Rabbit Trails: Criminal Intimacy & Pernicious Polygamy

May 28, 2017June 23, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

I’ve been trying to follow up on a previous post about the “divorce industry” in Oklahoma Territory (1889 – 1907), but I keep getting sidetracked by odd search results and unexpectedly engaging-but-off-topic tangents. I’m finally admitting that my ADHD (Abstemiously Distracted History Dysfunction) has won, and figure I might as well share some of the results.

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Oct. 24.—Last June Judge Field, of the circuit court, granted a divorce to Ira Welch from his wife Ida on the ground of infidelity. Mrs. Welch had not received notice of the suit and the only evidence introduced was the affidavits of Welch and others. Mrs. Welch now brings suit to have the divorce set aside on the ground that she did not receive notice and that publication was not properly made.

OK, so first off – Ira and Ida Welch? How adorable is that!

It sounds like a fairly typical midwestern divorce case so far. It’s not clear how Mr. Welch ended up in Kansas City, but clearly Mrs. Welch hadn’t come with him. While the Midwest was known for its generally lax divorce laws during this period, I’m not aware of Kansas City being particularly notorious in that regard. Whatever the reason, after legal requirements had been met – probably the posting of newspaper notices giving Mrs. Welch a window of time in which to show up and make her case – the court had granted Mr. Welch a divorce.

Now the ex has found out and shown up. She’s in “not so fast, buster” mode – understandable, if inconvenient for Mr. Welch. But this one’s about to get weird, even for a contested midwestern divorce.

She admits criminal intimacy with T.R. Burch, general western manager of the Phoenix insurance company with whom she lived for two years at the Palmer house in Chicago.

“Criminal intimacy” presumably refers to adultery, although it’s certainly a far more colorful term. And it’s not like they just got drunk at an office party and had a moment of passion on the couch – she lived with him for two years! That certainly suggests things with Mr. Welch weren’t going well. What to do, what to do?

She admits also that she purchased a foundling after the Eva Hamilton method and attempted to palm it off on Burch as their child for the purpose of black mail and the attempt failed.

A “foundling” was an unattached child – an orphan, or possibly a kidnapped baby or a child sold off for whatever reason. Apparently you could pick up a kid or three for next-to-nothing in those years. As to the “Eva Hamilton” reference, Hamilton was part of a wild, dysfunctional tale of sex, lies, and stabbing the nanny which unfolded in the press only months before. She, too, had tried the “but I gave birth to your child!” angle using faux offspring she’d only recently purchased, and was at the time of this report sitting in prison ostensibly for murder, but more honestly for being a bit of a ho.

Back to the tawdry Mrs. Welch:

She also admits criminal intimacy with Isaac Warrell, a capitalist of Chicago and several other prominent Chicago men.

Well sure – why not at that point?

So how, exactly, did she explain her opposition to this divorce?

She alleges, however, that her husband had full knowledge of her intimacy with all these men and that her immoralities were practiced with his consent, he receiving the greater part of the money that she extorted from her gentlemen acquaintances.
The case goes to trial tomorrow.
“Another Eva Hamilton” (Oklahoma City Daily Times, October 25, 1889)

Oh, well then – if her husband knew and approved, that’s a great reason to stay together.

Mr. Welch was granted his divorce.

As I returned to searching for “divorce mill” anecdotes, this story popped up:

TOLAGA, Oklahoma, Sept. 22.—Yellow Bonnet, a Cheyenne Indian, has applied for a blanket divorce from his four wives. It is the first time that an Indian has applied for a divorce in Oklahoma. Yellow Bonnett recently embraced the Christian religion, but his wives refused to become Christians.
The New York Times (September 23, 1895)

My first inclination was to question the term “blanket” divorce, given the slang and mindset towards Amerindians at the time. Pretty sure I was reading too much into the term, however.

Still, I couldn’t help but follow up. Apparently his wives had reached some sort of agreement amongst themselves that he had to divorce all or none of them. The fear was that if he divorced them individually, he’d get down to one last wife and decide to keep her, thus leaving the others cut off.

So they locked arms and insisted on all or nothing. Good for them.

And… “Yellow Bonnet”? Really?

Next result…

OKLAHOMA DIVORCE TANGLE
Mrs. Harris Sues Mason After He Is Reconciled with His Wife.
GUTHRIE, Oklahoma, Dec. 3.—A very sensational case closed in the Probate Court at Newkirk to-day. Some time ago George M. Mason, a jeweler well known in several Colorado cities, came ot Oklahoma City from Denver to try to get a divorce.

Ah, that’s more like it. This is Oklahoma’s “Divorce Industry” in action!

Soon after his arrival he began to lavish attention on Mrs. Anna Harris, a dashing widow, boarding house keeper. Recently Mrs. Mason arrived from Colorado, effected a reconciliation, and the couple prepared to start for the Centennial State.

See, Colorado joined the Union in 1876, the nation’s centennial. What made this timing particularly interesting was—

Actually, never mind. BECAUSE I’M FOCUSED NOW.

The widow first attempted suicide.

Whoah, there – suicide? Not to downplay her suffering, but that’s the go-to response when your man-toy reconciles with his old lady? I mean, yell, sure. Curse, throw stuff at him – but suicide?

The doctors pumped out her stomach, and she had Mason arrested for stealing $150. She claimed to have left it with him for safe keeping.

Did he have the audacity to even come and step to her and ask to hold some money from her until he got his check next week?

That trifling, good-for-nothing type of brother. Silly widow – why didn’t she find another?

The evidence developed that she had received the money from a well-known merchant, and had given it to Mason with the understanding that in return he was to pay attention to her alone. The Judge discharged the prisoner, declaring there had been no theft, simply a breach of contract.

That’s hilarious. By which I mean sad. If we use sad to mean seriously messed up.

Here’s a tip for all you young ladies (or middle-aged widows) out there – if you have to pay him not to run around on you, the relationship is not going well.

One last try. Surely I’m due for something useful and on-topic…

Citrus J. O’Donnell… comes into the court to ask for some sort of relief. Citrus himself seems to have rather hazy notions of the sort of relief he wants, but he thinks he is entitled to something of the sort. He says he does not want a divorce, but he thinks the court ought to look after his wife a little.

OK, I have to admit this caught my attention.

And… “Citrus”? My apologies to “Yellow Bonnet.”

He explains that he married Mrs. O’Donnell three years ago and that since then she from time to time has married other men, five in all. Citrus asserts that he has labored with his polygamous spouse and has earnestly sought to wean her from her pernicious theories of wholesale partnership, but all in vain.
After several months of marital tranquility and happiness with Citrus, Mrs. O’Donnell has been accustomed to steal away quietly, swoop down on some neighboring city and gobble up another husband. A few months later she returns, dangling another scalp from her belt and with another marriage certificate added to her souvenier collection.

We’re, um… we’re going to assume those “scalps” are metaphorical. Otherwise we have a very different legal situation here.

Citrus… doesn’t want a divorce; he wants his wife. And he comes into court to ask the law to do something for him. It strikes us that in equity Citrus is entitled to some sort of relief. If he cannot do better perhaps he might find relief in praying earnestly for brains.
The Guthrie Leader (February 26, 1895)

*pause*

That does it. I’m going to need to try some better search terms.

Rabbit Trails: Mary Sallade & The One-Eyed Pickpocket

May 27, 2017June 23, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been looking into the “divorce industry” in Oklahoma Territory (1889 – 1907). I’ve posted once on the topic, and I’m a bit overdue in following up. This particular line of inquiry evolved from my interest in author and Renaissance Woman Helen Churchill Candee, who came to Guthrie to sever her own marital bonds in 1896, and who stayed long enough to write about life there – multiple times and quite effectively.

So I spend more time than seems reasonable searching online newspaper archives for terms like “divorce” or “Oklahoma.” I’m not sure this makes me a crack researcher, but it has certainly led me down some weird paths. Not every result fits what I’m after – they’re just keyword searches, after all – but history is a twisted, taunting little minx. Pick any topic – ANY topic – and start scratching at it. Something fascinating will almost always unfold… and yet leave you with a congress of unknowns, smirking and smug like Alice’s cat.

MRS. MARY F. SALLADE IS MARRIED
Her Third Husband Harrison E. Havens of Enid, Oklahoma.
Mrs. Mary F. Sallade, who figured in court several times as the accuser of the proprietors of resorts in West Twenty-fourth Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, has been married for the third time.

OK – so third time, huh? Surely that was a bit unusual for that era. And… “accuser of the proprietors of resorts…”? There’s got to be a story there, one with which the Times assumed readers were already familiar.

She is now Mrs. Harrison Eugene Havens, having been married April 3 by the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst. Enid, Oklahoma, will soon be her home. Mr. Havens, who is a lawyer, procured for her a divorce from her second husband, whose name was Sharpe.

Ah, the plot thickens! Divorce Husband No. 2 while hooking up with your lawyer. Sly little thing, wasn’t she?

Mrs. Sallade gave $500 security for the appearance in court of George Appo, to answer the charge of having stabbed policeman M.F. Rein. Appo is missing and Mrs. Sallade may lose her money.
The New York Times (April 18, 1895)

Um… what? Who is – and he stabbed – and… WTF?!

George Appo, it turns out, was a notorious pickpocket and con man, easily recognized as the half-Irish, half-Chinese guy with one eye non-surgically removed. Several months after this piece was published he was sentenced to six months in a New York penitentiary for assaulting Officer Rein.

None of which explains how or why Mary Sallade was involved. But no matter – I should get back to that Oklahoma divorce stuff. I so rarely have the time to properly—

*sigh*

OK. One quick Google search. That’s all. Then back to my original quest.

Police officer Michael Rein charged Appo with stabbing him while placing him under arrest for creating a disturbance. Under cross-examination, however, Appo’s counsel, Frank Moss, challenged the veracity of Rein’s story and the media coverage of the event.

Sensationalized media coverage distorting the facts in 1895? The more things change…

The officer testified that after the confrontation with Appo, he returned to the precinct house, undressed, and slept in the station that evening. Only the next day, he admitted, did he bother to notice the stab wound…

So it really wasn’t even a proper stabbing? That would explain the relatively short sentence.

Appo was… represented by Frank Moss, but his five-hundred dollar bond was furnished by Mary F. Sallade, a prominent figure in moral reform circles in New York and sometimes called “the female Parkhurst”… Such encouragement bolstered Appo. He insisted that “no matter what the police tried they could not again drive him into the ranks of crooks”…

Sallade was “a prominent figure in moral reform circles”? The Sallade now on Husband No. 3, who helped her dump Husband No. 2, and seems to have brought her all the way to Enid, OK?

There’s another reference which presumably meant something to contemporaneous readers – “the female Parkhurst.” From context, we can reasonably infer he must have been some sort of reformer, perhaps a—

Wait, “Parkhurst”? Parkhurst. Where have we heard—

The guy who married Mary to her third husband, who helped her divorce her second husband, while she was putting up bail for the ne’er-do-well who’d supposedly stabbed a cop but now it seems like maybe he really didn’t? THAT Parkhurst? He was a household name of some sort?

But I’m not Googling him. I’m just not. Too much to do! Be strong.

Dammit.

On Valentine’s Day in 1892 an obscure minister delivered a sermon that changed the fate of New York City. The jeremiad by the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst inspired a campaign that unmasked New York’s first major police scandal, that contributed to the creation of a five-borough city and that placed Theodore Roosevelt on the road to the Presidency…
“Parkhurst proved that one just man could singlehandedly defeat a powerful and evil machine like Tammany Hall and reform an entire police department”…
“Taking on Tammany, 100 Years Ago” (Selwyn Raab – The New York Times, February 14, 1992)

*sigh*

He has his own Wikipedia entry. The Rev. Parkhurst mentioned in such casual passing as having hitched Mary Sallade to Husband No. 3 helped take down Tammany Hall, a task normally more closely associated with political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who popularized our current image of Santa Claus. I have no doubt they both connect directly to Kevin Bacon from here.

Rev. Dr. Charles Parkhurst is not to be confused, of course, with Charley Parkhurst, the cross-dressing (possibly transgendered) stagecoach driver and cowboy from a few short decades before. Born biologically female, and orphaned, she lived most of her life as a male and was best-known by the nickname “One-Eyed Charley.” Wanna guess why?

None of which helps Mary, who lost her bail money:

A week later Appo failed to appear for his trial, thus forfeiting Sallade’s bond. Appo later defended his flight as self-defense.
A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York, by Timothy J. Gilfoyle (2007)

Sallade comes up a half-dozen times more in Gilfoyle’s book. She gave Appo honest employment at “the Sallade Dress Factory” and is listed as one of the few “evangelically motivated reformers” who reached out to men like Appo offering pathways to redemption, no matter how many times they fell back into a life of crime. Appo mentioned her specifically near the end of his life, giving thanks to those who’d cared.

Fascinating. And I want so badly to make some sort of “Sallade” and “Dresses/Dressing” remark, but…

I’ve got a semi-legit post to compose. Surely the next result will be more useful.

BROOKLYN DIVORCE CASE: Aged Mr. and Mrs. Meinekhein in an Oklahoma Court.
PERRY, Oklahoma, Dec. 23.—Although seventy years old, with hair (when not dyed) as white as cotton, so her husband says, Mrs. Lucinda C. Meinekhein, school-teacher, of Brooklyn, N.Y., has come to Oklahoma to fight her husband, B.G. Meinekhein, in his divorce suit, which began to-day.

Ah, here we go. He came here to get an easy divorce, and she showed up to contest it!

Wait – did that say she was SEVENTY YEARS OLD?

Menekhein was married to Lucinda in 1868, and he says she treated him very cruelly. One charge is that she doused him with cold water several times while he was in bed. Mrs. Meinekhein introduced many love letters, purporting to have been written by Meinekhein to New York City Women.
The New York Times (December 24th, 1896)

She was a teacher? What color did she dye her hair normally? And these letters… how long ago had they been—

Nope.

But “Lucinda”? And what prompted the cold water? Was it just “you’re an a-hole!” cold water or was it “take a cold shower, you lecherous old goat!” cold water? If I research such an unusual name, surely–

Nope.

No more distractions. I have a post on the divorce industry in Oklahoma Territory to get compose. We’ll try again next time.

Humble Magniloquence (Purdy Words in Primary Sources)

March 3, 2017June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

There are folks you expect to write all fancy. Poets, for example. Certain flavors of novelists. Artsy musician types. George Will.

Education bloggers, not so much.

That’s just as well. Rhetorical flourish is a tricky business. Like cilantro, it can add unexpectedly welcome flavor and complexity, or make an entire passage taste like old soap. And language evolves in such unpredictable fashion that you can never be sure how that bit of clever wordplay might read a generation or two later.

Some historical figures clearly labored over word choice with sufficient fervor that even their personal letters play like Dvorak’s lost drinking songs. Consider Thomas Jefferson in a letter to fellow Virginian and Founding Father-type Edmund Pendleton, dated August 26, 1776:

You seem to have misapprehended my proposition for the choice of a Senate. I had two things in view: to get the wisest men chosen, and to make them perfectly independent when chosen. I have ever observed that a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom.

They’ve apparently been corresponding about politics – no surprise there, given the parties and the date. Jefferson proffers a sophisticated balance of Enlightened precision and dry wit. His understatement is both amusing and a tad vain.

Then again, he was Thomas Jefferson – so maybe we can let him slide on the latter.

This first secretion from them is usually crude and heterogeneous. But give to those so chosen by the people a second choice themselves, and they generally will chuse wise men.

He’s proposing what was essentially an electoral college for selecting Senators. That’s not how we ended up doing it, although until the 17th Amendment Senators were chosen by their States rather than the people directly, providing a comparable filter. What’s golden here, though, is the straight-faced use of slug imagery in reference to the common man and democracy.

Jefferson was an idealist – he genuinely believed a nation of ever-revolutionary small farmers was as close to heaven on earth as mankind could ever approach. And he does get there – “they generally will chuse wise men.” It’s just that the process, in his mind, must be carefully designed to accommodate those initial “crude secretions.”

Is it sad that I’m eternally entertained by phrases like that? On second thought, don’t answer that.

Later in the same letter, Jefferson considers the issue who is or is not qualified to vote or hold office.

You have lived longer than I have and perhaps may have formed a different judgment on better grounds; but my observations do not enable me to say I think integrity the characteristic of wealth.

Again with the understatement, this time combined with a purely rhetorical deference to his cohort.

In general I believe the decisions of the people, in a body, will be more honest and more disinterested than those of wealthy men: and I can never doubt an attachment to his country in any man who has his family and peculium in it.

‘Peculium’ here means ‘stuff’. It’s one of those vocabulary words that gives my kids fits. It’s rare enough that it’s not always in student dictionaries and it gives them nothing to work with in terms of root words or prefixes or whatnot. It does, however, come up again in evolved form in President Jackson’s speech to Congress on Indian Removal in 1830:

The consequences of a speedy removal will be important to the United States, to individual States, and to the Indians themselves. The pecuniary advantages which it promises to the Government are the least of its recommendations…

It’s the same Latin root as ‘peculiar’ – uncommon, or distinctive. Go back far enough and it suggests property belonging or assigned to a specific person. Suddenly what seem like unrelated definitions start to make sense. ‘Peculium’ = someone’s stuff. ‘Pecuniary’ = related to wealth. ‘Peculiar’ = weird. All from ‘distinctive,’ but said fancy.

Which is, if you think about it, rather fitting, given the definitions.

Sometimes what grabs your attention is simply the way language changes over time:

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes, which you say you have heard insisted on by some, I assure you was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them, strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime.

Good Lord, Tom – gasconade, much?

Still, how can you not love “sanguinary hue”? So highbrow, yet so graphic. My students, of course, are completely derailed by ‘penal laws’ and rarely manage to return to the richness of the phrase preceding it. Because, you know, they’re 14. Literally.

But that’s Jefferson – a known intellectual and proud froo-froo. He was, after all, the guy to whom a bunch of other smart people turned when it was time to boldly-but-nobly declare our breakup with England. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and all that.

I’ve been compiling primary sources on David L. Payne and the “boomer” movement lately – an important part of Oklahoma and American history, to be sure, but not a group you might assume prompted much purdy talkifying. And yet, a century after the lofty rhetoric of the Founders and their ilk, we find the most interesting phraseology in humble local newspapers when he’s discussed.

From The Sedalia Weekly Bazoo, Sedalia, MO (August 24, 1880):

Capt. L. D. Payne, arrested for an alleged violation of the federal laws governing intercourse with the Indian territory west of Arkansas…

Yeah, sometimes it’s not the fancy talk so much as it is the repeated use of words like “intercourse.” Again, 14.

…arrived Thursday at Fort Smith in custody of the United Marshal and will be tried before Judge Parker, of the western district court of Arkansas, whose jurisdiction covers Oklahoma…
The question to be decided in it is whether or not for the present white settlers shall be barred from that territory, which includes some of the most fertile land in the world, and that land be used only by nomadic tribes who will not cultivate and develop its resource; whether it shall be a farm or a hunting-ground; an abode of civilization or savagery; a garden or a wild.

My my! Of course, major media back then tended to more openly editorial. They weren’t all fair and balanced like we’ve come to expect today.

From The Weekly Kansas Chief, Troy, KS (May 05, 1881):

A private dispatch was received by Oklahoma Payne in this city yesterday, announcing an unfavorable result of his trial before the United States court at Fort Smith. The faces of a number of men who had gathered to his headquarters in response to a call for a meeting to-day visibly lengthened…
{Payne} made a full statement of his arrest and trial and the formal announcement of the result, but urged the settlers to stand by their organization until victory should crown their efforts…

That bit of divine flourish may have reflected Payne’s speech rather than the reporter’s biases, but still…

And I like the “visibly lengthened” faces by way of description. It reminds me of the way sportscasters come up with hundreds of ways to say “ran,” “scored,” “failed,” or “wow.”

There were eighty-seven present at the meeting… Resolutions were reported from a committee and adopted urging Payne to renew his efforts at affecting a lodgment in territory; criticising the place of Payne’s trial, and asking a change of venue. After which the great Oklahoma boom collapsed.

Funny how concise can convey so much dismissiveness. Also, “his efforts at affecting a lodgment”? I chuckle thereforth.

From the Omaha Daily Bee, Omaha, NE (November 30, 1881):

Out of the active brain and adventurous spirit of Capt. Dave Payne, known in border life and drama as the Scout of the Cimarron, grew the project known as the Oklahoma colony, scheme. And that scheme is the settlement of the lands belonging to the government of the United States, a vast body of fine arable land in the Indian Territory, on the north fork of the Canadian river.

This reads less like the first paragraph of a newspaper report and more like a pitch for a TV miniseries starring Brian Keith and Rob Schneider in his dramatic comeback role.

The project of planting a white colony in the very heart of the Indian Nation was at first regarded with indifference and afterwards with absolute ridicule; but to those who personally know Capt. Payne, and know him as he is, this project is not the dream of a fanatic. To them Payne is fostering no wild, filibustering scheme, nor lawlessly defying the government of the United States. Capt. Payne is a man of ability and legislative experience…
He is thoroughly conversant with Indian customs, manners, and warfare, skilled in woodcraft, and the peer of any marksman on the border with the rifle. His courage never was questioned. He is a giant in stature and a marvel in strength. Such, then, is a pen-picture of Capt. Dave Payne—”Oklahoma” Payne as he is now called…

I confess I mostly just like the created term, “pen-picture.”

The Kansas City Journal, quoted by The Wichita City Eagle, Wichita, KS (May 25, 1882):

“…if Payne and his followers would display one-half the energy and perseverance in tilling a few acres of Kansas soil as they do in getting a foothold in the Indian Territory, they would have no cause to complain of impecuniosity.

Isn’t it funny how once you know a strange new word, you seem to come across it, or its variations, everywhere? Impecuniosity…? Expialidocious!

It is a too common fault of the Indolent and shiftless that they nurse their idleness by dreams of something just beyond their reach. The farmer who by poor management finds it impossible to accumulate even a small store of money for a rainy day, is often found making elaborate calculations for selling out and removing to the Pacific coast; whereas, if he would devote as much money to the comfort of himself and family or to the improvement of his farm or stock, as it would cost him to remove his family to Oregon or Washington Territory, he would be much the wiser.”

Don’t hold back, Kansas. What do you really think of the boomers?

From The New York Times, New York, NY (February 03, 1883):

The language of PAYNE’S circular glows with adjectives and promises. The beautiful land of Oklahoma is “the garden spot, the Eden of modern times.” “Come,” says PAYNE, “and go with us to this beautiful land and secure for yourself and children homes in the richest most beautiful and best country that the Great Creator in His Goodness, has made for man.” But the circular fails to convey with sufficient clearness the information that this garden spot is no more open to settlement by PAYNE and his colonists than are the Central Park and Boston Common. The Territory belongs to the Indians and is secured to them by treaties.

That’s a nice analogy, the park thing. It plays off of Payne’s Eden imagery, while offering a sharp rhetorical contrast. His ideas are diminished and refuted by the sudden downshift in language. Sweet!

PAYNE has been taken by the nape of the neck once already and pitched out of the Territory. If he carries out his announced intention and the Government does its duty, he will be pitched out again and the foolish citizens who allow themselves to be inveigled into an unlawful enterprise by his fine promises will get into serious trouble.

“Now, Junior – don’t be getting inveigled into no unlawful enterprises!”

My absolute favorite, though, is less about vocabulary and more about structure and tone. It’s also from The New York Times, this time on April 9, 1891:

Topeka, Kan., April 8.- Is Oklahoma really overrun with negroes, and has there been an influx of pauper negroes from the South? So many conflicting answers have been given in response to these two questions that it was impossible to arrive at the truth…
In order to determine the truth, THE TIMES’s representative determined to visit the Territory and see what was to be seen, and to learn from interested persons as much of the truth as they could be prevailed upon to surrender. Those who have never attempted to draw the truth from an Oklahomaite can hardly realize the difficulties that are presented.

Imagine, if you can, a day and age in which the Times was periodically a tad opinionated about such things.

And… “Oklahomaite”?

The Territory was born in falsehood, was baptized in falsehood, and falsehood has been the principal article of diet ever since that fateful 23rd day of April, 1889, when the “sooners” became the leading citizens of a country opened to settlement too late in the year for the planting of crops, and to which the poverty-stricken were invited by speculators and impecunious lawyers…

OH-MY-GOD-ARE-VARIATIONS-OF-THAT-WORD-GOING-TO-BE-EVERYWHERE-NOW?!?! Was it trending that century or something?

…who had been permitted to enter beforehand by a pig-headed Administration, which could see nothing good outside the ague-stricken Wabash bottoms of Indiana.

That last bit is a jab at President Benjamin Harrison. While I’m sorry for the ghost of the man who officially opened up O.T. to white settlement, I can’t help but experience mild rapture at any outburst involving “ague-stricken Wabash bottoms.”

*snort*

I actually love this whole piece enough that I wrote at length about it here and here, and even transcribed it in its entirety. For now, though, I’m well-past my own self-imposed rambling limits and have said far too little with far too many words of my own.

I assure you that I rue this impecunious, if epiphenomenal, imbroglio.

Nope – doesn’t really work when I try it. Oh well.

RELATED POST: Defining Moments

John Wilkes Booth – Reader of Novels

February 27, 2017June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

The great profusion of children’s books protracts the imbecility of childhood. They arrest the understanding, instead of advancing it. They give forwardness without strength. They hinder the mind from making vigorous shoots, teach it to stoop when it should soar, and contract when it should expand…
Youth almost habitually seek amusement. The youthful intellect requires relaxation from a close attention to literary acquisitions: and to relieve the wearisomeness of such attention, books of amusement are generally sought, and read with avidity… Important then is it, that impressions made during the tender impressible years of childhood and youth, should be such as shall tend to prepare, rather than unfit the mind for respectability, real enjoyment, and permanent usefulness in riper years…
Rarely will a youth engage with assiduity, or even without disgust, in a study requiring mental exertion, immediately after his mind has been relaxed and debilitated; his taste, if not his heart corrupted; and his soul kindled into ardour at scenes of imagined bliss, which probably he will never realize, but which will only prepare his mind for bitter disappointment.
ON NOVEL READING (from The Guardian; or Youth’s Religious Instructor, 1820, pp. 46-49) via www.merrycoz.org/books/NOVELS01.HTM

You can find the most fascinating stuff on the internet. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a soul-sucking beast which will eventually destroy us all, but in the meantime OMGBUNNIES!!!

One of the coolest finds of the past 30 or 40 decades is www.merrycoz.org, a bewildering treasury of rare 19th Century writing edited, organized, and editorialized with love by the site’s creator, Pat Pflieger.

The mother lode is the collection of rare 19th Century literature for young people – including contemporaneous commentary on what they should and should not be reading:

Novel-readers spend many a precious hour in dreaming out clumsy little romances of their own, in which they themselves are the beautiful ladies and the gallant gentlemen who achieve impossibilities, suffer unutterable woe for a season, and at last anchor in a boundless ocean of connubial bliss. Nor does it require much previous mental cultivation to enable one to indulge in these visionary joys. The school-boy and school-girl, the apprentice, the seamstress, the girl in the kitchen, can conjure up rosy dreams as readily as other people; and perhaps more readily, as it requires but little reading of the sort to render them impatient of their lot in life, and set them to imagine something that looks higher and better.
In fact, the Cinderella of the old nursery story is the true type of thousands of our novel-readers… Ella, sitting among her native cinders, is a very prosaic individual, addicted to exceedingly prosaic employments, and fulfilling a destiny far removed from sublimated romance. But touched by the wand of the good Fairy, Ella is transfigured, her coarse garments are robes of magnificence, the mice are prancing steeds, the pumpkin is a coach, and she rides in state, the admiration of all beholders, and weds the prince triumphantly.
The modern Ella, sitting among the cinders, has indeed no good Fairy to confer sudden splendors upon her; but her place is well supplied by sundry periodicals, designed for just this style of readers. And so Ella invests her six cents weekly, and reads, and dreams. According to the flesh, she bears an honest, humble name, busies herself with a cooking stove, or a noisy sewing-machine, and with all her matrimonial anglings, perhaps has never a nibble. In her other capacity she is the Countess of Moonshine, who dwells in a Castle of Spain, wears a coronet of diamonds, and to whom ardent lords and smitten princes make love in loftiest eloquence; and she is blest.
But, as Napoleon once observed, there is only a step between the sublime and the ridiculous. At any moment the coach of state may relapse into its original squash, the prancing horses again become mice, the costly array turn once more to rags; and the Countess, sweeping in her trailing robes through the glittering crowd of admiring lords and envious ladies, subside into her former simple self, with the hideous onions to be peeled, or the clattering machine to be kept in motion.
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READING, by Rev. J. T. Crane (from Popular Amusements. Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, 1869; pp. 121-152) via www.merrycoz.org/books/CRANE.HTM

Gotta watch those crazy novel-readers; next thing you know, they’re going to reach higher than their station in life. In his defense, the good Reverend Crane also condemns dancing, card-playing, and baseball – so maybe he wasn’t all bad. He was incidentally the father of Stephen Crane – you know, the… um… novelist. What fun family dinners THOSE must have been!

The implications in terms of women’s issues, social class expectations, the tensions between faith and fancy, are all enormous, and too complex to even begin to tackle here (by which I mean, I have no idea what half the things I just said actually mean). Most often, fiction was compared to alcohol – fine in moderation, and if it were of the highest sort, but quick to overtake one’s tastes and one’s good sense until everything of value was destroyed by the devil in paperback.

I don’t believe in the “Elvis Fallacy”, an argument that goes something like this:

(1) People used to be offended by Elvis’s music and the pelvic motions he stole from Forrest Gump,

(2) Most people now consider Elvis harmless and figure people were overreacting, therefore

(3) Nothing a public figure does, no matter how explicit or horrifying, should be challenged or called offensive, because… Elvis!

Nevertheless, it’s worth considering some of the hand-wringing and soul-lamenting going on in these passages regarding reading that would today be considered rather tame compared to a truly violent, godless, porn-romps like The Hunger Games or The Fault In Our Stars.

Besides, novels killed President Lincoln:

In the foul stroke that laid low the honored head of our late president we witness the force and emphasis of a stage-actor’s education superadded to the morals of slavery. Crime is fearful enough when its blame is chargeable to a bad enterprise, and can be distributed among a million men, but it grows more fearful when a single villain leaps ahead of his class and concentrates all their wickedness into one enormity of his own.
The education of John Wilkes Booth had fitted him to act the part of murderer of our President. It had familiarized him with every species of tragedy till a murder meant nothing more to him than a move on a checker-board…
Does any young man feel as if he would like to be educated to do as daringly and dexterously as did Booth? Let him keep on, then, reading the bloody tales of the weekly story papers, or the flashy, ten cent, yellow-covered literature sold in almost every book store. He will soon learn how to be a hero of the approved romantic type. But, young friend, if you have any regard for your character, your future standing in society, the credit of your families, your own peace and the welfare of your souls, let such reading alone! Why should you suffer yourself to trace hour after hour the foul workings of human revenge, jealousy, malice and corruption, because some writer has woven them into intoxicating fiction? God has better pastime for you; better literature than that for your leisure hours. There is no aliment for the mind in that reading. Rather never read a printed line. Such material stimulates only the bad in your nature.
BOOTH AND BAD LITERATURE (from The Youth’s Companion, May 11, 1865, p. 74) via www.merrycoz.org/yc/BADLIT.HTM

There’s a pretty tasty bit that follows about the difference between offal-fed meat and meat fed on solid corn, but I worried it might lose something on the modern audience. “You are what you read” seems to capture it pretty well, though.

I was warned in my youth about my demonic rock’n’roll albums (I burned more classic vinyl in good faith than I can afford to replace on a public school teacher’s salary), the perils of playing Dungeons & Dragons (yeah, yeah – big shock that I was a nerd, I’m sure), and later the violence promoted by video games (if aliens ever line up suicidally to drop down on me one at a time, I am SO ready), movies, the interweb, the ‘rap’ music, etc.

Now the same fervency goes into fears that our kids will never learn to read or write because of texting, will never learn to listen or focus because of their phones, will never learn to properly use a telegraph machine or address an envelope because of their, um… lack of a need to ever, ever do those things. Ever. Still, we’re supposed to be worried – panicked, even.

And I won’t lie – some of my students don’t inspire me daily. We may need to learn Mandarin or Russian before I can die peacefully via ruling of some ACA Death Panel. I don’t understand the things they’ve made popular in modern music, movies, or the YouTube. And tights aren’t pants.

But many of them do inspire me, and encourage me, and amaze me, with their wit, their drive, their insight, their souls, and their aspirations and ideals. A ridiculous number of them have every intention of going out and changing the world in ways both large and small, and several of them just might. They understand the difficulties and requisite suffering required to accomplish such things, but figure they’ll find a way through or around whatever comes up.

Crazy dreamers, those kids. Must be reading too many novels.

This post is a reworking/repost of previous content. Don’t worry – you won’t be charged for this one.

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Forever Unfit To Be A Slave (A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing, Part Two)

November 16, 2016June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

{This Post is Recycled – Reworked from a Previous Version and Reposted In It’s Updated Glory}

In Part One, I waxed eloquent about secession and the South’s stated reasons for attempting to leave. Among their many complaints – most of which involved perceived threats to slavery – was the North’s tolerance of those who snuck in and taught slaves stuff.

A little knowledge, it turns out, can be a dangerous thing.

Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography (1845), describes his epiphany regarding education:

My new mistress proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at the door,—a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. She had never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living. She… had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery…

One thing Douglass’s account shares with those of Solomon Northup, Harriet Jacobs, and others, is their insistence that not all slave-owners were naturally cruel and evil people. They avoid neatly dividing people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and instead focus on the system, and its effect on those involved – slave or free, black or white.

Rather than letting a few slaveholders off the moral hook, it puts the rest of us on it. When the problem is bad people, we’re safe because we’re not them. When the problem is something larger, something systemic, which we either ignore or tolerate, we’re no longer absolved.

Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters…
Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said… “A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.”

Mr. Auld was no fool. He knew that control – whether of populations or individuals – begins through the information to which they have access. Whoever controls knowledge controls everything else – especially when it comes to maintaining a system based on privilege and inheritance.

You know, like the one we pretend we don’t have today.

”Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”

Mr. Auld is at least honest. Rather than claim young Frederick CAN’T learn, the problem is very much that he CAN – and as things stand, that helps no one. Raised expectations are a curse both ways.

These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought…

Isn’t that what the best learning does? Challenge everything, and force you to separate the assured from the assumed?

I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man… From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it…

If your room under the stairs is all you’ve ever known, you may not be happy, but you can hardly fathom more. Once you’ve gone to a museum or zoo, your horizons are forever altered – there are things out there of which you didn’t know. And Hogwarts… still full of limits, but compared to the room under the stairs…?

There’s nothing wrong with learning to be content with what you have, but that’s a choice we can only make if we have some glimpse of the alternatives. Until then, you’re just… stuck.

Douglass started tasting something bigger than he’d known, and for the first time found himself able to give form to his sense of bondage.

I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled “The Columbian Orator.” Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book. Among much of other interesting matter, I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave.
The slave was represented as having run away from his master three times. The dialogue represented the conversation which took place between them, when the slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the whole argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as well as impressive things in reply to his master—things which had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master…

Slavery is bad, and running away was illegal. Talking back to one’s master was dangerous and not to be advised – it was unlikely to lead to your emancipation. All this book lacked to be utterly perverse by the standards of the day were zombies and a gay shower scene. And yet, Douglass discovered benefit in reading this work of subversive fiction.

Douglass connected with a character who was in some ways like himself – not in wise words or holy determination, but in the ways his life sucked, like being a slave. This fictional character, however, was able to demonstrate at least one possible way to endure or even flourish in the ugly, imperfect situation in which he was mired. He resonated far more than an idealized hero-figure of some sort could have, belching platitudes while fighting off the darkness with patriotic pluck.

Douglass became who he was partly because of a banned book.

The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men.

Here’s the number one reason governments and religions and parents and schools ban whatever they ban. It’s nearly impossible to maintain the illusion you’re doing someone a huge favor by keeping them locked under the staircase once they’ve visited Hogwarts – even by proxy. The power to question is the power to overcome.

As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.
In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!

Finally, something our elected representatives could support.

Douglass went on to become one of the most powerful speakers and important writers of the 19th century. He also turned out to be a pretty good American, despite his dissent regarding any number of issues.

Turns out you can do that.

Learning is dangerous, but not to the person doing the learning. It can hurt along the way, but you usually end up better off for it.

Learning is dangerous to men whose ideas lack sufficient merit or whose systems lack sufficient substance to maintain their influence over people once they have other options.

Schoolhouse Rock intoned in the 1970’s that “It’s great to learn – ‘Cause Knowledge is Power!” A few thousand years before, Jesus of Nazareth had promised his followers that “you will know the truth, and the truth will set your free.” He was speaking most directly of Himself and salvation, but the principle echoes past the specifics.

In a time of strict codes and limited freedom, He offended the churchiest of them with his associations, the liberties he took with the law designed to protect them from damnation, and by suggesting we might not need holy arbiters any longer to find our way.

At the risk of getting preachy, the curtain tore long before Martin Luther nailed his complaints to the door.

Perhaps the Scribes and Pharisees had underlying good intentions, being naturally rooted in the ways of Old Testament law. They grew up under a God who’d kill you for touching His ark, even if it was to prevent it falling to the ground. We’ll cut them some slack.

The Inquisitions and Puritans and Assigners of Scarlet Letters in New Testament times have no such excuse. If their faith is what they claim, it’s a faith based on light and truth and – above all – informed choice. Jesus and Paul may not have had much in common, but there’s no record of either lying or hiding something they didn’t want the world to see. They had enough faith in their message that it could withstand freedom of choice. They didn’t want to capture anyone who didn’t wish to be won.

You don’t make better citizens or better Christians by hiding or prohibiting things you don’t want them to know. You can’t strengthen faith by torturing those who sin. You certainly can’t narrow the gap between young people and American ideals by doing a better job bullsh*tting them.

It’s wrong to even try, of course, but it also just doesn’t work.

Let’s have a little faith in our spiritual ideals, and our foundational values as a nation. Let’s offer enough light and live enough of an example that we can risk letting those we love have a little freedom. If they come back…

Well, you know the rest.

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