Older, Cora (Miranda) Baggerly

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OLDER, Cora (Miranda) Baggerly

Born 1875, Clyde, New York; died 26 September 1968, Los Gatos, California

Wrote under: Mrs. Fremont Older

Daughter of Peter and Margaret Baggerly; married Fremont Older, 1893

Cora Baggerly Older was a Syracuse University student on vacation when she met and married her journalist husband, who was soon fighting both corporations and labor as editor of the San Francisco Bulletin and later of the Call. In her early married years, Older wrote reviews, society news, and celebrity interviews for her husband's paper. Her first novels were fictionalized versions of muckraking journalism. When the family moved to a ranch in the Santa Clara foothills in 1915, Older took charge of managing the property and its staff of paroled convicts.

Older wrote in three distinct genres. Her early novels were social melodramas reflecting current events, like The Socialist and the Prince (1903), where Paul Stryne whips up resentment of cheap Chinese labor into a string of workingmen's clubs, a paramilitary organization, and an enormous political influence, but ultimately loses all for a beautiful, self-willed society girl who flirts with socialism. The Giants (1905) plays off the free children of the West against the railroad-monopoly capital of the East. Esther Damon (1911) is mildly utopian. The hero, a Civil War veteran reduced to alcoholism through wartime pain and postwar bitterness, reforms and begins a cooperative community. His protegée wins her way back to a place in society after she has been ruined by her parents' excessive Methodism and has had an illegitimate child.

During this period, Older also wrote magazine articles on social questions, including a long account of the San Francisco graft prosecutions for McClure's magazine. Her novels were, for the most part, condemned as too sensational, stark, and evident of purpose. Turning away from fiction, Older wrote plays (none of which have been published), and in the 1930s "authorized" and highly laudatory biographies of William Randolph Hearst (who was her husband's employer) and his father George.

Her last works took up the matter of California in a more sophisticated fashion. Savages and Saints (1936), a novel, two collections of short stories, and a book about San Francisco combine carefully researched history with fictionalized versions of the lives and legends of Hispanic and Anglo pioneers.

Older's style was not far removed from that of the dime novel. She wrote a spare, journalistic prose, with short simple sentences and abrupt paragraphs; she aroused emotion with predictable confrontations, duels, and love scenes played out on cliffs beside the sea during a thunderstorm. Yet although she shared the western naturalist's admiration for the successful—even brutal—man, she also wrote about women who took action instead of simply being acted upon. Flirtatious, dependent, clinging women are assigned to the villainous role; happy women generally earn a place of their own before marrying. Many of the stories in California Missions and Their Romances (1938) and Love Stories of Old California (1940) tell of women who endured enormous hardship to keep the flames of religion and civilization alive in an unwelcoming land.