When Katie was twenty-six, she gladly accepted the offer of Alice Freeman, the new president of Wellesley, to become an instructor on its faculty. That’s not to say, though, that she felt qualified or ready. Despite her Ivy League equivalent education and significant publishing experience, she wrote to a friend that “I am dreading next year horribly. I am a regular coward and I would like to take to my heels and run for it.”[20]
Wellesley grew, and Alice Freeman recruited other stellar female professors to meet the burgeoning demand. When Alice Freeman left Wellesley, her final act was to promote Katie to the position of assistant professor of Literature, which helped seal Katie’s career as an academic.
More than anything, Katie sought to help shape Wellesley in the vision of Henry Durant: “Gather around it all wisdom and all knowledge. Bring to it the light of all science and all truth. Study over it; pray over it; live in it; love in it; suffer for it.”[21]
On a trip to visit a friend for Christmas that year, Katie was exposed to smallpox, and the subsequent quarantine allowed her enough time to write a novel for young readers, called Rose and Thorn. It won $700 in a writing contest, which gave her the funds to take a year off from teaching at Wellesley and to spend the year in Europe.[22] At last, her writing was propelling Katie into a larger world, well beyond the narrow confines of New England.
Seven
Katharine Lee BatesEngland, 1880s
Katie set sail for England on a ship called State of Nebraska, and the weather on the voyage was terrible. She arrived injured from being tossed about on the boat, and sad to have left her loved ones behind for an entire year. She wrote that she arrived “blue and black and blue.”[1]
In England, she explored the libraries and the countryside alike. She found a room in the British Museum dedicated to the surname Bates, and in it was delighted to discover her very own book, Rose and Thorn. Haunting the Gothic cathedrals, she wrestled with her faith, knowing that she believed in something, but unable to decide what it was exactly. There was too much presumption in theology, Katie thought. She was both jealous and suspicious of people who trusted what they were taught about God.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, new waves of immigration were remaking the face of America. Many were worried that the newcomers would take their jobs, and too often, people found themselves working in abysmal and dangerous conditions. Perched from the vantage point of the wisdom and riches of Oxford, Katie saw America differently, and clearly: the American ideal of democracy was fragile.
After Katie’s year abroad, she returned home strengthened with new resolve. She earned her master’s degree from Wellesley and took her place as the head of her department. But she still felt stifled by the societal expectations placed on women: “We can calculate eclipses, but we are not free from the tyranny of the needle.”[2] Again, with the sewing. Being a female scholar had unique demands—not only were they expected to research and teach but they still had to undertake all of the domestic duties, unlike their male counterparts. Even if a woman was unmarried, she was still expected to cook and clean and stitch at home, while a man would have gotten someone else to do it for him.
Wellesley culture was unique. Here was a group of highly educated and talented women, all teaching other talented young women, and most of them, like Katie, were childless and unmarried. Many became each other’s best friends, spending holidays in the common spaces of the college and traveling together in the summer. And it was here at Wellesley that Katie met her lifelong companion, Professor Katharine Coman.
Katie and Katharine lived together for over twenty years. They wrote letters to each other that are decidedly romantic. Some scholars have said that when taken in its totality, Katie and Katharine Coman were obviously in love and “together” together. A minority of others have landed in the column of, it’s possible they were together, but there is no way to know for sure, because the nature of female friendship plus the Wellesley culture was very different than anything we experience today.
At the turn of the twentieth century, two women who lived together as partners were sometimes referred to as being in a “Boston marriage,” with the subtext being that they were quietly in a romantic relationship.[3]
When Katie was away in England, she wrote letters to Katharine that said things like, “For I am coming back to you, my Dearest, whether I come back to Wellesley or not. You are always in my heart and in my longings. I’ve been so homesick for you on this side of the ocean and yet so still and happy in the memory and consciousness of you.”[4]
Katharine Coman studied history, and had a particular interest in labor rights. Her research about economic history was groundbreaking—she was one of the first historians to use government documents like labor statistics in her books. She was politically active and adventurous, with a strong face and a prominent chin cleft. Katharine also had something that Katie longed for: a steadfast faith in God. Katie wished she could be sure like Katharine was. She knew that her restless mind might be stilled by a knowing faith, but belief was too elusive.
Eight
Katharine Lee BatesChicago, 1890s
The nation was headed toward a severe economic downturn in the 1890s, which at the time people referred to as the Great Depression. This unrest contributed to growing nativist ideas and anti-immigrant sentiment, and led to the passage of laws restricting immigration from Asian countries. Corporate monopolies were helping the rich grow richer as they paid their workers less, and corruption was at an all-time high. Grover Cleveland had been reelected president on the promise that he would help ferret out the corruption that had taken root in Washington.
In 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition was set to open in Chicago. People often wonder why we call Washington, D.C., the “District of Columbia,” or why an event like this was called a “Columbian” Exposition. It has nothing to do with the country of Colombia and everything to do with Columbus, the explorer. Columbia was the female form of the name Columbus, and so “Columbia” was sometimes used as a female personification of America. (Think about the woman holding a torch aloft at the beginning of any film made by Columbia Pictures. That’s her.)
Advertisements for the Expo screamed SELL THE COOKSTOVE IF NECESSARY BUT COME.[1] Katie and Katharine were scheduled to teach summer workshops in Colorado—a chance to marry their love of travel and their need for extra funds and intellectual stimulation. (To the same extent that Katie hated sewing, she loved travel. She went abroad regularly, and the list of countries she visited was quite long.)
Their train left Massachusetts and took them first to Niagara Falls, which was the site of Nikola Tesla’s incredible electrical innovations in alternating current electricity. It jostled them to sleep as they headed to see the expo, which was also billed as the White City, its alabaster structures glowing in the new light of incandescence.
The fair was huge and astonishing. There was a Liberty Bell constructed from oranges, and another from wheat, and also: the real Liberty Bell. (Why stop at just one Liberty Bell?) There was a map of the United States fashioned from pickles and a replica of the Statue of Liberty made from salt.
The Pledge of Allegiance was written especially for the fair, recited by children around a flagpole, designed to be adopted by schools nationwide to promote what some would call patriotism, and others would call a reflection of xenophobia.[2] Francis Bellamy, the author, said he was concerned about all the new immigrants pledging loyalty to their own countries of origin, and this was meant to remind them that they owed their loyalty to America only.
The fair was the United States’ signal to the world: Anything you can do, we can do better. America, at just over one hundred years old, was fully independent, ready and willing to claim the prestige it felt it deserved to have bestowed upon its name for its artistic, technological, and commercial innovations. President Grover Cleveland said of the expo, “I cherish the thought that America stands on the threshold of a great awakening…as by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast Exposition is now set in motion, so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the dignity and the freedom of mankind.”[3] He pressed a button, and in doing so set off a commotion of whistles, bells, cannons, guns, fountains, applause, and machinery.
Wealthy Bertha Palmer was the head of the “Board of Lady Managers” and was in charge of creating a building with displays to promote the accomplishments of women. She hoped it would encourage women to “step down from their pedestals, because freedom and justice for all are infinitely more desired than pedestals for a few.”[4] (We also have Bertha Palmer, whose husband owned a famous Chicago hotel, to thank for the invention of the brownie, arguably one of the best treats of all time. Inside the Women’s Building, box lunches were served, and Bertha Palmer directed the chef at the hotel to come up with a dessert that could withstand the jostling of delivery and the heat of the summer.)
Statues of activists loomed over the throngs of people visiting the Women’s Building—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the like—and murals of women picking the fruits of Knowledge and Science decorated the walls. Exhibits demonstrated the abysmal working conditions and low wages of women, so that women could advocate for the systemic reforms that were needed. Perhaps for the first time, Katie was able to fully envision the importance of Katharine’s work on labor rights. The building’s library had seventy thousand volumes written by women, and orchestras performed works by female composers.
The impression made, Katie and Katharine departed Chicago and continued their journey west, across the plains and into Colorado. As their summer school drew to a close, they had the chance to ascend Pike’s Peak on a cog tram, to visit Garden of the Gods, and to breathe in the landscape that was unlike anything they had seen on voyages anywhere else, with craggy sandstone rocks rising like giants out of the forest. It was a landscape that Clara Brown had helped pioneer just a few decades before.
There was nothing else like it on earth, Katie was sure, and to know it was here, in her own beloved America, stirred something inside her chest. Katie took out her notebook, as poets do, and jotted down some lines, which she would forever describe as a moment of divine inspiration. It was perhaps the closest she had ever come to the religious faith she yearned for. She said the words “sprang into being,” or they “floated into her consciousness.”[5] But soon, the journey home would begin, and the notebook was tucked away. The lines didn’t see the light of day for some time.
A year later, Katie revisited her travel notebook, pondering with fresh eyes what worked and what didn’t. She finished off the remaining stanzas and submitted the poem to The Congregationalist magazine, a publication for churches like the one where her father preached all those years ago.
A short time later, she received a letter congratulating her on the poem’s acceptance for publication, and she eagerly waited for the edition that contained her newest work to arrive, along with a check for five dollars.
The date was July 4, 1895.[6]
Katie’s published poem was immediately beloved by Americans far and wide. It went viral before anyone knew what going viral meant. Reprint requests rolled in, which she granted for free. She began receiving letters from people insisting that the lines should be set to music, urging her to consider how much better a song would be if she helped a few lines rhyme more melodically. Deluged with requests, Katie rewrote some of the lyrics to make them easier to sing.
Once her updated version was published, a Baptist minister named Clarence Barbour read them, and he got a bee in his bonnet. This poem just had to be a song. Barbour and his wife turned to their church hymnal to look for a tune that matched the metrical index of the poem. After a number of false starts, Barbour and his wife found “Materna,” and “at once I felt that this was the tune to which the words could be most wisely joined,” he said.[7]
“Materna” was written by Samuel Ward, a natural-born musician who took up the accordion at six and began playing the organ so skillfully that he was hired by a Manhattan church at age sixteen. He had no formal training but taught lessons to students, directed choirs, and supported himself and his family with his musical endeavors.
Ward found inspiration in unusual places, the most famous of which was Coney Island. As he and a friend, Harry, sailed away after a visit in 1882, Coney Island gleaming like Venice in the distance, he turned to Harry and said, “If I had something to write on, I’d put down a tune that has just come to me.”[8] Harry scrounged through his pockets, eventually removing a linen cuff from his shirt and handing it to Sam. Ward scratched out a staff on the piece of fabric and wrote the melody that danced through his mind.
The tune was a new setting for the hymn “O Mother Dear Jerusalem,” which was already famous and sung throughout Britain and the United States.
O mother dear, Jerusalem,
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end?
The joys when shall I see?
