Hilda Jones

 

First pages of Mary Ann Horneman's pamphlet,
The First Ladies of the White House (in miniature)

I can’t wait to get back to 1941 so that I can see Mary Ann Horneman at the annual convention of the South Dakota Federation of Women’s Clubs.

She’s been invited there to give a presentation about America’s First Ladies: sing old-time songs, tell stories, show off her collection of First Ladies dolls.

Each doll—Adams, Coolidge and the rest of the gang—is dressed in a copy of the gown worn by her corresponding mannequin in the First Ladies Hall at the Smithsonian Institution.

Mary Ann made the dolls and their costumes, painted their portrait faces, and stitched their satin skirts and lace bodices.

She launched her career as a lecturer and entertainer after publishing a small book, 5”x7”, that contains photographs of her dolls and a few paragraphs about each First Lady. Since then, she has been traveling around the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas, visiting every women’s group that needs a speaker.

It’s real tea party stuff. Crowned with a headdress, swishing her own satin skirt, Mary Ann presents the First Ladies as the finest examples of American womanhood, each a study in courage and beauty. The audience clucks and nods.

Before Mary Ann introduces her dolls at the big meeting, Gertrude Null, president of the Federation, will speak about “The Importance of Being a Woman.” Miss Null is a music teacher who grew up in Huron, S.D. not too far from the Minnesota border. Incorporated in 1883, Huron rose on the banks of the James River, blessed by the Chicago and Northwestern Railway.

Huron is not unlike the city of Beloit in north central Kansas, where Mary Ann was born and would spend most of her life. Perched over the Solomon River, Beloit boomed after the Civil War thanks to the Missouri Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, which passed through town carrying grain and passengers.  

Gertrude and Mary Ann were born, respectively, in 1889 and 1886. They were the daughters of wealthy men. Mr. Null practiced law and Mr. Horneman owned a furniture store that bulged with overstock.

Local and regional women’s organizations, like the South Dakota Federation, began to proliferate after the Civil War. Most of them sponsored pleasant social gatherings with performances and lectures by members. During the 1890s, however, the women’s club movement really took off. It grabbed thousands of white women like Mary Ann and Gertrude whose hometowns were scattered across the Great Plains.

Having imbibed the Victorian niceties of their mothers, Mary Ann and her peers tended toward the tinkly side of things. Yet they were very much a different generation, one that reached tentatively for new ideas. They wanted to learn about social issues like child welfare, took sides on Prohibition and women’s suffrage, and believed in reform, albeit incrementally. They agreed on “The Importance of Being a Woman,” but few met the definition of first wave feminist.

1916: Black professional women's club
(New York Public Library)

The women’s club movement was segregated, of course, so Black women began to form their own organizations around the turn of the twentieth century. Some grew out of sororities at historically Black colleges and universities and coalesced around the perennial campaign for anti-lynching legislation.

That fight was still going on, right in the middle of the New Deal in March 1936, when 18-year old Hilda Jones, a Black student at Girls Commercial High School in Brooklyn, won a contest to design a print for a dress to be worn by Eleanor Roosevelt.  

First prize was $75, a stunning amount of money for the daughter of immigrants from Barbados whose father worked  as a garage attendant. “I’ve liked to draw for as long as I can remember,” Hilda told a reporter. Her design was inspired one Brooklyn night by the mustard greens that her mother was preparing for dinner.

The story ran on the first page of The Voice of Colorado, a weekly with a largely Black readership, which had so little use for the Roosevelts that it endorsed Alf Landon for president that year. The bitter fight to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas, and the W.P.A.’s blind eye toward its own inequitable distribution of resources, dwarfed the story with the headline “Negro’s Design Bought by Mrs. Roosevelt.” 

Girls who entered the competition show off their designs.
Hilda is standing, second from right. 

Eleanor Roosevelt wore Hilda’s green and purple leaves, now imprinted on a chiffon dress, to a White House luncheon. Meanwhile, the young woman fervently hoped to become a commercial fabric designer.

By the time that Mary Ann Horneman started toting around her First Ladies show, Hilda had a factory job in one of the many manufacturing plants that once flourished in New York City. She never became a designer. After 1940 she disappears from record.  

Hilda's connection to Mary Ann and Gertrude is a barely visible thread, but it exists.  

“The buried talent is the sunken rock on which most lives strike and founder.”—Frederick William Faber (1814-1863), British theologian and hymnist   

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2021/09/hilda-jones.html?m=1

Wanamaker, Ogden, Whalen & Powell: A Story about Race

Wanamaker's at Astor Place, 1920s

In 1928, about 300,000 black people resided in New York City and 250 of them were employees of the department store known as Wanamaker’s.  

Founded by John Wanamaker in Philadelphia in 1876, the same year as the nation’s centennial, the store employed African-Americans through Reconstruction and into the Jim Crow era.  Wanamaker’s devout Christianity led him to believe in racial equality – to the extent that the times permitted.

John Wanamaker

The brilliant entrepreneur was also influenced by his friend Robert Curtis Ogden, who joined Wanamaker’s soon after it opened and conceived of the store’s innovative advertising and marketing schemes. 

Robert C. Ogden had been committed to the education of black Americans since 1874, when he joined the board of the Hampton Institute.  The Institute, established after the Civil War as a teachers’ training school, provided agricultural and industrial education – although little in the way of academics – to freed slaves. *

Nature study brochure
Hampton Institute, 1908

In 1896, Ogden moved from Philadelphia to New York City to manage a new branch of Wanamaker’s located downtown near Astor Place.   

There he drew admiration from black employees who soon formed the Robert Curtis Ogden Association of the John Wanamaker Store.  Its purpose was to celebrate the achievements of the store’s black employees; for example, the association awarded annual prizes for achievement in musical composition and performance.

In 1905 Wanamaker and Ogden addressed the National Negro Business League, founded by the educator Booker T. Washington to support black-owned businesses.  Their remarks received flattering reviews in the New York Age, one of the nation’s foremost African-American newspapers.

Robert Curtis Ogden

But contemporary scholars note that the speeches were patronizing and that both men denied the existence of systematic racism.  Further, it is now evident that Wanamaker’s nonwhite employees were rarely promoted. They remained in menial jobs behind the scenes with the exception of elevator operators.  

However, the store’s employment practices were tolerant compared to other businesses.

After World War I, for example, white veterans lobbied the Fifth Avenue department stores to fire black elevator operators and give them the jobs instead.  Saks and Best & Co. obliged but Wanamaker’s and Bloomingdale’s did not buckle.

One could argue that Wanamaker and Ogden were racists, yet they rose above the shameful standards of the day.

John Wanamaker died in 1922, by which time his son Rodman had complete control of the company.  While Rodman’s three passions were music, aviation, and American Indian culture, he continued the work of the Ogden Association and the store’s relatively liberal hiring policy.

Everything changed when Rodman Wanamaker died in March 1928 and a glad-hander named Grover Whalen, a longtime store employee who had been one of Rodman’s assistants, stepped into the top position.

Perpetually doffing a homburg hat, Whalen dabbled in everything: politics, public relations, ceremonies.  He did have some good ideas such as the creation of WNYC, the city’s radio station.  Also, he was a fabulous greeter of General Pershing, Charles A. Lindbergh, and numerous famous people who visited New York.

But he wasn’t great for Wanamaker’s.  Just a few months after Whalen stepped in, the New York Age ran a front-page story about a change in the store's longstanding policy.

It turned out that a white woman customer had observed employees eating together in the integrated company cafeteria and complained to management.  Whalen immediately issued an order to segregate the lunchroom.  In protest, black employees began eating in local restaurants rather than in the cafeteria, but Whalen remained unbowed.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Grover Whalen could not resist the call of City Hall.  Within a few months he was gone from Wanamaker’s, having accepted the job of Police Commissioner offered to him by playboy Mayor Jimmy Walker.   

“There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick,” declared Whalen.  Communists and bootleggers counted among his many targets.

Over time, Whalen’s views on race might have evolved.  But they did not. 

In his autobiography, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the first black member of the U.S. House of Representatives, recalled visiting Whalen around 1935 just after the former police commissioner had been named chair of the New York World’s Fair Corporation.  The fair would open in 1939.

We went to ask him for employment for qualified Negro people.  He offered us token jobs.  We refused them.  The slogan of the fair was “Building the World of Tomorrow,” and I can remember telling Grover Whalen: “You cannot have a World of Tomorrow from which you have excluded colored people.”

Mr. Whalen, suave and urbane, smiled beneath his carefully trimmed mustache and said, “I do not see why the world of today or tomorrow of necessity has to have colored people playing an important role.”

“A loss shared by all New Yorkers,” came the cry when Whalen died in 1962.  Even though the language is boilerplate, it’s still hard to choke down.

Grover Whalen (second from left) greets Charles Lindbergh
(facing camera) at the Manhattan Bridge in June 1927

*The Hampton Institute (now Hampton University in Hampton, VA) and the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University in Alabama) were denounced in some quarters for providing what critics considered the equivalent of a grammar-school education.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/02/wanamaker-ogden-whalen-powell-story.html?m=1

James D. Corrothers, Happy at Last?

James D. Corrothers, around 1910

In 1898  . . .  “a sunburst fell upon my being.”

James D. Corrothers later recalled the moment when he decided to enter the ministry of the AME Church. Upon learning his first assignment would be in New York, however, he and his wife agreed they would rather return to Michigan.

Turning back the clock, Corrothers found work unloading barrels of salt and flour from freight barges. The wet salt made the skin on his hands crack open and bleed. He switched to work on a fruit farm.

Eventually James came around to the idea of taking the offer in New York. He dropped his wife and sons with her family near Baltimore and hustled to the upstate town of Bath, where he received news that his wife and younger son had died.

Corrothers had no time to grieve. He brought his older son to Bath and worked for a pittance, supplementing his income by publishing Negro dialect verse in The Century, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Sunday Herald, and other papers.

Occasionally, Corrothers contributed to The Crisis, 
newspaper of the NAACP. His poem, "A Song of May and June,"
appeared in the June 1914 issue.

Moving on, he earned success and a good living as a pastor in the New Jersey towns of Red Bank and Hackensack, and prepared to answer the call of another congregation. But then:

The black tragedy of my life fell upon me; and I staggered and groaned, like a bludgeoned traveler in the dark. I was a stranger and nearly penniless. I had sacrificed all to do good, when, suddenly, I was accused of plotting to ruin my bishop’s good name – a thing of which I was as innocent as Heaven itself!  

The bishop brought a lawsuit against Corrothers, who was acquitted. It didn’t matter. He faced the wrath of the influential leaders of the AME church. James never recovered from their viciousness. He became an outcast immediately; no home, no congregation. He could not get another job and writing opportunities dried up. Thankfully, friends took in his son.  

Shall I tell of days of hunger, and wandering; of nights spent under the open, wintry sky? Shall I tell of rebuffs and buffetings; of “friends” who forgot or who “passed by on the other side”?

Many years later, Corrothers reflected on the Black church’s domination of African-American society and culture.

No other Negro institution is so powerful; so influential. All Negro life in American centres about the church. Coloured professional and business men, as a class, find it wise and profitable to remain in the good graces of the church. Even successful race leaders, like Dunbar, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, have not disdained a hearing through the Negro church.

Sabotaged at every turn, Corrothers gave up on being a minister ever again. He returned to New York where he found a job in Brooklyn as a janitor’s assistant, working from 5am until midnight. He loved the toil, he later wrote, and relished being able to send small gifts to his son.

Then one day it came to him that he should leave AME and join the Baptist Church, which welcomed him warmly.

Eventually, Corrothers remarried; with his second wife, Rosina, he had another son. He moved his family back to South Haven, Michigan, and built a brick church with his own hands. As the area developed as a resort for whites, however, Blacks felt unwelcome and left the area; so did he. 

View of the Black River, South Haven, Michigan; Corrothers
had a lifelong affinity with the area where he spent time as a child
and started a congregation around 1910.

Landing next in Lexington, Virginia, he renounced the Baptists for the Presbyterian Church over “a matter of conscience.”

In 1916, James Corrothers was ensconced as pastor of a church in Westchester, Pennsylvania. He died one year later.

While Corrothers figures in African-American history, his story does not resemble those of his peers who traveled a neat trajectory toward success. He moved often between triumph and despair, which may have reflected his own personality (at least in part). 

The hideous treatment of Corrothers by the elders of the AME Church is shocking, but so was Corrothers' candid denouncement of its abuse of power. While he never achieved the renown of Booker T. Washington, his clear-eyed perspective on race in America sets him apart even today. 

*This post is the last of three about James D. Corrothers; see August 17 + 24.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/09/james-d-corrothers-happy-at-last.html?m=1

James D. Corrothers Set Forth to be a Writer

Discouraged by his lack of success as a writer,
James D. Corrothers trained to be an amateur boxer. 

When it is told, the life of James D. Corrothers appears as a success story about persistence and a few fortuitous encounters with influential people.

In truth, Corrothers’ life was a zigzag of good turns and bad turns: those he chose himself and those that others dealt him. Nearly every achievement was followed by a setback. Corrothers had a hard time keeping on moving forward. 

There are some discernible reasons. He hampered himself; he slammed into the poisonous racism of his time, and he was victimized by powerful Black clergymen. It may be useful to say that he felt optimistic about the future of Black Americans. Actually, he never strayed from the harsh view he expressed in 1894:

. . . that the race question would never be definitely settled in America; that the whites would never extend to us the full social and commercial privileges which other races enjoy here; that all we had suffered and done in this country was merely disciplinary and temporary, and that the Negro’s destiny was AFRICA.  

Born in 1869, neglected by his parents, and raised in Michigan, James had a close relationship with his grandfather. From a young age, he wanted to be a writer.

As the only Black boy growing up in the lumber town of South Haven, Michigan, Corrothers got in the middle of a race riot that started during a July 4^th celebration when visitors came from neighboring towns. He was unhurt but did have to fight every white boy in order to take a place at school. The teachers whipped and punished him.

Harder times came. James and his grandfather moved to Muskegon where the 15-year old worked an 11-hour day in a lumber mill.  He went from the mill to a skating rink to a farm; survived typhoid fever, returned to the mill. Living in a freight car, James got to know an Irish sailor named Jack who persuaded him to go to Chicago where they would work together on a boat. Unsurprisingly, they could not get a berth together.

The men soon met a “brisk quick-spoken chap who had a foreign accent.” He told them there was work to be found on canal boats in upstate New York. James decided to go with him. But he ended up by the side of the road, the stranger having “borrowed” all of his money.

Next James found work at a hotel in Liberty, Indiana; this time a 17-hour day spent scrubbing floors and waiting tables. He still found time to read the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley, Longfellow, and Tennyson. A few months later, as a field-hand on an Ohio farm, he thought about attending Wilberforce University (the oldest African-American university in the U.S.).

"Yes James," she repeatedly protested to me, "you wrote it
but who was the author of it?"

Instead he became a coachman in Springfield, Michigan, where the editor of the local newspaper published one of his poems. The wife of his employer did not believe that it was Corrothers’ work:

 “Yes James,” she repeatedly protested to me, “you wrote it but who was the author of it?” 

Finally, Corrothers got work on the Peerless, one of the freight boats that plied the Great Lakes. By the time he arrived in Chicago, he had saved $90. He bought a suit and was hired as a porter in a barber shop. One day the muckraking journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd walked in and they got to talking about literature. Through his wife, Lloyd had a connection to the Chicago Tribune. When he left, Lloyd took a few of James’ poems which were published in the paper. 

Elated, Corrothers accepted an offer to be a porter in the Tribune’s counting room.* He had never earned so much money. He also became a frequent guest at the Lloyds’ home, where he met Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Booker T. Washington.

A Tribune editor, Robert W. Patterson, invited Corrothers to write a story “about the progress of the coloured people of Chicago.” After considerable research and interviews conducted during his time off, Corrothers produced the article. Patterson assigned a white reporter to edit it. The reporter rewrote it entirely in what was called “Negro dialect.” Corrothers was mortified. When he complained, Patterson laughed in his face. Then Patterson fired him from the counting room.

After the Civil War, many Black men found work as “dinner waiters” in Northern hotels, where they fought for stale bread and the leftover meat on diners’ plates. Joining the ranks, Corrothers decided that he would never have a career as a writer and should become an amateur boxer. He trained, but he never got there.

Instead, Corrothers was invited to recite his poem, “The Psalm of the Race,” at the first meeting of the National Afro-American League in Chicago in 1890. The League, established by Timothy Thomas Fortune, editor of the Black newspaper, the New York Age, preceded the NAACP by two decades.

Now hailed as “Chicago’s coloured poet” and “the coming poet of the race,” Corrothers ran into a long-lost aunt who, with Henry Demarest Lloyd, provided money for him to enter Northwestern University. Later, James met WCTU president Frances Willard, who also helped fund his education. He studied there from 1890 to 1893.

Then along came the Reverend Dr. Charles Nelson Grandison, purportedly the grandson of an African king, who dreamed of starting a Christian Negro Republic in Africa (a decade before Marcus Garvey launched the Back to Africa Movement). He persuaded Corrothers to join him on a tour of the South – at the height of Jim Crow – and stay on at Bennett College in North Carolina to study and teach.

Corrothers detested the South although he readily acknowledged that African-Americans who lived in the North encountered just as much racism.

Back in Chicago, Corrothers married
Fannie Clemens, with whom he had two sons.

  

He decided to return to Chicago where he married and had two sons. He got by writing articles for the Chicago Daily News, Chicago Daily Record, Chicago Journal, and Chicago Times-Herald. His earnings picked up when he started to write in Negro dialect. At this time, he began to write the stories that would be collected in his 1902 book, The Black Cat Club.

But still he despaired of ever making a living from writing.

*In the newspaper business during the late 19^th century, advertising and sales were managed in the counting rooms. “Counting-room journalism” referred to papers where the goal of increasing circulation drove the editorial content. Joseph Pulitzer was considered its greatest exponent; later it would be known as “yellow journalism.”

See also August 17 and September 7 posts.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/08/james-d-corrothers-set-forth-to-be.html?m=1

By Way of an Introduction to James D. Corrothers

James D. Corrothers, 1890s

Around 1900 while James D. Corrothers was the pastor of a Methodist church in Red Bank, N.J., he attended a banquet at a New York hotel.

The dinner honored Elbert Hubbard, a socialist, writer, self-improvement fiend, and adherent of the Arts and Crafts Movement, now largely lost to history.

In his autobiography, Rev. Corrothers described how he stood out as the sole Black person among 250 dinner guests. He sat near a woman journalist who wrote for the New York Times. She tried to guess his identity, he recalled years later.

“I know that coloured man!” she exclaimed. “It’s Booker T. Washington!”

But she learned her mistake.

“Oh, I know now whom he is! It’s Paul Laurence Dunbar!” she declared.

Then somebody told her my name and calling.

“Oh, I know whom he is now,” she explained. “He’s only a darky minister from Red Bank!”

In Reverend Corrothers’ autobiography, In Spite of the Handicap, he noted that the journalist, a Southerner named Zoe Anderson Norris, and the man she married, the illustrator J. K. Bryans, would become warm personal friends.

Indeed, Bryans, who specialized in comics and silhouettes, drew the pictures for Corrothers’ book, The Black Cat Club, Negro humor & folklore, published in 1902.

That book is a bit of a surprise, written as it is entirely in Negro dialect.

“I have grown to consider the book a very poor one, and regret exceedingly that it was published,” Corrothers reflected in 1916.

But he explained that his inspiration lay in the work of the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who popularized the use of Negro dialect.* In fact, some Black authors embraced “dialect literature” until the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance around 1920. And Black intellectuals of the day, including Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, lauded it. **

Historians and critics have analyzed this phenomenon. Was it a satirical device? A roundabout way for the Black elite to distinguish itself from less sophisticated brethren? A means to preserve Black folklore after the Civil War? Various interpretations exist.

Illustration, The Black Cat Club
(by J. K. Bryans)

It appears that Rev. Corrothers intended The Black Cat Club to be a send-up of the pretensions of well-educated Blacks and their delusions about assimilation. The book opens as its main character, Sandy Jenkins, nicknamed “Doc,” exults in his newly established Black Cat Literary Club in Chicago. Doc celebrates with a drink:

“You black people been raisin’ san’ wid yo’ Shakespeare ack,” observed Billy “Spooks,” the bartender, pouring out Doc’s drinks. . . “See whut de papahs said ‘bout you dis mo’nin’?”

“Nevah pays no ‘tention to such small mattahs,” answered Sandy; “might, ef I wuz raised pickin’ cotton in de backwoods down South lak you. I’se a genamun ma’safe.”

The Black Cat Club is an interesting artifact.

However, a poem entitled “An Indignation Dinner,” which Corrothers published in The Century Magazine in 1915, is far more compelling. It starts:

              Dey was hard times jes fo’ Christmas round our neighborhood one year;

              So we held a secret meetin’, whah de white folks couldn’t hear,

              To ‘scuss de situation, an’ to see what could be done

              Towa’d a fust-class Christmas dinneh an’ a little Christmas fun.

As the meeting progresses, the men become increasingly angry about the deprivation they routinely endure, and decide to steal a turkey, chickens, hogs, and sweet potatoes from a nearby farm. The last stanza:

              Well, we lit right in an’ voted dat it was a gran’ idee,

              An’ de dinner we had Christmas was worth trabblin’ miles to see;

              An’ we eat a full an’ plenty, big an’ little, great an’ small,

              Not beca’se we was dishonest, but indignant, suh.  Dat’s all.

*Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), the son of slaves, began writing at an early age and published books, stories, and poems although he was never able to support himself. His work, while admired widely, has been criticized for promoting racial stereotypes.

**During these years, white writers and artists also employed Negro dialect in books, songs, and plays for white audiences. Its use by whites was considered deeply derogatory.

Continued in August 24, 2016 post.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/08/by-way-of-introduction-to-james-d.html?m=1