In which I pull another long-unread book off the To-Be-Read shelf:
There was a time when I felt guilty about the number of unread books sitting on my shelves. They come in faster than I can read them.*
I don’t feel guilty anymore. More than once over the course of writing this book, I’ve found exactly the book I need sitting on my shelves waiting its turn. Books that I might not have known to look for out in the world. Most recently, that book was Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1939 by German historian Philipp Blom.
Blom looks at each of the twenty-one years (which, as he reminds us in his introduction, adds up to a mere 1,567 days) from 1918 through 1938 in a separate chapter . He splits them into two parts: Postwar (1918 through 1928) and Prewar (1929 through 1938). But he does not give the reader a step-by-step narrative of the interwar years.*** Instead his structure reflects the, ahem, fractured world between the wars. He looks at
“perceptions, fears, and wishes, ways of dealing with the trauma of the war, with the energies released by industrialization, with the confusing and exhilarating identies that became possible in an industrial mass society, especially once the old values had been shattered.”
Moving from spot to spot in the Western world, he begins with jazz and works his way through the republic of Fiume, speakeasies, Charlie Chaplin, the Harlem Renaissance, the Scopes trial, Marlene Dietrich, Soviet Russia’s Five-Year Plans, and various iterations of the superman. The result is a kaleidoscopic and brilliant picture of a world that was shadowed by the war that had not quite ended and another that everyone believed was soon to come.
Fracture has become a touchstone for me as I write this book.
Who knows what I’ll find on the To-Be-Read shelves next?
*I am not attempting to downplay my responsibility here.I definitely buy books faster than I can read them. And I pick them up from the various Little Free Libraries I cross on my daily wanderings** But I also receive books from publicists for me to consider for review. (Not as often as I used to, because I don’t think it is fair to accept books for review in my current state of overwhelm.) But there is still a slow trickle. And even a slow trickle can eventually cause a flood.
**My rule in that case is that I must deposit one book for each book I take. This requires keeping track of which libraries I owe books to and which ones I am apt to pass on any given trip out the door. (Now that I think about it, I should just carry a book with me whenever I set out and donate one whether I’ve taken one or not. No record keeping involved!)
***A model I am trying to keep in mind as I struggle my way through those same years. It is all too easy to chronicle the rise of the Nazis instead of telling how Sigrid Schultz reported on the rise of the Nazis. It is a subtle difference perhaps,**** but an important one. Moreover, it is a difference that it is easy to lose track of. I write IT’S ABOUT SIGRID NOT ABOUT HITLER at the top of every Scrivener document in the draft,***** and still I wander off into the wrong story over and over.
****Or maybe not so subtle
*****I try to remember to delete it before I give a chapter to my first reader, also known as My Own True Love. He is very clear about this and doesn’t need the reminder.
Road Trip Through History: The Mother Jones Monument
Driving from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks and back over the last mumble years,(1) I have passed the sign for the Mother Jones monument many, many times. It is a plain, almost amateurish, sign, without the official imprimatur(2) of a brown tourist attraction sign(3) or the flash of billboard advertising a show in Branson. Nothing about it is designed to lure a curious history bugg off the highway. And up to now, we have not been lured.
That changed this year, thanks to an information panel in an Illinois highway rest stop.(4) My Own True Love and I were hooked.
I had been vaguely aware that Mother Jones was a union organizer, but I had no idea how important she was at her time.
Mother Jones was in some ways the Grandma Moses of union organizers: in fact, when she was testifying before a committee in the Senate on labor issues, a senator mocked her as the “grandmother of all agitators.” (She replied that she would someday like to be called the “great-grandmother of all agitators.”) At the point that she began her career as a union organizers, Mary Harris Jones was a poor, widowed, Irish immigrant. She had had survived the potato famine, the loss of her husband an four children in a yellow fever epidemic, and the Chicago fire,which destroyed her successful dressmaking shop.
After each loss, she reinvented herself. In the 1890s, she reinvented herself one more time, as “Mother Jones.” The name was subversive: playing against and with nineteenth century domestic stereotypes of women. Mary Jones cast herself as the mother of oppressed people everywhere. At a time when women were “supposed” to be quiet and stay home,(5) Mother Jones was a street orator with no fixed address, who traveled the United States for twenty-five years, moving from cause to cause. She had no interest in being “ladylike.” As she told a group of women in New York: “Never mind in you are not lady-like, you are woman-like. God Almighty made the woman and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.”
Jones rose to prominence as an organizer for the United Mine workers, who paid her a stipend, but she went wherever she felt she was needed. She worked with striking garment workers in Chicago, bottle washers in Milwaukee breweries, Pittsburgh steelworkers, and El Paso streetcar operators, helping them fight against 12-hour days, low wages, dangerous working conditions, and the financial servitude of company housing and the company store.
Her motto was “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living”—the world would be a better place if we all adopted it as our own.
****
When we got to the monument in Mt. Olive, Illinois, we learned there is a second part to the story. Illinois became a battleground for labor rights in 1898, when the Chicago Virden Coal Company challenged the miners’ contract. They brought in a train loaded with strikebreakers and armed guards to back them Miners from across the state joined together to stand their ground against the company. In the violent encounter that became known as the Battle of Virden or the Virden Massacre, thirteen people were killed, including six guards and seven miners. Thirty miners were wounded. Mother Jones considered the battle the birthplace of rank-and-file unionism.
A Mt Olive church refused to allow the miners to be buried in their churchyard, fearing their graves would become a pilgrimage site for the labor movement. (This is what as is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.) In response, the United Mine Workers built the Union Miners Cemetery in Mt. Olive, which in fact became a pilgrimage site after Mother Jones, at her request, was buried there in 1930. Personally, the union buttons that had been left at the foot of the monument choked me up.)
(1) And by years, I mean decades
(2)Is there such a thing as an unofficial imprimatur?
(3) I went down a small rabbit hole trying to discover who approves such signs. I didn’t get an answer, but I did learn that the signs originated in France.
(4) We’re seeing more and more historical markers at highway rest stops, and I for one would like to say “bravo!” Not only because I love a historical marker, but because it encourages the curious to spend more time at the rest stop. After all, the point of the stop is not just to use the restroom, but to stretch the legs, rest the eyes, and fluff the brain, thereby making the next stretch of driving a little safer.
(5) Or so the popular account of history tells us. If I have learned anything in writing this blog, it is that the ideal of the “angel of the household” applied only to members of the relatively prosperous middle-class and that even within that class many women didn’t fit that mold for many reasons. Just yesterday a friend sent me the story of the team of “gentlewomen who had experienced reverses” who created the restaurants in Marshall Field’s in downtown Chicago. A very different story than that of Mother Jones, but one that also stands outside what we are taught was the nineteenth century norm.
Heading Home for Thanksgiving
As I write this, My Own True Love and I are packing for the drive from Chicago to my hometown in the Missouri Ozarks to spend the holiday with my family. As usual, the list of things I wanted to accomplish before we hit the road is longer than the time available to do them. And as usual, I am editing the list down from things I want to do to things I need to do. One thing I refused to edit off the list was this blog post.
People sometimes ask me why I write this blog, especially when I’m under the gun with a book deadline. (Don’t get me started!) The answer is simple: all of you. You don’t just read my posts. You send me comments and ideas, ask hard questions, point out the typos, and cheer me on. Thank you for being on this journey with me, whether you’ve been reading me from the beginning or you’ve just found me. There’s a lot more history out there to explore and I look forward to sharing it with you.
—————-
And speaking of sending me ideas, I getting ready to send out invitations to my annual Women’s History Month extravaganza of mini-interviews.* If you “do” women’s history in any format, or know someone who does, or just have an idea of someone you would love to see in the series, let me know. (With the caveat that I may not be able to get a big name writer to respond without a connection of some kind.)
*Some of you who know me in real life are probably saying “Are you crazy???!!!” To which I say, “yes, I am crazy” and “yes, I am doing this.”