Celia Morris Eckhardt reads from and discusses the book "Fanny Wright: Rebel in America"

Studs Terkel The traditional history books tell us something about what happened way back then. We know about presidents, about industrialists, about generals. We know a good deal. We know about some women in American history, but not about all, I mean those who molded changes in our lives. One woman, perhaps most exciting visitor the United States may have ever had, was Fanny Wright. I know the name is new to a great many people. Fanny Wright finally has a biographer: Celia Morris Eckhardt, my guest, and it's called "Fanny Wright: Rebel in America", published by the University, Harvard University Press. And we begin talking about -- Celia, I know you from, you've been involved in Texas life very much, and Willy Morris, Bob Eckhardt, former congressman. But you the writer, we're talking about you the writer, what attract-- first of all, who was Fanny Wright and how'd you first hear

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well, the first time I heard about Fanny, Studs, was from a friend of mine, a very dear man called John Edgerton, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, called when I was living in New York, and he was writing a book for the University of Tennessee Press on three 19th-century communes in that state, and one of them was Nashoba outside Memphis, and he called me in New York and he said, "I've just run across the most dazzling woman, and her name is Fanny Wright." And John asked me to do some research for him tracking down her descendants. She had two great-granddaughters who, one of whom lived outside New York.

Studs Terkel Where Fanny lived when?

Celia Morris Eckhardt Uh, 1795 to 1852. So these -- John had reason to believe that she had two very old great-granddaughters who were still living, and I can't remember exactly how I got to this stage, but my first little piece of research involved a tryst at St. John the Divine Cathedral with a man who said on the telephone "I'll meet you in the right bay and I'll be in long white," and he was a man who had been the Episcopal rector of St. Mark's in the Bowery succeeding Fanny's grandson, William Norman Guthrie, and he told me stories mainly about how extravagant Guthrie was. I think Fanny would have been quite startled at the very least to discover that one of her grandsons in fact turned out, both of them were ministers of the Episcopalian church, because she was essentially an 18th-century rationalist. But William Norman Guthrie clearly had inherited from his grandmother, he was flamboyant and dramatic and he had strobe lights in his church, and he invited people like Isadora Duncan to dance in it in the '30s, and he had spent a fantastic amount of money and this man complained about how long it took to get the church back into the black again. But I traced down these great-granddaughters and who were then slightly dotty old ladies

Studs Terkel So now we come to

Celia Morris Eckhardt And rather shocked by their great-grandmother.

Studs Terkel Shocked by it because Fanny Wright shocked the United States.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right.

Studs Terkel She came here, she came from Scotland with some dough, inherited some money, came with it, said "No, begin [there?]," and what she did here, speaking, lecturing, setting up communes, meeting Jefferson, Madison, all -- Lafayette, of course.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well, the extraordinary thing I think -- there were several extraordinary things behind Fanny Wright, but one of them had to do with the fact that she didn't come to this country until 1818 when she was 23, and she had therefore a perspective that no native-born man or woman was likely to find. She had been born in Scotland in 1795 and she became an orphan when she was two and a half, which is a devastating experience, which did of course scar her all her life, it was responsible for some of her strengths and some of her weaknesses. But she was then brought up in England by a Tory, a Tory aunt and her grandfather, and she rebelled very early against that effect -- in effect the Jane Austen world that she was brought up in. She was brought up to be a lady, but instead of being a lady, she read Byron and studied mathematics and became a considerable scholar of Epicurus, for example. She was very well-read in classical literature and of the romantic literature over time.

Studs Terkel For the moment she reminds me and some listeners very much of a contemporary of hers, who was here, Margaret Fuller.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right. Right.

Studs Terkel But she's even more

Celia Morris Eckhardt She's more political much earlier than Margaret Fuller. Margaret Fuller died earlier than Fanny. She died as I recall just as she was 40, and she had gone to Italy you'll recall in the last few years of her life and got involved in the Italian revolution, but Fanny discovered the United States of America when she was 16 or 17 in a book. And she then became dedicated to the ideals of a republic.

Studs Terkel So she became, she came, she found U.S. as the salvation.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Yes. She really thought, as I said she was in rebellion against the Tory -- her Tory surroundings in Devonshire, and she discovered in this book by Carlo Botta on the revolution that there was something like a republic that existed, and unlike any American of the time, she really took Thomas Jefferson literally when he said "All men are created equal." Americans of her time would presumably know not to take him literally. They would know that Thomas Jefferson did not mean to include Blacks. He did not mean to include women in this grand statement, but Fanny thought that "men" meant women as well. And this became a great -- not only ideal, but as you suggested before, possibility of salvation for her. So when she came here in 1818 when she was 23, she had very grand notions of what life here could be, and she was determined eventually in her life to see if she could help.

Studs Terkel Now, there was another visitor here who was often called upon, de Tocqueville's "America [sic - "Democracy in America"]", that he saw something happening here. Now, she found things, [the rumor is?], de Tocqueville never found.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right. De Tocqueville was very theoretical. So in many ways of course was Fanny. She was the child of the British and Scots' enlightenment and in an America which was becoming increasingly committed to evangelical Protestantism, that was to cause her very serious problems. But it was also, it was also a strength. But de Tocqueville came here with the idea that this was a republic. It was a democracy. It was -- in it people were equal. And he continued apparently to believe that. He didn't look as hard as Fanny did. But Fanny you remember, she came here in 1818 and stayed for a year and a half. She came back in 1824 and stayed until 1830, and then she spent at least ten or fifteen years here in the rest of her lifetime and she paid a great deal of attention. Unlike most of the European visitors, however impressive, Harriet Martineau by the way wrote beautifully about America, and so did so did Frances Trollope, who came with Fanny Wright

Studs Terkel Now, Trollope was a

Celia Morris Eckhardt -- In quite a different way.

Studs Terkel Frances Trollope was a strong critic, too, pretty rough on American customs and

Celia Morris Eckhardt But you know Mark Twain called her "a capital truth-teller." Americans didn't like to be, to be criticized, and Fanny Trollope was an

Studs Terkel But Trollope, Mrs. Trollope came here because of Fanny Wright.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right. She came with Fanny Wright.

Studs Terkel So Fanny Wright

Celia Morris Eckhardt But you see, but I didn't ever quite finish what you asked me about de Tocqueville. He wrote as though this were in fact the, a place where people lived as equals, but Fanny -- Fanny saw that this was by no means true. That money was concentrated, and it was becoming more concentrated, and that people lived in, though not in the kind of hovels of wretchedness that she had seen in England, they still lived in great poverty in important parts of the United States, and she was subsequently involved in the beginnings of the labor movement in New York. I mean, she really got out on the line and she was the first woman to really be involved politically in public.

Studs Terkel [She, even though it?] was a working man's party, that's, but before that, she immediately attacked slavery, did she not?

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's

Studs Terkel But how she came here, as she was several visits here, that she was feted when she first came, she came with Lafayette, who of course

Celia Morris Eckhardt No. No.

Studs Terkel Didn't

Celia Morris Eckhardt She, the first time she came with her sister just to see what the republic was like. And she stayed for a year and a half, and then she wrote this book called "Views of Manners and Society in America [sic - "Views of Society and Manners in America"]", and went back to England where it was published by Longman's in 1920 -- 1820, and that's the book that caught Lafayette's attention, and it caught Jeremy Bentham's as well. It made her celebrated in the circles of European radicalism.

Studs Terkel In that book, you just quoted from that "Views of Society and Manners in America" when she first came, "Alas for the morals of a country when female dignity is confounded with helplessness, and the guardianship of a woman's virtue transferred from herself to others." And so immediately she challenged the pedestal idea, didn't she?

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's, that's very, very true.

Studs Terkel So Lafayette was caught by this.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well, both he and Bentham were people who had staked

Studs Terkel -- Jeremy

Celia Morris Eckhardt A good deal of their reputation on the possibility of republican forms of government as opposed to aristocracy. And so they, they took Fanny up as, as part of their cause. Also of course, she was attacked by the Tory press very bitterly. And it behooved them to be her protectors, and so she went as you can imagine very eagerly to these absolutely fascinating and two of the most important men of her time.

Studs Terkel Jeremy Bentham who was a spokesman and of course philosopher, the working men at the time, things were happening in England, you know during the Industrial Revolution, organization of guilds and crafts and unions. And he was involved with

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well, he was very much opposed to the idea that institutions are necessarily good because they are old and have survived. He wanted to apply rational criterion to evaluate them.

Studs Terkel And so he was a booster of

Celia Morris Eckhardt Wonderfully eccentric man, Studs.

Studs Terkel Lafayette was, and Lafayette of course was beloved here.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right. Right.

Studs Terkel For his work and so

Celia Morris Eckhardt He was much more a hero in America than

Studs Terkel So though she came as a VIP with him, she immediately got in trouble, was challenging authority.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right. That's right.

Studs Terkel And so slavery.

Celia Morris Eckhardt So she came back with him in 1824, and this is when he had his last and very celebrated tour, he was -- fete. He was the subject of all these festivals and, I mean, people came out and shot fireworks and gave banquets that must have tried anybody's patience and stomach, too. And she stayed with that as long as she could. I think she really tired of it after a while. And she did, she did was discovering that Lafayette, her republican hero was susceptible to this sort of flattery of, you know, he was treated as not only a hero but almost a God. And in the process of all this, she became more and more and more obsessed with slavery. She had of course recognized the anomaly of slavery being in a republic when she was here the first time, and she wrote about that. But when she came back the second time, it affected her more and more, and she realized that she needed to do something about it. So she became actually the first woman in America publicly to oppose slavery.

Studs Terkel She's -- the first when she spoke out lect-- of course, her lectures later on were drawing tremendous crowds.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right.

Studs Terkel Let's come back to -- several things were happening, we'll take, after this pause we'll resume with her slavery and also the commune she saw, the connecting the two themes, because Robert Owen also.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Oh,

Studs Terkel She knew about him and the new, the colonies that were following the

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right.

Studs Terkel The utopian kind of communes and she connected that with

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right.

Studs Terkel Liberation of Blacks as well as whites. So we'll resume with Celia Morris Eckhardt, her book. By the way, it's a, it's a heady book, I mean it has been getting some rave reviews, and it reads like a house afire. It's called "Fanny Wright: Rebel in America", and Harvard University Press publish it, and after this message we're back with Fanny Wright again. [pause in recording] So we resume with Celia Eckhardt, Fanny Wright. Now, here she is. Here she is in the United States, there's slavery, she's talking against it and making enemies by the carload, challenging

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well, at first when she was with Lafayette, she didn't say anything about it. And in the first time she came to America, the closest she got to slave country was Washington. And I think she -- I have the impression from her book that perhaps she drove out in a carriage one day to Virginia, and some people showed her how slaves lived, and, and that was very troubling, but she had not --it was still basically theoretical to her. On this trip, by the time she'd been here about six months she was determined to see what slavery was really like. Despite all her friends who wanted her to avoid it, she decided that she wanted to write an article for Bentham's "Westminster Review" and she would go all the way down to New Orleans, and in the process of doing that would stop and see slaves, and she saw a slave ship with people manacled in the, a Virginia port. As she traveled down the Mississippi, slavery became more

Studs Terkel Isn't that funny? She preceded Lincoln on that trip, I mean something Lincoln did later on.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Oh, yeah.

Studs Terkel Almost the identical trip going down the Mississippi on the raft, New Orleans the auction block. Fanny Wright saw this a couple of generations before.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right. Well, I was just in New Harmony, Indiana, which was as you know the town Robert Owen bought in 1825 for $125,000, it's rather wonderful to think of buying a town for that kind of money. And they tell stories there about that's being the part of the country where Lincoln ferried people across the Ohio.

Studs Terkel Well, now that you mentioned Robert Owen now, see

Celia Morris Eckhardt It's important

Studs Terkel So now she saw slavery

Celia Morris Eckhardt About her in relation

Studs Terkel -- And now she's going to challenge it. And now we come to the other part of it

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well

Studs Terkel Robert Owen was, was what? He was a Scottish [sic - Welsh]

Celia Morris Eckhardt Textile manufacturer who

Studs Terkel Who was very

Celia Morris Eckhardt A Welshman who made himself a great fortune in New Lanark in Scotland, when he was very young. Before he was 25. But he was blessedly not willing to be somebody who merely made money. He decided that he needed to figure out how to improve the world, and he unlike any I think of his rich merchant peers in in Scotland, said that -- some marvelous phrase which means in effect, to hell with cotton. If the -- if it is purchased, if the wealth that's being made in the textile mills of Scotland and England are purchased with the misery of the working classes who were, who were brought in to live really terrible lives in those mills, and so Robert Owen had worked very hard to try to persuade his, his peers to pass legislation that would improve the conditions under which people worked. But the legislation got awfully watered down by the time it passed Parliament, and he decided that what he wanted to do was was try a communitarian experiment, and that he thought America was the place to do it. So he bought this town, New Harmony. It was

Studs Terkel -- Indiana.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Called Harmony, Indiana, and it had been built in ten years by a German Pietistic sect called the Rappites, or Harmonists, and its

Studs Terkel George Rapp being their leader.

Celia Morris Eckhardt He was their charismatic leader. They had come from Wurttemberg, and were amazingly successful. And this town is crucial in Fanny's history, because when she saw it first, it was during the period when there was of transition, there were something like 500 of Rapp's people who were still working there, and Robert Owen had not yet come. He'd bought it, but his experiment hadn't finished, and she, she saw what people working in a communal situation could do. I mean, they had built two churches, five or six three-storey brick buildings where people lived, any number of houses, twenty or thirty houses, brickyards, tanyards, coopers' houses. It's a fascinating place, and if you haven't been there, you should go. And they did this in only ten years. And Fanny looked at that

Studs Terkel -- This

Celia Morris Eckhardt This is, these are the Rappites. They had built this town

Studs Terkel -- These are the predecessors of Owen in New Harmony.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right. That's right.

Studs Terkel This

Celia Morris Eckhardt This is the town Robert Owen bought. Now, Fanny wanted to do an experiment that was going to be very much more like Robert Owen's, it was going to be secular.

Studs Terkel Yeah. By the way, just describe, there's as a little difference between the Rappites and Owen's people.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Oh, very much

Studs Terkel The Rappites were celibate and rather spartan in their life.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well, it was this primitive Christianity, too. And they were -- the great leader was George Rapp.

Studs Terkel Now,

Celia Morris Eckhardt And Fanny underestimated the power that he had over these people because of their religious faith and religious commitment, and

Studs Terkel As she was always, she was something of a skeptic as far as organized religion was concerned.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Yeah. Right. As Katherine Anne Porter said of the venerable Thomas Hardy, "The worm of original sin was lodged in her [sic - his] mind of all fatal places," and it took her out of the tradition of Orthodoxy into a tradition of equal dignity, equal seriousness, and equal antiq-- the great tradition of dissent.

Studs Terkel Now, what was Robert Owen's approach in contrast to the

Celia Morris Eckhardt He was also a skeptic, though at this time a much more outspoken one than Fanny, and he wanted to build what is -- what could be called a communitarian socialist experiment, essentially secular, in which people would come and they would cooperate and work together and provide a model for a new moral world. Neither one of them believed that the commercial instinct was a reliable instinct on which to build a just and a generous society. So Fanny got this picture of what people could do working together from the Rappites, the early people who built harmony. She got from Robert Owen the idea that the same kind of thing would be popular in a secular -- possible in a secular situation. And then she was focused on slavery and she got a man, a fascinating, wonderful man called George Flower who was also an Englishman but had emigrated ten years earlier to the Illinois frontier, and had been on the winning side of a very tough battle against forces that wanted to make Illinois into a slave state, and he eventually agreed to go down with her and establish this commune that she -- on land she bought outside Memphis. I'm anticipating somewhat, but why not? She had She bought this

Studs Terkel -- She bought this land

Celia Morris Eckhardt She had enough money to do basically what she, what she wanted.

Studs Terkel So she wanted to establish a certain society, a commune.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right.

Studs Terkel Modeled after New Harmony, but Black and white together! This is in slave time, we're talking about slavery now.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right. That's right.

Studs Terkel Go

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well now, there are several different stages to all this of course. Fanny's life changed in important ways. The first stage of Nashoba was an attempt

Studs Terkel Pardon me, it was called

Celia Morris Eckhardt Nashoba, excuse me.

Studs Terkel The commune. Okay.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Which is the Chickasaw word for the Little Wolf River that ran outside her land, and she wanted to show there, discover there and then to demonstrate how slaves could be responsibly educated and freed, and in the same way that Robert Owen's' New Harmony was to be a model for a free society, this was to be a model for how you end slavery, and she and George Flower thought that if you gave slaves the -- you see, these Rappites had not been particularly educated people, and she thought that slaves could do the same kinds of things that the Rappites had done, and even more, because she thought if you, if you gave them the possibility of their freedom that they would work all the harder. You know, the stories of how lazy slaves were were rampant at her -- during her time, and obviously people were trying to undermine Black slaves, were undermining their plantations and all that. Harriet Martineau said that she never saw -- she saw only one clean room in slave country. But -- and that's all very, very understandable, and Fanny thought, "All right. But people would work hard if they were working for their freedom," and she and Flower made some elaborate calculations, and on the basis of those they figured that if -- that a slave could work his way and her way to freedom in about five years. She didn't think that it was practical to try simply to say to Southern slave owners, "Slavery is immoral and you have to end it." She thought that was foolish. She thought the North couldn't tell the South that they should give up their property. So she wanted to find some way to end slavery that wouldn't mean the loss of the property from the slave owners, and therefore that people could copy, so they had this idea that they would set up this, this commune and it could be replicated and there would be several established in various different states. And the slaves would work their way to freedom, this floating capital that then was being invested in Latin America and things like that would be invested in these, in these communes and all kinds of problems would be solved at once. Well, it didn't work, for reasons not altogether having to do with the inadequacy of the plan. They really didn't have much chance to, to

Studs Terkel She was also shrewd enough to recognize people would not give things, give up property, as they called slaves, slaves were indeed, the ways of buying them. Some way or another, you know.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right.

Studs Terkel And then she had the idea of the Blacks and poor whites too, working together at Nashoba, was that it?

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well, she was down there working with the slaves. I mean, all the people who were involved in Nashoba

Studs Terkel -- What happened in Nashoba? Now, they got a number of families

Celia Morris Eckhardt The things that -- part of what happened was that Fanny got very seriously ill. I mean, there were several months in which this looked quite promising, and of course the records are very sketchy and it's hard to reconstruct exactly what happened. George Flower left to go back to Illinois, and his loss was a very serious loss, and it remains unexplained, though I have some speculation in my book about why that happened, but Fanny got very ill, and she decided that you know, that was a time when doctors were so frightening that the best way to stay healthy or stay healthier was to stay away from doctors. And so she decided that the thing to do was to go back to Europe for her, for her health.

Studs Terkel Well, in the meantime, by the way, this experiment of hers was of course being ridiculed put down wherever people heard of it by the press

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well, around -- there was, there was a fair amount of sympathy and things like the "Genius of Universal Emancipation", which was a newspaper Benjamin Lundy published, but obviously there was not very much public sympathy for this sort of thing, and from everything I've been able to tell, the planters outside and around Memphis did what they could to hinder them. But it was promising for a while. And then, do you know this was a time when there were plagues. I mean, mosquitoes. She got very, very dangerously ill, and so she left her sister and a man called James Richardson at Nashoba, and she and Robert Owen's oldest son Robert Dale Owen went for several months in Europe, and while they were gone James Richardson published in the "Genius of Universal Emancipation" a log he kept of Nashoba business, and at the end of the excerpt he included, and Lundy published, he announced that he had begun to live with a quadroon woman called Josephine Provo.

Studs Terkel And that was the [scandal?], of course that took over all the headlines.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's, that took, that was in some way the end. That was a bare-faced admission, exulting admission of both quote "free love," which was terrifying to people in that

Studs Terkel -- And

Celia Morris Eckhardt And miscegenation.

Studs Terkel That cast came the headline that demolished everything else that was happening.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That virtually demolished

Studs Terkel Was there a chance of it working out? This of course in the meantime Fanny Wright, we have to point out, knew the powers, too. She visited James Madison. She knew Jefferson, Jackson but whom she overrated

Celia Morris Eckhardt -- Jackson in fact had been helped, had helped her find the land.

Studs Terkel But that's a funny thing, because Jackson we know was anti-Black to the extent, that is, he was, she o-- you indicate later on that she overrated him.

Celia Morris Eckhardt I

Studs Terkel As a humanist, which he was not, of course.

Celia Morris Eckhardt No, no. She, she learned the hard way about Jackson.

Studs Terkel But coming back to Madison, though, and who was a friend of hers, and Jefferson, Madison had doubts

Celia Morris Eckhardt Jefferson more so than

Studs Terkel They had doubts that this would work, and they were telling, they offering

Celia Morris Eckhardt Jefferson warned her about some of the serious problems she might encounter, but it was clear that if she was going to do it she couldn't listen to Madison, because she would simply abandon it. And it was, it was very much worth trying and you know in a situation like this, there's no way to tell. Could it have worked? Well, I think it makes a whole lot better sense than the Civil War.

Studs Terkel But this is Fanny Wright, you sound like Fanny Wright now.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Yeah.

Studs Terkel And she was, now she's getting known, too, as this troublemaker, as this visionary, and now they are associating her with free love as well and being antireligious as well. She's getting

Celia Morris Eckhardt And so of course you know what she did, is she decided to be very straight about it, and when she found out that Richardson had done that, she canceled what remained of her European plans and on the ship coming back, and this is when Frances Trollope came with her, she wrote what she called her explanatory notes on Nashoba, and Fanny believed that it was it was rude to be unclear, and so she was not at all unclear. She said, she said that if Black and white people were brought up together as equals, they would be equal. She said that possibly miscegenation might be an answer to the race problem in America.

Studs Terkel Now, we're talking about what year?

Celia Morris Eckhardt We're talking about 1827, Studs. She said that since marriage imposed constraints on women that seriously limited their humanity, that marriage would have no force as an institution at Nashoba, she said she cast some doubts on the efficacy of religion and said it would have no place. And I would imagine that there were very few people other than Fanny Wright who didn't understand the kind of reaction that she would get

Studs Terkel Well, listen to this. This is again from that same work, Fanny

Celia Morris Eckhardt Eighteen twenty-seven.

Studs Terkel Twenty-seven, on page 156 of

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right. That's exactly

Studs Terkel -- Of Celia Eckhardt's book. "It was a curious" -- why don't you, "It's a curious truth," why don't you read that?

Celia Morris Eckhardt "It was a curious truth that necessary work was held in disrepute while society rewarded jobs the least useful, nay frequently the most decidedly mischievous. The husbandman who supports us by the fruits of his labor, the artisan to whom we owe all the comforts and conveniences of life, are banished from what is termed intellectual society and too often condemned to the most severe physical privations and the grossest mental ignorance, while a soldier who lives by our crimes, the lawyer by our quarrels and our rapacity, and the priest by our credulity and our hypocrisy are honored with public consideration and applause." That's pretty heady stuff, isn't it, Studs?

Studs Terkel Heady stuff.

Celia Morris Eckhardt And then she goes on to say that people were "virtuous in proportion as they are happy, and happy in proportion as they are free," which of course flies against the religious invocation of the terrors and damnations of hell.

Studs Terkel Now, it's interesting, she is hardly quoted, de Tocqueville is always used as the [guy? guide?], de Tocqueville saw things quite frankly superficially if you look at it now. He saw things going nice, and he saw the power of everything working out pretty well, he did hear, he did comment on money being the prime subject of discussion.

Celia Morris Eckhardt And he was concerned about that.

Studs Terkel [Less concerned about?], but Fanny Wright dug into, much, much, much deeper than de Tocqueville did.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's

Studs Terkel So now she got

Celia Morris Eckhardt -- It was of course you know Studs, her in effect endorsement of miscegenation which got her

Studs Terkel And that became

Celia Morris Eckhardt -- Subsequently into the most

Studs Terkel I'm talking about the other

Celia Morris Eckhardt -- Public trouble.

Studs Terkel Stuff she was talking about now that is buried. The observations she was making, and suppose we take a break now, come back to chapter 3 of this conversation about Fanny Wright, she was involved in so many things, Pestalozzi and technique of education with the Scottish enlightened rich man William Maclure, and she was involved in all aspects of a better society here in this godlike land.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right.

Studs Terkel The United States.

Celia Morris Eckhardt She fought for it very hard.

Studs Terkel So we come to -- the book, by the way, the book is "Fanny Wright: Rebel in America", by my guest Celia Morris Eckhardt, and Harvard University Press the publishers. We'll resume after this message. [pause in recording] Resuming with Celia Eckhardt and her biography of Fanny Wright, rebel -- that's putting it mildly, in America. Mrs. Trollope, of whom references are often made, who saw things somewhat jaundicedly here, too, spoke of Fanny Wright on that boat coming back for the third trip, talking to a sailor, and she's the most exciting conversation she'd ever heard. And she was painting what,

Celia Morris Eckhardt a Well, I think Mrs. Trollope was really quite shocked that Fanny would actually sit apparently on a coiled rope and read to this sailor her, what became her notes on Nashoba, and Mrs. Trollope, you see, for all her delightfulness was a proper Victorian, early Victorian lady, and the idea of talking to someone of a different social class as though they were equals was shocking to her.

Studs Terkel So 1820, 1827, Fanny Wright defies every convention. She didn't miss a bet.

Celia Morris Eckhardt She didn't miss a single one.

Studs Terkel Challenging slavery, in fact talking of miscegenation, talking of

Celia Morris Eckhardt Marriage.

Studs Terkel Those

Celia Morris Eckhardt Religion.

Studs Terkel Marriage, questioning organized religion, challenging those who make a lot of dough as worthless, you know, far more valuable those who make a little doing the more necessary work, doing everything. So we come to education, now her thoughts about education. Who is William Maclure? He figures

Celia Morris Eckhardt He was, he was a remarkable Scotsman. It's, it's fun to go back to this period and read about these eccentric millionaires who came and Maclure was a very radical man. He was erratically educated and had wonderful ideas and pungency about expressing them, and he believed that only the people who were workers could make the society of the future. But he was an inveterate benefactor nevertheless, and so he kept spending his money to try to encourage experiments in education or whatever that would live, lead to a world more equal than the world in which he found himself. He's a very attractive man, and he thought Fanny Wright was terrific, and in fact he wrote several wills and in two or three of the wills she was one of the beneficiaries of the will, and he wanted her to come to New Harmony, which he joined with Robert Owen, to help run the educational society there. It's the respect that Fanny elicited from people like Robert Owen and William Maclure and Lafayette that in addition to her writings make us understand how powerful she was, and how impressive.

Studs Terkel And had this belief in education. She wanted universal

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right.

Studs Terkel Full of, because she feared ignorance, she called ignorance evil.

Celia Morris Eckhardt "A diabolical evil."

Studs Terkel Yeah. "Diabolical evil." So throughout there was this drive, now she had one big flaw in character, right? Now with, not so much the messianic drive, she had that, too. But

Celia Morris Eckhardt If she hadn't had that, she wouldn't have done anything.

Studs Terkel But she could not tolerate any disagreement.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's somewhat of an exaggeration, I think. She -- her, her tolerance for disagreement was limited, and I think she felt that eventually if she explained clearly enough, she would persuade somebody that her way was best and proper. And she was willing for a long period of time to keep explaining, but then you see, Studs, when she went onto the platform actually after this "Notes on Nashoba" was published, and she became a public speaker, the first woman in public really to speak in America ten years before the Grimke sisters, who are ordinarily credited with that. And without the sanction of the church, which they had, she was subject to such ridicule and such abuse for preaching what for the most part were ideas very much in accord with Thomas Jefferson and the 18th century underpinnings of American society. But the idea that this would come from a woman was unacceptable to the editors, to preachers, and she was ridiculed. One of the terms she was called was "the red harlot of infidelity," infidelity at that time didn't mean sexual unfaithfulness, it meant disbelief in organized religion, and one of my first pieces of research on the book had to do with sitting one long afternoon in the New York Historical Society reading a newspaper called the New York "Commercial Advertiser", edited by a man called William Leete Stone, and at the end of this afternoon, the librarian said, "Lady, what's wrong with you?" And I must have looked ashen, because I said "I've just read the most vicious attack I've ever read on anybody. And that remains still to be the case." She -- let me see if I can find -- listen to one of the things he eventually said about her: "It is time we should have done with Miss Wright. Her pestilent doctrines and her deluded followers who are as much to be pitied as their priestess is to be despised. She comes amongst us in the character of a bold blasphemer and a voluptuous preacher of licentiousness, [unintelligible whisper], casting off all restraint, she would break down all the barriers to virtue and reduce the world to one grand theater of vice and sensuality in its most loathsome form. No rebuff can palsy her, no insult can agitate her feelings, it is iron equally in her head and heart, impervious to the voice of virtue and case-hardened against shame." And this was a very impressive woman and a very well, well-educated and splendid woman.

Studs Terkel Well, you realize that he could very well have burned her as a witch. In a way, he's describing her as a witch.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right. That's right. And I think the hysteria that she inspired, that was channeled through men like Stone is in some ways comparable to the Salem witch trials. There it becomes a hysteria in which she is treated as no man or woman ever was, as a kind of priestess.

Studs Terkel At the same time, yeah, [you were a?] priestess so, it has a Druidic witch-like respect. So we come to the other aspect, was she drawing big crowds?

Celia Morris Eckhardt Oh, very, very big crowds. In 1829 and 1830, which was the most creative of the periods of her life when she was working with Robert Dale Owen and they were publishing the "Free Enquirer", this weekly radical newspaper out of New York, she was drawing two and three thousand people. And you know, Fanny was almost six feet tall, and she had a voice so strong that she could be heard without microphone at the back of the hall without all these fancy modern acoustics, you know, with that many people in it. And those were the numbers of people who were coming to hear her. In 1837 and 1838, when she came back to America and was more even more brutally treated, she caused what was really a full-fledged riot in the streets of New York. In one of her lectures, 10,000 people apparently were in the streets, and the whole New York police force was called

Studs Terkel Let's stay with this, this is interesting, 'cause something was going on here. See, often we hear of the hysteria and the anti-feminist, anti-Fanny Wright feeling in the press and, there was a tremendous following she had too, so

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right.

Studs Terkel There were two strains in American society at that time, wasn't there?

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right. And what I would like to say by the way that one of the groups that supported her were the Quakers, and Quaker women would go on the platform with her when she spoke, sometimes as many as 40, and I tried terribly hard to find some kind of record from a Quaker woman of how she felt, and you know, couldn't ever. Couldn't ever do that. But there are newspaper accounts that say that this was true, and so Fanny being involved with Robert Dale Owen in the beginnings of the labor movement, I mean these people were very excited with these -- that the reawakening of these ideals of republicanism and the beginnings of some effort toward solidarity among working people. Walt Whitman was a young boy of ten or twelve and his father was a carpenter in Brooklyn then, and he took Walt Whitman to hear Fanny Wright, and in old age Walt Whitman remembered how tremendously exciting it was to hear her. So it was, she was the focal point of a very important movement. It was fragile then, and it was pretty quickly destroyed, and the destruction of Fanny Wright was part of the way they did that, you know, by the humiliation with which she was treated, the horrible way the press and the public

Studs Terkel dealt This

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right.

Studs Terkel I mean

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right.

Studs Terkel I'm asking you, Celia Eckhardt, now why you undertook this book, and it's astonishing there's been no other biography of

Celia Morris Eckhardt No, there have been two. But one was published in 1924 as a, it was a doctoral dissertation, and one in 1939, and nothing since then.

Studs Terkel But

Celia Morris Eckhardt Of any

Studs Terkel Thinking about how the -- putting down Fanny Wright. She had to be put down. Woman, but anti-slavery 'way back. Talking about more than educating Blacks and whites.

Celia Morris Eckhardt And she really believed that Blacks were equal to whites.

Studs Terkel That -- oh

Celia Morris Eckhardt She really believed

Studs Terkel Beyond Lincoln and Jefferson and the others

Celia Morris Eckhardt Oh, very definitely.

Studs Terkel Beyond that.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Very definitely. She believed that if they were educated as equals, they would be equal.

Studs Terkel Plus her thoughts about the classes, class role here.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That workers were at least as important and probably more so as anybody else.

Studs Terkel Plus challenging organized religion, plus a whole new approach to education. Plus a new kind of freedom. So, Fanny Wright. And

Celia Morris Eckhardt --- She

Studs Terkel So what was happening here were riots and when she, when latter days of her lectures before she went back to Europe, destroyed [practically?], before that there were tumultuous events happened. She was always surrounded by tumult, wasn't she?

Celia Morris Eckhardt Right. And she liked some of that, you know, Studs. She'd never admitted it, but she really enjoyed her hours on the stage, and I think she always wanted to go back to them and it was one of the great tragedies of her life that she came at a time in American history when evangelical religion was so powerful and becoming so much more powerful that they really had the ability to destroy her as a public

Studs Terkel force. At the time of the Awakening, the Great Awakening. And she, she flew right into the eye of the storm, didn't she?

Celia Morris Eckhardt That's right.

Studs Terkel Immediately so. We're talking about Fanny Wright, this remarkable figure, "Rebel in America" is the subtitle of the book, and my guest is Celia Morris Eckhardt, Harvard University the press, but it reads like a house afire. And let's after this one more message we'll resume for the last part of Fanny Wright's life and whatever her legacy may be today. [pause in recording] Resuming with Celia Eckhardt and Fanny Wright, and so

Celia Morris Eckhardt Her legacy

Studs Terkel [Unintelligible] was happening.

Celia Morris Eckhardt That

Studs Terkel And before that, toward the end, now the opposition to her was pretty well solidified. And now that you say they also were humiliating her, so was now, was now mockery? Mockery was now part of it.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Her last years in as a public figure in America were so -- she was finally just left. She was treated as a, as a mere curiosity. And then they became indifferent to her. They just sort of let her drop, and they took up the next, the next

Studs Terkel [Kid of the moment?].

Celia Morris Eckhardt Oddity.

Studs Terkel Oddity

Celia Morris Eckhardt And so she had -- they stopped taking her seriously. And that must have been the most terrible thing to her, because being attacked by people who were taking her seriously invigorated her, but.

Studs Terkel Now, Cincinnati played a role here. The city of Cincinnati. Was it, what, it was, it was a border city?

Celia Morris Eckhardt It was a port city.

Studs Terkel A port city.

Celia Morris Eckhardt City on

Studs Terkel And she was there for a while.

Celia Morris Eckhardt And she owned property there, and in fact she's buried there, right.

Studs Terkel She's buried

Celia Morris Eckhardt She's buried in Cincinnati. Exactly. But in those last years, she really didn't have anybody close to her who would give her ideas the rigorous critique she really needed, and she had no, virtually no emotional support. Her marriage became a disaster, and her daughter sided with her father, so that she was virtually alone. And she also had recurrent bouts of illness and so the last years are very, very depressing. But the -- nevertheless she did publish a book called "England the Civilizer" in 1848. The last third of it is a kind of apocalyptic fantasy of the way the earth is going to come to this state of Utopia that she and so many people in the 19th century longed for. But still in that book there is this grand vision. She just wouldn't give it up, and this is one of the reasons I think she's so much worth our attention. She was cranky and she was difficult to get along with in those last years, but she kept this vision of human possibility that was really just beyond that of practically any of her contemporaries. It's really, really fine.

Studs Terkel What was the Haitian idea? Thing involving Haiti.

Celia Morris Eckhardt Well, that was -- she simply took the slaves she had bought in in the United States and freed them in Haiti, because she thought that the United States was so, was such a racist society that there was no way for them to find a basically decent life.

Studs Terkel Did she buy a number? How many -- she bought a number of them [unintelligible].

Celia Morris Eckhardt I think she bought ten. And by the time she freed them, there were about 22. And she took a very important trip it turned out in her life to Haiti with them to free them there. She had made a public pledge to do that.

Studs Terkel But she still kept up, because Lafayette now is very old, back in France now, and things were happening in France at the time.