Heading Back to the Great River Road
In November, 2015, My Own True Love and I set out on an adventure. We headed south for a three-week trip along the Great River Road, a conglomeration of 3000 miles of local and state roads that follow the length of the Mississippi River. We started in Memphis, went south until we reached the end of the road in Louisiana, then headed back toward Chicago, stopping at whatever took our fancy. We made it as far as north as Vicksburg,(1) where we ran out of steam and the weather turned nasty. I blogged about it as we went. (If you're interested, you can find those posts in the category Road Trip Through History.)
In a few weeks we're setting out again. This time we're starting at the headwaters of the river at Lake Itasca State Park, and traveling south through Minnesota and Iowa toward Chicago. Once again, we'll stop at anyplace that catches our eye. We only have a week, so we may not even make it across the Minnesota border before we have to head home. More blog posts will ensure.
Once again, I'm asking the Marginalia for suggestions about places we should stop at, historical or simply hysterical, famous and obscure. Are there regional specialties we need to try? What little town has a great restaurant, bakery, farmer’s market, or music venue? Traveling history nerds want to know.
(1) I apparently never wrote a blog post on Vicksburg National Military Park, which is a shame because it was fascinating. I knew I left some posts unwritten, but sheesh! It may be time to dip back into those notes.
Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy–and Anne Boyd Rioux
It's the 150th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and the legions of Alcott fans have plenty of ways to celebrate. PBS released an adaptation in May and at lease one new feature film adaptation is in the works.(1) A graphic novel that re-envisions the March sisters as a blended family leaving in modern New York City will be released in hardcopy in February. (The hard core have been able to watch it on-line in serial form beginning in March.) As the anniversary grew closer, articles about Alcott, Little Women, and related topics have appeared in all the major publications that consider things pop-cultural, literary, and historical.
Anne Boyd Rioux's Meg, Jo, Beth , Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters is an important contribution to the conversation, and one that will last long after the current flutter of interest subsides. (2) Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy is not a biography of Alcott, though Rioux certainly tells Alcott's story. It is instead a biography of Little Women itself. Rioux considers the changing audience for Little Women(3). She examines its many adaptations into other art forms. She describes the book's cultural influence--including an amazing array of women who claim it as an influence. And, perhaps most importantly, she takes on the question of Little Women's relevance today.
Discussing Mark Adamo's opera based on Little Women, Rioux says "The story Adamo tells does exactly what an adaptation should do: it opens up the original text and makes you feel like you understand it even more deeply." The same could be said of Rioux's study. Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy is an engaging and enlightening piece of scholarship that led me straight to my copy of Little Women, eager to read it one more time.
(1) Maybe two. I'm seeing two different directors and two different time lines. The one with Meryl Streep as Aunt March looks interesting enough that I may break my long-standing ban on watching adaptations of Little Women.
(2) Rioux also edited a new annotated edition of Little Women for Penguin Classics. It's a thing of beauty: a good choice if you've read your childhood copy to flinders, or want to introduce someone to the book.
(3) Boys read it, too, when it first came out. And their lives were richer for it in my opinion.
J’Accuse!
As I've mentioned before here on the Margins, one of the weird facts about historical research (or maybe just about life in general) is that once a person or idea has come to your attention you find references to him/it/them everywhere. Lately the Dreyfus Affair has been popping up in my life. In email conversations with more than one writing friend and around the edges of subjects that don't at first glance have anything to do with the infamous trial and exoneration of a man wrongly accused. When a story tracks me down with that kind of fervor, it's time to share it with you.
On October 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer in the French War Ministry, was arrested for selling military secrets to Germany. His trial, conviction, and subsequent exoneration became an international cause-celebre.
A military court found Dreyfus guilty in a trial notable for fabricated evidence and illegal procedures and sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil's Island, off French Guiana. The French press, led by Édouard Drumont's virulently anti-Semitic La Libre Parole, applauded the verdict. Drumont, in particular, claimed that Dreyfus's actions illustrated the inherent disloyalty of French Jews.
Doubts about Dreyfus's guilt grew once the irregularities of the trial became known. When Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart uncovered evidence that another officer, Major C. F. Esterhazy, was a spy and that the letter that had incriminated Dreyfus was in Esterhazy's handwriting, the leftist press demanded a new trial. A military court acquitted Esterhazy and Picquart was arrested. Outraged, popular novelist Émile Zola published an open letter to the president of France, on January 13, 1898. Under the headline, J'Accuse, Zola denounced the army for covering up its mistaken conviction of Dreyfus. More than 200,000 copies sold on the day the letter appeared.
If Zola had hoped to catapult France into action on the Dreyfus case, he succeeded. The right-wing press exploded with diatribes against Zola, foreigners, and Jews. On the other side, more than 3,000 people signed a petition demanding a new trial for Dreyfus. Zola himself was brought to trial for criminal libel on February 7, in a case that kept the details of the Dreyfus affair in the international press for two weeks. Zola was sentenced to a year in jail and a 3,000-franc fine, but escaped to England.
In August of the same year, Major Hubert Joseph Henry, who had claimed to discover the letter that convicted Dreyfus, confessed he had forged documents in the case and suppressed others in an effort to convict a man that he believed to be a traitor. Henry then committed suicide. Faced with exposure, Esterhazy fled the country. Dreyfus's appeal for a retrial was now assured.
Dreyfus was brought back from Devil's Island for a new court martial in August, 1899. He was found guilty once more, but was pardoned with the right to continue his efforts to establish his innocence. In 1906, a civilian court of appeals reversed the conviction. Dreyfus was formally reinstated in the army and given the Legion of Honour. Recalled to active service in World War I, he commanded an ammunition column as a lieutenant colonel.
The French army did not declare Dreyfus innocent until 1995. Because evidently it's hard to admit you're wrong.
The moral of the story as far as I'm concerned? The path to justice begins when one person stands up and says "J'Accuse." Followed by a second, and a third, and--you get the idea.