Next Week we Vote

 Next week we vote.  Some of us already have.  A month later my book, Prairie Bachelor, The Story of a Homesteader and the Populist Movement will finally be released.  A decade of research for this book, as well as much of my life as a law student, an attorney, an author, and incidentally as the granddaughter of a member of the Kansas House have obviously focused my attention on our nation and how we govern ourselves. 

Isaac Werner's 480 page journal

Much has changed since my great grandfather, a Union Soldier, took advantage of the benefit of a year's credit toward getting title to his claim for each year he served the Union, in his case, reducing the time it took from five years to prove up a claim to only two.  He was not alone.  Many Union soldiers returned to their former homes and found that opportunities had changed, so they decided to come to Kansas to start a new life.  Their loyalty to Abraham Lincoln, their commander, often influenced the choice of Union soldiers to vote republican, a decision that many, including my own family, passed down through the generations.  I doubt that Kansas remaining a dependable republican state would surprise my great grandfather, but a different political change certainly would--women getting the vote!

My research about the Populist Movement, and the People's Party they created--the most successful 3rd party this nation has ever seen--included many discoveries not only about Kansas but also about Texas, where the populist movement began.  Kansas was slower to the movement, but ultimately became its heart.  Women lacked the vote in both of those states, but they were active in the movement.

Not only have women gained the vote, but in this election, one of our national political parties has chosen a female running mate for it's Presidential nominee. Kansas has a female governor, and both Kansas and Texas have female candidates making a strong challenge to their male political opponent in seeking election as their state's senator in Washington.

Stained glass window, Dole Institute 

Because this is a Presidential election year, as I often do, I have looked to the past to learn what past presidents have said about the responsibilities of the one occupying the highest office Americans have to give.  The words of three of America's presidents follow below:

Lincoln:  "We the people are the rightful masters of both congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."

Truman:  "When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things.  You have to remember it isn't for you.  It's for the Presidency."

Nixon:  "With all the power that a President has, the most important thing to bear in mind is this:  You must not give power to a man unless, above all else, he has character.  Character is the most important qualification the President of the United States can have." 

The responsibilities thrust upon those who are privileged to hold that office are great, but all of us have an important responsibility as well--to Vote! 

Isaac & the Populist Movement Coming Soon!

In September of 2011 I began this blog.  I had found Isaac's journal in February of 2010 and had spent nearly a year transcribing it, as well as continuing with genealogy searches for every person mentioned in the journal and beginning the research that would continue for a decade.  My first two books, published by Baylor University Press and Dutton, a division of Penguin, had been published fairly quickly, and I assumed the same for my third book.  I continued doing research--traveling to the places where Isaac had lived, interviewing descendants of Isaac's neighbors, walking through cemeteries where people Isaac knew were buried, searching records at the courthouse, reading books Isaac had read, spending days turning the fragile, yellowed pages of the County Capital newspaper available at the Stafford County Historical Museum, reading biographies and autobiographies of famous people of Isaac's era, as well as reading other books of all kinds--academic, local histories and centennial editions, and government documents among others.  I even walked the route between Isaac's claim and Doc Dix's claim where the local post office was located.

Instructions for easier reading once you reach the University Press of Kansas at bottom of this blog.
www.kansaspress.ku.edu

My research was traditionally academic but also a personal immersion into the place and era when Isaac Werner staked his homestead and timber claims and when his community became involved in the Populist Movement of the late 1800s.  I wanted my book to be academically sound but I also wanted it to tell the story of Isaac and his neighbors in a nearly forgotten but extremely important time in American history.  I was raised in Isaac's community and my husband and I returned to the community in retirement, but I knew little about the importance of the Populist Movement and the People's Party that grew out of the movement.  Yet, the People's Party is the most successful 3rd party in American history, and many of their goals were adopted by our present political parties.  I wanted to share that story with ordinary readers, not just scholars.  Isaac had the personal library of a scholar but he was an ordinary man who valued the importance of reading.  I wanted to write for people like Isaac, living today.

In doing the depth of research I have done to immerse myself in Isaac's time, I have discovered many things that informed me but do not appear directly in the book.  I began the blog to share those things.  My interest in exploring the era and places relevant to that time provided much of the content I have shared with followers of this blog over the years.  I will continue the blog and already have some wonderful blogs about surrounding communities to share week by week.  Thank you for your continued interest and support!  I never expected for it to take so long to produce the published book.  There were periods when I laid the manuscript aside, but many of you encouraged me not to give up on finding the right publisher for Isaac.

And I have!  Right now I am doing the final proof reading and the indexing for the book.  It is being published by the University Press of Kansas.  They have supported my goal of writing in a narrative style that makes it enjoyable for general readers to immerse themselves in Isaac's story and be taken back into the years when Kansas and other states like Texas and other western and midwestern states, and post Civil War Southern states challenged the two established political parties, marched for Prohibition and Women's Rights, confronted the power of wealth during the so-called Golden Age, and played their role in transforming the nation during a period of a growing middle class.

Soon, I will finish the proofing and indexing and will be like the rest of you, awaiting the arrival of the published book.  Thank you again.  The image I have attached is from the University Press of Kansas Fall Catalogue.  Most of you who follow this blog will recognize the journal that appears on the cover of the book.  I think Isaac would be pleased.

To see the page above for easier reading, go to www.kansaspress.ku.edu and in the search box top left of the page enter Lynda Beck Fenwick.  That will take you to the page shown above with lettering much easier to read.  At the bottom line following the first two reviews, (rather hard to see), you can click to read the reviews by two more reviewers.  I am very honored by the four reviewers and by their comments.  I especially like how each reviewer brought out different perspectives about the book.

More Historic Diaries

Leo Tolstoy

Continuing to share the history of diary keeping from Alexandra Johnson's book, A Brief History of Diaries>>From Pepys to Blogs, I was not surprised to see that writers and authors are often diary and journal keepers.  One example is, however, rather unique.

Sonya Tolstoy

From the beginning of Leo Tolstoy's courtship of his wife-to-be Sonya in 1862, until Tolstoy's death in 1910, Leo and Sonya kept diaries.  In her book, Johnson writes:  "A year into their marriage, Tolstoy decided they should share theirs.  For forty-two years, they read, wrote in and commented on the other's diaries."  Tolstoy's novel, War and Peace, grew from a seed planted by a story he read in his wife's diary!

Fanny Burney (1752-1828)

Frances d'Arblay, known as Fanny Bruney, was a member of the literary circle that included Boswell and Johnson in the 1700s.  In 1768, when she was only fifteen years old, the clever girl began her practice of diary keeping with these words:  "To Nobody then will I write my journal since to Nobody can I be wholly unreserved--to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my heart."

Dorothy Wordsworth

Like Sonya Tolstoy, another female diarist aided a famous relative.  In this case it was Dorothy Wordsworth who kept a diary to "give pleasure" to her brother, William Wordsworth.  She was twenty-six years old when she began in 1798, and William acknowledged that "She gave me eyes" through her journal entries.  The sketch of Dorothy is taken from her biography.

Alice James

Alice James, sister to novelist Henry and philosopher William, began her diary in 1889.  At her death in 1892, her brother Henry described her diary as "heroic in its individuality...Her style, her  power to write--are to me a delight."  Despite the praise of his sister's writing, he burned the diary!  We know what she wrote only because her companion had copies printed.

Anne Frank  (Fair Use)

War is often the inspiration for keeping a diary.  Perhaps the most famous war diary in the world is the one kept by Anne Frank.  Her second day's entry could not have been more wrong, for she wrote:  "Writing in a diary is really a strange experience for someone like me.  Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musing of a thirteen-year-old school girl."  Those musings, begun in June of 1942, ended August 1, 1944.  A noncombatant, young Anne Frank, kept one of the most read diaries about war that has ever been published.

Siegfried Sasson

World War I, with the horrendous loss of life as troops faced modern warfare in a way unlike past wars, produced a group of poet soldier diarists, among them Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves.  In this 1916 diary entry, Sassoon wrote:  "As I sit in a nook among the sandbags and chalky debris, with shells flying overhead in the blue air, a lark sings...Heaven is furious with the smoke and flare and portent of shells, but bullets are a swarm of whizzng hornets, mad, winged and relentless.  There are still pools in the craters; they reflect the stars like any lovely water, but nothing grows near them."

Mary Chestnut, age 13

Perhaps the most powerful diarist of the Civil War was a woman.  Mary Chestnut was the wife of a Senator, and when the War began, a Confederate soldier.  She had lived in Washington in the early years of Lincoln's presidency but returned to their home in the Confederate South when war came.  She was a sophisticated, well-educated woman raised in a slave-owning family, but as an adult the idea of slavery and the war being fought over that issue left her in anguish.  She socialized with men leading the South in the war that she questioned, and her diary became a place to express the feelings she could not speak.  On Spetember 20, 1863, upon seeing open railroad cars transporting sleeping Confederate soldiers, she wrote:  "...soldiers rolled in their blankets, lying in rows, heads all covered, fast asleep.  In their gray blankets, packed in regular order, they looked like swathed mummies."  Chestnut's diary was first published in 1905.  Historian C. Vann Woodward used her forty-eight copybooks, 25,000 pages that she had revised from the original diary, to restore and annotate what she had written.  His work was published as Mary Chestnut's Civil War and won the Nobel Prize.

Dame Ellen Terry

Alexandra Johnson ends her Brief History of Diaries with a chapter devoted to online diaries and blogs.  You may read my own blog on that subject at "Keeping a Journal," in the blog archives of 6-6-2013.  Johnson quotes Ellen Terry's definition of a diary:  "What is a diary as a rule?  A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contemporary who reads it, invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it!"  Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928), pictured at right from a painting by her first husband, George Frederick Watts, was the leading Shakespearean actor in Britain, and her respect for the English language can be seen in her wise definition of diary keeping.

Isaac B. Werner found his journal useful as a personal reference to aid in his farming, as well as an occasional place to vent frustration.  There is no evidence that he shared his journal with any contemporary, but I, more than a century later, have become a student of the era and community about which Isaac wrote, and his journal is certainly a treasure to me!

If these brief samples of diary and journal keepers over the years have made you curious, you may read more in Alexandra Johnson's book, A Brief Histoy of Diaries>>From Pepys to Blogs.

Historic Diaries

Isaac Werner's Journal

When I was a young girl I kept a diary.  Two of my diaries survive, both with faux leather covers and a flap from back cover to front with a metal closure secured by a lock that could probably be picked with a hair pin.  They contain the typical adolescent secrets, and my attempt to read one of them after I was an adult ended in disappointment.  Frankly, it was boring, even to the author.
 

Reading Isaac B. Werner's journal was another matter entirely.  Each day's entry was fairly mundane, but as one day built on another, I was transported back into another time.  His day-to-day chores and encounters allowed me to experience the era of my great grandparents and other settlers who had claimed homesteads on the prairie.  Isaac was influenced by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, (See "Advice from Henry Ward Beecher, 12-7-2012 in the blog archives) and kept his entries free of most personal opinions and emotions, sticking to the weather and actual events during his days.

Queen Victoria

Isaac was not alone in keeping a diary in the 1800s.  England's Queen Victoria wrote almost daily for sixty-eight years, and her diaries constitute over one hundred volumes.  Isaac wrote daily from 1884 to 1891, filling 480 oversized pages, and the journal was labeled "Vol. 5th."  With the opening pages including entries from 1870-1871 and an unexplained gap of 13 years, it appears that four volumes were kept prior to 1870 when Isaac was in his mid-20s and volume five began.

Isaac's journal provoked a curiosity that led me to read a book title A Brief History of Diaries>>From Pepys to Blogs, written by Alexandra Johnson.  The author acknowledged the ancient keeping of journals and diaries, but it was her history of those kept in the 1800s and 1900s that I found most interesting.

Francis Kilvert

The words of an English country curate named Francis Kilvert writing in the 1870s particularly caught my eye because he was keeping a diary at the same time Isaac was keeping his.  Kilvert wrote:  "Why do I keep this voluminous journal?  I can hardly tell.  Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record...and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me."  I can't know whether Isaac shared Kilvert's anticipation that some future reader might enjoy his journal, but I certainly have enjoyed Isaac's record of his day-to-day life.

Charles Darwin

Alexandra Johnson also selected examples from travel and explorer journals and diaries.  One such example was Charles Darwin, whose notebooks and journals filled 2,070 pages and became the sources from which he formulated his theory of evolution and natural selection which led in 1859 to the publication of The Origin of Species.  

Cover art by Sophia Thoreau

Another explorer did not go far from home.  A reader of Darwin throughout his life and a friend of diarist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau's exploration was of Walden Pond, which was only a mile and a half from the center of Concord, Massachusetts where he and his circle of friends lived.  Yet, from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847 he recorded his observations of nature and Indian trails while living in his secluded tiny cottage beside Walden Pond.  Those observations became the material for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854).  Thoreau explained his purpose for devoting himself to exploring and recording observations of Walden Pond and the surrounding environment, saying that he used his journals "to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."  The cover art for Walden was done by his sister Sophia.

Unlike Thoreau, Isaac documented not so much the native plants but rather his meticulously kept records of planting, nurturing, harvesting, and storing the crops he introduced to the prairie's sandy loam soil.  Yet, he too wrote about the weather, the native birds, and nature's spectacles, such as eclipses, mirages, and sun dogs.

Next week's blog will continue sharing other examples of journal and diary keepers described in Alexandra Johnson's History of Diaries.

Keeping a Journal

Title page from Isaac's journal

The spring of 2010 I found Isaac's journal and began the experience that has formed the basis of this blog.  One of my earliest posts described that discovery.  (See "Finding Isaac's Journal" in the blog archives, October 23, 2011.)  Isaac began the journal that forms the core of my manuscript in 1870, as a young druggist in his mid-20s living in Rossville, IL, but journaling was apparently something he had done most of his life, for that journal is labeled Vol. 5th.  Following an interruption in 1871, Isaac resumed his journal writing in 1884 and continued filling 480 pages of closely written daily entries until 1891.

Working with Isaac's journal--reading, transcribing, annotating, and eventually writing my manuscript about him, his community, and the period about which he wrote, I came to see Isaac as someone I knew very well.  However, most journals are meant to be private, and probably Isaac could never have imagined someone like me devoting months and years to his journal as I have.

People keep diaries and journals for different reasons.  Computer journals are now quite popular.  In my October 23, 2011 blog I describe the influence of Henry Ward Beecher on Isaac's method of journaling, an influence that changed Isaac from his youthful style of expressing his opinions and judgments of others to the more restrained style of his middle age.

Why do people keep journals?  In her book, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion examines that question in an essay, "On Keeping a Notebook."  She writes:  "The impulse to write things down is a compulsive one, inexplainable to those who do not share it.  ... Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant, rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."

Since I have intermittently kept journals during my life, I read her words with a personal interest.  Am I lonely, an anxious malcontent, a rearranger of things?  I think not.  The diary I kept in high school would have satisfied Rev. Beecher's suggestion that I should describe what I did each day, people I saw, and events in the community, although I don't believe I included the weather, as Beecher suggested, and I'm quite sure my teenaged activities would have bored anyone but me.

Joan Didion offers the best reason for consistently keeping a journal:  "We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not."  If I had the courage to confront my teenaged self, it might be interesting to see who I was so long ago.  I hope I would like that young girl, but I doubt that I would recognize her as myself!

Isaac's Journal

Was Isaac Werner lonely and resistant?  Yes, I believe he was.  Was he an anxious malcontent?  Well, he was often impatient of those he found unwilling to learn, lazy about their work, and neglectful of their commitments, but after venting his annoyance in his journal he was more likely to launch a campaign of educating, lecturing, or organizing than he was to indulge in anxious discontent. The 1800s were an era when many people kept journals, so perhaps their motives were different from Didion's assessment of modern journal keepers. 

I have a friend who writes letters to those who have angered or hurt her, expressing her feelings without restraint.  It helps calm her own emotions, although the person to whom the letter is addressed never knows how my friend felt, for once the letter is complete, my friend destroys it.  Sometimes, I believe that was what Isaac accomplished with his journal entries, although he did not destroy what he had written when he finished.

My journaling is the way I reflect on matters that concern or interest me.  I keep a review of every book I read.  It is very structured, opening with a section in which I identify Setting, Plot, Characters, and Theme.  That is followed with a section in which I analyze the writing itself under headings titled Literary Techniques and Structure & Style.  Next comes a section titled My Comments, concluding with the final section, Favorite Quotes.  I have often finished books still wondering why a particular book is considered a classic or was praised by reviewers.  By forcing myself to write the review and complete all the sections, I reflect more thoroughly on what I read and discover themes and symbols and richness in the writing that the original reading of the book had missed.

I have also taken issues that concern me and spent weeks or months researching, studying, and journaling to reach an informed personal judgment about the topic.  In other words, I tend to journal as a way of thinking deeply about a subject.  I think Isaac also used his journal to think through ideas he was considering, although he generally left the emotions out of what he wrote after falling under the influence of Rev. Beecher. (See "Advice from Henry Ward Beecher," Dec. 7, 2012, in my blog archives.)

While reflecting on Isaac's journal and why he wrote daily for so many years, I encountered a quote written by Virginia Woolf in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Woolf wrote:  "Since the only test of truth is length of life, and since words survive the chops and changes of time longer than any other substance, therefore they are the truest.  Buildings fall; even the earth perishes.  What was yesterday a cornfield is to-day a bungalow.  But words, if properly used, seem able to live forever."  (I found this quote in a wonderful website at www.brainpickings.org.)

Isaac's house and the school house he helped to build are gone.  Nearly all of the trees he tended with such devotion have died or been bulldozed to make way for crops.  Even the pinnacle hill he climbed to watch fireworks in distant towns has been carved away until it is now no higher than many other hills nearby.  What remains are Isaac's words--those published in newspapers and those written in his journal.  But for the words he wrote, Isaac and his deeds would be forgotten.  They are his truth.

 

Finding Isaac's Journal

When I learned that my deceased cousin had owned a homesteader's journal, I began asking questions, starting at the museum to which Cousin Lucille had bequeathed many of her possessions.  Unfortunately, no one seemed to know anything about the journal, but I was invited to look through the unsorted boxes of my cousin's possessions stored in the basement of the museum.  Like many small town museums, the Lucille M. Hall Museum depends on volunteers, and I felt selfish searching for the journal when it was obvious that they needed help sorting.  I made a compromise with my conscience.  As I began opening boxes, I sorted contents and identified pictures that I recognized, but I chose boxes that looked like they might contain the missing journal.  When the last two volunteers came down into the basement where I was sorting to let me know they were leaving for the day, they told me I was welcome to stay and continue looking.  I wasn't too keen on staying alone in the basement of an old building whose creaking and dripping sounds were not familiar to me.  I left with them.

The next day, a volunteer had gone into the storeroom where I had been working and had opened the box next to the one I was sorting.  It was the last box on the shelf, and inside was Isaac's Journal.  If I had stayed to work only a few minutes longer, I would have found it.  The important thing, however, was that the journal had been found--and what a discovery it was!

 

Each day from August of 1884 to June of 1891, Isaac wrote in this large, leather-bound journal, two inches thick, pages ten inches wide by fifteen and a half inches tall, containing 480 pages--the kind of legal journal in which records at the court house are kept.  In the front pages of the journal are entries from 1870 and 1871, when Isaac was a young druggist in Rossville, Illinois.  With no explanation for a 13 year interruption, the journal resumes during Isaac's years as a homesteader in Stafford County, Kansas.  Knowing that I wanted to use the journal for research, the museum board allowed me to take it home to do the work.                                                                                                                             

In order to organize and index all of the information the journal contained, I quickly realized I needed to transcribe it.  Isaac's penmanship is actually quite good, but he filled the pages from edge to edge in a fairly small script, and at my best, I was able to type only about one page every forty-five minutes.  I wasn't sure I could complete such a project.  After two weeks, I called one of the board members and told her what I was trying to do.  She said not to worry about how long it was taking, since without my inquiry, the journal might have gone undiscovered for months or even years.  The task of transcribing took me eleven months, involving one crashed laptop and a trip to my optometrist!                               

Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad:  "At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at his work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest."  Twain goes on to say that such enthusiasm only lasts about twenty-one days; however, Isaac's commitment lasted far longer, and it is a historical treasure.  The front page identifies the Journal as "Vol. 5th."  Sadly, the whereabouts of volumes 1-4 are unknown.

The writing done in 1870-1871 is that of a young man--full of ideas, opinions, and personal feelings.  When the journal writing resumes in 1884, the entries are of a more practical nature--the weather, his crops, labor done and done for him by others, economic matters, community events, and political activities.  Isaac seems to have been influenced in his changed style by a newspaper column authored by Henry Ward Beecher, which Isaac clipped and glued in the journal.  Beecher disapproved of confessional journal keeping, offering instead the following advice: "One may trace from day to day the mere facts of personal history, the proceedings of the farm, or the books read, visits made or received, the events in society, the conversations with men of mark, the facts of the weather, the seasons, the aspects of nature, and, in short, a journal for knowledge, in distinction from feeling, might be kept with great profit."  Isaac adhered to this advice for six years, preserving a record of prairie life and social struggles.

Isaac lived in an exciting time, but he kept his Journal for himself, written in sentence fragments and containing names familiar to him but a mystery to today's reader.  I decided to bring this historical place and time, with Isaac at its center, alive for readers!  Even while I was transcribing and indexing the Journal, further research began.

[Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.]