Branding with a Bang

Most of us today have heard of the retail clothing outlet Abercrombie & Fitch, most likely because of a string of nationally publicized controversies including sexualized advertising to teens, the sale of t-shirts displaying racist and offensive slogans, and a statement in 2006 by then-CEO Mike Jeffries that Abecrombie & Fitch clothing is only for "good-looking people." Although this statement is offensive for its elitist and exclusionary stance, it's also in keeping with the organization's founding vision. In 1892, the Abercrombie Company opened its doors in the Tribeca neighborhood of lower Manhattan, bent on catering only to an elite clientele. Instead of teen clothing, however, the company's focus was on a different sort of lifestyle: sporting and excursion goods for the wealthy and well-to-do. Abercrombie Co. was an outfitter for expeditions by Theodore Roosevelt, Richard E. Byrd, and Ernest Hemingway, among other notables.

Abercrombie became Abercrombie & Fitch in 1900 when Ezra Fitch, a wealthy lawyer and avid client of the store, bought a major share in the company. Fitch eventually bought out Abercrombie in 1907 and pursued his vision for the company by making it more accessible to the public and not just to high-brow, would-be explorers and adventurers. To that end, he published the company's first mail-order catalog in 1909. Fitch quickly became known as an innovator and, under his leadership, the company flourished. Here in Special Collections, we have a letter written by Ezra Fitch to Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1908, soon after Fitch took the helm of the company. Stefansson, a rising star in the field of polar exploration, was ostensibly preparing for his five-year ethnological survey of North American Central Arctic coasts. For that excursion, he needed a rifle, and so he visited Abercrombie & Fitch. In the letter, Fitch continues a conversation that must have begun in person at the store: he provides Stefansson with specifications for a Mannlicher-Schönauer rifle, which was very popular at the time with big game hunters (including Ernest Hemingway, who mentions the rifle in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber).

To see the letter, come to Special Collections and ask for MSS-196, Box 2, folder 27.

A Plan for World Peace

On July 9, 1917, Vermonter Belno Marsh Whelden enlisted as a private in the Machine Gun Infantry. For the next two years he would serve on the front lines in France. Whelden was one of the 4.7 million Americans who served in World war I. He was also lucky, because he got the chance to come home alive. Whelden was a member of Dartmouth College's Class of 1921. At Dartmouth, he was an avid fan of the track team and member of Phi Gamma Delta. After graduation, Whelden attended the Tuck School for a short time, before taking a position with Stetson Shoe Company in New York City. In 1925, he returned to Vermont and went into the family hardware business.

Whelden was never able to forget what he had seen during World War I and became an ardent proponent for the need of world peace. In 1945, he took matters into his own hands. In the report for the Class of 1921's 25th Reunion, he writes:

I am still on the losing end of the fight for World Peace, as I am an out and out World Government man. I have worked out my own plan for World government, based on an approach for the viewpoint of the individual who fights the wars and not from the viewpoint of nations who manage and operate same.

In 1945, Whelden sent his 147-page plan, entitled World Trusteeship of Life and the Means of Life, to Senator Tom Connally, a member of the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations. Whelden enclosed a message reading:

I enclose herewith my suggestions of a way to lasting peace. I have submitted it to no other group anywhere. You are the men who will make the peace …. Will you please read it today – now – before you go to San Francisco. I stand ready to come to Washington on a moment’s notice, if you wish to talk to me.

Whelden believed that his education at Dartmouth under President Hopkins contributed to his desire to take action. In his class letter, he continued:

Hoppy told us in ’16 when he took over that his thesis of the liberal college was to teach young men how to think and not what. … If we as people don’t damn soon cut out the fol-de-rol, flim-flam and bluff we are perpetrating at this moment, and really get down to the task of leading this tired old world or ours into the ways of peace by carrying out into the world the heritage that is ours as a nation of freeman under law, then the next war which is too far away, will wind up our life, and Dartmouth College, its Alumni Fund and its endowment won’t be worth a damn, and there won’t be any more reunions, because there won’t be anyway of getting there except in foot or canoe, the way old Eleazar got there and maybe we’d all be a helluva lot happier if that was the case anyway.

I do not know if Whelden was ever called upon by Senator Connally to speak in Washington. However, if you would like to read his plan, come to Special Collections and ask for MS-157.

Exhibit: "The Ties that Bind: Slavery and Dartmouth"

Eleazar Wheelock came to Hanover and carved a place for Dartmouth College out the wilderness, or so the story goes. Often overlooked in that account is the significance of slavery in the founding and the first century of the college. In an exhibit at the Dartmouth Library's Rauner Special Collections Library in Webster Hall, the students in Professor Deborah King’s Sociology 79.08 class, "Lest We Forget: History, Collective Memory and Slavery at Dartmouth," explore the role played by the enslaved people of its first two presidents, and the College and Hanover as a site for the intellectual, moral and political debates surrounding slavery.

The exhibit is on display in the Class of 1965 Galleries at Rauner Library in Webster Hall from November 15th, 2019, through March 13th, 2020. To learn more, visit the exhibit website.

Hitting below the Belt

We were digging though the Hanover Town Records for documents pertaining to the poor farm for a class next week on poverty in the 19th century. There was not a Federal safety net, and not much on the state level, so individual towns and counties ran poor farms for the indigent. We have file after file of sobering affidavits and letters documenting the plight of the poor.

One jumped out at us because of the rhetoric it employed. In 1860, the aged Mrs. Hastings sought relief due to some unfortunate event in her life: her son only alluded to it in a letter by saying "I need not ever name the cause of her unhappyness." She desperately wanted to stay out off of the poor farm, but no one in her family had the means to keep her and the Selectmen of Hanover seemed to have little pity for her case. There are several letters back and forth between the town and her son and her grandson. The family offered to take her into the grandson's home if only the town would pay thirty cents a day for her board. The town repeatedly denied the request, and her grandson finally resorted to saying that sending her to the poor farm would be tantamount to one of the worst horrors of slavery: he said his reason for writing was "to relieve the feelings of an aged woman lame and infirm for what to her is like separating the families of the black slave."

Damn, that is harsh, especially directed at northern government officials just before the start of the Civil War, but it points to the treatment of the poor in the 19th century when poverty warranted the removal of individuals to the poor farm, and often the separation of children from their parents.

To see the letters, and many other similar stories, ask for DH-1, Boxes 10799 and 10801.

New Year's on Ice

A quick search of our finding aids for things related to New Year's brought to light an amazing survival. This little program was typed up during the holidays on board the Karluk for the "Grand International Football Match to be held on the ice on New Year's Day, 1914." That is cool enough, but then when you set that into a little more context, it becomes amazing and terrifying. You see, the Karluk was the lead ship for the Canadian Arctic Expedition lead by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. At the time, it had been locked in the ice for several months, slowly drifting toward Wrangel Island.

The crew was suffering. Food supplies were still adequate, but they drank the last of the ship's liquor that New Year's Day, and there seemed little hope that they would be freed from the ice that winter. And it was dark--almost all of the time.

Just 10 days after the football match that pitted the ship's Scots against the team of "all nations," the ice shifted and crushed the hull of the ship. It sank within hours leaving the crew stranded on the ice over 80 miles from the uninhabited Wrangel Island. Over the course of the winter, 11 crew members died before a rescue ship arrived to pick up the survivors.

We checked, and four of the twelve crew members who played soccer on the ice that New Year's Day didn't survive the winter. By the way "all nations" won the match 8-3.

You can see the original by asking for MSS-107, Box 1, Folder 53.

Dickensian Christmas Words

Just this week, we acquired something that has us very excited: a complete run of Household Words, a literary periodical that ran from March 30, 1850, to May 28, 1859, and was edited by Charles Dickens. Our set, comprising 19 volumes that contain a total 479 issues, includes all of the "Christmas Supplements" and the rarer "Household Narrative" (On Politics, Crime and Statistics of events of the month or year), which was only published in the early numbers 1850-1851. The journal was intended for an aspiring middle class audience, although it was marketed as a vehicle for social justice for the working class. Interestingly, there were no advertisements or images in Household Words, which should seem a bit counter-intuitive to anyone who is familiar with the usual format for a stand-alone serialized version of Dickens's novels. Also, each issue cost only two pennies, contrasting with the entire shilling per issue for Dickens's David Copperfield, for example.

As might be guessed, a publication filled with anonymous or unheard-of authors wasn't doing very initially until Dickens decided to serialize his own novels in the publication as well. Both Bleak House and Hard Times both made their first appearances in Household Words. In addition to new works by Dickens, the publication also featured the serialized novels of many authors whose names would indeed become household words was in Household Words, and Wilkie Collins saw two of his novels initially introduced there as well. Ultimately, however, it was the work of Dickens that the people were most interested in reading. To satiate them, Dickens hit upon the idea of the "Christmas Supplement." In each holiday issue, he would write a beginning and ending to a story about a fictional gathering of strangers, each of whom would tell a story related to a theme. Then, his stable of authors would each provide a short story for that issue. The "Christmas Supplement" was a clear hit for over a decade and had a marked effect on the sale of the periodical.

We haven't created a catalog record yet for this marvelous set of books, but feel free to come by and ask for it by name if you'd like to experience a Dickensian Christmas in print.

A Dartmouth Lineage of Distinction

Today's post is a special one for us here at Rauner Special Collections Library because it is our 1000th post since the blog first began in 2009. Over the last decade, we have deliberately invested in the blog as a way to promote our collections and to bring to light the stories of many events and people who often have been overlooked. We've also reached such a quantity of content that we have begun to circle back, sometimes unknowingly, to stories that have been told here before. Luckily, when that happens, there is usually another detail or facet to the tale that allows us to approach from another perspective. The life of Winfield Scott Montgomery, class of 1878, is a perfect example. We recently stumbled upon his fascinating life story, only to find that one of our own student workers had already scooped us nearly five years ago.

However, there is more to Montgomery's story than one blog post can contain, for not only did

Winfield Montgomery attend Dartmouth, but so did his son Wilder Percival Montgomery 1906, and his son's son, Wilder Percival Montgomery, Jr. 1931, and his nephew, Charles McDuffy Wilder 1915. Winfield's son, Wilder, was known affectionately on campus as "Monty". He came to Dartmouth from Phillips Andover, pursued the pre-medical course of study available at the time, and then became a biology teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., which was one of the nation's first public high schools for African-American students. Monty taught there for twenty-five years and, at the time of his death, was chairman of the Board of Admissions of the Public Schools of the District of Columbia for Divisions 10 to 13.

Wilder Montgomery's son, also known at Dartmouth as "Monty," followed his grandfather's footsteps and became a physician, receiving his medical degree from the University of Chicago in 1935. He was an instructor at Howard University's School of Medicine from 1940 to 1950, and in 1951 was the first African-American physician to be appointed to the 10-member District Board of Police and Fire Surgeons in Washington, D.C. By the time he passed away in 1995, Montgomery had accrued numerous other honors and positions of distinction; he was a fellow in the American College of Physicians, a diplomat of the National Board of Medical Examiners, a member of the appeals council of the disability branch of Social Security, and a trustee of the American Lung Association and Children's Hospital.

To learn more about this amazing family, come to Special Collections and ask to see their alumni files.