Finding Your Voice
The Value of Being Vocal and the Cost of Staying Quiet: A Historical Perspective
It was the height of hay season, 1872. The farmers on Bell’s Run were busy, but the work seemed lighter somehow from all the excitement. Since late the previous fall, there’d been talk in the county about building a new narrow-gauge railway connecting Sardinia, eight miles to the south, with Hillsboro, twelve miles to the north. The route under discussion would run right through Whiteoak Township, changing life forever for Bell’s Run farmers. Instead of having to drive their stock and produce up to Hillsboro, they could bring it right to the local depot and still receive the same Cincinnati prices. Think what the extra margin could buy! And besides, with the railroad came possibilities – weekend trips, visitors strange and familiar, and bustling commerce in town. Why, with a railway stop, Taylorsville might even have enough business for a hotel!
The people of Bell’s Run bubbled with exuberance; they had to find an outlet for all that excitement while the railroad effort proceeded. Someone hit upon a marvelous idea: They’d passed dozens of cold winter nights that year at the Bell’s Run Social Singing Organization, gathering to pass the time and to learn the basics of singing. Why not organize a second singing school, with a teacher from Taylorsville, and let the two groups prepare for a festival and competition when the big day finally arrived to celebrate the new railroad? “All we want is for the [Columbus & Maysville Railway] to be a certainty,” one resident wrote, “to keep up the excitement, so that when completed we will be prepared to meet with the ‘German Saengerfest.’”
Sängerbund und Sängerfest
The “Saengerfest” they anticipated in Bell’s Run that summer in 1872 had been popularized in Germany earlier in the nineteenth century. Originally used to promote social and cultural change in Switzerland and Germany (kind of a Swiss/Prussian equivalent of Pete Seeger), the sängerfest soon came to North America in a less political form along with the luggage of German immigrants. Most of the farmers on Bell’s Run in southwest Ohio had German roots, and by their grandparents’ day, the sängerfest was popular in both Philadelphia and Cincinnati.
I came across this story while researching the childhood community of Wilbur J. Carr, a State Department bureaucrat in the early 20th century. Carr would later be associated with two infamous State immigration policies – its support for the 1924 Immigration Act, which restricted immigration based on race, and its denial of visas to German and Austrian Jews in the 1930s. To gain perspective on complicated questions about the scope of individual moral responsibility, I wanted to better understand Carr’s life, including the community and the times that shaped him. The railroad – which finally came to Taylorsville in 1878, when Carr was seven years old – fundamentally reshaped that community and their times. The people were so excited, they sang.
Finding a Voice
Because Carr was mostly a mid-level bureaucrat, more administrator than policymaker, not much direct evidence of his childhood survives. But Highland County has an active historical society, and a few newspapers of the community from 1870 to 1889 can be found there or online. With the Carr family generously sharing their own mementos and recollections, I’ve been able to piece together a picture of the boy and the place he lived.
I’ve struggled, however, to bring that world to life on the page. To give young Carr and his contemporaries authentic voices without overstepping the bounds of the historical record requires careful handling, and until this week I’d mostly struggled in vain. My first attempt sounded way too academic-y (it’s a word). I wanted to tell Carr’s story in a way that invites the reader to grapple empathetically but unsentimentally with the profound moral questions that he faced (versions of which we face again today). To accomplish that, I can’t just tell the reader about that world; I have to draw the reader into that world. It was a tricky problem.
This week, I had a breakthrough. To shake off my customary academic voice, I bailed on the office and sat in my kitchen (a cheerfully warm spot to spend a wintery week anyway). I opened a “fake” document (not my existing draft), typed “What if it sounded something like this?”, and began writing.
Like a spring thaw, a new voice came forth. Not quite Carr’s voice – his journals begin in the 1890s; I have none of his own words from his childhood – but the voice of someone walking alongside him. That voice, the narrator, certainly knows our time (her questions are our questions), but she knows Carr’s time, too. She’s a guide between two worlds, a bit like Jacob Marley.
These are the kinds of moments that make writers keep writing.
Voice and Vision
As I thought about the sängerfest in nineteenth century Highland County, I began to ponder the power of voice. Carr was musically inclined; members of his church congregation elected him chorister for their Sunday School when he was seventeen. But throughout his career in government, he remained quiet – or, better said, he used his voice mostly as a mouthpiece for others’ ideas. He drafted laws, testified on behalf of them, and implemented policies through the consulates, but he introduced few ideas of his own, at least when it came to immigration. He earned a law degree, but never used it. If the reader (and writer) ultimately judges him a failure, it might be a failure of vision, or it might simply be a failure of voice.
Or maybe the two – vision and voice – are one. If so, failure to find our voice could have profound costs. So much dreck passes for discourse today, it can be tempting to opt out of speaking entirely. I confess, as I saw that culture developing, I often chose that option myself. Plenty of good work can be done silently; why waste precious creative energy on the shouting?
Finding the line between dialogue and diatribe isn’t always easy. But sometimes discussing can lead to seeing, and seeing is an essential ingredient of vision. Despite the destructiveness of so much of what passes for public discourse today, using our voices may be necessary to truly see what’s going on around us, and to en-vision a better way.