Edmond, Oscar, Laura ~ 2

Dream of Laura

 

The star witness in the 1907 divorce trial of Professor and Mrs. Oscar Lovell Triggs turned out to be an anarchist named Herman Kuehn. He had arrived early for a lecture at the Spencer-Whitman Institute on Calumet Avenue in Chicago. The center, named for Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman, evidently doubled as a free love colony. 

Upon bounding up the steps to the professor’s office, Kuehn found Triggs – yes, this really was the headline – “in flagrante delictu.” 

“He does not regard the institution of marriage in any wise [sic] as a solemn or sacred institution or one conducive to the best interest of morals or the progress of the human race,” Kuehn told the court. It’s interesting that he sold out the professor on the matter of marriage. 

For later Kuehn became editor and publisher of a journal called Prospectus: Instead of a Magazine that proclaimed itself “calculated to jar the sensibilities and ruffle the temper of victims of ‘fixed’ opinions.”

Dismissed from the University of Chicago and disgraced by the trial, Triggs did have his defenders. Many insisted that his freedom of speech had been violated. 

“The worst that can be said is that he is a little touched with the mild socialism of William Morris and [German educator] Froebel,” the St. Louis Mirror editorialized.

Professor Triggs in 1904; photo
appeared in The Literary Digest

In September 1905, Triggs traveled to New York City where he attended a meeting at Peck’s Restaurant on lower Fulton Street (a go-to place for big thinkers on small budgets). 

With Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others, he established the League for Industrial Democracy and issued a call to study Socialism. The group stated:

The recent remarkable increase in the Socialist vote of America should serve as an indication to the educated men and women in the country that Socialism is a thing concerning which it is no longer wise to be indifferent.

Then Triggs married a former student, Ada Beall Cox. They moved to a ranch in Turlock, California, to raise animals and grow fruits and vegetables. The plan was to continue to write and publish.

Meanwhile in Paris, Laura had married a physician and cared for her young son, Edmond. She became a member of the Society of French Literary Critics and published articles under the pseudonym Julia Gagey-McAdoo. 

And she got to know Anatole France, an esteemed Parisian essayist, novelist, and historian who stood with Zola during the Dreyfus Affair and ultimately won a Nobel Prize.  

In the springtime of 1911, the two began a love affair replete with ecstatically passionate correspondence. Laura spoke and wrote French fluently. But the relationship did not last the year. In December, “la belle Floridienne,” as he called her, wrote to her lover:

I find myself sombering in a cruel despair which is slowly destroying my normal capacity for hope and a sense of inner harmony. You made me believe that I helped you live life and you would be equally sad to lose me. You told me yesterday that the wife of your youth (of which the memory is sacred) did not see you every day as I do. But similarly, I see myself in a societal position that recognizes my rank and my talents, (and I do not affect a false modesty there) in which you could at least visit, in which I could have you as a guest and see you at dinner parties and the like. I would adapt happily to this situation. What are words? You told me to not be afraid of them. The essential is to feel complete with another person. Love of this kind has no name or etiquette. It gives and receives all, it’s an endless circle and this is how I love you…*

The next day Laura took an overdose of barbital and died. She is buried in the ossuary at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Young Edmond returned to the United States to live with his aunt and uncle in New York City.  

In California, Oscar and Ada Beall Triggs became the parents of three children. They also won an award for their Shetland pony at the Sonoma-Marin Agricultural Fair in 1914.

Further down the road, the couple moved to the Tingley Colony in Point Loma, a Utopian community founded by an autocratic Theosophist named Katherine Tingley. After World War I, they lived in Seattle and then Manitoba, where Oscar died in 1930.

Ada lived for another 30 years and had all kinds of adventures. She may have been the happiest of the lot.

*Translation by Mark Olmsted.

 
https://www.throughthehourglass/edmond-oscar-laura-2.html

See also March 2 + April 6 + June 15, 2016 posts.

Edmond, Oscar, Laura ~ 1

Cobb Hall, University of Chicago, built in 1892; a scene that would have been familiar
to Oscar Lovell Triggs and his wife, Laura

The 1918 edition of Notable Southern Families discloses that Edmond made his home with his maternal aunt, Rosalie. Of course that made sense. His mother, Laura McAdoo, had taken her own life in 1911 in Paris and his father, Oscar Triggs, was ensconced in a utopian community in California with his second wife. 

Therefore, one might imagine that Edmond, then 17, lived with a dottering old lady on  the family plantation down in Milledgeville, Georgia, where the McAdoo family originated. That was not the case.

Rather, he resided with Aunt Rosalie on Riverside Drive in New York City. Rosalie’s husband, James, was secretary and treasurer of the Hudson and Manhattan Railway. He held the position by the grace of Rosalie’s brother, William Gibbs McAdoo, then serving as President Wilson’s Secretary of the Treasury.

Edmond went on to Columbia University and earned a BA, Master’s and PhD in English literature. Specializing in the history of American theater, he published several well-respected books and spent most of his career teaching at Bradford College in Haverhill, Mass.

His full name – Edmond McAdoo Gagey – gave a hint of his past but not a clear connection to his scandal-ridden parents, Laura McAdoo Triggs Gagey and Oscar Lovell Triggs.

One of six children in a family that found itself destitute after the Civil War, the beautiful, intellectual Laura made her way to Chicago from Knoxville where her father, William Gibbs McAdoo Sr., had joined the University of Tennessee faculty after the family fled Georgia. He and Laura were quite close from the time she was a little girl. He worried about her emotional intensity. 

Professor Oscar Lovell Triggs, “the most picturesque member of the Department of English at the University of Chicago” (according to a popular journal), revered the work of Whitman and Browning. Students flocked to him because he was amusing and irreverent. 

Laura enrolled at the university and took one of his classes. They fell in love and married in 1899.

Their son Edmond, born in 1901, spent his first four years in the university neighborhood of Hyde Park. John D. Rockefeller, Sr. had endowed the school a scant decade earlier and Oscar Triggs was among the first faculty members, having earned his doctorate there in 1895.

A proponent of the Arts and Crafts Movement which emerged during the late Victorian era, Oscar helped found the Industrial Art League of Chicago. 

The movement started in England as a reaction to the machine age and, according to some critics, sentimentalized a time when laborers created useful things that also were beautiful and thus gave their work meaning. It celebrated craftsmanship in wood, pottery, metal, and other materials. 

Professor Triggs believed that the Arts and Crafts Movement would create a “freer social order,” the elimination of the division of labor. With several friends, he also planned to open a tuition-free People’s Industrial College in Chicago.  

During this time, Laura McAdoo Triggs pursued her studies, joined the Arts and Crafts Movement, and published articles about patriotism, democracy, and higher education for women.

Then, unexpectedly in 1904, the University of Chicago dismissed Professor Triggs. Speculation abounded. 

Was he “too radical,” a publicity-hound, or just a conceited jerk? 

Of course, it was more complicated than that. Triggs’s critiques of church hymns (“inferior to Gilbert and Sullivan”) and Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow (poets “of minor order”) were controversial. And his comparison of the creativity and significance of Rockefeller and Pullman to that of Milton and Shakespeare? 

Well, he did explain what he meant – but really!

After Triggs was fired, or perhaps before, Laura discovered that her husband was entertaining “strange women on terms too close for friendship,” according to newspaper reports. 

Laura filed a divorce suit, then moved to Paris with Edmond.

Prof. Triggs Divorced by Foot of Woman; 

Former Savant Exposed as a Don Juan

Screenshot of image from newspaper story 

The 1907 trial made for delightfully sensational copy typical of its time. Named in the suit, Charlotte Minette Fagan, described as “a demonstrator of hygienic devices,” may have been “the owner of the dainty pedal extremity” – an “unshod and hoseless” foot that protruded from a quilt which covered a sofa where Professor Triggs sat en dishabille.    

Away in Paris, Laura married Dr. Pierre Gagey, who had invented a device that would enable sick people to breathe, and moved with Edmond into the doctor’s large apartment on the elegant rue la Boetie. 

The invention did not bear fruit, so the family found smaller quarters.

Back in Chicago, Oscar Triggs left his position as editor of To-Morrow, a magazine “for people who think,” where he earlier had the distinction of being the first to publish Carl Sandburg’s poems. A few years later, Triggs married a former student and went off to a ranch in California where he planned to write and farm.

Meanwhile, Edmond was growing up in Paris.

*Photo courtesy of University of Chicago Archive, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/03/edmond-oscar-laura-1.html

See also 2016 posts: March 10, April 6, May 4 + June 15.