Joe Gould's Teeth (13 page)

1.
Davenport to Gould, January 5, 1914, Davenport Papers.

2.
Gould to Davenport, January 11, 1915, Davenport Papers.

3.
Gould to Davenport, October 16, 1913, Davenport Papers.

4.
Ibid.

5.
Davenport's proposed visit happened to fall on the day of a suffrage parade that Gould had pledged to attend. “It will be a valid excuse for reneging,” Gould wrote Davenport, delighted. “It seems to me that because biological specialization seems to increase sex-differences with increased civilisation that woman will need to enlarge her interests to keep the psychical gulf between the sexes from widening. So you see I might get into trouble in the parade.” Gould to Davenport, April 15, 1914, Davenport Papers.

6.
The courses Gould tried to get into in 1914 were many. See Hurlbut's letters to several instructors, May 1, 1914, and the replies to Gould, May 6, 1914. Professor Gustavus Howard Maynadier allowed him to take the examination in English 37, “The Story of King Arthur,” without attending a single lecture. Hurlbut to G. H. Maynadier, April 9, 1914, Gould Harvard Files. For the course, see the
Harvard University Catalogue,
1913
–
1914
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1913), 331. Gould passed the exam. Gould to Hurlbut, January 2, 1915, and Hurlbut to Gould, January 4, 1915, Gould Harvard Files.

7.
Gould to Davenport, April 25, 1914, Davenport Papers. The Cosmopolitan Club was founded in 1908. John Reed was the founding president. After Reed graduated, the next president was D. C. Gupta, from Bengal. “Cosmopolitan Club Officers,”
Harvard Bulletin,
June 1909. See Henry Wilder Foote, letter to the editor,
Harvard Bulletin,
November 1907; Cosmopolitan Club,
Harvard Bulletin,
June 1908; Membership certificate, 1909, Cosmopolitan Club Papers; and “Cosmopolitan Club,”
Harvard Bulletin,
June 1910; “Harvard Cosmopolitan Club,”
Harvard Bulletin,
May 1911. Gould told people he had been a member. See, for example, Edward Nagel and Slater Brown, “Joseph Gould: The Man,”
Broom
5 (October 1923): 145–46. But I have not been able to find Gould's name on any list of members. Harvard Cosmopolitan Club, May 12, 1909, Harvard Cosmopolitan Club, Miscellaneous, HUD 3299, Harvard University Archives.

8.
Gould to Davenport, November 14, 1913, and November 1, 1914, Davenport Papers.

9.
“I am not going to assume any editorial task, but I am going to suggest to Prof. William E. Castle that he try and help the eugenics movement to some of the publicity of which it stands in need.” Gould to Davenport, January 11, 1915, Davenport Papers.

10.
For example, Joseph F. Gould, “In Moslem Spain,”
Crisis
7 (April 1914): 289–300.

11.
Upton Sinclair, ed.,
The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest
(Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1915); Sinclair acknowledges Gould for helping with the manuscript, 20.

12.
“
ONE PRISONER, A STUDENT OF RACIAL CONDITIONS
,”
Boston Herald,
April 19, 1915.

13.
Joseph F. Gould, “Equality of Opportunity Is the Chief Safeguard of Racial Opportunity,”
Proceedings of the Sagamore Sociological Conference, Sagamore, Massachusetts, June
30
–July
2
,
1914
(Sagamore, MA, 1917), 57–58. Gould was on the Platform Committee, 33. “What is the race question?” Gould asked at Sagamore in 1914. “It seems to me a conflict between two ideals—the American ideal of democracy, and the instinctive desire of any specialized people to keep their racial integrity intact.” History, he said, shows that “there is least intermixture where two races meet on equal terms,” and therefore, “those who desire racial purity should put forth their efforts to abolish discrimination.”

14.
Gould, “My Life,” 2. Perlstein spoke at the same Sagamore conference.

15.
Gould to Davenport, January 11, 1915, Davenport Papers; Gould to Hurlbut, January 28, 1915, Gould Harvard Files; Gould to Davenport, September 24, 1915, Davenport Papers.

16.
“
ONE PRISONER, A STUDENT OF RACIAL CONDITIONS
,”
Boston Herald,
April 19, 1915; Gould, “My Life,” 3.

17.
Joseph F. Gould, application, examination, pedigree, and supporting materials, Eugenics Record Office Papers.

18.
Davenport to Gould, September 14, 1915, Davenport Papers.

19.
Milton Bradley,
Elementary Color
(Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley Co., 1895), 31–34. For a discussion of Davenport's use of the top, see Michael Keevak,
Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 89–100.

20.
Gould to Davenport, October 19, 1915, Davenport Papers. And see Gould to Abbott Lawrence Lowell, November 22, 1915, Records of the President of Harvard University, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, 1909–1933, Box 79, Folder 857, Harvard University Archives, UAI 5.160. Gould also chronicled his time in the Dakotas in a set of detailed letters to the editor of his hometown newspaper. See Joseph F. Gould, “A Norwoodite in No. Dakota,”
Norwood Messenger,
March 23, 1916 (printing a letter to the editor dated February 25, 1916); “A Norwoodite in No. Dakota,”
Norwood Messenger,
April 1, 1916 (printing a letter to the editor dated February 27, 1916); and “A Norwoodite in No. Dakota,”
Norwood Messenger,
May 13, 1916 (printing a letter to the editor dated April 14, 1916). The letters are especially interesting because they're written just after Gould began the Oral History and they are presumably a part of it. My thanks to Patricia J. Fanning of the Norwood Historical Society for sharing these letters with me.

21.
Alfred Margulies, email to the author, June 1, 2015. Edward Shorter believes that the reason insane asylums got so crowded at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries is the spread of syphilis. Shorter,
A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 53–59. After symptoms appeared, general paresis of the insane was fatal, until, during the First World War, it was discovered that it could be treated by inducing a fever. Syphilitic patients were then injected with the blood of patients suffering from malaria. In the 1940s, penicillin replaced inoculation with malaria as the preferred treatment. Ibid., 192–96. See also Elizabeth Lunbeck,
The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender and Power in Modern America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 49–54. Locating an organic cause for insanity was revolutionary; it made psychiatry modern. “Syphilis is in a sense the making of psychiatry,” the head of a psychiatric hospital in Boston said (quoted ibid.,50).

22.
“This would indicate, perhaps, a commonness of the practice.” Gould to Davenport, December 9, 1915, Davenport Papers.

23.
Jerre Mangione,
An Ethnic at Large: A Memoir of America in the Thirties and Forties
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1978), 110.

24.
Gould to Davenport, December 24, 1915, and see also Davenport to Gould, January 7, 1916, Davenport Papers.

25.
Gould to Davenport, December 9, 1915, Davenport Papers.

26.
Gould's work was under the supervision of University of Minnesota anthropologist Albert Ernest Jenks. Davenport to Gould, September 14, 1915. And see Jenks,
Indian-White Amalgamation: An Anthropometric Study
(Minneapolis: Bulletin of the University of Minnesota, 1916), v–vi. In the end, Gould's work was too slow for Jenks's purposes, as Gould reported to the Eugenics Record Office in November 1915: “my work will be done too late to be of any use in Prof. Jenk's [
sic
] law cases.”

27.
Gould to Hurlbut, October 28, 1915, from Elbowoods, North Dakota: “I am to live with an Indian family, and will be in a village where there are only three other white people. During this time I should like to have a Harvard catalogue to pore over, and see if I cannot find some half course that can be taken by correspondence….I am very anxious to get my degree, as there is a possibility of my getting a scholarship at the University of Minnesota, where Prof. A.E. Jenks is making some studies of racial amalgamation.”

28.
Gould to Hurlbut, January 14, 1916; and see Hurlbut to Professor Wiener (who taught Tolstoy), January 21, 1916, Gould Harvard Files.

29.
Gould to Hurlbut, April 2, 1915, Gould Harvard Files.

30.
Gould, review of
America's Greatest Problem,
by R. W. Shufeldt,
Survey,
November 27, 1915, 216; Gould, review of
The Education of the Negro Prior to
1861
,
by Carter G. Woodson,
Survey,
January 29, 1916, 521–22.

31.
“Certain of the Indian's problems are the same as those which beset the Negro.” Gould to Du Bois, February 27, 1916, Du Bois Papers.

32.
“Joseph Gould, '15, having completed his assignment among the Dakota Indians has been moving eastward by easy stages during the past month. On May 12 and 15 he spoke at Howard University, Washington, D. C., on ‘America not a Melting Pot' and on ‘Race Prejudice.' On May 26 he dropped into the ‘Office' for a brief visit. He will remain for a time at his home in Norwood. Mass.”
Eugenical News,
June 1916.

33.
Earnest Albert Hooton,
Up from the Ape
(New York: Macmillan, 1937), 396–97, 501–2, 588–89, 594. This is what Hooton wrote in 1937; he may have had different ideas in 1916, when he was teaching Gould. Still, his convictions are very strong, and it's hard to imagine that they represent a reversal. He was, for instance, quite vociferous in his opposition to IQ tests, which he said ought to be called “environment tests.”

34.
Gould, review of
The Institutional Care of the Insane in the United States and Canada, Volume III,
by Henry M. Hurd,
Survey,
January 27, 1917, 497–98: “Especially encouraging is the exposure of evil conditions that formerly existed at the Manhattan State Hospital, and the present development of this same institution.”

1.
Mitchell, “Joe Gould's Secret.”

2.
Gould to Mitchell, January 13, 1946, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. “His quotations of me are rather inaccurate,” Gould complained in a letter to the editor,
Harvard Crimson,
May 11, 1945.

3.
Mitchell, interview with Colleen Chassan, August 3, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

4.
Gould to Mumford, July 1943, Mumford Papers, Box 23, Folder 1906.

5.
Gould to Mitchell, July 30, 1945, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. The anthology, a collection of humor, was H. Allen Smith, compiler,
Desert Island Decameron
(New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1945).

6.
Diary entry for April 17, 1945, Gould Diaries.

7.
On Mitchell's composite and invented characters like Mr. Flood of the Fulton Fish Market, the subject of two Reporter-at-Large pieces, and Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the subject of Mitchell's 1942 profile “King of the Gypsies,” see Thomas Kunkel,
Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of
The New Yorker (New York: Random House, 2015). Kunkel quotes a letter Mitchell wrote in 1961. “Insofar as the principal character is concerned, the gypsy king himself, it is a work of the imagination,” Mitchell wrote. “Cockeye Johnny Nikanov does not exist in real life, and never did.” Kunkel argues that blurring the line between fact and fiction had been common in the magazine, especially during its early years and while under the editorship of Harold Ross, who died in 1951.

8.
Gould, letter to the editor,
Harvard Crimson,
May 11, 1945.

9.
Mitchell quoted in Kunkel,
Man in Profile,
233.

10.
Stanley Hyman to Joseph Mitchell, September 27, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Hyman was a literary critic and the husband of Shirley Jackson. “Shirley adds her congratulations and love,” he signed off.

11.
Francis Bacon, “Of Truth,” in
Essays
(London, 1597).

12.
Mitchell's 1942 research notes, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

13.
Mitchell to G. A. Maclean, October 2, 1947, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

14.
Gould, “A Chapter from Joe Gould's Oral History: Art,”
Exile,
November 1927, 116.

15.
Mitchell, “Professor Sea Gull.”

16.
Gould, “Synopsis.”

17.
Diary entry for April 13, 1946, Gould Diaries.

18.
Ben Hellman to Mitchell, September 25, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 10.1. The library, “contrary to my expectations, proved a poor place to work,” Gould told Mitchell: it “reminded me that there were already more bks printed than any one person could hope to read.” Mitchell's notes on Gould talking about the Oral History, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

19.
Mitchell, “Joe Gould's Secret.”

20.
Mitchell, typewritten note to himself while writing the second profile, undated but ca. 1962, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

21.
Mitchell had held in his hands several different notebooks. In his notes from 1942, he lists their contents—they are essays, not “oral parts”—and indicates the dates the various sections were written, for example, 1921, 1923, etc. See Mitchell's notes on Gould and the Oral History, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. He writes, for instance, after reading one notebook: “typical ending of an entry in the O.H.: ‘This is all that I will say about my theories of social position as I write these lines at 20 minutes of 10 in the evening of Monday, September 10, 1934, in the Lex. Ave. express uptown which is stopping at Moshulu Parkway station of the Lex. Ave. subway where I am being ragged (or nagged) by a loquacious drunk.” Mitchell's discarded Gould interview notes from June 16, 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Mitchell also copied and typed the entirety of the “Tomato Habit” essay. Gould, “The Tomato Habit,” typewritten by Mitchell, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

22.
Mitchell's miscellaneous research notes from 1942, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

23.
Mitchell's Norwood notes, July 24, 1959, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

24.
Carlo Sovello to Mitchell, October 19, 1964, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

25.
Richard A. Hitchcock to Mitchell, November 11, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Gould mentioned his friendship with Hitchcock in a letter to Nino Frank, the editor of
Bifur,
March 1930,
Bifur
Archive, Box 1, Folder 13. He also mentions Hitchcock frequently in his diaries from the 1940s.

26.
Mitchell to Richard A. Hitchcock, December 9, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

27.
Florence Lowe to Mitchell, November 16, 1964, and March 13, 1965, and Mitchell to Lowe, December 3, 1964, and February 25, 1965, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Gould had first arrived in New York, in October 1916. Gould to Braithwaite, December 2, 1916, Braithwaite Collection, Box 8, Folder of Joseph F. Gould.

28.
Joseph F. Gould, “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II,” unpublished manuscript, 1922, Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1.

29.
A further description of the oral parts of the Oral History came from Ruth Mooney, who knew Gould well in the 1920s; she was married to the poet Lew Ney. Mooney wrote Mitchell, “Once Joe did read me a chapter of the Oral History which was really oral. He assembled in one place all he had ever heard people say about Alfred E. Smith. It was a collection of trivia without anything to recommend it by way of either historical sense of style. All that sticks in my memory is the story (told about Mrs. Smith and the wives of six previous politicians) that the Queen of Belgium had said, on a visit here, ‘This is a wonderful city' and Mrs. Smith had replied ‘You said a mouthful, Queen.' I was surprised to hear that there never was an Oral History but am sure that, if there had been, it would have been on this level.” Ruth Mooney to Mitchell, March 11, 1964 [
sic;
corrected to 1965 by Mitchell], Mitchell Papers, Box 9.1. Lew Ney's real name was Luther Widen. He took the name “Lew Ney” (pronounced “looney”) after he escaped from the Elgin Hospital for the Insane in 1916.

30.
Gould, “Meo Tempore. Seventh Version. Volume II,” 1922.