Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher

Here I Stand

Here I Stand

The Life and Legacy of John Beecher

ANGELA J. SMITH

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Baskerville

Cover image: John Beecher, c. 1971; courtesy of Barbara Beecher, Personal Collection of Barbara Beecher

Cover design: David Nees

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Angela J. (Angela Joan), author.

Title: Here I stand : the life and legacy of John Beecher / Angela J. Smith.

Other titles: Modern South.

Description: Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, [2017] | Series: The modern South | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017004258| ISBN 9780817319540 (cloth) | ISBN 9780817391379 (e book)

Subjects: LCSH: Beecher, John, 1904–1980. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Social reformers—United States—Biography. | Civil rights workers—United States—Biography.

Classification: LCC PS3503.E233 Z86 2017 | DDC 811/.54 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004258

For Barbara

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

I. GENERATIONS PLAYING THEIR PART

1. The Beecher Family

2. Shaping Forces

II. BECOMING A TWENTIETH-CENTURY BEECHER, 1904–1928

3. The Education of John Beecher

4. Becoming a Poet

III. PROFESSIONAL LIFE, 1928–1955

5. Experimental College and Sociology Work

6. Working the New Deal

7. The War and Its Aftermath

8. The Loyalty Oath

IV. POETRY AND LEGACY, 1955–1980

9. A Small Press of Their Own

10. Beecher and the Civil Rights Movement

11. The Final Years

Epilogue

Appendix 1. Beecher Family Tree

Appendix 2. John Beecher’s Published Work

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. Barbara Beecher’s wedding rings

2. Family photo of Lyman Beecher and his children by Brady Studios, c. 1859

3. Frederick Beecher, John Beecher’s grandfather

4. Leonard T. Beecher

5. Isabel G. Beecher (publicity shot for the Chautauqua circuit)

6. Isabel G. Beecher after receiving an honorary degree from Northwestern University in 1912

7. Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad furnaces, Ensley, Alabama, c. 1910

8. Leonard and John Beecher in Montclair, New Jersey, c. 1906

9. Isabel G. and John Beecher, c. 1906

10. The young John Beecher

11. John Beecher in the summer of 1932

12. John Beecher in 1938

13. Farm Security Administration (FSA) settlement sites around Birmingham

14. John Beecher in his merchant mariner uniform during World War II

15. John Beecher in 1950 talking to a San Francisco crowd about the California loyalty oath

16. John Beecher and his youngest son, Tom, at the ranch in Sebastopol, California

17. John and Barbara Beecher working on their press in the late 1950s

18. Leonard T. Beecher

19. Barbara and John Beecher, New Orleans, 1964

20. John Beecher, San Francisco, 1978

Preface

Few surnames resonate in American history more than Beecher. The family’s abolitionist ministers, educators, and writers are central characters in the historical narrative of the United States. The Beechers’ influence was greatest in the nineteenth century, but the family story continued—albeit with less public attention—with a descendant who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the early twentieth century. John Beecher (1904–1980) never had the public prominence of his famous ancestors, but as a poet, professor, sociologist, New Deal administrator, journalist, and civil rights activist, he spent his life fighting for the voiceless and oppressed with a distinct moral sensibility that reflects his self-identification as the twentieth-century torchbearer for the famous family. In this book, I argue that John Beecher is a twentieth-century abolitionist who carries his forebears’ moral sensibilities into a new era. While he had many vocations in his lifetime, he always considered himself foremost a poet and a teacher. Those were his passions, but the former never brought him the attention he felt his work deserved and the latter was blocked for many years because of his unwavering belief that it was his duty to fight for a democracy that would provide justice and equality to all people.¹

Some critics have compared elements of Beecher’s poetry to the work of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, but his writing never gained a broad audience or critical acclaim. His most significant legacy is his documentation of pivotal movements in twentieth-century America. Beecher left a detailed record of his life and times—the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the civil rights movement—in his dozen books and extensive letters, articles, unpublished poetry and prose, and audio interviews.² In 1924, he wrote Big Boy, the first of his published poems. It came out of his experience working beside black laborers in Birmingham’s grimy steel mills, a job he wanted even though his father’s status as a U.S. Steel executive could have helped secure a comfortable office job. Later, during his work as a sociologist, he wrote a notable article for the journal Social Forces that delved into a 1932 sharecropper revolt in central Alabama; his 1940 book-length poem, In Egypt Land, explored the hardship, inequity, and institutionalized brutality the sharecroppers faced in the segregated South in the 1930s. In 1937, as a manager in homestead and relief programs of the Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA), he fought to help his clients recover their losses—Alabama coal miners cheated by company stores, jobless North Carolina shipping workers whose benefits were lost because of fraud and cronyism, and migrant pickers who lived in squalor while harvesting sugarcane and vegetable fields for rich growers from Florida to Louisiana. A nonfiction work, All Brave Sailors, was inspired by his 1943–1945 tour of duty on the SS Booker T. Washington, the first Merchant Marine Liberty Ship to sail under the command by a black captain and to have racially integrated personnel, both officers and crew. In 1948, Beecher received an appointment to teach sociology at San Francisco State College, but he was fired two years later when he refused to sign a state-based loyalty oath as the Red Scare took hold in universities across the nation. Beecher would spend the next thirty years fighting for his job and for his principles. In the 1960s, he worked as a journalist covering the civil rights movement in the South, reporting protests, prejudices, and small victories. This experience, coupled with observations during his early years in Birmingham, led him to write To Live and Die in Dixie, published in 1966; it was the book that brought him the greatest attention. The volume reverberates with the ongoing social injustices—particularly racial—that he raised his voice against for most of his life, the same issues that gave rise to his ancestral legacy of activism.

John Beecher was a great-great-nephew of abolitionists Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher and great-grandson of their older brother Edward Beecher, a Congregationalist minister and the family’s first abolitionist. The family’s crusading history came into the twentieth century by way of John Beecher. He shared their belief in racial, social, and economic equality, and he held on to it in his wide-ranging vocations, many of them ending precipitately when he dug in heels on principle. It was Beecher’s worldview, an unwillingness to compromise his beliefs and a willingness to make personal sacrifices regardless of the cost, that marks him as an abolitionist. As Harvard University professor Daniel Carpenter explains in The Abolitionist Imagination, The abolitionist then and now requires moral clarity in the form of a sharp division between good and evil in which the viewer and reader can tell the two apart. Abolitionism also requires a refusal to settle for half-measures; it paints these compromises themselves as part of the problem, as resting firmly on one side of the binary divide.³ These characteristics emanated from Beecher as he pushed through his life with a certainty of purpose and moral conviction. From his refusal to lie about hazing while a cadet at Virginia Military Academy in 1920 to his refusal to sign the California loyalty oath thirty years later, John Beecher followed his moral compass throughout his life regardless of the personal cost to him or his family.⁴

This book, Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher, is a chronicle of his life. It draws on the records he left behind to reconstruct his path through the twentieth century. During his lifetime he saved voluminous letters, reports, poetry, and prose, which were deposited at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin after his death. This collection, along with the personal papers of his widow, Barbara Beecher, provides evidence of his words and deeds. Historians are often critical of biographies and with good reason. A biographical study can be myopic and often fails to offer larger insights into history beyond a single case study. However, this biography contextualizes each segment of Beecher’s life into a larger historical framework and examines the ways that he made a notable impact on twentieth-century America. It will also provide a window into the identity Beecher constructed for himself as an extension of his famous ancestors.⁵

Beecher might, at first glance, seem an unlikely entrant into the United States’ radical social activist movements. Born into economic privilege, his educated and affluent parents encouraged their only child’s individuality and creativity and instilled in him a love for reading and learning. He entered college at fourteen, attending Virginia Military Institute and later Cornell, his father’s alma mater, to study mechanical engineering, but he soon found that literature was far more interesting to him. In an English class, William Strunk, the author of the classic Elements of Style, recognized Beecher’s talent and encouraged him to spend more time writing, which he would do for the next five decades. In addition to Strunk’s response, over the next twenty years Beecher received advice and encouragement from Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams as well as editors at several publications that were interested in his work; however, he was rarely willing to make use of their suggestions in his writing. When he believed he was right, in a line of poetry or a social action, he was unwavering in his responses.

The price may have been the greatest at San Francisco State College with the loss Beecher experienced because of his stand against the Levering Act—the state loyalty oath requirement that was later ruled unconstitutional. He refused to sign it in 1950 and was fired. In the years following his dismissal from the faculty, Beecher became a chicken farmer and then a small press operator and freelance journalist, and, after a decade out of academia, finally a teacher again, if only on short-term contracts or as a poet-in-residence at several different universities. The injustice that he felt was done to him because of his stand against the Levering Act haunted him for the rest of his life. He instituted several legal actions that were unfinished when he died.

After John Beecher’s death in San Francisco in 1980, his widow, Barbara, an artist, returned to the mountains of North Carolina where the two had rented property a few years earlier. She had a modest house built, designed with nearly a third of the main floor devoted to a light-filled studio space. However, she has painted very little in the last three decades. Much of a long wall is the backdrop for filing cabinets. In the early 1980s she contracted with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas to become the repository for his papers. She organized and cataloged them methodically for nearly ten years after his death, ultimately logging correspondence, poetry, manuscripts, photos, and family artifacts from three generations as well as legal documents from the Levering Act lawsuit and many newspaper and magazine articles by and about John Beecher. The Ransom Center now has more than 120 boxes in the John Beecher Collection. For thirty-six years after her husband’s death, she dutifully and enthusiastically carried on correspondence with acquaintances from their twenty-five years of marriage as well as people who have only recently learned of the poet’s work. Her commitment to treasure and respect his life’s work and make it available to me and other scholars has ensured that he is not forgotten.

The file drawers are empty now. In recent years, she had someone come in to help her with the final batches of material that she has collected since the late 1980s. In the summer of 2015, six final large boxes filled with a few thousand pages were shipped to the Ransom Center. Barbara Beecher, who died at the age of 91 on December 22, 2016, was the torchbearer for her husband’s legacy. In the years after his death, Barbara wore a gold chain around her neck with three gold wedding bands—her own from her marriage in 1955; John Beecher’s mother’s from his parents’ marriage in 1898; and his grandmother Sarah Beecher’s from her marriage in 1859. These rings symbolized her commitment to preserving the Beecher family legacy and John Beecher’s place in it.

Acknowledgments

This project was born in the summer of 2005 when I met Barbara Beecher (1925–2016), John Beecher’s widow. During the decades since his death, Barbara’s mission was to ensure her husband’s legacy. Because of her devotion and determination, historians have access to detailed records of John’s life and work. It is only because of Barbara’s tirelessness and willingness to share personal stories, documents, and photos with me that my research for this book has been possible. Here I Stand is dedicated to Barbara, who championed John Beecher’s work from the time she married him in 1955 until 2016, when she died at the age of ninety-one.

No monograph reaches the finish line without immense support, and I am grateful to the many people who have helped me along the way. I am thankful that Martha Huie (1932–2014) knew this was an important story to tell. She was the conduit for my relationship with Barbara Beecher. There are many scholars who have mentored and guided me in my academic life and helped make this book possible. Pippa Holloway is one of my heroes both academically and personally. Pippa, thank you for your guidance and helping me become a better scholar. Big thank yous also go to Christopher Diller, Susan Myers-Shirk, Brendon Martin, Van West, Amy Sayward, Rebecca Conard, and Tara White. I am also thankful for the support of my colleagues in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at North Dakota State University, where I have taught since January 2012. History scholarship is dependent on primary source material that typically resides in a library or archive. John Beecher’s papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and I would like to thank their staff and particularly Molly Schwartzburg who was instrumental in arranging access to John Beecher’s records in 2010.

Finally, I am deeply indebted to my family for their love and support on this long and sometimes grueling path. My brother, Randy Smith, is my rock and my biggest cheerleader. My nephew, Gray Smith, never fails to make me laugh. My partner, Linda Quigley, has selflessly supported me in word and deed. She is a gifted editor and a loving companion. Accomplishing this goal would have been impossible without her. I also want to acknowledge the role that my mother, Margaret Gail Bald Smith (1941–1990), had in my life. She believed in me and gave me unconditional love, which is the foundation for my truly fortunate life. Thank you, mama.

I

GENERATIONS PLAYING THEIR PART

With firm and regular step they wend—they never stop,

Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions;

One generation playing its part, and passing on;

Another generation playing its part, and passing on in its turn,

With faces turn’d sideways or backward towards me, to listen,

With eyes retrospective towards me.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

1

The Beecher Family

This country is inhabited by saints, sinners and Beechers.

—Dr. Leonard Bacon, c.1863

In November 1907, three-year-old John Henry Newman Beecher arrived in Birmingham, Alabama. The move to this distant southern outpost, often called the Magic City, allowed his father to keep his job as a steel executive in the midst of that year’s financial panic. Beecher and his parents—he was an only child—left their suburban New York mansion, boarded a private Pullman car, and, after a one-thousand-mile journey, arrived in a grimy train station that the booming industrial city had already outgrown. The social, racial, and religious divides soon became clear to the boy, first on the playground where it was locally unacceptable for his white, German nanny to associate with the other children’s black nannies; and then in public schools, in the family’s upscale neighborhood, and around the furnaces of Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel and his father’s employer. His perspective on these divides was influenced by his identity as a Beecher descendant, the great-grandson of minister, educator, and abolitionist Edward Beecher and the great-great-nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. John’s early education about the Beecher family legacy came through his mother, Isabel, and his grandmother Sarah, both of whom were Beechers by marriage but held the family name in high regard.¹

The nineteenth-century Beecher family is an important lens through which to view John Beecher’s work as a poet, professor, social worker, New Deal administrator, journalist, and civil rights activist. The Beechers influenced American religious and social consciousness through most of the nineteenth century. In the next century, John drew from them an awareness of social injustice that he carried throughout his life. His ancestors fought against slavery because the institution conflicted with their understanding of a just and loving God. They believed that all people are God’s children, whatever their race. John Beecher’s beliefs were quite similar, although his were not anchored in religion. He held that all men are equal in the strictest sense, both by law and social circumstance, and he fought unapologetically with a passion reminiscent of his famous ancestors. He exhibited this consciousness in his vocational choices, his personal and public stands, and his poetry, news reporting, and speeches, often acknowledging his heritage and the role his ancestors played in his identity.

Lyman Beecher, John Beecher’s Great-Great-Grandfather, and His Children

The role that the Beecher family played in the nineteenth century is well documented. Patriarch Lyman Beecher had thirteen children born between 1800 and 1828, eleven of whom lived to adulthood. His first wife, Roxana, was the mother of Catharine, William, Edward, Mary, Harriet, George, Harriet E., Henry Ward, and Charles. Roxana Foote Beecher died in 1816, and a year later Lyman Beecher married Harriet Porter, with whom he had four more children, Frederick, Isabella, Thomas, and James. After his second wife’s death in 1835, he married Lydia Beals Jackson. He died January 10, 1863, just ten days after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, a noteworthy fact because of the role his abolitionist family had played to bring the injustice of slavery into the conscience of the nation.²

Lyman Beecher and his children helped transform American Protestantism from a rigid Puritanism to a more personal and relational belief system. The New England Puritan tradition was instilled in him as he studied under Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University and grandson of theologian Jonathan Edwards, author of the classic sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. He began his ministry as a staunch Presbyterian and believer in the Puritan way of salvation and pushed his children to follow that path. His children, however, ultimately rejected the God of their father and the idea of innate depravity—the theological concept that humans are inherently evil—and, instead, their beliefs evolved to trust in a God of love, compassion, and redemption. The Beecher siblings arrived at this understanding of God after a lifetime of wrestling with theological issues and with each other. Over the course of his life, Lyman Beecher found himself influenced by his children’s view and shifted from a belief in a rigid and angry God to one that was stern but loving.³

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the most widely known of Lyman Beecher’s children, moved with her father to Cincinnati when he became president of Lane Theological Seminary in 1832. It was there that Stowe encountered slavery firsthand. Ohio prohibited slavery, but Kentucky, immediately across the Ohio River to the south, did not, so Cincinnati was a critical early stop on the Underground Railroad. Stowe maintained that she created her fictional characters after she interviewed fugitive slaves and former slaves as they fled north via the Underground Railroad.⁴ Notably, the book made an unforgettable impression on young John Beecher in the early twentieth century. His grandparents, Frederick and Sarah Hale Beecher, retired to Birmingham in 1910, when their only grand-child was six years old. He described how he felt after hearing his grandmother reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin aloud to him: My heart was greatly stirred and troubled by the picture of injustice which was unfolded in this book and which tallied with the things that I had seen around me. I was very sympathetic with the Negroes whom I knew. . . . I resolved that when I grew up, I too would become a liberator of the Negroes like my ancestors. So this resolve formed when I was very young.⁵ The novel, published in 1852, sold 1.5 million copies in its first year and became the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. Uncle Tom’s Cabin meaningfully shaped the perception of slavery in America, and some argue it was one of the contributing causes of the Civil War.⁶ Charles Edward Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son, described what Lincoln said when he met his mother in the fall of 1862: So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!⁷ One of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brothers, firebrand minister Henry Ward Beecher, was two years younger and her close confidant; he also carried the antislavery banner. He used his powerful rhetorical skills not only to deliver sermons from the pulpit of Plymouth Church of Brooklyn, but also to take advantage of broader public forums to give speeches against slavery and the Confederacy.

Edward Beecher, John Beecher’s Great-Grandfather

Even before Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Edward Beecher, her older brother and John Beecher’s great-grandfather, had already become involved in the abolitionist cause. He was valedictorian of the class of 1818 at Yale University. He then spent two years as headmaster of Hartford Grammar School before enrolling at Andover Theological Seminary. According to historian Marie Caskey, Edward Beecher had a mild and diplomatic temperament and, being the third oldest of Lyman Beecher’s children, became something of a second father to his younger siblings. He was considered the scholar of the family, and his father groomed him to be his primary successor in the ministry.⁸ In 1826, Edward Beecher was ordained as the pastor of the Congregational Park Street Church in Boston. His ministry at Park Street ran aground when some members of his congregation learned that he did not hold their views about baptism. His father encouraged him to remain silent about this theological questioning, but Edward Beecher was unwilling to set aside his strong feelings. In November of 1830, to distance himself from the strict orthodoxy of the Boston church, he left New England for the Midwest.⁹

Edward Beecher became the first president of Illinois College, founded in 1829 in Jacksonville, Illinois. He held the post for the first thirteen years of the institution’s existence. Compared to Boston, Jacksonville was an undeveloped frontier outpost, and when he arrived he moved into a log cabin with his wife, Isabella—not to be confused with his sister, suffragette Isabella Beecher Hooker. He faced challenges that arose out of the physical environment as well as local attitudes. The state legislature was decidedly rural and anti-intellectual, and for three years the body refused to give the college a charter.¹⁰ Edward Beecher spent fourteen years as president raising money for the struggling college. In that period, he and his wife had six of their eleven children, including John Beecher’s grandfather, Frederick William.¹¹

An intellectual theologian and minister, Edward Beecher did not blindly accept the dogma of his father. Instead, he studied his own beliefs to understand and use that knowledge to teach spiritual concepts more clearly in both the pulpit and the classroom. While president of Illinois College, he expressed his belief that all slaves should be emancipated immediately and he joined the Illinois Antislavery Society in 1837. Later that same year, he nearly died with Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist martyr, minister, and newspaper publisher. In an effort to destroy Lovejoy’s printing press, a proslavery mob ambushed the building in Alton, Illinois, that housed his antislavery newspaper, the Saint Louis Observer. The incident occurred just hours after Edward Beecher had left Lovejoy’s shop, and it left a formative impression on his life and politics. Soon afterward, he wrote about the experience in a book, Narrative of Riots of Alton, in Connection with the Death of Elijah P. Lovejoy. By the late 1840s, he was a champion for abolition and influenced many toward a different attitude about slavery.¹²

Charles Beecher’s biography of Edward Beecher explained his brother’s understanding of slavery as a theological issue: It may not be clear at first to the ordinary mind why slavery and theology should go hand in hand in national affairs. But if we reflect that theology is but another name for the politics of the universe, or the Kingdom of God, the problem becomes simple. . . . Old School theology enthrones a great slave-holder over the universe; New School enthrones a great Emancipator.¹³ This passage alludes to Edward Beecher’s belief that the temporal world is the kingdom of God. He urged Christians to accept a moral responsibility to be socially active in the here and now rather than to be passive churchgoers who looked only to the beyond. He urged people to see slaves as human beings and children of God and strongly advocated his belief that Christians had a moral obligation to work together to eliminate slavery.

Edward Beecher trusted in an intellectual, spiritual, and moral consistency in thought, word, and deed. This characteristic drove him to reexamine not only slavery but also baptism and original sin. Instead of accepting theological inconsistencies, he arrived at interpretations that he found to be congruent. For example, after his sister Catharine’s fiancé, Professor Alexander Metcalf Fisher, drowned in 1822 without a salvation experience, both Catharine and Edward Beecher struggled with