Dear Jean P.S., Karen
Chadwick’s Tribute, Part Nine of Ten, 9/4/2020, to:
David Dale, A Life by David J. McLaren, Stenlake Publisher,
Ayrshire, Scotland, 2015, a truly beautiful new book rich with photos, docs,
maps, all supporting Dr. McLaren’s extensive research on David Dale, 1739-1806.
Dale was one of the first “Captains of Industry” at the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution with his new cotton yarn mill in New Lanark, Scotland beginning in
1786. I found this book fascinating for a few reasons, here’s one.
In 1799, Dale’s oldest
daughter, Anne Caroline, married Robert Owen. RO married into a pot of money.
In 1825, RO purchased a town from a departing Lutheran cult in the new state of
Indiana and renamed it New Harmony. RO took his passion for social engineering,
six of his well-educated adult children, were joined by other dreamers, and
attempted to create an intellectual communal experiment that failed two years
later. RO could talk the talk; he couldn’t walk the walk. In spite of this
expensive failure, RO became world famous for his radical ideas of how to shape
good humans. To this day, there is a “Robert Owen Society” in Japan, for
instance.
Flash forward to 1995 and my
new job in New Harmony as private secretary to Jane Blaffer Owen, JBO. She
married Kenneth Dale Owen, KDO, in 1941 and I worked for her when she was in
her 80s. She brought great wealth to the marriage as her Blaffer/Texas roots
were in Humble Oil and Texaco Oil, which morphed to Exxon. KDO was a descendant
of David Dale and Robert Owen, through Richard Dale Owen. Elsewhere on this
blog is their genealogy record. Wealth from the Dale/Owen legacy had evaporated
by KDO’s time. Young Jane Blaffer appreciated that this suitor was not from the
lazy wealthy class she grew up with and she was impressed that he had worked
his way through college. That credential and his notable name sealed the deal.
This wing of the Owen family
continued with the tradition of honoring David Dale. Kenneth and Jane gave the
Dale name as middle name to two of their daughters. The Blaffer wealth saved an
interesting portion of American history as Jane Blaffer Owen poured herself
into the restoration and renovation of New Harmony for over 70 years. I helped.
All page references from David
Dale, A Life. Buy it! It’s valuable.
* * * * * * *
David Dale of New Lanark by David J. McLaren, Caring Books,
Glasgow, 1999, my copy autographed!
* *
* * * * *
David
Dale of New Lanark by
David J. McLaren, Milngavie: Heatherbank Press, 1983. This research regarding
Dale, New Lanark Mills and child labor is the basis for a letter to my young
nephews on this blog and also an appendix of my manuscript, The Other Woman, Private Secretary to a
Daughter of Exxon Oil. I seek an agent/publisher for this work.
* * * * * *
*
Gratitude to Dr. David J. McLaren and Dougie MacLean, Dunkeld
Records, Perthshire
Dear Jean P.S. Part Nine of 10
September 4, 2020
Conclusion
What started the Dear Jean letters?
Perhaps it was when someone put in my hand a slim book, David Dale of New Lanark, 1983, by David J. McLaren, while I worked for Jane Blaffer Owen.
It was either JBO herself, or superb town historian and archivist Josephine
Elliott, or amazing Donna Creek, manager of Red Geranium Bookstore, one of
JBO’s many businesses. I remember reading the thin paper bound book and was so
fascinated with it that I was compelled to write a letter to my young nephews
in Michigan about child labor in the Scotland mills. I have that letter on my
blog, and it’s also an appendix with the manuscript I’ve written, The Other Woman, Private Secretary to a
Daughter of Exxon Oil, for which I seek a literary agent.
McLaren produced the third work in
2015, David Dale, A Life. I purchased it from the Scot publisher,
Stenlake Publishing, Ltd., http://stenlake.co.uk/. It’s truly a beautiful book in
every way. Gratitude to Friends of New Lanark, https://www.newlanark.org/world-heritage-site/friends.shtml and New Lanark Trust for their
archival and financial support of this valuable piece of world history.
As I opened DD A Life, I took notes.
And did I ever, 32 pages of notes, scribbled, messy, usually late at night,
fumbling for pen and clipboard while propped up in bed, for a couple months. I
loved reading it, loved thinking about it, loved considering how harsh the
times were for some and how good the times were for others. “It was the best of
times, it was the worst of times …” that opening sentence from Charles Dickens
novel, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, emerged 53 years after Dale.
Of course, considering this new trove of the facts of Dale’s life, where the
Dale money came from, how Robert Owen became wealthy, and more were all threads
in the weave of my life, having spent over six years with the Owen family in
New Harmony, and now to have such detailed fresh facts of Dale’s life was
exciting. Yes, David Dale was father-in-law to Robert Owen. Stay with me here.
Honestly, I tried to put the book
on the shelf, tried to file the notes, but I failed. The power of that time,
the power of the shift in human consciousness, the parallels to the present
time and our dangerous national happenings, somehow, they reflect on each
other. What would the 1787 Scot women think of the 2019 Right-to-Life
activists? Those married Scot women most often had a child a year. Dale’s
oldest daughter had two children one year. Lots of children died and many
hundreds were abandoned or otherwise turned over to lock-up charity workhouses
until they turned 16. Disease, famine, and alcohol problems were so common that
family life had little chance to proceed with family intact. How about the
reverse – what would our right-to-life activists think of the 1780s Scot
mothers, eh?
My shock of learning there were
Scots who were lifelong slaves to Scots in Scotland during Dale’s life, oh, oh.
Scots weren’t one big happy clan either. Reading of Dale’s determined attention
for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, how that became an ever-widening public
concern, and what did New Lanark Mills have to do with slave cotton? These
things and many more pressing concerns kept coming to my thoughts, where did I
put the book, I want to look that up again. And again. And again.
As I kept paging through the book,
one of the appendix materials suddenly popped into my creative zone. As
mentioned previous, it’s an interesting 1823 handwritten letter from a mill
worker to her sister, and McLaren was kind enough to also include a typed
transcript of the letter, good. I give the writer an A for penmanship even
though some words are illegible, and smiles for other factors, like no
paragraph breaks, and writing from edge to edge, mustn’t waste paper. She would
add a sentence that had nothing to do with sentence above, then proceed with
next sentence that continued first topic. She and sister are doing some money
business, and what a complicated mess it was, banks didn’t chat with each
other. She tells sister how mill owner/manager Mr. Owen has just informed mill
workers that a fund to assist injured workers had gone bankrupt, so no more
Mill Village Society help for them. We know that a year later, Owen had a lot
of money to buy a town in the USA, kind of frames that “bankrupt” cry, eh?
These aspects of McLaren’s book are true pointers to how civilization has
slowly organized itself, good and bad tangled together. Then a few weeks later,
I really had to clean up the notes, get stuff put away, and get on with other
projects, like my new obsession with viewing my new fav film, Mira Nair’s
beautiful work based on a true story, Queen of Katwe. I’ve watched it over
80 times. I play chess.
As I started to file away my notes
from the book, I had a sudden wild thought: what if I write letters to my
sister? Could I be a 1780s mill worker with young children who also work at the
mills? Fiction, not my comfort genre, yet what an interesting challenge. It
would be a sweet conclusion to the notes I’d taken. Why not? The purpose
quickly became a way to chat up Dale, the times, the life between me in New
Lanark and sister Jean in the new USA, with most narrative to Dale. I even
invented a cousin who works in Dale’s house, it became a fun exercise.
Also, was this: my continuing
search for a literary agent regarding the manuscript, The Other Woman,
Private Secretary to a Daughter of Exxon Oil, a memoir of my life and work
in New Harmony. As an unpublished author, query letters seldom get any action.
I’m shocked and pleased when a rejection shows up. My niece, Pamela Parker, who
is also my attorney of record for my manuscript, advised me this way:
I’d started a blog, had no idea
what it meant to anyone, and didn’t know what to put there but excerpts from
the manuscript and a few other short writing pieces. Ms. Parker advised me,
“When a publisher takes you on, the first thing they will demand is that you
take all excerpts of the book off the blog. They don’t want you giving away
what they are trying to sell.” Oh. Ok.
I pulled every excerpt off the blog
except the manuscript Table of Contents and the appendix entry, a letter to my
nephews about child labor. Well, then there was almost nothing on the blog.
Hmm. My attorney to the rescue — write something fresh, something that has some
connection to your book, but not pieces of the book. Oh. Ok.
My tech-savvy and wordsmith nephew,
Garrett, who was one of the young nephews I had written to 20 years ago about
child labor in the New Lanark Mills, offered to help get my blog looking more
intelligent, whew! My blogspot site got a do-over. Then “Dear Jean” began. He
offered to act as editor for Dear Jean, and since he writes for his day job, he
knows words — and commas, and periods, and paragraph breaks. And oh, those
exclamation points, ouch. !
My blog,
karen-chadwick.blogspot.com, now gets 20-50 hits a day, and that will matter to
a literary agent. Only 488 query letters to go.
Perhaps you will find the following
amusing or repulsive. When I worked for Jane Blaffer Owen, JBO, as her private
secretary in New Harmony, here is one of the vivid stories told to me by the
locals. They loved to fill me in on New Harmony history, especially Owen
family events, oh boy, did they ever. Several people told me this bit of
history and it still amused or bothered many.
My boss’s husband, Kenneth Dale
Owen, KDO, was a piece of work.
KDO married JBO in 1941, and theirs
was not a normal American marriage. After their wedding and resulting largess
from Blaffer $$$$$$$, KDO lived as he pleased. When my manuscript turns to a
book, you’ll see an account of hours after their wedding when the real KDO took
over. JBO was quite the opposite. She was anchored in her lifelong devotion to
the Episcopal faith. To that point, she thought of a radical idea for a new
church, and hired one of the top architects, Philip Johnson, to build her dream
church in New Harmony. “The Roofless Church” became real in 1960, and it
quickly gained national attention for its unique feature of being open to the
sky. It became a destination site in little New Harmony. You can view a photo
of it on my blog, the shingled dome seen there is merely a feature of the
entire 8-acre church. Fifty or more folks can stand under the dome in inclement
weather, been there, done that.
As the local lore repeated and
repeated to me goes, when the Roofless was ready for the public in 1960, JBO
organized a large gathering of notable national and international religious
leaders, and the primary event, a formal blessing, would occur in the Roofless.
She was particularly warm to not only leading Episcopalian priests and nuns,
but also Catholic monks, nuns, priests, bishops, additionally the Benedictines,
and Buddhists also had her respect.
Amazing thinkers like Sr. Rosemary
Crumlin from Australia, a noted authority on Aboriginal art, mattered to JBO.
That’s the kind of boss I had. She regretted to the day she died that she had
turned down several opportunities to host Catholic monk and writer Thomas
Merton. She felt she would interfere with his work, and that sometime up ahead
would be the best time to have Merton to New Harmony. Those two shared a mutual
friendship with Louisville writer Ron and wife Sally Seitz. Suddenly Merton ran
out of time on this side of the grass.
The day of the 1960 formal blessing
of the new Roofless Church started with class and respect for all, until.
Until. Until very loud music started to fill the area, and it got louder and
louder and louder. Disbelief spread to all faces, could that be circus music?
Just as our prayers are starting? Everyone in the Roofless had to go look out
to the street. In amazement, they saw an elaborate horse drawn calliope slowly
moving on the street, up and down, up and down, blaring circus music so loud
all normal conversations had to cease for the time being. JBO, the
extraordinary hostess, made the best of the shocking situation, kept smiling,
yet inside she was sure what that rudeness was about – her husband must have
organized the highly annoying music to thwart her dignified religious ceremony.
Smile anyway.
Now that I have a better view of
David Dale and son-in-law RO’s opposite opinions of religion, could KDO’s nasty
trick been a nod to his Owen secularist DNA? What about KDO’s Dale religious
DNA? Dale was deeply religious, even started a new flavor of Christian religion
in Glasgow in the 1780s.Thanks to McLaren, I imagine David Dale was the type
who would have been thrilled to be in the Roofless with the other religious
guests that day. In my years with JBO, her husband did not so much as darken a
church door. And trust me, in the late 20th century, New Harmony was
quite religious, church life ruled the tone of the area, what church one
associated with mattered to all other church goers. Six flavors of Christian,
and not a Lutheran in the bunch! Yes,
there were non-church residents, but best to not make a point of that choice.
KDO had no affiliation with any church, but he also had no cordial affiliation
with local residents of any stripe. His employees feared him, almost everyone
else dreaded any contact with him. My eternal gratitude to Josephine Elliott,
she was one of the very few who could go toe-to-toe with him and prevail in
spite of the nasty mean rude expensive trick he orchestrated on her many years
earlier. Josephine was 8 ft. tall in my eyes. She even went nose-to-nose with
JBO and they didn’t speak for years. That deep freeze melted over time, and
Josephine, a very well-educated and erudite thinker, was again on the invited
list when JBO would host international notable guests at the Maclure.
KDO & JBO had a strained
marriage in many ways. In my years there, he did not participate in any social
activity with his wife. Locals assured me that in the past, when KDO would
attend a public event that JBO had a hand in, he made it a point to insult her
in front of guests. Lovely.
Do you wonder what the secularists
did with that 1,000-seat Harmonist church when they bought New Harmony? It had
many uses, none religious, part of it became a slaughter house for pigs.
Really. That is, until some elder Harmonists returned many years later to look
at their former town. They were aghast at the re-purposing of their beautiful
church, paid to have it torn down, and used the bricks to make a wall around an
ancient First Nations/Harmonist cemetery. The wall stands.
Me? I’m not a Scot, that I know of.
Three grandparents from Kentucky, one from Virginia. Deaths, divorces, hatred,
lost history. I can’t imagine what it would mean to have a documented family
tree to have knowledge of my ancestors. Do the living relatives of David Dale
like having their roots show?
To be continued
Citations
and Bibliography
Apted, Michael,
Director, and Rostock, Susanne, Editor. Incident
at Oglala, 1992. Film.
Cep, Casey. Book review Finish The
Fight!, The New Yorker Magazine, July 8 &15, 2019. Print.
Cole,
Margaret. Robert Owen of New Lanark.
Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, New York, 1953 and 1969. Print.
Dickens,
Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859.
Print.
Dickmeyer,
Elisabeth Reuther. Putting the World
Together, My Father Walter Reuther: The Liberal Warrior. LivingForce
Publishing, 2004. Print.
DuVernay,
Ava. Director, When They See Us. Netflix. 2019. Film.
Fraser,
Antonia. Mary Queen of Scots. Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 1969.
Print.
Gallagher,
Marsha V., Sears, John F. Karl
Bodmer’s Eastern Views. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha Nebraska. 1996. Print.
Grann,
David, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and Birth of the FBI.
Doubleday, 2017. Print.
Greenberg,
Joel.
A Feathered River Across the Sky,
The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction. Bloomsbury, USA, New York.
2014. Print.
McLaren,
David J. David Dale, A Life. Stenlake Publishing Ltd. 2015.
Print.
McLaren,
David J. David Dale of New Lanark, A Bright Luminary to Scotland. Caring
Books. 1999. Print.
McLaren,
David J. David Dale of New Lanark. Milngavie: Heatherbank Press. 1983.
Print.
MacLean,
Dougie. Songs, “Rank and Roses” “Thundering In” Indigenous. Dunkeld Records. 1991. Album.
Mallett,
John.
Malt, A Practical Guide from
Field to Brewhouse. Brewers
Publications. 2014. Print.
Maximilian
of Weid-Neuwied, Prince. Travels
in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834. 1843. Print.
Morris,
Celia. Fanny Wright, Rebel in
America. Harvard University Press. 1984. Print.
Nair,
Mira. Director. Queen of Katwe. Disney/ESPN. 2016. Film.
Owen,
Robert. A New View of Society. 1813. Print.
Preston,
David. “The Trigger.” Smithsonian. October 2019. Print.
Walker,
Janet R. and Burkhardt, Richard W. Eliza
Julia Flower, Letters of an English Gentlewoman: Life on the Illinois-Indiana
Frontier 1817-1861. Ball State University. 1991. Print.
Walker,
Janet R. Wonder Workers on the
Wabash. Historic New Harmony.
1999. Print.
Warren,
Leonard. Maclure of New Harmony.
Indiana University Press. 2009. Print.
Other web sources include:
https://www.usi.edu/outreach/historic-new-harmony
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/295210-adoptive-couple-v-baby-girl
https://visitnewharmony.com/playexplore_cpt/maximilian-bodmer-gallery/
https://workingmensinstitute.org/
https://www.newlanark.org/world-heritage-site/friends.shtml
https://karen-chadwick.blogspot.com/
http://oldeconomyvillage.org/visit/hours-admission/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecumseh%27s_Confederacy
gilcrease.org
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