There’s no question the lines are tinged with ethnic derision nor that they were uttered in a bitter spirit. Nor is there doubt that they are historically accurate. They come directly from a poem written by the play’s main character, Lucy Culler.
From 1911 to 1924, Lucy lived on North Limestone Street about two and a half blocks from where I live now. Although she died in 1924 at 75, I’ve known her for about 15 years through her largely self-published writing, which leaves no question that Lucy was a character.
Because she wrote about a wide range of things, Lucy was a particularly good person through which to learn about her times.
Among the many poems Lucy wrote about her daughter Violet’s childhood, “The Doll’s Funeral” is one of my favorites.
In it, Violet’s childhood friend, Louie, comforts the girl by remarking how natural the doll looks in the shoe-box casket. The poem then ends with a memorable line addressing the cause of the doll’s untimely departure: “Alma died of a broken head, which none of us could fix.”
Lucy wrote a book length account of a European tour and afterwards urged international travelers to travel light and, if at all possible, leave behind the standard steamer trunk of the day.
“It is a nuisance,” she remarked. “Everyone who touches it wants a quarter.”
Among the many things she commented about is how surprised some people largely neglected by others in their later years would be if they could sit up in their coffins and observe the lavish funerals provided by the people who neglected them while they were alive.
“Things that Trouble Me” is, in my mind, one of her strongest essays. One of things that troubled her — showing Lucy was a woman of wide interests — was the number of vexing international problems from the 19th century that carried over into the 20th.
“Western civilization has long been considering the Chinese problem, but it is still unsettled. The serious Anglo-African must also be settled.”
On the other hand, as the year 1900 arrived, Lucy was fully confident that “the women’s rights problem, which has been vigorously agitated for the last 60 years, will undoubtedly be adjusted to the satisfaction of all long before the close of the 20th Century.”
Although the last remark may make her seem a bit of a fool, the fact is, we are all fools if we think we’ll not be wrong about some important issue during our lifetimes. Maybe the current digital video age may demonstrate that to us in an easily accessible way, assuming we’ll be able to replay the videos on our future contraptions.
The context in which Lucy made her ethnically derisive remarks is rooted in her times, of course.
She likely spoke them in the 1890s, after she’d been defeated in a school board election in the Mississippi River town of Burlington, Ill.
The temperance movement, which was likely born among mothers who visited their sons in the hard-drinking camps of the Civil War, was a catalyst for the women’s movement of the last decades of the 19th Century.
In Springfield, Eliza Daniel Stewart, known as “Mother Stewart,” was its leader and, as has been reported, will be recognized by having a locally brewed beer named for her.
Lucy not only was a supporter of temperance, but was active in the women’s literary club movement of the era. Once controversial, she said, any remaining opposition to it was bound to “melt, then evaporate” in the 20th century “because there has been nothing more remarkable in the progress of the people in the past 10 years than the intellectual development of the women of the United States.”
As Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s excellent series “Prohibition” illustrates, the only issue in the nation’s history to be the subject of two Constitutional Amendments involved other demographic forces as well. Among them was immigration.
Women whose families suffered from rampant alcoholism rallied to protect those families and especially their growing boys from future victim-hood. They often targeted Irish and German immigrants, who brought their drinking cultures with them to a new land.
When Lucy Culler became a candidate for the school board in Burlington, Ill., no one was suggesting that children in the schools there should drink. But, in an atmosphere in which women’s candidacies were seen as a political gain for temperance, Lucy blamed her defeat at the polls on what likely was the largest immigrant group in Burlington.
“The Germans said ‘If vimmins be / elected to the poard, / alretty then saloons must go, / which we cannot afford.”
After poking fun at Germans’ accents, Lucy got down and dirty: “And so 400 voting men / of scholarship and worth / were set aside by ignorance / and foreigners by birth.”
I understood my actor friend’s slight objections to the lines. My defense of including them in the play at first glance seems strong enough: They are, beyond question, historically accurate; and they help to illustrate the full character, warts and all, of a woman I am portraying.
I must confess, though, that I wouldn’t have included racially derogatory remarks in a play using the same defense. Of course, that’s in part because relations between German Americans and other Americans is not a hot button issue of today.
On the other hand, as I continue my long amble through Springfield history, I find myself sometimes seizing opportunities to shed light on voices of ethnic and racial intolerance in our past.
We tend to suppress them, I think, for a couple of reasons. One is the hope that in highlighting heroic voices of our past, we’ll live up to them. Another is that in teaching our history to our young, we want them to see the best example, not the worst. A third is to avoid legitimizing voices that may have lead us down the wrong path in the past.
In some ways, though, avoiding those voices is a fool’s errand we pass from one generation to the next and century to the next. And, at my age, I’ve come to believe that the spirit of narrowness is one of the many spirits that will be with us in every generation. Although it’s stronger in some people than others, it exists in all of us.
Fortunately, in her remarks about “the women’s rights problem,” Lucy has bequeathed to us a test we can use to determine whether issues of this kind that have passed from one generation to another in the past are still with us.
I’ll repeat what she said, then provide brief instruction for applying what I think of as Lucy’s Rule.
“The women’s rights problem, which has been vigorously agitated for the last 60 years, will undoubtedly be adjusted to the satisfaction of all long before the close of the 20th Century.”
Instructions for use:
1) Go to the part of her statement in which “women’s rights” appears and replace the word “women’s” with the ethnic, racial or other demographic identifier of your choice.
2) Go to part of her statement that mentions the 20th century and substitute the 21st, knowing that that our descendants will be able to add a new century when it comes along.
3) Read and consider the results.
Special thanks to Lucy Culler.
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