Pedestals: Reflections on Sylvia Pankhurst, the Hermitage and the Politics of Historical Monuments

I stood looking at the empty plinth in the baking Baltimore sun. 'There is nothing in the world so invisible as a monument', Morgan and I had quoted Robert Musil's words to our students only a few weeks before in London as we looked at which slave owners, overseers of massacres and sworn enemies of democracy get away with being commemorated there.

The empty plinth, Baltimore, 2017 (all photos my own).

But there's nothing so visible as the vandalised statue or empty plinth. It reminds us that history is contested - quite literally from below. The Black Lives Matter movement protested at the presence of Confederate statues. Some were pulled down, vandalised. In Baltimore, however, the decision had been taken to remove them in the middle of the night. History would not be contested here - it would be swiftly rewritten.

Baltimore, 2017

History is written, we are told, by the victors. So how come there are statues to the Confederacy, the losing side in the American Civil War? 

The statues, though, don't date from the Civil War - they date from the era of Jim Crow and the KKK. These monuments weren't about the Civil War, they proclaimed the victory of white supremacy and terror.

This year, Black Lives Matter has proved as urgent a movement as ever and one that resonates across the globe. And in Britain the hated statue of Edward Colston, who made enormous profits from slavery in the eighteenth century, was torn down by a huge crowd and thrown in Bristol’s dock.

In light of these events, I offer these thoughts on my visit to The Hermitage as a historian undertaking research in the summer of 2018, following in the thoughts and footsteps of lifelong anti-racist Sylvia Pankhurst, as a small contribution to the discussion about the politics of historical monuments and present day injustice.

When I say ‘footsteps’, that’s not strictly true. On 14 February 1912, the day she arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, Sylvia Pankhurst was driven to The Hermitage – the former home of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. It is now, as in 1912, a tourist attraction.

The Hermitage, tourist attraction.

Morgan and I are not drivers (discussed in my Railroads post) and we naively thought we’d get to this tourist attraction by public transport. The bus was an underused service, there was only one other passenger and they didn’t appear to know where they were.

The Hermitage stop was nowhere near The Hermitage to which, it was now clear, there was no pedestrian access. We trudged alongside dirt tracks up a six lane motorway under the blaring sun.

Finally, seeing the signs to The Hermitage, we ran across that motorway. It was a ridiculous thing to do, but the whole situation was ridiculous.

We found ourselves at the beginning of a long, meandering road, the house nowhere in sight. And that’s because The Hermitage is a one thousand acre plantation. The picking of cotton by enslaved people on this huge piece of land was the source of Andrew Jackson’s wealth.

It would take you a very long time to get away from here on foot.

A railroad crossing on the plantation, which provides a sense of scale.

Sylvia Pankhurst was probably taken here by local suffragists; the Jackson home was first maintained as an attraction by women supporters. They were perhaps the same women who told Sylvia not to speak at Nashville’s Fisk University to an audience of black students, perhaps those that Sylvia remembered ‘talk glibly of the “slavery days” as they site behind the Negro coachman, or are waited on at table by the Negro women servants’ (p.156).

I had read Sylvia’s description of The Hermitage before I saw it for myself. It seemed little had changed. There was the ‘row of massive fluted columns of white stone along the front’(p.157).

The Hermitage, just as Pankhurst described it in 1912.

In the entrance hall our first guide, a white man in nineteenth century costume, painfully, offensively imitated the black woman housekeeper he imagined would have welcomed us during the ‘slavery days’.

He showed off the wallpaper depicting mythological scenes, especially ordered by the Jacksons from Paris. I could hear Sylvia whispering in my ear:

“The walls of the entrance hall are covered with a hideous hand-painted paper, specially procured from Paris in General Jackson’s time, which shows innumerable little six inch gods and goddesses passing through a series of meaningless adventures. It seems impossible that nineteenth century Paris could ever have produced anything more ugly.” (p.157)

It was all just as she had described, including the four post beds so far raised above the floor that beside them are ‘the steps by which the family were obliged to climb up to them at night’ (p.157).

These people even slept on pedestals. The house slaves, we were told, slept on the floor.

We followed Sylvia through the stuffy rooms to the back porch where, like her, we saw ‘still standing in a row, are the cabins in which the slaves were housed’ (p.158).

The slave huts at The Hermitage, also just as Pankhurst described in 1912.

This is in the home of the man The Hermitage unashamedly celebrates today as ‘The People’s President’.

The museum attached to the house insists that Jackson did ‘good’ and ‘bad’ – the overriding message being that we cannot allow the ‘bad’ to discount the ‘good’. It is a message that the President and CEO of The Hermitage reiterated in response to the Black Lives Matter movement this year: “Andrew Jackson was a complex man who, like many U.S. presidents, was far from perfect” (15 July 2020).

Or, as one commentator on a Hermitage museum film told us, we have all done good and bad things.

It’s easy to see how this argument is persuasive – because we have all done good and bad things. We can all relate to that. And who among us would agree that it’s fair that our worst misdemeanours should cancel out everything decent we’ve ever done?

But there’s a cunning sleight of hand going on here. This is not the same as finding out that a good president was a bit of a bully at school.

Jackson was a militarist and a populist, presenting himself as on the side of ‘the people’ against the elites – something uncritically repeated by The Hermitage today: “The People’s President”.

But which people? Not black people. Not those enlisted soldiers who mutinied against his leadership in the Creek War. And not Native American people.

Howard Zinn described Jackson as ‘the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history’ (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2015, p.127). As president, he was responsible for the devastating forced removal of Native Americans.

Earlier in his career, in the war for territory occupied by the Creek Indians, Jackson expanded the American nation into parts of Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky and North Carolina.

His policy of selling off the land he seized expanded capitalist ownership and undermined the unity of Native American resistance. Huge tracts of seized land made way for new plantations tilled by enslaved black people to make huge profits for white plantation owners – like himself.

And this is why it is so clumsy to say that criticisms of the monuments to slave owners seek to erase history. Millions of people’s histories were forcibly erased and these monuments perpetuate the myths propagated by those who erased them. 

The Hermitage now purports to tell the stories of both the president and his slaves. But how can this claim upon balance be anything but one-sided when the president is the celebrated subject? It denies the fundamental antagonism in the relationship. Shouldn’t The Hermitage be a site of mourning, not celebration?

The Hermitage’s self-serving and simplistic ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dichotomy is misleading because it insists that they were separate. The ‘bad’ was not an aberration; it was integral to the creation of modern America. As the Black Lives Matter movement revealed, it’s not the past we are seeking to change, but the present.

 

 

Congratulations to Rachel Holmes on the publication of 'Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel'

"When she wrote her memoir of the suffragette movement, Sylvia Pankhurst explained:

My desire has been to introduce the actors in the drama as living beings; to show the striving, suffering, hugely hopeful human entity behind the pageantry, the rhetoric and the turbulence.[i]

Pankhurst’s vivid, detailed and human account, in scale and tone like a nineteenth-century novel filled with memorable characters and dramatic stories, became the defining history of that movement; the basis, for example, for the hugely influential 1970s TV series Shoulder to Shoulder that introduced a new generation to the suffragettes.

Rachel Holmes has achieved a similar feat in her monumental biography of Sylvia Pankhurst.  Where other biographies have focussed on a particular part of Pankhurst’s huge contribution to social movements in the twentieth century (Barbara Winslow’s Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism and Mary Davis’ Sylvia Pankhurst: A Life in Radical Politics), or have written shorter accounts (Shirley Harrison’s Sylvia Pankhurst: A Crusading Life or my own Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire), Rachel Holmes’ book matches the scale, ambition and artistic spirit of her subject’s own writing. 

If Pankhurst had thought about what her biography should look like, I think perhaps she would have hoped for one like this."

You can read the rest of my rest of my review of Rachel Holmes' new biography of Sylvia Pankhurst on Counterfire.  Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel is out now and published by Bloomsbury.

---

[i] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (London: Virago Limited, 1977), Preface.

Great review in Labour/Le Travail

"The result is an extremely valuable and enlightening picture of Sylvia Pankhurst's changing political ideas, as well as revealing snapshots of the American women's movement and U.S. labouring and social life. Connelly's extended introduction provides an excellent picture of the context framing Sylvia's travel, including the variegated British and American suffrage movements that she interacted with."

Thanks to Professor Joan Sangster, in the Gender and Women's Studies department at Trent University, Canada, for this enthusiastic review of A Suffragette in America in Labour/Le Travail, the journal of Canadian Labour Studies. 

Two substantial extracts of the review are available here and here, the full text is available for those with login access to Project Muse or, even better, subscribe to the Labour/Le Travail and support a publication dedicated to working-class history.

Cover of the previous edition of Labour/Le Travail.

Labour History Podcast on Sylvia Pankhurst

I was delighted to join Paul T. Simpson to discuss Sylvia Pankhurst and why she remains relevant and inspirational today on his excellent Labour History Podcast. 

You can listen to the interview here.

Radical broadcasting!

New Short Documentary: 'Passionate Pankhursts' at the Smith Opera House, Geneva New York

Last year I took A Suffragette in America to the beautiful Smith Opera House in Geneva, New York State and was kindly given a guided tour of the Smith and Geneva's connections to suffrage history by Chris Woodworth. It was magical tour I'll never forget and now you too can share this experience in the 10th episode of Chris' documentary series 'Smith Opera House Ghost Light Tours: Passionate Pankhursts' available below.

You'll find out about why both Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst came to lecture at the Smith, the suffragists they met and the differences between the the politics of these two Pankhursts. You'll also find out about how it was easier for Sylvia Pankhurst to get to Geneva in 1911 than it was for me in 2019!

I wrote about the whole experience and discovering the history of suffrage and anti-slavery history in upstate New York in the 'Railroads' entry on this blog. I am really honoured that Chris has included parts of that entry and quoted from A Suffragette in America in her documentary.

Holding Sylvia Pankhurst's American book outside the Smith Opera House last year.
Photo: Chris Woodworth.

Solidarity greetings on May Day

Solidarity with everyone fighting for their lives at work today. Here's a piece I wrote for Counterfire on the history of May Day, an unfinished struggle.

Discusses many of the movements that inspired Sylvia Pankhurst - like the Chartists - and a number of the revolutionaries she admired, met and debated with including Eleanor Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.

Silent Agitator, by Ruth Ewan, The High Line, New York City, photo: Katherine Connelly

#PPENow #solidarityforever

Sylvia Pankhurst's Passover in New York - a walk through the radical Jewish history of the Lower East Side

For Dana Mills

We had noticed the building on East Broadway three weeks before, when searching for the story of a fire in a school by Seward Park in 1911. With the word "Forward" emblazoned in the brickwork on the side, it was hard to miss. It was intriguing and seemed to recall the language of the German socialist movement.

I wrote up the story of the fire in the school which had taken place only two weeks after the devastating fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, not far away in Greenwich Village - and stored the "Forward" building for later.

On 2 July, Morgan and I returned to the Lower East Side ahead of the book launch of A Suffragette in America. Beforehand, we walked the streets and entered the synagogue on Eldridge Street. Opened in 1887, it provided a place of worship for the growing number of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who were making their home on the Lower East Side. The ornate and heavy building represented arrival, presence. After falling into disrepair, it has now been magnificently restored.

The synagogue on Eldridge Street, photographs by Katherine Connelly, 2 July 2019.

That bright light of a late afternoon in July dazzled through the stained glass windows, making everything else appear darker. The vivid paint work with its golden stars picked out by great collections of lamps.

It was here we learnt more about the "Forward" building which was featured on a display screen. Built in 1912, it was the headquarters of the Yiddish-language socialist newspaper "The Forward" which had indeed taken its name from the German Social Democrats' newspaper Vorwärts.

The Forward Building

In the four roundels next to the words "FORWARD BUILDING" engraved in stone over the doorway are the faces of the newspaper's German socialist heroes: Karl Marx (who looks rather more like William Morris), Ferdinand Lassalle, Friedrich Engels and one other - no one can quite remember now, it might be August Bebel, champion of women's rights, or it might by Wilhelm Liebknecht, a founder of the German Social Democratic Party, comrade and sometime drinking partner of Marx, or it might be his son, leading anti-war socialist Karl Liebknecht, who was murdered alongside Rosa Luxemburg by the proto-fascist Freikorps in 1919.

Engels in New York

Lassalle

Bebel or Liebknecht?

Marx

The size of the building indicates the impressive achievement and reach of this socialist newspaper just three years after a group of predominantly Jewish, working-class women in New York led a strike wave against the sweatshops that galvanised low paid, immigrant women workers across the country.

After squinting up at the faces in the roundels, it was time for the book launch - on the street parallel, Henry Street.

This place had been very specially chosen for the launch, there was nowhere else in New York City I would rather have spoken about Sylvia Pankhurst's A Suffragette in America than in the Henry Street Settlement.

The most lyrical and magical of all the chapters in Pankhurst's book is one which describes a journey across the New York streets to a place where 'the shops bore Yiddish signs'. Here she enters a house filled with animated, political women whom she joins for a meal: '[e]xcept for the big crackling wafers of unleavened bread, it does not matter of what the meal consists'. She is then taken to see children from the tenements performing 'Sleeping Beauty', in which awakening of the princess symbolises the coming of spring.

Researching the book, I worked out that Pankhurst was describing visiting Henry Street Settlement - a social welfare institution founded by the nurse Lillian D. Wald in 1893. Unlike many Settlement Houses, which operated on the assumption that the poor needed saving from themselves by an enlightened elite, Wald used her experience of suffering on the Lower East Side to demand reforms from the elites. She was determined that her Settlement House would espouse comradeship - and an important part of that was celebrating Passover with her neighbours:

"Hospitality", she wrote in her memoir Windows on Henry Street, "is a tradition in our neighborhood. One of the invitations most prized at Henry Street is that which bids us welcome to a Passover service."

Alice Lewisohn, a close friend of Wald's who helped choreograph the Sleeping Beauty, remembered that the very objects in the dining room were symbols of welcome:

"The brasses and coppers on the mantels, or the Russian bowl on the table, provided the link between the colonial decorum [the era the house on Henry Street was built] and the foreign homelandds of the neighbors. The relationship between the old and the new countries was always preserved." (Alice Lewisohn Crowley, The Neighborhood Playhouse: Leaves from a Theater Scrapbook [New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1959], p.11.)

Portrait of Lillian D. Wald with menorahs and samovar in the dining room at Henry Street, 2 July 2019.

The dining room at Henry Street Settlement.

The brasses - menorahs and samovars and bowls - remain in the dining room of Henry Street today. Years later, Alice Lewisohn would tell a biographer of Lillian Wald about the atmosphere of gatherings in the dining room where women "sparkled on during the meal, recounting episodes, telling tales spiced with native dialect, wit and fun. Bubbling spirits sparred back and forth across the table". (Quoted in R. L. Duffus, Lillian Wald: Neighbor and Crusader [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938], p.136.)

Pankhurst too remembered "a loud discussion at the table". The food at the meal and the children's performance about the coming of spring indicate that she joined them for one of those prized Passover meals at Henry Street. The year was probably 1912 - the same year that the "Forward" building opened.

While researching and writing the introduction to this chapter, I spoke to Dana Mills, a friend, comrade and expert on the history of radical dance (author of Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries). She impressed upon me that the same people who came to Henry Street to break bread, the parents of the children who danced in the Sleeping Beauty were those who were taking action against the sweatshops.

On 2 July, Dana and I launched A Suffragette in America in conversation in the dining room at Henry Street. In the room were activists, and dancers, and people who had come to Henry Street in their youth.

Launching A Suffragette in America in conversation with Dana Mills, dining room at Henry Street Settlement, 2 July 2019.

It was an exciting conversation. One of the things I spoke about was how Henry Street, as a place that championed reform and working-class access to and time for culture, resonated with Pankhurst's socialism. Dana spoke about how the project Pankhurst had admired in its infancy - the Lewisohns' Neighborhood Playhouse - trained some of the most exciting and avant garde dancers of the twentieth century, including Anna Sokolow, whose mother, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, was a socialist in the garment workers' union in New York.

Watching the Sleeping Beauty at Henry Street in 1912, Pankhurst was captivated. The coming of spring seemed also to represent a different future: "we might begin to be brothers and sisters from that hour." It was a fleeting moment; acutely conscious of the poverty around her she felt "the cold hard world outside dimmed the brightness and warmth glowing in my heart, and seemed to bolster up anew the barriers I had thought so easy to surmount." But hope was there - and it lasted Pankhurst a lifetime.

As I write this from lockdown in London, I am acutely aware that the Coronavirus means that Passover will be very different for my Jewish friends this year. And so, at a time when workers are again resisting the (Amazon) sweatshops, I dedicate this piece about the coming of spring and the hope that springs from walking the history of the Lower East Side to my friend and comrade Dana Mills.