All posts by David Malone

Jane Addams

May 4, 2009College-related Publications, Wheaton College ArchivesDavid Malone

Born in Cedarville, Illinois, on September 6, 1860, Addams graduated from Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford College) in 1881 where her father, John, served as a trustee. With Ellen Gates Starr Addams founded Hull-House on Chicago’s Near West Side in 1889 to address the social problems associated with urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Settlement houses, like Hull House, attracted individuals to settle in poor urban neighborhoods and seek to ameliorate social ills. By 1911, Chicago had 35. In its early years Hull-House was located in the midst of a densely populated urban neighborhood of Italian, Irish, German, Greek, Bohemian, and Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. As is often the case with neighborhoods, over the years the demographics changed. By the 1920s Hull House served African Americans and Mexicans neighbors. In her autobiography Addams recounted the influence of her father to be interested in the “moral concerns of life.”

Jane Addams and the Hull-House residents provided kindergarten and day care facilities for the children of working mothers; an employment bureau; an art gallery; libraries; English and citizenship classes; and theater, music and art classes. As the complex expanded to include thirteen buildings, Hull-House supported more clubs and activities such as a Labor Museum, the Jane Club for single working girls, meeting places for trade union groups, and a wide array of cultural events. The Hull-House residents and their supporters forged a powerful reform movement. Among the projects that they helped launch were the Immigrants’ Protective League, the Juvenile Protective Association, the first juvenile court in the nation, and a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic (later called the Institute for Juvenile Research). Through their efforts, the Illinois Legislature enacted protective legislation for women and children in 1893. With the creation of the Federal Children’s Bureau in 1912 and the passage of a federal child labor law in 1916, the Hull-House reformers saw their efforts expanded to the national level. In addition, she actively supported the campaign for woman suffrage and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920). In 1910 she received an honorary doctorate by Yale University–the first ever awarded to a woman by Yale.

Jane Addams spoke at Wheaton College on March 14, 1894. During her career she wrote prolifically on topics related to Hull-House activities, producing eleven books and numerous articles as well as maintaining an active speaking schedule nationwide and throughout the world. She played an important role in many local and national organizations. Despite being attacked by the press and being expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution, during World War I Addams worked for peace. As a result of her peace work she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Jane Addams died in Chicago on May 21, 1935. She was buried in Cedarville, her childhood home town.

The Narnia Code

April 17, 2009Collection-related Publications, Special CollectionsDavid Malone

Norman Stone’s professional affiliation with C.S. Lewis began when he directed the original Shadowlands, a film about the marriage of Lewis to Joy Davidman and her subsequent death. Most may be familiar with the title but remember Anthony Hopkins in the role of Lewis rather than the BBC’s Joss Ackland from 1985. Lewis’ papers and family wardrobe are housed in Wheaton’s Marion E. Wade Center. Stone also produced a docu-drama in 2005 titled C.S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia, which is viewed to be more accurate than the final production of Shadowlands. After a long association with the creator of Reepicheep, Tumnus and the Pevensie children, Stone returns to Lewis with The Narnia Code. To air on BBC1 April 16th, The Narnia Code details Michael Ward’s cracking of the mysterious thread that holds the various Narnian tales together.

Norman Stone has had an illustrious career with his being awarded a first class honors degree in Visual Communication Leeds College before transferring to London’s Royal College of Art for a Master of Arts degree in Film and Television. He began his professional career in television as the youngest producer/director for the Religious Department of the BBC.

Moving from Everyman documentaries and a pioneering Sunday children’s show into drama, he produced the highly acclaimed film A Different Drummer about the blind and deaf Cornish poet Jack Clemo (1980). Shadowlands helped more firmly establish his career with its international success. The film won two BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) awards, an International Emmy and the Prague D’Or for Best Director. Other of Stone’s dramas include Martin Luther – Heretic, starring Jonathan Pryce; New World, starring James Fox; The Vision, starring Dirk Bogarde and Lee Remick, and the award-winning Burston Rebellion with Eileen Atkins and Bernard Hill. In 1988-89 he directed a three-part thriller series for BBC Scotland, The Justice Game (first series), and the television feature Pied Piper, starring Peter O’Toole and based on the novel by Nevil Shute (a Granada TV/CBS co-production).

While working on the script of The End Time with Murray Watts, Stone also collaborated with Watts on a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Dream of a Ridiculous Man (BBC 2), starring Jeremy Irons.

Stone has won an International Emmy, Gold Awards for Best Film and Best Director at the New York Film and Television Festival, and the Monitor d’Oro for Best Drama at Umbriafiction TV ’92 for the Catherine Cookson television film The Black Velvet Gown, which he directed for World Wide International Television.

Following up on his successful direction of They Do It with Mirrors, BBC’s 1991 “Miss Marple” Christmas special, Stone has also worked on BBC’s final “Miss Marple” adventure, The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side.

Other awards include a BAFTA for the Omnibus special on the life of Dudley Moore, After the Laughter, an Andrew Cross Award for best documentary of the year for The Tartan Pimpernel and a Golden Remi for his first feature film Man Dancin’, which he created and directed in his home town of Glasgow. Stone directed Florence Nightengale, a period drama, which aired in the UK in mid-2008.

Faith & Geology @ Wheaton

April 15, 2009College-related Publications, Wheaton College ArchivesDavid Malone

Wheaton faculty Steve Moshier, David Maas and Jeff Greenberg recently saw the publication of their article on the history of geology at Wheaton College and its engagement with Wheaton’s theological stance and teachings in Geology and Religion: a history of harmony and hostility (Geological Society, London).

Since the college’s founding in 1860, geology has been part of its curriculum. Jonathan Blanchard sought to recruit the best faculty possible and this was true for the natural sciences as it was for the humanities. One of his first recruits was George Frederick Barker, whom Blanchard wanted to teach geology and natural history. Unfortunately, due to a number of circumstances his appointment lasted one year.

As scientific knowledge grew the tensions between science and religion began to grow. These emerged, in some campes, shortly after Darwin’s writings became widely available and taught. Wheaton’s geology faculty respected the geological evidence for an ancient Earth and interpreted Genesis’ telling of creation and its chronology as representing epochs of God’s creative activity. Wheaton’s first faculty member with an earned doctorate was L. Allen Higley, who harmonized mainstream geological history and the Bible through the gap or ruin-restoration interpretation, wherein the epochs of geological time preceded the biblical account of six days of recreation several thousand years ago. Higley and his ideas became a major influence in Wheaton’s interactions with its fundamentalist constituents and its recruiting of new faculty. By the 1930s geology became an established major and an independent department in 1958. Like the study of human origins, geology education at Wheaton has been profoundly influenced by the tension between science and faith in the evangelical sub-culture, causing concern in certain quarters. Wheaton’s faculty and administration have had to address these concerns on numerous occassions since the 1960s.

You’ll never become a cartoonist…

April 13, 2009Collection-related Publications, Special CollectionsDavid Malone

Vaughn Shoemaker, who died in 1991, was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News and his work is as relevant today as it was when he sketched it. Along with being an acknowledged cartoonist, Shoemaker was a Christian whose work often displayed his convictions.

According to David Enlow in a tract titled Meet a Pulitzer Prize Winner, in 1918 Vaughn Shoemaker enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, with a class that was overcrowded and with many waiting to get in, the instructor, after three months, took to the task of weeding out the least likely to succeed. The first one picked was Shoemaker.

“You’ll never become a cartoonist in a thousand years,” said the director.

Twenty years later he had won his first Pulitzer Prize. Also he won the National Headliners Award, two National Safety top awards, eleven Freedom Foundation gold medals, topping it off with an honorary degree from Wheaton College and his second Pulitzer Prize.

What happened to transform this young man into a distinguished American cartoonist?

In 1917 as a lifeguard on a Chicago beach, he met a beautiful girl who later became Miss Chicago and it was love at first sight. Not only was this girl beautiful, but she was also sensible. It was “no go,” she said, unless Vaugn showed more signs of making some success in life.

With this incentive, Shoemaker found himself attracted by an ad in a magazine: “Draw this cartoon and become a famous cartoonist.” The fact that he had no particular aptitude in that direction did not stop him. Soon he found himself in art school, from whence came the director’s discouraging word.

An apprenticeship in the art department of the Chicago Daily News opened up, and this laid the groundwork for his 44 years of successful cartooning.

At the age of 20, a storybook situation brought the first break of his life. The chief cartoonist for the News left to take a position in New York City. His assistant had gone to take another position in the same city, and the second assistant had to leave because of illness in his family.

“You, Shoemaker!” the boss shouted. “Draw something, anything, until I can get a cartoonist somewhere.”

As he faced his dilemma, Vaughn thought of his mother, who years earlier had taught him to pray at her knee. Right in the chief cartoonist’s studio, he fell to his knees and asked God for help. Somehow, the cartoon came off his pen. He was known at The Chicago Daily News as a “gospel cartoonist.” He once said he started each cartoon “on my knees with a prayer.” He noted that the boys at the newspaper noticed it. Some laughed. “Some kidded me,” Shoemaker said. “I laughed back. There I stood: God helping me, I could do no other.”

In addition to his professional success, Shoemaker travelled far and wide to share the Good News of the Gospel which transformed his life.

Shoemaker created the character John Q. Public and won two Pulitzer Prizes. Shoemaker’s most familiar character represented the beleaguered American taxpayer. The character appeared first in The Chicago Daily News, the paper on which Mr. Shoemaker began his career in 1922. In 1963 Mr. Shoemaker’s cartoons were syndicated to more than 75 newspapers. He worked at the Daily News for 27 years and then moved to the New York Herald Tribune, the Chicago American and the American’s successor, Chicago Today, where he retired. By the time he retired, in 1972, he had drawn 14,000 cartoons

He won his first Pulitzer in 1938 for a drawing, “The Road Back,” which showed a World War I soldier marching backwards into war. The caption said, “You’re going the wrong way.” His cartoons were criticised by Herman Goering who described his work as “horrible examples of anti-Nazi propaganda.” In 1947, he won his second Pulitzer, for a cartoon titled, “Still Racing His Shadow.” In this cartoon a worker, marked “new wage demands,” tried to outrun his shadow, “cost of living.”

Neither a borrower or lender be….

March 30, 2009Wheaton College ArchivesDavid Malone

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lord Polonius advises Laertes on how to conduct himself. During his oration he reminds Laertes:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

Now libraries, much more so that archives, have a long tradition of lending, at least in the United States. The history of the Public, or Free, Library in the United States is one of noble purposes as individuals like Franklin and others saw the need for an educated citizenry and free and easy access to information.

Sometimes that access can be thwarted by its own openness. While recently verifying the contents of a long-held collection of papers from a long-deceased faculty member (S. Richey Kamm) as the staff of the Archives & Special Collections finish development of our archival management system Archon, an interesting find was made. In a folder titled “Association of American Universities Conference Reports, 1900-1902” were two volumes of this potentially uninteresting serial. For some unknown reason piquing interest, these volumes, both, were found to have a call number written on the front covers and a notation inside its back covers, “mending.” Querying the library catalog it was clear that these two volumes were the missing start to a long series of publications. This long-borrowed couplet had been located in a faculty’s files for over fifty years and sitting in archival storage for over thirty of those years. Their brief foray into a faculty office soon became a multi-decade trek back to a more proper home.

One doesn’t wish to perpetuate old (and inaccurate?) stereotypes of absent-minded professors or dusty, little-consulted archives, but it does give an archivist or a librarian pause about all this “free and easy access” business….

At least for a moment. All will be put at ease to know that the renegade volumes have made their way back to their proper home with its other serial siblings.

An Indelible Impression

March 27, 2009College-related Publications, Wheaton College ArchivesDavid Malone

John Payson Williston, honored on Wheaton’s campus in brick and mortar through the “Women’s Building” built in 1895 and renamed Williston Hall in 1933, was a friend of Jonathan Blanchard. An inventor of indelible ink and a business man in Northampton, Massachusetts, Williston was also an abolitionist who used his financial resources and reputation to help those formerly enslaved to find freedom and better lives.

Charles A. Blanchard

Williston was like so many other evangelical Congregationalists of his time as he was involved in a variety of social and spiritual reform activities. He was not simply religious nor simply reformist, but he saw the holistic impact of the Gospel of Christ in addressing spiritual and physical needs. For Williston the Gospel was not simply “pie in the sky” or “a chicken in every pot” but a mysterious mixture of the here and now and the hereafter. Williston was involved in the Northampton Association of Education and Industry and served as an agent of the American Tract Society in western Massachusetts. He fought slavery and was a member of the Committee for West Indian Missions.

Williston was known to be a part of the Underground Railroad in Northampton and to employ those seeking freedom in his business operations. Additionally, as seen in the life of David Ruggles, Williston underwrote fines and court costs incurred by those on the front lines of the abolitionist cause (p. 41) (Porter, Dorothy B. “David Ruggles, an Apostle of Human Rights.” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1943), pp. 23-50)

Williston also had direct personal involvement in his helping others. He took on the guardianship of William Howard Day, the son of abolitionist Eliza Day and her husband, John. Williston helped him gain skills as a printer in Northampton and then sent him to Oberlin College, from which he graduated in 1847 — the only black graduate in a class of fifty. Day later was elected president of the National Board of Commissioners of the Colored People and helped start Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, a historically black college affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

Williston was a friend to both Knox and Wheaton College. After being presented with the needs of the school by George Washington Gale, Williston’s first gift to Knox was a set of classical books for use by the students. After Blanchard’s election as president of the school his interest in helping fund Knox grew. Williston pulled back his giving as Knox became more secure and landed. Williston was a regular benefactor to Wheaton College. When James Oliver Buswell became president of Wheaton College his also served as the J. P. Williston Professor of Philosophy and Bible.

Williston’s importance in western Massachusetts can be seen not far from Northampton as MountHolyoke College named their observatory after Williston. It was built in 1880 to be ready for the rare transit of Venus in 1882. It is the oldest academic building on their campus. Williston’s brother, Samuel, was instrumental in the founding of Williston Seminary, now Williston Northampton School. Samuel was also a friend and donor to Blanchard’s causes.

John Payson Williston was a business man, reformer, abolitionist, benefactor and compassionate Christian. He took personal and professional risks to help those in need. He made an indelible impression on numerous lives and institutions.

Chase-ing Wheaton — full circle

March 16, 2009Wheaton College ArchivesDavid Malone

One of Wheaton’s earliest trustees was Salmon P. Chase. During his career in public service Chase was a senator from the state of Ohio, had served as its governor, was Secretary of the Treasury (he appears on the $10,000 bill), and finally served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It is likely that Jonathan Blanchard and Chase first met when Blanchard pastored in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was involved in abolitionist activities and the Liberty Party. Interestingly enough, Salmon P. Chase was the great-great-uncle of J. Richard Chase, Wheaton’s sixth president and the great-great-great-uncle of current faculty-member Ken Chase.

Running alongside the east side of Blanchard Hall to the south is Chase Street. I think some weight can be placed behind the idea of Chase St. being named for Salmon P. Chase. In the 1874 Map of Wheaton (reprinted by the Dupage Co. Historical Soc. in 1975) several streets are shown in and around Chase St. The area, known as College Addition, was platted with North/South streets as Sumner (likely for Radical Republican Charles Sumner), Chase, Lincoln, Grant and President (likely for President Blanchard as this street went to his house). The East/West streets platted were Nebraska, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Illinois.

The One-Armed Explorer

March 10, 2009Wheaton College ArchivesDavid Malone

Deep in Wheaton’s past lies a connection to one of America’s great explorers of the nineteenth century. John Wesley Powell, the great explorer of the Colorado River was known to Jonathan Blanchard as “the one-armed explorer.”

Powell’s family moved to Wheaton, Illinois in 1852. Joseph Powell and his wife had three sons and three daughters when they moved to Wheaton; they also had two married daughters. Joseph Powell was a tailor and a lay preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist Church. In Wheaton they purchased a five-acre tract near the Illinois Institute, a Wesleyan Methodist school, since Powell had been elected a trustee of the new Institute. Powell had also purchased a forty-acre tract, from Jabez Dodge, in an area more distant from the school. By the standards of the day, the Powells were by no means poor. The house on the forty-acre parcel was moved to the five-acre plot nearer to the Institute, utilizing rollers and six oxen. John Wesley would return often to Wheaton, until his parents’ deaths in 1870. The Joseph Powell family eventually held title to 11 separate parcels in the Wheaton area.

The Illinois Institute didn’t offer the courses that stimulated John the most, logic and mathematics. He earnestly desired a college degree, preferably from Oberlin. His education was not directed towards the ministry, as his father would have preferred, and in search of a degree, Powell enrolled at Illinois College in Jacksonville in 1855. For his sophomore year, Powell made it to Oberlin, but returned to Illinois the following year, 1857, and enrolled as a sophomore at the Illinois Institute and actively participated in the Beltionian Literary Society.

It seems that finances were always a point of difficulty for Powell. His father had promised to pay for his education if it was for the ministry, but Powell turned to teaching to earn money for school. He had held a teaching post in Macon County, Illinois before his enrollment at Illinois College.

John Wesley Powell never received the degree that he sought so earnestly. Financial difficulty, his own and that of the Illinois Institute, prohibited this luxury. Also, the late 1850s a severe depression and economic panics to the nation. After his failed attempts at receiving a college degree Powell began taking field trips. On one such trip to Michigan, Powell met his future wife Emma Powell, a cousin of his.

Powell would also take part in the Civil War, rising from private to lieutenant quite quickly. During free time Powell would scour the surrounding area for geological samples and other items of interest, most of which made their way to the Powell home in Wheaton. However, his service to his country cost him an arm in battle.

Powell was honorably discharged in January, 1865 and took a position as professor of geology at Illinois Wesleyan. The next year he organized a trip to the Rocky Mountains and was immediately captivated by them and would return often. It was his interest in the west that would place him firmly in America’s history.

Powell had great interest in the Illinois Institute, which would become Wheaton College. As a student, Powell most likely saw the hardships and inadequacies of the fledgling institute. Powell later helped provide for the needs of his Alma Mater. In an excerpt from the Catalogue of 1865 it is recorded that:

“Major J.W. Powell, prompted by his love of science, and friendship for the Institution where he received part of his education, proposes to put up, during the summer, a cabinet illustrating the geology of the west….”

ReCollections

Re-telling stories from Buswell Library Special Collections

All posts by David Malone

Neither a borrower or lender be….

Chase-ing Wheaton — full circle

The One-Armed Explorer