March 18, 1907
Dear Ex-President Cleveland,
Today you said that sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. You said that God in his infinite wisdom had worked out a social and political hierarchy with men on top.
Mr. Cleveland, I am only eleven years old but I am old enough to know that you are a fat, stupid man who would do well to keep his stupid, fat-headed opinions to himself.
The day will come when bloated, bullying men like yourself will be forced to give way to women of wisdom and fair-mindedness who will take this country in the right direction.
In the meantime I will continue to remind men like you that such pronouncements make you appear ever the more stupid.
Sincerely,
Winny Wieseler
PS May I have a picture of you for my scrapbook? Thank you.
There is no evidence that the former president ever responded. Ibid., 14–15.
10. She was a talented artist, to boot. Winny was so heavily influenced by the first International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920 that she immediately framed her next protest for mixed media. Her piece, “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” displayed at the Günther Gallery in Philadelphia in 1921, depicted a shellacked foot, described by Winny as “a symbol of the downtrodden, trampled upon by those of pride and privilege. I want people to see the foot and think of Sacco and Vanzetti who have feet of their own but who also have hands and hearts and lungs and want nothing more than use those lungs to breathe free and to use their feet to stand tall and unflattened by the boot of corporate greed.” The foot on display was Winny’s. Literally. She lost interest in the project after two exhausting days of standing behind a black curtain with her right unshod and shellacked foot exposed and extended out upon a pedestal, an inviting target for spitballs and mischievous feather tickles. Ibid., 143-47
11. Jonathan was no fan of Coolidge, whom he found to be far too “lazy faire.” Winny expressed similar distaste for the new president in letters she exchanged with Jonathan while on holiday in Cuba with her spinster aunts. Winny’s antipathy for Coolidge had formed a few months earlier when, as vice president, he had accused women’s colleges of being hotbeds of Bolshevism. One imagines that the following letter, written on the day after the president’s swearing in (August 3, 1923), was received with a nod and a smile. Jonathan Blashette to Winny Wieseler, Wieseler Estate.
Dear Winny,
The invisible vice president is now the invisible president. I understand he was at his father’s farm in Vermont when he got the news of Harding’s demise. He was supposedly roused from a deep sleep. (Which raises the question: how does one know the difference between Coolidge awake and Coolidge asleep?) Here is how I imagine the conversation went.
SHERIFF: Mr. Coolidge, Senior. I am sorry to disturb you at this hour.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE: What time is it?
SHERIFF (consulting his watch): 7:45.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE: Botheration! Well, we’re all up now. What brings you here, Sheriff?
SHERIFF: Is your son—?
COOLIDGE (coming down the stairs, rubbing his eyes like a groggy toddler): Yes, I’m here, Sheriff. What is it?
SHERIFF: I have some grave news, sir. The President is dead.
COOLIDGE: President Harding dead? It is unthinkable.
(A long pregnant silence passes as all parties contemplate what this means.)
OLD MAN COOLIDGE: I suppose we should make things legal, son. Where’s the family Bible?
(The father administers the oath of office to the son. The father is a notary public. The son is now officially the President of the United States.)
OLD MAN COOLIDGE: Will there be anything else, Sheriff?
SHERIFF: I suppose not.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE (glancing out the window): The secret service men are mashing my pansies.
SHERIFF: Yes, I see them. I will ask them to move. Goodnight, Mr. Coolidge. Goodnight, Mr. President.
COOLIDGE: Good night, Sheriff.
(The sheriff leaves. Father and son sit for a moment in silence.)
OLD MAN COOLIDGE: I forgot to mention: the vet came to see Bessie today.
COOLIDGE: Teat still inflamed?
OLD MAN COOLIDGE: Not so much as before.
(President Coolidge nods. Another silence)
OLD MAN COOLIDGE: Cup of Ovaltine?
(President Coolidge shakes his head.)
COOLIDGE: Best be getting back to bed, Pa.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE: Best you should. Long day tomorrow.
COOLIDGE: Ayah. Good night, Pa.
OLD MAN COOLIDGE: Good night, son.
It should be an interesting eighteen months…if I can stay awake. I miss you.
Love,
Jonathan
12. Jonathan postponed the road trip to follow the Scopes Trial. Incidentally, a second, less publicized “monkey trial” docketed to get under way in Dawes Forge, Tennessee, on August 1 was to have included a brief appearance by William Jennings Bryan dressed in an ape suit. Out of respect for the family of Bryan, who, having concluded his prosecution of the Scopes case, promptly dropped dead of a heart attack, the judge granted both sides a continuance and forbade any references to Bryan or to monkeys at the trial. The case, in fact, never came to trial. Charges were dropped against the town’s young evolution-teaching high school biology teacher Miss Clorinda Pernell who promised to leave all mention of apes out of her classroom lectures in exchange for either a black Alaskan seal fur coat or an ermine with sable collar. The school board called her bluff and delivered her first choice, tied up with a big pink bow. So attached was Miss Pernell to the coat, that she was known to wear it year-round even as it became threadbare and she a sad, heavily perspiring remnant of her former self. Tightly swagged in the thick coat, she died of heatstroke during the heat wave of 1937. Sporting a thick moustache from an untreated hormone imbalance, Miss Clorinda Pernell, in the end, evolved into a life-drained replica of those very apes to which she had linked us all. A family court order prevented the Dawes Forge Anthropological Museum and Arboretum from installing her embalmed body in its new Primate Display (Miss Clorinda Pernell having sold rights to her corpse to the museum in this last year of her life to feed an obsession for rose water parfum).
13. U.S.A.: Union of Simian Anarchy. Jonathan’s West Greenwich Village neighbor Cabe Knudsen errs when he decries “monkey trials all over the country.” I have found evidence of only these two, in addition to a somewhat heated exchange involving two divinity students in Normal, Illinois, which ended when one of the two young men tried to put out the eye of the other with the business end of a roasting fork. An interesting footnote to a footnote: Cabe Knudsen was deported three months after this conversation following another nationwide sweep for potential anarchists. He claimed Tahiti as his country of origin and happily spent the remainder of his life there, serving for a time as curator of the Gauguin Museum of Art. Knudsen may be familiar to some art scholars as the man who dared to answer Gauguin’s haunting “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” His responses respectively: “Stupid Little Monkeys. Stupid Little Monkeys. To the zoo.”