Library of Congress's Blog, page 63

“Dearest Lenny”: Leonard Bernstein’s Love Letters from Japan

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A 1970 letter to Bernstein from Kazuko Amano, one of his longtime correspondents from Japan. Used with permission.

For pretty much all her life, Mari Yoshihara has had one foot in the United States and the other in Japan: She was born in New York City, raised in Tokyo. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tokyo, then an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Brown University. Her career as an academic — she teaches American studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa — has followed a similar pattern. She writes in English and Japanese, often focusing on cultural encounters between the U.S. and Asia.

Her latest book, published last fall, is “Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro.” She researched it using the Leonard Bernstein Collection in the Library’s Music Division. Here she answers a few questions about the book and her experience at the Library.

What drew you to Leonard Bernstein?

As a scholar of American studies and a music lover, I was of course familiar with Bernstein’s importance in American music and culture. But I was not particularly interested in writing about Bernstein per se. Rather, I intended to write a comparative study of Cold War cultural policy in the U.S. and Japan, and I wanted to find out about the history and politics of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Because Bernstein was a close family friend of the Kennedys — his piece “Mass” was written for the opening of the Kennedy Center — I was going to look at his involvement in the center’s establishment and operation.

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Bernstein in 1971. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko.

Tell us about the letters in the Bernstein Collection that changed your book project.

At first, I had no idea that the Bernstein Collection is one of the largest archival collections devoted to a single artist anywhere, with more than 1,700 boxes of manuscripts and other materials. I was quickly overwhelmed and started procrastinating by poking into other parts of the collection. I came across two Japanese names in the correspondence I did not recognize. Simply curious to find out who these people were, I requested the letters. When I began reading them, my jaw literally dropped.

One set of correspondence was from Kazuko Amano (born Ueno), who wrote her first fan letter to Bernstein in 1947. She was then an 18-year-old student and had spent the war years in Japan after having been raised in Paris, where she studied piano at Paris Conservatory. To her surprise, Bernstein replied about a year later, and thus began a personal relationship between two very different individuals: a globe-trotting maestro on the way to international stardom and a Japanese woman who would spend much of her adult life as a housewife raising two children in Japan.

The other correspondent was even more dramatic: Kunihiko Hashimoto met Bernstein in summer 1979 on the last day of Bernstein’s tour of Japan with the New York Philharmonic. The two men spent the night together, and Hashimoto saw the maestro off at the airport. Immediately afterward, Hashimoto wrote the first of many — over 350, in fact — love letters to Bernstein. The letters are passionate, tender and sometimes heartbreaking expressions of Hashimoto’s love and the evolving nature of his devotion to the maestro.

Needless to say, I left the Kennedy Center project behind (although I still think it is a worthy research topic) and started a completely new one.

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Mari Yoshihara

What new do the letters reveal about Bernstein?

Amano was first and foremost an extremely loyal fan. In the early years, her letters revealed a mixture of girlish fandom, admiration for a musician she respected, a tinge of romantic yearning and the awareness of the foolishness of harboring such sentiments. But over the years, her love of Bernstein evolved into something much more profound, and her letters express a deep understanding of his music and commitment to art.

The urgency evident in Hashimoto’s early letters is emotionally overwhelming. But over time, Hashimoto’s love also evolved into awe and worship for a great artist and a desire to serve him in any way he could. Hashimoto later was appointed to be the maestro’s business representative in Japan and played a key role in some of Bernstein’s most important projects in the late stage of his life.

What was your experience like researching the collection?

The sheer size of the collection makes it both heaven and hell for researchers. In one word, it is overwhelming.

But once I figured out the broad contours of the book, researching the collection — I took five trips to the Library, each about a week — was quite exciting. I learned things linking these personal relationships to my original interest in the intersections between art and politics, but I also learned a lot about things I did not know I would be interested in.

For instance, the business records of Bernstein’s management company, Amberson Enterprises, offer much insight into the sheer scope of Bernstein’s work and the changing nature of the American and global music industry in the second half of the 20th century.

Can you comment on the value generally of the Library’s collections for researchers? 

It goes without saying that the volume and range of the collections and the expertise of the librarians and archivists who know them inside out are immensely valuable to researchers. I have found Library staff to be extremely helpful, not only while I am physically at the Library but also when sending inquiries by email.

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A 1949 spring festival postcard Kazuko Amano, then Kazuko Ueno, sent to Bernstein. Used with permission.

A President and a King, George Washington and King George III, in a Dangerous Year

This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Library’s Manuscript Division.

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A print of busts of King George III (left) and George Washington (right), circa 1780–1820.

For both George Washington and King George III of England, the summer of 1788 began a year shaped by illness and worry. Even though the sources of their troubles differed, each George had reason to look anxiously across the Atlantic.

That summer, George III began what would be his first prolonged bout of madness. It is uncertain what he had, but the letters, reports and diaries of the doctors and courtiers who surrounded him describe his symptoms. These included stomach pains, rashes, lameness, blurry vision, sleeplessness and discolored urine. His psychological symptoms were even more frightening: He chattered rapidly, incessantly, delusionally, even obscenely.

Through the fall, the king’s condition fluctuated. By November, he was unfit to rule, and Parliament began to debate a bill that would have allowed the Prince of Wales, who was allied with his father’s political opponents, to rule as regent. Parliament, like the king’s household, was in turmoil.

That same summer, the United States ratified its Constitution. By the fall, as the king was falling deeper into illness, George Washington learned that his contemporaries expected him to agree to become the first president of the United States. Washington expressed his dismay in letters to his friends.

To Benjamin Lincoln, who had been one of his generals, he wrote that if he was “constrained to accept, I call Heaven to witness, that this very act would be the greatest sacrafice of my personal feelings & wishes that ever I have been called upon to make.” To Henry Knox, who would be his secretary of war, Washington wrote that he felt like “a culprit who is going to the place of his execution: so unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares, to quite a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties.”

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A view of a triumphal arch erected on Gray’s Ferry Bridge outside Philadelphia to receive the soon-to-be-inaugurated George Washington.

As Washington prepared to become president, he learned about the king’s madness from his European correspondents. One of these, Gouverneur Morris, had been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and was now in Paris. He reported that the king had Washington on his mind.

“By the Bye,” Morris wrote, “in the melancholy Situation to which the poor King of England has been reduced there were, I am told, in Relation to you some whimsical Circumstances.” In one of these, “the Defender of the faith, in one of his Capricios, conceived himself to be no less a Personage than George Washington at the Head of the american Army. This shews that you have done Something or other which sticks most terribly in his Stomach.”

Was this true? Or was it gossip that Morris picked up in a country on the verge of revolution, where people were happy to spread stories about the frailties of kings? These stories do not appear in the writings of people around George III. Yet, Charlotte Papendiek, wife and daughter of courtiers, confirmed in her diary that the loss of the American colonies was still on the king’s mind five years after the end of the war.

She recounted that on being told that Lord North, who had been prime minister during the American Revolution, had been to see him, the king said, “[H]e, poor fellow, has lost his sight, and I my mind. Yet we meant well to the Americans; just to punish them with a few bloody noses, and then make bows for the mutual happiness of the two countries. … We lost America. Tell him not to call again; I shall never see him.”

In February 1789, the king began to recover. On April 23, a service of thanksgiving was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. One week later, on April 30, 1789, Washington was inaugurated in New York. In his inaugural address Washington said in public what he had been saying all year in private: “Among the vicissitudes incident to life,” he told his hearers, “no event could have filled me with greater anxieties” than learning he had been elected president.

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The Federal Gazette, a Philadelphia newspaper, reported on a single page on May 2, 1789, news of both King George’s recovery (above) and George Washington’s inauguration (below).

[image error]As president of the Constitutional Convention, Washington had already had a hand in shaping the office of president of the United States. Now, as he filled the seat, he and the new government were responsible for starting the federal machinery. Together, they shaped the presidency in reaction to the monarchy while at the same time, as former British subjects, it persisted in their minds as a model.

While Congress debated whether Washington should be called “His Elective Majesty” or “His Highness the President of the United States of America,” Washington wondered how to divide his power and authority as president from his status as a private person. He wrote vice-president John Adams, treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton and others for advice.

Adams reminded Washington that the presidency “by its legal Authority, defined by the Constitution, has no equal in the World, excepting those only which are held by crowned Heads,” and that it would be hard for the new nation to uphold its dignity and authority in the world without at least some “Splendor and Majisty.”

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“Huzzah, the king is well” reads the motto on this tea set created to celebrate King George’s recovery. Royal Collection Trust.

Hamilton suggested a weekly levee, or reception. The Washingtons settled on two per week. Abigail Adams, who attended the levees of both king and president, wrote that the president’s “grace dignity & ease” left the “Royal George far behind him.” Despite the ease he projected, however, Washington worried that his behavior might be taken for “an ostentatious imitation, or mimickry of Royalty.”

The summer after his inauguration, it was Washington’s turn to be ill. A tumor on his thigh, accompanied by a fever, lasted for weeks. Washington’s illness, though serious, did not compare to George III’s, which returned in 1810 and made him incapable for the last decade of his life. Nor did Washington’s two terms as president of a new nation make him an equal in power to George III, who ruled an empire for 60 years.

But for a year between 1788 and 1789, when Washington rose to lead the colonies that George III had lost, they were equal as human beings — each anxious, vulnerable and aware of his own weaknesses and his rival’s strengths.

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“Truth is mighty and will prevail”– Ida B. Wells

We started Black History Month with the great Rosa Parks from Alabama and we’re winding it up today with the great Ida B. Wells from Mississippi. This is a guest post from Malea Walker, a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division, who first posted in on the Headlines and Heroes Blog. Wells’ motto, “Truth is mighty and will prevail,” is still reflected in the work of investigative journalists today, including, of course, the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. 

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Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Photo: Sallie E. Garrity. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

In a time of extreme racism and yellow journalism, documenting and speaking the truth about lynchings in the South was a rare and dangerous act. But that did not stop journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. When one of her friends was lynched in Memphis in 1892, she decided she could not let the defamation and murder of African American men stand any longer.

For months, Wells — she married in 1895, after she had begun her activism and publishing career, and added her husband’s surname to hers then — traveled throughout the South investigating lynchings. She used eyewitness interviews, testimony from families, and looked through records. The New York Times in its recent obituary for Wells noted, “She pioneered reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism.”

What she found was that the stereotype of black men being lynched for raping white women was almost always false. Disputes usually started over completely unrelated things, as it had with her friend Thomas Moss, killed over a dispute that began with children playing marbles. She boldly reported her findings in an editorial in the newspaper that she co-owned and edited, The Memphis Free Press and Headlight. That editorial, however, caused a riot in Memphis and she was forced to leave her home to save her life. The office of the newspaper was destroyed.

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“Driven from Home.” The Washington Bee (Washington, DC), June 11, 1892.

This did not stop Wells from continuing to speak out and write about lynching in the South, however. Instead she made it her mission to continue reporting on her findings, and to bring facts forward to combat the racist lies that covered up the violence that she found. As The Appeal (Saint Paul, MN) wrote months later, by leaving Memphis and going to New York, she began to reach thousands more people. “Free Speech,” they noted, “is not so easily suppressed as The Free Speech.”

Wells continued to face danger and opposition as she began telling her story across the country. An article from the Memphis Commercial as republished in The Columbia Herald, below, shows the depth of loathing that she faced. The language in the article (in the second column) is unpleasant to read — the author refers to Wells as a “wench” who writes “obscene filth” — but it is being presented here as a historical example of what Wells faced.

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“A Colored Corday.” The Columbia Herald (Columbia, TN), December 23, 1892.

Wells continued her reporting, though, writing for The New York Age, the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, The Conservator, and many other newspapers. She published the pamphlet “Southern Horrors” later in 1892, working off of what she had written for the Age and providing additional details. She then traveled across Europe, gaining support there for her anti-lynching mission. Her success in Europe emboldened her efforts once she returned to the United States and continued lecturing and writing.

In early 1895 she published her book, “A Red Record.” Again using her investigative reporting, “Record” was longer than “Southern Horrors” and included updated statistics, specific details, and photographs of cases of lynching across the South.

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“A Red Record.” Ida B. Wells (Chicago, 1895).

Wells continued to be an activist throughout her career. She started a number of clubs and organizations including the Ida B. Wells Women’s Club and Alpha Suffrage Club, the first suffrage club for black women. She helped in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1930 she even ran for a seat in the Illinois State Senate. She never stopped speaking the truth that she saw—the truth that she found through facts and figures. Her papers are at the University of Chicago. She died March 21, 1931.

 

Free to Use and Reuse: Movie Magic

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The Grand Riviera’s opening week, 1925. Historic American Buildings Survey. Photo: Jack Boucher. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Grand Riviera Theatre opened on Grand River Boulevard in Detroit in 1925, an intoxicating, million-dollar movie palace designed to resemble the wealthiest of Italian Renaissance courtyards. It was gorgeous. It was crazy. You couldn’t believe it.

Three stories, 3,000 seats and an 80-foot octagonal tower above the ticket window. The theater’s namesake sign was a vertical wonder, spelling out RIVIERA, one letter below the next, in lights that shone for blocks. Just inside, the lobby was a rotunda that soared forty, fifty feet straight up, a rounded chamber of multi-paned windows, a chandelier hanging from a painted ceiling. The floor was marble. The wood was mahogany. There was a smoking room for gentlemen. Ladies could repair to a well-appointed parlor.

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The Riviera’s lobby, 1970. Historic American Buildings Survey. Photo: Allen Stross. Prints and Photographs Division.

You can see the Riviera in all its long-lost splendor, and dozens of other unique movie theaters, in this month’s set of Free to Use and Reuse prints and photographs from the Library’s collections of copyright-free material. There’s the neon-lit Tower Theater, a Sacramento landmark. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. The Ritz Theatre in Greenville, Alabama, an Art Deco building opened in 1935 and now devoted to the performing arts.

But it was ornate movie palaces that were the rage in the 1920s when the Riviera was built. It was designed by architect John Eberson, who built dozens of similar theaters in the Roaring Twenties. His signature developments were huge “atmospheric” auditoriums, designed to look like a garden or courtyard or somesuch.

Detroit’s entry would be no exception, for the city then! The energy! It was home to the booming automobile industry – Ford, Cadillac, Chrysler, Packard – and growing like mad. Maybe 265,000 people in 1900; 1.56 million people in 1930. It was the fourth largest metropolis in the nation. The Riviera, set in the 9200 block of Grand River Boulevard, one of the city’s main arteries, was more than six miles from downtown and yet the district pulsed with life.

People came in droves, walking from nearby houses, bringing the kids, the whole thing an adventure. Once inside, just past the lobby, patrons walked into the auditorium. It was a vast, open space, the floor sloping to the front. Far overhead, tiny lights twinkled, star-like, in an arched ceiling that melted into darkness. The walls were lined with statuary and bas relief sculpture. Seats were plush. Ushers wore military-style uniforms. It was so mobbed that an 1,800-seat annex was built in 1927.

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The Riviera’s auditorium, above and below, 1925. Historic American Buildings Survey. Photo: Jack Boucher. Prints and Photographs Division.

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But as the decades rolled past and pages dropped from the calendar, times and fortunes changed. The auto industry started to collapse in the 1950s. The city’s white population began fleeing for the suburbs in the 1960s. Detroit went from being a symbol of American muscle to a symbol of American rust and ruin.

By October of 1970, the Riviera was fading. In the photo below, the marquee is missing several letters. Three films are on offer, but two are retreads. The draw was “The Executioner,” a spy thriller starring George Peppard. Filling out the bill was “Machine Gun McCain,” with John Cassavetes and future Bond girl Britt Ekland, from 1969; and “Salt & Pepper,” a racy comedy with Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, that was two years old.

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The Riviera in 1970. Historic American Buildings Survey. Photo: Allen Stross. Prints and Photographs Division.

A few years later, the place was turned into an arena for rowdy rock concerts. The Who played there. The Kinks. Fun, sure, but the magic was gone. By the 1990s, when the city’s population had dropped below one million – roughly the size it had been in 1920 – the Riviera was an abandoned wreck in a city full of them. It was demolished in 1996.

Today, the site is a local office of the Social Security Administration, a bland, one-story brick building. An empty lot is across the street, as is a beauty supply store, an abandoned building and a liquor store. The downtown skyline now looks so far away that it seems another place entirely.

But, so many years ago, it had been a fine time, the evenings at the Riviera on the wide boulevard, the vertical sign flickering on in the falling darkness, the promise of a crowd, the buzzing conversations, the men in hats, the ladies in dresses, a night in Detroit that you’d remember for years.

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Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood: On Stage at the Library March 2

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Garth Brooks, the 2020 recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

Garth Brooks has friends in library places – sorry, couldn’t help it – and one of them will be in the Coolidge auditorium on March 2, as the Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter will be talking about his life and career ahead of receiving the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song later in the week.

Brooks will be joined by his wife, fellow country music icon Trisha Yearwood, in an on-stage conversation with Librarian Carla Hayden at 7 p.m. The power couple will discuss their international success, their careers as music industry change makers and their humanitarian efforts. The conversation is being presented as part of the Library’s initiative to Explore America’s Changemakers.

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Country music icon Trisha Yearwood will be in conversation with Brooks, her husband, and Librarian Carla Hayden.

Tickets are available starting at 10 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 20 (that’s tomorrow). They’re free, as long as they last, so you’ll want to book your reservations. If you can’t be there in person, no worries: The event will be live-streamed on the Library’s YouTube channel.

The awards ceremony and concert will be taped in D.C. on March 4, then broadcast on PBS stations at 9 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 29.  The show will also be available on the PBS website and video app. It will be broadcast at a later date to U.S. Department of Defense locations around the world via the American Forces Network.

Brooks, 58, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and began his music career in college. Songs such as “Friends in Low Places,” “If Tomorrow Never Comes” and “The Dance,” catapulted him to the top of all-time record sales, and his energetic, freewheeling concerts made him one of the world’s most popular touring acts. He and Yearwood met in Nashville early on, toured together and later married. She has sold more than 15 million albums and now hosts her own cooking show.

Brooks’ music has received every accolade in the recording industry. He has been named the CMA Entertainer of the Year a record-setting six times. He is the first artist to receive seven Diamond Awards for albums certified by the RIAA at more than 10 million album sales each. He remains the No. 1-selling solo artist in U.S. history, certified by the RIAA with more than 148 million album sales. He has been inducted into the International Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame and, most recently, the Musicians Hall of Fame. His tour with Yearwood sold more than 6.3 million tickets, making it the biggest North American tour in history and the biggest American tour in the world.

He’s also the youngest artist to receive the Gershwin Prize. Past recipients include Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Paul Simon and Billy Joel. Last year’s recipients were Gloria and Emilio Estefan.

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For Presidents Day…Why Not Read Lincoln’s Mail?

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Our very own Michelle Krowl and special guest. Photo: Shawn Miller.

When President Abraham Lincoln (in the form of George Buss of Illinois) recently visited the Manuscript Division, Civil War specialist Michelle Krowl put him to work reviewing transcriptions in the Letters to Lincoln crowdsourcing campaign.

Mr. Lincoln did his part, and now you can too!

To commemorate Lincoln’s birthday and Presidents Day, the By the People team has issued a challenge to the public: finish the remaining pages needing review in the 1865-1889 group by February 21. The sooner this section is completed, the sooner these transcriptions can be made available for keyword searching, reading, and downloading through the online Lincoln Papers. Feel free to review other pages needing review in the Letters to Lincoln campaign, especially if we reach the goal early!

With every page you review, you contribute to the accessibility of Lincoln’s papers to scholars everywhere — and get a glimpse into Lincoln’s world to boot.

Registering for a By the People account is easy and just takes a minute.

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Love Letters Straight to Your Heart

 

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“Devoted lover,” Ulysses S. Grant. ca. 1860. Photo: Bain News Service. Prints and Photographs Division. 

History knows Ulysses S. Grant as the relentless Union commander who subdued the South, guided by a simple and brutally effective philosophy of war: Hit them as soon as you can, hit them as hard as you can, move on. Few know Grant the romantic — the all-lovey-dovey writer of more than 100 love letters to lifelong sweetheart Julia Dent. He was a softie who accessorized his words with flower petals and locks of hair.

Grant’s grandson, Ulysses S. Grant III, donated that trove of letters to the Library of Congress in 1960, where they joined countless other love notes in the collections — centuries of devotion, passion, longing, regret and heartbreak put down on paper. “My happiness would be complete if a return mail should bring me a letter seting [sic] the time — not far distant — when I might ‘clasp that little hand and call it mine,” Grant wrote to Dent, then his fiance, in an 1846 note signed “your devoted lover.”

If Grant’s letters are earnestly romantic, others are whimsical and offbeat. Film and theater director Rouben Mamoulian kept many cats in his home and playfully wrote love poems from one to another (“For Azadia on her birthday Jan. 16 — Piddles the Kitten”). In the letters of Navy officer Richard Merwin and his wife, their terms of endearment (“Dearest Stinky”) might not sound romantic to all ears, but it apparently worked for them. During the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, Wilson’s daughter Eleanor became engaged to (and would marry) his treasury secretary, William McAdoo. McAdoo sent Eleanor florid love letters, signing off with a not-so-mushy flourish: “Ever your Devoted, ‘Mr. Secretary.’ ”

Wilson himself was an enthusiastic practitioner of the art.

Wilson’s wife, Ellen, died in 1914, early in his first term. Seven months later, he was introduced to Edith Bolling Galt, the 42-year-old widow of a prominent Washington jeweler.

Wilson was smitten. They began exchanging notes — sometimes several per day.

“Adorable Lady, When I know that I am going to see you and am all aquiver with the thought, how can I use this stupid pen to tell you that I love you?” he wrote two months after meeting her.

In December 1915, Wilson and Galt married in a ceremony at her house — it was too close to the death of his first wife to hold it at the White House.

*

War separates sweethearts, and, in an era without email, FaceTime or easy access to telephones, letters often were the only means of communication.

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Robert Ware. Veterans History Project.

Such correspondence — telegrams, valentines, letters sealed with lipstick kisses — are preserved in the Veterans History Project, a testament to love amid the uncertainties and hardships of war. Robert Ware, a native of Amherst, Va., had just graduated from the Medical School of Virginia in 1940 when he enlisted in the Virginia National Guard, long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He married Martha Wood, a teacher who had graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. They soon had a son, Bob.

Ware was assigned to the Army’s 104th Medical Battalion and was based in the U.S. for much of World War II. But in early 1942,  he was in England as the Allies prepared to invade Europe. Two days before D-Day, Martha wrote to him, pondering their already-lost years and their precarious future: “Do you know the quotation that says, ‘Tho a man be dead, yet shall he live.’ I think I’ve come to know what that means these two years as I watched my 20s slip away and realized that we have never yet had our chance and have no hope of it for a long time.

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Martha Ware with the couple’s son, Bob. Veterans History Project.

“I am only living on the faith that God will give me a chance before it’s too late — a chance at a permanent home, children, a certain amount of financial security and above all a chance to live with the man I love so devotedly, so completely — my husband.”

The next day, June 5, 1944, she mailed him a Father’s Day card from Bob, now a toddler.

Ware never saw their letters.  The next morning, as a battlefield surgeon, “he volunteered to go with his men on the early dawn run to Omaha Beach in one of the first waves, believing that his services would needed much more desperately sooner rather than later,” according to his VHP biography. He never made it to the beach. “[H]e was struck and killed by hostile fire while attempting to disembark from his landing craft.”

He was 30 years old.

He was buried in Plot G, Row 17, Grave 8 of the U.S. Military Cemetery in St. Laurent, France, overlooking Omaha Beach.

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Not all letters that deal with love are romantic — quite the opposite, in the case of young Abraham Lincoln.

In 1836, Lincoln agreed to marry Mary Owens, whom he’d met several years earlier when she was visiting her sister in New Salem, Illinois.

Upon seeing her again, Lincoln changed his mind and promptly sought — successfully — to wriggle out of the arrangement in a have-a-nice-life letter to her:

“You can now drop the subject, dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me forever, and leave this letter unanswered, without calling forth one accusing murmer (sic)? from me. … If it suits you best to not answer this — farewell — a long life and a merry one attend you.”

He later described the incident in a letter (held by the Huntington Library) to a friend, complaining of Owens’ “want of teeth,” “weather-beaten appearance” and weight: A notion “ran in my head that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirtyfive (sic)? or forty years.”

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Julia Dent, circa 1865. Prints and Photographs Division.

Grant and Dent, though, married in 1848 and remained devoted to each other until his death in 1885, through war and peace and two terms in the White House.

In 1875, during Grant’s second term, Julia remembered the anniversary of their engagement and sent the president, busy at work, a note marked for immediate delivery:

“Dear Ulys: How many years ago to day is that we were engaged? Just such a day as this too was it not? Julia.”

Grant quickly returned the note, his reply scrawled at the bottom:

“Thirty-one years ago. I was so frightened however that I do not remember whether it was warm or snowing. Ulys.”

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Grant’s reply to his wife, on their anniversary. Manuscript Division.

 

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Love in the Comics: The Star-Crossed Story of “Negro Romance”

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Panel from “Negro Romance” #2. Art: Alvin Hollingsworth. Serial and Government Publications Division.

Hayley Salvatore, an intern in the Office of Communications, contributed to this post. 

It’s so romantic!

Gloria, pretty and hard-working, goes for a walk in a city park and meets kind and handsome Lloyd. Sparks fly! He takes her to meet her mom, who works nearby, then gently holds her hand, walking her home. Dinner, perhaps?

“I looked up into the tenderness of his eyes and my heart whispered a secret question,” Gloria wonders. “Had I really met this enchanting man only hours before – or was it a week – or a century?”

Such was the starry-eyed summer fling of “Negro Romance” — the only black romance comic ever printed between the 1930s and the 1950s, known as America’s Golden Age of Comics. It was startling and rare for its positive depiction of African Americans in the era, particularly in its portrayals of young black women as romantic heroines. But groundbreaking as it may have been, the magazine lasted just three issues in 1950 and then, with exception of one issue reprinted in 1954, almost completely disappeared from history.

So as Valentine’s Day approaches, we are delighted to report that the Library recently acquired issues of “Negro Romance” #2 and #3, thus completing the only known collection of all four issues. The comic is so rare – only two other libraries are known to have even a single copy – that Michelle Nolan, author of “Love on the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics,” estimated that “there are likely fewer than 50 copies extant of each issue” in a recent phone interview.

“In my 50-plus years of work with comics,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve seen a dozen copies of ‘Negro Romance.’ ”

Megan Halsband, a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division who helped direct the acquisition, said the completed collection offers a unique look at America at mid-century. For example, there are few white people depicted in the comic, subtly documenting segregation. The comic, written by Roy Ald, who was white, and drawn by Alvin Hollingsworth, who was black, does not traffic in demeaning stereotypes, caricatures, or dialect, contrary to the prevailing norms in pop culture.

“The research value is extraordinary,” Halsband said, “because it’s so rare for positive representations of African Americas to appear in comic books during this period.”

The Library already holds the nation’s largest publicly available collection of comics, with some 12,000 titles and 150,000 issues. Finding all four issues of this comic took six years. Issue #1 was purchased in 2014. Issue #4 (the 1954 reprint) was included in the Stephen A. Geppi Collection, acquired in 2018. Then, last September, issues #2 and #3 surfaced at a New York-based auction house. The Library jumped at the opportunity, said Halsband.

Starting in March, the Library will display issue #1 in the exhibition “Comic Art: 120 Years of Panels and Pages.”

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“Negro Romance”  #1. Serial and Government Publications Division.

“Negro Romance” flickered into life during a rush of romance comics in 1950, as publishers such as Fawcett, Marvel and Fox sought to hook young adult female readers. After “Young Romance” started the genre in 1947, the field erupted into nearly 150 romance titles in the early months of 1950, Nolan writes in “Love on the Racks.” That equaled thousands of issues on newsstands and spinner racks at once. Amid this deluge, Fawcett came up with “Negro Romance” #1 in June, #2 in August and #3 in October.

Each 36-page issue featured a glossy cover photograph of an attractive, well-dressed young couple. Inside, on pulp paper, were three soap-opera tales of love, deceit, treachery and romance. With stories such as “Love’s Decoy,” “Possessed,” (that was Gloria and Lloyd), “Forever Yours” and “Spite!” it trod familiar territory– a handsome beau, a lithesome beauty and lots of drama. The difference was that the lovely dames and dashing gents were black, middle-class, bound for college or working professional jobs.

In a way, it was shocking.

Blacks, when mentioned at all, did not get such treatment in pop culture, still in the throes of the Jim Crow era. The Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down legalized segregation, was still four years away.

Qiana J. Whitted, author of “EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest” and director of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina, notes that racism was brutal in comics of the era. There were the “savage” Africans featured in Tarzan and other jungle comics. Captain Marvel had a sometime sidekick named Steamboat, who had huge pink lips and spoke in dialect. “Li’l Eightball,” a caricature of a coal-black child (again, with the lips) who appeared in “New Funnies,” was so offensive that even schoolchildren complained, ending its run.

Still, there were larger cultural forces at work. The preceding decade had seen black authors have unprecedented success, as Richard Wright and Ann Petry had runaway bestsellers with “Native Son” and “The Street,” respectively. Black newspapers were thriving, including comic strips with black characters. Magazine publisher John H. Johnson started his iconic “Ebony” in 1945. Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis were two of the biggest sports stars of the age and each had a short-run comic devoted to their bios. All-Negro Comics, the first comic book by an all-black staff, ran for one issue in 1947. It would be another 45 years before another comic with all black creators was published by Milestone Comics in 1993.

So, while pop culture was very much segregated, publishers understood that black readers were out there. Their plan, Whitted notes, was to take established genres – sports, romance – “and see if we can reach out to black audiences who we know already buy our comics, but don’t have titles targeted to them,” she said.

No one now knows how many copies were printed of “Negro Romance” or where they were distributed. There is no apparent mention of it in contemporaneous literature, journalism or personal memoirs.

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The first panel of the first story of “Negro Romance” #1. Art: Alvin Hollingsworth. Serial and Government Publications Division. 

Still, it’s clear that the stars did not align for “Negro Romance” in the tempestuous world of comics, where few titles ever made it past a dozen issues. Of the 147 romance titles published in the early part of 1950, at least 117 were dead before the end of the year, Nolan writes. Fawcett started four romance titles that summer. None survived past autumn.

“June of 1950 was the ultimate kiss of death,” Nolan says. “Any romance comic that started in mid 1950 was doomed.”

Still, it’s nice to think that 70 years after Gloria and Lloyd fell in panel-by-panel love, the short-lived adventure that was “Negro Romance” has finally found a happily-ever-after home of its own.

 

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“Caged Bird” Inspired by the Library of Congress

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Paul Laurence Dunbar

Poet Maya Angelou’s debut memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” is her most famous work. The coming-of-age story has influenced writers and touched millions of people. Yet its title is not original to Angelou: She borrowed it from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar that he composed, at least in part, in response to his employment at the Library of Congress.

A new documentary by Frederick Lewis of Ohio University explores Dunbar’s poetry and life, including his stint at the Library. The film will be screened on Feb. 8 at 2 p.m. in the Mumford Room of the Library’s Madison Building. The Daniel A.P. Murray African American Cultural Association at the Library and its Moving Image Section are sponsoring the screening in recognition of Black History Month.

Here Lewis answers a few questions about Dunbar and the documentary.

Who was Paul Laurence Dunbar?

He was born to former slaves in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, where he was boyhood friends with Orville Wright. The Wright brothers — Orville and Wilbur — had built their own printing press, and they helped Dunbar publish a short-lived newspaper for Dayton’s African American population when Dunbar was still in high school. The only African American in his class, he became editor of the school newspaper and was elected president of the literary club. The Dayton Herald was already publishing his poems. Yet upon Dunbar’s graduation, racism kicked in, and the only work he could find was as a janitor. For several years, he worked as an elevator boy in a downtown office building.

What made you want to create a film about Dunbar?

I teach documentary studies and production at Ohio University, and I was approached by a colleague who had secured funds from the state humanities committee to get the project started. As a former English major, I was somewhat familiar with Dunbar, having read a few of his poems in my American literature class. As the project unfolded, however, I began to realize how little I actually knew about him, how rich his brief life had been and how much archival material exists. As a filmmaker, I’m especially drawn to projects that allow me to delve deeply into archives to search for photos, old film clips and ephemera.

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Frederick Lewis in his editing suite. An image from the Dunbar documentary appears on the screen behind him. Photo: Sam Girton.

How did Dunbar come to work at the Library of Congress?

In 1897, Dunbar’s book, “Majors and Minors,” was reviewed by literary lion William Dean Howells, after which Dunbar embarked on a reading tour of England. Financially, the trip was a disaster, and Dunbar returned home in need of work. Robert Ingersoll, a well-known orator, helped Dunbar secure a position at the Library as an attendant. He retrieved and reshelved medical and scientific volumes from the Library’s musty stacks.

The Library’s new home — now the Thomas Jefferson Building — had just opened, and Dunbar became the first poet to give a reading there, in the Reading Room for the Blind.

How does the concept of a caged bird relate to his Library employment?

Understandably, Dunbar’s time as an elevator boy back in Dayton is often assumed to be the inspiration for his poem, “Sympathy,” which contains the line, “I know why the caged bird sings.” This was of course the line borrowed by Maya Angelou for her famous memoir.

A gilded elevator is indeed a kind of cage, but the poem was written years later, during Dunbar’s time in Washington, D.C. Dunbar’s wife, Alice, herself an accomplished writer, noted in an article written eight years after her husband’s premature death:

The iron grating of the book stacks … suggested to him the bars of a bird’s cage. … The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one … and he understood how the bird felt when it beats its wings against the cage.

What research did you do in the Library’s collections?

The vast collection at the Library is the first place I go to when starting a new project. It is an absolute treasure trove. Although I use more than 550 photos and pieces of ephemera in the Dunbar documentary, drawn from more than 100 archives and private collections, the materials at the Library were absolutely critical. I haven’t done a tally, but I’m sure that I must have used more than 150 images from the Library, many of which helped me provide historical and geographical context. The librarians I worked with were excellent allies, always getting back to me with timely, thoughtful information about collections I needed to access.

Your film ties Dunbar to other individuals whose papers are at the Library. Can you elaborate?

As I mentioned, Orville Wright was a boyhood friend of Dunbar’s. I use several items from the Wright Brothers collection at the Library, including photos, letterhead from their bicycle shop and their celebratory telegram to their father on Dec. 17, 1903, after their first powered, controlled and sustained flight.

Mary Church Terrell and Dunbar met at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and years later became next-door neighbors in LeDroit Park in D.C. Terrell recalled, “I can see Paul Dunbar beckoning me as I walked by, when he wanted to read me a poem which he had just written or when he wished to discuss a word or a subject on which he had not fully decided.”

At the time, Terrell was teaching at the M Street School, where her husband, Robert, was principal. The M Street School would later be renamed Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, in honor of their neighbor.

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“Ro-sa Parks! Ro-sa Parks!” Kicking off Black History Month

We’re kicking off Black History Month with — who else — Rosa Parks, whose papers are currently the subject of a major Library exhibition.

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Rosa Parks may not be the woman you thought she was. She’s probably a lot more.

The “mother of the civil rights movement” is enshrined in popular culture as a quiet seamstress who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Alabama in 1955, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement. But in “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words,” the first major exhibit of her papers at the Library, her personal writings reveal Parks to be a fierce, lifelong activist who never shied from pursuing social justice, no matter the physical, social or economic cost.“As far as I can remember during my lifetime, I resisted the idea of being mistreated and pushed around because of my race,” she said in a 1957 documentary, “A Time for Freedom.”

At the Library, you can experience Parks’s life in a number of ways.

There’s also a Feb. 13 event at the Library with two of her biographers, Douglas Brinkley and Jeanne Theoharis, in conversation with National Public Radio’s Michel Martin, as part of the National Book Festival Presents series.

Most directly, you can help transcribe her papers on the Library’s By the People crowdsourcing web site. You’ll be reading her personal notes, letters and writings and transcribing them into a digital, searchable format. It’s an amazing way to reach into her day-to-day life. No registration is necessary unless you want to take on the additional responsibilities of reviewing and tagging first drafs of transcriptions. (A word of encouragement – her handwriting is both beautiful and legible!)

Meanwhile, the exhibit, and accompanying book, show the depth and intensity of her resistance to both racist violence and subtle bigotry. Some of it will no doubt surprise viewers accustomed to seeing Parks, who died in 2005, as a kindly, soft-spoken woman with a nice purse and sensible shoes.

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A page from Parks’ notebooks. Rosa Parks Papers, Manuscript Division. 

“Hurt, harm and danger,” she wrote on one line of an undated note to herself. A stroke of the pen marks a line across the page, and below it: “The dark closet of my mind.” Another page-wide stroke, and a last line: “So much to remember.”

Indeed.

Born on Feb. 4, 1913, under bitter Jim Crow segregation in Tuskegee, Alabama, she endured the threat of Klan violence as a child, helped her husband with his work defending the Scottsboro Boys, then joined the NAACP as a secretary and activist. Her unplanned bus protest cost Parks and her husband their jobs, subjected them to a decade of poverty, death threats and stress-related illnesses that never fully abated. She never wavered. She moved to Detroit, eventually finding steady work in U.S. Rep. John Conyers’ office. For the rest of her life, she worked with causes such as labor unions, radical black nationalist groups and anti-poverty agencies.

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Parks at the March on Washington, Aug., 1963. Photo: Bob Adelman. Prints and Photographs Division.

Hers was never a pretty journey from can’t to can, just as the struggle against America’s racist violence has never been easy to look at head on. Her papers show the sweat-and-blood woman behind the iconic photographs to be a thoughtful, composed, deeply religious woman of few words who was possessed of an unyielding drive to confront white supremacy.

She was 6 years old in 1919, the Red Summer when white mobs attacked black soldiers returning home from World War I and other black citizens in waves of violence that roiled the nation. That reached little Pine Level, Alabama, where Parks was living with her grandparents.

“KKK moved through the country burning Negro churches, schools, flogging and killing,” she writes. “Grandfather stayed up to wait for them to come to our house. He kept his shotgun within hand reach at all times.”

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Rosa Parks’ childhood home. Prints and Photograph Division.

Another childhood memory:

“One day when I was about 10, I met a little white boy named Franklin on the road. He was about my size, maybe a little bit larger. He said something to me, and he threatened to hit me — balled up his fists as if to give me a sock. I picked up a brick and dared him to hit me. He thought the better of it and went away.”

Still in her teens, she foisted off a white man who wanted to either rape her or pay her for sex while she was babysitting at a white family’s house.

In 1932, when she was 19, she married Raymond Parks, a barber 10 years her senior. He was a serious man who brooked no foolishness from whites. “I was very impressed by the fact that he didn’t seem to have that meek attitude — what we called an ‘Uncle Tom’ attitude — toward white people,” she wrote in “My Story,” her young-adult memoir. The handsome suitor was “the first real activist I ever met.” Shortly after their marriage, he was fundraising to help defend the Scottsboro Boys — nine black youths falsely accused of raping a white woman in Alabama. The clandestine meetings he attended were so dangerous that the group had lookouts, code words and secret locations.

By the 1940s, she was helping the NAACP document false arrests, beatings and sham trials that led to state-sanctioned executions. Her papers reveal an eloquent, bitter recognition of the humiliations that white supremacy imposed.

“Treading the tight-rope of Jim Crow from birth to death, from almost our first knowledge of life to our last conscious thought, from the cradle to the grave is a major mental acrobatic feat,” she writes in one undated note. “To me, it seems that we are puppets on strings in the white man’s hands. They say we must be segregated from them by the color line, yet they pull the strings and we perform to their satisfaction or suffer the consequence if we get out of line.”

In the early 1940s, when the young couple was living in Montgomery, she made three trips to the courthouse before she was allowed to register to vote, overcoming literacy tests and racist clerks. In 1943, a bus driver attempted to physically remove her from a bus because she did not go through the back door, as blacks were required to do. “I didn’t follow the rules,” she later wrote. When the white driver, known to be a rough bigot, stood threateningly over her and told her to get off the bus, she said, “I know one thing. You better not hit me.”

He didn’t, and she got off the bus. But, a dozen years later, on Dec. 1, 1955, she boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus at Court Square in Montgomery and saw the same driver, James Blake, glaring at her when she refused to give up her seat to a white man.

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E. D. Nixon escorting Parks to the Montgomery, Alabama, courthouse to attend the trial of Martin Luther King, Jr. March 1956. Photo: Associated Press. Prints and Photographs Division. 

Most everyone knows that her arrest, and the resulting protest, ignited the movement that changed the United States. Less known is how harshly she paid for getting “out of line.”

She and Raymond were let to, or fired, from their jobs, descending into harsh poverty for nearly a decade, and lived under constant death threats. The couple took home about $3,700 in 1955, the year of her arrest. Four years later, it plummeted to $661 — the equivalent of $5,800 in 2019.

The couple found no salvation in Detroit; she called it “the promised land that wasn’t.” In a 1960 profile, Jet Magazine called her the boycott’s “forgotten woman” and described her as a “tattered rag of her former self — penniless, debt-ridden, ailing with stomach ulcers, and a throat tumor.”

In 1964, Parks volunteered to work on the longshot congressional campaign of Conyers, then an unknown. When he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, he hired her to help run constituent services in his Detroit office, a position she held until her retirement.

Still, she was so unknown to the general public that in 1980, she appeared on the television game show “To Tell the Truth” as one of three guests saying, “I am Rosa Parks.” Only one of the three voting panelists correctly identified her. The fourth panelist, entertainer Nipsey Russell, had marched with her in Selma.

“Mrs. Parks is 10-foot tall, she’s a legend and a hero in the democracy of the United States, not just among black people,” Russell said, as the studio audience applauded.

A decade later, that had changed.

In 1990, when she was in her late 70s, Nelson Mandela stopped in Detroit after being released from prison in South Africa. As historian Douglas Brinkley described it in “Rosa Parks: A Life,” Mandela spotted her in the receiving line as soon as he stepped off the plane: “Tears filled his eyes … in a low, melodious tone, Nelson Mandela began to chant, ‘Ro-sa Parks. Ro-sa Parks. Ro-sa Parks,’ until his voice crescendoed into a rapturous shout: ‘Ro-sa Parks!’ ’’

In 1999, she was given the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor Congress can bestow. Schools, libraries and streets were named for her. There’s now a statue of her in the Capitol Building. In 2010, Time Magazine named her as one of the world’s “25 Most Powerful Women of the Past Century.”

It was an amazing life and is told by her with unfiltered honesty — in her own hand — in the Library’s collection.

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Parks receiving a 1998 honorary degree from Mount St. Vincent University, Nova Scotia. Photo: Monica Morgan. Prints and Photographs Division.

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