Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber A prelude to the Second World War 1 Ezgi İlimen Dorothy Canfield’s interwar social novel Seasoned Timber (1939) portrays the pre-WWII years through her warning about rising European totalitarianism and antisemitism. Canfield points out American nativism, anti-immigration policies, working class resentment, and the post-WWI illusionary isolationism from the European conflict. Set in the turbulent 1930s, the Clifford community serves as a microcosm of postwar materialism and progressivism with references to anti-communist hysteria, rising nationalism, and white supremacist tendencies. The principal of the Clifford Academy, T. C. Hulme, thus expresses Canfield’s concerns about another world war after the failure of the post-WWI peace settlements. In the novel, the emergence of antisemitic, elitist, and sexist totalitarianism results in a struggle between the supporters of conformity and those who resist un-American defiance of freedom, equal opportunity, and democratic principles. Depicting cultural and religious intolerance, ideological attacks, and discrimination, Canfield’s novel exemplifies her interwar progressive agenda through a shift from personal politics to public consciousness about American interwar society and global affairs in the 1930s. 1. Introduction Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958) was a renowned bestselling American writer, dedicated educational reformer, and social activist during the first half of the twentieth century. Her novels and short stories reflect her concerns about race, class, and gender prejudices, and their resulting injustices, through her insightful interpretation of interwar American society and Europe. Canfield, whose married name was Fisher, was com- 1 With further research, this article is derived from the author’s PhD dissertation. The author is grateful to Professor Tanfer Emin Tunç as the dissertation advisor. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0014 Ezgi İlimen 226 mitted to relief initiatives and producing wartime narratives, which cemented her role as a humanitarian figure, social critic, and prolific author. 2 According to Mark J. Madigan, she started her writing career through apprenticeships at newspapers and magazines, followed by the publication of her first novel Gunhild (1907), through which she cultivated her voice and interest in the relationship between men and women. This was followed by her novels The Squirrel Cage (1912) and The Bent Twig (1915) (xi). Canfield was highly influenced by Maria Montessori and published A Montessori Mother (1912) and later a children’s novel, Understood Betsy (1916), on her educational theories (Madigan xi). Canfield’s Home Fires in France (1918) and The Day of Glory (1919) portrayed wartime France. 3 The Brimming Cup (1921) achieved great commercial success as a counternarrative to Sinclair Lewis’s satire of small-town life in Main Street. It claimed second place on the bestseller list, after Lewis’s work, and emerged as “the first modern best-seller” that critically addressed racial bias against African Americans (xi). Dorothy Canfield emerged as one of the most acclaimed American writers due to the versatility of her works and sociopolitical agenda. The Home-Maker (1924) was another well-received bestseller that portrays “role-reversal” in married life, as it redefines the traditional homemakernurturer and breadwinner roles for mutual happiness (Madigan xi). Her translation of Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ was “the most purchased” book in 1923, while renowned critic William L. Phelps praised her novel Her Son’s Wife (1926) for being worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. The financial success of her novel Bonfire, published in serialized form by the Woman’s Home Companion in 1933, her honorary degrees from several institutions, and her interest in writing children’s books also added to her fame (xii). Furthermore, she was devoted to humanitarian work through her efforts to establish a Braille Press and a children’s hospital in France during WWI, her services to the Vermont State Board of Education and the Adult Education Association, her organization of the Children’s Crusade during WWII, and her lifelong contributions to charity projects, leading Eleanor Roosevelt to compliment her as “the most influential woman of her time” (xii). Janis P. Stout views Canfield’s social and humanitarian novels as political fiction, thus providing a renewed perspective on her work beyond the 2 The writer signed her works of fiction as Dorothy Canfield, whereas she signed her works of nonfiction as Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Throughout the article, she will remain as Dorothy Canfield. 3 With her wartime relief work in France, Canfield used her writing as a way to earn monetary support for relief projects, creating war sketches, such as “The Little Soldier of France” and “In the Brussels Jail” that appealed to the home front audiences (Washington 89). Thus, she raised humanitarian consciousness about the war. Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 227 cycle of middlebrow writers and, in the process, reconceptualizing the political novel (“Writing Politically” 252). Stout relates the longestablished gap or interpretive difference between political and middlebrow writers to a traditional view of gender that asserted that political writing was an embodiment of masculine interests in public issues, whereas women were concerned with “local, domestic, or nurturing” subject matters (“Writing Politically” 252). Canfield’s fiction shares the characteristics of middlebrow and political literature as a transition from the domestic sphere to the community (Stout, “Writing Politically” 252). Thus, her novels exhibit cross-genre elements and multiple affiliations with progressive writers and bestselling interwar authors. Stout notes that her main characters are committed to ethical behavior and principles, and are unafraid to confront social customs and standards. Canfield’s writing thus “serve[s] society through the quiet and ultimately educational pressure of modelling an alternative in one’s individual life” (“Writing Politically” 256). The individual’s political stance in their personal life proves that indeed, “the personal is political” (256). As a bestselling author, Dorothy Canfield integrates humanitarian drive, sociocultural concerns, and a progressive agenda into her political fiction that reflects elaborate storytelling, realistic portrayals of American life and society, and critical perspectives on historical periods. This article thus analyzes Canfield’s interwar social novel Seasoned Timber (1939) with its emphasis on the rise of antisemitism and fascism and the inevitable path to a second world war. Seasoned Timber emerges as a testimony to the postwar failure to secure world peace. Canfield challenges interwar American isolationism with the rising tension, antisemitic atrocities, aggressive territorial expansion, and totalitarian regimes of Europe. She asserts that American values, virtues, and sense of unity are under threat by delusional materialism, the corruptive desire for power and influence, discriminatory attacks on American citizens, and the elitist class struggle against immigrants and the working class in the postwar era. Canfield speaks through T. C. Hulme, the principal of the Clifford Academy, whose loyalty to American, that is humanitarian, principles functions as a revelation of American ignorance about the national sociocultural crisis and the possibility of impending war. Canfield uses her social novel as a vehicle to reflect on her interwar concerns about peace, education, racial discrimination, class resentments, gender prejudice, and injustice. Her characters’ various encounters with these issues reveal a consciousnessraising agenda that promotes personal commitment to human dignity in the private lives and public selves of people. With democratic principles and humanitarian progressivism, her works address forms of discrimination, the detrimental effects of war, and even socialist ideas that under- Ezgi İlimen 228 line the “fairness of distribution and pacifism”, thereby engaging in a unique form of literary activism (Stout, “Dorothy Canfield” 46). 2. The post-WWI years and American literature In between the armistice on November 11, 1918, and the Paris Peace Conference on January 18, 1919, the Allied powers undertook the timepressing job of assigning delegates and completing conference preparations, including reports on complex problems, grievances, and demands (“Germany and the Peace Treaty” 381). The Peace Conference was to provide ultimate relief and definite solutions regarding a “permanent peace” through the establishment of a League of Nations, the settlement of territorial expansion and border conflicts, the founding of new nation states with “liberty and unimpaired integrity” out of collapsed European empires, and the designation of mandates for millions of people in Africa and Asia (381). In the meantime, the peace treaty and the League of Nations represented Wilsonian idealism and his commitment to the principles of world peace, justice, and democracy. John Maynard Keynes harshly criticized the peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (published in 1919 in London and in New York in 1920) (Rothermund 841). Keynes noted that peacetime financial and political pressure on Germany would have serious repercussions, claiming another war could be on the horizon in just two decades. His critique of peace settlements and predictions supported Americans seeking non-involvement in the League, Britons siding with Germany for a revision of the treaty terms, and acceptance of appeasement policies (841). Prior to the US Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles on March 19, 1920, President Wilson ran a cross-country campaign for its ratification with his open criticism of the Senate’s “reservations” about the peace treaty, particularly the terms of the League of Nations (“Senate’s Rejection” 27). On March 8, President Wilson’s letter to Senator Hitchcock, who conducted the administration’s campaign for the treaty, emphasized his uncompromising stance about modifications to Article X of the treaty: “Any League of Nations which does not guarantee as a matter of incontestable right the political independence and integrity of each of its members might be hardly more than a futile scrap of paper, as ineffective in operation as the agreement between Belgium and Germany which the Germans violated in 1914” (qtd. in “Senate’s Rejection” 27-28). In his letter, Wilson justifies Article X of the treaty as the guarantor of postwar stability and security when it comes to the pressing issues of shared political interests, territorial rivalries, the possibility of future aggression, global peace and justice, and unremitting threats of militarism and impe- Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 229 rialism. Wilson concludes that people either defend democratic principles for the freedom of nations, or support imperial power and oppression (28). Nevertheless, he was unable to conquer opposition to the treaty and the League of Nations. The US Congress never ratified the Treaty of Versailles choosing, instead, to sign separate peace treaties with the aggressors in 1921. The postwar politics of the Allied powers (i.e., their peacemaking efforts, manipulation of war debt, and disarmament policy) and hyperinflation in Germany and other parts of Europe triggered the resentment that would ultimately culminate in another war by the end of the turbulent 1930s. In this regard, antisemitism in Europe was instrumentalized to catalyze the postwar backlash against a socioeconomic and political imbalance. The rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany and Italy promoted the scapegoating of Jews through antisemitic propaganda and policymaking. In Nazi Germany, antisemitism resulted in a “race” based redefinition of Jewish identity, severe limitations on rights and civil liberties that eventually became the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and violent attacks on Jewish communities and businesses. The experience of the Great War dominated modern American literature of the 1920s, until the Great Depression. In the postwar era, a generation of writers - the Lost Generation - influenced American fiction through their observations of WWI as servicemen, pacifists, noncombatant participants, or critics. John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, and Edmund Wilson took part in the war effort as ambulance drivers (Bradbury 75). F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected the expatriate American perspective, postwar disillusionment, and European civilization. William Faulkner portrayed the returning veteran’s homecoming story and dilemma, without setting foot on European battlefields. In Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), Amory Blaine represents the coming-of-age of a new postwar generation who seemed to be “dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success” (76). John Dos Passos’s One Man’s Initiation - 1917 (1920) tells the story of a hero’s growth amid European turmoil. As Hemingway’s story “A Soldier’s Home” implies, prewar hopes, dreams, and social expectations seem meaningless to a returning soldier like Krebs. The rise of a new postwar individualism necessitated “new perceptions and modes of speech, new kinds of existential self-awareness - to survive” (76). The war literature reflects a new literary style and way of seeing the relationship between man, nature, machinery, and history. Postwar literature, however, concentrates on physical, psychological, and existential suffering through metaphors and images of “waste, decline, and sterility, of a downward historical curve”, such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), Ezra Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Ezgi İlimen 230 (1922), and the “Valley of Ashes” from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) (77). Concerning women’s writing and their contributions to critical debates about WWI and the interwar period, Elizabeth Nolan underlines the role of American women as notable writers and individuals whose wartime narratives convey “the position of the woman in a changing society” and the view on gender during WWI. In addition to Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, Nolan indicates Mary Borden’s “fragmentary, experimental nurse’s narrative” in The Forbidden Zone (1929), Mildred Aldrich’s testimonial narrative from the Marne in four volumes, wartime writing of Gertrude Atherton, 4 Marie Van Vorst and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and those women engaged in wartime charity and relief services (528). Through the power of literary imagination or direct observations, they depicted wartime Europe in various genres (Nolan 529). With pacifist or propagandist views, they stepped into the traditional masculine realm by addressing warfare as writers, providing medical support as nurses, and assisting relief efforts (529). Besides critically acclaimed Gertrude Stein, H.D., Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, other interwar women writers explored the disillusionment with war, modernity, industrialization, urbanization, and discrimination. Dorothy Canfield was one of these neglected American women writers who have remained understudied. Tracing the link between interwar social history and social novels, Warren French regards the post-WWI decades as an era of irrational irresponsibility (6). French argues that the grand imprudence of the 1920s is best depicted in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which portrays the nonchalance of the “self-ordained aristocrats” and the disillusionment of “dreamers” who would wake up to European totalitarianism and expansionism in 1939 (6). William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway published The Hamlet (1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), respectively, as social novels at the end of the interwar era. They address historical events in a way that necessitates historical knowledge for their interpretation, while providing the writers’ unique perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, the Okie crisis, strikes and labor unions, race politics and lynching, and social problems (French 7). The advent of WWII also signaled the decline of the social novel and the reform and activism it represented. According to French, “1939 and 1940 marked not only the end of an era in social and political history, but the 4 In “Gertrude Atherton’s WWI Propaganda to the Home Front”, I provide an analysis of Atherton’s WWI narratives Mrs. Balfame (1916), The Living Present (1917), and The White Morning (1918) that portray women’s home front services and direct engagement with the European conflict. In this respect, I discuss American women’s rising wartime awareness and sense of duty as nurses, relief organizers, and staunch allies of their European sisters (İlimen 40). Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 231 end of a literary generation, especially in the creation of the social novel” (17). 3. Seasoned Timber: The post-WWI crisis culminating in WWII The Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal years coincided with the Nazi rise to power in Germany, which resulted in “an explosion of unprecedented antisemitic fervor” (Dinnerstein 105). Protestant and Catholic agitators, and the hostile statements of social and religious leaders, provoked anti-Jewish aggression, violence in urban centers, and conspiracy theories that allegedly threatened Christian America (105). The 1930s was a decade of extreme political and ideological factions with the emergence of Nazism and fascism on the conservative right and communism on the radical left. Therefore, as Alex Goodall states, the FDR administration sought ways to avoid offending political sensibilities, considering the US diplomatic relations with Europe and its domestic and international repercussions with the rise of antisemitic practices, the expansion of fascist regimes, and the threat of communism. Referring to the Cabinet of FDR, particularly the Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s attempts to avoid direct criticism of fascism, Goodall points out the growing tendency to use totalitarianism as a term rather than fascism (50). The political correctness strategy reflects a safeguarding response to the sudden shift from “the threat to national stability from the left (and primarily from within)” to “coming to terms with a new enemy on the right (and without)” and a judgment of “modern regimes of extreme right and left” as “two faces of the same evil” (50). In the United States, Jews did not encounter segregation laws, deportations, or forced internment, as they did elsewhere, which permitted them to build lives and businesses in their own communities until antisemitism began to seep in from Europe (Dinnerstein 106). European antisemitism was gaining popular support and a violent edge with the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, leading to pogroms and attacks on Jews in many eastern and central European countries during the 1920s, particularly at universities (106-107). Concerning the roots of anti-revolutionary, anti-alien, and antisemitic movements in the United States, Donald S. Strong points out a passage in the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), the emergence of nativist societies in the 1850s, such as the Know-Nothings (the American Party) in opposition to the Irish Catholic immigrants, and the arrival of Jews from eastern and southern Europe (14-15). The reactionary views of the newcomers resulted in the immigration restriction laws of 1921 and 1924 (the Johnson- Reed Act), and arguments supporting the superiority of the Nordic race as promoted by eugenicists (Strong 15). After WWI, antisemitism gained Ezgi İlimen 232 political currency beyond a form of social discrimination. Approximately two million Jewish immigrants had arrived since the late 1880s, and some were targeted by the Red Scare, the wide circulation of antisemitic media, and the Ku Klux Klan (15). The postwar economic downturn aggravated the clash between radicals and conservative groups with hypernationalist ideas and Jew-baiting on both sides of the Atlantic. In Seasoned Timber, Dorothy Canfield places the intense political atmosphere of 1930s Europe in the background of her American setting, Clifford, Vermont, in the period right before WWII. 5 Canfield begins the novel with the Principal of Clifford Academy, Timothy Coulton (T.C.) Hulme, who reads “an account of recent anti-Semitic brutalities under Hitler” from the Manchester Guardian, before he puts it aside with “a humanitarian familiar feeling of guilt over the passively accepted safety of his own life” (5). Canfield’s first glance at Mr. Hulme not only depicts his responsiveness to the humanitarian crisis and the serious offenses committed against Jews, but it also underlines the ironic American sense of security and isolationism from the raging unrest in Europe. Afterward, Canfield describes the geographical and symbolic situatedness of the Academy, which is literally set on a hill, “a slightly spot, set above the town on a shelf of rocky ground jutting out from the mountain” (6). The Academy overlooks the town and represents American ideals, including exceptionalism, which will be tested by the encroaching threat: a paradigm shift from democratic foundations to an unwelcoming American society. Canfield portrays the small town as the microcosm of the nation in her premonition of future conflict. Canfield questions to what extent American idealism and values provide a safe shelter from the culminating political disarray in Europe, and how far Americans are prepared to go to defend their founding principles and democracy against authoritarianism and persecution. During the hundred and seventeenth year of the Academy, the opening ceremony brings out bittersweet memories of bygone school days for the WASP townspeople, who regard the institution with pride and respect. However, 5 Tanfer Emin Tunc points out a white supremacist tradition in Vermont, “the Kake Walk”, which was an outgrowth of minstrel shows performed by white men in blackface makeup during the Winter Carnival at the University of Vermont from 1893 to 1969 (47). Tunc states that the racist public spectacle signified an overwhelming nostalgia for the antebellum South, plantation slavery, and the servitude and submissiveness of African Americans that it represented, during a time of massive social change (47). Dorothy Canfield’s choice of the fictional Clifford, Vermont, is not a coincidence in this sense, as the state, with all its whiteness, had a troubled racial history. Canfield portrays an interwar community of people who struggle with issues of discrimination, social integration, and the class mobility of immigrants. In their defense of “true” American identity and values, antisemites and nativists clash with liberals. Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 233 immigrant and working-class citizens listen to “the bell and the bugle” from the Academy Hill with disbelief, questioning the illusionary American promises of equal opportunity and class mobility: “Polish and French- Canadian workmen in the woolen mills and chair factory down at Clifford Depot renewed their resentment against the American pretence [sic] that all young people have the same opportunities for success [...] although everybody knows that in the modern world nobody can succeed who has not also money and influence” (Canfield 33). Through the disillusionment of immigrants, one can infer that the intrusive power of materialism, elitism, and nativist sentiments jeopardized American ideals and promises long before the outbreak of WWII, during the turbulent 1930s. The nostalgic narrative style of Seasoned Timber sustains a traditional sense of American security and indifference through occasional references to European affairs, at first without specific associations or historical parallels. On one such occasion, during his business trip to New York, Mr. Hulme is distracted by alarming headlines concerning the “Fascist bombing of civilians in Spain” and “more Nazi savagery in Germany” (Canfield 141). His initial reaction is to ward off such unpleasant news while running errands, which symbolizes the Americans’ failure to interpret European affairs. Still, he implicitly juxtaposes the violence and rising conflict in Europe with scenes of civilized modern cityscapes and amenities in New York, distancing himself from the tension and aggression between European nations and small-town life in Clifford. Associating civilization with urban life, security, and progress, he has a meeting with a Jewish woman, Mrs. Bernstein, who attempts to transfer her son to Clifford Academy due to financial problems resulting from the economic crisis. Mr. Hulme decides to give a chance to the Jewish student, considering his potential and dire circumstances. Subsequently, Mr. Hulme’s observations of the exhausted working class, the ungracious response of an elderly woman towards his empathy and decency, and the suffocating air in the subway cast a dim light on the city with its fast-paced lifestyle, perils, and insensitivity to human suffering. In this way, Mr. Hulme’s stay in New York challenges his belief that American cities are beacons of modern civilization in contrast to European nations, which signifies the fallacy of glorifying American values, institutions, progress and life style in the interwar years. His meeting with Mr. Wheaton, one of the wealthy trustees of the school, proves that antisemitism, ideological frictions, and discriminatory policies have already reached American cities. His encounter with the trustee puts Mr. Hulme’s traditional American mindset to the test, implying that his firm belief in American values might be further challenged by the highly esteemed people of the Academy and the town. The novel’s political undertone reveals Canfield’s warnings about impending social conflicts, specifically race relations, discrimination against Ezgi İlimen 234 immigrants, and concerns about social mobility. A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elitist, Mr. Wheaton harshly criticizes the acceptance of Jewish students to the school and the arrival of (Jewish) immigrants: “‘[Y]ou don’t realize that the only way to handle that problem is ab-so-lute exclusion [...] Let in Jews, and they’d make one mouthful of you. Admit just one - and the ghetto pushes in after him. We old-Americans must stand solidly against the flood of them that’s pouring in from Europe! ’” (Canfield 147). Mr. Wheaton’s antisemitic comments are the culmination of prejudice against Jews and immigrants in the United States that had materialized during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Hasia Diner indicates the Joseph Seligman incident in 1877, when a Jewish millionaire was denied entry to the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, as the first anti-Jewish response (4-5). The nativism of the 1920s enacted anti-immigration sentiments into law, such as the 1924 National Origins (Johnson-Reed) Act, which targeted European Jews, among many other groups (Diner 5). By the mid-1920s, “many private colleges and universities, clubs, resorts and hotels, hospitals, law firms, and other employers” had either established quotas against Jews or directly denied their admission (5). Furthermore, anti-Jewish narratives and stereotypical images circulated widely during the lynching of Leo Frank in 1916 and Woodrow Wilson’s initial veto (later overridden) of Louis Brandeis’s nomination to the Supreme Court, which disseminated the idea of a “Jewish problem” in the United States (5). Through Mr. Hulme, Canfield severely criticizes the modern individual, who lacks commitment to democratic principles and the power to resist violence, manipulation, and fear - common control mechanisms over the masses. With his share of self-blame, Mr. Hulme observes the alarming rise of fascism around the world: “‘[D]o you see anybody seriously trying to invent new and decent ways to keep order in crowds? You do not. They accept indecent ones’” (Canfield 222). He notes that people maintain the progressive vision of modernity through innovative ideas, change, and proper solutions to problems; however, they remain silent to totalitarianism and violent repression of human rights without an act of meaningful defiance. He relates the crisis in Europe to the resurgence of an oppressive pattern that acquires power over people through public indifference to injustices. Thus, he comments on the current situation in Europe as a type of mob mentality, “‘[k]nocking down enough people and kicking them when they’re down, to scare the rest into letting you get away with murder - the minute Mussolini began to stick out his jaw, I knew what he was up to. When Hitler knocked down the Jews and began to kick them, I recognized the gesture’” (Canfield 222). As Mr. Hulme’s argument suggests, the rise of totalitarian regimes silences the multitudes Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 235 through ideological, psychological, and economic control. 6 Concerned about the political turmoil in Europe, Mr. Hulme alludes to the justification of tyranny and antisemitic policies in the interwar world. In the 1930s, the fascist regime in Italy targeted Jews as the “new internal enemy” who assumingly collaborated with foreigners in violation of national interests, which was a reflection of the international political trend on the Italian domestic policy and rationalized antisemitism (Ialongo 334). Through the attack on Italian Jews, Italian Fascism had found an ideological means of regaining public support for the totalitarian remodeling of society and the emergence of the “Fascist new man” who blamed corruption and materialism for the descent of the Italian bourgeoisie. Italian Jews were villainized with the growth of antisemitism in the circles of the Fascist Party (334). With the use of biological racism to create national unity around chauvinistic identity and consciousness, the persecution of Italian Jews resulted in a massive scale of oppression and extermination (345). Parallel to the totalitarianism and strategic use of antisemitism in interwar Italy, Adolf Hitler engaged in systematic propaganda in order to secure his totalitarian rule and expansionist policies in Europe, concentrating on the German people’s “frustration, displacement and anxiety” in the post-WWI era and the global economic depression (Miller i). Hitler offered Christian Germans a way to channel their war-related resentment and insecurities, in this case towards the victimization of Jews through collective hostility and action (i). He appealed to the fears of the middle and upper classes, particularly “bankers, industrialists, the Protestant and Catholic churchmen, the statesmen, and the newspaper owners” through the alleged conspiratorial connection between Jews and communism, and the devaluation of democracy (Miller ii). Thus, he transformed selfdestructive anger into public support through Nazism’s anti-communist stance (ii). The Great Depression was equally alarming to American industrialists, clergy, politicians, and agitators who viewed the economic crisis, organized labor, unemployment, and the New Deal as pathways to communist and socialist revolutions, favoring Hitler’s anticommunist and antisemitic autocracy to preserve big business, class distinctions, and white Anglo-Saxon Christianity (iii). 6 In reference to social Darwinist ideas about survival of the fittest and false ethnological doctrines of the time, Hitler claimed to defend the interests of German society against the influences of Jews, democratic principles and Marxist class struggle (Turner 34). After he established his totalitarian regime, his plan was to expand the borders of Germany and dominate Europe; however, he remained silent about his agenda in the early 1930s. Instead, he used civil and political liberties, democracy, and the constitution in order to gain the confidence and support of German voters. He attacked the republicans whom he blamed for the impacts of Marxism and the Treaty of Versailles (35). Ezgi İlimen 236 In the same way, Richard Frankel argues for historical and ideological parallelisms between the rise of Nazism in Germany and the conservative radical movements in the United States in terms of both states’ adherence to racist and antisemitic agendas, public support of and manipulative resort to nationalist discourse (235). Frankel views European antisemitism that brought the Nazis to power as a result of “long-term historical trends” and economic and political upheavals in Germany, asking if it might have happened in the United States too (235). He challenges the Americans’ sense of security from European totalitarianism with their faith in democratic principles, freedom and equality, and selfrighteousness in race and class politics. Likewise, Dorothy Canfield highlights these concerns in Seasoned Timber through her portrayal of Clifford in the pre-WWII era. Canfield’s novel depicts antisemitism and totalitarian threat, eclipsed by racism, class concerns and materialism. The Clifford Academy serves as a testing ground for defending American ideals and virtues of equal opportunity, class mobility, and success drive against the rising tide of discrimination and the persecution of Jews in particular. In line with this, Frankel indicates “strikingly similar rhetoric” and language of radical antisemites in Germany and the United States (236). In that, the administration of FDR allegedly associated with the secret Jewish international organization, and was blamed for helping the Soviet cause with the New Deal and plotting another world war for the Jewish cause (236). In the novel, the portrayal of the Clifford community is a commentary on American interwar society and the world in general, with Canfield’s apprehension about the European conflict on the horizon. Mr. Hulme is challenged by the racist, sexist, and classist preconditions of Mr. Wheaton’s bequest upon his death. He leaves more than one million dollars to the school, provided that it is named after him as a preparatory school for all-American (WASP) boys. This also involves the exclusion of Jewish students and raising the tuition to keep out the non-elite: “‘George Clarence Wheaton found dead - apoplexy - will leaves Academy one million dollars for endowment - two hundred thousand for buildings - on condition name be changed - Wheaton Preparatory School - also exclusion of all Jewish students - Jewish defined as person with any relative of Hebrew blood - codicil prescribes also that tuition be […]’”. (Canfield 315). In response to Mr. Wheaton’s will, Mr. Dewey, another trustee, and Mr. Hulme take a silent oath, believing that the time has come “for all good men to stand up for their country” (316). Their resistance to un- American dictates champions the principle of human dignity above capitalism, intolerance, and enmity. Their defense of American principles amounts to the defense of the nation in a war against tyranny, which alludes to the colonial struggle against British rule for independence and Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 237 the abolition of slavery through the Civil War. Many prominent prep schools, colleges, and universities were committed to such antisemitic admission policies during the interwar years, and Canfield draws attention to this practice in her novel. The discrimination of Jews in higher education facilities introduced the quota system in colleges and medical schools with precedents in private schools and campus life (Higham, “Social Discrimination” 21). The post-WWI antisemitic policies targeted rising opportunities of postwar youth and college enrolments with the democratization of education. Columbia University implemented an anti- Jewish bar in its admission policy, which set a precedent for Harvard College in the early 1920s, through implicit changes in application and entrance procedures (21-22). Other colleges established questionnaires and demanded a photograph of the candidate among other requirements (22). Likewise, Rutgers University acted in accordance with prevalent anti-Jewish admission policies, resulting in the Jewish community’s reaction to discriminatory quotas in higher education institutions receiving public funds (Greenberg and Zenchelsky 295). Elite colleges opposed applicants considered “socially undesirable” and attempted to preserve their “exclusive” WASP student profile through restrictive policies (296). 4. Conflicted American promises and antisemitism The post-WWI era involved a deep sense of insecurity and the drive to seek “normalcy” after the internationalist war years, the October Revolution of 1917, and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in Russia, which triggered anti-immigration policies that were designed to preserve white Anglo- Saxon Protestant American identity (Dinnerstein 78). During the 1920s, the children of Jewish immigrants would “enter the elite Protestant world” in search of education, employment, and housing; however, they encountered antisemitic discrimination, regardless of their acculturation (78-79). Postwar antisemitism was prevalent, supported by the popularity of pseudoscientific, eugenic arguments about the white Christian race, the alleged threat of communist and socialist revolutions, and the fear of the “Protestant elite” losing their dominant position in prominent American institutions (79). As a result, Jews became the target of ideological, class-based, racist, and religious concerns of different groups. Furthermore, the Red Scare and labor unrest gave rise to the communist hysteria that scapegoated foreigners, particularly Jews (79). In reaction to their rising numbers among European immigrants and public visibility, many WASPs began associating Jews with materialism and radicalism. The eugenics movement benefited from the publicity of eugenic writing and social Darwinism; however, it owed its development to socioeconomic and cultural transformations taking place in Britain and the United Ezgi İlimen 238 States in the twentieth century: industrialization, expansion of cities and slums, migration from rural to urban centers, and the rise of immigration (Kevles 72). The accumulating statistical data about urban vices, such as prostitution, crime rates, alcoholism, and disease, called for urgent measures in both countries. The United States had had an upsurge in immigration since the late 1880s, which raised concerns about foreignborn population growth, cultural domination of native-born Anglo- Americans, and urban life (72). The prominent figures of the American eugenics movement were professors and members of research institutes with their agenda about immigration, public health and sterilization laws in the 1920s. 7 As the director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, Harry H. Laughlin was an eminent promoter of eugenics, the forced sterilization of people considered “unfit”, and immigration restriction laws. Laughlin prepared a “model sterilization law” that would be well-received by many states and the Nazi regime in Germany, and also provided his services as the scientific advisor to the Immigration and Naturalization Committee of the House of Representatives (McDonald 381). However, American eugenicists could not maintain their influence in the 1930s despite organizations such as the Eugenics Research Association and the Human Betterment Foundation in California (Kühl 79). The interwar years reflected the rise and notoriety of eugenics, seeing their popularity and the consequences of anti-Semitic race policy in the Nazi Germany. The extremist antisemitism of Nazi Germany resulted in American eugenicists’ disaffiliation with German racial hygienists after the passing of the Nuremberg laws in 1935, underlining the redefinition of German citizenship and the prohibition of marriages between Jews and Germans (Kühl 96-97). Beginning in November 1938 with the statesanctioned pogrom, restrictions targeted Jews in Germany along with 7 Laura L. Lovett writes about the emergence of “fitter family contests” with the legacy of better baby contests in Iowa and eugenic concerns about heredity, which shifted the primary focus from public health to the ideal family in the 1920s (70). Organized by Dr. Florence Sherbon and Mary T. Watts, the contests took place during the agricultural fairs, which reflected a longing for the traditional rural family threatened by urban life and the Roaring Twenties cultural transformation (Lovett 70-71). Thus, “human livestock competition[s]” offered “a modernist promise of scientific control” of the American family (71). Cold Spring Harbor’s Eugenics Record Office (ERO) held its national campaign around state fairs, which aimed to make a distinction between normality and abnormality to be pursued by positive and negative eugenics (Emin 2). The fitter family contests advocated by the ERO promoted white Anglo-American characteristics and racial purity while eugenic films were portraying genetic abnormalities of “unchecked breeding” (2). Eugenicists visited freak shows to gather scientific proof about “degenerate heredity”, including the sideshow performers of Coney Island, believing that cases of abnormality or disability would legitimize their agenda of racial and cultural homogenization (3). Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 239 segregation and forced labor, which disgraced the Nazi race politics in mainstream American media; however, Germans alluded to racism and violence in the United States in retaliation (98). In their democracy versus autocracy campaign, Mr. Hulme and Mr. Dewey visit Clifford residents about Mr. Wheaton’s bequest. Mr. Hulme claims that accepting it would mean running the risk of losing the American ideals and democracy, which they fought and died for in the Great War: “[H]ere’s Fascism, right in our lives, trying to buy us into endorsing one of its dirtiest ideas [...] The race-prejudice of that bequest is an open, shameless attempt to knock down and kick to death the principles we were brought up in and still believe in [...] Over in France when our soldiers first began to arrive, everybody on both sides was wondering [...] Well, they did stand up - they went forward under fire [...] Can we stand up under it? ” (Canfield 393) With freedom, dignity, and cultural diversity threatened by the autocratic leaders of Europe, Canfield’s novel signifies a cautionary interwar narrative to the American public through the voice and concerns of Mr. Hulme. In defense of American ideals, he fiercely opposes anti-democratic interests and practices that are becoming prevalent in Europe under totalitarian regimes and in Clifford where these ideas appear in disguise of a wealthy trustee’s bequest. Thus, he runs a campaign to warn against the global threat of fascism with references to the disheartening news from Europe. At the same time, he struggles to convey the imminent local threat to the people of Clifford who are still clueless about the consequences of their own ignorance, passivity, and scapegoating of others. As Canfield’s text indicates, the postwar era reflected a political swing between radicalism and conservative policies that targeted liberalism and immigration. According to John Higham, the antisemitic nationalism that emerged as the embodiment of wartime “100 percent Americanism” and anti-German sentiments also targeted German Jews who held wealth and prominent positions during the Wilson administration (Strangers 278). This continued into the interwar years in the form of a violent backlash against radicalism and immigrants, particularly Jews and Catholics. Historically, race and color politics had been integral to the experience of American Jews who witnessed the Jim Crow years, mob violence, and racist legislations that defined the position, rights, and privileges of people categorized as white or “non-white” with firmly-held cultural assumptions and constructions of American identity (Diner 13). American Jews encountered biological racism that made their whiteness questionable in the late nineteenth century and discrimination in the fields of higher education, housing, and employment through individual or institu- Ezgi İlimen 240 tional initiatives, which differed from the experiences of African Americans, Asian Americans of Chinese or Japanese descent, and Native Americans (14). These groups blamed direct governmental orders, court decisions and laws, including the Constitution, for their grievances (Diner 14). Jews arrived in search of equal economic opportunities, having seen pogroms, riots, and instability in Europe. This was why they appreciated the promises of US citizenship; however, acquiring social acceptance was another matter (15). Between 1920 and 1924, Henry Ford’s weekly The Dearborn Independent published a series of antisemitic articles, called “The International Jew”. The articles appealed to a broad audience, who appreciated his antisemitic campaign, sent money, and asked for more material. Supporters included academics, Christian ministers, and leaders of associations, among others (Dinnerstein 82). 8 The popularity of the articles revealed wide acceptance of anti-Jewish views and readiness to adopt discriminatory policies in the postwar period. 9 To name a few, “banks, insurance companies, publishing houses [...] advertising agencies, school districts, major industrial companies [...] hospitals, universities, and law firms” discriminated implicitly or openly in their employment policy (Dinnerstein 89). The 1920s admission policies of leading American institutions resulted in the struggle over meritocracy, and its differing promises to WASPs and Jews. The growing presence of Jews in American economy, professions, and higher education challenged economic interests and cultural domination of white Protestant Americans while Jews viewed anti- 8 Published as a book in Russia in 1905 and later translated into many languages, Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion publicized antisemitism with the circulation of “a series of Jewish ‘protocols’ or plans for Jewish world domination” (Corrigan and Neal 162). Later disclosed as a “hoax” narrative, the Protocols still legitimized religious and cultural bias toward Jews, stating their access to “economy machinations, media manipulation, and religious chicanery” (162). Henry Ford gave place to the messages of the Protocols in his weekly and published a multivolume work, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which brought him the recognition of his efforts and the award of the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle by the German Reich in 1938 (164). 9 The program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (1920) strictly defined the ideal German citizen, the Nazi male, as it complemented his “Aryan racial identity” based on German ancestry with his commitment to German family, community and culture (Lorenz 17). Even before the Party Program, quintessential to the future Nazi writing, gained publicity as a propaganda tool, Arthur Dinter’s 1917 novel Die Sünde wider das Blut (The Sin Against the Blood) depicted the “racial” characteristics of the German Aryan and Jews with antisemitism and arguments on race and heredity, which would provide a new ideological narrative method and an earlier example of the “Nazi racial typology” (17). Within the “racist cosmology” of the novel, Dinter depicts the idealized blond, blue-eyed Germans in mental and physical excellence whereas he stigmatizes “mixed race” and darkcomplexioned characters with negative physical characteristics and morals (18). Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 241 semitic economic and educational policies as a violation of class mobility and equal opportunities (Karabel 132-33). The changing definitions of merit and restrictive policies denoted a multifaceted rivalry between the old-stock Americans and immigrants: “[T]heir admissions offices decided which human qualities to reward and which to penalize” (133). Canfield’s novel alludes to the pervasiveness of prejudice and discriminatory policies targeting certain groups in American society. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Hulme’s campaign attracts considerable media attention. A reporter from a New York newspaper asks questions about his family line, claiming that he might be a Jewish man for defending the cause, and even has a “Jewish nose” (Canfield 400). This type of Jew-baiting circulated biases and stereotypical narratives that were then used to discredit individuals fighting to destroy those very same stereotypes. It was a strategy akin to the red-baiting of communists or denigrating white people who sympathized with African Americans. In Whiteness of a Different Color, Matthew Frye Jacobson indicates how the interconnection between social discrimination and racial difference reveals a vicious cycle in the unstable redefinition of whiteness for groups such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews in the United States (174). The whiteness of Jewish immigrants remained unsettled under “the shades of meaning attaching to various racial classifications, given the nuances involved as whiteness slips off toward Semitic or Hebrew and back again toward Caucasian” (176). Thus, Jacobson points out the unstable socioeconomic and cultural dynamics behind the definition of Jewish (American) identity: “[T]he question is not are they white, nor even how white are they, but how have they been both white and Other? ” (176). The color line was used to define the status of Jewish immigrants, which resulted in the “negroization” of Jews in order to fit them into existing racial stratifications and then assimilate them into the mainstream. As Goldstein states, “[i]f they could no longer defuse the danger they saw in the Jews by likening them to African Americans, they aimed instead to study, clarify, and expose their role [...] in white society” (126). Roughly from the 1850s to the 1950s, Jews, much like African Americans, were subjected to a “physiognomical surveillance” on the basis of physical attributes, namely the shape of the nose, eyes, skin color, and hair, viewed in relation to “an essential, immutable, inner moralintellectual character”, which legitimized their identity with distinctively self-referential characteristics (Jacobson 174). The sociocultural significance of these attributes depended on the historico-political discourse of the specific era, as they defined group identity within, and in relation to, the mainstream, leading to a compromise or the persistence of (racial) difference. The fact that the New York reporter refers to Mr. Hulme’s “Jewish nose” suggests that these discourses were still very much a part Ezgi İlimen 242 of the interwar world, and that as a defender of Jewish rights, Mr. Hulme could also be subjected to antisemitism as a “Jew by association”. This called his own whiteness into question (as many WASP Americans still considered Jews to be non-white), rendering him a race and class traitor, and jeopardizing his safety and security. While discussing the bequest with Mr. Hulme, Mr. Lane, the President of the Windward County National Bank, muses about upper-class white Americans who might settle down and make investments: “‘Substantial men from all over the East would flock here to buy summer homes; they’re looking for such a place [...] It would seem a haven to them’” (Canfield 417). Clifford is meant to be a sheltered place for wealthy Americans, free from racial and class threats posed by minorities and immigrants, particularly Jews. According to the antisemitic narratives of the time, “Jews were set apart by their greedy practices, their filthy bodies, their licentious behavior, and their isolationist tendencies. They were a race of people set apart” (Corrigan and Neal 149). Seasoned Timber similarly illustrates that living with Jews was unthinkable to individuals like Mr. Lane. Consequently, he portrays the arrival of Jews in Clifford as a form of cultural and moral decay, and fears the gradual displacement of Americans by foreigners: ‘If the Jews got in, the way they have in the Catskills’. It was the picture Downer had painted for Timothy, the picture many people had elaborated for his benefit - broad-bottomed women waddling around in shorts and highheeled pumps, flashy men with cold bloodsuckers’ eyes, bedclothes hanging out the windows of fine Colonial houses, noisy, ill-bred young bucks shouldering Clifford people off their own sidewalks. (Canfield 418) Mr. Hulme reacts by underscoring the use of racism as a manipulative tool that threatens modernity: “‘You’re talking exactly like the professional Southerner who used to say, when anybody suggested that maybe something ought to be done about the high tuberculosis rate among Negroes, ‘Oh, I see you want your daughter to marry a nigger’” (418). The analogy between racism and antisemitism reveals the scapegoating of minorities in the name of white supremacy, and the inevitable punishment of nonconformists who point out injustice. David Baumgardt pays tribute to Canfield as a twentieth-century writer and a friend of the Jewish community (246). Baumgardt appreciates Seasoned Timber as Canfield’s “war against the complacency” when the whole world remained silent to Hitler’s persecution of Jews and liberals in the pre-WWII years (246). To this end, Canfield’s novel elevates American principles by rejecting the bequest to the Academy secured by a majority vote. The people of Clifford defend American ideals, primarily equal opportunity and education, through a democratic voting process. In favor of American Dorothy Canfield’s Seasoned Timber: A prelude to the Second World War 243 principles, they cast their votes against the trustee’s bequest and demands. With patriotic fervor, they celebrate their victory as if it was another Independence Day in their local history and community. Canfield indicates the interconnection between her characters’ personal and domestic lives and culturally defined concerns, ranging from education, racial prejudice, class dynamics, gender roles, and global conflicts. Seasoned Timber highlights the need for socioeconomic justice through her opposition to racism, antisemitism, sexism, and elitism. Her social and political novel emphasizes the duties and responsibilities of a democratic nation to its citizens who, in the end, are the ultimate guarantors of American values and virtues. The peace settlements failed to prevent, if not trigger, the rise of fascism and antisemitism in Europe. She denounces the insistence on American isolationism from European affairs, seeing the autocratic regimes in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and the persecution of Jews. During the economic and ideological crisis of the Great Depression, the world Canfield creates in the Clifford Academy functions as a place to reclaim American principles and human dignity in opposition to the victimization of immigrants and working-class citizens. References Baumgardt, D. (1959). Dorothy Canfield Fisher: friend of Jews in life and work. Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 48 (4): 245-255. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/ 43059071 [Mar. 2023]. Bradbury, M. (1993). The Modern American Novel. Viking. Internet Archive, archive.org/ details/ modernamericanno00brad [Aug. 2023]. Canfield, D. (1939). Seasoned Timber. Jonathan Cape. Corrigan, J. & Neal, L. S. (Eds.) (2010). Anti-semitism. 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Ezgi İlimen Hacettepe University