california history - California Historical Society

california historyvolume 88 number 1 2010 The Journal of the California Historical SocietyExecutive DirectorDavid CrossonEditorJANET FIREMANManaging EditorShelly KaleReviews EditorJAMES J. RAWLSSpotlight Editorjonathan spauldingDesign/Productionsandy bellEditorial ConsultantsLARRY E. BURGESSROBERT W. CHERNYJAMES N. GREGORYJUDSON A. GRENIERROBERT V. HINELANE R. HIRABAYASHILAWRENCE J. JELINEKPAUL J. KARLSTROMR. JEFFREY LUSTIGSALLY M. MILLERGEORGE H. PHILLIPSLEONARD PITTc o n t e n t sFrom the Editor: 100 Years. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Collections: California Ephemera Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3People’s Park: Birth and Survival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8By Jon David CashSignificant Others: The Defining Domestic Lifeof Caroline Seymour Severance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30By Diana TittleNotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58Donors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61Spotlight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64on the front coverIllustrations comparing suffragists to heroic andinspired figures were prevalent during the prolongedstruggle for women’s suffrage. In this 1911 poster byOakland artist Bertha M. Boyé, a setting sun formsa halo behind a western woman advocating Votesfor Women. Winner of a competition sponsored bywomen’s suffrage organizations in San Francisco,the poster was displayed throughout the city priorto the successful October 10, 1911, election grantingCalifornia women the vote. Diana Tittle describes thecontributions of one of the state’s pioneering suffragistsin her essay “Significant Others: The DefiningDomestic Life of Caroline Seymour Severance.”California History is printed inLos Angeles by Delta Graphics.The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,Harvard UniversityEditorial offices and support forCalifornia History are provided byLoyola Marymount University,Los Angeles.1

c o l l e c t i o n sCalifornia Ephemera ProjectAdvertisements, catalogs, tickets, billheads,flyers, and other artifacts ofhistorical and cultural significance aredistinguished by their ephemeral, ortemporary, nature. Yet, the insightsthey provide into aspects of daily life—business, community, social trendsand movements, modes of travel, tomention but a few—are invaluable.Accessibility and preservation providean opportunity for these items—oftenthe only surviving records for sometopics—to endure.CHS’s ephemera collections, focusingon nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryCalifornia, are now more accessiblethrough the California Ephemera Project(CEP)—a portal to the ephemeracollections at California institutions viathe Online Archive of California. Withthe goal of offering greater public accessto these collections, the CEP processesand describes the ephemera of fourinitial partners: the California HistoricalSociety, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,Transgender Historical Society, the SanFrancisco Public Library, and the Societyof California Pioneers. The project wasawarded a Cataloging Hidden SpecialCollections and Archives grant by theCouncil on Library and InformationResources with funding by the MellonFoundation.CHS launched the CEP website(www.californiaephemeraproject.org) in September 2010; accounts ofthe project’s development are documentedin its blog, “36 pages or less”(www.36pagesorless.wordpress.com),named for one of the yardsticks usedto determine if an item qualifies asephemera.The following pages bring examplesfrom CHS’s ephemera collections outof “hiding,” unveiling their appeal andrich historical contributions.Business card, C. Herrmann & Co.(manufacturing hatter), San Francisco, ca. 1880–1898, California Business Ephemera CollectionCatalog of samples, Eleanor P. Gibbons & Co.(design and engraving firm), San Francisco, 1880,California Business Ephemera Collection

c o l l e c t i o n sAdmission ticket, Grand BalloonAscension, W. McLeish (aeronaut),undated, California Biography CollectionAdvertising calendar, James B. Capp (notary public,insurance, and real estate), San Jose, ca. 1900,California Business Ephemera Collection California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

Label, Buffalo Brewing Company, 1895,California Business Ephemera CollectionCampaign ribbon, Votes for Women, October 10, 1911,San Francisco Ephemera CollectionCampaign flyer, Patrick Henry McCarthy (1863–1933;San Francisco mayor, 1910–1912), ca. 1910,California Biography Collection

c o l l e c t i o n sBusiness cards and tag, BestManufacturing Co. Inc., San Leandro,1895–1912, California BusinessEphemera CollectionCalifornia History • volume 88 number 1 2010

Ticket booklets, Panama-PacificInternational Exposition, 1915,San Francisco Ephemera Collection7

People’s Park:Birth and SurvivalBy Jon David CashPeople’s Park marked the beginning of something new. For alienated youngpeople, it demonstrated that they could act creatively and together to buildan environment uniquely theirs where they could celebrate the rituals of anew culture. Although they lost the park, most felt that it was only a battlein a war that they would win someday.—Sim Van der Ryn, University of California, 1970 1Prologue: The University,the Community, and Lot 1875-2The University of California’s interest in thelot now famed as People’s Park dates backto 1952, when the Board of Regents deviseda long-range development plan designatingmuch of the south campus area of Berkeleyfor potential university growth. A 1956 revisionof the plan assured that it would be conducted insuch a way as to provide “a well-rounded life forstudents.” According to a 2007 study, universityadministrators embraced a policy of acquiring“large lots of land outside the campus” to develop“high-rise, modernist residential halls, administrativebuildings, and specialized sports fields.” 2Even in the relatively apolitical 1950s, it wasapparent that this area was closely intertwinedwith a developing youth culture. Berkeley’sTelegraph Avenue, consisting primarily of olderhouses often rented as low-income residences bystudents and the bookstores and coffeehousesthey frequented, was of particular significance.Running through the city’s business district andterminating at the campus gates, it had acquiredan anti-authoritarian reputation. As the journalistRobert Scheer noted: “Telegraph Avenue came torival San Francisco’s North Beach as the vital centerof the Beat Generation, with Allen Ginsbergand Gregory Corso denouncing the sterile socialorder and calling for liberation from their forumat Robbie’s Chinese-American restaurant.” 3In 1967, when the mass media coined the term“hippie” and publicized a “summer of love” inthe countercultural haven of San Francisco’sHaight-Ashbury district, thousands of teenagerunaways flooded into the Haight, causing massiveovercrowding. Older nonconformist residentsreacted with a mass exodus, gravitating tothe Telegraph Avenue area, whose environmentrecalled an earlier Haight-Ashbury. There theymingled with anti–Vietnam War activists. Alongthe local shops and stores, hippies and radicalsshared their mutual disdain for a war thatinvolved over a half million servicemen and costover 50,000 American lives. This informal alli-California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

ance soon would join forces in opposition to theuniversity’s expansion into their south campusneighborhood. 4From the development plan’s inception, campusadministrators had crept along with its implementation.In 1956, the Regents authorized aland-acquisition program, including Lot 1875-2,the three-acre parcel on which People’s Parkwould be constructed (a block east of TelegraphAvenue and bordered on the south by DwightWay, on the north by Haste Street, and on theeast by Bowditch Street). The Regents, however,did not allocate the funding necessary to purchasethe property. Finally, in June 1967, UCBerkeley Chancellor Roger W. Heyns and Vice-Chancellor Earl Cheit persuaded the Regents toallocate $1.3 million to acquire the lot. Justifyingthe urgency of the transaction, they cited a“desperate need” for the construction of a soccerfield. This “desperate need” apparently was afleeting one, since Heyns further conjecturedthat the site ultimately would be used for studenthousing by the late 1970s. 5In reality, the campus did not possess a dire needfor either student housing or a soccer field. Asdormitory usage declined from 5,064 students in1964 to 2,898 students in 1970, space in previouslyconstructed dormitories remained unused.The Regents, noting that the state barely brokeThe 1969 People’s Park controversy began with its creationin April and ended a month later in bloodshed. A source ofconflict since its founding, the park to some is a symbol ofcivil disobedience, memorializing the city’s role in the antiwarand free speech movements of the 1960s and the ecologymovement of the 1970s. Others consider it “a creativeecological endeavor,” as park founder Wendy Schlesingerdescribed: “At the Park, hippies and business people workedtogether, old and young, black, white, Asian, Latinos, menand women and children, all smiling, all unified in theirquest to create beauty out of waste and to ‘get a blister’ fora good cause.”Courtesy of Terri Compost; photograph by B. N. Duncan9

even on existing dorms due to the high cost ofmaintenance and low usage, had ranked Berkeleyas the lowest of all nine UC campuses in priorityfor new housing. Nevertheless, in a supremetouch of irony, administrators proceeded with aplan to demolish the low-cost off-campus housingpreferred by students in favor of high-risedormitories. As for the soccer field, ProfessorSim Van der Ryn, a member of the College ofArchitecture and chairman of the Chancellor’sAdvisory Committee on Housing and the Environment,accused Heyns of having “patentlyinvented” the “desperate need” for a soccer fieldto rationalize milking funds from the Regents.The campus’s existing soccer fields were notused to their full capability; even the conservativeNational Review conceded that soccer was “a sportwhich at Berkeley ranks right up there in popularitywith cock-fighting.” 6Van der Ryn alluded to other factors behind theuniversity’s haste to implement the plan, suggestingthat Cheit wanted to “clean up that areaand get rid of the people living there who are athreat to the stability of the University.” Indeed,the resolution adopted by the Regents specificallyaddressed the undesirability of Telegraph Avenueresidents: “The area has been the scene of hippieconcentration and rising crime.” The NationalReview agreed, stating that university administratorshad endeavored “to check the growth of thealien culture which has put down roots alongTelegraph Avenue” by seeking “to deny it growingspace.” 7After completing the lot’s purchase throughthe exercise of eminent domain, the universitydemolished houses standing on the propertybetween November 1967 and June 1968, uprootingstudent renters who were frequently inthe midst of final examinations. But, as it hada decade earlier, campus leaders took a sluggishapproach to developing the newly acquiredproperty.At this point, Van der Ryn and the advisory committeesuggested that the university set asidesome of the land for “people on the street tomake a place of their own, and to take some ofthe pressure off a crowded and tense TelegraphAvenue.” The administration, however, ignoredthis advice, and the site became an undevelopedvacant lot. Students used it for parking wheneverrainfall did not create too much mud. Meanwhile,the university insisted that it lacked thenecessary funding for construction of the projectedsoccer field. In April 1969, the founders ofPeople’s Park stepped into the void, setting thestage for a conflict whose repercussions are felttoday, more than forty years later, in the continuedstruggle over interpretations of public space. 8Act I: Creating the ParkThe concept of constructing a communitycontrolled,user-developed park was popularizedby a local merchant, Mike Delacour, owner of theRed Square dress shop. From 1956 to 1964, Delacourhad worked for General Dynamics, climbinghis way up the corporate ladder from mechanic’shelper to research and mechanical technicianand working on missile installations at variousAir Force bases. He later recalled a comfortablemiddle-class existence along with his wife andthree children in the San Diego suburb of Santee:“It was the American dream, living together butnot knowing your neighbors. I only got to know aneighbor when our wives had a fight going oversome dumb thing. It was worse than a ghetto—there was no community.” 9Following a divorce, Delacour rejected theregimentation that he felt General Dynamicsrequired, quit his job in 1964, and spent the nextyear traveling around Europe on a Eurailpass.Reports he had heard about Berkeley appealedto his new spirit of freedom and adventure, andso upon returning to the States in 1965, it wasnot Santee but Berkeley, and its radical politicalscene, to which he gravitated. 101 California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

Local merchant and activist Michael Delacour responded to the University of California’s neglectful stewardship ofLot 1875-2 by proposing a park on the site. An opportunity to revitalize the vacant, mud-filled lot as a communityproject, the new park was embraced by local residents and supporters of radical politics and countercultural idealism.© Photograph by Harold Adler11

The attraction, however, was fleeting. Strollingalong Fulton Street in the south campus area,Delacour passed the two-story frame house thatserved as headquarters for the Vietnam DayCommittee (VDC), noticed “a pretty girl in thewindow,” and eagerly volunteered. His fervor forthe cause was quickly doused by the assignmentof “shit work,” such as setting up microphonesfor speeches to be made by VDC leaders and slavingover mailing lists. Later, in 1968, he workedzealously in the Peace and Freedom Party’s registrationdrive. In October of that year, GovernorRonald Reagan and the UC Board of Regents prohibitedthe Peace and Freedom Party presidentialcandidate and Black Panther leader, EldridgeCleaver, from presenting a series of guest lectureson campus. Delacour was arrested duringthe ensuing campus protest on charges of disturbingthe peace, malicious mischief, and trespassfor his role in the seizure of Moses Hall. Heserved a ten-day jail sentence and, by the end ofthe election, was once again profoundly distrustfulof the radicals’ schismatic, internally dividedpolitics: “We suddenly had gained some power,but then we started dividing the spoils—formingorganizations and bureaucracies—and everyonebecame ego-involved in endless hassles.” 11The idea of building a park upon the university’svacant lot occurred to Delacour while organizinga community rock concert: “I contacted this bandcalled the Joy of Cooking to see if they’d play andthey said ‘Yeah.’ So we went up and looked atthe lot. The property was a mess—lots of brokenglass, mud holes, and abandoned cars. It wastoo ugly, so we called off the concert. We neededa park there.” He called for an organizationalmeeting at his dress shop, and the first gatheringof the park’s developers was held on Tuesday,April 15, 1969. It attracted five volunteers: WendySchlesinger, John Angelo, Paul Glusman, StewAlbert, and a carpenter named Curtis. 12Schlesinger, a stunningly beautiful blonde andthe only female among those credited with conceptualizingthe park, became the project’s primaryfundraiser, collecting nearly $2,000 fromlocal merchants, churches, and residents. Shehad graduated from college at the age of nineteen,taught English for six months in Long Island,New York, and then headed for Berkeley withthe ostensible—but easily diverted—intention ofattending graduate school. In a New York TimesMagazine article, Winthrop Griffith describedher as “both feminine and forceful . . . a girl whospeaks with a vocabulary almost equally devotedto four-letter words and such gentle concepts as‘love . . . freedom . . . justice . . . beauty.’” 13As a member of the People’s Park Committee, WendySchlesinger (second from left) negotiated continuouslyon behalf of park advocates. She was one ofeleven committee members who met on May 14 inhopes of reaching a last-minute settlement on the fateof the park. People’s Park, she contends, “marked thebeginning of the modern-day communitarian ecologymovement.”Photographer unknown1California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

Little is known about Curtis except his occupation.John Angelo was an eager nineteen yearold who volunteered to commute each week toVallejo to pick up grass sod. Paul Glusman wasinfamous among Berkeley radicals for his “senseof the absurd,” best manifested by his ownorganization of one, the Concerned Stalinistsfor Peace. He was also notorious to the Berkeleypolice for his role in organizing the Moses Hallsit-in and was one of three activists charged,though never convicted, with criminal conspiracyin connection with the building’s seizure. 14Stew Albert, another well-known Berkeley politico,was a native of Brooklyn, where he attendedPace University, earning a bachelor’s degree withan emphasis in politics and philosophy. Aftermoving to Berkeley in 1965, he was one of thefour principal founders of the Free University ofBerkeley (FUB), which offered innovative coursesdeemed unacceptable to mainstream academicthought. A close confidant of Yippie founder andleader Jerry Rubin, he mirrored Rubin’s quirkypassage from the somber Maoism of the ProgressiveLabor (PL) Party to the “do your own thing,”culturally-oriented yet politically-involved Yippiesprotest. Rubin described Albert as “the wildestteacher at the University of California,” who wascapable of attracting massive crowds to lectures“about pot, Vietnam, God, the university, sex, andCommunism.” 15In the spring of 1967, Albert served as Rubin’scampaign manager for his Berkeley mayoral bidand the next year plunged into organizing theYippies’ “Festival of Life” at the 1968 DemocraticParty convention in Chicago. He was arrestedduring the altercations with Chicago police andfor participating in the Moses Hall sit-in uponreturning to Berkeley in the fall. Todd Gitlin,president of Students for a Democratic Society(SDS) from 1963 to 1964 and now a sociologyprofessor at Columbia University, depicted Albertas “a bohemian ex-PLer with curly blond locksand a guileless manner who had turned RubinActivist Stew Albert wrote the April 18, 1969, call to action in the BerkeleyBarb to build a community park, urging people to “bring shovels, hoses,chains, grass, paints, flowers, trees, bull dozers, top soil, colorful smiles,laughter and lots of sweat.” In his 1970 run for Alameda County Sheriff,he carried the city of Berkeley with 65,000 votes.Photo: © Robert Altman, www.altmanphoto.comon to marijuana and for years enjoyed flirtingwith the idea of a hip-radical fusion.” 16The nucleus of six park developers soon expandedto include Jon Read, Mike Lyon, Art Goldberg,Frank Bardacke, William Crosby “Big Bill” Miller,and “Super Joel” (Joseph Eric) Tornabene. Readwas a professional landscape architect who hadgraduated from UC Berkeley in 1961. He hadlived in the original countercultural meccas of the1

Bay Area—North Beach and Haight-Ashbury—and also had belonged to a variety of antiwargroups, including Fair Play for Cuba Committee,VDC, and the War Resisters League. Lyon was amedical student, while Goldberg and Bardackewere both prominent political activists. 17Goldberg had worked for civil rights in Mississippiand had participated in the 1964 FreedomSummer voter registration project along withan estimated thirty to sixty UC Berkeley studentvolunteers. Back on campus that fall, these FreedomSummer veterans were confronted by theadministration’s order rescinding student organizations’rights to pass out information, recruitvolunteers, or solicit funds at the campus gates.Students organized the Free Speech Movement(FSM) to oppose these regulations, which finallywere revoked on December 18, 1964, followingtwo massive sit-in protests and a student strikethat won most teaching assistants’ support andofficial faculty backing. 18Goldberg served on the FSM steering committeeand in the spring of 1965 was its only principalmember to extend enthusiastic support to theorganization’s unofficial offshoot, the FilthySpeech Movement. This bizarre footnote to theFSM had begun when a student was arrested bypolice on the steps of the student union for wearinga sign that displayed one four-letter synonymfor sexual intercourse. In response, an “obscenity”rally was organized, with Goldberg as themajor speaker. Turnout was sparse; in the eyes ofthe vast majority of the faculty and students, theFilthy Speech Movement discredited the FSM.Goldberg, who earlier was sentenced to a 120-dayjail term and suspended from the university forhis involvement in the FSM, received an additionalthirty-day jail sentence and was expelledfrom the university for his support of the FilthySpeech Movement. 19Bardacke shared Goldberg’s commitment topolitical action; like Goldberg, his political activitieshad provoked the wrath of university officials.A former honors student and football player atHarvard, Bardacke had completed three yearsof graduate work in political science at Berkeleybefore his suspension stemming from his indictmentfor conspiracy as a member of the so-calledOakland 7. The group had been accused of plottingnew tactics, later termed “trashing,” duringStop the Draft Week, October 16–20, 1967, at theOakland Draft Induction Center. “Trashing” latertook on other meanings, including the WeatherUnderground’s symbolic bombing of the toiletat the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and burningcampus ROTC buildings. The Stop the DraftWeek methods, however, were milder—pushingunlocked cars, potted trees, and movable benchesinto intersections—but still represented an obviousbreak from past nonviolence in favor of disruptivestreet demonstrations. In describing theimpact of the Stop the Draft protest, Bardackerevealed his feelings about youth and America:“We said to America that at this moment in historywe do not recognize the legitimacy of Americanpolitical authority. Our little anarchist partywas meant to convey the most political of messages:we consider ourselves political outlaws.The American government has the power to forceus to submit but we no longer believe that it hasthe authority to compel us to obey.” 20The other two important park planners, Big BillMiller and Super Joel Tornabene, were membersof Stew Albert’s hip-radical fusion. Miller hadbeen active in the Berkeley student movementsince FSM days, during which he was convictedof trespassing and resisting arrest for his role inthe December 2, 1964, Sproul Hall sit-in, fined$150, and given a one-year probation. He quicklybecame involved with the VDC and in 1966 wasarrested twice with Albert—initially for an Aprilantiwar march from Telegraph Avenue to CityHall and later for a November sit-in at the studentunion in protest of the university’s consentto use of the facility for naval recruitment while1California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

efusing permission to the VDC. On the hip sideof the hip-radical fusion, Miller owned The Store,a Telegraph Avenue business that specializedin selling drug paraphernalia. In April 1969, hecampaigned as a Yippie-style candidate for theBerkeley City Council with an election slogandesigned to appeal to the drug culture: “To get ahead, you have to vote for a head.” 21Tornabene sometimes claimed he had run awayas a teenager from an Arkansas boarding schoolor that he was the grandson of prominent ChicagoMafia boss Sam Giancana, but he actuallywas raised in a comfortable, middle-class Chicagosuburb. He had played a pivotal behindthe-scenesrole at the 1968 Democratic Partyconvention. In Lincoln Park for the Yippies’ “Festivalof Life,” designed to contrast with the “Conventionof Death,” he tried to park a flatbed truckto use as a platform for a rock band. When Chicagopolice denied the truck entrance to the park,the subsequent confrontation became the firstepisode of what an official government study, theWalker Report, later termed “a police riot.” 22Delacour, Schlesinger, Angelo, Glusman, Albert,Curtis, Read, Lyon, Goldberg, Bardacke, Miller,and Tornabene formed a diverse group of parkfounders who defy simple characterization as“culturally alienated” hippies or “politicallyactive” radicals. The Berkeley of the 1960sembraced hippies who were disenchanted withthe military draft and the Vietnam War alongsideradicals who were far more influenced byGroucho Marx and John Lennon than by KarlMarx and Vladimir Lenin. Political activists andthe counterculture coexisted, sometimes distinctlyapart, sometimes side by side, and sometimesthoroughly absorbed into the fused beliefsof hip-radicals. 23In April 1969, the park founders—labeled “streetpeople” and defined as “an amorphous assemblageof hippies, yippies, students, and othersfalling into no classification” by Time magazine—decided to issue a call for volunteers to help create“a cultural, political, freak-out and rap centerfor the Western world.” Their appeal appearedin the April 18 edition of the local radical undergroundnewspaper, the Berkeley Barb. The articlestressed a communal approach that rejectedleadership roles (“Nobody supervises, and thetrip belongs to whoever dreams”). Paul Glusman,though, later recalled that Michael Delacour’senergy and commitment to the People’s Parkproject provided the incentive to spur other parkbuilders into action: “Mike Delacour stood headand shoulders above everyone else in initiatingthe park. He said, ‘Let’s build a park on Sunday,’and nobody believed him. But on Saturday hehad a truck of grass sod parked in front of theMed [the Caffe Mediterraneum] and was scouringaround Berkeley for the shovels.” 24On the following day, Sunday, April 20, workbegan with the participation of a hundred ofthe so-called street people. According to RobertScheer in Ramparts magazine, Delacourwas again the central figure: “The people whocame to work were the type that resists ‘leaders’and much credit is given to Delacour for havingdeveloped a style of leadership that stressesexample, rather than exhortation. He simplyworked the hardest at different jobs.” WendySchlesinger wrote about “the tangible feeling ofaccomplishment” she derived from being partof “a sod chain” that unloaded and planted tentons of sod. After reflecting upon the diversecomposition of the “sod chain,” her satisfactiongrew even more profound: “Right in the middleof anarchist, polarized, confused Berkeley, peoplegot themselves together instantly, without anydirector. . . . No one of us, be she or he, big orsmall, could have unloaded the ten tons by himor herself. But, together an exhausting task wasturned into an exhilarating frolic.” 25At the end of their first day of effort, workers hadcleared an area in the northeast corner of Lot1875-2 and planted $300 worth of shrubs and1

A hundred students, activists, and local residents participated in the creation of People’s Park on April 20. Stew Albertdescribed the park’s first day: “People were really happy. The sense of victory of having eliminated something ugly, of justdoing something that was uncompromising and truthful was a very powerful trip. . . . What we were creating was our owndesires, so we worked like madmen and loved it.”California Historical Society; photograph by Gordon Peterssod. A celebration then commenced, as workersdistributed communally prepared free foodand listened to the music of the Joy of Cooking,which satisfied Delacour’s original motivation forconceiving the park. Schlesinger was enthusedover what she perceived as a new style in dancingpatterns: “People whirled around barefoot, folkdancing together in a circle at a million miles anhour, going back to the jungle tribe. None of thepsychedelic crap.” 26For the next three weeks, People’s Park continuedto take shape and gain support. Althoughhe had composed the original Barb appeal, StewAlbert, concerned that his political radicalismmight negatively affect the turnout, had optednot to sign it. However, the paper’s April 25 issueincluded Albert’s account of the first day of parkbuilding, which placed Black Panther chairmanBobby Seale on the scene “laughing in total andhappy amazement” and portraying People’s Parkas “really socialistic.” Albert also announced that,although “anytime you want to work is the timeto come to the Park,” Sunday, April 27, wouldbe “our next big Commune Day.” A thousandparticipants, ten times as many as the previousweek, worked in People’s Park that Sunday, provingthat in Berkeley radicalizing the park issuewas not a deterrent to involvement. 27On May 9, the Barb also published Frank Bardacke’sdefense, “Who Owns the Park?,” a manifestoeven more overtly political. In his closingremarks, Bardacke threw down the gauntlet: “We16California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

Drawing from the doctrine of users’ rights, Frank Bardacke created the manifesto “Who Owns the Park?” Aformer political science graduate student, Bardacke asserted that the university had left the land disorderedand abandoned and that the park’s developers, whose use was more productive, could rightly lay claim tothe lot. Written against a backdrop of the Native American resister Geronimo, the leaflet was published inthe May 9 issue of the Berkeley Barb and was widely distributed.Courtesy of Terri Compost17

are building a park on the land. We will take careof it and guard it, in the spirit of the CostanoanIndians. When the University comes with itsland title we will tell them: ‘Your land title is coveredwith blood. We won’t touch it. Your peopleripped off the land from the Indians a long timeago. If you want it back now, you will have tofight for it again.’” This politicization of People’sPark did not scare off the counterculture. Delacour,for example, believed that Bardacke hadmerely brought out the implications with “thewhole user thing which the Indians had” thatwere always inherent in the park issue. Nor didradicalization prevent the participation of moremoderate elements of the south campus community.John Coleman, a Berkeley graduatestudent, neighborhood resident, ordained priest,and self-described “part of the ‘Silent Majority,’”later depicted People’s Park as “a place of delightand whimsy”: “Street people in colorful hatsand costumes, students, middle-aged men withtheir teen-age sons, black and white, straight andhippie, they worked—sometimes two hundredstrong—in the hot afternoon sun, raking, digging,uprooting stubborn rocks, planting corn orflowers (some said they were marijuana), wateringsod. At the end of the afternoon they barbecued—sometimesa symbolic roast pig—drankwine and sang.” 28The formerly desolate vacant lot suddenly wastransformed by swings, slides, and sandboxes;flowers, grass, and three apple trees; abstractmetal sculptures, benches, and brick walkways.Alan Temko, architectural critic for the SanFrancisco Chronicle, praised the park’s foundersfor “starting a new era in democratic city planning”and pronounced People’s Park “the mostsignificant innovation in recreation design sincethe great public parks of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries.” Van der Ryn compared theprocess of building the park to “the creation ofa frontier settlement” and the spirit of the parkbuilders to the heroic strain of “rugged individualism”prevalent in American history andfolklore. 29Twenty years later, Stew Albert reminisced nostalgically:“When people ask me, ‘What would yourpersonal view of heaven be like?’ I say, People’sPark. It was incredible. People were growingvegetables . . . people laying sod, planting rosebushes. There was a real kind of Walt Whitmanon a Sunday afternoon thing: a kind of blendingof play and work.” People’s Park, by bridging thechasm that once separated Bay Area politicos andhippies, exemplified the “hip-radical fusion” thatAlbert had envisioned. 30However, some Berkeley political radicals werenot thrilled with the partnership Albert hadbrokered. His former Progressive Labor comradesdismissed People’s Park as a “bourgeoisreformist” issue. In place of the Maoists, though,the park had gained the support of local southcampus residents, nonradicalized students, andfaculty sympathizers, making People’s Park farmore of a grassroots democratic movement thanits opponents realized. 31Act II: The Chancellor RespondsRoger Heyns arrived at UC Berkeley from theUniversity of Michigan in the autumn of 1965.An Iowa native, he had moved as a young childwith his family to Holland, Michigan. His devoutreligious upbringing convinced him to attendthe church-affiliated Calvin College, where hegraduated with a degree in psychology. At theUniversity of Michigan in Ann Arbor, he earneda master’s degree in psychology shortly beforeenlisting in the Army Air Corps in 1942. DuringWorld War II, he worked in the division of psychologicalservices, reaching the rank of captain.He returned to Ann Arbor after the war, receiveda doctorate in 1949, and joined the faculty. Anacclaimed teacher, he ultimately moved intoadministrative roles, first as dean and later asvice president for academic affairs. 321 California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

Upon taking office as chancellor at Berkeley,Heyns quickly established himself as a moderatingpresence between radical student demonstratorson the left and the newly elected conservativegovernor, Ronald Reagan, on the right. But inthe crisis over People’s Park, he failed at thetask. He waited too long to secure funding forhis projected soccer field and, when challengedwith the park’s construction, hesitated to assertuniversity ownership—by, for example, erectinga fence around the property as soon as plans tobuild the park were announced, thereby avoidingconfrontation.On April 30, following the creation of the parkand his declaration that “plans to build a playingfield are moving ahead,” Heyns advised: “In fairnessto those who have worked on the land, thedisutility of any additional labor must be pointedout.” Observing that park developers had paid noheed to his statement, he demanded on May 8the formation of a “responsible group” withwhom he could negotiate to “assure that furtherunauthorized development would be stopped.”He met later that day with a crosssection of parksupporters: Schlesinger, student body presidentCharles Palmer, student senator JondavidBachrach, and Van der Ryn. Collectively, theyrepresented the interest groups concerned withpreserving the park: the south campus “streetpeople” and UC students and faculty. 33It was definitely a “responsible group,” thoughone unwilling to accept Heyns’s agenda of halting“further unauthorized development.” NeitherSchlesinger nor Palmer believed that Heyns seriouslyconsidered the possibility of compromise.A disillusioned Schlesinger protested, “You can’tjust speak of building a soccer field—you haveto also speak of destroying a park.” And Palmerconsidered Heyns a deceitful individual: “Heynsdoesn’t have any real commitment. And he’s notan open man; he didn’t really level with us ortrust us when we tried to work with or negotiatewith him.” 34Ronald Reagan targeted UC student unrest during his gubernatorial bidin 1966, condemning campus disturbances on the campaign trail. Inthis San Francisco Chronicle cartoon, a gun-toting Sheriff Reagan atthe gates of the Berkeley campus exclaims, “Just show me one of themBeatnik varmints.” Reagan’s readiness for a showdown foreshadows theviolence of local law enforcement during the 1969 People’s Park protests.Courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle; cartoon by Robert BastianVan der Ryn also doubted Heyns’s interest innegotiations. Nevertheless, he proposed a compromise.At his request, the university’s Collegeof Environmental Design enthusiasticallyadopted a resolution urging acceptance of a usercontrolledpark under the college’s sponsorship.The resolution stressed that a community park inthe eastern portion of the lot would not precludethe university’s construction of a soccer field inthe western segment. The plan had the amusedsupport of Michael Delacour, who described it asthe “idea that we’d be specimens in some kind oflaboratory and they’d all come and observe us.” 35Chancellor Heyns rejected the compromise, citingconcerns over the university’s legal liabilitiesshould injuries occur in the park and also over apetition signed by forty-eight area residents frustratedwith excessive noise, sanitation conditions,19

and illegal drug use in the park. The former concernignored the fact that the university would beequally liable for the soccer field; the latter disregarded,even after the petition grew to 132, aneven larger number of area residents who alreadyhad shown their support. Seventy-four Collegeof Environmental Design students subsequentlyconducted a public opinion poll, which revealedthat 81 percent of residents in a thirty-five-squareblockarea surrounding the park favored anothercompromise proposal by William Wheaton, deanof the college: lease the land to a nonprofit corporationand allow it to be developed as a communitypark. 36William J. McGill, chancellor at the Universityof California, San Diego, thought that Heynshad missed one “window of opportunity” bynot quickly asserting university property rightsand a second by rejecting the possibility of compromise.By May 8, “with literally thousandsof protagonists determined to defend People’sPark,” McGill believed that Heyns’s best optionwas to cooperate with the concept of the park,even if only as “some form of temporary compromisewhile waiting for natural antagonismsamong the factions to split the group apart.” Itappeared to McGill that although Heyns initiallyhad favored compromise, he had spurned Vander Ryn’s proposal in fear of the need to defendany concessions to Governor Reagan and theRegents at an approaching May 16 meeting.The Regents, according to McGill, had alreadymade it quite clear that “a user-developed, usermaintainedpark was unacceptable to a majorityof the board, and especially the Governor’s supporters.”Heyns, after placing a phone call to Vander Ryn on the night of May 11, had practicallyacknowledged as much. He told Van der Ryn:“You’ve done your best, but it won’t fly.” Van derRyn then urged Heyns, as the chancellor of “aneducational institution committed to experimentationand student involvement,” to “take someleadership” and intervene in favor of the park.Heyns brusquely replied: “Look, I’m just a janitorfor the Regents.” 37Had Heyns accepted Van der Ryn’s compromise,he could have defended his position by arguingthat he had preserved the necessary land forthe urgently needed soccer field while removingradical operation of People’s Park and placing itunder university control through the College ofEnvironmental Design. Then, if conflict flared,Heyns could cancel the entire project and blameradical activists for failing to cooperate with theuniversity’s efforts to negotiate a workable compromise—aposition that probably would havedriven a wedge between the founders of People’sPark and the nonradicalized students, weakeningtheir coalition.Instead, on May 13, a day following his departurefor a meeting of the National Science Foundationin Washington, D.C., Heyns released a statementasserting that, after realizing People’s Parkwas only “a ploy to create a new confrontationbetween students and the University,” he had “nofeasible alternative except to fence the area.” Vander Ryn, whose initial contact with the park developershad been the radical Big Bill Miller, stillbelieved that People’s Park reflected the peacefulvalues of the counterculture rather than the confrontationalattitudes of political activists: “Radicalpolitical groups did try to use the park issue fortheir own ends, but they were largely ignored bythe majority of the ‘new culture’ people.” 38The park’s founders certainly included severalpolitical radicals who delighted in provokingconfrontations with the university. One of them,Art Goldberg, even publicly professed his pleasureover placing Heyns in a no-win situation:“The university is in a very difficult situation. If itmoves its bulldozers on a nearly completed park,it will arouse the wrath not only of the youngpeople and the radicals, but it will also disappointthe liberals and expose its true expansionistCalifornia History • volume 88 number 1 2010

nature. If it allows the park to exist, it knows ithas on its doorstep a center for the type of activitythat it despises.” Stew Albert, from his more hipradicalperspective, also foresaw two possible outcomes:at once viewing the park as “such a gentlething” that it virtually invited “co-optation” byuniversity authorities, but also recognizing thatGovernor Reagan, who had campaigned to “cleanup the mess at Berkeley,” might be “sucked intoa fight” over the issue. 39By declaring that there was “no feasible alternative”simultaneously with Van der Ryn’s compromisesolution, Heyns assured continued supportfor People’s Park from a broad-based coalitioncomposed of the original founders, faculty sympathizers,and nonradicalized students, includingrepresentatives of student government andmembers of sororities and fraternities who hadparticipated in building the park as one of theircommunity improvement projects. The chancellorhad failed at a hard-line strategy by not actingswiftly enough, at compromise by not acknowledgingits potential, and at diluting oppositionby not fragmenting the diverse People’s Parkalliance. Completing the process, he passed universitysupervision over the fence construction tothe police on May 15, 1969—“Bloody Thursday,”as it became known to park supporters. 40Act III: Bloody ThursdayNeither Chancellor Heyns nor Vice-ChancellorCheit was in Berkeley on Bloody Thursday.Heyns, prior to departing on May 12 for theNational Science Foundation meeting, had persuadedCheit to substitute for him at the May 16Regents meeting in Los Angeles. Heyns hadleft word for the fence to be constructed in hisabsence and had contacted the Alameda Countysheriff to provide protection for constructionworkers. However, he neglected to tell his secondvice-chancellor, nominally next in campus command,about the fence construction project. 41The oversight left the head of campus police,Captain William Beall, as the only universityofficial with any real conception of events as theytranspired during that momentous Thursday.Beall, however, was subordinate to the man whobecame Berkeley’s military commander for theday: Alameda County Sheriff Frank Madigan. Asixty-one-year-old alumnus of the FBI NationalAcademy and a winner of the California AmericanLegion award for “untiring zeal” in narcoticslaw enforcement, Madigan had served theAlameda County Sheriff’s Department since1932, the last seven as sheriff. He blamed theentire People’s Park controversy on “anarchistsand revolutionaries” who wanted “to take thisform of government down, starting with theeducational system and then with law enforcement.”Such a personal animus undoubtedlyaffected his actions. Earlier in February 1969,during a student strike in Berkeley organized bythe Third World Liberation Front over demandsfor minority studies programs, Governor Reaganhad declared a “state of extreme emergency” andauthorized the use of Bay Area and state policeon campus. Now, a few months following thestrike, the governor’s decree remained in force. 42The tragedy of Bloody Thursday began at dawn,4:45 a.m., when Madigan directed 250 policemen—includingmembers of the AlamedaCounty Sheriff’s Department, the San FranciscoTactical Force, Berkeley police, the CaliforniaHighway Patrol (CHP), and campus police—toevict seventy defenders of the park who hadcamped there overnight. By noon, some 2,000to 3,000 park supporters had gathered on campusat Sproul Plaza. Following several speakers,student body president-elect Dan Siegel took themicrophone. A second-year law student who livedonly a block away from People’s Park, Siegel laterrecalled speaking “very generally although heatedly”and then spontaneously exhorting, “Let’s godown there and take the park.” This idea strucksuch a popular chord with those assembled that,1

without even allowing Siegel to continue hisspeech, the crowd simply “poured off the campuswith whoops and yells.” 43Upon approaching the intersection of TelegraphAvenue and Haste Street, the protesters encountereda well-formed line of Berkeley police andCHP officers who denied them access to the park.At that point, some demonstrators darted downan alley leading to the park, and county deputieschased in hot pursuit. The other demonstrators,unable to reach the park, remained on TelegraphAvenue, where some protesters, willing to adoptthe strategy of trashing fashionable Berkeley,smashed the glass door of the Bank of Americabuilding. Others engaged the police in whatPeter Barnes of Newsweek’s San Francisco bureaudescribed as the “cat-and-mouse tactics of guerrillaprovocation.” “The guerrillas seemed to haveperfected a set of counter-tactics: in the face ofa police charge, they melted quickly down sidestreets and regrouped for another sortie; after atear-gas barrage, they lurked just out of range ofthe fumes, hurling their missiles and chanting,‘We want the park.’” Barnes believed that “fewstudents actually threw anything more dangerousthan epithets,” but the police complainedthat they were hit with rocks, sticks, bricks,bottles, jagged pieces of pipe and steel, chunksof concrete, and cherry bombs (some with BBshot glued on to act as shrapnel). Ominously,the police claimed that many of these projectileswere thrown from the roofs of buildings thatlined Haste Street and Telegraph Avenue. ThoughBerkeley police had occupied the rooftops for earlierantiwar marches, Madigan had neglected toseize this strategic high ground. 44When the Sproul Plaza crowd first arrived atthe intersection of Telegraph and Haste at 12:30p.m., they were confronted by a contingent of159 officers that proved woefully insufficient tomaintain order. With reinforcements from theBerkeley Police Department, CHP, and AlamedaCounty Sheriff’s Department, the number oflaw enforcement swelled to 791 and order wasrestored. However, either the call for backup ortheir arrival was remarkably slow; reinforcementsdid not arrive until 2:15 p.m. In the interim,while besieged officers from the Berkeley PoliceDepartment and CHP refrained from using servicerevolvers, Sheriff Madigan issued shotgunsto his deputies, who quickly opened fire at therooftops and at the street level. 45Madigan later defended his use of firearmson the grounds that “our men were beingassaulted,” which left him no choice but “to usefirearms—because we didn’t have the availablemanpower—or retreat and abandon the cityof Berkeley to the mob.” To be fair, Madiganapparently had believed that protesters wouldbe confined to a small group of political radicalsand therefore greatly underestimated the troopstrength required to quell a rebellion. When thethousands of people from Sproul Plaza arrived,there actually were fewer officers on hand than at4:45 a.m., when they were rousting campers outof the park. Faced with a far larger demonstrationthan anticipated, Madigan overreacted andresorted to the use of indiscriminate gunfire. 46His decision resulted in the hospitalization ofthirty-two gunshot victims, a blinding, and a fatality.The People’s Park martyr, James Rector, washardly an active provocateur or an obvious targetfor police retaliation. He was a twenty-five-yearoldcarpenter from San Jose visiting friends inBerkeley and part of a crowd observing the streetbattle from atop the roof of Granma’s bookstoreIn the early morning hours of May 15, 1969, 250 localpolice and California Highway Patrol officers cleared thepark, destroyed a section of its plantings, and installeda chain-link fence around its perimeter. Thus began theevents known as Bloody Thursday, in which one bystanderwas killed and another was blinded. Forty-three protestersand bystanders required hospitalization, thirty-two fromgunshot wounds, and many other victims avoided medicaltreatment to prevent getting arrested at the hospital.© Photographs by Harold Adler California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

on Telegraph Avenue. According to Time, thepolice opened fire on Granma’s rooftop becausean object had been thrown from an adjacentbuilding. Similarly, Alan Blanchard, a twentynine-year-oldfather of a three-month-old son,was standing atop the building where he worked,the Telegraph Repertory Cinema—between thesource of the hurled objects and the location ofGranma’s—when shots were fired at him. 47A Ramparts report, approved by former FBIagent Bill Turner, described the actions of afifteen-man squad of county deputies headed bySergeant Louis Santucci: “The deputies stiffened.Eight or nine of them (according to an analysisof a number of photographs taken at the time)aimed their shotguns at the rooftop. A count ofthe spent shell casings visible afterward on thepavement indicates that at least nine shots werefired.” The photographs published in Rampartsrevealed that only one of the policemen actuallyhad fired at the building from which the missileshad been flung. Rector was shot in the side as hewas turning to run and was saved from rollingoff the building by a history graduate student,Michael Meo. He suffered abdominal, chest, andheart wounds. Surgeons removed his spleen, onekidney, and part of his pancreas; nevertheless, hedied four days later from undetected damage tohis heart. Blanchard was permanently blinded byshots that damaged both of his eyes. Aside fromRector and Blanchard, Newsweek noted severalother wounded innocent bystanders: “the wife ofa local bakery shop owner, a 14-year-old boy, andtwo reporters.” 48Six years earlier, Sheriff Bull Connor had shockedthe nation when he opened fire hoses on civilrights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.After Bloody Thursday, Dr. Henry Brean, whotreated the victims of gunshot wounds at nearbyHerrick Hospital, suggested that Sheriff Madiganscale his notion of “law and order” at least backto Sheriff Connor’s level. Brean complained:“There are ways of solving disputes of this naturewithout killing people. Birdshot can penetrate thesoft tissues of the body and sometimes damagethe inner organs. Buckshot tears the body—allof it—apart. The indiscriminate use of shotgunsis sheer insanity. Hasn’t anyone here ever heardof fire hoses?” Initially, sheriff’s deputies deniedthe use of buckshot, admitting only to usingbirdshot. After Rector’s autopsy revealed thathe was, indeed, the victim of buckshot wounds,even Madigan was forced to acknowledge itsuse, although he claimed buckshot was issuedonly after birdshot ran out. In an article in Commonwealmagazine, Charles Horman suggested:“Buckshot is far more dangerous—but the sheriff’sevasion blurs the point that they should havebeen using neither.” 49At the end of Bloody Thursday, forty-eight peoplehad been arrested and sixty-two were hospitalized.Forty-three demonstrators and bystanders,mostly victims of gunshot wounds, had receivedmedical treatment, as well as nineteen policeofficers, including CHP officer Albert C. Bradley,who suffered a stab wound in the chest. Thosewho were detained in Santa Rita Prison Facilitylater filed a class-action suit in Federal DistrictCourt for the Northern District of Californiaagainst Madigan and the Alameda County Sheriff’sdeputies. Judge Robert Peckham respondedwith a restraining order, which prohibited Madiganand his deputies from threatening physicalviolence, using abusive and obscene language,and repeating such acts as “striking prisonerswith clubs and hands; forcing prisoners to beface down on a hard asphalt courtyard coveredwith gravel for periods up to four hours; preventingprisoners from sleeping by continued torment;forcing one prisoner, in full view of otherprisoners, to place his head against a woodenpost and then striking the post with great forceuntil the prisoner’s nose was bloody; cuttingthe hair of one prisoner; preventing at least oneprisoner from getting required medication.” Fortheir use of shotguns and abuses such as these, California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

As Bloody Thursday came to a close, Governor Reagan established martial law in Berkeley. Beginning on May 16,three National Guard battalions, with supporting units under the tactical direction of Alameda County Sheriff FrankMadigan, occupied the city, erecting barricades and clearing the streets, bayonets at the ready. Although he limitedtheir mission on May 25, Governor Reagan did not recall the troops until June 2.© Photograph by Harold AdlerMadigan and his deputies were dubbed by parkdefenders as “the Blue Meanies,” recalling theoppressive forces in the Beatles’ recently releasedfilm Yellow Submarine. 50In the aftermath of Bloody Thursday, on May 16Governor Reagan rushed 2,700 National Guardsmeninto Berkeley to restore order, slapped on a10 p.m. curfew, and outlawed any form of publicassembly, with an edict banning the gatheringof more than three people in one place. Thegovernor’s restriction of the First Amendmentguarantee of freedom of assembly was so broadand far-ranging that, if enforced, it would haveprevented the convening of the Berkeley CityCouncil. Nevertheless, from May 18 to 23, crowdsof 1,500 to 5,000 protesters gathered in defianceof these stringent security measures, despiteincurring more than 800 mass arrests. 51During Reagan’s military occupation of Berkeley,a National Guard helicopter assaulted the entirecity with tear gas. Even Reagan acknowledgedthat the helicopter’s gas dispersal constituted astrategic error, although the governor defensivelyadded: “Once the dogs of war are unleashed,you must expect things will happen, and peoplewill make mistakes on both sides.” Nevertheless,law enforcement’s use of shotguns and tear gasonly increased local support for the park, includinga special three-day student referendum thatattracted 14,969 voters, a record turnout tripling

participation in any previous student referendum.The results revealed that an overwhelming85 percent of the students favored “preservationof the land currently known as People’s Park as itwas prior to May 12.” 52Additionally, a total of eighty-four leaders ofmainstream student organizations—includingthe editor of the yearbook, the president of theInterfraternity Organization, the senior classpresident, the chairman of Big Game Week,and the leaders of the Pom-Pom Girls and OshiDolls—signed a letter to the nonradical campusnewspaper, the Daily Californian, calling for “thespontaneous and continued development ofthat park area” under the control of “those studentsand members of the community by whomthe park was initially developed and creativelydesigned.” On May 23, UC’s Faculty Senate votedoverwhelmingly, 642–95, in favor of a resolutionurging removal of the fence and also callingfor the attorney general to investigate “policeand military lawlessness committed . . . in thename of maintaining law and order.” On May 25,Reagan partly relented, rescinding the curfewand his edict prohibiting public assembly. Healso removed most National Guardsmen to theirarmories and reduced their role from patrollingthe streets to protecting the fence aroundPeople’s Park and the Hall of Justice. 53With civil liberties now fully restored, the causeof People’s Park drew tens of thousands to apair of peaceful marches. On May 26, 7,500marched to the state capitol and on MemorialDay an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 marchedpast People’s Park without incident. Rejecting thedisruptive street tactics that had been in voguesince Stop the Draft Week, the event representeda return to the nonviolent protests of the FreeSpeech Movement and the early days of theantiwar movement. Protesters employed creativetactics, such as laying sod on the pavement ofBerkeley streets. 54The peaceful nature of the Memorial Day marchobviously influenced Reagan. Responding onJune 2, the governor withdrew the NationalGuard and Bay Area police, including SheriffMadigan and his “Blue Meanies.” In addition, herevoked the “state of extreme emergency” that hehad declared nearly four months earlier. 55Chancellor Heyns now finally recognized anexpanding coalition of park supporters. Althoughhe still opposed the Van der Ryn proposal, hebacked a new compromise, approved by a 5–4Berkeley City Council vote, providing that a portionof Lot 1875-2 be leased to the city of Berkeleyand developed as a community-used anduser-developed park. In addition to Heyns, theplan had the support of 81 percent of area residents,according to the College of EnvironmentalDesign survey; 85 percent of students, accordingto the student referendum; 87 percent of the faculty,according to the Faculty Senate resolution;Berkeley Mayor Wallace Johnson; the BerkeleyCity Council; and the president of the nine-schoolUC system, Charles J. Hitch. 56Significantly, the widely popular proposal was notacceptable to Governor Reagan, who thought hehad backed down far enough by halting the militaryresponse to the protests. Reagan adamantlyrefused to make any concessions on People’sPark, maintaining that conceding in the past hadled to Bloody Thursday and the death of JamesRector: “The police didn’t kill the young man.He was killed by the first college administratorwho said some time ago it was all right to breakthe law in the name of dissent.” According to thegovernor, compromise on People’s Park would“appear as nothing but a cop-out” or “anotherconcession and roundabout way of giving this tothe people who tried to take it by force.” For Reagan,the course of action was simple: “We boughtthis land for $1.3 million for a specific use.” If theuniversity failed to develop the lot along the linesof the ten-year plan, then the governor suggested“we couldn’t show our faces to the taxpayers ofCalifornia History • volume 88 number 1 2010

this state.” On June 20, Reagan thwarted thespirit of compromise at a meeting of the Regents,which rejected the new plan by a vote of 18–6and endorsed Reagan’s position by approving,16–7, a resolution to construct married-studentapartments “as expeditiously as possible.” 57Reagan had emerged victorious in the battle forPeople’s Park. His assertion of university propertyrights was politically popular on state andnational levels with voters who had grown wearyof campus disruptions. William J. McGill noted:“Whenever Governor Reagan attacked the Universityof California, his popularity zoomed.” Reagan,with his antipark position, endeared himselfto his mentor, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, andto the conservative wing of the Republican Party,whose support ultimately took him all the way tothe White House. Reagan definitely got what hewanted from People’s Park. 58Epilogue: SurvivalOn the local scene, Berkeley radicals, who hadproclaimed in a pro-park leaflet “We need thepark to live and grow and eventually we need allof Berkeley,” also got what they wanted. Madiganand Reagan, by overreacting to People’s Park,destroyed conservative influence in Berkeley,paving the way for a radical takeover. In the1971 Berkeley elections, radicals won four seatson the City Council and controlled the mayor’soffice under Warren Wideman. Chancellor Heynsresigned the same year. One year later, a groupof activists tore down the hated fence that hehad constructed. The park was reclaimed, albeitwithout the imaginative architectural designs thathad marked the original project. However, thenew park was no longer limited to the northeastcorner of the lot, since all three acres were nowliberated as open space. 59People’s Park has survived the interveningdecades, despite periodic threats from the university.In 1979, the university tried to lay claimto a no-cost parking lot on the park’s westernend and turn it into a fee lot for students andfaculty. Protesters tore up the asphalt, pitchedtents, and maintained a twenty-four-hour vigil.The university surrendered, and park defenderstransformed the section into an organic gardeningarea that thrives today. Throughout the firsthalf of the 1980s, the university simply sniped atuser attempts to develop the park. For example,after allowing the construction of a wooden bandstand,the People’s Stage, in 1978, the universitybanned amplified music two years later. Whenpark users planted trees and installed benches,campus police uprooted and removed them. 60People’s Park again emerged at the forefrontof controversy in 1989. When Chancellor IraMichael Heyman complained that the park wasa haven for drug dealers and the homeless, theuniversity announced plans to build a 200-beddormitory on the site. Mayor Loni Hancock,one of four radicals elected to the Berkeley CityCouncil in 1971, blocked its construction, and awar of words ensued that ended with the signingof an accord between the university and thecity in October 1989. The university shelved itsplans for dormitory construction and agreed that“People’s Park should be retained as open space.”Veteran activists, though, were dismayed that theuniversity still claimed “a portion of the space” tobe “developed and maintained by the Universityfor informal recreation use (e.g.: volleyball andbasketball).” 61Their fears were confirmed on July 31, 1991,when bulldozers arrived to build sand volleyballcourts at the southern end of the park. Constructionof the volleyball courts coincided with theenforcement by campus police of the park’s10 p.m. curfew, preventing the homeless fromsleeping in the park. Protesters rioted for twelvedays. The underlying issues of this conflict,however, went far beyond volleyball courts. DonMitchell, a professor of geography at the Universityof Syracuse, has described the 1991 People’s7

In 1991, the university once again attempted toregain control of People’s Park by evicting thehomeless and others in order to construct volleyballcourts. On July 31, following fruitless town-gownnegotiations, campus administrators sent in bulldozers,sparking riots and protests. Although thecourts were removed in 1997, over the years theuniversity’s plans to erect structures in the southcampus area have created an enduring challengeto those who wish to maintain the park’s statusas a community mainstay and historical-politicallandmark.Courtesy of Terri CompostPark riots as a clash between “two opposed andperhaps irreconcilable ideological visions of thenature and purpose of public space, two opposedvisions that have a great deal of impact on howthe right to the city is conceptualized and forwhom it is a viable right.” 62On one side, adhering to “the same sorts of ideologicalvisions for public space” as the originalfounders of People’s Park, a coalition of politicalactivists and homeless users of the park “provideda vision of space marked by free interactions,user determination, and the absence ofcoercion by powerful institutions.” In this view,the park was “recognized as a refuge for homelesspeople since its founding.” The alternateposition, advocated by the university, envisioneda vastly different People’s Park that would be“open for recreation and entertainment” and“subject to usage by an appropriate public (students,middle class residents, and visitors, etc.)that used the space by permission of its owners.”Under the university’s “planned, orderly, andsafe” conception of People’s Park, appropriateusers needed “to feel comfortable” and therefore“should not be driven away by unsightly homelesspeople or unsolicited political activity.” 63In 1992, People’s Park faced another crisis whoseresolution, despite its preservation as open space,provided no certainty that it could survive withits original ideals intact. In the early morninghours of August 25, Rosebud Denovo, a youngrunaway from Kentucky with a history of psychologicalproblems, broke into the home ofChancellor Chang-Lin Tien and was killed by anOakland policeman. The twenty-year-old victimoften had slept in People’s Park and had beenamong those who had rioted against constructionof the volleyball courts. The official version of herdeath stressed two points: that the self-professedanarchist had intended to kill the chancellor andhis wife with a machete and that the officer whofired the fatal shots had acted in self-defense afterDenovo swung the weapon at him. Any actualknowledge of Denovo’s intentions died with her;many of her friends believed that she only hadplanned to destroy paintings and furniture withthe machete. Despite the officer’s claims that hefell backward into a bathtub and shot upward at California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

Denovo, her autopsy revealed a downward trajectory,indicating that the police officer had firedfrom an upright position. Police Review CommissionerOsha Neumann and other critics questionedwhy, following Chancellor Tien and hiswife’s safe evacuation, there had been no negotiationsto persuade Denovo to surrender withoutincident. At the time of her death, Denovo carrieda handwritten note in her duffel bag vowing,“We’re ready to die for this land. Are you?” 64Ultimately, the university spent a million dollarsto build sand volleyball courts, though few communitymembers used them. In January 1997,the university removed the volleyball courts butmaintained a basketball court that also had beenbuilt in the early 1990s and was also a source ofcontroversy. Today, People’s Park remains a freepublic park from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. serving primarilyas a daytime sanctuary for the homeless.The People’s Stage still hosts occasional ralliesand concerts on the park’s western end. 65On April 26, 2009, the stage became the focalpoint of the People’s Park fortieth anniversarycelebration. Two days earlier, Delacour,Schlesinger, Bardacke, and Van der Ryn hadspoken at a founders forum. Five years earlier,on the eve of the park’s thirty-fifth anniversary,Schlesinger had revealed a new account ofthe park’s founding: the original impetus hadbeen Delacour’s desire for a site to host theirromantic rendezvous. Delacour, who previouslyhad insisted that his motive was a desire for “afree speech area that wasn’t really controlledlike Sproul Plaza,” did not deny his romanticinvolvement with Schlesinger. However, herefuted Schlesinger’s explanation, adding simplythat other, more overtly political issues wereinvolved. 66Judy Gumbo Albert, Stew Albert’s widow and afellow activist, also attended the anniversary celebration.She described Delacour as “one of theunofficial keepers of the park’s flame.” Supportersof People’s Park, nevertheless, must wonderabout its future after Delacour and the originalfounders are gone. Already, the university warnsincoming freshmen of the park’s dangers, indoctrinatinga younger and more conservative generationwith a negative view of People’s Park. Yet,in an April 2000 referendum, students voted infavor of maintaining the park as it is, rather thanturning to an alternative use of the land, such asadditional housing. 67Is the university now just waiting for a futuretakeover, biding time until it can convincestudents of the park’s evils? Or will studentscontinue to resist the university’s efforts andsupport the park? Devin Wooldrige, communityrelations site coordinator of People’s Park for thelast nine years, believes that such distrust of theuniversity is simply misplaced: “The Universitypumps quite a bit of money into the park and Idon’t believe the park is now, or will be, in dangerof being redeveloped.” If Wooldrige is correct,People’s Park will always stand as a symbol ofgrassroots democracy. 68In her article on the park’s fortieth anniversarycelebration, Judy Gumbo Albert compared thepark then and now: “Maybe 50% hippies andfreaks, and the other 50% just plain folks: men,women, children, neatly dressed students, Vietnamvets, homeless women and men, bellydancers, bongo drummers, black, white andmulti-ethnic, one crowd, together, happy underthe warm California sun. Sitting on remarkablywell-tended and clipped grass, with the unmistakablesweet odor of that other grass thick in theair. Just like I remember.” 69Jon David Cash is the author of Before They Were Cardinals:Major League Baseball in Nineteenth-Century St. Louis (Universityof Missouri Press, 2002), a 2003 finalist for the SeymourMedal, awarded annually by the Society for AmericanBaseball Research (SABR) to the best book of baseball historyor biography. He holds a PhD in American history from theUniversity of Oregon and currently lives in his hometown ofCrossett, Arkansas.9

Significant Others:The Defining Domestic Life ofCaroline Seymour SeveranceBy Diana TittleCaroline Seymour Severance, aleading national proponent ofwomen’s rights, is best knownregionally as a pioneering settlerof Los Angeles credited with having establishedthe city’s first kindergarten, first Unitarianchurch, and first women’s club. Yet, only ahandful of scholarly articles—and no biographyto date—document her significant accomplishmentsduring a sixty-year career as an organizerand reformer that began in 1840s Cleveland,Ohio, with her admiring newspaper reviews ofbooks and lectures by New England abolitionistsand literary figures, and ended with her honoraryleadership of California’s suffrage movement inthe early twentieth century.It was in Boston, where Severance lived from1855 to 1875 and worked alongside such wellknownreformers as William Lloyd Garrison,Julia Ward Howe, and Lucy Stone on a variety ofcauses and projects aimed at securing the fullrights of citizenship for all Americans, that shefirst secured her place in history. Inspired bythe critical role female volunteers for the U.S.Sanitary Commission had played in supportingthe Union forces, she conceived of and helpedto establish the New England Women’s Club in1868. Her idea that a “sisterhood of women”could serve as a “striking force for their ownbetterment, and as a bulwark against injustice”spread across the country, giving birth to thousandsof women’s organizations devoted to civicreform and self-improvement and changing thecountry’s socioeconomic landscape forever. 1Severance herself introduced the concept of thewomen’s social-action club to Los Angeles in thelate 1870s. It was her entrepreneurial husband’slast-ditch hopes of striking it rich in Californiathat had brought her, somewhat reluctantly, tothe state in 1875. This finding and other insightsinto how her formative or longtime personalrelationships with her guardians, spouse, andchildren influenced her public life have emergedfrom recent research on the Cleveland Severances—thefamily of progressive Presbyteriansinto which Caroline married in 1840—andare documented in these pages. They paint anespecially vivid portrait of Caroline’s husband,Theodoric Cordenio Severance, to whom sheforthrightly said she owed a great deal of inspi- California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

ation and encouragement, and shed new lighton how the dynamics and tensions of Caroline’sprivate life spurred on the woman who deservesmore prominent recognition than as the “motherof clubs.”A Buoyant PersonalityTheodoric Cordenio Severance was the “mostjolly and genial person imaginable.” Neither thegravitas of his given name nor the tragedy thatmarred his adolescence had affected his “merrydisposition.” The second child of Robert Bruceand Diana Long Severance, he was born inShelburne township in western Massachusettson March 1, 1814. His father, a physician whosePuritan ancestors had come to MassachusettsBay Colony around 1634, named his son inhonor of an accomplished medieval surgeon. Tomake ends meet, Robert Severance operated ageneral store adjoining his home in the hamletof Shelburne Center. The nearest competitor wassix miles away, but Severance’s store never trulythrived. According to his family and friends,Robert’s “whole thought and study was given tohis profession.” 2Theodoric Cordenio and his older brother, SolomonLewis, assisted their father in running thestore. The younger boy soon gained a nickname,T.C., which better suited his buoyant personalityand quick wit.Caroline Seymour Severance (1820–1914) was at theforefront of almost every major progressive reform effortundertaken during the nineteenth century. Yet her name isnot as well known today as those of Lucy Stone, Julia WardHowe, and Susan B. Anthony, her sister abolitionists andwomen’s rights leaders. Though Caroline herself modestlydiscounted her contributions and accomplishments, writingat midlife, “I have done so little to justify my years,” herrole as a trailblazer—particularly for women’s suffrage—distinguishes her as a pioneering California social reformer.Library of Congress1

The interest in business that T.C. acquired at anearly age would be called upon sooner than anyonesuspected. 3Caroline married into a clan of entrepreneurial Presbyterians whosemembers were among the founding families of Cleveland, Ohio.Her husband, Theodoric Cordenio Severance—pictured here (left)with his youngest brother, John Long Severance, in 1858—beganhis career in the banking industry due to the influence of his fosterfather, David Long, a backer of Cleveland’s first bank. The Severancefamily’s involvement in the social reforms of the day, and T.C.’sunconventional belief in women’s abilities, reinforced Caroline’sparticipation in antislavery and women’s rights circles in Cleveland,Boston, and Los Angeles.Private family collectionAt age fourteen, T.C. wrote this poem about hispreoccupied, scholarly father:The Doctor he is always goneI have the store to tend aloneHe says he does not want your cashThe very way to make us crashIf we could have what you owe usIt would save amazing deal of fussFor if you’d pay us what is dueI’d fill the store cram full anewAnd you can have what you do wantFor cash or note or on accountSometime after 1828—the date of T.C.’s poem—Robert was infected with the bacterium thatcauses tuberculosis. The deadly disease, whichmost commonly attacks the lungs, was rampantin Shelburne township, and its cure would haveto await the development of antibiotics in themid-twentieth century. The sight of their obviouslysick father must have been especiallyterrifying to the Severances’ youngest sons,seven-year-old John Long and twelve-year-oldErasmus Darwin. The victims of tuberculosiswere living wraiths, their eyes red and swollen,their skin pallid, their bodies racked by fever andprolonged fits of coughing that often expelledgouts of blood. Robert Bruce Severance died onFebruary 10, 1830, two months before SolomonLewis turned eighteen. 4The thought of having to provide for four childrenwithout the assistance of a husband wouldhave been daunting to any mother, but Robert’swidow was herself wasting away from consumption,as tuberculosis was then called. Although“accustomed . . . by her religious views as by hernatural feelings, to look upon the bright side ofthings,” Diana Severance recognized that her illnesswas fatal. Before passing away five monthsafter the death of her husband, she had “purchasedher grave clothes and with perfect composuregave directions to have them made.” Shealso arranged for “good protectors” for her sons. 5Massachusetts state law required towns andtownships to pay for the care of its impoverishedresidents and vested in local boards, calledoverseers of the poor, the authority to installdependent minor children in workhouses orplace them in private households as servants orapprentices. Unwilling to condemn her sons tofates that would be characterized today as Dickensian,Diana prevailed upon her cousin, DavidLong, and his wife, Juliana Walworth, to becomeCalifornia History • volume 88 number 1 2010

the guardians of her children. The Longs lived faraway from Shelburne, in a place out west calledCleveland. 6David Long, entrepreneur, county commissioner,and fervent abolitionist, was the first physicianto set up a practice in the intended “capital” cityof Ohio’s Western Reserve, so called because theterritory had once been held in reserve by Connecticutfor possible future settlement by its citizens.Educated in New York City, Dr. Long wasa man of considerable cultivation and notablecompassion. He and his wife, who assisted himin nursing the sick, had already taken in theeight-year-old daughter of a deceased patient.They were not about to turn away their orphanedrelatives, all four of whom were said to be physicallyattractive and musically talented. Callingupon his wealth and influence, Dr. Long sawto the educations of John and Darwin; helpedSolomon (who fell in love with and married theLongs’ seventeen-year-old daughter Mary) setup a merchandise business; and likely arrangedfor T.C. to obtain employment with the Bank ofCleveland as a teller. 7The nation’s chaotic monetary policies playedhavoc with the budding career of the second oldestof the Longs’ wards. In 1832, Andrew Jacksonvetoed congressional legislation that sought toextend what the populist president regarded asthe unduly privileged charter of the Second Bankof the United States. Jackson’s successful “BankWar” left financial regulation solely up to thediscretion of each state and ushered in an eraof wildcat banking. Over the next two decades,T.C. was periodically forced to leapfrog to a newfinancial institution because a previous employerhad collapsed or lost its banking charter.The Earnest Miss SeymourAlthough he never stopped scrambling aftersuccess in business, T.C. was much luckier inlove, wooing and eventually winning the intelligent,serious-minded, verbally gifted CarolineMaria Seymour of Auburn, New York. T.C. methis future wife, who was born in Canandaigua,New York, to Orson and Caroline Maria ClarkeSeymour in 1820, while clerking at the Bankof Auburn during the mid-1830s. Upon thedeath of her banker father in 1824, Caroline’smother had moved with her eight children intothe home of Orson’s brother James, the Bankof Auburn’s cashier. Her mother’s unremittingunhappiness and her uncle’s “fearsome”Presbyterianism turned Caroline’s childhoodand adolescence into what she later termed a“long dark night.” “My father’s early death andmy mother’s constant mourning for him hadmade me a . . . super-sensitive child naturallyreverential to the authority of the home and thechurch,” she once elaborated. “I was thus alwaysunder torture for my sins—which were supposedto consist in a love for ‘worldly pleasure’—childthat I was, and sins that were never mine even inmy mature years!” Uncle James insisted that hiswards attend revival meetings, at which Carolineencountered leaders of American Protestantism’sSecond Great Awakening such as Charles GrandisonFinney and Jedediah Burchard. Their“emotional preaching stressed perfection of mankindand attainment of millennial happiness,”according to Seymour Severance scholar JudithRaftery—concepts that “guided [Caroline’s] life’swork [after] her religious fervor waned.” 8Although an instrument of her mental distress,James Seymour was to hand Caroline her deliverancewhen he introduced his niece to his favoriteclerk and made known his approval of the youngman as a suitor. T.C.’s relative poverty (he slept atthe bank at night on a bed that was hidden undera counter during the day) did not disqualify himin the eyes of Caroline’s guardian, himself a formerbank clerk who would rise to the presidencyof the Bank of Auburn in 1849. 9T.C. liked to joke that Caroline had “chased himall over the State of New York [until] she made

Following the completion of the Ohio & Erie Canal in 1832, Cleveland was transformed into a bustling mercantile city. Its mostprosperous citizens built new homes away from downtown in a section of Euclid Street called Millionaire’s Row (above). T.C.and Caroline also set up housekeeping on Euclid after their marriage in 1840, but in the less desirable business district. Carolineexperienced Cleveland as “a frontier town, with schools and churches galore, and with a Library Association, but with fewintellectual resources beyond these.” She satisfied her longing for a life of the mind by writing book reviews for the local papersand covering lectures by New England reformers.Cleveland Public Libraryhim marry!” In truth, she had broken off theirfirst engagement in 1836, the year after shegraduated from a “female seminary” (as academiesfor women were then called) in Geneva,New York, about twenty miles from Auburn. Thevaledictorian of her class, she had given only her“half-hearted consent” to T.C.’s proposal of marriage,and later realized that she must “revoltagainst such ties, unless under the compulsion ofan unconquerable love.” 10Miss Seymour thought that she had experiencedsuch passion. As a schoolgirl, she had fallen inlove with a classmate. The young woman hadunexpectedly died, and Caroline, distraught thatso much beauty had senselessly been removedfrom the world, visited her classmate’s grave severaltimes to pour out her grief. Her unresolvedfeelings may have been the reason that she endedher engagement to Theodoric, but they were notnecessarily a sign of homosexuality, and morelikely a same-sex crush that can be a normal partof the development of one’s identity. Caroline’sdecision to end the relationship constitutedthe first evidence of the independent thinkingfor which she would become well known andshowed a remarkable degree of self-awareness fora sixteen-year-old.T.C. returned to Cleveland to work, but couldnot forget the earnest Miss Seymour, who hadaccepted a teaching position at Mrs. LutherHalsey’s boarding school for girls in Pennsylvania,where she had moved with her mother. Per-California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

mitted to visit Caroline in her new home on theAllegheny River near Pittsburgh, he persuadedthe love of his life to renew their engagement.At the end of the school year a few months later,T.C. returned to Pennsylvania, driving a fine carriageand span of horses loaned to him by Dr.Long for the purpose of conveying his fiancéeto Cleveland. Caroline’s stay at Longwood—theresidence of the Longs, John Long Severance,and Solomon Lewis Severance’s widow and theirtwo young sons—cemented her attachment toher betrothed. She considered T.C.’s extendedfamily “most attractive” and their cozy domesticarrangement “a model in all that is lovely, hospitableand harmonious.” 11Forebears of the future patron of Severance Hall(a Standard Oil Company heir who underwrotethe construction of the Beaux-Arts home of theCleveland Orchestra at the dawn of the Depression),the Longs and the Solomon Severanceswere devoted to a cause about which Carolinealso would become passionate. Dedicated abolitionists,David Long and Solomon Severance hadhelped to found two local antislavery societies.Both organizations “left few traces” of effectivenessin changing the hearts and minds of amercantile citizenry busy trying to capitalize onCleveland’s location at the northern terminus ofthe recently completed Ohio & Erie Canal linkingthe Ohio River with the Great Lakes and easternseaboard. However, the second endeavor—achapter of a national organization founded in1833 by William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of thecrusading abolitionist newspaper The Liberator,based in Boston—did serve to place Cleveland,still a relative backwater, on the circuit of NewEngland’s social reformers and intellectuals. The“coming of noble men and women from the east,with their messages upon vital themes,” as Carolineput it, would enrich the first fifteen years ofher married life. 12T.C. and Caroline traveled straight from Longwoodto Auburn, where they were wed in heruncle’s home in August 1840. Following theirhoneymoon in Buffalo, the couple returned toCleveland to set up housekeeping in a cottageon Euclid Street, the neighborhood of choice forthose who wished to live within walking distanceof the Superior Street business district. Around1845, T.C. became a principal of the Fireman’sInsurance Company. By their tenth anniversary,he and Caroline were the proud parents of four“beautiful” children. Their first child had diedof cholera infantum at six weeks of age, and theinability of a physician substituting for the travelingDr. Long to save her baby son gave rise toCaroline’s conviction that she must seek alternativesto traditional medicine if she were to protectthe health of her husband and children from theSeverance family scourge: consumption. Carolinetook her domestic role seriously. “[I]n the earlyforties . . . I, a young wife and mother, was feelingkeenly the responsibilities of my position andseizing eagerly on all possible helps,” she wrote.Thus was born her trust in “nature to do her ownwork by her own remedies” and her keen interestin hygiene, exercise, and abstemiousness. Herforesighted embrace of the now accepted wisdomof plain living provides early evidence of CarolineSeverance’s receptiveness to radical new ideas. 13The Budding of a Natural LeaderCaroline was always careful to credit her husband—“thelight of my life”—with instilling inher the courage to challenge convention. “[W]henI met Theodore and married, I was at once freedfrom the bondage to authority, dogmas andconservative ideas,” she wrote after thirty yearsof marriage. The heart of a political and socialprogressive beat in the breast of her jovial, entrepreneurialhusband. Possibly as a result of hisexposure to the scientific humanism of his father,T.C. did not believe a woman’s place was solelyin the home. He encouraged his wife to join himin championing the nineteenth century’s “greatmovements to reform society, rather than simplybemoaning its decaying state.” 14

As “social questions and needs forced themselvesupon me, and as I began to realize thatnothing human is foreign to the home and itsinterests,” Caroline later explained, she soughtout opportunities to write book reviews andcover lecture-circuit speakers for the Clevelandnewspapers. In addition to supplementingT.C.’s sometimes spotty income, these activitiesintroduced the couple to the country’s leadingabolitionists, many of them from Massachusetts.It was no accident that the abolition movementhad found its most eloquent proponents in andaround Boston. “The brand of reformed Protestantismthe Puritans brought with them fromEngland . . . had within it a strain of intense politicalactivism,” historian George McKenna hasargued. This dormant impulse had reemergedin the 1830s and 1840s in an array of NewEngland-led reform movements, ranging fromvegetarianism to prisoners’ rights. The contemporaryinheritors of the Puritan vision of Americaas a city upon a hill wanted to do more thanimprove the personal conduct of others, however.They sought to abolish customs and institutionsthat they considered sinful. Chief among theirtargets was slavery, defended by white southernersas “our peculiar institution.” 15When movement speakers came to Cleveland,they often stayed with T.C. and Caroline, whoenjoyed long evenings of intense conversationwith the likes of Garrison, the lawyer WendellPhillips, the educator Bronson Alcott, and thepoet Ralph Waldo Emerson. At one encounter,Caroline shared with Alcott her “inextinguishablelonging to exchange Ohio for Massachusetts,as a place of residence, in order to gain theadvantage of Harvard [University] for my sonsand of the best schools for my daughter.” Shewanted to gratify her own intellectual needs, aswell. Cleveland simply “did not offer the kindof companionship” that she had come to crave.Only by moving to Boston could she satisfy, shetold Alcott, her “desire to ‘touch, if only with theextremest flounce, the circle’ of noble women.”The father of four daughters—one of whom,Louisa May Alcott, would go on to immortalizeher childhood in the 1868 novel Little Women—replied that if Caroline wished to live in Bostonfor its “broader and finer atmosphere,” she wouldnot be disappointed, but he warned her that herdesire to “meet easily the wise women in literature,reform work, and so on, would not be realized,for they were widely scattered in differentcircles, churches and suburbs.” Caroline’s zealous,if still embryonic, argument that “it mightnot be impossible to bring these noble womentogether on some common ground of fellowshipand service” eventually brought Alcott around.But she had little hope of persuading her husbandto remove to Boston as long as he was gainfullyemployed in Cleveland. 16The Severances did make one decisive break inthe early years of their marriage. Persuaded thatthey “could no longer sit conscientiously undera preacher, or in a fellowship, where the goldenrule of Christianity was not recognized as applicableto all men, whatever the color of their skin,or crinkle, or non-crinkle of their hair,” they abandonedthe faith of T.C.’s foster mother, a founderof Cleveland’s First Presbyterian Church. Theyoung couple began to assemble on Sundays witha small group of progressive Christians who were“less anxious about salvation than . . . about doingsome good for our fellow man.” The independentcongregation evolved into Cleveland’s first Unitarianchurch. T.C. and Caroline also worked toadvance temperance, dietary reform, and the “freesoil” movement, which opposed the expansion ofslavery into new states and territories. 17The Severances attended their first women’srights conference in 1851. It was held in nearbyAkron, Ohio, three years after the movement tosecure the political, legal, and social equality ofwomen was launched at a similar conference inSeneca Falls, New York. In Akron, former slaveCalifornia History • volume 88 number 1 2010

Sojourner Truth gave what famously becameknown as her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech.Sojourner’s passionate call to right the injusticesvisited upon the supposed weaker sex in thename of protecting it (“Look at me! Look at myarm! I have ploughed and planted, and gatheredinto barns, and no man could head me! Andain’t I a woman?”) must have stirred Caroline’ssoul. She subsequently attended women’s rightsconferences in Ohio, Indiana, and New York,where she listened to speeches, helped to passresolutions, and deliberated on strategies for winningthe support of the press, the pulpit, and thepolitical establishment for women’s suffrage andequal property rights. 18As the majority of Cleveland’s women ofmeans—the “primitive 400,” Caroline later calledthem—remained preoccupied with less weightymatters, Caroline gained recognition as the city’spreeminent women’s rights proponent. Mrs. Severancemay have lacked the stereotypical femininecharms (biographers describe her as “severeof countenance, caring nothing for fashion, neitherwitty, brilliant, nor very rich”), but she was anatural leader. 19In 1853, Cleveland’s Mercantile Library Association,a forum for the most prominent publicspeakers of the day, invited Caroline to delivera lecture on women’s rights. The organizationhad never before offered its podium to a female.Possessed of a lifelong fear of public speakingshe attributed to a childhood anxiety that anutterance could doom her to eternal punishment,Caroline initially pleaded her unfitness forthe assignment, but her sense of duty won outand she set about to write the “most exhaustiveessay I could . . . , to make sure, for once, thatmy city should have all that could be said on thesubject.” Her talk, “Humanity, A Definition witha Plea,” caused a “great sensation,” igniting passionsboth pro and con. Its central thesis, shelater explained, was that the state had a duty to“take the mother from the category of the alien,the criminal, and the lunatic, and place her . . . asan equal partner” of her husband and of her son,“the two who sit beside her hearth.” 20Caroline’s supporters in the audience presentedher with a handsome bound set of the completeworks of William Shakespeare as a mementoof her accomplishment, and she quickly foundherself in great demand as a lecturer. She presentedversions of “Humanity” before generalaudiences, women’s rights conferences, and eventhe Ohio Senate. Both she and T.C. were electedofficers of the fourth national women’s rightsconvention, held in Cleveland’s Melodeon Hallin 1854. There they and fifteen hundred otherattendees debated with movement leaders LucretiaMott and former Oberlin College studentsLucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell (thefirst American woman to be ordained a minister)the merits of such radical reforms as the rightof women to divorce alcoholic husbands andthe right of women to receive tax exemptionsuntil such time as their gender was awardedsuffrage. Cleveland—and the nation—remainedunmoved. 21Caroline later identified the event that finallysealed her decision to leave Ohio: the gatheringof Clevelanders in the city’s parks and publicspaces to await the second coming of Christ,which had been predicted by New York Statefarmer and self-appointed biblical scholar WilliamMiller. Or at least this was the reason shegave for uprooting the family to Boston, accordingto her son Mark Sibley Severance, whohimself never forgot the sight of a family of Millerites,sitting astride or holding on to the tail oftheir old white plow horse, ready for their ascentto heaven. Fearing that “this Millerite movementmight be demoralizing and at any rate fearingthe influence of the City of Cleveland on heryoung children . . . ,” Mark explained in his autobiography,“Mother and Father decided to take usall to Boston to be educated.” 227

In fact, a disciple of Miller’s had calculatedthat the Rapture would take place on October22, 1844, more than a decade before the Severancesrelocated to Boston, a center “famous,” inCaroline’s view, “in the world of letters, moralsand unfettered thought.” Most likely the family’sdeparture in 1855 was prompted by T.C’s businessmisadventures. When the forty-one-year-oldbank employee suddenly found himself withoutemployment, the Severances’ friends in Massachusettshelped him secure a job with a Bostonbank. The proffered position was that of teller, onthe bottom rung of banking’s career ladder. 23It was not the first time that T.C. was required tostart over. During the early 1840s, when Cleveland’sbanks were lost to repercussions of thePanic of 1837, T.C. had helped to build the Fireman’sInsurance Company into a quasi-bankinginstitution, taking advantage of a state law thatgave insurers note-issuing privileges. In 1845,the Ohio legislature passed a new bill placingbanking authority exclusively with chartered stateand independent banks. Fireman’s collapsed, takingcorporate secretary Severance down with it.“T.C. bears up under his losses like a man,” hisbrother John observed to their sister-in-law, MaryLong Severance, “and although he has lost hishouse & nearly every thing if not more—yet he isT.C. all over . . . says if he ‘has got to begin at thebottom and look up again, why very well, I’ve agood head & good pluck’ such a spirit at such atime is worth all the Indians in America.” 24T.C. and his business partners quickly regrouped.With a $50,000 investment from a new partner,they established City Bank, the first independentbank to be chartered in Cleveland under the newstate law. Severance served as the bank’s secretaryand cashier until 1849, when he jumped (orwas pushed) into a cashier’s position with CanalBank, an independent house catering to businessesdependent upon or related to water transportation.T.C. joined Canal Bank the same yearthat the Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnatirailroad began operations. As City Bank beganits evolution into Cleveland’s long-lived NationalCity Bank, Severance’s new employer traced adownward spiral. Perhaps Canal Bank’s reducedcircumstances motivated T.C. to take a second jobin 1851, selling the “Phillips’ fire annihilator,” anextinguisher designed for residential use. 25Its clientele diminished by the advent of the railroadera, Canal Bank failed during a depositors’run in 1854. “The bill holders, who got the goldfor their notes, were arrayed in smiles,” observeda reporter from Cleveland’s Plain Dealer whowas on the scene, “and contrasted, most ludicrously,with the grim-visaged depositors, whogot nothing.” Except, that is, for a certain CaptainGrummage. The day before the bank collapsed,Grummage had deposited $1,000 earned from ayear’s work on the Great Lakes. Upon hearing ofthe institution’s apparent insolvency, he grabbeda gun, forced his way into the bank’s offices atSuperior Avenue and Bank (West Sixth) Street,and ordered cashier Severance to return hisdeposit or else. Unprepared to “meet his maker,”T.C. complied. 26The welcome the Severances received in Bostonwas considerably warmer. William Lloyd Garrisoninvited them to a reception to meet his fellowreformers “as soon as Caroline had unpacked.”She needed no second invitation to join theirranks. “My Mother . . . never entered the mostfashionable society in and around Boston,” herson Mark recalled. “The predominant feature ofour domestic life was . . . reform. . . . [W]heneverany matter involving the improvement of the lifeof men or women or children was brought to thefore, my mother at once took part in it.” Carolinebegan speaking in abolition circles, became correspondingsecretary of the Boston Anti-SlaverySociety, and delivered her “Humanity” lecturethroughout New England. During the Civil War,she served on the Boston board of the U.S. SanitaryCommission, an agency that coordinated thevolunteer efforts of women to support the Union.California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

After emancipation, she helped to open the Bostonoffice of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federalcommission that supported liberated AfricanAmericans in their efforts to establish new lives. 27Having observed through her volunteer work atthe Sanitary Commission the great things thatcould be accomplished when women pulledtogether, Caroline began meeting with prominentfemale Bostonians to discuss a novel idea thatshe had first conceived in Cleveland. She wantedto organize a women’s club, envisioning “a centerof thought and action . . . a larger home forthose who love and labor for the greater humanfamily.” Opposition “from all sides” did not deterher or fellow women’s rights advocates LucyStone and Julia Ward Howe from incorporatingthe New England Women’s Club on March 10,1868. Also in 1868, New York journalist JaneCunningham Croly organized Sorosis, a professionalwomen’s association. 28Launching a club movement that is recognizedtoday as critical to the struggle of women to wintheir civil and political rights, these two organizationsserved as the models for thousands of otherwomen’s groups devoted to civic reform andself-improvement. The New England Women’sClub immediately proved its effectiveness, raisingmonies to support a tuition-free kindergarten forpoor children and the first hospital in Boston runby and for women, providing young women withcollege scholarships, lobbying for the installationof police matrons in women’s jails and asylums,and helping to elect women to Boston’s SchoolCommittee. The latter initiative allowed womento “have a voice and a vote in city governmentbefore they attained state or federal suffrage.”Caroline, who served as president of the organizationfrom 1868 to 1871, when she was succeededby Julia Ward Howe, would go on to win a uniqueplace in history as the “mother of clubs.” 29A Last Chance at WealthBy the early 1870s, T.C. was looking for a freshstart. Little more than twenty years earlier, in1850, California had entered the Union, andnow T.C. was pining to move to the nation’sthirty-first state.Ever since the discovery in 1848 of shiny bits ofmetal in a millrace in northern California hadprompted three hundred thousand people fromaround the world to take leave of their sensesand head straight for the foothills of the SierraNevada to pan for gold, California had occupiedan exalted place in the American imagination.Not only was the state part of the country’s lastfrontier, it was reputed to have perfect weather,an astoundingly beautiful topography (whosetreacherousness had yet to be fully appreciated),and an elastic social structure. Young peoplelooking for opportunity and adventure and thosein need of a second chance in life all believedthat they could make good there.The Severances’ California dream centered onthe purchase of a ranch in partnership with theirtwo eldest children. Thirty-two-year-old JamesSeymour Severance and his twenty-eight-year-oldbrother, Mark, had preceded their parents to theformer Mexican territory, which had passed intoU.S. hands (along with most of the lands thatbecame the American Southwest) at the end ofthe Mexican-American War in 1848. The youngmen ended up in Santa Barbara, a former Spanishmission town of four or five thousand, wherefamily friends from Cleveland owned a ranch. 30The brothers had assured their parents thatan investment in ranch land would, in time,dramatically increase in value. James Seymourpointed to the example of “young Blossom,” whohad come to southern California two monthsafter James’s arrival in 1872. Blossom had purchasedtwo five-acre “blocks” in Santa Barbara,one for $1,500 and the other for $1,000, and soldthe latter parcel for $2,500 within three months.9

“Quickly turned!” James crowed to his father. “Aman with good capital, sagacity and caution intaking only safe titles must soon make money intown. . . ,” he advised T.C., while admitting that,without greater population growth and the constructionof waterworks and irrigation systems,southern California’s historic Mexican ranchos,which now could be inexpensively acquired,wouldn’t be worth the trouble of “cutting up.” 31Until such day as their envisioned ranch could beprofitably subdivided into home lots, the brothersbelieved that the family could earn most of itskeep by raising sheep on the still-to-be-purchasedproperty. For a while, T.C. also had entertainednotions of starting a private bank in Santa Barbara.Mark Sibley made discreet inquiries aroundtown and reported back that a “man with $50,000to $100,000 could do very well out here . . . makingloans on real estate at 1.5 percent” to newcomerswho believed in the state’s unlimited future.The elder Severance did not have, or know how toraise, such a stupendous sum. 32James Seymour had been the first of the BostonSeverances to go west—for reasons of health.“Seymour” (the pet name used by the family)had attended Bronson Alcott’s private schoolin Concord, Massachusetts, where he struck upfriendships with May Alcott and her sister Louisa.Seymour was not intellectually inclined himself,and, upon completing his studies at twenty-one,informed his father that he wanted to find outdoorwork, supportive of “healthfulness.” Hismother’s insistence on a progressive educationfor her children, including exposure to the teachingsof physician Dioclesian Lewis, a pioneeringadvocate of the benefits of physical educationfor girls and women as well as young men, mayhave influenced Seymour’s unexpected careerpreferences. 33Still searching for his place in life at age thirty,Seymour had turned into a heavy drinker. “Ihave been in hell, Mother, I am in hell & nobodycan save me!” he wailed. Desperate to give hertroubled son a chance for “peace and even happiness,”Caroline marshaled her vaunted powersof persuasion in responding to Seymour’sanguished cry for help. Convinced by his motherthat he needed to put a continent between himselfand his drinking companions, Severanceheaded for Santa Barbara three years after thecompletion of the first transcontinental railroadin North America in 1869. 34The “Pacific Railroad,” which ran from Omaha,Nebraska, to Alameda, California, made travel tothe Far West much less onerous. California’s populationwould jump from 560,000 to 865,000between 1870 and 1880, as word of the state’samazing fecundity filtered out to itchy-footedfarmers, restless entrepreneurs, and would-becowboys on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada.The coastal plains and foothills of southern Californiahad been used as grazing lands for cattleand sheep under Mexican stewardship, but transplantsfrom the Midwest and East discovered thatyou could grow just about anything—providedyou had access to ample water during the drysummer months. Seymour spent his first fewmonths in California investigating his options.“Salaried places, just here, are few, but railroads,etc., would make a difference,” he reported laterto his father. “I think I can see money in realestate, sheep or hotels, that is about all. None infarming, year after year, none in fruit, save afteryears of work.” 35The Bostonian finally decided to invest in a flockof sheep. Although he also had to hire a herder,sheep ranching had a low cost of entry; it didn’tnecessarily require the purchase of a ranch.In next-door Ventura County were thousandsof unclaimed and unoccupied acres subject tosquatter’s rights. Seymour set up his sheep campnear San Buenaventura (the mission village thathad given the county its name) so that he couldeasily re-provision himself. 36California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

This 1885 view captures the sparsely populated ranch lands surrounding Mission San Buenaventura in Ventura County,where James Seymour Severance moved in the early 1870s to escape the influence of his Boston drinking companionsand where he established his sheep camp. In a letter addressing her son’s resolve to cure himself of alcoholism, Carolineappealed to his better nature: “You are too much of a man my dear S. and have too good a brain to be so idiotic.”California Historical Society/USC Special CollectionsJudging by several letters Seymour penned to hisfather whenever he could spare a moment, hewas clearly in his element. Seymour (who wouldlive to be ninety-four) found California’s brisk,sunny winters invigorating. “Warm weather willsoon make dust,” he wrote to T.C. from camp,“. . . but just now we are having quite cold nightsand mornings and the sun makes mid-day justabout perfect. This morning there was a whitefrost on the grass at camp and ice in our washbasin out-doors, the first time since I have beenthere. . . . There have been some heavy blows oflate in the valley and open country, but we feltthem only last Thursday night, when I thought itwould take my cabin down. But no snow or zeroweather, thank you!” And he enjoyed the rigors of“ranch life,” despite his mock complaints: “I letmy herder off for four days to attend to some ofhis own business, and had to play herder myself,besides cooking my own meals and getting woodand water. It is quite like work, I assure you,lighted by the herder’s return last evening.” 37After another busy spell, Seymour apologizedfor not having written more frequently: “I intendto get letters started, at least, in my cabin, to befinished up when I come to town, but it is justlambing time, and everything is on the jump.The wooly devils, as Sib calls them, are in threebands, and I seem to have done nothing the lastten days but drive and ride round from one campto another, looking after sheep, corrals, herders,supplies, etc. Up before sunrise and early to bed,with plenty of appetite for sleep.” 38“Sib” was his brother Mark Sibley, named forMark Hopkins Sibley, a New York state senatorwho was Caroline’s temporary guardian followingher father’s early death. A graduate ofHarvard College and a former assistant librarianat the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington,D.C., Sib had spent the summer of 1872 as apublicist with the U.S. Geographical Survey Westof the 100th Meridian, led by Lieutenant GeorgeMontague Wheeler. After encountering suchwonders as Native Americans, the Mormon faith,wine produced from mission grapes, the Grand1

Canyon, and the mighty Colorado River (whichalmost took his life when he and another manattempted a crossing on a log raft), he realizedthat he could not go back to cataloguing books.His mother advanced the opinion that he wouldhave more chances to “spread” (his wings) inwide-open California than in the nation’s cliquishcapital. Responding to her prodding, Sib agreedto try sheep ranching with his brother. 39Though he enjoyed donning a sombrero andspurs and riding the range astride a horse bearinga beautiful Mexican saddle laden with heavyleather trappings, in 1874 the former Harvardman accepted with alacrity an offer of a year’semployment as president of Santa Barbara College,a private boys’ school. He missed cultivatedBoston, he confided earlier to his youngerbrother, Pierre, “for in my late wanderings Ihave come upon no place to be compared to it.”But pride kept him from returning home: “I’vealmost resolved never to go back [to Boston] untilI’ve done something worth mentioning, moneywiseor otherwise—since I’ve really broken away,& should return only to find all my friends andclassmates far ahead in their life-work.” 40As soon as Seymour and Sibley were situatedin southern California, T.C. began to dreamabout joining them. “Don’t make a start hitherward. . . without something definite in hand orfunds enough to do something with,” Seymourhad cautioned T.C. in early 1873. “Cash is everythinghere.” 41But prospects were all that T.C. had. His positionat Boston’s North National Bank was of lowrank—as of 1875 he still reported to the bank’scashier—but it did provide a steady income.The problem was T.C.’s poor luck with investments.Shortly after the Civil War, he had beenpersuaded to buy into an Alabama coal mine by aBoston businessman who was building a railroadin the South and promised to purchase a substantialportion of the mine’s output. Unfortunately,the decision to employ African Americans,which Severance would have wholeheartedlysupported, subjected the mine to frequent raidsby the Ku Klux Klan, and the disruptions turnedwhat seemed to be a sure bet into a financial disappointment.42By 1873, T.C. had sufficiently recovered from thissetback to be able to consider an investment ina railroad company as a means of securing hisCalifornia grubstake. Two years later, he hadyet to build the needed cash reserve. Nonetheless,he couldn’t resist talking about his plannedrelocation to Santa Barbara. “[A]lmost to a man,”the friends with whom he shared the news haddeemed the move “a wise one,” he informedhis skeptical wife, provided that “we have somethingto do, or fall back upon, on arrival out.”T.C. was gratified that his confidants were not“backward” in admitting to their envy of the Severances’opportunity to experience California’s“climate and the trip over, with all their variety &charms. . . .” 43Caroline was not opposed to the move in theory.She had accommodated her husband’s careermoves once before, following him to Port Royal,South Carolina, where he had been appointedcollector of customs for the Union-occupiedharbor by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P.Chase, a “free soil” advocate from Ohio whosepresidential aspirations T.C. actively had supported.Five or so years after they had returnedto Boston, the Severances had begun to considerthe possibility of relocating to America’s westernfrontier. Caroline was over fifty and her husbandwas approaching sixty, but, as she explained atthe time, “I do not consider myself finished andhave not limited my ambition by what, to others,may seem more realistic. Even now Theodoreand I talk of moving to the West, perhaps California,to carry on our work of organizing people forthe improvement of the human condition.” 44 California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

But Caroline thought it imprudent to relocatebefore T.C. had earned his promised “fortune.”Otherwise, the process of starting over wouldstrap the family and prevent her from attendingconferences and visiting relatives and friends. “Ithink we might as well, or better go after we’vemade money and not to be obliged to stay awayfor years and to be able to come back if we liked,”she argued. “If we must go there & settle down,expecting to stay years before we could comeback, I fear we should be very homesick.” 45T.C. held firm, looking perhaps for a way tokeep his peripatetic wife more often at his side.Caroline had spent most of the winter of 1874 inWashington, D.C., and New York City, possiblyworking in support of the temperance crusadesthat led to the founding of the Women’s ChristianTemperance Union at year’s end. At theheight of his loneliness T.C. wrote to her almostevery day:February 14After these two or three hours waiting &reaching home in the expectation of a lettertonight, I came only to be disappointed, &therefore must content myself with no letter& by trying to heap coals of fire on your headby sending you one. Will that do?February 16I am to play flute at Chase’s this evening.. . . If you don’t come home soon I’ll beall engaged up for a long time ahead, & thenwhat’ll you say?February 16, in the eveningWhere are you now & when will you behome that’s the question?Finally receiving a letter from Caroline informinghim that she was in New York, he immediatelywrote back to propose that he join her there for abrief reunion. He would leave Saturday afternoonafter work and, taking advantage of the Washington’sBirthday holiday, stay over until Mondayevening, giving them two full days together andallowing him to “be here again for duty on Tuesdaymorning.” Caroline could hardly say no. Norcould she stop her husband, who would celebratehis sixtieth birthday a few weeks later, from seizingwhat he must have believed to be his lastchance at wealth. 46Reforming the Last FrontierBy T.C.’s sixty-first birthday, talk of relocating hadgelled into a firm plan. Late in the summer of1875, the Severances bade farewell to their daughter,Julia Severance Burrage, who was marriedand living in West Newton with her husband andchildren, and to their youngest son, Pierre, whohad decided to remain in Boston, and climbedaboard a train bound for Cleveland. After visitingLongwood, they headed for Omaha, wherethey would take the Union Pacific and CentralPacific to the West Coast. An uninterruptedrailroad journey across the continent took abouttwo weeks. The Severances left the train in SanFrancisco, already the country’s tenth largestcity with a population of 150,000, and boarded aship, perhaps a mail steamer, headed south. Aftera three-day sail on rough seas, the elderly couplefell gratefully into their sons’ arms at the SantaBarbara wharf. 47Seymour and Sibley had surprising news: Theyplanned to resettle in Los Angeles and wantedtheir parents to join them. Some months earlier,the brothers had picked their way on horsebackdown to the former pueblo, now a city of tenthousand, following trails that were sometimeslittle more than cow paths. With its unpavedstreets, frightful dust, mule-drawn streetcarline, minuscule business district, and two lonechurches (Catholic and Episcopal), Los Angeleslacked the charm of Santa Barbara, but Seymourand Sibley were convinced that it offered a morepromising business environment. They haddetected merit that would initially elude theirmother. 48

Caroline and T.C. purchased a ten-acre orange orchard on West Adams Streetin 1875 and transformed the property’s run-down cottage into a comfortablehome. Caroline was not alone in thinking of her place as a little “nest.” Formore than thirty-five years, the ivy-covered residence served as a hospitablegathering spot for “literary people visiting Los Angeles, for leaders in progressivethought . . . and for men and women interested also in local or municipalreforms and improvements,” according to Ella Giles Ruddy, who suggestedthat Caroline’s legacy as the “mother of clubs” should be supplemented byanother title: the “Ethical Magnet of Southern California.”California Historical Society/USC Special CollectionsBeguiled by Santa Barbara’s “unique beautiesand New England atmosphere” during her briefsojourn on the California coast, Caroline reluctantlybut dutifully climbed into a Concord buggythat her sons had acquired for the two-day trek toLos Angeles. Harnessing their saddle horses tothe low-sided, side-sprung vehicle, they set off onan arduous journey that was unduly prolongedwhen the brothers lost their bearings in a mazeof cactus in the San Fernando Valley. At journey’send, Sibley’s mare expired from its exertions, nodoubt adding to Caroline’s consternation. Uponsetting eyes on the brown, barren fields thatsurrounded Los Angeles, she had thought theterrain a “mockery of . . . our expectations.” Carolinehad imagined an endless vista of luxuriantorange groves. A few young pepper trees alongLoomis Street provided the town’s only shade, asfar as she could tell. 49Daily house-hunting trips led to the discoveryof Adams Street in a section of town that wasdevoted to orchards. The Severances were persuadedto purchase a ten-acre property at whatbecame 806 West Adams Boulevard becauseit was almost entirely covered with six-foot-tallorange trees. There was also a barn, but thehouse wasn’t much, just a three-room cottagethat Seymour and Sibley (who bunked there onand off for several years when not pursuing outof-townbusiness interests) volunteered to paint.The brothers chose for the cottage’s roof thecolor of the ceramic tiles that topped the typicalMexican hacienda, giving the Severances’ humbledomicile its first name: Red Roof. 50Over the years, Red Roof became a real homewith the addition of bedrooms, a library, and along, shaded veranda. The Severances landscapedthe cottage’s bare yard with magnolia, rubber,and fig trees; planted an abundance of shrubsand flowers; and installed a circular drivewaywhose entrance was guarded by two elms thatgrew to stately proportions. “Your descriptionof the various improvements of the Red RoofCountry makes me long to see it again,” Seymourwrote to his father in 1878 while away onbusiness. When eventually transformed into acomfortable and commodious home, the cottageseemed to deserve a fancier nickname, and it wasrechristened El Nido. The Nest would survive asa central Los Angeles landmark for seventy-fiveyears, time enough for the city’s population togrow to nearly two million. 51Unformed and uncultivated though it was in1875, Los Angeles became for Caroline “my secondBoston, its lineal descendant in my love andloyalty.” With so many gaps in the city’s culturaland social fabric, she found ample opportunityto “spread.” “The vitality and drive” of the fiftyfive-year-oldwoman “typified the reforming spiritinvading Los Angeles at the close of the century,a spirit that ensured that the city would notremain a frontier much longer,” as Judith Rafteryhas pointed out. 52 California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

The “Mother of Clubs”In Boston, Caroline had known and admiredElizabeth Peabody, the founder of the first kindergartenin the United States (and the sister-in-lawof Horace Mann, the creator of Massachusetts’scommon-school system). The first civic projectCaroline undertook in Los Angeles was theestablishment of a kindergarten. Before leavingBoston, she had persuaded Emma Marwedel, aleader of the German kindergarten movementthat had inspired Peabody, to come west to setup a private preschool. Marwedel launched herschool with twenty-five pupils, recruited by Caroline,in a house with a garden to accommodateplaytime, which Caroline had located. Althoughthe school itself was not a success and closedafter two years, the graduates of the trainingschool for kindergarten teachers that the indefatigableMrs. Severance simultaneously startedspread the value of early-childhood educationthroughout the state. By the early 1890s, publicschool officials in Los Angeles had embraced theconcept; kindergartens in eighteen elementaryschools marked the beginning of progressivereform of public schooling in that city. 53To satisfy their spiritual needs, the Severancesinvited a Unitarian minister of their acquaintancefrom Massachusetts to help found a congregationin Los Angeles. His first worship servicetook place in Red Roof’s front parlor in 1877.Ten years on, the Severances’ cohort of “religiousradicals” had grown large enough to build a formalsanctuary, the predecessor of the extant FirstUnitarian Church of Los Angeles. The Severancesalso hosted a neighborhood book club, anearly attempt to enhance their adopted city’s culturallife and one that would inspire the creationof cultural organizations of greater importance,such as the Ruskin Art Club, founded in 1888 topromote appreciation of engravings and etchings,and the Severance Club, a conversation groupestablished in 1906 and named in honor of CarolineSeverance, who in 1878 had invited a smallgroup of friends to help her launch Los Angeles’sfirst women’s club. 54The women’s club was “an innovation,” Carolinelater recalled, “whose very name was an offenseto the established order of things.” Conservativewomen disparaged its secular orientation andlack of exclusivity. The first draft of the club’sconstitution had opened membership to any“respectable” female resident of Los Angeles;Caroline persuaded the draft writers to deleteeven that qualifier on the grounds that it waselitist. She was just getting started. During herpresidency, the organization continued to rattlethe powers that be, mounting a protest againstmunicipal plans that would have entailed thedestruction of shade trees and lobbying (on oneor two occasions, successfully) for the appointmentof women to important educational andcultural positions. 55During one of Caroline’s periodic visits to Boston,the women’s club disintegrated. Five years later,in 1891, she organized a new forum to encouragewomen to discuss and act on critical issues.As the first president of the Friday MorningClub, Caroline favored programs on women’srights, suffrage, and economic independence,interspersed with lighter fare about diet andfashion designed to attract uninitiated women,who could then be gently nudged into takingpublic action. (For example, liberation from “ConstrictingCorsets” was the focus of a December1891 gathering.) The strategy worked. The clubwomen’s promotion of child labor regulation, fairemployment practices, and consumer protectioninfluenced the platform of California’s ProgressiveParty. With a membership that had swelled tomore than three hundred by the turn of the century,the Friday Morning Club built a handsomemission-style headquarters at Ninth and Figueroastreets. Still growing twenty-five years later, theclub erected an even larger structure that boastedan art gallery, a library, and a dining room for fivehundred, in addition to meeting rooms. 56

The Friday Morning ClubCaroline’s election as chair of the prestigious and formidableFriday Morning Club at its founding was recordedin the club’s 1891 minutes’ book. A summary of the firstofficial meeting on April 16 described how “a few womengathered in the reading room of the Hollenbeck Hotel todiscuss the feasibility of organizing a woman’s club. . . .Mrs. Caroline Severance was elected Chairman. . . . Theobject of the society was discussed, time, place, name, andgeneral plan of organization.”Huntington Library, San Marino, California California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

Caroline attended the September 1899groundbreaking ceremony for the club’sfirst permanent headquarters. Followingthe advice of their businessmenhusbands, club members had formed acorporation and issued stock in order toobtain financing to buy and build on theland. As the cornerstone for the clubhousewas laid, the reformer, still optimistic atage seventy-nine, called upon her friendsand colleagues to rededicate themselvesto the “highest welfare of our homes,our schools, our city, our country andthe world” and predicted that a “fairerfuture” lay ahead for her sex.California Historical Society/USC SpecialCollectionsIn 1900, club members moved into theirhandsome, mission-style headquartersat 940 South Figueroa, where Carolineplanted a camphor tree from El Nido toshade the patio in the rear garden. Likethe tree, the club thrived and grew, provingCaroline’s contention: “It stampsas blasphemy to God and man and asuntrue to the facts of life and history, theclaim that competition is necessary to thehighest development of the individual orof society.” The club’s achievements in itsearly years under Caroline’s leadershipincluded the establishment of kindergartensand efforts on behalf of women’ssuffrage.California Historical Society/USC SpecialCollections7

Clouds over Red RoofUnable to secure meaningful work, T.C. filled theuntraditional role of his wife’s helpmate and stayat-homehusband. He lived vicariously throughhis sons’ continuing adventures with ranching.Sometime in 1875–76, the Severance brothershad purchased—apparently with the assistanceof their parents—a portion of the Mexican landgrantRancho Muscupiabe, north of San Bernardino.The purchase price was $25,000, andit seems likely that the family had to assume alarge mortgage in order to pay for the 8,900-acreparcel, located about sixty-five miles east of LosAngeles. The timing of the purchase was inauspicious.A severe drought plagued California in thefall and winter of 1876–77, drying up the streamsand creeks on which both sheep and cattle ranchingand the state’s fledgling agricultural industrydepended. The market value of sheep on the hoofdipped to as little as ten cents a head. Unable topay property taxes, the Severances lost the ranchto the state. 57Seymour and Sibley bought the property backin 1878 for $800, but they had little time andmoney to invest in its development. Seymourwas living in Tecopa, California, near the state’sborder with Nevada, working futilely to protectthe family’s ill-advised investment in a miningoperation that had no ready means of transportingits excavated silver and lead ore to the nearestmarkets two hundred miles away. Sibley wasnow married and working as an assistant to theLos Angeles freight agent of the Central PacificRailroad, the California-to-Utah section of thefirst transcontinental railroad. He had met hisbride, Annie Crittenden, when she joined hishorseback-riding set. Annie was a niece of MarkHopkins, one of the “Big Four” builders of theCentral Pacific (along with Leland Stanford, C. P.Huntington, and Charles Crocker), but Sibley hadlanded his job through another connection. T.C.and Caroline lived off their sons’ largesse andcredit from obliging merchants. For a while, thebrothers were stretched so thin it looked as if thefamily might have to give up Red Roof.“[O]ur Los Angeles life is a continual drain &strain, with nothing coming in,” Sibley advisedhis father in May 1879, “& the sooner we put astop to it the better. . . . [B]y next winter or so,I think by all means the place might as wellbe sold . . . and for the present,” he continued,“Mrs. Woodward or Mrs. Lee will have to wait alittle while, does it not seem so to you? See howlong Mrs. W. can wait. And when you do cometo terms or to leaving you must make every centtell & must sell everything not needed, like theextra horses, etc. & not leave a large establishmentat a low price and a great bargain for othersto enjoy.” 58Fortunately for the elder Severances, the upsettingtalk of selling Red Roof came to an end afterSibley helped Seymour obtain full-time employmentwith the Central Pacific. Sibley and Anniedid well enough—he, through promotion tofreight agent in Central Pacific’s Salt Lake Cityoffice, she, through inheritances—to turn RanchoMuscupiabe into their avocation upon theirreturn to southern California. In the late 1890s,the couple built a home on the ranch, set outseveral thousand eucalyptus trees and hundredsof orange and lemon trees, and indulged theirmutual passion for horses by raising Thoroughbreds.Neither racehorses nor citrus farming netteda profit. 59The Severance brothers would have to wait untilSan Bernardino had completed its slow expansionnorthward to their property lines to findbuyers for their land. By the mid-1920s, they hadsold off approximately 6,000 acres to real estatedevelopers, a country club, and the city of SanBernardino (among others). On these sales thebrothers grossed nearly $400,000. After subtractingproperty taxes, the principal and intereston various mortgages, and the cost of improve-California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

ments, Seymour and Sibley earned perhaps$100,000 apiece for their combined one hundredyears of redevelopment effort. The absenceof a water system accounted for the low pricestheir land had fetched. Once city water becameavailable, the brothers enjoyed what Sibley considered“big returns” on sales of parcels fromtheir remaining three-thousand-acre inventory. 60T.C. did not live to see his sons realize thefamily’s dream of creating wealth from theirpioneering investment in California real estate.In his early seventies he began to suffer fromepileptic seizures. He shared his distress at thesudden restriction of his independence with hissister-in-law, Mary Severance, in Cleveland, withwhom he annually exchanged letters around thetime of their shared March 1 birthday. SolomonSeverance’s widow commiserated with T.C. andsuggested that his rapid recovery from eachattack offered hope that his life would “yet belengthened by many years.” An evangelical Presbyterian,Mary Severance felt duty bound, however,to remind her “dear brother” that he mustprepare for the inevitable by placing his faith inJesus Christ. “Look back to the time when youfound him precious to your Soul,” Mary gentlyadmonished him. “Though you have sought throlong years for some other way, you must comeback to the feeling that there is no other namegiven but Jesus, whereby men can be saved.” 61T.C. made peace at least with his close confinementto home during the last five or six years ofhis life. He learned to take pleasure in simpleactivities, such as riding the streetcar to and fromthe post office, and doted on the company of hisniece. Caroline’s only brother, James Seymour,had followed his sister to California and livednearby at West Adams Boulevard and Grand Avenue.James’s daughter, Carrie, watched over heruncle during her aunt’s travels. She often joinedTheodoric for breakfast (a hearty meal of figs,oatmeal, chopped beef on toast and “a good cupof real nice coffee”), and he would eat an earlydinner at the Seymours’ table. Afterward, he andCarrie liked to play word games. 62Still, Caroline’s extended absences pained herhusband, who expressed his longing for his wifeof fifty years by letting her know that things wentto hell in a handbasket whenever she wasn’t athome. “McMullen has not come to plow,” hecomplained in a letter written in the early fallof 1890 when Caroline was away for two weeksat church camp, “but promises to be here thismorning & it strikes me that I shall give him atalking to—about his nice wife and baby!” Continuingwith his list of vexations, T.C. wrote, “Thisblot, below, was on this sheet, when I turned itup, so I trust you’ll not charge it to me. . . . Nowashwoman yet this week nor last, & if it was mycase I should set Jane at it, instead of allowing herto mouse around here doing nothing. She’s nottouched a thing of the work & I think she shoulddo something, what is she here for?” 63Theodoric Cordenio Severance passed awayon October 21, 1892. “The dear father is sadlymissed . . . ,” Caroline said of her seventy-eightyear-oldhusband. Her involvement with themovement to win the franchise for California’swomen would help to keep her mind off her loss.“I Have Gained My Majority”For nearly fifty years, Caroline Severance hadbeen active with the women’s suffrage movement,which had yet to achieve many victories.In 1866, she had helped Susan B. Anthonyand Elizabeth Cady Stanton organize the EqualRights Association, which soon disbanded overdisagreements about the wisdom of advocatingfor the voting rights of male African Americans,who might side with their white counterparts inopposing women’s suffrage. Believing in equalrights for all Americans, she had joined withLucy Stone in 1869 to cofound the Americancontinued on page 529

The Fight for SuffrageThe “high esteem and friendship which Madame Severance has won from womenand men who have been foremost in thought” that was recalled by Ella Giles Ruddyextended to Susan B. Anthony (seated, right), who posed for this portrait in LosAngeles in 1905 with eighty-six-year-old Caroline, along with California suffrage leadersCharlotte Le Moyne Wills (standing, right) and Rebecca Buffum Spring (seated,left). On June 28 of that year, Anthony appeared at the Friday Morning Club todeliver a speech against gender discrimination at the Los Angeles Public Library.Ella Strong Denison Library, Scripps Library; photograph byTheodore C. Marceau California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

In this photograph, San Francisco shopgirls andclerks register to vote circa 1911, the year Californiaadopted women’s suffrage. In July 1920,a month before ratification of the NineteenthAmendment to the U.S. Constitution, Dr. MaryRoberts of Los Angeles responded to charges thatvotes by women, as prey of politicians, had led tocorruption and crime. Summarizing achievementsin California politics since 1911, she recalled: “Intheir first encounter with the Legislature womencitizens showed remarkably good sense in the wayin which they brought their political power tobear . . .—got behind a few measures important tothe welfare of women and children and let pass thehundreds of other bills whose supporters clamoredto secure the ‘woman vote.’”Library of CongressCaroline died in 1914, before the mass awakening of the nation’s women to the desire for suffrage. In this 1915political cartoon, a torch bearer personifying Votes for Women triumphantly strides across the western states,where women already had won the right to vote, as eastern women, their arms outstretched, await her influence.Below the drawing, a poem by suffragist Alice Duer Miller encourages women to follow a path of unity,its first verse urging them forward toward the day, five years later, when the right to vote was secured.Look forward, women, always; utterly cast awayThe memory of hate and struggle and bitterness;Bonds may endure for a night, but freedom comes with the day,And the free must remember nothing less.Library of Congress; from a drawing by Hy Mayer1

Woman Suffrage Association to push for universalenfranchisement. As of 1892, however, Wyomingwas the only state in which females couldvote. When the general assembly in Sacramentopassed a suffrage bill in 1893, California lookedas if it might become the second state. Thegovernor’s ruling against the constitutionalityof the legislation forced suffrage proponents toregroup. Three years later, they succeeded in placingon the ballot an amendment to California’sconstitution granting women the franchise. Itwon favor with the male voters of Los Angeles,where Caroline had helped to lay the groundworkfor acceptance, but went down to overwhelmingdefeat elsewhere in the state. 64A decade passed before the suffrage issuereemerged in California. By this time, womenhad been granted the right to vote in Colorado,Utah, Idaho, and Washington State. Caroline wasnow in her mid-eighties. To show their appreciationof the inspirational leadership she had previouslyprovided, her younger colleagues appointedher to honorary presidencies in suffrage andequity leagues formed to push again for the franchise.This time, suffrage proponents carefullyforged alliances with labor organizations andProgressives. At a special election on October 10,1911, California became the sixth and largest stateto enfranchise women. 65Caroline Maria Seymour Severance, who diedin 1914 at the age of ninety-four, would not liveto see national suffrage achieved with passagein 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment to theConstitution prohibiting the states and federalgovernment from denying any American citizenthe right to vote on the basis of gender. But shehad savored victory, casting her first vote in apresidential election in 1912. In recognition ofher fragility, she had been allowed to register athome, whose name Caroline had changed to ElNido following T.C.’s death. 66The registration ceremony, according to areporter who witnessed it, took place a weekafter the special election, perhaps on El Nido’sshady veranda screened by Japanese curtains andfurnished with easy chairs and two hammocks.Then in her early nineties, Caroline passed mostof her time reclined in a hammock, dictatingto her secretary or listening to her read aloudfrom “serious and instructive books.” Becauseof the importance of the occasion, Caroline was“allowed to sit up” to sign the registration book.In the space provided to list one’s occupation shewrote “Mother of Clubs,” an honorific that hadbeen bestowed on her by the activist women ofLos Angeles. Describing the day as among herproudest, she declared, “At ninety-two I havegained my majority.” Her formal statement,issued the day after the special election, showedthat, despite her physical infirmity, she retainedher spitfire: “We have come to the dawn of a glorioustomorrow! A landmark in the most sacredcrusade of the ages, when woman is heroicallyreleased from the bondage and superstition ofthe past, and liberated from the political blacklistin our own free country. . . . Your loving comrade,C. M. Severance.” 67Diana Tittle, a former magazine writer and editor, is theauthor of The Severances: An American Odyssey, from PuritanMassachusetts to Ohio’s Western Reserve, and Beyond. In 1997she received the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature for hernonfiction books on regional history and urban affairs. California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

n o t e s12People’s Park: Birth and Survival, By Ibid, 48. W. J. Rorabaugh (Berkeley at War,Jon David Cash, PP 8–29139) describes the Joy of Cooking as a groupunique among Bay Area bands because itCaption sources: Wendy Marian Schlesinger, “played mainly in Berkeley” and “its two“People’s Park, April 20, 1969–May 15, songwriters and lead singers were women.”1969: 26 Days That Shook Our World” Rorabaugh notes that Joy of Cooking “wasin The Whole World’s Watching: Peace and lionized locally for its feminist message.”Social Justice Movements of the 1960s and 131970s (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Art Center, Griffith, “People’s Park,” 15.2001), 105–112; Interview with Wendy14 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 48; Rorabaugh,(Schlesinger) Stevens, Aug. 31, 2010, Berkeley;Stew Albert, Berkeley Barb, Apr. 18,15Berkeley at War, 84–85.1969; “People’s Park: Free for All,” Berkeley “Stew Albert”—Wikipedia, the freeBarb, Apr. 25–May 1, 1969; W. J. Rorabaugh,encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York:Stew_Albert; Judith Clavir Albert and StewartOxford University Press, 1989), 157.Edward Albert, The Sixties Papers: Documentsof a Rebellious Decade (New York: Praeger,1 Sim Van der Ryn, “Building a People’s 1984), xix; Stew Albert, Who the Hell is StewPark,” in The Troubled Campus: Current Albert? (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2004),Issues in Higher Education, ed. G. Kerry 32–71; Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS: The Rise andSmith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc., Development of the Students for a Democratic1970), 70.Society (New York: Random House, 1973),2 Robert Scheer, “Dialectics of Confrontation:Who Ripped Off the Park,” Ramparts46; Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution(New York: Touchstone, 1970), 26.(Aug. 1969): 43; Peter Allen, “Violent16 “Stew Albert”—Wikipedia; Albert, WhoDesign: People’s Park, Architectural Modernism,and Urban Renewal,” ISSC Fellows Governor, The “People’s Park,” 4; Todd Gitlin,the Hell is Stew Albert?, 56–99; Office of theWorking Papers, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA: The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (NewInstitute for the Study of Social Change, York: Bantam Books, 1987), 211.2007), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/ 176vz4s7jj, 10.“Truthing: About the Author,” http://www.truthing.net/author.asp; Scheer, “Dialectics,”3 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 43.48.4 Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s, 145. 18 Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 19–37; MiltonViorst, Fire in the Streets: America in5 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 44; Winthrop Griffith,“People’s Park—270’ x 450’ of Confrontation,”New York Times Magazine (Junethe 1960s (New York: Simon and Schuster,1979), 285–99.29, 1969): 5–6; Frederick Berry, Thomas 19 Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 38–41; Viorst,Brooks, and Eugene Cummins, “The BerkeleyPark: Terror in a Teapot,” Nation (June ernor, The “People’s Park,” 3, 5.Fire in the Streets, 300–2; Office of the Gov-23, 1969): 784.20 Sale, SDS, 376–77.6 Allen, “Violent Design,” 15; Scheer,21“Dialectics,” 46; Berry et al., “The BerkeleyPark,” 784; “The Battle of Berkeley,”Office of the Governor, The “People’sPark,” 4; Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 99,National Review (June 17, 1969): 579.109, 148, 155.227 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 44, 46; John R.Fat Bill and Me, “Super Joel Tornabene,Coyne, Jr., “Positively the Last Word onPeople’s Park, and Berkeley in the Earlythe People’s Park,” National Review (Oct. 7,70s,” fatbillandme.blogspot.com/…/protest-photos-super-joel-or-hibiscus.html;1969), 1025.Paul Krassner, “Tom Waits Meets Super8 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 46; Berry et al., Joel,” www.counterpunch.org/krassner/02022008.html;Daniel Walker, Rights“The Berkeley Park,” 784; Allen, “ViolentDesign,” 19–20.in Conflict (New York: Bantam Books, 1968),9 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 48; Griffith, “People’six., 89–90; Abbie Hoffman, Revolution forPark,” 15.the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1968),133.10 Ibid.23 In his study of the 1960s protest of youth,11 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 48. Kenneth Keniston described “two polesof dissent,” separate groups that Kenistonlabeled as the “politically active” and “culturallyalienated.” Kenneth Keniston, Youth andDissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (NewYork: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1971),143.24 “The Street People,” Time (May 23, 1969):27; Office of the Governor, The “People’sPark,” 2–3; Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 156;Scheer, “Dialectics,” 48.25 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 48; WendySchlesinger, “Sod,” in Wendy Schlesinger,“Young Girl’s Diary—Berkeley 1968–1969,”http://www.peoplespark.org/sod.html.26 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 48.27 William Brand, “People’s Park AdvocateSuccumbs to Cancer,” Oakland Tribune, Feb.8, 2006; Albert and Albert, Sixties Papers,434–36; Albert, Who the Hell is Stew Albert?,101; “People’s Park”–Wikipedia; RichardBrenneman, “The Bloody Beginnings ofPeople’s Park,” Berkeley Daily Planet, Apr.20, 2004.28 F. J. Bardacke, “Who Owns the Park?:A Leaflet,” Berkeley Barb, May 9, 1969,reprinted in Albert and Albert, SixtiesPapers, 437–38; Scheer, “Dialectics,” 49;John A. Coleman, “The People, The Police,and the Park,” America (June 7, 1969): 668.29 “The People’s Park,” Newsweek (May 26,1969): 39; Allen, “Violent Design,” 28–29;Van der Ryn, “Building a People’s Park,”68; Berry et al., “The Berkeley Park,” 785;Griffith, “People’s Park,” 5; San FranciscoChronicle, May 16, 1969.30 Brand, “People’s Park Advocate.” Thechasm that once existed in the Bay Areabetween political activists and the counterculturecan best be illustrated by their intersectionat two important events. First, inOctober 1965, the Vietnam Day Committeewelcomed to Berkeley a crowd of 10,000–15,000 for Vietnam Day, a massive teach-inopposing the war. Ken Kesey, author ofOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a localcountercultural icon who had popularizedthe use of LSD with a series of “acid tests,”was an invited speaker. Taking the stagewith a harmonica and playing “Home onthe Range,” pausing periodically to accusethe VDC of “playing their game” by makingspeeches and planning marches, he finallyadvised antiwar activists that the only way tostop the war was simply to turn their backson it and walk away. Later, in January 1967,the counterculture staged a Human Be-Inat San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, wherea crowd of 20,000–50,000 gathered and

n o t e slistened to the music of popular rock groupssuch as the Grateful Dead and the JeffersonAirplane. After the music was over, whenpolitical activists took the stage and startedmaking their speeches, the counterculturevanished and left the activists all alone talkingto themselves. Tom Wolfe, The ElectricKool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Strausand Giroux, 1968), 221–25; William L.O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal Historyof America in the 1960’s (New York: Quadrangle-NewYork Times Book Co., 1974),240–42; Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 141.31 Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 156.32 Dennis Hevesi, “Roger W. Heyns, 77,Head of Berkeley in the 60’s,” New YorkTimes, Sept. 14, 1995, Obituary; Biography–NYTimes.com; Kenneth J. Garcia,“Roger Heyns—Chancellor in ’60s At UCBerkeley,” Sept. 14, 1995, SFGate.com articlecollections.33 Griffith, “People’s Park,” 15; Scheer, “Dialectics,”52.34 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 48; Griffith, “People’sPark,” 15, 22.35 Berry et al., “The Berkeley Park,” 785;Allen, “Violent Design,” 30–31.36 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 48, 52; Griffith, “People’sPark,” 5, 15, 18, 22; Berry et al., “TheBerkeley Park,” 784–85; “Reagan CondemnsPlanned Violence,” San Francisco Chronicle,May 21, 1969, and “The Neighbors ofthe Park,” May 27, 1969; Allen, “ViolentDesign,” 29–30; Coleman, “The People, ThePolice, and the Park,” 668–69.37 William J. McGill, The Year of the Monkey:Revolt on Campus, 1968–69 (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1982), 159, 161; Sim Van derRyn, Design for Life: The Architecture of SimVan der Ryn (Salt Lake City: Gibbs, SmithPublisher: 2005), 33.38 Griffith, “People’s Park,” 15; Scheer,“Dialectics,” 52; Van der Ryn, “Building aPeople’s Park,” 65.39 Office of the Governor, The “People’sPark,” 5–6; Gitlin, The Sixties, 355; JefferyKahn, “Ronald Reagan Launched PoliticalCareer Using the Berkeley Campus asa Target,” UC Berkeley Web Feature, June8, 2004, http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/06/08_reagan.shtml;Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 156. Albert, inhis 2004 memoir, described People’s Parkas “my nation, my home, and my poem”(101).40 Griffith, “People’s Park,” 15; Scheer, “Dialectics,”52.41 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 39, 52.42 “Rampage,” Ramparts (Aug. 1969): 54;Peter Barnes, “An Outcry: Thoughts onBeing Gassed,” Newsweek (June 2, 1969,):37; www.alamedacountysheriff.org/ADMIN/history.htm; Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 85,154.43 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 52; Griffith, “People’sPark,” 17; Barnes, “An Outcry,” 37; “CityUnder Siege,” San Francisco Chronicle, May16, 1969; Office of the Governor The “People’sPark,” 14–16. Siegel later explained thateverybody departed as soon as he utteredthe words, “Let’s go down there and take thepark,” because the university police shut offpower to the sound equipment at that exactmoment. Michelle Locke, “People’s Park,”Orange County Register, Apr. 19, 1999.44 Barnes, “An Outcry,” 37; Rorabaugh,Berkeley at War, 160–62; Office of the Governor,The “People’s Park,” 16–18.45 Office of the Governor, The “People’sPark,” 18–22.46 Office of the Governor, The “People’sPark,” 28; Griffith, “People’s Park,” 18; Berryet al., “The Berkeley Park,” 786; “Battle ofBerkeley,” Newsweek (June 2, 1969): 36,38; San Francisco Chronicle, May 16, 17, 20,1969.47 “Occupied Berkeley,” Time (May 30,1969): 22; “Rampage,” 54. Although 32gunshot victims were actually hospitalized,many victims—especially those with onlyminor wounds—avoided hospital care ratherthan face the prospect of being arrested bythe police at the hospital. Ramparts placedthe total number of gunshot victims at110. Scheer, “Dialectics,” 52; Brenneman,“Bloody Beginnings of People’s Park.”48 “Rampage,” 54; Berry et al., “The BerkeleyPark,” 786; “Buckshot Blamed in BerkeleyDeath,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 21,1969; “Battle of Berkeley,” 36.49 Griffith, “People’s Park,” 18; CharlesHorman, “The Second Front: Pacifying California,”Commonweal (June 13, 1969): 356.While many Berkeley citizens were shockedat the use of gunfire, Frank Bardacke wasnot. He explained, in terms much like FrankMadigan, that demonstrators had developedan effective strategy against conventionalpolice methods: “When the police took outshot guns with buck shot in them and killedone man and blinded another man, that wasbecause they were . . . in the previous fouror five years unable to control the streetswith tear gas and billy clubs. . . . Peoplewould pick up the tear gas canisters andthrow it back, people would run down thestreets, police couldn’t get them.” Therefore,Bardacke was not surprised when Madiganresorted to the use of shotguns: “Therewas a decision made on the police’s part toescalate their tactics because they wantedto take control of the streets back, they hadto take control of the streets back becausethey were going to try to fence off this pieceof property and that’s why they brought outthe shotguns. Shotguns are no fun at all.They are not the least bit fun, and they controlthe streets just fine”; http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-13/bardackel.html.50 San Francisco Chronicle, May 16, 1969;Office of the Governor, The “People’s Park,”23; Scheer, “A Night at Santa Rita,” Ramparts(Aug. 1969): 50; Berry et al., “TheBerkeley Park,” 787; Barnes, “An Outcry,”37; Kenneth Lamott, Anti-California: Reportfrom Our First Parafascist State (Boston:Little, Brown, 1971), 166.51 “Berkeley Riot Rules Assailed,” San FranciscoChronicle, May 21, 1969; “Mass ArrestsCut Off March in Berkeley,” Chronicle, May23, 1969; “UC Faculty Votes 642–95 To GetRid of Park Fence: Resolution Also UrgesGIs to Go,” Chronicle, May 24, 1969; Berryet al., “The Berkeley Park,” 787; Lamott,Anti-California, 159–65.52 “Helicopter Sprays Students,” San FranciscoChronicle, May 21, 1969, and “GuardTells Why It Gasses Campus,” Chronicle,May 22, 1969; Berry et al., “The BerkeleyPark,” 787, 788; Horman, “Second Front,”356; “Battle of Berkeley,” 36; McGill, TheYear of the Monkey, 179, 265; Lamott, Anti-California, 162–63; “UC Students Vote toKeep the Park,” San Francisco Chronicle,May 23, 1969; Griffith, “People’s Park,”18; Scheer, “Dialectics,” 49; “OccupiedBerkeley,” 22; Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War,165–66.53 Scheer, “Dialectics,” 49; “UC FacultyVotes 642-95 To Get Rid of Park Fence”;“Berkeley Quiet-GIs Off Street,” San FranciscoChronicle, May 26, 1969, and “ReaganEnds Berkeley Bans,” Chronicle, May 26,1969.54 “A Massive Protest: Throng DemandsTroops Pull Out of Berkeley,” San FranciscoChronicle, May 27, 1969, and “The Day inBerkeley: A Big Peaceful March,” May 31,California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

1969; McGill, The Year of the Monkey, 193;Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 164–65.55 “Berkeley Crisis: Reagan Orders Guardto Leave,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 3,1969; Office of the Governor, The “People’sPark,” 27.56 San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 1969;“Flower Power,” Newsweek (June 9, 1969):92; Griffith, “People’s Park,” 18; Rorabaugh,Berkeley at War, 165.57 “Regents Ban Park,” San FranciscoChronicle, June 21, 1969; Griffith, “People’sPark,” 22; Scheer, “Dialectics,” 52; Barnes,“Outcry,” 37.58 McGill, The Year of the Monkey, 155.Hoover actively assisted Reagan’s 1966gubernatorial campaign against the incumbentliberal Democrat, Edmund G. “Pat”Brown. He provided Reagan’s campaignwith classified FBI reports, handing Reaganample fodder for criticizing “the mess atBerkeley.” Kahn, “Ronald Reagan”; Allen,“Violent Design,” 33.59 Office of the Governor, The “People’sPark,” 8; Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 110–11,165–66, 176; “The Nation: Peace in thePark,” Time (May 29, 1972), www.time.com/magazine/article/.60 “People’s Park,” –Wikipedia, “People’sPark Chronology—Modern History ofPeople’s Park,” http://www.peoplespark.org/tmline.html.61 Jonathan Rabinowitz, “The People’s ParkStruggle Resumes After 20 Years,” New YorkTimes, Apr. 24, 1989; Larry Gordon, “UCto Lease, Not Build on ‘People’s Park,’” LosAngeles Times, Nov. 1, 1989; Craig Anderson,“Since We’re Neighbors, Let’s Be Friends,”miscellaneous clipping dated Nov. 10, 1989,contained in packet mailed to author byMiranda Oshigi of Berkeley’s Mayor’s Officeon July 18, 1990; “Memorandum of AccordBetween the Mayor of Berkeley and theChancellor of the University of California atBerkeley,” Oct. 30, 1989, included in packetmailed by Miranda Oshigi.62 “People’s Park”–Wikipedia; “People’s ParkChronology”; Don Mitchell, The Right to theCity: Social Justice and the Fight for PublicSpace (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003),125–28.63 Mitchell, Right to the City, 128, 134.64 Jane Gross, “Police Kill Protester at Berkeleyin Break-In at Chancellor’s Home,” NewYork Times, Aug. 26, 1992, www.nytimes.com; “Rosebud Denovo”—Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosebud Denovo;Claire Burch, What Really Killed Rosebud?(Oakland: Regent Press, 2000), “Outlawson the Left and Right,” Time (Sept. 7, 1992),www.time.com/time/magazine/article/.65 “People’s Park”–Wikipedia; “People’sPark Chronology”; Anna Hiatt, “CampusSeeks Input in Effort to Revamp Park: CommunitySplit on Right Approach for Much-Contested Site,” The Daily Californian, July9, 2007; Arianna Puopolo, “People’s ParkCelebrates 40th Anniversary,” City on a HillPress, May 14, 2009.66 People’s Park home page, http://www.peoplespark.org/; Brenneman, “BloodyBeginnings of People’s Park”; “People’sPark”–Wikipedia.67 Judy Gumbo Albert, “People’s Park Plus,”Berkeley Daily Planet, Apr. 30, 2009; “People’sPark”–Wikipedia.68 Puopolo, “People’s Park Celebrates.”69 Albert, “People’s Park Plus.”Significant Others: The DefiningDomestic Life of Caroline SeymourSeverance, By Diana Tittle, PP 30–52Caption sources: Parton, Horace Greeley etal., Eminent Women of the Age (Hartford, CT:S. M. Betts & Company, 1869), 379; DianaTittle, The Severances: An American Odyssey,from Puritan Massachusetts to Ohio’s WesternReserve, and Beyond (Cleveland: WesternReserve Historical Society, 2010); Ella GilesRuddy, ed., The Mother of Clubs: CarolineM. Seymour Severance: An Estimate and anAppreciation (Los Angeles: Baumgardt PublishingCompany, 1906), 21, 124; CarolineSeverance to James S. Severance, n.d., box36, folder 24, Severance Papers, HuntingtonLibrary, San Marino, California; Thelma LeeHubbell and Gloria Ricci Lothrop, “The FridayMorning Club: A Los Angeles Legacy,”in Women in the Life of Southern California:An Anthology Compiled from Southern CaliforniaQuarterly, ed. Doyce B. Nunis Jr. (LosAngeles: Historical Society of SouthernCalifornia, 1996), 304–05; Joan M. Jensen,“After Slavery: Caroline Severance in LosAngeles,” Southern California Quarterly 48(June 1966): 82; Debra Gold Hansen, KarenF. Gracy, and Sheri D. Irvin, “At the Pleasureof the Board: Women Librarians andthe Los Angeles Public Library, 1880–1905,”Libraries & Culture 34, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 337;“California Women Profit by Ballot,” NewYork Times, July 11, 1920.1 Hubbell and Lothrop, “The Friday MorningClub,” 283.2 For Theodoric Cordenio Severance’s lifeand business career and descriptions of hischaracter, see Mark Sibley Severance, AnAutobiography (privately printed, 1924) andDavid C. Dewsnap, The Severance Genealogy(Westminster, Maryland: Heritage Books,2007), 100–1, 194. The Italian surgeonTheodoric and his teacher, Hugo of Lucca,pioneered the use of anesthetics in the thirteenthcentury. Their advanced techniquesand beliefs—most notably, that woundsshould not be allowed to suppurate, butmust be kept clean in order to heal—werepreserved in Theodoric’s Latin treatises,which were translated into English in thelate Middle Ages and published under thetitle The Surgery of Theodoric; see EldridgeCampbell and James Colton, trans., The Surgeryof Theodoric: ca. A.D. 1267, 2 vols. (NewYork: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955–60).For biographical details about Robert BruceSeverance, see Reverend John F. Severance,The Severans Genealogical History (OrangePark, FL: Quintin Publications, 2007),37–38.3 Severance family records, privately held inCleveland, OH (hereafter cited as SFR).4 Mrs. Walter E. Burnham et al, History andTradition of Shelburne, Massachusetts (Shelburne,MA: History and Tradition of ShelburneCommittee, 1958), 194. Stephen W.Williams, “A Medical History of the Countyof Franklin, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,”Massachusetts Medical Society,Medical Communications 7 (1842–48). TheSeverances’ third child bore the name ofone of eighteenth-century England’s mostbrilliant minds: the physician, physiologist,and philosopher Erasmus Darwin, grandfatherof Charles Darwin.5 Diana Severance, obituary, n.p., n.d., SFR.6 See Egbert W. Kelso, The History of PublicPoor Relief in Massachusetts 1620–1920 (NewYork: Houghton Mifflin, 1922).7 For biographical details about David Long,see Elroy McKendree Avery, A History ofCleveland and Its Environs: The Heart of NewConnecticut, vol. 2 (Chicago & New York:Lewis Publishing, 1918), 321–22; D. H.Beckwith, “Early Medical Work of Cleveland,”Annals of the Early Settlers Associationof Cuyahoga County 5, no. 6 (1909). “ServicesHeld in Memory of the Late CatherineSears,” newspaper article, n.p., n.d., SFR.Article, The (Cleveland) Herald, n.d., SFR.

n o t e sGertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham, ThePioneer Families of Cleveland 1796–1840, vol.2 (Cleveland: Evangelical Publishing House,1914), 629. Maurice Joblin, Cleveland, Pastand Present: Its Representative Men (Cleveland:Maurice Joblin, 1869), 149. Julius P.Bolivar MacCabe, First Directory of Clevelandand Ohio City, for the Years 1837–38 (Cleveland,OH: Sanford and Lott, 1837).8 Dewsnap, The Severance Genealogy, 194.Judith Raftery, “Caroline Marie [CQ] SeymourSeverance: Activist, Organizer, andReformer,” in The Human Tradition inCalifornia, ed. Clark Davis and David Igler(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources,2002), 102; see also James Skinner SeymourVertical File, Seymour Public Library,Auburn, NY(hereafter cited as SeymourVertical File). “Caroline Maria SeymourSeverance Biographical Sketch,” The WomanQuestion, Connecticut History on the Web,http://www.connhistory.org (hereafter citedas CS biographical sketch). Ruddy, TheMother of Clubs, 55.9 Seymour Vertical File.10 Raftery, “Caroline Marie Seymour Severance,”102. Unless otherwise noted, thequoted remarks and the descriptions of theprivate life of Caroline Severance are fromher unpublished autobiography, “My OwnStory,” contained in the Papers of CarolineMaria Seymour Severance 1830–1980, box 5,folder 19, Huntington Library, San Marino,California (hereafter cited as SeverancePapers, CSS).11 Joan M. Jensen, “Caroline Maria SeymourSeverance,” in Notable American Women,1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed.Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, andPaul S. Boyer, vol. 2 (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1971), 265.12 Tittle, The Severances. Ruddy, Mother ofClubs, 59.13 Elbert J. Benton, A Century of Progress:Being a History of the National City Bank ofCleveland from 1845 to 1945 (Cleveland, OH:National City Bank, 1945), 3. Severance, “MyOwn Story.” Ruddy, Mother of Clubs, 58, 108.14 CS biographical sketch.15 Ruddy, Mother of Clubs, 135. For descriptionsof the public life of Caroline SeymourSeverance, see Raftery, “Caroline Marie SeymourSeverance”; Jensen, “After Slavery”;Hubbell and Lothrop, “The Friday MorningClub”; and Trustee Biographies—John L.Severance, Cleveland Orchestra Archives,Severance Hall, Cleveland, OH (hereaftercited as Trustee Biographies). GeorgeMcKenna, The Puritan Origins of AmericanPatriotism (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2007), 4. See Kenneth Stampp, ThePeculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-BellumSouth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1967).16 “Caroline Severance,” Dictionary of Unitarianand Universalist Biography, http://www25-temp.uua.org (hereafter cited as CSdictionary entry). Ruddy, Mother of Clubs,21–22.17 CS dictionary entry. Jeanette E. Tuve, OldStone Church: In the Heart of the City since1820 (Virginia Beach, VA: The Donning Co.,1994), 17. CS biographical sketch. Jensen,“After Slavery,” 75.18 CS biographical sketch. Parton et al., EminentWomen of the Age, 379–82.19 Hubbell and Lothrop, “The Friday MorningClub,” 287.20 Parton et al., Eminent Women of the Age,379–82. Severance, An Autobiography, 5.Hubbell and Lothrop, “The Friday MorningClub,” 287.21 Severance, An Autobiography, 5. Partonet al., Eminent Women of the Age, 379–82.“More Women’s Rights Conventions,”National Park Service Women’s Rights History& Culture, http://www.nps.gov/wori/historyculture.22 Severance, An Autobiography, 6.23 Ruddy, Mother of Clubs, 21. Severance,“My Own Story.”24 Benton, A Century of Progress, 5. JohnLong Severance to Mary Long Severance,July 22, 1846, SFR.25 Benton, A Century of Progress, 3–6. JohnE. Vacha, “My Money or Your Life: TheCanal Bank Failure of 1854,” Timeline(Mar.–Apr. 2001): 40. Workers of ProjectNo. 14066, Annals of Cleveland, 1818–1935:A Digest and Index of the Newspaper Recordof Events and Opinions in Two Hundred Volumes,vol. 34 (Cleveland, OH: WPA Administrationof Ohio, 1937), 102.26 Harlan Hatcher, The Western Reserve: TheStory of New Connecticut in Ohio (Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), 129. Vacha, “MyMoney or Your Life,” 37.27 Jensen, “After Slavery,” 74. Severance, AnAutobiography, 10. Trustee Biographies. Raftery,“Caroline Marie Seymour Severance,”103.28 Hubbell and Lothrop, “The Friday MorningClub,” 283. Raftery, “Caroline MarieSeymour Severance,” 104; Ruddy, Mother ofClubs, 24.29 Raftery, “Caroline Marie Seymour Severance,”104. “Mother of Women’s ClubsDead,” New York Times, Nov. 11, 1914.30 Unless otherwise noted, informationabout Caroline and T.C. and their sons’activities in California, as well as biographicaldetails about the sons, are from Severance,An Autobiography.31 James S. Severance to T.C. Severance,Feb. 17, 1873, box 47, folder 4, SeverancePapers.32 Mark Severance to T.C. Severance, Sept.17, 1873, box 47, folder 4, Severance Papers.33 James to T.C., Aug. 28, 1863, box 47,folder 4, Severance Papers. In the early1860s, Dr. Lewis had founded in Boston anormal school for training physical educationteachers, whose graduates spread outacross the country and helped to assure aplace for physical hygiene and exercise inthe curriculum of the public schools. Carolinehad invited the crusading educator, afellow native of Auburn, NY, for an extendedstay in the Severance home in West Newton.Dr. Lewis insisted that everyone in theSeverance household run a mile beforebreakfast. Apparently, unlike his eldest son,T.C. had not taken to the new regimen. Hewas still muttering about the damnable Diolong after his youngest child had left home.In the mid-1870s, Mary Severance senther brother-in-law an issue of a Clevelandnewspaper called the Leader that was “quitegiven up to Dr. Lewis & his movement inOhio.” The lavish coverage afforded his oldnemesis rekindled T.C.’s pique. T.C. passedalong to his traveling wife (who had taught“practical ethics” at Lewis’s normal schoolfor a time after the Civil War) the news thather reformer friend had recently held a publicmeeting in Cleveland to stir up interestin exercise and temperance, adding sarcastically,“& his cloven foot hung out all the waythro”; T.C. to Caroline, Feb. 14, 1874, box 52,folder 16, Severance Papers; Clark Davis andDavid Igler, eds., The Human Tradition inCalifornia, 103.34 Caroline to James, n.d., box 36, folder24, Severance Papers. The tactics Carolineemployed to persuade her son to stop drinkingreveal her skills as a rhetorician. First,she assured Seymour that she did not blamehim for his past failings, noting consolinglyCalifornia History • volume 88 number 1 2010

that “thousands of the brightest & best menfall under the habit of stimulants.” Thenshe tried to beguile him: “Now my darlingS. you have sworn off for two weeks, then ifyou can do it so brief, why not for longer?Why not give up the harmful dangeroushabit altogether. Can it be as hard to say toothers that you do not drink (the poison) asto do it.” Perhaps fearing that her tone hadbeen too soft, she next administered the verbalequivalent of a slap: “You are too muchof a man my dear S. and have too good abrain to be so idiotic.” Finally, she resortedto pleading: “And now, before will & memory& reason are too far weakened, make themanly resolve to save yourself from all thesefearful risks that lie before you, I beg you,I implore you, to do this, to use your bestreason on the matter. It is all summed upin the admirable sentence which I quoted toyou. If it is easy to do[,] do it for the sake ofthose who love you & depend upon you. Ifhard—do it at once, for your own safety.”35 James to T.C., Feb. 17, 1873.36 James to T.C., Jan. 28, 1873, box 47, folder4, Severance Papers.37 James to T.C., Feb. 17, 1873.38 James to T.C., Jan. 28, 1873.39 Severance, An Autobiography, 71.40 Mark Severance to Pierre Severance, 1872,box 50, folder 9, Severance Papers.41 James to T.C., Feb. 17, 1873.42 T.C. to Caroline, Feb. 16, 1874, Mar. 5,1875, box 52, folder 16, Severance Papers.Severance, An Autobiography, 26.43 James to T.C. , Feb. 17, 1873; Caroline toT.C., July 28, 1875, box 37, folder 26; T.C. toCaroline, Mar. 10, 1875, box 52, folder 16,Severance Papers.44 Severance, An Autobiography, 13–14; Raftery,“Caroline Marie Seymour Severance,”103. Caroline to T.C., July 28, 1875. Tittle,The Severances, 107. CS biographical sketch.45 Caroline to T.C., July 28, 1875.46 T.C. to Caroline, Feb. 14, 16, 17, 1874.47 Severance, An Autobiography, 82. MaryLong Severance to Caroline, Oct. 17, 1877;Mark to Pierre, 1872; Solon Severance toCaroline, Mar. 24, 1875, box 51, folder 5, SeverancePapers. Severance, “My Own Story.”48 Severance, “My Own Story.” Hubbell andLothrop, “The Friday Morning Club,” 288.49 Caroline Severance, “Reminiscences,” box5, folder 32, Severance Papers.50 Sibley, An Autobiography, 85; Severance,“Reminiscences.” The orchard becameT.C.’s pride and joy. He often importunedClevelanders on business in Los Angeles totake some of his delicious citrus fruit backto his relatives; Solon to T.C., June 14, 1879,box 52, folder 10, Severance Papers. “Mme.Caroline Severance,” newspaper article, n.p.,n.d, SFR.51 Julia Severance Burrage to T.C., June 9,1889, box 39, folder 4; James to T.C., Feb.25, 1878, box 47, folder 4, Severance Papers;Scrapbook, vol. 112, Pasadena [California]Historical Society (hereafter cited as Scrapbook).Severance, “My Own Story.” El Nidowas razed in 1950 to make way for the newheadquarters of the John Tracy Clinic, thecountry’s first preschool for the hearingimpaired, located at the corner of WestAdams and Severance streets. The clinic wasfounded by actor Spencer Tracy’s wife andnamed in honor of their son, who was deaf;Cecilia Rasmussen, “Actor’s Wife a Star inAiding Deaf Children and Their Families,”Los Angeles Times, Nov. 14, 2004.52 Judith Rosenberg Raftery, Land of FairPromise: Politics and Reform in Los AngelesSchools, 1885–1941 (Stanford, CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1992), 22; see also GloriaRicci Lothrop, “Nurturing Society’s Children,”California History 65, no. 4 (Dec.1986): 274–83.53 Raftery, Land of Fair Promise, 22–27 and“Los Angeles Clubwomen and ProgressiveReform,” in California Progressivism Revisited,ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1994), 149–51.54 Jensen, “After Slavery,” 79. Lothrop, “NurturingSociety’s Children,” 278.55 Trustee Biographies. Jensen, “After Slavery,”79–80.56 Jensen, “After Slavery,” 79–80. KevinStarr, Inventing the Dream: California throughthe Progressive Era (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1985), 96. Raftery, “LosAngeles Clubwomen,” 148. Lothrop, “NurturingSociety’s Children,” 278. Hubbell andLothrop, “The Friday Morning Club,” 294.Cecelia Rasmussen, “L.A.’s Leading, NowForgotten, Suffragette,” Los Angeles Times,June 7, 1998. Dwindling resources forcedthe sale of the Italian Renaissance buildingin 1977, but according to Rasmussen, theclub’s twenty active members continued togather twice a month as late as 1998.57 Muscupiabe was a variant of the nameof a Serrano Indian village, Amuscupiabit,meaning “place of little pines.” T.C.and Caroline’s investment in the ranchwas probably modest. Although Carolineasserted in her unpublished autobiography,“My Own Story,” that parents and sonsowned Muscupiabe “in common,” MarkSibley made no mention of the elder Severances’participation in the purchase in hisautobiography. Perhaps the elder Severancescontributed what they could toward themortgage payments.58 Mark to T.C., May 31, 1879, box 50, folder9, Severance Papers.59 James to T.C., Feb. 27, 1880, box 47,folder 5, Severance Papers. After ten yearsin Salt Lake City, Sibley and Annie hadbeen lured back to Los Angeles by Carolineand T.C.’s offer of a home lot sliced fromtheir West Adams property in what was fastbecoming the city’s wealthiest neighborhood.The usually broadminded Carolinehad dangled this bait because she did notregard Salt Lake City, where she had witnessedMormon women “walking like petdogs behind their much-married husbands,”as a fitting environment for her two granddaughters;Severance, “My Own Story.”60 Before his death at eighty-seven in 1931,Sibley also donated land to the San Bernardinocampus of California State University;“John Randall Munn Jr. ’38,” obituary,Princeton Alumni Weekly, Dec. 6, 2000.61 D. E. Parker to Mary Long Severance, May19, n.y., SFR. Solon to T.C., Sept. 28, 1892,box 52, folder 10; Mary Long to T.C., Feb. 15,1886, box 51, folder 6, Severance Papers.62 “Death of T.C. Severance,” obituary, n.p.,n.d., SFR. Severance, “My Own Story.” T.C.to Caroline, Sept. 17, 20, and 22, 1890, box52, folder 17, Severance Papers.63 T.C. to Caroline, Sept. 17, 1890.64 Jensen, Notable American Women, 267 and“After Slavery,” 80–81.65 Hubbell and Lothrop, “The Friday MorningClub,” 290.66 “Caroline M. Severance,” Historical Societyof Southern California, www.socalhistory.org/bios.67 Scrapbook.7

e v i e w sEdited by James J. RawlsThe Modern MovesWest: CaliforniaArtists andDemocratic Culture inthe Twentieth CenturyBy Richard Cándida Smith(Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2009, 264 pp.,$39.95 cloth)Reviewed by Paul J. Karlstrom, FormerWest Coast Regional Director, Archivesof American Art, Smithsonian Institution;editor of On the Edge of America:California Modernist Art, 1900–1950; andauthor of the forthcoming Peter Selz:Sketches of a Life in ArtRichard Cándida Smith’s mostrecent book is another tour de forceexample of the skillful employmentof art in the service of ideas. Here thehighly respected intellectual historianfurther develops ideas introduced inearlier works: Utopia and Dissent: Art,Poetry, and Politics in California (1995),a strikingly original look at mid-twentieth-centuryCalifornia avant-garde artthat diverged from the typical practiceof determining significance by progressionalong established formalist lines,and the brilliant Mallarmé’s Children:Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience(1999), in which the author findssignificance in California’s innovativebohemian subcultures and workingclasssociety.The Modern Moves West is in some wayseven more ambitious than the earliertwo books, but they really should beviewed as a series—a trilogy—sharingan intellectual/historical pointof view that seeks its evidence in artand specifically that of California. Theapproach is largely chronological, movingfrom ninteenth-century France toCalifornia, the early chapters laying theintellectual and philosophical groundwork.For this reader, the guidinghistorical perspective came togetheron page forty-five with the introductionof Simon Rodia and his splendidWatts Towers in South Central LosAngeles. Moving from the abstract tothe specific, the author could not havedone better than to start with Rodia,the working-class master who standslegitimately shoulder-to-shoulder withthe leading modernist elites—and notonly in California. Rodia’s direct influenceis emphasized by a long discussionof Noah Purifoy, first director ofthe Watts Towers Art Center, whosequestioning of the efficacy of workingas an individual artist to benefit hiscommunity, and his use of assemblageas a democratic means of expression,fits well with the author’s interests.Rather than focus on the most prominentCalifornia artists, Cándida Smithprefers to concentrate on a few figureswho best exemplify how artists create aplace for themselves in a more broadlydefined modernity. The analysis of JayDeFeo’s iconic The Rose (1958–66),with its obsessive layering of monochromaticpigment to approximatesculptural form, convincingly placesthe work within the realm of ideas aswell as the senses.In this extraordinary book, strikinglyoriginal and rich in synthetic thinking,Cándida Smith presents an alternativeway to look at and think about art, andits relationship to the larger social andcultural context. He patiently explainshow forces came together to producea creative culture in California that,on its own regional terms, played asignificant role in expanding how wethink about modernism as a historicalconcept. Along the way, he presents anonstandard but recognizable historicaloverview that significantly expandsour understanding of how art fits inand contributes to society. For thoseseriously interested in art, and in Californiahistory, The Modern Moves Westis indispensable reading.California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

For Both Cross andFlag: Catholic Action,Anti-Catholicism, andNational SecurityPolitics in World WarII San FranciscoBy William Issel (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 2009, 216pp., $40.00 cloth)Reviewed by Steven M. Avella, Professorof History, Marquette University, andauthor of Sacramento and the CatholicChurch: Shaping a Capital CityReligious believers and institutionsare among the forces that contributeto the life and viability of amodern metropolis. Churches andreligious people create places of worship,educational and social welfareinstitutions, and “intentional” communitiesof adherents who exercise theirown distinctive influences on city life.William Issel’s fine book highlights adimension of Catholic influence andagency on San Francisco exercised bythe city’s large Italian population duringWorld War II. His protagonist,Sylvester Andriano, is an upwardlymobile immigrant from northern Italywho established himself as a prominentlay leader among the city’s ItalianCatholics. He was also an importantconsultant to some of the city’s mostprominent Italian politicians, especiallyMayor Angelo Rossi.Andriano was one of many Catholicsof the first half of the twentieth centuryinspired by international CatholicAction movements. This wide-rangingfaction, encouraged and directed bypopes and bishops, called on an energizedlaity to work diligently for theChristianization of secular life. Theiractivities were very popular in manyAmerican cities with large Catholicpopulations and included a wide arrayof endeavors from sports programsto labor activism. Officially endorsedby the Archdiocese of San Francisco,Andriano became the public face ofCatholic Action among the city’s ItalianCatholics. Catholic Action’s popularitynotwithstanding, some of its social philosophyand organizational elementsresembled the corporatist movementsof Europe, especially those in Spainand Italy.As the relationship between the UnitedStates and Italy deteriorated in the1930s, San Francisco’s Catholic Actionorganization and Andriano’s activitiescame under suspicion as pro-Mussoliniand a potential source of domestic subversion.These allegations were leveledby the city’s active communist organizationand assorted anticlerical figures,who had long distrusted and attackedthe Catholic Church. Trumpeted in thelocal press, the accusations came to theattention of security-conscious localpoliticians and even the FBI.In the end, the indictments againstAndriano took on a life of their own.His friends, including ArchbishopJohn Joseph Mitty, struggled in vain toassure skeptical federal authorities thatthe devout lawyer posed no risk to SanFrancisco. They fought efforts to havehim relocated pursuant to a generalorder from the federal governmentthat Italian “enemy aliens” be bannedfrom coastal cities. This fight, however,proved futile, in part because no lessthan J. Edgar Hoover believed Andrianowas disloyal. Communists andanticlericals crowed over their triumphas the respected attorney was cast outof the city he loved.Issel’s work points out the significanceof lay religious movements, whichengaged large numbers of averagecommunicants in common cause, andhighlights the relationship betweenfaith and ethnicity that was part of SanFrancisco’s social fabric. It also detailsthe impact of religion on California’smodern urban life. The description ofthe internal battles among San Francisco’sItalians provides an interestingcase study of how the political andsocial battles that had raged in Italy forseveral generations took root on Americansoil. Issel has added another installmentto the sad wartime hysteria thatsent thousands of innocent and loyalCalifornians into exile for what wouldtoday be termed “racial profiling.”9

e v i e w sNot Fit for OurSociety: Immigrationand Nativism inAmericaBy Peter Schrag (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2010,320 pp., $26.95 cloth)Reviewed by Richard Delgado, Professorof Law, Seattle University, and authorof The Rodrigo ChroniclesWho is fit for life in the UnitedStates? Judging from this volume’s taleof racist quotas, harsh local laws, scathingmedia treatment, segregation, andoutright violence, the answer wouldseem to be—aside from light-skinnedNorthern Europeans—very few.Why, then, did we open the door at all,with bracero programs and other shortlivedrelaxations of the nativism thathas marked most of our history? Theauthor’s answer is that much as wedespised the newcomers, we neverthelessneeded their labor. From the Chinese,who constructed our railroads,helped us mine gold, or laundered ourclothing, to the Mexicans and Guatemalans,who harvested our crops,the United States selectively admittedimmigrant groups, then slammed thedoor shut when they outlived theirusefulness. Peter Schrag traces this“ambivalence”—despising the groupsbut needing their contributions—through three centuries of immigrationpolicy, ending in the present.The book’s strength lies in the similaritiesit reveals in the arguments thatsociety deployed against each group,especially when it was starting to concludethey had overstayed their welcome.It also exposes how similar currentanti-immigrant rhetoric (Mexicansare dirty, immoral, genetically unfitwelfare moochers, and uninterested inlearning English) and behavior (immigrationroundups, racist ordinances)are to ones we trained on variousgroups in former times.Despite the book’s good writing andoriginal sources, it is weak when itcomes to a remedy. Here, Schrag displaysthe same ambivalence he is atpains to show in society at large. Hedoes not believe the United Statesowes the groups against whom it hasdemonstrably discriminated affirmativeaction in hiring or university admissions,or that we should open ourborders wider to compensate for earlierexclusion. Readers who wade throughSchrag’s shocking account of rude,racist treatment and whose impulse isthat surely we, as a society, ought to dosomething to compensate for it, willcome away disappointed.California History • volume 88 number 1 2010

d o n o r sThe California Historical Society is deeply gratefulto the following individuals, corporations, foundations,and government and business organizationsfor their contributions.INDIVIDUALS$50,000 and aboveAnonymousThe Estate of J. Lowell Groves, San FranciscoThe Estate of Mary K. Ryan, San Francisco$10,000 to $49,999Mr. & Mrs. Reid W. Dennis, WoodsideThe Estate of Mr. Louis H. Heilbron,San FranciscoThe Estate of Mr. Arthur Mejia, San FranciscoMs. Jeanne S. Overstreet, Bennington, VT$5,000 to $ 9,999Mr. Sandy & Mrs. Linda Alderson,Rancho Santa FeMr. & Mrs. R. Thomas Decker, Los AngelesMr. Robert & Mrs. Kaye Hiatt, Mill ValleyDrs. Maribelle & Stephen Leavitt,San FranciscoMr. Bill Leonard, SacramentoMr. & Mrs. Greg Martin, RutherfordMr. Robert A. McNeely, San DiegoMrs. Susan L. & Mr. John L. 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Mitchell, NapaMr. Lawrence E. Moehrke, San RafaelMr. Mark A. Moore, BurlingameMr. Tim Muller, San FranciscoMr. Thomas R. Owens, San FranciscoDr. Edith & Mr. George Piness, Mill ValleyMrs. Cristina Rose, Los AngelesMr. Adolph Rosekrans, Redwood CityMr. H. Russell Smith, PasadenaMr. & Mrs. Steven L. Swig, San FranciscoJohn & Andrea Van de Kamp, PasadenaMr. A.W.B. Vincent, Monte Carlo, MonacoStein & Lenore Weissenberger, Mountain ViewDavid & Rene Whitehead, SebastopolMr. & Mrs. Richard C. Wulliger,Pacific PalisadesMr. & Mrs. Lee Zeigler, San Francisco$500 to $999AnonymousMr. Ted Balestreri, MontereyMr. & Mrs. Andrew E. Bogen, Santa MonicaJanet F. Bollinger, SacramentoMs. Lynn Bonfield, San FranciscoMr. John E. Brown, RiversideMs. Joanne E. Bruggemann, Redwood CityMr. Ernest A. Bryant III, Santa BarbaraMrs. Dewitt K. Burnham, San FranciscoAudrey Edna Butcher, SunnyvaleMr. Michael Carson & Dr. Ronald Steigerwalt,Palm SpringsDr. & Mrs. Melvin D. 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d o n o r sMrs. Jean Chickering, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. Herman Christensen Jr., AthertonMs. Marie G. Clyde, San FranciscoAlan & Janet Coleman, GreenbraeMr. John C. Colver, Belvedere-TiburonMr. Darrell Corti, SacramentoMs. Anne Crawford, Half Moon BayMr. & Mrs. Gerald B. Cullinane, OaklandMs. Karen D’Amato, San CarlosMr. Walter Danielsen, LivermoreMr. & Mrs. William Davidow, WoodsideMr. Lloyd De Llamas, CovinaT. R. Delebo M.D., SausalitoMr. & Mrs. R. Dick, HealdsburgMr. Gilmore F. Diekmann, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. William G. Doolittle,Carmel By The SeaMr. Robert M. Ebiner, West CovinaMr. & Mrs. Robert F. Erburu, West HollywoodJacqueline & Christian Erdman, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. John Fisher, San FranciscoMs. Myra Forsythe, San FranciscoHelene & Randall Frakes, San FranciscoMr. Mark Franich, Los AltosDeborah Franklin, San FranciscoMiss Muriel T. French, San FranciscoMr. Perry Franklin Fry, San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. Robert D. Funk, Santa BarbaraMr. Michael S. 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Juan & Joanne Lara, PasadenaMs. Jamila Mei Chun Leung & Mr. Siew WengLee, BerkeleyMr. Leandro Lewis, HealdsburgMrs. Maryon Davies Lewis, San FranciscoJerri Lightfoot, FremontMr. & Mrs. John G. Lilienthal, San FranciscoMrs. Robert Livermore, DanvilleFrancis R. Mahony III, June LakeDr. & Mrs. William Margaretten, BurlingameMr. & Mrs. Thomas H. May, OakvilleMr. & Mrs. Dean Mayberry, Palo AltoMrs. David Jamison McDaniel, San FranciscoMr. David McEwen, Newport BeachMr. Robert McIntyre, RiversideMr. James Miller, San FranciscoAndrew T. Nadell, M.D., San FranciscoMr. & Mrs. J. E. C. Nielsen, Mill ValleyMs. Joanne Nissen, SoledadMr. Stanley Norsworthy, FresnoMs. Mary Ann Notz, BurlingameBarbara O’Brien, Daly CityMr. & Mrs. Richard C. Otter,Belvedere-TiburonMs. Mary J. Parrish, San FranciscoMr. Warren Perry, San FranciscoJames Brice & Carole Peterson, PleasantonDr. & Mrs. John O. Pohlmann, Seal BeachMr. Herbert C. Puffer, FolsomMs. Carolyn Rees, Caldwell, IDMr. & Mrs. Richard W. 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Young, Los AngelesCORPORATE, FOUNDATION& GOVERNMENT SUPPORT$200,000 and aboveCouncil on Library & Information Resources,Washington D.C. / The Andrew MellonFoundation, New York$50,000 to $199,000San Francisco Foundation, San FranciscoUnion Bank of California, San Francisco$10,000 to $49,999Barkley Fund, Corona Del MarGrants for the Arts, San FranciscoInstitutional Venture Partners, Menlo ParkIntel Community Grant Program,Hillsborough$1,000 to $9,999California State Library (Library Services &Technology Act, Local History DigitalResources Program) SacramentoDodge & Cox, San FranciscoGeorge W. Davis Foundation, BelvedereInstitute of Museum & Library Services,Connecting to Collections Grant,Washington, D.C.John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJLouise M. Davies Foundation, San FranciscoMoore Dry Dock Foundation, San FranciscoNational Endowment for the Humanities,Preservation Assistance Grant,Washington, D.C.Sacramento Trust for Hist. Preservation,SacramentoS. D. 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In Kind DonationsSandy Alderson, San DiegoKirk Amyx, San FranciscoAmyx Photography, San FranciscoAnchor Brewing Company, San FranciscoAperitifs Bar Management, Santa RosaBelfor Property Restoration, HaywardMr. David Burkhart, San BrunoJohn Burton, Santa RosaH. Joseph Ehrmann, San FranciscoElixir Cocktail Catering, San FranciscoElixir Saloon, San FranciscoEtherington Conservation Services, The HFGroup, Walla Walla, WAKatzgraphics, San FranciscoKorbel, SonomaLoyola Marymount University, Los AngelesJohn & Sue Molinari, San FranciscoSquare One Organic Spirits, San FranciscoUnion Bank of California, San FranciscoUnited States Bartenders Guild, San Franciscodonors to thecollectionAmerican Theater CompanyAnonymousRichard Blair & Kathleen GoodwinCalifornia Department of TransportationCircle H Cowgirl PressFrances DinkelspielOlivier Le DourAdam S. EterovichCharles FracchiaL. T. GirdlerGail Terry GrimesF. William (Bill) GuerrinSusan HanksMinna (Mrs. Gordon) HewesJohn Hiskes, Red Fox PressAnne M. HomanAlastair JohnstonGrace JonesErika LeeCynthia LovewellMalcolm LublinerMichael McConeFielding M. McGehee IIIKenneth V. McGinityF.W. Olin Library, Mills CollegeJohn V. MooreRebecca Moore & Fielding M. McGehee IIISteve PeaseDiane (Frank V.) PiraroRand Richards, Heritage House PublishersDr. Francis J. RigneyAdolph RosekransSocietá Italiana di Mutua BenficenzaJ. Curtiss TaylorKathryn TaylorF. Alan TimmonsRichard P. Towne, Jr.Tuolumne County Historical SocietyUnion Bank, N.A.U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, DenverDavid WardRikke WettendorffDonald WhittonJudy YungO F F I C E R SJan Berckefeldt, Lafayette, PresidentThomas Decker, Los Angeles, Vice PresidentMark A. Moore, Burlingame, TreasurerTHOMAS R. OWENS, San Francisco, SecretaryB O A R D O F T R U S T E E sSandy Alderson, San DiegoJOHN BROWN, RiversideRobert Chattel, Sherman OaksArthur Gilbert, Pacific PalisadesLarry Gotlieb, Sherman OaksFred Hamber, San FranciscoRobert Hiatt, Mill ValleyAustin Hills, San FranciscoGary Kurutz, SacramentoBill Leonard, SacramentoSTEPHEN LeSIEUR, San FranciscoTom McLaughlin, San FranciscoCarlotta Mellon, RiversideSue Molinari, San Franciscochristina rose, Los AngelesRichard Wulliger, Pacific PalisadesBLANCA ZARAZúA, SalinasHelen Zukin, Los AngelesC A L I F O R N I A H I S T O R I C A LF O U N D A T I O N B O A R DDEWITT F. BOWMAN, Mill Valley, PresidentBill McCreery, Hillsboroughrobert a. McNeely, San DiegoPETER MUSTO, San FranciscoEDITH L. PINESS, Mill ValleyDAVID BARRY WHITEHEAD, San Franciscop r e s i d e n t s e M E R I T IMARIBELLE LEAVITT, San FranciscoROBERT A. McNEELY, San DiegoEdith L. Piness, Mill ValleyStephen L. Taber, San FranciscoJOHN K. VAN DE KAMP, Los Angelese x e c u t i v e d i r e c t o r e m e r i t u sMICHAEL McCONE, San Franciscos p e c i a l a d v i s o rHUELL HOWSER, Los Angeleson the back coverThis side of an 1880 advertisement for the Pacific Coast Trunk Store in San Francisco isone piece of a broad array of ephemera that comprise CHS’s California Business EphemeraCollection, 1849–2000. Open for research at the North Baker Research Library, our ephemeracollections are also significantly featured in the California Ephemera Project (see pages 3–7;www.californiaephemeraproject.org).f e l l o w sWilliam N. Davis, Jr., SacramentoRichard H. Dillon, Mill ValleyCharles A. Fracchia, San FranciscoRobert V. Hine, IrvineGloria Ricci Lothrop, PasadenaJames R. Mills, CoronadoDoyce B. Nunis, Jr., Los AngelesJames Jabus Rawls, SonomaAndrew Rolle, San MarinoEarl F. Schmidt, Jr., Palo AltoKevin Starr, San FranciscoFrancis J. Weber, Mission HillsCharles Wollenberg, BerkeleyCalifornia Historical Society

s p o t l i g h tIs that fog floating around the docksof the Embarcadero? In the soft-focuspictorialism favored by artisticallyinclinedphotographers in the earlydecades of the twentieth century, it canbe hard to tell the atmosphere from theatmospherics.San Francisco photographer Alice Burrmade this wonderfully rich and mysteriousbromoil print with soft edgesbut a strong design. Those black docksburst through the frame like a clarionof things to come. A student of ClarenceWhite, Burr anticipated the movementtoward bold modernism amongCalifornia photographers in the yearssoon after she made this image.Another California woman leads theway.Jonathan SpauldingPhotographerAlice BurrLocationSan FranciscoA View from Telegraph HillBromoil print, ca. 1910–1925Gift of Jeanne S. OverstreetCalifornia Historical Society,MSP 717; CHS2010.423.tifCalifornia History • volume 88 number 1 2010

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