GUEST REVIEW: ...And Ladies of the Club, by Helen Hooven Santmyer

Please enjoy a final guest review while our baby works on some teeth. This time we welcome “Amanda Reid,” a middle school history teacher.

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…And Ladies of the Club, Helen Hooven Santmyer (1982; Berkeley Books, 2000).

In the early 1930s, a well-educated young woman named Helen Hooven Santmyer started writing the greatest work of her life — and possibly anyone else’s. In the early 1980s, she was still working. Now an octogenarian, Santmyer dictated the final revisions to a friend from the confines of a nursing home. Yet this work of over 50 years landed with a whimper, not a bang. The first printing was through Ohio State University Press and sold a few hundred copies, mainly to libraries in Ohio.

Months later, a well-connected woman overheard someone tell a librarian that …And Ladies of the Club was “the best novel she had ever read.” That woman called her son, a Hollywood producer, who bought the television rights and sent it on to a major publisher. The biggest coup for Santmyer’s work, though, was its selection for the Book-of-the-Month-Club, which shot the book to #1 on the New York Times best seller list.¹ Since then, it has sunk back into obscurity.

Have you heard of this book? No? Good. Then I get to convince you that …And Ladies of the Club is the Great American Novel. John William DeForest coined that term in 1868, looking for a work that took on the “task of painting the American soul” with “the picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence,” and here Santmyer succeeds beyond measure.

A New York Times article published around the book’s reissue opens by describing And Ladies of the Club as “a 1,344-page novel about life in small-town Ohio.” And that’s about right. The book is set in Waynesboro, Ohio and revolves around the members of the Waynesboro Woman’s Club, a monthly literary society for the wives of the town’s bankers, doctors, judges, and clergymen. The main characters are Anne Gordon, the doctor’s wife, and Sally Rausch, the daughter of the banker and wife of the local factory owner. The story opens in 1868 at Sally and Anne’s graduation from the Waynesboro Female College and closes in 1932 with Anne’s death. 

While Anne and Sally’s lives provide throughlines for the novel, other members of the Club, in addition to the Great and Good of Waynesboro, dart in and out of the narrative. If you’re the sort of person who appreciates a doorstop tome with multiple generations of characters, minute historical detail, and a rich setting, this book is for you! A handful of readers, maybe those who devoured Gone with the Wind, Les Miserables, and Kristin Lavransdatter have already added …And Ladies of the Club to their reading lists. But the rest of you should, too.

A few years ago, it was my job to write an American history curriculum for 7th graders. Trying to find a balance between covering the stuff they needed to know and not covering so much that they remembered nothing, I erred on the side of brutal selection. After a unit on slavery and the Civil War and a brief sojourn to the American West, I hopped to a unit on the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. So what happened to about 100 years of U.S. domestic history? I skipped it.

Why? Even at the high school level, the United States between 1865 and 1932 is a tricky period to teach. It’s when my U.S. history textbook stopped proceeding in eras (Civil War, Great Depression, World War II, etc.) and instead offered a handful of thematic chapters. Many of the topics are complicated and comparatively inaccessible. The presidents are forgettable and hard to tell apart (Chester Arthur? I hardly…) If it’s been a while since you took U.S. history, here’s a list of key terms from the Table of Contents of one of the most popular U.S. history textbooks: “Radical Reconstruction,” “The Second Industrial Revolution,” “Labor and the Republic,” “Politics in a Gilded Age,” “The Populist Challenge,” “The Progressive Era,” and “Becoming a World Power.” Think monopolization, mass immigration, urbanization, and Jim Crow. Maybe some bells are ringing, but, if pressed, how well could you explain what was at stake in William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech? Could you explain it to a 7th grader? Do you even remember who William Jennings Bryan is?

I wish I could teach a class based on …And Ladies of the Club. This thousand-page tome would actually make my job easier. The hard part about teaching isn’t marshaling the facts and getting students to nod along as you’re writing on the board, it’s making the facts stick. One popular metaphor is that your mind is like velcro: the more hooks you have, the easier it is for things to adhere. Or, as Daniel Willingham writes, “The more you know, the easier it will be for you to learn new things.” The problem is, the converse of this is also true. The less you know the harder it is to learn new things. I prefer a spatial metaphor: if I hand you a new object, you need somewhere to put it where you know you can find it again, or else it will get lost. If your brain is full of coat hooks, you’ll have a place to put new coats. In history class, this means a broad understanding of world historical timelines, a basic grasp of geography, and a set of narratives. The narratives work on two levels: if you know the general thrust of the American Revolution, you have a place to slot in new new facts within that span. But you’ll also have an easier time learning about the Haitian Revolution, because you have a measuring stick to use in making comparisons.

This, by the way, is the problem with multiculturally inspired history curricula. It’s not that learning about the Ming Dynasty or reading Mayan origin stories isn’t interesting or important — it’s that the information is so disconnected from everything else that it’s likely to disappear the moment students leave the classroom. Most kids just don’t have the hooks to hang that information on. There’s nothing wrong with a nationally-focused history curriculum, especially in public schools. But even if American students learned nothing but French history they’d at least have one coherent narrative to compare against everything else. You can spend the rest of your life railing about why that one narrative is wrong if you like, but it’s far superior to having no narrative at all. As I recently heard from a professional historian, “You have to give kids a mind before you can blow it.”

On top of the timelines, maps, and narratives you learn in school, having a rich set of historical images and settings helps integrate new information — and these often come from fiction or pop culture. If I asked you to picture a village in England in 1300, or Cairo in the 1930s, you might generate an image based on a seven-hundred-page book. More likely, though, you’re picturing something from Monty Python or Raiders of the Lost Ark. But that’s good! Teaching about empire would be way easier if my students played more Civilization. Feudalism can be confusing to learn theoretically, but it’s much easier to grok if you have a rich background of princess stories to set the scene.

Which brings me back to William Jennings Bryan. I would wager that you once had a flashcard with Bryan’s name on it, but that he doesn’t loom large in your imagination. Men might be thinking of the Roman Empire, but they’re not thinking of nineteenth century monetary policy. In part, that’s because there isn’t an American classic, frequently taught in school, that set the scene for you so that William Jennings Bryan could not only walk in, but stick around for good. We need a book that does for the late nineteenth century what The Great Gatsby does for the Jazz Age.²

Historical fiction succeeds when it marries the personal dramas of worthy characters to the great dramas of the time. But some dramas are easier to write than others. Any half-competent author can wring your heartstrings by setting her paramours’ love story at Dunkirk or his family drama across battle lines at Gettysburg. 1960s-set books are playing historical fiction on easy mode. Try doing that for Gilded Age Ohio. …And Ladies of the Club does, and does it to perfection. 

One NYT critic wrote, “the book is more often ethnographic than novelistic; it is, in large part, an affectionate catalogue of the homes and happenings, ways and means, of that social segment named above — middle-American, genteel — during the 19th century.” Another described the book as “documentary in impulse.” This second critic meant her comment as a dig, implying that the book failed to have much personal drama worth investing in. I disagree that the many character arcs aren’t interesting, but I think the nearly cinéma vérité commitment to the mundane is in large part what makes the work so engrossing.

…And Ladies of the Club is like Forrest Gump in the sense that every major event of the time period gets a mention, with one average human placed for scale. But it’s not like Forrest Gump at all, because the characters aren’t “in the room where it happens.” The whole plot takes place in Waynesboro, Ohio. The Ladies are in a town where nothing in particular happens.

But this is how most of us experience history. Mostly you weren’t next to the Twin Towers on 9/11. Mostly you were sitting in a small town in Ohio. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect you personally! …And Ladies of the Club is about how history is experienced by housewives in Ohio. The stories are about how people fall in love, and are born, and die, and celebrate the Fourth of July, and have petty squabbles. But in between all this, they talk about Grant’s scandals and the Panic of 1893 and how those events affect their lives.

Take, for example, the case of Captain Ludwig Rausch and his ropeworks. Captain Rausch is the husband of one of the founding members of the club. Early in the book, he opens a small factory that manufactures rope for industrial and nautical uses. Through the book, each of the big abstract nouns of the era — Monopolism, Populism, Reconstruction, Labor, Socialism, etc. — rolls in to existentially threaten Rausch’s factory, and, by extension, the whole town.

First, Monetary Policy shows up, revealing just how strong the US currency was and how difficult it was to build anything on credit. Rausch would not have been able to open the works without marrying the daughter of Waynesboro’s bank owner. The many panics of the era are not dates to be memorized, but sweeping blights on the whole town that threaten to close the factory and leave a significant percentage of the town unemployed. Rausch deals with ethnic, religious, and political conflict between his black (Protestant, Republican) employees and his Irish (Catholic, Democratic) workers. He faces unionization attempts and perennial threats from a horizontally integrating rope monopoly. In moments of relative calm, he is an active member of the local Republican party, working to get Ohioans elected to the presidency. Indeed, eleven of the thirteen presidents elected during that time were Republicans and half were from Ohio!

Beyond Ludwig Rausch, the book drives home many other realities of the era that are obscure to modern students. First, so many characters die in this book, mostly of diseases that could be cured today with a two minute televisit and a dose of antibiotics. It’s mind-boggling just how recently modern medicine developed. Second, everyone in the town is Christian, but cavernous social divides on the basis of religion are real. And not just between Protestants and Catholics; many a Methodist party in the book is scuttled by the no-fun Reformed Presbyterians. Third, ethnic affiliations, even in an Ohio essentially untouched by mass immigration, remain divisive. The Germans, damn them, drink beer! Can you believe it? One ‘80s critic wrote, “​​without question, some readers will be put off by Santmyer’s uncritical portrait of these First Families —who despise Irish Catholics and shockingly-stereotyped blacks.” Well, yes. What exactly were you expecting from the 1800s? 

One thing that throws my students every year is that the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln is the same Republican Party that elected Donald Trump. Some of them come unglued. But one thing I walked away from this book understanding is that the Republican Party hasn’t changed all that much. Everyone in this book is a Republican except the Irish. Of course they are — they’re from Ohio! That, in itself, is a concept that is helpful to see illustrated: that party affiliation could be about ethnic and regional identification rather than ideology. The characters of this book are the people who have always been at the core of the Republican base: small town, Northern WASP business owners whose economic interests favor a strong currency and high tariffs, and have a certain tolerance for crusaders burning with high moral dudgeon. After all, they just conquered the ancient institution of slavery! Why can’t they stomp out drinking, gambling, and other moral blights?

The climax of the story is a doozy. Not because of a soap-opera style revelation, but because you’ve been with these characters for so long; it’s like reading Gone with the Wind when Rhett Butler walks out. It feels like he’s walking out on you personally. But here, what’s walking out is our characters’ America. With just a few pages left to go, Anne Gordon — the character we have grown closest to over the course of the novel — is having dinner with her grandchildren, who are rattled by her extreme reaction to the election of FDR. In her adult life, Anne has only seen two Democratic presidents, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. And she can’t take it:

The country had survived other Democrats, true, but they had not in her eyes been the threat to America that this one was: the country would outlive Roosevelt, but it would not be the America in which she had grown up and lived her life. No matter how she argued with herself that, after all, government did not impinge much on real life — loving, bearing children, bringing them up, growing old and dying — she was still depressed and full of foreboding. She was too old, she supposed, to adjust to what young people could take in stride.

Paragraphs later, Anne wrecks a family dinner by stating, “I hate to think of dying and leaving the country in the hands of the Democrats.” It would be a caricature — there goes Grandma, ranting over the turkey — but by this point you love Anne. And her tirade runs up against the part of you that learned in the 5th grade that FDR was essentially Superman.

She’s right, though. America did outlive Roosevelt, but it wasn’t the America the Ladies of the club had grown up and lived their lives in. It’s easy for middle schoolers to understand or even celebrate that the America of the Revolution and the Civil War is gone. It can be harder to see how radically the 1930s changed America. 1868-1932 was a different time. …And Ladies of the Club tells a provincial story at the time when America itself is provincial. All the fin de siècle novels set in Europe take place against the backdrop of Napoleon, or expanding British domination, or the formation of Germany. America, at that time, was still a backwater. Madame Bovary, that paragon of provincialism, can at least dream of going to Paris. The women in the novel don’t even dream about going to Cincinnati.

The characters of this book are accurately “American Americans” per the most recent U.S. census. …And Ladies of the Club brings to life an era before America had any meaningful role in the world order. Before the expansion of the federal government and the corresponding victory of the national over the local, and before mass immigration spills out into towns like Waynesboro. You don’t have to think that change was a mistake to regret what was lost. As Charles Tilly said, “It’s bitter hard to tell the history of remainders.” …And Ladies of the Club is a meticulously researched and preserved time capsule of something that doesn’t exist anymore. 

At the time, it was a popular refrain that “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some are born in Ohio,” a reference to the seven presidents from Ohio elected from 1868-1932. …And Ladies of the Club is about some ladies born in Ohio. It’s the best book I’ve read — possibly ever. And it sums up something essentially American. In the last paragraph of his best-selling book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood writes that America “would discover its greatness by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness — common people with their common interests in making money and getting ahead.” Santmyer’s book paints that picture. It deserves to, at least, be added to the list of contenders for the title of the Great American Novel. And it’s a buried treasure that should be brought to light.

1. For more details on this wild story, check out NYT coverage from the time.

2. Arguably these do exist, but most are focused either on the South or on New York City. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which is about sharecroppers, is frequently assigned. And Edith Wharton is great, but she’s painting a very particular slice of society. Even American Girl’s doll from this era, Samantha, is a New Yorker.