Eva McDonald Valesh

Title: Valesh Writes About Her Travels
Type: Letter
Date: no date
Source: Minnesota Historical Society

Description: Eva Valesh writes to a friend about the Alliance Party members she is meeting on her trip out East and her hopes for the future.

Transcription:

I spoke with Simpson and Peffer yesterday. Simpson thinks I am a pupil of considerable promise and proposes to show mw a few things about managing the dear public. He doesn't care much about money but he does like reputation. I speak with him at Syracuse Monday. He happens to be "one of our people" and that is fortunate for me, for he can do a good deal toward putting me a few rounds higher on the ladder if he chooses.

Simpson, Peffer, Mrs. Diggs, Mrs Sease, Weaver, Ms. Lune Ayers and a few of the best of us are going down to Old Colonial Beach at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay sept 1 to hold a council of peace on the industrial problem and incidentally to catch crabs and go surf bathing. I am not sure that I can afford to spend my time and shekels Money. in their aristocratic Upper class. inner circle, but I would like to and if I do may have some good stuff for you. We'll start a new school of philosophy a la Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American writer who lived from 1803-1882. and I think it would amuse the dear people to hear of the performance from one who was there.

I expect you to sympathize with my growing ambitions, Dolly, for I'm afraid Frank Eva Valesh's husband. will begin to fear that I'm getting so interested that it will end in my staying away from home right along.

It is a hard struggle. I hate to leave him and I'm unhappy all the time away; yet I can't bear to let slip the opportunities that offer to get to the front. I become the more eager, that now I have met the best of them I think without egotism, Sense of self-importance. that I could stand side by side with them and hold my own. Of course my ambitions are confidential. You know that's one of the privileges of friends — to bear with each other's peculiar infirmities. Unusual personality traits.