26 Aug 2018

Fictional Truth: Part 1

by | posted in: Laura and Rose Wilder | 0

“You will just have to take my word for it,” Rose Wilder Lane advised her now much more famous mother.  There was “historical truth” and “fictional truth,” and she must learn to put her trust in the latter.  Rose must have touched a nerve, for Laura snapped back in her next letter, “Change the beginning of the story if you want.  Do anything you please with the damn stuff if you will fix it up.”  Touchy, touchy!

Laura needed Rose.  Her daughter had more experience as a writer.  She held important contacts with the publishing world.  Rose would be the ticket to getting her childhood prairie stories   published.

Rose needed Laura.  Her mother had the memories.  She had something to say.  Her mother would be the inspiration for her only books that mattered, Let the Hurricane Roar and Free Land, even if they are long forgotten today.

Theirs was a bit of a love-hate relationship.  Or, perhaps, a collaboration-competition relationship.  They possessed complementary styles and strengths.  According to her biographer, Caroline Fraser, Laura employed a “plain, unadorned, fact-based approach;” Rose a “polished, dramatic, and fictionalized one.”

Fictionalized and dramatic.  Rose might have put too much faith in so-called “fictional truth.”  Fifteen years before her mother began writing the Little House books, Rose cut her authorial teeth penning an “autobiography” of Charlie Chaplin and a loose “biography” of Jack London.  Both works “straddled a line between fact and fiction” and displayed a preference for “felt experience” over “objective reality.”  Rose admitted she was more concerned with getting at “the truth rather than at the facts.”

Laura’s early drafts, which she mailed to Rose, read in places like a diary.  Rose pushed her to allow her imagination free rein.  The only book that Rose had no hand in editing, The First Four Years, is a slim a hundred and thirty-four pages to cover, yes, four years.  To say it is breezy, compared to the other books might be an understatement.  Still, the emotion is there.  And the moving naturalistic descriptions.  And the sharp memories that were surely filled out by imagination.  But it reads very differently from the preceding seven volumes.

Laura benefited from her competitive collaboration with her daughter.  How many of her five Newbery Honors would she have received without it?  Rose benefited from the same fraught relationship.  Her literary well would have run dry long before it did without the timely infusion of inspiration from her mother.  That’s why Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires is more than a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  It is also a biography of Rose Wilder Lane.  And, perhaps most of all, it is a biography of the Little House books themselves, with the contributions of Ma and Pa, and to a lesser extent, of Mary, Baby Carrie, and Grace, too.

Go to Part 2.

Sources:

  • Holtz, William.  The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane.  Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.
  • Fraser, Caroline.  Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2017.
  • Images: Wikimedia Commons except book cover
4 Aug 2018

92 Years Ago Today: Channel Fever

by | posted in: Will Rogers | 0

In late summer, 1926, the North Atlantic world was struck by Channel-crossing Fever.  Five hearty souls had already swum the waterway dividing England and France, beginning as far back as 1875, so what was all the fuss?  For starters, three of the five had made the crossing as recently as 1923.  The fad had been building for three years.  More important, in 1926 the swimmers lining up along the coast were women.  If successful, they would be the first of their sex to conquer the Channel.

Men balked at their presumption.  The London Daily News opined, “Even the most uncompromising champion of the rights and capacities of women must admit that in contests of physical skill, speed, and endurance they must remain forever the weaker sex.”  George Lacker, a crew manager, insisted, “Such a feat is impossible for a woman.”

Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle paid such talk no heed.  She knew she could swim the Channel, and she would, however many attempts it took.  Just the year before, in her first attempt, Trudy had swum within six miles of the English shore, but her coach insisted that she had reached her limit and must come out of the water.  Some suspected that he sabotaged her swim.  Having himself attempted the Channel unsuccessfully (twenty-two times!), Jabez Wolffe might not have been keen to be shown up by a nineteen-year-old girl.  After the swim, he told a reporter that “the torments of seasickness, indigestion, inflammation of the eyes, great cold and other disagreeable features may prove too much for any woman swimmer.”  It would not be long before he would eat those words.

Channel waters are too cold to attempt early in the season (too cold for mere mortals to attempt even at their “warmest”).  Trudy and two other women needed to time their swim just right.  Too early could risk hypothermia.  Too late could risk losing the first place prize to another woman.  Three women–all of them Americans–waited and watched for a sign that the time was right.

Lillian Cannon joined Trudy at Cap-Gris-Nez, France, the approved “jumping off” point for Channel swimmers.  A third American Clarabelle Barrett mobilized at Dover, UK, to swim the less popular England-to-France direction.  She dove in first, on August 2, and swam a steady twenty-two hours before becoming disoriented in a fog bank.  She pulled out within two miles of the French coast.  Trudy waded in at 7:08 on the morning of August 4.  She had covered herself in grease as insulation against the 60 ͦ  water.  She wore wraparound goggles sealed with candle wax.  She wore a two-piece bathing suit of her own design to protect against chafing.

She began with fair sea and sky, but they didn’t last.  At one point, a storm whipped up and churned the Channel into twenty-foot waves.  Trudy’s coach hollered for her to come out of the water.  Trudy, who was going deaf because of complications from childhood measles, heard well enough to call back, “What for?”  Retold in the papers over the next days and weeks, these two words became Trudy’s rallying cry, on par with “Remember the Alamo!” or “Once more unto the breach.”  Writing for the New York Daily News, Paul Gallico enthused, “‘What for?’  And thus, with two words, Miss Gertrude Ederle disposed of the English Channel.  No wonder it couldn’t lick her.  She destroyed it utterly.”

So much for male superiority.  Trudy shattered the men’s record, beating it by more than two hours.

Her record swim didn’t stop Channel Fever.  Swimmers, both men and women, came down to the beaches, greased up, and braved the chilly, jellyfish-infested waters.  On August 23 alone, five different swimmers made the attempt.  (None succeeded.)  Before the end of summer four more swimmers conquered the Channel, including another woman (the first mother to achieve the feat), and three men, all of whom beat Trudy’s time (one by just ten seconds, a second by two hours, and the third by more than three and a half hours.  Among women, Trudy’s record would stand for twenty-five years.)

 

*          *          *

Leave it to Will Rogers to make comic hay out of the Channel-swimming mania.  1926 found him in Europe the entire summer.  He crossed the Channel in an airplane (a big deal for an American at the time) and shared his view of the water from above:

Looked over the edge of the plane all the way across the Channel, watching crowds of American Women swimming it.  One old lady was a great Grandmother and she had three generations of daughters swimming it with her.  You could see crowds of men standing on the shore waiting for a smooth sea to cross it in a boat.

In fact, Will made his flight, in late June and early July, too soon for the August swims.  But no one expected strict accuracy from Will Rogers.

While in Europe, Will appointed himself a “self-made diplomat” and pretended to send reports to “his president.”  He addressed them in “code” to CALCOOL (President Calvin Coolidge) at Whitehousewash or (even better) Whitewashhouse.  In one he wrote: “England’s House of Parliament…closed today to give some of the lady members a chance to try and swim the English Channel.  I wanted to have my wife try it, but the Channel is all booked up for the next month.”

Will stayed on in Europe through the summer, performing in Cochran’s 1926 Revue and filming a series of short travelogues in European capitals.  Channel Fever obviously cooled with the temperature, as indicated in Will’s “report” of September 12 to “CALCOOL”: “All Channel swimming was called off today on account of rain and a wet track.”

His commentary on the Channel-swimming craze of 1926 is genuinely funny but is it irredeemably sexist?  Is his talk of great grandmothers and daughters, women parliamentarians and his own wife, just another iteration of: “Such a feat is impossible for a woman,” even after the feat has been accomplished?  Are the “crowds of men standing on the shore” putting the men in their place or ridiculing the women for trying to show them up?  Does the joke belittle the achievement?

Will gave us a hint of his stance in his first comments on the subject–which also happened to be one of his first “daily telegrams” to the New York Times, dated August 8.  Just four days after Trudy’s swim, Will seemed to say that some of the women hopefuls were giving up and going home, the prize of being first having already been won.  He wrote with a noticeable (but not unprecedented) lack of humor: “Hordes of other Channel swimmers are leaving for their respective homes.  If they will only go to work when they get there Gertrude Ederle will have accomplished much more than her original feat.”  Ouch!  Will knew that his wife, Betty, was essential in keeping him and his family grounded and operating at full throttle.  He believed every family deserved the same, but he didn’t appreciate that women might have their own goals that did not require being subsumed to the family’s.

Ultimately, Will was a humorist, not an activist.  He dropped his reactionary first response and looked for the humor in the Channel-swimming craze of 1926: men got their comeuppance; women surprised even themselves.

Then he milked it for all it was worth.

 

Sources:

  • Dahlberg, Tim.  America’s Girl: The Incredible Story of How Swimmer Gertrude Ederle Changed the Nation.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009.
  • Gragert, Steven K., ed.  There’s not a Bathing Suit in Russia & Other Bare Facts. Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma State University Press, 1973 (1927).
  • Mortimer, Gavin.  “When Gertrude Ederle Turned the Tide.”  www.telegraph.co.uk, April 27, 2008.
  • Rogers, Will.  Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to his President. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1926.
  • Smallwood, James M. ed.  Will Rogers’ Daily Telegrams: Volume 1: The Coolidge Years: 1926-1929. Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Press, 1978.
  • Images: Wikimedia Commons except book cover (https://www.abebooks.com/book…/letters-self-made-diplomat-his-president/first-editio…)

 

For Further Reading:

 

28 Jul 2018

100 Years Ago Today: Doughboys to the Rescue

by | posted in: WWI Nurses | 0

British Volunteer Aid Nurse Vera Brittain left No. 24 General Hospital in Étaples in time to escape the bombings of May 30 [see “Etaples Hospital Air Raid;” May 30, 2018] but not so soon that she missed the arrival of fresh-faced American doughboys on French soil.  She wrote of the “unusual quality of bold vigour in their stride.”

They looked larger than ordinary men; their tall, straight figures were in vivid contrast to the undersized armies of pale recruits to which we had become accustomed….  I wondered, watching them with them move with such rhythm, such dignity, such serene consciousness of self-respect.  Had yet another regiment been conjured out of our depleted Dominions?

No, they were Americans, come at last to reinforce the bone-weary Allied armies.  Brittain wept, overcome with relief from the “intolerable” tension she had kept bottled up inside.

General Pershing, the proud American, resisted placing these early arrivals under French or British command.  He insisted they be trained until they could fight as part of an independent American army.  Events dictated otherwise.  American units were raced into action against the German drive to Paris.  Their crucial role in the stand at Chateau-Thierry earned the Americans eternal gratitude from the French.

Shirley Eastham, a nurse in a French evacuation hospital in the Soissons sector, recorded her encounter with American patients ten days after Chateau-Thierry, July 28, 1918:

So many Americans.  I hate to see them pouring in, yet I am proud of them.  Such gallantry, such nerve, such pluck!  Even the French nurses have remarked about it.  Always: Thank you, for every little thing.  And: How soon will I be able to go back to the line?  And: Help him first, he has waited longer than I have.
I feel they are mine, every last one of them, and their downright grit makes me want to cry all over them.  Now I know what real nobility means.

Eastham questioned whether she might be “too sympathetic” to be a good nurse.  Many volunteer nurses did.

Pershing eventually got his wish.  A planned offensive with a full American Army of nine divisions at St. Mihiel began September 12.  The Americans’ success in eliminating the German salient might have led to overconfidence.  The United States First Army was rushed into battle between the River Meuse and the Argonne Forest just a week later.  Doughboys fought their way through “a brutal tangle of crisscrossed ravines,” taking heavy casualties, 120,000 in all, of which 25,000 killed.  95,000 American wounded kept Nurse Corps nurses busy until the armistice six weeks later–and beyond.

Sources:

  • Brittain, Vera.  Chronicle of Youth.  Burlington, VT: Phoenix Press, 2000 (1923).
  • Brittain, Vera.  Testament of Youth. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005 (1933).
  • Millard, Shirley.  I Saw Them Die.  New Orleans: Quid Pro Quo Books, 2011 [1936].
  • Ross, John F.  Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed.  New York: St. Martin’s Press: 2014.
  • Images: Wikimedia Commons and Ancestry
12 Jul 2018

“Print, Print, Print”

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

 

The first edition of The Chicago Defender, a run of three hundred papers, went on sale May 5, 1905.  For two cents, readers received six columns of text on four full pages.  It was a humble beginning for one of America’s most storied newspapers.

That isn’t the half of it.  According to the tale laid out in Ethan Michaeli’s The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America, the paper’s beginning wasn’t so much humble as precarious–alarmingly so.  The Defender was the brainchild of Robert Abbott who published it out of the dining room of his landlady, Henrietta Lee.  The indefatigable Mrs. Lee provided staunch support for Abbott in all sorts of ways, including meals, nursing, and small loans.  Her teenage daughter, Genevieve, did clerical work.  A Pullman waiter, Fay Young, made a vital editorial contribution by collecting discarded newspapers from the dining car and bringing them back to Abbott.  Over Lee’s dining room table, the two would scan the papers for articles of interest that they would “rewrite from an African American angle.”  Even more important was Young’s work in the circulation department.  He passed out bundles of papers for Pullman porters to distribute in towns and cities along their routes.  Abbott paid the porters for their services.  Finally, Abbott nurtured a relationship with successful African American club owner, Teenan Jones, who became an “informal bank”, in Michaeli’s words, for keeping Abbott solvent when credit from white-led banks was impossible to obtain at reasonable rates.

But Michaeli believes that The Defender’s relationship with the black community as a whole that was most crucial in its survival.  By keeping long-time residents, new arrivals, and potential migrants informed on issues of direct importance to them, The Defender was building community among African Americans, both within metropolitan Chicago and across large areas of the country.  Stronger community meant large subscription base.  Subscribers paid a dollar for a year’s worth of weekly papers, and the subscriptions gave Abbott his most reliable revenue stream.

Michaeli’s book is the biography of a newspaper, so it makes sense that he starts with the life of its founder, Robert Abbott.  Born in 1869 on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, to two recently emancipated slaves, Abbott never met his father, who died of “sudden consumption.”  His mother–self-reliant, practical, and a self-taught reader–moved back to Savannah, developed a close relationship with her landlord, and ultimately married him.  Robert’s step-father–the only father he ever knew–was a German immigrant by the name of John Hermann Henry Sengstacke.  Sengstacke had a spiritual/cerebral bent and was ordained as a minister when Robert was seven.   “He endeavored to lift the minds of the people above the soil.”  Robert would later say.  He might have said the same about his own mission in life.

His stepfather gave him access to education, including six years at Hampton University, where he learned printing skills and, at least as important, became a member of the Hampton Quartet.  It was as a Quartet member that he was invited to attend the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Talks by an aging Frederick Douglass and a youthful Ida Wells (soon to be Barnett), gave him the inspiration that would shape the rest of his life.

Chicago, itself, had been a revelation to Abbott.  In a city of over a million, he observed a small but growing African American community that lived in relative freedom and dignity.  It provided a model for how America and “the Race” could adapt into the future.  But it needed an evangelist to spread the word.  With his printing skills, Abbott was determined to fill that role.  Thus, The Defender was born.

Michaeli (or his publishers) want readers to know how it “changed America.”  Some will already know that it played a crucial role in spurring black migration from the rural south to the industrial north.  Michaeli fills in the details of how this happened.  We learn the crucial role the Pullman porters played in distributing the paper, how eagerly these papers were received by southern blacks, and how each copy was passed from hand to hand, sometimes “until they disintegrated.”  Carl Sandburg, poet cum reporter, estimated an average of four or five readers for every copy in circulation.

From early on, The Defender wrote for southern blacks as much as for Chicago’s African Americans, and southern lynchings were a staple of its reporting.  “Southern White Gentleman Rapes Colored Lady; Is Killed by Husband” blared The Defender’s headline in late 1911.  Two Pinkerton agents came to the papers offices (that is, Mrs. Lee’s dining room!) to find the author of the inflammatory article.  Abbott required the aid of two white Chicago dignitaries to avoid “extradition.”  After the incident, Abbott assured his southern readers that he would not be cowed: “So long as God liveth and as news comes to us in the regular course, The Defender will print, print, print.”

A. B. Walker confessed to the murder and accepted his punishment with dignity: not legal retribution but a hanging at the hands of a mob. His bravery was impressive; the lynching repugnant. The story of Eli Persons is yet more disturbing.  With no evidence that he had committed the brutal rape and murder of a white girl, Persons was taken into custody and tortured for twenty-four hours until he finally “confessed.”  Then, about to be transferred for his “protection,” Person was attacked by a mob of three thousand which included police officers and men of standing in the community.  His murder was nothing less than a sadistic romp.  Michaeli shows his bon fides as a journalist by never losing objectivity while retelling this horror.  (He does not use scare quote as I have done.)  The Defender did not seek objectivity in its editorial stance, yet it showed admirable restraint when it asked, rhetorically, “Do you wonder at the thousands leaving the land where every foot of ground marks a tragedy?”

The Defender’s animus against the South was as strong as it was justified.  A 1917 photograph of Georgia migrants titled “The Exodus” read (in part): “tired of being kicked and cursed.”  An editorial reminded readers of the ever-present danger of rape: “Every black man for the sake of his wife and daughters especially should leave even at financial sacrifice.”  It ended with a frank admission of potential schadenfreude at the South’s expense: “We know full well that would mean a depopulation of that section and if it were possible we would glory in its accomplishment.”

Michaeli teaches us, however, that The Defender did not initially advocate wholesale migration to the North.  Here, as elsewhere in the newspaper’s history, Abbott shows an innately conservative nature.  He worried that there would not be enough employment for new arrivals.  When the European war opened up new factory jobs in 1914-15, he changed his paper’s position.

In 1916 hundreds of African American migrants were arriving in Chicago every week.  A quarter of a million left the South in the winter of 1916/17.  Almost half a million left in 1917-18.  And the exodus was felt in the South.  One Georgia paper blamed The Defender for its current labor shortage, saying it “has agitated the Negroes to leave the south on the word picture of equality with the whites.”  Another Georgia paper showed an admirable degree of self-awareness (though still distanced itself by using the third person): White people “have allowed negroes to be lynched, five at a time, on nothing stronger than suspicion.  When the negro is gone, his loss will be felt in ever large agricultural section and every industrial economy of the South.”

The Defender did more than foment the Great Migration.  It was present and weighed in on all the great people and events of the early twentieth century.  Its record, in part, is worth noting: Jack Johnson (cheered), Big Bill Thompson (supported and received much for the black community in return), Woodrow Wilson (supported, then disillusioned, then pleasantly surprised), 370th All-black Infantry Regiment (celebrated), Betsy Coleman (supported by financing her plane), Marcus Garvey (condemned), the Klan (reviled), A. Phillip Randolph (butted heads with and was mocked by as “The Surrender” and “The World’s Greatest Weakly”).

Some of the most interesting sections come when Michaeli’s focus turns to Abbott, private citizen.  The Hampton graduate, forced to skip meals and walk to the printer to save on trolley fare in his early years, became a very wealthy man by the 1920s.  But his Georgia-barrier-island dark skin was the face he presented to the world.  Auto dealerships wouldn’t sell him a car, though he could have bought three.  (He sent his white wife to make the purchase for him.)  Traveling abroad, the Abbotts were turned away from an American-owned hotel but welcomed at an elegant Brazilian one.  Abbott felt a certain lightness in France, simply for not being under the constant threat of harassment.   But even in Europe prejudiced Americans dogged him.  And England was almost as bad as the United States.

I read only the first two hundred pages, through about 1940, which is as late as I go, usually, as a historical reader.  Abbott’s replacement by his nephew, John H. Sengstacke had just begun.  A new chapter for the “Legendary Black Newspaper” was opened.  There is more to the story, all the way up to Obama’s presidency, in Michaeli’s important book.

Source: