Volume 13 • Number 1 • Spring 2013

OHIO VALLEYHISTORY

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A Collaboration of The Filson Historical Society, Cincinnati Museum Center, and the University of Cincinnati. VOLUME 13 • NUMBER 1 • SPRING 2013 VOLUME 13 • NUMBER 1 • SPRING 2013 SPRING 1 • 13NUMBER • VOLUME Ohio Valley History is a Submission Information for Contributors to OHIO VALLEY STAFF Steven M. Stowe Allison Kropp collaboration of The Filson Indiana University Gary Z. Lindgren Editors Nikki M. Taylor Dr. Mitchel Livingston Historical Society, Cincinnati A. Glenn Crothers University of Cincinnati Phillip C. Long Museum Center, and the

Department of History Joe W. Trotter, Jr. John Pepper, Jr. Department of History, University University of Louisville Carnegie Mellon University Thomas H. Quinn of Cincinnati. Director of Research Joanna Reeder The Filson Historical Society CINCINNATI Edwin J. Rigaud Robert Gioielli MUSEUM CENTER J. Scott Robertson Cincinnati Museum Center and One paper copy of the manuscript should be sent by *Regarding general form and style, please follow the postal mail to: 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. For Department of History BOARD OF TRUSTEES Yvonne C. Robertson The Filson Historical Society University of Cincinnati Matthew Sheakley specific style guidelines, please visit The Filson’s web- are private non-profit organiza- Blue Ash College Chair Keith P. Spiller A. Glenn Crothers, Editor or Robert Gioielli, Editor site at: http://www.filsonhistorical.org/programs- Ohio Valley History Ohio Valley History and-publications/publications/ohio-valley-history/ Francie S. Hiltz Judith K. 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Postmaster, send address changes to Filson Historical Society, © Cincinnati Museum Center and The Filson Historical Society 2013 1310 S. Third St., Louisville, KY 40208. Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2013

A Journal of the History and Culture of the Ohio Valley and the Upper South, published in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky, by Cincinnati Museum Center and The Filson Historical Society. Contents

3 The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes Extinction of the Ohio Valley’s Only Parrot Stanley E. Hedeen

22 Acting to Shape Their Own Lives African Americans in Civilian Conservation Corps Junior Company 1520-C, Southern Ohio, 1933-1935 William W. Giffin

41 Ahead of their Time Anne Tracy and the Senior Women of the Cincinnati Union Terminal USO Lounge C. Walker Gollar

60 Collection Essay The USO at the Ninth Street YMCA The Turpeau Photograph Collection at Cincinnati Museum Center Linda Bailey

67 Collection Essay Nicola Marschall, Artist and Soldier James J. Holmberg

77 Book Reviews

95 Announcements

on the cover: “Carolina Parrot or Parrakeet,” John James Audubon, The Birds of America: From Drawings Made in the United States and Their Territories, 8 vols. (New York: George R. Lockwood, 1839). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER Contributors

Stanley E. Hedeen is an emeritus professor of biology at Xavier University, and the author of four books and editor of another. His publications include The Mill Creek: An Unnatural History of an Urban Stream (1994), Natural History of the Cincinnati Region (2006), and Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology (2008).

William W. Giffin is a professor of history at Indiana State University. He is the author of several academic articles and two books, African Americans and the Color Line in Ohio, 1915-1930 (2005), and The Irish (2006).

C. Walker Gollar is associate professor of church history at Xavier University. He earned a Ph.D. in historical theology from the University of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto in 1995. He has taught at Xavier for twenty years, twice receiving the university’s Bishop Fenwick Teacher of the Year Award.

2 Ohio Valley History The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes Extinction of the Ohio Valley’s Only Parrot

Stanley E. Hedeen

mall, colorful parrots once brought year-round gaiety to Ohio Valley forests. Called the Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), the bird in 1800 ranged from New York south to the Florida Everglades and west to SColorado and Texas. The parakeet subsequently disappeared from the Ohio Valley in the nineteenth century and vanished from all remaining parts of its range during the twentieth century. The parakeet’s biology contributed to its vulnerability, but human activities caused the jaunty bird to depart from the Ohio Valley.1

Carolina parakeet specimen killed in Ballard County, Kentucky, in 1878. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

spring 2013 3 The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes

The bright coloration and uniqueness of the parakeet frequently drew the attention of settlers. Oliver Spencer, a Cincinnati-area pioneer, recollected the spring of 1792 when “the redbud, the hawthorn, and the dogwood, in full bloom, checkered the hills, displaying their beautiful colours of rose and lily; and…flocks of parroquets were seen, decked in their rich plumage of green and gold.” Other Ohio Valley residents and visitors identified the parakeet’s preferred habitat as lowlands bordering the region’s waterways. Victor Collot’s mapping party in 1796 gave the name “Paroquet Island” to an Ohio River isle located a few miles below Cincinnati “on account of the immense number of those birds which are found upon it.” When Reverend Timothy Flint and his family left Cincinnati by boat in 1816 and floated down the OhioR iver past Louisville, his “children contemplated with unsated curiosity the flocks of parroquets fluttering among the trees, when we came near the shore.” Henry Schoolcraft navigated the lower Ohio in 1818 and observed that parakeets “are constantly to be seen on the Kentucky or Indiana shore, and add to the delight a traveler feels on descending that beautiful river.” Naturalists on Major Stephen H. Long’s expedition boating down the river in 1819 reported that “large flocks of these gaily-plumed birds constantly enliven the gloomy forests of the Ohio.”2 Scottish-American ornithologist Alexander Wilson, while traveling through the Ohio Valley, encountered parakeets mostly in “low rich alluvial bottoms, along the borders of creeks, covered with a gigantic growth of sycamore trees, or button-woods; deep, and almost impenetrable swamps, where the vast and towering cypress lift their still more majestic heads; and those singular salines, or, as they are usually called, licks, so generally interspersed O. M. Spencer (1781-1838). over that country, and which are regularly CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER and eagerly visited by the paroquets.” Visitors observed large groups of parakeets ingesting salty soils and drinking brine from saltwater springs at Great Lick in Ohio, French Lick in Indiana, Shawneetown Licks in Illinois, and Bullitt’s Lick in Kentucky. When William and George Rogers Clark collected fossils at Kentucky’s Big Bone Lick near Cincinnati in 1807, they saw “great numbers of Paroquets…flocking about.” Paroquet Springs, once a nineteenth-century health resort and presently a conference center situated a few miles south of Louisville, is built on the location of Paroquet Lick, a saline named for the bird that frequented the site. How parakeets satisfied their taste for salt in the many regions of their geographic range where licks did not exist is unknown.3

4 Ohio Valley History Stanley E. Hedeen

Schoolcraft portrayed the parakeet’s plumage broadly: “Its colours are green, yellow, and red, all bright colours, and it is a pleasing sight to see a flock of them suddenly wheel in the atmosphere, and light upon a tree; their gaudy colours are reflected in the sun with a brilliance of the rainbow.” Skins preserved at the Cincinnati Museum Center reveal that an adult parakeet was mostly bright bluish-green with yellow-orange feather patches at the bend of the wing and on the thigh. The bird had a lemon-yellow head, with an orange-red forehead and cheeks. About thirteen inches long, the wedge-tailed bird had pointed wings that spanned about twenty-two inches, allowing swift flight. Kentucky resident and artist John James Audubon described the flight as “rapid, straight, and continued.…They deviate from a direct course only when impediments occur, such as the trunks of trees or houses, in which case they glance aside in a very grace- ful manner, merely as much as may be necessary.” Flint favorably compared the quick, colorful Carolina parakeets to other Midwestern birds: “We have seen no bird of the size, with plumage so brilliant. They import a singular magnificence to the forest prospect, as they are seen darting through the foliage, and among the white branches of the sycamore.”4 Wilson described the flight vocalization of parakeets at Big Bone Lick as “screaming.” Other naturalists characterized the parakeet’s unmusical flight call as an “unusual racket,” “squalling,” “clamorous,” “loud enough to deafen the ears,” “noisy screeching,” “grating,” “harsh and unpleasant,” “shrill and discordant,” “disagreeable,” and “dreadful and not attuned to my ears.” One listener transcribed the call as a repetition of “qui” with a rising inflection on each “i” and the last notes drawn out like “qui-i-i-i.” Ornithologist Charles Maynard observed how parakeets in an airborne flock vocalized continuously until they “all pitch, at once, into some tree and a sudden silence ensues. So great had been the din but a second before that the comparative stillness is quite bewildering.” Maynard added that the hushed birds in a leafed tree “disappeared completely” when their mostly green plumage blended into the foliage.5 Audubon described parakeets as extremely acrobatic in trees, “moving side- wise, climbing or hanging in every imaginable posture, assisting themselves very dexterously in all their motions with their bills.” Strong neck muscles allowed the birds to hang by their beaks from branches and ascend tree stems “by striking their bills into the bark.” At dusk, the members of a flock entered a tree hollow formed by decay or woodpecker activity. The birds spent the night asleep in the hollow while grasping the inside of the cavity with their bills and feet. If a roost cavity proved too small for the entire flock, the excess birds slumbered outside by clinging to the tree bark around the entrance hole. A flock sometimes retired to their hollow during the daytime to escape storms or winter cold. The birds also used tree hollows for nesting during late spring and early summer months. A female deposited two or more white eggs on the bottom of a hollow

spring 2013 5 The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes

and incubated them until they hatched about three weeks later. Multiple females simultaneously utilized the same nest site in a large cavity, with twenty parakeet eggs reported in one hollow and a like number of eggshells found in another. After hatching, juveniles replaced their grayish down with bluish-green feathers and grew in size as parents supplied them with food. The young parakeets departed the nest to forage on their own at approximately six weeks of age.6 The fledgling and adult parakeets subsisted on a variety of native plants. The bulk of their diet consisted of seeds of cockleburs, sandspurs, thistles, and various trees including sycamores and pines. They also ate wild grapes as well as buds, flowers, and fruits of shrubs and trees. Adult parakeets, like many primarily herbivorous birds, may have captured insects to feed their nestlings. Maynard described the dining behavior of a foraging flock:

While feeding, the Parokeets are not absolutely noisy but will keep up a low, continuous chattering among themselves, as if conversing in a social manner. These notes are continued while the birds are assuming all kinds of positions, now clinging to the underside of a limb while they search for the seeds of a pine cone, now reaching for some tempting morsel while they hang head downward, or climbing with great ability from twig to twig.

Wilson determined that a parakeet always employed the same foot to grasp a food item. Just as a human prefers one hand over the other, each parakeet was either left- or right-footed.7 Parakeets searching for food endeavored to avoid becoming food for hawks. Audubon observed that upon reaching a feeding spot, “instead of alighting at once, as many other birds do, the Parakeets take a good survey of the neighbourhood, passing over it in circles of great extent, first above the trees, and then gradually lowering until they almost touch the ground.” If they spotted no predator, the parakeets landed “on the tree that bears the fruit of which they are in quest, or on one close to the field in which they expect to regale themselves.” According to the traveling German scientist Duke Paul-Wilhelm, when parakeets sighted a hawk, they “made a frightful outcry.” Naturalist David Thomas likewise reported that parakeets chased off birds of prey by “screaming most hideously” while “flying round and round in flocks.”I f a hawk downed a parakeet, its flock mates mobbed the predator in an attempt to drive it away from the injured, shrieking bird. Humans, too, hunted the parakeet. A Cherokee Indian told explorer James William Abert that the bird’s flesh was “very pleasant to taste, and is frequently sought.” Parakeet remains at prehistoric Indian village locations include leftover bones from meals as well as skeletal elements likely used for ornamentation and rituals. Nine upper bills found together at an Illinois site probably served as some form of decoration. Three bones unearthed in Ontario came from the extremity areas of the head, wing,

6 Ohio Valley History Stanley E. Hedeen

and tail, bones typically placed in a bird skin to impart a living appearance to the dead specimen. Archaeologists uncov- ered the three bones in close association with unusually fine artifacts—an antler prong tool, a ground slate knife, and an unusual stone pipe bowl—suggesting that a parakeet skin had served in some type of ceremonial function.8 In 1662, Father Hierosme Lalemant relayed the reports of Iroquois returning to Canada from the “beautiful forests” of the Ohio Valley: “In their branches live very peacefully birds of all colors and every note, especially little Paroquets, which are so numerous that we have seen some of our Iroquois return from James William Abert (1820-1897). those counties with scarfs and belts which they had made from THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY these birds by a process of interweaving.” Parakeet plumages also decorated Indian headdresses and stems of ceremonial pipes. Native Americans took parakeets alive as well as dead. A Shawnee captured a bird that he traded or gave to Christopher Gist during his 1751 exploration of Ohio and Kentucky. The parakeet subsequently suffered a bruise when one of Gist’s horses lost its footing. Gist wrote of the bird’s injury in his journal entry of April 14: “tho it was but a Trifle I was much concerned of losing Him, as it was perfectly tame, and had been very brisk all the Way, and I had still enough Corn to feed Him.” The parakeet died later that day.9 In 1810, while shooting parakeets for study during a voyage down the Ohio River to the Gulf Coast, Wilson wing-wounded a female at Big Bone Lick and gained a parakeet companion. He named the bird “Poll” and kept it for the remainder of his journey to the South. Wilson wrote extensively about Poll in his American Ornithology:

I fixed up a place for it in the stern of my boat, and presented it with some cockle burs, which it freely fed on in less than an hour after being on board.… When I abandoned the river, and traveled by land, I wrapped it up closely in a silk handkerchief, tying it tightly around, and carried it in my pocket. When I stopped for refreshment, I unbound my prisoner, and gave it its allowance, which it generally despatched with great dexterity, unhusking the seeds from the bur in a twinkling.

As he neared New Orleans, Wilson placed Poll in a traveling cage containing a mirror in which she could perceive her reflection:

It was evident that she was completely deceived. Always when evening drew on, and often during the day, she laid her head close to that of the image in the glass, and began to doze with great composure and satisfaction. In this short space she had learned to know her name; to answer, and come when called on; to climb up my clothes, sit on my shoulder, and eat from my mouth. I took her with me to

spring 2013 7 The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes

Carolina parakeet, from Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology, or, the Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, Scot.: Constable, 1831). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

sea, determined to persevere in her education; but, destined to another fate, poor Poll, having one morning, about day break, wrought her way through the cage, while I was asleep, instantly flew overboard, and perished in the Gulf of Mexico.10

Audubon was less enamored of tamed parakeets. He complained that “they cut to atoms pieces of wood, books, and, in short, everything that comes in their way.” Furthermore, Audubon continued, they could not mimic human speech and “their screams are so disagreeable as to render them at best very indifferent companions.” Audubon concluded that parakeets were best adapted to the wild where “the richness of their plumage, their beautiful mode of flight, and even their screams” brighten the woods. Audubon clearly admired the wild parakeets of the Ohio Valley. At the mouth of Cache Creek in Illinois during December 1810, he stood in awe before the grandeur of the Ohio River bottomland forest and its inhabitants: “The large sycamores with white bark formed a lively contrast with the canes beneath them; and the thousands of parroquets, that come to roost in their hollow trunks at night, were to be objects of interest and curiosity.” During the following summer at his home in Henderson, Kentucky, Audubon completed a spirited watercolor of a parakeet perched on a hickory branch. It must have pained him two decades later when, in his Ornithological Biography, he had to report on the shrinking population of the species:

Our Parakeets are very rapidly diminishing in number; and in some districts, where twenty-five years ago they were plentiful, scarcely any are now to be seen. At that period, they could be procured as far up the tributary waters

8 Ohio Valley History Stanley E. Hedeen

John James Audubon (1785-1851). From the painting by Alonzo Chappel (1861), originally published in Evert A. Duyckinck, National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans: Including Orators, Statesmen, Naval and Military Heroes, Jurists, Authors, etc., etc. (New York: Johnson Fry and Co., 1862). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

of the Ohio as the Great Kenhawa, the Scioto, the heads of the Miami, the mouth of the Manimee at its junction with Lake Erie, on the Illinois River, and sometimes as far north-east as Lake Ontario, and along the eastern districts as far as the boundary line between Virginia and Maryland. At the present day, very few are to be found higher than Cincinnati, nor is it until you reach the mouth of the Ohio that Parakeets are met with in considerable numbers.11

spring 2013 9 The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes

The decline of the parakeet in the Ohio Valley ended with its complete disappearance from the region by the 1880s. Several nineteenth century human activities contributed to the extirpation of the bird. Ohio Valley residents turned forests into agricultural lands that they populated with foreign species. Many households owned guns and shot native animals for sport, to obtain skins and meat, and to protect farm crops and livestock. Construction of hard-surfaced roads, canals, steam- boats, and railroads allowed shipment of Ohio Valley resources to national and overseas markets. All of these activities contributed to the downfall of the parakeet and other wildlife. Nineteenth-century bird collectors in the Ohio Valley captured parakeets, goldfinch, chickadees, mockingbirds, and cardinals to supply domestic and foreign pet sellers. At Cincinnati marketplaces in 1815, Flint saw “wild animals that have been taken in the woods; cages of red-birds and parroquets.” A German prince visiting Indiana in 1832 reported that parakeets “are amusing birds in a cage, and become very tame.” In the same year, zoologist Thomas Nuttall wrote of an acquaintance’s captive parakeet that “seemed perfectly reconciled to its domestic condition.” Freed from its cage, the bird perched on a fireplace screen to enjoy the warmth of the hearth. Nuttall related that when first released the bird “scaled the side of the room, at night, and roosted in a hanging posture by the bill and claws; but finding the labor difficult and fruitless, having no companion near which to nestle, it soon submitted to pass the night on the back of a chair.” An Indiana resident in 1842 maintained a dozen parakeets in an indoor cage made by attaching screening to a hollow sycamore stump. At night the birds left their perches and sus- pended themselves by their beaks and feet on the sides of the enclosure.12

Caged Carolina parakeets were sold at nineteenth-century Cincinnati markets. From the “Canal Street Market, 1860,” by Henry Mosler. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

10 Ohio Valley History Stanley E. Hedeen

The market demand for cage birds sparked the collection of untold thousands of parakeets, with many shipped to cities and some sold nearer their sites of capture. In 1869, for example, Ledyard Bill observed local parakeets being offered to tourists on boats plying the St. Johns River in Florida:

In paroquets, the colored people find an article of trade and commerce. Numbers of them were brought on board at one of the landings, and were speedily snapped up by the pater familias of admiring and persuasive young ladies, who thought them “so splendid,” that a couple of dollars a head was readily paid for them, when, we believe, in the New-York bird-markets they can be had for half that sum. But the poor birds were short-lived. A subsequent investment in a young alligator, of dimensions suitable for a cigar- box, was so much more “charming,” that the brilliant but woe-begone looking paroquets died from exhausted admiration.13

Bird-fanciers in England, Germany, Austria, and other European nations also admired the Carolina parakeet. The American bird cost more than any other parrot species offered for sale in Paris during the 1840s. In his 1877 book on foreign cage birds in England, Charles William Gedney reported the annual importa- tion of “vast numbers” of Carolina parakeets and recalled his recent sighting of two hundred of the birds in one room of a commercial establishment. Gedney ascribed the popularity of the parakeets to their beauty, cold-hardiness, and humanlike affection for each other.T o illustrate the latter characteristic, Gedney described how the male of his caged pair reacted when the female was seized with paralysis in her feet and legs:

The solicitude of the male bird for his afflicted mate was quite distressing; he crouched by her side, repeating his discordant call note at short intervals; then starting up he would restlessly perambulate the cage, returning with food, which he pressed upon his sick wife, vainly endeavouring to get her from the floor to the perch.…Later on, when she regained sufficient strength to use one foot in climbing, he assisted her by stretching his wing over and holding her up with it as she took a fresh grip with her beak. She roosted at night clinging to the wire of the cage, and her faithful mate never left her side for an hour.

The Carolina parakeet’s social attributes, attractiveness, and vigor made the bird one of the most common parrots held captive in European homes during the late nineteenth century. Zoological gardens in Europe as well as America also regularly exhibited the species. Zoos that housed parakeets included those in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington.14

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Bird catchers employed various techniques to procure live parakeets. They raided nests for nestlings or eggs subsequently hatched in incubators, and hand fed captive young until they matured into saleable animals. Bird catchers also collected adult parakeets in nets and bags placed over access holes to roosting cavities. Entire flocks were netted as they fed on fruit-baited patches of ground or crowded around previously captured birds tethered to “stools,” wooden structures staked in the soil. In his 1895 Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, Frank Chapman wrote that the parakeet “has been trapped and bagged in enormous numbers by professional bird-catchers” and the traffic in live birds was a chief cause for the “complete extermination of the Paroquet throughout the greater part of its range.” According to Chapman, “so-called sportsmen” who “wantonly slaughtered” the animal were another major reason for the parakeet’s disappearance. Parakeet shooters included an English visitor who killed the animals at Indiana’s French Lick in 1818 so he could hold “such bonny-looking birds” in his hands. Near Memphis in 1831, French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion enjoyed shooting parakeets and other colorful birds, an activity “which had the virtue of amusing us perfectly.” George A. Boardman reported in 1871 that gunners “would sometimes shoot forty or fifty at a few discharges, for sport.” In his 1881 book, Maynard’s list of the parakeet’s enemies included sportsmen who “slaughter them simply because they present a favorable mark.”15 The parakeets’ repeated attempts to distract a predator from downed flock mates made shooting them easy. According to Maynard, “if one out of a flock be wounded, the survivors attracted by its screams, will return to hover over it and, even if constantly shot at, will not leave as long as their distressed friend calls for assistance; in fact, I have seen every individual in a flock killed one after the other, and the last bird betrayed as much anxiety for the fate of its prostrate friends which were strewed upon the ground, as it did when the first fell.” Wilson described how the parakeet’s social behavior enabled him to secure a large collection of study skins from Big Bone Lick:

Having shot down a number, some of which were only wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions, and again settled in a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I stood. At each succes- sive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me, looking down on their slaughtered companions with such manifest symptoms of sympathy and concern, as entirely disarmed me.

Other ornithologists obtained numerous skins by killing parakeets returning again and again to their wounded flock mates. JohnT ownsend portrayed his collecting activity as “a most inglorious sort of shooting; down right, cold-blooded murder.”16

12 Ohio Valley History Stanley E. Hedeen

While hundreds of parakeet skins ended up in scientific collections, countless thousands were gathered during the nineteenth century to supply American and European millinery companies. By 1875, most women in the United States owned hats surmounted by plumes of egrets and feathers of colorful species such as the parakeet. One hunter amassed up to five hundred parakeet skins at a time before sell- ing them for ten cents each to buyers in the hat industry, the trade responsible for the deci- mation of beaver colonies in the Ohio Valley during the early nineteenth century. William Brewster in 1889 warned members of the American Ornithologists’ Union that remaining populations of the parakeet “are decreasing fast, and unless steps are taken to protect them African American woman in a feathered hat. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER from the ravages of the specimen and plume hunters, who invariably shoot all that come in their way, the total extermination of the species can be a matter of only a few more years.”17 Non-native Americans and their descendents continued the American Indian practice of killing animals for meat as well as skins. Game species included the parakeet, passenger pigeon, elk, and American bison, all of which vanished from the Ohio Valley during the nineteenth century. As early as 1663, an English party reported that they shot geese, ducks, turkeys, and “three dozen of Parrakeetos” for their flesh in North Carolina. French Jesuit Paul du Ru had a supper of parakeets along the lower Mississippi River in 1700, after which he concluded “they are not so good to eat as they are beautiful.” But other eighteenth century writers described the parakeet as a “very good dish,” a “delicious tidbit,” and “excellent good Food, preferable to any pigeon.” Nineteenth century commentators continued to dispute the tastiness of the parakeet. Wilson wrote that although people ate the bird, he found its meat “very indifferent” and “merely passable.” Audubon characterized parakeet flesh as “tolerable food, when they are young, on which account many of them are shot.” Nuttall reported that the parakeet was “commonly eaten in the Southern States, but, from my own experience, I cannot consider it as very palatable.” In contrast, an English visitor described the bird’s flesh as “by no means unpalatable,” and a German immigrant wrote that parakeets shot near the mouth of the Ohio River “made a savory dish.”18 While sport, feathers, and meat prompted many Ohio Valley residents to shoot parakeets, farmers killed the birds because they were crop pests. The agricultural lands that covered much of the Ohio Valley by the mid-nineteenth century

spring 2013 13 The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes

made new food items available to native animals. Parakeets invaded farms to eat cereal grains, hemp kernels, and the flesh and seeds of cultivated fruits. Audubon reported that the parakeet:

is always an unwelcome visitor to the planter, the farmer, or the gardener. The stacks of grain put up in a field are resorted to by flocks of these birds, which frequently cover them so entirely, that they present to the eye the same effect as if a brilliantly coloured carpet had been thrown over them. They cling around the whole stack, pull out the straws, and destroy twice as much of the grain as would suffice to satisfy their hunger. They assail the Pear and Apple-trees, when the fruit is yet very small and far from being ripe, and this merely for the sake of the seeds. As on the stalks of Corn, they alight on the Apple-trees of our orchards, or the Pear-trees in the gardens, in great numbers; and, as if through mere mischief, pluck off the fruits, open them up to the core, and, disappointed at the sight of the seeds, which are yet soft and of a milky consistence, drop the apple or pear, and pluck another, passing from branch to branch until the trees, which were before so promising, are left completely stripped.19

Chroniclers of birdlife repeatedly highlighted the parakeet’s pillaging, contrasting its destructiveness with its feathered splendor. Thomas noted “the parro- quet commits depredations on the wheat in harvest, but it is a bird of uncommon beauty.” Flint observed that the parakeet “poorly compensates by the extreme beauty of its plumage for the injury it does the orchard and garden fruits.” William Kennedy referred to the bird as “gay, clamorous, and pilfering.” James Hall considered the parakeet “a bird of beautiful plumage, but very bad character, whose thievish propensities renders him a great nuisance to orchards and cornfields.” Farmers took up weapons to protect their crops against the parakeet, just as they defended their farm animals against the cougar, gray wolf, and other predators that consequently disappeared from the Ohio Valley. Workers at a Tennessee orchard used sticks and thrown apples to kill invading parakeets, but farmers usually shot them in a manner described by Audubon:

Parakeets are destroyed in great numbers, for whilst busily engaged in pluck- ing off the fruits or tearing the grain from the stacks, the husbandman approaches them with perfect ease, and commits great slaughter among them. All the survivors rise, shriek, fly around for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge…until so few remain alive, that the farmer does not consider it worth his while to spend more of his ammu- nition. I have seen several hundreds destroyed in this manner in the course of a few hours.20

14 Ohio Valley History Stanley E. Hedeen

Carolina parakeet flock perched above a bald eagle in a bottomland forest, Charles Bodmer illustration, “Confluence of the Fox River with the Wabash,” from Maximilian, Prince of Wied, Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834, 3 vols. (Cleveland, Oh.: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), atlas. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

The parakeet population of the Ohio Valley fell because of the activities of bird collectors and hunters, but deforestation and the introduction of non-native organisms also contributed to their decline. Pioneer families in the heavily wooded Ohio Valley usually developed their farms by first clearing and cultivating any flat, deep, fertile bottomland soils on their property. They logged areas too swampy for farming for the durable wood of wetland trees. Flint described the conversion of the region’s bottoms in his 1826 reminiscence, Recollections of the Last Ten Years:

The trees and shrubs are of the most beautiful kind. The brilliant red-bird is seen flitting among the shrubs, or, perched in a tree, seems welcoming, in her mellow notes, the emigrant to his abode. Flocks of parroquets are glittering among the trees, and grey squirrels are skipping from branch to branch. In the midst of these primeval scenes, the patient and laborious father fixes his family.…Pass this place in two years, and you will see extensive fields of corn and wheat.…Pass it in ten years, and the…shrubs and trees will be gone.

Deforestation of Ohio Valley bottomlands and swamps caused the parakeet, ivory- billed woodpecker, and other wet-woods wildlife to lose their breeding and feeding habitats. The parakeet lost additional woodland food sources as farmers cleared upland forests to produce additional acreage. In total, approximately 75 percent of the Ohio Valley’s tree cover was eliminated during the nineteenth century. Ornithologist William Scott blamed deforestation for causing parakeets to for- sake “regions where they were once comparatively common, or even abundant.”21

spring 2013 15 The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes

The introduction of Old World organisms such as hogs, house sparrows, and honeybees proved a final cause of the decline of the parakeet and other animals native to the Ohio Valley. Hogs foraging in woodlands killed snakes, while swal- lows had their nests usurped by house sparrows imported to control American caterpillars. The breeding success and winter survivability of parakeets suffered as European honeybees left their farm apiaries and built hives in tree cavities appro- priated from parakeets. The chicken, another species brought to the Ohio Valley, harbored microorganisms capable of producing deadly disease outbreaks in wild avian populations. Pathogenic microbes transmitted from chickens via mosqui- toes may have killed parakeets. The birds also could have become infected when they came into contact with chicken feces used to fertilize farm fields.22 Along with the parakeet, two other bird species dwindled away in the Ohio Valley during the nineteenth century. The passenger pigeon suc- cumbed to meat hunting while the logging of bottomlands and swamps destroyed the habitat of the ivory-billed woodpecker. The parakeet likewise was shot for meat and displaced from lowland forests. In addition, the bird was harmed by introduced species, captured for the pet trade, gunned down for sport, hunted for feathers, and killed for crop protection. The combina- tion of these factors doomed the bird in the Ohio Valley. As a result, wild parakeets were last seen in the vicinity of Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 1826, in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1858, in Columbus, Ohio, in 1862, and near the mouth of the Ohio River in Kentucky in 1878. The human activities that eliminated the parakeet from the Ohio Valley also reduced the bird’s presence in the remaining portions of its geographic range. The nation’s foremost ornithologists in 1874 called attention to the “rapid dimi- nution in numbers” of parakeets throughout the United States and concluded “there is little doubt but that their total extinction is only a matter of years, perhaps to be consummated within the lifetime of persons now living.” Naturalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made special note of reports of parakeets as the species population continued to decline. Hunters shot birds in Kansas and Florida in 1904, and bird watch- ers sighted single parakeets in Missouri during 1905 and 1912. Specimens for museums may have been collected in Florida until 1914. During the same period, the caged birds in American and European homes and zoos grew old and died without leaving offspring.23 In September 1914, the Cincinnati Post announced that “the only three birds of this species left in the world are at the Cincinnati Zoo.” Following the death of one of the three parakeets in 1916, the Zoological Gardens of London offered four hundred dollars for the surviving pair. Cincinnati Zoo general manager Sol Stephan rejected the solicitation, explaining that the parakeets had become the elders among the birds in the aviary:

16 Ohio Valley History Stanley E. Hedeen

Aviary at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

It is possible that soon there will be a “last parrakeet,” just as there was, so far as can be learned, “a last passenger pigeon.” I can not accurately estimate how long our pair will live, but we will keep them so long as we can and give them every care. They have been with us 32 years and are the “deans” of the Zoo colony, so to speak. Zoos all over the country, I know, are seeking parrakeets. Once the bird was very plentiful, but its curiosity made it an easy victim for hunters, who found a market for the bird in the millinery shops. Years ago we got all the fine specimens of parrakeets we wanted at $2.50 apiece. The parrakeet had a habit fatal to its preservation. After hunters would shoot at a flock of them, the flock would immediately return to the same tree, possibly to see what caused the shots. At the Zoo, their failing was to toss their eggs out of the nests.24

The NewY ork Zoological Society and others joined the London institution in making unsuccessful offers for Cincinnati’s parakeets, a female named Lady Jane and a male named Incas. After Lady Jane passed away in 1917, various zoos renewed their attempts to purchase Incas, but Stephan still refused to sell him. Incas, described as “a listless and mournful figure” following the departure of his mate, perished on February 21, 1918. Stephan believed that Incas’s grief over the loss of Lady Jane contributed to his death. Stephan also stated that he would have Incas mounted and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution, just as he had sent the national museum the carcass of the world’s last passenger pigeon following her death at the zoo in 1914. The Smithsonian, however, does not have Incas on display or in storage. Perhaps the mounted bird remains in the Ohio Valley as one of the two unlabeled parakeets in the collection of the Cincinnati Museum Center.25

spring 2013 17 The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes

Observers reported wild parakeets in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina during the two decades following Incas’s death, but they collected no birds for verifica- tion. The Florida Museum of Natural History houses five Carolina parakeet eggs taken from two tree hollows in Florida in April 1927, but some have questioned the identification of the eggs because of their small size and early month of collection. If future genetic testing determines that the museum correctly labeled the eggs, then some bird other than Incas was the last Carolina parakeet. Ornithologists now generally accept that the species vanished, if not in 1918, then certainly by 1940 when Arthur Cleveland Bent published his eulogy for the extinct bird:

The spread of civilization, the selfish greed of human interests, and the lust to kill have wiped out some of the most spectacular and beautiful features in our formerly abundant bird life. The countless millions of passenger pigeons that formerly darkened the sky in their seasonal migrations are gone forever. And the great flocks of gorgeous parakeets that formerly roamed over nearly all the eastern part of our country will be seen no more. This was the only representative of the parrot family that lived and bred within the United States; it gave a touch of tropical character to our avifauna and a vivid tinge of color to the landscape; its loss is much to be regretted. Never again may be seen the glorious sights witnessed by Wilson, Audubon, and other early writers, as great flocks of these gorgeous birds wheeled through the air, in close formation, their long tails streaming out in straight flight or spreading as they turned, and their brilliant colors, red, yellow, bright green, and soft blue, gleaming in the sunlight.26

Today’s Ohio Valley farmers and orchardists continue to profit from the disappearance of the Carolina parakeet, but that benefit comes at the cost of less charm and beauty in area woodlands. The region lost a valuable esthetic resource when its single species of parrot passed out of sight.

1 Noel F. R. Snyder and Keith Russell, Carolina Parakeet: Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley Conuropsis carolinensis (Philadelphia: The Birds of of the Mississippi…(Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and North America, 2002), 1. Co., 1826), 84; Henry R. Schoolcraft, A View of the Lead Mines of Missouri…(New York: Charles Wiley & Co., 2 Oliver M. Spencer, Indian Captivity: A True Narrative of 1819), 37; Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from the Capture of the Rev. O. M. Spencer by the Indians, in Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains: Performed in the Years the Neighborhood of Cincinnati (New York: Lane & Scott, 1819, 1820…, 3 vols. (London, Eng.: Longman, Hurst, 1852), 32; Edward D. Mansfield, Personal Memories, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 1:23. Social, Political, and Literary with Sketches of Many Noted People, 1803-1843 (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 3 Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology, or, the 1879), 16; Georges-Henri-Victor Collot, A Journey in Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 4 vols. North America: Containing a Survey of the Countries (Edinburgh, Scot.: Constable, 1831), 1:118; David Watered by the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, and Other Jones, A Journal of Two Visits Made to Some Nations of Affluing Rivers…, 2 vols. (Firenze: O. Lange, 1924), Indians on the West Side of the River Ohio, in the Years 1:137-38; Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 1772 and 1773 (Burlington, N.J.: Isaac Collins, 1774),

18 Ohio Valley History Stanley E. Hedeen

63; David Thomas, Travels through the Western Country (Jan. 1892), 53; Snyder and Russell, Carolina Parakeet, in the Summer of 1816…(Auburn, N.Y.: David Rumsey, 13, 17; Butler, “Some Bird Records from Florida,” The 1819), 134-35; Simon Gratz, “Thomas Rodney,” Auk 48 (July 1931), 439. Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 43 (Apr. 1919), 136; “Col. William Fleming’s Journal in Kentucky 7 Noel E. R. Snyder, The Carolina Parakeet: Glimpses of from Nov. 10, 1779, to May 27, 1780,” in Travels in a Vanished Bird (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University the American Colonies, Newton D. Mereness, ed. (New Press, 2004), 88-91; Maynard, Birds, 251; Wilson, York: Macmillan, 1916), 620-21; William Clark to American Ornithology, 1:123-24. Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 10, 1807, in Howard C. Rice Ornithological Biography Jr., “Jefferson’s Gift of Fossils to the Museum of Natural 8 Audubon, , 1:137; Paul-Wilhelm, Travels in North America, 1822- History in Paris,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Duke of Württemberg, 1824 Society 95 (Dec. 1951), 602; Robert E. McDowell, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), Travels Carolina “Bullitt’s Lick: The Related Saltworks and Settlements,” 277; Thomas, , 210; Snyder and Russell, Parakeet Journal of Lieut. J. W. Filson Club History Quarterly 30 (July 1956), 260. , 12; James W. Abert, Abert from Bent’s Fort to St. Louis, in 1845, U.S. Senate th st 4 Schoolcraft, Lead Mines, 37; John James Audubon, doc. 438, vol. 8, 29 Congress, 1 sess. (Washington: Ornithological Biography; or, An Account of the Habits Government Printing Office, 1846), 73; Daniel McKinley, of the Birds of the United States of America…, 5 vols. “Archaeozoology of the Carolina Parakeet,” Central States (Philadelphia: Judah Dobson, 1831-1839), 1:137; Archaeological Journal 24 (Jan. 1977), 23-25; Paul W. Timothy Flint, The History and Geography of the Parmalee, “Remains of Rare and Extinct Birds from Illinois Mississippi Valley…, 2 vols. (1828; Cincinnati: E. H. Flint Indian Sites,” The Auk 75 (Apr. 1958), 174; Rosemary and L. R. Lincoln, 1832), 1:72. Prevec, “Archaeological Evidence of the Carolina Parakeet in Ontario,” Ontario Birds 3 (Apr. 1985), 24-26. 5 Wilson, American Ornithology, 1:120; “Report of the Journey of the Brethren Abraham Steiner and Frederick 9 Hierosme Lalemant, “Relation of What Occurred in C. de Schweinitz to the Cherokees and the Cumberland the Mission of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus in the Settlements (1799),” in Early Travels to the Tennessee Country of New France, from the Summer of the Year Country, 1540-1800…, Samuel C. Williams, ed. 1661 to the Summer of the Year 1662,” in The Jesuit (Johnson City, Tn.: Watauga Press, 1927), 505; Caleb Relations and Allied Documents; Travels and Explorations Atwater, A History of the State of Ohio, Natural and Civil of the Jesuit Missionaries in North America, 1610-1791, (Cincinnati: Glezan & Shepard, 1838), 95; John T. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., 73 vols. (1896-1901; New Irving, Indian Sketches, Taken during an Expedition to York: Pageant Book Co., 1959), 47:147; Daniel McKinley, the Pawnee Tribes, 1833 (1835; Norman: University of “History of the Carolina Parakeet in its Southwestern Oklahoma Press, 1955), 231; Dumont de Montigny, Range,” The Wilson Bulletin 76 (Mar. 1964), 79; McKinley, Memoires Historiques sur la Louisiane…(Paris, Fr.: C. “The Carolina Parakeet in the Upper Missouri and J. B. Bauche, 1753), 87; R. E. C. Stearns, “Rambles Mississippi Valleys,” The Auk 82 (Apr. 1965), 215, 218; in Florida,” American Naturalist 3 (Nov. 1869), 465; “First Journal of 1750-51,” in Christopher Gist’s Journals James W. Abert, Report of Lieut. J. W. Abert, of His with Historical, Geographical and Ethnological Notes and Examination of New Mexico, in the Years 1846-’47, U.S. Biographies of his Contemporaries, William M. Darlington, Senate exec. doc. 23, 30th Congress, 1st sess. (Washington: ed. (Pittsburgh: J. R. Weldin & Co., 1893), 62. Government Printing Office, 1848), 128; Jervis Cutler, A Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana 10 Wilson, American Ornithology, 1:123-25. Territory, and Louisiana…(Boston: Charles Williams, 11 “Audubon’s ‘Journey up the Mississippi,’” Journal of 1812), 49; Flint, Mississippi Valley, 1:71; Schoolcraft, the Illinois State Historical Society 35 (June 1942), 152; Lead Mines, 37; “Narrative of John Heckewelder’s Daniel McKinley, “The Carolina Parakeet in Kentucky,” Journey to the Wabash in 1792,” Pennsylvania Magazine Indiana Audubon Quarterly 57 (Aug. 1979), 190; of History and Biography 12 (July 1888), 167; Charles Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1:138. E. Bendire, Life Histories of North American Birds, from the Parrots to the Grackles, with Special Reference to their 12 Andrew R. L. Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Breeding Habits and Eggs (Washington: Smithsonian Indiana University Press, 1996), 183; Clayton E. Cramer, Institution, 1895), 3; Charles J. Maynard, The Birds Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why of Eastern North America…(Newtonville, Ma.: C. J. Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (Nashville, Tn.: Maynard & Co., 1881), 250. Nelson Current, 2006), 206-16; Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel 6 Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1:137-39; Maynard, Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Birds, 251; Thomas, Travels, 161; Wilson, American University Press, 1996), 112-15; Lowell H. Harrison and Ornithology, 1:121-22; Amos W. Butler, “Notes on the James C. Klotter, A New History of Kentucky (Lexington: Range and Habits of the Carolina Parrakeet,” The Auk 9

spring 2013 19 The Carolina Parakeet Vanishes

The University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 125-33; 1:120-21; Mark V. Barrow Jr., Nature’s Ghosts: Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 241; of Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Flint, Recollections, 40; Maximilian, Prince of Wied, ix, 12; John K. Townsend, Narrative of a Journey across “Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834,” the Rocky Mountains…(Philadelphia: Perkins & Marvin, in Early Western Travels, 1748-1846…, Reuben Gold 1839), 21. Thwaites, ed., 32 vols. (Cleveland, Oh.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1906), 22:169; Thomas Nuttall, A Manual 17 [Mary Thacher], “Slaughter of the Innocents,” Harper’s of the Ornithology of the United States (Cambridge, Ma.: Bazaar, May 22, 1875, p. 338; Harold Harris Bailey, Hilliard & Brown, 1832), 549; Butler, “Notes,” 53. The Birds of Florida; a Popular and Scientific Account… (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1925), 78; Milton 13 Ledyard Bill, A Winter in Florida or, Observations on the B. Trautman, The Ohio Country from 1750 to 1977: A Soil, Climate, and Products of Our Semi-Tropical State… Naturalist’s View (Columbus: Ohio State University, (New York: Wood & Holbrook, 1869), 120-21. 1977), 20; William Brewster, “Nesting Habits of the Parrakeet (Conurus carolinensis),” The Auk 6 (Oct. 14 John Woods, Two Years’ Residence in the Settlement on the 1889), 337. English Prairie, in the Illinois Country, United States… (London, Eng.: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and 18 Stanley Hedeen, “From Billions to None: Destruction Brown, 1822), 198; Johann M. Bechstein, Cage and of the Passenger Pigeon in the Ohio Valley,” Ohio Valley Chamber Birds, Their Natural History, Habits, Food, History 10 (Fall 2010), 33-37; William J. Hamilton and Diseases, Management, and Modes of Capture (London, John O. Whitaker, Mammals of the Eastern United States Eng.: H. G. Bohn, 1856), 135; A. A. Prestwich, “Records (1979; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), of Breeding the Carolina Parakeet (Conuropsis carolinen- 522; Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, Extinction: sis) in Captivity,” Avicultural Magazine 72 (Jan. 1966), The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of 20-22; James Mann, The American Bird-Keeper’s Manual; Species (New York: Random House, 1981), 116; William or, Directions for the Proper Management of American Hilton, “A Relation of a Discovery,” in Narratives of Early and Foreign Singing Birds…(Boston: Little and Brown, Carolina, 1650-1708, Alexander S. Salley, ed. (New York: 1848), 115; Charles William Gedney, Foreign Cage Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 53; Paul du Ru, Journal Birds: Containing Full Directions for Successfully Breeding, of Paul du Ru (February 1 to May 8, 1700), Missionary Rearing, and Managing the Various Beautiful Aviary Birds Priest of Louisiana (Chicago: The Claxton Club, 1934), Imported into this Country, 2 vols. (London, Eng.: “The 18; Commissary von Reck, “Journal from Dover to Bazaar” Office, 1877), 1:63-65; Karl Russ, The Speaking Ebenezar,” in Historical Collections of Georgia Containing Parrots: A Scientific Manual (London, Eng.: L. Upcott the Most Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Gill, 1884), 213; Daniel McKinley, “The Last Days of Anecdotes, etc., Relating to its History and Antiquities…, the Carolina Parakeet: Life in the Zoos,” Avicultural George White, ed. (New York: Pudney & Russell, Magazine 83 (Jan. 1977), 42-49. 1854), 436; Beatty and Mulloy, Byrd’s Natural History, 64; John Brickell, The Natural History of North Carolina 15 robert W. Furnas, “The Carolina Paroquet,” Proceedings with an Account of the Trade, Manners, and Customs of of the Nebraska Ornithologists’ Union 3 (Dec. 1902), the Christian and Indian Inhabitants…(Dublin, Ire.: 107; Butler, “Bird Records,” 439; William Temple J. Carson, 1737), 179; Wilson, American Ornithology, Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and 1:121; Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1:139; Preservation (New York: New York Zoological Society, Nuttall, Ornithology, 550; Charles Augustus Murray, 1913), 16; Richmond Croom Beatty and William J. Travels in North America during the Years 1834, 1835, & Mulloy, eds., William Byrd’s Natural History of Virginia 1836…, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1839), 1:184; G. (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1940), 64; Frank M. Chapman, Eifrig, “An Old Record of the Carolina Paroquet,” The Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America…(New York: Auk 46 (July 1929), 388. D. Appleton & Co., 1895), 222; William Tell Harris, Remarks Made during a Tour through the United States of 19 James Hall, Notes on the Western States: Containing America, in the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819…(London, Descriptive Sketches of their Soil, Climate, Resources, and Eng.: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1821), 131-32; Alexis Scenery (Philadelphia: Harrison Hall, 1838), 61-67; de Tocqueville to Mother, Dec. 25, 1831, in George Frank W. Langdon, “Observations on Cincinnati Birds,” Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History 1 (Oct. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 593-94; Joel 1878), 115; Thomas, Travels, 133; Albert Pourtalès, On Asaph Allen, “On the Mammals and Winter Birds of East the Western Tour with Washington Irving; the Journal and Florida,” Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 2, Letters of Count de Pourtalès (Norman: University of no. 4 (1871), 309; Maynard, Birds, 253. Oklahoma Press, 1968), 31; Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1:136. 16 Maynard, Birds, 251; Wilson, American Ornithology,

20 Ohio Valley History Stanley E. Hedeen

20 Thomas,Travels , 133; Timothy Flint, A Condensed Arts 10 (Feb. 1826), 331; Butler, “Notes,” 52; John M. Geography and History of the Western States, or The Wheaton, “Report on the Birds of Ohio,” Report of the Mississippi Valley, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: E. H. Flint, 1828), Geological Survey of Ohio. Volume IV. Zoology and Botany. 2:73; William Kennedy, Texas: The Rise, Progress, and Part I. Zoology (Columbus: Nevins & Meyers, 1882), Prospects of the Republic of Texas…, 2 vols. (London, Eng.: 405; McKinley, “Kentucky,” 192; Spencer F. Baird, R. Hastings, 1841), 1:131; Hall, Notes, 124; Hamilton Thomas M. Brewer, and Robert Ridgway, A History and Whitaker, Mammals, 404, 410, 482, 489; Samuel of North American Birds: Land Birds, 3 vols. (Boston: N. Rhoads, “Contributions to the Zoology of Tennessee, Little, Brown, & Co., 1874), 2:588; Otto Widmann, No. 2. Birds,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural “A Preliminary Catalog of the Birds of Missouri,” Sciences of Philadelphia 47 (Oct. 1895), 481; Audubon, Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis 17 (Nov. Ornithological Biography, 1:136. 1907), 116; McKinley, The Carolina Parakeet in Florida (Gainesville: Florida Ornithological Society, 1985), 21 Michael Williams, “Clearing the United States Forests: 42; Harry Harris, “Birds of the Kansas City Region,” Pivotal Years, 1810-1860,” Journal of Historical Geography Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis 23 (Feb. 8 (Jan. 1982), 12-28; Robert B. Gordon, “The Natural 1919), 270; Christopher Cokinos, Hope Is the Thing with Vegetation of Ohio in Pioneer Days,” Bulletin of the Ohio Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds (New Biological Survey New Series 3, no. 2 (1969), 22, 70-73; York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000), 39. Flint, Recollections, 52-53; Amos W. Butler, “Observations on Faunal Changes,” Bulletin of the Brookville Society 24 Cincinnati Post, Sept. 2, 1914; Cincinnati Times-Star, of Natural History 1 (1885), 11; Stuart L. Pimm and Nov. 29, 1916. Robert A. Askins, “Forest Losses Predict Bird Extinctions in Eastern North America,” Proceedings of the National 25 Cincinnati Times-Star, Feb. 22, 1918; R. W. Shufeldt, Academy of Sciences vol. 92, no. 20, Sept. 26, 1995, p. “Anatomical and Other Notes on the Passenger Pigeon 9344; William E. D. Scott, “Supplementary Notes from (Ectopistes migratorius) Lately Living in the Cincinnati the Gulf Coast of Florida, with a Description of a New Zoological Gardens,” The Auk32 (Jan. 1915), 30; Species of Marsh Wren,” The Auk 5 (Apr. 1888), 185. George Laycock, “The Last Parakeet,” Audubon 71 (Mar. 1969), 25. 22 Laurence M. Klauber, Rattlesnakes: Their Habits, Life Histories, and Influence on Mankind, 2 vols. (1956; 26 Snyder and Russell, Carolina Parakeet, 4-7; Jeremy Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 2:1070- J. Kirchman, Erin E. Schirtzinger, and Timothy F. 72; Frank W. Langdon, “Ornithological Field Notes, with Wright, “Phylogenetic Relationships of the Extinct Five Additions to the Cincinnati Avian Fauna,” Journal Carolina Parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis) Inferred of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History 3 (July 1880), from DNA Sequence Data,” The Auk 129 (Apr. 2012), 124; Daniel L. McKinley, “The White Man’s Fly on the 203; Donald J. Nicholson, “Escaped Paroquets Found Frontier,” Missouri Historical Review 58 (July 1964), 448; Nesting in Florida,” The Auk 65 (Jan. 1948), 139; Snyder and Russell, Carolina Parakeet, 22-24. Arthur Cleveland Bent, Life Histories of North American Cuckoos, Goatsuckers, Hummingbirds, and Their Allies… 23 Samuel P. Hildreth, “Facts Relating to Certain Parts (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, United States of the State of Ohio,” American Journal of Science and National Museum, 1940), 1.

spring 2013 21 Acting to Shape Their Own Lives African Americans in Civilian Conservation Corps Junior Company 1520-C, Southern Ohio, 1933-1935

William W. Giffin

om Sharp, a young black resident of Cleveland, was interviewed during the winter of 1936-1937 about his participation in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the emergency relief program formed early in President TFranklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Sharp’s mother, a widow with two children, made a living from her boarding house and his father had worked as a carpenter. Pursuing his ambitions, Sharp had enrolled in a “Negro college” where he majored in sociology and edited the college magazine. By 1934 the twenty-two-year old had worked his way through three years of college, but the family’s fortunes worsened during the Great Depression, and when financial circumstances prevented Sharp from entering his fourth year, he enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps. At the time of the interview Sharp’s mother had lost the boarding house and worked as a housekeeper, his younger brother lived with other members of the Sharps’ extended family, and Sharp was staying with the family of a friend.1

African American CCC camp. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

22 Ohio Valley History William W. Giffin

Sharp worked and lived two years at an unidentified “for Negroes only” CCC camp in Ohio. According to a report of the interview published in 1938, he took many CCC educational courses and participated actively in organized camp life:

He was editor of the camp newspaper, organized and was a member of a musical club and social club for the enrollees.…[A]s the camp was quite Civilian Conservation Corps logo. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY near a small town and many of the enrollees spent a good deal of time there, he organized a choral club and a discussion group in connection with the church [in town] which he and number of other enrollees attended.…He had also enjoyed being active in church affairs in the town, and mentioned a girl friend whom he had met there.

Sharp eventually rose through the camp ranks to “the position of assistant educational adviser with a rating as an assistant leader.” A close reading of the report reveals the nature of African American life in his CCC camp and the agency of recruits during their leisure hours. Like Sharp, many black recruits initiated organized activities at the camps and made their own decisions about how to use their free time. Enrollees also visited nearby towns in their spare time, estab- lishing connections between themselves and African American residents. Sharp and his peers attended a local black church, but the nearby town held additional attractions and “most of the boys went there in their hours off duty.” Like Sharp, many black recruits visited the town for female companionship or participated in group activities with town residents that coalesced around common religious or musical interests.2 Historians of the New Deal and the CCC have largely ignored African American life and agency in the camps. John A. Salmon offered short national overviews of African Americans and the CCC in 1965 and 1967. In 1976, Calvin W. Gower examined the national effort to persuade federal authorities to include African Americans in CCC leadership positions. Harvard Sitkoff’s classic 1978 study, A New Deal for Blacks, discusses the CCC in the context of the rising significance of civil rights issues in the 1930s, and Olen Cole Jr. detailed the management of camp life by white supervisors in his 1999 study of African Americans and the CCC in California. In 2001, Thomas W. Patton explored the reaction of white authorities to a brief but notable protest by black corpsmen at a CCC camp in New York State, while Joseph M. Speakman’s 2006 study of African Americans and the CCC in Pennsylvania focuses on New Deal administrative issues, the selection of recruits, racial discrimination, camp discipline, and work projects. These sources share a common perspective rooted in the politics of the Depression decade. To

spring 2013 23 Acting to Shape Their Own Lives

varying degrees, they examine the CCC through the prism of New Deal policies, federal bureaucracies, and CCC programs, assessing the agency’s impact on African Americans. Harvard Sitkoff, for example, concludes that African Americans experienced a “Raw Deal” during President Roosevelt’s first term; not until his second term did African Americans enjoy a “New Deal.” In this literature, the federal government and public figures initiated action to which black CCC corpsmen became subject.3 Histories of black people’s experiences with other 1930s federal emergency relief programs reflect a similar Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER perspective, focusing on the role of government and how New Deal programs impacted African Americans posi- tively or negatively. As a result, historians have usually viewed African American participants in the CCC and in other New Deal programs as subjects of racial discrimination and/or recipients of public assistance. Though useful and enlight- ening, this approach ignores the agency of black corpsmen, who like the African Americans in CCC Junior Company 1520-C shaped the life of their camps. Black participants in the CCC were more than corpsmen under the supervision of a federal bureaucracy. Exemplified by individuals like Sharp, these young men made decisions and acted to shape their personal lives, particularly when they associated together in pursuit of their social and cultural interests. Black corpsmen also made new African American acquaintances in and out of camp, and together they initiated cultural and social activities that enriched the camp experience. 4 Recent scholars of the Great Migration, the massive exodus of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began during World War I and continued through the Depression, have highlighted the agency of black migrants and offer a roadmap for understanding black life in the CCC camps. This scholarship rebuts earlier studies that explained the Great Migration as the product of powerful economic phenomena that swept passive African American migrants out of the South. Instead, historians now recognize that migrants made conscious decisions and plans about when to leave the South and where to move. Likewise, Great Migration historians argue that southern black migrants developed and deployed friendship and kinship networks to facilitate their journeys to northern cities. They also cultivated new friendships after they settled in the North. Kinship and friendship networks eased the rural migrants’ adjustment to urban living in the North by helping them reproduce a semblance of southern black social and cultural life. Notably, they ensured that southern black religious and musical traditions remained vibrant in the North, and helped black migrants cope with the effect of economic deprivation. On occasion, blacks also deployed friendship and kinship networks to protest racial discrimination. Strikingly, life

24 Ohio Valley History William W. Giffin in African American CCC camps shared may of the same features. Young black corpsmen were also inter- or intrastate migrants. Like Sharp and his fellow corpsmen from Cleveland, most black CCC recruits in Ohio had migrated from the South, as had their families. And all of the black corpsmen of Junior Company 1520-C had migrated from northern Ohio cities to a rural campsite near the Ohio River.5 The corpsmen of Junior Company 1520-C faced circumstances common among black migrants from the South. They were separated from most kinfolk, friends, and acquaintances, as well as from the familiar cultural and social life of their previous residence. Feeling alone, isolated, even alienated in an unfamiliar place, migrants longed for the familiar things of their past life. They sought companionship when possible with kinfolk and new friends who shared similar social and cultural values, relied on them in hard times, and joined them in activities such as religion, music, and food preparation that perpetuated familiar cultural traditions. Migrants supported each other’s attempts to adjust to different and new life circumstances. In 1938, sociologist Helen Walker recognized that black migrants from the South faced cultural adjustment issues comparable to those confronted by European immigrants—with one exception. As Walker observed, black migrants, unlike white immigrants, encountered issues “connected with their race.” Black corpsmen established similar networks to negotiate the tricky color lines of southern Ohio, a region of intense racial consciousness.6 African American CCC Junior Company 1520-C produced a variety of primary sources that provide insight into corpsmen’s efforts to shape their lives, particularly the Shawnee Heat Wave, the camp newspaper issued by the company. The paper offers extraordinary insight into the social and cultural life of rank-and-file black corpsmen at Camp Shawnee #2. Newspapers in white and black camps were often house organs that reflected the perspective of the CCC bureaucracy to varying degrees. TheShawnee Heat Wave proved an exception. Corpsmen staffed the newspaper following the CCC’s usual practice, and as a result the staff of the Shawnee Heat Wave’s was entirely African American. More unusual, the supervisor of the newspaper was also African American. The black staff of theShawnee Heat Wave largely reported news from the perspective of the African American corpsmen, highlighting the identities of the otherwise anonymous young people who worked in the camp. The staff created rare documentation of the lives of black men who received relief and lived in the rural North. The Shawnee Heat Wave recorded numerous instances of black corpsmen exercising agency in their religious, musical, athletic, culinary, and job-seeking activities. It reveals the existence of class consciousness and aspirations for upward mobility among the African American corpsmen. Equally notable, the camp newspaper often contained prominent notices about African American women and families.7

spring 2013 25 Acting to Shape Their Own Lives

Shawnee Camp #2, home of CCC Junior Company 1520-C. COURTESY OF THE PORTSMOUTH PUBLIC LIBRARY, PORTSMOUTH, OHIO

The Shawnee Heat Wave also frequently reported the social and cultural activities of various friendship networks developed by the men of CCC Junior Company 1520-C. These informal associations helped forge a camp-wide community identity that reflected shared African American roots drawn from both the rural South and the urban North. The Shawnee Heat Wave illustrates how the black corpsmen at Camp Shawnee #2 formed links to black communities in several cities and towns, building a network that extended across southwestern Ohio from Lawrence to Hamilton County. The camp paper carried news of the joint activities of friendships that spanned outward from the camp to local towns and cities. These informal associations offered individual black men companionship and support during their adjustment to life in a segregated CCC camp in a part of Ohio in which de facto racial separation prevailed. Movie theaters in the vicinity of Camp Shawnee #2, for example, did not admit “colored people.”8 Junior Company 1520-C was formed shortly after the New Deal’s CCC initiative became law on March 31, 1933, taking occupation of Camp Shawnee #2 on June 18, 1933. The camp lay in the hill country of southern Ohio’s Scioto County, on a site in the midst of the Shawnee Forest, twelve miles northwest of the nearest city. Usually located in rural areas, CCC work projects were designed to protect, conserve, and develop the country’s natural lands while providing temporary employment for young men from urban families on relief during the Great Depression. In return for their work, CCC enrollees received monthly wages, food, lodging, educational and vocational training, and health, religious,

Shawnee Camp #2, home of CCC Junior Company 1520-C. COURTESY OF THE PORTSMOUTH PUBLIC LIBRARY, PORTSMOUTH, OHIO

26 Ohio Valley History William W. Giffin and recreational opportunities. Company 1520-C and most other CCC units carried the designation “Junior” because their corpsmen were between the ages of seventeen and twenty three. World War I veterans joined units labeled “Veteran.” The “C” in Junior Company 1520-C identified its racial composition. With few exceptions, CCC companies were either all white or all black. When a company included black recruits, officials color coded its designation number “C” for colored or “M” for racially mixed. Whites served as camp commanders and as work project supervisors for all CCC units regardless of their racial composition.9 The young black men in Camp Shawnee #2 wanted to maintain contacts with family and friends in distant northern Ohio cities, and kinfolk and friends at home surely felt their absence. The camp newspaper sometimes reported week- end and holiday visits to and from the corpsmen’s home cities, including a notice that “J. D.” “went to Cleveland for a visit,” and that Robert Collins’s “parents and girl friend from Lima, Ohio, visited and dined with him [here] Sunday.” Economic and geographic circumstances made such visits unusual, however. Corpsmen welcomed mail from home, but it provided no substitute for the presence of kin and old friends. Feeling isolated in their wilderness campsite in the Shawnee Forest and separated from the family and friendship networks of their home cities, the young CCC corpsmen developed alternative associations in Camp Shawnee #2 that ultimately extended to small neighboring Ohio cities, especially Portsmouth. 10 African American networking within Camp Shawnee #2 led to the development of a variety of camp groups. Young men with common interests formed friendships and associations around the camp’s educational, religious, and recreational activities. Corpsmen with an interest in journalism staffed the camp newspaper. Athletes joined together on the camp’s sports teams according to their talents, including track, baseball, boxing, gymnastics, basketball, and volleyball. Spiritual men assembled in the camp’s Bible class. James H. Rowland, the first African American appointed camp education advisor in the CCC’s Fifth Corps area, acted as a catalyst for the networking at Camp Shawnee #2. The Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, native and Cheney State Teachers College alumnus performed multiple camp duties. He organized educational courses, advised the newspaper staff, and supervised religious, social, and athletic programs. In 1935, in a notable example of his ability to bring together groups of men, Rowland took corpsmen from the camp’s athletic program and the newspaper to Columbus to see an Ohio State University and University of Notre Dame dual track meet. The CCC recruits witnessed OSU track athlete Jesse Owens set new records in several sprint and broad jump events. The camp newspaper report of the trip, headlined “Shawnee II Sees Jesse Win,” helped to build a sense of community among the black corpsmen of Junior Company 1520-C. They identified with college track star Owens, a fellow African American of similar age from Cleveland, like so many of them.11

spring 2013 27 Acting to Shape Their Own Lives

Rowland also facilitated the development of networks that linked African Americans in the CCC camp and Portsmouth, the closest city with a long established black community. Town and camp relationships broadened the social and cultural life of the corpsmen. Young men from Camp Shawnee #2 visited Portsmouth during their free time on weekends and after work on weekdays. Time spent in Portsmouth’s urban setting made the transition from life in their home cities to their rural camp less difficult. African Americans first settled in Portsmouth in the early nineteenth century. By the antebellum era, they occupied a small but identifiable residential neighborhood, foreshadowing the black community’s organizational and institutional growth. In the 1930s Portsmouth was home to three black churches—African Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal, and Baptist—and an active National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch. The 1930 census reported that 1,891 African Americans lived in Portsmouth, or 4.4 percent of the city’s 42,560 residents.12 Rowland involved himself and his corpsmen in the social and cultural life of black Portsmouth, bringing together black corpsmen and local African Americans with similar interests in religion, education, entertainment, and sports. For instance, he organized games between black athletes from the CCC camp and the local area. His basketball team competed in the 1934 Scioto County African American basketball league, its only loss coming in the championship game. Camp Shawnee #2 suffered no losses in the 1934 CCC “Southern District” basketball league that included eight other CCC camps, only one of which was black. Fielding successful teams in several sports enabled Rowland to boost camp morale and unity.13 Rowland worked to establish a good relationship between Portsmouth’s black middle class and young African American corpsmen. He became acquainted with the clergymen of the Portsmouth’s leading black churches, including Reverend William M. Mitchell of the A. M. E. Allen Chapel. Black ministers visited the camp as Rowland’s guests or participated in religious programs, and corpsmen sometimes attended or participated in events held at black churches in Portsmouth. In 1935, the camp newspaper reported that “Some of the talented enrollees of our group were given the privilege of presenting a program at Finley Street, M. E. Zion Church, last Monday. A very creditable crowd was present, that in itself shows the [positive] attitude of the [black] people of Portsmouth towards our efforts.” The report revealed a consciousness of class and gender, emphasizing the middle class values of the corpsmen’s program, especially in the choice of music. “Quite a few members of the fairer sex were there,” the newspaper reported, “as well as many of the Portsmouth [black] ‘Elite.’” Rowland introduced the program and some corpsmen gave talks, including Richard Haley who discussed the “Benefits I Have Obtained While in Camp.” The corpsmen’s musical program included songs by the camp singers and the camp quartet, vocalist Roger Reed sang “Song of the Isles,” and pianist Paul Williams played Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp

28 Ohio Valley History William W. Giffin

Minor, musical selections acceptable to the middle class sensibilities of the church audience. The report concluded: “Most of the audience received a pleasant sur- prise at the intelligence and ability which is rampant in this neck of the woods.”14 On another occasion, Rowland took young men from the camp to Portsmouth to hear Kansas native and Western University graduate Eva A. Jessye lead her choir in a performance at the Allen Chapel of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Jessye’s choir also gave an on-air concert at the local radio station and visited Camp Shawnee #2 as Rowland’s guest. The camp news described Jessye as a “recognized Negro artist” with a reputation for choir direction, poetry, and music composition. Such reports contributed to the efforts of the camp newspaper staff to build networks between corpsmen and black communities near the camp. An editorial explained that the camp newspaper’s most important task was to help “establish a relationship between the camp and the community.” In a direct appeal to middle-class blacks in Portsmouth, the editors reminded “friends that the boys in the camp are not just boys of the lowest social strata, but are young men who have come from some of the best homes and are really intelligent.”15 The black church had great significance in the lives of the young black men at Camp Shawnee #2, as it had historically for many African American families in and out of the South. Over the generations, the black church served as a spiritual refuge, an incubator for African American music, a political forum, and a social and cultural meeting place. It thus offered the most important institutional locus for networks of family and friends. Young black men lost the sacred and secular support of their black churches when they left their home cities for Camp Shawnee #2, but they regained it when they made new spiritual friends and new connections within local black churches. Corpsmen of Junior Company

Allen Chapel, A.M.E. Church, Portsmouth, Ohio. COURTESY OF THE PORTSMOUTH PUBLIC LIBRARY, PORTSMOUTH, OHIO

spring 2013 29 Acting to Shape Their Own Lives

1520-C attended nearby churches regularly, according to a 1935 CCC report that stated: “95% of the company attend religious services.” Local black clergymen conducted weekly religious services in the camp on Thursday evenings, and corpsmen attended Sunday morning services at the African American churches in Portsmouth. Some also participated in Sunday and weekday evening special programs sponsored by Portsmouth’s black churches, as when the camp’s glee club took part in a Sunday evening Mother’s Day program at Allen Chapel.16 Young black corpsmen at Camp Shawnee #2 also engaged in networking activity independently of Rowland. They made acquaintances in and out of the camp on their own initiative or as a result of efforts by Portsmouth’s black community. A common interest in music sometimes served as the basis for such friendships. A number of the corpsmen gifted in vocal and instrumen- tal music formed groups and performed in and out of camp. Occasional ad hoc performances lifted spirits and united corpsmen who attended them. The mess hall, for example, often resounded with music during meals, according to the camp newspaper, which reported that “we have been highly entertained by the delightful lunch [time] and dancing music furnished by…the Shawnee Syncopators.” Some members of this band occasionally played in an African American dance orchestra from Portsmouth. Singers from Camp Shawnee #2 influenced the cultural life of white as well as black Portsmouth. Most notably, members of a camp quartet consisting of Freddie Malone, Andrew Jackson, Leslie Bowman, and Roger Reed successfully auditioned for airtime at Portsmouth radio station WPAY. After their first on-air performance the camp newspaper reported, “Shawnee’s ‘Kool Breezes’ Quartet is making quite a show at broadcasting.” The report continued: “They made unique renditions of the old favorites ‘Mood Indigo,’ ‘Dinah,’ ‘Sweet Sue,’ ‘Coney Island,’ and ‘Underneath A Harlem Moon.’ Roger Reed, Guitarist, crooned ‘Rosetta’…and [this] was one of the highlights of the program.” WPAY subsequently gave the quartet a weekly fifteen-minute spot onT uesday evenings.17 African American music played a prominent role in Camp Shawnee #2’s cultural life. The corpsmen valued the music, part of a common cultural heritage shared by black people across the country. African American music in the 1930s was deeply rooted in the black culture of the antebellum South’s plantation society. It provided a bond between corpsmen whose families had recently migrated from the South and those whose kin had done so much earlier. The prominence of music in camp life also owed something to its potential as a career for talented corpsmen. Music represented a rare ave- nue of upward mobility for blacks in the United States, some of whom had attained national prominence, if not fortune, in the music field. In 1935, composer George Gershwin selected Eva Jessye, the choir director who visited Camp Shawnee #2, as musical director for performances of his Broadway

30 Ohio Valley History William W. Giffin

WPAY, Portsmouth, Ohio, radio station pamphlet, c. 1946. COURTESY OF THE PORTSMOUTH PUBLIC LIBRARY, PORTSMOUTH, OHIO

musical Porgy and Bess. And African American musicians and singers, including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and the Mills Brothers, performed for mixed-race public audiences across the nation by the mid-1930s. The Mills Brothers, a popular vocal quartet with a distinctive sound combining jazz and barbershop harmony, offered a role model for the young men who formed the camp’s Kool Breezes Quartet. The Mills Brothers sang on national radio broadcasts, made nationally distributed records, and appeared in a major motion picture with Bing Crosby in the early 1930s. Moreover, the Mills

spring 2013 31 Acting to Shape Their Own Lives

The Mills Brother Quartet, early 1930s. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Brothers were from Ohio and around the same age as the camp quartet members, and had their first show business break when they sang on radio station WLW in Cincinnati.18 Show business ambitions surely motivated the corpsmen in the Kool Breezes Quartet. Their interest in upward mobility reflected the middle-class values and aspirations of Camp Shawnee #2 corpsmen. In the 1930s, entertainers’ performances met the standards of middle class respectability and they avoided the bawdy lyrics of African American blues music. Consequently, the Mills Brothers and the Kool Breezes Quartet crooned songs like “Mood Indigo,” with lyrics inoffensive to middle-class ears, but in an African American musical style. The young black men in the local quartet used their association of musical friends to advance careers in popular entertainment. And they did so without the assistance of the CCC, which did not offer show business training. Oscar Hoskins, another talented young black man at Camp Shawnee #2, decided to leave the CCC to pursue a career in the music industry. As the camp newspaper reported in April 1935, “our ‘Crooner’ left us last week to return to the Cleveland night clubs.”19 Portsmouth’s African American women also exercised agency by participating in Camp Shawnee #2’s personal networks, forming friendships and socializ- ing with the black corpsmen. Such relationships probably represented the most common contacts between the camp and Portsmouth’s black community. The young men and women usually met in town, most often in the young woman’s family home, according to the camp newspaper. Young men regularly visited

32 Ohio Valley History William W. Giffin on the porch and stayed for a meal, allowing them to experience a taste of family life while far from home. African American churches in the city also served as meeting places for couples, as did dances where Portsmouth’s black dance band performed. The city’s African American community viewed these locations as respectable meeting places for young people in the mid-1930s. The gossip column of the camp newspaper mentioned many of the personal relationships between corpsmen and Portsmouth women, reporting that some persons enjoyed

Pleasant Green Baptist Church, Portsmouth, Ohio. COURTESY OF THE PORTSMOUTH PUBLIC LIBRARY, PORTSMOUTH, OHIO

spring 2013 33 Acting to Shape Their Own Lives

blissful new romances while others suffered the blues as relationships ended. The writers of the column adopted a tongue-in-cheek style, noting, for instance, that “Cupid has shot another one of the boys.” Yet these friendships engendered sin- cere feelings between the young women and the corpsmen who lived far from their families and friends.20 Groups of young women from Portsmouth also occasionally visited the camp, usually on Sunday. Locals expected such social calls to meet middle-class standards of respectability. Rowland’s educational program included a class entitled, “Conduct in the Presence of Ladies.” The camp’s recreation building served as a reception area for female visitors and they could visit throughout the camp “when properly escorted.” The camp welcomed female visitors between six a.m. and six p.m., though the policy was lifted for the general public on special occa- sions. Some female professionals, including teachers, also visited the camp at Rowland’s invitation.21 Networking between Camp Shawnee #2 corpsmen and Portsmouth’s black community produced a variety of meaningful and caring friendships. For example, when Patricia May Lucas, a member of Portsmouth’s black Baptist community died, corpsmen attended her funeral service and the camp newspaper published her obituary on its front page. An apparent contemporary of the corpsmen, she was survived by parents, aunts, uncles, and distant relatives. Reverend Mitchell, the sometimes religious advisor at the camp, conducted the service at Pleasant Green Baptist Church in Portsmouth. “The church was crowded” according to the obituary in the camp newspaper, for “Patricia was beloved by a host of town and camp friends.” Sympathy and grief at her death linked her friends in the camp and city. Attendance at other events reflected the geographic breadth of the black camp’s social network and the interest of large numbers of African Americans outside the camp in the young men of Junior Company 1520-C. Over one thousand black people, including corpsmen, attended a celebration of Camp Shawnee #2’s first anniversary in 1934, while guests at the camp’s second anniversary celebration came from the Ohio cities of Portsmouth, Chillicothe, and Ironton, and from Huntington, West Virginia.22 In sum, young black corpsmen at Camp Shawnee #2 employed coping strat- egies previously employed by southern black migrants who made new lives for themselves in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other northern cities. The networking both of urban migrants and CCC enrollees contributed to the development of extended black communities organized around shared religious, musical, and culinary interests rooted in the South’s African American culture. Thus, the camp newspaper could boast that Junior Company 1520-C had “the best mess a la southern barbeque style.” More notably, the black networks developed at Camp Shawnee #2 also gave rise to civil disobedience, when in 1933 corpsmen organized a brief but remarkable protest against camp conditions. The protesting

34 Ohio Valley History William W. Giffin enrollees constituted a friendship network, living together for some time and sharing common experiences. All but two of the protesters came from Cleveland, all had traveled to Kentucky for CCC training, and all had served in the same racially mixed company. Subsequently, they had all been stationed at the same campsite in Ohio where they labored in the same work squadron. Finally they had all been transferred to Junior Company 1520-C at Camp Shawnee #2, remaining in the same work squad. By the time of the protest, members of the group knew each other well.23 The corpsmen also drew on a history of direct action protests growing out of African American kinship and friendship networks. Historian Kimberly Phillips describes black friends and neighbors who organized a boycott of retail stores in their Cleveland neighborhood when the shop owners refused to employ African Americans. And scholars August Meier and Elliott Rudwick explore the long history of boycotts, marches, and demonstrations by black activists in the one hundred twenty five years prior to the civil rights protests of the 1960s. Meier and Rudwick describe these protests as episodic and spontaneous events indige- nous to the black communities in which they occurred, initiated by local African Americans rather than outsiders. The protest at Camp Shawnee #2 fit within this tradition of black direct action.24 The young black corpsmen’s protests began after their transfer from a racially integrated company to Camp Shawnee #2, less than ninety-nine days after Congress approved the CCC. Following their enrollment, the young men had traveled from Cleveland to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where they underwent physical conditioning and processing and received their company assignments. According to one Ohio-based officer, in the CCC’s early days, black and white recruits from northern states received assignments to the same companies. Accordingly, Cleveland-area recruits were assigned to Junior Company 502 without regard to race. On May 20, 1933, the company occupied the first CCC site in the state, Camp Stony Creek, located in southern Ohio several miles from Chillicothe. After May 20, however, all new companies were designated as either white or “colored,” and in June a recently formed African American unit, Junior Company 1520-C, occupied Camp Shawnee #2. An officer from Ohio later explained that the decision to create separate black CCC units reflected the “army experience that large units of colored and white men do not function without some friction.”25 Shawnee Camp #2 became the locus of protest on July 8 when CCC authorities transferred all thirty black youths from the racially mixed company at Camp Stony Creek to the African American company at Camp Shawnee #2. Some of the young men “started grumbling about the transfer as soon as they arrived at Camp Shawnee #2,” according to its white company commander. Fifteen of the transferees complained of longer hours of work and

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poor food at the segregated camp, while others complained of stricter discipline. In response, the transferees employed direct action to protest conditions, refusing to work or obey rules, according to CCC camp inspection reports. The protesters belonged to a fifteen-man squadron led by Howard J. Gardner of Cleveland, the most outspoken of the protesters and identified by camp authorities as the protest leader. Officials complained that these men “continued to shirk their work duties and complained of food, etc.” during the week following their transfer.26 Near the end of the week, the camp’s commander, Lieutenant E. J. Skalandzunos, demoted Gardner as squad leader and appointed a new supervisor to oversee the protesting squad’s work. The protests at the camp culminated on July 15 when Gardner responded to the new orders. According to an NAACP investigation report:

on the above date at inspection time Gardner stepped from the [inspection] line and openly demanded an immediate discharge. It seemed that Lieutenant Skalandzunos ordered him back to the line and demanded silence, to which order Gardner refused to obey and insisted upon demanding his ‘rights.’ Lieutenant Skalandzunos ordered Gardner placed under arrest to be sent to Portsmouth.…It seems that when Gardner was ordered to be taken to town some of the men openly stated that if he had to go, they would go also, to which Lieutenant Skalandzunos ordered that they all be taken.

The fifteen arrested men were confined in the Scioto County Jail in Portsmouth for eight days without charges or trials. After receiving dishonorable discharges from the CCC, fourteen were released from jail and sent home. Gardner pleaded guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct and received a sentence of twenty-one days and a dishonorable discharge.27 In protest, Clifford Sharp, one of the corpsmen jailed in Portsmouth, reported the incident to the Cincinnati branch of the NAACP, sparking an investigation of Camp Shawnee #2. Cincinnati branch officer Theodore M. Berry’s detailed report to the organization’s national office concluded that some of the men involved in the July 15 confrontation, particularly Gardner, had acted insubordi- nately, but he objected to their subsequent treatment. Each of the fifteen received an official CCC notice citing “‘continued disobedience of orders and inciting riot’” as the reason for the dishonorable discharge. But as Berry reported, “We found no evidence or information suggesting that there was threatened violence or disorder requiring discipline by imprisonment.” He concluded that Lieutenant Skalandzunos’s decision to imprison the men to enforce discipline was unneces- sary and improper under the circumstances. Berry could not determine whether Skalandzunos used this method because of the protesters’ race, but he believed the officer would have jailed whites under similar circumstances.28

36 Ohio Valley History William W. Giffin

Theodore M. Berry (1905-2000). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

The Camp Shawnee #2 protesters, believing they had suffered racial discrimination, acted to protest what they perceived as unfair treatment by refusing to work. The scholarly literature about African Americans in the CCC reveals that black corpsmen rarely employed such tactics. However, a similar protest occurred at Camp Preston in New York State in July 1933, where Company 235- C, an all-black CCC unit, was stationed. African American corpsmen refused to work after the arrival a small number of white recruits, whom they feared would replace four black company clerks. The protest deepened when the camp com- mandant announced that the white corpsmen would actually replace two black clerks. The incident resulted in the arrest of six protest leaders, who were charged with disorderly conduct, taken before a justice of the peace, and sentenced to five days in the county jail. The camp commander gave the thirty-five remaining

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black strikers the option of ending the work stoppage or leaving the CCC. All but one of the protesters opted to return to their homes in Harlem. The protests in the Ohio and New York camps shared a number of similarities. In both instances, young black men demonstrated agency and objected to camp conditions by refusing to work. Both protests relied on existing networks in which a group of friends or acquaintances aided each other or acted to promote their common interests. And in both cases, work had forged the association, with the network at Camp Preston composed of the company’s black clerks and some of their acquaintances and supporters from Harlem.29 Previous histories of black CCC units have depicted enrollees as poor black men who received benefits from a segregated federal work program. However, historians need to see black corpsmen like those at Camp Shawnee #2 as more multifaceted—as sons, brothers, friends, migrants, churchgo- ers, athletes, newspaper reporters, musicians, radio performers, and protesters. Roger Reed, for example, was both musician and corpsman in Junior Company 1520-C. Reed and most of his peers at Camp Shawnee #2 did not opt to protest camp conditions. Instead, they chose non-confrontational ways to better their lives in their rustic environment and relied on each other. Reed’s musical talents—his skillful guitar playing and “crooning” voice— enabled him to make acquaintances and friendships with black musicians at the camp, including Paul Williams, a bespectacled pianist who performed popular numbers like “Rag Doll” and European pieces that betrayed classical training. Reed’s circle of musical friends also included the black corpsmen in the company singers whom he accompanied on guitar. As the most entertain- ing singer in the company, Reed became the featured soloist when he and his friends performed in and out of the camp. Reed and his musical peers made acquaintances in Portsmouth when they sang and played in black churches, the traditional African American social and cultural forum. Ambitious as well as talented, Reed and his companions worked to improve their economic circumstances without the aid of the CCC, forming the Kool Breezes Quartet and winning their own program on Portsmouth radio station WPAY. Their repertoire of songs included “Dinah,” “Sweet Sue,” and “Rosetta,” the last crooned by Reed. Music kept them and other corpsmen in touch with older African American traditions and widened their circle of social contacts.30 In short, the friendship networks young black corpsmen like Reed developed enriched the social and cultural life of Camp Shawnee #2. Despite occupying the lower economic strata in Depression-era America, African Americans in the CCC actively worked to shape and improve their lives.

38 Ohio Valley History William W. Giffin

1 Helen M. Walker, The CCC Through the Eyes of 272 7 Shawnee Heat Wave (CCC Camp Shawnee #2), vol. 2, Boys: A Summary of a Group Study of the Reactions of nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, Civilian Conservation Corps Camp 272 Cleveland Boys to Their Experience in the Civilian Newspapers, Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, Conservation Corps (Cleveland: Western Reserve Il. (hereafter CRL); Alfred E. Cornebise, The CCC University Press, 1938), 7, 45-47. Chronicles: Camp Newspapers of the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004). 2 ibid., 45, 47. 8 Camp Report, May 21, 1935, Camp No. S-51-A, Camp 3 John A. Salmond, “The Civilian Conservation Corps Shawnee #2, Portsmouth, Ohio, Camp Inspection and the Negro,” Journal of American History 52 (June Reports, 1933-1942, Records of the Division of 1965), 75-88; Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, Investigations, Records of the Civilian Conservation 1933-1942: A New Deal Case Study (Durham, N.C.: Corps, Record Group 35, Ohio, S-51, National Archives Duke University Press, 1967), 88-101; Calvin W. Gower, and Records Administration, College Park, Md. (hereaf- “The Struggle of Blacks for Leadership Positions in the ter Camp Shawnee #2, CCC Records, NARA). Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1942,” Journal of Negro History 61 (Apr. 1976), 123-35; Harvard Sitkoff, 9 Camp Report, Feb. 1, 1934, Camp Shawnee #2, CCC A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as Records, NARA; Salmond, Civilian Conservation Corps, a National Issue, vol. 1: The Depression Decade (1978; 88-101. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), ix, 34-83; Olen Cole Jr., The African American Experience in the 10 Shawnee Heat Wave, May 4, 17, June 29, 1935. Civilian Conservation Corps (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 45-59; Thomas W. Patton, “‘A Forest 11 Camp Report, Sept. 1, 1934, Camp Shawnee #2, CCC Shawnee Heat Wave Camp Disgrace’: The Rebellion of Civilian Conservation Records, NARA; , Apr. 20, May 4, I Have Corps Workers at Preston, New York, July 7, 1933,” 17, 1935. See Jesse Owens, with Paul G. Neimark, Changed New York History 82 (Summer 2001), 231-58; Joseph (New York: William Morrow, 1972), 27-33. M. Speakman, At Work in Penn’s Woods: The Civilian 12 David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860- Conservation Corps in Pennsylvania (University Park: The 1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 10, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 131-52. 18, 27, 98, 144, 194, 304; Shawnee Heat Wave, May 4 Leslie H. Fishel Jr., “The Negro in the New Deal Era,” 4, 17, June 14, 1935; A. A. Andrews to Walter White, Wisconsin Magazine of History 48 (Winter 1964), 111-26; Feb. 29, 1936, Ohio State Conference, Branch File, Christopher G. Wye, “The New Deal and the Negro Group I, National Association for the Advancement of Community: Toward a Broader Conception,” Journal of Colored People Records, Manuscript Division, Library of American History 59 (Dec. 1972), 621-39; Douglas Carl Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NAACP Records, Abrams, “Irony of Reform: North Carolina Blacks and LC); United States, Department of Commerce, Bureau Fifteenth Census of the United States: the New Deal,” North Carolina Historical Review 66 (Apr. of the Census, 1930 Population, Volume III, Part 2, Montana-Wyoming 1989), 149-78; Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing of North Carolina Press, 1996). Office, 1932), 494.

5 Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ 13 The black camp and the blackY oung Men’s Christian Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-30 (Urbana: University Association (YMCA) of Lockland, Hamilton County, Shawnee Heat Wave of Illinois Press, 1987), 8, 49-51, 183, 205-10; James competed in football in 1933. , Apr. 20, R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, 1935; unidentified newsprint clippings, in Camp Report, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Feb. 1, 1934, Camp Shawnee #2, CCC Records, NARA. Press, 1989), 6, 20, 21, 105-10, 133; Kimberly L. Phillips, 14 Shawnee Heat Wave, Apr. 20, May 17, 1935; Polk’s Alabama North: African American Migrants, Community, Portsmouth, Ohio, City Directory (Columbus, Oh.: R. L. and Working Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 Polk and Company, 1935), 54. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 7-8, 10-11, 48, 127-28, 190; Walker, CCC Through the Eyes, 11, 16, 51. 15 Shawnee Heat Wave, May 4, 1935.

6 Walker, CCC Through the Eyes, 51; Phillips, Alabama 16 Camp Report, May 21, 1935, Camp Shawnee #2, CCC North, 127-28, 161-64; Maldwyn A. Jones, American Records, NARA; Shawnee Heat Wave, May 17, 1935. See Immigration (1960; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black 1974), 134-41; William W. Giffin, African Americans and Church and the African American Experience (Durham, the Color Line in Ohio, 1915-1930 (Columbus: The Ohio N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990). State University Press, 2005), 48-49.

spring 2013 39 Acting to Shape Their Own Lives

17 Shawnee Heat Wave, Apr. 20, May 17, June 14, 29, 1935. 24 Phillips, Alabama North, 190; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “The Origins of Nonviolent Direct 18 Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Action in Afro-American Protest: A Note on Historical Culture in Urban America (Urbana: University of Illinois Discontinuities,” in Along the Color Line: Explorations in Press, 1992), 11-21, 145-63, passim; Eileen Southern, the Black Experience, August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, The Music of Black Americans (New York: W. W. Norton, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 307-404. 1997), 379-82, 385-89, 422-23 (quote), 513; New York Times, Jan. 25, 1936, July 17, 1981, June 29, 1982, 25 Theodore M. Berry, “Report on Civilian Conservation Apr. 14, 1989. See also John Blassingame, The Slave Corps—Camp Shawnee #2, Portsmouth, Ohio,” Aug. Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New 15, 1933, Cincinnati, Ohio, Branch File, Group I York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 27-32, 56-76. (hereafter Berry CCC Report, Camp Shawnee #2, Aug. 15, 1933), NAACP Records, LC; Stony Creek Progressor 19 Shawnee Heat Wave, Apr. 20, 1935; Salmond, Civilian (CCC Camp Stony Creek), June 16, Sept. 8, 1934, Conservation Corps, 162-66. For middle-class values and Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Newspapers, CRL; popular music, see Andrew R. L. Cayton, Ohio: A History Camp Report, May 13, 1935, Camp No. S-53, Camp of a People (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, Stony Creek, Chillicothe, Ohio, Camp Inspection 2002), 285; Steven C. Tracy, Going to Cincinnati: A Reports, 1933-1942, Records of the Division of History of the Blues in Cincinnati (Urbana: University of Investigations, Records of the Civilian Conservation Illinois Press, 1993), 46, 60-61; and Victoria W. Wolcott, Corps, Record Group 35, Ohio, S-53, NARA; “CCC Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Camps in Ohio,” Civilian Conservation Corps Legacy, Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North www.ccclegacy.org/CCC_Camps_Ohio.html (accessed Carolina Press, 2001), 100-101, 201-202. June 9, 2013); Camp Report, May 21, 1935, Camp Shawnee #2, CCC Records, NARA. 20 Shawnee Heat Wave, Apr. 20, May 4, 17, June 14, 1935. 26 Berry CCC Report, Camp Shawnee #2, Aug. 15, 1933, 21 Camp Reports, Feb. 1, Sept. 1, 1934, Camp Shawnee #2, and Berry to White, July 29, 1933, NAACP Records, Shawnee Heat Wave CCC Records, NARA; , May 4, 17, LC; Camp Reports, Feb. 1, 1934, May 21, 1935, Camp Remaking Respectability June 29, 1935. See also Wolcott, , Shawnee #2, CCC Records, NARA. 4-9, 24. 27 Berry CCC Report, Camp Shawnee #2, Aug. 15, 1933, 22 Unidentified newsprint clipping, June 30, 1934 in Camp and Berry to White, July 29, 1933, NAACP Records, LC. Report, Sept. 1, 1934, Camp Shawnee #2, CCC Records, NARA; Shawnee Heat Wave, June 14, 29, 1935. 28 Berry CCC Report, Camp Shawnee #2, Aug. 15, 1933, and Berry to White, July 29, 1933, NAACP Records, LC. 23 Unidentified newsprint clipping, Dec. 9, 1933 in Camp Report, Feb. 1, 1934, Camp Shawnee #2, CCC Records, 29 Patton, “A Forest Camp Disgrace,” 231-58; Speakman, At NARA; Theodore M. Berry to Walter White, July 29, Work in Penn’s Woods, 147-48; Berry to White, July 29, 1933, Cincinnati, Ohio, Branch File, Group I (hereafter 1933, NAACP Records, LC. Berry to White, July 29, 1933), NAACP Records, LC. For southern migrants’ networks, see Phillips, Alabama 30 Shawnee Heat Wave, May 17, June 14, 1935. North, 6, 7, 10, 161-64; Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way, 210; Grossman, Land of Hope, 155, 156.

40 Ohio Valley History Ahead of their Time Anne Tracy and the Senior Women of the Cincinnati Union Terminal USO Lounge

C. Walker Gollar

wo black soldiers wandered through Cincinnati’s Union Terminal one afternoon early in 1943. Drawn to the “USO” banner that hung in the corner of the semi-circular concourse near the front door, one of these Tmen muttered, “You ask.” “No, you ask,” rejoined the other. During World War II tens of thousands of troops, including these two black soldiers, passed through Cincinnati’s train station moving to and from military service. Many visited the lounge—now a Graeter’s Ice Cream Parlor—of the USO, or United Service Organizations. From under the banner, a widow in her sixties, Grace Bellamy Mann, approached the soldiers. One of them mumbled, “We guess this is a private club.” To the contrary, Mann explained, the USO welcomed “any man in uniform, regardless of his race or creed.” The soldiers, along with four or six of their friends, “came in,” as Mann reported, and “helped themselves to the food, smokes, etc., and later were directed to a movie to enjoy before they left town.” Mann claimed that the USO was more inclusive than even the Red Cross, for which she also volunteered. “I felt proud,” she concluded, “that I had had the pleasure of explaining what the U.S.O. really stands for, and that race prejudice had no place in it.”1 Amidst the harsh religious and racial segregation of America in the early 1940s, the claim of USO inclusivity was astonishing and mostly true, at least in Cincinnati. Across the country many USO facilities failed when it came to achieving the organization’s professed goal of openness. Cincinnati’s USO lounge, in contrast, took the inclusive mission to heart. Especially under the leadership of Anne Cecelia Tracy, the senior women of Cincinnati’s USO lounge consciously created a space where soldiers passing through received respect and appreciation for their service regardless of skin color and religious affiliation. Immediately after World War II, several writers praised the work of the USO. A handful of historians subsequently analyzed a few aspects of the clubs and camp shows, but no scholar has explored the contribution of the USO transit stations. The story of the UnionT erminal USO lounge thus remains untold, despite its significance. This Cincinnati effort illustrates the unprecedented level of mobilization during World War II, demonstrates that era’s prevalent tensions over sexuality and gendered spaces, and affirms the power of interfaith organizing. Most unique of all, Anne Tracy and the Cincinnati lounge offered a tolerant space during a relatively intolerant time.2

spring 2013 41 Ahead of their Time

Before World War II, Cincinnati women already enjoyed a history of helping soldiers in need. Generally falling under what contemporaries called “War Camp Community Service,” religious-based agencies across the country had helped World War I military personnel get to and from military bases, keep in touch with family members left behind, and relax when off duty. The Salvation Army, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Knights of Columbus, and the Travelers Aid Society assisted military personnel in this fashion. Begun in mid- nineteenth century Saint Louis, Travelers Aid was, like the other organizations mentioned above, rooted in communities of faith, but always provided services regardless of age, gender, or beliefs. Three weeks after the outbreak of Anne Tracy (1872-1946). World War I, Travelers Aid organized on a national level CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER to benefit soldiers on the move.T racy served as the executive secretary, or more simply put, the day-to-day “head” of the Cincinnati Travelers Aid Society during World War I. Headquartered in various downtown locations, Travelers Aid conducted most of its business through small booths located in Cincinnati’s two train depots. Through the Cincinnati, Lebanon, and Northern Railway station on Court Street, and more significantly at Pennsylvania Station near the downtown riverfront, Travelers Aid provided nourishment and rest, all free of charge, to approximately one hundred thousand “lonely and tired and friendless” servicemen during the course of the war. “Part of our job, in the early days,” Tracy remembered, “was caring for transient young soldiers. We tried to find lodging for them for the night, help them find some wholesome amusement and keep them out of mischief.”3 Keeping soldiers safe “was no easy task,” Tracy noted:

Numbers of times I had to phone for the police to come for some ‘dead drunk’ boy to put him in jail to sober up. I hated doing that. So I finally arranged to rent two rooms at Pearl and Butler streets [directly across from Pennsylvania Station]. These I fixed up with cots, chairs, and other bare necessities of fur- niture. Then when a drunk came under my eye I’d have his buddies carry him up to one of the rooms. We’d let him sober up there.

Tracy’s system gained the attention of an unnamed Cincinnati philanthropist. “What do you think she needs most?” the man asked a friend of Tracy. As Tracy later told the story, her friend replied a little too quickly that she needed, “A bath. Give Miss Tracy a bath.” Acquaintances often acclaimed Tracy for her good humor and humility. With the help of this and other philanthropists, she not

42 Ohio Valley History C. Walker Gollar only got a bath installed in her rented rooms, but eventually acquired the entire building. After the war, Tracy and Travelers Aid continued to work for veterans, assisting war brides and helping sweethearts reunite with soldiers. Inspired by the war-related assistance she received, Tracy summed up her World War I experience glowingly: “in Cincinnati some may lose their money, some their figures, but Cincinnati never loses its offer of hope to human beings.”T racy did not specifically mention African American soldiers in her reflections on World War I, though such troops must have constituted part of her ministry. Despite extensive racism in society and across the military, nearly four hundred thousand African American soldiers fought during World War I, serving a nation that denied them full citizenship.4 The prosperity of the 1920s ended with the Great Depression of the 1930s, initiating a new wave of challenges for Cincinnati. Tracy and Travelers Aid continued to help various persons on the move, including an increasing number of children escaping from broken families. But as more people lost jobs, “It dawned upon Cincinnati’s public,” as one account noted, “that private charities could not support such hordes of unemployed.” In 1932, a Protestant organization called Associated Charities assisted twenty-three thousand families, which constituted a more than 600 percent increase over the previous decade. As a result, a new mandate supplanted the old sentimental notion that ministry to the poor fell to a few goodhearted souls. As the secretary of Associated Charities put it, “the care of the unfortunate has become a part of the public business.” However, the economic depression also coincided with a rise in religious bigotry. During the 1930s, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews had little interaction, while a resur- gent Ku Klux Klan, industrialist Henry Ford, Catholic radio personality Father Charles Coughlin, and other prominent people and groups promoted a virulent anti-Semitism. During a well-publicized speech, Coughlin gave a Nazi salute and yelled out, “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” While Americans committed little violence against U.S. Jews, prejudice restricted immigration and decreased viable escape routes for German Jews after the election of Adolph Hitler as chan- cellor of Germany in January 1933. Six years later, in September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and World War II began.5 One week after the invasion, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a “limited national emergency,” prompting the social agencies active during World War I to swing into action. The NationalT ravelers Aid Association warned Tracy to prepare to meet the needs of American soldiers and defense workers pressed into service. The United States had not yet entered the war, but during the winter of 1940 military personnel started coming through the city. With only one sub- stantial military post, the Fort Thomas Induction Center across the Ohio River in northern Kentucky, Cincinnati never became a military town. But after the

spring 2013 43 Ahead of their Time

List of Cincinnati USO facilities. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

44 Ohio Valley History C. Walker Gollar

Interior of the USO lounge. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

1933 opening of the new Union Terminal a few miles from downtown, Midwest train travel grew more efficient and Cincinnati became an important hub of military movement. Throughout World War II, hundreds of thousands of service persons moved through Cincinnati, the acclaimed “Gateway to the South,” en route to training and military camps, most of which were located in the southern states. How could Travelers Aid meet what promised to be the tremendous onslaught of soldiers? “What was going to happen to these men?” worried Tracy. She consequently considered converting the Rookwood Lounge, a vacant thirty by sixty foot tearoom located just off the main concourse of UnionT erminal, into a waiting room for soldiers.6 Tracy got “a head start on other groups throughout the country” that did not begin to organize until the spring of 1941. Talks about a national, consoli- dated effort to meet the needs of soldiers had just commenced when in early April several Cincinnati social service agencies agreed to sponsor a temporary service and information booth in the heart of downtown at Fountain Square. A local delegation traveled to the Hotel Willard in Washington D.C., where on April 17, 1941 representatives from six welfare groups joined to form the United Service Organizations, Incorporated, or USO. The groups included the National Catholic Community Service, the Jewish Welfare Board, the Salvation Army, the YMCA, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and Travelers Aid. At this initial meeting, President Roosevelt affirmed the “great enterprise” of the

spring 2013 45 Ahead of their Time

USO, explaining: “I cannot emphasize too strongly my conviction that this work which you have come here to initiate is of the utmost importance.…If national defense is to be an all-out effort, the preservation—yes, and the strengthening— of spiritual and social values is imperative.” Roosevelt believed that all citizens must be engaged on some level, even before the United States entered the war.7 Generally labeled a “religious agency,” the newly formed USO proclaimed a shared belief: “in a supernatural power that exists beyond any that is upon this earth; faith in the brotherhood of man; belief in the individual dignity of man; belief in the existence of positive ethical standards of right and wrong that exist apart from the will of any man.” These principles had dramatic implications, and Protestants, Catholics, and Jews occasionally used similar religious-patriotic rhetoric to denounce Hitler. But significant cooperative interfaith activity would not occur in the United States for some twenty years, except within the USO. In the early twentieth century, racial bigotry limited employment and destroyed social and political opportunities for African Americans. Disenfranchisement and lynching crippled the black community and created a segregated society. Like most of America, the U.S. military remained officially segregated throughout the war. In the face of such restrictions, the USO, like Travelers Aid, promised support for all soldiers regardless of race and/or religion. Never professing a profound theological or interfaith understanding, the six organizations of the USO instead joined together in a common cause. As one early report put it, they simply “decided to pool their resources and their brains to meet the emergencies that were clearly visible ahead.”8 Joining previously autonomous organizations that did not always get along was not easy. As one USO official explained, “Theoretically the three faiths had cooperated before, but their work in the USO was the first time in the history of the world that Jews, Catholics, and Protestants as religionists had together not only made plans, but budgeted for them, and then carried them out in the practical day-by-day work.” While USO officials ruled out proselytizing from the start, “it had been inevitable,” this same official acknowledged, “that institutional vested interests would sometimes collide.” Yet officials hardly spoke about these collisions, choosing instead to celebrate acts of cooperation. For example, several USO officials recalled initial conflict over what religious literature the organization would make available to soldiers visiting USO facilities. But participating agencies eventually agreed to display three identical racks of literature representing the three different faiths.9 In early May 1941, Tracy wondered if Travelers Aid might make better use of the money reserved for the service and information booth at Fountain Square, which soldiers rarely used. On May 27, in the Cincinnati Jewish Welfare Building, Tracy joined eight men and three women representing the six agencies of the USO to form a Cincinnati chapter. They elected World War I veteran

46 Ohio Valley History C. Walker Gollar

James W. Pottenger local USO president. Other prominent men filled all but the position of secretary, but Tracy served as representative to the national USO association, and also helped start Cincinnati’s first successful USO facility. On June 8, 1941, Tracy and Marcia Mills, a recent widow, opened the “Service Room” in the Union Terminal’s Rookwood Room. They closed and dismantled the Fountain Square booth, running all USO information services through Union Terminal. “With a lot of enthusiasm and not very much money we started the lounge,” reported Tracy. As the first facility of its kind in the country, the women had no guidelines about how to set up the room. Unlike typical USO facilities located near military bases that generally provided regular off-duty entertainment, the Union Terminal lounge catered to people on the move. Volunteers had to be ready at a moment’s notice, and enjoyed only a short window of time to meet soldiers’ needs. The first women involved designed their own rules of operation, with “the only stipulation,” as Tracy recalled, “that as every family in the country was touched by the war, that every woman in Cincinnati had a right to minis- ter to these men.” Local businesses donated furnishings, while the public library provided books. Various women volunteered to host the lounge; used their own money to purchase cigarettes, postcards, and stationary; and baked cakes, pret- zels, doughnuts, and cookies, which fast became the USO’s signature item. “We started with cookies,” explained Tracy.10

Eleanor Helmers and an unidentified soldier at the USO lounge. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

spring 2013 47 Ahead of their Time

Bailey Wright Hickenlooper, another prominent widow “recognized as an able and tactful executive” “of wide interests,” managed the USO lounge. Travelers Aid paid Tracy for her services to the USO, but all other women volunteered their time. Wealthy women who did not need a salary and who had few traditional family responsibilities tended to become leaders. Hickenlooper was sophisticated, genteel, and strong-willed. As one grandson recalled, she “had a great respect for people…and looked at people as people.” Three vice chairs (each representing Protestants, Catholics, or Jews), a corresponding secretary, a treasurer, and a supplies chair assisted Hickenlooper. Throughout the course of the war several hundred volunteers served shifts of varying lengths, three women at a time. Like the vice chairs, the volunteers represented Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, but Tracy told them “we mustn’t try to force any of our religions on soldiers.…If they weren’t made religious in all their years at home we can’t hope to give them religion in the hour or so they are with us.”11 Tracy also demanded that volunteers “be as kind to Negro soldiers as to whites.” Only one volunteer refused to follow this instruction and Tracy promptly dismissed her. Across the country and in Cincinnati, many African Americans reported that they did not feel welcome at USO facilities. In October 1941, some Cincinnati black women suggested one reason for African American discontent when they complained that no black hostesses served in the Union Terminal USO lounge. The national USO had advocated the use of white and black hostesses, but ultimately left the decision to local chapters. As a result, black hostesses tended to serve black clubs, and white hostesses usually served white clubs. In time, one group of black women successfully fought to include black hostesses at the USO Boston Buddies Club in the presti- gious white neighborhood of Boston Commons. In Cincinnati, black advo- cates who had asked the USO to find black hostesses gained the support of the Cincinnati Women’s Club, but their pleas still went unanswered. Reflecting the era’s racial restrictions on employment, one African American suggested that qualified black women were too busy working their own jobs and thus did not have time to volunteer. Later that month a directive, probably issued by Union Terminal officials, ordered that transient black soldiers be sent to the nearby Post Office Annex lunchroom instead of the main UnionT erminal res- taurant. The Division of Negro Welfare of the Community Chest investigated the matter of segregated meals and the order evidently was rescinded, though when and by whom remains unclear. But the Cincinnati USO never employed black hostesses and the concern lingered.12 In 1941, activity in the lounge and across Cincinnati increased as the nation mobilized, even though the United States had not yet declared war. A weeklong citywide “Keep the Boys Smiling Campaign” began in mid-October 1941, two

48 Ohio Valley History C. Walker Gollar days early due to six hundred workers anxious to raise money for the USO. The campaign’s chairman, Cincinnati businessman Albert H. Morrill, inspired potential benefactors when he proclaimed:

Your boys—your neighbor’s boys—thousands of young Americans on leave tonight from the grueling strain of Army routine are leaning on lamp-posts longing for some place to go, something to do. They are our boys—Cincinnati boys and their buddies—on leave from dozens of army camps created almost overnight in isolated communities as part of America’s mighty mobilization. On their shoulders rests the job of making America invincible. They are sac- rificing their present to make our future secure. Give these boys something wholesome to smile about in their free time and morale—wrecking home- sickness and restlessness will be wiped out.

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, one volunteer in the Union Terminal lounge continued working “diligently” and “untiringly” even though her son was stationed in Hawaii. “We who served with her,” reported Tracy, “had aching hearts because we knew the burden she was bearing.” After the United States entered the war, Tracy resigned from other volunteer work to concentrate on helping transient soldiers.13

Interior of lounge. At right are Anne Tracy and Marcia Mills. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

spring 2013 49 Ahead of their Time

Some of the soldiers would need the casualty room, opened on January 12, 1942 in a former storeroom—now part of a bookstore—adjoining the Union Terminal USO lounge. The room served as a quiet waiting area for injured soldiers. Tracy’s younger sister, Helena Tracy, managed nurses from the Jane E. Delano unit of the American Legion Auxiliary who volunteered in three-hour shifts, while the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society maintained first-aid cabinets according to hospital standards. “In addition,” Tracy recalled, the six screened cots of the casualty room “provide[d] a place for” wounded and non-wounded “soldiers, sailors, and marines to write home and to rest.” In early 1942, numerous other USO facilities began to address the needs of military personnel passing through town. Through the USO, troops could acquire free tickets to movie theaters, Coney Island, the zoo, and Cincinnati Reds baseball games at Crosley Field, located near Union Terminal. Many soldiers enjoyed the opera, though few attended USO-sponsored religious services. As a result of all these opportunities, Mrs. Harper Sibley, a USO national board member and wife of the national USO president, praised the Cincinnati branch for “doing one of the great social service jobs of the time, an example of ‘total service’ in these days.” Sibley also praised “Cincinnati for being the first city in the country to sense the great need for aiding troops in transit,” with the Union Terminal lounge “the first center to be opened for the convenience of service men.” Another Cincinnati observer put it this way: “Time was when all a soldier could do in town was stand around street-corners looking as if he had lost his last friend, but not now.”14

USO lounge dormitory. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

50 Ohio Valley History C. Walker Gollar

At the same time, servicemen reportedly wanted “girls” most, even though they did not always pursue them in healthy ways. USO lounges offered homely, neutered spaces that attempted to thwart the passions of young men. The average soldier in his early twenties often hailed from depressed, rural parts of the country, frequently fleeing an admittedly “unsatisfactory or broken home,” and commonly lured by, as one report put it, “too many bad things” in the city. Pickups, brothels, and prostitution posed a serious problem during World War II, particularly before penicillin was introduced to treat sexually transmitted diseases, and especially in distressed areas like those surrounding Union Terminal. One report described the West End as “a rather unattractive section of the city,” peopled by poor, unskilled laborers and known as a vice district, where gambling and prostitution thrived. One observer added, “The main trouble [for soldiers spending time in the neighborhood of Union Terminal] is not the professionals, who can be segregated and known, but girls generally who are attracted by the uniforms [and who] become infected [with venereal disease] and then pass it along.” Some soldiers confessed to secreting away to the park in front of Union Terminal with girls they had picked up at the station. One soldier took his pickup, a North Carolina girl, a bit further. Police found her near Union Terminal dressed in men’s clothes and in need of medical care, presumably after having been sexually assaulted. Other soldiers sought women in local taverns, while a notorious redheaded “tavern girl” worked right inside the train station. According to the Cincinnati police chief, “Her practice was to lure her victims to a terminal freight elevator which she had learned to stall between floors by pressing an emergency button.” Upon her arrest she was found to carry a venereal disease. The federal government subsequently demanded that the Union Terminal improve conditions, while the Cincinnati police tried to force terminal officials to install more spotlights.15 By March 1942, sixty-three thousand troops had visited the terminal’s USO lounge, where they more than likely met motherly and even grandmotherly women, not pickups. One historian has noted that, “Every time a senior hostess distributed a sandwich or a cookie to a male soldier, she was tacitly reminding him that ‘mom’ was watching and would be disappointed if her son disrespected her by drinking in a tavern or soliciting a prostitute.” To the amusement of some hostesses, a few sailors wandered outside, lured by the fountains just beyond the main entrance. Though the USO prepared no written standards, the organization’s leaders expected hostesses “to be reasonably well-groomed, and to be dressed inconspicuously and sensibly.” USO officials reportedly preferred older women, “the ones that really give the home atmosphere.” Volunteers cared for visitors’ immediate needs as much as possible, but directed all travel inquiries concerning tickets, schedules, and the like to Travelers Aid. Other responsibilities included preserving a homelike atmosphere, keeping supplies full, and tidy- ing up the room. As a result, one observer reported seeing “soldiers…lounging

spring 2013 51 Ahead of their Time

on overstuffed couches, eating apples, reading papers and magazines, and writing letters to their mothers and their girls.” The USO presumed hostesses’ patrio- tism, and directed that they not discuss military maneuvers—to prevent leaks to the enemy—nor initiate conversation or games, though they should play if asked. “Many of the young men seem very glad to have someone to talk to,” reported one hostess. Every now and then, longer lasting relationships developed, as when hostess Florence Bedford Bishop introduced her soldier son, Bedford John Bishop, to his future wife, another volunteer, Gertrude Steinwart.16

Soldiers and USO hostesses outside the lounge. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

At the first anniversary of the UnionT erminal lounge in June 1942, the Cincinnati Enquirer claimed that the city’s USO was “one of the largest and most active service groups in the United States.” Eighty thousand soldiers of all types, “officers and pri- vates, Negro and white, army, navy, and marine corps” had reportedly received service from the two hundred hostesses serving three-hour shifts, from seven-thirty a.m. to midnight, at the terminal lounge. Former Ohio Governor Myers Y. Cooper presented a large flag to Marcia Mills, congratulated Hickenlooper, and honoredT racy, who by this time had purportedly “become nationally known for her work with Travelers Aid and the U.S.O.” Another widow in her sixties, Grace Bellamy Mann, claimed that the Cincinnati USO ranked “second to none,” especially concerning matters of race. Though black soldiers tended to pass over places primarily run by and for white servicemen, those who did come received a warm welcome. Unlike much of Cincinnati, the public space of the Union Terminal remained integrated, in contrast to private,

52 Ohio Valley History C. Walker Gollar employee space. The Cincinnati USO divided the localY MCAs by race, with the downtown Central Parkway and the Walnut Hills Williams branches for whites, and the downtown Ninth Street and Lockland branches for African Americans. In contrast, both white and black soldiers used the same showers at the Union Terminal. Unlike other, larger USO facilities, the terminal lounge was a relatively small place, allowing the hostesses to avoid the potentially volatile repercussions of interracial dancing. Soldiers could listen to music inside the lounge, especially after the installation of a jukebox in the middle of 1942, but dancing did not occur.17

The “porch” seating area outside the USO lounge. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

As the war progressed, Travelers Aid and the local USO further enhanced the Union Terminal facility, with Tracy insisting that “there must be an unusual effort put forth to meet whatever needs…[soldiers] may have, regardless of what it costs us, regardless of time, energy or money expended.” On December 28, 1942, the USO furnished three rooms on the second floor of the terminal with fifty- five double-decker beds for soldiers needing a short rest.T wenty-four hours a day, three male attendants working eight-hour shifts oversaw this dormitory that white and black servicemen used at the same time. “There has never been a protest,” reported A. J. Edmonds, the Cincinnati USO executive director. Thereafter, hostesses used the former casualty (or quiet) room to check soldiers’ bags, which averaged about fifty thousand per month by early 1943. According to one report, soldiers left some surprising items unclaimed, including “musical instruments, birds from tropical countries, monkeys, puppies, kittens, dolls destined for small

spring 2013 53 Ahead of their Time

daughters and, after the war’s end, souvenirs of all kinds from every theater of the war.” Tracy oversaw the extension of the lounge into the rotunda in an area called the “porch,” while supplies previously donated by volunteers were written into the lounge’s budget. As the number of cookies consumed by all Cincinnati USO facilities reached one hundred thousand per month, the organization instituted a system with different women’s groups from the Protestant Council of Churches, the Catholic Women’s Association, and the Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs rotating baking and distribution responsibilities for each month.18 Such work exhausted staff and volunteers, includingT racy, who in 1943 was reportedly “getting very crabby and not getting along at all with the volunteers.” The women of the lounge had discussed the problem ofT racy’s behavior for some time before one leader “buttonholed” a male member of the Travelers Aid board, explaining that the situation had “reached a point where something will have to be done about it.” On February 15, a special noontime meeting took place at the downtown Cincinnati Club to which Tracy was not invited and alcohol served. Numerous such gatherings, some of which included Tracy, followed. The problem revolved around who actually ran the lounge, USO lounge director Hickenlooper or Travelers Aid executive secretary Tracy. To help resolve the conflict,T racy oversaw the writing of a series of policies and rules for the lounge in the summer of 1943. First among twenty general items stood the declaration that “There is no color or racial discrimination in the service of the USO.”19 The last of the general items also stipulated that USO hostesses make no fundamental distinction between servicewomen and servicemen. In conjunction with the second anniversary of the Cincinnati USO in June 1943, a sun deck and nursery for military wives and female soldiers was created above the main entrance of Union Terminal. Few servicewomen actually took advantage of the sundeck, but many families used the nursery. Along this narrow aisle, soldiers’ wives bathed, fed, and cared for their children. One sailor told his wife, “I won’t worry about your trip to Norfolk. The CincinnatiT erminal USO will take care of you and the baby.” In addition to making clear policy for the Union Terminal lounge, Tracy’s rules, though they did not resolve the question of who ran the lounge, nonetheless helped the national USO set standards for what a transit lounge should look like. As early as the summer of 1942 agencies from across the country had asked about Cincinnati, with the national USO recognizing the Union Terminal lounge as “a model for similar services set up at transportation centers throughout the nation.” Following Cincinnati’s lead, ninety-four transit lounges had opened across the country by early 1943.20 Tracy undoubtedly was thrilled that the work that she had begun on a shoe- string during World War I had advanced so successfully throughout the course of World War II. But on the day of Tracy’s seventy-second birthday, February 12, 1944, a friend reported that “old age seems to have affected her so that

54 Ohio Valley History C. Walker Gollar

Soldier and child in the lounge nursery. Family in the lounge nursery. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

she seems unable to get along with anyone.” In addition to the course of time, other factors probably played a role, most notably a diagnosis of cancer that she had received twelve years earlier. Tracy lived near the University of Cincinnati with two younger sisters, one of whom led a delegation to inspect the lounge in tribute to Anne. On that occasion Tracy announced her retirement. “For nearly 25 years,” she declared, “mine has been one of the most exciting lives in Cincinnati, because nothing has happened, I might say in the world, that hasn’t in some way touched our desk.” On June 3, 1944, about one hundred people, mostly professional social workers, honored Tracy with a luncheon in the Union Terminal dining room. Three days later Allied forces stormed the beaches of northern France on D-Day, thus beginning the last major campaign of the war in Europe. Although the number of soldiers commissioned at nearby Fort Thomas decreased, the hoards of “war-weary and convalescent veterans” coming through Cincinnati skyrocketed. After Tracy’s retirement, Hickenlooper and four Protestant, five Catholic, and two Jewish women, all of them officers in the local USO, managed the lounge. Most had worked in the facility from the beginning, rotating from one position to the next, and often serving other Cincinnati USO agencies. Officers tended to hail from prominent, wealthy Cincinnati families, and averaged about sixty years of age, including five widowed, three single, and four married women. Of the married women, only two had younger children, and these mothers had only one child each. Most officers, in other words, had few traditional family responsibilities.21 After Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, the Cincinnati USO “prepared for the throng from Europe.” Local leaders expected a “good percent- age” of the anticipated two and a half million returning servicemen to travel through Cincinnati. “We are primed and equipped to care for them,” reported the Cincinnati USO executive secretary. In June, 112,360 soldiers visited

spring 2013 55 Ahead of their Time

Cincinnati’s USO lounges, representing a 10.5 percent increase over January. Nearly two thirds of these visiting soldiers—72,695 persons—spent time at the Union Terminal USO lounge, which stayed open twenty-four hours a day during 1945. On average, about six children used the Union Terminal’s nursery each day. “It was impossible to determine which yelled the loudest,” noted one observer. In July, national USO officials visited the UnionT erminal lounge, warning Hickenlooper that a significant portion of five to six million discharged servicemen would pass through Cincinnati in the next eighteen months. July’s numbers reportedly reached an all-time peak, with 81,153 soldiers visiting the lounge. The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, prompting Japan to surrender five days later. World War II had ended. From September to December about one hundred thousand soldiers used Cincinnati USO lounges each month, taxing local facilities “to the utmost.” Nevertheless, by January 1946 most Cincinnati USO facilities had closed. The UnionT erminal lounge remained open for six more months, closing on June 10, 1946, exactly five years after opening. An estimated three million soldiers, a fifth of all World War II GIs, had used the facility throughout the war. The USO did not keep records of how many black soldiers used the lounge, but African Americans represented nearly a third of the persons who sought directions from Union Terminal’s Travelers Aid. Six days after the lounge closed, Tracy, known as the “railway shepherd” or “Saint Anne,” passed away.22

Two people greet a soldier. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

56 Ohio Valley History C. Walker Gollar

Unidentified soldier and woman. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Nearly sixty-five years later, in April 2011, First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, with support from the USO, announced the “Joining Forces” initiative, which aims to mobilize all sectors of society to support military persons and their families. “We should all be working together on this,” declared Obama. Much has changed over the years—and the country has not mobilized for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to the degree it did during World War II—but Obama’s call to work together nonetheless resurrects an earlier spirit. Summarizing her work, Tracy liked to say that “USO” stood for “Us-Organized.” This may have proved truer of the USO branch in Cincinnati than elsewhere in the country. The national USO of the

spring 2013 57 Ahead of their Time

1940s offered services regardless of religious background, but stum- bled over matters of race, claiming inclusiveness but generally following alienating patterns of segregation. The senior women at the Union Terminal USO lounge did a better job, especially in offering services to black soldiers, even if they failed to employ black hostesses. They also pushed gender boundaries by attempting to honor women who signed up for military duty. Historians have accurately described the USO as a conservative organization that usually did not challenge social norms. But in Cincinnati, amidst the open wounds of war, bigotry, sexism, and racism, the senior women of the Union Terminal USO lounge created a progressive oasis of peace.23

1 Cincinnati Post, Apr. 6, 1943. 1981), 279; “History: Travelers Aid International,” http://travelersaid.org/history.html (accessed June 12, 2 On early praise of USO, see Raymond Kendall, “Music 2013); Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The in the U.S.O.,” Music Educators Journal 29 (Feb.-Mar. Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I 1943), 18, 48-49; Pattie S. Smith, “Nurses and the (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 1974; Chad L. USO,” American Journal of Nursing 43 (May 1943), 462- Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American 63; Margaret Blenkner and Jeannette M. Elder, “Migrant Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of Boys in Wartime as Seen by U.S.O. Travelers Aid,” Social North Carolina Press, 2010). Service Review 19 (Sept. 1945), 324-42; Arthur Plaut, The Story of the U.S.O. in Cincinnati(Cincinnati: USO 4 Cincinnati Post, Nov. 23, 1931, May 18, 1944. Council of Cincinnati, 1946); Julia M. H. Carson, Home Away From Home: The Story of the USO(New York: 5 Cincinnati Post, Apr. 27, 1979; Alexander Johnson, first Harper and Brothers, 1946); Lucy P. Carner, “Review secretary of Associated Charities, quoted in Cincinnati of Home Away from Home: The Story of the USO,” Social Enquirer, Nov. 23, 1929; “Father Coughlin, the Radio Service Review 20 (Dec. 1946), 589; “Hail and Farewell, Priest: Political Views, Old Time Radio, and Religion,” U.S.O.,” Social Service Review 22 (Mar. 1948), 92-93. http://www.fathercoughlin.org/father-coughlin-anti- Subsequent historical work includes Maryann Lovelace, semitism.html (accessed June 12, 2013). On the religious “Facing Change in Wartime Philadelphia: The Story climate of the 1930s, see Lucy S. Dawidowicz, On of the Philadelphia USO,” Pennsylvania Magazine of Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881-1981 (New York: History and Biography 123 (July 1999), 143-75; Gretchen Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982), 96; Roger Fortin, Knapp, “Experimental Social Policymaking during World Faith and Action: A History of the Catholic Archdiocese War II: The United Service Organizations (USO) and of Cincinnati, 1821-1996 (Columbus: The Ohio State American War-Community Services (AWCS),” Journal University Press, 2002), 267; Hennesey, American of Policy History 12, no. 3 (2000), 321-38; Meghan K. Catholics, 278; Haim Genizi, “American Interfaith Winchell, “‘To Make the Boys Feel at Home’: USO Cooperation on Behalf of Refugees from Nazism, Senior Hostesses and Gendered Citizenship,” Frontiers: 1933-1945,” in American Jewish History, vol. 7: America, A Journal of Women Studies 25, no. 1 (2004), 190-211; American Jews, and the Holocaust, Jeffrey S. Gurock, ed. Pradip Baijal, “USO and Rural Connectivity: Not an (New York: Routledge, 1998), 263-77; Lloyd P. Gartner, Obligation but an Opportunity,” Economic and Political “The Midpassage of American Jewry,” The American Weekly, vol. 39, Dec. 4-10, 2004, pp. 5201-5203; Jewish Experience, Jonathan D. Sarna, ed. (New York: Meghan K. Winchell, Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: Holmes and Meier), 224-33; Stanley Feldstein, The Land The Story of USO Hostesses During World War II(Chapel That I Show You: Three Centuries of Jewish Life in America Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). (New York: Anchor Press, 1978), 216, 260; Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: 3 Cincinnati Enquirer, June 30, 1940; Cincinnati Post, Nov. Knopf, 1992), 428. 23, 1931, May 18, 1944; James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community 6 Cincinnati Post, Dec. 4, 1942. in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,

58 Ohio Valley History C. Walker Gollar

7 Plaut, Story of the USO, 8; Franklin D. Roosevelt to 15 Eleanor Wilson quoted in Cincinnati Post, Dec. 14, 1942; Paul V. McNutt, Apr. 17, 1941, newsclippings, in Blenkner, “Migrant Boys,” 331; Keagy, “For Troops Herbert Koch Diaries/Scrapbooks (hereafter Koch in Transit,” 212; Koch Diary, Feb. 12, 1943, CHSL; Diary), Cincinnati Historical Society Library, Cincinnati Cincinnati Enquirer, Nov. 4, 1943. Museum Center (hereafter CHSL). 16 Winchell, Good Girls, 28; Cincinnati Enquirer, Nov. 4, 8 Carson, Home Away From Home, xii (1941 USO state- 1941; Dick Hollingsworth to C. M. Hollingsworth, Mar. ment of purpose), 23; Carner, “Review of Home Away 1, 1943, in Cincinnati Post, Apr. 4, 1943; Keagy, “For From Home,” 92. See also Albert Russell Buchanan, Black Troops in Transit,” 213. Americans in World War II (Santa Barbara, Ca.: Clio Books, 1977); Robert F. Jefferson, Fighting for Hope: 17 Cincinnati Enquirer, June 3, 1942; Keagy, “For Troops in African American Troops of the 93rd Infantry Division in Transit,” 214. World War II and Postwar America (Baltimore: The John Cincinnati Post Hopkins University Press, 2008). 18 , Dec. 4, 1942; A memorandum of a conference with Mr. A. J. Edmonds, Executive Director 9 Unnamed USO official, quoted in Carson, Home Away of the U.S.O., Ohio War History Collection (hereafter From Home, 26. OWHC), CHSL; Plaut, The USO Story, 31.

10 Cincinnati Post, Dec. 4, 1942. 19 Koch Diary, Feb. 9, 15, 1943; U.S.O. Union Terminal Lounge—Policy and Rules of Service, OWHC, CHSL. 11 Margaret Louise Keagy, “For Troops in Transit,” Survey Midmonthly: Journal of Social Work 78 (Aug. 1942), 20 Cincinnati Post, Jan. 4, 1943, July 8, 1944. 213; Cincinnati Enquirer, Sept. 21, 1962; Smith “Skip” Cincinnati Post Hickenlooper III, interview by author, Cincinnati, Oct. 21 Koch Diary, Feb. 4, 1944; , Dec. 4, 1942, 22, 2012, transcript in author’s possession; Tracy quoted May 18, 1944, Dec. 3, 1975 (Helena Tracy obituary); Cincinnati Enquirer in Cincinnati Post, Sept. 23, 1941. , Feb. 2, 1945. On Kathleen Tracy, see Cincinnati Post-Times Star, June 13, 1960, Sept. 28, 1966 12 tracy quoted in Cincinnati Post, Sept. 23, 1941. On the (obituary). See also Cincinnati Times-Star, Jan. 26, 1944. issue of black hostesses, see Women’s City Club Records, Tracy retired at the end of January, but the luncheon was Race Relations Committee, Oct. 21, Dec. 5, 1941, not held until June 3, 1944. CHSL; Mrs. Ed. F. Alexander to James Pottenger, Jan. 11, Cincinnati Enquirer Cincinnati Post 1943, copied in Women’s City Club Records, Defense 22 , July 13, 17, 1945; , Committee, CHSL. On the order to segregate meals, see May 18, 1944. On the overall estimate of service persons Cincinnati Racial Amity Committee Minutes, Oct. 31, 1941, Urban served by the Union Terminal USO lounge, see Goes to War: A Community Responds to World War II League Records, CHSL. One obscure note suggests the order was not rescinded until 1943. See Women’s City (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1991), 40. Club Records, Feb. 9, 1943, Defense Committee, CHSL. 23 USA Today, Apr. 13, 2011; Cincinnati Post, Dec. 4, 1942. 13 Morrill quoted in Cincinnati Times-Star, Oct. 17, 1941; Cincinnati Post, Dec. 4, 1942.

14 Cincinnati Enquirer, Jan. 8, Feb. 21 (Silbey paraphrase), 1942; Cincinnati Post, Apr. 3, 1942.

spring 2013 59 Collection Essay The USO at the Ninth Street YMCA The Turpeau Photograph Collection at Cincinnati Museum Center

rom its founding, the United Service Organization (USO) had a policy against discrimination on the basis of race or creed. Clubs in larger cities were integrated but they did not welcome black hostesses. Many African FAmerican servicemen chose not to go to places regarded as run primarily by and for whites. As a result, separate USO centers often opened in the same town.

Sailors and USO hostesses pose in front of the Ninth Street YMCA, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

60 Ohio Valley History Linda Bailey

Ninth Street YMCA volunteers accompanied soldiers on a picnic in August 1944 to Camp Simms near Batavia, Ohio, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

spring 2013 61 The USO at the Ninth Street YMCA

Hostesses at the Ninth Street USO pack boxes to be sent to troops overseas, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Navy dance at the Ninth Street YMCA in 1944, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

62 Ohio Valley History Linda Bailey

Soldiers entertain USO hostesses at the Ninth Street USO, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Junior hostesses at the Ninth Street USO in 1943, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

spring 2013 63 The USO at the Ninth Street YMCA

USO trip to Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, Indiana, to entertain the soldiers, July 14, 1944, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Cincinnati had eleven USO facilities, with the largest the Troops in Transit Lounge at Union Terminal. In January 1943, a new USO lounge for African American servicemen opened in the Ninth Street YMCA in the city’s predomi- nantly African American West End neighborhood. Prior to its opening, the USO used improvised quarters at the site to entertain black servicemen. Located a short distance from the terminal, the facilities included a pool, bowling alleys, billiard room, dining room and grill, and sleeping quarters. Mrs. Eva Savage was chairperson of the sixty hostesses on duty there.

64 Ohio Valley History Linda Bailey

Bailey Hickenlooper presents a USO flag to Eva Savage, 1944, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

USO Certificate of Meritorious Service presented to Eva Savage in 1943, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

spring 2013 65 The USO at the Ninth Street YMCA

USO volunteers organize dances and parties to welcome troops returning home, Evva Friason Turpeau Collection. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER

Evva Friason Turpeau donated the Cincinnati Museum Center’s collection of thirty-five photographs of various wartime activities at the USO at the Ninth Street YMCA. Her father, Lawrence Friason, was the first black superintendent of the Cincinnati Post Office. She married into the prominent West EndT urpeau family. Reverend David D. Turpeau pastored the Calvary Methodist Church and served five terms in the Ohio legislature. His wife, Ila, helped organize the Urban League of Greater Cincinnati, served on the board of the local chapter of the NAACP, and sat on the USO Advisory Committee as well as numerous other West End organizations. Linda Bailey Curator of Prints and Photographs

66 Ohio Valley History Collection Essay Nicola Marschall, Artist and Soldier

aving highlighted The Filson’s War of 1812 collections for the bicenten- nial of that conflict in the last issue ofOhio Valley History, we return in this issue to the Civil War. Previous essays have focused on The Filson’s Hmanuscript collection and Civil War exhibit, highlighting photographs, prints, portraits, letters, documents, broadsides, and artifacts. This essay focuses on Nicola Marschall, an artist who created visual records of the war that help us to remember it. The German-born painter lived in Alabama during the war and served intermittently in the army. Unlike war artists who documented the tragic conflict, its participants and victims, through drawing and painting, Marchall’s fame arises from designing the first Confederate national flag and the gray Confederate army uniform, and from his portraits of many Confederate veterans. Marschall moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1873, where he lived until his death in 1917. A popular and successful portrait painter, he had many Kentucky veterans, mostly those who wore gray, sit for him. The Filson’s collection includes both primary and secondary sources documenting Marschall’s life and work. Of particular interest and importance are portraits he painted and a scrapbook of ephemera and sketches that he compiled. Born in St. Wendel, Prussia, on March 16, 1829 to Emanuel and Margaret Mohr Marschall, young Nicola worked for the family’s successful tobacco and wine business.1 From an early age, however, he had a serious interest in art and music. He received a good education, including training in painting, drawing, and music. The political unrest in Germany in the late 1840s probably contributed to Marschall’s decision to seek a new life in the United States. The government excused him from compulsory military service and gave him permission to immigrate to the United States. On April

27, 1849, he sailed on the Jane H. Glidden Photograph of Nicola Marschall, c. Civil War. to America and a career as an artist. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

spring 2013 67 Nicola Marschall, Artist and Soldier

Pencil sketch of “Henry” on board the Jane H. Glidden while coming to America, 1849. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

68 Ohio Valley History James J. Holmberg

Pencil sketch of an unidentified African American—likely a slave— on Napoleon Lockett’s Plantation, 1853. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Marschall landed in New Orleans and journeyed to Mobile where a cousin lived. The cousin, preparing to leave for the California goldfields, encouraged Marschall to join the party. The young artist declined and instead settled in Marion, Alabama, because, as he recalled in 1905, of its reputation as a seat of learning, the area’s beauty, and the many wealthy planters and old southern families living in the area that represented prospective clients. He opened a studio teaching art and music as well as painting portraits. By the fall of 1851, Marschall had become assistant teacher of music, drawing, painting, and

spring 2013 69 Nicola Marschall, Artist and Soldier

French and German language at the Marion Female Seminary. The school’s 1851 circular letter lists Marschall’s position and credentials, stating that his “accuracy of Drawing, boldness of conception, and richness of coloring, (in oil, water or body colors) is unsurpassed by any artist in the country. Mr. M. is a very superior performer on the Guitar and Violin, and also assists Prof. Daly on the Piano and Harp. He speaks English fluently, correctly, and with purity, and is highly competent to teach German and French languages.” Marschall also continued to paint and sketch, as well as attend and play in concerts, for his pleasure and paid commissions.2

Marion Female Seminary circular listing staff, courses, and expenses, August 16, 1851. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

70 Ohio Valley History James J. Holmberg

In 1857, Marschall returned to Europe for two years for a family visit and additional artistic training and study. Though based in Germany, he visited London, Paris, Rome, and other cities. In 1859, he returned to the Marion Female Seminary with a growing reputation as a portrait painter. In 1861, Marschall fulfilled two requests that fixed his place in Confederate history. In March, the Confederacy adopted his design for what became its first national flag (often called the “Stars and Bars”). Marschall also designed the gray uniform adopted by the Confederate Army. As he recalled in later years, the design was inspired by the uniforms of Austrian sharpshooters he saw in Verona, Italy, in 1858. Marschall served intermittently during the war. From April 6 to June 25, 1862 he served as a ninety-day volunteer in the company of Captain John Moore in the 4th Alabama Volunteer Militia Regiment. In July 1863, he supplied a substitute and was exempted from military duty. Marschall soon reconsidered and on January 20, 1864 he enlisted as a private in the 2nd Alabama Engineer Regiment at Meridian, Mississippi. On February 21, he was assigned as a drafts- man to the regiment’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel H. Lockett, one of Marion’s leading citizens and a Marschall associate. Marschall served with the 2nd Alabama Engineers to the end of the war. Military documents record Marschall’s physical features: five feet eight inches tall, with blue eyes, fair hair, and a fair complexion. Photographs dating from the Civil War period to his later years, as well as two surviving self-portraits, visually preserve his image.3

Marschall’s parole at the end of the war to return home to Marion, May 11, 1865. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

spring 2013 71 Nicola Marschall, Artist and Soldier

After the war Marschall returned to Marion, resuming his duties at the Marion Female Seminary and work as a portrait painter. Marschall’s service during the war and notoriety as designer of the first Confederate national flag and army uniform facilitated commissions, but his talent assured pleased cus- tomers and recommendations. Marschall particularly enjoyed painting former Confederate military and political leaders and became one of only a few artists to paint General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the famous cavalry leader, from life. So pleased was Forrest with his portrait that he wrote Marschall a letter of introduction and recommendation. On August 9, 1865, Marschall married Mattie Eliza Marshall of Marion, a union that produced three children, Emanuel, Kate, and Mamie. In 1870, Marschall again returned to Europe to visit family in Germany and study art Photograph of an elderly Nicola Marschall. in Paris and other European art centers, returning to THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY Alabama in 1872. He made at least two more trips to Europe, in 1879 and probably in late 1887 or early 1888—he returned to the U.S. in October 1889— staying overseas approximately two years each time.4 In 1873, the Marschall family moved to Louisville. Family tradition states that Louisville offered more opportunities for a portrait painter and Marschall had connections. Certainly, many Confederate veterans and sympathizers made Louisville their home. The city also had a large German American population. Marschall gained easy acceptance into both Notice in the Louisville Courier-Journal about the city’s professional and social circles and made Nicola Marschall opening a studio in Louisville, November 25, 1873. Louisville home for the rest of his life. Working out THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY of his studio on the second floor of the McDowell Building on the southwest corner of Fourth and Liberty (then Green) Streets, Marschall still traveled to accept commissions and exhibit at expositions. Wherever he went, he took the opportunity to attend that city’s musical and theatrical offer- ings. His membership in the Masons and United Confederate Veterans provided social and networking opportunities. In this period Marschall completed a number of portraits of Civil War veterans and leaders, both Confederate and Union, done from life and posthumously from photographs. He also copied other artists’ portraits of famous Americans. Marschall retired from painting in 1908, died on February 24, 1917, and was buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery.5

72 Ohio Valley History James J. Holmberg

Nathan Bedford Forrest to Messrs. Humphries, Murke, and Billups, introducing and recommending Marschall, August 23, 1870. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

spring 2013 73 Nicola Marschall, Artist and Soldier

Marschall’s appointment to the Fine Arts Committee of the Louisville Industrial Exposition, July 6, 1874. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

74 Ohio Valley History James J. Holmberg

Josiah Stoddard Johnston by Nicola Marschall, 1875, John C. Breckinridge by Nicola Marschall, 1881. Marschall one of the first of many portraits of former Confeder- painted this portrait from a photograph of the recently ates the artist painted after moving to Louisville. deceased former U.S. vice president, Confederate general, THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY and Confederate secretary of war. THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

An accomplished artist technically and in the use of color, Marschall’s portraits varied from vibrant color to subdued tones. Comparison of his portraits painted from photographs show his skill as a copyist. His sketches copying people and scenes and of his own creative design also showcase his talent. His numerous works are housed in institutions and homes throughout the country, but particularly in Alabama and Kentucky where he spent most of his professional life. The Filson’s collection includes ten of his portraits and his scrapbook offers significant insight into his artwork and documentation of his life and artistic career. Fame for most artists arises from their ability to immortalize their subjects on canvas. Though partly true for Marschall, his lasting fame will always lie with the two requests he fulfilled on the eve of the Civil War, when he designed a flag and uniform for the Confederate States of America. James J. Holmberg Curator

spring 2013 75 Nicola Marschall, Artist and Soldier

1 Bibliographical sources routinely date Marschall’s birth as 3 Miscellaneous Marschall army documents, 1862-1865, March 16, 1829. In contrast, official Confederate docu- Marschall Scrapbook, FHS. ments sets the year of his birth as both 1830 and 1831. See Nicola Marschall Scrapbook, The Filson Historical 4 Nathan Bedford Forrest to Messrs. Humphries, Murke, Society, Louisville (hereafter FHS). and Billups, Aug. 23, 1870, Marschall Scrapbook, FHS.

2 Stark Young, ed., “The Confederate Flag,” A Southern 5 Marschall Scrapbook; Owsley C. Costlow, “The Life Treasury of Life and Literature (New York: Charles of Nicola Marschall: The Artist who designed the First Scribner’s Sons, 1937), 215; Marion Female Seminary, Confederate Flag and Uniform,” Senior Thesis, University circular letter, Aug. 16, 1851, Marschall Scrapbook, FHS. of Louisville, 1949.

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From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715 Robbie Ethridge

obbie Ethridge’s history of the Chickasaw Rfrom their Mississippian origins through their involvement in the second wave of native slave-trading, which culminated in the Yamasee War of 1715, offers an artful blend of social and cultural history augmented with anthropologi- cal and archaeological research. Though the documentary evidence pertaining to the Chickasaw is scant at times, Ethridge mines moments of encounters with outsiders to reconstruct aspects of their lives as shaped by European contact and the forces the intruders unleashed in the Mississippian region. European contact and sus- tained interaction did not destroy Mississippian life, but Ethridge demonstrates that this seminal moment broke up communities and tribes, reoriented political hierarchies, and drew native economies into a larger world economic system. Ethridge delineates three principal causes for this transformative effect on the Chicaza Robbie Ethridge. From Chicaza to Chickasaw: and other Mississippian polities: political, eco- The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715. Chapel Hill: nomic, and social stresses from Soto’s maraud- University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 360 pp. ing; the introduction of European disease; and ISBN: 9780807871690 (paper), $27.95. the rise of the Indian slave trade, which deci- mated Native American groups while strength- slave trade eventually turned polities like the ening their ties to the nascent world economy. Chickasaw against former allies and adoptive kin These factors became endemic to the geopoliti- in the early eighteenth century. Through a mas- cal makeup of the region, creating a southern terful synthesis of numerous studies, Ethridge “shatter zone” that grew increasingly tumul- demonstrates that the dissolution of polities tuous and fragmented as the pressures of the and geopolitical change began after 900 C.E.,

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long before the intrusion of Europeans to the French explorations of Jacques Marquette and Mississippi Valley, but that it accelerated and Louis Joliet, Ethridge employs a wide-angle took on new forms after the Europeans arrived. view of Mississippi Valley societies to outline the In the period after Hernando de Soto’s ini- various pressures facing the Chicaza and other tial foray, the paramount chiefdoms and hier- polities as they adjusted to European contact. archical class structures that he observed gave She skillfully navigates archaeological data per- way to more egalitarian political structures that taining to pottery styles and settlement patterns deemphasized elite status and refigured native as evidence for the movement of people within religious cosmologies. Soto’s expeditions led to the “shatter zones” and to detail the fluctuations the introduction and increasing availability of of polities. Ethridge forthrightly admits when European trade goods, in the process depleting the documentary evidence runs thin and offers native food stores, and allowing rival “micos” to plausible speculation based on parallel devel- challenge communal leaders. Europeans exacer- opments in neighboring tribes in order to sug- bated tensions between Indian polities through gest developments within Chickasaw society. the introduction of the native slave trade, which Where the historiography disagrees—as in the drew tribes like the Chickasaw into a grow- nature of the Chicaza chiefdom encountered ing web of economic connectivity to Europe. by Soto—Ethridge presents the various posi- Competition between the Spanish, French, and tions and offers her own sensitive reading of the English also bred factionalism within kinship evidence. groups such as the red (war) and white (peace) Ethridge’s maps provide a welcome addi- moieties of the Chickasaw with their respective tion to the text, adding a visual representation ties to the British and French. In Ethridge’s tell- of slave raiding patterns, settlement dispersion, ing, the slave trade acted as the central catalyst and the overall makeup of Mississippian poli- of change, with the Chickasaw willingly adopt- ties throughout this period. From Chicaza to ing the role of principal slavers after the first Chickasaw will prove a useful and important wave of slaving tribes—the Iroquois, Westos, monograph for students of archaeology and and Occaneechis—declined in prominence. anthropology, as well as history. Clearly written The militarization of Indian polities hastened and full of detail about a period lacking con- their integration and reliance on European mar- ventional documentary evidence, it is essential kets and goods, particularly guns and ammuni- reading for researchers interested in native soci- tion, and wrought havoc in the region. eties and the early modern Southeast. Confronted with a paucity of documentary Gregory A. Michna evidence regarding Chicaza history between West Virginia University contact with Soto around 1540 and the 1673

78 Ohio Valley History Book Reviews

Sex, Sickness, and Slavery: Illness in the Antebellum South Marli F. Weiner and Mazie Hough

n Sex, Sickness, and Slavery, Marli Weiner and IMazie Hough offer a probing account of the medical community in the Old South. In antebellum America, “laypeople knew that bodies suffered and died and that physicians did not always bring significant relief” (4). In an effort to woo a skeptical public, southern physicians espoused a medical theory upholding notions of sex, race, and place particular to the South. Promoting a uniquely southern methodology enabled physicians to “act as influential arbi- ters of the social order,” eventually giving them enormous influence (212). While the authors’ work retraces well-trod medical history on the construction of race, sex, and the alleged benefits and dangers of “civilization,” they nevertheless deftly recast these themes through the lens of the Old South. Weiner and Hough discuss the medical definitions of “black and white” and “male and Marli F. Weiner and Mazie Hough. Sex, Sickness, and female” as the predominant social categories Slavery: Illness in the Antebellum South. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 288 pp. ISBN: of the Old South. The beginning chapters lay 9780252036996 (cloth), $60.00. bare the inherent contradictions in maintaining these categorizations. Weiner and Hough argue text constitutes an important contribution to that “southern physicians created complex intel- American medical history. Weiner and Hough’s lectual dilemmas” reinforcing local sex and race research shows that physicians cemented their hierarchies (126). To maintain these hierarchies, professional authority by focusing on regional physicians understood bodily shortcomings first illness and the health problems allegedly unique in racial and then in gendered terms. If physi- to black bodies. Significantly, when white phy- cians claimed that black women were less vul- sicians asserted southern medical knowledge, nerable to illness than white women, they ran they gained the power to act as specialists in the risk “of viewing them as inherently stronger tropical diseases, control black and female bod- and thus superior to white women, an untenable ies, and explain the alleged necessity of slavery. position in slave society” (47). In addition to The authors’ discussion of “ambiguous bod- the categories of sex and race, the authors define ies” in the Old South further illuminates the and analyze “place” as a particularly southern political and professional aims of physicians. construct. The analysis of place throughout the Weiner and Hough suggest that “Americans in

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the middle third of the century were committed such as the casting of curses, also caused ill- to an increasingly rigorous program of classifying ness. Rather than examine their role in the ill- bodies and eliding differences” (93). “Ambiguous nesses of slaves, owners blamed these “supersti- bodies” posed a problem because they resisted tions” for interfering with their “efforts to cure classification. Hermaphroditic or intersex bodies slaves’ ailments” (168). Yet the practice of tradi- fitted poorly into either gender category, while tional herbal or spiritual remedies offered slaves mixed-race bodies straddled multiple racial cat- an alternative to formal medical treatment they egories. Physicians knew that by arbitrating the could not control. categorization of ambiguous bodies they became Despite the authors’ extensive research, at stakeholders in regional debates over sex and race least two anecdotes reappear. An anonymous and ensured the future of their profession. review of Samuel Cartwright’s work in the The authors conclude by discussing lay Charleston Medical Review appears twice (22, knowledge and practice in the Old South. 80), as does Dr. Tomlinson Fort’s treatment Both physicians and lay folk believed the of “hyperaesthesis,” with the same diagnostic mind and body acted together. The patient’s anecdote in both locations (46, 80). Such lapses attitude had a direct impact on the course of prove puzzling in a study so richly researched. their illness, whether a physician treated them Notwithstanding these minor lapses, Weiner or not. Predictably, physicians claimed a supe- and Hough provide an exciting and insightful rior knowledge of the link between mind and perspective on the ideological underpinnings body and warned against trying home remedies of diagnosis and treatment in the antebellum before consulting a doctor. They derided above South. Their study offers a masterful guide to all the lay knowledge of slaves. For slaves, ill- the particularities of southern medicine on the ness resulted from the external environment, eve of the Civil War. Historians of the South, so the conditions of servitude proved a major medicine, gender, and race will welcome it. cause of sickness and death. However, many Bethany Johnson slaves believed that events in the spiritual realm, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

80 Ohio Valley History Book Reviews Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery Henry Goings

ntil recently, historians did not know that UHenry Goings’s Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery existed. In an interview with Benjamin Drew in 1855, former slave Goings promised that he would publish his “whole history…to the people of the United States and Canada.” In 2006, the University of Virginia library acquired from a rare book dealer what was ostensibly the only extant copy of Going’s narrative. Editors Edward Gaynor and Michael Plunkett matched the details of the narrative to the interview with Drew, traced the book’s prov- enance as much as possible, and determined the legitimacy of the library’s copy of Going’s narrative. This newly discovered narrative, written over the course of thirteen years (1855-1868), proves well worth the wait. In it, Goings details his enslavement, escape to Canada, interpretation of the Civil War, and eventual disillusion- ment with freedom in America. In the first Henry Goings. Rambles of a Runaway from Southern chapter, Goings presents his enslaved experience Slavery. Calvin Schermerhorn, Michael Plunkett, and Edward Gaynor, eds. Charlottesville: University of as unremarkable, providing limited detail about Virginia Press, 2012. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780813932385 his life. But those spare details remind modern (cloth), $45.00. readers how the antebellum South’s slave system made tragedy commonplace. Goings’s owners hiding places; he experienced no death-defying separated him from his mother and sister at a derring-do amidst the baying of bloodhounds; young age and then sold him, forcing his moves and no quilts told him what direction to follow. from Virginia, to North Carolina, and eventu- Instead, Goings relied primarily on self-confi- ally to Alabama. They also promised him free- dence and hard work to get to Canada. Along dom and then denied it. When faced with the the way, he found employment in a barbershop likelihood of separation from his wife, Goings in Portsmouth, Ohio, as a cook on boat plying made the decision to escape, remarking: “I now the canal from Portsmouth to Cleveland, and as determined to strike for liberty or death” (39). a waiter in Detroit and in a hotel in Perrsyburgh, While Goings received help during his jour- Ohio. At various times Goings had to con- ney to freedom, his “under-ground railroad” vince suspicious whites that he was free. When did not reflect the image of popular myth. He questioned at the Ohio River, Goings refused did not travel through tunnels or stay in secret to show his free papers and instead offered to

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accompany his accusers to the justice of the on the enslaved to remain obedient or else face peace. “Abashed” with his “boldness,” the inter- eternal peril. But Goings offers no explanation locutors allowed Goings to use the ferry to cross for why he ends his narrative on this dark note. the river (43). Without confidence to face down In the most telling passage, the preacher states, his accusers or the wherewithal to find employ- “I will give you passes, provided you promise ment in various cities, Goings never would have not to stand around the streets engaged in loud made it to Canada. The Underground Railroad, talking and laughing with other negroes” (119). it appears, depended on the ingenuity of its Perhaps here Goings means to point to the sort passengers. “freedom” whites offered African Americans: In the early chapters Goings provides the emancipation without freedom. details of his life, but by the later chapters he Following Calvin Schermerhorn’s won- offers a hemispheric call for racial uplift. He asks derful introduction, the editors use the foot- his fellow citizens to work hard, act virtuously, notes to identify every person mentioned in and accept their freedom with “grateful hearts” the narrative using census data, county and tax (75). Writing about the Civil War, Goings pro- records, and court documents. In addition to claims, “From the signs of the times there is this biographical information, the editors pro- everything to hope, nothing to fear” (60). After vide useful and thorough contextual informa- the war’s end and Lincoln’s assassination, Goings tion. Goings’s description of catching sixty- pleads: “My colored Brethren…let not your pound rockfish in the Roanoke River, for exam- sudden and unexpected emancipation have its ple, prompts the editors to explain: “It was not lustre dimmed by violence or revenge.…Act as uncommon to find fish weighing sixty to sev- men…manfully exhibit yourselves, at least the enty-five pounds…in North Carolina waters” white man’s equal, by the exercise and cultiva- (13n31). They also highlight and explain the tion of that Divine Spirit” (73). But if the Civil significance of Goings’s literary references from War chapters highlight the promise of emanci- the Christian Bible to William Shakespeare, and pation, by 1868 when Goings wrote the appen- provide numerous historiographical references dix he had lost hope. In the opening paragraph, to explicate and corroborate the details of the Goings suggests that his “emancipated brethren” narrative. Goings’s heartbreaking story deserves move to “British Honduras.” He details the fail- to be told because it reflects the story of eman- ings of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the pervasive cipation in America. If the Civil War allowed violence of the postwar South, ultimately con- African American hopes to soar, the failure cluding: “No act of Congress can pull down the of Reconstruction and the violence of racism social barrier erected by superstition and preju- brought them crashing down again. dice” (84). He concludes his narrative by relat- Matthew Salafia ing a sermon by a white preacher who called North Dakota State University

82 Ohio Valley History Book Reviews Divided Loyalties: Kentucky’s Struggle for Armed Neutrality in the Civil War James W. Finck

he complex story of Kentucky’s attempt Tto maintain neutrality at the outset of the American Civil War merits careful analysis. In Divided Loyalties, James W. Finck sets out to address this deficiency by focusing attention on the critical year from November 1860 to November 1861, a period that “decided Kentucky’s fate” (xiii). Finck identifies three principal political groups in Kentucky at that time—unconditional Unionists, secessionists, and the largest group, conditional Unionists. Finck blames E. Merton Coulter’s The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (1926) for over- stating the strength of Unionist sentiment in Kentucky and therefore the inevitability of the state’s decision to remain in the Union. In stress- ing the complexity and fluidity of the political situation in Kentucky, Finck rightly reasserts the importance of close attention to chronology. At the beginning of this critical year Unionists fought for neutrality because they feared James W. Finck. Divided Loyalties: Kentucky’s Struggle for Armed Neutrality in the Civil War. El that Kentucky would join the Confederacy. Dorado Hills, Ca.: Savas Beatie, 2012. 264 pp. ISBN: However, when Unionist sentiment strength- 9781611211023 (cloth), $26.95. ened, secessionists began to favor neutrality. Finck’s primary contribution is recognizing the matter. For example, Finck makes the useful that neutrality served as the banner of political point that 72 percent of Kentucky counties voted underdogs within Kentucky’s rapidly changing for the same party in 1852, 1856, and 1860, political landscape in 1860-1861. Ultimately, reflecting the persistence of party loyalties, even Finck concludes, “maintaining neutrality would though the Democrats faced Whigs, Americans, prove to be a difficult task, with men on both and Constitutional Unionists in those respec- sides favoring neutrality for their own agendas. tive elections. He also points out that historians Remaining in the Union was never a foregone should not necessarily interpret a vote in 1860 conclusion” (xvi). for Constitutional Union candidate John Bell Unfortunately, the chapters that support as reflecting unconditional Unionist sentiment. these conclusions have too many questionable Fair enough, but he goes on to argue that a vote assertions to make this study the final word on for Bell did not represent a vote for the Union

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because Virginia and Tennessee also voted for narrative, Finck does not cite Elizabeth Bell and joined the Confederacy and Bell him- Leonard’s fine biography, Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: self supported the Confederacy. This logic con- Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky flates the political situation of November 1860 (2011). He also fails to cite William C. Davis’s with that of mid-1861, a violation of the careful Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the attention to chronology Finck urges elsewhere. Union (2011), though Davis wrote the foreword Finck seeks to prove that Kentucky remained for Finck’s book. Perhaps these two volumes more loyal to its own self interest than to the appeared too late for consultation, but certainly Union, insisting that even the “massive defeat for Finck could have profitably examined Anne E. the States Rights Party in the May [1861] election Marshall’s Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The did not prove Kentucky’s loyalty to the Union.” Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border Unionists won this election of delegates to a pro- State (2010). Unfortunately, Finck’s bibliogra- posed border states convention with an over- phy includes references to only two books and whelming 96 percent of votes cast. Finck con- two articles published after 2003, and none after tends that “numbers do not tell the entire story” 2005. Even the appendix, which provides the (111). If it represented such a great victory for texts of various speeches, proclamations, party Unionism, he argues, Unionists “would not have platforms, and letters, is poorly integrated into blocked the call for a state convention in May the book. For example, Alabama commissioner or tried so desperately to create and arm its own Stephen F. Hale’s letter to Kentucky Governor Home Guard” (132). The May 1861 elections Beriah Magoffin has one date in the footnote did spell the doom of secessionists in Kentucky, citation and a different date in the appendix (43, but what political group after winning an elec- 209), although neither the narrative nor the note tion favors another election to reconsider the out- alerts the reader that the text of the letter appears come? With the state militia in the hands of seces- in the appendix. Magoffin’s proclamation of sionists, why would Unionists not arm their own April 24, 1860 inexplicably appears twice within military force in opposition? Finck insists that the appendix itself (197-98, 225). Such careless- most secessionists did not vote, though if they ness does not inspire confidence in the reliability had “Kentucky’s Unionist image would be far less of the transcriptions nor the quality of the analy- impressive” (112). However, he fails to explain sis. The story of Kentucky’s path from neutrality why the secessionists failed to vote in May. to Union merits more attentive study. Sources present another problem. Although Daniel W. Stowell Joseph Holt figures significantly in Finck’s The Papers of Abraham Lincoln

84 Ohio Valley History Book Reviews

Illinois’s War: The Civil War in Documents Mark Hubbard

hen Abraham Lincoln spoke of “a house Wdivided against itself,” he intended his words to serve as a metaphor for the Union. Yet as the primary sources edited by Eastern Illinois University historian Mark Hubbard in Illinois’s War: The Civil War in Documentsreveal, Lincoln’s native Illinois also proved a “house divided” throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. Part of Ohio University Press’s “The Civil War in the Great Interior” series that also covers Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, and Ohio, Illinois’s War provides a comprehensive portrait of the state between 1850 and 1870, with race and slavery at the center. The book’s eight chapters each feature approximately ten wide-ranging primary readings. Despite ample historical context and a clear interpretive frame- work, Hubbard lets his fabulous sources speak for themselves. They reveal that while Illinois played a central role in the Union cause, the Mark Hubbard, ed. Illinois’s War: The Civil War in state, like the Union itself, was also fraught with Documents. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780821420102 (paper), $18.65. division. The book’s contents will leave propo- nents of Confederate internal defeat much to consider regarding comparable factionalism 1858. Illinois’s shift toward the Republican Party within the wartime North. in 1860 marked a Yankee victory in what histo- The “most consequential state in the Union,” rian Richard Lyle Power termed the “thirty year’s Hubbard’s Illinois looks more like a compli- war” between pro- and antislavery influences in cated border state than a Unionist monolith (xv). the state. Although these divergent political cul- Like Ohio and Indiana, contemporary observ- tures formed an often-shaky wartime coalition, ers often remarked on divisions within Illinois the 1862 “Secession Constitution,” civil liber- and the border North, and Hubbard under- ties issues, and debates over contraband slaves scores these fissures. Arising out of an antebel- split Illinoisans at both polling places and in lum demographic rift that saw upland southern- blood-soaked streets. Even within the ranks, dis- ers and eastern Yankees vie for political and cul- cord abound. As Hubbard’s section on common tural supremacy, Illinois proved ground zero for soldiers reveals, Illinois again stood as a north- sectional political arguments during the 1850s, ern standard, contributing upland southern, culminating in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of native-born Yankee, African American, and Irish,

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German, and mixed European regiments. These election data. Overall, Hubbard’s wealth of soldiers took center stage in the Western Theater, documentary evidence provides an exemplary Hubbard maintains, and played an integral role composite of stasis and change, consensus and in the development of what he deems “total war.” contestation in the highly stratified Middle Changes wrought by war sparked new West during the Civil War era. debates over race and freedom on the home Yet Illinois’s War is not without its short- front, as the former white society in a white comings. For instance, Hubbard’s use of the republic grappled with rapid racial transfor- term total war will rankle some military his- mation. Citizens clashed over liberalizing war torians, particularly those who subscribe to aims, waved the “bloody shirt,” and debated Mark Grimsley’s more nuanced portrait of the nature of Reconstruction. Although Illinois “hard war.” Further, arguments about primacy became the first state to ratify the Thirteenth and typicality are easy to allege but difficult to Amendment, many residents contested racial refute. One might suggest that Pennsylvania or progress at every turn. Yet as Hubbard’s vista Ohio, for instance, also played primary roles of postwar Illinois demonstrates, reform issues, in the war and better represented the North. economic policy, and battles between capital These minor quibbles, however, do not detract and labor gradually supplanted questions of from Hubbard’s success in addressing the polit- Reconstruction. Indeed, as Hubbard suggests ical divide within Illinois that historians of the the war ultimately made Illinois into a national Middle Period typically overlook. A notable cross-section, with Chicago as its metropolis, book within an important series, Hubbard the great city of the interior bridging East and offers an indispensible volume for students of West. Although Hubbard rightly gives prior- the Civil War and Midwestern history. Well- ity to racial politics and slavery, women’s work suited as a jumping off point for graduate on the battlefront and activism on the home students and serious researchers, Illinois’s War front, libertarian-minded dissenters, Peace will also appeal to undergraduates and buffs Democrats, striking miners, and sanitary work- due to its readability. The volume confirms ers all occupy critical space in his chronology. that despite Illinois’s considerable contribu- Moreover, by putting central and southern tions of political and military leadership and Illinois on near-equal footing with Chicago its impressive marshaling of manpower and and the Springfield region, Hubbard provides materiel, Illinoisans—like all Americans— a fair and representative portrait of the state remained simultaneously divided over the war as nineteenth century Illinoisans viewed it. To and its legacies. its credit, Illinois’s War also features a timeline, Matthew E. Stanley classroom discussion questions, and illustra- University of Cincinnati tions, including several helpful maps detailing

86 Ohio Valley History Book Reviews Conflicting Memories on the “River of Death”: The Chickamauga Battlefield and the Spanish-American War, 1863-1933 Bradley S. Keefer

hen Americans think of Civil War Wbattles in 1863, they usually think of Gettysburg or Chancellorsville, the cru- cial eastern battles. If prompted, they might remember that western battles mattered and recall the victory at Vicksburg that led to Union control of the Mississippi River. In contrast, fewer Americans remember the Battle of Chickamauga fought in September 1863, south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, in northwest Georgia. This bloody Union defeat lived up to the supposed Cherokee meaning of the word Chickamauga, or “River of Death”; after two days, thirty-five thousand Union and Confederate soldiers had been killed, wounded, or declared missing. Eventually, the federal government preserved the site as a national battlefield park. During the Spanish-American War and the world wars of the twentieth century the battlefield also served as a military installation. Bradley S. Keefer. Conflicting Memories on the Bradley S. Keefer’s Conflicting Memories on “River of Death”: The Chickamauga Battlefield and the Spanish-American War, 1863-1933. Kent, Oh.; the “River of Death” chronicles this unique his- Kent State University Press, 2012. 400 pp. ISBN: tory: the battle, the creation of the park, and 9781606351260 (cloth), $65.00. its subsequent use as a military camp, particularly during the Spanish-American War. Keefer retreating U.S. forces. Despite the controversies first describes the battle itself; the performance surrounding the Union’s leadership, many of of Union General William S. Rosecrans, in par- the common soldiers who fought in the engage- ticular, became the subject of intense scrutiny ment joined together to create a sacred space on both during and after the war. When General Chickamauga battlefield that commemorated James Longstreet, on loan from Robert E. Lee’s their service and sacrifice. While this effort Army of Northern Virginia, tore through a gap seems similar to other battlefield preservation in Union lines, Rosecrans and a portion of his efforts, the park remained unusual because fed- army retreated back to Chattanooga. Only the eral officials made it available for military train- action of Union General George Thomas, the ing. When the United States declared war on “Rock of Chickamauga,” prevented Confederate Spain three years after the park’s dedication, vol- forces from pursuing and destroying the unteer soldiers trained at the facility. Most of

spring 2013 87 Book Reviews

these men never saw combat, but hundreds died century and contributed to the loss of black from diseases such as typhoid fever. According civil rights. While Keefer highlights Union and to Keefer, the contrasting memories of Civil Confederate veterans’ joint efforts to create War and Spanish-American War veterans who the battlefield park, he argues that their coop- occupied the field represented a “story of what eration proved more practical than ideologi- happens when one group of soldiers disagrees cal. Chickamauga, like most other Civil War with another on the meaning and importance battles, occurred in a former Confederate state of the same piece of sacred ground” (1). Their and Union soldiers needed local support for different experiences on the field led Civil War their preservation efforts. This micro-study thus and Spanish-American War veterans to inter- suggests an alternate, non-ideologically based pret the space in dissimilar ways. explanation for these reunions. Without south- While military historians have studied the ern participation, such reunions could not have Battle of Chickamauga in detail, Keefer exam- taken place. Keefer also identifies a difference ines the postwar battlefield park in light of in veterans’ interpretation and memory of the what scholars know about Civil War memory battlefield, but he does not provide an exten- and broader memory studies. Keefer includes sive discussion of the view of Spanish-American an extensive discussion of previous studies War veterans. His evidence for this divergence on Civil War memory in his book, particu- emphasizes postwar debates on the responsibil- larly as they relate to veterans’ desire to pre- ity for deadly camp diseases. Spanish-American serve important battlegrounds. He also offers War volunteers blamed the park, while Civil the reader a solidly researched and well writ- War veterans, specifically those who created ten study of the creation and utilization of the the park, blamed the volunteers. Keefer fails to Chickamauga battlefield park. While both dis- document how Spanish-American War veterans cussions offer valuable insights, Keefer does constructed a counter-narrative of their expe- not connect the two sections. For example, he rience on the Chickamauga battlefield beyond highlights studies that argue that northern sol- this postwar controversy. Thus, while Keefer’s diers constructed a historical memory of cour- study proves less valuable than the author envi- age and manly sacrifice broad enough to include sioned as a memory study, it does represent an southern soldiers, best illustrated by “Blue and outstanding case study of the creation and evo- Gray” reunions. Some scholars have argued that lution of one battlefield park in the fifty years Union and Confederate soldiers’ postwar gath- after the Civil War. erings played a central role in the triumph of Barbara Gannon sectional reunion at the end of the nineteenth University of Central Florida

88 Ohio Valley History Book Reviews A History of Education in Kentucky William E. Ellis

ver a century of scholarship confirms OKentucky’s tradition of educational neglect. Historians may shift emphasis or add nuance but the narrative remains the same. Kentuckians failed to recognize the benefits of formal instruction throughout the state’s early history; when large-scale educational reform appeared, progress remained limited and incon- sistent. William Ellis’s ambitious one-volume History of Education in Kentucky updates the story by adding a twenty-first century perspective to Kentucky’s well-traversed educational past. Ellis, professor emeritus of history at Eastern Kentucky University, adopts a methodi- cal approach; four, equally divided sections take us from the one-room schoolhouses of the frontier era, to the state’s most recent approaches, to formal instruction. Each section contains chapters on elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education, and Ellis employs public records, William E. Ellis. A History of Education in Kentucky. secondary accounts, anecdotes, and previously Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 546 pp. ISBN: 9780813129778 (cloth), $40.00. unpublished reflections to document the history of the state’s schools. The work follows a strict political chronol- Appalachian “Settlement School,” the failure of ogy. The policies of Kentucky governors and Cora Wilson Stewart’s illiteracy campaign, and state legislators provide the backdrop for hun- other colorful asides give testimony to the dura- dreds of histories about schoolhouses and indi- ble qualities and uncommon characteristics of a vidual educators. The litany of programs, ini- Kentucky education. tiatives, and institutions often becomes pon- Ellis’s thoughtfully prepared collegiate his- derous but not pedantic. Ellis embeds within tories prove equally valuable. Sketches of suc- the detail many charming vignettes, long for- cesses, successors, and failures demonstrate gotten but useful stories featuring men and the tenuous, unsettled nature of higher edu- women from Kentucky history. Schoolmaster cation in Kentucky. Ellis develops individual John McKinney’s showdown with a stubborn accounts in isolation but makes thematic con- wildcat, the unconventional childhood educa- nections. He notes, for example, the long-term tion of Supreme Court Chief Justice Frederick consequences of denominational influence in Moore Vinson, the success of Katherine Pettit’s higher learning, arguing that Transylvania,

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Centre, Campbellsville, Georgetown, and and graft inhibited what was otherwise a step other denominationally controlled colleges in the right direction. Nepotism, bribes, and struggled to find their place among publicly kickbacks to county education trustees—men funded and progressively oriented state col- responsible for the hiring in and manage- leges. Readers will find some expected pat- ment of local schools—ensured that teaching terns—World War II proved a net positive remained of a low quality throughout the first for most Kentucky colleges, intercollegiate half of the twentieth century. athletics developed in spite of administrative As a chronicle of institutional politics, A protests—as well as other almost inexplicable History of Education in Kentucky is an unquali- trends—military schools never found a solid fied success. As a contribution to history of footing while professional schools, especially education, however, Ellis’s work remains programs in medicine and law, experienced regrettably deficient. His reliance on aged, early and permanent success. often irrelevant secondary scholarship under- However, Ellis devotes the majority of his mines authenticity and works against intended work to documenting the abysmal failures of significance. For example, Elllis draws his his- Kentucky public elementary and secondary tory of Transylvania University almost exclu- schools. A system of common, tuition-free sively from Niles Sonne’s Liberal Kentucky, schooling, he argues, languished for want of published in 1939, and John D. Wright’s public support, legislative oversight, and a sat- Transylvania: Tutor to the West, published in isfactory approach to teacher education. For 1975. More troubling perhaps is Ellis’s lack much of the state’s history, Kentuckians proved of historiographical sophistication. Historians neither willing nor able to contribute to this moved beyond school-centered definitions of end. A brief period of reform under state edu- education decades ago, creating a field that cation superintendent Robert J. Breckenridge is now more broadly conceived and inclu- in the 1850s did not survive the Civil War. Not sive. No longer confined to environments of until the state’s fourth Constitution (1891) structured learning, historians of education did the legislature formalize a regulated sys- now investigate the means and significance tem of state financial assistance. The education of cultural exchange and the intellectual lega- of Kentucky teachers proved another matter cies passed from one generation to the next. entirely. Wandering pedagogues—the intem- Schools remain important to the story but perate, ill-tempered, and poorly educated mas- historians now consider traditions, social val- ters of one-room schoolhouses—contributed ues, and cultural habits. An updated, historio- to the rustic quality of early Kentucky. Pleas graphically relevant history of Kentucky’s edu- for even basic evaluations of teacher compe- cational heritage could, for example, consider tency went unfulfilled until the middle of the the effects of print culture, public celebra- nineteenth century. Requirements increased tions, political oratory, rural mannerisms, and slowly but with purpose; a one-day test of rudi- inherited family customs. A more comprehen- mentary subject knowledge in 1852 became a sive, less-encyclopedic narrative is desperately week-long “teachers institute” in 1870, and a needed and long overdue. more rigorous two-day state exam at the turn James P. Cousins of the twentieth century. However, corruption Western Michigan University

90 Ohio Valley History Book Reviews Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 Rebecca Sharpless

he cover of this engaging study of African TAmerican cooks in the century following the Civil War features an aproned cook seated in a galley kitchen holding a young white girl on her lap. The 1943 photograph, taken for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Administration, highlights the physical connection between the figures while touching delicate historical questions about class and race in the Jim Crow era. The gaze between the two figures draws our attention so that the cook’s enor- mously swollen knee, which supports the child, is easily missed. For this cook and many like her, Sharpless argues, a sentimental southern scene rested on a pillar of historical pain and complexity. Before 1960, the low wages paid to African Americans required nearly all black women to work, providing cheap household labor for white families. According to Sharpless, work Rebecca Sharpless. Cooking in Other Women’s in other people’s homes occupied a “middle Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. ground between slavery and an open economy” 304 pp. ISBN: 9781469606866 (paper), $24.95. (xi), with field labor the only alternative. An appendix documents the stunningly low wages paid through the period, underscoring the dif- hours, and enhanced personal autonomy. Cooks ficulty black families faced. Isolated by the labored to educate their children so they would nature of their work, cooks struggled for dig- never have to work in white households. nity amid racist assumptions about their intel- Teasing out the experience of cooks from ligence and honesty—in contrast to the ubiqui- domestic workers in general proves a challenge, tous and jolly image of Aunt Jemima. Over the since many women cooked, cleaned, and nursed course of a century, cooks rejected live-in jobs children, or moved in and out of these positions. in favor of day work to maintain family bonds. But only cooking offered a culturally recognized When other opportunities opened—in indus- creative space, the chance of local fame, and try, schools, black businesses, beauty parlors, occasionally independence as a restaurateur or and government offices—black women seized caterer. In few other realms were southern black them for better wages, shorter and more regular women “allowed to succeed” (170), though

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even recognized cooks rarely earned enough to and the fact that cooks could not prepare two become homeowners. After World War II, one meals for two families. “In kind” gifts of cloth- cook delighted at the prospect of public housing ing or castoff furnishings proved helpful, but (96-97). Among the sources Sharpless employs such acts of one-way giving underscored the are cookbooks written by southern white women unequal relationship. While the stereotype of that feature recipes by African American cooks. the loving Mammy appealed broadly to whites In Dixie Dishes (1941), Louisville writer Marion between 1865 and 1960, Sharpless argues per- Flexner told of “our cook Molly…a true art- suasively that cooks’ real love was for their ist.” When pressed by admiring white women own family. As New York Times editor Harold to share her recipe for shredded apple pie, she Raines once noted, “There is no trickier subject left out key ingredients or steps. Molly told for a writer from the South than that of affec- Marion she intended to protect something she tion between a black person and a white one in could do “better’n ennybody else.” Addressing the unequal world of segregation,” because “the her white readership, Flexner blithely betrayed dishonesty upon which a society is founded Molly’s wish: “I’m afraid she wouldn’t approve makes every emotion suspect” (“Grady’s Gift,” of the fact that I’m sharing her prized pie recipe New York Times Magazine, Dec. 1, 1991). The with everyone” (xxi, and Dixie Dishes, 125-26). Raines’s family maid stayed seven years and Whites might enjoy the food cooks prepared, taught him about the civil rights struggle, but the races rarely ate it together, one of many but most cooks viewed their work chiefly as a ways to reinforce white supremacy. Uniforms means to survive. While some remained in the proved another tool of repression, and Sharpless same job many years, most moved frequently to reports that servants resisted wearing them in avoid ill treatment, obtain slightly better wages, public. In the 1930s, Martha Poole’s Louisville or to avoid the feeling of “belonging” to whites. employer assigned a different color uniform for Cross-racial intimacy had keen edges; the men each part of the day, the final pink outfit match- of the house commonly viewed black women ing the dining room wallpaper. Not only did as “fair game.” Older women or family mem- she become “part of the household décor,” but bers would “tell you stories of rape…hard too,” Poole had to wash (on her own time) three sepa- one Washington, D.C., cook recalled, “No rate uniforms. She ultimately quit. lies!”(139). Many who cooked for a living struggled The threat of sexual harassment and the fail- to feed their own families. The book’s most ure of New Deal wage and hour laws to cover poignant passages come from the children of domestic work make no appearance in Kathryn cooks. Richard Wright remembered waiting for Stockett’s 2009 novel The Help or in the film his mother’s employers to finish their dinner: of the same title. In Cooking in Other Women’s “Watching the white people eat would make Kitchens, Sharpless labors to fill a pantry with my empty stomach churn and I would grow stories from the legion of southerners who expe- vaguely angry” (103). The common practice of rienced a remarkable slice of American history. “toting” or the “service pan”—allowing cooks to Emily Bingham take food home—compensated for low wages Independent Scholar, Louisville

92 Ohio Valley History Book Reviews Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer

reedom Rights is a collection of twelve F essays intended to represent the diver- sity of the current scholarship on the modern U.S. civil rights movement. The editors dedi- cate the book to Steven F. Lawson, credit- ing the inspiration of his many seminal books and years of graduate teaching and specifically his call in his article “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement” for a “broader and more interactive model” of the movement (American Historical Review 96 [April 1991], 456-71). Fulfilling that call, these essays demonstrate how historians have enriched our understanding of the struggle for racial equality, presenting an expan- sive view of the movement and extending the chronology far beyond the older “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative. The story begins with postwar action by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer, eds. Freedom not in school desegregation or voting rights liti- Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Move- ment. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, gation but in campaigns to fight racial stereo- 2011. 402 pp. ISBN: 9780813134482 (cloth), $40.00. typing in popular culture, and with the Young Women’s Christian Association’s (YWCA) embrace of multiracialism and fight against If these essays substantially lengthen the segregation in its own ranks. Pippa Hollaway, chronology of the movement, they likewise moreover, sees even earlier precedents in her widen its locus. A few of the essays demon- tale of disenfranchised felons’ efforts in the early strate the transregional nature of the movement. 1910s and 1920s to have their vote restored. Krystal D. Frazier, for example, looks at how The story is likewise stretched at the other end relationships among families spread out between by essays on Equal Employment Opportunity the Deep South and the urban North affected Commission (EEOC) enforcement of civil the young African Americans who came of age rights law in the 1970s and 1980s, political bat- at the time of the Emmett Till murder, while tles in Alabama at the turn of the new century, Danielle L. McGuire documents the national and the remaining racial “blight” in the suppos- campaign that coalesced around the North edly post-racial era of President Barack Obama. Carolina trial of Joan Little. Other essays focus

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on how the NAACP, YWCA, and EEOC each in argument and ability to make the claim for their own way confronted racism on a national the significance of the particular story in the level. Jacqueline Castledine introduces the inter- larger narrative of the freedom struggle. The national context in her exploration of African main weakness of the book, however, lies in American and South African jazzwomen’s cri- an internal contradiction. In the opening tique of white male supremacy in all its forms. essay Lawson critiques the “long civil rights Indeed, only three of the twelve essays tell stories movement” approach that has in recent years located specifically or narrowly in the South. animated debates about the periodization and With an emphasis on gender and sexual- major themes of the quest for racial equality in many of the essays, Freedom Rights also ity. He rejects efforts to extend the chronol- raises the question of who stood at the center ogy past 1954-1968, arguing that doing so of the movement and what it aimed to achieve. blurs the distinctiveness of the movement. Women and issues of family and sexuality play Moreover, he makes the case for defining the a lead role in eight of the twelve essays. Black civil rights movement as the southern black- women (and some white) are the key actors in led campaign for voting rights and against the stories of the YWCA’s move toward multira- overt discrimination, for re-centering Martin cialism, a black communist family’s endurance Luther King as the leader and inspiration of during the Cold War, jazz vocalists’ challenge to that struggle, and for viewing it separately racism at home and abroad, and the EEOC’s from the popular front of the 1930s and 1940s commitment to fighting discrimination in a and the black power movement of the 1960s changing political climate. Moreover, these and 1970s. The remainder of the book belies essays reveal the extent to which activists fought that position on almost every score by explod- for and understood control over one’s own body ing the narrow chronological frame; demon- and sexuality as a basic right. McGuire high- strating the transregional, national, and inter- lights this in her description of Joan Little’s trial national stage on which the movement played for murdering her jailor after he forced him- out; largely ignoring the top-down male cen- self upon her, and the role of that trial in rally- tered leadership personified by King; hinting ing people to protest sexual exploitation of all at links both with black communists in the women. But as Stacy Braukman illustrates in postwar period and black nationalists in the her essay on the Johns Committee in Florida, later years; and most important, suggesting a segregationists likewise focused on and even broader meaning of freedom than the “privi- obsessed over the supposed “perversion”—that leges the state grants its citizens and protec- is, the nontraditional sexuality—of movement tions” against infringements upon those priv- activists. Thus, these essays illustrate how activ- ileges (23). The contrast between the opening ists conceived of the movement as a struggle for and framing essay and the remainder of the autonomous personhood, and with it bodily book should provide food for thought for his- integrity and dignity, and how challenges to tra- torians and others interested in understand- ditional notions of gender and sexuality threat- ing the when, what, and where of the civil ened white supremacy. rights movement. As with many anthologies, the essays in this Tracy E. K’Meyer collection are uneven in the persuasiveness of University of Louisville

94 Ohio Valley History Announcements

Cincinnati explores the Civil War through the arts This summer, Cincinnatians have the opportunity to explore our Civil War history in three unique ways thanks to the Civil War Cincy package, a collaboration among Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

The Cincy Civil War package, priced at $45, includes a voucher for one guest admission to the Cincinnati History Museum, one guest admission to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and one limited seating ticket to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s Lincoln Portrait performance with Maya Angelou from November 8-10.

Now open at Museum Center through October 27, learn about Cincinnati’s involvement in the war in the free exhibit Cincinnati and the Civil War: 1863. See artifacts from our own collection that help paint a picture of important events such as Confederate General John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry raid through Ohio, battles of the 10th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and the Great Western Sanitary Fair. The Cincy Civil War package may be purchased through the ticket offices of all three organiza- Also open at Museum Center, Hush the Fields is tions through September 2. Cincinnati History a mixed media art exhibition by the artist Robert Museum and Freedom Center vouchers are Claiborne Morris and inspired by Douglas A. redeemable through November 10. For more Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize- information, call (513) 287-7001 or visit www. winning book, Slavery by cincymuseum.org. Another Name.

spring 2013 95 ANNOUNCEMENTS

96 Ohio Valley History Ohio Valley History is a Submission Information for Contributors to OHIO VALLEY STAFF Steven M. Stowe Allison Kropp collaboration of The Filson Indiana University Gary Z. Lindgren Editors Nikki M. Taylor Dr. Mitchel Livingston Historical Society, Cincinnati A. Glenn Crothers University of Cincinnati Phillip C. Long Museum Center, and the

Postmaster, send address changes to Filson Historical Society, © Cincinnati Museum Center and The Filson Historical Society 2013 1310 S. Third St., Louisville, KY 40208. OHIO VALLEYHISTORY

Periodicals postage paid at Cincinnati, Ohio, and additional mailing offices.