The Other Adams Woman: Louisa Catherine Adams

Despite her husband’s inevitable protest, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams applied rouge to her cheeks in their Berlin apartment.  She rehearsed her defense as she admired herself in the mirror.  

“Do you want me to look a fright in the midst of Splendour?” she whispered, imagining John Quincy standing in front of her with a disapproving look.¹

This portrait of Louisa Adams was painted by Charles Robert Leslie in 1816 in London. 

The night before, when the Prussian Queen had offered her the rouge, John Quincy had insisted that she refuse.  At first, Louisa had dutifully done as he commanded.  She began to have second thoughts, though, when saw her reflection in a darkened window.  Her face was rather pale.   While John Quincy was occupied, she sought out the Queen and accepted her offer.  After some convincing, she knew her husband would understand.  She was, after all, the wife of the Ambassador to Prussia and the daughter-in-law of the President of the United States, and rouged cheeks were expected of her in Berlin’s court society.

Louisa stood up, checking herself one last time in the mirror.  No one could deny that her brightened face livened her dull homemade dress.  John Quincy walked into the room, and Louisa reached up to dim the light in an attempt to hide her face.  Just as she thought she had escaped his notice, John Quincy pulled her close to the light.  She saw the rage in his eyes as he demanded that she wash her face.  But instead of complying, Louisa “with some temper refused.”² In a surge of anger, John Quincy left for the party without her.  But Louisa didn’t let that discourage her.  With her face still decorated, she arrived at the party on her own and ended up making quite an impression on the king and queen of Prussia.  

If Louisa ever regretted defying her husband, she never let it show.  Based on her parents’ relationship, she believed “it was necessary for her own self-respect...to remind her husband from time to time that she was not the conventionally submissive helpmeet that middle-class Americans seemed to admire in their wives in the early nineteenth century.”³

Louisa’s childhood had been filled with encouragement and opportunity, which turned out to be both her blessing and her curse.  Born in London in 1775 to an American father and an English mother, Louisa attended school in France, where she became so fluent in French that she had to relearn English when she returned to London.  Since French was the language of diplomatic society at the time, Louisa was able to hold her own in the courts of Europe even though John Quincy would have preferred to control his wife’s tongue as much as possible.⁴  

Louisa and John Quincy met and married in London in 1797.  They were an unlikely pair from the start; everyone suspected that John Quincy would marry one of Louisa’s older sisters.  Louisa, who “foresaw women taking a vigorous role, one of equal importance to that of men”⁵ was not the most obvious choice for a man like John Quincy, who, with his short temper and severity, was determined to bow to no woman.  

Like many men during his time, John Quincy would tolerate only the most passive female, which would seem unlikely considering the relationship between his parents.  With a mother like Abigail Adams, it would only seem logical for John Quincy to marry a woman like Louisa.  But John and Abigail Adams had reservations about the Johnson-Adams marriage.  In fact, Abigail thoroughly disapproved of her son’s wife at first, mostly because she judged Louisa as a foreigner and “anti-american.”  With their son’s political career in mind, “they often fretted about [Louisa’s] ability...to measure up to the rigorous family standards.”⁶ Louisa eventually proved herself to her in-laws, and they welcomed her into their lives and hearts.

The same could not be said for John Quincy.  As his parents grew more fond of Louisa, he grew more distant.  Time would prove that John Quincy “never saw in marriage the partnership arrangement advocated by his parents....At heart he seemed to fear the opposite sex, and eventually most of his anxiety took the form of disregarding and disobeying his wife.”⁷

But the couple’s dysfunctionality was not the only thing to plague their marriage.  Louisa had twelve pregnancies and seven miscarriages between her twenty-first and forty-second years, and as a result, “her health was wretched a great deal of the time....She once complained that ‘hanging and marriage were strongly assimilated.’”⁸

Despite everything, Louisa supported her husband’s political endeavors.  In 1824, John Quincy refused to campaign for the presidential nomination.  He expected to be nominated as “a reward for his many years of public service.”⁹  As a result, Louisa became his campaign manager.  Louisa “curried to the right congressional wives, always ‘Smilin’ for the Presidency,’ calling cards in purse.... In the election year, she hosted dinners for sixty-eight congressmen.  Every single Tuesday night between December and May, she held open house with fine wine, lavish food, and musical entertainment.”¹⁰  No doubt that John Quincy was fully aware of what his wife was doing for him, and we can only hope that he realized that without her he had little chance of being elected.¹¹

If Louisa could have seen the future, though, she might not have worked so hard to get her husband into office.  Her years as First Lady were the worst of her life.  She noted that “the exchange to a more elevated station must put me in prison.”  Furthermore, after he was elected president, John Quincy’s use for his wife ended. He became even more cold, demanding, and inconsiderate toward her, and once sniped, “There is something in the very nature of mental abilities which seems to be unbecoming in a female.”¹²

Louisa proved to be good at hiding her true feelings, though.  Harriet Upton, in an illustrated piece for the November 1888 issue of Wide Awake, described Louisa as “enjoying an existence of ‘wooings and weddings, baby life and christenings and many frolics, long old-fashioned visits from relatives, quiet hours when the President read aloud.” The article pictured a first lady who, like all right-minded women, served in a man’s world.”¹³  In truth, Louisa spent most of her time alone and ignored, and she called the White House “her prison” and a place “which depresses my spirits beyond expression.”¹⁴

Louisa spent most of her time in the White House alone in her room.  Over the years, she developed a deep depression and a breathing problem (her room was heated with burning anthracite coal, which caused choking and coughing).  Louisa wrote that her depression “passes for ill temper and suffering for unwillingness and I am decried an incumberance unless I am required for any special purpose for a show or some political maneuver and if I wish for a trifle of any kind, any favor is required at my hands, a deaf ear is turned to my request.  Arrangements are made and if I object I am informed it is too late and it is all a misunderstanding.”¹⁵

To combat her isolation and depression, Louisa ate chocolates obsessively and took to writing poems and satirical plays about the folly of society and the illnesses of females.  She also began her autobiography, which she called Adventures of a Nobody.¹⁶  In short, Louisa was angry.    She was angry about what she believed men were doing to humiliate women.¹⁷  A latent feminism emerged in her writing, which “was aroused in her bitterness over a world in which man controlled female, no matter how capable the female might be.”  Louisa resented “that sense of inferiority which by nature and by law we [women] are compelled to feel and to which we must submit is worn by us with as much satisfaction as the badge of slavery generally, and we love to be flattered out of our sense of degradation.”¹⁸

To Dr. Thomas.
___

at note last night addressed to you
was by my pen indited [sic]:
Professional alone ‘tis true
By anxious doubt incited:
Your presence eased the laboring? thought
The note aside was laid
Before, with kind expression fraught
my compliment was paid
In justice then Dear Doctor now
The pen I quick resume,
Esteem and friendship to avow,
To love I cann’t presence -
Love such as Mother to her Son
With bond affection proffer’d;
Sprung from a grateful heart alone
with pleasure may be offer’d -
of deep respect assurance kind
no proof what’ere requires
Tis the conviction of the mind
that merit aye inspires;
This silly scrawl you must excuse
A laugh its best reward
The Sentiment do not refuse;
The lines their just reward

Louisa Catherine Adams

F. Street 25 Jan 1842


Above: Louisa Catherine Adams' poetry manuscript dated 1842, from the Littlejohn Collection at Wofford College.Following his term as president, John Quincy entered Congress and became involved in the anti-slavery movement, which resulted, finally, in the couple developing a sympathetic understanding for each other.¹⁹  Louisa spent her last years dedicated to the fight for freedom of slaves and women.²⁰ Their mutual pursuit for equality at the end of their lives was the closest thing to a happy ending the couple had.Years after her death, Louisa’s grandson, Henry Adams, remembered thinking there was something exotic about his grandmother.  He wrote that he liked “her gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of not belonging there [Boston], but to Washington or to Europe, like her furniture, and writing-desk with little glass doors above and little eighteenth-century volumes in old bindings labelled ‘Peregrine Pickle’ or ‘Tom Jones’ or ‘Hannah More.’  Try as she might the Madame could never be Bostonian, and it was her cross in life, but to the boy it was her charm.”  Henry Adams knew little about his grandmother’s interior life, which had been, like many women of the time, full of severe stress and little pure satisfaction.²¹

The F Street house near the White House was Louisa’s home during many of her years in Washington and the site of her death.  Earlier, it had been the residence of Dolley and James Madison.  The property remained in the Adams family until 1884.

-- Hannah Jarrett ‘12



1. Boller, Paul F. Jr., “Louisa Catherine Adams 1775-1852,” Presidential Wives: An Anecdotal History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 55.
2. Nagel, Paul C., The Adams Women: Abigail & Louisa Adams, Their Sisters and Daughters, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 170.
3. Boller 56.
4. Allgor, Catherine, “Louisa Catherine Adams Campaigns for the Presidency,” Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government, University Press of Virginia, 2000, pp. 161.
5. Nagel 161.
6. Allgor 161-162.
7. Nagel 164.
8. Boller 55.
9. Boller 57.
10. Anthony, Carl Sferrazza, First Ladies: The Saga of the President’s Wives and Their Power 1789-1961, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990, pp. 107.
11. Boller 58.
12. Anthony 108.
13. Nagel 3.
14. Boller 53.
15. Anthony 108.
16. Anthony 109.
17. Nagel 4.
18. Anthony 109-110.
19. Boller 54.
20. Anthony 111.

21 Boller 60-61.

President for a Day

Washington
Jan 24th / 45

To the President of the U.S.

Sir

Mr. Aristides Welch a citizen of the State of Missouri is an applicant for the office of Purser in the Navy; I have but a slight personal acquaintance with Mr Welch, but have been informed by gentlemen in whom I have every confidence that Mr Welch is in every way worthy and well qualified for the station he seeks, I would therefore recommend with the utmost respect a favourable consideration of his claims.

Very respectfully your
obt. servt.
D R. Atchison

In this letter, David Rice Atchison (1807-1886) writes President John Tyler, recommending Aristides Welch to the office of purser in the Navy.  Fortunately, Welch was appointed a purser in the Navy on June 27, 1846, but that is not the story I want to focus on here.

At the time of this letter, Atchison served as a Senator from Missouri -- in fact, he was the first senator from western Missouri and the youngest senator at the time.  He had been appointed to fill a vacancy left by the late Lewis F. Linn, and he was re-elected in 1849 and went on to serve in the Senate until 1855.  He was instrumental role in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, but his claim to fame in American history is his day-long presidency.

 

If someone had told Atchison on that January day in 1845 he was writing to one of his predecessors, the 37-year-old pro-slavery Democrat would have laughed.  But by the end of the year, Atchison’s fellow Democrats would take control of the Senate and would choose him to be President pro tempore (and this was only the first time -- the Senate elected him for this position 12 more times during his Senate career!).  As President pro tempore, Atchison presided over the Senate when the Vice President was absent and stood in second place in the presidential line of succession.

Until the 1930s, presidential and congressional terms began on March 4th at noon.  In 1849, March 4th happened to be a Sunday, and incoming president Zachary Taylor and vice president Millard Fillmore refused to be sworn in to office on a Sunday.  So from noon of March 4th to noon of March 5th Atchison (who had once again been elected President pro tempore two days before) was President of the United States.  Of course, Taylor could have taken the oath privately and begun to execute his presidential duties on the fourth, but Atchison’s supporters claimed that the expiration of James Polk’s term and the delay of Taylor’s inauguration made Atchison the President, fair and square.  Though Atchison was never exactly sure how to view those 24 hours (he slept most of the day), he enjoyed telling the story of his “presidency,” describing it as the "honestest administration this country ever had."

But it seems that even a 24-hour administration can’t escape controversy.  Some say that Atchison couldn’t have been president because Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution states that the incoming chief executive must take an “Oath of Affirmation” before assuming duties, which Atchison admittedly never did.  Others believe that Atchison was president, but only for a few minutes rather than 24 hours.  According to this viewpoint, Atchison’s newest term as President pro tempore did not officially begin until he was sworn in on March 5th, which means his presidency ended a few minutes later when Millard Fillmore was sworn in as Vice President.

Regardless, the inscription on Atchison’s gravestone reads: “President of the United States for One Day.”

 

-Hannah Jarrett '12




Works Consulted:

Joseph H. Bloom.  “David Rice Atchison.” American History 37.6, Feb 2003.

http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/President_For_A_Day.htm

http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=a000322

Love is in the...mail: A proposal via letter, 1878

Richmond

Oct 28th, 78

My dear miss Bessie:
On last Friday and Saturday I looked for a letter from you, & instead of going to Judge Oul’s class yesterday morning I went to the PC & was more than remunerated by yielding to the temptation
Yesterday was a lovely day & the streets were thronged with strangers who have come to attend the Fair
Our church was filled & Dr. Hoge preached a splendid sermon, his subject was “hope,” I think it suited me exactly. And now miss Bessie I am going to write on a matter the solemnity of which is needless to remind a woman of your good sense. For me to write you that I love you is useless for you much be [sic] aware that my attachment for you far exceeds the love that I have for my own life. And will you my dear miss Bessie marry me?
I hoped & fully expected to be able to visit you this week but will be unavoidably detained from doing so, but I sincerely trust the time is near when shall see you & call you my own
Goodnight my dear miss Bessie, & believe me to be yours truly,
Wm. B. Taylor

In this letter, dated October 28, 1878, William “Willie” Barnett Taylor expresses his love and desire for his longtime love, Bessie Boggs. Our collection dates the letters between Taylor and Boggs to as early as January 25, 1878. In the context of these letters, Willie was on an extended trip around the United States. Shortly after this letter was written, he departed for Australia.

The sentimental tone of Willie’s note is characteristic of male correspondence during this era. Rather than this romanticism being perceived as emasculating, “nineteenth-century middle-class men were expected to express intense emotions in their romantic relationships. Tenderhearted feelings were not usually perceived as unmanly or as troublesome when confined to private relationships with women.”¹ Willie and Bessie’s letters, written from a distance, fall into a broad category of correspondences from the nineteenth century in which love was preserved over time and space through intense sentimental expression. Women were given frequent affirmation, because it was expected for men to “[explode] with feeling, manifesting as much emotional intensity and range as nineteenth-century women” themselves.²

The concept of marriage had, by the dawn of the 19th century, transformed in a sense from being a logistical, calculated match to being a mutual partnership based on sincere affection. While this is an idea that is taken for granted today, two hundred years ago it symbolized the end of an era, and was regarded by many to be irresponsible and frivolous. Second century Stoic Seneca claimed that “nothing is more impure than to love one’s wife as if she were a mistress.”³ Fifteen hundred years later, John Adams famously declared that the “ideal mate” was characterized by the willingness “to palliate faults and Mistakes, to put the best Construction upon Words and Action, and to forgive Injuries.”⁴

Those critical of the newfound “love match,” as these men would have been, worried that “the values of free choice and egalitarianism could easily spin out of control. If the choice of a marriage partner was a personal decision, conservatives asked, what would prevent young people, especially women, from choosing unwisely?”⁵ Questions were raised about how marrying based on love might upset the established institution of marriage, as well as the social structure in which it was formed. In 1774, the British Lady Magazine published the opinion that “‘the idea of matrimony’ was not ‘for men and women to be always taken up with each other’, but ‘to discharge the duties of civil society, to govern their families with prudence and to educate their children with discretion.’”⁶ The idea that these tasks might be possible within a love-based marriage was yet unproven.

It is unknown whether Willie received permission from Bessie’s father to ask for her hand. And yet it seems that, as early as the nineteenth century, that “courting couples...insisted on the priority of their feelings over all social barriers or familial restraints.”⁷ Since marriage had become an institution based on happiness and satisfaction, couples insisted--as they still do--that if their family “professes to have [their] happiness at heart,” they would support the union.⁸ The selection of a wife represented finding a love superior to existing relationships; Lyman Hodge, for example, professed his love in the mid-nineteenth century by declaring that "I love my father, mother and sisters. . .[but I] love you so much more." This independence of will was evident in the reality that “by the 1830s at least, men and women were engaging in courtship, agreeing upon marriage, and only then seeking parental blessings.”⁹ And while some men observed the formality of obtaining permission from the bride’s parents, it was by no means required, and it became very rare for the groom’s parents to have any say at all.

Coontz argues that the evolution of the home in the 19th century into a proverbial “nest” aroused the swiftly changing roles within marriage. A man’s primary obligation shifted from his birth family to his conjugal family, and consequently, “husband” and “wife” adopted more “sentimental” roles. “Manly virtue” was no longer associated with community or political affairs, but with the “‘private passions’ [of] supporting one’s own family and showing devotion toward one’s wife and children.”¹⁰ The quiet adoration and warmth toward one’s mate thus became inherent in what the community might perceive as a virtuous home. And very often, this adoration was expressed over distance and time, through love letters.

From a perusal of their correspondence, it appears that Willie and Bessie married shortly after this letter was written. In 1884, they had a child, Henry Porterfield Taylor. Henry Taylor wrote the introduction to “Military Reminisces of Gen. William R. Boggs,” a memoir by his grandfather, Bessie’s father, a West Point graduate and Confederate general.

Bessie began archiving her family’s documents, many of which are in our collection now. She died on September 1, 1922. Willie died July 8, 1933. Both are buried in Salem Cemetery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

- Stephanie Walrath '12





1 Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (Cary: Oxford University Press, 1992), 139.
2 Ibid, 33.
3 Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited (New York: Routledge, 1981), 347.
4 Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), 21.
5 Ibid, 149.
6 Ibid, 150.
7 Lystra, 175.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid, 159.
10 Coontz, 168.

King Faisal of Iraq writes to the British Government, 1927

The Royal Palace

Baghdad

10th APRIL, 1927

My Dear Mr. Amery,

I am glad to have this letter to you through Muzahim Bey Al-Pachaji [sic] whom you have met before I suppose.

Muzahim Bey will act as our Representative in London. He is quite able, and sincere. I hope you will be kind enough to afford him the same support and assistance you had to his predecessor Ja’far Pasha.

When Sir John Shukburough was in Baghdad I had the pleasure to talk over with him various matters. He had undoubtedly conveyed them to you. I am hoping that they will be considered with your due sympathy.

With my best wishes to Mrs. Amery.

Yours Sincerely

[signed] Faisal

Rt. Hon. J.S. Amery, M.P.,

Colonial Office,

LONDON.

In this letter, King Faisal I introduces Muzahim al-Pachachi, Iraq’s new ambassador to Britain, to Leo Amery, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies.

Faisal I, a Sunni Muslim and part of the Hashemite family, which descended from the prophet Muhammad, was born in 1885 in the city of Ta’if. He was destined for political involvement from birth; Faisal’s father, Hussein bin Ali, was the leader of the Arab Revolt of 1916, Sharif of the Holy City of Mecca, and later King of Hejaz. Faisal was elected to the Ottoman Parliament in 1913 before he joined his father and his British allies in the Arab Revolt to topple the Ottoman Empire.¹

After World War I, the newly established League of Nations decided that government of the Middle East needed to be delegated to European powers. They redrew the borders of this region, in many cases ignoring long-standing ethnic and cultural groupings that had defined boundaries previously. The countries who were mandated to the European powers were classified as either A, B, or C, depending on the League’s perception of how autonomous the mandate should be. Both Class A Mandates, and theoretically granted the highest level of autonomy, Syria was mandated to France, and Iraq to Britain.

Because of the impressive and victorious nature of his leadership in the Arab Revolt that secured the city of Damascus for Arab control, Faisal was appointed King of Greater Syria in March 1919. Unfortunately, the League of Nations had other plans; France was granted its mandate for Syria in April, and in July, after a short-lived and unsuccessful resistance, Faisal was deposed and banished.

Britain, however, was interested in Faisal’s leadership. They admired Faisal’s dedication, diligence, and cooperation, traits that they sought in a ruler to maintain their mandate. They also believed that Faisal would be “moderate and that his reputation as an Arab figure of international stature would prove attractive within Iraq.”² At the Cairo Conference in 1921, Faisal accepted Britain’s offer of kingship with the understanding that he would be allowed to work Iraq toward a state of independence. True to their word, the British set up treaties over a ten-year period that increased Iraq’s autonomy until, in 1930, they signed a treaty that would allow Iraq independence within two years.³

Faisal’s ambitions were broader than mere Iraqi independence, however; he was deeply devoted to the cause of pan-Arabism. He attempted to strengthen Middle Eastern ties to achieve this goal through appointment of ethnically and religiously diverse scholars, economists, and advisers to his cabinet. These appointees were Sunni and Shiite, Syrian and Iraqi. In 1925 Faisal successfully passed Iraq’s first Constitution. This constitution was in effect until 1958 when the monarchy was overthrown and the Hashemite family executed. Remnants of this constitution can be seen in Iraq’s constitution today.

Not much is known about Al-Pachachi, but he was the ambassador to Britain from 1927-1928 after serving two years in parliament. The previous ambassador, Jafar al-Askari, was Iraq’s first minister of defense and served twice as Iraq’s ambassador to Britain. He was taken prisoner by the British during WWI and later joined the British in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. Al-Askari and Faisal had a history long before the British crowned Faisal king of Iraq and even before Faisal had been elected King of Syria. Faisal and Al-Askari worked together in the Arab Revolt of 1918 with the British against the Ottoman empire, and when Al-Askari became military governor, he gained control of much of the conquered land in Syria. In February of 1919 he became governor of Aleppo. In this position he was described as “an able man...frank and broadminded...[with a] good angle of vision towards the problems of government.”⁴

Al-Askari’s family was of great importance in the development of Iraq; his brother-in-law, Nuri Pasha al-Said, was elected Prime Minister seven times, and served a crucial role in the evolution of British-Iraqi relations. Both were Arab nationalists who believed that cooperation with the British was paramount for the advancement of an independent Iraq. Both were also killed for their political work; Al-Askari during the coup of Bakr Sidqi in 1936, and Al-Said as a result of the July 14th Revolution of 1958 that toppled the monarchy Faisal constructed.

Faisal’s correspondent, Leo Amery, was the Secretary of State for the Colonies, overseeing the British mandates from the Colonial Office in London. Amery advocated a strong British presence in Iraq, arguing in the Cabinet in 1918 that “only actual possession of the Middle East before a cease-fire went into effect would enable the Cabinet to bring the region into the British orbit.”⁵ He expressed fear that without a strong hold in the Middle East, Germany might be able to capture this enviable slice of land, which contained the trade route to Asia. Amery held Zionist convictions, which likely influenced Faisal’s own Zionist sympathies. Faisal was exceptional in his religious tolerance; the Constitution he enacted in 1925 assures that “Complete freedom of conscience and freedom to practise the various forms of worship, in conformity with accepted customs, is guaranteed to all inhabitants of the country provided that such forms of worship do not conflict with the maintenance of order and discipline or public morality.”⁶

Iraq was admitted into the League of Nations in 1932. Faisal died of a heart attack in 1933 and didn’t get to experience much the independence he had created.⁷ But his contribution to the development of Middle Eastern autonomy lasted far beyond his twelve years in office.

- Stephanie Walrath '12 and Hannah Jarrett '12

References
1. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York City: Avon Books, 1989), p. 113.
2. William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), p. 203.
3. Ibid
4. Malcolm B. Russell, The First Modern State: Syria under Faysal, 1918-1920 (Minneapolis: Bibliothetic Islamica, 1985), p. 64.
5. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York City: Avon Books, 1989), p. 364.
6. “The Constitution of the Kingdom of Iraq,” Part 1, Article 13.
7. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York City: Avon Books, 1989), p. 364.Cleveland, p. 204-205.

Mrs. Smith's Best Ginger Snap Recipe (from 1880)

Earlier this year Special Collections received a donation that included a really cool item: a recipe book from 1880 kept by a Mrs. G.C. Smith of Columbia, S.C.

We share with you today this first recipe in the book: ginger snaps!

Ginger Snaps, best.

3 pounds flour
1 pound sugar
1 pound butter
1pt. molasses
½ cup spices.

And that's it!

Yield? Not so sure. Oven temperature? Wing it. Preparation? Good luck!

Stay tuned for more epic Southern recipes from Mrs. Smith.

New Books: Controversy in Poetry, Football, and a Historical City

Planisphere- New Poems by John Ashbery. (New York, 2009)

Ashbery is known as one of America’s leading post-modern poets. He has published over two dozen volumes of poetry and won nearly every major literary award. Simultaneously dense and funny.

The New York Times book review:

John Ashbery’s new collection, dedicated to his partner, David Kermani, draws its exotic title — “Planisphere” — from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,” [...] Ashbery also juggles the infinite possibilities of genre, his mind running through many exhausted topics at once, trying for one that still has life in it[....] Some of the games “prove out” exhilaratingly for the reader, some are perhaps too private, some too abstruse, some too silly (there are a couple of Steinish collages that don’t earn their keep, one of them made from the titles of movies). But when the Ashberian associative complex works (as in the cases cited above) the mind is delighted by its unexpectedness. Conversation is nearly always the pretext, as in the poet’s shorthand summary of life in old age: “This is how my days, / my nights are spent, in a crowded vacuum / overlooking last year’s sinkhole.” Ashbery, the master of sinuous syntax (see his “Three Poems” or “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”) has performed surgery on his poems here, often bringing them into the wry epigrammatic domain of Dickinson[....] But several poems, notably ­“Planisphere” and “Pernilla,” belong to Ashbery’s ambitious longer lyric mode. I quote, for readers longing for the lyric Ashbery, the conclusion of the love poem “Alcove,” which opens this volume with a wondering joy at the return of spring and ends with a vista of love, despite its inevitable separateness, surviving the worst days of old age:

We indeed

looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.

In his rendering of American speech, slang, cliché, Ashbery has surpassed most of his contemporaries. His “small museum / of tints” has provided ambiguous prophecies, curdled recollections, menacing prospects, emergencies, landscapes and puzzles; it has no less provided memories of youth, intimacies of love, the comedy of the ephemeral, the ­transhistorical speech of painting, and the ­literary in its quoted quintessence. The poet’s last look here is a “glimpse of / the books in the carrel, sweet in their stamped bindings”; one of these days, the carrel will hold his “Collected Poems.”

Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era by Michael Oriard. (Chapel Hill, 2009)

Why does a college football coach make more money than a college president? Bowled Over attempts to answer this question and others like it by explaining the development of university football programs and the conflicts surrounding their growth into powerhouses that dominate academics.

The Oxford Journals book review:

I begin this review by misquoting Otto von Bismarck, “College football is like sausages; it is better not to see them being made.” The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football (and basketball) is a mass of contradiction and hypocrisy. Only the most naïve would believe otherwise.

Author Michael Oriard offers a unique perspective on big-time college football: He played football for Notre Dame University and for the Kansas City Chiefs in the National Football League in the late sixties and early seventies before becoming a professor of English at Oregon State University.

He opens his book by recognizing college football's potentially contradictory pulls of marketing and educating, a contradiction recognized by observers almost at the inception of the college game. College presidents and coaches debated whether it was better for alumni to support individual athletes or for universities to provide scholarships.

While he does not state this quite as baldly, collegiate football, similar to the professional brand, depends upon older men (and, in a few cases, women) exploiting younger men. While collegiate football players pass through the system within four or five years, the older men—coaches, athletics directors, and college presidents—remain to dictate the rules.
[...] Oriard believes that such outrageous behavior as sporting sideburns (no one, apparently, was suspended for wearing bellbottom pants) led coaches to seek greater control over their players. He believes that the one-year scholarship rule passed in 1973, whereby scholarships were renewed at coaches’ discretion, was at least partly a response to the players’ rebellion. Indeed, his thesis is found on page 5: “that this mostly forgotten reinvention of the athletic scholarship marks a crucial turning point for big-time college football. … The one-year scholarship, backed by the mindset that it represents, exposed so-called student-athletes to the mounting pressures of an increasingly commercialized sports while denying them a share in its new bounty [of television money].”
[...] Oriard's discussion of the events that occurred during his playing career is another strength of his book. Indeed, had he focused even more on autobiographical detail and explored in greater detail the milieu in which he played rather than dwell on a lengthy discussion of reform, the book would have been shorter but more powerful.

[...] Many of the readers of this review are academics, whose schools are facing severe budget cutbacks. For academics working for schools in the Bowl Championship Series (the infamous BCS), the specter of ever-growing expenditures on football programs may well remind them of Groucho Marx's prescient comment in the movieHorsefeathers. When Groucho is told that Huxley has a college and a football team, he quips, “Well we can't afford both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.” [...] Oriard, too, is bemused by the “arms race” in building ridiculously lavish facilities for football teams.

[...] Oriard's book should appeal to the general reader. Those researchers who have already investigated the seamy world of collegiate athletics may not find much new information in this well-written book.

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King. (New York, 2011)

Odessa offers the compelling and fascinating history of a key Ukrainian city in such a way that it is appealing to any reader. King focuses on the controversies sparked in the city due to violent anti-Semitism and the radical movements that grew out of the city’s population of artists, authors, great thinkers.

The New Republic book review:

[...] Charles King has written a crisp, reliable account of the town culled from a wide range of sources, most impressively from archival material on Odessa’s wartime experiences under the Romanians. It is a history clearly intended for the general reader, but the book tells a complex story. King appreciates the poignancy of an urban tale of a visually attractive melting pot that was, and not infrequently, the site of fierce inter-ethnic brutality. More Jews were slaughtered in the Odessa pogrom of 1905 than were killed anywhere else in Russia at the time. And although Odessa’s most beloved post-war celebrities—the film star Mark Bernes, and Russia’s Sinatra, Leonid Utesov—were both Jews, its municipal authorities were known in the 1950s and ’60s as among the most overtly anti-Semitic in Russia.

[...] King tracks Odessa’s history with the use of biographical snippets and quick forays into the rich body of imaginative literature. The book is something of a blend between a general history and a guided tour with often quite splendid descriptions. Here King recreates the smells, the feel of the mid-nineteenth-century city, as many hundreds of wagons filled with wheat and pulled by animals bound for Odessa’s slaughterhouses packed the streets—the streets, constructed of highly porous limestone, that filled the lungs of Odessa’s populace especially on windy days.

[...] The story ends, as King tells it, not in Odessa itself but in Brighton Beach. (Packed already in the 1970s with Odessa Jews, some estimate that three-quarters of Brighton Beach's population come from Odessa and from Black Sea towns nearby.) King acknowledges that Odessa, still beautiful (if faded) in its center, has by now lost much of what it was that made it a source of nostalgia, of tender longing for quite nearly as long as it has existed. Still, its imprint remains palpable.

-Becky Heiser '11