Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [30]
Of course, this argument might be seen as just as valuable for Hetty’s opponents, for it threw into stark contrast the image of a hale and hearty bank president signing dozens of documents per day, and a lonely, disabled shut-in, who had quite literally to be placed in front of a document, at times with a pen inserted between her fingers, in order to sign anything at all. No matter, the complainants charged on.
Lawyers for the estate located a variety of other individuals with consistent penmanship, the most prominent among these being John Quincy Adams. The sixth president had been dead for nearly twenty years, but he became an unwitting participant after his thirty-three-year-old grandson discovered in the president’s old study a chest containing dozens of canceled personal checks. The grandson’s testimony served primarily to establish that the checks were, in fact, in the handwriting of the president, and that the president never used a stamp of his signature on checks, always preferring to sign them individually.
A series of engravers, tracers, and penmanship experts were then enlisted to examine the various multiple copies of signatures of these individuals, to see whether their handwriting might duplicate, or “cover,” as well as or better than the signatures of Sylvia. What followed was a detailed, exhaustive digression into the arts of penmanship, mapmaking, photography, and assorted other fields with ever more tenuous relation to the issues at hand. John A. Lowell, a twenty-nine-year-old Boston engraver, found, upon examining hundreds of sets of signatures, “quite a number … covered quite as well, or better, in my opinion” than the purported Sylvia signatures. No doubt Lowell was an expert in his field but it is difficult to imagine a judge following or paying attention for long to his testimony, a small segment of which serves to represent the overall tone: “I found of the J. Q. Adams lot, No. 24 matched with No. 49, covered as well as the best one, and that No. 51 with 58, did not cover as well as does No. 10 does with No. 1, but better than 15 does with one.”
George Mathiot, head of the electrotype and photographic division of the United States Coast Survey Office in Washington, submitted to no fewer than five days of mind-spinning, posterior-numbing testimony on ever more arcane subjects. An expert on tracing, Mathiot had devised a method for reducing table-sized maps to standard paper size, for publishing purposes. Hetty’s lawyers had enlisted him to examine signature pairs and testify with authority, as had Lowell, that lots of signatures covered better than Sylvia’s. Mathiot did so, but his testimony, especially under cross-examination, drifted onto subjects ranging from the attributes of various lens types, the manufacturing process of paper, and the type and configuration of clamps used to hold paper to drafting tables at the Coast Survey Office. One excruciating session, covering much of an afternoon and extending into the following morning, concerned the relative merits of the Voigtlander lens. When, nearing the end of his testimony, Mathiot was asked by one of the respondents’ lawyers whether his examination of the signatures had been a long or short one, he replied, “A long and tedious one.” It is safe to say that everyone present could feel his pain.
The respondents’ lawyers, for their part, produced an equal number of witnesses claiming precisely the opposite, that signatures so uniform and precise could be nothing but forgeries. George A. Sawyer, a forty-four-year-old