June is the month of graduations, and this episode tells the story of two strong and inspiring women whose words left an enduring impact on students -- and many others -- in the Brattleboro area. Invited to the Putney School commencement in June 1956 by its founder Carmelita Hinton, Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged graduates to be good global citizens. Narrator Anna Kusmer sets the stage of McCarthy-era America where civil rights were routinely violated especially for people of color. Commentator Marni Rosner, Hinton's granddaughter, helped the Brattleboro Words Trail discover a forgotten reel-to-reel tape of Roosevelt's speech and restored it so it could be heard for the first time and used for the podcast. Roosevelt cautions that democracy can only survive when citizens are educated. She says if the US wants to lead the world, it had better lead by example. She says the world is composed of mainly people of color who would be lifted up to a higher standard of living through the new UN's work and that they would be watching what's happening in the US. Rosner reflects on her grandmother's work in the Progressive Era with Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams and education leader John Dewey. Kusmer ends with keen observation on youth, the future and a great Roosevelt quote. The second half of the episode on Wangari Maathai, the first black female (and environmentalist) Nobel Peace Laureate, is narrated by filmmaker Lisa Merton who, along with her partner Alan Dater, made the wonderful documentary "Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai." Merton discusses how the filmmakers met Maathai and how potent, communicative and loving an individual she was. We hear archival tape of Maathai speaking stirringly and presciently about the origins of her famed 'Green Belt Movement' and how humans must act to maintain the Earth - our life support system.
The first half of this episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast on Eleanor Roosevelt, Carmelita Hinton and the Putney School, was produced, written and narrated by Anna Kusmer with commentary by Marnie Rosner, Putney School founder Carmelita Hinton's granddaughter. Archival tape of Eleanor Roosevelt's voice at that commencement speech was restored and mastered by Guilford Sound.
The second half of this podcast on Wangari Maathai was produced and edited by Lisa Merton and Alan Dater. Clips of Wangari’s voice were taken from their documentary film: Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai. Executive Producer of this episode was me Lissa Weinmann. Final mastering was by Guilford Sound. Final podcast editing and production was by Alec Pombriant. Many thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Humanities Council and the hundreds of volunteers who make the Brattleboro Words Trail a reality.
Thanks to Christopher Grotke for making composite image of Roosevelt and Maathai for episode image.
Two Inspiring Women: Eleanor Roosevelt and Wangari Maathai
Host Lissa Weinmann: June is the month of graduations. So this month the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast is bringing you stories of two very different but equally powerful women leaders who came to Brattleboro at very different times to inspire area students – and many others – with strong and hopeful visions for the future.
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at the June 1956 Putney School commencement. The Words Project discovered an old reel-to-reel tape which had been forgotten and was restored for the story. She was invited to Putney by Carmelita Hinton, another progressive firebrand, who founded and ran the Putney School for many years before Roosevelt's visit.
The second piece explores Kenyan leader Wangari Maathai’s ties to Brattleboro. Maathai won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for founding and promoting the Green Belt Movement throughout Africa. She studied at the School for International Training in Brattleboro and made it a point to plant trees and talk to Brattleboro area students. She inspired local filmmakers Lisa Merton and Alan Dater to make a documentary film entitled “Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai. Lisa and Alan produced the segment on Wangari Maathai for the Brattleboro Words Trail. Roosevelt and Maathai’s words and examples have resonated and reverberated in the Brattleboro area and beyond for many, many years, and we expect that they will continue to inspire you today.
(Begins with piece on Roosevelt and the Putney School)
Narrator Story One Anna Kusmer: Eleanor Roosevelt had a saying I like: “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.”
Roosevelt was by all accounts a strong woman. She was the First Lady of the United States during the Depression and World War Two, helping her husband create the New Deal, revolutionary public policy that would forever transform the country.
So why in her later years did she one of the world's most famous women find herself addressing a roomful of teenagers on a cow speckled hilltop in Vermont? It was a graduation.
Archival Voice of Eleanor Roosevelt: I’m very happy to see Putney and to visit you…(fades out)
Kusmer: On a scratchy recording from June 1956, Roosevelt said she's heard a great deal about the Putney school and its founder, another strong woman, Carmelita Hinton.
Marni Rosner: Inviting Eleanor Roosevelt to speak at the commencement in June of 1956 was really the last public occasion that she organized for Putney school before she went off traveling around the world.
Kusmer: That's Marni Rosner. Full disclosure, my mother in law.
Rosner: My grandmother was Carmelita Hinton, the founder of the Putney School in Putney, Vermont.
Kusmer: Although Hinton and Roosevelt had never met before that point in 1956, in some ways they led parallel lives. Born five years apart, they both grew up to be relentless advocates for social reform and progressive values. By founding the Putney school, Hinton pushed forward a version of education with little precedent.
Rosner: She was very passionate about progressive education.
Kusmer: The school, founded in 1936, focused on appreciating arts, participating in democracy, learning by doing. Every student had to work shifts on the campus dairy farm
Rosner: Of course, on a farm, you have to cooperate and you can't sort of lay in bed and say, ‘I'm not going to feed my animals today.’ So really learning a lot of responsibility and taking it very seriously.
Kusmer: Many people in Roosevelt's circle of friends had sent their children to the Putney School to experience the unique combination of rigorous education, arts and civic engagement. Hinton and Roosevelt also had friends in common, social reformers, like Nobel Peace Prize winning Jane Addams, a leading labor rights activist in Chicago.
Rosner: Jane Addams was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's and was also my grandmother's first real employer.
Kusmer: Hinton worked with Addams in the Hull House in Chicago, which helped poor immigrant families working in factories learn English and improve working and living conditions.
Rosner: It was really the the earliest social work of the day.
Kusmer: Hinton also took classes with John Dewey at the University of Chicago, an advocate for social change and education reform.
Rosner: There was a quite a large movement. That was really the Progressive Era, the eight hour work day and the 40 hour work week and the end to child labor and many of those other issues that are so important.
Kusmer: That movement helped inspire Roosevelt to head the UN Human Rights Commission in her later years.
Archival Voice of Roosevelt: This must be taken as testimony of our common aspiration first voiced in the charter of… (fades out),
Kusmer: Here she is addressing the UN General Assembly in 1948.
Archival Voice Roosevelt: …to lift men everywhere to a higher standard of life and to a greater … (fades out)
Kusmer: Roosevelt's 1956 graduation speech in Putney came on the tails of the McCarthy era, where American citizens were punished and blacklisted for their ideas. Segregation in schools had just been outlawed by the Supreme Court. In the South African Americans faced violent persecution fighting for their right to vote. Much of the country had some form of racial segregation.
Archival Voice Roosevelt: They might come to realize that they might be free….(fades out)
Kusmer: In the graduation speech, she alluded to people all over the world fighting for freedom from oppression. She says at this time, there is a sweep which is taking people right along their feet. Suddenly they've come to realize that they might be free.
Archival Voice Roosevelt: When that sweep occurs, then I think a nation like ours…(fades out)
Kusmer: Roosevelt said a nation like ours has a responsibility it cannot shirk.
Rosner: She really spoke to many of the just many of the issues that were so key to my grandmother.
Kusmer: In her speech, Roosevelt spoke about how racial injustice and segregation in the US were seen by the rest of the world. At the time, the US was forming the UN and trying to promote democratic ideals as a model for the world. But if the world was to follow America's lead, it first had to reckon with glaring problems at home. The world was watching.
Archival Voice Roosevelt: We think our values for individual people are far greater than any other…(fade out)
Rosner: Eleanor Roosevelt says we think that our values are the best. She says we think our values for individual people are far greater than any other the world can offer today, but we have to prove that value. How we meet our own problems is going to be something of a gauge as to our greatness as the rest of the world looks on.
Archival Voice Roosevelt: …as the rest of the world looks on.
Kusmer: A vast majority of the world are people of color, says Roosevelt…
Archival Voice Roosevelt: Freedom and (opportunity) and they do not like to be looked down upon… (fades out)
Kusmer: Eleanor Roosevelt had strong ideas for what types of policies would promote a more peaceful and equal society. However, in her speech, she didn't tell students what to think. She encouraged them to learn about the realities of the world and to think deeply and critically, to understand their role in a democracy and as global citizens.
Archival Voice Roosevelt: No democracy can really function unless the people as a whole are an educated people…(fades out as Rosner translates from the scratchy archival recording)
Rosner: No democracy can really function unless the people as a whole are an educated people. Where do they want their influence? A great nation like ours, stronger than any other nation today, where do we want our influence to be felt?
Kusmer: After her speech, the students sang Roosevelt some Bach. (Sound of singing begins.) The work of creating a more just world starts with education, said Roosevelt. It starts in classrooms and small town meetings, and on dairy farms in the hills of Vermont. Eleanor Roosevelt had another saying I like: “Do one thing every day that scares you.” Addressing and educating children in a broken world, and trusting the future to them, is not for the weak hearted.
(musical interlude before part 2)
Narrator Lisa Merton: In 2004, Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmental and women's rights activist and founder of the Green Belt Movement, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace. She was the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the prize.
Wangari had a long connection to the Brattleboro area. She was a friend of the Guilford church, a board member of World Learning, and she planted a tree with students at Oak Grove School. Our film ‘Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathi’ showed at the Latchis Theater for a week. And in 2009, when Wangari visited Brattleboro on a book tour for her second book, ‘The Challenge for Africa’, she attracted a standing room only crowd at the Latchis.
She loved Vermont's forest, especially in the autumn. This excerpt is from Wangari’s Nobel acceptance speech. We also used it at the beginning of our film ‘Taking Root.’
Voice of Maathai from Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech: Ladies and Gentlemen, it is 30 years since we started this work. Activities that devastate the environment and societies continue unabated. Today, we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life support system. We are called to assist the earth to heal her wounds, and in the process, heal our own.
Merton: My name is Lisa Merton, Alan Dater, and I are filmmakers from Marlboro (Vermont). We met Wangari in 2002 at the Yale School of Forestry, where she was a visiting professor. We'd been asked to make a 10 minute film about her for a small foundation. But as soon as we met her, that idea went right out the window.
Wangari’s story was astounding. We were captivated, inspired and deeply moved. She was a storyteller, spellbinding, funny and wise, a filmmaker’s dream. We have never met a person of such courage. She had repeatedly risked her life to speak truth to power in her quest to protect the land, democratic space and the rights of women in Kenya. Her rural roots connected her deeply to the earth. And despite her education and years in academia, she had never lost that connectedness.
Wangari discovered her life's work by reconnecting with the rural women with whom she had grown up. Their lives had become intolerable. They were walking long distances for firewood. Clean drinking water was scarce. The soil was disappearing from their land, and their children were suffering from malnutrition.
Voice of Maathai: Why not plant trees? I asked the women. Let's plant trees. And then they said: ‘Well, we would plant trees, but we don't know how.’ And that started the whole story of yeah, okay, let's learn how to plant trees. Initially, we tried to give them seeds, and then we decided against it. We said if we give them seeds, they will become dependent. We said if you plant a tree, and the tree survives, the movement will compensate you a very small amount of money – about four US cents per tree that survives. And so they just started very, very, very small, very, very small. And before too long, they started showing each other how and before we knew it, the tree nurseries just started mushrooming.
Merton: Today the Greenbelt Movement has planted over 50 million trees and Wangari Maathai’s work and life stand as an example to people around the globe of how one person can be a force for change.
She urged action on climate change, protection of forests, environmental justice, women's rights, and good governance. She touched people's hearts, whether they were heads of state, or rural women, no matter where they lived, or who they were.
Voice of Maathai: In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.
Host Weinmann reads credits: The first half of this episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast on Eleanor Roosevelt, Carmelita Hinton and the Putney School, was produced, written and narrated by Anna Kusmer with commentary by Carmelita Hinton's granddaughter Marnie Rosner. Archival tape of Eleanor Roosevelt's voice at that commencement speech was restored and mastered by Guilford Sound.
The second half of this podcast on Wangari Maathai was produced and edited by Lisa Merton and Alan Dater. Clips of Wangari’s voice were taken from their documentary film: Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai. Executive Producer of this episode was me Lissa Weinmann. Final mastering was by Guilford Sound, and final podcast editing and production was by Alec Pombriant. Many thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Humanities Council and the hundreds of volunteers who make the Brattleboro Words Trail a reality. Thank you for listening. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast if you like us, and we look forward to seeing you next month for the next episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.