Late in the summer of 1788, Thompson was appointed
Bavarian minister of war and police, made a member of the Privy Council, and promoted to the rank of major general. After listing these titles, the Flounder declared to the Women's Tribunaclass="underline" "That kind of thing probably doesn't mean much to the ladies. I can already hear you saying, 'A typical male career!' Maybe so. Thompson's ambition sometimes went to ridiculous lengths. And yet his correspondence with the farm cook Amanda Woyke made a great change in him, the kind of change that is ordinarily produced only by love letters. It is indeed my contention that Amanda, then a sturdy forty-five, and our American, some ten years her junior, were impelled by passionate reason to write each other love letters revolving around the problems of human nutrition. For once no soul music, no sob stuff, no pens dipped in heart's blood. Listen to what he wrote to Zuckau:
" 'To you alone, esteemed friend and benefactress, I owe the great, the crucial insight that no political order can be truly good unless it redounds to the common weal. I have undertaken to combine the interests of my regiment with those of the civilian population and to make our military might serve the public welfare even in time of peace, by seeing to it that every garrison in Bavaria maintains soldiers' gardens and therein, apart from the estimable potato, cultivates not only rutabaga but also, by way of crop rotation, clover for cattle feed. I take the liberty of sending you, my friend and benefactress, a few seeds and young rutabaga plants by the same post. This highly nutritious root plant has, not without my help and advice, been bred from rape. Rest assured that only my diplomatic tact deters me from proclaiming to the Bavarian people what my heart knows full well, to wit, that they are indebted to an estimable Prussian woman not only for the potato, but for the potato dumpling as well. In conclusion: do you know of a rational way of eradicating the plague of beggary with which Munich is now afflicted? A mere police action would accomplish nothing.' "
Here I must interpolate the fact that thanks to Thompson's express package, rutabaga took hold in West Prussia and soon gained popularity under the name of Wruke: Wruken with Ganseklein, flank of mutton with Wruken,
tripe stewed with Wruken. But also, in the rutabaga winter of 1917, Wruken cooked with nothing at all.
Of that the Flounder made no mention before the Tribunal. But Thompson's great achievement — suddenly arresting all the beggars in Munich, registering them, and moving them to a workhouse — was celebrated in quotations from letters which made it clear that the minister of war and police had derived his inspiration from Amanda. For this is what she wrote Thompson: "My dear Sir: If enny tramps or beggars turn up here in Zuckau, they haff to chop wud and unravvel nitted yarn in the junkroom if they want enny of my potato soup."
This little hint sufficed to start Thompson off in the right direction. He replied: "Ah, dearest friend. If you could see how ubiquitous the crime of beggary is here. Parents put little children's eyes out or maim their limbs so as to arouse pity by exhibiting them. The situation is generally thought to be hopeless. Thoughtful persons have come to regard beggary as an intrinsic feature of our social order. It is widely held that wicked persons must first be made virtuous before they can be made happy. But why, in response to your excellent advice, should I not attempt to reverse the order? Made happy by work, my sinners will become virtuous."
The rest is known. Thompson requisitioned a run-down Pauline monastery in the suburbs and transformed it into a military workhouse with shops for turners, smiths, dyers, saddlers, and so on, as well as dormitories, a refectory, and a community kitchen with a masonry cooking stove that Amanda later had copied (from Thompson's blueprints) for her farm kitchen: horseshoe shaped with numerous openings and fire grates. He then established welfare committees in Munich's sixteen districts, put up a sign in gold letters over the gateway of the workhouse saying, "No alms accepted here!" and finally, on January 1, 1790, arrested twenty-six hundred beggars in a sweeping roundup, had them registered on previously prepared blanks, and sent them to the workhouse the following day.
In a letter to Amanda, Thompson wrote, "We are making footstools, horse blankets, and uniforms for the whole Bavarian army. We wind yarn and spin wool. Fourteen hundred permanent inmates are industrious and happy. Even
the little children help. It is to be hoped that my success will encourage others to follow my example."
What was discussed before the Women's Tribunal, however, was not the successful police action but the accused Flounder's contention that by advising Thompson to give the beggars and other paupers work, wages, and food, a farm cook, who was not only a Kashubian but a serf as well, had prevented the French Revolution from spreading to Bavaria.
Protected by his bulletproof glass, the Flounder said: "If such advice had been given to an able Frenchman, if the French mob had been provided with well-heated workhouses and ample community kitchens, if they had been guaranteed full soup kettles with smiling eyes of fat floating on top, there would have been no revolution, the guillotine would not have had to function many thousands of times, no Robespierre, no Napoleon would have become known to us; instead, enlightened princes would perforce have resolved to promote the public welfare. As it was, Amanda Woyke's advice benefited only the Bavarian people. While elsewhere the Furies raged, the beggars of Munich were made over into useful citizens."
You're right again, Ilsebilclass="underline" carrot and stick. It would be easy to imagine Ms. Huntscha, the prosecutor, taking a strictly materialistic approach and demolishing the Flounder's speculations—"If the dog hadn't shat, he would have caught the hare," and so on. But she adopted an entirely different tone. "Excellent reasoning," she said. Then she dissociated herself from "male revolutionary rites," expressed her horror of Robespierre and Napoleon, exposing the one as a hypocrite, the other as a little man who wanted to be big. After that, she wound up for a haymaker:
"But what, defendant Flounder, became of your enlightened princes' alleged achievements? A few years later Thompson's workhouse, with its rudiments of self-government, had become a common jail where the prisoners were bullied and beaten. And on the state farm at Zuckau serfdom was maintained until well into the nineteenth century. Nay, more: your great genius, your friend of the people Thompson, was chucked out by the Bavarian estates. And Amanda
was obliged to look on as an ambitious inspector drove the serfs of the state farm from their individual potato plots. That's right, with whips. Her little talks with the sweet Lord didn't help one bit. And as for Thompson, who'd been made a Holy Roman count in the meantime, the best this Count Rumford could do, even in his late years in London and Paris, was to rush into more and more new ideas which, as the defendant has succeeded in proving, were kindled in a Kashubian farm kitchen and exploded in Rumford's brain. "We concede that by their division of labor the Woyke-Thompson correspondence tandem were productive — we owe them the slow-combustion stove, the steamer, and the soup kitchen — but what part did the Flounder play in this often pioneering collaboration? He claims to have been the Welt-geist. He claims to have coupled the ambition of a delinquent upstart with the public spirit of a farm cook rooted in her native soil. He tried to play God for Amanda Woyke and to embody social progress in the interest of Count Rumford. A scheming matchmaker, that's what he was. It's beginning to look as if he'd sold the Tribunal a bill of goods, as though we feminists had fallen for his flimflam about equality, as though his belated monument to the farm cook had turned us into a lot of gaping fools, as though he, in his Floundery way, were contributing to our emancipation. But let's not be deceived by appearances. His version simply doesn't make sense. The intention is too obvious. Here's what the Flounder is really saying: in the hands of a man, the naive invention that this dear little woman managed to arrive at over her homely cooking stove — West Prussian potato soup, for instance — becomes social and political achievement, namely, Rumford soup for the poor, which was spooned up for a whole century in Munich, London, Geneva, and Paris. In other words, the defendant wants us to praise, glorify, and perpetuate the inventive little woman's humility, the admirable inner freedom of a lifelong serf, subservience misrepresented as equality. There's Flounder morality for you! What a stinking, fishy trick! I move that we rule out all further quotations from letters!"