Walker was born in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, two years after the end of the Civil War. Her mother married less than a year after she was born and for the first few years, Walker enjoyed some financial security. But after her stepfather died when, she was nine, her mother struggled to support the family by taking in washing. Walker helped by delivering the laundry to clients and looking after her younger brother. She would later say, “I was not born with s silver spoon in my mouth, but with a laundry basket practically on my head.”

Despite these challenges, Walker managed to stay in school, graduating from the Richmond Colored Normal School in 1883 at the age of sixteen. (She was already a shin-kicker: she organized Richmond’s Black students to strike against the unequal graduation ceremonies held for Black and white students.[2] ) For the next three years she taught grade school in Richmond’s public school system. That ended when she married Armisted Walker, whose father owned a successful brick-making and construction business.

Instead of trying to fight against the laws that made it illegal for married women to teach in the public schools, she found her cause in the Independent Order of St Luke (IOSL) , a fraternal insurance society established by a free Black woman named Mary Prout in Baltimore in 1867. IOSL was devoted to mutual aid for its members as well as providing life insurance policies, which were originally intended to make it possible for families to afford funerals and burial plots.

Walker joined IOSL at the age of fourteen. After her marriage, she began to quickly rise through its ranks. In 1890, she was named the Right Worthy Grand Secretary-Treasurer of the organization. IOSL was in financial trouble, with $31.76 in assets and more than $400 in unpaid bills, and on the verge of closing. Walker brought the organization back to solvency: by 1927, IOSL had 103,000 members in 24 states and more than $450,000[3] in assets. It had paid out more one million dollars[4] in death benefits.

Walker wanted IOSL to do more. At its annual meeting in 1901, Walker outlined a bold vision for financial security beyond the ability to buy a burial plot. She said that the organization should open its own department store, which would provide jobs for the community and support black-owned supplies. They should publish a newspaper, which would allow them to share news about the order and the community—and attract new members in the process. But she told her listeners “first we need a savings bank. Let us put our moneys together; let us use our moneys; let us put our money out at usury among ourselves, and reap the benefits ourselves. Let us have a bank that will take the nickels and turn them into dollars.”

Over the course of the next few years, Walker successfully opened the St. Luke Emporium, the St. Luke Herald, which rapidly became a platform for civil rights advocacy, and finally the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Walker was the bank’s first president. Under her leadership, the bank helped hundreds of Black families, who had found it difficult if not impossible to borrow from white-owned banks, to buy homes, start businesses, and build wealth, helping to build a Black middle class by creating generational wealth.

Walker continued to lead the bank and IOSL even as her health failed from diabetic complications. When she became confined to a wheelchair, she had a desk built that would accommodate the chair and carried on. She successfully led the St Luke Penny Savings Bank through the Great Depression, when many other banks failed. When she arranged for the bank to merge with two other Black-owned banks in Richmond, she became chairman of the board, a position she held until her death.

Not surprisingly, Walker was an advocate for civil rights in general and a supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. She advocated for education and jobs, especially for Black women—a position on which she led by example at the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. She supported voter registration drives and a boycott against the segregated street car system in Richmond. She was a co-founder of the Richmond chapter of the NAACP and organized the first black Girl Scout troop in the South.

Today her home in Richmond is a historic site, run by the National Park Service. I’m adding it to my list of places to visit.

[1] No relation to Madame F. J. Walker (1867-1919), founder of the eponymous hair care products company and the first self-made female millionaire in the United States. I feel like Madame C.J. Walker’s story is well-known enough that I don’t need to tell it here. If I’m wrong, let me know.
[2] I went down a rabbit hole on the question of whether I should also capital white in this context. There are a lot of different opinions out there. But the position taken by the Columbia Journalism Review made sense to me. To quote the Review’s style guide: “

At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.”

I’m sticking to this position until someone convinces me otherwise. If you want to read the Review’s analysis, you can find it here.
[3] More than eight million dollars today
[4] More than 40 billion dollars today

In response to my recent post on the American Civil War, blog reader Karen Eliot talked about her experiences visiting Gettysburg.

Her comments left me thinking about what makes battlefield visits such a powerful experience.  I’ve certainly walked my share of Civil War battlefields: Gettysburg, Antietam, Pea Ridge, and my hometown battlefield of Wilson’s Creek. (Not to mention a few Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sites.  I’m an equal opportunity history nerd.) My Own True Love will tell you that I tear up at every battlefield I visit. Or at least get a lump in my throat.

But thinking it over, I’m not sure that the experience would be quite so powerful if the National Park Service weren’t there to lead me by the hand.  I think it takes a special person to be able to walk into an empty field and see the sweep of a past battle.  I’m not that person.  I need a guide, an exhibit, or at least a few historical markers. (Have I mentioned how much I love historical markers?)

Which brings me to the battlefield visit that hit me hardest:  Gallipoli.

Fought at the Dardanelle Straits, where Turkey has one foot in Europe, the Gallipoli campaign of World War I was the first major amphibious operation in modern warfare. The British and French hoped to drive Turkey out of the war and gain control of the warm water ports of the Black Sea.  The campaign started out as a slapdash naval expedition in which the big powers expected to blow Turkey out of the water–so to speak.  It turned into the grimmest of trench warfare.  Trenches were close enough together that soldiers could toss a live grenade back and forth across the lines several times before it exploded in a horrible parody of the childhood game of Hot Potato.  Water was so scarce on the European side that they tanked it in from Egypt.  ( That’s a long water run.  Look at a map.)

The campaign was a military stalemate paid for by heavy losses on both sides, but it was a formative event for three modern nations: Australia, New Zealand and Turkey.  Today the Gallipoli National Historic Park is a pilgrimage site for all three countries.

My Own True Love and I traveled to Gallipoli from Istanbul in a tour bus.  Many of our fellow travelers that day were New Zealanders and Australians whose father/uncle/grandfather/great-grandfather had fought at Gallipoli. (ANZAC Day is a national holiday in both Australia and New Zealand commemorating the landing of Australian and New Zealand forces.)  Our tour guide was a retired Turkish naval captain for whom Gallipoli was a lifelong passion.  The museum was heart-breaking.  You could walk the trenches in the battlefield. The memorial honored the soldiers from both sides.  The combination was magical.

But the thing I remember most clearly is the end of the day.  Every tour of the Gallipoli National Historic Park ends in front of a statue of the oldest Turkish survivor of the battle and his young granddaughter, who holds a bouquet of rosemary for remembrance.  He is said to have told his granddaughter that every man who died at Gallipoli is part of Turkey now and should be honored. Visitors add rosemary springs to the granddaughter’s bouquet from bushes that surrounded the memorial.  Because My Own True Love held the highest military rank of anyone on our bus, Captain Ali invited me to step forward to add a spring of rosemary to the bouquet on behalf of our group.  Did I get all teary?  You bet. [2}

Remembrance is, ultimately, why we visit battlefields.  Remembrance of those who died and those who survived, of causes lost and causes won, of the reasons we go to war, of greed, honor, bravery and shame.  Remembrance of the world we have lost on the road to today.

What battlefield visits made an impact on you?

[1]  You take your chances when you go to dinner with us.  Between us we are able to geek out about many, many things.

[2]  Did I get all teary re-reading this fifteen years later?  Yep.

***

If there’s a post from the past that you would like to see again, let me know.

Now and then I realize that a book slipped through the cracks, that I read it and never reviewed here on the Margins. My friend Theresa Kaminski’s  Angels of the Underground: The American Women Who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II is one of those books[1], something I realized only after I watched her excellent interview on WW2TV several weeks ago in preparation for my own appearance in April.[2] It seemed like a good idea to pull it off the shelf and take another look.

Angels of the Underground tells the stories of four American women—Peggy Doolin[3], Yay Panililio, Claire Phillips, and Gladys Savary—who were trapped in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation in World War II. Before the war, Doolin was a nurse, Panililo was a newspaper correspondent and photographer, Clair was a not-entirely-successful entertainer, and Gladys was a very successful restaurateur. Each of them became involved in the loosely coordinated resistance movement, but they were not a unit. In fact, they barely knew each other, which in some ways underlines the breadth of the resistance.

Kaminski skillful establishes what life was like for Americans in the colonial Philippines in the years before the war, and why each of her subjects went there is search of a better life. She sets her subjects’ lives and actions firmly within the context of the military action that led to the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in 1942 and the campaign to regain control of the islands, beginning in 1944. She brings to life the horrors of the Japanese occupation in general, and the specific dangers suffered by these women. She examines how those experiences shaped their lives after the war.

In short, it is an excellent contribution to the growing body of work on the experiences of women in World War II.

[1] Looking at my notes, I realize I read Angels of the Underground in 2017. *dang*

[2] I strongly recommend WW2TV  for any of you who are World War II buffs. It is an amazing YouTube channel at airs live interviews related to the war several times a week. The topics vary widely and so do the presenters. Pretty much something for everyone.

[3] aka Margaret Utinsky—a name that might be familiar to you from the war movie The Great Raid. Women’s names are often a tricky issue when you write about historical women.  It becomes even trickier when women chose to take on false names as part of their cover.

When I visited the Harold C. Deutsch World War II History Round Table in the Twin Cites back in March, one of the members introduced me to a women’s military auxiliary unit. I had never heard of the Women’s Air Raid Defense of the Hawaiian Islands (WARD). It was rabbit hole time!

WARD was formed soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Most of the existing staff of the Air Defense Command’s Information and Control Center (ICC) on Oahu were being reassigned throughout the Pacific. The Air Defense Commander, Brigadier General Howard C. Davidson decided the answer was to recruit women to staff the control center. He met with the first group of 20 women on December 26, the day after President Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing one hundred women to be recruited for a military auxiliary unit assigned to the 7th Fighter Wing of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The young women had been through the trauma of Pearl Harbor and were eager to help defend their homes.

The first group of WARD recruits was inducted into the service on January 1st. Many of the volunteers were military spouses who had been scheduled to be evacuated to the mainland; Davidson was given the authority to remove those who wanted to become WARDs from the evacuation list. As the need for volunteers grew, women were recruited from the mainland, subject to FBI background checks and loyalty tests.

The WARDs’ job was to help defend the islands from further attack by coordinating and tracking airplane movements. They were given a ten-day crash course in plotting airplane positions as they were reported from radar[1] units around the island. Training over, they went to work in a bomb-proof tunnel known as Lizard, which was located under Fort Shafter in Honolulu. Radar units throughout the islands, with the collectively code-name Oscar, sent reports to the ICC, code-named Rascal, giving the location, number, and speed of any aircraft that had been spotted. WARDs plotted the information on a huge table with a map of the islands superimposed with coded grids. Because the information was constantly changing, they marked the locations with colored markers topped with flags that noted identifying details, which could be moved as needed with plotting rake with similar to a shuffleboard stick.[2] (It was perhaps inevitable that they were given the nickname “Shuffleboard Pilots.” ) They compared the reported aircraft with the known flight schedules of military and civilian aviation in the islands. If they noted an anomaly, they passed it up the chain of command

ICC operated 24/7, with the “radar girls” working six hours on, six hours off, with a 32 hour break after eight days.

The Women’s Air Raid Defense unit was disbanded at the end of the war. Over the course of the war, more than 650 women had served as WARDs. Always a small, top secret unit, it was largely forgotten after the war.  (Does this surprise anyone?)

[1] Radar was still experimental at the time. In fact it was so new that most people who used it knew the word was an acronym for Radio Air Detection and Ranging. Something I didn’t know until I got into this rabbit hole.

[2] The description of this work reminded me of the British Navy’s use of Wrens and a room-sized board game to create anti-U-boat tactics in the Battle of the Atlantic. More about that here.

Those of you who also read my newsletter may remember that for the last few months I have been exploring the question of Japanese pop culture and the United States. It has been fascinating and frustrating. I know a lot more than I did when I began my quest in early February, but I still don’t feel like I have wrapped my brain around the particular question I’m trying to answer, or even the subject in general.

For anyone who might be interested in the subject, I recommend Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World[1] by Matt Alt, which is by far the best of the general books I’ve read, though not the most useful for my purposes[2]. As his title suggests, Alt argues that in the decades since World War II Japan’s “pop-cultural complex” has transformed “how we interact with the world, how we communicate with each other, how we spend time along with ourselves, how we shape our very identities.” I’m not sure I agree, but I found the discussion fascinating.

Alt sets the development of Japan’s pop culture creations solidly in the economic, cultural, and historical context in which they were created. He divides the book into two sections. The first deals with period from 1945 through the early 1980s, when Japan rebuilt itself from the literal ashes of World War II into an economic and technological powerhouse. The second deals with the so-called Lost Decades of the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century that resulted from Japan’s economic crash in 1990. He tells the stories of innovators and designers[3] and the corporations they founded. He sets the rise of manga and anime in the context of Japan’s increasing disaffected youth culture, connects the development of the karaoke machine in a tradition of bar sing-a-longs, and demonstrates the unexpected (at least to me) influence of Japanese schoolgirls in pioneering the use of digital communications. At each step, he discusses the way in which individual creations made their way to the United States, and why they succeeded.

I will admit that I found the first section more interesting than the second, though that says more about me than Alt’s work. If I owned the book, I would have filled the margins with exclamation marks, the occasional interrobang,[4] and many questions and comments.[5] Instead I have stuffed my library copy with sticky tabs,[6] as is my wont.[7]

If you are interested in Japanese popular culture, or modern Japanese history, this one’s for you.

[1] The title refers to a quotation from Oscar Wilde: “In fact the whole of Japan is pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people…The Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.”  The Decay of Lying. 1891.

[2] It’s amazing how often this turns out to be true when I’m in the initial stages of grappling with a question. It’s a puzzlement.

[3] None of whom I had heard of.

[4] A piece of punctuation that combines a question mark and an exclamation point into a single item:

It was invented in 1962 by American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter, who believed it would make a a cleaner page than ending a sentence with both pieces of punctuation when you want to write something like “Who ate my cheese?!”.

I’m not sure it’s actually a useful change, particularly since many computer fonts don’t support it. On the other hand, it seems to embody the appropriate response to much of the news today.

But I digress. As I so often do.

[5] Yes, I literally write history in the margins.

[6] I am fond of a brand produced by a company called Semikolon—appropriate given the above punctuation diversion.

[7] Pro tip: I also use 4 “ by 6” lined sticky notes to write thoughts in the moment and keep them with the relevant text. This is true even with books I own, because sometimes I have more to say than the margins allow.

Today is Independent Bookstore Day in the United States, assuming you are reading this on the day it comes out.  It’s a nationwide party for book lovers.  Here in Chicago, local independent bookstores are once again hosting their bookstore crawl in celebration.  I’m lucky enough to have three independent bookstores within walking distance: the fabulous Seminary Coop, its more commercial younger sister, 57th Street Books, and,  just around the corner from our house) Call and Response Books, which specializes in books by and about people of color.  In addition, Barnes and Noble just opened a store in the neighborhood. [1]  So many choices.  So little room on my bookshelves. [2]

A bookstore visit always leaves me feeling a little better. I browse.  I scan the shelf readers—those cards on the shelves that tell you something about a book. I chat about books with the booksellers. I eavesdrop on other people’s bookish conversations. I check to see if my books are on the shelves. I check to see if my friends books are on the shelves. I sheepishly take photos to post on social media. I try to resist the temptation to buy books I don’t need. [3] I give in to temptation and buy some anyway, which I justify by reminding myself that it’s important to support independent bookstores.

If you’re lucky enough to have an independent bookstore near you, stop by and show them some love. If not, you can adopt an independent bookstore somewhere else—most of them ship. Or you can buy your books through Bookshop.org, an online bookseller that supports independent bookstores.

[1]  I must admit, I have mixed feelings about the new store.  It is beautiful and well stocked, but I worry that my local indies will find it hard to compete.

[2]  By which I mean no room on my bookshelves.

[3]I have enough unread books to keep me going for years, even without taking my habit of re-reading into account.

As the official superintendent of the Union Army’s newly minted nursing corps, Dorothea Dix had a clear vision of what her nurses should look like. Only women between the ages of thirty or thirty-five and fifty would be accepted. “Neatness, order, sobriety and industry” were required; “matronly persons of experience, good conduct or superior education” were preferred.

Dix turned away many able applicants because she thought they were too young, attractive, or frivolous. Twenty-three- year-old Cornelia Hancock, for instance, was preparing to board the train to Gettysburg with a number of women many years older than she was when Dix appeared on the scene to inspect the prospective nurses. She pronounced all of the nurses suitable except for Hancock, whom she objected to on the grounds of her “youth and rosy cheeks.” Hancock simply boarded the train while her companions argued with Dix. When she reached Gettysburg, three days after the battle, the need for nurses was so great that no one worried about her age or appearance. Too inexperienced to help with the physical needs of the soldiers, she went from wounded soldier to wounded soldier, paper, pencil and stamps in hand, and spent the first night writing farewell letters from soldiers to their families and friends. When wagons of provisions began to arrive, Hancock helped herself to bread and jelly, then divided loaves into portions that could be swallowed by weak and wounded men.

She quickly became accustomed to the realities of the battlefield, telling a cousin in a letter written on her second day in the field “I do not mind the sight of blood, have seen limbs taken off and was not sick at all.” In fact, she proved to be such a dedicated nurse that the wounded soldiers of Third Division Second Army Corps presented her with a silver medal inscribed Testimonial of regard for ministrations of mercy to the wounded soldiers at Gettysburg, Pa. -—July 1863. (She also had a dance tune named after her, the Hancock Gallop–a tribute that I suspect none of Dix’s middle-aged matrons received from the soldiers under their care.)

Hancock worked as a nurse for the rest of the war, tending the wounded after the battle of the Wilderness, Fredericksburg, Port Royal, White House Landing, City Point and Petersburg. She was one of the first Union nurses to arrive in Richmond after its capture on April 3, 1865.

After the war, Hancock helped found a freedman’s school in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where she taught for a decade. (At one point those who objected to the concept of education for black children riddled the schoolhouse with fifty bullets.) When she moved back north to Philadelphia, she helped found the Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania.

Hancock became a posthumous best-selling author in 1937, when her charming and insightful letters from the battlefield were published under the title South After Gettysburg. They are now available under the title Letters of a Civil War Nurse–well worth the read if you are interested in Civil War nurses or daily life in a Union army camp behind the lines.

I had no idea what to expect at the museum, mostly because I didn’t take fifteen seconds and look it up online[3]. Even if I had taken a look at the website, nothing would have prepared me for “Spies and Space,” an exhibit featuring artifacts[4] of Cold-War popular culture from both sides of the Iron Curtain. It was a fascinating combination of nostalgia and smack-up-the-side-of-the-head.

The exhibit space is cleverly divided with a mock-Iron Curtain. In some ways it is divided by differing mind sets as well.

The half of the exhibit dealing with Cold War popular culture in the United States is devoted to toys and entertainment. What I’m going to call collectibles rather than artifacts— toys, lunch boxes, posters, etc—evoked childhood memories for my two companions and I, all members of Generation Jones[5]. We laughed, shared memories, and occasionally quoted lines from shows that ranged from early James Bond through Star Wars. (I suspect that no American my age can see a promotional item from Lost in Space without thinking “Danger, Will Robinson”.) We also gasped at a large, over-the-top, toy robot that looked like a mash-up of a giant nutcracker, the witch’s soldiers in The Wizard of Oz, and Snidely Whiplash, with a creepy grin that had too many teeth. None of us had seen anything like it. Which was a good thing from my perspective. I think it would have given seven-year-old Pamela nightmares.

Then we turned the corner at the end of the mock-Iron Curtain and everything changed.

The first thing we saw was The Motherland Meets the Hero a painting on an epic scale depicting cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin being greeted in Moscow after his return from space. The mood is joyous, with the heroic Yuri striding down a red carpet with smiling, red-flag-waving Russians on either side. Krushchev waits at the other end, arms outstretched in welcome. It is socialist realism at its best.

The painting set the theme for the Soviet half of the exhibit. Where much of the American section of the exhibit was focused on spies, often in satirical form, and fictional space adventure, the Soviet section was devoted almost entirely to real life space exploration. Following Gagarin’s flight in space, space exploration became a major theme in Soviet culture, high and low.

Our guide, who was the Russian equivalent of a Baby Boomer in age, clearly felt the same nostalgia for some of the objects on this side of the mock-Iron Curtain as we did for the Get Smart lunch box: holiday[6] tree ornaments in the shape of Sputnik and other space vehicles, a gift tin with images of Belka and Strelka, the first “cosmohounds,”[7] etc. There were many, many postage stamps devoted to triumphs in space exploration, which our guide described a “celebration of firsts.” On the darker side, the exhibit also included Soviet propaganda posters, including images of Uncle Sam as a threatening figure that I found both disturbing[8] and illuminating.

In short, the exhibit was a useful reminder that there is always another side of the wall story.

‘Spies and Space’ is on display through May 10. If you happen to be in the Twin Cities, I strongly recommend that you see it. If you miss “Spies and Space,” I still highly recommend the Museum of Russian Art. Exhibits change every six months. One special exhibit, a selection of Ukrainian political cartoons, changes every week—a statement of the museum’s support of Ukraine in the current war.

[1] And speaking of speaking, if you belong to a group that needs speakers and are interested in hearing about Sigrid Schultz, women warriors, Civil War nurses, or the craft of writing history, send me an email and we’ll see if we can make it work. I’m happy to speak to small book clubs, auditoriums packed with history buffs, and everything in between. And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

[2] I feel some complicated joke about knights and Round Tables circling my brain, but I think I will spare all of us and ignore it.

[3] Life has been crazy enough in the the last few months that I am trying to simply let things happen when I can. Unlikely as that may sound to those of you who know me in real life. Old dog. New tricks.

[4] A term I’m not entirely comfortable with since many of the items on display date from my childhood.

[5] I came across the idea of Generation Jones a while back and it immediately resonated. The term refers to those of us born between 1955 and 1964—although still part of the population explosion that gave the Baby Boom its name, our formative experiences were very different than those of the earlier boomers. Thee term was coined by cultural historian Jonathan Pontell, himself a member of Generation Jones, in 1999 and has gained traction ever sense. But I digress.

[6] New Year’s Eve, in case you’re wondering

[7] Krushchev gave one of Stelka’s puppies, born after the space flight, to Jaqueline Kennedy, after the First Lady asked about the puppies at a state dinner.

[8] Again, So Many Teeth

***

My Own True Love and I are spending a long weekend in Charleston, South Carolina.  For me, it’s a vacation/work sandwich.  Yesterday we bopped around together doing history-buff stuff.*  Today he heads off for twenty-four hours with his grandson’s Cub Scout troop aboard the USS Yorktown while I settle in for a day of reading and writing.  Tomorrow, we resume bopping.

The center of our first day was a visit to Fort Sumter, where the Civil War officially began.**  As always, the National Park Service did an excellent job.

Because Fort Sumter is on a island in the mouth of Charleston’s harbor, the visit begins with a boat ride, offered through an official park vendor.*** I must admit, I grumbled at the idea of a narrated boat “tour” of the harbor with only hour on the ground at the fort. I should have had more faith.  A hour was just about the right amount of time.

If you have the choice, I recommend the first trip of the day because it includes a flag-raising ceremony.  The ranger began with a brief, impassioned account of  the fall of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, including a description of the role that the American flag played in the events on Sumter.  (Stay tuned for some of the details.)  Then she asked for help raising the flag.  Twenty or thirty visitors (including me and My Own True Love) lined up to help unfold and hoist the flag.  Before we began, she asked us to introduce ourselves to our neighbors in the line.  It was moving and meaningful—a moment of unity in which no one mentioned the election or the inauguration that was going on as we shook hands and remembered a time of national division.

Once the ceremony was over, we were  free to explore the ruins of the fort and the excellent small museum. We would have enjoyed the visit even if all we got out of it was a more detailed version of the events of April 12, 1861—the ranger was interesting, the boat ride lovely, the weather was amazing.  But, as is so often the case, the NPS did a good job of putting the place in its broader historical context, including a small exhibit on the role of African-American slaves in the fort’s history.  Here are some of the things that caught my imagination:

The fort was built as part of a string of coastal fortifications, planned as a result of the inadequacy of coastal defense in the War of 1812. (At some level, armies always plan for the last war.  And really, what choice do they have?)  They built a man-made island in the mouth of Charleston’s Harbor in 1829, using sand and 70,000 tons of granite from New England.  Intended for a garrison of 650 men with 135 guns, the fort was almost completed by 1860 but it was not yet manned   When Anderson and his men arrived at the fort, they raised the American flag there for the first time.

The military professionals of the Union and Confederate armies were drawn from the same small pool of big fish:  Brigadier General Pierre G.T. Beauregard led the Confederate troops that bombarded Anderson and his men.  Anderson was Beauregard’s artillery instructor at West Point.  This is the kind of thing that would lead to dramatic tension—or charges of implausibility—if I wrote historical fiction.

Major Anderson was allowed to surrender with full honors, including the right to take his flag with him.  At the war’s end, on April 9, 1865, he raised the same flag over Fort Sumter  once more.

The story of Fort Sumter didn’t end with Anderson’s surrender.  The fort remained a Confederate stronghold for the next four years despite repeated Union efforts to recapture it.  The Confederate garrison never surrendered.  They withdrew from the island when Sherman’s march threatened the South Carolina capitol.

The ruined fort was brought back into service during the Spanish-American War, when the army constructed a large concrete battery on the former parade ground, and it remained in service as part of the coastal defense until Pearl Harbor, when it became clear that aviation was the name of the coastal defense game.

*And eating.  Because everything you hear about food in Charleston is true.  The only thing that saved us from dyspepsia and blimpitude has been lots and lots of walking.

**For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story or want a refresher, here’s a recap:

In November, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president.  On December 20, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union.  By March 2, a total of seven states had seceded and seized Federal forts and naval yards throughout the South.  Fort Sumter, an unfinished red brick fortress built on a man-made granite island,  was one of the few to remain in Federal hands, thanks to peremptory action by Major Robert Anderson.

Anderson commanded two companies—a total of 85 men, including musicians—at nearby Fort Moultrie.  Six days after South Carolina seceded, he decided Moultrie was impossible to defend and moved his troops in the night to Sumter.  The Confederate government saw Anderson’s transfer as an act of aggression.  (Unlike, say, seizing Federal forts.  Partisanship blinds us all.)

The fort became the emotional focal point of the conflict between Union and Confederacy.  The small garrison was cut off from resupply or reinforcement, but refused to surrender the fort to Confederate control. Anderson, a Kentucky native and former slaveholder, was praised as a hero in the North and reviled as a traitor in the South. President James Buchanan, at the end of his term of office, was unwilling to trigger civil war by attempting to relieve the besieged unit and equally unwilling to trigger a public outcry by recalling the troops from Sumter. He chose instead to leave the problem for his successor.

When Abraham Lincoln took office on March 4, the garrison at Sumter had less than six weeks of food left. Lincoln’s cabinet told him it was impossible to relieve the fortress and urged him to evacuate Anderson’s troops as a way of reducing tension between North and South. Popular opinion screamed for Lincoln to send reinforcements to the “gallant little band”.  With public opinion eager for action, and no sign that delay would improve the chances of reuniting the country, Lincoln chose to resupply the garrison but not send reinforcements unless the Confederates attacked either the fort or the supply ships—a compromise that pleased no one.

Shortly after midnight on April 12, with resupply ships on the way, the Confederate government gave Anderson until 4:00 AM to surrender. Anderson refused. At 4:30 AM, the bombardment began. Although they had neither the men nor supplies to mount a meaningful defense, the Union forces held out for a day and a half before surrendering.

The war had begun.

***Only two round trips a day in January.  There are more in the high season, but there are also more people who want to go.  Plan ahead so you aren’t disappointed.

Returning to the idea of women who were inventors and/or entrepreneurs, allow me to introduce you to Bette Nesmith Graham, a struggling single mother who founded what became a multi-million dollar business in her kitchen[1].

In 1954, Bette Nesmith Graham was a divorced single mother who supported herself and her son, Michael,[2] by working as the executive secretary for the chairman of the Texas Bank and Trust in Dallas. But the introduction of new technology to American offices, in the form of IBM’s electric typewriter, threatened that position and her livelihood.

Nesmith Graham was an excellent secretary overall, but she was not a good typist. The transition to an electronic typewriter was a nightmare. The new typewriters allowed typists to work more quickly, but they had sensitive keys, which triggered more typos than the stiffer manual typewriter keys. Worse, they used carbon ribbons instead of fabric ones: when typists tried to fix a mistake with a pencil eraser, the carbon ink would smear all over the page, meaning that a secretary often had to retype an entire page because of a single mistake. As far as Nesmith Graham was concerned, it was lose/lose.

Even though the position of executive secretary was as high as a woman could go as a clerical worker, she lived paycheck-to-paycheck on her salary of $300 a month.[3] to make extra money, she would take on side jobs, which often used the artistic skills she had learned from her mother, who was an artist and small business owner. One of those jobs was helping dress display windows at the bank that Christmas. Watching the display artists paint windows with a festive scene, Nesmith Graham noticed that when they made a mistake they painted over it. It was an “aha!” moment. Why couldn’t she do the same thing when she made a typing error?

She started with a small watercolor brush and fast-drying water-based tempera paint that she tinted to match the bank’s stationary. She brought it to the office in nail polish bottles, which she hid in her desk so her boss wouldn’t see. But while her boss might not have noticed her careful corrections using the paint, other secretaries did and asked her to make bottles for them.

Soon she was staying up late at night working in her kitchen,  making batches of “Mistake Out” in her blender and filling bottles. Determined to make it a viable business, she researched paint formulas in the local library. She collaborated with her son’s chemistry teacher to improve the consistency of the product and paid an industrial polymer chemist $200 to help her develop a formula that would dry more quickly.

Orders increased. She formed the Mistake Out Company in 1956, though she couldn’t yet afford the $400 fee to patent the idea.

At night she filled the growing orders from other secretaries in Dallas and sent samples to potential buyers. She sent IBM two typed documents, one with errors corrected with an eraser and one with her correcting fluid, along with a personal note in which she said “I truly believe that this can mean a turning point from the old methods—a new era.” She hoped IBM would be interested in marketing the product. IBM declined.

On the weekends, she traveled from Dallas to San Antonio and Houston trying to market the product.

Eventually orders increased enough that she hired her first employees. She paid her teenage son and his friends a dollar an hour to fill nail polish bottles using restaurant-style ketchup bottles, cut the tips of the brushing inside the bottle caps at an angle, and paste on labels.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that working two jobs would catch up with her. One day she signed a letter at the bank as “The Mistake Out Company.” She was promptly fired.

Without the safety net of her secretarial job, Nesmith Graham concentrated on building her correction fluid business. In 1958, she renamed the product “Liquid Paper” and could finally afford to file for a patent. That same year, the business made a breakthrough when an article in a trade magazine for secretaries, called The Secretary, described Liquid Paper as “the answer to a secretary’s prayer.” Soon after that General Electric placed an order for 400 bottles in three colors—her first large order. Orders from other large companies followed, including IBM. (I bet Graham did a dance of triumph the day that order came in. Or maybe she blew a raspberry in the direction of Big Blue.)

With the help of her second husband, Robert Graham, a former frozen food salesman who used his experience to sell Liquid Paper to office supply stores across the country, the business grew. She moved the business from her kitchen to her garage, to a trailer and then to a four-room house. In 1956, Nesmith Graham was selling 500 bottles of Liquid Paper each week, produced in her kitchen. By 1968 what was then the Mistake Out Company was a million-dollar business, producing one million bottles of Liquid Paper annually.

In 1968, Nesmith Graham changed the name of the company to Liquid Paper Corporation, and filed for a trademark. In 1969, she built a new company headquarters that was well ahead of its time in terms of making it easy for employees to work there. It was wheel-chair accessible 21 years before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It included an in-plant library, an employee-owned credit union, and, perhaps because of her struggles as a single mother, an onsite childcare center.

The company continued to grow: at its height, it produced 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper a year. That’s a lot of typos. (More of them were mine than I like to admit.)

She faced a new business challenge in 1975, following the end of her marriage . After their divorce, Robert Graham, who was then chairman of the board, convinced company executives to bar Nesmith Graham from both the building and any business decisions. He attempted to change the Liquid Paper formula, which she had spent ten years perfecting and which was legally protected as a trade secret. If the formula was changed, it would lose its trade secret protection and Nesmith Graham would lose her royalty rights.

She fought back. (Are you surprised?) After regaining controlled of the company, she sold it to the Gillette Corporation for $475 million in 1980. She died six months later, at the age of 56.

On behalf of all of us whose typing wasn’t our strongest skill, I thank you, Bette Nesmith Graham.

[1] The single mother equivalent of tech bros inventing things in their parents’ garages. It’s a cliche for a reason.
[2] He became a musician, best known as a member of the pop band The Monkees. (I’ve suffered from an ear worm or two since learning this.) He later founded a multimedia production company, Pacific Arts, and helped pioneer music videos. But I digress.
[3] Roughly $3500 today. Slightly less than the average secretary makes in Dallas today.