Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (7 page)

The challenge for a successful, high-profile German family like the Ederles was to emphasize the American portion of their ancestry, for New York, despite its vibrant German community, was particularly reactionary—even long-established German-American families in New York were not immune to the reach of anti-German sentiment. The New York press, particularly the
New York World,
encouraged anti-German attitudes, and they were on display throughout the city in any number of ways: City College of New York cut the number of credits it awarded for the study of German language and history, city schools dropped German from the curriculum, and the Metropolitan Opera banned works by German composers. Germanic street signs were changed and foods such as sauerkraut temporarily became known as "liberty cabbage," German measles was referred to as "liberty measles," and even the most ubiquitous of American foods with a German heritage—the hamburger—temporarily became known as the "liberty sandwich." Although nearly three-quarters of a million New Yorkers were of German extraction, during the war fewer than half would publicly acknowledge their German roots. German cultural and social societies either disbanded or virtually went underground. In some parts of the city, most notably Brooklyn, anti-German sentiments ran so high that entire neighborhoods fled in fear, dispersing to elsewhere in the city. Plenty of Schmidts and Brauns suddenly became Smiths and Browns.

Henry Ederle did not hide his German heritage but neither did he flaunt it, and as the war continued, the Ederles found ways to emphasize the American portion of their German-American background. Henry Ederle had been a citizen since 1906 and openly and enthusiastically embraced his status as an American. In 1917, as required by law, he registered for the draft, willing, if called, to do battle against his former countrymen. He made a point to buy Liberty bonds and made sure the American flag and patriotic bunting were prominently displayed in the front window at Ederle Brothers Meats. And even though the social life of many German-American families centered around various German groups like the Turner societies that promoted German culture and German-only athletic competitions, wise Germans like Henry Ederle either cut their ties to such groups or kept them hidden. The Ederles did not raise their children as German-Americans, but as Americans. The Ederle girls were typical American girls to the core, thoroughly modern. To the occasional consternation of their parents, they embraced every fad and fashion. They liked listening to popular music on the gramophone, taught one another how to dance, went to the movies, and, in the winter, ice-skated in Central Park.

While the Ederles had to exercise some caution over their heritage in Manhattan, the xenophobia so common in New York was far less pronounced in the Highlands. There the Ederles didn't have to worry who they were perceived to be—they could be themselves, something that was increasingly important to Trudy.

It was hard to tell which parent she favored, for apart from a slight cleft in her chin she shared the same close-set eyes and strong chin of both parents. She was neither tall nor short for her age, and although, compared to her older sisters, she was rather large-boned, she was not overweight. Her hair was auburn and she wore it long, down to her shoulders, although in the summer the power of the sun gave her temporary blond highlights and a smattering of freckles spread across her cheeks.

In the summer of 1918, as World War I inched toward its conclusion, the war dominated newspaper headlines and dinner conversation. But Trudy was almost oblivious. Every day she spent in the Highlands revolved around the water, and all she thought of was swimming. As she became more accomplished as a swimmer, she was allowed in the water by herself, and long after Meg or Helen had left for home Trudy could be found in the water. She liked to test herself, swimming from one pier to another, or seeing just how long she could stay afloat without touching bottom. At times she seemed not to notice how much time was passing and sometimes stayed in for hours. She would even tell people, "To me, the sea is like a person—like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there." For the rest of her life, like the tide itself, she would return to her conversation, again and again and again, with the sea.

One reason Trudy found the sea to be such a steady companion was that as she grew older her hearing problem grew more pronounced. It didn't happen all at once, but over time Trudy slowly began to withdraw. At home, with her family, young Trudy was a typical, bubbly, feisty young girl who doted on her young siblings, George and Emma, and continued to follow her older sisters around like a puppy, but in school and away from the family she was a bit withdrawn, as if not always certain what was being said or taking place around her.

It wasn't obvious to everyone, but away from home she spoke just a little bit louder and a little less often than other girls her age, and gravitated to activities she could do by herself, like swimming, that didn't require a great deal of interaction with others. She was a good student but around strangers remained a little shy. More so than her sisters, she became a voracious reader, curling up in a chair every evening after finishing her schoolwork, devouring popular dime novels full of romance, daring, and adventure. While her doctors were alarmed by the amount of time she was spending in the water, fearing the possibility of further infections and additional damage, now that she could swim, keeping Trudy out of the water was impossible. As Trudy admitted later, "The doctors told me my hearing would get worse, but I loved the water so much I couldn't stop." Whatever damage exposure to the water might have caused to her hearing, it was more than offset by the joy she experienced in the water.

Her parents seem to have come to the same conclusion—nothing was going to keep Trudy out of the water. So when her mother saw a notice for a swimming and diving exhibition in the Highlands sponsored by something called the Women's Swimming Association (WSA), she was intrigued. But she was drawn to the group by more than the simple fact that it was about swimming. Unlike the Turner societies or other German social groups, the WSA had no ethnic identity—it was an American organization, albeit all-white, without other restrictions on membership. Perhaps, thought Gertrud Ederle, this was the kind of group Trudy might want to belong to, a place where she could meet other young women of various backgrounds just as excited about swimming as she was, and an organization that could simultaneously draw her out of her shell and help her pursue her favorite pastime.

Although the WSA was less than a year old, the organization was already revolutionary, changing the way women looked at themselves, and thereby changing the way men viewed women. It was made for the Ederle girls, who loved the water and loved all things new and American.

The roots of the organization had been born on the day of the
Slocum
tragedy. In the wake of so many deaths, all so pointless and all so avoidable, the issue of women and the morality of swimming had been thrust into the spotlight. Only a few weeks after the tragedy a letter to the editor in the
New York Times
began, '"Self-preservation is the first law of nature,' but to teach its people the 'art of self-preservation' should be the first law of a nation and would tend to lessen the repetition of Slocum tragedies." Captain Tom Riley, Coney Island's best-known lifeguard and swimming instructor, told a reporter, "The burning of the
General Slocum
has aroused thousands of people of the necessity of learning how to swim." Riley addressed the question of women swimmers directly, telling the newspaper bluntly, "The average girl has just as much nerve as the boy in the water and will become as good a swimmer if taught properly," but he offered that "the trouble with grown up women is that sometime in their lives they have been dunked by a would-be funny idiot until they have come to regard the water with terror."

Those who were fighting for women's suffrage and women's rights viewed the tragedy as a call to arms. Suffragists and women's rights advocates immediately began to campaign for changes in women's swimming attire and recommended swimming lessons for women, but at first the movement had little traction.

The major problem was, in a sense, semantic. Over much of the next decade any call to teach women how to "swim" for its own sake inspired moral outrage. Opponents of swimming became half hysterical as they imagined the deleterious effects on public virtue if women were allowed to commingle with men in pools and on public beaches, particularly if they did so while not fully and conservatively clothed.

The reason was a young Australian woman named Annette Kellerman—or women who admired her—because to the minds and fertile imaginations of most American men, Annette Kellerman
was
women's swimming—and absolutely everything that was wrong with it.

As a child growing up in New South Wales, Kellerman suffered from some undiagnosed bone affliction, likely either polio or rickets, which left her with bowed legs, forcing her to wear heavy braces. At the suggestion of a doctor, her father insisted that Kellerman begin taking swimming lessons to strengthen her legs. In Australia, where virtually the entire population lived along the coast, taboos against swimming for both men and women were far less pronounced than elsewhere in the western world. An Englishman named Frederick Cavill and his sons pioneered the sport in Australia and were among the first swimming instructors both to teach the trudgen stroke and begin to improve upon it.

At first Kellerman found swimming impossible, later writing, "My brothers and sisters had learned to swim in four or five lessons, but eighteen were required for me. Only a cripple can understand the intense joy that I experienced when little by little I found that my legs were growing stronger, and taking on the normal shape and normal powers with which legs of other youngsters were endowed." She advanced quickly, and by age of seventeen, in 1902, Kellerman was the 100-meter champion of New South Wales. The pretty young woman, with the support of her father, parlayed her local fame into a vaudeville routine, performing a mermaid show in a glass tank, swimming with fish. She then began making more public swims, such as one down Melbourne's Yarra River, and in 1904, at age eighteen, she traveled with her father to England, where they hoped she would find a larger audience for her mermaid show.

Yet once Kellerman arrived in England no one knew who she was. While the stodgy English public was titillated by her act, they also found it morally offensive and—publicly anyway—ignored her. To generate publicity Kellerman began making long-distance swims in the Thames and other bodies of water. That was more agreeable. A newspaper, the
Daily Mirror,
became intrigued and in 1905 sponsored Kellerman in an attempt to swim the English Channel, a publicity stunt that had little chance of success. To date, the Channel had been swum successfully only once before, by the Englishman Matthew Webb in 1875. Few men, and no women, had since come close to repeating Webb's feat.

Kellerman didn't have a chance but that really didn't matter. All during the summer of 1905 stories about Kellerman's training regimen appeared in the newspaper, many of them commenting on her beauty and accompanied by illustrations, making her a public figure. She made several attempts to swim the Channel, failing each time, although during one attempt she managed to stay in the water for an impressive six hours before being forced to quit due not only to seasickness, but chafing under her arms and on her thighs as a result of the rough surface of her woolen swim dress.

The attempts made her famous but also caused her to rebel. Men who tried to swim the Channel knew full well about the dangers of chafing and avoided it altogether by swimming in the nude. Kellerman decided that simply wasn't fair.

She didn't swim nude—not yet. But she did toss out her swimming dress with its long sleeves and skirt and bought a boys' one-piece suit, similar to a leotard. To this she sewed a pair of black silk stockings to the legs that covered her bare skin and nominally adhered to prevailing standards of modesty. She called her outfit the "one piece all over black diving suit." The public didn't care what it was called but couldn't take their eyes off her when she was wearing it, for the garment revealed as much as it concealed, accentuating and even enhancing every curve on Kellerman's already curvaceous body. In an instant Kellerman became the world's first sex symbol.

The impact on her career was instantaneous. She became a sensation and soon took her act to the United States, where she attracted a huge following. Her vaudeville show was an ingenious mixture of sex and sport. Kellerman revealed herself slowly. She first threw the diablo (a form of juggling), then put on an exhibition of swimming and diving in a glass tank before "dancing" behind a backlit curtain that etched her silhouette—and more—into the mind of every man who saw her performance. For publicity reasons Kellerman also continued to make long-distance open-water swims. At Revere Beach, just north of Boston, she created a huge scandal when, in an act of defiance that guaranteed her the front page, she removed the stockings from her suit, exposing her bare thighs to onlookers. Shocked local officials charged her with public nudity. Kellerman fought the case, arguing that the modification had nothing to do with morality but everything to do with women's rights—it was safer for her to swim unrestricted by heavy stockings—and the case was dismissed. The notoriety of the case made Kellerman both more notorious and more heroic, part sex symbol and part suffragette, a combination that was both tantalizing and—to some—threatening.

Dudley Sargent, the longtime director of Harvard University's Hemenway Gymnasium, was obsessed with measuring the human body and convinced Kellerman to allow him to take her measurements. He then declared that out of ten thousand women he had measured, she was the first whose proportions matched those of Venus de Milo.