Amherst College Picks Emily Dickinson as New Sports Mascot

In Surprise Move, Amherst College Picks Emily Dickinson as New Sports Mascot
Edged Out Leading Contender: “Fighting Poets”

Image of Emily Dickinson from Amherst Colleges Archives and Special Collections

The long wait is over. Although the official announcement is not expected until sometime next week, sources inside the Amherst College administration revealed that, after months of controversy and speculation, they have chosen poet Emily Dickinson as their new sports mascot, replacing eighteenth-century British military leader Lord Jeffery Amherst, considered by many to be politically and morally unacceptable in this day and age. The move came as something of a surprise because, among the five finalists announced to the public, “Fighting Poets” was widely expected to get the nod. A few trustees, gathered for cocktails in the elegant and dimly lit bar of the Lord Jeffery Inn  (spoiler: yes, it’s ironic, but that name isn’t changing yet), late Friday night spoke on condition of anonymity about the process that had just concluded.


A Background of Controversy

The decision arose from the intersection of longstanding concerns and recent protests. For years, Native Americans and their allies have protested both the appropriation of American Indian culture and the related use of racist stereotypes as emblems of sports teams. American campuses have been roiled in conflict for several years over histories of white supremacy as well as continuing issues of institutional racism, but it was the recent activism associated with the Black Lives Matter movement that brought things to a head at Amherst.

The figure of Lord Jeffery Amherst, after whom the college’s sports team—the “Lord Jeffs”—was named, is no stranger to controversy on campus and beyond. In this case, the issue was not a symbol that appropriated  Native American culture, and instead, one associated with its destruction. As almost every Amherst resident and Amherst College student soon comes to learn, Amherst sought to exterminate Native Americans (“this execrable race”) during the “French and Indian War” through an early form of biological warfare by giving them smallpox-infested blankets.

For a long time his ubiquitous emblematic presence caused the administration no discomfort. The College commissioned elegant representations of him on “collectible” Wedgwood china.

Wedgwood plate on display in the library of Lord Jeffery Inn

a great way to start your day: old Amherst College dinnerware

And as late as the 1960s, a stylized depiction of Lord Jeff hunting down Indians was considered a light-hearted scene with which to greet the young WASP males of the “One Percent” as they began their day in the dining commons.

That dinnerware was in the meantime quietly removed, but the presence of Lord Jeff as sports mascot remained. When students of color and their allies rose up in protest in the fall of 2015, he became an obvious target.

Amherst Uprising protest poster, Frost Library, November 2015

A Symbol of Changing Times

The administration took the protests seriously, and President Caroline “Biddy” Martin  returned to campus from her travels to meet with protesters.  In January 2016, the College announced that it was giving Lord Jeff the heave-ho.

In late October, the College announced a public process to select a new mascot. By the end of the year, having received 2045 suggestions, the Mascot Committee chose 30 semifinalists. On Saint Patrick’s Day 2017, the College announced five finalists, to be winnowed through an online voting process ending March 31. They were:

• “Fighting Poets” (“celebrates multiple poets who have taught, studied or written poetry in association with the college or town of Amherst")
• “Mammoth” (a reference to fossils in the Beneski Museum)
• “Purple and White” (the College colors)
• “Valley Hawks” (“would reflect pride in the campus bird sanctuary and the college’s other connections to avian studies”)
• "Wolves" (“Known for their keen senses, intelligence and power, wolves collaborate and care for one another in packs, but they can also represent individuality and independence")

Trustee Coup? “Fighting Poets” or not “Fighting Poets”: that was the question

Some of the 2045 suggestions were easy to reject for one reason or another. For example, although “Hamsters” was considered clever by some because Hamster is an anagram of Amherst, it is also the nickname of students at nearby Hampshire College. “A’s” was unimaginative. And “Pride” was just plain mystifying. A younger left-leaning trustee provided particular insight into the deliberations. In his view, it was much like the Trump White House: characterized by chaos and infighting.

The trustees faced a dilemma. Four of the five finalist names were anything but inspiring. Until just recently, “Fighting Poets” therefore seemed to be headed for victory: it was clever, had a light touch, and referred to the college’s intellectual legacy: Emily Dickinson did not attend Amherst College--it was among the last of the Ivies to go coed (1975), and only after great resistance–but her family was associated with the founding and administration of the College, and Amherst owns the Dickinson Museum, which attracts thousands of visitors to the town. Robert Frost taught at Amherst College, and the library is named after him. And Richard Wilbur, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards, is an alumnus (Class of ’41).

Still, as trustees weighed the choice, doubts arose. To begin with, none was really familiar with poetry. A few thought they had encountered Frost or Dickinson in a freshman English class but could not recall much else. Some remembered having seen Richard Wilbur at a dinner and admiring his tweed jacket. “Too bad that Joyce Kilmer didn’t go to Amherst,” one elderly gentleman mused over a Bone Dry Sapphire Gin Martini. “I really liked that poem about trees. But we didn’t let girls in back then.” “Wilbur who?” asked another. “Wasn’t he the guy on that show with the talking horse?” he snorted, as he took a sip from his third Macallan 18 Year Old Sherry Oak 1992.

A more politically aware younger trustee raised doubts even about Robert Frost: the poet came from a racist white nationalist family and was named for Robert E. Lee. His official biographer described him as (in the words of a reviewer) “a nasty piece of work, cruel to his family, dismissive and contemptuous of other writers, a liar and a manipulator.” The same reviewer summarized a fictional portrait of the poet by Joyce Carol Oates as: “racist, sexist, loathsome, bullying.” “’Fighting poets’?!” the trustee asked with some exasperation. “For the Confederacy? Against women? It would be worse than ironic if, after the anti-racist protests on campus, we picked this  guy. Just what kind of message are we sending?!”

“Besides,” another worried, “we might just be opening ourselves up to ridicule. “What are our boys going to yell when these ‘Fighting Poets’ take to the gridiron? You know that Haverford College football cheer: ‘Kill, Quakers, Kill!’ Come on. It’s the worst of both worlds.”


Purple and White Privilege: we’re the trustees and can do pretty much what we want

A group of more traditionally minded trustees therefore tried to come up with an alternative. When asked how they could circumvent the choices developed through an open public process, one who works in corporate law replied that it was perfectly legitimate, in the spirit if not the letter of the charge: “After all, you folks in town did the same thing: you held a flag contest calling for designs based on the theme of ‘the book and the plow’—which, I’ll have you know, was the invention of an Amherst College professor—and then chose the book and three sheaves of grain—even though they’re not a plow and no one ever grew wheat in Amherst. Sauce for the gander, you know. Anyway: we’re the trustees and can do pretty much what we want.”

This trustee faction settled on the figure of John McCloy as the new mascot. He was an alumnus, a major figure in twentieth-century American law, finance, politics, and government, and served on the Warren Commission: an ideal representation of Amherst men in the service of the nation. And of course he was male. That plan fell apart when a young leftish trustee pointed out that, as Assistant Secretary of War, McCloy had played a decisive role in the notorious internment of Japanese Americans, had refused to believe stories of Nazi artocities, and then, as High Commissioner for postwar Germany, had commuted or reduced the sentences of many of the worst Nazis:

“So: you’re dumping a guy who wanted to poison Indians but didn’t actually manage to do so—and replacing him with a guy who put loyal Americans in prison—and let German war criminals out? Bright move.” Besides, he added with a wink, “Just think about the nicknames: If the Lord Jeffs are known as ‘the Jeffs,’ then the ‘John McCloys’ would be known as ‘the Johns.’ I. Don’t. Think. So. Look, if you guys aren’t going to take the need for social change seriously, why don’t you just be done with it and call the team “Purple and White Privilege?”

Ironically, although he spoke those words with bitter sarcasm, they broke the logjam. The trustees began to think in concert about how to spin or improve upon the five final options. It was thus that they hit upon the idea of casting aside the generic “fighting poets” and singling out Emily Dickinson. It was an easy choice and a unifying one. For those on the left, it was thinking outside the box and a means to underscore the College’s commitment to diversity and modern values. For the conservatives, it was a cynical, cost-free choice. The Lord Jeff mascot was a clear liability, easily thrown off the back of the sleigh to appease the wolves. Choosing a woman as emblem would also help to distract attention from damaging news reports concerning an aggressive masculine sports ethos, ranging from rape culture to racist and misogynistic e-mail exchanges. Above and beyond that, the move would secure the future of athletics at Amherst. It is an open secret that, when the trustees reluctantly accepted former President Tony Marx’s demand for emphasis on greater ethnic and racial diversity, the quid pro quo was increased financial support for the sports teams. Was it only a coincidence that, when the trustees selected the first woman president as his successor, they chose Biddy Martin, a self-described “crazed sports fan”? The choice of Emily Dickinson as mascot thus hit the trifecta, solving numerous problems at once, changing things without really changing things.

even on March 31, search engines still show the description of the team under its old moniker

Early Reaction

Discreetly presented with the breaking news on Friday evening in the bar of the Lord Jeff, one professor of English sitting nearby looked up from her Chocolate Appletini and said, “Wow, that’s really disruptive!” “Transgressive, even!” chimed in her colleague from comp lit, giggling slightly as she took a sip from her squid-ink-garnished Firenze-Palermo cocktail. A member of the Hampshire College faculty known to be well versed in both academic and town politics happened to be at the bar, as well: “You know if I were conspiratorially minded—which I’m not: only idiots believe in conspiracy theories—I’d say that this was a cunning plan by the Emily Dickinson Museum to get the College finally to pay attention to its most valuable cultural resource. Everyone knows that, even though Biddy Martin was trained in literature, she has never really shown much interest in the Museum. She’s set foot there like, what: once in her life? But she always has time to go to a football game or tweet about sports.

With teams named after Emily Dickinson, she’d finally have to pay attention. It’s absolutely brilliant.” With that, he returned to his Vieux Carré and discussion of the upcoming Town Meeting with his two female companions.


Jeff, John, Dick, and Harried

Reached via telephone on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the Amherst College Office of Communications said that President Martin, on her way out of town for a full weekend of men’s tennis matches at Tufts, both women’s and men’s lacrosse at Middlebury, and women’s outdoor track and field at the Tufts Snowflake Invitational, would not be available for comment until late next week or whenever there is a break in the College’s sports schedule.

We pointed out that, although the choice of mascot was bold, there was one fly in the ointment. If the “Lord Jeffs” had been known as “the Jeffs,” then the “Emily Dickinsons” might come to be popularly referred to as "The Emilys"--or: “The Dicks.”

There was a brief but painful silence on the other end of the phone line. “Oh.” Pause. “We hadn’t thought of that. Boy, is our face red.” Another pause. “I’ll have to get back to you on that. First, I’ve got to check my calendar. Remind me: what day is this?”

15 October 1830: Helen Fiske (Helen Hunt Jackson) born in Amherst

On October 15, 1830, Helen Fiske was born in Amherst. The friend of Emily Dickinson, who was born two months later (the arrival of both children is entered on the same page in Dr. Isaac Cutler's "baby book," or record of deliveries) became an author in her own right. Unlike Dickinson, Helen Hunt (Helen Hunt Jackson after widowhood and remarriage) chose to make a career of her writing.

She also became devoted to the cause of Native American rights. Her best known works are
 A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (1881) and the novel, Ramona (1884), which she hoped would be a Native American pendant to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Jackson is prominently depicted on the Amherst History Mural (2005) by David Fichter, in the 1730 West Cemetery. Although the wall on which the mural is painted will fall to the wrecking ball when the former motel building is replaced by a large new mixed-use development, the developers have contracted with the artist to repaint the mural in full scale on a more suitable surface as part of the new building.

• From the vaults: More background on Jackson, her home, and the Amherst Writers' Walk.
• Biographical sketch from "Mass Moments," a this-day-in-history service of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities

History Channel Puts Western Massachusetts History on the Mobile App

A song of ascents:

I make fun of History Channel
For its Ancient Aliens crap,
But credit where credit is due:
I'm trying its History app.

As my followers on Twitter are aware, I have been known to poke gentle fun at the History Channel and its sibling H2 for their steady descent into banality or outright intellectual bankruptcy. Whereas they used to run real documentaries, nowadays there is hardly anything worth watching.

We all have our bugbears decide which burdens to assume for the sake of the common good. For me, it's about vigilance in the face of shows on Ancient Aliens and history—or shows that don't even pretend that they have to do with history: "Ice Road Truckers"? "Swamp People" "Shark Wranglers"? (wtf?)  For Gordon Belt, Director of Public Services for the Tennessee State Library & Archives, it's the never-ending battle against "History Buffs." We're all allies in this great war on behalf of civilization.

But one has to be fair. The Channel still does broadcast some history, and its website and Twitter feed likewise pay more attention to its supposed raison d'être. I was therefore pleased to see them announce their new "History Here" app for iPhone, described as "an interactive travel guide to thousands of historic locations across the United States."

So I decided to give it a try.

It's a fairly simple little thing, though serviceable enough in its way.

You get a Google road or satellite map with little pins that lead to descriptions of sites (with driving distance, contact information, and URLs; videos, in some cases).  One can search by location, view sites on both maps and lists, save "favorites," etc.

 Checking out those that appeared on the screen when I used my home location, I found:

Amherst

• Emily Dickinson Museum
• National Yiddish Book Center

Northampton

• Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library
• Doresey-Jones House
• Hill-Ross Farm

Cummington

• William Cullen Bryant Homestead

Springfield

• Connecticut Valley Historical Museum

Petersham

• Petersham Common (where troops put down Shays' Rebellion in 1787)

It's not always easy to tell why a given site was included or omitted.

In Amherst, of course, I expected to find the Dickinson Museum, as it has National Historic Landmark status and is our principal tourist attraction. I was pleasantly surprised to see a listing for the National Yiddish Book Center, on the campus of my own Hampshire College. But Amherst has, in addition to the 2 Dickinson houses, 5 other properties on the National Register of Historic Places, two of them open to the public: West Cemetery  (where Dickinson is buried, thus likewise one of our major tourist attractions—even a pilgrimage site), and the eighteenth-century Strong House, home of the Amherst Historical Society and Museum.

It's great that Northampton (or Florence, as the case may be) includes two sites associated with the Underground Railroad, but then one might assume it would also have included the David Ruggles Center for Early Florence History & Underground Railroad Studies. And any reason not to include Historic Northampton? Or perhaps the Sojourner Truth monument in Florence?

In the case of Springfield, the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum makes sense, not least because it is part of the larger, acclaimed five-museum Springfield Museums campus. But then why leave out the Springfield Armory National Historic Site? 

Looking to our west, it is eminently sensible to include Cummington's William Cullen Bryant Homestead but (unless I really missed something), Historic Deerfield, just down the road from Amherst, is absent. (To the east, Old Sturbridge Village made the cut). Delighted and relieved to find Arrowhead, home of Herman Melville—whose birthday and meeting with Hawthorne we marked this month—in Pittsfield, but then why not Hancock Shaker Village, located in the same town?

I was certainly glad to see the boyhood home of W.E.B. DuBois in Great Barrington, as well as Edith Wharton's The Mount in Lenox on the map. But then why not Chesterwood—home of Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial and  Minuteman statues?

It seems that the National Park Service Heritage Travel Itinerary and National Register of Historic Places were the source for many of the listings, and that is as it should be. As the example of the Yiddish Book Center shows, there were obviously also other sources of information, and one hopes that the list will be broadened. The nice thing about apps versus books is that the latter can readily and continually grow in scope as well as robustness.


Summary: Given that the thing is two years old (the first incarnation for Windows, came out in 2010), one might expect more of it. Then again, given that the new app  is described as "free and ad-supported" (see also below), you get what you pay for. (The old one cost $ 2.99; this says something about our rising expectations of apps, among other things.)

In addition, there are sometimes practical limits to what sort of data one can conveniently collect and display in software designed for small handheld devices. I just took part in a workshop on digital mapping, so I am getting a better idea of what goes into the making of these things.

Balance sheet: It's simple and useful. I didn't find every historic site that I expected (to cover the entire country is after all quite ambitious), and I didn't find a great deal of technical sophistication or even information—but I also didn't find a single alien.

That's a start. Baby steps.


Update, 20 August 

History Here, a decent but no means distinguished app, just dropped another few notches in my estimation. When I first tried it out, the ads for some reason never appeared. Now, however, they're here. Annoying advertisements appeared at the bottom of the screen. One promoting an alleged iPad giveaway, was particularly annoying and intrusive flashing incessantly. As I said, you get what you pay for.

Hog-Wild (Animals and Politics): More Rural New England Fun

A story about the town of Goshen in today's Gazette reminds me of some lesser-known facts and lighter moments of Amherst and rural New England history.

According to the paper,

After a history of complaints about wandering livestock causing damage to property and posing potential dangers on roadways, a tenant farmer is being ordered to get his cows and pigs out of town.
 . . .
According to the order, complaints were received by the police, the Board of Health and the Select Board on numerous occasions in November and December of 2011, as well as April and May of this year.
The complaints state that cows and pigs have been entering the public way on Spruce Corner Road and Route 9 and have also entered private property, causing damage to lawns and posing a threat to septic systems and wells.
The order says that on April 30, 15 to 20 pigs caused damage at a property at 116 Spruce Corner Road. In addition, there were five days in March, five days in April, and thus far, five days in May when cows have been reported on public roads. Most recently, employees of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation reported cows on Route 9 on the morning of May 11. 

The story is no laughing matter because Town governments are required to ensure public safety.

But such stories are news in part because incidents of runaway livestock are so rare nowadays. A century and a half ago, they were common. This is one reason that so many Amherst properties had fences, most of which have, regrettably disappeared.

Amherst, still a town of fences in the 1873 Beers map

Fences not only helped to keep the animals on their own property, but also protected the property of others from animals that strayed. And when they strayed, they had to be rounded up and kept someplace: hence, the Town Pound, an institution that in Massachusetts dates back to 1635, and survived in many locales until the late nineteenth century. The early ones, as well as many others, used wooden fences or palings, but still others were of stone. One of the latter survives in nearby Leverett. In Amherst, the Pound was located on what is now the southwestern portion of Triangle Street near Main. A sliver of it—about an eighth of an acre—apparently extended down past the northern boundary of the Dickinson property. The Town conveyed that portion to Dickinson in 1857 for $ 5. (In the deed, today's Triangle Street was then described only as "the road leading to J.P. Gray's dwellinghouse." in the 1836 plan below: "Sunderland Road.")

from the historic structure report on the Dickinson Homestead

Of course, someone had to get the miscreants from the streets and yards to the pound, so there was even a special officer in charge of tracking down the miscreants.  In hopes of coping with its problem last summer, Goshen took a page from the past:

After months of responding to complaints of loose cattle ruining lawns, milling about parking lots and roaming down Route 9, the Goshen Select Board has decided to resurrect the traditional position of "field driver," one of the oldest traditional jobs in many rural towns. 

Except for residents of rural New England, most people have never heard of a field driver. Once a common job throughout the Northeastern states, a field driver is an appointed official charged with rounding up any stray livestock and impounding the animals until their owners can recover them. 

Ironically, Goshen removed the post from the books at a Town Meeting in 2010, as the town hadn't needed a field driver in several decades.

Another variant for dealing with what we would nowadays call "Hogs Gone Wild" was: the "Hog-reeve." He and his office became something of a running joke: one more of the funny (in the sense of both peculiar and humorous) aspects of our quaint town meeting form of government. Histories of New England sometimes allude to the humor without explaining it. One volume, for example, refers to "the annually-recurring joke about the hog-reeves."

Wondering what was so funny about that?

Find out by reading last year's post, "New England Elections: Town Meeting, Select Board. . . Hog Reeve?!"

At least Town Meeting doesn't have to deal with that nowadays. Then again, it might just lighten things up a bit.


Updates

• A judge will now decide the fate of the offending cows and pigs: Bob Dunn, "Judge eyes wandering livestock," Daily Hampshire Gazette, 1 June 2012

• And decide he did: Bob Dunn, "Judge rules Goshen cows must find another pasture," Daily Hampshire Gazette, 2 June 2012

• Saga at last concluded? Fran Ryan, "Goshen's errant cows relocate to Ashfield," Daily Hampshire Gazette, 19 July 2012

December 10, 1830: Birthday of Emily Dickinson; recorded in doctor's journal

Emily Dickinson was born on this date in 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Below, the entry from the records (Special Collections of Jones Library, Amherst) of local doctor Isaac G. Cutler, who delivered her.

On the same page is the entry for Emily's future friend Helen Fiske, who, as Helen Hunt Jackson, earned a name as an author and an activist for Native American rights. Fiske's entry is is fourth from the top of the right-hand page, and Emily Dickinson's, tenth from the bottom.

Last year's entry describes the 180th birthday celebrations at the Emily Dickinson Museum, as well as the "baby book" and the relations between Emily Dickinson, her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson (who shares a December birthday), and Helen Hunt Jackson.

This year, the annual celebration of the poet's birth, sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum, features a lecture—"Emily Dickinson - Outlaw"—by Jerome Charyn, author of the recent fictional account The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson.  The book has a popular Facebook page.

Town Greetings: Inauguration of Carolyn "Biddy" Martin as President of Amherst College

As noted in the previous post, I was deputized to represent the Town at the inauguration of Amherst College President Biddy Martin. Because several people requested that I share those remarks, it seemed simplest to post them here.

The event, as one might expect of the sponsoring organization, was a dignified and immaculately organized affair. Inauguration Coordinator Pat Allen saw to it that everything ran like clockwork (do we still say that in the digital era?). Nature, history, and a sizable endowment combined to provide the ideal setting: the southern end of the quad at the War Memorial, looking out over acres of protected land, with the magnificent Holyoke Range as backdrop. Even the weather cooperated, granting us a crisp and sunny morning after a stretch of rainy days.

musicians arriving for the ceremony: barely 20 minutes to go, and most seats still empty

The only thing that proved beyond the limits of planning and organization was: the students. Not only as we arrived for assembly in Pratt Hall (originally the wonderful old natural history museum, since refurbished as a dormitory), but even as we finally "processed" to the dais, young scholars were few and far between, as the rows of empty seats testified. It was, after all, 10 o'clock on a Sunday morning, which, as we know, follows Saturday night. (In fairness, some could plausibly plead to having stayed up too late at the inaugural dance, which President Martin herself visited until the wee hours.) At any rate, they eventually drifted in.

dignitaries line up in their regalia

outgoing President Anthony Marx pauses to greet a young well-wisher

The ceremony was complex, and if anything, threatened to burst the bounds of the schedule if not tax the patience of the audience. Careful planning and careful instructions prevented that. Speakers were given strict instructions on time limits, which most managed to obey. There was a lot to get done.

After a slightly wobbly rendition of the overture from Händel's Royal Fireworks music by the college orchestra (one could almost hear the waves rocking the barges), things got underway. There were numerous "greetings": from Amherst College and its alumni, trustees, staff, and students; from other institutions of higher learning; from the town (I represented the Select Board, and Superintendent Maria Geryk, the public schools). There were honorary degrees and various ceremonial gifts, from the symbolic keys to the College (many or most from buildings that no longer exist) to a volume (just on loan) from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington; few outsiders know that it belongs to Amherst College. There was music, old and new: in the latter case, an original piece by composer and faculty member Eric Sawyer. Among the highlights—in addition, of course, to the actual inauguration act and the address by President Martin—was Richard Wilbur's (Class of '42) reading of his poem, "Altitudes," which, concerned with spirituality and art, references both classical Europe and the nineteenth-century Amherst of Emily Dickinson.

(the full program booklet—all ten pages of it)

As on most such occasions, you ponder what to say—only more so. You don't know the audience and its tastes. The only thing you do know (and had better remember) is that they're not there mainly to hear you. Given my choice, I would have preferred to come up with something brief and witty.

In the end, lacking sufficient inspiration and creativity, I decided to stick with what I knew best: Amherst history and the Five Colleges. It proved to be the right choice. As chance would have it, several of us, including Dean of Faculty Greg Call and President Martin herself, gravitated, independently and in complementary ways, toward similar themes. We all dealt with the pattern of experimentation and change: Amherst College, despite its elite status (and at times, marked awareness of same), always had a democratic streak that made room for or even encouraged visionary change. We all mentioned the educational innovator and gadfly Alexander Meiklejohn, who served as president from 1912 to 1924. We all noted the College's tradition of assistance to students of merit rather than means, and we all noted the eventual and essential acceptance of diversity, and the significance of selecting a woman president.

* * *

Remarks for the Amherst Select Board, on the Occasion of the

Inauguration of Amherst College President Carolyn (“Biddy”) Martin

16 October 2011

When Noah Webster—whose birthday it happens to be today—spoke at the laying of the cornerstone here in 1820, he praised the location in part by virtue of the townsfolk, “whose moral, religious & literary habit dispose them to cherish the cultivation of the mind.”

The town seal depicting “the book and the plow,” invented by an Amherst professor [for our Bicentennial] in 1959, reflects our self-image. None of the pioneering institutions of higher learning in Amherst would have come into being were it not for the peculiar passion for learning evinced by the residents of this rural community.

It was the people of Amherst who created the Amherst Academy in 1814, to provide a modern secondary education for women as well as men. Citizens associated with the Academy in turn created Amherst College, to provide future Christian clergy with a new liberal-arts education, regardless of financial means. The ordinary citizens of Amherst were no less enthusiastic, donating not only money, but also stone and lumber: laboring day and night, we are told, “like the Jews in building their temple.”

When the Morrill Act of 1862 created land grant colleges to advance democratic education and scientific agriculture, our residents fought to win a charter for the new Massachusetts Agricultural College. To be sure, Amherst College, with its, shall we say, typically complex mixture of altruism and acquisitiveness, unsuccessfully sought control over the new institution—but its intellectual elite both shaped and led it.

A century later, the four area colleges—led by visionary Amherst administrators and alumni—created Hampshire College, which offered an experimental interdisciplinary education suited to a coming information age and global community.

Amherst College was conceived of as a bastion of Calvinist orthodoxy, and yet from the start, it grew and adapted. It never imposed a religious test on students or faculty. It graduated its first African-American student in 1826. It (finally) admitted women in 1975.

Vice President Webster envisioned a college shaping a world devoted to learning rather than destruction:

Too long have men been engaged in the barbarous works of multiplying the miseries of human life. Too long have their exertions been devoted to war and plunder: to the destruction of lives, and property; to the ravage of cities; to the unnatural, the monstrous employment of enslaving and degrading their own species. Blessed be our lot! We live to see a new era in the history of man . . .

In welcoming President Martin, we also mark a new era: in the history of men—and women.

Amherst College has not always been kind to its presidents: in the 1920s, when Alexander Meiklejohn tried to update that vision, he was forced out for being too radical. Today, his vision of progressive, interdisciplinary education and community-engaged learning seems, well, visionary. He left for the University of Wisconsin. In a happy irony, we today install as President a graduate of that great institution.

On behalf of our government and residents: Welcome! May we always embrace rather than fear new ideas and approaches. May your efforts be crowned with success as the partnership between the Town and College of Amherst approaches its third century.

Resources

• Information on Biddy Martin (including her inauguration) (official Amherst College President website)
• Video of the inauguration and text of President Martin's address (official Amherst College website)
• Video of the inauguration (YouTube)
• "Carolyn Martin inaugurated as first woman president at Amherst College," Hampshire Gazette, 17 Oct. 2011
• "Amherst College president inaugurated," Boston Globe, 16 Oct. 2011

15 May 1886 Death of Emily Dickinson. Do You Know the Stamp? The Souvenir Cover?

On this day in 1886, the poet Emily Dickinson died in the home in which she was born, here in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although she published a few poems and shared more in manuscript with friends and family, the bulk of her oeuvre of 1789 pieces was, of course, discovered only after her death. The history of their publication and editing is a story in its own right, in some ways more dramatic than that of her life.

The Emily Dickinson Museum describes the funeral as follows:

Dickinson’s white-garbed body lay in a white coffin in the Homestead parlor, where the family’s former pastor Rev. Jonathan Jenkins of Pittsfield (Mass.) led a prayer and Thomas Wentworth Higginson of Cambridge (Mass.) read Emily Bronte’s poem on immortality, “No coward soul is mine.” Higginson, who gazed into the casket before it was closed for the service, reported: “E.D.’s face a wondrous restoration of youth – she is 54 [55]; looked 30, not a gray hair or wrinkle; perfect peace on the beautiful brow. There was a little bunch of violets at the neck; one pink cypripedium; the sister Vinnie put in two heliotropes by her hand ‘to take to Judge Lord’” (Years and Hours, Vol. II, 475).

The honorary pallbearers, among them the president and professors of Amherst College, set the casket down after exiting the Homestead’s back door, and their burden was shouldered, at the poet’s own request, by six Irish workmen who had been hired men on the Dickinson grounds.

Following her late directions, they circled her flower garden, walked through the great barn that stood behind the house, and took a grassy path across house lots and fields of buttercups to West Cemetery, followed by the friends who had attended the simple service. There Emily Dickinson was interred in a grave Sue had lined with evergreen boughs, within the family plot enclosed by an iron fence.

Originally the grave was marked by a low granite stone with her initials, E.E.D., but some decades later niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi replaced it with a marble slab bearing the message “Called Back.” The title of a popular Hugh Conway novel, the words were also the complete content of a letter the poet sent her cousins as she entered her final phase of illness.

Below is the Dickinson commemorative stamp (Scott # 1436) that the US Postal Service issued in Amherst in 1971.

Designed: Bernard Fuchs
Modeled: Leonard C. Buckley
Vignette: Arthur W. Dintamen
Letters engraved: Albert Saavedra
Printed: Giori Press

It is based on the famous 1847 daguerreotype—or: "derogg-a-type" (some sort of Freudian slip?)—as outgoing Amherst College President Anthony Marx embarrassingly referred to it at an elite reception following Garrison Keillor's benefit performance there for the Dickinson Museum last winter. (Good luck with that, New York Public Library!)

That youthful image, jealously guarded in the Rare Books and Special Collections of Amherst College—and in fact specially brought out for the above occasion—is the only authenticated representation of the poet, although other candidates appear from time to time and remain the subject of debate.

Image via Wikipedia

Although I was young in 1971, I had been a stamp collector for some years, and I also already knew something about Emily Dickinson and her work. Just what it was, I no longer remember precisely (this was even before Julie Harris's performance of the "Belle of Amherst" on network television in 1976, which I do remember quite well). I believe that we read Dickinson in school; it would have been about the right point in the curriculum, as I recall. Perhaps my mother had taught me about her, too. At any rate, Emily was already a growing presence in my life. (A few years later, I bought my own first paperback edition of her poems.)

So, I ordered a first day of issue cover.

It was the heyday of the first day of issue "souvenir cachets," as these unofficial, privately and often commercially embellished envelopes were known. Mount Holyoke College, which counts Dickinson as one of its most distinguished students (if not actual  "graduates") maintains a page that catalogues the proliferation of those items and other covers involving the stamp. (Note: Back in Emily's day, of course, it was the "Mount Holyoke Female Seminary," as one irate aficionado prissily informed visiting Dickinson scholar Lyndall Gordon after a lecture at Amherst College last fall.)

Below is a rare unused copy of one such cachet, produced by the particularly prolific "Art Craft" company.  It is one of the more repulsive exemplars of the genre. Even leaving the general bad taste aside, it is reprehensible because it is everything that Dickinson was not: sentimental, conventional, cloying, dishonest.

 

The whole presentation is profoundly false, but it begins with the distortion of Dickinson's image, a distortion admittedly ascribable to the poet's own conflicted family. Never happy with the haunting daguerreotype that so appeals to our modern sensibility, they were also dissatisfied with their own early attempts to modify and soften it. In 1897, at the request of Emily's sister, Lavinia, Boston artist Laura Hills first added the fuller and more styled hair and a flat angular lace collar. She subsequently turned the collar into a full-fledged ruff, part of a white dress rather than a superimposition on the old dark one. Emily's niece and zealous guardian of her legacy Martha Dickinson Bianchi had the new image modified still further in 1924, when she published The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Taken altogether, the Hills image with its subsequent modifications is quite an accomplishment, in that it manages to be infantilizing and meretricious at once.

I haven't the time or the energy to produce a digital graphic comparison right now, but sometimes the simplest approach is the best: Just cover the falsified image of the hair on the souvenir cachet with your fingers, and you'll see the lineaments of the poet's only authentic image emerge.

I didn't go for one of those fancy cachets. I'm not sure I saw an advance advertisement, but in any case, I think I was, haltingly, already developing a sense of taste and historical evidence. For example, I viewed with a certain skepticism the inordinate interest of some my friends in the deliberately exotic philatelic productions (some were issued on gold foil) of the feudal states of the Arabian Gulf, which to my mind were geared to the market of gullible western collectors rather than actual postal users. (1, 2)

In any case, a kid back then had limited funds and no checking account. The standard practice was to send a request, containing cash payment for the stamps and the proverbial "self-addressed envelope," to the "Postmaster" of the issuing locale, and then, lo and behold, a week or so later, the coveted cover would arrive in the mail.

Looking at mine for almost the first time since then, I see that I made a mistake in the Zip Code by transposing the digits to read 00102 rather than 01002. I know better now. I even know not to pronounce the "h" in Amherst. Not sure which I learned first. Anyway: been there, also got the t-shirt. A week ago at the North Amherst Rezoning Visioning session, I was surprised to hear that the head of the Cecil Group, the consultants who also took part in the public design process for Kendrick Park, still had not absorbed that little linguistic fact of life (though he also, upon learning this, appropriately poked fun at himself).

The spring is always a big season for Dickinson-related events here in Amherst, first and foremost the Poetry Walk, which takes place on the Saturday closest to her death anniversary. This year's Poetry Walk was distinctive, and it was moreover preceded by other events of note (hint: got a cell phone?). Separate reports to follow.


Resources

• Houghton Library, Harvard University:  Emily Dickinson Commemorative Stamps and Ephemera (1 Box: includes stamps, Amherst newspaper articles, ephemera, and a pane of 50 stamps "in a presentation binder stamped in gold lettering: 'Harvard University.'" [in case anyone had any doubts about...what])

• US Postal Service: Women on Stamps

•  National Postal Museum