Theodore Frelinghuysen Dwight

Theodore Frelinghuysen Dwight was born in Auburn, Cayuga County, New York, the son of Almon Dwight (1814–1902) and Cyria Charge White (1817–1897). His father followed the Millerite Doctrine that the second coming of Christ would occur around 1843 or 1844 and, acting on that belief, lived in Jerusalem for four years, between 1837 and 1841, where he ran an industrial school.[1] From 1865 until around 1869, Theodore Dwight attended Rochester (NY) Collegiate Institute and paid his way through school by working in a wholesale saddlery and hardware store.

In November 1895, at the age of 49, Dwight married Sally Pickman Loring (1859–1913), the daughter of George Bailey Loring and Mary Toppan Pickman of Salem, Mass. The marriage followed a very brief courtship and was a surprise to Dwight’s circle of friends, given his prominent place in Boston’s homosexual circles and the fact that he had had no known previous platonic or romantic involvement with women.  Henry Cabot Lodge’s wife Anna Cabot Mills Davis, known socially as “Nanny Lodge,” even advised Sally not to marry Dwight after the engagement was announced, such was Dwight’s reputation as a homosexual.[2] During the early years of their marriage, the couple lived in what was then known as “the Bradbury Estate” at Kendal Green in Weston, Mass.[3] Their son Lawrence Dwight (1896–1918) was born a year later in Boston, on November 6, 1896. Lawrence spent most of his youth in Vevey, Switzerland, where his father was U.S. Consul. He graduated August 30, 1917, from the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY. He was to have graduated from the Academy a year later in the spring of 1918, but his class finished a year early due to World War I. Lawrence died six months later of pneumonia in Brest, France, without having seen battle. He held the rank of Second Lieutenant at the time of his death and is buried in the Suresnes American Cemetery and Memorial in France.

Theodore Frelinghuysen Dwight, Self-Portrait, ca. 1890 (Gardner Museum Archives, Boston CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Dwight died on February 3, 1917, at the age of 70. At the time, he was living at 48 Beacon Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill. His health had been failing for several years, though he stayed in touch with friends by phone and letter, especially Isabella Stewart Gardner, who had been a friend and confidant since the 1890s.[4]   He is buried alongside his wife in the Harmony Grove Cemetery in Salem, Massachusetts.

The major portion of Dwight’s career was as a librarian and archivist. Later in life, he served as an American diplomat. He occasionally worked as a bookkeeper, editor, and proofreader.

Dwight was a member of several prominent men's clubs and historical organizations. These included in Washington the Cosmos Club, of which he was Secretary in 1881-1882;[20] and in Boston the American Antiquarian Society,[21], a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society[22], the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts (where he also served as editor of numerous publications), the Tavern Club, and the St. Botolph Club. In 1884, he was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa Alpha, Harvard College Chapter.[23]

Sometime around October, 1881, Dwight, then librarian of the Department of State, had became acquainted with American historian Henry Adams, who was at that time doing research in the State Department archives for his landmark publication, The History of the United States of America (1801 to 1817) (9 vols., 1889–1891).[24] Adams worked with thousands of pages of original documents housed in the State Department archives and came to rely on Dwight, who was meticulous, hard working, and knew the State Department collection inside and out.  

During the last three years of his tenure at the State Department, starting sometime around 1885, Dwight began moonlighting as a personal and literary assistant to Henry Adams.[25] Though the exact nature of the assigned duties are unclear, they almost certainly included proofreading and editorial work on Adams’s History of the United States. During the summer of 1885, Dwight lived in Adams’s house at 1607 H Street, a house facing Lafayette Square that Adams rented from Washington banker William Wilson Corcoran while his own house designed by Henry Hobson Richardson was being constructed next door. Dwight managed the house and its staff while Adams and his wife, Marian Hooper Adams, were on vacation in Virginia. Adams viewed Dwight as a friend rather than caretaker, because he encouraged him to make use of his wine cellar during the couple’s absence.[26]

After Marian’s death in December 1885, Dwight moved in with Adams to help him run the household and, as Dwight described in a letter to a friend, to “support his bereavement.”[27] He continued his work at the State Department while living in Adams’s home for the next three years.

In March 1888, Adams and Dwight traveled together to Cuba by way of Florida, where they visited friends of Adams before sailing to Cuba for a visit of two weeks. In a letter to a friend, Adams called Dwight his “companion.” In Havana, the two men attended a bull fight, a carnavale mascarade, and the opera, but ultimately found the city to be too noisy and, in Adam’s opinion, a “gay ruin.”[28]

Shortly after their return from Cuba, Dwight resigned from his position at the State Department Library and within a few months began working for the Adams family as their archivist in the “Stone Library” located on the Adams homestead in Quincy, Massachusetts. The Stone Library is now part of the Adams National Historical Park and houses the personal and family papers of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams, Henry Adams, and Brooks Adams.

During Dwight’s years working in Quincy, Henry Adams became increasingly concerned about his archivist’s mental health. For example, in 1890, he became particularly alarmed and wrote to Dwight: “I am very anxious to hear that you are feeling right. I cannot believe that the trouble is beyond easy and quick treatment. These clouds vanish as quickly as they come, and some day you will wake up right. Most men and women have had the experience.”[29] The letters of Adams to his friends during these years contain many references to Dwight’s mental health and Adams’s worries about him.

By mid-1891, anticipating both the conclusion of Dwight’s duties in Quincy and the possibility that Dwight might be named Librarian of the Boston Public Library, Adams encouraged Dwight to consider leaving the employ of his family and accept the Library job if it were offered to him. The letters of Adams to his friends during these years contain many references to Dwight’s mental health and Adams’s worries about him, so that was almost certainly another reason Adams encouraged Dwight to leave:

By all means [Adams writing to Dwight], accept the Librarian-ship if it is offered to you. I do not know how far you have got along with the Quincy [Adams] library; but I suppose by this time that is sufficiently in order; the papers arranged, and the indexes carried far enough to be finished in reasonable time. After these things are once organised, the work of carrying them on requires no great care or labor. A year of attention ought to exhaust the whole thing, as far as it requires your close labor. I take for granted that this is long ago done, and that you have really no more to do at Quincy, and rather need a bigger field and better position. If I were you, I should certainly take it, as I told you long ago, when we first discussed the subject of your leaving the [State] Department.[30]

Early in 1892, Adams and his brother Charles Francis Adams, Jr. decided that the work Dwight was doing for them on the Adams family political papers would not continue past the summer.[31]

Adams would remain friendly with Dwight and later also his wife Sally until their deaths. He visited them in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1902, when Dwight was serving there as American consul. Though he maintained a voluminous correspondence with Dwight, and mentioned him often in letters to other members of his innermost circle of friends, Adams never referenced Dwight's homosexuality or his place in Boston's elite homosexual community.

After moving to Boston to take a position with the Adams family, Dwight took up residence in a gentleman’s rooming house at 10 Charles Street where his lover, the writer and dramatist Thomas Russell Sullivan, also lived. The two men were not reticent about their homosexual relationship. They entertained together,[32] were members of the same clubs (e.g., The Tavern club and The St. Botolph's clubs), and went out in society as a male couple. They socialized together, for example, over private dinners with Isabella Stewart Gardner and her husband John L. Gardner at Boston’s Somerset Club.[33]. In 1892, while Dwight was traveling to meet Isabella Stewart Gardner in Europe, Sullivan wrote to her about the sadness he felt during Dwight’s absence:

I mourn for T.F.D. [Theodore F. Dwight] who has departed this house [10 Charles St.] and sails for your shores in two days.... Sturgis Bigelow, M.D., has come in with hypnotic influence and carries me off to dine with him to-night with the resident literati and tutti Frutti....Don’t keep our librarian [Dwight] away too long.[34]

Bigelow, another prominent member of Boston’s homosexual community, opened his men-only summer retreat on the remote and sparsely populated Tuckernuck Island to other members of Boston’s homosexual community and their tolerant male friends.[35] Not all the guests were homosexual: Bigelow's close friend George Cabot Lodge was a regular visitor, even after his marriage to Mathilda Elizabeth Frelinghuysen Davis (1876–1960). At the Tuckernuck lodge, clothes were only required at evening dinner. Dwight and Sullivan were frequent guests of Bigelow at the island house. One of the most overt indicators of Dwight’s sexual orientation was his fascination with photographing and collecting photographs of nude men and boys, both before and after his marriage to Sally Pickman Loring in 1895. In the summer of 1892, Dwight traveled to Europe with Isabella Stewart Gardner. While in Munich, he bought 121 male nude photographs by Guglielmo Plüschow and Wilhelm von Gloeden, and another of their photos in London later that summer. In a letter to his friend Charles Warren Stoddard, Dwight bragged that he had gotten the photographs through U.S. Customs without being detected, thus preventing “confiscation and imprisonment.” “When you see my spoils you will comprehend my dangers,” he wrote to Stoddard.[36] In January 1896, while in Rome on his honeymoon with Sally, he again wrote to Stoddard with an extensive account of his visit to von Plüschow’s studio in Rome. He was such a good customer, that von Plüschow permitted Dwight to use his studio to make his own photographs of the male models he most appreciated:

Pluschow himself was not visible but I was given all the opportunities to see his collection, without, apparently, any expectation of [a] sale, by his German assistant. ... While we were talking who should come in but a very handsome, black haired & mustachioed Italian, quite stout built, broad shouldered, perhaps 24 years old, who seemed anxious to be noticed & very much in command of the place; & presently I learned that he was Vincenzo Goldi [sic, Galdi] the subject of so many of our pictures. He posed for those in sitting posture on the wall, with a fillet round his head & with Edoard, the more beautiful youth, in an infinite number of others. I told him that I knew him from the soles of his feet to the top of his head & he immediately became most talkative, showing me all his favorite attitudes. We established such friendly relations that I have now the privilege of making photos myself in the Pluschow studio & of his models.[37]

Dwight himself corresponded quite openly with Gardner about his homosexual impulses and affairs, writing in one letter to her, for example, about his secret life:

You would be amused could you know how in my secret thoughts of late I have been chiefly engaged in trying to penetrate my own disguise to find the real Dwight, for it is really ridiculous that I should all unconsciously have played a part so well as to deceive so many intelligent and respectable people. I dare not think of the time when they will discover their mistake.[38]

In another letter to her, Dwight described the breakup of an unidentified love affair, writing “...the period has come to that little romance in which I was so foolish as to indulge. You were right in your prediction. I seem to come out of it somewhat battered perhaps, & somewhat benumbed but quite patient & resigned.”[39] The Boston historian Douglass Shand-Tucci concluded that Dwight’s homosexuality was one of the reasons for his hasty departure from the Boston Public Library.[40] When Dwight decided on short notice to marry a woman, his lover Sullivan likened it to a death, writing in his journal: “To-night I dined quietly at Miss Sally Loring’s with Dwight. They are to be married very soon, and pass a year in Europe. So, in this whirl of life, Love and Death go hand in hand.”[41]

In 1881, Secretary of State James G. Blaine instructed Dwight to assist the U.S. Government in acquiring the Henry Stevens collection of Benjamin Franklin’s papers that had once belonged to Franklin’s grandson William Temple Franklin. The papers were on the market in London, England, and Dwight, who was then traveling in Europe, went to London to examine the papers and assess their relevance to American history. He reported to the Senate that the papers “are the veritable records of our history, and are as worthy of a place among the national archives as those of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton."[42]

Were it not for Dwight’s association with Henry Adams, Dwight would have largely been forgotten by history. Adams’s biographers Ernest Samuels and others have had little interest in researching the personal details of Dwight’s life, despite the important ways that the lives of the two men intersected. For example, Samuels provides no context for Adams’s frequently-expressed concern about Dwight’s mental health and well-being, or why Adams chose Dwight rather than someone else to be his housemate and literary secretary and to “assist him with his bereavement” after the death of his wife Marian.[43] Given Adams’s deep connections to the elite literary and social scenes of Boston, it seems unlikely that he had no notion of Dwight’s homosexuality or his relationship with Sullivan and others. Adams was well aware of the reputation of Bigelow's all-male Tuckernuck Island retreat, for example, calling it "a scene of medieval splendor."[44] Also, Henry Adams knew why his friend Mrs. Henry Cabot “Nanny” Lodge had advised Sally Loring against marrying Dwight.[45]

Adams had enjoyable and interesting friendships with gay men and women, and wrote about those friendships in his diaries and letters. Yet the fact that Adams’s biographers have chosen to ignore the homosexuality of friends such as Dwight, Charles Warren Stoddard (himself a close friend of Dwight's), William Sturgis Bigelow, Elsie de Wolfe, and others, suggests that the biographies of non-LGBT people can also be de-gayed.

Look up de-gay in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

There is no evidence anywhere in Adams’s papers or scholarship about him that he had any homosexual inclinations of his own, yet the record clearly shows that he was comfortable with and enjoyed close friendships with gay and lesbian people; for example, Charles Warren Stoddard was a frequent visitor at Adams's home in Washington, at a time when Stoddard was leading a more or less openly-homosexual life in the Nation's capital, where he cohabited with his lover Kenneth O'Connor Stoddard, a younger man who he referred to as his "son" (even though he never formally adopted him) and with whom he socialized publicly in Washington.[46]

The official accounts of Adams’s life (principally his collected letters edited by J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, and others, and Samuels’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, three-volume biography of Adams) all address Dwight’s place in Adams’s life, of course, but in the blandest of terms and with no reference to the complexities of Dwight’s own interesting life. The collections of Adams’s and Dwight’s personal papers are both housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and so it seems like flawed scholarship that Levenson, Samuels, and others who were there working with Adams’s papers in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s would not have bothered to further investigate Dwight, who was so important to Adams in so many ways. Had they chosen to study Dwight’s papers and gain a fuller understanding of his life, they might have produced a fuller and even more interesting account of the life of Henry Adams. It is also notable that while mainstream American historians such as Samuels were not aware of or chose not to disclose Dwight’s homosexuality, gay scholars such as Roger Austen and Douglass Shand-Tucci who have studied Dwight’s life make no mention of his association with Henry Adams. This suggests that more dialog between LGBT and non-LGBT scholars of American history, arts, and letters would lead to a deeper appreciation of the role of LGBT people in the narrative of American history.

• Roger Austen, Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1991)
• J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, et al., eds. The Letters of Henry Adams, 6 Vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982-1988)
• Ernest Samuels, The Young Henry Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967)
• Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965)
• Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Major Phase (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964)
• Douglass Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia: 1881–1900. Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995)
• T.R. Sullivan, Passages from the Journal of Thomas Russell Sullivan, 1891-1903 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1917)

• Theodore Frelinghuysen Dwight at Find a Grave
• Theodore F. Dwight Papers, 1668-1915: Guide to the Collection (Massachusetts Historical Society)