James Alexander Davidson, ca. 1945
Ambiguity characterized our return from the
Renaissance Weekend in Santa Monica on Wednesday last. On the one hand we had been exhilarated by a
rich diet of lectures, panels, discussion groups and simple high class
schmoozing among the remarkably able thought-leaders gathered in a luxury beach
hotel. One of my own talks touched upon
the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, which at the beginning of the seventeenth
century had modestly announced itself with the publication of a plan “for the
comprehensive and thorough-going reformation of the whole wide world” addressed
to “all the learned people and leaders of Europe.” Though far less megalomaniacal, the
Renaissance Weekends, festivals of ideas, do have a little of this spirit. “Ah,
but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,” writes Browning, “Or what's a
heaven for?” For all of fifteen minutes I convinced myself that I understood
Bitcoin. No less enjoyable, in a
somewhat different register, were two days spent with a dear old friend in his
stunning Hollywood condo. Thanks to
Larry we had our first visit to the Getty Museum: magnificent art in a
magnificent setting. The “ambiguity”
part began to appear on the return flight.
With each eastward mile I was getting sicker and sicker. A nasty flu, showing utter contempt for my
prudential inoculation months ago, laid me low and delayed this essay by a
week. However, resurgo, and let the deed
shaw.
The
Renaissance Weekends are not the Judaeo-Masonic conspiracies that the Czarist
police spies once attributed to any meeting of the learned people and leaders
of Europe, but they do observe an informal, consensual off-the-recordness
designed to ease the candid, open and respectful exchange of experimental and
sometimes conflicting ideas. One of the
most fascinating things I learned at the weekend was in the category of
personal family history, and hardly politically controversial; but in
identifying the midwife of my enlightenment I shall say only that she is an
eminent expert in environmental law and the one-time majority leader of the
Colorado House of Representatives.
My maternal
grandfather, James Alexander Davidson, was born just before the Civil War and
died in his nineties in the late 1950s.
He was a true Colorado pioneer, most of whose life was spent as an engineer
of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, an instrument of cardinal importance in
the economic history of Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. For a time in the first decade of the last
century he was a member of the Colorado legislature. He lived in the railroad town of Salida,
where my mother and her three older siblings were all born. This tale concerns
her oddly named sister, my aunt Evangeline Heartz Davidson. My brothers and I spent the War years living
with my grandparents in Denver, where they had retired. Heartz (the Evangeline part was for
documentary use only) lived with her retired husband amid spacious undeveloped
fields toward the edge of the city, then just about half its current size.
This man Jodie Stewart, nearly two
decades her senior—he had actually been in the first war--had about him an air of mournful mystery. He was a Mississippian, a retired Army
chaplain with the rank of colonel. He
had briefly served as a Presbyterian minister in a parish, but he never talked
about his civilian life, which had been indelibly stained by divorce—a huge
social disgrace for his time and place and calling. Later, when I became a reader and came upon
Faulkner’s Light in August, I
thought: “Uncle Jodie. Gail Hightower!” Aunt Heartz had no children of her own, but
tried to play beneficent stepmother of Jodie’s son Gerry, another career Army
officer (captain) and his wife Virginia.
This was a little awkward, given that Heartz, Gerry, and Virginia were
approximately the same age.
The Stewarts had spent their married
life on army bases in the Philippines. Their
furniture seemed exotic, practically all of it being made of blond palm fibers
and strips of bamboo, what Heartz called “our rattan work”. The social perceptions of a lad of seven or
eight are unlikely to be authoritative, but I believe that Jodie had reached
mandatory retirement in 1937 or 1938, and that his resentment at having to
“miss” the war was exacerbated by the certain knowledge that his former
American friends and colleagues in Manila were suffering horrors in a Japanese
death camp.
Mrs. Evangeline Heartz, Populist of Arapahoe County, ca. 1915
Heartz, when asked about her name,
always answered that she “had been named by an act of the legislature”. This was true, and thanks to the help of my
dynamic Renaissance contact from Boulder, I am now in possession of the
details. It’s a charming story, and
rather inspiring, as it reminds us of the vibrancy of American democratic
ideals long since smothered by carpets of money. Around 1900 it was not merely possible but
unexceptional for a workingman to be a citizen-legislator in a western state
house. It was more exceptional, but
still possible, that one of his distinguished colleagues might be a woman not
yet enfranchised to vote in Federal elections.
This would describe the situation of my grandfather (Democrat, Chaffee
County) and Mrs. Evangeline Heartz (Democrat-Populist, Arapahoe County).
My source for the following is the House Journal of the Legislative Assembly of
the Territory of Colorado, for the session of March 7, 1902. (Colorado of course became a state in
1876—hence the Centennial State—but
the relevant documentary archive has this title.)
H.R. No. 13, by Mr. Burwell:
“Whereas, The wires announce the
arrival of a little princess at the home of our esteemed fellow member, James
A. Davidson, of Chaffee; be it
“Resolved, That we extend to our
fellow member, the mother and the child, the good wishes of the House of
Representatives of the Thirteenth General Assembly.
“May happiness light the life of
this little one as our almost cloudless Colorado sun does our beloved state.
“Resolved, That the clerk be
instructed to furnish the little one with a copy of these resolutions.”
The resolution was adopted.
It was further moved and seconded
that the little one be named Evangeline Heartz Davidson
The motion prevailed.
The House adjourned.
A wonderful bit of true family
lore, but before I wax too euphoric about the egalitarian spirit of the old
republic, I do note that these same documentary records clearly show that on
the day of my Aunt’s birth in Salida my grandfather was present and voting in
the State House in Denver. The easier
part of childbirth is probably the handing out of the cigars.
Headwaters of the Arkansas River at Salida CO
