by Alice Arlen
It was there in March 1907 that a reporter from World magazine braved the snow-covered fields outside Madison to interview “Chicago’s former golden society couple.” In his piece he described Patterson as “handsome, all bone and muscle, now wanting to lead an honest life by learning to plough and furrow, milk a cow.” Mrs. Patterson told him that “each day she walks a mile and back along the railroad tracks to the provision store,” while their cottage was portrayed as “no more or less than any dairyman might afford, shared by two pretty children, a charming wife and only two servants.” The novice agriculturist was apparently “reluctant to be interviewed until the subject turned to Socialism, at which point his dark brown eyes lit up”; whereupon he told the reporter that he had “sold his automobile and in a general fashion turned his back on Society,” setting himself a goal for the future of “providing high-class dairy products to the sick and ailing.”
By midsummer, with the Wisconsin landscape suffocating in heat instead of buried by snow, Alice Patterson was more than ready to return to Chicago and civilization. She thought she had an ally in her mother-in-law on Dupont Circle, with whom she corresponded on a regular basis. “Joe does mean so well,” she wrote in one letter, “and he is so much healthier away from certain temptations. But I worry that out here he is too far removed from things that matter to him.” Nellie, however, while perfectly willing to take a few swats at her rebellious son (“I do get so angry at him, and he is so bland and rude to me at times”) doesn’t rise to the bait. “True, he is exasperating, turbulent, willful, stubborn,” she writes to Alice, “but who is to say he has not a touch of genius? Besides, I think he never did a mean, dishonorable thing in his life. I am satisfied with him.” And then, to demonstrate her satisfaction, she takes for her the rare step of loosening her purse strings and advances Joe the necessary funds for him to buy and improve a farm in Illinois he’s had his eye on.
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THE PROPERTY was a three-hundred-acre farm in Libertyville, Illinois, a sparsely settled rural community some twenty-five country miles west of Lake Forest or, to put it another way, a two-hour journey by horse cart down a rough dirt path to a decidedly unsuburban destination, far removed in fact and spirit from the softening influences of familiar shops and neighbors. In Alicia’s recollection: “I don’t think father was any expert on farming, but he knew enough to see that the topsoil was deep and black, and that the corn grew as tall as you could want it—taller, in fact. The farm was bang in the middle of that bounteously rich farmland that marched in straight section-lines right to the horizon. So, fertile it certainly might be, but also unbelievably flat and bleak, fiery hot in summer, freezing in winter. And few trees anywhere, except along the fence lines or beside a muddy stream, or in little clusters we called ‘the woods.’ I remember April and May were always glorious, many wildflowers—trillium, hepatica, spring beauties—sometimes growing so thick you had to walk carefully not to crush them. But I don’t think mother ever really made a connection to the farming part of the place, which of course is what it was; it was a farm. Even when the corn started growing to the sky, you knew she just didn’t give a tinker’s dam about such things, about corn or grain or hogs. The truth is, she thought all that kind of thing was a bit vulgar, ought to be left to the laboring classes, the Sons of the Soil as she called them. In Libertyville, even the wildflowers didn’t quite meet her standard of how flowers are supposed to look. If you had to live in the country, she thought, better do it as the English do, with deer tripping daintily on lush lawns, and graceful sheep grazing in the distance. An English country house had style and presence, not an Illinois farmhouse. So, from the start, I think she and father had a kind of unspoken pact. The farm was his, the isolation and discomfort all of ours; but the house and its garden were hers. And over the years, she tried as hard as she could, with the help of architects and landscape people, to simply block out the Illinois prairie behind a screen of imported stately elms and assorted shrubbery. I don’t think it was ever a marriage of two minds.”
Both Pattersons, Joe and Alice, were still in their twenties, young enough to have some good days together from time to time on their remote, experimental farm. In the beginning Alicia, barely two years old, was in no position to remember much of anything beyond a blurry sense of fields and animals. Elinor at six, later claimed to remember that thrilling moment in their first year, the early morning when they could see that the alfalfa crop had come in: those little green shoots poking above the soil, with her father stomping about in the fields, welcoming the event with happy shouts; then marching up and down the furrows, singing some music-hall ballad, followed by his running back to the house to lift his tiny wife Alice off her feet and carry her out in his arms to show her their triumph—well, surely his triumph. Unfortunately much more of the time seems to have been passed in an atmosphere less resembling a pact than a chilly stand-off between two people who had painfully little in common: With Patterson out all day in the fields or in the barns, usually in the company of his Swedish farmhands, trying hard to be a farmer; with Alice either indoors, suffering from allergies or “nervous exhaustion” as she struggled to match fabrics to wallpaper, writing voluminous instructions to Chicago decorators, or else outside, on what she insistently called “the grounds,” trailing about with her Scots gardener, trying hard to be a country lady.
Two-year-old Alicia ponders her future.
Then, too, with Joe Patterson, there was nearly always the problem of focus, or perhaps of its opposite, distractedness. No matter how sincerely he might have wished to devote himself, say, to the challenge of feeding the sick and ailing, at the same time there was so often the rival challenge of keeping his attention fixed in one place. Thus, in addition to plowing and planting, to raising pigs and milking cows, to training as well as breeding workhorses, he soon went back to journalism. On the ground floor of the red-brick farmhouse, just off the front door, was a square, plain, low-ceilinged room which he took for his own, paying one of the rawboned Swedes to saw planks and install bookshelves, dragging in an old green sofa, a desk and chair, and various writerly implements, including one of the new Underwood typewriters. He called it his library, and when he wasn’t out in the fields or jogging along the fence lines (sometimes skipping rope and shadowboxing) to keep in shape, he was at his desk, writing signed editorials for the Daily Socialist, unsigned editorials for the Chicago Tribune; also a growing number of articles for magazines, national and regional; also fiction, in the form of the beginnings of a novel provisionally titled “Little Brother of the Rich.” All things considered it was not a bad life on the farm; there were strains and disagreements though also a kind of balance. But then, in early June 1908, seemingly on the spur of the moment, Patterson accepted a request from the leaders of the Socialist Party to serve as manager of Eugene Debs’s next run for the presidency.
· 8 ·
PATTERSON’S REENLISTMENT in the Debs campaign turned out to be one straw too many for his beleaguered wife. As Alice Patterson saw it, two years earlier she and her children had been uprooted from decent society and removed to a wilderness of pigs and cornstalks; now she was being asked to undergo public humiliation because of her husband’s perverse decision to align himself (and thus her) with those Reds and assorted troublemakers who were proposing the notorious, and possibly criminal, Debs for the highest office in the land. In late June a cross and embattled Alice left the farm for Chicago, where she linked up with Mother and Father Higinbotham (both of them as tiny as she), and then all three took the train east to Manchester-by-the-Sea, an hour or so north of Boston, where her older sister, Florence, and her lately acquired husband had rented an immense house close by the water.
The former Florence Higinbotham, now Florence Crane, or rather Mrs. Richard Teller Crane, seemed continually to be grabbing the gold rings that, by simple justice or some principle of sisterly fairness, should at least now and then go to Alice but somehow never did. Younger sister Alice had married first,
and married well, so it appeared, into a family with all those imposing Medills and Pattersons, to say nothing of Groton and Yale. But then look where it had got her: an alfalfa crop in Libertyville and Eugene Debs. Big sister Florence, on the other hand, with her brassy voice and bossy manner, had just married into the greatest plumbing fortune in the country: Wherever and whenever bathtubs, sinks, and especially flush toilets were being installed, a mighty river of dollars flowed into the Crane bank accounts. Moreover, Mr. Richard Teller Crane was definitely not a renegade heir, was by no means ashamed of having dollars in his bank account. Indeed, in the harbor just below their summerhouse he kept a fine white yacht at anchor; in the garage was parked one of the new Renault touring cars; and upstairs in the airy nursery, thanks to Florence who obviously managed everything better, a newborn son.
After a week or so of having her nerves restored by the sea air and soothed by the comforting nearness of her diminutive parents, Alice Patterson for the first time in her marriage found the voice, at least on paper, to send back a coolish reply to Nellie Patterson, who had been pursuing her across the country with letters of concern since her decampment to the East. “Dear Mrs. Patterson,” she wrote her mother-in-law: “Your last letter was forwarded to me here although I have been leading such a strenuous life I haven’t had a minute to answer it. Last week we motored by way of Newport to New London and the Yale-Harvard boat races in Mr. Crane’s splendid new automobile—a Renault it is. And here in town, Florence gave a big Tea in my honor, which was well-attended and most delightful. I can also report that Mr. Vanderbilt has been visiting from Newport for a few days, his wife being still abroad, and that later this week we have been promised a yachting excursion.”
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THERE IS POSSIBLY some arithmetic of revolt, whether of wives or Russian students, that suggests that, should the rebellion not be violent or alarming enough to actually frighten the authorities, these same authorities will either pretend not to notice it or notice it only with disdain, as a gesture of the powerless and neurotic. Granted, Alice’s deft dropping of Mr. Vanderbilt’s name into her letter to Dupont Circle might have scored a temporary point or two with Nellie Patterson. But it was a sign of how far apart the Pattersons had grown, with their paths not merely diverging but opposing, that in roughly the same time frame that Alice was proudly picturing herself with her Crane in-laws and all the other plutocrats, in the parade of straw boaters and white flannels at the Yale-Harvard regatta, Joe Patterson, her Son of the Soil husband, just then was putting the finishing touches on his novel, still titled Little Brother of the Rich, and lately accepted by a Chicago publishing house, Reilly & Britton, which energetically attacked and satirized those same kinds of people.
When Alice finally returned to Libertyville, she said she was glad to be back, which was almost the same as saying she was glad to be home, and was happily greeted by her husband and two children. All three were glad to see her, to have the household recompleted, although each one of them had evidently done quite well in her absence. In fact both girls, in the way of children who have watched their mother disappear for no reason, and now reappear for no better reason, reacted for the most part as if they couldn’t tell the difference. Elinor remained engrossed in her dolls, while Alicia was engrossed in Elinor, at least when permitted access, otherwise suffering more or less cheerfully her lackadaisical supervision by Inger, the maid, and Mrs. Swenson, the cook, and being ever alert to the overexciting possibility that her father might make another of his sudden, boisterous incursions into whichever room or corridor she was stumbling about in. Alice noted, on the whole mildly, that in her absence Joe had resumed the habit of wearing his dusty farm boots inside the house, as well as of tossing the baby a little higher in the air than was probably safe. But otherwise everything seemed in order—perhaps not quite the order she had had in mind six years ago, walking down the aisle of Grace Church, but what had she known then about anything?
· 9 ·
IN THOSE FIRST YEARS out at the farm, Libertyville was barely a speck on the map of Illinois: by one measure only some thirty miles north of Chicago, a dozen miles inland from the western shore of Lake Michigan, but the terrain was for the most part sparsely populated farmland—what people still called the prairie, at least the outskirts of the prairie. The nearest town of any size or substance was Lake Forest—actually a “village,” not a town—and essentially a weekend retreat for a few rich Chicagoans, one whose origins, as it happens, had much to do with Joe Patterson’s own family. Back in the spring of 1855, Patterson’s other grandfather, his father’s father, the Reverend Robert Patterson, leader of the city’s important Second Presbyterian Church, had taken an expedition of church elders north on the Chicago & Milwaukee Railway, a line so new that the track beyond the Wisconsin border was still in the process of being laid. Ten miles before the line ended at Waukegan, Rev. Patterson and his colleagues had asked the conductor to stop the train and let them off in the middle of a scraggly section of brush and scrub oak, where they stomped around for an afternoon in their frock coats and stovepipe hats until they were satisfied they had found what they were looking for—the site for a model Presbyterian community, which by its arcadian remoteness should be free from both the taints of urbanity and the heresies of rival Presbyterian factions, and which they agreed to name Lake Forest, given that the steely waters of Lake Michigan could be more or less glimpsed through the surrounding trees.
Despite his family’s role in its founding (also in the establishment of Lake Forest College, built with bricks from Rev. Patterson’s church, destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire), Joe Patterson himself had no special fondness for the place, especially as it evolved into a suburb of faux-Tudor mansions for Chicago industrialists. His wife, on the other hand, looked on Lake Forest as an oasis in the bleak landscape of farm country, if not a kind of Camelot at least an aspirational enclave of English gardens and properly countrified ladies and gentlemen: alas so near and yet so far, since to travel the dozen or so miles to get there required two slow challenging hours in a horse cart over corrugated dirt roads, difficult enough in good weather and impossible in bad. Eventually, in fact in the matter of a few years, new asphalt roads would be built across the vanishing prairie, and the railroad that already linked Lake Forest to Chicago would extend a spur inland so as to include Libertyville. But for the time being the four Pattersons, young and old, Tolstoyan and not so Tolstoyan, were very much up there, on their own, on a farm in farm country.
What a grown-up Alicia remembered of her mother from those early days was a slight, cool, determined figure, often a kind of theatrically costumed presence, with her face hidden beneath the wide brim and ribbons of an English gardening hat, her small hands and arms encased in elbow-length gardening gloves. Outdoors, pacing about her “grounds” like a military commander, usually with her gardener, the stoic Mr. McGregor, at her side, she staked out the dimensions of a French orchard and supervised the planting of two long rows of young saplings, which she hoped would one day become an allée of stately elms at a European level of impressiveness, suitable for welcoming the Lake Forest Garden Club. Indoors lay a similar challenge, as she struggled with Higinbotham persistence to effect the transformation of a nondescript red-brick Illinois farmhouse into a proper “country-house,” a place that would have a cedar-lined closet for the good linen, English chests for the good silver, a display case for the good china, and so on, all the while waging a never-ending and mostly useless campaign to persuade, bully, or shame the servants and the rest of her own family into showing some little respect for the niceties of civilized life.
The two children, Elinor and Alicia, seem mostly to have kept out of the way, in their own geographies and routines, maintaining separate orbits from their variously preoccupied parents, and often from each other, since there was a nearly three-year difference in their ages. Day in and day out the Patterson sisters were buttoned into clothes, fed, nudged about, and more or less watched over by a sequence
of Swedish farm girls masquerading as maids, also on occasion by suddenly arriving and mysteriously departing French governesses, those ubiquitous mam’selles of the era, whose task it was to teach “deportment” to both girls (that is, table manners, sitting up straight, and other emblems of the well-brought-up child) when not engaged in the ceremonial ritual of brushing Elinor’s hair; for as Elinor had grown in size and loveliness (accompanied by a mostly amiable placidity), so too had the general importance of her hair, her long blond tresses, almost perfect, virtually perfect, but which governesses, Swedish farm girls, as well as Alice Patterson herself were always eager to improve by a fond lashing of fifty strokes with an English hairbrush.
Alicia ready to ride, age seven, at the house in Libertyville, Illinois.
While youthful Elinor, blond and blue eyed, seemed to be growing into the kind of cool, composed, almost languid beauty that caused young and old, males and females, to gush their approval, her younger sister, Alicia, was, from infancy, cast as a supporting player: so sweet, as people said (at least for a while), with her round, wide-open face, her dark eyes and dark hair, so demonstrably untresslike, always flopping this way and that in defiance of English hairbrushes, which in any case were only seldom applied. As did everyone else, Joe Patterson duly noted Elinor’s perfections, her loveliness, what might later be called her star quality, but more often than not it was little Alicia, all knees and elbows and tousled hair, her imperfections cheerfully on display, whom he went out of his way to run after, seize, and toss into the air; “she seems to want to be thrown into the air,” he more than once remarked to his wife, somewhat puzzled.