Daniel Sargent Curtis

Claude Monet to
Ariana Randolph Wormeley Curtis
December 7, 1908

In August 1869, Daniel Sargent Curtis took a train headed to Needham, Massachusetts. He was joined in the train compartment by Judge Al Churchill who, with a female guest, took a seat nearby. At some point during that journey an altercation ensued connected to an ill-placed carpetbag, a toy wagon, and an empty seat. Words were exchanged, with Churchill commenting that Curtis must not be a gentleman. Feeling insulted, Curtis twisted Churchill's nose and struck him in the eye, breaking his glasses. Curtis was charged with assault and sentenced to two months in jail. According to John Berendt, author of The City of Fallen Angels, more than 300 prominent citizens of Massachusetts petitioned for a pardon for Curtis. However, Curtis refused to sign it. He also refused Churchill's offer to drop the charges for an apology because he felt that his actions on the train had been justified - and so Daniel Curtis went to jail.

Henry James to
Ariana Randolph Wormeley Curtis
May 3, 1897

It is often stated that it was this "unfortunate incident" that prompted the Curtis family to leave America for Venice, Italy. Berendt, however, states that the desire to leave America had been voiced by Curtis many years before this event. Curtis left for Venice in 1881 with his wife, Ariana Randolph Wormeley, and their son Ralf. There they rented and later bought the Palazzo Barbaro. After restoring it to its former glory the Palazzo Barbaro became the center of American life in Venice. The Curtises hosted many writers, artists and other expatriates at their home, including John Singer Sargent (a distant relative), Robert Browning, Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Claude Monet and Henry James (a close friend of Ariana). James had several prolonged visits with the Curtises between 1887 and 1907, and, when not in Venice, wrote many letters to his "Dear Mrs. Curtis," often with tales about life at home in England or with requests for introductions for his acquaintances.

Henry James to
Ariana Randolph Wormeley Curtis
May 3, 1897

Henry James to
Ariana Randolph Wormeley Curtis
May 3, 1897

The correspondence of Daniel Sargent Curtis and his family is a small but vital collection and includes not only letters from Henry James to Ariana Curtis, but also letters from Henry Adams, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Lady Ritchie and John Addington Symonds.

Ask for MS-194 to read the letters in the collection.

A Day to Remember

On June 6, 1944, Clinton Gardner, Class of 1944, found himself digging a foxhole on Omaha Beach as part of the D-Day invasion of German occupied Europe. The landing area was already strewn with bodies and the Germans were raking the incoming allied forces with artillery and machine gun fire. Gardner, a Lieutenant in the artillery, was not about to move any further inland until the infantry made a hole in the German defenses, and that did not seem to be about to happen.

An incoming round suddenly exploded in front of him. His head snapped back and then a curtain of blood blinded him. In his memoir, D-Day and Beyond, Gardner recounts how he stood up and staggered toward two of his fellow officers wiping blood from his eyes. The two officers stared at him in horror. Then he reached up and felt his helmet. There was a gaping hole, large enough that he could get two hands into it. Gingerly he felt around and found that he could feel a soft, mushy surface that he assumed must be his brain. Sick and disoriented though he was, he managed to get his first aid kit out and pour sulfa powder into the hole and then stuff it full of gauze.

Unable to walk or speak properly, Gardner watched as his unit packed up and began to move inland, following the infantry who had suddenly begun to advance. The other officers told him that they would send medics back for him. He was soon alone on the beach with a handful of wounded and dying soldiers, all of whom would have been killed by German mortar fire had not a group of British troops happened along. The British moved the wounded Americans up the beach to a sheltered area among some rocks.

After 23 hours wounded on the beach, a group of medics finally arrived and moved Gardner and the others to a field hospital in Vierville. There Gardner made the happy discovery that what he had felt through the gash in his helmet was not his brain, but badly lacerated scalp tissue. Though his skull was scarred, it was not broken. Getting the helmet off was another matter: it took three doctors and a fair amount of pulling and twisting as the edges had curled in and were imbedded in his scalp. Eventually Gardner was sent back to England to recover, but that was not the end of the war for him. Later he would find himself being bombed by friendly fire during Battle of the Bulge and still later he would serve as the American Commandant at Buchenwald following its liberation.

Gardner’s helmet remains, to this day, the most damaged helmet whose wearer survived his wounds.

To see Clint Gardner’s helmet or to read his letter home ask for MS-1109. A guide to the collection is available. To read his book, D-Day and Beyond, ask for Alumni G1728.

"An Amusing Experience"

Rupert Brooke was born in 1887 in the English Midlands town of Rugby, where his father was a master at Rugby School. He is chiefly remembered today for his poetry, but among his contemporaries he was an icon of youth and the promise of literary talent. Brooke, at various times referred to as a "young Apollo," the "handsomest man in England," and a "lithe and radiant figure," played the muse for the literary and artistic circles that he frequented.

When World War I began in the fall of 1914, Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as a sub-lieutenant. He participated in the failed defense of Antwerp a few months later, where he witnessed first-hand the true brutality of the war. In a February 1915 letter to poet and critic Edmund Gosse, Brooke reflects on the loss of friends as a result of the ongoing conflict:

We’re going abroad very soon, it appears. It’ll be an amusing experience. But I wish we could beat them, & have done with it, this summer. So many of my friends have been killed lately. It forestalls Time too much in stripping the world away from me.

Several months later, Rupert Brooke would himself die aboard a French hospital ship near the Greek island of Skyros on April 22, 1915. The cause was not a war wound but blood poisoning caused by a severely infected mosquito bite. Brooke’s poetry had begun to garner widespread attention after two of his war sonnets, "The Dead" and "The Soldier," were published in The Times Literary Supplement. A month after he died, 1914 & Other Poems was published and became wildly popular, requiring eleven subsequent impressions in that year alone. This explosion of Brooke's popularity was fueled by the tragic circumstances of his death, an event that Brooke anticipated in his poetry. The numerous versions of Brooke's works that appeared after his demise speak to the immediate impact they had, but also to their continuing significance decades later: a Braille version of 1914 had a handwritten dedication to a son who died in the Battle of the Somme and a 1940 Armed Services Edition of Brooke's poems, specially published for American troops serving in World War II, testified to the continuing popularity of his work as a symbol of patriotic fervor.

Brooke's death and the subsequent publication of 1914 inspired an outpouring of eulogistic prose and poetry lamenting the loss of such an inspiring young man. Despite this postmortem adulation of Brooke as a tragic and stirring example of British patriotism, not every voice praised the young writer. After Brooke’s death, his close friends and fellow poets took great pains, both privately and publicly, to separate public sentiment for Brooke the person from Brooke's actual literary talent. One of these comrades, the Welsh poet Edward Thomas, wrote a frank assessment of Brooke in a letter to Robert Frost:

It would take me too long to be sure what I think of Rupert…. I don’t think ill of him. I think he succeeded in being youthful and yet intelligible and interesting (not only pathologically) more than most poets since Shelley. But thought gave him (and me) indigestion. He couldn’t mix his thought or the result of it with his feeling. He could only think about his feeling. Radically, I think he lacked power of expression. He was a rhetorician, dressing things up better than they needed. And I suspect he knew too well both what he was after and what he achieved.

Despite these attempts to regulate the strength of feeling about Brooke's poetry, the popular appeal of his passionate lines came to define a jingoistic philosophy towards the war – one that would be challenged by later poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

To learn more about Brooke, stop by to view our latest exhibit: "A Richer Dust": Rupert Brooke and the Culture of Mourning, curated by Laura Braunstein and Morgan Swan. It will be on exhibit in the Class of 1965 Galleries until July 31, 2014.

Slow Sales on the Sphinx

Tucked into one of our copies of Oscar Wilde's The Sphinx (London: Bodley Head, 1894) is a fragment of a Wilde poem in his hand and a royalty statement from his publisher, John Lane. As of February 1895, 132 copies were still in stock and only nine had sold since the previous statement in September. Lane calculated the 10% royalty at two pounds, no shillings, and three pence.

This limited edition had a print run of 200, so only a third of the copies had found buyers at that point. The statement refers to two different states of the book: the more luxurious, large-paper copy sold for over four pounds while the small paper copy was priced at 35 shillings.

Our second copy of the same book lacks the glamor of manuscript inserts, but has a watercolor of an Egyptian scene painted beneath the half title. We haven't figured out who the painter is (the signature looks like "Bamdin") but it is clearly not in the style of Charles Ricketts' illustrations.

Come see for yourself by asking for Val 826 W64 W6 copies 1 and 2.

A Sot for All His Life

We love it when our books speak to each other. In 1722, Daniel DeFoe published his Journal of the Plague Year (London: E. Nutt, 1722). In it he refers to one physician who warded off infection with prodigious alcohol consumption:

Nether did I do, what I know some did, keep the Spirits always high and hot with Cordials, and Wine, and such things, and which, as I observ'd, one learned Physician used himself so much to, as that he could not leave them off when the Infection was quite gone, and so became a Sot for all his Life after.

Defoe was only a child when the Plague hit London in 1665, so he drew on other accounts for his "eye-witness" Journal. One of his principle sources was Nathanial Hodges's Loimologia: or an Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665.  We have the 1721 London edition of that work and it has a curious passage where Hodges described the methods he used to ward off infection.

Before dinner he had a glass of Sack "to warm the Stomach, refresh the Spirits, and dissipate any beginning Lodgment of the Infection." This was followed by a heavy dinner with plenty of wine. The early evening was spent visiting patients, then he ended the day "by drinking to Cheerfulness of my old favourite Liqour."

More alarming, he always carried wine with him and would have a glass "if in the Day-time I found the least Approaches of the Infection," such as "Guidiness, Loathing of the Stomach, and Faintness." Hum, I wonder what could have caused those symptoms--other than the Plague, of course?

Sobering statistics from Loimologia

To relive a Plague year and marvel that anyone survived at all, ask for Val 825D36 S21 (Defoe, see page 276) and Rare RC114.Q5 1721 (Hodges, see page 222).

Hopkins and Mitsui

Nowadays when Dartmouth students hear the name Hopkins, they think of the "Hop," the campus performing arts center and home to chicken tender quesos from the Courtyard Café grill. Yet the memory of President Hopkins at Dartmouth spans far beyond the funky building that bears his name. Amidst the turmoil that World War II produced, President Hopkins extended a helping hand to an atypical pupil. Takanobu "Nobu" Mitsui, class of 1943, was a legacy at Dartmouth, a physics major, but more importantly in an era of international conflict, a Japanese national. His experience demonstrates how President Hopkins established Hanover as a haven during wartime hysteria.

The outbreak of World War II coincided with Mitsui’s matriculation at Dartmouth in the fall of 1939. By August of 1941, as the relationship between Japan and the United States was deteriorating, the undergraduate began to debate whether he would continue his studies or return home. Despite the possibility of internment, Mitsui wished to remain at Dartmouth.

He was fortunate to have the sponsorship of a classmate of his father’s, Charles Griffith, class of 1915, as well as the backing of the President of the College himself. On August, 11, 1941, President Hopkins expressed his willingness to help Mitsui remain in the United States when he wrote to Griffith stating, "I can see no likely risk in the sponsorship which you have established, and I should be very glad, as a matter of fact, to cooperate with you or to give any official or personal endorsement that might be helpful to you in the matter at any point." Although Nobu’s father, Takanaga, wanted him to return home, he allowed Nobu to remain at Dartmouth due to the support of Hopkins and Griffith.

The events of December 7, 1941, revealed the strength of Mitsui’s relationship with the College. On the day of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, reporters targeted Mitsui as an outsider and solicited him for an interview. Nonetheless, a group of Mitsui’s peers also congregated at his dormitory, showing their support and assuring Mitsui that he was welcome in the Dartmouth community. In his memoir, Mitsui declared how "being classified as enemy at first left me feeling forlorn and helpless, but the goodwill expressed by school authorities, the student governing body," who had voted to guarantee his well being as long as the government allowed him to stay, "and our close friends was supportive and warmly welcome." It is clear that he felt as though he had a firm support system in Hanover.

The day following the bombing, Mitsui "felt a vague uneasiness," fearing that the attack may prompt someone to act against him, yet he "had not experienced the slightest change in atmosphere" on campus. He later described how "when the war did begin, I was not thrown into a panic. Everyone's manner toward me was all I could have wished. Basically, it was as if they had known from the beginning that my presence was harmless."

Mitsui visited President Hopkins later that day, who described him merely as "a victim of circumstances." Mitsui recalled how he stood "gazing gratefully into the frank, unwavering eyes of a man who harbored no discrimination whatsoever against someone from a foreign country." He juxtaposed his experience with one that someone in the opposite situation may have encountered since "the president of a Japanese university could not possibly have shown publicly such concern for a foreign enemy student studying abroad. If he were to do so he would be labeled as unpatriotic, and it would become impossible for him to stay in office." This was not the case with President Hopkins; although he was often away from campus, he made every effort to ensure Mitsui's well being.

Not only did President Hopkins help Mitsui remain at Dartmouth by providing moral support, but he also stepped in when the war interfered with Mitsui’s tuition payments. Nobu's family had been using his cousin in New York, Sadakazu, as a medium by which to fund his education. When Sadakazu became interned at Ellis Island, the accounts were frozen, and Mitsui could no longer pay his Dartmouth bills. After extensive correspondences with the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the administration decided to offer Mitsui loans while he completed his studies.

Nonetheless, wartime circumstances required Mitsui to make some compromises. President Hopkins suggested that Mitsui end his involvement with the Dartmouth Broadcasting System (DBS). He thought it would be best for Mitsui to avoid any connection with radio broadcasting and photography, which were the basis of the club. In a letter from July of 1942, President Hopkins stated that this recommendation was "made in the desire to protect him rather than in any question which we have in our own minds," revealing that instead of doubting Mitsui’s actions, he merely sought to avoid any misconceptions concerning the student’s extra curricular activities.

However, the entire Hanover community did not share President Hopkins’s feelings toward Mitsui. A newspaper article from September 23, 1943, declared "While New Hampshire boys languish and die in barbarous Japanese prison camps, a scion of one of Japan’s handful of great families whose wealth greases the gears of the global war, dwells unobtrusively in the academic atmosphere of this New Hampshire college town." While their anger is understandable, those that personally knew Mitsui saw no reason to object to his presence.

Despite the opposition, Mitsui did not regret staying at Dartmouth. In a letter to President Hopkins from January 11, 1943, Mitsui wrote that "staying here means I am fighting for democracy… going back means either I am giving up or postponing my duty as a human being, God’s child." Furthermore, his memoirs reveal his strong conviction that Dartmouth was his home. He stated, "Immediately upon the outbreak of the war, I found myself firmly determined to stay in America, and later I came to realize that the motivating factor in my decision was this place, here where I was." This was in part due to the bond he felt with his friends and fraternity brothers, and the hill winds and picturesque setting of Dartmouth may have contributed to this sentiment as well, but it undoubtedly was also related to his connection with President Hopkins.

Likewise, President Hopkins held a special affinity for Mitsui. In 1944 he exchanged a series of letters with an acquaintance, John Tyssowski, in which he explained his sponsorship. This correspondence reveals how he had more than a single motivation for supporting the Japanese student. Although President Hopkins believed continuing his connection with Mitsui would be advantageous for the nation: "I always felt that we were in all probability rendering a large public service in affording educational opportunities to a man of his prominence at home and bound to have his influence in periods subsequent to the war. "The nature of their relationship was more than mere politics. In addition to writing how he had "the very definite feeling that Mitsui may be very helpful in the period succeeding the war," he continued by stating: "Moreover, as always happens when personal relations are involved, I have become very fond of the boy, and he is to be classified as 'my favorite [Japanese relation]' for the time being and I think probably permanently."

Ask for Hopkins's President Office Records: Student Undergraduate files to see the letters, and to read the translations of Mr. Mitsui's memoir completed by Edward Rasmussen '42, ask for MS-1069.

Also see a previous blog post regarding Nobu Mitsui.

Posted for Haley Shaw '15.

How Far the Mighty

Joseph McCarthy preached the perils of Communism's insidious reach into American's institutions to garner immense political power and control during the 1950s. His name has since become a synonym for fear mongering and the worst kind of political abuse. After riding high for several years, McCarthy finally stumbled.

In 1954 McCarthy and his attorney Roy Cohn were accused of bringing undue influence to bear on the Army in regard to its treatment of one of McCarthy's former aides. While McCarthy was found to be innocent of the charges, his reputation was badly damaged by the media coverage and never recovered. He became a liability to his party, and on December 2, 1954, he was officially censured by the Senate. He died three years later.

One of the Senators who helped precipitate McCarthy's downfall was Senator Ralph Flanders from Vermont. In a note to Harold Rugg dated December 31, 1954, he makes a somewhat casual, almost offhand, remark about the censure proceedings which he had instigated.

We didn't get to Scotland. I concluded that I had to come home to play my part in the censure proceedings.

Flanders then wraps up the letter with another reference to McCarthy.

I am having sent from the Washington office the speeches on the subject of the junior Senator from Wisconsin, which I assume are the speeches to which you refer.

Its ironic that one of the most feared and notorious men in American politics would be so quickly demoted in stature such that he isn't even mentioned by name.

Ask for Mss 954681 to see the letter from Flanders to Rugg.