Agnes Inglis Papers, 1909-1952

Summary

Abstract:

Anarchist, social worker, friend of J. A. Labadie, and first curator of the Labadie Collection. Comprise administrative files of the Labadie Collection which she combined and intermingled with personal correspondence, memoirs, and research notes.

Extent:

13 Linear Feet
13 linear feet and 3 scrapbooks

Language:

English.

Authors:

Finding aid prepared by Tom Hyry, August 1996

Background

Scope and Content:

The Agnes Inglis Papers are comprised of a variety of materials including her correspondence, research notes, writings, scrapbooks, and her work at the Labadie Collection. The bulk of these papers range from 1924 to 1952, the years during which she served as curator of the Labadie Collection.

These papers hold significance in several respects. First, Agnes Inglis held an important place within the radical movement (anarchism, communism, socialism, etc.) in Southeastern Michigan during the first half of the 20th century, and was particularly active in the anti-conscription campaigns and the subsequent deportation of radicals surrounding the first World War. Her connections within this movement were extensive, and her papers reflect insider knowledge of the events, activities and especially of the individuals of the Left during her lifetime. Also, these papers essentially document the Labadie Collection itself. Because she was the initial and sole curator for the Collection for its first three decades in the University of Michigan libraries, her papers hold extensive information on the Collection's history. Finally, Inglis was an extremely historically minded individual and saw great value in documenting the facts and her impressions of the many people, organizations and events she came to know.

The Agnes Inglis Papers are separated into three series: Corresponsence, with Individual and Corporate subseries; Writings, with Autobiographical, Creative and Theoretical and Notes and Research subseries; and Scrapbooks.

It should also be noted here that during her time as curator of the Labadie Collection, Inglis constructed a card catalog filled with references and biographical and historical notes on the individuals, groups and events of the radical movement. Labadie staff should be consulted if one wishes to view this catalog.

Biographical / Historical:

This biographical sketch is mostly taken from one prepared by R. Anne Okey for a 1992 exhibit on Agnes Inglis.

Agnes Ann Inglis was born in 1870 in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest child of prominent Detroit physician Dr. Richard Inglis and Mrs. Agnes Lambie Inglis. The family was financially comfortable, respected in the community, conservative and faithful members of the Presbyterian Church, and though Dr. Inglis died in 1874, the circumstances of daily life for the four-year old Agnes changed very little. She went to Sunday School, later attended the Clay Grammar School and Capitol High School in Detroit, and spent a year at Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

After her year in Andover, Agnes returned home, taught Sunday School and cared for, first, her older sister, stricken with cancer, and then her mother. About 1900, both her sister and mother died and, for the first time in her life, at the age of thirty, she found herself without either family responsibilities or the family home as she had always known it. With an independent income from her parents' estate and very little experience of the wider world, she did what many young women in similar circumstances have done: she traveled abroad, spent a year at the University of Michigan, and went into settlement work. From the Franklin Street Settlement House in Detroit, she went to Chicago and lived and worked in Graham Taylor's settlement, called the Commons. However, as she says in her unpublished "Reflections," "the longer I worked at it, the less uplifting appealed to me...We taught [the poor] many things,... but not how to reduce the cost of living except by being more frugal than we ever expected to be ourselves."

Back in Michigan, she returned to Ann Arbor, where another sister, Catherine (Mrs. Andrew F.) Smith, lived with her husband and family. First in a small cottage on Geddes Road and then in a house on Wilmot Street, both of which she owned, Miss Inglis offered hospitality and temporary haven to social worker friends from Detroit and elsewhere, as well as entraining nieces, nephews, students, and other University acquaintances. She also continued her "uplifting," as a Sunday School teacher and a volunteer with the YWCA.

It was in Ann Arbor, and in particular in her work at the YWCA with young working women, that Miss Inglis' own internal revolution began. For a while, she worked as a State Inspector when a minimum wage law for women was under consideration by the legislature, a job which took her into factories, shops, saloons and other places where women were employed. She was grateful that her independent income saved her from what she saw in other women's lives, but grew increasingly uncomfortable that her income was "unearned" and came from rent paid by just such women, immigrant workingmen, and other poor people. She went to meetings and lectures, read a great deal, observed even more, talked to people, listened and thought, and by 1912 or 1913 considered herself an anarchist and was actively involved with radical affairs.

She met Emma Goldman and John Beverley Robinson, an anarchist writer who had retired to the home of his son, in Ann Arbor. She came to know Judson Grenell, Joseph A. Labadie and other labor activists in Detroit, and she joined the Industrial Workers of the World. When the arrests of IWW leaders and other radicals started about 1917, she posted bail for many of them and participated actively in the unsuccessful struggle to save friends and fellow activists from prison and deportation. By the early 1920's, the unearned income that had so troubled Miss Inglis' conscience was gone, and she was once again living in Ann Arbor, largely dependent on an allowance from her brother, James, a very successful businessman whose large and elegant home was bequeathed to the University and is still known as Inglis House.

In 1924, pursuing some research of her own, Miss Inglis inquired after the extensive collection of early labor and other radical materials donated to the University of Michigan in 1912 by Joseph A. Labadie, and learned it was still packed away in boxes. Shortly thereafter, she volunteered to unpack and sort the contents of the boxes. By 1926, she had come to recognize that the Labadie Collection was her life's work.

Until her death in 1952, at the age of eighty-one, Miss Inglis devoted herself, largely without pay or official recognition, to enlarging and "fixing," as she called it, the personal papers and correspondence, tracts, pamphlets, shop papers, handbills, minute books, union badges and credentials, and publications of numerous radical political and social reform organizations that constituted the original Labadie gift. She was, of course, without library or archival training, and her methods of organization and of providing bibliographic access to this heterogeneous clutter of materials were, from a latter day perspective, often eccentric. But unlike the academic establishment in the midst of which she lived and worked, largely invisibly, she knew the value of the material with which she worked. During Agnes Inglis' 26 years as Curator of the Labadie Collection she enlarged it perhaps twenty-fold, almost entirely through gifts and donations. Starting with her own circle of friends and acquaintances, she corresponded tirelessly with a wider and wider network of radicals and their families and friends, informing people about the Labadie Collection and soliciting gifts of papers, books, pamphlets, journals and memorabilia. Inglis' contributions toward documenting the radical movement of her time have proven invaluable.

Processing information:

Collection processed and finding aid prepared by Tom Hyry, August 1996.

Arrangement:

The Agnes Inglis Papers are separated into three series: CORRESPONDENCE, with Individual and Corporate subseries; WRITINGS, with Autobiographical, Creative and Theoretical, and Notes and Research subseries; and SCRAPBOOKS.

Subjects

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Names:

University of Michigan. Library. Labadie Collection.
Warren, Josiah, 1798-1874.
Inglis, Agnes
Bray, John Francis, 1809-1897
Abbott, Leonard Dalton, 1878-1953.
Abrams, Irving S., 1891-1980.
Adams, Frederick B. (Frederick Baldwin), 1910-
Aldred, Guy Alfred, 1886-1963
Armand, E. (Emile), 1872-1962.
Bagardus, Janet.
Bailie, Helen Tufts.
Baldwin, Roger Nash, 1884-
Ballantine, Stella Cominsky, 1886-1961.
Barb, John M.
Barnard, Harry, 1906-
Baskette, Ewing C.
Beal, Fred Irwin, 1896-1954.
Beffel, John Nicholas.
Behen, David Marion.
Belfer, Bernice Shoul.
Bendler, Mary.
Berkman, Alexander, 1870-1936.
Bernstein, Aline 1881-1955.
Bestor, Arthur Eugene, 1908-
Biedenkapp, Fred G.
Bolloten, Burnett, 1909-1987
Bonner, Miriam.
Borneman, Alfred.
Bower, Joseph.
Boyd, David Armitage, 1868-1939.
Bradshaw, Ceres Heywood Hadcock.
Brinton, Ellen Starr, 1886-1954.
Brite, Mary D.
Brown, Joseph, of Walled Lake, Mich.
Brown, Bob, 1886-1959
Brumm, Dorothy.
Burbank, David T.
Byington, Steven Tracy, 1868-1957.
Calkins, Deborah.
Capes, Ben.
Carey, George.
Carr, H. J.
Carrick, Louis B.
Chaapel, Belle.
Chafetz, Henry.
Chaplin, Ralph, 1887-1961.
Chen, Darren Kuang.
Cherney, John.
Clevans, Johanna Boetz.
Cohen, Henry, 1864-1942.
Cohen, Joseph Jacob, 1878-1953.
Conrad, Lawrence Henry, 1898-
Conroy, Jack, 1899-
Cook, Cassius V., 1879-1950.
Cousens, Leon A.
Crane, Harry W. (Harry Wolven), 1885-
Curti, Merle Eugene, 1897-
David, Henry, 1907-
Flanagan, Hallie, 1890-1969.
Day, Dorothy, 1897-1980
Deciampis, Mario.
De Cleyre, Harry, 1890-1974.
De Leon, Solon, 1883-
Denton, Carrie D.
Destler, Chester McArthur, 1904-
Dickinson, William Croft, 1897-
Dickinson, Z. Clark (Zenas Clark), 1889-
DiGaetano, Nick, 1893-
Di Lanna, Anna.
Ditzion, Sidney Herbert, 1908-
Downs, Tom, 1916-
Dudden, Arthur Power.
Fabijanovic, Minnie.
Fack, Hugo R.
Fetz, Beatrice Schumm.
Fitzgerald, M. Eleanor (Mary Eleanor), 1877-1955
Fletcher, Ben, 1890-1949
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley.
Forss, Harry.
Frank, Nelson, 1906-1974.
Franklin, Burt, 1930-
Frend, George.
Friedland, William H.
Friedt, Olga.
Furst, Alice Graystone Baker, 1893-1942.
Gagnier, Cleora E.
Gallagher, Mary E.
Gerson, Herman.
Ginger, Ray.
Glazer, Sidney, 1905-
Gl?uck, Albert.
Goodrich, Francis Lee Dewey, 1877-1962.
Grenell, Judson.
Grenell, Margaret.
Grierson, Margaret S.
Griffith, Emma Shepherd.
Gudell, Martin.
Guthrie, Paul Newman, 1903-
Haan, Aubrey.
Haessler, Carl, 1888-1972.
Hagglund, Benjamin Clarence.
Hall, Covington, 1871-1951.
Hall, Thomas Randolph, 1907-
Hanke, Walter.
Hansen, Thomas Emanuel, 1918-
Hapgood, Mary Donovan.
Heinzen, Henriette M.
Hennacy, Ammon, 1893-1970.
Herring, Ralph
Herrmann, Otto, fl. 1931-1945.
Hicks, Granville, 1901-
Ishill, Joseph.
John, Arthur W.
Johnson, Bertha F., 1880-
Johnson, Oakley C., 1890-
Jones, Ray, fl. 1934-1949.
Joughin, Louis.
Kaplan, Marcia.
Kaukonen, Beatrice Levine.
Keell, Thomas H.
Kelly, Harry.
Kelsey, Isabel T.
Kessler, Sidney.
Kiefer, Daniel, 1856-1923.
King, Carol Weiss, 1895-1952.
Klock, John Morris, 1918-
Kolchin, Edward.
Kooser, Ernest O., 1871-
Kramer, Leon, 1889-1962.
Kraus, Henry, 1905-
Labadie, Jo, 1850-1933.
Labadie, Laurance, 1896-1975.
Lazarus, Louis.
Lehning, Arthur.
Leland, Marine.
Letzer, Sam.
Levey, Jeanne.
Lewis, Harold H., 1902?-
Ba, Jin, 1905-
Livesay, L. C.
Lloyd, J. Wm. (John William), 1857-1940.
Lloyd-Prichard, Muriel F.
Lord, Ann.
McClinchey, Florence E.
MacNair, Everett W.
Madison, Charles Allan.
Mahler, Herbert.
Maisel, Max N.
Makofsky, Abraham.
Graham, Marcus, b. 1893.
Martin, James Joseph, 1916-
Mattison, Alfred.
Metzkow, Max, 1854-1945.
Meulen, Henry.
Miller, Randolph Crump, 1910-
Moore, Ellwood Burdsall, 1890-
Morenoff, Michael.
Myers, James, 1882-
Nef, Walter T.
Nielson, Julia A.
Nixon, Harry D.
Noetzel, Ida A., d. 1943.
Nold, Carl, 1869-1934.
O'Brien, George Harman.
Opler, Ascher.
Orr, Lois (Culter), 1917-
Parker, Sydney E.
Pattullo, Elizabeth Titus.
Perry, Carl E.
Quint, Howard H.
Ramsey, John Fraser, 1907-
Reitman, Ben L. (Ben Lewis), 1879-1942.
Riley, Thomas Auraldo, 1907-
Robinson, Beverley, 1886?-
Rolland, Siegfried B.
Romm, Robert D., 1867?-1935.
Rosenberg, Mark.
Rovner, Maurice B.
Rynin, David.
Samuelson, Gustav.
Sanftleben, Alfred, 1871-
Sassaman, W. R.
Schappes, Morris U. (Morris Urman), 1907-
Scheltema, Ann Van.
Schilling, George A., b. 1850.
Schleifer, Ernst.
Schroeder, Theodore Albert, 1864-1953.
Schulder, Fred.
Frank, Adelaide Schulkind
Schumm, George, 1856-1941.
Schuster, Eunice Minette.
Schwartz, Anna Jacobson.
Scott, John G.
Seaman, Francis Chester, 1919-
Seligman, Edwin Robert Anderson, 1861-1939.
Shannon, David A.
Shorr, Isaac.
Small, Sasha, 1909-
Smith, Alan W.
Stavis, Barrie.
Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-
Steimer, Mollie, 1897-1980.
Stimson, Grace Heilman, 1907-
Swain, Dwight V.
Sward, Keith, 1904-
Swede, Dorian.
Swede, Oscar H., 1900-1942.
Taft, Philip, 1902-
Templin, Ralph.
Thayer, Adelaide De Claire, 1864-
Thompson, Lawrence Sidney, 1916-
Thorpe, Helene.
Trimball, E. G.
Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson, 1854-1939.
Tucker, Oriole.
Tucker, Pearl Johnson, 1879-1948.
Turner, John Kenneth.
Van Valkenburgh, Warren Starr, 1884-1938.
Warbasse, James Peter, 1866-1957.
Watson, William, 1880-
Waudby, William Smith, 1857-
Weinberger, Harry, 1888-
Weintraub, Hyman.
Wells, Jennie M.
Williams, Elizabeth Swartz.
Wittke, Carl.
Woledge, Geoffrey.
Wolfe, Lilian Gertrude, 1875-1974.
Woodbridge, Dana M.
Wright, Malcolm T.
Yarros, Victor S.
Yelensky, Boris.
Zaft, Helen.
Zeller, Jack.
Zucker, A. E. (Adolf Eduard), 1890-1971.