Jonathan Ned Katz: Francis Davis Millet and Charles Warren Stoddard, 1874-1912, PART 2

Continued from:

Jonathan Ned Katz: Francis Davis Millet and Charles Warren Stoddard, 1874-1912

Profile (below): Francis Davis Millet by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1879.

Millet to Stoddard, May 10, 1875

From Venice, Millet wrote affectionately to Stoddard on May 10, 1875, calling him "Dear Old Chummeke"--explaining, "I call you chummeke," the "diminutive of chum,"' because "you are already 'chum' but have never been chummeke before. Flemish you know." "Chum" and its variations constituted a common, positive name among nineteenth-century male intimates, one of the terms by which they affirmed the special character of their tie.

Claiming he had not much to say because he "let out" so much in his first letter (not extant, significantly and unfortunately) Millet reported that he had a new pet. He had told their mutual friends, the Adamses, that he had "named the new dog Charles Warren Stoddard Venus, though "it wasn't that kind of a dog" (not, that is, a dog of mixed, ambiguous sex). To Stoddard, Millet certainly referred to Stoddard's large admixture of the feminine and perhaps to Stoddard's sexual intrest in men. To the Adamses, Millet was probably perceived to refer only to Stoddard's effeminacy. The dog's name "was not a question of sex,"' Millet had stressed to the Adamses, "but of appropriateness."

The dog's-and Stoddard's-ambiguous masculinity had obviously been the subject of some lighthearted banter between Millet and the Adamses. But Millet's reference to Stoddard's effeminacy probably did not then bring erotic infractions to this Adams family's mind, nor is it likely to have suggested to them the sexual aspect of the relationship between these men. Gender deviance and erotic nonconformity were not yet linked as they would be after the installation of homosex and heterosex.

Another dog, Tom, "sleeps in your place now and fills it all up, that is, the material space he occupies, crowding me out of bed very offen." Stoddard's body was absent, but his spirit lingered on.

"Miss you?" Millet asked. He answered: "Bet your life. Put yourself in my place. It isn't the one who goes away who misses, it is the one who stays. Empty chair, empty bed, empty house." Millet's desire for Stoddard's bodily presence is palpable in his words.

"So, my dear old cuss;' Millet ended warmly, "with lots of love I am thine -- as you need not be told." He had obviously declared his love many times earlier. [A transcription of this whole letter is available on OutHistory at Millet to Stoddard: May 10, 1875. All Millet's letters to Stoddard are transcribed and listed at: Letters of Frank Millet to Charles Warren Stoddard: May 10, 1875 - January 3, 1900.]

Millet to Stoddard: May 26, 1875

He was working on a painting that called for two boy models, "posing two small cusses--the naked ones-together,"' Millet wrote to Stoddard on May 26 (again, the talk was of nude male flesh). But the hot, dustladen, dry wind of Venice, lightning flashes, and "the mercurial little cusses" made him feel that he had "nearly ruined what good there was on the canvas." Millet wished Stoddard was present to "make me feel that I have not done so awfully bad work today."

"No gossip to speak of," Millet reported, except that a mutual male friend "does no work but spoons with Miss Kelley. "Spoon" appeared repeatedly in Millet's letters and in Stoddard's published journalism, with varying degrees of romantic and sexual intimation.

Spooning reminded Millet that he had had "a squaring up" with Charlotte ("Donny") Adams, the eighteen-year-old daughter of their good friends. Millet had told Donny "exactly what I thought of her going off with one fellow and coming home with another." In response, she had tried to "put it all on to me,"' saying "I alone was touchy." But Millet had told her Stoddard agreed with his criticism, "and then she seemed very anxious to beg my pardon etc. which was not granted."

Millet's high-handed objection to what he considered Donny's breach of dating etiquette shows him identifying with a man done wrong, supposedly, by a woman. Criticizing Donny's inconstancy in ditching one man for another, Millet may have applied to her the same standard to which he held himself. He was certainly constant in his romantic devotion to Stoddard, despite the journalist's inconstancy. Stoddard, off with Monte Cristo and Robert William Jones, clearly applied a less rigid rule to his own liaisons.

Donny Adams had ended this confrontation by reporting one of her men friends' suggestions: Millet was gaining weight that winter "because I liked her and did not care to see another fellow go with her." Donny and her man friend did not perceive that Millet's romantic-erotic interest was focused then on Stoddard. Men's erotic romances with men were invisible because at this time in the public consciousness, there was only one kind of erotic-romantic attraction-toward the other, different sex.

Millet asked Stoddard to meet him in Belgium in July. Then, for the first time in his letters, he acknowledged the imbalance in their need for each other: "My dear old Boy, I miss you more than you do me." He wondered "constantly--after dark;' he confessed, "why should one go and the other stay. It is rough on the one who remains"--a repeated refrain. "Harry" (another dog) "sends a wave of her tail and a gentle swagger of her body"--"Charles/Venus" was not the only mixed-sex dog name. "Tom;' Millet added, "sends you his brightest smile and Venus wags his aimless tail in greeting."

Millet to Stoddard: May 30, 1875

He had not "passed one good night" since they parted, Millet admitted to Stoddard on May 30, and he was "completely played out from want of sleep and rest." He had not mentioned it before, "and I don't dare tell you why I haven't."

What was it, exactly, that Millet dared not say? Was it simply that he missed Stoddard too much and was depressed? Or did he believe, possibly, that he had exhausted himself: in Stoddard's absence, from voluntary or involuntary seminal emissions? Or, did Millet believe, perhaps, that he received from Stoddard's physical presence some spiritual, or material, vitality-enhancing substance? We cannot know for sure. But other evidence that we will consider supports a sexual interpretation.

Whatever Millet did not say, he was also probably worrying again about their unequal need for each other and about coming on too strong to Stoddard. We have already heard Stoddard's reference to two men friends' "monstrous show of feeling." Displays of emotion were evidently threatening, as well as intriguing, to Stoddard.

Millet had supposed for a while that it "was our old attic chamber that made me restless."' and he had ordered Giovanni to move his bed elsewhere in the house. He had not "been into our attic room since and don't intend to go"--strong feelings about their old bedroom. But the "change of room does not cure me."

"What is the matter?" asked Millet, struggling to understand the source of his distress: "I know I miss you, my old chummeke, but isn't it reasonable that my other self misses you still more and cant let me sleep because he wants your magnetism! I think it must be so."

Millet was two-sided, he suggested, and one of his sides lacked the vital force provided by Stoddard's physical, bodily presence. "Magnetism" was a common nineteenth-century name for an individual's power to attract, his force of personality, and his energy.

Was it possible that Millet missed, specifically, the vivifying ingestion of Stoddard's spirit via oral sex? This is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Three years after Millet wrote to Stoddard, in 1878, Dr. Mary Walker warned readers of her popular medical manual not to believe the common folklore that women's ingestion of men's semen, and men's ingestion of women's vaginal secretions, promoted health, life, and beauty. The benefits of an older man ingesting a younger man's semen was actually extolled by the English sex reformer Edward Carpenter to an American visitor (Gavin Arthur) with whom he tested the practice in the early twentieth century.

Mrs. Adams "is spooney on you, you know," Millet told Stoddard. But the roaming Stoddard was not thinking about Mrs. Adams, however affectionate their relationship. At long last, Stoddard admitted that he missed Millet, who was extremely pleased to hear it: "Bet your life, dear Boy, that it soothes me to learn that I am not the only one who misses his companion in arms." ("Companion-in-arms" appears here, again, as these bedfellows' private, affectionate name for each other.)

Millet sent Stoddard "much love," declaring himself "yours to put your finger on" -- he was still available for the taking. Millet played Penelope, stay-at-home wife, to Stoddard's wandering Odysseus.

Millet to Stoddard: June 9, 1875

"Since I got your last letter;' Millet reported on June 9, "I have passed two good nights dreamless and waking only in the morning." Reassured of Stoddard's love, he slept: "I reckon it was the influence of the letter, or the prayer."

Stoddard was still much on Millet's mind, however: The Adamses "say I am always thinking of you,"' and Millet did not deny it. But Mr. and Mrs. Adams probably did not understand Millet's infatuation as sexual.

Earlier, Millet and Stoddard had conspired with Donny Adams so that she could meet a young woman she idolized from afar, Julia Constance ("Dudee") Fletcher, an androgynous, aspiring writer (later, the author of the noveI Kismet, the source of the musical). But Donny had decided that she was afraid to meet Dudee at home-to "beard the lion in his den," as Millet put it. (Julia, the lion, is an intriguing, sex-mixed metaphor). So Millet had arranged to introduce Donny to Dudee on some neutral ground, and, he reported, "Donny at last has met her idol!!" He hoped that Donny "has not created too exalted an ideal."

The Donny/Dudee introduction, in fact, proved a bust. A few weeks later Millet reported to Stoddard that Donny "has given up the study of girls and is going to devote herself to the law. A profitable change, I think."

What, exactly, "the study of girls" meant to Donny is not clear. But Donny's "interest in girls" and in men again suggests a historical fluidity of libido that only later hardens into an exclusive, either/or devotion to girls or boys. In 1875, neither Millet, Stoddard, nor Donny seem surprised at her shift in interest from men to women.

Millet ended this letter playfully, sending Stoddard "more than the sum total of the whole with a sandwich of love between the slices," bidding him, "Eat & be happy." Millet's love sandwich echoed Stoddard's earlier linking of food and sensual satisfaction. "Yours with all my heart;' Millet signed himself.

Millet to Stoddard: June 10, 1875

But Millet's needy heart now sometimes bled for his wandering loved one. A note that the artist wrote the next day concluded with a drawing of a heart dripping blood, an arrow through it, and the slang query "How high is that?"--meaning "What do you think of that?"

Millet to Stoddard: June 18, 1875

A few weeks later, however, on June 18, Millet was telling Stoddard: "You can't imagine what pleasure I take in anticipating our trip in Belgium and Holland. Don't fail to come, old chummeke, and we'll have a busting time."

But, true to Millet's anxious premonition, his slippery, intimacy-shy friend failed to appear in Belgium. And, by the summer of 1875, Millet had run out of money and had returned to America, writing to Stoddard, first from Boston, then from his parents' home in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he had a studio. In the States, Millet sought writing and illustration work as a journalist, as well as commissions for painted portraits.

Millet to Stoddard: August 13, 1875

In Massachusetts, Millet reported on August 13, he was "bored to death" and felt himself "the prey of a thousand vulturous individuals who suck the vitality out of me in ten thousand different ways." This draining of his vitality was the exact opposite of the vitality provided by Stoddard's "magnetism;' and Millet's sucking metaphor may hint again at an aspect of their energy interchange.

Millet to Stoddard: August 15, 1875

A letter from Stoddard had "brought an odor of the old country with it that was refreshing in this desert," a gloomy Millet reported on August 15, from East Bridgewater, a place he detested: "If there ever was a soul killing place this is it. Crowds of people ... swoop down upon me and bore me to death."

If Stoddard, his "dear old fellow;' was with him, Millet imagined, "we could be happy a few months and do some good work." Only his own death, or his father's, could keep him in America, Millet declared dramatically, adding, "I hope for a long life for both of us yet." Intimations of mortality.

"You know that I only feel whole when you are with me;' Millet now confessed, admitting for the first time his full, profound need for Stoddard. Millet then referred, again, to Stoddard's "magnetism of the soul that can not be explained and had better not be analyzed." Close analysis of Stoddard's magnetism was dangerous for Millet. Stoddard's magnetic attraction led Millet to a humiliating pursuit of an unavailable beloved, perhaps even a loss of self.

His and Stoddard's "Venetian experience is unique;' declared Millet, summing up their former romance at its height. He hoped for as good an experience in the future, "if not a similar one." He still seemed to be expecting a similar future intimacy with Stoddard, whom he urged to join him on his travels through Europe (and, implicitly, through life): "We can do the world if you keep up your courage."

Millet ordered Stoddard, jokingly, to "Tell Mrs Swoon" (Mrs. Adams, no doubt) that he would send his photograph. But, in the meantime, he enclosed for Stoddard "a crumpled proof of one as Juliette." The faded proof of Millet in a long, curly, blond wig is still enclosed in his letter. Playing with sex inversions was not, among these friends, limited to dogs' names.

Photo (right) Millet as Juliet.

Stoddard had written earlier that if Millet did not return to Europe soon, he would find a new "boy"--his tease simultaneously expressed desire for Millet and suggested that he was replaceable. Once again (as documented by historians), "boy" and "man" name the partners in a nineteenth-century intimacy of males, though, in this case, the actual age difference was slight. Millet was Stoddard's "boy" only metaphorically, and temporarily, for the younger Millet usually acted the active, pursuing "man," the older Stoddard, the hard-to-get "boy."

The ever-traveling Stoddard was impossible to pin down. Millet finally understood, admonishing his flighty friend: "I see indications of butterflying in your threat to try another boy if I wont come back." "Butterflying" was slang then for "fickleness," "inconstancy in love," or "sexual unfaithfulness"; only later did the butterfly come to symbolize effeminate, men-lusting men.

"Go ahead!" (Try another boy!) Millet urged Stoddard, "You know I'm not jealous, if I were I should be of Bob [Robert William Jones]. Anyone who can cut me out is welcome to. Proximity is something but you know I'm middling faithful."

Millet's faithfulness was now, for the first time, qualified, but his devotion was still steady. Millet promised to write "pretty offen:' so that the straying Stoddard "may not entirely forget me." He called Stoddard "my windward anchor:' declaring himself "thine."

Millet to Stoddard: August 25, 1875

There is a "glorious sunset" but he "cannot enjoy it," a disgruntled Millet complained to Stoddard on August 25, blaming his unhappiness on the "the absence of the only one of my sex (or any other sex) with whom I could enjoy any beauties of nature or of art without the feeling that one or both of us was a porcupine with each quill as sensitive as a bare nerve."

The sex of his soulmates was not important, Millet indicated, only their sharing an appreciation of nature or art. However prickly their present relationship, Millet still looked to Stoddard for contentment: "If you were here Charlie, I could perhaps, be happy:' He employed another food/affection metaphor: "Hungry: I'd give all I possess if you were here to lie down under the pines at the river side and yawn with me for a season." He ended, "With very much love," and "I am always yours."

Millet to Stoddard: September 6, 1875

He had spent the afternoon with Stoddard's brother Fred, Millet reported on September 6, adding that Fred was a "dear fellow, wonderfully like you." This resemblance, Millet knew, Charles was not happy about, for the wastrel, alcoholic Fred represented the drifting Charles's worst fears about his own future. Millet reassured Charles that his brother had "changed very much since you saw him."

Fred, Millet again insisted, "certainly resembles you in a remarkable degree in more ways than one" -- Millet intimates that Fred, like Charles, was interested sexually, and perhaps exclusively, in men. Insistently reminding Charles that he resembled Fred, Millet got his own back against his long-courted, long-fleeing friend. He even tried to incite a little jealousy: He and Fred "embraced," then spent the "whole afternoon ... together," Millet reported.

Millet was still hoping "to have you for myself for a season in the only country in the world" -- Italy. He was fantasizing about collecting a little money, and buying a small house in Venice, making "an artistic place of it," where Stoddard could stay, even if he was not a convert to "Bohemia." The terms "artistic" and "Bohemia" included sexual nonconformity within the iconoclasm they invoked. Millet would like to "live and die in Venice," he said later.

Stoddard had reported quarreling with Mrs. Adams and her daughter Donny, and Millet now commanded: "You had better make it up again and spoon as before." He called Stoddard a "Don Juan" (in this context, a man feminized by associating too closely with women). And, Millet added, "it is plain that you need masculinizing a little--association with an active broad-shouldered large-necked fellow will do it." He continued: "I'm not that, but will do as a substitute in a pinch and would gladly serve if you would only come in my way." Millet here played aspiring butch to Stoddard's retiring femme.

Millet to Stoddard: September 9, 1875

Millet eagerly anticipated reconnecting with Stoddard in Europe, but warned him, in a letter of September 9, not to "go skimming way off somewhere where I can't come to." Just as he was returning to Europe, Millet worried, "you will be on the move." He was "starving" for a letter, he said, again looking to Stoddard for metaphorical sustenance.

But Stoddard was busy that September, visiting Ostend, Belgium, and a secluded beach called, appropriately, "Paradise;' where, as he reported to the San Francisco Chronicle, the bathers, "mostly males," walk "to and fro in the sunshine naked as at the hour of their birth." He had also spied "one or two unmistakable females trip down to the water-line in Godivahabits," as well as "two Italians--lovers possibly, and organ grinders probably," who, "guileless, olive-brown, sloe-eyed, raven-haired, handsome animals, male and female, hand-in-hand, strode on the sand," then loosened their clothes, and "with the placid indifterence of professional models ... stepped forth without so much as a fig-Ieaffor shame's sake -- a new Adam and Eve."

Given Stoddard's past practice of sex-reversal, it is not difficult to imagine that this Italian Adam and Eve were actually Adam and Steve, two male "lovers" and "organ grinders." To "grind" had meant to "copulate with" since the 1600s, so Stoddard's "organ grinders" certainly signified copulating lovers.

Millet to Stoddard: September 27, 1875

"If you are within grabbing distance," Millet wrote on September 27, imagining a hands-to-body connection, "I shall get my paws upon you suddenly, you bet!"

He had attended a "country cattle fair," and "a great ball," where he had found "lots of stunning girls but none strong enough to anchor me to this country, you may write your people." Stoddard was evidently charged with informing their friends of any romantic adventures that might delay Millet's return, and Millet's interest in girls was apparently unremarkable to this group. But Millet's ship was still tied to Stoddard, his "windward anchor."

Millet to Stoddard: October 19, 1875

He would never have enough money to buy a house in Venice, Millet despaired: "Such tight times I never experienced;' he complained on October 19. Stoddard's brother also wrote to say that he, "like many others," was "out of employment." ,

The panic of 1873, caused by unregulated speculation in railroads and the overexpansion of industry, agriculture, and commerce, had weakened the United States economy, which was eroded further by the contraction of European demand for American farm products. The eftect of this crisis was still being experienced in 1875.

For the first time in his letters, Millet expressed anger directly at the elusive Stoddard, swearing on November 15: "You D.B. [damn bastard? deadbeat?], "you haven't written me for ages you know you haven't and why? Two weeks in Munich spooning! Spooning! SPOONING! and couldn't find time to write me[.] Che diavolo!"

Millet complained to Stoddard about a demanding visitor whose three-week stay had left him "in agony." He added: "We'll have to take an extra spoon to make up for all this," and confessed his own faithfulness, "I haven't spooned a bit since I got back, you know l hnaven't but you, you [here, he pasted a butterfly on the paper] you have had one solid spoon with the Adamseseseseses and that's why I envy you." Millet's spooning with Stoddard, and Stoddard's spooning with the Adamses, apparently implied different sorts of spoons.

Jokingly, Millet directed his anger at Stoddard's lack of reciprocal feeling, threatening him: "Now then you butterfly if you don't write more I'll cut your --- off so you won't flutter about anymore." The missing word is clearly "cock:' "dick:' "prick:' or some other slang term for penis, and the slang suggests how the two may have talked sometimes when alone. He could not speak freely in a letter, Millet several times told Stoddard. Millet's threat also shows that he understood Stoddard's straying as, specifically, sexual. The missing word also strongly, though indirectly, suggests the sexual character of their own past relation.

Millet to Stoddard: December 2. 1875

"Do come up to Paris, chummeke!" Millet urged Stoddard on December 2: "Come and work!" he pleaded, begging, "Come up, Charlie, do! Come and spoon and ... produce something! We will live again the old Bohemian [life] in a different way." They would travel together, "and live as artists should in Paris. Do come!"

Millet was then assisting the artist John La Farge in the decoration of Trinity Church in Boston ("The romantic and picturesque details of this enterprise I shall take keen delight in elaborating to you when we meet.")

In addition, Mark Twain, a mutual friend of his and Stoddard's, had come into the church and had "asked me to come to Hartford and paint his portrait." Millet's artistic career was beginning to take off, and he became, in a few years, a well-known artist of his day.

Mark Twain. Painting by Francis Davis Millet

Millet to Stoddard: January 15, 1876

In his next letter, on January 15, 1876, Millet was fantasizing once more about his and Stoddard's return to Venice: "If we could pass another season there together I think I would not begrudge any sacrifice." Financial sacrifice was Millet's obvious meaning, but emotional sacrifice was implied. His feeling for Stoddard was frustrated and painful, as well as sustaining.

Ending this letter with a postscript, Millet reported: "People here think I am insane about a chum of mine and wonder why I don't find a female attachment." The unnamed people did not expect that Millet's openly expressed, overwrought, persistent attachment to a male precluded the more common attachment to a female. But even this new declaration of Millet's affection provoked only silence from Stoddard, who did not write again for about seven months.

The wandering Stoddard was having a jolly time. In "gay Paris," on New Year's Eve, 1876, with a group of young men friends, as he reported to the San Francisco Chronicle, he attended a masked ball. There, those who had come only "to renew our feeble but I trust virtuous indignation at such sights, turn at last from the girls in boys' clothes; from the jaunty sailor girl-boy who has just ridden around the room on the shoulders of her captain; from the queen of darkness who swept past us in diamonds and sables, and never so much as suffered her languishing eyes to rest for a moment on anyone of us."

Stoddard stayed at a hotel "like a great boys' boarding school," where he and the other boy-guests had pillow fights while "robed in the brief garments of our sleep." With these friends he hied himself to "gay halls where sin skips nimbly arm in arm with innocence and verdancy," and the noisy carousers later attracted the attention of a "brace of gendarmes, the handsomest and most elegant fellows in Paris."

Stoddard's "gay," "girl-boy;' and "queen" are certainly sexual in implication, but I do not believe they yet had the specifically "homosexual" meanings they did two decades later.

Millet to Stoddard: March 11, 1877

In March of the following year, 1877, Millet was in Paris, and Stoddard was somewhere else. On March 11, the persistent Millet was still urging Stoddard to come and "occupy a room with me. I dare say I can so arrange it with William who now is my bedfdlow and roommate."

Millet to Stoddard: April 24, 1877

On April 24, Millet again urged: "My bed is very narrow but you can manage to occupy it I hope." If Stoddard did not want to share that bed, "we can fix things in the study."

In the summer of 1877 Millet was employed by several newspapers as a journalist and illustrator to cover the Russian-Turkish war.

Millet as war correspondent: painting by George W. Maynard.

Millet to Stoddard: June 29, 1877

On June 29 he wrote to Stoddard: "I've seen two battles and thirst for more." "Human nature;' he added, "is incomprehensible, it adapts itself much too easily to circumstances." His comment applied to his affection, as well as his aggressive urges. "I am quite warlike now. You wouldn't know me;' he later told Stoddard.

For the first time in his letters to Stoddard, Millet mentioned a new love interest: "I am spooning frightfully with a young Greek here in Oltenitza. He is a first rate fellow."

Millet to Stoddard: May 7, 1878

Back in London on May 7, 1878, after' receiving medals for services rendered to Russia, Millet for the last time addressed Stoddard as "My dear Chummeke." That change in address marked the end of Millet's fantasy of live-in domesticity with Stoddard, though the two remained friends for life.

February 19, 1879

Just eight months later, on February 19, 1879, Millet wrote friends about his forthcoming marriage to Elizabeth ("Lily") Greely Merrill, an accomplished musician and the sister of a successful newspaper editor, William Bradford Merrill.

Describing his love for Elizabeth, Millet joked that he was suffering from a "malady that doesn't let go very soon when it has once taken hold and the more it attacks one the more he wants." This "contagion" he had caught "very badly some time ago," and "on the Eleventh of march next I am going to marry Miss Merrill." Millet clearly felt for Elizabeth the same strong, constant, romantic infatuation that, just a few months earlier, he had still felt for Stoddard.

On the appointed date, in Paris, Mark Twain and the foremost American sculptor of the time, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, served as witnesses for the groom, and showman Phineas Taylor Barnum stood as a witness for the bride. In time, Millet and his wife produced four children: John Parsons, Edwin, Katherine, and Lawrence.

1884

Five years later, Millet fulfilled a dream, founding a Bohemian colony with the painters John Singer Sargent, Alfred Parsons, and Edwin Austin Abbey in the little old town of Broadway in England.

1887-1891

In addition to working as a journalist and an illustrator, in 1887 Millet published a translation of a Tolstoy war novel (read and praised, incidentally, by Walt Whitman), wrote a book about his own seventeen-hundred-mile canoe trip down the Danube (1891), a book of short stories (1892), and his report of the United States military expedition in the Philippines (1899).

1893

In 1893, Millet was appointed Director of Decoration and Functions for the World's Columbian Exhibition, in Chicago, on the grounds of which he got the visiting Stoddard a room next to his own.

Millet received major commissions for murals for the state capitols of Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Baltimore Customs House, and the Cleveland Trust Company.

He served on the American Federation of the Arts, the National Commission of Fine Arts, and as director of the American Academy in Rome, which he helped to found.

1912

In 1912, Millet and his close friend and Washington, D.C., roommate, the bachelor Major Archie Butt, aide to President William Howard Taft, booked steamer passage to the United States.

From Southampton, Millet mailed a letter to the artist Alfred Parsons describing their steamer's accommodations: "I have the best room I ever had in a ship and it isn't one of the best either."

Millet added: "Queer lot of people on the ship," in particular, "a number of obnoxious ostentatious American women, the scourge of any place they infest and worse on shipboard than anywhere. Many of them carry tiny dogs and lead husbands around like pet lambs. I tell you when she starts out the American woman is a buster. She should be put in a harem and kept there." (This whole letter is reproduced on OutHistory at: Francis Davis Millet to Alfred Parsons: On Board R.M.S. "Titanic", April 11, 2012.

Millet's comment seems as much a critique of class arrogance and the relations of men and women as a misogynistic statement on human females, and he probably did not mean this to be his last word on the subject of women.

Three days after writing that letter, on the night of April 14, 1912, Millet was reportedly last seen encouraging Italian women and children into the lifeboats of the Titanic on which he, age 60, and Butt, age 46, lost their lives.

A joint monument to Frank Millet and Archie Butt, designed by the sculptor Daniel Chester French and architect Thomas Hastings, in President's Park, Washington, D.C., is described as a tribute to friendship.

Millet's Letters to Stoddard

Millet's wonderful, loving letters to Stoddard were among Stoddard's papers when he died in 1909, three years before Millet's death. Millet's letters were then sold to Charles E. Goodspeed, a Boston dealer in books and literary manuscripts, who seems to have held them off the market for years because they were love letters from one man to another, and because Millet, and, later, his wife, and immediate descendants were still alive. The letters were again sold, finally, to another dealer in literary manuscripts, from whom they were purchased by the library of Syracuse University, which today preserves these precious documents.

All of Millet's letters to Stoddard are transcribed on OutHistory at: Letters of Frank Millet to Charles Warren Stoddard: May 10, 1875 - January 3, 1900