Introducing Murray Schloss

Murray Schloss, around 1905

At its peak in the early 19^th century, the Jewish community of Kleinsteinach-Riedbach in Lower Franconia, Bavaria, numbered about 200. There was a school, synagogue, and cemetery. Today the cemetery remains and the town is quite charming, as if nothing evil happened there in November 1938.

Seligman Schloss, born in Kleinsteinach in 1830, immigrated to the United States in 1853. He settled in Detroit and became a highly successful manufacturer of men’s suits; so much so that when he died in 1914 he left an estate worth more than $1 million.

In Seligman’s will, he singled out his youngest son, Murray, then 38 years old. Murray would receive nothing until he turned 50, after which he would receive several $20,000 installments until he turned 90. Seligman wrote:

His talents, which I have ever failed to appreciate, do not run along commercial lines, and it is on that regard that I have made the best effort within my power to provide permanently for him. . .

Murray was furious. He called the terms “repulsive,” and vowed to challenge the will. Murray must have been successful, for he left a considerable estate when he died in 1927 at age 51.

Why did the son infuriate his father? Was Seligman angry because Murray refused to participate wholeheartedly in the family business? Did he object to Murray’s passion for revolution? Or his rejection of Judaism in favor of John Alexander Dowie, a healer who claimed to be a prophet and established Zion City, Illinois?

Good feelings surely prevailed at some point, for Murray was the only Schloss child who accompanied Seligman and his wife, Hannah, to Europe in 1895. Unlike his brothers, who joined the firm of Schloss Brothers, Murray graduated from college. First enrolled at the University of Michigan, Murray transferred to the University of Chicago and graduated in 1904.

At Chicago, Murray attended classes taught by the compelling Professor Oscar Lovell Triggs and in 1905 joined the staff of Triggs’ magazine, To-Morrow, as managing editor. For a while, Murray wrote a column entitled “To-Morrow’s Today and Yesterday,” in which he railed against capitalism and politicians:

Revolution is in the air. In politics only can we count the tallies; but no interest that we humans have escapes the metamorphosis that the changing world is undergoing. The forms that fetter, whether legal or social, that labor-saving humanity has outgrown but not sloughed off, must go, and only by new ways of living and thinking can we attain peace and the new life.

The high-flown rhetoric echoes the style of numerous socialist publications that came and went in the U.S. between 1900 and 1920. The Russian Revolution fired up many a writer about the promise of the future. 

So it seems incongruous that during this time, Murray took over a floundering Chicago magazine called Wayside Tales which featured detective stories and photographs of theater stars. He and his business partner, Marguerite Warren Springer, widow of a real estate mogul, advertised “Tales of Work Play Life in All Moods, A Flavor of its Own.” 

Next, he rented an office in the Times Building in Manhattan and proposed to move Wayside Tales to New York. “Can it be possible that Chicago will not stand for the erstwhile slumbering magazine any longer?” commented one wit.

Well, maybe – because now Schloss is living at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, N.Y.!

And now Schloss is running for Congress on the Socialist ticket in the Third District of New Jersey!

“Nobody knows exactly what he does,” commented the editor of The East Side, a society rag, about Murray in 1910.

“He is a genial university man with a passion for the new civilization,” observed another journalist.

Then, Murray had the honor of being insulted by H.L. Mencken, sarcastic columnist for The Baltimore Sun.

“Schloss is an amateur socialist and culture-hound deluxe,” Mencken wrote to his friend George Jean Nathan, a critic with whom he would found the enormously popular magazine, The American Mercury.

“The conversation ran to poetry,” Mencken continued. “After my tenth seidel^* I delivered my well-known dithyrambic^** glorification of Swinburne⁺ right in the face of Schloss.”

In 1916, Murray Schloss moved out to Los Angeles. The census shows his occupation as a social worker. During the next seven years, he bought up 2,500 acres in the Inland Empire region of California, planning to create a Utopian community in an area called “Heart of the Hills.” It was said that Murray claimed to hear voices from the “Masters” who told him to build a “Temple of the Dawn.”  

After he died in 1927, there followed years of legal wrangling over the property before it went into a state trust and was given to San Diego State University in 1960. The land is now part of the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve near the ancient Indian city of Temecula. It serves as a field station and helps to protect the Santa Margarita River and its ecosystem.

Murray Schloss gave a great gift to the environment. But his disappointed millionaire father, who fled European pogroms, surely would have raised his arms and voice to say: “Utopia? Temple of the Dawn? This is how you spent my fortune?”

^{*A large glass of beer.}

^{**Spoken with fervor.}

^{+Algernon Charles Swinburne, a Victorian poet whose florid ballads Schloss would have despised. Mencken himself was ambivalent about Swinburne.}

^{See posts March 2 + 10, April 6, & June 15, 2016}

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/05/introducing-murray-schloss.html

 

The Story of Negro Mystic Lore

Advertisements for the book appeared exclusively in To-morrow Magazine, an early 20^th century journal whose writers enthused about Socialism, atheism, and woman’s suffrage.

The “talented authoress,” an Alabama native named Mamie Hunt Sims, wrote with “a Pathos and a Sociological Insight” and “knew every touch of Negro Philosophy,” according to the promotion.

In passing, I assumed that Negro Mystic Lore, published in 1907, was written by a black woman.  Perhaps it explored stories told by former slaves and analyzed their African antecedents.

But now, book in hand, I realize that my assumption was absurd.  Negro Mystic Lore comprises 18 stories written in what linguists today define as African American Vernacular English.  In her foreword, Sims wrote that she hoped “to show the real kindly feeling that existed between the people of the South and the better class of the negroes.”

A character named Uncle Jake, based on a real person according to Sims, is the main voice in a series of interactions between “de collured pussuns” and “white folkies.”  He is a grotesque caricature:

You chillun is too interruptin enny how and ef you all don’t hush I gwine to hush my mouf and I ain’t gwine to tell you nuthin. I did low ter tell you some two or three nannydotes dis mawnin in case hits too naturally hot ter work dat garden an I mout as well be erestentin you chillun as gwin ter sleep under dat fig tree.

According to the sole notice the book received, Mrs. Sims originally created the stories as entertainment for her friends. “Her work is at once a memory of the ‘Old South’ in its pride and beauty, and a suggestion of the new and greater South flushed with the dawning of more glorious days,” wrote the reviewer.

The title page bears the quotation: “Dem dat has must give to dem dat hain’t.”

How did Negro Mystic Lore come to be published? The likely answer is that it was a favor granted by Parker Sercombe, editor of To-morrow Magazine who also ran a press.

The self-aggrandizing Sercombe (see earlier post), stood accused of many things but not bigotry. He had railed against South Carolina Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, a white supremacist who led a KKK-style terrorist group called the Red Shirts. He expressed solidarity with J. Max Barber, editor of the newspaper Voice of the Negro, who fled a white mob in Atlanta in 1907.

But it turns out that one of Sercombe’s friends, William Hill Hunt, had a sister named Mamie Hunt Sims who wanted to publish her stories. Sercombe obliged.

William Hill Hunt, born in Alabama in 1864, grew up in a family with some wealth in its past. He became successful in business at a young age. In 1902, he founded the Mexican Trust Company with a group of American investors. Around this time, Parker Sercombe also was active in banking in Mexico.

Like Sercombe, Hunt proved slippery. In 1905, the state of Illinois accused the latter of violating its banking laws when he accepted deposits from a bank that he knew was insolvent. Sentenced to Joliet Penitentiary, eventually he received a pardon from the governor.

Mamie Sims dedicated Negro Mystic Lore to her brother, thanking him for his support and encouragement.

The book is a nasty relic of racism written 44 years after the end of the Civil War. But it is typical of its time. During the Progressive Era, America’s white upper class perpetrated outrageous indignities against black people in books, music, and theater. The insults reflected the deep-seated, rationalized prejudices of educated whites.

During the Theodore Roosevelt administration, performers at the White House included Mary L. Leech, a soprano who performed a selection of “coon songs.” The German diplomat Baron Speck von Sternburg and TR’s Secretary of State, John Hay (once President Lincoln’s private secretary) were among the guests who applauded “You’se Just a Little Nigger, Still Youse Mine All Mine” and “Is Dat You?”

Whose dare? Whose dare?

Oh who’s dat knockin’ at my door?

Is dat you, Sambo?

Is dat you, Sambo?

Now you better stop dat knockin’ at de door!

Although Negro Mystic Lore was published by an obscure press and scarcely advertised, my bet is that it was read widely.

Mamie Hunt Sims, frontispiece of Negro Mystic Lore

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/the-story-of-negro-mystic-lore.html

The Uncompromising Parker Sercombe

Advertisement for a book by Parker Sercombe, 
evidently never published 

He was a newsboy, editor, capitalist, anarchist, and lecturer. And it looks like he led a colony that verged on being a cult.  

His education stopped at high school yet he engaged the interest of professors, including Oscar Lovell Triggs of the University of Chicago.  He mastered the works of Herbert Spencer, edited To-Morrow, a magazine advertised as "a hand-book of the changing order," and received Jack London, H.G. Wells, and other authors at his office.

Born in Milwaukee in 1860, Parker Holmes Sercombe wended his way through Chicago, Detroit, Mexico City, Austin, and other places that remain unknown before dying in obscurity in Alhambra, California, in 1944. 

By the time Parker turned five years old, his mother was gone, probably in childbirth, leaving six children with his father, a farmer born in England. 

Two of the daughters went to college; one to the Women’s Medical College of Northwestern University which was no mean feat in 1881. She returned to practice in Milwaukee where Parker still hung around, figuring things out. 

He worked as a teacher and postal clerk, married, and finally found some success selling bicycles, typewriters, and the occasional cash register.

“He sprang to prominence in 1894,” noted the Milwaukee Journal. Powerfully athletic, he loved bicycle races and built a plant that manufactured the “Parker Sercombe racing bicycle.”

Parker H. Sercombe was lauded as an up-and-coming
bicycle entrepreneur in The Bearings, the Cycling Authority
of America (1892). 

As bicycling became a nationwide craze, Parker made a lot of money but annoyed competitors with schemes to get free advertising. They called him a “plunging faker” and “snooky.” Then, at the top of his bicycle game, his wife died and in 1896 he suddenly took off for Mexico.

In Mexico City, Sercombe became friends with President Porfirio Diaz, who ruled Mexico from 1876 until the first stirrings of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. An autocrat who favored economic development through capitalism, Diaz encouraged foreign investment. 

Between 1897 and 1903, Sercombe promoted commercial banking in Mexico with support from Chicago and New York financiers. He established the American Surety Bank in Mexico City and traveled between Mexico and the U.S. numerous times. According to two books that describe Sercombe’s work, he conducted several unsavory business transactions.  

It sounds like Sercombe’s yanqui colleagues eventually drove him out. Bear in mind, however, that the trusts established by Morgan, Schiff, Baruch, Rockefeller, and others carried on and came to dominate the Mexican economy.     

***

Back in Chicago, Sercombe struck up with Professor Triggs. They collaborated on several ventures including the Spencer-Whitman Center at 2238 Calumet Avenue – named for Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman – which became notorious as a free love colony. It also housed the offices of To-Morrow Magazine.

To-Morrow published the poems of young Carl Sandburg, who accepted Sercombe’s offer of room and board in exchange for some writing and copy editing. “A foggy philosophical anarchist,” as Sandburg described him:

. . . he was at any time ready to show his various wrestling holds though never throwing a guest to the floor. He welcomed radicals and revolutionaries but he preferred the gentle philosophical anarchists of the Kropotkin variety to the direct actionists who believed in bombs and ‘the propaganda of the deed.’

Parker Sercombe inscribed an issue of To-Morrow to Otto Lippert,
who was either a Cincinnati pharmacist or a news photographer.

Then there was the People’s Industrial College, to be “funded by the intellectual elect,” per Triggs and Sercombe. They would offer free tuition to students of all ages who would perform “at least four hours of useful work with their hands each day.” 

The plan for the college grew out of the men’s interest in industrial arts education. The sole evidence of its existence is advertisements.

In 1906 the Chicago police broke up the Spencer-Whitman Center, citing immoral activities and ramshackle living conditions. Referring to himself as a prophet, Sercombe told a Chicago Tribune reporter that the colony would move to an 800-acre farm on the Kankakee River. That never happened.

In 1907, Triggs went down in a scandalous divorce trial and soon disappeared from the scene.

But Parker Sercombe carried on.

He lectured widely, presenting himself as an expert in politics, religion, philosophy, economics, crime, and sociology. 

He claimed to be organizing a National Bureau of Longevity for the Federal Government. He claimed to be a retired Baptist minister. 

He claimed that his collection of 7,000 rare books would be housed in a marble hall of fame which Andrew Carnegie had agreed to build at a cost of $200,000.

In 1909, he promoted his book Correct Thinking, The First Gun in a Revolt against Leisure-Class Ideals of Education. In 1910, he spoke about “Education in a Democracy” at the University of Wisconsin. In 1915, he was fired from his job as a supervising statistician for the Cook County coroner’s office after he told a welfare bureau official that “350 high school girls are ruined yearly in Chicago.” (Perhaps he was right about that.)

While he denounced marriage as a social evil, Sercombe married a woman named Leontine with whom he had three children: Syndex, Rommanie, and Herbert Spencer.

In 1918 the police sought him for embezzling $875. In 1927, he ran over a child with his car. During the Depression, he moved his family to Mexico where he owned a gas station. Eventually the Sercombe family ended up in California where he came full circle working as a salesman. His ashes are in the Chapel of the Pines crematory in Los Angeles.

What’s compelling about his life? Everything! It’s remarkable that he dissembled so often; people and newspapers took note, but he rolled along. He embraced established institutions – universities, government, banks – yet he attacked the conventions that they represented. He sat on top of the heap at several points in his life, then almost perversely made his own trouble. 

But you have to hand it to him: unabashed, unapologetic, he always acted out of self-interest. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/the-uncompromising-parker-sercombe.html

See also March 2 + 10, 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.