by Carla Kaplan
Dr. Mason was also a primitivist. “Our western civilization,” he had written in 1896, “is materialistic, hard, mechanical; it values nothing, it believes in nothing that cannot be weighed, measured, analyzed, labeled and appraised.” The seemingly odd ideas of “primitive, undeveloped and ignorant people,” he suggested, were clues, cultural “vibrations” that could release the superior “subliminal” or “secondary” self stuck behind the anxious, grasping, uncreative, and overly acquisitive modern self. Proper channeling of spiritual phenomena, he argued, was the cure for a “materialistic, hard, mechanical” civilization. As early as 1900, he had been inculcating in his wife an idealized picture of Native Americans, even insisting to her that some native peoples could make their crops grow psychically just by “standing apart and singing.”
His wife agreed with all his ideas (though many other people did not). In the only written work she ever published, she compared her husband’s ability to “heal the sick” through “the message of the spirit” to that of Jesus Christ. He had taught her that a divinely inspired “great genius soul” would lead the way out of “this jungle of stupidity,” as she called the modern world. Such genius, she often pointed out, was not to be expected from “every little mingapoop crawling on the Earth.” She was no “mingapoop,” she knew. But as long as he was alive, that “genius soul” was her husband. She apprenticed herself to him wholeheartedly.
In fact, her thinking had been strikingly similar to his even before they met. In 1885, a year before her marriage, she’d had her first “mystical vision” of how to save America from itself. She had had dreams about Africa as a “flaming pathway” to America’s “cure.” Believing in the truth of her dreams and convinced that African or Indian native cultures could restore modern citizens to a lost spiritual health, she became determined to infuse America with an African ideal. If she mediated between the traditional and modern worlds, she believed, “the creative impulse throbbing in the African race,” could save a world destroying itself through commercialization and industry (ironically, the sources of her own wealth). A “magic bridge” from Africa to America was needed to wake up the country and infuse it with earthy authenticity. “As the fire burned in me,” she wrote, “I had the mystical vision of a great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of Africa, across which the Negro world, that our white United States had done everything to annihilate, should see the flaming pathway . . . and recover the treasure their people had had in the beginning of African life on the earth.” As her husband’s acolyte, she may have expected Dr. Mason to realize her vision.
But matter unexpectedly got the best of Dr. Mason on May 11, 1903, when, at seventy-three years of age and at the height of his professional career, he suffered a burst gallbladder. He died at home on West 58th Street, of septicemia. His death was a tragedy for Charlotte, who was not yet fifty. But with willfulness and plenty of money, it was also a kind of freedom. She could now be the “genius soul” she had looked for by channeling her dead husband’s spirit. As the new century ushered in more progressive ideas about women’s roles, she could experience some of the new freedoms while also, as Dr. Mason’s dedicated disciple, staying true to her Victorian ideas about gender. She could now assume leadership of that “most important” task of releasing the nation’s “subliminal self” and, at the same time, realize her 1885 “vision.” Like her contemporary Annie Nathan Meyer, she cannily combined a doctor’s wife’s conventional privileges with a modern desire to make a name for herself, adopting the prerogatives of modern feminism without espousing its ideology.
To channel Dr. Mason, she added to his blend of spiritualism and psychology her own version of primitivism, founded on a collective—or racial—“subliminal self.” Thus she combined two of her husband’s chief ideas into a new philosophy. If an individual could release a subliminal self to approach divinity, she reasoned, the subliminal self of the human race could similarly be freed for planetary healing. She resolved to effect that planetary health, making herself, in her own eyes, the earth’s psychical physician. Her mission was now clear: under her direction, a select army of Mason “godchildren” would heal the world.
“The Primitive Element”
Like many others who watched modernity roll in with anxiety and apprehension—fearful of the alienating effects of industrialization, mechanization, urbanization, commercialization, and capitalism—Charlotte Mason felt that modern society was hell-bent on annihilating everything that mattered. She was part of an explosion of solutions for modern woes that was as characteristic of the 1920s as was its taxonomic fever. Social healers offered orientalism and psychoanalysis; religious revivalism and folklore; medical cure-alls such as raw-food diets, cornflakes, and radium-laced drinking water; suntanning; and surgically implanted goat testicles—all promising to restore vim and vigor.
Mason’s first serious attempt to forge her planetary cure occurred when she went to the Southwest soon after her husband’s death in 1903. Many Americans looked to Native Americans in the early twentieth century to lead them to a purer and more holistic way of living, especially romanticizing the Pueblo cultures of the Southwest as guardians of a spirituality absent from mechanized, modern cities. In what she viewed as a “simple people,” Mason saw “the primitive element still flaming [that] opposing whites, in order to live at all, will yet have to receive.” She wanted to bring that flame back to white society and took Natalie Curtis west with her to help her collect it.
Curtis (no relation to the famous photographer) was born on April 26, 1876, into a well-to-do Washington Square family, in what Henry James called “the most delectable” of New York’s neighborhoods, educated at Brearley, and reared in a liberal family with ties to Transcendentalism and abolitionism. Her father was a New York physician active in various medical societies and social clubs, and most likely the women met through those. Natalie’s family was close-knit. According to her biographer, she was especially influenced by her father’s older brother, her uncle George William Curtis; and her aunt Anna Shaw Curtis. George Curtis was an early supporter of abolition and black civil rights, with a “sincere, intense aversion to racial prejudice and discrimination of any kind.” His wife, Anna Shaw Curtis, was the sister of Robert Gould Shaw, celebrated as a martyr for his role as the commander of the all-black 54th Regiment from Massachusetts. Anna’s sister, Josephine, who had lost her husband, Charles Russell Lowell, in the Civil War, spent her adult life in a variety of progressive causes, including work with the Freedmen’s Society to build the kinds of schools to which Lillian Wood dedicated her life. George Curtis took advantage of his public platform to promote suffrage for women as well. “The sphere of the family is not the sole sphere either of men or women . . . they are also members of the State,” he argued.
Separate-sphere ideology dominated U.S. society. Natalie admired her uncle’s “moral courage,” but, as a woman, she could not very well imitate his activities. Women such as Natalie, “whose sex forbade them to offer their lives,” had to approach political issues gingerly, mindful that public advocacy was not considered feminine. She cannily discerned, as did Harlem’s white women, that the farther she moved from white, upper-class society, the greater freedom of movement she could have. Being a white woman in nonwhite society afforded special freedoms.
Though raised to be a composer and pianist, Natalie turned from performing music to collecting it, feeling that her performing skills did not match her ambitions. “I want to have a kind of profession just as a man would, so that I could be perfectly independent,” she wrote to her best friend. “Don’t you think that it would be awful to feel as some girls do that they must marry? Just as though they were as many cows!” She taught herself ethnology, folklore, and ethnomusicology, attracting support from financier George Foster Peabody and Franz Boas. She was a New England New Woman, described as bright, optimistic, and sympathetic. Like most New Women, she sought out female role models. She met Mason in the 1880s and considered her a woman with
a “warm interest in human problems and . . . charity of heart.”
The Southwest at the time was particularly attractive to “restless and rebellious women seeking freedom from their stays and from the drawing room domesticity of Boston and New York.” Curtis and Mason went there to make their mark by documenting the art of “‘living ruins’ from the childhood of civilization.” They traveled throughout the Southwest to gather material, sitting in on interviews, listening to songs, and meeting with subjects to capture their perceptions of the “sunset hour” of a romantic world. Both believed they could honor the authenticity of what they collected (although they spoke none of the languages in which the songs were sung), by capturing “the direct utterance of the Indians themselves” to reveal “the inner life of . . . the child-race of a by-gone age.” They faced competition from Columbia-trained students of Franz Boas, such as Elsie Clews Parsons, Ruth Benedict, Gladys Reichard, and Ruth Underhill, who were strongly encouraged to do fieldwork in the Southwest, a radical idea for women ethnographers especially. Like most autodidacts, Natalie Curtis disliked academics. “I resented,” she wrote, “the notion that only New England with Harvard College as its ‘hub’ can be ‘American.’” She took the view that “the Southwest was quite literally overrun with anthropologists.” Mason was even more resentful.
They also faced competition from commercial interests, such as the Harvey House enterprise, which had created a national fascination for Indians through the “staged authenticity” of “human showcases” appearing across the nation along the Santa Fe Railway line. Observers were invited to witness the daily behavior of an “exotic” people in a “natural habitat.” Along its railroad routes and restaurants, the Fred Harvey formula used those staged “artist-demonstrators” to sell trinkets, souvenirs, and an image of the Southwest designed to lure tourists to the region.
Mason and Curtis disdained “stage Indians” and “sentimental conventions about the ‘Noble Savage,’” although they were sentimental as well. Documenting songs, they felt, rather than collecting things, set them apart. Unlike other whites, whom they saw as less sensitive, they believed that, as mediums, they were merely channeling the Indians they interviewed and recorded. Hence the book that came out of their collecting, the 1907 volume The Indians’ Book: Songs and Legends of the American Indians, carried the subtitle “An Offering by the American Indians of Indian Lore, Musical and Narrative, to Form a Record of the Songs and Legends of Their Race.” Curtis and Mason also used their connections to bring exemplary Native Americans before the national government. They moved to Washington, D.C., in 1905 to lobby “chosen people here and there in conversation” about government policy and to encourage more native singing in the notorious Indian schools. President Theodore Roosevelt was an old family friend of the Curtises, and he invited Natalie to sing Indian songs at luncheon one day. But he did not take her—or her friend Mason—seriously.
Nonetheless, Mason felt that The Indians’ Book was a great triumph. She and Curtis alone, she believed, had recorded what was authentic, precious, and “True.” The Southwestern Indian, she maintained proudly, “has been ready to give me everything he had of his people, and then closed completely that door to the [other] white man.” Winning such approval meant the world to Mason. “The Indians say that the book speaks with the straight tongue,” she told her readers.
How did Curtis and Mason square their conviction that they were channeling cultural salvation from a morally superior people with their condescending belief that all native music was, as Curtis put it in 1903, “monotonous barbaric chanting” and that the Indians were “a race of savage people” stuck in a “primitive grade of development”? To say that primitivism, as one critic has written, was “a new way of packaging racism” is only part of the story. Romantic racialism was built on contradictions and fueled by reverence and disrespect, emulation and condescension. It allowed white women such as Mason and Curtis, to take up the mantle of pioneer explorers otherwise foreclosed to them by both gender and class. Romantic racialism let them conquer—and claim—new worlds. Sometimes Curtis and Mason represented that privilege as a conflict, sometimes as a blessing. “What a problem,” Curtis complained in 1916, “to have a primeval soul and one’s home in New York!” Strange as it may seem to us today, none of those contradictions was particularly striking to their contemporaries. Contradictory ideas about race and identity were a matter of course.
Mason’s intellectual contributions to Curtis’s work were substantial. Her ideas of interracial friendship, especially, are stamped across The Indians’ Book like a shadow text drawn from “Genius and Primitive Man,” Mason’s unpublished manifesto. The book’s epilogue quotes her essay at length (without ever mentioning her name):
Do we tend to become a people continually busy with the world’s affairs, let us remember that the sources of spiritual truth have arisen oftenest among the contemplative peoples of the Orient, and let us then turn to the contemplative dark-skinned natives of our own land. If not in the hope and expectancy that are born of friendship, at least with tolerance and without skepticism let us stop long enough to hear the broken fragments of a message which they might have brought in its entirety to all their brethren in the world.
Mason may have felt that The Indians’ Book was a triumph aesthetically, but it did not sell particularly well. She took that disappointment keenly.
She began nurturing additional protégés, Katherine and Cornelia Chapin, clearly determined, as she would be for the rest of her life, not to put all her eggs into one basket. She moved into the Chapin family’s Upper West Side home in 1908, six months before the wedding of her stepdaughter, Ethel, her husband’s child from his first marriage. She immediately, and with the apparent approval of their parents, assumed responsibility for the moral and intellectual education of the sisters, with whom she then lived on and off for the next three decades. Both sisters were descendants, like Mason, of some of New York’s earliest Dutch settlers. And, like her, they also descended from American railroad fortunes. They had been raised in the same elegant and rarefied atmosphere Natalie Curtis had enjoyed, trained in music, acting, literature, the arts, and philosophy. Mason helped ensure that they had the best teachers available, even hiring the leading intellectual Max Eastman as Katherine’s private tutor. Mason was almost old enough to be the girls’ grandmother, but the influence that she exerted over them was intense. Katherine arranged all of her relationships so that they could include her “Godmother,” now nicknamed “Precious.” She insisted that all of her friends bow to Mason’s advice. And she hated to be separated from “Precious” even for a night. They often shared a bed, lying awake for hours to talk, read, and plan Katherine’s life, down to the last detail of the linen she would order and how it would be stored. When Katherine married a man of Mason’s choosing, Mason accompanied her and her new husband, Francis Biddle (later to become the attorney general of the United States under FDR) on their honeymoon. A matching third ring—identical to their wedding bands—was made for “Precious.” Dozens of letters about Mason from Katherine to Francis Biddle survive. “Godmother” is always “all-seeing,” “Precious,” “Darling,” “adorable,” “absolutely selfless,” “perfectly glorious,” a “blessing,” and “Divine.” Indeed, “there is never quite paper enough to take all the love I want to send her,” Katherine wrote to her skeptical husband. Katherine’s descendants have told me that they remain baffled about the influence Mason was able to exert over the young women. But such power was not unusual for her—Mason had a genius for showering her “godchildren” with equal measures of devotion and control.
From her new base of operations with the Chapins, Mason helped Curtis cofound the Society for the Preservation of the American Indian in 1911 “to keep extant the Indian type, racially.” They also founded a short-lived Music School Settlement for Colored People, which they put under the direction of the composer J. Rosamond Johnson, a brother of James Weldon Johnson and the author of “Lift E
very Voice and Sing” (also known as the “Negro National Anthem”), among many other works. None of the New York projects succeeded. Faced with multiple failures, they made a final effort to secure their vision in 1919. On a stifling hot day in August, they brought a Mojave Apache chief named Pelia to Manhattan. At Mason’s Park Avenue apartment, he was “well soaped and combed.” Mason and Curtis took him to Washington to meet with Roosevelt, a meeting that Curtis claimed was a great success in rescuing “the country’s promise to the Native Americans.” The reported success of the meeting is inexplicable, since apparently nothing at all came of it.