Finishing School for Pickets

Howard Zinn (1922–2010)
From Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1963

Also of Interest
An Appeal for Human Rights, March 1960 (Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement)

John Steinbeck, Norman Rockwell, and Ruby Bridges’s first days at school, Fall 1961 (Ken Laird Studios, HubPages)

SNCC: The Battle-Scarred Youngsters, October 1963 (Howard Zinn, The Nation)

Howard Zinn’s commencement address at Spelman College, May 2005 (Institute for Southern Studies)

Buy the book
Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1963
996 pages

Available in a boxed set
Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941–1973
2-book set • more than 150 writers • 2,000 pages
Save $20 when you buy both volumes—only $60!

The “Spelman girls” of the early 1960s, “sheltered” within the isolated (and somewhat integrated) walled compound of their college campus, confronted twin obstacles when they took it upon themselves to leave campus and protest segregation. In addition to the far more serious and dangerous outside threats—including knife-wielding local residents and trumped-up “conspiracy” charges to inflate potential prison sentences—the young women also faced pressure from nervous academic administrators who just didn’t want to make any waves. In a recent history of Spelman’s role in the civil rights movement, one student, who had been expelled for her off-campus activities, recounted that college officials “made it pretty clear that any young ladies who got involved could be summarily dismissed.” (She was later readmitted “on probation” when students protested.)

One college employee who parted ways with the “present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty” was a young professor named Howard Zinn, who since 1956 had been chair of the history department; he wrote of his students’ heroism in “Finishing School for Pickets,” which was published in The Nation fifty years ago this week. Zinn (who died in January of this year) recalled in a posthumously published interview:

My experience at Spelman College is an example of the interaction between education and activism. . . . One of [Zinn’s colleagues] wrote a letter to the Atlanta Constitution saying, “I deplore what my students are doing; they are cutting class; they are missing out on their education.” And I thought, what a pitiful, narrow, cramped view of education this is. To think that what these students are going to learn in books can compare to what they will learn about the world, about reality. They will come from town, they will come back from prison, and then when they will go into the library, they will go into it with an enthusiasm and a curiosity that didn't exist before.

Zinn, whose students at Spelman included Marian Wright Edelman and Alice Walker, subsequently served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and ultimately angered the college’s president. In spite of having tenure, Zinn was dismissed in 1963. “I was fired for insubordination,” Mr. Zinn was quoted as saying. “Which happened to be true.” In May 2005, however, he was invited back to the college to give the commencement address.

*   *   *

One quiet afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

The Devil and Tom Walker

Washington Irving (1783–1859)
From Washington Irving: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra

Also of Interest
Washington Irving and the model for Rebecca in Ivanhoe (LOA Reader’s Almanac)

Washington Irving’s Sunnyside (Historic Hudson Valley)

Buy this book:
Washington Irving: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra
1,104 pages • dozens of stories and sketches

When Tales of a Traveller was published in 1824, critics derided the collection as a rehash of Washington Irving’s previous works. Even the painter Gilbert Stuart Newton, Irving’s friend and fellow lodger in England, confided in a letter that the book suffered from a common malady afflicting popular writers: “they give the world a work, however well executed, but resembling in its nature what they have already done.” Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the section entitled “The Money-Diggers” was “told amazingly well.”

The section admired by Newton includes “The Devil and Tom Walker,” which remains the most well known piece in the book. Based on the story of Faust, Irving’s darkly comic tale inspired a number of works, including Stephen Vincent Benét’s The Devil and Daniel Webster and, most recently, a 2008 musical that debuted at New York’s Metropolitan Playhouse. In both Irving’s and Benét’s stories, the devil goes by the name of “Old Scratch” (probably from the Old Norse scrat, or goblin), an epithet also used in works by writers such as Dickens, Trollope, and Kipling and transformed into Scratchy Wilson, the outlaw drunkard in Stephen Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.”

Although the story is set “about the year 1727,” the historical details describing the financial collapse actually refer to the circumstances of the Land Bank scheme of 1739–40, which occurred toward the end of the administration of colonial governor Jonathan Belcher. Given Irving’s painful, personal bankruptcy after the War of 1812, it’s surely not a coincidence that Tom Walker’s chosen profession in evildoing is financial wizardry, accumulating bonds and mortgages and forcing foreclosures and bankruptcies during the “hard times” following a speculative real estate bubble gone bust:

the people had run mad with schemes for new settlements; for building cities in the wilderness . . . lying nobody knew where, but which every body was willing to purchase. In a word the great speculating fever which breaks out every now and then in the country, had raged to an alarming degree, and every body was dreaming of making sudden fortunes from nothing.

In spite of its many comic and satiric elements, the bleak background and moralizing tone (“Let all griping money brokers lay this story to heart”) make for what biographer Andrew Burstein (The Original Knickerbocker, 2007) calls “perhaps Irving’s most pessimistic tale.”

*   *   *

A few miles from Boston, in Massachusetts, there is a deep inlet winding several miles into the interior of the country from Charles Bay, and terminating in a thickly wooded swamp, or morass. On one side of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on the opposite side the land rises abruptly from the water’s edge, into a high ridge on which grow a few scattered oaks of great age and immense size. Under one of these gigantic trees, according to old stories, there was a great amount of treasure buried by Kidd the pirate. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

“Spiritus Valet”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
From Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926–1948

Interesting Links

Interview with J. D. McClatchy, the editor of the LOA's Thornton Wilder edition (PDF, The Library of America)

The Thornton Wilder Society: Biography, newsletter, events, and more

Buy the book
Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels
1926–1948
731 pages
The Cabala | The Bridge of San Luis Rey | The Woman of Andros | Heaven’s My Destination | The Ides of March | stories and essays

As an undergraduate at Yale during World War I, Thornton Wilder experimented writing short stories—a form to which he would rarely return after the publication of his first novel in 1926. One of these stories, “Spiritus Valet,” won Yale’s John Hubbard Curtis Prize for 1918, which was established in 1900 to honor student achievement in English and which is still given to worthy Yale undergraduates today. (The following year, the prize was awarded to a fellow member of the Class of ’20, Stephen Vincent Benét.) It was a harbinger of Wilder’s career; among his many future honors were the National Book Award and three Pulitzer Prizes; he is the only author to win the latter for both drama and fiction.

The story was also published in one of Yale’s literary magazines, the Yale Courant—which Wilder’s father had edited as an undergraduate three decades earlier—and, unless you somehow had access to a copy of the hard-to-find issue in which the story appeared, you could not have read it until last year, when the text was reprinted in a Library of America edition that includes six of Wilder’s early stories.

J. D. McClatchy, who edited the LOA edition, acknowledges that “Spiritus Valet” is “apprentice work”—but it is very good apprentice work, displaying Wilder’s experiments with “ironic situations and sophisticated dialogue” that he would perfect in his later fiction and drama. Its three parts follow a widow who, earlier in life, had briefly known a famous poet—but the poet’s biographer is convinced that the pair had an affair, the evidence for which is found in the poems themselves. Perhaps the prevailing force of “Spiritus Valet” (Latin for “the spirit is strong”) is the larger-than-life, ghostly, background presence of Sebastian Torr, the “great self-concealing poet, the eternal incognito.” This description of Torr, notes Eric Ormsby in a recent essay in the New Criterion, is Wilder’s “own most prescient epithet.” The subtle intersections of life and art—of “secret” and “confession”—would reappear frequently in Wilder’s writings, and he advised in the 1928 essay “On Reading the Great Letter Writers” that “art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and to hide it at the same time.”

*   *   *

“The record of Sebastian Torr’s life is the meagrest we have of any great poet’s life since antiquity. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

A Certain Oil Refinery

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
From American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Interesting Links
Short video: Thomas Edison's film of the destruction by fire of Standard Oil Company's plant at Bayonne, N.J., on July 5th, 1900 (Library of Congress)

The Dreiser Web Source (University of Pennsylvania Libraries)

Buy the book
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Save 36%, free shipping
1047 pages • 80 pages of photographs, many in full color

Bayonne, New Jersey, refinery complex in 1890. Engraving from King's Hand-book of the United States.

In the anthology Writing New York, Phillip Lopate observes:

When Indiana-born Theodore Dreiser arrived in New York in 1894, he found “the city of my dreams” and explored it avidly, fascinated by its sharp contrasts. In his first masterpiece, Sister Carrie (1900), and his later Frank Cowperwood trilogy, he portrayed New York as a Social Darwinist winnowing machine, elevating some to the top while pushing others under.

In addition to his more famous works of fiction, Dreiser wrote a series of newspaper sketches about his adopted home, and he collected some of them in The Color of a Great City. One of the pieces, first published in 1919, takes his readers on a tour of the Standard Oil works, located in Bayonne, New Jersey, which on a clear day could be seen across New York Bay from the south side of Brooklyn. Dreiser’s Social Darwinism is on full display here, contrasting the mansions of Fifth Avenue with the “wretched” conditions of the industrial purgatory populated by men “of an order which you would call commonplace.” His article says little of the work itself (“You can find the how of it in any encyclopedia”) and instead focuses on the toxic filth and foul odor of the Bayonne refinery—reminding us that the societal and environmental costs of America’s hunger for oil are a century old.

*   *   *

There is a section of land very near New York, lying at the extreme southern point of the peninsula known as Bayonne, which is given up to a peculiar business. . . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Going to Shrewsbury

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909)
From Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories

Also of Interest
Sarah Orne Jewett House, South Berwick, Maine (Historic New England)

Buy the book
Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories
Deephaven • A Country Doctor • The Country of the Pointed Firs • Dunnet Landing stories • other stories and sketches • 937 pages

Paula Blanchard, in her biography of Sarah Orne Jewett, writes about a recurring character type found throughout the author’s fiction: “a succession of elderly women farmers, most of them having been widowed early and raising children alone.” The price of this precarious autonomy in the late nineteenth century could be sometimes devastating, as we see in “Going to Shrewsbury.” Jewett’s 1899 story portrays an endearing widow who, after forty-five years, loses her farm to a nefarious nephew who had “coaxed an’ over-persuaded” her late husband to use the property as collateral for a loan.

Suddenly homeless and dependent on the goodwill of others, Mrs. Peet takes her first-ever train-ride to a new and uncertain residence among relatives in the town of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Mrs. Peet’s looming resettlement, as the late scholar and critic Richard Cary notes, presents us with another theme found in many of Jewett’s stories: “The country represents a treasury of all that is good in the past; the city, all that is dreadful in the present. . . . Country women are reserved and self-sufficient; city women, volatile and helpless.” Or as Mrs. Peet herself says, “Town folks has got the upper hand o’ country folks, but with all their work an’ pride they can’t make a dandelion.”

*   *   *

The train stopped at a way station with apparent unwillingness, and there was barely time for one elderly passenger to be hurried on board before a sudden jerk threw her almost off her unsteady old feet and we moved on. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.