Paying the Civil Rights Movement's First Dues

We've posted previously about Dartmouth students Johan Liutkus '65 and Roger Daly '67 and how they answered the call of Martin Luther King, Jr., for white people of goodwill in the North to rise up in indignation over the treatment of Black Americans in the South. However, we recently had the opportunity to review more of the letters written in early 1965 by Liutkus to George Kalbfleisch, the Director of Undergraduate Religious Life at Dartmouth, and it seems to us that Liutkus' experiences and insights resonate more strongly than ever with contemporary society.

In a letter to George Kalbfleisch dated January 9, 1965, Liutkus says that when he and fellow Dartmouth student Roger Daly '67 mentioned to more experienced SNCC volunteers that the two of them had been assigned to Selma, the veterans looked at them as if they were "condemned men". However, he notes that Selma itself seems relatively peaceful at the moment. He also draws a clear distinction between the town police and Sheriff Jim Clark's "land posse", which consists of 300 men wearing helmets and carrying 2-foot clubs. Liutkus says that this group roams the county looking for ways to disrupt civil rights movements. In a later letter written on January 14, Liutkus states that because of a sudden appearance by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that evening for a "Mass Meeting", local police were on every corner in town primarily to keep the Clark "brown-shirts" from causing trouble.

Liutkus provides a telling example of the different strategies and viewpoints held by civil rights organizations during this era when he expresses his concerns about how the SCLC operates. He is frustrated because in his view SNCC is doing the hard work of staying in a community for a long time and building infrastructure while the SCLC and Dr. King "come into an area and put on a high pitched campaign for a month or two and then pull-out, almost like a revival." Whenever SCLC does inevitably leave, Liutkus says that local organization usually collapses and then SNCC has to redouble its efforts to keep the community from falling back into "dis-organization".

However, despite this minor disagreement over tactics, it is clear that Liutkus and Daly were committed to the cause. On January 25, they were arrested and jailed by sheriff deputies for refusing to leave the voter registration line, and a photo of the two men being grabbed and shoved by the law enforcement officers made it into the pages of the New York Times. That same evening, both wrote letters to George Kalbfleisch in response to a telegram of concern that he had sent their way. In his reply, Liutkus says that "Roger wasn't beaten seriously' and that "jail has made us feel more one with the movement -- we have paid our first dues to the Movement."

To read Jonas Liutkus' letters to Kalbfleisch or to see the Times clipping, you'll need to request his dean's file in advance by emailing or visiting Rauner in person. The call number is DA-8, Box 4540.

Three Branches of the Golden Bough

Popular conceptions of folklore and mythology can be a funny game of telephone. In high school, for instance, you may have learned about the “hero’s journey”, a concept developed by Joseph Campbell (Dartmouth Class of 1925, non-graduate) to describe a "universal" narrative structure. It has a tendency to come up in English classes as a useful framework to apply to assigned texts, mapping well onto classics like the Odyssey. And it can be useful in that narrative context, but it’s terrible as any sort of comparative mythology. Still, the trope of the hero’s journey persists in the arts and in pop culture, even though its value as scholarship has been dismissed for decades.

One of Campbell’s influences was James Frazer (1854-1941), a Scottish classicist who sought to collate myths and ritual practices from around the world into evidence of universality. At the time, Darwinism had done a number on the Victorian world, and the social sciences were trying to figure out what it could imply for them. The results were theories like Frazer’s, who proposed that all cultures went through a linear evolution in belief from magic to religion to science. This positioned his own culture as the most evolved and his personal secularism as more evolved still.

Frazer’s interest in the topic began with research into a specific Roman rite, but it did not stay there. He consumed and cataloged a truly impressive amount of data about various cultures, though he never attempted any fieldwork himself, nor was he disposed to question his sources. The result was The Golden Bough, an anthropological work consisting of two volumes when it was first published in 1890, and increasing to twelve by 1915. It had its critics from the start — Frazer’s conclusions were quite speculative, as even he tended to admit — but it was also an exciting and entertaining read, so it gained an audience outside of its academic aspirations. The Golden Bough is no longer creditable, but Frazer’s work had a significant impact on scholarship as well as an influence on the arts.

Rauner has three versions of The Golden Bough, each a bit different. The earliest is a pair of books from that twelve-volume series we mentioned earlier, this pair being Part V, “Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild,” published in 1912. This is Frazer’s most expansive and uncertain version of his own work. The second is Leaves from the Golden Bough, a 1924 book of stories selected by Frazer’s wife Lilly and re-framed for children. The third is a fine press abridged edition from 1970. This last version comes with an introduction from the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, whose analysis bridges the gap between the work’s failure as anthropological scholarship and its success as “imaginative literature.”

Each of our three versions was meant for a different audience. Each also appeared at a different moment in the perception of Frazer's work, both within and outside of the academy. They're interesting to compare! Ask for Hudson 7, Sine Illus B762leav, and Presses L629fraz to do your own investigation.

Our Bodies Our Selves

If you are a woman of a certain age and your family of a certain social/political persuasion, at some point your mother or your most awesome aunt might have given you a copy of Our Bodies Our Selves. By the 1980s it was a huge book with hundreds of pages covering all aspects of women's health and sexuality, but it started out as a pretty humble, stapled mimeograph in 1971.

We recently received a generous gift of the eighth printing from July 1972, priced at only 35 cents. The printing history on the inside cover reveals a lot:

1st printing December 1970 5,000
2nd printing April 1971 15,000
3rd printing September 1971 20,000
4th printing December 1971 25,000
5th printing March 1972 25,000
6th printing May 1972 25,000
7th printing July 1972 10,000
8th printing July 1972 25,000 

That's incredible. A book printed by the Boston Women's Health Collective, with no real advertising or marketing plan ran through four printings in less than six months and sold 150,000 copies in its first year and a half. Clearly there was a need for some honest information about reproductive health and sexuality that included things not talked about (hell, not even acknowledged to exist) in many circles. This is not your grandmother's gynecologist.

To see it ask for Rare RA778 .B69 1971. 

Surveying the Field

In 1871, Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth officially opened for business. The fledgling school boasted just three students and one professor but also a proud lineage and a bright future. General Sylvanus Thayer, a member of Dartmouth's class of 1807 and the fifth superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, had turned his sights back to Hanover in 1867 at the ripe old age of eighty-one. He had accrued by then a stunning list of life accomplishments, including the establishment of the country's first school of civil engineering during his time at West Point.

Thayer intended for his alma mater to establish a similar program: he donated a total of $70,000 to the college as well as an impressive library of books and manuscripts related to engineering, many of which we still have to this day. He also recommended a West Point graduate, Joseph Fletcher, to be the first (and only) faculty member and dean of the new professional school. His mission accomplished, Thayer passed away in 1872 but he is still remembered to this day in certain circles as "The Father of the Military Academy" and one of the earliest proponents of engineering education in America.

Perhaps Thayer's influence is what made Dartmouth faculty insist that all undergraduates take a surveying course, even before the School of Engineering was formally established. We have several of the student field notebooks from those classes, and it's obvious from looking through them that at least a few of the undergraduates struggled to appreciate the science of engineering. Robert Bolenius, a member of the class of 1870, certainly seemed more interested in creating whimsical doodles in his assignment book than demonstrating his surveying prowess. His drawings, whether of a naked man fighting with a dog over a pair of pants next to a data table or an abstract geometrical shape converted into a Civil War tent, make us hope that Robert went on to discover a profession less rigid in its approach to seeing the world than engineering.

To look through the surveying notebooks of Robert Bolenius and other undergraduate surveying students, come to Rauner and ask for DA-31, Box 2912.

Exhibit: "Reading Sentences: Prison Libraries and Literature"

Beyond punishment for social wrongs, imprisonment has long functioned to silence or remove voices from the public forum. As we have seen with figures from Cervantes to Martin Luther King Jr., however, prison can also give inmates copious time to articulate their thoughts and the fame or notoriety necessary to draw attention to them.

This exhibit examines both the literature consumed and produced by prisoners as well as the evolving depiction of the prison in popular culture. Its scope spans hundreds of years and thousands of miles, from the chivalric romances dreamed up by imprisoned knights (and aspiring knights) of the medieval and Renaissance eras to the cheap, sensational prison dramas peddled to the working classes and the reformist prison library catalogs whose titles sought to educate and equip inmates with secular knowledge and employable trade skills in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New England. It highlights the electrifying prison manifestos of several prominent civil rights leaders and concludes with contemporary artist and children’s books which grapple with the psychosocial impact of incarceration.

The exhibit was curated by Sophie Chadha, Edward Connery Lathem '51 Special Collections Fellow at Rauner Special Collections Library. The poster was designed by Chadha and Max Seidman, Exhibits and Graphic Arts Designer for Dartmouth Libraries. It will be on display in Rauner Special Collections Library's Class of 1965 Galleries from April 6 through June 19, 2026.

Wealth of Nations at 250

We have a lovely first edition of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations published 250 year ago in March of 1776. A lot happened that year and the Enlightenment was having a pretty dramatic (one might say revolutionary) impact across Europe and into the colonies. Oddly, it had never occurred to me to think of Wealth of Nations as a product of the Enlightenment until about ten years ago when a faculty member in the Economics department asked me to talk about the book next to Diderot's Encyclopédie. At first I was confused, then it all made sense.

You see Adam Smith was one of the book buyers for the University of Glasgow and he persuaded the university to invest in the acquisition of Diderot's epic project to create an encyclopedia that would wrest control of knowledge from the church and the monarchy and put it into the hands of anyone literate and able to gain access to his encyclopedia. Smith would have been an avid consumer of the work, so is it any wonder that his first and most famous example of the division of labor came right out of the Diderot's project? You can look at Wealth of Nations alongside the fabulous illustrations of pin manufacture presented in volume 4 of the plates of the Encyclopédie. This is old news to anyone well versed in the history of economics, but for me it was an enlightening experience that made me rethink the rise of capitalism.

To see the first edition of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ask for Val 330.1 S643i 1776. For Diderot's Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers you'll want Rare AE25 .E53 (ask for volume 4 of the plates).

The Road to Redemption

On a Tuesday in May of 1831, President Nathan Lord of Dartmouth sat down at his writing desk to pen an awkward letter to Reverend Jacob Cummings, a member of Dartmouth's class of 1819 who was a friend of Lord's and the minister of a small congregation in Stratham, New Hampshire. Cummings had written to Lord to inquire about a recent incident involving Daniel Clark, a member of the class of 1834 and a Stratham boy. Lord began by telling Cummings that although he was "unwilling to give pain", he felt "obliged to correct [Cummings'] impressions" about the story that Clark had told him.

The facts of the case, as per a faculty investigation, were as follows: that several nights earlier, a sizable group of pious and concerned young students had gathered at 1am before the front door of local resident Mr. Holton, whose home was known to be a den of ill repute; that they had peaceably gained access with the intention of relocating the ladies of the night from the establishment; that Mr. Holton had drawn a knife and threatened them when they tried to enter a back room; and that when they had finally been able to enter said room, they had discovered Mr. Clark hiding within. The investigation resulted in Clark's suspension from the college for a year.

Apparently, soon after being dismissed from the college and returning home, Clark had entreated Cummings to intercede with Lord on his behalf; the young man claimed that he was merely out for an evening walk to get some exercise and stopped for a rest at Holton's without realizing the nature of the dwelling. Lord's incredulity is palpable as his letter lays out Clark's story in detail: a casual stroll down the darkest road in Hanover at one in the morning followed by a random visit to an unknown residence? Nearly two hundred years later, one can almost feel the force from Lord's eyes rolling. The president ends the letter by openly acknowledging Clark's intellectual gifts and his potential, expressing his hope that Clark will repent of his sins, and praying that the young man will return to Dartmouth to finish his studies after a year's suspension so that he may "yet become a blessing".

Lord's prayers were ultimately answered, though perhaps not quite in the way that he would have hoped. Clark did repent and return to Dartmouth to finish his studies. Several decades later, he was elected to represent New Hampshire in the United States Senate where he served from 1857 until 1866. In contrast to Lord, who was well-known for his support of slavery, Clark was a staunch abolitionist who gave eloquent speeches denouncing slavery as well as supporting suffrage for all men regardless of race. His colleagues in the Senate held him in such high regard that they elected him president pro tempore for the Thirty-Eighth Congress (1865-1866).

To read Nathan Lord's frank assessment of a youthful Daniel Clark's indiscretions, request MSS 831317.1 online and then come to Rauner.