1 RECENT EVENTS IN GREATER RHODE ISLAND “When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten.” — Robert Pen Warren, 1961 THE LEGACY OF THE CIVIL WAR GO BACK TO THE PREVIOUS CENTURY 1900 In the Touro Synagogue, to supplement the seats around the walls of the room, pews were installed. NEWPORT RHODE ISLAND Between this year and 1932, the US Patent Office would be receiving some 350 applications for new designs of water closet. Two of the first of these to succeed would be to designs by Charles Neff and Robert Frame of Newport, Rhode Island, who would imagine a siphonic wash-down closet that in later years, after redesign of the bowl by Fred Adee a decade later to avoid the messy overflows to which the design was prone, would become the norm of the nation.2 GOD IN THE JAKES WATER SUPPLY 1. “Recent” meaning in the course of this extended 20th Century. HDT WHAT? INDEX RHODE ISLAND ROGUE ISLAND At about the turn of the century the area of downtown Providence, Rhode Island available to its Chinese population was being narrowed down, by urban renewal projects, to the point that all of Chinatown was made up of one stretch along Empire Street. Surprise, the white people didn’t really want the Chinese around. Publication, in Providence, Rhode Island, of Augustine Jones’s BRIEF HISTORY OF PROVIDENCE FRIENDS SCHOOL, about the Yearly Meeting School of the Religious Society of Friends on top of the hill. In this year or the following one, the Quaker schoolhouse near Princeton, New Jersey, virtually abandoned and a ruin, would be torn down. The land on which it stood is now the parking lot of the new school. August 10, Friday: A message reached the Peking legations that the relief force was on its way. A team of Harvard College students defeated an invited team of British tennis players in a challenge match at Longwood Cricket Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. The victors’ cup was donated by, and therefore named after, one of the Harvard students, Dwight Filley Davis. In Providence, Rhode Island at 11AM Milton S. Hershey sold his Lancaster Caramel Company for the round sum of $1,000,000.00 (this bought-out entity would go on to become the Hershey Company of Derry Church, Pennsylvania, largest chocolate manufacturer in America). 1901 Gypsy moth infestations were discovered in Rhode Island. William Hannaway relocated the blacksmith operation from the lean-to on the west side of the mill at Saylesville to a nearby carriage house. 2. Some of the initial problems in the bowl design in Neff and Frame’s unit, causing messy overflows, would be corrected a decade later by Fred Adee. From this would develop the German-style toilet, in which the shit lies on a ledge at the rear for your inspection, until it is flushed down a hole at the front, and the French-style toilet, in which this arrangement is inverted, the hole being at the back. Only in British and American toilets does the shit fall directly into the water. In FEAR OF FLYING, Erica Jong would comment on this: “German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.” Slavov Žižek comments that when one visits the lavatory, immediately one is knee-deep in ideology. 5208 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX ROGUE ISLAND RHODE ISLAND In its beginnings, the Quaker Meeting for Sufferings committee of the New England Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, which had been so named because it was commissioned to care for Friends who were suffering persecution during the American revolution, had acquired a dominant position within the society. In 1872, in a belated recognition of the fact that Friends were no longer being persecuted for their peace testimony, the name of this governing committee had been updated to “Representative Meeting.” At this point the name was updated again, to “Permanent Board.” Publication, in Providence, Rhode Island of Augustine Jones’s A SKETCH OF WILLIAM ROTCH, a pamphlet which contained information relating to the role played by Friends William Rotch and William Rotch, Jr. in the formation of the Yearly Meeting School of the Religious Society of Friends at the top of the hill. 1902 The Quaker Yearly Meeting School in Providence, Rhode Island went into debt in order to erect Hawes Gymnasium at a cost of more than $30,000 (the debt would be eliminated later when a bequest would be received from Sarah J. Hall). Friend William Cadbury of Cadbury Chocolates was offered a cocoa plantation on San Thome (a West African island) but saw an advertisement on which its workers had been listed as assets, at so much a head, so Cadbury instead looked to the Gold Coast (Ghana) where the quality of cocoa was at the time perceived as poor. At the Cadbury facility in England, Men’s and Women’s Suggestions Committees were set up, formalizing a process that had already begun (in 1893 women had voted in favour of starting work later than 6AM and working later each day). “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5209 HDT WHAT? INDEX RHODE ISLAND ROGUE ISLAND 1903 Quakers had in this year, as always, a grand reputation, more or less warranted, for probity and solidity, tending mildly in the direction of obesity: It is evident, however, that there was in this year some doubt, among the general public, about allowing these Quakers of probity and solidity and stick-to-your-ribs substance to educate the next generation of your family. What sort of weird ideas would your kiddies try to bring home, from a Quaker school? –Would they try to bring home, for instance, the Quaker Peace Testimony? In this year the Friends Yearly Meeting School of the New England Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Providence, Rhode Island under Principal Augustine Jones (“principal” means that he was pocketing one half of the annual excess income) took out an advertisement, which it printed among other places in the “Who’s Who,” in which it offered among its many advantages as a school the fact that although it was admittedly “under the management of the Society of Friends,” what it was engaged in nevertheless amounted to nothing other than “the most complete preparation for the best American colleges and universities, and for the highest walks of business or professional life.” One need not be afraid of the influence of this Friend Moses Brown, since he also helped found Brown University (and you know that Brown University isn’t weird). You can feel free to send your child to this “unsectarian” 5210 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX ROGUE ISLAND RHODE ISLAND school, since we can reassure you that in point of fact most of the students are non-Quakers and therefore non- problematic, and since we can reassure you that in point of fact most of the teachers also are non-Quakers and therefore non-problematic! Don’t worry, the actual Quakers are in a minority and can be handled. (This actual advertisement is pictured on a following screen — so that you can judge for yourself whether these extrapolations from its implicit argument are appropriate or inappropriate.) In the absence of any policy of racial inclusiveness it goes without saying that this advertisement by Principal Augustine Jones of the “Friends School” was aimed only at acceptably white matriculants. Despite the school’s need to attract a wider clientele, and despite Quakerism, any applicant of color would have been turned away: Quakers had created schools for free people of African descent and newly freed African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but, well into the twentieth century, they showed little interest in educating students of color in the schools they had created for their own children. This disinclination was, in part, a function of the Quakerism of earlier centuries when Friends founded schools to retain the purity and the distinctiveness (or sometimes their own branch) of their religious society. Quaker children, Friends maintained, required a “guarded” education where teachers could instill religious values and limit the influence of the secular culture. As the Quaker population began to decrease, Friends faced the choice of opening schools to non-Quaker students or closing for lack of adequate income. Most schools chose the former, but they typically admitted the children of parents attracted to the particular teachings and quality of Quaker education, who – without concerted efforts to attract a diverse student body– were virtually always of European descent.3 3. Page 319 in Donna McDaniel’s and Vanessa Julye’s FIT FOR FREEDOM, NOT FOR FRIENDSHIP: QUAKERS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL JUSTICE (Philadelphia: Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 2009). “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5211 HDT WHAT? INDEX RHODE ISLAND ROGUE ISLAND July 21, Tuesday: George Thomas Downing died after a long illness in his Bellevue Avenue home in Newport, Rhode Island (the funeral would be held at the Emmanuel Church on Dearborn Street). 5212 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX ROGUE ISLAND RHODE ISLAND 1904 As the Augustine Jones administration ended and the administration of Dr. Seth Kelley Gifford began at the Yearly Meeting School of the New England Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Providence, Rhode Island, the Lower School building was constructed at a cost of $20,000 and the school formally changed its name to the Moses Brown School.4 There were 172 students. The overt objective of the new headmaster would be to convert this old Quaker school into a college-preparatory academy.