64997 Frontier LoriAnn 5 - Huntington Librarymedia.huntington.org/uploadedfiles/Files/PDFs/S06frontiers.pdf · Hengwrt manuscripts are the closest we can come to his original intent

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

SPRING/SUMMER 2006

SAFE HAVEN FOR ENDANGERED PLANTS

Unraveling a Knotty Mystery

ANTI-COMMUNISM IN LOS ANGELES

T HE HUNTINGTON’S ELLESMERE MANUSCRIPT of Chaucer’sCanterbury Tales is a true original. More than 600 years old, it hascaptivated scholars and library visitors alike. Linne R. Mooneyhas made news by identifying the scribe who produced the raretreasure (see page 2).

Another important version of the Canterbury Tales is housed at the NationalLibrary of Wales, copied out by the same hand, although the stories of thepilgrims have been presented in a slightly different sequence. One is hardly a“copy” of the other in any traditional sense of the word, but rather both arevaluable and rare versions of the same celebrated poem.

Ten years ago,The Huntington published its own copy of the Tales.Thefacsimile edition is a photographic reproduction of the Ellesmere manuscriptand extends its circulation to scholars who are unable to travel to the Library.

Such a “copy” does not diminish the value of the original work. Rare booksand masterpieces hanging in art galleries have a special aura made evident bythe throngs of visitors who find their way to the world’s museums to get aglimpse of them.They are irreplaceable cultural and historical touchstones. Butwhat about the plants in the Huntington’s gardens?

In plant propagation, a horticulturalist can make new “originals.” Forexample, writer Catherine Phillips explains how a plant growing in the DesertCollection nursery is a direct vegetative link to a specimen first documentedby a collector in Mexico in 1951 (see page 9). Cuttings of a particular cactuspassed along to former botanical director Myron Kimnach in the 1950s leddirectly to the plant we see today in the nursery. It is not a facsimile but rathera clone.

In her article on the Huntington’s InternationalSucculent Introductions program,Traude Gomez-Rhineexplains how John Trager has been germinating seeds andcross-pollinating plants for more than 20 years, creatingclones of countless rare succulents (see page 5). In theplant world, the rarer an item, the more you want toreproduce it and circulate “copies” that will ensure thesurvival of the species.Through plant propagation, aplace like The Huntington is helping to spread the aura of the original.

MATT STEVENS

The Huntington Library,Art Collections,and Botanical Gardens

SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON

STEVEN S. KOBLIK

President

GEORGE ABDO

Vice President for Advancement

JAMES P. FOLSOM

Marge and Sherm Telleen Director of the Botanical Gardens

KATHY HACKER

Executive Assistant to the President

SUSAN LAFFERTY

Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education

SUZY MOSER

Assistant Vice President for Advancement

JOHN MURDOCH

Hannah and Russel Kully Director of Art Collections

ROBERT C. RITCHIE

W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research

LAURIE SOWD

Director of Operations

ALISON D. SOWDEN

Vice President for Financial Affairs

SUSAN TURNER-LOWE

Vice President for Communications

DAVID S. ZEIDBERG

Avery Director of the Library

MAGAZINE STAFF

Editor

MATT STEVENS

Contributing Writers

LISA BLACKBURN

TRAUDE GOMEZ-RHINE

Designer

LORI ANN VANDER PLUYM

Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually by the Office of Communications. It strives to connectreaders more firmly with the rich intellectual life of The Huntington, capturing in news and features thework of researchers, educators, curators, and othersacross a range of disciplines.

This magazine is supported in part by theAnnenberg Foundation.

INQUIRIES AND COMMENTS:Matt Stevens, EditorHuntington Frontiers1151 Oxford RoadSan Marino, CA [email protected]

Unless otherwise acknowledged, photography providedby the Huntington’s Department of Photographic Services.

Printed by Pace Lithographers, Inc. City of Industry, Calif.

© 2006 The Huntington Library,Art Collections, andBotanical Gardens.All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of the contents, in whole or in part, withoutpermission of the publisher is prohibited.

FROM THE EDITOR

THE AURA OF THE ORIGINAL

Opposite page, upper left: A sample from the Papers of Marie Koenig,Huntington Library. Right: Detail from Astrology, a 17th-century carpet pro-duced by the Savonnerie Manufactory, Huntington Art Collections. Lower left:John Trager, Curator of Desert Collections and director of the Huntington’sInternational Succulent Introductions program. Photo by Don Milici.

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 1

[ VOLUME 2, ISSUE 1 ]

QUIETLY TO THE RESCUE 5Propagating endangered succulentsby Traude Gomez-Rhine

A SHARED CURIOSITY 9The story of two men and a cactusby Catherine Phillips

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE SUN KING 14The timely arrival of a 17th-century carpet fragmentby Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COLD WAR,

MOMMY? 18The acquisition of two anti-Communist collectionsby Matt Stevens

SS PP RR II NN GG // SS UU MM MM EE RR 22 00 00 66Contents

DEPARTMENTS

DISCOVERY: Solving a 600-year-old mysteryby Mary Robertson 2

ACCESSIONS: The fine art of paper conservationby Steven Tice 23

BOOKS IN PRINT: Recommended reading 2455

1144

1188


[ DISCOVERY ]

DESPITE SIX CENTURIES OF INTENSIVEstudy by generations of scholars, theHuntington’s famous “Ellesmere Chaucer”manuscript still guards some of its secrets.Although scholars have long understood it to be the earliestcomplete text of the Canterbury Tales, the identity of itsscribe has remained a mystery. Until now.

Credit for this landmark discovery goes to Linne R.Mooney, an American scholar who is a professor ofMedieval English Palaeography at the University of York,in North Yorkshire, England.Thanks to her, we can atlong last put a name to the Ellesmere scribe. He wasAdam Pinkhurst, member of the Scriveners’ guild ofLondon, professional copyist, sometime moonlightingaccountant for the powerful Mercers’ (clothiers) Company,and almost certainly a man employed for many years byChaucer himself as scribe and copyist.

Over the years, scholars had worked doggedly to learnas much as they could about the Ellesmere manuscript.They have known, for instance, that the scribe worked inor around London within a decade of Chaucer’s death in1400.The same scribe also made another copy of the poem,now in the National Library of Wales (the “Hengwrt”manuscript—pronounced “HENG-ert”). Chaucer’s ownhandwritten drafts have not survived, so the Ellesmere andHengwrt manuscripts are the closest we can come to hisoriginal intent for the work.The layout of the text and itsdecorations appear carefully designed to create a unifiedwhole from the disparate stories of 23 pilgrims.Threeanonymous artists collaborated to create miniature paint-ings of Chaucer and the other pilgrims, presenting a vivid,visual cross section of late medieval English life to matchthe literary genius of the text. By the early 17th centurythe precious manuscript had come into the possession ofthe Egerton family, who were dukes of Bridgewater andearls of Ellesmere (from whom the volume took its nick-

name). It was the crown jewel of the great EnglishRenaissance library purchased by Henry Huntington for$1 million in 1917.The celebrated volume is the model formost modern printed editions of Chaucer’s greatest work.

Questions about the manuscript have always capturedthe attention of scholars. For whom was the manuscriptmade? Why does the Hengwrt copy, written by the same

scribe, vary in so many details, omit some of the text, andrearrange the order of the tales? Was the Hengwrt writtenfirst, as most scholars now believe? Could either or bothhave been made in Chaucer’s lifetime, and if so, could thepoet himself have been involved intheir creation? Who were the earliestowners of the Ellesmere Chaucer,and—more frivolously—whichof them scribbled in thepreliminary flyleaves,“Margery seynt Johnys a shrew”?

Sometimes, aftermany long years ofpursuit, answersemerge.And sometimes,a certain amount ofserendipity enters the pic-ture. Mooney’s epiphanycame in the course of hermore general research onmedieval English scribal prac-tices.After spending a morning

The Name of the ScribeSOLVING A MYSTERY BEHIND THE HUNTINGTON’S CANTERBURY TALES

by Mary Robertson

The Huntington’s celebrated

volume is the model for most

modern printed editions of

Chaucer’s greatest work.

Left: The opening page of the Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’sCanterbury Tales, Huntington Library. Right: The Wife of Bath, detail from theEllesmere Chaucer, Huntington Library.

in 2004 in the Mercers’ Hall archives in London, she cameacross what she recognized as the hand of the Hengwrt-Ellesmere scribe in account books. Energized by herfind—and shut out of the Mercers’ archives during thelunch hour—she walked two blocks to the GuildhallLibrary, where she opened the “Common Paper,” a recordbook of the Scriveners’ Company. In it new memberssigned their names and wrote out the text of their oath ofadmission to the guild.There, on page 56, was the familiarhand of one Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney’s expert eye recog-nized that the wide spacing, spikey curves, idiosyncraticdecorative strokes, and a dozen other characteristic mark-ers matched perfectly the hand of the Ellesmere scribe.

After taking some notes and requesting a photograph,Mooney started to walk back to Mercers’ Hall whencorroborating evidence suddenly popped into her head.“About halfway back,” Mooney recalls,“I stopped still inthe middle of a busy intersection as the penny dropped—as the British say—and I said aloud, ‘Oh, his name isAdam!’” She was thinking of Chaucer’s short, well-knownpoem addressed to “Adam, his owne Scriveyn,” in whichthe poet ruefully chides someone named Adam for carelessmistakes in copying two of his earlier poems. If this literaryAdam was the very real Pinkhurst, then his association withChaucer was long standing and of some affection.

4 Spring/Summer 2006

Scholarly precision required further proof, however, andafter more than a year of additional meticulous researchthe full details of Professor Mooney’s argument have onlyrecently appeared in her article “Chaucer’s Scribe” in theJanuary 2006 issue of Speculum, the journal of the MedievalAcademy of America.We now know far more about AdamPinkhurst’s life as a professional scribe in the world ofLondon manuscript production, about the production anddissemination of Middle English poetry, about his workfor the Mercers’ Company, about the nine other (so far)surviving literary or business manuscripts written in hishand, and most importantly about his long and close work-ing relationship with Chaucer, for whom he apparentlymade the first copies of the poet’s three great works—Boeceand Troilus and Criseyde as early as the mid-1380s and theCanterbury Tales around the time of Chaucer’s death in1400 or shortly thereafter.

This last, the most exciting outcome of Mooney’s dis-covery beyond the actual identification of Adam Pinkhurst,means that the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts werewritten by someone who knew and worked directly withthe author over many years.As such the two manuscriptsnow speak with far more authority about the text of theCanterbury Tales than in the past, when the circumstancesof their copying were less clear.The Huntington’s EllesmereChaucer, admired for six centuries as a literary and artistictreasure from late medieval England, now at last enjoysthe added luster of a direct connection to the father ofEnglish poetry.What else will future scholars find?

Mary Robertson is the William A. Moffett Chief Curator ofManuscripts at The Huntington.

THE WRITING ON THE PAGEPaleography (literally, “ancient writing”) is the study ofolder forms of handwriting and their evolution overtime. Expert paleographers recognize the personal char-acteristics of individual scribes, such as the idiosyncratic“double slash–dot–double slash” decorative flourishes(seen above) used by Adam Pinkhurst in the EllesmereChaucer. Because most medieval scribes remain uniden-tified, scholars rely on paleography to establish the datesof manuscripts and the circumstances of their copying.

Professional scribes could write in any of severalstyles of handwriting, depending on the type and con-tent of the text required. The Ellesmere copy of theCanterbury Tales was a work of secular literature writ-ten in Middle English rather than Latin and planned asa large-format volume with miniature paintings andelaborate illumination. It uses a large, formal displayscript known as Anglicana formata.

Mooney’s expert eye recognized

that the wide spacing, spikey

curves, idiosyncratic decorative

strokes, and a dozen other

characteristic markers matched

perfectly the hand of the

Ellesmere scribe.


John Trager is proud to show offhis favorite exotic offspring,thousands of which fill theDesert Collection shade housein the Huntington nursery. Row afterrow of cacti, euphorbias, and other suc-culents crowd the worktables aroundthe doting horticulturalist. He picksup a small container among a largecollection of Stenocactus ochoterenanus—delicate globes of cacti resembling seaurchins. Covered with spikes, someare topped with a mere wisp of aflower striped in white and violet—such fragile beauty surrounded by

barbed danger make for an alluringbotanical specimen.

When the horticulturalist arrivedon staff at The Huntington in 1983, ahandful of seedlings of the plant werealready part of the collection, grownfrom seed that had been collected inthe Mexican state of San Luis Potosíin the early 1970s.Years later, in 1999,Trager finally found a space in hisschedule to hand pollinate about fiveplants.He was rewarded with hundredsof seeds.A couple of years later he sowedthe seeds produced from that effort andis now cultivating and selling these

second-generation plants as part of theHuntington’s International SucculentIntroductions program, or ISI.

In existence for almost 50 years,the ISI is both a shopper’s paradiseand a unique conservation program.The Huntington’s plant introductionprogram propagates and distributesnew and rare succulents to collectors,scientists, and research institutions.While certainly a savvy way to buildHuntington collections, it also furthersscientific knowledge and helps to mit-igate the alarming rate at which theworld’s flora is becoming extinct.

QuietlyRescueto the

How a Little-KnownPropagation ProgramStrives to Save Rare andEndangered PlantsBy Traude Gomez-Rhine


“We need to acknowledge that thelandscape is changing radically aroundthe world,” says Jim Folsom, the Margeand Sherm Telleen Director of theBotanical Gardens at The Huntington.“In a few decades half the planet’ssucculents will be lost. In the plantkingdom, the more you propagate,the more you keep for the world.”

It was Folsom who formallyadopted ISI as the Huntington’s ownin 1989, shortly after he came onboard as the new botanical director.His predecessor Myron Kimnach hadhelped found the program as an inde-

pendent nonprofit when he was onthe staff of the University of CaliforniaBotanical Garden in Berkeley in thelate 1950s. Joining forces with J.W.Dodson and two other like-mindedfriends, Kimnach started propagatingin earnest in 1956. During his tenureas superintendent and curator of theHuntington Botanical Gardens from1962 to 1986, Kimnach made numer-ous expeditions to Mexico to conductfieldwork, resulting in the discovery ofmany new species. (He began theHuntington’s popular plant sales, inpart, to finance such expeditions.)Kimnach supervised the propagationof many of these new succulents forintroduction through ISI and forplanting in the Huntington’s burgeon-ing Desert Garden.Today—as then—only seedlings, grafts, and rooted cut-tings produced under nursery condi-tions are sold.All income generated isused to support the program.

Since Kimnach’s heyday, botanicalgardens have assumed even greater

positions of leadership—and havebecome much more vocal—on issuesof conservation, a response undoubt-edly driven by deepening environ-mental concerns.“Potentially, we playa huge role as repositories of biodi-versity—and also as places of outreachand education,” says Trager. Curatorof the Desert Collections,Trager is theprogram’s chief ambassador. He bal-ances the pleasure of distributing newcacti to grace collectors’ hothouseswith the responsibility of dissuadingpeople from going into the wild anddigging up plants on their own.

For more than 20 years,Trager hasspent uncountable hours in the nurs-ery taking cuttings, sowing seeds,cross-pollinating plants, and perform-ing the endless—often mundane—tasks required to generate new life.“Timing is everything,” he explainswith a sweeping glance through thenursery’s huge space, which alsoextends into a hothouse. “We can’tpossibly be in the right place all thetime. Fruits may explode when we’renot there to catch the seeds.” Hiscoworker Karen Zimmerman, DesertCollections propagator, helps himwatch for these opportune momentsamong the 200 to 300 different speciesin various stages of propagation. Asingle plant can sometimes take fiveto eight years to yield a good crop;some plants need decades. BecauseTrager does not have to adhere to thebusiness model of a commercial nurs-ery, he can adopt a Zen approach—everything happens in good time.Also, his other full-time curatorialduties mean some plants just have towait their turn in line, as was the casewith S. ochoterenanus.

“Propagation requires extraordinarypatience,” says Trager.“But it’s worth itfor the promise of producing a newplant that hasn’t been seen in theUnited States.” Trager developed hisskills early in life.As a teenager growing

In existence for almost 50

years, the International

Succulent Introductions

program is both a shopper’s

paradise and a unique con-

servation program.

Above: A close-up of the flowering Stenocactus ochoterenanus, offered in this year’s ISI catalog. Photo by LisaBlackburn. Previous page: ISI director John Trager at work in the Desert Collection nursery. Photo by Don Milici.

up in Santa Barbara, he “inexplicablystarted chopping and propagating” thesucculents in his family’s backyard.Upon exhausting these plants,he movedon to take cuttings from the neighbors.

The ISI distributes as many as 40new succulent varieties every year,requiring at least 100 plants of each tofulfill orders. Published annually inthe March/April issue of the Cactusand Succulent Journal, the ISI catalogattracts mail orders from around theworld—including a thriving clientelein Germany and England, which gen-erates one-sixth of the ISI orders.TheISI catalog can also be found on theHuntington’s Web site.

The 33 species for sale this yearare indigenous to the Canary Islands,Chile, Madagascar, Malawi, Mexico,and South Africa. From the UnitedStates comes a new variety of cactithat makes its horticultural debut.Discovered by botanists in the desertof southern Texas a few years back,

Echinocereus viridiflorus var. canus hasgreenish-yellow flowers with a lemonyfragrance.Also featured is Boswellia nana,a rare treat from Socotra, a remoteisland in the Arabian Sea that has seenfew botanical expeditions because of

tight governmental controls.The plantis perhaps the most ornamental of thefrankincense genus, similar in look toa compact bonsai with glossy, feather-like leaves and showy pink flowers.

The laissez-faire political climatethat once allowed explorers to collectbotanical specimens from Mexico andbeyond has—in the last decade inparticular—changed dramatically asgovernments have moved to imposemore stringent restrictions on collect-ing and exporting plants. Intended toprotect biodiversity, this tighter controlhas also severely curtailed field expe-ditions for educational and researchinstitutions such as The Huntington.Because funds are limited—as is stafftime—Trager has relied more heavilyon botanists and explorers whoalready have permits to collect seedsin certain countries.Walter Röösli andRalph Hoffmann, a noted team ofSwiss explorers, collect specimensfrom the exotic and singular flora ofMadagascar. “The Swiss team is veryjudicious in harvesting from thewild—they only take what they needto establish a species in cultivation,”says Trager.

Röösli and Hoffmann propagatenew plants in Switzerland then sendthem to Trager with necessary per-mits and documentation. Plant datainclude information about the precisewild location of the plant and thesoil type, associated flora, and altitudein which it thrives in the wild.These

SEUSSIAN SCULPTURES

The Huntington’s Desert Gardenserves as an important lab forISI plants. Celebrating its 100thanniversary next year, the 10-acregarden contains one of thelargest and oldest assemblages ofsucculents in the world, collectedfor decades from such places asthe American Southwest, Mexico,Guatemala, Brazil, Bolivia, andSouth Africa, and now tended toby Desert Garden Curator GaryLyons. These Seussian sculptures,otherworldly shapes in shades ofgreen and gray, blue and silver,thrive in a sunny locale on theestate’s east side. From hoarycolumns that shoot toward thesky to squat barrels covered withvicious-looking spines and nee-dles, the cacti and euphorbias canseem simultaneously creepy, pre-historic, and utterly amazing.

The Huntington has in its col-lections about 5,000 species ofcacti and other succulents. Thereare an estimated 10,000 succu-lents worldwide, about 2,000 ofthem classified as cacti. While allcacti are succulents, not all succu-lents are cacti. Succulents aredefined as having water-storingtissue to sustain them during peri-odic drought, which can be foundin many diverse lineages, includ-ing the grape and orchid families.

“Propagation requires

extaordinary patience,”

says Trager.

Echinocereus viridiflorus var. canus, native tosouthern Texas. Photo by Miles Anderson.


details are critical to researchers, andmany have used the Huntington’srepository of original source materialfor their own botanical studies pre-cisely because the records are so thor-ough. The documented collectiongrows more valuable to researchersas governments around the worldimpose more restrictions, and as plantdiversity diminishes.

Anyone with even a slight interestin the environment knows the outlookis not especially hopeful. Some studiesestimate that as many as two-thirds of

the world’s flora and fauna may becomeextinct during the course of the 21stcentury, the result of global warming,encroaching development, and over-farming. Scientists alarmed by theseprospects are working diligently topropagate plants outside their naturalhabitats, in protected areas.

Ex-situ cultivation, as this practiceis known, can serve as a stopgap forplants that will otherwise be lost tothe world as their habitats disappear.In Madagascar, from which come asignificant number of ISI plants, onlyabout 15 percent of the land is nowforested—people, cattle, fire, and aburgeoning industry of charcoal pro-duction have cleared much of the rest.The Huntington has 60 individualseedlings of the Madagascan succu-lent tree Euphorbia kamponii, a few ofthem growing in the Desert Garden.(Euphorbia is a succulent genus of theEuphorbiaceae family, one of thelargest families in the plant world.)

Only three individual trees of thespecies are known to exist in the wildin Madagascar. While Trager has noillusions about repopulating species inthe far corners of the world,he is heart-ened by the fact that future botanistswill be able to use ISI plants if they everwant to reintroduce a species into itsnative habitat.

It’s easy to be a pessimist in this busi-ness, just one step ahead of extinction.Trager,however,brightens considerablyas he displays another offering fromthis year’s catalog,Othonna protecta.“It’san ugly little plant, actually, in the sun-flower family—a little succulent withdaisy-like flowers that only open inthe morning,” he says with pride. “Itscharm is that it has a caudex, a Latinterm for a swollen, water-storing stem.Caudiciforms attract a huge followingbecause of their gnarled,bonsai quality.”

Trager collected the original plantshimself in the Richtersveld region ofnorthwest South Africa in 1997, beingpermitted to bring back only threespecimens. Now he gazes upon anentire flat of descendants.The ISI offer-ings represent the first time the planthas been in cultivation, although for-tunately its survival in the wild—atleast at the moment—is not in jeop-ardy. But Trager is ever mindful of hisrole as custodian of a species’ future.“It’s definitely worth having in culti-vation,”he explains,“because you neverknow when something might happento the indigenous population.”

Traude Gomez-Rhine is a staff writer atThe Huntington.The current ISI catalogcan be found at www.huntington.org/BotanicalDiv/ISI2006/catalogintro.html.

The ISI distributes as many

as 40 new succulent vari-

eties every year, requiring

at least 100 plants of each

to fulfill orders.

Beneath the benches of the Desert Collection shadehouse are several pots of a rare and nocturnal-flowering cactus, Epiphyllum chrysocardium. Here

they thrive, lush and sinuous and verdant under thefiltered, broken light cast through the woodenslats as if they were growing under the canopy ofthe Mexican rain forest, where the species first

was found.In one pot is the old embossed aluminum tag with

the Huntington accession number 15189.The matchingaccession card lists two cuttings that arrived at The

Huntington with Myron Kimnach when he movedfrom the University of California Botanical Gardenat Berkeley in November 1962 to become super-

intendent of the Huntington Botanical Gardens.Kimnach brought with him the glossy stems of

the living plant as well as a dried herbarium specimen,a fragile but unchanging artifact that speaks equally to


The story of a cactus, two men, and a missionBy Catherine Phillips

A SharedCuriosityCuriosityA Shared


botanists and historians.Both the livingand the pressed plants were cuttings ofthe original plant first documented by

naturalist Thomas Baillie MacDougallin the wetlands of northern Chiapas,Mexico, on Feb. 9, 1951.They survive

to remind us of the close collaborationbetween Kimnach and MacDougall,two men who devoted years to thestudy of Mexican flora and saw thesafe passage of many succulent plantsfrom the wild into cultivation and sci-entific research.

It was Kimnach who establishedthe herbarium at The Huntington;throughout his tenure he contributedto the archive of preserved specimensas both collector and taxonomist.Although he retired in 1986, he con-tinues to participate in its care eventoday. Among the many herbariumsheets he has prepared is the mountedE. chrysocardium specimen, an exampleso large that two sheets of paper arerequired to lay out both a flower anda stem.The massive faded stem, similarin shape and arch to a fern frond orthe huge pinnate leaf of a deciduous ashor hickory tree, presents a profile quiteunlike a cactus. Reduced succulence,subdued spines, climbing stems—ataxonomist’s puzzle.

“Here was a cactus that didn’t looklike a cactus” is a refrain he has repeat-ed many times about this and othermembers of the Hylocereae, the groupof cacti to which it belongs.

When he was just 12 years old,Kimnach tended his first cactus, a giftfrom his mother. It was an epiphyt-ic rattail cactus native to Oaxaca andHidalgo, Mexico. So from the verybeginning, Kimnach was drawn to the

The massive faded stem,

similar in shape and arch

to a fern frond or the huge

pinnate leaf of a deciduous

ash or hickory tree, pres-

ents a profile quite unlike

a cactus.

Above: Thomas Baillie MacDougall graces a 1956 cover of the Cactus and Succulent Journal. The pub-lication lists the annual offerings of the International Succulent Introductions program. In 1962, the cata-log offered Epiphyllum chrysocardium, described as a spectacular species with fern-like stems and mag-nificent nocturnal flowers, almost a foot in diameter. Previous Page: The stem of the Epiphyllum chryso-cardium stretches across hybrids of Haworthia retusa from the ISI. Photo by Lisa Blackburn.


Hylocereae, the tribe of epiphytic cactithat thrive, far from arid desert habitats,in the humid cloud and rain forests ofCentral and South America, wherethey live alongside other epiphyticplants such as bromeliads and orchids.There they find support from trian-gular, pencil-thin, or flattened stemsthat scramble and hang like vines, andfrom roots that establish themselves inthe leaf litter on the forest floor or highup in humus pockets in the crotch of anadjacent tree.

The jointed growths of epiphyl-lums that appear to be leaves—but areactually stems—give each species adistinct silhouette, and it was thestrangeness of the silhouette that bothperplexed and tantalized ThomasBaillie MacDougall one wet Fridaymorning in 1951 when he discoveredE. chrysocardium. He was descending asteep path through the low cloudsand primeval oak and pine stands ofthe rugged, remote mountains of LaSelva Negra, Chiapas, into a heavilyshaded ravine, a “botanist’s paradise” oforchids, aroids, dwarf palms, bromeliads,begonias, ferns, and flowering vines:

A remarkable plant caught my eye.Closer inspection showed it to beundoubtedly a cactus, and appar-ently an Epiphyllum; a terrestrial,with stems arching over the under-growth until the tips sometimestouched the humus again, to rootand form new plants.…An herbar-ium pad…surprised me by dryingwithin a few days—almost like atrue leaf.

The excerpt is from MacDougall’sarticle written in 1953 for the Cactusand Succulent Journal.Accompanying thepiece is a photograph of MacDougall’sguide,Valentin Villareal, holding a glis-tening lobed pad of E. chrysocardiumacross the width of his chest, pressedflat against his loose white garment, likea specimen on a white herbarium sheet.

Thomas Baillie MacDougall was bornin Scotland in 1895 and grew upin a village on the Sussex Downs.

After fighting in the battles of theSommes and Arras in World War I, heleft Europe for the United States inthe early 1920s. He trained in forestryin Syracuse, N.Y., and took a positionin the nursery business of William andEmmanuel Shemin in theBronx and later Greenwich,Conn. There, he propagatedrhododendrons and holliesand bided his time during thesummer months.

With his imagination kin-dled since childhood by thewritings of naturalist W.H.Hudson—and eager to explorea region “rich in rare and un-known species of plants andanimals”—MacDougall at age36 began his journeys toMexico. From 1931 until hisdeath in Oaxaca in 1973, he

spent each dry season (November toMay) searching for flora and fauna inthe two southernmost states—Oaxacaand Chiapas. He made his base in theZapotec town of Tehuantepec at thesouthern Pacific side of the isthmus.From there, he roamed in all direc-tions, exploring the high mountainsand cloud forests, sites rich in diversity.

Myron Kimnach inspects the herbarium specimen of a cutting from the plant collected by Thomas BaillieMacDougall. Photo by Lisa Blackburn.

MacDougall’s guide, Valentin Villareal,posing with the plant in Chiapas, Mexico,February 1951. Photo by ThomasBaillie MacDougall (roll 8, no. 7),American Museum of Natural History.


He sent thousands of mammal andreptile specimens to the AmericanMuseum of Natural History, N.Y., andplants to the New York Botanic Garden(NYBG) and later to specialist growersin California.

But, it was not enough to visit alocality, collect, and leave. Rather,MacDougall immersed himself in thevery essence and ecology of each place,teaching himself about the plants,

insects, birds, archaeology, language,costumes, markets, fiestas, and ritualsof the distinct groups of people wholived there. He never drove a car, pre-ferring to walk for days on end withlittle but a clean shirt, straw hat,flower press, and satchel, sleeping out-doors or finding “posada” with a localfamily. During the summer months,MacDougall would spend long hoursin the New York Public Library, read-

ing anything he could find on Mexico.The depth of his reading altered hisinterpretation of everything he saw andultimately the scope and ambition ofhis legacy as collector and naturalist.

Slight in frame and often elusiveto the curious,“Don Tomás” was lovedand revered by those who knew himfor his self-effacing charm, his warmthand gentle wit, and his indifference tophysical discomfort and risk. He wasgenerous with his collections, and hewas equally generous with his accu-mulated knowledge.

In late February 1958, almost fiveyears before he arrived at TheHuntington, Myron Kimnach began

to correspond with MacDougall.Kimnach was writing a series of arti-cles under the title “Icones PlantarumSucculentarum” for the Cactus andSucculent Journal, concentrating onepiphytic and jungle cacti and speciesin the Crassulaceae family. Each arti-cle was devoted to a comprehensiveaccount of one species. In the fall of1958, he wrote to MacDougall askingfor information for a new article onE. chrysocardium. Had MacDougallcollected additional specimens? Didhe have anything new to share?Kimnach described taking botanicalartist May Blos to the University ofCalifornia Botanical Garden at mid-night to draw the plant, just as thehuge fragrant white flower unfoldedinto its brief, extravagant bloom.

A week later, MacDougall wroteback with praise for Kimnach’s green-house skills but offered no new infor-mation.A second letter came six weeks

MacDougall was generous

with his collections, and he

was equally generous with

his accumulated knowledge.

Above: In 1991, Kimanch placed the plant in what he considered a more suitable genus, Selenicereus,the night-flowering moon cereus. Photo by Ralf Bauer. Opposite: Drawing of the flower by May Blos,University of California, Berkeley, ca. 1958.


later, clarifying the 2,000-foot altitudeof the type locality—the mountains inChiapas where he had collected theoriginal specimen.

In the tone of their letters is some-thing of the shared curiosity, themodesty and tact, the give and takebetween two self-taught botanists. Forfive years, these two men who had yetto meet—one almost 30 years olderthan the other—corresponded betweenOaxaca and California, exchanginginformation about trails, localities,plants in habitat, plants in cultivation,as together they sorted out the epi-phytic cacti of southern Mexico.

In October 1962, on the eve ofleaving Berkeley and taking up his newHuntington position, Kimnach wroteto MacDougall, confiding to him theexcitement of his new endeavor:

Starting Nov. 1, I will be the super-intendent at Huntington BotanicalGardens. This should prove to bemore interesting work especiallybecause of the huge cactus collec-tion there. I hope to bring in col-lected material to replace some ofthe things whose origin is unknown,so that the research value of thecollection will be increased. I thinkI can get starts of most of your

things that are already in the U.S.,but in the future I hope you cansend me some items directly, espe-cially of the epiphytic cacti thatyou will come across in your trav-els. I am taking all the cacti that Ineed from U.C. to carry on mystudies, but of course there mustbe much else of interest yet to befound in Mexico.

It was at The Huntington, inFebruary 1963, that Kimnach metMacDougall for the first and only time.Their correspondence continued untilMacDougall’s death, 10 years later.Kimnach never finished the article hehad proposed in 1958. Only in 1991did he return to writing about E.chrysocardium. In a short note in thejournal Bradleya, he revised andrenamed the plant, placing it in whathe considered to be a more suitablegenus, Selenicereus, the night-floweringmoon cereus.

Kimnach’s short note remains thelast taxonomic change for the plantthat MacDougall first collected. Butcuriously, the source of the clone thatKimnach brought with him to TheHuntington—both to the herbariumand the nursery—was not MacDougall,but an intermediary link, EdwardJohnston Alexander (1901–1985). Inthe early days of his Mexican travels, itwas to Alexander, curator and botanistat the NYBG,that MacDougall sent hiscollections for identification and deter-mination. Gradually, this partnershipsoured, as plants sent to Alexanderwere neglected and new finds wereleft unnamed.

Although many of MacDougall’slater discoveries remain in the herbar-ium at the NYBG, those from theearly years have disappeared. But thereis one item that survives. Deep in thebasement of the NYBG herbarium isa collection of specimens pickled inalcohol, a method used to preserveplants that are too fleshy to mount

or too big to be contained on oneherbarium sheet.There, in a glass jar, isthe holotype of E. chrysocardium—thespecimen designated by Alexander asthe “type”of the species at the time hewrote the plant’s description.

Unlike the brittle, splayed padson the herbarium sheet at TheHuntington, this precious original iswet and three-dimensional and, to theuntrained eye, unrecognizable. It floatslike a ghostly seaweed, seeminglyhalfway between life and death, witha flower bud not quite open and notquite closed, forever caught between

day and night, colorless like a blackand white photograph. It is the spec-tral remnant of the plant first seen byMacDougall and then grown anddescribed by Alexander. It is whatremains of the plant that mesmerizedAlexander when he saw it bloom forthe first time in cultivation in the earlyhours of dawn on Jan. 2, 1954. It iswhat survives of the plant his gardenercalled “a beauty,” which Alexandernamed as the epiphyllum with thegolden heart (chrysocardium) becauseof the flower’s central mass of yellowstamens. It is a direct vegetative linkto the plant that May Blos drew, thatMyron Kimnach renamed, and thatendures today at The Huntington, inthe herbarium, and in the nursery ofthe Desert Collection.

Catherine Phillips is a research fellow atThe Huntington. She works in the DesertCollection nursery and is researching abiography of Thomas Baillie MacDougall.

It was at The Huntington,

in February 1963, that

Kimnach met MacDougall

for the first and only time.

BY KIMBERLY CHRISMAN-CAMPBELL

T he Huntington recentlyacquired a piece of a puzzledating back to the time ofFrance’s Louis XIV. At first glance,the jagged patchwork of 17th-centurycarpet—held together with fat, clumsystitches à la Frankenstein and sheddingits knots like wooly dandruff—appearsto be the detritus of an extreme homemakeover gone horribly wrong. It’shard to believe these bits of woolonce felt the footsteps of kings andrevolutionaries.

But the patchwork of carpet frag-ments comprises rare remnants fromone of the most famous interior deco-ration schemes in history. Measuringabout 35 by 56 inches, it is an assem-blage of long-lost pieces of Astrology,one of two 17th-century French car-pets in the Huntington collection.Astrology and the other carpet—Music—were part of a series of 93 carpets onceintended to furnish the Grand Galleryof the Louvre, the former French royalpalace that became a museum in 1793.The commission, initiated around 1665

by the Sun King—as Louis XIV(1638–1715) was known—and hisfinance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert,was intended to unify the gallery’s vast,high-ceilinged interior,which stretchesalong the banks of the Seine for 1,460feet, longer than four football fields.(The gallery is well known today asthe setting of the opening scenes ofThe Da Vinci Code.)

How did an illustrious object likeAstrology suffer such a fate? CharissaBremer-David, associate curator ofdecorative arts at the J. Paul Getty


Museum, and independent textile con-servator Sharon Shore began unravelingthe carpet’s knotty history in the springof 2003.They were conducting researchon the Huntington’s textile collection;their findings will be published in aforthcoming French art catalog.

“On one day, I’d be on a ladder orlift many feet in the air, looking at atapestry in weak light,” Shore recalls.“The next day, I’d be literally down onmy hands and knees with my derrieresticking up in the air.” Bremer-Davidand Shore pored over every inch ofAstrology and Music, uncovering evi-dence of multiple campaigns of alter-ation and restoration. As they con-cluded their work in late 2004, TheHuntington got word that a group ofsome missing pieces of Astrology hadsurvived all these years in the archiveof Maison Hamot, a Paris textile firmestablished in 1762.Bremer-David andShore soon found out how close theyhad come to piecing together the car-pet’s history.

Long before they heard fromMaison Hamot, Bremer-David andShore had started to examine the his-tory of Astrology and Music.They beganwith the more well-known history of

The fragments from Astrology as they arrived from the Maison Hamot textile firm in 2005, sewn togetherand measuring 35 by 56 inches.

SunKingFootsteps

IN THE

OF THE

UNRAVELING A KNOTTY MYSTERY


the Sun King’s ambitious commissionbefore delving into the archival andphysical histories of the two carpets.For the unprecedented task of carpet-ing the Grand Gallery, Louis XIV hadturned to the Savonnerie Manufactory,the royal carpet-making workshophoused in a former soap factory onthe outskirts of Paris. The king’s petproject would keep the Savonnerielooms busy for decades. A skilledcraftsman could produce about twoand a half yards of plain carpet peryear; intricate patterns like thoserequired for the Grand Gallery tookmuch longer.The Huntington exam-ples contain up to 132 Turkish knotsper square inch, creating astonishinglyintricate patterns.

The architect Louis LeVau and thepainter Charles Le Brun collaboratedon the designs for the carpets. Mixingclassical mythology, religious symbol-ism, and allegory, they celebrated thevirtues and glories of the king’s reign.Their designs called for rich blackbackgrounds, the botanical flair ofacanthus scrolls, gold borders, and thesymmetrical placement of panels, bas-reliefs, and cartouches.

It would have been a dazzlingartistic and technological achievement.Unfortunately, the ambitious plan tocarpet the Grand Gallery never cameto fruition. By the time 92 of the 93carpets had rolled off the looms in1689, the king had transplanted thecourt to his newly renovated countrychâteau,Versailles, and lost interest indecorating the Louvre. Although theSavonnerie manufactory eventuallycompleted all 93 carpets, they werenever displayed together as originallyintended, but went into storage to beused as needed in the various royalresidences. The carpets were, never-theless, highly prized, and when the

king gave away 10 as diplomatic gifts,replacements were immediately made,making a total of 103. Of those, only48 are intact today, scattered amongmuseums and private collections aroundthe world. Another 18, including the

two Huntington carpets, survive in analtered state. The remaining 37 areknown only by fragments or writtendescriptions.

During three reigns, from LouisXIV to Louis XVI, the carpets foundtheir way out of storage for specialoccasions and holidays. Astrology, forexample, reappeared for the fatefulmeeting of the Estates-General—orgeneral assembly—at Versailles in 1789.But during the public sale of the royalfurniture following the FrenchRevolution, the carpets were dispersed,and many suffered damage. TheRevolutionary government required

buyers to promise to remove all ves-tiges of the old regime from theirpurchases. Thus, royal crests, mono-grams, and symbols were removed orreplaced with innocuous motifs.Bremer-David and Shore already had

established that the central globe ofAstrology originally had been sur-rounded by a ribbon of the royalOrder of the Holy Spirit, which wasreplaced by an incongruous garlandof oranges. Music has lost its fleurs-de-lys and royal monograms. A similarfate befell the Huntington’s five-piecetapestry suite The Noble Pastorale,which also has a royal provenance.Each shows evidence of alteration inthe top center, where the royal crestwould have been displayed.

Some of the royal furniture endedup in the offices of new governmentministries or in the homes of creditors

Two men working at a carpet loom, from Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 31 (Paris: 1751–80), Huntington Library.


of the bankrupt monarchy. Under theDirectoire government (1795–99),Astrology decorated the offices of theMinistry of Justice. Further alterationensued when new owners reshapedthese carpets—scaled for the vastexpanses of the Grand Gallery—to fitthe smaller interiors of offices andprivate residences. Both Huntingtonexamples reflect such changes. Astrologyhas lost about three feet in length,including a large panel showing afemale figure representing Astrology.

About 18 inches of depth at the otherend have been replaced, giving thefigure of Dusk an elongated profile(see detail, page 1).Music has lost aboutthree feet in length, much of it cutfrom the middle of the carpet, andeight inches in width; two feet havebeen reknotted, including the head ofthe female figure representing Music.The second figure, Euterpe, the museof Music, has been replaced by a car-touche from an entirely different carpetin the series.

After the Directoire era, theHuntington carpets disappeared formore than a century. In 1911, theyresurfaced at another illustriousaddress, 14 Princes Gate, the Londonhome of American financier and artcollector J. Pierpont Morgan. Morganhad large chunks of both carpets cutout so they would fit around his fire-places, a sad but common fate. Despitethese alterations,Arabella Huntingtonadmired the carpets when she visitedMorgan, paying particular attentionto the larger carpet, Astrology.Arabellawas an avid collector of French deco-rative arts, and she especially likedobjects with a royal provenance.

When Morgan’s carpets came onthe market after his death in 1913, theHuntingtons snapped them up for$110,000.The dealer, Mitchell Samuelsof French & Company, arranged thecleaning, repair, and lining of the car-pets before shipping them to SanMarino. Bremer-David and Shorespeculate that it was during this roundof repairs that two large and five small-er pieces were removed from Astrologyand the carpet returned to its earlierrectangular shape. The carpet nowmeasures approximately 25 by 16.5feet. When The Huntington openedas a museum in 1928, both carpetsadorned the floors of the large libraryat the east end of the Huntingtonhouse, where they rested peacefullyuntil 2003, when Bremer-David andShore entered the picture.

For two weeks, Bremer-David andShore pored over every inch of thecarpets, side by side on their hands andknees, using dental tools and a spatulato push back the dense pile so theycould count the knots and glimpsethe dizaines, the darker warp threadsindicating a 10-knot unit. Savonnerieweavers had been paid for every 100knots, and the dizaines helped themkeep track of their earnings. It wasdifficult to see the dizaines in the

The figure of Dusk adorns the top of Astrology, produced by the Savonnerie Manufactory in the late17th century. Evidence of alteration can be detected in the line running above her right hand andthrough her face.


intricate Astrology carpet, as they werecompletely obscured by the knots, butBremer-David and Shore hypothe-sized that they were light brown, whichwould date the carpet to the 1670s, theonly period when the SavonnerieManufactory used the light browncolor for that purpose. Bremer-Davidcombed through the records of theMobilier National (the royal furniturewarehouse) and surviving palace inven-tories stored in the French nationalarchives to find early descriptions ofthe carpets and trace their whereaboutsbetween their creation and the FrenchRevolution. Like a detective buildingher case, she compared the carpets toduplicate versions and searched muse-um and auction catalogs for clues.

The fragments came to light in early2005 when the Maison Hamot textilefirm liquidated its inventory and ar-chives through the Paris auction houseDrouot.The auction included severalSavonnerie carpet remnants from theperiod of Louis XIV.Experts at Drouotidentified the fragments as missingpieces of the Huntington’s Astrologycarpet.Only two versions of that carpethad been completed; the other, now inthe Mobilier National Museum’s col-lection, is largely intact with a violetbackground color in the central re-serve, whereas the Huntington’s is roseseiche (dried roses), like the backgroundof surviving fragments. Separately, thepieces visually complete the top of thehead and arm of the figure of Duskand some background now filled byre-created inserts.

It is likely that Maison Hamotundertook the replacement of dam-aged sections of the Huntington carpetat some point in its history (possiblyaround the time of Morgan’s sale) andretained the unused portions. Sevenpieces from the area around Dusk hadbeen crudely sewn together in a longrectangle, with the design forming amirror image. The Huntington pur-chased the pieces for its collection,allowing Bremer-David and Shore todelve more deeply into the carpet’srich history. Shore is grateful thatsomeone had the foresight to sew thefragments together.“Care was taken notto lose the original pieces,” she says.“They didn’t just blithely cut them offand throw them away.”

The recovered remnants acted as akind of textile DNA, helping Bremer-David and Shore understand the con-struction and original appearance ofthe carpet.“Laying them right on thecarpet allowed us to see exactly thecolor change and the rates of fadingbetween the reknotted sections and theoriginal,” Bremer-David explains.Theywere elated to see the frayed ends ofthe light brown dizaines clearly visibleamong the prevailing off-white warpsaround the roughly hewn edges ofthe pieces, confirming their hypothe-sis about the carpet’s date.Though thepieces have suffered obvious damage,their colors are far more vibrant thanthose of the faded carpet, which hasbeen on display sinceThe Huntingtonopened to the public in 1928. (Thecarpets have always been cordoned offto prohibit foot traffic. They are nowin storage, awaiting the reopening ofthe house after renovations are com-pleted in 2008.) Against the rich, vel-vety black background, the pink mar-bled scrolls and arabesque rinceauxstand out in all their baroque splendor.Dusk’s face in this original version isnot awkwardly elongated, and heruplifted eyes are more soulful than in

the later rendering.The vases on eitherside of her are filled with lush, almostthree-dimensional fruits—grapes,burst-ing pomegranates, pears, and apples—rather than the fussy pastel flowers ofthe altered version. But what is most

striking about the pieces is not theirbeauty, but their imperfection. Evenin such a small area, it is evident thatthe pattern is slightly asymmetricaland irregular, as only handmade tex-tiles can be. It is a powerful contrast tothe cold perfection of today’s mecha-nized, computer-designed textiles.

The Huntington has no plans torestore Astrology to its original appear-ance. Even if the other pieces re-moved from the carpet over the yearsshould surface, the task would bemore destructive than beneficial.Furthermore, restoring the carpetwould erase material evidence of itsfascinating history, which is as impor-tant as the object itself.

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is a MellonFoundation Curatorial Fellow in Frenchart at The Huntington. She would like toacknowledge Charissa Bremer-David andSharon Shore, whose entry in the upcomingFrench art catalog served as a source forthis article.

The carpet is a rare

remnant of one of the

most famous interior

decoration schemes

in history.

Looking for dizaines, or the darker warp threads,on Astrology.


BY MATT STEVENS

M ichelle Nickerson wanted answers.The Yale doctoral candidate was at

The Huntington in 2000 on a historyfellowship, trying to reconstruct theimpact women had on conservativepolitics in Los Angeles during the 1950sand ’60s. She hoped to demonstratethat women played a vital role throughtheir grassroots activism—conductingmeetings, challenging school boards,and distributing pamphlets,newsletters,and flyers.The activists were the blog-gers of yesteryear, producing and dis-tributing materials at a frantic pace,but their paper trail had disappearedinto the proverbial ether.

Nickerson’s curiosity brought herout of the confines of the Library andinto the homes of 28 local women whohad played active roles in various clubsand organizations.“I wanted to get theirperspective,” she explains.“I wanted tovisualize this political landscape throughtheir eyes.”

Now an assistant professor of his-tory at the University of Texas, Dallas,Nickerson is back at The Huntington asthe Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow,working on a new book—Mothers ofConservatism: Women and the PostwarRight. While supplementing herresearch in the Library with testimonyfrom activists, she met two women whohad much more than stories to share.Their personal archives—newsletters,correspondence,news clippings, reports,magazines, and books—comprise a

trove that has since become part of theHuntington’s rich collection of 20th-century political materials.

Equal parts gumshoe and scholar,Nickerson cobbled together severalfellowships to keep her in SouthernCalifornia for the 2000–2001 academicyear. But while digging througharchives was vital to her research, itleft her begging for details about thelives of women and their grassrootsactivism. The papers she found pro-vided mere hints. “Maybe you wouldfind something with a woman’s nameon it,” Nickerson says.“But you wereshooting in the dark.”

So at the end of her long days inthe stacks, she tried to call some of thepeople who had been mentioned invarious news articles and reports. Itdidn’t seem to bother her that she wasworking off leads that were 40 or 50years old. She wanted to know whatmade these women become political.“What made them want to get a baby-sitter and go to a meeting?” she askedherself.“How did they put dinner onthe table and then go out at night andgive talks?”

One night she picked up thephone and called F. X. Ranuzzi. Shehad found the name in an archivehoused at California State University,Northridge—the “Spy Reports” ofthe Community Relations Council,a division of the Jewish FederationCouncil of Los Angeles that monitored

right-wing activity. Ranuzzi, it said,ran the “right-wing” Poor Richard’sBook Shop on Hollywood Boulevardin the early 1960s. A quick search onthe computer turned up a listing inTehachapi, Calif.

Nickerson was greeted by an awk-ward silence on the other end of theline.When she described her researchand explained that she was hoping to

A SCHOLAR’S QUESTIONS TO DOZENS OFLOCAL WOMEN LEAD TO THE ACQUISITIONOF TWO UNIQUE COLLECTIONS

H E C O L D WA R , M O M M Y ?W H AT D I D YO U D O I N T


interview activists of the era, the voicewarmed up. Frank X. Ranuzzi hadpassed away, his stepdaughter explained,“But it was my mother who really ranthat bookstore.And she would love totalk to you.”

Mrs. F. X. Ranuzzi was FlorenceRanuzzi,who saw no reason to changethe phone listing after the death ofher second husband some years before.

The common practice among wid-ows of her generation had made itdifficult for Nickerson to track downother women who balanced householdresponsibilities with activism whileavoiding the limelight.

Ironically, Ranuzzi began her careerin the spotlight—literally—as a movieactress. But she suffered from “Kliegeyes,” a common affliction among

actors sensitive to the bright lights onmovie sets. She would thrive behindthe scenes, though, first as a legal sec-retary and eventually as the managerof the bookstore run in the back ofher husband’s insurance company.

“Not only did I learn that thiswoman ran the bookstore,” Nickersonsays now in recalling the weekendshe spent at the Ranuzzi home withFlorence and her daughter, MaryCunningham.“I learned that the book-store was a clearinghouse for right-wing literature for the entire country!”

Throughout her reminiscences,Ranuzzi would punctuate her talesby showing Nickerson some of thematerials she had sold in her shop aswell as old letters, photos, and scrap-books—touchstones that led to digres-sions and memories of old movies,family history, and politics. Nickersonhad a hard time keeping up with theeffusive 93-year-old, but managed toinject follow-up questions aboutgroups like the Mothers of GoodCouncil or the John Birch Society.Ranuzzi and her cohorts were suspi-cious of the United Nations and othergovernment programs that smackedof “creeping socialism.”

Many women entered activismwhen their children started school,not because they had more time ontheir hands but because they grewincreasingly wary of “progressive”edu-cation methods. In 1955, for example,the superintendent of schools inPasadena met resistance when he triedto combine the early-20th-century

Poor Richard’s Book Shop was the first of manyconservative bookstores to open in Los Angelesin the early 1960s. Manager Florence Ranuzzishelves a book while clients inspect the stock.Courtesy Mary M. Cunningham.

H E C O L D WA R , M O M M Y ?


reform principles of John Dewey withsummer education “camps,” amongother programs.This was at the heightof the red scare, and a number ofgroups—many composed mostly ofwomen—were taking action to protestpolicies with allegedly “collectivist” or“socialist” agendas. The superintend-ent eventually was pressured to resign.

When Nickerson came back toThe Huntington, she shared her find-ings with Alan Jutzi, the Avery ChiefCurator of Rare Books. Both agreedthat the binders and boxes of speeches,correspondences, diaries, and politicalliterature offered a rare portrait of anactivist in Los Angeles in the 1950sand ‘60s. Jutzi eventually would contactthe family about donating the materi-als to The Huntington.

Meanwhile, Nickerson focused onfinding more former activists. Jutzisuggested she approach the local SanMarino Tribune, which ended up run-ning a feature story about a youngscholar’s quest to interview conserva-tive women activists. Her phone startedringing off the hook.

“What I learned was that thesewomen were serious, but they had

not been taken particularly seriously,”Nickerson says.

The “little old ladies in tennis shoes”were dismissed by Democrats in theearly 1960s.The disparaging phrase wasattributed to California State AttorneyGeneral Stanley Mosk and then pickedup by a number of newspaper car-toonists.The label stuck regardless ofthe diversity of age and apparel pref-erences among conservative women.Cheryl Walker, president of the TuesdayMorning Club at the time, embracedthe epithet while convening a luncheonof the women’s political group at theHuntington Hotel in Pasadena. Shemade a gavel out of a bronzed tennisshoe and hammered it on the podium.“The place fell apart,”mused her sister,Joan Bennett, in an interview withNickerson at her San Marino homein 2002.

Some of the very same womenhave also been guilty of painting witha broad brush, mislabeling many so-called opponents as Communists andcontributing to a climate of suspicionand fear. For too long, though, right-wing women have endured stereo-types and neglect within the academic

world. Only recently have scholars likeNickerson begun to challenge theseone-dimensional portraits. Bill Deverell,the director of the Huntington-USCInstitute on California and the West(ICW), attributes the change to thecuriosity of a new generation of schol-ars.“Michelle is writing in a period oftime in which the scholarly rediscov-ery of conservative politics is really agrowth field.”

Nickerson admits that her originaldissertation topic had been an envi-ronmental history of Alaska. A semi-nar on 20th-century political historyresulted in a paper about the AlaskaMental Health Bill—legislation in 1956that appropriated land and money tofund psychiatric facilities and programs.Opposition to the bill came from—ofall places—the suburbs of Los Angeles.Groups of conservative women vocif-erously attacked a policy that wouldallow Alaskan police officers or healthcare professionals to incarcerate men-tally ill patients in facilities that theycontended would transform the stateinto “Siberia, U.S.A.” Despite passageof the bill, a grassroots movement ledby two women’s clubs—the American

Marie King (before she married Walter Koenig) with James C. Ingebretsen, who led an organizationcalled Spiritual Mobilization in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Papers of Marie Koenig, Huntington Library.


Public Relations Forum and the MinuteWomen of the U.S.A.—gained consid-erable attention.Nickerson was hooked.

The admitted liberal was 30 yearsold in 2001 when she set out to inter-view staunchly conservative womenwho were in their 70s, 80s, and 90s.But Nickerson seemed to tap into theauthentic voices of her subjects. Callit a common language of bravado orchutzpah; more than likely it boileddown to a mutual respect and curiosity.

“I told them I wasn’t going towrite a polemic against the organiza-tions they belonged to,” Nickersonexplains.The women opened up.Theywanted their stories to be heard.

Not long after the appearance ofthe Tribune article, Nickerson receiveda letter and résumé from Marie Koenig,a Pasadena resident who proudlyexplained that she had compiled one ofthe larger research collections devotedto the anti-Communist movement.

Born Marie King in New Orleansin 1919, Koenig had been raised bya family that had rallied around thepopulist—and Democrat—Huey P.Long. “Nobody was a Republican inthose days,” she told Nickerson.Koenigadapted her homegrown populism tothe anti-Communist movement of thepostwar suburbs. Nickerson suggeststhat “right-wingers saw themselves as

the people in the community, con-stantly doing battle with intellectualsor the government.”

Koenig moved west in the late1940s, and later landed a job at SpiritualMobilization, an anti-Communistorganization founded by the Rev. JamesW. Fifield of the First CongregationalChurch in Los Angeles. A chanceencounter there with the president ofthe American Public Relations Forum

got her involved in that organization—the very same group that stood up to“Siberia, U.S.A.” From there she kepttrack of just about every cause or groupthat attempted to hold Communismat bay.

For decades, Koenig had kept afull-blown archive on the second floorof her traditional home. “Marie wasclearly a packrat,” Nickerson says nowwith obvious relish. Her holdings in-cluded a dozen four-drawer file cabi-nets with books and binders piled ontop of them.

“The folders were organized exact-ly the way I could only beg for,”Nickerson recalls with a grin as shethinks back to the days she spent inlibraries looking for needles inhaystacks.

“Over the course of my year inSouthern California, I would call herup and ask questions like, ‘What doyou know about Fred Schwarz and theChristian Anti-Communist Crusade?’And Marie would respond, ‘Oh, Ihave a couple folders on them. Come

THE BINDERS AND BOXES OF

SPEECHES, CORRESPONDENCE,

DIARIES, AND POLITICAL LITERA-

TURE OFFERED A RARE PORTRAIT OF

AN ACTIVIST IN LOS ANGELES IN

THE 1950s AND ‘60s.

Above and opposite: A sampling of items from the Koenig Papers,including a letter to Marie King from Barry Goldwater, written in1955, long before Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.


on over and copy them. I knew FredSchwarz.We were friends.’”

If Florence Ranuzzi’s material wasa snapshot of one activist, then MarieKoenig’s collection represented a com-plex portrait of the American right.Her 600-plus files ran the gamut oflocal, national, and international issues:UNESCO and education in publicschools, Christianity and the NationalCouncil of Churches, fluoridation,and Communists in Hollywood. Shekept binders and folders on local clubs,national organizations, and politicalfigures. Like any compulsive collector,she saved indiscriminately, so her stashof periodicals and books representingthe left likely rivaled the inventoriesof used bookstores in Berkeley.

Alan Jutzi and Bill Deverell soonpaid a visit to see the materials forthemselves.“The Koenig house was atime capsule,”Deverell says,“and MarieKoenig had a librarian’s sensibilities.”

Sadly, both Ranuzzi and Koenigpassed away before the completion ofNickerson’s dissertation in 2003.Theirdaughters then worked with Jutzi tocomplete the move of each collection.

In the summer of 2004, Nickersonhosted a reception at The Huntingtonfor the two dozen surviving womenshe had interviewed. Part reunion, partwake, the occasion gave the womenthe opportunity to listen to highlightsfrom Nickerson’s research and con-template their impact.They didn’t needsomeone to tell them that they hadplayed critical roles. But few peoplehad ever acknowledged the connec-tions between their years of grassrootsactivism and the eventual rise of pres-idential candidate Barry Goldwater or

California governor Ronald Reaganin the mid-1960s.Nickerson concludedher dissertation by saying that “con-servatism was not simply mass hyste-ria, but more thought-out, organized,female, and deeply woven into thefabric of American political life.”

Today, other scholars are benefit-ing from the Koenig Papers. USCgraduate students Daniel HoSang andBarbara Soliz recently presented articlesfrom their own research at a workshopmoderated by Nickerson and spon-sored by Deverell’s ICW—“GrassrootsConservatism in Post-War California:New Research from The Huntington’sMarie Koenig Papers.” Soliz hadbegun asking Nickerson for advice ayear earlier, when she was in her firstyear of graduate school. She says thather final dissertation topic will likelyaddress the effects of Communismand anti-Communism on Los Angelespolitical activism and will draw heavilyfrom the Koenig collection.

Like Nickerson back in 2000,HoSang is in the thick of his own dis-

sertation, “Contested Terrain: BallotInitiatives, Race, and Political Culturein Post-War California.” The Koenigcollection—which spans a broad swathof time—has allowed him to trace theprogression and contradictions ofideas about race, housing, and busing.Koenig’s file on the Rumford FairHousing Act of 1963, for instance,contains grassroots literature on legis-lation that pitted anti-Communistactivists against civil rights proponents.

Nickerson concedes that MarieKoenig might not have agreed withinterpretations from young scholarslike Soliz and HoSang, but she wouldhave been pleased to see people usingher materials.Nickerson, too, is pleasedthat more answers are now being foundwithin the Huntington Library.“Everytime I’ve been curious about a specificsubject,” HoSang explains,“I find thatKoenig seems to have paid attentionto it.”

Matt Stevens is editor of HuntingtonFrontiers magazine.

FOR DECADES, KOENIG HAD KEPT A FULL-BLOWN ARCHIVE ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF HER TRADITIONAL HOME.

Michelle Nickerson chatting with Joan Bennett at Bennett’s San Marino home in February 2006.Nickerson interviewed 28 local women about their grassroots activism. Photo by Lisa Blackburn.


A New DestinyPRESERVING A DIARY FROM THE MEXICAN WAR

by Steven Tice

[ ACCESSIONS ]

H UNTINGTON LIBRARY CONSERVATORFiona Johnston is in the middle of a stickyproblem, thanks in no small part to 19th-century writer Ralph Waldo Emerson.In 1844, Emerson wrote a lecture titled “The Young

American.” In it he said,“The bountiful continent is ours.”John L. O’Sullivan, a prominent New York editor at thetime, evoked the words “manifest destiny” in proclaimingthat it was the right—even the duty—of the United Statesto expand to the Pacific Ocean. Some 160 years laterJohnston has found herself repairing a diary from theMexican War (1846–48), a conflict that was manifestdestiny in action.

While the American Revolution and the Civil Warhave loomed larger in the national consciousness, theMexican War was a pivotal event in American history.At the close of the war a defeated Mexico ceded almostall of present-day California, Nevada,Arizona, Utah, NewMexico, and Colorado.Today, scholars use Huntingtonmaterials to gain a better understanding of this era,

especially by consulting the observations of participantssuch as Jacob Medtart Smith.

When Smith served in the Mexican War, he carrieda packet of writing paper with him and eventually filled36 pages with his experiences between July 1846 and June1847, including entries during the two-day Battle of BuenaVista (Feb. 22–23, 1847). His unit, the Arkansas Regiment,“represented the worst of the volunteer troops who sup-plemented the regular army,” says Peter Blodgett, the H.Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western HistoricalManuscripts. “Undisciplined and poorly trained, theyseemed to do everything they could to embarrass the army.”

The Huntington has only one other firsthand accountby an enlisted man from the MexicanWar.“This fact makes Smith’s perspectivevaluable,” explains Blodgett. It is amongthe 2,000 objects that are being treatedthis year by the Huntington’s staff of fiveconservators and one volunteer.

This diary speaks volumes about itsown wear and tear. Smith wrote duringa year of travel on horseback acrossmore than 2,000 miles of Texas andnorthern Mexico. He (and the diary)endured 25-mile marches in summer heatand winter cold. Diary passages reveal histribulations:“Oh! What a storm…ourtents blew down…it was a hell of acold night…crossed the Rio Grande by swimming most of the horses.” Suchfluctuations in temperature and humiditywreak havoc on a soldier’s morale—andon paper.

Before and after views of one page from Jacob Medtart Smith’s diary. The diary entered the collec-tion in 1988 as loose sheets without a binding. Following Fiona Johnston’s treatment of the paper, itwill be bound once again as a book.


[ ACCESSIONS ]

Books in PrintA SAMPLING OF BOOKS BASED ON RESEARCH IN THE COLLECTIONS

EMPIRE OF LETTERS: LETTER MANUALS AND

TRANSATLANTIC CORRESPONDENCE, 1680–1820

Eve Tavor Bannet

Cambridge University Press, 2006

Manuals on the art of letter-writing spreadnorms of polite conduct and communication in England,Scotland, and America.They also helped connect and unifydifferent regions of the British empire. Bannet explorestheir history and analyzes 18th-century novels, periodicals,and other kinds of writing that used the letter form.

JOSEPH SMITH: ROUGH STONE ROLLING

Richard Lyman Bushman

Alfred A. Knopf, 2005

Joseph Smith founded the largest home-grown Christian church in American his-

tory, publishing the Book of Mormon when he was just23 years old. Bushman moves beyond a one-dimensionalportrait of Smith, evaluating the Mormon prophet’s con-tributions to Christian theology and situating him cultur-ally in the modern world.

KATHLEEN AND CHRISTOPHER: CHRISTOPHER

ISHERWOOD’S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER

Edited by Lisa Colletta

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Colletta edits and introduces more than100 previously unpublished letters written by ChristopherIsherwood to his mother between 1935 and 1940. Composedwhile Isherwood was still a struggling writer, they offer aneyewitness account of Europe on the brink of war and anintimate look at the early career of a major literary figure.

CHILDREN OF COYOTE, MISSIONARIES OF SAINT

FRANCIS: INDIAN-SPANISH RELATIONS IN

COLONIAL CALIFORNIA, 1769–1850

Steven W. Hackel

University of North Carolina Press, 2005

As Spaniards colonized what would later become California,they forced Indians to forge communities in missions underFranciscan oversight.Yet these missions proved disastrouslyunhealthful and coercive, as Franciscans sought control overIndians’ beliefs and instituted unfamiliar systems of labor

The real damage came with a well-meaning butmisguided repair effort about 25 years before it wasdonated to The Huntington in 1988.A page-by-pagereinforcement with clear tape—considered state-of-the-art adhesive around 1960—had done more harmthan good.The tape had become embedded in thepaper and darkened over time, obscuring much ofthe writing.

In the conservation lab, Johnston first examinedthe diary with her unaided eye and then with a micro-scope.The sheets had a fair share of water stains (thinkrain, snow, Rio Grande) as well as numerous tears and“losses” (areas of missing paper). But Johnston woulddevote most of her attention to the adhesive, whichwas acidic and had weakened the paper over the years.Surgery is an apt word to describe much of her work.Her instruments are tiny spatulas, scalpels, and tweezersas well as small artist’s brushes and cotton swabs.

She began by warming a thin metal spatula on aheating iron before using it to soften the adhesiveunder the cellophane strip.This allowed her to liftoff the tape, but some of the adhesive remained. Shethen donned a respirator to get ready for the taskbefore her: dissolve the rest of the adhesive withoutdamaging the paper or affecting the ink in any way.By spot testing more than 20 solvents on discreteareas of the diary, she was able to settle on a groupof four that proved to be both safe and effective.Throughout this painstaking procedure—taking upto three days per sheet—the pages rested on a counterequipped with a suction device that drew the liquidthrough the paper.

She then used Japanese tissue to repair tears and fillin the missing areas of paper. Made with plant fibersnative to Japan, the tissue is strong, flexible, and naturallyacid-free.The new tissue is “sympathetic” in hue tothe original, says Johnston.“The finished effect shouldnot distract a reader—it should not draw the eye.”

Conservators are forever asking themselves whento treat an object and when to leave well enoughalone. Both Johnston and Blodgett agree that nothingshould be done about the water stains that appear onthe top half of many of the pages.As Johnston puts it,“The dramatic water stains are part of the history ofthe document.”

Steven Tice is a project archivist in the ManuscriptsDepartment at The Huntington.

and punishment. Hackel draws on a wide variety of sources,using Mission San Carlos Borromeo—the administrativecenter of colonial California—as a case study.

CONSUMING SPLENDOR: SOCIETY AND

CULTURE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Linda Levy Peck

Cambridge University Press, 2005

Peck explores the ways in which the con-sumption of luxury goods transformed social practices,gender roles, royal policies, and the economy of 17th-century England. Her book charts the development ofnew ways of shopping; new aspirations and identitiesshaped by print, continental travel, and trade to Asia,Africa, the East and West Indies; new building, furnishing,and collecting; and the new relationship of technology,luxury, and science.

BÁRBAROS: SPANIARDS AND THEIR SAVAGES IN

THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

David J. Weber

Yale University Press, 2005

Weber explains how late-18th-centurySpanish administrators tried to fashion a more enlight-ened policy toward the people they called bárbaros, or“savages.” Even Spain’s most powerful monarchs failed,however, to enforce a consistent, well-reasoned policytoward Indians.Although the Crown sometimes recog-nized autonomous tribal governments, it also authorizedbloody wars against Indians when Spanish officersbelieved they could defeat them.

BA

CK

FLAP

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS: A WRITER’S LIFE

Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson

University of California Press, 2005

Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson like tofinish each other’s sentences. Actually, thecolleagues from the University of Delaware(who also happen to be wife and husband)

edited each other endlessly when they wrote their biography ofWilliam Dean Howells (1837–1920).

Howells wrote more than 100 books and served as editor ofthe Atlantic Monthly magazine in Boston. He counted MarkTwain and Henry James among his closest friends and mentoredmany young writers before they gained wider exposure. As apolitical critic, he found company in his opposition to slavery, butstood nearly alone in his condemnation of the Haymarket trialsof 1886 and ’87 and the subsequent execution of four Chicagoanarchists. Goodman and Dawson used a letter from theHuntington collection in describing the lack of courage amongHowells’ contemporaries: Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittierlamented to Boston writer Annie Fields, confessing his shame in“being only a looker on.” Other items show a glimpse ofHowells’ private life. The Huntington’s collection of the familypapers of Howells’ sister, Annie Fréchette, contain letters anddiaries that describe family reunions and the declining mentalcondition of their youngest sibling, Henry.

The co-authors’ collaborative approach seems to work. Theyare currently divvying up the nearly 4,000 letters from theHuntington’s Mary Hunter Austin Papers as they polish theirAustin biography. Goodman explains that biographers not onlymust attempt to show how someone lived in the world. “We mustalso describe that world.”

Pulitzer PrizeHistorian Edmund S. Morganreceived a Special Citation fromthe Pulitzer board in April “for acreative and deeply influentialbody of work that spans the lasthalf century.” Morgan, whoseessay “Cultivating Surprise”appeared in the premier issue ofHuntington Frontiers in 2005,has authored more than a dozenbooks on early colonial historysince first serving as a researchfellow at The Huntington in1952–53.Photo by Michael Marsland, Yale University

On the CoverSince the 1950s, the International Succulent Introductions (ISI)program has propagated and distributed succulents to collectors,scientists, and research institutes. Cofounded by Botanical DirectorEmeritus Myron Kimnach in the Bay Area, the program moved toThe Huntington in 1989. In this issue we speak with ISI directorJohn Trager about the program’s unique role in conservation.

While the jade plant (cover and left) is now common in culti-vation, this particular species (Crassula ovata) was not commer-cially available until The Huntington introduced it in 2004. It wascollected in the Western Cape Province of South Africa in 1990by the late Michael Vassar, plant propagator and Curator ofFloristic Gardens at The Huntington from 1997 to 2003.

This collection differs from commonly cultivated forms, withits slightly rhomboidal shape, red-edged leaves, and its excep-tionally compact, bonsai-like form. The tiny red dots along the leafmargin are specialized stomata called hydathodes, which func-tion in the excretion of water and dissolved salts, helping the plantretain the optimal amount of each in its succulent tissues.

Photos by John Trager

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Documents

64997 Frontier LoriAnn 5 - Huntington Librarymedia.huntington.org/uploadedfiles/Files/PDFs/S06frontiers.pdf · Hengwrt manuscripts are the closest we can come to his original intent