On 9 January 1953 Sylvia Plath, her leg in a cast, wrote from Smith College to her mother that she was less depressed after persuading the college to let her audit science courses she so dreaded that she had talked suicide. Meanwhile, in a nation battered by the Red Scare and war in Korea and the new hydrogen bomb, with Eisenhower’s inauguration days away, Sylvia’s mother Aurelia Plath, Boston University professor, scribbled on the envelope’s verso:
subjects questions for political discussion group
1. religion
2. Are sororities and fraternities democratic.
3. Is liberal education desirable for everybody.
4. college education open to all / should a college education be public as one will be to high school students?
5. heredity or environment
6. are students taking advantage of the opportunities around them.
7. what will be religion’s should place [sic] in the modern world.
8. is there a course or lessons needed for college education work.
9. communism and how it affects us.
10. current events
11. the American negro [1]
Because “religion” and “sororities and fraternities” top the list, the political discussion group was for college students, possibly fellow Unitarian congregants or at Boston University where Aurelia taught. “The American negro” as a topic implies all group members would be white. A subject “1” on the list implies that the group had not yet formed or met.
Was this group Aurelia’s own brainstorm, or are these notes,
written in Gregg shorthand, from a planning meeting? Regardless, the list opens
a window onto Aurelia Plath’s politics.
Most of the discussion items center on Aurelia’s areas of expertise: religion, education, college life. Topics 2 through 8 are formulated as questions, most with her own answers implicit -- yet open for discussion. Topics 9 through 11, nationwide and nonspecific, conclude the list because they were either too explosive for initial group discussions or rearmost in Aurelia's awareness. Yet the plan to start the group is activist. And the agenda does not sound prescriptive.
Biographers assume that Aurelia voted for Eisenhower in 1952 because Sylvia supposed her mother had, but that’s not proof. Aurelia wrote in Letters Home that her Austrian-born parents “believed [in] every word their idol, Theodore Roosevelt, ever wrote or uttered" and voted Republican ever after. Why? Possibly because of Roosevelt was “the only candidate in whose veins flows German blood, who has received part of his education in Germany,” said the German-American Roosevelt League. [2] California voter-registration rolls show Otto Plath and his first wife Lydia registered as Progressives in 1912 when Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive party ran him for re-election on a very liberal platform.
Aurelia's political discussion group never met. A crisis erupted in Aurelia’s household: Her mother was diagnosed with gastric cancer. Aurelia took summer 1953 off from
teaching to care for her mother, and Sylvia, disheartened by a month as a
guest editor in New York City, chose to spend July and August at home and
became suicidally depressed.
[1.] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, 9 January 1953, Lilly Library.
[2.] Gable, J. The Bull Moose Years, Kennikat, 1978. When Roosevelt was 15 his parents sent him and two siblings to Dresden, Germany for five months, to learn German. Roosevelt did not become fluent.