For me, the essence of Progressivism, the heart of it, is the ability to empathize; the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes and imagine their experiences. This is at the core of the Progressive movement. I do not need to be a gay soldier to not boo a gay soldier. I can imagine the anguish and longing any soldier must feel if not allowed to express his or her love for someone simply because of the sex of that person. I do not need to be a dying, uninsured cancer patient to not cheer for the death of that uninsured cancer patient. I can easily imagine that pain and fear without needing to actually experience it. Why? What happened in my life to plant those seeds of empathy that grew into Progressivism?
When I was in elementary school, the librarian in charge of our neighborhood Bookmobile knew that I loved animal stories, especially dog stories. She made a point of stocking a variety of classics on a shelf I was very familiar with and always made a beeline to when she drove up. One week, a book called
Beautiful Joe: A Dog’s Own Story by Margaret Marshall Saunders waited there for me. The book tells the story of a young dog who is abused and brutally treated by his cruel master. The dog is rescued by a passerby just at the point when the dog’s master has cut off his ears and tail with a hatchet to punish him. The book implies that the master was escalating towards killing the dog. Saunders wrote her story in the first person, relating the events from the dog’s perspective
Margaret Marshall Saunders was a young Canadian woman when she visited her brother in Meaford, Ontario in 1892. She heard the true account of an abused dog rescued by her brother’s in-laws and decided to write a story about the dog and enter it in a contest held by the American Humane Education Society. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell had been written in 1877 and began the trend of writing sentimental animal “autobiographies” to further the cause of humane treatment and Saunders actually references Sewell’s book in her story. Saunders submitted her story using her middle name “Marshall Saunders” because, like many women writers of that time, she thought a more masculine name would have wider appeal. She also changed the location of her story to a small town in Maine to fit the parameters of the American Humane Society’s contest, which she won. Beautiful Joe was published in 1893 and became the first Canadian book to sell over a million copies. Saunders became an important voice in Canada for socially conscious movements like feminism, poverty and children’s and animal rights.
Of course, eight-year-old koosah knew nothing about any of that. What I knew was that I had a compelling dog story in my hands that made me sob my eyes out. I was captivated. I eagerly read each chapter, as Joe told me his story about the physical pain he suffered, the emotional trauma of losing his mother and the relief he felt by being rescued by a kind family. Joe’s life was completely changed by their kindness. His mistress and the other family members were unrelentingly good and Saunders filled out the rest of her book with stories Joe tells about their good deeds in the community, rescuing other mistreated animals and helping the poor. Joe’s new family is deeply committed to several social causes that any good Progressive of the 21st century would recognize: education, animal rights, food safety and environmental conservation. Even women’s suffrage is touched on with the mention that many of these problems would cease if only women could vote on them.
Like a lot of eight-year-olds, I was dog-and horse- crazy, but to an extreme degree and to the exclusion of other pursuits. While all my friends amassed collections of Barbie and Skipper dolls, I only added stuffed collies, retrievers, and Breyer horses to my bedroom. Posters of dogs plastered my walls. I voraciously consumed any book about dogs or horses. I developed a fair hand at drawing chiefly so I could draw my favorite dog characters. Name any breed of dog and I could tell you for what purpose it was bred. My friends talked about their futures as mommies and teachers and nurses. I told them I wasn’t going to be a mom—I wanted to have a ranch and raise dogs. 101 Dalmatians sounded like a good start to me.
In all likelihood, the not-so-subtle message of social change through a life of activism found in the pages of Beautiful Joe fell upon fertile ground. I probably already was inclined to be empathetic, but having my favorite animal, a dog, tell me how my actions could change his life for the better absolutely cemented a habit of thinking about others. Joe’s love and devotion for his new mistress were real to me. Joe’s stories about his suffering and his descriptions of his emotions, good and bad, made those emotions real to the little eight-year-old koosah, who read them with a suffocating feeling of overwhelming compassion in her soft, liberal bleeding heart.
I wanted to rescue poor abused dogs like Joe. I wanted to be like the people Joe so admired. I wanted to make a difference.
Joe is called “beautiful” by his family in ironic recognition of his mutilation at the hands of his first master. His new mistress, Laura, is sincere when she calls him “Beautiful Joe,” however. Her good-heartedness gives her a keener perception for the true beauty that lies within the dog’s nature.
Like Laura, I resolved to look past surface appearances and look for beauty.
The book might not have changed how I felt about dogs and people and the world, but it definitely made me aware that people could make a conscious decision to help. They could decide to use their energy to effect change for the betterment of the world. People could imagine the condition of others, even other species, and work to make that condition better.
Although the story of Beautiful Joe has remained with me my entire life, I hadn’t read it in years, so I looked it up to re-read it for this diary. The entire book is available free from Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/.... I was quite surprised by just how liberal it is. Naturally, it has a blatant sentimentality that the modern reader may find heavy-handed and manipulative. Anthropomorphizing animals to that degree has fallen out of favor along with the Disney movies that glorified the genre. Many of the classic literary works of the social consciousness movement employ subtle nuances of language seldom seen today, while at the same time bludgeoning their readers with obvious messages and themes. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, even much of Dickens’ works can strike us as overwrought unless we make allowances for different sensibilities.
Different as the times may have been, though, Margaret Marshall Saunders faced many of the same old problems we still see today. She wrote during the height of the Gilded Age when Robber Barons acquired vast fortunes through gaming the system, buying politicians, and taking advantage of the misfortunes of the less powerful. Saunders saw education and government intervention as solutions to ending some of the problems faced by society in her time. Waiting for a train with his beloved mistress Laura, Joe the dog listens to a conversation she has with an older woman, who tells Laura and other travelers,
"Just the remedy that I would propose for the great evil of intemperance," said the old lady, smiling at him. "Legislation and education. Legislation for the old and hardened, and education for the young and tender…”
A younger man in the group has a more Ayn Randian philosophy:
"Don't you think," he said, "that you temperance and humane people lay too much stress upon the education of our youth in all lofty and noble sentiments? The human heart will always be wicked. Your Bible tells you that, doesn't it? You can't educate all the badness out of children."
The older woman has an answer waiting for him:
“We don't expect to do that," said the old lady, turning her pleasant face toward him; "but even if the human heart is desperately wicked, shouldn't that make us much more eager to try to educate, to ennoble, and restrain? However, as far as my experience goes, and I have lived in this wicked world for seventy-five years, I find that the human heart, though wicked and cruel, as you say, has yet some soft and tender spots, and the impressions made upon it in youth are never, never effaced. Do you not remember better than anything else, standing at your mother's knee--the pressure of her hand, her kiss on your forehead?"
The older lady is arguing, of course, that within all of us lie the seeds for empathy and compassion, planted there when we were young by kindness and caring. For me, at least, those seeds were watered by tears shed while reading the story of an abused dog. They have long since sprouted into a life of trying to make a difference.
What books nurtured your seeds of Progressivism?
Visit The Beautiful Joe Heritage Society to find out more about Margaret Marshall Saunders and the work still being done by the Beautiful Joe Heritage Society in honor of a real dog named Beautiful Joe.