Search Results for: Scientific American

Making Peace with the Site of a Suicide

Photo by Liz Arnold

Liz Arnold | The Common | Spring 2018 | 19 minutes (5,189 words)

Sixteen years ago, my mother found my father behind the shed on a Saturday morning in June. “Get up off the ground in your good shirt,” she told him, before she understood he was dead. “He looked like he was sleeping,” she told us. “The gun glinted in the grass.”

Seven years after my father’s suicide, I opened the envelope containing police photographs of the scene. He did not look like he was sleeping. Limbs: a swastika. Angles inhuman. Violence and velocity rendered in two hundred pounds of a six-foot man. The gun glinted in the grass — she was right about that.

Initially, I was upset she got it wrong. Did she get it wrong? Or she lied to protect her children, three grown adults. (I was 25 at the time.) Or shock wrote its own version. She says that shock drove her back into the house to start a load of whites. She watched her hand grasp the silver knob on the washing machine.

Maybe we’re trying to protect each other. I haven’t told her that I’ve read the autopsy report, or that I viewed photographs of the scene.

I remember how, on the night of his death, when I’d flown home to Michigan from Los Angeles, she tapped her temple twice, quickly. “Not a lot of blood,” she said. That was true, though I wouldn’t know until years later that the temple wasn’t the site of the entrance wound. “Intra-oral,” it said on the report. Of course. He was a dentist who collected guns, and his expertise in those two fields converged at the palate, the most vulnerable place in the skull. Bypassing bone, the impact destroys the control center for vital organs.

I’ve since revised my account to believe he was standing. He was standing behind the shed, and then—I can’t piece it together anymore. Read more…

The Wheel, the Woman, and the Human Body

CTK via AP Images

Margaret Guroff | The Mechanical Horse | University of Texas Press | April 2016 | 35 minutes (4,915 words)

Angeline Allen must have been pleased. On October 28, 1893, the 20-something divorcée, an aspiring model, made the cover of the country’s most popular men’s magazine, a titillating journal of crime, sport, and cheesecake called the National Police Gazette. Granted, the reason wasn’t Allen’s “wealth of golden hair” or “strikingly pretty face,” though the magazine mentioned both. Rather, the cover story was about Allen’s attire during a recent bicycle ride near her Newark, New Jersey, home. The “eccentric” young woman had ridden through town in “a costume that caused hundreds to turn and gaze in astonishment,” the Gazette reported.

The story’s headline summed up the cause of fascination: “She Wore Trousers” — dark blue corduroy bloomers, to be exact, snug around the calves and puffy above the knees. “She rode her wheel through the principal streets in a leisurely manner and appeared to be utterly oblivious of the sensation she was causing,” according to the reporter.

It is unlikely Allen was truly oblivious, having already shown an exhibitionistic streak over the summer when she appeared on an Asbury Park, New Jersey, beach in a bathing skirt that “did not reach within many inches of her knees,” according to a disapproving newspaper report. (“Her stockings or tights were of light blue silk,” the report added.) Allen didn’t mind people noticing her revealing outfits — “that’s what I wear them for,” she told one reporter — and she kept cycling around Newark in pants despite the journalistic scolding. As another paper reported that November, “The natives watch for her with bated breath, and her appearance is the signal for a rush to all the front windows along the street.”

For a grown woman to reveal so much leg in public was a staggeringly brazen act. What was noticeably unnoteworthy by then was Allen’s choice of vehicle. Ten years earlier, all bicycles had been high-wheelers, and riding one had been largely the province of daring, athletic men. The women who had attempted it were seen as acrobats, hussies, or freaks; one female performer who rode a high-wheeler in the early 1880s was perceived as “a sort of semi-monster,” another woman reported. But by the early 1890s, the bike had undergone a transformation. Allen’s machine — a so-called safety bicycle — had two thigh-high wheels; air-filled rubber tires; and rear-wheel drive, with a chain to transmit power from the pedals. In fact, it looked a lot like a 21st-century commuter bike, and it had become nearly as acceptable as one. Even the fashion police who scorned Allen’s riding outfit didn’t object to her riding.

What had happened to the bicycle in the interim? Market expansion. In the 1880s, when bicycle makers had begun to saturate the limited market for high-wheelers, they sought products to entice other would-be riders, particularly men who had aged out of the strenuous high-wheel lifestyle. In the United States, where bad roads made tricycle ridership impractical, the sales potential for an easy-to-ride bicycle looked stronger than in Europe. In response, manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic created a profusion of high-tech two-wheelers, including models with foot levers instead of pedals; “geared up” bikes with chains and sprockets that spun the driving wheel more than once for each rotation of the cycle’s cranks; and a supposedly header-proof version with the small wheel in the front and the big wheel in the rear. Riders and makers started calling the standard high-wheeler an “Ordinary” to distinguish it from experimental models.

Several of the new bikes used geared-up rear-wheel drive as a way to bring the rider closer to the ground. The most influential of these was the English Rover, with a rear driving wheel only thirty inches tall that had as much force as a 50-inch Ordinary wheel. (Even today, American bicycle gears are measured in “gear inches,” which indicate how tall an Ordinary wheel of equivalent force would be.) At 36 inches, the Rover’s front wheel was slightly bigger than its rear one, but apart from that, the machine looked as streamlined as some models of fifty or a hundred years later.

Introduced in England in 1885, the Rover Safety Bicycle delivered the speed of an Ordinary, but with a greatly diminished risk of skull fracture from flying over the handlebars. The Rover’s manufacturer made some quick refinements, and a model with same-sized wheels caught on in Britain and inspired a fleet of imitators: low-mount, rear-wheel-drive bikes also called “safeties.”

The major US manufacturers weren’t impressed by this new low profile, though; they dismissed the safety style as a mistake. In 1886, after a two-month tour of England’s bicycle factories, the US industry titan Albert Pope expressed confidence in his high-wheeler: “I looked at nearly all the principal [English] makes and I could not find a point that was in any way an improvement over our own.” Echoed his lieutenant, George H. Day, who also made the trip, “Every innovation is regarded as a trap.”

But when imported safeties hit the US market in the spring of 1887, the machines found eager buyers; Pope and other American cycle makers scrambled to put out their own versions of the header-resistant contraptions. By November, the safety bicycle was established in the United States as the modern option for men, even though its low wheels evoked the comically old-timey velocipede of 20 years prior, as one bard made clear in the accented voice of an immigrant child:

In days of old, full many a time
You’ve heard it told, in prose and rhyme,
How down the street a wheelman came,
And chanced to meet his beauteous flame
Just where a pup in ambush lay,
To tip him up upon the way,
And make him wish that he was dead,
While gyrating upon his head.
In days of old
You’ve heard it told.
But nowadays, it’s otherwise.
The safety craze new joy supplies;
The boulders lose their terrors grim,
Stray cans and shoes are naught to him;
He laughs at rocks, he kicks the pup,
But, in the end, things even up;
For, as his maid he gayly greets,
Some unwashed urchin always bleats —
“Hi, look at der big man on der melosipetes!”

For a short time, Ordinaries and safeties coexisted like Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, with the bigger, older species continuing to inhabit its traditional niche while the smaller, nimbler creature carved out a new one. “I do not think that [the safety] will hurt the sale of the Ordinary bicycle,” predicted one US industry watcher in late 1887. “It will open the pleasures of cycling to a great many who have been afraid to venture upon a high machine.” The writer was thinking of physicians and other “professional men” for whom an Ordinary was too dangerous, but some enthusiasts suspected that the safety would also appeal to female riders. Offering women “a clumsy wheelbarrow of a tricycle” to ride while men zip around on slender bikes, wrote one sympathetic man, “is offering a woman a stone to eat while men have soft biscuit.”

And the safety bicycle’s low profile did intrigue many American women, especially after the spring of 1888, when makers offered a drop-frame version, in which the bike’s top bar scooped downward to make room for a lady rider’s long skirts. As one woman reported that year, “A sudden desire began to awake in the feminine mind to ascertain for itself by personal experience, what were those joys of the two-wheeler which they had so often heard boastfully vaunted as superior, a thousand times, to the more sober delights of the staid tricycle.”

With the safety’s smaller wheels, its ride was bumpier than the Ordinary’s at first. But then came the pneumatic tire. Devised in Ireland in 1888 by a veterinarian named John Boyd Dunlop, who was seeking a faster ride for his son’s trike, the air-filled rubber tube cushioned the road’s ruts and bulges in a way that springs and other early shock-absorbing devices never could. This marvel arrived in the United States by 1890 and became standard equipment on American safeties within a few years. “It permitted travel on streets and roads previously thought unrideable,” recalled an American journalist of the time, “and added to cycling a degree of ease and comfort never dreamed of.”

In the 1890s, bikes got lighter as well as more comfortable. The average weight of a bicycle dropped by more than half during the decade’s first five years, falling from 50 pounds to 23. And since new gearings were able to mimic wheels larger than those of the largest Ordinary, speed records fell too. In 1894, while riding a pneumatic-tired safety around a track in Buffalo, New York, the racer John S. Johnson went a mile in just over one minute and thirty-five seconds, a rate of nearly thirty-eight miles an hour. He beat the previous mile record for a safety by fourteen seconds, and the record for an Ordinary by nearly a minute–and the record for a running horse by one-tenth of a second.

The Ordinary — which had by then acquired the derisive nickname of “penny-farthing,” after the old British penny and much smaller farthing (quarter-penny) coins ─ became obsolete. High-wheelers that had sold for $150 to $300 just a year or two earlier were going for as little as $10.

The first safeties, meanwhile, cost an average of $150 during a time when the average worker earned something like $12 a week. At such prices, the new bikes targeted the same upscale demographic as the tricycle. But a strong market for safeties among well-to-do women goosed production, and competition among manufacturers reduced prices, making the bikes affordable to more would-be riders — and further fueling demand. In 1895, America’s 300 bicycle companies produced 500,000 safeties at an average price of $75, according to one encyclopedia’s yearbook. Even manufacturers were surprised at the demand among women, who thrilled to the new machine’s exhilarating ride. As one female journalist wrote, “If a pitying Providence should suddenly fit light, strong wings to the back of a toiling tortoise, that patient cumberer of the ground could hardly feel a more astonishing sense of exhilaration than a woman experiences when first she becomes a mistress of her wheel.”

It wasn’t just that women enjoyed the physical sensation of riding — the rush of balancing and cruising. What made the bicycle truly liberating was its fundamental incompatibility with many of the limits placed on women. Take clothing, for example. Starting at puberty, women were expected to wear heavy floor-length skirts, rigid corsets, and tight, pointy-toed shoes. These garments made any sort of physical exertion difficult, as young girls sadly discovered. “I ‘ran wild’ until my 16th birthday, when the hampering long skirts were brought, with their accompanying corset and high heels,” recalled the temperance activist Frances Willard in an 1895 memoir. “I remember writing in my journal, in the first heartbreak of a young human colt taken from its pleasant pasture, ‘Altogether, I recognize that my occupation is gone.’” Reformers had been calling for more sensible clothing for women since the 1850s, when the newspaper editor Amelia Bloomer wore the baggy trousers that critics named after her, but rational arguments hadn’t made much headway.

Where reason failed, though, recreation succeeded. The drop-frame safety did allow women to ride in dresses, but not in the swagged, voluminous frocks of the Victorian parlor. Female cyclists had to don simple, “short” (that is, ankle-length) skirts in order to avoid getting them caught under the bicycle’s rear wheel. And to keep them from flying up, some women had tailors put weights in their hems or line their skirt fronts with leather. Other women, like Angeline Allen, shucked their dresses altogether and wore bloomers. The display that reporters had deemed shocking in 1893 became commonplace just a few years later as more and more women started riding. “The eye of the spectator has long since become accustomed to costumes once conspicuous,” wrote an American journalist in 1895. “Bloomer and tailor-made alike ride on unchallenged.” (For her part, Allen may well have given up riding, but not scandal; she progressed to posing onstage in scanty attire for re-creations of famous paintings, a risqué popular amusement.)

Bicyclists’ corsets changed too, though less publicly. The corset of the 1880s was an armpit-to-hip garment stiffened with whalebone stays, which helped the hips support heavy skirts that hung from the waist. But while corsets braced women’s torsos, they also weakened their wearers, squeezing women’s lungs and displacing other internal organs, making deep breaths impossible. Out of necessity, female cyclists looked for alternatives, and many chose another garment that had been advocated by dress reformers decades earlier: a sturdy, waist-length cotton camisole with shoulder straps. When introduced in the 1870s, this garment was called an “emancipation waist,” and it featured a horizontal band of buttons at the hem, to which drawers or a skirt could be attached. Later versions were named “health waist” or, finally, “bicycle waist.” One 1896 model included elastic insets; its maker promised the wearer “perfect comfort — a sound pair of lungs — a graceful figure and rosy cheeks.” All for $1, postpaid.

If women’s clothing constrained them, so did their role in society. More Americans than ever worked outside the home; by 1880, farmers made up a little less than half of the country’s labor force. But even among the urban working class, married women typically stayed home during the day to cook, clean, tend to children, and often manufacture homemade goods for sale. Meanwhile, their husbands, sons, and unmarried daughters toiled in factories, shops, offices, and other people’s houses. Many Americans came to believe that men and women naturally inhabited two separate spheres: men held sway in business, politics, and other public arenas, and women took charge of the home. For most middle-class women, respectability meant appearing in public only under certain circumstances ─ such as while shopping ─ and making as small an impression as possible. “A true lady walks the streets unostentatiously and with becoming reserve,” instructed an 1889 etiquette manual. “She appears unconscious of all sights and sounds which a lady ought not to perceive.”

In addition, an unmarried young woman didn’t go out without a chaperone, usually an older female relative. Being seen on an unchaperoned date, even at a restaurant or other public place, could be cause for social ruin. An 1887 etiquette guide warned against sailing excursions, for example, lest the boat be becalmed overnight: “A single careless act of this sort may be remembered spitefully against a girl for many years.”

The bicycle challenged all that. Wives who had stayed close to home — venturing out only on foot, by trolley, or, if wealthy, with a driver and horse-drawn carriage — were suddenly able to travel miles on their own. Being so mobile, and so visible, was a revelation to many. “The world is a new and another sphere under the bicyclist’s observation,” wrote one female journalist. “Here is a process of locomotion that is absolutely at her command.” If a woman’s sphere begins to feel too small, wrote another, “the sufferer can do no better than to flatten her sphere to a circle, mount it, and take to the road.”

As for unmarried women, manners mavens urged them to cycle only with chaperones, but the rule didn’t take. “New social laws have been enacted to meet the requirements of the new order,” reported one newspaper editor in 1896. “Parents who will not allow their daughters to accompany young men to the theatre without chaperonage allow them to go bicycle-riding alone with young men. This is considered perfectly proper.” According to the editor, the reason for this difference was the “good comradeship” of the bicycling set. Fellow enthusiasts looked out for one another on the road, he wrote ─ so in a way, every ride was supervised. The historian Ellen Gruber Garvey suggests a second possible reason: propriety already allowed unmarried women to ride horses unchaperoned. Bicycles, as a less costly equivalent, may simply have extended this freedom down the economic scale.

But the same things that made the bicycle liberating also made it threatening. Moralists warned that skimpy costumes and unsupervised travel would lead to wanton behavior. “Immodest bicycling by young women is to be deplored,” declared Charlotte Smith, founder of the Women’s Rescue League, a group that lobbied Congress on behalf of “fallen women.” “Bicycling by young women has helped to swell the ranks of reckless girls, who finally drift into the standing army of outcast women.” Smith reported that her tours of brothels and interviews with prostitutes confirmed this.

Physicians — who at the time shouldered responsibility for patients’ moral as well as physical well-being — had their own concerns. One visited New York’s Coney Island and saw a 16-year-old cyclist get drunk on wine provided by a beautiful but nefarious older woman. “She looked like an innocent child, but was away from home influence,” the doctor reported. Many physicians fretted that pressure from the bicycle seat would teach girls how to masturbate, a practice thought to lead to spiritual and psychological decline. Climbing hills on a bike could excite “feelings hitherto unknown to, and unrealized by, the young girl,” wrote one doctor in 1898. (Boys faced the same danger: pressure on the perineum would call their attention to the area, warned one doctor, “and so lead to a great increase in masturbation in the timid [and] to early sexual indulgence in the more venturous.”)

The bicycle’s peril was medical as well as moral. In the late nineteenth century, many saw physical energy as a finite resource that had to be carefully parceled out, not a power that could be renewed through exercise. The fashionable malaise of neurasthenia was only one of the disorders thought to be caused by a depletion of energies. Overexertion could also cause tuberculosis, scoliosis, hernias, heart disease, and other maladies, doctors believed. Safely sedentary middle-class women, who frequently suffered from varicose veins and other consequences of annual pregnancies, were prone to fatigue; one Boston writer called them “a sex which is born tired,” adding that “society sometimes seems little better than a hospital for invalid women.” Particularly for women in heavy dresses and constricting corsets, any activity that raised the heart rate could seem more likely to be the cause of fainting and listlessness than their remedy. Opponents of the bicycle latched onto this perception, arguing that riding would cost women more effort than they could afford. “The exertion necessary to riding with speed … is productive of an excitation of nervous and physical energy that is anything but beneficial,” Charlotte Smith warned. “If a halt is not called soon, 75 percent of the cyclists will be an army of invalids within the next ten years.”

But even as Smith made her dire predictions, Americans’ fear of cardiovascular exercise was beginning to lift. For decades, health reformers had trumpeted the benefits of fitness, and during the 1880s, the United States saw a spike in organized physical activity. Citizens of America’s growing cities tried new sports such as baseball and football, and exercise advocates built the first public playgrounds and pushed for physical education for both boys and girls. Doctors continued to caution against overexertion, but they acknowledged that, in moderation, fresh air and exercise tended to improve patients’ health. The high-wheel bicycle of the 1880s proved the benefits of regular exercise to those who could ride it; proponents made extravagant claims for the risky machine’s ability to restore well-being. “For constipation, sleeplessness, dyspepsia, and many other ills which flesh is heir to, not to speak of melancholy,─all are curable, or certainly to be improved, by the new remedy, ‘Bicycle,'” wrote a Texas physician in 1883. “It is always an excellent prescription for the convalescents, and nearly always for chronic invalids.”

Not everyone could take the prescription, though. High-wheeled cycling and rigorous team sports were acceptable only for young men. The new games deemed suitable for mixed company, such as lawn tennis and golf, were far less taxing — and therefore far less likely to lead to noticeable improvements in fitness. As for working out on your own, the recommended options were either too costly (horseback riding) or too boring (indoor calisthenics) to gain much popularity. As a result, many more Americans of the 1880s thought they ought to exercise than actually did it. So when the safety bicycle appeared at the end of the decade and Americans began riding in large numbers — an estimated two million by 1896, out of a population of about seventy million — few were certain how such vigorous physical activity would affect them.

Doctors were wary. Most US physicians believed that each patient’s condition was based largely on his or her habits and experiences, the weather, and other environmental factors. Good health was a reflection of proper balance among bodily systems and energies. “A distracted mind could curdle the stomach, a dyspeptic stomach could agitate the mind,” writes the medical historian Charles Rosenberg. It was a doctor’s job to know each patient well enough to restore balance when something was out of whack, using laxatives, diuretics, and other purging drugs to reboot the system. Even contagious diseases could not be treated in a cookie-cutter fashion, argued an 1883 medical journal editorial: “No two instances of typhoid fever, or of any other disease, are precisely alike … No ‘rule of thumb,’ no recourse to a formula-book, will avail for proper treatment even of the typical diseases.” To many doctors, advocating a specific drug to cure a specific disease seemed the height of quackery.

And just as there were no one-size-fits-all medical treatments, many physicians believed there were no one-size-fits-all exercise routines. While cycling enthusiasts rhapsodized about the safety bicycle’s benefits for riders of both sexes and all ages, doctors fretted that many of their patients would be harmed by the new machines. Even seeming success stories were suspect. In an 1895 paper on heart disease, one doctor reported that a patient who had panted for breath after climbing one flight of stairs was now able to cycle up hills with ease. “It would be wrong to conclude from this that cycling is not injurious,” the doctor wrote: there hadn’t yet been time to observe the bicycle’s long-term effects. Moreover, as an unfamiliar activity, cycling tended to catch the blame for pretty much anything bad that happened to a new rider afterward, up to and including death.

Logically, acute injuries were a concern. Though the safety bicycle did greatly reduce the risk of head wounds, it didn’t obliterate that risk, particularly among “scorchers” — thrill-seeking youngsters who hunched over their handlebars and pedaled as fast as they could. “It might seem almost impossible to fracture a skull thick enough to permit indulgence in such practices,” reported the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, “but the bicycle fool at full speed has been able to accomplish it.” Medical journals also noted the danger of road rash and broken bones.

More insidious than crash injuries, though, were new chronic complaints attributed to cycling. The bent-over posture of the scorcher was thought to cause a permanent hunch called “kyphosis bicyclistarum,” or, familiarly, “cyclist’s stoop.” Repeated stress to the cardiovascular system — that is, regular workouts — could lead to the irregular heartbeats and poor circulation of “bicycle heart.” Gripping the handlebars too tightly might cause finger numbness, or “bicycle hand,” and a dusty ride could trigger “cyclist’s sore throat.” Practically every body part seemed to have its own cycle-related malady; at least one New York doctor devoted his entire practice to treating such ailments.

Of all the physical woes attributed to the bike, the one that most strained credulity was the “bicycle face.” Characterized by wide, wild eyes; a grim set to the mouth; and a migration of facial features toward the center, the disorder was said to result from the stress of incessant balancing. A German philosopher claimed that the condition drained “every vestige of intelligence” from the sufferer’s appearance and rendered children unrecognizable to their own mothers. The bicycle face hung on, too, warned a journalist: “Once fixed upon the countenance, it can never be removed.”

The doctors raising these alarms were careful to state that many of the new diseases affected only cyclists predisposed to them — which would explain why so few of their fellow physicians might have encountered the disorders. “Whilst thousands ride immune, a small percentage will suffer,” wrote one doctor. Another, who blamed cases of appendicitis, inflammatory bowel disease, and the thyroid condition Graves’ disease on excessive riding, said it didn’t matter how many people believed that cycling had improved their health: “It would not affect my argument in the least if swarms of them had been rescued from the grave.”

Nevertheless, the more Americans took to bicycling, the more tenuous these claims of danger came to seem. The machine made physical activity both practical and fun. “The bicycle is inducing multitudes of people to take regular exercise who have long been in need of such exercise, but who could never be induced to take it by any means hitherto devised,” one doctor wrote in Harper’s Weekly in 1896. And all that activity had an effect. Riders quickly noticed improved muscle tone, increased strength, better sleep, and brighter moods. Women, especially, transformed themselves, wrote the novelist Maurice Thompson in 1897: “We have already become accustomed to seeing sunbrowned faces, once sallow and languid, whisk past us at every turn of the street. The magnetism of vivid health has overcome conservative barriers that were impregnable to every other force.”

The empirical evidence of cycling’s health value began to overtake conservative doctors’ concerns, as the rhetoric scholar Sarah Overbaugh Hallenbeck argues. Though many physicians continued to raise objections to the sport, their voices were increasingly drowned out by those of more observant — and pragmatic–practitioners. “The bicycle face, elbow, back, shoulders, neck, eroticism,” wrote one military doctor in 1896, “I pass as not worthy of serious consideration.” Rather than discourage bicycle use, most physicians came to cautiously endorse it. “So long as the cyclist can breathe with the mouth shut,” wrote one such doctor in 1895, “he is certainly perfectly safe.” Some went further, citing evidence of the bike’s benefits for heart patients, migraine sufferers, diabetics, and others with chronic conditions. In Chicago, the demand for injectable morphine dropped as patients with anxiety or insomnia “discovered that a long spin in the fresh air on a cycle induces sweet sleep better than their favorite drug,” the Bulletin of Pharmacy reported.

This shift paralleled a transformation in medical thinking during the 1890s, when American physicians increasingly embraced the scientific method. Some clinics in Continental Europe had adopted this evidence-based approach early in the nineteenth century, using statistics to determine the efficacy of treatments and evaluating patients’ conditions according to universal norms, rather than trying to divine what was normal for each individual patient. In the United States, however, doctors arguing for this approach were long in the minority. According to Rosenberg, the rift between medical traditionalists and empiricists “provided an emotional fault line which marked the profession throughout the last two-thirds of the century.” Only at the very end of the nineteenth century did a research-based, objective philosophy take hold at US medical schools.

It would be folly to suggest that the bicycle alone caused this transformation. Many other factors were at play, such as improved trans-Atlantic communication; an influx of European immigrants, including scientists; and a snowballing of evidence for new medical concepts such as the germ theory of disease. For centuries, Western healers had believed that contagion could erupt spontaneously, but between 1870 and 1900, researchers disproved this theory by isolating the microscopic causes of illnesses including typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, meningococcal meningitis, plague, and malaria.

But even if the bike did not independently modernize American medicine, its unprecedented impact on fitness — and the clash this revealed between what doctors said and what experience showed — may well have accelerated the shift. Much as the bicycle triggered changes in women’s dress that high-minded advocacy could not, it bolstered scientists’ then-radical argument that what is good for one human body tends to be just as good for another.

To the bicycle faithful of the 1890s, this seemed to be just the beginning of the changes that the machine would bring about. The gulf between social classes would recede under the influence of this “great leveler,” one enthusiast wrote in the Century Magazine: “It puts the poor man on a level with the rich, enabling him to ‘sing the song of the open road’ as freely as the millionaire, and to widen his knowledge by visiting the regions near to or far from his home, observing how other men live.”

And while women may not yet have had full access to higher education ─ or even the right to vote — the unchaperoned, self-propelled bloomer girl seemed to be pedaling in that direction. “In possession of her bicycle, the daughter of the 19th century feels that the declaration of her independence has been proclaimed,” wrote one female journalist, “and, in the fulness of time, all things will be added to complete her happiness and prosperity.”

The first-wave feminist Susan B. Anthony was born in 1820, the year after Charles Willson Peale built his iron draisine. By the time of the safety bicycle boom of the 1890s, she was a snowy-haired eminence, too old to risk riding, but she had an opinion of the sport. “I’ll tell you what I think of bicycling,” she said in an 1896 newspaper interview as she leaned forward to lay a hand on the reporter’s arm. “I think it has done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in the world.”

***

From The Mechanical Horse: How the Bicycle Reshaped American Life. Copyright © 2016 by Margaret Guroff. All rights reserved, with permission of the University of Texas Press.

Eating Alone

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Stephanie Rosenbloom | Excerpt adapted from Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude | Viking | June 2018 |14 minutes (3,719 words)

Comptoir Turenne is on the ground floor of a nineteenth-century building with battered shutters in the Haut-Marais, on the less fashionable end of rue de Turenne. On the more fashionable end, Glow on the Go! serves concoctions like the Lolita with organic cherries and “superfoods adaptogens,” Baby Beluga sells bikinis and matching sunglasses for Capri-bound toddlers, and the windows of Delphine Pariente’s jewelry shop (now known as Nouvel Amour) advise: Soyez heureux, be happy.

Comptoir Turenne has no such panache. Its sidewalk views are mainly of a real estate agency and a men’s suit shop. It is not on “must-eat” lists. Visitors are not burdened by the ghosts of Hemingway and Sartre to have an indelible experience. All of  this makes Turenne a laid-back spot for breakfast pour un. You can sit under its cheerful red awnings, mere blocks from the action, and fancy yourself Parisian.

Portions, however, appear to be measured with Americans in mind. A croque madame arrived at the table looking as if it had been flown in from the Cheesecake Factory. A sunny-side-up egg was as big as a pancake. Beneath it, thick, crusty bread was covered in toasted cheese. Beside it, french fries were piled in a little deep-fryer basket. A salad was already beginning to migrate off the plate. There was barely room on the table for my café crème and the speculoos tucked between the cup and saucer.

When you’re not sitting across from someone, you’re sitting across from the world.

I eyed the speculoos. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story in Peace Is Every Step about being a child and taking half an hour, sometimes forty-five minutes, to finish a cookie that his mother bought him. “I would take a small bite and look up at the sky,” he wrote. “Then I would touch the dog with my feet and take another small bite. I just enjoyed being there, with the sky, the earth, the bamboo thickets, the cat, the dog, the flowers.”

I can polish off a speculoos in less time than it takes to say “speculoos.” Nonetheless, Nhat Hanh’s story resonates in an age when it’s not unusual for a meal to be eaten with one hand while the other is posting a photo of it to Instagram. Men in suits stopped for coffee and cigarettes. Children were being walked to school. For the solo diner, no view is better than the one from the sidewalk, even the one from Comptoir Turenne. When you’re not sitting across from someone, you’re sitting across from the world. Read more…

Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Author

Original Parker Brothers Ouija Board elements from Dave Winer/Flickr CC, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Joy Lanzendorfer | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,948 words)

One day in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings at a Ouija board. Curran’s father had died the year before, and Hutchings was hoping to contact him. While they’d had some success with earlier sessions, Curran had grown tired of the game and had to be coaxed to play. This time, a message came over the board. It said: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come — Patience Worth my name.”

This moment was the start of a national phenomenon that would turn Curran into a celebrity. Patience Worth, the ghost who’d contacted them, said she was a Puritan who immigrated to America in the late 1600s. Through Curran, she would dictate an astounding 4 million words between 1913 and 1937, including six novels, two poetry collections, several plays, and volumes of witty repartee.

The work attracted national headlines, serious reviews, and a movie deal. Patience Worth’s poetry was published in the esteemed Braithwaite’s anthologies alongside writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1918, she was named an outstanding author by the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York. Her novel, The Sorry Tale, was a bestseller with four printings. The New York Times said her poetry was a “high level of literary quality” with “flashes of genius.” Harper’s Magazine said that the “writings attributed to Patience Worth are exceptional.” The New Republic added: “That she is sensitive, witty, keenly metaphorical in her poetry and finely graphic in her drama, no one can deny.”

Literary Digest summed up the critical interest by writing: “It is difficult not to take Patience Worth seriously.” Read more…

The Myth of the Stanford Prison Experiment

AP Photo/Paul Sakuma

The story goes that on August 16, 1971, a 22-year-old prisoner named Douglas Korpi started freaking out, demanding guards let him leave the Stanford Prison Experiment. Guards denied his request. But it didn’t really happen that way.

For Medium, Ben Blum interviews participants and examines documents to tell the truth about the world’s most famous psychological study, and explains why such revelations won’t keep the experiment from influencing popular thinking about human behavior. Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychology professor who put the experiment together, misrepresented details and settled on a set public narrative that conflicted with the facts. He groomed the fake prison guards to act “tough,” copied another experiment and manipulated results. Why does this matter? Because, as Blum puts it, the experiment made Zimbardo “the most prominent living American psychologist,” and the experiment achieved lasting “canonical status in intro psych classes around the country.” The SPE was an experiment alright, but not necessarily scientific. Just as Douglas Korpi was acting, so was a guard named Dave Eshelman. He actually trained as an actor and faked his Southern accent.

“As I was walking down the hall,” Eshelman recalled, “he made it a point to come and let me know what a great job I’d done. I actually felt like I had accomplished something good because I had contributed in some way to the understanding of human nature.”

According to Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher, psychologists who co-directed an attempted replication of the Stanford prison experiment in Great Britain in 2001, a critical factor in making people commit atrocities is a leader assuring them that they are acting in the service of a higher moral cause with which they identify — for instance, scientific progress or prison reform. We have been taught that guards abused prisoners in the Stanford prison experiment because of the power of their roles, but Haslam and Reicher argue that their behavior arose instead from their identification with the experimenters, which Jaffe and Zimbardo encouraged at every turn. Eshelman, who described himself on an intake questionnaire as a “scientist at heart,” may have identified more powerfully than anyone, but Jaffe himself put it well in his self-evaluation: “I am startled by the ease with which I could turn off my sensitivity and concern for others for ‘a good cause.’”

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Drought In Post-Apartheid Cape Town: An Interview with Eve Fairbanks

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Cape Town, South Africa has been suffering a three-year drought. Despite government intervention, citizens have taken matters into their own hands, tapping springs and modifying their homes and behavior. Their innovations prove the necessity of civic involvement and DIY innovation to endure the kind of natural disasters that will increasingly plague civilization due to climate change.

United in a common struggle, the drought has also leveled the racially divided city’s physical and social barriers in profound ways. At HuffPost Highline, Johannesburg-based journalist Eve Fairbanks examines the way Cape Town residents of different classes are using the opportunity to help and learn from each other—with white privileged residents expanding their concept of “community” to include the black South Africans previously known as “them.”

The drought has dissolved what Fairbanks calls the “infrastructure of privilege,” luxuries like pools, gardens and long showers, as well as a sense of security.  Some people in Cape Town view the drought as the inevitable reckoning with apartheid. But is this new camaraderie also a fantasy?

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In your piece, you report on the aquifer of meaning below the story’s surface, examining the surprising psychological and social dimensions of the city’s relationship to its resources.  At what point during your reporting did these layers of meaning emerge?

I love your word “aquifer.” Table Mountain, the crag that lords over Cape Town, has unusual aquifers whose depth and abundance of water are still unplumbed. Cape Town was designed for a relatively small white population, and for centuries it relied, unlike other cities, only on surface dams. Some scientists believe that tapping the Cape Flats aquifer — a vein of water that runs from the mountain to the sea ─ would solve the city’s water issues, at least in the medium term. The problem is the aquifer runs straight through several of the largest townships in the city. So to tap the aquifer would mean displacing a population. Experts said that they had to be kicked out of their homes. So these people have very good reasons not to trust experts.

It struck me that no technocratic solution to a problem like drought or climate change, or exists in a vacuum. You can’t sit in an office — as the Cape Town government has tried to do make their drought plan as neutral as possible — and diagram a solution. People have feelings and commitments about things like water that are many, many-layered.

I also really love science. I often find metaphors for social life buried in apparently technical scientific aspects of the stories I cover — the geology of the landscape of a political piece, the weather, the biome, and so on. Scientists still don’t know the contours of the Table Mountain aquifer, or what outcome tapping it would have; it parallels the profound psychological disconnect between the experts and the people they serve.

Are there other reporters or science writers whose work inspires you?

I kind of wish there wasn’t the category of science writing! So much great classical writing didn’t see itself as separate from science, since science is how we interpret the world, and we’re in the world.

One of my favorite Shakespeare passages is Mercutio’s monologue where he mentions the atom to make more vivid a riff on blame and responsibility. My favorite John Donne poems use the compass and map as visual metaphors for vague things like love or the soul. In Donne, tying those things to objects of scientific inquiry is part of the argument that they’re real.

Every writer needs science, even novelists. Once you’re making any kind of description of a landscape, or even reflecting on human motivations in politics or love, you’re entering the territories of geology, botany, physics, and psychology. I think people are sometimes scared of science, though, because it’s become a specialty. Some of the most vivid, moving conversations I’ve had related to my writing were with scientists who told me about uncertainty in physics, about botany, or about the way objects’ behavior changes according to their size.  These relate to deep questions about the scalability of projects, the singularity of truth, and so on, and give me a different way to think about abstractions like relationships or class, to make them real as forces.

Science writing today, in some cases, seems pretty specialized, and the presumption is that the science writer in a magazine is responsible for transmitting the findings of studies to the layman. This can remove the writer from the story. In some science writing, I don’t see a lot of confidence on the part of the author to ask, “Does this accord with my experience? Could this finding be wrong?” My favorite writers who incorporate science are working with science over the longer term, and they tend to be really interested in the essence of science — the history, the scientific method — rather than super excited by what it can prove.

I love Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks because they incorporate their own journeys and doubts into their science writing. They aren’t making proofs or touting answers to social problems offered by a hot new study. Simon Schama, the historian, actually uses science obliquely but wonderfully in his writings on how landscape formed cultures. I was inspired by Ann Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. She invested years in understanding the science, but at heart it was a story about science’s limits. I also love Ben Adler at City & State. He’s doing what used to just be called geography. He writes things like landscape and infrastructure in a scientific way, but he’s deeply interested in how these things influence politics and vice versa.

It’s interesting how your story suggests that technology won’t necessarily solve all of humanity’s resource problems — that a change in simple civilian behavior is necessary. Doesn’t that contradict the ongoing fantasy of industrial civilization?

I think most of us feel the limits of the industrial fantasy now. But we’ve also built our civilization on it to the extent that we don’t know what we would do without it. The solutions we’ve imagined tend towards a rewinding of the tape back to a purer, more natural innocence. But that isn’t possible. In my own life, change has often come through some unintended break in the plan: a breakup or a firing or whatever, something that throws things into disarray and makes me live a different way. That was what I hoped to suggest with the Highline piece: that accelerating climate change, in some ways, may force its own solutions by making certain ways of life literally untenable.

I do foresee a growing conflict between government and its citizens. Governments, including in Cape Town, are tired of “politics.” They want to get away from criticisms by becoming increasingly technocratic, in the hopes that technocratic solutions will be perceived as neutral. In Cape Town, though, this desire translated into dictatorial, smug, and detached behavior, a deep distrust, and even rejection, of solutions that came from the public.

After I published the piece, the government closed the spring I highlighted in it, cementing the whole thing over, a real “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” move. It amazed me, because the spring was so small, but it was such a symbol of people’s capacities to rise above social divisions and entitlement. It amazed me the government couldn’t see how important that would be to people in the city. But I think the possibility that citizens could create their own solutions to social problems, however much governments play lip service to this ideal, really threatened the Cape Town government insofar as it suggested it might be dispensable.

You grew up in Virginia, a region still imprinted by slavery and segregation. Thinking of Cape Town’s drought, do you see any analogs in America for the way natural disaster can help build community relationships or dismantle racial divisions?

I’ve lived in South Africa for nine years. After a few years, I began to get the impression that whites here are really uncomfortable with their rarefied position in society. They know that it is both unsustainable and unjust. We tend to think of elites as evil, selfish automatons. But they’re also human, with innate moral intuitions.

In South Africa this moral intuition has tussled with a powerful fear of loss. So I was surprised by the explosion of joy in Cape Town when the drought forced elites into a somewhat less privileged position. I also wasn’t surprised. It was like disaster freed people to do what they had longed to do but, in the reigning political language and interpretation of human self-interest, could barely articulate to themselves that they wanted, which was to be more equal, and closer to everyone in their community.

It’s hard to imagine such a scenario in America. We’re such a lucky country, and we’ve managed to insulate ourselves so much from all kinds of bad fortune. In the 1980s, before white rule in South Africa ended, the novelist J.M. Coetzee wrote a book called Waiting for the Barbarians. I think that’s how we feel in America ─ we’re waiting for some kind of extraordinary shift or upending of inequality and subtle segregations; we’re in a state of terrified hypervigiliance. I can’t imagine what exactly will break it. But I do think that more people will be happy with a sea change in the American way of life than currently expect themselves to be.

Do you think the Cape Town’s reclaimed sense of self — and the changed norms drought has brought — will stick?

I talked to a middle-aged Californian recently who grew up during a drought in the state, and he told me he still feels a visceral horror when he sees a tap running and implores his wife and children not to flush every time. I think we should also recognize the more drastic attitudinal shifts probably take work to maintain — public messaging, continual nudges from the more ardent citizens to their family and friends. I worry more about the permanence of the social changes, partly because the government is set against social flux it doesn’t control.

You’re writing a book about post-apartheid South Africa. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I think there are really strong parallels between South Africa and America — between the conflict some people in the West feel between maintaining their society and letting newcomers in. Post-apartheid South Africa is that tension in miniature. For decades, a physical barrier was erected between white and non-white South Africa and that barrier has fallen. It’s an incredible place to witness some of the tensions and changes that face the whole world, but in a contained environment, it’s almost like an experiment.

My book is about two people — a black former freedom fighter and a white lawyer who fought for the apartheid regime in the most elite army unit — confronting those changes. It doesn’t really make an argument rather but tries to show us, like a play would, what happens when people try to leave their pasts behind while living in a world that offers constant reminders, nostalgic and painful, of those pasts.

The physical environment of South Africa becomes a ghost that can’t be exorcised: the informal segregation that still exists with housing and the neighborhoods people live in; the sense of nonbelonging and alienation in the cities — new in demographics, old in visual symbols and patterns of human association — that haunts both blacks and whites alike. Both blacks and whites here feel that the other group holds the real power in society, which is so reminiscent of America right now. I’m hoping the book will leave a lasting image of a particular country, but also hold a mirror up to America and Europe.

We Are Scientists

(AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Kirtan NautiyalBoulevard | Spring 2018 | 25 minutes (6,903 words)

In 1969, my father traveled alone from India to Boston so that he could enroll in the master’s program in geophysics at MIT.

I don’t know whether he flew or came by boat, so when I try to picture him setting foot in America for the first time, I don’t know what to imagine. I’ve tried to find the photographic evidence, but there aren’t any pictures of the fifteen years he spent in this country before he married my mother. Maybe he just threw out the tattered albums when we were moving between houses, but it’s more likely that he never took any photos at all. He’s never been a sentimental man.

I also don’t know why he chose to come in the first place. He has never had any great fascination with money; despite his making a good living, we lived in shabby rentals for most of my childhood, and my mother shopped for us from department store discount racks. I never felt that professional success was what he was after either. He never advanced past middle management, and except for one late-night discussion in which he made clear that he felt there was a glass ceiling for people with our skin color, I never heard one word of frustration from him about work. Maybe it was to help his family – along with his brother who came to Kansas State University earlier in the 1960s, he supported his parents in India for years with the money he earned. When trying to make us feel guilty about our second-generation lassitude, which is often, he tells us of how at MIT he had to work all hours of the night in the cafeteria and library while keeping up a full courseload, so maybe we need to be a little more appreciative that he helped with the room and board during our own time in college. Read more…

‘I Was a Storm of Confetti’: Michael Pollan On Why It’s a Good Idea To Lose Your Self

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Hope Reese | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,468 words)

On April 19, 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a quarter milligram of LSD to confirm that it had caused the oddly fantastical journey he had experienced the day before. To his surprise and delight, he was not mistaken –– the drug opened up a new window of consciousness. The discovery caught the attention of other researchers, and by the 1950s, psychedelic testing was in full bloom, yielding promising results for people suffering from neurosis, schizophrenia, and psychopathy.

But as counter-cultural experimentation progressed and the drugs were taken out of the lab and into the wild –– think of Tim Leary, dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” by Nixon, and his controversial LSD experiments –– there was a backlash. According to the writer Michael Pollan, society “turned on a dime” against psychedelics. “You’d have to go back to the Inquisition and Galileo for a time when scientific inquiry was stigmatized quite the way this was,” he tells me. “And it’s a measure of how powerful that backlash was and how threatened powerful interests felt about what psychedelics were doing to society.” Read more…

Nell Battle Lewis, Storyteller for Jim Crow

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Elizabeth Gillespie McRae | Excerpt adapted from Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy | February 2018 | 19 minutes (5,394 words)

In the late fall of 1923, a young Nell Battle Lewis decided to spend an evening at the Superba Theater in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, watching Birth of a Nation for the fifth time. Reviewing the film in her Raleigh News and Observer column “Incidentally,” Lewis noted that each time D. W. Griffith’s movie came to town, she had to see it. This was her sort of “religious observance.” Birth of a Nation, she wrote, was “the best movie we’ve ever seen.” It made her weep and drove her to exclaim, “This is my native land.” She went on to claim that the first KKK was “a necessary tour de force effected by some of the leaders of a . . . civilization in danger of its very life.”

Her devotion to such a film at first seemed incongruous. Lewis had returned to her hometown after years as a southerner living outside the South. After a brief stint at Goucher College in Maryland, she attended and graduated from Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts. At Smith, she sat in integrated classes, heard black and white political leaders, debated woman suffrage, and studied a curriculum that challenged the conservatism, reactionary impulses, and, to some extent, segregated and sectarian currents of the South. After a year in Manhattan, she had gone to France as part of the YMCA’s “Y-Girl” program to support the American Expeditionary Force. In 1921 Lewis had returned to Raleigh and interviewed with the News and Observer editors while dressed in jodphurs, a blazer, boots, and a hat. Her androgynous presentation gave pause to the editor, but he hired her anyway, as an embodiment of the “New Woman” — single, independent-minded, and career-oriented with world experience. As the newspaper’s first female staff writer, she set out to challenge the hidebound traditionalism of white southerners, pedestal-residing white women, and greedy industrialists. In economics, she rejected the trappings of the New South creed and disdained the materialism and business practices of the textile industry. In her early politics, she seemed to identify more with white women of the working class than those like her former St. Mary’s School classmates. Instead of joining the Daughters of the American Revolution and preaching Americanization and anti-immigration, she made fun of their reactionary politics and condemned their red-baiting. Opposing evangelical Christians, she parodied creationists and defended the study of evolution. When H. L. Mencken pronounced the South “the Sahara of the Bozart,” Lewis expressed her intellectual alliance with him, noting that he was “a heady stimulant . . . and effective purgative for intellectual inertia and dry-rot complacency.” As her prominence grew, southern commentators called her an iconoclast and a radical. Her enemies called her a communist; her father and brothers characterized her as abnormal, eccentric, and perhaps even mentally unstable.

Considering the widespread influence of the second Klan, her relentless attacks on them might have merited such judgments. A national organization with professional fundraisers and advertising executives, the KKK proclaimed Anglo-Saxon superiority, recruited record numbers of members, sponsored candidates for southern legislatures, and intimidated their political opponents. More than a few southern leaders lacked the moxie to publicly condemn the Klan, yet Lewis castigated them for their contribution to mob justice and racial violence and told her readers that the KKK was ignorant of the very race science it claimed to follow. In her published poem, she ridiculed their cowardice and intolerance in her opening stanza: “The Kautious Klan Klandestinely. . . . Kwarrels Konstantly with those; Who Kannot Like their Kourse DesPotio.” When the Klan threatened to send one of its female members to take Lewis’s job, she gleefully wrote of her anticipation and then attacked them for their criticism of professional women and flappers. She deplored most of all that KKK activity put North Carolina in the company of its less progressive southern neighbors — Georgia and Alabama. Each time the KKK reared its ugly head, Lewis felt it testified to the failure of North Carolina’s white leaders who had promised a more humane, compassionate, and just state. Still, she wept through Birth of a Nation, a film that she knew the second KKK had exploited.

Lewis did not erase the black South or ignore black achievement…. In fact, the stories she wrote offered up both the black elite and the black folk, but such writing often served to educate white people about the appropriate ‘place’ of blacks and whites in a Jim Crow world.

Taken together, these seemingly dissonant reactions were in fact not anomalous but rather typical outcomes of Lewis’s work in the cultural production of white supremacist politics. As Lewis put pen to paper, she celebrated a world led by educated white progressives, white female reformers, and black elites and populated by oppressed white industrial workers and black southerners receptive to enlightened white leadership. In the News and Observer and other periodicals, she crafted public narratives that created a cultural landscape of a more “affectionate segregation.” Her fiction and non-fiction reinforced specific historical interpretations, invoked black stereotypes, and celebrated white liberals and exceptional black men and women. Her feature writing often highlighted white women who called on social reform for white and black North Carolinians, noting white women’s gendered affinity for cleaning up politics. She praised white and black progressives and condemned those who participated in racist violence and who justified the neglect systemic to racial segregation. Lewis did not erase the black South or ignore black achievement. For example, she celebrated the poetry of Harlem Renaissance writers, congratulated North Carolina’s black collegiate choral groups, and lobbied for state-run girls’ homes for wayward black youth. She also wrote a piece that attributed the impoverished state of the black neighborhood Haiti Alley to the suspect character of those who lived there and ignored structural poverty. When she returned from her travels, she celebrated seeing the first shacks of black sharecroppers because they told her that she was home, romanticizing economic outcomes of segregation. In fact, the stories she wrote offered up both the black elite and the black folk, but such writing often served to educate white people about the appropriate “place” of blacks and whites in a Jim Crow world. In crafting her narratives, she encouraged her readers to follow cultural practices that reinforced racial segregation. She was a storyteller for Jim Crow.

In telling these stories, Lewis did important political work for the segregated South. Culture was one of the central levels where everyday experience could be translated into support for the larger social system, joining social welfare policies, educational practices, and electoral politics as critical sites where the Jim Crow order was shaped and sustained. Her writings offered a template for segregation to be modern and long-lasting — a system grounded in new cultural and scientific arguments more than older biological ones. For Lewis, North Carolina’s segregated order would be a product of a progressive state that adopted national reforms. Educated, liberal white supremacists, not mean reactionaries, would control race relations and mitigate the worst abuses of the system. Relying on the “best” white people, Lewis was a female counterpart to Howard Odum, who, as historian Glenda Gilmore noted, served as one of the “hydraulic engineers at Jim Crow’s watershed” urging white liberals to be the engines of gradual incremental change. With so many stories of mean-spirited and violent segregationists abusing black women and men, rarely did Lewis or Odum or progressives nationwide have to confront how their liberal reforms reified racial inequities. A broad agreement on white supremacy among white social reformers meant that Lewis could easily balance her progressive ideas with her devotion to a society of white over black. To her readers, she delivered lessons on a racial etiquette that upheld racial segregation, gendered ideas about female citizenship, paternalism, and devotion to social reform. For all the stories she told celebrating North Carolina’s enlightened race relations, she served the Jim Crow order by suppressing those that challenged the authority of liberal-minded, middle-class, educated white men and women. Lewis knew that the segregated order was never as secure as it might seem. White people needed instruction in how to maintain white supremacy. White apathy and white misuse of racial authority threatened the very system that guaranteed their political, economic, and cultural authority. In the 1920s and 1930s, her stories criticized the way segregation as practiced departed from the way she wanted and believed it should be. Right up to 1954, Lewis kept calling on fellow white southerners to live up to separate but equal, not abandon it.

Lewis’s brand of white supremacist politics clearly took root in the particular conditions of her home state where she could bring her beliefs in progressive era reform, modern science, eugenics, and women’s civic participation to bear on her work for racial segregation. North Carolina’s champions held the state apart from the racial violence of the Deep South, advertised its black educational institutions, embraced voices that challenged the material greed that undergirded the New South creed, and condemned the rawness and rage that characterized other southern demagogues. Politically, a relatively active state government had earned North Carolina its progressive reputation. Throughout the 1920s, rising public expenditures for state services inspired broad political discussions on economic development, social welfare, and education. Some white political and religious leaders even talked about improving black facilities, held interracial conferences, and welcomed black participation in a community of Christian humanitarianism. For the state’s leaders, North Carolina’s black population of nearly 30 percent figured in their vision of the state, where black moderates like James Shepard, president of North Carolina College for Negroes, could urge black North Carolinians to challenge inequality gradually and cautiously, exemplifying the “politics of respectability.” Josephus Daniels, once an architect of the 1898 white supremacy campaigns, owned the News and Observer, which served as a voice of moderation and modernization. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recruited to its faculty such luminaries as sociologists Howard Odum and Guy Johnson and moved to national prominence under the leadership of Harry Chase and Frank Porter Graham. Progressive reformer Kate Burr Johnson headed the state’s Bureau of Social Welfare. In the interwar period, Bertrand Russell, Gertrude Stein, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Frances Perkins, and Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at the University of North Carolina or Duke University, bringing some of the cosmopolitan energy Lewis had experienced in Manhattan and France.

At the News and Observer, Lewis first contributed feature pieces, edited the Society Page, and wrote a children’s page. Despairing at the limitations of these forums, she nevertheless made her first mark in “Kiddies Corner.” In this full-page feature, Lewis encouraged literacy and imagination, reinforced the social order with black dialect stories and caricatures, and promoted the study of North Carolina history. An early story entitled “Patrick, the Rollin’ Possum,” was written in dialect and included a Nell Battle Lewis original cartoon with the caption: “then the n****r held Patrick up by his long skinny tail and said: Ef dis heah’ possum ain’t sho’ nuff fat, den I dunno fat w’en I sees hit.” The next week, she encouraged young people to have their mothers read to them about their home state so they would “not only . . . feel that North Carolina is the best State, but to know why it is.”


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Soon she introduced her weekly column “Incidentally,” which would run almost uninterrupted for the next forty-five years. Prophetically, her column began with a scene in a park, depicting two black men and one black woman whose “contented laughter broke forth frequently, and the red meat of the melon disappeared rapidly.” Later her caricatures acknowledged the calming comfort offered by “deferential Negroes who wave to you even when they don’t know you.” Contented black North Carolinians joined Lewis’s frequent romanticized depictions of black-white relationships embodied in her print tributes to “mammy.” She noted that the ties between mammy and her white children were “more than imaginative gossamer,” as she lamented a system based on paternalism that was “now passing with the changing times.” In return for their loyalty and love, Lewis said that mammies would receive no earthly reward but the same spiritual reward “as the white folks they worked for.” In fact, the mammy of her childhood, she claimed, “came as near being a Christian as anyone who ever lived.” For Lewis, “Mammies” embodied the epitome of black leadership — serving in a position of deference, devotion, and dependency to white middle-class women. While she attacked her state’s social ills, she had established her column by trotting out minstrel-like black characters that assured herself and others of the satisfaction of the state’s black population. Under the helpful hands of the state’s white progressives, Lewis believed, black North Carolinians would take childlike steps forward.

Her writings offered a template for segregation to be modern and long-lasting — a system grounded in new cultural and scientific arguments more than older biological ones. For Lewis, North Carolina’s segregated order would be a product of a progressive state that adopted national reforms.

But as Lewis paid homage to the Mammy in print, she was participating in a larger cultural production of white supremacy in which the iconic black domestic took center stage. In the immediate aftermath of the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, the UDC’s Washington, DC, branch gained congressional support for a granite tribute to black mammies. Mississippi’s Senator John Sharp Williams proposed and received appropriations of $200,000 for it, and North Carolina’s Charles Stedman introduced the funding bill to the House of Representatives. At the peak of its membership, the UDC seemed poised to build a monument that imposed its historical interpretation on the national cultural landscape. Some black newspapers responded with outrage. Newspaper owner, editor, and art historian Freeman Henry Morris Murray argued that “public sculpture was not merely reflective . . . but also productive of new publics and power relationships.” Encouraging his readers to be more critical in interpreting the meaning of sculptures, he asked them to evaluate “its obvious and also . . . its insidious teachings.” Black newspapers published their own renditions of a mammy statue that spoke to sexual aggression and assault coupled with long hours and no wages. For the UDC, the Mammy monument offered a racialized household that put white women in positions of authority, allowing them “to recast their own citizenship” and create a more “affectionate segregation.” While the monument never materialized, “mammy” did not need to be cast in bronze to function as an important symbol of segregation. Inked in Lewis’s columns, she remained both important and politically flexible in propagating the cultural infrastructure of segregation.

Lewis did not just deliver black characters of white mythology in her storytelling but also offered up black literary luminaries and black educational leaders. Lewis had long noted that she read the NAACP paper, The Crisis, and celebrated the artistic achievement of “Negro poets” like Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson. Her favorite Harlem Renaissance novelist was Jessie Fauset, whose upper-class African American characters condemned passing as white and interracial marriage, themes that would have fit well with Lewis’s belief in eugenics and white supremacy. Lewis’s book reviews also upheld a racial hierarchy. In 1924, Lewis wrote a joint review of Walter White’s A Fire in the Flint and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, declaring that Forster’s work was art and superior in form and tone to White’s A Fire, “a more melodramatic piece along the lines of propaganda.” With omissions and exaggerations, White’s book, she claimed, made for a biased treatment of the “Southern White” and the “Southern Negro.” Like Forster’s work, there were similarities in the ruling people of each area who did not understand the colonized — blacks or Indians. She also saw parallels in that the rulers were ruling for “their own good,” not the common good. What bothered her most, however, was that “the Negro mind,” which she assumed to be distinct, appeared in White’s book as “not one whit different from that of the white man.” White’s black man acted just like a white one would under similar circumstances. “Can the Negro author who speaks for his race in this novel give us something more distinctive than that? . . . With all the mystery of Africa and all the darkness of slavery behind him, is there nothing unique in the Negro, after all?” she asked.

Lewis’s question exposed the cultural and geographic underpinnings of her racial ideology. Proud of her association with social reform, informed by scientific data, and assured of white women’s authority because of their particular racial and gendered identity, Nell Lewis rejected the pedestal and the pulpit but believed in Anglo-Saxon superiority. She rooted her hierarchical beliefs in “race science,” a position superior to those southerners whose racism rose from raw emotion. To educate her readers, she ran a crossword puzzle about eugenics, celebrating modern scientific thought. But as her review of White suggested, her racial liberalism left no space for discussions of an equality born of commonalities. Modernism had educated her, and there were differences — biological, cultural, historical differences — she believed, that should shape public policy and culture. It was not anti-modernism or economic gain that drove her racial politics, but a Progressive Era devotion to social reform, women’s gendered contributions to society, and modernity itself.

While Lewis’s attention to black accomplishments reflected a kind of racial moderation to both her white readers and her black readers, it simultaneously stung some black readers. In the winter of 1925, she attended a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night put on by the Shaw University Players. Despite the technical perfection, Lewis noted that “the general effect of the performance was strikingly artificial.” Instead of Shakespeare, which black students must perform, she claimed, in their “adopted language,” she advised them to focus on folk drama. While the KKK had carried “racial consciousness and racial pride . . . to excess,” she conceded, “I am a great believer in trying to be what you are.” Lewis advocated an emphasis on “their own distinct racial character.” Lamenting that the “advancement of the Negro has been largely imitative,” she was anxious to witness “a genuine drama of their own.”

Willing to engage with her critics, Lewis published the objections of two black North Carolinians who lamented how white supremacist ideology infiltrated her public narratives. Shaw University dean William Turner appreciated her “to some degree complimentary criticism” but disagreed with her assessment of English as an adopted language for African Americans. He instructed Lewis that black and white babies learn language in the same way and that there was no “racial predilection for any particular language.” Black social heritage in the United States, he continued, was the English language. At the State Department of Public Instruction, W. A. Robinson also noted that her comments solicited much discussion among those who “admire your usually broad attitude toward thought in general and concerning the Negro in particular.” He also disagreed with her suggestion that black Americans just imitated white Americans, noting that black Americans had long legacies of their own American traditions.

Two years later, Lewis again sparred with her critics after she reviewed black musical performances at the governor’s mansion. When black performers sang “Negro-folk songs,” Lewis praised them because they “sang like Negroes.” In the middle of “Cotton need a-pickin so bad,” the Fayetteville singers even “did a little shuffle . . . exactly right,” she wrote. This time a University of North Carolina professor reminded her that the “cultured Negro . . . is not the freedman of 1867.” Eavesdropping on a conversation about her review among black college girls, he heard them comment that “the white audience had a taste for music that was satisfied in direct proportion as the program descended toward more clownish setting.” For Lewis, the Jim Crow South meant black southerners occupied a particular cultural place, and this meant deference, dialect, and slave spirituals, not Shakespeare, “correct” English, or political participation. Her reviews and accompanying criticism reminded her readers — both black and white — that white supremacy reigned even among white southern liberals.

Lewis knew that the segregated order was never as secure as it might seem. White people needed instruction in how to maintain white supremacy…. In the 1920s and 1930s, her stories criticized the way segregation as practiced departed from the way she wanted and believed it should be.

Lewis’s views on social reform, however, held some real possibility for positive changes to the justice and prison systems. She worked together with Howard Odum and the Journal of Social Forces to publicize reform proposals for mental health and penal facilities. This work connected her to nationwide efforts that rooted reform in social science research and simultaneously reified an American racial hierarchy. Condemning capital punishment for those suffering mental disabilities, Lewis wrote about “a lone man behind the grim gray walls of the State’s prison, with a pitifully jangled brain [who] will pass swiftly and mercilessly and forever into death’s dark silence.” In 1925, she told her readers how prison guards murdered a “mentally defective Negro prisoner.” Lewis blamed this state-sanctioned killing on politicians who cared more for the bottom line than prisoner well-being, an impulse that also shaped an unwillingness to fund a segregated institution for the “feebleminded.” Thirsty for revenge, state officials would rather have a rape trial and lynching of a black man “with a mind of a 10 year old,” Lewis wrote, than “provide adequately for the mentally ill.” Lewis was incensed that “mental defectives” — particularly those who were black — were often left in society to commit crimes and then put to death without ever receiving treatment. Lewis argued that without the “exercise of disinterested public spirit and intelligence” that might consult sociological rather than economic studies in the pursuit of a fair and just legal and penal system, the state’s political leaders would fail to uphold North Carolina’s progressive image. Subsequently, Lewis feared that North Carolina would never rise above the South’s reputation of “savagery” and “backwardness.”

Her outrage about capital cases of mentally ill prisoners in 1921 and 1925 coalesced in her study entitled “Capital Punishment in North Carolina.” Full of data about age, region, race, economic standing, and crimes of those put to death by the state, her research connected her to the American League for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (ALACP) and the work of its secretary Vivian Pierce and lawyer Clarence Darrow. Pierce praised Lewis’s report on capital punishment as unmatched and asked her for permission to publish parts of the report. While Lewis worked with the League and other reform organizations, she did not join the ALACP, the southern-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation, or the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). In 1930, when a black man was lynched for the alleged rape of a white girl in Edgecombe County, Lewis did not sign the petition circulated by the North Carolina ASWPL. She did write a blistering article that blamed South Carolina’s former senator Coleman Blease, known for inciting racist violence among the white working class, for the particular brand of vitriolic racism now circulating in her home state. She criticized the barbarity of a mob that took no account of either the evidence or the mental condition of the accused. Lewis worked closely with white female reformers, public health officials, and the League of Women Voters to upgrade mental health facilities, youth reformatories, and prisons, and to make the state’s judicial system administer justice that met the spirit of separate but equal. From this liberal political platform, Lewis managed to continue to craft North Carolina’s position as a progressive southern state even in its commitment to racial segregation.

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In 1931, the editors of the Chapel Hill magazine, Contempo, Lewis’s friend Paul Green, and social scientist Guy Johnson invited Langston Hughes to the University of North Carolina for a reading of his scathing poem “Christ in Alabama,” about the false accusations and shoddy trial of the nine Scottsboro boys. Hughes came to town, read poetry, and charmed many Chapel Hill residents, simultaneously earning the ire of industrial and political leaders across the state. While Nell Lewis applauded academic freedom, her brother, Kemp Lewis, led a campaign to punish those who sponsored Hughes. He wrote to UNC president Frank Porter Graham claiming that Hughes’s poetry, particularly the poem he referred to as “Black Christ,” was “enough to make the blood of every Southerner boil to have a man like this . . . given any attention or consideration whatever by decent white people.” Kemp Lewis asked “if this Negro was allowed to use the buildings” or if he had “any recognition whatever by the faculty?” He then questioned Graham about the students who authored Contempo and accused them of “striking at the very foundations of our civilization and our social relationships.” Not satisfied with alerting only Graham, Kemp Lewis proceeded to notify Governor O. Max Gardner and included clippings of Hughes’s poetry in his letter. He then asked the governor to speak to Graham about this attack on white supremacy.

The turmoil over Hughes alerted the state’s white elite to “subversive” activity at their university. By early 1932, more than 300 people had signed the Tatum Petition that called on Graham to curb “the alleged evil influences of the University of North Carolina upon the youth of the State.” Though convalescing from oral surgery and bouts with mental illness at Tucker’s Sanatorium in Richmond, Nell Lewis did not let this attack on academic freedom pass silently. She wrote her brother Kemp that she hoped “all is well at the University” and asked “Is ‘Contempo’ still uncensored?” “I wish you would run David Clark out of that State,” she continued, as he was “behind that petition . . . as sure as the world, and is nothing but a public nuisance.” Kemp Lewis did not sign the Tatum Petition, but he continued his protest and broadened his attack to include the university’s leniency on socialism. In her weekly column, Lewis ridiculed the Tatum Petition, describing it as “foolishness, just plain foolishness — I don’t care how many mayors, ministers, and manufacturers have signed it.” She defended the presence of both Russell and Hughes and claimed sarcastically that “although that [the Hughes visit] was in the ticklish realm of race relations in the South, lynching still seems to me out of order.” While Kemp continually referred to the “nausea that came to me over the Langston Hughes incident,” Nell Lewis wrote, “Black or white . . . Hughes is a poet and like it or not, his works are part of current American literature.”

When Lewis returned to health and to North Carolina, she became less vitriolic in her calls for reform and more indebted financially to the very brothers she had excoriated. The cultural landscape of white supremacy that she continued to shape from her columns, however, was not decidedly different than before, even with the New Deal. She still condemned racist violence and an unresponsive judicial system, and she upheld what she believed could be a sanctified and responsible system of white over black. Far from challenging this position, architects and leaders of the New Deal helped her cultivate this space for social reform in the hands of an enlightened white elite. Thus, Lewis’s friend Frank Porter Graham could belong to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and deny Pauli Murray, an NAACP member and civil rights activist, admission to University of North Carolina’s graduate program in social work. Even as African Americans realized the subversive potential of the New Deal, liberal white supremacists, like Lewis, saw few national challenges to southern race relations from the federal government, the Democratic Party, or black southerners.

While many North Carolinians and students of the 1920s would remember Lewis’s radicalism, advocacy for industrial reform, and opposition to the region’s most reactionary moments, her most long-lasting work had been in the cultural production of white supremacy.

She still worked to expose her state’s failures to meet the equal part of separate-but-equal and attacked reactionaries who condoned exploitative and cruel public policies. Lewis’s commitment to prison reform and her public commentary on the deplorable conditions faced by the state’s black and white incarcerated demonstrated that she still had room to critique the implementation of white supremacy without threatening its foundation. She exploded with characteristic fury and sarcasm when two black prisoners, Woodrow Wilson Shropshire and Robert Barnes, lost their feet to gangrene. Sentenced to “serve short terms” on the state highways for larceny and drunk and disorderly conduct, respectively, Shropshire and Barnes suffered frostbite after being “hung up” in marginally heated cells during twenty-degree nights. After nine days of such treatment, they worked eighteen days in the prison camp until they received medical treatment for “the flesh of their gangrenous feet rotting and dropping off the bones.” At ages nineteen and twenty, the two black men had their feet amputated and were left crippled. When the case reached the courts, the unfairness of the judicial system compounded the tragedy, reinforcing how Jim Crow courts equaled injustice. The jurors failed to find the guards and the prison physician guilty of cruel and unusual punishment. Lewis claimed that this case revealed how African Americans were often denied the right to ask for justice in the state’s courts. Lewis noted that the state-appointed attorney presented a lackluster case for the prosecution. Even though an indictment could not help the prisoners, she noted that it could have shown them that justice was available to African Americans in North Carolina. Instead, she claimed, the trial “actively says to them — and to an admiring world . . . Just a couple o’ n****rs — so we should worry.” Taking an even sterner stand, Lewis proclaimed that black North Carolinians had not “a ghost of a chance in its [the state’s] white man’s courts . . . because they were poor Negroes without influence.”

Read as a defense of black civil rights, Lewis’s condemnation of prison abuse would earn her a place among some of the most liberal activists of the 1930s. The all-white court system — a product of segregation — was partially to blame, contended Lewis. This was a bold assertion in 1935; it was not a damning one. For Lewis, whites failed to uphold a legal system that guaranteed their superiority, not their infallibility. Segregation laws did not prohibit a just conviction of white criminals. The white prison guards and physicians deserved jail time for their crimes and for compromising the myth of white superiority. Whites had failed to uphold the law and in doing so had threatened the entire rationale of white supremacy. In failing to carry out its legal responsibility, the courts of North Carolina, not Lewis’s critique, jeopardized the system of racial segregation. In fact, she was all too aware that incidents such as these earned her beloved state the condemnation and condescension of outsiders and perhaps threatened to incite the spirits of the state’s black citizens.

Her blistering attacks fell short of condemning racial segregation. Neither did she support the Southern Committee for People’s Rights, a Chapel Hill group led by her friend Paul Green and other white radicals who called for the dismantling of racial segregation. Lewis’s commitment to social reform did not apparently push her this far. The committee rebuked the system and also defended the rights of the prisoners as individuals. In advance of a national discussion, they spoke of human rights and tied their efforts to those working for African American civil rights. Lewis did not adopt the human rights discourse but maintained a tone of parental remorse and paternalistic regret when she affirmed that even in the face of injustice, “it seems to me that the Negroes of this State, as a whole, are remarkably well-behaved, remarkably patient.” In her open statement to North Carolina’s black population, she reassured them that “many other white people in North Carolina are shamed by this verdict . . . [and] we consider it a disgrace to the State.” She admitted, however, that her “many” was really more like a few.

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While many North Carolinians and students of the 1920s would remember Lewis’s radicalism, advocacy for industrial reform, and opposition to the region’s most reactionary moments, her most long-lasting work had been in the cultural production of white supremacy. Carefully balancing her political radicalism in other areas with a relatively liberal position on segregation, Lewis had emerged as an incisive storyteller for segregation and the political project that undergirded it. Her reputation as a “truth-teller” only reinforced the lessons she offered about white over black in the Jim Crow South. Her racial politics also offered educated, progressive white southerners a politically palatable way to digest the politics of white supremacy. Lewis was not out of step with more progressive views of women’s political activism. Her efforts connected her to reform projects across the nation — prison reform and social science-based policies hatched in universities across the nation and published in academic journals. Rooted in this modern political context, she offered white southerners stories to take them forward in terms of the white supremacist political project.

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Elizabeth Gillespie McRae is an associate professor of history and director of graduate social science education programs at Western Carolina University.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Why Psilocybin and LSD Don’t Deserve Their Bad Rap

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In the context of some recent reads on psychedelic drugs, Laura Miller at Slate looks at Michael Pollan’s new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

In it, Pollan says that drugs such as psilocybin and LSD got a bad rap after some flawed scientific experimentation and images of burned-out, ’60s counter-culture hippies soured Americans on exploring the medical benefits these drugs might offer, suggesting that their mind-altering abilities might help free us from cognitive patterns that are holding us back.

After 40 years in the wilderness, psychedelics are once more the subject of serious scientific study, with early results suggesting that the drugs, when used under a therapist’s supervision, can help patients suffering from anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and both alcohol and nicotine addiction.

Pollan took a couple of research trips himself in the course of writing How to Change Your Mind, with results that are interesting only to the extent that they help him make sense of other people’s accounts of their own journeys. The meat of the book is its chapters on the neuroscience of the drugs and their evident ability to suppress activity in a brain system known as the “default mode network.” The DMN acts as our cerebral executive, coordinating and organizing competing signals from other systems. It is, as Pollan sees it, the “autobiographical brain,” and the site of our ego. The long history of people reporting the sensation of their egos dissolving while under the influence of psychedelics meshes with this interpretation. It’s an experience with the potential to both terrify and, paradoxically, comfort those who undergo it.

Why should this effect prove so helpful to the depressed, addicted, and anxious? As Pollan explains it, these disorders are the result of mental and emotional “grooves” in our thinking that have become, as the DMN’s name suggests, default. We are how we think. The right psychedelic experience can level out the grooves, enabling a person to make new cerebral connections and briefly escape from “a rigidity in our thinking that is psychologically destructive.”

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