Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Among the Specks, as among many Iowa families, it was the women who made the dreams come true. It was the women, strong-willed and resourceful, shepherding their men through the hardships of frontier life, who were celebrated in local lore and family legends. Typical was the oft-told tale of a young couple whose wagon came unhitched as they were fording a river. The horses bolted and the wagon began to roll back into the deep, swift water. While the husband sat on the sinking wagon seat lamely yelling “Whoa,” the wife grabbed the reins from his hands, jumped down into the mud, and wrestled the frightened horses to shore. Another popular story told of a grandmother who saved the family’s precious milk cow from choking to death by reaching deep into its throat and pulling out a wad of hay—while the men of the family stood by “wringing their hands.” Men whose wives died on the trek west were notoriously disconsolate and “lost” for years; some never recovered. Women whose husbands died, on the other hand, would routinely repair to the nearest town or relative, remarry, and press on.

  In August 1861, Barclay Cappoc of Springdale, Iowa, accompanied John Brown on his raid at Harpers Ferry and became Iowa’s first casualty of the Civil War. (By the time the darkness passed, five years later, some 70,000 Iowa men had died, most of them from disease. Unlike troops drawn from the East Coast who fought through the fields and woods of Georgia and Virginia, prairie soldiers fought and died in the malarial swamps of the lower Mississippi valley.) News of the war soon reached Fairfield, Iowa, where the Specks had moved after the birth of their fifth child, Cordelia Jane—known to everyone as Jennie—in 1848. Samuel Speck, their oldest son, was among the first of the town’s young men to join the ragtag corps of volunteers who drilled on the road at night while the small boys played fife and drums. On July 4, the men planted a “Liberty Pole” in the center of town while the women sewed a giant flag and made picnic lunches.

  In the Speck household, the festive mood that greeted “the War of Rebellion” was short-lived. Jennie’s older sister, Mary, died three days after the holiday celebration; brother Samuel soon marched off, never to return; another sister, Elizabeth, died in November at the age of seven. The quick succession of tragedies had a profound effect on Jennie Speck. For the rest of her life, relatives and friends would describe her as if she were two people: the warm, risible, slightly irreverent, and unpredictable girl from before the war and the measured, humorless, severe woman from afterward.

  It was the severe side of Jennie Speck that found its natural expression in a lifelong “union” with the Presbyterian church. Even among their God-fearing Iowa neighbors, the Presbyterians were considered “stricter than the Methodists or even the Christians,” and Jennie was strict even by Presbyterian standards, chastising young girls for playing cards on the “almost Sabbath” (Saturday night), and forbidding boys who had worked hard all week to play baseball on Sunday. Children were allowed to sing, but only “p’sams”; even hymns were too worldly. She would tolerate no drinking or swearing in her presence, and dancing she considered “the last straw.”

  Work was the only sufficiently godly recreation, and Jennie was proud of her handiwork; often boasting to her daughters about the “40 yards of blankets [and] 107 yards of carpet” she had woven by the time she was sixteen, as if the sheer quantity of effort were the best measure of a soul’s worth. One chronicle from the period describes a group of Iowa women sitting around quilting and “talking about what they considered happiness to be.” The answer, they all agreed, was “Something to do … even if [it was] only winding and unwinding a ball of yarn.” Jennie Speck learned early that a woman should never be idle, that a trip to town was an hour of crocheting, an evening was a shirt, a Sunday was a tablecloth, a snowstorm was a quilt. “Busy hands,” she would say, are the Lord’s workshop.

  The Civil War opened up vast new fields of opportunity to Iowa’s busy, strong-minded women. Bereft of college-age men, the University of Iowa began to admit women, becoming the first coeducational state university in the country. For the first time, women were hired as elementary school teachers, store clerks, government workers, and even farmhands to replace men gone to war. Newspapers urged women to come out of the home to aid the war effort. “Any woman who neglects all other duties, and devotes herself to the avocations of warlike times is a heroine forthwith,” declared one editorial. Jennie Speck even heard stories in school about older girls who disguised themselves as boys and enlisted in the infantry.

  Theodore Tilton, a popular reform speaker from New York who lectured after the war in towns throughout Iowa, including Fairfield, was struck by the “spirit of equality” that animated Iowa men and women. In 1866, he predicted that “Iowa would be the first state in the Union to achieve the political equality of the sexes.” With that objective in mind, suffragist speakers fanned out across the state, taking the message to every town, no matter how small. “Women were classed with paupers, criminals, and idiots in being denied the right of property and suffrage,” they told their large, predominantly female audiences, and they deserved a better fate. As a woman who had carried the burden of her family since the death of her sisters, Jennie Speck must have shared their outrage. She might even have joined in the wave of vocal protests that led, in 1873, to passage by the Iowa legislature of the first comprehensive women’s rights bill in the country. (The bill was conspicuously silent on the issue of women’s suffrage, however. That fight would take another fifty years.)

  In October of 1873, only a few months after passage of the reform bill that greatly expanded the rights of married women, Jennie Speck married John Robinson McClure.

  The Specks and the McClures had lived in neighboring counties in southwestern Ohio for at least a generation before coming to Iowa. The two families had made the trip within five years of each other, following exactly the same river route. At that point, however, although they continued to live less than fifty miles apart, their lives took very different courses.

  On the boat trip from Ohio in 1850, John Robinson’s father, McKee McClure, contracted cholera (he was “exposed to cholery on the rivery,” Jennie later wrote). By the time the boat arrived at Burlington, he was gravely ill and the rough twenty-five-mile wagon ride to the farm of his uncle, James McClure, finished him. With her two-year-old son, John, the young widow, Ann Reid McClure, lived for a while with relatives until her plight attracted the attention of a brother-in-law, James R. Willson. In 1854, Willson dispatched his eldest unmarried brother, Adam, age thirty-seven, to rescue the young mother from widowhood.

  John McClure never took his new father’s name and, as far as can be told, never really felt a part of the large family of twelve that Ann McClure bore for him. By the time he was eighteen, John had moved to Sharon, where he was probably working on his uncle James’s farm when he met Jennie Speck.

  A childhood of abandonment had left John McClure withdrawn and distrustful. In later life, neighbors who knew him would refer to the “McClure Trait”—the pained reticence, the slowness of speech, the stony reserve—that he passed on to most of his children. In a photograph taken when he was an old man, his face is a mask, but his eyes betray the lifelong burdens of sweetness and sensitivity. In the same picture, Jennie sits in her high white collar, teeth clenched, her eyes blank walls of rectitude and determination.

  Soon after his wedding in October of 1873, John McClure took his new wife farther west, across the Des Moines River at Ottumwa and into the more fertile hills of south central Iowa. On a grassy knoll just a few miles north of the little town of Mount Ayr in Ringgold County, he built a log house and began a family. On May 20, 1875, Jennie McClure bore her first child, a girl, and named her Stella.

  John and Jennie McClure, Jackson’s maternal grandparents

  As a first child on a small frontier farm, a son would have been more welcome, certainly, but there was plenty of work to keep a girl’s hands busy. At the age of three, Stella was initiated in the restless, numbing routine of a frontier woman’s life: build a fire, thaw the pump, fi
x breakfast, refill the lamps, empty the bedside “thundermugs” in winter; purge the flies in summer. There was always mending to be done and knitting. Jennie took in sewing to earn extra money for sugar or cloth, but it was always the last thing done, usually late at night. Monday was for washing; Tuesday, ironing; Wednesday, mending; Thursday, shopping; Friday, baking; Saturday, cleaning; Sunday, churchgoing and Bible-reading. Jennie McClure strictly enforced the rule of rest on Sunday; even Sunday supper was prepared the day before. “They wouldn’t even hardly go out the door on Sundays,” a neighbor recalls.

  For a farm woman, cooking was the highest art, and from an early age, Stella proved extraordinarily talented. At six, she could make peach, plum, and grape butter; watermelon molasses; pumpkin leather (cooked, dried pumpkin meat); and hominy. When her father butchered a hog or steer in preparation for the long winter, she would fry the meat down, pack it in big stone jars, and cover it with lard. (The odor lingered for days.) She dried corn and packed it in salt; canned fruits; stored pumpkins, squash, apples, potatoes, cabbage, beets, and turnips in the root cellar, covered with dirt and straw. The first pie in spring was always dried apple and peach.

  When two more daughters, Anna Myrtle and Mary Elizabeth, were born, five-year-old Stella tended them while Jennie helped with the farm work. “She had to be quite a strong individual,” says a granddaughter who lived with Stella for fourteen years. “She took a lot of responsibility very early in terms of raising the kids.” By 1885, Stella was a short, sturdy ten-year-old strong enough to work shoulder to shoulder with her father in the fields and barnyard. Perhaps it was the added responsibility of playing son to her quiet, melancholy father that gave her the premature self-confidence and steely determination friends later marveled at. As Anna grew into the quiet, thoughtful one, and Mary into the girlish effervescent one, Stella was already developing the stone face, the emotional reserve, and the implacable will that would steady her, and confound those around her, through the crises ahead.

  Stella, Mary, and Anna McClure, about 1885

  Partly, of course, it was just the Presbyterian way. Jennie McClure had joined the Mount Ayr United Presbyterian Church immediately upon arriving in 1874 and raised her children in the straight and narrow. The Presbyterians believed there was only one road to salvation and they were on it. “They didn’t think you could get to heaven by short cut,” says an old resident of Ringgold County. “If you weren’t immersed you were hell-bound.”

  The Presbyterians were known for being “hardshelled”—secure in the rightness of their routing, impervious to the vagaries of fate. Whether windfall or catastrophe, good harvest or blight, they accepted it without unseemly rejoicing or lamenting, because it didn’t alter the fundamental reality of salvation. To respond to events in daily life, to laugh or cry, was to legitimize their claim on happiness, when good Presbyterians knew that salvation was the only genuine source of happiness, and that salvation could be secured only through the church: reciting catechisms, singing psalms, reading the Bible, resting on Sundays, and avoiding the dark constellation of prohibitions—dancing, drinking, cardplaying—many of which were, in themselves, temptations to false happiness or false grief.

  Stella’s hard shell was put to the test early.

  Although two sons, Samuel Cameron and David Leslie, were finally born in 1883 and 1885, they came too late to prevent their father’s farm from failing. Not that a boy, or even several, would have made the difference between success and failure on John McClure’s eighty acres. Not only had he started with too little land, he had probably started too late. Most of the best land in Ringgold County had been bought up by 1870, four years before his arrival. What was left were odd lots, rocky patches, and timbered and hilly parcels that no one had bothered to break. Locals called them “heartbreak deals.” For John McClure, the farm was a toehold at best, and it never developed into anything better.

  In his first full season of farming, 1875, a grasshopper plague devoured his fields of corn and oats. The next year, his hogs died in a wave of hog cholera that swept through the county. He bought more hogs with the slim profits from the year’s harvest, but the cholera returned the following summer and the hogs died again. There was plenty of corn the next two years, 1878 and 1879, but too much corn meant low prices. At tens cents a bushel, he could barely make the mortgage payments. Because the land was gratuitously bountiful, there was always food on the table. But in 1880, months of storms and perpetual rain flooded the fields and washed the crops into the swollen streams. Inflated by demand from the railroad crews who were laying track in the county, the price of corn shot up to fifty cents a bushel, but John McClure had no corn to sell. In the spring of 1881, after the planting, the rain returned and he watched his crops rot in the fields. After the flood of May 1881, he planted another crop, but this time there was no rain. For six months, there was no rain and his corn turned brown. Another year went by and John McClure had nothing to take to market except a few melons and vegetables. In the spring of 1882, corn was eighty cents a bushel.

  That fall, to make ends meet, he took a job as a mason, bricklayer, and plasterer in the tiny town of Tingley, eight miles north, where the coming of the Humeston and Shenandoah Railroad had sparked a construction boom. For the next five years, he laid sidewalks and foundations in Tingley while clinging to his eighty acres near Mount Ayr, trying, against continuing waves of blight, drought, rot, and grasshoppers, to keep the farm alive. Jennie made it known that she would prefer life in town, but it was the hour-long wagon rides into work, longer and more treacherous in winter, that finally brought the McClure family, now grown to eight, to a farm one mile west of Tingley. For Stella, age twelve, the move would offer a first taste of something new and better.

  Due to Thomas Jefferson’s obsession with classical symmetry and order, Tingley township is easy to locate. In 1783, Jefferson had proposed dividing the trans-Appalachian lands into “hundreds,” parcels consisting of ten units, each ten miles square. The Land Ordinance of 1785 opted instead for townships six miles on a side, sixteen to a county. By 1855 the land had been surveyed and the section corners fastidiously marked with stones, posts, pits, or mounds. Each township was further divided into nine school districts, each district two miles on a side, and finally into mile-square “sections,” each of them numbered and outlined by dirt roads. The result was a grid of numbing regularity superimposed on the prairie’s casual roll. On a map of Iowa, Ringgold County is the fourth county from the left on the bottom row; in Ringgold County, Tingley township is second from the right on the top row; and the town of Tingley is in school district number 5—middle row center—in sections 16 and 21.

  Tingley, Iowa, about 1885

  When John McClure and his family moved nearby—to section 18—in 1887, Tingley was two neat rows of low frame buildings on either side of a wide dirt road. The town’s short roster of buildings and businesses spoke economically of its concerns: three churches, three general stores, two lumberyards, and one each of grocery store, hardware store, drugstore, meat market, law office, hotel, farm implement store, blacksmith shop, furniture store, paint shop, and livery stable. There were only four hundred people and even fewer trees. But, like most Iowa towns, Tingley was ambitious; no one ever considered calling it a village. Someone planted elms along both sides of Main Street, someone else started a town band, and plans were in the air for an opera house.

  Stella McClure probably had little contact with Tingley during the three years she spent on the farm west of town. Her time was consumed by the work left undone when her father went off on masonry jobs, her share of the chores, and the duty of caring for five brothers and sisters, none of whom was old enough for heavy work.

  In 1890, when Jennie McClure became pregnant again in what was probably a last try at another boy, it was simply assumed that fifteen-year-old Stella would take charge of the family—including the youngest, two-year-old Euphonia Isabell—called Phony—who had contracted a high fever. On May 7, for reason
s unknown, Phony went into convulsions. With no time to run for help, Stella tried to stop the seizures by holding her tightly, but the spasms continued until the child died in her arms.

  Stella left no record of her reaction to Euphonia’s death. She never spoke of it again, either within the family or to her own children. Perhaps she consoled herself in the birth of another sister, Martha Ellen, exactly one week later. The McClures apparently accepted Phony’s death with resignation, as yet another temptation to false grief. The death of an innocent, after all, was a chance to reaffirm the optimism of the true believer: “A little flower of love,” reads the 1879 gravestone of a two-year-old Tingley girl, “that blossomed but to die, transplanted now above, to bloom with God on high.”

  Soon after Euphonia’s death, John McClure surrendered to economic reality and moved his family into a small house on the west end of Main Street in Tingley.

  For his eldest daughter, it was a liberation.

  Life in town meant fewer chores and a chance to pursue her adolescent craving for a more genteel life. Except during the canning season, the Ladies’ Missionary Society and the Ladies’ Social Club met weekly in their stiff white skirts to discuss an astonishingly ambitious range of assigned topics, from Raphael to Lord Byron. “Art and art consciousness,” wrote a traveling art lecturer in his memoirs, “[are] present mainly in the five largest cities of the land, plus an attenuated dribble that [runs] through the women’s clubs of the country.” Given the obstacles they faced, these small groups of Tingley women had to have a burning commitment to learning and to bettering themselves. The nearest library was fifty miles away, the nearest college, a hundred miles. To hear traveling lecturers like Ralph Waldo Emerson (speaking as a “Man of the World”), or Bronson Alcott (holding forth on “The New England Mind”), they had to journey to Davenport, Cedar Falls, or Webster City and pay fifty cents.