by Sally Mann
When the press box was packed full, the strong-thighed press men jumped in and began wadding and stomping down the buoyant cotton with their bare feet, sinking deep into the cumulate mound, often lost from view until, by dint of their furiously pumping legs, they gradually rose up through the suffocating mass into the turbid air that at last afforded their lungs some relief.
The mounting clouds of lint and dust that arose from the force of their effort coated everything in the pressroom and beyond, and over time coalesced into racemes gently swaying from the rafters and beams, drifting down to brush the passing faces with spidery tendrils—Miss Havisham’s living room writ large. All the workers, despite wrapping their faces with moistened kerchiefs, coughed constantly and their eyes wept. The mortality rate was unavoidably troubling.
As it happened, despite being a pretty tough kid, Robert Munger himself had some pulmonary ailments, and when he began working in the gin, his health suffered along with that of his workers. Wheezing and coughing after work, he and his clever bride, Mary, whom he had married in 1878, began to speculate about a closed, mechanized ginning system that would minimize exposure to cotton dust. Although neither had any education in engineering or design, they bent to the task of realizing this concept, drawing by hand specifications for the complex mechanical operation they envisaged.
Reading accounts of this inventive charrette, which frequently required most of the night, I am struck by the parity and harmony in which they worked. Theirs was a remarkably modern and happy marriage, and Robert Munger’s courtship letters from 1877 express an uncommon, almost instant, connection between them. Even more apparent in those courtship letters is his respect for Mary’s impressive intelligence. She wasn’t all that beautiful by the standards of the time, at least not in this view, which I found in the Birmingham archive.
But, take a look at this: see the photographer’s address at the bottom of the picture? Staunton, Virginia. Thirty-five miles from where I live, Staunton is the nearest city to the north of our farm. How on earth did my great-grandmother, a teenage girl from Fairfield, Texas, get all the way to my backyard in 1875 to have her picture taken? And why?
Turns out, to attend a Staunton finishing school, the Augusta Female Seminary, and it seems to have worked: the next picture I found of her, taken back home in Texas at the time of her wedding to Robert Munger, shows a woman with considerably more polish. But there’s still not a lot more in this picture of what were then considered the indicia of feminine beauty: pliancy, refined features, and a delicate, shy gaze. To the contrary, Mary has an almost masculine heft, her features are somewhat coarse, and there is a stubborn set to her jaw. She is a formidable woman.
In an interview years later, Robert Munger spoke of her as his indispensable helpmate and of her encouragement as essential to his success:
She has always been my greatest inspiration. She has helped me and… been right with me through it all. She would stay up just as late as I did, and she always was up and fully dressed, no matter how early I had to leave in the morning to get to work. She would see that I had something to eat and [would give me] a hearty, cheerful send-off, and I didn’t carry away with me any recollections of her in a kimono, either. She was as ready for the trials of the day as I was.
Apparently she was up to those trials, and together, in 1879, Robert and Mary Munger finished designing the improvements that were to revolutionize the process of ginning cotton and make them multimillionaires. He, or they, had designed a system by which the cotton, upon arrival at the gin, could be transported by pneumatic suction from the bins, sparing the half dozen or so workers from having to gather it up and carry it by hand. The cotton was filtered while being sucked up from the bin, cleaned of dust and trash, and delivered by a spiked belt to a battery of feeders. After passing through a more refined lint flue and primary compressor, it was then fed in a continuous batt along the moving belt to the mechanical press box for baling. No more basket boys. No more gasping, half-suffocated cotton stompers. No more Miss Havisham-y racemes.
In this clean and efficient process, the cotton passed from the wagon to the bale in one automated operation, requiring only a few men to run the machines rather than the eighteen needed earlier.
Obviously these refinements were gratifying from a humanitarian point of view, but, from a businessman’s bottom-line perspective, they were momentous. Not only did they produce significantly cleaner cotton, but they also upped the plant’s production by a peachy 25 percent. As the business grew, the expanding operation provided different, and safer, jobs for the workers displaced by the new technology. Robert Munger clearly was doing very well by doing good.
After working out the glitches in the new invention at his own little Rutersville gin,
Munger moved the whole burgeoning operation to Mexia, Texas. He patented his Munger Ginning System, and then spent four frustrating years peddling it to existing gin manufacturers. Inexplicably, none wanted to adopt and produce it, so, in 1884, at the age of thirty, he and Mary went back to the drawing board and designed the means of production for the equipment they had invented. Munger then borrowed money, found land in Dallas, built a large factory, and began manufacturing the Munger System himself.
By printing beautifully designed catalogs,
and going all-out on advertising,
he was rewarded with rapid commercial success. Within a few years, his factory was so profitable that he sought a location for a second large plant in Birmingham, Alabama, strategically east of the Mississippi. Merging his company with several other regional ginning concerns, he formed the Continental Gin Company and moved the family from Dallas to Birmingham in 1892.
With the little Rutersville ginning shack still visible in his rearview mirror, Robert Munger’s Continental Gin Company was soon operating six booming factories, with showrooms throughout the world and assets of well over $116 million (in today’s dollars).
At the age of forty, just twenty years after taking over his father’s gin, Robert Munger
was an extraordinarily successful and rich man. But it is satisfying to note that when I went looking for him in the pages of history, his abiding reputation is not as an inventor and wealthy businessman but rather as a humanitarian and philanthropist.
By all accounts, he genuinely cared for people, was unfailingly kind and courteous, and “his generosity knew no bounds.” Much of my information about my great-grandfather comes from his obituaries, where, in an extensive front-page article in the Birmingham News, he was described as “a gentle, sweet soul whom neither applause nor riches puffed up. He never behaved himself unseemly.” The same article stated:
Munger looked up to no man, and he looked down upon none.… He did not overlook the Negroes and he numbered his friends among the Negro race by the hundreds. There isn’t a Negro church in Birmingham to which he has not contributed… and the Negro schools of the area have always found a ready response when appealing to Mr. Munger for funds. He also gave of his time and counsel.
In that era, how many prominent society figures could have had that written about them, or, more importantly, would have?
Apparently, those “friends among the Negro race” did not hesitate to express their reciprocal feelings for both Robert and Mary. When Mary died in 1924, within a year of Robert Munger’s death, the following was received and published by the Birmingham News:
Tribute by a Colored Preacher
Please allow me the space in your paper to say a few words in regard of the beautiful life of Mrs. Robert S. Munger.… I feel that death has removed from Birmingham one of the greatest sympathizers with unfortunate humanity that ever lived in our city.
Very much like that of her late husband, she possessed a heart of sympathy for the poor, irrespective of color or creed. I feel safe in saying that there is not a church or institution of learning among the people of my race in Birmingham that these sainted hands have not aided and… thousands of colored people in Birmingham… are sorrowing wit
h you in the loss of one who has done so much in the work of charity.
Rev. W. H. Hunt
In the same way that I was ignorant of the pathos and peculiarities in my mother’s past, I knew almost nothing about my great-grandfather Robert S. Munger until I began digging around in those boxes in the attic. I had no concept, for example, of the magnitude of his wealth. Whatever had trickled down to my father had been soaked up in land, art, cars, education, exotic trees, and the trappings of a funky-charming southern existence by the time my parents died. I had known Munger was an innovator, something about cotton ginning, but had no idea of the originality and significance of his inventions. On the wall of my father’s study hung pictures of him sitting proudly at the wheel of some old jalopy but, again, I had only the sketchiest notion of his involvement with the automobile. That a few buildings had been named for him I was perhaps aware, and I’d seen the gold and silver medals with his name engraved on them, but I knew nothing of the extent of his philanthropy.
Since I was deep in this search, I began to wonder what racial skeletons hung in the closets of that deeply southern side of the family, especially given the timing of Henry Munger’s move to Texas. I had rested comfortably on the assumption that the Mungers, coming to America when they did, were Puritans hoping, as Garrison Keillor put it, to repress themselves here more than was legally possible at home. Often in New England families, Puritan origins foreshadowed a noble commitment later in the nineteenth century to abolitionism: that is the upside of the Puritan heritage.
But here the Mungers appear to have gone off-track. Henry Munger moved to Texas in the early 1850s, and it was not the repression of the self, but the enslavement of others that usually motivated such a migration of gringos to Texas in those years. The Texas Republic, whose constitution expressed an overheated enthusiasm for America’s peculiar institution, had been created in 1836 in part as a way for slave-owners to keep their human property by effectively seceding from Mexico where slavery was illegal.
These are well-known facts, except possibly in Texas, and they only increased my trepidation as I headed south in the summer of 2011 to find out what I could about my southern ancestors. My mother’s Boston side was pristine (in that respect, anyway), and, of course, it was also on the right side of Civil War history. But I feared the worst from Alabama and Texas.
I found it in a sad and provocative letter preserved in the storage chest of my ninety-three-year-old Birmingham relative. In this handwritten letter, J. H. Collett of Fairfield, Texas, the same seemingly open-minded man who had sent his daughter Mary 1,210 miles to be educated in Staunton, Virginia, describes to a cousin in Tennessee the purchase and resale of slaves:
An unusual case happened in the purchase of a family of six Negroes, a man and his wife and four children, age respectively from 12 to 21 years.
The owner came to town one afternoon and told me he wanted to sell the Negroes. I told him I did not have money to pay for them, and he told me that made no difference, and he asked me to go home with him and stay all night. I went.
The Negroes’ cabin was some distance from the dwelling house and he suggested that we go by it and see the Negroes. When we got to the cabin the Negroes were eating their supper and he told them to all come out, that he had brought me there to buy them. The Negro woman said:
“Marse Jackson, that man is not able to buy one of us. I heard that a few years ago he came to Springfield with his pack on his back.”
The owner called their names and their respective ages, and I made a memorandum in a little book that I had and put opposite each name my estimate of price. The owner saw my figures; it was a total of $5,000. Without hesitation he said, “that’s alright.”
When supper was over I wrote a bill of sale and he signed it. I then gave him my note for the $5,000 payable on demand. Next morning he had the Negroes loaded up in a wagon and they got to Fairfield before I did. And in a day or two I sold them to a man in our town for $6000.
I learned later why he sold them. His wife did not like the way he treated…
And at that cliff-hanging ellipsis the letter stops, leaving little doubt as to the sorry end of the almost certainly damning sentence. The remaining pages are lost to time—or to the editing instincts of a relative who thought they sullied the archive.
So, there it is: my great-great-grandfather, starting out with only the “pack on his back,” bettered himself by buying and selling slaves. And it would be naïve to think those workers in Henry Munger’s Texas gin were anything but slaves, hauling the bundles, stomping the cotton, and dying of the dust. Since he was eleven when the Civil War ended, Robert Munger himself never owned slaves, but I have often wondered whether his munificence to black churches and charities possibly sprang from guilt over his family’s slave-owning past. As a child, having worked closely with his father’s slaves, especially, one might assume, his contemporaries the basket boys, he surely saw them work until they dropped dead. This, it seems to me, might provide an impressive psychological explanation for Robert Munger’s later generosity to African American causes.
However it came about, the compassion that provoked Munger’s inventive successes continued well beyond his lung-saving cotton gin improvements. Early on, with an initial gift of more than $250,000, he established the Munger Benevolent Fund to be held in trust for the benefit of his factory employees in the case of sickness, injury, or death. In Gilded Age America, the era of the robber barons, this was an unusually progressive gesture. In other ways as well he was remarkably ahead of his time, especially in the respect he paid his wife. Munger’s countless donations to charitable causes were always presented as gifts from both him and Mrs. Munger, extending into philanthropy the inclusive and respectful spirit that marked their marriage in so many ways.
This generous impulse came to the fore when, in 1921, Munger was awarded the Birmingham News Loving Cup, a very big deal back then, for distinguished and unselfish service in the South. The formal presentation was held at Birmingham’s First Methodist Church, which was filled to capacity. In fact, the newspaper reported that as many as seven thousand people were turned away when the sanctuary was filled and the doors closed.
A reporter interviewed one woman as she stood weeping before the barred door. She told him between sobs that she had come all the way from Ensley (then a thriving industrial city outside Birmingham) to see Munger get the Loving Cup, and he quoted her entreaty in the paper: “He helped my son. He helped him when he needed help. I must get in: it means more to me than it does to you, or to the others.”
Banging on the doors, the reporter interceded on her behalf, and the woman was admitted.
The newspaper printed several of the speeches lauding Robert Munger, and a description in one of them by a Mr. Stallings particularly caught my eye, for it might just as easily have been said about his grandson, my father:
He is unobtrusive in his daily life, but a man of tremendous, quiet force, of broad sympathies and understanding, unassuming and genuinely anxious to benefit others.… In the carriage of his body there is a quiet pride, a feeling not of vanity but of instinctive power. He is a man of purity, warm affection, simplicity of manner and courtesy, singularly graceful and dignified.
At the conclusion of the speechifying, in front of the cheering (and weeping, it was reported) crowd, Munger accepted the trophy with “modest demeanor, halting speech and evident humility.” He spoke briefly and then, to everyone’s surprise, he stepped off the platform and over the chancel rail into the audience, stopping next to Mary. He spoke again to the hushed audience:
There is one in this room… who has stood by me all these years, has been a true and devoted help, and inspiration, one who has never uttered a cross word to me, one who has aided and approved every impulse for good that I have entertained.
He handed her the impressive silver cup, kissed her, and sat down. The next day, he delivered the cup to a local jeweler with instructions for it to be inscribed with her name.
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In my own marital experience, money has caused the most friction between Larry and me, but clearly this was not the case with Robert and Mary. Munger so trusted and respected Mary that, at his death in 1923, he left a fund in excess of $3 million for her to distribute to charities in her own name. He himself left much of his estate (estimated by the newspapers at the time to have been as great as $52 million, more than enough, it was said, to burn a wet mule) to be distributed to charity anonymously as well as in their joint names.
In fact, in going over his will and his meticulously handwritten accounts, it is obvious that far more money went to charity than to his children, though each child, as well as grandchildren (among them, my father) and step-grandchildren, got a generous plenty.
His will stipulated that, as with bequests made during his lifetime, his money should go to educational institutions, orphanages, homes for the blind, the fledgling YMCA, and various churches in the area, including, it was pointedly noted in the paper, “many Negro Churches.”
In light of all of this, it seems odd that Robert Munger, a prosperous, fulfilled and enlightened man, devoted to his wife, and with every reason to enjoy the sleep of the virtuous, should be afflicted with debilitating insomnia. But apparently he was.
Mary blamed it on his excessively active brain, and there’s no reason to doubt her. When his first Birmingham home, the Mirabeau Swanson house,