Undertaker Rigdon was Complicated and Celebrated a Reactionary Politics

Over at Salem Reporter the history column yesterday was about W. T. Rigdon.

Salem Reporter yesterday

The piece is a tie-in to the new exhibit at the Mill on Salem musical history. It is centered on a poem that was set to music and became lyrics to a song. (A modern recording here!) Rigdon's a kindly old man who cares for the dead and also has a "side hustle."

lyrics by Rigdon
WHC 2004.016.0002

It is apt to remember Rigdon was more. He occupied a place in Salem middlebrow culture as a thinker and writer, not only a poet, but also in history and politics. 

In 1919 he loudly embraced the Red Scare after the Centralia Riot and called to "purge thy fair and sacred soil....America for Americans, native born or well assimilated." The blood and soil nativism was not at all concealed.

"Purge thy fair and sacred soil"
November 23rd, 1919

A decade later, regarding the centenary of Jason Lee he celebrated Oregon as "a free state for the Anglo Saxon."

March 19th, 1929

"That Blessed old Cradle of Mine" itself should be read with the cult of the Pioneer Mother.

Rigdon's racism and nativism was casually and widely held, not so exceptional, but his public expression of it was forceful and exceptional, and he held a place of at least some status in Salem society. He didn't have to amplify it so loudly, after all.

There are other complications to his character. A person driving struck and killed his daughter as she tried to cross the street. Grief may have deranged him a little.

November 27th, 1916

As we grapple with a reactionary politics at the Supreme Court, Legislatures, and Congress, we should also think about other expressions of our long tradition of reaction here. Rigdon was not merely an undertaker-turned-poet, working sentimental notions of familial piety, and he may be worth a much closer look.

Previously:

• For more on the Anglo-Saxon link with Jason Lee: "As Jason Lee House Site has Layers, so History Telling has Layers"
• For more on Rigdon and a full transcription of the poem: "Responding to Centralia Riot, W. T. Rigdon Pens Poem urging Purge" (2019)
  
• For more on the Pioneer Mother: "Guidance of Youth and the Ideology of Pioneer Mother Monuments" (2019) and "Eugene's Pioneer Mother Statue, Burt Brown Barker, and the Problem of Genealogy" (2020).