CUADRO N° 10 RESUMEN DE ENTREVISTA PARA OBTENCIÓN DE REQUISITOS

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Quakers had become firmly entrenched in the founding myths of the United States. As we will see in Chapter Six, even the Quaker Oats Company took full advantage of the Quaker legend, replacing outright the starving pilgrims at Plymouth Rock with the less problematic Friends. Unlike pilgrims and Puritans, however, Quakers remained a thriving and present religious group. But by virtue of their calcifying reputation as founders, Quakers were imagined to be, like their speech, something less than wholly modern. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 Evangeline finds old- fashioned music in the speech of the Quakers that reminds her of home:

There from the troubled sea had Evangeline landed, an exile, Finding among the children of Penn a home and a country. . . . And her ear was pleased with the Thee and Thou of the Quakers, For it recalled the past, the old Acadian country,

Where all men were equal, and all were brothers and sisters.50

As plain speech began to disappear in the latter half of the century, the Quakers’ pleasant language resonated all the more with an American past as yet untouched by the hustle and noise of industrial life. An article in The Atlantic Monthly’s “Contributor’s Club” in March of 1881 remarked on scenes which were “particularly pleasing in the picture of the simple rural life of the Quaker family in Rhode Island, as yet unvexed by any of the evils which may attend trade and manufactures.”51 Quaker practices and virtues were becoming static in the American imagination, transformed from living witnesses to comfortable reminders of a long, pious, and gentle history of the United States.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the plain Quaker language often was imagined to indicate a person diametrically opposed to modernization and technologies. Their long history as practical (and theological) innovators was forgotten or subsumed in records of

their charming speech. For example, Henry Fairfield Osborn’s reminiscence of the great naturalist and taxonomist Edward Drinker Cope, published in The Century in 1897, takes pains to point out the gently comic disconnect between Cope’s Quaker background and his very early scientific researches. At the age of eight, young Cope was observing and then, according to the memoir, “recording in quaint Quaker language: ‘Two of the sclerotic plates look at the eye—thee will see these in it.’”52 Osborn’s characterization of this study clearly marks a contrast between the “quaint Quaker language” and Cope’s precocious and

progressive research.

Quakers were imagined as old-fashioned—but occasionally eminently susceptible to the superiority of the modern. Although the imagined Quaker balked at the new, he could be persuaded by example to accept superior American advances in technology. In 1863, the author and critic H.M. Alden wrote an “anecdote” of an anxious and anonymous Quaker couple observed at the tourist cars on the steep incline at Mount Pisgah. Before their trip up the hillside began, a Quaker man addressed his plainly spoken fears to the conductor: “‘Does thee mean to say,’ asked the Quaker, ‘that all these people are going up?’ ‘Certainly,’ said the conductor, again assuring them of their perfect security.” The Friends evidently were persuaded by his reassurance, and

agreed to make the venture upon one condition. “Thee will go no faster than we want thee to?” stipulated the Quaker. “Not a whit,” replied the conductor . . . The old Quaker’s gray eyes glisten with excitement as the speed gradually increases. Soon he gives an

impatient gesture, and asks the astonished conductor, “Can’t thee go a little faster, friend?” . . . The Quaker’s eye has a mad twinkle about it, as with still greater impatience he beseeches the conductor to put on all possible speed, utterly unconscious of the merriment which he is making among the party.53

The comedy of this scene lies in the Quaker’s desire to go faster and faster, presumably in stark contrast to the stereotype of Quakers as slow-moving, even as fixed points. His

requests—first to go slow and then, in assent to the excitement and promise of what man has wrought, to go faster—are consistently couched in the plain speech. While he eventually succumbs to the allure of technology, his language, the anecdote assures the reader, will remain static.

Among the favorite characterizations of these quaint Quakers was that they were living reminders of colonial days. Thee and thou were old-fashioned on their own terms, and provided the quickest (and sometimes cloudiest) referent to admirable early Americans. After all, John Adams observed the simple language with a touch of irony in September of 1774, when he dined with the Quaker lawyer Mr. Fisher. Impressed by Fisher’s wife and table, Adams remarked that “this plain Friend, and his plain, tho pretty Wife, with her Thee’s and Thou’s, had provided us the most Costly Entertainment.”54 The impression of thee-ing and thou-ing as an attractive colonial practice lasted more than a century. In 1899, Jennie Betts Hartswick penned “A Colonial Valentine,” addressed “To a Belle in 1770,” for the Ladies’ Home Journal. An earnest Quaker—not a dashing Minuteman—penned this “Colonial Valentine,” and the scene laid by its archaic spellings is completed pleasantly by thee and thou:

And when upon ye windy square By happie chance I meet her—

We “thee” and “thou” each other there— (Sure language ne’er was sweeter!) If I behold her eyelids falle

Beneath my glances steadie I cannot help but hope withal, Since we are “Friends” alreadie.55

In this poem, the “sweeter” language of the Quaker lovers is a crucial component of the colonial setting, and their modest and plain-spoken courtship is rendered less uncertain by Hartswick’s easy joke that they “are ‘Friends’ alreadie.” Popular historian of everyday life Alice Morse Earle was likewise interested in the courtship and marrying habits of colonial Quakers. In 1898, she wrote an article on colonial Friends for the New England Magazine.56 Much of her space was spent on Friendly lovers; she spent her conclusion, however,

lamenting that the

The horse sheds have vanished, and the horses and carriages too. Every Sunday the shrill resounding notes of Moody and Sankey hymns with parlor organ accompaniment rend and pierce the air. Scarce one who enters within the garish walls ever heard a thee and thou, and I doubt whether a child in the Sunday School has ever seen a Quaker man or Quaker woman in Quaker garb; there is not a Colton, a Hadwen, a Hartshorn, an Earle, a Chase or any of good old Quaker names among them; and people say with much satisfaction, it is no longer a dull old Quaker meeting, but a hustling mission.57

In Earle’s estimation, Quakers of the colonial days were far superior—it is the loss of both the plain language and the aristocratic “good old Quaker names among them” that are to be lamented (careful readers will see the Earle among these). The “shrill resounding notes of Moody and Sankey hymns,” the widespread markers of a rising evangelical influence among Quakers, were as objectionable as the passing away of “thee and thou.” Quakers, she

suggests, had been able to stave off time—to remain in the colonial period as long as they retained their simple language, their plain habits, and the well-known aristocracy of their gathered families.58