END OF SEPTEMBER 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

End of September 2018

The night of Sept. 24, 1918, Rockwell Kent wrote in his journal, “The wind that night continued rising till it blew a gale. And that night in their bed Rockwell and his father put their arms tight about each other without telling why they did it.” That day their near-death experience rowing from Seward to Fox Island had been a lesson for Kent, one they were both fortunate enough to have survived.

The storm continued the next day. After they dried out their damp bedding by the stove Kent, with Rockie’s help on the cross-cut saw, chopped down a tree blocking sunlight from entering his new south-facing window. He noted others that needed removal to give him the brightness needed for his indoor work. While Kent added to his firewood supply, Rockie attended to his reading homework. For every page he read his father read him a page before bed of Robinson Crusoe. That evening Rockie read nine pages in The Early Cave-Dwellers by Katharine Elizabeth Dopp. “He undresses and jumps into bed and cuddles close to me as I sit there beside him reading,” Kent wrote. “And ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is a story to grip his young fancy and make this very island a place for adventure.

It was no accident that Kent brought to Alaska books by Katharine Dopp for Rockie’s eduction. Born in 1863 in a Wisconsin log cabin, her New England parents were among the first white settlers in the area. Educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Dopp later became a public-school teacher and university professor while earning several degrees including a PhD in Philosophy and Education. She wrote about anthropology and economics, with a special focus on industrial education. Kent also brought The Later Cave-Dwellers, The Early Sea-People, and Dopp’s most popular book The Tree Dwellers. He may also have brought The Early Herdsmen. Why would Kent use these books for Rockie’s education. It turns out that by 1909, the year Rockie was born, Dopp’s books were standard curriculum as early readers for the Socialist Sunday Schools that had sprouted in New York and other parts of the U.S.

Kent’s move toward Socialism had many influences, including the English Romantics. Socialist Sunday Schools emerged in Great Britain with advocates like Robert Owen in the 1830’s. They died out in the 1850’s reemerging in the late 1880’s. About that same time, they began appearing in New York and Chicago connected to the German-American socialist movement.

Robert Henri had a major influence on Kent’s politics, as David Traxel notes in An American Saga: The Life and Times of Rockwell Kent. “Henry had introduced him to the working-class sections of New York Henri also acquainted him with Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? Kent rarely marked passages in his books, but he did in this one. “The destiny of art in our times consists of this,” Tolstoy wrote. “To translate from the region of reason to the region of feeling the truth that the well-being of people consists of their union, and to substitute for the kingdom of force, the kingdom of heaven, that is, love, which presents itself to all of us as the highest aim of life.” Another important influence on Kent was Rufus Weeks, a family friend and avid Socialist. In the fall of 1904 Weeks took Kent to a Socialist Party meeting. When it ended, Kent joined and paid his dues. By 1905-8 on Monhegan Island, Kent was reading Turgenev, Tolstoy, Ernest Haeckel, Schopenhaur, Ruskin and Herbert Spencer. “He felt particularly close to Henry Thoreau,” Traxel writes, “finding parallels in the simple, frugal ways of life they had both chosen, lives stripped to the essentials so as to have the freedom to create.” The influence of Rufus Weeks continued, especially his Christian socialism. “I love talking with him,” Kent wrote. “we went over lots of things…in fact everything of great worth that the human mind has to occupy itself with…One does not dispute what Mr. Weeks says. I at least just listen very humbly.” These years Kent not only painted but also worked at various laboring jobs including lobstering. Kent married Kathleen Whiting on Jan. 31, 1908. The next year they lived for a time on a small island attached to Connecticut by a bridge – Caritas Isle. There Kent met and socialized with a close-knit group of intellectuals, many of them socialists. There he met and befriended Horace Trauble, biographer and companion of Walt Whitman. About this time Kent fixated on an extremely remote island adventure. In Dec. 1909, two months after Rockie was born, he wrote to a socialist writer and hero of his, Jack London, asking information about Pitcairn Island. “Dear Comrad Kent,” London began the letter. He had only sailed by the island but offered Kent a letter of introduction, and ended with a “Yours for the Revolution.”

About this time, on May 9, 1909, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published an article headlined “Sunday School in Brooklyn Part of Plan to Spread the Doctrine.” A new Socialist Sunday School now met on Sunday afternoons on Flatbush Avenue with fifty youngsters ages 6 through 20. Mrs. Bertha M. Fraser “is the mother of all these schools,” the article said, “and her methods of teaching obtain [exists} in them all.” The first one in Brooklyn started in 1906 in a private home, and by 1909 there were a few others in Manhattan and the Bronx. “When Mrs. Fraser started the first Socialist school in Brooklyn,” the article continued, “there were twelve boys and girls that used to come to her home every Sunday afternoon and she began by a simple service and telling them stories about the people of early civilization, which were intended to implant a foundation for the beliefs of Socialism.” Soon Fraser developed a curriculum which included a specific literature.

In 1909, these socialist schools found a relatively safe haven in places like Chicago and New York. That was not to be the case ten years later. The socialist versions were unlike the traditional “Sunday” schools with their “gray bearded superintendent in his high Sunday collar, the maps of Jerusalem, the golden texts and the library of green and red volumes with pale pink contents.” Morning classes began by the singing of a revised version of “America” – “My country thou shalt be, sweet land of liberty…” Next came the recitation of the Socialist ten commandments:

1. Love your school fellows, who will be your fellow workers Love in life.
2.  Love learning, which is the food of the mind. Be as grateful to your teachers as to your parents.
3.  Make every day holy by good and useful deeds and kindly actions.
4.  Honor good men and women; be courteous to all men and women; bow down to none.
5.  Do not hate or speak evil of any one; do not be revengeful, but stand up for your rights and resist oppression.
6.  Do not be cowardly; be a friend to the weak and love justice.
7.  Remember that all the good things of the earth are produced by labor. Whoever enjoys them without working for them is stealing the bread of the workers.
8.  Observe and think in order to discover the truth. Do not believe what is contrary to reason and never deceive yourself or others.
9.  Do not think that he who loves his country must hate and despise other nations or wish for war, which is a remnant of barbarism.
10. Look forward to the day when all men and women will be free citizens of one fatherland and live together as brothers and sisters in peace and righteousness.

This list reminded me of my entry for August. 29^th on this website. I describe a witness’s memory of Rockie, back to the wall against the Sexton Hotel in Seward, being bullied by some local boys. Kent’s son had unwisely bragged that he could speak German. The witness recalled this scene: “In response to the question “Do you like the Germans” – he bravely responded “I’ve been taught to like all people.” The Brooklyn Eagle article notes that “Theology is entirely eliminated from the Socialist Sunday schools, no word of religion ever being heard except of the religion of humanitarianism. Love, justice and truth are constantly impressed, but the Bible is not used nor referred to. Truths that are inculcated are economic truths. Patriotism is replaced by the idea of brotherhood that will wipe out party and national lines and make war an impossibility. The small boy is taught not to call the Italian a ‘dago’ nor to nickname or apply any term suggestive of scorn to one of his neighbors. He is not taught to despise the capitalist, as all good and regular Socialists are popularly supposed to do, but to look upon him as a necessary part of the present system that obtains {exists}. The lessons are impressed in story form and are put in a way that holds the attention of the youthful mind.” After the commandments are recited the students sing Socialist songs like “To Labor” by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. You can read the lyrics on the third photo with this entry. After that his school lessons begin. The beginning readers use the books by Katharine Dopp that Kent brought to Alaska for Rockie’s home schooling. The older students read Marxian Economics by Ernest Untermann, and a book that would be published soon, John Spargo’s Socialist Readings for Children. Those 1909 days for the Socialist Sunday schools were relatively safe. By 1919, the U.S. Department of Justice began investigations into their subversion, and the churches were determining ways to combat the Socialist heresy.

During these last days of September 1918 over million American soldiers began their engagement in the deadliest battle in American history, the 47-day long Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The seven-mile advance stretched over a 20-mile front as U.S. troops took 12 towns and 5000 prisoners. Americans lost 26,277 soldiers and the Germans lost 28,000. An unknown number of French were lost. Many knew the war’s end was near and Kent anxiously awaited word. He knew he was expected to register for the draft in Seward. He wrote to Kathleen asking her to send official papers attesting to their marriage and their children. Kent hoped to get a deferment due to his dependents. He also arranged with a German friend to signal him by lantern when the war ended, which he learned later caused suspicions. From his cabin site he couldn’t see Seward, but the town was visible from the south end of his beach, so that’s where he and Rockie hiked at certain assigned times.

The weather was wet and cold, and Kent spent these days chinking the wall and roof spaces with moss, even though it was sopping wet. If he kept his stoves going, it would dry. On the evening of Sept. 26^th he had a clear moonlit night, and the next day was clear. “I worked all day about the cabin,” he wrote, “calking it and almost finishing that job, splitting wood, and working with the cross-cut saw. Added stops to the frame of our door, made a miter box, and cut my long strips brought from Seward last trip into pieces for my stretcher frames. And Rockwell all this time helped cheerfully when he was called upon, played boat on the beach, hunted imaginary wild animals with his bow and arrow of stone-age age-design, and was as always so contented, so happy that the day was not half long enough.”

Now that the rain had stopped Kent could better appreciate the scenery around him. He couldn’t watch the sun rise – that was behind him to the east, but he could view “the quiet rose color of morning” as the sun’s rays hit the western mountain range. He could also trace the sun as it traversed over the southern headland of his cove toward its setting on the Resurrection Peninsula to the west. “We glance through our tiny western window at sunrise,” he wrote “and see beyond the bay the many ranges of mountains, from the somber ones at the water’s edge to the distant glacier and snow-capped peaks, lit by the far-off sun with the loveliest light imaginable.”

On Sept. 27^th, Kent cleared more and trees from around his cabin site. “This afternoon I prepared all my wood panels to begin my work,” Kent wrote, “painting them on both sides.” Finally, at last, he would soon begin to paint. That evening as he and Rockie ate supper, an excited Olson dashed into their cabin. He had seen a site I’ve observed many times on Fox Island – a family of river otters traveling from the sea down the path to the lake. They came within 20 feet of Olson and Nanny, his milk goat, and played with each other. Kent and Rockie may have told Olson they had seen some otters, probably the same family, swimming and playing among the rocks at the north end of the beach.

Though the two had nearly lost their lives on their Sept. 24^th return row, it had been a momentous visit to Seward. They met the incoming and outgoing steamships, received and sent out a lot of mail, and strengthened new friendships. But the letters from his wife disturbed Kent, annoyed, angered and depressed him. She was accepting the attentions of Mr. Walker of the Coast Guard. They had spent time together, he loved the children, they had taken walks on the beach, sat and talked by a camp fire. They had the same birth dates and were the same age – which was about ten years younger than Kent. “Isn’t that romantic?” Kathleen taunted her husband. I wrote about this here and in the entry that followed. Kent was furious and devastated. He contemplated ending his adventure early and even hinted at the peace of death.

Olson’s charm; the river otters; Rockie’s youthful optimism and exuberance; the morning appearance of pink sunlight on the distant mountain peaks; the cross-cut saw; the clearing of trees and brush. Ah…the pioneering!

All this probably distracted him from other thoughts deep inside his being – his endangered marriage and the uncertainty of Kathleen’s faithfulness; his profound love for his family and children; his feelings for Hildegarde and concern over melding that relationship into other life; his apprehension about the draft. What would happen if he didn’t register as his pacifism demanded? What would happen if he did and didn’t get a deferment?

Finally, all this preparation for winter was necessary and the pioneering was energizing. But that’s not why he had ventured to Alaska. He had come to paint. And his mind and hands agonized to get started.

PHOTOS

A pen and ink by Chris Kent, Rockwell Kent’s grandson (Rockie’s son). He created this as an illustrative logo for Jim Barkley's Fox Island business. Chris emailed me: “I was trying to capture a particular clear calm winter night when I saw the moon light up the mountains and a thin layer of ice covering some spruce bows. It was not drawn from any field sketches but from what I imagined the view would be like from the top of northern ridge of the island looking south to the beach (covered in snow). I don't think you would have been able to see Rockwell's cabin from this vantage point but you can see Jim's cabin, and that's who I drew it for.” Published here with Chris Kent’s permission.