The long and winding road… Alan Seeger and family

What unites investment publications, Electric cars, the French Foreign Legion, a Communist, T.S. Eliot, and the American Legion? A dive down rabbit-hole of a Mexican footnote.

While only slightly surreal, considering it’s Mexico City, that bastion of US conservativism … the local American Legion post… not only for a period hosted poetry readings … but was named NOT for a US war hero, but a poet, who … while a war hero… was a FRENCH war hero.

Mexfiles has written before about Alan Seeger, whose poetic style and idealization of war might have, like other poet-soliders of the era, have gone on to a more developed, “mature” style, had his short life not ended with a unromantic, hardly ideal, gutshot in the trenches of the Somme in 1916. “He needed more time to move from a stock and outmoded romanticism to a more distinctive and original style, from a style full of abstractions to one more concrete and personal., as James Hart in the Dictionary of Literary Biography opined.

Seeger was only 28 when he died and had only lived in Mexico City for a few years when he was in his teens. But, considering Mexico was better known for as a safe space for those evading military service in the trenches of Europe, and — while his service was with the French Foreign Legion — he’s probably as close to a US World War I veteran with a Mexican connection you’ll find.

And… his time in Mexico City was not all that long… a few years as a young teen in the twilight of the Porfiriate. His father, Charles Seeger, Sr. is somewhat typical of the “expat community” of the era… a wealthy businessman looking for opportunities to exploit south of the border. What makes Charles Sr. an interesting figure is that what he found to exploit was not minerals, or agricultural products, or even lucrative railroad contracts… not directly, anyway. Seeger was one of the first to hit on the idea of business investment reporting… his bilingual Mexican Financier being a must read for both Mexican and foreign investors and wannabe investors. Perhaps it was dad’s success as a working writer that inspired both Alan, and his younger brother Charles, Jr. to taking up the pen, and publishing from time to time.

Although Mexican Financier ran into management problems in the late 1880s, it was profitable enough to sell, and return a very comfortable return that allowed the Seegers to live more than comfortably, bring the boys back from boarding school in the United States until they were ready for college, and for Charles Sr. to invest in other opportunities.

One of those opportunities… and a somewhat surprising one… was the new and exciting automobile. And not any automobiles: EVs! Yes, in the 1890s and up until 1910, it was a very lucrative business. The Electric Car Company (so much for snazzy corporate names). While somewhat more expensive than gasoline powered autos, they were hugely sucessful in cities (already electrified by this time), and the fleet cars they produced (which ran at a speed of 27 miles per hour or 40 Km per hour) were twice the speed of a trotting horse. They captured the New York City taxi market, and US cities were eager to acquire electric vehicles for their police departments.

The Seegers of Mexico City were… while not the 1% of the era… certainly seen as a brood of outside the box thinkers, with the money to spend on untried and new ideas.

Alan, enrolled at Harvard (as one would expect) turned to poetry, working with fellow student T.S. Eliot at the college’s literary magazine. Tom — the more unconvential poet — would opt for a conventional life, whereas Alan — the conventional poet — went in quite the opposite direction. As you might expect, upon graduation, Alan turned down a job with the Electric Car Company, and headed for… you guessed it, Greenwich Village. Where, of course, he ended up crashing with John Reed… whether Alan’s Mexican connections were a factor in Reed’s own interest in Revolutionary Mexico is debatable, though I’m not the one to start that debate. Both seem to have been in love with danger, and almost welcomed violence, although Reed focused on a romanticized proletarian future, while Alan seems to have internalized a sense of the romance of the past.

And where else to live in the romantic version of the past in the early 20th century than Paris. Despite the squalor of his digs in Paris (to which he complained in letters to his friends and family), the idealized “gloire” of the days of knighthood and an homorable death seemed to call him. With the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the French Foreign Legion, wrote his poems (and letters much less idealized, detailing the mud and slaughter of trench warfare). And earning a posthumous Croix de Guerre after his death on the fourth of July 1916. And even a statue (Place de Estas-Unis) in Paris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Louis_Seeger_Sr.

While Alan’s posthumous poetry’s publication was largely financed by the family (which also would endow a library in Paris), the most immediate effect was on his younger brother, Charles, Jr. Charles, who had taken a more artistic route to writing than their father, was already becoming a well known music critic and professor.. However, he lost his job over his militantly pacifist objections to the US entry into World War I. Never giving up his pacificism and “internationalism”, Charles Jr. became a scholar of folk music, organized the collection of American folklore and music for the New Deal’s “WPA” and fathered a few radicals and outside the box children of his own, including the singer, songwriter, and peace activist Pete Seeger.

Other than Alan’s name on that building in Hipodromo, there isn’t all that much visible reminder of the Seegers… although with EVs more and more appearing on our streets (including taxis and police vehicles), foreign poets and “boheminans” aplenty, and a committment to peace and neutrality even at the highest levels of government in Mexico… the Seegers may be forgotten but a reminder that our ghosts — even expat ghosts — are reluctant to completely disappear.