Stephanie Dray's Blog

“And by the way, in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” ~Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March 1776

“I am not apt to be intimidated, you know.” ~Abigail Adams to John Adams, 20 September 1776

“Knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since.” ~ Abigail Adams

“He who dies with studying dies in a good cause, and may go to another world much better calculated to improve his talents, than if he had died a blockhead.” ~Abigail Adams

“Posterity who are to reap the Blessings, will scarcly be able to conceive the Hardships and Sufferings of their Ancesstors.” ~Abigail Adams to John Adams, 8 March 1777

“You could not have sufferd more upon your Voyage than I have felt cut of from all communication with you. My Harp has been hung upon the willows, and I have scarcly ever taken my pen to write but the tears have flowed faster than the Ink.” ~Abigail Adams to John Adams, 21 October 1778

“I have never let an opportunity slip without writing to you since we parted, tho you make no mention of having received a line from me; if they are become of so little importance as not to be worth noticeing with your own Hand, be so kind as to direct your Secretary” ~Abigail Adams to John Adams, 12 – 23 November 1778

“These are times in which a Genious would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. Would Cicero have shone so distinguished an orater, if he had not been roused, kindled and enflamed by the Tyranny of Catiline, Millo, Verres and Mark Anthony. The Habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All History will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruits of experience, not the Lessons of retirement and leisure.” ~Abigail Adams to John Quincy Adams, 19 January 1780

“My Heart and Soul is more American than ever.” ~Abigail Adams to Cotton Tufts, 3 January 1785

“I hope our people will never again suffer the flag of a tyrant to fly.” John Adams to Abigail Adams, 26 June 1776

“In private Life, no one has a Right to censure me for following my own Inclinations, in Retirement, Simplicity, and Frugality: in public Life, every Man has a Right to remark as he pleases, at least he thinks so.” John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776

“The Faculty of Writing is attainable, by Art, Practice, and Habit only. The sooner, therefore the Practice begins, the more likely it will be to succeed. Have no Mercy upon an affected Phrase, any more than an affected Air, Gate, Dress, or Manners.” John Adams to Abigail Adams, 7 July 1776

Dr. Graham did me the honor of providing this sneak peek of her work for my readers. I highly encourage you all to run out and grab this important book.

On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazis burned synagogues, looted Jewish homes and businesses, raped Jewish women, and deported Jewish men to concentration camps across Germany and Austria. The Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht, made headlines around the world, including in the U.S. For many Jewish people, that night marked the first time that they truly wanted to leave their homes forever. For others, it increased their resolve to seek refuge.

In the U.S., the agency that might be able to help them—the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—was under the Department of Labor, which was headed by the first female cabinet secretary in American history, Frances Perkins. At age fifty-eight, she wore a tricorne hat and pearls. She was a white woman with dark eyes and dark, matronly clothing. Her handbag and heels stood out under the cabinet meeting table surrounded by men’s shoes. She slept in a single bed because her husband was in a psychiatric institution, but her personal life was off limits to anyone outside her miniscule private circle. Perkins habitually felt others’ pain as her own, and refugees were no exception.

She had a flurry of ideas, mostly good ones, all of which had been in motion before 1938. The ideal course of action would be expanding U.S. immigration quotas—the numerical caps that dictated how many people born in each country could immigrate per year—but because those numbers were controlled by Congress, that seemed unlikely. She proposed mortgaging quotas, combining both 1939 and 1940 allotments into 1939. She supported adding an additional quota for child refugees to offer children a chance at a safe life. If Congress would not adjust quotas, she suggested a separate quota for the American territory of Alaska to settle Jewish refugees there.

Could the U.S. be a refuge to oppressed people? Did it want to be? Could it overcome its own prejudices to be “the golden door”? All refugees whose lives were in danger counted as immigrants under the same quota laws as other foreigners seeking to relocate. Perkins had helped shepherd radical New Deal legislation—the Social Security Act of 1935, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—through Congress. Could she do the same with refugee policy? These questions kept her up at night.

The morning after Kristallnacht was the morning before Armistice Day on the twenty-year anniversary of the end of World War I. Americans listened to Kate Smith perform over the radio a new song composed by Irving Berlin to mark the occasion. The original first verse of the song, “God Bless America,” was “As the storm clouds gather, far across the sea / Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free / Let us all be grateful that we’re far from there / As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.” Musical tones from the accompanying instruments then bounced into a vivacious “God Bless America.” Let us all be grateful that we’re far from there as we raise our voices in a solemn prayer. As a devout Christian, Perkins was undoubtedly praying. But unlike most of the country and most of the government, she tried to translate those thoughts and prayers into actions.

At what point would rising Nazi atrocities awake the U.S. from its postwar isolationism? How might Americans care about the welfare of noncitizens, especially while struggling through the poverty and scarcity of the Great Depression? Contemporary myths of immigrants taking American jobs and resources date back to the 1930s, and farther. “I am a ratcatcher in Boston for 20 years. I can show you 500 alleys in Boston with 100 children ages 5 to 8 in these alleys . . . These children are in bad need of care. So, take care of kids at home first,” an American citizen wrote to Katherine Lenroot, head of the Children’s Bureau in Perkins’s Department of Labor, in 1939. The question of how to share resources with refugees when citizens lacked resources might have seemed well-meaning enough until he signed off, “Are you taking orders from . . . the Rich Jews?”

On November 18, 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced via press conference his willingness to extend the tourist visas of 12,000 to 15,000 German-Jewish refugees already in the country. Perkins had the idea for these extensions in 1933.

Following a cabinet meeting in spring 1933, a State Department official journaled about a phone conversation in which the State Department had tried to explain immigration to the Labor Secretary. He wrote that Perkins “quite blew our poor Undersecretary off his end of the phone.” Perkins claimed that it was an American tradition to help people seeking asylum. By 1938, however, Perkins’s tone had shifted. “A great many people seem to hold the belief that there is some provision in the immigration laws for political refugees or for making this country an asylum for the oppressed of all nations. This is absolutely not the case,” she wrote to a correspondent.

Between those two different claims from Perkins, she’d come face-to-face with the antithesis of her highest American ideals when anti–New Dealers in Congress tried to impeach her. For her role in protecting an Australian immigrant and labor organizer, Harry Bridges, Perkins faced an impeachment hearing, hate mail, bad press, and even antisemitic slurs from conspiracy theorists claiming she was Jewish. She handled the accusations of Jewishness with grace, publicizing a letter expressing that she’d be proud of her Jewish heritage if she had it, which she didn’t. But overall, the impeachment experience shook her.

Nevertheless, she persisted. Through a combination of relaxing visa requirements, reducing deportation numbers, devising the corporate affidavit for businesses to finance refugees, and collaborating with the German-Jewish Children’s Aid Inc. on a robust child refugees’ program, Perkins contributed to saving the lives of tens of thousands of refugees from Nazism.

By the time initiatives that she’d set in motion reached Congress, however, any political capital that she once had was in shambles because of the impeachment ordeal. These efforts to accept refugee children and create a German-Jewish settler colony in Alaska failed in 1939 and 1940, respectively. Both ideas crossed Perkins’s mind and materialized in scribbles on notepaper across her desk. The Alaska plan signified a rare instance when American colonization and imperialism could not prevail above all else because the antisemitism toward those who would be settling was too strong.

Perkins navigated an American climate of antisemitism, capitalism, misogyny, xenophobia, and more. Her positionality as a Christian, educated, relatively privileged descendant of English settlers made her encounters even more unsettling and stark. As a historical figure, she’s a unique tour guide for contemporary readers interested in the history of the U.S. in the 1930s. As an American governmental official, she offers the lens into American responses to the German-Jewish refugee crisis prior to World War II. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt later moved the INS from Labor to Justice in 1940 ahead of America’s entrance into World War II—because Perkins’s immigration policies were too progressive.

This story is easy to miss. Myths have persisted to obscure it for too long. Sixty years after her death, Perkins continues to be relatively unknown. Keeping a low profile was partially her own doing, and the men who wrote first and second drafts of history through journalism and scholarship didn’t need to be asked twice to downplay her role. Further, ideas about American immigration history are still recovering from the “melting pot” myth of American cohesion and happiness. And that leaves historical memory of Nazism and the Holocaust in the American collective consciousness, which has taken a tumultuous journey all by itself. Uses and abuses of Holocaust memory in fiction, politics, and more are endless. As a result, the first female cabinet secretary—a quirky fun fact—the U.S. as a nation of immigrants, and American moralistic outrage and resolve to “never forget” and “never again” might seem like three separate strands of history. In truth, they converge in a singular story.

I’m tremendously honored to have been interviewed as part of the tremendous Throughline program on Frances Perkins available from NPR right now. It’s so well done. So interesting. You need to give it a listen!

A REPUBLICAN COURT

It was a wondrous thing to me, watching my mother in those early days of the republic, taking her place at Mrs. Washington’s side. 

All manner of people turned out for Friday night levees dressed brilliantly to be entertained with lemonades and ice creams. And though the ladies tried to outdo one another in pearls, gloves, feather ornaments, and embroidered silk shoes, my mother outshone them all from the dais, where she alone was permitted to attend the president’s lady.

It did not matter that my mother was no longer as fair and fetching as she had been when I was a child; her sharp eyes had not changed at all, and only added to her noble bearing. Indeed, she carried herself with a sense of authority and sureness that would have rivaled any lady in any king’s court.

And I could only marvel at this, since I still remembered her on her knees scrubbing floors of the little saltbox home all those years ago. If I closed my eyes, I could easily conjure the memory of her feeding geese, milking cows, and trying to scrape together some meals for her children from crumbs in the kitchen and the old root vegetables in the cellar.

But she had transformed herself as the circumstances required and was far more adaptable than I feared I might ever be. Despite my father’s many years of service as an important man, and my awareness that some would always seek his help, I was not prepared at all to be pressed by on all sides with those who now sought to curry favor. 

“Beware,” my mother had said. “Some of these ladies will attempt to befriend you simply because you are the daughter of John Adams. They will think it was your father who saw to it that your husband has finally been awarded a post, and think you can exert your influence to advance the cause of their husbands, brothers and sons.”

Because of this, at every social gathering, I suddenly found myself encircled by hangers on who wished me to get an audience for them with my father. I was pressed by strangers, who somehow thought they had some right to presume upon me at first meeting. Of course, I was also pressed by friends of longstanding acquaintance, like Mercy Otis Warren, who, despite her virulent opposition to the constitution, now asked me to convince my father to find some government position for her sons. 

I could not do this in good conscience, for her mischief-making sons were not qualified. To spare us both the embarrassment, I threw the letter into the fire and would pretend never to have received it.

It was much more difficult, however, to ignore the pleas of our own family. “It isn’t fair that Aunt Mary should suffer such financial hardships?” I asked my mother. “Uncle Cranch gave good service to his country; it isn’t his fault that in the wake of Shay’s rebellion, Massachusetts refused to pay him what he was due. Does it not seem right that the federal government should make up for it now?”

Given Mama’s pained expression, I realized that she had already been wrestling with the problem. “Your father will not do it. He will think it would reflect poorly upon him to use his influence in this way. Especially since your uncle is of an age now where he can no longer perform any task with vigor. It would not be in the public interest.”

I did not agree with her. My uncle still had a very sharp mind; surely there was some need for that in the new government. But my mother had another idea on how to ease their financial difficulties. “I’ve lent your aunt money over the years. Little amounts each time—out of my pocket money. But these loans have now added up to something significant. I intend forgive every last penny. But you must promise to tell your father nothing about it.”

Though I had grown much closer to my father in recent years, this promise was not a difficult one to make and it would not be difficult to keep. Especially as I had no wish for my father’s sense of honor to conflict with the well-being of the Cranch family, who had done so much to assist and sustain us. Besides, it was my mother’s good financial sense that made my father’s sense of honor even possible. Without her frugality and clever investments, Papa certainly would not have been able to afford such a grand house. Even less would he be able to afford the weekly entertainments now hosted there.

My mother set a dinner table for twenty-four now, with the help of servants who were very unprepared for the task. “Oh, for an English butler and housekeeper,” she would mutter while we fixed the place-settings, lit the parlor, and fussed over one another’s hair since we had no friseur.

Mama complained bitterly about the difficulty in finding good help. And she moaned about her weariness in making idle conversation with the wives of every government official, diplomat, or other stranger who happened to make the trip to Richmond Hill. But she was exceedingly good at it. 

Her quick wit was now an asset in political circles, whereas it had often served to irritate and intimidate before. Of course, if society ladies feared my mother a little bit, under the circumstances, that was no bad thing. It meant they were more apt to aim darts at someone like the jolly Mrs. Knox. 

On one Friday afternoon, after having nursed my children, both boys afflicted by whooping cough, I set to work on my mother’s favorite black satin gown whilst my mother bent over her account books, fretting at the costs. “We are obliged to keep six fires burning constantly in this house, and with wood nearly seven dollars a cord!”

“You love this house,” I reminded her, to restore her good cheer.

And the corners of her mouth twitched as they fought off a smile. “I like it well enough.”

“You are happy here,” I accused. “Happy in your station, in your good health, in your duties, and even in your account books.”

Despite her financial worries, I knew that her investments were likely to pay vast dividends if Alexander Hamilton’s plan to assume the state’s debts passed in congress. My father had never approved of speculation, but my mother did not hold herself accountable to him for what she did with her so-called pin money. With the help of her Uncle Tufts as trustee, she stood to become a wealthy woman. But she did not boast about that. 

Instead, she said, “It’s true that I am well content. And why shouldn’t I be? Surrounded as I am by my children and grandchildren. If only I could pluck my remaining loved ones from Braintree and transport them all here to New York, I should be the happiest woman who ever lived.”

Hey everybody, it’s time to celebrate women’s history. Learn more here! And if you want to turn this into a fun bingo game for your book club, see instructions and examples here!

~March 18, 6pm, American Friends of Lafayette Women’s History Celebration, in conversation with Alice Look, Park Avenue Armory, New York City

~March 19, 6pm, Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College with Giovanna Grey Lockhart

~March 20, 6:30pm, Wellington Square Bookshop, Exeter, PA

~April 3, 2pm, Friends of the Library of Collier County, Naples, FL

Meet Smoothie, a loving young cat who’s been through a lot and needs a special home where she can feel safe, loved, and get back to full strength.

Smoothie’s journey hasn’t been easy. This beautiful girl came to us after giving everything she had to her three adorable kittens. When she arrived, she was nothing but skin and bones, having starved herself to keep her babies alive. Even though she was young and recovering, she nuzzled her kittens every day, even when she was too weak to clean them, proving that a mother’s love knows no bounds.

At first, Smoothie was more than a little shy. In fact, she hid in our house for at least a month before feeling brave enough to come out of her enclosure. Her sweet personality was always there, though, especially at mealtimes. She couldn’t help but get so excited about food that she’d forget to be scared, rubbing her cheeks against our hands to show her affection. It’s clear that Smoothie still needs to get her strength up, and she’s making steady progress every day.

We discovered that Smoothie has the cutest little chirps and sing-song meows, a special way of talking to us and her kittens. With time and patience, she started to come out of her shell. Wand toys became her favorite. Treats like Churu became the key to her heart. Smoothie is slowly learning to trust and find joy in simple things again.

At the shelter, she’s been scared and upset, and it’s clear she needs a calm and patient environment to feel comfortable. Smoothie can be skittish and might hiss or growl when she feels cornered, but it’s all talk—she’s not aggressive at all. She just needs someone who understands that she’s been through a lot and will give her the time she needs to adjust.

Her one naughty habit? Scratching carpet! But with a little guidance, she’s learning to use a scratching post, proving that Smoothie is as smart as she is sweet.

Smoothie’s journey has shown us one thing: she’s ready to find a loving home that understands she may need time to adjust and get back to full strength. In return, she’ll offer a heart full of love, chirpy meows, and the joy of seeing her sweet personality blossom every day.

Let’s give Smoothie the forever home she deserves—filled with love, trust, and plenty of treats!

She’s available from the Anne Arundel County Shelter in Maryland even if you live out of county or state!

The Bulgarian Cover of The Women of Chateau Lafayette

We have had the pleasure of hosting the very charming Mario as a house guest for two weeks, and he has completely won our hearts. Just like his famous namesake from the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario is a hero ready to bring joy and adventure to his forever home. (He can be adopted even from out of state from Anne Arundel County Animal Control.)

From the moment Mario arrived, he showed himself to be incredibly friendly and eager to meet human visitors and especially other cats. This bright, communicative kitty has boundless young-cat energy and doesn’t like to be alone, making him the perfect companion for a household with other cats or active family members. He really needs friends!

Mario has a few favorite pastimes that keep him entertained for hours. He loves to sit by open windows, watching the world go by as if he’s keeping an eye out for his next big adventure. He enjoys Cat TV on YouTube, Mouse for Cats on iPad, and interactive automated toys, but nothing compares to the joy he gets from playing with humans.

Mario is not very food motivated—he prefers his dry kibble and the occasional can of food over treats—but he does enjoy catnip as a special power-up!

What makes Mario truly special is his intelligence and adaptability. He took to using a litter robot immediately and never had an accident. When a tornado warning alarm went off, he calmly let us carry him to safety without a fuss. Mario is happy to drink from any water source, including bowls and fountains, but be careful with open toilet bowls!

Mario has a charming personality that will make you fall in love with him. He was affectionate from the get-go, but it took about ten days for him to become a real cuddle-bug at night, wanting to sleep and snuggle on our pillows. His cuddle time became so important that he would meow relentlessly at bedtime to usher us into bed, serving as a highly accurate furry alarm clock.

In our home, Mario has been curious and loves to explore, but he also understands boundaries. He occasionally sneaks into tempting places like our pantry, but he respects the rules and prefers to please people. He’s quick to learn and adjust, like when we placed a scratcher next to his favorite sofa arm, and he happily used it instead.

Mario might even be the kind of cat who can be leash trained, though he might need some patience to get used to a collar and harness. His only minor faults are getting underfoot when excited and occasionally trailing a musk scent since he hadn’t been neutered yet. He’s also very chatty and will let you know if something’s on his mind, performing an entire opera if needed.

Mario is a loving, resilient, and playful cat who would thrive in a home where he receives plenty of attention. If you’re looking for a delightful, affectionate, and adventurous feline friend, Mario is the perfect choice.

If you have any questions about Mario that we might be able to answer from our short time with him, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. Adopt Mario today and let the adventures begin!