by Fred Kaplan
Little is known about Eugen Vidal for the twenty years between his arrival in America and 1870. Like many other German-speaking Catholic immigrants, the Vidals apparently went directly to the Midwest, to South-Central Wisconsin, first to Monroe, then Sauk City and Bangor (where Eugen paid taxes from 1866 to 1870), and then to La Crosse, in western Wisconsin, across the Mississippi River from Minnesota. The family surfaces in the 1870 census, which gives the forty-nine-year-old Eugen’s occupation as chemist (his family’s old-world trade) and real estate. Three children were born, Hermania (Fanny) in 1858, Felix in 1862, and Mary in 1864. Caroline Hartman most likely lived nearby or even in her daughter’s home. And one day, around the year 1870, Eugen simply picked himself up, left his family, and wandered away. Some years after his disappearance, he returned to Wisconsin, for he was sustained for a short time before his death in 1892 in a nursing home run by the Milwaukee Catholic Sisters of the Poor. One of his children must have attended to his remains, since his gravestone has “Father” engraved on it.
“Father,” but not provider. Emma struggled desperately, the New World even more difficult than the old. The 1880 census lists her as a drapemaker, a seamstress of sorts. Family legend says she worked as a translator “for foreign [-language] magazines and journals,” translating from English into German, French, and Italian. Even if so, it would have been erratic, poorly paid work. The Spanish inheritance must have glittered like even brighter fool’s gold. Eugen and Emma’s children struggled also. None of them received an education. In the 1880s Hermania worked as a clerk and later married respectably. Family legend says that Mary, who married young, went to Chicago, where she became at best a kept woman, at worst a prostitute. “This was the great family secret. Pure Dreiser,” Gore Vidal recalled. At the age of eighteen the patronymic heir was a laborer. Five years later, in 1885, still living with his mother in La Crosse, Felix Vidal became a machinist, the year after that a fireman for the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway. Living at a boardinghouse in La Crosse, he presumably now stoked coal on trains in the upper Midwest. Caroline Traxler von Hartman died in 1883, as many years old as the century. Her daughter, sixty-three-year-old Emma, died eight years later in Hokah, Minnesota, across the river from La Crosse, where she had moved to live with her daughter Hermania.
The attending physician at Emma’s death was Dr. Luther Lazarus Rewalt, Gore Vidal’s great-grandfather. A capable doctor and a man of verve and talent, Rewalt had been born in Pennsylvania in 1838, one of three children of William Rewalt and Catherine McKinley. The Rewalts were of Dutch origin, probably Catholics. Luther had attended the University of Pennsylvania medical school and served four years as an assistant surgeon in the Civil War. In 1862 he married a fellow Pennsylvanian, Mary Jane McGee. The twenty-five-year-old Irish-Catholic girl had decided to become a nun, but the handsome doctor, three years younger, persuaded her to become his bride. Later, they became Methodists and then Episcopalians. In 1863 Mary Jane became locally famous as the “Heroine of the Susquehanna.” When a fire set by retreating Union troops spread, Confederate soldiers worked with the townspeople to save Wrightsville from destruction. In appreciation, Mary Jane Rewalt, who had labored valiantly during the crisis, hosted a dinner for the Confederate general and his staff. So gracious was she that they suspected she might be a Confederate sympathizer. A strong Union partisan, she explained that even enemies should show appreciation for humanitarian deeds. The Confederate soldiers left that same day for Gettysburg.
Sometime after 1872 the Rewalts moved to the northwest-frontier state of Minnesota, but why they left Pennsylvania is unclear. At least four of their five children were born in Wrightsville, including their third child, a daughter named Margaret Ann, born in 1870, who brought with her to Minnesota as a small child no memory of her Pennsylvania birthplace. Like all but one of her siblings, she became a Midwesterner. And why the Rewalts settled in Fulda, Minnesota, about two hundred and fifty miles due west of La Crosse, a little north of the Iowa border and only about fifty miles from South Dakota, is a mystery. The nearest city was Sioux Falls, South Dakota. What did Dr. Luther Lazarus Rewalt, a man of some sophistication and medical skill, who enjoyed eating and drinking well, who had a strong sense of personal style, do in Fulda, a town with fewer than a thousand people and great distances from any place he might have enjoyed visiting? Like many nineteenth-century rural doctors, he also owned a drugstore. Perhaps his work was enough to sustain his spirit as well as his pocketbook. In 1891 he was in Hokah, Minnesota, near La Crosse, where he attended the dying Emma Hartman. One of his granddaughters believes that her father and mother “became acquainted through [his] treating my grandmother.” At any rate, Dr. Rewalt’s daughter, Margaret Ann, soon married Emma’s son, Felix Vidal. By the early 1890s Felix, now in his thirties, had settled with his wife in the small city of Madison in eastern South Dakota, about fifty miles northwest of Sioux Falls and about a hundred miles from Fulda. They were to live there the rest of their lives.
Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, the weather in eastern South Dakota was more bracing than the culture. But the culture was real, specific, estimable in the Midwestern American sense. As with the weather, there were few modulations, little nuance. The Vidal household was part of the landscape. It quietly belonged. Anchoring a corner lot of about an acre, the house the young couple bought was an efficient three-story box, its plain lines relieved by a porch, with four bedrooms upstairs and the usual rooms below. Heated by ineffective air ducts, it felt cold in the winter, warm in the summer. Outside was often either bone-chilling or torrid. In the growing season a small garden flourished, devoted to vegetables, except for corn, which the vast fields of this farming world provided in such abundance that it made growing your own pointless. The Vidals walked the less than a mile downtown all the years that Gene, their eldest son, born in April 1895 and baptized Eugene Luther Vidal, was a child. The grade school and the high school were about four blocks from the house, with an athletic field on which, soon after the turn of the century, the eldest son began to play. When he showed medical evidence of an enlarged heart, euphemistically called an “athlete’s heart,” or perhaps tuberculosis, his father put up exercise bars in the backyard. Gene soon had an athlete’s body and a heart for competition. Football, basketball, track, baseball—by his teenage years he was the premier all-around athlete at Madison High School.
Corn and wheat fields dominated the landscape. Most of Madison’s approximately five thousand residents made their living as farmers or serving the farming community. Whether he was still a fireman or now an engineer running a train or had graduated to the administrative-clerical job he held in later years, Felix Vidal and the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul helped make the Midwest work. They transported what farmers grew and what farmers needed. The railroad brought Sioux Falls nearer: Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois were part of the larger network. When on duty, Felix was away every second night. At home, Margaret ran the house and bore children. Two years before Gene, the first Vidal child, Lurene, had been born, then Amy in 1903, a new Margaret in 1910, a new Felix (nicknamed Pick) in 1912, when Margaret Ann was forty-two, a late pregnancy that shocked family and friends. They did not suspect that some of the long silences between husband and wife were being filled, at that late date, by lovemaking. The household finances were modest but stable. Unlike his father, Felix kept his nose to the grindstone. As far as his eldest son could tell, he had no ambition to accomplish anything more than to work obscurely as a minion of the railroad empire. As the World War approached, he concealed, outside of the household, his German sympathies. Though he put up exercise bars for his son, he had no interest in athletics. As Gene got older, Felix rarely attended his son’s games. If he had any passion at all, it was politics: deeply moralistic and conservative, he was remembered for abhorring dishonesty in politicians and always voting for the Republican candidates whom he read about in the newspapers to which he subscribed, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader and the Madison
Leader. Capitalism appealed to him. Religion did not. A nominal Episcopalian, he rarely went to church. Thin, taciturn, with icy blue eyes and a temper that sometimes burst into household dramatics, he was not a man who gave or showed love readily. From early on there seems to have been a chill between the father and his oldest son.
As a young mother, Margaret was attractive, full-figured, and broad-faced. Unlike her saturnine husband, she contributed constant good cheer to the household, the proverbial sunny disposition. Her own mother had died the year after Gene’s birth. Felix’s parents were already long gone. Gene never saw the paternal grandfather to whom he was indebted for his first name. Later, in old age, Luther Rewalt, for whom Gene had been given his middle name, came to live with his daughter and son-in-law in Madison. He died there in 1925, a dapper old man who liked to drink, who loved going to the movie theater downtown in a spiffy white suit, carrying an inflatable rubber cushion into which he blew air before ostentatiously sitting down, and who had invented Rewalt’s Elixir, an all-purpose heavily alcoholic patent medicine that he and his favorite daughter manufactured in vats in the kitchen, bottled for sale from the porch, and packaged for the Brown Drug Company in Sioux Falls. In Gene’s years in Madison, though, it was a house without grandparents. Some family lived nearby: Margaret’s sister and her husband and, almost within reach, her brother Frank in Minnesota. A sociable rather than a religious woman, Margaret attended the Episcopal church every Sunday and participated in innumerable church activities. When Chattauqua made its regular visits to Madison, the Vidals attended all the lectures. Margaret, who belonged to a women’s reading group, kept sets of books in the house, The Wonder Book and The Book of Knowledge. If her politics were her husband’s, she had one separate plank: she strongly favored the vote for women. She marched in a suffragette parade in Madison and had herself photographed, dressed in semimasculine clothes, banner in hand, her principles clearly visible. But, as the keeper of the domestic keys, she did not manage economically enough for her husband. She had none of the German thrift he admired. She might well have wished that the Spanish debt (in family legend now worth millions) would allow her never to have to count pennies again. “By the time they told and retold that story,” her grandson later remarked, “we were the Perhapsburgs waiting for our throne to be returned to us.” She also had a disastrous tendency to gain weight: the pretty young bride allowed herself to become transformed into a matronly massiveness that her husband disliked and that later made her children uncomfortable.
In his mother’s eyes, Gene could do no wrong. She beamed in his presence and, later, at the mention of his name. If his father took pride in him, he apparently never told his son. When the time came for the son to make judgments, the case was clear-cut. Eventually he seems to have disapproved of his father, perhaps for his temper, his emotional stinginess, his treatment of his wife. “‘I don’t know why he was such a stinker,’” Gene later said to his own son. “That’s the word he used,” Gore Vidal recalled. “I think a lot of it had to do with his devotion to his mother. He felt that his father was rude to his mother and unpleasant. They apparently quarreled quite a lot, and Gene took his mother’s side.” Later, as he and his sister Lurene rose in the world, their mother’s obesity became an embarrassment. But though they preferred to keep her out of sight, they undoubtedly loved her. As Gene did Lurene. Two years older, smart, willfully decisive (nicknamed “The Sergeant” by her critics in the family), and a great gossip, Lurene became the sibling to whom he was closest. They shared a childhood and its memories. When he went from grade school to Madison High, which had about three hundred students, his handsomeness made him popular with the girls, his athletic achievements and good temper with the boys. Early in the 1910 football season the starting quarterback broke his nose, Gene took over, and the quarterback never got his position back. Soon Gene had an attractive girlfriend on his arm, Leila Love, later a physical-education teacher in Madison. The boys did the usual behind-the-house and locker-room things, small talk, cigarettes, fantasies, bonding, perhaps some sex.
Like his mother’s, Gene’s temperament was placid, unargumentative, though somewhat impersonal. He charmed and impressed people, a combination of striking good looks and intelligence with shyness and dreaminess. He liked to tinker, to invent. Self-sufficient, self-absorbed, he gave more importance to activities than to people. Only on the athletic field was he noticeably competitive, a dynamic athlete who enjoyed being special, being admired, winning. Dark-complexioned, thin but wiry, almost six feet, with striking blue eyes, sharply angled face lines, high cheekbones, with excellent coordination and the desire to win, he seemed a natural athlete. He was not as aggressive, though, as his coaches would have liked. His manner implied that playing elegantly was almost enough. Early on he developed an ironic style, a sense of proportion that sometimes seemed amused indifference. He had no doubt, though, that athletic prominence was a way out of Madison. As the premier high-school athlete of eastern South Dakota, when he graduated in 1912 the University of South Dakota at Vermillion encouraged him to come. For many, Vermillion was the first step out of the relative emptiness of places like Madison. Since the family could provide little money, at first he worked at a local business as a janitor, learning his lifelong habit of watching his pennies. Fortunately, college cost next to nothing. Subsistence was cheap. Enrolled in the engineering program, with modest effort he began to get good grades, mostly B’s and some A’s. His interest was in designing things, inventing things, making them work. The College of Engineering caught the spirit of a heroicizing time, when the country believed that American character, epitomized by its engineers, would transform the world. The engineer’s “college course should be loaded with the same risks and desperate chances that he will afterwards find in life, which is mainly an unbending effort to do the apparently impossible in which failure is worse than death. The engineer is the man to accept life in all its strenuous seriousness and the last man to expect the illusory advantages of special privilege.” From the beginning, Vidal’s athletic prowess and physical grace attracted notice. Soon he was setting records, helping the Coyote teams win in basketball, football, track, and baseball. An excellent punter, place-, and dropkicker, his evasively clever open-field running transformed him from quarterback to halfback, where he was still noteworthy for throwing and now for receiving also. In his junior and senior years he starred as the basketball team’s high-scoring center in the days when a six-foot basketball player seemed tall, or at least tall enough, and then in his senior year captained the team to the state championship. At track and field he regularly won the university indoor and outdoor meets with an all-around competence at the various jumps, shot puts, hurdles, and pole vaults, including setting the state high-jump record. Even in baseball, the sport he focused on least, he pitched well enough to win his fourth “letter,” the only athlete in South Dakota’s history, with one exception, to have done so: “the best all round athlete the Dakotas ever turned out,” the local sports experts agreed.
Fame came partly from the innumerable South Dakota newspaper headlines that proclaimed the accomplishments of the Vermillion teams and their stars, especially Gene Vidal. His good looks and amiable intelligence made him eminently salable, a Midwestern, soon an all-American, role model. America loved its games and its playing-field heroes. In those distant times, before the triumph of commercialism, athletes were idealized for their manliness and their American virtues. Madison swelled with pride: “Local boy great star at state university.” When Gene came home for holidays, he now had about him an aura. His siblings and their friends were in awe. In June 1916 he completed his engineering course. At home in Madison he deliberated whether to apply to the naval academy at Annapolis or to West Point, where he could continue his engineering studies and his athletic career. Someone of influence, eager to have him play football there, made “a vigorous plea that Vidal be sent to West Point.” Congressman Royal S. Johnson used South Dakota’s one appointment. At Minneap
olis he passed the entrance examination with high grades. By late summer 1916 this “demon on the gridiron” was marching and practicing on the fields above the Hudson, at first kept under wraps by the Army coach the better to surprise opponents. For the next three years he set West Point records in football and track, and was soon to be known to a generation of Army enthusiasts as the best all-around athlete West Point had ever produced. As the starting half-back for a nationally famous Army team that beat all its major rivals, the South Dakota boy was now a national hero. He played before huge audiences around the country. At the Polo Gounds the “largest crowd that ever attended a sporting event” in New York City watched Army beat Navy. Film of the Army victory in the 1916 game, starring “Gene Vidal,” shown along with The Law Decides, “A Powerful Gripping Drama in Seven Parts,” could be seen for ten cents on the movie screens springing up across America. When he visited home, resplendent in his cadet uniform, “the whole town was watching him.” Not everything, though, went smoothly in his cadet years at the academy. A debilitating war was devastating Europe. When the military and political brass cheered at the Army-Navy game, they also had other, more brutal games on their minds. So too did some of the cadets. As always, there was a glut of officers in the promotions pipeline. Advancement came excruciatingly slowly in the peacetime Army. Cadets were more concerned about the lack of opportunity for promotion than about physical danger. After the 1916 academic year, Gene considered leaving for “some technical school…. At the present rate of promotion,” Vidal and other cadets “see themselves second lieutenants on small pay,” reported a worried sports reporter, “until they are old men with little chance of retiring at a higher rank than captain.” Gene stayed. Soon, in response to America’s entry into the war, graduation was accelerated. The class of 1920 graduated two years early.