Monday, January 28, 2013
Crystal Eastman, 1: Brains and Beauty
CHRONICLES OF CROTON’S BOHEMIA
Crystal found strong support for her latent feminism in her father. “When I insisted that the boys must make their beds if I had to make mine, my father stood by me. When I said that if there was dishwashing to be done they should take their turn, he stood by me. And when I declared that there was no such thing in our family as boys’ work and girls’ work, and that I must be allowed to do my share of wood-chopping and outdoor chores, he took me seriously and let me try.”
Crystal was almost six feet tall, athletic and vigorous. One of the first women in the country to bob her hair, she wore short skirts at work, pointing out that this style was not only “comfortable, hygienic, and becoming, but a step in the direction of freedom, for it gave women freer use of their legs than they had known for hundreds of years. Incidentally, it gave them back use of the left-hand which in the days of trailing skirts have always been used for holding the ugly things up out of the dust and dirt.”
Labor Lawyer
After graduating fromVassar College in 1903, Crystal earned a Master's degree in sociology from Columbia University and was second in the class of 1907 at New York University 's School of Law
In 1907, Paul U. Kellogg, editor of social work magazine Charities and the Commons, hired her to investigate labor conditions for the Russell Sage Foundation's Pittsburgh Survey. She moved toPittsburgh and over the next year conducted the first comprehensive sociological investigation of industrial accidents ever undertaken. Her pioneering 1910 report on worker safety in Pittsburgh , Work Accidents and the Law, caused New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes to name her the first and only woman among the 14 members of the Commission on Employer's Liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents.
On this commission, Crystal Eastman drafted the state’s (and the nation's) first workers' compensation law.Existing industrial safety legislation--called “protective” legislation by male legislators responding to what they saw as the “special” needs of women--regulated working conditions, but only for women.
“Feminism has entered upon a new phase,”Crystal wrote. “No longer content with asking for their rights, women have begun to question their privileges. They have begun to examine, with some shrewdness, the whole body of more or less benevolent legislation which has been gradually built up during the last half-century for the ’protection’ of women in industry.”
Instead, she advocated the objectives of British feminist groups, which was legislation for the protection of the worker based not upon sex but upon the nature of the work.
Marriage
Less than a month before her 30th birthday, in May of 1911,Crystal surprised her friends by marrying Wallace Benedict, a good-looking insurance agent, and moving to Milwaukee , even though it meant letting her husband’s career choice take precedence in the relationship.
Her friends felt that Benedict was a poor choice as a husband: He had the wrong occupation, lacked a social conscience and his home was far fromNew York . Crystal made up for these shortcomings the following year by managing the unsuccessful fight for women's suffrage in Wisconsin , which was defeated by the big breweries and liquor interests.
The marriage lasted only two unhappy years beforeCrystal returned to New York and filed for divorce--but refused alimony, scorning the practice as a woman's admission that she could not take care of herself.For two years after divorcing Benedict, Crystal led the suffrage movement in New York , but she had no illusion that gaining the vote for women would bring true equality.
“Today when there is no longer a single, simple aim and a solidarity barrier to break down,” she wrote, “there are a hundred difficult questions of civil law, problems of education, of moral and social custom to be solved before women can come wholly into their inheritance of freedom.”
Much work still lay ahead for Crystal Eastman before women would achieve a measure of equality.
Crystal Eastman was a pioneering feminist, an influential labor lawyer, a founder of the Woman’s Peace Party and the American Civil Liberties Union, a co-founder and co-editor of The Liberator, and one of the most beloved women of her generation.
Ironically, despite her distinguished record of accomplishments, Crystal Eastman is mostly remembered as Max Eastman’s older sister.
She was born in Marlborough , Mass.
At a time when women’s place was in the home, Annis Ford had defied her father and had gone to Oberlin College in Ohio to study theology, where she met her husband. When illness caused her husband to give up his profession in Elmira , N.Y.
Role Models
Crystal Eastman found role models in both her mother and father. "When my mother preached we hated to miss it. There was never a moment of anxiety or concern; she had that secret of perfect platform ease which takes all strain out of the audience. Her voice was music; she spoke simply, without effort, almost without gestures, standing very still. And what she said seemed to come straight from her heart to yours.”
“Once when I was twelve and very tall, a deputation of ladies from her church called on my mother and gently suggested that my skirts ought to be longer. My mother, who was not without consciousness of the neighbors' opinions, thought she must do something. But my father said, ‘No, let her wear them short. She likes to run, and she can't run so well in long skirts.’”
“A few years later it was a question of bathing suits. In our summer community I was a ringleader in the rebellion against skirts and stockings for swimming. On one hot Sunday morning the other fathers waited on my father and asked him to use his influence with me. I don't know what he said to them but he never said a word to me. He was, I know, startled and embarrassed to see his only daughter in a man's bathing suit with bare brown legs for all the world to see. I think it shocked him to his dying day. But he himself had been a swimmer; he knew he would not want to swim in a skirt and stockings. Why then should I?”
Her mother started a series of summer “symposiums” at their home in Elmira . Once a week, neighborhood mothers and children “and any fathers who happened to be around” would gather on the Eastman’s front porch to listen to a paper and then discuss it. Crystal ’s contribution was titled “Woman.”
“The trouble with women,” Crystal wrote, “is that they have no impersonal interests. They must have work of their own, first because no one who has to depend on another person for his living is really grown up, and, second, because the only way to be happy is to have an absorbing interest in life which is not bound up with any particular person. Children can die or grow up, husbands can leave you. No woman who allows her husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe against disaster.”
The author of these words was 15 years old at the time.
“The moment I saw her and heard her voice I liked Crystal Eastman,” said Claude McKay, black poet and seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance, in his autobiography. “I think she was the most beautiful white woman I ever knew. She was of the heavy or solid type of female, and her beauty was not so much of her features but in her magnificent presence.”
She added, “Surely the best thing about bobbed hair is the new sense of freedom it brings to the wearer. What the short skirt has done for women’s legs, short hair is doing for their heads. And outside of musical comedy, a woman’s head is ever more important than her legs.”
Labor Lawyer
After graduating from
In 1907, Paul U. Kellogg, editor of social work magazine Charities and the Commons, hired her to investigate labor conditions for the Russell Sage Foundation's Pittsburgh Survey. She moved to
On this commission, Crystal Eastman drafted the state’s (and the nation's) first workers' compensation law.Existing industrial safety legislation--called “protective” legislation by male legislators responding to what they saw as the “special” needs of women--regulated working conditions, but only for women.
“Feminism has entered upon a new phase,”
Instead, she advocated the objectives of British feminist groups, which was legislation for the protection of the worker based not upon sex but upon the nature of the work.
Marriage
Less than a month before her 30th birthday, in May of 1911,
Her friends felt that Benedict was a poor choice as a husband: He had the wrong occupation, lacked a social conscience and his home was far from
The marriage lasted only two unhappy years before
“Today when there is no longer a single, simple aim and a solidarity barrier to break down,” she wrote, “there are a hundred difficult questions of civil law, problems of education, of moral and social custom to be solved before women can come wholly into their inheritance of freedom.”
Much work still lay ahead for Crystal Eastman before women would achieve a measure of equality.
Crystal Eastman, 2: Taken Too Soon
CHRONICLES OF
CROTON’S BOHEMIA
Crystal Eastman
was “a natural leader,” recalled Roger Baldwin, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with whom she
had many differences.
Crystal left her mark on the series of
organizations she helped to start with her diligent attention to detail.
Crystal
Crystal married British
poet and antiwar activist Walter Fuller in 1916. The New York Times for Nov. 14, 1916, reported that the marriage
took place “some time ago.” It also reported that she had obtained a divorce
from Wallace Benedict “last winter.” The following year she invited Roger
Baldwin, then a St. Louis
social worker, to manage the AUAM office while she took a brief maternity leave. A son,
Jeffrey, was born on March 19, 1917.
Roger Baldwin later remembered Walter Fuller as "extremely witty and totally pacifist and worked hard to makeCrystal
laugh--and, you know, Crystal
loved to laugh."
When The Masses was forced to stop publication in 1917 by suspension of its second-class mailing privileges, the November-December issue effectively became the final issue. Crystal and Max immediately made plans for a successor. The first issue of The Liberator appeared in March 1918. Max readily admitted thatCrystal “really ran” The Liberator.
Walter Fuller had moved toLondon
in 1922 to seek work. For the next five years Crystal and their two children
traveled back and forth between the U.S.
and England .
She described their peculiar lifestyle in a magazine article in the December
1923 issue of Cosmopolitan with the
title “Marriage Under Two Roofs.” In it she told readers the unusual
arrangement had saved the marriage.
In 1927, she returned toNew York
intending to stay permanently and eager to work in health insurance. Her
husband was to join her when their finances permitted. Instead of his arrival,
however, a cablegram came less than a month later told her of his sudden death
of a stroke.Within
ten months Crystal ,
too, would be dead, at the age of 47.
The body she often referred to as “this good-for-nothing body of mine” gave out and succumbed to kidney failure. Crystal Eastman died at the home of her older brother, Dr. Ford Eastman, inErie ,
Penn.
“All over the world there are women and men who will feel touched with loss, who will look on a world that seems more sober, more subdued,” wrote Editor Freda Kirchwey in her tribute in the liberal weekly The Nation.
“In her short life Crystal Eastman brushed against many other lives, and wherever she moved she carried with her the breath of courage and a contagious belief in the coming triumph of freedom and decent human relations.
“Force poured from her strong body and her rich voice, and people followed where she led. She was to thousands of young women and young men a symbol of what the free woman might be."
Her death left her two children, son, Jeffrey, 11, and daughter, Annis, 7, parentless. Although Max Eastman was close toCrystal ,
he was disinclined to raise his sister’s orphaned children. Instead of taking
them in, he selfishly found a foster home for them.
Aversion to children was a pattern with Max. After he left his first wife, Ida Rauh, in 1912, it was twelve years before he visited his only child, Daniel. The boy grew up never really knowing his father and never forgave him for deserting him.
Daniel Eastman married twice, but both marriages failed. By the age of 29, he had already unsuccessfully tried four different careers. At the age of 44, a troubled and recovering alcoholic, Daniel Eastman earned a Ph.D. atColumbia University
Fortunately,Crystal 's
children found loving parents in Henry Goddard Leach, editor of the
intellectual and literary magazine Forum
and president of the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and his wife, Agnes
Brown Leach, who took them in.
On October 7, 2000, Crystal Eastman became one of that year's 19 new women inductees into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Headquartered atSeneca Falls , N.Y. , midway
between Rochester and Syracuse ,
Seneca Falls was the birthplace of the women's
rights movement in 1848.
She joined such other previously inducted heroines as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosa Parks. Although there have been many biographies about the pioneering feminists ofAmerica , no one
has essayed a biography of the remarkable woman who was Crystal Eastman.
Epilogue
Born on March 19, 1917,Crystal ’s
son, Jeffrey Eastman Fuller, had an interesting life, albeit a short one like
his mother’s. He graduated from Harvard in 1938 with a major in Slavic
languages and history.
Drafted in January 1941, he wound up in the military police, followed by a stint at an infantry regimental headquarters. After attending officer candidate school, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in October 1942 and served as aide de camp to Major General D.H. Connolly, commanding general of the Persian Gulf Command. Fuller traveled extensively with the general and served as Russian and French interpreter for him. In May 1943 Fuller became liaison officer and civilian personnel officer inQazvin , Iran
Recalled to theU.S. in October 1944
for training in military government and civil affairs in preparation for the occupation
of Japan , he was tapped by "Gen. William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan's Office of Strategic Services ( OSS) in May 1945 and worked as a field operative
in Berlin and Central
Europe . Fuller was discharged from the Army in June 1946 with the
rank of major, and remained in the Army Reserve. We can only wonder what Crystal would have said
about his impressive military career.
He joined the staff of the ACLU in 1948 and served until 1966. Jeffrey Eastman Fuller died of a heart attack on February 24, 1970, at the age of 53.
She was also “outspoken
(often tactless), determined, charming, beautiful and courageous.”
The Wisconsin
Suffrage Campaign
Crystal Eastman’s 1911 marriage to insurance agent Wallace Benedict and the move toMilwaukee
opened opportunities. Unable to find work in Milwaukee
with a law firm as a labor lawyer or with the state government in Madison were
disappointments. The women in the Wisconsin
suffrage movement recruited her for their cause.
Crystal Eastman’s 1911 marriage to insurance agent Wallace Benedict and the move to
Between 1896 and 1910 no state had
extended the vote to women, but in 1911 California
suffragists won the right to vote. Buoyed by that victory, campaigns were
launched in 1912 in six states: Arizona , Kansas , Oregon , Michigan , Ohio and Wisconsin . Women’s
suffrage would score a victory in three states: Arizona ,
Kansas and Oregon . Despite Crystal ’s
vigorous campaign, it was defeated in Wisconsin
by an opposition heavily financed by brewery interests determined to protect
the male bastion of the corner saloon.
Congressional Union
On January 2, 1913, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns and Crystal
Eastman launched a new movement from a basement room in Washington , D.C.
Eastman and Lucy Burns approached
the National Women’s Suffrage Association and persuaded it to adopt the new
group. Reconstituted as the Congressional Union, it organized dozens of
demonstrations in which many women were arrested and jailed.
The American Union Against Militarism
The work of the women’s suffrage movement was transformed in
August 1914 when war broke out in Europe .
Crystal and Max Eastman met with leaders of social reform like Lillian Wald in
December 1915 to create the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM). Crystal
Eastman was named executive secretary.
Its purpose was to lobby Congress
and to organize massive letter-writing campaigns. Widespread public acceptance
of the AUAM
should come as no surprise; Germans made up the largest immigrant group in the U.S.
Immediately upon United States
A separate organization was
needed to safeguard these rights, and the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB)
was established in the autumn of 1917 with Roger Baldwin as director. On Jan.
20, 1920, the NCLB became the ACLU with Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas and Crystal Eastman as founders.
Roger Baldwin later remembered Walter Fuller as "extremely witty and totally pacifist and worked hard to make
When The Masses was forced to stop publication in 1917 by suspension of its second-class mailing privileges, the November-December issue effectively became the final issue. Crystal and Max immediately made plans for a successor. The first issue of The Liberator appeared in March 1918. Max readily admitted that
Walter Fuller had moved to
In 1927, she returned to
The body she often referred to as “this good-for-nothing body of mine” gave out and succumbed to kidney failure. Crystal Eastman died at the home of her older brother, Dr. Ford Eastman, in
“All over the world there are women and men who will feel touched with loss, who will look on a world that seems more sober, more subdued,” wrote Editor Freda Kirchwey in her tribute in the liberal weekly The Nation.
“In her short life Crystal Eastman brushed against many other lives, and wherever she moved she carried with her the breath of courage and a contagious belief in the coming triumph of freedom and decent human relations.
“Force poured from her strong body and her rich voice, and people followed where she led. She was to thousands of young women and young men a symbol of what the free woman might be."
Her death left her two children, son, Jeffrey, 11, and daughter, Annis, 7, parentless. Although Max Eastman was close to
Aversion to children was a pattern with Max. After he left his first wife, Ida Rauh, in 1912, it was twelve years before he visited his only child, Daniel. The boy grew up never really knowing his father and never forgave him for deserting him.
Daniel Eastman married twice, but both marriages failed. By the age of 29, he had already unsuccessfully tried four different careers. At the age of 44, a troubled and recovering alcoholic, Daniel Eastman earned a Ph.D. at
Fortunately,
On October 7, 2000, Crystal Eastman became one of that year's 19 new women inductees into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Headquartered at
She joined such other previously inducted heroines as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosa Parks. Although there have been many biographies about the pioneering feminists of
Epilogue
Born on March 19, 1917,
Drafted in January 1941, he wound up in the military police, followed by a stint at an infantry regimental headquarters. After attending officer candidate school, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in October 1942 and served as aide de camp to Major General D.H. Connolly, commanding general of the Persian Gulf Command. Fuller traveled extensively with the general and served as Russian and French interpreter for him. In May 1943 Fuller became liaison officer and civilian personnel officer in
Recalled to the
He joined the staff of the ACLU in 1948 and served until 1966. Jeffrey Eastman Fuller died of a heart attack on February 24, 1970, at the age of 53.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Lillian Nordica, 1: Downeast Diva
CHRONICLES OF CROTON’S BOHEM
Hudson in search of a German opera house." To soften the blow of his harsh judgment, he added, "I hope Madame Nordica will wake up from her dreams before they have cost her all her salary."
Suffrage
InEngland
As streets go in that part of Croton still called Harmon by some, Nordica Drive
The name Nordica Drive
The Making of a Prima Donna
The Lillian Nordica story is a study in fortitude. It begins with her mother, Amanda Norton. “Give me a spoon,” she once said, “and I won’t hesitate to dig a tunnel through a mountain.” Amanda imparted this determination to her daughters.
Born Lillian Norton in 1857 in Farmington , a town in western Maine that prided itself as a center of learning with its Farmington Academy , she studied voice at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and began singing professionally in churches and concerts.
Chaperoned by her mother, Lillian joined Patrick Gilmore's American Band, performing ballads and arias on long whistle-stop tours of this popular and impressively uniformed organization. She reached London with the band in 1878, and later left for Paris and Milan for crash courses in opera.
Because of the prejudice of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic against American opera singers, she adopted the stage name of Giglia Nordica. Her first performance was in Italy as Donna Elvira in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni in 1879. The next year she took St. Petersburg by storm and was invited back for another season. By 1882, she was in Paris , this time to study Marguerite in Faust and Ophelia in Hamlet with their respective composers, Charles Gounod and Ambroise Thomas.
A Fool for Love
As lucky as Lillian Nordica was in her operatic career and choice of roles, she was unlucky in her choice of husbands. The first was Frederick Allen Gower, her second cousin. Formerly a reporter on a Providence newspaper, he had been the business manager for Alexander Graham Bell. He was now the millionaire owner of several European telephone companies. They were married in Paris early in 1883.
She soon discovered that she had made a horrible mistake. Her husband was a bully and abuser who insisted that she abandon her singing career. To reinforce his demand, Gower burned her music and her gowns. "I paid for them," he insisted. After two years of sheer marital hell, Lillian had enough. She filed for divorce in 1885.
In the meantime, Frederick Gower had become interested in balloon ascensions. After a successful balloon flight from England to France , he disappeared over the English Channel on the return leg. The balloon was found; the basket and the balloonist were not. Ropes attaching the basket to the balloon had been cut. No matter, Lillian Nordica was now officially Gower's widow. Peculiarly, there was no estate; his millions had mysteriously melted away.
A Return to Opera
Lillian resumed her career with an American tour. In 1887, she was feted by London . She decided to break with the operatic tradition that called for opera stars to wear the latest Paris creations. For her appearance as Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata, she dressed in the costume of the period of the story.
In 1894, she studied Wagnerian roles in German, appearing as Elsa in the first Bayreuth presentation of Lohengrin. The following year she appeared at the Metropolitan as Isolde in a memorable performance that set new vocal standards for Wagnerian interpretation.
Despite her bitter first marital experience, in 1891 she again fell for a scoundrel. This time it was a handsome young Hungarian drawing-room tenor named Zoltan Döme. Love may be blind, as Shakespeare said, but in Lillian's case, it was also deaf. Döme’s singing voice was mediocre, but to an infatuated Lillian it sounded divine. Because their careers kept them apart, their long-distance romance continued for five years, until their marriage in 1896.
Dome turned out to be a hopeless gigolo and inveterate womanizer. She resignedly filed for divorce again after seven years.
Yankee Courage
Nothing demonstrates Lillian Nordica's character and presence of mind better than an incident during a performance at the Met. The opera was Götterdämmerung, always a risky affair because of the flaming torches carried by the choristers. While she was singing Brünnhilde’s Immolation, a torch began to leak alcohol that fell in a blazing puddle on the stage. An audible gasp escaped the audience.
The conductor, Alfred Herz, was engrossed in the score and took no notice. Lillian, facing the funeral pyre, sensed something was wrong. She looked around. The male singers onstage were immobilized and doing nothing about the fire.
Still singing, the indomitable Lillian gathered up her robes with one hand, marched up to the fire and stamped out the flames without missing or misplacing a single note. When the curtain came down, the audience erupted in tumultuous applause, quite as much for her heroism as for her singing. Later, she noticed that her laced white boots had been scorched brown by the flames.
Lillian Nordica gave her first professional performance in 1879 and the last operatic performance of her career in 1913--a span of 34 years in which she mastered 42 different roles. She made millions and reigned as a queen at a time when grand opera was truly grand, traveling to engagements in her own private railroad car named “Isolde.”
An American Bayreuth
Her association with Westchester County London in 1891. The house still stands on Field Terrace in Irvington .
In June of 1907, before embarking for France on the French Line steamship Savoie, Lillian revealed a plan she had dreamed about for many years: She would build an opera house and create an American Bayreuth at her estate in Clifford B. Harmon's new community up the Hudson .
"Call my object philanthropic or what you may," she told a reporter, "but the idea of founding here in my own country an American Bayreuth has been my life's ambition. All the years I have been singing I have dreamed of such an institution. Now I am financially able to start this great project."
The "estate" she purchased in Harmon was huge, a large tract in the newly platted development that dwarfed all other lots. On early maps, the name Nordica Drive was also applied to what is now Old Post Road South and Cleveland Drive . The area opposite the Croton Free Library is still sometimes called Nordica Hill. The house she built is on Alexander Lane , a narrow dead-end street.
Her vision was for an Institution of Music with dormitory quarters for students that would cover four acres; she owned a tract of 21 acres. The Festival House would be a replica of the 1,925-seat Richard Wagner Festspielhaus in Bayreuth in Germany . She explained that her chief reason for going to Europe was to consult architects in Munich and to obtain plans of the Festspielhaus.
An open-air theater was also planned. Here famous actors would perform Shakespeare during the summer months. Popular prices would prevail for Saturday performances. Oratorios and symphonies would fill the air with music on Sundays.
The management was to consist of a board of directors exclusively of women, with men constituting an "advisory board." She hoped the members of New York 's society would subscribe to the 25 "diamond horseshoe" boxes.
Laid out in the shape of a large oval, the buildings would consist of a Festival House auditorium with a wing on each side. One would house a cafe and the other a club for the socialites on whom she counted for support.
"The theater may not be self-supporting during the first year, but that will not make the slightest difference. In years to come it will be, for the men interested in the project with me will endow it, aside from the financial aid I will give it."
She told interviewers, "Men are well taken care of in America . They have colleges without number, and the man who desires to perfect himself in any branch of human endeavor can easily find tuition. But such institutions for women are scarce in this country, and it is my purpose to furnish to the struggling girls a place where, if they have musical ability, they will have a chance to develop it."
Lillian Nordica’s ambitious plan for a Westchester version of Germany ’s Wagnerian opera festival was widely publicized. It quickly ran into trouble on both sides of the Atlantic .
"Well, I suppose she has a few acres of land somewhere or other," observed German-born operatic promoter Oscar Hammerstein, perhaps sensing a competitor. "But that is the only solid thing about the scheme. The rest is dream, pure dream, a sheer dream."
Hammerstein was something of an expert on opera houses. In New York City , he had built the Harlem Opera House on 125th Street in 1889 and the Manhattan Opera House on 34th Street in 1906. These offered opera at popular prices far below those charged by the Metropolitan.
“Anyhow, who wants a home for Wagnerian opera?" he questioned. "I can see New Yorkers trooping out to some God-forsaken place up the
Her plan for a music school and opera house in Harmon was equally scorned in Germany , where it was pointed out that what made the German festival so successful was its atmosphere. Atmosphere could not be exported to the Hudson River , "which, as everyone knows, is a low, unhealthy river where only malaria and mosquitoes are bred."
In April of 1909, Lillian announced her engagement to George Washington Young, a dapper, white-haired Wall Street financier on the board of several corporations. He wooed her with gifts of emeralds and pearls, and they were married inLondon in July of that year. Her newest husband soon reported doleful financial reverses, and Lillian began advancing money to him. Before long, he had run up his debt to her to more than $400,000. He also convinced her that the site of her German opera festival should be in Deal, N.J., an Atlantic beachfront community where he was building an opulent new home--with her money. Young turned out to be less a financier and more a smooth talker. A sadder but wiser Lillian soon realized that none of her three marriages had brought her happiness.
In April of 1909, Lillian announced her engagement to George Washington Young, a dapper, white-haired Wall Street financier on the board of several corporations. He wooed her with gifts of emeralds and pearls, and they were married in
Suffrage
In
Responding to a group of reporters, Lillian said, "Smash windows? Yes! When men take the view that to gain an end warlike methods are excusable, they are heroes. Many a man has fought and gone to prison for his principles, and I think no great reform has been brought about without there being those willing to cast themselves into the breach and fight. It is all very well for those in power to keep on their way, ignoring us. We have to draw attention to ourselves. If we are to be heard, we have to make ourselves obnoxious, perhaps, at times."
She sang in June 1910 in a concert for the suffrage cause at Irvington , her hometown in Westchester , and town fathers had the village clock's chimes stopped for two hours.
"I have," she declared, with a touch of wry wit, "sung perhaps at more dedications of church steeples, vestry carpets, orphan asylums and sewing circles than any other woman of my profession."
In 1912, she appeared in a giant suffrage pageant staged at the Metropolitan Opera House at which former president Theodore Roosevelt spoke. Lillian, regal-looking as Columbia in a crown of stars (one for each state in the union in which women had been emancipated), sang the national anthem "with great fervor." It was the last time her voice would be heard in that hall.
A lightning rod for controversy, in 1913 she submitted to an unusual public interview on the stage of the Hudson Theater on 44th Street . Her interrogator was Robert Erskine Ely of the League for Political Education, which eight years later would open the Town Hall on 43rd Street .
Lillian outlined her position, explaining that she was for equal pay for equal work. Asked whether she believed women would stand together, she responded by asking if women did not already stand by their families, if women were not the trusted secretaries of businessmen, and if 30,000 working girls then on strike were not standing together.
Years ahead of her time, she said she believed in higher education for women and added that she would vote for a woman for president should one ever run. She reminded her listeners she had never lost money with a female impresario.
Last Act
Almost as though she had a premonition of her own death, she told William Armstrong, a former music reporter for the Chicago Tribune, "At my funeral I want a baritone to sing Wotan's Farewell, and an orchestra to play the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung. For me that music has such dear memories."
She continued, "And then I want some great speaker to say . . ." She broke off, searching for the right words. Changing the mood and almost mocking her somber tone, she supplied the desired sentiment: "She did her damnedest."
At the age of 56, Lillian Nordica embarked on an ill-advised concert tour that would take her around the world. Following successful concerts in Australia , she had a complete emotional and physical collapse.
After resting, she resumed her tour. Her next concert was to be in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies . Ironically, her train to Sydney was late and the Nordica party wired the captain to hold the ship, the Tasman, for their arrival.
In the Torres Strait , the Tasman ran aground on a reef and was damaged. Forced to stay on deck because of the danger of sinking, Lillian contracted pneumonia from exposure during a storm and was taken to a primitive hospital on Thursday Island . Here she made a new will leaving nothing to her avaricious husband.
Among the patients in the hospital was a small American boy who had been taken ill while on a world tour with a San Francisco boys' club, and had been set ashore from the steamship Moanu. Lillian sang softly to him and comforted him. The child seemed to be growing better, but had a relapse and died. Sick as she was, Lillian remembered this lonely little boy. In a cemetery on Thursday Island stands this gravestone:
IN MEMORY
OF MY
LITTLE AMERICAN FRIEND
GEORGE MCDONALD
WHO DIED FEBRUARY 13, 1914
FAR AWAY FROM HOME
FROM HIS COUNTRYWOMAN
LILLIAN NORDICA
At her request, she was taken to a hospital in Batavia in Java, where her heart began to fail. One of her last acts was to make still another will cutting off her husband. She died there on May 10, 1914.
Her body was placed in a teakwood coffin and brought to London . After a brief funeral service in the same church in which she had been married only five years before, she was cremated. It was the only one of her wishes that was fulfilled. Her husband returned to New Jersey with her ashes that she had wanted to be given to her sisters.
Lillian Nordica’s estate was valued at more than a million dollars. George W. Young, who had never repaid his debt of $400,000, immediately sought to break the will that excluded him. Lillian’s jewelry and furs were auctioned off in New Jersey
In the end, after witnesses to its signing were produced, the courts upheld the will Lillian had made on remote Thursday Island . By then, much of the fortune she had earned in a lifetime of rigorous opera and concert singing was eaten up by legal expenses. The residue was divided among her three surviving sisters. George W. Young died in 1926 in Atlantic City .
No operatic role sung by Lillian Nordica ever ended more tragically. No baritone sang Wotan's Farewell. No orchestra played the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung. And no great speaker intoned the words she hoped would be said about her.
Epilogue
After Lillian's death, a plan was announced to erect a statue of her as Isolde in New York 's Central Park . The sculptor was to have been Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, but the First World War intervened, and the idea was forgotten.
During World War II, a Liberty Ship named the S.S. Lillian Nordica was launched at the New England Shipbuilding Company's yard at South Portland , Maine harbor of Antwerp
Lillian's birthplace in Farmington , Maine , is maintained as the Nordica Homestead Museum University of Maine at Farmington commemorates her last concert in 1911 in the town of her birth. It is reputed to be haunted by Lillian’s ghost.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Lillian Nordica, 2: Unlucky in Love
CHRONICLES OF CROTON'S BOHEMIA
Suffrage
InEngland
Lillian Nordica’s ambitious plan for a Westchester version of Germany ’s Wagnerian opera festival was widely publicized. It quickly ran into trouble on both sides of the Atlantic .
Hudson in search of a German opera house." To soften the blow of his harsh judgment, he added, "I hope Madame Nordica will wake up from her dreams before they have cost her all her salary."
"Well, I suppose she has a few acres of land somewhere or other," observed German-born operatic promoter Oscar Hammerstein, perhaps sensing a competitor. "But that is the only solid thing about the scheme. The rest is dream, pure dream, a sheer dream."
Hammerstein was something of an expert on opera houses. In New York City , he had built the Harlem Opera House on 125th Street in 1889 and the Manhattan Opera House on 34th Street in 1906. These offered opera at popular prices far below those charged by the Metropolitan.
“Anyhow, who wants a home for Wagnerian opera?" he questioned. "I can see New Yorkers trooping out to some God-forsaken place up the
Her plan for a music school and opera house in Harmon was equally scorned in Germany , where it was pointed out that what made the German festival so successful was its atmosphere. Atmosphere could not be exported to the Hudson River , "which, as everyone knows, is a low, unhealthy river where only malaria and mosquitoes are bred."
In April of 1909, Lillian announced her engagement to George Washington Young, a dapper, white-haired Wall Street financier on the board of several corporations. He wooed her with gifts of emeralds and pearls, and they were married inLondon in July of that year. Her newest husband soon reported doleful financial reverses, and Lillian began advancing money to him. Before long, he had run up his debt to her to more than $400,000. He also convinced her that the site of her German opera festival should be in Deal, N.J., an Atlantic beachfront community where he was building an opulent new home--with her money. Young turned out to be less a financier and more a smooth talker. A sadder but wiser Lillian soon realized that none of her three marriages had brought her happiness.
In April of 1909, Lillian announced her engagement to George Washington Young, a dapper, white-haired Wall Street financier on the board of several corporations. He wooed her with gifts of emeralds and pearls, and they were married in
Suffrage
In
Responding to a group of reporters, Lillian said, "Smash windows? Yes! When men take the view that to gain an end warlike methods are excusable, they are heroes. Many a man has fought and gone to prison for his principles, and I think no great reform has been brought about without there being those willing to cast themselves into the breach and fight. It is all very well for those in power to keep on their way, ignoring us. We have to draw attention to ourselves. If we are to be heard, we have to make ourselves obnoxious, perhaps, at times."
She sang in June 1910 in a concert for the suffrage cause at Irvington , her hometown in Westchester , and town fathers had the village clock's chimes stopped for two hours.
"I have," she declared, with a touch of wry wit, "sung perhaps at more dedications of church steeples, vestry carpets, orphan asylums and sewing circles than any other woman of my profession."
In 1912, she appeared in a giant suffrage pageant staged at the Metropolitan Opera House at which former president Theodore Roosevelt spoke. Lillian, regal-looking as Columbia in a crown of stars (one for each state in the union in which women had been emancipated), sang the national anthem "with great fervor." It was the last time her voice would be heard in that hall.
A lightning rod for controversy, in 1913 she submitted to an unusual public interview on the stage of the Hudson Theater on 44th Street . Her interrogator was Robert Erskine Ely of the League for Political Education, which eight years later would open the Town Hall on 43rd Street .
Lillian outlined her position, explaining that she was for equal pay for equal work. Asked whether she believed women would stand together, she responded by asking if women did not already stand by their families, if women were not the trusted secretaries of businessmen, and if 30,000 working girls then on strike were not standing together.
Years ahead of her time, she said she believed in higher education for women and added that she would vote for a woman for president should one ever run. She reminded her listeners she had never lost money with a female impresario.
Last Act
Almost as though she had a premonition of her own death, she told William Armstrong, a former music reporter for the Chicago Tribune, "At my funeral I want a baritone to sing Wotan's Farewell, and an orchestra to play the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung. For me that music has such dear memories."
She continued, "And then I want some great speaker to say . . ." She broke off, searching for the right words. Changing the mood and almost mocking her somber tone, she supplied the desired sentiment: "She did her damnedest."
At the age of 56, Lillian Nordica embarked on an ill-advised concert tour that would take her around the world. Following successful concerts in Australia , she had a complete emotional and physical collapse.
After resting, she resumed her tour. Her next concert was to be in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies . Ironically, her train to Sydney was late and the Nordica party wired the captain to hold the ship, the Tasman, for their arrival.
In the Torres Strait , the Tasman ran aground on a reef and was damaged. Forced to stay on deck because of the danger of sinking, Lillian contracted pneumonia from exposure during a storm and was taken to a primitive hospital on Thursday Island . Here she made a new will leaving nothing to her avaricious husband.
Among the patients in the hospital was a small American boy who had been taken ill while on a world tour with a San Francisco boys' club, and had been set ashore from the steamship Moanu. Lillian sang softly to him and comforted him. The child seemed to be growing better, but had a relapse and died. Sick as she was, Lillian remembered this lonely little boy. In a cemetery on Thursday Island stands this gravestone:
IN MEMORY
OF MY
LITTLE AMERICAN FRIEND
GEORGE MCDONALD
WHO DIED FEBRUARY 13, 1914
FAR AWAY FROM HOME
FROM HIS COUNTRYWOMAN
LILLIAN NORDICA
At her request, she was taken to a hospital in Batavia in Java, where her heart began to fail. One of her last acts was to make still another will cutting off her husband. She died there on May 10, 1914.
Her body was placed in a teakwood coffin and brought to London . After a brief funeral service in the same church in which she had been married only five years before, she was cremated. It was the only one of her wishes that was fulfilled. Her husband returned to New Jersey with her ashes that she had wanted to be given to her sisters.
Lillian Nordica’s estate was valued at more than a million dollars. George W. Young, who had never repaid his debt of $400,000, immediately sought to break the will that excluded him. Lillian’s jewelry and furs were auctioned off in New Jersey .
In the end, after witnesses to its signing were produced, the courts upheld the will Lillian had made on remote Thursday Island . By then, much of the fortune she had earned in a lifetime of rigorous opera and concert singing was eaten up by legal expenses. The residue was divided among her three surviving sisters. George W. Young died in 1926 in Atlantic City .
No operatic role sung by Lillian Nordica ever ended more tragically. No baritone sang Wotan's Farewell. No orchestra played the Funeral March from Götterdämmerung. And no great speaker intoned the words she hoped would be said about her.
Epilogue
After Lillian's death, a plan was announced to erect a statue of her as Isolde in New York 's Central Park . The sculptor was to have been Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, but the First World War intervened, and the idea was forgotten.
During World War II, a Liberty Ship named the S.S. Lillian Nordica was launched at the New England Shipbuilding Company's yard at South Portland , Maine harbor of Antwerp
Lillian's birthplace in Farmington , Maine , is maintained as the Nordica Homestead Museum University of Maine at Farmington commemorates her last concert in 1911 in the town of her birth. It is reputed to be haunted by Lillian’s ghost.
