Ethelene Whitmire and “The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram” : A Unique World War II Epic (Part 2 of 2)
Professor Ethelene Whitmire came across the story of Reed Peggram while doing research on African Americans in Denmark.
by Jonathan Gramling
Professor Ethelene Whitmire has been busy since returning to her position at UW-Madison’s Department of African American Studies after her 2023-2024 sabbatical.
“I came back and I had an exhibit Nordic Utopia: African Americans in the 20th Century,” Whitmire said. “I’ve been teaching classes like a new Harlem Renaissance course, a course on biography, a course on autobiography of African Americans and now I’m teaching a course on comparative ethnic studies. It’s a course that we share with Chican@ Latin@ Studies, American Indian Studies and Asian American Studies.”
And her life is going to get a whole lot more busy with the publishing of her book, “The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram,” a unique World War II love story based on the life of Peggram. Whitmire is a researcher who has focused on African Americans in Denmark. And that’s how she came across Peggram.
As a child, Whitmire loved to read Nancy Drew mysteries. And uncovering Peggram’s life was like uncovering a mystery. You have to be open tou sources and where the trail leads you.
“When I got an agent, I told her that I wanted to write about African Americans in Denmark,” Whitmire said. “And I used a writing sample about Reed for my application. And she said, ‘No, this is a story to tell people. People love World War II stories. There isn’t enough about about Black men who aren’t soldiers. And there aren’t enough gay love stories that come out of World War II.’”
Whitmire followed the trail to the Boston Public Library where she learned about Peggram’s intellectual pursuits.
“I could see these updates at Harvard, Class of 35,” Whitmire said. “They would update every few years. And so I was able to follow and trace. But he was never able to work and become a university professor that he wanted to be. I would also say that he probably was thwarted by race in terms of his ability to work at a lot of different schools. I have about 200 pages of records from Harvard when he wanted to work as a professor. He said, ‘I don’t want to go into the South.’ Nothing south of Virginia where both of his parents were from. And of course, they only submitted his applications to HBCUs in the South even though he said that he didn’t want to do that. And yet, there were a lot of letters of recommendation. They all mentioned his race. He had applied to go abroad to England when he was an undergrad. And the dean wrote a very nice letter at Harvard to him saying how great he was. He wrote a letter back saying, ‘Thank you.’ And then the dean wrote a second letter the same day saying, ‘You should know that this is a Black man. You might not be able to tell by his name.’ And the place in England said, ‘Oh thanks for telling us. We would have been alarmed if he had showed up.’ They also said, ‘It won’t impact his application.’ But he didn’t get accepted.”
Whitmire followed Peggram’s steps to Boston and Europe.
“I was able to go back to all of the places where he lived in Boston and to his grave,” Whitmire said. “He went to Boston Latin School besides going to Harvard. I went to the space where he lived in Copenhagen and in Florence. I know the address because of the letters. And then I stayed in the hotel where he stayed. He stayed in two hotels in Paris in 1938-1939. And I was able to stay in both of them luckily. They were updated. I went to see the neighborhood. He lived where all of the famous cafes were. The cafe where James Baldwin hung out was just around the corner. He was a member of the Shakespeare & Company Bookstore Library. I saw his library cards, so I knew everything that he read that year. And I knew that he went to the Bibliotheque Nationale. I have a copy of his library card with his photograph. And so I was just able to replicate. I knew he went to the opera. Just to see the spaces and places where he lived and visited was great.”
The trail led to the Library of Congress where Whitmire first learned that Peggram was gay.
“I found out he was gay when I found love letters that he wrote to Leonard Bernstein that are in Bernstein’s archive at the Library of Congress,” Peggram said. “That was the first clue as to what was going on. Reed might have known him from Boston Latin School because there was a few years difference, but they would have been in school at the same time. But they definitely knew each other at Harvard. And these are unrequited letters. We don’t have Bernstein’s replies, but we know what he said to Reed because Reed wrote in a letter, ‘I’m shocked by some of the things you said.’ And he actually told Bernstein, ‘Destroy these letters,’ which Bernstein never did. They are in his archives.”
And Whitmire unearthed some of the story about Peggram and his lover Arne through Italian police records about their experiences in Italy.
“They were under espionage files,” Whitmire said. “They were curious why these two foreigners were in Italy in the first place. They were being watched. And In Reed’s case, he was sending letters to his friend and his grandmother. They actually took the letters and translated them and commented on what he was talking about. Also, at one point, Reed and Arne were having dinner in Genoa with another Dane and a high-ranking military official in Italy overheard them. And this was all in the document. And he asked other people whom he was with, ‘Who are these men?’ He asked for them to be taken into the police station to be questioned. And then they were released after they explained why they were in Italy. But eventually in some of the documents, it said, ’People reported to the prefect of a city in Italy that these two men are sharing a home and sharing one room and one bed.’”
Information was there waiting to be uncovered in every nook and corner.
“When they escaped, they ran into African American troops who were there,” Whitmire said about Arne and Peggram’s escape from an Italian concentration camp. “And they had reporters on the ground embedded with them. And the reporters captured their stories and took photographs. And that’s how I know about the whole story to begin with, by searching the African American newspaper databases that are digitized. When I was looking for information on African Americans in Denmark, his story popped up. That’s how I knew about him.”
While Whitmire was proactively on the information trail of Peggram, sometimes the information came to her from the most unlikely sources.
“In 2016, I had a Fulbright at the University of Copenhagen,” Whitmire said. “Associated with that, the U.S. Embassy paid for a symposium about Denmark and African Americans. And I was one of the keynote speakers. And I invited this young African American woman, Tasue whom a friend introduced me to, from Boston. When I finished speaking, Tasue raised her hand and said, ‘Reed Peggram, that’s my great uncle.’ She recognized his photo. She didn’t know him because she was too young. And then she came to my office at the University of Copenhagen and she told me that the family had letters that they kept that Reed Peggram wrote. So I have letters from him from Paris, Copenhagen and Italy, over 200 letters he wrote to his grandmother and mother during this whole time period. It’s just this treasure-trove of letters that Tasue’s aunt Reed’s niece — kept for decades. These are from the 1930s – 1945.”
“The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram”’s far-reaching storyline complete with war and love and danger and mystery. And it is a storyline that will appeal to a diverse audience.
“It’s resonated with gay men more than anyone else, whether Black, White or people I talk with in Denmark and France,” Whitmire said. “My taxi driver here in Madison, I was telling him when he was taking me to catch the bus to go to Florence, he asked, ‘Why are you going there?’ I told him about the story and he said, ‘That’s interesting. I’m a gay man myself.’ He was a much older man. And so, apparently, there aren’t enough of these love stories.”
In terms of public visibility, Whitmire’s book is taking her writing career to a whole new level.
Unlike my first book, which was from the University of Illinois Press, this is a trade book, so it is everywhere,” Whitmire said. “What I like is more people will be able to access it and see it. There is a whole publishing and marketing team at Penguin/Random House, called Team Reed, which is behind it and they try to push it to Goodreads and all of these places.”
And it is available in all types of media.
“The book is available through Viking Books through Penguin/Random House,” Whitmire said. “It’s sold at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It’s at Walmart and Target. It’s available anywhere. It’s the largest publisher in the United States. There is an audio book. They asked me if I wanted to do the intro where I talk about my journey. But we got a professional and then a Black man read the rest of the book. It’s also going to be on e-books. Hopefully, it will be on paperback next year.”
And who knows? Maybe in a few years, “The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram” will be coming to a theater near you or on Netflix. And it is all possible because Whitmire followed Peggram’s trail no matter where it led her.
