Alright! Today was an awesome day in the archives. We dealt entirely with correspondence between Dana and his friends and family. He was an active letter writer, and his editorials often attracted responses from across the nation. Conveniently, he saved most of it, including the envelopes (which are surprisingly helpful to connect names to places and dates.) So even though we've barely scratched the surface of Dana's personal writing, we already know his opinions on birth control (good), big business (bad) and socialism (good). Margaret Sanger, pioneer of birth control in the early 20th century, wrote him a letter, expressing her thanks for his latest newspaper column. Upton Sinclair (he of The Jungle fame) addressed him by his nom de plume "The Hill Billy" and offered to send Dana any of his books that he found interesting.
Perhaps the most intriguing though, is his six years of correspondence with Mr. Homer T.Bone, future senator from Washington. We first have letters from Bone from 1930, when he decided that he had no money to run for Senate, and no one had enough money to fund him. By 1931, he had decided to go for it, and in 1932, he was elected to the Senate. He was a firm socialist, and was appalled at the apathy of the lower classes (whom he called 'serfs'.) It's surprising to me that he could ever get elected. In his letters, he rails against private corporations and profits which undercut the common man. He sends Dana lists of organizations that are considered "communist." The League of Women Voters and the Society for Safer Schools among them. It's also interesting to read the subtext of the letters. Beyond the indignant cries against capitalism, there's a sense of loneliness and isolation. He often hopes to come down to Portland to share some crayfish and a (then illegal) drink, or urges Dana to come up, offering up his best room (complete with Gideon Bible!). And then there's a man named Tom Burns. Bone often mentions how he'd like to clasp hands with Burns again.
And this is why history is awesome on two fronts:
1) I get to learn all the gossip about people, but because they're dead, no one cares, and I still get all the guilty pleasure of knowing these people's secrets.
2) People back in the 1930s were struggling with the exact same issues that we are today. You could have changed the date on Bone's letter, and I would have thought that it was written by some Tacoma hipster who liked type writers. There was almost no difference between the issues being discussed then and now. While it's disconcerting on one hand to see that we are, in some respects, grappling with the same issues 80 years later, it's also reassuring to know that the world hasn't really gone to hell in that time. No matter what the pundits like to tell us, there was never a magical "better" time when business and individual worked together in harmony or the two political parties got together and sung Kumbaya across the aisle (the Era of Good Feelings aside).
Also, Bone was a very eloquent and quite snarky writer. But between pot-shots at newspaper editors and Prohibitionists, some times he was just ridiculous. I really wish we could read what Dana wrote back. I'm sure that he was just as good.
Here's another one of his gems (regarding his desire to get into politics): "I neigh like an old war horse when I smell the smoke of battle, and long to set my manly brisket against the cold steel of the enemy, but dammit, I want some shock troops and latrine cleaners to go along on this gory path to Glory."
Next time: Dana's untimely and totally bizarre death and letter he never received that he really should have.
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