Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

XVII
EDWARD ATKINSON

EDWARD ATKINSON

Edward Atkinson, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since March 12, 1879, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on February 10, 1827, and died in Boston on December 11, 1905. He was descended on his father’s side from the patriot minute-man, Lieutenant Amos Atkinson, and on the maternal side from Stephen Greenleaf, a well-known fighter of Indians in the colonial period; thus honestly inheriting on both sides that combative spirit in good causes which marked his life. Owing to the business reverses of his father, he was prevented from receiving, as his elder brother, William Parsons Atkinson, had received, a Harvard College education, a training which was also extended to all of Edward Atkinson’s sons, at a later day. At fifteen he entered the employment of Read and Chadwick, Commission Merchants, Boston, in the capacity of office boy; but he rapidly rose to the position of book-keeper, and subsequently became connected with several cotton manufacturing companies in Lewiston, Maine, and elsewhere. He was for many years the treasurer of a number of such corporations, and in 1878 became President of the Boston Manufacturers’ Mutual Insurance Company. Such business was in a somewhat chaotic state when he took hold of it, but he remained in its charge until his death, having during this time organized, enlarged, and perfected the mutual insurance of industrial concerns. In 1855 he married Miss Mary Caroline Heath, of Brookline, who died in December, 1907. He is survived by seven children,—Mrs. Ernest Winsor, E. W. Atkinson, Charles H. Atkinson, William Atkinson, Robert W. Atkinson, Miss C. P. Atkinson, and Mrs. R. G. Wadsworth.

This gives the mere outline of a life of extraordinary activity and usefulness which well merits a further delineation in detail. Mr. Atkinson’s interest in public life began with a vote for Horace Mann in 1848. Twenty years after, speaking at Salem, he described himself as never having been anything else than a Republican; but he was one of those who supported Cleveland for President in 1884, and whose general affinities were with the Democratic party. He opposed with especial vigor what is often called “the imperial policy,” which followed the Cuban War, and he conducted a periodical of his own from time to time, making the most elaborate single battery which the war-party had to encounter.

From an early period of life he was a profuse and vigorous pamphleteer, his first pamphlet being published during the Civil War and entitled “Cheap Cotton by Free Labor,” and this publication led to his acquaintance with David R. Wells and Charles Nordhoff, thenceforth his life-long friends. His early pamphlets were on the cotton question in different forms (1863-76); he wrote on blockade-running (1865); on the Pacific Railway (1871); and on mutual fire insurance (1885), this last being based on personal experience as the head of a mutual company. He was also, during his whole life, in print and otherwise, a strong and effective fighter for sound currency.

A large part of his attention from 1889 onward was occupied by experiments in cooking and diet, culminating in an invention of his own called “The Aladdin Oven.” This led him into investigations as to the cost of nutrition in different countries, on which subject he also wrote pamphlets. He soon was led into experiments so daring that he claimed to have proved it possible to cook with it, in open air, a five-course dinner for ten persons, and gave illustrations of this at outdoor entertainments. He claimed that good nutrition could be had for $1 per week, and that a family of five, by moderate management, could be comfortably supported on $180 per year (Boston “Herald,” October 8, 1891). These surprising figures unfortunately created among the laboring-class a good deal of sharp criticism, culminating in the mistaken inquiry, why he did not feed his own family at $180 a year, if it was so easy? I can only say for one, that if the meals at that price were like a dinner of which I partook at his own house with an invited party, and at which I went through the promised five courses after seeing them all prepared in the garden, I think that his standard of poverty came very near to luxury.

Mingled with these things in later years was introduced another valuable department of instruction. He was more and more called upon to give addresses, especially on manufactures, before Southern audiences, and there was no disposition to criticise him for his anti-slavery record. Another man could hardly be found whose knowledge of manufacturing and of insurance combined made him so fit to give counsel in the new business impulse showing itself at the South. He wrote much (1877) on cotton goods, called for an international cotton exposition, and gave an address at Atlanta, Georgia, which was printed in Boston in 1881.

Looking now at Atkinson’s career with the eyes of a literary man, it seems clear to me that no college training could possibly have added to his power of accumulating knowledge or his wealth in the expression of it. But the academic tradition might have best added to these general statements in each case some simple address or essay which would bring out clearly to the minds of an untrained audience the essential points of each single theme. Almost everything he left is the talk of a specially trained man to a limited audience, also well trained,—at least in the particular department to which he addresses himself. The men to whom he talks may not know how to read or write, but they are all practically versed in the subjects of which he treats. He talks as a miner to miners, a farmer to farmers, a cook to cooks; but among all of his papers which I have examined, that in which he appears to the greatest advantage to the general reader is his “Address before the Alumni of Andover Theological Seminary” on June 9, 1886. Here he speaks as one representing a wholly different pursuit from that of his auditors; a layman to clergymen, or those aiming to become so. He says to them frankly at the outset, “I have often thought [at church] that if a member of the congregation could sometimes occupy the pulpit while the minister took his place in the pew, it might be a benefit to both. The duty has been assigned to me to-day to trace out the connection between morality and a true system of political or industrial economy.”