In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, hundreds of men and women wrote to the Detroit News advice column “Experience” with letters that offered vivid, idealized descriptions of their lives. Adopting clever pen names such as Blossom and Connecticut Yankee, they addressed their correspondence not only to advice columnist Nancy Brown, but to each other, forming intimate virtual relationships and weaving a veritable soap opera that the News’s readers consumed voraciously.
The forum’s anonymity allowed these letter writers — who called themselves “columnites” — to take liberties with their autobiographies, blurring the line between fact and fiction. That anonymity also makes it difficult for scholars to assess who these columnites actually were. In fact, I only have been able to definitively identify one: a woman writing under the name Hibiscus.
In her correspondence, which spanned 1939 to 1940, Hibiscus posed no questions and sought no counsel. Instead, she spun a narrative, warm and nostalgic, about her life as a young and genteel Southern woman whisked away to Detroit by her dashing Yankee husband. She gushed about how much she adored her new spouse, their young son Tiny Hands and their cozy new home in a bustling Northern city. But Hibiscus also described a deep longing for the plantation house in Natchez, Miss., where she grew up. Her letter included wistful imagery straight out of a Lost Cause fantasy of the antebellum South: ancient oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, warm breezes scented with magnolia and African American servants speaking in dialect.
Like so many columnites, Hibiscus did not write the Detroit News’s advice column asking for advice. Instead, she was a woman struggling alone in a big city, seeking connection and acknowledgment from strangers.
Hibiscus was none other than the marketing genius Brownie Wise, who would skyrocket the Tupperware company to international success only a decade later. Her identity is important because the reality of Wise’s life tells us much about the ways that columnites may have used the “Experience” column to process their own traumas and challenges in a rapidly modernizing America.