R.V. Cassill: The Monticello Years

by

John J. Dunphy

(Originally published in Springhouse magazine 27:4. My other article about R.V. Cassill’s The Eagle on the Coin for Medium is “R.V. Cassill’s ‘The Eagle on the Coin:’ Forgotten, Landmark LGBT novel”).

Founded in 1838 by Benjamin Godfrey, a former slave ship captain turned philanthropist, Monticello College in Godfrey, Illinois was a two-year college for women. Although some of its early students were women of modest means such as Lucy Larcom, a former mill worker who later wrote the classic A New England Childhood, the overwhelming majority of its students came from upper-middle and upper class families. For example, those young women who were passionate equestrians often brought their beloved horses with them to Monticello College.

Attending Monticello was an established tradition in some families. It was not uncommon for a woman to boast that her mother and grandmother also had been “Monti girls,” as Monticello students called themselves. Many of its students were from New England and the mid-Atlantic states. No small number of Madison County residents tended to dismiss Monticello as a glorified finishing school. Young women from Godfrey, Alton, East Alton, Wood River and the other surrounding industrial and agricultural towns enrolled in Shurtleff College, a small coeducational Baptist school in Alton — if they went to college, rather than directly into a job or marriage.

The 1960s made Monticello into a dinosaur. Women — even those from affluent Eastern families — now wanted a four-year college education. Monticello’s location in rural Godfrey had little appeal for those who craved the excitement of a big city or, at least, a college town. That era’s political activism also underscored Monticello as an anachronism. When women at other colleges and universities were participating in protests and sit-ins, Monti girls were learning how to knit, just like their mothers and grandmothers who had attended Monticello. It closed in 1971, only to reopen the next year as Lewis and Clark Community College.

Monticello’s most distinguished alumnus was Ruth Bryan, the daughter of three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. While representing Florida’s fourth congressional district, she sponsored a bill that made the Everglades into a national park. Upon assuming the presidency in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt appointed Bryan as United States Minister to Denmark, the first woman to hold such a high diplomatic post.
Bryan worked as an instructor and counselor at Monticello from 1939 to 1944. President Harry Truman in 1949 appointed her as an alternate delegate to the United Nations. She died in 1954.

For years, when I was asked who, in my opinion, was the most distinguished faculty member at Monticello, I replied that I didn’t know of any. That changed in 2008 after a conversation with Virginia Russo of Godfrey, a friend of the author and fellow member of Alton’s Unitarian Church. Virginia had been employed as faculty secretary at Monticello in the late 1940s, and her late husband, Joe, had worked as director of communications at the college when Ronald Verlin Cassill was on its English faculty from 1946 to 1948.

Virginia, a widow in her nineties and residing in an assisted-living facility during our discussions, and Joe had been good friends with Cassill, who taught and wrote under the name R.V. Cassill and was known to his friends as Verlin. “Verlin’s first book was about Alton,” Virginia said. “You should read it, since you like history. It’s called The Eagle on the Coin.”

I researched Cassill, who was born in 1919 and died in 2002, and discovered that he had left Monticello College far behind, literally and figuratively. He departed that Godfrey institution in 1948 for a teaching post at the University of Iowa, which was followed by positions at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University. Cassill served on the faculty of Brown University from1966 to 1983. At the time of his death, he had written 27 novels (several under pseudonyms), about 40 short stories and several works of non-fiction. Cassill also edited two Norton anthologies that were widely used as college textbooks. He enjoyed painting and had exhibits in Chicago and New York.

There was no shortage of biographical material on the Internet about Cassill, but all of it shared the same omission about his Monticello years. Every professional vita listed his teaching career as beginning at the University of Iowa in 1948. Even his New York Times obituary, written by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, would have readers believe that Cassill’s teaching career began at Iowa. I discussed this matter with Virginia, who suggested that Cassill probably regarded a two-year Midwestern college as a poor country cousin to the schools where he later taught and preferred to list Iowa as his first teaching position. Still, she noted, those Monticello years were important in his development as a writer. Some further research on my part readily corroborated her statement.

Cassill earned his bachelor’s degree from Iowa in 1939 and enlisted in the army 1942 during World War II. He served for 32 months as an administrative officer in the medical corps in the Pacific theater. Cassill was discharged in 1946 and came to Monticello that same year with his wife, the former Kathleen “Kathie” Rosecranz. They settled in a log cabin on Winter Lane in Godfrey, just a short distance from campus, and became friends with Virginia and Joe, who already worked at the college. Cassill was an accomplished painter and didn’t limit himself to canvas. He painted a mural that covered an entire wall of the cabin. While this cabin was torn down years ago, Joe Russo was an avid photographer and captured Cassill’s mural on film. The year 1947 was significant for Cassill in at least four ways. He received his master’s degree from Iowa, which was the highest degree he earned throughout his professional career. He also served as the “literary leader” for a series of lectures at Alton’s YWCA that dealt with modern American literature. The photograph of Cassill that ran in Alton’s newspaper to announce this lecture series was taken by Joe Russo, who handled publicity for Monticello. Joe also wrote the cutline that complemented the photo of Cassill.

As Cassill’s friend, Joe took particular pride in writing yet another publicity release in 1947 for Monticello College’s English instructor. Cassill received the “Atlantic First” award, which was sponsored by The Atlantic Monthly to recognize new and emerging authors. “The Conditions of Justice,” a short story, was published in the December 1947 issue of that magazine and brought Cassill his first acclaim as a writer. Virginia recalled that Monticello’s administration, faculty and staff warmly congratulated Cassill on this accomplishment. Kathie Cassill was delighted by her husband’s publication in such a prestigious periodical, according to Virginia, and she and Joe shared in the young couple’s joy. Virginia said that Monticello College was notorious for paying low salaries to its faculty and staff, so the $750 prize for winning the contest was greatly appreciated by Verlin and Kathie.

In a brief biographical note that accompanied the story, Cassill stated that “Most of the stories which I have written in the past year are stories about the Army, the war, or people somehow involved with these things.” The biographical note concludes by mentioning that Cassill taught at Monticello College and was working on a novel.

The protagonist of “The Conditions of Justice” is an American Army officer who serves in a medical unit stationed in the South Pacific — much like Verlin Cassill, who told the Russos that the story was based on his wartime experiences. This officer must deal with the case of an African- American patient at the unit who was attacked by an ax-wielding corporal in the PX for allegedly showing him disrespect. Other soldiers tackled the corporal before he was able to murder the African-American. “I said to him that niggers don’t talk that way where I come from,” the corporal tells the officer when trying to explain his actions.

The African-American wants to speak to the unit’s commanding officer about the incident, but the medical officer knows all too well that the C.O., like the corporal, is also a racist. In an attempt to placate the African-American, the medical officer phones the mess hall, where the wronged young man works, and speaks to the company commander. The lieutenant contemptuously dismisses the African-American as “a trouble-making nigger.” By the end of the story, readers know that the African-American’s quest for justice is futile, even with the assistance of the sympathetic medical officer.

“The Conditions of Justice” was strong stuff for 1947 and controversial for its blunt depiction of the racism that was rampant in that era’s American military. Cassill’s first novel — the novel mentioned in the biographical note — would deal with racism in the post-war United States. But more on that later.

The fourth event of 1947 that played a crucial role in Cassill’s career occurred in the city of Alton. Gene Randall, who owned Gene Randall’s Restaurant at 419 East Broadway, was arrested and faced state and city charges for disorderly conduct as well as for what the account in The Alton Evening Telegraph referred to as “an infamous crime against nature.” He pleaded guilty and paid a fine but served no jail time in an era when gay sex, consensual or otherwise, was illegal in Illinois. Randall was a respected businessman whose restaurant had been a popular dining spot for decades. In one of its articles about Randall’s downfall, The Alton Evening Telegraph mentioned that his restaurant “had been one of the best patronized restaurants in Alton and had done a big business.” A review of his restaurant, published shortly after it opened in the 1920s, commented that “there is no finer restaurant in Alton.” The reviewer also referred to Randall’s “great host of friends.” One can only speculate how many of these friends stuck by Randall during the firestorm ignited by his arrest. Randall realized he was ruined in such a conservative community, closed the business and moved away, never to return. Virginia said that she heard he eventually settled in California.

Randall’s restaurant, according to Virginia, had served as a meeting place for an informal organization comprised of Alton’s liberals. They gathered at the restaurant to discuss the city’s racial situation and what strategy they could employ to change it. Virginia told me that, while she and her husband hadn’t been members of the group, she and Joe knew many of the people and supported their aims. She couldn’t be absolutely certain after so many years but thought Cassill had attended some of the group’s meetings at Randall’s restaurant.

“Verlin was very liberal and supported Henry Wallace,” Virginia said, referring to the politician who served as Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture during his first two terms and was selected by FDR as his running mate for that controversial third term in 1940. “It wouldn’t have endeared him to Monticello, if they had known about that.”

Henry Wallace indeed was a controversial political figure in the late 1940s, and any open support for him by Cassill clearly would have embarrassed such a conservative institution as Monticello. Vice-President Wallace was unceremoniously dropped from the ticket when FDR ran for a fourth term in 1944 for what Democratic party centrists and conservatives saw as his excessive zeal for the Soviet Union and its way of life. Harry Truman, an obscure senator from Missouri who was acceptable to the center-right conservatives, replaced Wallace as FDR’s running mate.

After winning a fourth term, Roosevelt appointed Wallace as Secretary of Commerce. Upon assuming the presidency following FDR’s death, Truman inherited Wallace as a cabinet member and the two began feuding about American foreign policy regarding the Soviet Union.

Truman fired Wallace, and the former commerce secretary became a rallying point for disaffected leftists — such as Verlin Cassill. Wallace ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the Progressive Party, which was openly supported by the Communist Party, USA.

Cassill certainly would have shared the moral outrage of those embattled liberals who gathered at Gene Randall’s Restaurant to discuss Alton’s racial situation. While de jure segregation was illegal in Illinois, de facto segregation existed in many communities — and one of those communities was Alton. The city’s only public high school was integrated, but separate grade and junior high schools existed for white and African-American students. Many restaurants refused to serve non-whites, while clothing stores did not allow black customers to try on garments before buying them. African-Americans who wished to watch movies at Alton’s Grand Theater were relegated to the balcony, which whites referred to as “nigger heaven.”

While living in this area, Cassill became intrigued by the saga of Elijah Lovejoy, the Alton newspaper editor and abolitionist who was murdered in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob. The magnificent monument to Lovejoy, erected in 1897 in the cemetery where his body is interred, is an area landmark today, just as it was when Cassill taught at Monticello. While the first full-length biography of Lovejoy was still a decade from being published, Cassill realized that Alton revered Lovejoy and had adopted him as the city’s unofficial patron saint.

Cassill soon discovered, however, that Alton chose to celebrate Lovejoy only as a martyr to freedom of the press. Celebrating him as an abolitionist — even acknowledging that he was an abolitionist — simply presented too many difficulties for citizens of a city where racism and segregation were so deeply embedded.

Cassill left Monticello College in 1948 for a teaching position at the University of Iowa. Virginia recalled that neither Verlin nor Kathie expressed any particular regret upon leaving southwestern Illinois. Verlin gave Joe and Virginia a number of paintings he had completed during his Monticello years.

Three of those paintings hung on the wall of Virginia’s quarters at the assisted-living facility, along with a photograph Joe had taken of Cassill at his log cabin home on Winter Lane. The black and white photo shows a young man with disheveled hair working on a painting at his easel.

While Verlin Cassill had left the area, he wasn’t through with it. There is a saying among writers that an author’s first novel is always autobiographical. Teaching at a conservative junior college whose student body was comprised of the daughters of the privileged wealthy; a city that lionized an abolitionist while denying his abolitionism because it was an embarrassment to their jimcrow community; a small group of liberals trying, against almost impossible odds, to combat their city’s racism; and a local businessman whose life was destroyed because his sexual orientation is criminalized all became material for Cassill’s first novel — The Eagle on the Coin, which was published by Random House in 1950. He dedicated the book to Kathie.

Joe and Virginia Russo as well as some of Cassill’s other friends from his Monticello days leaked word that the novel had a local setting, and the curious couldn’t wait to peruse it. A local book store had to reorder copies of the novel five times, while Alton’s Hayner Public Library purchased extra copies to accommodate its many patrons who wanted to read it.

Cassill had a bit of fun with the brief biography of him that appears on the book’s dust jacket. It notes that Cassill was:
born and bred in Iowa, and has now gone back
to teach in the Writers’ Workshop of the University.
The intervening years were spent as an officer in the
Army Medical Corps in the Pacific, a period about
which he does not plan to write a book.
Not a word about his 1946 to 1948 teaching stint at Monticello College. Ironically, the photo of Cassill that accompanies this biography is openly credited to Joseph A. Russo, Cassill’s friend at Monticello.

Cassill, of course, felt obligated to change names in The Eagle on the Coin. Riverton is a Midwestern river town located near St. Martin, a major city known as the Gateway to the West, and a smaller city called East St. Martin, which was the scene of a race riot in 1917. Figuring out that Riverton is Alton, St. Martin is St. Louis and East St. Martin is East St. Louis decidedly is not rocket science. Verlin and Kathie Cassill, as well as their other proof-readers, slipped twice while checking the text, however, and allowed “St. Louis” to stand when Cassill should have written “St. Martin.”

The protagonist is Andy Cameron (Cassill), a World War II veteran who teaches at a junior college. He wants to write a book about Ezekiel Mountwood, an abolitionist murdered in Riverton who was later commemorated by the construction of an impressive monument. Mountwood is obviously Elijah Lovejoy. The book’s title refers to a comment made by Cameron. In the novel, Mountwood’s Riverton memorial is an eagle atop a column. Just as an eagle is stamped on a silver dollar, Mountwood’s eagle is stamped on the city of Riverton, Cameron tells his wife.

Ezekiel Mountwood, like Lovejoy, is an embarrassment for Riverton. The town has a segregated school system and blacks possess no political power. Most Riverton residents prefer to celebrate Mountwood as a martyr to the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press, since commemorating him as an abolitionist presents too many problems in a city with segregated schools and second-class status for black residents.

Andy and Margaret Cameron are committed liberals who network with other like-minded citizens to form the Riverton Independent Voters League. This organization sets as its first goal the election of a black candidate to the city’s all-white school board. The driving force behind this league is Tom Kettle, a restaurant owner who has a long history of championing controversial causes such as civil rights. Like Gene Randall, Tom Kettle is gay and suffers arrest and disgrace for a homosexual tryst with two drifters.

Kettle rivals Cameron as the novel’s most intriguing character. After being charged with homosexual behavior, Kettle empties the drawer of his restaurant’s cash register and flees Riverton. He drifts around the country for a while and then journeys to St. Martin, where he agrees to meet Cameron at a seedy hotel. Kettle astounds the professor by revealing that he intends to return to Riverton. In a passage that seems years ahead of its time, Cassill portrays Kettle as having come to terms with his homosexuality and deciding that people with his sexual orientation are unjustly persecuted.

When Cameron warns Kettle that, while the law might seem unjust, returning to Riverton won’t change that law and he will be prosecuted, Kettle replies:
“They don’t have to change it,” Kettle said.
“Let them use it. Let them keep using it
and maybe they’ll wear it out or get tired.”
Cameron is dumbfounded by this strategy and Kettle continues:
“I’m right,” Kettle said. “If someone has a
bayonet and you have to take it away from
him…You can’t. But you can wear it down
by letting him use it on you.”
When the professor protests that there aren’t enough “people” — meaning homosexuals and possibly their straight allies — to allow such a strategy to succeed, Cassill has Kettle reply, “There have to be.” Much like Mountwood who moved to Riverton and advocated abolitionism until he
was murdered, Kettle intends to return to the river city and protest the persecution of homosexuals. And, like Mountwood, he may well lose his life while conducting such a controversial and dangerous campaign for human rights.

Cassill has Cameron also coming to identify with Mountwood. The young professor sets about writing the first full-length biography of the murdered abolitionist, a scholarly pursuit that is heartily applauded by the junior college president. When Cameron and his wife become involved in the campaign to elect an African-American to the school board, however, the president warns Cameron that such activity could jeopardize his teaching position at the college. Cameron realizes that, while paying homage to Mountwood is acceptable and even encouraged in Riverton, championing human rights in the tradition of Mountwood is not and carries dire consequences. Nonetheless, he chooses to remain involved with the reformers and their quixotic campaign.

The African-American candidate garners only five votes of the 3,215 votes cast. Cassill chose to have the numbers so lopsided to emphasize the racism in Alton. Virginia recalled that local liberals in the 1940s attempted to elect an African-American to the Alton School Board with similarly unsuccessful results. Cassill portrays cynical white politicians as passing out pint bottles of cheap whiskey in Riverton’s black wards to buy votes. This Alton native knows firsthand that such a practice was common in my city and continued decades after Cassill’s outrage at discovering it.

Cassill has his literary stand-in lambaste the provincialism and ignorance of Altonians. Musing that he had accepted the teaching position at Riverton’s junior college to see the heartland of America, Cameron decides that his problem now is how to get out of the town. “What the hell are we doing in Riverton?” he asks his wife. The disillusioned young professor dismisses the population as “frightened boobs” who steadfastly refuse to recognize Mountwood as an abolitionist. Cassill has another character castigate Riverton’s steelworkers as “Hoosiers,” a pejorative label applied by area residents to coarse, ignorant people. It is a regional term that Cassill most likely learned while living and working in Godfrey.

\Monticello College doesn’t fare much better in The Eagle on the Coin. Cameron describes Riverton’s junior college as “a gloried high school.” According to Virginia, she and her husband were amused by the characterization; other Monticello faculty and staff, less so.

The Cassills never returned to southwestern Illinois. The Russos visited Verlin and Kathie when Verlin taught at Iowa and were surprised and saddened when their Monticello friends later divorced. Virginia remembered visiting Kathie after the break-up, who told her and Joe that Verlin had been “a difficult act to keep up with.” They saw Verlin a few times when he was teaching at Brown but eventually lost touch with him.

Cassill made a humorous veiled reference to teaching at Monticello in an essay titled “Our Unperishing Unpublished.” After noting the large number of writers in the United States, Cassill remarked that “They rise like guerrillas from the population at large, breaking cover from Federal penitentiaries and the faculties of junior colleges.” The Russos and others familiar with Cassill’s past surely appreciated the joke.

Cassill in 1972 reflected on his published work and observed:
From my first novel onward I have explored the
correspondences between the interior world — of desire
and anxiety — and the public world of power, [with its] extra-social
violence and politics. In The Eagle on the Coin I wrote of
the ill-fated attempt of some alienated liberals, including a
compassionate homosexual, to elect a Negro to the school
board in a small Midwestern city.

Cassill still was not prepared to identify Alton as that “small Midwestern city” or the fact that he had based the novel on people he had known and actual events that had occurred when he taught at Monticello College. He also remarked that:
My most personal statement is probably to be found
in my short stories. If there is a constant pattern in them,
it is probably that of a hopeful being who expects evil and
finds much worse.

While a novel rather than a short story, this “constant pattern” is certainly discernible in The Eagle on the Coin, where “hopeful beings” such as Tom Kettle and the Camerons expect that their school board candidate probably will lose but do not foresee the destruction of Kettle’s reputation and business.

Upon Virginia’s death in 2009, the photograph Joe had taken of Cassill at work on a painting was donated to the Monticello College Foundation, which preserves memorabilia from that school founded so long ago by Benjamin Godfrey. Her collection of Cassill’s paintings went to the daughter of the couple that owned the log cabin where Verlin and Kathie Cassill had lived on Winter Lane. Virginia Russo was likely the last area resident who had known Verlin Cassill when he taught at Monticello College.

Virginia died before I learned that Cassill’s writings have been rediscovered and appreciated by a new generation of readers. Joe and Virginia Russo would have been so happy for their old friend from Monticello College.

Cassill had his Andy Cameron character wanting to write the first full-length biography of Ezekiel Mountwood. Ironically, the first biography of Elijah Lovejoy — Tide Without Turning: Elijah P. Lovejoy and Freedom of the Press — was written in 1958 by John Gill, who served as pastor of Alton’s First Unitarian Church when Cassill taught at Monticello. Gill’s contract with First Unitarian Church was not renewed in 1950 because his civil rights activism had made him too controversial.

Bibliography

“Randall Fined on Plea of Guilty; The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph, April 16, 1947.
“Gene Randall’s Restaurant Closed;” The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph, April 18, 1947.
“Randall Fined $200 on First of State Charges;” The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph, April 28, 1947.
“Ronald V. Cassill of Monticello College, who will be literary leader, Oct. 9 in the first of three lectures on modern American literature at the YWCA literary guild;” (cutline for photograph of Cassill) The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph, October 8, 1947.
“Monticello Teacher Wins Atlantic Monthly Award; The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph, October 28, 1947.
“Local Setting Seen in New Cassill Novel;” The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph, March 23, 1951. Cassill, R.V. “The Conditions of Justice;” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1947.
Cassill, R.V. “The Conditions of Justice;” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1947.
— . The Eagle on the Coin. New York: Random House, 1950.
— . In an Iron Time: Statements and Reiterations. Purdue University Studies, 1969.

Dunphy, John J. “Monticello professor wrote novel about Alton;” The [Alton, IL] Telegraph, August 31, 2008.

— . “Forgotten, landmark LGBT novel set in this area;” Book Blog, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. October 24, 2013.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “R.V. Cassill, Novelist and Writing Teacher, Dies At 82;” New York Times, April 1, 2002.
O’Neill, Schaefer. “Folks, Meet Gene Randall, Restaurateur!” The Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph, June 7, 1928.
http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4204/Cassill-R-onald-V-erlin_R-V-Cassill-comments.html; accessed 12/20/08 at 3:34 pm
Conversations with Virginia Russo, former Monticello College faculty secretary and dear friend of the author.