For Brad Will

My heart goes out to the family and friends of Brad Will, who was fatally shot by federal riot police on Friday, in Oaxaca, Mexico (see articles in the New York Times and Daily News today). Brad was covering an ongoing, popular uprising and teacher's strike for Indymedia. An attack on a journalist anywhere is an attack on the truth. May his death be avenged by increased, honest coverage of the plight of the protestors in Oaxaca.

I didn't know Brad well; my husband knew him better; but what can you say about a man who gives his life documenting the struggles of the poor and oppressed? He was cool.

He lived in the tradition of one of my heroes, the woman who “invented” the persona of the activist foreign correspondent: Margaret Fuller (1810-1850).

Fuller was a physically and spiritually beautiful woman, a genius, ahead of her time in every way. America's first true feminist, she was a prominent member of the Transcendentalist movement, a literary critic, editor, journalist, teacher, and political activist who ultimately turned revolutionary.

Emerson, Thoreau, Horace Greeley, Thomas Carlyle—all regarded her with admiration, even awe. I have always been perplexed as to why her legacy is so ignored in our public school system and in colleges. Draw your own conclusions as to that.

I hope it isn’t trivializing to say that Margaret Fuller's life “would make a great movie,” but in the way of most fascinating people, it would.

I got the following information on her biography from www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendetalism/authors/fuller/ and www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/margaretfuller.html. Read on and be inspired:

Margaret Fuller was born Sarah Margaret Fuller on May 23, 1810 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. She was a very intelligent, even precocious, child who received an intense education from her father, Timothy Fuller, learning Greek and Latin at a very early age. Her father was a prominent lawyer and later a Congressman. She attended several schools and continued to educate herself, learning German and Italian, and would soon do a translation of Goethe. Her father's death brought financial problems for the family, and she became responsible for the education of her younger siblings. She taught school, especially at Bronson Alcott's Temple School and the Green Street School in Providence, RI, for two years, but that gave her too little time for her writing.

In 1839 she established celebrated formal "conversations" on various topics, primarily for women, which were very successful. She was close friends with most of the intellectuals of Boston and Concord, particularly Emerson, and would spend weeks at a time visiting in his home, teaching him German and talking.

She was evidently a brilliant and thoughtful conversationalist, much respected for her intellect and learning, although friends often had problems dealing with her mercurial emotions. From 1840 to 1842, she served with Emerson as editor of The Dial, a literary and philosophical journal for which she wrote many articles and reviews on art and literature. In 1843, The Dial published her groundbreaking essay The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Man, Woman versus Woman, in which she called for women's equality.

In 1844, after an extensive trip west, she published Summer on the Lakes. Charmed by the book, Horace Greeley asked her to join his newspaperpaper, the New York Tribune as book review editor, and she became quite successful, branching into art and cultural reviews. In 1845 she expanded her Dial essay and published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which became a classic of feminist thought.

A manifesto for the women's rights movement, it revealed Fuller's enormous knowledge of literature and philosophy as she described the oppression of the female sex through history and advocated equal status for women. Years later Horace Greeley wrote, "If not the clearest and most logical, it was the loftiest and most commanding assertion yet made of the right of Woman to be regarded and treated as an independent, intelligent, rational being, entitled to an equal voice in framing and modifying the laws she is required to obey, and in controlling and disposing of the property she has inherited or aided to acquire…hers is the ablest, bravest, broadest, assertion yet made of what are termed Woman's Rights."

Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune…invited [Fuller] to write for his paper. For the Tribune, Fuller wrote essays, reviews and criticism brought together and published as Papers on Literature and Art in 1846. That summer she sailed for Europe as the newspaper's foreign correspondent. Relishing her long-postponed trip abroad, she visited England and Scotland, moved on to Paris, and finally to Italy. In Paris she met George Sand, whom she had long admired, and found a new friend and mentor in the exiled Polish philosopher and poet Adam Mickiewicz. Having met the Italian revolutionary Guiseppe Mazzini in England, she became an ardent supporter of his movement.

On the eve of the 1848 uprisings in Italy, Austria and France, Fuller plunged into the turmoil. No longer the "outsider" she had seemed in New England, she felt at home in Italy, free to express her fullest sense of self. When war broke out, she saw a role for herself "either as actor or historian." To her the revolution meant freedom and human rights for the laboring class and for women. She rededicated herself to Rome, "City of the Soul," and sent vivid eye-witness reports to the Tribune.

Soon after her arrival in Rome she met the handsome twenty-six-year-old nobleman, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Then in her late thirties, she had survived several unfulfilled love relationships. She enjoyed the attentions of this young man in what soon became a serious attachment. In the summer of 1848, she retreated to the village of Rieti where her son, Angelo Eugenio Filippo Ossoli, was born on September 7. It is not clear whether Fuller and Ossoli ever married. Her letters home had made only oblique references to her personal situation. Finally, in 1849, she sent a packet of letters to her mother and other friends, telling of Ossoli and the birth of their son.

With the outbreak of war in Rome itself, Ossoli's unit of the Guard was actively involved, and Fuller volunteered in a hospital. Although the revolution at first succeeded and a Roman Republic was celebrated, Fuller was right in predicting that it would not last. When the pope was restored to power, she and Ossoli fled to Florence. There for the first time they lived together openly and were readily accepted by the expatriate colony, including the Brownings, whose baby son was close to theirs in age. Fuller continued work on her history of the Italian revolution. For a time she thought of remaining in Italy where they could live inexpensively and she could complete her book. Friends urged her to stay there, uncertain of her reception at home in her new role.

Nevertheless, in May, 1850, Fuller and Ossoli sailed for New York on the merchant freighter, Elizabeth. Not long after leaving port, the captain died of smallpox. Baby Angelo caught the disease but recovered during the voyage. The inexperienced mate who took command after the captain's death miscalculated his position and was unaware of an approaching hurricane. During the night before the ship's expected landfall, it struck a sandbar within sight of Fire Island and began to break up. Some crew members managed to reach shore, but the wind and high surf made it impossible to launch a lifeboat. Fuller, Ossoli and their baby perished on July 19, 1850.

Emerson sent Henry Thoreau to search the wreckage, but no trace was found of their bodies or personal effects, including Fuller's last completed manuscript, a history of the revolution. The Fuller family erected a monument to Margaret in their plot at Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge.