In December 1920, Arthur Sweetser reported back on the first assembly of the League of Nations. He went through all of the major points of the meeting, including the discussion of humanitarian issues.

In a recent blog post, the topic ended on the owners of the Montgomery Hall plantation in Staunton, one of the larger tracts near Staunton where enslaved people were forced to work the land. The Virginia Chronicle at the Library of Virginia offers some more information from the state’s newspapers on the fate of the house. For instance, we can see the sale of the land by John Peyton’s heirs shortly before Woodrow Wilson was born. Highlights included a vineyard of catawba grapes, acres already planted in wheat, and housing for enslaved farm workers.

The Valley of the Shadow at the University of Virginia was an early example of a successful digital humanities project. Comparing northern and southern communities, the digital archive is especially valuable for us here at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library because Staunton and surrounding Augusta County are one of the two Civil War regions covered. The Wilson Library was even involved in the initial development of the project in the early 1990s.

We read a bit of Wilson’s diary in the last blog post when discussing his trip to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. We mostly have his sparse notes on life at Princeton and then at home for summer vacations over the next two years. Wilson repeatedly lags in his writing and then berates himself for his failings as a diarist when he starts up again, often months later. As the editors of the Woodrow Wilson Papers describe his journal: “It covers the period June 3 to November 23, 1876 and consists of fifty-five pages of closely written shorthand.”

The volunteers discovered a delightful newspaper article in the collections that is worth sharing. This is from the October 27th edition of the New York American in 1912, just before the election when Woodrow Wilson faced off against two former presidents, Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.

We often have to tell researchers that President Wilson did not keep a diary. That is one of the reasons why the diaries of his doctor are so valuable. There is one intriguing period, though, when young Tommy Wilson did attempt to keep a journal when he was working to teach himself shorthand while a student at Princeton. Many of these were collected and transcribed for the Woodrow Wilson Papers by Arthur S. Link

Recent scholarship has stressed how much “Anglo-Saxon” is really more of a modern term than a reflection of medieval identity. Contemporary documents from the Early Middle Ages rarely mention that name, but as scholars of English became focused on the idea of an old, original language in the sixteenth century, they called it Anglo-Saxon after two Germanic tribes. Late in the 19th century, just as historians began to link the laws of these groups to the liberties of both England and America, scholars again discussed the idea of the ancient Anglo-Saxons. Numerous dictionaries and documents were produced for a wide market of educated people to study the origins of the English language.

On September 25, 1919, in the town of Pueblo, Colorado, President Woodrow Wilson stepped down from his private railcar to give a speech. He was to be the first person ever to address the townspeople in the new City Auditorium. Wilson explained the importance of the League of Nations for the numerous peace agreements that ended the war for the United States, and he showed the ways in which the League would prevent further battles for American soldiers. Not only would it allow conflicts to cool off, before they led the parties to declare war, but also show the common consensus of the world.

Just last year I was reviewing some shelves in the processing room that normally have a book cart standing in front of them. What I remember is that I was looking for a box of pictures that had been misplaced. Instead, I found two beat-up boxes that seemed to hold a bunch of old forms.  Some of them were in different languages. The “Murlison Collection” did not look very promising, but we are trying to finish up any processing backlog that remains scattered about the various rooms of the archives. So we set to work.

In the last years of his life, as recorded in Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound, the poet Ezra Pound had a disturbing dream. “Eustace Mullins, of Staunton, Virginia, one of Pound’s acolytes at St. Elizabeth’s, starred in an unlikely Freudian drama. Ezra and the poet Hilda Doolittle, his young sweetheart, were staying with the Mullins family when Ezra learned that Mullins had raped H.D.” Nothing else is said about Mullins in the book, though there are many references to famous visitors to St. Elizabeth’s, as well as a regular corps of eager young believers. Mullins seems to have met Pound’s wife, Dorothy, in 1949 when he worked at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. A year later he became a researcher for the Library of Congress and a frequent visitor at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Washington, DC, where Ezra Pound was imprisoned for his treasonous radio broadcasts from Italy during World War II. Suspected of being insane, the famous poet was never transferred to prison and was finally freed after twelve years. During this time, Mullins claimed to have been Pound’s secretary and also did research for the House Un-American Activities Committee. And he began his career as an author.