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The following is a guest blog post by Barbara Snedecor, editor of Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens. The book can be purchased here.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens—Mark Twain—famously described the moment when he saw a small photograph of his future wife: “I saw her first in the form of an ivory miniature in her brother Charley’s stateroom in the steamer ‘Quaker City,’ in the Bay of Smyrna, in the summer of 1867, when she was in her twenty-second year.”
My own odyssey with Olivia Louise Langdon Clemens began not with a photograph but with a statue—one commissioned in 2004 by the incoming freshman class at Elmira College in western New York. As director of the college’s international Center for Mark Twain Studies there, I was tasked with bringing to fruition the class’s wishes. By the time those students graduated in 2008, a bronze statue of Olivia Louise Langdon Clemens would, if all went according to plan, adorn the campus. Olivia had grown up in Elmira and had been, for a time, an Elmira College student and a member of the Class of 1864. My task was to gather everything I could find—photos, descriptions, anecdotes, whatever might reveal something about her—and share that information with her sculptor, Gary Weisman. Entire archives at Elmira College and at the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, were devoted to Mark Twain, yet barely half a dozen volumes focused exclusively on Olivia. What little we knew of her came more from interpretive biographers and literary scholars than from Olivia, herself. Who was this largely unknown woman?
So began my specific interest in the form and figure of Olivia Louise Langdon Clemens who was, I discovered, 5 feet 6 inches tall with a 20-inch waist, when corseted. I collected known photos and read all that I could about her physical description, regularly sharing my increasing knowledge with her sculptor. One afternoon, he and I visited the Chemung Valley History Museum. The director had kindly placed one of Olivia’s elegant gowns on a mannequin. As we walked into the room where the mannequin stood, it seemed, for one startling moment, as if Olivia were waiting there to greet us. With yellow dressmaker’s tape, I measured the sleeves of her dress, the length of the skirt, her bust, her shoes, the wrist of her sleeve, the distances from hand to elbow to shoulder—feeling almost embarrassed to suddenly know so much about the body of Olivia.
But what of her mind? Her feelings? Who was the person who had lived and breathed inside this lovely lavender gown and whose hands had slipped into these elegant gloves? How could I know the woman who, early in their courtship, was called “Gravity” by her suitor, the brilliant 32-year-old writer from Missouri who would change the shape of American literature?
Aware of my limited knowledge in so many areas related to Mark Twain’s life and times, and realizing now that I knew even less about his wife and family, I determined to return to school to earn a doctoral degree focused on American literature in the nineteenth century, specifically on Mark Twain’s life and times. As I progressed through my coursework at Harpur College of Binghamton University, I began to consider the topic of my dissertation.
At a conference of the Modern Literature Association in San Francisco, I spoke with Dr. Kerry Driscoll, then professor of English at the University of Saint Joseph in Hartford, Connecticut, and a Mark Twain scholar. She had just completed a captivating essay about the Clemenses’ five-month tour of the Continent in 1873. She told me that she had a hunch that exploring the letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens might be a wonderful project. I was intrigued. After all, I already knew Olivia’s outer form fairly well—by then I had seen her move from clay to bronze—but what about her mind and heart?
My first acquaintance with Olivia’s letters occurred under the dome of a microfilm reader. Her letters, scattered in various places over the years—and some probably destroyed by Olivia, herself, or by her daughter, Clara—had been photographed and stored on microfilm. I began a daily trek across campus from my office to the college library where Mark Twain Archivist Mark Woodhouse helped me begin my research. Ensconced under the reader’s hood, I determined that I would quickly lose my sight and possibly my mind, sobered by the fact that it would take endless hours to read and transcribe Olivia’s wonderful and instantly engrossing letters.
Discouraged, I wrote Victor Fischer, then editor at the Mark Twain Papers, to inquire if by any chance he might know something about the letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens. With joy, I learned that a hard-working, patient, and devoted graduate student was almost done with the task of typescripting Olivia’s letters. Eureka! Incredulously, I asked Vic if I might merit a copy of those files. Shortly thereafter, a compact disc arrived in the mail with the more than 600 letters of Olivia’s inconsistent handwriting now beautifully typescripted. My project began in earnest. Later, another disc would arrive with a larger, updated set of files.
Olivia’s letters cover almost forty years of her life. While some of her letters, as well as portions of letters, already had been published in biographies or scholarly works, this newly transcribed collection would offer the most complete assemblage of her letters to date. I was overwhelmed by the chance to explore this woman who seemed to have moved in the background of her husband’s formidable gifts but whom I suspected would reveal herself in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. Little did I anticipate, however, how intimately our lives would overlap at times. As Olivia nursed her father, friend, and son to their deaths, I nursed my own mother to hers. As she sat beside her mother’s deathbed, I cared for my father to his. As she greeted babies, I greeted grandbabies. As she managed the rigors of nineteenth-century quarantine, I experienced the same in our century. In dozens of smaller ways, Olivia’s observations aligned with my own. As I often paused to admire a turn of phrase or relish a description, I began to think that our lives had somehow merged. The empty lavender dress on the mannequin was now brimming with life.
Barbara Snedecor served for many years as Director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. In addition to editing the second edition of Mark Twain in Elmira, she has contributed pieces to the Mark Twain Annual and American Literary Realism.
Jon Langmead is a writer covering music and popular culture for a variety of outlets. The University of Missouri Press has just released his book, Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling. The book offers a colorful, entertaining history of professional wrestling’s formative years in the U.S., from roughly 1874 to 1941. Special attention is paid to the life and career of Jack Curley, a boxing promoter who was instrumental to professional wrestling’s rise.
We recently spoke to Langmead about his early love for professional wrestling, the process of writing Ballyhoo, and his goals for the book. Check out our conversation below. The book can be purchased here.
How did you become a wrestling fan?
I first got interested in it when I was around 9. It was on TV a lot (in the ‘80s). Those were the early days of Vince McMahon taking over the WWF. I caught it on TV, and something about it just caught my attention. I’m sure it was the colorful characters and the drama of the matches. That first exposure completely pulled me in. In Baltimore, we got a lot of wrestling (broadcasts) from around the country. I was a huge fan for a couple years, but it trailed off in high school.
My interest in wrestling itself never came back. Modern wrestling didn’t appeal to me. But I did become interested in the history of it. Maybe I was interested in understanding why I was interested in the first place…people compare wrestlers to comic book or movie characters — these kinds of archetypal figures. But nobody ever looks into who created those characters, the way they do with comic book characters. It’s sort of taken for granted. I became interested in (the people) who created these characters. Who told them how to dress? That was what really drew up my interest. Who were the people who played these roles?
Tell us about the research process for Ballyhoo!
The best part of this was meeting (wrestling historians) in person. I was able to meet them and talk to them, to learn about their interest and where it came from. Then I was able to figure out where there were holes in the research, and do my own research through newspaper archives, libraries, old books, and stuff that’s not available online — old memoirs that wrestlers have written. A lot of stuff went unpublished that I was, luckily, able to get access to. Those documents created the foundation for the book.
Dr. Ben Roller wrestles an unknown opponent at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, 1909. Photograph by Frank H. Nowell. Courtesy Special Collections, the University of Washington Libraries, AYP616.
The families of the people I covered didn’t know always know a lot of detail, because the wrestlers didn’t talk openly about their lives. It was all a very secretive thing. I think they certainly wanted to create the illusion that the sport was 100% on the up and up. That was one of the essential parts of being a wrestler or a promoter — that you never gave the impression that the business was anything less than completely honest. They sewed a lot of misdirection into what they were doing to continue that illusion, and the impression that the business was completely honest. People use the analogy of a magician. You want to believe that what you’re seeing is real, and the best ones don’t do anything to dissuade you from that.
My interest was really in who these people were. That was not easy to figure out for these people who have been dead for one hundred years — people who didn’t write memoirs, because they didn’t want to tell the truth about what they did. I really had to dig to find quotes from them in newspapers, and letters they wrote. A couple people did write memoirs that were never published. Getting a hold of those was a big catalyst, and they had a lot of great information that otherwise would have been inaccessible.
Were there any figures you came across that especially interested you?
Jack Curley. From Langmead’s personal collection.
Definitely Jack Curley, who was the promoter based out of New York who is most closely associated with the growth of wrestling in the early 20th century…he played a strong role in turning it into more entertainment than sport. By the end of the ‘20s, a wrestling match at that time probably wasn’t all that different from one in the ‘80s or ‘90s. All the conventions were set and stayed pretty consistent, and (Curley) played a major role in that.
Also Gus Sonnenberg. He was a football player in the early days of the NFL, then went on to become a professional wrestler, which isn’t that unusual. That still happens nowadays. He was a phenomenon for a couple years…I can’t explain what it is, but I really fell in love with him, and really wanted to know more about his life. He was, in some ways, a pretty cynical guy, and took a lot of heat from the public when it came out that his matches were manipulated. The public really turned on him. He would get chairs thrown at him. He became a pariah, really. His struggles with that really fascinated me, but he kept wrestling, and wanted to make as much money as he could. My goal with the book was to bring guys like that to life. My hope is that their stories resonate with readers as much as they resonated with me.
Gus Sonnenberg and Judith Allen in Boston, 1931. Courtesy the Alton H. Blackington Collection, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Why did professional wrestling attract “roughhousers, con artists, and wildmen?”
You could make a lot of money. It was unregulated. The government struggled with regulating it. A lot of (wrestlers) probably had pretty limited options with their careers. Not all of them could have made it as boxers. A lot of them tried and weren’t successful at it.
Promoters could go and pick any big, hulking guy who worked around the city, and teach him how to take falls and stuff like that, and they could make more money than they would make in a workday. I think that appealed to guys like that. I think the money was very attractive to people — but it was a very tough business. People took a lot of punishment, and there were diseases they would pick up. Promoters would steal their money. It wasn’t an easy life, but it was a way to make a living when that wasn’t easy to do. That being said, there was an element of show business to it that I think they had to have loved. Because, to be successful, you had to be theatrical in your own way. I suspect the most successful ones had to have loved that aspect of it.
Tell us about the connection between professional wrestling and vaudeville.
A lot of the time, wrestling took place in vaudeville theaters. The wrestlers would have certainly mixed with vaudeville performers. I think to appeal to an audience, the wrestlers had to find ways to stand out. They couldn’t just have a wrestling match for an hour, and try to turn the other guy on his back. They had to find ways to appeal to the audience, especially as they got into bigger arenas, and people were sitting further and further away. They found ways to do facial expressions, and make noises. They call it the ‘grunt and groan game’ for that reason. They made noise to emphasize if they were in pain. I think they learned those tricks partially from being exposed to vaudeville and theatrical presentations. Some people will say they took the conventions of a vaudeville tour, packing a group of wrestlers together and touring around the country.
The question of whether professional wrestling is “real” or “fake” comes into play here. The notion of authenticity is evoked in conversations surrounding many other forms of entertainment, like reality TV and popular music. Why do you think it’s so important to us that these things be “real?”
I don’t know. Wrestlers don’t like to use the word ‘fake.’ They use the word ‘staged.’ Because what’s fake? What constitutes something as fake? There’s nothing fake about the damage their bodies take. But (the matches) are predetermined. Is any of the entertainment we watch on television really authentic? Everything is manipulated to a certain point. It’s told through a certain point of view, and you can change the material to fit that, and we’re not always privy to how the material was changed. But for some reason, wrestling, less so nowadays, was the thing everyone pointed to as ‘that’s fake, but other things aren’t.’ I would question where that line really is.
Promotional flyer produced by Jack Pfefer and Toots Mondt. From the author’s personal collection.
What do you hope readers take away from this book?
I wanted to write this because we explore the roots of so many things, — so much information is out there on the roots of filmmaking, football, and baseball, and we really look up to the early pioneers in these areas — but wrestling is something we take for granted. It’s one of the most popular forms of entertainment or sport on television. It’s a mainstay in American pop culture, but we’ve never really looked into where it came from. There’s a lot that went into creating it, and I was hoping to shed light on that, and the people who spent their lives building it.
I also think there’s a great story there about the government’s attempts to regulate it in the late ‘20s, the struggle that audiences and the government had in how seriously to take it, and the question of ‘what does it mean to have a manipulated sport that we pretend is real, but clearly can’t be?’ How do you regulate something like that? And how does something that, in a certain respect, was ‘real,’ then become packaged entertainment, but is presented as “the real thing?”
I really hope that I found a way to make the story entertaining, and my goal was to make it something that might be appealing to people who might have never even seen a wrestling match. I hope I found an entertaining way to tell that story for everyone.
While Olivia Langdon Clemens is popularly known as the wife of Mark Twain, she deserves to be remembered on her own terms. Her many letters are perhaps the best way for us to understand her as a world-class thinker in her own right. Thus, in honor of her birthday, we’ve decided to share the preface to Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens, edited by Barbara E. Snedecor.
PREFACE
The title of this volume, Gravity, refers to Samuel Clemens’s affectionate nickname for his wife, Olivia Louise Langdon Clemens. Samuel’s first use of this moniker appeared in a letter he wrote in response to a humorous comment Olivia had made during their epistolary courtship. He called her his “dear little concentration of gravity” (23 and 24 December 1868). Later, Samuel reported that Olivia “wrote with great gravity in a stately, smooth-flowing commercial style” (23 and 24 January 1869). After their engagement, Samuel took pleasure in Olivia’s reference to her engagement ring as “the largest piece of furniture in the house.” It was then that Samuel noted that her comment “is a burst of humor worthy of your affianced husband, Livy, you dear little Gravity” (27 February 1869). Although Samuel’s references to Olivia as gravity referred to her plain style of humor and writing, in another sense, the notion of Olivia as Gravity may suggest his powerful attraction to her as well as underscore her central, steadying, grounding force in his life. It is these latter insights that the title of this volume seeks to highlight.
What little we know of Olivia Langdon Clemens comes more through her husband’s letters and comments, and from interpretive biographers and literary scholars, than from Olivia herself. While entire archives at the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Elmira College in western New York are devoted to Mark Twain, barely half a dozen books focus exclusively on Olivia. Some complete letters or portions of letters written by Olivia have appeared in biographies and in letter collections already, but this volume offers the broadest assemblage of her letters to date, thus allowing readers to meet Olivia in her own voice across the breadth of her life. As Mark Twain scholar James Cox, in his Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (1966), suggests: “Olivia Langdon Clemens is one of the most influential wives in the nineteenth century—which amounts to saying that she is one of the most influential wives in any century” (62). In this collection, Olivia emerges on her own terms as a general correspondent, an enduring friend, a mother to her four children, a world traveler and, of course, as complementary partner to her world-famous spouse.
Reading any private letter correspondence is a privilege, and Olivia’s is no exception. A letter collection allows experience with content that was never intended to be widely shared. A 3 May 1878 comment to her older sister, Susan Crane, underscores Olivia’s sense of privacy: “Sue dear I cannot endure the idea of my letters traveling around…it is exceedingly distasteful to think of any one else seeing them—.”Olivia also was aware of her limitations as a writer. In an 11 August 1878 letter written in Lucerne, Switzerland, to her sister, Olivia laments her inability to describe the Alps: “I know it is useless to try and give expression to ones enthusiasms and this saddens rather than enlivens one—.” Olivia’s sense of privacy, as well as her feelings of inadequacy as a writer, underscores the privilege of our having her words available here.
Her first extant letter, written to her mother in 1864, revealed the precarious state of her adolescent health. In a letter startlingly full of self-inserted, vertical interruptive lines, she explained: “the straight l|ines are where I| rested. . . . I think there |is little hope of your|raising me.” The cause of Olivia’s confinement in various care facilities is unclear, but it has been discussed by biographers and literary critics and by Mark Twain himself in his autobiography; all made much of her early frail condition. As her strength returned, however, Olivia’s letters reveal her engagement in life—enjoying friendships with other young women, studying and reading broadly and with great interest, and weighing attractions that both she and her girlfriends were experiencing with other young men, until finally she witnessed to her lifelong friend, Alice Hooker Day, “that a great satisfying love, has slowly, gradually worked its way into my heart—into my entire being—” (3 March 1869). According to Olivia’s count, Samuel had written her over 180 love letters over the almost eighteen months of their epistolary courtship, but only one letter from Olivia’s side of that correspondence survives. 1 In that solitary missive to her betrothed, she wrote: “I am so happy, so perfectly at rest in you, so proud of the true nobility of your nature—it makes the whole world world look so bright to me” (13 November 1869). It is as if her early letters moved in quiet and steady crescendo toward this moment of joyful recognition of love.
As her life continued, Olivia’s letters, overall, reveal little evidence of sickness. She occasionally mentioned that she was battling quinsy, a throat disease that ironically may have been brought on by her proximity to Samuel’s smoking habit (he averaged about twenty cigars a day). She also complained about pink eye, a disease that was especially bothersome because it rendered her unable to read or to write letters. But the frail, sickly woman so often depicted by biographers is largely absent in her letters. True, like most men and women in her century, Olivia was intimately acquainted with sickness and death. She sat by the bedsides of her dying father, son, good friend, brother-in-law, and mother. When she traveled to Europe and around the globe, she quarantined to avoid cholera. She worried often about the health of her spouse and children. Late in life, though, when she accompanied her husband on his around-the-world tour to relieve their enormous debt, she appeared as a fully engaged traveler, sleeping on the decks of ships at night and touring the world with energy and delight. This was no weak woman. When heart failure ultimately began to overtake her, she patiently managed the uneven slope toward death.
Olivia’s letters do expose, however, a lesser malady: her poor spelling. She admitted to her friend Alice Hooker Day: “I am ashamed to send this letter with its many erasures and corrections, you never send so untidy a letter, but my letters never were moddels of neatness and corect spelling, and I am afraid I am now too old to learn that” (1 November 1869). Samuel was amused and entertained by Olivia’s errors. Trained as a typesetter and proofreader, he was a meticulous speller, but viewing Olivia’s weakness through the lens of love, her spelling flaws were beloved. “Oh you darling little speller!—you spell ‘terrible’ right, this time. And I won’t have it—it is un-Livy-ish. Spell it wrong, next time, for I love everything that is like Livy” (12 May 1869). Her letters reveal amusing and frequent errors.
Olivia enjoyed a privileged upbringing and unending generosity from her father and then her mother. She was raised by adoring, principled parents who benefited from wise business choices that brought abundant new wealth into their lives. Her father, Jervis Langdon, evolved from a mercantile manager in Millport, New York, to become a major player in the region’s lumber, coal, and railroad industries. In addition to his sharp investment sense, he naturally possessed a warm sense of equality toward his fellow man, advocating for equal rights for women and for people of color. Escaping slaves found refuge with Jervis’s help, and known abolitionists dined in the Langdon home. Jervis and his wife, Olivia Lewis Langdon, helped found Elmira’s Congregational Park Church, home of the magnanimous Reverend Thomas K. Beecher, who taught no doctrine but to do good.
Olivia’s parents had adopted their oldest daughter, Susan Dean Langdon Crane; Olivia was their middle child, and Charles Jervis, their youngest son. The parents made sure their children received a good education. For Olivia, this included enrollment in the preparatory department of Elmira Female College, where her father was a board member. Jervis had backed the development of the college with his money, much in favor of its bold curriculum that offered a four-year program for women equal to that of men. Olivia’s letters affirm her lifetime love of reading. When her younger brother Charles failed to respond to his education as his parents had hoped, they arranged for two trips abroad to expand his mind and possibly refocus him from female attractions. On the first trip, Charley met a gregarious new author who called himself Mark Twain. Charley showed him a small photograph of his sister, and that image captured Samuel’s attention. Part of Samuel Clemens’s initial attraction to Olivia may have been the open-handedness that he observed in Charley on that trip.
The Langdon family generosity is on display in Olivia’s letters by the many gifts given to Olivia and, by extension, to Samuel, from her parents. For the couple’s wedding present, Jervis arranged a surprise: a house on fashionable Delaware Avenue in Buffalo—entirely paid for, fully furnished, and staffed with several servants. Prior to their wedding, Jervis also loaned money to his soon-to-be son-in-law, thus allowing Samuel to have part ownership in the Buffalo Express, his first place of employment following the couple’s February 1870 marriage. A few months after their wedding, Olivia exclaimed with delight in a letter to her father: “There is no end to surprizes to this young woman, when I opened the check I expected to see five hundred dollars at the most, when I saw the one, I thought it was one hundred, and could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw that it was onethousand dollars—” (13 May 1870). After her father’s death from stomach cancer less than a year after their marriage, Jervis bequeathed his estate to be divided between his wife and two of his children, Olivia and Charles, with his oldest daughter, Susan, receiving the gift of the family’s summer home, Quarry Farm, on East Hill. Even after her husband’s death, mother Olivia continued her husband’s generosity by sending checks in the couple’s direction: $1,000 here, $500 there, $10,000 there. She also showered gifts on her grandchildren.
And while Olivia and Samuel spent money with abandon in Europe, Olivia wrote rather callously to her brother, “I am so sorry that you are having so much trouble with the miners … I hope you will soon be relieved by the miners going to work—” (20 September 1873). Olivia’s seeming nonchalance for the welfare of the workers who made the Langdon fortune possible, coupled with the abundant gift checks, may create the perception that Olivia was a too-fortunate daughter of over-generous parents, but Olivia was innately generous, too. She supported her husband’s kindness in sending his older brother, Orion, a living stipend throughout most of Orion’s lifetime of recurring failures. Samuel also sent monthly checks to his mother, Jane Clemens. Perhaps a sense of generosity was innate in Samuel; perhaps he wished to follow the pattern he observed in Olivia’s mother and father.
When Olivia’s material wealth is coupled with the long line of calamities that occurred in her life, a more complete portrait emerges. These misfortunes included the early deaths of her father from stomach cancer and of their firstborn son from diphtheria; the death of a childhood friend whom Olivia nursed to her end; and, later in life, the death of their twenty-four-year-old daughter and the onset of epilepsy in their youngest daughter. Add to these the meteoric rise of her husband’s success as a writer and lecturer and the unending social requirements akin to his popularity, followed by the family’s steady and public descent into bankruptcy, their heroic battle to regain their financial status, and the constant logistical strain of living abroad and economizing during those years. Then there were the more expected stresses of her life—her marriage to her dazzling but at times draining spouse; the energy required to raise their three daughters; the management of their unending social schedule, including the overseeing of the household staff and the lavish meals served at their home; and the considerable amount of time that Olivia and Samuel were separated as either one or the entire family traveled. All this—the extraordinary and the ordinary—required Olivia to be resilient and energetic, to hold the family together, and to be the source of stability and of private and public grace in an ever-changing landscape.
Olivia’s almost forty years of letter-writing attest to the constancy of her love for her husband, her family, and her friends. Through the deaths, the financial calamities, the sicknesses, the traveling, and the stresses of their busy and public life, Olivia’s closing words were often evocative of a written embrace, a verbal touch, a brief greeting of love that likely nurtured both giver and receiver. To be sure, Olivia’s letters are not the stuff of great literature—although there are moments that may move deeply—but they are replete with the warmth, simplicity, delight, and kindness of their author. The large life of her acclaimed husband is also Olivia’s life, and her account enlightens and reviews what we know of his life, but in its own captivating voice. At one point, Olivia boldly inserts in a letter Samuel writes, “I am woman’s rights!” (22 March 1870). In the end, she emerges as a literate woman of intelligence, fortitude, propriety, grace, and fidelity—a financier, a decorator and designer, a world traveler.
It is, of course, impossible to offer a conclusion about a life well lived in just a few phrases, but perhaps the following comment, written by Olivia to her husband during their plunge toward bankruptcy, best summarizes her worldview: “I feel so strongly these days that we have not a great while to stay here and that there is only one thing of real importance for us. To do all the good that we can and leave an irreproachable name behind us” (9 April 1893).
1. In his final courtship letter to Olivia, Samuel suggested their correspondence “be laid reverently away in the holy of holies of our hearts & cherished as a sacred thing” (20 January 1870). While Olivia’s half of the exchange likely numbered as many as Samuel’s, only one of her letters from their courtship period survives. Katy Leary, Olivia’s maid for almost 30 years, provides clues as to the whereabouts of Olivia’s love letters following Olivia’s death in 1904 but prior to the death of Samuel Clemens in 1910. Katy explained, “There was a green box that used to go to the bank every year with the silver and other valuables.” When Katy inquired about the contents of the green tin, Olivia blushingly explained, “That’s one thing I’m sure you never will see the inside of, because that box holds all my love letters.” After Olivia’s death, Katy reported that a writer who was preparing a piece about Samuel was given access to all of Samuel’s papers. The writer “got a hold of that box. Mr. Clemens didn’t know what was in it either, and so he said not to bother if they didn’t have the key, to just break it open. When I heard that, I ran as fast as I could to Miss Clara and told her, ‘Are you going to let them love letters of your mother’s be seen? . . . ’Cause they’re going to break that box open now and see what’s in it.’ And Clara says, ‘No, Katy, no, of course not. Can you carry it?. . . Bring it right in here to me, then, quick.’ So I brought the green box to Miss Clara, and I never seen it since. I guess she’s treasuring it just like her mother did’” (Lawton, A Lifetime with Mark Twain, 64-65). It is not known what happened to Olivia’s portion of the correspondence following Clara’s possession of the green box. It is presumed that Olivia’s love letters are lost. A green tin box is mentioned six times in their extant correspondence (see Samuel to Olivia, 13 December 1873; Samuel to Mary B. Cheney, 21 July 1904. See also Olivia to Samuel, 30 December 1871; 7 January 1872; 7 July 1872; and 14 October 1903).
The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut
[the following letter appears on pgs. 44-45]
Letter from Chapter Two
1870–1872
Marriage ∙ Motherhood ∙ Death, Birth,
Death, and Death ∙ Hartford
To Susan L. Crane, with Inserts
16 April 1870 • Buffalo, NY
(CtHMTH; MTL4, 107-108)
Buffalo April 16th
1870
My darling Little Woman
It seems as if it was a month since I had heard from you or Father and Mother—We had a letter from Father about ten days ago, that is the last that we have heard,2 we do love you and we do desire to hear from you—We had a delightful visit with the girls,3 it was quiet and was not the least of a tax—We are so happy that nothing seems able to mar our joy—Our little home is just as pleasant as ever and we do love it—There is only one thing that I would like to add4 to the pleasures that we have, that is the hills about our valey, as the Spring days come, it makes me sorry that we cannot go into the woods—I love you little woman—[. . .]
The Ivy in my hanging basket does well, but the other things do not seem to flourish as well—Susie dear, when some one is coming here, will you send, if you have them and it is no inconvenience to you, two slips of ivy, I want to train them about my dining room window—you know if it is not entirely convenient we can get some here, I can find out where to get them—
Samuel inserted, “—and Susie dear, will you send us a couple of cats by the next minister or other party that is coming this way. We have not a cat on the place, & the mice will not patronize the little trap because it is cheap & small & uncomfortable, & not in keeping with the other furniture of the house. If you could send us a kitten or two like ‘Livy,’ it would suit Mr. Clemens’s idea of what a house-cat should be.”
Olivia replied, “What a witch it is, I left my letter for two or three minutes, and lo when I return, the page is filled—[. . .]”
1“We had a letter from Father”: In a letter dated 2 April 1870, Jervis Langdon wrote: “Doct Sayles has been a great comfort to me, I could not have got along without him, all my organs seemed to have susbended their functions [. . .] Samuel, I love your wife and she loves me, I think it only fair that you should know it but you need not flare up, I loved her before you did and she loved me before she did you & has not ceased since I see no way but for you to ‘make the most of of it’—my wife sends much love Your father J. Langdon” (MTL4, 108).
2“about ten days ago, that is the last that we have heard”: Olivia’s parents had traveled to Virginia in the hopes of improving Mr. Langdon’s health.
3“We had a delightful visit with the girls”: Clara and Alice Spaulding.
4“There is only one thing that I would like to add”: Olivia misses the Elmira hills and the springtime walks she enjoyed with her sister there.
Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens (9780826222916) can be purchased on our website for $55 USD.
Greg Olson reappears on the publishing scene with his new book, Indigenous Missourians: Ancient Societies to the Present. This week’s author blog features a fascinating excerpt of the book from the preface.
In May 1962, forty-six-year-old Elinor Fields was heavily involved in many aspects of her community. A member of the Pawnee Nation, Fields had been a sergeant in the US Army during the Second World War. After returning home to Pawnee, Oklahoma, she had become a member of the Indian Women’s Pocahontas Club, an all-Indigenous women’s organization formed in 1899, for the purpose of caring for “our culture, our heritage, and our communities.” By 1950, Fields was contributing to the club’s weekly “Indian News” column in the Pawnee Chief. A decade later, the column would appear under her byline. “Indian News” was the kind of small-town newspaper feature rarely seen today. It covered the social events and the comings and goings of Pawnee community members. In putting each week’s column together, Fields made it her business to know about local weddings, funerals, graduations, birthdays, anniversaries, and who had visited whom. As an active member in her tribal community, it is little wonder that “El,” as she was known, was one of about a dozen Pawnees called upon to make the three-hour car trip to Neosho, Missouri, on Saturday, May 12, to represent the nation in an “Indian program.”
When the Pawnee delegation reached Neosho, they found the streets of the town of seventy-five hundred people filled with a crowd of eight thousand. The crowd had gathered that day to pay homage to seventy-three-year-old Thomas Hart Benton who had returned to Neosho to bask in a “homecoming” celebration held in his honor. Benton, who had left his hometown in 1912 to eventually become a world-renowned artist, was celebrated in Neosho by the likes of former President Harry Truman and the artist Charles Banks Wilson. The activities included the unveiling of a new portrait Wilson had completed of Benton, performances by folksingers, a press conference, and a gala dinner for five hundred guests.
The Pawnees had been asked to participate in the festivities as a way of commemorating the many trips that young Tom Benton had made into the Indian Territory, the eastern border of which was just fourteen miles away, to hunt and fish. Their performance might also have reminded Benton of his childhood when Indigenous people were a common sight in the streets of Neosho. As their exhibition ended, El Fields invited Benton to join them. What followed was described as an impromptu “Pawnee two-step” with Benton and Fields leading a line of dancers around a circle in the Newton County Courthouse square.
It is telling to see the beaming Benton navigate his way across the square as he held hands with El Fields. The Pawnee two-step, which differs from the Texas two-step, is a staple of powwows across the country. It is one of the few powwow dances in which couples step together while holding hands. It also provides women with a rare opportunity to extend invitations to the dance partner of their choice. In fact, men who refuse a dance invitation run the risk of having to give the asker a small gift. In some ways, the role of women in the two-step is in line with traditional Pawnee culture in which women held much of the power and made many of the important decisions. Though it was Fields who had extended the dance invitation, asking Benton to participate in an exhibition of her culture, Benton appears to have quickly assumed control. The artist, who during his long career had rendered dozens of Indigenous people—not always flatteringly—in his regionalist paintings and murals, turned the women’s two-step into a spectacle that he controlled. The dancers were there, after all, to commemorate his life. So, it seemed natural for Benton, the guest of honor, center of attention, and a white male, to lead the way.
Pawnee dancer Elinor “El” Fields does a “Pawnee two-step” with artist Thomas Hart Benton near the Newton County Courthouse in Neosho, Missouri. Fields and other Pawnee dancers were participating in a home-coming celebration for Benton in on May 12, 1962. (Missouri State Archives).
The spectacle of Benton leading Fields and the Pawnees in the two-step, photos of which were printed in newspapers around the country, can be seen as exemplary of Missouri’s general attitude toward Indigenous people. Originally planned by Thomas Jefferson as a place in which displaced Natives from east of the Mississippi River could be resettled—at least temporarily—to live without white interference, the state had removed all Indigenous nations from its borders by 1837. Two years later, Missouri law required any Native person who entered the state to have written permission from a government Indian agent in order to do so. From that time on, the people of Missouri considered themselves to live in a state in which Indians, at least the “real” buffalo robe-wearing, face-painting, arrow-shooting Indians of their imagination, no longer existed. This perceived absence of Indigenous people is particularly noticeable in the state’s history. Natives have only appeared in the annals of Missouri’s past when they presented a significant challenge or obstacle to settler colonialists’ hunger for land and natural resources. Once many were successfully deported to Kansas, Nebraska, and the Indian Territory in the 1830s, and no longer signified a threat to the state’s white settlement, Natives completely disappeared from Missouri’s story. This erasure of Indigenous people from the state’s boundaries and the story of its past has had long-lasting consequences. The presence, experiences, and rights of the Indigenous people who remained in Missouri over the past one hundred seventy years has been ignored and forgotten. For the most part, non-Natives now have no concept of, or connection to, their Indigenous neighbors, nor do they comprehend the long process of colonialism that has defined the history of Indigenous people. As a direct result, we live in a state where a large percentage of the general population is genuinely mystified as to why Native people object when fans of the Kansas City Chiefs enact the “Tomahawk Chop” in Arrowhead Stadium. As the Cree-Métis archaeologist Paulette F. C. Steeves recently has observed, “The cleaving of links between contemporary Indigenous populations and ancient homelands and links between ancient and contemporary people denies Indigenous identities and rights and fuels discrimination and social and political disparities.” No, Missouri has never danced well with Indigenous people, and on those rare occasions when we do, non-Natives insist on taking the lead.
My most enduring early memory of my soldier father is of watching him dress for work when we lived in France. I was about five. As he was buttoning up his “fatigues” I asked him about the metal buttons. Each black button had a five-pointed star made up of smaller stars. He explained that small stars represented the original 13 states, adding adding that the purpose of the United States was to defend the constitution and our country. I had no real notion of what all of that meant, but I grasped, even then, that it was a big deal, and to me still is.
As I grew older, I came to realize that Bastille Day, the first national celebration I witnessed, was different from the Fourth of July. I grew up on Army posts in Japan, where I was born, and in France, Germany, and various posts in the United States. My parents’ friends were other Army couples. I came to know men who had fought across Europe or the Pacific in World War II. One of my dad’s closest friends did the Bataan Death March and another was captured in the Schnee Eifel during the Battle of the Bulge. My oldest friend’s father landed on Omaha Beach with the 16th Infantry of the 1st Infantry Division. Some of these same men fought in Korea, and while I was in high school some of them were fighting in their third war in Vietnam. I had a profound if naïve admiration for these men, even if I had little idea of all they had endured. Both of my parents encouraged reading and education. Not surprisingly, I found military history compelling because it gave me some insight into what these veterans had gone through despite the fact they rarely spoke of the wartime experiences. When they did, it was often an anecdote about military foolishness that they laughed about. Somewhat to my father’s disappointment I studied American Military History at Kansas State University and followed him into the Army.
I served 28 years and four months in uniform and another 11 years as a civil servant. I split my career more or less evenly between operational assignments as an Armor officer and as a trainer/educator. I commanded a battalion task force in combat in Desert Storm and led a Brigade during the first year of NATO’s efforts in Bosnia. I am proud that my brigade was first across the Sava River in December 1995 and proud of the role we played in bringing and enforcing peace to the traumatized people of Bosnia. As a trainer/educator I taught at West Point, served as Director of the Army’s school of advance military studies, and finally as commander of the Army’s Battle Command Training Program.
As a civil servant I did threat emulation and ran the Army’s red teaming school that sought to educate members of all services in developing empathy for other countries and understanding foreign military services. The school had the ungainly and pretentious title of University of Foreign Military Services. During my nearly forty years of government service, I have come to believe that if examined critically the past can teach us a great deal. Having been a soldier and civil servant in both peace and war I believe we need to understand doctrine, how the Army and the nation proposes to fight, how we structure our units and man our force, and most important how are our services respond to dynamic conditions in peace and war. In No Sacrifice to Great, the 1st Infantry Division in World War II, I examine how the 1st Infantry Division sustained tactical excellence despite suffering 206 percent casualties fighting in North Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium, Germany, and eventually into Czechoslovakia. I also tell the WWII stories of soldiers in the 1 ID, both officers and young enlisted men: you’ll read about Jim Sharp, who arrived at his unit in the wee hours of the morning in January of 1945 and learned how to fight on the fly at the hands of his sergeant and junior officers to become a confident and able squad leader by that May; and the story of John T. Corley, who arrived in the 1st Infantry Division as Lieutenant, became a Major and battalion commander in 1943, and in the autumn of 1944 helped take Aachen, the first German city to fall to the Allies in the conflict. The stories of how these men learned to fight and teach others are, in my opinion, compelling and theirs are stories that both those who serve and those who do not should know.
Kevin M. Hymel (pronounced Heemel) is a contract historian at Arlington National Cemetery and a Historian/Tour Guide of Ambrose Historical Tours, leading the “In Patton’s Footsteps” tour. For fifteen years he was the research director of and regular contributor to WWII History and WWII Quarterly. He is the author of four books, including Patton’s Photographs: War as He Saw It. His article “Fighting a Two-Front War,” in WWII History is being made into the Netflix movie “6888,” written and directed by Tyler Perry. Mr. Hymel served as a technical advisor to the film.
Finding the Real George S. Patton
by Kevin M. Hymel
When I started writing my trilogy on General George S. Patton, Patton’s War, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, I intended to do a deep dive on America’s most famous WWII combat leader. I had no idea I would gain access to his actual diaries, not the transcribed ones his wife Beatrice typed up for all the world to see, but Patton’s actual hand-written diaries. I drew from the transcribed diaries to write volume 1, but it was not until I was deep into volume 2 that I happened to be in the Library of Congress Manuscripts Room and one of the staffers there showed me their website with each page of Patton’s chicken-scratch, hand-written diary pages next to word-for-word translations. I was blown away.
What was the difference between the two? Simple, Beatrice greatly embellished her husband’s diaries as she transcribed them. With the help of two of her husband’s former staff offices, Hap Gay and Paul Harkins, Beatrice dictated the diaries to a stenographer named Ann Carrol, who typed up the notes, resulting in the 1953 transcribed version. This was the diary almost all historians have used since, including myself.
Fortunately, as the pandemic subsided and life began to return to normal, I myself returned to the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Room, where I requested Patton’s original diaries. That’s when the staffers showed me the website with the newly transcribed diaries. The original diaries still attest to Patton’s genius for war, but he was not so judgmental to his peers, not as detailed in his portrayal of daily life in WWII, and not as clairvoyant in predicting the actions of the enemy. In some cases, a simple sentence was inflated to a paragraph full of insults to his peers, or names simply mentioned in the original had dispersions cast upon them in the 1953 version, and Patton’s all-seeing eyes and combat sixth sense simply did not exist.
I refer here to his “prediction” of the Battle of the Bulge. That prediction came from a sentence on a November 25, 1944 diary entry where he complained that Major General Terry Middleton’s VIII Corps was static “as it is highly probable that the Germans are building up east of them.” This sentence did not exist in the original diary, although a line almost exactly similar to it was written on December 27, a little more than a month later, after Patton had relieved Bastogne. Beatrice had moved the sentence back a month to make her husband look like a prophet. She took him out of the realm of the practical and into the world of mystics. These are the kinds of discoveries that make historical research so exciting. It’s easy (and lazy) to believe that everything has already been written about a person or topic. It seems sometimes that everyone argues that way. Heck, even my old agent told me Patton had been done to death and no one wanted another Patton biography. I knew better and went out to find a publisher as excited about this project as I was. Of course, back then I thought this would only be a really big, single volume on Patton. I never dreamed it would span three volumes. I hope people enjoy learning about Patton as much as I enjoyed researching and writing about him.
Tuesday, June 6, starting at 11:00 AM ET | National D-Day Memorial, Bedford, VA, 79th Anniversary of D-Day Commemoration. For more information, visit their events calendar.
Thursday, July 13, 5-8 PM ET | Live! at the Library, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. For more information, visit their events calendar.
Jonathan “J.” Danielspent twenty years working in sports, both in front of and behind the camera, producing five seasons of Rays Magazine, a weekly television show about the Tampa Bay Rays, and working as a sports producer at Fox affiliates in Tampa and Chicago. He currently works in communications for Indiana University. He is the author of Phinally!: The Phillies, the Royals, and the 1980 Baseball Season That Almost Wasn’t and blogs at www.80sbaseball.com.
Here’s a peak of his blog post!
With the release of my new book, Suds Series, I thought I would give people some insight into how the book came to be. It is an arduous process and not one that will likely make me a lot of money, but it was something I wanted to do and I’m glad I did it. Please note: This is not a “How to Write a Book” post, this is a “How I wrote my book” post and there is a big difference. I am not claiming to be an expert and I absolutely made a lot of mistakes. I am hoping that those who would like to write a book may find this helpful and those who are simply interested in the process may enjoy the “behind the scenes” look.
Jeff Pearlman sent me this message on Twitter when I was working on my first book, Phinally! In addition to being a tremendous writer, Jeff is also very supportive of young or, in my case, inexperienced writers. He recommended someone for me to contact and I was off on my journey. After some research, I began soliciting agents and I made a spreadsheet to track replies.
What I quickly discovered is that getting an agent to represent you, especially for a first book, is very difficult. It is kind of like trying to find a job and a spouse online at the same time. Several of the agents I contacted were interested at first but quickly bowed out with excuses such as “too regional” “not right for me”, etc. I’m not blaming them, but I was operating in what a friend described as a “zero feedback loop.” Rejections kept coming but I didn’t know what I could do to better my chances.
Finally, an agent told me, to paraphrase, that he thought my book was a good idea and that he liked my writing, but he didn’t think he could sell the book to a publisher. It was a bummer, but I was also grateful that someone had leveled with me. It was nice to have someone in the industry confirm my suspicions. I abandoned my search for an agent and began soliciting publishers directly.
Shortly thereafter, I signed a deal with McFarland Publishing to do my first book, which came out in 2018. Fast forward to the end of 2019 and, with one book already out in the world, I thought it would be a lot easier to get an agent for my next project. I was wrong. More rejections followed but this time I stopped chasing. I figured it would be best to go the same route and solicit publishers directly.
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Read the entire blog post on J. Daniel’s blog here.
Interested in hearing more from J. Daniel? Here is an interview from a recent episode of the sports show, High Noon with Nate Lucas, which aired on 590 The Fan.
In this month’s guest blog post, Kevin Jon Fernlund discusses his new book out this month, A Big History of North America: From Montezuma to Monroe. Fernlund is a Professor of History at the University of Missouri – St. Louis and is the author of Lyndon B. Johnson and Modern America (2009) and William Henry Holmes and the Rediscovery of the American West (2000). From 2001 to 2002, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam and between 2006 and 2012, he directed the Western History Association.
In a new book published this January by the University of Missouri Press called, A Big History of North America: From Montezuma to Monroe, I have tried to rewrite the American story by placing it in a continental as well as a transatlantic and transpacific context. This is not another national narrative on the rise of the early US republic, of which there are many, but a new North American history, inclusive of Mexico, of which there a very few.
In fact, most histories of North America either explicitly divide the continent by geography and culture between British North America, that is, Canada and the United States—the continent’s Anglosphere—on the one hand, and Mexico or Mexico and Latin America—the continent’s Hispanosphere—on the other. This history seeks to integrate the histories of these three countries into a single narrative, which sets it sharply apart from older Anglo and Hispanic historiographical traditions.
This is a story of revolving relationships and reversals of fortune, which reveal a rich as well as tragic North American history, one largely hidden from view by the separate national and conventional histories of Mexico, Canada, and the United States.
What this history is not is what is called “transnational history,” which downplays the nation state in history. I actually emphasize the origins and evolution of the nation state in the history of North America, in particular in regard to the important issue of security and the building of borders, much as European historians have done in writing the history of Europe.
This history is a “big history,” if a qualified one. The historian Stephen Pyne once said that the “sciences deal with figures, and the humanities, with figures of speech.” Big history bridges the divide between the sciences and the humanities by seeking to unite natural and human history. In my case, I specifically try to tie together the two fields of geography and history.
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Read the entire blog post on Fernlund’s blog here.
Our guest blogger this week, Petra DeWitt, author of The Missouri Home Guard: Protecting the Home Front during the Great War, discusses the need for a home defense organization or home guard in Missouri to replace the departing National Guard during the Great War and the purpose it served. DeWitt is Associate Professor of History and Political Science at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. She specializes in migration and ethnic history and has published several articles and encyclopedia submissions on those subjects.
The First World War was a time of great change for the United States, including the federalization of the National Guard with service obligations overseas. Americans in several states, including Missouri, were concerned about the protection of the home front should a natural disaster occur, workers go on strike, or the German enemy conduct acts of sabotage. The National Defense Act of 1916 gave states the authority to replace the departing National Guard with home defense organizations and twenty-seven states decided to raise state guards or home guards. Missouri’s governor Frederick Gardner perceived a real need for the establishment of a home guard because workers in the lead belt region of St. Francois County had gone on strike in spring of 1917 and he activated two National Guard companies from St. Louis to preserve law and order in the region. The induction of the National Guard into federal service in August 1917 left a vacuum and Gardner called for the establishment of the Missouri Home Guard to take over the guard’s tasks.
Any man between the ages of eighteen and fifty could serve in this entirely volunteer organization but anyone older who passed the physical exam would also be accepted. The structure and chain of command was similar to the National Guard with the exception that men elected their own officers. The Missouri adjutant general Harvey Clark eventually mustered into service five Home Guard infantry regiments, five separate infantry battalions, twenty-two separate infantry companies, and one troop of cavalry. Several companies that were not mustered into service included a company in Potosi, a women’s Home Guard company in Webb City, and one “Negro Home Guard” company each in Kansas City, Columbia, and Joplin. Men joined because they genuinely believed they were providing an important service on the home front during the Great War. White collar workers also appreciated the opportunity to demonstrate their masculinity through physical exercise and the manly duty to protect family and home. German Americans, whether recently arrived or living for generations in Missouri, used service in the Home Guard to publicly demonstrate their loyalty to the United States but to also control the behavior of co-ethnics who appeared to be disloyal.
The primary task of the Home Guard was military training, including weekly drill practices, shooting exercises at rifle ranges, and week-long encampments. The adjutant general suggested that this training would result in men, who were drafted, receiving promotions to noncommissioned ranks. Additional tasks resembled the traditional duties of the National Guard, such as protecting bridges and food supply from potential German saboteurs, maintaining law and order during labor strikes in St. Louis and Kansas City, and providing services during funerals for men who had made the ultimate sacrifice for their country on the battle front. Governor Gardner also thought that the Home Guard should assist in preserving patriotism on the home front. For that purpose, uniformed Home Guardsmen marched in parades, knocked on doors to solicit contributions during Liberty Loan campaigns, and conducted inspiring send-off celebrations for departing draftees. Service in the Home Guard required considerable sacrifice in time and resources, contributed to a relatively peaceful home front during the Great War, and reminded Missourians of a war fought thousands of miles away. Members in the Home Guard were also instrumental in commemorating the sacrifices by Americans in the military services through the construction of the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City.
In this month’s guest blog, Benjamin Moore, author of The Names of John Gergen: Immigrant Identities in Early Twentieth-Century St. Louis discusses the importance and meaning of found objects. Moore is Professor Emeritus at Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Missouri. In 2006 he co-founded the Bosnia Memory Project, dedicated to preserving the memory of St. Louis’s Bosnians by recording oral histories and collecting personal letters and artifacts. In 2020, the Bosnia Memory Project became the Center for Bosnian Studies, where Ben now serves as Senior Researcher.
The best documentation of our lives is the detritus that we leave behind.
I’ve been collecting discarded objects for half a century and privately rearranging them for forty years. Thousands of them are now assembled in what I call the box room: a second-floor study with windows and high ceilings, where makeshift shelves and wooden boxes hold the remnants of other people’s lives. The older I grow, the more resonant the objects become, and the more they accumulate, the more commonality I feel with the countless people they represent.
When I wroteThe Names of John Gergen, I was moved by the knowledge that young John never meant for me to read his World War-I era schoolwork, which I stumbled on in an alley in 2004. He never meant for me to discover his bilingualism, his perseverance, his learning disabilities, his family, his community, or his vexed and complicated life, which came to a tragic end at age 26 in 1935. Over the fifteen years that I researched John and his world, I came to realize that the schoolwork, fraught with errors, was much like John himself—“labored in the rendering, flawed in the result, and ultimately forgotten” (The Names ofJohn Gergen, 158).
So it is with the other objects that I’ve pulled from dumpsters, alleys, and the shelves of second-hand shops. They speak to the ways that lives play out and break down, becoming anonymous and obsolete: wooden shipping crates, drawers from tossed furniture, rusted machine parts, galvanized steel wash basins, old bottles, worn shovels, wooden spindles, brass keys, ceramic doorknobs, a weathered plaster angel whose first purpose is now unknown.
Some of the items are researchable, like the antique liquor bottle found in the same dumpster as John’s schoolwork. “Ginger Cordial,” reads the faded label; “bottled and guaranteed by J. Simon and Sons, St. Louis, Mo.” Jacob Simon migrated from Germany in 1858. He lived first in Kentucky, where he fathered five children, but by 1900 he resided in St. Louis, working with his sons as a liquor distributor. Jacob died in 1910 at the age of sixty-seven, but his sons kept the business going, even during Prohibition. By 1922, they had turned to selling “strictly pure altar wines, dry and sweet” (Catholic Fortnightly Review). Meanwhile, 222 cases of the Simons’ wines, bitters, cordials, and brandies lay in storage in a warehouse in south St. Louis. On August 31, 1929, federal agents opened the warehouse and poured into the sewer “some of the choicest products of Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, and the Rhineland” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
Or take the whetstone that I bought at a yard sale near my house, carefully encased in a length of two-by-four that was sawn down the middle and chiseled out, a custom box that fits the stone snugly. On the top of the box is engraved the name “W Huxel.” William Walter Huxel was born in St. Louis in 1888 and died in southern Illinois in 1966. He was an electrician who took care of his tools. The whetstone, which still smells of machine oil, bears a gentle depression worn in over the years as Huxel honed his blades.
But most objects that I find are untethered from their past, mute remnants of lives whose outlines are long lost. They offer no clues about who held and relinquished them, silently suggesting that people are the true ephemera. Artifacts evoke absence. And many writings about the past—including The Names of John Gergen—seek to fill the void that is left when life and memory end.
We leave behind pieces of ourselves as we go along our way. Most of the pieces will be lost, but some will be recovered by others, and then history will do with us what it will. For most of us, that will mean oblivion, but we will never know for sure. As I write in the book, “John is therefore what all of us have the potential to be. None of us can be certain that we will be remembered—or, for that matter, that we will be forgotten” (282).
To take a guided tour of Ben’s Box Room, check out this video produced by Lyla Turner.
The University of Missouri Press 