Pamela D. Toler's Blog, page 3

Queen of Bohemia: A Q & A with Eve Kahn

I’m delighted to have Eve Kahn back on the Margins to talk about her new book, Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris. Queen of Bohemia is the story of a Kentucky-born belle turned ferocious New York journalist who used her pen to advocate for impoverished immigrants and to expose corrupt politicians. (I leave you to make any comparisons you please.) Eve—and Zoe—give us a different image of the Gilded Age. I was hooked from page one.

Take it away, Eve!

Even well-known women in the nineteenth century are often neglected by biographers and historians. What path led you to the story of journalist Zoe Anderson Norris, and why do you think it’s important to tell her story today?

I was introduced to Zoe (as everyone called her) in 2018 by my friend Dr. Steven Lomazow, a neurologist and preeminent historian of American magazines—his holdings of some 83,000 periodicals date back to the 1700s and include examples of Zoe’s groundbreaking bimonthly magazine, The East Side (1909-1914). I could not believe, in 2018, that no scholar had written anything about this expectation-defying woman. She set out “to fight for the poor with my pen,” and her self-published writings combating bigotry against immigrants resonate in our own tumultuous times. She documented, for instance, the sufferings of sweatshop workers at firetraps including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory—like my own Ukrainian-born ancestors—and caged deportees at Ellis Island.

Zoe was a well-known journalist and activist during her lifetime, but is largely forgotten today.  Why do you think stories like hers vanish from history?

History so often gets told because of flukes, for instance someone’s papers land at the right institutions and are findable by scholars. Zoe’s descendants in her sleepy Kentucky hometown tucked away a boxful of her manuscripts and memorabilia. Who knows what would have been previously published about Zoe if, perhaps, she’d corresponded copiously with someone celebrated like Willa Cather and those letters survived in some well-combed archive?

Zoe sometimes went undercover for her stories about immigrant poverty.  How does Zoe fit into the tradition of “stunt girl” journalists?

It’s fascinating that Zoe never, as far as I know, wrote about those newspaperwomen, her trailblazer predecessors and colleagues like Nellie Bly. And Zoe’s take on undercover reporting is wry and self-deprecating, it’s sui generis. She sometimes made fun of herself for being poorly disguised. She wrapped herself in shawls while pretending to be an immigrant accordionist beggar, taking notes on wealthy philanthropists ignoring her while other beggars gave her coins, but one of the few songs she could play, “My Old Kentucky Home,” was a dead giveaway of her Kentucky origins.

The Gilded Age has been a popular history hotspot for several years now, the setting for the television series by that name, now at the end of its third season, and a number of best-selling novels, including The Personal Librarian, The Address, and The Social Graces.   In your subtitle, you describe Zoe as a Gilded Age journalist.  How does her story relate to the world evoked in such works?

I’ve had many conversations about this, especially with my podcaster friend Carl Raymond, “The Gilded Gentleman.” Zoe wrote vividly about her era’s gaping disparities and fluidity. Immigrants were starving and freezing on garbage-strewn streets, a few blocks from new skyscrapers “flashing back the fire of the sun” (Zoe’s gorgeous phrase) and liveried servants hoisting bejeweled blueblood employers into carriages upholstered in velvet. And yet immigrants were also visibly getting footholds in a new land, elbowing their way from wheeling pushcarts to running department stores.

Writing about a historical figure like Zoe Anderson Norris requires living with them over a period of years.  What was it like to have her as your constant companion?

You can’t believe how often I see the world through Zoe’s eyes. Just the other day I was heading back to Manhattan across an East River bridge and I thought, oh, there are those luminous skyscrapers still flashing back the fire of the sun, in a town still so full of gaping economic disparities and fluidity.

Can you tell me where you got the title Queen of Bohemia?

Zoe drew people into her social justice battles and attracted new East Side subscribers by having fun, especially at weekly restaurant dinners for an intentionally disorganized bohemian group that she organized, the Ragged Edge Klub. Reporters descended on Klub meetings as the members tried out trendy ragtime dance moves, like the Tarpon Squirm and Banana Peel Slide (that one required wearing white tights under a yellow gown). Newspapers dubbed Zoe the Queen of Bohemia, and at first she chafed at that title, since bohemia in her time suggested a place full of unbathed, self-indulgent wastrels. But eventually she ironically coronated herself, and she used a wine bottle as a scepter to anoint her friends with aristocratic titles—Baron Bernhardt of Hoboken, for instance, and Lady Betty Rogers of the Bronx.

Zoe is not a major historical figure.  How difficult is it to find sources for women whose lives are not well documented?  What is your favorite research tip for people who want to write about relatively obscure historical women?

Any institution that seems, as you comb through databases like worldcat.org and ArchiveGrid, to have anything related to someone who knew the figure you’re researching, don’t hesitate to call or email the librarians for deeper dives into the finding aids and boxes. And don’t hesitate to call or email people descended from people you’re researching. You can’t imagine how often, even in this age of constant downsizing and tossing out heirlooms, I reach someone who says, basically, “oh, call my sister, she’s the keeper of family stories and artifacts, she’s got a box in the garage.”

What was the most surprising thing you learned working on this book?

How many descendants of people whose lives Zoe touched remembered her as the Queen of Bohemia, who fought for the poor with her pen. How amazing that the daughter and granddaughter of The East Side’s illustrator William Oberhardt carefully kept mounds of his sketched portraits of immigrants (which the family donated, bless them, to the New York Historical). And how amazing that Zoe’s descendants include writers and social justice advocates.

Independent scholar Eve M. Kahn’s Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded-Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris (Fordham U. Press) has been called “a daring story told with exceptional verve” (Amy Reading, 2024 Pulitzer finalist and biographer of New Yorker editor Katharine White). Kahn writes for The New York Times (where she served as weekly Antiques columnist, 2008-2016), among other publications. Her 2019 biography of the Connecticut-born, globetrotting painter Mary Rogers Williams (1857-1907) from Wesleyan University Press won awards from institutions including the Connecticut League of History Organizations.

History on Display: Mill City Museum

My Own True Love and I spent the third day of our time in the Twin Cities at the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, which had been on our “must-visit” list ever since we decided to skip over the Twin Cities as we drove along the Great River Road from Minnesota into Iowa in 2018.[1]

Built in the ruins of what was once the world’s largest flour mill, Mill City Museum uses many smaller stories to tell two larger stories. The first was the development of Minneapolis around St. Anthony’s Falls, which is the only major waterfall on the Mississippi and provided power for two industrial booms, lumber and flour. The second was the history of the flour industry itself, which boomed in Minneapolis between 1866, when C.C. Washburn, the founder of what became Gold Medal Flour, built his first flour mill in Minneapolis, and 1930, when Buffalo, New York, replaced Minneapolis as the center of flour milling the United States.

The museum includes a multimedia presentation, staged in a gutted flour tower, that uses vintage photos and films and recorded interviews with former mill workers to to bring to life what it was like to work in the flour mill. There are also “lab” spaces devoted to the two major elements that are part of the museum. I skipped out on the Water Lab, a hands-on demonstration of how water works to generate power—the chlorine smell was a little two much for me. I found the smells in the Baking Lab much more appealing. The only hands-on experience was a sample of a freshly baked loaf of bread, but I was fascinated by a technical discussion of different flours.[2]

Here are a few of the stories that caught my imagination:

 The so-called “mill girls” worked on a separate floor from the men and had their own break room, where they played the piano, played cards, and occasionally danced. Their primary job was filling smaller flour sacks for home consumption, but occasionally they also sewed flour sacks, and their own neat uniforms and caps. If the exhibited pages from the in-house magazine are to be believed, people were also interested in the mill girls at the time.Brands of flour were first created at the end of the nineteenth century, alongside the growth of the million industry. Before that, you bought whatever flour the general store or grocer had in the flour barrel. (Or, earlier yet, took your own grain to the local mill to be ground.)I already knew that, unlike Oscar Mayer, Betty Crocker was not a real person. I did not realize that she was created in 1921, when the Washburn-Crosby company ran a contest in the Saturday Evening Post.  Unexpectedly,  the marketing department received baking questions along with contest entries. The department wanted to answer the questions—talk about a way to build brand loyalty!— but wanted those answers to come from a woman. Betty Crocker was born.
• Bisquick was created when a tired flour executive enjoyed hot biscuits as part of a restaurant meal. When he asked how the cook did it, he learned the cook kept a mix ready to go in the kitchen cooler so he could make hot biscuits on demand. The test kitchens were put to work to develop a product that would allow home cooks to do the same thing. And then to figure out other things the resulting product could be used for.[3]

The museum website suggests you give yourself two hours to go through the museum. We were there five hours. A resounding four thumbs up.

[1] We spent much of our second day actually driving the Great River Road through the Twin Cities. We enjoyed it a lot, though it didn’t produce much in the way of history nerd stories. We ended the day with a couple of hours at the Minnesota History Center. One child-friendly exhibit on Minnesota history in general. One more specific on the “great generation” in Minnesota, from their childhoods through the boom years after WWII. Both excellent.
[2] I was there at the same time as another curious cook. Since we were only guests at the time, the conversation went way off script, but the staff member was more than able to answer our questions.
[3] Disclaimer: This is not a product endorsement

In which I announce that The Dragon From Chicago is out in paperback, and then wander off topic

For historical reasons related to the business of publishing that I do not entirely understand, new (traditionally published) books almost always release on Tuesdays—that’s why my Q & A’s with other authors about their new books almost always run on a Tuesday. Today it’s my turn. The paperback edition of The Dragon from Chicago is now out in the world, and I couldn’t be more happy.

I wish I could claim that I took the way news books are released into account when I decided that my blog posts would appear on Tuesdays and Fridays.[1] But I wasn’t looking that far ahead. I’m not even sure I knew that books release on Tuesdays when I started History in the Margins back in May, 2011. I certainly didn’t understand the relationship between writing a blog and writing a book.

I calculate that over the last fourteen years and a bit I’ve written roughly 1350 posts. (Yikes!) At an average of 500 words a post, those posts add up to the jaw-dropping equivalent of eight medium-sized books.

[pauses to check math.] [checks math a second time] [Yikes!]

In theory, I could have used that time to write another book or two—or take tap-dancing classes, or learn another language, or read my way through the hundreds of books on my To-Be-Read shelves[2] or take a trip with My Own True Love. But the fact of the matter is that the blog feeds the books in important ways. Blog posts keep my writing muscles strong and limber. They give me a place to explore ideas. To grapple with bits of history, large[3] and small, that I need to understand to write the current book project.[4] To share the cool stories I stumble across that don’t belong in the book at all, but add texture to my understanding of a period.

Writing History in the Margins is also a way to stay in touch with all of you. Thanks for being along for the ride.

[1] Unless my schedule blows up on me. As it did last week. I try to have one or two posts in the pipeline and scheduled to go live. And in fact, I do have two posts in the pipeline. Both of which will run on Tuesdays in September to coincide with the publication of other writer’s books. Unfortunately, that did not help me when Friday’s post squirmed in my hands like a cat that doesn’t want to be held. But I digress.
[2] And piled on my study floor
[3] I wrote a five-part series back in the early months of working on The Dragon from Chicago in which I tried to wrap my head around the Weimar Republic. There’s no easy way to give you a link to the series, but you can find them in June and July, 2020.
[4] Just for the record, I do not have a current book project yet.

 *  * * *

It’s taken me fourteen plus years, but I finally figured out how to produce real footnotes on the blog.  Next challenge:  Can I make it work on the newsletter?

Road Trip Through History: Historic Fort Snelling

For anyone who missed the memo, My Own True Love and I spent last week in the Twin Cities, finishing up the last bit of our multi-year exploration of the Great River Road. It was wonderful. We enjoyed lots of history-nerdery, learned some amazing stories,(1) and danced to a local Cajun band(2)—a perfect way to link the two ends of the Great River Road on our final visit.

Painting of Fort Snelling by Col. Seth Eastman, ca. 1830

We spent our first day in Minnesota at Historic Fort Snelling, the place where the Twin Cities began. Fort Snelling was built between 1818 and 1825, as a frontier fort with the purpose of protecting American interests in the fur trade. It was in active use through 1946, with a brief pause between 1858, when Minnesota became a state and it was presumed that a frontier fort was no longer needed, and the U.S. Dakota War of 1862, an important event in Minnesota history which neither I nor My Own True Love had heard of. (3) Over the years, new buildings were erected and old buildings torn down. At the time the fort was decommissioned, only four of its original buildings were standing. Today, the fort has been reconstructed to its original 1825 appearance, with the help of extensive archeological research. (Both the reconstruction and the excavations continue.) The buildings house exhibits that include life in the fort, medical knowledge at the time, and archeological exhibits. Staff members are available to answer questions. (I was particularly interested by the representation of how soldiers’ lives and equipment varied from period to period.) Living history exhibitions occur. In short, it resembled many other historic American forts that we have visited, and enjoyed, over the years. (4)

But the fort itself is only part of the story told at the site, an experience summed up in the title of the excellent exhibit in the site’s new visitor center: “Many Voices, Many Stories, One Place.” The on-site interpreters and museum designers take that title seriously.

The main focus on other voices is the Native American presence. Both the brief introductory tour of the fort and the interpretive exhibit begin the story not with the decision to build a fort at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, but with the importance of that location as a sacred place for the Dakota. Exhibits discussed Dakota and Ojibwe culture in the area, the United States’ repeated failure to honor the treaties made with those peoples, and the U.S. Dakota War of 1862.

Historic Fort Snelling also takes care to include the stories of African-Americans and women who were at the fort. Those stories are more than a performative aside. They provided a deeper picture of life at the fort. For example, even though slavery was illegal in Minnesota, Army officers brought enslaved people with them as servants. Two of those servants made history: Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet Robinson Scott, used their years in the free territory of Minnesota as the legal basis when they unsuccessfully sued their owner for their freedom. The landmark case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which effectively declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional—right up there in the list of really bad Supreme Court decisions. The course of the case increased tensions between north and south and brought the United States one step closer to civil war. (5) Two months after the decision, a subsequent owner of the pair

In short, an excellent start to our history nerd road trip.

More stories coming in future posts. Don’t touch that dial!

(1)Don’t worry. I plan to share

(2) What? You don’t associate Cajun music with Minnesota? In fact, local musicians have been playing Cajun music in the Twin Cities and dancers have been waltzing and two-stepping to it since the 1970s.

(3) It is humbling how often I discover big gaps in my knowledge about our own history, let alone that of other places. I hope to fill a few gaps when I read my way through Native American heritage month in November. I own a lot of unread books on the subject . I have a list of others I want to read. I hope to make a small dent in both the To-Be-Read pile and my own ignorance.

(4) For example: Old Fort Madison, Fort Robinson, Fort Sumter, …

(5) It is telling that we know this only as the Dred Scott case. I’m not sure I even knew that he had a wife, let alone that she was part of the legal action. I certainly didn’t know her name. Moreover, the Scotts were not the only enslaved people who used their time at Fort Snelling to claim their freedom. Two enslaved women, known only as Rachel and Courtney, successfully sued for their freedom based on their time in Minnesota. I don’t think they showed up in my textbooks at all. Perhaps because they won.

Back for one last section of the Great River–and a post from the archives

In November, 2015, My Own True Love and I began what turned into a multi-year adventure, driving the Great River Road along the Mississippi from where the river begins in Minnesota to where it ends in Louisiana. * We envisioned doing the entire trip in three weeks—a totally unrealistic assessment given the fact that between us we are interested in just about everything. On our first trip we lasted the better part of three weeks: We spent two days in Memphis, three days in and around New Orleans, and then drove back again north without a schedule. We got as far Vicksburg, where the weather turned ugly and we gave up. On our next trip, we drove north to Lake Itasca in Minnesota and started to work our way back south. At the end of that trip, we had many miles left to travel and many things still to see. Last summer, we “finished” the project with a series of day trips out of Memphis.**

In fact, we had one piece of the road left: As we reached southern Minnesota, in 2018, we decided to skip over the Twin Cities and go back another time. There was so much to see in Minneapolis and Saint Paul that we knew we wouldn’t make any progress down the river if we stopped.

We finally made it back this year. By the time you read this, we’ll be back home.

Driving north, we decided to travel by U.S. highways rather than the interstate. As we went, we found ourselves reminiscing about places we had stopped on previous trips: the Froelich tractor museum, the lock master’s house in Guttenberg, the lumber museum in Clinton. The Great River Road became a trip down memory lane.

My guess is the entire adventure took us close to fifteen weeks, broken up in chunks of ten days and two weeks.

*Actually, we had intended to do the trip in 2014, but had to revise our plans due to an ailing elderly cat and an elderly house in the middle of extensive renovations. Instead of the big trip, we took a bite out of the middle on a four-day weekend from Nauvoo to Quincy in Illinois.  It was a very good start.

**I didn’t write a single blog post about the experience. I was deep in the run-up to releasing The Dragon from Chicago  Instead of chronicling our adventure, I was writing posts about women journalists. (Sorry. Not sorry.) However, I did write a newsletter looking at the trips as a whole. You can read it here.

 

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One of our most memorable stops in the stretch through Iowa and Minnesota was the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa. I was pleased to re-visit the post I wrote then. I hope you enjoy it, too.

*****

On the first day of our Great River Road adventure (1), My Own True Love and I veered about 45 miles off the Great River Road so I could sneak in a bit of a research for the book proposal I’m working on at the Vesterheim Norwegian American Museum and Heritage Center  in Decorah, Iowa.(2) Sandy was a willing co-conspirator because 1)it would be a shame to have to come back if I sell the book and 2)it looked like a pretty fabulous museum.

And let me tell you, it IS a pretty fabulous museum.

The museum explores the story of Norwegian immigration to the United States, putting it in the context of nineteenth century Norwegian culture and the broader experience of nineteenth century immigration to America. It also celebrates Norwegian folk art, then and now. In fact, if you’re in Decorah for a longer period, you can sign up for classes in rosemaling, traditional embroidery techniques (3), folk music, flatbread baking (4), etc, etc, etc.

Kubbestol–Traditional Norwegian log chairs. More comfortable than they look!

The folk art exhibits are breathtakingly beautiful. Well-trained docents give tours of a campus of well-maintained historic buildings, ranging in size and complexity from a small log storage cabin (5) to a nineteenth century Lutheran church. And the exhibit on Norwegian immigration not only told me a portion of the story of immigrants to the United States that I had not heard before, but it made elements of the broader story of nineteenth century immigration to this country more vivid for me.

Here are some of the things that caught my imagination:

The first group of Norwegians emigrants sailed from Norway on July 4(!), 1825. They were known as the “Sloopers” because their ship was a sloop that was tiny for ocean-going even by the standards of their time. Like so many early emigrants they were religious dissenters. Some of them were Quakers; (6) others followed the pietist teachings of Hans Nielsen Hauge. The official state church of Norway persecuted both groups.Norway was second only to Ireland in the percentage of its population it lost to emigration in the century between 1825 and 1930. Norwegians left their homes for many of the same reasons as the Irish: growing population, limited arable land (7) and the potato famine that swept Europe in 1845.In the mid-nineteenth century, emigrants provided their own food for the voyage and cooked it on the ship on open fires in  long bins filled with sand.A “stove wood” house, built of pieces of wood cut to the length that would fit in a woodturning stove and held together with plaster. The walls were about one foot thick and well-insulated. Unlike log cabins, a man could build a stove wood house by himself.

I came away stunned by new awareness of just how hard it was for emigrants to leave their homes to travel to a new country.  I was also stunned by the love of decoration pervasive in traditional Norwegian culture.

If you’re anywhere near Decorah, take the time for a visit.

(1)Part 3, or maybe Part 4, depending on whether you count our consolation prize four-day weekend in 2014.  And you really should, because it was weird and wonderful.

(2) Yes, that’s a hint. But it won’t help you much.

(3) Personally, I’m tempted by the hardanger classes. (Autocorrect changed this to harbinger classes. Perhaps a good choice for Halloween weekend. Beware, beware….)

(4) Or Norwegian Christmas cookies

(5)The answer to the question of where people stored things in a one-room cabin.

(6) Norwegian Quakers, you ask? I did, too. According to our docent, Denmark/Norway fought on the French side in the Napoleonic Wars. (Brief pause while I check this.) Some Norwegian prisoners of war were taken to England, where Quakers and Methodists visited them in prison and managed to convert a number of them from the state-sponsored Lutheran church.

(7) In the case of Norway, the limits were imposed by the country’s geography. In the case of Ireland, they were artificially created by British policies.

 

 

Lady Duff Gordon, aka Lucile

I honestly thought I had written my last post on changes in ladies’ lingerie.  Then Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (1863-1935) floated across my path in one of the romantic and subtly sexy gowns with which she wowed the fashionable world at the turn of the twentieth century. I was already familiar with Lucile’s trademark tea gowns and evening dresses. It never occurred to me that her (relatively) insubstantial dresses would need something different in terms of underwear. But of course they did.

 

Lady Duff Gordon, ca. 1919

Lucile, then Lucy Wallace (née Sutherland), entered the “rag trade”in 1890 because she was desperate for money when her alcoholic husband, James Stewart Wallace, abandoned Lucy and their daughter. Lucy moved in with her mother and she began supporting herself as dressmaker. When one of her dresses was a hit at a weekend house party, her career took off. In 1894, after divorcing James Wallace, that nice little dressmaker Lucy Wallace turned herself into the mononymous Lucile, owner of the exclusive Maison Lucile, which catered to a wealthy clientele that included aristocracy, socialites and stars of the film and stage, such as Lily Langtry, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Mary Pickford, and Irene Castle. A few years later, Lucile married, Scottish baronet Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon. Already a celebrity as a couturier, her new title added additional cachet to her career.

Lucile was best known for her tea gowns, evening dresses, and luxurious lingerie. She dubbed her evening gowns “Gowns of Emotion”, and gave them evocative, if not very descriptive, names like “Give Me Your Heart” and “The Sighing Sounds of Lips Unsatisfied.” The gowns were made with floating layers of diaphanous fabrics in pale colors, soft drapery, and dramatic asymmetrical effects. They had low necks, and slit skirts, daring and scandalous at the time. The lingerie that went under her dresses was sheer, trimmed with tiny hand-made silk flower, and provocative—no boned corsets under a Lucile gown!

Lucile made more innovations in the world of fashion than just her dresses. She was the first couturier to train lovely young women as professional models.  She originated the “mannequin parade” as a technique for displaying her gowns and luring women into placing orders. Invitation-only, the parades were important social events. * For most of the year, the parades were held at Maison Lucile, but in the summer Lucile held the fashion shows in her garden, where models walked pedigreed dogs with jeweled collars and leashes.

Over time, Lucile transformed Maison Lucile into the first successful international couture business, Lucile Ltd., with houses in London, New York, Chicago and Paris. Beginning in 1910, she wrote weekly columns for the Hearst newspapers and monthly columns for Harper’s Bazaar and Good Housekeeping. In addition to creating gowns for famous actresses, she designed costumes for theatrical productions, including the operetta The Merry Widow, several productions of the Ziegfeld Follies, and more than eighty movies. For a brief time she also had a successful mail-order business with Sears, Roebuck, offering a lower-priced, mass-produced line with her name.

During World War I, Lucile closed her couture houses in London and Paris and based herself in New York. Her business did not revive after the war. Fashions had changed and Lucile’s trademark romantic style seemed old-fashioned compared to the bold new fashions of the flapper era. Lucile Ltd. closed in 1922, though Lucille herself continued to design for private clients in London.

A few odd tidbits:

Lucile was the older sister of novelist, screenwriter and film producer Elinor Glyn, who popularized the terms “It” and “It Girl.”

Together with her husband, her maid, and nine other people, Lucile survived the sinking of the Titanic in boat designed for forty. The Duff-Gordons were cleared of charges of having bribed crew members to not allow others on the boat, but Sir Cosmo’s reputation was permanently smeared. Lucille seems to have gotten off more lightly in the public eye: on the day that she testified at the public hearing about the disaster , the room was packed with society women wearing their Lucile creations in support of their favorite designer.

 

*Women came to look at their dresses. Unattached young men—ostensibly escorting their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and old family friends—came to look at the models.

A Light in the Northern Sea: A Q & A with Tim Brady

I am fascinated by stories of the resistance in World War II. (My guess is that comes to no surprise to those of you who have been hanging out here in the Margins for a while.) And I have slowly come to realize that the resistance took different forms in different places. All of which explains why I said yes with no hesitation when I was offered an advance copy of Tim Brady’s A Light in the Northern Sea: Denmark’s Incredible Rescue of Their Jewish Citizens During WWII. (This despite the fact that I have been turning down most of the books publicists offer me because life is short and the To-Be-Read piles are tall.)

I’m glad I did: the story is amazing.

I’m also glad Tim Brady agreed to answer some questions. Take it away, Tim

What path led you to the story of the Danish resistance movement in World War II?   And why do you think it is important to tell this story today?

After finishing Three Ordinary Girls, which told a story about the Dutch Resistance during WW II, I was looking for another resistance story to tell. I knew vaguely of what had happened in Denmark—the story of the rescue of the Danish Jews—but only at a surface level. When I decided to dive into research, I quickly realized what a powerful story it was. These early efforts were occurring just as Russia was invading Ukraine, which seemed like a very timely example for what happens when a powerful, authoritarian nation occupies a lesser power with democratic traditions.

The resistance in France and the Netherlands has been the subject of many books in English  over the last few years, including your own Three Ordinary Girls. How did the Danish resistance differ from these better know experiences?

The Danish resistance was slow to begin. The German occupation began in April 1940, but as a consequence of the agreement signed by the Danish government at the time, the German takeover was less oppressive than occurred in other Western European nations, and a majority of Danes were not moved to resistance by the presence of Germany in their daily lives. It would take three years before an effective resistance evolved in Denmark.

Why do you think people are drawn to these stories today?

I think readers have grown more interested in the nooks and crannies of the history of World War II. While the great sweep of the war remains a powerful focus of its history, many are looking into lesser-known aspects of the conflict to get a better sense of what happened to a wide variety of its participants.

You introduce your readers to individual members of the resistance, who come to the work by different paths and carry out different missions.  Do you have a favorite among them?

Jurgen Kieler and the whole of his family are great heroes of mine, and of much of the Danish nation. The Kieler’s alignment with and participation in the resistance grew out of a deep moral conviction that the German presence in Denmark could not be tolerated. They struggled within the family, particularly Jurgen and his older sister, Elsebet, in how best to respond to the oppressive nature of the occupation, before ultimately siding with a violent resistance. They paid deeply for their decision;  four siblings, and their father, all spent time in concentration camps before the war ended.

Was there a story you were sad to leave out?

There was no one story that I was sad to leave out, but collectively I wished I had more opportunity to delve deeper into the story as a whole: more history of Denmark, extending back before the 20th century; more depth about the nature of the Danish character—what were the roots of their collective decision to come to the aid of the nation’s Jews? More understanding of the Danish monarchy and how it worked with the country’s democratic institutions. More details about particular aspects of the resistance like the rescue of the Jews through Bispebjerg and other hospitals in Copenhagen. More about t4he White Bus rescue— how it was organized and  how it worked.

What was the  most surprising thing you learned working on this book?
I would say the most surprising thing was the fact that I found the story was essentially as true as its reputation. I’m by nature, and probably by profession, skeptical when it comes to history stories that promise heroics and good deeds across a wide swath of a nation’s populace. While there are many footnotes and asterisks to go along with this story, I think it lives up to its reputation; the Danish people deserve a tip of the cap for what they did to rescue 95% of the country’s Jewish population from capture by Nazi Germany.

Tim Brady is an award-winning author whose books—Twelve Desperate Miles, A Death in San Pietro, His Father’s Son, and Three Ordinary Girls—have received wide critical acclaim. He has contributed to PBS history documentaries and has written frequently for the History Channel Magazine. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

 

From the Archives–Word with a Past: Gerrymander

This post originally ran in 2018.  Unfortunately, some stories never go out of date.

If Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) had played his cards right, he could have been a minor but respected figure in American history. He signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Bill of Rights, served two terms in Congress, and was the fifth Vice President of the United States. His contemporaries thought him intelligent, gentlemanly, quirky, and a bit of a hot-head.

Instead his name is permanently linked to the practice of re-drawing political districts for partisan advantage. In 1812, Gerry was a member of the Democratic-Republican party and the governor of Massachusetts. Although he had called for an end to partisan bickering in his inaugural address in 1810, he came to believe that the Federalist party was too close to the British and wanted to restore the monarchy. Gerry went on a partisan power binge. He removed Federalists from state government jobs and replaced them with Democratic-Republicans. He had his attorney-general prosecute Federalist newspapers editors for libel. He even seized control of the Federalist-dominated Harvard College board–presumably recognizing the college as the source of future American political leaders. (Though he may have just gotten carried away. Power is an addictive and intoxicating beverage.)

To put the cherry on the partisan sundae, his fellow Democratic-Republicans, who controlled the legislature, redrew the state’s Senate districts in a way that would benefit their party. Previously, Massachusetts’ senatorial districts followed country boundaries. The new senate map twisted and turned in irrational patterns to insure a Democratic-Republican victory. Gerry may not have been responsible for the map’s design, but he signed it into law in February, 1812.

The Federalist controlled Boston Gazette ran an illustration of the district map in the form of a salamander-like monster and ran it with the title “The Gerry-Mander,” claiming it had been born of “many fiery ebullitions of party spirit, many explosions of democratic wrath and fulminations of gubernatorial vengeance within the year past.”

There are better ways to have your name live on in the language: public toilets for example.

Gerrymander: To manipulate the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favor one party or class.

Word with a Past: Muckrakers

While I was writing about Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910), I started off thinking of her as a proto-muckraker, working a generation before people like Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946),* Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) and Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). But the closer I looked, the more I realized that the realism for which she was known was not the same as the investigative reporting which earned the muckrakers their name. They exposed political and economic corruption–and related social hardships–that resulted from the growing power of big business in the Second Industrial Revolution. Corporate monopolies, political machines, unsafe working conditions, urban poverty, and child labor were all fair targets. Davis described the hardships, but she didn’t dig for the, well, muck.

I sadly abandoned several lovely but incorrect sentences about Davis, and then treated myself to a little rabbit-holing. Here are the high, or possible low, points:

 The word muckrake entered English in 1366 as the name for a rake designed to collect and spread muck, referring to manure, not filth in general.John Bunyan was first the first to use the implement in a literary metaphor, noting in Pilgrim’s Progress that “The Man with the Muckrake could look no way but downward”—and that he consequently was unable to look up when offered a spiritual crown.

Theodore Roosevelt used Bunyan’s words and imagery in a 1906 speech in which he exhorted the investigative journalists of his time to show moderation: “The men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crowd of worthy endeavor. There are beautiful things above and round about them; and if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone.” (You can read the entire speech here . Personally, I think Roosevelt makes some good points.)

Roosevelt did not mean the term as a compliment, but many of the journalists of the time embraced it.

Muckraking as a movement disappeared between 1910 and 1912. The need for journalists willing to look down and the stir the, ahem, muck, did not.

*Who also wrote work that was the antithesis of muckraking using the name David Grayson. As Grayson, he wrote books of personal essays with titles like Adventures in Contentment, Adventures in Friendship, and The Friendly Road. He not only took on a different name for these books, he created an entirely different persona. Baker was an Amherst family man; Grayson a well-read bachelor who left the city to live on a modest farm. (Think an intellectual version of the 1960s television comedy Green Acres,** minus the glamorous wife and, presumably, Arnold Ziffel, the pig.) Grayson had serious fans: they formed clubs named after him and called themselves Graysonians, claiming to be dedicated to the simple life. On the other hand, as  Baker he won a Pulitzer for his biography of Woodrow Wilson. Best of both writing worlds?

**My apologies to any of you who now can’t get the theme song out of your head.

 

 

Word with a Past: Muckrackers

While I was writing about Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910), I started off thinking of her as a proto-muckraker, working a generation before people like Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946),* Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) and Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). But the closer I looked, the more I realized that the realism for which she was known was not the same as the investigative reporting which earned the muckrakers their name. They exposed political and economic corruption–and related social hardships–that resulted from the growing power of big business in the Second Industrial Revolution. Corporate monopolies, political machines, unsafe working conditions, urban poverty, and child labor were all fair targets. Davis described the hardships, but she didn’t dig for the, well, muck.

I sadly abandoned several lovely but incorrect sentences about Davis, and then treated myself to a little rabbit-holing. Here are the high, or possible low, points:

 The word muckrake entered English in 1366 as the name for a rake designed to collect and spread muck, referring to manure, not filth in general.John Bunyan was first the first to use the implement in a literary metaphor, noting in Pilgrim’s Progress that “The Man with the Muckrake could look no way but downward”—and that he consequently was unable to look up when offered a spiritual crown.

Theodore Roosevelt used Bunyan’s words and imagery in a 1906 speech in which he exhorted the investigative journalists of his time to show moderation: “The men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crowd of worthy endeavor. There are beautiful things above and round about them; and if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone.” (You can read the entire speech here . Personally, I think Roosevelt makes some good points.)

Roosevelt did not mean the term as a compliment, but many of the journalists of the time embraced it.

Muckraking as a movement disappeared between 1910 and 1912. The need for journalists willing to look down and the stir the, ahem, muck, did not.

*Who also wrote work that was the antithesis of muckraking using the name David Grayson. As Grayson, he wrote books of personal essays with titles like Adventures in Contentment, Adventures in Friendship, and The Friendly Road. He not only took on a different name for these books, he created an entirely different persona. Baker was an Amherst family man; Grayson a well-read bachelor who left the city to live on a modest farm. (Think an intellectual version of the 1960s television comedy Green Acres,** minus the glamorous wife and, presumably, Arnold Ziffel, the pig.) Grayson had serious fans: they formed clubs named after him and called themselves Graysonians, claiming to be dedicated to the simple life. On the other hand, as  Baker he won a Pulitzer for his biography of Woodrow Wilson. Best of both writing worlds?

**My apologies to any of you who now can’t get the theme song out of your head.