Barbara Egger Lennon

Teacher, Mother, Activist

Tina Stewart Brakebill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429973758
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Facets of Barbara Egger Lennon's life depict an ordinary white Midwestern woman of her time: teacher, wife, mother. Her work as a union organizer and political activist, however, complicate that picture. The way in which Egger Lennon balanced these roles illustrates how many women of her time shaped their lives in the face of three significant forces: work, family, and politics. Enriched by years of her detailed diary entries, Barbara Egger Lennon: Teacher, Mother, Activist deepens our understanding of the ways in which work and political activism existed alongside the traditional role of women in the early 20th century.

About the Lives of American Women series: Selected and edited by renowned women's historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a woman's life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a 'good read', featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject's perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.

1

From Student to Teacher, 1880s–1902

On the evening of June 18, 1900, fire broke out in the central Illinois community of Bloomington. Helped by a brisk wind, the fire spread through the mostly wood-frame structures simply too quickly for the fire equipment of the day. Fortunately, the conflagration claimed no lives, but by the next morning the largely uninsured downtown business center laid in waste. Rather than succumb in despair, Bloomington citizens chose to tackle the tragedy as an opportunity. One of the city’s businessman boosters said it best: Bloomington would “rise again … greater than ever.”¹ Rebuilding began almost immediately, and by the next summer twentieth-century designs of brick and stone had begun to replace the ruined remains of the nineteenth.

While the rise of modern structures proceeded as planned, new starts proved harder for those without insurance or deep pockets, and these unrecoverable losses could have unforeseen consequences. For high school student Barbara Egger (Barbe), the fire ultimately changed her life’s path. She had been boarding with a local cigar manufacturer who lost his uninsured business to the fire and his home to the financial aftermath. His disaster left Barbe potentially homeless until another local couple, Juna and John Brown (J. B.) Lennon, brought Barbe into their Mulberry Street home. This move was Barbe’s third major relocation in her young life, and although it was the shortest in distance, its effects were significant. The couple apparently intended to provide temporary shelter for a displaced girl in exchange for household help, but Barbe soon became a part of the Lennon family. The Lennons assumed the role of surrogate parents in a way that her boarding family had not. This surrogacy changed her life as well as theirs.

But before their paths could intertwine, they had to find themselves in the same place, and this process spanned several decades and two continents. Seventeen years earlier, while still a toddler, Barbe took her first step toward this meeting when she left her hometown of Thal in the canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland.² Under the sole guidance of her mother, Barbara Katherine Toggler Egger (Katherine), Barbe and her five siblings (aged infant to teen) set sail from Le Havre, France, on the steam ship La Normandie along with a thousand other third-class passengers en route to America. After an arduous three-week transatlantic trip, they landed at Castle Garden in New York in June 1883. This exhausting trek was followed by a series of trains that took them another thousand miles, nearly halfway across the country, to their final destination of Odell in Livingston County, Illinois. It was there that the family reunited with Barbe’s father, Jacob Egger. He had made the journey approximately a year prior to his wife and children and had already settled among the many other immigrants populating the northern Illinois farming community. Jacob’s desire to preserve a long-established way of life inspired him to move his family halfway around the world; ultimately, however, this first move set Barbe on a path that led away from the presumed traditional life of early marriage and farming and toward change.

This change had begun with the intersection of the sweeping social trends of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization. By the early 1880s, the Industrial Revolution had transformed St. Gallen’s traditional embroidery work from a local craft enmeshed within an agricultural base to a booming industrial export business. These new economic opportunities brought wealth to the region, but some farmers, including Jacob, viewed the accompanying social and cultural shifts with fear. The desire to avoid the upheaval of industrial change and protect a simpler, more traditional way of life had pushed him to leave St. Gallen sometime in 1882 in search of a new place to reestablish an old way of life. Luckily, like many of the 25 million immigrants who endured transatlantic voyages and cross-country treks in the decades between the Civil War and the Great War, he had a path to follow. Letters from kin, friends, and community members served as ready advertisements for the possibilities and challenges of a new place. These missives and return visits from earlier travelers lent an aura of familiarity to a foreign locale and fueled migration chains in which newcomers followed the paths laid by their migrating predecessors.

For the Eggers, this chain led to Illinois, where industrialization, urbanization, and modernization had also brought tremendous change and growth. In 1850 fewer than one hundred miles of railways had existed, but by 1860, thanks to large federal land grants, twenty-six hundred miles transected and connected the state. One of the most important rail expansions extended from Chicago to St. Louis. This line opened up outlets for industrial and farm products and helped to give birth and growth to Illinois communities such as Odell in Livingston County and Bloomington in McLean County. This boom provided thousands upon thousands of jobs building, maintaining, and running the lines while also creating access to millions of acres of cultivable land. In order to sell this land and lure cheap labor, the rail companies, land speculators, and the federal government advertised and recruited aggressively among new arrivals in the United States as well as sending agents to Europe to attract possible emigrants. In Illinois German and Irish immigrants grabbed up many of these jobs and acres, but in 1858 a St. Gallen emigrant planted the first roots of what would become a small but thriving Swiss contingent nestled among these other European transplants in Livingston County.

By the time the Egger family arrived, this initial St. Gallen transplant had produced a small network of Swiss immigrant families who, like their mostly Irish and German Livingston County neighbors, had settled into traditional farm community life. The Egger clan quickly did the same. By the early 1890s, the family had grown to include ten children, three boys and seven girls. Despite the desires of many immigrant fathers, America often offered their daughters and granddaughters a chance at a life governed less by the restrictive “Old World” ideas about women’s narrowly prescribed roles. Nonetheless, these shifts were less common in rural settings than in urban environments, and this certainly seemed true for the Egger family. Barbe, her sisters, and her mother shared in the duties traditional for farm women such as caring for the animals, milking the cows, and churning the butter. In addition, the women took care of other traditionally female work such as cleaning, cooking, canning, sewing, and laundry. For Barbe’s sisters, these same roles continued into their adult lives. Four of them married farmers at a young age, while the youngest surviving daughter continued her traditionally supportive duties at home. (The last of the ten children—a daughter born in 1892—died in 1897.) Only Barbe’s experience strayed from this traditional pattern of early marriage, multiple children, and a life of farming. Ironically, this divergent life path was made possible by the very industrial forces and societal shifts the Eggers had sought to escape.

Like Barbe’s father, many native-born Americans feared the myriad effects of the changing times. But for a significant number, rising immigration was the most troubling aspect of these changes. They anxiously watched as Thomas Jefferson’s ideal agrarian republic gave way to a modern, urban, industrial landscape largely populated by wage-laboring immigrants who seemed unfamiliar with core American ideals. Reactions to this perceived problem ranged from immigration restrictions and nativist violence to aggressive “Americanization” programs. Within the context of the latter, educational reformers stepped forward and successfully emphasized the role schools could play in preparing young people to participate “appropriately” in the American social order. In the late nineteenth century, this belief that the school should both drill students on the “three R’s” and instill American values led to the vast growth of a tax-supported educational system in which universal and centralized institutions taught a shared curriculum to all students regardless of their background—in short, “public” schools.

Public schools were not new. By 1860 all thirty-four states had adopted laws requiring tax-supported public schooling. Yet considerable disagreements existed over how universal institutions and a common curriculum should be defined and implemented. The result was an incomplete and fragmented system. In the decades after the Civil War, however, those fears regarding the changing industrial world accelerated the school movement, and new state-(and county-) level regulations brought universal public education closer to reality. By the 1890s the length of both the school day and the term became more standardized, and many states, including Illinois, mandated compulsory attendance for children under fourteen. As a result, between 1880 and 1900, Illinois student enrollment and daily attendance dramatically increased. Extensive school construction and renovation also moved Illinois communities gradually away from one-room schools to larger brick and frame structures. Despite this growing emphasis on the role of education, reformers believed that for most children, primary-age schools provided sufficient training to instill the necessary skills and values to participate in American society. As a result, education beyond the eighth grade was still rare. Illinois had only three hundred high schools, and in 1900 only about 5 percent of all eligible students nationwide entered high school, and the majority did not stay to graduate. While this number signified quite an improvement over the 2 percent level of 1870, high school was still far from the norm.

Barbe became one of those small numbers when she graduated from high school in 1902. The motives for this path are unclear, as Barbe’s education set her apart and marked her as the odd member of her family. A family dynamic may explain her desire to escape the Egger farm. Her father, she later confessed, was rarely sober and treated the family “like dogs.” She placed the blame for her mother’s unhappy and troubled life squarely on her father’s uneven temperament. His drinking sometimes led to violence. “Pa acting so terribly. Lost a valuable horse simply because he struck its head with an iron rod.” Her father’s overbearing demeanor and selfish attitude left scars as well. She once lamented about her own childhood, “I am not responsible for being restrained in every way the first fourteen years of my life and so am or feel timid or backward about asking for things or being communicative.”³ Reflections such as these suggest an unhappy childhood, but was this enough to explain her path?

Given her status within the traditional household and her self-proclaimed timidity, the choice probably was not hers to make as a teenager. Economic factors were probably at play. The farm was small, the family was large, and in 1896 (when she moved out) the economy was still in the midst of the depression produced by the panic of 1893. Her older brothers soon moved west, looking (in what would be a failed attempt) to strike it rich, but that still left eight children at home, seven of them girls. Large farm families like the Eggers commonly expected their unmarried daughters to boost family income or, at least, pay their own way until marriage by taking advantage of the new teaching opportunities created by the expansion of the public school system. With her older sister’s marriage on the horizon, Barbe (as the second oldest daughter) was the next logical choice for this strategy. Relocating fifty miles southwest to Bloomington also made sense, as it offered access to an excellent school district known for its teacher preparatory work.

This reputation was no accident. In 1892 the city’s first female school superintendent, Sarah Raymond, ended a nearly twenty-five-year career in Bloomington during which she spearheaded a vast revisioning of public schools. Under her watch the city built more schools, improved existing facilities and materials, hired and promoted qualified teachers, standardized the curriculum, and won certification for the high school. Whether students planned only to complete their required eighth grade education or, like Barbe, intended to move on to high school, Bloomington’s nine public grade schools offered a solid foundation. And in October 1896, Barbe made her second major move when she left Odell and relocated to Bloomington, where she entered seventh grade at Jefferson grade school. She struggled initially with the more advanced curriculum but quickly found her footing. In eighth grade she earned “Excellent” scores in all her subjects. She even won a one-dollar prize in a local patriotic essay contest. After successfully completing eighth grade, gaining entry into Bloomington High School (BHS) became her next challenge. This step required scoring at least a 75 percent on a comprehensive exam. She accomplished this task and in September 1898 became one of the few students throughout the nation entering high school. True to Bloomington’s stellar reputation, BHS was one of the few Illinois high schools requiring a four-year program for graduation, and students faced a challenging curriculum. In Barbe’s class of 1902, only 44 graduates emerged from the total first-year enrollment of 432 students. Barbe proved worthy of her chosen curriculum, which included Latin, German, Botany, Physics, Chemistry, Geometry, History, Rhetoric, and English. She pursued her studies diligently and was excelling academically when the aftermath of the Bloomington fire brought the Lennons into her life.

This meeting was somewhat serendipitous, as J. B. and Juna Lennon’s path to Bloomington also was not a direct one. J. B. had been born in Wisconsin in 1849. His mother proudly claimed her place in the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) as the daughter of a former Revolutionary War officer. His father’s American lineage was not as long, but he had emigrated from Manchester, England, as a child. Not long after J. B.’s birth, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where his father established a tailoring business amid the tensions that eventually took the nation into civil war. Missouri had long played a significant role in this tension. In 1820 the Missouri Compromise had brought it into the Union as a slave state, and Hannibal’s port was an active slave-transporting hub. Slave ownership also was common. During the 1850s, however, German immigrants and migrants from the North and East, like the Lennons, introduced a strong strain of antislavery sentiment to the state. These opposing forces as well as its position as a border slave state complicated things further when it came time to take sides during the Civil War. Ultimately, the state chose not to secede, but many people remained strongly proslavery.

The Lennon family’s actions during this period made their allegiance clear and helped cement a lifelong commitment to progressive reform in young J. B. In addition to her proud DAR heritage, J. B.’s mother was a somewhat distant cousin to the infamous abolitionist John Brown. The Lennons may not have condoned Brown’s participation in the violent murder of five proslavery men in “Bleeding Kansas” or actively supported his attempts to foment war at Harpers Ferry, yet they were self-described abolitionists. At one point, according to family history, they risked prison or worse by harboring a group of runaway slaves in their home. Whether this family lore was completely truthful is unknown, but its inclusion in various news items commemorating J. B.’s mother’s death in 1906 illustrates the importance the family attached to their commitment to the antislavery movement. As another measure of this commitment, within months of the war’s outbreak J. B.’s father enlisted in the Union army, where he spent the next three years.

The family weathered the war years, and once the fighting ceased J. B.’s father resumed his tailoring trade. As a testament to the family’s progressive leanings, he did not insist his now sixteen-year-old son take up the trade. Instead, he supported J. B.’s desire to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, which was one of the earliest institutions of higher learning that accepted both women and African Americans as students. He managed to spend seven months in this progressive hub before economics forced his return to Hannibal. In hopes of a better future, the entire family relocated in 1871 to booming Colorado. J. B. initially dabbled in mining and farming but ultimately joined his father’s tailoring trade. This decision prompted his lifelong association with the labor movement. He helped organize Denver’s first central labor council, represented the city’s tailors, and was elected to national leadership positions in the Journeyman Tailors Union (JTU) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). His commitment to labor activism took him to New York City in 1886 and then to Bloomington, Illinois, in 1894. Once permanently settled in that up-and-coming labor hub, he became a central figure in local labor concerns while also maintaining his national prominence and connections with the AFL and the tailors union. He even relocated the JTU’s national headquarters to Bloomington.

By the time Barbe moved in with the Lennons, J. B. had a long history as a respected labor reformer and a public advocate for progressive causes such as women’s suffrage and temperance. Juna, however, was still in the early years of what also would be a very successful tenure as an active public reformer. Little is known about Juna (Allen) Lennon’s early life. Born in 1849, she and her family lived in New York and then Vermont before relocating to Hannibal soon after the Civil War ended. In 1871 she and J. B. married, and soon the entire Lennon clan moved to Denver. She gave birth in 1873 to the couple’s only child, a son named John Frank Lennon, and devoted the next twenty years to motherhood. The 1894 relocation from New York to Bloomington offered a change, as her now twenty-one-year-old son did not accompany the family west. The couple’s move also coincided with the advent of the “Progressive Era.” This period of social and political activism celebrated modernization but also worked to counter the negative effects of industrialization and urbanization. Although not all progressives agreed on the problems, or the solutions, the reforming fever offered women increased opportunities for public involvement. By the late nineteenth century, middle-class female reformers had pushed the boundaries of what many viewed as women’s acceptable sphere of influence outward. Using traditional ideas about women as their justification, these “social housekeepers” claimed the right to be involved in any facet of society that potentially affected women or children or the safety of the family. After her arrival in Illinois, Juna took full advantage of this wider sphere by supporting the women’s suffrage movement as well as becoming actively involved in a variety of social reform groups.

It was one of these social reform connections that brought the newly homeless Barbe together with the Lennons. This third move in Barbe’s short life had both immediate and long-term consequences for all three. As a couple the Lennons offered Barbe a model for Progressive Era activism, and this left an important impression on her. The fire and the dislocation could have put an end to her school days, but instead their home allowed her the space to spread her wings during her final two years of high school. Her scrapbooks, which she began soon after moving in with the Lennons, are filled with mementos of dances, parties, games, and plays. She also pasted clippings documenting Juna’s extensive club and volunteer activities and J. B.’s work. The interest seemed mutual. Juna stepped in as a surrogate mother and hosted Barbe’s social and school functions at their home. J. B.’s work often took him out of town, but he sent notes that revealed his affection and his respect for Barbe’s intelligence. For example, during one lecture trip, he sent her a copy of the speech he gave to the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs, entitled “The Industrial Problem as It Effects [sic] Women & Children.” His esteem for her intellectual capacity was not misplaced. She continued to earn high marks in all her classes and display excellence in other endeavors. In the spring of 1902, Barbe won top honors in an open essay contest based on the writings of renowned international travel writer John L. Stoddard. She treasured her prize, an eleven-volume illustrated set of travel discourses on Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, which offered a fascinating window into a wide variety of exotic locales. With this success behind her, she embarked on the final months of school and her proudest high school accomplishment: becoming the editor in chief of Bloomington High School’s monthly newspaper, the Aegis.

The need, desire, or opportunity for work meant that boys waived the noncompulsory chance at a high school education in far larger number than girls. So at BHS, like most high schools of the time, young women made up the majority of students. Despite this fact, the Aegis staff was overwhelmingly male. Barbe’s assigned status as editor in chief...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction
• 1 From Student to Teacher, 1880s–1902
• 2 Personal and Professional Deference to Authority, 1902-1908
• 3 Aspiring New Woman, 1909–1915
• 4 New Woman, 1915–1918
• 5 From New Woman at Work to New Woman at Home, 1919–1921
• 6 Motherhood and the New Woman, 1921–1928
• 7 Union Organizing and Local Politics, 1929–1937
• 8 From Local Organizer to National Reformer, 1937–1945
• 9 Political Battles Won and Lost, 1945–1950
• 10 Continuity and Change, 1950–1983
• Primary Sources
• ABBREVIATIONS
• STUDY QUESTIONS
• NOTES
• ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX