Current Project Update: Developing Theme

​In the early days of a project, all is new, all directions possible, no conclusions are fixed. It’s an exciting time of discovery, to formulate hypothesis, test them against the evidence, change course as needed, and see where the research takes you.
 
When I started the project on Daisy Lampkin I knew that I would be learning new things about race and gender and class in America, about how the suffrage movement influenced the civil rights movement, and about how African American women such as Daisy made their entrée into such networks. I also expected to learn, and am learning, a great deal about how local communities, including cultural and political powerbases, related to larger patterns of national influence. What I didn’t realize at the beginning was the role that technology would be playing in the narrative:

​It sneaks up on you, if you pay attention. What at first appear to be random and unrelated data points begin to coalesce into a theme a writer can build into the narrative.
 
Daisy had a step-uncle very influential in her life, the Rev. N. D. Temple. Early in his career Temple was an itinerant minister and congregation-planter. He was an ordained man of God but he was also a lay scientist. During his overstays in a town he was visiting, when he wasn’t ministering the Word, he would give demonstrations in which he made oxygen, burned magnesium ribbon, and fired a hydrogen gun. In the days before social media, television, radio, even movie theaters for a lot of towns, these must have been great fun for audiences. I know he often visited Reading, Pennsylvania, where Daisy and her family lived. Young Daisy must have giggled and squealed in delight at the demonstrations. Did Uncle Temple spark a scientific curiosity in the young activist?
 
There is reason to believe that Daisy became what we would now call an “early adopter.” Among her publicity techniques as she advocated for suffrage was to show films. This was a highly creative application of new technology. We must remember this was in a day before Charlie Chaplin  began his celebrated career, even before the Keystone Cops. It seems to be a pattern throughout her life: she was one of the early passengers to travel through the new Greater Pittsburgh Airport, within weeks of its opening in 1952.
 
Automobiles played a large part in Daisy’s life. In the early part of the century, the automobile was a new technology. It was new enough that in 1906-07, the Pittsburgh Press printed a full roster of all the area citizens who had earned their driver’s licenses. William Lampkin, Daisy’s soon-to-be husband, is listed there. Daisy and William would spend every summer on the road throughout their married lives, traveling to African American resorts in Idlewild, Michigan, and Mackinac Island, Toronto and Montreal, and regular trips to their cottage on the New Jersey Shore. I don't know this yet, but I suspect William was a real car guy.

Pittsburgh Press, Sept. 30, 1906, listing William Lampkin had earned his driver's license. Hundreds other names were listed.

But the automobile may have already become part of her political life. In 1915, noted Pittsburgh suffrage activist Jennie Bradley Roessing and her compatriots devised a plan. Suffrage activists here and abroad were always notable for their ability to attract attention. This plan, what Roessing would call her “Pittsburgh Plan,” would have them strap a replica Liberty Bell to a truck, and then travel the entirety of the state that whole summer giving speeches. The spectacle of the bell and the truck and women drivers (!) would attract the audiences. The bell’s clapper was strapped down and wouldn’t be rung until Congress passed women’s suffrage, four years later.
 
Apparently, automobiles loomed large in the suffrage movement, with the emerging four-wheeled symbol of American freedom and movement readily appropriated by freedom-seeking activists. I note Jeryl R. Schriever has a new book out, Driving the Vote for Women: An American Journey for Suffrage, that details the cross-country trip Alice Burke and Nell Richardson made in 1916 to garner publicity for the cause. Did they get the idea from Roessing? Could Roessing have gotten the idea from Daisy and her car-mad new husband, William?
 
The research will tell, but seeing a theme appear and slowly take shape, early in the process, is a thrill, at least as much a thrill as young Daisy got cheering on her uncle’s flashy demonstrations.

​-- David J. Snyder