From the Archives: Choosing (Historical) Sides
A frivolous post from 2016, that feels a little more pointed today.
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Recently a friend of mine texted me from Culloden in Scotland[1]–the battlefield where the Duke of Cumberland routed Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite forces and effectively ended the Jacobite cause. (Charles was later involved in a half-hearted French plan to invade England in 1759, but it came to naught.) She wanted to know if I wanted a Jacobite blue bonnet.
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- William of Orange (aka William III)
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- Bonnie Prince Charlie
My answer–which didn’t surprise her–was no. Despite the fact that the exiled Stuarts clearly had the better legal right to the throne, I’ve always had a soft-spot for that hard-working sober-minded prince, William of Orange. And I’ve never had much use for Bonnie Prince Charlie–who I’ve always thought of as a putz rather than a failed romantic hero. (If you have strong opinions on the subject, feel free to yell at me in the comments below.)
Karin’s offer of a Jacobite blue bonnet led me to think about the fact that history buffs tend to chose sides. Sometimes it is because we agree with one side’s political position. Sometimes it’s because we have a family connection to one side of a conflict or a vested interest in the outcome. Sometimes it’s simply a question of who won. (Though Lost Causes also have their supporters.[2])
And sometimes it simply comes down to preferring one historical figure over another. In my graduate school days, classes on Victorian England quickly divided themselves into two camps on the question of who was the greatest Prime Minister of the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli or William Gladstone. The members of Team Disraeli and Team Gladstone all had good solid arguments supporting their guy, but when you pushed them it eventually came down to a question of personality. [3]
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- Benjamin Disraeli
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- William Gladstone
Choosing sides isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as you realize you have a preference. In the end, no one writes objective history.
So tell me, oh Marginalia, what historical sides have you chosen and why?
[1] Not quite as exciting as the time she called me from Tipu Sultan’s palace at Seringapatam. While I occasionally grumble about feeling like my cell phone is a leash, there is something pretty cool about getting instant communication from far flung historical sites.
[2] Which brings us back to Bonnie Prince Charlie. I have to give the man credit for persistence.
[3] Me? I vote for Sir Robert Peel. Call me contrary.
Sir Robert Peel
From the Archives: Shin-Kickers from History: Mary Heaton Vorse
As some of you may have noticed, for the last year or so I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Not entirely on purpose. I’ve done a number of Q & As with the authors of books set in the era.) Several names keep popping up–some of them even appeared on stage when I went to see Suffs! for my birthday. One who is wandering onto the page a lot recently is Mary Heaton Vorse, who I first introduced to you in 2023.
In a recent blog post, I introduced you in passing to activist and journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. As is so often the case, Vorse is worth a closer look.
Born to an upper-middle class family in Amherst, Massachussets in 1874, Vorse was a prolific and high-profile novelist, labor journalist, and activist.*
In 1896, after a period of studying art in France,* she continued her studies at the Art Student’s league in New York City, which had a reputation for progressive teaching methods and radical politics. She soon discovered that she had no real talent for art and took up progressive causes, including women’s suffrage, in place of painting.
Vorse was married twice—to journalist Albert Vorse in 1898 and radical journalist Joseph O’Brien in 1912—and widowed twice. Both Vorse and O’Brien supported her writing and shared her progressive values.
Her career as an activist and journialist blossomed after O’Brien’s death in 1915.
That year she joined with a group of left-wing writers, including John Reed, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser and Edna St Vincent Millay, to found the Provincetown Theater Group., which was dedicated to showcase new American talent outside the rules of the commercial Broadway theater.
In the early years of the First World War, she and other progressives formed the Women’s Peace Party, with the goal of bringing the war to an end. She was one of the party’s delegates to the 1915 International Conference of Women in the Hague.
More importantly, at least in terms of the impact she made, she also turned to serious journalism. She already supported herself as a writer of short stories for women’s and general interest magazines and of romantic fiction novels, which she later dubbed “lollypops.”** Beginning in 1916, she traveled across the United States and Europe reporting on social justice issues, with an emphasis on the impact of events on woman and children that was unusual in labor journalism at the time. Her work appeared in a wide range of mainstream publications including the New York Post, Harper’s Weekly, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, McClure’s Magazine and even McCall’s.
Her biographer Dee Garrison summed up her journalism career: “Across the space of half a century, wherever men and women battled for a wider justice, she was apt to have been there.” She reported on striking miners in Michigan and striking textile workers in New Jersey and South Carolina.She covered the Scottsboro Boys’ trial in Alabama and the battle between coal bosses and miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, where she was run out of town by thugs working for the bosses. She reported on the United Auto Worker’s strike in Flint. Michigan, in 1937 and on the steel workers’ strike in Youngstown, Ohio, where she was grazed by a bullet fired by company guards. She reported on conditions in Stalin’s Russia and Hungary under Béla Kun—experiences that led her to write in her diary “I am a communist because I don’t see anything else to be, but I am a communist who hates Communists and Communism.” In 1952, she wrote an extensive and hard-hitting investigation of dirty politicians and organized crime on the New York and New Jersey water front.
Her career as a journalist ended in 1959, at the age of 85, when she suffered a stroke on her way home from reporting on a textile workers’ strike in North Carolina.
* I am fascinated by the number of privileged children of the Gilded Age who devoted themselves to social change.
**Much like novelist Graham Greene, who dubbed his thrillers “entertainments,” as opposed to what he believed were his more serious novels dealing with issues of faith and politics. Subjects that also play an important role in his thrillers.
From the Archives: Endpapers
Over the past two days, I have spend several hours struggling with and ultimately abandoning two different blog posts. I suspect the problem is me rather than the topics. So I’m going to queue up a few posts from the past and hope I come back with my brain fluffed up and ready to write.
First up, a book review from 2021:
I love this cover!
Let me start with the short version: Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home is one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read in a while.
Here’s the long version:
In 2017, former Sports Illustrated journalist Alexander Wolff set out to explore his family’s German roots. The result is an extraordinary mixture of memoir, journalism, history, and an up-close look at one family’s complicated relationship with Nazi Germany.
Two biographical narratives stand at the heart of Endpapers. Wolff’s grandfather, Kurt Wolff, was a leading publisher of contemporary literature in Germany, publishing authors whose works would later be burned by the Nazis. ( Think Kafka, Thomas Mann, Günter Grass.) In 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, he fled Germany with his wife Helene and took refuge in the United States, where they founded a new, equally influential, publishing house, which served as gateway for introducing American audiences to major European authors in translation, including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.* They left behind Kurt’s family from his first marriage, including Wolff’s father, Niko. Niko served in the German army, spent time in a POW camp and emigrated to America in 1948, with a little belated help from his father. He became a chemist with Dupont and assimilated to a degree Kurt never managed. But he never told his son about his wartime experience. And Wolff didn’t ask.
In the course of tracing their stories, Wolff discovers family secrets. He learns the intricacies of which family members escaped being labeled as Jewish by the Nazis and which did not. He realizes how deeply his grandmother’s family, the Mercks of Merck Pharmaceuticals, were involved with the Nazis. He takes a fascinating and horrifying detour into the tragedy of the 1972 Olympics in Munich.** And he eventually confronts the questions of guilt, shame and accountability that many Germans of his generation struggled with decades earlier and the larger questions of “moral inheritance” in general.
Ultimately, Endpapers is not only the gripping story of one family’s history, but an important exploration of our collective responsibility for the past.
* They also published Anne Morrow Lindbergh, which I find somewhat ironic given Charles Lindbergh’s political positions.
**It turns out that a security specialist hired by the Olympic Committee to “tabletop” the event predicted the murder of the Israeli Olympians in the Olympic Village with frightening accuracy in one of several worst-case scenarios. The committee chose not to act on them.
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CODA: Endpapers is a prime example of why I always read the acknowledgements. Wolff buried some good stuff in the midst of the usual “thank-you” list, including a brief discussion of historical novels that shaped his feel for the period and this gem:
Nor could I have told this story without two other women close to Kurt and Niko, my grandmother Elisabeth Merck Albrecht and step-grandmother Helen Mosel Wolff. Their voices underscore how much this narrative, despite its patrilineal spine, owes the women of our family. It is a truism borne out to me repeatedly over years of writing about sports figures, many of them alpha males reluctant to reveal their vulnerabilities: all praise to the mothers and sisters and wives who dress the skinned knees, keep the scrapbooks, vividly recall the failures and thus better sense the full arc of a story.
Sing it, Mr. Wolff!