The job here at Cleveland has turned out to be a very interesting one from the educational technique point of view. This town is interested in all kinds of educational experiments. I suppose they would say it is school-minded or something of that sort. Practically everyone is taking a course in something or other. One has to barricade himself in the office to keep women’s clubs and lecture dates away. But this has its advantages. I have been able to divert to my use several thousand dollars of the Cleveland Public Library acquisition funds, and have had them buying in the middle of the [nineteenth] century simply because I happen to be writing on that period, — and beginning to buy up Russian materials, although I imagine I am the only one in Cleveland who is likely to use them.¹

So Binkley described the intellectual environment in Cleveland in October 1931, at the beginning of his second year at Western Reserve University; and indeed his files are full of invitations from civic groups to lecture or lead discussions, many of which he accepted. One of the courses that Clevelanders could follow that year was a series of sixteen radio lectures that Binkley delivered on European history from 1815 to the present. Though the broadcasting of lectures from universities had of course been known since the beginnings of radio, Binkley was evidently a little nervous about this new medium. The previous summer he wrote to a friend:

I am floundering on the edge of the probability that I may give a radio course in history, in order to contribute to technological unemployment of professors.²

Inauguration of the Division of Informal Adult Education, Oct. 1930.

The University is concerned that a high quality of presentation be assured in this venture, as regards both subject matter and personnel. It intends to exercise care that popularization entail no sacrifice of dignified, scholarly standards. Consequently, although the Division will use the services of teachers and lecturers not on the University Faculty, it is hoped that considerable reliance may be placed upon the members of our own Faculty for occasional service in this program.⁴

At its beginning, in 1930-31, the program had 15 minutes of radio time per week on WTAM. By the time of Binkley’s course the following year, it had moved to WHK and generally had twenty minutes, 4:15-4:35, on Thursday afternoons. The lectures aired after a musical or comedy program; in the first couple of weeks, the newspaper listings combined Binkley’s lecture with “Mike and Herman”, apparently a “Dutch dialect comedy team“, whose program presumably preceded the lecture.

Arrangements for the Dec. 3 lecture.

Cleveland College paid $25/lecture to Flora Stone Mather College, of which $15 was to go to Binkley and $10 for expenses. As it turned out, a mix-up between WRU and Cleveland College led to Binkley being overpaid by $90, which he arranged to have deducted from his September 1 paycheck in 1932.⁷

This list of the lectures was compiled from the daily radio listings in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

As to the content of the lectures, we can make a guess based on the university courses he was giving that year. In the letter to Langer quoted above, Binkley described his current graduate course in European history from 1815 to the present. It was based on an undergraduate course he had given the year before, in which he had had his secretary make a stenographic transcriptions of his lectures. No doubt this course provided a template for the radio lectures; but it was primarily oriented to the emerging outline of the book that Binkley was writing for Langer’s series, which would be published three years later as Realism and Nationalism.

This year I am giving my graduate course on Federalism and Confederal Problems in the History of Europe since 1815. I feel the need of this to give me perspective on the rather special handling which I want to give to the politics of the mid-century. I do not recall how far I went in the discussion of this interpretation with you. I can see three trends, all interwoven of course. — The intellectual trend which is towards materialism and away from romanticism and sentiment. In art and literature it is called realism; in politics Real Politik. It colors equally the thinking of the Russian type which Turgenev depicted as Bazarov and of Karl Marx. Against the implications of this climate Fechner tried to revolt, but only succeeded in making psychology unphilosophical. The intellectual climate then is the first thing.

In the field of politics the outstanding development is the collapse of the confederal principle. This is precisely the same thing as the rise of the unitary national state or of the bureaucratic state, and the only advantage of referring it to the principle of confederation is that the latter permits a more generally applicable interpretation. I do not expect to approach this in any “de-bunking” spirit, but only to try to be above the battle where the problem of democracy is at stake and to be as cognizant of what the middle of the century lost as we are already of what it gained.

In the economic field, — developments are linked to the intellectual climate in the connection between science and technology, to politics through the consequences of improvements in transport which affected at once the free trade policies of Cobden and the unification problem in Germany and Italy. In institutional economics of the time, the development of corporate organizations alike on the side of labor and capital will be the main thread.

No doubt the radio lectures hewed closer to the narrative line than the discursive and multi-disciplinary approach that he took in his teaching (and which perhaps owes something to his reading of Spengler), and which became an important characteristic of Realism and Nationalism. It’s interesting to see that he had already arrived at the theme which he later called “federative polity” as the core of the book: setting up the transnational federation as an alternative to the national state in nineteenth-century history, against which the latter can be evaluated. If the radio lectures turn up either among the boxes of papers still in the attic or in the CWRU archives, it will be worth looking to see whether these themes also made it into his popular presentations at this time.

Binkley does not seem to have given another radio course after this.

Footnotes

1. Doc. 3995: RCB to William L. Langer, 1931-10-06.
2. Doc. 3551: RCB to Ed Clapp, c. August 1931.
3. Doc. 4343: RCB to Mrs. Arthur Shepherd, 1930-10-08.
4. Doc. 4663: Robert Ernst Vinson, 1930-10-31.
5. Doc. 4408: Mrs. Shepherd to RCB, 1931-11-24.
6. Doc. 4408; Doc. 4405: RCB to James T. Shotwell, 1931-12-09, mentions the Joint Committee meeting.
7. Doc. 4364: F.C. Froelich (cashier at Cleveland College) to RCB, 1932-06-10.

Update 2012-03-04: I’ve found a 1938 booklet by Rabinovitch, which includes the first portrait below among his students’ work. I’ve scanned it and contributed it to the Internet Archive, where you can see the portrait in context.

Here are some prints by Frances. There’s no information about where or when they were taken, and I can identify only one of the subjects. The portraits may come from her commercial work in Cleveland in 1938-1940, or from her time as a student at Rabinovitch‘s studio in New York in 1937. She had her first commercial sitting in Cleveland on Oct. 15, 1938.¹ I don’t know how many paid jobs she did, but the letters for 1939-40 often mention her portraits of friends, so she at least kept busy. Her picture “Old Actor”, described as “a well-realized head”, took first prize in the Portrait and Figure division of the May Show at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1939.² The boy listening to the radio is her son, my father, Robert W. Binkley.

Footnotes

1. Doc. 4947: RCB to his parents, 1938-10-15.
2. Henry S. Francis and William M. Milliken, “Review of the Exhibition,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 26, no. 5 (May 1, 1939): 57-83, at p.63.

The IFLA website has some newly-mounted historical materials on the World Bibliographic Congress in Italy in 1929, about which I’ve been blogging here in the “Summer in Italy” series. The materials include a conference program (really a brochure), a report on the Congress by Marcel Godet, director of the Swiss National Library, and a poster. (There’s a low-res colour version of that poster here.) Best of all is a link to a couple of short newsreel snippets of the congressisti on the Palatine Hill and at the Villa Falconieri (Microsoft Silverlight needed). I don’t spot Bob or Frances in these films (they avoided the big social gatherings, it seems), but the clips give a sense of the occasion, frock coats and all. (If those links don’t work, go to the IFLA page and follow the instructions for finding the clips on the Cinecittà Luce website).

Just above the Congress materials, there’s a link to “A Chronology of IFLA Sessions, 1927-2009″ by Jeffrey M. Wilhite, which has a useful summary of the Congress at pp.14-16.

Finally, I cannot but be flattered that IFLA has made good use of my scan of the Congress logo!

The two versions of RCB’s manual on documentary reproduction are both now accessible from Hathi Trust, though you’ll need to belong to an institutional member to download the whole books.

I’ve turned up some letters that shed a little light on the closing paragraph of the memorial I posted the other day. In July 1940, Frances sent a copy to Ralph Lutz at the Hoover War Library at Stanford. She wrote:

Here is one of the documents I said I would send you. You will note an expression, in the last paragraph, of the bitterness some of Bob’s friends here feel at the opposition he had. It was quite natural, I think — the sort of thing that would be expected when rather dull and timid people encounter a man like Bob. He had an unusually loyal and devoted group of friends on the Mather faculty.

What with one thing and another it looks as if the opposition are taking things over, now. This grieves me and makes me want to go away. Not, however, if I am being driven away. So I put up a sort of rear guard action here.

Lutz responded:

I read the memorial for Bob and was very much impressed by it. … My study of history has firmly convinced me that the works of able men survive in institutions long after any temporary opposition is even remembered by posterity. It is perfectly natural, of course, for Bob’s friends to feel that certain of his enterprises are not being carried out. Of one thing I am, however, convinced, namely, that Western Reserve will for all future time regard him as one of the really great men connected with the institution.

The closing paragraph of the memorial, while couched as a confession, was intended as a more or less open criticism of some members of the university. Who were they? It may be interesting to try to sort out the academic politics.

First page of the memorial

In Memoriam

ROBERT CEDRIC BINKLEY

Born in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, December 10, 1897, the first of the eleven children of Christian Kreider Binkley and Mary Engle Barr. Married Frances Williams at Stanford University, California, September 13, 1924. Died in Cleveland, Ohio, April 11, 1940, aged 42 years and four months. Survived by his wife and two sons, Robert Williams, aged 10, and Thomas Eden, 8. (A daughter, Barbara Jean, had died February 14, 1926, aged eight months.)

Academic biography as printed in the Catalogue of Mather College, December 1, 1939:

Robert Cedric Binkley, Ph.D., Professor of History

A.B., Stanford University, 1922; A.M., 1924; Ph.D., 1927; Instructor in History, New York University, 1927-29; Associate Professor of History, Smith College, 1929-50; Acting Associate Professor of History, Stanford University, 1950; Professor of History, Harvard Summer School, 1932; Lecturer, Harvard University, 1932-33; Visiting Professor of History, Columbia University, 1937-38; Acting Professor of History, Flora Stone Mather College, 1930-32; Professor of History, l932-

The career of Robert Cedric Binkley took its bent from early exposure to history in the making, immediately followed by experience in collecting, organizing, preserving and making accessible to scholars the documentary material upon which the record and interpretation of that history was to be based. In June, 1917, when he was a student of nineteen at Stanford University, he enlisted in the U. S. Army Ambulance Service and served in France for the duration of the war. He was wounded in action and cited for distinguished and exceptional gallantry at Fleville. In the spring of 1919 he studied art at the University of Lyons. In June Professor and Mrs. E. D. Adams of Stanford arrived in Paris to begin a collection of research materials on the War and the Peace Conference, for which a fund of $50,000 had been placed at their disposal by Herbert Hoover. In July Mr. Binkley was discharged from the Army to join Professor Adams as assistant and interpreter. Their first task was to secure from the delegations to the Peace Conference their memoranda, propaganda material, and such records as they were willing to surrender. At Mr. Binkley’s suggestion they began collecting the war-time publications, particularly pamphlets and posters, of patriotic, religious, academic and trade associations and societies. He himself did most of the work on the French societies, and on all but the women’s organizations in England. More than a thousand societies were eventually represented. He also played an important role in securing from the British Foreign Office a large part of the library and the enemy-propaganda collection of the Ministry of Information. These and similar collections from other countries, along with files of various army and civil newspapers, and the records of the food administration and relief commissions headed by Mr. Hoover, formed the nucleus of the Hoover War Library endowed by Mr. Hoover in 1924 and now housed in a separate building on the Stanford campus. Mr. Binkley continued in the service of this Library while completing his work for the bachelor’s degree. During his five years of graduate study he was its reference librarian. He began at that time to experiment with film copy and other techniques for meeting the problems of space and of paper deterioration involved in preserving and making accessible this vast collection of research materials.

To understand the war in which he had fought, the Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles, Mr. Binkley went back for perspective to the Congress of Vienna and the events that led up to it. His master’s thesis in 1924 was on The Reestablishment of the Independence of the Hanseatic Cities, 1813-1815. While working on it, he collaborated with Malbone Graham on a book on The New Governments of Central Europe, published ln 1924. In the same year he married Frances Williams, who was to be his collaborator in so many enterprises, and to whom he gladly attributed many of his most fruitful ideas. His doctor’s thesis in 1927 was entitled The Reaction of European Opinion to the Statesmanship of Woodrow Wilson. From 1927 to 1929 he was instructor in history at New York University. He soon began experimenting with the use of source materials and research methods in the teaching of undergraduate students, and settled upon the Calendar of State Papers and other documentary collections for Elizabethan England as best suited to the purpose. The plan there worked out of having each student reconstruct a month’s history from all the available sources, was later to be the distinguishing feature of the freshman history course in Mather College.

While still at Stanford the Binkleys had begun work on an essay in domestic theory which they published in 1929 under the title What is Right with Marriage. After a summer in Italy, Mr. Binkley went to Smith College as associate professor of history in the fall of 1929. The next year he published a contribution to the prohibition controversy called Responsible Drinking. He was acting associate professor of history at Stanford University for the summer quarter of 1930. In the fall of that year he came to Mather College as acting professor, to become professor of history and head of the department in 1932. In 1935 appeared his major publication, a history of Europe from 1852 to 1871 under the title Realism and Nationalism.

While still at Smith College he was elected in February 1930 a member of the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. His special responsibility was the problem of reproduction of rare or unique materials. In September of that year, just after joining our faculty, he become secretary of the Committee, and from 1932 until his death he was its chairman. In 1931 he published for the committee a manual on Methods of Reproducing Research Materials, which he revised for a second edition in 1936.

When the Works Progress Administration was set up in 1935 with a place in its program for unemployed “white-collar” workers, Mr. Binkley saw at once the potential value of this group in preparing for the use of scholars materials hitherto seldom touched because the volume to be sifted was out of all proportion to what it would yield for the purposes of any single specialist. He proposed a coordinated set of projects for the inventorying, indexing and digesting of local public archives and selected newspaper files, including the foreign language press. It was largely due to his initiative and perseverance, and the able assistance of his secretary. Miss Adeline Barry, that Cleveland became a national center for this phase of the W.P.A. program, and that the Annals of Cleveland set the standard for similar enterprises in other centers. He gave freely of his time and counsel, without salary, and without office until just before his death, when he was appointed a member of the National Advisory committee of the Historical Records Survey.

There was a larger strategy in which his work for the Joint Committee and for W.P.A. was brought to a common focus. On the one hand, the materials made available by W.P.A. were widening the range of possibilities for amateur as well as professional scholarship, especially in the field of local history. On the other head, inexpensive methods of reproduction and distribution were bringing publication within the reach of amateur scholars with limited private means or none. These methods were also opening the way to the large-scale use of amateur scholarship in the work of translation, especially from languages not ordinarily included in the professional scholar’s equipment. As a result of his initiative, W.P.A. workers are now translating documents and treatises from the languages of central and eastern Europe, and Mather College is national headquarters for supervised volunteer translation of Latin American literature.

Mr. Binkley had urged for years the rescue, by purchase or microfilming, of unique and important materials in the war danger zones of Asia and Europe. His active interest contributed to the salvaging of a Hongkong collection of records invaluable for the history of western business enterprise in China since 1782. Now that the American Council of Learned Societies has called for June 5 and 6 a “Conference on Microcopying Research Materials in Foreign Depositories,” there is at last some prospect of his efforts coming to larger fruition, though only after the destruction of much that he had hoped to save.

Only those who knew him best realized how completely all these enterprises were subordinated to his work as a teacher in this University, how scrupulously he exacted of them all a promise of contributing to the enrichment of its teaching program. Though his primary devotion was to Mather College, he not only took active part in the reformulation of its status as a coordinate college within the University, but served the University at large in ways of which his work on the Advisory Committee of the University Libraries may be taken as an example. He conceived the regional union catalogue, and collaborated with Dean Hirshberg throughout in bringing it to fulfilment. He was also the initiator of the campus inter-library loan plan, whereby materials belonging to any library within the University are temporarily transferred to any other according to need and regardless of ownership.

No complete account can yet be given of the work on which Mr. Binkley was engaged at the time of his death, or had planned for the future. He left a typescript of four chapters and part of the fifth of an institutional history of modern Europe, employing an original conceptual analysis and embodying more fully than anything he had yet written what may be called his philosophy of history. It is to be hoped that this may be completed from his notes by some sympathetic hand, and published soon, along with a volume bringing together the best of his scattered essays and reviews. He had contracted to write a biography of Napoleon III. Probably his chief work would have been a history and reinterpretation of the Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles in the light of the preceding century of European history and as sowing the seeds of the second World War.

Younger historians influenced by his ideas may perhaps do most or all of the work he would have done as a scholar, and the pioneering causes to which he devoted himself have gathered momentum enough to continue without his leadership. But the teaching strength of Mather College and of Western Reserve University has suffered irreparably. The testimony of his present and former students begins almost uniformly: “He was the most stimulating teacher I ever had.” The following may serve as samples of the more specific things they go on to say: “He is the only teacher under whom I took lecture notes which grow warmer instead of colder with the passing of time.” “He had a directness of approach to every problem; he did not have to go through the usual academic warming-up exercises.” “At the end of nearly every meeting he would formulate with dramatic vividness some question for us to take away, as if he were less concerned about our reviewing the things he had said than about our going on for ourselves from the point at which he had left off.” “He made us believe that what we found ourselves wanting to do was worth doing and that we could do it; but then he made us see possibilities in it that hadn’t occurred to us, so that what we did in the end, if not always recognizable as the thing we had set out to do, seemed always to have grown out of it.”

Without subscribing to pragmatism as a general philosophy, Mr. Binkley exhibited to an extraordinary degree the pragmatic temper. There was for him no question which might not be reopened at any time, and there were no constants with a clear title to be carried over from problem to problem. It was for thought to determine in connection with each problem as it arose what had best be taken as constants for the purpose of solving that problem. With a mind untouched by the academic idolatry which pays to ideas and propositions the reverence and devotion that is due only to persons, he brought to every problem an extraordinary fertility of suggestion. Fortunately he had also a counterbalancing power of concentration. He was able on a moment’s notice to drop the matter in hand and shift his whole attention and energy to a fresh problem, and when that was disposed of to return to the previous task as if there had been no interruption. Thus it was possible for him to do most of his work in his office, and yet to give himself so completely to the students who called upon him at all hours of the day. The door was always open.

It would not be honest to omit the confession that it was with very little encouragement from us that he dreamed his dreams of amateur scholarship, W.P.A. organization of research materials, and a renaissance of local history in the republic of letters. We curled a deprecating smile before the vision of every Mather graduate her own historian. If we find it possible now to take a more generous view of his enterprises, that is in part because the prospect of others still to come has been removed. He had ideas, and nothing is quite safe with a man of ideas about, especially if he will go on having them and neither we nor he can guess what the next will be. Let us confess it humbly, he was a gadfly to our sluggish academic society, and we are as little disposed as ancient Athens to pray that God in his care of us should send us such another.

Respectfully submitted,

(Summerfield Baldwin III)
(Meribeth Cameron)
(M. H. Fisch)
(J. C. Meyer) Chairman

This is a letter from Robert C. Binkley to his family in California. It was written toward the end of the 1937-38 academic year, when he was a visiting professor at Columbia. His office (assuming Fayerweather Hall has not been renumbered) still belongs to a history professor. The letter is his contribution to the “circulate”, which seems to mean a family circular newsletter.

The letter is remarkable for its touching on almost all of Binkley’s fields of activity in two pages. Like the lecture he describes, it tries “to bring all threads together”: teaching, research in 19th-century European history, near-print publication, microfilm, amateur scholarship, academic politics, W.P.A. projects for white-collar workers, the Historical Records Survey, the Joint Committee on Materials for Research, preservation of crumbling newspapers, local history, union catalogues and copyright. It shows his playful and optimistic spirit, and his practicality and sociability, and above all his capacity to set great forward-thinking projects in motion, which was so suitable to the New Deal era.

One interesting detail is the mention of legal support for copyright issues: “for the Carnegie Corporation has arranged to have Elihu Root’s firm give that advice wherever it will serve the interests of microcopying development.” The firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Ballantine, had given advice to the Joint Committee during the negotiation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1935, and Binkley had recently called upon them again as he sought to press the ADI to test the boundaries of copyright. This had led to contention at the meeting of the American Documentation Institute‘s board the previous November. All of this had the covert support of the Carnegie Corporation. This effort included a committee “to study the ways and means of improving international copyright protection”, on which Binkley and Lydenberg and others in their circle served (Farkas-Conn, 1990, pp. 82-83). This confrontational attitude was a change in Binkley’s approach to copyright and relations with publishers (Hirtle, 2006 Spring/Summer, pp. 38-39), and it is interesting to see him breezily clearing copyright on a 25 million page medical library in the course of an impromptu conversation. (Of course, the reality might have been more complex than a family letter would show.)

This period was the high water mark of Binkley’s approach: the WPA’s workforce peaked at 3 million in 1938, and would soon start to wind down as wartime spending rose. When he wrote this letter, Binkley had a little under two years to live.

615 Fayerweather Hall, Columbia University
13 May, 1938

Dear folks:

This is the simple account of a day or two, which is much like other days.

Yesterday I met classes for the last time till September. I had worked very hard on my lecture, for it was necessary to bring all threads together in an hour. At the end of the session there was very encouraging applause, and then one of the students gave me a little book with a most gratifying letter of appreciation. Then up to the office at 11:00 to confer with a student on his M.A. thesis, a conference that lasted till 1:00; then came <home?> for lunch, and back to meet another student with his M.A. thesis — a poor timid little fellow who should never have been in graduate school. His work was only half done, and whether he can complete it or not I have much doubt.

There are always surprises coming to the office. This time it was a woman from New Jersey who had written some church histories and wanted publication subsidies. I tried to sell her the ideas which our Joint Committee on Materials for Research propagates, namely that printing publication is not appropriate for books that are to fill a small edition need — that some of these other techniques are preferable. Meanwhile, in this line, an interesting development took place. A student had come to my office with a letter from the dean giving him permission to submit his thesis in photo-offset. I got in touch at once with Edwards Brothers in Ann Arbor to make sure that they would do a very good and very inexpensive job. A long distance call from Ann Arbor came in on details. For a long time I have tried to maneuver the university into accepting this method, but there is great resistance to it. Word came through this morning that the Dean had been under fire for giving consent, but it was too late for him to draw back. The fact of the matter is that students pay up to $800 or $1200 for thesis publication, the Columbia University Press makes money out of the situation, and the library gets 75 free volumes. I think this man will get his job done for $275.00 instead of 800 or 1000.

Then a phone call from Luther Evans, who is national director of the W. P. A. Historical Records Survey. I dated him for dinner with Frances and Miss Barry,¹ secretary of my Joint Committee, and then turned to meet my seminar.

It was the last session of the seminar. The students have done well. I plan to hectograph their term papers, which have really uncovered new information about early 19th century history. The session was spent in a discussion of liberalism in the early 19th century, — the period in which all of them had been working. After the seminar one of the best of the students lingered to ask advice about a job. Should she take an appointment in a high class private school? She hates the social stratum represented by the school, but I told her I didn’t think she would be spoiled by it. Meanwhile she can get her degree and prepare for college work.

Then down town to meet Evans, for a session lasting till 11:00 on the strategy to be used in getting the most out of W.P.A. projects in the white collar field. The new appropriation calls for 250,000,000 dollars in that field. The policies we have stood for — that the best work for these people is in the field of improving materials for research — has been gaining headway in Washington and elsewhere. The offices upon which we pressed our advice two years ago are now coming to us for counsel. And in spite of all the work done, the program for them to follow is still unclear even in my own mind, though its broad principles are clear. We decided a number of subsidiary questions, and then I came to the office this morning to clear up the mail.

With the mail out of the way, there began the session of strategic thinking. Two things stand out as firsts in importance: microcopying and indexing newspapers, making union catalogues. Lydenberg, Director of the New York Public Library and I have made a move to get $10,000 to prepare strategy on union cataloguing of libraries. My guess is that there is about five million dollars worth of work to do there, and then we will be able to know with a simple inquiry whether any book is in the United States and where it is. On indexing of newspapers and microcopying them for preservation I had launched a scheme in February which is still not in the definite stage. It will call for $30,000 from the Rockefeller foundations. The idea is to have excellent copying equipment and pass it from community to community, letting each city copy its newspapers, paying only for the film, and having relief labor do the work. At the same time they can index the newspapers with relief labor. But the manual of instructions for indexing is still not written.

Meanwhile another enterprise drifted into the office — a woman from India wants to microcopy a medical library of 25 million pages, take it to India and serve all medical science in India on film. She called me up during the day to ask that I serve on her advisory board, and get a statement from a firm of lawyers that the project was all right in respect of copyright law. I agreed with some hesitation to the advisory board — for what other people may do with your name is sometimes pretty awful, and got her copyright clearance for the project, for the Carnegie Corporation has arranged to have Elihu Root‘s firm give that advice wherever it will serve the interests of microcopying development.

Then I arranged all my notes and papers in neat piles, that do not mean anything except that the same size papers are on top of each other. But at least the top of my desk and table looks neater than it has looked for a long time.

Let this letter be my contribution to the circulate. Since I had the experience of getting into a plane here at 5:00 p.m. and getting out at San Francisco at 9:00 a.m. the family in California seems so near to me — just around the corner, in fact.²

Love to all,

Bob

Cited works

Footnotes

1. Adeline Barry later married the philanthropist Kenneth Davee, who endowed a chair in history in her name at Case Western Reserve University.
2. My father remembers that RCB flew to California at the time of the death of his father, a few weeks before this letter.

Robert C. Binkley came to Western Reserve University in 1930 as the head of the History Department of the College for Women (which changed its name to Flora Stone Mather College the following year). The main building, Mather Hall, had received an extension the year before.

View Larger Map

Binkley’s office, room 224, was at the back of the extension, on the second floor, near the top of the stairs.¹

Footnotes

1. Doc. 4795: RCB to Maxwell Wolgemot, 1930-10-13.

Thanks to the Prelinger Library, the Internet Archive has digitized Robert C. Binkley’s Selected Papers (Harvard UP, 1948). This post is an annotated table of contents, with links to Internet Archives book-reader application.

This collection was edited by Bob’s colleague the philosopher Max H. Fisch, with the help of Frances, who seems to have given Fisch access to the files of Bob’s correspondence that I’ve been working through. The extent of Frances’ involvement isn’t clear to me yet, but may emerge from some correspondence between her and Fisch that I have, or from Fisch’s papers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which include correspondence with Frances and some of RCB’s friends and colleagues. The volume is dedicated by Fisch to Frances and the two boys. The Foreword is by the Librarian of Congress Luther Evans, who had known Binkley during his time as head of the Historical Records Survey in the 1930s.

The Binkleys lived in the West Village from September 1927 to May 1929, and frequently revisited in the following few years, using their old apartment at 49 Morton St., now occupied by various friends, as a base. That apartment was the scene of many interesting events, some of which Bob wrote up in the occasional diary he kept. Here is one from February, 1929.¹

The cast:

• A poet named Hal White. I think he must be the same whose poem caused the May 1926 issue of New Masses to be banned from the mails. He was an assistant professor of English at Yale but at the time was teaching at the University of Montana summer school, from which he refused to resign.²
• Fran Klein, roommate of the Binkleys, a commercial artist.
• Kate Beswick, also a roommate, poet, friend of John Steinbeck.
• Bob

This is, I’m afraid, as close as the Binkleys seem to have come to the literary life of Greenwich Village. The incident, silly as it is, shows something of the kind of playful social life they led, at least. They looked back on their not-quite-two-years in the Village with great fondness after they had moved away.

(I have corrected a few typos but otherwise presented the text as Bob typed it.)

Last night Hal White came over with his poem — a magnificent narrative of man and civilization — the intelligent man verhexed by civilization, and getting rid of it to commit glorious murder. The thoughtful Brooks and the peasant Strohmeier are rivals for Mara, and Mara is just earth. Anybody’s woman. Brookes at first cannot act, being inhibited by civilized restraints. He gets rid of these. Getting rid of honor, he spies upon Mara and Strohmeier, dropping pride, he lets himself be stung by Strohmeier’s primitive gloating, and finally being able to act, he strangles his rival whom he has stalked and found in delictu.

While we were discussing whether the transition could be made convincing, in came Fran Klein. And Kate said “This is Mara”. Fran played up to something of the game, and said she was an Arabian. And as Hal questioned her, she said always just the right things. Soon Hal was strongly moved, for it was clear that Mara was hostile to civilized restraints, and having dark eyes and hair, and being every inch voluptuous in body, she fitted Hal’s picture in every respect. Hal talked of how “I have been writing a poem about you”, while Kate and I participated in the game.

As the evening advanced I turned out the light so that we might better enjoy the fire. And at once Hal noticed something about Fran’s eyes. They fixed themselves upon the fire in an almost animal stare, hypnotic and hypnotized. “Your eyes are in the fire” said Hal, becoming enthusiastic, “You terrify me” “You are Nature”. Hal arose from his place in the corner, and sat down beside her; they petted.

I took a few notes on their remarkable conversation

Enter F. Kate made the introductions: ‘This is Hal White’; ‘This is Mara’. Hal: No really, is that your name? F. ‘Yes’. F. went on to say that she was an Arabian. The conversation took on the color of a game. On the one hand I was explaining to Fran how it was possible to see much of her room by way of the mirror hung near the door; Fran was pretending that this explained many things, but this was a bluff; meanwhile we mystified her about Mara. “Mara means bitterness” said Kate, but Hal protested.

Hal then began to question F. “Do you like farming”?

F: I like anything about the soil.

H. How do you exist in New York.

F: I have a hard time; sometimes I go up on the roof and see clouds and stars.

H: The roof? Why not down to the ground? Once in a while when they are digging the subway you can see the soil. They dig down to the rock, and you see hard Nature.

F: declared that she missed the earth and trees.

Hal. commented upon the starved appearance of the trees in Washington Square, and went on to say that he would like to have a farm and live the life of the soil.

Bob ventured to doubt that he would like the life of the farm, and queried whether he had actually farmed at any time in his life.

About this time Hal turned to Fran with the question “What do you think of me?” Fran replied “I think you are civilized and trying to be natural”

There ensued a discussion upon morals painting and poetry, taking the form of a catechism of Frances.

Hal: Have you any morals?

Fran: What do you mean?

Hal: What people usually think of.

Fran: No.

Hal: What religion are you? Mohammedan? Jewish, Christian, Pagan?

Fran: Pagan.

Hal (with enthusiasm) Good!- Why do you paint? Is painting living or passionate?

Fran: what is the difference?

Hal (with even greater enthusiasm): Good!

They discussed then what a poem should be, and what a picture. Their theoretical observations led them back to the intimate connection of both with life. They discoursed about Morocco, and other Mediterranean regions. Fran told of the places to go, and the excellences thereof.

It was Hal, then, who inquired “Did you ever see a fire in the desert?”

Fran replied with a description of her Bedouin camp, while Hal’s excitement visibly increased. Answering the spirit of the moment, Bob turned out the light and threw more wood on the fire. As Fran finished Hal declared “I knew it. You couldn’t look at it that way if you only saw fires in a house”

And then it was noted that Fran was looking at the fire with a very intent and fixed stare, like an animal. Hal exclaimed about it again and again. “Your eyes go into the fire.” There was brief discussion as to whether others looked at the fire in the same way. Someone objected that Hal himself was not looking in the fire. He did not take his eyes from Fran’s face and replied in low and purposely dramatic tones “But I see the fire”.

Then the conversation came to a new level. “You terrify me” said Hal. And he went out of the room, to return a moment later and take his seat beside Fran. Henceforth this was the keynote of his discoursing “You terrify me”.

Having examined Fran’s eyes at very close range, he declared that they were not black after all, and to this remark Kate ventured the addition that Fran was, perhaps, not Mara after all. Hal replied decisively that it made no difference; she continued to be Mara.

The subsequent conversation was interrupted from time to time by kisses.

“If my eyes could go out as simply and directly as yours, I might write a great poem” said Hal. And then the question was raised whether it would be well to be completely natural. Fran declared that it would be well if one were in the right kind of a place.

Hal: And would that be happiness?

Fran: I believe it would.

Hal: Why don’t you go?

Fran: I was brought up to be civilized.

Hal: Is there a conflict?

Fran: Yes.

It as at this time that Hal spoke of going off to the desert together. His view was that the consequence of such a venture would be happiness. And something was said of contentment.

Hal: But you’re not placid at all; you’re vitally alive.

Fran: Of civilization?

Hal: No. Of yourself. You’re just Nature.

Nature is never calm. There is continual struggle — war between growth and death.

Fran thought it was wrong to identify happiness with comfort and quiet.

Hal then raised a new question. What about ideals?

Fran: I suppose they’re civilized!

Hal: Are they always?

Fran: I think nature breeds them.

Hal: But what about them? A completely natural person — what sort of ideals would he have? Not Christianity, not Mohammedanism, not formulated as ‘thou shalt not’…

Fran: No, I imagine more or less selfish. I don’t believe a primitive person thinks much about ideals.

Hal: They are not at war with themselves.

Then Hal began to get back to his main theme:

Hal: But are you not afraid of Nature? Does nature ever terrify you?

Fran: Not if I’m out in Nature.

Hal: But in a storm, perhaps?

Here Hal went on to propound a hypothetical case in which Fran was caught in the middle of a lake by a storm. Fran’s boat had been stolen. The illustration was used to deliver a criticism of Anglo-Saxons and Wordsworth, their greatest nature poet, who could see in Nature nothing but moral law.

Hal: I want to be a natural person. I’m my hero.

Kate: Perfectly futile.

Hal: I may have to strangle someone.

After some discussion of the point, it was agreed that Bob was the logical one to be strangled.

Then the discussion turned back to the fire and the desert.

Hal: Perhaps the desert would teach me to make my eyes go out.

Fran: Why don’t you go there?

Hal thought that in the desert he could create great art. Bob denied it, and argued that art would there be superfluous. And Hal came back to the theme of identifying self and nature. “I could be a lump of coal in the fire.” He discussed with Fran “Could I learn Arabic?” And as the talk progressed, Fran passed this judgment “You’re not a natural person.” Hal is civilized trying to be natural; Fran is natural trying to be civilized.

Hal: “Why write? If is a defect. Every bit of art is a defect.”

There was then some talk of the relative sincerity of the Bedouin and the American. The conversation drifted into French, and then Hal brought it back to its source.

“I’m at a disadvantage. I can’t see your eyes. They enter the fire; mine don’t.” And then again “You’re perfect in your way. I’m terrified.”

Hal: May I ask one silly question?

Fran: Yes.

Hal: Are you pleased that you’ve been born?

Fran: Yes, of course.

Hal: Some people aren’t.

Fran: They must be very cynical…

And so it went on, as Fran and Hal petted more and more ardently. His Cybele was becoming Mara; his type becoming a particular. And as for Fran hers was the straight- forward physiological reaction.

The party broke up at 4:15 A.M.

Footnotes

1. Doc. 2559.
2. “Poet Refuses to Resign”, New York Times, 18 June 1926, p.14.