Author Spotlight: Mary Jo Ignoffo

Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune by Mary Jo Ignoffo
This first full-length biography of Sarah Winchester, heir to the arms company and a notorious eccentric who kept her home under extensive construction for twenty years, reveals that she was not a maddened spiritualist driven by remorse but an intelligent, articulate woman who sought to protect her private life amidst the chaos of her public existence. By excerpting from personal correspondence, Ignoffo gives the heiress a voice for the first time since her death.

Q: What prompted you to write a biography of Sarah Winchester?

Initially, I scoffed at the idea. I had heard about the woman who kept a large house under constant construction in order to stave off death, and I thought she must have been mad. I had never visited the Winchester Mystery House, and I had no desire to do so. I was a skeptic’s skeptic.

As I was researching another topic at San Jose’s main library, the librarian there told me that he was asked for information on Sarah Winchester every week, and that he wished he had something worthwhile to offer patrons. He went on to mention that he believed a local history museum nearby had some papers relating to her. His suggestion nudged me to go and look at the papers.

The papers I found opened the proverbial Pandora’s box. Sarah Winchester’s attorney had left papers, including both sides of the correspondence between the widow and the lawyer. The letters and assorted documents indicated a woman far different from her quirky persona. I discovered that the attorney had also been Mrs. Jane Stanford’s attorney and had been president of the first board of trustees of Stanford University. From the local museum I went to Stanford’s archives and found more letters. By that time, I was hooked on Winchester and certain that others would also be interested in the woman most categorized as one of history’s laughingstocks.

Q: Why did Sarah Winchester build such a large house?

If Sarah Winchester kept a personal diary, it has not been found, so knowing her personal desires and aspirations is not possible. But the historical evidence can allow us to reach some conclusions.

First, it is documented that when Winchester purchased a farmhouse near San José in 1886, she immediately took steps to enlarge it. I was able to prove that her three sisters with their families came to California at the same time. The widow supported them financially with monthly allowances. One might surmise that she built the house to accommodate the relatives.

Before long, the sisters and their families were living elsewhere. Yet Winchester continued to build and enlarge the San José house and gardens. She also purchased adjoining properties so that her land holdings grew from about forty-five acres to almost 160 acres over about fifteen years. Only Marion “Daisy” Merriman, Winchester’s niece, lived with her and a few servants. So why did she keep building?

In a letter in 1898 to her late husband’s sister in New Haven, Winchester described construction delays and problems she encountered while building the house. Yet, the tone of the letter suggests that she was telling her sister-in-law not to visit. “I am not so situated yet,” she wrote after almost ten years of construction, “as to feel that I can make invited guests as comfortable as to justify me in giving pressing invitations.” Perhaps Winchester kept building to avoid houseguests rather than to encourage them.

Winchester’s personal secretary reported that the house was the widow’s hobby. Planning, designing, and viewing the construction was an occupation that fulfilled her and brought a sense of well-being. A woodworker stated that Winchester wished to keep woodworkers gainfully employed. This line of thinking is easy to believe since Sarah Winchester’s father had been a finish carpenter who, for many years, was not able to support his family with his skill and had to resort to other work in order to make a living.

Sarah Winchester built because she wanted to, she enjoyed it, she could afford it, and she found satisfaction in providing employment for woodworkers. It also allowed a reasonable excuse to avoid houseguests. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 destroyed a large portion of the house and this lifestyle that she enjoyed so much.

           

Q: Was Sarah Winchester a spiritualist?

This question is often asked with an edge of suspicion to it, as if being a spiritualist is so far to the fringe as to constitute madness. In the middle to late nineteenth century it was not uncommon for a woman of Winchester’s social class and background to explore spiritualism, attend a séance, or visit a medium. In this book I draw parallels to other wealthy women, like Mrs. Jane Stanford for example, who appealed to a medium to conjure her deceased son. There is no concrete evidence that Winchester did this. One legend names a Boston spiritualist who Winchester purportedly consulted after the death of her husband. However, a search of spiritualist directories and periodicals of the time lists no such person.

But what if Winchester was a spiritualist? Would she not have joined with others in the San José area who practiced spiritualism? There was an active local community of spiritualists who come together at monthly meetings, and held sessions in their parlors. They were also educated people from the East of significant means. Winchester would have been welcomed, yet she never attended.

And what of the “séance” room of her large San José house where Sarah Winchester purportedly sealed herself off to commune with spirits? This notion misrepresents spiritualism which is primarily a social activity. It requires more than one person. It is not a solitary devotion. Sarah Winchester’s supremely private personality almost single-handedly precludes the assumption that she was a spiritualist.

Winchester was raised Baptist, and in California she participated in an Episcopal church in Burlingame. She befriended the rector there and invited him to her home. He presided at the funerals of a few of her employees, at least two relatives, and finally, was the presider at Sarah Winchester’s own funeral. If she ever employed spiritualist practice is uncertain. What is certain is that she often participated in a traditional church and arranged for her own funeral to be carried out through it.

Q: Legend has it that the only person allowed entry through the front door of the Winchester house in San José was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science religion. Is there any truth to this?

No. Eddy was never in California. Furthermore, the Mary Baker Eddy library has no correspondence between Eddy and Winchester in its vast collection.

Q: Was Sarah Winchester obsessed with the number 13?

I found no evidence that Sarah Winchester was obsessed with the number 13. Furthermore, I found no evidence that the number played any particular role in the design and construction of her house. In tracing newspaper articles about Winchester that appeared in the press between 1895 and her death in 1922, none mentions the number 13. In fact, the number 13 only begins to appear in articles relating to the Winchester house a full six years after the widow’s death.

Within six months of Winchester’s death, an amusement park manager had leased her large old house, and he invited a local columnist, Ruth Amet, to visit the house. The columnist wrote a lengthy article, detailing the rooms, doors, stairways, and it lays out the house as ghostly and mysterious. In all the details, Amet never mentioned the number 13. Added to that, James Perkins, a man who worked as a carpenter at the Winchester place for many years, reported that the references to the number 13 were added by the new owners after the widow’s death. Perkins said many oddities were added to the house to draw the curious tourist.

Recently when I visited the Winchester house, a corridor with thirteen coat hooks was pointed out to me, and I was told they had been added quite recently. This twenty-first-century addition is only the latest of many references to the number 13 that were not in the house when Winchester lived there.

Q: Was Sarah Winchester consumed by guilt over the Winchester repeating rifle?

There is nothing to indicate that Mrs. Winchester felt guilty over her association with the Winchester repeater. She followed the finances of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company quite closely and was updated by the president of the firm, who happened to be her brother-in-law, at least quarterly between about 1890 and her death in 1922. Her personal finances fluctuated with the profits and losses of the company. Winchester did not hesitate to use dividends earned from stock in the company for a wide variety of investments in real estate, stocks, and bonds. 

Sarah Winchester’s female relatives, and possibly Sarah herself, were animal rights advocates. Her sister was the first Humane officer in California. Yet even taking into account an allegiance to the Humane Society does not equate to a negative attitude toward guns. The women objected to waste and to cruelty to animals. They did not object to hunting for sport or sustenance. Each hosted or enjoyed meals from locally grown or hunted animals.

Until the early years of the twentieth century, most firearms including the repeating rifle, were considered symbols of progress and industrial ingenuity. They were viewed as deterrents to crime and enforcers of peace. They offered hope for a lawful and upright world. This view came into question early in the century, but even then in Winchester’s old age, there is nothing to show that she felt guilty over gun production. During World War I, the numbers of firearms manufactured by Winchester and purchased by the government and its allies was forwarded to Sarah. After the war when the company faced bankruptcy, the idea that the Winchester family would relinquish control of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was one that shocked Sarah Winchester and that she resisted. She exhibited no desire to free herself from the gun company.

Q: What is the most surprising thing that you learned while researching the life of Sarah Winchester?

There are a few things that surprised me. The first was the amount of material related to Winchester that I was able to uncover. I had always heard, and when I started out was told, that there was no information on her. Sure enough the collections that contain her letters are not catalogued with her name but buried within the papers of other individuals like her attorney and ranch foreman. Finding the first set of papers was like pulling a loose thread, unraveling what had held Sarah Winchester secreted away all these years.

Another surprise was discovering Sarah Winchester’s sister, Isabelle Merriman, who was Sarah’s opposite in every way imaginable. Where Sarah was reclusive and private, Isabelle was outspoken and brash. The two lived at opposite ends of the Santa Clara Valley, a balancing act reflective of their lifestyles. Isabelle went bankrupt, and Sarah got richer; Isabelle was political, and Sarah never registered to vote; Isabelle practiced the Bahai faith, and Sarah was Episcopalian. Somehow through their differences and eccentricities, the two remained close, one offering support to the other. Ultimately, when Sarah Winchester’s remains were transported for burial to New Haven, so too were those of her sister Isabelle.

Perhaps most surprising was the realization that Sarah Winchester did not live at her large San José house after the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. I thought she occupied the burgeoning house, as legend has it, for over thirty years. This is not the case. After 1906, Winchester occupied other homes, primarily one in Atherton, and went “to the ranch” a few times a year but rarely for longer periods of time. The ranch foreman at San José kept daybooks, one for each year from 1907 until 1922, and in them he noted when “Mrs. W. came” or “Mrs. W. went away.” Some of her visits were just for a few hours, and at other times she spent a week or two. She lived the last fifteen years of her life at her Atherton home, although she was in San José when she died. Her physician was a San José doctor, about twenty miles from Atherton, making it almost impossible for him to check in on her unless she was at the ranch.

Author Spotlight, Robert C. Plumb

Your Brother in Arms by Robert C. Plumb

George P. McClelland, a member of the 155^th Pennsylvania Infantry, witnessed some of the Civil War's most pivotal battles. Never before published, McClelland's letters to his family offer fresh insights into camp life, battlefield conditions, perceptions of key leaders, and the mindset of a young man who faced the prospect of death nearly every day of his service. Plumb expounds on McClelland's words by placing the events in context and illuminating the collective forces at play in each account, adding a historical outlook to the raw voice of a young soldier.

Q: How did you obtain the letters that are in the book?  Are they family letters?

The McClelland letters came to me from a relative of my wife.  Her uncle purchased the 42 letters and photographs of McClelland from a Civil War ephemera dealer during the Civil War Centennial in the late 1960’s.  When the uncle passed away in the early 1990’s, his widow gave the letters and photos to me. So the letters are, in a sense, “family letters,” but McClelland is not a relative.  Nothing had been done with the letters until I began transcribing them in 2005.  And that’s when this soldier’s fascinating story began to unfold.

Q: A lot has been written about the Civil War, including compilations of letters.  What new information does your book offer to readers?

It’s certainly true that more books have been written about the Civil War than any other subject in the American experience, including some excellent books based on diaries and letters.  Your Brother in Arms, however, is a singular contribution to the body of non-fiction work covering the Civil War.  First, the letters cover a broad timeframe – the Army of the Potomac from summer 1862 to spring 1865, a critical period in the war.  And McClelland’s letters are exquisitely written and hold up well for the 21^st century reader.  Finally, I have written contextual narrative to accompany the letters so that the general reader has some historical guideposts to better understand the environment in which McClelland was operating as he was writing his letters.  The eminent Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust has said: “War cannot be understood or communicated as a grand panorama.  It is real only in the context of individual lives and deaths.”  The new information for readers is the fresh perspective that the individual life of George McClelland brings to our understanding of a war that was fought 150 years ago.

Q: What went into your work in writing the narrative that surrounds McClelland’s letters?

Military records from the Civil War are very well preserved and relatively easy to access.  I spent a lot of time pouring over McClelland’s service, medical and pension records at the National Archives in Washington, DC.  And I was able to pull a tremendous amount of information from these very complete records.  I spent time in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Davenport, Iowa exploring McClelland’s pre- and post-war life.  During the course of my research, I walked the battlefields where McClelland and his unit fought.  All of these battlefields have been saved from development so that I was able to walk in McClelland’s footsteps without having to detour around a big box store or a housing development. I was also fortunate to spend time with some of our country’s most knowledgeable Civil War historians and battlefield guides to get information first-hand.

Q: Did your own military experience inform your writing about McClelland?

From a macro sense, I think there are shared experiences for anyone who has served in a theatre of combat regardless of whether it’s 1863 at Gettysburg, 1968 in the Mekong Delta, or 2011 in Kandahar, Afghanistan.  The appreciation of correspondence from loved ones at home; a deep sense of responsibility for one’s comrades in arms; and an acute awareness of one’s own mortality -- all these transcend time and place.  Today soldiers write home using e-mail, enjoy vastly better diets and have the benefit of some very sophisticated medical treatment – but the fundamental experiences of a military person in a combat zone are universal and timeless. These overarching aspects of combat did help my understanding of what McClelland was going through as I researched and wrote the narrative material in the book. 

Q: What would you like readers to take away from this book?

I think my answer – or rather answers – depend on the reader.  I hope the general adult reader better understands what the men who fought at well-known battles, such as Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, were facing and thinking.  Short of being there or watching a film of battle -- both of which are impossible when we study the Civil War today – the articulate and descriptive letters from soldiers are the next best thing.  I hope the young reader comes away with an understanding and appreciation of a teenager who went off to serve in one of America’s bloodiest wars and conducted himself with honor and bravery under the most difficult of circumstances.  For Civil War buffs I hope that they get a fresh perspective on the conduct of the war that either confirms their thinking or challenges what they have learned to date and gives them an opportunity to reflect again on this event in American history that is so important to them.

Author Spotlight: James Landers

The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine by James Landers

 Cosmopolitan is known for its vivacious character and frank, explicit attitude toward sex, yet many people don’t realize that the magazine has undergone many incarnations, including family literary journal and muckraking investigative journal. This book explores how Cosmopolitan survived three near-death experiences to become one of the most dynamic and successful magazines of the twentieth century. Landers uses a wealth of primary source materials to place this important magazine in the context of history and depict how it became the cultural touchstone it is today.

Q: What made you decide to write a history of Cosmopolitan?

It has had a fascinating life. Cosmopolitan is so completely, unbelievably different from how it began, and the fact that the magazine changed its identity completely several times over the years made me wonder who was responsible for the decisions and why those transformations happened.

Q: How do you write a 100-year history of a magazine?

You look at as many issues of the magazine as you can find. I read more than a thousand issues of Cosmopolitan published from March 1886 to March 1986. I would have read more, but dozens of copies were vandalized or otherwise destroyed, especially those from the 1960s and 1970s. I relied on college and university libraries around the country to loan me volumes of Cosmopolitan, and sometimes I had to request the same volume from two or three different libraries just to obtain a complete six-month set to read. It was sad to see that covers and pages were ripped out, something I rarely saw prior to the 1960s.

Reading all those issues let me see patterns – the types of articles that ran during a certain period, the types of fiction stories, what illustrations and photographs were like, what the advertisements were like, what products were advertised. It gave me a sense of shifts in the magazine’s editorial format at specific times.

Q: Once you’ve read the magazines, then what?

Then I needed to learn who changed the magazine’s formats and why. A historian hopes to find letters, memos, and other written material from key people. Their thoughts, their rationale for switching format, and other factors often are mentioned in such correspondence.

Usually the changes were a matter of money for Cosmopolitan. The magazine went through cyclical periods of losing readers and advertisers, then recovered, then slid again. Editors and publishers had to find a way to survive.

In this case, material from William Randolph Hearst’s archives at the University of California–Berkeley was quite interesting and helpful. Historians have ignored the magazines he owned because his newspapers were so outrageous and presumably important early in the twentieth century up until the 1920s. It turns out Hearst was proud of Cosmopolitan from the time he bought it in 1905 until he died in 1951. Plenty of telegrams, memos, letters, and business documents pertained to Cosmopolitan.

Also, material from Helen Gurley Brown was stored at Smith College in Massachusetts —memos, circulation reports, letters to advertisers and writers.

Of course, my interview with Mrs. Brown was invaluable. She remembered details about several important incidents, and she explained her goals and methods for transforming Cosmopolitan after being hired as editor in 1965.

Q: Any surprises?

Many. My first surprise was that Cosmopolitan was such a respected and popular magazine during the 1890s. I learned this after I had changed careers and was a middle-age graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. I was taking a history seminar on war policy and researching what magazines had written about imperialism after the Spanish-American War. A fierce debate raged whether the United States should keep Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico—all of which we took from Spain—and what should be done with Hawaii, which had been “annexed” during the war. I was amazed at the range of articles in Cosmopolitan—science, politics, international events—and was impressed by the caliber of contributors—diplomats, professors, well-known intellectuals, and public officials, including Theodore Roosevelt. Also impressive was the list of fiction authors: Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Jack London, Tolstoy, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells.

Another surprise was what Hearst did with Cosmopolitan early in the 1900s. It was an exposé magazine with the “Treason of the Senate” series on corruption, also a very graphic series on the hazardous conditions where children worked in factories, and with numerous articles on corruption in cities and states across the nation.

Then a big surprise was the complete switch from serious exposé articles to fluffy fiction and romance and adventure stories by the 1920s. It was a smart decision, because Cosmopolitan was more popular and profitable than ever.

The final surprise was the way Helen Gurley Brown took over a mediocre, dull magazine without any specific identity and created a controversial, popular magazine with an incredibly loyal readership. My conversation with her persuaded me that she was not at all surprised by the success of Cosmopolitan. She knew what young women of that era wanted.

Q: What lessons can be learned from the survival of Cosmopolitan?

Leadership makes a difference. An individual makes a difference. Be bold, be daring.

Author Spotlight, Bob Priddy

The Art of the Missouri Capitol by Bob Priddy and Jeffrey Ball 
 After fire destroyed Missouri’s capitol in 1911, voters approved a bond issue to construct a new statehouse. The tax to pay the bonds produced a one-million-dollar surplus, leaving a vast amount of money to decorate the new building. A special commission of art-minded Missourians employed some of the nation’s leading painters and sculptors to create powerful and often huge pieces of art to adorn Missouri’s most important new structure.

Q:  Did it really take you ten years to write this book? 

 Give or take a decade or three, I suppose.  I know the precise day that I first saw the Missouri Capitol and got my first exposure to its art.  I was on my way back to my hometown of Sullivan, Illinois with my classmates after our senior trip to the Lake of the Ozarks and we stopped at the Capitol. We took the standard tour that included the Benton mural in the House Lounge.

     

A little more than seven years later I became the news director of a Jefferson City radio station and began covering events from time to time at the Capitol.  One of our listeners had a copy of the 1928 final report of the Capitol Decoration Commission and gave it to me. That would have been in the late 60s. It was my first exposure to the scope of the art in and around the building.  I noticed several of the paintings had been done by artists from Taos, New Mexico wondered how that came to be. 

    

The mayor of Jefferson City in those days was John G. Christy, who had been the Speaker of the House when Benton painted his mural. I had heard him tell of his efforts to have the mural painted over when he saw how vivid it was. And when Benton died in 1975, I recorded Christy telling me that story.

    

By then I'd become the news director of the Missourinet, a statewide radio network and I covered the House when the legislature was in session. The House press gallery is right below Schladermundt's "The Glory of Missouri at Peace" window and directly across from Hoffbauer's "The Glory of Missouri at War" mural.  Since moving to the Senate twenty or so years ago I have occupied a seat at the press table on the Senate floor, right beneath one of Richard Miller's senate paintings.  So I’ve been surrounded by the art for a long time.

   

My sister-in-law and her family lived in Albuquerque and I decided that I would go up to Taos one day while we were visiting her and see if I could find any relatives of the Taos artists.  I wound up recording interviews with E. L. Blumenshein's daughter and Oscar Berninhau’s daughter.  I also got in touch with Buck Dunton's son who sent me some photographs of his father working on "The First Train to Tipton" painting. 

     

Somewhere during all of this a thought had begun to grow that somebody needed to write a better book than the 1928 report that didn't really tell us anything about the artists or how they'd been chosen and how they created these works. But I didn't have any idea how to go about doing the research.

    

A few years later I met Jeff while he was working with the School of Art and Archaeology on the collection of preliminary works the Capitol artists had submitted for commission approval. We exchanged some notes and kept in touch.   And then in 2001, Tom Sater--who was in charge of the restoration of the Senate chamber--suggested we combine our efforts for a book on the construction and decoration of the capitol. 

     

Somebody had to be the writer and since I stayed in this area while Jeff went off to teach art in out-of-state colleges, I became the one who put fingers on keys and saw letters appear on a screen. But we still had so much research to do because none of the major records of the decoration commission survived.  So, most of the decade was spent ferreting out information. 

Q:  Do you have any favorite stories that came out of that research?

 Loads of them. People sometimes ask me to take them on a tour of the art and when I do it takes at least three hours to visit most of the major interior decorations and tell stories about them.  I call those tours "Gilligans."  You know---after the crew of the Minnow that went on a three-hour tour.  No way can we do that here. But some stories kind of stick out. 

     

Some of the most remarkable canvases in the building are the rotunda murals by Sir Frank Brangwyn, who was the United Kingdom's foremost muralist for the first third of the twentieth century.  They're remarkable because of their size AND because Frank Brangwyn was never in the building. He painted these huge canvases at his studio in London. They're also remarkable because he was dealing with some significant perspective issues because of the vertical and horizontal curvature of the rotunda walls.  The story also has a melancholy part to it, too. 

     

When the first paintings were unveiled in January, 1921, a state senator from Jefferson City who admitted he knew nothing about art got all puffed up and tried to block any more funding for any more decoration.  That was a fun story to tell because he wound up tangling with a woman who was the art critic for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

    

The story of General Pershing's speech at Lafayette's tomb, which is one of the few paintings not in the book (at least I haven't found it), interested me because it's a painting about an event that did not happen and the portrait uses the body of someone other than Pershing.  

     

The story of the "Signing of the Treaty" bronze grouping on the river side of the Capitol is an interesting one, too, because the original plaster statue was well traveled and almost thrown away before it was cast in bronze. It captures a second in history that Thomas Jefferson thought was the most unconstitutional act of his Presidency---the signing of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty. 

     

Q:  What pieces are your favorites in the Capitol building?

I suppose my previous answer goes to that.  My problem, though, is that I've been so submerged in this stuff for so long that I don't know whether I like something because of its artistic merits, the historic event or person it portrays, the story of the artist and the way he created the piece, or the controversy the work generated.  

I'm in love with the Capitol as a whole, with the story of its construction and its decoration, and with the stories of the people who made all of it happen.  So it's really hard to separate the elements into favored categories.

Q:  What do you want readers to get from the book?

 Lots of things. I want people to appreciate our capitol for the gem that it is and the gem it can be. I want people to understand the greatness of the art that makes it unique among the nation's capitols. I want readers to learn the significance of this decoration project; the commission didn't just go out and hire some artists and sculptors and tell them to do this painting or carve that figure.  The commission hired some of the foremost painters, sculptors, and stained glass and tapestry artisans in America whose names remain familiar in the entire history of this country's art. Only a few people who visit the capitol know what they're seeing or understand that they are looking at the works of some of this country's greatest artists.  

     

Most of all, I hope readers, including the public officials who have bought and will buy this book, will develop greater pride in this greatest symbol of our state. This building has been neglected for years: paint is peeling; lighting is bad, bronze sculptures are in need of restoration.  The very steps people walk on are cracking. But it is more convenient to ignore these conditions than it is to invest in making repairs and restoring this great symbol to a dignity and a grandeur it deserves.

    

Capitols are intended to represent the strength, beauty, and dignity of their states.  They're supposed to be uplifting symbols to the people, inspirations to the citizens, and representations of the strength of democracy. 

    

Our building needs help becoming those things.  I hope this book helps others discover their pride in the building and gain the courage to bring it back to the glory the builders and original decorators gave us. 

  

Author Spotlight, Michael E. Shay

Revered Commander, Maligned General by Machael E. Shay

Michael E. Shay presents a complete portrait of this notable American and his many merits in Revered Commander, Maligned General. This long-overdue first full-length biography of General Clarence Edwards opens with his early years in Cleveland, Ohio and his turbulent times at West Point. The book details the crucial roles Edwards filled in staff and field commands for the Army before the outbreak of World War I in 1917: Adjutant-General with General Henry Ware Lawton in the Philippine-American War, first chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, and commander of U.S. forces in the Panama Canal Zone. Revered Commander, Maligned General follows Edwards as he forms the famous Yankee Division and leads his men into France. The conflict between Edwards and Pershing is placed in context, illuminating the disputes that led to Edwards being relieved of command.

Q: Why did you write this biography?

This book is a natural outgrowth from my previous two books, both about the 26^th (“Yankee”) Division in the First Word War. My paternal grandfather was an original member of the division and served in the 103^rd Field Hospital Company all through the war. My first book was about his service and that company in particular. My second book was a history of the Yankee Division in the war, told from the viewpoint of the soldiers themselves. In addition to original archival records, my wife and I scoured New England for first-hand accounts like diaries and letters. We were able to find materials from about 350 soldiers. Maj. Gen. Clarence Edwards formed the division in 1917 and served with it until he was relieved by General Pershing about two weeks before the end of the war. That action alone remains controversial to this day.

Q: Did you find a difference between writing a biography and your other non-fiction works?

Definitely. Writing a biography is all about maintaining the proper balance. It is important not to become so involved in the subject that you lose your perspective. That is not to say that a biographer cannot come to love the subject, but the writer must never forget that the subject is, after all, a human being with all their good points and failings. When it is finished, you hope that the reader comes away satisfied that they have been introduced to a very real and important person.

Q: What did you discover about General Edwards?

Most mentions of Edwards are brief, negative, and refer to his relief by Pershing. He has been referred to as a political general and a failure as a commander. While he may have owed much of his rise to his and his family’s political connections, so did virtually all successful commanders of his generation, including Pershing.  I discovered that, in point of fact, he enjoyed a very long and distinguished military career. Not only was he cited three times for bravery in the Philippine War, he was considered an exceptional administrator. Also, while he often let his mouth run away with him, at the same time, he enjoyed the confidence and friendship of President Taft and other important figures. Most telling was his relationship with those under his command, particularly the men of the Yankee Division, who revered him and affectionately referred to him as “Daddy.”   Edwards was a family man, and lost his only child in 1918, his daughter Bessie, who was in training to be an Army nurse. He deserves to be remembered for his rich and full life, and not for one incident taken out of the context of the whole.

Q: Why do you believe that it is important to write about the American participation in World War I?

During my lifetime, the last veteran of the Civil War died, and just this year, so did Frank Buckles, the last American veteran of World War I. So much continues to be written about the former, but for a variety of reasons, relatively little has been written about the latter. In all of our wars, the bulk of the fighting was, and continues to be, fought by citizen soldiers. The First World War was no exception. The Yankee Division was a National Guard division. Out of the nearly thirty divisions that saw some fighting in France, only about a half dozen were Regular divisions. The rest were either National Guard or National Army (draftees). Of the four divisions that collectively suffered nearly thirty percent of the casualties, two were Regular and two were National Guard. They were referred to as the “Old Reliables,” and the Yankee Division was one of them. It is important that we keep alive the memory of the sacrifice made by these brave men and women. 

Author Spotlight, Marian Janssen

Not at All What One Is Used To by Marian Janssen

Born to an elite family, Isabella Gardner was expected to follow a certain path, but that plan derailed when she caused a drunk-driving accident. Being sent to Europe fanned the romantic longings and artistic impulses that would define her life. She became associate editor of Poetry; poet Allen Tate left his wife to marry her but then abandoned her for a young nun. Gardner associated with many of the most significant cultural figures of her age, but connections couldn’t save her from herself. Her life was emblematic of the cultural unrest at the height of the twentieth century.

Q: How did you, a Dutch woman, come upon the American poet Isabella Gardner, while most Americans don’t know her? 

It all started in the rare book room of Washington University in St. Louis, where I was doing research for my book on the literary magazine The Kenyon Review. Holly Hall, its librarian, asked me if I would like to see the Isabella Gardner collection there, which no researcher had yet looked at closely. For me, Gardner had been merely one of the few women poets to be published in the male dominated Kenyon Review, but I enthusiastically accepted because nothing is more fun than to see what no one has seen before. Learning from hundreds of letters to Gardner, I realized I had been shamefully inattentive to a poet whose books had been nominated for National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize and whom Sylvia Plath saw as a rival to the title of “The Poetess of America.” Yet, when I first made Gardner’s superficial acquaintance, she had been virtually forgotten.

My admiration for her poetry had to overcome my having been steeped in the quasi objective approach to poetry as preached in The Kenyon Review. Gardner’s first collection of poetry, Birthdays from the Ocean, had earned glowing reviews in the 1950s because she had clothed naked feelings of sex, terror, and death in perfectly crafted intense lyric verse, but her other three collections were out of touch with the poetic fashions by which I was swayed. However, being her self-designated biographer I had to immerse myself in her poetry, as even her most distanced poems are very autobiographical, and I was caught. In my book I use snippets of Gardner’s poems because they are the footprints of her life, and I am happy to find that my very first (Kirkus) reviewer is blown away by Gardner’s “stunning” poetry.  

Q: How did her poetry figure in Gardner’s life?

When I got acquainted with Gardner in St. Louis, I was struck first by the range of her correspondents in the literary world, from T. S. Eliot to Erica Jong. Also, Gardner called forth inordinate openness in her friends, who told her about their loves and lusts, their marriages and money problems, their ambitions and abortions. But the drama of her life encompassed much more than her being the focal point of an intimate literary circle. Born into one of the first families of Boston, cousin to Robert Lowell, she was a child of wealth who rebelled against her privileged surroundings. Before she became a poet, she was an actress on Broadway; she married into the theater world, then wedded a prominent Russian-Jewish photographer with connections to the mob, who was followed by one of the millionaire Chicago McCormicks; he, subsequently, was cast aside for the southern writer Allen Tate, who then deserted her. During her last years at the Hotel Chelsea in New York she was ravaged by the tragic fates of her wayward children, and struggled with enemies, friends, lovers and the bottle. 

Q: As you live in the Netherlands, I suppose your biography is mainly based on published sources?

No way. I have indeed read hundreds of studies dealing with American history and culture, from ballet to business to poetry, and countless biographies, from Elizabeth Bishop to Ernie Kovacs to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but they merely firmed up my book’s foundation. I derive my intimate insights from over a hundred interviews and thousands upon thousands of letters, many of them from private collections, most of them never seen by anybody else. In all, I spent two years in America reading Gardner related correspondence in archives and talking to family, friends and acquaintances. They were the best two years of my life.

Q: Why the title Not at All What One Is Used To?

My first choice was Poetry and Passion: The Life and Times of Isabella Gardner, but I decided that title, though fitting, was too static for Gardner’s inordinately tumultuous life. Then my publisher suggested Dead Center of All Alone, a line from one of Gardner’s poems and the title of the tragic last chapter, but this does not do justice to the lust for life that is so very much part of Gardner. Not at All What One Is Used To is the title of a Gardner poem in which she describes her life as an actress, poles apart from her aristocratic background. The title is unexpected, unusual, and as such emblematic of the drama of Gardner’s life.

Q: If you had ever met her, would you have liked her, do you think?   

My feelings for Gardner have rollercoasted over the years. A young, impressionable scholar, I started out with admiration for this passionate woman and anger at her being sidelined as a poet in the male-dominated Cold War period. But after I had read the love and hate letters between Gardner and Tate,,  I felt she was mired in self-pity. Interviews with people who knew her during her last years and described her as an imperious, nymphomaniacal dipsomaniac increased my moralistic attitude. Then I became an administrator and put Gardner on the backburner for over a decade. Re-reading the letters I had gathered, the interviews I had held when I returned to her after my time-out, my admiration for Gardner came back with a vengeance. Self-pity? Well, perhaps, for a while, but with a philandering husband like Tate she had much reason to. An alcoholic? Yes, but during her last years, she pulled herself together and managed to write some great poems again. I don’t think I have mellowed over the years, but the break has helped me to cut through the surface.   

Q: Why should we read this book?

Because it is a super-dramatic, compelling story of a talented actress and most gifted poet, whose kaleidoscopic life under the weight of her aristocratic parentage and wealth, played out in close connectedness with a number of central cultural episodes in America. It is a must for anybody fascinated by American aristocracy and interested in American culture of the twentieth century, from Poetry Magazine to Virgil Thomson, from William Carlos Williams to Yoko Ono, from Cape Cod to Ojai, from the Ballets Russes to the goings-on in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. I share the estimate and confidence of the Kirkus Reviews critic that it is a “long overdue study that will surely spark new interest in Gardner’s work.”

The Mississippi: A Visual Biography by Quinta Scott
 

Photographer Quinta Scott has documented the progression of the Mississippi River from its source at Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico, with hundreds of stopping points along the way. Scott explains how we have changed each site depicted, how we try to manage it, and the wildlife that occupies it. This majestic book is nothing less than a natural biography of the Mississippi, showing that, to understand the river and its floodplain today, we must understand the natural processes we have disrupted.

Questions and Answers about the Mississippi River and Hurricane Katrina.

Q: What is the connection between the geology and the history of New Orleans?

            To understand how Hurricane Katrina came to be so damaging to New Orleans you need to know a little bit of geology and a little bit of history.

Start with the geology: When the Muddy Mississippi floods, it washes over its banks, dropping its heaviest sands and silts closest to its channel. Flood after flood it builds a natural levee to an average height of fifteen feet above the adjacent floodplain. Relieved of the heavy sands, the floodwaters wash a carpet of fine silts across the low-lying floodplain and create a poorly drained, marshy backswamp in which cypress and tupelo flourish.

Now a little bit of history: In 1718 Sieur de Bienville founded New Orleans on the natural levee of the Mississippi north of its mouth. Over the objections of engineers he laid out the town on the left bank of the river at the point where the river swings nearest to Bayou St. John and Lake Pontchartrain to the north. Residents built their houses on high ground, on the natural levee of the river and near the head of Bayou St. John, which gave them a shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico through Lake Pontchartrain. A cypress forest fronted by a marsh, the backswamp, lay between the village and the lake and protected the village from storm surges in the lake. New Orleans held to the natural levee until the 1920s when developers cleared the cypress forest, drained the marsh, reclaimed land from the lake, and built a floodwall to keep the lake from flooding the neighborhoods that followed. The newly drained land compacted and sank below sea level.

Q: How does a river build a delta and what does that have to do with Katrina and New Orleans?

            When a fast moving stream meets a still body of water, it almost comes to a halt and deposits its load of sediment in the still body of water. In this way the Mississippi built its delta.

And: When the river becomes too long and its slope to the sea too flat, it finds a shorter, steeper route to the sea. The Mississippi, south of Old River at the head of the Atchafalaya, has done this at least five times in the last 7,000 years. First it deposited its sediment on the western edge of the delta, where Hurricane Rita touched in mid-September 2005. Then it shifted to the eastern side of the delta, southeast of New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina tore up the landscape in August 2005. Then the river shifted directly south of New Orleans. Then, a little to the west of there, and finally, about 1300 years ago, it began to deposit the modern delta, laying it down between two older deltas and contributing sediment to them also.

More delta building: A distributary channel is one that breaks off from the trunk channel of a river and carries its sediment to the sea. Such a channel functions much like a trunk channel. Like the trunk channel, it builds a natural levee, adding to it with each flood. Like the trunk channel, it washes fine silts and clays over its natural levee into a poorly drained backswamp. And, it can split into a splay of branching channels: each one pushing into the Gulf, each one forming a natural levee, each one washing fine silts and clays into a poorly drained marsh. Together they form a delta lobe laced together by a network of natural levees.

Basins, which form between the branching channels, fill with marshes--saline marshes closest to the delta front, freshwater inland swamps farthest away from the delta front. In between, the marshes progress from freshwater to brackish to saline as the lobe pushes out into the Gulf of Mexico.

Q: What is subsidence and what does that have to do with Katrina and New Orleans?

Finally, there is a natural process called subsidence: As long as a distributary continues to deliver sediment to its delta front, and as long as flood deposits feed the basins between the separate channels, mud flats form in the basins and are quickly colonized by fresh water vegetation. Once the distributary ceases to deliver sediment to its delta front, once flood deposits no longer feed the basins between separate channels, and once the cycle of growth and decay in the marsh can no longer sustain the marsh, sea water seeps in and begins to eat away at the marsh, replacing it with shallow lakes or bays.

Q: How does subsidence increase the intensity of hurricanes?

There is a rule of thumb: Every mile or two of marshland reduces a storm surge from a hurricane by as much as a foot. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Louisiana was disappearing, subsiding, at the rate of one acre every twenty-four minutes. Project that rate over a year, and Louisiana was disappearing at the rate of 20,000-25,000 acres per year, which correlates to twenty-five to thirty-five square miles per year. In the eighty years before 2000 Louisiana lost 600,000 acres of vegetated wetlands. If this continued, the Louisiana shoreline would creep inland some thirty-three miles in some areas of the coast. Louisiana was disappearing and New Orleans was threatened by hurricanes, as coastal marshes receded.

Q: What changes to the Mississippi and its delta aggravated the threat to New Orleans by hurricanes?

            The process started with the first levee built at New Orleans in 1723. Every change we have made since to the natural functions of the river has decreased the amount of sediment delivered to the Gulf of Mexico for the construction of coastal marshes.

            James Eads’ jetties at the mouth of the river may have allowed the river to cut a thirty-foot navigation channel through the sandbar blocking the South Pass of the modern delta, but delivered sediment carried by the river to very deep water at the continental shelf, where it washed away, never to be used for marsh building. Closure of the old distributaries of the river may have prevented flooding in the bayou country of Louisiana, but cut the flow of Mississippi freshwater sediment to the coastal marshes. Revetments built of concrete mats may have stabilized the navigation channel, but reduced erosion of the banks, a source of sediment in the marshes. Artificial levees, extending clear to the Gulf of Mexico, may have made human habitation of the Mississippi delta south of Cape Girardeau possible, but prevented the Mississippi from refreshing Louisiana’s swamp and marshes with freshwater and sediment when it did flood. Channel dams may have made navigation on the Upper Mississippi economically feasible, but they retained its sediment north of Alton, Illinois. Dams on the Missouri, from which the Mississippi drew sixty percent of its sediment, did the same. In short at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the coastal marshes south of New Orleans received eighty percent less sediment than they had at the beginning of the twentieth and had been servely eroded away. And, they became dependent on rain for freshwater.

Q: How did oil drilling in the marshes cause their destruction?

The destruction of the marshes was further aggravated by the discovery of oil in the early twentieth century. Oil companies dredged long, straight navigation and exploration canals--an urban-like grid laid over the meandering bayous that laced the coastal marshes together. They dropped their dredge material along the edge of their canals, created spoil banks, levees that disrupted the natural flow of water across the marshes. They prevented water and sediment from refreshing the marshes; they created open lakes. Each vessel passing through the canals dragged a wake behind it, which spread out and eroded the banks, creating still more open water. Finally, the canals broke down the zone between fresh water and salt water, allowing salt to bleed into fresh water marshes, killing the native plants and trees, forcing wildlife to adapt or go elsewhere.

Q: What about the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet?

The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet barge canal may have shortened the distance between the Port of New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico by 40 miles, but its construction decimated the marshes southeast of New Orleans—marshes that would have absorbed the brunt of hurricanes like Katrina. On August 29 MR GO, as the locals call it, funneled Katrina’s storm surge into its shared channel with the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, into the heart of New Orleans, where the surge breached the floodwalls of the Industrial Canal and flooded the lower ninth ward in the eastern part of the city.

Q: What are those other canals that caused the flooding of New Orleans?

            Because the city lies in a bowl surrounded by levees, every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans must be pumped out through drainage canals built at the beginning of the twentieth century. The design and/or the construction of the floodwalls along the 17^th street and London drainage canals were flawed. Rather than overtopping the floodwalls along the canals, Katrina’s storm surge undermined them. They collapsed, flooding the rest of the city, all but the French Quarter, which was built on the natural levee.

Q: What is the value of Louisiana’s Marshes and can they protect New Orleans and other coastal cities?

            Louisiana’s coastal wetlands buffer storms. One to two miles of marshland can reduce a storm surge by one foot. The marshes absorb nutrients, sediment, and contaminants. They serve as breeding, spawning, feeding, and nursery grounds for fish and shellfish, which migrate to their freshwater nurseries in the summer, and return to the Gulf when temperatures drop in the fall. Migratory birds rest on Louisiana’s barrier islands on their annual migration from Central and South America. Waterfowl, wading birds, and shorebirds colonize its freshwater marshes, attracted by their diverse menu of fish, shellfish, and vegetation. The marshes provide habitat for the endangered brown pelican and seventy pairs of bald eagles. Fur bearers—nutria, muskrat, mink, raccoon, otter, bobcat, beaver, coyote, and opossum—thrive in the marshlands. The American alligator—once endangered, now abundant—nests along the their banks.

            Louisiana’s commercial fishermen harvest 1.1 billion pounds of fish and shellfish, up to sixteen percent of the nation’s catch, valued at 1.5 billion dollars a year to Louisiana’s economy. Recreational anglers contribute another 235 million dollars. More than forty percent of the nation’s fur harvest comes from Louisiana. Alligator meat and hides bring in thirty million a year. Twenty to twenty-five percent of the nation’s oil and natural gas supply moves through Louisiana. Four hundred million tons of goods move through the Port of New Orleans.

Louisiana’s three million acres of coastal wetlands are more productive than many agricultural lands. If the loss of wetlands continues, commercial and recreational fishing will likely decline by thirty percent, putting fifty thousand jobs at risk. Migratory birds and fur-bearers that depend on the marshes will decline. The cost of treating drinking water will rise, along with the cost of salt and other minerals taken from the coast. Alligator meat will once again become a delicacy.