Advertisement for Mary MacLane’s film Men Who Have Made Love to Me, 1918. Photo: Perfection Pictures / Essanay Film Manufacturing Company / George Kleine System. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

“I of Womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel.” Thus begins one of the most unusual books in our literature, by one of the most scandalous American writers.

When The Story of Mary MacLane was published by the prestigious Chicago firm of Herbert S. Stone and Company in April 1902, its author was skyrocketed to nationwide notoriety. The book was an immediate sensation. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and the fact that it was the work of a teenage girl—living in Butte, Montana, of all places—made the scandal complete. Every Associated Press affiliate in the country ran a front-page story on it. Here for the first time was a young woman’s “inner life shown in its nakedness”:

I have discovered for myself the art that lies in obscure shadows. I have discovered the art of the day of small things … I care neither for right nor for wrong? my conscience is nil. My brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility. I have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness … May I never become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity—a virtuous woman …

Respectable critics roared their disapproval. “Mary MacLane is mad,” wrote the New York Herald. “She should be put under medical treatment, and pens and paper kept out of her way until she is restored to reason.” The New York Times urged that she be spanked. Other critics raised the charge of “obscenity.” When the Butte Public Library announced that it would not allow the book on its shelves, the Helena Daily Independent applauded, arguing that if this book “should go in, all the self-respecting books in the library would jump out of the window.” Read More

When my grandmother died she owned no property, personal or real; no goods, durable or consumable. Personal property is also called movable property, personalty, movables, chattels (chattels first meant goods and money, and later came to be associated with a beast held in possession, livestock, cattle; chattel, as slaves, came into use in the seventeenth century), and under U.S. law can be further divided into tangibles and intangibles. Tangible property can be felt or touched and intangible property is immaterial. Personal effects are tangibles; debt and goodwill, intangibles. (And then there was paraphernalia, a specifically female version of personal effects: these are called her paraphernalia … the apparel and ornaments of the wife, which also included tableware and sometimes her bed.) Real property, with its echoes of real estate, realty, royalty, realm, kingdom, is immovable property, land and the structures on it. Durable goods, also known as hard goods, have a useful life of three or more years, and consumable goods, also known as soft goods, get used up or discarded; a further subset is known as perishables, goods prone to disintegration or decay. Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions. She didn’t leave a thing, save her body and that, of course, would be gone soon, too.

My grandmother was under my custodianship, a kind of power, although in daily practice she was under the care of the nurses and aides at the Sherwin Manor Nursing Home. Mine was the name they had on file, the responsible party. She died with no clothes, shoes, sleepwear, undergarments, accessories, eyeglasses, jewelry, toiletries, trinkets, talismans, keys, loose change, photos, birthday cards, collectibles, household goods, furniture, financial assets, or real estate.  She never owned a vehicle. She owned no artwork, although her husband, my grandfather, was an artist by trade, in the trades, a sign painter. (He scribbled dirty pictures on scraps of newspaper to amuse me while we did the crossword puzzle in the Chicago American.) There had been a wedding ring, removed before she went into the nursing home and then stored in a safe-deposit box; a heavy gold choker that sat on one’s neck like a snake, passed on to my mother and then to me but never worn; a small ruby ring, possibly a child’s, which I lost in a motel room. She died without anything to her name, a phrase that arguably has its origins in the ability to sign one’s name to a binding document, a right that many women were long denied. Civiliter mortuus, civil death.

I first came across the term civil death in the landmark 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, articulated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other early feminists, who argued that the twin institutions of marriage and patriarchy had rendered women, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. Civiliter mortuus: civil death. To be civilly dead is to lose the rights of citizenship through imprisonment or banishment. To lose the right, among other rights, to property and wages. Civil death had its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where it was known as atimia (dishonor) and infamia (infamy), respectively. It was a form of collective forgetting that forced the infamous, the disregarded, to disappear from the polity. Had I, as her default caretaker, rendered my grandmother civilly dead? Read More

Collage by A. E. McClure/ Yearbook photo courtesy of the Department of College Archives and Special Collections Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.

Twenty-year-old Fred Rogers did not like Dartmouth College. The Ivy was a “beer-soaked, jockstrap party school,” as Maxwell King, Rogers’s recent biographer, puts it. Dartmouth also didn’t have a music major. But Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida, did, plus a reputation as “the only New England college not located in New England.” In 1948, after two years at Dartmouth, Rogers transferred to Rollins and minored in French. “Bold move,” King summed on a phone call. Rogers had been a timid and sickly boy, overprotected. The switchover was “an instance of daring.” “And I think Rollins was the first place where Rogers really felt happy,” King told me. He’d once explained: “I just felt so much at home there.”

When I attended Rollins, sixty years after Rogers, his oil portrait hung in the concert hall, and a blue zip-front cardigan and signed canvas sneakers were encased at the library, like relics. We used to joke that a Rogers endowment bankrolled the landscapers—a huge, omnipresent force who cared for our subtropical surroundings—and frat boys boosted the urban legend that the children’s-TV host was an ex-Marine sniper.

Today, I’d shred those boys for wanting to bend the nonsmoking, teetotaling, vegetarian, pacifist mensch into a macho. Of course, Mister Rogers would not favor incivility. Mister Rogers would talk me out of it, slowly and softly. “He had this amazing ability to look into people and see past the adult façade that we present, and take a really direct look at the aching kid that’s within all of us—and to decide what that kid needed,” said the journalist Tom Junod, whose 1998 Esquire profile is the basis of the recently released A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, starring Tom Hanks.

The director Marielle Heller waited almost a full calendar, until Hanks’s schedule opened up, to make it happen. “Tom was my first and only choice,” she told me. Hanks was Rogers’s favorite actor, perhaps because of his roles as the man-child in Big and the gentleman in Forrest Gump. Hanks has also been the playful cowboy in the Toy Story franchise and the boyish boss in Saving Mr. Banks. All these characters are renditions of Fred Rogers’s idée fixe that not only does the kid remain in every grown-up, a grown-up is coming of age in every kid, and that our humanity depends on keeping them conversant.

The last two years have seen a Mister Rogers boom: a documentary (the highest-grossing bio-doc ever), two biographies (Shea Tuttle’s theologically driven Exactly As You Are dropped in October), and this boffo film. But his undergraduate experience, that searching, shaping time between childhood and adulthood, has hardly been considered. In this peak Rogers moment, as a fellow alum, I had to ask: what was Fred Rogers like in college?

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