Strange Country Ep. 298: Rhinelander v. Rhinelander

Strange Country

We love our trials of the century here at Strange Country and this one is a doozy. It’s likely one you’ve never heard of: Rhinelander v Rhinelander. See a young aristocrat married a domestic worker and everyone went all “heavens to betsy” about it, but what made it bring out the worst in people was that the working class bride was biracial. This was in 1924 before the country accepted interracial marriage and the KKK was on the resurgence—or what we could now call the present time.

Theme music: Big White Lie by A Cast of Thousands

Cite your sources:

Greene, Bryan. “How an Interracial Marriage Sparked One of the Most Scandalous Trials of the Roaring Twenties.” Smithsonian Magazine, 20 November 2024, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-an-interracial-marriage-sparked-one-of-the-most-scandalous-trials-of-the-roaring-twenties-180985486/. Accessed 8 May 2025.

Johnson, Theodore R. “When One Of New York's Glitterati Married A 'Quadroon.'” NPR, 7 June 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/06/07/319813854/when-one-of-new-yorks-glitterati-married-a-quadroon. Accessed 10 May 2025. Lewis, Earl, and Heidi Ardizzone. Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White. Norton, 2002.

Onwuachi-Willig, Angela. A Beautiful Lie: Exploring Rhinelander v. Rhinelander as a Formative Lesson on Race, Identity, Marriage, and Family , 95 California Law Review 2393 (2007) https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/310

“Rhinelanders Flee Glare of Publicity.” The New York Times [New York], 15 November 1924, p. 6, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1924/11/15/100236265.html?pageNumber=6.