30:53
Speaker 1: Griffith was undoubtedly hurt by this refusal to accept his gifts, but he still had a vision for the projects, and of course today there are a Greek theater and the Griffith Observatory. They were built, but that did not happen until later. In nineteen nineteen, Griffith died after a prolonged illness, which was reported as liver trouble. His image was still tarnished in the minds of many of the city's residents. Although the obituary that ran in the La Times did not mention the assault, or his conviction or any of that. It instead recounted his philanthropic works and kind of left it at that. Upon his death, it was revealed that Griffith had set up a trust to ensure that his observatory and the Greek Theater project did move forward, and the city did use the funds from that trust to carry out construction on both of them. The Greek Theater was completed in nineteen thirty and the Griffith Observatory was finished in nineteen thirty five. And now people know his name, which is probably what he wanted in the first place. Yeah, dun Dundas, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.