A Strange Delusion

A sad story. Am I bad for wanting
to know more?

Perhaps one of the saddest things about his story is that it ended up in the newspapers at all. Still, I can understand why the newspaper ran the following story. It was just too tempting. It’s pure voyeurism. I’m going to simultaneously disapprove of it and write it up anyway. I’ll feel guilty later. But this is why newspapers run tittilating stories, right?

The short version: A woman, who had been married only a few months, went insane. Feel free to read on. This appeared in the San Francisco Call on October 1, 1912.

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A Desperate Plunge Into Esperanto?

That's a charge of felonious
leg pulling

The article in the the August 3, 1907 New York Sun reads like a piece of fiction, though the names are real. So, did this really happen? Was there a “renaissance of culture” among the police in 1907?

I wouldn’t believe it for a minute, but the Sun did publish this. Here’s their tale of the New York police making a desperate plunge into Esperanto. You can decide whether or not to believe it. My mind's made up.

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That's Not Actually Volapük

What are you implying that he said?

A short item on the sports page of the August 3, 1914 Washington Herald claims that it includes a line of Volapük, but what’s actually there looks more like mangled Esperanto. By 1914, the Volapük movement was long since dead, with only a small number of Volapük speakers remaining. Yet it was still mentioned in newspapers from time to time, though without much frequency. Over the years, reporters had moved from portraying it as the archetypal incomprehensible tongue to the archetypal failed international language scheme.

It’s a filler item, wedged in between the last of the sports reports (the scores of the game between the Washington Cricket Club and the Baltimore Sons of St. George) and the advertisements (Dr. Reed’s specialties include “Private Diseases”). It reads:

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Beware of Scorchers!

No scorching.

This letter to the New York Sun was just too good to let pass. It appears right below Henry Foreman’s remarks on Esperanto and takes us back to a time when cars were a rarity and blinding speeds were much slower than they are today.

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Insisted on Trial after Sodomy Charge

Was Mr. Farrell naughty too?

In the midst of reading old newspapers today, my attention was drawn to the case of Margaret Delf, who was (repeatedly) charged with prostitution and brothel keeping in 1884 St. Paul. The search term that lead me to Margaret was “sodomy,” which was not one of the things she was charged with, but was the charge for the case described immediately after hers.

Unlike Ms. Delf, for whom this was to be the last reference in the St. Paul Daily Globe, there is a follow-up to the second story. I’ll give it all here.

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Mrs. Delf's Unsuccessful Profession

Naughty Margaret Delf

I hope that whoever wrote the police court column in the Saint Paul Daily Globe in 1884 went on to bigger and better things. There’s some real style here, so I hope the anonymous journalist gave us some work at book length. It’s really amusing writing, which makes me think I should be dipping into the Saint Paul Daily Globe’s police column more frequently.

I’ve decided do things a little differently, and I’ve scattered a few footnotes into the text. The second item in the column was the one that lead me there, but this one was too good to resist.

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A Respectable Young Man

Then what happened?

I wasn't able to find anything else in the archives about Frank Hensley, the "respectable young man," who was arrested for sodomy, according to this article from the Dallas Weekly Herald on July 30, 1885. The Weekly Herald didn't do a follow-up where they discussed what happened after this man's arrest.

I can make one guess: the 1880 Census includes a Frank Hensley, living in Dallas. In 1880, this Frank Hensley is 22 years old, single, and working as an assistant collector in a bank. In 1885, he would have been 27 or 28 years old. On the other hand, it looks like this Frank Hensley married in October, 1885.

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American Esperantists Plan 1921 Convention for Boston

Was it a close vote?

I'd make a bet that it's been a long time since the U.S. Esperanto congress attracted any press attention outside of the city where it was held (and the most recent one seems to have received none at all). The conventions in the first few decades of the Esperanto moment got a lot of press attention.

The Sun and New York Herald persisted in referring to Edward S. Payson as "Dr. Payson." Payton was neither Ph.D. nor M.D., but the president of Emerson Piano of Boston. Oddly enough, the trade press of the piano industry called him "Colonel Payson." Odd thing to call a Yankee.

As noted before, this was a meeting of about fifty people. I'm going to guess that the New York Times would probably ignore events with 500 people taking place over a weekend in Manhattan, although the Times did cover the convention in one small article, which adds that the president of the New York Esperanto Association was Miss Cora L. Butler, and that she gave the welcoming address.

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Would an Orderly Brothel Been Okay?

Let's have some order here!

Just a short news item from the July 25, 1856 New Orleans Daily Crescent.

Catherine Webber was fined $15 for keeping a disorderly brothel; two of her boarders were fined $5 each, and four others sent to the Work-house.

I did a quick bit of searching and wasn't able to find anything about Ms. Webber. Typically I like to fill out the historical record a bit more, but then there was that term, "disorderly brothel." Disorderly houses were places of prostitution, drug use, or such. By definition, a brothel is already "disorderly."

There was a Catherine Webber living in New Orleans in 1850, the wife of one J. G. Webber. The couple was from Germany and lived with their children and two women (presumably Mrs. Webber's sisters). The 1860 census doesn't show a Webber family living in New Orleans.

Could J.G. Webber, the 29-year-old German merchant of the 1850 census been dead by 1856 and his wife become a brothel-keeper in order to raise funds? Who were the "boarders"? Since they were fined, they clearly weren't so much boarders as prostitutes.

Then there were the four sent to the work house. I really wan to know how the judge made the distinction. Perhaps the other four weren't the actual prostitutes, but those who were helping run the establishment.

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Parents, Don't Send Your Children to Brothels

Don't do it. It's bad parenting.

Wait a minute, was this sort of thing legal beforehand? On July 24, 1878 the Clearfield Republican of Clearfield, Pennsylvania wrote about a change in the laws, effective at some point in 1878 (since the article describes it as "the law of 1878"). I wonder if there were people who looked at the law and thought, "there goes the government, telling parents what they can and can't do with their children."

Is the whole point of the article that under the law in 1877 parents actually could do these things? I used the word "brothels" in the title, because it actually shows up in the article. Were women being sent into prostitution by their families?

A NEW DEPARTURE  — Under the law of 1878, people who unnecessarily beat or ill use their children, hire them to acrobats and gymnasts, or beggars, keep them in brothels or at indecent or dangerous occupation, are not only liable to punishment, but may have them taken from their custody and put under charge or guardians appointed by the court.

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An Esperanto Organization for the United States

William K. Harvey
Early American
Esperantist

If it weren’t for George Alan Connor, the national Esperanto organization in the United States would be 106 today. (This post was written in 2014; adjust this number to compensate for the year in which you are reading this.) By 1908, Floyd Barnes Harbin was already jumping the gun and announcing a book to be titled History of the Esperanto Movement in America (I haven’t turned up any evidence that the book was ever published). In the February 1908 Amerika Esperantisto, Mr. Harbin was asking people to pay 10¢ to get their names in a complete directory of American Esperantists. If Mr. Harbin published the book, it would be a directory of those who sent in the 10¢, and maybe not a complete directory of all the Esperantists in the United States.

But the oddest thing was that in February 1908 there really wasn’t much history of the Esperanto movement in America to write about. Not none, but not much. There was, at the time of the 1908 conference in Chautauqua, at least sixty-seven local Esperanto societies in the United States. The state with the largest number of groups was Massachusetts with eight, though there were two in Boston, one specially for the blind. One of the goals of the 1908 Chautauqua conference was to found a national society.

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Washington D.C. Schools Asked to Consider Esperanto

The Washington Times, in an article on July 15, 1908, made reference to “Mrs. Wilbur F. Crafts, a Chautauqua lecturer.” A “Chautauqua lecturer” is one who is on the teaching staff of what is now called the Chautauqua Institution, which had its start as the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly. Chautauqua was home to the first Volapuk convention in the United States, as well as the first Esperanto convention in the United States.

So, who is Mrs. Wilbur F. Crafts? Clearly, she is someone who became well accustomed to going by her husband’s name. In the 1930 census, she’s listed as “Wilbur F. Crafts,” though her sex is marked with an F. Clearly the census taker was told that she was Mrs. Wilbur F. Crafts, and that was that. The 1900 census (when Wilbur was still alive) makes it clear that her given name was Sara, and that she was born in August of 1851. Her profession is given as “authoress.”

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Sodomy Arrest Leads to Suicide

Convicted by the paper though he
didn't survive to be tried

A somewhat grim story from the news archives, but I felt that this story, with all its gray areas needed to be told. I ran into a total brick wall on researching anything, although there are some errors in the article (which makes things tough). Here are the particulars: a man was arrested on a charge of sodomy on July 15, 1915. When he learned that several complaints were being made against him, he attempted suicide, being successful on the second attempt.

Other details are less clear. The Ward County Independent gives the man’s name as E. O. Edwards (not helpful in finding additional details), and his age as 21. The North Dakota death indexes give his age as 36. So was he born in 1894 or 1879? Which record do you believe? The article also notes that the officials notified the dead man’s brother, “a locomotive engineer, at Lance, Nebr.” There’s no such place. Nor does it show up on a list of Nebraska ghost towns. There is a town called Alliance, and when I checked the census records, I found a John W. Edwards, who worked as a railroad engineer, probably the brother mentioned in the article.

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Justice, Not Lynching, after Sodomy Charge

Another point on the
arc of the moral universe

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century newspapers, there's a depressing regularity to the stories of black men raping white boys. Look for "sodomy," and they keep coming up. I haven't found anything of particular interest in them, even though they are the stories that get a little fleshed out (most of the items simply name a person who has been charged or convicted of sodomy).

But The Appeal, of Saint Paul, Minnesota, which described itself as "A National Afro-American Newspaper" had an article in its July 13, 1901 edition that helps put these stories into context. Okay, we have these horrible stories of black men raping white boys (it's either black men or "hoboes"), but that doesn't mean that they're true.

Here's what The Appeal reported:

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An 1888 Same-Sex Marriage

The first marriage of a
same-sex couple?

Many opponents of, or even those skeptical of same-sex marriage act as if same-sex couples are some sort of modern novelty, and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made the claim that same-sex marriage was “newer than cell phones.” Even if same-sex marriage were newer than cell phones, it’s not clear that would necessarily put it outside of constitutional protection.

An article in the Springfield Daily Republic of Springfield, Ohio on July 13, 1888, suggests that same-sex marriage might be significantly older than the cell phone. The article describes it as perhaps “the first case on record where one man was duly married to and living with another.” For that, of course, they had to get around the usual procedures.

How they did that, it’s not clear. Perhaps George Burton had been living long enough as a hermaphrodite that they were able to convoke the clergyman, J. Y. Campbell, that Burton counted as a woman. But then why did they name the bride Georgeann Holly?

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Esperanto’s Little Advertiser

How he learned it

A twelve-year-old sent in a letter to the children’s page of the New-York Tribune, where it was published on July 10, 1910, in which he gives a description of Esperanto and his involvement in it. Young Joseph Lepsey was quite active in the New Haven Esperanto Club. He was their librarian in 1911, at the age of 13.

In the June, 1911 issue of Amerika Esperantisto he was described as “kredeble la plej juna esperantisto en la urbo” (credibly the youngest Esperantist in the the city) and founded a club just for young esperantists, the Zamenhofa Rondo de Junaj Esperantistoj. In this, he was joined by Mabel DeScheen, Frederick Knodel, Josefo de Scheen, and George W. Wilber.

It’s not clear after this flurry of activity that Mr. Lepsey was later active in the movement. Records indicate that he was unmarried at the age of 42, living with his mother, and working as an advertising agent. He died in 1986, so there might be some Esperantists in the New Haven area who knew him, if he remained active.

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Esperanto in Bad Verse

Roy K. Moulton,
funny man

Roy K. Mouton clearly didn't think much of Esperanto, so much that he was moved to mock the language in a fairly long poem, printed in at the Daily Missoulian of Missoula, Montana on July 10, 1912. It wasn't just Esperanto; his column was fairly tongue-in-cheek. The first item in "On the Spur of the Moment" was on how to make money. Well, you can either counterfeit coin, or you can counterfeit bills. He does suggest that this be done in "a nice dark cellar, which has no windows in it."

Mr. Moulton was an American humorist who lived from 1874 (or perhaps 1876) to 1928. The only book-length works I can find attributed to him are The Blue Jeans of Hoppertown, A Good Friend of Mine, and I Held Her Hand, which were written between 1908 and 1911. After that, he seems to have stuck to the newspapers. He was born Michigan and was living there in 1910. By 1920, he had moved to New York (specifically Queens). He listed his profession as a writer.

But maybe not a poet. Here's the poem.

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A New Name for Dr. Zamenhof

Europeans in D.C.
Alert the media!

If you know some Esperanto, the first line of this article from the July 10, 1910 Washington Times is comically bad. The article is one of the many in the Washington press as the sixth Universala Kongreso neared.

You can skip this paragraph if you've been reading my blog: The sixth World Esperanto Congress was held in Washington, D.C. This was the first time that the congress met outside Europe. The Esperanto movement had high hopes for the success of the meeting.

Its headline "Europeans Coming to Visit Capital," hardly seems worth mentioning. Surely, even in 1910, Washington D.C. must have had something to attract the attention of foreign visitors. The National Museum of Natural History had just opened its new building. The Smithsonian Institution was there as well. Certainly, the World Congress had tourism plans for the area.

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Protection of Marriage —1920 Edition

Till death, or Congress,
do you part

One of the claims made by the opponents of marriage for same-sex couples is that by allowing same-couples to marry, marriage will be further devalued. Some go on to say that the real enemy is divorce (since in any given year, it’s likely that there will be more divorces of opposite-sex couples than marriages of same-sex couples), but that if they give up on same-sex marriage, they will never be able to fight divorce.

That doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me (then again, the objections to same-sex marriage don't make any sense to me). What if they tried it? Then they could find out what the public reaction was, if they had any hope of making divorce difficult or impossible to obtain.

It would seem that in 1920, someone tried just that: fighting divorce, and the New York Evening World was having none of it, printing this editorial on July 10, 1920.

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Sanctity of Marriage — Old News Division

Marriage. No joke.

I wasn't able to turn up the New York Sun article that the Washington Evening Star claimed to be reprinting, so all I have to go on is the cautionary tale titled, "Mock Marriages are not Funny." Well, I suppose they could be. But it must be taken as the official position of the Evening Star that you take absolutely no merriment in the following account.

The article describes what transpired as a "mixed marriage," and we all know what that means, don't we? Well, I thought we did. When I searched the term, my first hit was the Wikipedia entry on interracial marriage.

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