***

When we think about quilting, we tend to think about hand-crafted patchwork coverlets and puffy down coats. We don’t think about armor. But in fact, quilted armor played an important role in European warfare from the time of the Crusades through the sixteenth century.

The most basic form of quilted armor, the jack, was simple enough for a soldier or his wife to make at home: a sleeved coat made of two outer layers of linen, canvas, or fustion that enclosed a layer of padding, with small pieces of metal stuffed in the padding for extra protection.* The jack’s up-market relative, the brigandine, was made by a professional armorer and combined the flexibility of the jack with the protection of plate. Small metal plates were riveted to a canvas foundation, overlapped like scales for ease of movement. The scaled canvas was then covered with a rich material and a lining.

Whether made by a pro or run up by loving hands at home, so-called “soft armor” was surprisingly effective against sword cuts and arrows, though it provided no protection against a thrown lance or a mace. Even with the advent of metal armor, foot soldiers continued to wear fabric armor as their primary defense and knights wore padded garments in conjunction with chain or plate as an additional defense.

The use of quilted armor finally declined with the rise of firearms and heavy artillery at the beginning of the seventeenth century, only to reappear in the twentieth century in the form of the bulletproof vest.

* Sir Thomas Wyatt, who led a Protestant rebellion in England in 1554, had gold pieces sewn into his jack instead of the usual metal or horn scales so that he would have the dual protection of armor and ready money if he had to flee the country.

Yet, against all odds, Agnes Young McAlpin managed to alert next-door neighbors to her plight, rallying their support to rise up against her abusers. After escaping with her children to a safe house, she sued for divorce in a weeklong trial that made national headlines.

It’s an amazing story.

I’m delighted to have  Marcia back here on the Margins to talk about the book and how she wrote it.*

Take it away, Marcia!

What brought you to the story of Agnes Young McAlpin?  Why do you think it’s important to tell this story today?

For research related to another of my nonfiction books, I needed to look at early 20^th-century Pennsylvania newspapers, and they were filled with coverage of Agnes Young McAlpin’s divorce trial. Much as I tried to put on blinders and get my work done, I kept getting distracted by the small photo of her and the caption identifying her as an “educated” Alaskan seeking divorce from a dentist in Butler, about an hour outside Pittsburgh. “News of Her First-Born’s Death Was Withheld by Butler Family,” declared a subheading, while another added, “Baby’s Grave Is Hidden.”

Obviously, this was quite a story. A glance at other papers published around the same date showed that it was getting widespread coverage. Moreover, the press seemed to empathize with this woman, whom they identified as an Alaska Native—she was Haida—but one sufficiently assimilated to meet their approval. The Butler Eagle said it had expected Agnes McAlpin to be an Indian, Eskimo, or other “low-bred person,” only to find she was a “refined and cultured lady,” whom Kenneth had met in Alaska during the madness of the Klondike gold rush.

Then there were the villainous relatives: the mother- and sister-in-law from hell, who welcomed Agnes by showing her to a stark, unheated attic room, giving her the silent treatment, and concealing her from visitors. They told close friends they felt disgraced by Kenneth’s marriage to a woman they accurately described as “nearly a full-blooded Indian.” Instead of taking Agnes’s side, the husband spent most of his time away from home, ostensibly looking for work, but seldom finding any and never writing to Agnes. She bore him two children, but he refused to be seen with her in public. When she discovered she was pregnant a third time, he conspired with his female relatives to try to abort her against her will, forcing her to flee to Alaska in fear for her life.

Agnes’s story encompasses themes of colonization, racism, and domestic abuse that are relevant today. But I was drawn to it largely because, as one reader of my book put it, “Agnes did stuff.” Ignoring the McAlpins’ objections, she returned to Alaska twice, sometimes without money to buy food on the arduous journey. In Butler, she refused to stay in the shadows. Never mind that the McAlpins did their best to confine her to the attic.  Running after her children, or intercepting visitors in her in-laws’ absence, Agnes managed to meet and charm the neighbors. Many were longtime friends of the McAlpins, but Agnes recruited them to her side. When she was ready to sue for her divorce, they offered her a safe house and free legal services, which made her freedom possible.

Writing about a historical figure like Agnes Young McAlpin requires living with her over a period of years.  What was it like to have McAlpin as your constant companion?

It’s interesting that you ask. One of her neighbors, a so-called society matron, testified that Agnes was “good company,” and I agree. I was especially fortunate to find dozens of letters written by her, her husband Kenneth, and her in-laws, beautifully preserved and organized in a family collection. This gave me a window into Agnes’s thoughts and feelings, particularly the letters in which she unburdened herself to a young brother-in-law, Victor McAlpin, whom she thought she could trust.

Kenneth’s letters to Agnes and Victor were also preserved, affording me a look at the spouses’ differing views of the same events, with Kenneth always perceiving himself as the victim.  These and other missives from the mother-in-law, the sister-in-law, and the “other woman” who eventually entered the picture helped me bring these key players to life. I’m indebted to the descendants of Kenneth’s oldest brother, Archie, who kept the letters and allowed me access to them.

What type of sources do you rely on in writing about a non-elite woman from the past?

I’ve already mentioned newspapers and correspondence. I also made liberal use of the usual genealogical records: censuses, birth and death certificates, etc. For that, and to find clippings from Butler newspapers, which exhaustively covered the divorce trial, I relied on the staff and volunteers of the Butler Area Public Library.

Like everyone else, I also use search engines, and in this case Google was enormously helpful. Agnes had a father-in-law, Volney McAlpin, who felt sympathy for her and may have protected her, had he not died shortly after she arrived in Pennsylvania. A historical Alaskan newspaper told me that Volney had preceded Kenneth to Alaska, taking several trips there during his lifetime. Googling his unusual name, I learned that Volney had assembled a formidable collection of Haida and Tlingit artifacts, some of which his descendants donated to the American Museum of Natural History in 1945. Just a few years ago, one of these items ended up in an exhibit at the Bard College Graduate Center here in New York.

As a former journalist, I don’t hesitate to reach out to living people who might know anything, however peripheral, about someone from the past. I emailed the Bard anthropology professor who’d put together the exhibit. He referred me to a former graduate student of his who’d done extensive research on the Volney McAlpin Alaskan Collection at the natural history museum. He also told me the exciting news about the cache of letters, including some about a “Native girl” who had married into the family.

Through that connection, I contacted the family guardians of the letters, who invited me to come to Indiana and read them. I learned that the descendants were appalled to learn of Agnes’s mistreatment (which a grandson of Kenneth, related to him through his second wife, discovered in a genealogical search) and were willing to share her story. Indeed, since I began my project, that grandson has reached out to his Indigenous relatives in Alaska, and they’ve stayed in touch.

Agnes Young McAlpin had both Haida and European ancestry. You describe her as a “code switcher”: she had a European-style convent education but was also deeply aware of her Haida traditions.  Were there special difficulties in writing about a woman with cultural roots so different from your own?

There were definitely special responsibilities. Taking my cue from art historian Emily L. Moore, who has written about the New Deal totem pole restoration projects that employed one of Agnes’s sons, I made sure to identify myself as non-Native in all communications with potential sources.

Early on, I presented my project to the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, asking their opinion on whether I should proceed with a project, then tentatively supported by a Butler pastor, to memorialize the death of Agnes’s firstborn son by erecting a plaque in the cemetery where his grave is unmarked. The council made clear that, for questions like that, I had to talk to the family. For all my projects, I try to locate descendants, not always successfully. For this book, I saw that it was not optional.

With the help of the then-mayor of Ketchikan, AK, who is also a journalist and poet, I found that at that time, 2022, one of Agnes’s grandsons was alive at 93, although seriously ill.  His family, the Alaskan McAlpins, generously invited me to visit them, and I did, twice. The time I spent with them was a delight, and the grandson, who has since died, understood the basic outlines of my project and welcomed me. He’d always known that his grandmother went to Pennsylvania and had to free herself of some sort of intolerable situation. The family was pleased that I could fill in the details. I returned with scans of family photos and useful information. Best of all was spending time with them.

In California, I met two grandchildren of Agnes’s maternal aunt, Cecilia Baronovich Balenti, who was a few years younger than her niece. The two had been close before Agnes married and moved to Pennsylvania, and they revived their friendship later. Cecilia’s grandchildren shared with me photographs, news clippings, and their grandmother’s unpublished writings about her childhood memories of visiting relatives in a traditional Haida village, an experience that Agnes shared with her. The grandchildren also led me to a book, Alaska Silver, written by a white man once smitten with Cecilia, in which he describes Cecilia multiple times and mentions Agnes without naming her. That book deepened my understanding of Cecilia and filled in blanks about a period of Agnes’s life when, while still married, she experimented with living independently.

I also relied heavily on an extensive oral interview about Agnes’s family that one of her brothers, Walter Young, recorded in 1971. By then, Agnes had long been dead, but her brother mentioned her several times in the interview, which focused on their parents, the houses and fishing camps where they spent their childhoods, and the way their father, a hereditary clan chief, melded Christian and Haida traditions. The person conducting this interview—a Canadian anthropologist who was then in grad school—is still active in the field and remembers Walter. Agnes’s other brothers left other descendants whom I’ve talked to or texted, but these first-hand recollections, guided by an anthropologist’s questions, gave me the confidence to write about Agnes’s childhood.

What was the most surprising thing you found doing historical research for The Attic Wife?

That  Americans of that eraweren’t as buttoned up as we think. From researching my previous book, The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill, I already knew that abortion, though strictly criminal, was then commonplace. However, I didn’t expect to find abortion playing an important part in this book as well. Her sister-in-law, a licensed physician, had participated in a criminal abortion, for which she evaded legal consequences. She also oversaw the forcible attempts to abort Agnes, which sent Agnes fleeing to Alaska.

On a lighter note, I was delighted to find Agnes complaining in a letter that her husband thought “I’d be contented to sit on my ass the rest of my days.” Well said, but the phrasing surprised me!

What is your favorite research tip for people who want to write about obscure historical women?

Well, I can’t give advice about medieval times, but for American women alive in the late 19^th or early 20th century, you’ll probably be using newspapers, vital records, and, if you’re lucky, letters and diaries. To organize those, I’ll share some nuts-and-bolts tips about naming files. Attach a date to every one of your files in the format YYYY MM DD. Then alphabetizing them in File Explorer or Finder will put them into chronological order. It’s amazing how often this reveals cause and effect: earlier events set later ones into motion.

I often use very long file names. In addition to the date, I might include the title of a newspaper (to compare different reports on the same events) and a fragment of a quote you might use, so you don’t go nuts later searching for it. For example, to answer the question about things that surprised me, I searched File Explorer for “on my ass,” and voila!

Marcia Biederman is the author of five nonfiction books about remarkable American women, as well as three mystery novels. A former journalist residing in Brooklyn, New York, she has written more than 100 pieces for the New York Times on subjects ranging from ice dancing to automobile wheel repair, and her guest essays have appeared in the New York Daily News and the Hartford Courant.

For more information about Marcia and her writing, check out her website: https://marciabiederman.com/

*You can read other interviews with Marcia here and here:

✢ ✢✢

I always learn something new when My Own True Love and I head out on a Road Trip Through History.  Our recent expedition to Colonial Michilimacinac was no exception.

• I learned that eighteenth century cooks dried pumpkins as well as apples* and used pig bladders to seal crocks of prickled vegetables.

• I had long known that when push came to shove (so to speak) the bayonet was a more useful weapon than the musket to which it was affixed.  I had not previously known that with repeated firing the sides of the bayonet became coated with a greasy toxin that meant soldiers stabbed with a bayonet were unlikely to survive even a flesh wound. **

• I was introduced to wall guns–a weapon that combined the blasting power of a cannon with the mobility of a musket.  Obviously a besieged fort’s best friend.

But the thing that struck me the most forcibly was the difference between how the British and the French built log cabins in the wilderness.

The Anglo-American log cabin style is what I picture when I think of log cabins:  horizontal logs fitted together with notches and chinked with mud.

photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress

It is the form that evolved into WPA lodges, resort cabins, and Lincoln Logs.***

The French Canadian style of construction, known as poteaux en terre, or posts in the ground, used vertical timbers set into trenches, then weather-proofed with chinking and plaster.

It’s a small difference, I know.  But it somehow seemed emblematic of the larger  cultural differences that exploded into violence along the borders of the British and French colonies–a subject I’ll be coming back to in later posts.

*I may have learned about dried pumpkin before and simply blocked it out. I know it’s un-American, but I do not like pumpkin and cannot understand wanting to preserve it for future use.

**I’m not sure why this came as a surprise. Until the commercial production of penicillin in WWII, infected wounds were a major cause of death in warfare.

***Invented by John Lloyd Wright, the son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Really. I was as surprised as you are.

I am pleased to have Mary Lisa here to answer some questions about Selling Opportunity, Mary Kay, and what she learned from writing about the woman and business.

Take it away, Mary Lisa!

What path lead you to the story of Mary Kay Ash and her creation of Mary Kay Cosmetics?  Why do you think it’s important to tell this story today?

For a biographer, Mary Kay Ash was the best of both worlds: undocumented American history and the rags-to-riches story of a public figure.

She belonged to a demographic that historians don’t really examine. Mary Kay was a dutiful daughter and diligent student who believed every bromide she ever heard about hard work making dreams come true, over-performed in any task she was assigned, and yet still found herself in a dead-end marriage with two babies by the age of eighteen. As the success of her company demonstrated, she proved to be far from the only woman desperate for a second chance and self-invention.

Writing that story let me dig into the culture of evangelical capitalism, how we are brought up to define the American Dream, traditional gender roles, women’s access to capital, and a lot of other issues that are especially topical today.

All that, plus a page-turning personal history that ended up with Mary Kay being the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange and the only woman in Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time.

A man with that level of influence on American culture would have been the subject of a biography long ago.

Most of my readers will recognize the name Mary Kay as a product—and probably have opinions about direct selling as a business model—but know little about Mary Kay as a person.  (Me included before I read your book.)  Are there particular challenges in writing about a figure who is best known as a brand?

Women regard beauty brands as a referendum on taste. This is not a brand you’ll see on the cover of Vogue, so the biggest challenge is getting them to pick up the book.

Once you get past that, most people assume this book will be an endorsement of her brand and/or current MLM business models. It’s quite the opposite. But you have to read the book to realize that.

Writing about a historical figure like Mary Kay Ash requires living with her over a period of years.  What was it like to have Mary Kay as your constant companion?

After seeing so much video, reading so much publicity, and talking to so many people who knew her, I found myself thinking, “Hmmm . . . I bet she would have done this next. . . . “  I started developing a “spidey sense” about what she left out of her life story. Intuitions led me to biographical details that nobody else had been able to find: her parents’ divorce and remarriage, her sketchy stepfather, her first husband’s work at a nightclub known as a drug and gambling den, her financial bailout for her third husband, etc.

What was the most surprising thing you learned working on this book?

That anybody could write anything about Mary Kay and get away with it. Hard to imagine that happening in coverage of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or any other male CEO.

During her lifetime, Mary Kay made that work to her advantage. She was an easy story: campy, quotable, cooperative. No fact-checking needed. Even if the story was inaccurate or insulting, she would still send the reporter a thank you note. So she got a lot of coverage, which she used to build her brand.

How does your previous career as a beauty journalist inform your response to Mary Kay, and Mary Kay Cosmetics?



Mention the name Mary Kay Ash to a beauty editor and she will make a moue of distaste, perhaps followed by a graceful shudder. I’m sure that was one of the things that attracted me to the subject.

I left the beauty beat in 1997. Well before that, I was known as the cranky one who asked inappropriate questions at press conferences. Ruth Whitney, Glamour’s editor-in-chief, had recruited me as Beauty Features Editor in the early 1990s, a time when the magazine was using its considerable clout to promote Susan Faludi’s Backlash and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. Whitney added me to the magazine’s coverlines meeting and let me focus on ingredients stories and female entrepreneurship; both years that I was on staff, Glamour was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

I was not so lucky with other editors at other titles. The perks of being a top beauty editor were phenomenal, so it was not a job that most women willingly surrendered. But, one fine day, I found myself in a limo going from the Chanel sample sale to an all-the-caviar-you-can-eat event at The Four Seasons—bored with being a beauty editor—and I realized it was time to stop. My first book, Color Stories, put the nail in that coffin.

We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past and little-known women.  What are the challenges of writing about a prominent woman from the twentieth century?



People suspend their willingness to put themselves in another place and time. As history comes closer to their own lifetime, solipsism takes over. I’ve had people ask why Mary Kay didn’t jump on the bandwagon for second wave feminism. They don’t consider that, in Texas, it was illegal for a woman to open a bank account, take a job, or write a check without her husband’s permission—a law didn’t change until 1968 and a culture that didn’t change until much later.

You also find yourself playing whack-a-mole with the internet. For example: Type Mary Kay’s name into a search engine and Biography.com will dish up an official-looking factoid explaining that she was “hired away” by World Gift in 1952—which was a full year before World Gift was founded and at least two years before Mary Kay ever considered working for them. (Sadly, that one made it into a NewYorker.com piece: proof of how pervasive the disinformation can be.)

Selling Opportunity is as much—or more—a history of direct selling as it is a biography.  Why did you decide to take this approach?

There was no way to write about Mary Kay without writing about the business that consumed her every waking hour.

I was already a couple of months into the project before I learned that I was going to have to figure out a lot of the business history for myself. The major work on the subject, sociologist Nicole Woolsey Biggart’s wonderful Charismatic Capitalism, published in 1989, included a high-level history of early direct sales companies. But, as I tracked down original documents of those early companies, I found an ad hoc, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, improvisatory industry and not the organized, intentional enterprises described in her book. I also saw found brilliant African-American businesswomen, like Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker, who had not been mentioned.

So I took a different approach. Borrowing from my start as a reporter, I did “history from the ground up” documentation in imitation of my heroes Studs Terkel and the late Mike Wallace, who headed the Gotham Center for New York City, where I was listed as an “expert resource” from 2003–2015.

I saw Mary Kay as a figure who—like Henry Ford or Dale Carnegie—synthesized cultural influences and then sold that synthesis back to her customers. She was a one-woman historical feedback loop.

Readers have alternately described Selling Opportunity as a hagiography or as a hatchet job, depending on how they feel about Mary Kay Ash.  Why is Mary Kay such a polarizing figure?

Class prejudice. Mary Kay was as a working class Southern girl who became a teenage mother. She loved Liberace. She drove pink Cadillacs. She wore big wigs and the kind of jewelry that fashion magazines do not find to be in good taste. People either embrace that as authenticity or run far and fast in the opposite direction.

Regional prejudice plays a part too. Mary Kay is identified with traditional gender roles, the motivational speaking industry, the Southern Baptist Convention, and conspicuous consumption. Those are not topics beloved by legacy media.

Then there’s politics. Donald Trump ran an MLM. Betsy DeVos, his former Secretary of Education, is married to the CEO of Amway. His former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development was a spokesman for a nutritional MLM. Lumping Mary Kay, who had a massive stroke in 1996 and died in 2001, with current MLM culture gives any pundit a lot of clicks.

Selling Opportunity straddles the boundary between biography and business history. How did you balance those components in telling Mary Kay’s story?

Mary Kay was an ideal subject—a one-woman history of direct selling. Her life touched on everything I needed to tell that story.

What she didn’t experience directly, she experienced indirectly through her many marriages. For example: Husband Number Two started with the old tea wagon traditions inherited from the 19th century, then moved to Fuller Brush, the company that changed the image of the door to door salesman; thanks to Husband Number Four, she had a sister-in-law who founded an outrageously successful company that later provided the model for Mary Kay’s own recruiting and rewards; Husband Number Five had been involved in one of the era’s most notorious network marketing scams. And so on . . .

Your previous book, Color Stories, is an engaging look behind the scenes in America’s beauty industry. Was it a challenge to make the leap to a historical narrative?

A lot happened between that book and this one.

Color Stories came out in 2002, after I made the switch from lifestyle to business reporting, a beat that tends to integrate lots of historical narrative. I was working full-time, finishing a master’s degree in the history of material culture, and writing an academic reference, The Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear (Bloomsbury, 2008). That book included hundreds of biographies and brand histories, so that gave me plenty of practice.

After that, I was looking at PhD programs when I won a Leon Levy Fellowship for Biography. That was a life-changing experience: I had a full year to research, develop Mary Kay’s story, and discuss my work with distinguished practitioners. When the fellowship ended, I also benefited from a year at the Wertheim Study of the New York Public Library.

Unfortunately, I had to put reporting on hold for a dozen years because I became a self-supporting single mom—that “Can you be in Shanghai by Saturday?” schedule doesn’t work when you’re raising a child—but I was able to sneak in some academic writing and conference presentations. It’s no coincidence that this book finally came out the same year that my son started college.


Is there anything else you wish I had asked you about?

I changed my writing style for this book. Selling Opportunity uses a lot of idioms to help readers understand characters who used those tropes.

I also committed to a non-academic writing style. True, this book has over a thousand end notes, but I didn’t want it to read that way. Going back to Terkel and Wallace again, I am a fan of accessible history—that’s how I became a fan of your blog.

After her start as a reporter and editor on daily newspapers, Mary Lisa Gavenas became an editor at Mirabella, Glamour, and InStyle magazines, was twice a columnist for ELLE, and freelanced for publications ranging from Salon to Fast Company. Writing for both the academic and popular press, she is the author of Color Stories: Behind the Scenes in America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry (Simon & Schuster) and The Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear (Bloomsbury, 2008). Her current book, Selling Opportunity, a NYT Editors’ Choice, grew out of her fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography. Follow her online at https://marylisagavenas.com/

First up, a post from 2011, when maybe a dozen people were following me here in the Margins.

Who made the map of the modern Middle East?  The simple answer is:  Great Britain.  You want the long version?

In The Makers of the Modern Middle East  historians T.G. Fraser, Andrew Mango, and Robert McNamara tell the story of how today’s Middle East was created from the remains of the Ottoman Empire during the peace negotiations at the end of the First World War.

The Allies weren’t the only powers that had an interest in the future of the region. Prince Feisal, who led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire with British aid, hoped to build an Arab kingdom based on Syria and Palestine. Dr. Chaim Weizmann had laid the political groundwork for British support of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.  Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, created the modern, secular Turkish republic in the teeth of Allied opposition.

Fraser and his co-authors weave the details of competing territorial claims, conflicting political agreements, ignored reports, and colorful characters into a narrative as intricate as an Oriental rug, with a warp of Allied imperial ambitions and a weft of the emerging claims of Arab nationalism, Turkish nationalism and Zionism.

*   *   *

The bottom line?  If you promise the same piece of land to France, the Zionists and an Arab king, someone’s going to be unhappy when the war is over

“Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth… While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free…”

With Debs on my mind, it seemed like a good time to share this post from 2020.

Labor organizer Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855. He left home when he was fourteen to work for the railroad—not unusual for the time. In 1875, he helped organize a local lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman, a fraternal benefit society which gradually took on the role of a trade union. He rose rapidly in the organization, becoming its national secretary and treasurer in 1880.

In 1893, Debs took labor organization one step further, when he successfully united railway workers from different crafts into the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union. As the union’s first president, he successfully led its members in a strike for higher wages from the Great Northern Railway in April 1894. The national press gave him the nickname “King” Debs.

In June, “King” Debs and the union were in the news again in the great Pullman Strike. As a result of financial reverses in the panic of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut its wages by 25 percent, but did not cut rents for company-owned workers’ housing in Pullman, Illinois, the company town near (now in) Chicago. Many workers and their families faced starvation. Local members of the union sent a delegation to Pullman’s president, George M. Pullman, to present their grievances about low wages, poor working conditions and sixteen-hour work days. Pullman refused to meet with them.

The Pullman workers voted to strike and walked off the job on May 11, 1894. At its June meeting, the American Railway Union’s national council called for a nationwide boycott of trains carrying Pullman cars until the company submitted the dispute to arbitration by June 26. The company was unwilling to play.

Within four days, union locals in twenty-seven states went out on sympathy strikes, affecting twenty-nine railroads. Illinois governor John P. Altgeld sympathized with the strikers and initially refused call out the militia, so the railroads’ management called on the federal government for help. On July 2, U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney got an injunction against the strike from local judges on the grounds that the union was impeding mail service and interstate commerce. (1) Union leaders ignored the injunction. On July 4, President Grover Cleveland ordered 2,500 federal troops to Chicago. The strike ended within a week and troops were recalled on July 20.(2)

The Pullman Strike was a critical event in American labor history. It was also a turning point for Debs. He was arrested at the height of the violence and ultimately sentenced to six months in jail for contempt of court and conspiring to interfere with the U.S. mail. During his prison terms at Woodstock, Illinois, Debs read broadly. Introduced for the first time to the works of Karl Marx,(4) he came to see the labor movement as a struggle between classes.

After announcing his conversion to socialism in 1897, Debs helped found the Social Democratic party, which was renamed the Socialist Party in 1901. Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate for President five times between 1900 and 1920.His highest populist vote came in 1920, when he received about 915,000 popular votes. (But no votes in the electoral college.) (5) He was in prison at the time, serving a sentence for criticizing the federal government’s use of the 1917 Sabotage and Espionage Act against labor activists.

He was released from prison in 1921 by presidential order. His citizenship, which he lost in 1918 when he was convicted of sedition (for labor activism) , was posthumously restored in 1976.

(1) Unfortunately for the strikers, they derailed a locomotive attached to a U.S. mail train. And as you know, neither snow, nor sleet nor striking railway workers can stop the U.S. Postal Service from its appointed rounds.
(2) A lot happened in between the arrival of the troops and the end of the strike. Altgeld and Cleveland sent piss-y telegrams back and forth. Strikers rioted and destroyed lots of property. More federal troops arrived. State militia arrived. National guardsmen fired into the crowd, killing several strikers.(3) It was a busy week.
(3)When will people learn that is a bad idea? It never turns out well.
(4) Obviously a well-stocked prison library.
(5) Just to put this in context: the winner, Warren G. Harding, received 16,513,200 popular votes.

Uncle Sam (to the Wolf at the Door) One of you pesky critters comes around here about every twenty years; but this is the gun that gits you! (Illus. from Puck, April 11, 1894.

As I’ve mentioned before, occasionally an event, or person, or book, or idea begins tracking me down.[1] It shows up in footnotes or casual asides in books I’m reading. Eventually, I give in and go down the rabbit hole. Then, if it’s interesting or important enough, I share it with you. That is, after all, the social contract on which History in the Margins is based.

Lately, the Great Panic of 1893 has become insistent.

Here is what I knew pre-rabbit hole: The Great Panic of 1893 plunged the United States into a four-year depression. It was the worst economic panic in United States history prior to the Great Depression.[2]

Quite frankly, until recently, that was all I needed to know. But for the last year or so I’ve been spending a lot of time in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Great Panic of 1893 keeps coming up in terms of how it affected individual families. (For instance, the panic was the proximate cause of Sigrid Schultz’s  father moving the family back to Europe for what he thought would be a short time.) Finally I decided the time had come for me to get a firmer grasp on the panic’s causes, scope, and legacy.

Turns out there is a lot more to the story than I realized. Buckle up!

First we need to consider the term: a panic is not just a jazzier name for a recession or a depression, though they can, and often do, occur together.[3] A panic is a crisis in which people lose confidence in banks and large numbers of people withdraw their money in a short period of time[4], making banks unstable. A recession is a period of reduced economic activity: businesses can’t sell goods or services, so they lay people off, which means people can’t buy goods and services. A depression is a recession on a larger scale.

To my surprise, bank panics were pretty common in the last half of the nineteenth century: eighteen panics rocked the United States’ economy between 1863 and 1913. Most of them were centered in New York City, which was the heart of the nation’s financial system. In addition, regional panics hit the midwestern states of Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin in 1896, the mid-Atlantic states of Pennsylvania and Maryland in 1903, and Chicago in 1905.[5] I am neither an economist nor an economic historian, but it seems to me that the country was in a financial panic almost as often as it was in a state of non-panic between the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of the Great War.

Unlike most earlier nationwide financial panics, the Great Panic of 1893 began with banks in the Midwest and West instead of in New York. There were two causes of bank instability leading up to the panic. The U. S. Treasury’s gold reserves fell from roughly $190 million in 1890 to about $100 million in early 1893. The country was on the gold standard, which meant that Treasury notes could be redeemed for a fixed amount of gold.[6]Falling gold reserves led to fears, at home and abroad, that the government would be forced to suspend convertibility of notes. Some depositors began to convert their bank notes to gold while the converting was good. At the same time, roughly six months prior to the panic, the country entered an economic recession[7]. As the economy contracted, defaults on loans began to rise, which weakened banks’ balance sheets. Fearing for the security of their deposits, people began to withdraw their funds, creating a spiral of fear and further withdrawals.

In June, bank runs began in midwestern and western cities; more than one hundred banks failed. Between mid-July and mid-August, as the panic grew worse, another 340 banks failed. Banks in the Midwest and West began to withdraw funds they had on deposit with New York banks, creating strain on those banks in turn. In order to meet withdrawal requests, banks in New York began to sell assets. Asset prices fell. The downward spiral continued. More banks failed. Farm prices dropped. New construction largely stopped . Business and industry slowed down; more than 15,000 businesses had failed by the end of the year. People lost their jobs. Things were so bad that firms issued scrip and financial institutions used quasi-currencies like clearing house certificates[8] to make payments because the standard banking system was not functioning.

The banking panic ended in the fall of 1893. The economic depression it triggered lasted until mid-1897. The period was marked by violent strikes, the apogee and effective end of the Populist and free silver political movements, levels of unemployment that were only matched by those in the Great Depression[9], and a shift in public opinion in favor of currency and bank reform, regulation of business in the public interest, and labor relations. Even the wealthy were affected to some extent.

Not the Gilded Age portrayed in popular culture.

[1] You’re all familiar with this general phenomenon I’m sure. You become aware of something and then start seeing references to it everywhere. This is variously known as the Baader-Menhoff Phenomenon, frequency illusion, or, my favorite,  the Blue Ford Syndrome.

[2] Looking back, I am surprised I knew that much. American history is not my academic field.

[3] The United States has not suffered a large scale bank panic since the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933, proving that bank panics aren’t the only cause of recessions.

[4] The phrase “bank run” is much older than I expected. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it appears in its modern meaning as early as the end of the seventeenth century.  I suspect I am not the only one who assumed it was a literal description of events like this:

Depositors clamor to withdraw their savings from a bank in Berlin, 13 July 1931 . (Photographer Georg Pahl. Bundesarchive. Bild 102-12023)

[5] I must admit, I wonder how Chicago could have an economic panic all by itself. However, I refuse to go down that rabbit hole until I’ve dealt with the Panic of 1893 to my satisfaction. Any one else interested?

[6] Several years ago I tried to write a “word with a past” post about the term “gold standard.” I just went back to look at it again. The draft is a mess, but there are still some interesting bits there. Anyone interested in my giving it another try?

[7] In this case, the recession seems to have caused the panic rather than the other way around. Without going into details, factors leading the recession included a panic and depression in Europe that affected American markets, several years of agricultural problems as a result of storms, drought, and overproduction, and slowing investment in railroads, which had been an economic driver for two decades.

[8] I understood scrip, but I had to look up clearing house certificates. Turns out, the New York Clearing House was founded in 1853 to bring order to the complicated web of currency exchanges that had developed over the prior decade as a result of westward expansion. A Clearing House loan certificate, with the words, “payable through the Clearing House,” was the joint liability for all member banks. As such, they were a remarkably secure form of payment and were used as a substitute currency during financial panics between 1853 and 1913. It was probably illegal, but it was so successful that no one wanted to raise a fuss.

[9] More than ten percent for between five and six consecutive years.

For example, the creation of the New York Central Railroad’s Exposition Flyer,[1] which I stumbled across while researching what the woman I’m thinking about would have experienced traveling from Chicago to New York City in 1893.

This image of the Exposition Flyer is from 20th Century by Lucius Beebe.

The Columbian Exposition was expected to bring millions of people to Chicago in the summer of 1893—an expectation that was fulfilled. An estimated 27 million people visited the attraction during its six-month run. Railroads from east and west alike were eager to capture their share of those travelers.

The New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad were already competing over passenger traffic between Chicago and New York in the years before the Chicago exposition. Between 1881 and 1891, the two companies had managed to reduce the time their fastest trains took to make the trip from more than 30 hours to roughly 24, mostly by reducing the number of stops and limiting or eliminating cargo cars.[2] The fare was slightly higher to reflect the time saved.

On the eve of the exposition, the New York Central’s general passenger agent, George H. Daniels,[3] envisioned a train that would take only 20 hours to make the trip between New York and Chicago, building on the techniques of the various “limited” and express trains currently traveling the route. The Exposition Flyer, billed as the “fastest train on earth,” was a small train, usually limited to a “buffet smoking and library car,” which was a haven for male passengers, a dining car, and two or three sleeping cars. It was also a “solid train”: all of its cars went the entire distance so no time was lost adding cars or leaving cars behind. And it made only seven maintenance stops on the route—no passenger stops.

None of this will appear in the proposal I am (still) struggling with. It probably won’t even turn up in the final book, if I am lucky enough to get to write it. My subject would have taken the cheapest train possible, not the Exposition Flyer nor one of the various limited or express trains that traveled from Chicago to New York . But knowing that she had to make a choice, and what those choices were, adds to my understanding. of her experience.

This is the way you write a book, one detail at a time.

[1] Not to be confused with a train of the same name that carried travelers west from Chicago to San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939

[2] Both railroads continued to run slower trains, which took more than 36 hours but made all the stops on a route that traveled through Michigan and New York State. For which people who wanted to travel to Kalamazoo. Battle Creek, Buffalo, or Albany were doubtless grateful.

[3] Remembered by railroad buffs and advertising history nerds for his innovative promotion of the railroad, including the use of travel brochures to encourage people to take the train on their vacations. Much of his work rested on the tagline “Send a stamp to George H Daniels.” Anyone who wrote to Daniels for information and enclosed a 2¢ stamp would get travel information tailored to their interests in return, whether it related to the railroad or not. He and his team created a wide range of brochures, dubbed the Four-Track series. The most popular was a reprint of Elbert Hubbard’s inspirational essay “A Message to Garcia” (1899)–the story had nothing to do with the railroad, but the pamphlet included a map of the New York Central’s routes. The railroad published hundreds of thousands of copies of the essay, keeping an essay that originally appeared in an obscure magazine that reached a small audience in the public eye.

You know the beginning of this story.  In the fifteenth century, Portugal under the leadership of Prince Henry the Navigator(opens in new tab) *  began maritime exploration along the coast of Africa.  More or less a hundred years later, a Portuguese fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama reached India.  After a certain amount of bumbling around, Portugal transformed itself into a maritime empire(opens in new tab) with a lock on the spice trade.

For almost a hundred years, the Portuguese successfully protected their control over the sea routes to the Indian Ocean.  Foreign ships caught sailing to the Indies were seized and their crews sentenced to a lifetime in the galleys. Suspected spies were arrested and shipped back to Lisbon for trial; those from the Protestant countries of England and the  independent northern Netherlands were charged with heresy as well as espionage.**

Things changed in 1580, when Phillip II of Spain*** conquered Portugal and united the two countries.  The enemies of Spain became the enemies of Portugal, especially England and the Netherlands.  The two Protestant countries could no longer buy spices from Portugal.  Suddenly free trade was a religious as well as a political issue.  The English took the direct approach and attacked Portuguese ships as they returned from the Indies.  The Dutch preferred to trade rather than raid, but establishing trade with the Indies would require information they didn’t have.

Dutch merchants sent a spy overland to the Indies.  Before he returned, they received all the information they wanted from a source they didn’t expect:  a Dutch spy who worked right under the nose of the Portuguese.

Jan Huygen van Linschoten was a Dutch Catholic, born in the Netherlands in 1563.  When he was seventeen, he traveled to Lisbon, where he worked for a Portuguese merchant.  In 1583, he traveled to India as secretary to the new Archbishop of Goa, the Portuguese capital in India.

Linschoten worked in Goa from 1584 to 1589.  As secretary to the Archbishop he had access to protected information regarding trade routes and sailing conditions.  He questioned any European traveler who came through “golden Goa” about the countries further east.  When the Archbishop died in 1589, Linschoten began a four-year-long voyage home to the Netherlands, learning even more about the Portuguese trading empire on the way.

Back in the Netherlands, Linschoten wrote Voyages to the East Indies, an account of everything Dutch merchants needed to know if they wanted to trade in the Indies.  He described the sea routes to the east, including where to get fresh water and vegetables and what time of year the weather was best for safe sailing.  He explained that they would need silver to buy spices because the Asians weren’t interested in European products.  He described the countries and customs of Asia from India to Japan.  He even provided up-to-date maps.  Most important, Linschoten revealed that the once powerful Portuguese army, which had defended the trade routes with blazing guns in the past, was no longer so powerful.  The sea routes to the east were open to anyone who dared take them.

In 1595, Dutch ships sailed for Java, with a copy of Linschoten’s Voyages aboard as a guide.  Portuguese control of the spice trade was over.

*A misnomer applied to him by nineteenth century British historians for nineteenth century British reasons

**A serious matter in the days when the Spanish Inquisition was more than Monty Python routine.

***Just to remind you, he’s the guy who was married to Queen Mary Tudor from 1554 until her death in 1558, tried unsuccessfully (and illegally) to marry her sister, Queen Elizabeth II, and sent the equally unsuccessful Spanish Armada against England in 1588.  He was also one of the most powerful rulers in Europe at the time.  Sometimes its hard to tell the players without a program.

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The official trading area of the Dutch East India Company

The way we learn the story in elementary school in the United States, European trading companies sailed East in search of spices and other luxury goods. What those merchants took with them to trade is generally left unmentioned–perhaps because it makes it clear that Europe was a backwater in the global marketplace until well into the eighteenth century.

The truth is that in the early centuries of the Asian trade most European-made merchandise was a dud in the Asian marketplace. Some products, like mechanical clocks and toys, were too expensive for any but the wealthiest to purchase. Others, like heavy woolen cloth, were simply not useful or appealing. The only thing Europeans had that Asian were interested in was precious metal from the mines in Latin America.

The Portuguese, who controlled the trade routes from Europe to Asia for almost a hundred years, were content to pay silver for the luxury goods that reached their Indian stronghold at Goa. When the Dutch entered the spice trade in 1595 , they didn’t have the luxury of paying for everything with hard currency. It was too expensive to simply trade with the Indies. Instead they learned to trade within the Indies: carrying goods from one Asian market to another as part of what they called the “inland trade”.

The Dutch didn’t invent the inland land. Merchants from all over Asia bought and sold goods at busy seaports along the Red Sea, on the coast of India, throughout the Indonesian archipelago, and in China and Japan. Islamic merchants in the Persian Gulf shipped raw cotton, coffee, dried fruits and nuts, and attar of roses across the Indian Ocean. Chinese merchants sold silks, tea, porcelain and zinc. India produced printed cotton textiles that were popular throughout Asia. South East Asia was the source for pepper, sandalwood, spices, and ivory.

Asia ships seldom sailed all the way from the Persian Gulf to China. Instead, an Arab ship would sail from Mokha to Surat and back. An Indian merchant would travel between Surat and Java. Chinese junks controlled the trade between Canton and Bantam. A chest of tea or a load of pepper would be bought and sold several times , and transported from port to port in several different ships.

Instead of concentrating on trade between two ports, the way most Asian merchants did, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) traded throughout the entire system, trading one type of goods for another, which was then used to buy a third. From one end of the chain to the other, Dutch traders handled more than one hundred Asian products, including raw silk, sandalwood, saltpeter, tin, opium, and cowry shells. Each item was bought for a low price in the place where it was made and then sold for a higher price in another part of Asia in which it was in demand.

In order to make the most of this complicated series of trades, the VOC set up a network of permanent trading stations along the major trade routes in Asia–a process that often involved violence against local rulers and other European merchants. By 1785, the company had roughly 20,000 employees in twenty settlements spread across Asia, including company-owned spice plantations in Indonesia and walled warehouses in port cities in China, Japan, and India.

The spice trade–more than just pepper.