Research Journal: Polly and the Poem
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Minneapolis Tribune, July 17, 1880 |
Beginning in the 1860s, Sarah Cahill Worthington, the daughter of Irish immigrants living in Shieldsville, Minnesota, worked as a journalist, first for the St. Paul Dispatch and Chicago Times and later for the St. Paul Globe, contributing political commentary under the pseudonym “Polly Carp.”
“Polly Carp” wasn’t afraid of going after Minnesota’s most powerful men. In 1881, she aimed her barbs at former Governor Alexander Ramsey. She didn’t hold back in her caricature of Ramsey as a profiteer and dispenser of political patronage:
He humors people. He listens complacently to them, and he agrees with everybody. His pendulous under lip is as full and bulging as a sausage, and it helps his chuckle immensely. He smiles, and smiles, and is — A. Ramsey, which is as significant as the quotation, in some directions.
The “quotation” alluded to here is “he smiles, and smiles, and is a villain,” a common paraphrase of a description of Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. She continues:
As one looks at Ramsey’s tumble-down buildings, chiefly saloons, on the most eligible sites, and knows of his cut-throat leases and unimproved property in valuable parts of the town, one begins to wonder what he has ever done for the State, with so much damaging evidence to the contrary right here at home …
She goes on to compare Ramsey to the ravenous grasshoppers who picked large swaths of the state clean during the 1870s:
The precious old settler has always used the State for himself and his retainers. Applause and appropriations! … The two States which were green enough for the grasshoppers to work in were the Minnesota of Ramsey and the Kansas of Dilworthy Pomeroy[1] … Minnesota once took to public prayer to be rid of the grasshoppers, and if necessary the House of Hope should again test it efficiency on Ramsey, too …
This barbed—and, by today’s standards, potentially libelous—style often caused offence, but more importantly, it sold newspapers. As a writer for the St. Paul Globe said in Sarah Worthington’s obituary in 1900: “Hundreds of copies of the Times would be sold in St. Paul whenever whenever ‘Polly Carp’s’ articles appeared.”[2]
“Polly Carp’s” writing sometimes provoked an equally sharp-tongued response, as it did when she criticized a long original poem recited by A.P. Miller, the editor of the Worthington Advance, at an event in 1880 marking the 200thanniversary of Hennepin’s “discovery” of Saint Anthony Falls. Polly Carp had mocked the length of Miller’s poem and its extended metaphor of Minnesota as “the Mother of the Waters,” culminating with the lines:
Nor yet content to call the South and East
To her own free yet sumptuous water feast,
The Mother of the Waters gives the West
Another river from her teeming breast.[3]
Poet Miller shot back, taking aim at Polly Carp’s gender:
Some spinster up in St. Paul, who signs herself “Polly Carp,” has written to the Chicago Times and objects to the Celebration Poem. She objects to its length and to the elocution of the reader, but, the red flag that roils her blood most is that—the poem makes Minnesota a “Mother State,” giving down rivers instead of milk. There is the secret of it. This spinster, “Polly,” is one who is dry, and any imagry [sic] drawn from a “mother’s breast” enrages her … We would advise “Polly” to get married, and then she will not be so shocked by metaphors and other sweet things drawn from a “mother’s breast.”[4]
“Polly Carp,” Sarah Worthington, was in fact a widow, raising a young son, eleven years old in 1880, and supporting them both with her newspaper writing. As a political journalist, she followed in the footsteps of Jane Swisshelm (1815-1884), the pioneering editor of the St. Cloud Visiter, and paved the way for the next generation of women in journalism, including Eva Valesh (1866-1856), who joined the St. Paul Globe in 1888 as an investigative journalist covering labor issues.
Sarah Worthington left the Globe in 1885 when the newspaper was sold, and her career was cut short by tuberculosis, which claimed her life in November 1900, one week before her 66th birthday. She was buried with her parents and siblings in Shieldsville, Minnesota.
[1] Samuel Pomeroy, a Senator from Kansas who served from 1861 to 1873, was charged with offering a bribe of $7,000 to a state legislator in exchange for his vote (until the 17th Amendment passed in 1913, U.S. Senators were elected by state legislatures). Pomeroy became the model for the corrupt Senator Dilworthy in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s novel The Gilded Age (1873).
[2] “Death of Polly Carp,” St. Paul Globe (November 3, 1900), 3, 3.
[3] “The St. Anthony Falls Celebration,” Worthington Advance (July 15, 1880), 2, 4.
[4] “A Critic,” Worthington Advance (July 15, 1880), 3, 3
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