Edgar Lee Masters used news skills in ‘classic of classics’

Bill Knight column for 3-4, 5 or 6, 2019

            Edgar Lee Masters, who died March 5, 1950, is remembered as the author of “Spoon River Anthology,” but he also was a long-time newspaperman and, eventually, a lawyer.

            Before using Lewistown and nearby Petersburg to conjure his imaginary village of Spoon River, exposing conflicts from the grave and expressing his love/hate feelings for the area, Masters wrote sports and obituaries, reviews and news, and wedding and trial stories for the Lewistown News and the Fulton County Ledger.

            “As with Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, Masters’ newspaper background provided a thrust toward the use of factual material in his literary works,” wrote author/editor John Hallwas in “Spoon River Anthology: An Annotated Edition,” published in 1993. “Without a doubt, the small-town newspaper, with its intimate account of ordinary people and its revelation of countless conflicts and interrelation, had an enormous influence on the poet.”

            In 1936, Masters remembered, “As a boy I always hung around the print shop, fascinated by the presses and the smell of printer’s ink. I was only 15 then, and I hired out at a dollar a week. I was taught to set type. After a while, the old editor, Selah Wheadon, an ex-pastor, let me try my hand at writing a few items.”

            Masters was to send election stories and human-interest pieces to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Chicago Inter-Ocean, and the Peoria Journal. He contributed to the Quincy Herald, the Bushnell Democrat, and the Chicago Herald, and to Boston’s Waverly Magazine and the Peoria Saturday Evening Call.

            First published in 1914, “Spoon River Anthology” over the decades was often regarded as pleasant, perhaps unique, poetry, with observations about rural Illinois, an ideal America and individuals, and for a while was considered “Illinois’ classic of classics.” However, consisting of monologues spoken by the dead, the book was also received as shocking as well as innovative and influential. Seeing the Midwest of his youth as a clash between traditional settlers from the South and reformers from the East, Masters in 1927 explained that “these two hostile and never-to-be-reconciled kinds of human nature fought each other at every point and all the time.”

            Masters believed the area changed for the worse because Yankee newcomers advocated social improvement at the expense of individual freedoms, while more agrarian types opposed change and supported “freedoms,” from drinking whiskey to owning slaves.

            His newspapering permitted him to observe and at least vicariously experience worldly matters, from society news to scandals. And it may have contributed to Masters being considered “a chronic dissenter,” as one Peoria newspaper columnist wrote.

            “They were largely true characterizations of real persons and could not be accurate if any different,” Masters said in 1918.

            It’s from this perspective that Masters drew the anthology’s 243 characters, such as “Julia Miller” (based on Master’s childhood sweetheart, Hallwas writes), “Deacon Taylor” (based on the Masters’ family enemy, William Taylor Davidson), and others based on Lewistown News editor Lewis Breeden, for whom Masters worked for four years after high school. Breeden’s “commitment to democratic ideals, outspoken opposition to repressive forces, and leadership in journalism and politics are reflected in ‘John Cabanis,’ ‘Carl Hamblin,’ ‘Enoch Dunlap,’ and three other [poems],” Hallwas wrote.

            Lewistown banker Henry Phelps was the basis for the villainous “Thomas Rhodes” and “Henry Phipps.” And the unscrupulous lawyer “John M. Church” and the indecisive attorney “George Gray” were based on local lawyers who embodied “the hard, shrewd, money-grabbing corporation and business lawyers,” Masters said.

            There are other, more notable, figures, like Illinois’ reform governor John Peter Altgeld (“Herman Altman”) and writer Theodore Dreiser (“Theodore the Poet”). And there are locals: Petersburg’s Hannah Armstrong and John “Fiddler” Jones have entries titled after their actual names.

            Masters was in his early twenties when he moved to Chicago in 1891, considering a newspaper career but instead becoming a bill collector, then an attorney, for a time partnering with the legendary Clarence Darrow.

            Throughout his subsequent writing career, Masters retained a wistful longing for his feeling of an idyllic past lost to modernity.

            In 1936, he wrote, “Give us back our country, the old land,/ The cities, villages and measureless fields/ Of toil and song, the just reward and sleep/ That follows after labor performed in hope.”