Pauli Murray and Caroline Ware: Forty Years of Letters in Black and White

By Michael J. Lazzara

In 1942 Pauli Murray, a young black woman from North Carolina studying law at Howard University, visited a constitutional law class taught by Caroline Ware, one of the nation's leading historians. A friendship and a correspondence began, lasting until Murray's death in 1985. Ware, a Boston Brahmin born in 1899, was a scholar, a leading consumer advocate, and a political activist. Murray, born in 1910 and raised in North Carolina, with few resources except her intelligence and determination, graduated from college at 16 and made her way to law school, where she organized student sit-ins to protest segregation. She pulled her friend Ware into this early civil rights activism. Their forty-year correspondence ranged widely over issues of race, politics, international affairs, and--for a difficult period in the 1950s--McCarthyism.

In time, Murray became a labor lawyer, a university professor, and the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. Ware continued her work as a social historian and consumer advocate while pursuing an international career as a community development specialist. Their letters, products of high intelligence and a gift for writing, offer revealing portraits of their authors as well as the workings of an unusual female friendship. They also provide a wonderful channel into the social and political thought of the times, particularly regarding civil rights and women's rights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780807876732

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Born and Raised in New England

Lina Ware reached adulthood at the end of the First World War—at the close of what the British historian Eric Hobsbawm once called the long nineteenth century. She grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, in a family of New England Unitarians with a long tradition of social concern as well as of attachment to Harvard University. Her great grandfather, Henry Ware, as dean of the Harvard Divinity School, had been both praised and vilified when he moved that institution into the Unitarian fold. Her grandfather, father, brother, and various cousins were all graduates of Harvard College. During the Civil War her grandfather, then a young college graduate, had gone with his sister to work with newly freed people in Port Royal, South Carolina, the first area to be liberated by the Union army. When President Kennedy created the Peace Corps, Ware was reminded of her grandfather’s experience.

Lina Ware admired her parents. Her father—a lawyer, municipal judge, and member of the Brookline town meeting—she remembered as a generous man of gentle and just spirit with a ready sense of humor. Her mother was a busy community volunteer involved with Girl Scouts, the church, and other community organizations. Her down-to-earth view was that the most you could do for your children was to love them and keep their galoshes on. Lina had some of each parent in her makeup.

She remembered a happy, somewhat sheltered, childhood in a family where she felt loved and free to be a nonconformist. Late in her life she claimed that even as a child she noticed the division in her Brookline neighborhood between the group she labeled top of the hill—professional and business Protestants—and bottom of the hill—Irish Catholic blue-collar workers. By the time she articulated that memory she had been involved in labor activism and worker education for years.

The Ware family believed in educating women. After a few years in local private schools, in 1915 Lina and a group of her classmates, almost whimsically, chose Vassar over the more intellectually oriented Bryn Mawr. For her, it turned out to be a good choice. Under the influence of Lucy Maynard Salmon, an extraordinary history teacher, Lina learned to use primary sources, to pay attention to the lives of ordinary people, and to think for herself. She said that Salmon students could be recognized by their careful, methodical research and spirit of inquiry. Salmon believed that nothing could be considered the final truth about the past and that knowledge should be used as the basis for responsible conduct.¹ Many members of the Vassar faculty shared this view. Ware remembered Dean Mildred Thompson, a historian, meeting her on campus at the 1920 graduation, and saying: Now, Lina, DO something in the world.

In light of this spirit, it is not surprising that, the day after that graduation, Lina went south for the first time, to teach in a summer school in the mountains of Kentucky. At eighty-four, she looked back to that trip as her first encounter with segregation.

Fall found her teaching at the Baldwin School in Pennsylvania, founded in 1888 to prepare girls for admission to Bryn Mawr College. From the beginning, the school was as serious about learning as the college for which it prepared students.²

The following summer Ware volunteered at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, an institution created in 1921, largely by Hilda Worthington Smith. Smith thought women workers needed more than vocational training. The Summer School was a remarkable experiment in teaching liberal arts courses to factory workers, many of whom had no more than a sixth-grade education. The students tended to teach the faculty at least as much as the faculty taught them.³ Ware would teach worker education classes from time to time for the rest of her life. Hilda Smith, whom she called Jane, became a lifelong friend and, like Lucy Salmon, helped shape Lina Ware’s pedagogy. A report she turned in some years later after a stint teaching women workers in North Carolina is revealing:

The most striking thing is the speed with which so elementary a group was able to achieve the impressive stage of development that the girls displayed at the labor conference and in the economics class discussions during the latter part of the third week […]. Moreover, I think it was apparent from the girls who spoke during the various discussions in the conference which I heard, that what they have acquired is not a pattern which has been superimposed on them and is likely to slip away, but something which is an integral part of themselves. Specific points learned in the various classes will go, but the ability to confront their problems and analyze them is, as far as it goes, there to stick.⁴

In her second year at Baldwin, Ware won a Vassar scholarship to study at Oxford—a rare opportunity for a woman in 1922. While at Oxford, she wrote a letter to a close friend, Helen Lockwood, that describes the life of a woman student there and gives evidence of the adventurous spirit and lively sense of humor that remained with Lina all her life (see Appendix).

Ware’s time at Oxford ended unexpectedly after only one year when her mother fell ill and she was needed at home. Back in Massachusetts, contemplating her future, she decided to enroll at Radcliffe to earn a Ph.D. in economic history, and as a graduate student she worked with Harvard faculty. Wanting very much to study with Frederick Jackson Turner, she talked her way into what would turn out to be his final Harvard seminar. Though she learned a great deal from Turner, her greatest debt was to Edwin Gay, who pointed her toward a recent acquisition by the Harvard Business School of important unexamined records dealing with early experiments in the factory production of cotton cloth. She went to work studying the records as a foundation for her dissertation with characteristic enthusiasm and diligence, and the ability to see further into a subject than her predecessors had done.

Graduate school life was not all work. Lina met a young man four years her senior named Gardiner Means, who, trained as a pilot in the Great War, had found himself helping to organize postwar relief in Turkey. Supervising a village inhabited by 1,000 orphans who were working to support themselves, he observed a production process that fitted Adam Smith’s explanation of supply and demand. He began to think about the contrast between the home-based production characteristic of the Turkish village and the beginnings of factory production in his own country. Returning to New England, he created a successful factory producing very fine, luxury blankets. He realized that his enterprise did not fit Smith’s theories since by producing a unique product he could set prices as he pleased. He moved to Cambridge to see whether the Harvard Business School might provide the tools with which he could analyze the implications of this difference. This was the beginning of his lifelong effort to understand what he called administered prices.

Judging by his later life, Gardiner Means liked people with ideas who were willing to argue with him. What luck, then, to meet an attractive young woman writing about a subject so close to his own interests. Late in life Ware told an interviewer a well-honed and revealing story about their courtship:

There was an eclipse of the sun, and Gardiner invited me to drive down to Providence […] where the eclipse would be total. It was icy, snowy, absolutely awful, awful driving. Gardiner had started life as an airplane pilot, and when you skid in an automobile it feels a little as if you were flying, and so he was skidding down that road, and we were arguing about this, that and the other and he managed to skid into somebody […] we tried to help […] but they wouldn’t think of riding with us […] we saw the eclipse but on the way down we got into an argument about the meaning of the words estuary and delta. One of us thought that both words applied to the land, and one that both words applied to the water. So on the way back we stopped in the Providence public library, and it turned out that one of us was half right and the other half right so that made us decide that after all we could go on […].⁵

They were married in 1927 by a practically illiterate town clerk whose mind was so much on a fishing trip he planned that he nearly forgot his appointment to perform the ceremony.

In 1929 Ware’s dissertation, which had been completed on time, thanks to a good deal of practical help from Gardiner, won the substantial Hart-Schaffner-Marx Prize, established to encourage scholarship in economic and commercial subjects. The judges who made the award were among the best-known economists in the country. She moved expeditiously to transform the thesis into a book, and two years later Houghton-Mifflin brought out The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings. The argument of the book is now so much the conventional wisdom that present-day historians have difficulty understanding just how pathbreaking it was in the 1920s and 1930s. She argued that the entrepreneurs who created the early New England textile mills were the pioneers of the system that changed forever the nature of production and foreshadowed the dominant corporation of the future. This industry, she wrote, brought the factory system to the United States and furnished the laboratory wherein were worked out the industrial methods characteristic of the nation.⁶ She thought that historians had not begun to understand the social and political consequences of that change, or its effect on the lives of ordinary people. She also introduced subjects at the time untouched by American historians: the nature of work culture and the multiple effects of factories on women’s lives.

The book was reviewed more widely than is customary for such monographs: reviews appeared in the New York Times and The Nation, for example, as well as in the American Economic Review. Several reviewers recognized the originality of her approach to familiar material.

By the time Ware’s book came out, Gardiner Means had moved on to Columbia University, where he was not only finishing a Ph.D. in economics but also embarking upon a research project with Adolph Berle, a friend from his army days. Together they began to write The Modern Corporation and Private Property, a book that would lead to a fundamental change in the concept of property in American economic thought and would make both authors famous.⁷

Reading the two books together it is not difficult to envision many conversations and exchanges of work-in-progress between their authors. Their research dovetailed in interesting ways.

In 1931, in order to join Means in New York, Ware took leave from Vassar, where she had been teaching since 1925, and undertook a community study of Greenwich Village inspired by the Lynds’ Middletown.⁸ She produced a book that had little to do with the popular image of the Village as the home of bohemian artists and writers and a great deal to do with the culture of Italian, Irish, Spanish, and Jewish immigrants who made up the larger part of the population. Like the New England textile book, Greenwich Village broke new ground, both in the questions Ware asked and the data she used. It was a young person’s book—her prejudices were sometimes visible—but its sources and methods, and her attention, as in her first book, to the life experience of hitherto invisible people foreshadowed a new kind of social history that would not be widely practiced by historians for another two or three decades.⁹

By 1933 the Great Depression was reaching its nadir, Franklin Roosevelt had been elected, and numbers of bright and ambitious young people had converged on Washington to take part in the president’s effort to save the country from economic disaster. Gardiner Means, who had worked in Roosevelt’s campaign, went to Washington to work on economic and consumer problems for the Department of Agriculture. Lina Ware, by that time a highly respected member of the Vassar faculty, spent more and more time in Washington. It was an exciting place for young professionals. Pulled into the orbit of the New Deal, with Gardiner’s help and that of his mentor, Mary Harriman Rumsey, Ware, too, found a job in the Department of Agriculture. In short order she found herself helping to develop a field labeled consumer affairs that was just then taking shape in the federal government.

The concept of consumer had broadened considerably since it was developed by Florence Kelley and others at the turn of the century. Then the idea was that consumers could improve the lot of the poor by refusing to buy goods produced by ill-paid and exploited workers. The New Deal use of the term incorporated this earlier idea but added the view that consumers themselves needed protection from the greed or the neglect of local governments. Workers, it was argued, should be guaranteed certain rights to health care, decent housing, and living wages. It followed that consumers should be represented in New Deal agencies on a plane of equality with business and labor.

After Pearl Harbor this idea became focused on war workers, whose needs were manifold, including such things as decent housing, schools, and child care; medical services; and—in the case of African Americans—equal opportunity for war-created jobs.

Ware may have taken this job because she wanted to join the fun in Washington, but since thoroughness and the need to understand were among her basic characteristics, she became deeply engaged with the problems of consumer protection. In the shifting terrain of New Deal agencies she moved from one place to another battling the indifference or outright antagonism of old-line bureaucrats and the representatives of business and labor. She worked with her usual intelligence and diligence and soon became the person to call for any group wanting to promote consumer protection. The work introduced her to the ways and means of getting things done in Washington, knowledge she would use in the ensuing decades, both as a historian and as a practical activist. Many years later, in a long interview, she reflected with amusing insight on what she had learned about the ways of Washington seen both from inside government and from outside as a lobbyist.¹⁰

She stressed the importance of homework. She believed in knowing more than anyone else about any question under consideration and observed that with enough knowledge it was possible to exercise considerable power, even from a subordinate position. She had learned the importance of turf and the need to respect that of other people while guarding one’s own. She understood that bureaucratic processes exist in private as well as in public settings. She observed that low-level people often seem obstructionist because that is the only way they can get attention. She suggested that the use of grants and contracts led to fragmentation of responsibility and authority. She noticed the common problem that people at the center of power are often not well informed about what is going on out in the field.

In 1936, for $7,000, Ware and Means bought approximately seventy acres of land in Vienna, then a rural community in northern Virginia. They moved into an old log cabin that had been the planter’s house on a small plantation and began to shape the idiosyncratic careers they would follow for the rest of their long lives. Like many of their colleagues, Ware and Means had come to Washington temporarily—and stayed for a lifetime. Each developed a multilayered life. Gardiner Means was more and more attracted to the possibility of influencing public policy, which he did both inside and outside the government. While economic theory and the search for effective public policy were the central threads of his intellectual life, he was also much concerned with putting practical ideas into action. He was an inventive entrepreneur who in time created a business raising and selling a newly developed grass, called zoysia, and soon found that he could not raise enough of the grass to keep up with demand. Later he developed what he hoped would be a program to increase employment in a depressed coastal town in Maine close to the island where he and Lina spent summers. He liked to invent things that would make life easier for the user, such as a solar cookstove inspired by cooking methods he witnessed among rural families in India.

By frugal living, the couple kept themselves free to take on the jobs they wanted to do and avoided the trap of having to do things solely for money. Family resources and their own earnings allowed them to be generous to people they thought promising who needed a hand.

The tight-knit group of early New Dealers carried on what amounted to an ongoing seminar at The Farm, and many of FDR’s experiments were hatched in its living room or on its lawn. Many years later Pauli Murray recalled the spirit of the place:

For half a century the Ware-Means home, known to friends as The Farm, has been a sanctuary for city-weary students and government workers, intercontinental travelers on diplomatic missions, writers, professionals, and leaders of various humanitarian causes—as well as flocks of migratory birds […] they lived simply in a white clapboard house overlooking rolling fields [… ]. The center of their house, a community living room, was built as a log cabin in the 1760s, and its original beams survived. A wall of books and a huge stone fireplace where Lina broiled steaks over hot coals for Saturday night dinners were the room’s dominating features.¹¹

Gardiner and Lina combined their intellectual pursuits with rugged outdoor life. At one time they raised sheep, and during the winter a weekend visitor might be pressed into service rescuing newborn lambs from snow […]. A visitor was free to disappear with a book […] or to join in the physical chores as a FIBUL (Skipper’s acronym for Free Intelligent But Unskilled Labor) painting the barn, cutting and stacking wood, pulling up weeds […]¹²

Very early on, Ware and Means recognized how much shaping public policy depended on knowing who had vital information and who had the ability to get things done. They were adept at finding such people.

Ware appeared to have been born with a gift for friendship, and over her life had friends of many kinds. In her thirties she had already managed to meet with an astonishing number of the movers and shakers of those heady days. Means, by contrast, tended to be so preoccupied with the analysis of economic problems that he did not seek social contact unless it involved serious policy talk, though he was gracious to the variety of people Ware invited to come to The Farm—for a meal or for a week. She encouraged visitors and several times took in young people who were in need of housing or mentoring. Many of her letters to a wide variety of people closed with an urgent invitation to visit.

In the midst of such a busy life Ware’s interest in history did not diminish. In 1939 she was asked (by an all-male committee) to organize for publication a series of papers presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The result was The Cultural Approach to History. Ware wrote the introductory essay, which codified the kind of history that she had begun writing a decade earlier, but was only then beginning to attract interest in the discipline at large. Even in 2005 that essay is still a place to begin for graduate students intent on writing social history, labor history, or women’s history.¹³ The essay is notable for, among other things, the lucid discussion of what is now called the problem of objectivity. With too much optimism, Ware believed that historians had come to recognize their biases and their unconscious major premises.

The voluminous correspondence growing out of Ware’s government responsibilities (preserved at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York) shows that by 1941 she was already a person to whom others turned for advice and assistance when they needed a job, or simply needed career guidance. She often went to some lengths to be helpful to people whom she barely knew. She was also getting a good bit of fan mail for her speeches and books.

While she taught history part time at Sarah Lawrence and at American University, Ware moved from one consumer advocacy position to another as the demands of the economy and the visible approach of world war, and then war itself, led to new agencies and new challenges. She appeared regularly to testify at congressional hearings on consumer issues.

In 1940 the president appointed a National Defense Advisory Commission with members representing business, labor, agriculture, and consumers. Ware was appointed deputy to the consumer representative, Harriet Elliott, a friend and co-worker in the American Association of University Women. It soon became apparent that the other members of the commission took a dim view of the whole idea of including consumers in the focus of their work as well as a dim view of women commissioners. They made their feelings clear in unkind comments and in such actions as forbidding the women to use the Executive Dining Room, to which the men went for lunch, and failing to include Elliott in policy discussions. In later life Ware had a number of wry stories about the things that had been said to her—without apparent embarrassment—by their male opponents. The man in charge of setting up the commission, for example, told her if you think your commissioner is going to get the same treatment as the head of General Motors […] you have another guess coming.¹⁴ Ware was ready to fight for equal rights. Elliott, who had been a dean at North Carolina College for Women, was a proper southern woman who had her own ways of dealing with men. She declined to make an issue of the discrimination.

At the same time the commission’s consumer division acquired more and more responsibility: for overseeing housing of war workers, welfare of children, making sure of an adequate food supply in war production neighborhoods, assuring the availability of medical care,