by Linda Gordon
Henry’s success rested on Hoboken’s prosperity and ethnic makeup.4 Germans were so dominant there that it is misleading to consider them an ethnic group, which carries the implication of minority status. Teaching German in the public schools was standard and Germans dominated many of the biggest churches, Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed (Evangelical). The Nutzhorns’ church, St. Matthew’s, was one of the oldest and most distinguished, with its 150-foot bell tower.
Hoboken’s population of 59,000 in 1900 made it a suburb of New York City, whose population was then 3.5 million. But Hoboken was not a bedroom community. Its economy was thriving, a success story based on a greater diversity of enterprises than was typical of growing cities. Its largest manufacturers included Remington Arms, which employed three thousand, a huge dry docks, Cooper Hewitt Electric, and the country’s biggest pencil maker. Lipton Tea and Maxwell House Coffee were two of many large importers in Hoboken. Between 1900 and 1905, its factories increased from 194 to 279, and these manufacturing activities gave rise to many mercantile and financial institutions.
In Dorothea’s time, Hoboken’s soul was its docks. San Francisco’s Embarcadero seemed familiar to Dorothea when she first saw it, because Hoboken’s riverside had always swarmed with longshoremen and sailors moving from ships to docks to bars and back. Fifty years later, the feel of the Hoboken docks remained vivid enough for Elia Kazan to film On the Waterfront there. In Dorothea’s youth, Hoboken was the major New York–area steamship terminal, featuring a dozen lines, notably the Hamburg-American Line, which offered express service from Hoboken to Southampton in a record six and a half days. So many immigrants disembarked from these ships that boosters called Hoboken “the city at the nation’s front door.”
Hoboken also provided for transshipping between sea and rail, and the Lackawanna Railroad provided the fuel—anthracite coal—for this engine of capitalism. In 1907, the massive Erie-Lackawanna train station opened, a Beaux-Arts confection sheathed in lavish ornamental copper, connecting both to the ferry terminal and the new Port Authority Trans-Hudson tunnel train to Manhattan. The wealth of Hoboken and its nearby cities made education and high culture possible, in part because of proximity to New York. It claimed Stephen Crane, Fred Astaire, Jerome Robbins, Alfred Kinsey, and Alfred Stieglitz, the dean of art photography in Dorothea’s youth, as native sons.
The Nutzhorns belonged to the elite among Hoboken’s middle class. Henry Nutzhorn quickly gained positions of importance: elected Hudson County freeholder, trustee of the most important Lutheran church in Hoboken, officer of the Hoboken Board of Trade, and Republican state representative (at the age of twenty-seven). These offices came to him from family, political, class, and ethnic connections—his father also sat on the church and trade boards. Because of these connections, Dorothea learned early about local politics in all their pettiness and dirtiness. In the state legislature, the two parties made their peace through guaranteeing equality in corruption. Politicians ran gambling, prostitution, racing, and bribery enterprises and sold pardons to criminals, while the state became known as “the Mother of Trusts” for its permissive policy toward holding companies. As New York City had begun to crack down on corruption, some of its greatest barons, such as Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, fled to New Jersey. Nowhere was the graft greater and more brazen than in Democrat-dominated Hudson County. The power behind the county’s bosses, magnate Edward F. C. Young, controlled the trolleys, banks, and railroads of the area from the Civil War through the 1890s and doled out lesser properties to his cronies. Becoming careless, legislating too openly in the interests of their criminal and corporate masters, Democratic politicians lost the legislature in 1894 and the governorship in 1896. Within the ascendant Republican party arose a Progressive reform caucus, called the “New Idea” movement, which attacked not only corruption but also subsidies to corporations. The New Idea represented middle-class, professional, and upper-class Protestants, Germans prominent among them, typical of the constituencies of Progressivism throughout the United States. Weehawken, where Henry and Joan and their children now lived, was a center of support for the Progressive reformers, and Henry Nutzhorn counted himself among them. Although they were defeated in 1910, the New Idea movement had increased Nutzhorn’s prestige within his community and constituency.
As with many other Progressives, the young Nutzhorn couple was modern and cultured. Their second child, Dorothea’s brother, Henry Martin Nutzhorn, Jr., was born when she was six, in 1901, so some kind of birth control was being practiced. The Nutzhorns valued literature and education. The young Dorothea read from the family’s volume of Shakespeare’s plays. Her father took her once to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When they arrived, there were no more seats, so he stood and she sat on his shoulders through the whole performance. He had a strong back and a strong desire for his daughter to take this in.
Joan, however, was the major communicator of culture. A music lover, broad in her taste, she collected jazz as well as classical recordings; a great reader, she was tuned in to world and local politics, progressive in her opinions and even activist in her orientation. In Weehawken, a uniformed maid relieved her of housework and Joan at times made snobbish remarks about the less cultured. She enjoyed good furniture and a well-decorated home and liked displaying the household’s many books. She disliked the way that her sister-in-law Minette, a Ziegfeld dancer, came “shambling up from the train with all her children in tow—it looked too ‘Italian,’ ” and thought that her father had married “beneath” himself in choosing Sophie Votteler. In other ways Joan was liberal, open-minded and restless. She frequently rearranged her house, and once explained that she would move objects and furniture whenever reaching them got to be automatic.5 This odd and interesting preference was due not just to restlessness or adventurousness but also to an imperative to resist the routine, the taken-for-granted. The same resistance would characterize her daughter, but in Dorothea it would be transmuted into awesome discipline.
The family created art as well as consuming it. Joan was a fine soprano and, when still in her teens, became the paid soloist at St. Matthew’s, singing from a classical as well as a religious repertoire. She took Dorothea to hear the renowned Leopold Stokowski conduct an oratorio at New York’s elite St. Bartholomew’s church. Joan’s youngest brother, John George Lange, was a cellist with the Hoboken Quartet, the Haydn Orchestra, and the Dvořák String Quartet. When conducting for Ziegfeld, he met and married Minette, who was then performing in a Victor Herbert musical.6 A generation back, Joan’s great-uncles Otto, William, and Fritz were all lithographers and engravers. They had learned their skills in the old country, and passed them on to two sons, Dorothea’s uncles, who also became lithographers. She loved to look at the stones they worked on. They were artisans, yes, but at this time the line between the skilled crafts and the arts was fuzzy, and after a few years they switched their occupational identity in the city business directory to “artist.”
Joan’s mother, Sophie, was an artisan seamstress, as creative as her brothers. She made all the women in her family a new dress twice a year. She also “turned” the old ones, disassembling the frocks and reassembling them with the inside of the fabric facing out. (This was an indicator of thrift, not poverty.) These were the days when clothing had gussets and plackets, tucks and pleats, even passementerie—elaborate edgings and trimmings of braid, cord, embroidery, and beads. She cut her own patterns, having first marked them out with an old-fashioned pattern wheel on a walnut-topped oval table. The table was covered with little pricks made by the wheel as it marked the paper or fabric, and Dorothea thought it beautiful, like an abstract design. Grosmama Sophie was an aesthete; Dorothea remembered that she once said that “of all the things that were beautiful in the world there was nothing finer than an orange. . . .”7
Henry and Joan made a fine-looking couple. Henry, handsome and vigorous, was five nine, lean, blond, with gray eyes behind his glasses. As a teenager, Dorothea thought he looked like Woodrow Wils
on. Joan was lovely, her features both softer and stronger than his, with a generous nose and mouth, large eyes, an animated face, freckles and a ruddy complexion, a wealth of red-brown hair worn up in a twist. The Nutzhorns were active in their church. While they were not devout, they practiced and cherished Christian family rituals—singing and playing favorite Christmas music and listening to it on the Victrola, hanging much01-used decorations, and cooking and eating elaborate extended-family holiday meals.
DOROTHEA’S CHILDHOOD APPEARS to have been placid for seven years. Nothing threatened to disturb this well-being when the seven-year-old girl came down with a cold in the summer of 1902. But it worsened into what her parents thought was influenza, a potential killer at the time. The young girl was feverish and nauseated, with headache and a stiff neck. But after days of this and then a day or two of feeling better, her legs suddenly buckled while she was walking just a few steps around the house, and soon she could not move her legs at all. Then the paralysis stiffened her whole body. After about a week, the Nutzhorns realized that their daughter had caught infantile paralysis, as poliomyelitis was called in those days. In fact, parents of many children who contracted the disease thought it was a cold or flu, because most polio cases never progressed beyond those symptoms. And since these symptoms came with many other diseases, it is not an anomaly that there is no record of a 1902 outbreak in Hudson County. Entering the body through the digestive system, the virus is often destroyed there by antibodies. Only when it enters the central nervous system does it become destructive, killing motor nerve cells, which cannot regenerate. More confusing yet, sometimes children died before exhibiting clear evidence of paralysis, and at other times the paralysis developed de novo, without any previous warnings of illness. Even the most knowledgeable physicians were confused.
The polio virus is probably ancient, not a new mutation. It had long been endemic—that is, the virus was widespread—but rarely caused much serious disease because children gained a passive immunity through breast-feeding, and later active immunity through exposure. In the crowded slums of London, Paris, and the Lower East Side of New York City, babies and young children were routinely exposed and became immune.
Progress then intercepted this adaptation. When public-health measures improved sanitation, babies were more likely to be spared exposure; then, if exposed at older ages, they lacked immunity. For that reason, polio struck most where standards of hygiene and plumbing were highest, a disease not of the slums but of upscale and rural neighborhoods where water was clean and human wastes either efficiently removed or effectively degraded.8 In other words, poliomyelitis was an unintended perverse consequence of public health.9 As living standards rose, exposure to polio was postponed, so that the age of victims climbed. That Franklin Delano Roosevelt came down with polio at age thirty-nine in 1921 was not, by then, completely strange.
But earlier in the century, associations of disease with dirt and poverty clouded the eyes of public-health experts. Despite reports that showed greater polio incidence in better neighborhoods, during the large 1916 New York City epidemic, Commissioner of Health Haven Emerson focused on cleaning up the slums. These assumptions amounted to a moralizing attack on the urban poor, and specifically seemed to blame mothers, since 80 percent of the New York–area cases affected children under five.10
The disease soon became known as “the crippler.” Although the death rate from polio was much lower than that in epidemics traditionally called “plagues,” the crippling and disfigurement made polio differently terrifying. That it almost always attacked children made it the cruelest of diseases. Epidemiologist John R. Paul anthropomorphized the virus as a calculating, strategizing enemy. It “seeks to establish itself in the lymphatic tissue. . . .” It does its best “to get a further foothold in the body of the susceptible child.”11 His semantics eerily match that of the memory of a child polio, the writer Leonard Kriegel:
I just lay in bed, an eleven-year-old boy who was terrified of the thick somnolent deadness that was creeping up from his ankles. . . . I knew then without even knowing that my life depended upon that thing within me, on whether it had fed enough on my soft, child-muscled body or whether it was simply resting, a quiet pause to cool the ardor of its appetite . . . before it crept on to devour my heart, my neck, my head, even my mind, in its untempered, unrestrained desire.12
Neither Dorothea nor anyone close to her left an account of her polio experience, so I have pieced together the typical polio progression from other sources. The onset of paralysis often caused vertigo. One polio remembered crying out, “I can’t find my body.”13 The pain was brutal and terrifying. “As the neurons in my body died one by one during those two weeks, I felt relentless pain, like the pain of a tooth being drilled without Novocain, but all over my body.”14 As paralysis ebbed, the pain increased, and there were few painkillers. Polioed muscles were tender and often in spasm. Every manipulation of the patient—to dress or undress, to wash or massage—produced pain. During the acute phase of the illness, patients were commonly unable to speak, swallow, or control the bowels and bladder.
There was, quite literally, nothing one could do to cure this disease. No reason to be hospitalized. (Middle-class people at the time associated hospitals with the worst of medical care and with death. One physician writing about poliomyelitis referred to the “hospital classes,” meaning the poor and disreputable.)15 If polio attacked the diaphragm, you died, because there were no iron lungs or respirators before 1924. The first reliable U.S. study reported that 17 percent of victims died, but the death rate was higher when polio struck adults or older children. A doctor likely saw Dorothea, for this was standard practice among people of her class and location at the time, but the less he did, the better. Many physicians turned to traditional practices of considerable unpleasantness and no benefit.16 It is hard to blame them, considering the desperate pleas from parents to do something, try anything.
The eerie paralysis produced a radical separation between consciousness and body, as if the self were imprisoned. Depression often followed. Once active, sociable children were no longer able to play with others. Fear of contagion kept visitors away and led parents to confiscate and even destroy children’s most beloved objects—pets, teddy bears, favorite books—in case they were vectors of dirt or germs. Discrete deprivations merged into a pool of loss. Children could even feel guilty: When eleven-year-old Leonard Kriegel could speak again, his first words to his mother were, “Momma, I’m sorry.”17
When paralysis abated, treatments aimed to prevent deformity through physical manipulation, braces, and painful physical therapy.18 Dorothea was fitted with a brace for her right leg. It began with a special shoe, a short boot really. Double steel uprights were attached to its shank, running to the upper thigh; the outer upright continued up to a band strapped around the pelvis; it was hinged at ankle and knee, but these hinges could be locked, so as to provide support for maintaining a straight leg and to correct misshapen legs.19 The steady pressure of the device caused pain, the straps abraded the skin, and the weight of the brace—probably about twenty pounds—fatigued the wearer.
Some paralyzed victims regained full mobility, while others suffered permanently paralyzed legs (this is the single most common polio consequence), arms, stomachs, and, worst of all, diaphragms. In Dorothea’s case, the permanent damage—that is, the visible permanent damage—was to her right leg. The muscles shrank, the tendons fixed in tension. Treatment and exercise left her with a right lower leg that was functional but stiffer, weaker, and less well shaped than her left, with a “drop foot” that could not flex into a position perpendicular to the leg. (That foot position was the most common of polio deformities, called talipes equines because it appeared hooflike, in extreme cases resembling the bound foot of a woman in old China.) Since the foot was in constant plantar flexion, the posterior muscles and tendons contracted. Dorothea’s right foot also took on a bit of talipes varus, where the foot turned inward, so that only the ou
ter edge of the sole touched the ground. She would always need to wear two different shoe sizes.
It is difficult to distinguish Dorothea’s emotions about her trauma from Joan’s, because at the heart of children’s polio experience was often a renewed dependence on a caretaker, usually the mother, from whom they had just been developing autonomy. Seven-year-old Dorothea might have been back in diapers, unable to meet any need without her mother, possibly even unable to call her mother, and thus entirely vulnerable. This unnatural and frightening intimacy left a child paralyzed not only in limb, but also inert, without agency. Little knots of misunderstanding might chafe the already-tender child. With the first paralysis, a child was stunned, but the very young might assume it would pass, especially since she experienced her parents as all-protecting. The child might imagine a logical explanation. One child asked, “ ‘Mama, why does my food all go down into one leg and leave the other one so thin?’ ”20 Worse trouble could start here. Knowing that the child needed reassurance, the parents might fib: “You have a cold in your leg.” Or misunderstand: One child, experiencing double vision as the polio affected his eyes, told his parents that he was “seeing through” solid objects. They responded that this could not be. So children realized that what their parents said was not necessarily to be believed. In Dorothea, this paralytic dependence strengthened her extraordinary need for independence, a need that came from feeling that dependence was unsafe, unreliable.
With partial recovery came stringent, if not impossible, challenges. Joan emphasized that Dorothea should hide her limp and her distorted leg. Her desire to protect her daughter from stigma communicated her own anxiety at being the mother of a “cripple.” The very experience of renewed dependence intensified the child’s normal desire to please her mother. This effort was exhausting and often failed. As an adult, Dorothea turned that failure into anger, and condemned her mother for undignified deference to the opinions of others. Yet Joan’s shame contributed to Dorothea’s lifelong fastidiousness. She cared little for conventional fashion but much for absolute control over her image.21