Historical Musings and the “True Truth”

MANNERS AND THE PRIMER OF PROPRIETY
THE HISTORICAL MOMENT
INDECENT BATHING SUITS
KU KLUX KLAN CHURCH VISITATIONS AND W.E.B. DUBOIS
TERRORIST THREATS
MARGARET SANGER AND THE CONTRACEPTIVE SPONGE
“THE TRUE TRUTH” AND A COUPLE OF CHEATS
OTHER BOOKS

MANNERS AND THE PRIMER OF PROPRIETY

When creating the Primer of Propriety, I went back again and again to Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home by Emily Post.

“In decent society a lady doesn’t go traveling around the country with a gentleman unless she is outside the pale of society, in which case social convention, at least, is not concerned with her.”  

“Absolutely no lady (unless middle-aged—and even then she would be defying convention) can go to dinner or supper in a restaurant alone with a gentleman. A lady, not young, who is staying in a very dignified hotel, can have a gentleman dine with her. But any married woman, if her husband does not object, may dine alone in her own home with any man she pleases or have a different one come in to tea every day in the week without being criticized.”

It’s a wonderful book. Bartleby.com has posted it on line. Dip into it. It’s fun to find out how the world has changed.http://www.bartleby.com/95/

THE HISTORICAL MOMENT

Of all the histories I read, my favorite was Only Yesterday, an Informal History of the 1920’s by Frederick Lewis Allen 1931, Perennial Classics

In setting the scene he writes about life in 1919: “Mrs. Smith may use powder, but she probably draws the line at paint. Although the use of cosmetics is no longer, in 1919, considered prima facie evidence of a scarlet career… most well-brought up women still frown upon rouge. The beauty-parlor industry is in its infancy… Her hair is long, and the idea of a woman ever frequenting a barber shop would never occur to her… In Mrs. Smith’s mind… short haired women, like long-haired men, are associated with radicalism, if not with free love.”

INDECENT BATHING SUITS

The idea for Belle’s arrest came from a picture in This Fabulous Century, Volume III, 1920-1930 published by TIME LIFE BOOKS. The picture shows a fat policeman hauling a young woman into a patty wagon, while a matron pulls on another, who’s hanging onto the door of the bathhouse. The caption reads: “ Chicago police arrest bathers for indecent exposure. 1922.” Both women wear sleeveless knit suits. Their legs are exposed, shockingly, all the way to the tops of their thighs!

However in Volume 11 of the same series, 1910-1920, there’s a fetching photograph of ten women standing on a diving board. The caption reads “One more barrier between the sexes comes crashing down as a Milwaukee women’s swimming team appears in a chic and revealing collection of men’s suits.”

So permissible bathing suits seem to be a question of community standards, one Belle and her friends decide to test.

Writing about the same time, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his haunting story “Winter Dreams,” describes the wildly provocative Judy Jones wearing a bathing-suit, “which consisted apparently of pink rompers.” The American Heritage Dictionary describes rompers as: “A loosely fitted, one-piece garment having short bloomers.” However, Fredrick Lewis Allen pointed out that in 1919 if a conventional lady such as Mrs. Smith were to buy a bathing suit, “it will consist of an outer tunic of silk or cretonne over a tight knitted undergarment—worn, of course, with long stockings.”

KU KLUX KLAN CHURCH VISITATIONS AND W.E.B. DUBOIS

There are many good books written about the Klan, but my favorite is The Fiery Cross, The Ku Klux Klan in America by Wyn Craig Wade, Oxford University Press, 1987. It’s fascinating and wonderfully written. I went to it again and again for the history, structure, and economics of the Klan. The appendices include original Klan documents and language.

I learned about “church visitations” as a tool for Klan recruitment from Wade. He describes the theatrical entrance of the masked men at the end of a long sermon and says, “Sympathetic to the Klan or not, most ministers could hardly refuse their offerings, and Klan leaders took smug satisfaction in the fact that men of God could be bought.” However, there were exceptions, “in Pittsburgh... an angry minister ordered his ushers to throw the hooded intruders out of the church.” Unfortunately in St. Louis, Presbyterian minister James Hardin Smith was quoted as saying, “If Jesus was still walking the earth, He’d be a Klansman.”

For an excellent overview of the Klan click on A Hundred Years of Terror. Thisspecial report was prepared by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It was there I learned, that although victims were usually blacks, Jews, Catholics, and various immigrants... sometimes they were white, Protestant, and female... considered "immoral" or "traitors" to the white race. In Alabama, for example, a divorcee with two children was flogged for the crime of remarrying, and then given a jar of Vaseline for her wounds. In Georgia a woman was given 60 lashes for a vague charge of "immorality and failure to go to church.” And when her 15-year-old son ran to her rescue, he received the same treatment.

But such instances were not confined to the South--in Oklahoma Klansmen applied the lash to girls caught riding in automobiles with young men, and the Klan in the San Joaquin Valley in California were know to flog and torture women.

As an antidote to the hate-mongering Klan, Bartleby.com has posted W.E.B. Dubois’ seminal work on race The Soul of Black Folks on line. You can read it all, by clicking on: http://www.bartleby.com/114/

TERRORIST THREATS

Terrorist threats were real in Belle’s time as well as ours. Mail bombs were sent to legislators and businessmen across the East Coast in 1919 and one even exploded in front of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house in Washington. A description of his subsequent raids on “reds” and foreigners and his violations of civil rights can be found on the Smithsonian Magazine website Crackdown! When bombs terrorized America, the Attorney General launched the "Palmer Raids"

For vivid descriptions of the 1920 bombing of Wall Street, the worst terrorist attack in America before September 11, check out: WWW.NYPRESS.COM Big Bang on Wall Street

And Previous Terror on Wall Street -- A Look at a 1920 Bombing, By Daniel Gross
Special to TheStreet.com 09/20/2001 03:33 PM EDT

http://www.thestreet.com/comment/ballotdance/10001305.html

MARGARET SANGER AND THE CONTRACEPTIVE SPONGE

The contraceptive devices Belle sends away for and Mrs. Sanger alluded to, but was not able to describe, were natural sponges with a ribbon sewed into them. Of course they were reusable. Women were advised to soak them in vinegar before inserting.

Margaret Sanger was an early twentieth century pioneer for women’s rights. She believed that a woman “must have her freedom—the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have.” You can find her book Woman and the New Race, “the chronicle of Sanger’s decades-long battle to legalize and develop information on the prevention of venereal disease and then methods of birth control, during which she endured indictment, exile and prison” at: http://www.bartleby.com/1013/

“THE TRUE TRUTH” AND A COUPLE OF CHEATS

As you can probably tell by now, I tried to make The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell as accurate as possible. I wanted to find out the “true truth” and so I spent a lot of time researching haircuts, cheap hotels, how to drive a 1918 Ford truck, and whether a town like Gentry would have sidewalks in 1920 or if the vigilantes who attacked Luther would use cars or horses. In 1920 people used a lot of slang, but I had to be careful. Had teenager come into common usages? — not yet, nor had Jalopy. But picture show and movies were already in common usage.

However, to make things interesting I made two cheats and I will confess them now.

At the Klan picnic Belle wanders into the eugenics booths. These booths popped up at state fairs across the country during the twenties, but probably not until about 1922.

Finally, when I was in school, this is what I learned about women’s suffrage: Women in funny hats and ugly shoes held meeting and now we can all vote.

Most of the older history books left out the struggle for women’s suffrage. Frederick Lewis Allen, writing just ten years later, hardly mentions it. When I started writing about Belle I didn’t want to deal with the suffragettes. I’d read a little about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but they seemed, I have to admit, boring. It was only when I saw the docudrama Iron Jawed Angels and then read the book did I discover the amazing Alice Paul and her National Woman's Party who went to jail and endured so much so we could vote.

Those were exciting times and our uppity foremothers deserve credit. That we would ever achieve suffrage was uncertain. Up until the final vote in Nashville, no one knew if the Amendment would ever find the “Perfect Thirty-Six” states to ratify it. My problem was how to communicate the excitement of that day without taking Belle to Nashville and blowing a hole in the narrative. Belle and Rachel might well have gone to the newspaper office to wait for the results. The stringer in Nashville might have called them in. But, I admit, it was improbable (not impossible) that he could tie up a telephone where he could watch the action on the floor as it happened. For a short overview of that historic day see: The Nineteenth Amendment & the War of the Roses

OTHER BOOKS

Of course I didn’t just surf the web. I poured over such esoterica as The United States Department of Agriculture Year Book 1920, Everyday Fashions of the Twenties As Pictured in Sears and Other Catalogs, Ford Pickup Trucks, The Original Picayune Creole Cook Book first published in 1901, Vanity Fair Selections From American’s Most Memorable Magazine 1920s and 1930s It was lots of fun, but I wouldn’t recommend these books to you for light reading. I also spent months reading contemporary fiction to see how the writers of the time portrayed their world. I particularly liked Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, and Arrowsmit, and Main Street. The short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald are brilliant and still fun to read as is the writing of Dorothy Parker, who has a wonderful cynical voice that I associate with the time. Of course there are also many fine histories and memoirs of the period, including Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son by William Alexander Percy, and Where Main Street Meets the River by Hodding Carter. Pistols and Politics by Samuel C. Hyde, Jr. gave me a vision of what life was like in Louisiana when Belle was growing up.