1910 Portal

My sister handed me a timeworn, canvas-bound scrapbook and said, “I don’t know where this came from, but knew you’d want to see it.” With its somber hues and cherubic child, the cover looked like a Victorian valentine minus the hearts. Wearing a blue, lace-edged dress and white apron, a little girl tips her head close to an open book, strands of her red hair tumbling forward. Inside, each heavy, age-browned page held newspaper clippings from 1910. 

A quick perusal proved this was someone’s personal version of People Magazine. The book was plump with pictures of presidents, royalty, society weddings and travels, stage performers, scandals, and murders. Whose book was this?

My grandmother, Byeo, was eight in 1910, so, an unlikely candidate. Could it have belonged to Jessamine, her mother and my great-grandmother? Women of the time could not vote, and with options for work and activities as confining for female behavior as corsets were for one’s body, might the risqué doings of actresses, the affairs of the wealthy, and gruesome murders be a source of release for a young woman, however proper she seemed to be?   

Or maybe my father’s mother, Frances, was the book’s creator? The woman I knew as my grandmother was kind but guarded, having lost her firstborn son in an accident when he was 18 months old. Still, I’d heard stories of her youthful self, and of escapades with her best friend Sally. It was hard to believe that my reserved Gaga could have been the girl who snuck into a morgue with two young, male, hospital aides, but she told me the tale herself, adding details about an ID tag dangling from a corpse’s toe. That girl might well have been intrigued by such lurid headlines as “Charlton Woman Alive When Placed in Trunk.”

Certainly, I was intrigued. I tapped in a Google search and discovered a bounty of vintage coverage. Two fishermen out for a day’s catch pulled in a large trunk and hoped it held valuables. Instead, it contained the body of Mary Porter Charlton, murdered by her husband, stuffed in a trunk, and dumped into Italy’s Lake Como. Beyond that, five pages of articles and pictures followed the trial of 17-year-old Hattie Le Blanc, accused by Mrs. Clarence Glover of murdering her husband. Mr. Glover was handsome and young Hattie, quite lovely, so I was not surprised to learn that Hattie was acquitted and Mrs. Glover’s innocence questioned. Apparently, I shared a morbid curiosity with the book’s owner, for I Googled that story too.

The clippings collector was not solely concerned with court cases and crimes and snipped historically significant photos and headlines as well. The death of England’s King Edward VII and the succession of his son, George V; the doings of President Taft and his wife; the family vacation plans of (then) Colonel Theodore Roosevelt; and the multi-million-dollar union of Marjorie Gould and Anthony Drexel fill the pages.

The lives of women better able to call their own shots clearly held allure judging by numerous pictures of stage performers in exotic attire. It appeared that Opera singer, Geraldine Farrar, however, turned traitor to her sex as she was quoted as discouraging girls from following her path. One wonders, though, what she actually said. She may have simply spoken honestly about the challenges facing a woman striving to live beyond the dictates of a patriarchal society. Perhaps the newspaper’s editors chose to twist her words to conform to traditional values. For, bellowed in bold caps next to Farrar’s picture was the headline: “BETTER STAY HOME AND WASH DISHES THAN GO ABROAD AND SING.” 

Such messages must have fueled the fires of the Suffragists and inspired socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth who formed a political study club under the guise of keeping in touch with her husband’s work.   

Beyond gathering images of the stars, fashions, and news of her day, the scrapbook’s owner seemed playful and ironic in her juxtaposition of pictures and headlines. Surely she was grinning in gluing grim Mrs. Gilbert in her somber garb next to actress Lora Lieb with her self-possessed pose and graceful sweep of lace and feathers. And what were her thoughts in the line-up of a “feverish tenement tot,” “Boston’s mammoth cat,” and Mrs. Astor’s engagement?  

When I encounter a column or cartoon in The Boston Globe that seems illustrative of our times, I cut it out and tuck it in my journal. All may wind up in the trash someday, or possibly, in the hands of a great-grandchild. For that person, the news and whatever issues plague me now will be resolved and lack the sting of current events. The clothing depicted will seem absurdly outdated and the hairstyles mundane, but they represent life as I know it. For me, this scrapbook has been a portal to 1910, making real the girl who flipped through newspapers and magazines, snipped out human stories, and pasted them in her book. 

 

 

 

 

A Celebration's Postscript

What’s that sound?  It had been a late night prior, and the heavy brocade curtains in our room at Boston’s Parker House effectively muffled the outside world. But as I shook off sleep, I thought I heard… drums?

 

Omigod! Drums! “Dave! Wake up! The parade’s starting!”

 

It was 9:30 AM, the morning of the 4^th of July, and the Declaration of Independence would be read at 10:00 from the balcony of the Old State House as it was to Bostonians 245 years ago. One of our reasons for this visit to Boston was to be present for that reading. 

 

We scurried about our 7^th floor room, donning jeans and jackets, and grabbing raincoats and umbrellas, then dashed to the elevator. The doors opened to reveal a couple in full red, white, and blue regalia: beads, hats, and tee-shirts. Our lack of visible patriotism was ever more evident when we left the hotel and joined a similarly bedecked throng heading to the square, the trill and thump of fife and drum coaxing our footfalls into a rhythmic march. Thankfully, a city employee was distributing small flags which we gratefully accepted. 

 

After days of rain, the heavens were kind, gray and churning, but so far, dry. With a boom of muskets and pounding of drums, the various bands and corps dressed in colonial garb assembled in the square beneath the East side balcony of the three hundred years-old brick building. Small children were lifted to parents’ shoulders as people poured in from surrounding streets. Strangers smiled at strangers and inched aside to allow others to pass as everyone pressed closer to get a good view.

After this year of Covid, mask-contention, insurrection, shootings, and racial strife, it seemed hopeful and fitting to merge with the multitude for greetings from Boston’s Black mayor, Kim Janey, and Black baritone Dana Whiteside’s magnificent rendition of “God Bless America.” Still, as we jostled cheerfully below the balcony, I couldn’t escape troubling images of other happy celebrants - at a concert in Las Vegas or a night club in Orlando - and headlines, crosshairs, and targets. While no shots rang out, this year’s reading seemed to hold added weight, as I pondered recent events and the country’s opposing factions. How might their interpretations differ in listening to the Declaration’s justifications for separation from a government seen as grievously flawed? 

 

In the Founders’ list of accusations against King George, I heard reflected Trump’s disregard for American traditions, laws, and public health: to me, grounds for impeachment, conviction, and removal. Conversely, those who stormed the Capitol on January 6^th claiming the revolutionary fervor of 1776 might point to some of the same statements as validation for their assault. 

 

The pandemic and January’s uprising were awakenings: we are not immune to the plagues and issues that challenged our ancestors. They are ever-emerging, and ours to address. Never have the people of the past seemed more real. 

 

During a 2019 visit to Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Dave and I participated in a reenactment of a debate over the Fugitive Slave Law and 1854 arrest of Anthony Burns. Burns had escaped slavery and lived in Boston as a free man for two years, but a probate judge bowed to the federal law and Burns was returned to his owner in Virginia. Bostonians erupted at this outcome, and one Amos Adams Lawrence remarked, “[W]e went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists."

 

For the reenactment, index cards bearing the names and assertions of those who’d attended the 1854 meeting were distributed to people who wished to take part. Slavery was abolished in 1865, but the injustices and discrimination of recent years infused the readings of the men, women, and children of all ages and colors who volunteered with an outrage as urgent in 2019 – and 2021 - as when Andrew Burns was led away in chains. The fury we gave those borrowed words was driven also by a sense of responsibility to those confined to the balcony in 1854. At that time, most of us would have been silenced: only white, male property owners had the right to speak.  

 

 

Truth is objective, but the reporting of history is not. It has depended on who held the pen, who knew how to write, who was allowed an education, and whose opinions and input were given credence. How many know the story of Anthony Burns? Or the names of suffragists Lisa Stone and Carrie Chapman Catt? Until recently, the horror of the Tulsa Massacre was largely suppressed, and the current uproar over Critical Race Theory demonstrates the resistance that remains to teaching America’s failings as well as our achievements.  

 

On Sunday, we gathered, jubilant in celebrating 245 years of democracy and progress as clouds of confetti shot skyward in a celebratory whirl. Those once silenced now can speak. Tragedy and activism have spurred wider awareness; and in teaching the whole story, we move forward together.

 

Epilogue: 

 

After the 1854 decision, Anthony Burns spent four months in jail in Richmond, VA and was then sold to David McDaniel of North Carolina. Fortuitously, Boston abolitionists learned of Burns’ whereabouts and raised $1300 to buy and free him. Burns went on to be educated at Oberlin College and became a Baptist preacher in Ontario, Canada. In 1862, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 28.