A Splendid Savage: An Interview with Steve Kemper
I'm a Steve Kemper fan. Four years ago, I read his A Labyrinth of Kingdoms with the sort of all encompassing fascination I brought to Gone with the Wind when I was thirteen. I've been eagerly awaiting his newest book, A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham, for at least two years.* Maybe longer. It did not disappoint.
A Splendid Savage tells the story of Frederick Russell Burnham (1861-1947), sometimes known as "the American scout"--a story with the dash of an H. Rider Haggard novel and a Saturday matinee thriller combined. The story of how he learned his astonishing woodcraft reads like a story from a boy's magazine of the nineteenth century. His career as a scout and prospector carried him to every frontier and mining boom in the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth--serving as a lens for looking at the larger stories of American expansion westward and Europe's scramble for Africa.
Kemper successfully pieces together Burnham's life from limited (and sometimes controversial) resources--a challenge that he never tries to gloss over, but that he handles with such skill that it is easy to forget . He sets his splendid savage firmly in historical contexts that include Indian wars and range feuds in the American Southwest, the Anglo-Boer wars, mining camps in south Africa, the Mexican sierras and the Yukon, Wall Street booms and busts, and London high society.
As Kemper says in the prologue, "Other men of his era had a few such adventures, but Burnham had them all.'" If you like real life historical adventure with a complicated, larger-than-life hero, A Splendid Savage will be your cup of bush tea.
And now, welcome Steve Kemper:
Burnham was a well-known figure in his lifetime, but is largely forgotten today. What led you to Burnham?
I was researching a magazine story about hyenas and came across a remark by the African hunter and explorer Frederick Courteney Selous, who said that he had never met anyone who knew as much woodcraft as the famous American scout Frederick Russell Burnham. I’ve been fascinated by American scouts and frontiersmen since boyhood, but Burnham’s name was new to me. A famous scout? In Africa? And he knew more woodcraft than the celebrated Selous?
Naturally I Googled him, and naturally he had a Wikipedia entry. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I tracked down his two memoirs. Reading them encouraged me to keep digging, including a visit to the rich Burnham archive at Yale. It seemed incredible that no one had written his biography. I felt a bit like Barbara Tuchman after she stumbled across “Czar Reed” in her research for The Proud Tower. Reed was so “writable,” she said in her essay “Biography as a Prism of History,” that it seemed impossible no one had written about him, and she started worrying that another writer might beat her to the punch. I understood the feeling.
Your titles are always wonderful. Can you tell me where you got the title A Splendid Savage?
It’s from a letter Burnham wrote to his mother in October 1903 as he was about to leave colonial East Africa for Britain. The letter sounds like a farewell both to Africa and to the frontier way of life that he loved. Here’s a portion:
The wildest and sweetest land I have ever seen. It is I fear passing from me forever. Sometimes I wish I had never learned to read or form any conception of duty, civilization, religion, for I would have been and am at heart a splendid savage, nothing more, and now I am to return to London—to swallowtails, the club, soft carpets, soft food, soft life, soft men and women.
One of the things that fascinated me most about the book was Burnham's relationship with his wife, Blanche. They clearly loved each other, but her life as his wife could not have been easy.** You made the unusual and, to me at least, very appealing decision to include her experiences even when they were apart, instead of simply using her as a source for details about his life. What led you to make this choice?
Blanch was enormously important to Burnham, so their love story became a strong element in the book. Burnham was incapable of resting peacefully in domestic life, yet he depended on Blanche’s support and admiration. She was his partner, his psychological ballast, and his dream-catcher.
She was also an eyewitness to Burnham’s story. Her hundreds of letters to Burnham and other family members gave me invaluable intimate material.
Blanche was also fascinating in her own right. She enthusiastically accompanied Burnham to start new lives in rough places. She was strong, tough, and feminine, as adept with a pistol as with a decorative peacock feather. She was often deeply lonely because of Burnham’s prolonged absences. Her experiences and perspective let me illuminate Burnham from a different angle and illustrate the emotional costs of attaching oneself to a human whirlwind.
It seems like Burnham spent time at every frontier that opened in the second half of the nineteenth century, sometimes as a scout, sometimes as a prospector. What would you say was the driving force in his "restless life"?
No single force can explain his drive, but I think there were three main ones: a desire for risky action, for the possibility of financial fortune, and for the chance to influence the direction of history. Burnham loved frontiers because they offered the prospect of all three.
You deal very well with one of the hardest aspects of writing about nineteenth century travelers, adventurers, etc.: the question of racial attitudes. Could you talk a little bit about the complexity of Burnham's position on race, and how you decided to deal with it?
As I got deeper into the research and learned more about Burnham, this worried me, not only because many of his racial attitudes now strike us as deplorable, but also because I wasn’t sure I could do justice to both this explosive issue and to Burnham. In other words, I had to figure out a way to be honest about Burnham’s racial attitudes without reducing him to them or having them overshadow everything else about him.
Wrestling with this forced me to expand my views and my understanding of the past, and to acknowledge the deep connections between Burnham’s time and ours. We’re still arguing about how to do this—witness the recent demonstrations at various universities about Cecil Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, and John C. Calhoun.
I found a quotation from the historical novelist Hillary Mantel that helped: ''Learn to tolerate strange worldviews. Don't pervert the values of the past. Women in former eras were downtrodden and frequently assented to it. Generally speaking, our ancestors were not tolerant, liberal or democratic. Your characters probably did not read The Guardian, and very likely believed in hellfire, beating children and hanging malefactors. Can you live with that?''
I could. My solution was to describe the forces that shaped Burnham within his historical context, while always keeping in mind that those forces had consequences for both good and ill, often simultaneously. I wrote an op-ed about this dilemma that might interest your readers: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162159.
*One of the benefits of knowing other writers is that you learn about books long before they come out. Of course, then you have to wait.
** In her own words: "It seems as though two tragedies and three wars were enough for any poor woman to bear."
Steve Kemper is also the author of A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles Through Islamic Africa and Code Name Ginger. He lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.
The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting: An Interview with Anne Trubek
Anne Trubek and I hang out in some of the same places online. Or perhaps more accurately, I lurk in some of the online places that Anne Trubek has created for people who are interested in writing about intelligent stuff for a non-academic audience. She is not only a creative writer, but an innovative creator of spaces in which writing, and talking about writing happens. When I saw that her new book appeared on the list of September books to review for Shelf Awareness for Readers, I was quick to put up my virtual hand and say "pick me!"
I was not disappointed. And I'm pleased to be able to offer you a chance to hear what Anne has to say about the book.
Before we get to the interview, a little bit about the book:
In The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, Anne Trubek explores the development of handwriting—physical and cultural—from clay tablets and cuneiform in ancient Mesopotamia to handwriting's role in the world of digital communication.
Trubek describes changes in the technology of handwriting. (Making a quill pen is more complicated than you may realize.) More importantly, she considers the political and social implications inherent in who learned to write, what they recorded, and the scripts they used. She traces the relatively late rise of the idea that a person's handwriting is a unique production, and ties the idea that handwriting is a reflection of personality to psuedosciences such as phrenology and eugenics.
Some of the most interesting sections of the book arise from the recurring fear the innovations in handwriting and technologies such as the printing press and the typewriter that threatened to replace it, would prove detrimental to the intellectual abilities of future generations would embraced them. Handwriting itself was the target of impassioned attacks by Socrates and his followers, who believed the written word would destroy not only the ability to remember but the ability to think complex thoughts.
Trubek never loses sight of the fact that handwriting is a controversial subject today. Throughout the book, she offers amusing and insightful comparisons between past and present, preparing the reader for a final discussion of the future of handwriting. The result is a light-handed and thoughtful account of a complicated subject.
And now, please welcome Anne Trubek:
You bracket your history of handwriting with the controversies that surround teaching handwriting today. Is that where the book began for you or did something else inspire you to write about handwriting?
Yes and no. I did start writing about handwriting when my son was in elementary school and his handwriting was causing him problems in school. But I was then also researching and writing about book history, so it synced with an area I was already working on. But most importantly I wanted this book to be for parents and educators who are confused and anxious about changes happening with writing—to give them a longer lens through which to view them, and to alley their fears.
One thing that fascinated me about your book was the way the function of handwriting as a marker of social status shifted over time. Can you tell us a something about the issues involved?
Isn’t that fascinating? One thing that I was interested in is that literacy levels fluctuate across time and cultures. It is astounding how few Egyptians learned to write--.3 percent according to some estimates. And in the 18th and early 19th century, some American women were taught to read but not to write.
Handwriting serves as a marker of social status because it reflects literacy rates, of course. But then there are more gradations. For most of Western history, the higher your status, the more likely you were not to write—you had people take dictation for you. In 19th century Britain, there rose an astounding number of different scripts that people used for specialized purposes—so if you wrote in one it would mark you as upper class, or as professional class, or as a woman.
Americans still have some ways of judging people’s status by their handwriting: consider the assumption you might make of someone whose handwriting is very large, neat, and rounded, with the I’s having circles above them instead of dots—do you think relatively uneducated woman, perhaps? Now compare that with someone whose handwriting is small but almost illegible—a male doctor or lawyer, perhaps?
You set your history of handwriting in the larger context of the history of what I guess I'd call "communication technology". (Is there a better term for this?) What innovation in the way we produce the written word most changed the nature and use of handwriting?
Wow what a great question! And tough to answer. Maybe papyrus? In Sumeria, people wrote on clay. In Greece and Rome, they wrote on clay as well (as well as stone), but they also imported Egyptian papyrus and the book grows out of that. More recently, the shift from quill pen to fountain pen (and then ball point) definitely sped things up! I should add here I’m only considering Western innovations.
You describe a number of different scripts with different purposes. Do you have a favorite?
I love uncials. And I love that it was all majuscule or upper-case letters. IT WAS LIKE THIS. (there weren’t spaces between words either so ITWASLIKETHIS. Then they invented half-uncials, which are all lower-case, or miniscule. And you never combined the two!
In the interest of giving equal time to both sides of the handwriting controversy: Do you have a favorite font?
I like myself a copperplate font. Also Courier. But I use Times New Roman. It’s incredible how dominant Times New Roman is now. I should have bought stock! In the early days of computers we used lots of different ones—it was more playful, really. Now you show yourself a rube if you use the “wrong” font.
While I've got you here, could I ask you to tell my readers about Belt Magazine?
You bet! Belt Publishing is both an online magazine that publishes independent journalism about the Rust Belt and a small press. We publish books about cities like Cleveland and Detroit, and publish articles about these places online as well. I founded it three years ago to give voice to an underrepresented, fascinating region.
Is there anything else you wish I had asked you about?
No-- I love your questions! Thanks so much for engaging with my book. It’s wonderful.
Anne Trubek is the founder and director of Belt Publishing. She is the author of The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting and A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Smithsonian, Slate, Salon, Belt and numerous other publications. A tenured professor at Oberlin College from 1997-2015, she currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio.
Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Know Nothing Party
A major political party divided against itself. Fear of profound social changes. A populist movement that feared America was in decline and looked for a leader that would make the country great again. Virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and fear that members of a "foreign" religious group are a threat to--well-- pretty much everything.* Sound familiar? Welcome to 1854 and the rise of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, more commonly known as the Know Nothing party.***
The Know Nothings tend to be overlooked in American history classes, largely because they are overshadowed by the events leading to the Civil War and partly because they represent an ugly side to the antebellum north that muddies the narrative. Located in the urbanized North with a membership base that was primarily working and middle class, the party had a "nativist" ideology: they were for white men born in the United States (preferably several generations previously) and against pretty much everyone else--particularly the Irish Catholics who flooded into the country following the potato famine of 1848. Long before Max Weber coined the phrase "Protestant work ethic", the Know Nothings believed that Protestantism was responsible for America's freedom and prosperity and that Catholics in particular and immigrants in general had corrupted the political system.***
Because they played little role in the sectarian divisions of the war, it is easy to brush them off as a minor movement, but their contemporaries saw their rise as a major political problem They were originally a fraternal order, complete with secret rites and vows of secrecy--think Masons with a bad attitude. By 1854, they had some 50,000 members in sixteen states. By the end of 1855, they had elected eight governors, more than 100 congressmen, mayors in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and thousands of local officials. Their influence did not survive the presidential election of 1856. Their candidate, Millard Fillmore (previously a member of the Whig party), took only one state and split the Whig/Republican votership, ensuring the election of the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan. By 1860, the Know Nothings had disappeared, taking the Whig party down with it.
* If you've spent any time here in the Margins, you may have noticed that one of the themes I return to from time to time is the fact that we** historically screw up on the question of immigration. In theory we say, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." In reality, large numbers of us say, "I'm on board the freedom ship, pull up the ladder so no one else can get on. Don't want it to get too crowded in here." We pass quotas. We put up signs saying "No Irish need apply." Now we rant about building walls. It really irks me that we keep going back to this poisoned well whenever people feel threatened by social, political and/or economic change. Rant over.
**And by we, I mean the United States. I know some of the Marginalia are from other parts of the world.
***Because they swore an oath when they joined that they would answer any questions about the order by saying "I know nothing."
****In all fairness, it was the height of Tammany Hall corruption, which in fact drew on New York City's immigrant base for its political clout. But Tammany Hall was able to do so because existing political blocs rejected immigrants. Chicken or egg?