The Accursed (72 page)

*
Though Winslow Slade destroyed the vast majority of his private papers in the unhappy spring of 1906, some partly charred pages of his Journal remain; and so we know that the subject of Horace Burr’s several anguished conversations with him involved one of the knottiest moral problems in Christianity: whether the marital act is
innocent
, while the carnal desire is
evil
, as the Church Father Gregory taught in the sixth century; or whether, as the Thomists later calibrated, evil lies less in carnal indulgence than in the
ligamentum rationis
(the suspension of the rational being). But what did Winslow Slade advise Horace Burr; & why indeed did Horace feel the need to seek him out, after fifteen years of marriage?

*
Is Josiah Slade prescient here, or naïve? So captivated by his precious
theory of evolution,
he imagines a similar sort of progression, of ever-more complex ideas, in the human sphere? For faith will never be supplanted by reason, not so long as
Homo sapiens
endures.

*
“Pump”—stomach pump. When in particularly severe gastric distress Woodrow Wilson employed his own stomach pump, a favored home remedy (like the enema) until such time as the instrument was forcibly taken from him by a White House physician in 1913, shortly after his inauguration as twenty-seventh President of the United States.

*
Since a Georgia physician had once told her that “so long as a man’s neck is
full,
and
firm,
and
strong,
his health will be good,” Mrs. Wilson made it a practice to massage Dr. Wilson’s neck each night at bedtime, and to examine it for inflamed pimples, sensitive moles, swellings, unnatural hollows, etc. There was never a wife so concerned for her husband’s health as Ellen Wilson; I hope I am not leaping too far ahead of my story by noting that, on her deathbed, in August 1914, Mrs. Wilson exhausted herself by making anxious inquiries after her husband’s health, as the Presidency of the United States weighed heavily upon his shoulders, and exacerbated the poor man’s many physical ills, as never before.

*
Dr. Wilson is referring to Grover Cleveland, whose name he could not bear to speak, and whom he disliked so much that, upon the occasion of Cleveland’s death, in 1908, in Princeton, Dr. Wilson decreed that no observation be made on the Princeton campus, not even a flag lowered to half-mast; though elsewhere in Princeton, as through much of the United States, flags flew at half-mast.

*
Historians are sharply and irrevocably divided: when did the “intimate relationship” between Mrs. Peck and Dr. Wilson begin? Was it on this date, April 25, or the following day, when Dr. Wilson so abruptly changed his (pre-paid) residence at the Admiralty Inn, to spend several nights at
Sans Souci
? Many letters were to pass between Mrs. Peck and the besotted Dr. Wilson, it is believed, but, unfortunately, not a single one of these has been preserved, so far as I know. (Most scandalously, Mrs. Peck was also believed to be
carrying on
with Samuel Clemens at this time, a relationship not so unconscionable, as Mr. Clemens was a widower, and Mrs. Peck’s husband seemed scarcely to exist. Of this liaison, we can assume that Woodrow Wilson had not a clue.)

*
A note here will be helpful, I think! For Adelaide Burr had certainly been reading Captain Scott’s
The Voyage of the Discovery
in its excerpted form in the
Atlantic
,
to which Horace Burr subscribed; and clearly she had been moved by the skillful drawings of penguins by Edward A. Wilson, one of the officers of the
Discovery
expedition of 1901–04. It is this historian’s thrilling discovery to have come across the issues of the
Atlantic
containing these, that had once belonged to Horace and Adelaide Burr of Maidstone House, sold at auction amid a large carton of books and journals which I was able to acquire, in 1952, for a sum of twenty-two dollars!

*
Upton Sinclair is referring to a recent march of striking child mill-workers in eastern Pennsylvania, led by the labor organizer Mary Harris Jones. The children, some as young as nine, and many missing fingers and toes, and exhibiting other injuries as a result of work-related conditions, “marched” from Philadelphia to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to the private residence of Theodore Roosevelt. Though derided in the press as an “anarchist invasion” the march did bring much publicity to the plight of children working in silk mills and mines. The strike was for a fifty-five-hour workweek. In his mansion at Oyster Bay, Roosevelt refused to meet with “Mother Jones” and hundreds of bedraggled, clearly very foot-weary children. A Pennsylvania judge ruled against the striking children:

“You are on strike against God.”

*
The Thornhurst water cure for nervous invalids, named for the prominent physician Silas Thornhurst of the Harvard Medical School, was one of a number of “water therapies” of the time. The patient was strapped in a chair of proven durability, with particular attention given to leather straps (encased in cotton batting, to prevent injury) about the head, torso, and legs; then, a quantity of cold water was “dashed” onto the head from several hoses or conduits, from a height of approximately six feet. To prevent accidental drowning, swallowing of the tongue, or vocal cord rupture from excessive screaming, a clean cloth or sponge was always kept in the mouth; and every precaution was taken, and after several hours of the treatment the patient was removed at once to a room and placed in a warm bed, there to sleep uninterrupted for as long as twelve hours. Although Horace Burr was to die of a stroke in 1911, still an inmate at Otterholme, it was generally believed that the Thornhurst treatment had cured him of his raving delusions, as the patient was reported “docile, very quiet and tranquil” in the last year of his life.

*
It is not the historian’s strategy to keep his reader in any sort of cheap suspense, for history is
past;
so I see no reason not to reveal to the reader that the outcome of the feud between Wilson and West is signaled by the fact that, to this very day, the antique musket and powder horn once belonging to Captain Hiram Wyman adorns a wall in Wyman House, the residence of the dean of the graduate school. We can marvel retrospectively how, out of the dean’s inspired, “The Battle of Princeton, you say?” spring forth not only the triumph of Woodrow Wilson’s enemies at Princeton but also the subsequent triumph of Woodrow Wilson as the Democratic candidate for President in the autumn of 1912; also the Fourteen Points, the Covenant of a League of Nations, the Espionage Act of 1917, and the Sedition Act of 1918.

*
Lake Carnegie! This was one of the first, and it would hardly be the last, of Woodrow Wilson’s “presidential defeats.” The beautiful lake is an artificial reservoir formed by a dam on the Millstone River, a gift from the “Gilded Age” industrialist Andrew Carnegie to the Princeton University crewing team in 1906. Woodrow Wilson perceived the gift as a mixed blessing and could not rejoice, as others did, in Lake Carnegie; for Andrew Carnegie had conspired with alumni behind the president’s back to purchase the land and build the lake, quite apart from Dr. Wilson’s reiterated wish that the wealthy industrialist would underwrite the costs of a university library. To the irascible benefactor Dr. Wilson reputedly said: “We needed bread, Mr. Carnegie, and you gave us cake.”

*
“The Soldier” may be long forgotten today, I am afraid. In his time Captain Lawrence E. G. Oates of the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons was a member of the ill-fated
Terra Nova
expedition of 1910–1912, under the command of Robert Falcon Scott, which came to a disastrous end in a blizzard on or about March 1912 at the South Pole.

Captain Oates’s nicknames were both “The Soldier” and “Titus”; relatively little is known of his younger brother Eric, and virtually nothing of the polar expedition in which Josiah Slade participated, though I have searched records assiduously, for years. And so I am led to wonder, less as an historian than as a neutral observer, whether Josiah in his wish to escape
terra cognita
hadn’t been seduced by agents of the Fiend even as he valiantly sought escape from the past.

*
Though it isn’t possible after so many years to determine its authenticity, there is good reason to believe that this single playing piece in my possession, kept on my desk here that I might contemplate it, and take inspiration from it, is the very piece brought home by Todd Slade from the Bog Kingdom. So worn is the checker from the passage of time, its serrated edges are not very distinct any longer; and so faded its coloring, you can barely discern that it was once black.

*
The historian is reluctant to indicate here, as my chronicle is nearing its close and I must condense vital information, that despite Upton Sinclair’s zealous intentions and unfailingly high ideals, he was to be commonly presented in the gutter press as having established his commune expressly for the purpose of creating a harem among the “amoral Socialist females.” Bravely and stubbornly Sinclair was to protest such lies, and tried to maintain a measure of his natural dignity; until such time as the Helicon Home Colony burned to the ground on the morning of March 7, 1907; and the disconsolate young man (who had suffered injuries in the fire) was the more slandered by baseless rumors that he and his comrades had set their own fire, to collect insurance and to cheat local tradesmen of money owed them. (Though a cross had been burned on the grounds in front of the residence but several days before, by a dozen individuals cloaked inside white robes with masked hoods.) In this debacle, his new friend and comrade Yaeger Ruggles would be of great help to Upton, though Ruggles refused to appear ever again in New Jersey, as he too had been injured in the fire, and the dangerous charge of “race mixing” was associated with him, like a brand in his forehead. Recovery from the catastrophe was slow, but Upton Sinclair did recover, and his optimism remained unabated as he looked forward to the publication in 1908 of his next book,
The Metropolis,
which was expected by all who’d read the manuscript to bring to fruition the Socialist dream in the United States, that
The Jungle
had precipitated but not fulfilled in 1906.

*
Muckraker
was a derisive term coined by Teddy Roosevelt himself, the allusion being to the Man with the Muckrake in John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
who “suffers from an unwholesome obsession with filth.”

*
At the Helicon Colony, it was quickly determined that Annabel Slade had a skill for bookkeeping, and took pleasure in “balancing the books,” that had quite eluded Upton Sinclair who had neither the time nor the aptitude for such; by degrees Annabel was given responsibility for the housekeeping budget and in this way had much opportunity to confer with Yaeger Ruggles, whose dark eyes, “kinky”-dark hair worn to the collar, olive-tinted complexion and “meltingly Virginian” accent quite entranced her; as the very blond Annabel Slade entranced the former seminarian, at their first meeting. What is the historian to think? Is it the historian’s place to suggest disapproval of “race-mixing”? Or—was such radical behavior on the part of Annabel Slade but a prophecy of what disruptions to tradition lay ahead in the tumultuous twentieth-century, let alone the unfathomable twenty-first? It was a measure of the elder Slades’ resignation to fate that, confronted with the news that their daughter, only newly returned to them from the dead, should “fall under the spell” a second time of a seemingly unsuitable individual with a marked Virginia accent, they did not interfere with her marriage plans.