Wide Awakes
symbols: capes to unify diverse coalitions, torches to light the dark corners against conspiracies and marching orders sending masses off against a common enemy.
IT TOOK DECADES for Yergason to fully grasp what he had done. After creating the first cape, he fell into the background of the original club, not old or well-established enough to win election as an officer. But at Gilded Age reunions, he could finally appreciate his contribution. He started to show off the original cape he had sewn and published letters in the Hartford Courant, explaining that “I was the first one to wear a cambric cape . . . with four other young men—we originated the Wide Awakes.” Other members affirmed Yergason’s version of events.
And who was this Edgar S. Yergason, writing to editors, reminiscing at banquets? He no longer slept on a cot in the Talcott & Post’s store. The young man with an eye for the striking visual detail had risen to become one of America’s most successful designers. He curated interiors for Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. President Benjamin Harrison, who was also said to have been a Wide Awake, invited him to redecorate the White House. Yergason enlivened that old mansion with electric lighting, bold color schemes and modern window treatments. Can it be a coincidence that the boy who launched such a visually composed political movement grew up to be a celebrated designer?
Not many people remember Yergason, unlike the generals who fought the war and were memorialized afterward. Recalling the Civil War in purely military terms has helped Americans distance themselves from the hardest questions it posed: how citizens could go to war with each other, how racism poisoned our republic, how the political system we herald led to such carnage.
But Yergason and his cape are apt reminders of how our political symbols capture both what is most motivating, and most terrifying, about our democracy. The young clerk looked around a textile shop and found the tools to express the hopes and fears of millions of Americans. Most of the time, people can distinguish between a symbol and a threat. For a democracy on the brink, that distinction vanished. Perhaps more than any icon in the history of American politics, Eddie Yergason’s cape fit.