 Frontispiece of To the End of the Trail (1908). |
Richard
Hovey: Wayfaring Poet (Whose Last Harbor Was Barnard)
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In
a short autobiographical sketch prepared in 1894 at the request of the
Dartmouth College literary magazine, the poet Richard Hovey reported
with pride that for eight generations, all of his Hovey ancestors had
been “pioneers--each one pressing on to the settlement of a new
country.” Richard Hovey, with his restless, rebellious character,
his vagabond lifestyle, and his optimistic spirit, was a worthy heir
to this pioneering heritage. In his life and work, Hovey, like them,
attempted to settle many new countries, albeit in the figurative sense.
His interests and occupations were diverse and often unconventional.
He specialized in English literature at Dartmouth, but studied drawing,
painting, Hebrew, and theology at other institutions; enjoyed two brief
stints on the stage; was a one-time devotee of the Aesthetic Movement
led by Oscar Wilde; translated the French Symbolists; lectured on philosophy
at a Connecticut summer school and on literature at Barnard College;
and wrote poetry, dramas in prose and verse, and literary criticism.
Hovey’s biographer, Allan H. Macdonald, and William R. Linneman,
author of a critical study of Hovey’s work, agree that, while Hovey’s
mature poems are skillfully written and show sensitivity of emotion
and intellectual curiosity, most cannot be called the work of a genius.
Both scholars maintain that, although Hovey was a pioneer in the use
of free verse and one of the first to introduce such topics as physical
love and women’s rights into his poems, he failed to develop a
fully unique and consistent poetic voice. His poetry reflects the influences
of such disparate figures as Whitman and Poe, Kipling and Mallarmé.
Hovey’s reputation as a poet, inflated in part by his early death,
peaked in about 1930 and then declined until he was almost entirely
forgotten. While much of Hovey’s poetry would probably not appeal
to the contemporary reader, the man, who was in many ways ahead of his
time, deserves to be rescued from oblivion. As original and distinctive
as his art was, his life was much more so.
Richard Hovey was born on May 4, 1864 in Normal, Illinois, not far from Bloomington. When Richard was a child, his family moved to Washington, D.C. He received only two years of formal schooling to prepare him for college, the vast part of his earlier education coming from his mother Harriet (or Harriette), who was a teacher and translator of French literature for the U.S. Bureau of Education. Harriet Hovey was an energetic, independent-minded woman who, besides teaching, translating, and caring for her two sons, nursed wounded soldiers and sheltered runaway slaves while her husband was fighting in the Civil War. The respect with which Richard Hovey treated women later in life, and his support of sexual equality and women’s rights issues may have been the result of his growing up with an intelligent and loving mother who was also strong and well-educated. In 1881, Hovey entered Dartmouth, where he wrote prolifically, submitting stories, poems, and literary articles to the college newspaper, and became a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity. His fraternity experience left a lasting effect on his poetry. Hovey was a serious student, the only one in his class to graduate cum laude, but it was the camaraderie of fraternity life, the jovial drinking by the hearth on a cold winter night, and the harsh climate and rugged landscape of the surrounding countryside that epitomized Dartmouth life for Hovey, and he devoted many a poem to these, including several upbeat drinking songs glorifying brotherhood and wine. Hovey’s rebellious nature also began to emerge during his college days. He combined a passion for literature, especially poetry, with a deliberate disregard for then-prevalent social norms. The most outwardly conspicuous manifestation of the young poet’s bohemianism was his taste for outlandish clothes, which would distinguish him for the rest of his life. Occasionally appearing on campus in a cowboy outfit that included riding boots, a large black bow at the neck, and a hat with a “bandit-like brim,” he shocked Hanover residents and his fellow students even more profoundly with his “Aesthetic costume” in the style of young American admirers of Oscar Wilde. Hovey flaunted knee pants, black silk stockings, and a loose-flowing tie, to which he occasionally added a monocle and a sunflower, the symbol of the late 19th-century Aesthetic Movement. There is also evidence to suggest that Hovey experimented with hashish while in college. After graduating in 1885, Richard Hovey was plagued by a lack of direction. Despite good recommendations from former professors, Hovey could not secure a college teaching position, possibly because of his unusual full beard and bizarre costume, and he received rejection slips from literary magazines, despite the letters of introduction that had accompanied his submissions. He returned to Washington, where he briefly studied drawing and painting in addition to acting in amateur theatre productions. The indefinite future of his literary career and his failure to find an occupation that suited his abilities and interests made Hovey turn to religion. He was drawn to Anglo-Catholicism (a High Church movement in Anglicanism) because of the aesthetic quality of its rituals, differing sharply from the austerity and simplicity of the Congregational Church in which he had been raised. Hovey took courses in Hebrew at the Newton Center seminary in Massachusetts and attended the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church at Chelsea Square in New York City during 1886-1887. However, Hovey’s probing intellect ultimately rebelled against the conservatism and inflexibility of the Church. While still at the seminary in New York, he began to plan a work on Christianity that would be written from a more distant viewpoint, and his notes for it include the following passage:
Hovey abandoned the seminary when two new friends, the artist Tom Meteyard and the poet Bliss Carman, revived his interest in poetry. Together, they walked through the Massachusetts countryside and along the coast. Hovey spent the later part of the summer roaming the New England mountains, earning his dinner and bed by reciting poetry at local hotels. Hovey enjoyed the carefree wandering, the proximity to nature, and the absence of society’s critical eye. The spirit of warm friendship, but most of all of love that is uninhibited by the Victorian fear of the physical, set against the backdrop of the summer landscape, permeates many of Hovey’s poems written after that summer. Hovey and Carman later published three books of poetry (one came out after Hovey’s death) that included love and nature lyrics by both authors and designs by Tom Meteyard, and were aptly titled Songs from Vagabondia (1894), More Songs from Vagabondia (1896), and Last Songs from Vagabondia (1900). Although that summer marked the end of Hovey’s close involvement with theology, he remained a deeply religious person throughout his life. However, in later years, it was not the doctrine but the general spirit of Christianity that had more importance for him. Returning to his parents’ home in Washington by way of Boston, Hovey continued to write poetry, also attempting short stories and making plans for dramatic works and essays. Through a lucky accident (a prominent philosopher and educator, Thomas Davidson, saw Hovey in the street and was struck by his resemblance to Giotto’s portrait of Dante), Hovey was invited to give a lecture at the Summer School of Philosophy in Farmington, Connecticut. His topic gave him a chance to pull together his thoughts on religion, philosophy, and literature and to share them with an audience that turned out to be intelligent and receptive. As could be expected of this non-conformist, Hovey concluded his class with a warning against philistinism, blind acceptance of norms, and insincere belief. Subsequently, Hovey briefly lectured at the Chicago School of Philosophy and Literature and again at the Farmington School the following summer. The years 1888-1890 were crucial in the consolidation of Hovey’s philosophical and political views and his conception of his own poetic mission. Hovey strongly believed in the ideals of American democracy but felt that these ideals had fallen into oblivion and needed to be resurrected. According to Hovey, art had a responsibility to foster greater spirituality in the public, as well as to promote a new morality that would be at once more lax but also more truly ethical. He resolved to write a series of plays in verse that would expose contemporary social problems, and deal with moral questions, under the guise of dramatizations of Arthurian legends. Meanwhile, Hovey’s poetry remained largely unpublished, leaving him dependent on his parents for income and housing. 1890 was an especially important year in Hovey’s personal life. He met Henriette (or Henrietta) Russell, a married woman separated from her husband and fourteen years Hovey’s senior, who was well-known in artistic and high-society circles of America and England as the chief living expert on Delsartism. Named for its inventor and original expounder, François Delsarte (1811-1871), this teaching was based on the idea that certain exercises in breathing and gesture could help develop graceful intonations and poise. Mrs. Russell was also a proponent of dress reform, advocating most of all the rejection of the corset, which disfigured the female body and often led to health problems. Much like Richard Hovey, Mrs. Russell had a striking appearance, primarily because of her loose clothing held together with pins and decorated with primitivist-style jewelry, but also because of her unusual “Egyptian” hairstyle. She earned her living by giving lessons in the philosophy of Delsartism to aristocrats and socialites in Britain and America, and mixed with artists and writers. Hovey and Mrs. Russell began collaborating on a book she had conceived about Delsartean principles. As they worked in the apartment Mrs. Russell had rented on 12th Street in New York, they began an intimate relationship. Hovey was greatly impressed by Mrs. Russell’s ability to stand firm in the face of social norms, which frowned on Delsartism, on dress reform, on her two marriages, and in general on the fact that a woman was able to lead a public life independent of her husband and earn her own income. Some of his poems express admiration for this new type of woman, and others describe an imaginary lover that would be the poet’s intellectual peer and would not be afraid of public disapproval, harsh living conditions, and a nomadic existence. One of Guenevere’s monologues from Hovey’s Marriage of Guenevere is an impassioned speech about the plight of women in a male-dominated society. The relationship eventually led to marriage four years later but not without a number of trials and tribulations. Mrs. Russell had to obtain a divorce, which was still an uncommon practice. Before the divorce was final the two went to France, in part because Hovey hoped that life there would be cheaper but primarily because Mrs. Russell was pregnant with Hovey’s child. As much as Hovey disregarded social conventions and even enjoyed shocking “respectable” citizens, he did not want to damage his future wife’s reputation and disgrace his parents in the eyes of their acquaintances. Therefore, they placed their child, born in February 1892, in the care of a French foster mother and were reunited with him only three and a half years later when they brought him to America after their marriage. Even then, however, the boy was introduced as the son of Hovey’s fictitious first wife, who had supposedly died during childbirth. Throughout the 1890’s, Hovey led the life of a wanderer. He spent time in France, living in the countryside and in Paris, in London, and on the American East Coast, primarily in Washington, New York, and Boston. His illness, which was either asthma or hay fever, became especially troublesome at the end of the summer, and forced him to spend each August further north, either in the mountains of New England or in Nova Scotia. Mrs. Russell continued to spread the doctrine of Delsartism, traveling all around the States, sometimes separating the couple for months at a time. In the summer, Hovey and Mrs. Russell would sometimes camp with friends in the woods or at the beach, once living in canvas tents that they sewed themselves. In 1894, Hovey and Mrs. Russell finally married, despite the disapproval of Hovey’s father. In the same year, Hovey, asked to compose a college song for Dartmouth, produced the poem “Men of Dartmouth,” which, renamed “Alma Mater” and slightly altered to reflect the now coeducational nature of the college, remains the official Dartmouth College song. Later that year, Hovey and his wife sailed for England, where Hovey undertook the translation into English of the plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Symbolist author. Although Hovey’s own poetry was far from being Symbolist, and was especially different from the gloomy preoccupation with death that dominates Maeterlinck’s early plays, he genuinely enjoyed working on the translations for the next two years, and earned high praise from Maeterlinck himself, whom he later met and befriended. The playwright was so satisfied with the translations that he designated Hovey his official American translator. Some of Hovey’s translations, which were published in 1894 and 1896, are still available today. The encounter with Maeterlinck’s work prompted Hovey to become more interested in the Symbolist movement, then at its height in France. He frequented the home of Stéphane Mallarmé, where the famous poet would discourse brilliantly about art and philosophy, surrounded by admiring listeners, mostly authors. Hovey translated some poetry by Mallarmé, greatly pleasing the French poet with the results. He also wrote numerous articles and gave lectures on the Symbolists, making them more familiar to the American reading public. Throughout this time, Hovey also worked on his own poetry, primarily his Arthurian verse dramas. Although the first two plays had been published, as well as his critical articles and several slim volumes of poetry, Hovey suffered from a perpetual lack of money, as the royalties amounted to very little. Mrs. Hovey continued her lecturing, but was likewise poorly paid. In 1896, Hovey was asked to read a poem at the national convention of his college fraternity in Detroit. Since he had no money to return to America from France, where he was then living, the fraternity agreed to pay for his trip from England to Detroit and back to Washington. He spent the next two years primarily in the United States, continuing to write poetry despite the dire poverty in which he and his wife were living. In October 1898, Emily James Smith, the Dean of Barnard College, asked Hovey to teach two lecture courses at Barnard without pay, one entitled “General History of Literature,” the other, “History of English Literature from 1789 to the Death of Tennyson.” The courses had been suggested by Curtis Hidden Page, a lecturer in Romance Languages and Literatures at Columbia University and a literary critic. The initial instructor of choice had been a certain Mr. Barry, but due to his unexpected illness, it was necessary to find a replacement just as the school year was about to begin. Dean Smith asked Columbia University President Seth Low whether she could offer the position to Richard Hovey. “Mr. Hovey graduated from Dartmouth College in 1885,” she wrote to Low. “His subsequent career as a man of letters is too well known to need comment.” Apparently, Dean Smith chose Hovey because she wanted to make the study of literature at Barnard more spiritual and enjoyable and less scientific and dry. As she later wrote to Hovey’s wife,
President Low promptly granted Dean Smith’s request, and Richard Hovey was engaged to teach both courses in the fall of 1898. Although classes had already been in session for more than a week by the time of Hovey’s arrival from Boston, many Barnard students were so eager to have him as their teacher that they rearranged their schedules in order to include one of Hovey’s courses. A total of 43 students (out of 131 undergraduates) attended either one or the other of his courses, held in 204 Milbank Hall. Hovey’s lectures at Barnard College were far from conventional, even by today’s more relaxed standards. A class notebook contains the following excerpt from one of Hovey’s lectures:
Hovey spent most of the class period reciting poetry to his students, one of whom, in “History of English Literature from 1789,” was 21-year-old senior Virginia C. Gildersleeve, who was later to serve as Dean of Barnard College for thirty-six years. This is how she recalls the poet in her memoirs:
In addition to teaching, Hovey also advised three students on their senior theses. Reappointed as lecturer in English literature for the 1899-1900 academic year, Hovey began teaching a course on Shakespeare and another one on “English Literature in the 19th Century.” However, at the end of January, he was informed that his contract would not be renewed after the spring semester, since the professor who would head the Departments of Rhetoric and English (which were to be combined) wanted a lecturer of a more traditional sort. Although Dean Smith praised Hovey’s teaching (“We have never had lectures given in any department in Barnard more adequate, brilliant, and generally valuable than yours,” she wrote to him), she was apparently unable to override the decision to replace Hovey. For Hovey himself, the lectures were no doubt a welcome opportunity to expound his views on literature before an eager young female audience and to engage in public speaking and recitation, at which he was particularly good. But since, notwithstanding Dean Smith’s favorable opinion of him, Hovey was not paid for teaching the courses, his financial problems remained unresolved. On February 24, 1900, Richard Hovey died unexpectedly of a blood clot in his heart following a successful minor operation. He was only thirty-five. Throughout his life, he remained a wanderer both in the physical and in the spiritual sense. He never had a fixed home and never settled on a vocation. He was drawn to studying a wide variety of subjects and experimenting with different literary genres. He was attracted to the Anglican priesthood and to drunken camaraderie, fascinated by the Parisian literary elite and the low life of the taverns. Still, Hovey’s entire life was dominated by a single purpose: to strive for social change in the best way that was available to him--through poetry. He advocated greater spirituality, less emphasis on material concerns, equality between the sexes, and freedom from convention which stifled individualism, genuine feeling, and moral development. Despite health problems and emotional and material difficulties, all of which intensified in the last year of his life, Hovey always managed to retain faith in what he believed would be the imminent future, when society would shed all self-imposed restrictions and delusions, and its members would lead emancipated, productive, and spiritually enriching lives. In his critical biography of the poet, William R. Linneman compares Hovey’s lifestyle to that of the radicals of the 1950’s and ’60’s, and some of Hovey’s lyrics to those of Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger. Had Hovey lived a century later than he did, however, he might have sympathized most with the words of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a song of hope for understanding, peace, and freedom for all people in a world without poverty, greed, or hate.
•Gildersleeve, Virginia
Crocheron. Many a Good Crusade. New York: The Macmillan Company,
1954; contributed by Irina Vodonos '02 |
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 Frontispiece of The House in Good Taste (1913). |
Elsie
de Wolfe: Cultural Maverick, Moral Iconoclast, and Interior Designer of Barnard’s Brooks Hall
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A
noted stage actress in her youth, Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950) came to prominence
as the first professional interior decorator. Prior to the First World War,
she single-handedly altered the vision of interior design in both the United
States and Europe. Indeed, her principles were the single greatest stylistic
influence on the American and European home during the first half of the
20th century. Her book The House in Good Taste (1913), an immense best-seller
in its day and still in print nearly a century later, is considered the
bible of post-Victorian interior design. Speaking with passion and vibrancy
to an audience of middle- and upper-class American wives, de Wolfe
urged her compatriots to avoid “the errors of meaningless magnificence”
in favor of “the virtues of simplicity and reticence,” e.g., by
replacing gaudy pinks and golds with natural tones such as beige, ivory,
and chestnut. She scoffed at the idea that a high degree of training or
erudition was required to do the job right: “A technical knowledge
of architecture is not necessary to know that a huge stuffed leather chair
in a tiny gold and cream room is unsuitable, is hideously complicated, and
is as much out of proportion as the proverbial bull in the china shop.”
Elsie de Wolfe enters the history of Barnard College in 1907, several years before attaining the national recognition brought to her by The House in Good Taste. At the time, work was nearing completion on Brooks Hall, the dormitory for undergraduate women at the south end of the Barnard campus. Lucretia Perry Osborn, Chairman of the Barnard College Committee on Buildings and Grounds, had been impressed by the results of de Wolfe's first major job as an interior designer: the Colony Club, the first private women's clubhouse in America, whose new building had just been erected at 120 Madison Avenue. Although de Wolfe's rates were exorbitant and the young Barnard College chronically short of funds, Mrs. Osborn invited the eccentric former actress to design the Brooks interior, and she accepted. But scarcely had Miss de Wolfe begun her work, when she began to bridle at the financial constraints imposed on her by Mrs. Osborn. In a brusque letter dated 25 May 1907 to Barnard College Dean Laura Drake Gill, de Wolfe complains that
In spite of these impediments, Miss de Wolfe completed her work on schedule, and Brooks Hall was ready for students to occupy by the fall of 1907. The Barnard Bulletin thus describes her color scheme for the dormitory's original interiors:
Exactly one hundred years later, thanks to the philanthropy of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Lewis, the Brooks Living Room has been restored to its original splendor, along with the adjacent gallery and the building's main entrance. Renamed the Jan and Daniel Lewis Parlor, the room will no doubt grow in popularity as a venue for social and educational events regularly attended by students and other members of the Barnard community. Elsie de Wolfe was as bold in her personal life as she was in her public accomplishments. Back in 1887, a few years after her formal introduction to society, de Wolfe had met Elisabeth Marbury, whose commanding figure impressed the former no less than her prodigious accounting and business skills. Although Miss de Wolfe was eight years younger than Marbury, the two began a romantic relationship that would weather four decades. In 1890, after the death of her father, de Wolfe made the daring and scandalous choice to pursue a full-time career as an actress, with Marbury assuming the role of her manager. (Marbury's clientele at that time also included the playwrights Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and J.M. Barrie.) According to Jane S. Smith's biography of Elsie de Wolfe: “Like most marriages that are made to last, the relationship coupled romantic fulfillment with certain practical improvements in both their lives.” Through her aptitude as a manager, Marbury quickly transformed Miss de Wolfe from an amateur actress of middling talent into the leading lady of Broadway. Rather than for her acting, Elsie de Wolfe became famous for the splendor of her wardrobe, which featured the latest designs by the most prominent French couturiers. By the late 1890's, de Wolfe and Marbury had taken up residence together at Irving House in Manhattan, where they threw bohemian dinner parties that attracted the most elegant members of New York society, who referred to their hostesses as “The Bachelors”. According to Smith's description, the parties “were so stylish and witty that they were said to have made lesbian households not only acceptable, but positively chic.” Shortly after moving in with Marbury, Miss de Wolfe undertook to renovate the interiors of Irving House. The result so impressed the endless stream of visitors who came to The Bachelors' dinner parties, that de Wolfe began to receive regular requests for her services as an interior designer. By 1904, Elsie de Wolfe had left the stage for good. As noted above, her first major job as a professional interior designer was the Colony Club. Later credits include Barnard's Brooks Hall, and the original clubhouse of the Vacation Committee (later the American Woman's Association) at 36-38 West 39th Street. Dividing their time between New York and Europe, Elsie de Wolfe and Elisabeth Marbury together rode a rising tide of fame, fueled by the constant attentions of the popular press. In 1907, they began a long and fruitful association with Anne Morgan (J.P. Morgan's daughter), who helped to finance Miss de Wolfe's striking interior renovation of the Villa Trianon in Versailles. Anne Morgan also proved a powerful influence on de Wolfe's politics, inducing her to work and speak out for the cause of woman suffrage in America. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Elisabeth Marbury became a force of her own in politics, serving consecutive terms as the Democratic national committeewoman for New York. In 1926, at age 60, Elsie de Wolfe shocked the world by announcing her marriage to Sir Charles Mendl, a press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. Thereafter, Elsie de Wolfe was known formally as Lady Mendl. Appreciating that her union with Sir Mendl was entirely unromantic, Elisabeth Marbury remained on intimate terms with de Wolfe. After Marbury's death in 1933, Elsie de Wolfe spent an increasing share of her time in Hollywood, counting among her close friends the celebrated humanitarian author and lecturer Marion Mill Preminger. In addition to founding the modern profession of interior design, Elsie de Wolfe may be credited with a number of other aesthetic innovations, including the popularization of short white gloves (long before Michael Jackson!) and the application of blue dye to her white hair. She also created the cocktail known as the Pink Lady, consisting of grapefruit juice, gin, and Cointreau. Elsie de Wolfe never ceased her travels, and never tired of life. On her deathbed in 1950, she is reported to have exclaimed, “They can't do this to me. I don't want to go.”
•Blair, Karen J. “The Colony Club.” In Jackson, Kenneth T., ed.,
The
Encyclopedia of New York City, New York: Yale University Press, 1995, p.
255;
contributed by Donald Glassman |
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 From The Mortarboard 1907. (Barnard College Archives) |
Juliet
Stuart Poyntz: Suffragist, Feminist, Spy
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Juliet
Stuart Poyntz (née Points) '07 is unique among Barnard alumnae of
her generation for the radical path she chose in life. Her fate sharply
separates her from most American women of her age, and especially from her
classmates at Barnard. Apart from this, her unconventional life and its
mysterious end make a fascinating story that is inextricably tied with the
historical circumstances in which she lived.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska on November 25, 1886, Miss Points entered Barnard College in September 1903, at the early age of sixteen. Some time before that, Points’s family moved to Jersey City, New Jersey. While studying at Barnard, Points took a very active part in many aspects of college life, in particular student government. The college yearbook (The Mortarboard) and the student newspaper (The Barnard Bulletin) list her as Freshman Class Treasurer, then as President of the Sophomore Class, later as Secretary of the Barnard Union, and finally, as the President of the Undergraduate Association and the Chairman of the Student Council during her senior year. Points’s other commitments included, at various times, the post of editor-in-chief of The Mortarboard, and membership in Kappa Kappa Gamma fraternity, the Philosophy Club, the Classical Club, the Athletic Association, the Christian Association, and the Sophomore Dance Committee. She even acted a part in a Class of 1907 play entitled Casting the Boomerang, where she portrayed “Mrs. Hypathia Bargiss, a lady possessed of ancestors, aspirations, and a hobby.” The play was presented in Brinckerhoff Theatre (today the Minor Latham Playhouse) on November 17 and 18, 1904. In 1905, Points took part in Barnard's third annual Greek Games, where she recited the “Invocation to the Gods” and was tied for first place in wrestling. Points also spoke in the Interclass Debate pitting the Class of 1906 against the Class of 1907. The statement debated was the following: “Gladstone's policy in the Transvaal in 1881 was justifiable.” Points was the first and principal speaker on the affirmative side, which prevailed in the contest. As final evidence of Points’s popularity and her strong and charismatic personality, she was voted “Most Popular in College” and “Most Popular in 1907” according to the 1908 Mortarboard. The legend next to her photograph in the 1907 Mortarboard reads, “At her command the palace learned to rise.” Points’s concern with social equality was apparent early on. In a letter to her best friend and classmate Sophie Parsons Woodman '07 about the latter’s proposal to create a “senior society” at Barnard, Points writes:
At the conclusion of her college career, Juliet Stuart Points was the valedictorian of the Class of 1907, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. Points’s valedictory provides evidence of her commitment to take on an active role in society in order to fulfill her aspirations and realize her ideals--something that was not expected of women at that time. She commended Barnard for teaching its students to apply their academic learning to the realities of life: “We have been trained to place our knowledge continually in the frame of the real world around us. We must know the Actual and with that knowledge visions and false idols disappear and we see Truth unabashed and unafraid.” She also spoke about the importance of friendships formed in college, which are “founded on a community of interests,” as opposed to the colder, more pragmatic relationships that one would often encounter in the outside world. Although she was referring to the common academic interests of college students, perhaps this remark explains in part why Points was later attracted to feminist circles, then to trade unions, and finally to the Communist Party: all of these movements, fighting on the side of oppressed social groups, were indeed founded on a “community of interests,” which bound their adherents with a shared ultimate purpose. At the conclusion of her speech, Points appealed to her classmates never to give up the struggle for their goals. However, she chose to keep her speech abstract rather than express her political views:
By the time of her graduation from Barnard in June 1907, Points’s own interests had evolved considerably. Having progressed from suffragism to feminism (see below), she now embraced the causes of trade unionism, labor rights, and socialism, at first concentrating primarily on female workers. During her studies in England, Points, concerned with the labor question, wrote an introduction to a collection of essays about seasonal unemployment entitled Seasonal Trades. For two years after graduating from Barnard, she held the position of “Special Agent for the U.S. Immigration Commission,” working in Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Utica (New York), Lawrence (Massachusetts), and many other cities. Points called this time “the glad two years or less when I broke away from the respectable middle classes and found my proper level in the slums with the lowest of the low delightful immigrants.” This job was perhaps Points’s first exposure to the hardships of immigrants who were struggling to make ends meet, and also to the socialist ideas which had become popular among some of the immigrants. It is no wonder that Points, who yearned for social justice, sympathized with the tenets of socialism, which promised to remedy the ills of the capitalist system and to improve the lives of workers. In 1912, she announced to her former classmates in a letter to the Class Book, “I am still a woman’s suffragist or worse still a Feminist and also a Socialist (also of the worst brand).” The New York Times reports that Points first became associated with the Socialist Party as early as 1909. Soon after her graduation, Juliet Stuart Points returned to Barnard as a teacher. In 1909-1910, Points was an assistant to History Professor James T. Shotwell, well-known for his liberal and pacifist views. The course they taught was entitled “Continental European History, Modern and Contemporaneous.” In 1910, Points received her A.M. degree from Columbia University. 1913-1914 found her once again back at Barnard, again assisting Professor Shotwell in his European history course. Between her two stints of teaching at Barnard, Points had gone to England as the first Scholar of the American Federation of Woman's Clubs, studying economics, sociology, anthropology and other subjects at the London School of Economics (1910-1911) and Oxford University (1911-1912). She had also traveled from England to France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland, later writing in her Class Book that she had “met many very interesting people everywhere and had most illuminating experiences.” Upon returning to New York, Points continued her studies at the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1912-1913). In 1913, she married Dr. Friedrich Franz Ludwig Glaser, an attaché at the German consulate in New York and a Communist. (Contrary to convention, she insisted upon keeping her maiden name and never used her husband’s surname, although she did change the spelling of her own surname to “Poyntz” at about this time.) It remains to be speculated whether her marriage to a man who held Communist views might have drawn her closer to that ideology, or whether her interest in leftist movements might have attracted her to Glaser. What is known with certainty, however, is that for a number of years before her marriage to Glaser, Points had been a radical herself, establishing and becoming the first leader of the Barnard Chapter of the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York State in 1907. An article in The Barnard Bulletin relates that the club’s founding members numbered about ten or fifteen and were “much abused” (indeed, the Suffrage Club is not mentioned in the Mortarboard published in 1907), yet only a few years later, in 1912, the Suffrage Club could boast “one hundred and one highly respected members.” In December 1912, the club held its first open meeting, at which Juliet Points spoke about the weakness of the suffrage movement, which she believed lay in its narrow scope. The movement focused only on obtaining political power, Points explained, while it was necessary to make social and economic gains as well in order for the newly-acquired political power to be of real use. Points called on college women to revive the spirit of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when women were allowed a fuller share in social life, and also to fulfill their duties as wives and mothers. Points also spoke for the creation of what we now know as women’s studies, maintaining that every woman’s college should offer a course on the position of the woman in modern social and economic life. In April 1914, Poyntz (as she now spelled her name) published an article on a similar topic in the Barnard Bear, in which she reflected on the progress of the suffrage movement at Barnard. She recalled the early days of the Barnard College Chapter of the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York, when “it required considerable courage [...] to take a decided stand for woman suffrage [...] even in such an enlightened institution as Barnard College,” since “the intrepid few who composed it [the club] were distinctly made to feel by the rest of the college that they were regarded as ‘queer,’ as lacking in balance and altogether abnormal.” Poyntz then explained that the suffrage club had recently decided to become a feminist club, widening the scope of its mission to include not only the question of obtaining the vote for women, but also the “economic, social, and moral advance of women, the development of the feeling of independence and responsibility in all women and the creation of wider opportunities for women in the economic, social and political field.” In her article, as in her earlier speech, Poyntz advocated the creation of college courses on the woman’s social and economic position and on the history of the woman’s movement, which she said were necessary in order to educate students about the suffragist cause and the broader feminist cause. On February 28, 1915, Juliet Stuart Poyntz spoke at a Socialist-sponsored meeting devoted to the celebration of Woman’s Day, held at Pabst’s Coliseum in Harlem. The question of the day was defined simply as “Woman,” and Poyntz addressed the audience from the point of view of “The Feminist”--other speakers being announced as “The Voter,” “The Working Woman,” “The Father,” etc. Later that day, Poyntz gave a speech at another Woman’s Day meeting, held at a casino in the Bronx. Around the same time, Poyntz was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, as well as an investigator for the American Association for Labor Legislation, having taken up the latter job in 1914. By 1917, Juliet Stuart Poyntz was also active in the Ladies’ Waist and Dressmakers’ Union, Local No. 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), where she held the post of education director. According to The New York Times, Poyntz later became the head of the Labor Research Department at the Rand School of Social Science, located at 7 East 15th Street. In 1919 and 1921, she published two articles in The Nation (where Freda Kirchwey '15 was then an Associate Editor), one entitled “Industrial Peace and War,” and the other an unsigned piece entitled “The World and the Practical Man.” In the first article, Poyntz examined the turbulent relationship between labor and capital, regretting that the National War Labor Board, which acted as an arbiter in of worker-owner disputes during World War I, might be abolished, and with it would disappear “the one institution, imperfect though it may be, which embodies for the worker some hope of economic justice, and which assures to the harassed public the preservation of the machinery of industrial peace.” Poyntz’s second article was an argument for the superiority of “idealists” over “practical men” in their ability to run the affairs of the world, if given a chance. “They [the practical men] have had their way in the world and not the visionaries and the idealists and the enthusiasts,” Poyntz observed, “and it is they who have brought the world to its present pass.” Poyntz went on to show that the practical men have been unable to govern effectively, have led the world into war, and have driven the economy into a state of disarray. As Poyntz concluded, “The trouble with the practical man is that it is never the obvious that appeals to him; that, lacking vision, he all too often fails in all he undertakes.” The New York Times further reports that Poyntz was one of the founding members of the American Communist Party, which came into existence between 1919 and 1921, and was listed in New York Police Department files as one of the “ten principal Communist leaders of the United States.” In the years that followed, Poyntz tried to engage in conventional politics in order to represent the interests of workers more effectively. She ran for office four times as a Communist candidate: in 1924, for Assemblyman from New York’s 20th District; sometime in the 1920’s, for New York City Alderman; in 1928, for Attorney General of New York State (polling over 10,000 votes); and, finally, in 1931, for Assemblyman from New York’s 3rd District. She was never elected. Benjamin Gitlow, himself a prominent American Communist, wrote in his 1948 book The Whole of Their Lives that Poyntz was a delegate to several consecutive American Communist Party conventions starting in 1926, and was a member of the Party’s Central Executive Committee, besides being on New York’s District Executive Committee. She had even gone to China on a Comintern (Communist International) mission. The subsequent events in the life of Juliet Stuart Poyntz are known with much less certainty. She is mentioned in at least five published books, two of which are memoirs by ex-Communists, one scholarly, and two largely derivative of the memoirs. It appears that Poyntz dropped out of the U.S. Communist Party in 1934 in order to work for the OGPU, the Soviet secret police. Benjamin Gitlow maintains that Poyntz was assigned “to gather scientific information in the United States in the fields of chemistry and physics.” She went to Moscow in 1936, in order to receive further instructions from the Soviet authorities. It seems that while there, Poyntz witnessed the purges instigated by Stalin, in which people she had known and worked with were killed, and she returned to the U.S. disillusioned and unwilling to continue spying for the OGPU. She told some acquaintances about her plans to write a book in which she would expose the Communist movement. A friend of hers, Mrs. Marie P. MacDonald, later recalled that Poyntz was unwilling to reveal her reasons for breaking with Communism, and it was agreed that as a condition of continuing their friendship, they would not discuss that subject. What happened next is much less clear. On one evening in early June of 1937, Juliet Stuart Poyntz walked out of her room at the American Woman’s Association Clubhouse at 353 West 57th Street. She was never seen or heard from again. The New York Times, which carried a few stories several months later related to her disappearance, reported that her room looked just as if she had expected to return that same night; she had not taken any extra clothing with her, and all her luggage remained in the room. It is virtually certain that Poyntz was murdered by the OGPU. The Soviet secret police was prompt in eliminating anyone who knew too much about its workings, especially if that person had shown signs of disillusionment and even intended to reveal its activities to the public. Several rather comprehensive accounts exist of Poyntz’s death, all of them based on the story told by Benjamin Gitlow. According to his version, the OGPU used Poyntz’s former lover, a man named Shachno Epstein, the associate editor of the Yiddish daily newspaper Freiheit and an OGPU agent himself, to lure Poyntz out for a walk in Central Park. “They met at Columbus Circle and proceeded to walk through Central Park,” Gitlow writes. “ [...] Shachno took her by the arm and led her up a side path, where a large black limousine hugged the edge of the walk. [...] Two men jumped out, grabbed Miss Poyntz, shoved her into the car and sped away.” As the assassins supposedly reported later, they took Poyntz to the woods near the Roosevelt estate in Dutchess County, and killed and buried her there. “The body was covered with lime and dirt. On top were placed dead leaves and branches which the three killers trampled down with their feet.” However, Gitlow’s description of the abduction and murder, like the rest of his book, The Whole of Their Lives (1948), is saturated with flowery and overly dramatic details which make it seem less than perfectly credible. His trustworthiness is further undermined by his obvious lack of knowledge about the basic structure of secret police work. In light of such inaccuracies, we have reason to doubt his account of Juliet Stuart Poyntz’s abduction and murder, especially the details, and therefore the subsequent accounts based upon it, e.g., On a Field of Red (1981) and Women in Espionage (1993). Nonetheless, New York Times articles from the years immediately after Poyntz’s disappearance at least support Gitlow’s claim that Poyntz was murdered by agents of the OGPU. According to the articles, Carlo Tresca, anarchist and leader of New York’s anti-fascists, voluntarily appeared before Francis A. Mahony, acting chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney General’s office, then before a federal grand jury, in order to provide information in support of his claim that Poyntz “was ‘lured or kidnapped’ to Soviet Russia because she broke with her associates and ‘knew too much’.” The newspaper never reveals the name of Poyntz’s abductor, which Tresca gave to the legal authorities, but the description which Tresca shared with the correspondents sounds similar to that of Shachno Epstein: the agent is described as having “been an editor of a Communist foreign-language newspaper in this city,” “an intimate friend of Miss Poyntz,” in “the service of the [Russian] secret police,” and a person in whom Poyntz “had absolute confidence.” Tresca knew Poyntz well, and had connections with other OGPU agents in the U.S., and therefore was likely to know or suspect the truth about Poyntz’s disappearance, or at least about the identity of the person used as a lure in her abduction. Therefore, it is grimly unsurprising to read in the Times that Tresca himself was murdered in January 1943. It seems plausible to this researcher that, when Poyntz was about to give compromising information about them, the OGPU got rid of her, and when Tresca, in turn, exposed the OGPU murderers of Juliet Stuart Poyntz and the details of their plot, the OGPU eliminated him as well. Of all Poyntz’s colleagues in the Communist underworld, undoubtedly the most famous was Whittaker Chambers, who would later shake the nation with his public allegations against Alger Hiss. The murder of Juliet Stuart Poyntz apparently made a deep impression on Chambers just as he was contemplating a break with the Communist Party. In his classic memoir, Witness (1952), Chambers writes that after learning of Poyntz’s murder and several other similar cases, he determined to arrange his flight from the Party with great care, “using against the conspiracy all the conspiratorial method it had taught me.” On October 26, 1944, over seven years after her disappearance, Poyntz was declared legally dead by Surrogate Judge James A. Foley in New York City. Letters of administration on Poyntz’s $10,500 estate were awarded to her sister, Eulalie Poyntz McClelland of Frederickstown, Ohio, as sole next of kin. Juliet Stuart Poyntz was a suffragist, a feminist, a trade unionist, a socialist, and a Communist. Her passion for justice led her to renounce the ideology to which that passion had earlier led her--Stalinist Communism. However, it proved impossible for her to extricate herself from the grip of the Stalinist OGPU, who were not as concerned with justice as they were with self-preservation and revenge--which meant ruthlessly punishing those who had expressed dissatisfaction with them and their methods. In the larger historical scheme of things, Juliet Stuart Poyntz was but one of many victims of the Stalinist purges of the 1930’s that liquidated thousands in Russia and around the world, including one of Barnard’s own.
•Cave Brown,
Anthony, and Charles Brown MacDonald. On a Field of Red: The
Communist International and the Coming of World War II. New York:
Putnam, 1981; contributed
by Irina Vodonos '02 |
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 "Group picture probably taken when K’ang [Yu-wei, at center] was in the United States in 1907. His second daughter, K’ang T’ung-pi, then a student at Barnard College, is seated on K’ang's right. Behind her is Lo Chong, then studying at Oxford University." Courtesy of Mr. Shipp Lo. From K’ang Yu-Wei: A Biography and a Symposium (1967) by Lo Jung-Pang. |
Kang
Tung Pih:
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Contemporary Barnard College, like many American colleges and
universities, prides itself on its population of international
students. In the fall of 2007, Barnard could boast an undergraduate
population that represented 45 foreign countries. But before World
War I, there was hardly a foreign student to be found on the Barnard
campus. During the academic year 1907-1908, for instance, Acting
Dean William T. Brewster reported that four foreign students were
registered at Barnard: one from England, one from Germany, one from
Russia, and one from China. While it is not certain that these were
the first four international students at Barnard, it is virtually
certain that the fourth student, Kang Tung Pih (pinyin: Kang
Tongbi) was the very first Asian student to study here. She was also
the beloved second daughter of the late 19th-/early 20th-century
Chinese political reformist Kang Youwei. The records concerning Miss
Kang in the Barnard College Archives, though scant, reveal
fascinating details about her obscure yet intriguing life.
Kang Tung Pih’s exact date of birth is in dispute. According to Kang Youwei’s personal journals, she was born in 1880, most likely to his first wife, Chang Yün-chü. The English translator of these journals and author of K’ang Yu-wei: A Biography and a Symposium (1967), Lo Jung-Pang, maintains that Miss Kang was actually born in 1887; this is supported by her 1905 application for the Barnard entrance examination, which states that she was born in late 1887. To complicate matters, Miss Kang’s date of birth is listed on her Barnard transcript as 5 February 1888. It is possible that these discrepancies have something to do with the incongruity between the Chinese and Western calendars. In any case, it is certain that she was a native of Guangdong (Canton) province in southern China, yet because her father was an elite scholar and personal advisor to the Qing Emperor Guangxu during the Reform Movement of 1898, Kang Tung Pih grew up in Beijing in the midst of the emperor’s court. Her father’s program for reform included melding the best of Chinese tradition with the useful aspects of Western government and culture, in addition to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy for China. While his tenure in the court was brief, Kang Youwei’s advocacy of modernizing China through political and social reform was already well underway by the time of the Reforms of 1898. For example, Kang Youwei was vehemently opposed to the traditional practice of foot-binding. He refused to bind the feet of his own daughters, thus freeing them to lead physically active lives, unlike most of their noble peers. No doubt, her father’s decision also helped to mold Kang Tung Pih’s independent, activist character–a radical departure from the accepted social deportment expected of women of her stature. Unfortunately, the height of Kang Youwei’s influence in the Chinese government lasted only about 100 days (hence the alternate name of the Reform Movement of 1898: The Hundred Days Reform), before the Empress Dowager Cixi was able to stage a coup, wresting power over the court from the Emperor Guangxu. With the emperor under house arrest, ruling in name only, the 1898 Reforms had effectively failed. The Empress Dowager then used her influence to order the execution of prominent reform supporters in the court. Kang Youwei’s own brother was among those executed, but Kang Youwei managed to escape his death sentence by fleeing China. Thus began the Kang family’s sixteen years of life in exile. Kang Youwei first went to Hong Kong, then Japan, and later Canada. It is known that Kang Tung Pih was sent to Hong Kong to visit relatives around that time, but whether she stayed there or lived with her father in Japan and Canada is unknown. Even in exile, with a price on his head and the occasional hired assassin on his trail, Kang Youwei continued to travel around the world to lobby publicly and privately for his program for a constitutional monarchy and social reform in China; Kang Tung Pih and her older sister Kang Tung Wei would often accompany him on these trips. Besides the Mandarin of the imperial court and the Cantonese of her birthplace that she already spoke, Kang Tung Pih also studied English, French, Italian, and Hindi, in order to better represent her father’s cause around the world, and possibly also to interpret for him on occasion. Kang Tung Pih arrived in the United States in August 1903, with the dual purpose of studying and generating overseas support for her father’s Reform Party. Despite her young age, her father clearly recognized her independent spirit and devotion to reform in China. Kang Youwei composed this telling verse for his daughter:
Kang Tung Pih was well-equipped to deal with this “great task”. She first arrived in Tacoma, Washington, and immediately founded a women’s branch of her father’s organization, the Chinese Empire Reform Society, recruiting its members from the Chinese community of the Puget Sound region. From there she made her way to British Columbia, San Francisco, Chicago, and finally New York City by October 1903. Though only 15 or 16 years of age, Miss Kang was comfortable making public speeches (in both Cantonese and her best English) before large crowds of both Chinese and non-Chinese spectators. On 20 October 1903, the New York Ladies’ Branch of the Chinese Empire Reform Society was born at a public meeting held at the Morning Star Mission, 17 Doyers Street. With a touch of condescension, The New-York Tribune describes the scene when the founder and keynote speaker addressed the crowd, which included some 35 Chinese women, many wobbling about on bound feet; Mrs. Fong Mow of Rutherford, New Jersey, first president of the new organization; and Dr. Walter Brooks Brouner of Columbia University:
But Kang Tung Pih’s first visit to New York was a brief one; by November she was reportedly a student at Radcliffe College, having been turned away by Wellesley due to lack of space. Miss Kang subsequently attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and also studied with a private tutor, Mrs. Adeline Bartlett Allyn, from 1904 to 1905. In the fall of 1906, she was a student at Hartford Public High School.
She applied to take the entrance exams for Barnard College in May 1905, but only in February 1907 did she enter, as a “Guest of the College”--a status which Dean Laura D. Gill seems to have invented especially for Miss Kang. Under it, she would not receive credit for the courses she took, but she would be considered a member of the Class of 1909. This special status was not intended to slight Miss Kang’s intelligence or previous education. Rather, due to her continuing need to travel on her father’s missions, her imperfect English, and possibly her young age, Dean Gill felt that she would be unable to formally pass the exams necessary to officially graduate. There is, however, little doubt that Miss Kang was capable of the work required in what was, in those days as in ours, one of the most academically demanding women’s colleges in the country. While at Barnard, Miss Kang took a full 23 courses, including history, anthropology, philosophy, and education. Though she left Barnard College after the spring 1909 semester, her junior portrait does appear in The Mortarboard 1909, along with the legend, “Mistress of herself, though China fall”, a line from Alexander Pope’s “To a Lady, Of the Characters of Women”. Miss Kang’s worldwide travels with her father caused to her take prolonged leaves of absence from Barnard, which led Kang Youwei to write a letter of apology to Dean Gill, stating in part, “I consumed much of her time and am fear that her frequent absence may affect her studies considerable. However I sincerely hope that you will excuse her being absenced for this reason.” In spite of her active life outside of Barnard, Miss Kang was still very much invested in the academic and social culture of the College. She rented the most expensive suite in the newly built Brooks Hall, attended by personal servants, where she hosted popular teas for her fellow students. At one dormitory Halloween party, as reported by The Barnard Bulletin, Miss Kang found a lucky dime in her slice of cake, a traditional symbol of future wealth. She even contributed an original piece, “Lost in an Indian Forest,” to the May 1907 number of the student literary journal, The Barnard Bear: an account (embellished for dramatic effect) of the narrator’s journey through the jungle with her father on the way to visit a mysterious Prince. Miss Kang also attended the Class of 1909 senior lunch; engaged by that time to Kang Youwei’s protégé Lo Chong, she reportedly blushed “at the toast of ‘how to be happy though announced’”.
Even while studying at Barnard, Miss Kang continued her relentless efforts in support of the Chinese reform movement. A celebrity in the New York press ever since her October 1903 visit, she was sought after by journalists to comment on the mysterious death of the Emperor Guangxu on 14 November 1908. In an interview published in The New York Evening Mail on 18 November 1908, she says that she believes, on information from her many friends and connections still in Beijing, that the emperor was poisoned by a certain high minister with control over the military and the favor of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who had just died of natural causes. Miss Kang does not name the high minister, but it is almost certain that the man she had in mind was Yuan Shikai. The case of Emperor Guangxu’s death is still a mystery disputed among historians. Miss Kang, however, was not afraid to spread what she thought was the truth to the wider world, and, according to the Evening Mail, was personally responsible for leading the Chinatown memorial service for the Emperor Guangxu. (This and other items in the New York papers incorrectly refer to Kang Tung Pih as a “princess”--no doubt an attempt to convey to American readers the influential social and governmental position her family held in China. But the American sense of the word implies a connection to the royal bloodline of the imperial family that was not present in the case of the Kangs.) Like her father, Miss Kang also had some reputation as a poet; in reference to his daughter, Kang Youwei once said, “A tiger father will not produce dog progeny”. Miss Kang’s independent spirit and devoted pursuit of women’s rights and reform only add to the aptness of this quote. In 1908-1909, Miss Kang was one of only 28 students out of a total registration of 498 bold enough to publicly support the radical cause of women’s suffrage by joining the Barnard College Chapter of the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York. Miss Kang intended to broaden the scope of her activism once she left Barnard. She was quoted in The New York Evening Mail as saying, “When I finish here, I am going back to China to wake up my countrywomen. I am deeply interested in suffrage, and hope to arouse the women of China to a realization of their rights.” Like Kang Youwei, Kang Tung Pih supported reform in Chinese government and society, including equal rights for women. She may have been even more radical than her father, in that she emphasized women’s suffrage as an essential democratic right. Little information is available in English on Kang Tung Pih’s life after she left Barnard College in 1909. But it is known that after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, she returned to China, where she continued to agitate for feminist causes. She was deeply involved in the women’s movement in Shanghai, advocating women’s rights through meetings and speeches. She was an editor and major contributor to Nüxuebao (Women’s Education), one of the first women’s journals in China. After the journal folded, Kang Tung Pih continued to crusade for women’s rights. Like her father, she took a stand against the practice of foot-binding, establishing and co-leading a Tianzuhui (Natural Feet Society) with other Chinese feminists that served as a base of operations for their activities. She was part of the effort to organize the various Shanghai women’s groups into a united Shanghai Women’s Association, which petitioned the Nationalist government in Nanjing for a new constitution under the slogan, “Down with the warlords and up with equality between men and women”. Kang Tung Pih is also remembered for her Biography of Kang Youwei, published in 1958. She died in 1969.
•Barnard College Office
of Admissions. “International Students.” Retrieved
September 7, 2007 from the World Wide Web:
<http://www.barnard.edu/admiss/International/>
contributed by Katie Portante
'08 and Donald Glassman |
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 November 9, 1934. Credit: Carl Van Vechten / Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University |
Zora
Neale Hurston: Paradoxical Genius of the South
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Zora
Neale Hurston is one of the most prominent literary figures of the Twentieth
Century, owing to her extraordinary contributions to fiction and anthropology,
as well as her major role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's. Her popularity
has only increased in the years since her passing, and she was an important
influence on other notable African-American writers such as Ralph Ellison,
Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Hurston was born sometime between 1891
and 1901 (most likely the latter date) to Reverend John and Lucy (Potts) Hurston in Notasulga,
Alabama. At the age of three, she moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida,
where her father became the town’s first mayor. Eatonville was the
first African-American township to be incorporated into the United States,
and living there during her childhood affected the rest of her life, as
she developed the idea at an early age that African-Americans could lead
separate and sovereign lives apart from other ethnic groups. Because she
lived in an all-black community, in her early youth Hurston never witnessed
the brutal racism that most African-Americans experienced at that time,
especially in the South. Thus, her perspective on racial issues was considerably
different from other African-American writers of her generation.
In 1910, Hurston's entire life changed when her mother became fatally ill. As one of eight children in her family, she often felt overlooked by her father and second in priority to his job as Mayor of Eatonville, whereas her mother had always encouraged and inspired her personal growth. As she writes in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road
Zora's mother's funeral was the last time Hurston's entire family was together. Two weeks later, Hurston moved to Jacksonville, Florida with her older sister Sarah, and was forever separated from her childhood family and friends:
After living with her sister for a few years, Hurston left to become a maid to a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. From this point on, Hurston was destined to lead a nomadic life, never settling in one place for more than a few years. She traveled around the South with the troupe for a short period of time, ending up in Maryland, where she decided to attend Morgan Academy, an historically all-black preparatory school (now known as Morgan State University in Baltimore); she graduated in 1918. In the same year, she applied and matriculated at Howard University in Washington, D.C., which was the start of her higher education. Out of economic necessity, Hurston also held many odd jobs such as manicurist and maid, but, as was her character, she never held one job for long before she felt the need to find another. She also began to take her writing more seriously at this time, and succeeded in publishing her first story in the University's literary magazine, Stylus. About writing, Hurston felt that:
Hurston attended Howard University from 1918 to 1924, without completing her undergraduate requirements, as she was constantly involved in other things such as her series of jobs. By 1924, she decided that she was ready for yet another change. She left school to seek her next calling, living on the meager earnings received from the short stories she sold with ever more frequency to various magazines. Soon she was befriended by the editor of Opportunity (an African-American journal), who encouraged her to move from Washington to New York City, then as now the literary capital of the United States. Following her advice, Hurston was once more on the move, settling in New York City at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Upon reaching the big city, Hurston was almost immediately discovered by Annie Nathan Meyer, one of the founders of Barnard College. Meyer was extremely supportive of Hurston's zest and talent in numerous areas, and offered her a scholarship to the college. Hurston gladly accepted, and thus in the fall of 1925 she began her studies at Barnard, feeling:
Similar to when she was at Howard, at Barnard Hurston was never solely a student, but engaged in numerous other activities. She became personal secretary to one of the most popular and highest-paid writers of her time, Fannie Hurst, who was greatly impressed after reading one of Hurston's short stories, “Spunk.” Thus Hurston became Hurst's protégé, and was greatly influenced by her throughout her years as her secretary. Another extremely important influence in Hurston's life during this period was Franz Boas, her professor in the majority of the anthropology classes she took at Barnard and Columbia. By his ideas and his example, he inspired her in the anthropological quests which she was to embark on in the years ahead. On February 29, 1928, Hurston finally received her undergraduate degree, becoming the first African-American student known to have graduated from Barnard. Although she was not permitted to reside in the dormitories, and may have confronted many other obstacles while at Barnard, she never complained about racial prejudice at the College:
As Alice Walker stated in the 1975 Helen Rogers Reid Lecture at Barnard College, Hurston “went to Barnard to learn how to study what she really wanted to learn: the ways of her own people, and what ancient rituals, customs, and beliefs had made them unique.” She was never set back by her color, but rather immersed herself in the study of her people's culture. The same year that she graduated from Barnard, Hurston wrote the following:
She graduated from Barnard with a major in English (not anthropology, as is often said) and a minor in geology. Along with her B.A., she was also awarded a fellowship by the Rosenwald Foundation for two years of anthropological work at Columbia University. Franz Boas became her mentor during her two years of graduate study at Columbia, after which she once again felt the urge to try new things and see new places. She decided to return to the South, and in 1931 traveled primarily in Florida to collect experience and knowledge of the African-American folklore which she so highly valued. In the years following her research, she was also a drama instructor at Bethune-Cookman College in Florida. But Hurston never lost touch with her alma mater. In 1932, she contributed her expertise in African-American folk songs, dances, and rituals to the drama Black Souls, produced by Annie Nathan Meyer as a benefit for Barnard. 1934 brought the publication of her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine. The story takes place in a small all-black Florida town, much like Eatonville, and draws heavily on the anthropological and folkloric research that had occupied her during the four previous years of her life. Her second book, Of Mules and Men (1935), also focuses on the African-American culture in which she had always been immersed. When appearing as guest of honor at a 1935 meeting of the Barnard Club of Bergen County, New Jersey, Hurston described her experiences collecting folklore for Of Mules and Men and autographed copies for the Barnard alumnae and guests who were present. Her largest literary success, however, came in 1937 with the publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the most autobiographical of all her works. This novel about two fictional characters, Teacake and Janie, was also greatly inspired by her childhood, as one of Janie's husbands is actually the mayor of the non-fictional Eatonville, as was Hurston's father. Speaking of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston said, “There is no book more important to me than this.” Janie is nomadic, much like Hurston, and she has three different husbands, the first two of which intensely dissatisfy her. This parallels Hurston's own love life, which included two divorces. In the same year, 1937, Hurston was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, which she used to travel to Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda, and Honduras. In each country she collected more folklore, which continued to inform and inspire her writings, including her fourth book, Tell My Horse (1938), which relates to Haitian vodun ceremonies. The following year, another of her books was published, Moses, Man of the Mountain, a story of the emancipation of the Hebrews, emphasizing aspects which she felt appealed most to African Americans. Though these later books were only mildly well-received, she did have one last literary success: her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. Published in 1942, it presents a vivid picture of her wanderings, starting in the South and continuing throughout the Americas. Immediately preceding the publication of her autobiography, she was on the writing staff of Paramount Studios in Hollywood, after which she lived on a house boat in Daytona Beach, Florida, where she continued to do free-lance writing. Hurston's fame, however, began to dwindle with the progress of the civil rights movement, as her views were not in accordance with the majority of those in the movement. A Utopian, Hurston felt that African-Americans could attain sovereignty apart from whites. As explained by her biographer, Robert Hemenway: Zora’s standard for comparison was always the Eatonville of her childhood, a proud, self-governing, all-black village that felt no need of integration and, in fact, resisted it so that an Afro-American culture could thrive without interference. She never quite acknowledged that there were few Eatonvilles [...] In her last years her personal political test failed to acknowledge either the diversity of the Southern black experience or the need to react against the tyranny that would characterize their life. During the congressional race of 1946, Hurston worked for the campaign of Grant Reynolds, the Republican candidate running for the seat representing the 22nd District (Harlem), New York City. The National Chairman of the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training (which would later succeed in lobbying President Truman to desegregate the U.S. military), as well as a student at Columbia University Law School, Reynolds was a moderate figure on the issue of integration, closely allied to the labor leader A. Philip Randolph. His opponent in the race was the one-term incumbent Democrat, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the most famous and charismatic African-American politician of the day. Hurston strongly differed with Powell's absolute integrationism, e.g., his radical position that no federal funds be granted to any institution or program that practiced segregation. But Powell won by a landslide in the general election, demonstrating how the moderate views on race espoused by Reynolds and Hurston were fast becoming obsolete. In part because Hurston never revised her political opinions to match the times, she fell into obscurity and poverty towards the end of her life. In 1959, Hurston suffered a stroke from which she never fully recovered. The following year, on January 28, she passed away in a welfare home in Fort Pierce, Florida. Having left no money for a headstone, she was buried in an unmarked grave. In more recent years, Hurston's genius has been rediscovered and her fame revived, as her considerable accomplishments become more widely known and appreciated. In the early 1970's, Alice Walker traveled to Florida in search of Hurston's burial site, visiting places which seemed well-known even to her, a stranger, through Hurston's vivid descriptions of the area. Walker located Hurston's grave on August 15, 1973, and there erected a headstone on which she had the following words engraved: Zora Neale Hurston, "A Genius of the South," Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist, 1901-1960.
•Boulware, Marcus H.
The Oratory of Negro Leaders, 1900-1968. Westport, CT: Negro
Universities Press, 1969; contributed
by Stephanie Pahler '05 |
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 1935. Credit: Ernest A. Bachrach / Barnard College Archives |
Key
Confrontations in the Life of Helen Gahagan Douglas
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It
is no wonder that the autobiography of Helen Gahagan is entitled A Full
Life. Talented, vivacious, and confident, she accomplished more than most
women of her time in spite of considerable discouragement and hostility
from those who stood in her way. Gahagan’s first achievement was becoming
one of the most prominent Broadway actresses of the 1920’s, a feat
all the more remarkable given her father’s steadfast opposition to
her choice of profession, which lasted well into her acting career. Subsequently
an opera singer successful both in the States and in Europe during the 1930’s,
and a noted lecturer during the last three decades of her life, she is nonetheless
best remembered as a politician, under the name Helen Gahagan Douglas. She
was one of only a handful of women in the House of Representatives between
1945 and 1951 (she was the only one there in 1947), and would have been
the fourth woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate, had she not lost t | |||
