The Tobacco Queen of Texas

In late April of 1906, a one-paragraph news item appeared on an inside page of the New York Times: Justice Blanchard of the Supreme Court has granted Brodie L. Duke an interlocutory decree of divorce from his wife, Alice Webb Duke, to whom he was married on Dec. 19, 1904. She did not appear at the trial of the case. The cursory notice signaled the end of a marriage that got sensational front-page headlines in both New York and Chicago 15 months earlier, when readers learned that Brodie L. Duke, one of the Dukes of tobacco fame, had married an attractive, mysterious woman with a checkered...

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