Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was fiction. Victoria Woodhull's Brave New World was to be terrifyingly real. As the first female Wall Street brokers, Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennie had reputations to protect. They fretted about Tennie's well-publicized remark, "Many of the best men in [Wall] Street know my power. Commodore Vanderbilt knows my power." She had meant her skill as a fortune teller, but the press quite rightly picked up hints the attractive pair traded sexual favors for assistance in their business. To make matters worse, in their magazine the sisters had published articles promoting free love, while distancing themselves from what was said. Taking the offensive, Victoria moved, step by step, until in a speech on November 20, 1871, she boldly proclaimed: "And to those who denounce me for this I reply: 'Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law can frame any right to interfere.'" Having come out of the closet, she had to defend that lifestyle from those who warned that it meant social ruin. In speeches across the country, she championed a new society that, in its nineteenth-century context, was remarkable similar to Huxley's 1932 classic, Brave New World. Babies were not grown in bottles, but pregnant women were to be treated as "laboring for society," "paid the highest wages," and once the baby was weaned, "the fruit of her labor will of right belong to society and she return to her common industrial pursuits." To critics who warned that free love meant children growing up without parents, she replied that, "not more than one in ten" mothers was competent, and that parents should be replaced by the State because, "It is but one step beyond compulsory education to the complete charge of children." In her Brave New World, you could have all the sex you could attract, but it would be impossible to be a genuine parent.
The independence you see reflected in the books I've written or edited for publication reflect a similar independence shown by one branch of my family, the Hallmarks of northwest Alabama. Struggling as farmers, when the Civil War came, they had no interest in supporting what they quite rightly considered a "rich man's war" for slavery. They would stick by that conviction with a courage and a tenacity that is nothing short of amazing.
If I imagine myself born into that branch of my family tree exactly a century earlier, I would have been a boy when the Civil War broke out. Here is what I would have seen.
Defying a state governor who said that all such "traitors" should be hung, four of my uncles slipped through Confederate patrols and enlisted in First Alabama Cavalry U.S. That "U.S." is important. These were Southerners, born and bred, who were fighting for the Union in an integrated, all-Southern cavalry. As testimonials from Union generals attest, the First did a marvelous job, using their knowledge of the land and people to help restore the Union they loved. When General Sherman made his famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) march across Georgia to the sea, he chose the First to provide the cavalry screen for his army.
You can find out more about the First Alabama Cavalry U.S. at: http://www.1stalabamacavalryusv.com/
There's a short history of those uncles of mine on this page: http://www.1stalabamacavalryusv.com/roster/stories.asp?trooperid=863
In case the second link changes, here is what it says:
"George W. Hallmark was the brother of James Washington Hallmark, Thomas Frank Hallmark, and John Madison Hallmark. Although they were all born in Fayette County, Ala, they were living in Marion County at the time the war broke out. George, James, and Thomas joined up with the First together in 1862. The fourth brother, the youngest, John, was only about 15 when the war started. He joined the unit in 1863. He was the only one who survived the war and made it back home."
That's right. Four of my uncles went to war, but only one came home. That's sacrifice. Here's what that page says about one who would have been my father.
"There was also a 5th Hallmark brother who refused to join up with either side and hid out in the north Alabama woods for most of the war. The local home guard beat their father to death and shot and killed one of their sisters because of the brothers' decision to fight for the Union instead of the CSA."
That fifth Hallmark, Hopwood Hallmark, didn't go to war, because he had five children to feed, one of whom in this tale I pretend was me. For not supporting this war, the "Home Guard"--a precursor to the Ku Klux Klan--killed both his father, George Hallmark and his sister. His turn came in 1874 when he died under suspicious circumstances that some in the family believe meant he was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in a year in which the Democratic party threatened to restore white rule by "bullets or ballots."
That's why, although I've written on many topics, a common thread runs though many of them from Untangling Tolkien, my chronology of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, to my various books on eugenics and their modern counterparts. I focus on the same struggle the Hallmark's faced, the struggle of ordinary people to live their lives free of those who dehumanize and control. It's an unending war and one that each generation has to meet with the same sort of courage and conviction that the Hallmark family displayed so long ago.
