USA > New York > Onondaga County > Syracuse > Sixty-odd, a personal history > Part 32
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Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt Brüder-über'm Sternenzelt Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
The vision of that vast embrace encircling all the nations of the earth, swept one np into its glory for a brief moment. Now the com-
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pany scattered, carrying felicitations across the campus. By after- noon rejoicing was in full swing. The staid old town went wild. There was a procession of cars, and every sort of vehicle from a hay- cart to a handcart, galloping horses, barking dogs, long strings tied to the back ends of buggies with tin cans dragging from them; streamers of bright paper, tooting of horns, shouts and songs and flag-waving; a leaderless mob up Elm Street abandoning itself after long repression, to unleashed frenzy. Later on dispatches arrived with news that this was not the real armistice, and that peace must still be arranged; but it did not discourage the populace, which had worked off its first jubilation in the preliminary stampede. On the eleventh came the authentic announcement, received with more dignity and celebrated by a great gathering in the Auditorium. I think no one who attended it and heard President Neilson's read- ings from the Bible could have doubted his innate spirituality. There was a deep reverence in the silence which followed. That eve- ning the Neilsons threw open their house to town and college and a long line of sympathetic friends streamed through the rooms offer- ing congratulations and eager handclasps. Everyone felt keenly the relief to Mrs. Neilson, after months of anxiety for her people in Germany.
But the days which followed were not joyful ones. The com- munity was by no means content with the cessation of hostilities. For hundreds of young men, eagerly expecting call for service in France, it meant disappointment, openly acknowledged. Intense feeling set in against Wilson; the peace-machinery was held back by complaints and quibblings. The war was not over. Old shibboletlis were revived and familiar scandals and stories repeated. One after- noon early in 1919 I was told that a man who said he had come from the United States Government, wanted to see me. I descended blithiely, while good Minnie, rather anxious, lingered in the hall to be near me in case of need. She had heard rumors that I was liable to investigation of my suspected "activities". I found a middle-aged man of quite uninteresting appearance, and a manner which sug- gested salesmanship rather than military authority; was I to be ap- proached, I wondered, for subscription to some liberty-bond scheme
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or other patriotic enterprise, since the gentleman was in civilian's garb? I greeted him cordially, but noticed that he seemed a trifle put about. He moistened his lips.
"You'll be a little surprised to see me, I guess," he began, "but I'm from the War Department and I want to ask a few questions. It's about your son; his name's Roger, is it? I hear he's an instructor in the college and is rooming in an apartment with a young man of the name of D --- who we understand is a German. Can you tell me anything of him and how your son happens to be associating with him?"
"He has a German name," said I, "but I believe he was born in this country. There isn't a trace of foreign birth about him. Futher- more, I understand that his father is an American citizen and fought in the Civil War." The statement about the war. was a mis- take, which I did not find ont till years after, but it produced a marked impression.
"Well, that puts a different face on it. I had heard he was a spy."
"The best thing you can do," I suggested, "is to go to John Spencer Bassett, of the history department, in which the young man is an instructor and let him get that idea out of your head. I'll give you lis address and you can see him at once."
The man reddened, and his flat face took on a more aggressive expression. "I've got to find out something else," he said. "Your son himself is on our list. It seems, to begin with, that he signed a tele- gram which was sent to President Wilson last year asking him not to declare war. That was a traitorous act; it was going against the Gov- ernment. He hadn't ought to have done it; it made him liable."
"According to the newspapers," said I, "Professor Phelps of Yale signed that telegram also. Are you getting after him too?"
"He isn't on my list," said the visitor evasively. "But I presume they'll see him. We're going right on looking up people who are suspected of anti-war activities."
"What, now?" I exclaimed. "Why, the war is over; there isn't any war."
"Yes, but there are just as many traitors. We're getting thiem,
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right along; sending them on to Leavenworth and other places. I hold my job till the fall, anyway."
"I'm glad you're assured of steady employment," I snapped. "Now, what else?"
"Well,"-he hesitated. "I don't know whether you know about it, but they say your son belongs to a crowd that meets every Sat- urday night at a drinking place down street, where they have dis- cussions of a radical sort. Are you acquainted with any of those people?"
I could hardly subdue a smile. "Certainly," I answered. "They are all older than he, and mostly faculty men. A number of them are Harvard graduates."
"Oh. They have a lot of radicals at that college."
"One may hope so. I hear a good deal about their discussions, because Roger usually stops in as he comes home on Saturday nights, and tells me about it. I'm apt to sit up late, reading. They are all interesting. Perhaps you'd like to meet some of them. There's Pro- fessor Kimball of the History department, and Professor Fay, Mr. Bassett of course, the Greek and Latin men, Mr. Lieder, Mr. Locke of the music department, Mr. Churchill-why, he is a most genial person! I don't know how many of them belong to that particular group, but you'd find them wide-awake men. You might see Presi- dent Neilson, and ask him about then; why not do that?"
There was no response whatever to this proposition. My visitor switched to another point of attack.
"What are your own views, Mrs. Sessions, on the subject of the war?" I told him I was very glad he asked me that, because I had found it difficult to formulate my views. My objection to war had been an inherent personal antipathy. But it was not a thing that could be made an influence; the time had come when one must put prejudices aside and rationalize one's mental attitude. "If you want nie to tell you where mine has arrived," I said, "I will say that it coincides with the point of view of the British Labor Party. That's very important, you know, and Great Britain is our foremost ally."
"What is i ? A union? We haven't any use for those fellers. I. W. W.'s make a lot of trouble; they shoot 'em up out West."
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I hastened to assure him that there was no alliance between the two. I brought down the Labor manifesto, of which I had a fine copy, to show him, and made him go over it with me. He actually brightened up, and seemed quite interested, especially when he heard of the men who had been imprisoned and then released, like Ramsay McDonald.
"I never knew about that party," he said. "You're a real smart woman to find out about such things. I guess it's a good thing to have an education. I never had one myself."
It seemed an appropriate time to break off this amusing inter- view and speed the parting guest. I offered him my copy of the British Labor Party's principles, but he declined it; it wouldn't be the thing, he said, to be carrying papers about, and it was too big to go into his pocket. I urged him to make sure of higher advice on the subject of the young instructor with the German name, and sent him on his way. As soon as he was out of sight, I called up Professor Bassett and told him of the call he might expect.
"Good," he said; "I'll settle him." Which apparently he did, in short order.
8
WOMAN SUFFRAGE
Even if the Peace settlement still moved slowly, there was one cause, and that a very big one, making forward strides. The cam- paign for woman suffrage had kept up all through the war; national upheaval could not hinder nor demolish it, in America or Europe. The work of women in hospitals and on battlefields had raised them to a commanding position, and more and more of them demanded the vote. After seventy-three years of agitation, the movement was gathering momentum, and had penetrated every state in the union.
Born and bred in the stronghold of suffrage, and closely asso- ciated with its promulgators, I had taken it as much for granted as my very religion. But the fight itself had not come conspicuously into my foreground until after the first ten years of the twentieth century; it was a widely-accepted principle but not a battle, despite skirmishes here and there and struggles with obdurate legislatures. Since the 1875 convention in Syracuse-and it had existed before that in connection with anti-slavery agitation-there had been a band of older women, in that city, some of them intimate associates of my mother and sister; the Mills family, the Sedgwicks, the Mays and Wilkinsons, the Mundys, the Millers of Geneva and other old New York families who upheld it. Arria had been an active cam- paigner; Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews had been prominent in it and had used her influence and pen; Susan B. Anthony, by that time retired from the presidency of the National Woman Suffrage Association, had visited in our house, and Anna Shaw had spent a day or two with us at Northampton.
The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution had been re- jected by Congress in October, 1917, but had won quite a sensa-
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tional victory in the following January, just as the House of Lords conceded the vote to British women. Now came the fight to get it through a reactionary Senate, and those of us who had hitherto been content to let our braver sisters lead the van swung forward into action with them. I was one of those who with shame for their pas- sivity found themselves called to the front, as it were, and spurred into the intensive work without which victory was well nigh im- possible. Both political parties had alternately opposed and fur- thered the Amendment; the South was to a very large extent against it. The liquor interests were fighting prohibition, for the Eight- eenth Amendment, too, was at stake, and the anti-suffrage forces were thereby strengthened.
We found plenty to do in Massachusetts, and by the spring of 1919, even standing for suffrage, let alone speaking for it, became a matter of aggressive tactics. Making speeches was more amusing than difficult, but one had to conserve one's wits, for clever oppo- nents assailed the speaker with all manner of questions and objec- tions. Their prophecies reminded me of the days of the pompadours in Consumers' League meetings.
Dire predictions were voiced. Women would leave their babes and their kitchens for the polls-which one was led to believe would be places of daily resort-and thereby break up the sanctity of the Home. They would vote for the political interests of their hus- bands, to the detriment of other women's husbands. They would not vote for the political interests of their husbands, but for the furthering of their own ambitions. They would give themselves to office-seeking and wire-pulling; they would let themselves be bribed. The good women would neglect their voting-privileges on election- day, and the bad women would seize the ballot and vote against prohibition. The South would be laid waste by the enfranchisement of the negro woman. In fact, the working-people of both sexes would rule everything and everybody, and refuse to labor.
"Do you want," said one lady, "to have your maid have a right to go to the polls and vote against you?" And women would smoke, and probably end by wearing trousers. They would aspire to cab-
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inet-positions, would even try for the presidency, and would spec- ulate themselves instead of letting their men do it.
I smile to think what good officials some of those women have made since they had the un-wished-for vote. I made no prognostica- tions myself, however; I was not prepared to promise a millennium as the result of giving the franchise to women. The one real reason for it which my stubborn mind would concede was that it was right; plain justice.
The students at Smith were beginning to wake up to suffrage agitation. Women on the faculty wielded a considerable amount of influence in discussions, but there were opponents of woman's suf- frage among them. In town circles we made slow progress, though there were fine workers; at meetings (which were more successful if preceded by a supper) we had good chairmanship and excellent speakers from the great centres. Lucy Watson came to us for one of these; she was easy and persuasive on a platform, and I was proud of her impressive argument. When the alumnae came for their 1919 commencement, there was a large increase in adherents to the cause; it was hartening in the midst of national and international instability.
We ourselves, as individuals, learned a good deal in the course of the campaign. It became possible to analyze the different types of objectors, to get one's self in trim for an encounter with the purely belligerent, to avoid sarcasm as a cheap and ineffective weapon, and to find out the sort of person to whom one should listen patiently and answer her argument with a calm, "I see; of course." The "of course" was important, for it deluded your ad- versary into believing that she might be converting you, and encour- aged her to go on and exhaust her powder, after which you might gently change the subject and leave it at that; for, by the time one had heard plenty of long and satisfied asseverations, one knew that words alone would have no effect. It was really a matter of sales- manship, the psychology of which was not familiar to us in those days. And all for this boasted finasserie, I am quite sure that I never personally won over a single anti.
One of the most effective speakers who came to us during that
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period, however, was Max Eastman. He had a pungent wit, an orig- inal set of illustrations well applied, and a human appeal that was irresistible. He urged suffrage for women on the ground of its bene- fit to their own characters, in added responsibility and interest. It illustrated clearly the many-sidedness of so great and slowly-advanc- ing a movement as the enfranchisement of women or of backward nations and helpless minorities. Still far from its goal, it actually made over individual characters; and the suffrage struggle, with its inspired and intrepid leaders and its fight for a principle that tran- scended and conquered political opposition, may be incorporated in history as an endowment to civilization.
I went to my first parade in Boston with conflicting sensations of heroism and criticism. I had never outgrown the notion that it was childish to flaunt one's self before the public to the music of a brass band, even though as a child I had loved Church procession- als and vestments. I joined the line of march on Beacon Street. I had always, since the days when my short legs took me to my music les- son at Mlle. de la Motte's, considered Beacon Hill a tiresome ascent. But when we were started, at a pace which at first seemed impossibly brisk (with the responsibility of keeping step to several discordant blaring bands) we lost all consciousness of our past prej- udice, and we floated, the corpulent and slender side by side, on wings of sound, up to the State House. My heart pounded with fervor for a noble cause, and in my exalted frame of mind I decided that the one way of achieving the devotion of an individual to a creed, was to make him march for it.
My friend Mrs. Henry Dyke Sleeper was one of the active par- ticipants in the Woman Suffrage movement. We had worked to- gether for the Children's Home and were at one in our sympathies with the interests of Labor and the struggle for peace. Lydia Lud- den, business manager of the Hampshire Gazette was also a stalwart upholder of all progressive action. She, and Marion Dodd, manager of the Hampshire Bookshop, and I were taken into the Northamp- ton Chamber of Commerce that year, its first woman-members. I have a vivid memory of the meeting we attended in a crowded hall which made us less conspicuous. We had a good deal of curiosity
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with regard to the gatherings of the Chamber, especially since we were not representing high finance or ambitious civic projects. Everybody was extremely polite to us, and we were much chagrined when the gentlemen proposed to relinquish their cigars as a conces- sion to our sex. We saw that that would not do at all when women were entering public life, and protested. It was effected for that one evening, but conceded to be only a gesture of welcome. Marion Dodd had brought some chocolate cigarettes which she handed to Miss Ludden and me, and we nibbled them, smiling, as the smoke- wreaths faded. But we appreciated the compliment from the men, and looked forward to meeting them at the polls, the long process of ratifying the Amendment was now well under way.
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NINETEEN TWENTY
The twenty years at Smith College, almost a third of my whole lifetime, had meant caring for four hundred and fifty girls; a vast number it seemed when one came to count them. And that amount of responsibility could not be carried indefinitely. I had not been really well in 1920, since my eyes had given out, and I was obliged to have a secretary for all desk work.
But in the spring I grew stronger again, and in June came Roger's marriage to a brilliant and fascinating student with whom he had been in love ever since the beginning of the war. They had been engaged for eighteen months, and Barbara had been living in a little annex to our old house, with five other girls, during her senior year. The two had studied together evenings, in our library, taken long walks, and heard concerts. Barbara played the violin very well and their mutual enjoyment of music was intense. They planned a honeymoon at the farm, where they could be alone for a week before I moved there for the summer, and decided to have their wedding the day after examinations closed, escaping from commencement ceremonies. My husband and sister and I, with John and Nan made a quick trip to New Hampshire, where Bar- bara's parents lived; it was a home wedding in their lovely house, and we all enjoyed meeting them and beginning a new friendship. Our young people were marrying with no more realistic idea of the implications of matrimony than their forbears had had, and we elders wondered with some anxiety whether life would destroy, or sublimate, the romance and imaginative rapture which these tem- peramental children were bringing to their union. They were com- pletely absorbed in one another.
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They were sure they could live on the small salary of an in- structor, and they were eager to work together. They had picked out a tiny house in Hadley village. So we fathers and mothers stood by and heard them plight their troth to one another with the hope and pride and sympathy that had inspired our own parents. They went directly to the farm, but as commencement approached, Bar- bara's teachers were dismayed at the idea of her being absent from the graduation-ceremonies, because she had received high honors. We found it difficult to induce her to go there without breaking the news to her, but it was managed somehow by enlisting Roger's services, and in the end she was on hand to receive the summa cum laude which she had well carned.
We had the families all together at Phelps Farm that sum- mer. Paul Andrews was back from France; John, a Harvard senior, was returning after a triumphant season as football manager, which had consoled him after the disappointment of parting with the Yale guns.
Our brother James, too, made us one of his unforgettable visits. He was still in the "prime of life" at sixty-six, a striking figure in his monastic garb. He walked easily, up hill and down, accompanied by the nephews and nieces. My brother George's widow was now living at Forty Acres, invalided but alive to all the interests of her five sons-a professor, a publisher, a doctor, a clergyman and a business- man-and her daughter, who was my godchild and the cousin near- est Nan's age. They had been with us much since their childhood and were like older brothers to my own two boys. All of them were eager for companionship with their uncle and it was amazing to see with what keen understanding he entered into their confidence, not only taking the objective and occupation of each personality into his thought and experience, but teaching youth to find a stim- ulus for its own living in the performance of the task itself. In the evenings the young men walked back and forth with him along the road between our two houses, their bursts of hearty laughter echo- ing, as did the chorus of katydids in the elms, from the wooded hill east of the farm, while we elders waited ungrudgingly for a chance to have him to ourselves. In the forenoons he was exclusively
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Molly's property, for strolls in the woods or talks under the pines. Archie came to us at the end of the season; he had become very fond of Barbara, and delighted in the way with which she fitted into the family life. He was getting as much satisfaction as ever out of his work and his circle of friends, one of whom was O. Henry, to whom he had been useful in starting a recognition of his undoubted talent and originality. He had already told me much about the man's charm and his pungency of characterization, and the definite im- portance of his previously unencouraged literary achievement, which, by that time, had become successful. They had been ex- tremely congenial, and after his death, my husband was chosen to write the introduction to the last edition of his books.
Another interest, also, had come into my husband's life. He had begun to do some writing of plays, for which he had only evening-time, but which promised real success. He was working with David Belasco over one of the plays, which they were planning to produce together. The two were excellent friends; Belasco was very enthusiastic over its possibilities, and over the subject-matter, a bit of American history not yet appropriated for drama or fiction. This was of course an absolute secret for the time being, and at first was imparted only to me, which gave it mystery and importance. The enterprise filled him with hope, the hope he had cherished for twenty years of being able to provide, after a little longer waiting, not only for the needs, but for extra indulgences which we had not been able to achieve thus far. With our children all self-supporting and no longer in need of financial help, we could make a home to- gether again in some quiet spot, and live simply; the success of the play would put us on a footing of ease, if not actual luxury.
I remember observing one night that our best gains had come to us as surprises, and that perhaps it was as well that we could not see into the future. I was none too good at air-castle-building. Archie laughed and said, "Yes, but you love to look forward to tomorrow; you say that is the essence of happy living." "But not farther," I insisted. "One tomorrow at a time." There were yet to be many to- morrows. A friend once said to me; "Have you no villain in your book? No story is complete without a villain." I laughed and said
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that villains were boring to write about. But there was one, of whom I could not write; the false friend who stole, and sold, my husband's play and broke his heart; the heart that had withstood the ravages of the great blizzard thirty years before, but was not proof against mortal treachery. We try to forget the crime and remember only the happy visions that were never realized.
10
"THEY TELL ME YOU'RE GOING AWAY"
The autumn of 1920 found our old house in Northampton full and flourishing. I had never appreciated so keenly as in that post- war year, the expansion of the college. There was a difference in the student body. Girls were coming now from families where national, as well as domestic issues were a matter of concern; they longed for foreign travel and wider opportunity and were ready for the con- templation of problems which their forerunners had never faced. Self-support was looked upon as a universal objective. Even the recreational side of the campus life was taken more seriously; in athletics there was less individual rivalry and more group competi- tion. One heard about "worth-while" courses and new clubs. Par- ents, and even a few alumnae, recoiled to some extent from the scientific frankness of professors in the departments of Psychology and Sociology, and the startling revelations in the lecture-rooms of all the colleges seemed likely to be upsetting. But post-war condi- tions which must be taken into account, had brought sex-questions to the fore, and adolescents were strangely aware of facts from which their elders had vainly sought to protect them. Whether they real- ized it or not, a burden of responsibility had descended upon their youthful shoulders. Furthermore, if women were to be entrusted with the ballot, which was by the autumn of 1920 a fait accompli (though not yet used) they would eventually have to deal with public evils as well as with grave problems in their own circles. The president of Smith College was patient, watchful and liberal; upon that the alumnae and the world at large might count; he was not upset by criticism.
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