Just last year I was reviewing some shelves in the processing room that normally have a book cart standing in front of them. What I remember is that I was looking for a box of pictures that had been misplaced. Instead, I found two beat-up boxes that seemed to hold a bunch of old forms.  Some of them were in different languages. The “Murlison Collection” did not look very promising, but we are trying to finish up any processing backlog that remains scattered about the various rooms of the archives. So we set to work.

In the last years of his life, as recorded in Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound, the poet Ezra Pound had a disturbing dream. “Eustace Mullins, of Staunton, Virginia, one of Pound’s acolytes at St. Elizabeth’s, starred in an unlikely Freudian drama. Ezra and the poet Hilda Doolittle, his young sweetheart, were staying with the Mullins family when Ezra learned that Mullins had raped H.D.” Nothing else is said about Mullins in the book, though there are many references to famous visitors to St. Elizabeth’s, as well as a regular corps of eager young believers. Mullins seems to have met Pound’s wife, Dorothy, in 1949 when he worked at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. A year later he became a researcher for the Library of Congress and a frequent visitor at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Washington, DC, where Ezra Pound was imprisoned for his treasonous radio broadcasts from Italy during World War II. Suspected of being insane, the famous poet was never transferred to prison and was finally freed after twelve years. During this time, Mullins claimed to have been Pound’s secretary and also did research for the House Un-American Activities Committee. And he began his career as an author.

Carolyn Wells, of Rahway, New Jersey, wrote 170 popular books over the course of a forty-year career that started with her first book in 1896, At the Sign of the Sphinx. She specialized in children’s literature and generally humor books, but also detective stories. Roughly seventy of her books could be considered mysteries. She even wrote a guide on how to understand and craft these stories, The Technique of the Mystery Story.

Puck started as a weekly German-language magazine in 1871 in St. Louis. Its founder, Joseph Keppler, was an Autrian born cartoonist. The political satire and commentary in Puck is typical of prominent publications in Europe at the time, such as Punch in England or Ulk in Germany. After faltering, the magazine switched successfully to English in 1877 and ten years later moved to New York City to take up residence in the large Puck Building.

Despite opposition, the United Mine Workers of America were able to organize among the workers of the Colorado Coalfields to the point that in 1913 they put together a list of miners’ demands, backed by the threat of a strike. Among other things, they insisted on an eight-hour workday, just like the UMWA had been able to win at other sites. Soon strikers were forced out of their company-owned housing and many moved to shanty towns in the area. There were threats of violence.

Woodrow Wilson as Hamlet in 1916 copy of the German satyrical magazine, Simplicissimus

In a 1911 essay on the King James Bible, after he had run successfully to become the governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson saw fit to compare Scripture to Shakespeare:

The book, Evidences of Advances among Colored People, appeared in numerous editions after the first printing in 1902. With descriptions of institutions and short biographies, it seeks to prove that African Americans had indeed made progress since the Civil War, despite what some people thought. In the 1904 eleventh edition, the chapter that covers various business people lists two men from Staunton, Virginia. George H. White, a grocer, and Frank T. Ware, the owner of a furniture store. It is worth showing the entire passage on Ware.

330 U.S. Marines were ordered to invade Haiti on July 28, 1915, following a coup and the lynching of Haitian President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. This action by President Wilson would begin the 19-year-long occupation of the small island-nation of Haiti, which had previously been independent for over 100 years.

Over forty years ago, the Perry family gave the Woodrow Wilson Library two dozen books from the collection of William J. Perry, a Presbyterian minister who died in Staunton in 1870. They included theology books, Plutarch’s biographies of Greeks and Romans, and instruction on shorthand.

In the first year of his presidency, Woodrow Wilson approved the imposition of segregation on several federal agencies that had not been racially divided up to that point, even in places where segregation had been common, such as Washington, DC. William Monroe Trotter, of the National Independent Political League, responded with a speech against the move.