by Alice Arlen
Patterson and his two children spent ten days in Berlin, waiting for the doctors to clear Alicia for transatlantic travel, which on the whole seems to have been a pleasurable time for all of them. Then, on the night before taking the train back to Bremen, Patterson seems to have stayed up late in his hotel room, unburdening himself to his wife in a rarely personal, alternatively self-flagellating and accusatory letter, which perhaps served as a coda to the whole problematic European journey, as well as to the state of their marriage. “Of course I should prefer to be virtuous, simple, and maybe above all level,” he wrote Alice, “a successful businessman say, an exemplary father. But I can’t. We both know that. For I don’t come of good blood, from the kind of stock that will let me feel contentment, or be free from worthlessness….” And: “We must do our best, Alice. I know you can be brave, but you also need to be big, and big all the way through. Not peevish or small. Not like every lady you know, inert or malicious or quick to escape into those expressions of silent disapproval. Remember: if you haven’t much of a husband, and I fully concede that point, you still have two pretty fine kids, whose lives will be made or marred by your influence.” And finally: “If we could only get on together, I think everything else would solve itself. But it’s knowing that we can’t, that I grate on you across the board—my way of doing things, running the farm, arranging my books, looking out of the window of my study, just my way of talking, eating, driving the car, my whole point of view. Well, my guess is these would be your ways too, if I were your sort of fellow. But I am not, and I can’t say as I blame you. All I can promise is, I will do my best on my return.” And on that rueful note the family trio headed for home.
· 12 ·
UNFORTUNATELY AND PERHAPS PREDICTABLY, no sooner were the Pattersons reassembled back in Chicago than their marriage resumed its muddled course, though with one seeming improvement, and not a small one either, noted by Alice in a letter to her mother-in-law. “I seldom see J until past the dinner hour,” she wrote, “but at least he is in good spirits and clear of eye.” Since many of their recent problems had been attributed to Joe’s fondness for stopping off at a bar or hotel or one of his clubs for the proverbial drink with friends, which then sometimes led who knew where, the part about being “clear of eye” at least seemed partial good news. It also might have struck Alice as a positive development that her husband, who not that long ago was writing editorials for a socialist paper and associating with Reds, had apparently found a place for his interests and energy at the family Tribune; where he had a small office, down a corridor from the newsroom, in which he put together the Sunday edition, with the help of his secretary, a young Irish Catholic woman called Mary King, whom he had inherited from a departing executive and once described to Alice as “extremely efficient, with plenty of good ideas of her own.”
But this is Alicia’s story, and at the time she knew little of any of these matters beyond the facts—facts as they seemed to her—that on the one hand her father, who had seemed so jolly and close at hand in Germany, was now again so distant as to be nearly invisible, and that her mother, who was usually all too visible though never exactly close, had lately spoiled everything by putting her in school with Elinor. Could anything be worse? It turned out that yes, it could. Mother was pregnant; of course not a word anyone would use in front of the children. The stork, it was explained, would soon be flying in with a baby brother to be named Joseph, though probably he could be called Joe.
One month before the stork’s arrival, the girls were sent down on the train to their grandmother’s house on Dupont Circle, accompanied by yet another governess and instructions to be good and mind their manners. Since goodness and manners minding were skills at which Elinor excelled, this was not likely to be a problem, even at Dupont Circle, where there were many precious objects to be careful about and rules to be observed. Indeed, Nellie Patterson was quick to write Alice of her gratitude for the presence of her granddaughters, although mentioning only one of them, Elinor, whose sweetness and amiable deportment were apparently equaled only by her beauty. Seven-year-old Alicia was not unnoticed, however, swiftly becoming the bad child, refusing to heed Mam’selle or any of the domestics or even Grams, not only with hair permanently unbrushed, dirty hands at table, in fact no discernible table manners at all, as her grandmother reported, but also with somewhat criminal or at least delinquent tendencies: using a pillow to toboggan down the broad marble banisters, hiding in the dumbwaiter, assaulting the chandeliers in imaginative ways. Things were no better on returning to Chicago, to the house on Bank Street, which the stork had obviously visited, though perhaps carelessly, depositing baby Josephine in the crib intended for baby Joseph. Predictably Elinor smoothly glided into the charming role of “Little Mother,” earning coos of approval from the real mother, whereas Alicia, not so long ago the reigning “Baby,” descended into tears and tantrums at any, or even at no, provocation. Worse still, she took her new persona to school, the relatively accommodating and progressive Francis Parker School, causing the headmistress to write Mr. and Mrs. Patterson one of those grimly polite and dreadful letters, suggesting that “Miss Alicia” might be better served at “an institution with greater structure” than her own.
Thus, with the usual inconveniences associated with such rearrangements, and in the middle of the school year, too, late in January 1914, Miss Alicia was transferred from Francis Parker to the more regimented University School on Lakeshore Drive. Roughly one month later, on February 20, with probably less outward signs of disturbance, Patterson himself left, the first in a sequence of departures, bound this time for Houston, Texas, and then on to Veracruz, Mexico. Houston was the assembly point for a U.S. Navy battle squadron as it prepared to attack—on the orders of President Woodrow Wilson—a force of some eighteen hundred Mexican “insurrectionists” who were in fact troops belonging to the sitting Mexican government (of which we disapproved), who currently held the post office and several waterfront warehouses on the Gulf of Mexico at Veracruz. In due course, after the arrival of navy cruisers off the Mexican port, the Mexican soldiers were impressively dislodged from post office as well as warehouses by eight or maybe ten shells, and then by the much-photographed wading ashore of two companies of U.S. Marines; which more or less constituted the Battle of Veracruz, after which a patriotic U.S. Congress handed out a total of fifty-two Congressional Medals of Honor—about half as many as were awarded in all of World War II.
As to why the presence of the Sunday editor of the Chicago Tribune was personally needed at such a faraway adventure, Patterson’s first dispatches to the paper were prefaced with a note from “The Editors,” explaining that their Veracruz correspondent was “a veteran reporter who in his present position as editor of the Sunday department is also leading The Tribune’s pioneering newsreel camera crew in pursuit of motion-picture news opportunities.” It was certainly true enough that Joe Patterson was an early appreciator of film, movies, motion pictures in general, and that the Tribune’s newsreel teams were among the first and best in the business. But there was truth of another kind in baby Josephine’s observations, years later as a grown woman, that “Poppa pretty much walked out the door after learning I wasn’t a boy. It was a time when the roof started to fall in on all of us.”
· 13 ·
AS EVENTS WOULD PROVE, the devolution of the Pattersons’ marriage had much more to do with the nature of the marriage itself, of the conflicting strengths and unhelpful limitations of the people involved, and most certainly, as we shall see, with the offstage presence of a third party. All the same the refusal of fate as well as Alice Patterson to provide a son to a man so driven and confused by tribalism was little help in an unraveling situation. Joe Patterson returned to his family and the Bank Street house after Veracruz, though taking his time about it, but by midsummer he was off again. Long afterward Alice Patterson told Alicia that she had never felt so lonely as when her husband was first away in Mexico, then added that it was almost as lonely wh
en he came back.
In mid-August 1914, with the European great powers at war, Patterson headed back across the Atlantic, officially in charge of another Tribune newsreel crew, though soon leaving his supposed charges behind, with their cumbersome tripods and heavy cameras, in order to scout the German frontier on his own. As a result he was among the first correspondents to witness and report on the swift advance of German troops into Belgium, following a German battalion on its way into Liège by traveling in a rented touring car with three British reporters. Five months later, in March 1915, the war having settled into the trenches, he returned to the western front, this time in the French sector, making numerous flights above the lines with French aviators and reporting on some of the first air engagements. Next, in April 1916, finding obstacles in the way of a third reporting assignment to Europe, he impetuously signed on with the Illinois National Guard as an ordinary private, and went south into Texas, close by the Mexican border, where he played a small though energetic part (as a “mule-skinner,” packing mules for the supply trains) in Gen. John Pershing’s little war against Pancho Villa, eventually being promoted to sergeant.
Meanwhile on the home front, the Patterson family began what would become an extended, in fact never-ending, process of trying to redefine itself as a solar system revolving erratically around a largely absent sun. Mother and Elinor on the whole seemed to find a natural alignment with each other, perhaps around a shared bond of stoicism mixed in with not a small amount of denial, plus an understandable impulse to present the best face on things to the outside world. Baby Josephine of course was little more than a tiny moon in Elinor and Alice’s shadow. But middle daughter Alicia seemed determined to put herself in an altogether different orbit of her own, whether from conscious intent or from some intuitive response to the growing strangeness of life around her.
Not unexpectedly the tighter discipline at the University School served mainly as a challenge to break more of the rules, and soon the new pupil was notorious for the impudence as well as the creativity of her pranks. In an early example, perpetrated at a time of frequent labor agitation in Chicago, she persuaded several classmates to rise together in the classroom brandishing “Strike” placards, only to quickly sit down again herself, exposing the placard holders to scolding and demerits: an act of defiance toward both school and classmates that was at once pugnacious and self-defeating. After a few more such disturbances, Alice Patterson’s imperious sister, Aunt Florence, took it on herself to step in and have Alicia removed from school, to be admonished and set on the path of righteousness by no less an admonisher than the rector of St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church. But needless to say Alicia’s career of waywardness continued, though for a while she shifted her rebellious activities from school to after school: stealing fruit from the grocer, sneaking into movie theaters through a side alley, hitching rides on the back of ice wagons like a regular townie, and of course terrorizing baby Josephine whenever possible, thus keeping her in a seemingly constant and necessary conflict with her mother.
—
AS TO HER FATHER, the much-missed and glamorous Poppa, inevitably more desirable in direct proportion to the length and mystery of his absences, he returned home in February 1917, after months of unsuccessfully pursuing the mustachioed Pancho Villa across the Chihuahuan desert. He was back for little more than two months, doubtless enough time to reconfuse everyone in the family including himself, when the bugle call to arms sounded once again, only much louder this time. Spurred on by the German sinking of the Lusitania, America was finally in the Great War, and Sergeant Patterson of the Illinois National Guard was swift to volunteer his service once more to General Pershing, who was already beginning to assemble an American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to cross the ocean and give battle to the Hun.
Were this not his daughter’s story, there would be opportunity here, and more than ample material, for describing at length Joe Patterson’s service in the Great War (also known at the time as “the War to End All Wars”). Enough to say that it was in the main exemplary, honorable, and harrowing, although memories of the dead and dying, the human costs he saw all about him, continued to resonate inside his head for the rest of his life. He was thirty-nine when he enlisted, definitely on the old side, but he was determined to play his part, do his bit; also, as an inveterate man of the people he was intent on enlisting in the ranks as a private or sergeant. But higher-ups (prodded by his cousin Bert McCormick, who glided in as a major) second-guessed the recent mule skinner from the Tex-Mex border and took him in instead as a lieutenant. In brief, he shipped overseas in late summer 1917, executive officer of a four-gun artillery battery, and after some few months of training exercises at an abandoned French army base in Brittany he went into action as part of the new U.S. 42nd (or Rainbow) Division, first attached to a French corps in the Champagne district, then as part of a larger American force assembling in the shadow of the Vosges Mountains. Patterson seems to have been both liked and respected by his men, who called him “Auntie” in good-natured reference to his age, also to the commonsense attention he paid to practical matters of health and sanitation. In April 1918, after his unit was shifted west, toward the center of the Allied line near Charlevoix, he was among those stricken by a German gas attack and spent several weeks recovering in a field hospital. Returned to his brigade and promoted to captain, he fought with his unit as part of the first American offensive at the notorious Saint-Mihiel salient. According to a published brigade history, “Captain J. M. Patterson first led his battery out of danger from air attack, during which his own horse, tethered nearby, was destroyed by a German bomb…then, when orders to advance were received, Capt. Patterson moved his cannoneers at a gallop, down a steep hill, right through the village of Ste. Etienne, four horses pulling each gun carriage, the men hanging onto the Seventy-fives…arriving in time for his battery to materially assist our advance on the Boche position.”
By war’s end he and his brigade were still in action, living in the field, taking casualties, part of the final Allied advance through the ruined woods of the Argonne. According to those who knew him, Patterson was much affected by his experience in the war, deeply troubled by the wasteful carnage as well as by, as he saw it, an almost inbred penchant for incompetence and double-dealing on the part of French and British leadership, amounting to a virtual betrayal of the troops in the trenches. But he also took away something much more positive from his many hard months in the field: both a sense of pride at having acquitted himself well with the ordinary guys in his command, and a new, or perhaps reaffirmed, confidence in knowing that he could “speak the lingo” of the common soldier, indeed that he shared many of his tastes and interests.
After the so-called Armistice that ended hostilities on November 11, 1918, a time when those who could were heading home as fast as possible, Joe Patterson, just released from active duty, made a purposive detour before crossing back across the Atlantic. In a letter from AEF Headquarters in Rouen to his mother, after saying that he is in good health though tired and dirty, he writes that he will make “one more stop to drop in on Edward Harmsworth in London, who has offered to see me.” Lately knighted by King George V as Lord Northcliffe, Harmsworth was at the time publisher of the wildly successful London Daily Mail, one of the great swashbucklers and innovators of the newspaper era, more or less the inventor of tabloid journalism.
· 14 ·
WHEN ALICIA’S FATHER—eleven months at the front, with gas-scarred lungs and a Distinguished Service Medal—returned to Chicago on December 20, 1918, it was a moment she remembered all her life. A cold, bright morning, with the four Patterson females, mother and three daughters, in their winter coats and hats, waiting in cavernous Union Station for the overnight from New York. The train was hours late, which only added to the strain and excitement of the moment, but then there he was, walking down the platform in his army greatcoat. “Big as ever,” as Alicia recalled it, “but older, weathered, and with a limp in one leg where
he said he had been kicked by a supply mule. Mother lately seemed to have acquired this wry little smile, one side of her mouth turned down, and she had on that little smile just then. As I remember it, at one point he said ‘I got really scared over there,’ as if, I thought later, trying to share something with us, or at least with her, from the dark places he’d been to, and mother coolly saying ‘Joe, I thought nothing scared you,’ just throwing it right back. But we had a glorious Christmas that year, I think maybe the best ever, with a big tree and colored glass balls….Poppa brought a new Caruso record for mother, also a new Victrola to play it on, and perhaps to balance-out Caruso he came home one afternoon with a large, green, squawking and cursing parrot.” But then three weeks later, in January, right after New Year’s, he was off again.