Barbara Young Welke's "Writing with Fire"

Barbara Young Welke is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of history and law at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States and Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life, and reported the following:

From page 99:

On Sunday, April 8, 1945, a double headline spanned the columns of page 1 of the Washington, DC, Times-Herald: “Patton Seizes Nazi Gold Hoard” and “Yanks Smash Japs Naval Power.” But just beneath these headlines, in columns 2 and 3, was an investigative report by Times-Herald reporters Roland Nicholson and Spence Drummond: “D.C. Parents Warned: Inflammable Cowboy Suits Kill One Child Here, Burn 7” and “Fuzzy ‘Chaps’ Flare Like Torches; Stores Are Notified, Probe Launched.” Here was what for so long had been lacking: a story clearly identifying the danger.

Here’s what I like about the Page 99 Test for Writing with Fire: it lands in a chapter about the cowboy suit tragedy. At mid-century, children across the United States suffered burns when their highly inflammable Gene Autry cowboy playsuits caught fire, Americans’ first reckoning with “flammable fabrics.” The history of this tragedy is the heart of the book. One of the questions that troubled me from the start in working on this project was why it had taken so long—close to three years of children across the United States being burned, many dying—before the hazard began to be known for what it was. The Page 99 Test lands in the chapter focused on the role of the press in reinforcing the common-sense narrative that this is what happens when children play with fire, situates readers in the broader World War II context in which this tragedy unfolded; and, just so happens to be the page on which I introduce news stories from DC that identified the dangerously inflammable character of the fuzzy fabric on the chaps of the Gene Autry cowboy suit as the cause of deaths and injuries. As readers later learn, this coverage was key to the first lawsuits brought against Autry and others involved in producing and selling the cowboy suits.

But the test is also misleading. Although the news broke in DC, it did not break elsewhere with the result that children continued to be burned and die. But it’s also misleading because this tragedy is only one of three strands in this braided narrative. Intertwined with the cowboy suit tragedy is a history of the curriculum vitae, the form at the center of academic life. That sounds dry, unrelated, and certainly unexpected. It’s none of these things. It’s here because a traumatic loss in my life—the sudden death of my teenage daughter—led me to question how the CV, as it is colloquially called, claims to represent a life, and yet excludes so much of what gives life meaning, reinforcing norms that ask scholars to distance themselves from their emotions and personal experience in the writing of history and other disciplines. Braided between the two historical strands are letters I wrote my daughter in the year and a half after her death. Together this braided narrative invites readers to think deeply about history and the course of a life.

Learn more about Writing with Fire at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue