A CU Boulder poet considers the socioeconomic and political environment of the turn of the 20th century through the history of her own family
Mud, Blood, and Ghosts is not a typical history book.
To write it, Julie Carr delved not just into archives and manuscripts, but also into —specifically, the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem, a People’s Party politician who served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Nebraska between 1891 and 1897. Kem’s story weaves everything from populism to eugenics to spiritualism, and represents a broader narrative of a particular time, place and people in the American West.
Subtitled “Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West,” the book, through Kem, tells the story of how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the region and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.
Julie Carr, a CU Boulder professor of English andchair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, plumbed her family's history to write Mud, Blood, and Ghosts.
In crafting the book, which was published last year, Carr, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of English and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, blended historical exposition with poetic language, a way of writing that she says is essential for expressing complex emotions. Because of the personal nature of the subject, Carr says, she was interested in speaking from her own perspective in the present as well as from Kem’s perspective in the past, demonstrating the idea that history is always with us.
In this sense, the reference to ghosts in the title has a double meaning, not just refering to 19th century spiritualists, but how “we are haunted by our pasts. They are with us all the time, and they are directing what we do,” Carr says.
“To acknowledge that is to take responsibility for it, to think, ‘Given all of that, what is my responsibility to the future and to the present?’”
A farmer’s populism
Omer Kem was born in 1855 in Hagerstown, Indiana, to an itinerant and largely unsuccessful farmer who often moved his family to find better work. Kem’s family was ravaged by disease and continuing financial instability, so he set out on his own, ultimately moving to Nebraska. As a young man, he farmed through government programs like the Swamp Lands Act and the Homestead Act, but failed due to infertile conditions. Many farmer settlers in Nebraska were in a similar situation, falling into debt as the seeds they sowed blew away in the hot winds of the region’s 1889-1899 drought.
When Kem ran for and won a seat in Congress, his experiences inspired him to join the populist movement of the time along with many rural farmers and other people living in poverty. The movement was a response to the economic and social conditions of the Gilded Age, according to Carr:
“Both urban laborers and rural laborers were left in the lurch,” as the former lacked protections like the eight-hour workday and the latter faced unregulated crop prices and railroad rates, among other issues. Meanwhile, with no graduated income tax, the people at the top did not pay more, and there was no significant social safety net at that time.
Mud, Blood, and Ghosts details how factors as disparate as economic inequity, water scarcity and scientific racism, among many others, shaped the American West and the country and still resonate politically and socially today.
“All of these things combined with the problem of weather and climate in the Plains states,” Carr says. Many poor farmers had moved to states in the Great Plains region during the mid- and late-19th century following the Homestead Act, but in dry climates, the land couldn’t produce without massive irrigation. In the South, where climate was not the issue, “we’re looking at a totally different dynamic having to do with the end of Reconstruction, and poverty among Black farmers especially.”
What unites the People’s Party with today’s populists might be its criticism of the societal elite, Carr says, “coupled with the demand for greater representation in politics. I think a lot of people would say that many contemporary American populists, on the right or the left, are people who for various reasons have not felt included in the political system.”
American eugenics at the turn of the 20th century
Kem also was influenced by the racial segregation and fear of “mixing races” that was both commonplace and largely unchallenged for several generations after the Civil War. Along with large swathes of the American public, Carr says, Kem came to believe in the ideology of , a term coined to describe attempts at increasing the number of people with “superior” mental and physical traits through the human equivalent of selective breeding. It grew, in part, from elements of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly the heritability of traits.
“The science itself was not very detailed,” Carr explains. “It was the beginning of an understanding of how genetics works. That science got married to criminology, ideas around welfare, the problems that came with urbanization, the first wave of the Great Migration and the huge numbers of immigrants coming in during the beginning of the 20th century.”
These major demographic and political changes made some people afraid, especially members of dominant groups, Carr says. Because of the widespread belief that many traits and behaviors were inherited, eugenicists justified ostracizing or marginalizing people who were Black, poor, disabled, criminals and immigrants, insisting they would “taint” the gene pool.
“Many people who believed in ‘progress’ believed in eugenics,” Carr says, including those who might be considered left-wing. “That’s important to say because it points to the ways in which white supremacy and fascistic thinking can bleed into different political mindsets or belief systems.” Even prominent feminists of the time like Margaret Sanger espoused eugenic beliefs, though she never fully bought into forced sterilization as Kem did, Carr says.
The spiritualist movement
In addition to eugenics, Omer Kem believed in spiritualism, a movement centered around the idea that it is possible to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Carr notes in her book that spiritualism was common in Midwest Populist circles as well as among the general public; there were an estimated 5 to 6 million adherents by the 1860s, according to a historian cited by Carr.
A number of scholars document spiritualists’ involvement in progressive political causes. For example, the Bland family, Washington, D.C., activists whom Kem met when he moved to the capital after being elected to Congress, were populists as well as the founders of the National Indian Defense Association, a reform organization that opposed the forced assimilation of Native Americans.
CU Boulder Professor Julie Carr focused on the story of her great-grandfather Omer Kem to explore the history of spiritualism, populism and eugenics in the American West and the United States.
At a dinner that Kem had with the Blands after he had been placed on the House Indian Affairs Committee, the Blands’ niece Maggie, a purported medium, described the ghosts of Kem’s mother and beloved sister Ellen as glowing orbs hovering near his head. This led to a series of encounters with his dead family members, including his son Bert.
Carr suggests that the Blands might have been using their spiritualism as a form of lobbying, as after these encounters with his dead relatives, Kem became very close to the Blands and did, in fact, advocate for their cause in Congress. Later, Kem’s spiritualism took another turn when he began to “see” a Native American “spirit guide” who he believed had entered his body.
Historians understand the prevalence of Native spirit guides differently. Some interpret it as yet another form of removal, reducing Native Americans to spectral presences, while others argue that spiritualists were generally sympathetic toward Native Americans, and sometimes used the “voices” of Native spirits to advocate for reforms (though these generally involved coerced assimilation through institutions such as the Indian schools). While this may have been a form of social justice work, it was a distorted one, according to Carr, based as it was on both appropriation and projection.
“In my great-grandfather’s case,” Carr says, “he started having visions of the ‘spirit’ of a ‘Native American healer’ entering his body in the 1890s when he was in Congress. He maintained this imagined relationship with this ‘spirit’ for the rest of his life. I think there’re some interesting psychological dynamics going on there, one being a desire to identify with Native Americans because of the way that he understands Indigenous people as having a legitimate right to the land.
“The other complexity is that, even as he’s making speeches on the congressional floor advocating for at least some level of Native sovereignty, he is also legislating for the further removal of Native people from land. In that split, you can see a kind of crisis. If nothing else, it has to be a crisis of conscience. Creating for himself, in a sense, an imaginary friend in this spirit guide he calls ‘Fleet Wind’ is a way, I think, to respond to that crisis of conscience. Perhaps this is true of many forms of appropriation and projection.”
Kem’s “complex history of bad and good luck, of power struggles, and of property,” as Carr describes them, highlights how the past haunts the present like a ghost, despite the flaws of its actors. Carr finds stark contrast between the past and the present in the People’s Party platform: “This Republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other.”
“Though this word love, like the phrase the people, has so often been cheapened, distorted and mobilized for violent ends,” Carr writes, “I still want to ask: What if we took them at their word?”
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