Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  On 11 June 1912, Sarah Lampe died at Tumut aged eighty-one. When this news reached her eldest granddaughter, and how she coped, is unknown, but it would certainly have been a great blow. By 1914 she was beginning to feel that her grandmother was the only person who had never let her down (‘the supreme love of my life’ is how the heroine of her unpublished manuscript ‘Red Cross Nurse’ puts it, which now seems rather extreme). ‘Oh how I wish I could go home, if I had a little strength perhaps I would,’ she wrote to Rose Scott six months later.32

  That summer the suffragists of Miles’s circle were galvanised by successful suffrage referenda in several states and increased suffragette militancy in England. ‘Yes, [it’s] “our” suffrage campaign!’, begins a report by Editha Phelps in June’s Life and Labor of a local pre-primary campaign conducted by the league in which the question of woman suffrage was put to the (all male) voters of an inner-city ward. (Two-thirds of the respondents, a significant number of them European immigrants, were against votes for women, an outcome Miles Franklin recalled when a mass immigration program was proposed for Australia.) The news that Walter Burley Griffin had won the Australian capital city design competition delighted Miles and Alice Henry, who went to Walter’s office to congratulate him.33

  In addition to the other extraordinary events of that year, in June the Republican convention was held in Chicago. A great upset occurred when former president Theodore Roosevelt was dumped as presidential candidate in favour of the incumbent, Robert Taft, and the ‘Grand Old Party’ split. A mere six weeks later, a newly constituted Progressive Party met at the Chicago Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue to declare Roosevelt its candidate (‘Give me Teddy or give me death’). The hastily cobbled together but long-gestating platform comprehended everything the league had been calling for, including equal suffrage, and there were even two women delegates, who were given a historic suffrage escort through the streets to the opening of the new party’s convention. The escort was headed by the distinguished sociologist Sophonisba Breckenridge and thirty female students from the University of Chicago, and included a contingent representing working women, among whom the Chicago Daily Tribune listed ‘Stella Franklin’.34

  Miles had a thrilling time in the press gallery. ‘Never enjoyed myself so for years.’ And others found it equally exhilarating. Mary Dreier was delighted by the new party’s ‘splendid suffrage plank’ and by a social and industrial plank ‘which surpasses our wildest dreams’. A letter from Miles Franklin to Rose Scott gives a personal reaction:

  These have been stirring times for our circle as Mr & Mrs Robins are in the thick of the fight of the new Progressive Party to elect Mr Roosevelt . . . His humanitarian plank has attracted a great many reformers. Of course I am against his military ideals and certain characteristics, but it is a great thing that he has come out for the suffrage. One gets bored to death with all the old, old discussion still going on about this simple thing. I feel as if I had lived before the flood having come from a universal suffrage country . . . I had a seat in the press section. I was next to the London Times representative . . . within four seats of the speakers and had a fine view of Teddy, teeth and all.35

  The main reason for her letter, however, was to inform Rose Scott of the embarrassment occasioned by Sir George Reid, the Australian High Commissioner in London and former Australian Prime Minister, who visited Chicago in early September. Reid had declined to be received by suffragists in Chicago seeking to know about the achievements of women in advanced Australia, due, he said, to feeling against the suffragettes in England (and according to hearsay, his wife backed him up by asserting that the best women in Australia did not vote anyway). The protest letter written by Alice Henry and Miles Franklin to Australia’s Labor Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, duly appeared in the Sydney Daily Telegraph:

  Dear Sir,

  Sir George Reid, High Commissioner for Australia, at present on a visit to the United States, has refused to accept the courtesy of a reception to be tendered to Lady Reid by the suffragists on the ground that it would not be politic (see clippings enclosed). It seems to be a strange position for an Australian official to take, that when in a foreign country, he cannot stand for the principle of equal suffrage embodied in the laws and Constitution of Australia . . . As Australians we should like to know what is the explanation of the High Commissioner’s attitude, which tends to discredit Australia among the women of this country, for the question inevitably arises, is Sir George Reid High Commissioner for Australia or for Great Britain.36

  Miles now had one Guido Mariotti in tow. Not for much longer, however. Poor Guido, who gave Italian lessons to Editha Phelps and many times walked Miles home after an evening meal in one or other lakeside diner, was dismissed by Miles in mid-November as ‘a most vacuous specimen of humanity’. Soon afterwards, letters started to come from playboy Demarest Lloyd, the younger son of the Lloyds of Winnetka, where Miles had convalesced in 1907. He was living mainly in Boston but by 1912 was a journalist and enthusiast for Christian Science. Emma Pischel’s older brother Fred, who worked in his father’s lumber and estate business in north-west Chicago, had also become an admirer. Somehow Miles never lacked for admirers. It was partly because of her relatively diminutive size, which kept her looking young: she weighed a mere 104 pounds (47 kilograms) at this time, and had to buy clothes from children’s departments. No wonder ‘Demy’ Lloyd called her ‘little rascal’. And often she seemed fragile (in particular, her teeth were giving her trouble).37

  After seven years in America, Miles Franklin could honestly say that she loved Americans and wished that relations between Australia and America were closer (a process already under way informally, though Australia would not appoint its own representative in Washington until 1937). In the despatches of information about her work — she scored at least ten Australian press mentions in 1913, including four in the Worker, where Mary Gilmore ran the ‘Women’s Page’, and she exchanged trade union journals with the prominent Sydney labour leaders Annie and Belle Golding — and in the letters she wrote introducing Raymond Robins and Walter Burley Griffin to Australians in 1913, she was a forerunner. (Raymond Robins was in Australia in March and April 1913 on a world crusade to bring men back to Christianity, during which time he met Miles’s mother, ‘a dear old lady’.)38

  It used to be said of ‘exodists’ (Miles’s word in Cockatoos for talented people leaving Australia) that if they stayed away longer than three years they were unlikely to return. Clearly after seven years the capacity of America’s second city to stimulate and delight was far from exhausted. The net of circumstance was so richly woven, with new threads all the time. Thus the very first evening of 1913 found her at the latest site of cultural innovation, the Little Theater, located at first in the Fine Arts building, then on the city’s South Side. A month later she saw a performance of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, produced by theatre founder Maurice Browne, which she reviewed enthusiastically in the next issue of Life and Labor: ‘What a mighty tragedy wrought in the lives of women this is.’ The review concludes with a request for the young director to find an adequate labour play and give a Women’s Trade Union Night.39

  The Little Theater, which presented experimental and poetic plays, became one of her enthusiasms. It only held ninety-nine people — a darling place, she wrote to Rose Scott — with a tearoom attached where she sometimes went on Sunday evening and met ‘the geebungs in art and literature’. It was, she said, ‘quite a jolly highbrow affair’ (though she elsewhere abhorred its bohemian aspects, especially its sexual culture), and it made a lasting impression.40

  This new enthusiasm fed into romantic interests. William Bross Lloyd often took Miles to opera matinées in 1913 and to dine in the great hotels. No correspondence remains to clarify the relationship, but it seems clear that Bill Lloyd was entranced by Miles, once saying she was the most complex mortal he had ever known, and that he wanted to marry her or at least have an affair. The trouble was he was already married, with a wi
fe, Lola, in Winnetka whom Miles knew well, and several children. Worse (in Miles’s eyes), it seems Bill Lloyd resorted to prostitutes. As she put it in her literary notebook in the 1940s, ‘when he wanted me to marry him, I said scornfully I cd not undertake the heavy burden competing with all the “sporting” women in town’ (‘sporting’ being a North American usage denoting a prostitute or loose woman). To this Bill Lloyd replied that he had exempted himself from such services since pursuing her; but when he could not recall any of the women’s names, it disgusted her all the more. (Miles probably took this stand later, as the relationship continued until 1914. The Lloyd marriage lasted a year or two longer, by which time he was ‘poor Bill Lloyd’.)41

  Miles never said she regretted not marrying Bill Lloyd. With his younger brother Demarest, who came to the fore a little earlier, the story would be different, as she confessed to Ethel Nielsen (Mason) in 1951. Born in 1883, Demarest was a few years younger than Miles and by all accounts a fine specimen of manhood. When he died in 1937, Miles wrote, ‘I knew him intimately’, meaning not sexually, but closely, or very well. She kept his letters too (as she did those of Edwin Bridle and later some from Fred Pischel), bizarre and one-sided as they mostly are. All but two of the surviving thirty-six letters were written during 1913 and 1914, and among them are a few responses from Miles (though these seem to have been composed as much to obscure as to illuminate what was really going on).42

  On paper, at least, the story began on 19 December 1912, when Demarest Lloyd wrote to ‘Miss Franklin’, thanking her for a copy of her review of his aunt’s book on the life of his father. By this time he was a political commentator on the Boston Journal, while maintaining a presence in Chicago, where his interests were substantial. How much more Miles knew about him is hard to say, since neither she nor any of her associates mentioned certain pertinent facts until 1951, and they were not reported at the time in the Chicago Daily Tribune (of which he and his brother were major shareholders). However, on 5 November 1912 the New York Times reported that Demarest Lloyd had recently instigated divorce proceedings in Boston against Mayme (‘May’) Fisher Lloyd on the grounds of adultery. He had married May in 1905, when he was aged twenty-two. There were no children, and due to certain incidents in a hotel in New Hampshire, apparently involving Fisher rather than Lloyd, as was usually the case, the divorce was uncontested. A decree nisi was granted on 13 January 1913 and was to become absolute six months later. It was on that same day that Demarest Lloyd next wrote to Miles Franklin, thanking her for a bright and cheery note.43

  Through 1913 the relationship between Demarest Lloyd and Miles Franklin developed in a haphazard manner, due in part to his lavish lifestyle — according to the New York Times, he was worth $9 million at this time — but also to her characteristically unpredictable demeanour. As his life revolved around sailing and automobiles, his letters came from up and down the east coast — from Boston, New York and Miami — and in August 1913 he was in France, where she wrote to him. More seriously, he sent Miles some Christian Science literature. But he failed to respond to invitations to attend a welcome-home dinner for Mrs Robins in September, and although he was tempted by her invitation to the union Halloween Ball the following month, he did not make that either.44

  What he did perceive was that his ‘dear fascinating little rascal’ was ‘in some kind of trouble’. This he attributed to associating with ‘materialistic’ people, labour and socialist people; or perhaps it was her work that made her nervous? His prescription that she see a Christian Science practitioner ‘where you can open up’ seems hardly that of a suitor. The problem, he concluded, possibly correctly, was his beloved brother, whom Demy (as he now signed himself) also mistrusted. Demy urged Miles to keep ‘our little secrets’ from Bill Lloyd, and to conclude the relationship with him.45

  These lightly flirtatious letters may seem tiresome to the present-day reader, but it is clear that Miles did want something of him. Was it romance? Probably. Doubtless his attentions were flattering, even intriguing. And marriage? Maybe. He fitted the eugenical bill well, but she avoided him when he came to Chicago for a family Christmas that year, and Demy Lloyd was often mystified by Miles. Certainly, she found his Christian Science hard to take, as the draft short story ‘When Bobby Got Religion’, dated 1914 and incorporated into On Dearborn Street, would make abundantly clear: ‘the only religion that can be made to comfort the rich’.46

  Increasingly, Miles Franklin was stuck somewhere between the old and the new: an impassioned upholder of social purity and chastity but increasingly conscious that, aged thirty-four, her experience of sex was, to say the least, limited. Whereas both virginity and chastity had their place in Catholic teaching, the mostly Protestant-reared first-wave feminists had no such justification to fall back on when new approaches challenged their faith in self-restraint. Lack of sexual experience presumably was worse than not being able to dance, at a time when Americans were doing the turkey trot, or not being able to drive. Miles got Bill Lloyd to teach her to dance, and Fred Pischel would soon offer to teach her to drive; but she thought it best to hold to the old truths about sex. Self-restraint, however, may not have been enough, if the alarmingly brutal account of the abduction and attempted rape of the young working woman narrator by a wealthy suitor in ‘Red Cross Nurse’ is based on her own experience, as seems to be the case. During a lengthy break in Boston in 1914, Demy Lloyd took Miles driving and dancing and apparently tried to assault her after one dangerous trip to Providence, Rhode Island. The relevant diary entry reads: ‘He was desperate & brutal in an unprecedented degree when drunk. Escaped death or tragedy by v. small margin.’ She began ‘Red Cross Nurse’ three days later.47

  In November 1913 Emmeline Pankhurst came to Chicago. There had been quite a fuss about it, as the United States government had at first tried to keep her out, to the huge indignation of the citizenry. Her lecture tour and the fundraising that was the main purpose of this, her third visit to the United States, were subsequently a great success. Miles, who claimed to have joined the WSPU as a gesture of solidarity back in 1911 when a prior tour by Sylvia Pankhurst had to be cancelled due to public hostility to militancy, went to all the Chicago events and wrote a pointed article for Life and Labor: ‘The government that sends a woman of such high qualities and unswerving purity of purpose before us as a felon . . . while the white slaver flourishes untrammeled in Piccadilly, is in need of profound condolences.’48

  At the league convention in St Louis mid-year, where she appeared in the local press as a union leader, Miles presented a forward-looking secretary’s report, and was ‘as busy as an ant’. The league’s organisational and legislative agenda was a lengthening one, and as Gladys Boone first pointed out, in many respects well ahead of its time, but hard to implement too, due to the problems inherent in organising unskilled and mostly young working women, and having to push labour legislation through state by state.49

  In addition, there was the challenge of establishing a training school for women trade unionists. There had been a strong general emphasis on education at the convention, and Mrs Robins was clear that the time had come for trade unionists to take over from the ‘allies’. Having become secretary-treasurer (after the convention), Miles had to help find the not inconsiderable sums of money needed for the pioneering effort, which began in a small way in 1914 and lasted until 1926, when the challenge was passed to the newly established Labor colleges.50

  After such a year, it is something of a shock to come upon Miles’s last diary entry for 1913:

  Looking back over the year I cannot recall one thing of usefulness or worth that I have accomplished for others nor one of pleasure or satisfaction for myself. The futility of my existence, my weakness in effort, my failure in accomplishment, fills me with a creeping melancholy that grows more impenetrable. I will fight against it once more by hard work & if in two yrs the results are no better than in the past I shall die of my own volition.

  Of all Miles’s black moments th
is was surely the blackest, yet she determined to struggle on, at least for the time being.51

  On the face of it, things were proceeding as normal. The usual round of work and play resumed in the new year. Money was needed for larger office premises as well as the new school, and Miles wrote twice about funding to Dorothea Dreier (sometimes it seems the league was entirely funded by the Dreier sisters). There were judicial decisions, trade agreements and the rather complex waitresses’ hearing to be attended to — where human rights were at stake — and articles for Life and Labor to be written.

  There is a fine studio portrait of Alice Henry and Miles Franklin taken about this time, showing both to be clear-eyed, coiffured, confident, modern women. In reality, both women were feeling badly overworked, and were in trouble with Mrs Robins over the printers’ bills for Life and Labor, already a worry in 1913.52

  A sadly familiar story of workers defending a good product in the face of financial stringency and plans to downsize began to unfold. Mrs Robins wanted Alice Henry to stand down and finish her long-promised history of women and trade unions, and Miles to take over (an idea to which Miles was not averse). But Alice Henry was appalled, and raised the latent issue of overwork, as Miles had a few days before. The fault lay with the NWTUL’s overambitious plans, and what was proposed meant the exploitation of the most efficient workers. It was wrong, Henry further asserted, that ‘we who carry so much of [the league’s] administration should be leading lives utterly at variance with what we are standing for’.53