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Albert C. Hopkins to Walt Whitman, 14 March 1892

About This Item

  • Title: Albert C. Hopkins to Walt Whitman, 14 March 1892
  • Date: March 14, 1892
  • Creator(s): Albert C. Hopkins
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.02265
  • Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Contributors to digital file: Cristin Noonan Amanda J. Axley Stephanie Blalock
  • Cite this page: Hopkins, Albert C.. "Albert C. Hopkins to Walt Whitman, 14 March 1892." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 03 May 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: loc.02265.xml (TEI)
 loc.02265.001_large.jpg #42 Pine Park Chicago Ill.1 12. March 1892 Mr. Walt Whitman Camden N.J. Dear Comrade:—

I notice that the press still reports you feeble, and I am constrained to write you, thinking that a cheery hail in memory of old days from even an unknown comrade may comfort you.

True, we are all comrades in the largish sense, and all go one road, but that comradeship of war and war's suffering and privations makes closer if not truer union.

It may interest you to hear that we have formed a temporary society which we hope to soon make  loc.02265.003_large.jpg permanent. devoted to the pansy, the children's flower for the national emblem of the United States. The motto is "Union, Culture and Peace."

We hope to secure its adoption by Congress and its official establishment in the Union Flag as an outline setting setting for the stars, the centre representing the Central government or Capital, from which radiate in the white outlines of the leaves and dark blue pencilings of the flower, "light, order, land."

We mean to do this in time to make it a conspicuous feature of the world's Colmbin. Exptin.2

Unless we greatly overestimate the strength and fitness of our cause, we shall on July 4th 1893, march an all–union army of a hundred thousand children with pansy–bud caps and pansy  loc.02265.005_large.jpg banners, badges, gloves and belts, into the open gates of The World's Columbian Exposition, and replace the present awkward and unmeaning union of The Flag, with the star—pansy union, and sing, to war's of Bethlehem, a new Peace Anthem of America, thus making, with the time and place, the most imposing and memorable pageant of Union, Culture and Peace, of universal fellowship and human progress in the history of the world.

I shall be glad if you are able to see it with your material eyes, and, if not, why then from the other shore, with clearer vision, perhaps.

The argument for the pansy appeared in the October number of The Kindergarten, 1890, Pan the Piper, and in the 4th July number of America 1891  loc.02265.007_large.jpg A Place for The Pansy. These are both Chicago publications.

The Illst'd. Home Journal is likely to have a more complete argument in a short time.

The full argument for that star Pansy Flag, has been sent The Youth's Companion3 and, I hope, may appear soon with an illustration of it. We have just ordered what we think a very pretty zinc etching for letter heads and envelopes for the society, showing the flag and a spray of Pansies.

Pardon me if I am making this worrisome. Of course, I'm a Crank on this particular subject.

I hope you may escape serious suffering, and I presume you have no doubt, as I have none, of your assured place in history and literature  loc.02265.009_large.jpg This is our summing up in three lines of the present and future of the world.

"In the bright blue Pan's eye awakes: No darkest land God's light forsakes: O'er all the world, Christ's morning breaks."

And still, "The man is ruler of the dark."

The eye of Pan, the fairy, the All–God. "Keeps watch and ward above his own."

Whatever valley of shadows you may be called upon to pass, go bravely with full trust—"the heights where morning shines" and safe and sure and permanent beyond.

Though I have never seen you, I hail you friend and comrade well met.

Albert C. Hopkins Pres. Protem. The Pansy Society of America Comrade G.A.R. Post #132 Nashua Ia  loc.02265.002_large.jpg  loc.02265.004_large.jpg  loc.02265.006_large.jpg  loc.02265.008_large.jpg  loc.02265.010_large.jpg  loc.02265.011_large.jpg  loc.02265.012_large.jpg (over)

The full argument for The Pansy is promised in The apl. number of The Illst'd. Home Journal

H.

 c 1892

Correspondent:
Albert C. Hopkins (1844–1904) was born in Wisconsin and became a partner in a dry goods business. He was a soldier in the American Civil War, and he was wounded in both shoulders, injuries from which he never fully recovered. In the 1880s he caught typhoid fever and began suffering from mental illness. Hopkins went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in December 1890 and claimed to be a messiah to the Native Americans. At this time, the U.S. government was concerned about the increasing influence of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement at Pine Ridge. Under the mistaken impression that the Sioux chief Sitting Bull was a Ghost Dancer, reservation police on December 15 attempted to arrest him and killed him in the process. Hopkins persisted in his attempts to minister to Native Americans; he went to Washington in 1893, requesting authority to visit the Sioux reservations and preach to them the motto and teaching of the pansy, "Union, Culture, and Peace" (James Mooney, The ghost-dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890 [Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896], 893). Hopkins later served a term in the penitentiary for circulating theories of love, sex, and marriage through the mail that were deemed to be obsence during legal proceedings; in 1899 the court judged him to be insane and he was transferred to a soldier's home ("Hokpkins Adjudged Insane," Dakota Farmers Leader [August 18, 1899], 8). In the early 1900s, he moved to South Dakota, where he spent the final years of his life.

Notes

  • 1. This letter is addressed: Walt Whitman | Camden | N.J. It is postmarked: CAMDEN, NJ | MAR16 | 6AM | 92 | RECD. [back]
  • 2. The World's Columbian Exposition was initiated by an Act of Congress in 1890, when Chicago was chosen as the site for the event celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of America. Planners requested a commemorative poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson, who declined; the request angered many in the U.S., who felt that Whitman should be asked instead. Despite a number of attempts to get Whitman to write a poem for the event, Whitman declined, and he died seven months before the exposition finally opened (a year late) in May of 1893. It is possible that the poem Whitman was working on during the last months of his life–published posthumously as "A Thought of Columbus"–was an effort to write a commemorative poem. See Andrew Vogel, "Whitman's Columbia: The Commemoration of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in 'A Thought of Columbus,'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 29 (2011), 1–18. [back]
  • 3. The Youth's Companion, a weekly magazine for families and children, was founded by Nathaniel Willis in 1827. During its more than one-hundred-year run, the magazine published contributions by Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. For more on the Youth's Companion, see Susan Belasco, Youth's Companion. [back]
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