Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative 9780813542386

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Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

Critical Issues in Health and Medicine Edited by Rima D. Apple, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Janet Golden, Rutgers University, Camden Growing criticism of the U.S. health care system is coming from consumers, politicians, the media, activists, and health care professionals. Critical Issues in Health and Medicine is a collection of books that explores these contemporary dilemmas from a variety of perspectives, among them political, legal, historical, sociological, and comparative, and with attention to crucial dimensions such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and culture.

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine A Los Angeles Illness Narrative Emily K. Abel

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Abel, Emily K. Suffering in the land of sunshine : a Los Angeles illness narrative / Emily K. Abel. p. ;

cm. — (Critical issues in health and medicine)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8135-3900-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8135-3901-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Willard, Charles Dwight, 1866–1914. 2. Tuberculosis—Patients—California— Los Angeles—Biography.

I. Title.

II. Series.

[DNIM: 1. Willard, Charles Dwight, 1866–1914. 2. Tuberculosis, Pulmonary— Los Angeles—Personal Narratives. 3. Tuberculosis, Pulmonary—history—Los Angeles. 4. History, 19th Century—Los Angeles. 5. History, 20th Century—Los Angeles. WF 300 A139s 2006] RC313.C2A24 2006 362.196'9950092—dc22 [B] 2006007067 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2006 by Emily K. Abel All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Manufactured in the United States of America

Across the Border

For you there was no conscious departure, no hurried packing for exile. You are here, anyway, in your own minor archipelago of pain. Do what every exile does. Tell stories, Smuggle messages across the border. Remember things back there As simpler than they ever were. Karen Fiser, Words like Fate and Pain

The responsibility of the ill . . . is not to get well but to express their illness well. Arthur W. Frank, At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness had not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

xiii

Chapter 1

Encountering Illness

1

Chapter 2

“A Real Man Again”

22

Chapter 3

Boosting Los Angeles

45

Chapter 4

Reforming Los Angeles

68

Chapter 5

“The Old Trouble”

87

Chapter 6

The “Gash” in “Our Happiness”

117

Epilogue

141

Notes

149

Index

171

vii

Illustrations

I.1 Streetcar arriving in downtown Los Angeles, early 1900s 1.1 Samuel Willard 1.2 Charles Dwight Willard as a boy

xiv 2 5

1.3 Southern Pacific passengers arriving in 1885

18

3.1 Charles Dwight Willard in 1891

46

3.2 Mary McGregor at the time of her marriage

51

3.3 Orange tower, composed of 14,000 oranges, at the Chicago World’s Fair 3.4 The LA Chamber of Commerce building in the late 1890s

55 62

4.1 Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” departing from the San Bernardino train station 6.1 Pasadena houses among the orange groves, 1890

72 121

ix

Acknowledgments

Like Charles Dwight Willard, I regularly draw assistance from a wide array of people. Unlike him, I take pleasure in acknowledging it. Two close friends rendered the first and strongest support. Mary Felstiner helped me realize this was the story I wanted to tell and then took valuable time from her own manuscript to wield her red pen on mine. Mary Rothschild joined her in constantly admonishing me not to allow the history to overwhelm the narrative. My history reading group, Janet Brodie, Lynn Sacco, Sharla Fett, and Alice Wexler, read draft after draft, occasionally urging me to insert the historical material the two Marys had deleted. Other insightful critiques came from Elaine Tyler May and Andrea Sankar. My sister-in-law Carla Cappetti read all Willard’s short stories to give me the benefit of her literary expertise. At Rutgers University Press, Senior Editor Audra J. Wolfe; the two series editors, Janet Golden and Rima Apple; and an anonymous reviewer provided invaluable comments. Bill Frank, curator of Hispanic, Cartographic, and Western Historical Manuscripts at the Huntington Library; Dace Taube, Regional History Curator, Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections, University of Southern California; and Katharine E. S. Donahue, Teresa G. Johnson, and Russell A. Johnson, all of the History Division, UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, were especially helpful in pointing me to relevant archives. Charles Doran edited the cover photograph, originally from the frontispiece of the Land of Sunshine, a journal edited by Willard in 1894. Permissions were received from the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, to quote from the Charles Willard Collection; from the Special Collections, Doheny Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, to quote from the Records of the Chamber of Commerce; from the Department of Archives, Manuscripts, and Museum Collections, the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., to quote from the Lawrence Flick Collection; from the Urban Archives Center, California State University, Northridge, to quote from the Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles Collection; from the State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City, to quote from the Huftalen Collection; from the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, to quote from the Meyer Lissner Papers; and from Karen Fiser, to reproduce her poem, “Across the Border.” xi

xii

Acknowledgments

The book was supported by grant number 5G13LM007969 from the National Library of Medicine. Its contents are solely my responsibility and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. My family, now expanded by three sons-in-law and three grandchildren, provides the happiness that makes any accomplishment possible.

Introduction

In the spring of 1910, a middle-aged, white man boarded a Los Angeles streetcar and saw a woman he later would describe as severely deformed; her spine was “twisted” and her head jiggled constantly. Just as he was thinking “what a hideous affliction” she had, he realized he, too, inhabited a deviant body. Indeed, he “could almost read her lips” saying of him, “Hear that poor consumptive cough.” He “would not trade with her for $50,000,” but then he could “bet she would not trade” with him.1 By that date, Charles Dwight Willard had lived in Southern California for twenty-four years, seeking a cure for tuberculosis. Although he had married, raised a child, and risen to prominence in Los Angeles civic and social life, the specter of worsening disease relentlessly haunted him. Every cough could presage a hemorrhage; every undertaking had the potential to harm. Now he was largely confined to his house. The encounter on the streetcar may have struck so deeply because he rarely exposed his symptoms in public. But he did chronicle his disease privately. Dispatching long, weekly letters to Chicago, he asked his family to witness his suffering and affirm the value of his struggle. Although some correspondence is missing, more than four hundred letters survive, recording his fears, frustrations, disappointments, and occasional moments of joy or wonder in lavish detail. For nearly three decades he managed, in poet Karen Fiser’s words, to “smuggle messages across the border,” telling stories from the land of the sick.2 Willard told the story of his illness more obliquely in published writing. Despite physical frailty and recurrent health crises, he managed to produce a remarkable body of work. The short stories he penned during the late 1880s expressed the dark forebodings he struggled to hide from his family. His promotional literature conveyed many of his deepest longings. And the public persona he created in hundreds of newspaper articles and editorials enables us to glimpse the kind of man he desperately wanted to be. His story was about the most fearsome disease of his time. Tuberculosis is an ancient scourge which we now know is caused by the tubercle bacillus, a rod-shaped germ. Although some people contract the disease from cows, most become infected from other individuals, who transmit the bacillus by coughing or sneezing. Those with weakened resistance as a result of stress, poverty, poor nutrition, and repeated exposure are most likely to develop discernable

xiii

xiv

Introduction

symptoms. Pulmonary tuberculosis is most common, though the disease can attack any organ of the body. Like many sufferers, Willard experienced recurrent crises interspersed with periods of relative well-being. He received his diagnosis at the age of twenty-five in 1885, three years after Robert Koch’s discovery of the bacillus had galvanized the world. For more than a decade, however, many physicians remained convinced that the

Figure I.1

Streetcar arriving in downtown Los Angeles, early 1900s.

Courtesy of the University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

Introduction

xv

disease was hereditary. Because Koch’s announcement produced neither a vaccine nor a cure, tuberculosis continued to kill more people than any other disease. Willard frequently attributed many of his symptoms to “weak nerves,” only to have coughing fits and hemorrhages starkly remind him that his malady was intractable and deadly. Hundreds of East Coast consumptives had preceded him to Los Angeles, prompted by the Southern Pacific Railroad’s massive campaign to portray the metropolis as the promised land, where everyone could find robust good health. Five years after arriving in Southern California, Willard became one of the region’s foremost promoters, seeking to lure other invalids by means of stories of miraculous cures. As secretary of the chamber of commerce between 1891 and 1897, he spearheaded a vast array of activities that helped make Los Angeles among the best advertised American cities. But because the inflated booster rhetoric promised more than could possibly be delivered, a metropolis that prided itself on the health of its inhabitants soon had an unusually high proportion of sick and dying people in its midst. Willard and other boosters camouflaged the widespread disease surrounding them even while addressing the yearnings of the sick. As a vast historical literature reminds us, changing medical beliefs increased the difficulties of living with tuberculosis. During the last years of the nineteenth century, people struggled to understand what it meant to live among the deadly microorganisms scientists had revealed. Massive health education crusades were launched to convince the public that even casual contact with infected individuals could be dangerous. Tuberculosis was the central focus of those campaigns. As news of the communicable nature of the disease spread, sufferers increasingly were viewed as menaces who had to be segregated from the rest of society. And health officials began to describe the affected population in new ways. No longer convinced that tuberculosis struck all segments of society equally, experts increasingly identified the disease with poor people, racial minorities, and immigrants. Like many Anglo Los Angelenos, Willard was proud of his genetic inheritance, repeatedly referring to the high quality of the “Willard constitution.” The promotional literature he disseminated asserted that only middle-class whites could reach physical perfection in Southern California. His letters suggest the various, often convoluted, strategies he employed to sustain his belief in his superior endowment as disease increasingly ravaged his body.3 The booster enterprise itself contributed to the increasingly virulent and racist hostility surrounding people with tuberculosis. The flip side of exalting good health was denigrating those who did not get well. Once recovery became

xvi

Introduction

the only permissible public outcome, sufferers increasingly met suspicion. Successful health seekers often presented their new robustness as a sign of superiority and described long-term invalids as hopeless and resigned. Popular faith in medical science increased after the turn of the century, further encouraging contemporaries to conflate ill health with failure to take appropriate steps for recovery. Those with advanced disease drew particularly fierce condemnation because they represented everything boosters had promised migrants they could avoid—failure, subjection to fate, deterioration, and premature death. And although most people with early tuberculosis could “pass” as healthy, those in the later stages created unsettling spectacles. For a fleeting moment, Willard had observed the other streetcar passenger from the “point of view” of “normals,” in Erving Goffman’s words. Only then did Willard realize that he, too, displayed a stigmatized condition. Emaciation, his most visible symptom, was especially disturbing during a period which valorized men’s physical bulk over the wiry leanness that previously had been the ideal.4 The disease declared itself in distinctive sounds as well as sights. After describing his humiliating encounter on the streetcar, Willard noted that he hated not only “to look so sick,” but also “to cough so that people can hear me.” Coughing was the preeminent tuberculosis symptom. By the early twentieth century, when Willard’s disease entered its final phase, growing numbers of Los Angelenos described the noises emanating from tuberculars as repulsive and complained about having to hear them. His persistent cough also meant that his body, like that of the woman passenger, could be viewed as out of control. And when blood vessels in his lungs broke off, he coughed up large quantities of blood; the worst hemorrhages produced the sensation of drowning.

I did not set out to write a book about Willard. I was in the midst of a study of the social history of tuberculosis in Los Angeles when I first encountered his letters. Having read that the typical LA booster had arrived as an invalid, quickly achieved a cure, and then tried to share his good fortune with others, I was curious to see how Willard framed his experiences. What I did not expect was that his private account would diverge so dramatically from the booster ideal he helped to promulgate. I quickly realized that Willard’s writings could help advance the project of uncovering the history of disease from the patients’ perspective. A rapidly expanding sociological and anthropological literature highlights the gap between the records of health providers and the lived experiences of sufferers. Popular readers as well as scholars seek patients’ accounts, helping to spur the

Introduction

xvii

burgeoning genre of illness narratives. Despite the proliferation of historical studies of doctors and nurses, however, we have little access to lay people’s responses to their illnesses in the past. Historian Sheila M. Rothman demonstrates that the narrative of Deborah Vinal Fiske, an early nineteenth-century woman with tuberculosis, can elucidate the meaning of that disease. Willard’s writings open a rare window on a very different patient experience.5 Like Fiske, Willard was a member of the white, Protestant, middle class. But there the similarity ends. Willard lived with his disease for twenty-eight years, an unusually long time and nearly twice as long as Fiske. While Fiske struggled to adhere to the prevailing model of domesticity, Willard wrestled with the problem of retaining his masculine identity. Fiske lived on the East Coast before the Civil War. By the late nineteenth century, when Willard received his diagnosis, both the cultural representation and social meaning of tuberculosis had begun to change dramatically. And he faced that disease in a metropolis helping to construct and propagate a new ideal of health. Living in Los Angeles a century after Willard, I also was drawn to his story for personal reasons. After six months of breast cancer treatment, I assumed my troubles were over. Family and friends reassured me. But breast cancer, like early twentieth-century tuberculosis, is a chronic disease as well an acute one. Although many “survivors” celebrate their cures, breast cancer can recur at any time, and watchful waiting never ends. What is less widely recognized is that lingering symptoms from chemotherapy and radiation also can make recovery elusive. When I experienced overwhelming fatigue months and then years after finishing treatment, I realized I had to carefully manage my public presentation. Every doctor I consulted concluded that I must be depressed—all the more reason to hide my condition. And then terrifying information began to emerge about chemobrain, suggesting a new way the trouble could all be in my head. Of course, one kind of fatigue is a badge of honor in my profession. In a world where it is unseemly to brag about salaries, promotions, and awards, we instead complain about accumulating demands. Fatigue talk also is a way of showing that in a professional life built on the honor system, we haven’t been slackers. We, too, have worked doctors’ and lawyers’ hours even though no one is counting. But my fatigue came from within. And all along there was a deep sense of failure at not having recovered when so many others had. Like Willard, we live in a society where good health is not just a desired state but also a moral imperative. Willard’s chronicle enabled me to explore several key issues. How do expectations of cure affect the illness experience and how do patients participate in them? Although no one could be considered definitely recovered from

xviii

Introduction

tuberculosis until the 1940s, Willard repeatedly insisted he would prevail. Even after his disease entered its final phase, he portrayed each crisis as a temporary setback. Participation in the progressive reform movement as well as the Los Angeles booster industry strengthened his belief that the future would get better and better. As a result, he pressed himself to triumph over his body long after he might have been expected to acknowledge the inevitable. How do concepts of race, class, and gender affect people who live with sickness? Not only did Willard’s frail, emaciated body betray the prevailing ideal of masculinity, but he increasingly depended on the caregiving services bestowed by a broad array of women. The care rendered by Japanese servants threatened his place in the racial hierarchy. His greatest fear was that he would be compelled to withdraw from the workforce and thus drop to the status of a pauper. After fire destroyed his house in 1910 and he almost failed to find accommodation, he realized he could provoke the same disgust as indigent and Mexican consumptives. How do different cultures constrain the coping strategies of the ill? Reading Willard’s correspondence, I often wished he had been able to live more openly with his illness and discover his commonality with other sufferers. Because he craved acceptance from a society which exalted physical robustness, however, those options were not available. Instead, he employed two ultimately self-defeating, strategies: masking his infirmity and distinguishing himself from the majority of people with his disease. But he was never all of a piece. Writing to his family, he revealed the anxieties and sorrows he carefully concealed in public. And in a remarkable Christmas letter sent to a wide circle of friends and colleagues shortly before his death, he testified to the wisdom that can come from sickness. The following chapters discuss those issues while tracing Willard’s life as a sick man over three decades.

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

Chapter 1

Encountering Illness

Childhood and Youth

By late January 1886, when twenty-six-year-old Charles D. Willard was carried off the train at the San Bernardino, California, station, he already had received important messages about negotiating his illness. Greatly beloved by his large family—and especially by his mother and two sisters—he had learned that he could rely on their unstinting devotion and care. Simultaneously, however, he had seen that their services came at a cost. He had returned to childhood dependence just when most of his male contemporaries were launching independent lives. Only by ignoring some of the care he received could he recover his self-respect. In addition, because he was closely bound to his mother and attuned her needs, he was acutely aware of the terror she felt about him; he also realized that her anxieties greatly magnified his own. Even while yearning for her sympathy and reassurance, he thus had begun to hone a skill he later would employ when managing his public presentation, concealing the worst while conveying a sense of openness. Two years before arriving in Southern California, Charles had graduated from the University of Michigan, confident he could fulfill his exalted literary ambitions. But illness had suddenly derailed him. In June 1885, he was one of seventy-five swimmers who contracted typhoid fever from a local public pool. Before he had fully recovered, he began to experience lung problems, which doctors labeled pneumonia. Because his doctors lacked any way to identify tuberculosis in its early stages, it is possible that disease caused the symptoms originally attributed to pneumonia. As late as 1906, a prominent Los Angeles specialist noted that many deaths blamed on pneumonia were “really due to 1

Figure 1.1

Samuel Willard.

Courtesy of the Willard Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Encountering Illness

3

tuberculosis.” Perhaps changes in the nature of his cough led physicians to suspect that malady. Or perhaps it took a hemorrhage—“that telltale, brilliant red blood”—to convince them to change their verdict.1 In any case, by November they diagnosed tuberculosis—or consumption, as it still was called. Willard must have seemed a likely candidate for that disease; young adults and whites with “refined” temperaments were considered at especially high risk. The new diagnosis was far more serious. Although both maladies could kill, consumption was also chronic. Some people enjoyed remissions of years and even decades, but permanent cure was impossible until the introduction of streptomycin in 1946. We will see that for years Willard resisted the notion that his affliction was intractable. Especially in the beginning, he assumed he would adhere to a linear pattern of recovery and progress, frequently highlighting any sign of “improvement.”2 He was not the first family member to face serious, long-term illness. Having trained as a surgeon, his father, Samuel, had practiced for a few years before physical problems forced him to quit. He then taught literature in the Illinois State Normal School. Charles later wrote that his father volunteered to serve in the Civil War but “suffered a stroke of paralysis through an acute attack of swamp fever” shortly before the fall of Vicksburg and was “shipped north with the expectation that he would die without reaching home.” Samuel eventually recovered but walked with crutches for many years. In 1871, he began teaching high school history in Chicago and pursuing various writing projects (most of which remained unfinished). From his father Charles may have learned both to associate good health with whiteness and to conceal any impairment as far as possible. Shortly before his death at ninety-two, Samuel attributed his longevity to his membership in a “vital family” and in “the strongest race on earth—the Teutonic Norse.” His children, however, had long been aware of his physical frailties.3 Charles’s closest relationship was with his mother, his primary correspondent. More than anyone else, she would convey a sense that his life was unusually precious and his illness struggle had special meaning. She also provided a model of industry and drive. The daughter of Quakers, Harriet Edgar Willard drew on the example of many of her forbears to engage in an array of philanthropic activities, including coordinating relief for the 1871 Chicago fire, assisting the families of Civil War soldiers, and working with Jane Addams in a program that later became Hull House. Much of the responsibility for supporting the family fell on her. In addition to raising eight children and working in charitable organizations, she published several books and bought a private high school, which she renamed the Willard School and ran until 1888.

4

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

When Charles forced himself to produce a large body of work despite overwhelming obstacles, he may have been trying to follow the mold she set.4 Despite her exceptional energy, Harriet’s efforts to supplement her husband’s salary were only partially successful, and the large family never easily maintained a comfortable middle-class existence. Instead, they emphasized nonmaterial pleasures. Music and literature were the core of the family life. Charles’s fondest childhood memories included singing or playing musical instruments with his parents and sisters, discussing books with them, and reading aloud. During his first months as an invalid, he had drawn comfort from listening to one sister play the piano while another read aloud to him. Letter writing also was highly valued in the family. Throughout four years of college in Ann Arbor, Charles had kept his family apprized of events in his scholarly and social life. Despite the high value placed on academic achievement in his family, he had been an indifferent student as a boy, won a place at a selective high school only through his father’s intercession, and entered the university on probation. But his success in history and English courses and his election to top editorial positions in major college journals gradually convinced him he could make his mark in the world of literature. Now he had another story he urgently needed to tell. Within days of arriving in San Bernardino, he began to chronicle his experience as an exile not just from home but even more from the comfortable world of the healthy. For many of the next twenty-eight years, his weekly correspondence would take precedence over other endeavors. One of his first concerns after medical crises was to be able to communicate with his family. When too weak to leave his bed, he wrote propped up on pillows and, occasionally, flat on his back. We will see that those letters sought simultaneously to reassure his family and solicit their sympathy, to describe disturbing symptoms and deny their significance, to mourn his losses and accept his limitations. As we try to interpret his equivocations, we can imagine the conversations his family members may have had, passing the letters from one to another. Because the great majority of surviving letters from Charles to his siblings were addressed to his sisters Sarah and May, the ones closest to him in age, we may assume an intimacy that was absent from his relationship with his older brother, John, or the four youngest children, Jane, Alice, Edgar, and Paul. In 1885, when Charles’s illness letters begin, Sarah had recently married Henry Hiestand, a lawyer, and had produced the first of many children. May was still a student at the Willard School. In the fall of 1886 she entered Wellesley College. After graduating, she returned to Chicago and taught in the public schools, eventually becoming a principal. Perhaps because she never married,

Figure 1.2

Charles Dwight Willard as a boy.

Courtesy of the Willard Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

6

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

Charles’s correspondence with her remained particularly intense. He teased her about various beaus but also lectured her about her health, finances, education, and family obligations. Edgar’s death in the early 1880s had shattered the close-knit family. Now Charles’s diagnosis threatened them with a second devastating loss. Samuel and Harriet probably placed the most faith in Norman Bridge, by far the most distinguished of the five doctors they consulted. Born in Windsor, Vermont, in 1844, Bridge received his medical degrees at Northwestern University Medical College and Rush Medical College. An authority on consumption and a prolific writer, he was an attending physician at the Presbyterian Hospital of Chicago. But Bridge had little to offer Charles in the fall of 1885. In order to build resistance, the doctor undoubtedly advocated a special diet (including ample eggs and milk), fresh air, and the proper proportions of rest and exercise. The “best of all measures of benefit,” Bridge later would write, was travel to a more salubrious climate. Since ancient times, it had been widely believed that certain air, soil, and water could promote health. Westward journeys by Americans in search of cures for lung problems began in the early 1800s, stopped temporarily during the Civil War, and then rapidly increased after fighting ended. One historian argues that “faith in climatic treatment” was “so universal” by the late nineteenth century that “most patients accepted with unreserved approval a physician’s charge to seek a more favorable climate.” Even well-educated physicians, however, still commanded relatively little respect in late nineteenth-century America, and most sick people felt free to challenge medical prescriptions. Bridge recalled Willard as having “rebelled against leaving Chicago on my insistence.” A prominent member of the recently established American Climatological Association, the doctor had to work hard to convince his patient to go.5 Because Charles would later build his reputation as a Los Angeles publicist, it is fitting that Bridge’s choice of a site for cure owed much to the first wave of boosterism. Other parts of the country still drew legions of health seekers, since no one yet agreed on what a healthful climate meant. As historian Barbara Bates notes, “medical testimonials lauded regions as different as Bethlehem, New Hampshire, and Aiken, South Carolina.” One doctor simultaneously recommended that consumptives try “the ocean climate of the East Coast; the mild, moist climate of Florida; the White, Green, Adirondack, Allegheny, and Rocky Mountains; the cold, dry winters of Minnesota; the warm, dry climate of the Southwest; and the pine forests of the Carolinas and Georgia.” Even consumptives convinced of the advantages of the Southwest had no special attraction to Los Angeles. In 1903 Bridge wrote that “as places to

Encountering Illness

7

migrate to, in the hope of recovery from pulmonary tuberculosis, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico had better reputations than southern California.”6 But that region began to receive unprecedented attention after the extension of the Southern Pacific Railroad from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1876. Although notorious for polluted air today, Southern California towns and cities began to vie for the invalid trade by touting the remarkable curative power of both the climate and the newly planted citrus orchards. An 1882 trip to Southern California with a friend “recovering from a severe chest disease” had convinced Bridge that the area offered the “most hope of recovery.” He may have relied on the burgeoning promotional literature as well as medical evidence to plead his case with Willard. I. M. Holt, the secretary of the Immigration Association of San Bernardino County, declared Southern California “Nature’s Great Sanitarium.” A former invalid proclaimed, “Steady, persistent cultivation of the soil, in a pure atmosphere and under a genial sky, like we have here, will as surely save from destruction any lungs capable of salvation, as faith will save the soul.” Consumptives who were too sick to work in the orchards could still benefit from their produce. A physician wrote, “In this semi-tropic country, one finds an abundance of fruits most acceptable to the invalid, such as oranges, grapes, apricots, pears, peaches and figs, all grown in the greatest abundance, their matured juices in many cases greatly enhancing the patient’s chances of recovery.”7 Another booster promise also may have appealed to Charles. Promoters described Southern California as a land of culture and refinement, rather than adventure, hardship, and danger. In his 1885 Homes and Happiness in the Golden State of California, Benjamin Cummings Truman wrote that “no State in the Union spends more relatively on its common schools, or has a better educational system or more competent teachers.” Other works emphasized the fine hotels dotting the region. Deploring crudeness of any kind, Willard must have been relieved to learn that he would not have to forfeit all cultural amenities when he left Chicago.8 “Old timers” who had endured the rigors of a stagecoach trip across the country frequently derided the new generation of travelers whose trip lasted less than a week and who could ride in the comfort of a Pullman car. In fact, however, a train trip to California was beset with peril for consumptives, especially at high altitudes, where the thin air made breathing difficult. During the 1890s, two health seekers warned that “all invalids, no matter how they may take the trip, arrive in California fatigued and exhausted.” Although we lack information about how Willard fared on the trip, he later wrote that he arrived at the California station “more dead than alive.”9

8

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

Some health seekers portrayed themselves as Western heroes, abandoning wives and children to embark on solitary adventures. Charles, by contrast, did not seek to distance himself from his family. Although he left no account of his departure, he described every subsequent leave-taking as a painful dislocation, and the first must have been especially wrenching. Because he was too sick to travel alone, his mother accompanied him on the train. And his destination was his brother John’s house in San Bernardino. Joan Didion has famously described the San Bernardino Valley as “an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour.” Charles may well have felt that his trip, like his illness, had plunged him into a foreign land.10 Ignoring the Indians and Mexicans, Didion identified only the Mormons as early residents. After they left, the valley drew “people who brought with them Midwestern ways of building and cooking and praying and who tried to graft those ways upon the land.” Charles’s Midwestern brother had brought his family to the town of San Bernardino. Having been bypassed by the Southern Pacific Railroad, San Bernardino was still small (approximately one square mile) and sparsely settled. But in January 1886 the arrival of the competing Santa Fe Railroad was greatly anticipated, and John hoped to benefit from the economic expansion the railroad promised to bring in its wake.11 San Bernardino

Charles dispatched his first letter back to Chicago on February 11, 1886, soon after his mother departed for home. “Mother expects to hear every day of my temperature, etc.,” he wrote to his sister May. So he started the kind of detailed report a child might make for a parent, and he continued for many years. “I had a good day yesterday—very little coughing. Temperature rose from noon until at bed time it was 100.8. Slept well. Temp. now at 9:30 is 99.5. Today will complete a week of fairly good days. That beats my Chicago record. I am certainly improving rapidly now. Took cod liver yesterday and suffered a little from indigestion.” We can sympathize with Harriet’s distress at leaving her dangerously ill son in San Bernardino. She anticipated he would remain at least several months. Unable to observe his symptoms directly, she relied on his delayed reports. But she could depend on at least one objective indicator. Temperature was believed to provide an accurate gauge of the course of the disease, and thermometers reached growing numbers of middle-class homes during the 1880s. Because cod liver oil was one of the most commonly prescribed drugs

Encountering Illness

9

for consumptives, Harriet also must have derived considerable comfort from knowing that Charles had taken at least one dose (despite its unpleasant side effect). The remainder of Charles’s report, however, could have done little to allay her fears: “My temperature is higher than it ought to be considering the other signs of improvement. Expect a relapse soon.”12 Charles continued his letter to May by noting that his limited strength prevented him from writing his typical long, chatty letter, but he had one more issue to discuss before closing: “How,” he asked, would he “get used” to his mother’s absence? “I wanted her to go and argued and I insisted upon it for it had to come some time. For so many weeks and months she has slept near me and waited on me for everything, read to me, talked to me, encouraged me when despondent and at times fairly stood between me and death—do you imagine it was easy for me to lose her without the hope of seeing her again, perhaps for a year? Yet I am glad she is gone as I felt guilty, selfish every day she was here.” This would not be the only time Charles would express appreciation for the services he received from family members, even while minimizing them. He declined to mention that she must have bathed him, lifted him in and out of bed, changed his clothes and bedding, and administered various medications, all the while watching for dangerous symptoms. But why did he also feel “guilty” and “selfish”? He undoubtedly recognized that Harriet’s young children and school demanded her presence in Chicago. And he must have realized how inappropriate it was for an adult male to rely on his mother.13 Harriet Willard left her son in the care of another female family member. Although Charles later would complain about John’s repeated career failures, the poor housekeeping of his wife, Ella, and the unruly behavior of their many children, John and Ella provided Charles with the emotional and physical support he desperately needed during the winter and spring of 1886. The burdens fell most heavily on Ella. “Brother John and Sister Ella are as good to me as it is possible to be,” he wrote. “Ella spends much time reading and talking to me. She has been sick and suffered I imagine more than I have a good deal so she understands what to do and how to do it.” Charles lacked the religious faith that might have enabled him to believe in the redemptive nature of sickness, but he frequently welcomed any sign that illness could enlarge one’s humanity; here he suggests sickness could heighten sensitivity and compassion.14 Ella probably was not greatly surprised to be asked to nurse an invalid for several months. Caregiving dominated women’s lives during the nineteenth century. Even those with no special knowledge or skills were expected to incorporate care for sick and dying relatives, friends, and neighbors into their daily rounds. Few alternatives to family care existed. A national survey

10

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

conducted in 1873 found only 120 hospitals, most of which were custodial institutions for the “deserving poor.” By 1886, Southern California had a few small hospitals serving consumptives; few middle-class patients, however, entered them. Although Dr. Edward L. Trudeau established the first American sanatorium the year Willard received his diagnosis, Southern California did not begin to build separate facilities for tuberculosis patients until after the turn of the century.15 Because John’s wages were too low to support his growing family, he and Ella undoubtedly welcomed the money Charles received from his father to pay for room and board. But there was no compensation for Ella’s services. Although some of the tasks she performed for Charles were indistinguishable from her routine household labor, his arrival imposed extra burdens, such as cooking special meals, preparing tonics, and washing blood- and sweat-stained sheets and clothes. Marian Louise Moore, an Ohio homesteader, remembered her experience nursing her mother: “In the Spring of the year 1872 . . . she was sick three months, part of the time helpless. . . . This sickness of her brought more work upon me, washing and other work, when I had more work of my own than I could possibly do well.”16 Ella also delivered what we now would call skilled nursing and medical care. Charles occasionally summoned a local doctor, William R. Fox. But Fox charged five dollars a visit, and Charles thus refrained from calling him except during emergencies. Skepticism about his skills may have further deterred the patient and his hosts from summoning Fox. We take for granted an enormous chasm between professional and lay knowledge and skills, but throughout most of the nineteenth century little distinguished the ideas and practices of physicians from those of family caregivers. Although Fox had attended a medical college in Chicago before arriving in San Bernardino in 1884, Charles and Ella undoubtedly were well aware that most medical schools were poorly funded commercial enterprises, staffed by part-time instructors; some even lacked laboratories and libraries. Ella may have consulted one of the many popular health guides written by doctors and lay authors. Or perhaps she acquired medical knowledge the same way she learned other domestic skills— while helping her mother at home and accompanying her on visits to ailing neighbors.17 One of the major functions of doctors was to dispense drugs. Even such potent medications as mercury, however, were available in many local stores and could be administered without physician oversight. When Charles suffered a “bad tooth ache” one night, Ella (with John’s assistance) “tried everything [they] knew” before finding that “oil of cloves” soothed Charles enough

Encountering Illness

11

to allow him to sleep. Ella also felt competent to challenge at least some of Dr. Fox’s advice. When a tonic he recommended “had almost as bad an effect” as the cod liver oil, “Ella got mad and declared she would give [Charles] no more medicine.”18 Ella’s services, too, engendered mixed feelings. Throughout the spring Charles would express a desire to “repay” her by assuming increasing responsibility for himself. As he confided to May, “I hate to have other people whom I do not hire, constantly doing things for me. Don’t you?” Although the great majority of nineteenth-century patients relied on the unpaid care of (primarily female) relatives, Charles preferred to operate within the market economy, where all obligations could be fulfilled by remuneration and amorphous feelings of indebtedness need not persist.19 Most health seekers initially penned glowing accounts of their progress, and Charles’s first letter to his mother tried to follow that mold. “If you were here now you would spend most of your time taunting me with my improvement,” he wrote on February 15, 1886. “Yesterday I coughed very little, ate four enormous meals, bathed and shaved myself, walked about my room and out in the yard and my temperature did not rise above 99.5” But he could not sustain that tone for long. He now had new problems to report. “One eye was pasted up” so that he could “scarcely see out of it” and a “bad tooth-ache” had kept him and Ella up most of the night. Writing had helped him “forget” the toothache, but it was growing worse and he had to “cut the letter short.20 Charles’s letter to Sarah, his other favorite sister, a few days later also started on a hopeful note. He was “gaining with unexpected rapidity.” Sarah would “enjoy seeing” him “walk about the room and the yard.” Every day he planned “a bigger job” for himself; that afternoon he expected to “walk about 3/4 of a block without stopping.” He had “only two coughing spells in the day and one at night,” and they were all “very easy.” He “stowed away” five “goodsized meals” daily. “I begin to realize,” he commented, “that at last I am pulling out of this horrid pit and am becoming myself again.” At this stage, Willard viewed consumption as an acute event. Expecting to return to full health, he assumed illness was merely a temporary part of his true identity.21 But even the letter to Sarah soon took another turn. “Frequent toothaches and badly inflamed eyelids” made him “miserable much of the time.” And he suffered from homesickness. Hearing a neighbor play the piano demonstrated how he missed “the music [he] used to enjoy so much!” His one consolation was to “spend hours remembering music.” Charles abandoned even the pretense of cheerfulness in his February 27 letter to May. His eyes remained “badly inflamed” and his teeth had “been acting funny again.” He also had

12

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

more ominous symptoms. The previous week he “took cold,” and his “cough took a new lease of life.” Because his fever had “mounted,” he had “resumed” his “old place on the bed.”22 On March 4, Charles warned his mother to expect a “doleful” letter and then proceeded to catalogue his troubles. His mouth was “punishing” him “dreadfully,” and he could not “swallow, chew, move my tongue, cough, yawn, sneeze, or even speak without wincing with the pain.” He had tried the standard remedies for his troubles (Vaseline, glycerine, and eucalyptus), but they seemed “to do no good,” and he had decided to send for the doctor. He also had seen little of the hot, dry air that Norman Bridge had promised would heal. The weather was “still cold”; as a result, Charles had not “smelled out of door air” for two weeks. He continued to “get along comfortably enough with John and Ella” but could “fill this letter plumb full of kicking.” Ella had not swept his room or turned over his mattress for several weeks. Because she apologized “so volubly for the things that [were] not done,” it was hard to “ask for things.” And he had financial woes. The five dollars a month he paid John for his room and board, combined with the expense of medicine and doctors’ visits, had left “a good deal of a hole” in the limited funds he had brought with him.23 Four days later Charles was still “suffering many miseries.” He had intended to write to one of his sisters, but his mother had to remain his correspondent. Only she would have the “patience to read” his complaints. Because intense pain had persisted, he had summoned the doctor, who had prescribed cocaine, which had provided some relief. Used as an anesthetic in the 1880s, cocaine was widely available as a patent medicine, for state governments did not begin to restrict its use until the following decade. Charles’s parents probably had more serious concerns about the second remedy he mentioned in his letter. When a headache began, he had had “the worst fit of hysteria” he had experienced since the start of his illness. He thought he “should never get done screaming” and was able to sleep only after “two large doses of whiskey.” Firm adherents of the temperance movement which swept late nineteenth-century America, Harriet and Samuel disapproved of alcohol even for medicinal purposes.24 Charles also wanted to correct a misunderstanding. In a letter to Ella, Harriet had written that she assumed Charles now was walking downtown and almost well. “Have I been so sparing of the truth as to make you think that?” he asked. “Why it is three weeks nearly since I have been out doors. I spend most of my time on the bed and I think I do well if I walk across the room. Understand that this is a veritable set back and is good for a good week or two yet.”25

Encountering Illness

13

Clearly, it was not easy to strike the proper balance. On March 19, Charles wrote to his father, “I can see by the returns which I get that the doleful letters which my combination of miseries have wrung from me have produced an altogether too harrowing effect.” How could he both confide in his mother and conceal information that would alarm her unduly? Some news he imparted to other family members instead. Shortly after sending his last letter to his mother, he had informed May that he had experienced a “little hemorrhage.” Somewhat disingenuously, he now wrote that he hoped this report “did not frighten mother.” He “should not have allowed any mention to be made of it” had not the doctor “said it was of no consequence.” Fortunately, he had good news as well: He had coughed only “once” the previous day; his appetite had “picked up again,” and his eyes were “so much better” that he “read quite a while.” As usual, however, he undercut whatever reassurance he offered. “I have little doubt,” he concluded, “but that by the time this letter reaches you or its answer me I shall be enjoying another set-back!”26 Writing directly to his mother a few days later, Charles reported continued “improvement.” Although he recently had “suffered so with stomach aches,” he was feeling better and spent most of his time outside. Nevertheless, he could not relax: “I find I take cold very easily and have to be on my guard all the time.” And a game of chess had “upset” his “nerves.” According to prevailing medical beliefs, people had a limited stock of nervous energy, which easily could be depleted, especially by excessive “brain work”; the result was nervous exhaustion, or “neurasthenia,” the term George M. Beard coined in 1869. Neurasthenia and consumption were closely related. Both were assumed to strike high proportions of cultured and refined individuals. Some doctors assumed that neurasthenia could manifest itself as respiratory trouble. Although Charles later would attribute many symptoms to neurasthenia rather than consumption, at this point he does not appear to have believed that his primary problem was a lack of nerve force. He did, however, assume that overtaxing his nerves could deprive his body of the strength needed to fight consumption, and thus he vowed “not to try” chess “again.”27 “I keep improving a little,” Charles told his mother early in April, “not day by day and scarcely week by week—but still I improve.” He slept “a good deal” and his appetite was “good.” He walked every day to a neighbor’s fence—a distance of “about three city blocks.” Sadly, however, the exercise “exhausted” him, and he would “indulge” in more “foolish guesses” about when he would walk to town.28 Bad news went in both directions that spring. Because the Willard School had failed to attract enough students, the family finances were even more

14

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

precarious than usual. “I do not want you to suppress anything for I am anxious to know it all even the worst,” Charles wrote to his mother after receiving a particularly gloomy report. Nevertheless, he concluded that concealment represented his own best strategy. “I may as well remark,” he wrote to his father on April 12, “whether it will do any good or not that I have now reached a point in my recovery where the future has ceased to be dubious and worry and apprehension are totally out of order. It is true that I shall not be well in all probability until next fall—perhaps not then—but barring some accident my recovery is now assured. I may have some more hemorrhages, I expect to have them, but the next time you may exercise your wits in keeping it from mother since she goes to pieces so.”29 It soon became clear that he had decided to withhold other information as well. Early in May he told his mother he finally had been able to achieve his goal of walking into town. “It seems very queer to be walking away about as fast and (for four blocks) as easily as I ever walked,” he remarked. The following month, however, he confessed to Sarah that some letters suppressed more than they revealed: “The fact is I am not gaining and have not been gaining for seven weeks—during the last two weeks I have lost decidedly. I have said nothing about it when I wrote home for the reason that I knew it would disturb mother and do no good. Indeed I think I have even assured her that I was improving tho’ I took pains not to specify.” It was true that he had “uniformly gained in strength” and could walk longer distances, but he coughed more, ate less, had lost two pounds, and suffered with “occasional headache and dizziness.” The previous night and day he had felt so sick that he had consulted the doctor, the first time since the middle of March.30 Charles’s primary reason for confiding in Sarah was to ask for advice. Although John pressed him to stay, his own impulse was to leave as soon as possible. With the family’s approval, he would return to Chicago, remain through the summer, and then look for a teaching job, preferably in the South. His continued ill health had made a mockery of publicity claims about Southern California. He noted that when asked whether Charles needed to stay, Dr. Fox “answered—and I firmly believe he is right—that the Eastern doctors put as a rule altogether too much faith in this climate.” All through February and March Charles had complained about the fog and cold. Now he encountered the hot, dry air which so disturbed Joan Didion many years later. “By eight o’clock in the

A.M. ,”

he wrote, “it is unpleasantly warm out of doors and dur-

ing most of the day it is beastly. Yesterday . . . the thermometer on my desk was 91 for several hours. . . . Do you like this country? If you do, you can have it.” And there were other disappointments: “Strange as it may seem, we have no

Encountering Illness

15

fresh vegetables and very little fruit. We have had strawberries for example only about half a dozen times.” Only the flowers surrounding John and Ella’s house had fulfilled the boosters’ promises. “Are you aware that there are 75 rose bushes on this place each one has on it at present at least ten roses and 150 buds?” Charles had asked May in April. But longing for familiar surroundings, he had taken little delight in that alien, if luxuriant, vegetation. “I would trade it all for one good Christian snow-storm and the health to be out and enjoy it.”31 Because none of Charles’s letters survive from the middle of June to the beginning of October 1886, we do not know how he finally decided to spend the summer in Chicago, how he employed his time there, or whether he found the improvement he craved. What is clear, however, is that when he left Southern California later that June, he was determined never to return, at least not for an extended stay. The Tutor

“Extraordinary good luck has befallen me,” wrote Charles from Chicago on October 1, 1886, to May, now a freshman at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The luck was “so good” that he could “hardly realize it.” The previous July he had applied for a position as companion and tutor for Sam Newberry, a nineteen-year-old orphan who was heir to an immense fortune. To his surprise and delight, Charles had learned of his selection. As a result, he was about to embark on a “six or eight months trip to California, making long stays at different places and doing what can be done at reading and study.” An important advantage was that he would be able to follow doctors’ orders. In order to gain the full benefits of the California climate, consumptives were enjoined to engage in outdoor activities. Willard’s physician Norman Bridge later wrote, “The exercises that can be used with propriety are all gentle . . . like horseback riding, driving, and walking.” Charles promised May he would have “a healthful good time” with “plenty of horse back and buggy riding through the country.” But health does not seem to have been uppermost in his mind. In addition to earning “a snug little salary,” he would be able to dip into an enormous sum for expenses. “Do you see anything to kick in that?” he asked.32 Having met his charge ten days later, Charles pronounced him “a very nice fellow.” Sam had “no education,” but his “appearance” was “very good” and “his disposition agreeable.” On October 18, Charles wrote again to “bid” May “good-bye” because he would depart for Los Angeles the following day. “In leaving Chicago,” he noted, “I feel as though I was getting farther away from

16

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

you.” Hearing Jane play the piano intensified his sense of loss: “You can imagine how it affects me when I know I am not to hear anything of the sort for many months.” But the tone of the letter was anything but melancholy. “I go off in excellent spirits and I do not imagine shall weep much,” he insisted. The trip was “to be done in first class style.” He promised to write “often” and keep May “informed of the good times we have.”33 His next letter to May (on November 3) began, “I am feeling peculiarly wretched so I seize upon the auspicious occasion to write you. I expect I will have to quit and go to bed before I am half done. Confound this blasted California air!” He assumed she already had heard his news: a hemorrhage had struck shortly after he crossed into the state. Perhaps he hoped to integrate the shock of his hemorrhage by telling his story again.34 He had been enjoying the “pleasant” train trip when “a strange thing happened”: I had bought a very entertaining novel called “Other People’s Money” and as I chalked it up to “the account” I laughed to myself. I had got well into it and it was hugely entertaining when I had occasion to leave the car. It was stolen and the porter was unable to get it back—a thing which never before happened to me in a Pullman and is really a rare occurrence. I sat thinking over the title and wondering if there could by chance be anything prophetic in its disappearance. I had been unusually well all the way and had coughed but little. With scarcely an instant’s warning the blood began to come up. You can imagine the consternation I was in. I thought of the disappearance of the book and a sickening horror swept over me.

Fortunately, Charles had come prepared; he had packed ergot, a drug widely used to stop hemorrhages. After “taking some” and “lying down,” he “soon had the flow stopped.” He and Sam left the train at San Bernardino and telegraphed John, who took them to his house. The hemorrhage “happened again” that night, and for several more days Charles “spit red after coughing.” Once again he “lay in bed” while Ella “took good care” of him. Although he had recovered enough to continue to Los Angeles later that week, his lungs still hurt “a good deal” when he “read aloud” or talked “much.”35 Charles also narrated his experience to Sarah. He now confessed that during his “last few weeks” in Chicago, he had “felt worse” than he “was prepared to reveal to others or even to admit” to himself. His “breakdown at San Bernardino” provoked “great mental distress” because he worried about being “permanently disabled.” “For the first few days I was in Los Angeles,” he con-

Encountering Illness

17

tinued, “I fairly trembled every time I thought of the situation I was in. My lungs pained me so that at times I wished I might quit breathing, and I moved about and spoke as little as possible.” Charles was a devotee of the ghost stories currently enjoying renewed popularity, and he soon would publish several himself. When he used such words as “sickening horror” and “trembled” and described his terrifying premonition, he suggested that the literary form already had begun to influence him.36 If Charles dramatized his relapse to his sisters, he minimized it to his mother. “I do hope you have not been disturbed about my health,” he wrote. “That is the last thing to fret about.” Dr. Fox had seen Charles in San Bernardino and declared that he might even “be the better” for the hemorrhage. And he was “on the whole glad to have had that experience. It was a reminder and caution and also made [him] feel easier about such a thing should it occur again.” In any case, he seemed “now perfectly well again,” could “walk some distance without fatigue,” and slept and ate normally. He also promised to take “great care,” keeping warm and “never lifting anything that weighs more than twenty five pounds.”37 What Charles did reveal to his mother was contempt for the city he encountered for the first time. Unlike Chicago, Los Angeles was still overwhelmingly rural. Wheat grew in the San Fernando Valley, corn in El Monte, and grapes in the east. Vast stretches of land remained uncultivated, covered by dirt and scrub. Only the two-mile downtown area bore any resemblance to a contemporary city. But Los Angeles was in the midst of a metamorphosis. Although Willard had arrived in San Bernardino just before its rapid economic expansion, he reached Los Angeles at the height of its first major boom. The completion of a second railroad line to Southern California had sparked a new frenzy of advertising and real estate speculation. Train passengers were met by thirty-piece brass bands as well as drivers arrayed in silk top hats, eager to provide transportation to lots for sale. There were fourteen thousand real estate transfers in 1886 and thirty-three thousand the following year. Cable cars and electric streetcars began to replace horse-drawn carriages. And the number of residents grew rapidly. The city’s population, which had been approximately 4,400 in 1860, 5,700 in 1860, 11,200 in 1880, and 20,000 in 1885, reached nearly 50,400 by the end of the decade.38 With thousands of tourists and prospective settlers arriving, housing was scarce. No longer able to rely on John and Ella, Charles and Sam followed the example of countless other young adults who found themselves among strangers in expanding urban areas, lodging in a boardinghouse. Although Los Angeles, like other West Coast cities, soon would boast an unusually high

18

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

Figure 1.3

Southern Pacific passengers arriving in 1885.

Courtesy of the University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

number of such facilities, the two men could find a room only in a “dreadful” dwelling. The tiny fireplace failed to provide enough heat, and the food was paltry. Most other residents were not Charles’s kind. A woman sitting at his table was so “coarse and vulgar and homely” that he lost his appetite. The servants were even more uncouth. A “ghastly” event one evening demonstrated “the state of things out here as regards service”: “The two girls who waited on the table had been given warning because some of the guests complained of their insolence. It happened that the landlady was away and we were left for one meal to their tender mercies. They behaved in a most outrageous manner shouting and throwing things around and answering back so insolently that several ladies left the room. It was sickening for such a respectable place.”39 And there was a far greater shock: “In the room above us a young married lady—about my age I take it—is dying of consumption; she will hardly last a week longer.” Finding another consumptive in a boardinghouse must have been a common occurrence in late nineteenth-century Los Angeles. Another newly arrived consumptive recalled that he encountered a fellow sufferer “at every street corner.” A woman who accompanied her consumptive brother-inlaw reported that they met invalids “constantly.” Martha Shaw, the wife of a consumptive postman from Kansas, counted several invalids among the residents of both the hotel where she worked and the boardinghouse where she lived. Lucy Sprague spent three years caring for her father and aunt in Sierra Madre, a town thirteen miles northeast of downtown Los Angles; she wrote in

Encountering Illness

19

her autobiography, “Mother and I were about the only people in Sierra Madre who did not have tuberculosis.” And advertisements for consumption cures filled local newspapers, suggesting that recovery eluded a very high proportion of the health seekers flooding into the region.40 Lacking the support networks available at home, circles of patients often cared for each other. Martha Shaw noted that migrants from Kansas supplied her and her husband with food and helped to assuage their terrible loneliness. Perhaps because Charles and his neighbor Mr. McKay had “mutual acquaintances in Michigan,” Charles and Sam showed him “what attention [they] could.” After his wife died, Mr. McKay invited Charles and Sam to serve as pall bearers at the funeral, and Charles “offered him whatever miserable sympathy [he] could,” spending two evenings with him and lending him magazines.41 But close association with the death of another consumptive—coming so soon after his own hemorrhage—must have ignited Willard’s fears. The various strategies he used to allay his mother’s anxiety may have helped to quell his own as well. Mrs. McKay’s illness “resembled mine somewhat,” he wrote, “only they did not come to California until she had been ill some six months. Then it was too late.” In extremely stilted language, he discussed the possibility of his own death, only to insist it was a matter of indifference to him: “It is a peculiar manifestation of selfishness I suppose that while I cannot consider with anything else than horror and grief the idea of anything happening to you or father, yet I can look upon my own taking off with composure and almost with satisfaction.” Condescension and humor further deflected attention from his pain. His description of Mrs. McKay’s funeral read thus: “It was a wretchedly sad affair and some lugubrious music made it almost horrible. I hope when I come to die they won’t let loose any ordinary church choir to sing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ and ‘So Bury Thy Sorrow’ over my body. Some Mendelson and Schumann if you please.”42 Above all, improved health must have helped Charles detach himself from the distressing scenes he had witnessed. “The great thing,” he reported in December, was horseback riding: “We go every afternoon and I enjoy it very much. Los Angeles you know is situated among mountains and hills and roads head out from it in all directions with beautiful and interesting scenery for your delectation. We climb the hills and take long gallops along the level roads.” He finally tasted the vaunted fruit of the region: “I eat a great many oranges in these days. When we are riding we often come to orchards where we pick them from the trees and I eat them by the dozen.” Even the climate now pleased. Although he continued to “hunger for the snow and the cold” about to arrive in Chicago, he found “the weather delightful here, though

20

Suffering in the Land of Sunshine

sometimes foggy in the evenings.” And he was proud of the figures they cut. Although he could not match Sam, resplendent in “velveteen,” Charles sported a new “blue chinchilla jacket,” and they both wore “big leather leggings.” When they cantered “through the avenues of the town,” they made “quite an impression especially upon the kids who yell[ed], ‘Here come the jockey dudes.’”43 A move to Santa Barbara in January 1887 did not disrupt the fun. Another town currently enjoying a real estate boom, Santa Barbara was nestled between mountains and the ocean and thus provided even more opportunities for outdoor activities than Los Angeles. Charles and Sam soon resumed their practice of horseback riding every afternoon. As Newberry money enabled them to live in style, they stayed first at the Arlington, Santa Barbara’s most elegant hotel, and then rented a large home, overlooking the ocean, which they found with the help of a wealthy acquaintance. “If I had made that house and the surroundings to order I would not have changed it a particle,” Sam exulted. “Way above the Pacific so that you can see for miles out at sea, under the grandest mountains I ever looked upon, amid beautiful forests of live oaks, near a mountain arroyo, jack rabbits and quail all around, and deer within one day’s ride.”44 But early in February, Charles was back in bed, having experienced “another hemorrhage.” Once again he admitted to a sister that his letters had concealed more than they revealed. “The fact is,” he told May, “I have been through quite a little in the way of lung difficulties since I left home but precious little does any one know about it there except father.” And his mother was not to hear of this latest setback: She “has enough to distress her without this so say nothing about it to her.” As in November, he suggested that a hemorrhage might actually be beneficial: “Only a little blood came up and that seemed to make my breathing easier.” The doctor who was consulted suggested that “it is likely these pains and troubles are merely the signs of recovery.” But Charles wanted to elicit May’s empathy and compassion, not just dampen her fears. “I suffer a great deal,” he noted and then asked, “Can you think what it is like for months at a time not to be able to draw a full breath—to be unable to lie on either side at night and often to feel as though some animal were steadily gnawing away your lungs?” Pain often is described as a place of terrifying loneliness. Charles’s graphic image of the gnawing beast may have represented his plea that his sister join him there.45 Perhaps guilt about the secret he kept from his mother impelled Charles to confide another intimate experience to her nine days later. “I believe I will write you a letter just for you alone this time,” he began, “for I feel that when no one else but you reads what I write I can speak so much more freely as I

Encountering Illness

21

always do when I talk with you.” He then provided a detailed account of a long conversation in which Sam had expressed his high regard for Charles, thanked him for his help, and suggested they continue to share their lives after his contract ended, possibly studying law and launching careers together. Young men struck with consumption in the nineteenth century often expressed anguish at being forced to abandon cherished life plans. Sam’s unexpected openness and warmth appears to have both inspired Charles’s hope he still could realize some of his career aspirations and allowed him to acknowledge his deep grief at his lost opportunities: “I saw again with my old ambition and belief in myself, my forgotten hopes in life. The veil of my ill health and my feeble start in life seemed to roll up and for a moment I saw the future of which I used to dream.”46 By the end of February, Charles was again dispatching glowing reports of his activities. The weather was “perfect,” “warm and bright and delicious,” and he was able to be “in the saddle about 1/3 of the day.” A “Chinaman” cooked Charles and Sam “superb meals,” and a neighbor supplied “oranges by the thousand gratis.” But he was not yet ready to join the booster ranks. When his parents expressed a desire to follow him to Santa Barbara, he discouraged them thus: “I cannot tell why, but I despise this country—not the people exactly, for they are most of them easterners who live here under protest and pretend to be glad of it. . . . Next year Santa Barbara will be a good place to make money in. But California is not for me. It has no past, its future reveals nothing but an ignominious scramble for dollars, its politics odious, and its population mongrel.”47

Chapter 2

“A Real Man Again”

Becoming a Journalist

“We have had good luck as usual in getting located,” Charles wrote shortly after he and Sam arrived back in Santa Barbara in September 1887. “We are in a house about a block from the Arlington in the pleasantest part of town. It is a beautiful neighborhood and this house is a lovely one, covered with vines and flowers and in the midst of a beautiful yard. . . . As I lie in bed at night I look out these windows upon the vines and trees lit up by the moonlight and the effect stirs my aesthetic soul.” Willard’s “good luck” consisted primarily of finding a household that closely resembled the one he had left in Chicago. The other lodgers included a “nice young lady” who played “Kroner exercises, Mendelson, and Beethoven” and two schoolteachers. The landlady, Mrs. Harrison, was “motherly” and had “two pleasant little girls.” There was no mention of a Mr. Harrison. He probably had either died or departed, which would explain the need to rent out rooms. But it also is possible that, like Samuel Willard, he had simply absented himself emotionally.1 The household revolved around Mrs. Harrison. One historian notes that a nineteenth-century woman who took in boarders “operated as surrogate mother and father. She wielded authority over parlor life and over curfews and guests.” Charles soon was able to assure Harriet that his landlady would “act as [her] substitute in the worrying business. She is a dear, sweet lady and . . . quite fond of your spoiled boy. If I should fall ill, not too ill, you know, you may depend upon it she and her daughters will do all they can for me. They are lovely people.” Long after leaving Santa Barbara, Willard would continue to regard Mrs. Harrison’s home as a refuge, occasionally returning for brief visits during stressful periods.2 22

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That fall, however, he was looking for more than female solicitude. Despite his father’s failure to support his family in middle-class style, Charles had learned as a boy to associate manliness with professional success. As his health improved, he determined to restore his sense of male worth by launching the career his illness had delayed. Practical considerations strengthened that resolve. Because his relationship with Sam recently had frayed, Charles realized he might lose his tutoring job at any time and wanted to be prepared. He also needed additional income. As the Willard School continued to lose pupils, his parents’ financial situation became increasingly dire, and he decided to help by reimbursing the money they had spent on his illness. (That sum included his round-trip train fare to San Bernardino, his expenses at his brother’s house, and the cost of various doctors’ visits and medications.) Willard always would assume that the best way to get ahead professionally was to associate with the right people. “By the way,” he asked Sarah in late September, “did you say that you met the artist Ford last summer?” A prominent painter, Henry Chapman Ford had lived in Santa Barbara since 1875. Charles described him as “a shining light in this place” and noted, “A letter to him would be worth my while provided it came from someone who had weight with him. I am really anxious to get into the society that there is here for I know it is good, but I imagine it is pretty exclusive.” The following month Willard wrote that he had succeeded in meeting Ford and having “several conversations” with him. “In this way, you see, I come to know some of the nicest people in town.” After learning about “an elegant full-dress ball” all the “greats” would attend, he solicited an invitation. When none was forthcoming, he went anyway, donning his “dress suit” and Sam’s patent leather shoes and “trusting to my good manners and cheek to pull me through.” “It was a grand success,” he reported. “I had a delightful evening and pulled myself up socially several pegs.” The search for suitable acquaintances also led him to join a Shakespeare Club and, overcoming his contempt for religion, attend an Episcopal Church service.3 The job Willard found inaugurated his career as both a journalist and a Southern California booster. In October he announced that he would work for the Santa Barbara Press, the paper which had launched the town’s publicity campaign in the 1870s. Willard considered it “an excellent little paper for a town of this size.” Mr. Nixon, the owner and editor, was “a gentleman and a man of culture.” In addition to writing articles and editorials, Charles would be responsible for producing a “12 page special edition devoted to the interests of Santa Barbara,” which would be circulated throughout the East Coast. “I feel as though I were just taking a fresh start in life on a new basis,” he wrote

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excitedly to his mother. “I never tried anything like this before and I feel like a child with a new toy.”4 He rapidly distinguished himself. “I have succeeded in making myself famous,” he reported early in November. “I did not expect to create a sensation and become the talk of the town as actually happened. I should blush to be guilty of repeating what has been said to me and about me.” His article about the poor service provided by the local post office had drawn wide acclaim and even encouraged federal authorities to investigate. Emboldened by his success, he launched a campaign in the Press to force the town postal manager to resign. “There are lively times ahead,” Charles noted. “If we fail we lose nothing and get well advertised among our contemporaries, who are watching the row with interest; if we succeed people here will fairly worship us.”5 Even before the special issue of the Press appeared, George P. Tebbets, the editor of the rival Independent, hired Willard to write a similar edition for that paper, raising his proposed salary from $80 to $125 a month when he demurred. “It seems I have been scoring a succession of bulls’ eyes with my editorials without hardly knowing it,” he boasted. Within a few weeks of joining the staff, he was asked to substitute for the manager, who was sick. “Everything went smoothly and at the end of the week I was delighted with my success,” Charles wrote. “Now I know how to run a small town paper.” The following month he was offered a permanent position as manager. Back at the Press in January 1888, he wrote, “My coming into the office has been a great relief to Nixon who hails me as a deliverer and treats me with a sort of consideration that I imagine very few assistant editors get. He takes my advice so readily that I have to be extremely careful about offering it.”6 In December Sam fell into “bad company” and then absconded, thus eliminating Charles’s remunerative job. Forced to economize for the first time in more than a year, he realized the high cost of illness. Although he could save five dollars a month by leaving Mrs. Harrison’s house and another five to eight dollars by eating less expensive meals, he did not “think it wise to make any changes of this sort.” The “sunny, airy room and the good fare,” including “lots of milk and eggs,” were “worth all the dollars they cost.” He also was determined to continue to try to gain strength by riding every day, despite the eighteen dollars a month he spent on his horse.7 Entry into the workforce had increased his awareness of the need for selfcare. Physical changes he had been able to ignore when keeping his own daily schedule must have become starkly apparent when he was forced to adhere to the frenzied pace of a daily newspaper office. Longing for the freedom to pursue his professional dreams, he railed against the restrictions illness imposed.

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“It makes me angry sometimes that I can’t be let alone to do as I please instead of being forever hampered this way,” he wrote in October. In December he continued, “I am not a well man. If I were I could do a great many things which I am now sadly compelled to let go undone. At every turn I feel exasperating limitations on my capacity to do what I want to.”8 Employment also made his public presentation more important. Erving Goffman argues that stigmatized individuals frequently try to “pass” by concealing their “spoiled identities” as far as possible. And, by the late nineteenth century, any physical impairment had become extremely discreditable. That period represented, in the words of two historians, a “moment of major redefinition” in the history of disability. “Public policies and laws; emerging medical, educational, and social-service professions; and the institutions those policies and professions created either questioned the competency of people with virtually all types of disabilities for full citizenship or declared them disqualified.” It is striking that during the years when Willard first was learning to manage his public impression, Theodore Roosevelt (later Charles’s hero) completed his metamorphosis from a “sickly,” asthmatic child into the exemplar of robust good health. But recent scholarship reveals that, far from overcoming his disease, Roosevelt carefully hid it in public. For Roosevelt, as for Willard, passing would involve enormous effort and constant fear of exposure.9 Soon after joining the Press, Charles wrote, “I cannot bear to have people that I respect think that I am without ambition or industry when I have so much need of both.” “Ambition” and “industry” were both signs of masculinity as well as essential to professional achievement. But what “people” did Charles have to impress? Perhaps because Santa Barbara, like Los Angeles, had sold itself as a health resort, Charles again found himself surrounded by health seekers. One “good friend” was “a young man whose case seems in every way a parallel of mine.” Another was Bert McGregor, a former Willard School student who had followed Charles to Southern California. He had arrived “pale and thin” with pains in his lungs and his breath “fearfully short.” Even Willard’s boss, Mr. Nixon, was “an ex-invalid” whose wife continually hovered, refusing to “let him work evenings.” Despite the ubiquity of illness, however, Charles remained ashamed of his own. In order to prove his worth in the work world, he had to hide his infirmities, creating an impression of energy and drive.10 That concern followed him to the Independent. He noted that Tebbets “talked to me very kindly about my health—said that he would do everything in his power to keep me from over working and would make any arrangement, that I thought necessary in the matter of division of labor ‘even if it did cost

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more.’ ” Tebbets’s solicitude, however, did not diminish Charles’s insistence on concealment: “I have no intention of letting these people get the idea that I am not to be relied upon and am liable to get sick at any minute.”11 He worried not only that his bosses and colleagues would discern his physical distress but even more that employment would greatly exacerbate it. Consumptives were counseled to avoid “too much work, too much strain of some kind,” in the words of Charles’s doctor Norman Bridge. And, indeed, Charles began to send reports of disturbing symptoms almost as soon as he arrived at the office. By October 30 his cough had increased, and he “often” had a “disagreeable sensation” in his lungs. Although he insisted that the “extra work” was not to blame, he was worried enough to contemplate resigning; he refrained only because he was “tired of everlastingly giving up.”12 A few days later he conceded to his mother, “A daily paper seems to me to operate on a man’s brain much as a tape worm does on his bowels. Its appetite is frightfully voracious. It devours with terrific rapidity everything you give it and incessantly howls for more.” Nevertheless, he still refused to quit: “Of course I know very well that all this extra work is in some degree to blame for the extra coughing. I have little doubt that by dropping all work and spending my afternoons loafing or riding about . . . I could reduce it to a trifling amount. But will I do it? Well, hardly.”13 A temptation to heed his mother’s warning can explain the alacrity with which he rebuffed it. To get ahead professionally, he had to spurn the female caution he yearned to accept. Imagining himself ensnared by a supernatural force, he decided he could extricate himself only by ignoring it: “I feel as though this disease were some kind of an evil spirit trying to ruin my life and I hate it with a sort of childish hatred. I begin to believe that I have allowed myself to be more or less humbugged by it and propose to obey its call no longer. I will take reasonable care, such as I would take if I were a well man, but I shall no longer proceed on the theory that I am likely to get sick at any time.” Demons are ancient explanations for sickness. Willard did not have to believe literally in their existence to experience their power. In an unusually acerbic concluding comment, he made explicit the tension between confession and concealment which shaped his relationship with his mother: “Be careful how you worry about me. If you do, rest assured I shall not tell you the truth any more. It would do no good. Indeed it is only because I am selfish and like to talk it over that I tell you now.”14 After alarming his mother, Charles hastened to reassure her. “My health is enough better now to put all your fears at rest on that point,” he wrote on November 11, 1887. Although he had “worked very hard” all week, his cough-

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ing had “greatly diminished” and his appetite was “good again.” His letter the following week began, “It will please you to know that my health is lots better.” He rarely coughed and his appetite remained fine. He had, however, “met with a little mishap” that “startled” him. Having “played tennis a little too hard,” he was “seized with a violent fit of coughing and brought up some blood.” Despite his recent decision to pay less attention to his symptoms, he concluded, “Of course that means no more tennis and I have declined invitations since then.”15 “I see by your letters that you are a little worried about me,” Charles wrote on November 24. “My last letter was not calculated to reassure you. Neither will this one I fear when I have done.” While “on the way downtown” the previous Friday, he had had “a light hemorrhage—several mouthfuls of blood.” But though the news might panic his mother, he had a new reason to deny the implications: “I had a little before met a physician from Chicago who had passed through much the same experience as I have. He has hemorrhages about twice a week and pays not the slightest attention to them. I determined to try his plan and it worked very well. I felt—or imagined I felt—some weakness, but otherwise I was all right. . . . I never felt better than I did the three days that followed and my lungs have been all right ever since.”16 By the end of the letter he had wavered yet again about the need for selfmonitoring. “I see altogether too many good things in the future to be fool enough to take any very large chances so you may depend upon it that I shall exert myself to the utmost to keep out of physical difficulties.” He would continue to “work steadily and hard” but would “not over do” if he could “physically help it.” Although he recently had felt “a light headache” in the back of his neck, “combined with a sort of dizziness and nausea,” he expected to be “all right in a day or two” after doing less work and sleeping more. Scrupulous attention to symptoms would save him: “It is a relief to me to know what form difficulties resulting from over exertion are liable to take. Then I can be on the watch for them and head them off.”17 As winter began, Willard increasingly acknowledged his helplessness in the face of disease. Soon after assuring his mother that he would begin working for the Independent “all right physically,” he admitted to “a dim suspicion” that he was “not destined to get through this job without some kind of an upset.” An “ache” in his lungs and a “great deal of coughing” had “troubled” him for several days. By the middle of December, the lung pain had become “villainous.” He could only yearn for the freedom to ignore his body’s signals. “What fun it would be to be well,” he remarked on January 4, 1888, “not to have to give a little start every once in a while and think ‘there it is again.’”18

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A story widely used today to teach medical students to understand the patient perspective further terrified Charles. “I recommended Ivan Ilyich to you did I not?” he asked his mother. “That describes the sensations of a man who is sick with a dangerous disease in a way that positively frightens one.” It is not surprising Willard found Tolstoy’s character so alarming. Ivan Ilyich, too, “was attracted to people of high station . . . , assimilating their ways and views of life and establishing friendly relations with them.” His efforts to ignore mysterious symptoms increasingly proved futile. As pain continually gnawed, his appetite diminished, and his weight dropped, he realized he was “doomed.” But the life around him remained unaltered. “He had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him.” Charles’s recommendation may have represented a desperate plea for compassion.19 He soon discovered the impossibility of denying the ominous nature of his own symptoms. Late in January a series of devastating hemorrhages struck, confining him to bed for several weeks and threatening to undo all he had accomplished in Santa Barbara. By the time he was well enough to return to work, he had lost a total of $150, of which $120 represented forfeited wages; doctor’s visits, medicines, and special food probably accounted for the rest. He now understood that he would have to earn enough to tide him over during inevitable periods of disability, but it was impossible to find any job at the papers which previously had vied for his services. “My good luck stayed with me steadily enough until my last illness,” he complained on April 1. “Then it seems to have all departed.” Lacking sick leave, he had been forced to quit his position, and the Press had hired Bert McGregor as his replacement. The Independent also had “a good man” who gave “satisfaction.” And the boom had collapsed, forcing both papers to lay off staff. “Things have not turned out as the speculators hoped this last winter,” Charles explained. “The weather has been uniformly bad and the great rush that was anticipated rather failed to come off. The real estate agents are discouraged and have stopped advertising and this has cut into the newspapers badly.”20 With departure his only option, Charles sent his mother a letter that was even more contradictory than usual. His first stop would be Los Angeles. When he found no “hope” there, he would proceed to San Francisco, where he had “no doubt” he could “string something together”; however, by the time he got “fixed in any position” his “hemorrhage period” would arrive again and he would be “knocked out.” One consolation was that he had $100 in savings, but that would not last long if he remained out of work. “Dear me!” he continued. “It is cruel of me to worry you with all these wretched particulars of my misfortunes! But I am so unhappy!” Possibly he

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would have found a good job by the time his mother received the letter. But it was “much more likely” that he would be “walking the sticky pavements of crowded Los Angeles—heavy at heart, in search of work.” It was “so hard to leave Santa Barbara,” and even more difficult to contemplate his continued separation from his family: “I cannot seem to get over this longing for home and for Chicago. What wouldn’t I give to be with you tonight—I am so lonesome and miserable and you would pet me so and console me.” Nevertheless, “when it is all said, it might be much worse.” He was “getting tired of staying still in one place and anxious to be on the move.” And in Los Angeles there would be “new worlds to conquer, new excitement, perhaps some adventure.”21 Arriving in Los Angeles

Willard was no more impressed with Los Angeles than he had been the previous winter. The entire city was “vehemently Philistine.” Although he soon found a room in a boardinghouse which was “supposed to be the best in town,” the “vulgarity and bad manners” of the other residents offended. His only companion was Horace Wing, whom Willard had known while growing up in Chicago and at college. One of the five doctors who had counseled Willard to seek his health in California in 1885, Wing now practiced in Los Angeles. The two men met for dinner most evenings, often continuing on to plays or concerts. They shared a taste not just in entertainment but also in people, and Willard viewed Wing’s contemptuous manner a model to emulate. Wing also served as Willard’s doctor, offering advice about his coughs and headaches and recommending various tonics to brace him up. “Thank goodness I have Horace here to fall back on,” Charles wrote soon after arriving. “He is as good to me as can be.”22 But Wing could not fill the enormous vacuum in Willard’s life or counteract his homesickness. That feeling had begun to appear unseemly. “How in the world did you ever succeed in spoiling me so?” he asked his mother. “Most young men of decent good sense . . . get over their fondness for home after they have been away as much as I have.” Some of his homesickness was probably a longing for the person he had been, not just for a particular place. The greatest pleasures of home might remain closed to him forever. “Tell Alice I often think of her and long for some more tennis which I shall never have,” he wrote to his sister May. “How happy I should be if I might only come home and play tennis with you and Alice this summer. But if I came I should not venture to play so it would only tantalize me to go.”23 The one bright spot was the gradual improvement in his health. “I have been ill with what to any one else would have been only a bad cold but with

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me is somewhat more serious,” he reported on April 11. “I coughed until I was too sore to cough any more.” By April 21, however, he noted, “My health has been so much better the last two days that I have been quite hilariously happy over it. If one wants to know what it means to enjoy good health let him cough for a week or two with sore lungs, no appetite, and a constant feeling of fatigue. Now it is over and I am all right again for a time. As long as I am well I don’t care a cent what happens for I know I can get something to do.” On May 6 he commented that “not to have an ache or any bad feeling or cough much or feel out of shape in any way—it is a luxury I have not indulged in for so long that it is very agreeable.” And on May 13 he exulted, My health continues to be a matter of wonder to me. It must mean something that I have suddenly stopped coughing. You must remember that I stopped for a day or two at a time once or twice before but never so completely as at present. For a week now I have merely cleared my throat a little in the morning, no more than almost everyone does, and have not coughed once during the day. I stride up those hills without puffing at all and in every way I feel perfectly well. It is a more emphatic improvement and it holds on longer than any I ever had before. It is now more than three months since I have had a hemorrhage which is longer than has been the case for a year and more. And I cannot see anything to make me suppose I am likely to have one. . . . It seems quite absurd to account for my improvement by the change of climate for until the last day or so the weather has been quite bad here, chilly, cold and damp. The fact is a lung disease is a totally unaccountable affair all around. If you could really appreciate how much of a change this has been for me you would be quite joyful over it.

A chronic illness, Charles discovered, had incredible highs as well as terrible lows. Reflecting on his long experience with cancer, sociologist Arthur Frank writes, “One lesson I have learned from illness is that giving up the idea of control, either by myself or my doctors, made me more content. What I recommend . . . is to recognize the wonder of the body rather than try to control it.” Willard soon would try again to master his body and would revise his opinion about the importance of the Southern California climate. For the moment, however, he concentrated on his newly restored energy and savored the intense pleasure it brought him.24 His finances took longer to recover. The boom had collapsed in Los Angeles as well as in Santa Barbara as a result of a decline in investor confidence and a steep drop in land value. The number of real restate sales held steady

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during the first three months of 1888 but then plunged in April, the month Charles arrived. Every newspaper he approached was dismissing staff. As his savings dwindled, he struggled to support himself with piece work. “Mother is not treating me kindly if she ventures to worry [about money],” he wrote to May at the end of April. Long afterward, however, he acknowledged that he had been “at the very last edge,” unable to pay for his laundry or afford the nourishing meals his health demanded.25 To his “immense relief,” he found temporary employment at the Telegram, a new evening paper, in the middle of May. But the job was in “every way an unsatisfactory one.” The pay was low and erratic. The paper was “a disgraceful affair which is no credit to be connected with—full of scandals and sensations and low stuff.” The staff was equally unappealing: “The city editor is a vulgar Jew and the force is Irish mostly and very tough.” And work again seemed to imperil his health. He attributed weight loss to job stress and a persistent cough to the long hours spent “sitting in crowded rooms with bad air.”26 Did the relationship between employment and health work the other way as well? “An old fashioned sick headache” forced Willard to leave early on June 4, and he was fired when he returned the following morning. The manager’s explanation was that the paper would be reduced in size and Willard’s position eliminated. But perhaps his dismissal also resulted from the fact that his premature departure had exposed his physical frailty. Ten days later he was rehired, but only on sufferance. The manager looked at him “suspiciously,” cautioning, “We don’t want any sick men.” Not surprisingly, Willard again tried to conceal his condition; he “swore” he was “never sick,” although he acknowledged to his mother that “the responsibility and worry” would probably make him “sick in a little while.” This time he had no chance to find out because the paper folded the following day. “I begin to envy the very laborer I see in the streets,” he remarked that evening. “They at least are earning an honest living and they have the health and strength to do so.”27 Finally, at the end of July, Willard found a secure position. Everything initially seemed promising. The Herald was “the leading Democratic journal of Southern California.” Because he was assigned to the criminal courts, he anticipated ample excitement. “You know what a nose I have for adventures,” he remarked to his mother. “I know I am in for some before long.” The editor, Joseph Lynch, was a “very good fellow.” Although the assistant editor was “rather eccentric,” he was also a “pleasant chap” and “kind and thoughtful to those under him.” Best of all was the city editor, Henry Hanchette, whom Willard described as “a perfect gentleman” with “excellent manners and a gentle way of speaking.” And Willard soon made an “interesting and rather

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important discovery.” Hanchette was “a Chicago boy” who had been a classmate of Willard’s sister Sarah and was the brother of one of his own friends.28 Nevertheless, his August 1888 letters were filled with despair. “Dear mother,” he wrote on the seventh, “You are the only mortal in the world that I feel has a real hold on me. The rest of them get tired of me but you don’t. . . . I don’t make much of a success living for myself alone. I should have as near I can see no particular cause for keeping up the tiresome and discouraging struggle if I didn’t know that somebody cared more or less about the matter—I don’t mean more or less but a great deal more.” He garnered little respect at the Herald. “I am at the very bottom of the ladder,” he complained to his father on August 12. “I count for nothing in the office. They don’t any of them except Hanchette know that I am capable of anything above what I am doing and they wouldn’t care particularly if they did know it.” Five days later he confessed to May, “I feel as though I was losing my grip on a certain part of life.” An important sign was his “outrageously shabby” clothes: “I am wearing this minute the same suit I wore all last spring, summer, and fall and which I threw away last October thinking it too filthy to use any longer. I put it on again in March and have worn it ever since. It is brown with grease and dirt. But I don’t care any more.” “Care” was the key word in all three letters. He went from his mother’s special attachment and commitment to his bosses’ lack of concern and finally to his own creeping indifference.29 A major cause of gloom was fear that illness would force him to quit by the end of the summer. The job was “seven days in the week with no let up for sickness or any other recreation.” He recently had remained at the office during “a most sickening headache.” He also had “taken a cold” which would “probably get worse” as a result of spending so much time in the night air. In September he had “a little scare” that a hemorrhage was imminent. “Do you realize that I haven’t celebrated anything of that sort for more than six months now?” he asked his mother. “I don’t venture to hope that I am done with the business. I suppose it is saving up for some time when it will smash my plans worse.”30 Illness at home sharpened his sense of vulnerability. In November he read “with distress and anxiety” that his sister Alice was seriously ill. He would “watch eagerly” for more letters and “hope that it [was] only a scare.” Nevertheless, he could not “help this dread.” Living far away, he was powerless to offer help: “Even my grief and sympathy seem empty and useless.” He could, however, offer one consolation: “Alice’s strong constitution may help her to get through it all right,” he wrote to his mother. The “fact” that he and Sarah “pulled through such terrific struggles” as they were “compelled to undergo”

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had shown “an immense amount of inherited strength.” (Although we never learn the nature of Sarah’s problems, she appears to have endured a substantial period of invalidism prior to her marriage.) Willard drew on views which were widely accepted among white Anglo Saxon Protestants. Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin of the Species had inspired an array of studies arguing that humans, like animals, evolved through a survival of the fittest. Among the many traits the unfit inherited was a constitutional bent, or a predisposition, toward certain diseases, including nervousness, heart disease, cancer, and consumption. Charles’s own experience as well as that of Sarah (and now Alice) might have weakened his confidence in his family pedigree. He therefore chose to focus on his and Sarah’s successful recoveries, rather than on their susceptibility to disease.31 But Willard’s faith in his lineage could only partially allay his fears. Although his mother’s next letter offered “profound relief,” he “was not so sanguine as to imagine that all the danger [was] over” and he had remained “in a moderate sort of distress all the week.” An incident a few days earlier had revealed his heightened state of alert. Visiting Horace Wing one evening, Charles had learned that a message about a telegram had just arrived for his friend. Recalling that his parents had informed him of his brother Edgar’s death through a telegram to a friend, Willard became convinced that they were using the same method to transmit “evil news” about Alice. Unable to bear the suspense, he had insisted that Wing drop his plans and “hurry” with him to the telegraph office. When Willard learned that the telegram was not for him, he “was as much relieved” as if he “had suddenly got news that Alice was quite well again.” Reflecting on Alice’s troubles, Charles concluded that biology was not the only determinant of destiny. “It does seem a great pity that you should have to endure such a succession of evil chances with your children as you have,” he wrote to his mother. “It is idle to lament it—Kismet is lying in wait for you and poor father at every turn.”32 “No Longer Snubbed and Knocked About”

Willard’s loneliness gradually abated. Bert McGregor, the Chicago friend who had followed Willard to Santa Barbara, now arrived in Los Angeles. Charles described him as “an affectionate little chap quite devoted to me and anxious to please me in every way that he can.” The two men reduced their expenses by sharing a room in a large apartment house. “The beauty of the situation” was that Henry Hanchette and Horace Wing planned to move to the same building. Hanchette and his wife had two young boys, and Wing was about to be married. “It is quite like being with Mrs. Harrison in Santa Barbara,” Willard

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wrote soon after they settled in. If either he or McGregor “should be ill, [they] would not be utterly alone.” An additional advantage was that the Hanchettes and Wings would form the nucleus of a growing society of “nice people” and thus “help to ameliorate the condition of the town.”33 There were soon new friendships to report. Mr. Adams, “one of the finest fellows” Willard had ever known, was “very popular in society” and had “a wide acquaintance among the best people in town”; his grandparents were related to both President Adams and Martin Van Buren. Early in September Adams suggested “that we should have a club called the ‘white people’ as we do not consider much of the town of that complexion.” Willard urged his mother to understand that he did not “judge these people harshly. They mean well enough no doubt but they are not of the sort one cares to have about.” Scholars in the new field of whiteness studies argue that “white” was an honorific title during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that groups could claim that designation only by displaying certain characteristics. Willard’s comment helps to bolster that claim.34 When Bert McGregor returned to Santa Barbara, Charles found a new roommate, Mr. Farquhar. Although he could not claim such a distinguished pedigree as Adams, he had belonged to the DKE fraternity at Cornell, which was, according to Willard, “a pretty good indication that he is a gentleman.” As the friendship flourished, Willard became even more impressed, writing, “His tastes are like mine, he admires the same books and the same sort of people.” And, perhaps most important, Farquhar shared Willard’s experience of a long illness. He mused that his own health problems had conferred an important benefit: “I wonder sometimes if the reason why I always get along so well with people in these days and find myself so well liked (apparently at least) by all with whom I have dealings is that my illness made me more charitable to people through my learning how kind they could be to one in trouble. . . . At Santa Barbara there was West and Nixon—two finer fellows never draw breath. Long as I live I shall never forget how West ran for the doctor when they thought I would bleed to death and dragged the rheumatic old fellow out against his will, threatening to pick him up in his enormous great strong arms and carry him if he wouldn’t come otherwise.” The care Willard received muted his excessive regard for social rank. Although he considered tenderness and concern the marks of a gentleman, he also believed that his dependency had strengthened his personal relationships and revealed aspects of his friends that usually remained hidden.35 Nevertheless, he continued to cultivate connections he hoped would promote his social and professional advancement. After dining at the home of a

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new acquaintance, Willard wrote, “What a reputation that man has, everybody seems to hate him. I guess he has made his money by very questionable methods and the fact that he is sanctimonious makes every one down on him. I wouldn’t stand as much dislike as that for all the $50000 they say he has made. From what he says himself I don’t believe that he has made half of that.” Willard concluded, however, that his host seemed “to have a good enough opinion of me and some day he may come very handy.”36 In February 1889 Charles announced that he and Horace Wing were planning to organize a university club. “It will be a little expensive,” he added, “but will be valuable to me.” The Masons consumed more of his money and time. Originating in England in the 1700s, Freemasonry was part of the fraternal movement that attracted millions of white, middle-class men in late nineteenthcentury America. “I began on the Masonry business this week taking my first degree in the So. Cal. Lodge,” Charles wrote to his father in October 1889. “I shall take the second in a week or so and be a 3rd degree mason within a month. In the course of the year I intend to go up to Royal Arch and next year I will become a Knight Templar.” Although the expenses of his lodge were “unusually large,” they represented “a satisfactory form of investment.” Like many members, Willard stressed the career advantages. “I notice that most of the successful men of this locality are all Masons and they are a very clannish set. Since I made known my determination to go in, it has already done me good in a business way, making it easier for me to get news.” But a sick man had an even more pressing reason to enroll: Fraternal orders offered some of the first burial and health insurance available in late nineteenth-century America. In various cities, doctors contracted with the Masons to provide care on a capitation basis. Although Wing rendered care for free, Charles often complained about the fees other doctors charged. The prospect of paying for a funeral also probably weighed heavily. After the Civil War, burial became far more expensive than before, involving embalming and elaborate caskets. “Since I joined the Masons,” Willard wrote in February 1890, “I don’t feel the necessity which I used, to keep some money ahead because if I should get sick or die suddenly they would see that I was cared for.”37 Charles’s reputation as a journalist grew along with his social network. By March 1889 he was able to declare, “I am no longer snubbed and knocked around as I was at first.” Two articles won special praise. One reported a “row in a negro church . . . in a lively style.” Joseph Lynch declared the piece “the best local article” he “ever read published in Los Angeles.” The other relied on the kind of detective work Willard would deplore at other times. “Accidentally,” he wrote to his mother, “I learned of a conspiracy that had been worked

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by several members of an old French millionaire’s family to frighten him into changing his will by bogus spirit manifestation.” Pretending to be a spiritualist, he gained admission to the house and was granted an interview. The following morning the story occupied a prominent place in the paper. “A dozen people have assured me that it is the greatest scoop ever executed in this city. Lynch was so tickled that he was positively deferential to me. It was one of the most exciting experiences that I ever had.”38 When Hanchette briefly contemplated leaving his job in January 1889, he recommended that Willard replace him as city editor. After a staff reorganization in June made Willard second in command to Hanchette, Willard wrote, “If he ever leaves I will unquestionably have his place.” The following month Hanchette departed for vacation, leaving Willard in charge. After the first week on the job, he told his mother that he had “succeeded much better in every particular than [he] had any reason to hope.” Although he received various offers to join other dailies, he decided to remain at the Herald, where he and Hanchette plotted to gain control of the management.39 Willard also enjoyed growing recognition as a fiction writer. He began writing short stories soon after arriving in Santa Barbara and published his first in December 1887. Between 1888 and 1891, twenty-five more appeared, an astounding number, especially for a man with a full-time job and a serious illness. The stories are an uneven lot, often written in stilted language and employing familiar literary devices. Nevertheless, the Argonaut, the premier California literary magazine, accepted virtually all Willard’s submissions, typically asking for no more than minor revisions. When a new journal, The Pacific Review, was established in June 1889, the editor invited Willard to send regular contributions. The earnings from both sources helped to supplement his low wages from the Herald. Paid by the word, his stories typically garnered between twenty-five dollars and thirty-five dollars (at a time when his monthly salary was a scant one hundred dollars).40 Many stories received laudatory reviews. In August 1889 “a cultural fellow” who was “an Oxford man” and “a fine writer” “astonished” Willard by saying that his stories were “not only superior to anything that was published on this coast but . . . fully up to the standard of most that appears in the Eastern magazines.” Six months later, a San Diego newspaper described Willard as the “lucky possessor of a genuine literary style of a high character.” Such praise could not entirely silence his doubts. Because most of his stories fell short of his own exacting standards, he published them under pseudonyms. He emphasized that the Argonaut was “small potatoes” compared to the major East Coast magazines. And, although he devoted virtually all his free time to

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writing, he often berated himself for not working harder. Nevertheless, his growing acclaim helped to restore the self-esteem that illness and lengthy unemployment had eroded.41 A New Masculinity

Despite growing social and career success, Willard continued to long for his family in Chicago. He still referred to himself as an “exile” and fantasized about returning home. “I often dream of climbing the steps and ringing the bell,” he wrote to his mother. “What long confidences we would have. Alas, who can guess how many years it will be before I get home again?” When May was about to return from college for the summer, he ended a letter to her this way: “Good by dear sister. I wish to heaven I could be with you.” The longer he remained away, the more he feared that he had suffered an irretrievable loss. “I feel as if you were slipping away from me,” he confessed to May. A photograph of Paul reminded him that the younger siblings were growing beyond his recognition. When his mother finally sold her school and the family moved to a new house, he pined for “the old place, now in the hands of strangers.” And he received frightening reports about his mother’s health. When one of her letters arrived later than expected, he wrote, “I hardly dare to think of you. I am in such dread lest you be seriously ill.”42 But even while seeking to remain connected with his past, Charles increasingly tried to accomplish the reverse—detach himself from his family, forge an independent identity, and commit himself to Southern California. In January 1889, he announced his intention “to settle in Los Angeles sooner or later.” Despite his parents’ assumption that he would spend the summer in Chicago, he made other plans. “I’m a Californian now, Mother,” he declared in August. Outside his parents’ orbit, he began to experiment with new forms of behavior. In defiance of the family’s strict moral code, he inserted hints of impropriety into his stories; he also established a friendship with a “theatrical” woman and defended her against his mother’s criticisms. Because alcohol made him “nervous and excited,” he rarely drank; however, he frequently joined his friends at saloons. “Your ideas and mine on alcoholic stimulants and tobacco don’t coincide,” he informed his father. He told his mother that he had “to get along with his fellow men as they are, not as they ought to be.”43 Willard’s desire to sever some of the links to his past may need little explanation. I already noted his belief that most men his age had freed themselves of their “fondness for home,” suggesting that he considered the achievement of independence a central task. He also must have realized that he could create a meaningful life in Los Angeles only by ceasing to mourn Chicago. Did the new

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ideas about manliness emerging in the late nineteenth century also play a part? In place of restraint and virtue, white, middle-class men increasingly were exhorted to embrace strength, power, and forcefulness and reject everything associated with femininity. Willard would have encountered those ideas in the all-male organizations he joined. Like other nineteenth-century fraternal orders, the Masons were, according to historian Mark C. Carnes, an “exclusively masculine” institution. The rituals that engaged Willard’s attention during the fall of 1889 symbolically ruptured bonds between sons and mothers, binding initiates to other men.44 Willard’s work at the Herald also must have introduced him to the new masculine ethos. Although he reveled in his sense of superiority over other staff members, he found some of his deepest satisfactions in the close fellowship he developed with them. Several weeks after joining the staff, he began to refer to himself as belonging to a “fraternity.” His coworkers shared his pleasure in his success and covered for him when a headache or cough forced him to leave work early. And he was generous in return. He lent substantial sums of money to two men in financial distress. When he learned that a reporter with a family was about to be discharged, he contemplated offering to leave in his place. In April 1889, Willard wrote to his mother, “If ever I come to leave the Herald and many of the present force are still on the staff it will cut me up like leaving home.”45 It is perhaps not coincidental that six months after joining the paper, Willard characterized his preoccupation with illness as a sign of femininity. “Physically I am having just the experience that I have always longed for,” he wrote in December 1888. “I can eat just what I please, work as hard as I like . . . and smoke all I want without ever noticing it. I don’t have to be bothering over trifles like an old woman. In the course of time I think I shall be a real man again.” Living with a chronic illness, Willard had sought to exercise control by constantly monitoring his body, watching for signs of crisis, and altering his actions in response. This was not the first time he had expressed a desire to be able to abandon that practice. In Santa Barbara he had twice vowed to disregard even the most disturbing symptoms, first by invoking the image of an evil spirit as the cause of his troubles and then by emulating a consumptive physician he encountered. What was new was the gendered meaning Charles ascribed to his behavior. Self-monitoring was now associated with vulnerability, softness, fearfulness, and weakness—the quintessential feminine traits.46 But why would Willard have accepted the new standards of manliness when he rejected so many other features of his new environment? Historian E. Anthony Rotundo writes that “men in the late nineteenth century began to

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sort themselves out into hardy, masculine types and gentle, feminine types.” With his fastidious disdain for any kind of roughness or crudeness, his aspirations to be a “gentleman,” and his reverence for high culture, Charles might have assumed that he fit comfortably in the second group. But perhaps he needed to transform his sense of himself. Various forces threatened the social dominance of white, middle-class men at the end of the nineteenth century. As low-level, white-collar positions proliferated and opportunities for selfemployment declined, such men failed to achieve the power and privileges they considered rightfully theirs; instead, they were locked into jobs offering paltry salaries, few satisfactions, and no routes of advancement. Faced with career disappointments, many men sought, in Rotundo’s words, “new forms of reassurance”; the masculine ethos “reaffirmed the importance of manhood and asserted a new pride in traits that had previously been attributed to men— and roundly condemned.” Although Willard had risen quickly to the top of the Herald hierarchy, he remained painfully aware of the gap between his employment situation and his career aspirations. His pay barely covered his living expenses, his working conditions were poor, and, as he frequently reminded his parents, the Herald could not begin to compare with the major Eastern newspapers. In June 1889 he acknowledged that, despite his boasts of success, he was merely “a cheap reporter on a small town daily.” He, too, needed a way to assuage the disappointments he met on the job.47 Health concerns may have further encouraged Willard to reassess his past. In the absence of a curative agent, consumptives were enjoined to build up their general resistance. Physicians spoke about the need for toughness and strength, the very qualities the new ideology promoted. As Dr. Norman Bridge wrote, “The chief factor in the recovery of victims of non-surgical tuberculosis is the power of their own physiologic resistance. . . . All through the long course of sickness the truth is daily verified, that any depreciation in the general vigor and resisting power is followed by an increase in the evidence of the disease.”48 Those traits also could help to counteract weak nerves, another problem Charles confronted. Many contemporaries attributed neurasthenia to “overcivilization,” a new term with explicit feminine connotations. It became common to argue that women’s control over child rearing had made boys not only too refined and sensitive but also too weak physically to withstand the pressures of modern life. Some commentators even began to speak of the “disease” of “feminized upbringing.” Although Willard associated moral probity and gentility with both parents, his mother and sisters had dominated the household during his childhood, and his closest relationships were with them. And

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now his mother, previously the exemplar of vigor and vitality, began to exhibit alarming signs of invalidism. Her primary complaint was chronic indigestion, which Charles—and presumably the other family members—attributed to neurasthenia. That was a reasonable diagnosis. Dyspepsia was a prominent symptom of the disease, and worry appeared to aggravate her distress. If neurasthenia could strike Harriet Willard, it was especially urgent to adopt an alternative set of values and find a new way to live.49 But while offering a route to better health, the masculine rhetoric also made it harder to be sick. Charles now had a new standard against which to judge himself inadequate. A large, imposing body was central to the new ideal. Like countless other authors, Willard described the physical traits of characters in his fiction, endowing the villains with bodies that were much smaller and less developed than those of the heroes. Thus, the reader of “The Family Tree” is immediately aware that Sol Blenker is a swindler rather the descendant of a distinguished family because “physically he was little more than a piece of a man, being of dwarfish stature, with thin legs and a flat body.” Mr. Burton, the unscrupulous reporter in “Boys and Frogs,” is described only as “little.” But Charles himself had always been considered puny. In college his thinness had earned him the sobriquet “skeleton,” and since then he had lost nearly twenty pounds.50 Some of Willard’s intense preoccupation with size may have been a natural consequence of his diagnosis. Because weight was believed to be an important indicator of the course of consumption, it is hardly surprising that he reported even minute changes to his family. But his weight had a nonmedical significance as well. Many men in robust good health kept careful, even obsessive, tallies of their weight, and Willard wanted to fulfill a certain standard, not simply follow his individual trajectory. In December 1889, he noted that he weighed “six pounds more than last summer—about 132 now.” “This is a very light weight for a man of my height,” he added, although it was “better than the 123” when his parents last saw him. Earlier that year he had begun work with dumbbells, a fashionable means of attaining the desired body size and type and one which Willard credited with adding two pounds to his weight. When his family sent photographs, he wanted to reciprocate but decided to wait until his face no longer looked “thin and gaunt.”51 The attention Willard bestowed on attire further demonstrates his concern with appearance. The villains in his stories had disreputable clothes as well as puny bodies. One, for example, was dressed in a “shabby suit of black cloth,” another in “a shiny suit of black clothes and linen that was none too clean,” and a third in “garments stained and tattered by long use in rough out-of-door

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life.” We have seen that Willard’s letters home often included detailed descriptions of his own attire. He delighted in his ability to adorn himself in stylish outfits with Newberry money in 1886; his indifference to the filth on his suit in August 1888 had been a sign of despair, not of revised priorities. He spent most of the income from his stories on his wardrobe. “Tomorrow I blossom out in a new spring suit,” he announced in 1890 after itemizing the sums he had received from the Argonaut. As he explained to May, “I have to dress well and pretend to be prosperous whether I am or not.” What else did he need to “pretend to be”? Perhaps clothes also were so important because they covered the leanness he considered shameful.52 The freedom from worry that Charles viewed as the mark of “a real man” also eluded him. When Hanchette first proposed that Willard become city editor, he asked his mother, “Do you think such frail flesh as mine could stand a strain like that? I sorrowfully told him that there wasn’t much use discussing it for I never could do his work.” He often measured time in terms of his distance from his last hemorrhage, and on February 2, 1889, he commemorated a particularly important anniversary: “One year today I was struggling with hemorrhages. The last one occurred on the 6th of this month. So I have now completed the year which I said would make the proof of my complete future recovery. But alas! Here is Grove who is now down with them who was quite well for 18 months and had had no trouble of that sort for over two years!” The exacerbation of Willard’s complaints also made it impossible to define them as “trifles” to be ignored. “Rest assured,” he wrote to his mother after describing particularly worrisome symptoms. A letter informing her that he had been “sick in bed” a “couple of days” and that he still had “some fever and cough” closed with this postscript: “Nothing serious . . . no hem[orrhage]s or anything bad.” But he could not rid himself of his greatest fear—that the stresses of his job imperiled his health. “From the reports I get from San Francisco I am quite sure I could get a good deal, better pay, up there,” he wrote to his mother in April 1890. “I don’t look with much favor, however, on any plan that involves my doing much moreover harder work than I am doing at present. I was sick a good deal this last week. Monday was a hard day and as a consequence I was a little ailing on Tuesday—but I worked just the same and under a villainous strain. Wednesday a headache began with the day, grew steadily worse and when I sat down to work I had nausea and had to go out and vomit several times. At last I grew so ill I was afraid I would faint and had to leave my work all undone and ride out to my room. . . . The next day I dragged myself around but could only do a little work. I am no good for hard, continuous work that involves a mental strain.”53

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“An Unlimited Quantity of Ghostly Conceits”

If Willard’s private correspondence revealed the weakness and fears he struggled to conceal from his employers, his fiction disclosed an even darker reality than he acknowledged in his letters. Knowing that his parents disapproved of his morbid themes, he insisted that his stories were primarily money-making ventures and that his primary goal was thus to appeal to the public. As he wrote to his mother, the Argonaut editor demanded fiction that “makes your flesh creep.” Many years later, Willard recalled that the “influence of Poe” had been very “strong” during the late 1880s and early 1890s and that “stories of that variety were the vogue.”54 But Charles did not simply cater to public tastes. Because he had literary aspirations, he tried to cultivate what he considered an elevated style. He also made frequent allusions to Shakespeare and the classics, despite his belief that readers “out here” would miss such references. Gothic plots came easily to him. In June 1889 he wrote to his mother, “I have an unlimited quantity of ghostly conceits in my head asking to be let out.” And he was hardly indifferent to the horrors he conjured up. In 1890 he told May that one story was “so ghostly that after I thought it out, it frightened me into an hour’s wakefulness at the dread vast in the middle of the night.”55 Although he claimed that he never based his characters on real people, he later confessed that he had been the model for the “Superfluous Man,” whose fruitless job search mirrored his own. He also bore an unmistakable resemblance to the central character in “The Doppelgänger,” which Charles described to his father as a “delirium tremens and suicide kind of story” and to his mother as a “ghostly Poeish affair.” The protagonist, a reporter, receiving an exceedingly small paycheck along with an admonition from his boss, wondered whether “it was worth while to continue a struggle to which there could be but one end.” Encountering his double in a bar, the reporter asked himself, “Did I have that gaunt, haggard look and those weary eyes? . . . Surely I was not wearing such a garb as that, I, who was once faultless in every detail of my dress. I had been conscious from within of my disreputable appearance, and I had gloried in it; now I saw it from without, and it made me shudder.” Charles wrote that story in August 1888, when he had just begun working at the Herald. We recall that he wrote to his mother that he could “see no particular cause for keeping up the tiresome and discouraging struggle,” complained to his father that he was “at the very bottom of the ladder” at the paper, and described his “outrageously shabby” attire to May. It thus does not seem farfetched to conclude that the reporter represented Willard’s own “doppelgänger.”56

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Fear of self-disclosure, an increasingly important issue in Charles’s life, was a major theme in his fiction. In “Boys and Frogs,” a mother who had carefully guarded her daughter’s secret would “wake up suddenly in the night sometimes, shivering at the thought that it may yet be discovered.” When a newspaper revealed the girl’s sexual indiscretion, both the mother and daughter fell ill. The mother “never rallied.” There was hope of the girl’s recovery, but her mind had been “affected in some way.” The narrator of “Tomasson: The Tale of a Materialized Figment,” who had pretended that a friend rather than he had wooed a certain woman, feared he was “on the verge” of “a disagreeable exposure of all [his] mendacity.” Worried that a former lover would betray her secret about their affair, a married woman in “An Auto-da-Fé” committed suicide. Shortly before her death, the wife in “Second Death” tried to destroy the Bible containing evidence that she had not been the “pure and perfect woman” she appeared to her husband.57 Other stories expressed feelings about which Charles’s private correspondence could only hint. The narrator of “The Restored Palimpsest” found himself “bound firmly hand and foot, and utterly helpless,” by a man posing as a doctor. Although he “continued to struggle, it was like the faint buzzing of a fly wound round with countless strands of web.” When the central character of “Beyond the Veil” tried to touch the door of the room in which he waited for a fortune-teller, he discovered it had “no knob, latch, or key-hole” and that “soft padding” had been added “to keep out sound.” Perhaps Willard experienced himself as being locked inside the frail body which constrained his movement and reduced his life chances. Or perhaps he drew on memories of being confined to bed during his worst crises. A sense of terror pervaded several stories. People “sickened with the icy chill of dread” and experienced “the cold thrill of horror”; knees “trembled,” a voice had “a faint tremor of agitation,” and “words struck . . . with a sudden and icy chill.” Although observers occasionally attributed dark forebodings to overwork and worry, the central characters were well aware that the primary cause was far more sinister.58 Willard’s fiction also exposed his doubts about his ability to master his body. “And now mark how fate prepares for her victims,” wrote the narrator of “Sleep No More,” just before an assailant killed a man summoned by a mysterious voice. “An Amendment to Destiny,” about a man who fled after stealing his wife’s fortune, closed this way: “Strange yet simple are the workings of fate.” An even more striking example is a story aptly entitled “Herald of Fate.” One winter morning a merchant named Clark Rogers received a letter from the “spirit” of a man known to have died twenty years earlier, warning of the imminent arrival of a visitor. The visitor, in turn, brought a message

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from the spirit, announcing that the day of Rogers’s death was “at hand,” giving a detailed account of the gruesome manner in which he would die and urging him to draw up a new will, leaving his property to a woman he had once loved but then spurned. Although Rogers tried to convince himself he had the power to control his life, he soon died the horrible death the spirit had predicted.59 If confidence and optimism were crucial ingredients of the new masculine ideal, Willard failed to attain it. Far from believing in a constantly improving future, he feared that death lay constantly in wait. Powerless to forestall it in any way, he expressed its horrors in story after story. Willard may have stayed up many nights crafting his stories not only to earn extra income but also to confront the dark feelings he carefully concealed in both public interactions and private correspondence. Fiction also probably punctured his acute sense of loneliness. A man who felt separate from the well and kept himself apart from most other sufferers, he could see himself in the characters he imaginatively created.

Chapter 3

Boosting Los Angeles

Transitions

Four events fundamentally altered the course of Charles Willard’s life between May 1890 and June 1891. The first was his mother’s death on May 23, 1890. Although none of Willard’s letters survive from that period, we can assume he suffered a devastating blow. If he occasionally had chafed at her overwhelming demands and concerns, he also had found his primary comfort in her devotion and solicitude. His father could not substitute. A distant, vague, and formal man, Samuel was much less involved in his children’s lives. A passage in a letter Charles sent his mother at the end of a particularly “homesick” day in October 1888 perfectly captures the difference between the two parents: “I have thought of you and of dear father a great deal and wished I might be with you. If I could only be there just through this Sunday evening sitting and holding your soft gentle hand and talking across that great mountain of a desk to father. Of course he would have to read or write to divert his mind a little but he would be glad to listen just the same.” Hiding behind his enormous desk and distracting himself with other pursuits, Samuel could not replace the woman who sat close to Charles, enjoyed his physical touch, and offered her full attention. The center was now gone from the Chicago home.1 Charles reported the second event to his sister May in the middle of September. “I have some bad news to tell you,” he began. After a three-year respite, he had had another hemorrhage. Although he had consulted Horace Wing “several times” during the previous summer about headaches, lung pains, and coughing, Wing had concluded that the problem lay with the stomach and liver, which were “out of order.” Had Wing really not suspected a recurrence 45

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Figure 3.1

Charles Dwight Willard in 1891.

Courtesy of the Willard Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

of consumption? He must have heard that disclosing a diagnosis of that disease could heighten a patient’s anxieties and thus exacerbate symptoms. But we also can assume Willard was overeager to find an alternative explanation for his malaise. We will repeatedly see him cling even to improbable diagnoses to avoid the most terrifying one.2 Bert McGregor was now again living in Charles’s building. Willard had previously noted that one of the advantages of their proximity was that they could care for each other in an emergency. Now he was even more fortunate: Bert’s sister May, a Chicago schoolteacher, was visiting him, and Willard summoned her from the next room. She arrived immediately, bringing salt to stop the blood

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flow, and continued to provide care for several weeks. May thus became the fourth woman (following Harriet Willard in Chicago, Ella in San Bernardino, and Mrs. Harrison in Santa Barbara) suddenly pressed into caregiving. Perhaps guilt at imposing on a new friend made Charles acutely aware of some of the difficulties he presented: “May reads to me or patiently allows me to exercise a disposition to be very cross upon her,” he wrote. Once again he omitted the most onerous parts of care. May, too, must have made medical decisions, administered treatments, and cleaned up his blood and other products of his body. It is possible she also worried about the impact on her own health. Nineteenth-century women often attributed physical problems to the stresses of care. For example, when Emily Gillespie, an Iowa farm woman, lay dying in the late 1880s, her daughter Sarah complained constantly about exhaustion and back problems. Louisa May Alcott wrote five months after her mother’s death, “I too have been ill and still am ordered to keep still for some months. Too much nursing last summer was bad for me.” Like Alcott, May McGregor considered herself frail, and she thus may have found that lifting an invalid and getting up at night to tend to his needs sorely taxed her strength.3 New fears about contagion probably added to May’s burdens. One historian notes that after Robert Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, educated Americans “slowly began to reckon with the fact that proximity to a person with tuberculosis could be dangerous.” Though California did not launch an extensive health education campaign until the early 1900s, the many patients and families in Los Angeles may well have spread the news about the communicable nature of tuberculosis among themselves. Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles with her dying husband in 1893, Martha Shaw confided to her diary that she wished that she did “not have to be so much with Johnny and run the risk of taking consumption.” Lucy Sprague, who accompanied her tubercular father to Southern California the same year, later recalled her morning ritual: “I began to empty the cuspidors. Every room except mine had at least one cuspidor partly filled with water. . . . I knew cleaning the cuspidors was dangerous work.” May delivered care three years earlier than those women, but she was well educated and widely read and thus probably had learned some of the new medical information.4 Although Willard must have felt his mother’s absence especially keenly during this crisis, he put the best possible interpretation on her loss: “When mother was alive I used to be rather afraid to own up to being sick, but I know that you and father will not allow yourselves to exaggerate the seriousness of it the way she used often to do.” He thus felt free to acknowledge he was “much discouraged and disgusted.” Despite his earlier pronouncement about

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being a Californian, he had not definitely resolved the question of where he would live. His relapse settled the issue: “I had begun to believe that I might sometime get away from this country, but it appears to be out of the question. I can’t live any where else and I am going to need big luck if I can live here.” Nevertheless, he closed with his customary reassurance. He would write immediately if he had “any more trouble”; silence would indicate that he had either returned to work or gone to recover in Santa Barbara. “Either way I am all right.”5 On September 20, Willard explained why his family had not heard from him during the past week: “If it had been at all serious I would have written or had May write. But I was just bad enough to feel unwilling to make the exertion but not really sick.” Although he had continued to lose blood, Wing remained optimistic that “there is nothing serious or even permanently troublesome in the situation.” May McGregor continued to be the “chief nurse.” She took “awfully good care” of him and was “very kind and thoughtful.” He was “in great luck that she happened along just at this time.”6 Willard coughed up more blood the following month. “Alas,” he wrote on October 19, “the old feeling of security is gone. Now I can never know when I am to be beset again.” Hemorrhages could “come on any minute without warning just as they used to.” Fortunately, he had a comfortable place for convalescence. May McGregor “moved into another room and gave up hers which had a fire place—for my use. She is ever so kind.” But his setback threatened to exact a serious financial toll. Although his employer promised to keep Willard’s job open, he doubted his ability to fulfill its demands: “Not for six or eight months will I venture on any strain or any hard work,” he wrote. “I must live along as quietly and as easily as possible.”7 Willard returned to the office sooner than he had expected, but he remained far from well. He “managed to stick it out through the week” only by engaging in “a tough struggle.” Even “trifling work” caused “great fatigue.” Four days had been especially “miserable”: “Every breath came with pain and if I pulled it out too far it made me wince in spite of myself. Of course I was very cross and was rather in despair for I thought I would be compelled to give up work entirely.” Because several letters are missing, we do not know when he finally regained his strength.8 We also cannot precisely date the third transformative event. Willard and Henry Hanchette apparently abandoned their dreams of gaining control of the Herald because in late 1890 Willard left the paper and Hanchette accepted a position as secretary of the chamber of commerce. One of his first actions was to appoint Willard as his assistant. The organization that occupied the center

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of Willard’s professional life for many years began its importance for him in one dramatic episode. In March Hanchette traveled to Chicago on chamber business. The day he was due to return, he ostensibly departed for the station but never was heard from again. Some people speculated that he had been abducted, others that he had fled. Willard eventually concluded that Hanchette had been “in secret a spend thrift and a fool about money matters.” Although not “exactly dishonest,” he conducted his affairs in a “dishonorable” way. “When he went away things were in a hopeless snarl with him and he had not the courage to come back and face them.”9 Willard defined his task, however, as rebuffing the reporters who swarmed around him, trying to uncover a scandal. “Do you remember my story of Boys and Frogs?” he asked his father. “Well I have stood by and in a measure seen it acted out.” The story’s central character was a reporter who discovered the tarnished past of Hattie Phelps, the “pleasant” daughter of an upstanding boardinghouse manager. In a history of the chamber of commerce that Willard wrote many years later, he referred to Hanchette’s “sterling character.”10 We can explain Willard’s anxiety to save Hanchette’s reputation in several ways. Willard probably still harbored affection for his former mentor and friend and believed that his admirable qualities outweighed his financial lapses. Willard may have been unwilling to acknowledge that he could not always discern the “best” character. He undoubtedly felt a need to protect Hanchette’s wife and children, with whom he continued to associate. And perhaps he also saw himself in Hanchette, striving to conceal a major part of his life over which he had little control and which others viewed with disdain. More than any other, one major event that year marked a new era in Willard’s life. He must have anticipated that his announcement of it would disturb his sister May because he began his March 1891 letter with a lengthy report of his activities at the chamber of commerce before suddenly writing, “Well—to change the subject rather abruptly I have decided to tell you, My dear sister, that I am engaged to May McGregor, and expect to be married to her as soon as she can conveniently get ready and come out here.” He then recounted the story of their courtship. Having known May in Chicago, he had suspected “something was likely to happen” when she arrived in Los Angeles in June and “it promptly proceeded to happen.” He decided, however, that his poor health disqualified him from marriage. When “in the distress” of that decision, “the hemorrhages came on,” he “felt worse than ever.” “But,” he concluded, “she took care of me and was as sensible as any one could be and in the end I came to the conclusion that our marriage would not be such an exhibition of folly as I had at first thought.”11

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Charles had long complained about his awkwardness with women, but his relationship with May McGregor was probably easy from the start. He had known her while growing up in Chicago, and her brother looked up to him. His sickness and her care fostered their intimacy. A man who hid many aspects of his life from others, he had been forced to reveal himself to May. “She knows me well enough to understand that I am likely to be profoundly disagreeable at times, I imagine,” he wrote. “She saw me many days when I was in constant pain and savagely cross.” She also must have cleaned the private parts of the body that most proper, unmarried, nineteenth-century women were not permitted to view.12 In addition, she showed Charles could rely on her whenever future crises arose. And her “sensible” care displayed her competence, a trait Charles associated with his mother and valued highly in women. Charles listed May’s other admirable qualities: “Her manners are excellent, she knows how to wear clothes and to fulfill all other society requirements. She likes books and reading and is bright and witty. . . . [She] is always light hearted and hopeful and she has ambition. Her health is pretty good and in this climate I believe it will be perfect.”13 The family response to Charles’s news initially was favorable. After writing to his father about the engagement, Charles waited impatiently for a reply. Because heavy rains had washed out the roads, all mail was delayed. “Your letter reached me 11 days after you wrote it,” Charles wrote on March 5. “I opened it very eagerly for I had half a fear that you might think unfavorably of my marrying at all and especially so of my marrying May McGregor under the circumstances.” Under what circumstances? Although he does not specify, we can assume that his precarious health and finances loomed large. The most comforting part of Samuel’s letter appears to have been his comment that Harriet had known and respected May. Her father also had written “a very pleasant note,” but Charles refused to trust it: “He is a little given to soft talk and harsh action.”14 Mr. McGregor was not the only person to say one thing and mean another. Although May Willard wrote to Charles to express her pleasure in the match, she and Sarah sought to convince their father to withdraw his support. Their primary objection appears to have been May McGregor’s physical condition. She was now back in Chicago for a visit, and although Charles believed her health would be “perfect” once she could live in Los Angeles full time, his sisters detected problems that led them to conclude otherwise. Their brother John’s experience may have served as a negative example. After marrying at a young age, he had struggled unsuccessfully to support his growing family; his

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Figure 3.2

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Mary McGregor at the time of her marriage.

Courtesy of the Willard Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

sisters appear to have attributed most problems to his wife’s poor health. Did they also worry that Charles’s sickness indicated he had deficient genes and would produce unfit children? Koch’s discovery had punctured the belief that consumption could be directly inherited, but many people assumed that a constitutional predisposition, as well as exposure to germs, explained the onset of disease. May McGregor’s (undefined) problems and her brother’s consumption suggested her family, too, had a propensity to disease. Or perhaps eugenic concerns were simply a cover for more personal objections. Sarah and May probably feared the marriage would distance them from the brother who was closest to them in age and had always been special to them.15

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Samuel’s second letter, expressing his reservations to the match, infuriated his son. Charles explained his financial situation, defended May against his sisters’ charges, implored his father to ignore them, and then stated firmly that he had made his decision and would not waver. He and May were married on May 22, 1891, the day before the first anniversary of his mother’s death. It must have been a great comfort to be able to commemorate his mother’s passing after linking himself to a woman who exhibited many of Harriet’s qualities and could take her place as his caregiver. On June 10 he wrote, “May has already gained seven pounds and she looks rosy and bright and I never was in better health in my life.” Although the health of both partners would falter repeatedly, the marriage proved extremely happy.16 “The Right Kind of People”

Willard’s June 10 letter contained another piece of welcome news—his position at the chamber of commerce was now permanent. The following month he reported that he expected to be elected to replace Hanchette as secretary. Originally founded as the Board of Trade in 1873, that organization remained largely moribund until its revival during the boom of the late 1880s. Because the chamber attracted the major Los Angeles business leaders, Willard interpreted their endorsement as an indication that he finally had achieved the status he had long coveted. As soon as he increased the chamber membership and paid off its debts, he would consider himself “one of the most fortunate young men in Southern California.”17 He also would have to stay well—and not only because his workload was exceedingly onerous. Thrusting him into the heart of the LA booster industry, the job required Willard to propound an ideology of health sharply at odds with his own experience. According to the voluminous literature he quickly began to produce, physical robustness was an essential component of both white supremacy and the new metropolis being created in Southern California. That formulation greatly increased the difficulties of living with sickness. Erving Goffman has identified “two phases in the learning process of the stigmatized person” as “learning the normal point of view and learning that he is disqualified according to it.” But Willard not only absorbed attitudes which were widespread in his society; he also helped to write the script. It was thus especially crucial for him to strive to recover and hide all evidence of infirmity when he failed.18 The chamber’s first goal was to attract tourists and potential settlers. Although the city’s population growth slowed after the end of the 1880s boom, the pace continued to exceed that of such major rivals as New York, Chicago,

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Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco. By 1900, the number of residents reached 102,000. LA boosters, however, were not interested in numbers alone. As the Land of Sunshine, a journal founded and edited by Willard, declared, “We wish more population of the right sort. . . . But we are particular. We are anxious to have our friends come; but not everybody.” Promoters touted the opportunity to live in an exclusively white, Anglo-Saxon region as a major advantage. Another Land of Sunshine editorial, entitled “The Right Kind of People,” read, “We are not compelled, as in most eastern cities, to set aside 20 to 30 per cent as speaking little or not English and caring nothing for American institutions. . . . Only the best class of immigration thus far has been attracted to this section, and the situation is likely to continue the same in the future.” Only whites, moreover, could both benefit from and realize the potential of Los Angeles. Just as some crops were ideally suited to the soil and climate, so Anglo-Saxons were most likely to flourish there. Since losing the protection of the missions, California Indians had rapidly been dying out. The Chinese lacked immunity to consumption and thus died in large numbers from the disease. Anglo-Saxons already had won the Darwinian race for survival; in Southern California, they would reach perfection.19 According to the boosters, whites also deserved to control the land because they alone had the energy to develop it. In 1880, Los Angeles was still a “sleepy semi-Mexican pueblo of 11,000.” Its homes were “mostly of adobe, or sun-dried brick.” Its streets were “unpaved and few even graded.” Its commerce was “confined to wool and hides.” Within ten years whites had increased the population fivefold, built fine roads, schools, churches, homes, and hotels, and “transformed great ranches of dry pasture land . . . into ten, twenty and forty-acre tracts of irrigated land, dotted all over with orange and lemon groves, vineyards, and deciduous orchards.”20 Marketing those products—and especially the orange crop—was the chamber’s second major function. Although the Mission fathers had imported orange trees from China, historians typically date the beginning of California’s orange industry with the 1873 development of the Washington navel, better suited to the soil and climate than the Valencia, and the 1876 arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad, making shipment to the East possible. By 1881, half a million orange trees grew in Los Angeles County. But there could be too much of a good thing. During the 1890s, oranges glutted the market, and the chamber had to work hard to convince the public that the fruit was an essential part of a healthy daily diet, not a luxury to be consumed only on holidays.21 Much of our information about the early years of the chamber comes from Willard’s 1899 history of the organization. By that year, it had published “some

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thirty-five pamphlets, with an aggregate circulation of nearly a million” and “circulated papers and pamphlets not of its own publications” which were read by “nearly a million more.” Southern California agricultural products had been displayed to “five or six million people in scores of different places and occasions.” During his six-year tenure at the chamber, Willard presided over five citrus fairs, three agricultural fairs, the Southern California exhibition at the Columbian World’s Fair in 1893, and the Mid-Winter Fair in San Francisco in 1894.22 The citrus fairs, held in alternate years in San Francisco and Los Angeles and heavily subsidized by the state government, were by far the most important events sponsored by the chamber. “March in this city is consecrated to the citrus fair,” proclaimed the Land of Sunshine in March 1895. An article in the following issue (written by Willard under a pseudonym) described the “several hundred thousand oranges” that were “arranged in beautiful figures interwoven with lemons, tangerines, and grape fruit.” The “artistic centerpiece” was a forty-foot tower “worked out in imitation of the Edison electric tower of the Electrical Building at the World’s Fair in Chicago.” But the “crowning glory” was the building decoration: “The walls, the posts, the ceilings, the great expanse of the dome and the huge breadth of the proscenium arch were all covered with yellow cloth, over which was stretched fish-net threaded with fresh English ivy. The effect of the dull green leaves against the soft yellow was like nothing ever seen before, and appreciative people on entering the hall and beholding the canopy above for the first time, cried out with delight, as children do when they see fire-works.” The article concluded that “about eighteen thousand people visited the fair. Of this number probably one-third were new comers to the State to whom the display was a revelation of the greatest industry of Southern California.” Oranges also dominated the permanent displays in the exhibition hall of the chamber office and were “the special feature” of the Los Angeles County exhibition at the World’s Fair. For that occasion the chamber erected a giant globe, eight feet in diameter, consisting of 6,280 oranges, and a thirty-five-foot high tower of 14,000 oranges; another 4,500 oranges were placed in the shape of the “Old Liberty Bell,” thus underlying the link between the fruit and the national destiny.23 In addition to mounting lavish displays, the chamber hosted two major conferences to promote the interests of the citrus industry. In April 1893, approximately sixty growers came together to form the Southern California Fruit Exchange (later known as Sunkist). The goal of the National Irrigation Congress, held the following fall, was to convince the federal government to create irrigated farms on the public lands that remained in the West. The cham-

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ber rented the Grand Opera House for the event and later circulated a pamphlet describing the proceedings. Willard served as both secretary of the local arrangements committee and one of the four hundred delegates, having been appointed by the governor to represent his district.24 Although Willard’s job as chamber secretary occupied most of his time, he also publicized Southern California through the Land of Sunshine, which he

Figure 3.3

Orange tower, composed of 14,000 oranges, at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Courtesy of The Land of Sunshine 1, no. 2 (July 1894): 39.

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established as a monthly journal in June 1894. He insisted that it “must not be mistaken for a mere ‘boom’ periodical,” but one would have been hard pressed to discern the difference. An editorial quoted a San Diego newspaper that the “object” of the Land of Sunshine was “to lay the manifold advantages of scene, soil and climate of Southern California before our friends on the other side of the Rocky mountains.” Letters were solicited “about why southern California is the best place to live in the world.” The masthead noted that the editors would answer, “free of charge,” requests for information from “tourists, intending settlers, and health seekers.” One of Willard’s assistants was Harry Ellington Brook, a Times editorial writer and the author of many brochures disseminated by the chamber. The publisher was Frank Pattee, the chamber lawyer. And articles routinely employed the same inflated rhetoric that appeared in other booster publications. (Willard’s responsibilities gradually diminished after Charles Fletcher Lummis, later a prominent writer and the founder of the Southwest Society and the Southwest Museum, became editor early in 1895.)25 In October 1895 Willard wrote to his father of “a new honor” that had been bestowed on him—his selection as superintendent of “La Fiesta de Los Angeles,” an annual celebration sponsored by the Merchants’ Association and modeled on the New Orleans “Mardi Gras.” Complete with parades, pageants, concerts, plays, exhibitions of flowers and fruit, and even a queen appointed for the occasion, the fiesta lasted for five days in April.26 A central message of those various booster activities was that everyone (from the right background) could find health and vitality in Southern California. A poem in one of the first issues of the Land of Sunshine described Los Angeles as a place “where the pleasure, toil, and rest, alike bestow / On mind and body—vigor, strength, and health.” The author of a prize-winning letter in the journal wrote that although he “came to Los Angeles a physical wreck— pale, haggard, and debilitated,” his health had “been restored.” He was now “simply robust,” and his weight “augmented by over thirty pounds.” An article asserted, “A consumptive who can live in sunshine year in and year out has chances for life not obtainable under other conditions.” The author believed that “California sunshine has helped keep him alive and arrest the ravages of disease which threatened him with death within a few years.” Statistics gave the patina of science to such claims. According to an editorial entitled “Living on Climate,” “there are some thirty or forty thousand people in Southern California who were doomed to death in the eastern climate, and are allowed under these balmy skies to continue their lives to old age.”27

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Recovery was promised metaphorically as well as literally. Article after article gave examples of plants or flowers which barely survived in the East but flourished in Southern California. Although “the apricot in every other locality except California is of delicate growth and requires much care and nursing to bring it to maturity, here it ranks in hardiness with the peach and requires no more attention than it.” The calla lily was “a dwarfish plant which the housewife in the East nurses in its little pot in a warm room to coax its feeble blossom,” but “it grows here out of doors the year round.” Roses “grown from cuttings in California make much healthier plants, give better flowers, and grow much faster than those purchased from Eastern green houses”; there is “a vigor about them which the latter lack.” Contemporary medical beliefs may have encouraged invalids to identify with the vegetation. As two historians observe, “More often than not doctors spoke simply of a person’s ‘strength,’ the ‘toughness’ of their lungs, and their ‘general vitality’; indeed, the open air treatment at this time was often spoken of in horticultural terms as being designed to ‘harden off’ patients.”28 Boosters appealed to health seekers in other ways as well. Uncertainty is a prominent feature of the chronic illness experience; it was also, we have seen, the aspect Willard found most difficult to bear. But booster literature claimed that health seekers in Los Angeles would not have to endure the agony of uncertainty in one major area. A great advantage of the climate was its “equability.” Unlike Easterners, Los Angelenos did not have to worry about “vacillating skies” and “unexpected” storms. Invalids who might have hesitated to embark for a part of the country still associated with ruggedness and hardship also were assured they could live in comfort and ease. The many elegant hotels that dotted the landscape obviated the need for “roughing it.” Even new settlers could find large, beautiful homes, rather than the crude shacks of many frontier areas. Ample “healthful, light work” was available.29 Some of the boosters’ health claims may have seemed less outlandish to contemporaries than we might assume. Although the Puritans had accepted sickness and suffering as inevitable features of human life, a host of early nineteenth-century reformers had argued that everyone could remain healthy until extreme old age by following certain principles. Hydropathy, vegetarianism, vigorous exercise, and avoidance of urban areas were among the many measures purported to preserve health and ensure longevity. Like Los Angeles promoters, the health reform movement assumed, in historian Thomas R. Cole’s words, “that individuals were naturally healthy and that disease was caused by transgression of natural law.” Boosters who argued that a trip to Los Angeles

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could cure all ills thus built on widespread notions about the power of individuals to control their bodies.30 Women and children figured prominently in the booster vision. The entire region frequently was associated with nurturing and fecund womanhood. One Land of Sunshine author noted that a visitor to Southern California could “cheer himself with her almost everlasting sunlight and draw sustenance from her beneficent great.” Another commented, “The Goddess of Fruits has here been lavish with her favors.” Pictures of robustly healthy women graced the covers of numerous booster publications. The literature also was replete with photographs of hardy white babies, testifying to the benefits of combining the best genes with an ideal environment. Entitled “The Pick of the Crop,” a Land of Sunshine article displayed a plump white infant surrounded by baskets overflowing with fruits and vegetables. In order to fulfill the booster ideal, Willard thus not only had to remain well himself but also had to keep his family healthy and vigorous.31 “Utterly Used Up and Exhausted”

During his years as chamber secretary, Willard wrote less faithfully to Chicago than he had before. When his sister May complained about the long interval that had elapsed since his last letter in 1892, he responded, “I expect you will have occasion to do that pretty frequently if you propose to take notice of every time I fall down that way.” An 1895 letter to his father began, “It is some time since I wrote you—in fact it must be several months.” And some of his letters were terse, almost business-like notes, not the chatty, expansive missives he previously had posted. Between the pleasures of his evenings with his new wife and the press of work, he explained, he could find little time for private correspondence. It also is likely that his father’s and sisters’ disapproval of his marriage dampened his desire to confide in them.32 Unsatisfying though Willard’s letters may have been to his Chicago family, they enable us to glimpse the enormous discrepancy between the booster ideal he promoted and his lived experience. On July 12, 1891, he wrote that he anticipated that his wife soon would become “buxom and vigorous”; however, “if she is never any stronger than she is now, she will suit me well enough. I think it is a good deal better for me who am not particularly robust myself, get tired easily and after a day’s work like to take things quiet and easy, not to be linked to a wife who was too full of energy and go. She might not sympathize with my difficulties and in course of time we would be likely to get estranged from one another.” Unlike the sturdy and resilient plants of Southern California, Charles and May needed careful tending. How should we understand his belief that a

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more vigorous wife eventually would reject him? The chronic nature of his troubles may offer one clue. Although he frequently expressed gratitude for the friends and colleagues who rallied around in a crisis, many probably lost interest as his troubles lingered for months and then years. Especially with his mother gone, Willard needed a wife who was in for the long haul. In addition, now that he was engaged in a project that valorized health and heartiness, he may have anticipated rejection from anyone exposed to his frailties.33 When intense heat depleted his energy the summer after his marriage, he wrote, “I suspect if I had not had pretty good care taken of me I would have broken down. In other words I am getting some of the first great advantages of getting married.” Explaining his reluctance to economize by buying cheaper food, he noted he was not “tough and hearty like some people and able to eat anything and yet keep well. If I don’t eat well I lose strength rapidly.”34 But above all onerous work obligations threatened his health. In July 1891 he complained that the job involved “too much desk work” and provided little opportunity for rest. In August, he acknowledged, “I suppose I ought to take a vacation, but I hardly know how I can take it. My work seems to get more and more severe and the breathing time for which I am forever hoping seems to be steadily moving away from me.” While planning the 1892 citrus fair, Willard wrote, “The amount of work connected with an enterprise of that sort can scarcely be imagined by any one who has not been through it.” If he belittled the labor involved in producing oranges and lemons, he emphasized the tasks required to display them. He had to coordinate farmers in many different localities, handle large quantities of perishable fruit, and negotiate with various railroads, all the while ensuring that the chamber made a substantial profit. As the depression deepened, that task became harder and harder. The 1895 fair, described in glowing terms by Willard in the Land of Sunshine, was “an almost lamentable fizzle . . . as far as the financial end of it.” And the weather often proved unreliable. “We had bad luck in our weather,” Willard wrote after the 1891 fair. “It rained three days out of seven and was threatening and sprinkling two days more.” As a result, the proceeds were twelve hundred dollars less than had been expected. The following year, “wind and frost” “seriously injured” the orange crop he had hoped to display.35 Outside jobs imposed additional responsibilities. In the spring of 1895 Willard noted that the “success” of the Land of Sunshine was “very gratifying,” but then commented, “It is bothering us a good deal to keep up with the amount of work it calls for.” If his appointment as manager of the fiesta the following fall was a “new honor,” it was also “an accompanying burden of tremendous magnitude.” His job was “a good deal like running a circus and

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newspaper at the same time with social functions of all sorts and a few railway excursions on the side. All this coming in addition to the management of the Chamber of Commerce.” At the end of March 1896, he complained, “Nothing remains but an infinity of detail and the actual carrying out of the plans laid. We have 12 events to handle—any one of them big enough to keep a good many people busy for months. You can have only a faint comprehension of what it is like to manage such a menagerie of things all at once. I hope I don’t go mad.”36 When Willard completed a task without injury to his health, his confidence grew. “My health is almost perfect,” he wrote after the 1892 Agricultural Fair. “My headaches seem to have disappeared entirely and I never hear from my lungs. I must have a good deal more strength than I generally give myself credit for to be able to get through with the amount of work that I get away with every day.” Similarly, when his health remained “excellent” despite the arduous tasks involved in planning the Midwinter Fair of 1894, he concluded that “hard work doesn’t seem to affect me at all.”37 More commonly, however, he blamed his job for amplifying his symptoms. Explaining why his November 2, 1891, letter bore a San Francisco postmark, he wrote, When the [Agricultural] Fair was over I found myself utterly used up and exhausted. Like most things of its sort it wasn’t over when it was done. I struggled hard in the Sunday and Monday which followed to get its finances all straightened out, and for the most part succeeded, though by Monday night I was a total wreck physically. . . . May begged and implored me to get away just as soon as possible to avoid breaking down and I promised to do it. But it seemed as though the moment of getting away never could be reached, so many things piled up—some of them growing directly out of the fair and other important matters relating to them which I had postponed. I grew thin and pale and took to headaches. Last Friday night I had the second bad headache which I have had since I was married—it was very bad. Well the upshot of it was I told the Board that I must get away otherwise I might break down and they gave me a week’s leave of absence to come up here.

What did Willard mean by writing of his sensation of being “used up” and his fear of a “breakdown.” As Rotundo notes, contemporaries commonly employed those words in reference to neurasthenia. Although Willard may have worried about that disease as well as consumption, he probably was simply adopting the discourse about neurasthenia to emphasize his concern that overwork would trigger another relapse.38

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In the midst of organizing the Southern California exhibition at the World’s Fair, Willard wrote, “I never worked so hard as I am working at present and I am sorry to say it is beginning to tell a little on my health. I feel that I must get away but things are in such shape it seems utterly impossible. . . . I don’t mean that anything points to my getting really ill—only that I am thin and run down a little.” The following winter he complained, “I have been rather overworked of late although the strain has let up a little in the last few days. We are preparing for the midwinter fair at San Francisco—a larger and finer exhibit than we sent to Chicago. We have to raise money for it all by subscription which means a lot of work.” Willard’s next few letters are missing, but they must have contained more disturbing information. On April 2 he tried to reassure his father: “I think and so does May and Dr. Wing that you are worrying about me unnecessarily. I am about as well as I have been at any time— when I was especially hard worked—during the past few years. I don’t know how it happens but at times things will get stacked up high on me and in the process of digging out I get used up some times.”39 Willard’s responsibilities for the fiesta also exacted a toll. Because he no longer could relax on weekends or evenings, he soon began “coughing a good deal and not sleeping very well.” In July he decided to postpone the next fiesta so he would “not have to go through such a horrible strain” the following year.40 Willard’s frailty impelled him to try various popular health remedies. In the fall of 1891 he announced that he and May soon would move to Glendale, “a small village eight miles west of town up among the mountains.” The new location would “be vastly better for our healths.” The air was drier than that in Los Angeles, and fogs were rare. Because “lots of flowers and shrubbery” surrounded his new house, he would be able “to get some out-of-door life” and thus “get toned up.” A few months after moving in he felt “equal to” the task of planning the next citrus fair. Having spent the day “digging in the flower garden and tramping through the fields,” he was “thoroughly refreshed and ready for any amount of hard work.” When the 1892 fair closed, he sent this triumphant report: I was perfectly well through the whole business and am unusually lusty just now. I had occasion yesterday to try on a vest that I wore two summers ago. It was then quite loose for me but now I find it so tight that I had great difficulty in buttoning it. I think my chest is growing a little larger. I certainly breathe more deeply and no matter how long a breath I draw I never feel pain as I used occasionally a year or two ago. I don’t think I was ever so well before as I am now. Our living in the country

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has without doubt contributed a good deal to my improvement in health. I spent this morning at work about the yard and garden and by dinner time had a ferocious appetite. I eat heartily and sleep long and well. Out here I manage to forget all about business and nothing worries me now.41

Early in 1894 he adopted another measure: “I have gone back to my ancient practice of cold water baths every morning and it has braced me up a good deal.” Dr. Benjamin Rush, an early advocate of cold bathing, claimed it could “wash off impurities from the skin, promote perspiration, drive the fluids from the surface of the internal parts of the body, brace the animal fibres, stimulate the nervous system, and prevent the ‘diseases of warm weather.’” The practice became far more widespread in the 1840s when followers of Vincent Priessnitz (a Silesian peasant) disseminated his theories in the United States. By 1849, thirty water-cure establishments were in operation in nine states; the Water-Cure Journal enabled many people, consumptives among them, to apply hydropathy principles at home.42

Figure 3.4 The LA Chamber of Commerce building in the late 1890s, when Willard rode his bicycle to work. Courtesy of the University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

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In October 1894, Charles bought a bicycle. By riding “regularly ten or twelve miles a day to and from the house to the office four trips,” he would be able to save the expense of streetcar fares and lunches and recoup most of the cost of the machine within a year. But economic interests were not primary. “I am doing it for my health,” he emphasized. One historian observes that “like nearly every other panacea of the nineteenth century,” the “wheel was allegedly able to cure everything from neurasthenia to consumption.” Although physicians and health reformers encouraged cyclists to ride through the countryside, the exercise also was believed to confer important benefits on those confined to cities and towns. In 1896 Willard attributed the “excellent” state of his health to his daily commute.43 Because Willard’s job had the most deleterious effect on his health, he tried to reduce his workload. When he learned that his sister May had failed to take adequate steps to protect her health and thus soon might “get into the invalid stage,” he sent an unusually smug account of his actions: I don’t think I ever took better care of myself than at the present time. If I make mistakes it is either through mere thoughtlessness or else because I have over work thrust upon me. . . . A couple of months ago, for instance, the Herald people asked me to begin writing for them . . . and partly because an extra $15 a week would help me out of a tight squeeze I was in at the time, I tried it. At the end of three weeks I found that the writing of a column of editorial stuff . . . at the end of the day after a fair day’s work at the office was driving me mad. I couldn’t sleep nor eat, I was irritable and cross and at last a headache settled down on me that no quantity of drugs and not even several days of complete rest could shake off—and I dropped the extra work as quickly as I could. It was such a relief that I have hardly yet gotten over the joy of it.44

In short, some of the measures Willard adopted enabled him to describe himself in terms similar to those used to define Los Angelenos. Just as they made the desert bloom, so he successfully imposed his will on nature. Willard’s deepest despair always would arise whenever he was forced to confront the futility of the regimes he followed. Willard was not the only family member who needed to monitor health. After the close of the Agricultural Fair of 1891, May “was much tired out by the Fair—a part of the fatigue being vicarious and the rest a result of hard work which she did herself and of a bad cold which she took.” Her exhaustion also must have stemmed from anxious monitoring. She constantly watched Charles for signs of danger, worried about the strains imposed on him, and beseeched

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him to rest. Although he considered her support and solicitude “some of the first great advantages” of marriage, they undermined her own well-being. Fortunately, he could give as well as receive care. In the only surviving letter from May, she wrote to Samuel, “I know I shall grow strong and well under the care Charlie takes of me and happiness is a great healer you know.”45 Because the overriding concern was that onerous housework would overtax her limited strength, she employed a servant, whom Charles described as “a colored girl of about 15.” Her mother had been “a servant for many years in a wealthy New Orleans family,” and the daughter had received “excellent training.” Between 1880 and 1900, the black population of Los Angeles grew from approximately one hundred to more than two thousand. Although an image of the city as the land of freedom convinced many blacks to leave the South, hiring practices confined most women (and many men) to domestic service.46 The Willards also took advantage of another labor source. An 1893 pamphlet noted an important advantage of Los Angeles: “Many people come here because one of their members is sick. Such people are often willing to work for very little compensation.” Shortly before moving to Glendale, Charles wrote, “It is impossible to get servants out there so we have hit on a compromise arrangement. We take along with us a young married couple evidently of good family but of much reduced circumstances. The woman is well and strong but the possessor of a baby less than a month old. The man is in about the same fix I was several years ago—excepting the hemorrhages—and can’t do much work. They will live in two of the rooms which are rather shut off from the rest of the house. She will do the bulk of the house work and he will do chores about the place—for their board. So you see the arrangement is a moderately advantageous one.” After the couple arrived, Willard wrote, “We treat them of course with more consideration than we would servants being conscious of the fact that as far as birth and breeding go they are almost if not quite our equals—but they are anything but presuming and seem perfectly ready to assume the status of hired servants—that is to say they are not aggressive or troublesome in any way.” As the economic recession of the mid-1890s decimated the chamber’s finances, Charles’s salary plummeted, and by 1996 he no longer could afford household help. In November he noted, “For five months May has been doing her own work and she simply isn’t strong enough.”47 The birth of a healthy daughter, Florence, in September 1892 was an immense joy. “She is very bright and lively [and] not at all nervous,” Charles exulted the following month. But Florence was his hostage to fate; at a time of high infant mortality, any illness could presage disaster. In May 1894, he

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explained why he and May had decided to move to Santa Monica: “Baby was ill for several weeks and we became quite worried about her. She was thin, pale and cross and nervous. Doctors said she needed a change of air. We tried Santa Monica a few days and it helped her so that we go down on the first of the month.” In September he wrote, “We have just passed through—and are not yet done with—baby’s first serious illness. . . . The Doctor feared pneumonia. . . . Her illness makes us suffer a good deal.”48 And distressing news continued to arrive from Chicago. When Willard learned that sickness again struck his sister Alice in January 1892, he asked to “be informed by telegram” should “anything serious happen.” A telegram a few months later brought news of his brother Paul’s illness, eliciting this response: “I was in terror all day long lest I should get another message that he was worse.” That time Willard’s worst fears were realized. “There is one less of us,” he wrote to his sister May, “six now where there once was eight.” After the burglary of May’s house in August, he asked, “Are we naturally an unlucky family, or is it because there are so many of us somebody must be taking his turn all the time?” Although the booster literature promised stability and reliability, Willard was well aware of the unpredictable and ephemeral nature of life.49 “The Lord’s Own Appointed Country”

One way Willard responded to the gulf between his personal experiences and the Southern California ideal was by viewing his participation in the booster enterprise simply as a job. When his remunerative tutoring position vanished, he had carefully cultivated his skills as a publicist. Soon after settling in Los Angeles, he noted that his experiences at the Santa Barbara Press had taught him how to cater to the “public taste.” He hoped his understanding of “boom writing” would enhance his prospects in LA’s tight market. After organizing his first fair, he wrote proudly of the “tricks” he had “played” and “the devices” used to “attract attention and excite curiosity.” Accustomed to denigrating others, he held himself aloof from the public he sought to entice. When visitors poured into his exhibitions he rejoiced, but when his sister May wrote enthusiastically about attending the Chicago World’s Fair, he responded that he would not want to “get mixed up with such a crowd.” We can assume he also retained critical distance from some ideas he helped to promulgate. The booster message was so preposterous it is difficult to imagine anyone believing it. And Willard’s fragile health continually forced him to confront the limitations of his public proclamations.50 Anthropologist Margaret Lock reminds us, however, that ideologies can exert considerable sway even when they are not “congruent with what happens

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to the ‘lived’ body.” Charles’s private correspondence suggests he accepted some of the extravagant claims about the Southern California climate despite the knowledge he acquired subjectively. “Well, Heaven bless this climate,” he wrote in September 1888. “Here it hasn’t rained since the month of April and the days have all been perfect or nearly so. . . . I begin to think sometimes that this is the Lord’s own appointed country.” But the days he labeled “perfect” were not the ones he found most beneficial. “I suppose it is the cool weather coming on that makes me feel so much better,” he wrote in October. “We had our first spring of rain and our first cloudy day this week—the first since May. Think of 150 perfect days in succession. I had almost forgotten that there was such a thing as weather. And now it is clear, cool, and invigorating.” When he declared in December that the climate had “saved” his life, he failed to specify what feature he meant.51 Three years later he proposed that his sister May earn extra money by helping to find students to attend a girls’ boarding school established by a Glendale friend. Charles was confident: “It will be possible to secure pupils in the east to come out here—girls who have a tendency to lung trouble that might be improved by a winter in this lovely climate. Glendale is the best kind of a place you can imagine in the matter of health. Last year [the owner] had a dozen girls and a physician living in the house. His fee for services to those young ladies during the year was $2. None of ’em ever got sick although several of them came rather sickly, one with a bad cough which entirely disappeared. A rosier fatter lot of girls I never saw.” Until various illnesses befell Willard’s daughter, Florence, her vitality and cheerfulness also had demonstrated the benefits of the climate: “You see this is a great country to bring up babies in because you can keep them out of doors most of the day every day in the year and that makes them healthy and good natured.” When he learned of the assorted physical problems that had visited his Chicago family, he wrote, “Dear me, I wish you had a slice of this climate to live in. I am sure it would give you no excuse whatever to be sick.”52 But Willard also rejected some booster arguments. His brother Paul had been the focus of family concern long before he became sick. Because he performed poorly in high school, his father proposed sending him to join his brothers in Southern California. Despite the claim that fruit ranches offered abundant “light” work, Charles cautioned that it would “impracticable” for Paul to seek such employment. The boy was “not strong enough” and the work was “very hard.” (Of course, it is possible that Charles’s primary concern was that Paul’s arrival would add to his own burdens.) Boasts about the gigantic profits to be derived from land investment also failed to convince Willard.

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When his sister May asked for advice about whether to buy a particular parcel, he warned, “Every one who puts money in such things takes chances.”53 Willard also must have known that most health seekers were too poor to enjoy Southern California’s advantages. Rather than building large, elegant homes, they slept in poorly ventilated lodging house and ate in cheap restaurants, receiving neither the sunshine nor the nourishing food believed vital to recovery. As death approached, some moved to the county hospital, a dark, dismal, and severely overcrowded facility offering unappetizing meals and little care.54 Nevertheless, boosterism shaped Willard’s experience, whatever he thought of its specific arguments. By never mentioning the possibility that disease could persist after arrival in Southern California, the promoters had made recovery the only permissible trajectory and perfect health a requirement for continued residence in the promised land. Willard had hidden some of his difficulties long before he became a Los Angeles booster. In writing to his mother he had developed the skill he would employ with various audiences, concealing critical information while conveying the impression of openness. Despite his frailty, he presented himself as energetic and industrious to win the favor of his Santa Barbara employers. He also may have identified with Henry Hanchette, who had preferred fleeing to revealing personal failure. The widespread denial of sickness may have encouraged Willard to redouble his efforts to camouflage his own shameful secret. We have noted the terror he felt after reading Tolstoy’s “Ivan Ilych.” Much of Ilych’s suffering arose from the refusal of his family and friends to acknowledge that he was mortally sick. (That “falsity” “did more than anything else to poison his last days.”) Perhaps the evasiveness surrounding the prevalence of serious disease in Los Angeles similarly deepened Willard’s sense of vulnerability and increased his dark forebodings.55 And yet we have seen that his own views were far more complex and contradictory than those he helped to spread as a publicist. If Willard occasionally employed inflated booster rhetoric in his private writing and asserted that the Southern California climate had unique properties, his letters also discussed his fears about another relapse, his growing concerns about May and Florence, and the scrupulous care he devoted to safeguarding them all. Even while penning and disseminating stories of miracle cures, he continued to remind his father and sisters about the suffering that occurred, even in the land of sunshine.

Chapter 4

Reforming Los Angeles

“A New Undertaking”

During his last years at the chamber of commerce, Willard began to participate actively in progressivism, the broad social and political reform movement which swept through the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Willard focused primarily on municipal affairs. Exposing the problems of Los Angeles might seem a strange endeavor for a man who continued to celebrate its perfection. But as one historian argues, progressives did not believe they faced intractable problems: “It would be more accurate to say that they swam in a sudden abundance of solutions.” While advocating political and social change, reformers assumed that life was filled with promise. In a defense of muckrakers, Willard later would write, “Few editors of magazines are willing to publish a fault-finding article that does not offer the reader a practical method of cure.” “Fault-finders,” he contended, “represent today the most optimistic force existing in the nation. They believe in the people and in the power of right. . . . Led by some of the bravest and biggest and best men of the country, they are facing the future with confidence, patriotism, and an unswerving hope.” Like boosterism, the progressive movement thus fostered expectations that were wildly extravagant—especially for anyone suffering from a chronic, often fatal, disease.1 But if progressivism held out an impossible ideal, it also served Willard’s interests in two ways—solidifying his place in the LA elite and separating him from other tuberculosis victims. We will see him use his position as a local reform leader to identify contagious diseases with both “tramps” and Mexicans. Only later would he discover that the hostility he helped to incite could be directed toward himself as well. 68

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In a classic study, historian George E. Mowry argued that the California movement “was really inspired, kept alive, and directed by an extremely small group of men.” Most had been born in the Midwest, received college educations, worked as journalists, attorneys, or businessmen, and belonged to both fraternal orders and chambers of commerce. Although those “fortunate sons of the upper middle class” struggled primarily against the power of the Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation, they feared organized labor and socialism even more than big business. Revisionist historians recently have broadened the definition of California Progressives to include socialists, women, and African Americans who embraced such wide-ranging goals as the transfer of wealth from rich to poor, women’s suffrage, child labor laws, and the end of segregation. The elite progressive model, however, fits Willard and his coterie.2 A harbor fight which engulfed Los Angeles during the 1890s illustrates their views. Willard later described the controversy as a momentous struggle to liberate “the people” from the “sinister force” of corporate interests. But the contest also revealed, as one historian notes, that “when Willard spoke of ‘the people’ he usually referred to those having property interests to protect.” The genesis of the battle lay in the decision to create a major metropolis in a highly unsuitable geographical area. Unlike San Diego and San Francisco, Los Angeles lacked a natural deep port and could create one only with substantial assistance from the federal government. The debate concerned whether federal funds should be used for a harbor in Santa Monica, which the Southern Pacific demanded, or in San Pedro, the favored choice of the chamber of commerce, many of whose members had financial interests in the area. As chamber secretary, Willard had worked vigorously on behalf of the San Pedro site, organizing a letter-writing campaign to congressmen in January 1895 and helping to establish the Free Harbor League a few months later.3 Willard and his colleagues also sought to reduce the power of the Southern Pacific in municipal government. In September 1896 Charles told his father that he had founded an “independent movement in local politics,” called the League for Better City Government. Because the railroad exerted power primarily through the local wards, the league drafted a new city charter to strengthen the mayoralty; the charter also sought to institute a civil service system and mandate the election at large of both school board and city council members. Willard helped to frame the document and then chaired the campaign committee. The rejection of the charter in the January 1897 election was, he acknowledged, “a bad defeat” which “hurt my prestige among the men I work with. . . . Truly it was a bitter dose.”4

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Ten weeks later, however, he had a new platform for pushing the progressive cause. On March 23, 1897, Willard had time to “snatch” just “a few minutes” to tell his father of a “new undertaking” which had “closed one chapter” of his life “and opened up another.” His friends recently had bought the Los Angeles Evening Express and installed him as general manager. The appreciation demonstrated by the chamber of commerce may have smoothed his change of work: “They elected me a director, passed all sorts of resolutions and things and presented me with a beautiful new gold watch chain and locket value $200.” One phrase in the resolution may especially have pleased him. In addition to his “rare discretion” and “marked ability,” Willard’s “persistent energy” had helped “to make the Chamber of Commerce the most noteworthy organization of its kind in the United States.”5 But such praise could not conceal his new difficulties. The Express had a poor reputation and a large debt. Willard anticipated the “work of reconstruction” would be “slow.” He elaborated two months later. Because newspaper expenses were higher in the West than in the rest of the country, he had to charge five cents for a paper that would cost one or two cents elsewhere. The agricultural basis of the economy, undermined by drought, exacerbated the recession. Business was thus “dull” and advertising scarce. Because Willard’s salary would remain negligible until the paper began to turn a profit, he had a particularly strong incentive to succeed. “I am in the great big struggle of my life,” he stressed. He could “win,” but only if economic conditions improved and he kept his health despite the overwhelming stresses to which he was subject. Fortunately, he was not working as hard as he might: “The big secret lies in knowing how to move people along and not allow them to waste one’s time. Next to that comes a hard heart which I have succeeded in cultivating. To be able to discharge a half sick man with a family dependent upon him without a cent ahead, in order to replace him with some one more desirable and then give his weeping wife only a few minutes for an interview—of such things is success made in this world.” Willard may have felt more discomfort than he acknowledged. Perhaps he remembered being as defenseless as the newspaperman he dismissed or could imagine May being forced to appeal on his behalf. Or perhaps he was simply relieved to be the boss and thus no longer subject to the control of others.6 The editorial side of the paper was “enjoyable almost without alloy.” Here, too, he had the power to hire and fire. Instead of accepting “the usual run of hacks,” he was able to select men and women of “good birth and breeding.” His reporters and junior editors included “a Harvard man,” a “University of Dublin man,” a “University of California man,” and a “Cornell man.”7

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Some of Willard’s editorials could have appeared just as easily in the Land of Sunshine. Despite the economic gloom which continued to envelop Southern California, he focused on whatever signs of prosperity he could find. “From all quarters come cheering reports of improved business,” he wrote in June 1897. Eighteen months later he proclaimed that “the greater destiny of Southern California is now just at its beginning. They are wise who study the signs and abide by them.” California crops, he contended, remained superior to those produced elsewhere. Early spring was “the pleasant time of year when the California enthusiast takes his benighted friend from the East around to the store to show him some olives that are worth eating.” When gold was discovered in the Klondike, he reminded his readers of the “indisputable fact that mining conducted upon business principles pays far better dollar for dollar and man for man in California than it does in Alaska, not to mention the advantages the California miner has in living in God’s country.” Bad luck in other parts of the country always worked to California’s advantage. Floods that devastated Mississippi orchards and farmland would help to increase demand for Los Angeles fruits and vegetables. Criticisms of Los Angeles invariably provoked ridicule. In an editorial entitled “Some Day They Will Learn,” Willard wrote, “Our Northern brethren are complaining that the prospects of the fruit crop are very much less than if the April clouds had done their duty. We are happy to say that such is not the case here. Most all our orchards are independent of such capricious things as April clouds.”8 Boosterism, however, no longer was Willard’s only concern. During his two years at the paper, he relentlessly vilified the Southern Pacific and promoted the agenda of the League for Better City Government. His first editorial, on March 16, 1897, lambasted the railroad for opposing the San Pedro site and declared that “the people of this section” would not “allow such an atrocious infringement of their rights to proceed.” With the outcome still hanging in the balance in July 1898, he wrote, “The San Pedro harbor project is the most important public matter that now concerns the people of Los Angeles and Southern California as a whole.”9 Like many progressives, Willard also sought to impose white, middleclass codes of conduct on other citizens. Whatever pleasure he previously had taken in unsavory city delights apparently had vanished by the late 1890s, when he railed against such “evils” as gambling, alcohol, and prostitution. Seeking to beautify as well as purify the city, he demanded that officials remove such “serious blemishes” as telegraph, telephone, and lighting poles, line sidewalks with “palms and other stately trees,” pave all the streets, and keep them clean.10

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With the Spanish American War looming early in 1898, international affairs increasingly dominated Willard’s columns. The immediate impetus was fury at Spain’s treatment of the Cuban revolutionaries seeking independence. One of the key proponents of American intervention was Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, who would play a sensational part in the war as the leader of the Rough Riders. Newspapers helped to whip the American public into a frenzy, hoping to increase circulation by publicizing Spanish atrocities. Willard did his share. Only “timid, nervous,” and “over-anxious” people, he claimed, opposed war with Spain. By contrast, “the young, the vigorous, the ambitious, the dominant portion of the population” were “heart and soul for the new policy and the new era.” When the first Southern California troops departed, Willard wrote, “Let us have Old Glory everywhere, with music and cheers; let the smiles of fair women greet brave men, and flowers, too. The bouquets will be garlands when they come back.” And he repeatedly insisted the war was just. “In all the history of the world,” he wrote in May, “this war with Spain is the first ever undertaken on unselfish grounds. Not only are the grounds we stand on humanitarian, but we have deliberately given up palpable grounds of self-interest on which we could have stood.”11 Willard also excoriated the enemy as “feeble,” “old,” and “decrepit.” Spanish soldiers could not “be expected to keep up their courage when pinched

Figure 4.1

Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” departing from the San Bernardino train station.

Courtesy of the University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

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with hunger and devoid of ammunition.” But “our people” were “well fed and clothed”; their “energy” would “tell in battle as well as in business.” The “American solder was always the intrepid warrior eager for the fray.” By July the United States had become “the most powerful country on the globe.” The following month “the young nation” had shown the world that it “had the strength to stand forth as the champion of liberty and justice.” The “promise of peace” would “stimulate the people to new enterprises.” Commercial expansion would promote further “growth and prosperity.” In short, during the war as throughout his tenure at the chamber, Willard relentlessly exalted the values of strength, toughness, power, and energy—all qualities he longed to display.12 After the Spanish surrender, the United States had to decide how to treat the former Spanish empire. The Platt Amendment awarded the United States control of Puerto Rico and Guam as well as the right to intervene in Cuba. Soon afterwards, the United States also annexed Hawaii. When the United States sought to win dominion over the Philippines, however, the Filipinos rose in rebellion. It would take seven years of bloody fighting to defeat them. That foray into imperialism galvanized Willard, even though the Hawaiians were “a strange aggregation of humanity,” the “American element” represented “less than 3 percent,” many Cubans were “negroes,” and the Filipinos were “of the Malay race . . . mixed with the blood” of various groups, few of them “European nationals.” But these physically inferior people had many positive traits. The Filipinos, for example, seemed “to be good fighters and that is one of the necessary elements of character to fit a people for modern civilization.” If “left to themselves they might yield to the temptation to commit excesses,” but that “would not be strange when one thinks of the treatment they have received at the hands of Spain.”13 And, most important, the Americans were greeted as liberators throughout the former Spanish empire. The Puerto Ricans had for “a long time looked forward to the time when they should be delivered from the bondage of the Spanish,” and they seemed “to care very little about the independence of the island.” The “people of Havana” were relieved that their harbor would be “guarded not by the frowning guns of a hostile fleet, but by a Goddess of Liberty holding in her right hand the emblems of peace.” Even the rebellion in the Philippines testified to the need for U.S. intervention: “We can not give over the islands to . . . cruel and untamed savages.”14 “A Hopeless Entanglement”

Willard’s private experience was far less glorious than America’s first global ventures. Five months after taking control of the Express, he conceded that he

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never had been “so completely overwhelmed” by such “a hopeless entanglement.” The previous editors had engaged in ethically dubious financial transactions, and he had suffered new losses when he sought to ward off legal suits. During the past two months he had been “so depressed” he could “hardly speak about it to anyone outside of those to whom it was necessary to speak.” As usual, emotional stress inflicted a physical toll: “Sleep would desert me at one or two o’clock, and the rest of the night I tossed and thought. Chronic headaches tormented me and my digestion collapsed. One night I had a frightful set-to with six hours of incessant retching.”15 May’s health also sparked concern. “Baby tears her all to pieces,” Willard explained in August 1897. Florence was “an affectionate and well meaning child,” but “these California children living always out of doors are charged with a fierce almost savage vitality that wreaks itself on everybody and everything they come in contact with.” “Savage” was a widely used term in the late nineteenth century; we have just seen Willard employ it in reference to the Philippine rebels. Historian Gail Bederman notes that “civilization denoted a precise stage in human racial evolution—the one following the more primitive states of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism.’ Human races were assumed to evolve from simple savagery, through violent barbarism, to advanced and valuable civilization. But only white races had, as yet, evolved to the civilized stage.” Even white children, however, were believed to need to develop the physical strength associated with savages in order to be able to withstand the enervating forces of civilization later in life. Willard thus praised his daughter even while emphasizing the harm she caused. Florence’s plump and vigorous body also undoubtedly helped to alleviate Charles’s terrible fears about her safety. And her “vitality” meant that she could serve as an exemplar of the perfect child Los Angeles prided itself on producing.16 The beginning of Willard’s annual Christmas letter may have been calculated to convince his Chicago family that all was well. His neighbors were “our own kind.” Florence was a “happy and contented child.” Although May continued to do all the housework, she “[bore] up under the strain.” She and Charles had now been married six and a half years, and he “did not know of a case where the two seem so perfectly mated” as they were. May was “bright, jolly, original in her thought and speech,” “very popular with everybody, a charming entertainer, full of hope and courage and belief in her husband’s ability to overcome obstacles.” But the letter soon took an ominous turn. Although he could list numerous professional achievements, he had no pride in them: “I find so many other men of my own kind and sort that look up to me as successful, that I suppose I ought to feel satisfied with what I have

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accomplished up to this day—but I don’t at all. . . . I am eternally in a state of contempt for things I have done, doubt about those I am doing and dread of those I have yet to undertake. I never expect to succeed, and when after a thing is over, and people congratulate me, I always feel like laughing at them for the result is so villainously far short of what I had hoped.” One problem with cultivating a public presentation was that, much as Willard coveted praise, its receipt invariably made him feel fraudulent. And it was no longer so easy to create the desired image. His failure to “build up a broken down and demoralized newspaper” kept him in a “chronic state of blueness,” which he “sometimes struggle[d] in vain to conceal.” Every evening he arrived home “tired and cross.”17 In February, 1898 (when Willard was beginning to rouse public support for the war), he explained his silence during the past few months this way: “I despise calamity letters and having little else than calamity to offer I have refrained. We have all been sick a good deal and everything has gone wrong with me in about every way I can conveniently think of—but I don’t know why I should burden you people . . . with a detailed account of all the disagreeable things that happen.” His next extant letter had the same date (June 17) as the editorial in which he aligned himself with the healthiest and most “vigorous” segment of the population. He noted that May was about to depart for Chicago, where she would remain throughout the summer. She was “terribly run down” and he was “sending her East in the (almost forlorn) hope that it may better her condition physically.” Florence would stay with cousins in Chicago. But Charles also wanted to correct a possible misconception: “In rereading this letter I see that I have referred to May as an invalid several times,” he wrote in a postscript. “In justice to her I ought to say that she is the kind of an invalid that does the work of two women and has lots of leisure left for amusement, and never complains, but goes on getting thinner and paler with a shorter breath, and the doctor says, ‘You must be on your guard or something may happen.’” Was Charles still trying to protect May against his family’s criticisms? Did he fear that her breakdown suggested that their original assessment of her had been correct? Perhaps it was especially important to separate her from other “invalids” when his editorials glorified American strength and toughness. Despite the serious problems besetting her, May continued to display the energy her countrymen exhibited in battle.18 Several days later, Charles implored his sister Sarah to “please write [him] right away about that rest cure. Where is it and what does it cost? . . . Would five weeks in such a place be enough?” Devised by the Philadelphia doctor S. Weir Mitchell, the rest cure involved several weeks of what he described as

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“a combination of entire rest and of excessive feeding, made possible by passive exercise obtained through steady use of massage and electricity.” Drawing on her experience as Mitchell’s patient, feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman reviled him as a misogynist tyrant and his therapy as oppressive and harmful. As one historian shows, however, Mitchell never directed his therapy solely toward women, and the regime made sense within the context of contemporary medical beliefs. If too much strain could overtax an individual’s limited supply of nervous energy, it was logical to prescribe a period of prolonged rest. To the Willards, convinced that May’s problems stemmed from her onerous household responsibilities compounded by worries about Charles, Mitchell’s treatment offered the best hope.19 Because no letters survive from the remainder of the summer or fall, we do not learn the nature of May’s troubles, whether she went on the rest cure Charles recommended, or, if she did, whether she found the relief she sought. We do know, however, that she developed a chronic ear problem soon after her return from Chicago and was still debilitated several months later, when Charles suffered another relapse. “You may hear from some quarter the news that I have been seriously ill,” he wrote to his father on December 5, “so I make haste to write you with a little of the first of my returning strength, that you and the girls may not be too apprehensive about it.” His hemorrhages were “serious” only because they signaled the return of his illness “after eight years of respite.” Because they lasted less than a week and he was now “dressed and able to wobble about,” however, they could “hardly be called serious as regard actual results.”20 He then proceeded to relate his experiences in detail. The day before the crisis, he felt “particularly well” and “went to bed healthfully tired, after doing a lot of odd jobs about the place.” That night he “woke up suffocating and at a cough the blood began to come up.” Although there “wasn’t much in the whole hemorrhage—a dozen mouthfuls or more perhaps,” it “was a sorrowful thing to see.” The “opening up of the old wound” meant he “knew not what.” That day he “lay in bed, quietly and thought of things. No hemorrhages, nor any that night.” The next morning he thus “undertook to get up.” But “no sooner” was he dressed “than they began again, this time somewhat worse than before.” “As the blood came up in quantities,” Willard “sickened with the fear” that he was “in for a long siege again.” The following two days he was “very weak and wretched,” but on Friday evening “a change came” and since then, he had been “improving rapidly.”21 Because Willard no longer could afford to hire a servant, the full responsibility fell on May. She “cried a little” at first but then “took hold bravely and

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did all that was necessary to be done.” Since then she had “held up splendidly” and seemed better than she had “for some time.” Willard’s regular doctors also were unavailable, and he thus consulted “a new physician, Dr. Bishop.” Born in New London, Connecticut, in 1844, Herbert Martin Bishop had attended both Yale Medical College and the New York Homeopathic Medical College. Before arriving in Los Angeles in 1892, he had been president of the Connecticut Homeopathic Medical Society; he later served as president of the California State Homeopathic Society. Homeopathy was by far the largest and most popular of the many irregular medical movements flourishing during the nineteenth century. With its enormous population of sick people, Los Angeles was a center of unorthodox medical practice. Willard noted that Bishop’s “followers form a sort of cult: that is they believe in him very profoundly as being different from most other physicians and capable of extraordinary things.” Although Willard did not share those enthusiasms, he found Bishop “a very capable man” and his appraisal “consoling.” The doctor had not yet given his views in “full” but had declared that Willard’s “right lung [was] all sound and abnormally developed in strength and action to make up for the other failing.”22 Willard’s next letter, posted in the middle of March 1899, was filled with bitterness: “Things have been in such a sorrowful condition with us out here that I have not had the heart to write.” As a result of the arrival of the “dreaded second dry season,” numerous businesses had folded, and the Express was on the verge of collapse. “Ten years of hard work and average luck would have made me a wealthy man—instead of that my candle is snuffed out in two years.” In the middle of April he had gone home expecting the paper to fold the next day. He “woke up in the middle of the night with a hemorrhage. It was not very bad and no others followed.” The next day he unexpectedly received twenty-five hundred dollars, but no further assistance would be forthcoming and he had conceded defeat. The paper “may go to the devil as far as I am concerned—it has gone there. This sorrowful tale must be told you some time and you may as well have it now. I have failed utterly, although the town does not know it yet.” A month later, the Express announced Willard’s resignation.23 “The Great National Disease”

Although Willard had anticipated “no trouble” finding another job, the economic slump which had destroyed his hopes for the Express also shattered employment opportunities throughout Southern California. Unable to find satisfactory work, he turned to nonfiction writing. His first two books (A History of the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles, California and The Free Harbor

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Contest) appeared in 1899. Those works, however, produced little income, and Willard soon was compelled to seek other employment.24 In April 1900, he took “up the work for the Jobbers’ Association.” Established the previous fall, that organization united manufacturers and wholesalers to fight for lower rates from the railroads. Willard’s position as secretary thus placed him in opposition to his old foe. Although he expressed gratitude for “the friendship and regard which a number of men in business feel for me,” he acknowledged his job “really call[ed] for an expert in railway matters.” After attending a conference of Los Angeles retailers organized by the chamber of commerce, he wrote, “My people were much astonished (as so was I in fact) at the speech that I delivered. . . . However, I had sense enough to know that it was a superficial performance.” Nevertheless, Willard retained his post until January 1911, when illness forced him to resign.25 Willard’s appointment as secretary of the Municipal League of Los Angeles in late 1901 was a better fit, and that position rapidly consumed most of his time and effort. The local chapter of the National Municipal League, the organization was, according to one historian, “the single most influential reform group . . . in Los Angeles history.” Its primary object was “the bettering of the city government.” Willard’s responsibilities included attending all meetings, pursuing the issues decided upon there, conferring regularly with the executive committee, and writing Municipal Affairs, the eight-page monthly bulletin distributed to all members. He remained secretary until January 1909, when he became the league’s statistician, a far less onerous (and largely honorific) position.26 Willard’s job at the league placed him in the center of a debate about the place of consumptives in the city and state. By the twentieth century, California, like other states with large concentrations of health seekers, had withdrawn its welcome. Officials continued to argue that health was California’s normal condition, but they also circulated statistics showing the high prevalence of consumption. Concluding that health seekers were responsible for importing a dread disease, the California State Board of Health urged the legislature to deny admission to all consumptives.27 That proposal failed largely because it was so patently impractical. As Willard’s doctor Norman Bridge wrote, “All passenger trains would have to be delayed several hours till all the passengers could be examined. The general appearance of the travelers could not be relied upon to tell who are dangerous consumptives, for some mortally sick ones look in the face very well, and nine-tenths of all tuberculous patients could easily hoodwink any inspector.”28

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Policy makers thus sought to impose a quarantine by other means. By the late 1890s, local charitable groups had begun to expel consumptives who applied for assistance. An 1898 article in the Express complained about “H. Jimoniski, late of New York, formerly of Russia and a direct descendant of Abraham,” who was “a little evaporated Russian with a perpetual whine and a silvery voice which sounded like a cheap phonograph with the rolls worn out.” His most notable feature, however, was “his nerve,” which “was something wonderful.” He had “coolly informed” a local charity that he was too sick to work and needed assistance. Fortunately, that group sent him to St. Louis, where he had family.29 Efforts to repel health seekers could involve inaction as well as action. An early twentieth-century campaign to establish a state sanatorium met defeat partly because of fears that the facility would attract invalids from other states. In 1902 the Los Angeles City Council passed a law prohibiting any hospital from caring for consumptives within city limits. The same year several Jewish trade unions began to raise funds to establish a national sanatorium in Los Angeles; the elite German Jewish community protested that such a facility would serve as a magnet for health seekers and urged that it admit only county residents.30 The growing understanding of the germ theory provides one key to the ardent embrace of exclusionary strategies. I noted that shortly after the discovery of the tubercle bacillus, news about the communicable nature of consumption began to spread among sufferers and their families. That information began to reach a much broader segment of society during the late 1890s and early 1900s, when anti-tuberculosis societies in various parts of the country mounted what historian Nancy Tomes dubs a mass “crusade.” Spreading the message that consumption was an infectious disease, they transformed victims into menaces.31 The dramatic policy of exclusion also stemmed from new notions about the affected population. When Willard began to exhibit symptoms of consumption in 1885, whites with “refined” temperaments were believed to be especially susceptible. After the turn of the twentieth century, however, the disease was associated overwhelmingly with poor people. And in Los Angeles, that group was synonymous with “tramps.” The “tramp scare” that spread through the United States bore many elements of a “moral panic”—exaggerated media reports, the conflation of a targeted group with danger, and calls for aggressive forms of social control.32 During Willard’s tenure at the chamber of commerce, that organization helped to spread the alarm about tramps by declaring that they had “become a

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dangerous element to the peace of the city” and urging the city council to establish barracks where they would be required to work in return for lodging and food. As general manager of the Express, Willard continued the campaign. One of his first editorials stated, “It is to the interest of the entire community that the tramp nuisance should be abolished.” Because “Southern California has a winter climate which will always attract visitors of an undesirable class,” Los Angeles would always have a “tramp problem.” He demanded that the police stop its practice of providing free lodging: “Placing these fellows in jail during the winter months suits them too well. The jail is fairly comfortable and the meals come regularly.” The “only feasible plan” was to force vagrants to work at “the rock pile” to earn their keep.33 Soon after his appointment as secretary of the Municipal League, Willard traveled to various Midwestern cities to investigate their reform movements. On his return, he wrote approvingly of laws in Wisconsin and Minnesota “fining railroads from bringing indigent invalids over the border.” He also urged Los Angelenos to direct greater attention to the issue of tramps. “Without doubt, the most serious and the most difficult problem this city has now on hand—and one that promises to stay longest unsolved—is that of the criminal tramp—the ‘yegg-man’!” His report helps to substantiate the common contention of medical historians that reformers often advocated public health measures to impose social control, not just to eradicate disease. Because the discovery of the tubercle bacillus made disposal of the sputum an urgent issue, various municipalities enacted ordinances against expectoration. Willard wrote that the passage of such a measure in Los Angeles would help to reduce the large number of “tramps, yeggman and tramps’ boys” who congregated on certain downtown street corners. Willard also endorsed “rigid inspection of private lodging houses by the police” and the passage of a special ordinance for that purpose: “Theoretically the law is based on sanitary regulation, but its real object is to give the police opportunity to enter the nests where the yeggmen swarm.” Willard concluded that tramps represented “the great national disease”; charity dispensed outside punitive institutions served to nourish “this pestilence.” Tramps thus not only carried consumption, they also personified it. They constantly menaced, could erupt at any time, and needed firm control.34 In January 1902, Willard was appointed chairman of the hospital committee of the Los Angeles County Grand Jury, which he defined as a “general inquisitorial body, that goes over all the accounts of the county officers, and hears all complaints, and makes recommendations of needed reforms, and sometimes finds indictments against evildoers.” It is thus likely that Willard

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saw an 1899 letter sent to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors from a patient describing the treatment received by three consumptives on his ward. The first, “a Scotch boy,” had been “brought to the hospital with hemorrhages” and died “under most pitiable circumstances.” During the night “he fell out of bed in his restlessness and in so doing overturned a toilet jar half filled with urine and the vomit of undigested food. The stench . . . immediately floated throughout the ward all the rest of the night.” The nurse who was called “at first . . . paid no attention to the filth but finally . . . cleaned the place in a perfunctory manner.” When the boy’s bed “was made filthy by the excrements from his body,” the nurse wiped him with “clothes enriched with filth.” A few nights before, a doctor had ordered a plaster for the boy. The nurse, however, refused to apply it until the letter writer “remonstrated” with her. Another “pathetic instance of abuse on the part of the nurses” concerned a man “bought to the hospital dying of consumption.” When other patients helped him sit in a chair, the nurse insisted that he return to bed unaided. The third patient “was ordered to leave the hospital . . . because he refused to work beyond his strength.”35 Perhaps Willard recalled an 1897 article in the Express about a talk by Dr. D. C. Barber, the hospital superintendent. According to the newspaper account, Barber “thought that the patients who most loudly complain are those who never had known what good care was when in health. Sick people are invariably morbid and they impose on the attendants whenever possible.” Barber exhorted the county board of supervisors “to pass strict rules for the prevention of garrulous and fault-finding visitors, whose chief aim seems to be to pick the management to pieces.” But even if Willard discounted patient complaints, he must have visited the hospital and read reports documenting its dismal condition. Bedbugs and cockroaches infested the wards. Patients received little food and were required to make their own beds. In 1914, the Los Angeles Society for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis would write that before 1908, “the care of the unfortunate creatures who were sent to the County Hospital may have been little less than horrible in the cold-bloodedness with which they were allowed to eke out their few remaining years of life in the unsanitary ward known as ‘Old Ward 10.’”36 In any case, in the fall of 1902, when the board of supervisors announced plans to construct four new buildings for the hospital, Willard spearheaded a protest. In a letter written on behalf of the Municipal League and published in the Los Angeles Herald, he argued that the proposal would involve exorbitant expense to taxpayers. In addition, the new buildings would serve as an “apparent invitation to indigent invalids from all over the Union to come to this

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county and be cared for.” Shortly after that letter appeared, several trade unions signed petitions urging the board to proceed with the “plans for enlarging the county hospital and for making that notoriously inadequate and antiquated institution more modernized and comfortable.” But Willard held firm, continuing to oppose any expansion until the spring of 1903, when the board finally agreed to a compromise, reducing the number of new buildings from four to two.37 One historian writes, “Knowing his own history, Willard may have had mixed feelings” about his comment about “indigent invalids.” But it is equally likely that Willard’s “history” was what impelled him to agitate against them. Philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum demonstrates that both disgust and shame contribute to the stigmatization of subordinate groups. Drawing on the work of psychologist Paul Rozin, she argues that disgust arises from “anxiety about a vulnerability that we share with other animals, the propensity to decay and become waste products ourselves.” Shame, Nussbaum writes, “involves the realization that one is weak and inadequate in some way in which one expects oneself to be adequate.” More than many other Los Angelenos, Willard was acutely aware of his frailty and mortality. And as a sick man in a society that valorized strength and physical perfection, he constantly saw himself as falling short of the ideal. By projecting his feelings of disgust and shame onto groups already defined as inferior, he may have been able to live more comfortably with the most problematic parts of himself.38 Another aspect of Willard’s “own history” may have encouraged him to distance himself from “indigent invalids.” His appointments to positions in such organizations as the chamber of commerce, the Jobbers’ Association, and the Municipal League had demonstrated his success in gaining a foothold in his adopted city. But he could not yet rest secure about belonging to the upper echelons of local society or claiming the privileges associated with that status. He remained acutely sensitive to the opinions of more prominent men, watched others acquire enormous wealth while his own money-making schemes floundered, and still smarted from his failure to revive the Express. Willard’s lingering anxiety about his place in Los Angeles may have intensified his desire to sharpen the boundary between himself and “excluded others.”39 “Breeding Places for All Forms of Germ Disease”

Willard also played an important role in efforts to link contagious diseases with another group of “outsiders.” Of course, because Southern California originally was part of Mexico, Mexicans were outsiders only in the AngloSaxon imagination. Available data suggest that they represented 80 percent of

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the total population during the 1850s. The racial composition of the region changed dramatically during the 1880s, when stories of cheap, fertile land and the balmy, healthy climate lured white settlers from the East and Midwest. By the end of the “boom,” whites outnumbered Mexicans four to one. But after the turn of the century, migrants slowly began to swell the size of the Mexican population. Some were recruited by the railroads; others sought agricultural jobs.40 The primary response of progressive reformers was to call attention to the house courts, inhabited overwhelmingly by Mexican workers and their families. House courts were vacant lots, owned by the railroads, on which tenants constructed small shacks, typically of tin, gunny sacks, and boxes; residents shared toilets and carried water from outside faucets. After surveying the house courts’ lack of sanitation, overcrowding, and flimsy construction, Dr. Titian Coffey asked, “Is it any wonder that vice, drunkenness and crime are bred under such conditions?” Sickness was an equally serious problem. “Contagious and infectious diseases, diphtheria, tuberculosis and smallpox” not only afflicted the residents but were “liable to spread to an epidemic at any time.”41 Willard had made what historian William Deverell calls “ugly, reflexive” comments about Mexicans three weeks after arriving in San Bernardino. Although he had spent virtually all his time in bed, he felt competent to describe Mexican children as “filthy, and only half-clad” and their parents as even “worse.” He must have encountered many Mexicans once he emerged from seclusion, but his correspondence gives no indication that he noticed them. Nevertheless, he again considered himself an expert on that population during the early 1900s.42 Municipal Affairs, the Municipal League newspaper written by Willard, helped to publicize the deplorable conditions of the house courts. Willard also was responsible for convincing the Los Angeles City Council to establish a housing commission in 1906; he then worked closely with that body to secure the passage of a housing ordinance the following year. In May 1907, the ordinance was used to compel landlords to close nearly half the house courts and demolish the buildings on them. “It is a sad fact,” Willard wrote in Municipal Affairs, “that the closing of these courts has driven” the tenants “out into the street.” But he pointed out that the courts had been “breeding places for all forms of germ disease, and immorality and crime,” and thus represented “a menace to the health and welfare of the whole city.” Suggesting that Mexicans were like children, he asserted that their major response was incomprehension: “They do not understand what they have done that is wrong, and indeed

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the whole procedure is a complete mystery to them.” And he minimized the injury they sustained: “Fortunately the weather is pleasant, and they are accustomed to out-of-door life, and the worst that can happen to them will scarcely be as bad as the conditions under which they have been living in the house courts.” In 1908, Willard listed the closure of the house courts as one of the league’s major accomplishments. Hundreds of Mexicans had been “lifted from conditions of helpless misery and wretchedness,” where they had been “disseminators of disease and crime to the entire city.”43 Like the booster literature he penned, Willard’s writings about tramps and Mexicans were partly a job requirement. Various members of the Municipal League must have decided to call attention to problems attributed to tramps, oppose the hospital expansion, and support the campaign for housing reform. And the league’s agenda was hardly unique. Although the influx of invalids and the Mexican house courts were uniquely Southwestern concerns, progressive reformers throughout the United States advocated punitive measures for paupers, agitated for strict housing regulations, identified contagious diseases with immigrants, and described the victims as menaces. But if Willard expressed widespread opinions, he also helped to stigmatize an illness that had plagued him for more than a decade. As his health deteriorated after 1907, he would have to find ways to distinguish himself from other sufferers and deflect the fears he aroused. During the last few years of the old century and the first seven of the new one, however, he appears to have hoped to be able to distance himself from the disease that provoked such terror. “Nothing but a Sort of Nervous Exhaustion”

In his1899 history of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Willard obfuscated the genesis of his health problems this way: Shortly after graduating from the University of Michigan, his “lungs became seriously affected through a long siege of typhoid fever.”44 The word “consumption” also vanished from his private correspondence. Because few letters survive from that period, we can trace his experiences only with difficulty. We do know, however, that his departure from the Express had not ended his troubles and that the primary complaint he discussed was chronic indigestion, which he viewed as a symptom of neurasthenia. Regardless of whether Willard or his doctors made the diagnosis, he probably worried privately that his indigestion suggested a more serious problem. (Pulmonary tuberculosis can produce lesions in the intestines as well as the lungs.) Neurasthenia had obvious advantages. Most notably, it was not fatal. After describing his symptoms, Willard often added that they indicated “nothing serious.” At a

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time when public health campaigns directed attention to the infectious nature of consumption, he also must have drawn comfort from assuming his condition was not communicable. And neurasthenia remained associated with Anglo-Saxons engaged in refined, intellectual pursuits, not the tramps and Mexicans now identified with consumption.45 In the beginning of August 1901 Charles suffered so much pain after every meal that he tried to eat very little; two weeks later he fainted at breakfast. Because May and Florence were in Chicago for the summer, Charles had moved to a hotel, and his collapse occurred in public view. “Being entirely among strangers,” he was “dreadfully chagrined.” But May’s absence had a major advantage. The “mean, cold truth” was that he was “very glad” she was away. “She worries so like the dickens when I am ill,” he explained to Sarah, “and when she takes care of me I am so afraid she will overdo and break down.” All summer he had not dared “to confess” how ill he had felt, and Sarah was not to “hint” of it now. Charles seems to have recreated with his wife the relationship he had established with his mother. Although dependent on May’s sympathy and support, he considered her anxiety burdensome and thus hid his complaints when possible. May’s own frailties made concealment especially critical. Charles previously had argued that a more robust and vigorous wife soon would tire of him, but life with another invalid had its own difficulties. Mutual concern heightened the distress of each.46 Willard soon wrote with his old confidence: “It was nothing but a sort of nervous exhaustion,” and there was “nothing to worry about.” His faith in his ability to master his body also revived: “I am going to make a business of getting well, if I don’t do a stroke of work for a month. I always do get well when I take a rest.” When he learned in October that his father had been suffering from “nervous dyspepsia” and “feeling quite discouraged about it,” Charles offered his own experience as a guide: “My last set-to with this disease lasted for seven weeks. I am just well of it now, and feeling very happy to actually get through the day without pain, and eat pretty much what I please. I am satisfied now that I cured myself by drinking great quantities of water about an hour before each meal. I really ought to have it warm, I suppose, but as that was not convenient, I took it just at the temperature of the room. . . . I drink three tumblers full in rapid succession, and it is not difficult any more. At first it nearly strangled me.” Because his customary exercise regime proved too strenuous the following year, he substituted ping pong: “It is a moderate exercise. It does not require strength nor great endurance and yet brings all the limbs and muscles of the body into active use. After an hour’s play and a cold bath I sleep splendidly.”47

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Willard was even more insistent that Florence adopt a healthy regime. By the early 1900s he had begun to worry she had inherited his “nervousness” and weak stomach. Fortunately, girls as well as boys could now participate in strenuous exercise. “I don’t intend, if it can be helped, that Florence shall ever go to the bad physically,” he declared in April 1903, when his daughter was eleven. “She is under regular athletic training and I hope to keep her there right along. She is getting tough and muscular and is never ill any more. You know she used to go all to pieces occasionally and was always having stomach trouble and bad colds. All that seems to have ceased with her more regular life and exercise.” In December 1906, he reported success: “Florence . . . is exceptionally well. She sleeps out of doors under the sky—unless it rains—and then we have to fight with her to get her in. She trains a good deal in the gymnasium and leads a very regular life.”48 Nevertheless, Willard could not keep his own problems at bay. The only extant letter from 1905 reads thus: “We are all pretty well, except that I am ‘sort of’ going to pieces a bit from being crowded a little too hard with the work. Hope to get an easier spot soon.” In July 1906, he reported that he had struggled “with nervous dyspepsia all winter—in fact it was the worst siege I ever had with it.” He was more hopeful in December. Although he had suffered from a “bad cough” as well as indigestion throughout the fall, he recently had found a remedy: “Well, a few days ago it occurred to me to stop my morning cold bath—and presto! Almost instantly the cough ceased. Also my appetite has picked up again a little.”49 But his reprieve proved ephemeral. He became so ill in January 1907 that he remained in bed until the end of March. After he returned to work, his health continued “slowly disintegrating,” and by August he experienced pain, nausea, and chills after every meal, sometimes lasting many hours. He thus announced a new plan: he would to travel to San Francisco to consult a Dr. Fisher, a San Francisco “specialist” who had “attained some celebrity there for treating nervous dyspepsia.”50

Chapter 5

“The Old Trouble”

A Terrifying Diagnosis

Dr. Fisher gave Willard the news he most dreaded. As he wrote to his father on October 4, 1907, the doctor “says the old trouble has come back and has been working some time.”1 A new problem accompanied that “old trouble.” As Charles’s symptoms amplified, he discovered he had crossed the critical divide between “incipient” and “advanced” disease. Because one of his responsibilities as secretary of the Municipal League was to follow policies in other cities, he undoubtedly knew most public health authorities viewed sufferers of late tuberculosis with special disfavor. Hermann M. Biggs, the chief health officer of the New York City Department of Health and the object of enormous public attention, tried to reserve places at his municipal sanatorium at Otisville for people with “incipient” disease who could be “restor[ed] to permanent usefulness in the community.” As his biographer later explained, Biggs believed that there were individuals . . . whose lives were so worthless to the community that it would be an unpardonable waste of public funds to give them the benefit of sanatorium care.” Viewed as pariahs, these “hopeless third stage cases, chronic alcoholics, and the persistently incorrigible” were warehoused in large city hospitals.2 Early twentieth-century Los Angelenos, seeking to stem the tide of health seekers, similarly directed the greatest hostility toward those in the last stages of disease. One reason was that, as Biggs’s comment reminds us, people who were too sick to return to the workforce had no social value in a culture which enshrined the value of efficiency and productivity. In addition, the sickest 87

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consumptives displayed the most conspicuous symptoms. After surveying early twentieth-century policies toward tuberculosis patients throughout the Southwest, Ernest A. Sweet, a former assistant surgeon in the U.S. Public Health Service, wrote, “The far advanced consumptives . . . are objectionable, those who present no appearance of invalidism being in an entirely different category from those who exhibit every evidence of the ravages of the disease.” Although public health leaders targeted their comments primarily toward the poor, Willard increasingly had reason to suspect that their attitudes easily extended to him.3 The progress of his illness also made his efforts to assert control both more urgent and less effective. His drive to recover not only sustained hope but also helped to distinguish him from undesirable social groups. Unlike the tramps and Mexicans disparaged as helpless and passive in the face of disease, Charles tried to impose his will on his body. And he could differentiate himself from the nineteenth-century consumptive in the popular imagination. According to Susan Sontag, tuberculosis had been considered “the disease of born victims, of sensitive, passive people who [were] not quite life-loving enough to survive.” Charles, by contrast, always had valued people who fought, even against overwhelming odds. During the Spanish American War, he had described fighting as an emblem of civilization. But as his personal struggle became increasingly desperate, he would have to grapple with the sting of recurrent defeats.4 Willard’s “old trouble” had a new name. For the first time, he called his malady “tuberculosis” in a family letter. With its clear link to the tubercle bacillus identified by Koch in 1882, that term gradually replaced the word “consumption” during the early twentieth century. Some scholars argue that the name change signaled the enormous transformation which the germ theory wrought in the history of the disease. As Sheila M. Rothman writes, “tuberculosis brought with it a nearly total reordering of the relationship between the sick, their doctors, and their communities.” We already have recorded some of the consequences of that “reordering.” As a result of public warnings about contagion, victims of the disease increasingly were viewed as menaces, and the job of family members expanded to include the careful disposal of the sputum. Fears about germs also contributed to the virulent hostility directed toward people in the late stages of the disease; their sputum was assumed to be especially dangerous.5 Nevertheless, the new bacteriological knowledge can only partially explain the changes in the social meaning and medical treatment of tuberculosis. We have seen that poor people with tuberculosis were feared not only as

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menaces but also as economic burdens, that some of the stigma surrounding the disease stemmed from its new association with subordinate social groups, and that the germ theory did not easily or entirely eclipse the belief that tuberculosis was a hereditary disease. It also is unclear what Willard’s use of the label “tuberculosis” signified. For several years he continued to refer to himself as a consumptive as well as tubercular. And, although the discovery of the causative agent profoundly affected his illness experience, both he and his doctors continued to cling to many aspects of an older medical framework. Like other physicians, Fisher remained reliant on remedies that had been current long before Koch’s announcement. Willard informed his father that he and May would heed Fisher’s orders by embarking on a six-week trip to Honolulu. A sea voyage had been a standard nineteenth-century recommendation for consumption. To build resistance, Fisher suggested diet, fresh air, and exercise, all of which popular health reformers had advocated since the 1830s.6 Willard’s response to Fisher’s pronouncement also followed familiar patterns. With his characteristic secretiveness, Charles avoided disclosing his diagnosis to many intimates. “I haven’t told May yet all of it because she feels badly enough as it is,” he wrote. “She thinks it is nothing but stomach trouble, and so do most of my friends.” And, as usual, he tried to soften the impact of the news on his father by presenting it in a measured and detached manner, revealing no fear, and promising to recover: You may think it strange but I don’t feel in the least disturbed about [the diagnosis]. If I never had had tuberculosis I would be badly frightened, but I have been through so much and pulled out again that one more round doesn’t scare me. Besides I am going to be a good boy and do just what this doctor tells me to do—first of which is to stop work for a time. . . . Now I haven’t a bit of doubt that when I am able to shift off this load and forget things, I shall begin to digest my food again. Then my flesh will come back and my strength which has been a little impaired but not much. Then by sleeping out of doors, careful and copious eating and by working more moderately in the future I have no doubt whatever I can hold my own for many years to come.

E. Anthrony Rotundo writes that “a language of hope and determination . . . shaped the private thoughts of middle-class men.” Although Rotundo was referring to attitudes toward professional setbacks, Willard used that discourse to explain his stance toward his recent relapse. Despite the return of his disease, he still believed he could determine the outcome. Prior success bolstered

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his confidence. Because he had prevailed in the past, he expected to be able to do so again.7 Charles could not, however, evade the issue of mortality entirely. If he “should go under,” May and Florence would be able to rely on the income from his recent real estate investments. “I don’t like to talk of these things to you,” he noted, “but I guess I had better—all things considered.” A Unitarian minister, Samuel might have appreciated some reassurance that Willard was spiritually preparing for death. One historian notes that in nineteenth-century Britain, tuberculosis was “idealized . . . as a blessing in disguise which allowed time and mental clarity for spiritual reflection and improvement.” But Willard had renounced his father’s faith. Although he acknowledged the need to make practical arrangements, he apparently had no desire to take advantage of his long period of infirmity to purify his soul.8 A letter two months later brought more bad news. “Sorry to say,” he wrote, “the Honolulu trip—for all its costs and trials and nuisances, was not a success.” He “grew worse instead of better.” He explained, “[My cough] increased alarmingly and its character changed from the hard dry clean cough to which I have been accustomed for years and which doesn’t worry me . . . to something very different, which disturbed May so much that she got into a bit of a panic— and we ‘up and bolted.’ ” A moist, expectorating cough was one of the most dreaded signs of tuberculosis, and May might have become alarmed even if Charles still declined to reveal his diagnosis. What we cannot know is how Charles felt about her precipitate action. Although he occasionally complained about her dictates, he also appears to have complied with them willingly, perhaps because they relieved him of the need to make decisions or appear unduly cautious.9 Willard later confessed that the failure of the voyage left him “pretty cross”: “It was some time before I got back my equanimity.” That must have been a considerable understatement. Now he had to confront his terrible diagnosis without a simple remedy to pursue. He and May went first to Santa Barbara, where they awaited the completion of a new house in Pasadena. Although he preferred to be in his own home, he was able to reconcile himself to the plans. “After all,” he noted, “it isn’t a matter of climate as it is food, comfort, good air, and that sort of thing.”10 Charles was not alone in expressing reservations about the benefits of the climate he previously had touted. The early 1900s witnessed the decline of the climate theory, which had kept many consumptives on the move during the preceding century and gave a scientific gloss to LA boosterism. In 1880, Lawrence F. Flick had left Philadelphia to “chase the cure,” first in Colorado

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and then in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, El Paso, Tucson, and finally Los Angeles, where he found work on an orange ranch. Between 1889 and 1891, he had belonged to the American Climatological Association. But by the turn of the century he had changed his mind. Now a prominent tuberculosis specialist, he placed his faith in sanatorium care. In 1906, when a mother asked whether her son should leave such a facility to travel to Denver, the doctor responded that the boy could “live just as well” in Pennsylvania as in the Southwest.11 As 1908 approached, Willard began to worry about returning to work with his health so uncertain. His two employers, the Municipal League and the Jobbers Association, had granted him three-month leaves, but those were due to expire on January 1. During the little time remaining, he had “vague aspirations as toward a gain of flesh,” although he acknowledged that any weight increase “of course [was] improbable.” Thinness had plagued him for many years, but his persistent, severe indigestion must have lowered his weight still further. Another goal was “to get this coughing down to a point where it won’t be annoying.”12 “Annoying” to whom? We will see that Willard’s cough soon began to constrict his life, but here he may have been more concerned about its impact on others. Los Angelenos displayed little tolerance for the sounds of tuberculosis. In 1909 Pasadena residents would urge the county board of supervisors to abolish a health camp for indigent patients, arguing, among other complaints, that “the coughing of the patients is constant night and day, and while we have every sympathy with the victims of the disease we do not think it fair or right to be compelled to hear their distressing coughing day and night continuously.” Grumblings about the noises emanating from the health camp must have begun long before the petition was sent. With his acute sensitivity to the opinions of others, Willard may have feared that his cough would not only irritate his work colleagues but also identify him as a member of a group widely regarded as repugnant.13 “The Worst of All Our Married Life”

The two blows which fell early in 1908 accentuated Willard’s sense that his life was out of control. His letter to his father on February 13 began, “I write particularly to let you know of the untimely death of Horace Wing, the son of your own friend—our family physician and very dear friend.” Wing had suffered “for some time with the grippe” which had “changed suddenly to pneumonia,” and he had died the previous day. Charles described himself as “profoundly depressed.” Although he and Wing were no longer as close as they had been during Willard’s early months in Los Angeles, they had continued to see each

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other regularly, and Willard would miss “one of the most lovable characters [he] ever knew.” The death of any friend is an intimation of mortality, and in this case the two men had shared at least two significant traits. Wing, too, had contended with both “dyspepsia of a severe order” and weak nerves; he “had a tendency to melancholia which took the form of pessimism—a pessimism which he concealed from the world generally but showed to an appalling degree to a few people.” Given Willard’s anxiety about how his family could manage in the event of his death, he may have felt furtive envy at Wing’s financial success. His practice had been “lucrative,” and his property, which included both an orange grove and two buildings, would provide an annual income between $5,000 and $10,000.14 Charles considered the second assault even more devastating. “We have been passing through a terrible experience the last ten days,” he wrote on March 27. It was, he emphasized, “the worst of all our married life.” The story he recounted had many elements of a melodrama—duplicity, insanity, and suicide. The villain was Henry H. Dwight, the architect who had designed the Willards’ new home in Pasadena. He and his wife had arrived from the East Coast two years before, bringing “letters to all sorts of nice people from nice Boston people.” Sharing the name “Dwight,” Charles and Henry soon discovered that they were distant relatives. Although “the cousinship was treated partly as a joke, it was also held in earnest.” Charles helped Henry “get started in the profession, giving him his first job and introducing him to other people for whom he built.” He was “apparently an elegant fellow—charming high bred clever—a delightful entertainer.” The Dwights soon “had their own circle of friends of the best people here,” and the Willards “figured as their nearest friends.”15 Willard’s confidence did not wane in the fall of 1907, when the cost of the house greatly exceeded the amount of Dwight’s estimate. Rumors of financial irregularity were more disquieting, and Willard quietly investigated. A Boston agency, however, reported that Dwight had, in Charles’s words, “the finest kind of a standing—as an architect and as a man.” Before departing for Honolulu, Willard established a trust fund for the remaining work on the house; the signatures of both his secretary and Dwight were required for an expenditure. Then, on Christmas Eve, Willard learned that Dwight had forged the secretary’s signature and embezzled the funds. “It seems the man is a degenerate with a gambling mania,” Willard later wrote. “This slumbers on for years at a time and then suddenly breaks out. Back in Boston he got away with his wife’s and sister in law’s fortune of over $10,000 and his own sister’s fortune. He committed all kinds of crimes but was finally adjudged insane and was for several years

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in charge of the courts. Strange, is it not that nothing of his terrible past leaked through or was ever suspected here. And all the time they were entertaining the most charming and elegant people from Boston here who were equally ignorant of all this.” In February the Willards moved into their new house, across the street from the Dwights. The following month Henry Dwight began to exhibit signs of insanity. His wife killed herself by drinking poison on March 17. He committed suicide ten days later.16 The Willards’ financial losses were substantial. The house they had expected to build for $6,500 had cost $9,500 instead; the embezzlement added another $1,000. Because the poor state of the Los Angeles economy made it impossible to borrow money, Charles and May were forced to make “some serious sacrifices,” including withdrawing Florence from private school.17 The double suicide in a house three hundred yards away was even more traumatic. Charles noted, however, that he felt “great relief” because he now was free to disclose the source of his financial problems: “Carrying this thing round as a secret and fighting for money without being able to explain why I needed it was the hardest part of all. I had to go to the banks and pretend that I had misfigured on the cost of the house and meekly take the scolding.” Although he gave no indication that he questioned his ability to identify the “best people,” he may have been acknowledging the corrosive effects of keeping other kinds of secrets as well. The treachery also probably cut so deeply partly because it resembled his body’s betrayal. Ruminating over the events in a letter to his sister May, Willard used language he previously had reserved for his disease; he had fallen “into the hands of a fiend of extraordinary cunning.” Perhaps the episode intensified his fear that he was at the mercy of a malign force that arose periodically to threaten to destroy his life.18 There were some consolations. The house Dwight had designed was “beautiful.” Florence was “plucky” about changing schools. And although May “collapsed twice,” Charles “remained surprisingly well through it all.” “Sleeping out of doors and eating raw eggs and lots of milk have saved me,” he proclaimed on April 2.19 “A Whirlwind”

He spoke too soon. Three weeks later the Express reported that Willard had suffered more hemorrhages and was “still close to death” at his Pasadena home. On May 29, he was finally “able to sit up a bit and write a short letter.” He informed Sarah that he was “really ill only two days,” but for the first time noted that progress would be slow and hard. It would “take at least six weeks to recover from the wreckage of that brief time.” The illness “tore through

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[him] like a whirlwind. Takes quite a while to build a little town that a cyclone destroys in 10 seconds.” Although a storm is a common metaphor for illness, that term may have had special meaning for a man who previously had made his living by extolling his city’s stable and balmy weather. In Los Angeles, a storm was a freak of nature, not an expected, if unpleasant, occurrence.20 “By the way,” Willard’s letter to Sarah continued, “you speak of offering to come out and help to take care of me. Don’t suppose you consider it seriously but if so—don’t. Very kind but impracticable. Under our present ménage no place to take care of you as the only room is taken indefinitely and there is no place for any one to stay within two miles of here.” Two days later, however, he wrote to his sister May: “Yesterday a very wealthy man asked May [Willard’s wife] if she would not allow him to pay for a nurse from this on to the end of my illness—he found we hadn’t one, and thought it was from motive of economy. But really we don’t need a nurse. It is too much of a strain—for one as well as I am—and May won’t listen to it. There is a sort of a missing link in the scheme but a nurse would not supply it. I think you would and often wish you were here—but I suppose by the time you get here I shall be back at my desk.”21 How can we explain this suggestion to May, coming so soon after the rejection of Sarah’s offer? May and Charles had been particularly close when they were young. Charles also may have believed he could draw special comfort from May because she reminded him of their mother. In April 1888, he had commented that they were the only family members who could “shine in society.” The following month he noted May had inherited Harriet’s “pluck.” He and May also seem to have enjoyed special relationships with their mother. In October 1888, he reminded Harriet that they “were always wont to be your best standbys.” And he had long felt freer about acknowledging vulnerability to May; after describing the collapse of his newspaper in 1888, Charles had told his father that he could show the letter to May but not to Sarah.22 But perhaps the answer lies even more in the different life situations of the two sisters. Sarah had her own health problems, several children, and serious money worries. May was the only daughter who remained unmarried. Although she supported herself by teaching school, she had the summer off. She also was the designated family caregiver. She had been largely responsible for tending their mother during her long illness and now lived with their father, who suffered from assorted physical difficulties. Despite the obliqueness of Charles’s invitation, she appears to have responded by immediately trying to find an alternative place for Samuel to live during the summer months. Charles waited anxiously as various arrangements unraveled. “Perhaps I am inclined

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to look on the dark side of things from having so much hard luck,” he wrote, “but I have witnessed before your efforts to cut loose and get away.”23 Once May’s plans were set, a new worry arose. Charles hoped that by the time she arrived, he would “no longer be a disgusting sick man but a decent— almost interesting—convalescent.” Every encounter now engendered discomfort. May had not seen him since his last trip to Chicago in 1897, when his weight had been much higher and other disease symptoms absent. Even when not hemorrhaging, he appears to have coughed and vomited frequently and may have soiled himself, his bed, and even the room around him. His breath probably emitted a foul odor. I previously suggested that Willard projected some of his repugnance about his own flawed body onto tramps and Mexicans. But after his latest setback, it was more difficult to separate himself from those “disgusting” others. Perhaps he also hoped that his self-deprecating comment would forestall May’s negative reaction. His warning may not have been enough. Shortly before her death from consumption in 1844, Deborah Vinal Fiske sent her father a detailed description of her altered appearance. When he arrived for a visit, however, her “thin face and tottering steps” so upset him that she realized he had received a “false impression.”24 Despite his initial unease, May’s visit signaled renewed closeness between Charles and his Chicago family. Until his death in 1914, he frequently would pen long letters, replacing the brief notes he had sent at long and irregular intervals since the early 1890s. Virtually all contained detailed medical reports. In 1912, he would note that there were “six points” he always “considered in the health statement”: pulse, appetite, digestion, coughing, strength, and breathing. The list also might have included weight, nerves, sleep, headaches, and hemorrhages. And each symptom could be divided into various components. When writing about his morning coughing, for example, he specified its length and intensity as well as the nature and volume of the discharge. Accounts of his strength noted the hour at which he got out of bed and the length of his walk. Such precision was hardly new. We have seen that he frequently filled his letters with minute details about various aspects of his life. When his mother’s or sisters’ missives were too vague for his taste, he demanded more specific information.25 If precision was Willard’s customary practice, however, it also may have served a specific purpose here. As long as he remained focused on details, he could deny his anxieties about death and the existential issues they raised. And he typically could find at least one cause for hope. We saw that during periods of relative good health in the late 1880s and early 1890s, he had kept his mother off balance by constantly reminding her of disturbing symptoms.

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Now he tried to reassure his father and siblings—and simultaneously, perhaps, convince himself—that he had some grounds for optimism despite the relentless progress of his disease.26 Charles’s letters did not consist solely of medical reports. He also reminisced about his early years with his father and sisters, dispensed advice about his siblings’ work lives, children, and health, chronicled his professional activities, and described Florence’s development. Through such means, he may have sought to reaffirm his past and reconstruct the sense of self his disease had shattered. But while correspondence with his family in Chicago helped to sustain Charles, his wife and daughter in Los Angeles were his first line of defense. “I am very well taken care of,” he wrote at the end of May. His wife was “a splendid nurse and so [was] Florence.” The Willards typically tried to protect Florence from her father’s illness, sending her away as often as possible and encouraging her to remain engaged in normal pursuits when she was at home. During the relapse in the spring of 1908, however, she had been pressed into service. Charles recognized that May shared the restrictions imposed by his illness: “It’s a monotonous life we lead, poor May and I.” He doubted he deserved the devoted care she bestowed: “She is so good to me these days, it makes me feel guilty.” And he worried about the cost to her health; whenever she managed to rest and eat properly, he expressed relief.27 Charles also had professional assistance. Mrs. Delive, a “nurse who makes a specialty of tuberculosis cases,” had tended him in April and May. After the first nursing schools opened in 1873, private nurses became available. Beginning in 1905, many were trained specifically to care for tuberculosis patients. Willard boasted that Mrs. Delive was “one of the best trained nurses [he] ever saw or heard of.” She had been one of the best students at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York and had accumulated “long experience” since then. On June 21, he would write that he was “driven to a trained nurse again.” That time she would remain four months.28 Willard also frequently noted the presence of physicians. Two of the five doctors who had recommended in 1885 that he travel to Los Angeles now lived there themselves. Horace Wing’s brother Elbert had begun to assume responsibility for some of Horace’s practice even before his death in 1908. Born in Collinsville, Illinois, in 1852, Elbert Wing had attended the Chicago Medical School, pursued postgraduate education in Berlin, and interned at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. In addition to his private practice in Chicago, he had served as a professor of nervous and mental diseases at Northwestern University Medical School.29

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Willard’s other primary physician was Norman Bridge, the only doctor who had offered any hope to Charles in the fall of 1885. In his memoir Bridge noted that a few years after encouraging Willard to travel to Southern California to seek a cure of his lungs, he “had been compelled to take [his] own medicine.” Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1891, he moved to Los Angeles on his “own journey of banishment.” There he soon amassed a fortune from oil investments and became a major philanthropist. An active participant in public health efforts to control tuberculosis, he spoke frequently about the need to counteract the stigma surrounding the disease.30 During emergencies, Willard consulted Joseph Dayton Condit, a physician in private practice in Pasadena. Born in Indiana in 1877, he received his medical degree at the College of Physicians in New York in 1901 and arrived in Los Angeles the following year.31 In June 1908, Willard noted that he was debating sending for “some Los Angeles specialist to get a new line on the situation.” Walter Jarvis Barlow was yet another physician who came to Southern California to recover from consumption. Born in 1868 in Ossining, New York, he attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and interned at Mt. Sinai Hospital. Shortly after opening his medical practice, he received a tuberculosis diagnosis. He traveled first to Denver and then to San Diego before arriving in Los Angeles in 1897. As he gradually recovered, he began to treat others with his disease. In 1902 he founded the Barlow Sanatorium for the “indigent tuberculous of Los Angeles County” and two years later established the Southern California Sanatorium for Nervous Disease, serving a more affluent clientele. In addition, he was first professor and then dean at the University of California School of Medicine between 1908 and 1914.32 Some historians argue that the shift in authority relations between physicians and patients was one of the most dramatic changes occurring in the world of tuberculosis at the turn of the twentieth century. By capitalizing on such recent breakthroughs as the isolation of the causative agent of tuberculosis, doctors were able to transform themselves into a powerful and privileged profession and wield greater authority over patients. Growing numbers of tuberculosis physicians began to follow Dettweiler, a German doctor whose ideas were introduced to Americans by Paul Kretzchmar. “The smallest details of the patient’s life,” Kretzchmar wrote, should be “controlled by the supervising physician and nothing of any importance . . . left to his or her judgment.”33 Family members writing to Dr. Lawrence F. Flick presented themselves as following his treatment plan punctiliously and plied him with questions about

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the minutiae of his instructions. Flick’s detailed responses implied that nothing could be left to the discretion of patients or their caregivers. The rare challenge to his authority met hostility.34 With their degrees from well-known institutions and, in at least some cases, years of postgraduate study in Europe and appointments at established medical schools, Willard’s doctors, too, enjoyed the stature that might have led them to demand obedience from patients. But two doctors were also friends. Willard had known Elbert Wing, along with his brother Horace, while growing up. When Elbert moved to Los Angeles in 1902, he chose a house close to the Willards on Terminal Island. Political interests may have deepened the bond between the two men. Elbert Wing was a member of the Executive Committee of the Municipal League in 1910 and the author of a 1912 article in the progressive California Outlook.35 Perhaps because Norman Bridge was considerably older than Willard and one of the wealthiest men in Los Angeles, Willard’s relationship with him remained more formal. Willard never referred to him by his first name; after Charles and May dined at the Bridges’ home, Willard wrote that they had been “very very kind to us.” Nevertheless, even Bridge failed to remain the kind of distant authority who might have expected to demand deference.36 Willard’s response to the various medications and treatments doctors recommended helps to indicate the extent to which he considered himself subject to medical control. The goal of those remedies was to alter symptoms, which Willard could readily observe on his own. He thus made his own decisions about which therapies were effective enough to continue and which were either futile or harmful. He noted that the inhaler prescribed by Barlow helped to reduce the cough and that the “inhaling mixture (benzoic acid, turpentine eucalyptol in steaming water)” from Condit produced “miraculous effects.” When Willard took the codeine Bridge and Wing recommended, he could “sleep well” and his cough improved slightly, although he was wary of depending heavily on opiates. But he abandoned the massages Bridge advised, writing, “At the end of 11 weeks of trial I made up my mind that [the treatment] was not doing me any good.” When Barlow changed his medicine from strychnine to digitalis, Willard commented, “I can’t say that my breathing is any better.” And he believed that the calomel one doctor advised was responsible for “three bad days.”37 A devotee of popular health remedies, Willard continued to welcome advice from lay as well as medical sources. He took cod liver oil on Sarah’s recommendation. When his father sent a box of “yougurt” pills to curb the dyspepsia, Willard “went right to work on it.” The following year he reported

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that the pills had helped to keep his digestion “in order.” We can assume that May and Charles also accepted some of the advice they undoubtedly received from the many friends and colleagues who regularly stopped by the house to visit.38 When doctors spoke about the need for regulation and control, however, they meant much more than the selection of medications. Fresh air, rest, moderate exercise, and proper diet constituted the core of the tuberculosis therapy, and patients were expected to adhere to an extremely rigid schedule throughout the day. Because poor people were believed to be especially unlikely to comply with the advice, public health efforts focused on them; visiting nurses preached the importance of personal reform while providing instruction about hygiene, ventilation, and nutrition. Even affluent patients, however, were assumed to lack the self-discipline, fortitude, and stamina required to follow medical dictates. The central mission of private-duty nurses was thus to monitor behavior, not cater to patient wishes. One advocate of nursing wrote, “A trained nurse armed with all the knowledge and ability that modern science can give her . . . [affords the family] the relief of having a person with recognized authority take command over a willful patient.”39 Private-duty nurses repeatedly complained about overly affectionate family members who undermined the therapeutic regime. One nurse working under Flick’s supervision wrote, “[The patient’s wife] has annoyed me greatly for the last month because there is no sick room rule here. . . . You have supported me in saying Mr. M. must have rest and quiet. But frequently Mrs. M. insists on my leaving the room ‘as she knows very well how to care for him.’” The nurse stressed her “duty” to “not yield to the authority of a patient’s relatives or their kindness.” In another case, a mother was faulted for undermining professional authority. In a letter reprimanding the father, Flick asserted that the boy must “not be permitted to judge what is best for him either in the way of exercise, diet, or medical treatment” and that “these things must not be under the control or subject to the wishes of those who are tied to him closely by bonds of relationship.”40 But ties of friendship soon bound Mrs. Delive to both Charles and May. Although Willard initially introduced the nurse by emphasizing her training and professionalism, he later described her as an attractive widow with many beaus. He also worried that the demands of care overwhelmed her. “May took Mrs. Delive’s place,” he wrote in August 1908. “I had worn her out—I guess— and given her a headache.” She, in turn, “visited” the Willards on many days for which she was not paid. “No one could be more faithful and devoted,” Charles wrote at the end of October.41

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Moreover, Willard hardly needed an external agent directing his life. He desperately wanted to believe in the recommended measures, and they must have seemed sensible because they so closely resembled the regime he had followed throughout the 1890s. Then, too, he had tried to exercise, eat special food, and find enough time to rest. And he was accustomed to expending enormous energy in pursuit of a goal. Shortly after becoming head of the Express, he had written, “I am in the great big struggle of my life.” He approached his illness the same way. The word “struggle” appeared seven times in his letter of July 18, 1908. The suppression of the cough, he wrote, “involves as hard a struggle as I ever went through in my life.” In a 1903 book on tuberculosis, Bridge had stressed the need to “repress” the cough, arguing that “this can be done to a large extent by the will by the patient.” Willard explained what such work involved: I still have to sit on [the cough] for several hours out of each day. . . . I have to drop whatever I am doing—reading or card playing or talking— and stare rigidly at some spot on the wall and say “don’t cough” and at intervals swallow hard, and if it starts, catch it quick and smother it. Things inside rattle and gurgle and stuff works up the windpipe almost strangling me and at last I clear my throat and out it comes. . . . Coughing is a thousand times easier, but once started it lasts indefinitely and makes things worse. I coughed horribly for nine weeks, strangling and tearing myself to pieces with no improvement. Under this regime the volume of “bad stuff” has steadily diminished until now it is not onefifth of what it was when I quit coughing—and I can use what strength I have to help me get well instead of wasting it. But the daily struggle is still an intense one. The only times I fall down is when I wake out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night in the midst of a violent fit of coughing. But I will not take opiates even then.

As this passage suggests, Willard’s efforts gave him at least some sense of mastery. In the same letter he noted, “I manage to get up and dress each day—about 10 o’clock and get down stairs and I sit up in chairs at last half the day.”42 Willard’s excruciating regime and occasional victories, however, could not mask his overall failure. Throughout the summer and fall of 1908 he poured out his rage and frustration in his letters. “Some days I get out of bed and sit in an easy chair an hour,” he wrote to his sister May on June 12, “but quite as often it is bed all day long. I am half through the eighth week and it is perfectly easy to believe that it may last four to six weeks longer. It makes me wild to think that.” After May’s visit, Charles wrote, “I celebrated your departure by

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being extra ill all day yesterday. I managed to get up and dress and stand up until lunch time, but could not eat a mouthful and as I hadn’t eaten any breakfast I went to pieces—and back to bed. At three o’clock I felt enough better to get up a second time but in the evening went all to pieces again. That’s the worst record I have made for six weeks.” The “old stomach problem” returned, forcing him to question cherished beliefs: “I have always been told that it is the immediate consequence of head work. As I am not doing any head work, but have been resting completely for over four months, what is it doing now—eh?” Any improvement took much longer than anticipated. He wrote to Sarah on August 26, “I keep making gains—although it is so miserably slow I scarcely recognize myself,” and again on September 5, “I continue to improve, after the preposterously slow fashion that is allowed me.” On September 14, he complained, “Elbert declares I am doing as well and better than he expected so I ought not to kick—but it is all so slow—so mortal slow, it seems sometimes as though I could not bear it.” And on October 23, 1908, he wrote, “There are about 1,000 little things waiting for me to do about the house and grounds, most of them requiring only a trifle of strength—and I haven’t the strength. It is maddening! . . . Nothing to do but grin and bear it and swear.”43 Then, at the end of October, Wing recommended another consultation with Barlow. “The past three weeks have been the bluest and most discouraging for me since early July for it has been a stand-still time,” Charles wrote. “Dr. Barlow thinks that I was a case of overdoing—what with the daily massage and the lengthening walks and my efforts to do things for myself.” Barlow’s comment relieved one source of Willard’s anxiety: Elbert . . . like Bridge keeps harping on the nervous phase of the situation. Barlow doesn’t. He says the lungs and heart show by the stethoscope ample reason for all my trouble. He doesn’t dwell on the psychological side of the thing, except to beg me not to be in such a hurry—and that only because I am tempted to do actual physical things that are dangerous to me. Of course Elbert is a nerve specialist and . . . he naturally sees that part of the difficulty very large. Indeed he has embarrassed me a great deal by things he has said to my friends. I am afraid some of them think I am deficient in will force and have just “settled down to being sick” etc. God knows I would go though tortures to get well, and I am afraid my very eagerness has caused this last, and perhaps my other setbacks.

Willard probably had needed little persuasion to accept Wing’s interpretation. We have repeatedly seen Charles cling to a diagnosis of neurasthenia not only

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because that disease was neither communicable nor fatal, but also because it helped to distinguish him from the subordinate social groups identified with tuberculosis. But after the turn of the twentieth century, neurasthenia, too, began to acquire negative connotations. Where previously it had served as an excuse for overworked men to take more rest, the disease increasingly was associated with an absence of moral fiber. Willard’s friends were thus justified in concluding that his nervous symptoms demonstrated that he lacked the will to get better. By declaring that his lungs and heart explained “all” his “trouble,” Barlow absolved him of culpability.44 But Barlow also rendered Willard’s efforts meaningless. “One does not despair if one can act,” writes Zygmunt Bauman, “and if one can hope that the actions will be rational. One can keep despair in abeyance as long as one acts: as long as one knows that not all has been lost, that ‘something can be done yet’ and as long as that ‘something’ which ‘can be done’ has not been done and hence one can trust it and believe in [it] with all one’s heart. Rational efforts go on draining the abysmal depths of irrationality. They will never reach the bottom, but at least one need never again think of the bottom unless the effort stops.” Medical historians emphasize the crisis polio patients experienced when forced to recognize that they would have to live with some degree of permanent impairment despite the rigid therapeutic regime to which they were subjected. Because Willard’s disease could result in death as well as disability, it is hardly surprising that his three weeks of “stand-still time,” followed by Barlow’s pronouncement, represented his “bluest and most discouraging” period.45 Charles’s lack of recovery also increased his similarity to the tuberculosis sufferers whom public health experts were most determined to bar from the metropolis. In 1906 a doctor had explained the importance of exclusionary measures: “No harm can come to California from the decent and orderly settling of consumptives within her borders, but no argument is needed to show that it is injurious to the State that there should swarm upon her soil from the East consumptives unable to provide themselves with the necessities of life or palpably stricken with death.” As Willard’s disease advanced, he became less and less like those “decent” consumptives. For one thing, he had growing difficulty providing himself with what he considered the “necessities of life.” In March, both the Municipal League and the Jobbers Association had given him six-month leaves at full pay (on top of the three months they had granted him the previous fall); in September both leaves were extended another three months. Thus, by the end of 1908, Charles had been away from his office twelve of the last fifteen months, and he had grave doubts about his ability to retain his post.46

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Simultaneously, his expenses had mounted. In July he had calculated that visits by various health providers had added another five hundred dollars to the sum he recently had lost on his house. Although he reduced Mrs. Delive to two days a week in October, he continued to summon doctors regularly. Moreover, Charles used the money saved from the nurse’s salary to purchase a horse and buggy. “This sounds like an extravagance, but it isn’t,” he commented to Sarah. “It is merely bankruptcy.” Still believing in the recuperative power of nature, he hoped that rides through the country around Pasadena would help to restore his health.47 And Willard was now “palpably stricken with death.” During the 1890s and early 1900s, his weight had fluctuated between 125 and 132; it plummeted to 110 after the hemorrhages of early 1908. Despite his best efforts, paroxysms of coughing frequently overwhelmed him. On January 1, 1909, Willard’s leaves expired, and he was forced to return to work. Three weeks later he wrote that he was “sorry” for his colleagues, “who have to look at a gasping, coughing skeleton.”48 “The Shadow of a Man”

He soon created a worse spectacle. In the middle of March 1909 he suddenly began to hemorrhage in his city office and lay on the floor, apparently close to death. “That was when we touched zero,” he recalled the following year. Although his letters do not reveal how he returned home, how his colleagues responded, or how soon he was able to get medical help, we do learn that he remained critically ill for several weeks. The nurse who was summoned later told him “that she measured the blood after one of [his] hemorrhages—the worst one—and it was three pints. Seems almost unbelievable. All together there were 16 hemorrhages of varying severity, four of them very bad. This was the first time I ever gave up hope.”49 Nevertheless, he soon wrote optimistically to Chicago. “Yes—I am lots better—in fact on the high road to recovery,” he declared on April 2. “A week ago today I began to walk about the upper story of the house and Tuesday I got down stairs to talk business over the telephone. Wednesday I took a short automobile ride. Yesterday I had both lunch and dinner down stairs and staid out of doors all day. . . . We had a series of cloudy and rainy days—up to Tuesday of this week. I suffered a good deal of suffocation, but with the change in the weather . . . my cough has diminished and I feel strong and full of hope and courage.” He also expressed renewed confidence in his ability to triumph over his body. His cough was as severe as before, but he refused to “yield to it.” He had “the thing reduced [to] a system” and “could write a monograph on ‘How

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to hold down a cough.’” His “strong heart” and “powerful will” helped to compensate for his “broken lungs,” “erratic alimentary canal,” and “weak nerves.” Early in May he was walking longer distances every day and “taking exercises, with the arms and body”; as a result, his “soft and flabby” muscles were “gradually hardening.” He was also “getting back some of the lost flesh,” although the doctor doubted Willard would “ever be anything else than very lean.”50 “Pride goeth before a fall,” he wrote on May 22. His last letter had “boasted . . . quite recklessly” of having walked a mile, but the following day he “could with difficulty do a half mile” and the next one “none at all.” Because Elbert Wing had recently left for Europe, Willard now relied solely on Norman Bridge. “That is,” Willard explained, “he will come to see me occasionally. There is not much a doctor can do.” Today it is commonplace to note that most of the activities and food recommended during the early twentieth century were totally ineffective and that a few, such as the consumption of large quantities of eggs and milk and the ingestion of various tonics, probably harmed some patients. We have seen that although Willard tried the various medications his doctors suggested, he judged many of them worthless. Nevertheless, we probably should read his comment more as a measure of his despair than as a reflection of his insight into the limits of medical science.51 In a letter mailed in late spring, Willard reported that he had resigned his position as secretary of the Municipal League: “You see, it became quite impossible for the League to wait any longer—indefinitely—for my recovery and they have elected a young man in my place.” But Willard did not have to confront unemployment: “Just at that time a friend of mine bought a paper that he wanted me to edit and I agreed—after a month or two of dickering, to allow my name to be attached as ‘editorial contributor.’” His friend was printer Alvin M. Dunn, and the paper the Pacific Outlook, a weekly magazine. Municipal Affairs, the organ of the Municipal League, was condensed into a one-page insert in the Outlook; in addition to preparing that page, Willard was responsible for writing several short editorials and one long article, typically totaling between five thousand and seven thousand words. (In February 1911, the magazine merged with the California Weekly to become the California Outlook, which soon became the leading Progressive journal in the state.)52 Willard noted “the advantage” of his new position: “[I have] work I can do—instead of work that I can’t do.” But familiar conflicts soon arose between employment and illness. We will see that new setbacks periodically would hamper his ability to complete his assignments. And as soon as the job began, he worried about its impact on his health. In June he wrote, “The doctors all say I must not force myself to take exercise. Also, they say writing is physical

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exercise!” Nevertheless, Willard was far more fortunate than most people with tuberculosis. Turn-of-the-century charity workers and public health officials frequently advised manual laborers with early stages of the disease or “arrested” conditions to find “light jobs.” Such employment, however, frequently was unavailable. The less strenuous jobs that existed, such as night watchman, rarely paid a living wage, and few blue-collar workers who were as sick as Willard could hold any job. Willard never had been forced to engage in taxing physical labor. He had friends who could craft a job with flexible hours he could do at home. And his income remained constant. Although the Outlook could not afford to pay him as much as he previously had earned, he continued to work part-time for the Jobbers Association and to receive a small salary from his position as the league “statistician.”53 Willard’s editorial job had an even broader significance. Anthropologists frequently use the term “liminality” to describe the passage from one state to another. As Robert F. Murphy and his colleagues write, “people in a liminal condition are without clear status, for their old position has been expunged and they have not yet been given a new one. They are ‘betwixt and between,’ neither fish nor fowl; they are suspended in social space without firm identity or role definition.” Willard fit that template after his 1908 relapse. Although he had struggled to retain his identity as a healthy man, he gradually conceded that his diminished physical capacities had fundamentally changed him. With the exception of occasional forays into his office in town, he remained isolated at home, unable to find a socially appropriate role. Then, by defining himself as an editorial writer, he was able to reenter society. In June 1909, he wrote that he found “a great satisfaction” in having “a voice again to talk to the public.” It was “like coming to life again. Instantly I am put into the thick of things.” The sense of rebirth continued to exhilarate the following month: “Being only the shadow of a man, hopelessly out of it, and all but forgotten, it is like a reincarnation to find myself a factor in things—one to be reckoned with.”54 Willard’s position also enabled him to continue to align himself with a movement which was increasingly successful just as his efforts to conquer his disease had become increasingly ineffectual. Various recent events had boosted the fortunes of local Progressives. In 1906 three lawyers (Meyer Lissner, Marshall Stimson, and Russ Avery), along with Express reporter Edward A. Dickson, had formed the Non-Partisan Committee of One Hundred to push the political agenda of the Municipal League. Several months later their candidates won twenty-one of the twenty-three city offices. The Progressives then turned their attention to the mayoralty, occupied by George Harper, the candidate

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supported by both labor and the Southern Pacific. Charges of corruption against Harper helped the Progressives garner enough signatures to place his recall on the ballot for March 26, 1909. It was in the midst of the campaign for that election that Willard’s hemorrhages struck. As Lissner wrote a few days after Harper resigned, Willard “came into the Recall fight from a sick bed and had to quit before it was over.” By late spring, when Willard was able to reemerge from seclusion, the Progressives looked forward to capturing the entire city government in the December election.55 In addition, Willard’s job helped him manage his public presentation. Explaining the many benefits of his position, he wrote, “What I say—if I can say it decently—and my style is all right as far as local standards go—ought to carry weight and it does.” Here Willard referred primarily to the paucity of reputable editorial writers in Los Angeles and to “the confidence and personal intimacy” he now enjoyed of “practically all the people of standing in the town.” But the words “carry weight” probably had special meaning to a man who considered himself as insubstantial as “a shadow.” Perhaps he hoped his writing would serve the same purpose as his elegant clothes in the mid-1890s, covering his physical inadequacies.56 It would, of course, have been impossible for Willard still to pretend to be well. His recent hemorrhage occurred in a public setting. Previous crises had been reported in the local press. Friends and colleagues openly discussed his condition. The few who visited saw a frail, wasted man who coughed constantly, spoke in a whisper, and rarely left his bed. But if he no longer could hide his illness, he could try to deny the likelihood that it soon would prove fatal. The letter continued, “There are lots of people—I feel it and I know it— even among my dearest friends that have come to regard things that I do as uncertain and temporary. They haven’t much hope that I will recover. It takes time to overcome that.” One of Willard’s “dearest friends” was Meyer Lissner, a successful, young lawyer who increasingly was recognized as the local Progressive leader. Lissner’s recent letter to Clinton Rogers Woodruff, the secretary of the National Municipal League, lends substance to Willard’s fears about what his intimates were thinking. “You may be interested to know that our friend Willard has been very ill, almost giving up the ghost,” Lissner wrote. Willard was “recuperating again” and might “regain some of his strength,” but Lissner could “hardly see how he can last very much longer.” Nevertheless, Willard’s comment reveals more than his awareness of the gossip about him. Having helped to construct a society that denied the inevitability of serious illness and death, he had good reason to assume his terminal condition undermined his legitimacy.57

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As an editorial writer, Willard would seek to camouflage his transience in various ways. One, paradoxically, may have been by repeatedly employing disease metaphors. Just as he previously had characterized tramps as a “pestilence,” so now he referred to the “contamination” spreading from the white slave trade, described Roosevelt’s optimism as “catching,” and characterized Progressive reforms as “cures.” A Progressive electoral defeat produced “a sick, sad feeling.” Willard was not the only contemporary writer employing such language, but it may have served a particular purpose in his columns. Readers could hardly imagine that a man who wrote so impersonally and dispassionately about illness was in the last stage of one of the most fearsome afflictions of his time. His endorsement of public health measures may have further deflected attention from his physical condition. As a Progressive, it was natural for him to support efforts of reformers throughout the country to abolish public drinking cups, establish open-air schools, mandate the reporting of specific diseases, and hire public health nurses and sanitary inspectors. Nowhere, however, did he acknowledge that such measures could have anything to do with him.58 Although Willard’s racist attitudes were commonplace during the early twentieth century, they may have helped to differentiate him from the groups increasingly associated with tuberculosis. He told a joke about “a Baltimore clergyman of the colored variety” who discovered, “to his utter astonishment, that great numbers of white folks believed that the sun stood still while the earth turned on its axis.” In a departure from political topics, Willard wrote that ragtime music expressed “the wild and primitive sensualism” of the “African savage brought to America and tamed by several generations of slavery and a few years of semi-idle freedom.” The music had a rapid beat because “the darky, whose primitive instinct of rhythm is yearning and intense,” could not wait “a long time between thumps.” He also emphasized the “filthy personal habits” of many “foreigners,” requiring sanitary inspectors to “enforce cleanliness, even to the requirement of bathing and of clean underwear.” When condemning Georgia for failing to abolish child labor, he argued, “These are not the children of the black race but the white; and they are not of foreign birth nor of foreign ancestry, but descendants of the oldest and most truly American families in the nation.”59 In addition, Willard wrote in the persona of the forceful, determined, political commentator he had crafted as editor of the Express. Gone was the equivocation and contradiction that marked his private correspondence. In a 1911 letter to Theodore Roosevelt, Willard urged the ex-president to write “frankly, boldly, clearly, with no modifying words or phrases and with no

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accompanying doubts and exceptions that would leave people befogged.” His own editorials followed that model. Even when he recently had changed his mind about an issue, he expressed no ambivalence.60 Willard also held before his readers the possibility of an infinitely improving future. Despite the many “stand patters,” satisfied with the corrupt status quo, the Progressives would succeed in their goal of creating a more just and humane society. In passages that might have been written partly for himself, he urged his colleagues not to relinquish hope when they met disappointment. But he also insisted victory was inevitable: “When we consider what the progressive movement stands for—rule by the people, equal opportunity, prosperity on the broadest possible base, the overthrow of privilege, and human rights above property rights—it is perfectly clear that this movement must ultimately triumph.”61 “A Splendid Victory for Our Crowd”

Willard’s correspondence during the next several months alternately expressed joy about the Progressive victories he helped to produce and despair about the personal defeats he was powerless to prevent. “This work seems to have come to me at the good hour to take my thoughts off my own troubles which are fairly numerous,” he wrote on July 16. “I am not making the progress I had hoped for in my health—in point of fact it is hard for me to see that I am making any progress whatsoever—in the right direction.” After several months at home, he had tried to visit friends. The expedition had been “a ghastly kind of a failure,” reminding him “what a dreadfully sick man” he was. “Evidently it’s home or hospital for a time,” he concluded.62 Two weeks later he wrote to his sister May, “You say that you think of me sitting out in front of the house but I don’t anymore.” Too frail to endure even the softest breezes, he was restricted to a corner of the back porch, where he was less exposed. “Out of my experience,” he continued, I have evolved a theory as to the future probable treatment for tuberculosis, when the long-hoped for combination of medical science and good sense is effected. I sleep out of doors—and take cold. I set out in the air—and take cold. I bundle up—and get soft and take worse cold. I try to harden myself—and take the worst colds of all. The constant effect of the cold is coughing—formation of vast quantities of phlegm, great irritation of the bronchial tubes—more coughing and more irritation—then excessive nervousness, poor sleep, no appetite, bad digestion etc. etc., all of which means increasing the strength of the disease until ultimate death—and yet fresh air is a positive since qua non.

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What then? Well in this country we have demonstrated the fact that irrigation beats rainfall. . . . Science, not chance. Nature made us naked but we wear clothes. Why trust to capricious weather for consumptives? Make weather for them. Construct a huge sanitarium with double doors and windows that do not open. Pump in quantities of air, cool it or warm it to just the right temperature—wash it clean, extract moisture or put some in, whichever it needs to get results, sent into the rooms gently through perforations in floor and walls and draw it off through the ceilings to the roof.

Charles’s black humor revealed his bitterness. Disillusioned with the climate he previously had extolled, he now placed his hope in the certainty of science.63 If irrigation represented the triumph of man over “capricious” nature, however, Charles could not prevail against his own. By August 12, he was “gaining steadily” but only in “microscopic amounts.” He had recently “changed his tactics. No exercise, no attempts to gain strength. Just rest, sleeping and eating and avoidance of taking cold.” Although he had tried to “force” “six raw eggs every day,” he had “no appetite—only nausea.” His weight remained at 110 (35 pounds less than it had been in college). There was “nothing to do apparently but to wait.” Back from vacation at the end of October, Elbert Wing was able to issue only an equivocal assessment. He thought Willard had “gained,” but he was not “very enthusiastic.”64 The November primary, by contrast, resulted in “a splendid victory for our crowd.” Although the Times had predicted that people would not bother to vote, approximately 45 percent of the electorate turned out, far more than in any other primary. And “the outcome exceeded our fondest hopes.” The Progressive candidate for mayor, Supervisor George Alexander, won 40 percent of the total vote and was far ahead of his closest rival. It now seemed likely that the Progressives would win control of the entire council in the December election. “This is the culmination of a long fight,” Willard concluded. “It smashes a big hole in the Southern Pacific machine here and opens the way for a clean up all over the state.”65 He felt entitled to share in the glory because he had contributed to it. “Everybody says the Outlook helped a great deal,” he boasted. “All the leaders read it, and the precinct captains, and the main office men. Our corps of speakers use it—one of them a young Harvard man, eloquent, courageous, splendid, makes a point of quoting and speaking of it. I had an article a week ago [which] was the greatest hit of all.” Some reader responses also suggested that Willard had accomplished his other goal, to counter reports of his transience: “How

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many times men say to me—‘and when I got done reading it I says—the man that wrote that ain’t a going to die. He’ll get well, all right.’”66 But it was “pretty much the old story as to health.” His indigestion was “more or less acute about half the time.” And there seemed to be no connection between his actions and symptoms. The indigestion “flits in and out with no tangible cause. Like enough it is worst when I am doing no work and least troublesome when I am hard driven. Wing says that this very uncertainty indicates that nothing radical or dangerous is affecting me. He says it is largely nervous and that there is nothing to do but to wait and when it gets ready it will cure itself. Really I do feel a bit more encouraged at that idea.” Willard’s readiness to accept Wing’s assessment indicates how desperate he was for a cause for hope. Two specialists (Fisher and Barlow) had insisted that tuberculosis explained all his troubles, including the indigestion. Wing’s inconsistencies also might have alerted a more suspicious patient. Previously, Wing had claimed that the direct relation between overwork and stomach troubles demonstrated that nerves were the culprit; now he argued the opposite. Willard later noted that he had long worried that his symptoms indicated tuberculosis had invaded his digestive tract. Perhaps because such a development would have been extremely serious, he clung to Wing’s diagnosis and to the “bit” of encouragement it offered.67 Charles was still jubilant over the primary when he wrote a “Thanksgiving” letter to his father: “The machine crowd is disorganized and all split open. Their campaign is ‘soft’ and ‘feeble.’ We have raided their meetings, captured their people, pulled down their leaders, taken away their newspapers, riddled them, wrecked them, as I never saw it done in any campaign. We have forced them from one ludicrous flight to another, and have hammered them until they are stunned and groggy.” Relishing a good fight, he even regretted that one victory came too easily: “It takes some of the zest out of the game . . . that the oldtime machine boss for this city and the state, the man I have been fighting for fifteen years and have defeated in small things but never on anything as big as this—is dying of Bright’s disease. His bad services are over, but the fight between us has been so long and so persistent—on both sides—that I had hoped he would be in the field against us this time. We should have won just the same and have had more satisfaction in the fight.”68 But the forceful action of the Progressives could not alter his stasis. He, too, was a fallen combatant. “No improvement in my health, I am sorry to say,” he wrote. “Cough is decidedly worse, in fact, but that is chiefly due to taking a cold. I take every conceivable precaution against colds but it seems hopeless. Digestion has been better of late but I eat very little. A well man would eat as

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much in one meal as I do all through the day. I have no strength at all—am utterly exhausted in crossing the room.” He had managed to complete his editorial assignment by “utilizing every scrap of time” he was not coughing.69 The December 7 election represented “a swell triumph for US. My! But it was a thorough job—better than we ever dreamed. There were 23 officers to be elected (9 council, 7 [Board] of [Education] and 7 misc) and we simply cleaned up the whole thing. We are in full possession now at last of the entire city govt. A long fight at last won.” Unfortunately, hemorrhages had struck at the end of November, and Willard was still flat on his back when the results were announced. He wrote little about that crisis but later noted that he had lost another four pounds. May, too, must have been preoccupied on Election Day. Although a nurse had been summoned, the servant recently had quit. Charles urged Sarah to “imagine . . . how pleasant this episode had been for May— doing her own work. . . . It was ghastly some of the time.”70 There were small signs of recovery in January 1910. “Possibly anyone not familiar with the case would say it was a pretty slow convalescence,” but the past twenty months had taught Willard “the difference between standing still and making some progress.” He had an “appetite and good digestion more than 4/5 of the time,” and with every “good day,” he could feel his “strength grow a little.” “Best of it all” was the “demonstration,” according to Wing, that “the digestion and everything else” were “fundamentally all right.” If the “nerves” would not interfere, Willard could still “pull . . . out of the hole yet. Nothing is gone beyond repair.”71 Friends as well as physicians helped to deny what was happening: “Wing told me yesterday that the other day someone called to him on the street, and he stopped, and a friend of mine—a very old and dear friend named Burnham—came running up. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I honestly believe we are going to save Charlie Willard after all.’ Funny thing about that is that Burnham is such a pronounced optimist about everything but especially in his way of expressing himself about my troubles (to me and to May) that I never suspected before that he had any doubts about it.” (Robert W. Burnham was a member of the Municipal League executive committee.)72 Readers provided another kind of reassurance. The Outlook circulation had grown sixfold during the past nine months, and many subscribers sent “most gratifying” comments about Willard’s contributions. But he acknowledged that he tended to exaggerate any praise: “It’s the only thing on these days that connects me to life, so I make the most of it.”73 May appears to have intensified Charles’s isolation. Explaining why he could communicate with Lissner only in writing, Willard commented, “I had

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hoped to get into town today and was planning to call you up and talk . . . things over with you, but it is raining and Mrs. Willard simply won’t listen to my going.” As we saw when Charles discussed his abrupt departure from Hawaii, May had relieved Charles of at least some responsibility for monitoring his condition and deciding what actions were safe. But it also is possible that Charles used May’s dictates as yet another form of concealment. By blaming her for his confinement at home, he did not have to reveal his frailty and fears.74 Willard acknowledged that his infirmity circumscribed May’s life along with his. When friends unexpectedly arrived late one afternoon and convinced her to accompany them to a dinner party, he ruefully commented, “It’s about the first time May has been out of an evening, for a year.” Florence’s world, too, had narrowed: “My long illness has cut us out of things so that poor Florence has rather a sorry time of it. It isn’t the matter of gifts or money but of jolly times and the fresh young companionship that she needs. . . . She can’t go out evenings and . . . she can’t have her friends much.”75 Contagion was the overriding worry. Referring to germs for the first time in a spring letter, Willard wrote, “The fear that May or Florence may take the disease drives me wild sometimes. . . . Of course, I am very careful, and the product of the poison is said to be small.” During that period the “careless” tubercular was the focus of widespread health education campaigns. One poster distributed by the National Tuberculosis Association declared, “A Careless Consumptive Is Dangerous to His Family.” Willard assumed that it went almost without saying that he followed every precaution. Knowing that his sputum contained bacilli from his lungs, he undoubtedly coughed only into enclosed receptacles, washed his hands frequently, and refrained from kissing and sharing food with his wife and daughter. Nevertheless, he was well aware that even the most scrupulous patient could never be sure that loved ones would remain uninfected.76 Charles was especially worried about Florence. By the early 1900s, physicians began to call attention to the “pretubercular” child, whose symptoms included weight loss, pallor, and fatigue. In 1909, Alfred Hess, a New York City pediatrician, opened a “preventorium” for poorly nourished children who had been exposed to infection at home. The facility accommodated 150 children, between the ages of four and fourteen, who stayed an average of three months. Other reformers established open-air classes and camps for vulnerable youth.77 Florence might have been considered a likely candidate for such a program. The daughter who previously had reveled in the outdoors now spent far too much time on “study and book work.” Her afternoons were devoted to writ-

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ing plays and editing school newspapers. And she resembled her father in her relationship to food as well as in her chosen activities. “She is like me in that she hates to eat,” he complained. Although relieved that the “risk” of contagion would be “over” when she entered college the following year, he feared that her constitution and habits made her susceptible to nervous complaints.78 The words “strength” and “strong” appeared repeatedly in Charles’s letter of March 17, 1910. “The Progressive sentiment is very strong,” he wrote, “and we have good hopes of carrying the state.” The previous year Progressives had succeeded in changing the election law. By instituting direct primaries, the new act reduced the power of the Southern Pacific, which long had been able to manipulate the nomination process at party conventions. Willard described Hiram Warren Johnson, the favored Progressive candidate, as “a very strong man.” Willard hoped he would “be given strength to take a hand” in the upcoming election. If he had “enough strength” to pay “any attention” to the Outlook, he could “build it up to strength and influence.” But that seemed unlikely. Even the slightest amount of work quickly exhausted his trifling amount of reserve. He needed “15 lbs more of weight, a good appetite and the end of coughing.” In the meantime he had to remain “on the outside edges of the fight” and not “dare even to get very interested.”79 Comparison with other sufferers (as well as political events) helped Willard assess his condition. On a rare outing that spring, he rode a streetcar to town and had the encounter described in the opening paragraph of this book. We recall he saw a woman whose spine was “twisted” and whose head moved continually. Just as he said to himself “what a hideous affliction,” he realized she pitied the “poor consumptive” who could not stop coughing. Literary critic Rachel Adams writes of the “unpleasant stirrings of mutual recognition” which accompany “the exchange of gazes” between customers and performers in freak shows. Displaying a deviant body himself, Willard was especially likely to identify with the passenger he considered a freak. His fantasy that she regarded him with sympathy must have been especially disturbing. Pathos was a prominent element of contemporary attitudes toward low-income people with tuberculosis. To imagine himself an object of pity to a woman with a “hideous affliction” was to reveal just how far he believed he had fallen.80 It is remarkable that Charles did not impute fear as well as pity to that woman. Because public health officials warned about the dangers of associating with tuberculosis patients, Willard might have assumed that his presence in an enclosed streetcar would alarm other passengers. But just as his anxieties about Florence did not focus exclusively on her proximity to germs, so his concerns about his symptoms extended beyond the communicability they

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betrayed. When he ventured into the world with the marks of his illness upon him, his primary worry was that others would view him as a helpless sufferer, not that they would respond with terror. Reports of the deaths of other tuberculosis patients sharpened his fears. After thanking his father for the “yougurt” pills he had sent, Willard noted that a young acquaintance had “just died in Pasadena after taking the tablets for a year or more.” Dwelling on their differences provided some comfort: “I think he had intestinal tuberculosis. The doctors all say mine is strictly pulmonary. My intestinal health is nervous.” Regardless of the cause, Willard’s suffering was intense. “Were you ever thoroughly seasick?” he asked Sarah in April. “Can you imagine sitting down to all your meals seasick. I simply loath all food.” Indigestion also prevented him from gaining the “strength and energy” essential for recovery.81 As poor health lingered, financial problems intensified. Willard’s income barely covered his living expenses, but during the past year he had spent more than four hundred dollars on medicine and doctors’ and nurses’ visits. Once again friends came to the rescue. Marshall Stimson, a young lawyer who had been a leader of the Non-Partisan League, raised thirty-six hundred dollars from a large circle of prominent Los Angelenos to pay off Willard’s mortgage. Nevertheless, he remained “pretty badly in debt.”82 “It is the same old miserable story,” he wrote in July. “No change month after month.” Although he had gained “a little” since the new year, his weight remained low, coughing fits continued to overwhelm him, and he had less strength than before. “It used to be that I was practically never too ill to write but now I have days of complete exhaustion when I can’t even do that.” And he had yet another problem to report: “Things are sadly complicated for me by the [pain] of the left shoulder which began two or three months ago and has been acute for six weeks at times extremely painful. I cannot dress myself any more and cannot lie on my left side in bed.” Various doctors were “working at it” but “without success.”83 Florence’s health caused greater alarm. At the close of school, she “collapsed entirely” and failed to recover even after a few weeks. She refused to eat and seemed to have “no strength.” Her parents finally “looked the dreadful possibility in the face and had her thoroughly examined for tuberculosis.” To their “infinite relief,” the doctor found “no sign of it.” She was, however, “loaded up with nervous dyspepsia.” Although the most “dreadful possibility” had been eliminated, the new diagnosis was frightening enough, and Willard decided to withhold it from Florence: “We tell her that all her troubles are just because she won’t eat.” His powerlessness to influence her behavior added to

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his distress: “She is the most intense worker I ever saw—both her mother and I are hard workers but she compounds on us both. She hates to eat. She wants to curl up over a book, or dream over a paper and pencil. It infuriates me to think of it—for when she was little she was so active physically and I wanted her to develop in that direction.”84 Only the Progressive campaign broke his bleak reports. “If about the 17th of August you hear an astonishing din from the west,” he wrote to Sarah, “you may know we have cleaned up the Southern Pacific crowd and are in the saddle in California just as we are now in Los Angeles. You have no idea how much fun even a sick man can get out of politics when all his best friends are deeply involved.” But August brought more hemorrhages. Although Charles “got over that trouble” ten days later, he “wasn’t quite [him]self for a week or two more.” Early in September he “was hit again.” By September 21, he had recovered enough to leave his bed, but “miserable nausea” continued to plague him. “These frequent hemorrhages are of course very discouraging,” he wrote. “The worst feature of them is that when they come on me in town it is a very serious matter and a great expense—and yet I must go to town to earn a living. That has happened only twice, but it is naturally distressing to May to have the possibility always hanging over me. And it discourages me about undertaking much work.” Nevertheless, he remained “full of joy over things political.” The Progressives were “completely in the saddle” in the state, and events seemed “to be working out for the right all over the country.”85 May’s fears were confirmed the following month. “Last Wednesday I got caught in town again,” he wrote on October 24. “I was at the Club which fortunately is just across the street from Wing’s office. I kept it very quiet so no one was disturbed. Elbert gave me a hypodermic and I borrowed an automobile. Luckily May also was in the club in the ladies dining room. Made the trip to [home] in perfect time—thanks to a good chauffeur and the morphine.” By that time, Willard rarely left home without May, and he was indeed fortunate she was close at hand during the crisis. She probably stayed with him and helped to stanch the flow while others ran to get the doctor; she also must have comforted him during the ride back to Pasadena. Nevertheless, the costs mounted. In addition to a doctor’s visit and medication, the Willards had to pay for a car and driver. Charles kept “very quiet so no one was disturbed,” but we can well imagine the ignominy he must have felt at this public display.86 Although he estimated he lost less than half a pint of blood, mild hemorrhages continued for several days. He could write only during the intervals between “long and sometimes terrible coughing fits.” Fortunately, his editorials continued to win praise. At least two prominent men asserted that they

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never formed an opinion on an important issue without first checking to see what he thought. Such comments made “another thing to live for, and just that much harder to let go.”87 The November primary election was a “magnificent victory,” putting Progressives “in possession” of the state government. The result, he wrote, “[is] joyous for one who has been fighting these battles all his life since he came to the state, as I have. At last we are on top—not as the result of any sudden chance wave, but at the end of a long steady contest and a persistent campaign of educating the people. The pendulum will never swing back very far. I think we have come to stay.” “But alas!” he continued, “I can take very little hand in the jollification for I am too ill.” Although he did not lose much blood in his last relapse, recovery was “painfully slow.” His cough had grown “a good deal worse,” causing him to “choke more with it.” The one good sign was his renewed appetite, which “in time must tell for improvement.” He would “keep plugging at it,” trying to “forget present troubles and future possibilities.”88

Chapter 6

The “Gash” in “Our Happiness”

Fire!

As Willard’s health continued to worsen, he had to struggle harder than ever to retain his identity as middle class, as the scion of good Protestant stock, and as a man. The new calamity which visited his family on December 14, 1910, highlighted both the benefits of high social standing and the fragility of the border he had tried to construct between himself and “indigent invalids.” A match lit by a gas company employee accidentally set fire to the Willards’ home. By the time the flames were extinguished, the entire building had been destroyed; only the piano and a few rugs saved by a neighbor’s servant remained. Perhaps nothing so dramatically demonstrates the changed climate around tuberculosis as Charles’s experiences that winter. As a young man recovering from consumption in the late 1880s, he had experienced no trouble finding suitable accommodation. Indeed, Mrs. Harrison, his Santa Barbara landlady, had watched over him, worrying about his symptoms and caring for him when he began to hemorrhage. But times had changed. After the turn of the century, people with tuberculosis increasingly encountered housing discrimination in Los Angeles, as throughout the country. When Mrs. Rothstein (a pseudonym) applied for assistance from the Los Angeles Ladies and Hebrew Benevolent Society in October 1904, charity workers reported that her husband was “ill with consumption” and that, “owing to the husband’s disease, accommodation was refused wherever applied for.” Had Willard heard about the case, he probably would not have been very concerned. As indigent Jews, the Rothsteins represented the kind of people who did not belong in the city he was trying to create. He also probably would have approved of the society’s response to Mrs. Rothstein’s appeal. 117

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Rather than offering the family economic help or helping them find a place to live, the society sent them back to New York. We recall that in 1898 the Express (then under Willard’s control) had ridiculed a Jewish man with consumption who had sought financial assistance; Willard also had endorsed the decision of charity workers to transport the applicant and his family to their home in St. Louis. Two years before Mrs. Rothstein made her request, Willard had spearheaded a campaign against the expansion of the county hospital in an effort to discourage the migration of “indigent invalids.” And in various writings he had reminded elite Los Angelenos that subordinate social groups were especially likely to spread disease.1 After the fire, Willard discovered that he, too, could be a target of repugnance and fear. “Everybody slams the door in the face of the consumptive now,” he complained. “Even the ‘haunted’ place where the Dwights had their place unable to get a tenant for years was refused to us—we were so desperate we would even have taken that place of horror.” Charles asked Sarah to imagine “what a soul-absorbing thing it is for a man as sick and feeble and dependent as I am to be burned out of house and home, in a country where a consumptive is treated like a leper, with every hotel, boarding house and home for rent closed against him.”2 One option he quickly rejected was to enter an institution. “Strange to say,” he explained, “there are no good tuberculosis hospitals here except those run for charity and they are horribly overcrowded.” It is not clear why he did not mention the few private institutions established in Southern California during the early 1900s. Perhaps he believed he could not afford the fees when his economic situation had drastically deteriorated. Or perhaps, because those facilities contained only a small number of beds, none was available at the time. It also is not clear whether the charitable facility he referred to was the sanatorium which his physician Jarvis W. Barlow had established in 1902 or the public hospital whose expansion Willard had tried to block the same year. Either way, his comment undercuts the argument he then made that an expanded county facility would serve as a beacon to indigent consumptives from other parts of the country. As he must have known, one of the harshest criticisms leveled against poor people with tuberculosis was that, far from seeking institutional care, they routinely rejected recommendations to enroll in hospitals and sanatoriums. Now Willard wrote that even if a bed became available, hospital placement would involve his separation from May and thus be tantamount to “a death warrant.”3 Nevertheless, he was not nearly as vulnerable as he felt. As a member of the middle class, he had access to critical resources. The family spent the first night

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with neighbors and then moved to the large, elegant house of the Hookers, wealthy relatives in Los Angeles. When two weeks passed, and the Willards still had not found their own accommodation, Dr. Norman Bridge “came to the rescue,” offering, free of charge, a small house in Pasadena previously used by his chauffeur. Bridge’s kindness may have reflected not only concern for a patient and a friend but also anger at the stigma increasingly darkening the lives of tuberculosis sufferers. As Charles wrote to Meyer Lissner, the doctor “appreciated the impossibility of getting a house for a consumptive.”4 Bridge could not, however, stave off Willard’s hemorrhages, which began almost immediately and continued for eight of the following thirteen days. “This was a handy time to have hemorrhages, I don’t think!” he wrote. They were, of course, the result of the shock. The night before the fire I lay awake all night for some unaccountable reason, and of course I scarcely slept a wink the night after. Saturday and Sunday I tried opiates without much effect. Also I ate almost nothing. So a smash was bound to come. Now I am lying still and praying so hard to get well so that I can help a little at last on the thousand things to be done. . . . If I would only get well—even as well as I usually am—that would be something. But to be a care every minute at such a time—it seems too much to put upon people.

As May’s health deteriorated, Charles’s sense of burden grew. After two weeks of buying new furniture and “working like a beaver” to get Bridge’s house ready, May had a “frightful cold” and was “utterly exhausted.” Shortly before they were scheduled to leave their relatives, “a sick headache with vomiting and retching” began, and both a doctor and nurse were summoned. Although May gradually recovered, she was still so sick on moving day that she could not leave her bed to supervise the delivery and unpacking of furniture.5 Just as Willard often tried to “pass” as well, so he sought to minimize the disaster. “We are putting up a good front to the public,” he wrote early in January 1911. Florence did her share. Having recovered from her troubles of the previous summer, she proceeded with her plans to attend a sorority party with a childhood friend and participate in the Rose Tournament as a maid of honor. A few years later Willard explained a “loving and dear” letter from the naturalist John Muir this way: Muir had been staying at the Hookers when the Willards arrived. Because Charles had not “seemed to snarl” about the fire, he said, “Muir got an idea I was quite a model of patience. As a matter of fact, I did snarl—but never in public.” Willard also wrote philosophically about the

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catastrophe in the Pacific Outlook early in 1911, mourning the loss of his books but emphasizing his great relief that no one had been hurt.6 His private correspondence was more revealing. Soon after arriving at the Hookers, he wrote to Sarah, “Nothing but time—and a lot of that will be needed—can heal the gash this thing has made in our happiness.” He told Lissner, “The shock of the disaster hangs on worse and longer than I thought it would—owing to my weak condition, I suppose.” If the fire exacerbated his illness, his illness shattered the resources needed to cope with this new crisis. Perhaps the “shock” also lingered because it so closely resembled the physical assaults Willard periodically sustained. The fire was like his hemorrhages, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and utterly devastating. Once again, he would have to slowly dig out of a wreckage.7 The loss of his shelter may have been especially important because the body he inhabited had proved so untrustworthy. In addition, the house had been a source of immense pride and pleasure to both Charles and May. It was not the first they had owned. In 1897 they had joined other members of the Los Angeles elite who bought property on Terminal Island, a popular seaside resort twenty-two miles from the city. But the Willards had been able to afford to build only a small beach cottage; to pay the mortgage, they had rented it during the summer months when their most desirable neighbors were in residence. The Pasadena house was superior in every way. The land was on a hillside “in a place where [they had] always wanted to own something.” From one direction they could see “the estates of millionaires” and from the other the “rolling country comprising links of the Annandale golf club.” Best of all was the address. Incorporated as a city in 1886, Pasadena rapidly became, in one historian’s words, “a liberal Protestant upper-middle-class daydream.” Booster literature frequently touted its charms. According to Harry Ellington Brook’s 1893 pamphlet for the World’s Fair, the city had “well-paved streets, handsome business blocks, large and tasteful churches and school buildings, an imposing library, spacious opera house, and several banks.” Its “chief attraction,” however, was “found in the beautiful homes of its citizens, standing in grounds of from half an acre to ten acres.” It was “small wonder” that the city was “attracting wealthy men from all over the world, who come, see, and are conquered, building tasteful and costly residences among its orange groves.”8 The Willards’ many difficulties with the architect Henry Dwight never dimmed their delight in the building he designed. May filled it with “beautiful” furniture and rugs. Workers she supervised constructed an elegant garden on four levels, connected by a stone stairway and containing fruit trees, flowers, a sunken pool, and comfortable chairs. Shortly before moving in, Charles

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This image is unavailable.

Figure 6.1 Pasadena houses among the orange groves, 1890. Variations of this photo appeared frequently in promotional literature. Courtesy of the Security Pacific Collection, Los Angeles Public Library, CA.

wrote, “May and Mr. Dwight have between them designed a ‘home’ that will stand out even in this region of homes.” Admiration from others added to the joy. A famous landscape designer was “tremendously enthusiastic,” declaring the view “one of the finest to be found anywhere in California.” After a visit from San Francisco friends, Willard noted, “Like everybody else they fell in love with our house.” The neighbors also satisfied. “We have a near neighbor now whose company I enjoy,” Charles wrote to his father in 1910, “a minister and a school teacher who (mirabile dictu!) has acquired a very considerable fortune. The President of the University of South Dakota (also a rich man!) has bought a place near us and is putting up a $50,000 house.” Charles was “hopeful” that “companionable” people would move into the place next door for sale at $35,000.9 Although the Willards’ house was far less expensive than those of their neighbors (the building and its contents were valued at $13,200), the financial consequences of the fire were devastating enough. Because the insurance covered only $6,000, Charles was forced to replace the mortgage his friends had “lifted off” the previous year. He and May soon would begin to rebuild their house, and by December it would be finished; in 1912 they would win a judgment against the gas company. As the new year dawned in 1911, however, they could have had little notion that they would be able to recoup their losses and reestablish their lives.10

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A check for $500 from a wealthy Outlook reader enabled Willard not only to rebuild his library but also to counter his sense of victimization. “Am I not lucky?” he asked Sarah. “Don’t you think that lots of pleasant things happen to me—to offset some of the unpleasant ones? Some people have it all one way.” But as he lay awake night after night, he continued to agonize over the loss of May’s and Florence’s clothes and the furnishings May had chosen with such care.11 Charles originally had intended to call the house “the Pines,” after the large trees that encircled it, but by the time he moved in he had decided to follow the popular Los Angeles custom of bestowing a Spanish appellation. Although Dwight had designed a square, wooden structure, Charles named it “El Arco” (the arch). As historians show, romanticization of Los Angeles’ Mexican past often went hand in hand with vilifying Mexican people and slighting their hardships. Perhaps the romance Charles attached to El Arco enabled him to ignore the parallels between his experience and that of the Mexicans who had lost their homes two and a half years earlier. Then, he had argued that the residents of the destroyed house courts were not worse off than before. Now, he gave no indication that his own tragedy would lead him to reconsider.12 “Something Deeper and More Dangerous”

The next two misfortunes cast new doubts on the superiority of Willard’s lineage. He later admitted that he “felt rather ashamed” of his failure to acknowledge a letter from Chicago that reached him immediately after the fire, informing him that his sister Alice had died in childbirth. He explained he had been too preoccupied with his own troubles and “too weak to do any more” than was absolutely necessary. Perhaps his lapse also can be attributed to the tenuousness of the bond between the two siblings. Alice was several years younger than Charles, and they had never been close. Since 1903, when Alice married and moved to Philadelphia, they seem to have had little contact of any kind.13 Charles did respond immediately to a telegram in the middle of February alerting him that his beloved sister May was gravely ill and about to undergo surgery. Months before, when he had learned that May suffered from stomach troubles, he responded in his characteristic manner, assuming that they were “just what we call nervous dyspepsia—that one may live with indefinitely.” Reports of “acute attacks,” however, seemed “to indicate something deeper and more dangerous.”14 As May grew worse, Willard urged his family not to keep information from him. “I am stronger than you think . . . and there is no reason why I should not

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face the facts, as well one time as another. . . . Perhaps because I have looked at Death so near and so often in my own case I have learned to be very calm about it.” If Willard had looked openly at death many times, he rarely had found words for it. It was probably easier to acknowledge the issue of mortality when he was not the one most at risk.15 The Chicago family also had to decide how much to tell May about her condition and how to respond when she broached the subject of committing suicide. Again Willard drew on his own experiences. “I would give her the truth,” he counseled. “It always did me good to be told the worst—and at least I enjoyed my sense of self-respect.” But Willard appeared to have had few qualms about concealing Florence’s diagnosis from her the previous summer. Did he believe that her youth justified his decision? And had he always been told “the worst”? When he failed to recover as quickly as he had expected in the spring of 1908, he had written that Bridge initially “figured two weeks—or three at the utmost would be sufficient. He never had the faintest conception of the true state of affairs—or else purposely deceived us—I don’t believe the latter. It would be too cruel.” Bridge may indeed have misled him. His 1903 book on tuberculosis contained this advice to physicians: “We may, if it seems best, refrain from telling [the] patient the full nature of his disease and his prospects, and should never say that his case is hopeless.” Perhaps some of Willard’s insistence on honesty reflects lingering doubts about the openness of one of his doctors. His comment also may have stemmed from unease about his own many deceptions.16 Charles soon revealed a more important strategy to maintain his dignity. Returning to the theme of honesty in his next letter, he wrote, “If I need to know the truth about death, how much more do I need to know it with regard to that other thing that is worse than death—helpless dependency.” What is most striking is how he defined that term. The letter continued: Talk with [May] frankly on the subject of suicide—not too earnestly nor with any show of terror. . . . Take me as your moral if you like. I long ago decided that if the day ever came when it was absolutely certain that I could not support myself but must be a burden on others, I would make for the exit door. But that underlined condition is a pretty safe one to serve as permanent respite for a person charged with energy and full of versatility as May is and I am. Look at me now—I who faced an imminent prospect of death only three years ago by the operation of this same rule—now working out from one form of employment into another that is much better adopted to my tastes and abilities and that fits in almost perfectly with my cramped physical life.

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Suicide, he concluded, was “not to be considered by a person of courage and a sense of logic except as a very last resort. When? Why, after months and months of consistent effort had demonstrated that self-support was impossible. And as long as one can move about—or even, as in my case, sit up in bed (and I once dictated $50 worth of stuff flat on my back with hemorrhages in between) hope of self-support is not gone.”17 By defining self-sufficiency solely in professional terms, Willard was able to bolster his dignity as a middle-class man while relying on women’s services. He was by no means oblivious of those services. After his sister May visited in the summer of 1908, he wrote to thank her for the sensitive care she had rendered. He expressed concerns about the burdens imposed on Mrs. Delive and gratitude for her help. And, as we have seen, he frequently noted his appreciation for the care his wife bestowed and his fears that it exacted too great a toll on her health. But while he lavished attention on his efforts to triumph over his illness, he never mentioned that women often fed, bathed, and dressed him. He must have known that he could reassure his family most effectively by emphasizing his efforts to recover, not his helplessness. Reticence about the most intimate aspects of care was customary during the early twentieth century. And he lived in a society that extolled the virtues of independence.18 When several weeks passed, and Willard received no letters from Chicago, he “began to fear that the silence was to cover more disasters.” Instead, he received the welcome, if unexpected, news that May was back teaching at school. “What a wonderful thing is this Willard tenacity of life,” he wrote to Sarah. “Although it did not save either Paul or Alice, perhaps, as they were the last to come, it had exhausted itself. Their hold on health was always tenuous.” Two months earlier he had used the same notion to comfort May, writing that “the Willard constitution can certainly do wonders.”19 We last encountered Charles’s views about his family pedigree in 1888, when he had written to his mother about the “inherited strength” of her offspring. His subsequent involvement in boosterism and progressivism could only have reinforced his commitment to hereditarian thought. Just as assumptions about the superiority of Anglo-Saxon “stock” infused the campaign to entice tourists and residents to Southern California, such ideas influenced the progressive movement. Numerous leaders embraced eugenics as a way to solve previously intractable social problems. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that Charles’s letters throughout the 1890s and early 1900s continued to refer to the importance of heredity. Introducing Charles F. Lummis to his father in 1894, Willard emphasized his “New England birth.” The following year Willard went

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so far as to join the Sons of the Revolution, and he asked his father to check the family genealogy for evidence that an ancestor “was a soldier in the Revolution or was a member of some Committee of Safety or held office of some kind during that period.” Willard also subscribed to phrenology, a popular doctrine reflecting current ideas about heredity. (Phrenologists believed that an examination of the shape of the skull revealed key aspects of individual character.) “I received . . . a photograph from Alice of the gentleman she is to marry,” Charles wrote in 1903. “He has certainly a most pleasing face. It is the physiognomy of a man of sentiment and feeling but there is at the same time no lack of force. Without doubt Alice is to be congratulated. I don’t believe that a man with eyes like his will be mean to her, and the shape of his head and the general cut of his face suggests industry, perseverance, good judgment—and success.” Hearing about a family friend besieged by various illnesses in 1909, Charles commented, “A bad physical inheritance, I take it.” And now he implicated Alice’s inherited defects in her childbed death (despite the very high rate of maternal mortality in early twentieth-century America).20 How then did he deal with his own decline? Koch’s discovery of the causative agent might have suggested that Willard’s disease was simply a matter of chance; having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, he could have inhaled the bacillus from a dust particle or directly from the air. But the growing acceptance of the germ theory did not shatter the belief that tuberculosis was an inherited disorder. I have speculated that Charles’s sisters’ objections to his marriage may have rested partly on fears that he was eugenically unfit, liable to transmit a susceptibility to the disease to his offspring. As Willard must have known, commentators increasingly pointed to the prevalence of tuberculosis among African Americans, American Indians, and Jews as proof of innate physical inferiority. It is thus likely that Charles’s long struggle with the disease at one point shook some of his faith in his lineage. But then May’s swift recovery appears to have helped to restore that faith while also, perhaps, rekindling his hopes for his own future.21 “Those Miserable Wretches”

Throughout that crisis, Willard occasionally conveyed his sympathy for Sarah, who had to care not just for May but also for her own large and occasionally troublesome family. In addition, May’s incapacity left her sister solely responsible for their ailing father. Nevertheless, Charles considered Sarah’s task relatively easy in two respects—May’s disease was not contagious, and she could afford to hire a “practical intelligent housekeeper.” Recalling his experience during the winter and spring of 1908, Charles wrote, “We could only get those

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miserable wretches of Japanese, and some of them would not go into the room where I was. They have a terror of tuberculosis.”22 His caregivers came from a population which grew rapidly during the early twentieth century, reaching a total of nearly twenty thousand in Los Angeles County by 1920. The overwhelming majority were young, single men, who quickly became a new source of household help. Soon after moving into their new house, the Willards had hired one Japanese man as a gardener and another to help with the housework. Although early twentieth-century privateduty nurses frequently complained about being treated like servants, there could be no confusion between the status of Mrs. Delive and the Japanese employed in the Willard household. The grudging respect Willard accorded his servants was dependent on their maintaining what he viewed as their proper place. After first dismissing and then rehiring one man, Willard wrote, “Takayama is certainly a jewel. Losing his job for a time has improved him. He works like a Trojan all the time and is perfectly contented.” Several months later Willard wrote that Takayama was still “neat and industrious,” although now also “surly.” After Takayama left permanently in the summer of 1909, Willard wrote happily about his replacement: “We have a jewel of a cook named Oura—a Jap—he makes everything taste so good and May says he is the most exquisitely neat and orderly person she ever knew in her life. His kitchen is like a dream of a kitchen. As a rule the Japanese are sanitary, you know. And he waits on the table like a butler.”23 Willard, of course, had long demanded subservience from servants, especially those who belonged to groups he regarded as racially inferior. The Japanese escaped some of the virulence directed toward the Chinese, but hostility grew, especially in California. The Asiatic Exclusion League, organized in San Francisco in 1905, inspired the San Francisco Board of Education to segregate all Asian students. Although the board rescinded that order at Theodore Roosevelt’s behest, discrimination continued. In the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement, the Japanese government promised to restrict the number of laborers migrating to the United States, and in 1913 the California legislature forbade aliens from owning land.24 Like many turn-of-the-century Anglo-Saxon observers, Willard had praise as well as contempt for the Japanese. In 1898, he had written in the Express: “It is stated that Japan has only ten thousand paupers in its whole population of forty million. This small percentage is largely attributable to the fact that idleness is considered disgraceful in Japan. It would be a good thing if one Japanese idea could be imported and successfully sprouted in the United States.” Although a 1911 Outlook article described the “filthy personal habits”

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of many “foreigners,” he clearly exempted the Japanese from that charge. (“As a rule,” they were “sanitary.”) But Willard also bracketed Japanese people with blacks, a group he viewed as primitive. In December 1910, he complained about having to “fight with Japs niggers or such to get the [gardening] work done.” In 1913, he would write an article attacking the federal government’s attempt to overturn California’s Alien Land Act.25 Willard’s insistence on proper behavior from his Japanese servants may have stemmed even more from his fear that his disease had inverted the racial hierarchy. Strength and vigor fortified Anglo-Saxon claims to superiority, but Willard suffered from a disease frequently linked to subordinate groups and used as a sign of their inferiority. The Willards relied on Japanese men to do the gardening that Charles’s illness had forced him to relinquish. Even worse, May entrusted the servants with the task of watching over Charles during her rare absences from home. It also is possible that the men’s refusal to do some work derived from revulsion at his bodily discharges and fear that they may have contaminated some parts of the house. In 1910 he had complained, “The Japanese boys will not do any cleaning.” Even the “faithful” gardener “will not beat the rugs unless positively ordered.” When Willard labeled his servants “wretches” and implied that their “terror of tuberculosis” represented a greater weakness than his own physical frailty, he may have been making yet another attempt to salvage his self-esteem in the face of a disease that frequently violated it.26 “A Valiant Soul”

If Willard’s reliance on his Japanese servants disrupted his sense of white superiority, a dramatic encounter with Theodore Roosevelt helped to restore Charles’s dignity as a man. Roosevelt’s apparent success in transforming himself from a “sickly” child into a vigorous cowboy provided a model for many health seekers. George F. Weeks, for example, drew on Roosevelt’s experience to frame his own account. Like Willard, Weeks was a young man diagnosed with consumption in the late nineteenth century; he received advice to leave unhealthy urban air and settled first in San Bernardino. According to his 1929 autobiography, he regained his health by engaging in a series of Western adventures, including sleeping outside, riding wild horses, and shooting bears and mountain lions. Three years after arriving in Southern California, he looked “well tanned, full of life and vigor” and weighed “a normal 165 or 170 pounds” for his “six feet of stature.” In the portrait he chose for his memoir’s frontispiece, he is dressed in buckskin and stands in the iconic Roosevelt pose— arms crossed, legs apart, and posture erect.27

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Although Willard could hardly present himself as triumphing over all adversity, Roosevelt loomed large in his life as well. Explaining the nature of his job at the Pacific Outlook, Willard had been proud to compare his position to Roosevelt’s on the New York Outlook. During his two terms as president, Roosevelt had enacted progressive ideals, most notably by initiating the antitrust suit against the Northern Securities Company, intervening in the 1902 coal strike, and ensuring passage of the Hepburn Railway Act to increase the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission. In California, he was especially revered. As one historian writes, “Of all the outside personal forces operating to inspire progressive rebellion in California, Theodore Roosevelt was by far the greatest. . . . To a great degree, the President’s moral and political doctrines struck close to the California progressive idea. He was a source of inspiration, a symbol of progressive virtues, and a protector at the highest court.”28 Beyond his political actions and views, Roosevelt exemplified the powerful masculinity revered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historian Sarah Watts argues that by injecting “a rich vein of fantasy and emotionalism, an unabashed paean to violence, and a desperate fashioning of masculinity into political culture,” Roosevelt “offered ordinary men a sense that they actively participated in the era’s aggressively insurgent manhood.” That sense must have been especially important to Willard, weakened and emaciated from sickness and longing for bodily wholeness.29 Willard’s editorials heaped encomiums on Roosevelt. He was “the great soldier of human progress and hope,” a “force ready for instant service in the cause of righteousness,” and “a living, breathing, fighting demonstration of what is the use.” But Roosevelt was not above criticism. Willard’s column on February 4, 1911, began by describing the ex-president as “our hero,” who “holds public attention and public confidence as no other leading man does.” His recent discussion of the initiative, referendum, and recall, however, was “absurdly inadequate and disappointing,” demonstrating “a point of view that is not at all in harmony with real democratic sentiment.” (The initiative allowed citizens to propose and vote directly for legislation, bypassing the state legislature. The referendum permitted them to vote on bills referred by the legislature. The recall enabled voters to ask for an election to decide whether to remove elected officials before the end of their terms.) Progressives throughout the country embraced those measures as a way to strengthen popular rule; in California, they were considered key elements of the fight against the Southern Pacific.30 Although Willard initially characterized the initiative and referendum as “rank nonsense,” he gradually became a convert and served as an officer of the

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Direct Legislation League, organized by John Randolph Haynes in 1902. Willard later boasted that he worked tirelessly during the successful campaign to incorporate the initiative, referendum, and recall into the 1903 Los Angeles city charter, “speaking night after night all over town.” Hiram Johnson’s election inspired hopes of replicating the LA victory at the state level. Willard’s editorial criticizing Roosevelt appeared shortly after the California legislature passed a constitutional amendment to include direct legislation; that amendment was to be presented to the voters in the fall.31 Roosevelt’s insistence on a meeting during a forthcoming visit to Los Angeles created a new set of problems. Roosevelt first asked Willard to travel with him by train to San Francisco, a possibility Charles considered “quite alluring” though clearly ludicrous. The next proposal was that he attend a small lunch with Roosevelt, California’s governor, and a few Progressive leaders. Willard feared he “must decline even that.” As he explained to Sarah, “I still have fits of coughing and they are irregular and uncertain. I don’t wish to make a scene, and possibly hurt the pleasure of others.” Perhaps Willard was especially inhibited by the thought of meeting the leader who frequently expressed his disgust for weakness and dependency of any kind and fulminated against the dangers of effeminacy and racial degeneration. Roosevelt’s suggestion of a train trip indicates that he had no conception of Willard’s physical condition. Even if Willard managed to stifle his cough, he would represent the unhealthiness Roosevelt had vowed to extirpate from society.32 During the same month Willard received a powerful reminder that his appearance fell short of the rigorous standards embodied in Roosevelt. An artist had taken “a liking” to Willard’s “lean and haggard face” and “did quite a marvelous color crayon of it.” Willard was so delighted with the drawing that he had many photographs made and sent one to his family in Chicago. He was less pleased by the time he received Sarah’s response. “Glad you liked the picture,” he wrote, “tho it scarcely calls for such enthusiasm. Some people think it too effeminate.”33 When Willard finally accepted the lunch invitation, he did so “with some misgivings,” although he promised to do his “level best to be well and equal to it.” Even the smallest expedition now required advance planning. He arranged to spend the night before the lunch with the Hookers, whose house was close to the event. As a result, he hoped, he would be able to finish most of his morning coughing before he had to leave for the lunch.34 Roosevelt’s warm reception made those cumbersome preparations worthwhile. “As soon as he came into the waiting room,” Charles wrote, “he came across to where I was sitting, and, remarking that I was the man he particularly

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wished to see, sat down beside me.” Roosevelt requested that Willard sit next to him, and they continued to talk “through the entire meal.” Willard learned that Roosevelt “had been reading a good deal of [his] stuff, and was taken with it as sound progressive doctrine. . . . Indeed the feeling I had when it was over was that I had made a new friend, making all allowance, however, for the way these big public men have of making friends with pretty nearly everybody.”35 Roosevelt’s desire to continue the conversation by mail also gratified. Soon after the luncheon, Willard sent Roosevelt the “long” letter he had requested, and the two men debated the merits of direct legislation throughout the spring. Willard repeatedly chastised Roosevelt’s reluctance to embrace democratic principles more wholeheartedly but also acknowledged that his own commitment was strictly limited. On April 28, Roosevelt pointed out that popular rule in California would “mean that the Chinese and Japanese should come in unlimited quantities, and should rule you.” Furthermore, he noted, “In Haiti, absolute democracy has been at work for over a century; and really, my dear Mr. Willard, it is sad to think of . . . what democracy has done to Haiti.” The South provided another counterexample: “I suppose no one now seriously contends that during reconstruction days the negro majority in Mississippi and South Carolina acted wisely, or that it was possible to continue the government in the hands of that majority.” On June 9, Willard replied, “We certainly do not think that a belief in the capacity of the American people to govern themselves under a pure democracy requires that we should also believe that the initiative and referendum would be a good thing to give to the Hottentots or Bushmen: or conversely, that because democracy will not work well in Hayti and San Domingo, we should regard it with suspicion in the United States. It is a general principle that freedom is best for mankind; yet we do shut some men up in penitentiaries. I hold that democracy uplifts those who enjoy its privileges, but I freely admit that it will not do for Hayti.” Roosevelt responded eleven days later, “Upon my word! You are a trump. . . . My dear fellow, down at bottom, I believe that you and I are in substantial agreement on all the real things.”36 Roosevelt’s comments about Willard’s illness may have pleased as much as the respect accorded his political opinions. In August Charles told his Chicago family that he often felt “badly” and rarely saw people. The same month Roosevelt sent a letter which Charles described to Sarah as “perfectly beautiful.” “The real wonder of it is that you should have lived so long with the chances so terribly against you,” Roosevelt wrote. “I do not like to seem to gush, but I believe you are going to live for many years, just because I do not

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see how we can spare you. At any rate, you and I are now within range of the riflepits, and if we are hit it is all right, because we have done our work. We have fought the good fight and have accomplished something, and if the end at any time comes to either of us, we have the profound satisfaction that should come to a soldier who dies when he has had a chance to do his share in the fighting instead of having been killed before the campaign opened.” Watts argues that some of Roosevelt’s reverence for violence stemmed from his sense of shame about the weakness he believed his father had exhibited in the Civil War. After receiving a draft notice, the elder Theodore Roosevelt had hired a replacement, who died within months. After the Cuban War his son wrote that the U.S. soldiers killed there deserved “respect and admiration” because they had “the supreme good fortune” of “dying well on the field of battle.” In 1901 he explained that he had chosen a military and political career so that “if foreign or domestic strife arose [he] would be entitled to the respect that comes to the man who actually counts in the conflict.” Now Roosevelt suggested that Willard, too, had earned that respect.37 Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” campaign for president in 1912 enjoyed Willard’s unfettered enthusiasm. Alone among the three major candidates, Roosevelt had the fighting spirit the Progressives needed. Although William H. Taft had “many admirable qualities,” he lacked “the things that really count toward the making of a progressive American president.”38 His plan for the nation was “feeble.” After Woodrow Wilson won the Democratic nomination, Willard acknowledged his “high opinion of Dr. Wilson both as to his intelligence and his sincerity of purpose,” but “the only way to get effective national control of trusts was to elect Theodore Roosevelt President.” An August editorial read, “One who wishes to follow this campaign attentively will do well to keep his eye right on Roosevelt, for the hardest fighting will always be where his standard waves its challenge. That is true not only because he is a warrior who naturally rushes the fighting, but also because all the opposition recognize him as the one they have to beat.”39 That spring Willard had another “bust up.” As he wrote to Sarah in July, “I was doing very well when it happened and was full of hope for the future. I went to a little luncheon of 50 fellows that very day and spoke for a few minutes. . . . Hemorrhage came 14 hours later and started off violently.” Although Dr. Bridge assured Willard that the hemorrhage was merely a “‘mechanical’ affair,” it “took the previous blood that I have been so slowly gathering for several years and reduced me to a condition of weakness that it will take many months to overcome.” Two and a half months later he remained “in a miserable state—walking only a few steps and that with great difficulty and long panting

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spells afterward.” He continued to attribute some problems to neurasthenia, noting that the “old nervous bronchitis” had returned; as a result, he had “only . . . two or three hours of clear breathing in the day—long spells of suffocation through the morning and evening.” He looked “pretty well in the face” but was “wasted to a mere skeleton.”40 News of that setback must have reached Roosevelt, because in August he wrote, “I hate to think of your having been suffering from hemorrhages, but, my dear friend, you are a valiant soul, and you are actually doing what after all I and others are only preaching, you are doing your duty with quiet indifference in the face of death. How can anyone do better or exercise a finer and higher influence on his fellow men?” Here Willard proved himself a warrior by confronting his mortality with fortitude and equanimity rather than by fighting social and political evils. Roosevelt also implied that Willard’s behavior resembled his own heroic charge up San Juan Hill with Spanish guns pointed at him. Roosevelt viewed suffering primarily as a test. According to Watts, “[Roosevelt] could never endure enough pain himself, and he never tired of exacting it from those around him. He tallied his own manhood through broken bones, ‘drubbings’ in sports, and the numbers of wounded and dead Rough Riders in the Cuban campaign.” Seen in that light, Willard represented not a man who had succumbed to disease but one who withstood the pain it inflicted. If he had worried about appearing weak and frail before his idol, Willard now had the satisfaction of receiving Roosevelt’s praise for his courage and strength.41 “ Health Is First ”

During the same period, Willard’s parental pride was restored, at least temporarily. After Florence’s physical collapse in June 1910, doctors had declared her “loaded up with nervous dyspepsia.” Her father remained “frightened,” but he soon was able to revel in her accomplishments. Despite his ambivalence about her literary aspirations, she had plunged ahead, and in February 1911 “a big dramatic school with marvelously trained children” had decided to perform a play she had written. After the March opening, Charles asked to be allowed “some parental bragging,” although he acknowledged that her triumph had a cost: She was now at work on another play: “When she does that she won’t eat, she won’t stand up straight, and her mother says talking to her is like talking to someone down a deep well who has to laboriously pull himself to the surface before answering. We don’t like it, but what are we to do?” Her dazzling success—at age eighteen—appears to have temporarily overwhelmed his qualms. She “scored again tremendously” in her second play, “which was

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before a crowded audience in the Pasadena Opera House. Not only the play itself but her acting in it made a big hit.”42 Florence’s departure for Stanford that fall left both parents disconsolate. As Charles explained to Sarah, “My illness has shut in our lives for May cannot leave me very well and people are all afraid of tiring me when they call so they don’t stay long.” But they had one major comfort: “Florence’s letters are so entertaining that we are almost reconciled to her absence.” Although those letters are not available, Charles’s responses demonstrate his intense involvement in every aspect of her life. “I guess you have had a pretty busy day today,” he wrote a few hours after her departure, “putting money in the bank and unpacking your trunk, signing things up and being properly rushed by various gangs. You will remember August 28, 1911 all your life.” He expressed pleasure in reading about her “charming roommate,” encouraged her to pursue music, and urged her not to worry about lectures: “You will soon get the hang of note taking. Keep your eye on the book and not on the lecturer.” He also dispatched detailed advice about how to navigate the pressures of sorority rushing. When she deigned to make her own selection without consulting him, he asked his friends about the reputation of the group she had chosen. Because she hated criticism, he tried to tread lightly but could not resist telling her how to behave should members of the rejected sororities begin to snub her: “Don’t let anybody make you lose your temper. You are not a success when you are angry. Some people are grand and queenly and impressive, but others only splutter and make themselves absurd and ineffective. When you are furiously angry that is a splendid time to be absolutely silent.”43 Florence’s health aroused his deepest concern. “It is of no importance whatever that you are good in your studies and that you write with some success or that you are popular in your sorority if you are going to be sickly and miserable all the time and end up an invalid. Health is first and you must positively subordinate everything to that.” Willard’s close identification with his daughter both exacerbated his fears and encouraged him to draw lessons from his life. Still convinced that neurasthenia caused his indigestion, he cautioned her thus: “Don’t go out so much, get to bed early, and don’t let yourself be drawn into things that will eat up your strength and destroy your digestion. I don’t want to see you go through your father’s experience, because, leaving the tuberculosis out of it, I still had a miserable kind of a life through incessant stomach trouble, nearly all of which was the result of too constant application of the mental faculties.” He concluded by reminding his daughter that “it will be up to you some day to take care of your mother” and that her health was “absolutely necessary to do anything in that line.”44

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Although few 1912 letters to any family members survive, we learn that Florence’s health again gave rise to parental anxiety by that summer. Suffering from “some kind of stomach trouble,” she experienced “a good deal of pain” and got “exhausted easily.” When she left for her second year at Stanford, Charles wrote, “I missed a good deal of her visit through being too ill to see her or talk to her and also through her being ill a good deal of the time herself. We expected to read aloud together, but I could not stand being read to. And I thought we would enjoy music together . . . but our times of wellness seldom corresponded. We are a poor lot, she and I.”45 This grim report arrived in Chicago in the middle of October: Florence has gone to pieces so badly we had to take her out of college. She was quite miserable all summer but we sent her back in the hope that the northern climate would stimulate her. Then she had worried so much about my slipping back, that we thought it best to keep her away from home anyhow, and college was the best chance for that. Hardly had she arrived there before she was taken so seriously ill that the doctors ordered her to the hospital. When she was able to get about we had her go up to San Francisco to be looked over by a specialist. I must admit I was not surprised at the verdict. No tuberculosis yet but a certainty of it unless heroic methods are used to combat the wasting of continued indigestion, the first essential being abandonment of college. Then while we were discussing what to do, she collapsed again and went to the hospital at Palo Alto where she has been ever since—three weeks. When she is able to get about—she is taking a rest-and-food cure—she is going to go up in the mountains for life among the pines on a farm, and do nothing for a time. . . . You can imagine that it was very hard on May not to be able to go to Florence at such a time but we had good friends who looked out for her, and she has hosts of friends of her own. Everything imaginable is done for the child. . . . But it is a great disappointment to have her give up college. Her mind eats up her body the doctor says. . . . She has—we all have in our lineage—too much of a tendency towards books and study and not enough toward life and people. If she gets well enough—I mean when she gets well enough, we may be able to arrange for her to travel about a little, visit, and gain experience. But the first order of business of course is to get back her health—yes, and pile up a good surplus of strength. She used to have it when she was little—from 6 to 14 years of age. But during the past five years she has drooped more and more. Her mother thinks my illness has a great deal to do with it. Of course we shall keep her away from home as much as possible.

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It is not difficult to imagine the pain behind that dry recitation of facts. During a later crisis, Charles would note that Florence’s misery affected him more than his own: “It is harder for me to see that child’s distress than to stand it myself, I believe. I can scarcely write or do anything under the depression.” Florence represented Willard’s hopes for the future. Even in the midst of overwhelming financial difficulties, he had steadily added to the college fund begun the day of her birth. Her few hints in the summer of 1911 that she might abandon her college plans to marry her high school sweetheart had panicked her parents. When she finally departed, Charles expressed his relief to Sarah, noting, “We cannot lose Florence.” Florence also represented the fulfillment of Willard’s own dreams as a writer. And her youth and vitality shone especially brightly when contrasted with his growing weakness and fragility. During the past few years, he had lived almost exclusively through her.46 The close connections Willard drew between his illness and Florence’s breakdown must have heightened his anguish. Once again he had to confront the possibility that the family trait he cherished most highly—its “tendency towards books and study”—was a terrible flaw. Florence’s exposure to tuberculosis rendered her highly susceptible to that disease. His frailty prevented May from going to care for Florence. And her anxieties about her father’s health jeopardized her own. The Willards thus sought to keep Florence away from the depressing events at home as long as possible. Another concern strengthened that resolve: Charles now considered the bracing air of northern California more restorative than the warm Southern California climate he had reverently touted throughout the 1890s. Charles had “good” news as well as “bad”: “I am making gains toward recovery. The last few weeks have been quite surprising. . . . If the hemorrhages would only keep off, and if I could continue this rate of improvement I would in another year come back to life and health. But I don’t allow myself to expect too much. I just take what comes and thank Heaven it is no worse.” His life remained extremely restricted: “Expect to journey to town tomorrow in a friend’s automobile—the second time in five months.”47 In February 1913 his father died. “Somehow it does not seem like a real death,” Charles commented to Sarah. “It is more like a sudden recovery from a long and wretched illness. That is the form it takes in my mind as I think of it. Because there was no future for him; it was only a case of waiting anyhow, and he was miserable so much of the time. I know you must all feel a great sense of relief that it is over at last.” Charles may have had difficulty distinguishing his father’s “long and wretched illness” from his own. During the past month, he had experienced “much digestive pain and trouble.” He hoped “to make

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some good progress when the warm weather” arrived, but only if he “kept clear of hemorrhages.” At the end of the month he explained why May had accompanied him to a political event: “I am not allowed to go anywhere in these days without someone along who knows what to do in case I should blow up.” In March he wrote that “any day hemorrhages may begin again and I lose all I have gained. I have to face that possibility all the time.” Two months later he reported: “I am fairly well in these days although almost every day I have some slight hemorrhages—just little flecks that do not amount to anything except a warning. I make just the least possible exertion so as to take no chances.” Now frequent hemorrhages as well as coughing fits circumscribed his life, sapping his energy, shattering his ambition, and keeping him close to home.48 Only reports of a possible tuberculosis cure helped to dispel the gloom. “Although I don’t admit it publicly,” he wrote to Sarah, “I am hoping a lot from the Friedmann cure. My reason tells me that the chances are it is either a fake or a thing that will merely do a little good to a limited line of cases. My own case is so old and so far advanced that I can scarcely hope for much even if the serum does kill the germ. . . . Still, I can’t help dreaming about it; and I read every scrap of the reports with eager interest.” Far from admitting “it publicly,” Willard cautioned his California Outlook readers not to believe newspaper accounts. Because the cure was still in the “experimental stage,” it should not be “held up before the public as a probability.” He had learned the hard way that “tuberculosis is a form of malady that is full of . . . strange and uncharted possibilities. . . . Its active work is all concealed, and the surface symptoms are capricious and often misleading. All the more reason, then, why single instances of supposed cures have but little significance.” A man who once had promised miraculous lung cures in Los Angeles now warned that unrealistic expectations could kill: various tuberculosis sanatoriums and hospitals reported that “the publication of matter about the Friedmann cure is doing a great deal of harm in exciting hopes that are probably unavailing, and in Denver it is recorded that a number of deaths have been hastened by this cause.”49 “Write Often and Tell Us Everything”

Most of the extant letters between spring 1913 and early 1914 were either to or about Florence. In May, Charles told Sarah that, to his immense relief, doctors had concluded that the “cause of all” Florence’s troubles was her wisdom teeth, which had been growing “horizontally and upsetting all the molars.” Although she had needed a “very severe operation to get them out,” she was “up and dressed” a week later. As soon as she had regained her strength, she

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would go “back to the mountains—this time in the hope of getting a complete recovery.” He was not unduly optimistic. By the end of August she was well enough to depart for Radcliffe College in Boston.50 Why Radcliffe? Because Charles and May still played a major role in Florence’s life, they must have been largely responsible for that decision. Perhaps they wanted her to avoid the unpleasantness now associated with Stanford and to keep far away from both the boyfriend who continued to hover and the father whose dismal condition affected her so adversely. Or perhaps Charles’s inexorable decline had undermined his faith in California. Throughout the fall of 1913, the former Los Angeles booster enjoined his daughter to appreciate the many advantages of the East Coast. After receiving one of her first letters, he remarked, “I hope you won’t go around finding fault with Eastern ways and shortcomings of things in general. A large part of it is mere strangeness and sometimes you give yourself away for a rank provincial. . . . Don’t be too fiercely western.” He urged her to subscribe to a local newspaper so that she could discover which plays and concerts to attend and responded enthusiastically to her suggestion of traveling to New York with a friend. Recalling his own college trip to the city, he noted that it had “stirred [his] feelings and imagination deeply.” Even the climate won praise. When storms struck Boston in October, he wrote, “I am sorry you don’t seem to be getting any of the clear, crisp fall weather that I know you would enjoy—it is exhilarating.” When she complained about the “terrible” weather in early December, he chided her thus: “I have talked with scores of Harvard boys and graduates scores of times all through my life about college and existence there and not one of them ever mentioned the weather. With most eastern people weather being as it is bad most of the time is a thing people of strong character learn to take as it comes without fussing.”51 As in 1911, Willard followed every aspect of her school life with enormous interest and concern. After using his influence to gain her admission to a highly selective writing class, he tried to assuage her doubts about her abilities and reveled in her successes. We can only imagine the pressure she also must have felt to fill the emptiness in her parents’ lives. “No letter from you this morning which was quite a jar for your bereft parents,” Willard complained soon after she left. A month later he wrote, “News here consists of getting up in the morning, sticking round all day and going to bed at night.” One of his first letters closed with his injunction: “Write often and tell us everything.” No matter how much information she sent, he begged for more. If she mentioned that she had eaten crabs, he asked if they were good and if she had tried Eastern lobster yet. When she referred to a professor by name, he wanted to know

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his “line of work.” “You don’t tell us anything about the Hall,” he wrote in October. “Is the food good? Is your room comfortable? What French are you taking? Send us a catalogue so we can follow you. Remember everything about your life interests us.”52 Whatever Florence wrote left her vulnerable to criticism. Virtually all her father’s letters opened with a list of her spelling mistakes. After she reported “a bit of a triumph” in class, he urged her to “make a business of being modest.” Although pleased when she began to attend concerts, he sent this note of caution: “If you are going to hear music and talk music with people you ought to get hold of a musical dictionary and bone up a little or somebody may be winking behind your back.” When she remarked on her good sense of humor, he counseled her to “guard against saying that to others.”53 Health advice permeated Charles’s correspondence. Although doctors might be convinced they had found the cause of “all” her problems, he continued to worry. “Any nervous dyspepsia?” he asked in October. “If that comes you must let up instantly.” The following month he explained what symptoms demanded attention: “If hard work makes you hungry that is the best sign in the world because it shows the body is keeping up with the mind. Of course working the engine hard calls for more fuel. But when work gives you dyspepsia and you can’t eat, then your brain is a cannibal, drowning the body— while it lasts. Observe me for an illustration.” Other letters beseeched her to go to bed early, conserve her strength, eat regular meals, and dress warmly. Above all, he stressed the need for exercise. “There is one thing I have asked you about several times—and you have not answered me yet—and that is about gymnasium work,” he wrote in December. “We are very much in earnest about that and we expect you to take some regular exercise. Rushing about in the way you picture yourself is not exercise and will not be acceptable in lieu thereof. You are in the last two or three years putting the finishing touches on your growth and form and it is of the utmost importance that some expert person look you over occasionally.”54 But he could find little guidance for himself. He confided to Sarah that the gains of the previous spring had all “been reversed.” He experienced “more coughing, poor appetite and general weakness.” “Worst of all” was the pain in his right arm. One doctor diagnosed neuritis, another neuralgia. Willard could write only with enormous effort, moving the paper rather than the pen. “The beastly thing demoralizes me and causes me to put off writing except what must be done.” May’s health was only “fair.” She had “an almost perfect servant” but she also had added burdens. Charles was “a much more trying patient—so many things have to be done for [him].”55

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Although Charles wrote little to Florence about his deterioration, he mentioned her mother’s increased workload. “Isn’t it lucky for both of us,” he asked his daughter, “that she is so patient and devoted and so willing to take steps for others, no matter if she is tired and doesn’t feel like it? Suppose she had been one of those selfish kind or a sloppy, disorderly or inefficient woman. I would undoubtedly have pegged out five or six years ago and you and she would have had jobs in some store.” Intending to praise his wife, Charles accomplished the opposite. May’s care, he implied, was simply a natural extension of her personality, not real work demanding skill, knowledge, and effort. And once again he took credit for making the essential contribution to the household; May’s services were important only insofar as they sustained the family breadwinner. By the fall of 1913, Willard must have desperately wanted to deny the extent of May’s care. Lacking a nurse, she probably fed him, washed blood and sputum from his body, helped him to dress, and changed his clothes and bedding. Even if she tried to render some care invisible, Charles could not deny his extreme vulnerability and helplessness.56 He still anticipated better times in both his public and private writing that December. In an editorial entitled “The New Leaf,” Willard noted that the “entire year of 1913 has been for the American business man that very winter of his discontent.” He had confronted “uncertainty and the lack of confidence that goes with it.” Nevertheless, Willard could discern “promising omens for the turning of a new leaf,” most notably in the passage of a new currency and banking law and the dissolution of the Telephone and Telegraph Company. A letter to Florence used the same theme and vocabulary. After acknowledging that he had “not been as well as usual,” he insisted that he had “turned over a new leaf” the previous day. But Florence must have found little reassurance in his account: We had about ten days of very cold weather, 32 to 60 degrees accompanied by cold electric winds of the kind that make the chills run up and down your spine and bring out all the neuralgia you have inside. I made the mistake of trying to stand up against it and fight, whereas I should have surrendered and gone to bed. In fact I am satisfied now I have been on the wrong track for many weeks—struggling to be better than I am. It made an appalling increase in my cough and my fits of weakness were frequent and intense. It began to depress me a great deal and I fell to wondering if I was getting pretty close to the wind-up. But Saturday I turned over a new leaf and staid in bed nearly all day. Sunday the same and again today. The effect is quite remarkable. Also there is milder weather minus electricity. I feel a great improvement from the

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resting. Even my appetite is coming back. Coughing has diminished. . . . I am resolved from this experience to give up quickly hereafter when I begin to get weak and not try to make the will power take the place of strength.

Clinging to a belief in the power of his will, Willard had struggled to master his body for more than a quarter century. Now he was forced to surrender. He wrote very little after that letter. Six weeks later—on his fifty-fourth birthday, January 22, 1914—he was gone.57

Epilogue

Thirteen months before his death, Willard sent to a wide circle of friends a Christmas letter in which he both summarized his recent experiences and transcended them. Abandoning his customary camouflage, he spoke openly from the world of sickness: A man who is well, and able to get about, is allowed the happiness of meeting his friends at intervals, but one who is tied down by long illness, as I am, may see only those that come to him. As I live in rather an inaccessible spot, and as I am not always strong enough to see people, the number I actually meet is small, and tends perhaps to grow less. Yet there never was a time in my life when I felt more dependent on my friends than now, for they are the windows through which I get most of my view of the world of action—where I once played a small part myself, but from which I am now exiled. Whether this exile is temporary or permanent I do not know. I do know that it has already lasted over four years, and that I am now in a condition where the force of disease and the power of resistance seem to hold exactly even, but leave me unable to get about, save with the utmost strain and discomfort. However, my situation is not one that calls for sympathy. Tuberculosis seldom causes its victim much pain, and it leaves his mind free and, as a rule, cheerful. Sometimes he is even absurdly hopeful, which I believe I am not. It is my good fortune to have almost the only profession in which a man can earn a fair living and be sick-a-bed at the same time. I have a comfortable home in beautiful surroundings, and I lack for nothing that could help toward my recovery. How many of the hundreds 141

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of thousands who are afflicted with this disease are so fortunate? But after all, who are they in this world that really deserve pity? The unlucky? No. The sick? No. The poor? No. Who then. The unhappy— they and they only. And I am not unhappy. On the contrary, but for my knowledge that those who are dear to me are often troubled with fears on my account, I could truthfully say that this is the happiest period of my life. . . . I have discovered that four years of illness coming to one who has led a life of considerable activity has one surprising form of compensation— it gives him a chance to think. There is so much to think about in this big and wonderful world that it is a pity we can so seldom take a good crack at it. Life was always an utter mystery to me—awesome and tantalizing. At times the sense that there was something I ought to understand, and did not, half terrified me, but usually I was indifferent about it. I had no other philosophy than that of doing today’s work today—a philosophy that has this advantage, if industriously carried out: that it gives one no chance to ask himself questions. It was in the second year of my illness that the impatience began to wear away, and I was able to look on the world with calmness and in a spirit of inquiry. What followed seems almost like a miracle to me now, as I look back over it in the aggregate and analyze my changed and clarified point of view; and yet each step was natural and easy—almost inevitable. It was merely a process of mental housecleaning, and a cautious thinking out of problems and matching them together to make a consistent whole—a new philosophy of life, in which happiness and hope can grow as they never could before. I do not speak of this as anything unique, for I am sure it happens to many people at one time or another of their lives. Not every one needs a long illness, as I did, to put him though such an experience. And I don’t pretend to be able to communicate it to anybody—at least not by an easy and rapid method. I speak of it chiefly because I feel that when a man who has been imprisoned over four years with a wrecked body, and who has lost his home by fire, ventures to say that he is reasonably happy, and never enjoyed life so much—there is certainly some form of explanation due from him. And here you have it.1

Willard used stronger language than ever before to describe his physical limitations. He was “tied down” and “imprisoned” in his “wrecked body,” phrases which may have resonated with any readers who recalled the short stories he had published many years earlier. He made a rare acknowledgment of the possibility of death. And he described himself as “exiled,” a word that

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had appeared repeatedly in his correspondence in the late 1880s to refer to his forced separation from home. Here he conveyed his sense of banishment from the world of the well. But his goal was not to elicit pity. Once again, he emphasized the boundary separating him from most people with tuberculosis. Unlike those who burdened the public purse, he supported himself and his family. His rebuilt home was “comfortable” and the Pasadena landscape “beautiful.” As in so many other letters, he also concealed more than he revealed. He minimized his physical pain and was silent about Florence’s recent collapse, May’s precarious health, his financial troubles, and the horror of experiencing the relentless progress of his illness. He described himself as dependent, but only in relation to his friends. There was no mention of his far greater reliance on May and other female caregivers. As many of his readers well knew, he also overstated his economic independence. It would be difficult to exaggerate the courage and will power he must have summoned to produce articles and editorials in the midst of great suffering. But we do not diminish his accomplishment if we remember that he could remain self-supporting only because two employers had granted him extended leaves at full salary, a friend crafted an editorial job ideally suited to him, a host of friends and acquaintances had paid off his mortgage, and his doctor had given him the use of a house rent free. Nevertheless, this letter was not simply one more attempt to present himself in an acceptable light. Although he spoke of his growing “happiness,” the letter had none of the naive optimism that had pervaded his booster writings. Rather than extolling the “energy,” “industry,” and “enterprise” of the AngloSaxons who had rescued Southern California from the somnolent Mexicans, he emphasized the joy he had discovered in stillness. Relinquishing the fantasy of a world free of adversity, he had glimpsed the possibility of personal transformation in illness. Simplifying his life, he had begun to live more intensely. He soon received what he described to Sarah as “a wonderful collection of responses—many of them touching and beautiful.” Several assured him he had not been forgotten. The writers thought of him often, toasted him at their clubs, and refrained from visiting only to preserve his strength. His weekly editorials reached a wide audience. “I have kept in touch with you from the pieces that you write in the Outlook, and which I always read with a great pleasure, interest and improvement to my knowledge of things,” wrote John MacKay Elliott, president of the First National Bank of Los Angeles. “I do this while I do not always agree with you.”2 Some letter writers sent poems or quotations from philosophers. Troubles of their own enabled a few friends to empathize with Willard. “You will

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remember that I have been through the mill myself, on the lung trouble problem,” wrote businessman Frank W. King, “so I can appreciate the many trials you have endured.” Lydia B. Torrey commented, “I can meet you on equal terms for what illness has done for you, time has accomplished for me.” Writing on Southern California Music Company letterhead, Frank Hart remarked, “Many, many times I have thought of you and your illness, since my own remarkable recovery from a trouble which is commonly supposed to be more fatal than your own.”3 The letters also reminded Willard that he was far more than his disease. “The laws of compensation ever hold,” wrote banker Jess Stoddard. “With the physique of a foot-ball player you could not have the subtle mind and the sweetness of character evidenced by your letter.” Willard’s “intellect” remained “undimmed” despite his “prostrated” “body,” according to W. E. Slossen, another banker. “In wishing you a happy and prosperous New Year,” wrote Maurice Harris Newmark, a businessman and leader of the Jewish community, “I can only add that it is a source of gratification to know that you are unconquerable and enjoy your existence far more than most of those who are bodily sound.” Lee D. Gates wrote on trust company stationery, “Yours is a martyrdom and a heroism. Out of your weakness you have reaped strength, and have sown strength for others’ reaping.” Physical frailty also did not prevent Willard from fulfilling the masculine ethos. “You have always done a big man’s work, on a big man’s job, in bettering the condition of our commercial and municipal life,” commented lawyer Bradner W. Lee. Theodore Roosevelt added, “You are one of those men who more than pull their weight in the world.”4 Once again, Willard was described as a warrior. “To all who know you, you are a hero,” the naturalist John Muir wrote. “I admire and love you and with warmest enthusiasm congratulate you on the victories you have won in these hard fought life battles.” T. E. Gibbon, a lawyer and Progressive leader, recalled his early acquaintance with Willard “in a struggle that tested some of the mettle in a man.” Superior Court Judge Frank G. Finlayson wrote, “You fought the good fight valiently [sic] and your life is today an inspiration.” Others lauded Willard’s “indomitable will-power,” “strength of character,” “stout heart,” “courage and grit,” and ability to be “brave and unflinching in adversity.”5 His cheerfulness also won special praise. “It is optimism such as yours that makes all of us happier,” wrote newspaperman Edward A. Dickson. Robert Poindexter sent this note: “I shall always retain and cherish your letter as a choice possession; and when I am weak, ill, or discouraged, I will read it and try to smile at misfortune.” Lawyer Henry O’Melveny commented, “Your genial optimism is pervasive, and warms my heart.” Banker W. C. Patterson

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wrote, “Your splendid philosophy, which has developed through your years of affliction, has been a most valuable lesson to me. With my peculiar temperament, I fear that I could not be so placid, or half so cheerful.”6 Nine days after Willard’s death, a series of obituaries appeared in the California Outlook, lauding his optimism and integrity and reviewing his major accomplishments—his successful fight for a “free” harbor; his leadership of the chamber of commerce, Jobbers’ Association, and the Municipal League; and his voluminous writing, including short stories, nonfiction, and countless editorials. Here, too, Willard’s friends asserted that his long struggle with illness had elevated him to the status of a warrior. “Charlie Willard was a hero,” proclaimed A. M. Scherer, president of the Throop College of Technology in Pasadena. “It takes infinitely more pluck to fight disease with good cheer through years of isolation and suffering than to face death at the cannon’s mouth with the blood at fever heat and your comrades surging around you and the flag of glory beckoning through the smoke.” Dr. Norman Bridge wrote, “He lived the life of a solder liable to go under fire at any moment. His fight against his infirmity was made with a courage undaunted by pain, and undisturbed by a thought of surrender.” Russ Avery, a local lawyer and Progressive leader, added, “Helping others while powerless to help himself; fighting for the right and battling each day for the public good, every nightfall found him losing his own life-battle and one step nearer the setting sun. He never wavered in his purpose to make each hour count for his country; and he died as much on the battle field of glory as did any hero of ’61.”7 By comparing Willard to a warrior, his friends invested his illness with special significance. Unlike the thousands of indigent people with tuberculosis who had to be banished from the metropolis, Willard was a hero, worthy of the highest praise and emulation. Such tributes bestowed the social recognition and respect he long had craved. But they ignored the lesson he had tried to communicate in his Christmas letter. The deepest happiness, he had asserted, could come from acknowledging the vulnerability and pain inevitable in life, not from conquering them. That was a message most elite Los Angelenos were not prepared to hear.8 Florence also disregarded some of her father’s advice. Just as he had married May against his family’s wishes within a year of the death of his primary parent, so, eight months after the death of hers, Florence wed Harold S. Ryerson, the high school boyfriend of whom Charles had disapproved. But she ultimately fulfilled some of his dreams for her by writing detective stories and screen plays; among her many credits was The Wizard of Oz. The

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improvement in her health also apparently held. She died in June 1965, at the age of seventy-three. Willard did not have to witness the outbreak of World War I a few months after his death and the gradual waning of the progressive movement, which, like his daughter, had inspired his best hopes. But he also missed California’s first sustained campaign against tuberculosis. Among the many social welfare measures initiated by the Progressive governor, Hiram Warren Johnson, in 1911 was the establishment of a commission to investigate “the tuberculosis problem of California” and “determine the best means of its eradication.” The report, issued shortly after Willard died, urged a vast infusion of funds for tuberculosis programs. A 1915 law provided a three dollar a week subsidy to counties for every indigent patient in an approved facility. Los Angeles County responded quickly to that law, beginning construction of Olive View Sanatorium in the northern part of the San Fernando Valley in 1918 and admitting the first 95 patients in 1920; the facility grew almost continually until 1931, when capacity reached 971. The newly established local health departments also placed tuberculosis control at the top of their agendas, opening clinics and hiring nurses to visit patients at home.9 Although Willard had feared that an expanded county hospital would attract indigent consumptives from other states, those new programs probably would have won his approval. Both local and state officials shared his concerns about encouraging the wrong kind of migration and thus imposed strict residence requirements, limiting eligibility to people who had lived in the county for at least a year. Willard also might well have applauded the public health response to the many Mexicans who poured into Southern California during the 1920s. Like the housing reformers associated with Willard’s Municipal League in the early 1900s, health officials blamed Mexicans for spreading various communicable diseases. Reports of high tuberculosis rates attracted particular concern, provoking efforts to bar Mexicans during the 1920s and expel them during the 1930s. We can find echoes of this past in growing fears today about the resurgence of tuberculosis, especially among “new” immigrants, and in calls to restrict their entry.10 The dominance of chronic diseases today also endows Willard’s story with contemporary significance. The major causes of death are now heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Although physicians can save the lives of many people who previously would have died quickly from those conditions, the survivors frequently experience severe disabilities for years. Many elderly people suffer simultaneously from multiple chronic ailments. But recovery remains the only acceptable outcome, just as it was in turn-of-the century Los Angeles. Millions

Epilogue

147

of people thus face Willard’s dilemma of contending with serious, ongoing health problems in a society convinced that sickness is repellent and abnormal. We saw that Willard carefully camouflaged his illness in public and attempted to separate himself from other tuberculosis sufferers. The exalted value assigned to good health today encourages many people to hide physical complaints and distinguish themselves from other sufferers. Willard showed the costs of doing so. Concealment frequently absorbed his final energy reserves. By assigning unremittingly negative traits to other people with his disease, he intensified the hostility surrounding it. And yet Willard also demonstrated the importance of honoring sickness as a source of knowledge by talking about it. The ill today have resources unavailable to him. In support groups and published personal stories, sick people reach out to each other, trying to make sense of their troubles and sharing counsel and wisdom. Lacking those sources of sustenance, Willard bore witness to his suffering in his letters. Even while penning triumphalist narratives about recovery and rebirth in the land of sunshine, he wrote to his family in a different voice. Although his booster articles and political commentary received the greatest praise, his weekly chronicle represents his ultimate gift.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all letters to and from Charles Dwight Willard are in the Charles Dwight Willard Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. These abbreviations are used in the notes: CDW

Charles Dwight Willard

HEW

Harriet Edgar Willard (CDW’s mother)

SW

Samuel Willard (CDW’s father)

SH

Sarah Hiestand (CDW’s older sister)

MW

May Willard (CDW’s younger sister)

MMW

May McGregor Willard (CDW’s wife)

FW

Florence Willard (CDW’s daughter)

Introduction

1. CDW to SW, letter dated 1909, but contents indicate it should be sometime in spring 1910. 2. Karen Fiser, Words like Fate and Pain (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland Publishers, 1992), 3. 3. The major histories of tuberculosis in the United States on which I draw include Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Georgina D. Feldberg, Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Barron H. Lerner, Contagion and Confinement: Controlling Tuberculosis along the Skid Road (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 4. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 114–115. 5. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death. Chapter 1

Encountering Illness

1. CDW, “In the Pergola,” California Outlook 14 (Feb. 15, 1913): 5. A potentially fatal infection often caused by contaminated water, typhoid fever typically results in high fever, rashes on the abdomen and chest, and intestinal problems. See Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 218; Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 24; comments of Dr. F. M. Pottenger, Southern California Practitioner 21, no. 12 (Dec. 1906): 606; René Dubos and Jean Dubos, Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (1952; repr., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 15.

149

150

Notes to Pages 3–11

2. See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 115. 3. CDW, “In the Pergola,” 6; “A Brief Review of Facts Concerning Charles Dwight Willard,” California Outlook (Jan. 31, 1914): 6; Florence Ryerson Clements, “Notes,” manuscript in Willard Collection; SW to CDW, Feb. 1913. 4. “A Brief Review”; Clements, “Notes.” 5. CDW, “In the Pergola,” California Outlook (Feb. 15, 1913): 5; Bates, Bargaining for Life, 27–28; Ott, Fevered Lives, 39–40; Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 131–175; Billy M. Jones, Health-Seekers in the Southwest, 1817–1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), 146; Norman Bridge, The Marching Years (New York: Duffield and Co., 1920), 151, 189. 6. Bates, Bargaining for Life, 27; Bridge, Marching Years, 145. 7. Bridge, Marching Years, 145; I. M. Holt, ed., The Great Interior Fruit Belt and Sanitarium of Southern California (Riverside, Calif.: Press and Horticulturist Establishment, 1885); the quotation by the “former invalid” is in John E. Baur, The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870–1900 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1959), 119; J.F.T. Jenkins, “Southern California for Invalids,” in Great Interior Fruit Belt, ed. Holt, 63. 8. Benjamin Cummings Truman, Homes and Happiness in the Golden State of California: Being a Description of the Empire State of the Pacific Coast: Its Inducements to Native and Foreign-Born Emigrants; Its Productiveness of Soil and Its Productions; Its Vast Agricultural Resources; Its Healthfulness of Climate and Equability of Temperature; and Many Other Facts for the Information of the Homeseeker and Tourist, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker and Co, 1885), 51, quoted in David M. Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 39–40. 9. CDW, “In the Pergola,” California Outlook (Feb. 15, 1913): 5. 10. George F. Weeks, California Copy (Washington, D.C.: Washington College Press, 1928; Joan Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1961), 3–4. 11. Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem, 3–4; Gloria Ricci Lothrop, “The Boom of the ’80s Revisited,” Southern California Quarterly 75 (fall–winter 1993): 278; Glenn S. Dumke, The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington, 1944). 12. Ott, Fevered Lives, 22–23; CDW to MW, Feb. 11, 1886. 13. CDW to MW, Feb. 11, 1886. 14. CDW to MW, Feb. 11, 1886. 15. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 18. 16. “Journal of Marian L. Moore, 1831–1860,” in The Female Experience: An American Documentary, ed. Gerda Lerner (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 176–177. 17. CDW to SH, March 27, 1886. See also Ingersoll’s Century Annals of San Bernardino County, 1769–1904 (Los Angeles: L. A. Ingersoll, 1904), 812–813; and Emily K. Abel, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 68–82. 18. CDW to SH, Feb. 18, 1886; CDW to MW, Feb. 27, 1886. 19. CDW to MW, May 17, 1886.

Notes to Pages 11–19

151

20. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 161–167; CDW to HEW, Feb. 15, 1886. 21. CDW to SH, Feb. 18, 1886; According to medical sociologist Kathy Charmaz, Willard’s response was typical of many patients newly diagnosed with chronic disease (Kathy Charmaz, Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991], 15). 22. CDW to SH, Feb. 18, 1886; CDW to SH, Feb. 27, 1886. 23. CDW to HEW, March 4, 1886. 24. David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (1973; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4–9; CDW to HEW, March 8, 1886; CDW to SH, Nov. 5, 1886. 25. CDW to HEW, March 8, 1886. 26. CDW to SW, March 19, 1886. 27. CDW to HEW, March 22, 1886; Ott, Fevered Lives, 72; CDW to HEW, March 22, 1886; on neurasthenia, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 77–120; F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1987); Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon Books 1986), 137–166; Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 185–193. 28. CDW to MW, April, 16, 1886. 29. CDW to HEW, May 25, 1886; CDW to SW, April 12, 1886. 30. CDW to HEW, May 2, 1886; CDW to SH, June 9, 1886. 31. CDW to SH, June 9, 1886; CDW to SH, June 18, 1886; CDW to MW, April 16, 1886. 32. CDW to MW, Oct. 1, 1886; Norman Bridge, Tuberculosis, Recast from Lectures Delivered at Rush Medical College, in Affiliation with the University of Chicago (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1903), 182. 33. CDW to MW, Oct. 10, 1886; CDW to MW, Oct. 18, 1886. 34. CDW to MW, Nov. 3, 1886; Philosopher Susan J. Brison writes, “In contrast to the involuntary experiencing of traumatic memories, narrating memories to others (who are strong and empathic enough to be able to listen) enables survivors to gain more control over the traces left by trauma” (Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002], 71). 35. CDW to MW, Nov. 3, 1886. 36. CDW to SH, Nov. 5, 1886. 37. CDW to HEW, Oct. 31, 1886; CDW to HEW, Nov. 17, 1886. 38. Dumke, Boom of the Eighties; Lothrop “Boom of the ’80s Revisited,” 263–301; Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles, A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 486; Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 21, 67, 137. 39. Dumke, Boom of the Eighties, 45; Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 19; CDW to HEW, Oct. 31, 1886; CDW to MW, Nov. 17, 1886; CDW to MW, Nov. 28, 1886. 40. CDW to HEW, Nov. 17, 1886; Helen Raitt and Mary Collier Wayne, We Three Came West (San Diego: Calif.: Tofua Press, 1974), 131; diary of Martha Shaw Farnsworth,

152

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Notes to Pages 19–26

Feb. 19, 1893: the complete diary is located in the Martha Farnsworth Collection, no. 28, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas. For an annotated and abbreviated version, see Plains Woman: The Diary of Martha Farnsworth, 1882–1922, ed. Marlene Spring and Haskell Springer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1888); see also Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 103. Diary of Martha Shaw Farnsworth; CDW to HEW, Nov. 28, 1886. CDW to HEW, Nov. 17, 1886; CDW to HEW, Nov. 28, 1886. CDW to HEW, Dec. 5, 1886; CDW to MW, Dec. 7, 1886. CDW to HEW, Jan. 16, 1887. CDW to MW, Feb. 3, 1887. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 26–30; CDW to HEW, Feb. 12, 1887. CDW to HEW, Feb. 20, 1887; CDW to MW, Feb. 26, 1887; CDW to HEW, Feb. 27, 1887.

Chapter 2

“A Real Man Again”

1. CDW to HEW, Sept. 17, 1887. 2. CDW to HEW, Nov. 4, 1887; Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 92. 3. Owen H. O’Neill, History of Santa Barbara County, State of California: Its People and Its Resources (Santa Barbara: Union Printing Co., 1939), 258; CDW to SH, Sept. 29, 1887; CDW to SH, Oct. 29, 1887; CDW to SH, Sept. 20, 1887; CDW to HEW, Oct. 2, 1887. 4. CDW to HEW, Oct. 16, 1887. 5. CDW to HEW, Nov. 4, 1887. 6. CDW to HEW, Nov. 24, 1887; CDW to HEW, Dec. 18, 1887; CDW to HEW, Jan. 29, 1888. 7. CDW to HEW, Dec. 23, 1887; CDW to HEW, Jan. 4, 1888. 8. Sociologist Kathy Charmaz observes that “the meaning of disability, dysfunction, or impairment becomes real in daily life. Until put to test in daily routines, someone cannot know what having an altered body is like. . . . When ill people return to work, the ‘before and after’ contrasts become striking” (Kathy Charmaz, Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991], 21–22). CDW to HEW, Oct. 30, 1887; CDW to HEW, Dec. 18, 1887. 9. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 73–91; Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, “Introduction: Disability History: From the Margins to the Mainstream,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Longmore and Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 22; Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, A Strenuous Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 52. 10. One widely circulated guide had included a physician’s claim that Santa Barbara was “the land of promise to the weary and desponding invalid” (quoted in John E. Baur, The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870–1900 [San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1959], 66). Historian John E. Baur claims that “tuberculosis carried off one third of all who died in Santa Barbara” during the late 1880s; that figure, however, cannot be verified (Baur, Health Seekers, 71). CDW to HEW, Dec. 28, 1887; CDW to HEW, March 13, 1887; CDW to HEW, Nov. 24, 1887. 11. CDW to HEW, Nov. 30, 1887; CDW to HEW, Nov. 24, 1887.

Notes to Pages 26–33

153

12. Norman Bridge, Tuberculosis, Recast from Lectures Delivered at Rush Medical College, in Affiliation with the University of Chicago (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1903), 182; CDW to HEW, Oct. 30, 1887. 13. CDW to HEW, Nov. 4, 1887. 14. David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 45–47. Sociologist Arthur W. Frank writes, “When we feel ourselves being taken over by something we do not understand, the human response is to create a mythology of what threatens us. We turn pain into an enemy to be fought. We think pain is victimizing us, either because ‘it’ is malevolent or because we have done something to deserve its wrath” (Arthur W. Frank, At The Will of the Body [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991], 30–31.). CDW to HEW, Nov. 4, 1887. 15. CDW to HEW, Nov. 11, 1887; CDW to HEW, Nov. 17, 1887. 16. CDW to HEW, Nov. 24, 1887. 17. CDW to NEW, Nov. 24, 1887. 18. CDW to HEW, Nov. 30, 1887; CDW to HEW, Dec. 11, 1887; CDW to HEW, Dec. 18, 1887; CDW to HEW, Jan. 4, 1888. 19. CDW to HEW, Jan. 4, 1888; Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories (New York: New American Library, 1960), 103, 124, 127; see Ann Folwell Stanford, Daniel J. Brauner, Tod S. Chambers, William J. Donnelly, Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, Suzanne Poirier, Barbara F. Sharf, “Reading Literary Theory, Reading Ivan Ilych; Old Wine in New Wineskins,” Caduceus 10 (winter 1994): 161–178. 20. CDW to HEW, March 2, 1888; CDW to HEW, April 1, 1888; Willard’s experience was more common than he probably realized. Sociologist Paul Starr estimates that income lost because of illness at the turn of the twentieth century tended to be “two or four times greater than health care costs” (Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry [New York: Basic Books, 1982], 245). 21. CDW to HEW, April 1, 1888. 22. CDW to SH, April 11, 1888; CDW to HEW, April 17, 1888; CDW to HEW, June 24, 1888; CDW to HEW, April 8, 1888 (dated 1887 but almost certainly 1888). 23. CDW to HEW, May 6, 1888; CDW to MW, April 29, 1888. 24. CDW to HEW, April 11, 1888; CDW to HEW, April 21, 1888; CDW to HEW, May 6, 1888; CDW to HEW, May 13, 1888; Frank, At the Will of the Body, 59. 25. Gloria Ricci Lothrop, “Boom of the ’80s Revisited,” Southern California Quarterly (fall–winter 1993): 285; Glenn S. Dumke, The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1944), 259; CDW to MW, April 29, 1888; CDW to HEW, Sept. 17, 1888. 26. CDW to HEW, May 21, 1888; CDW to HEW, May 28, 1888. 27. CDW to HEW, June 5, 1888; CDW to HEW, June 15, 1888. 28. CDW to HEW, Aug. 7, 1888; CDW to HEW, Aug. 8, 1888. 29. CDW to HEW, Aug. 7, 1888; CDW to SW, Aug. 12, 1888; CDW to MW, Aug. 17, 1888. 30. CDW to HEW, July 29, 1888; CDW to HEW, Aug. 26, 1888. 31. CDW to HEW, Nov. 20, 1888. See Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1995), 1–39; Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Bitter Fruit: Heredity, Disease, and Social Thought in Nineteenth-Century America,” in From Consumption to Tuberculosis: A Documentary History, ed. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 154–194. 32. CDW to HEW, Nov. 25, 1888.

154

Notes to Pages 34–42

33. CDW to HEW, Sept. 17, 1888; CDW to SH, March 8, 1888; CDW to HEW, Nov. 16, 1888; CDW to HEW, Sept. 2, 1888. 34. CDW to HEW, Oct. 22, 1888; CDW to HEW, Sept. 2, 1888. See The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, ed. Birgit Brander, et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 35. CDW to HEW, Dec. 29, 1888; CDW to HEW, Jan. 13, 1889. 36. CDW to HEW, Dec. 29, 1888. 37. CDW to HEW, Feb. 17, 1889; CDW to SW, Oct. 20, 1889; CDW to SW, Oct. 20, 1889; CDW to HEW, Feb. 23, 1890; Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); see Beatrix Hoffman, The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 9–14; Jason Kaufman, For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 38. CDW to HEW, March 3, 1889; CDW to HEW, April 5, 1889; CDW to HEW, Sept. 6, 1889. 39. CDW to HEW, June 30, 1889; CDW to HEW, Aug. 4, 1889. 40. CDW to HEW, June 18, 1889. 41. CDW to HEW, June 18, 1889; CDW to HEW, Feb. 14, 1890; CDW to MW, June 1, 1889. 42. CDW to HEW, Jan. 23, 1889; CDW to MW, June 1, 1889; CDW to MW, Jan. 14, 1889; CDW to HEW, Nov. 18, 1888; CDW to HEW, Nov. 21, 1889. 43. CDW to HEW, Jan. 13, 1889; CDW to HEW, Aug. 18, 1889; CDW to HEW, Nov. 25, 1888; CDW to SW, May 11, 1889; CDW to HEW, March 2, 1890. 44. Carnes, Secret Ritual, 14, 91–128. 45. CDW to SH, Aug. 25, 1888; CDW to HEW, April 5, 1889. 46. CDW to HEW, Dec. 19, 1888. 47. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 12–13; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 265; CDW to HEW, June 3, 1889. 48. Bridge, Tuberculosis, 177–178. 49. Georgina D. Feldberg, Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 31; Rotundo, American Manhood, 251–258; Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon, 1986). 50. See especially Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Rotundo, American Manhood, 223; Philip Firmin (pseud.), “The Family Tree,” Argonaut 27 (Aug. 25, 1890): 4; Philip Firmin (pseud.), “Boys and Frogs,” Argonaut 23 (Dec. 31, 1888): 4–6. 51. CDW to HEW, letter dated Dec. 8, 1888 (but probably 1889); CDW to HEW, March 29, 1889; CDW to HEW, Oct. 20, 1889; Rotundo, American Manhood, 223. 52. CDW, “The Herald of Fate,” Argonaut 22 (June 13, 1888): 4–5; Firmin, “Family Tree”; CDW, “Sentence Suspended,” Argonaut 27 (July 28, 1890): 4–5; CDW to HEW, April 21, 1889; CDW to MW, Feb. 4, 1890. 53. CDW to HEW, Feb. 24, 1889; CDW to HEW, Feb. 2, 1889; CDW to HEW, June 3, 1889; CDW to HEW, Jan. 21, 1889; CDW to HEW, April 27, 1890. 54. CDW to HEW, June 3, 1889; CDW, “In the Pergola,” California Outlook, March 22, 1913.

Notes to Pages 42–51

155

55. CDW to HEW, Oct. 22, 1888; CDW to HEW, June 3, 1889; CDW to MW, Dec.1890. 56. Will Dwight (pseud.), “The Superfluous Man,” Argonaut 27 (Sept. 29, 1890): 4; CDW to SW, Aug. 12, 1888; CDW to HEW, Aug. 7, 1888; Philip Firmin (pseud.), “The Doppelgänger,” Argonaut 23 (Sept. 17, 1888): 4–5. 57. Firmin, “Boys and Frogs,” 4–5; Philip Firmin (pseud.), “Tomasson: A Tale of a Materialized Figment,” Argonaut 26 (April 14, 1890): 4–5; CDW, “An Auto-da-Fé,” Argonaut 26 (May 5, 1890): 4–5; Philip Firmin (pseud.), “Second Death,” Argonaut 27 (Dec. 15, 1890): 4–5. 58. CDW, “The Restored Palimpsest,” Argonaut 25 (Sept. 16, 1889): 4–5; Will N. Harben (pseud.), “Beyond the Veil,” Argonaut 28 (May 11, 1891): 4; CDW, “Sentence Suspended,” 4; CDW, “Sleep No More,” Argonaut 27 (Dec. 15, 1890): 4–5; Dwight, “Superfluous Man,” 4; Firmin, “Boys and Frogs,” 4–6. 59. CDW, “Sleep No More,” 4–5; “An Amendment to Destiny,” Argonaut (Dec. 1, 1890): 5; CDW, “Herald of Fate,” 4–5. Chapter 3

Boosting Los Angeles

1. Unfortunately, the only information we have about the cause of Harriet’s death is that she had complained repeatedly about stomach troubles during the past several months; CDW to HEW, letter dated Oct. 29, 1889, but probably written the previous year. 2. CDW to MW, Sept. 12, 1890. 3. CDW to MW, Sept. 12, 1890; The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen is located in the Huftalen Collection, State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City; Louisa May Alcott to Ellen Conway, Concord, Massachusetts, May 1, 1878, The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1987), 229–230. 4. Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 182; Diary of Martha Shaw Farnsworth, Feb. 19, 1893, Martha Farnsworth Collection, no. 28, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas; Lucy S. Mitchell, Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 105. 5. CDW to MW, Sept. 12, 1890. 6. CDW to MW, Sept. 20, 1890. 7. CDW to MW, Oct. 19, 1890. 8. CDW to MW, letter dated “Sunday Evening, 1890.” 9. CDW to SW, July 12, 1891. 10. CDW to SW, July 12, 1891; Philip Firmin (pseud.), “Boys and Frogs,” Argonaut 23 (December 31, 1888): 4–6; CDW, A History of the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles, California, from its Foundation, September 1888 to the Year 1900 (Los Angeles: Kingsley-Barnes & Neuner, 1899), 187. 11. CDW to MW, “Monday evening,” March 1891. 12. CDW to MW, “Monday evening,” March 1891. 13. CDW to MW, “Monday evening,” March 1891. 14. CDW to SW, March 5, 1891. 15. State laws passed in the early twentieth century often included tuberculosis as one of the disorders whose carriers could not marry. See Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 51.

156

Notes to Pages 52–57

16. CDW to SW, April 9, 1891; CDW to SW, June 10, 1891. 17. CDW to SW, Aug. 5, 1891. 18. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 80. 19. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 67, 78–79; “The Right Kind of People,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 1 (Dec. 1894): 10; CDW, “The Padres and the Indians,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 4 (Sept. 1894): 75; Harry Ellington Brook, The Land of Sunshine, Southern California: An Authentic Description of Its Natural Features, Resources and Prospects, Containing Reliable Information for the Homeseeker, Tourist, and Invalid (Los Angeles: World’s Fair Association and Bureau of Information, 1893), 11. See Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 20. Brook, Land of Sunshine, 63; Spencer G. Willard, “Why Southern California Is Prosperous,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 3 (Aug. 1894): 60. 21. See Josephine Kingsbury Jacobs, “Sunkist Advertising” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1966), 1–5; Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California though the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 140–141. 22. CDW, History of the Chamber of Commerce, 145–147. 23. Land of Sunshine 2, no. 4 (March 1895): 71 [no title]; Owen Capelle, “The Citrus Fair,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 5 (April 1895): 88; Final Report of the California World’s Fair Commission: Including a Description of All Exhibits from the State of California, Collected and Maintained under Legislative Enactments, at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1894), 49. 24. Jacobs, “Sunkist Advertising,” 7; Starr, Inventing the Dream, 86; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 135–139; David M. Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 54–56; CDW to SW, Oct. 21, 1893. 25. “A Year’s Forecast,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 2 (July 1895): 37; “Our Initial Number,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 2 (July 1894): 44; “A Five Dollar Letter,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 3 (Aug. 1894): 58. 26. CDW to SW, Oct. 27, 1895; Frank Van Vleck, “La Fiesta de Los Angeles, 1895,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 5 (April 1895): 83–84; “La Fiesta de Los Angeles,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 6 (May 1895): 105. For a history of the celebrations, see William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 49–90. 27. C. R. Pattee, “The Land of Sunshine,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 1 (June 1894): 13; W. C. Patterson, “Why Am I Here?” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 2 (Jan. 1895): 38; M. Y. Beach, “Southern California from a Health-Seeker’s Point of View,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 5 (Oct. 1894): 101; “Living on Climate,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 5 (Oct. 1894): 98. 28. Horace Edwards, “A Southern California Specialty,” Land of Sunshine 1, no.3 (Aug. 1894): 61; Frank Wiggins, “Some Big Things,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 2 (Jan. 1895): 36; Theodosia B. Shepherd, “The Rose in Southern California,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 2 (Jan. 1895): 23; Mark Harrison and Michael Worboys, “A Disease of Civilisa-

Notes to Pages 57–65

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

157

tion,” in Migrants, Minorities, and Health: Historical and Contemporary Studies, ed. Lara Marks and Michael Worboys (New York: Routledge, 1997), 96. Beach, “Health-Seeker’s Point of View,” 101; M.E.W., “A Home in Southern California,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 6 (Nov. 1894): 117; “Southern California Resorts,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 1 (June 1894): 3; Richard Gird, “Beet Culture in Southern California,” Land of Sunshine 1, no. 1 (June 1894): 17. See Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 92–109. M.E.W., “A Home in Southern California,” 117; “Pomona—A Typical Community,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 2 (Jan. 1895): 39; “The Pick of the Crop,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 6 (May 1895): 97. See also “Our Amateur Photographs,” Land of Sunshine 2, no. 2 (Jan. 1895): 28; Wrobel, Promised Lands, 174. CDW to MW, Oct. 11, 1892; CDW to SW, Oct. 27, 1895. Willard also stopped writing short stories. CDW to SW, July 12, 1891. CDW to SW, Sept. 26, 1891; CDW to SW, Dec. 6, 1891. CDW to SW, July 12, 1891; CDW to SW, Aug. 19, 1891; CDW to SW, March 17, 1895; CDW to SW, March 19, 1891; CDW to SW, Jan. 31, 1892; CDW to SW, Jan. 31, 1892. Although Frank Wiggins, the assistant secretary of the chamber, was superintendent of most fairs, Willard worked closely with him and occasionally assumed primary responsibility. CDW to SW, March 17, 1895; CDW to SW, Oct. 27, 1895; CDW to SH, March 28, 1896. CDW to MW, Oct. 11, 1892; CDW to SW, Dec. 11, 1893. CDW to SW, Nov. 2, 1891; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 186–187; see also F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 12. CDW to SW, July 7, 1893; CDW to SW, Jan. 14, 1894; CDW to SW, April 2, 1894. CDW to SH, March 28, 1896; CDW to SW, July 13, 1896. CDW to MW, Nov. 24, 1891; CDW to SW, Dec. 6, 1891; CDW to SW, Jan. 24, 1892; CDW to SW, March 27, 1892. CDW to SW, Feb. 17, 1894; Dr. Benjamin Rush quoted in Susan E. Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 20, 25, 44–48. CDW to SW, Oct. 23, 1894; CDW to SW, Nov. 13, 1896; Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 229. CDW to SW, May 19, 1895. CDW to SW, Nov. 2, 1891. CDW to SW, July 12, 1891; Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 25, 71. Harry Ellington Brook, The County and City of Los Angeles in Southern California (Los Angeles, Times-Mirror Co., 1893), 311; CDW to MW, Nov. 24, 1891; CDW to SW, Dec. 6, 1891; CDW to SW, Nov. 13, 1896. CDW to MW, Oct. 30, 1892; CDW to SW, May 25, 1894; CDW to SW, Sept. 3, 1894. CDW to SW, Jan. 24, 1892; CDW to MW, June 14, 1892; CDW to MW, July 11, 1892; CDW to MW, Aug. 28, 1892.

158

Notes to Pages 65–71

50. CDW to HEW, April 17, 1888; CDW to HEW, June 24, 1888; CDW to MW, “Monday evening,” March 1891; CDW to MW, Oct. 30, 1893. 51. Margaret Lock, Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 383; CDW to HEW, Sept. 2, 1888; CDW to HEW, Oct. 6, 1888; CDW to HEW, Dec. 19, 1888. 52. CDW to MW, July 31, 1892; CDW to MW, Dec. 16, 1892; CDW to MW, Aug. 28, 1892. 53. CDW to SW, Aug. 19, 1891; CDW to MW, Feb. 5, 1893. 54. See D. C. Barber, “The Care of Tuberculous Patients at the Los Angeles County Hospital,” Southern California Practitioner 24, no. 1 (January 1909): 24. 55. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories (New York: New American Library, 1960), 135. Chapter 4

Reforming Los Angeles

1. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Who Were the Progressives? (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 4; CDW, “Who Are the Pessimists?” California Outlook (July 22, 1911): 2. 2. George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 86–88; California Progressivism Revisited, ed. William Deverell and Tom Sitton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 3. CDW, The Free Harbor Contest at Los Angeles: An Account of the Long Fight Waged by the People of Southern California to Secure a Harbor Located at a Point Open to Competition (Los Angeles: Kingsley-Barnes & Neuner, 1899) [the words “sinister force” appear on page 15]; Donald Ray Culton, “Charles Dwight Willard: Los Angeles City Booster and Professional Reformer, 1888–1914” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1971), 104; William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 93–122. 4. See Tom Sitton, John Randolph Haynes, California Progressive (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 22–23; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 248; CDW to SW, Jan. 3, 1897. 5. Founded in 1871, the Express was one of the city’s four major newspapers. See Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 28; Minutes of March 17, 1897, “Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Minutes of Meetings, December 18, 1895–July 2, 1897,” carton 1, Records of the Chamber of Commerce, Special Collections, Doheny Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; CDW to SW, March 23, 1897. 6. CDW to SW, May 12, 1897. 7. CDW to SW, May 12, 1897. 8. Some of the editorials I attribute to Willard may in fact have been written by others. None of the editorials was signed. Willard wrote most, but not all. Nevertheless, he did approve all that appeared. Express, June 2, 1897, Oct. 17, 1898, April 5, 1897, Oct. 21, 1898, April 20, 1897, June 1, 1897. 9. Express, March 16, 1897, July 13, 1898. 10. See Gerald Woods, “ ‘A Penchant for Probity’: California Progressives and the Disreputable Pleasures,” in California Progressivism Revisited, ed. Deverell and Sitton, 99–113; see also Express, March 18, 1897, March 20, 1897, March 24, 1897, June 7, 1897, June 8, 1897, Aug. 10, 1897; June 11, 1898, July 18, 1898, Aug. 23, 1898.

Notes to Pages 72–78

159

11. Express, April 5, 1897; April 6, 1897, June 17, 1898, May 5, 1898, May 5, 1898. 12. Express, May 21, 1898, June 23, 1898, May 3, 1898, Aug. 12, 1898, July 19, 1898, Aug. 13, 1898, Aug. 8, 1898, Aug. 2, 1898. 13. Express, July 7, 1898, July 9, 1898, Aug. 5, 1898. 14. Express, Aug. 2, 1898, Aug. 6, 1898, Aug. 18, 1898. 15. CDW to SW, Aug. 13, 1897. 16. CDW to SW, Aug. 13, 1897; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25. 17. CDW to SW, Dec. 19, 1897. 18. CDW to SW, Feb. 25, 1898; CDW to SW, June 17, 1898. 19. CDW to SH, June 28, 1898; Mitchell’s quotation is in Ann Douglas Wood, “ ‘The Fashionable Diseases’: Women’s Complaints and Their Treatment in NineteenthCentury America,” in Women and Health in America, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 225; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall Paper,” in The Great Modern American Short Stories, ed. William Dean Howells (New York, Boni and Liveright, 1920), 320–337; Regina Markell Morantz, “The Perils of Feminist History,” in Woman and Health in America, ed. Leavitt, 239–245. 20. CDW to SW, Dec. 5, 1898. 21. CDW to SW, Dec. 5, 1898. 22. George H. Kress and Walter Lindley, A History of the Medical Profession of Southern California, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Press of the Times-Mirror Printing and Binding House, 1910), 109. Founded in Germany in the early 1800s, during a period when regular physicians applied such “heroic” remedies as bloodletting and the administration of large doses of purgatives, homeopathy recommended giving small amounts of all medications. Practitioners also believed that the efficacy of drugs could be determined by the symptoms produced in healthy people and that the suppression of an itch caused many chronic diseases. See Martin Kaufman, “Homeopathy in America: The Rise and Fall and Persistence of a Medical Heresy,” in Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America, ed. Norman Gevitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 99–123; John E. Baur, The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870–1900 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1959), 80–91. Arriving in the early 1920s, the writer Louis Adamic found, “in addition to thousands of more or less regular doctors,” “no end of chiropractors, osteopaths, ‘drugless physicians,’ faith healers, health lecturers, manufacturers and salesmen of all sorts of health ‘stabilizers’ and ‘normalizers,’ psychoanalysts, phynotists, mesmerists, the glow-of-life mystics, astro-therapeutists, miracle men and women” (Louis Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932], 219). Ads for many of those practitioners filled the Express in the late 1890s; CDW to SW, Dec. 5, 1898; CDW to SW, Dec. 5, 1898. 23. CDW to SW, March 13, 1898; Express, April 22, 1899. 24. CDW to SW, March 13, 1899; CDW, A History of the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles, California, from its Foundation, September 1888, to the Year 1900 (Los Angeles: Kingsley-Barnes & Neuner, 1899); CDW, Free Harbor Contest. Two later works were CDW, City Government for Young People: A Study of the American City Adapted for Use and for Home Reading for Children (New York and London: Macmillan Co., 1906); and CDW, The Herald’s History of Los Angeles City (Los Angeles: Kingsley-Barnes & Neuner Co., 1901).

160

Notes to Pages 78–80

25. CDW to SW, April 22, 1900; Express, January 14, 1911. 26. Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 230; Municipal Affairs (June 1907): 5. 27. Because the diagnosis of consumption remained inexact during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those statistics are open to challenge. See Linda Bryder, “ ‘Not Always One and the Same Thing’: The Registration of Tuberculosis Deaths in Britain, 1900–1950,” Social History of Medicine 9, no. 2 [1996]: 253–265. Moreover, although health officials emphasized the high proportion of deaths attributed to people who recently had moved to the county, those officials never compared that group to the rest of the population; most people in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles recently had arrived from elsewhere; see Baur, Health Seekers, 163–164; Francis Marion Pottenger, The Fight against Tuberculosis, An Autobiography (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), 116. 28. Norman Bridge, “How Far Shall the State Restrict Individual Action of the Sick, Especially the Tuberculous,” California State Journal of Medicine 1 (1903): 180. 29. “Professional Beggar,” Express, Oct. 20, 1998. Although Willard wrote few articles during his two years as general manager, he read everything that appeared in the paper and excluded whatever he considered offensive; this article thus apparently won his approval. 30. Baur, Health Seekers; Max Vorspan and Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1970), 173–180; see George H. Kress, “Is the Health of Los Angeles Menaced by Pulmonary Tuberculosis?” California State Journal of Medicine 3 (Jan. 1905): 208. 31. Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 114–115. See 53,052 Lives: A Brief History of the Los Angeles Tuberculosis and Health Association, with a Report of Activities for 1936 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Tuberculosis and Health Association, 1937), no pagination. 32. Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 100–134; Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 179–185. On tramps, see Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); Todd Depastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 131–167; Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History (New York, Oxford University Press, 2002), 148–151; Eric H. Monkkonen, ed., Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1890–1935 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). The classic description of a moral panic is Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panic (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972). 33. Minutes of December 1895, Records of the Chamber of Commerce. See Depastino, Citizen Hobo, 12; Eric H. Monkkonen, “Regional Dimensions of Tramping, North and South, 1880–1910,” in Walking to Work, ed. Monkkonen, 193; Paul T. Ringenbach, Tramps and Reformers, 1873–1916: The Discovery of Unemployment in New York (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 3–79; Express, April 2, 1897. 34. Los Angeles Herald, Aug. 19, 1903.

Notes to Pages 81–86

161

35. CDW to SW, Jan. 13, 1902; C.H.E. to Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Sept. 15, 1899, file OD3085H, files of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Hall of Administration, Los Angeles. 36. Express, April 20, 1897; Helen Eastman Martin, The History of the Los Angeles County Hospital, 1878–1968, and the Los Angeles County–University of Southern California Medical Center, 1968–1978 (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Medical Center, 1979), 42; October 17, 1914, file OD#1197, files of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. 37. Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 11, 1902; “Resolutions in Regard to Board of Supervisors and Proposed County Hospital,” adopted November 14, 1902, file OD3110H, files of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors; Los Angeles Herald, April 9, 1903. 38. Donald Ray Culton, “Charles Dwight Willard: Los Angeles City Booster and Professional Reformer, 1888–1914” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1971), 219–220; Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 92, 183. 39. The term is David Sibley’s in Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (New York: Routledge, 1995), 43. 40. This section relies heavily on Jennifer Koslow, “Eden’s Underbelly: Female Reformers and Public Health in Los Angeles, 1889–1932” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2001), 52–80; William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 26; George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19. 41. Municipal Affairs 2, no. 5 (May 1907): 1–2; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 78–80; Titian Coffey, “The Housing Conditions of Los Angeles,” Southern California Practioner 21, no. 12 (Dec. 1906): 624. 42. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 11; CDW to MW, Feb. 27, 1886. 43. Coffey, “Housing Conditions,” 621; Koslow, “Eden’s Underbelly,” 61–71; Municipal Affairs 2, no. 5 (May 1907): 1–2; Municipal Affairs 3, no. 3 (March 1908): 4. 44. CDW, History of the Chamber of Commerce, 271. 45. See René Dubos and Jean Dubos, Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (1952; repr., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 3. Bederman observes, “Neurasthenia resulted when white men with highly evolved white bodies overspent their scarce nervous forces on the enervating activities of civilization” (Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 118). See also F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 6; John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 10. 46. CDW to SH, Aug. 26, 1901. 47. CDW to SH, Aug. 26, 1901; CDW to SW, June 17, 1902; CDW to SW, Oct. 5, 1901. The hydropathy movement advocated drinking water as well as bathing. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, “ ‘All Hail to Pure Cold Water!’ ” in Women and Health in America, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt (Madison: University of Madison Press, 1984), 246–254. 48. See Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 180–185; CDW to SW, April 21, 1903; CDW to MW, Dec. 13, 1906.

162

Notes to Pages 86–95

49. CDW to SH, Sept. 16, 1905; CDW to SW, July 8, 1906; CDW to MW, Dec. 13, 1906. 50. CDW to SH, Feb. 18, 1907; CDW to SW, Oct. 14, 1907; CDW to SW, Aug. 17, 1907. Chapter 5

“The Old Trouble”

1. CDW to SW, Oct. 4, 1907. 2. Hermann M. Biggs, The Administrative Control of Tuberculosis (New York: New York City Department of Health, 1909), 21; Charles-Edward Armory Winslow, The Life of Hermann Biggs, M.D., Sc., LL.D., Physician and Statesman of the Public Health (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1929), 198; New York City Charity Organization Society, Home Treatment of Tuberculosis in New York City: Being a Report of the Relief Committee of the Committee on the Prevention of Tuberculosis of the New York City Charity Organization Society (New York: New York City Charity Organization Society, 1908), 16. 3. Ernest A. Sweet, “Interstate Migration of Tuberculous Persons: Its Bearing on the Public Health, with Special Reference to the States of Texas and New Mexico,” Public Health Reports (April 16, 1915), 1150. 4. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 24. 5. Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 6. 6. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 19ff.; see Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 7. CDW to SW, Oct. 4, 1907; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 182. 8. CDW to SW, Oct. 4, 1907; Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41. 9. CDW to SH, Dec. 2, 1907. 10. CDW to MW, Dec. 23, 1907; CDW to SH, Dec. 2, 1907. 11. Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 15, 28–29; Dr. Lawrence F. Flick to Mrs. M. Whitney, Bradford, Penn., Sept. 5, 1906, Lawrence Flick Collection, Department of Archives, Manuscripts, and Museum Collections, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. 12. CDW to MW, Dec. 23, 1907. 13. Letters to the Board of Supervisors, Aug. 20, 1908, OD949H, files of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Hall of Administration, Los Angeles. 14. CDW to SW, Feb. 13, 1908. 15. CDW to MW, March 27, 1908. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid.; CDW to MW, June 9, 1908. 18. CDW to MW, April 2, 1908. 19. Ibid. 20. Express, April 25, 1908; CDW to SH, May 29, 1908; see Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 54. 21. CDW to SH, May 29, 1908; CDW to MW, June 1, 1908. 22. CDW to HEW, April 17, 1888; CDW to HEW, May 13, 1888; CDW to HEW, Oct. 22, 1888; CDW to SW, March 13, 1889. 23. CDW to MW, June 12, 1908.

Notes to Pages 95–99

163

24. CDW to MW, June 21, 1908; see Bates, Bargaining for Life, 110; see also Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 30; the quotation of Deborah Vinal Fiske’s father is in Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 123. 25. CDW to SH, Oct. 10, 1912. 26. David Shapiro argues that the disadvantage of a “narrow interest in technical signs and indicators” is that it prevents one “from seeing things in their real proportions” (David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles [New York: Basic Books, 1999], 52). To Willard, that may have been an advantage. 27. CDW to SH, May 29, 1908; CDW to MW, June 12, 1908; CDW to MW, Sept. 10, 1908. 28. CDW to SH, Sept. 5, 1908; see Ellen D. Baer, “Nurses,” in Women, Health, and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook, ed. Rima D. Apple (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 454; Susan M. Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 95; Bates, Bargaining for Life, 200; CDW to SH, May 29, 1908; CDW to MW, June 21, 1908. 29. George H. Kress and Walter Lindley, A History of the Medical Profession of Southern California (Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Printing and Binding House, 1910), 202–203. 30. Norman Bridge, The Marching Years (New York: Duffield and Company, 1920), 151; Kress and Lindley, History of the Medical Profession, 111; Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles, A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 591. 31. Kress and Lindley, History of the Medical Profession, 121. 32. W. Robert Finegan, The Barlow Story: An Illustrated History of Barlow Respiratory Hospital, 1902–1992 (Los Angeles: Barlow Respiratory Hospital, 1992), 1–19; Kress and Lindley, History of the Medical Profession, 106. 33. Kretzchmar is quoted in Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 196–197. 34. See Emily K. Abel, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 139–148. 35. See letter of R. W. Burnham to Meyer Lissner, Nov. 17, 1910, Meyer Lissner Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif.; California Outlook, Feb. 3, 1912. 36. CDW to SW, June 10, 1891. 37. CDW to MW, June 8, 1908; CDW to SW, May 25, 1910; CDW to MW, June 1, 1908; CDW to SH, Oct. 23, 1908; CDW to MW, Oct. 29, 1908. Strychnine was used to stimulate the central nervous system, digitalis to stimulate the heart. Bridge probably had recommended the strychnine, which he praised in his 1903 book on tuberculosis (Norman Bridge, Tuberculosis: Recast from Lectures Delivered at Rush Medical College, in Affiliation with the University of Chicago [Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1903], 249); CDW to MW, Sept. 30, 1909. The doctor who recommended calomel probably was not Bridge. In 1903 Bridge wrote, “Calomel does not agree with tuberculous patients as well as with most other sick people, and the habit of taking it in rather full doses to ‘clean off’ a coated tongue or to remove feelings of ‘biliousness,’ as many patients do without advice, is vicious, for it fails to do these desirable things, and it does debilitate the patient instead” (Bridge, Tuberculosis, 254). 38. CDW to SH, April 14, 1910; CDW to SH, June 20, 1911. 39. Quoted in Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 83. 40. Both quotations are from Abel, Hearts of Wisdom, 141.

164

Notes to Pages 99–107

41. CDW to MW, Aug. 1908; CDW to MW, Oct. 29, 1908. 42. Bridge, Marching Years, 218–219; CDW to SH, July 18, 1908. 43. CDW to MW, June 12, 1908; CDW to MW, Aug. 1908; CDW to MW, Aug. 20, 1908; CDW to SH, Aug. 26, 1908; CDW to SH, Sept. 14, 1908; CDW to SH, Sept. 5, 1908; CDW to SH, Oct. 23, 1908. 44. CDW to MW, Oct. 29, 1908; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place for Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 222; Rotundo, American Manhood, 185–193. 45. Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 152; see Amy L. Fairchild, “The Polio Narratives: Dialogues with FDR,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75 (2001): 488–534; Daniel J. Wilson, “Covenants of Work and Grace: Themes of Recovery and Redemption in Polio Narratives,” Literature and Medicine 13, no. 1 (spring 1994): 22–41. 46. “The Southern California Anti-Tuberculosis League,” Southern California Practitioner 21, no. 9 (Sept. 1906): 466–467. The author is identified only as a contributor to the journal. 47. CDW to SH, July 18, 1908; CDW to SH, Oct. 23, 1908. 48. See CDW to SH, July 16, 1909; CDW to SW, Jan. 27, 1909. 49. CDW to SW, March 17, 1910; CDW to SW, May 6, 1909. 50. CDW to SW, April 2, 1909; CDW to SW, May 6, 1909. 51. CDW to SW, May 22, 1909; see Bates, Bargaining for Life, 320–321. 52. CDW to SH, letter dated “Saturday evening” (probably May 1909); CDW to SW, May 22, 1909; California Outlook (Feb. 25, 1911): 1 53. CDW to SH, “Saturday evening”; CDW to SH, June 24, 1909; see Case Files of the New York Charity Organization Society, Community Service Society Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. 54. Robert F. Murphy, Jessica Scheer, Yolanda Murphy, and Richard Mack, “Physical Disability and Social Liminality: A Study in the Rituals of Adversity,” Social Science and Medicine 26, no. 2 (1988): 237; CDW to SH, June 24, 1909; CDW to SH, July 16, 1909. 55. See Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 211–213; Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers, and Their Influence on Southern California (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1977), 66–76; George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 40–45; Tom Sitton, John Randolph Haynes, California Progressive (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 67–74; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 246–252; Lissner to Clinton Rogers Woodruff, June 24, 1909, Lissner Papers. 56. CDW to SH, June 24, 1909. 57. Municipal Affairs, 3, no. 5 (May 1908): 1; Express, April 25, 1908; CDW to SH, June 24, 1909; Lissner to Woodruff, March 30, 1909, Lissner Papers. 58. CDW, “Facts of the Social Evil,” California Outlook (Aug. 2, 1913): 4; CDW, “Two Impressions of Roosevelt,” California Outlook (April 1, 1911): 3; CDW, “Who Are the Pessimists,” California Outlook (July 22, 1911): 2; CDW, “Was It the Tariff,” California Outlook (Nov. 16, 1912): 2; CDW, “Municipal Affairs,” California Outlook (May 13, 1911): 10; CDW, “Taking Stock for A.D. 1911,” California Outlook (Jan. 6, 1912): 6; see David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion (London: Routledge, 1995), 24–25.

Notes to Pages 107–118

165

59. CDW, “When the Sleeper Wakes,” California Outlook (July 5, 1913): 3; CDW, “Ragtime Rampant,” California Outlook (June 21, 1913): 4–5; CDW, “Taking Stock for A.D. 1911,” California Outlook (Jan. 6, 1912): 15–16; CDW, “The Cry of the Children,” California Outlook (Sept. 13, 1913): 4. 60. “Letters of Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Dwight Willard,” American Scholar 4 (autumn 1934): 470. 61. CDW, “The Struggle of Realignment,” California Outlook (April 29, 1911): 3. 62. CDW to SH, July 16, 1909. 63. CDW to MW, July 29, 1909. 64. CDW to SH, Aug. 12, 1909; CDW to SH, Sept. 30, 1909; CDW to SH, Oct. 25, 1909. 65. CDW to SH, Nov. 12, 1909. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. CDW to SW, “Thanksgiving, 1909.” 69. Ibid. 70. CDW to SH, Dec. 9, 1909. 71. CDW to SH, Jan. 3, 1910. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. CDW to Meyer Lissner, undated letter, Lissner Papers. 75. CDW to SH, Jan. 22, 1910; CDW to SH, Dec. 17, 1909. 76. CDW to SW, “1909” (but probably written in spring 1910); Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 131, photos following 134. 77. Alfred F. Hess, “The Tuberculosis Preventorium,” Survey 30, no. 22 (Aug. 30, 1913): 666–668; Alfred F. Hess, “The Significance of Tuberculosis in Infants and Children,” Journal of the American Medical Association 72, no. 2 (Jan. 11, 1919): 83–88. See also Cynthia Anne Connolly, “Prevention through Detention: The Pediatric Tuberculosis Preventorium Movement in the United States, 1909–1951” (PhD diss., School of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, 1999). 78. CDW to SW, March 17, 1910. 79. See Starr, Inventing the Dream, 252; CDW to SW, March 17, 1910. 80. Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8. 81. CDW to SH, April 14, 1910. 82. Ibid. 83. CDW to SH, July 22, 1910. 84. Ibid. 85. CDW to SW, Sept. 21, 1910. 86. CDW to SH, Oct. 24, 1910. 87. Ibid. 88. CDW to SW, letter dated “Nov. 1909” but probably 1910. Chapter 6

The “Gash” in “Our Happiness”

1. See Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 215; Annual Meeting of the Ladies and Hebrew Benevolent Society, 1902–1914, Series II, Minute Books, 19092–1977, Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles Collection, Urban Archives Center, Oviatt Library, California State University, Northridge.

166

Notes to Pages 118–125

2. CDW to SH, Dec. 23, 1910; CDW to SH, Jan. 3, 1911. 3. Francis Marion Pottenger, The Fight against Tuberculosis, An Autobiography (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), 121; Report of the California Tuberculosis Commission of the State Board of Health, Sacramento, California (Sacrameno: State Printing Office, 1914); Emily K. Abel, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 150–176; CDW to SH, Jan. 3, 1911. 4. CDW to SH, Dec. 23, 1910; CDW to Meyer Lissner, January 1, 1911, Meyer Lissner Papers, 1903–1923, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, Calif. 5. CDW to SH, Dec. 23, 1910; CDW to SH, Jan. 3, 1911. 6. CDW to SH, Jan. 3, 1911; CDW to SH, Feb. 12, 1913; CDW, “The Burning of El Arco,” Pacific Outlook (Dec. 24, 1910): 3. 7. CDW to SH, Dec. 23, 1910; CDW to Meyer Lissner, undated (must be spring 1911), Lissner Papers. 8. CDW to MW, Oct. 30, 1906; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford, 1985), 101; Harry Ellington Brook, The Land of Sunshine: Southern California, An Authentic Description of Its Natural Features, Resources, and Prospects (Los Angeles: World’s Fair Association and Bureau of Information Print, 1893). 9. CDW to MW, Dec. 23, 1907; CDW to SW, Sept. 21, 1910. 10. CDW to MW, Dec. 23, 1910, CDW to MW, Dec. 26, 1911. 11. CDW to SH, Jan. 18, 1911. 12. See especially William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 13. CDW to SH, Jan. 3, 1911. 14. CDW to SH, Feb. 15, 1911. 15. CDW to SH, Feb. 27, 1911. 16. Ibid.; Norman Bridge, Tuberculosis, Recast from Lectures Delivered at Rush Medical College in Affiliation with the University of Chicago (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders & Company, 1903), 180. 17. CDW to SH, “Early March, 1911.” 18. Studies of family care today conclude that many sick and disabled people disregard the care they receive in order to preserve the semblance of self-sufficiency. Moreover, both paid and unpaid caregivers often conceal their contributions as effectively as possible. Perhaps Mrs. Delive and the two Mays similarly sought to render their care invisible to promote Charles’s sense of autonomy. See Emily K. Abel, Who Cares for the Elderly? Public Policy and the Experiences of Adult Daughters (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Lynn May Rivas, “Invisible Labors: Caring for the Independent Person,” in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 70–84. 19. CDW to SH, May 2, 1911; CDW to MW, March 15, 1911. 20. CDW to SW, Feb. 17, 1894; CDW to SW, July 1, 1895; CDW to SW, Feb. 21, 1903; CDW to SH, April 20, 1909; Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Child-Bearing in America, 1750–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cam-

Notes to Pages 125–131

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

167

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 214; Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1995); Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Bitter Fruit: Heredity, Disease, and Social Thought in Nineteenth-Century America,” in From Consumption to Tuberculosis: A Documentary History, ed. Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 154–194. See Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 100–110. CDW to SH, March 17, 1911. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 11, 13; CDW to SH, Sept. 5, 1908; CDW to SH, undated (probably May 1909); CDW to SH, July 16, 1909. Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, Ethnic Americans, A History of Immigration, 4th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 76. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 198–200; Express, June 20, 1898; CDW, “Taking Stock for A.D. 1911,” a paper read before the City Club, Los Angeles, Dec. 30, 1911, in California Outlook (Jan. 6, 1912): 15–16; CDW to SH, Dec. 8, 1910; CDW, “Ins and Outs,” California Outlook (May 17, 1913): 3. CDW to MW, Oct. 29, 1908; CDW to SH, undated (probably 1910). Some evidence suggests that many Japanese people did have a particularly intense fear of tuberculosis. See William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University and Harvard University Press, 1995), 107–113. George F. Weeks, California Copy (Washington, D.C.: Washington College Press, 1928). CDW to SW, May 22, 1909; George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 90. Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 2. “Roosevelt and Democracy,” California Outlook (Feb. 4, 1911): 3. Express, July 6, 1898; “Letters of Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Dwight Willard,” American Scholar 4 (autumn 1934): 484. CDW to SH, Feb. 27, 1911. See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 170–216. CDW to SH, March 3, 1911. CDW to Lissner, undated letter from 1911, Lissner Papers. CDW to SH, March 31, 1911. “Letters of Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Dwight Willard,” 477–485. CDW to SH, Sept. 1, 1911; Theodore Roosevelt to CDW, Aug. 18, 1911; Watts, Rough Rider, 198–200. CDW, “Figs and Thistles,” California Outlook (Feb. 10, 1912): 3. CDW, “The Twilight Zone,” California Outlook (April 24, 1912):4–5; CDW, “In the Thick of It,” California Outlook (Aug. 31, 1912):3.

168

Notes to Pages 132–144

40. CDW to SH, July 25, 1912. 41. Theodore Roosevelt to CDW, Aug. 15, 1912; Watts, Rough Rider, 164–165, 198. 42. CDW to SH, Feb. 15, 1911; CDW to SH, March 17, 1911; CDW to SH, June 20, 1911. 43. CDW to SH, Sept. 1, 1911; CDW to FW, letter dated “Monday evening”; CDW to FW, letter dated “Tuesday evening.” 44. CDW to FW, Oct. 12, 1911. 45. CDW to SH, July 25, 1912; CDW to SH, Aug. 22, 1912. 46. CDW to SH, Oct. 10, 1912; CDW to SH, May 6, 1913; CDW to SH, Sept. 1, 1911. 47. CDW to SH, Oct. 10, 1912. 48. CDW to SH, Feb. 13, 1913; CDW to SH, Feb. 24, 1913; CDW to SH, May 1913; CDW to SH, March 28, 1913. 49. The State Board of Health was equally guarded about reports of a cure by Friederich Friedmann, a German physician who widely promoted the anti-tuberculous potential of his concoction, derived from the tubercle bacillus of water turtles. See Monthly Bulletin 8, no. 7 (Jan. 1913): 123. See also René Dubos and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (1952; repr., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992 ), 158; Georgina D. Feldberg, Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995); CDW to SH, March 28, 1913; CDW, “Doctors and Reporters,” California Outlook (March 15, 1913): 4. 50. CDW to SH, May 6, 1913. 51. CDW to FW, Oct. 2, 1913; CDW to FW, Dec. 8, 1913; CDW to FW, Oct. 22, 1913; CDW to FW, Dec. 8, 1913. 52. CDW to FW, Sept. 9, 1913; CDW to FW, Sept. 29, 1913; CDW to FW, Oct. 16, 1913; CDW to FW, Oct. 8, 1913. 53. CDW to FW, Oct. 28, 1913; CDW to FW, “Thanksgiving Day,” 1913; CDW to FW, Dec. 24, 1913. 54. CDW to FW, letter dated “October” 1913; CDW to FW, Nov. 6, 1913; CDW to FW, Dec. 1, 1913. 55. CDW to SH, Oct. 22, 1913. 56. CDW to FW, Sept. 26, 1913. The recent memoir of anthropologist Robert Murphy may help us understand Willard’s comment. After a spinal tumor compelled Murphy to relinquish all household activity, he wrote that he sometimes felt “as if [he] had been put on a shelf, sidelined. In light of this position of passivity and dependency, my role as the chief financial support of the family . . . acquired greater symbolic importance in my mind; it became a mainstay of my egos” (Robert F. Murphy, The Body Silent [New York: W. W. Norton, 1987], 212). 57. CDW, “The New Leaf,” California Outlook (Dec. 27, 1913): 3; CDW to FW, Dec. 8, 1913. Epilogue

1. CDW to “My Dear Friend,” Dec. 25, 1912. 2. CDW to SH, Feb. 13 1913; John MacKay Elliott to CDW, Jan. 3, 1913. 3. Frank W. King to CDW, Dec. 28, 1912; Lydia B. Torrey to CDW, Dec. 29, 1912; Frank H. Hart to CDW, Jan. 2, 1913. 4. Jess Stoddard to CDW, Dec. 31, 1912; W. E. Slosson to CDW, Jan. 6, 1913; Maurice Harris Newmark to CDW, Jan. 2, 1913; Lee D. Gates to CDW, Jan. 3, 1913; Bradner W. Lee to CDW, Dec. 28, 1912; Theodore Roosevelt to CDW, Jan. 3, 1913.

Notes to Pages 144–146

169

5. John Muir to CDW, Dec. 28, 1912; T. E. Gibbon to CDW, Dec. 30, 1912; Frank G. Finlayson to CDW, Dec. 28, 1912; George Alexander to CDW, Dec. 28, 1912; F. Zeehandelaar to CDW, Dec. 31, 1912; Charles V. Barton to CDW, Dec. 28, 1912; Louis Fischer Vetter to CDW, Dec. 30, 1912. 6. Edward A. Dickson to CDW, Dec. 1912 (no specific date given); Robert Poindexter to CDW, Dec. 28, 1912; Henry O’Melveny to CDW, Dec. 30, 1912; W. C. Patterson to CDW, Dec. 30, 1912. 7. A. M. Scherer, “The Heroism of Charles Dwight Willard,” California Outlook (Jan. 31, 1914): 8; Norman Bridge, “Charles Dwight Willard,” California Outlook (Jan. 31, 1914): 7; Russ Avery, comments in “A Few Appreciations of the Late Charles D. Willard,” California Outlook (Jan. 31, 1914): 9. 8. See David B. Morris, “About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community,” in Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 25–45. 9. “Introductory,” Report of the California Tuberculosis Commission of the State Board of Health, Sacramento, California (Sacramento: State Publishing Office, 1914); “18th Annual Report of Olive View Sanatorium, 1936–37,” 3, file 40.20, files of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Hall of Administration, Los Angeles, Calif. 10. See Emily K. Abel, “From Exclusion to Expulsion: Mexicans and Tuberculosis Control in Los Angeles, 1914–1940,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77, no. 4 (winter 2003): 823–849.

Index

Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations.

Adamic, Louis, 159n22

“Boys and Frogs” (Willard), 40, 43, 49

Adams (Mr.), 34

Bridge, Norman, 6–7, 12, 15, 26, 39, 78,

Adams, Rachel, 113 Addams, Jane, 3

97–98, 100–101, 104, 119, 123, 131, 145, 163n37

African Americans, 64, 69, 107, 125, 127

Brison, Susan J., 151n34

agricultural fairs, 54, 60–61, 63. See also

Brook, Harry Ellington, 56, 120

citrus fairs alcoholic drinks, 12, 37, 71

burial insurance, 35 Burnham, Robert W., 111

Alcott, Louisa May, 47 Alexander, George, 109 Alien Land Act (Calif.), 126–127 “Amendment to Destiny, An” (Willard), 43 American Climatological Association, 6, 91 Anglo Saxons, 33, 53, 124, 126–127, 143, 161n45. See also whiteness anti-tuberculosis crusade, 78–79 Argonaut literary magazine, 36, 41–42

California Outlook, 98, 104–105, 109–111, 113, 115–116, 121, 136, 145 California State Board of Health, 78, 168n49 California State Homeopathic Society, 77 calomel, 98, 163n37 caregiving, 9–11, 47, 49–50, 52, 124, 126, 166n18. See also names of caregivers

Asians, 53, 126, 130

Carnes, Mark C., 38

Asiatic Exclusion League, 126

chamber of commerce (Los Angeles), 48–49,

“Auto-de-Fé, An” (Willard), 43 Avery, Russ, 105, 145

52–61, 62, 69–70, 79–80, 157n35 Charmaz, Kathy, 152n8 Chicago fire (1871), 3

Barber, D. C., 81

Chicago World’s Fair (1893), 54, 55, 61, 120

Barlow, Walter Jarvis, 97–98, 101–102, 110,

Chinese, 53, 126, 130

118

citrus fairs, 54, 55, 59, 61, 157n35

Barlow Sanatorium, 97, 118

citrus industry, 53–54, 55, 59

Bates, Barbara, 6

citrus orchards, 7, 19, 21, 53, 71, 91

Bauman, Zygmunt, 102

civilization, 74, 88, 161n45

Baur, John E., 152n10

Civil War, 3, 6, 35, 131

Beard, George M., 13

clothes, 23, 32, 40–42, 106

beautification, 71

cocaine, 12

Bederman, Gail, 74

codeine, 98

“Beyond the Veil” (Willard), 43

cod liver oil, 8–9, 11, 98

Biggs, Hermann M., 87

Coffey, Titian, 83

Bishop, Herbert Martin, 77

cold water baths, 62, 85–86, 161n47

blacks, 64, 69, 107, 127

Cole, Thomas R., 57

boardinghouses, 17–18, 22, 24, 29

Condit, Joseph Dayton, 97–98

boosterism, 6–7, 23, 52–53, 56–58, 65–67,

consumption. See tuberculosis

71, 90, 120, 121, 124. See also chamber

contagion, 47, 51, 78–85, 88, 112–113

of commerce (Los Angeles)

county hospitals, 80–82, 118, 146 171

172

Index

Darwin, Charles, 33, 53

Free Harbor Contest, The (Willard), 77–78

Death of Ivan Ilych, The (Tolstoy), 28, 67

Free Harbor League, 69

Delive (Mrs.), 96, 99, 103, 124, 126,

Freemasonry, 35, 38

166n18

Friedmann, Friederich, 136, 168n49

demons, 26, 38 Dettweiler (Dr.), 97

Gates, Lee D., 144

Deverell, William, 83

genealogy, 125

Dickson, Edward A., 105, 144

Gentleman’s Agreement (1907), 126

Didion, Joan, 8, 14

germ theory, 79, 88–89, 125

diet, 6–7, 15, 24, 53, 59, 89, 93, 99–100,

ghost stories, 17, 42–44

104, 109

Gibbon, T. E., 144

digitalis, 98, 163n37

Gillespie, Emily, 47

direct legislation, 128–130

Gillespie, Sarah, 47

Direct Legislation League, 129

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 76

“Doppelgänger, The” (Willard), 42

Glendale (Calif.), 61–62, 64, 66

drugs, 10–12, 98, 163n37

Goffman, Erving, 25, 52

Dunn, Alvin M., 104

Grove (Mr.), 41

Dwight, Henry H., 92–93, 118, 120–122

guilt, 9, 11, 20

dyspepsia. See nervous dyspepsia Hanchette, Henry, 31–34, 36, 41, 48–49, 52, economic recession, 64, 70–71, 77

67

El Arco, 122. See also Pasadena home

harbor fight, 69, 71

Elliott, John MacKay, 143

Harper, George, 105–106

embezzlement, 92–93

Harrison (Mrs.), 22, 24, 33, 47, 117

eugenics, 33, 53, 124–125

Hart, Frank, 144

evil spirits, 26, 38

Haynes, John Randolph, 129

exercise, 6, 15, 57, 86, 89, 99–100;

healthful climates: and boosterism, 6–7,

bicycling, 63; buggy riding, 15, 103;

56–58, 66–67, 135; delight with, 19, 21;

dumbbells, 40; horseback riding, 15,

disillusionment with, 14–15, 30, 89–90,

19–21, 24; ping pong, 85; tennis, 27; walking, 104; writing, 104–105 expectoration, 80

109 health insurance, 35 hemorrhage, 3; in advanced stage, 93, 95, 103, 106, 111, 115, 119–120, 131–132,

“Family Tree, The” (Willard), 40

135–136; efforts to ignore, 27–28; and

Farquhar (Mr.), 34

May McGregor as caregiver, 45–49,

femininity, 38–39

76–77; reporting in letters of, 13–14,

fiction writing, 36–37, 40, 42–44, 145–146

16–17, 19–20; timing of, 32, 41, 76

Finlayson, Frank G., 144

Hepburn Railway Act, 128

fire, 117–122

“Herald of Fate” (Willard), 43–44

fire insurance, 121

hereditary disease, 51, 89, 155n15

Fisher (Dr.), 86–87, 89, 110

Hess, Alfred, 112

Fiske, Deborah Vinal, 95

Hiestand, Henry, 4

Flick, Lawrence F., 90–91, 97–99

Hiestand, Sarah Willard (sister): as

Ford, Henry Chapman, 23

caregiver, 53; cod liver oil recommen-

Fox, William R., 10–11, 14, 17

dation, 98; Hanchette as classmate of, 32;

Frank, Arthur, 30

illness of, 32–33, 94; marriage of, 4;

fraternal orders, 35, 38, 69

reaction to Charles’s engagement, 50–52;

freak shows, 113

reaction to Charles’s picture, 129

Index

173

History of the Chamber of Commerce of Los

May (sister), 6, 8, 11, 13, 15–16, 20,

Angeles, California, A (Willard), 77, 84

29–30, 32, 37, 41–42, 45, 47–48, 58,

Holt, I. M., 7

65–66, 93–94, 108–109, 124; to mother,

homeopathy, 77, 159n22

8–9, 11–14, 17, 19–24, 26–29, 31–34, 37,

Homes and Happiness in the Golden State

41–42, 124; reporting “improvement” in

of California (Truman), 7

health, 8–9, 11, 13–14, 29–30, 151n21; to

homesickness, 11, 29

Sarah (sister), 11, 14, 16, 23, 75, 85,

Honolulu trip, 89–90, 92, 112

93–94, 101, 111, 114–115, 118, 120, 122,

Hookers (relatives), 119–120, 129

124, 129–131, 133, 135–136, 138, 143;

hospitals, 10, 79–82, 84, 87, 118, 146

striking a balance in, 12–14, 17, 20,

house courts, 83–84, 122

26–27, 67

housing discrimination, 117–119

liminality, 105

Hull House (Chicago, Ill.), 3

Lissner, Meyer, 105–106, 111, 119–120

humanity due to illness, 9, 34

Lock, Margaret, 65–66

hydropathy, 57, 62, 85, 161n47

loneliness, 20, 28–29, 33, 44 Los Angeles (Calif.): and boosterism, 6–7,

Immigration Association (San Bernardino County, Calif.), 7 imperialism, 73

14, 52–53, 56–58, 65–67, 90; chamber of commerce, 48–49, 52–61, 62, 69–70, 79–80, 157n35

Indians, 53, 125

Los Angeles City Council, 78, 83

infectious disease. See contagion

Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors,

inhalers, 98

81–82

inheritable disease. See hereditary disease

Los Angeles County Grand Jury, 80–81

initiative, referendum, and recall, 106,

Los Angeles Evening Express, 70–75, 77,

128–130 Interstate Commerce Commission, 128 irrigation, 53–54, 109

79–82, 84, 93, 158n8, 160n29 Los Angeles Herald, 31–32, 35–36, 38–39, 42, 48, 63, 81 Los Angeles Ladies and Hebrew Benevolent

Japanese, 126–127, 130, 167n26 Jews, 79, 117–118, 125, 144 Jimoniski, H., 79

Society, 117–118 Los Angeles Society for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, 81

Jobbers’ Association, 78, 91, 102, 105

Los Angeles Telegram, 31

Johnson, Hiram Warren, 113, 129, 146

Los Angeles Times, 56, 109 Lummis, Charles Fletcher, 56, 124

King, Frank W., 144

Lynch, Joseph, 31, 35–36

Knight Templar, 35 Koch, Robert, 47, 51, 88–89, 125

masculinity, 25, 37–41, 44, 128, 144

Kretzchmar, Paul, 97

Masons. See Freemasonry massages, 98, 101

“La Fiesta de Los Angeles,” 56

McGregor, Bert, 25, 28, 33–34, 46, 50

Land of Sunshine, 53–59, 71, 157n35

McGregor, May, 46–51, 51, 52. See also

League for Better City Government, 69, 71

Willard, May McGregor (wife)

Lee, Bradner W., 144

McKay (Mr. and Mrs.), 18–19

letter writing, 4, 6, 8–9, 95–96, 147;

mercury, 10

Christmas letters, 74, 141–145; to father, 13, 14, 32, 35, 37, 42, 50, 58, 61, 64,

Mexicans, 53, 68, 82–85, 88, 95, 122, 143, 146

69–70, 76, 89–91, 110, 114, 121; to

Midwinter Fair, 54, 60–61

Florence (daughter), 133, 136–140; to

Mitchell, S. Weir, 75–76

174

Index

Moore, Marian Louise, 10

preventorium, 112

morphine, 115

Priessnitz, Vincent, 62

Mowry, George E., 69

private nurses, 96, 99, 103, 126

Muir, John, 119, 144

progressivism, 68–71, 83–84, 104, 107–108,

Municipal Affairs, 78, 83, 104

124, 146; and local politics, 105–106,

Municipal League of Los Angeles, 78,

109–110; and Roosevelt, 128–131; and

80–84, 87, 91, 98, 102–105, 111 Murphy, Robert F., 105, 168n56

state politics, 113, 115–116. See also reform movement

music, 4, 11, 16, 19, 22, 133 quarantine, 79 National Irrigation Congress, 54 National Municipal League, 78, 106

Radcliffe College, 137–138

National Tuberculosis Association, 112

ragtime music, 107

nervous dyspepsia, 40, 85–86, 92, 114, 122,

real estate booms, 17, 20, 28, 30–31, 52, 83

132, 138 neurasthenia, 13, 39–40, 61, 63, 84–85, 101–102, 132–133, 161n45

recall, 106, 128–129 recession, 64, 70–71, 77 reform movement, 68–86; and anti-

Newberry, Sam, 15–24

tuberculosis crusade, 78–79; and

Newmark, Maurice Harris, 144

beautification, 71; and harbor fight, 69,

New York Outlook, 128

71; against Mexican house courts, 82–84;

Nixon (Mr.), 23–25, 34

opposition to hospital expansion, 80–82;

nonfiction writing, 77–78

and public health measures, 107; and

Non-Partisan League, 105, 114

Spanish American War, 72–73; against

nurses, 96, 99, 103, 107, 126, 139. See also caregiving Nussbaum, Martha C., 82

tramps, 68, 79–80, 84 religion, 9, 23, 90 rest cure, 75–76, 134 “Restored Palimpsest, The” (Willard), 43

obituaries, 145 Olive View Sanatorium, 146

Roosevelt, Theodore, 25, 72, 72, 107, 126–132, 144

O’Melveny, Henry, 144

Rose Tournament, 119

orange industry, 53–54, 55, 59

Rothman, Sheila M., 88

Origin of the Species (Darwin), 33

Rothstein (Mr. and Mrs.), 117–118

Oura, 126

Rotundo, E. Anthony, 38–39, 61, 89 Rough Riders, 72, 72, 132

Pacific Outlook, 104, 120, 128

Rozin, Paul, 82

Pacific Review, The, 36

Rush, Benjamin, 62

Pasadena home, 90–93, 117–122, 121

Ryerson, Harold S., 145

Pasadena Opera House, 133 Pattee, Frank, 56

sanatoriums, 79, 87, 91, 97, 109, 118, 146

Patterson, W. C., 144–145

San Bernardino (Calif.), 8–17, 72, 127

phrenology, 125

San Francisco Board of Education, 126

Platt Amendment, 73

San Pedro harbor site, 69, 71

Poe, Edgar Allan, 42

Santa Barbara (Calif.), 20–28, 152n10

Poindexter, Robert, 144

Santa Barbara Independent, 24–28

polio patients, 102

Santa Barbara Press, 23–25, 28, 65

poor people, 10, 67, 79, 88–89, 99, 113,

Santa Fe Railroad, 8, 17

117, 145 pretubercular children, 112

Santa Monica (Calif.), 65, 69 “savagery,” 74

Index

175

Scherer, A. M., 145

tramps, 68, 79–80, 84–85, 88, 95, 107

“Second Death” (Willard), 43

trauma, 16, 151n34

segregation, 69, 126

Trudeau, Edward L., 10

self-sufficiency, 124, 139, 166n18, 168n56

Truman, Benjamin Cummings, 7

servants, 64, 125–127

tubercle bacillus, 47, 79–80, 88, 112, 125,

Shakespeare, William, 42 Shakespeare Club, 23

168n49 tuberculosis, 1, 3, 6–7; and authority of

shame, 82, 122, 131

physicians/nurses, 97–99; as contagious

Shaw, Martha, 18–19, 47

disease, 47, 51, 79–85, 88, 112–113;

“Sleep No More” (Willard), 43

cures for, 136, 168n49; deaths from,

Slossen, W. E., 144

18–19, 114, 140–141, 145, 152n10;

smoking, 37–38

efforts to ignore, 27–28, 38; and

social control, 79–80

exclusionary policies, 78–82, 102,

Sons of the Revolution, 125

160n29; and housing discrimination,

Sontag, Susan, 88

117–119; “incipient” vs. “advanced,”

Southern California Fruit Exchange, 54

87–90; as inheritable disease, 51, 89,

Southern California Sanatorium for

155n15; and Japanese, 126–127, 167n26;

Nervous Disorders, 97 Southern Pacific Railroad, 7–8, 18, 53, 69, 71, 106, 109, 113, 115, 128 Southwest Museum, 56

and passing as healthy, 25–26, 31, 52, 119; prevalence of, 18–19, 78, 160n27; remission of, 30, 76; “repressing” the cough, 100. See also hemorrhage

Southwest Society, 56

tutoring, 15–21, 23

Spanish American War, 72–73, 88, 131–132

typhoid fever, 1, 84, 149n1

spiritualism, 36 Sprague, Lucy, 18–19, 47

University of Michigan, 1, 84

Stanford University, 133–134, 137

U.S. Public Health Service, 88

Starr, Paul, 153n20 Stimson, Marshall, 105, 114

Water-Cure Journal, 62

Stoddard, Jess, 144

water cures, 62, 85–86, 161n47

streetcars, 17, 113

Watts, Sarah, 128, 131–132

streptomycin, 3

Weeks, George F., 127

strychnine, 98, 163n37

Wellesley College, 4, 15

suicide, 93, 123–124

West (Mr.), 34

Sunkist, 54

whiteness, 3, 33–34, 52–53, 58, 161n45.

“Superfluous Man” (Willard), 42

See also Anglo Saxons

survival of the fittest, 33, 53, 124–125

Wiggins, Frank, 157n35

Sweet, Ernest A., 88

Willard, Alice (sister), 4, 29, 32–33, 65, 122,

Taft, William H., 131

Willard, Charles Dwight: and boosterism,

124–125 Takayama, 126

6, 52–53, 65–67, 71; career aspirations

Tebbets, George P., 24–26

of, 21, 23, 25–26, 39; at chamber of

Terminal Island (Calif.), 120

commerce, 48–49, 52–56, 58–61, 70,

tobacco, 37–38

79–80, 157n35; childhood and youth

Tolstoy, Leo, 28, 67

of, 1–8, 5; college career of, 1, 4, 84;

“Tomasson: The Tale of a Materialized

death of, 140–141, 145; engagement of,

Figment” (Willard), 43

49–52; fiction writing of, 36–37, 40,

Tomes, Nancy, 79

42–44; finances of, 15, 23–24, 28, 30–31,

Torrey, Lydia B., 144

38, 48, 52, 64, 103; fire destroys

176

Index

Willard, Charles Dwight (continued) Pasadena home of, 117–122; and Jobbers’

Willard, May McGregor (wife): as caregiver, 59, 77, 96, 99, 111–112, 115,

Association, 78, 91, 102, 105; journalism

124, 127, 133, 135–136, 138–139,

career of, 22–28, 31–32, 35–39, 41, 70–75,

166n18; Charles’s concerns about, 67,

77, 79–82, 84, 158n8, 160n29; and Land

70, 90, 112, 118; Chicago trip of, 75–76,

of Sunshine, 53–56, 55, 59; marriage of,

85; Honolulu trip of, 89–90; illness of,

46, 52, 58–59, 64, 74, 92–93; and

58, 63–64, 74, 76, 93, 119, 138, 143;

masculinity, 25, 37–41, 44, 128, 144; as

and Pasadena home, 93, 119–122;

Mason, 35, 38; and Municipal League of

views on servants, 126. See also

Los Angeles, 78, 80–84, 87, 91, 102–104;

McGregor, May

nonfiction writing of, 77–78; obituaries,

Willard, May (sister): attendance at

145; as Outlook editorial writer, 104–105,

Wellesley College, 4, 15, 37; attendance

109–111, 113, 115–116, 128, 136; and

at Willard School, 4; burglary of house,

passing as healthy, 25–26, 31, 52, 119;

65; as caregiver, 166n18; and Chicago

pseudonyms of, 36, 54; temperature of,

World’s Fair (1893), 65; comparison

8–9, 11–12; toothaches of, 10–12; as tutor

with mother, 94; finances of, 66–67;

to Sam Newberry, 15–21, 23; weight of,

illness of, 63, 122–125; reaction to

31, 40–41, 91, 103, 109, 111, 114

Charles’s engagement, 49–52; visit to

Willard, Edgar (brother), 4, 6, 33 Willard, Ella (sister-in-law), 9–12, 15–16, 47, 51 Willard, Florence (daughter): attendance at

Pasadena of, 94–95, 100–101, 124 Willard, Paul (brother), 4, 37, 65–66, 124 Willard, Samuel (father), 2; death of, 135; emotional absence of, 22, 45;

Radcliffe College, 137–138; attendance at

finances of, 23; illness of, 3, 53, 85, 94;

Stanford, 133–134, 137; birth of, 64; as

longevity of, 3; moral code of, 12, 37;

caregiver, 96; Charles’s concerns about,

reaction to Charles’s engagement, 50,

67, 90, 112–113, 122; Chicago trip of, 75,

52; as Unitarian minister, 90; “yougurt”

85; death of, 146; fiction writing of, 145–146; illness of, 65, 114–115, 123, 132–138, 143; marriage of, 145; as

pill recommendation of, 98–99, 114 Willard, Sarah. See Hiestand, Sarah Willard (sister)

playwright and actor, 132–133; and

Willard School, 3–4, 13–14, 23, 25, 37

private school, 93; in Rose Tournament,

Wilson, Woodrow, 131

119; vitality of, 66, 74, 86, 135

Wing, Elbert, 96, 98, 101, 104, 109–111,

Willard, Harriet Edgar (mother): as caregiver, 8–9, 47, 50; death of, 45, 47, 52, 155n1; illness of, 37, 40, 155n1;

115 Wing, Horace, 29, 33–35, 45–46, 48, 91–92, 96, 98

moral code of, 12, 37; philanthropic

Wizard of Oz, The, 145

activities of, 3; and Willard School, 3–4,

Woodruff, Clinton Rogers, 106

13–14, 23, 37

World’s Fair (Chicago), 54, 55

Willard, Jane (sister), 4, 16

World War I, 146

Willard, John (brother), 4, 8–10, 12, 14–16, 50–51

“yougurt” pills, 98–99, 114

About the Author

Emily K. Abel

is professor of public health and women’s studies at the Univer-

sity of California, Los Angeles. She has published numerous articles and books, including Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940 (Harvard University Press, 2000).