Sisterhood of Blood: the Will to Descend and the Formation of The

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Carolyn Strange

Journal of Women's History, Volume 26, Number 3, Fall 2014, pp. 105-128 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2014.0052

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jowh/summary/v026/26.3.strange.html

Access provided by Australian National University (15 May 2015 02:16 GMT) 2014 Sisterhood of Blood The Will to Descend and the Formation of the Daughters of the American Revolution

Carolyn Strange

The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), one of many white lineal societies that emerged in the late-nineteenth century, promoted a fantasy of the nation as an extended white family, united by blood. Yet the DAR faced internal and external challenges before it could transform documented Revolutionary blood into political capital. The organization accomplished this by asserting its biological credentials selectively, not just in racial and class terms, but also in reference to the fitness of its ancestors and descendants. The DAR’s “will to descend,” and the ambition of its leaders, meant that patriotic character had to be demonstrated as well as celebrated. By narrating a compelling, ethno-nationalist interpretation of U.S. history—inclusive and elitist, democratic and demonstratively exclusionary—the DAR began to exercise a marked influence over political culture within a decade of its founding, culmi- nating in its enthusiastic support for the War with Spain.

he 1890s was a particularly bloody decade in U.S. history, opening with the massacre at Wounded Knee and closing with a quick and victori- ousT war against Spain, followed by a protracted assault against Philippine resistance fighters. A different kind of bloody campaign characterized the decade as well: the homegrown craze for tracing bloodlines. As one mea- sure of this new interest in genealogy, in 1900 the journal Patriotic Review listed seventy heritage societies, half of which had emerged since 1890. The citizens who searched for blood relatives in family attics, graveyards, libraries, and archives, were as likely to be women as men, and they joined historical and genealogical societies by the tens of thousands. Ancestral research provided a bridge into public life for women, particularly those with the documentation required to join the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). Founded in 1890, the DAR quickly became the largest women’s descent society, and one of the country’s most prominent women’s organizations. Five years after its establishment one of the DAR’s co-founders, Ellen Hardin Walworth, proudly declared “genealogy affords a field of study where men and women have an equal interest and a common bond.”1 The Society, and a crop of similar organizations that sprang up in the 1890s, sought to affirm another bond: the organic and indissoluble link

© 2014 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 26 No. 3, 105–128. 106 Journal of Women’s History Fall between the nation’s origins and its uncharted future.2 Nation-building rhetoric in the United States and other nascent nations, notably Italy and Germany, deployed tropes of common familial origin and ancestry to link blood, soil, and nation.3 The DAR contributed by stoking pride in, and reawakening the memory of, the Revolution and articulating its values in family terms. As the historian Stuart McConnell argues, white lineal societies imagined the nation “as a kind of extended family, held together by the blood tie of kinship.” Sectional politics had torn the Union apart in the mid-nineteenth century, but patriots believed blood relationships could rebind it. Genealogical groups set out accordingly to construct a kinship- defined national identity, one that linked “true Americanism” to a racial and ethnic cohort distinct from newly emancipated African Americans and from the rising numbers of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.4 As genealogy went public it became political, for women as well as men.5 Although female “guardians of tradition” had long demonstrated their capacity to lead such patriotic heritage projects as the preservation of Washington’s homestead at Mount Vernon and the establishment of the National Trust in England, the club movement of the late nineteenth century provided new impetus and infrastructure for women to organize and establish a public presence. Temperance, social purity, and suffrage were causes that inspired women internationally over this period, but national and nationalistic preoccupations also stirred women to action.6 Women able to trace their lineage to ancestors who had supported or fought for liberty could demonstrate to all Americans genealogy’s capacity to flesh out the story of the nation’s birth. Through the DAR, members collectively took pride in this scarce commodity: documented patriotic blood. Critical studies of the DAR’s history attribute its remarkable growth and national profile to its conservatism, specifically its appeal to middle- class white women. Attracted to the prospect of celebrating their family heritage and drawn to the opportunity to promote an exclusive notion of the national family, they could join the Society without compromising their domestic identities and class status. Although the DAR included self- identified suffragists it was not a woman’s rights organization; indeed, the Daughters’ veneration of heroic female forebears was more than matched by its celebration of male war heroes and political leaders, George Washing- ton in particular.7 The historian Francesca Morgan underscores the DAR’s exclusively white members’ ambition to augment their sense of distinction: “Agreeing that a combination of race and documented bloodlines denoted Americanness, many white women based American national belonging on descent rather than consent.”8 Yet their attempt to translate bloodlines into organizational power also provoked internal struggles over the value and 2014 Carolyn Strange 107 meanings of blood. In addition to facing external critics’ charges of elit- ism, the Society’s members and leaders had reason to question the quality of their patriotic blood five generations removed from the Revolutionary era. Because blood began to accrue new legal and political meanings for Americans in the 1890s, any patriot parading a biological passport to civic leadership invited scrutiny. But bloodlines also attracted scrutiny in more troubling ways. Indeed, even as prospective Daughters filled out their eligibility forms and presented their lineage documentation for approval, Bureau of Indian Affairs agents were traveling over the country, drawing up rolls of “full-blood” and “mixed blood” Indians; Jim Crow courts were ruling on racial status based on blood quantum; and immigration agents and school inspectors were beginning to screen suspect populations for signs of bad blood.9 This article examines the ways in which the DAR Board of Management and members manipulated the meanings of Revolutionary lineage over the 1890s in order to accomplish their overriding aim: to shape national political culture. Blood was culturally potent but the Society’s leaders soon discovered its political volatility. Historians who have examined the Daughters’ handling of blood have focused on the ideological incoherence of their rhetoric. The historian Woden Teachout describes the Daughters’ genealogical approach as paradoxical: they believed in “ideas of good blood and a kind of genealogical determinism,” while they also claimed to stand up for American values and democracy. Similarly the American studies scholar Michael Sweeney examines the DAR’s genealogical discourse in the early 1890s to analyze how the organization reconciled its discordant beliefs in “mutually supporting” ways.10 Yet the Daughters were political animals, not intellectuals, and they were led by ambitious, power-seeking individuals. The leadership’s goal was to convince the wider public that inheritors of blood could promote patriotism in unique ways, and the DAR accomplished this feat through its demonstrated commitment to nation building. From tending heroes’ graves to lobbying Congress on heritage and educational policy, Society members turned their energy to cultivating “true Americanism” in the citizenry at large, working with the government wherever possible. The DAR’s crowning achievement by the end of the decade was not just the growth in its membership but its direct support of military operations in the war against Spain.11 The Daughters’ schism over the merits of lineal versus collateral bloodlines provided an early sobering lesson: the public authority they sought could not rest on family pedigree alone. By connecting its members’ blood to an ethic of patriotic service, which conservative white Americans grew to value, the DAR’s founding strate- 108 Journal of Women’s History Fall gies paved the way for its later turn to right-wing extremism.12 Over its first few tumultuous years, however, the Society came close to collapsing until a policy to restrict its membership to lineal descendants was settled. Although the DAR used its members’ distinguished blood lines to justify its stewardship of civic programs, the Society’s culture-shaping ambitions led its leaders to focus less on the exclusivity of blood and more on the inclusivity of character: all Americans ought to celebrate the Revolutionary past and to conduct themselves according to the patriots’ example, although many required guidance from individuals inspired by their patriotic inheritance. The DAR founders’ personal experiences of overcoming adversity through club work and civic engagement convinced them that the best means to advance their political cause was to promote character-building at large. By following this conviction the sisterhood of blood navigated its way into larger nation-building initiatives within the first decade of its existence, including the organization’s enthusiastic support of a new war against an old empire.

The Will to Descend and the Meanings of Blood The search for “noble ancestors” was not unique to the late-nineteenth century United States. Although it varies historically, ancestor seeking is especially intense in the context of nation building, when hope for the future is tethered to the glorious past.13 In the post-Civil War era, neo-Confederates’ nostalgia for the Old South, along with anti-immigrant antipathy in the urban industrial north and agrarian populism in the mid-West, converged in a reactionary response to change as the discontented advocated a return to past ways. Patriotic lineal societies similarly fed the myth of the white “kinship nation,” united by blood, land, and history, by linking old-stock family memory to the country’s present and future.14 This widely shared post-war impulse to join with others of similar heritage for political purposes fits what the historian David Hollinger terms “the will to descend.” Unlike the simple desire for impressive ancestors, it expresses a “deep-seated drive to claim politically-potent artifacts for a contemporary descent community.”15 The descendants of Revolutionary patriots who formed lineal societies in the late-nineteenth century organized themselves into badge-bearing “descent communities,” which translated individual genealogical interest into broader claims-making. Yet these claims required a receptive audience to be heard and endorsed.16 On the basis of their blood connection to the men and women who had supported the Revolution, they built monuments to patriot heroes, preserved Revolutionary battle sites, and encouraged respect for the flag and the national anthem.17 As the historian Carol Medlicott notes, 2014 Carolyn Strange 109 the DAR was remarkably successful at shaping the political landscape, lit- erally and figuratively imprinting its vision of American ideals locally and nationally.18 A society that simply celebrated its members’ blood lineage could never have made such a significant geopolitical impact. Although the DAR benefited from the momentum of the women’s club movement in the 1890s and the upsurge in nativist patriotism, cross- cutting currents of thinking about the mechanics and effects of inheritance threatened to scuttle it. Research into the biology of descent, beginning with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), entered U.S. public discourse, as did the work of Francis Gal- ton, the English originator of eugenic theory. His first study, conducted in 1869, traced inheritance to show that high intelligence ran in families, an appealing notion for elite lineal societies. However it was not long before eugenicists began to construct dysgenic family trees with a different and potentially disquieting objective: to trace the etiology of criminality, disease, and deviance. According to the author of The Jukes (1877), the first tract in a line of studies to expose the potency of bad blood, its negative effects in kin groups, and by extension, the nation were compounded by the deleterious conditions of life for the rural and urban poor.19 The prognosis for the well- born was alarmingly no better, since modern life had evidently generated a host of new nervous and mental disorders that sapped ambition and energy, the very qualities that had spurred patriots to fight for independence. The theory of degeneration emerged in Europe to explain this dark underside of civilization, and religious and intellectual figures in the United States added a new-world cast to this notion.20 The closing of the frontier and the indulgences of Gilded Age materialism had replaced the elemental struggle that had formed the American character—bold, independent, and liberty-seeking. In the 1895 U.S. edition of Degeneration, Max Nordau observed that “degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists.” President of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, warned the American elite about the dangers of “hereditary inefficiency”: “There is no development without activity, and no race is so perfect that judicious weeding out could not improve it.”21 Thus, two questions haunted patriotic lineal societies. Was it plausible that the blood of Revolutionary heroes remained “pure” in their descendants? And was it not likely that degenerate bloodlines had mingled with the blood of patriots since 1776?22 No DAR member had greater reason to fret over these questions than Ellen Hardin Walworth (1832–1915). Her family of origin included a string of heroes, leading back to her great-grandfather, who had fought in the Battle of Saratoga (1777), in which the Americans achieved their first ma- 110 Journal of Women’s History Fall jor victory over the English in the War of Independence.23 The family she formed after she married Mansfield Walworth, of Saratoga Springs, New York, however, introduced a questionable strain of blood.24 Over the 1860s, her husband grew increasingly irrational and violent, and his cruelty and refusal to support their five children led Ellen Walworth to file for divorce in 1871. Mansfield’s continuing homicidal threats ended in 1873, when his son shot and killed him in a Manhattan hotel room. Frank Walworth’s subsequent murder trial and conviction for second-degree murder became national news. The nineteen-year-old prisoner headed to Sing Sing State Prison to serve a life sentence, but before the year was up doctors confirmed that he suffered from epilepsy—a condition then associated with insanity as well as criminality. This diagnosis led to his transfer to a hospital for the criminally insane, confirming speculation that Frank Walworth had inherited a strain of his father’s madness.25 “The Walworth tragedy,” as the family scandal became known, exposed a brute biological truth, that it took but one unfortunate union to corrupt Revolutionary blood and to produce degenerate or defective progeny.26 Ellen Walworth’s transition from divorcee and murderer’s mother in the 1870s to co-founder of the DAR by the 1890s illustrates Hollinger’s larger observation: historically privileged groups “search for empowerment through genealogy” when they sense that their “traditional position is being threatened.”27 A common route to empowerment involves eliding the complicated present through public rituals and heritage projects that celebrate a simpler, nobler past. When Walworth and her DAR co-founders connected their blood to the nation’s origins, bequeathed by heroes of un- questioned virtue, they were far from the only patriotic white Americans to favor a selective reading of inheritance, familial and national. In a climate of nativism and reactionary racism, the DAR’s will was shared by many similarly minded white Americans, not just the tens of thousands of women who identified as a descent community through this particular Society.28

The Priceless Legacy of Patriotic Blood The educated white women who established the DAR met in Wash- ington, D.C. in the late 1880s, each having gravitated to the capital in search of employment. By the late nineteenth century most mixed industrial cities provided jobs for women in service and waged labor, but Washington was the first in the United States to employ substantial numbers of salaried women. Each of the officially recognized founders was an independent wage earner, though not by choice, and several joined the D.C. branch of the Wimodaughsis Club, organized in 1890 to “furnish educational advantages 2014 Carolyn Strange 111 in practical, industrial, and educational work for . . . [white] women of limited means.” At the time they co-founded the DAR, each was “downwardly mobile,” Woden Teachout observes, and none had a male relative able or willing to support her.29 The youngest of the founders and the only outspo- ken suffragist, Mary Desha (1850–1911) moved to Washington to work as a clerk in the federal government. The Civil War and the financial crisis of 1873 left her once-illustrious Kentucky family broken and in financial disar- ray—setbacks that spurred her to organize with other women who struggled to support and educate themselves.30 Through her paid work and club life Desha befriended Eugenia Washington (1840–1900), the first President’s great-grandniece. Following her parents’ death and the loss of the family estate after the Civil War, Washington was reduced to clerking in the Post Office. The eldest co-founder was journalist Mary S. Lockwood (1831–1922), a widow, active clubwoman, and the President of the Women’s National Press Association.31 Compared to servants and factory hands—the period’s far more numerous working women, who earned between four and nine dollars per week in 1890—the founders were the cream of the female work force, yet workers, all the same.32 Clerkships and journalism allowed them to pay for room and board and to maintain a modicum of respectability, but their kinship with Revolutionary patriots was their “priceless legacy.”33 They regarded themselves as the elect, not the elite, and they were eager to lead. Lockwood and Walworth likely became acquainted in the 1860s, when the latter moved to Washington to find work to support herself and her children. During one of Walworth’s marital separations she used her father’s political associates to secure a post as Treasury Department clerk, where she joined a handful of other white, well-educated women with connections.34 Back in Saratoga Springs by 1870, she weathered her decade of trauma and scandal, which abated after she petitioned the Governor to pardon her son.35 The nation’s centennial in 1876 inspired her to stride into the public spotlight on her own terms by promoting historic preservation and publishing two articles on military history, which earned her appointment as the first and only female board member of the Battle of Saratoga Monument Association in 1880.36 But still there were bills to pay. In 1889 Walworth returned to Washington for work, this time as a clerk “first class” in the Census Bureau. Her salary increased to $1,000 per annum, and her opportunity to form alliances with other women interested in genealogy and civic activism expanded as well, thanks to the vitality of women’s club life. 37 Walworth’s brush with infamy provided ample reason for respect- able women to shun her, yet her compatriots accepted her as she presented herself: as a woman of refinement and learning, though of limited means, and forced by “circumstances” to earn her own living. More significantly, Walworth, like the other women, could document her Revolutionary lineage. 112 Journal of Women’s History Fall

When the newly-formed patriotic lineal society, the Sons of the American Revolution, decided to exclude women as full members in 1890, masculine rebuff inspired feminine action in this coterie of Revolutionary daughters.38 Rather than resist a ruling made by men “puffed up by vain glory,” the founders established their own national women’s lineal society in Washington on 11 October 1890—Columbus Day. Drafting a constitution was their first order of business. This organization was not to be a “pink tea” club for ladies wishing “to compare, with varying degrees of pride and scorn, the relative shades of azure in our blood!” as one member mocked.39 The Society’s founding document explained the organization’s plan to link family memory to nation building. They pledged to “perpetuate the memory and spirit of the men and women who achieved American Independence,” something they intended to accomplish by preserving and commemorating sites of historical significance. The Daughters responded to George Wash- ington’s appeal in his farewell address for citizens to “develop an enlight- ened public opinion.” Although it would take concerted effort to develop Americans’ “capacity for performing the duties of American citizens,” the young DAR committed itself to the challenge. More broadly, the Daughters dedicated themselves to cultivating love of country through “the promo- tion of celebrations of all patriotic anniversaries.” All DAR members, they pledged, would “cherish, maintain and extend the institutions of American freedom . . . to aid in securing for mankind all the blessings of liberty.”40 With aims as lofty as these, the Society needed women ready to “foster true patriotism and love of country.”41 Applicants, however, would first have to document their lineage and obtain a current member’s endorsement in order to be judged “acceptable.”42 By 1892, both criteria became contentious, as members differed over the best way to encourage the right sort of membership. The battle over blood rocked the Society, but a consensus over character would become the ballast it required to move forward.

Sanguinary Sectarianism The story of the Sons’ rejection and the founders’ plucky response became part of the DAR’s founding myth of female heroism, retold regularly at annual gatherings and in the Society’s official publications. By 1892, the Daughters offered an olive branch to their brother organization when they reserved two spots on their advisory board for SAR representatives.43 In contrast, the internal struggle over the DAR’s eligibility clause, which played an equal role in the Society’s early development, was bitter and destructive. Each of the founders took the dispute personally, and their differences became public knowledge, thanks in large part to Flora Adams 2014 Carolyn Strange 113

Darling (1840–1910). Had Darling had her way, she, too, would have been acknowledged as a DAR co-founder; instead the Board of Managers treated her as the Society’s Benedict Arnold, because of her “attempt to usurp all the powers of the Society—regardless of the wishes of the members or the Constitution.”44 Like Ellen Walworth, Darling was a self-supporting widow (though she had only one child to support), and she also found work as a government clerk in Washington in the 1880s, traveled in the capital’s society circles, and dabbled in publishing. Through her acquaintance with Eugenia Washington, Darling joined the DAR’s national board and served as the Society’s first “Vice President General in charge of Organization.” Her principal responsibility was to recruit members, and she did so by inviting women of high social status to join the Society, hoping that they might be able to present the appropriate ancestors. This strategy, she admitted, was a “Pedigree Hunt.”45 Under her leadership, the membership grew rapidly, but Darling clashed with her fellow board members over the Society’s central management style and its acceptance of collateral descendants. Never shy of publicity, Darling aired her strict linealist stance in the press, and reporters pounced on it, amused by the insults that flew back and forth between the “collaterals” and “lineals”: “TROUBLE IN THE CAMP;” “DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AT WAR;” “REVOLUTIONARY DAUGHTERS OF THE REVOLUTION;” “THERE IS NO DOUBT THEY HAVE FIGHTING BLOOD.”46 Darling’s defection from the DAR set off a protracted dispute over the purity of the DAR’s bloodline, raising doubt within and beyond the Society about the basis of the organization’s political claims. In public statements, she charged that the DAR had admitted women whose ancestors—mothers and other relatives of patriots—had evidently been Tories, not patriots. “I did all in my power to prevent the admission of the clause,” which allowed collateral ancestors, she explained in her press release: “I cannot feel that they are entitled to the same recognition at the hands of a commemora- tive association as those in whose veins actually flows the blood that once vitalized the brains and nourished the heroic hearts which conceived and executed the deed that made our republic a living fact.”47 Darling’s declara- tion posed a public relations disaster for the Society. The New Orleans Daily Picayune backed the Confederate widow, claiming, “she belongs to good old revolutionary stock [and] she is not likely to surrender.” Within a year of the DAR’s founding, Darling left to establish her own rival genealogical group, the Daughters of the Revolution (DR). Indeed, Darling announced at the end of July 1891 that her splinter organization would be restricted to “pure, lineal descendants.” The New York Times had been dismissive of the DAR from the start, and this affair confirmed women’s political incompe- 114 Journal of Women’s History Fall tence: “A tale of woe lurks behind the fight between the Daughters, and the future has even more to unfold.” Lampooning the combatants’ Revo- lutionary pretensions, the Times concluded: “[Darling’s] friends are full of that martial spirit which converted the Battle of Bunker Hill into a glorious incident of the struggle for independence.”48 Contained within Darling’s pronouncements on patriotic purity were darker implications of unfitness. By claiming to lead a cohort of “pure” descendants, Darling insinuated that members who favored the DAR’s “mother of a patriot” clause were of impure blood; consequently, lineal descendants of male patriots were the only women whose biological inheritance granted them the right to proclaim themselves daughters of the Revolution: “We seek quality, not quantity,” she insisted.49 One of Darling’s recruits portrayed collateral descent as a form of degeneracy when she predicted the consequences of the DAR’s membership policy: “the water if once clouded by the mistake of laxity in admission could not be pure and clear ever after, at least a sentiment of doubt would exist.”50 From the DAR’s point of view, any member who challenged other members’ blood lineage undermined its kinship claims and thus the basis on which the Society asserted its custodianship of the nation’s history and memory. The Board members decided to expel their rogue member on the ground that Darling’s accusations had made “the pedigree of the Society of doubtful origin.” Like Darling, the leadership wished to ensure that the DAR’s “name may mean something,” namely that its members were “in very truth Daughters of the American Revolution.”51 Yet the question lingered within the ranks: could collaterals legitimately make this claim? The first national gathering of the membership after the Darling debacle exposed disunity among the Society’s remaining members. Delegates who attended the Continental Congress in February 1892 responded to the eligibility issue after the Pennsylvania State Regent, Mrs. Julia K. Hogg, issued a resolution to strike the contentious “mother of [a] patriot” clause from the Society’s Constitution. A majority (fifty-five to eighteen) agreed.52 Before the constitutional amendment could be made, further defections occurred and another vice president in charge of organization, Helen Boynton, was removed in 1893 for using her position on the Board to attack the strict linealists.53 The matter was finally resolved at the Society’s third Congress in 1894, when delegates supported a motion to amend the Constitution’s original membership clause, thereby aligning the DAR with other lineal descent communities, including the SAR and the Daughters of the Confed- eracy. In a speech to the SAR in 1894, a former supporter of collateral descent stated that the time had come to “submit loyally and gracefully to the will of the majority. This is the fluid extract of all virtues. Not to do this is rank 2014 Carolyn Strange 115 heresy.” Others were more prosaic. Mary Desha, the original architect of the “mother” clause, considered by many as a means to recognize women’s domestic contributions to the Revolution, welcomed the end of the saga: “I hope I will never hear the word collateral again as long as I live.”54 The leadership’s shift to strict lineality in 1894 suggests that blood overtook character as the DAR’s chief concern. According to the American studies scholar Shawn Michelle Smith, the DAR’s rise occurred as club women’s rationale for organizing moved from “the bonds of love to bloodlines.”55 However, this shift was more complex. The Society’s motto was (and remains) “God, Home, and Country,” and its lineal resolution oriented it toward the founders’ original high ideals and ambition: to connect domestic values to national virtue. In contrast to lineality’s capacity to divide the DAR, its members could agree that their “labors of love” would shape national memory into national pride. From the start, the DAR required that applicants be women of “unblemished character,” not simply descendants. Francesca Morgan notes how this discretionary criterion allowed chapters to reject women whose ancestors’ poverty or lack of formal education left them without documentary proof of their lineage.56 In April 1893, amidst the lineality crisis, the national registrars enjoined state representatives to be “particularly careful as regards the acceptability of applicants,” so that candidates were “in every way acceptable.”57 When it came to African American, Indian, or Jewish women, whom they excluded from membership, the DAR’s spongy notion of acceptability made a mockery of its stated reverence for historical accuracy, as well as its claim that blood links to patriots conferred special status on descendants.58 Chapters could also reject otherwise-qualified descendants on the basis of dubious morals, un- conventional tastes, or unpleasant dispositions. And women such as Darling, well-bred but ill-mannered, could be purged. “Unblemished” character and willingness to work for one’s country were the qualities the Society most revered in patriots and most praised in its members. In biographical lineal sketches, which appeared in every issue of American Monthly Magazine (AMM), the selfless willingness to serve one’s country was held out as the supreme virtue. Ellen Walworth’s sketch of Eugenia Washington was typical. Rather than boast of her lineage Washington worked in the nation’s interest: “If she has the characteristic modesty of her family, she has also the family courage that does not shrink from any plain duty.”59 As the centenary of President Washington’s farewell address ap- proached, the DAR regrouped from its eligibility disputes. In 1896, AMM published chapter reports and a longer reflective submission on the man the Daughters admired above all others. For the DAR, the first President was a paragon of virtue and a model that women as well as men could 116 Journal of Women’s History Fall emulate: “Beyond all intellectual force and achievements of the sword, there is a deep beauty of character that makes Washington the peer of other great warriors. It was the pure morality of his character wherein its peculiar excellence resided . . . Oh, that his pure example . . . could bring us back the blessings of national vigor and uprightness.”60 The implication, that vigor had dwindled over the century, expressed contemporary concerns over the “devitalizing” effects of modern indulgences, and it hinted at fears of racial degeneration. While the DAR maintained its lineal membership restrictions its public face turned toward national character building. Like the writers of Gilded Age self-help manuals that advised young men on the secrets of success, the Daughters used parables of patriots’ virtues—modesty, in combination with industry, discipline, and perseverance—to dictate the habits contemporary Americans ought to adopt. Character was capital, but, unlike blood, it could be forged and tested for strength.61

Daughters of the Nation As anti-immigration sentiment rose, and as white resistance to Afri- can American equality rigidified in law and in extra-legal violence over the 1890s, civic concepts of national identity hardened along explicitly racial and ethnic lines.62 In this context, every individual effort to connect members of the current generation to “old stock” white Americans had profound political implications. When the DAR was founded many edito- rialists had criticized it as yet another club for self-indulgent women who expected respect without having to earn it. The appointment of Caroline Harrison, the nation’s First Lady, as the DAR’s inaugural President General, alongside the studio portraits of the Society’s regents published in AMM did nothing to counter that impression.63 As early as the DAR’s second an- niversary, however, the New York Times, the Herald, the Tribune, and their nation-wide wire service affiliates covered the DAR in a more favorable light. The women’s pretentious rhetoric and rancorous splits continued to amuse male editors, but their aims and, more importantly, their actions, struck a nationalist chord. In 1895, the Society began to intervene in child- hood education by forming the Children of the Revolution. It sponsored a chair in American history at Barnard College and raised funds to endow the George Washington University. It set up historical markers and monuments to commemorate Revolutionary battles and heroes. It lobbied successfully for Flag Day in states across the country, and it called for respectful perfor- mances of the national anthem.64 By leading such endeavors, the DAR held itself out as “a new aristocracy, the Aristocracy of Character.” In the eyes of its erstwhile critics, the Daughters’ aristocratic airs became forgivable 2014 Carolyn Strange 117 because they represented an American aristocracy. Compared to European nobility, the Herald commented, “The Fathers of the Revolution robbed no one, slew no one for self or glory, but fought and bled in the noblest of causes—the cause of freedom, in defense of their rights and liberties and of their cherished homes.”65 By focusing outward the DAR gained surer footing as it stepped into public affairs. The Daughters descended from these heroes, through their earnest work, affirmed they were women of action, not ladies of leisure. As they proved their commitment to patriotic endeavors, they earned wider respect. The Evening World approved of them as it reflected: “In these degenerate days, when our American comic journals, our caricaturists and our humorists found most of their jokes, their cartoons and their witticisms upon an alleged absurd worship by Uncle Sam’s sons and daughters of noble houses of Europe, and Anglomania is declared to be as epidemic as la grippe, it is refreshing and reassuring to listen to the plans and operations of the DAR.”66 As the organization’s ranks rose, its operations expanded, and its commitment to public education grew more visible and more vital to its mission. In keeping with the emphasis on character building, the DAR sponsored English instruction and civics classes for immigrants of diverse cultures, programs that placed it in line with liberal Progressive efforts to weave immigrants into the American fabric.67 The State Regent for Illinois stated that “the D.A.R. feel it especially incumbent upon them to spread among the foreign element, so rapidly coming among us, information and intelligence regarding the spirit of the Revolution,” and she reminded members that in the eighteenth century, “mixed nationalities” had come together harmoniously, to form the nation. A century after the nation’s founding, the DAR tasked itself with orchestrating the conditions necessary to blend the country’s latest diverse elements. The Daughters vigorously pursued their nation-building agenda, convinced that recent immigrants had “dampened American ardor in devotion to the past glory and present greatness and magnificence of the country.”68 Through its official publication, AMM, the DAR articulated its over- arching goal: to promote “the cause of a true and liberal Americanism.” Nevertheless, it hitched that cause to conservative objectives. The inaugural editor, Ellen Walworth, edited AMM for two years, beginning in 1892. Her tenure spanned the lineal controversy, yet her editorials emphasized patriotic duty over blood inheritance, and her opening editorial linked this imperative to the DAR’s objectives. Above all, she identified “individual responsibility” as the cure for a nation suffering from “the selfish and sordid spirit which endangers a respect for the elementary principle of our government.” In her opinion, new immigrants were not the only groups whose 118 Journal of Women’s History Fall love of country required elevation: native-born Americans, more concerned about material progress than democratic principles, had neglected their precious political heritage. True, the patriots’ descendants were best suited to revive the nation’s spirit; yet this meant inheritors must be prepared to undertake “the highest action” by carrying out their blood-born, and blood-borne, civic duty. There was no room for “vanity and braggadocio” when it came to Revolutionary lineage, just dignified, virtuous, and noble endeavor. Thus, in Walworth’s mind, and in the Society’s stated aims, it was perfectly logical to form an organization exclusively for the blood relatives of heroes to uphold and promote the values of liberty and equality. “This is eminently a Society of democratic principles and practices,” she wrote in her regular column. 69 The DAR leaders extolled character to capitalize on blood for personal as well as political reasons. Building on the merits and industry of its individual members, the DAR set its collective mind on the challenge to become a moral force. “Is there a need for the influence of the Daughters of the American Revolution today?” the Chaplain General, Frances Bacon Hamlin, asked at the first national congress in 1892. When it came to teaching children to respect the flag, for instance, the answer was “decidedly yes!”: “This is what we need! To have our children know what [the flag] has cost in blood and treasure; to realize ourselves that it means more than politics; that it means ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”70 The DAR searched, foremost, for public influence and a means to shape the country’s future through its chapter members’ stewardship of the inspira- tional past. In an effort to “become a factor in American life and directors in American thought,” the Daughters repeatedly identified their forbears as their models.71 No field of action was ruled out, and the DAR aimed to set the standard of good citizenship by tutoring the ignorant and unpatriotic on the country’s history. The State Regent of Georgia described the Daughters’ duty in ominous tones: “A nation forgetful is a nation degenerate.”72 Immediately after the DAR settled its membership, dramatic pronouncements about the challenges of changing demographics overtook earlier talk of lineals versus collaterals. Teaching the foreign-born about American history and political values became a key DAR priority, as did defending the nation’s “unguarded gates,” in calls that grew louder during the organization’s first decade. Mary Lockwood, who became the new editor of AMM in 1894, asked her readers whether the nation must “go to the slums of every city in the Old World and gather up the scions of ‘hereditary unfitness’ and furnish them a dumping place because this is a land of freedom?”73 From its early days, the rural poor and Native Americans were targets of the DAR’s pa- 2014 Carolyn Strange 119 triotic instruction, but from the mid-1890s the DAR regarded foreign-born immigrants as the greatest threat to national integrity, and the most likely bearers of bad blood.74 The DAR’s warnings about the “denationalization” of the country suppressed, though never fully quelled, unease over the organization’s own pedigree.75 Although the Society formally ended its eligibility squabble, eugenic ideas drifted beyond scientific and professional writings into popular discourse.76 An Indianapolis editor, who grudgingly approved of patriotic lineal societies, raised the specter of unfitness when he joked that the DAR’s genealogical research would inevitably turn up unaristo- cratic ancestors and descendants. Over more than a century, surely patriot blood must course in today’s “scrub-women and rag pickers, such are the mutations of life in a republic.” Looking further back in history, before the Revolution, was equally unwise, he teased, since dubious individuals might well have numbered among the American troops: “It is exceedingly unsafe to wander too far into the musty past. An opening of forgotten closet doors discloses many a skeleton.”77 The DAR’s determination of “acceptability” was racially exclusive and elitist, but its appraisal of members’ descent was quite forgiving compared to eugenic family studies, which explained how one unfortunate union could produce “armies” of defectives. Prospective members had to document their blood lineage, but no rule compelled them to divulge the history of every family member. Unpatriotic individuals might lurk in earlier generations.78 Worse, still, the ancestors of patriots might include inebriates, criminals, the insane, or degenerate—the “unfit.”79 By the late nineteenth century it became increasingly difficult, from a scientific point of view, to deny that deviations, along with virtues, were transmitted across generations, leading to morbidity, malformations, and infirmities. The Daughters, who soldiered on for the sake of their nation and its destiny, suppressed doubts of this nature.

Conclusion By the turn of the century the Daughters of the American Revolution earned both government recognition and public accolades. The war with Spain broke out at an ideal moment in the DAR’s development, and it capitalized on the opportunity to prove that its interest in Revolutionary heritage was prompted by members’ concerns about the nation’s future. From merging their blood and racial identity to the nation’s identity, the Daughters widened its borders of influence by 1898, when they responded to the nation’s battle cry. America’s war with Spain and its growing extra- territorial ambitions provided a new avenue for women to share in the 120 Journal of Women’s History Fall glories of conquest and the affirmation of white racial superiority. Native- born white women identified closely with American imperial engagement, through which they saw the Revolution’s destiny flower.80 Although some clubwomen and prominent pacifists, notably Jane Addams, criticized the war, the Daughters rallied to the flag: DAR member Clara Barton headed the Red Cross’s medical services in Cuba; DAR Vice President General, Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee, organized the Army and Navy’s nursing corps, assisted by Mary Desha; Ellen Walworth became Director General of the Women’s National War Relief Association; and the DAR’s membership at large funded a hospital supply ship for the government’s use.81 It was one thing for the President’s wife to invite DAR members to tea; it was quite another for the President to consult them on the logistical support required for military campaigns.82 From their first days the Daughters had claimed that their only distinction, as descendants of patriots, was their commitment to work “for heroic purposes and deeds of sacrifice such as would do honor to the ancestry whose memory and virtues are our inheritance.” Now the pro-war press applauded the Daughters’ courage: “WOMEN TO THE FRONT.” “PATRIOTIC WOMEN FOR WAR.”83 Had the DAR membership focused exclusively on pedigree it might well have faded into obscurity; instead its leaders crowed over the size of its membership rolls and the scope of its work. In 1900, the Registrar Gen- eral announced at the annual Congress that the Society had reached 31,192 members “in spite of one hundred years of foreign immigration”; certainly, it continued, this number ought to squash rumors that “ours is a decadent race and dying out.”84 Florence Adams Darling could not claim the same of her rival organization, whose rolls stalled at 2,000 members. More significantly, the breakaway Sisters never developed, as Darling had planned, into “a society of women of principle, property and pedigree, [which] would find its proper place in the political economy of our country.”85 The DAR did. As a descent community with nation-building ambitions, the DAR set its course in the 1890s, laying the groundwork for its better-known and more notorious interventions in civic life in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Its move into ultra-conservative politics, including red-baiting, the persecution of pacifists, and even, for some members, participation in the Ku Klux Klan, was not a decisive break from its first decade of “liberal Progressivism,” as other historians have emphasized; it was rather the apotheosis of the founders’ conviction, that the kinship nation was both destined for greatness and perpetually under threat, as much from within as without.86 The DAR and its sibling lineal patriotic societies, which emerged alongside it in the Gilded Age, were proselytizers of Revolutionary ancestor worship, which harmonized strategically with the era’s retrogressive tone of 2014 Carolyn Strange 121 patriotism. As David Hollinger notes, the will to descend is exercised most effectively when the heritage values promoted by descendants are already widely recognized. Patriotic genealogical societies narrated a compelling, ethno-nationalist interpretation of U.S. history that was inclusive and elitist, democratic and demonstrably exclusionary. As the meanings of blood multiplied, DAR members managed their blood identity by spotlighting the character and deeds of white founding heroes, and by following their example as nation-builders and defenders. As a racially exclusive descent community, the DAR helped fulfill white America’s dream of rebirth after the Civil War by investing privately in blood and by trading publicly in character. No other Americans in this period, notably African Americans and Native Americans, as well as individuals diagnosed as unfit, had the luxury to define for themselves when and how, and to which audiences, they wished to identify their status through their biological lineage.87

Notes

1Margaret Gibbs, The DAR (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 21; Ellen Hardin Walworth, “Genealogy” (unpublished manuscript, c. 1895), Walworth Memorial Museum and Archives, folder 23-5.

2Wallace Evan Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans’ and Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), 45–6; Woden Teachout, “Forging Memory: Hereditary Societies, Patriotism and the American Past, 1876–1898,” (PhD. diss: Harvard University, 2003) 10–11.

3Peter Wade, ed., Race, ethnicity and nation: perspectives from kinship and genetics (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 12. See also Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetics of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

4Stuart McConnell, “Reading the Flag: a Reconsideration of the Patriotic Cults of the 1890s,” in Bonds of Affection: Americans Define their Patriotism, ed. John Bodnar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 102–119, see especially 113–114.

5Julie Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 66–7; Francesca Morgan, Women and Pa- triotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

6Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991); Dorothy Troth Muir, The Presence of a Lady: Mount Vernon, 1861–1868 (Mount Vernon, 1946). Octavia Hill established the National Trust in 1894. Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill: A Life (London: Constable, 1990). On African American heritage preservation efforts see Joan John- son, “‘Ye Gave them a Stone’: African American Women’s Clubs, the Frederick Douglass Home, and the Black Mammy Monument,” Journal of Women’s History, 17, no. 1(Spring 2005): 62–86. On the rise of the clubwoman and club-joining as women’s politicization see Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood 122 Journal of Women’s History Fall re-defined, 1868–1914 (New York and London: Holmes &. Meier, 1980). On African American women in religious, social, and political clubs see Dorothy Salem, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890–1920 (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1990); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Wanda A. Hendricks, Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

7Simon Wendt, “Nationalist Middle-Class Women, Memory, and Conserva- tive Values, 1890–1945,” in Inventing the American Family: Family Values and Social Change in Twentieth-Century U.S. ed. Isabel Heinemann (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2012), 33–60, particularly 39.

8Morgan, Women and Patriotism, 10. See also W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “White Women and the Politics of Memory in the South, 1880–1920,” in Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics, from Civil War to Civil Rights, eds. Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 115–39.

9For a detailed analysis of the lineal debate see Michael C. Sweeney, “Ances- tors, Avotaynu, Roots: An Inquiry into American Genealogy Discourse,” (PhD. diss: University of Kansas, 2010), 43–56.On the state- and expert-defined blood status in the 1890s see Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 257–290; Paul Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 107–22. See Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, Eugenics: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4–5.

10Teachout, “Forging Memory,” 110; Sweeney, “Ancestors, Avotaynu, Roots,” 35; Teachout, “Forging Memory,” 112.

11Kristin Lee Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1998), 57, 80.

12See Kirsten Delegard, Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conser- vatism in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Post-War Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Morgan, Women and Patriotism, 127–52; On the later development of the DAR’s pro-militarism see Christine K. Erickson, “‘So much for men’: Conservative Women and National Defense in the 1920s and 1930s,” American Studies, 45, no. 1(Spring 2004): 85–102.

13Anthony Smith, “The ‘Golden Age’ and National Renewal,” in Myths and Nationhood, eds. Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 36–59, quote on 39.

14Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 2001); Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); McConnell, “Reading the Flag,” 114. 2014 Carolyn Strange 123

15David A. Hollinger, “National Culture and Communities of Descent,” Re- views in American History, 26, no. 1(March 1998): 312–28, quoted on 319.

16David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, (Cambridge, 1998), 202–18.

17For detailed accounts of the DAR’s programs, see Teachout, “Forging Memory,” 381–416; McConnell, “Reading the Flag,” 118; Davies, Patriotism on Parade, 330–32; and Francesca Morgan, Women and Patriotism, 63–68; 84–88.

18Carol Medlicott, “Constructing Territory Constructing Citizenship: The Daughters of the American Revolution and “Americanisation” in the 1920s,” Geo- politics, 10, no. 1(Spring 2005), 99–120, 101.

19Dianne Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic High- lands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995). Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: an Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869). On Galton’s early eugenic research’s impact in the United States, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1985), 3–19. Richard Dugdale, The Juke’s: A Study of Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity: Further Studies of Criminals (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1877). The relation between eugenics and genealogy is analyzed in Sweeney, “Ancestors, Avotaynu, Roots”, 24–26.

20Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breed- ing in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 117–21. On maternalist pronatalism in response to fears of white “race suicide” see Laura Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Maternalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 13–34.

21Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895), vii; David Starr Jordan, Footnotes to Evolution: A Series of Popular Addresses on the Evolution of Life (New York: Appleton, 1898), 311.

22Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 135–7.

23In addition her father, Colonel John J. Hardin, died leading Illinois militia in the decisive Battle of Buena Vista in 1847. Accessed February 16, 2012, http:// bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=H000185 .

24For an adulatory account of Walworth’s life see Patricia Joy Simkovich, Indominatable Spirit: The Life of Ellen Hardin Walworth (Washington, D.C.: National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, 1990). The family tragedy is richly explored in Geoffrey O’Brien, Fall of the House of Walworth: a Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).

25Simon D. Shorvon, “The Causes of Epilepsy: Changing concepts of Etiol- ogy of Epilepsy over the past 150 years,” Epilepsia, 52, no. 6 (June 2011): 1033–44.

26Dugdale, “The Jukes,” 114–15. 124 Journal of Women’s History Fall

27Hollinger, “National Culture,”320. 28John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 236. 29Cindy Sondik Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-class workers in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3–4; 48–49; Jane Cunningham Croly, The History of the Women’s Club Movement (New York: Henry G. Allen, 1898), 348. On the Wimodaughsis club’s racial exclusivity see Teresa Zack- odnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011), 233–4; Teachout, “Forging Memory,” 91. Mary S. Lockwood was not originally recognized as a founder, but her likeness appears in the founders’ memorial, constructed in 1929.

30In 1825 Mary Desha’s uncle, Isaac Desha, was tried for murder three times, finally convicted, and subsequently pardoned by his father, Governor Joseph Desha. Lewis Franklin Johnson, Famous Kentucky Tragedies and Trials: A Collection of Impor- tant and Interesting Tragedies and Criminal Trials which Have Taken Place in Kentucky (Louisville: Baldwin Law Book Company, 1916), 34–43. This scandal’s occurrence in Kentucky almost seventy years prior to the DAR’s founding suggests why Desha’s family past was scrutinized less intensely than Walworth’s.

31Melanie Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 81–2.

32Lynn Y. Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: the Female Labor Force in the United State, 1820–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 4, 25.

33“What we are doing and chapter work,” American Monthly Magazine, 7 (1895), 348 (hereafter AMM).

34Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen, 204. John J. Hardin served as a Whig member of Congress from 1843–5 and was a colleague of Lincoln’s in Illinois.

35Carolyn Strange, “The Unwritten Law of Executive Justice: Pardoning Pat- ricide in Reconstruction-Era New York,” Law and History Review, 8, no. 4(November, 2010): 891–930.

36O’Brien, Fall of the House of Walworth, 255–9. Her publications conferred her credibility as a military historian. See Ellen Walworth, “The Battle of Saratoga, Bur- goyne and the North Campaign, 1777,” Magazine of American History, 1 (May 1877), 273–302; “The Battle of Buena Vista,” Magazine of American History, 3 (1879), 705–38.

37National Archives and Records Administration, RG 56, General Records of the Department of the Treasury, Records of the Division of Appointments, Applica- tions for Positions in Washington D.C., 1830–1910, Ellen Walworth.

38Previously some SAR branches had admitted women members. Davies, Patriotism on Parade, 58.

39Janet E. Hosmer Richards, “The Great Objects of the Daughters,” AMM, 3 (1893), 491. 2014 Carolyn Strange 125

40Woden Teachout, Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 125–7; National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, Constitution and By-Laws of the Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR: Washington, 1890), 1–2.

41National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, Constitution and By-Laws of the Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR: Washington, 1890), Article II, 2; Teachout, “Forging Memory,” 91–3.

42Morgan, Women and Patriotism, 42. 43National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, Constitution and By-Laws of the Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR: Washington, 1892), Article VI, 17.

44Ellen Walworth, Mary Desha, Eugenia Washington, “A History of the Origin of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution,” c. 1892, unpublished ms. National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Archives, Special Collection pertaining to the History of the NSDAR, Box 1, folder 17. For Darling’s version, see Founding and organization of the Daughters of the American Revolution and Daughters of the Revolution (Philadelphia: Independence Publishing, 1901).

45Darling published memoirs and fiction, including Mrs. Darling’s letters, or Memoirs of the Civil War (New York: J.W. Lovel), and A Winning, Wayward Woman (Washington: National Book Club, 1889); Flora Adams Darling, “Statement of Fact,” 25 July 1905, in Flora Adams Darling Papers, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, MSS. 39.1 D25, folder 10.

46The Emporia Daily Gazette, 29 July 1891; New York Times, 30 July 1891; The Daily Picayune, 17 August 1891.

47The Daily Picayune, 17 August 1891, 7. 48New Orleans Daily Picayune, 14 August, 7; New York Times, 30 July 1891. 49Quoted in Teachout, “Forging Memory,” 89.

50Mrs. Edward P. Steers, quoted in “Tom’s River Organization Meeting,” Magazine of the Daughters of the Revolution, 1 (1893), 35.

51Walworth, Desha and Washington, “A History of the Origin.” Darling was also accused of misappropriating funds. Julia K. Hogg, “Proceedings of the Third Continental Congress,” AMM 4 (June 1894), 622–23.

5222 February 1892, AMM, 1 (1892), 94–6. When the Board of Management met several months later the majority voted in favour of allowing the motion to amend the Constitution to be put forward at the 1894 Congress. AMM (April 1893), 684.

53Boynton sent unauthorized circulars in an attempt to oppose Hogg’s pro- posal, which the Board did not sanction. Davies, Patriotism on Parade, 86. 126 Journal of Women’s History Fall

54Mary Sawyer Foot, “Some Glimpses of Massachusetts during the Revolu- tion,” AMM (July 1894), 27–34, 31; “Report of the Third Continental Congress,” AMM (June 1894), 626.

55Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 137–8.

56Morgan, Women and Patriotism, 10. 57Eugenia Washington and Alice M. Clarke, “Report of the National Regis- trars-General,” AMM, April 1893, 445.

58Teachout, “Forging Memory,” 126–7. 59Ellen Hardin Walworth, “Miss Eugenia Washington,” AMM, (July 1892), 216–21, 218.

60Mary L. Fogg, “A Few Words on Washington and his Farewell Address,” AMM (October 1896), 460–63, 461. On the DAR’s adulation of Washington see Simon Wendt, “Nationalist Middle-Class Women,” 53–6.

61Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis (New York: The American Home Missionary Society, 1885), 178. On social gospel leaders’ antici- pation of scientific eugenics see Christine Rosen,Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004), 25–8. Judith Hilkey, Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); James B. Salazar, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York: NYU Press, 2010). Some manuals included advice for success-seeking women. See William Makepeace Thayer, Women who Win (New York: T. Nelson, 1896).

62Dale T. Knobel, “America for the Americans:” The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996). Rates of anti-black and anti- immigrant lynching also shot up in the 1890s. See Cynthia Skove Nevels, Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness through Racial Violence (College Park: Texas A & M University Press, 2007).

63Morgan refers to the DAR’s high-status recruits as “capitalism’s consorts.” Women and Patriotism, 51.

64The history chair was granted in 1895; the George Washington University was established in 1904. Davies, Patriotism on Parade, 42; 245; 218.

65Mary J. Seymour to Mary Desha, 3 April 1894, quoted in Teachout, “Forg- ing Memory,” 136. Seymour became the DAR’s “Historian General” in 1894; New York Herald, I March 1891.

66“Our Fair Patriots,” New York Evening World, 23 June 1891. See also “An Aristocracy of Patriotism Happily Organized,” San Francisco Call 11 December 1891 and “For Blue Blood Only” San Francisco Examiner, 11 December 1891. 2014 Carolyn Strange 127

67On the tension between inclusionary and exclusionary impulses in nation- building, see Carl Guarneri, ed., John Higham, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 173–97. The DAR also supported maternal welfare programs, oriented toward assimilation. See Katrina Irving, Immigrant Mothers: Narratives of Race and Maternity, 1890–1925 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 70, 90.

68Effie Reeme Osborn, “Proceedings of the Continental Congress,” AMM, 1 (1892), 51–2; p. 57; “To Cultivate National Feeling,” Harrisburg Independent, 7 December 1891.

69Ellen Walworth, Editor’s Notebook, AMM, (July 1892), 1; Walworth, “A History of the Origin,” 14; Walworth, “Principle of the Organization,” AMM (July 1892): 8–9; Walworth, “Editor’s Notebook,” AMM (September 1893), 245.

70“Report of the Chaplain-General,” AMM (July 1892), 51. 71Mary S. Lockwood, National Tribune, 4 March 1897, 2. 72Mrs. Robert Emory Park, “Georgia State Conference,” AMM (July 1899), 44. 73Mary Lockwood, “Editor’s Notebook,” AMM (July 1894): 185. 74Medlicott, “Constructing Territory.” 75Mary Lockwood, “Report of the Historian General,” AMM (April 1893), 450; Mary Virginia Ellet Cabell, “President-Presiding Address,” AMM (April, 1893), 482.

76Wendy Smith Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 7–31.

77Editorial, Indianapolis News, 12 February 1891. 78Eugenicists, nevertheless, focused on the poor and ethno-racial minorities. See Nicole Hahn Rafter, White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), and Gregory Michael Dorr, “Defective or Disabled? Race, Medicine and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama,” Journal of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era, 5 (October 2006): 359–392. See also Sweeney, “Ancestors, Avotaynu, Roots,” 60.

79Fitness was a eugenic concept that developed greater currency over the decade. See David Starr Jordan, The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902).

80On imperialism’s inspiration for conservative women’s organizing in this period see Katie Pickles, Female Imperialism and National Identity (Manchester: Man- chester University Press, 2003); on its implication in efforts to shore up uncertain nationhood see Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 6–7.

81Morgan, Women and Patriotism, 57–8; Hoganson, Fighting for American Man- hood, 125–9. 128 Journal of Women’s History Fall

82Carolyn Strange, “How did women’s war relief in the Spanish-American War alter traditions of female benevolence and pave the way for women’s formal military service?,” Women and Social Movements, Scholars Edition, 15, no. 2 (September, 2011).

83Emeline Marcy, “Paper read before the Dearborne Chapter,” AMM (Septem- ber 1894), 234; Albany Argus, 3 April 1898; Boston Times, 10 April 1898.

84Susan Revere Hetzel, “Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Congress,” AMM (April 1900), 491.

85Teachout, “Forging Memory,” 111. In addition the SAR had only one-third the membership of the DAR by 1900; Florence Adams Darling, Founding and Or- ganization of the Daughters of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Independence Publishing, 1901), 114.

86Wendt, “Nationalist Middle-Class Women,” 36. See also Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Co- lumbus: Ohio State University, 2001), 56–7. On the overlapping membership of the DAR and the Klan see Carol Medlicott, “One Social Milieu, Paradoxical Responses: A Geographical Re-Examination of the Ku Klux Klan and the Daughters of the American Revolution in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Hate, Discrimination, and Intolerance in the United States, ed. Colin Flint (New York: Routledge, 2003), 21–48.

87Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 34–5. On the legal and political significance of blood quantum for Native and African Americans see Fay A. Yarbrough, Race & the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); on genealogy’s influence in the development of the ‘one-drop rule’ see Floyd James Davis, Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition (Phila- delphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).