by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The many letters in the Homestead’s collection from the fawning and fussy J[ames] Perry Worden, who spent almost a decade working on a Workman and Temple family history that went unfinished, are interesting specimens in correspondence as well as the too-cozy relationship between a historian and a patron.
As noted here before, Worden (1866-1945) had an interesting and varied background, traveling widely and living and working throughout the United States and, at intervals, Europe before settling in California in 1911 and staying put in Pasadena for more than thirty years until his death from a stroke.
A native of Hastings-on-Hudson, just north of New York City, Worden was a newspaper reporter in the adjacent Yonkers, as well as a correspondent for the New York Sun, New York Times and other papers, while also becoming well-known as a lecturer. He briefly St. Stephen’s College, now Bard College, with the intention of becoming an Episcopal minister and then went to Columbia University, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1895.
Before he finished there at nearly age 30, however, Worden employed his skills and interests in the outdoors, including a hiking trip in Maine that was written up in a New York Times piece and, much better known, a bicycling tour through Europe that garnered him national attention when undertaken under the auspices of Outing magazine in 1892. His physical activities were supplemented by an avid interest in photography and his interest in literature and poetry.
He spent much of the late 1890s studying in Europe and leading to his being awarded a doctorate in philology and literature at the University of Halle in Germany in 1900. While on visits home, however, he continued to speak on his varied background, whether it be his bicycle tour, his photographic work, and his deep knowledge of German literature, including the works of Göethe and Schiller and the passion play, the Oberammergau (which was a great influence on John Steven McGroarty’s Mission Play, performed in San Gabriel for two decades and which counted Walter P. Temple as a major supporter.)
In 1900, Worden’s translation of Schiller’s The Song of the Bell was published and he embarked on a teaching career lasting several years, including stints with a girls’ school, boys’ military academy and a high school in Mexico, Missouri, northeast of the state capital of Columbia; the high school at St. Louis; the University of Maine; and Kalamazoo College in Michigan. Occasionally, he published pieces in newspapers and magazines, but made another major life change at the end of 1907.
After passing a federal civil service examination, Worden was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to be American consul at Bristol, England, where he remained just over a year until January 1909. He then moved to Berlin, where he pursued his interest in German literature until September 1910. The following February, he came to Los Angeles and gave a highly-regarded lecture to the prominent Friday Morning Club, comprised of some of the elite women in the Angel City, and followed that with a presentation for the Venice Public Library, then part of an independent city before it was absorbed into Los Angeles.
Worden next migrated to San Luis Obispo, where he taught at the town’s high school, joined a literary society and gave talks on his experiences in Europe. The low pay, however, led him to resign after a year and he embarked on a lecture tour of the San Joaquin Valley, including Fresno, Tulare and other communities, with his topics being on education, German literature and municipal improvement.
In spring 1913, he returned to greater Los Angeles and lectured on “How to Build, Beautify and Develop a Town” in such areas as Monrovia and Whittier and, with the outbreak of the First World War, wrote to the Los Angeles Times, for which he was an occasional contributor, about the need to support Germany against Russia— though the former’s attack on American ships soon led to a virulent anti-German sentiment, especially after the United States joined the allies in 1917.
Worden was generally well-known and often covered in the press in the various small towns in which he lived and worked most of his life, but, in the burgeoning Los Angeles, he was not all that well known. The exception was for those history buffs who read Sixty Years in Southern California, the memoir of the prominent Jewish merchant Harris Newmark. Newmark’s detailed recollections of events and people through the period of 1853 to 1913 were largely put into a readable narrative and supplemented by footnotes provided by Worden, though Newmark’s sons, Marco and Maurice, were credited as the editors.
Long a resident of a modest bungalow near CalTech and the Huntington Library, Worden clearly became known to Walter P. Temple because of the Newmark book and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to get a Workman and Temple family history written by attorney Johnston Jones and Luther Ingersoll, he was hired. Worden had been on the job not much longer than a year when he penned the missive highlighted here, while this blog has posts covering a couple of letters written in early December 1922 and mid-January 1923.
In this piece of correspondence, Worden’s idiosyncratic penchant for excessive underlining, capitalization and spacing is rather muted, but it is still a notable example of both the historian’s abounding confidence in his abilities and accomplishments and his habit of becoming very personal with his patron. He began by hoping that Temple’s health was well because “all the rest is of little worth” and added that “I fancies your trip to Mexico,” taken the prior summer, “had done you a good deal of good, for you looked more than every in the prime of life.”
Worden then added “you must not neglect yourself, now that you no longer have the Devoted One to watch over your interests, and yourself, as only a devoted wife may and will.” Laura González Temple, Walter’s wife of nearly twenty years, died of colon cancer at the end of 1922 and the historian’s reference to her no longer able “to watch over your interests” is especially notable given the dramatic change in the family’s financial situation in the years that followed as spending dramatically increased, personally and professionally, while income diminished.
Worden continued that he understood Temple was away and that the bad winter weather also kept the two from seeing each other recently, but, typically, the writer observed that “I have also been very busy, continuously busy, day and evenings” but that
the main satisfaction I have is that I have advance[d] our book work steadily, always getting some additional material such as want, and in some cases being very lucky to get some really valuable and out-of-the-way stuff, such as we never have had before, and such as has not, as yet, crept into any book.
The came more of Worden’s penchant for complaint as he detail to Temple about “the difficulties under which I work at the Library in Los Angeles,” this involving looking at old newspapers “within a narrow, crowded space” filled with other researchers so that “I have to protest at the utter impossibility of even turning the leaves of the paper!!!.” Under these “difficulties,” the historian was forced to stand from 9 a.m. to Noon and 12:30 “till late, perhaps in the evening, when I am very fatigued.”
Despite this, Worden went on to “the good things to greatly stimulate me” including “most important side-lights on the conditions prevailing here at the time of the Bank failure in the ’70’s, which came to me through looking up the death of a pioneer, and communicating with his family.” What was related to him, he continued, was material that “shows me that we can offer a very good alibi, so to speak, against certain charges” published in regional histories “for we can show that there were other things than those for which F.P.F. Temple could possibly be held accountable, which had a great deal to do with people’s unlucky experiences at that time.”
The key issue, according to the historian was, though this was totally against the idea of a general impartial and unbiased interpretation expected of most historical work,
THIS WILL PROVE OF PRIME IMPORTANCE IN PRESENTING THE BANK FAILURE STORY IN THE LIGHT MOST FAVORABLE TO YOUR ESTEEMED FATHER.
Worden added that he’d come across a rare volume that dealt with post-Revolutionary War New England, including “a very interesting reference to the Temples of Massachusetts, giving one an idea as to their being, as an old-established, thoroughly Yankee family one of the very representative American family lines then influential there.”
Moreover, in talking to friends whom Worden assumed had only been in Los Angeles for a decade or so, he learned that their residency in the City of Angels went back some thirty-five years and that there were remembrances, documents and other material made available. An aunt, residing in Glendale, came to the area in the 1870s, he noted, and had recollections of Temple Street and the Temple Block. Therefore, the historian commented, again with no apparent concern at all for relative objectivity,
we are piling up good, UNpublished matter calculated to fix in the most lasting and honorable manner in local history the good old Yankee-Californian name of T E M P L E, and fix it so, when your book is published, it can never be forgotten, as many good old names are likely to be, in the passing of the years and with the natural attention directed to other and later names.
Somewhat cryptically, Worden told Temple that he had “a couple of excellent items to our fast-growing stock, which will have a personal interest to you—one pertaining to an incident in your life and personal history” and another related to the “wonderful period of scientific advancement in which you, the last notable representative of the old Temple family, and the forerunner in the Montebello Oil Fields, are to be a central figure.”
Buttering up his patron as he often did, Worden ventured that “far beyond your Uncle [Jonathan Temple] or your Father [F.P.F.], in some respects, you have been privileged to live and be progressively active in a period of the greatest importance in both the world and in Southern California history.” Therefore, it was specially remarked, “in giving the story of your interesting life, we shall do well to set forth this environment, too.”
Having “fawned” in this manner, Worden came to the conclusion of his missive, including the admonition “you may rest assured therefore, my dear Mr. Temple, that I am not only working hard and steadily for you, but I am also working with great success.” Beyond this, he went on,
I am making sure that we are to have a very fine volume, and one that will be so valuable, and so much in popular demand, and for the student, and be so acceptable to the scholar and historian as well as the ordinary reader, that it will take its place with the best, and will certainly be a splendid monument to the Temples.
Returning to Newmark’s memoir, which, Worden added, would soon (1926) be issued in a new edition, he was “glad to remind you that they expect to include this time the portraits of both John [Jonathan] and F.P.F. Temple,” which Temple said he would provide to the historian, “and a special reference to yourself, so that THAT will be some additional help to make the Temples lastingly secure, and not be forgotten.” These inclusions “will also be helpful in assisting to direct attention to the proposed Temple history.”
Even if they hadn’t seen each other recently, Worden ended by reminding his patron that he was “working hard ‘behind the scenes,’ and that I AM PERFECTLY SATISFIED WITH MY RESULTS.” His only dissatisfaction was that “the day has only 24 hours!” After wishing Temple good health “in this somewhat treacherous Winter weather,” Worden closed with the promise that “I’ll be over before long.”
Seven more years would go by until Temple’s finances were such that he could no longer pay Worden for his work on the book and the many other small tasks and projects (such as helping the Temple children get in to their several schools) that were added. It has never been clear just how far the historian progressed on the book and his surviving papers, now at the Huntington Library, don’t indicate that much was done beyond some general sketches and draft chapters.
We’ll offer more posts on Worden’s correspondence with the Temples, so look for those in future installments of “Reading Between the Lines.”
I concur that a historian who seeks favor by fawning over celebrity patrons may compromise objectivity in interpretations and judgments. Doubts about a person’s professionalism always arise when they habitually exaggerate achievements and boast capabilities.
While uncertain if Mr. Walter P. Temple welcomed sycophants, it seems Perry Worden wasted nearly a decade, consistently claiming hard work and successful progress without fulfilling what he promised to deliver.
Thanks, Larry, we’re glad you enjoyed the post. It should be noted that Temple often sent Worden on errands unrelated to the book project, but, given all that time, it does seem like there wasn’t a whole lot produced.