Introduction

First, a few words of explanation and, perhaps, expiation.

1) I’m trying to use MacJournal to update this blog. This is new for me, so let’s hope it uploads as smoothly and easily as it is supposed to upload. The software is rather nice and full-featured for a journaling/blogging application. Apparently I can really easily insert and upload video and audio! Luckily for you I have no need to do that for a written dissertation, so you won’t have to actually look at my face in low-res video-cam glory or listen to my dulcet tones (aside: I have never used the word dulcet except as an adjective for “tones”). But who knows, maybe I’ll read one section aloud for you.

2) Teaching is over for the summer for me. I’ll be turning in grades on Tuesday, and turning my full attention to this chapter. As Christoph once told me to do, I’ll be writing with both hands. My general plan is to go through the sucker methodically and deliberately, posting up what is ready when it’s ready. Ideally I’ll be able to start at the beginning and move on through til the end, but realistically I anticipate a couple of skips and jumps in the middle over the two places that I don’t know what to do with just yet. If I keep to my schedule, this project will conclude round about the beginning of September. It would be earlier, but I’ll lose a week on August 23rd to the W131 “boot-camp” seminar week. Forty-something first-time teachers for the five ADs and Christine to train and mentor, complete with all-day meetings for 5 days!

3) So, look for something every few days, at least for the next two weeks--well, barring another gift from the summer that has so far blessed me with multiple reasons to look forward to 2011 (and, honestly, multiple reasons to look back fondly on 2010, but right now my knee hurts, so it’s on to 2011!!). Oh, the latest update on my Grade 3 MCL and Grade 2 PCL tears is that my knee does not need surgery just now--unless it stays as loose as it is or gets worse, which I can hardly see how that would happen. Without my brace on, I feel like I’m walking on a stilt with my right leg. For now, I am working on getting my range of motion back and the swelling down, and next month I can start doing some strengthening exercises. Until then, I am under medical orders to be lazy--no basketball, no soccer, no running, no lower-body weight lifting. I can ride the exercise bike, but even then I can’t use any resistance and I’m not supposed to stay on it for very long.

Ok, back to the post. What follows is the introduction to the chapter. Since it is the introduction, if it needs any introduction, then I’ve not done my job very well. I should come up with a clever title...

Introduction.

        Out on the “high prairie of eastern Wyoming,” on September 27th of 1890, eighteen year-old Waldo Emerson, traveling for the first time away from his home in Missouri, was shot to death in an empty freight-train car (O’Connor 258). For reasons that have and will continue to remain unclear, a fifteen year-old boy, who called himself “Kansas Charley,” placed a thirty-two caliber nickel-plated revolver up to Waldo’s temple and killed him while he slept. Then, “Kansas” Charley, who had never been to Kansas, having grown up in New York City, and whose real name was Charles Miller, shot Waldo’s traveling companion, Ross Fishbaugh. The two older boys bled from bullet wounds in each of their temples where moments earlier they dozed peacefully to the rocking of the train. “Kansas Charley” then stowed his $1.25 nickel-plated revolver under the pile of straw serving as Waldo’s pillow, and while Fishbaugh “writhed and foamed at the mouth,” Kansas Charley rifled through the older boys’ pockets and took their money. Then, Kansas Charley went back to sleep, waking only two hours later when the train stopped in Hillsdale, Wyoming. Charley then walked across town, begged lunch from a local farmer, and hopped on another train before the bodies of the two older boys could be found. 18 days and nearly 600 miles later, on October 15th, Charley Miller and his older brother Fred Miller told the story of what the Cheyenne Daily Leader had already called “the most dastardly crime ever committed in the west” to another newspaper editor, Albert Stewart, of the weekly paper the Republic in Manhattan, Kansas (261). A long way from the Manhattan, the “island of many hills,” of his childhood, Charley Miller came to the end of his travels in a town with a familiar name to the boy from New York City.

        Nearly eight and a half years earlier, on April 27th of 1882, another Waldo Emerson (no one ever called him Ralph) passed away a month shy of his 79th birthday. Death came unexpectedly but less suddenly to the older Waldo, who caught cold after a soft rain fell on his evening walk down the lanes of Concord, Massachusetts on April 25th. Waldo’s cold turned into pneumonia, and he passed away, also in his sleep, two days later. What follows in these pages is in the story of how the lifes and deaths of these two Waldo Emersons are connected. This story is bound up with changing American understandings of family, friendship, and individuality, but as we come to understand the links between these two Waldos, I hope that we might also gain some perspective on those changing understandings and the tragic circumstances that led young Charley Miller to the same train car as the younger Waldo Emerson.

        An obvious connection between these two Waldo Emersons is, of course, their names. While it is tempting to argue that this simple confluence does not reveal much, I think it rather important to admit the cultural importance of the elder Waldo Emerson even in the post-bellum United States. The younger Waldo, born in 1872 in the young midwestern state of Missouri, had little in common with the “sage of Concord.” His father was a factory foreman who had paid for Waldo’s travel to Denver, where he and his companion were hoping to find work (260). But for all of their differences, the fact that that they shared a name shows the national reach of the older Emerson’s legacy in the now-not-so-young republic. The younger Waldo’s father, a “relatively well-educated” industrialist on the midwestern prairie, seems to have been living out one version of the ideal of the rugged individual in the West (260). His decision to name his son “Waldo” must have been a conscious choice.

        But it is through Charley Miller that the two are also connected. “Kansas” Charley had only been living in the New York Orphan Asylum for three years when the older Ralph Waldo Emerson passed away, but he was uniquely a part of Emerson’s legacy because of his contact--through another confluence of names--with another man named “Charles:” Charles Loring Brace. Brace was leader of the foremost charity in what we have come to call the child saving movement: the Chidren’s Aid Society of New York City (CAS). The CAS began operation in 1853, and was best known for its series of schools and lodging houses (of which the Newsboys Lodging House is most famous) and for popularizing the orphan trains, which ideally took orphan, abandoned, and often “found” children from New York City and “emigrated” them to families in the country. Charles Loring Brace, one of the elder Emerson’s correspondents and acquaintances, tried to bring Emersonian democratic friendship and specifically Emerson’s cherished ideal of self-reliance to bear on child poverty in New York City. It is this effort to apply Emersonian democratic friendship that primarily connects our two Waldos. Without Brace, Charley Miller would never have been in Wyoming; six years after the older Emerson’s death, Charley Miller left the New York City in one of the Children’s Aid Society’s “orphan trains,” heading west for work and a new family.

        We will return to what happened to Charley Miller both in New York City and once he arrived at his new home in Minnesota. His experiences will illuminate the difficulties faced by Brace in adapting and implementing Emersonian democratic friendship. Those difficulties lay at the intersection of two very American values and their changing natures in the nineteenth century: the self-reliant individual and the sacred unit of the family. The questions before us are, first, how Emersonian democratic friendship negotiated the differences between those two values within the particular context of social work in post-bellum New York City, and, second, what were the results of a specific attempt to put into practice Emersonian democratic friendship?

        Charley Miller was on the train with Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh in part because of Emersonian democratic friendship. The double murder of of those two young men was a tragedy. It was the work of a troubled young man, who was executed himself on April 22, 1892. But this chapter is not a murder mystery. It is an investigation into the swirling vortex of discourses surrounding Charley Miller and how one man, Charles Loring Brace, tried to control and contain the explosive potential of those discourses by recourse to Emersonian democratic friendship and its key principle of self-reliance. Ultimately, Brace’s efforts may have failed as much as they succeeded, but they were a part of a new era in America’s understanding of family and individuality, an era that challenged the “naturalness” affect and intimacy as the basis for relationships, even a relationship as natural as that between parent and child. Looking at how the CAS and Brace saw self-reliance figuring in their work with poor children in New York City will help us understand much about the changing attitudes about family, childhood, and individuality in the post-bellum nation.