Fragments of a Life

Chance encounters aren’t just for rom-coms. Or even the living.Sometimes you stumble across an artifact that makes you want to learn more about a person. Such was the case when I noticed an envelope in our Realia collection titled “CRIB Belonging to William N. Johnston Class of 1893.”

When I opened it I found not one but two small scrolls of crib notes apparently written for an exam in German. My first question was: what disciplinary action did William face? Was he expelled?

As it happens, Mr. Johnston did not graduate from Dartmouth, but not because of his cheating. While his alumni file doesn’t contain a written reason for leaving college, there are suggestive items. One note, addressed to “Will” by a girl named Eva Baker, asks him to send “cigreete pictures,” referencing the small collectible cards that once came in cigarette packs. Could she have been his cousin, or even a half-sister?

A typed 1893 letter from the Superintendent of the Concord and Montreal Railroad commends the young William for his work of the past year and agrees to employ him for the future, though he says they “cannot allow you the amount received by your father at present.” Did William lose his father while he was a student? Did he leave school to support his mother, and possibly other relatives?

The other contents of his file are attendance slips, financial records, Masonic ephemera, and notes relating to debate team (“Resolved, that Demosthenes was a greater orator than Cicero”; William was assigned the affirmative position). We also have a scrawled note from a railroad customer thanking Will for helping him out on a hectic night.

Ultimately, all we can learn of Will from the ephemera of his life is that he was a college debater, followed his father into railroad work—possibly to support his mother, married but had no children, and was remembered kindly by a traveler who passed through his station. That he kept the thank-you note suggests that Will was a person who valued being helpful.

Not all of us accrue acclaim or leave our names on buildings, but we could do worse than be remembered with gratitude. To see the crib sheets, request Realia 509 online and come to Rauner. Do the same to see Johnston's alumni file.

---

The thank-you note reads:

24 Nov [or NW]
Pembroke St

Dear Sir
much obliged
for your ticket.
I forgot to leave
it till I'd got started off in
the hack when I returned
at 6 train last eve.
Please acknowledge
on postal. It will oblige me
if you hold on to my cane
till I call at station

Yrs
E P Tenney

A Little Charity, Maybe?

Here's a good one. This week we stumbled on a sweet little book entitled Peeps into the Far North from 1875. The book, geared toward young readers, is full of fun facts about Greenland, Lapland, and Iceland. Our copy was presented to Evelyn Parsons in recognition of her services for the Wesleyan Methodist Foreign Missionary Society. Evelyn apparently raised enough money for the cause to warrant a book prize.

That is all well and good, but then you see the warning that little Evelyn wrote in the back of the book:

Steal not this Book for fear nor shame,
For here you see the owners name,
If you do the Lord will say
Where is that Book you took away.
And if you say you do not know.
The Lord will say go down below.
                        E.E. Parsons
                        Feb. 4th 1912

Wow, a quick trip to hell if you steal her prize for raising money to help missionaries! Maybe Evelyn had other lessons to learn...

To see it (but definitely not steal it), ask for Stef G614 .S366 1875.

What Made Budd Talk? Budd Schulberg’s Testimony and the Implications of the House Un-American Activities Committee

Seymour “Budd” Wilson Schulberg was a screenwriter, novelist, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 1936, and for three years of his life – from 1937 to 1940 – he was also a member of the Communist Party. A decade later, at the height of the McCarthy Era, he was called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities regarding his party involvement. However, unlike some others who were called before the committee, Schulberg cooperated fully with investigators, acknowledging his membership in the Communist Party and naming former associates. So how did a man involved with left-wing advocacy during his college years who eventually became a member of the Communist Party become so disillusioned with the organization that he turned on them on the biggest stage? Per his testimony, it came down to debates over his novel “What Makes Sammy Run?”

The late 1940s to mid 1950s were marked by McCarthyism: suspicion of and investigation into left-wing individuals on the belief that they were responsible for communist influence on American society, which would ultimately lead to the destruction of democracy and the spread of Soviet totalitarianism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, the governing body that conducted such investigations, looked into the alleged subversive activities of private citizens and public employees alike. However, many considered it a political spectacle that ruined careers by public shaming rather than bringing about actual change or producing evidence of illegal activity. On May 23, 1951 Budd Schulberg was called before this committee after being cited other testimony in April of the same year.

Schulberg begins his testimony, a transcript of which is held in the Rauner Archives, by outlining how he first became involved with left-wing organizations:

“From about 1937, as I say, I was first in a study group, a Marxist study group, which, without any formality that I remember, became a Young Communist League group…I joined because at the time I felt that the political issues that they seemed to be in favor of, mostly I recall the opposition to the Nazis and Mussolini and a feeling that something should be done about it…”

He identified the man who invited him to join this group as Stanley Lawrence, the head of the Hollywood Communist Party. According to Schulberg, Lawrence originally framed the group as a broad advocacy organization “...that any man of good will, anybody opposed to Fascism, really could join.” Schulberg goes on to say that Lawrence encouraged discourse, testifying that “...it was even said that you didn’t have to believe in all of the points of the program. You could even disagree with some.” However, once the group began to transition away from its informal origin and into an official cell of the Communist Party, it became much more restrictive in the opinions it allowed.

When Schulberg began writing his first novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?”, he faced sharp backlash from his associates. Party members deemed his novel too individualistic. On suggestion from one of his comrades, Schulberg met with John Howard Lawson – a screenwriter later convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name other Hollywood Communists – for advice on how to make his novel more ‘proletarian’. But Schulberg refused to listen. He realized that if he were to ever be a writer, he had to distance himself. He “decided to leave the group, cut myself off, pay no more dues, listen to no more advice, indulge in no more political literary discussions, and to go away from the Party, from Hollywood, and try to write a book, which is what I did.” Schulberg left Hollywood for Vermont in May of 1939 and stayed until the early months of 1940 upon the completion of his novel.

Once back in Hollywood, Schulberg was approached by Richard Collins, one of his original Communist Party contacts, who told him “that they felt that my whole attitude had been sharply in opposition to the Party; that I had gone away without announcement.” Collins further suggested that Schulberg should once again consult the Party before submitting his novel to the publisher, but he again refused. As a result, Schulberg was told that his “entire attitude was wrong; that I was wrong about writing; wrong about this book; wrong about the Party…” For Schulberg, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. During his testimony, he says that at this time he “felt maybe, almost for the first time, that this was to me the real face of the Party…I felt I had talked to someone rigid and dictatorial who was trying to tell me how to live my life, and as far as I remember, I didn’t want to have anything more to do with them.” So Schulberg left the Communist Party. 

Schulberg’s testimony provides both an inside look into the experiences of a Communist Party member and calls into question the intent of the HUAC. What was their intention of subpoenaing a man who was a member of the Communist Party for only three years a decade prior? Was it really about investigating alleged subversive activity or was this government-sanctioned silencing of free speech? It seems that any information on subversive activity that he could have had would be useless by 1951, so the latter seems much more likely. Ultimately, Budd Schulberg’s testimony is only one piece in a much larger narrative that calls into question the House Un-American Activities Committee’s impact on private citizens and whether or not they existed as a genuine investigative committee or as a political theater that ostracized its victims.

To read Schulberg's full testimony, come to Rauner and request MS-978, box 126.

Posted for Ellie Appelgren '28, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2026 fall term. The Historical Accountability Student Research Program provides funding for Dartmouth students to conduct research with primary sources on a topic related to issues of inclusivity and diversity in Dartmouth's past. For more information, visit the program's website. 

The Word Imprinted

Way back in 1476, William Caxton returned to England from the continent with some fancy new tech to show off. While in Flanders he learned the relatively young art of printing. After a few years practicing the trade there, he packed up his press and headed home to see if there was an appetite for the printed word in England. There was.

Over the next 15 years, Caxton produced the earliest printed works in England. His taste was decidedly English. His first publication was Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but he followed with other major works of English history and literature. We only have one complete work printed by Caxton--an oration by Cicero that Caxton himself translated into English--but we have a leaf from his 1477 printing of Chaucer. The typeface is a beast for the modern eye, but you can work it out with a little patience. That you can still read it shouldn't be taken for granted. How many human production still work as they were originally designed 550 years after they were made? Some buildings, a few bits of machinery, and a whole lot of books.

To see the Chaucer leaf, ask for Hickmott 201. The Cicero oration is Hickmott 203. 

Dartmouth Libraries Exhibit: "In Which Winnie-the-Pooh Turns One Hundred"

Winnie-the-Pooh was first published on October 14, 1926 as the second of four wildly successful children’s books by Alan Alexander (A. A.) Milne (When We Were Very Young, Winnie-the-Pooh, Now We Are Six, and The House at Pooh Corner). One hundred years later, these stories and characters are as beloved as ever, and Milne is remembered mainly as a children’s author. But Milne’s writing career began well before he introduced the world to Pooh, Piglet, and their friends. He made a name for himself as a master of light verse, an editor of The Granta and assistant editor of Punch, and a respected playwright with productions on Broadway and London’s West End. He crossed paths with many of the best-known writers and thinkers of his time and was well known among intellectual circles. He was also a committed pacifist and spoke out against fascism.

This exhibit explores Milne’s literary career—his earliest influences, his body of work, and his enduring impact—as shown by materials in the Dartmouth Libraries collections. The exhibit begins in Rauner Special Collections Library (Class of 1965 Galleries) and continues in Baker-Berry Library (Baker 2 West, outside room 234). It was curated by Rachel Starr, Research and Learning Specialist, and designed by Max Seidman, Exhibits and Graphic Arts Designer, and will be on display through December 4th of this year.

For more, visit the exhibit webpage:https://www.library.dartmouth.edu/exhibits/in-which-pooh-turns-one-hundred.

Brahe's Universe--What the Hell Was He Thinking?

After Copernicus laid out his fancy new theory placing the Sun at the center of the universe, and then Galileo argued so forcefully for it, you would think that any self-respecting astronomer would acquiesce and admit the Earth no longer held primacy in the universe. But Tycho Brahe was a stubborn cuss, and a stickler for good observation. He figured with the more accurate observations he could make with his state-of-the-art observatory, he could prove Copernicus and Galileo to be fools for doubting the long-held dogma that the Earth was the center of everything. Years of careful observation gave Brahe a trove of data.

Then came the hard part: fitting it all into his preconceived notions. There was no way to argue that some of the planets didn't revolve around the sun, but that didn't stop him from keeping the Earth in the middle. His elaborate scheme placed the Sun and Moon in orbit around the Earth, while Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and Venus circled the Sun. Jupiter retained its cluster of moons. The math behind all of this is way more complicated than what Newton would later come up with, but Brahe made it all fit. The two images pictured here are representations of Brahe's imagined universe from Andrea Cellarius's Harmonia macrocosmica (Amsterdam: Apud Gerardum Valk et Petrum Schenk, 1708). In his book, Cellarius non-judgmentally lays out all of the competing cosmographies and leaves it to the reader to decide their comfort level with heresy and science.

To see it in person come on in and ask for Rare QB41 .C39 1708.

Clip Off and Slap On

If you’ve been to the Rauner mezzanine this summer, you may have noticed that we’re offering swag: free stickers from the 1971 Liberated Woman’s Appointment Calendar and Survival Handbook, currently on display in our Rauner Staff Picks exhibit. The appointment calendar portion is something like a feminist version of a book of saints, featuring, instead of feast days, dates from women’s history that run the gamut from well-known (e.g., July 19, the first day of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention) to downright obscure (e.g., February 25, the day in 1959 when someone named Josephine Bay became the first woman to head a major steamship company). Paging through the calendar, it’s notable how many of the feminist anniversaries it memorializes are from the previous year. As the editors explain in the introduction, 1970 was the year that women’s liberation “burst into the headlines,” marking “a new chapter in female history — so many womanly accomplishments, you’d need a calendar to keep track.”

All of this is interesting, but what makes this book special are the “survival forms” at the back, including a “Charge of Discrimination Form” that can easily be filled out and sent to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a “Barefoot Pregnant Award of the Week for Advertising Degrading to Women” which can be clipped out and mailed to the offending company. And, of course, there are the stickers that can be slapped on things that insult women: ads, construction workers, enzyme detergents, midi-skirts, etc. We couldn’t let something this cool and funny stay locked up under glass, so we turned them into real stickers. Swing by our exhibit and grab some while supplies last.

To grab a feminist sticker, come to the mezzanine until next Friday, September 4th.

Print your own stickers with this PDF (Avery template 5163, easily found in any office supply store).

To view the Liberated Woman’s Appointment Calendar, request Rare HQ1105 .W639 online and then come to Rauner.