Capsule, Kellor, and You!

My two most recent books concern the formation of identity in modernity.  “Capsule: A Search for Identity in Modern Japan” follows Adam and John as they systematically discuss sources of identity on psychedelics.   “Founding Mother: Frances Kellor and the Creation of Modern America,” looks at ways in which Kellor (1873 – 1952) presaged, promoted, and formed our modern sense of American identity.

The quintessential characteristic of modernity is choice.  You can live as a gay Buddhist all the while working as a corporate executive, voting Republican, and have surrogates create multiple children for you.  You could also stay single, vote Democrat, and spend the majority of your time improving your drinking skills.  Nothing fetters your self-invention in this modern world. 

In its valuing of choice, modernism contradicts traditionalism.  In traditional societies men and women know their roles. They have children.  The men work and the women raise the children. In this sense, child-free transgender persons represent the final frontier of modernity, of the Western modern experience.  They have become the essential Americans.  No tradition binds them.

Kellor lived with a woman, had no children, and dressed as a man.  And, she ran the Americanization movement that greeted immigrants from 1906 – 1921.  100 million Americans trace their heritage to Ellis Island.  During Ellis Island’s hey day she ran New York’s Bureau of Industries and Immigrants; the official governmental agency in charge of immigrant affairs.   This is only one way that this LGBT role model created America’s modern self-image.

The definition of American identity Kellor promulgated eschewed traditional American sources of identity.  Rather than our old Protestant definition, she taught that Americans were those who participated in political activism.  Her multicultural parades showed that being American required no particular sets of beliefs.  To her, as to us, our national identity solely stems from our label as a democracy.

This lack of judgment made a world safe for modern gender benders with alternative life styles like Kellor.  So from where do we get our moorings today? 

In Capsule Adam and I discuss our lack of belonging.  He lives in Japan and so is clearly out of place.  And, I am bewildered by the dizzying array of choices my life presents.  In a backdrop of adventure in Japan, we ponder if marriage, LGBT lifestyles, travel, nationalism, our personal stories, our work, or many other sources of identity could provide us with a fulfilling sense of community, belonging, meaning in live, or identity. 

To understand Capsule’s conclusions, you must read the book.  But know that the search, the fact that we must self-identify fuels every fun moment.  And, Kellor necessarily launched the search that the Capsule chronicles.  Once we have left our traditional moorings, we get faced with choice.  Founding Mother helps us understand where our modernity comes from.  Capsule helps chronicle the adventure that being let loose from roles entails. Both help us to understand who are and might become in this modern world.  

Frances Kellor Interrupted

The new edition of Founding Mother has been published.  The last blog post, simply relayed the new introduction.  As book introductions went, it rocked the house.  As a blog post, it ran a bit long. And, due to my occupied by publishing, it stayed up for months.  For all of those who were considering becoming regular readers, I apologize.  I am back.  Now if you want the new introduction, just buy the new version of Founding Mother.  The blog is back.

In the interim, I have also published another book, Capsule: A Search for Identity in Modern Japan.  This project also kept me from writing Kellor blog posts.  And, as this blog provides my main word-based source of expression, I will introduce those interested in Kellor to capsule at a later date, on this blog.  Suffice it to now say, that both Kellor and Capsule converge in the theme of my publishing company, Social Books; the attempt to understand what holds society together.

Today, I launched another phase of my Kellor promotion campaign.  I began bringing Kellor and my other books to the streets of New York.  I set up a table and chair and offered such information to the Columbia University community.  I sold zero books in my hour and a half selling.  But, I met some very interesting people.  I have always been attracted to the extravagant, eccentric folks in the world.  And, if nothing else, selling Founding Mother on the street seems to introduce one to eccentrics.

Transgender Pronoun Disclaimer Help

Hello Readers, Colleagues, and Friends,


I am especially asking the LGBT scholarly community to critique the "Note on Pronouns" that will appear on in the final edition of Frances Kellor's biography, Founding Mother.   


Your comments are greatly appreciated.


Thanks in advance,


Here is the text:

A Note on Pronouns

Throughout this text, though transgender, Frances Kellor will be referenced with the feminine pronouns, “she,” “her,” and, “herself.” Kellor was the male persona in her forty-seven year relationship with Mary Dreier, argued publically that women needed to take on more “masculine” characteristics, changed her name from the feminine “Alice” to the more masculine “Frances,” and dressed in men’s clothes.  Within the broad parameters of today’s language, Kellor was transgender. But, the past lives with different terms. In Kellor’s time, sex change operations did not yet exist.  As such, to expect her to even consider becoming anatomically male is anachronistic. In her ongoing focus on gender roles, Kellor called herself “masculine,” but she never called herself “male.” Therefore, throughout this text we shall use feminine pronouns in reference to Kellor.

Frances Kellor Lives in Lady Gaga and Media Bias

     
The transformation of a photograph of the transgender lesbian activist Frances Kellor (1873 – 1952) raises important questions concerning our current perceptions of gender. The photograph shows Kellor in her full masculine guise.[i] Months thereafter, a line-drawing rendition of the image appeared.[ii]  The contrast between the photograph and the line-drawing provides a contrast between what Kellor really looked like and an artistic rendition for public consumption.  The newspaper redrew her as they would like to have seen a female leader – they feminized this giant figure.

 Frances Kellor had her likeness in the newspapers a lot. She garnered wide publicity for her studies of African-American women in southern penitentiaries. Her work leading up to the founding of the National Urban League received a lot of attention, as did her undercover work for domestic workers.  When Theodore Roosevelt told crowds about Kellor taking him to homeless shelters, she needed no introduction. But at the time of the images, the public would have read of her monthly as the head of the movement that greeted immigrants –the Americanization movement.

  At first glance, the photograph of Kellor could be one of a man.  An acquaintance from childhood claimed dislike of young Kellor was widespread because she walked and talked like a boy.  Here we see a thirty-seven year old Kellor dressed in men’s clothes.  She has a tie on and a shirt that accentuates extremely broad shoulders.   Kellor worked as a basketball coach and rowed on the Cornell boating team she helped form. The expression on this reformer’s face gives the impression that she is busy and businesslike. The mess on her desk provides another clue that could lead an unsuspecting      reader to think ‘male.’

  The drawing rendition of this photograph could not but retain the masculine tie and shirt.  But several essentials have been feminized. While a Romanesque slightly florid design accompanies the photo, we now have a full flower below Kellor and another above her. The hair has feminized streaks and sits a bit looser. The eyebrows have been stylized. And the harried expression in the photograph has been transmuted into a welcoming feminine smile. 

  The differences between the photo and the drawing are subtle.  To totally feminize this short-haired, tie wearing, broad-shouldered person, would require a total falsification.  And, perhaps my perception that a slight hint of breasts appears in the drawn version verges on the paranoid. Furthermore, we could argue that newspapers routinely work to make people appear more appealing.  Still, in this case, it seems the aggregate of the small changes, making Kellor more “appealing,” results in a much more feminine appearance overall.

  Today it is still news when Lady Gaga or others act as ‘gender benders.’  The media’s shock reflects our fascination with this chink in the armor of the dominant gender paradigm.  And while at first blush the rare attention to ‘gender benders’ might not seem socially significant, it should raise our awareness of the constancy of normalized gender depictions. Female celebrities’ femininity, their dress, and make-up get hyped daily. And while these women may love performing these gender roles, Kellor’s photograph makeover reminds us of the longstanding and constant public pressure to bend girls to femininity and alternatives. 

 But what does this matter?

 The line-drawing rendition of the photograph sat above a headline that read, “Little Sister of the Alien Comes to Teach.” No male in Kellor’s position would have been described as a “Little Brother.” Upon becoming the first woman to head a New York State Bureau, a surprised New York Times told readers that they would have thought, “the head of the New York State Bureau of Industries and Immigration would be some big strong man.”[iii] Earlier the Times exclaimed that if anyone had suggested a year earlier that a woman would have had held Kellor’s position in a Presidential campaign they would have been “thought mad.”[iv] With such a powerful known history, this depiction of Kellor as “little” and familial illustrates how feminized images of women can diminish them.

 Not only can the reception of Kellor’s masculine image tell us something about gender perceptions, her example can remind us of means to fight it. Kellor advocated using sports – particularly basketball - to make women more masculine. Specifically, she thought sports would get women out of the home and off gossipy topics and into the street publically fighting injustices. In 1916 Kellor opened a women’s campaign for Presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes with a “historical discussion of men’s campaign trains and the masculine way of working.”[v] And, of course, in contrast to the more feminine settlement house workers around her, Kellor often dressed as a man. 

 The drawing of Kellor identifies her as “Miss Frances Alice Kellor.” As a teen Kellor wrote under the name of ‘Alice Kellar.’ After leaving her hometown, she only wrote under the more androgynous name Frances Kellor. This feminized depiction of this ‘little sister’ marked her gender by revising her girlish first name. Not all women would be comfortable changing names, dressing as a man, or adopting “masculine” styles of activism; nor should they have to. But we would do well to understand the dynamics in public presentations of gender. To this end, we would do well to teach Kellor’s example and depictions of gender in today’s media.

  Finally, these comparisons model something of a victory in public perception. The photograph appeared in The New York Times in April of 1912. The article it illustrated showed Kellor scouring filthy conditions in industrial sites.  The ‘Little Sister’ drawing was printed in The Los Angeles Times in November of 1913. The text noted Kellor was a “remarkable woman” for leading a New York Bureau. Kellor’s level of achievement was new for women on the West Coast. The drawing and the headline had not yet caught up with the possibility of powerful masculine women. But the photo running earlier in the East Coast paper showed that activism had laid the groundwork for seeing women as powerful.

[i] “Preying Upon Helpless Immigrants After They Land,” The New York Times, April 14, 1912, SM10

[ii] “Little Sister of the Alien Comes to Teach,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1913, II1

[iii] “A Good Samaritan for Hapless Alien Hosts is Miss Frances Kellor,” New – York Tribune, May 12, 1912, A4

[iv] “Women as A Factor In the Political Campaign:  For the First Time in American History Their Active Support Is Openly Sought by All Parties,” The New York Times, Sept. 1,1912, SM9

[v] “Tells Why Hughes Asks Women’s Aid,” The New York Times, Aug. 7, 1916, 9

Frances Kellor’s Americanization Versus Tony Kaye’s Detachment

Detachment, by Tony Kaye and Carl Lund, ranks among the most depressing films ever made.  It includes two suicides, overdosing, incest, whores, the beating of whores, and, worst of all, apathy.

Much of the social detachment that the film highlights comes from the absurdity of trying to foster growth in mechanized schools.   The out-of-control students’ rebellion mirrors rather than challenges the surrounding ugliness.  But if Detachment blamed the school system for all of the characters’ pain, the film would just be preachy.  This amazing piece of art explores all of our slow daily deaths.

But while institutions do not cause our existential dilemmas, a day at the DMV will show you the connection between systems and death. 

Frances Alice Kellor (1873 – 1952) was a asocial scientist and educational theorist.  And while the system caused Detachment’s educators to simply worry about State test scores, Kellor promulgated systems that took the human element into account – that sought to combat the very lethargy and mood of Kaye and Lund portray.

“Some women are abnormally sensitive and introspective or morbid, and live too much on the subjective side of life” Kellor noted in her book Athletic Games in the Education of Women.[i]  Detachment exposes just these sorts of brooding states. Kellor called these states “feminine” and sought to combat them by getting women involved in action via sports.  In a phrase, “When down do!”

Basketball instills the aggressive characteristics Kellor found feminine girls lacked.  Among the desired characteristics were focus, energy, and initiative.  And, the newly constituted active female would have mastery of herself. “All forms of ball-playing, from simple chase-ball up to basket-ball,” Kellor wrote in 1901, “require self control.”[ii]

In trying to make women as effective as marines, Kellor could be said to mirror one of the systemic traps that Detachment poetically shows us.  In the film, exterior goals remove all internal values and feelings. Brutal self-control for the sake of a goal can kill.  

But from her earliest sports writing, Kellor insisted on the “play-spirit.”  This coach never wanted her girls to become “too hard and business-like.”[iii] Eerily predicting Detachment, she wrote that without the “play-spirit” humans were “a machine, which without its operator either runs amuck or becomes a mere automaton.”[iv] And, on Detachment’s very subject, she worried that “the growing commercial spirit in education institutions so hurries students that they have no time for games.”[v]

By way of a cure, Kellor enthused that sports “Seem to awaken a spirit of play and fun which brings a level of healthy excitement to even the most sluggish natures.”[vi] Yet, insightfully, she held that even in sports, “The play-spirit is yielding to the work-spirit and the loss of individual play spirit has not yet found its counterpart in the proportionate increase of the group play-spirit.”[vii]

We can see herein that Kellor promoted a complicated nuanced vision of play that deserves analysis. And, if we wish to use social systems, such as sport, to enliven people, we would do well to investigate the values that competition and other structural trappings our sports and other endeavors tend to cultivate. If nothing else, Detachment should encourage such discussions.  

Kellor’s greatest notoriety came from leading the Americanization movement.  From 1906 – 1921 this movement greeted immigrants and attempted to assimilate them into our national fiber. This systemic confrontation with alienation parallels took on the sort of alienation Detachment depicted, only on a national level. 

While other’s brand of Americanization sought to make immigrants conform culturally, Kellor Americanized via having immigrants and long-term Americans work collectively on progressive reform efforts.  Thus, quite literally, her Americanization work became a direct analogy to team building in sports.  When undertaken with a play – spirit such reform could bring a joyous sense of vibrancy to our national community. 

In Detachment, the lead character finds some salvation via helping his father and a prostitute.  No impersonal goals, such as saving the homeless, grace the screen.  Such distant impossible goals would only insert more distance into any of the immediately needy Detachment characters.  Whereas Kellor dealt in social justice writ large, she also understood the importance of human connection. 

Kellor’s Neighborhood Americanization project urged long-term American women to spend time in the homes of immigrant women. Beautifully, she advocated entering immigrants’ homes without an agenda. She told her female audiences, that immigrants just wanted “friendliness and new contacts.”[viii] The public social scientist told them to visit, “Not with the idea of uplift, but of getting acquainted for mutual benefit.”[ix]

Detachment painfully exposed the intimate pain and distance in modern lives. As a sensitive humanist Kellor realized that large systems could not solve deeply intimate psychic issues. She asked, “Have we gotten into the habit of asking too much of our government – thinking of it as something impersonal – unfailing, like air and sunshine? The governments cannot impersonally Americanize the home.”

Yet as a sensitive soul, Kellor understood, as Detachment conveyed, that social systems can promote or hinder well-being. This creative sociologist began the national celebration called Americanization Day. And she often crowed that immigrants told her “it was the first time they had shaken hands with an American!”[x] We can create venues for intimacy. And, sports, with a proper sense of the play-spirit, can promote well – being. Thus can the social sciences combat Detachment. 

---

[i] Dudley, Gertrude, Kellor, Frances, Athletic Games in the Education of Women, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 135

[ii] Kellor, Frances, Experimental Sociology: Descriptive and Analytic (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1901), 29

[iii] “Ethical Value of Sports for Women,” American Physical Education Review, Vol. 11, 1906, 162

[iv] Dudley, Gertrude, Kellor, Frances, Athletic Games in the Education of Women, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 142

[v] Dudley, Gertrude, Kellor, Frances, Athletic Games in the Education of Women, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 38

[vi] Ibid, pg. 238

[vii] Ibid., pg. 5

[viii] Ibid pg.,17.

[ix] Kellor, Frances, “Americanization of Women: A Discussion of an Emergency Created by Granting the Vote to Women in New York State,” Address delivered before the New York State Woman’s Suffrage Party in New York City, Jan. 17, 1918, 7

[x] Kellor, Frances, Neighborhood Americanization: A Discussion of the Alien in a New Country and of the Native in His Home Country, An address to the Colony Club in New York City, Feb. 8, 1918; in Wisconsin State Historical Society Pamphlet Collection #54-997, 8

Frances Kellor at the 4th Annual Leon Levy Biography Conference

Today my never-ending quest to make Frances Kellor known, led me to a wonderful time at the 4^th Annual Leon Levy Biography Conference.  I passed out over 100 fliers introducing Kellor.  Each offered a heavily discounted copy of my Kellor biography, Founding Mother, to people who would email me.  But I also got a lot of intellectual stimulation.  And that is always wonderful.

My encounter with the famous E. L. Doctorow provided great entertainment.  He argued for the importance of story.  He noted the cultural importance of Homer’s stories and how boring factual depictions would be.  Realities result from Jesus’ virgin birth.  And, in contrast to scientists’ big bang, he championed author’s little bangs – creation in the form of a sentence.

I told him that as a historian, I was a bit offended.  Did my research mean nothing?  Is there no virtue in trying as best as possible to uncover the past on its own terms?  Though we ultimately interpret, shouldn’t we historians strive to be as faithful to the past as possible?  And, for good measure, I asked him if storytellers were central to culture, why is writing better than TV?

First he asked me to rephrase the question while “he thought up an answer.”  I returned to the microphone and repeated the question.  He then answered, “If you’re asking how much research I do, the answer is ‘as little as possible.’”  Someone from the audience shouted, “That wasn’t the question!”  He retorted, “Well that’s the question I wanted to answer!”  Wow!  Fun!!

During the body of Doctorow’s speech he said that the fictional and real person had nothing to do with each other.  That was a relief.  I have often wondered if Frances Kellor would punch me for distorting her if she came back from the grave.  Doctorow essentially said, “Don’t worry about it.  All is fiction. The real person and the fictional character we create based on them have nothing to do with each other. Invent.”  I am not sure I am comfortable with that answer.

Still my portrait of Kellor is a portrait that locates her in the debates happening between today’s scholars.  Specifically, these scholars discuss progressive intellectuals’ search for progressive democracy in the era of mass Federal programs.  And while this question resonates in our time of apathy and disconnect from political elections, it also resonated with progressive activists.

A gossip-ladened session looked into biographies of the singers Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett and asked what people you write about would think of your depiction.  In writing about Tony Bennett, David Evanier even has to worry about what a living subject would think of his biography.  Though safely dead and without relatives or mafia ties, I often ask, "What would Kellor think of my depiction of her as a transgender lesbian?"

Kellor might have a beef with me for discussing her lesbianism publically.  But, in today’s world she’d likely get married to Mary Dreier.  And, though the term had not been invented, she might chafe at the emphasis I put on her being “transgender.”  But if you asked her about the import of women being masculine and acting like men, she’d go on for hours. She clearly thought women should be more masculine and dressed the part. 

I think Kellor would not totally disavow my depiction of her as trasngender.  And, that is important to me.

I asked Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the biography of John Nash, upon whom the Academy Award winning film ‘A Beautiful Mind’ was based, about whether personal life and public life intersected.  If not, why was Nash’s bisexuality an issue? 

Nasar’s argument about Nash’s difficulty with personal relations feeding into his facility with abstractions sort of worked for me.   And, I have written about the contrast between Kellor’s public emphasis on gender and her not discussing sexuality. But her insistence on sticking to policy publicly seems like a very masculine thing to do.  Her stance asks the reader to value public issues over private issues.  Subtlety, her public issue orientation can be read as a manifestation of a desire to live in the closet and still honestly say a lot about her personal values. 

This gets us to the fractal labyrinth of Margo Jefferson’s biography of Michael Jackson and back to E. L. Doctorow. Michael Jackson’s public image distorted his “real self” to the extent that no “real self” existed.  Is Kellor her public image?  In some respects.  She would want it that way.  Did she have bizarre subconscious dreams as Michael did?  Did she reflect our public as he did?  I think inclusion as a lesbian transgender woman fed her passion for including immigrants. And she framed issues in ways that spoke to public opinion.

Like Michael Jackson, Kellor’s private and the public image, the real person and the performer, became a part of a simultaneously created life based in imagination. 

All-in-all, I ended up feeling great about my Frances Kellor project. 

Brad Gooch spoke of not always liking his subject Flannery O’Connor.  As I love Kellor, that problem only challenged me in terms of my tendency to ignore critics. Debby Applegate has written about a Madam who ran a prostitution ring.  Kellor brought the question of “white slavery” while the Madam lived.  Making connections with other scholar’s work is important.  And, James Kaplan wrote that he had to find an “edge” to justify his writing the umpteenth biography of Frank Sinatra. Kellor’s amazing contributions to creating the modern world have gone unnoticed and obviously deserve recognition. 

All-in-all, it was a wonderful conference.  I got a book to a person who knew an agent.  And, again, more than 100 people now have heard of Frances Alice Kellor who previously had not.  But,  I mostly enjoyed this brush with academics reminding me of the eternal unanswerable questions upon which any conscious biographer must dwell.  

www.franceskellor.com

My Uncle Lou and Frances Kellor

This week my Uncle Lou died.  Louis Press was the youngest of eight siblings.  My grandfather was the oldest.  Uncle Lou was always an enjoyable man.  He played piano.  He met his wife while stationed in India during World War Two and made his money in the wig business.  And, Frances Kellor influenced his life.

In 1915 or thereabouts, my family moved from New York City to Bay Minette, Alabama.  They went with three children, including my grandfather, and left with seven, ten years later.  When the oldest child, Rachel, turned eighteen, my great grandparents realized there were few Jewish men for her to marry in Alabama.  So they sold the potato farm and tailor shop and moved to California.    My Uncle Lou was born in Pasadena.

From the beginning of her Americanization work until the end, Kellor worked with Jacob Schiff.  This wealthy Jewish banker founded the Industrial Removal Office (IRO).  The purpose of this office was to remove and resettle New York City’s Jews.  Schiff hoped to relieve decongestion and assimilate Jews with this effort.  70,000 Jewish families took his offer of financing emigration.  My family’s records are in the IRO archives. 

Kellor stole and modified Schiff’s program.  Her program was not specific to any one ethnicity.  Furthermore, her distribution program was the hub of an national employment agency program.  It told workers where there was work and made sure those advertising work had it.  While it didn’t go national, her arguments for seeing unemployment as the Federal government’s responsibility did take hold.

As there was no industrial employment there, and assimilation was not a goal she cared about, Kellor would have never sent immigrants to rural Alabama. But Jacob Schiff was a main backer of pretty much every effort she ever undertook in the name of Americanization.  And, I am sure that she returned the support. 

Whereas my grandfather always seemed influenced by the South, Uncle Lou had a more Californian demeanor.  I call Kellor our Founding Mother because she helped launch so many aspects of our modern world. The existence of Federal unemployment programs provides one example.  But, her influence went deeper as well.   My family, as well as many others, was intimately touched by Kellor’s work.   

In summary, bye Uncle Lou, I will always cherish having known you!