You will find it more for your happiness to spend your time with them in this manner, than to be engaged in fashionable amusements, and social entertainments, even with the best company.
But I must restrain myself, and subscribe the name of your affectionate father,
John Adams
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL TO
ELSIE AND MARIAN (DAISY) BELL
“I cut off the tail and sent it to Elsie by mail today
so that you might see it.”
By inventing the telephone in 1876 at the age of twenty-nine, Alexander Graham Bell changed the world. Imaginative and extremely industrious, throughout all of his seventy-five years, he was continually inventing and creating. Sound, communication, aviation, architecture, genetics, geography, geology, geometry, current affairs, linguistics, and, most importantly, the education of the deaf—he was interested in it all. He invented a metal detector and the first respirator, he was a founder and president of the National Geographic Society, he warned about environmental pollutants and coined the phrase “greenhouse effect,” and he was integral in bringing the teachings and methods of Maria Montessori to the United States.
Bell was convinced that children learn through their play and by doing. He believed that education was “a leading forth from within rather than a putting in from without” and that “exercise of the mind is just what children need. It develops their reasoning powers and arouses their interest.”
Here, at forty, Alexander Graham Bell writes to his two daughters, nine and seven years old.
Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard
Sunday, November 13th, 1887
My dear Elsie and Daisy
I wish you could be here with me in Martha's Vineyard, for I am sure you would enjoy playing on the sandy beach, and watching the great big waves dashing on the shore. I am sure you would enjoy looking for the beautiful shells and pebbles that are thrown on the beach after every storm.
I was walking on the beach this afternoon with Mr. [Hity?] when I saw a funny black object on the shore. It looked like a book with a long tail!!
What do you think it was? It was the dead body of a fish—and it was the funniest fish I ever saw! It was flat like a book. Its eyes were on the top of its head, and its mouth was in its stomach! But where do you think its teeth were? I opened its mouth—but there were no teeth there. Guess where they were. Did you ever hear of a fish with teeth on its tail?!!!! I never did, but this fish had teeth all over its tail, and all over its back. It was covered with teeth so that you could not touch it without being bitten.
It could bite you by wagging its tail. I cut off the tail and sent it to Elsie by mail today so that you might see it. I hope it will reach you safely.
The mouth of this wonderful fish was very beautiful. Its lips were not soft like yours but quite hard and covered all over with beautiful little ivory pearls. I cut off the lips so that you might see them. I sent them to Daisy by mail.
The people here call the fish the “Stingaree” though its proper name is “The stinging ray.” The fish I saw was only a baby. Captain Osborne says he has seen one with a tail four feet long covered with teeth an inch long. He says that the teeth have poison on them when the fish is alive, so that it is dangerous to touch them. He knew a man who tried to catch one in the water, but the fish stuck its long tail into his leg and hurt him so much that he was glad to let it go. The leg swelled up and he was unable to walk for months. You need not be afraid of the tail I have sent you, because the fish has been dead for a long time, the teeth are dry and there is now no poison on them. Now my dear little girls I must say good-bye. I hope you are both good and gentle. I hope you are trying to learn as much as you can from Miss Hudson and I hope you try to make Mamma very happy and proud of you both. I expect Grandpapa and Grandmamma Bell tomorrow. Won't you write a nice letter to Grandmamma? I am sure she would be glad to hear from you—and so would I. Good bye for the present.
Your loving father
Alexander Graham Bell
JACK LONDON TO JOAN LONDON
“Do you, desiring to be a success, think your success
depends on the advice of a failure?”
Jack London was the most successful writer of his generation. Over his lifetime he produced an astounding quantity of work: two hundred short stories, four hundred pieces of nonfiction (essays, articles, war correspondence reports, and book reviews), and twenty novels. Yet, by 1913, at the age of thirty-seven, London was dying, his body failing. He was still writing, but by his own admission, only churning out pieces for the money. Years of excessive drinking and extravagant living had left him with kidneys diseased beyond hope.
Bitterly divorced from his two daughters' mother, Bess, London was a mostly distant father. High living kept him from his children, as did Bess's refusal to allow the girls ever to see their father in the presence of his second wife, Charmian.
Here London writes his twelve-year-old daughter, Joan. It is interesting to note that Joan's mother, Bess, was a teacher.
Glen Ellen,
Aug 17 1913
Dearest Joan:—
I have just dispatched a telegram to you, telling you that letter follows.
(1) Regarding bulkhead—I havent the money now. In another year I'll have the money. In the meantime we'll have to endure the damage of the winter rains. Tell mother, by digging drainage ditches, this damage can be minimized at the cost of several dollars for a day-laborer. Ask Uncle Ernest to indicate where the drainage ditches should be dug, how deep, how wide, etc.
Now (2). Please remember that an English teacher is a teacher of English, for not very many dollars a month salary for two reasons: (a) She has failed to get married & have a man buy her clothes & food for her; (b) she can't write stuff that brings money from the editors and publishers. In short, no matter how good an “English” teacher she may be, she has proved that she can't write salable English. Again, in short, she is a failure. Do you, desiring to be a success, think your success depends on the advice of a failure?
Now, Joan, when your Daddy tells you he is a top-writer in the world, do not think he is bragging. He is telling you in order to show that he has succeeded where teachers of English have failed. He is telling you this in order to prove that he knows where literary success lies, and where the failure—English teachers do not know.
I must talk this over with you at length. I can't write it. I can't leave the ranch now. Ask mama, from me, if you can run up on the train to the ranch when here and have a few hours talk with me about your education.
If mama says “no,” & I hope for your sake that she will not, then, anyway, select your French & German & cut out Latin & Greek (as we previously planned), & wait until I can come down & talk with you.
Of course, remember, & tell mother so, that you are my first-born; that your life is largely at stake here; that I know; that teachers of English do not know; and that the greatest thing in the world right now for you would be to have this talk with me. It is not a case of mother; of me; but of you & your whole life welfare.
You can come on a morning train and leave on an afternoon train; better would it be to stay one night over, because I work all morning.
Of course, have mama read this letter and talk the whole matter over with her.
Remember that your daddy is a very busy daddy these day.
Daddy.
P.S.—Always write your letters in ink, on one side only. Always address your letter in ink. Always know the postal laws.
First class postage is reckoned in units of two cents. 3cts is no good on a letter. 2–4–6–8—is the way to stamp letters. 3 cts. means that you lose 1 ct., and that the recipient must pay the difference between 2 cts. and 4 cts., or 2 cts.
Daddy
LINCOLN STEFFENS TO PETE STEFFENS
“Nobody understands things as they are and the proof of this is that nobody,—not the greatest scientist,
not the tenderest poet, not the most sensitive painter; only for a moment, the kindest lover
can see
that all is beautiful.”
Journalist, radical, and reformer, Lincoln Steffens was among the first of America's muckrakers. In a series of articles for McClure's magazine, later published together in 1904 in his well-known book The Shame of the Cities, Steffens exposed to the nation the widespread corruption of local governments. His work changed the way Americans viewed the establishment and introduced a new kind of journalism to the country: investigative reporting.
A father only late in life, to Steffens's great surprise, he was delighted and fascinated by fatherhood and created a gentle, affectionate atmosphere for little Pete. “The father's place is in the home,” he wrote, “and there I am and there I mean to stay—on guard—to protect my child from education.”
Here, while in Germany working on his autobiography, sixty-year-old Steffens writes a letter of guidance for the future to his two-year-old son, Pete.
Carlsbad, June 23, 1926
Dear Pete:
This place will suit you I think. Down three flights of stairs is a restaurant through which you will go to either an open cafe in front or on a side toward the town to a large graveled playground. There is not much for a little fellow like you to do on this playground. It is the grown-up idea for a place for kids. A bare yard where there is nothing to break and nothing to get hurt on. Safety first is the law for children, but you will have your ball and we will find you a half-developed Deutsches Madel [German girl] to play with, so that you can learn to think in another language. Sometimes we can go in back of the house to a playground for grown-ups. That has a net and balls 'n' everything to amuse the big children who can't play with nothing like a baby. They have a game called tennis which they work at hard rather than do anything useful. It's thought to be degrading to work; and it is. It is a sure sign that your father was an honest man and never got any graft, if you have to work for your living. I hope to arrange it so that you will not be ashamed of me; I leave you my graft and I'll show you how to get more if you need it. If you work, you will work as a scientist or an artist, for fun, not for money. Money cannot be made by labor. But work, real work, for what we call duty or the truth, that is more fun than tennis. Sometimes we will sit, you and I, and look at the human beings that crawl around here, and when we have had our fill of that sight we will walk away a few hundred feet and look at the trees, the beautiful, tall straight trees that have no bellies and no bad tastes. They are dignified and well-dressed. I'd like to have you appreciate trees, appreciate the difference between them and men, and then, some day, believe that, under decent conditions it will be possible for human beings to also have souls. They haven't now; only bellies, pockets and the poor beginnings of a mind.
Your mother and your Cousin Jane will explain this to you, if I am gone. They will tell it to you honestly and humorously, Pete; they will not propagand with you; with all others maybe; but not with Pete. You are to have the straight of it my boy; and the straightest of the straight is that we don't know anything; not any of us; not Jane, not Peter, not I. Nobody understands things as they are and the proof of this is that nobody,—not the greatest scientist, not the tenderest poet, not the most sensitive painter; only for a moment, the kindest lover can see that all is beautiful. I can't, I only believe that.
It may be wrong; there may be ugliness, like the sick bellies these miserable Kurgaste [spa guests] come here to cure, but I have a funny old faith that, if a little fellow like you is shown everything and allowed to look at everything and not lied to by anybody or anything, he, even Pete, might do better even than Joyce did what Ulysses was meant to do; he might see and show that there is exquisite beauty everywhere except in an educated mind.
And an educated mind is nothing but the God-given mind of a child after his parents' and his grandparents' generation have got through molding it. We can't help teaching you; you will ask that of us; but we are prone to teach you what we know, and I am going, now and again, to warn you:
Remember we really don't know anything. Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don't know. That is your playground, bare and graveled, safe and unbreakable.
Love your mother, but don't you believe and revere her; and as for your father, laugh at him as he laughs at himself till the tears start.
L. Steff.
EUGENE O'NEILL TO SHANE O'NEILL
“Because any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish
is the only way to be happy.”
In July 1939, playwright Eugene O'Neill had just completed notes and outlines for two of his masterworks, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. At fifty years of age he had already won the Nobel Prize and three Pulitzer Prizes (a fourth Pulitzer was awarded to him after his death).
O'Neill was the father of three children—Eugene, Jr., with his first wife, and Shane and Oona with his second wife. A shy, often depressed and extremely driven man, he was not particularly affectionate nor involved with any of his children. His second child, Shane, was a sweet but troubled boy who idolized his father. For O'Neill, Shane's lack of commitment and his dependence on others were persistent sources of frustration. Here O'Neill, who was living in California with his third wife, Carlotta, writes to nineteen-year-old Shane, who over the preceding several years had been asked to leave one school after another.
July 18, 1939
Dear Shane,
I wrote Oona a couple of days ago to tell you to expect an answer to your letter soon and here it is.
My feeling, that Harry spoke to you about—and by the way, I didn't tell him to say anything to you—was based on the fact that you had let me hear so little from you at Lawrenceville. But forget it. I appreciate a lot the frankness of this last letter of yours and I hope you will always write to me in just that spirit. What you say of your feeling a new understanding had sprung up between us on your last visit was exactly what I felt. Which made it doubly hard to comprehend why later on you went ahead with a complete change in your plans without consulting me and were all booked for Lawrenceville by the time I heard from you.
My advice on the subject of raising horses would not be much use to you. I don't know anyone in that game, what conditions or prospects are, or anything else about it. All I know is that if you want to get anywhere with it, or with anything else, you have got to adopt an entirely different attitude from the one you have had toward getting an education. In plain words, you've got to make up your mind to study whatever you undertake, and concentrate your mind on it, and really work at it. This isn't wisdom. Any damned fool in the world knows it's true, whether it's a question of raising horses or writing plays. You simply have to face the prospect of starting at the bottom and spending years learning how to do it. The trouble with you, I think, is you are still too dependent on others. You expect too much from outside you and demand too little of yourself. You hope everything will be made smooth and easy for you by someone else. Well, it's coming to the point where you are old enough, and have been around enough, to see that this will get you exactly nowhere. You will be what you make yourself and you have got to do that job absolutely alone and on your own, whether you're in school or holding down a job.
After all, parents' advice is no damned good. You know that as well as I. The best I can do is to try to encourage you to work hard at something you really want to do and have the ability to do. Because any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy. But beyond that it is entirely up to you. You've got to do for yourself all the seeking and finding concerned with what you want to do. Anyone but yourself is useless to you there.
I'm glad you got the job on the party-fishing boat. It's a start in the right direction of independence. The more you get to know of independence the better you will like it, and the more you will get to know yourself and the right aim for your life.
What I am trying to get firmly planted in your mind is this: In the really important decisions of life, others cannot help y
ou. No matter how much they would like to. You must rely on yourself. That is the fate of each one of us. It can't be changed. It just is like that. And you are old enough to understand this now.
And that's all of that. It isn't much help in a practical advice way, but in another way it might be. At least, I hope so.
I'm glad to know of your doing so much reading and that you're becoming interested in Shakespeare. If you really like and understand his work, you will have something no one can ever take from you.
We are looking forward to Oona's visit. I appreciate your writing about her as you did. It is so long since I've seen her. Too long. Ordinarily I would have been coming East every year or two to put on new plays and would have seen her then. But a Cycle of nine plays is another matter. It brings up complications that keep me tied down to the job, especially as I have not yet caught up on my schedule from the delay my long illness of two years ago caused.
Don't talk of dry spell! We know all about that! We hardly had any rain last winter and now we live in dread our springs will get so low before summer ends that a lot of the stuff we have planted around the house can't be watered and will have to die. It's rotten. Natives tell us there was less rain this year than at any time for forty years.
Carlotta joins me in love to you. Let me know as soon as you have any definite plans for the immediate future. And keep your chin up! You will be all right as soon as you get yourself organized along one set line.
As ever,
Father.
N. C. WYETH TO NAT
AND CAROLINE WYETH
“To keep alive and to intensify his sense of wonderment and his curiosity about the simplest things—these will become and remain the most potent factors in his life, no matter what he is destined to do.”
N. C. Wyeth's enthusiasm for the world around him was apparent in nearly all he did. The celebrated illustrator, whose classic paintings illuminated the pages of such books as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, loved adventure, nature, and action. He was known to stand for hours on the rocky coast of Maine just watching the crashing waves, sensing the power of the ocean. Wyeth delighted in his family and encouraged his five gifted children to stretch their imaginations and creativity to their fullest. Three of his children—Henriette, Caroline, and Andrew—became artists. His daughter Ann became a composer and painter, and son Nat, an engineer and inventor.
Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children Page 4