Leonora S. Raines, 1866 – 1952
Leonora Raines (née Sheehan) was born in 1866 to Cornelius James Sheehan and Elizabeth McCarty Sheehan, who raised their nine children in Atlanta, Georgia. Leonora married accountant Robert H. Raines, whom she divorced in 1904, but whose last name she retained throughout her life (newspaper accounts referred to her at Mrs. Leonora Raines until she died).
Raines established herself in Paris in the winter of 1899. Throughout her extended residence in Paris (around 32 years), she never lost touch with her hometown and family members, whom she visited on a regular basis and hosted whenever they came to Paris. For several periods between 1900 and 1913, she lived with one of her sisters, who had earned a significant reputation for opera performances in Florence and Paris under the stage name of Signorina Margaret Claire. The two hosted musical and literary salons in their home for the American Colony. Margaret married in 1914, seemingly ending her opera career.
Although she had no formal training in journalism, Raines began her career as a reporter and opinion writer in Paris. She became the Society Editor of the American Register, founded in 1868 as the first American newspaper in Paris. She also contributed articles to the column “Art and Music” in the Atlanta Journal, providing long descriptions of the musical and visual arts scenes in the U.S. and Europe at the turn of the 20th century.
In the early years, Raines was a member of the Girls’ Art Club and made daily visits for the afternoon teas and discussions. She wrote about American student life in Paris, with special emphasis on women artists and the academies to which they flocked, lauding their hard work and bemoaning their impoverished existence:
In the Latin quarter, the truly hard workers live – men and women who have made sacrifices for a year’s study abroad, and who go there and slave from morning till night. They accomplish more than the others, but to the detriment of their health in many instances, and their work bears more the mark of strength than of beauty. [...] But it is a pity to see some of our American brothers and sisters as they walk to and from their studios. Some of them are so poverty-stricken, and indeed it often happens that collections are made among the American colony to send some poor girls home, as they are literally dying of starvation (Atlanta Journal, March 24, 1900, p. 12).
Despite her observations, she still believed that the experience was worth such pains and deprivations:
It is furthest from my thought to attempt to discourage travel or to decry Paris. After a student has arrived at the point where he can produce form with some facility, there is probably no place in the world where his ideas will get such a thorough shaking up as in Paris. A year there will be of great value. The salons, the Louvre, and the Luxembourg will mean something, and have much to do with broadening his horizons and developing his personality (Atlanta Journal, May 19, 1900, p.13).
In her article, "Remarkable Success of a Rome Girl in Paris," she not only lauded Girls' Club resident Imogen Coulter, but also commented on the selection process for the Paris Salons, highlighting the subjective cruelty of these elite exhibitions:
After a picture is finished, recommendation has first to be passed by the teacher, then by an army of judges who mercilessly fling aside anything that does not come up to the standard. After the picture has been admitted by these august personages, however, it has yet to pass a higher tribunal of pastmasters of the brush, and if there be the slightest flaw or objection, then the painting or sculpture is refused (The Atlanta Journal, July 26, 1903, p. 23).
Raines left the Register in early 1903 after joining the staff of the New York Sun at the end of 1902. Many of the articles she wrote for the Sun were reprinted or quoted at length in the Atlanta Journal. In addition to the Sun, she contributed to numerous American magazines and newspapers. Commenting like a self-styled ethnographer on fashion, art, music, and society, she always compared lifestyle and values in the U.S. with those of France and Europe.
When WWI broke out, Raines made her reputation as a war correspondent for the New York Sun, providing “first-hand observations of belligerent troops” and revealing “how civilians across Western Europe were struggling to cope with loss, despair, and uprooted lives” (Fondren and Edy). Becoming a wartime correspondent had not necessarily been in her plans or those of the Sun:
Even as the Germans crossed into Belgium and took Paris for their goal, she had no thought of turning war correspondent. Like other Americans, she packed her trunks, and, when the fall of Paris seemed a matter of days, she sought transportation to the ports. But what chance was there? With her trunks round her, she sat disconsolately at the station and saw 2,000 people struggling and fighting for passage through the narrow gates to the trains. For a woman all alone to force a way through that crowd was impossible. “Well,” decided Mrs. Raines, “since I can’t go I’ll stay and write what I see.” [...] she set out to find the war; and not once but many times she almost reached the battleline. Until the soldiers stopped her, she would penetrate right into the fighting district. Her course would lie over fields where Germans, French and English had struggled, and the picture of carnage would stretch before her eyes (Atlanta Journal, November 22, 1914, p. 29).
Raines spent months traveling on foot, or in camionettes, coal vans, or river boats, scalded by the hot sun or drenched by soaking rain, all the while encountering shattered bodies and utter devastation all over Europe. She put her heart and soul into the long articles she submitted to the Sun and other American newspapers, telling of soldiers, battlefronts, and the miseries of the trenches, which she termed a “double line of slaughter pens” (Atlanta Journal, January 17, 1915, p.38). In her reporting, she mixed her observations and experiences with her own opinions about the war, the Germans, and Allied propaganda campaigns.
After sending dispatches from France, Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium, she returned to Paris. Finding the city dark and gloomy, she longed for home: “After all I have seen, Atlanta is two-fold dear to me” (Atlanta Journal, January 15, 1916). She sailed to the U.S. in December 1915, but returned to Paris in March 1916, where she resumed writing mainly about lighter subjects such as music, wartime fashions, soldier types, and French and American women.
After the Armistice, Raines went back to Atlanta, where she gave speeches on comparisons between the U.S. and Europe and wrote about jazz and music from the South (often from a perspective informed by the racist stereotypes typical of her day). In 1923, she went back to a much-transformed Paris, save for the weather: “I lived in the rain. I left in the rain, I return in the rain, and the rain I have ever with me” (The North Adams Transcript, January 19, 1924, p. 6). Besides regularly returning to the U.S., where she visited with family in Atlanta and toured Florida (1926), Raines traveled to Italy, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Spain, Majorca, and Cuba, among other destinations.
Her thirst for travel continued for many years. Even after her permanent return to Atlanta in 1932, Raines voyaged throughout the U.S. and made a world tour in 1934, visiting China, Japan, India, before returning after fourteen months via Honolulu and the Panama Canal. She left again for an extensive tour of continental Europe in 1937 and a three-month trip to Greece, Turkey, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Belgium in 1939. All the while, she published articles that were as varied as her lifestyle, filled with commentaries on the places she visited and people she met, replete with comparisons and observations about America and Europe, and the beauty of the natural world (trees, gardens, parks).
With the onset of WWII, her greatest fear was that the U.S. would once again come to the assistance of Europe. She asserted isolationist views informed by her own gruesome experiences in the Great War:
The Allies realized how we reacted to the horrors of war, so they fed horrors to us. Europeans are accustomed to war and take it in its stride. They always have had wars and will probably continue to have them after this one. [...] We should remain aloof and let European nations fight European battles. We have no business in any war over there. Let them fight it out among themselves (Atlanta Journal, May 22, 1940, p. 16).
I lingered long on those lands and absorbed something of their philosophy, their psychology, their point of view. Consequently, I am quite unmoved at their pleas for forthrightness, democracy, fair play. In a word, knowing them as I do has made a deep-rooted isolationist of me (Atlanta Journal, January 14, 1941, p. 14).
Raines lived out the remainder of her life mostly in Atlanta, where she gave speeches and frequently wrote letters to the editor of the Atlanta Journal – ever the opinionated and outspoken analyst. True to her varied interests, she wrote and spoke about the memorable sites she had visited, the history of Atlanta, music, the newspaper industry, landscapes and cityscapes, immigration, books, and the like. A patron of the arts, she also funded prizes for art students and donated paintings and furniture to the High Museum in Atlanta.
After years of traveling and recording her thoughts in print, Leonora Raines died on Wednesday, June 25, 1952. She was buried in the Oakland Cemetery, about which she had written a mournful portrayal for the Atlanta Journal:
Before another quarter century has passed, Oakland Cemetery will be all that is left of old Atlanta. It will be a huge, far-spreading tablet that will record where the city’s fathers and forefathers sleep, and will commemorate the lives of those that have passed to silent dust (January 7, 1906, p. 26).