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Six Amazing Indian Women From New England

Indian women faced double discrimination since the first European colonists arrived in the Americas. Many fought back against the prejudice that destroyed their traditional way of life.

Some Indian women like Lucy Nicolar exploited stereotypes to put across a message of equality for all. Other Indian women like Gladys Tantaquidgeon used modern education to preserve traditional customs and arts.

Here, then, are six amazing Indian women from New England. If you know of others, please mention them in the comments section.

Lucy Nicolar

Lucy Nicolar, a talented musician, took the stage name Princess Watahwosa, and spent her life mixing entertainment with political activism.

Publicity photo of Lucy Nicolar as Princess Watahwaso

She was born June 22, 1882, on the Penobscot reservation, which stretched along the Penobscot River in Maine from Indian Island to East Millinocket. As a child she traveled with her family to Kennebunkport. There they sold baskets and performed in Indian dress for tourists.

Lucy came to the attention of a Harvard administrator who hired her as his assistant, took her into his household and gave her musical and educational opportunities. Eventually she became a recording artist with Victor Records, performing adaptations of Indian songs such as By the Waters of Minnetonka and By the Weeping Waters.

Lucy Nicolar eventually returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation with her husband Bruce Poolaw, a Kiowa entertainer from Oklahoma. They opened a gift shop while Lucy and her sister campaigned to improve life on the reservation. The two Indian women raised the educational standards for Penobscot children by gaining access to the public schools. They also persuaded the state to build a bridge to the island.

Lucy and Florence also demanded the right to vote for their people. When the state extended suffrage to the Penobscots in 1955, Lucy Nicolar cast the first ballot.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain promoted the then-radical idea that Indians – and Indian women — are people.

The Lowell Offering

A half-Algonquian mill girl, she published some of the first criticisms of the treatment of Native Americans in short stories from 1841 to 1848.

Born sometime around 1797, perhaps in Wolfeboro or Brookfield, N.H., she was part European. She married Josiah Chamberlain, a farmer, in 1820 and they had three children. Her husband died in 1823. Betsey sold their farm and went to work in the Lowell textile mills to support herself and her children.

The mill girls wrote for magazines published in town called the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering. Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote for both.

Harriet Hanson Robinson, a Lowell Offering contributor, wrote that Betsey Guppy Chamberlain probably came to the mills from a Shaker community.

She had inherited Indian blood, and was proud of it. She had long, straight black hair, and walked very erect, with great freedom of movement. One of her sons was afterwards connected with the New York Tribune.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote 37 stories and poems for the magazines. In them, she embraced themes of Indian gods and spirituality while satirizing Christian hypocrisy. Robinson called her the most original, prolific and noted of all the Offering writers.

In a story called A New Society she wrote of her dream where new rules of living are adopted. Among those rules:

Resolved, That every father of a family who neglects to give his daughters the same advantages for an education which he gives his sons, shall be expelled from this society, and be considered a heathen.

Weetamoo

Weetamoo, a Pocasset Wampanoag Indian, was married to Wamsutta, the eldest son of Massasoit. Massasoit had negotiated a treaty of friendship with the Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation, and the English and Indians coexisted peacefully for 55 years.

Wamsutta succeeded his father as the tribe’s sachem. When war broke out between the English and the Narragansetts, Wamsutta and the Wampanoags joined the English against their rival tribe. After Wamsutta died, the Plymouth Colony grabbed more and more Indian land, subjected the Wampanoags to a humiliating peace treaty and hanged three of their men.

Weetamoo became sachem after Wamsutta died because the Wampanoags allowed women to become sachems in the absence of an adequate male heir.

Weetamo allied with her brother-in-law, Metacomet, also known as King Philip, to drive out the European settlers. They attacked the English in June 1675.

After months of bloody fighting in King Philip’s War, the English defeated the Wampanoags in August 1676. While trying to escape from them, Weetamoo drowned in the Taunton River. The English fighters mutilated her corpse, cut off her head and displayed it on a pole.

Molly Spotted Elk

Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name for Mary Alice Nelson, a Penobscot Indian acclaimed for her dancing in Paris.

Mary Alice Nelson

She acted out the stereotype of the sexy savage to meet the racist expectations of white people. At the same time she strove for recognition as an entertainer, as a writer and as an anthropologist.

Molly was born on the Indian Island Reservation on Nov. 17, 1903, about 20 years later than Lucy Nicolar, with whom she performed early in her career.

As Molly Spotted Elk, she started out on her own performing Indian dances along with the Charleston and the Black Bottom. She carried her typewriter into dressing rooms and between shows wrote poetry and adventure stories, literary fiction and traditional Penobscot tales.

In 1930, she starred in the film documentary The Silent Enemy. The next year Molly Spotted Elk left for Paris in the ballet corps of the International Colonial Exposition. When the troupe returned home, she stayed behind.

Shortly after she arrived in France, she met Jean Archambaud, a reporter for Paris Soir newspaper. Soon he wrote passionate love letters to her. She agreed to marry him, and they had a daughter. She worked on a book of Penobscot stories and found a publisher willing to bring it out.

The Nazi invasion of Paris separated Molly and Jean. She fled with her daughter on foot over the Pyrenees and found her way home to Indian Island. For the rest of her life, she drifted between New York and the reservation, taking menial jobs. She died on Indian Island on Feb. 21, 1977 at the age of 73, in poor physical and mental health. But she left a legacy: a book of traditional Penobscot stories in English and a dictionary of the Penobscot language.

Buffy St. Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a rising pop star in the 1960s until her activism on behalf of her Native-American people put a lid on her career.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1970

She was born Feb. 20, 1941, on the Piapot Plains Cree Nation Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan. Her parents abandoned her as an infant. Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a Wakefield, Mass., couple of Mi’kmaq descent, adopted the baby known only as Beverly.

Nicknamed Buffy, she played piano and guitar by the time she went off to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

There she began to write songs about Native-American rights, addiction, incest and war. When the singer Donovan recorded one of her songs, Universal Soldier, it rose to the top of the charts. That launched her on a successful recording career – which began to sputter in the mid-1960s.

Starting in the 1990s, Buffy Sainte-Marie came out and said the industry blacklisted her in the 1960s because of her activism. She sent money to buy water for the Indians who seized Alcatraz Island the year before. She’d also set up a foundation to send young Indians to law school.

Her career took a twist in 1975, when Sesame Street called to ask her to make a one-time appearance on the show. Buffy Sainte-Marie then appeared on Sesame Street for the next five years.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon revived dying Indian traditions, published books on traditional herbal medicine and helped the Mohegan tribe gain Federal recognition.

She was born on June 15, 1899 to Mohegan parents, a descendant of the Mohegan chief Uncas. She grew up on Mohegan Hill in Uncasville, Conn.

Indian women elders selected her when she was five years old for training in traditional pharmacology and culture. While studying anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladys researched traditional Indian herbal medicine. Over her lifetime, she published several books about traditional medicine.

In 1931, Gladys, along with her father and brother, started the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum. It displays eastern Indian artifacts and is still run by the Mohegan tribe.

During the Great Depression, she worked as a native arts specialist with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. She helped western tribal artisans preserve traditional skills and arts by finding ways to sell their work. She also saved customs like the Ghost Dance and the Sun Dance, banned in the 19th century.

Gladys saved tribal records and correspondence, documents that helped the tribe’s case for federal recognition.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon died in 2005. Her great niece, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, continues her work as an author and the current Mohegan Medicine Woman.

End Notes

Images: Gladys Tantaquidgeon By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37390510. Thanks to Bunny McBride for research on Lucy Nicolar and Molly Spotted Elk in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives (Viewpoints on American Culture) edited by Theda Perdue and Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot Indian in Paris . Thanks to Annalyssa Gypsy Murphy for her research on Betsey Guppy Chamberlain in Dissent Along the Borders of the Fourth World: Native American Writings as Social Protest and Judith A. Ranta in The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker. And thanks to Jason Schneider for his research on Buffy St. Marie in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music… from Hank Snow to the Band. For more about Weetamoo, read Longing To Be Free: The Bear, The Eagle and The Crown by Judith Guskin. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Antis: Women Who Fought Against the Vote

In the late 19^th century, women known as antis began to organize against women who wanted the right to vote.

A cartoon making the antis argument. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The antis viewed suffragists as angry killjoys who wanted to intrude on politics, the proper realm of men. They argued women didn’t need the vote because men could conduct government for both sexes. Further, they contended, the vote alone assssscouldn’t fix any injustice women suffered.

Maine native Kate Douglas Wiggin, who wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, supported the antis. She told a group of women in 1912 she would have ‘woman strong enough to keep just a trifle in the background, for the limelight never makes anything grow.’

As extraordinary as it seems today, the antis got plenty of support from women.

Who Were The Antis?

Suffragists started their first national organization in 1869. It would take the antis another 42 years to form theirs. They called themselves the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, or NAOWS. They passed out pamphlets that preached, ‘you do not need a ballot to clean out your sink.’ One pamphlet included household hints such as cleaning ink spots with sour milk — along with advice to ‘not waste time, energy and money’ on voting.

Other anti-suffrage propaganda pictured men caring for babies and doing household chores while women went off to vote.

The antis had many reasons for opposing the vote. Some with wealth and social prestige feared the vote would dislodge them from their comfortable positions.

Others viewed the suffragists as dangerous radicals associated with birth control, free love and the labor movement.

Some women became antis because they feared electoral politics would erode their ability to do good works. The Progressive Era, for example, got its name from women who tried to solve social problems in clubs, hospitals and settlement houses. They supported prison reform, shorter work days, an end to child labor and improved sanitation and diet.

The antis national organization. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Josephine Jewell Dodge

Josephine Jewell Dodge had wealth and prestige, but she also spent several decades promoting day care centers for working mothers. Dodge was born in 1855 in Hartford to Marshall Jewell, a prominent Connecticut politician who headed the Republican National Committee. She married Arthur Murray Dodge, son of wealthy Congressman William E. Dodge, in 1875.

After rising to prominence for her activism, Josephine Jewell Dodge turned her attention to fighting woman’s suffrage. In 1911, members of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage elected her their first president.

As an anti, she faced accusations that she was a political cats’ paw. The suffragists, who mostly supported temperance, claimed she carried water for the liquor interests.

The suffragists, of course, met the same kind of allegation. The antis charged the suffragists fronted for corrupt male organizations like Tammany Hall.

Both sides used ridicule as a weapon. And as head of NAOWS, Josephine Jewell Dodge confronted the same kind of ridicule the suffragists endured.

Ladies Riot

In 1915, a newspaper reported the antis and the suffragists nearly rioted at a meeting before the National Democratic Committee in Washington, D.C. Josephine Jewell Dodge gave a speech that affronted the suffragists.

“Charges of bribery hurled against Mrs. Dodge met with tears, then a haughty rejoinder — altogether like a men’s political affair except for the smoke,” reported the Washington Herald.

A ‘Western woman’ shook a handful of suffrage leaflets ‘under the nose of the very dignified anti,’ reported the Herald. She shouted that Josephine Jewell Dodge received $75 for delivering her speech.

“Mrs. Dodge flushed angrily and tears filled her eyes,” reported the Herald. “Then she replied in her haughtiest manner:

“As a woman of independent means I not only have never received a cent for my services, but I have financed the work of many others.”

State Chapters of Antis

The antis, just as the suffragists had, began their organizing in Massachusetts, though much later than the suffragists.

An anti-suffrage cartoon showing how the vote would backfire. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1895, the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women was founded by such Brahmins as Mrs. J. Eliot Cabot, Cornelia Baylis Lowell and Kate Gannett Wells. They attracted nearly 37,000 members by 1915 and had a headquarters on Boylston Street in Boston.

By 1910, the antis spread to other states, including Connecticut.

Mrs. Grace G. Markham, founded the Connecticut Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. It had branches in 161 cities and towns.

Mrs. Markham warned the ‘suffs’ had joined the Reds and wanted to incite class and race hatred.

The fight over woman’s suffrage divided many Connecticut communities, including a prominent artist colony.

In 1914, about 50 suffragists organized the Equal Franchise League in Old Lyme.

Two years earlier, 16 ladies, including art colony founder Florence Griswold, formed Old Lyme’s group of antis. Within a year the antis filled Town Hall for a speaker who denounced the suffragists. Alice Hill Chittendon explained ‘some of the undesirable results of equal suffrage already discovered.’

In January 1919, Mrs. Hermon Hubbard wrote a blistering letter to the New London Day, excoriating the newspaper for supporting the suffrage movement. She called it ‘the most radical and socialistic movement of the day.’ Six months later, she wrote a follow-up letter arguing women should stay home minding their children, ‘not running in the streets.’

New Hampshire Antis

A typical antis argument against the vote.

How did antis respond in 1920 when Tennessee approved the 19^th Amendment, reaching the threshold required to give women the vote?

Some antis refused to vote. But the diary of an Exeter, N.H., teenager shows a typical progression from anti to voter.

New Hampshire antis organized a state chapter of NAOWS, and Exeter formed its own chapter. Effie Tufts, an ardent anti, took her 16-year-old daughter Helen to hear two antis speak at Town Hall in 1913.

Helen reported in her diary that the meeting was ‘very good,’ and she had decided, “I’m an anti.”

In 1919, Helen’s father, state Sen. James Tufts, voted against the 19^th Amendment .

“Father fought it, spoke etc, but N.H. passed the suffrage amendment 18 to 10,” wrote Helen Tufts. “Worse Luck!”

She changed her tune in 1920, when at 23 she could vote for the first time.

“Mrs. Illsley came at — and took Mother and me down to VOTE!!! My first X ever put on a ballot was for Father for State Senator.”

With thanks to the Exeter Historical Society and the Florence Griswold Museum. This story about the antis was updated in 2022.

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Men in Drag: The Hasty Pudding Theatricals

Some of New England’s most distinguished statesmen and jurists kept a part of their past quiet later in their careers. They had performed as drag queens in Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club theatricals.

An early Hasty Pudding chorus line

Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club for more than 170 years has staged theatricals featuring silly plots, collegiate humor and men in drag. It started out as quite a departure for Puritan New England, which frowned on such frivolity.

Presidents from John Quincy Adams to John Fitzgerald Kennedy belonged to the club. But you won’t find photos of any former president, U.S. ambassador or Supreme Court justice in a gauzy dress and wig.

It’s hard to argue the drag performers didn’t know what they were doing. Boston had an emerging gay subculture in the late 19^th century, and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals had a reputation as homosexual influencers.

Hasty Pudding Club History

Twenty-one Harvard juniors founded the Hasty Pudding Club on Sept. 8, 1795 in the dorm room of an undergraduate named Nymphas Hatch. Harvard food was notoriously awful, so they mandated that “the members in alphabetical order shall provide a pot of hasty pudding for every meeting.”

James Russell Lowell

The Hasty Pudding Club merged with another called the Institute of 1770, to which John Quincy Adams belonged. For half a century the Hasty Pudding Club put on mock trials, debating such issues as Harvard presidents or mathematics.

In 1837, drag made its debut in the form of James Russell Lowell, who partied at Harvard more than he studied. He played Abby Roe in a breach of promise suit, and dressed from head to toe as a woman.

The Hasty Pudding Club held its first drag theatrical on Dec. 13, 1844, a tragic burlesque called Bombastes Furioso. Distaffina, the female lead, wore a low neck and short sleeves.

“On her introducing a fancy dance the applause almost shook the house down,” wrote Lloyd McKim Garrison in a club history. “Afterward they ate hasty pudding, the actors kept on their dresses and Distaffina was nearly bothered to death by her admirers.”

The Hasty Pudding Club stage, around 1876

A Charming Girl

Every year since then, the club has staged plays except twice during each of the world wars.

One early member nearly wiped out the Pudding’s treasury by paying $15 to the Boston Museum for his costume and wig. Garrison suggested it was worth every penny: “He looked a stunningly pretty girl in it.”

The actors sometimes kissed each other under protest, but one actor conceded, “Charles P. Greenough was a very charming girl. Up to that time, though, I had never been tempted to kiss any girl so much as Harry Williams of ‘65.”

By 1854, a critic called the first diva a ‘vision’ in “tights and a thousand gauzy skirts in a professional style.” In the 1880s, the Hasty Pudding Club took its shows on the road to New York and Philadelphia.

The Hasty Pudding cast of ‘Duenna’

The club launched many theatrical careers, including those of Alan Jay Lerner and Jack Lemmon. Lemmon performed under a pseudonym because he’d been placed on academic probation. It prepared him for the role of Gerald the double bass player who disguises himself as Daphne in Some Like It Hot.

Hasty Pudding makes news every year when it bestows its annual Man (since 1967) and Woman (since 1951) of the Year award to celebrity entertainers. Jane Fonda established a tradition of showing up for the award when in 1961 she came to Cambridge to accept hers unannounced. A parade, a banquet and a roast accompany the awards.

Many famous people belonged to the club, including William Randolph Hearst, Charles Francis Adams and Joseph P. Kennedy. Robert Todd Lincoln played an obese and cruel-hearted parent. Ironically, J. P. Morgan (Class of 1886) nearly bankrupted the Hasty Pudding Club during his tenure as business manager.

Men in Drag

Before he rose to eminence as a religious leader, Phillips Brooks (Class of 1855) played the huge Princess Glumdalka, Queen of the Giants, in Tom Thumb. Brooks became Bishop of Massachusetts, rector of Trinity Church and author of the Christmas carol, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later a Supreme Court justice, played the “widow” in A Gentleman and Lady in a Peculiarly Perplexing Predicament in 1865. Holmes had returned to Harvard from the Civil War, where he was wounded. In the risque play, a man and a woman must reluctantly share a room in an inn.

Philosopher George Santayana (Class of 1886) famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Perhaps his experience with the Hasty Pudding theatricals inspired the comment. He played Lady Elfrida in Robin Hood in 1885. As Lady Elfrida, he fell in love with Allan-a-dale and was rescued from the arms of Sir Reginald.

I Am Willing

Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., Class of 1872, played Imogene the Fair in Alonzo the Brave in 1869. He spooned at the male lead, uttering lines like, “Eyes so killing, looks so thrilling,” and “Cooing, billing, I am willing.” He might have done otherwise had he foreseen his future dignity as majority leader of the U.S. Senate.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a history major, played a chorus girl in 1903 in Catnippers, a comic opera set in India. A reviewer called the show “diverting” and “well staged” and noted the future president “got a good deal of fun out of it.”

Robert Benchley

Humorist Robert Benchley (Class of 1913) played the hairdresser Miss Mayme O’Brian in the Crystal Gazer. He wore a cheap costume that attempted to be stylish. “I may be only a hairdresser, but Heaven deliver me from ever being compromised,” Mayme declared.

William Weld played leading lady Vera Similitude in the 1966 Hasty Pudding production, Right Up Your Alley. He wrote his thesis underneath the stage during the show in between his scenes. His classmate Mitch Adams recalls him wearing a dress and wig with a legal pad on his lap. Weld also participated enthusiastically in the kick line during several Hasty Pudding shows. Later he won election as governor of Massachusetts.

Men and Women of the Year

In 1951, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals gave its first annual “Woman of the Year” award to English actress Gertrude Lawrence for her “lasting and impressive contribution to the world of entertainment.” The honorees leads a parade through Harvard Square, usually with the news media in attendance. The Pudding then treats her to a celebratory roast followed by a presentation of a Pudding Pot at Farkas Hall. Honorees have included Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Scarlett Johansson and Anne Hathaway. In 2023, Hasty Pudding actor Jennifer Coolidge won the honor.

In 1967, the Pudding added a “Man of the Year” honor, bestowing the tribute on Bob Hope. Since then, Tom Cruise, Paul Newman, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro have won. In 2023, the Pudding gave the honor to Bob Odenkirk.

The 2023 show, Cosmic Relief, was scheduled to premier on February 5. For more information, click here.

This story about the Hasty Pudding theatricals was updated in 2023.

Images: Octavia Spencer By IceCreamForEveryone – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56453899.

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6 Famous Franco-American Writers from New England

Let’s face it, Franco-American writers never receive their due. They tend to get pigeonholed as regional writers, and they can’t take advantage of their differentness the way African or Hispanic writers can.

New England’s Franco-American writers, though, have had a huge impact on literature and philosophy. That, at least, should be obvious from the six Franco-American writers listed here.

1. Jack Kerouac, Franco-American Beat

Jack Kerouac

Born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Mass., on March 12, 1922, he was the son of Franco-American immigrants. Kerouac’s father was a printer who lost his shop in a flood; his mother worked in a shoe factory.

French was his firs language, and he didn’t learn to speak English until he was six. He started writing his masterpiece, On The Road, in French.

He grew up a serious student and a devout Catholic. As a child he was told his family motto was “Love, Work, Suffer.” Before his death at 47 on Oct. 21, 1969, he published more than a dozen books that earned him a devoted following. Critics called him “the voice of his generation,” and On The Road became the bible of the Beat Generation.

2. Jean de Crevecoeur, American Farmer

Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur was born in 1735 in Normandy to the Count and Countess of Crevecoeur.

John Hector St. John

He migrated to New France in North America at the age of 20, serving in the French and Indian War as a surveyor.

He then moved to New York when the French lost to the British, took the name John Hector St. John and married an American woman. St. John subsequently bought a farm in New York State and wrote about life in the American colonies. His book, Letters from an American Farmer, is still in print.

He befriended Benjamin Franklin and Ethan Allen, who suggested the town of Dunmore, Vt., rename itself St. John in his honor. St. John suggested adding the ‘bury’ to differentiate the town from the one in New Brunswick. He died in France in 1813.

3. The Dark Themes of Robert Cormier

Robert Cormier was born Jan. 15, 1925 in a tight-knit Franco-American community known as French Hill in Leominster, Mass. He spent the rest of his life there. When growing up he looked out his classroom window and saw his house on fire. The nun made him recite a rosary before he could run home.

Cormier graduated from Fitchburg State University and worked for 30 years as a reporter for the Fitchburg Sentinel.

Robert Cormier

He also wrote 13 young adult novels and 100 short stories that made him famous. The New York Times described him as a nice, quiet family man, but he wrote novels with themes so dark that people thought them too disturbing for teenagers.

Lists of the most frequently banned books usually include Cormier’s, The Chocolate War. Novels like I Am the Cheese and We All Fall Down deal with abuse, mental illness, violence, revenge and betrayal.

4, Scandalous Grace Metalious

Grace Metalious led a short tragic life that began in 1924 on the largely Franco-American West Side of Manchester, N.H. Born Grace de Repentigny into a poor family, she married George Metalious, a school teacher in Gilmanton, N.H.

She was a lousy housewife who drank, swore, wore baggy jeans and cheated on her husband. Grace Metalious rocketed to fame with her first novel, Peyton Place.

Grace Metalious

Peyton Place described the hidden seamy side of a small New England town. The critics panned it, but the public loved it – except for Gilmanton, N.H., on which Metalious based the book.

Peyton Place became a staple of American entertainment as a movie, a sequel and a nighttime television soap opera. Fame made Grace Metalious rich and reckless. She burned through millions of dollars and then died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 39.

5. Henry David Thoreau, Franco-American Transcendentalist

Most people know Henry David Thoreau for Walden, his account of his two years, two months and two days living in a simple cabin in the woods. But his essay Civil Disobedience, with its message of nonviolent protest against an unjust government, perhaps had a bigger impact than Walden. It influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

He also wrote more than 20 volumes of poetry, journals, books and essays. His writings about nature inspired the environmental movement.

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau was born in Concord, Mass., in 1817, to John Thoreau, the son of French Protestant immigrants, and Cynthia Dunbar, of English descent. He never married and often didn’t have a job. When he did, he taught school, surveyed or did odd jobs for Ralph Waldo Emerson.

His influence endures beyond the other members of the Transcendentalist circle that included Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and William Ellery Channing.

6. Will Durant and His Better Half

Will Durant and his wife Ariel wrote the 11-volume Story of Civilization, one of the most popular works of history and philosophy ever. He was born in North Adams, Mass., to Franco-American parents who came to America as part of the Quebec diaspora. Ariel was born in Ukraine and migrated to the United States at the age of three.

Will studied at Jesuit schools in New Jersey, where he flirted with the idea of joining the priesthood. He then met his wife while teaching her at the Ferrer Modern School in New York. He quit his job to marry her when she was 15. She roller skated to their wedding at City Hall.

Will and Ariel Durant

They won the Pulitzer Prize for the 10^th volume of Story of Civilization, and President Gerald Ford awarded them the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They died within two weeks of each other in Los Angeles in 1981.

Image: Robert Cormier By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3988962.

This story about Franco-American writers was updated in 2022.

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11 Famous People Committed to McLean Mental Hospital

Sylvia Plath called McLean mental hospital the best mental hospital in the United States. U.S. News & World Report did too.

Though McLean mental hospital has excellent staff and conducts groundbreaking research, its reputation rests mostly on its rich and famous residents. They lend the place an odd glamour when they come to dry out, get sane or avoid prison.

So many Boston Brahmins stayed at McLean that it was said a proper Bostonian lived on Beacon Hill and had an uncle at Mclean mental hospital. Louis Agassiz Shaw II, for example, strangled his Irish maid and spent the rest of his life there surrounded by his books.

Creative people and their relatives also stayed at McLean mental hospital, including Al Capp’s daughter, John P. Marquand’s son, two of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brothers and two of Van Morrison’s sidemen. Even, perhaps, William James.

McLean Mental Hospital History

Otto Folin in biochemistry lab at McLean Hospital, 1905

In 1811, prominent Bostonians founded the Asylum for the Insane in Charlestown, Mass., to care for the homeless mentally ill.

In 1823, a Boston merchant named John McLean left a generous bequest to the insane asylum, which renamed itself after him. Another renaming — to McLean Hospital — reflected the evolution of thinking about mental illness.

Originally built around a Charles Bulfinch mansion, in 1895 it moved to the Boston suburb of Belmont.One of the 11 famous people who stayed at McLean mental hospital chose the new site.

McLean mental hospital

McLean combines teaching, treatment and research, unlike most hospitals for psychiatric disorders. Today it is a private, nonprofit division of Massachusetts General Hospital and a teaching hospital for Harvard University’s medical residents. But most people know it through the songs, poems, books and movies that its patients created over the decades.

1. Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted selected the site for McLean mental hospital when it moved to Belmont.

Toward the end of his life he went to McLean after showing signs of dementia. Olmsted reported ‘noises in his head.’

His influence makes the place look more like a college campus than a mental hospital.

Frederick Law Olmsted

2. A Beautiful Mind

John Nash, the mathematical genius and subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind spent a month at McLean in 1959. Doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, and he spent the next 11 years in and out of psychiatric hospitals.

In 1970 he began to control his illness, and in 1994 he won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

3. Brother Ray

In 1964, police arrested Ray Charles for possession of pot and heroin, his third drug arrest. A sympathetic judge sent him to McLean for observation.

“The nicest part was meeting one of the nurses who I got next to a little later on,” Charles wrote in his biography, Brother Ray. He also entertained the other patients when he found another piano player. “A classical cat,” he wrote, “who could really wail.”

He alluded to his drug use in the song, Let’s Go Get Stoned.

Ray Charles publicity still

4. Sweet Baby James

As a high school senior at Milton Academy, James Taylor fell into a deep depression, sleeping 20 hours a day. He was sent to McLean mental hospital, where he was heavily medicated but grateful to be there.

After 10 months, he checked himself out against medical advice. He later wrote a song about it: Knocking ‘Round the Zoo.

Brother Livingston and sister Kate also spent time at McLean.

5. Interrupted Girl

Susanna Kaysen was the daughter of John F. Kennedy’s deputy national security advisor, Carl Kaysen. In high school, her parents sent her to McLean mental hospital for treatment for depression.

Doctors diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder. She left after 18 months. In 1993 she wrote a memoir about her time at McLean, Girl, Interrupted, made into a movie starring Winona Ryder in 1999.

6. Sister Morphine

Part of the 1960s British Invasion, Marianne Faithfull had a couple of hit singles and a relationship with Mick Jagger. She got addicted to drugs and alcohol, and at one point she was anorexic, homeless and a heroin addict.

She made a comeback, tried to dry out in Minnesota and then checked into McLean in 1985. Faithfull then resumed a long career as a recording artist and actress on stage and screen.

Marianne Faithfull on Danish TV in 1966

7. Best Seller

David Foster Wallace published his literary best-seller, Infinite Jest, at the age of 34.

In it he describes the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, based on Granada House in Brighton, Conn. He spent time there after a four-week stay at McLean Mental Hospital for help with alcoholism, drug addiction and depression.

Wallace struggled with depression for decades. At 46, he committed suicide.

8. Demon of Screamin’

Steven Tyler, Aerosmith’s lead singer, was confronted by his bandmates about his drug use in the mid-80s. So he checked himself into the rehabilitation wing of McLean Mental Hospital.

He stayed off drugs after his stay until he fell off the wagon with painkillers. Back in the day they didn’t have safer alternatives to opioids like the kratom strains from Star Kratom that many rely on these days. Tyler returned to an unnamed rehab hospital.

Steven Tyler performing with Aerosmith on the National Mall in 2003

9. Bell Jar

In 1953, a depressed 20-year old Smith student named Sylvia Plath crawled under her house and swallowed a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills. She lay under the house for three days until she was found.

Plath then entered McLean Mental Hospital for six months of treatment, which she wrote about in her novel The Bell Jar. She published several collections of poetry, which won critical acclaim. But she, too, committed suicide. After her death she won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry.

10. Farm Equipment Heir

Stanley McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune, played champion tennis at Princeton but fell prey to mental illness later on. T. Coraghessan Boyle later portrayed him as a sex-mad recluse in his novel Riven Rock.

11. Mayflower Screwball

The Brahmin poet Robert Lowell suffered from manic depression all his life.

He stayed at McLean Mental Hospital four times in eight years. Of his stay at McLean he wrote the poem Waking in the Blue in 1976. In it, he described ‘Mayflower screwballs.’

Robert Lowell

Image: McLean Mental Hospital administration building By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9715880. Robert Lowell By Elsadorfman – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26201157. Marianne Faithfull By Photographer: A. Vente – FTA001007877 013 con.png Beeld & Geluid Wiki, Fanclub, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57844584. Steven Tyler By Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Rob Rubio – https://web.archive.org/web/20030911122036/http://www.news.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=9357, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=994727.

This story about the McLean Mental Hospital was updated in 2022.

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Louis B. Mayer Goes to Hollywood — By Way of a Run-Down Burlesque Theater in Haverhill, Mass.

In 1907, 23-year-old Louis B. Mayer visited a run-down, dingy burlesque theater in Haverhill, Mass., and saw his fabulous future.

Then called the Gem, locals called the theater the Germ. Or they called it the Garlic Box because of its poor Italian customers. Respectable women, they said, wouldn’t go within a block of it. Whores performed on its stage.

Nevertheless, Louis B. Mayer scraped up the money for a six-month lease on the place, fixed it up and renamed it the Orpheum.

And if it hadn’t been for the Orpheum, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would never have produced Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz Ben-Hur and The Philadelphia Story. Nor would it have launched such stars as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Buster Keaton, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

Louis B. Mayer

Young Louis B. Mayer

Lazar Meir was born July 12, 1884, near Minsk in Belarus. When he was two, his family fled the pogroms in Russia. They moved to St. John, New Brunswick, where his father worked as a scrap metal dealer and a peddler.

Louis foraged for junk metal in streets and garbage cans. From time to time his father sent him to Boston to sell the scrap metal. At 19, he decided to change his address to a room in the Jewish immigrant section of Boston’s South End.

“I hadn’t the price of a sandwich,” he later remembered.

He eventually changed his name to Louis Burt Mayer and his birthday to July 4.

He got a job scavenging metal from the bottom of Boston Harbor. Within six months he married Margaret Shenberg the daughter of the kosher butcher across the street. They moved in with her family. Soon after their first daughter was born a year later, they moved to Brooklyn. Things didn’t go well and Mayer, broke and depressed, moved his family back in with the in-laws two years later.

The Germ Theater

A Boston nickelodeon.

By then, a craze for nickelodeons swept America’s immigrant neighborhoods. They intrigued Mayer. He hung out at a South End nickelodeon, sometimes taking tickets and making friends with the owner, Joe Mack. One day Mack told him he saw a newspaper ad for a burlesque theater for rent in Haverhill, Mass.

In 1907, Louis B. Mayer took the train to Haverhill with Joe Mack and $50 in his pocket. They visited 8 Essex St., off Washington Square.

The place was a dump.

The theater had been built only seven years earlier, but it had already accumulated dirt and damp. It had 600 rickety seats and tobacco juice stains along the baseboards.

Legends grew up around the Gem during its short existence. According to one story, a show’s announcer once declared, proclaimed, “Miss Blanche Fernandez will now sing White Wings.”

“Blanche Fernandez is a whore,” yelled a man in the audience.

“Nevertheless, Miss Blanche Fernandez will now sing White Wings.”

Louis B. Mayer later said he didn’t see a dingy theater, but he saw what it could become.

Success

The small city of Haverhill, population 45,000, proved an excellent place to open a movie theater. Its shoe workers, small shopkeepers and tradesmen were an ideal demographic for cheap entertainment.

Washington Square, Haverhill, Mass.

Louis B. Mayer scraped and borrowed to come up with enough money for a six-month lease.

He and his wife and a handyman cleaned the Gem and put a fresh coat of paint on it. He converted the manager’s office into a small apartment and moved his family into the theater.

On Nov. 28, 1907, Thanksgiving Day, Louis B. Mayer opened the Orpheum, ‘Haverhill’s Home of Refined Amusement.’ A newspaper advertisement promised ‘clean, wholesome, healthy amusement, no waits, no delays.’ (For a picture of the Orpheum, since razed, click here.)

After a slow start, the Orpheum succeeded. Factory workers began to line up outside the theater after their shifts.

Up the Ladder

Louis B. Mayer enjoyed a growing reputation in Haverhill as he moved his family into better and better neighborhoods. Soon he owned all five theaters in the city. He branched out to Lynn, Brockton and Lowell.

In 1915, he bought the rights to distribute D.W. Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation throughout New England. He made so much money on the deal he could set up his own production company.

On Dec. 29, 1918, Louis B. Mayer took a train to New York City for the premier of his first film, Virtuous Wives, starring Hedda Hopper.

The silent film was enough of a hit that Louis B. Mayer could devote the rest of his career to moviemaking. He had outgrown New England. Shortly after Virtuous Wives came out, Louis B. Mayer moved his family from his Brookline estate to Hollywood.

He then built Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer into the country’s biggest and most powerful movie studio.

Louis B. Mayer died of kidney failure on Oct. 29, 1957.

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