Fine Arts Friday: Paintings of Family Life by Horace Pippin

Giving Thanks by Horace Pippin, 1942

Horace Pippin was an African-American painter, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania,  in 1888, 10 miles from the Brandywine River. When he was a small child, his family moved to Goshen, New York, but he returned to West Chester in 1920 and lived there with his wife until his death in 1946.

Pippin was an artist who proved what courage and perseverance can achieve. He was forced by the illness of his mother to leave school as a young teen and work to help support the family. When World War I came, he joined the renowned African-American 369th infantry, called Harlem's Hell Fighters, all of whom received France's Croix de Guerre honor. Pippin returned from the war with wounds that rendered his right arm useless. This did not stop him from becoming an artist. To paint, he learned to use his left arm to prop up and guide his right hand.

Horace Pippin marker outside 327 West Gay Street in West Chester, where Pippin and his wife lived. The marker says notes: "A self-taught black artist, he painted while living here such notable works as 'Domino Players,' 'John Brown Going to His Hanging,' and the 'Holy Mountain' series."

In 1937 at the behest of a local school principal, Pippin's work was shown in the Chester County Art Association show. N. C. Wyeth, a judge of the show, found his paintings impressive and began to open doors to Pippin. Wyeth introduced his work to the art historian, Christian Brinton, and from there Pippin's work began to be collected, including by Albert Barnes. His work also came to the attention of the pioneering New York City art dealer Edith Halpert. One year later, his work was being shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  In 1994, a retrospective of his work, with more than 100 paintings, was shown at the Metropolitan Art Museum, and in 2015, the Brandywine River Museum had a major exhibition of his work.

Pippin painted many kinds of subjects--historical, allegorical, religious, and scenes from life in the Brandywine River Valley. Here is a small selection from among his scenes of domestic life. All of these paintings were done in the last few years of his life. Some of them have quilts, and in Domino Players, a woman is sewing one! Pippin may have been thought of as a folk artist, but I find in his work a sophistication of color and composition that goes beyond folk art, and an emotional intensity with an economy of line that folk art often lacks.

Christmas Morning Breakfast, 1945

Domino Players, 1943

Sunday Morning Breakfast, 1943

Supper Time, 1940

Interior, 1944

A House That Means Home

 

Portsmouth Street by Childe Hassam, 1917

 

It turns out that Americans who can afford them are getting tired of McMansions--the extra large houses with ultra-high ceilings that deliver 10,000 square feet to keep clean. One of the reasons that the large Victorian home went out of style in the 1910s and the 1920s was because the labor force for domestic labor had dried up. When offered other opportunities--even factory labor--many women will prefer a job that does involve caring for a far wealthier woman's home. A McMansion clearly cries out for domestic help, and as I drive by them, I often wonder to myself, "Who's clean all those bathrooms?"

However, now, according to the Wall Street Journal January 24, people are now seeking homes that look a lot more traditional, offer slimmer space, but have modern amenities such as open floor layouts, more bathrooms, family rooms, and so forth. To me the most startling aspect of the story was this:

One thing that draws his clients to the more rigorous authenticity of a New Old House, said Mr. Versaci, [an architect of modern "old" homes]  is a search for what he called the "psychic comforts of yesterday," a concept of the past that's happier and less disposable than life in 2014. "People have visceral memories of their grandmother's house," he said, "the slamming of the door, sitting on the porch watching cars drive by, sitting down to Sunday dinner when Sunday dinner was a big deal."

In contrast to the home of their grandparents, the McMansion seems sterile and when I peruse them in the Wall Street Journal's House of the Day slideshows, I always feel that such a home would be fine as a hotel, but I could never feel at home in one of them. The architecture seems more appropriate for an institution, not someone's private and personal space in which we live and to which we are privileged to be invited as guests. The McMansion is devoid of charm.

I think the desire for a house that reminds one of eating Sunday dinners with the extended family is a good trend, and perhaps the first sign--along with the increasing popularity of aprons--that perhaps we are turning the corner on the trend toward modern, edgy, single, and institutionalized life, and that the longing for family, for private space that has private meaning and links us to those beloved of the past, is beginning to stir itself again in our American hearts, which have been so bent against domesticity by Betty Friedan and her followers.

Was Early America Far More Convivial than 21st Century America?

While I have not been seeking it, I have come across  information about George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and life in Ohio in the 1830s that indicates that early Americans might have been far more convivial than we are today--Facebook and other social media notwithstanding.

Benjamin Franklin: a very friendly man.

 

Take Benjamin Franklin. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal on the newly refurbished museum on Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia,  "Visitors should leave behind any midcentury notions of a nuclear family. The museum shows Franklin lived in households brimming with nonrelatives. In Philadelphia, for instance, he resided with his mother-in-law and grandchildren as well as 'houseguests, boarders, apprentices, and free and enslaved servants.'"

This corroborates Steven Mintz's Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, which reports that in early America, a family was considered everyone who lived in a household, including servants, apprentices, long-staying guests, adopted children or orphaned children living with the family, and anyone else on hand.

'Wherever Franklin lived, he established a household with friends and family members,' Remer curator] says. 'To his friends, he had this incredible ardor. He was so sociable.' Indeed, she says, Franklin had some 600 correspondents—people he wrote to on regular basis; these letters are 'not just quick notes' but 'are so full of warmth and love,' Remer says. 'These are people with whom he has real intellectual and emotional rapport.'" [emphasis added]

Then there is George Washington. According to Ron Chernow's George Washington: A Life, in the 16 years from their marriage til Washington departed Mount Vernon in 1775 to command the Continental Army, the Washingtons had more than 2,000 guests at their home, sitting at one time or another round the dining room table. Since Washington was a reluctant politician and wanted nothing more than to attend to all his business and agricultural activities at Mount Vernon, I think it would be wrong to assume that he was merely working to cultivate a social network as a means of gaining power. He and his wife simply loved talking and being with other people.

 

The Dining Room at Mount Vernon: Seems that places at the table were rarely empty.

 

The Washingtons also opened their home for long periods of time to various relatives and orphaned children. They adopted their two youngest grandchildren, after Martha's son Jack Custis died. It was always a full house at Mount Vernon, bursting with the sound of children and conviviality.

 

The last example of the amiability of Americans is from a fascinating book, American Grit: A Woman's letter from the Ohio Frontier, edited by Emily Foster. The book comprises letters written mostly by Anna Briggs Bentley, who moved to Ohio from Maryland with her husband and six children in 1826. The Bentleys moved near other Quakers, so they had a ready-made community around them, as they built their first house and struggled to eke out a living off the Ohio land.

 

What Mrs. Bentley describes in rich detail in writing to her mother and siblings in Maryland is that whenever anyone was sick in the area, a neighbor always appeared to help. When her own child was at death's door, she writes:

 

"We had set up with her ourselves til yesterday when they heard of it at Levi Miller's and Hannah came over in the afternoon, made pies and baked them, got supper. Susan Holland hailed Franklin when he returned from the Dr. When she was informed how Deborah was, she had her saddle put on [her horse], mounted her, and came here prepared to stay til a change takes place. Dear, kind girl. My hearts owns her as a sister. She is a most experienced and tender nurse. She has gone over the whole house, cleaned and put all to rights, and is now bending over the washtub after setting up all night. And she staid away from a wedding, too, to come."

 

 

Early American houses: filled to the brim? 

 

Such a scene is described many times in the letters, as neighbors always went to help a household that was in need.

The Bentleys also had a large household, not only of their own children, but of any hands they had hired to help them farm, of an older widow who had no money and came to live with them as a seamstress, and of nieces, nephews, and friends who came to visit for periods of time, as long as weeks and months.

 

You may also enjoy Bold Colors for a Courageous People. 

 

 

Good Neighborliness Reduces Unemployment, Study Finds

 

Caldwell Church Soup Kitchen in Brooklyn, N.Y., manned by church volunteers.

 

I have always believed in the now-old-fashioned imperative to be a good neighbor--after all, the person you help may be yourself.  Now "a remarkable, but mostly unnoticed, 2012 study found a powerful correlation between a community’s civic health and its economic well being," reported the New Geography website on March 5. The study, produced by the National Conference on Citizenship, correlated the presence of non-profit organizations--civic and volunteer groups of all kinds--and social cohesion in a counties across the country with the counties' unemployment rates during the 2008 recession and onward.

Factoring out demographic and regional economic variances, the study found that those counties with the highest number of non-profit organizations and with the highest levels of social cohesion--measured by the frequency of interactions in a year by county residents with family, neighbors, and friends, had lower unemployment than other countries.

 

As factors standing alone also, a high presence of civil organizations or high levels of social cohesion each contributed to keeping a county's unemployment lower than the rate in counties with fewer civic groups or lower social cohesion. The difference in unemployment between the most highly social connected counties and the lowest socially connected counties is a whopping 2 percentage points, as shown in this graphic from the study.

A Knight Foundation Soul of the Community study on what keeps people attached to their communities was one source for the National Conference on Citizenship research. The Knight Foundation believes the reasons for the correlation are:

 "1. In communities with more nonprofits per capita, more organized groups, and more participation in formal activities, residents have stronger local networks of friends.
2. Strong local friendship networks are related to pride in the community and attachment to it.
3. Pride in and attachment to the community predicts positive perceptions of its economy. Positive perceptions of the local economy encourage people to invest and spend locally, supporting employment."
                                                                                                

 People do really help people. There are a lot of implications of this report. First off, higher levels of social cohesion and volunteerism are saving people from the devastation that unemployment can wreak not only on the budget but also from the depression and demoralization it can bring to a household, with deleterious effects on children in particular. Plus, the tightly knit community is lowering the need for tax dollars, for unemployment insurance and other federal, state, and local aid to families in need.

The conclusions of the National Conference on Citizenship study leads to the question: How do we build up the social cohesion and levels of volunteerism in our communities? What are the factors in a community's life that lead to greater people's increased personal involvement and what are the factors that decrease it? How can we repair the social fabric in a broken community?

 

The answer does not necessarily lie with government, at all. Factors that contribute to community life can be as mundane as the time spent in commuting to work. According to a recent Canadian government report,  full-time workers with flexible work conditions and who work at home at least occasionally, are more likely to be volunteers in their community than those who work full time with inflexible schedules and commutes--by a difference of 26% to 18%, respectively. You can read about this report here.  Commuting time also affected volunteer levels: "Among full-time workers who took 45 minutes or more to get to work, 15% were regular volunteers. For those whose commute was 30 minutes or less, the rate was 21%."

There are probably myriad ways that we can boost our community's levels of social cohesion and participation. One thing is certain, the need to be a good neighbor is as true now as it was when Christ first told the story of the Good Samaritan in answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?"

The American Blended Family: 1865

In Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, author Steven Mintz reports that the kinds of blended families we see today were common from the country's beginnings, up to the 1940s and 1950s. The reason for blending, though, was not divorce, but death. On the American frontier, for instance, 25 percent of women died in childbirth, often in isolation with no medical care. Without modern medical care and antibiotics, illness in an adult, especially one already exhausted by overwork, could easily leave a child without a father or mother, or both. Often the remaining parent would seek another mate, as a necessary for the survival of homestead and children. Then the new stepparent and children needed to get to know each other, and hopefully, a bond would grow between them, which, while not detracting from the bitter missing of a beloved parent, offered comfort and nourishment to the children.

Mother and Child by Mary Cassatt, 1880

The McNairs became such a blended family in The Able McLaughlins, and a more poignant story of blending could not be told. A widower, Mr. McNair had brought home a new wife, Barbara, from Scotland to help him care for his eight-year-old son, Dod, and his three-year-old daughter, Jeannie. No sooner had they arrived at the homestead than McNair took off for the fields with his son.

Mrs. McNair "stood contemplating. The rain continued blowing about in imprisoning drab veils. Finally she turned away, and sat down weakly. From where she sat, she saw the dripping cows shivering. She sat huddled down. She seemed trying to cuddle up against herself. Her hands, folded in her lap, seemed the only sight not terrifying that her eyes might consider.

"Presently the silence of the room was broken with a little sob. She looked up. Christie's little sister, standing near the window, was just turning away from it.... She felt deserted. Big tears were running slowly down her face. She looked like a neglected, ragged, little heartbroken waif.

"Barbara started from her chair. That moment her face showed she had forgotten the surrounding desolations. She ran and gathered the child into her arms. She sat down with her in her lap. The little Jeannie, finding herself caressed, began crying lustily. The new mother kissed her. She caressed her. She soothed her, coaxing her into quietness. She told her little stories. She sang little songs, examining thoughtfully the poor little garments she wore. Dusk came upon them as they sat consoling each other. Barbara demanded help then of the child. Jeannie must show her where all the things were kept which were needed for the supper. They would make some little cakes together. Jeannie grew important and happy.

"Dod's eyes fairly bulged with amazement when he saw that supper table. Nothing of the sort had been set before him in that kitchen. His new mother made no apologies.... " Her husband protested, "We don't have cake every day."

"I do," she said placidly. "I like a wee cake with my tea."

Perhaps Barbara McNair made Scottish rock cakes. Given the meagre contents of the pantry, theycould not have been too fancy.

The Able McLaughlins by an Able Writer

 

The Iowa prairie as it might have looked when the Able McLaughlins farmed it in the mid-19th century.

Margaret Wilson won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize with her novel The Able McLaughlins, about a Scottish group of families who had transplanted themselves to the Iowa prairie from Scotland and carved farms out of the prairie. When we meet them, their children, born in the United States, are nearing adulthood, the boys who survived just coming home from service for the North in the Civil War.

The story is fairly simple. The young man Wullie McLaughlin comes home wounded from the war and suddenly sees his childhood friend, Chirstie McNair, whom he remembered as a wee lass, in an altogether different light. He intends to marry her and, her behavior conveys, she would agree. He goes back to battlefield, but when he returns at war's end, the girl will have nothing to do with him. The plot revolves around the resolution to this conumdrum. 

But the book is called The Able McLaughlins, and the story of Wullie and Chirstie functions as the heightened surfaces of a bas-relief parade of figures and scenes, as Wilson brings to life the type of Scottish community in Iowa into which she was born in 1882. At various points, she suddenly shifts the narrative for a brief second to that of the memoirist writing a tale of her grandparents--like a quick lifting and shutting of a curtain.

 

As with so many American families in the 19th century, the McLaughlins and their fellow Scot Presbyterians built their farms from scratch, and Wilson portrays them as competent and successful over the span of just one generation. The families are all of a community, bound together not only by their momentous and risky undertaking, but even more tightly by their devotion to their religion, the Covenant, and their reliance on the Bible as the practical guide for every aspect of life.

Wilson gives this community a voice of its own in the book, but we hear it as if we were in the room with them, sitting at the big table spread with remains of a community meal, as children are ushered into their beds, and the adults are all chewing on the events of the day, seeing if their points of view match, groping in relaxed chatter to a community consensus.

As with Conrad Richter's The Trees, Wilson writes her novel in lyrical imitation of the language of her characters, the talk she must have heard as a child and young girl. The rhythm of the language--moving through descriptions of work and prairie and house, to the inner most thoughts of the characters, to the gatherings and interactions of the wider community--creates a current that keeps the reader swiftly coarsing through the pages, until... much too soon... it's over.

Children and Work

A little friend who loves to do the dishes. She and my daughter (r) had just made a cake.  

 

More from Living with Children by Mrs. Lillian Gilbreth

Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth were big believers in encouraging and allowing children to work in service to the family at a very young age. In fact Mr. Gilbreth had even "marked places on the closet floor with chalk where his slippers should go and nailed down a paper circle where his wastebasket was to stand, and allowed the baby, even before she could walk, to feel that she could help by putting away the slippers and pushing back the wastebasket.... The parents who have allowed their boys and girls this opportunity and privilege [to serve and contribute to the family] not only know their own joy in teaching the childrn but the children's delight in learning to be of service."

"Children learn to work best on real live projects. This is one reason why the children of pioneers were so admirably trained. There was no need to invent jobs to keep them busy or to think up chores to make them believe the work they actually did was actually needed. It is very difficult today, especially in the apartment-house life which is all that some families ever have, to find live projects."

Mrs. Gilbreth then relates how she and her husband chose their home because it needed love and care to bring it up to snuff and maintain--a large project full of many little projects and chores that they did as a family, with all children participating. The same with the summer house, which was little better than an empty shack in the beginning. "To rescue, repair, and reinstate every old piece of furniture on the place and never to buy anything that one could make became a matter of pride with the children.... A very young child, especially if his efforts are appreciated, will form ties with the places where he has accomplished something worthwhile that will always remain sources of satisfaction."

"Once the work projects have been thought through, an efficient workplace must be planned for. Again and again I have heard my husband say to some child who had started to sort stamps, polish silver, or do his homework, 'Here that is no place to work.' He would then rearrange work and worker till the light was right, the clutter removed, and the room or desk or table established as a workplace that not only made the work easier but gave the small person that attitude of good work. The child was made to feel, too, that a well-arranged workplace was not prescribed for him alone. He was allowed to criticize the workplace of the older members of the family, and any suggestions he could make for betterment were rewarded."

To read more of the ideas of Mrs. Lillian Gilbreth, in addition to Living with Children, there is her fascinating autobiography, As I Remember, and The Home-Maker and Her Job. Mrs. Gilbreth invented the three-sided kitchen geared to efficiency and the step-lid-up trash can.

An Old (and Successful) Method Comes Back Around

The Kidder Family, profiled in the Wall Street Journal for its use of workplace methods to make their family life happier and still productive. 

 

Parents are borrowing methods from the workplace to help run their households and raise their children, the Wall Street Journal reported in a feature article February 9. The large spread featured a fun graphic with photo mugs of a family of five with their family-company titles, plus the cat (Rodent Removal Engineer) and the dog (Security Officer).

The author is Bruce Feiler, whose new book The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Marriage, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More is being released this month. Mr. Feiler reports that families are starting to take some pages from the workplace to manage their hectic family lives: weekly family meetings, accountability sheets in the kitchen for daily and weekly chores, a family mission statement, and much freer back and forth between children and parents (borrowed from agile development methods), all in the interests of building the enterprise--a happy and productive family.

This is not a new idea. As many of us have known since we enjoyed Cheaper by the Dozen as children, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gilbreth applied their efficiency methods--in-depth studies on how to reduce fatigue and increase productivity--to the daily lives of their house full of children. Unlike their contemporary and rival efficiency expert Frederick Taylor, the Gilbreths believed that people who enjoyed their work were far more productive than those who didn't, and so were keenly interested in all the subjective aspects of creating a human and productive workplace. For instance, they studied the causes of stress (in which  they included clutter) and how to remove them.

 

Mrs. Lillian Gilbreth

Nevertheless, one might well ponder how Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth, both of whom worked full time professionally, albeit at home, were able to maintain their large family of 12 youngsters with the help of one cook and one adored but feckless handyman, and then after Frank Gilbreth died, without a father and without the cook. Family councils, where chores were assigned with much back and forth on skill levels by age and likes and dislikes, routines, family meals, fun outings, a stripped down and lean vacation home to go to each summer, were among the ways the Gilbreths kept their children happy and productive in their endeavors, while as mother and father blazed new trails in the industrialized workplace.

Underlying their success, I believe, were two secret ingredients. First, the marriage between the Gilbreths was a partnership in every sense of the word. Although Mrs. Gilbreth                        
was willing to take a second place next to her husband, she held nothing back in bringing her excellent education, intelligence and thoughtfulness, self-discipline, and energy for the use of her husband and her family--and found great joy in doing so. Second, radiating from their mutual respect for each other, the Gilbreths showed great respect for their children. "Each member of the home must not only be able to express himself but be urged to do so and given not only the opportunity but the rewards of expression," she wrote in her 1928 book, Living with Children.

Expectations and standards were high. Children were not harshly disciplined nor were they coddled:

"It is better, too, for children to enter the family life as sharing rather than receiving members. They should not be allowed needlessly to change the entire method of living or to feel that they are to be the center of interest and the real reason for the existence of the family. This is no kindness to them. All their lives long they will have to learn to adjust themselves to the needs of others; the family may not continue to make them the most important members of the household, and even if it does, the world will not follow its example.... It may be beneficial for parents and family 'to give up everything for the baby,' but it is most undesirable for the baby....

"If a satisfying life is one full of experiences, then it is our job to expose the child to experiences, not to shield him from them; to help him overcome difficulties, not move them out of his way; to teach him to achieve successes, not hand him the results of successes we have achieved for him....
As often and as early as possible, he should become an active participant in every home problem in order to derive creative experience from it....

"Nothing better generates self-confidence than being effective. While the child in a home consciously governed by laws which hold good everywhere may have a little harder time learning to be effective, he has a much better chance to be so when he later steps out in the world than if he had to learn a new technique of handling situations when faced with the difficulties of a more complex life."

The Gilbreth family on the see-saw outside their vacation home.

By the same reasoning, "as a part of his effectiveness in the world, we want the child to learn to make his own decisions wisely and quickly and having made them, to be satisfied with the results. We may start with letting him decide on the color, design, and cut of his clothes. This is a personal problem that is sure to interest him and on which he will have opinions at a very early age. I have known youngsters to point out in a very decided manner which dress they wanted to wear before they were old enough to ask for the dress or discuss the matter."

I found Mr. Feiler's article right in the spirit of Mrs. Gilbreth's child-raising philosophy. In Living with Children, Mrs. Gilbreth opined that it is far more difficult to raise one child than many. I have seen articles recently in which women have spent so much energy on being mothers that there is little time for anything else, so great is their obsession with their youngster and doing everything "right." I think Mrs. Gilbreth would laugh at such an attitude. I hope that Mr. Feiler's book helps demystify some of the current views of raising children.

Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker

Golden Afternoon by Thomas George Sotter, 1935

Recently a friend asked me which country I would most like to visit and I answered Montana. Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker gave me a chance to go. Written in 1944, the book tells the story of a young woman and her experiences in love and work. She is the daughter of a rancher transplanted from Vermont after marrying a Russian peasant girl he had met when wounded in Archangel, Russia, at the end of World War I. His New England family did not take kindly to Anna and to escape the wounds of disapproval and unkindness, the two took up an offer of free land and moved to Montana to try a living as dry land wheat farmers.

Written in the first person by the couple's young daughter and only child, Ellen, Winter Wheat is a medley of love stories: the young love between Ellen and her fiance Gil, whom she meets in her first year at college; the subterranean love of her parents for each other; her parents' love for Ellen; and the love of a young widower for his young son, a family that Ellen comes to know when she spends a half year teaching in a one-room schoolhouse far out in the prairie.

The other love that fills the book is Ellen's love of the sky and land of Montana. Walker's descriptions of the terrain are the constant frame of the story and give an Easterner like me a sense of what it must be like to see such a big sky and open land. Walker herself was, like me, raised in Philadelphia. She moved out West with her husband, a medical doctor. Perhaps it takes an Easterner to appreciate the gigantic vistas of the West, since for the most part we are hemmed in by hills and trees.

Mrs. Walker also makes us acutely aware of the way in which the extreme hard work and isolation--the lack of leisure or luxury--for those who eeked out a living on the prairie could lead to a kind of de-culturation, in comparison to life in the East--a fact of life that many Western wives, mothers, and teachers such as Ellen fought to overcome.

This is the first book I have ever read of Mildred Walker's, and I intend to read more. I found that she examined real life, described the real work of ranching and school-teaching. Nothing was tied up in a neat and facile bow; the story bears a greater resemblance to the uncertainties, confusions, and discoveries of real life, and with the miracle of the land and its fruit.

Can Civic Duty Replace the Golden Rule?

The Golden Rule by Norman Rockwell

In today's Wall Street Journal today Laura Kreutzer, assistant managing editor of private equity in the newsletter group at Dow Jones, writes about how she has a hard time convincing her seven-year-old daughter to perform acts of civic-minded charity. When her Girl Scout troop was planning to help with a neighborhood cleanup, her daughter wanted nothing to do with it. "Although we have tried to raise Neva to be kind to others, I don't think we've done enough to instill a sense of commitment to the community around her. I don't necessarily need to raise the next Mother Teresa, but I also don't want to raise the next Gordon Gekko."

After discussing this conundrum with her husband and a friend, Ms. Kreutzer decides that "we are going to try to do a better job of getting the family active in community-service activities. For starters, we plan to contribute to local relief efforts for areas of the Northeast, including our own state, hardest hit by the recent hurricane. As the holidays approach, I'm also signing us up for a local charity drive that provides clothing and other items for people in need."

I applaud Ms. Kreutzer for trying to induce her child to be less selfish and for providing a role model for giving to the community, but I am deeply saddened by the paucity of intellectual and emotional equipment she has to do the job of inducing charity in her daughter. Ms. Kreutzer makes no reference to religion of any kind. Without access to the rich mine of religious thought that links individual acts of charity and goodness to the goodness of the universe as created by a loving Father, Ms. Kreutzer is left encouraging the abstraction of civic duty. To the question of Why, she has no real explanation and takes the option of offering carrots to reward charitable behavior.

But charity for the sake of a reward, at least in this world, is not the point of charity in the Judeo-Christian tradition, one of the bedrocks upon which our civilization was founded. In a Christian household, for example, at a very early age one learns the Golden Rule--do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Embedded in this rule is the assumption that each individual person is made in the living image of God. Love thy neighbor as thyself. We have the story of the Good Samaritan as an example of what being a good neighbor means and of who the neighbor is--the stranger lying on the side of the road. We have Christ saying to Peter, "If you love me, feed my sheep."  This Christian emphasis on charity was rooted in Judaism.

The Good Samaritan by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1644--the neighbor is the stranger lying on the side of the road.

For this reason, within Judeo-Christian culture, young children are taught that they must share their toys, that being "selfish" is not a good, and are brought into habits of charitable giving. This is not because our parents simply want us to be this way, but, we are taught, because this is the way in which we take our place as a contributing part of God's moral order of the universe. This is the way we participate in God's love, how we return His love. Love of God and of others is the force within us that compels charity.

There is nothing unscientific about this view. Charity, as Ms. Kreutzer recognizes, is necessary for the cohesion of society. A society which loses the concept of charity as a norm runs the grave risk of producing psychopaths and of human beings for whom "the other" as a concrete being like oneself, and not a utopian abstraction,  is a nonexistent. Charity is essential to nurturing the capacity for empathy, without which our society descends into increasingly harsh cruelty.

Ms. Kreutzer's article makes me fear that, without religion--now considered by so many as irrelevant, retrograde, and unscientific--our civilization is skating on very thin ice indeed.

The Small Town as a Greek Chorus

New England Interior by Edmund Charles Tarbell, 1906. I wonder if the interior that is the actual subject of this painting is the private conversation these two women are having, which, one gets the feeling, is not meant to be overheard.

I enjoy novels that are situated in small towns, where the town itself becomes a kind of Greek chorus--a veritable player in the plot, through its commentary on the real or imagined behaviors and thoughts of the town's residents and the story's main characters. Sometimes, this Greek chorus steers the action to tragedy, as in William Maxwell's Time Will Darken It. To me, the presence of the small town enables us to see the characters in context--much like a photograph of a person surrounded by their particular milieu gives us unique clues about the subject.

In his 1947 short novel Always Young and Fair, Conrad Richter explains how the small town weaves a cloak of talk around its residents. The story concerns a beautiful and well-to-do young woman, Miss Lucy Markle, who refuses to marry but remains faithful to her fiance, Tom Grail, who had been killed in battle in the Philippines two years earlier. As Conrad explains the workings of the small town of Pine Mills, Pennsylvania:

So far as I know, very little of consequence was ever kept strictly secret in Pine Mills, not even in the brick confines of the big Markle House. Cousins, callers, and maids all dripped like leaky taps to the thirsty town. In those days Pine Mills followed its own dramas passionately, the actors appearing on the stage in person on its stage. Today we are addicted to the same stories as then, but we take them at second and third hand through the radio and moving picture, and the actors are seldom seen except in bloodless images, much less passed in flesh and blood and bade good morning to on the street.

Everyone in Pine Mills, I am sure, must have known Lucy Markle's story and followed it intensely as a serial. The reader did not have to wait a week or month to know the next installment. It was always imminent, might possibly come today, and meantime, additions, missing passages, and revealing phases were constantly being filled in by friends and passers-by. There was not one editor of commentator, but many. Most of the town, I think, approved and respected Lucy for her stand.... Death and dignity were taken rather seriously then, and a girl of character stood fast. Lucy was showing her Markle and Grandmother Mattson blood, they said. It would wear off in time, and meanwhile a year or two out of respect for Tom Grail would not hurt her. It was respect to Company G, to the town which was Company G, and to the U.S.A. After all, Tom Grail hadn't given just a year or two but the rest of his young and lighthearted life.

Such is the town commentary in the beginning of the novel. Although many stories have been written about people's strong drive to get out of the small town they found stifling precisely because of its Greek chorus effect, it may be difficult to escape the human need to be part of some kind of community through church and other institutions or band of mutual friends, all of which invites talk and commentary on the doings of each of its members.

"Society," for instance, plays the same role as the small town in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. In The Late George Appley by J.P. Marquand, Prodigal Women by Nancy Hale (1942), and Joy Street by Frances Parkinson Keyes, the word "Boston" conjures up not a place but the explicitly understood views and opinions emanating from Beacon Hill, which seems to serve as some kind of lighthouse shining its value-laden light on the behavior of all Bostonians.

In the 1970s American society sought to cast off fear of castigation for any type of behavior, but today both sides in the social issues debate have their puritanical and intolerant streaks that disparage the attitudes of others with a vituperation that would rival that of any small town biddy. Facebook, Twitter, and online commentary also seem to answer a need for immediate human connection--ironic in a world in which people fought to exchange small town prurience for the relative anonymity of the cities and the suburbs. And today, instead of nodding our heads about "Markle and Grandmother Mattson blood," we would note, significantly, Markle and Mattson genes.

Maybe you can take the human being out of the small town, but you can't take the small town out of the human being. We re-create it wherever we are.

The Indomitable and Fun-Loving Julia Dent Grant

Monument to Mrs. Julia Dent Grant in Galena, Illinois.

This statue of Julia Dent Grant, I believe, shows the vitality of the beloved wife of President and General Ulysses S. Grant. Because she was afflicted with strabismus (lazy eye), she never permitted her picture to be taken head-on, but always turned her head to the side. The sharp features of her profile and the 19th-century propensity to put on a serious face for the photographer have combined to leave us no photograph that captures the spirit of Mrs. Grant, a woman who was known then and ever since as the necessary source of strength for the great military commander.

Some may think that a man who was prone to alcoholism, who left home for long periods of time for Army duty, who was practically incapable of earning a living when not on active military duty would not a good husband make. But Julia, according to her own telling in The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant and as confirmed by her children, never had any problem with or criticism of General Grant, and they led a full married life, raising four children, moving from home to home over the course of decades, and achieving what was by all accounts an enduring and affectionate relationship that was a joy to them both. Grant, says her children, was never happier than to be at home with his wife and their offspring. Mrs. Grant dictated these memoirs for her grandchildren, and it was only in 1975, 73 years after her death, that they were published.

Despite her dour photographic poses, her book shows Mrs. Grant was a very lively person, embracing both life and people. She, as her husband, loved company and the occasion of having company. But in contrast to Grant, who she said was generally a quiet man in social gatherings, she appears to have been quite a talker, and one gets the impression that during their world tour after Grant left the White House, she kept up a running narrative of their adventures as they were happening. She may have been a "plain Jane," as she says of herself, and quite small in stature, but her personality was ashimmer with warmth, vibrance, and enthusiasm.


The Dent plantation, White Haven, where Julia was born and spent many months when her husband was away.

Julia Dent was born in 1826, the fifth child of a slave-owning family in Missouri. According to her memoirs (and of course we may hesitate to believe everything she says), she never knew a harsh word from her parents, was indulged in terribly, and enjoyed a childhood of bliss that anyone would envy. She recalls playing with her sisters and children of slaves in the woods all day and encountering all kinds of wild and domesticated animals. Her descriptions of the antebellum life at the Dent home, White Haven, are so charming, that the antebellum sections of Gone with the Wind seem social realism in comparison. Everyone was happy in this household, including the slaves--although their prompt departure from the Dent plantation upon the Emancipation Proclamation puts this somewhat in doubt.

Julia met Ulysses Grant, a friend of her brother's, in 1844, and they swiftly became friends thanks to Grant's continual efforts to be by her side. They went for long walks and horseback rides together, as Grant opened up in the warmth of her sunny soul. When he proposed, she was startled, she says, because she had never thought of him in that way and declined. But when he went away after his proposal, she missed him, and upon his return they became engaged, marrying in August 1848, after Grant returned from the Mexican War.

Julia Dent had pluck. She recalls one childhood day when she and her little sister wanted to pick some wild clematis that grew in a meadow on the other side of a flooded creek. At the time, Mrs. Grant relates, she had echoing in her mind the words of her preacher: "If ye have faith even as a grain of mustard seed, ye may move mountains and walk on the waters."

I informed Nell of my determination to make the crossing on the deepest and smoothest place, reminding her of what the preacher said about faith. She was much alarmed and timidly asked, "What is faith, sister?" In great superiority, I replied: "Little goose, believe that you can and you can."... I stepped out on the water and plunged in up to my armpits. I was surprised and looked back at Nell with a frightened smile. I went on, however, to the other side and scrambled up the bank--crushed flowers, dead butterflies, and wet little girl.

Wet or not, Miss Dent's can-do spirit must have surely struck a chord in Ulysses S. Grant.


Hardscrabble, one of the many domiciles in which Mrs. Grant lived during the iterant years of her married life.

From the genteel life of White Haven, Mrs. Grant found herself living with her husband and young children in a log-and-mud soddered home, which Grant built in Missouri as a homestead. This house was "so crude and homely I did not like it at all, but I did not say so. I got out all my pretty covers, baskets, books, etc., and tried to make it look home-like and comfortable, but this was hard to do. The little house looked so unattractive that we facetiously decided to call it Hardscrabble.”

She showed the same domestic spirit when she arrived at the White House in March 1869:

"I found the White House in utter confusion. I felt greatly discouraged, but after a few weeks things began to assume an appearance of order, ... and by autumn the house was in beautiful condition. After much thought and fatigue, I at last had the furniture arranged in suites, so that each room would have its own set. I found it scattered widely in the upper chambers. Chairs and lounges were recovered; the hall carpets, which were much worn and so ugly, I could not bear to look at them, were replaced."

Under her direction, the White House not only became a domicile suitable for the President of the United States, but also the social center of Washington, as Julia hosted constant dinners and other events during her eight years there. She sobbed all afternon the day she and her husband left the White House--I think not only because she would miss her life there but because she had lived there the longest with Grant. She thought of it as her real home and opened it up for grand hospitality to all Americans, including, she was emphatic, to African Americans.

Ulysses S. Grant is one of the military leaders I admire the most. As I was reading about him recently and about the strength he took from his wife, I decided to find out what kind of person she was. Her memoirs give us a glimpse of Grant in home life and of her devotion to him. Mrs. Grant of course comes under attack from today's feminists because she made no attempt to break through the boundaries in which society and her marriage had placed her--although she was her husband's confidante and wanted to be informed. With her sharp nose for danger, she saved Grant's life when he was targeted as part of the assassination plot against Lincoln.

There is no doubt that Ulysses Grant thoroughly enjoyed her. Here she relates a story of the final leg of their trip round the world:

We had a delightful sail up the coast of Portland; that is, we had a pleasant party, but the sea was rather rough. I remember how the ship tossed and pitched. I said to the Captain: "I fear you have not placed your ballast as it ought to be. You should have it distributed more widely." The General [Grant] was surprised at this speech and said: "Really, Mrs. Grant, I was not aware that you know how to ballast a ship." "Nor do I," I replied, "but if you will remember, when we were coasting along the Spanish shore, the ship behaved exactly like this one. It careened over and returned with a thud. Well, I heard two Englishmen talking about it and they said the ballast was too much in the center of the ship and it was very dangerous." The Captain said: "There is a great deal in what you say, Madam, and as soon as we get into port I will see that all is made right."

Julia Dent Grant (fourth from left) and Ulysses S. Grant (fifth from left) after a descent into a mine in Virginia City, Nevada. "The General made a wager with Mr. Mackay that I would not venture down the shaft. I came out all equipped for a descent into its gloomy depths and was just about to reconsider when Mr. Mackay said to me in a low tone, 'Don't give up going. The General has bet money that you would back out.' I calmly stepped on the platform. The General looked surprised and said: 'We descend one thousand seven hundred feet. Are you going?' 'Yes,' I said, with a look of reproach and triumph. So the General lost his wager when he bet against me."

Fine Arts Friday: Breakfast

The Breakfast Table by John Singer Sargent, 1883.

(As always, click on the paintings to get a better view.)

Not everyone's breakfast is as elegant as that shown in Sargent's painting of his sister Violet engrossed in a book at the breakfast table. Roses, good silver, cloth napkins in napkin rings, a silver coffee pot on a white tablecloth. Nevertheless, a leisurely breakfast in pleasant surroundings can be a real pleasure no matter what the fare.

The Gilchrist family breakfast is more typical of our image of the family breakfast: not in such elegant surroundings, with slightly grim parents, and children who are well behaved but subdued--the atmosphere is not carefree. The painter, the son of a famous Philadelphia conductor and composer, must have usually sat in the empty seat at the head of the table there.


The Gilchrist Family Breakfast by William Wallace Gilchrist, Jr., 1916

But often at breakfast, people are anxious to get on their way and are not attuned to those around them. The social image of breakfast begins to disintegrate, and breakfast begins to look and more like a dining bustop rather than the first gathering of the family.


The Breakfast by William MacGregor Paxton, 1911


At the Breakfast Table by Norman Rockwell, 1930

Of course, no self-respecting child or adolescent wants to hang around the breakfast table for long.


Cottage Interior by Berthe Morisot, 1886. That's her daughter Julie edging toward the garden.


Breakfast at Berneval by Pierre Auguste Renoir, 1898

To keep children engaged in breakfast, when time and weather permit, it is always fun to move the meal outdoors.


Breakfast on the Piazza by Edmund Tarbel, 1902


The Open Air Breakfast by William Merritt Chase, 1888

A leisurely and quiet breakfast in beautiful surroundings would seem to be a luxury in today's world, except for some on Sundays. I hazard a guess that in the long run it pays to make breakfast each day as lovely and inviting as possible, as this mother has done,


Illustration from Bright April by Marguerite di Angeli, 1946

or even if one is eating alone.


Breakfast in the Garden by Frederick Frieseke, 1911

Backbone of America

John Garfield as Mickey Borden

"Hmmm," says Mickey Borden, the cynical composer, when he first walks into the home of the musical Lemp family, "Rug, the smell of cooking in the kitchen, piano, flowers. It's homes like these that are the backbone of the nation."

Four Daughters, 1938

Delta Wedding Celebration Fare

In Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, on the night before the wedding, all the family has gathered at the Fairchild house for a family celebratory meal. Here's what Ellen Fairchild served:

"They had been eating chicken and ham and dressing and gravy, and good, black snap beans, greens, butter beans, okra, corn on the cob, all kinds of relish, and watermelon rind preserves, and that good bread--their plates were loaded with corncobs and little piles of bones, and their glasses drained down to blackened leaves of mint, and the silver bread baskets lined with crumbs.... Then Roxie was putting a large plate of whole peaches in syrup and a slice of coconut cake" on the table."

The wedding dinner featured chicken salad--"two or three tubs and we've got it covered on ice"--along with cold lobster aspic, champagne, and of course, the cake. There was always cake, at all meals, it seems, served with fruit, and for all snacks and for tea when the aunts or anyone else came to visit.

Shown here is my favorite southern cookbook: The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock.

More People Living Alone in the United States

Christmas Eve by Carl Larsson

The number of people in the United States who live alone continues to climb and stands now at 27%, still lower than that of most Western European countries, where Sweden's 47% hits the high mark, noted an op ed in the New York Times February 4, on the basis of U.S. 2010 Census reports.

The author, Eric Klinenberg, argues that "living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities."
What I find interesting about this
sentence is the distinct line drawn between being with one's family and engaging in social activities. For many people, being with their family, including their extended family, is the heart of their social life. When I was growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, our family lived within half an hour of our grandparents' houses. We saw our grandparents often. We vacationed with our grandparents. We went to parties of the extended family or parties involving the extended family plus friends. Aren't all of these social activities? Isn't the family dinner a social activity?

It is true, as the author notes, that families today are less social within their own homes. Technologies such as TV, ipods, and computers have pulled children and parents away from the family dinner table and familial interaction. Smaller nuclear families also make for less interaction and fun in the house. The fact that 77% of all married mothers with children under the age of 15 work outside the home has drastically reduced the number of meals eaten together for families and in some cases eliminated the family meal altogether. And, with the far greater geographical dispersion of extended families since World War II, visiting grandparents and aunts and uncles can involve air travel or long car rides and is mostly reserved for holidays. These conditions, sadly, could be causing an under-socialization within the family, hurling members outside of it to seek friendship, comfort, and fun.

Nevertheless, I take issue with the idea that family and social life are mutually exclusive. The author notes that living alone "comports with modern values. It promotes freedom, personal control and self-realization — all prized aspects of contemporary life"--"values" that also add to the centrifugal forces pulling at the family today.

Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding: A Family Celebration

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty was a joy to read, although sometimes the syntax took some getting used to. The style is brisk and breezy but not light. The second daughter of Battle and Ellen Fairchild is marrying Troy Flavin, the overseer of the Fairchild cotton farm on the Yazoo River in the Mississippi delta. It's a large family and there are aunts living with them and more uncles, aunts, and great aunts and cousins to descend upon the home for the wedding and fest to follow. The author is attentive to nearly all members of the family and highly-charged children dart in and out of the book's dialogue, just as they do whenever there are a lot of people in the house for a grand celebration. Everyone is there and we get to know most of them in some way at least, in Miss Welty's panoramas of the family scene.

There are glimpses into the inner thoughts of some. The excerpt below, concerning the bride's mother, Ellen, is one of the most solemn moments in a book that is otherwise as lively as the family it describes:

When Ellen was nine years old, in Mitchen Corners, Virginia, her mother had run away to England with a man and stayed three years before she came back. She took up her old life and everything in the household went on as before. Like an act of God, passion went unexplained and undenied--just a phenomenon. "Mitchen allows one mistake." That was the saying old ladies had at Mitchen Corners--a literal business, too. Ellen had grown up not especially trusting appearances, not soon enough suspecting, either, that other people's presence and absence were still the least complicated elements of what went on underneath. Not her young life with her serene mother, with Battle, but her middle life--knowing all Fairchilds better and seeing George [her brother-in-law] single himself from them--had shown her how deep were the complexities of the everyday, of the family, what caves were in the mountains, what blocked chambers, and what crystal rivers that had not yet seen the light.
Ellen sighed, giving up trying to make Robbie eat; but she felt that perhaps that near-calamity on the trestle was nearer than she had realized to the heart of much that had happened in her family lately--as the sheet lightning of summer plays in the whole heaven but presently you observe that each time it concentrates in one place, throbbing like a nerve in the sky.

Eudora Welty wrote Delta Wedding in 1946.

American Under-18 Population Drops

For the first time in at least two decades, the Wall Street Journal reported January 6, the American population under the age of 18 years of age fell between 2010 and 2011. First off, fewer immigrant children are coming to the United States. Second, fewer children are being born. The Journal correlates the decreased birth rate with the states hardest hit by unemployment--which seems true but not uniformly.
The numbers of children in the United States also fell in the 1970s, when the country underwent both economic recession and cultural upheaval--women entered the workforce en masse and the divorce rate climbing steeply. A large drop in fertility was also the cause of a decline in the number of children in the 1920s--a boom period that was also marked by a major shift in cultural norms with the emergence of the flapper.
Overall, the number of children in the United States is still 2.3% above that of 2000, but that growth occurred in the early part of the decade.