Humanities,
July/August 2008
Volume 29, Number 4
An account, surely apocryphal, of local goings-on in the “Bingville Bugle,” a humor column that ran in the Washington Herald, found in Chronicling America, the NEH-supported online newspaper archives at the Library of Congress. From the March 28, 1909, issue:
SKANDOLUS!
Disgraceful Fight Betwixt Ladies at Church Last Sunday Morning—Fatal to One Hat—Particklers as Follers
There was a disgraSeful and scandalious scene ockurred in church service last Sunday morning at the Bingville church which shocked everybody present and filled them with consternashion in the extreme. For a while it looked as if the service would almost be broke up on the spot.
Miss Phronica Hildebrand, our fashionable dress maker, who also trims hats and indulges in milinery along with her dress making, paid a visit to the Co. seat a couple of weeks sinst in order to study the spring styles and lay in a fresh supply of millinery which she done.
While at the Co. seat Phronicia purchased what is called a pattern hat for herself which she made up her mind she would wear as a sort of advertisement for her millinery dept. as you mite say.
Last Sunday Rev. Moore had just begun to preach when Miss Phronicia with her new hat on and all rigged out in a new suit of clothes entered the church and swept down the aisle and set down in about the 5th pew back right in front of Miss Amos Hillyer, wife of our talented loryer and legal light.
|
|
—The Granger Collection, New York
|
Phronicia’s hat was the synocure of all eyes. Them as saw it say it was the biggest hat they ever seen on a woman’s head and they should think it would give Phronica the headake to carry it. The church was crowded and Mrs. Hillyer set just behind Phronicia and couldn't see nothing but hat. Mrs. Hillyer and Phronicia
ain’t been very good friends sinst 2 years ago last winter when Phronicia trimmed a hat for Mrs. Hillyer which Mrs. Hillyer didn't like and refused to pay for it and so they ain't spoke sinst.
Mrs. Hillyer says she would just as well leaf set at home as to set in church and lissen to a sermon without being able to see the pastor. She stretched and craned from one side to the other trying to see past Phronicia’s hat until she began to get stiff neck. Then she whispered to Mrs. Lem Brown, who set beside her, loud enuff for Phronicia to
hear. “I should think she would take off the ridicklus thing so a body could see,” but Phronicia never let on she heard it.
Finally Mrs. Hillyer leaned over and whispered to Phronicia, “Will you kindly remove your hat, Madam?” Phronicia
turned around and gave her a cold stare and hissed back, “No, I wouldn’t remove my hat for nobody, let alone you.”
What follered almost beggars desckripshion. Mrs. Hillyer grabbed the hat with both hands and pulled it offen Phronicia’s head
and throwed it into the aisle on the floor. Phronicia give a shreek of anger and turning round grabbed Mrs. Hillyer’s hat
and tore it in 2.
|
“A Killing Gentleman” by James M. Prichard delineates the carefully prescribed
protocol of dueling in the April issue of Kentucky
Humanities.
On January 16, 1900, two young Kentucky gentlemen, both officers in the recent Spanish-American War, met
by chance in the lobby of the Old Capitol Hotel in Frankfort. Bitter rivals due to a wartime quarrel,
they immediately opened fire on each other. By the time their pistols fell silent, one of the shooters
lay dead, along with four innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. No doubt there was more than one
elderly gentleman of the old school who shook his head in disgust at the news of the incident known as
the Scott-Colson tragedy. Had these two young hotbloods adhered to the Code Duello that prevailed up until
the Civil War, they could have settled their differences like genuine gentlemen
on the “field of honor”—and without all the collateral damage.
Dueling was widespread in the antebellum South, where it persisted longer than it did in any other part of
the country. It was a formal, highly ritualized form of violence transplanted from Europe to America during
the colonial era. Gentlemen did not settle matters of honor in court. Such matters transcended the law and were
settled privately. Honor was all. To endure an insult without retaliation, to walk away from one who publicly
denounced you as a liar or coward without a fight, was considered an unbearable disgrace. As the Kentucky
orator, wit, and duelist Thomas F. Marshall (1801-1864) put it, “If a man calls a Southern boy a liar, that
man or that boy must die. . . .”
Although antebellum duels sometimes had a rough frontier edge, most encounters were carefully arranged events
based on written guidelines, such as John M. Taylor’s Twenty Six Commandments of the Dueling Code. These 26
commandments first appeared as the Code Duello, a document promulgated in 1777 by a committee of Irish gentlemen.
The code covered, in great detail, the subject of offenses to a gentleman’s honor and the proper way
to seek satisfaction. Though duels could, and did, result in death, they were not designed to always be fights
to the finish. According to the code, “Any wound sufficient to agitate the nerves and necessarily make the hand
shake must end the business for the day.”
Initial disputes were generally followed by an exchange of formal notes between the principals. Go-betweens
known as seconds delivered such communications, and also selected the dueling ground, settled the terms, and
made certain the participants adhered to the rules. Seconds were obligated to try to engineer a peaceful
resolution of the dispute, but in some cases the bad blood was so strong that the seconds also ended
up exchanging shots. Personal physicians were usually on hand to tend the fallen.
|
Long before Martha Stewart, there was Louisa—as in Louisa
Yeomans King (clarke.cmich.edu/KingsGarden/King2.htm.
In his 2006 NEH-supported book, The Modern American House (Cambridge University Press), Sandy Isenstadt touches
on King’s role in American homemaking.
Although famous as a period when large private estates and fine suburbs were built and landscaped,
the early twentieth century was equally a time when little gardens attracted great loyalties, and when the
conflict between the need for privacy and the desire for visual breadth became a mainstay of discussions
regarding the small home site. With professional fees prohibitive for an average middle-class family, many
landscape architects argued that writing had become a new professional duty and that what owners of small
homes needed most was to develop their taste in landscape design rather than to purchase an actual design.
Writing on the outdoors was “one of the most emphatic and significant movements of the time,” wrote Bailey
in “What This Magazine Stands For,” the initial editorial of Country Life in America, a magazine that
featured larger properties but also often included advice for owners of small homes. Other magazines
such as House Beautiful and the more middle-class-oriented House and Garden also began at this time
to devote annual issues to gardening. Titles on Japanese landscaping appeared more frequently,
explaining various effects such as the practice of “distance-lowering,” that is, grading tree
sizes to force perspective.
A central tenet of such literature was that gardening strengthened democracy.
Gardening clubs, for instance, founded largely by well-to-do women in the nineteenth century,
showed particular concern for small gardens as a means of extending aesthetic education to
the middle class through newsletters, meetings, and the camaraderie of shared interests.
Whereas the profession of landscape architecture was dominated by men, with some notable
exceptions, garden clubs, which arguably affected more of the built American landscape than
did professionals, were nearly exclusively run by women. Many women had gained expertise from working
their own gardens and began to consult with individual and even institutional clients. Louisa
Yeomans King, cofounder of the Garden Club of America, editor of the “Little Gardens” series
and author of two of its titles, and named by House and Garden the “fairy godmother” of
American gardening, proclaimed in 1925 the democratic implications of the modest gardens
surrounding small homes: “There is no other such meeting ground: there is no community
of interest such as this of gardens.” All citizens were equal working the soil and so
American masses almost instinctively clamored for green. Garden interest would grow only
greater, King prophesied, as the United States compensated with quantity what it
lacked in antiquity or magnificence.
Humanities, July/August 2008, Volume 29/Number 4
Subscribe to Humanities magazine here.
|
|
|