Hugh M. McGuire
English 226
Dr. Coronado
8 December, 2014
The Diaries of Anson W.
Buttles
Anson
W. Buttles (1821-1906) was an obscure diarist who worked as a farmer and an
urban manager. He carefully looked at
the world around him and recorded his thoughts in response. His importance to
us, I believe, is his lack of importance in our general sense of past. When we
look to the 19th century America, the men we read and quote from are
white (generally) and clever. We think of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville – all
accomplished writers. Before Melville fell into obscurity his works were
famous, Poe and Hawthorne, once well known stayed well known. We seek to learn
and to know 19th century America through the study of these men’s
works and attitudes. Anson Buttles is not like them. He is an everyday sort of
fellow. I believe we can learn much about the 19th century attitudes
of white men by looking at his work, for his writing, unlike those of Poe,
Hawthorne, and Melville are not privileged writings. Buttles’ are special
texts, they are texts of someone closer to us, today, who are not part of the
literary establishment. They offer us insights that the 19th century
literary establishment can’t.
My
father, who attended college in the 1970’s, has told me that the books and
poems for his American literature courses were chosen on the basis of what some
people (mostly men, mostly white) thought were great works of literature. Their
literary greatness was the primary factor in their inclusion; some other works
were chosen because they contributed specifically to the American experience.
The most preferred works were those that combined both criteria. Out of them, America created a three-step
narrative that began with the arrival of Europeans, who looked to their old world
for their cultural ideals, then followed the Emersonian reaction that called
for a particularly American literature. Paul Douglass puts it another way:
“Those who have been recently ‘canonized’ like Emerson and Fennimore Cooper,
stood at the head of a list to which later writers and thinkers would be added,
like rings on the great trunk of the American cultural tree. They preserved and
extended the wished-for tradition” (26). Finally, in the rubric that my father
was taught, American literature, with its own voice, became the dominant
tradition in world literature.
The curriculum of
those 1970’s American Literature courses was exclusionary, as the contents
pages of my father’s copy of The American
Tradition in Literature, 3rd Edition makes plain (Bradley v-xii).
As college English majors, students in that decade were not taught Phyllis
Wheatley, slave narratives or captivity narratives. There was no discussion of Life
in the Iron Mills. In the nearly 800 pages of The American Tradition, Elizabeth Bradstreet is the only woman whose
work is given credibility.
American
Literature courses are more inclusive today. Wheatley is there and so are the
slave and captivity narratives. Native American poems often show up as well.
And the story of American Literature is no longer the three steps to world
literary domination.
However, something is still missing from
American Literature courses. Jefferson, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville and
Whitman are still 19th century male masters, along with their
comrade Emily Dickenson, and the expansion to include narratives of the
marginalized, but where are the other people who lived America? If students of American Literature are to
understand the contexts from which captivity narratives differ – and slave
narratives differ – students need to see and read pieces comparable to those
other narratives. It is misleading in
some way to read Emily Dickenson beside “Life in Iron Mills” and it is also
illuminating. But something equally
illuminating might be reading the memoirs of an everyday American who is
earnest but not necessarily as literary as Herman Melville. Such a man is Anson Buttles and his
interesting memoir.
Anson Buttles was
born early in 1821 in Pennsylvania. His
family moved to Wisconsin, at an undisclosed date, and he lived most of his
life in Fox Point, a township just outside of Milwaukee. Mr. Buttles’ consistent source of income was
from farming, however, he also worked for the city of Milwaukee as Town Clerk,
County Surveyor, Justice of the Peace, School Clerk, and County Superintendent
for the County of Milwaukee in Fox Point, Wisconsin. His life thus was a combination of rural and
urban existence and therefore it is not a life that is easily categorized. What unifies his life is that banality is
key.
From the years
1856 right up to his death in 1906 he kept a diary. And every day’s entry is part of an
accumulation of the trite things of life that add up to a happy, satisfying
existence. But Buttles also saw and noted a variety of current and historical
events. He did so in two ways. Sometimes he merely noted the anniversary of an
event from the old world or he lamented certain current events. In some
instances he laments current events such as the Lady Elgin steamboat disaster
which occurred on September 8, 1860. There are other instances when he mentions
historical events in passing; for example, on February 8, 1860 he simply says ”Mary
Queen of Scots killed 1587” (Buttles).
What this
combination shows is that whilst living the life of a rural urban fellow, Buttles
lived with a sense of culture that wasn’t blindly American the way Emerson and
the leading writers of the day wanted to be.
He’s still stuck in the past of Europe, so what we’re seeing in his
diaries is a man of the times responding with the education he received to
things that we now look upon in other ways. He mentions many events of European
history that an urban Milwaukee Wisconsin farmer most likely would not know,
these events he mentions about European history show his desire to remember the
old world culture as well as showing his education and background. These events
are briefly mentioned and given a date. Wednesday Feb 8, 1860 “Mary Queen of
Scotts killed 1587”, February 12, 1860, “Lady Jane Grey beheaded 1534”,
February 18, 1860, “George Duke of Clarence convicted of Treason 1478”, May 23,
1860 “Girolamo Savonarola is burned at the stake in Florence 1496”, September
5, 1860 “Great fire of London ends 1666” (Buttles). These entries on European
history prove his desire to remember where it is that America comes from, but
is also a reminder that he is indeed very well educated for a Milwaukee farmer.
Other entries he
may mention his wife like on February 13, 1860 “my wife is 31 years old today
and looks young as ever” (Buttles), or his mentioning the steamship accident
where here he goes into great detail, and this is all that is mentioned that
day. You can actually feel his sadness for this event. September 9th,
1860 “Heard sad news, a great tragedy…..Lady Elgin sunk near Chicago and many
lives were lost…..so many lives lost” (Buttles). He goes on to say everyday type of jargon
about farming techniques and weather patterns and sometimes even goes as far to
describe how certain farming techniques work better than others.
Buttles diary, as
I say, is not profound, but inclusion of it in our sense of history will help
make the American narrative more profound. America is not made merely of great
literary practitioners or memoirists of slave experiences and captivity. Every
day people, such as Buttles, showed a daily concern to record their lives and
emotions. We can’t know the 19th century without at least showing
what passed for normal—even if today we don’t buy into the idea of a norm.
Works
Cited
Bradley, Sculley et al. The American Tradition in Literature.
New York: Norton, 1967.
Print.
Buttles, Anson W. Diaries;
Anson W. Buttles Papers. Wisconsin Historical Society.
Unpublished.
Douglass, Paul. “Loose Canon on the
Deck: Curriculum Wars of the Nineties.“ Pacific
Coast
Philology 24.1-2(1991):26-34. Print.
McGuire, Patrick. Personal
Interview. 13 October 2014.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2MJy0JRRgUyYl9TVHY3RnRDV3c/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2MJy0JRRgUyYkVMLU1FS0h6ZkU/view?usp=sharing
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