Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  She was born in February 1873 to Elizabeth Lewis Niven and Dr. Thornton MacNess Niven, Jr., a highly respected Presbyterian clergyman who was the son of the noted engineer, builder, architect, and businessman Thornton MacNess Niven of Newburgh, New York. T. M. Niven, Sr., who had started out as a stonemason, was described as “a man of wealth, a vigorous writer, and a fine public speaker.”18 In 1839 he had designed and built a house for his family at 201 Montgomery Street in Newburgh, a sturdy, spacious edifice still in use in the twenty-first century, along with other buildings he designed, such as the Newburgh courthouse. In 1841 the navy commissioned him to supervise a ten-year-long, three-million-dollar project—the construction of its first dry dock. Dry Dock Number One in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was also the first dry dock to be built in New York. T. M. Niven arranged for massive blocks of prime granite to be floated down on barges from Maine to be installed in tiers in what was hailed as “one of the greatest structural achievements of its day.”19 He went blind in his eighties, after failed cataract surgery, but the loss of vision did not keep him from other pursuits, such as composing hymns and poems, including “Meditations of an Old Blind Man on His Eighty-eighth Birthday,” written on February 3, 1894, the year before he died.

  The Niven ancestors had immigrated to the northeastern United States from Bowmere, a small village on the island of Islay off the west coast of Scotland, now known for producing uncommonly good Scotch, and in the New World they became engineers, masons, architects, merchants, and ministers. Isabella’s father, an 1855 graduate of Williams College, prepared for the ministry from 1856 until 1858 at the Newburgh, New York, Theological Seminary of the Associated Reform Church, for which his father had drawn the architectural plans in 1837. When the seminary closed in 1858, his father, who opposed abolition, dispatched him to complete his studies at Union Theological Seminary of Virginia, a Presbyterian school.20 After graduating from the seminary in the middle of the Civil War, Thornton M. Niven, Jr., was ordained by the West Hanover, Virginia, Presbytery, preached in various churches in Virginia, and served as a chaplain under Gen. Stonewall Jackson.21 After the Civil War, Niven became pastor of the Greenburgh Presbyterian Church in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

  Isabella Thornton Niven was the Nivens’ second child. Her older brother, Archibald Campbell Niven, died of tuberculosis in 1891 at the age of twenty, leaving a heartbroken family behind.22 His letters indicate that he was a patient in 1889 in the famous Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York, founded by Edward Livingston Trudeau in 1884—one of the foremost tuberculosis treatment centers in the country.23 Archie Niven’s parents later sent him to Pasadena, California, where the climate was touted as ideal for treating tuberculosis. They hoped in vain that he could recover from what he called his “terrible disease” in a letter written from Pasadena May 15, 1891, shortly before his death.24 His mother and sister Charlotte were with him when he died.

  Isabella’s mother, Elizabeth, was much indulged by her husband because she was often ill, most likely with gynecological problems, leaving to Isabella many of the daily duties that usually fall to a minister’s wife. Isabella’s dynamic younger sister, Charlotte, was freer to go her own way. She was a gifted pianist who hoped to become a concert performer. Instead she would build a globally useful and visible career for herself as an officer of the international Young Women’s Christian Association. Dr. Niven needed one of his daughters to stay in the home and help him in his ministry in ways his wife was not always able or willing to do. This seemed to be Isabella’s destiny, not only as the older daughter but as the eldest surviving child.

  Parker Wilder met Isabella Niven at a vacation house party in Dobbs Ferry, and from the first he was drawn to the lovely young woman—her gentility, her elegant good looks, her accomplishments—and her pedigree.25 Her father’s people had been successful in business and the ministry—but her mother’s people had helped to shape history. Not only were Isabella’s father and paternal grandfather prominent figures in their own right, but her maternal great-grandfather was Arthur Tappan, a wealthy merchant and a leading abolitionist, who had been elected first president of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and, after his break with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (and the society’s decline), was voted first president of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. The Tappans had money, and used it for important causes. In 1835 Arthur Tappan began to make significant financial contributions to support the development of fledgling Oberlin College, the first coeducational college in the United States, and the first to have a race-blind admissions policy.26 His generous patronage of Oberlin was conditional; he specified that “students should be admitted irrespective of color, that entire freedom should be allowed on the anti-slavery question, and that a high order of religious instruction should be given, especially in favor of revivals of religion.” He also supported the idea of the coeducation of males and females—an idea, unfortunately, which was not shared by some on the Niven branch of Isabella’s family tree.27 Arthur Tappan’s brother, Lewis, had arranged for and helped to finance the defense of the slaves in the Amistad slave ship mutiny case, and chose John Quincy Adams to assist in presenting the case successfully to the Supreme Court.28

  Isabella Niven possessed “rare good looks and personal charm,” as well as a fine intellect and a courageous, independent spirit.29 From 1892 through 1894 she kept a scrapbook recording her interests in her late teens and early twenties. She was a strong student at the Misses Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, earning 90s or above in all eleven of her courses, including first honors in six. After graduation she studied at the Dobbs Ferry University Extension Center, established in 1893, passing her course in the masterpieces of English literature with honors.

  In her scrapbook she saved invitations to dances and parties, along with programs of tennis tournaments she played in and concerts she attended—including John Philip Sousa’s Grand Concert at the Manhattan Beach Hotel on Coney Island, July 20, 1893. She traveled to Chicago to see the great World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893—an enterprise that had, coincidentally, moved journalist Parker Wilder so profoundly that he composed an oration that was published in its entirety—filling a full newspaper page—on April 28, 1893, just before the official opening of the exposition on May 1.30

  Also tucked between the leaves in Isabella’s album were pressed flowers, and evidence of an evolving courtship: An undated news clipping reports that Mr. A. P. Wilder participated in a discussion at the “Splendid Gathering” at the Quill Club’s monthly dinner. Another undated clipping, headlined “Patria Club Election: Prominent People Attend the Annual Meeting of the Organization Last Night,” noted that the evening’s topic was “The Industrial Emancipation of Woman,” and that Amos Parker Wilder was elected recording secretary of the club, which was founded on the “cardinal principle” of the “inculcation of patriotic sentiment,” and admitted both men and women to membership.31 Saved also was an invitation to a dinner party in New York, with a note from her hostess: “When I hear from you I will write to Dr. Wilder inviting him.”32

  Several of Isabella’s friends were getting married during those years, often with her father officiating and Isabella serving as a bridesmaid. She kept the invitation to the Michigan wedding of family friend William Lyon Phelps to Annabel Hubbard on December 21, 1892. Although there were suitors in her very active social life, none of them captured her attention for long. On their first meeting she found Amos Parker Wilder interesting but was not strongly attracted to him, and declined his wish to exchange letters. At their second meeting a year or so later, however, she changed her mind, and by spring of 1894, Amos Parker Wilder had declared his hopes and intentions to Dr. Niven.

  Once they were engaged, Isabella was given to believe by the tall, charismatic Parker Wilder that she was not his first choice of wife. He had been engaged twice before, only to have the women break off the commitment. He was especially haunted by the memory of a young woman named Edith, who had
the “same comfortable build and dominating personality” that his beloved mother possessed.33 Nevertheless the engagement moved forward through letters flying back and forth between Amos on the road and in Madison, Wisconsin, and Isabella in Dobbs Ferry. A wedding was planned for spring of 1895, but Amos Lincoln Wilder fell ill and died of heart trouble at the age of seventy years and six months—“one of the leading men of the city,” according to the November 1, 1894, Daily Kennebec Journal, a “dentist by profession” but for twenty-four years a “manufacturer of oil cloth.” Incorrigibly practical, Parker Wilder suggested to the Nivens that they reschedule the wedding for December, since he had to travel east anyway for his father’s funeral. His budget would not permit two long trips away from Madison just months apart, he said, and the marriage date was changed accordingly. Isabella was twenty-one and Amos Parker Wilder was thirty-two when her father presided over their wedding in Dobbs Ferry on December 3, 1894.

  Years later, when she was forty-four and her son Amos was twenty-two, Isabella wrote to him about the circumstances of her marriage. Three days before the wedding, she confided, when it was “too late to turn back from it since eight hundred people were invited and my father and mother would have been horrified,” Amos Parker told his bride-to-be that he was “a widower at heart, that he had no ‘tenderness’ left in him from a long seven-years courting that came to nothing.”34

  “Of course I was stunned,” Isabella wrote to her son, “but with the courage of youth reviving next day, told myself he would forget all that, etc. But he never did. Never has.”35

  AMOS PARKER WILDER had built quite a résumé in the decade between his graduation from Yale and his marriage. “I matured late and so missed much at New Haven,” he wrote later. “I trifled much of my time away.” 36 During his college years, he wrote letters to his father that foreshadowed some of the letters his own son would send him from Yale years later—admitting his academic shortcomings, trying to justify the disappointment he knew his father would feel when he did not excel, and accounting penny by penny for every dollar his father gave to support him. Parker did not study as much as he should, he acknowledged, and he found that mathematics in particular came hard. He had written to his father on December 6, 1880, to prepare him for an academic-warning letter that was on its way from Yale. He was in the bottom third of his class, he confessed, and while he knew he should study harder, he defended himself on the grounds that he was not as well prepared as the boys from Andover and Exeter.37 His academic performance was still disappointing in 1883, the year before he graduated, and he defended himself vigorously in a letter to his father: He was confident that he would pass his courses, and he would have done better had he “not been compelled to do so much telegraphing last term.”

  If his father would just understand how much money he needed and provide it, he wouldn’t have to work so hard to earn money in New Haven. “I think if you would trust me a little more on money matters and let me exercise what little judgement I may have on expending a certain sum enough to pay all reasonable expenses things would move a little smoother and I know you would not receive anymore such letters,” he complained.38

  In fact he made quite a name for himself at Yale—writing for the college newspaper; winning election as “fence orator” in his freshman and sophomore years, and class historian in his senior year; and being chosen for membership in the Pundits, a group organized in 1884 and made up of men noted for their wit and gifts of satire. He was also elected to Skull and Bones, Yale’s most prestigious secret society, founded in 1832 in the mode of the secret societies of university students in Germany. He was a popular, highly visible Yale man, noted for his ebullience and for his talents in singing, oratory, and mimicry.

  After graduation Parker Wilder threw himself into a series of jobs, some of them obtained through the Yale network. He taught for a year in a Connecticut boarding school and another year in Faribault, Minnesota, at Shattuck Military Academy, considered one of the best schools for boys in the Northwest. He spent two summers working at the Albany, New York, Journal; was hired in 1886 as a reporter for the Philadelphia Press; and soon returned to the Albany paper, where he was assigned to cover the state legislature. When he was twenty-six he became editor of the New Haven, Connecticut, Palladium, the leading Republican newspaper in New Haven, where he stayed for three and a half years. He traveled to Europe during the summer of 1891, but otherwise, he remembered, he “worked all the time for many years.”39

  From the beginning of this peripatetic decade, his avocation was public speaking, and the demand grew for Amos Parker Wilder’s entertaining, provocative speeches. Large and small newspapers of the 1890s carried reports of his political stump speeches, his Chautauqua lectures, his after-dinner discourses for civic and cultural groups, and his forward-looking commentary on issues facing American cities. While he was working on the newspaper in New Haven he had earned a doctoral degree at Yale, granted in 1892 in the Division of Economics, Sociology, and Government. He produced a thesis titled “The Government of Cities,” which was later printed in pamphlet form by the New Haven Chamber of Commerce. A political dispute led to his departure from the New Haven newspaper, and he wound up in New York for two years, moving from one paper to another. “I have ‘lost my job’ a number of times,” he wrote later, “and suffered great depression. One who has failed in business, or who is utterly cast down from any cause will often do well to begin life under a new environment—to move to another place.”40 He decided to do just that. He was engaged to be married. He needed to support his wife and a family. He wanted to buy a newspaper and be his own boss. It was on June 19, 1894, with his modest savings augmented by borrowed money, that Amos Parker Wilder bought a half interest in the Wisconsin State Journal and moved to Madison. According to the Madison journalist Edward S. Jordan, Wilder was a “scholarly young man, imbued with ideals” and a “brilliant, sensitive man, almost painfully honest, but with a subterranean fire of enthusiasm, and belief in MEN.”41

  BY MID-DECEMBER 1894, the Wilders were settling into married life in an apartment near his Madison newspaper office. By the sixth year of their marriage, despite her doctor’s ongoing concern about the impact on her health, Isabella had given birth to five children, one stillborn. (According to family memory, she had refused her husband’s request that their first daughter be named Edith, after his lost love.)42 Their son Amos was born September 18, 1895, a little more than nine months after his parents’ marriage. The twins were born when Amos was nineteen months old. Charlotte was born when Thornton was sixteen months old and Amos was not quite three. Charlotte would be eighteen months old when Isabel was born January 13, 1900. Thus, of the first seventy-two months, or six years, of her marriage, Isabella had spent about fifty-two months, or four years and nearly four months, being pregnant.

  Her deliveries were relatively easy, but her pregnancies could be difficult, and her doctor did not think Isabella should be caring for two small boys and a baby girl in the last months of her fourth pregnancy, even with the occasional help of nurse Margaret Donoghue, who had assisted at the births of her previous children.43 Worried about Isabella’s health and stamina, as well as the health and development of the unborn child, the doctor recommended sending baby Charlotte away during the last three months of Isabella’s pregnancy, to be cared for by the nuns in a Catholic hospital for babies and children. The Wilders were instructed not to visit for the first month so that Charlotte would get used to her new “home.” When Isabella returned a month later, the baby allowed her to hold and kiss her, but was so stiff and unresponsive that Isabella feared she had “lost Charlotte forever.”44

  Now with four small children to care for, Isabella could be seen walking up and down the street in her Madison neighborhood, pushing three little children in a large wicker baby carriage, with young Amos walking along beside. Sometimes neighbors saw Isabella herding her children with one hand and holding a book in the other. When she could find time to herself, she was a
ctive in French and Italian literary circles at the University of Wisconsin. One of her frequent pleasures was traveling to Chicago with Madison friends to go to the opera. In the spring of 1902 she spent three months in Europe, leaving the children in the care of their father and capable Nurse Donoghue while she traveled abroad in the company of three of her Madison friends.45

  Amos Parker Wilder, all the while, was an earnestly busy man. In addition to his growing administrative as well as editorial responsibilities at the newspaper, he avidly followed local, state, and national politics, writing and speaking about important issues. Madison was home to a lively, contentious mix of political opinions, and he often found himself and his newspaper caught in the cross fire. To foster open civil dialogue, he helped organize the “Six O-Clock Club,” inviting the town’s leading citizens, regardless of political viewpoint, to meet for conversation. He served as club secretary for seven years.46