The Fevers of Reason
Page 11
After the moment of Holmes, in fact as in fiction, it became the task of clinical and criminal investigators—of docs and cops—to root out the transgressor, to incriminate man or microbe. Edmund Wilson described what happens to a villain in the nineteenth-century detective story: “he has been caught by an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where to fix the guilt.” We have learned over the last century that social Darwinists—detective or dictator—have had no qualms about fixing guilt on one or another gene. If this lesson smacks of anachronism, so be it.
The rise of the detective story in the years between Lamarck and Darwin is one aspect of the nineteenth-century argument in favor of nature over nurture. In that sense, murder is no mystery; when a detective scans the palm or the face he is reading the gene. Holmes’s Elsie Venner, Doyle’s Moriarty, even Poe’s ourang-outang are cast as losers in the Darwinian lottery, examples of others who could no more change their nature than their serpentine eye or their furrow of skin. On the other hand, a meliorist would argue that if guilt lies in the gene, the guilty are more to be pitied than censured. That is exactly what Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in Elsie Venner. Those whom Dr. Doyle and the social Darwinists turned into villains, Dr. Holmes and the Boston meliorists regarded as victims. Snakebit in the womb but guiltless before God, they were more to be pitied than censured. What is given by nature can be forgiven by man. Following that example today, we might say that if “special influences” work on behavior like ferments in the blood, it is the task of our new genetics to give them any name but guilt.
Dr. Doyle may not have learned genetic sweetness and light from Dr. Holmes, but he remained forever in the Autocrat’s debt for the name of his sleuth. On his first trip to America in the autumn of 1894, he visited Boston to view Mount Auburn Cemetery. Among the russet elms, yellow willows, and golden maples, he saw the graves of those who had presided over the Flowering of New England: “Lowell, Longfellow, Channing, Brooks, Agassiz, Parkman and very many more.” And he did one other thing. “Yesterday,” he wrote, “I visited Oliver Wendell Holmes’s grave and I laid a big wreath on it.” Why Holmes alone of all the others? Elementary, my dear Watson!
Two for the Road
13.
Swift-Boating “America the Beautiful”: Katharine Lee Bates and a Boston Marriage
O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
—Katharine Lee Bates, “America the Beautiful” (1893)
I strongly believe the neglected American people need
. . . leadership and our Country needs to return to
America The Beautiful in every way possible.
—Linda Archer, reader comment on washingtonpost.com (April 18, 2007)
IN THE SUMMER OF 2007, AS POLITICAL TEMPERS FLARED in early skirmishes from Iowa to the Carolinas, one rather nasty theme emerged. “Iowa Gay Marriage Ruling Stirs 2008 Race,” ran the AP headline, and a contest began for the bipartisan laurels of bigotry. And sure enough, between mug shots at weenie roasts and platitudes at county fairs, a handful of hopefuls warned the faithful that marriage between people of the same sex ranked among the major threats to our republic.
Irony rampant: the same cameras that showed us politicians of every stripe and party disporting themselves at the Iowa State Fair also featured squeaky-clean farm kids welcoming visitors to the fair with the rousing verses of “America the Beautiful.” So on behalf of a good number of my fellow citizens—and of their legislators as well—I’d like to remind both present and future candidates for office of Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote the poem “America the Beautiful.” It’s the story of a happy Boston marriage in the Era of the White City.
KATHARINE LEE BATES (1859–1929) is the most famous native of Falmouth, Massachusetts; her statue decorates the library lawn, the road to the library bears her name, the bicycle path along Vineyard Sound to Woods Hole is named “The Shining Sea,” and the upscale granola store is called “Amber Waves.” Her poem “America the Beautiful” is usually sung to music set by Samuel A. Ward, a Son of the American Revolution. It pays homage to their New England forebears:
O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self control
Thy liberty in law!
It’s a sentiment less bellicose than that expressed in our official national anthem—“the bombs bursting in air”—and considerably sweeter than the boast of “Deutschland Über Alles,” the pomp of “God Save the Queen,” or the gore of “Le Marseillaise.” It is also a fitting postbellum sequel to Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Indeed, Julia and Samuel A. Ward were Yankee kin.
Bates was inspired to write “America the Beautiful” on her first trip out West. A professor of English at Wellesley, she had been asked to teach English religious drama at a summer school in Colorado Springs and, she recalled, “spent a happy three weeks or so under the purple range of the Rockies.” To celebrate the end of the session, she and others on the faculty made an excursion to Pike’s Peak, pulled to the summit in mule-drawn prairie wagons that bore the slogan “Pike’s Peak or Bust!” She went on, “It was at the summit, as I was looking out over that sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.”
She left Colorado Springs with notes for the entire four stanzas and other memorabilia of her extended trip to the Rockies, but the poem did not appear until July 4, 1895, when it was published in the Congregationalist. After a musical setting by the once well known Silas G. Pratt attracted national attention, the popular stanzas became open game for other musical versions, and by 1923 more than sixty “original” settings had been perpetrated. The verses can be sung to many old tunes, including “Auld Lang Syne” and “The Harp That Once through Tara’s Halls.” But the setting we know best nowadays was adopted by Ward from the hymn “Materna,” and the words we use are those of Bates’s revised version of 1913.
“THY LIBERTY IN LAW!” COULD SERVE AS A MOTTO for Bates and her impassioned generation of pilgrim daughters. Bates was graduated from Wellesley in 1880, ten years after that stern, seminary-style college had been chartered as a place for “noble, white, unselfish Christian Womanhood.” But by 1882, winds of change from the West brought a new generation in the person of Alice Freeman (1855–1902). Freeman was only 27 when she was called from the coeducational University of Michigan to become Wellesley’s second president. She proceeded to transform Wellesley into a college ready for the twentieth century; she also helped to found Radcliffe and the Marine Biological Laboratory.
As president of Boston’s Woman’s Education Association (WEA), Alice Freeman collaborated with Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, widow of biologist Louis, to work out the legal arrangements whereby the Harvard Annex for Women became Radcliffe College. The WEA also raised $10,000 to promote the teaching and research by women in science. This gift made it possible in 1888 to purchase land near the all-male U.S. Fisheries building at Wood’s Holl (as it was then) to establish the Marine Biological Laboratory. The WEA also ensured that women might work at the laboratory by requiring that two of its members be on the board of trustees: the first two were graduates of Vassar and MIT.
Among Freeman’s first appointments at Wellesley were Eliza Mosher as professor of practical physiology and Katharine Coman (also from Michigan) as professor of political economy and history. In 1885, she appointed Katharine Lee Bates an instructor of English. They were soon joined by Mary Calkins, a student of Wil
liam James, who established the first laboratory of experimental psychology to be headed by a woman. Like Mosher, Coman, and Calkins, Katharine Lee Bates was destined to spend her entire life at Wellesley; she became full professor in 1891 and long-term chairman of the English Department until her retirement in 1925. But her life changed forever in 1887 when she met Katharine Coman. The two Katharines lived together for more than a quarter of a century in the loving bonds of what was then called a “Boston marriage” and is now appreciated as “a devoted lesbian couple.” They called their Wellesley home the “Scarab,” their faithful collie “Sigurd,” and their automobile “Abraham” (because they were so often deep in its bosom). When parted by professional travel, they wrote passionate, almost daily, letters to each other:
Your love is a proof of God. How does love come, unless Love is? . . . That is a glorious sentence wherewith to close your letter. I love it and I love you and I love what shadowy hint of God comes to me.
In 1893, on that journey to Pike’s Peak, the two Katharines stopped to visit the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Bates becoming “naturally impressed by the symbolic beauty of the White City,” as the grounds of the exposition were known. By that time Alice Freeman had become Alice Freeman Palmer after marrying a Harvard philosopher, and the Palmers together supervised the construction and installation of the Woman’s Building, a monument fashioned in the mock alabaster of the exposition’s Beaux Arts style. Featuring statues of prominent feminists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, its interior was chock-a-block with objects picked to show, as The Book of the Fair put it,
. . . the contributions made by women to the huge workshop of which this world so largely consists, their contributions not only to the industries of the world but to its sciences and arts. Thus it is hoped in a measure to dispel the prejudices and misconceptions, to remove the vexatious restrictions and limitations which for centuries have held enthralled the sex.
The Woman’s Building was an anomaly among the grander structures of the Columbian Exposition, the iconography of which played to the “prejudices and misconceptions” of centuries. In statuary great and small, burly men steered the ship of state, while women were placed on pedestals, perched as guiding spirits or cast as docile handmaidens. The Central Fountain, designed by Frederick MacMonnies, underscored each of these roles.
A visit to the Palmers’ Woman’s Building was not the only reason the two Katharines had stopped in Chicago; there were professional reasons as well. Bates had taught in Colorado Springs on equal terms with such male professors as William Rolfe of Harvard and Davis Todd of Amherst, and Coman had lectured on the economic history of Western expansion. In Chicago, Coman heard Frederick Jackson Turner deliver his famous address on “The Role of the Frontier in American History.” Turner argued that the Western frontier had for three centuries been a metaphor for the American dream, for “manifest destiny.” Now that the open frontier had closed and the United States had become one nation from sea to shining sea, other frontiers awaited. Coman’s two-volume Economic Beginnings of the Far West (1912) was devoted to parallel themes, and her view of the economic history of the railroads echoed Turner’s message that the age of an external frontier and the West as wilderness was over. Coman and Bates were convinced in 1893 that the spirit that had won the West would in time remove those “vexatious restrictions and limitations.”
THE AMERICA OF CONTINENTAL EXPANSION was no collection of White Cities. The year 1893 was a year of significant social unrest, and the strife was by no means liberating. Grover Cleveland entered the White House for the second time, with the country in the midst of a deep economic depression. On February 23, 1893, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad had gone bankrupt, and before the end of the year the Erie, the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe went belly up as well. Two and a half million people—one fifth of the work force—were unemployed, and Henry Adams lamented that “much that had made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890 perished in the ruin.” Even the president admitted that “values supposed to be fixed are fast becoming conjectural, and loss and failure have invaded every branch of business.” In legislation that was to provide windfall profits for J. P. Morgan and Augustus Belmont, Cleveland brought the country back to the gold standard in the very week that Bates stood atop Pike’s Peak.
Meanwhile, federal and state militias were sent against workers in the Homestead steel strike in Pennsylvania, against switchmen in Buffalo and coal miners in Tennessee, and finally against the Pullman strikers in Chicago. Each of these episodes of class warfare was later treated in Katharine Coman’s Industrial History of the United States (1905).
The two Katharines were also in the vanguard of social activists. They were among the founders in 1887 of the College Settlements Association, a group that made it possible for young female college graduates to spend a year at community settlement houses among the poor and the immigrants—the “teeming refuse” of Europe’s shores. In the course of this work Bates and Coman became closely associated with the pioneer of Chicago’s Hull House—and future Nobel Peace Prize winner—Jane Addams. In 1889, Addams’s lifelong companion, Ellen Gates Starr, described how the settlement-house movement might benefit not only the needy but also the philanthropist:
It is not the Christian spirit to go among these people as if you were bringing them a great boon: one gets as much as one gives [but] people are coming to the conclusion that if anything is to be done towards tearing down these walls . . . between classes that are making anarchists and strikers the order of the day, it must be done by actual contact and done voluntarily from the top.
A generation of social workers, public-health activists, and egalitarians spent their lives convinced of the need for that actual contact.
In 1892, Katharine Coman became chairman of the committee that opened Denison House in Boston and made it a center of labor-organizing activity, to which Bates was inevitably drawn. Denison House, Hull House, and the other settlement houses were deeply committed to reform of working hours, protection of immigrants, compulsory school attendance, school health, and—above all—abolition of child labor. It was toward this end that the poet Sarah Cleghorn wrote in “The Masses”:
The golf links lie so near the mill,
That almost every day,
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
When violence broke out during the Chicago Pullman strike of 1894, and strikers burned down the remnants of the White City, Coman and Addams sided with workers against the militia; Coman went to Chicago again in 1910 to help striking seamstresses win union rights.
MEANWHILE, TRAGEDY HAD STRUCK THE COUPLE; Coman’s last work was completed as she lay dying of breast cancer. Unemployment Insurance: A Summary of European Systems (1915) was a meticulous survey of how other industrialized countries cared for the aged, the disabled, and the unemployed. She concluded that social services in Bismarck’s Germany and the Third Republic’s France were far in advance of those in her own country. Posthumously published to little acclaim, Coman’s book was to become a blueprint for social justice in the United States. Her call for old-age and disability benefits in the New World—social security—became a platform plank of the Progressive and then the Democratic party. After the New Deal, Coman’s dream became the law of the land. Bates describes how she helped her friend finish this major economic study:
Through those four years beset with wasting pain,
The surgeon’s knife again and yet again,
. . . So we twain
Finished your book beneath Death’s very frown.
For all the hospital punctilio,
Through the drear night within your mind would grow
Those sentences my morning pen would spring to meet . . .
These lines, and the ones following, come from a volume of passionate love poems, Yellow Clover, written by Bates and published in 1922, seven years after Coman died. Ea
ch of these poems was devoted to Katharine Coman, and in some Bates reached levels of emotional expression—perhaps even art—that eluded her in seven other volumes of verse.
Your life was of my life the warp and woof
Whereon most precious friendships, disciplines,
Passions embroider rich designs . . .
No more than memory, love’s afterglow?
Our quarter century of joy, can it
Be all? The lilting hours like birds would flit
By us, who loitered in the portico
Of love’s high palace . . .
Bates spoke in no loud voice the love that dared not speak its name: yellow clover stood for physical love in the flower language of the two Wellesley scholars, who
Stooped for the blossoms closest to our feet
And gave them as a token
Each to each
In lieu of speech,
In lieu of words too grievous to be spoken . . .
“Undimm’d by human tears” is the hopeful lyric of Bates’s most successful public poem, our national anthem of social justice, a hymn to the better angels of American nature. The lyrics of “America the Beautiful” should remind the bigots of this world of a generation of women whose emotional ties and social reforms have outlasted the alabaster cities’ gleam of the Columbian Exposition.