Everyone laughed when I said I was writing a book called Smut. “You,” they would say, pointing fingers at me, “you writing about obscenity?” Nonetheless, I did write about an obscenity trial in Ithaca, NY in 1883 and laughed as I transcribed the trial testimony to the page.
I found writing Smut fun, and I hope that readers might also find it informative, and interesting, curious, and fun too.
It was the names on the top sheet identifying the legal case against Jefferson Beardsley and his wife Helen Quigg Beardsley that made me pick up the folded papers lying on the floor of the closet in which county archives were stored. Today the archives of Tompkins County are available to everyone online, the originals stored in a cave in Seneca Depot where the white deer run inside the fence.
The case against the Beardsleys was owning, showing, purveying and selling obscene pictures, known at the time as French postcards. The question that was never developed in the trial, possibly to shield Jefferson Beardsley from its dire consequences: was Jefferson Beardsley also making his own “dirty pictures?”
I have always known that there are treasures to be found in county archives, but they are little used by local historians because court cases generally involve controversy and as a woman insisted years ago, local history is about celebration of place. I disagreed then, and do now, for local history to me is a way of understanding the past of the place where I live. And the past is not something to be celebrated but understood, warts and all.
The current dictates from the White House would have agreed with the woman from near Rochester who would not investigate the consequences to her community from a major bank failure because she knew current people who were connected to the nephew who ran away with the funds.
She didn’t think about the workers who lost their jobs as factories failed, or farmers who moved further in debt, of the people who lost their homes and hope.
Local history, the history of our hometowns, is the history of the human condition in time and over time. It is full of stories: about the people who started churches and businesses, those who volunteered to fight our fires and wars, those who struggled to bring about change. But that is not the complete story.
We are not only a country of the healthy wealthy, male and white; we have a complex past and even if previous local historians ignored women and Black Americans, those of different ethnicities, and the poor we cannot.
Local historians can celebrate those people who made our communities vibrant. But along with the upright are those who failed — and many did; of those who needed aid, of those who looked about and saw no place for themselves and left to try a different place.
The White House would like to privilege white people over the immigrant, over women, people of color, and those who do not fit one prescribed pattern. It is important that local historians avoid that narrow view and celebrate the complicated kaleidoscope that truly was us.
Because that is who we are today — a proud and complicated, but not perfect people, people who know that to be a member of a local community or of this nation, we have a right to make conclusions based on fact not fabrications, we are inclusive, we move the idea of democracy forward, and we must exercise our right to vote.
All that begins in our home places and all that is reflected in our local history — the past that was yesterday.
Illustrations, from above: Smut book cover, and the immigrant-run Greek American Fruit Company and Salvation Army in Ithaca, ca. 1900 (The History Center in Tompkins County).
I’m glad to see that Carol Kammen is still Doing Local History. Smut sounds like it was a fun book to write AND a useful opportunity to discuss current attacks on history.