American Progress

by Veda Boyd Jones

  “Someone must do it, Robert. If not, there never will come the day when workers have a say in matters.”

  Uncle Robert shifted position in his overstuffed chair, being careful not to disturb the sleeping four-year-old Joanne in his lap. Her dark hair, much the same color as her father’s, curled about her pretty face, making her look like a little china doll.

  “Do you think it wise, Franz,” Uncle Robert remarked, “to make yourself so visible? They know how to target people. Is it worth the risk?”

  “To stand for what is right? It is worth it,” Papa replied.

  Papa’s German accent was more noticeable when they were with the Andersons than when they were with all Papa’s relatives at a big German Saengerfest or one of the many German festivals they attended. Sometimes Maria felt like two different people—one very German, the other not so German. One day she asked Thomas if he ever felt that way, but he said he’d never thought about it. He was American, and that was that.

  As the wife of a German man, Mama did well to cook most of the foods that Papa liked, but she never really liked going to the noisy biergartens on Sunday afternoons. To Mama, Sunday was for being quiet, not for drinking beer and listening to the oompah-pah of a rousing German polka band.

  But Papa didn’t drink beer. He said he went because it was his time to be with home folk and to learn news of the Fatherland, as he still called Germany. For that reason, many Sunday afternoons found the Schmidt family with the rest of the German population of Minneapolis, many of whom were their relatives. Those were the times when Maria felt most keenly that she wasn’t really German at all.

  She was proud of the resoluteness she’d heard in Papa’s voice when he spoke of the labor union. But then she happened to glance over at her younger brother. Curt the worrier, she sometimes called him. She could see concern in his young eyes. Thomas, on the other hand, looked as pleased as Maria felt.

  “I agree with Franz,” Aunt Josephine was saying. “We do need to stand up for what’s right. That’s what compelled me to join the suffrage group.”

  Maria had snuggled comfortably into a corner of the pillow-laden divan. She didn’t usually enter into the adult conversation, since all the children had been taught to be seen and not heard. But her words spilled out almost before she could think.

  “A boy at school asked me if you were going to jail, Aunt Josephine. Will you go to jail for helping women get the vote?”

  Aunt Josephine had a light, happy laugh, and it filled the room. “Oh, dear me, no, Maria. I’ll not be going to jail. At least I don’t plan on it. I’m not too sure I agree with all the shenanigans of Miss Alice Paul and her group at the capital. They’re the ones who’ve been taken to jail. We’re a bit more conservative here in Minneapolis.”

  Turning to Mama, Aunt Josephine said, “That reminds me, Christine. Mrs. Ueland happened to say at our last meeting that we need more women from the workplace added to our numbers.”

  “Mrs. Ueland?” Mama said. “Who’s she?”

  As Aunt Josephine moved, the lamplight accented the red highlights of her strawberry-blond hair. “Clara Ueland,” she said. “Wife of Andreas Ueland, the attorney.”

  Mama nodded, but Maria was sure her mother had never heard of the Uelands. “Their son Torvald is in my class,” Maria offered.

  Mama nodded again.

  “Clara is head of the Equal Suffrage Association of Minneapolis,” Aunt Josephine continued. “She’s a dear friend. You would like her.”

  Maria wasn’t sure about that. She couldn’t imagine Mama being friends with such wealthy, prominent citizens as the Uelands.

  “At any rate, Clara feels it’s time to draw on our working sisters in the city. That’s where you come in, Christine. Would you help us form a suffrage group at Wynlan’s? I can’t think of a better place to begin in all the city.”

  Mama never answered quickly to anything. She sat quietly thinking while Maria was about to burst. What a privilege it would be to gather support for the suffrage movement. At last Mama asked, “What would it entail?”

  “You’d begin by handing out literature and procuring names and addresses of those who are supportive of our cause. Then you’d encourage them to attend our monthly meetings. Often our speakers are women like Carrie Chapman Catt. They give rousing talks and spur us on to work even harder for the vote.”

  Maria had never heard of anything so exciting. If she were Mama, she’d say yes in a heartbeat. But all Mama said was, “I’ll think about it, Josephine. I’ll think about it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Learning to Be a Lady

  Sounds of hammering rang out from the Schmidts’ backyard. Maria sat on the back stoop with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching as Thomas made Curt a pair of wooden stilts.

  The April sunshine promised much but delivered little. The air was still too cool to be without a jacket. The first green sprigs of grass were poking through, although not much grass grew in the packed dirt of their small backyard. Mama was able to make a few marigolds and petunias come up along the fence each year, but that was about all.

  Absently, Maria scratched her legs and wondered how soon Mama would let them stop wearing their long underwear. A few more sunny days like this, and she might say yes.

  For the past week, Thomas had tromped all over the neighborhood on his pair of stilts, with Curt following close behind begging to try. Thomas finally let him, and once Curt got the hang of it, there was nothing to do but make a pair for him as well.

  Curt held a small block of wood, where a person’s foot was to be placed, while Thomas drove in the nails. That morning the boys had made a trip to the dump to find more boards. Maria had begged Mama to let her go, but Mama needed her to do the Saturday cleaning while Mama went to work. Libby and Maria willingly helped with the cleaning, of course, but it still didn’t seem fair. Boys had all the fun!

  “Why would you want to go to a smelly old dump?” Libby had asked Maria.

  Neat-as-a-pin Libby would never understand. Just going to the dump wasn’t what mattered to Maria. Actually it was a smelly place. But boys always got to do adventurous things, while she was stuck with dull things like cleaning house and cooking dinner. Now the house was spotless, and Papa’s favorite bread was baked and ready for supper. So Maria allowed herself a few minutes to come out and soak up the sunshine.

  “Hold it steady,” Thomas said as he raised the hammer again.

  “I’m holding it as steady as I can,” Curt replied.

  “Need some help?” Maria stood and sauntered closer to watch. “I can help hold.”

  “Naw,” Curt said, “I’ve got it.” But the board did slip when Thomas’s hammer came down hard.

  “Let’s let her hold that end.” Thomas looked up at Maria and gave her his lopsided smile.

  “Well, all right. Just the end,” Curt agreed.

  The wood was splintery, but Maria used the hem of her skirt to protect her fingers. Once she got a good grasp, she held on hard. With her help, the stilts were finished in no time.

  “Take them to the stoop,” Thomas directed. “It’ll be easier to get up on them.”

  “I know, I know,” Curt said. “I’ve walked on yours, don’t forget.” At the stoop, Curt steadied first one stilt and then the other and quickly was up and going. “Whee, I’m taller than all of you,” he called out as he walked around the yard, lifting first one and then the other of the wooden stilts.

  “May I try yours, Thomas?” Maria asked.

  “Think you should?” he replied.

  Libby came out on the porch carrying her china-faced doll with the painted-on black hair, a Christmas gift from Aunt Josephine that was Libby’s favorite possession. She had named the doll Florence after Florence Lawrence, an actress in the moving pictures. Mama said she should have named her doll after a Bible character such as Ruth, but Libby was adamant, and the name stuck.

  Libby had caught the drift of the backyard conversation. “Maria, you’re not supposed
to walk on stilts,” she protested. “That’s for boys.”

  “Yeah,” echoed Curt, coming back nearer the house and still keeping his balance perfectly. “For boys.”

  “I can do whatever a boy can do,” Maria countered. She wanted to remind Curt of how she threw all his newspapers in a driving snowstorm, but she knew that would hurt his feelings.

  Thomas was saying, “Tuck up your skirt, sis. Let’s see how you do.”

  Good old Thomas. She could have hugged him. As he brought his stilts over to the stoop, she tucked up her dress hem, making the skirt like a pair of bloomers. She stood poised at the edge of the stoop, and Thomas helped her step up on the wooden supports.

  “I’ll steady you ‘til you get the hang of it,” Thomas offered. “That’s what I did with Curt.”

  Walking on stilts wasn’t as easy as it looked. Maria wobbled some. But then she got the feel and rhythm—lift one and set it down, lift the other and set it down. Thomas stepped back and let her go.

  “I’m doing it!” she called out. “Do you see me, Curt? Libby? I’m really doing it.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Thomas called out. “Just watch out for …”

  In a split second, one of the stilts sank down into soft dirt, throwing her off balance. As she crashed to the ground, she heard a ripping sound, but she was more aware of being unable to breathe. The wind had been knocked clear out of her.

  “The gopher holes,” Thomas said, finishing his sentence.

  “What’d I tell you?” Curt jumped nimbly down from his stilts and ran over to see if he could help.

  Thomas was already beside Maria, helping her to sit up. “Are you all right?”

  “Mama’s gonna be real mad you tore your dress.” Libby stood, looking down at her older sister with a measure of disdain.

  When she could breathe again, Maria looked at Thomas. “I did it, didn’t I?” she managed to say between gasps.

  “I have to admit it. You did.”

  “If it hadn’t been for the gopher hole …”

  “You’d still be up there,” Thomas said.

  “Well,” she said struggling to her feet, “since I know where the gopher hole is, let me try again.”

  “Don’t you think that’s enough for one day?” Thomas touched her arm where it was scratched and bleeding. It must have hit the wood on her way down.

  “Mama’s gonna be mad about the dress,” Libby repeated.

  “I can sew up the dress,” Maria reminded her, tucking the hem up once again. She took the stilts to the stoop, got up without any help, and made her way around to the front sidewalk. Maria walked a ways up and down the sidewalk. No gopher holes there. The exhilaration of standing higher than anyone else was surpassed only by the exhilaration of doing something that only boys were supposed to do!

  Just then, Mrs. Braun opened one of her front bay windows, stuck her head out, and yelled, “Maria Schmidt! Ach! My eyes cannot believe what they are seeing. A fine young lady like you! You should come down off those crazy sticks this instant.”

  Startled, Maria wobbled a bit, but she quickly caught her balance and kept on walking. What business was it of Mrs. Braun if she walked on stilts or on the ground? How could it make any difference to anyone?

  Thomas, Curt, and Libby would never have told on Maria, but that evening Maria caught sight of Mrs. Braun accosting Mama as she came home from work. From Mama’s expression, Maria guessed that her mother was not terribly pleased with the news.

  When Mama finally got home, she took off her wraps and pulled the long hat pin from her felt hat. She hung the hat on the hook by the back door along with her coat. “Come into the parlor, Maria,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

  For once, Maria was glad Papa came home late. At least she would only have to face Mama.

  Mama sat in Papa’s Morris chair and motioned for Maria to sit on the nearby divan. “Now what’s all this about you making a spectacle of yourself in front of our house?”

  “I walked on Thomas’s stilts. And I did well at it, too,” she said.

  Mama was quiet. She picked up Papa’s reading glasses from the table beside his chair, the pair he wore when reading the Bible, the newspapers, and all his German publications. Putting the glasses on, Mama picked up the Bible and placed it in her lap.

  The carved clock chose that moment to begin its happy little serenade, and the couple did their skittery little dance. The gong sounded six times.

  “Doing wrong is one matter,” Mama said when it was quiet again. “Being proud of doing wrong is yet another.”

  Maria didn’t feel she’d done anything wrong, but she couldn’t say that. Not to Mama. So she kept quiet and waited.

  “Is that how you tore your dress?”

  Maria had neatly stitched it, but it was a long rip. Right in front, near the hem. Mama’s eagle eyes missed nothing. Maria nodded.

  “When you asked to go to the dump with the boys this morning, what did I tell you?”

  Maria tried to remember. “You told me I couldn’t go with them.”

  “What else did I say?”

  “You said the dump was no place for a lady.”

  “Precisely. And being precariously perched on a pair of stilts in front of all the neighbors is no place for a lady, either.”

  “But, Mama,” Maria blurted out, “it’s so unfair that boys get to do things that girls can’t do. Just because I’m a girl, I’ll never even get to vote, and I’m a whole lot smarter than that silly old Charles Briggs. I wish I’d been born a boy!” She hadn’t meant to be disrespectful, but the words kept tumbling out.

  “I don’t believe this conversation is about voting or about Charles Briggs. We’re talking about your discontent.” Mama opened the Bible to the book of Romans. “You are not the potter, Maria Schmidt. You are the clay.” Adjusting the glasses, she said, “Romans 9:20 says, ‘Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?’”

  Carefully, Mama unhooked the reading glasses from behind her ears and placed them back in the black leather case. The case snapped shut. “God created you to be a lady, and God doesn’t make errors. Even without speaking, your actions question God’s wisdom in this matter.”

  Maria stared at Mama’s Franklin treadle sewing machine pushed up against the wall. The machine was covered with one of Mama’s dainty tatted coverlets. Maria couldn’t deny that she’d questioned God. Surely He must have made a mistake. Deep inside, she was still certain she was as good as any boy alive.

  “Before you return to school on Monday,” Mama continued, “you will write this verse one hundred times and turn in the pages to me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  But even as she spent hours that evening at the kitchen table writing, Maria decided that if God hadn’t made a mistake, perhaps it was the people around her who were wrong. In what she’d read of the Bible, she found nothing about girls not walking on stilts—or not going to the dump, for that matter. Who made all the silly rules anyway? Perhaps when she got a little older, she could help change a few.

  Thomas sat at the table with her doing his schoolwork. He’d already apologized for helping her to get in trouble.

  “Please don’t apologize, Thomas,” she said. “Because of you I know now that I truly can walk on stilts. But I probably should have stayed in the backyard.”

  Thomas gave his lopsided smile. “Don’t forget, Mrs. Braun can see our backyard as well.”

  Curt came home from his delivery run one morning upset about the news. He’d even used his own money to purchase a copy of the paper. The article told of miners near Ludlow, Colorado, who had gone on strike because they wanted better safety conditions in the mines. One accidental explosion had killed seventy-six miners.

  The article explained that when the miners went on strike, the company evicted the strikers and their families from their company houses. The miners had created a tent city for temporary shelter through th
e winter months. They and their families had suffered from cold and hunger. Finally that spring, the infantry and cavalry had been called in. Instead of helping the cold and hungry families, the soldiers were under orders to force the miners to return to work.

  Curt read the story aloud as Mama prepared to leave to catch the trolley. It told how four men and a boy were shot dead. Then the tents were set on fire. Twelve children and two women who were hiding in a space under one of the tents died from smoke inhalation. The miners were forced to return to work. Nothing had been gained.

  “Sometimes I wonder if reading all the news is healthy,” Mama said as she pulled on her coat and pinned on her hat.

  “You’re supposed to be throwing those newspapers,” Maria said to Curt, “not reading them.”

  “I can’t help but see the headlines,” he protested. “Why would the army kill innocent people just because they were striking for safer working conditions? Why? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “There are many things in this world that don’t make sense,” Thomas said. “Shouldn’t you be eating your breakfast?”

  Curt sat down at his place, but he just picked at the sausage and eggs.

  Mama kissed each of her children good-bye but lingered at Curt’s place, giving him a special hug. “Those brave people were doing what they thought to be right, Curt. Who knows? Perhaps their sacrifices will cause changes to come about.” She pointed to the article. “If their plight is published in papers across the nation, perhaps public opinion will shift in favor of the workingman. There may come a day when the millionaire business owners can no longer mistreat their workers, nor sway government officials to their side.”

  After Mama had gone out the door, Maria thought about what she’d said. She’d never heard Mama say that about making sacrifices before. Perhaps that meant Mama would help Aunt Josephine in the work of the suffrage association. Mama’s sacrifice might also help changes to come about.

  On the way to school, Libby pointed out to Maria all the pretty dresses the other girls were wearing, especially the girls whose fathers dropped them off in their fancy touring cars. Now that spring had arrived, the new frocks were as plentiful and colorful as budding tulips.