The Reading History Project: "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History" by Helen Zoe Veit

Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History by food historian Helen Zoe Veit doesn’t fit into my 2026 reading plan as far as reading history books advocating for the “our” in our shared history is concerned. Unless someone wants to argue that we’re all supposed to eat a particular way and, therefore, yes, I’ll make a stand for the picky eaters. I am, after all, dealing with a second generation of them, myself. Even without a personal connection, Picky is my favorite type of history book in that it deals with the impact of events on individuals and how we came to be the way we are. Veit does a fine job with this, though I think she stopped a little short.

According to Veit, documents such as letters and journals indicate that children in mid-nineteenth century America most definitely were not picky eaters. They ate an array of foods we don’t associate with children, or maybe even with adults these days. They ate, in fact, what their parents ate. There was no special food for children. What this may mean is that the people who recalled their eating as children in letters and journals ate the same things their parents ate. There may be another population of people who did eat differently as children, but no documentation exists. But that doesn’t change the fact that, historically, picky eating was not a universal childhood experience. Veit explains why childrearing, in terms of feeding, was different then than it is now.

Child mortality was high in the nineteenth century, though. By the end of the nineteenth century, some health/food activists (they did have them back then) suggested diet could be a cause. Veit says the general public didn’t show much interest in that, but it does lead into what would start happening during the Progressive Era.

Veit mentions the Progressive Era by name a few times. For those of us who missed it in history class, it was the period from around 1890 to 1920 (the exact dates vary depending on the source), when reforms were enacted. On state levels you might see improved funding for education. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed early in the period. The 18^th and 19^th Amendments, prohibiting the sale of alcohol and legalizing women voting were passed toward the end of it. (The eugenics movement in this country was also considered a Progressive reform, to be honest here. I have a hard time not including that with my thinking about early twentieth century progressives.)

This era coincided with a move toward specialization in the professions. You start seeing different types of medical specialties, for instance. Home economics and nutrition become fields, possibly because of women were entering higher education. Home economics and nutrition were considered “women’s interests,” but at this point they were also considered scientific and important. 

So you’ve got a period when people are interested in reform and you’ve got professional fields that are interested in food. Voila! Kids should eat different foods!  Oh and you’ve got an adult population that’s becoming more and more educated, so parents become aware of food studies and recommendations for children through magazines and government publications, as well as whatever their doctors were telling them.

At this point, drinking milk is now considered important for children. This didn’t happen in earlier periods, because without refrigeration (or knowledge of the germ theory of disease), milk wasn’t considered safe for humans to drink. Because it wasn’t. Bringing milk, and a lot of it, into children’s diets was significant, because milk is filling. There had also been little eating between meals in the nineteenth century, which begins to become more common. Filling children up on milk and snacks left them less hungry to eat whatever was put in front of them at meal time. 

By the 1930s you start seeing kids doing less. They’re not working on farms as often, because families are moving to urban areas. They’re not walking as far to schools. They have less opportunity to work up appetites. Another reason why kids are less hungry when they come to the table at mealtime than they used to be.

You start seeing talk of picky eating among children now. It’s definitely a thing by mid-century. Then psychologists get involved. Then post-World War II, you get all kinds of unhealthy prepared food appearing as well as marketing to sell it. Marketing to both adults and children.

Veit makes a very good argument that American culture created the picky eating phenomena. To me it seems as if no other result could be expected given how we were living.

In her Epilogue, Veit offers a list of suggestions for combating picky eating. “Mass childhood pickiness resulted from a series of concrete changes, and parents who understand those changes can directly combat the causes of pickiness today.” This struck me as odd for two reasons.

First, I can’t recall historical works offering information on how to deal with or reverse the issue of the book. This may be a result of my not having read enough history.

Second, Veit doesn’t address a few historical/cultural changes that would impact parents’ ability to follow her suggestions. It's as if she stopped short in documenting the chain of events that got us to the state of child pickiness we're now dealing with, leaving a gap that could have a big impact on parents' ability to "combat the causes of pickiness today."

1. While Veit shows us that pickiness goes back at least to the mid-twentieth century, she never considers what happens to all the picky child eaters who existed over the last seventy years. Did they outgrow pickiness? Or did they become picky adults who will be limited in their ability to model healthy eating for their children and make the changes Veit recommends?
2. Veit only mentions “overscheduling” children in passing. However, kids, and their parents, being tied up with after school and evening activities, prime dinner prep and eating time, goes back at least until the 1980s if not longer. We now have three generations for whom that lifestyle is a norm. That means adults have limited time to prepare the kinds of meals Veit describes and families have limited opportunities to eat them together.
3. Veit never addresses the increase in ADHD and autism. Both those conditions can be accompanied with sensory issues that make eating difficult. Neurodivergent children's (and adults') eating situations are not cultural and would require different kinds of interventions with different kinds of results that can be expected.

Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History is a terrific book in which the author does an excellent job of explaining how we came to be as we are. It just doesn’t do as good a job of convincing us there’s something we can do about it. But I don’t know that that’s history’s job.

 

 

 

Getting Serious About Humor: Where Comic Writing Comes From

I am a fan of Zarna Garg's on-line videos and the clips of her stand-up I've seen. So, I jumped at the chance to buy her memoir, This American Woman, when the e-book edition was on sale. (I like ebooks, because I'm a minimalist and control the number of things around me. I like them even more when they're cheap.) I was talking about it all the time I was reading it.

Interesting point: I often force a family member to watch Garg's videos, some of which include her family, because everyone wants to share funny stuff, right? For the most part, he just does not get them. I find this fascinating, because I believe Garg's work is incongruity humor, my favorite kind. She describes herself as "America's first Indian immigrant mom comedian" and does a lot of Indian culture clashing with American culture humor, which often ends up being commentary. She grew up in India, moving here in her late teens. She definitely gets America. 

Oh, and she also has some feminist stuff going on, describing what life was like for a girl in India, even a girl from a family with money. The family with money part ended rather abruptly when she was fourteen and her mother died. She was the youngest child, and her father wanted her to accept an arranged marriage. Our Zarna would have none of that, which meant pretty much living on the street for a year and a half. She continued to go to school during the day, while hustling her friends for places to stay at night. She ended up going back home to her father. What saved her from marriage was the paperwork coming through that enabled her to move to the United States to live with her sister and brother-in-law.

So that's an interesting backstory for anybody, but particularly a comedian.

I'm always fearful of giving away too much of another writer's story, particularly a personal story. So I will just offer up some of the fascinating stuff about how Garg got into comedy. She grew up in a business family. Her father was a businessman. Her brother was. After graduating from law school in this country, she married a man going to graduate school in business. She got permission to audit his courses. She wanted to do his homework, though he said no, because, it seems, he liked doing homework, too.

Her big interest, after she finished up her years as a New York City mom, was business. She wanted to start a business and made a few attempts.

They didn't go well.

And then someone suggested she try comedy. Which she treated like a business. She went about becoming a comedian in a very business-like manner. And it worked for her. It seems to be not only a business, but a family business.

If you read her book, watch her videos, read what she says about herself and her life on-line, you'll see how much this woman works.

• Of course, there is the stand-up appearances. 
• But she has also written an award-winning screenplay. Read the book. She'll explain why awards for screenplays are important. She's made me rethink submitting short-story manuscripts for awards.
• She won a Webby in 2025 after seven years of making videos.
• She does a podcast with her family. 
• She's an actress.
• She's all over the place. There's an article about her in The New Yorker! I read the New Yorker! How did I miss that?

I don't know that I would say that there is a lot in This American Woman about humor as a subject. But if you read this book, you can see how Garg's life experience is woven into her comedy persona. At the same time, you can see how that comedy persona is not necessarily the real Zarna Garg.

And that has something to say about where comic writing comes from. 

 

The Reading History Project: "Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed History of America" by Michael Harriot

In Thinking About History Sara Maza writes that "The skills and temperaments of good research historians are very similar to those of successful journalists: curiosity, ingenuity, patience, and doggedness. And like journalists, good historians know how to put a story together and make it understandable to a wide range of readers." The similarities between historians and journalists may explain why Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed History of America by journalist Michael Harriot is so good.

This marvelous book is more than an account of traditional American history from a Black perspective, which is what I expected when I bought it. It covers a lot of material I didn't know about. Additionally, Harriot's position is that the history of America is the history of racism, a premise I haven't read about before. He does a good job of supporting his argument.

For instance, his contention is that Africans made the plantation system work not just with their labor but with their knowledge. In the Carolinas, Africans had the knowledge and ability to grow rice, what Harriot calls "America's first edible cash crop." He writes of the ineptitude of the original British settlers at Jamestown, saying the colony was saved because of the arrival of slaves. 

In case you haven't heard anything like this before and are wondering if this guy is really talking about whitewashing or just doesn't know history, culinary historian Michael Twitty writes of Africans being brought to America to grow rice in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. In The Story of America: Essays on Origins historian Jill Lepore says of Jamestown, "They brought the wrong kind of settlers: idle and indolent English gentlemen, who spent their time bowling in the streets." Harriot is also not the first to have written that Lincoln was primarily interested in preserving the Union, not freeing the slaves and that Franklin Roosevelt did nothing for Blacks. He's not the only writer who doesn't have a lot of positive things to say about Woodrow Wilson, either. 

So, yes, Harriot has read some history. 

I appreciated Harriot's covering the history of political parties in this country, something I've never been clear on, and describing how the Federalist and Democrat-Republicans evolved into the parties we know now. And how racial attitudes passed back and forth between them.

He also makes clear the incredible openness of the violent racism during the Jim Crow era. I missed learning much about the Jim Crow period in my schooling, and I've taken a few history courses in my day. That's something to consider when talking about the teaching of "our history." How much of "our," meaning everyone in the country's, history are we exposed to?

But don't think that Black AF History is just the heaping on of one grim event after another. Though, it kind of is. It is also entertaining. Harriot brings in some memoirish elements to introduce sections, describing his family. Uncle Rob, who appears a few times to take over the narrative, is a standout. "Racist Baby" also appears a number of times, interacting with Harriot's narrative voice so Harriot can provide the little one with some info that his racist parents most certainly will not. 

Harriot's enthusiasm for Black historical figures who have been lost to the general public is, well, touching or heart-warming, not terms I would expect to use regarding a history book. He particularly embraces Black women from the past. I swear I had heard of Ida B. Wells. I just hadn't heard enough.

To wrap this up, I will say that Black AF History is a great combination of content and presentation.

The Reading History Project: "The Westerners: Myth-Making and Belonging on the American Frontier" by Megan Kate Nelson

The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier by Megan Kate Nelson will be published March 31. I read a digital ARC provided by NetGalley.

This is a book that definitely addresses the "our" in "our shared history," my reading subject for this year.

Nelson begins in her prologue with an account of Frederick Jackson Turner's reading of The Significance of the Frontier in American History at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. Turner argued that "...American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West." Nelson says that before Turner, most historians believed that Europe had the greatest impact on what America became. Turner's contention that America became America because of the "colonization of the Great West" by white people from the East was a shift in thinking for professional historians.

To give you some idea of how big a deal Turner and his theory of the American frontier became, I recall hearing at least something about it in high school. I've had a copy of The Significance of the Frontier in American History floating around my office for a year now. 

While it was new thinking in 1893 as far as professional history was concerned, Nelson says popular perception of the "Great West" supported Turner. Novels featured Indian fighters saving white families, painters romanticized Western landscapes, and government policies encouraged people in the East to go West. Turner was preaching to a choir that already believed a mythic frontier story involving white Americans moving West and bringing civilization with them.    

Some of Nelson's content moves on to the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is primarily laid out chronologically from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to that American Historical Association meeting in 1893 at which Frederick Jackson Turner read his paper. Along that timeline are what might be called a collection of microhistories, in this case the stories of people who lived in the West, people who didn't reflect the frontier myth. (Except for the one person who actually promoted it.) All these people are what we would consider today as minor historical figures, the most recognizable being Sacajawea. But they are also people who had some significance at the time they lived or were even well known then. Others wrote about them, or they left writing themselves. In her epilogue, Nelson describes what happened to them after death, a sad afterlife for people who didn't fit the Western myth narrative but were part of the West, nonetheless. 

My first thought while reading The Westerners was that I was ignorant of a great deal that happened in the western part of this country in the nineteenth century. That was probably Nelson's intention, and, if so, she was very successful in educating this reader. I was going to give some examples of the depth of what I didn't know but decided I didn't want to get into that.

My second thought was how different regional history must be for elementary school students in different parts of the country from what I was exposed to growing up in rural New England. At least, it should be different. 

In the very readable The Westerners Megan Kate Nelson replaces the myth of the Great West with a reality that is just as empowering, because it includes so many more people. It's a reality based on our shared history.

You can hear her speaking about the frontier myth at her publisher's website.

A Lesson On Finding Lost Things That We Can All Use

I dabble in reading fiction that includes ADHD characters, so I got a copy of D.L. Green's CJ Baker Mover and Shaker: The Mystery of the Missing Book. (Debra is a Facebook friend from way back.) This is an early reader from Capstone Publishing, an educational publisher, so it is instructive fiction, so to speak.

The book includes a four-step process for finding lost things, and IT WORKS! I used it last night to find my box of straight pins. I only had to go to the second step. Sadly, I didn't think to do this until the pins were lost for two hours, and by then, it was time to go to bed.

I was pretty amazed, nonetheless.

Capstone published four CJ Baker books last year, all written by Debra, all coming out at the same time. They may each have some kind of coping lesson.

Because I don't read a great deal of fiction that's written to overtly teach something, I can't address how well that is done here. But the basic, very short story is complete, and the program for finding lost objects being taught makes sense in the context of the story.

And the program works. Assuming I can remember to use it.

ADHD Awareness Month: Still Looking for Adult ADHD Characters in Adult Books

With adult fiction dealing with ADHD characters there are two issues to consider: 1. Characters who are not intentionally created as being ADHD, readers see it in them. 2. Characters who are intentionally created as being ADHD. In my limited experience, there may be more of the first than the second.

Unintentional ADHD Characters

This is a matter of readers perceiving a character as ADHD whether or not the character is clearly identified as ADHD or whether or not the author intended to be writing an ADHD character. 

This Book Riot article, for instance, argues that Jane in Dread Nation and Ayoola in My Sister, the Serial Killer both have ADHD characteristics. I've read both books but before I became what I might call ADHD sensitive. Thus, I can neither support nor refute their characters' ADHDness. Certainly, these books were written in a time period when ADHD is recognized as ADHD and authors could be interested in creating ADHD-like characters, even if it wasn't discussed as such in the story.

But I've also found articles about characters in books from periods when the disorder must have existed and was even recognized within the medical world. But how much the general public and reading public knew about it is another thing. Were the authors modeling characters on people they knew with what we'd now recognize as ADHD characteristics? Were they intentionally creating ADHD characters, though they wouldn't have known that designation? 

Characters from older books who are sometimes believed to be ADHD-like include Sherlock Holmes and Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables. But the character from an older book that I frequently saw listed as having ADHD qualities is Emma from Jane Austen's Emma. 

Unlike the Sherlock Holmes stories and Anne of Green Gables, I don't believe I've ever read Emma. I made an attempt this past month, but the characters in that thing talk a lot. They talk about the neighbors, primarily. I used to have to finish reading a book once I'd started it, but not anymore.  

However, I did get through, I believe, 18 chapters and found some of the material sited by readers who find Emma to be an ADHD character. 

• She has been meaning to read more since she was 12, has made lists, but another character says he has given up expecting her to do any reading. 
• When her mother died, a character says, Emma lost the only person who could cope with her.
• Emma describes having been interested in painting portraits a few years before but had given it up in disgust and not one painting had been completed.
• At one point, Emma herself describes how little she's able to maintain attention.

I find Emma to be incredibly elitist and overall unpleasant, which has nothing to do with these ADHD type characteristics. I'm not at all sure what Austen was going for here.

Authors With ADHD: More Unintentional ADHD Characters?

Adult authors with ADHD include Rebecca Makkai and Mary Robinette Kowal, both of whom were diagnosed as adults, after they were established in their careers. Kowal has a marvelous short video on ADHD and writing.  In a conversation with Mindy McGinnis (The Female of the Species) Kowal says "I think I'm writing all of my characters as ADHD characters, but if I were trying to write a character who is explicitly ADHD, I wouldn't actually know how, because that's just the way my brain works all the time."

Now I had read the first of Kowal's Lady Astronaut books a few years ago, before ADHD was something I was what you might say sensitive to. I have no recollection of seeing anything ADHD-like in it. But for this ADHD Awareness Month project I read her book Ghost Talkers.

Kowal writes alternative history, and Ghost Talkers involves an alternative World War I-era world in which the British government employes mediums to work with recently deceased soldiers who are trained to report back to them immediately after being killed in order to pass on information about what is actually happening during battles. On the very first page the main character describes having to try to struggle to maintain control during a work session.  "She tried to hold the awareness at bay, along with the dozens of other spirit circles working for the British Army." "...if she weren't careful that would pull her back into her body." There are references throughout the book to her being in danger of coming unmoored, in danger of losing her grip, and dealing with thousands of memories at once. At another point, one of the ghosts has to struggle to focus.

Was Kowal using ADHD characteristics to create characters and even plot? Is this something other ADHD authors may do? Or is this just a reader finding what she's looking for in a text? 

Intentional ADHD Characters in Romance

I've read, more than once, that romance writers have embraced ADHD characters. In fact, you can find ADHD romance lists. I found Portrait of a Scotsman, a historical romance by Evie Dunmore, on a couple of ADHD romance lists. 

Right away in the first chapter the main (wealthy, of course) character is concerned that she has gone to the wrong address. "Or perhaps she had done it again...She squinted at the address, then back at the house number with full attention." She struggles with impulse control in a gallery. "...she shouldn't touch it. She really should not." When caught touching something she shouldn't have, she says, "I had not meant to touch it." She later describes how she had failed to get her mail that morning and thus didn't know about a cancellation. In a discussion with the male lead, she says, "...there's the matter of my attention...It is either scattered or directed with an unnatural focus. I lose track of time when I paint, for example."

She, and her family, are aware of her ADHD, even if they don't have a word for it.

She is also clearly dyslexic, however. The two conditions do sometimes occur together. Having seen  doctors about her inability to write without spelling errors or keep numbers in the correct order, her family is finally told that it's not her eyes causing the problem, but a sort of "word blindness." This leads her father to fear there is something wrong with her brain. Her brain is considered odd within the family, though the male lead in the story recognizes early on her superior visual memory.

We don't see a great deal about her conditions over the course of the story, but I think what we do see is mainly related to dyslexia. Dyslexia is like the autism I wrote about earlier. Neurotypical readers feel they know what it is and can recognize it. That would make it easier to show in fiction than ADHD.

My short study of ADHD adult fiction has been as interesting as it's been disappointing. I'll definitely be looking for ADHD in my adult fiction reading in the future.

Getting Serious About Humor: More Humor With Mystery

Timmossholder on Unsplash

I picked up The Mystery of the Crooked Man by Tom Spencer while browsing at a library, and I'm blogging about it now because I really need to get it back there. One of the book's blurbs described it as "riotously funny," and while I wouldn't go that far, main character Agatha Dorn is extremely drole in a bitter way that I enjoyed very much. 

In my inept study of humor writing I have found very few truly funny works of fiction. They tend to involve wry point-of-view characters and how they perceive what is happening in the story. Perhaps what I should learn from this is that humor in fiction is usually about character, not situation or plot.

Of another humorous mystery, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, I said, among other things, that the narrator's inner life contributed to the humor. The same is true of the main character in The Mystery of the Crooked Man. Agatha might argue that she doesn't have much of an inner life or much of a life at all, which ends up being far funnier than you'd think it should be.

Of course, any readers of mysteries, or at least any readers of a certain age who have been reading mysteries for a long time, are going to raise their brows at a main character named Agatha in a mystery novel. Agatha Christie has become as famous for being Agatha Christie, Mystery Author, as she is for being Agatha Christie the author of mysteries, if you follow my thought there. She's sort of transcended her work. 

Now that I think of it, you probably don't need to be a reader of mysteries to know who Agatha Christie is and to note the use of that unusual first name in a book. 

Here is an interesting bit from the The Mystery of the Crooked Man that casual readers may not get and is not a spoiler: Agatha Dorn is a museum archivist who is a specialist on an author from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction named Gladden Green. Gladden Green had a real mystery in her life, because she disappeared for a few days while at the height of her career and later turned up in a hotel. This all right out of the real life of Agatha Christie. In case I haven't been clear, Agatha Dorn is a specialist on a character modeled on Agatha Christie. And get this...Gladden Green's husband's name is Archie. Agatha Christie's husband at the time she disappeared was also named Archie. She got another one later.

Now, of course, none of this is particularly funny, but it is fun. Also, is it metafiction? I've never been one hundred percent clear on what that is. 

I'm obsessing.

I must say that I felt this book dragged a little in the middle in terms of plot and mystery. But then it came roaring back with one of the best mystery endings I can recall. I didn't see it coming, but it made perfect sense.

I don't know how Agatha Dorn can come back for another mystery, but I'm definitely onboard if she does.

 

The Heritage Month Project: "Night at the Fiestas: Stories" by Kirstin Valdez Quade

Last week I discussed Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao as part of my Hispanic Heritage Month observance. I feel I should point out that I am aware that seven years ago he was the focus of claims regarding inappropriate behavior toward several women writers. As a result of that issue at that time, writer and critic Monica Castillo tweeted "Because I need/want to deal with this Junot Diaz news in another way, can we signal boost some Latina authors out there?" And that led PBS to run the article Sexual misconduct claims against Junot Diaz have sparked support for Latina writers. Here’s who you should be reading now. 

That is how I came to find Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade, a book of very fine short stories. They are all set in the southwest, many around Santa Fe, with Hispanic families/culture often part of that setting. This raises a question for a lifelong New Englander: Am I being exposed to a world I know nothing about? Or do I know so little I can't recognize whether or not I'm being exposed to a world I know nothing about?

But I obsess.

I will admit that though I found these stories highly readable, I often wasn't clear about the endings. Now this is an issue for me when reading short stories, anyway. Endings are a factor for me when writing short stories, too. Could my lack of ending knowledge be keeping me from finding publication homes for more of my short stories?

I continue to obsess.

Let's Talk About Some of These Stories

When I looked over these stories a second time in preparation for writing this post, I noticed a couple  things that I wasn't aware of during the first read.

• Religion plays a part in a number of them. In Nemecia, the main character has an opportunity to lead the procession at the annual Corpus Christi festival, an opportunity her creepy cousin Nemecia snatches from her. In The Five Wounds a pretty poor excuse for a father is playing Christ in a local Passion Play. In Family Reunion, an atheist child wants to convert to the Mormon faith. In Ordinary Sins, a young, single woman pregnant with twins works at a local Catholic church office.
• Family trauma turns up in many of them. In Nemecia, Nemecia is living with the main character's family because of something that happened in Nemecia's past, something the narrator only knows about through what creepy Nemecia tells her. In that one, childhood trauma spreads. In The Five Wounds the poor excuse for a father is seeking redemption for forsaking his child, realizing that the child his daughter is carrying is going to suffer pain from that, too. The Guesthouse is your classic family trauma instigated by a death. And in Family Reunion that atheist child I mentioned is the daughter of an alcoholic father and thus recognizes that something is wrong with the Mormon family she has become attached to.

Family trauma isn't something I'm usually a fan of in my reading, but, as I said, I did like these stories.

Other Favorites

• Mojave Rats. A woman is trapped in trailer park with her children while the furnace is broken. She insists to herself that they aren't like the other people there. They will be leaving. Readers may have their doubts.
• Night at the Fiestas. This story is clearly set in the fifties or sixties, which I found novel. I also liked it because I found the main character unlikable. Writing workshops/how-tos often insist that main characters must be likable, because readers won't relate to them otherwise. I've never agreed with that, and I found this story particularly memorable because of this main character who wants to escape her world and doesn't mind a little theft to help her do it.
• Jubilee. The daughter of a Hispanic man wants to hate his Anglo employers, the Lowells, which is an old New England upper class family name, in case I am the only person who noticed.  Do they deserve it? Another main character who's not all that likable. 
• Canute Commands the Tides. A New England artist moves to Santa Fe, with little understanding of what's there or what she's doing there. Her move has a bad impact on the painting she's working on "Canute Commands the Tides." Should we stay in the culture that made us? I particularly liked this story because the artist moving west is from my part of the world. I can see this woman. Also, I was familiar with the Canute Commands the Tides story, though with a different spin than the narrator of the story gives it. Canute was not a foolish old man. He was making a point to his followers who had been sucking up to him. No, he could not command the tides. If I had all the time in the world, I would read this story again to work out Canute's place in it. Also, there are two women here with adult children, something I should probably think about more. 

Another Interesting Work from Quade

The Five Wounds is Kirstin Valdez Quade's first novel and picks up on the characters and world she introduced in her short story The Five Wounds. I love when this kind of thing happens.

The Heritage Month Project: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz

Hispanic Heritage Month, one of the heritage months recognized by the U.S. State Department prior to 2025, runs from September 15 to October 15. For those of us very focused on traditional classifications/designations of time, mid-month to mid-month seems...wrong. However, a number of Latin American countries observe their independence days on September 15 or soon thereafter, so think outside the box, Gail.

I must admit upfront that in the past I associated Hispanic American literature with my back-in-the-day book discussion group. The books by Hispanic authors I read for book group I found difficult. Deep. Maybe stylistically outside my experience. Very literary? The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos--There were only a couple of sentences in that book that registered with me, and they both dealt with Desi Arnez, who I had some previous knowledge of. Even the movie was lost on me. In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez--that's pretty dramatic original material and all I could tell you about it is that everyone...... Well, that would be telling you the ending, so I won't. I think we read some magical realism, which is a big deal in Latin American literature and after that I avoided that genre. Even if you take the attitude that magical realism can exist in writing from nonLatin American writers, and I've heard that some people don't, I tend to avoid it now. Be magic...be real...be one or the other. 

In short, I wasn't looking forward to my Hispanic Heritage Month reading. But things have gone really well.

I Found Oscar

I cannot recall what led me to look into author Junot Diaz's work, other than I'd heard his name. I often say I can't recall why I read this or that, and it isn't because of some kind of mental lapse. Though would I recall it, if it were? No, it's because I juggle reading a great many things, as well as thinking about them. 

Pardon me for obsessing.

I became aware that Diaz has published in The New Yorker, and flash fiction, too! I could get a short sample, and I did with the lovely The Books of Losing You.

And so I went on to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I think I chose because it was available at a library I was in. Yes, I have crap reasons for reading the things I read. I shouldn't even mention them.

This is not one of the Hispanic-related books I was used to, even though it has markers of what some people would think of as a "literary" book. The story moves around a number of twentieth century periods, and a number of points of view. Much of the book has a narrator who remains unknown for a while. (He's Oscar's college roommate and his sister's sometime boyfriend.) There are footnotes. There's a lot of Spanish. There's what might be a curse.

On the other hand, though, there is Oscar, a sad, Dominican-American nerd who might be living under that family curse and who wants love so badly. His story is extremely engaging. Of course, everyone who has watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory thinks they know nerd culture. Oscar Wao reads as if author Junot Diaz really knew it back in 2007 when his book was published. Or I should say, knew it in the '90s, the period when Oscar was living. Who doesn't love a nerd, wherever he comes from?

A Little Bit of What We're Dealing With Here

A lot of footnotes. Footnotes were a thing in fiction for a while. I have a family member who intensely dislikes them used that way, but I enjoy them. I liked what Diaz did with them here. He uses them to explain the Dominican Republic world that earlier generations of Oscar's family lived in under the Trujillo regime there. I had actually heard of Trujillo, probably because I'd read In the Time of the Butterflies, which Diaz mentions. Meaning I got something out of that book. I realized he was bad news, but I couldn't have told you what country in which he was bad news. Meaning I didn't get very much out of that book. Diaz places the bulk of his Trujillo history in footnotes, but he handles that history with wit. Could readers skip the footnotes, which is probably what many readers of nonfiction do with footnotes there, and still get a story in Oscar Wao? Probably, but the footnotes are fantastic. It's hard not to compare our own times to the Trujillo era, which most readers probably weren't doing in 2007 when this book was published. As grim as things are now, they are not Trujillo grim.

A lot of Spanish. I've read that there are some objections to the amount of Spanish in this book. I don't feel you had to understand it to follow the story. What's more, this is a story about Spanish speaking people. Wouldn't a book about Spanish-speaking people with little or no Spanish be a book about Spanish-speaking people for nonSpanish people? What am I trying to say here? Would it be a book about Spanish-speaking people that English-speaking people would be comfortable with? I read a book about Spanish-speaking people but they weren't Spanish enough to speak Spanish? 

I have to admit, though, that I did wish the Spanish was French. Because I study French, de temp en temp, and I would have looked up what I didn't know, and my French would have improved so much! So I was patient with the Spanish. Someone's Spanish probably improved as a result of reading this book.

The curse. I am not a fan of curses, but this one provided a connection between characters. It was a sort of storyline. A recurring theme, perhaps.

In short, there is a great deal to like about this book.

Has Oscar Influenced Another Book?

Earlier this year, I read The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao brought it back to mind. The books' titles are similar, both in terms of how they're structured and in terms of them tipping readers off to the fates of the main characters. Both books deal with an ethnic group in America, Dominican Americans in one case, Franco-Americans in the other. Both make use of a language other than English in the text, Spanish for Oscar Wao and French for Babs Dionne. (There's far more Spanish in Oscar Wao than there is French in Babs Dionne. I'm going to make a wild guess here that Diaz is more fluent in Spanish than Currie is in French, but that may just be me overidentifying with another Franco-American author.) In Oscar Wao we have the nightmarish Trujillo back in the Dominican Republic. In Babs Dionne we have a pretty terrifying criminal back in Canada. Both books also have a touch of the supernatural. In Oscar Wao there is that curse. In Babs Dionne there is a character who suffers from hallucinations in which she communicates with the dead.

I should be writing an undergraduate paper, shouldn't I? 

Yes, my Hispanic Heritage Month reading is off to a good start.

The Heritage Month Project: "Blind Man's Bluff" by James Tate Hill

While Disability Pride Month (July) is recognized by a number of groups, it doesn't appear to have ever been observed by the U.S. government as a heritage month. Nonetheless, July was kind of free as heritage month reading goes, and what you might call disability literature isn't something I think I've ever sought out, so I decided to go for it.

You can find lists of books featuring disability. I was attracted to Mystery – The Disability Book Archive,  but then was thrown because it included a book about vampires, who I don't think of as disabled. (This led me to much speculating about what, exactly,  disability is, which I will spare you. You're welcome.) I wish now that I'd spent more time going through The Disability Book Archive's other genre offerings.  I did look at Book Riot's 20 Must-Read Fiction and Nonfiction Books About the Disability Experience, though. It had a lot of memoir, and I was hoping for fiction at that point.

Yes, I am so freaking picky.

One way or another, it's the end of July, and I've only read one disability-related book, the memoir Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill. I ran into Hill on BlueSky, where he comes across as being very congenial. (The first thing I look for in a writer, I guess.) His memoir describes his efforts to hide his blindness, something he had a shot at doing, because he became legally blind in his mid-teens, being left with some modest vision. (I think the cover of his book is an attempt at replicating what he can see.) The book is also described as humorous, which is always a draw for me.

So here was an intriguing situation, with humor. I was in. 

First, Hill does have a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor that I definitely appreciate. 

Second, what most intrigued me about this book was not the disability/blindness. What intrigued me was the way it was about transitioning from high school to college and from college to the work world and from single life to married life. Yes, Hill had to do all these things I recognize while working out how he would get his college reading done, how he would mentally map out how he'd get to classes, how he would find the men's room in restaurants and bars, and how he would, as a college instructor, deal with the issue of students raising their hands to speak, since he couldn't see them. Also, he risked his life every time he crossed a road. But there was still much that he was living through that many seeing people live through, also.

I don't want to downplay the significance of the blindness Hill deals with. But what struck me about this book was not how different he is, but how much he is the same. He just can't see.

The "Bluff" Aspect of This Book

The young Hill didn't like to address his vision with new people. He didn't like to talk about what he couldn't do. When he did feel he had to deal with it, with new people he expected to have to interact with in the future, for instance, he would say something about having blindspots that made it too hard to do something. "Too hard. Never impossible. Not once had I ever said I can't drive; it was always I don't drive, which wasn't a lie. I didn't drive. If that particular verb left room for one to infer choice, so be it."

That idea of choice seems significant to me. When he lost his sight at sixteen due to Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy, Hill didn't just lose his vision. He lost the choice to do so many things, choices that sighted people have. And that may be a big factor in why he tried to keep his blindness to himself as much as he could. He didn't want to make his lack of choice obvious to the world.

At one point, though, he says, "I had accomplished less than many blind people who acknowledged their disability."

He was still young, though. He had time.

The Writer Aspect of This Book

I'm not sure if I've read other writer memoirs. I can recall reading my-mother-was-horrible memoirs and my-oddball-dad memoirs and collections of essays about aging women or young humor writers. I can't believe I've never read a writer memoir, but I have to say that Hill as a young writer seemed familiar to me not because I'd read about writers, but because I am one.

He writes about how he became a reader after he lost his sight, through audio books. He writes about editing his work. He quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald. He gets an agent!

This, to me, illustrated that a disability isn't everything a person is. This person was a writer like me. In fact, one who right now is doing more than I am professionally.

I am still here, though. I have time, too.

The Memoirist Now

I don't want to say. I don't want to take another writer's story. Read his book. Oh, wait! I will share that there was a section of this book, which was probably the most painful, and that was only marginally involved with his blindness. Unless, of course, I've got that wrong and it was intricately involved with his blindness. Anyway, that was a part that really kept drawing me in in a when-is-what-I-am-damn-sure-is-going-to-happen going to happen? way.

A Couple of Other Options

While going over disability reading lists, I did find a couple of novels I'd read. And written about here!

Tru Biz by Sarah Novic, an adult book that deals with a deaf school that both my sister (for what that's worth) and I liked. It also won the Alex Award.

The War That Saved My Life , a middle grade book by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, turned up somewhere on a disability reading list. This is a book I liked, and I liked the sequel even more. These are books that fall into the World War II British child evacuation genre. I'm assuming there's a genre, because there are so many of them. Not complaining about that. I have enjoyed a lot of those books. In this one, main character Ada has a clubfoot that was ignored by her abusive mother. 

If you followed my link to my post on the subject, you saw that I didn't even mention Ada's disability. I had trouble recalling it until I read a review of the book at a site that focuses on disability. What was my thinking about that? Can't even begin to guess.

I do think that the reading I've done this month, limited as it was, will change my perception of how disability is portrayed in the future.

I don't have any Heritage Month reading planned for August. I hope I can use that time to read ahead for September.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and Eugenics

This is it, folks. My last reading post for National Immigrant Heritage Month  related to Franco- Americans and the very fine A Distinct Alien Race by David Vermette.

I have no recollection of ever hearing about the eugenics movement in school, though I was a history minor in college.  In the early twentieth century eugenics, the belief that humanity could be improved through selective breeding, became popular enough in the United States that in 1927 the Supreme Court in Buck v Bell found that "The Virginia statute providing for the sexual sterilization of inmates of institutions supported by the State who shall be found to be afflicted with an hereditary form of insanity or imbecility, is within the power of the State under the Fourteenth Amendment."

Eugenics was a national and international movement, culminating in the Holocaust. 

It wasn't until around 25 years ago while I was taking my one graduate course, which was on essay writing (I aced it, since I know you're all wondering), that I stumbled upon eugenics. I was working on an essay for that class that would one day become Dinner at Shirley Farr's House. At that point, the essay was about a local rube (me) who managed to get into a wealthy person's house by way of the restaurant someone had opened in it after her death, enjoyed the place, and then it became even more of a wealthy person's place, ruining her bliss. I decided I should see if I could find anything about Shirl on-line. The woman definitely used her wealth to help her community. She also used it to support something called The Eugenics Survey of Vermont. and did so for ten years. The survey involved research on families as part of the Vermont Eugenics Project, and it would eventually lead to Vermont's own sterilization law in 1931. (It was one of 30 states to have one.) The goal was to reduce the "population of Vermont's "social problem group."

And What Does This Have to do With Franco-Americans, Gail?

Well, it has plenty to do with them, as Vermette says in his chapter on eugenics in A Distinct Alien Race. He refers to a writer named Madison Grant who believed that the U.S. needed to "prevent an infusion of so-called inferior breeding stock to maintain its racial purity." There's lots of quotes  concerned about who was--and was not--fit to reproduce. 

Various groups tended to turn up as targets for eugenicists and French Canadians were among them. (You see them mentioned in writing about Vermont's eugenics survey.) Grant said of them "The Quebec Frenchmen will succeed in seriously impeding the progress of Canada and will succeed even better in keeping themselves a poor and ignorant community of little more importance to the world at large than are the Negroes in the South." (Hitting two groups at once!) Vermette says that Grant classified Canadiens as "the lowest form of whiteness in his racial scheme."

During this period, the issue of whether or not French Canadians are mixed race came up again. Vermette says that genealogists today are divided on how much early French and Native American marriage actually occurred, but it was a common believe in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and that was a reason for considering Franco-Americans nonwhite and thus inferior. (Another case of hitting two groups at once.)

Vermette gives the Vermont Eugenics Project its own section in his eugenics chapter. He quotes a letter to Dr. Henry F. Perkins, the head of the Vermont project, from Charles Benedict Davenport the creator of the Eugenics Record Office. "Did you know, that in the study of defects found in drafted men, Vermont stood at or near the top of the list...? This result I ascribe to the French Canadian constituents of the population which, I had other reasons for believing, to contain an undue proportion of defectives."

One of the interesting aspects, yes, there is more than one, of the eugenics movement is that terms like "defective" do not appear to have ever been defined. Another interesting aspect? It was a Progressive reform.

Vermont's Eugenics Project particularly targeted the poor, the disabled, French Canadians, and Native Americans. Two hundred and fifty-three sterilizations were performed there between 1931 and 1957.  You can also find a breakdown of sterilizations due to eugenics by state.

Eugenics Today? Positive vs Negative Eugenics

Now, there were two aspects to the eugenics movement:

The one sometimes referred to as negative, involved forced sterilizations of people considered unfit to reproduce. Negative eugenics gets a lot of attention for very obvious reasons. In addition to the unpleasantness going on in this country, books on eugenics by American writers were cited by Hitler and his buddies as influences. (Vermette and others.) Hitler...his buddies...the Holocaust.

This past spring, the word "eugenics" turned up in the press in response to some comments from a government leader on the topic of neurodivergence. 

But while the positive aspect of eugenics isn't, shall we say, as dark, it is...impactful. Positive eugenics encourages the improvement of humanity through selective breeding by actually encouraging breeding, but of the right sort of people. We're talking white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or at least western European. In A Distinct Alien Race, Vermette quotes someone who made a distinction between European French and French Canadian, for instance. No one was encouraging French Canadians to reproduce. The French they were more open to. 

An argument can be made that today's pronatalist (probirth movement) may have a positive eugenics tone to it, one involving large white families. Some pronatalists also have a goal of producing lots of children with high IQ. I say may, because it's difficult to speculate about how wide-spread a goal is when the same couple is featured in articles about it.

To Recap

A Distinct Alien Race is an excellent, well-documented history of a group that has seemed invisible to me most of my life, even though I'm a member of it. At one point the author, David Vermette, describes Franco-Americans as "a mostly forgotten, white-identified ethnic enclave in New England." 

It seems bizarre to me that that could happen to a people who were despised as much as Franco-Americans were one hundred plus years ago. However, history tells us that there are far worse things that can happen to a culture.

Comptez votre bénédictions.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and the Ku Klux Klan

My reading for National Immigrant Heritage Month continues.

I grew up in central Vermont and graduated from the state's university. While there, I had a suitemate (later one of my bridesmaids) who grew up in the northern part of the state. One day she casually mentioned that her grandfather had been active in the Ku Klux Klan in Vermont. (No recollection how the conversation came about.)

I was ignorant back then and not shy about showing it. Everybody knew that the Klan was anti-Black, right? And back then Vermont was not known for its extensive Black population. So, I laughed and said, "Who were they against?"

"French Canadians."

Ayeah, I stopped laughing.

And that, mesdames et monsieurs, is why Klan activity in relation to Franco-Americans is something I was aware of a little earlier in life than I was, say, Little Canadas.

David Vermette has a fascinating chapter on the the KKK and its activities in relation to Franco-Americans in A Distinct Alien Race.

The Klan in the Early Twentieth Century

As Vermette tells it, in the early twentieth century, the Klan became very business-like.  The Ku Klux Klan Corporation was formed in 1915. In 1920, its Imperial Wizard (a former minister) hired a public relations firm. There were members who functioned as traveling salesmen, going into new towns to drum up new members. They ran ads in newspapers and offered special promotions. Protestant ministers, for instance, could join for free. New members paid a membership fee, and bits and pieces of that fee were doled out to various people in the Klan hierarchy. Members bought their hoods and robes from the Klan, and that fee was spread out amongst higher ups, too. It sounds very much like a pyramid scheme.

As with all kinds of businesses, the Klan wanted to grow, and it did. It had quite an impressive membership by the 1920s and was pulling in real bucks. To continue growing, it had to branch out to other parts of the country, such as New England. I was right. Back in my day, there was not a large Black population in New England, and the same was true in the '20s. (Before my day!) But as Vermette says in his book, "Since, in most cases, New Englanders had little occasion to interact with non-whites, distinctions of language and faith served as the practical basis for othering minorities."

In other words, New England had a lot of French-speaking Catholics. According to Vermette, in the early part of the twentieth century it also had a lot of Klan members.

The Klan and Franco-Americans

The Klan response to Franco-Americans was "logical" to the extent that Franco-Americans were both Catholic and foreign. Foreign-ish, even if they were born in the United States, because they maintained their language. The fear that Franco-Americans were too close to their homeland and would thus be able to join with French Canadians in some kind of French Catholic takeover was renewed during this period. To deal with that the Klan encouraged the passage of laws that would enforce English-only instruction in schools, and they were successful with that in some New England states. Dealing with Catholicism was harder. In the South, the Klan worked through the Democratic Party, but in the north Democrats tended to be working class and...Catholic.

And recall that French Canadians and Franco-Americans were sometimes considered mixed race because of the possibility of intermarriage between early French settlers and native people. In addition to being Catholic and French speaking, for the Klan Franco-Americans were not truly white the way European immigrants were. 

Vermette's chapter on the Klan in New England is fantastic in terms of both explaining the Klan's response to Franco-Americans there (conflicts between pro- and anti-Klan groups, bombings, and the burning of a Franco-American parish school, for instance) and in terms of Klan history, itself. It left me wondering why, given the times we live in, we're not hearing about a resurgence of Klan activity.

Perhaps, given the times we live in, those who might otherwise be interested don't feel there's a need for it.

Next time: Franco-Americans and the eugenics movement. 

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race" and Little Canadas

My Reading for National Immigrant Heritage Month Continues

One of the many things author David Vermette writes about in  A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans  that I knew nothing about growing up is Little Canadas. I mean I didn't hear about them until the last ten years or so. I had some knowledge of Little Italies, Chinatowns,  Little Polands, and Little Swedens. But I'd never heard of Little Canadas, even though there was supposed to have been one in the early twentieth century in Winooski, Vermont where I was a student teacher in the middle school years later. I now also wonder if the extremely small  town in which my father was born and grew up would qualify as a Little Canada, but one that grew up around farming, not mills. My Gauthier grandfather was 

The Gauthier family on their Vermont farm. 

from eastern Ontario and came here with his wife and older children after WWI, making him and other French Canadians like him different from the French Canadians who came to the U.S. from Quebec in the nineteenth century to find work in mills. My American-born father, who as an adult lived in a neighboring, very nonFrench town, spoke his native language with nearby people he'd grown up with right up until his death. (He didn't speak it in his own adult home, of course, since his wife and daughters didn't understand a word of it.)

Otherwise, Petite Canadas were neighborhoods that developed around mills and Catholic churches, primarily in the nineteenth century. People shopped in French-run stores, attended French-speaking schools, and may have been able to read locally published French newspapers and go to French doctors. I'd say they could attend French churches, but the Mass was in Latin in the old days, so that wouldn't have mattered as much, though French-speaking priests did appear to be common in them.

According to Vermette, it may have been possible for many French-Canadian immigrants to not have to speak English if they lived in a Little Canada.

What Happened to Little Canadas?

Why do other areas associated with the ethnic identities of immigrant groups still exist, but we find so little left of Little Canadas? Even Chinatowns, which experienced serious racism in the late nineteenth century, are still around and attract visitors. Many of the other ethnic "towns" may have grown up around mills or some other work situation, as Little Canadas did. But when the mills closed down, the big factor in the end of Little Canadas, some aspect of Italian, Polish, Swedish, etc. culture remained. 

Why were Little Canadas different?

My own speculation:

1. Vermette says in A Distinct Alien Race that there was incredible poverty in Little Canadas, at least in those in New England. He talks of housing built for Franco-American workers by the Cabot Company, which owned a number of mills in the area that employed them. Typhoid and diphtheria were an issue in the 1880s. He has quotes from a newspaper editor and doctors from the same time period complaining of the sanitary conditions.  Vermette also has statistics suggesting that education levels stayed low among Franco-Americans into the twentieth century. Among my father's siblings, only one of the eight finished high school. For all I know, she was the only one of the eight to even attempt going to high school. My point being, if the living conditions were not as bad in other ethnic communities and if the groups living in them were able to improve their personal situations with education faster, that would explain why they stayed in them while Franco-Americans got out of Little Canadas, many of which were then just absorbed into the English-speaking world. Lowell, Massachusetts' Little Canada, for instance, was demolished as part of an urban renewal project.
2. Because the French-Canadian immigrants came from a country that bordered the U.S., their need for an ethnic community where they could speak their own language and practice their own faith may not have been as great as it was for people who came from Europe and Asia. People arriving from Italy, Poland, and China in the nineteenth century, for instance, probably had no expectation of ever being able to go home again. But the French Canadians, the only immigrants arriving in this country by train, could "go home again." In fact, there was a great belief at that time that they were here just to make money, and when they'd made enough, they'd go back to Canada with it. (I don't know how many of the French Canadians knew that, since so many of them stayed here.) My husband's family has heartbreaking nineteenth-century letters from Irish parents writing to their children in America, asking them when they're coming home. My father's family, who arrived here in the twentieth century, went back to Canada for funerals and events and had family members coming down here to visit them, which explains why I know some of my father's cousins. That kind of familial interaction may have been enough to satisfy the cultural needs ethnic communities filled for other groups.

Some Fiction Related to this Subject

Last week I happened to stumble upon and start reading The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie. It's primarily set in 2016 in what's left of a Little Canada in Maine, where the number of remaining French-speaking residents can fit around a kitchen table. So far, it's terrific

Next Time: Franco-Americans and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Heritage Month Project: "A Distinct Alien Race"

As Heritage Months go, June is primarily known as Pride Month. But it is also National Immigrant Heritage Month. (Once again, I want to point out that those links are to archived material from former administrations. It appears that the present one doesn't observe them.) I hope to get to Pride Month in a few weeks. (I have a book!) But I'm beginning June with the first of four posts on my own favorite immigrant group, French-Canadians, and a fine book about their immigration to New England in the nineteenth century, A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans by David Vermette.  

What's that you say? You weren't aware that Franco-Americans, Americans of French-Canadian descent, even were an immigrant group? Not a real immigrant group? That may be because though the term Franco-American isn't new according to Vermette, it is more common in New England than in other parts of the country. Like him, I never heard the word Franco-American until I was an adult, though I grew up in New England and even around French speaking family and neighbors. (I had only a few American-born French-speaking cousins. By our generation, the language was pretty much gone, but my American-born father didn't learn to speak English until he went to school.) The lack of a well-known unifying name may help explain why we are a very low-profile group. That's in spite of the fact that in early days the French were all over North America. It's also in spite of the fact that, as Vermette explains, in the United States in the late nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries, French Canadian immigrants were...maybe reviled is too strong a word. Something like reviled.

How the Press Treated Franco-Americans in the Nineteenth Century

The press in the nineteenth century had a great deal to say about the French-Canadians moving into the United States according to Vermette. He quotes British-American Citizen from 1889:

"The French number more than a million in the United States...The number of their children is unimaginable for Americans...They are kept a distinct alien race subject to the Pope in matters of religion and politics. Soon, with the Irish, they will govern you, Americans."

Well, the British have always had a thin about the French, haven't they? Should we expect them to feel any differently about French-Canadians?

The New York Times also had things to say about French-Canadian immigrants in the late nineteenth century.

May 1, 1881. "They are, for the most part, ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world...They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.,,[T]he feeling which they excite...is not fear or jealousy, but a sort of contempt."

French-Canadian immigrants were believed to be temporary here. They'd only come to the U.S. to make some money and go home with it. The New York Times, 1885, Canadians in New England:

"In such towns as Fall River and Holyoke the French Canadians have nearly shouldered out the native American operatives, who a generation ago impressed foreign observers by their superiority to any persons engaged in similar occupations elsewhere...he [French Canadians] cannot be brought to take any interest in the life around him of a community in which he regards himself as merely a sojourner. He maintains his own churches and no schools. Add to this feeling of alienism that he is absolutely unenterprising, and it becomes evident that he must be a troublesome element in the population."

Notice the term "native American" in the above quote. Vermette says that the descendants of English Protestant settlers in the United States managed to establish themselves as the native, original people here, even though the French had been on the North American continent as long as they had and the original native people had been here for thousands of years. 

Going back to 1878, Vermette quotes another New York Times article:

"...beyond dispute that there is hardly a French Canadian family...that does not inherit strongly-marked traces of Indian blood."

This is a reference to a belief, which Vermette discusses, that French Canadians were mixed race because of intermarriage with native people in earlier years. While I had not actually heard that, I wasn't surprised. Years ago, I'd read that the French settlers in Canada were far less brutal towards the native people there than the English settlers were toward them in the United States. Certainly, there was violence there. But, as I heard it, the French were often more interested in trapping than farming, which meant they didn't feel a need to take as much land, and sometimes married native women. It never occurred to me that that would have some kind of impact generations later. It would come into play during the twentieth century eugenics movement. But that is another blog post.

One attitude toward Franco-Americans in the nineteenth century is particularly interesting for us today. At the end of that century, there was a fear that French Canadians wanted to take New England to create a French Catholic country. The New York Times was on this in January, 1889:

"The tradition is that within a period not included within the present century there will be a country in North America called New France. It is to be constituted of Quebec, Ontario as far as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New England states, and a slice of New York. No effort is to be made to realize this tradition until the French race in America reach a certain number."

This appears to have been quite a widespread belief, and you can read more about it in an article by Vermette in Smithsonian Magazine, When an Influx of French-Canadian Immigrants Struck Fear Into Americans. 

Vermette says that in a region/culture where there aren't clear physical differences between people, language and religion become far more important in classifying others. You can see that with almost all immigrant groups, but it seems to have been happening in spades with Franco-Americans in the nineteenth century. The attitudes toward Franco-Americans in the past that Vermette reports are so extreme that it's amazing to me that now we are pretty much invisible. 

Given the fear of a French-Canadian plot to take over a section of the United States a hundred and fifty years ago, more or less, it is jaw-dropping to me that there are U.S. folk (at least one, anyway) who now want to push the issue of making Canada a fifty-first state. The reversal is just amazing. 

Coming up next: Little Canadas