News! (And A Small News Item From 1922)
Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter got the word yesterday* and may want to skim to the bottom of the post. But for the rest of you:
After hinting for months, I’m pleased to tell you that I have a contract with Beacon Press for a new book and I’m ready to begin the next adventure.
Allow me to introduce you to Sigrid Schultz of the Chicago Tribune:
Sigrid Schultz was the Chicago Tribune‘s Berlin bureau chief and primary foreign correspondent for Central Europe from 1925 to 1940. It was a period of big ideas and big events, and Schultz was at ground zero for many of them. She was one of the first reporters—male or female—to warn American readers of the Nazi menace. At a time when women reporters rarely wrote front page stories, her connections in Berlin society, her colloquial command of German, and her understanding of Germany’s history and politics allowed Schultz to regularly scoop her male counterparts on major news events, including the impending death of Weimar Germany’s first president in 1925 and Hitler’s non-aggression pact with Russia in 1939. William L. Shirer, author of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, who reported from Berlin from August 1934 to December 1940, admitted, “No other American correspondent in Berlin knew so much of what was going on behind the scene as did Sigrid Schultz.”
I’m looking forward to digging into Sigrid’s story over the next two years. It’s a story that includes working around glass ceilings, keeping the news flowing despite tightening controls on the media, outwitting Nazis in Germany, standing up against pro-Nazi sympathizers at home, and dealing with claims of “fake news” on both sides of the Atlantic, plus a little bit of a conspiracy theory. (All issues that have resonance today, alas.)
At the moment I am working my way through twenty years of Schultz’s reporting in the Chicago Tribune.** (Thank goodness for online resources and the Chicago Public Library.) It is tedious work, because I’m building an index to the articles as I go.*** It is also surprisingly fascinating. I am getting a close up look at the events of the period that I would never get in a secondary source. And I’m finding stories that I doubt will belong in the book but will make excellent blog posts.
For the moment, let me share a small Chicago news item that ran alongside an article by Schultz on November 4, 1922:
“Maud’s” Owner Still Sought
“Maud,” the mule arrested yesterday by the Shakespeare Avenue police and charged with vagrancy,is still in custody. The police are anxious to find the owner or a home for the animal.
The past was a different place.
*In case you didn’t know, I send out a newsletter twice a month. Here on the Margins I mostly share historical stories, and misc. tidbits that didn’t fit into whatever I’m working on and the occasional book review. In the newsletter, I tend to muse about the process of writing and thinking about history. For instance, a couple of issues ago I wrote about the paradox of writing a book proposal. If this is the kind of thing you’re interested in—or if you want to hear Big News a day or two early—you can sign up here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b
**In case you did the math and think I’m fudging: Schultz started working for the Tribune in 1919 as a translator for her predecessor as the bureau chief. She quickly made the switch from translator/Girl Friday to working journalist.
***Future Pamela will thank me.
The Ghosts of Eden Park: A Review and an Invitation
Often a review of a work of narrative non-fiction will claim that said work reads like a novel. With all due respect to my fellow reviewers, it is seldom true. The Ghosts of Eden Park is an exception. Karen Abbott combines impeccable research with the story-telling devices of fiction to create a work of narrative non-fiction that reads like a very specific type of fiction: the classic detective novel. (Think Perry Mason.)
Abbott opens with a chase through Eden Park that ends in a murder. The reader is left uncertain about which of the two figures murdered the other until she is two-thirds of the way through the book. At that point, Abbott shifts to a courtroom drama, in which it is entirely unclear whether the murderer is going to get off. And at least one reader halfway expected to discover that someone other than the person on trial had actually committed the crime.(Did I mention, think Perry Mason?) The book is a narrative tour de force.
The book has been out several months now, so you may already know who-dun-it. But for those of you who don’t, I’m going to avoid the reprising the plot so I don’t spoil it.* As for the general subject, Abbott’s sub-title sums it up: “the bootleg king, the women who pursued him, and the murder that shocked jazz-age America.” Add in a tough female prosecutor, a very young J Edgar Hoover lurking around the edges of the story, a sordid love triangle, and material excess that makes Jay Gatsby look restrained and you have quite a story.
*This is why I don’t review novels. My hats off to those of you do. It is flipping hard to tell someone enough to make them want to read a book without spoiling it.
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A lagniappe: I’m going to interview Abbott Kahler (aka author Karen Abbott) about her real-life thriller The Ghosts of Eden Park on May 7 at 7 PM Central on the Facebook group Nonfiction Fans, which I host with fellow historian and author Theresa Kaminksi,. If you’re interested, you can ask to join the group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1760137804315990/ Once we figure out all the technical issues, it should be Big Fun.
Rebel Cinderella
You’re going to see a lot of book reviews here in the coming weeks, because I’m doing a lot of reading and I love to share books that I think the Marginalia will enjoy.* I will do my best to mix it up.
Next up, a gripping and occasionally heartbreaking account of American reform movements in the early twentieth century, told through one woman’s story: Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes, by Adam Hochschild . (An author whose work I love.)
In 1905, an unlikely marriage made headlines around the world. Rose Pastor was a young Jewish woman whose family had fled Russia when she was a child. She began working in cigar factories at the age of eleven to support her family and turned a talent for language into a career as a journalist for a Yiddish-langue newspaper. James Graham Phelps Stokes (commonly known as Graham) was the Ivy-league educated oldest son of one of “the Four Hundred”—the families that dominated New York Society in the Gilded Age.
Hochschild tells the story of their marriage within the broader history of the American socialist and labor movements in the first half of the twentieth century. (He also provides a comic counterpoint to their story in the form of Stoke’s Uncle Will: an unpredictable and litigious New York real estate mogul who was an ugly version of the sprightly uncles in P.G. Wodehouse novels, complete with mustache.)
Pastor and Stokes met at a time when patrician reformers were not uncommon. She was assigned to interview him at University Settlement, a settlement house that served Italian and Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. Stokes was not only on the settlement house board, he was one of a number of wealthy, young volunteers who lived on the settlement’s top two floors.
For a time they were the golden couple of progressive thought in America. Their home was a salon for visionaries of all types. But there were pressures on their marriage from the beginning. Graham’s family was never comfortable with Rose’s politics. And Rose was never entirely comfortable with the advantages and opportunities that his privilege afforded her, even though that privilege made it possible for her to become a prominent figure in the socialist and labor movements.
Their approaches to reform diverged as Rose became a rising star in radical circles. World War I and the Russian Revolution drove them further apart. Like many socialists, Graham discovered national patriotism mattered to him more than international brotherhood. Rose remained passionately socialist.
In the end, the immigrant Cinderella and her American prince found their differences too great to overcome. They divorced in 1926 and returned to their natural social habitats, at roughly the same time socialism lost its momentum as a mass movement in the United States.
Rebel Cinderella is a powerful account of a woman who, like so many, has disappeared from our historical narrative. It is also an excellent introduction to the the history of socialism and labor in America, which has also disappeared from our historical narrative.
*Which is not to say that you’re going to get a review on everything I’m reading. Some of the academic monographs I’m reading are enormously useful but are not thrilling reads. Which is not to say I won’t share something that is both very academic and thrilling.
A version of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.