(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[T]he man must have thought she was nuts. Out for a stroll with a group of friends one day around 1900, Herbert Congdon spied a partridge. Congdon, who was carrying a shotgun, lifted his weapon and fired. “BANG went my gun. The bird dropped in a cloud of feathers,” he wrote later in his unpublished autobiography.
The next thing Congdon knew, his acquaintance Sarah Cleghorn was screaming at him.
“Sally rushed at me, red in the face, loud of voice, ready to claw me I thought. As I picked up the bird she burst into tears and screamed ‘I hate you, I hate you!’ ” The episode put Congdon off Cleghorn. He wrote that she was “a decidedly peculiar person of very strong beliefs and feelings.”
Cleghorn was indeed a person of strong beliefs and feelings, at a time when women weren’t supposed to have either, or at least weren’t supposed to express them. Despite her outburst, for most of her life, Cleghorn preferred to voice her opinions in writing. Doing so made her one of the leading activists, educators, authors and poets Vermont has ever produced.
Cleghorn, who was in her mid-20s at the time of her run-in with Congdon, reacted so strongly because she opposed cruelty to animals, which she considered hunting, as well as vivisection (medical experimentation on animals), to be. But her political beliefs went far beyond preventing animal cruelty. Cleghorn was an ardent reformer whose goals were no less than to gain for women the right to vote, improve the conditions of American workers, and end child labor, racism and war.
Cleghorn seems to have been born with her sense of justice. One of her early memories is how, at about the age of 5, her younger brother, Carl, had “picked up an offensive habit of throwing out his stomach and declaring ‘I’m a man, and I can do what I please.’”
Born in Virginia in 1876, Cleghorn spent her early years in Minnesota and Wisconsin. After the death of her mother and sister, Cleghorn moved at the age of 9 to Manchester, Vt., where she and Carl were raised by two aunts. “We’d never known anything of community life until we went to Vermont,” she later wrote. “In Manchester we soon felt their warmth and expansion. Without naming or recognizing community existence, we liked it even to enchantment.”
Cleghorn graduated from local Burr & Burton Seminary and attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before beginning a successful writing career. Her articles appeared in such publications as Scribner’s, Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly.
She became friends with another writer who had moved to Vermont at a young age, Dorothy Canfield Fisher. In fact, it was Fisher who had calmed Cleghorn after the incident involving the partridge. They would work together several times over the years, beginning in 1916 with “Fellow Captains,” a book of essays.
World War I further radicalized Cleghorn. In 1917, she published a series of political poems in her book “Portraits and Protests.” Her most famous poem, “Golf Links,” speaks out against child labor.
“The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.”
Her political views, particularly her pacifism, got in the way of her career. During World War I, Cleghorn’s acceptances from magazines dropped off precipitously. Cleghorn, who never married, turned to teaching, accepting positions at girls’ schools in New York state and later at Vassar and Wellesley colleges.
Her passions, however, remained politics and writing. Cleghorn, who was a socialist, believed that national leaders tricked people into fighting wars. Pacifism was her response. Reviewing her country’s military history, mentioning first the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars, Cleghorn wrote in her autobiography, “I saw war now quite naked. Its Mexican mask was childishly transparent. Not the Mexicans, now or in the eighteen-forties, not the British, in 1776 or 1812, not the Sioux or Cherokees had ever been our enemies, but war itself. War was the enemy of all of us at once.”
Analyzing the root of war, she wrote, “I saw its foundations in shameful and ridiculous timidities. It throve on scaring people into murder; scaring them of foreigners, as they had once been scared of witches, scared of Catholics, of Protestants, of Jews, of their own poor little naughty children going to hell.
“I saw war as the great Pharisee of the world, causing every nation to thank God that he was so good while his neighbor was so bad, that it was his duty to be the stern executioner. I saw it as the apotheosis of the old superstition of punishment, that we can force human nature to be good by frightening and disgracing it and making it unhappy. And I began to have for war, as for poverty, race prejudice and all other cruelties, the kind of loathing that most Americans have for legalized prostitution. I was, in short, a very thorough pacifist.”
Cleghorn resurrected her writing career in 1934, when she dramatized Fisher’s popular children’s book, “Understood Betsy.” She followed that by publishing her autobiography, “Threescore” in 1936. Then in 1940, she and Fisher co-wrote “Nothing Ever Happens and How It Does,” a series of short stories meant as edifying lessons for young readers.
But politics was never far from her mind. She published “Poems of Peace and Freedom” in 1945.
Throughout her life, Cleghorn was never one for moderation. As her friend Robert Frost wrote in the introduction to “Threescore”:
“To a saint and a reformer like Sarah Cleghorn the great importance is not to get hold of both ends, but of the right end. She has to be partisan and even a trifle grim.”
Cleghorn, Frost wrote, “is the complete abolitionist. She has it in for race prejudice and many other ignobleness besides. Some time I intend to ask her if she isn’t bent on having the world perfect at last.”
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