Margaret Fuller (38 page)

15

“Flying on the paper wings of every day”

T
HE MID-MARCH DAY WAS “DULL AND DUBIOUS,” THE SKY
“leaden and lowering,” the birds silent in the chill air that had brought a swift end that morning to one of New York’s unseasonable warm spells. But the dour weather seemed “suitable” for the outing, a visit to the “pauper establishments”: first the old Bellevue Alms House on the outer limits of the city, on the East River at the foot of 26th Street, and then, by open boat to Blackwell’s Island, a quarter-mile offshore, for tours of the recently constructed Farm School for orphans, the Asylum for the Insane, and the massive crenellated fortress of the Penitentiary, filled already with twelve hundred inmates. All four were institutions that “admonish us of stern realities,” the chill winds of misfortune that could so readily effect the “blight of Nature’s bloom,” Margaret would write in “Our City Charities,” her most comprehensive front-page
Tribune
editorial to date on societal ills.

These and other similar establishments she had visited since beginning to write for the
Tribune
in December—the privately run Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in rural upper Manhattan, the dank overcrowded jail in the heart of the city known as the “Tombs”—“should be looked at by all,” Margaret instructed, repeating the imperative twice in her opening paragraph. She urged her readers not to “sink listlessly into selfish ease,” now that the city had completed the three facilities on former pastureland on Blackwell’s Island—the paupers’ new Arcadia.
The ambitious building plan was part of a wave of publicly funded social reforms that had swept the young nation since the establishment of the Worcester State Lunatic Hospital in Massachusetts a decade earlier in 1833, an initiative that had gathered the impoverished mentally ill from local jails across the commonwealth, where they were normally held alongside convicted criminals, and provided them with medical treatment in healthful surroundings at the centrally located hospital.
As the population of needy citizens, criminals, and other outcasts swelled in big cities, the notion of providing enlightened care and remediation took hold elsewhere, and by 1845 few would have disagreed with Margaret’s statement that “parsimony” was “the worst prodigality” when it came to the treatment of the poor man or the prisoner—though just what should be done inside the new buildings continued to be a matter of debate.

Margaret argued that New Yorkers should play an active role as visitors, both to monitor progress and, more important, to extend a representative hand of care to the inmates so that their benefactors’ “intelligent sympathy” would be felt directly. The “acceptance of public charity,” she wrote, can be “injurious” to the recipient in an atmosphere devoid of human kindness. “Men treated with respect are reminded of self-respect” was the reform doctrine Margaret preached, allying herself with progressives like Eliza Farnham, the matron at Sing Sing who had the female prisoners under her care keeping journals, tending gardens, and rehearsing for choral concerts.

Yet Margaret knew that few of her readers would heed her advice and follow the route she took on that dreary March day. Few would witness the “vagrant, degraded air” of the men residing in the Alms House, who lacked any employment “except to raise vegetables for the establishment, and prepare clothing for themselves.”
There were no books, no classes, no opportunities to learn a trade, no “openings to a better” way of life.
Few would see the young mothers next door in Bellevue Hospital exposed to the “careless scrutiny of male visitors” as they nursed their newborns and echo Margaret’s plea to allow them privacy. Few would be greeted on entry to the hospital yard by the little Dutch girl, a misshapen dwarf child abandoned in the city by “some showman,” or notice, along with Margaret, how the poor “gnome” ran expectantly to the gate every time it was opened to search the face of each new visitor.

Out on Blackwell’s Island, the Farm School—which, to Margaret’s eye, was nothing more than “a school upon a small farm”—also failed to provide any vocational training for its young charges, even though, as Margaret noted, children “have vital energy enough for many things at once, and learn more from books when their attention is quickened” by a variety of pursuits.
She admired the well-ventilated dormitories and the way the school’s infants were arranged in a circle at mealtimes “like a nest full of birds” to be spoon-fed by affectionate nurses. But she worried about how the older students, who were required to leave the school at age twelve, would find work. Many of these “show[ed] by their unformed features and mechanical movements” the ill effects of having been “treated by wholesale”; they were not accorded the respect that engenders “self-respect.”

The Asylum for the Insane too, despite its location on the island’s grassy headlands and its ingenious design—two three-story neoclassical dormitory wings with a row of columns marking their separate entrances, one for women and the other for men, extended at a right angle from a central octagonal structure containing the doctors’ rooms—appeared to serve as little more than a warehouse. Here Margaret found the inmates crouching in the corners of their rooms. They had “no eye for the stranger, no heart for hope,” in stark contrast to patients in the privately run Bloomingdale, where “the shades of character and feeling were nicely kept up, decorum of manners preserved, and the insane showed in every way that they felt no violent separation betwixt them and the rest of the world, and might easily return to it.”

The Penitentiary was gloomier still—in fact “one of the gloomiest scenes that deforms this great metropolis.” There, seven hundred women, more than half the prison’s population, were incarcerated “simply as a social convenience, without regard to pure right, or a hope of reformation,” in Margaret’s view, and they lacked even a single matron.
As at Sing Sing, most of the imprisoned women had been prostitutes, and “I have always felt great interest in those women, who are trampled in the mud to gratify the brute appetites of men,” Margaret wrote afterward to a friend, “and wished I might be brought, naturally, into contact with them.”
She was convinced, as she told Horace Greeley, they were “women like myself, save that they are victims of wrong and misfortune.”
Writing for the
Tribune
gave her the opportunity to test her intuition, and the chance to speak out, as she had in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
against the hypocritical laws that made a woman pay for a man’s crime. Why should women “receive the punishment due to the vices of so large a portion of the rest”?

Acute firsthand observation enlivened by “intelligent sympathy” had quickly become Margaret’s distinctive style as a critic and, increasingly, as an advocate for social reform: to read, to hear, to see what the
Tribune
’s many subscribers could or would not, and then to shape an instructive message from her experience, was the means she chose “to aid in the great work of mutual education,” as she summed up her ambitions as a journalist in a letter to James Freeman Clarke.
To her relief, James had emerged, perhaps in an effort to make amends for his younger brother’s indifference, as the chief—sometimes, it seemed, the sole—supporter of Margaret’s new vocation among her old Boston friends. Cary might offer only slighting praise—“for those who like introductions[,] your criticisms must be of value”
—and Waldo complain that the job, “made acceptable” only “by good pay” (ten dollars per week, two dollars higher than Greeley had paid his previous literary editor), was “honourable” to Margaret, but “not satisfactory to me.”
But James understood Margaret best now, as he had so many years earlier, and recognized that the
New-York Tribune
was “an excellent organ through which to speak to the public.” Her
Tribune
articles, which had “more ease, grace, freedom and point to them,” he told her, were “better written than anything of yours I have read.”

It
was
the perfect job for Margaret, who always had an opinion on almost any subject as well as the verbal facility and the compulsion to express it. The “rich extempore writing” that Thoreau had admired in “The Great Lawsuit,” her gift of “talking with pen in hand,” enabled her to turn out three or four articles per week, more than 250 in eighteen months. The goal of “mutual education,” as well as the space constraints and frequent deadlines, forced a clarity and efficiency of expression that she had not submitted to previously. Margaret was aware that her “old friends . . . think I ought to produce something excellent”—another book—yet, as she wrote to James, she had spent all of her writing life so far in “
the depths.
” She expected that “an abode of some length in
the shallows
may do me no harm.” Like James, Margaret was already pleased with the results: in the shallows, writing about vitally important surface realities, “the sun comes full upon me.”

Her success was attributable to more than the new compression, however, or to the fluent delivery of swift perceptions for which she’d always had a talent in conversation. Margaret’s eye for the telling detail and the poignant image, developed over many years of immersion in the great Romantic novels, in Shakespeare and the classics, allowed an easy transition to the new style of literary journalism of which she promptly became a leading practitioner. Waldo Emerson was wrong to see the newspapers of the mid-1840s as cheapening their writers. In fact, the rise of the “penny press,” papers like Horace Greeley’s
Tribune,
which relied on subscriptions, newsstand sales, and paid advertisements rather than the financial backing of religious sects or political parties, put greater pressure on writers to provide compelling copy.

Seventy newspapers were listed in the 1845 New York City directory; the
Tribune
vied with the
New York Sun
and the
New York Herald
for top circulation figures in a battle that took place on the page. Unwilling to stoop to publishing lurid accounts of murder and mayhem, the stories that sold the lesser publications, Greeley nevertheless valued the human interest reporting at which Margaret instinctively excelled. The characters and incidents she’d habitually recorded in her journals, noting they might make “scenes for a drama” or “materials for romance,”
now found their way into her journalism, as in the case of the little Dutch girl at Bellevue, who, Margaret wrote, “would have suggested a thousand poetical images and fictions to the mind of Victor Hugo or Sir Walter Scott.”
She exhorted her readers: “Do you want to link these fictions, which have made you weep, with facts around you where your pity might be of use? Go to the Penitentiary at Blackwell’s Island.”
Her readers might not go, but Margaret did, turning her fact-finding missions into emotionally charged narratives in order to “be of use.”

It took some time for Margaret to write as a New Yorker, however. The early news she delivered came from New England and betrayed a predisposition to think of Boston as a “chief mental focus to the New World,”
as she wrote in her first article, a review of Waldo Emerson’s second collection of essays—which privately she had concluded were “more fine than searching.”
On Thanksgiving in 1844, celebrated in early December, she applauded Massachusetts, where “the old spirit which hallowed the day still lingers, and forbids that it should be entirely devoted to play and plum-pudding.”
At Christmastime, she reviewed
The Liberty Bell
for 1845, an anthology sold to benefit the annual Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, praising “the contributions of the men of color,” in particular the work of a new writer named Frederick Douglass, only six years out of bondage.
She even gave an account of the dispute among Boston’s Unitarian clergy over Theodore Parker’s radical views on the “nature of inspiration, and the facts of Bible history,” which had come to a head in late January 1845, when James Clarke granted the “excommunicated” Parker the opportunity to preach in his Church of the Disciples. The incident spawned outrage in the local press and inspired Margaret to respond from New York with “regret that, in the nineteenth century, ‘liberal Christians’ should not be liberal enough cheerfully to allow an honorable mind free course.”

But by the time of “Our City Charities,” Margaret had experienced enough of the city to begin addressing her readers as one among them. She had attended concerts of the New York Philharmonic Society, where she heard symphonies by Beethoven, Haydn, and Spohr “performed with a degree of perfection worthy a great metropolis”; she had walked or ridden the city’s cobblestone streets by horse-drawn omnibus, discovering the manicured parks at Washington Square and Union Place as well as the bustling commercial blocks of Nassau Street near the
Tribune
offices, where two dozen of Greeley’s competitors printed and hawked their wares.
“There is no reason why New-York should not become a model for other States” in social reform, she concluded. “We trust that interest on this subject will not slumber,” for “there is wealth enough, intelligence, and good desire enough, and
surely, need enough.
”

What did it mean to be a New Yorker anyway? Between 1840 and 1850, the city’s population, already three times that of Boston, would nearly double, jumping from 300,000 to over 500,000, with most of the growth in newcomers. More than eighteen hundred ships from foreign ports reached New York Harbor each year, many of them carrying passengers with no intention of making the return trip. Margaret experienced New York’s cosmopolitan nature first through its music, which she found to be “worthy the admiration of any mind,” the highest praise she could give. Here she found an audience of “persons educated where the Fine Arts have already attained their perfection”—enough listeners who had emigrated from or traveled in Europe—and “also an influx of well-educated musicians.” Opera singers from Italy and Germany, and the great violinist Ole Bull from Norway, passed through on tour during Margaret’s first months as reviewer for the
Tribune,
and many more well trained if lesser virtuosi had taken up residence to staff the philharmonic and other New York orchestras.