EIGHT
Dorothy of Oz, Tobacco Road and the Beverly Hillbillies, Hans Brinker and Rangers of Fortune, (have you ever heard of) Fourierism, Freethought, the Salem witch trials (know you’ve heard of that), the Cygnes de Marais Massacre and poor Bobby Greenlease
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Because of Dorothy of Kansas who, with Toto too, tripped to Oz in the swirling, whirling vortex of a tornado (called a cyclone in Frank Baum’s book, I was taught to call the North American phenomena a tornado, having learned as a child that cyclones have to do with tropical areas out past the west coast of America in the Pacific Ocean, that’s where one encounters cyclones, which form over water), for me to have been born in Kansas to a woman named Dorothy, and both my grandmothers named Dorothy, for which reason my mother went by her middle name as her mother was the Dorothy in her family (no nicknames like Dot or Dottie) always struck me as a minor joke neither funny nor bad enough to elicit a modest laugh, but I was amused. Also, it seemed to me there might be a connection between the book and the proliferation of Dorothys. Time now to finally look it up, and I find that Dorothy had not figured in the top 126 U.S. girl names in 1880-1890, then in the decade following 1900, the year The Wizard of Oz was published, Dorothy jumped from fifty-seventh place to seventh (the decade in which my grandmothers were born), then in 1910 to 1919 it moved from seventh place to third, from 1920 to 1929 it was a second place name, moved down to sixth in 1930 to 1939 (the decade in which my mother was born), then after 1939, the year The Wizard of Oz sprang up out of the book, transformed into a Hollywood musical and sang and danced down the yellow brick road on movie screens around the globe, Dorothy fell off the Top 10 chart forever, or at least to the present day, despite the fact The Wizard of Oz was infinitely better as a musical, despite Dorothy’s heartfelt encouragement that somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly and troubles melt like lemon drops, because there were too many Dorothys, the U.S. was saturated with them, it had its fill of Dorothy and was canceling the name, except for a woman named Judy who, in blue-and-white checked pinafore, her shoes each shimmering with 2300 ruby red sparkling sequins, would become as a monument to all Dorothys, whether they liked it or not. Both of them born in Missouri, though about 275 miles apart, my mother’s mother in north-central Missouri and my father’s mother in the southwest, my grandmothers would have shivered their shoulders and shaken their heads dismissively if I had ever brought up The Wizard of Oz to them, they would have been offended by the indignity of their names so famously usurped by a children’s book then Hollywood. I did bring this up to my father’s mother and she frowned and wrinkled her nose in the way that let me know I was not to bring this up to her ever again. They were serious adult Dorothys who consumed their television with a mixed drink. Neither of them had anything to do with the choice of their names, their parents instead were the ones who tagged
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into the trend. None of us have anything to do with names given us at birth that become a part of our identity, the familial and cultural baggage they a priori import into their relationship with us, as if we might be thus intrinsically known by a name, like some might hope to describe a person’s psychology by the shape of a nose, the height and breadth of a forehead. Our names are more often than not bestowed on us by our parents and ultimately refer to them, which is perhaps the point. Do we each of us labor to make our names belong to us, rather than we belonging to our names, consciously or unconsciously? Our names can be so much a part of us that they are as our skin, and for some they wear just right, while for others their names are such a deformation of their essential beings that they legally change them in adamant protest. “No, that’s not me.” The responsibility of bestowing a name on someone is perhaps not taken seriously enough. People keep dropping on us names with which we have nothing to do and we may feel we must bear them as an anointing from Mother and Father Cosmos. Many acquire a nickname, but it may be unsatisfying, perhaps especially if assumed while one is a child, it may feel infantilizing, or it may be even derogatory. My spouse’s mother’s paternal line received not only official given names, first and middle and surname, but also an unofficial name by which they were known by family and friends, so that a person named Ezra William Last Name would instead be called Jodi, and Desera Wilber Last Name was known as George. There are cultures in which, as one becomes older, second and even third names are given, or chosen by the individual. Had I remained in the Roman Catholic Church or the Episcopalian, eventually I might have received another name had I elected to go through the process of confirmation. When one is baptized as a child, one is brought into the church’s body by one’s parents, and godparents are chosen who are supposed to guide and support the child on their Christian road. When one is confirmed, one is personally electing to reaffirm one’s attachment to the church as an adult, on their own two feet now, often in adolescence, about the age of thirteen, which is too young for a true personal assessment of what one has been taught about God and the universe but the right age to be convinced everything is just as one’s been told and that confirmation is the natural conclusion. But I was never confirmed as the wheels for that were never set into motion and I never initiated them as I had no desire to be confirmed, it was meaningless to me. Somehow my siblings were confirmed but I was not, and when I was sixteen or seventeen I was ejected from the church as a heretic.
In case one isn’t familiar, the reason one takes a saint’s name is you decide upon which saint you’d like to emulate, who has virtues that resonate with you, some holding the belief this saint will intercede for you with a very-distant-God, they are your personal patron if you are Roman Catholic, whereas if you’re Episcopalian the saints are just members of the body known as the communion of saints, which is all the believers in Christ, including you, but they have been formally recognized as better than you. As for what makes a saint, in the Roman Catholic Church the candidate for sainthood has to perform at least two miracles post-death in order to be canonized and get their own medals and recognition on the church calendar, while in the Episcopal Church, which started out with many of the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic saints, one just has to be exceptionally good in some way, you are an example of life lived in a holy manner, like Saint Sarah Hale who is responsible for the rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. She’s a saint because she is credited with laboring hard to
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make Thanksgiving a national American holiday. Harriet Tubman, who made thirteen trips to lead slaves to freedom is an Episcopal saint, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King are also among the Episcopalian Black saints, all good people to emulate. Among the few Episcopal American Indian saints is Enmegahbowh, an Ojibwe Episcopal missionary. The Roman Catholic Church has over 10,000 saints while the Episcopal Church has I don’t know how many and I’m not going to find a listing of all the Roman Catholic saints either. Excluding the Virgin Mary, the Vatican website sells medals of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Benedict, St. Patrick, St. Peregrine, St. Gerard Majella, St. John the Baptist, St. Stephen, St. Thomas the Apostle, St. Peter, St. Barbara, St. Agate, St. Nicholas, St. John Bosco, St. Matthew, St. Andrew the Apostle, St. Jude, St. Mark the Evangelist., St. Escriva, St. George, St. Rosalia, St. Paul, St. Rita of Cascia, St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Clare, St. Joseph, St. Anthony, St. Christopher, Archangel St. Raphael, Archangel St. Michael, for some reason there’s no Archangel St. Gabriel medal listed. I’m looking at a website that sells votive saint candles that look like designer candles.
Saints make money. They are a business.
The Harry Potter book universe didn’t work the same magic for the name Harry as Oz did for Dorothy of Kansas. In the United States, Harry was in the top ten from 1888 to 1894, never rising above the position of eighth place, was in the top twenty from 1895 to 1916, then went on a steady downward slide so that by 1957 it was no longer in the top 100 and in 2018 was positioned at 620. In the United States, the name Harry wasn’t rescued by either Harry Potter or American Anglophiles who might have been influenced by the birth of Britain’s royal prince Harry (however, a nickname for Harold) in 1984. The Dorothy that was my mother’s mother was married to a Harry, not a Harold, at least his middle name was Harry, a name he received in 1900 while Harry was in the top twenty and I don’t even know what anyone called him outside the family because my mother only called him “Daddy”, her mother only called him “Daddy” and “Mac”, it was our duty to call him “Grandpappa”, and my father only called him “Mac” if he called him anything. So, maybe he was called “Mac” by everyone except for those who called him “Mr”.
When I, as an adult, visited Sedan, Kansas, county seat to Chautauqua County, Kansas, home to several generations of my father's father’s line, my hope being to dig up a little sound information on my elusive family, I found that one of the town’s attempts to pull in tourism had been to wrap around the downtown Main Street area the longest Wizard of Oz yellow brick sidewalk of a path in America. Not so much a yellow path, a little less gray than the sidewalk in which it’s embedded, over 11,500 bricks have been inscribed with the names of people from around the world who have donated to the cause. If you're so inclined you can probably still donate one, and you will be confident your brick is a good thing as the project has the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. “We test it, so you can trust it,” Good Housekeeping avers, which means if you donate money for a brick it will be formed and baked and placed in the ground and you’ll be remembered in Sedan for however long the not-so-yellow brick path sidewalk lasts, or whomever’s name you have inscribed on the brick, which was a point of the project, to use the proceeds to fix and maintain the town’s sidewalks.
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Some parts of my paternal family arrived in the area in the early 1870s, before what was Howard County (named for General Oliver Howard, a Union officer at Bull Run) would be renamed and divided into Elk (the Elk River runs through it, maybe there were a lot of elk around) and Chautauqua Counties (named for Chautauqua County, New York) in 1875. A little over 11,000 people resided in Chautauqua County in 1880, now there are a little under 3400. The population of Sedan (named for Sedan, France, which a native from Sedan, France, thought it looked like and it kind of does but wilder) is now about 1000, which is near what it was in 1900. As of the 2000 census, less than one percent of the population was black, about ninety-four percent was white, and only about three and a half percent was indigenous, despite bordering both the Osage and Kaw Reservations. I imagine it wasn’t far different in 1900 though my family was often living amongst Osage “half-breeds” who often identified themselves as white when not living on Osage lands but were identified as Osage on the federal census when living on the reservation. To the east, Montgomery County had about 18,000 people in 1880 and in 2020 had 31,000. To the west, Cowley County had about 21,000 people in 1880 and in 2020 had about 34,000. To the south, Osage County, Oklahoma, had about 20,000 people in 1910 and in 2020 had about 45,000. To the north, Elk County, Chautauqua’s other half of the Howard County of which the two were formed, had about 10,600 people in 1880 and 2400 in 2020. While the surrounding counties increased in population, with the exception of its twin to the north, from 1920 on the life’s blood of its future was either suctioned out of Chautauqua County, or fled, or both, my grandfather included and both of his siblings, they all left. Though my father’s father circulated around Chautauqua County, never moving far from it, engaged with family who remained, he and his sisters had absented the adopted home of their predecessors, and their children and grandchildren would not return. The top contributor to Chautauqua County’s economy is currently beef cattle ranching and farming. Seventy-eight percent of its farmland was used for pasture in 2017, and sixty-seven percent of its sales were almost all cattle and calves. Maybe Chautauqua County decided it just didn’t need many people hanging around because it belonged to cows.
Many relations were ranch hands, but if my grandfather was ever a ranch hand, he never mentioned it. He did have a horse as a youth, I don’t know what color or type, but I never thought of him as a horse person or having been one in the past, though the way he brought up the horse I knew this was a significant feature of his childhood, that he was proud of having had a horse. I have the feeling that after going off to high school, once out of the daily saddle he may have never gotten back in it. From the way he told his story of having had a horse, I don’t believe his two sisters would have been given horses as well, but I could be wrong on this. My cousins on my father’s side, with whom I’ve no contact (no contact with any cousins), some of them became horse people. I’ve no clue if my father ever sat in a saddle.
The Chautauqua County courthouse is two stories of 1918 red brick set upon a bottom story of limestone, a portico staged with four Ionic columns embellishing the front entrance. The slender Ionic columns, these without flutes, each has a capital composed of volutes or scrolls, which is the ornament said to form the basis of the Ionic order. The embellishments are however decidedly middle American, the
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dressing up dressed down enough that you will not forget you are in a small town in southern Kansas and mistake yourself for being in the Mediterranean that delights with olives and azure seas. George Putnam Washburn, eventually George Putnam Washburn and Son, was the architect for the Kansas State Board of Charities, and designed thirteen courthouses across the state, dipping down into Oklahoma for at least one, and glancing around at them I’m surprised that I find the courthouse in Chautauqua, exceptional for its flat roof, the most pleasing in its confident neoclassical revival simplicity. That flat roof, a rarity for Washburn, really does something for the building’s bona fides. Set into the “basement” or first story limestone is a ceremonial marble cornerstone that on one side gives the names of those associated with the design and construction of the building, on the neighboring side of the cornerstone the engraving informs it was laid by Vesper Lodge No. 136, A.F.A.M., A.L. 5917 to A.D. 1917. The A.F.A.M. means Ancient Free and Accepted Masons. The Symbolic Lodge uses a reckoning of time called Anno Lucis, “in the year of Light”, that fixes The Beginning at 4000 years before the Common Era thus A.L. 5917. This was calculated by the Masoretic text and was a date supported by Isaac Newton, who contemplated an apple’s fall and came up with gravity as a force of nature but was about 13.7 billion years shy on the age of the universe, however I don’t know if he personally held the belief the universe was only as old as that set in the Masoretic text or if he was only stating this was the Masoretic text’s calculation. A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, published 1918, gives a Dr. George Jack as a member of Sedan’s Vesper Lodge remembered in the cornerstone of the courthouse. Dr. Jack would have been a member at the time the cornerstone was laid. His name is familiar to me through his marriage to Ermie, a daughter of relation Martha “Mattie” Crockett. A physician, Dr. Jack served as county coroner and was on the board of education. His father-in-law, William Lemmon, who made it into William G. Cutler’s History of the State of Kansas, published in 1883, was an attorney and register of deeds in Chautauqua. None of my direct line was so notable as to make it into either book, and for some reason only my paternal family’s Crockett side made it into The History of Chautauqua County, Kansas, Volume I, published 1987, which gave them as having been there five generations, but the cemeteries of Chautauqua hold other lines of family who made their mark on that prairie in some way or another for a century, some dying after only a few hours, and some producing descendants who were bound to eventually leave and not donate to the land the testament of their bones.
The choice to have the facade of the courthouse ornamented with Ionic columns perhaps refers to one of the three pillars of Freemasonry being the Ionic which is connected with wisdom and is the Master’s pillar. If you were aware of this then as you approached the building you could assure yourself that beyond those Ionic columns wisdom would prevail, yet one knows there are going to have been more than a few who were justifiably upset with rulings handed down within.
I climbed the outer then inner stairs of the courthouse to reach the appropriate office, accompanied by husband and child (who was enthusiastic for the adventure), looked for possible angles wanting a photo taken but the building’s interior resisted my eye, and met more resistance at a nondescript counter where I lodged my request for family wills. Though several lines of my paternal family had lived in Chautauqua
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County, I’d already found the few people I encountered in this conspicuously underpopulated town were unfamiliar with any of the primary family names I mentioned, not that I expected anyone to remember them but a small part of me hoped there might be a small reciprocity between a town member and a person whose family had lived there for over a century, but the woman who assisted me in looking up wills at the courthouse seemed vexed that I’d come seeking information and suggested I return later. I explained I was from hundreds of miles away, passing through on my way elsewhere, and I couldn’t return the next day or next week as I again would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away. There would be no camaraderie of sharing a same origin of place, for though I wasn’t born in Chautauqua County I felt a heritage affiliation with this area via all the family who had worked and died there, my paternal great-grandfather had run a feed store on the main street, another relative had run an ice cream shop, an affiliation with all the family who had labored on keeping the roads in traveling order, the Crockett ancestor who had been burned to death in their own burning down home that made big news in the papers for days due the horrifying drama of Samuel vividly witnessed as conscious while burning alive in his bed, and his daughter-in-law badly scorched in her attempt to rescue him. Even with ancestors and relations occupying the town’s cemeteries, there was no “Welcome home!” Kansas was not so inviting, though Sedan greeted one with an artistic mural of a bison in full race over the range and, wanting money spent there, attempted to appear receptive, such as with the yellow brick walk. I had visited Chautauqua County a few times in my youth and I felt no connection then either, my paternal great-grandfather just as disinterested in my presence, not the kind to share a story, he had no desire to converse with or be around great-grandchildren, but my step-great-grandmother, who used to run a little beauty salon on Sedan, was friendlier and showed me their root cellar that was stocked with jars of vegetables and fruits and I worried about accidental food poisoning lurking in those jars and wondered if they’d ever taken refuge in the cellar from a tornado and if it was safe to do so when surrounded by all that glass. We had basements in Richland and in Seattle but it was my time in the Midwest that greatly impressed on me the necessity of a basement or root cellar, so I was astonished that in Augusta, Georgia, basements were rare. The wet clay and high-water table in much of the South resists them. I was told there was no need to worry about it as the South never had tornadoes, but the South has tornadoes, of course. My husband’s family has a picture of the Louisiana home of his maternal great-great-grandparents that was so leveled by a tornado nothing was left except blown apart lumber and children reflecting on the wreckage, gathered for the camera, some in pairs under shared umbrellas, others wore huge straw hats the size of pails, with shoulder wide brims, which oddly don’t look like sombreros while looking exactly like them.
Of course I can’t penalize the town of Sedan for not appreciating I’d history there, certainly for not intuiting that I did, for not caring that, “My family lived here for several generations”, because what’s past is past, I was a stranger, I am not the center of the world, and I can understand a clerk’s annoyance at someone not of the town’s population of 1000 walking up and imagining they might get help without an appointment. That said, what I felt was resisted as the obvious outsider, as is the way of many places, as with the South, which vigorously prides itself on a hospitality that
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can be a veneer of passive-aggressive graciousness if extended at all. An environment where I instead felt surprising humane community was in New York, we were visitors exiting a neighborhood diner where I had insisted we eat our breakfasts as it was everything I wanted of a diner in New York, not a showplace for tourists, I could relax and feel there like it was home territory, and as we were walking down the frigid cold December sidewalk away from the diner my son, then about nine or ten years of age, became suddenly ill (no fault of the diner), and instantaneously from a couple of different sides we had people rush forward with generous assistance, no exclamations, no drama, just immediate, practical help, expecting no thanks. They weren’t shaming, not judging, not asking what we might need, they just had in their hands what would be helpful and gave it to us, their attitudes demanding we not be embarrassed or obligated. They were quick to assist and then vanished.
One will was dug up that I quickly perused as there wasn’t much to it. The clerk found no more, which wasn’t much of a surprise, and I don’t know what I’d hoped to discover in any older wills, had there been such, except that I’ve seen a few from other families, not mine, in which the testator grows loquacious and remarks on their history and spouses and you don’t know for certain your ancestors wouldn’t have done the same until you check out the evidence, but from what I can tell that line of family generally preferred not to leave wills at all. The clerk was so reluctant I felt both harried and imposing-upon with the few minutes I took from her. Futility quickly overcame me, what was I doing there, what did I hope to achieve, the woman was right that I was wasting her time. She pointed me in the direction of the Chautauqua County Historical Society, but they closed promptly at 3:00 p.m., which it already was, and there was no convincing them to stay open for an out-of-towner, my little story of not being able to return didn’t touch their hearts, or they had business elsewhere, and I understand that as well though I was disappointed, so I peered in the window then went away, now anxious for a glimpse of other places where my forebears and relations lived, Pawhuska then Ponca City, and we’d have to rush to briefly set our eyes on them, leaving out all the small towns, before the sun went down. Maybe I would return one day, I told myself, but I never had the opportunity, and Chautauqua County wasn’t exactly beckoning me to return, despite all that familial DNA lying about. A few minutes were taken to wander the empty streets of Sedan and no spirits nudged at me beckoning recognition. Was that the building where my great-grandfather had his feed store? Or was it another store two doors down? I didn’t know. Before moving into town, they’d lived on a place next to the Oklahoma border called Limestone Prairie, where I’ve been told was a large boulder inscribed with that name. This limestone prairie, part of the southern Flint Hills, has evolved a unique tallgrass ecosystem as there is little top soil atop the rock and what there is of it is dry. What I remember of visiting one relative, when I was a teenager, was walking the path to her front door was like wading through a veritable ocean of grass and how disorienting it was not to see above it in parts, I’d never been fully immersed in such an environment before. Much of the tallgrass prairie of the so-called Great American Desert is fertile and good for farming, thus its tallgrass ecosystem was quickly destroyed by settlers. Limestone prairie was instead good for bison and antelope and cattle ranching, not for farming. My family didn’t have cattle ranches and it doesn’t seem they’d have chosen to live there with serious farming in mind as they were
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mostly tradespeople, carpenters, stonemasons. But then I read in old newspapers that while some sections of limestone prairie were only good for tall grasses, others supported wheat farms, and there’s a mention of an ancestor getting in his hay. So what do I know except I do know that hay isn’t wheat.
The United States once had about 142 million acres of tallgrass prairie. Only four percent is now left. When I was a teen, in the early 1970s, my grandmother still had acres of pristine, native, original, genuine tallgrass prairie that had been left her by her parents. I don’t know how many acres my grandmother held but it wasn’t one or ten, it was of a sizable enough portion that the government desired to purchase it for preservation, but my grandparents were looking at other offers. How special was it that my grandparents (A) possessed virgin tallgrass prairie and (B) were in the position of playing a part in its preservation?—well, I thought part A was cool and part B was an amazing opportunity they couldn’t possibly turn down. I knew the importance of the preservation of virgin grasslands, and I implored my grandparents to sell to the government. My grandparents cooly stuck to their argument that if the government really wanted to preserve virgin tallgrass prairie that badly then they would increase their offer to match the highest bidder. They didn’t. I don’t know where their tallgrass acreage was located, whether it was in Kansas or Missouri or both, so I can’t go look at it on Google Maps and see what it became that is no longer tallgrass. Maybe it’s concrete, maybe it’s soybeans or alfalfa. And, no, I didn’t benefit from their selling to the highest bidder, I received nothing from either when they died.
Chautauqua County is at the southern border of the state, inclining a little to the western side of what is southeastern Kansas. I read that the family of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, has erased conjecture for what inspired the yellow brick road with their knowledge it was based on cobblestone roads in Holland, Michigan, where Baum spent summers as a child vacationing with his affluent New York family. Baum’s descriptions of Kansas came not of a familiarity with Kansas but of his time in Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, so I needn’t feel odd about beginning this chapter, which deals with my father’s mother’s side of the family, in Kansas, for though my father’s paternal line was in Kansas, his mother grew up in a Missouri county bordering Kansas, but they were at least Kansas connected, and part of her family had lived in Kansas on their way to eventually settling in Missouri after the Civil War. Relations of my grandmother were still living in Chautauqua County when I stopped by the courthouse, I hadn’t notified them I’d be driving through as we would only be there briefly and didn’t know when we’d arrive, so my plan had been to just drop by the establishment where they worked, the Emmett Kelly Historical Museum (he was born there) and say “Surprise! Hi!” but when I went to the door I found they were closed on Mondays and it was of course a Monday.
Wikipedia’s entry on the Yellow Brick Road doesn’t mention Sedan but notes there’s a Yellow Brick Road in Wamego, Kansas, in the northeastern part of the state, in Pottawatomie County, where there is a Wizard of Oz museum. And that a part of Route 54 in Kansas has been officially designated as the Yellow Brick Road. Looking it up I find in the 2009 Kansas Code, Chapter 68, Roads and Bridges, Article 10, Naming and Marking of Highways and Bridges, Designation of part of U.S. 54 as the Yellow Brick Road; designation of the city of Liberal as the Land of Oz and the Home of
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Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz. (a) The portion of United States highway 54 from the west city limits of the city of Greensburg then in a southwesterly direction to the Kansas-Oklahoma border, is hereby designated as “The Yellow Brick Road.” The secretary of transportation shall place signs along the highway right-of-way at proper intervals to indicate that the highway is “The Yellow Brick Road,” except that any additional signs shall not be placed until the secretary has received sufficient moneys from gifts and donations to reimburse the secretary for the cost of placing such signs. The secretary of transportation may accept and administer gifts and donations to aid in obtaining suitable highway signs bearing the proper approved inscription. (b) The city of Liberal is hereby designated as “The Land of Oz” and “The Home of Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz.” This sounds very possessive and maybe a little distressing for Sedan with how their Yellow Brick Road appears to be coldly snubbed, perhaps for no other reason than it was a sidewalk. Greensburg, Kansas, is in Kiowa County, in the middle to west part of the state, while Liberal, Kansas, is down in the southwest portion of the state neighboring Oklahoma, in Seward County. In Liberal, Kansas, is a museum that’s stated to have been made to look like Dorothy’s home, and it has its own Yellow Brick Road. The house doesn’t look like Dorothy’s house in the movie but I suppose that’s all right because the house is a real Kansas house that was built in 1907 and Dorothy’s house as described in the book is a little shack and looks nothing like the houses in the movie. There is also a Land of Oz park in Beech Mountain, North Carolina, because Jack Pentes, the designer who was tasked with coming up with an idea for a summer tourist attraction, believed Beech Mountain looked like Oz.
Kansas is a place but Oz is a fairy tale that transforms the Depression Era dust bowl into everyone’s back yard in which, promises the movie, so beautifully filmed, the quest for one’s heart’s lost desire will be fulfilled, “Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with,” Dorothy philosophizes. Which sounds the kind of sentimental bell that will pour tears from eyes with the truth that all you need is right where you are, but on second glance makes no sense.
Medium close-up on Dorothy from the front as she sits on her bed clasping her dog, Toto, to her breast. Aunt Em is also seated on the bed, the rear of her left shoulder and gray-haired head in the frame screen right between Dorothy and the camera but not obstructing our view of Judy Garland who will one day die of an accidental drug overdose. “There’s no place like home,” Dorothy says, ecstatic, tearing up, eyes bright, as the film ends and quick fade out immediately as Em rises from the bed. The ending is odd in its abruptness, in the way the film closes as Aunt Em rises from the bed. I’ve rewound it and considered their decision to cut it right there, at that exact moment, not a split second sooner or later. A moment interrupted, unresolved.
As a child, I loved the wise but not overbearing Scarecrow as much as anyone, and as an adult I don’t know whether or not to be surprised that the scarecrow’s origin was in nightmares Baum had as a child in which the scarecrow was chasing him, and that Dorothy was named after a beloved niece of his wife who had died as an infant of five months. Baum would likely say that in the interest of forming a modernized fairy tale he had excised the heartaches and nightmares of his inspirations, retaining instead the wonder and joy. Both wise clown and fool, with his being vulnerably stuffed with
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straw, the primary caretaker and friend of Dorothy, working on emotional memories of the most cherished of one’s childhood toy friends the scarecrow was fashioned to be the favorite of most everyone, just as he was the one Dorothy would miss the most, but he was also insistent on their releasing one another after their time together that was most significantly Dorothy’s journey. I was terrified by Almira Gulch on her bike, in the film, transforming into the Wicked Witch of the East outside Dorothy Gale’s (her very name heralds strong winds) window in the tornado. I was even more terrified by, after the red ruby slippers were translated to Dorothy’s feet from the dead feet of the Wicked Witch of the East, the red-and-white striped stockinged toes of that witch curling up like a fiddlehead fern and withdrawing under Dorothy’s house that had fallen on her—bump—when it landed in Oz. And even more terrorized when Dorothy is in the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West and views in the large crystal ball Aunt Em’s anguished face replaced with that of the Witch who mocks Dorothy calling out for Em in distress. This scene makes perhaps worth noting that though telephone usage had then been expanding, it would be some years before that revolutionary tool of communication was broadly realized in rural America. The movie shows utility poles lining with punctual regularity the dirt road outside Dorothy’s home, the interior of which is comfortably outfitted, but it’s closer to absolutely certain than doubtful that the Gales wouldn’t have had a telephone with a party line on which nosy neighbors could listen in on conversations.
As with many children in the 1950s through 1960s, through most of my childhood I never saw Dorothy’s Kansas transform from a sepia-toned dustbowl to a veritable explosion of color when she opened her door on Oz. Instead, The Wizard of Oz was a black-and-white world on our television screens, and still it worked magic. The film was first broadcast on television in 1956, before I was born, then was broadcast yearly, with the exception of 1963, from 1959 through 1991. The 1959 broadcast was Sunday, the thirteenth of December, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., followed by Ed Sullivan. The 1960 broadcast was on Sunday, December eleventh. The 1961 broadcast was on Sunday December tenth. The 1962 showing was on December ninth. 1964 to 1966 it was broadcast in January, moved to February in 1967, to April in 1968 and for at least a few years was in March and April, I’ve not checked the schedule beyond that. So it was shifted from late autumn, almost a pre-Christmas scheduling, to an early New Year’s spot then to late winter as everyone looked forward to Easter spring. I was checking when The Wizard of Oz came to the television screen because the first dream I recollect was from the summer of 1959 and after a certain point in my life I came to believe it must have been influenced by The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t realize I was dreaming, but having been put down for a nap when my father’s parents and his father’s sister Allena were visiting us in Washington State, my first time to see them beyond infancy, I was startled awake by the frightening laugh of the Wicked Witch, as in The Wizard of Oz. I was convinced what I’d heard was a witch then realized it must have been a strange waking dream, that I’d probably heard my grandmother or grand-aunt Allena laughing in the back yard outside my high bedroom window and it had been translated into the witch’s laugh in the dream. But it wasn’t the laugh from The Wizard of Oz as I wouldn’t have the opportunity to hear it until December thirteenth. It seems that the laugh I’d heard and half-dreamed would have been similar to it. I do know at the age of two I didn’t associate it with The Wizard of Oz, that came later, I
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just was frightened by the witch outside the window. The fact I later associated it with The Wizard of Oz shows the memory being altered after the fact.
After living in the Midwest when I was ten and then having moved to Georgia, I explored the school library in an effort to deepen my connection to Kansas and to try to expand on it and comprehend it better, the purpose for which I turned to The Wizard of Oz, I thought the book might elaborate more, and was excited when I found it was a series, as this meant that much more opportunity to read about Kansas. What I hadn’t expected was that the period of time devoted to Kansas is given more impact and time in the film than in the book. The first four pages of The Wizard of Oz describe the harsh, gray territory of Dorothy’s existence, the four walls of the cabin and its meager furnishings, how her Aunt Em and Uncle have been so brutalized by prairie life that they never laugh and the only companion Dorothy has to brighten her day is her dog. Then the tornado whisks her away to Oz, and I no longer care about Dorothy and her adventures because, whereas in the film what happened in Oz felt emotionally real, in the book I no longer feel anything authentic.
As a child, I didn’t like Frank Baum’s books.
Frank Baum’s remoteness from the midwestern prairie life of Kansas begins with his having been born in New York into a family of considerable wealth built upon barrel-making, oil drilling in Pennsylvania and real estate. He is sent to military school, which he deplores, and when he’s an adult his father attempts to set him up in various businesses such as fancy poultry, but Frank’s not very good at business and instead wants to be in theater, which is fine and good, I’m certainly not going to be critical over anyone wanting to tell stories and go into theater, I used to write for the theater. But Frank’s father dies and the family business essentially collapses. Frank has responsibilities and must earn a living. He takes off for boomtown South Dakota to which relatives have moved and opens a store, but the store fails and he turns to newspapering. His mother-in-law is a much respected feminist who perhaps sometimes ghostwrites for him on the paper. His mother-in-law, who he admired, is concerned with indigenous affairs, in 1878 wrote about treaty rights, in 1893 about the rights of women in Iroquois society, and was reportedly admitted into the Iroquois Council of Matrons. But in 1890, Frank appears to call for the destruction of Native Americans when in an opinion piece he calls them “whining curs”. Frank Baum’s opinion was, “The whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced, better that they die than live as the miserable wretches that they are.” That’s brutal. Frank’s way of dealing with whites not honoring the treaties they’ve made is to erase those with whom they’ve broken their promises. Nine days later, on December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek between 250 and 300 Sioux—elders, women and children—were massacred. To this horror, Baum responded, “The Pioneer has before declared that our safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the
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earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with these redskins as those have been in the past.” Baum does lay considerable and cynical blame on the American government and whites in their mistreatment of indigenous peoples, but he still places the indigenous on the side of “other”, and determines the best of what he believes is an unsalvageable situation is their erasure, whereas Dorothy and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, no matter how gray their sorry lives on the unforgiving plains, are a part of settler occupation to be preserved at all costs, despite the fact that the three eventually, in the book series, elect to abandon Kansas altogether for the better fantasy of Oz.
If I appear to place considerable emphasis on Baum, this has only to do with my three Dorothys, and Kansas, and because The Wizard of Oz proved to be so influential on some artists, and dug so deeply into American pop culture.
In order to refresh my memory, and compare my childhood and adult comprehensions, I tried rereading some of the Oz books, but was unable to do it, they were too frustrating and left me not wanting to waste my time on trying to find in them the purely agrarian heartland “American” fairy tale voice that some tout as part of their intrinsic beauty. I got further with the books when I was ten years of age and was even then dismayed by what I interpreted as colonialist Beyond-the-Atlantic inheritance. The fundamental impetus of Baum’s Oz books ends in seeming an effort to build a white settler fairy tale to lay over the plains landscape obliterating all pre-existing indigenous lore and legends.
In order to refresh my memory I also read, in its entirety, the Laura Ingalls Wilder book in which the Ingalls move into Osage territory, which left me with questions about pa and ma. A reason that people might love this book they’d read as children is that it’s pretty reassuring, despite Laura’s occasional fears, because, as Ma says, everything that works out fine is fine. As children the readers might not hear how Ma is denying very reasonable anxieties on the parts of the Ingalls children, instead what the readers, as children, perhaps absorb is a sense of adventure, most everything appears to them to turn out fine, they might not comprehend how stressed is the Ingalls family and how in peril the children often feel. Also reassuring are the detailed descriptions of how the Ingalls set up camp, then the building of the cabin and barn, the stress is on Pa being competent in all that he does, and for me as an adult it’s interesting, considering the first steps my ancestors who settled about thirty miles away would have taken. But I keep thinking about what’s really going on, what Laura doesn’t know about as a child, which the parents keep saying isn’t for the children to consider, which Laura Ingalls Wilder wasn’t game to confront in her books as an adult.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose books I also never bought into as a child, at least lived in Kansas (briefly), the family progressing there by way of New York and Wisconsin. Often, in early published histories of the states and their counties, note was made from place to place of who was the first white person in the territory (I take it for granted usually erroneously recorded), the first white settler, who was the first white woman, whose was the first white marriage and who was the first white child born there. This is why Frank Baum’s books about Kansas life are instead about Oz, a
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fantasy to which Dorothy escapes from a world deadly to white settlers who were killing themselves and their children trying to learn how to live in a place hostile to European practices and sensibilities. No white person was initially “of” Kansas or South Dakota or Iowa, the continent was flooded with people who were not “of”, who having escaped the colonized east coast were on the move until they obtained the Pacific. Then they became possessive and territorial and determined themselves “of”. If their descendants bristle at losing the status of “of” when reminded they are “of” settlers, it’s because the vast majority of the whites who flooded the continent were simply bodies directed out there to occupy and establish colonialist American interests with the aim of displacing American Indians. Wealthy people were amongst them, who had the wherewithals to snatch up mineral rights and other prime resources, but the majority were existentially lost and seeking a home here then there then perhaps over there. They were, yes, Onward Christian Soldiers, for those who thought of themselves as God-ordained rescuers of the new Jerusalems from heathen hands (and not all felt this way), but what they were principally, or became, was the must of the American self-made individual, self-reliant, independent, supposed proof that anyone could start with “nothing” and, by the clever opportunistic virtues of capitalism, make fortunes. The late nineteenth century power housing of this mythology was in the name of one Horatio Alger, son of a Unitarian minister, descended from Puritan aristocracy but by his generation not aristocratic enough to join in the posh clubs at Harvard where he matriculated. Following in his father’s footsteps, he too became a Unitarian minister, with a special interest in moral entertainments for boys, but then he turned out to be a pedophile and was forced out of the church and out of town. Elsewhere, Alger continued his “rehabilitation” efforts centered on boys and birthed Ragged Dick novels about wastrel youth who through hard work and self-sacrifice, gaining the attention of helpful elders, were rewarded with upward mobility, stories written for boys (Alger couldn’t break into a successful living in writing for adults). Laura Ingalls Wilder, too, developed her books for children, as with Frank Baum. One could hazard, influential myths of the American West that informed the tastes of later generations were centered on the indiscriminate receptivity of youthful ears.
But it’s more complex than this because the “not of” white settlers had children and they did become “of” because they were born there, and when you are born somewhere you grow up “of” there. They were no longer English or Scottish or Irish or German or Spanish or French. They were descending of people from across the Atlantic Ocean but they were now disconnected from the place from which they descended, and as the colonies began to intermix after several generations then those of Dutch descent began to marry with English and Irish and who they were initially of was increasingly no longer so simple. They were still not “of” America in the manner of the indigenous American Indian, but they were of the place where they were born, an American landscape, albeit one to which their forbears had imported and imposed upon lifestyles from where they’d hatched. The threat that transpired and remains is of their not really belonging to anything but an abstract concept of “America” as they are descended of imports, but they can’t go back to the old homeland, regardless of whether or not their ancestors left their old homeland because it wasn’t hospitable to them for one reason or another, and while they are “of” they no longer belong, and
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the threat that they might not really belong on the American continent, where they are, creates an existential instability. It’s not masochistic or self-punishing to examine this, instead the anxieties of prior settler generations demand examination, their hopes of becoming “of”, their descendants becoming “of the USA” by reason of their birth here, what they felt they were owed, what they felt they owned, how they looked for places where they might fit, and the needling fears that would arise of how they were, most significantly, psychically vulnerable to being exposed as thieves, despite their rationalizations that to the victors go the spoils, that they were god blessed with the Better Homes and Gardens Seal of Approval.
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I used to try to comprehend my paternal grandmother through her father’s side of the family, the Noyes, and now I think perhaps a proper understanding can be had only through also acknowledging the family of her mother, the influence of which I’d previously ignored. Perhaps I’d ignored it because my father’s mother ignored it. The Noyes were prosperous farmers, the Brewers were not. Other than the fact she was attractive, I don’t know how my grandmother’s mother caught the eye of my grandmother’s father or vice versa. I don’t know how my paternal grandmother met my grandfather either. My grandmother had ample opportunity to tell me how she came to know and decide to marry my grandfather, and my grandfather had ample opportunity to tell me his side of the story, but neither ever did, and I never got the feeling it was a big romance anyway. It occurs to me to look up whether there was a wedding announcement and I find the 1915 announcement of my paternal grandmother’s eldest sister reads, “This wedding was a surprise to the relatives and friends.” A wedding dinner was given the day following by the bride’s maternal grandmother. My grandmother’s second eldest sister’s 1915 wedding announcement reads, “This wedding was a surprise to the many friends of the contracting parties. It was also a surprise to the bride’s parents. [The groom’s] father knew that their marriage was contemplated but did not know when it was to be.” They had a supper afterward at the house of the eldest sister who had married several months earlier. My grandmother’s only brother was married in 1926 and again it was a surprise to nearly all. “The young pair let it be known to the bride’s mother that the wedding was close at hand but gave no indication of the exact date.” The announcement for the 1928 marriage of my paternal grandparents which, as with the others, takes place away from the old home town, in this case not too distant from where they had been attending school in Kansas at what is now Emporia State University, makes no mention of the family of either except that my grandmother’s youngest sister was an attendant as was a man who that youngest sister would marry the following year in Indiana, a marriage that I don’t find announced in the papers. My grandmother’s father’s family wasn’t religious so it’s not surprising that none of the marriages took place in a church, but one might wonder why my paternal grandmother’s parents weren’t included in any of the marriages of their children, not even informed they would take place. What I know about my paternal grandmother’s father is that he had a glass eye (fireworks accident), he was diminutive in build, and though photos from
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his youth give him the appearance of having light hair his WWI draft registration states he had black hair and brown eyes. I was told the fireworks accident was in his youth but on 7 July 1905 the Liberal Enterprise reports the “lamentable” accident occurred when he was teaching his children how to use fireworks. He had lit the fuse and had thought it had gone out as the outside wrapper on it stopped burning, but it hadn’t, and when it exploded part of the clay packing struck his eye. He was thirty-one, it was three years before my grandmother was born, but her oldest sibling and sister would have been ten. My grandmother’s three elder siblings would have witnessed the accident. My grandmother and father believed fireworks were best left to professionals. A healthy fear of fireworks was passed along to me, that accidents happen, and I’ve passed on that avoidance to my son. Anyone I’ve ever known who likes fireworks has looked upon my fear of them with condescending scorn. “Oh, they’re safe.” I once caught a ride home, in a car in which everyone was smoking pot and cigarettes, from North Carolina to Georgia, and no one told me that under my seat was a stash of fireworks. When I found out, I was, “What the hell!” and they were, “It’s perfectly safe!”
My grandmother’s father was “severe” enough in laying down the law in his family that because he didn’t believe in women wearing pants my grandmother didn’t wear pants until in her sixties, decades after his death, but he also spent lavishly on her clothes so that she prided herself as being, she said, the best dressed girl in the county. It didn’t occur to me until years down the road that the only thing my father’s mother ever said about her mother was that she was always impeccably groomed and that she blued her hair, like it was high art to do so. That this might be considered to be the most remarkable information on her suggests something, though I’m not sure what, even more so as this was how her daughter elected to describe her. And the significance of the bluing of her hair escaped me as when I was growing up it seemed all older women with graying hair “blued” it, which is a method to remove a yellow cast that can occur with gray hair. As far as I was then aware, nearly all older women visited the hairdresser once a week for their hair to be washed and set and their color corrected as needed. I didn’t know this kind of bluing wasn’t popularized or available until the 1930s, which is the decade when my grandmother’s mother was in her 50s, so she was utilizing what was then a new cosmetic treatment, though the dying of hair in shades of blue, green, and purple had briefly entered the high fashion world early in the century immediately before and during WWI. As with men visiting barber shops for a trim, some men for their daily shave, the ritual of the weekly visit to the hairdresser was a significant part of the culture, these visits being also an important part of their social world. They were, many of them, women who didn’t work outside the home and had their appointment scheduled for the same day and time weekly, just as with the other women they might see at the beauty shop that wasn’t a chain but run by a local individual. Rather than the blue rinse my grandmother had her hair dyed a muted auburn, similar to my grand-aunt Allena. My paternal grandfather’s stepmother (his mother died when he was twenty-four), rather than being among the women who only frequented the salon as a consumer, advertised in the 1930s as being then proprietor of a beauty shop that provided shampoos, finger waves, manicures and facials two doors down from the National Bank in Sedan. This wasn’t a minor part of their culture, it was an important part of the observable fabric of their lives in
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which they were trusting another to not only groom them, to ensure they might present themselves at their best, but also required that they submit to grooming in a semi-public environment in which they were viewed in a vulnerable state without their optimal public masks. It means a kind of social compartmentalization in which they were mutually forgiven that hour, more or less, of vulnerability for the maintenance and enhancement of their public face, the self projected on the town’s stage. “Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure,” was a popular mid-twentieth century ad campaign that assured the public wouldn’t be able to tell if one’s hair color was natural or by choice, but a trip to the beauty shop, unless one had perfect privacy, typically meant one being exposed for at least the communal hair dryer line-up, and many had only open beauty stations so every step of the process was exposed.
My paternal grandmother’s mother took a step up on the economic ladder when she married. This meant a certain privilege in keeping up appearances. This great-grandmother was predominately Dutch. If I could speak with my Dutch line of ancestors, I’d say something like:
ME: OK, so you were slime for stealing New York from the Lenape for the price of a few beads and some trade goods—they thought you were leasing hunting rights and you muscled the deal into a real estate bonanza.
THEM: ....
ME: Never mind that. You were in New York for two centuries. Two centuries! And then you get it in your heads to up and leave for Kentucky, where you must have gotten a bum deal, so you promptly picked up and went to where? Kansas and then immediately Missouri. The Ozarks. And there you stopped. Where several generations later you'd sit and chuckle over Petticoat Junction and claim it as your cultural heritage.
THEM: Let’s back this up. Your accusations about New York are flat out wrong. We were little people and didn’t make that land deal. And we weren’t in the Ozarks. Get your facts right.
ME: You were almost in the Ozarks.
THEM: You know, they made an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies at Silver Dollar City.
ME: I’m aware. I was told that many times.
THEM: Petticoat Junction was good. It was based on a real hotel in Eldon, Missouri. But Green Acres, well, Eddie Albert got a bit full of himself with his left-wing views. Got it into his head he had important opinions when he was just an actor. He was no Ronald Reagan.
ME: You were Vanderbilts.
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THEM: Not since 1699.
ME: How did the Vanderbilts become the wealthiest family in the United States, while you made for the Ozarks and poverty.
THEM: We weren’t in the Ozarks.
ME: If you had stayed in New York then maybe your descendants would have grown up enjoying the Museum of Modern Art instead of Sam Butcher’s Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri.
THEM: There’s nothing wrong with Sam Butcher’s art. Sam Butcher is a fine artist. He made a good living ministering for God through it, too.
ME: Sam Butcher is neither a fine arts artist nor a fine artist. He’s sentimental kitsch. Art can appear to be kitsch but if it’s exploring and commenting on kitsch it’s not kitsch, it’s struggling for self-awareness, to examine the nature of kitsch, what buttons it’s pushing, how it manipulates the viewer. Butcher doesn’t care about self-awareness, he cares about hitting all those right buttons that bring up an automatic hard-wired response to all the feels that are supposed to be generated by sentimentality. Like the phrase “mom and apple pie” is a button that’s intended to associate the good mom cares for me with good smelling tasting pie it’s my responsibility to give my life in exchange for that sacrificing myself for mom, apple pie, god, and country.
THEM: What are you talking about?
ME: You wouldn’t say that in a real conversation. In a real conversation you’d shut down the conversation with the reply, “I know what I like and that’s all I need to know.” You left Manhattan and MOMA for Silver Dollar City. This makes me bitter.
THEM: We left New York for New Jersey first.
ME: Point taken.
This internal dialogue is tongue-in-cheek. I make an uneducated joke about New Jersey, I’m obnoxious and rude but these are the feelings that happen when your interests and dreams are scorned by people who think, for example, Sam Butcher is the best, they are determined you should think Sam Butcher is the best, they want you to become just like them, they don’t want to consider your views. One gets defensive. Still, I went to YouTube to reacquaint myself with Petticoat Junction, and I took a look at Eldon, Missouri, twelve miles north of the Lake of the Ozarks, and I browsed newspapers. The Shady Rest Hotel of Petticoat Junction was inspired by the Burris Hotel, located near the Rock Island railroad tracks in what was then a three hotel town, and was a plain, two-story, rectangular, unadorned box of a building with unassuming porches spanning both floors in front, no architectural flounce, a standard build for hotels like this from the mid-late 1800s into the early 1900s, in
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exploring places different branches of my family were at I’ve seen many old illustrations of such hotels. It was originally called the Rock Island Hotel, opened in 1889, which means it had been part of the Rock Island Hotel chain kept by the Rock Island Railroad. In the series, the hotel is instead an isolated, sprawling Second Empire Victorian with a Mansard roof, such as was the Bates residence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, built on a railroad line about twenty-five miles from Hooterville that has the small general store where Kate, the hotel’s widowed matron, does all her shopping for supplies. The show opens with the three beautiful daughters of Kate who, upon hearing the train whistle, pop up out of a big water tower where they supposedly take recreational baths, it’s a head-and-shoulders shot that does more than give the impression they are nude, so one can associate “hooter” with either the hoot of the train or something other, wink wink nudge nudge. The plots of the episodes I viewed online from the first season are homespun Americana wisdom up against the corporate greed of big city folk, the down home people being for the most part gentle oddball caricatures mixed up with a very few smart ones, like Kate, who look after trying to keep their down home way of life viable. The branch of railroad the Shady Rest sits on is long forgotten and exists solely to connect the struggling Shady Rest to Hooterville, much like a personal taxi. The hotel’s matron lures traveling salesmen to her hotel with the promise of great home cooking and the attractions of her three lovely and curvaceous daughters. If you live in a small town that’s been murdered by the Interstate having bypassed you, much like small towns that had been earlier killed off by railroads choosing to not honor them with a depot, then you’re going to feel a connection with the Shady Rest trying to convince the big city people to not close their little twig of a RR branch. Or if your family was one of those who left behind the farm and small town and settled in the city then the show may feel like it’s providing a glimpse of the small town America in which your grandparents dwelt.
The Burris family took over the Rock Island Hotel in 1910, soon purchasing it, and also operated a livery stable, which suggests they had some measure of wealth. One of the Burris daughters, who had married in 1909 and lived in St. Louis, had a daughter, Ruth, who moved to Kansas City and went into radio, then she married Paul Henning, who had grown up in Independence, Missouri, and also worked for the radio station KMBZ. In 1938 they relocated to the West Coast where they wrote for movies and television. He created The Beverly Hillbillies, said on Wikipedia to be based on “his experiences while camping in the Ozarks near Branson, Missouri”, and while he and his wife eventually purchased over a thousand acres of land there, newspaper accounts and an in-depth interview with him instead name the location of the Boy Scout camp he frequented as being in southwestern Missouri in Noel and that it was by way of camping excursions there he’d become aware of people in remote places who resisted modernization. He described the setting as like Tobacco Road, referring to the stage play he’d once seen in Kansas City, which was based on the book, a combination of social realism and dark comedy about sharecroppers outside of Augusta, Georgia, who are trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty. The play retained enough of the book that it was banned in some cities as immoral. Henning recalled, “and what I wanted to do was escape the week to week depressive setting of the back woods…you wouldn’t want to see it very often because it was depressing, the seeing, the surroundings.” He had previously played around with the idea of what would it be
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like if a person from the time of the Civil War found themselves translated to the present, zipping down the road in an automobile. (And someone probably asked, “But won’t we have to deal with slavery having been abolished? Do we want to go there? Do we want the essential comedic element to be their getting used to no one owning slaves?”) These ideas morphed and combined to become Henning’s hillbillies who he initially conceived as being transplanted to New York as the Manhattan Hillbillies then decided instead on Beverly Hills as it would be too expensive to occasionally film in New York. The Shady Rest first appeared in The Beverly Hillbillies in 1962 then spun off to become its own show in 1963, a Henning daughter starring in the show as one of the three daughters of Kate. In 1965, Henning was executive producer and casting director of Green Acres, which also took place in Hooterville, but with wealthy New Yorkers giving up their sophisticated lifestyle to become rural farmers. I didn’t pay much attention to any of these rural comedies until I was in Missouri in 1967, seated on the carpet in my paternal grandparents’ living room, watching television with them, they were in charge of viewing fare, and with some surprise I realized where I was, southwestern Missouri, was almost the vicinity of the down-home territory of these comedies. I didn’t watch them earlier, in Washington, as I didn’t care for them, they were too corny, and I had assumed the Beverly Hillbillies hailed from Texas because as far as I was aware that’s the state that was known for black gold oil, and I’d believed Green Acres happened in rural New York.
Ruth Henning grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, but as a child she spent summers at the Burris Hotel. Petticoat Junction was intended to nostalgically extol what were imagined to be old time, small town values, based not on an isolated hotel twenty-five miles from the nearest small town of Hooterville, which had a population of about forty, but a hotel in a small town that grew from a population of 2000 to over 3000 between 1910 and 1930. Admittedly, it’s funnier to have the hotel in the middle of nowhere, built where the train dropped the lumber, but it might be argued that the root story has little to nothing to do with Ozark hillbillies. As for the Burris hotel, Paul remarked that the grandchildren were warned to stay away from the traveling salesmen.
Henning’s view on the Ozarks, at least the more remote pockets, was of an oppressive place into which he didn’t want to immerse the television-viewing public, from which he was giving his hillbillies the opportunity to escape into cathode ray tubes all across America, Wednesday nights on the Columbia Broadcasting System, the number one show in the Nielson Ratings for its first two seasons. Paul Henning had also written a couple of episodes for The Real McCoys, introduced in 1957 by the American Broadcasting System, done with by 1962, the first of the rural comedies, and its premise was similar. Looking up their first episode, I find it opened with a car much like the Clampett’s a-kilter Ozarkmobile, only it’s piloted by the McCoys, an Appalachian family from West Virginia who have come to California because they’ve inherited a ranch from a relative, the difference was the Clampetts had a more extreme transplanting from insulated Ozark hillbilly culture into fantastic wealth.
John Ford’s 1941 movie adaptation of Erskin Caldwell’s 1932 novel, Tobacco Road,
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opens with scenes of a ruined plantation mansion followed by Jeeter Lester’s old jalopy rambling down the road supposedly outside Augusta, Georgia, but Augusta’s terrain has changed so it would be unrecognizable to Caldwell’s Tobacco Road resident, we are in Appalachia or the Ozarks, Augusta transformed to have rolling hills that are instead California mountains, and one may say, “Of course, it’s a movie,” but a choice was made as to what type of landscape in which to place the family of Jeeter Lester. Actually, the movie opens with the notice, seemingly inscribed in earth, that the stage play opened 4 December 1933 in New York “and has played continuously since then, breaking all records for length of run in the history of the American theater”. The play shut down in May of 1941 after a run of 3182 performances, three months after the release of the movie, and has briefly returned to Broadway several times. In the list of longest-running broadway shows, its position is now twentieth place, the first eighteen all being musicals with the exception of one musical revue, nineteenth place belonging to the play Life With Father that ran 1939 to 1947 and was a comical and sentimental tale of family life in the New York upper crust during the Victorian years. That Tobacco Road was popular as a play is mind-boggling, also that the novel has sold over ten million copies, because Caldwell’s depiction of the Lesters is the damning bleakest of representations of an American family, their utter ruination associated with the Great Depression and the absentee landowner of the land on which they sharecrop. having abandoned their own farm, but the boundaries and expectations that compose the rudiments of a humane and civilized life are so alien as to have been lost for generations. As with Jeeter’s car, nothing functions any longer. The only boundary left to break is the oppression of poverty. Because Jeeter refuses to move to Augusta to work in a mill, insistent that God has made man to till the land, he and his family spend every moment of their lives starving to death on a diet of corn meal and fat back rind. He lives with his wife, Ada, a daughter with a cleft lip, Ellie May, and a sixteen-year-old half-wit son, Dude, the rest of their children who hadn’t died revealed to have fled for the city, with no love lost as they will have nothing to do with the family they left behind. Jeeter and Ada married off Pearl, their twelve-year-old blond-curled and blue-eyed daughter, for about seven dollars, and we learn that if she looks mysteriously different from the rest of the family it’s because she’s not Jeeter’s, but Jeeter has fathered numerous children outside his marriage, and is acknowledged as so perverse that he’s told by Bessie, a preacher woman friend, the reason God gave Ellie May a cleft lip was to protect her from Jeeter’s lust and he agrees this has likely prevented him from having sex with his own daughter, an aversion that wanes as the novel progresses. The first chapters are concerned with Lov, the husband of Pearl, on his way home from fetching turnips, he has stopped to complain to Jeeter about how Pearl hasn’t slept with him yet, she won’t even speak with him, no matter how he treats her, whether he gives her small gifts or beats her, and he hopes her father will help him with this matter, he even considers having Jeeter help tie Pearl up so he can rape her. While Lov complains, Ellie May scoots her sex-starved rump across the sandy ground toward him until she is seated on his legs. The rest watch in hypnotized anticipation that the two may have sex right then and there, but are preoccupied as well with the prospect of stealing Lov’s turnips. Which they do, they attack him while he’s distracted by Ellie May and rather than sharing the turnips Jeeter runs off to hide and eat them by himself. A widow, Bessie, also hungry
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for sex, afflicted with a birth defect that has deprived her of a full-fledged nose, decides that God has ordained she and Dude should marry so she may turn him into a preacher man, like her deceased husband. She convinces Dude to marry her in exchange for the privilege of driving a new car she purchases with insurance money from her husband’s death, and though Dude is underage Jeeter gives his consent as he hopes to also use the car. After the marriage, Bessie moves in with the family and while she and Dude retire to consummate the marriage the rest of the family attempts to look in through the window, and Jeeter thereafter becomes preoccupied with having sex with Bessie as well. Dude treats the brand new car so carelessly it immediately begins to fall apart, plus it was low on oil before they even left the show room. He runs into a wagon, killing its black driver, and if one is disconcerted by everyone’s lack of concern for the man’s death, and determines this must be racism, by the book’s end one has an opportunity to reconsider their callousness when Jeeter’s mother, who has been starved by the family, is not once but twice run over by Dude, then left by all to lie where she was crushed into the earth. When they check her after a couple of hours they find she managed to roll over and crawl a couple of feet toward the house before breathing her last. What they have positive to say about her is that at least she never complained. Pearl runs off to Augusta after Lov attempts to tie her up and rape her. In consolation, he’s given Ellie May to take home with him. The novel ends with Jeeter setting fire to the broom sedge to burn it off, as his father and grandfather did, even though burning the broom sedge never killed the boll weevils, even though he will be planting no crop, but the wind turns during the night and he and Ada are burned up in their shack.
The story is told in a repetitive style, as if it had been serialized and the reader must be reminded at the beginning of each chapter of what is happening. Caldwell makes the reader aware of how these illiterate and insensible individuals have been taken advantage of by every capitalistic cog and wheel of a predatory society, but their treatment of one another is no more sympathetic, and that he takes up three chapters with Ellie May dragging her rump across the sandy soil to sit on Lov’s legs, while the rest of the family watches transfixed, leaves the reader to question where Caldwell’s use of dark comedy becomes instead exploitative pulp fiction titillation at the expense of his desperate characters. Though it can be argued what the initial three chapters accomplishes is to wholly immerse the reader in a life that has no moral compass, Caldwell’s dark comedy is so relentlessly bleak, it seems a crippling onslaught of lethargic misery that leeches from the novel to consume a horrified audience, so by the book’s end the reader feels as emptied of initiative to do anything as Jeeter’s family, one can scarce imagine being able to move to help the dying grandmother, one is even amazed Jeeter has the energy to bury her (we’re not even confident she’s actually breathed her last), one wonders how anyone could muster the scant iota of energy left in their starved souls and bodies to do anything but lie down and wait for exhaustion to complete the job of transforming their flesh into dust. It may be we find it difficult to imagine the conjuring of energy because anyone with a moral compass has been excised from the book’s pages, they’ve already fled Tobacco Road. As for Jeeter, who accepts the rationalization that his daughter was given the cleft lip so that his disgust of it would prevent him from raping her, it’s near impossible to feel any
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sympathy for his desire to one day till the soil again, he and Ada burning up in the shack while they sleep would seem a cleansing blessing for all concerned, if the reader wasn’t left a scorched witness.
On the way to becoming a movie, the play injects some humanity and energy by having Ada become concerned for Pearl, who is only a subject of conversation in the book but appears in the play, running home away from Lov. When Jeeter takes her captive for Lov, Ada takes up for her daughter, attempts to save her, and is the one run over by the car. Pearl sobs over Ada as she dies, then flees for Augusta, Ellie May takes off to live with Lov, and Jeeter reprimands Ada’s body for dying for nothing other than helping Pearl. Pearl doesn’t physically make it into Ford’s film, in which Ellie May loses her cleft lip, becomes a beautiful “older” woman of twenty-three, and joins Lov when Pearl runs off. In the play, the “Captain” has died, who owned the land on which Jeeter is a tenant farmer, and with the Great Depression the Captain’s son has fallen into his own financial problems so that the land is possessed by the bank and will be converted into a research farm. In the movie, the bank gives Jeeter the option of renting his land, and as Jeeter can’t pay for it, the Captain’s son pays his rent for six months and stakes him the money to plant a crop. So Jeeter and Ada are left with a measure of golden hope, but the audience doesn’t know if Jeeter will mend his slothful ways and muster the energy to separate himself from his porch to work.
It’s barely a hop, skip and gulley jump from the movie to The Beverly Hillbillies, in which Ellie May is fused with golden-haired Pearl, and amuses television audiences with how she is ever disappointed when she must release the men she comically, innocently takes captive as potential husbands. Dude becomes the good-natured simpleton Jethro, and Ada and the grandmother are blended to become Granny, both further transformed so they may be genially compared to the comic Li’l Abner, which entered publication in 1934. A little of the movie’s passive, daydreaming Jeeter survives in Jed, who as the wise family patriarch mediates the family’s introduction to the wealth and conveniences of Beverly Hills.
The Tobacco Road Lesters wouldn’t have counted themselves as kin of Appalachian mountain folk, or the Beverly Hillbillies, separated from Missouri by near half a continent. Georgians despised Erskine Caldwell for Tobacco Road but when the play toured, despite efforts to ban it, Georgians filled the theaters in which it was performed, and a 22 November 1938 review in Atlanta reported there was much appreciative laughter and applause though the audience was disappointed by some of the punch having been taken out of the play by the actors stepping around lines that might be found objectionable, that the characters could not be accurately portrayed without the expected profanity, and that the original script was less objectionable than the current form that called attention to the deletions. Dr. M. Ashby Jones, a Baptist minister, said he had no desire to see the play but that he was fundamentally opposed to censorship. A 1987 article revealed that Caldwell’s books weren’t on display in the town of Wrens, Georgia, where he’d spent part of his youth, they were kept by the librarian in a box in a small room behind her desk so they were available to “teachers and students” who asked for them.
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Decrying the level of poverty displayed in Tobacco Road, reports were published in the Georgia newspapers that asserted Caldwell’s representation maligned Georgia and that Tobacco Road was now a prosperous land. Governor Talmadge held that “everyone who knows about rural life knows that the further back in the country you get, the more religious the people are, and the less profanity they use.” The Augusta Chronicle, however, having promised to investigate the situation, reported they’d found about a dozen families seriously degraded by poverty and illness, while Erskine Caldwell’s father said there were about thirty-five such families in Jefferson County. The assessment was they were “descendants of parents who lived in the same manner, are products of a combination of poverty, utter ignorance and interbreeding of families, through generations…It was found that many people in Jefferson County know the families and have known of their condition for years…” Treatment indicated was long-range rehabilitation, education in the “moral codes of civilization of which they are not a part”, and sterilization. In 1937, Georgia passed a compulsory eugenic sterilization law against those with “a tendency to serious physical, mental or nervous disease or deficiency”, which was repealed in 1970.
As if to balance his depiction of poverty and moral degradation in Tobacco Road, in 1937, in collaboration with his photographer wife, Margaret Bourke-White, Erskine Caldwell published, You Have Seen Their Faces, a collection of images that depicted impoverishment around the country, with essays by Caldwell on the causes, the curse of the cotton plantation system that had exhausted the land, generations of sharecroppers wed to uncompromising destruction and belittling failure from birth to death, children deprived of education as they were used on the farms by their families as labor, if they had access to school they hadn’t the clothing to attend. Illness and disease had broken the senior generations, but Caldwell had hope that youth would surpass the fears instilled in their parents against fighting unscrupulous business and landlords, and that they’d find strength together in unionization that would ensure a living wage. The 1974 reprint had an introduction by Caldwell that bleakly observed poverty persisted but had retreated from public view to rural and urban slums despite times of “numerous social and economic benefits…freely bestowed elsewhere in American life.”
A man Erskine Caldwell’s father said had been the inspiration for Jeeter, from whom was drawn “his humor and philosophy many of the better traits of” the character, died in 1937, and was well-known enough that his published obituary remarked on this relationship and that he and his large family were often photographed by Tobacco Road visitors. It seems they’d become something of a tourist attraction, which may account for a staged photo I’ve seen of the family patriarch dressed in a bowler hat and belted trousers while drawing water from a well at a farm in Matthews, Georgia, not far from Wrens. This may also explain a studio portrait of his wife that shows her not in Sunday best but a housedress and large sun bonnet of a style that would have been worn in the field. This smiling and apparently toothless portrayal of her has the attitude of a PR photo for either the stage play of Tobacco Road, in which she becomes a heroine, or a sibling of Granny of The Beverly Hillbillies. At that time of her death, several decades subsequent that of her husband, she lived in the mill
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neighborhood area of Augusta, Harrisburg. In the 1940 census, three years after the death of her husband, she was still in rural Augusta, head of a household in which a son of thirty-three worked that year as a carpenter for $286, and two sons of twenty and sixteen years had each earned $170 as laborers with a National Youth Administration (NYA) training project that was part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Their neighbors all worked in the textile mill, most of whom had incomes that outpaced that family considerably, but the collective income of the family was comparable to those with better jobs. A textile mill weaver earned $448, another earned $520. But a mechanic for a laundry earned $676. The mother had never gone to school, nor had four of the five children who remained in her household. The youngest, at thirteen, had only one year of school. A daughter, given as widowed in 1940, though her husband was still living, had at thirteen given birth to her first child and married into a family in which there also had been no schooling, and resided in a household in which the head had earned $150 as a farmer but others had earned but $45 as farm laborers. Another daughter, still living in her mother’s household, who had married at fourteen, and was also given in the census as widowed in 1940 at the age of twenty-three, though her husband was still alive, had named her eldest son, born when she was fifteen, for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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Was destitution what made for the attraction to the facile and infantile art of the religious figurines of Sam Butcher’s Precious Moments and the saccharine holiness of bad folk art, developed to appeal to the superficial nostalgia nerve that gets blitzed on uncritical sentiment, not just overlooking dire realities of yore but remaking them as good grit and honorable times, when those ancestors would likely have given their all to not be in grinding dirt poverty. The recreations for tourists of old home, pseudo pioneer living, are comfortable and as artificial as the fairy tale Disney castles that are their close cousins. They can seem made for children trying to less make sense of than peace with mom and pop and grandma and grandpa, ready to mythologize a past that forebears may have already distorted. For people who never had an acquaintance with what was and want to believe the mythology, there is nothing in these representations that would mean a confrontation with the hard realities chronicled in old WPA photographs and the images of Margaret Bourke-White.
Old WPA photographs posted on social media, no matter the destitution pictured, tend to collect comments of the good old days when they loved and respected one another and, “You know those meals were made with love.”
Those meals were made with TB.
Who were these Dutch ancestors of mine who began in what would soon become New York and generations later are deep in the country’s interior in post-Civil War Missouri? They weren’t hillbillies who resided in the nooks and crannies of Ozarks, no, but they had a hard life. They did eventually gravitate down to the Springfield Plateau area of the Ozarks, but it was to the big city of Joplin.
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What are the first things I think about when I think about the Dutch? Painters. Most immediately, Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt, Hieronymus Bosch and William de Kooning. Oh, and Vincent Van Gogh. People who painted pictures that are now worth millions, if their worth can be calculated at all, and housed in big city museums. I have no relationship to any of these painters. Then I think of Swiss Miss instant chocolate powder, which has nothing to do with the Dutch, but has become confused with them by virtue of Dutch processed cocoa. As a child I would have said what I knew about the Dutch was Mary Mapes Dodge’s 1865 novel Hans Brinker, its plot being something something about a poor brother and sister who have wood skates and want better ones in order to compete in a speed-skating race, the grand prize of which is a pair of silver skates, and has in it also the story of “The Hero of Haarlem” about a little Dutch boy who sticks his finger in a hole in a dike, remains there throughout the night despite his nearly freezing, and saves his town from flooding. Some give Mapes’ grandmother as being Dutch, when instead she has Dutch heritage, her great-great-great grandparents, Sarah Orrest and Diedrich Areson, were born in Holland and died in New York. Close enough. As for “The Hero of Haarlem”, it was a story first published in England in 1850 and isn’t Dutch, but because American tourists in the Netherlands kept looking for the dike that the little Dutch boy saved, in 1950, in Spaarndem, Haarlem, a statue of the boy was erected that symbolized “the struggle of Holland against water”. Because of Hans Brinker, as a child I associated the Dutch with skates, believing they skated everywhere in winter, and I understood that they were low country and that dikes protected them from the sea. I associated them with wooden clogs, which are Dutch, at least the style associated with them, from the time of the thirteenth century the clogs protected their feet from wet, muddy terrain and sharp objects. I associated the Dutch with tulips and windmills because anything about the Netherlands (the country, of which Holland is a province, which I note as when I was a child I was confused about what was Holland and what was the Netherlands) was often accompanied by a picture of tulips or windmills. I’m right now looking at a vintage Valentine’s Day postcard for sale on Etsy that has a little Dutch Boy, holding tulips, sitting in a boat that is a large wooden clog shoe, a windmill in the background. Another vintage postcard shows a little Dutch girl standing before a windmill, wooden clogs on her feet and tulips in her arms. It reads, “You can have my tu-lips.” I was familiar with Dutch Boy paint, which is named for a Dutch process of producing high quality paint products, which involved lead, but the boy who represented Dutch Boy paints was Irish-American, and the federal government banned consumer use of lead-based paint in 1978.
The why of the prominence of Hans Brinker in my childhood education I can’t answer, but I know I was a little perplexed, even then, as to its relevance to my life in a part of America in which one didn’t see much snow and there was no skating to school as the waters didn’t ice over. The Disney movie Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates came out in 1962 which must have popularized the story, which taught me, and millions of other children, that if we were ever passing by a dike and saw a hole in it that we too could stick our finger in the hole and wait through the freezing night for help to come and be heroic saviors of a town.
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Jan Vigne, a husband of my ninth great-grandmother, was the first white European male born in the New Netherlands in either 1624 or 1625, the line descending through Huytes and Vigne to Andries, two generations of Konigs, then five generations of Brewers who had initially come over as part of the Dutch West India Colony in 1630. But Jan Vigne’s a step relation, how about something closer. Sarah Rapalje, my tenth great-grandaunt, whose father was a Walloon Calvinist, an illiterate textile worker, and a Brooklyn magistrate after whom a street was named. She was the first white European female born in New Netherland in June 1625, my line from her sister, Janette, going from Rapelje to Vanderbeek, Vanderbilt, four generations of Van Cleaves, and Catherine Hedden who married Daniel L. Brewer, great-grandson of the aforementioned Brewer who had married Maria Koning and been the sole individual from his family to depart New Jersey for Kentucky. Daniel L. Brewer was descended from Adam Brouwer, a soldier, born in 1620 in Germany, but his forebears were Dutch, buried in the Flatbush Reformed Dutch Church Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, in 1692. His wife was Magdalena Jacobs Verdon, born in 1627 in Amsterdam, she was buried in the same cemetery as her husband in 1698. The English had already seized the New Netherlands in 1664, and I don’t know how my ancestors felt about coming under British rule but they didn’t return to Europe. Maybe they couldn’t afford to go home. Maybe they considered themselves already “of” the North American continent.
There are estimated to be a million descendants of Sarah Rapalje, for which reason she and her husband have been dubbed the Adam and Eve of Manhattan, and while they and the descendants of her siblings couldn’t all stay in what began as the New Netherlands, I question my family’s choices that took them away from the future home of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art and ultimately to the Springfield Plateau of the Ozarks where culture is the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri, as the number one attraction, its own Sistine Chapel, inspiration said to be drawn from Michelangelo, in which paintings of cartoon three-year-olds enacting Biblical scenes cover the walls, cartoon cherubs flit about the blue sky ceiling, and the grand “Hallelujah Square” welcomes little ones to heaven. Sam Butcher’s evangelical art is intended to be a child’s view of heaven, but photos of tourists tend to excited middle-aged women who are likely to have the money to drop on Precious Moments figures in the gift shop. I assume this line of Dutch had started their move out west as they had reached a critical point of failure to make a living where they were. About 1772 they were still in New Jersey, by about 1774 they were in Pennsylvania, perhaps by 1784 they were in Mercer, Kentucky, where they spent two generations west of Appalachia, by 1821 they were in Putnam, Indiana, where again they stayed for two generations, by 1867 they were in Kansas, then would move across the border into Missouri.
Amongst the Golden Age Dutch artists, is Karel Dujardkin. One of his paintings, from about 1663, a generation or two after my Dutch had stepped off the boat in New Amsterdam, presents an allegory that was popular with Dutch and French painters, the subject being “homo bulla”, man as a bubble, on the transitory, delicate nature of life. These paintings are often accompanied by a skull, a memento mori. Karel's instead depicts the transitory child as reminiscent of the birth of Venus, riding on a sea shell, standing upon a wealth of pearls and coral, but rather than the shell afloat in
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a placid sea it is one embroiled by a tempest, the sky dark with storm clouds, but the child is oblivious to the turmoil, captivated by his bubbles. Though the child’s expression is blithe, it’s by no means a sentimental, saccharine painting, and when one sits to seriously reflect upon it, the anticipated meaning has a way of flipping and flipping again, escaping a pat assessment. There is nothing philosophically or artistically that begins to relate this transitory child to the Precious Moments children. Appreciators of the Precious Moments children would likely walk by this homo bulla without so much of a nod of appreciation for the child blowing bubbles as a tempest threatens.
With the children of Daniel L. Brewer and Catherine Hedden, who wed in 1843 in Putnam, Indiana, something went wrong because almost all of them married atypically young. Daniel L. Brewer, who was doing reasonably well financially in Putnam in 1860, died in April 1868 in Neosho County, Kansas. His yoke of oxen reportedly dragged him to his death. The year their eldest daughter Sarah married is unknown but it was before 1869 when she had her first child at about twenty-six, at least her first known child. Her marriage was atypical in that she married a man who was thirty-five years her elder, which suggests to me this may have been marriage that brought security not only for her but her family. Daniel L. and Catherine’s daughter Rachel Brewer had married at fourteen, in 1866, two years before her father’s death, to a man named Henderson who was twenty-two. Son James D. Brewer, before his father’s death, married in 1867, at the age of eighteen, to a girl named Amanda who was fifteen. These ages are according to their later claimed birth dates, but the marriage certificate states he was nineteen and she was fourteen. Their romance was a mixed-up story something something about how she was an orphan living with relatives in Kansas and was placed by her relatives in a convent in Missouri to break up their romance, but James D. stole her away and they married in Kansas City. A family history from 1976 puts it this way, “Somehow, she and James met and very much wanted to marry. However, she was an orphan and had been left with relatives. The family did not want her to marry James, so she was placed in a Catholic convent somewhere in Missouri. There, they were mean to her, and she was unhappy. The daring James stole her away, and then went to Kansas City to get married September 17, 1864. They lived happily…” One day it may be proved that Amanda was placed in a convent, but my research shows they weren’t married in Kansas City, they were instead married in Catholic Mission, Neosho, Kansas, 17 September 1867, and one wonders if the place of Catholic Mission, so named because it was the place of the Catholic mission to the Osage Indians, has made for confusion with the tale, plus in 1870 a sixteen-year-old who is likely her brother is living with Catherine’s eldest above-mentioned daughter Sarah and her sixty-one-year-old husband. Daughter Matilda Brewer had just turned thirteen when she married in February 1869 to a man who was twenty-three, a brother of the Henderson who had married Matilda’s sister Rachel in 1866 when she was fourteen. She would have a child at thirteen, another at sixteen and would die at eighteen. Catherine’s son, David Brewer, my line, married in March 1869 at the age of eighteen to Delana Fowler, who was fourteen. She would have her first child at fifteen. A history published in 1874 gave Delana’s maternal grandfather as having died in 1837 “when he was killed by an ox he was attempting to
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hitch up to a wagon”. I don’t know if this makes suspect the story of Daniel L. being killed by oxen running off with him, if the story became confused and misattributed to Daniel L, or maybe oxen really did cause the deaths of both men. The widowed mother, Catherine Hedden Brewer, remarried on 25 December 1869 to a John Foster, and their house had no Brewer children in it at all in the 1870 census because by now all the Brewer children were married, there were only Foster children in it, ages twenty-two, twenty-one, seventeen, fifteen, thirteen, and nine. By 1874, David N. Brewer and his wife Delana would be in Barton County, Missouri, then would move further east into Dade County, Missouri.
When the first wife of James D. Brewer died in 1882, the one who had been placed supposedly in a convent and from which her paramour had rescued her, you know, the couple who “lived happily”, the newspaper did a relatively rare thing, publicly shaming her husband. They printed, “A woman named Mrs. Brewer, died yesterday morning at her home east of town, of puerperal fever. Her neighbors and those who visited her during her illness, made the grave charge against her husband that he abused her shamefully, and willfully neglected her. A little scorching is about the only punishment that will fit the case of a man who will treat a woman as it is said he treated his wife.“ If she died of puerperal fever, this means she’d had a child who also died, their birth and death not recorded anywhere that I find. I already thought it odd family lore had them as living “happily” together, because most pioneer accounts state people worked hard, built a life, had children, if the husband or wife dies the partner is simply given as remarrying, because they most often did remarry, there is typically nothing about happiness in a marital life. And then it turns out that the newspaper publicly shamed him for his abuse and neglect of his wife, such that the impression is given that had she been given proper care she would have lived. But what this also means is there was a break in the broader safety net of the family, for James D.’s sister, Rachel, with her husband and children and mother-in-law, were living three census households away, and beside them was the family of sibling Matilda who had died and her husband had remarried. Matilda had married at thirteen, and Rachel at fourteen. Did the surviving Rachel simply lack any agency? Or was she one of the “neighbors” mentioned in the paper who accused James of abusing his wife, but for some reason was unable to step in and help. Two years after his wife’s death, James D. Brewer again married to a girl of fifteen, nineteen years his junior. Her father was Dutch, born in Holland.
Whereas the siblings of Daniel L. Brewer, all of whom remained in Indiana while he made for Kansas, were for the most part doing better than him financially, and were doing very well in 1870, possessing real estate and personal estate in the thousands of dollars, almost all Daniel L. Brewer’s children in 1870, after his death, had no real estate and their personal estate values were each $250. I don’t know if the same can be said for David N. Brewer, down my line, as he escaped the 1870 census though he was still supposedly in Neosho. Whatever happened that motivated Daniel L. and Catherine’s children to marry at such young ages, and left them without much money, I don’t know. Catherine and her second husband in 1870 are given as having no real estate either and only $200 in personal estate, so it seems she’d not married for
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financial security. In 1860 her father, back in Indiana, had real estate worth $4900 and a personal estate of $700. When he died in 1861 he left $50 to Catherine to be paid when his youngest son turned twenty-one, which would not be until 1875, as after the death of his first wife he married again and had a second family, so that Catherine’s youngest step-sibling was thirty years her junior. As for Daniel L. Brewer, who died in 1868, his father wouldn’t die until 1881.
Let’s skip some years to 1940.
In 1940 the average income was $1368 but the unemployment rate in the 1930s was eighteen percent after Wall Street crashed in 1929.
In my direct line, Elizabeth, daughter of David N. Brewer and Delana, had lucked out when she married Ray Noyes. They did well.
Elizabeth’s youngest brother, Walter, living in Barton, Missouri, made $350 a year in the 1940 census and was working on a WPA project. He had completed eighth grade.
Her youngest sister, Jessie, was living in Selah, Yakima, Washington, dying there in 1981. In 1940 her husband made $180 as a laborer on a farm in Yakima. She had completed fifth grade while her husband had completed sixth. Yakima isn’t too far from Richland and yet I never knew my grand-aunt was living in Yakima, though she was still alive when we were in Richland. They never visited us and we didn’t visit them but certainly when my father’s parents visited us in Richland when I was two they would have gone to see Jessie, my father's mother would have wanted to stop in and see her aunt. Six months earlier, Jessie had spent a month in Missouri visiting Elizabeth (called Betty) and other relatives.
At the age of twenty-four, Elizabeth’s younger sibling, Alva, drowned in 1909 in the Sac River in Missouri. He was with their younger brother, Walter, and must have underestimated the depth of the flooded river when attempting to cross at Kimbler Ford in a wagon. He had initially swum with Walter to safety, then went back out into the river to try to save his team of horses but was swept away before reaching them. The horses saved themselves, emerging on a bank a hundred yards below the ford. I don't know if every time the family thereafter looked at the horses they thought of how Alva was drowned attempting to rescue them yet they survived. I don't know if they were relieved or bitter that the horses survived.
Elmer, a brother two years older than Alva, died at the age of twenty-nine. A news report states he had varnished his gun, put it under the bed, then when he later took the gun out from under the bed it went off and the thigh of his left leg was torn to pieces. Elmer’s daughter, Ruby, died at the age of nine in 1918 from the influenza epidemic. Another daughter, Nora, died in the same year, at fourteen, of tuberculosis.
A younger brother, Lewis, had died in 1932, so I don’t know his education level either, just as I don’t know the education level of anyone who died prior 1940. His one son had received an eighth-grade education, as had Lewis’ wife.
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An older brother, Daniel, had died in 1938. His wife had received an eighth grade education. His eldest son had a fifth grade education while his youngest had an eighth grade education.
Her eldest sister, Mary, had received a sixth-grade education.
Elizabeth had received an eighth-grade education, as had her husband.
My Elizabeth Brewer Noyes’ eldest sibling was John D. Brewer, who was still alive in 1940. The census shows he had completed a third grade education in school, and his wife had completed a second-grade education. Farmers, they aren’t given as working or having income in 1940, so I’m going to look at his children instead and how they were then faring. The names, income and grade levels of each of these individuals may strike as superfluous labor to read through, but it’s context for a Hollywood Cinderella story in their midst.
Amongst the twelve children of John D., from eldest to youngest:
Addie’s husband, in 1940, made $1200 a year as a red lead smelter. She had completed sixth grade, he had completed seventh.
Maude’s husband, John, had no income in 1940. She had completed a fifth-grade education, he was given as having had no schooling at all.
Albert, who had completed eighth grade, made $904 a year as a painter in construction. He and his family were out in Los Angeles and his daughter, Virginia Elizabeth “Betty” Brewer, was in the movies.
Flora had died in 1939 so I don’t know what schooling she had. Her husband, Ernest, in 1940, was making $1250 a year working in a warehouse, and had completed his first year of high school.
Daisy had died in 1929 but her husband, Daniel, was making $200 a year as a WPA laborer, having completed seventh grade.
Ralph, who had completed eighth grade, was making $2100 a year as a railroad lineman.
Lewis, who had completed seventh grade, was making $940 a year as a teamster. By 1948 he was a taxi driver and was living in Springfield, while his ex-wife, who had completed third grade, worked in a cigar factory in Joplin. At about 7:30 a.m., 15 January 1948, shortly after his ex-wife left for work, a fire started around a flue from a coal heating stove in her home and an eleven-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son were burned to death. Their other child, ten years of age, survived. He had spent the night with a friend, returned home to see his two siblings asleep, and had gone next door to the house of an older married step-sibling who was also not at home. I know all of this from news reports in which a news photographer captured his misery and confusion as he stood outside the burned hull of his home which looks little more than a shack. He said, “They were both in the bedroom when I came home. I went to
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my sister’s house to look for a wheel. When I came home the house was on fire. I tried to get in through a door but couldn’t. I hollered to them to come out.” His brother had stumbled into the living room and was found by firemen within three feet of the front door. The sister was found in her bed. A month before the fire, in December of 1947, a divorce had been granted Lewis who had been separated from his wife since 1942, he had pled that she had lost interest in the marriage and had been drinking and visiting nightclubs with other men. In 1950 Lewis’ ex-wife, living with their surviving son, gave herself as widowed in the census. Lewis was living but had been already moving on to another marriage when the fire occurred, having applied for a marriage license in Springfield in December of 1947.
Wilma and her husband, who had been farmers in 1930, in 1940 reported no income or employment. She had completed eighth grade and her husband had completed three years in high school.
John E., who had completed fifth grade, reported no income or job.
Elizabeth (it gets confusing when names are often repeated in a family, but this Elizabeth was niece of my Elizabeth) had married an Edgar who made $330 a year in concrete construction in 1940. They were given as both having completed eighth grade.
Lelia married Ira who made $600 as a glazier. She had completed sixth grade while he was given as having completed 11+.
Those are the children of John D., cousins of my father’s mother, and that is how they were doing in 1940.
In 1940, the median number of years of school completed by individuals over the age of 25 was 8.4., which was elementary school plus one year of high school, only twenty-five percent having completed high school. Four of the ten living children of John David’s had less schooling than eighth grade, which was the highest grade any of them completed, none having gone on to high school. Some of them were doing okay for themselves but others were not. I don’t know if those who had a little more were able to help those with less.
Albert, the one who lived in Los Angeles, was working as a painter for the Paramount movie studio, because he had children who were contracted as actors with Paramount. He had four children living in 1940, the eldest who had married and was out of the household, and three children still at home, Virginia Elizabeth “Betty” Brewer and her sister Ilene and young brother Monte. A news photo from 1937 shows Betty and Ilene singing into a big NBC microphone, which was promo for Sacramento, California’s KPBK radio station’s President’s Birthday Ball at which they would be performing that night. Betty made it into several Hollywood films, and Ilene had bit parts in a couple. The Cinderella story for Betty, the one who was vigorously promoted, was that they had been on relief in Missouri, and a la The Grapes of Wrath had moved to California in their “flivver” with the hope of better times. Some entertainment columnists or reviewers seemed cautious when relating her story, maybe primed to be because Betty was being sold as thirteen and yet she was weirdly mature, almost obstinately not adolescent, a sharp self-promoter, concerned with
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conserving money, portrayed as the one who handled the family’s finances. Despite her petite size, perhaps they sensed she was older than thirteen and were thus suspicious about the family’s story. Was it also not to be trusted? But the family had suffered hard times. Their father had been a lead miner with EaglePicher and Betty reported he had become unable to work on average one week out of five due ill health from his job. The girls were talented blues singers, and by the age of thirteen Betty had her own daily fifteen-minute long radio show in Joplin, Missouri. Born in 1923, at the age of fifteen, she had already been the breadwinner for the family for a year or so, singing “blues”. Small, less than five feet tall as an adult, she was consistently represented in the PR as younger than she was, a 1940 article giving her as thirteen and two years older than her sister, Ilene, who was actually five years younger than Betty, born in 1928. After the move to California, they were living in a backyard “shack”, their consistent diet being spuds and beans, when Betty was reportedly discovered singing hillbilly style for change with her sister and brother outside the famous Brown Derby restaurant frequented by movie stars, which is the story most often given, but another states they were discovered after performing at a Governor’s ball, not the President’s Ball as that was in 1937. Another PR story is that the children were discovered when they showed up in shabby attire at the Paramount switchboard, Betty asked how one got into the movies, then they launched into song as director Sam Wood wandered by. Three stories and you get to choose which is your favorite discovery door.
The three children first appeared in the 1940 Gene Autry movie, Rancho Grande. At the film’s opening, seated in a hay wagon, they do a lovely job serenading the movie’s audience with a Spanish song as Gene comes strolling up. They even have a little dialogue. Supposedly Latino, their faces are obviously made up to be slightly darker than their normal complexions, and Betty does a bad job of speaking broken English, while her young brother speaks perfect Missouri English and does a bad job speaking Spanish. Betty’s next big film was a featured role in Sam Wood’s 1940 Rangers of Fortune, starring Fred MacMurray. Betty does more than play a little girl with pluck, she’s surprisingly good in what was a demanding role, given the palette of emotions she must represent, and she supplies her character depth and immediacy, so when she’s astonishingly murdered toward the film's end you care and wonder why the portrayal of her death is so toned down that it becomes an anti-climax, perhaps to keep it from overwhelming the film and upstaging the adult stars though it is a major plot point. She appeared in the 1941 Western The Round Up, and was in the 1942 Wild Bill Hickok Rides as a young Calamity Jane. A publicity shot in the paper shows her with her sister, Ilene, who is her stand-in, Betty given as fourteen and Ilene as thirteen, though Betty would now be eighteen. Her next notable appearance was in the 1942 movie Juke Girl, which features Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan. The plot concerns the trials and tribulations of migrant workers, of which she’s one, her family living in a tent city. Her role is minor, but she’s on her way to being a good character actor, depicted as a youth of indeterminate age due her maturity yet diminutive stature. The film was released in May of 1942. Her brother Monte had died only a month beforehand, at ten years of age, causes variously given as appendicitis and food poisoning. She’d already had a brother die when she was two, and another when she was eleven, both of pneumonia. After Monte’s death, her career nosedives rather
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than getting a boost from Juke Girl. Her next film role is uncredited, the 1942 film The Pride of the Yankees. She appears again that year in Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch then the 1943 film My Kingdom for a Cook. Her last film appearance was an embarrassing, uncredited turn in Charles Vidor’s 1944 Cover Girl, which features Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly. As part of a bunch of teenyboppers she briefly rushes on screen to beg Gene for an autograph and that’s that. She doesn’t fit in with the teenagers, and other than tossing out one feeble, bitter line she has nothing to do so one wonders why she’s even on screen. To my knowledge, it’s the last we see of Betty in films. A 1944 article gave her age as twenty-one, which means she’d been allowed to grow up, perhaps had insisted on it. A September 1945 Hedda Hopper article mentions her, the girl who “took eight members of her family off relief”, being tested for a contract at Universal. The next and about the last I know of her is that her first marriage was in October of 1945.
Going too fast on a rain-slick Highway 101, the father, Albert Brewer, was killed in a single car crash in 1946, his car wrapping around a pole.
The New York Times had loved her in Rangers of Fortune and said she was on her way. Ilene, who appeared in the 1941 Riders of the Badlands, and had a nice but very small role in Sam Wood’s The Devil and Miss Jones as the child who is uncooperative when being fit with a pair of shoes, was written up in 1941 as having obtained a long-term contract with RKO, then we hear nothing else about her. What happened with Ilene and Betty? I don’t know. They each had great screen presence that caught the camera.
An early article about Betty, in which she was given as having a seven year contract with Paramount, stated she had a problem. That problem? The Paramount teacher traveling with Betty on her PR tour East said, “She has what it takes to make good in anything she may undertake. Her main weakness is her distrust of how long her luck is going to last. She can’t be convinced she’s really good. I guess she has a little inferiority complex to outgrow.” Betty remarked, “In Hollywood they like you one day, forget you the next. I’m grateful, but I’m not going to get too excited or spend my money thinking it’ll keep coming.”
Betty commented in another article that she knew she wasn’t beautiful, she felt she looked like Pinocchio. And she was, weirdly, sold as ugly but a fantastic actress. It’s beyond odd, even cruel how the newspapers kept pushing her as unattractive but talented, because she’s far from ugly in her PR shots and on screen. She wasn't going to be cover girl hot or sexy glamorous. But she was a pretty girl who was selling herself as fit her roles, country, capable, smart. She was genially sly in sensing and manipulating soft touches who would help her needy family in Juke Girl, a film in which she was permitted to begin to flirt with womanhood. So what happened? Was she simply unable to make the leap from child star to adult roles? Did something crack in the family that undermined her with the death of Monte? Did she have too much rough back story she couldn’t personally overcome? Did her so-called inferiority complex push her out of Hollywood? Or did she ultimately decide she didn’t like Hollywood?
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In their hometown of Joplin, Missouri, an article in August of 1940 gave Betty as thirteen and her younger sister as fifteen, which seems a little odd that even in a place where they had relatives, friends, acquaintances, Betty would be made no younger than Ilene. A piece on Betty also appeared in the Ponca City newspapers, where my grandmother was living when Betty’s movies came out. My grandmother, who bragged she was the best dressed in the county, was first cousin of Betty’s father, whose family had been on relief and living in shacks, then their children made it into the movies. You know my grandmother had to have been paying attention. I must have heard a little about Betty when I was living with my grandparents, but it wasn’t much more than a sentence or two, because when initially contacted by a closer relation of Betty’s with a bit of her history, I wasn’t surprised. A vague memory seemed had of standing in my grandparents’ living room and hearing of the “cousins” who went to Hollywood. But they weren’t talked up. They weren’t boosted as talented individuals who had found success for a time. In fact, I never met any of the Brewer relatives though they would have been in close proximity, but I never met any relations on my grandmother’s side of the family except one of her sisters, though she had a brother living in the area when I was ten, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s there were nearby a number of nieces and nephews and cousins of varying degrees.
In 1940, I would imagine my grandmother was in the theater in Ponca City noting any bit of a family resemblance between herself and Betty and how that shared inheritance read on the big screen, a part of the family writ large from coast to coast, considering how did Betty’s plucky country girl and the PR likening Betty’s family to Grapes of Wrath reflect on them. Was my grandmother jealous? Was she offended that the story was nationwide news that her impoverished cousin had been on relief?
Betty, who I think was pretty (this is not a personal familial prejudice, I never thought of my grandmother Noyes as pretty), had features that could perhaps be described as emphatic, but to me they fit well together. The Dutch side must have been strong in her as from certain angles she calls to mind one of the women depicted in Vincent Van Gogh’s "The Potato Eaters". The features of the individuals in Van Gogh’s painting seem exaggerated, so much so as to be almost caricatured, yet they were not being caricatured, they were people Van Gogh admired and his intention was to paint them sympathetically. A Wikipedia article relates that Van Gogh wanted to “depict peasants as they really were. He deliberately chose coarse and ugly models, thinking that they would be natural and unspoiled in his finished work”. This take on Van Gogh’s art uses as its source Letter 497 from Vincent to his brother Theo, written 30 April 1885. But that isn’t what Van Gogh said in his letter. He instead said, “You see, I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour and—that they have honestly earned their food. I wanted it to give the idea of a wholly different way of life from ours—civilized people. So I certainly don’t want everyone just to admire it or approve of it without knowing why…And it might well prove to be a real peasant painting. I know that it is. But anyone who would rather see insipidly pretty peasants can go ahead. For my part, I’m convinced that in the long run it produces better results to paint them in their coarseness than to introduce conventional sweetness. A
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peasant girl is more beautiful than a lady—to my mind—in her dusty and patched blue shirt and jacket, which have acquired the most delicate nuances from weather, wind and sun. But—if she puts—a lady’s costume on, then the genuineness is lost. A peasant in his suit of fustian in his fields is finer than when he goes to church on Sundays in a sort of gentleman’s coat. And likewise, one would be wrong, to my mind, to give a peasant painting a certain conventional smoothness. If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam—fine—that’s not unhealthy—if a stable smells of manure—very well, that’s what a stable’s for—if the field has an odour of ripe wheat or potatoes or—of guano and manure—that’s really healthy—particularly for city folk. They get something useful out of paintings like this. But a peasant painting mustn’t become perfumed. I’m curious as to whether you’ll find anything in it that you like—I hope so. I’m glad that now, just as Mr. Portier has said he wants to handle my work, I for my part have something more important than studies alone. As to Durand-Ruel—although he didn’t think the drawings worthwhile, show him this painting. He may think it ugly—very well—but let him see it anyway—so that they may see that we’re putting energy into our endeavours. However, you’ll hear—‘what a daub!’; be prepared for that as I’m prepared myself. But nonetheless to on giving something genuine and honest. Painting peasant life is a serious thing, and I for one would blame myself if I didn’t try to make paintings such that they give people who think seriously about art and about life serious things to think about…No—one must paint the peasants as if one were one of them, as feeling, thinking as they do themselves. As not being able to be other than one is. I so often think that the peasants are a world in themselves, so much better in many respects than the civilized world…”
Van Gogh doesn’t say he is deliberately painting ugly models. Van Gogh is choosing not to go the Precious Moments route, the sentimentalized kitsch art route, to dress his peasants in finer clothes, to place them in an idealized environment, to erase the intensity of their labor, to make them fake so that the “civilized” world, far removed from them by privilege, may be comforted by a distorted and picturesque representation of peasantry. Van Gogh doesn’t state they are ugly, he says that Durand-Ruel may think his paintings ugly, but Van Gogh has respect for the individuals he is painting, respect for them as people who have been stamped with the rigors of the lives they lead. What he leaves out, in his ambition to be close to them, is that while impoverishment shouldn’t be seen as debasing, it doesn’t sanctify and elevate either. Hardship, poverty, illness, and want of education are not desirable. Betty’s father shouldn’t have been made ill and incapable of work by his job in the lead mine. Her young cousins shouldn’t have died in a fire (I was never told about this) that began one cold Thursday morning in January after their mother had left for work in a cigar factory. I’m not laying blame on anyone, instead my thoughts are on the anguish of need and the realities of the hard and desperate losses it incurs. Bad luck, illness, tragedy, and family dysfunction don’t belong to any single class, but when one hasn’t money and doesn’t have a safety net, it’s impossible to cope in the moment as a catastrophe unfolds, and not only is there nothing left upon which to rebuild lives after a disaster, when one doesn’t have much it doesn’t take much to be knocked down and out. Resilience is not an inexhaustible commodity, and though multiple generations of a family may not be necessarily, unilaterally impacted, resources, as they become available, are going to be dedicated to some that may not be available to
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others. Financially, emotionally, psychically, a family may be able to support the dreams of certain children, but at the expense of others, and while some may acknowledge this others may prefer to fault or praise destiny or the individual.
4
So, as I’ve said, my great-grandmother, Brewer, did quite well marrying my great-grandfather, a Noyes. They had a nice large farmhouse. My grandmother boasted she not only had the nicest clothes in the county, if she was to be believed they were the first in their area to have electric light installed in their homes, which would have been courtesy of J. F. Curl and E. A. Wilson who established the first electric light works in Liberal in 1909, and it was this conversation on electric lighting during which I also first learned that before electric homes were lit with gas lamps. I believe that old home still stands, passed down through a sibling of my grandmother, but I don’t know where it is and was never taken by it. As for whether my grandmother had the nicest clothes, she may have, but I came across a social media thread in which people chatted back and forth about whether or not Granny Noyes, my grandmother’s sister-in-law, would feed her chickens while wearing one of her mink coats, then someone clarified she had two full-length mink coats and it was the old one she used for feeding the chickens, and everyone spoke of her lovingly and how she was a wonderful seamstress who designed beautiful clothes and looked glamorous in an old Hollywood way. From what I gathered of my grandmother she prized her nice ready-made clothing. A relation once sent me a digital photo file of what she believed was an elderly James Noyes (my grandmother’s grandfather) in the seat of a sparkling brand new car and she’d been told he was the first to own a car in Liberal. I have since lost that photo because I didn’t rename it to something sensible to find and didn’t put it in an appropriate folder, my fault. Well, no, I just now did an intensive search and found that photo, which was taken in front of a barber’s and a millinery shop in Liberal, and I can identify it instead as Orrin Harmon, a son-in-law of James, who lived in Washington State for a number of years then returned to Liberal about 1897.
My great-great grandfather, James Noyes Jr., had farmed strawberries. Fruit farming was very popular with progressives of the time. He was also a freethinker, a free-lover and his birth family had been Fourier socialists. The socialism didn’t pass down beyond the generation of my great-great-grandfather, except maybe for Orrin, he may have been a socialist. From what I gather, my great-grandparents were purely capitalists. As far as I can foresee, I’m done talking about the Dutch. I’m moving on to the socialists and free-lovers, who descended from old New England stock. Y’know, like as in Massachusetts Puritan witch hunters. They were agnostics yet spiritualists and I think they had a fair amount of guilt hanging over their heads due the lynchings of witches.
In December of 2018, I made the following described art work as part of a series I was working on at the time. In nearly every piece of art of the series I had employed some form of geometric background, usually a checkerboard pattern, and in the bottom left
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corner of the painting had placed the representation of a television screen-monitor with an image in it from a movie. In nearly all I had painted also a nude female in a pose intended to be perceived as non-erotic and positioned outside the typical sexualizing gaze.
The image I captured from Jacques Demy’s 1970 film, Donkey Skin, and placed in the television set in this particular work of art, was from a scene in which a prince, after a dialogue on the function of unseen fairies as motivating forces, goes on a walk in the forest and encounters a rose that both sees and speaks. When asked by the rose what he seeks, the prince states "to discover, to understand", and the rose sets him on the path of love, guided by trust. In the forest, he then comes upon a house in which a princess is hiding from her father who had intended to marry her. Himself. How’s that for scary, though it’s not treated as scary and awkward, the princess, played by Catherine Deneuve, just doesn’t want this to happen, but no one talks about how the king is insane. The source of the king’s wealth was a donkey that excretes jewels. On the advice of a fairy, in order to escape her father, the princess has had the donkey flayed and run off to take refuge in the forest of the kingdom of another, where, in public, she goes in the disguise of the donkey’s skin, so that she is perceived as hideous and unclean, unfit even to get a glimpse of that kingdom’s prince, but she had managed to do so when he was previously passing through the wood. In her home, she appears as a princess and uses a mirror as a medium. Having climbed a ladder to look through an upper window, the prince sees her but is unaware that she has also seen him. In fact, she has been waiting for him as the agent that will release her from the ordeal of the donkey skin through their falling in love.
The tale is a peculiar one, even difficult. That the king desired to marry his own daughter was in early versions of this tale predating the 1695 Charles Perrault version, and is a predicament in other tales of this type. Contemporary reworkings attempt to soften the story by changing it so the king wants to marry an adopted daughter, which remains a desperate and terrifying situation for the princess as an adopted daughter is still a daughter. Demy—who was married to director Agnes Varda—sticks with the earlier version, but also has Donkey Skin partly a satire on fairy tales, and adds modern touches that befuddle and vanquish the boundaries of eras (there are castles, there is a helicopter), while still honoring such original peculiar mysteries as a donkey that defecates the jewels that have made the king rich, which fits old alchemical formulas and the putrefaction as essential for the production of gold or the Great Work. The king is played by Jean Marais, who starred as the beast-prince in Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast, which was a beautiful and straightforward relation of the fairy tale, the beast transforming into a prince at the end.
In Donkey Skin, the Lilac Fairy, played by Delphine Seyrig, had first instructed the princess, in order to delay her marriage to her father, to demand precious gowns of near-impossible attributes. She wouldn’t marry him unless he fulfilled these conditions. When he did supply her the gowns, the princess was told to demand from her father the skin of the magical donkey that was the source of his wealth, which she then used to conceal her identity, finding refuge in another kingdom. Her cottage magically capturing the prince’s notice, when he climbs the ladder and gazes through the window into her forest home, one is reminded of a scene in Beauty and the Beast in which Jean Marais, who also played a thief in that film, Avenant, has followed Beauty back to the castle of the Beast with the intent of stealing the Beast’s riches. Avenant climbs onto the glass roof of the Beast's treasure room where he peers into the sparkling glory of the treasury. Then, as he breaks the glass and enters, a guardian
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statue of Diana draws an arrow and shoots, killing him. At the moment of the handsome Avenant’s death, he transforms into the Beast, and the Beast, who has been dying because Beauty had broken a promise to return to him at a set time after a visit with her family, transforms into the handsome Prince Ardant, who is a royal version of Avenant. Deneuve, like the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, must win the heart of the prince despite her not living as a princess, and in this scene becomes as Diana in the Cocteau film. The prince peering down at her through the window, she flashes a mirror she holds so that the light off it strikes the prince's eyes, briefly blinding him. In effect, she slays the prince by transfixing him with the spell of love that transforms and renews him. In myth, all who even accidentally spied the goddess Diana nude in her bath were struck blind. It is not so much a penance but a mystical relation of the transformative power of attaining the heart of the mysteries, Salome unveiled, and the price exacted.
This guiding rose from Donkey Skin, at the heart of which is an eye, I’d placed in the television screen in the lower left corner of the painting. The female figure was in the center of the canvas, facing the viewer, her hand raised as in an impromptu gesture that might cause the viewer to question her action. In the upper right corner, I elected to include the geometrical figure of what amounted to a circle within a square, the circle bisected by a vertical line and further dissected into triangles by partly transparent diamond shapes overlaid, the coloring done so it resembled a stained glass window. I wasn't sure why I put it there, as I didn't find it very pleasing, or even sensible. It just belonged.
Down my paternal grandmother’s side of the family, through her father, I am descended from individuals who were involved in the Alphadelphia Association, a Fourier socialist phalanx that was operative several years in Kalamazoo, Michigan, an ancestor being its last president in the 1840s. His son, my grandmother's grandfather, spent part of his youth at the Alphadelphia commune, after which he traveled to experience other communes, including the Fourier phalanx in LeGrange, Indiana, perhaps the Wisconsin Phalanx (Schetterly, an Alphadelphia founder, had also gone to both the LaGrange and Wisconsin phalanxes), the Oneida Community, and the Francis Barry "free love" community in Berlin Heights, Ohio (his name was on a convention notice), where he was said to have met my great-great grandmother, Caroline. They married, had a family, and when the first freethought town in America was founded, under the name of Liberal, in Barton County, Missouri, they moved there. They were freethinkers involved in spiritualism. Freethinkers tend to deny the presence of spiritualist beliefs in the freethought movement of the 1800s, or I should say that they tend to deny spiritualists were valid freethinkers. Charles Fourier, the designer of utopian socialism, was a wildly eccentric French philosopher. His more outrageous beliefs and the mystical aspects of his work were played down by his immediate followers, but something was perhaps being communicated that either attracted or produced mystic freethinkers, for there were spiritualists at Alphadelphia. The Berlin Heights community attracted spiritualists as well. Some believe that to be a freethinker means one must be an atheist, at least agnostic, purged of superstition and supernaturalism, what can’t be proven, and thus naturally contrary to spiritualism. But people are complex and can believe conflicting things, especially over a lifetime. Bertrand Russell’s definition of freethought accepts the natural
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ambiguities in how people actually think and live, and instead posits freethought is a manner of living, of self-examination that has presumably enabled one to make their own decisions rather than being automatically ruled by tradition and authoritarianism. No person, as he states, is completely free from tradition and their own passions. The pursuit of emancipated thought is a process.
The book, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in Victorian America, notes that, “If free-thought editors did not attract many scientists, they did attract some radicals by crusading for significant issues such as free speech, women’s rights, sex education, and, to some extent, radical political systems. The important element of Liberal Leaguers who defined liberalism in libertarian and anti-Comstockian terms attracted sex radicals to the cause and nurtured others who would become sex radicals. The movement’s anti-Christian, ‘scientific’ cast drew both spiritualists, who were intent upon empirically demonstrating the possibilities of the soul, and materialists, who were intent upon proving the absence of one. In the eighties, spiritualists made up one-quarter of the Truth Seeker’s readership; and according to Bennett’s successor, nine tenths of America’s spiritualists supported Bennett’s anti-Comstock effort.” The reason I’m including this is the clarification of how spiritualists defined themselves as freethinkers who leaned toward a possibility of proof of a soul. DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett’s Truth Seeker was committed to free speech, “science, morals, freethought and human happiness”, and opposed to dogmatic religion and puritanical obscenity laws. As far as spiritualists were concerned, they were freethinkers who believed that science would one day prove the existence of the soul, or would at least fail to disprove it.
What was the Liberal League? It was the National Liberal League founded in 1876, renamed the American Secular Union in 1885.
Anthony Comstock was a United States Postal Inspector, who did some good things like suppressing fraudulent banking schemes and mail swindles, but he was also an anti-vice activist who counted himself as tasked with protecting Christian morals, and classed as obscene any literature on abortion, contraception, the prevention of venereal disease, masturbation, prostitution, gambling, and patent (non-prescription) medicine. In 1873, the Comstock Laws were passed, which made it illegal to use the U.S. mail for distribution of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. The Free Love Movement was actively targeted. Family planning was targeted. Not only was pornography banned, but books such as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Voltaire’s Candide, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Over a span of forty years, Comstock prosecuted 3500 individuals, only ten percent of whom were found guilty, and destroyed 240,000 pounds of literature.
In September of 2020 I was contacted by a Fourier researcher because of a website on which I had material concerning my family and Alphadelphia. For twenty years I had attempted online to gather material on Alphadelphia, and research the involvement of other families, such as if they went on to other progressive communities, as had mine. This personal effort was both initiated and frustrated by the fact that knowledge of nineteenth-century socialism in America had been near erased by McCarthyism. As
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for the Fourier researcher who contacted me, I was asked a few questions and we had an occasional correspondence that had only to do with my family's involvement at Alphadelphia. Eventually I was invited to write a brief something of my own that would be published in their special issue for a Fourier studies journal. I realized, going through past issues of the journal, that it had material on the embrace of Fourier by Andre Breton and other surrealists, and that in 2006 the journal had published a piece written by an individual who was connected with a couple of surrealist friends of mine and had art shown in an exhibition staged by these two individuals. I liked this chance connection.
I deliberated on the essay for some months, which was supposed to have been prepared by June of 2022. Finally, I sat down to tackle it in earnest, then as I didn't know where to begin, I took a nap, had a dream that somewhat startled me, and determined that I would begin with that dream. Then, though I had written the essay, I didn't send it off, being in the thick of some stressful personal matters. As I missed the deadline, and didn't hear anything, I believed it was over and done with. Oh, well. I thought maybe I would put the piece up on my website. Then I was contacted in September of 2022 and asked if I'd prepared the text for the journal. I sent it. It was accepted and an invitation was offered for me to submit a piece of my art to go along with the text if I so desired.
It’s impossible for me to continue to discuss the art without relating the dream.
After several weeks, even months, of deliberation over what to write in the essay, I finally sat down to work on it, then instead took a nap, and dreamed that a family bible with a peculiar cover had appeared after many years, and upon its appearance my grandmother Noyes had dropped dead and I was looking at her face, her eyes wide open, framed in close-up as with a camera. This closely replicated a scene in a Danish television series I’d watched, called Rita, wherein a grandmother in an emotionally-complicated family system suddenly drops dead and is found by her granddaughter lying on her kitchen floor with her eyes open wide in astonishment. Only I didn't think of that woman in the television show in my dream, my grandmother instead looked like the lovely Delphine Seyrig as the Lilac fairy godmother in Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin, but she was instead Jeanne Dielman, also played by Delphine Seyrig, in Chantal Ackerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. In real life, my grandmother didn't at all ensemble Delphine Seyrig. However, like Jeanne Dielman, she was a person of routine, ruled by the clock and habit to the point of rigorous order. Ackerman’s work has deeply interested me not only for the rigidity expressed in the fictional Jeanne Dielman, but the trans-generational effects of trauma in Ackerman’s life and work, her mother having survived Auschwitz while her mother’s parents died there. My paternal grandmother, to my knowledge, never experienced any trauma in her life, but her father’s mother, Caroline, who married James Noyes Jr., had been profoundly affected by loss of her parents and two siblings in her youth, and her father’s father, James Noyes Jr., had lost most of his many siblings to illness when they were young, then also his mother. Both their lives had been profoundly shaped by death. My grandmother had a photo of her mother’s mother’s birth family, it would have been a
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daguerreotype made in the early 1840s, which I only saw once, and I could feel the disturbance and uncertainty connected with that image as she showed it to me, the sense of tragedy and mystery attached to it, and how this had filtered down and impacted her despite the fact both of her paternal grandparents had died before her birth. My grandmother had adult-onset diabetes and a way she attempted to come to terms with this was to stare at the face of her great-grandmother and try to divine in it if she had died of adult-onset diabetes, if in her was the genetic cause of her diabetes, though the record left by her grandparents was that her great-grandmother had died in 1843, at forty-one, a week after the birth of a child who would die three days later. It’s certain her death was childbirth-related.
With the invitation to submit a relevant photo, such as of my great-great-great-grandfather, James Noyes Sr., who had been an Alphadelphia Association president, or even a piece of art from my website, knowing that Andre Breton and other surrealists had been attracted to Fourier's utopianism, I wanted to do a piece of art, but I also felt restricted to having Alphadelphia as the subject, and felt that it should be. What to do? And I had just a few days to come up with something. Though I'd been excited about this, I became stuck and couldn't break through. Then I got the idea to use the dream I'd had, and to start with the above-related piece of art from 2018, in which I had already used the rose from the movie Donkey Skin. But now what to do with it? How to connect it to Alphadelphia?
I had been unaware until several months prior that Andre Breton had written Ode to Fourier, and I looked it up in the hope I might find something in the French for inspiration (a language of which I no longer have any grasp, though I pursued a double major of English Lit and French when in college and had done a long period of independent study in college translating French surrealist poetry). I also found art, by Frederick Kiesler, that had accompanied the Ode to Fourier publication. I reflected on these things but found in them no direction.
This is the process that followed. I took the one very small photo I had of my great-great-great-grandfather, one of the presidents of the Alphadelphia commune, and layered it over the digital painting in which I had the image from Donkey Skin, and playing with how I filtered it, I realized that it actually fit very well over the figure of the woman so it became a combination of male and female. That seemed nicely serendipitous, and I liked the blending of male and female as Fourierism was greatly concerned with the equality of the sexes. Now what? Google Maps hadn’t in the past shown territory near where Alphadelphia had been, but looking it up again I found it now showed a location near where the Alphadelphia communal mansion had been in Michigan, but how to incorporate this contemporary landscape.
I turned next to the what I call the "stained glass" portion of the original painting in the upper right corner. All the digital paintings in this set had a geometrical background of some type, but this was the only one in which I'd placed a figure such as I’ve already described. I found a high school photo of my grandmother online in which her hairstyle reminded me of Delphine's, a cross between the waves of the Lilac Fairy in Donkey Skin and the fluffier bob in Jeanne Dielman, and I placed it so it was a faintly discerned presence in the middle of the circle, the portrait solidifying a square
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around the circle. The stained glass window portion made sense for the first time. I knew, when I had done the original painting, that for some reason this geometrical section highlighting the circle in the square needed to be there, but I didn't know why. So I simply went with the feeling that it should be there. Now it had found its purpose and resolution.
Still not quite certain about the direction in which I was moving with this art for the Fourier piece, I did another search for writings on Breton's Ode to Fourier and this time I landed on art for it that I’d not seen previously. It was a geometric diagram, a grid on which were three figures, one of which was a circle in a square, divided into eight sections, which reminded me a lot of my digital painting which had a strong checkered background in which was set the “stained glass window" of the circle in a square of the window divided into six sections by an overlay of diamond shapes. There was such a strong resemblance someone might imagine I'd taken inspiration from that piece of Kiesler art, instead of this being pure happenstance that came of my placing that "stained glass window" in the original painting, uncertain why it belonged, then when I began to work on it as a Fourier-related image I had placed my grandmother's image in the circle in such a way that the borders had solidified a square around the circle.
Feeling confident now that I was moving in the right direction, the rest of the image quickly pulled itself together. Instead of focusing on land I switched to water and took a screengrab of the Kalamazoo river from Google Maps, an area right next to where the Alphadelphia mansion had been, put it under the woman's feet, and it fit well, she seeming as a giant standing astride the river with feet on either side of it. The dream had in it a family Bible, and what I had instead was a copy of my great-great-grandfather's record, in his hand, of family members and their birth and death dates, made when he was at the LaGrange phalanx in 1848. I took part of this and layered it in on top of the Kalamazoo River. I took the title from the cover page of the Alphadelphia Association Constitution and placed it in the upper left corner of the painting. Finally, I took the Kiesler geometric art that had accompanied the Ode to Fourier, reduced it in size, and placed it over a photo my great-great-great-grandfather was holding, the subject of which was impossible to discern except that it was of a couple of people.
When I was near done with the image, I realized what my subconscious had zeroed in on in selecting Delphine to represent my grandmother in the dream—other than the fact that Jeanne Dielman has always reminded me of my grandmother. Delphine = the delphia in Alphadelphia. Delphi was the site of an oracle of Apollo and may mean "fish with a womb". Located at a sacred spring, it was considered the center of the world, at least the world of the Greeks, its navel. As a fount of origin it was sensibly one of oracle as well.
At that time I was preparing for an upcoming Surrealistic "Undertakers and Underselves" Excavation and Mediumistic Communication Exhibit here, and this seemed a timely conjunction.
Charles Fourier, who was born in 1772 and died in 1837, credited with having been the
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godfather of socialism, had some wonderful ideas, he well understood the corruption in the free enterprise, capitalist system, how it relished impoverishment and was egregiously wasteful in its destruction of essential goods for sake of profit, how it destroyed the minds and bodies of laborers, how the upper classes fed upon and demanded the inequities of class. In his dream phalanxes, he wanted everyone to have beautiful environments in which they worked as they pleased, two or so hours a time at each job, several jobs a day, and everyone would have a universal basic income. He was also a fantasist and many of his ideas about reordering the world for utopia were suppressed by his advocates because they were too outrageous even for them. He felt he had produced a blueprint for the perfect society in which all people could perfectly follow and realize their passions—passion being what he felt ruled life—and assumed that behaviors would, like clockwork, because the passions were appeased, harmoniously collaborate and produce the common and personal good. He never lived in a phalanx and was never able to test his theories. He didn’t live to see if the salinity of the oceans, with a reengineering of the earth’s climate so the earth was temperate from pole to pole, would transform the salty oceans into a drinkable liquid that tasted like lemonade, which would kill off the ocean’s “vile sea monsters” but birth new “amphibious servants” that could be harnessed to pull ships and help in fisheries.
Imaginative.
He was French. He never traveled to America. It would have been pretty easy for Albert Brisbane, his acolyte on this side of the Atlantic, to only reveal in his publications those ideas of Fourier’s that weren’t delivered via fever dreams. Having studied Fourier’s ideas for two years in Paris, he didn’t publish his book, Social Destiny of Man, on Fourier’s plan for the reorganization of society, until 1840, three years after Fourier’s death, and didn’t start publishing his Fourierist journal, The Phalanx; or Journal of Social Science until 1843. But, man, news spread fast, didn’t it, for phalanxes to start opening across the northern states in 1844. Such as Alphadelphia. The early industrial revolution was scary. People wanted meaningful work for everyone, they found industrialization demeaning, saw it throwing people into miserable poverty, and they hoped to fight back and do better than that.
So, my great-great-great grandfather James Noyes was the last president of the communal phalanx of Alphadelphia in Michigan, which lasted only a few years. He had brought into the commune his sawmill, which was returned to him when the commune disbanded. He had ten children by his first wife, six of whom would survive to adulthood, then four of those dying as young adults, which left my great-great grandfather James Noyes Jr. and a sister. James Noyes Sr. married again, five months after his first wife died, and had seven more children, five of whom would survive to adulthood, three of those dying in young adulthood. The story passed down was that my great-great grandfather didn’t get along with his stepmother as she was not an abolitionist, which was a reason he left.
My great-great grandfather, James Jr., had been born in 1826. A sibling, James, born in 1821, died in 1823, before my great-great grandfather’s birth, and he became his namesake. Dan, born in 1831, died in 1835 at the age of three, when James was eight.
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Della, born in 1833, died in 1837 at the age of three, when James was ten. His mother died in 1838 when he was eleven. In 1841, when James was fourteen, his eldest brother, Ezra, born in 1817, died at the age of twenty-three. Another sibling, B. J., born in 1823, died in 1843 at the age of nineteen, when James was sixteen. Maryette, born in 1828, also died in 1843 at the age of fourteen. In 1850, when he was twenty-one, his eldest sister, Elizabeth, born in 1819, died at the age of thirty-one. His youngest full sibling, Sarah, born in 1836, lived to be one hundred.
James Jr. had experienced the deaths of six siblings by 1850, as well as his mother. He had only one surviving full sibling. That’s a lot of death. More than the normal family experienced. I have assumed most of the deaths were likely caused by malaria, because the area was rife with it, one account I’ve read said everyone had malaria.
The first meeting of the Alphadelphia Association was in 1844. It folded as a commune, in 1848. The last meeting, for the purpose of disposing of the books, was in 1857. As for Alphadelphia, their documents expressed a socialist desire for a situation in which all might be assured of food and home, meaningful employment, and a place in a community that invited and valued poets and artists, and intellectual and spiritual curiosity. A Universalist journal was published out of Alphadelphia, and the preaching there was mostly by Universalist ministers, though others preached as well, for their constitution held that the religious and political opinions of the members were to be unmolested and inviolate, also that no member should be compelled to support, in any way, “any religious worship”. There were 300 members at one point and according to one document perhaps even as many as 1800 (one could be a member and not live at the commune). As far as I’ve been able to determine, the majority seem to have been from New York. Perhaps the primary reason the commune failed was it was too popular too quickly, they were just starting out, they didn't have the necessary resources and didn't have the time to build them. Some people say instead that there were too many freeloaders but I have never heard it enter the discussion how sickness may have also been a cause, for I have read that malaria so severely impacted the area’s population, everyone impaired in their ability to work, that even ministers would need to schedule funerals around their ability to perform their duties with the "ague". The prevalence of malaria may have impaired a community that was intended to provide a supportive, protective social network for all its members. An example of that desire for such a network may be seen in how many joined the commune with their children after the death of a young spouse.
When they folded, they left a large community house that they’d built, called the mansion, which became the county poor house.
Fourier’s proposal for his utopia was that the sexual rule of the phalanxes be what would come to be called “free love”, marriage abolished, and homosexuality accepted. I don’t know if this was known at Alphadelphia or not, it wasn’t mentioned in their constitution, but Alphadelphia called itself an association, and the American phalanxes that distinguished themselves as associationists did so in order to distance themselves from what were considered some of Fourier’s more controversial non-economic writings, as with French Fourierists who had selected from his writings what benefited them while rejecting the rest. Fourier was an inspiration, rather than
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the master he presented himself as being in writings that can be uncomfortably egomaniacal. So while I don’t know Alphadelphia’s stance on free love, we do know that James Noyes Jr. was certainly associated with the free love community at Berlin Heights. His name appears in a call for a convention, in 1857, as one of the “undersigned” welcoming their “brother-socialists” from all parts of the country. The advertisement read, “Ourselves, who send you this greeting, appoint to meet in Convention, at Berlin Heights, Erie County, Ohio, on Saturday and Sunday, the 26th and 27th of September, inst., to plan what in us lies toward maturing a practical and successful effort at social reconstruction; and we hereby invite you to meet with us, to combine your wisdom and action with our own, that by as much as the union of endeavor is more wide spread and universal, the result may the more surely and speedily be reached. The Convention will be addressed by the best speakers on social science; and the whole great question of freedom, association, and harmonious human relations, will be up for discussion.”
As with James Jr., his wife, Carrie Atwell, came from a family shattered by death. Her mother had died when she was seven, as had a newborn sibling. Her father had died when she was fourteen. As an adult, she had only one member of her nuclear birth family remaining, a sister who married a dentist and had a millinery shop at No. 417 Shawmut Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. “Ladies’ Dress Caps. All styles, constantly on hand, and made to order. We shall also keep an assortment of cambric, silesia, crinoline, dressing braids, sewing silk, thread, and small wares.” The story passed down through the family was that after the deaths of the mother and newborn in 1843, a son named Hiram had taken medicine that had been intended for his mother and had died, but Hiram had actually died in 1834 and the family record stated he had died in 1834. The rest of the story given me by my grandmother was that the father kept the home together for his two remaining daughters then, motivated by the gold rush, was readying to move to California with the girls when he froze to death, caught in a freak snowstorm as he drove his remaining livestock to his father’s home. When he didn’t appear at his father’s, he was sought and discovered the next morning, frozen, surrounded by his calves.
As it turned out, he had married a second time, which was not listed in the familial account, so Carrie must have preferred to forget about her stepmother. A news article relates her father was driving the cattle to a location twenty miles from his home in Vermont, “when about seven o’clock, in the evening, he was suddenly attacked with a fit of apoplexy, which completely overcame his vital energy. About eight o’clock the morning of the second day, he was found prostrate in the highway, destitute apparently of all natural sensation. Medical aid was immediately secured, but to no avail. He survived until about 9 o’clock, p.m.” I don’t know how it was known when he was overcome by apoplexy, unless he was able to communicate this, but it appears he survived for nearly twelve hours after having been found. There is no mention of a snowstorm or his having been found frozen. He hadn’t frozen to death. Maybe there was snow but no storm that overcame him. It was December, so maybe we can suppose he had hypothermia, and as he was found near death, the story eventually became that he had been found frozen to death. He was not, however, driving his cattle to his father’s house, as his father had died five years before, and his mother
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had died three years before. He did have brothers living in the area. Maybe one of those brothers lived where their parents had lived. And I’m willing to believe he may have been preparing for a trip to California.
Carrie went to work at Pacific Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a document places her there as an employee in 1854, a year after it was opened. The regulations state that employees were expected to observe the Sabbath and attend a place of worship. Three years later James Noyes Jr. appears in the notice for a free love convention at Berlin Heights—a notice in which free love was not mentioned, but would have been understood through its mention of interest in “harmonious relations”. In Carrie’s address book was “Francis Barry, Berlin Heights, Ohio”, and as Francis Barry left Berlin Heights around 1858, this means Caroline was at Berlin Heights before that time. The reason Francis Barry left Berlin Heights was because antagonism had been stirred up against the free-lovers and some citizens of the town attacked him and destroyed copies of a publication he was preparing to ship. However, many of the free-lovers stayed, the town became used to them as productive members of society. When a person ran about complaining he’d seen them bathing naked, men and women together, in the lake, he was told he shouldn’t have been spying on them.
I’d always assumed that Carrie went to work at Pacific Mills because she’d been orphaned, she didn’t like her stepmother, and had no one to whom to turn to help, but when I examine her family I find that she had an abundance of uncles and aunts living nearby in Vermont, so one wonders what happened that she didn’t find a home among them, yet she maintained close relations with family in Vermont. Relations with whom Carrie was reported as living for a time weren’t in Vermont but had moved to Wisconsin before her father’s death.
James Jr. was also given as having gone to the Oneida Community, which was John Humphrey Noyes’ effort at perfectionist religious communal living, its Oneida, New York, incarnation begun about 1848, which survived until 1879 when John Humphrey Noyes fled to to Canada to escape statutory rape charges. While several siblings of John Humphrey Noyes were members of his commune from early on, his immediately elder sister, Elizabeth, who had married Farnsworth Ransom in 1831, had moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Farnsworth’s family had located, and his brother, Roswell, would be a member of Alphadelphia. Roswell’s obituary gives Alphadelphia as having been disastrous for him financially and that it was an “evil moment” when he was talked into joining the group of “visionary socialists”. Maybe I presume too much but, as it seems all Noyes in this country are related (my Noyes were related to John Humphrey Noyes, however distant), I would imagine that my Noyes were acquainted with Elizabeth’s family in Kalamazoo, though she died before Alphadelphia began, and that they perhaps counted one another more as family, however distant, than strangers. But Elizabeth Noyes Ransom’s brother being a member of Alphadelphia may have played no part in James Jr. trying out Oneida as well.
One of the first presidents of the Alphadelphia Association was Benjamin Wright who went to Ceresco, the Wisconsin Phalanx, where he was voted in to replace its founder, Warren Chase, who had been converted to spiritualism and free love. Ceresco lasted about the same length of time as Alphadelphia, from 1844 to 1848 or 1849, which was
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about the same time the LaGrange Phalanx lasted as well, from about 1844 to 1847. One article gives a reason for the breakup of the Wisconsin phalanx was people came over from the Oneida Community advocating free love. James Noyes Jr. may have been at Ceresco when the Oneidans came hunting, or he may have simply heard of the Oneida Community and felt it was a place to check out. Plus there was the family connection. If the Oneidans went to Wisconsin extolling free love, it sounds like they were trying to attract people from other communes to Oneida, but I also know that the Oneidans didn’t consider themselves to be practicing free love, they were instead practicing communistic marriage, they had no use for free love and disdained Berlin Heights. I’ve tried to track what happened to members of these Fourier phalanxes as they closed down, and I may be missing something but I don’t see people flooding over to the Oneida Community. The lifestyle it was selling wasn’t at all like Fourier socialism. I’m guessing my great-great grandfather made his way over to Oneida some time between 1848 and 1856. I could be wrong, but I doubt he would have gone there after Berlin Heights, and his meeting his soon future wife. I have no idea how long he might have stayed. A couple of weeks? Months? Years? Days?
Rather than a socialist commune, John Humphrey Noyes’ community was a cult. It’s been extolled as being feminist as women wore bloomers and were said to be able to choose their sexual partners, which was not really the case. But birth control was practiced in the form of male continence. Those who joined signed over their lives to John Humphrey, who boldly and loudly asserted himself to be Jesus Christ’s representative on earth, and as they must submit to God in all decisions in their lives, they must submit to him as he was God’s representative. And they submitted in all things, from how they dressed themselves to sexual partners and childbearing, because John Humphrey had attained the most grace on earth, he was perfected, sin came from the devil and as he was born again in grace and the devil was not in him he was sinless—which is what got him kicked out of Yale Theological Seminary, and his license to preach revoked, because he refused to be talked out of his conviction he was sinless and spiritually superior. At Oneida, one’s sexual partners were not freely chosen, they were determined ultimately by John Humphrey Noyes and the community. John Humphrey was not simply opposed to nuclear families, he was against “special”, exclusive love relationships altogether, though as the commune’s leader he was exempt and could have his favorites, like his niece, Tirzah, thirty-two years his junior, who was initiated into the commune sexually when she was fourteen, and when she developed a special love relationship with someone more her age John Humphrey sent him off to the Oneida Community’s equivalent of Siberia. When one learns that the initial core group of John Humphrey Noyes’ cult consisted of John Humphrey Noyes and his wife, another couple with whom they’d become involved, and several of John Humphrey Noyes’ siblings, one wonders if the incest taboo among siblings was broken. It’s said no one knows. But relations with nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, were openly not taboo. John Humphrey wanted a child with Tirzah, so it upset him when she had an unapproved child with her uncle, John Humphrey’s brother, George. Her next child was by Edward Inslee, a boy named Hayden. Jealous, John Humphrey requested, in August 1875, when Hayden was sixteen months old, that she break off all communication with her son and have nothing to do with him as he was a link between her and the father, who had left the community. “I told him I
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should obey him heartily,” she wrote, “And I have had good experience today in doing it. It seemed to be the thing I needed to keep my heart free from distractions, so that my faith should be bright continually.”
I’m inclined to believe that John Humphrey Noyes did at least have sexual relations with his sister Harriet. Their brother, George, in 1869 wrote of John Humphrey telling him, “…I have struck on a view of truth in connection with the subject of consanguinity which leads out in many directions. Whether we shall be to get it all out or not I don’t know. For one thing is certain, that the relation of brothers and sisters is the nearest possible one—nearer than that of parents and children or uncles and nephews or husbands and wives. Brothers and sisters have absolutely one and the same blood. These other relationships approximate toward it but there is always in them a fractional quantity of different blood, forming a more or less compound result. The fraternal relation is the true radix of society…Again for the last two years I have been led to teach and practice this doctrine about ‘going home.’ In the spirit of it I went to Oneida, and set down there in conjunction with Harriet Skinner [their sister] and she was a helpmeet and wife to me.” That seems pretty straightforward, describing their sister, Harriet, as his helpmeet and wife. He was further recorded by George as saying, “In conquering the worldly notion about incest I am conquering the devil’s last stronghold. We have routed him on marriage and got our freedom and now remains the last citadel of social falsehood, which forbids the union of brothers and sisters. In setting up this bar the devil bars the possibility of ever founding a new race. It has got be taken down. The fellowship of brothers and sisters is fundamental and eternal. It is concentration. It approaches nearest to the fashion of God himself whose life ever turns in upon himself.”
John Humphrey told Tirzah he desired to “have a child by a natural-born daughter”, namely Constance Bradley, who was his child by Sarah Bradley. The book on Tirzah’s diary, Desire and Duty at Oneida, states that Constance denied he was her biological father, but that there was compelling evidence he was and that “he had sexual relations with her.” On Find-a-Grave, John Humphrey Noyes is given as her father. It’s not so difficult to imagine why Constance would deny John Humphrey was her father.
At its height, the Oneida Community had about 306 members, and they were okay with all this.
I don’t know how they tabulated that number of members. What about the children? They probably weren’t counting the children, were they.
Tirzah’s diary is interesting for her frankness about her sexual relationship with John Humphrey Noyes, her record of his criticisms of her that were highly manipulative, and which she received in the spirit of being medicine for her soul, received in the spirit of a desire to be loyal to him and the community.
Tirzah’s biological father had died when she was nine years of age, after which John Humphrey Noyes, her uncle, had stepped in and treated her as a father.
On 14 December 1878, at the age of thirty-five, she writes, “I had a strange experience
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yesterday. Mr. Noyes was holding a meeting in his room with a few of us who regularly contribute to the Socialist. He was talking, and I was interested and sympathizing with what he was saying, when all at once my heart gave me one of those sickening contractions which drain the very life-blood, and I said to myself in an agony of doubt: ‘Oh! Is he a crazy enthusiast, who is just experimenting on human beings?’ This came so suddenly and so unexpectedly that it seemed it must have been injected into my mind by someone else. I looked at the others…but they all looked innocent of any mockery in their thoughts. Several times during the remainder of the day I wondered about it. When this letter came from Edward, I understood it. Does he still have a mesmeric power over me?” The letter she is referring to is one that John Humphrey had received from Hayden’s father, who was refusing to return unless the government at Oneida was changed, wishing however that he could visit. Tirzah, unable to entertain that she might have the slightest negative thought about John Humphrey, instead imagined that she had telepathically received someone else’s criticism of him, and decided it was Edward’s, from afar.
My father’s mother mentioned a couple of times the association with Oneida, and was fascinated enough with it that she made a kind of pilgrimage to visit the Oneida mansion house. She said that when she was a child, a woman had lived with her family for a while who had been a member of the Oneida Community, and that she was a relative. All she had to say about her was that she was quiet and never spoke about Oneida. She described her as childless and that after the dissolution of Oneida she’d never married. Try as I might, I’ve been unable to identify a relation that was close enough to live with my grandmother’s family who had been a member of the Oneida Community, a long-term resident, so I might wonder if my memory was accurate, but I well remember asking if the woman had spoken about Oneida because I hoped to hear something of her direct experience. That my grandmother was herself unable to identify how exactly she was related, but she called this woman “Aunt”, makes me wonder if she was instead a friend of the family through James Noyes Jr., from the time when he was at Oneida. Or it may be that when he was at Oneida he became acquainted with a distant member of the family who was there, and that they’d remained close. Either way, it was an intimate enough association that she would stay with James Noyes Jr’s family long after his death in 1901, some time in the 1910s into 1920s when my grandmother was a child then youth, she having turned twelve in 1920. As a child and teenager I knew nothing about the sexual relationships between family members at Oneida, but I did know about their communal marriage. I didn’t realize until recently, when reading Desire and Duty at Oneida, published in 2000, that the siblings had relationships, and that John Humphrey had a relationship with at least one daughter. While it’s horrifying, when one reads John Humphrey’s words one can clearly comprehend what his rationalizations would be even if the threat of genetic complications were known but made moot by sexual relations being almost exclusively (not completely) non-procreative, and I can imagine how he could convince Tirzah, and perhaps even Constance, of the rightness of it all, within the framework of his logic. These were individuals entirely within his power, who knew no other life than the Oneida Community. They had no friendships outside the community.
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Breaking down other barriers, it’s recorded how John Humphrey Noyes proposed to Tirzah, in 1869, that “We shall never have heaven till we can conquer shame and make a beautiful exhibition on stage.” He had designed a program for a performance of sex on stage, in which the man and woman would “disrobe themselves and dance or perform other evolutions until a man is prepared, when the woman should be for a while distractingly coquettish.” He said there was no reason sex should not be performed in public, like music and dancing. He thought it would give particular pleasure to the oldsters who no longer had sex, and felt, “It is a sight which would purify the whole Community…Now that propagation has become such a Community matter why shouldn’t children be begotten in the public way?” He already had two people in mind, one of whom was a John Lord. I find that in a criticism session in 1855, John Humphrey had positively offered that John was “one of the best lovers he knew. He made a Community matter of it, harmonized with his business, had the fear of God in it, and kept open with his superiors.” I really don’t know what to comment except that I wonder if by this time John Humphrey was drilling peep holes in the bedroom walls.
If I have near to nothing to praise about the Community, for me it really doesn’t matter what good things John Humphrey might have done, not when you consider the mental and emotional prison that was the Oneida Community, and that with families who joined the commune, they had also bound their children to be all sexually initiated into the community. Daughters were sexually initiated into the system of complex marriage usually about the time they began menstruating. The median age for these girls was twelve and thirteen, but some were as young as nine. I’ve found on the Internet Archive the report made by a gynecologist, Dr. Ely Van De Werker, on a quarter of the women at Oneida, which gave the ages at which they were sexually initiated. Of the forty-two women who were examined, twenty-six had been initiated between the ages of ten and sixteen, the majority in this sample being twelve to fourteen. These were almost all girls who had lived their entire lives in the commune, which meant that they had grown up in the children’s part as parents were separated from children so there would be no preferential, exclusive love bond (described as “sticky”) on either side. They grew up only knowing about complex marriage, in which all the women were wives of all the men and the men were husbands of all the women, and that their destiny was to be initiated into it, usually by John Humphrey Noyes, because he was Jesus Christ’s representative on earth and there was no sin in anything he did. They practiced what was called ascending fellowship. Young men under twenty (usually initiated into complex marriage at the age of sixteen) were only permitted sexual relationships with women over menopausal age, and girls under the age of twenty were paired with men in their fifties through seventies, the idea being that experienced individuals were training the inexperienced, and pregnancy was less likely to happen as the boys were being trained in the practice of male continence. While the ascending fellowship arrangement was taught as essential to spiritual development, it had been devised early on when it was discovered that teenagers preferred to only have sex with others their own age. This was a very controlled process with “interviews” (sexual intercourse) arranged through intermediaries, a special committee who kept track of pairings.
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The in-depth gynecological survey took place in 1877, two years before John Humphrey Noyes fled to Canada to avoid being arrested for statutory rape, four years before the community disbanded. John Humphrey Noyes was then resident at another branch of the community, his son Theo was presiding over Oneida, and he had called in a gynecologist to perform the study, explaining there was “a feeling of dissatisfaction, then growing in the institution, concerning the effect of their peculiar sexual practices upon the health.” The doctor only completed an examination of a quarter of the women before John Humphrey Noyes learned of the exams and halted them.
One woman, no longer a member of the Oneida Community, in a written interview with the doctor told him that John Humphrey’s belief was that girls had amative desires “when quite young, and that they would get bad habits unless these feelings were satisfied in the way of sexual intercourse, and so of course they were looked after and introduced into the social system certainly at the age of puberty and in quite a number of cases before.” The woman knew of women of her own age who’d been introduced to sexual intercourse at the age of ten, and one at the age of nine, individuals who’d not yet begun menstruation. Young women felt stressed with having intercourse at least seven times a week with individuals for whom they may only feel repugnance but would refrain from complaint as they feared criticism, they felt in “bondage” to the religious beliefs of the community, and if they did object to sex with the community at large, and if they had someone with whom they felt a romantic attachment, they might be forbidden to see the one they loved. Towards the close of the community, the women had begun to make their complaints known.
Desiring to perfect humans spiritually by breeding a superior race, John Humphrey Noyes in 1869 began his own eugenics program, selecting who would pair and have a child. Fifty-eight children were born, nine of whom John Humphrey fathered. They were called Stirpicults.
The commune had strictly regimented schedules so that it was known down to the minute what any given member was doing. They also had group sessions in which individuals who were even slightly rebellious or out-of-step were publicly humiliated. The meetings lasted for hours. From the time they were little the children were drilled in Christ-like unselfishness, taught, “I-spirit, with me never shall stay, We-spirit, makes us happy and gay.” It was determined that children playing with dolls, acting as if they were living beings, seduced females toward children away from Christ, that the doll-spirit was even a species of idolatry, meaning it was an idolatrous love, in the way it was felt the love between parents and children was idolatrous. So the dolls were stripped of their clothing and the children were gathered around a stove, each girl with “her long-cherished favorite”, and as they marched in time to a song, around the stove, as each girl came to the stove-door she threw her doll into “the angry-looking flames, and saw them perish before our eyes.” I think the key concern is in that phrase “long-cherished favorite”, and that just as children were separated from their parents, removed from the special, preferential love of a mother and father, the burning of the dolls was also intended to curb exclusive, preferential love. The journalist, Charles Nordhoff, reported he found the Oneida children “a little
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subdued and desolate, as though they missed the exclusive love and care of a father and mother”, but Spencer Klaw, in Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community, published in 1993, excuses this as the journalist perhaps seeing what he wanted to see, for when the sociologist, William Kephart, in 1961 interviewed several former Community children, then in their eighties and nineties, they “felt certain that childhood in the Old Community was a happy and exhilarating experience.” As if old people aren’t inclined to nostalgia. As if they might not have had a lifetime to convince themselves everything had been just fine. Several people in their eighties and nineties doesn’t seem to me to be much of a survey. We are all to varying degrees brainwashed by the families and communities in which we grow up, but with the Oneida Community they had extra helpings, and were individuals who were raised to stay within the community, they didn’t have associations with others outside of it, they experienced their sexual coming-of-age in the community, their intellectual coming-of-age, they were limited in what thoughts they could entertain, and were trained not to ever seek a life outside the community as adults. One wonders how any of them would have found the boldness to rebel. John Humphrey Noyes’ son, Pierrepoint Noyes, in the outside world after the community’s breakup, recognized just how he’d been indoctrinated with reverences, obediences, and timidities that he had to learn to “slough off”. He remembered his father, John Humphrey Noyes, not as a personal father, but a “great power…the father of all of us, just as God is the Father of all of us”. He reasoned John Humphrey couldn’t have favorites, but he did remember being allowed to go to his room “on one or two occasions”, and that John Humphrey then sat him on his lap, and “once he gave me a cookie.” For affection he turned to a man he called Uncle Abram, unlike the “strict, disciplinarian ‘father’ of the Children’s House”, who paid attention to him, and was with him “as much as the regulations permitted”. Friendships were also monitored to keep them from becoming special and preferential.
The mother of Corinna Noyes, when she gave in to the “mother spirit”, was punished with being forbidden to speak with her daughter for days or weeks. Corinna remembered once catching a glimpse of her and screaming for her, but her mother didn’t stop to speak with her for if she did it would mean an additional week added on of complete separation. When Corinna pursued her mother, begging her not to leave her, a Children’s House mother “came and carried her away.” Pierrepont Noyes recalled how he’d once had a “tantrum” because his weekly visit with his mother had been cancelled, and Papa Kelly, the Children’s House Father, had seized him up, shaken him, commanding him to be still, and reprimanded he’d gotten too “sticky” with his mother and would be forbidden to see her for yet another week. Another little girl would stand outside her mother’s window and call to her though her mother was forbidden to answer.
They were not anti-capitalist. When it was realized their land at Oneida wouldn’t provide them a secure living, they began a cottage industry of making animal traps, the children a part of the labor force. This went beautifully and they went into spinning silk as well. They prospered. Orders outpacing them, they built their own factories, for which they preferred hiring young teenage girls as they were cheap labor, cheaper than women, and held to be just as productive. The hirelings worked
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ten hour days, had a lunch break, and when it was worried they might be working them too hard it was decided to give them a fifteen minute break in the morning and one in the afternoon. During interviews, the community itself gave the appearance of the success of their own communal labor providing them much leisure, in that they described themselves as having only to work at silk spinning or other manufacture for a couple or several hours in the mornings then the rest of the day was free for more genial pursuits—not that they didn’t like their work, for they did.
But, hey, there are many photos of them having picnics on the mansion grounds, the women in their so-called feminist bloomers that prove they were free and modern, and the myth is that the Father (they called him “father”) John Humphrey Noyes was a heroic man—a little confused maybe—who labored in the American Desert of Puritanism to provide for his followers a happy life, a good life of sexual freedom and equality and strawberries and cream (for public relations they attracted tourists with their strawberries and cream, no unwholesome beverages like coffee or tea served) so who am I to judge. The blurb for a book on the Oneida Community published in 2017 states that the author, “rather than drawing a sharp boundary between spiritual concerns and worldly matters…argues that commune and company together comprise a century-long narrative of economic success, innovative thinking, and abiding concern for the welfare of others.” The author addresses certain claims of John Humphrey manipulating the women who had bonded with him through his introducing them to sex at a young age through the right of “first husband”, and manipulating men with his ability to provide and withhold access to sex and sexual partners, claims leveraged by John Humphrey’s son, Theodore—who said his father “possessed a remarkable faculty of convincing people that the use of this arbitrary power was for their own good” and “he was a man of quite extraordinary attractiveness to women, and he dominated them by his intellectual power and social ‘magnetism’ superadded to intense religious conviction to which young women are very susceptible…”—but the author flinches against these claims, saying Theodore’s account “should be considered with respect to its consistency with other evidence”, and that, in essence, historically sound methodology shows that this community of Bible communists built together a lucrative business and that for them the welfare of everyone was paramount.
I don’t see the community and John Humphrey being concerned with the welfare of everyone when children are raped—let’s call it what it is, I’ve yet to see a single history describe the children as being raped, they are instead “deflowered” or initiated—and we can describe women as well being regularly raped as they fear saying no, they have had hard-coded in them submission to the authority of the community and dare not object.
What James Noyes Jr. might have felt about the Oneida Community, I don’t know, I can’t conjecture. I don’t know how long he was there. He could have walked in and right back out the door, or he could have stuck around for a bit. But he didn’t join. He didn’t remain there. When they wrote a family constitution, they gave each member of the family the right to disagree.
Carrie and James Noyes Jr. married in 1859 and were at first in Kalamazoo, Michigan,
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where James had been in his youth, then were in Anna, Illinois, which is known for being a good place to grow fruit, which is what they did. Which is what free-lovers in Berlin Heights did. They, too, grew fruit. It rested the land and was considered a progressive method of farming. I’ve no idea if, when they moved with their children in 1882 to the freethought community of Liberal, Missouri, they were still proponents of free love, which had much to do with feminism and the rights of women, but free love was a hot topic at Liberal and divided the community. Carrie’s habits reflected the free love lifestyle at Berlin Heights in as much as the “water cure” was practiced there and all her life she took a cold bath daily, even if she “had to break the ice to do so”, and she refused corsets. I suspect, however, they may not have been free-lovers any longer, or at least not openly practicing, as disagreements over it were so sharp that free-lovers left Liberal due to feeling unwelcome.
A Liberal newspaper gave its community as being about 500 people. But while there was much to like—and there really was a lot to like—one might question the intensity of the sunshine in the advertising. An article boasted, “Its novelty comes in part, in the peculiarity of its people, who have boldly stepped out and declared themselves utterly…opposed to all sectarian churches and church organizations. They boast, with seeming pride, that they have no church, no preacher or priest, no saloon or place where a person can get a drink or any kind of intoxicants. They have no hell, no God, no devil, no debauchery, no drunkenness. They believe in but one world at a time, and a heaven of their own making. Every person is esteemed for his or her mental and moral worth, rather than for the amount of faith they possess. They recognize the nobility of man, woman, and child. They substitute a good hall, with staging and furniture suitable for amateur plays, which they use on Sunday evenings, for the church. They have lectures and literary entertainments for long sermons, and a reading room and library for the saloon. They have social gatherings in the place of prayer meetings…They have morality without religion; prosperity without a god; happiness without a Jesus, and harmony without the Ten Commandments. They have become truly infidelized, and have built up their town on the principle of manhood without sectarianism, and humanity without superstition…They have demonstrated the fact that infidelity to the Bible religion does not tend to a lower morality, but that it elevates and ennobles man, in the sense of being his own Savior. They have no shortcuts to glory, nor flowery beds of ease. They go on the principle that every man shall earn what he gets and get what he earns.”
My great-great grandparents had a family constitution in which the third article stated, “No oppression, force, quarrel, or fighting shall be practiced…” The fourth article held that, “Everybody shall be fully independent of all the others; provided that his actions and conduct are not in the way of anybody.” The constitution, of which I have a copy, by way of a second cousin, was dated “February 10th 283”, using the Era of Man dating system that was devised by Moses Harman, publisher of the freethought periodical, Lucifer, in Kansas. His dating system, rejecting one dominated by Biblical teachings, began with the execution of astronomer Giordano Bruno in 1601. The 1883 Freethinkers Congress in Amsterdam, as reported in the papers “made earnest speeches on behalf of the recognition of the political and social equality of men and women. A motion was adopted expressing the indignation of the Congress at
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the persecutions of the Jews, and inviting all Freethinkers to unite in opposition to persecution for matters of belief. It was decided to contribute to the fund for the erection of a memorial to Giordano Bruno. The next Congress is to be held at Brussels.”
Nearly twenty years beforehand, a sibling of my great-grandfather, born in 1865, had been named Victor Hugo Noyes, for the author, politician, activist for social justice issues, and freethinker, Victor Hugo, who was then sixty-three years of age. At that time he was in exile from the France of Napoleon III, living in Guernsey where had written Les Miserables which was published in 1862. In 1885, my great-grandparents named their eldest child and daughter, Pansy, the flower a symbol of freethought in France. To date, the Pansy’s earliest known, published use was in 1889 at the international conference of freethinkers in Paris. But I know that it would have been in use before 1885, when Pansy was born, and determined to find a reference to it I scour the news for an earlier date—and while there are thousands of mentions of pansies, I have managed to find a Manchester Evening News article, from England, of 14 April 1884, in which the pansy is already known as a flower associated with freethinkers. “The Paris Court of Appeal has just given its decision in a very curious case. A certain Mme. Chandelier was a member of ‘The Freethinking Society.’ She died, and one of the rules of the society orders [is] that its members shall be buried without religious rites. Her husband had cut on the tombstone a pansy (in French, pensee, which also means ‘thought’), and under the flower the word libre ‘free.’ M. Chandelier has six children, and four of them deemed with him that it was quite natural the tomb of their mother should bear the emblem of the belief in which she had lived and died. The two other children, who are Catholics, considered the emblems offensive, and brought an action against their father to force him to efface it, pleading that their mother had not been a Freethinker. The father produced her card of membership to prove that she had. The doctor who attended her in her illness swore that she had complained to him several times that the parish priest would insist on visiting her, and that she had been obliged to ask her husband to forbid him the house.” Despite this, the Court of Appeal decided the pansy symbol and the word libre should be effaced.
A freethought university was undertaken in Liberal, and Catalpa Park was created, thirteen acres of beauty, with an artificial lake, where spiritualist conventions were held that attracted people from around the nation. Some wrote it was the prettiest park in the country, which I doubt, but I’ve seen photos and it was lovely. There were fountains, flower gardens, a windmill, dining hall. In 1910, the town’s founder, George Walser, built a stone house in the park for himself, “impressive”, yet not ostentatious, then died. After his death, the park’s land was dug up for coal in a steam-shovel mining operation.
Orrin Elliot Harmon, the husband of a sibling of my great-grandfather Noyes, was the first to write a history of Liberal, Missouri. Published in 1925, he titled his book, The Story of Liberal, Missouri. Straightforward. His book tells about the early settlement of the area, how Liberal was founded, about the barbed wire fence that ran through the town separating it from its neighbor that had churches and saloons, the spiritualists, various buildings, the United Mental League Hall, old Main Street, the
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earliest organizations such as The Brotherhood, and The Women’s Guild, the churches and charitable organizations, a few “characters” get their own chapter, veterans of the wars, some of Liberal’s public servants, etcetera. When he wrote the account, only twenty of the original freethought residents survived, whom he lists, so we don’t know what families in town were descendants of the original freethinkers who had died. It’s very dry, spare account, but at least it was written, though he and his wife weren’t even living in Liberal during its earliest days, they had moved out to Washington State with his side of the family and were there from 1882 to 1897. A photo of Orrin in his history on Liberal shows him in his study in Liberal, surrounded by books, gazing at an image of the planet, Saturn. He was a lawyer, but didn’t like the law, so was school superintendent for Lewis County out in Washington State, and he was so bewitched by the Pacific Northwest he composed a number of poems praising it, which aren’t very good. He also wrote poems that were intended to be humorous, which also aren’t very good. Much more fun are the loving monthly columns he wrote for a Seattle paper on the movements of the stars in their heavens, a study which he pursued poetically with grand visions and soul-refining reflections on the nature of one’s place in the grand scheme of things, and these accounts are rather inspiring whereas his regular poetry is not. His obituary states he was a poet and lover of the poets, philosopher, a lifelong student with a great appreciation for mathematics, possessor of a fine mind and frail body, a bold and free thinker who was kindly and tolerant. He was the only Unitarian in Benton County.
It is often taken for granted that spiritualism in Liberal failed when in 1887 a fire at the home of Dr. J. B. Bouton, who conducted seances, revealed means by which he fraudulently made it appear he was communicating with spirits, aided by Mr. W. Samuel Van Camp and Mr. J. H. Roberts. But it was in 1889 that the Spiritual Science Association was formed at Liberal and a meeting hall built for it.
In 1889, the town’s founder, George Walser, sold the Universal Mental Liberty Hall to the Methodist Episcopal Church for their use as a Methodist Sunday School. From what I read, this was a big surprise to everyone. There had been an argument. Orrin Harmon wrote in his book that Walser’s intention was that the hall be a place of free speech, and that many debates were held there, people airing their opinions on freethought, spiritualism, and orthodox Christianity. On the Sunday evening before the presidential election of 1888 (Benjamin Harrison versus Grover Cleveland), a meeting was held and the chairman, G. W. Baldwin, had given each speaker a maximum of ten minutes to air their opinion. Walser, who had a lot to say, took exception, he balked against Baldwin’s attempt to limit his time on the floor, he felt the hall was now a place of suppression of free speech, and that was the last public meeting held in it. So, while some say Liberal’s freethought era ended when Walser sold the hall, Harmon, who wasn’t in Liberal at the time (so this history he gives will be based on the accounts of others) seems to feel that, instead, Walser saw the era of freethought and free speech as having already died, which is why he sold the hall.
Or maybe one could call Walser a petulant tyrant for getting upset over time limits being imposed on his opinions, promptly shutting down the hall, which he owned, then selling it. That was a problem, that Walser owned the hall.
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In 1896 Walser was converted to Protestantism. He wrote a book on it. I’ve not read all of it, but the book isn’t about finding God and Christ. Instead, Walser reinterpreted Christianity into a belief system with which he could live.
The last of the spiritualist camp meetings was in 1899. In December of 1911, when an account of the town and its people was published in the Liberal Enterprise, running thirteen pages, its freethought origins weren’t mentioned, not even in the bio of George Walser. Instead, the paper notes that Liberal has two churches, the Christian and Methodist Episcopal. “The Methodist Church was first organized by Adam Burris, in December, 1889, with a membership of 17, and the Christian Church was first organized in July 1898, starting out with a membership of some forty-odd.” The bio of Walser that directly follows states he founded Liberal, and while anything about freethought or spiritualism isn’t mentioned, his very brief bio ends with the assertion he was “a man of strong convictions, and was not afraid to stand for what he thot was right. One had to know the man to know his REAL worth.” Someone wanted to remind others of what Walser had attempted with Liberal.
The population of Liberal was 546 in 1890. The new Methodist Episcopal Church beginning with a membership of seventeen may reflect that religion hadn’t quite caught on yet.
The Noyes family isn’t mentioned in any of the thirteen pages in the 1911 Liberal Enterprise article on Liberal and its leading and prominent business families.
The Noyes only have a mention of one sentence in Orrin Harmon’s book, which was the fact that they were one of the freethought families.
James Allen Noyes Jr. died in 1901 and Orrin wrote his obituary. He said of his father-in-law, “He took a deep interest in the welfare of his family, and his children are reaping the rewards of the father’s industrious, energetic life. His interest in this life was not, however, confined to his own family. His sympathy went out to the world and his deep sense of justice made him decidedly socialistic in his views. In his early manhood he became a believer in spiritualism, and he held to its faith the rest of his life. A strong believer in immortality, he had no fear of death and he looked upon the passing from this world as the entrance to a happier realm beyond. He died beloved by his children, respected by his neighbors and friends. Again we are made to feel: ’To live in hearts we leave behind, Is not to die.’”
When one comes from a family as shitty as mine, it’s natural to be suspect of everyone, but I would like to imagine that James Allen Noyes Jr. was the person Orrin made him out to be. The fact he and Caroline left their successful fruit farm in Illinois to move down to Missouri to be part of the only freethought town in America speaks to their dedication to attempt to live as they believed.
We began with 1840s Alphadelphia, an era when women dressed in the romantic, Gothic revival clothing familiar to Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein, which may be an odd way to think about it but a lot of time has been covered, seventy years, and it seems expedient to anchor with personal visuals. James Noyes, photographed in the
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1850s looks like an artist in his long loose jacket the fabric a pattern of thin white and perhaps blue stripes, very light in color and drape, underneath a plain white shirt, no tie, he’s holding a pen and a photo about which he must deeply care, there’s no ostentation, no grandiosity, he makes no effort to project authority, the read is this is a socialist given to thinking and writing (yet I have nothing he may have written), then his son James Allen Noyes Jr., when he is youngish he is well-dressed and looks dedicated to making a good impression, only the elegant simplicity of his clothing holds him back from appearing almost dandyish, then in 1864 he and Caroline are seated side by side with their first two children confronting the camera squarely, neither wearing wedding rings, she sports no jewelry, her hair is simple parted in the middle and and pulled back, he wears a full dark beard and is dressed in a dark suit with what will be a smart tie if we could see it clearly but it’s not designed to grab more attention than his face just as Caroline’s attire doesn’t detract but doesn’t grab attention, the fabric of her light-colored dress a small print, remember she never wears corsets, her skirt is full but I was told she didn’t wear crinolines, her only hint of ornamentation is a ribbon laced through the simple white collar of her dress which may have also a square brooch but it’s not jeweled, then in a photo from the 1880s, when they are living in Liberal, her hair now streaked with gray, again she has no wedding ring, no rings at all, no jewelry at all, the style of her dress is much like the one in the 1860s only this one is all one dark color and the top may look like the attached bodice of the dress but seems instead to be a close-fitted jacket over a white shirt it’s hard to tell. Their son, Ray, in his 1895 wedding photo with Betty, now those two are primed with youth ready to take on the world she’s not going to withdraw from showing how they are doing well, her light hair is pulled up with a Spanish comb, she has short, stylish bangs, her gaze meeting the camera has a touch of the coquettish she knows she looks good, the neck and bodice of her dress is layers of youthful style, Ray who has yet to lose his eye is stylish as well in his jacket that is simply cut but well-made, the perfection of his lovely tie that isn’t knotted instead it is held together by a circular band, the opalescence of the single stone stud at the neck of his shirt. Jump forward now to the 1940s, the WWII years, Liberal has radios and television, it has automobiles rather than horses, women have been able to vote for a generation and wear short skirts, they have experienced WWI, the pandemic of 1917-1918, the bust of the stock markets, the Great Depression, the flapper years, the rise of Hollywood, FDR and the New Deal, and will swing back into a new conservatism.
Long after my grandparents had died, I learned from another in the Noyes family that a Noyes niece of Ray’s, a nurse by the name of Grace, who spent much of her adult life away from Liberal, had it in mind to write a spicy book, one that told all Liberal’s secrets. About 1950, in her retirement, now going blind, she had brought in a relation to take dictation and type up the manuscript, but when the person learned what the book was to be about they decided not to participate. Several Oneida Community descendants have written books. While I can understand Alphadelphia and other similar Fourier experiments not producing any memoirs, considering how short-lived they were, it’s interesting that no memoir-style histories came out of Berlin Heights or Liberal, for which reason I’m sad that Grace’s book on Liberal didn’t materialize. What was considered spicy by the general public, at that time, would no longer raise eyebrows. Who had practiced free love? There were likely some abortions? Did she
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have some secret knowledge about the suicide of George Walser’s third wife in 1902? But it was already known she was secretly a drug addict in a time when opium was in over-the-counter medications. Or did Grace instead have dirt on how the Christian folk behaved in the shadows, out of line with what was preached? Grace was born in 1892 so she wasn’t around for the thick of the freethought days, her direct experience was with Liberal as a Christian town, and not much of that since as an adult she lived in Kansas City. She didn’t marry until she was 42, in 1934, and it was to a man twenty years her elder, who had been a bachelor all of his life until three years beforehand when he took his first wife, a woman who died of apoplexy the year before he married Grace. I think it’s perhaps appropriate to wonder if she might have been a lesbian and he might have been gay. He and Grace had been married fourteen years when he died by suicide. His obituary was a news item on how he shot himself after an illness of some seventeen years, so what he had done was wait to marry until he was an invalid and needed nurses who would care for him, only at some point in their marriage he had begun fighting Grace for his right to die but it was believed he was too weak to carry out his threats of suicide and she said that she was never able to find the gun he claimed to have hidden. Grace kept him going for fourteen years then one day he became out of control and Grace ran down to the front desk of the hotel where they lived at the time (the Rasbach, in Kansas City, postcards from the mid 1940s say it had a “New Orleans Cocktail Bar”) to ask for help and while she was gone a maid entered the room where he was and when he held up a gun at her she screamed and ran and he then shot himself. His death certificate reads, “Gunshot wound of heart.” After his death, Grace returned to Liberal for good and lived there until 1975, so she was around when I was living occasionally with my grandparents and she’s another one to whom I was never introduced, I didn’t even know she existed.
I’ve read that when Liberal was first formed many freethinkers and other progressives passed through the town and published newspapers out of it before moving on to the west coast. With the exception of a few, I’ve been unable to locate anything about these people who passed through, I’ve not come across any of their publications. The only newspaper I’ve seen out of Liberal are some issues of George Walser’s The Liberal, “devoted to freethought”, and I’ve only come upon a couple of issues of that.
The freethought era having passed, the town had busied itself with erasing its past. Grace may have favored neither the freethinkers or the Christians, she may have thought it was time to blast them all. The more I look up Grace, I find that she was fairly consistently in Liberal after her marriage to Pinkerton, and was often giving Red Cross classes, and participating in Daughters of the American Revolution meetings (she was probably a member through John Atwell or Capt. Robert Hunkins). Occasionally she would be highlighted in the paper for a rare antique she’d picked up, such as a big four poster bed in cherry wood she located in Fort Scott, Kansas, the posts “turned in the large spool style, popular in colonial and early post-colonial time”, she said it was at least a hundred years old, maybe over a hundred and fifty years old, and was rare to find west of the Mississippi, that if such beds were found they were in river towns as they were too cumbersome to be carried in wagons. Grace was the one writing the Noyes clan back in Massachusetts and collecting information on the family’s arrival in America and further back to where they lived in England. If Grace
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had plans of letting loose a “tell all” book, she may have intended to draw on what she’d learned of the family’s history, as well as what she knew about the town.
In 1947, Oneida Limited officers burned a truckload of Oneida Community documentary materials, including diaries and letters, that hadn’t been made available to the public. What remained, preserved by some members of the family, was a compilation transcription, 2200 pages long, of some of these materials, that had been made by George Wallingford Noyes, a nephew of John Humphrey who died in 1941. He had prepared a portion of this for publication, and an edited version was published in 2001.
Worried about reprisals during the Joseph McCarthy years of the Red Scare witch hunts, my grandmother, with her eldest sister, burned a trunk full of historical family papers, even all personal letters that documented the family’s socialist activities and beliefs all the way back to Alphadelphia, they kept only a few things of Caroline’s, a few envelopes of personal correspondence emptied of contents, and a couple of letters written by Ray’s eldest brother, Victor Hugo Noyes, a person whose few surviving letters stir empathy for him because he’s curious about the world and his social and spiritual relationship to it, he wrote from Kansas City and Boston working odd jobs, perhaps saving money for a trip to China, which he made, then upon his return he was struck by a train in Nowheresville, Florida, in 1886, dying at the age of twenty-one when Ray was only twelve.
The Oneida Community was well known so the burning of their materials wouldn’t have been out of fear of McCarthy, instead it’s assumed there were worries about further revelations of the community’s practices that would harm the reputation of the company that gave us Oneida Silverware—and, yes, I once purchased a set of Oneida tableware just because, and I know my grandmother purchased wares from Oneida.
In our case, my grandmother explicitly said the fear of McCarthyism was the reason for their burning all their documents. But if there were materials, such as letters, that held family secrets preferred to be forgotten that would have been a good time to get rid of them as well, and this appears to be what happened, if personal letters were discarded yet some envelopes preserved, and I’m taking for granted if there was a literal trunk filled with materials that means—well, that’s the problem, isn’t it, it’s left to me to attempt to imagine what constituted the materials that were in the trunk.That one page of Caroline’s address book was retained but the rest discarded raises the question of why preserve that page and burn the rest? Why preserve the page that pointed to their association with Berlin Heights? James Allen Noyes Sr. was the last president of Alphadelphia. Why burn everything associated with Alphadelphia but preserve the family constitution that was explicitly socialist?
I’m left with the following preserved envelopes (by which I mean another person has them but wrote me about them), that appear to have been letters to Ray’s sister, Cora, from her husband, Frank Greene:
K of L (?) Section, Beloit, KS (Postmark–unreadable, KS)
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Transient, Lincoln, NE (Postmark–Liberal, MO)
Care U.P. Engineer Corps, Hutchison, KS (Postmark–McPherson, KS)
Omaha, NE (Postmark–Liberal, MO–from Allen Noyes)
Occidental Hotel, Omaha, NE (Postmark–Liberal, MO)
Editor Resident, Wichita, KS (Postmark–Junction City, KS)
Transient, Chester, NE (Return Address–Green & Co., 211 S. 13th Street, Lincoln, NE)
Hon. Frank Greene, State Convention Anti-Monopoly, Topeka, KS (Postmark–Wichita, KS)
From 1887, one envelope to Liberal, one to Junction City, KS, (no date) in the same handwriting. The same handwriting on a plain envelope addressed to Cora in McPherson, KS (no date).
When I started out I had no idea who Frank was, but along the way I learned he was an assistant editor on The Liberal for a while, maybe two to three years, he was writing to the Lucifer paper in Kansas about freethought progress there, and to The Truthseeker, he and Cora married in Junction City in 1886, he started his own paper in Wichita, Kansas in 1886, which seems to have been associated with the Knights of Labor, they had a child in 1887 and Cora died after giving birth, her sister, Emma, and her husband, Orrin Harmon, taking in the child to raise, skip a few years and I find that in 1891 Frank was editor of the Deadwood Pioneer-Times, the infamous gold rush town that had begun in 1876, before that I guess he was connected with the Lead City Tribune, and before that he was in Sturgis, he had married a second time and this woman, whose name I don’t know, died while visiting family in the east in 1890, then he married, Amanda Musselman, a suffragette from Pennsylvania who spoke in saloons for women’s rights, he seems to have relocated to Pennsylvania and then he died in 1893. The son he’d had with Cora was six years of age and his mother and father were dead, but he had Emma and Orrin. He would grow up to be a well-known baseball pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals then the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Maybe you can see my bewilderment. No papers at all handed down from James Noyes Sr., or James Noyes Jr. Not even empty envelopes. Nothing in Cora’s hand. Nothing in Emma’s hand. Nothing in Orrin Harmon’s hand, despite my knowing for a fact that Harmon loved to write. Nothing in Ray’s hand. Nothing in the hand of Ray’s two other brothers—Allen, who went to Oklahoma to farm, then to Lawrence County, Missouri, west of Springfield to farm, or Paul, who went to Oklahoma to farm then returned in 1899 and had a farm near Springfield as well and did some building and contracting. There are these empty envelopes of letters written by Frank Greene to Cora, a couple of Victor Hugo’s letters, and several things preserved of Caroline’s. Of course there were no issues of The Liberal preserved, despite and because of Frank having edited it. If they were ridding themselves of everything that could damn past family as associated with freethinkers and socialism, I understand not keeping
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editions of The Liberal. But why toss everything else, including everything personal that may have been written by Noyes Sr. or Noyes Jr., and yet preserve these empty envelopes from Frank to Cora, maybe some from Frank after Cora’s death? Why this handful of empty envelopes?
That feels like an anticlimactic revelation. “My grandmother and her sister burned the family’s papers.” Maybe it helps to envision my grandmother and her sister and generations of documents and letters, a trunkful, and their feeding all these family words and dates and knowledge to a fire that transmutes history to smoke and ash. What sparks suspicion that the burning of the lot was more than just a reaction to McCarthyism, is the fact they would have supposedly read these documents before torching them, which means my grandmother and her sister knew exactly what was in them, and my grandmother acted as if she did not know, she brushed off my inquiries as a child, so that I never tried to ask her again about them as I knew she would remain forever opaque. When I was ten years of age I believed her account, and that acceptance designed my account of the event for decades. For my grandmother it was enough that she knew what was in the papers, so that she made the determination, with her sister, that no one else should know. These two women were the last with the knowledge of what was in the papers they burned, and if they passed it along orally it wasn’t to anyone with whom I’ve been in contact. As far as I’m concerned, when you’re disposing of generations of documents that aren’t of your own making, that is some rather selfish control. One has to be careful about myth-making, and for a while the McCarthy scare was enough that I was fully on board with the dramatic story of the burning of the papers due it, and saw my grandmother and her sister as responding to an American crisis. And it is true that they were worried about McCarthyism. But, come on, no one was going to go digging in the family attic for a trunk of old documents, newspapers and letters from the nineteenth century. I wondered about that even then, but convinced myself as a child that fear can motivate irrational acts. Now I believe that McCarthyism, while very real, it ruined many lives, may have been a contributing, even an initiatory concern that prompted the burning of my Noyes family’s documents, it was also likely an excuse.
5
It’s 1988 and I’m sitting in the audience section of a black box theater as auditions are being held for a play of mine. An actress begins a monologue she has prepared for the audition, she’s on the stage—I’ve been told a little bit about her, how she’s a fine actress, which she is, that’s immediately apparent, she’s very good, she didn’t get the role but she could have, one of those things, there were several good actors who could have gotten the role, each one would have brought a different flavor to the part that would have been interesting, maybe one of them should have come away with the role but didn’t, no fault of their own, the stars just weren’t aligned—I’m seated in the dark on the bleachers, the director and some others around me, and all who were there said afterward that my face went white during her monologue. I don’t know how the attention of the director and others might have been drawn from the actress to me to notice my face had gone white, because I was silent, I didn’t move, I was
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transfixed, frozen with surprise and perplexity, for the story related in the monologue was, if I remember, in Indiana, the Oneida Community wasn’t mentioned, I don’t think any commune was mentioned, but I could tell this was a woman’s experience with sexual oppression and abuse within a commune, and I could hear my paternal grandmother’s voice. That’s what made my face go white. My grandmother had never been in a commune, she was born in 1908, her father and mother had never been in a commune, and while my great-great-grandfather had visited Oneida he’d not been a member. But I could hear my grandmother, an attitude of language, of phrasing, of choice of words, of what to leave out, to omit, but more than that it was as if her spirit had entered the theater and filled the room. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember exactly how this was, only that it seemed as if my grandmother was speaking through the actress who was acting as a transmitting vessel. The hair literally rose on my arms, because my grandmother was suddenly, unexpectedly there, despite the action being based on the Oneida Community, of which my family had never been members. I felt not only my grandmother as if speaking through the actress, but a history of family resident in my grandmother, something trans-generational. When the woman finished the monologue, I called out from the bleachers, “Is this about the Oneida Community?” And she was dumbfound by my question, because it was a piece written by a playwright friend of hers, and it was based on Oneida. She was out of touch with him, but she promised to get me his name and address, which she eventually did, but though I kept the information for a while I never contacted him to find out what his connection was to Oneida, because what had happened was so ghostly, so peculiar, and I wasn’t prepared to pursue it. I didn’t know the meaning, I didn’t know how this had occurred. For Oneida ended in the 1880s, and yet my deceased grandmother was speaking through the woman, saying things my grandmother would never have said, instead it was a way of mind, a dissociation of emotion from experience, a hard alienation from love and affection, a rationalization of materialism.
There is sometimes a power with the arts to transcend and give voice to knowledge not within conscious reach, they can be surreal in a deep way not often recognized or accepted. A kind of mediumship is the only way to describe it.
6
I absurdly consider author Thomas Ruggles Pynchon vaguely remote family, though it’s not through the Pynchons of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, we’re instead both descended from Stephen Gates and Anne Neave of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a free thinker but not a Fourierite—he stayed long enough at the Fourier commune, Brook Farm, to decide it wasn’t for him—wrote House of the Seven Gables, in which a family contemporary for his time was strangled with the dark burden of Puritanism and the role of their ancestor, a Colonel Pyncheon, in the witch trial of Matthew Maule, whose desirable land is coveted by Colonel Pyncheon. Matthew Maule, who had a lovely piece of land with a good spring, is sentenced to death for witchcraft, which frees up the land with the good spring for
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Pyncheon to take. From the gallows, as Pyncheon coldly observes the scene, Maule curses him, saying he will have blood to drink. Pyncheon builds his Puritan MacMansion on Maule’s land, and when he dies on housewarming day everyone is left to wonder whether it was due the curse or not. Hawthorne thus transfers to the Pynchon family a legendary curse that some held was placed on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ancestor, John Hathorne, who sat as judge over the trials of 1692, but documentation has always held the curse was placed on Nicholas Noyes, the Reverend who presided over the trials and hangings. Before Sarah Good was executed, she said to Noyes, “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take my life, God will give you blood to drink.” A hemorrhage of some sort was the cause of Nicholas’ death in 1717, legend has it that he died choking on his blood, which one can observe on the internet still captures the public’s imagination. But Nathaniel Hawthorne isn’t concerned so much with how his fictional Pynchon died, the curse is the crushing oppression of Puritanism that is strangling what remains of the family in their prison constructed of the past. What could release them from it? The appearance of a free thinker in their lives, who turns out to be a descendant of Matthew Maule.
Nicholas Noyes is family of mine. He never married so has no direct descendants. He is my seventh great-granduncle, sibling of my ancestor Timothy Noyes. Another brother, James, was the ancestor of John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community. While I learned, at the age of ten, about my family being part of the the Fourierite Alphadelphia Association, and moving to Liberal for sake of freethought, it wasn’t until I was somewhere between twelve and fifteen when my grandfather summoned me into his office to give me “the talk”, which for some reason was upon him to give, rather than my grandmother who was the Noyes. I wish I could give a precise year for the talk, but I’m inclined to think it was the summer I turned fifteen. An old, yellowed black-and-white illustration depicting a group of the accused witches dangling from the hanging tree, along with a sheaf of papers on the family, including the Noyes genealogy, was pulled out from hiding and I was informed of our family’s participation in the trials. The stiff and morbid image of figures suspended from a tree like slashes of black I’ve conjectured may have depicted the 19 July 1692 hanging from a tree of Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Wildes, or so I when young, because that’s when Good had cursed Noyes, but if I remember correctly there was also one man pictured amongst women. If so, it could not have been the 19 July hangings, nor the hangings on 19 August as those were of Reverend George Burroughs, Martha Carrier, John Williard, George Jacobs Sr., and John Proctor. The image may instead have depicted the 22 September hangings of Martha Corey, Mary Easty, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Red, Margaret Scott, and Samuel Wardwell. At first, I thought I was about to be told we were among those who had been wronged, which would have made for a great story, then I learned instead we were the ones who had done wrong, which wasn’t so great a story, not the kind of thing that would exact sympathy for you at school, when Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was discussed (a play about the witch trials serving as a warning about McCarthyism) because you were on the bad side of history. Who wanted to be on the bad side of history? It wasn’t a great feeling that Nicholas Noyes was my
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seventh great-granduncle. The light in my grandfather’s office was dim and it was afternoon so it must have been a heavily clouded day. The talk had enough coverage that I was told about the curse, and I was told the idea Nicholas had died choking on his own blood was folklore, that it might have happened was not denied, but I was also told he had taken steps to help the families of the accused. In other words, the family had cleansed itself. After hearing about how Nicholas had participated in the hangings, I wasn’t sure I was going to buy that the Noyes family had done any penance at all, besides which hindsight and apologies and some bits of monetary recompense would never restore lives that were lost or make up for the families destroyed. And there are accounts that state Nicholas never apologized for his part in the trials.
That illustration, I don’t know what it was from and haven’t seen anything like it since. It was impressed upon me that the accused witches weren’t burned, they were hanged from a tree. There are almost no illustrations I can find of the hanging of the accused Salem witches, and when the hanging is depicted it is usually from a gallows, which is incorrect, the illustration profoundly ingrained in my mind that they were hung from a tree. That place, in proximity of a site since called Proctor’s Ledge, above old Pope Street, has since been precisely located on a place called Gallows Hill, which at the time of the hangings was recorded as observable from a house on Boston Street below. Just outside the boundaries of the city its height afforded a prominent view for all below to watch the proceedings, as well for those being hung to look down over the town. An 1855 news article, which briefly makes note of it, states it was a locust tree. A current image of a memorial for those hanged, within a wall of granite stones a small clearing about a new tree, leaves me feeling nothing, but then I see an image of the supposed place of the hangings beyond and I feel light-headed as partly exposed in the hill is a ledge of rounded, boulderous rock, and reminds me of the illustration I was shown. The longer I deliberate on it, thinking of the rock, the more nauseous I feel, perhaps remnant of how it was impressed on me this was private to the family. Because of this, at least in the generation of my grandmother, I’m unconvinced there was any familial shame there, despite the admonition this wasn’t to be talked about, and because of that admonition. Not that there should have been shame either, for these were events long past, generations intervening having nothing to do with them. Instead, while there was recognition and acknowledgment of wrongs done, rather than any shame demanding that this history not be discussed outside the family, it was a matter of self-protection, of self-preservation, of not being negatively associated with the hangings. Of not drawing attention to the family, one which was in many ways highly secretive.
When did this “talk” become a thing in the family? My father and I never discussed this history (nor that of Alphadelphia or Liberal), and when I brought it up to him afterward I don’t remember his saying he’d had the “talk”. I’d the feeling, however, this was a long-established rite, though I could well be wrong. I can imagine it might have begun when the socialist James Noyes Sr. was at the Alphadelphia commune, or maybe it was the freethinker, free-lover, spiritualist and socialist James Noyes Jr. who started the family talk. Did the family talk begin in the time of Nathaniel Hawthorne
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and his book, which was published in 1851, with the generations that had become free thinkers, or before then. Had there been already some version of the family talk, from the beginning, all the way back to Salem Town and Newbury? Because of the hangings being attached to the name of Noyes? When the family was still in New England, which they were until the early 1800s, might there have been no reason to discuss it because everyone was going to remember Nicholas Noyes and know by your name he was your relation? Timothy Noyes of Newbury, Essex, Massachusetts, was the great-grandfather of James Noyes, born 1771, who had moved to Michigan with his son, James Noyes, born 1793, who would be the last president of Alphadelphia. James Noyes, born 1771, had died in 1835 but his wife, Rebecca Russell, had lived until 1853, which meant my great-grandfather James Noyes, born in 1821, had known her, the one who had experimented at different communes and moved to Liberal. As a Noyes in New England you must know something about your family’s involvement, as a child, a grandchild, a great-grandchild of those who lived during the time of the trials, even if your facts weren’t perfectly straight you would know, so what reason would there have been to have “the talk”. But my situation assumed I would have zero knowledge, that I was learning this thing for the first time, that my father hadn’t told me, that no one who knew us and was outside the family knew of the involvement of my grandmother’s line, and in that way it had the quality of a deep, dark secret. Was my ancestor, Timothy Noyes, brother of Nicholas, even in line with the accusers? At least, neither he nor his wife, Mary Knight, are among those who gave witness against the accused. But “the talk” had the feeling of a peculiar rite of passage in which the history was solemnly handed down, reserved for when it was determined a child was of age to learn of it, at about puberty. I also know that none of my siblings received the talk from my grandfather. Was my father, as the son of a Noyes, supposed to give it? Why didn’t he have “the talk” with me, and why didn’t my grandmother have the talk with me rather than my grandfather who was not a Noyes? I was given what amounts to a presentation, with the illustration, and the papers, and a full Noyes genealogy that went all the way back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and beyond, to England, which I copied by hand because it was the early 1970s and while Kinko’s, the king of public-access photocopying, was already in operation in California, we weren’t in California or anywhere close to a university.
Nicholas Noyes was a ruthless one. For eternity, he sentenced Rebecca Nurse to, “"A dungeon horrible on all sides round, as one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames no light, but rather darkness visible; regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace and rest can never dwell; hope never comes that comes to all; but torture without end, as far removed from God, and light of heaven, as from the centre thrice to the utmost pole.”
As compared to now, there wasn’t much published on the witch trials at that time. Charles W. Upham’s Salem Witchcraft had been published in 1867, George Lincoln Burr’s Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases had been published in 1886, Marion Starkey’s book The Devil in Massachusetts had come out in 1949, Chadwick Hansen’s book Witchcraft at Salem was published in 1969, Salem-Village Witchcraft: A Documentary Record, by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum would come out in 1972. I steered clear of anything to do with the subject until well into the 1980s, maybe the early 1990s.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804 and died in 1864, was directly descended from John Hathorne, who was his great-great-grandfather, born in 1641 and died in 1717, judge over the Salem witch trials, and I suppose I should make the distinction between Salem Village, the scene of the hysteria, and Salem Town, a prosperous port five miles distant where the trials took place. The two had been once a single entity, in the sense that Salem Town was where the church was, it wasn’t until 1672 that Salem Village became its own parish with its own church. When you go looking for it now you’ll instead find the town of Danvers, its name having changed in 1752. House of the Seven Gables, published in 1851, does an interesting psychological job of tracking the guilt from the Salem witch trials into the 1800s, a cleansing provided by freethought, and I’ve considered the parallels between Hawthorne’s family and my own, how he became a freethinker, how he was at the Brook Farm commune, and my family was at the Alphadelphia commune, and then my family was involved with freethought until George Walser sold, in Liberal, the Universal Mental Liberty Hall to the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1889.
My point being that if, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s generation, the knowledge of the witch trials, over 150 years after the fact, was passed along from generation to generation, each new set of descendants another link forged in a chain leading back to the event, then it may be there was this same gravity of an inheritance in the families of some of the other victimizers. Timothy was James Noyes Jr’s third great-grandfather. He was my seventh great-grandfather and still the story was told. If indeed it was passed along generation-to-generation and the presentation to which I was treated wasn’t just trotted out for me.
I wonder when the illustration of the hangings was acquired.
One of the very few scraps preserved from the past was a dream had by my great-great-grandmother, Carrie Atwell Noyes in 1885. She wrote, “I also dreamed of being at some neighbors house and seeing a woman and some children—and it seems I sent a young woman to return a cloak to Mrs. Boulware’s folks and she started with it but I afterwards learned she did not take it to the right place. I dreamed something about Cora, though she was not the messenger with the cloak—Cora went on the journey I expected to take—and I saw the figures 8 7 which I understood meant it would cost her eighty seven dollars to buy her ticket. I also dreamed of seeing milk several times once when I set down after I had set there a while I looked and there I was sitting in a great pan of milk. The pan was as big as a dish pan, and I exclaimed, was I a witch!”
Her daughter, Cora, died a day after giving birth in 1887. This was a powerful dream for Carrie else she wouldn’t have kept this piece of paper throughout her life, and it became a significant document for her family, else they’d not have kept it after her death, which would be because Cora died in 1887 after giving birth. The milk in the dream may have been comprehended to be witch’s milk, which in folklore is the milk sometimes produced by the breast of a newborn infant, called witch’s milk as it was thought to be a source of nourishment for the familiar spirits of witches. Carrie may have felt that the dream was a prognostication of not only the year of Cora’s death but that she would die from childbirth.
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Maybe the preservation of this “witch” dream has all to do with the Noyes, but Carrie descended from the Massachusetts Bay Colony family of John Cummings Sr., born 1630, and Sarah Howlett, whose brother Deacon Isaac Cummings, with his wife, were accusers of Elizabeth Jackson Howe, who would be executed, while an aunt of Isaac Cummings' daughter-in-law, Susannah Towne, was Rebecca Towne Nurse, whose conviction and execution as a witch surprised everyone because she was a solid and pious member of the community. Rebecca Nurse had been accused by Edward and John Putnam. Rebecca’s sister, Mary Towne Estey, was also considered pious but was accused by Mercy Lewis and executed. Another sister, Sarah Towne Cloyse, was accused by Abigail Williams and Mary Walcott, the complaint on their behalf filed by Jonathan Walcott (Mary’s father) and Nathaniel Ingersoll, senior deacon of the church, and Edward Putnam, but she survived the trials. Edward Towne, a sibling of Rebecca, Sarah and Mary, had a daughter, Sarah, who was married to John Howe, sibling of James Howe whose wife was the above-mentioned Elizabeth Jackson Howe who the Cummings had accused.
Carrie’s great-grandmother, Bridget, was a Cummings, and it was her great-grandfather who was John Cummings Sr., born 1630. I don’t know if she knew this and it doesn’t mean that the family of her ancestor, John Cummings, sided with the accusers. But if my family well knew their Salem history, then so may have Carrie’s. Bridget’s son, Nathan Atwell, may have told his son, Hiram Atwell, Carrie’s father, about it. Nathan lived until 1844, he may have even told Carrie.
Deacon Nathaniel Ingersoll, whose tavern was used as a meeting place, and was also an accuser, is my ninth great-grandfather through my mother’s father’s side of the family, and was related to Nicholas Noyes through the marriage of Nicholas Noyes’ brother Timothy (my ancestor) to Mary Knight. Mary Knight’s mother was Bathsheba Ingersoll, sister of Nathaniel Ingersoll, and also Alice Ingersoll Walcott who was the grandmother of Mary Walcott, one of the three primary teenage accusers. Mary's father, Jonathan Walcott, after the death of her mother in 1683, was married second to Deliverance Putnam in 1685, sister of the above mentioned Edward Putnam and also Thomas Putnam, whose daughter, Ann Putnam, born 1679, was another of the primary teenage accusers.
And on my mothers’s father’s side of the family, Rebecca Towne Nurse and Mary Towne Estey and Sarah Towne Cloyse, are my ninth great-grandaunts, as their brother Joseph Towne is also my direct ancestor, whose daughter, Susannah Towne, married John Cummings, my eighth-great-grandfather on my mother’s father’s side, via the Warrens and the Sparhawks.
But I am concerned with the Noyes. As we can see, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes was related through family connections to Mary Walcott and Ann Putnam, via Timothy Noyes’ wife’s mother being an Ingersoll. Thus Timothy’s wife, Mary Knight Noyes, was a first cousin of Jonathon Walcott, father of Mary, a grandniece of Bathsheba’s. Then Jonathon Walcott married Deliverance Putnam, and that brought in her niece, Ann Putnam, as an extended member of the family. Timothy’s wife’s uncle, Nathaniel Ingersoll, not only hosted meetings in his tavern, he would accuse as witches Sarah Cloyce, Martha Corey, Mary DeRich, Susannah Martin, Sarah Pease, John and Elizabeth Proctor, Benjamin Proctor, Sarah Wilds, and John Willard.
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Not only did Bathsheba Ingersoll Knight’s daughter, Mary Knight, marry a Noyes, her son John married Rebecca Noyes, daughter Elizabeth married Cutting Noyes, daughter Sarah married Thomas Noyes, daughter Hannah married James Barnard Noyes, all siblings of Timothy Noyes and Reverend Nicholas Noyes with the exception of Rebecca who was a cousin.
“Am I a witch?” Undoubtedly, the Puritans of Salem Village and Salem Town would have counted spiritualism as witchery, so it may cause a bit of whiplash that 150 years after the Salem Witch Trials my branch of the Noyes were spiritualists, and that they had later been fearful of a McCarthy red scare witch hunt, so that Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, related to both the Noyes as part of the community of witch hunters (though not in the play) as well as those who feared being hunted with McCarthyism.
Ancestors of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon got into an extended heated argument with Nathanial Hawthorne over his use of the Pynchon name in his book, and Hawthorne promised to publish in the next edition a clarification that would set the Pynchons at rest in the next world, but he never did. Hawthorne said that he didn’t know about the Pynchons, but I’ve taken for granted he did. Historians are divided on this, and historians that believe he did know about the Pynchons have tried to sort out why Hawthorne would have transplanted the curse onto the Pynchon name but can only hazard guesses. One paper asserts that Nathaniel Hawthorne would have known that William Pyncheon and son John, of Springfield, “shared political and business connections throughout the mid-seventeenth century with William Hathorne of Salem”, whose son John Hawthorne presided over the witch trials. Deborah L. Madsen notes in her article, “Hawthorne’s Puritans: From Fact to Fiction”, that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1837, “In the cabinet of the Essex Historical Society, old portraits…Endicott, Pyncheon, and others, in scarlet robes, bands, &c. Half a dozen or more family portraits of the Olivers, some in plain dresses, brown, crimson, or claret…Peter Oliver, who was crazy, used to fight with these family pictures in the old Mansion House; and the face and breast of one lady bear cuts and stabs inflicted by him. Miniatures in oil, with the paint peeling off, of stern, old, yellow faces…Nothing gives a stronger idea of old worm-eaten aristocracy—of a family being crazy with age, and of its being time that it was extinct—than these black, dusty, faded, antique-dressed portraits, such as those of the Oliver family.” It sounds as if Hawthorne had more distaste for the Oliver family, and that he also had inside information, the kind that is obscured and forgotten for sake of good names. These were names that Hawthorne connected with the elite, old aristocracy, and that may have been enough for Hawthorne to consolidate John Hathorne and Nicholas Noyes within the Pyncheon name. One of the individuals who had pursued Hawthorne, irate at his use of the Pynchon name, was a Peter Oliver, descendant of the above, who had been named at birth William Pynchon Oliver but changed it in adulthood, shedding the Pynchon.
According to one source, twenty individuals were executed for witchcraft; at least eight individuals died in prison (I read there were perhaps thirteen others); one was found guilty and escaped; seven were indicted, imprisoned, and escaped; forty-three people were accused, imprisoned, and released; seven were accused and fled before
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arrest; eleven were released on bond and never tried; six were found guilty and pardoned; two pled guilty and were pardoned; fifteen were accused, not indicted, and released; twenty-five were tried, found not guilty, and released; eight were accused but never arrested. Count in all their families, the children and siblings, the nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, the in-laws, and the net of trauma is daunting to consider. The community’s strength of belief in the accusations was such that family and friends turned against the accused, which would have been yet another excruciating horror to confront after the mania had passed.
The executions were staged about a month apart, almost all taking place at what would be called The Hanging Tree at Proctor’s Ledge, so-called as the land was later purchased by his grandson. Bridget Bishop was hung June tenth. I’ve already listed who was hung on 19 July, 19 August and 22 September. Giles Corey was instead pressed to death with rocks in an effort to get him to plead, he dying after three days on September nineteenth.
Eventually, in November of 1692, a member of the Noyes family, Sarah Noyes Hale, married to John Hale, another reverend who initially supported the trials, was accused of being a witch but was never brought to trial. She was a cousin of Nicholas, and sibling of Rebecca who had married John Knight. It was believed by Salem historian, Charles Upham, that this accusation was one that brought an end to the trials as they lost the support of Hale and public sentiment began to shift against them. However, the tide was already turning. On October twelfth, Governor William Phips had suspended the trials, his own wife said by then to have been accused, and on October twenty-ninth the court was officially dismissed. When the remaining witch trials began to be heard in January 1693, spectral evidence was no longer allowed, and it was the allowance of spectral evidence that had made for so many accusations becoming convictions. Of fifty-six persons, three were convicted and scheduled for execution, but all were pardoned by Phips in May of 1693. Later, John Hale would write A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, in which he sought to explain the trials by shifting the blame to the direct manipulations of Satan.
There were many adult accusers, but the initial core group were children, nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris, her eleven-year-old cousin Abigail Williams, and twelve-year-old Anne Putnam Jr., Anne proving to be the most prolific. While Betty was sent to live with relatives away from the turmoil, Abigail went on to accuse fifty-seven people, fifteen of whom were executed, but only testified against eight before her name disappears from records after 3 June 1692, and Anne accused sixty-two, seventeen of whom were executed. Condemning a child would be unwise, not only due their immaturity and thus their inability to grasp the true import of their actions, but they were thoroughly indoctrinated in a culture that accepted witchcraft, puritanism demanded their worldly experience beyond their religion and culture be limited and alienated, plus they would have been influenced by their elders directly and indirectly. Their actions are so distasteful it’s difficult to feel sympathy for them, but then if we consider their normal position of power in the community they would be invisible, so it’s appropriate to look through them as if they are transparent, toward the true causes for their accusations, to what afforded them a remarkable power they’d not
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otherwise have possessed, a terrifying power, and which provided the community an excuse to perform as they did in the names of these children.
Many good books have since been written on the Salem witch trials, but Charles Upham’s 1867 Salem Witchcraft already attempts to exhaust an examination of the causes. “In reviewing the proceedings at the examinations and trials, it is impossible to avoid being struck with the infatuation of the magistrates and judges…So far as the medical profession at the time is concerned, it must be admitted that they bear a full share of responsibility for the proceedings…It is not to be denied or concealed, that the clergy were instrumental in bringing on the witchcraft delusion in 1692…But justice requires it to be said that the ministers, as a general thing, did not take the lead after the proceedings had assumed their most violent aspect, and the disastrous effects been fully brought to view. It may be said, on the contrary, that they took the lead, as a class, in checking the delusion, and rescuing the public mind from its control…The whole force of popular superstition, all the fanatical propensities of the ignorant and deluded multitude, united with the best feelings of our nature to heighten the fury of the storm…In baleful combination with principles, good in themselves, thus urging the passions into wild operation, there were all the wicked and violent affections to which humanity is liable. Theological bitterness, personal animosities, local controversies, private feuds, long-cherished grudges, and professional jealousies, rushed forward, and raised their discordant voices, to swell the horrible din…The effects of the delusion upon the country at large were very disastrous. It cast its shadows over a broad surface, and they darkened the condition for generations…The ruinous results were not confined to the village, but extended more or less over the county generally…The destruction dealt upon particular families extended to so many as to constitute in the aggregate a vast, wide-spread calamity…There is nothing more mysterious than the self-deluding power of the mind…The lesson needs to be impressed equally upon all generations and ages of the world’s future history.” Those are only snippets drawn from involved discourses Upham presents on such subjects of cause and effect.
By the way, the Puritans of Massachusetts were insanely litigious folk. They argued over every little thing in the world and promptly took those arguments to court. They measured all things social, geographical and monetary in nano-increments, and any suspicion of an infraction was going to be argued, argued, argued. I’m looking at a paper by E. Brooks Holifield in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and they write, “When colonial American Puritans explained why they crossed the ocean, they usually mentioned congregations. They had left a land of corrupt congregations in order to create pure ones…One aim of those congregations was to create communities of harmony and peace, and one means of achieving that end was to promote appropriate ritual…They would have been astounded to hear themselves described as communities of ritual…They had protested against a panoply of Anglican symbolic ritual forms…The irony was that ritual led not only to social cohesion but also to conflicting conflict.” And they were conflicted about everything, the kind of people where if I heard they occupied a particular area I’d be, “No, not going there. Keep me away from backbiting, backstabbing quarrelsome, money-grubbing, materialist, humorless, censuring Puritans.” They outlawed celebrating Christmas because it was pagan (it is), banned theater, and had no appreciation for irony.
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We shouldn’t forget that the system was patriarchal, for when people today hear that women and children were complainants, many will not understand that only men had the power to file complaints against supposed witches, making them on the behalf of the complainant—or, to be safe, let me say that typically the third party of a father, a husband, another male relative, a respected male was required for the filing. Married women, through the doctrine of coverture, had almost no legal standing, her rights subsumed by her husband. When we think of the children as the complainants, even though children require adult intermediaries today, we can tend to imagine them as having taken possession of Salem so that they were almost running the whole show by themselves, the adults frantically taking up the rear. It can be overlooked that the buffer of a third party was involved in the legal filing in Salem, people who recede into the woodwork. That third party had considerable power—to persuade the accuser one way or another—and without their agreement, the complaint wouldn’t go forward.
The amount of power conferred upon those typically powerless to accuse, women who were largely voiceless, children who would never be relied upon as authorities in any other situation, combined with the allowance of spectral evidence, should make one sit back and consider how adults distanced themselves, the burden resting largely on the children, so that even to this day when we think of Salem it’s the young girls who come to mind, who we feel are responsible for the devastation wrecked.
7
I’m looking at an engraving, based on art by John Reuben Chapin, of the Marais des Cygnes Massacre that took place in Kansas on 19 May 1858. The event belongs to Bloody Kansas in the years leading up to the Civil War, also called Bleeding Kansas, as popularized in a poem by Charles S. Weyman that was published in Horace Greeley’s Tribune in 1856. "Far in the West rolls the thunder—The tumult of battle is raging,
Where bleeding Kansas is waging, against Slavery!" That this was published in Greeley’s Tribune is notable as his paper was so widely known in rural areas and small towns that the travel writer, diplomat, and poet Bayard Taylor supposed its influence in the Midwest was only second to that of the Bible. This was a paper that hired Karl Marx as its foreign correspondent in London in 1851, which distinguishes its readers from the conservative Kansans of later times. Marx, with his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, is reported to have produced about 500 articles in over a decade of association. Greeley was passionate about social reform and equality, a person of big, best intentions, and the back end of Greeley’s story bewilders with its mess of a home life, but I can’t get caught up in that, move along. Though I've been well-familiar with the engraving of the massacre for years, I've never really examined this image that is an imaginary rendering even if it is based on fact. The New York Public Library gives it as first issued in 1867, appearing as an illustration in Albert D. Richardson’s book, Beyond the Mississippi; From the Great River to the Great Ocean. An imaginary recreation (weren’t they all before journalism photography), the illustration is at least close to contemporaneous with the massacre so the illustrator may have made
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certain educated guesses on representation based on this intimacy in time, and an access perhaps to descriptive accounts. In it we see Free-State Kansans being gunned down by the proslavery intruders from Missouri who rode in, rounded them up and took them to the Marsh of the Swans River to kill them. The scene is a ravine with the Free-State Kansans lined up on the left, eleven of them, but as perspective has the men receding into the distance the eleventh is difficult to see and we focus on those in the foreground, one of whom already lies prostrate on the ground, one is falling, one is on his hands and knees, another has his hands thrown up in the air while he also looks up to the heavens which may be intended to represent his being shot or he almost seems to be pleading with destiny for mercy. On the right, border ruffians take aim at them, their number receding into a less definite distance so our eye focuses on the several in front who are on horseback, their rifles and pistols trained on the Kansans who are weaponless. The artist has marked the difference between the Free-Staters and Pro-slavers stylistically. The Pro-slavers wear high boots with pants tucked in while the Free-Staters all wear long trousers without such boots. The Free-Staters are in shirt sleeves or jackets that end high on the hip, while the most prominent of the border ruffians wears a thigh-length coat, as do at least a couple others, and brandishes not only a rifle but a knife. The Free-Staters wear squat flat hats with a rather narrow round brim while the border ruffians wear something more like an early cowboy hat, likely leather with a wide brim and a diamond-shaped crown. The Free-Staters are clean-shaven, while almost all the Pro-slavers have mustaches and their hair is just slightly longer. Though there are photos of many Free-Staters with facial hair, my guess is the illustration depicts the Free-Stater as both an example of the common man of the time, and a youthful family farmer with progressive values, likely from the East or the already settled northern part of the Midwest. The border ruffians, who seem depicted to look a little older than the Free-Staters, I would guess are styled in such a way as to be equated with southern plantation owners and Missouri mountain men. Charles Hamilton, who led the massacre but was never charged with it, was from a plantation family in Georgia. After briefly running a plantation in Texas during the Civil War, he would return to Georgia where in 1878 he was voted into the state legislature. Find-a-Grave memorial information doesn't mention his leading the massacre, instead he’s given a high polish of a man of worth and distinction in his obituary of the time that relates how the captain was writing a letter at his desk at his plantation when he keeled over and died, leaving behind many friends.
What put the Marais de Cygnes Massacre on my personal map was my paternal grandmother's sister, Pansy. Decades upon decades ago, on ruled paper hole-punched for a binder, she wrote a brief history about how, on the Noyes side, we were related to two survivors of the Marais de Cygnes Massacre. She wrote that her great-grandfather, Hiram Atwell, had a sister named Olive, born in 1808, who married a Clarke Fiske of Eden, Vermont. Their daughter, Caroline Fiske, married Austin Wilbur Hall of Trading Post, Kansas. Caroline Fiske Hall was a cousin to Caroline Atwell, Pansy’s grandmother, daughter of Hiram Atwell, wife of James Noyes Jr., Caroline Atwell and James Noyes Jr. being my great-great-grandparents. Living fifty miles from one another in Missouri and Kansas, Caroline Fiske Hall and Caroline Atwell Noyes would visit, and Caroline Fisk Hall gave Caroline Atwell Noyes a shawl that was passed down to one of Carrie’s daughters then a grandson. Austin Wilbur Hall had a brother
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named Amos Cross Hall, and before their marriages the pair had, in 1857, gone from Eden, Vermont, to Westport, Missouri (Pansy instead gave it as West Point Landing) which was the origin of what are called the Overland Trials, so named because travelers would arrive there by boat, where the Missouri River bends, and then had to travel further by land. Westport is now part of Kansas City. Being without money, the two Hall brothers walked the rest of the distance, about sixty miles, to Trading Post, Kansas, where in 1825 the Missouri trader, Cyprian Chouteau, had established a licensed trading post to trade with indigenous tribes west of the Missouri River, and was the site of the first white settlement in Linn County, Kansas.
I’d already been told a part of this when I was a child, about ten years of age, by either my paternal grandfather or grandmother, but it was Pansy’s report, which I later received, that returned my attention to the Hall family.
While Caroline Fisk Hall, who lived from 1841 to 1886, is my first cousin, four times removed, in a newspaper report of 1893, her son, Amos H. Hall, visiting Liberal, Missouri, was stated to be a nephew of my James Noyes Jr. People will hear “nephew” and think Amos’s mother was a sibling of James Noyes Jr., or his wife, Carrie. Though they were first cousins, they seem to have viewed one another as more sisters. Carrie Atwell Noyes’ only sister, Sarah, had died in Boston in 1877, and this intimacy with Caroline Fisk Hall may have been fostered due this and Carrie having been orphaned before 1850.
Pansy’s history is a short sketch that has a few family details, which I’m here further elaborating upon from other sources. On 18 May 1858, thirty Pro-slavers (Pansy gives thirty-two), led by Charles Hamilton of Georgia, had crossed over the border from Missouri into Kansas where they gathered up eleven innocent Free-Staters, including the 22-year-old Amos Cross Hall and 25-year-old Austin Wilbur Hall. Austin Hall was partially blind, Pansy states it was a condition brought on by the glare off the tall prairie grass, and although he was driving a team of oxen “from the forge” and might have been able to get away, because of his “sore eyes” he was unable to see the approach of the ruffians. The captured men were then lined up in a ditch and shot down. Five died. Five were severely wounded. One was unharmed, which was Austin. Austin's obituary reveals that neither brother was immediately shot, they had managed to communicate with one another an agreement to drop to the ground when the shooting started and play dead. After the shooting, when the murderers went through the ditch, kicking the heads of individuals to see if they were dead, Amos, who had been unharmed, winced, and so was shot through the mouth. Austin, when his head was kicked, managed to stay rigid, and was so covered with blood that he was mistaken for being dead. Those who died were John Campbell, William Colpetzer, Michael Robinson, Patrick Ross, and William Stillwell. Those who were wounded but survived were Charles Snyder, brothers William and Asa Hairgrove, Reverend Benjamin Read and Amos Cross Hall. Charles Snyder (sometimes given as Eli Snider, but on a memorial to the event is listed as Charles Snider), a blacksmith, had managed to fire on his attackers and escape though he was wounded. Pansy relates that after the attack, going for help, Austin “met a woman who had seen the men led away and had hitched up an ox team to a wagon filled with bedding and water.” This was Benjamin Read's wife, Sarah, who had initially pursued the captive men on foot,
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then discovering the massacre had gone to Mrs. Colpetzer and Mrs. Hairgrove for aid, and were on the way to the site in a wagon stocked with water, bedclothes, and other things when, in Sarah’s account, they came upon Austin Hall who was on his way to find a doctor. The site of the massacre became what has been called a "demilitarized zone". The famous abolitionist John Brown arrived later in the year and built a fort there that would eventually become the Marais de Cygnes Massacre State Historic Site and Cemetery where Austin Hall would be buried in 1900.
Amos Cross Hall was noted as a pacifist who had never borne arms.
After the massacre, Amos and Austin returned to their home in Eden, Vermont, where they recovered--Amos from his shattered jaw, and Austin from his blindness. The length of Austin’s convalescence was such that he didn’t return to Kansas until April 14, 1865. So whenever I’ve imagined the massacre I’ve not only pictured its horrors but had such sympathy for poor Austin, who couldn't see and who, near sightless, stumbled down the road, covered in blood, seeking help. This is true. I’m not denying any of that horror. But what had really caused the blindness? Looking up "prairie blindness" about all I find is controversy on whether Mary Ingalls, of House on the Prairie fame, went blind from scarlet fever or meningitis. The manner in which Pansy describes Austin's illness it sounds like snow blindness, caused by the glare off the prairie, but people are said to heal from that in a day to two days. I’m not arguing that he wasn’t partially blind for a while, but I wonder what illness might have been the actual cause. Also, I’ve found alternative timeline accounts and if we can take them at face value then Austin was not recovering from his blindness until 1865 in Vermont, he had already recovered and returned to the West well before that.
Amos Cross Hall’s obituary from 1893 instead states that rather than going directly from Vermont to Kansas, at the beginning of his journeys, in 1856 he had first gone to Janesville, Wisconsin, then in 1857 moved on to Linn County, Kansas. It’s not said whether Austin was with him in Wisconsin or joined him later. After recovering, in Vermont, from the wound he’d received in the 1858 massacre, he and Austin, just a year later in 1859, returned to Kansas in order to follow the gold rush out to Pike’s Peak in Colorado. They abandoned that effort after meeting disappointed prospectors on the Santa Fe trail, and settled in Junction City, Kansas. Amos went on to Denver, Colorado, in 1860, then following the Virginia City gold rush in Montana he had moved on to Alder Gulch in 1863. Sisters Jeanette and Helen Celia Hall had also moved to Montana, Jeanette marrying Henry Rossiter there in 1872, whose profession in the census was given as "capitalist" and had been mining at Alder Gulch since 1864, about a year after the discovery of gold. After Jeanette’s death in 1874 her sister, Helen Celia, married the widowed Henry who at some point started a successful mercantile business, while Amos Hall went into banking.
Austin would have returned to Vermont as he was there in the 1860 census (Amos was not) and had registered for the draft in New Hampshire in 1863 (I find no draft registration for Amos). But a lengthy tribute to Austin, published several weeks after his death in Linn County, Kansas, in 1900, relates that following the massacre he was determined to stay in Kansas. “With that dauntless New England courage—that kind of fearlessness that inspired his ancestry in the ‘green mountain’ state to deeds of
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heroism in the olden days, Austin W. Hall, declared that it was his intention to stay where he was and fight the battle out ‘on that line’ though it took all summer or his life.” Though the obituary might be wrong, the description of “all summer” indicates he had remained throughout the summer of 1857 following the massacre in May. The account goes on to relate that during the Civil War he lost much of his property in Kansas, especially with the raid of “Pap” Price’s army at Trading Post in October of 1864. In the spring of 1869 he went to Kansas City, Missouri, “and there was joined in marriage to the love of his youth, Miss Caroline Fisk, who journeyed from far off Vermont to become the wife of a man whose name and heroism had become heralded from ocean to ocean.” Four years after Caroline Fisk’s death in 1884, he married Edith Hill. In this tribute version of Austin’s life, no mention is made of his blindness, that he had been unable to see the approach of his captors and had to return home to Vermont for his eyes to heal. Instead, his brother Amos was taken captive from his sickbed, while Austin, who had been on his way back from Snyder’s blacksmith shop, “saw the approach of his captors. Without dreaming of the consequences, he turned the brown oxen loose and at the command joined the little band of martyrs, and within an hour thereafter lay by the sides of his comrades to all appearances dead.” Amos is given as having fallen with the first fire, the bullet that was aimed at his head striking his cheekbone then passing down and nearly cutting his tongue in two. Austin survived with bruises from being kicked in the ribs while he was feigning death.
When Austin Wilbur Hall died at 67, he was given as surrounded by “peace and plenty”, one of the richest men of the county due his being successful in all his ventures, which included stock raising, mercantile, banking and milling businesses. Pansy lived from 1895 to 1985, in Liberal, Missouri, which was the family seat since 1882, sixty miles away from the site of the Marais de Cygnes Massacre, and I don't know when she wrote her short biography of Austin and Amos, but this story was obviously something the family was supposed to be proud of and keep in memory, and be proud too that Caroline Fisk’s and Austin Wilbur Hall’s branch of the family had done well for themselves, for she wrote of their children, John Austin Hall, Amos Homer Hall, and Carlton Fisk Hall, and how these brothers, sons of Austin Wilbur Hall, were a prosperous family in Linn county. Her account may have been penned before 1932, which is when John Austin Hall was the first of the three brothers to die. For all I know, she may have written this in high school.
As a child, I was proud of Austin and Amos Hall. Of course. These brothers were on the right side of history. Their tribulations were made personal by family association. As a child I rather sentimentalized and spread good guy energy to all their family members who were good guys because Austin and Amos were on the right side of history.
From this section being about the pride over being relations of Austin, a survivor of the Marais de Cygnes Massacre (Marais de Cygnes is going to be pronounced very differently in Kansas and Missouri than in France), we now shift to this section being about my death row relation whose crime was so notorious it was said to be the biggest Missouri crime of the twentieth century, and was compared with the Charles Lindbergh kidnapping and murder. This person was executed, as was his lover, side by
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side, in the gas chamber, for the murder of a six-year-old boy. The murderer’s name was Carl Austin Hall and he was a second cousin of my grandmother, Dorothy, sister of Pansy.
The two living sons of Austin Wilbur Hall’s—Amos and Carl—with their wives, were given in The Liberal News, 12 May 1939, as visiting first cousin of my grandmother, Grace Noyes Pinkerton and her husband. Austin Wilbur’s son John Austin Hall was dead but his widow was present, and her mother, Mrs. Cannon. In June 1939, Grace Noyes Pinkerton and her husband were reported as visiting John Austin Hall’s widow at her home, which she shared with her mother, and the families of John Austin Hall’s two brothers were present. In 1942, Grace was reported as having driven over to visit with the widow, Mrs. John Austin Hall. In 1942, Carl Austin Hall would have then been in the Marines, and my grandmother Dorothy was married and living in Ponca City, Oklahoma.
John Austin Hall, son of Austin Wilbur Hall, was a successful lawyer, and well off. In 2009 a book was published about the murder, Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease, by John Heidenry, which has some new information but also incorporates much that appeared in James Deakins’ 1990 book, A Grave for Bobby, the Greenlease Slaying. Both relate John was also a severe person and strict disciplinarian. To illustrate his severity, the story is told of how he did a good job defending an individual against a murder charge and got him off but his price was the man's farm. John Austin Hall, and his wife Zella, had two sons, John Richard Hall born in 1914, and Carl Austin Hall, born in 1919. Carl is given as having been raised as a spoiled "only" son, though he had the older brother, John. This older brother, the Deakin book says, suffered some injury during birth that left him mentally incapacitated and he died at about the age of five. The Heidenry book states that due a brain injury sustained during childbirth, he was placed in a mental institution at age three, then died two years later. He may have suffered an injury at birth, but I instead find he was at the family home in the 1915, 1920, and 1925 censuses, then on 25 May 1926, at the age of eleven years, three months, and twenty-six days, died from a brain hemorrhage, while living at the Powell School in Red Oak, Iowa, which was a school for mentally disabled children and children with "nervous" disorders. The death certificate states he had been living there five years and nine months, which means he had entered the institution when Carl was about a year old, perhaps he was at home during the 1920 and 1925 censuses, for usually if a person is institutionalized they’re not counted as at home. Carl was six years of age when his older brother died. With Carl’s father’s death in 1932, when Carl was twelve, he was immediately sent by his mother, Zella, to live on the ranch of a woman who had a reputation for being able to take care of children who had problems after a parent's death. This woman, Pansy McDowell, testified at Carl's trial and observed that he was a sad child, she had never seen a child who was so eager to please, that he was yes also a problem, but his mother was the coldest, hard-hearted woman she had ever met in her life and as a society woman had no time to give her son. Exploring all this at the trial, I guess they were trying to save Carl from death row. Everyone knew Carl was guilty of his crimes, Carl had even confessed and was remorseless. The newspapers said the court was looking for a motive.
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Carl was not the only one in the McDowell household who was grieving when he lived with her. His father had died May 28, 1932. Pansy McDowell’s husband had died 1 June 1932. John McDowell’s obituary followed immediately after John Hall’s in the 3 June 1932 issue of The Las Cygne Journal.
After a summer spent under the care of Pansy McDowell, Carl's mother then sent him to Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri. Carl's family may have been well-off, but at military school he met Paul Greenlease, then the only son, adopted, of Robert Cosgrove Greenlease, who was not just wealthy but very, very wealthy. Robert Greenlease would divorce in 1939 then marry a second time and have two biological children with his second wife, a girl and then a boy.
After military school, where he was already getting in trouble for alcohol, Carl attended public school, his senior year, and was liked enough that he was voted vice-president of his class. He went to college for several months but dropped out. He got into more trouble, maybe he got a young woman pregnant, and Carl's mother insisted he go into the Marines. So Carl went into the Marines. At his trial they read from the many letters he'd written his mother illustrating how broken the family was, in which he said he knew she thought he was worthless and he professed he certainly was but he hoped yet to make her proud of him, he hoped to live once again as a family, and would she please send him some money because he had none and had to borrow money for a stamp. He was honorably discharged from the Marines after four years but his mother insisted he go back in the military and he immediately did, served overseas in the Pacific theater during WWII and came home with two bronze stars, which would have been recognition for acts of heroism in ground combat. When his mother disowned him, he wrote that he knew she had been "influenced" to do so, and he hoped to yet make her proud. When she died in 1944, her estate went to her mother, which went to Carl upon his grandmother’s death in 1946 when he was twenty-six and fresh out of the Marines after having served eight years. The inheritance was around $200,000 which would be close to $3,000,000 today. The picture painted of the Carl who had served eight years in the Marines, several spent in the Pacific Theater, was that he was hardened, no longer the good-natured child, and had no head for money. Carl hooked up with a married woman who divorced and married him. He blew through his inheritance in four years with investments that went bad, gambling, luxury cars, plus there were the expenditures on drinking (a fifth a day), amphetamines and morphine (the Times reported he was taking one-half grain, or 30 milligrams, every six hours). His wife divorced him in 1950 when his money dried up—at least biographers do more than suggest this wife was only in it for the money, while she claimed their marriage was finished due his drinking—and Carl almost immediately landed in jail.
Carl was rather tragically stupid. It seemed there was nothing he couldn't do without being tragically stupid about it. After blowing through his money—somehow now without anything even though he'd been left acres upon acres of land and investments and cash—he did a series of armed robberies of cab drivers that netted him $33 and a prison sentence of five years, of which he only spent two in jail before he was paroled. Having spent his adolescence in a military school, then his early adulthood in the Marines, one may consider that Carl might have been, deep down, not too uncomfortable with an institutionalized environment regulated by others.
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He worked as a nurse in jail and read up on how to dispose of bodies. Plotting how to reverse his luck, he decided the Greenlease family was the ticket, later confessing to having decided, in prison, on a Greenlease kidnapping, and that he’d spent two years planning the crime. Remember, back in military school, he'd met Paul Greenlease. The Greenleases had gotten stuck in Carl's brain as the path out of his troubles. Robert Cosgrove Greenlease had two young children by his second wife and Carl decided he would kidnap one and collect a generous ransom. He even told another prisoner about his plot, offering to let him in on the kidnapping, but the prisoner declined.
Paul Greenlease had, by 1950, two children of his own, sons aged seven and two. In 1953, they would have been about ten and six. During the trial and after, Paul likely spent many nights thinking about how Carl might have instead kidnapped one of Paul’s own children rather than his youngest sibling.
Released from jail after two years, in May of 1953 Carl hooked up with another alcoholic, Bonnie Heady, forty-one, who was from well-enough-to-do circumstances but now down on her luck, divorced, supporting herself breeding dogs. And she did sex work out of her home. He was living off her money, and the Deakin book says he had initially planned to let Bonnie drink herself to death and inherit her property and some money she’d inherited from her father. Carl was reported to have said he woke up one night to see her pointing a her gun at him, and he beat her up. We are given no insight as to why she was pointing the gun at him, maybe he had already abused her, but she fell in love with Carl, and Carl’s plan shifted to using Bonnie in his plot to get rich. Of the Greenlease children, there was an older girl and a six-year-old boy. Carl decided against kidnapping the older girl as she might put up too much of a fight. The boy, Bobby, was selected as Carl determined he was the right age to still be controllable. On 28 September 1953, Bonnie took a cab to the French Institute of Notre Dame de Scion, the private Catholic school Bobby attended in Kansas City, where she gave the story that she was Bobby's aunt and that his mother was in the hospital with a heart attack. The two senior nuns weren't available so Bonnie spoke with a subordinate nun who was French (not fluent in English) and young and she simply released the child to Bonnie. Though the child didn’t know Bonnie, he went trustingly along. Bonnie had the cab driver take them to a place where they met Carl, who had Bonnie’s car. They had ice cream and then Carl and Bonnie took Bobby on a drive in the countryside.
Carl's plans had never been to restore a living child to the Greenlease family. From the beginning the plot was to immediately kill the child and dispose of his body. Carl related later how the boy enjoyed the ride out to the countryside, not suspicious even after Carl changed his story and said he was taking the boy to see his father instead of his mother. Carl had brought along a twelve-inch-long cord to strangle the child, which wasn’t long enough for the job (I tell you, Carl had a bizarre and profoundly disturbing way of doing everything wrong). The boy struggled so that Carl took out his gun and shot him through the head. Then he and Bonnie buried the boy in Bonnie's back yard, next the back door, planted a chrysanthemum bush over him (another report says it was behind a honeysuckle hedge, not necessarily contradictory), and sent their ransom letters demanding $600,000 for Bobby’s return. It was the most ransom ever demanded in a kidnapping.
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Carl, who had been a Marine for eight years and received two bronze stars, said the boy had bravely fought for his life. The coroner’s report detailed how Bobby’s face had been pretty well broken to pieces with blows.
The murder was committed in the car, and after failing to strangle him, the cord not being long enough and the boy struggling, by Carl’s account he then shot twice at the boy in the car, the second bullet required as the first missed him.
I’m more than a little astonished that the house where Bobby was buried is still there, and that it looks much as it did in the photos that ran in newspapers in 1953, even the rear of the house with its back screened-in porch, to the right of which Bobby was buried.
Carl had plans to collect the ransom money in a particular car with license plates he'd stolen, but somehow, on October fifth, he found himself out collecting the money in a different car on which he had forgotten to change the license plates. This caused Carl to freak out. He thought he was being followed and could now be identified. He picked up Bonnie and took her to St. Louis, Missouri, where he rented an apartment for her and deserted her while she was passed out drunk, leaving her with $2000 of the $600,000. He then made himself so noticeable to his cab driver, throwing money around, that the cabbie, who was in with the mob, immediately contacted them. It was supposed that Carl must be an embezzler. I should now relate that over half of the ransom money was never recovered and for decades it was rumored that Carl had hidden it at the Coral Courts motel in St. Louis where he had briefly stayed (a lovely art deco motel back in its day) but what I read is that the cabbie contacted the mob and the mob contacted a crooked cop and on October sixth Carl was arrested. For what? Not for kidnapping Bobby. He was arrested for having a lot of money with him. Then someone said that was really A LOT OF MONEY he had there and Carl promptly confessed that he and Bonnie had been the kidnappers of Bobby. That's all it took. "You have a lot of money!" "Yes, yes, I am the kidnapper of Bobby Greenlease. I did it with Bonnie, my lover, go pick her up, too, she is living at this address!" At first he made up a story about someone else who was involved having been the one who killed Bobby, an ex-convict by the name of Thomas John Marsh, “a wino, who has served time for molesting children”, but then admitted to everything. The Deakin book instead gives the name of the molester and not-a-co-conspirator as John Martin, the name Thomas John Marsh never used, a several page biography of John Martin even given. Thomas John Marsh was the name used in the papers when he was being sought as a suspect.
At least Carl didn't try to pawn off the murder on Bonnie. He didn’t say, “Bonnie killed him, not me!” Bonnie just helped.
During the trial, the papers printed Carl's long confession that detailed even how the twelve inches of rope wasn't long enough to strangle Bobby so he'd had to shoot him, a graphic account. Carl’s description of the murder wasn't laced with a shred of compassion. Nor did Bonnie ever, it's said, express remorse except for Carl having been caught. She did cry when she heard Pansy McDowell describe how, after Carl had been dropped off to live with her when he was twelve, she found him in his
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bedroom sobbing over his situation, grieving his father’s death, mournful over his mother not loving him. This had been in June and Carl’s father had died May twenty-eighth. One has to admit that Carl’s mother, Zella, quickly went to work to get Carl out of her home.
Carl and Bonnie had kidnapped Bobby 28 September 1953. Carl collected the ransom on October fifth. They were taken in custody on October sixth. On October thirtieth they both entered guilty pleas. They had their trial and on November nineteenth they were sentenced to death. They requested to be permitted to marry but this was denied. On 18 December 1953 they said to one another "I love you" and were executed in the gas chamber strapped into neighboring chairs. That's how quickly everything went. I don't know why they were executed side by side, perhaps for the theater aspect of it, a good story. Perhaps it was just plain cheaper. Bonnie Heady was the last federal execution of a woman until 2021.
The kidnapping changed regulations on how children could be picked up from school. Why a movie has not yet been done based on Carl Hall and this murder, I don’t know, because it’s movie material. But you’d have to in some way depict the murder of the child to show how horrible Carl was and that horribleness would detract from the very dark comedy that would so naturally go with this story about the "playboy" (he was always called a playboy in the papers) who could not do a damn thing right, his psyche was formulated so it solidly committed him to ineptitude and failure, not to mention he was consuming a prodigious amount of alcohol daily. Who goes from having today’s equivalent of several million dollars to doing seven armed robberies of cabs in a row for a total of $33? What is wrong with that person's brain? Carl was begging to be sent to prison. Who thinks they will be able to strangle someone with twelve inches of clothes line? Carl had to fail at strangling poor Bobby so he could shoot him. I keep thinking of how Carl was six when his twelve-year-old brother died in the home for "subnormal children" (another thing the institution was called) and then when Carl was twelve his father died two months after the Charles Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, two weeks after the Lindbergh baby’s body was found, the news media would have been saturated with the story when Carl's mother sent him away forever so that from the time he was twelve to twenty-six he was almost always under some kind of military supervision, first in military school, then the Marines, until he came into his money which he then threw away. This was a man who seemed to have locked himself into a scenario in which he had to land in prison, famous as a ruthless kidnapper-murderer, and be executed. And he decided that poor little Bobby Greenlease would have the lead victim part in his play.
Carl Austin Hall walked off with $600,000 in ransom money, the greatest amount ever obtained up to that date. Only $288,000 was recovered. It was believed that the Lieutenant Louis Ira Shoulders and Patrolman Elmer Dolan were involved with the disappearance of the balance, at least $300,000. They were tried for committing perjury in their accounts of how they had handled the two suitcases which had held the money, and they served time in prison. Whether or not the money had landed in the hands of the mafia was explored, but never absolutely settled, though Dolan confessed as much in September 1962, after the deaths of Shoulders and one of the local gangsters involved, Joe Costello. Shoulders had died of a heart attack in May of
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1962, and Costello, who was scheduled to go on trial for the murder of a nightclub owner, had died in June of 1962 of a heart ailment. With Shoulders and Costello now dead, Dolan said he’d been offered $50,000 as his share, but he turned it down, realizing he’d gotten mixed up by accident in a bad wrong situation but scared he’d be killed if he didn’t go along with it. After his release from prison for the perjury conviction, lying about how he and Shoulders had handled the money, Dolan said he had met with Costello and was offered $10,000 instead, which he refused except for $1500 for Christmas presents for his wife and children, and some living expenses. The unsigned confession, made in Washington D.C. to the FBI on the condition it would be kept confidential, only came to light in 1982, found in materials which had been obtained by reporters through the Freedom of Information act. On 21 July 1965, Dolan had received a full pardon from President Johnson. On 25 March 1970 the FBI had officially closed the case. Dolan had died in 1973, at forty-five, of a heart attack. Damn, I hate to say it, but it would make a great movie, but only because Carl was so dedicated to failure. There are multiple stories here. The story of poor Bobby is horrifying and desperately sad. The story of the Marais des Cygnes massacre is horrifying, what happened to Amos Cross Hall, and his brother Austin Wilbur Hall, who was determined to not be driven out of Linn, Kansas, so returned to the scene of the crime where he could live within the proximity of where he escaped death, and bring up his children within a weekly Sunday’s picnic on its Bloody Kansas ground.
And somewhere between the two is the story of Carl Austin Hall, who kept begging his mother to be family to him, and couldn’t do anything right, and so appears to have made it his death wish to blight his family’s name with a heinous crime that would pay penance for his grandfather not having died that spring day in May of 1858, for his grandfather having won the lottery in surviving.
In May of 1958, five years after the slaying of Bobby, a centennial observation was performed for the Marais des Cygnes Massacre, at the monument to it that was raised in 1883. One of the special guests in attendance was the last surviving sibling of Carl’s father, last surviving child of Austin Wilbur Hall. He was about eighty-six, and his role would be to place a wreath on the Marais des Cygnes monument in tribute to the victims. Tours of the Massacre State Park would be had, where one could review the death ravine.
I’ve included this story as I wanted to demonstrate how these family ties, which may seem distant, can last generations. Those ties stretched from Vermont and Caroline Fisk Hall, a first cousin to Caroline Atwell Noyes, to Kansas and Missouri and the families were still associated in 1942, fifty-six years after Caroline Fisk Hall’s death and forty-eight years after the death of Caroline Atwell Noyes. The Noyes were connected with and exchanging visits with the widow of John Austin Hall, then she died in 1944, twelve years after her husband, and I’m going to assume that with Zella’s death there was probably nothing much to connect her with her surviving son. Nine years later, he was executed for an infamous crime, and despite the close association of the families I never heard of this, not through my father, or my grandparents, not there would have been any reason for this story to be told me as Carl died four years before I was born, he had been dead fourteen years by the time I was living with my grandparents, but my grandmother would have been forty-five when Carl was
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executed and my father would have been nineteen, they would have been acutely aware of this relation having become a national outrage, they knew exactly who was Carl Austin Hall, and I doubt the memory of the family association with Carl would have faded. While the trial was ongoing it would have been discussed daily in their household because it was a relative, John Austin Hall’s boy. And if you were at all related to the Halls and lived within a hundred miles of Linn County, Kansas, if the Marais des Cygnes massacre was being taught in school, it’s likely that for a long while after Bobby Greenlease’s murder you would have been reluctant to disclose you were privileged to have the Halls as your relations.
Whatever was Austin Wilbur Hall’s character, I don’t know. He was successful. He was determined to not have the massacre push him out of Kansas. He may have been a great guy. He was viewed as a hero in Linn County, Kansas. His son, John Austin Hall, has been described as severe, stern, but also a success, and his wife, the daughter of a judge, was severe as well. As for John Austin’s son, Carl Austin Hall, who kept telling his mother he would one day make his father’s name proud, at least past a certain point in his life he seemed almost determined to die in the gas chamber as a belligerently careless child murderer. He told a minister that it was fortunate God had caused him to be arrested when he was, as having received the ransom he’d then the means to kill five people he had hated all his life, which he had fully intended to do within the next twenty-four hours. I find no hint anywhere of who those five people might have been.
Nor do I find any deep interrogation into why Carl had fixated so obsessively on the Greenleases. Paul Greenlease, when questioned about him, said Carl’s face was familiar from the academy, but that’s all that was printed about the matter. But there were many others who were wealthy in Kansas and Missouri, so why the Greenleases? Why, for some two decades, would Carl have been fixated on the Greenleases? While at military school did he have an unpleasant experience of some sort with Paul who was two years his elder? Had Paul scorned him? Did he resent Paul for some personal sleight? Was there something more significant about which neither would talk? Did something about the Greenleases instead remind Carl of his own family or pain him over what his own family wasn’t?
All I know is what I’ve read, which is that Carl greatly desired the approval of his parents when young, that he started drinking and doing drugs and became a liar, he would have spells in which he did well and was promising then would become a bitter disappointment, he hated military school, he hated the Marines, when he finally did something well it was at mismanaging and losing an inheritance that could have provided him stability for life, but he wanted to be upper upper class the-money-stretches-on-forever wealthy which he wasn’t, and he became a child murderer. What’s curious is that I’ve not read anywhere that he sexually molested Bobby, and we would likely now know if he had, yet he initially made up for the police the story of an accomplice in the kidnapping who he said had been in prison for child molestation, that he was the person who had held the boy after his kidnapping, that he was the one who had killed him. One could hazard he only made up such an association as he expected it would seem most plausible for a child molester to be responsible for the murder. There’s nowhere been any suggestion made that Carl had abused children,
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nor has there been any suggestion that Carol had been abused by someone as a child. But Carl’s false insertion of a child molester into the story makes me wonder. Had Carl been abused as a child? That seems an appropriate question to ask about a man had not only shot Bobby but cruelly tortured him in the attempt to strangle him with too short a string, had battered the struggling boy, then would observe in court that Bobby had been a brave fighter.
It seems an appropriate question to ask as Carl had, initially, passed Bobby off to Bonnie as being his own son. The book by James Deakin relates that Carl had initially led Bonnie to believe that Bobby Greenlease was his son, he and the mother had divorced and he was a loving father who had been prohibited from seeing his son. Under this pretense, he drove Bonnie several times to see the home of the wealthy family with whom his purported son was living, which was the Greenlease home. His hope was to glimpse the boy, his son, and maybe talk with him. It wasn’t until late August or early September that he revealed to Bonnie that Bobby wasn’t his son, that he wanted to kidnap the boy for ransom, her role being to pick up the boy from school. Bonnie said she thought, at first, it was drunk talk. She was always drunk, and Carl drank from one fifth to three fifths a day. He did tell her, prior the kidnapping, his intention of murdering the boy, as if Bobby was left alive he might be able to identify them, he would certainly be able to identify her, and she agreed to it.
In all his contacts with the Greenleases, during the kidnapping, Carl only ever identified himself as "M". Speculation was that this was an attempt to concretize the involvement of the man named Marsh, the child molester, but Carl and Bonnie said there was no meaning to it. Though there is likely no link, I am reminded of Fritz Lang’s 1931 film (released in America in 1933), M, which is about a serial child killer. The “M” stands for murderer. The killer, Hans Beckert, had been whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King” when he purchased a balloon from a blind street vendor for a little girl he would murder. The blind vendor, one day, recognizes Beckert when he hears him whistling the same tune, and tells another who follows him, then when Beckert appears to be preparing to kill another little girl the man who followed him chalks an “M” on his palm and transplants the chalked “M” onto the back of Beckert’s coat by bumping into him, thus saving the girl by distracting Beckert. It is by this “M” that Beckert is identified and captured. When he is tried by a people's court, he claims they have no right to judge him. He is saved from being executed by them when the police swoop in and take him away to be tried in a legal court.
Peer Gynt, in the hall of the Mountain King, a great troll, is told by him to no longer adhere to the rule that humans should follow, “To thine self, be true”, but to the creed of the trolls, which is, “To thine self, be—enough!” And people have argued ever since exactly what was meant by this.
A 1951 Joseph Losey remake of M has the police telling the public, over the news, five means to prevent child abductions. The first “don’t” shows a young girl beside a car, while the policeman warns, “Don’t let your children accept rides from strangers. Sometimes these are one-way rides, leading to death. The amiable stranger may be a killer.” Fritz Lang never attempts to explain what drives his killer, other than Peter Lorre stating he feels pursued by his own relentless shadow. Joseph Losey’s film
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attempts some rudely implemented psychology. We see the killer where he lives, a photograph of his mother or grandmother kept in his rented room, before which he strangles with string the figure of a girl he’s molded out of clay, after he has built himself up to a frenzy playing with the short light cord on a lamp. With no idea of how to find the killer, the police come down hard on petty criminals. Cut to the mob and a member telling the mob boss it was smart of him to set up the child killings to distract from their own crimes. Which upsets the mob boss, whose name is Marshall, and has an “M” embroidered on the pocket of his shirt. He’s revolted by the killings, as is everyone else there. He points out the police going after petty criminals endangers them. Eager to protect business, the mob boss organizes the petty criminals of the city, and those with whom the criminals network, such as cabbies, to keep an eye out for the killer. Detectives identify the killer as a Martin Harrow but don’t know where he is. In the meanwhile, the blind balloon salesman also identifies the killer by a flute he plays, a comparison drawn to the pied piper, who is pursued by a gangster and his coat marked, after which a protracted chase scene ensues during which the killer becomes nonsensically locked in a mannequin factory. The mobster arranges to turn the killer over to the police in the presence of press, the people’s court (here all of a criminal element or neighboring) try the murderer, the lawyer tries himself as having sold out and the mobster insensibly shoots him just as the police arrive, which is why the mobster, as with the killer, was wearing the shirt embroidered with an “M”, and Losey probably intended this to tie in with and implicate the law as the mobster’s name is Marshall. Plus McCarthy. Losey, who had joined the Communist Party USA in 1946, was about to leave America because of McCarthy.
Every criminal, every person, is daily tried by their peers, moment-to-moment, that’s just how it is. Sometimes they’re right. A lot of the time they are wrong.
As I don’t believe in the death penalty, I instead think Carl should have gotten life in prison. That would have given an opportunity for Carl to completely sober up and maybe someone might have learned why he had killed Bobby Greenlease. Maybe. But it’s obvious Carl had nothing personal against the little boy. And obvious as well this was a very personal murder, that Carl had made Bobby the object to receive all his distemper, and Bobby’s relations as well by extension, the impact that Bobby’s murder would have on them.
Maybe Carl, if he hadn't planned on being caught, was quite fine with being caught. Maybe he was fine with his life ending in this way. Maybe he was ready for it to be over. Maybe he was tired of chasing after the alcohol and morphine. Maybe he liked being famous for something. Maybe he liked making the Hall name, the tale of two survivors of the Marais des Cygnes massacre, somewhat less illustrious. Maybe he got back at that name and the burden of that heroism, which he had likely heard about so often he couldn't go a day without thinking about how his grandfather and granduncle had not only survived but made something of themselves, as had his father brought honor to their name. He reminds me of the son of my maternal grandfather's first cousin, who at thirteen shot his parents, set their bed on fire, then went to his bed, huddled under his covers and shot himself. He, too, was a boy who was from a family of means and described as being left desperately alone--which doesn't strike as enough reason to commit such a terrible act of violence, something
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else had gone bad wrong from which he had to escape. The big difference is that Jackson, barely an adolescent, killed his parents then himself, whereas Carl started drinking alcohol as a young teen, moved on to other drugs, survived his grandparents and parents to receive and squander a respectable fortune, then managed to just barely pull together his wits, profoundly addled by alcohol and morphine, to kidnap and murder an innocent child for the purported purpose of a remarkable ransom, and then for all intents and purposes he goes to the crossroads and announces, "Look at me, I did it, here’s the money, I’m the one you seek. I did a horrible thing and the child I did it to valiantly fought for his life. I honor him for his bravery and you will as well. Kill me."
While most of those residents of Carl’s hometown, who were interviewed by the papers, said he was an average boy who was just a little more spoiled than others because his family had money, Marshall Hoag, a family lawyer who administered the Hall estate and who had helped defend Carl, said of him, “He was an odd sort of fellow who never really had a chance in life.” That his father was “too busy making money to pay any attention to his son and that when the boy couldn’t get along in school at Pleasanton he was sent to the Kemper Military academy to get him out of the way.” Samuel Tucker, president of the Pleasanton Telephone company and a close family friend, who had employed Carl for a summer at the request of his mother, told a reporter, “Something happened to that boy a long time ago and he never came out of it.” Both Hoag and Tucker served as pallbearers for Carl. Other pallbearers were the editor of the Pleasanton Observer-Enterprise, Marsh Bradley; the postmaster, Lawrence W. Leisure; Francis James, a merchant; John W. Fletche, a former city marshal. Amos, his one surviving paternal uncle, attended his funeral, as did the woman who had cared for him after the death of his father. My grandmother’s first cousin, Grace, who had been a friend of Carl’s mother didn’t attend the funeral, which is to be expected. I wouldn’t have attended either.
No doubt Carl would have made it into Grace’s book had she finished it.