Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Appearing twenty years before The Death and Life of Great American Cities was Jane’s first book, Constitutional Chaff.

  In her preface, Jane expressed hope that her book might invite speculation on how a different Constitution could have led to a different America—if, to use her example, it had decreed that the Senate remain always in session, and that it, rather than the president, preside over foreign affairs. Her book, then, was in the spirit of what today is called “counterfactual history,” the serious scholarly consideration of what might have unfolded had events turned out otherwise—if, say, Lee had won at Gettysburg.

  She hoped her book would be enjoyed, she said, “by those who read for the best possible reason—entertainment.” And there was a species of entertainment in Constitutional Chaff—in the brash conceit of its central idea; in the sheer perversity of some of the suggestions Jane dignified by her attention to them; in how the Framers cut and parried their way to the One True Constitution. And, of course, in her attached Appendix C—the delegate William Pierce’s sometimes wicked Character Sketches of his Convention colleagues: “With an affected air of wisdom,” said Pierce of Delaware’s John Dickinson, for example, “he labors to produce a trifle.”

  Set against Jane’s future work, Constitutional Chaff might be reckoned slight; it was merely a “compilation,” Jane’s own voice seemingly silent. But not entirely; it did reflect her sensibilities. It was contrary. It was serious; a “compendium of ideas,” she called it. It expressly valued reading pleasure. By early spring of 1940 Jane had probably finished putting together the text and proposed it to Columbia University Press. By May the press’s associate director, Charles G. Proffitt, wrote to Professor Dowling, then on sabbatical at the University of Virginia, for his views. Dowling wrote back that it was “a well done job by a very careful student” and that the manuscript would be useful to scholars. But not many scholars, he felt bound to admit—“a most limited market, if indeed it could be called a market at all.”

  On July 15, Jane learned that her manuscript was approved for publication, but that “finances” posed a problem. Some $350 beyond the press’s own resources would be needed to go ahead with it. Did she know “of any source from which we might draw this amount…?” If so, they’d be happy to place her under contract and schedule the book to appear the following year.

  Three days later, Jane called Henry H. Wiggins, the Columbia Press officer who’d written her of this little wrinkle, peppering him with questions about how her book would be distributed, how much it would sell for, and the like. She admitted, as Higgins wrote in a memo, “that she would have some difficulty in raising the money, but would think the matter over and let us know.”

  Three hundred and fifty dollars was seven months’ rent for Jane and her sister; or, when she was working, three months’ pay. Think of it as at least $5,000 today. Where would she get such a sum? Could she?

  Her father’s death had begotten a substantial life insurance settlement, which would support Mrs. Butzner for the rest of her life and had probably loosened things up financially for the family. Soon after his death, Jane had stopped working and enrolled at Columbia. The following January, Mrs. Butzner sent her a check to help her visit Philadelphia; plainly, Jane had not cut the purse strings. Now, with opportunity beckoning, she doubtless turned to her family once more. She may also have turned to her first employer in New York, Robert Hemphill, who had become both her friend and, very much more, Betty’s, and was often to be seen around the Morton Street apartment until his death the following year at age sixty-four. In any event, on July 22 Jane wrote Wiggins that she could come up with the money.

  The book appeared, in an edition of about eleven hundred copies, at $2.25 each, in January 1941, early copies reaching her in time to hand out to her family at Christmas. “I am delighted with the appearance of the book,” Jane wrote Proffitt on January 2, “and am very much impressed with the care and taste which the Press has given it in every respect.” She liked the type used. She liked the binding. Even the book’s eight-page index “fills me with awe.”

  The book was published by an important university press, the fourth-oldest in the United States and publisher of the works of two U.S. presidents. It found its way into libraries. It was reviewed here and there, cited in the literature. It bears reading even today—maybe especially today, when endless partisan infighting saps the nation’s strength and confidence. Jane writes of Hamilton, Franklin, and Edmund Randolph of Virginia, each with reservations about the Constitution, yet urging its ratification, or in other instances acting counter to their own convictions; the country’s good, in Jane’s words, “could best be obtained by composing their own divergences, by compromising with one another.”

  It is tempting, and true, to see this book, by an undereducated twenty-four-year-old, contributing to questions plumbed since the very birth of the republic, as early evidence of genius. We may see it equally, however, through the lens of Jane’s acknowledgment that her book “would not have been made without the encouragement and assistance of the members of my family.” From what we know of her growing-up years, this seems heartfelt and entirely genuine, and reaching far beyond that $350. In a copy of the book she gave her brother John, probably that Christmas, she thanked him for the book’s title and for his “helpful counsel.” But the book’s dedication is neither to him, nor her mother, nor her recently deceased father, but rather to something larger than any of them individually—“to 1712 Monroe Avenue,” her Scranton home, and all, and everyone, who had nurtured her there.

  —

  Just before registering for her first classes at Columbia in 1938, Jane took a boat trip up the Atlantic coast to New England with Betty on something like a real vacation. Jane fell in love with Boston, at the time very much down on its economic luck. They visited Cape Cod, too, just missing the killer hurricane that swept through New England the following weekend.

  In 1940, the two of them took a week-long bike trip in Quebec Province, where they visited, among other places, Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, a pilgrimage site whose Roman Catholic church had become a repository for crutches said to be discarded by the miraculously cured.

  When, for six months each in 1939 and 1940, the New York World’s Fair took over Flushing Meadows Park, Jane visited its iconic Futurama Exhibition, boarding one of the little cars that introduced her and millions of others to General Motors’s modernist vision of fast and easy personal transportation, the superhighways of the future spread beneath them.

  “I thought it was so cute,” she’d tell an interviewer years later. “It was like watching an electric train display somewhere.”

  “Did you have an inkling that this was going to turn out to be Dallas in 1985?”

  “No,” she replied, “of course not.”

  —

  Also before starting at Columbia, Jane heard from her aunt Hannah, her grandmother’s seventy-seven-year-old sister, with a request she could not ignore.

  After leaving Bloomsburg late in the last century, Hannah had gone on to study at the University of Chicago, teach Indians in the American West, then Aleuts and other natives for fourteen years in Alaska. Once back in Pennsylvania, where she regaled audiences with her adventures, she was won over to the idea of setting them down in print. Retrieving from her correspondents some of the letters she’d written from the wild, she put together a manuscript, “A Woman Blazes a Trail in Alaska.”

  Put together a manuscript? “It would be more accurate, though uncharitable,” Jane would later write, “to say she threw together a manuscript.” Aunt Hannah’s years in Alaska were no doubt trailblazing, but her account didn’t do them justice. “Reading it was a bit like contemplating a box of jigsaw-puzzle pieces,” Jane wrote. “The fragments were fascinating but maddeningly unassembled.” When Hannah first approached her, Jane said as much: the manuscript needed revision. At her age, though, Hannah was not about to tackle it herself. But Jane had written published magazine articles. Jane was a
pro. Would Jane help her?

  Jane tried. Hannah had had her manuscript typed up. Jane now worked up a new draft and, as she would write, sent it out over the next two years “to some admirers who liked it, and to publishers who did not.” An awkward and belabored correspondence with a Philadelphia publisher, Dorrance, came to nothing. So did an approach to the University of Washington Press. So did all of Jane’s other efforts on Hannah’s behalf. “The book as a whole moves along too slowly and does not make dramatic enough use of the incidents as they occur,” one publisher wrote back.

  That was April 16, 1940. Aunt Hannah died a few days later. Jane put away the manuscript, not to take it up again for fifty years. “I lacked sufficient craftsmanship” to make it into a good book, she’d write, “and knew it.”

  —

  By the spring of 1940, Jane had taken classes at Columbia for two years and was halfway toward a bachelor’s degree. She had sampled the sciences, and decided she “passionately loved geology and zoology.” She’d taken four courses in economic geography, the field in which much of her later work could be said to belong. “For the first time I liked school and for the first time I made good marks,” mostly As.

  But this late success, she’d say with humor and bitterness in approximately equal measure, “was almost my undoing.” It seems that as a woman accumulating so many credits in the general studies arm of the university she had swung under the administrative scrutiny of Barnard College. Barnard was the women’s college across Broadway from the main Columbia campus, variously linked with the university, but in other ways distinct from it. Until now, Jane had enjoyed rapturous intellectual freedom. No more. She was called in to meet with a Barnard administrator she would term “the Dragon Lady.” Now, Miss Butzner, you wish to take which courses? Oh, and with which prerequisites missing? And with no college-level foreign language to your credit? It only got worse. Turning to Jane’s high school grades the Dragon Lady threw up her hands: How could Jane be admitted to Barnard at all with grades like those?

  Jane managed to take a few more courses before she was through at Columbia. By fall 1940, with the publication of Constitutional Chaff imminent, she signed up for a single two-credit course in embryology, then went out looking for a job again.

  She found one at a trade magazine called Iron Age, published weekly from offices near Grand Central Station, and serving the metals industry. “They hired me,” Jane liked to say, “because I could spell molybdenum” (a key alloying metal). At first, despite her two years at Columbia, she was just a secretary again. And at $25 a week, she made less than she’d made at Frasse when she left. But with the magazine’s top editors her immediate bosses, within a few months she had new responsibilities thrust upon her. Once a week she went down on the train to Philadelphia, to call at the offices of metals industry firms and scrap metal dealers, gathering news of market conditions. Or she’d get on the telephone to gather data on tonnage coming out of blast furnaces in Bethlehem or Baltimore. In time, she was editing and writing technical articles herself.

  That year, 1941, Jane took a little Spanish at Columbia. Betty started taking courses there as well. Brother John graduated from the University of Virginia law school and joined Uncle Billy at his offices in a little brick building on Princess Anne Street across from the courthouse in Fredericksburg. Aunt Martha, ill with breast cancer, came to live with Jane’s mother in Scranton, but a few months later, on November 23, died there, at age sixty-seven. Two weeks later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America was at war.

  As a twelve-year-old, in 1928, on a trip with parents of friends, Jane had visited New York for the first time. “It was lunchtime in Wall Street in 1928…and the city was just jumping,” she’d say in an interview. “It was full of people.” When, six years later, she moved to New York, things were different, the streets fairly exhaling the unemployed. “It was the difference between the high tide of the Twenties prosperity and depression.” And while she herself, a little cosseted, had managed all right, the times had been cruelly, inescapably hard for most—in families doubled up in shabby quarters, homes unbuilt, roofs unpatched, jobs never filled, opportunities quashed, hopes withered. The city, the country, everywhere and everyone felt poor, insufficient, dilapidated, and worn. The unemployed millions suffered, and their wretchedness seeped into the lives of everyone else, into the psyches of all who lived in uncertainty and constrained ambition.

  With Pearl Harbor, the army of the unemployed vanished. In New York, the Brooklyn Army Terminal was soon processing servicemen bound for Europe. The Norden Company was making bombsights on Varick Street in Lower Manhattan. The city’s garment industry was churning out millions of uniforms. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, just one of forty shipbuilding and repair facilities in the city, was building battleships. And as the men went off to war, women got jobs long closed to them. “Everyone knew it was ghoulish to delight in jobs and prosperity at the price of war,” wrote Jane, looking back from a distance of six decades; “nevertheless, everyone I knew was grateful that suddenly good jobs and pay raises showered like rain after a drought. It seemed that the world did need us.”

  CHAPTER 6

  WOMEN’S WORK

  AT AGE TWENTY-FIVE, Jane Butzner had already sampled several sides of the world of writing, editing, and publishing—as high school poet, newspaper intern, research assistant to an established writer, freelancer, and published author (or “compiler,” anyway) of a university press book. Now, for the past year at Iron Age, she’d inhabited yet another corner of it. Iron Age, poor thing, was never read just for the pleasure of being read, was of no interest to the larger literary world, was found rarely on newsstands, and was about as far from literature, on the one hand, or academic scholarship, on the other, as any publication could be. It was a trade magazine, its news, insights, and reportage valued by its niche readers, and by no one else.

  Jane had started there as a secretary, was soon promoted to editorial assistant, would ultimately rise to the rank of associate editor. Just before that final promotion, in late 1942, she was working on a big article about nonferrous metals. Ferrous metals include iron and, especially, steel; nonferrous metals are all the others, like copper, tin, aluminum, zinc, magnesium, nickel, and lead. They are vital to modern life. And in 1942, that first full year after Pearl Harbor, they were vital to the war effort. To many of a literary bent, the subject itself might have seemed hopelessly utilitarian, barren of interest. To others, its technical ramparts stood forbiddingly high, the shops, factories, foundries, and dreary back-of-the-mill offices in which its industrial dramas took place rough and repellent.

  Still, this was Jane’s subject.

  “All the common non-ferrous metals,” she began her article, “have become precious metals, sought after and hunted down, cherished and pampered, aliens to thoughtless use and ordinary ends.” Most of the world’s tin supplies had fallen to the Japanese. Most other metals could be had, but the war-fed demand for them was insatiable, expanding wildly beyond even plentiful existing supplies. A bomber sent over Germany used a ton and a half of copper. Antiaircraft gun sights needed zinc die castings. Alloy steels needed nickel in vast quantities.

  “To teeter these enormous, swift demands into balance with supply, everything has been used except transmutation”—Jane’s coy reference to the alchemists of old. “Allocations, reclamations, requisitions, restrictions, prohibitions, substitutions, premiums, Indian giving, capacity building and manpower freezing have all clattered onto the scale.”

  Was Jane having fun with this?

  A Cuban plant for making nickel from local ores, she reported, had been built from “a fabulous quantity of odds and ends, including steel from the World’s Fair trylon,” the iconic triangular pylon that had stood high over the fairgrounds, “an abandoned cement plant, an Indiana hotel, and a New Jersey factory. A complete Oklahoma machine shop was moved, like a Hearst monastery,” down to the island.

  In composing her long article, which took up fi
fteen pages in an early 1943 issue of the magazine, Jane was writing for readers hungry for industrial insider information; the technical details mattered: To make magnesium, you mix calcined dolomite with pulverized ferrosilicon, and reduce it in a vacuum at 2100 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, Jane had recently completed a short course in physical metallurgy, receiving an “Engineering Science, and Management War Training” certificate attesting to it.

  But it wasn’t enough to collect raw information and slather it onto the page. Her task was to make it easy, even pleasurable, to take in. Among the nonferrous metals, she wrote now, “only lead is fat and happy.” Lead was plentiful, restrictions on its use few: “While other metals must give way to substitutes,” she went on, “lead moves into the manicured society where it never moved before. While other metals must skitter from hand to mouth, lead can rest peacefully and long in inventory.” Jane, then, had to care about her readers as readers. Not caring explained why nine-tenths of the world’s technical reports, legal briefs, and academic papers were scarcely readable at all. With sure command of her subject, stylish wordplay, and an occasional streak of merriment, even mischief, Jane made it almost fun to read about magnesium, aluminum, and lead.

  At Iron Age, she seems never to have had people working for her, but she did enjoy substantial autonomy there, and in the end was making $45 a week, almost twice her starting salary. She often went down to Washington to meet with officials of the War Production Board, the Navy Department, the Department of Labor, and other agencies, her nose deep into the metals trade news, rounding up leads for stories. She visited refiners and metal fabricators around Philadelphia, New York, and up into New England. She attended scientific meetings. She met with metallurgists who had agreed to write articles for the magazine, edited their manuscripts, helped work out graphic and photographic treatments for them.