November, 2021
Lincoln — The name Canfield is much storied and honored in Nebraska. May it ever remain so.
James Hulme Canfield was chancellor of the state university during its early golden era. The UNL administration building is named for him. Robert Knoll, author of the authoritative history of the university, wrote, "James Canfield's record as chancellor is unsurpassed in the whole history of the University of Nebraska."
The great chancellor's daughter, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, grew up in Lincoln. Subsequently, after returning to her family's New England roots, she became a celebrated Vermont writer. She wrote fiction and non-fiction, for young and old. She championed causes of women and minorities. From her years in Lincoln she knew Willa Cather and maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence with her. Eleanor Roosevelt named Dorothy Canfield Fisher one of America's ten most influential women and upon Fisher's death wrote:
I had never known Mrs. Fisher intimately, but I read her books with constant interest and pleasure.... Mrs. Fisher was a woman of great spiritual perception, and for many years it has given me comfort if I found myself on the same side of a controversial question with her. We might discover ourselves to be unpopular at the moment, but in the end our position would probably prove to be the best one, I felt, if she believed in it.... May her influence be kept alive among us for a very long time.
In 2017, a member of the Abenaki Native American tribe of Vermont controversially suggested that Dorothy Canfield Fisher's name should be removed from an annual children's book award. She was accused of being a eugenicist and of disparaging French Canadians and Native Americans in her writing, particularly in the 1933 novel Bonfire.
Another Vermonter joined in, making this startling claim: "Fisher’s involvement with the eugenics movement informed the subject matter of much of her fiction, portraying an idyllic picture of Vermont, romanticizing rural values and describing, pretty unsubtly, the 'right' and 'wrong' kind of people."
Most of those who came to the defense of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, unfortunately, did so only tepidly. They did not push back with evidence that her link to eugenics was only an imagined guilt by association and that Bonfire was surely written as a rebuttal to the idea that heredity is destiny. Rather, they weakly offered that she was a "product of her time." Her name was removed from the award.
Those who have actually read Dorothy Canfield Fisher know that she was decades ahead of her time and deserves better. Which raises the question of the role of scholarship. Where is the academic community in interpreting her works and pursuing the truth about her?I read Bonfire to determine if there is evidence to support the charges against her. Importantly, it was written the same year her daughter Sally married John Paul Scott, a Rhodes Scholar and zoologist who debunked eugenics and whose views likely shaped the novel.
The novel is set in a small town in Vermont. The protagonist is a district nurse who returns home after living and working in Paris in the 1920s, an autobiographical reference to the author herself. The townspeople see themselves as divided between the better folk who live in the valley and those with hereditary defects living in the hills above. Everyone in the novel knows everyone else's heredity, and they are all judged by the area's inhabitants accordingly.I count at least thirty-five separate references in Bonfire to heredity. The nurse herself, however, is not so sure about its influence. She signals this early on with statements about how human differences might be explained by nutrition and education instead. She sets up a boarding school arrangement at the local academy to give those living on the mountainsides a chance to improve themselves. In doing so, she despairs of "the grim local cult of heredity, which made it one with Fate."
Her critics must have missed that sentence.
A subplot of the novel is a comparison of the lives of two young women, one raised in privilege and one rescued from poverty and family dysfunction in the hills. It is almost modeled as a scientific experiment. The results are unclear. As is often the case in science, the null hypothesis offers itself for rejection but there are too many variables to reach any glib conclusions.
What is clear, however, is that easily-missed references in Bonfire to French Canadians and Native Americans are not in the voice of the author, but in the voices of those she challenges, those of the "grim local cult." That matters, decisively. Bonfire is a disturbing novel, but not in the way its latter-day detractors suggest.
The point is this: it may be fashionable these days for some to disparage people who are not around to defend themselves, in the misguided hope that somehow it will reflect well on their particular causes. It doesn't, and is counterproductive. And indulging it does not reflect well on the academic community, which may know better but remains all too silent.
The Canfield name deserves restoration. Nebraskans should come to the defense.
