The Fatal Romance of Consumption New Netherland’s Enduring Shadow Dragging Quakers to Abolitionism Lone Star State’s Tent Show King
Fall From Grace Brilliant but star-crossed, Herbert Hoover followed a landslide victory with a landslide defeat
April 2021 HISTORYNET.com
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PHOTO CREDIT
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34 APRIL 2021
FEATURES 26 Fall From Grace
Herbert Hoover, the limits of efficiency, and the pitfalls of political reality By Roger Forsgren
34 Going Dutch
42
New York inherited a big hunk of its soul from the Netherlands By Raanan Geberer
42 Half in Love With Death
Before antibiotics, tuberculosis was a national fixation and a disease to die for By Mary Fuhrer
50 Tent Show King
Harley Sadler brought show business to Texas, and vice versa By Barbara Finlay
58 Quaker Awakening
The Friends had to be hectored into becoming abolitionists By Alice Watts
DEPARTMENTS 6 Mosaic
News from out of the past.
12 Contributors 14 Interview
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. says James Baldwin’s work is the most important window into the way racism organizes America.
58
16 Déjà Vu
A violent try at voiding an American election? Yes—in Kentucky, 1899-1900.
20 American Schemers
“Colonel” Tom Parker lived a life of grand scale, gluttony, and secrets.
22 SCOTUS 101
Chief Justice Warren’s demand for unity made the Brown case a turning point.
24 Cameo
PHOTO CREDIT
Former slave Elizabeth Keckly became Mary Todd Lincoln’s closest confidante.
6
A set of 1953 sketches by Charles Schulz of Charlie Brown and his Peanuts pals brought big bucks at auction.
66 Reviews 72 An American Place ON THE COVER: Herbert Hoover found out the hard way that winning an election by a landslide only opens a door, sometimes to opportunities for bitter failure.
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Man’s Outrage Ignited Women’s Crusades Diocletian Lewis defied convention, pushing women’s causes: temperance, suffrage, and the uncorseted life. bit.ly/manlitfemalefires
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Sh Se
by Sarah Richardson
SAUL LOEB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Historic Echoes in Capitol Attack
A man carrying a Confederate flag appeared in photos of the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol that threatened the continuity of American governance and damaged windows, shutters and doors, and vandalized a figure in Statuary Hall. No Confederate flag had ever before appeared in the Capitol, but construction of the building itself figured prominently in the career of Jefferson Davis. The Mississippian went from being U.S. secretary of war to senator before resigning in January 1861 to become president of the Confederate States of America. In the 1850s, however, Davis was the official most closely associated with the Capitol. As new states entered the Union, newly fledged Senate and House solons needed room. The Capitol acoustics were so atrocious as to make speeches undecipherable. Major renovation and expansion began, jointly managed by Davis and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Captain Montgomery Meigs. Davis got President Pierce to put the War Department in charge of the project. Envisioning a monument as well as a working government facility, Davis sought to spare no expense in remaking the building. He also pressured Meigs to rework the headgear of the statue planned for atop the dome. That figure had been designed to wear a liberty cap, customarily worn in antiquity by freed slaves. To placate Davis, a slaveholder, sculptor Thomas Crawford devised a headdress evoking a Roman helmet and Indian regalia. By late 1865, when workers were putting the finishing touches on the impressive fresco in the Rotunda of the building he had spent years promoting, Jefferson Davis was being held in a federal military prison. 6 AMERICAN HISTORY
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House Invasion The flag carried into the Capitol evoked links to personages and images of antebellum days.
Representative James Clyburn (D-South Carolina) has a dream: to make the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” an official national hymn to rank alongside the national anthem. In January, Clyburn introduced legislation to do that. The lyrics, written in 1900 by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, right, then a school principal in Jacksonville, Florida, are sung to a melody by his younger brother, John Rosamond Johnson. The song honors the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. In 1931, the NAACP adopted “Lift” as the Negro National Anthem. “To make it a national hymn, I think, would be an act of bringing the country together,” Clyburn told USA Today. “It would say to people, ‘You aren’t singing a separate national anthem, you are singing the country’s national hymn.”
National Hymn Proposed
1776 Commission 86’ed
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES; UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES
SAUL LOEB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Among executive orders issued by President Joseph Biden on January 20, 2021, one disbanded the 1776 Commission, established by President Donald Trump in September 2020. A panel of that body whose ranks included no professional historians produced a report touting “patriotic education.” The report, withdrawn by President Biden, drew multiple condemnations by historians. Pulitzer Prize-winning Professor David Blight of Yale University told the Associated Press that the report reflected “a sixth- or seventh-grade kind of approach to history—to make the children feel good.” In 1963, a Ku Klux Klan member assassinated civil rights activist Medgar Evers in the driveway of his modest home in Jackson, Mississippi. In 2017, the residence, on a 6,500-square-foot lot, was named a national monument, and in November 2020 established as the 423rd unit of the National Park Service system. Evers, the NAACP’s first field secretary, staged a pioneering sit-in at the Jackson Library in 1961 with nine students from Tougaloo College, in addition organizing voter registration drives and boycotts. The Evers home, still being readied for visitors, is on the Mississippi Freedom Trail. (bit.ly/EversHouse)
Evers Home a National Monument APRIL 2021 7
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Righteous Grrrls Laura E. Foster’s 1915 cover for LIFE pulled no punches about women’s impatience.
Say Her Name: Ida Wells-Barnett
Editorial cartoons depicting the clashes over voting rights for Blacks and women are among items being presented in an online exhibition by the Massachusetts Historical Society. The drawings, mostly from 19th-century newspapers, also touch on aspects of the electoral system, such as the ballot box, gerrymandering, and political corruption. (masshist.org/features/whocounts)
Tubman on the Money?
A move to put freedom fighter Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill has regained impetus. Announced in 2016 by the Obama administration, the change from Andrew Jackson was sidelined under President Donald Trump. In 2019 Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, citing issues related to counterfeiting, said the shift could not be made until 2028. On January 25, 2020, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced an effort to shorten the Mnuchin timeline.
LIFE; PHOTO 12/UIG/GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Voting in Ink
President Woodrow Wilson High School in Portland, Oregon, which opened in 1954, will be renamed Wells-Barnett High School. The change honors pioneering journalist, educator, and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862. The push to rename Wilson High came after July 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd while in the custody of police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Schools in Jackson, Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia, have also been renamed to honor Wells-Barnett, whose unflinching reporting on an epidemic of lynching brought the issue national scrutiny.
8 AMERICAN HISTORY
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Basket of Stars A Native American basket entitled “Myriads of Stars Shine over the Graves of Our Ancestors. A Dat-So-Lalee Masterpiece” sold at auction for $87,500. Renowned artisan Dat So La Lee (aka Louisa Keyser) made the vessel around 1917, meticulously interweaving willow, bracken fern root, and red birch bark. Basket weaving for the tourist market reached its apogee during the artist’s lifetime; museums prize her work, which rarely comes to auction. Her baskets, fashioned in the tradition of vessels created by the Washoe tribe of the Lake Tahoe, Nevada, region, were marketed by the Emporium in Carson City, Nevada. The basket, about 14 inches high, is 15 inches across.
TOP BID
$288,000 First Ladies on View
“Peanuts” drawings by Charles M. Schulz sold for $288,000 at Heritage Auctions on December 13, 2020. The comic strip debuted in 1950. Schulz made the sketches of eight characters for a newspaper promotional freebie in 1953. Schulz produced the strip, save for a five-week stretch in 1997, until his death in 2000. He had wanted to title the strip “Lil’ Folks,” but because of copyright issues the publisher went with “Peanuts,” as adults of the day often called kids.
“Every Eye Is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States,” an exhibition of portraits, is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, until May 23. The gallery’s first exhibition to focus on First Ladies also is online. The show divides more than 60 portraits by six eras, starting with Martha Washington and ending with Melania Trump. The exhibition traces the emerging celebrity accorded presidents’ spouses. Related ephemera and dresses are also on display (firstladies.si.edu).
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State of Mind
Forsgren
Finlay
Watts
Fuhrer
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Barbara Finlay (“Tent Show King,” p. 50) has written here about post-Reconstruction voter suppression, Tex-Mex music, and a historic strike by pecan shellers in San Antonio, Texas. Roger Forsgren (“Fall from Grace,” p. 26) majored in history at Georgetown University before acquiring undergraduate and master’s degrees in engineering. He recently retired as Chief Knowledge Officer at the National Aeronautical and Space Administration. He and his wife live in Indialantic, Florida, and have four sons and four grandsons. Social historian Mary Fuhrer (“Half in Love with Death,” p. 42) writes primarily about community life in the early republic. She is the author of Crisis of Community (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). She lives in Acton, Massachusetts. Manhattan-based writer Raanan Geberer (“Going Dutch,” p. 34) contributes frequently to the magazine. Alice Watts (“Quaker Awakening,” p. 58) last wrote about landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing (“Pattern Recognition,” December 2019).
In “Roadway to Realism” (December 2020), Daniel B. Moskowitz clouds his otherwise enlightening analysis of Louisville Railroad v. Letson and its impact on the federal courts. The court did rule corporations, for legal purposes, to be people, but the article overlooks a key facet: The South Carolina-based railroad, noting that its board included individuals from North Carolina, argued that those directors’ origins kept it from being a South Carolina entity. However, the Court found corporate officers’ home states irrelevant, holding that the Louisville Railroad could be sued as a South Carolinian person owing to being based in South Carolina. Edward Keller Central Islip, New York
Sea Story
I read with great interest “JFK’s Other Boat” (October 2020) about PT-59 and “Combat Yacht” (February 2021) about USS Niagara. My wife’s father, Edgar Edman Mauer, served on both vessels. Upon his rescue from Niagara he became quartermaster on PT-109, surviving its sinking and again serving under Lieutenant Kennedy on PT-59. Mr. Mauer survived the war but died before Kathleen and I met; articles such as these help us understand what he experienced. Dennis Lyon Layton, Utah
Comments and a Correction
“Electric Warriors” (February 2021) was very informative and timely. Too bad the recent president never read a history book in his life. The ad on p. 9 for figurines claims the Marines were the nation’s first fighting force; they were not. Even as a retired Marine, I honor the U,S. Army as the senior service. Your caption on page 68 refers to an image of Omaha, Nebraska, in “the late 1900s.” I think you meant “the late 1800s.” J.H. Thompson, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.) Ogden Utah The editor replies: We did. Apologies for my error. CORRECTION: An item in the February 2021 issue incorrectly identified the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New York, as having belonged to Alexander Hamilton.
12 AMERICAN HISTORY
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Eddie S. Glaude Jr., James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, is the author of Democracy in Black and Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (Crown, 2020), an expression of anguish at American racial recidivism viewed through Baldwin’s life and works.
Glaude finds in the writer James Baldwin a lens through which to view American exceptionalism and its relationship to unresolved issues of race and equality.
Why use James Baldwin’s writing to examine the precarious state of race in America? I have been reading and teaching Baldwin for more than 20 years. I think he is the most insightful writer we have ever produced on the vexing issue of race and democracy. His later works, especially No Name in the Street, revealed his struggles with the nation’s equal-rights betrayals. He desperately sought to pick up the pieces
BY RICHARD ERNSBERGER JR.
in the face of the country’s refusal to change; in the effort, his art and social criticism evolved. I found those works helpful in my effort to come to terms with my despair and disillusionment. Initially Baldwin successfully wrote fiction but then racism really became a moral mission for him, didn’t it? Indeed. But I would argue that the moral issue of racism preoccupied him from the beginning. Baldwin grappled with, among other things, what gets in the way of an honest understanding of who we are and who we aspire to be. He explored ruthlessly our illusions of safety and comfort. And it is in this exploration of the perils of individual self-understanding—and the ongoing challenge of loving and being loved—that Baldwin makes the move, by analogy, to the broader
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ABOUT THAT INNOCENCE…
question of the country’s moral state. Racism becomes one of the most America’s innocence. And its effect is to disimportant areas to explore, because it organizes so much of American tort American democracy. Think of the 1776 life, and keeps us from confronting ourselves honestly. Commission Report, for example. Calling himself a “despairing witness,” Baldwin wrote that “America changes all the time without ever changing at all.” He uses the phrase “despairing witness” to describe his ongoing effort later in life to tell the truth about America, while many were leaving behind the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s for the comforts of the ’80s. He saw how and why the nation turned its back on the Black freedom struggle and yet still claimed that struggle as an example of AmeriMarching On can perfectionism. The story of the movement Baldwin and friends had become a part of the exceptional story of after making the America. However, Baldwin also saw the March 1965 march depths of suffering in the nation and how the between Selma and belief that White people mattered more than Montgomery, others continued to organize American life. Alabama. This belief and the practices that give it meaning constitute the through line of American history. It is, to invoke Amiri Baraka, “the changing same.”
Baldwin felt betrayed by the election of Ronald Reagan—it confirmed for him that the Civil Rights movement had failed. You felt a similar shock at Donald Trump’s election. Was that the catalyst for Begin Again? Absolutely. I kept saying to myself: they have done it again; they’ve done it again. And I worried about all of those young people who organized and protested in the name of Black Lives Matter. I worried about how they would react to the fact that the country responded to their sacrifice by vomiting up Trump. It is with this sense of despair, disillusionment, and concern that I retreated to the “ruins” of Baldwin’s work. There I found Begin Again.
You write that “we have to allow the ‘innocent’ idea of White America to die. It is irredeemable.” Is that the heart of the matter? Yes. There is nothing redeemable about the idea that some people ought to be valued more than others because of their skin color. So much of American life has been made disasIn the Civil Rights movement, was he caught between his peers Mar- trously hideous because of this belief. If we tin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and can finally uproot it, we may yet younger revolutionaries like the Black have a chance. Panthers? I don’t think so. His was a unique voice, the voice of an artist seekWhat do you want people to ing to render what he witnessed—to tell remember about Baldwin and the story of the extraordinary efforts of his work—and how hopeful or those he described as “improbable arisdespairing are you that America tocrats.” In some ways, Baldwin “queers” can overcome its lingering race Black politics. He complicates the issue? Baldwin insists, with Sochypermasculinity at its core and refuses rates, that the unexamined life is the binaries that often shape our not worth living. We have to accounts of the moment. He loves and plumb the depths of our sorrows, he rages. He gives voice to a kind of wounds, and fears if we are to live humanism and yet speaks forcefully and love genuinely. That becomes out of the specificity of Black life. the ground for the work we must all do if we are to step into a New In Begin Again, you focus on AmeriJerusalem—to bear witness to the ca’s “big lie.” What is that? The lie is suffering, so that it may end. Mine this story we tell ourselves to avoid is a chastened hope when it comes confronting who we really are and to race in America. Human beings what we have done. It is our way of avoiding The Examined Life are what they are. As Baldwin put facing the truth about the nation’s unjust Glaude sees Baldwin as it, we are, at once, disasters and miracles. treatment of Black people in the name of the focusing on the moral But if we show up in moments when history belief that White people matter more than issue of racism and calls, we at least have a chance for a miracle. others. The lie is a vast architecture of mean- exploring American My hope remains in us. We will see what we ings that malforms events to fit the story of illusions of comfort. do next. H
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Baldwin didn’t have an easy life growing up in Harlem. Not at all. He was born in August 1924. He grew up in the heart of the Great Depression. He chronicles the difficulties his stepfather had in providing for his family of nine children. He was not a product of Sugar Hill. His class position informs and shapes how he sees the world.
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Coming Heavy A state guard Gatling gun crew in defensive position at the capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky, in January 1900.
CATCHPHRASE COINAGE
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump capped a months-long campaign against the legitimacy of the election in which he lost the presidency with an incendiary speech to 2,000 supporters on the Ellipse outside the White House. After the rally several hundred in the crowd marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, where Congress was certifying the states’ electoral votes. The crowd swarmed the building, smashing doors and windows, battling cops, and taking copious selfies. One rioter and one cop were killed, three rioters died from medical emergencies. The most appropriate tweet of the day, from a citizen horrified by media coverage of the mayhem: Can we have 2020 back? What Americans have gotten back instead is 1899’s Kentucky gubernatorial election, and its deadly aftermath. A slave state that had stayed in the Union, post-bellum Kentucky was a tinderbox. Its political class mixed ex-Confederate Democrats, Republicans, and Populists. Squeaker elections—in 1896 William McKinley carried the state by fewer than 300 votes—stoked partisan passions. Kentuckians were a trigger-happy lot, as apt to settle grievances via duels and feuds as lawsuits; the McCoys of the state’s eastern mountains battled the Hatfields of West Virginia for decades. A rising figure in this maelstrom as the century ended was Covington lawyer William Goebel. A son of German immigrants, Goebel was not an obvious politician, much less a lightning rod. Cold and silent, he put one journalist in mind of a reptile. But Goebel was smart, hard-working, and
ambitious, and early on he adopted a populist cause: regulating the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. That line, the state’s largest, could break small farmers with its freight rates. Its lobbyists ruled Frankfort, the state capital. In 1887 voters sent Goebel to the General Assembly as a Democratic state senator. Goebel displayed his mettle clashing with John Sanford. The politically connected Covington banker had blocked Goebel from getting a judgeship he coveted. Goebel published an anonymous newspaper essay calling Sanford “Gonorrhea John.” He coyly blocked out a few letters easily imagined by even the dullest reader. In April 1895, the two met on a Covington street. “I understand you assume the authorship of that article,” said Sanford. “I do,” answered Goebel. The antagonists drew pistols and fired, almost simultaneously. Sanford’s bullet passed through Goebel’s coat and trousers; Goebel’s struck Sanford’s forehead, killing him. Goebel coolly turned himself in to the chief of police. Since witnesses could not say
KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
BY RICHARD BROOKHISER
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GARY GALLAGHER ON GETTYSBURG’S CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS H
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committee’s judgment that Goebel had in fact won. Sworn in January 31, the wounded man died three days later. Controversy shrouded even his last words. Admirers recalled a stirring envoi: “Tell my friends to be brave, fearless, and loyal to the common people.” A skeptical journalist reported the dying man’s comment on his last meal: “Doc, that was a damned bad oyster.” Under Kentucky law, the lieutenant governor opened legislative sessions. Two men now were laying claim to that slot: Goebel’s running mate, J.C.W. Beckham, and Taylor’s, John Marshall. Beckham sued Taylor and Marshall, who countersued, and their consolidated case went up to the U.S. Supreme Court, Taylor and Marshall losing all the way. Taylor had other legal issues crowding his plate: accused of plotting his opponent’s assassination, he fled across the Ohio River to Indiana, where the Republican governor refused to extradite him. Jurors convicted a lesser Republican official and a notorious gunman from one of Kentucky’s feudwracked counties of the shooting. The next Republican to win the Kentucky governorship eventually pardoned them and Taylor. Kentucky’s culture of violence contributed to the state’s poisonous political climate. But for too long Kentuckians had been shooting off their mouths as well as their guns. “Gonorrhea John” was only one epithet among many barked by members of a crowd that painted opponents in the most lurid colors, expecting nothing good from them and fearing every possible dirty trick. Every election became a last stand; any loss could be final. The day after Goebel died, Ambrose Bierce, satirist par excellence, wrote in William Randolph Hearst’s flagship New York newspaper: The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast Can not be found in all the West; Good reason, it is speeding here To stretch McKinley on his bier. In September 1901, President McKinley was in Buffalo, New York, gladhanding at an exhibition when an unemployed factory worker shot him. Leon Czolgosz’s reading ran to anarchists rather than Ambrose Bierce. His bullet was lethal all the same. Mean what you say but say only what you mean. H
KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
who fired first, Goebel successfully pleaded self-defense, beating both a criminal rap and a civil suit filed by Sanford’s widow. Goebel prepared for his next step, the 1899 governor’s race, by adding issues to his quiver—Republican corruption (the GOP held the statehouse), prison reform, and a modest dose of female suffrage, proposing to allow women to vote in school board elections. Most important, in 1898 Goebel pushed the assembly to create a State Board of Election Commissioners. Under existing rules, each county conducted its own vote and certified its own returns. Democratic counties regularly threw out Republican ballots, while Republican counties returned the favor—a crooked system whose gimcrack stasis maintained an ad hoc balance of power. Goebel’s State Board, by contrast, would itself select each county’s vote counters while answering to the party controlling the General Assembly—which happened to be Goebel’s Democrats. Despite charges of bossism and machine politics, Goebel got his way, and filled the Board’s three slots with supporters. Upon winning the Democratic nod for governor in June 1899, Goebel stumped the state with William Jennings Bryan, the national party’s silver-tongued star. Since Republican governor William O’Connell was term-limited, the GOP put up William Taylor, a mustachioed Morgantown lawyer. In November Taylor seemed to have won, 193,714 to 191,331. All eyes turned to Goebel’s handpicked State Board. Surely the commissioners would invalidate enough Republican votes to give Goebel the statehouse. Lame-duck Governor O’Connell asked President McKinley to order 1,000 federal troops into Kentucky to maintain order—that is, to protect Taylor’s lead. McKinley declined to involve the federal government. Republicans from around eastern Kentucky took matters into their own hands, flocking to Frankfort, armed. A Louisville editor, coining a potent phrase, called on good citizens to “stop the steal.” Target On December 9, the State Board surprised Winning Kentucky’s all parties by declining to invalidate any of governorship brought the results, on grounds that it lacked authorGoebel to the verge ity to investigate charges of fraud. Taylor was of power until a bullet inaugurated on December 12. to the chest brought Goebel and the Democrat-dominated Genhim to mortal grief. eral Assembly, however, held a hole card. When the new session of the legislature opened on January 2, Goebel, acting as leader of the state Senate, charged that the votes from no less than 50 counties had been tainted. A committee of 11 solons was chosen by lot to review his claims; mysteriously, the lot-drawers picked nine Democrats, one pro-Democrat Populist, and only one Republican. Angry, armed Republicans continued to swarm Frankfort as the committee deliberated over the results. The explosion came on January 30. As Goebel was walking to the statehouse: five or six shots were fired from a state office building, one catching him in the chest. Governor Taylor called out the militia and summoned the legislature into a special session in London, a Republican stronghold in southern Kentucky. But the majority Democrats, meeting in a Frankfort hotel, accepted the 18 AMERICAN HISTORY
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TODAY IN HISTORY JANUARY 25, 2005
RENOWNED ARCHITECT PHILIP JOHNSON PASSED AWAY IN THE INFLUENTIAL GLASS HOUSE, OR JOHNSON HOUSE, HE BUILT IN 1949. CONTROVERSY REGARDING THE STRUCTURE STILL EXISTS AS TO THE EXTENT JOHNSON ‘BORROWED’ FROM THE DESIGN OF MIES VAN DER ROHE’S FARNSWORTH HOUSE. JOHNSON’S RAMBLING ESTATE LOCATED IN NEW CANAAN, CT BOASTS AN UNDERGROUND ART GALLERY WITH WORKS BY STELLA, JOHNS, RAUSCHENBERG AND WARHOL.
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AMERICAN SCHEMERS
Full Control to Colonel Tom Parker striking his usual confident pose in 1970, as Elvis was riding a new crest of popularity thanks to a televised concert.
Colonel Tom Parker was a big man with a big appetite. He loved country hams, imported cheeses, and ribeye steaks topped with fried eggs. He loved these and other delicacies even more when he was getting somebody else to pay for them, and he usually did. He spent most of his time in Las Vegas, where the casinos stand high rollers to unlimited free food. Parker fit that bill, frequently betting $10,000 on the spin of a roulette wheel. “I do like I want to,” he declared. “I spend like I want to.” He lost millions at the roulette and craps tables but collected millions more as Elvis Presley’s personal manager. A flamboyant, 300-lb. former carny, Parker was a cigar-chewing, hype-spewing wheeler-dealer. Reporters
portrayed him as a Barnumesque American hustler, and they were right—except Colonel Tom Parker was not really an American, not really a colonel, and not really Tom Parker. Born in Breda, Holland, in 1909, he was christened Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. He abruptly left Breda at 20, sailing to the United States without informing his family. Biographer Alanna Nash suggested he may have fled his homeland after killing a woman during a robbery, but he was never accused of the crime, and Nash soft-pedals her story as only “a theory, a possibility.” He never got around to legitimizing his entry into the United States. After bumming around America, he joined the U.S. Army in 1930, calling himself Thomas Andrew Parker. After two years he went
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AMERICAN SCHEMERS AWOL, then spent weeks in an Army mental hospital. Diagnosed as a psychopath and discharged, he spent the 1930s as a carny with Royal American Shows, a mammoth traveling carnival featuring roller coasters, vaudeville acts, hula dancers, palm readers, and a freak show. Parker acquired all the tricks of the trade: Decades later, he’d amuse acquaintances by hypnotizing people or theatrically lowering a flaming match down his throat like a fire eater. In the 1940s, Parker began managing singers like crooner Gene Austin and country star Eddy Arnold. The Man and His Man In 1948, country singer Jimmie Davis, Elvis in 1963 as he was then governor of Louisiana, proclaimed conferring with the Parker an honorary colonel in the Louisicolonel between takes ana state militia. The militia had been dison the set of one of banded a year earlier but Parker ballyhooed many movies, mostly forgettable, starring the the dubious title for the rest of his life. The colonel first eyeballed Elvis in 1955, King of Rock ’n’ Roll. when the singer, 20, was an opening act in a Hank Snow show Parker was promoting. Seeing teenage girls go gaga over Elvis, he smelled money, and convinced Presley to hire him as his “exclusive advisor and personal representative.” The arrangement paid off. Presley had been recording for a little label, Sun Records. Parker persuaded major record company RCA to buy Elvis’s contract. He soon recorded “Heartbreak Hotel,” his first No. 1 hit. In 1956, Parker took Elvis on the road—but not headlining a rock ’n’ roll cavalcade. Instead, the crafty carny loaded the bill with tap dancers, jugglers, and second-rate comics. Enduring lame act upon lame act, Elvis’s female fans worked themselves into a frenzy. When The Pelvis finally did appear, crowds screamed and shrieked and stormed the stage. The repeated rumpuses generated enormous publicity—and helped Parker license the use of his client’s name and picture on everything from lipsticks to jeans to charm bracelets. Within a year, Elvis merch was generating $1 million-plus in royalties. The colonel’s cut: 50 percent. When the U.S. Army drafted Elvis in 1958, Parker turned the rocker’s induction into a media mob scene, herding dozens of photographers up close as a barber mowed Elvis’s ducktailed pompadour into a GI crewcut. When Elvis mustered out in 1960, the colonel staged a theatrical 48-hour train trip from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to Memphis, Tennessee, with whistle stops and photo ops all along the way. By then, rock ’n’ roll had entered a lull, so the colonel steered Elvis to Hollywood. In the ’60s, the singer starred in 27 movies, most of them made on the cheap, hastily shot, and cinematically forgettable. But Elvis earned about $1 million per movie, plus royalties from soundtrack albums. In 1966, Parker negotiated with MGM to pay Elvis a staggering $75,000 a week. The colonel took 25 percent—and cut a side deal under which MGM provided him with a suite of offices, including a fully stocked kitchen and a staff to work—and cook—for him. “Parker always expected to receive something for himself,” Presley
all his adult life elvis relied on the colonel to look out for him. parker responded to that trust by working his client like a rented mule.
biographer Albert Goldman wrote. “The colonel’s favorite action was ‘side action.’” In 1967, Parker revised his contract with Presley: Instead of getting a quarter of Elvis’s earnings, the colonel now took half. Parker justified his grabbiness by touting his devotion to Presley: “Elvis is my only client and my life.” Elvis didn’t balk. “He always shrank from any sort of confrontation with the colonel,” Goldman wrote. Two years later, Parker brought Elvis—who hadn’t performed live since 1957—to Las Vegas for what became a yearly eight-week stand at the Hilton International Hotel. Elvis made $125,000 a week. Besides his half of that booty, the colonel made sure to get his “side action”—a year-round, three-room suite at the hotel and all the food he could eat. It was a great deal for him, but an even better deal for the Hilton, where the colonel lost millions in the casino. In the 1970s, Elvis crisscrossed America, playing hundreds of gigs, in 1974 alone grossing $7 million. European and Japanese promoters waved millions more in offers to perform abroad, but Colonel Parker nixed every overture. As an illegal immigrant, he had no U.S. passport and feared that if he left the country, he’d never be able to return. Bloated, depressed, and addicted to prescription drugs, Elvis died in 1977 at age 42. Hearing the news, Parker quickly negotiated a contract to license Elvis memorabilia. Half the royalties went to a company the colonel controlled, the other half to Elvis’s estate. However, Parker was still getting half of Elvis’s earnings, so he wound up with 75 percent of the total. After signing the deal, he attended Elvis’s funeral, his corpulence encased in a loud Hawaiian shirt. For years afterwards, Elvisiana made Parker millions. He even authorized an Elvis-branded wine whose label bore a photo of the King and a memorial poem that earned $28,000 for its author…Colonel Tom Parker. When Parker died in 1997 at age 89, Elvis’s ex, Priscilla Presley, delivered a eulogy at her former husband’s manager’s funeral. “Elvis and the colonel made history together and the world is richer, better and far more interesting because of their collaboration,” she said. “And now I need to locate my wallet because I noticed there was no ticket booth on the way in here but I’m sure the colonel must have arranged for some toll on the way out.” H APRIL 2021 21
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SCOTUS 101
BLACK AND WHITE AND BROWN BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KS 11 347 U.S. 483 (1954) THE JUSTICES UNANIMOUSLY OVERTURNED PLESSY V. FERGUSON (1896), PROCLAIMING THAT SEGREGATED EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES ARE INHERENTLY UNEQUAL AND VIOLATE THE RIGHT TO EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER THE LAW.
On December 13, 1952, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court met to consider five cases they had heard argued earlier that week. Those cases raised the most explosive topic any of the jurists would ever have to rule on: whether the Constitution allowed American public school districts to continue to use racial criteria to segregate facilities. Opening the discussion, Chief Justice Fred Vinson admitted, “The situation is very serious and very emotional.” This was no theoretical matter. In the South, 17 states required public schools to separate students by race, and Kansas, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona permitted school segregation by law. But the country had begun to rethink segregation. In 1947, California had repealed a law mandating separate schools for Asians. The next year, President Harry Truman issued an executive order ending racial segregation in the armed forces and Arkansas desegregated its state university. The justices had long relied on predecessors’ 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which said that it was not a violation of the guarantee
of equal protection of the law to consign people of different races—for which read Whites and others—to separate facilities, provided those facilities were equal. But the justices had begun to take baby steps away from the court’s historic pattern of defending school segregation. In the mid-1930s civil rights activists had begun litigating the question of whether educational facilities assigned blacks were in fact equal. These efforts led initally to cases that involved graduate education—not nearly as hot-button a topic as integrating primary and secondary schools would have been. That tactic generated the first Supreme Court ruling against racial segregation in education. The 1938 decision found that Missouri was not giving equal treatment—and therefore was violating the Constitution—when the state university law school refused to admit a qualified African American, even though the institution offered to pay his tuition at a law school in an adjacent state. In 1950 the court held unconstitutional the Texas policy of maintaining separate, racially segregated law schools,
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SCOTUS 101 because not only did the school for Whites boast a greater variety of courses and a better library but also enjoyed a superior reputation and “standing in the community.” The same day, the justices embraced an even broader reading of “equal” by holding unconstitutional a University of Oklahoma policy forcing a Black doctoral candidate to sit at a separate table when in a classroom, library, or cafeteria. The justices knew that any ruling on segregation in grades K-12 would detonate in ways that decisions on post-bacClosed Out calaureate education did not. So incendiary On March 10, 1953, was the prospect that at that December 1952 students in Topeka, meeting the justices decided not to rule on Kansas, line up at the segregated elementary the issue. Without a formal vote, they set the five cases for rehearing in 1953. However, school at the heart of the Brown court fight. discussion revealed that four justices were ready to ban racial school segregation and four others found the Constitution to permit school segregation, while one—Felix Frankfurter—would ban segregation only in Washington, DC. Three months before the cases were to be argued again, Chief Justice Vinson died of a heart attack. President Dwight Eisenhower gave California Governor Earl Warren an interim appointment to the Court, allowing him to step immediately into the role of chief justice in time to hear the desegregation cases; Warren’s Senate confirmation, by acclamation, came five months later. Vinson had favored segregation, infusing Warren’s appointment with huge impact. As governor Warren had spurred California’s repeal of its law dictating separate schools for Asians, and as a justice he could be counted as a fifth vote against segregation, making a majority. But Warren wanted the Supreme Court to strike down school segregation with a unified voice. He opened the conference after the 1953 re-arguments by saying, “There is great value in unanimity and uniformity, even if we have some differences.” He painted the question of continuing segregation as a moral one, precedent be damned. “The basis of the principle of segregation and separate but equal rests upon the basic premise that the Negro race is inferior,” Warren told colleagues. “I don’t see how we can continue in this day and age to set one group apart from the rest and say that that they are not entitled to exactly the same treatment as all others.” Warren’s reasoning closely reflected the oral argument the lead lawyer for the students pressing for integrated schools had made to the court. The NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall, later the Supreme Court’s first African-American member, had told the justices that if they found continued school segregation allowable “the only way to arrive at this decision is to find that for some reason Negroes are inferior to all other human beings.” Not every justice agreed. “Segregation is not done on the theory of racial inferiority, but of racial differences,” Stanley Reed, the most adamant resister, argued to his colleagues. “It protects people against the mixing of races.” But Warren was able to convince Reed and the other dissenters that, since a majority was going to hand down a contentious ruling deeming school segregation unconstitutional, it would be best for the nation if there were no public disagreement. That call for unanimity was so compelling that when the decision came on May 17, 1954, Justice Robert H. Jackson left his hospital bed to be with his colleagues in the courtroom.
To underline the ruling’s national nature and make clear that it was not a regional jab at the South, the High Court cited as the first case one brought on behalf of Kansas schoolgirl Linda Brown. Local authorities had barred her from attending her neighborhood elementary; thus the historic title Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Warren wrote the opinion, a mere 13 paragraphs long and devoid of Latinate legalisms. The issue could no longer be whether educational opportunities being offered Black and White students in segregated schools were equal—in the cases before the court, facilities and programs were in fact equal or making significant strides in that direction—but whether separation itself violated the 14th Amendment promise of equal protection under the law. Warren insisted that school segregation by its nature was unequal, inflicting particular harm on children: “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way that is unlikely ever to be undone.” As evidence, Warren unconventionally cited not legal precedent but results of seven sociological and psychological studies showing that Negro children in segregated schools did in fact feel that blacks were inferior. Warren’s decision acknowledged “a great variety of local conditions” and asked the litigants to recommend how to achieve integration. In May 1955 the chief justice announced the High Court’s second Brown decision, calling for school desegregation to proceed “with all deliberate speed” but telling lower courts overseeing compliance to recognize that they “may find that additional time is necessary to carry out the ruling.” Change began. However, so many localities resisted that integration was still being fought in 1970. That year President Richard Nixon, declaring Brown “right in both constitutional and human terms,” created a Cabinet-level committee to put federal muscle behind its mandate. But Brown did generate one immediate impact. As lawyer-journalist-professor Roger Wilkins phrased it, the decision was a ringing rebuke to a cultural smear that African Americans had had to grow up with—that they were inherently inferior. “For me, May 17, 1954 was a second Emancipation Day,” Wilkins declared. H APRIL 2021 23
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WHITE HOUSE INSIDER
her social standing and financial security. The dressmaker’s remarkable life story remained unexplored until 2003, with publication of Jennifer Fleischner’s book Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, correcting historians who had long been misspelling her name as “Keckley.” By the time Keckly brought out Behind the Scenes in 1868, publishers had been acquainting readers with life in bondage and freedom via accounts by figures such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Memoirs about Abraham Lincoln were popping up. But the only other story of life inside the White House published prior to Keckly’s had been a brief recollection by Paul Jennings, who, enslaved by the Madison family, worked in the presidential mansion at age 10. In her book Keckly, writing at age 50, chronicles not only her life but four years in close companionship with the Lincolns, including frequent interactions with the president. In recounting her youth Keckly
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THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
“A smile half-sorrowful and wholly sweet makes you love her face as soon as you look on it,” Mary Clemmer Ames wrote from Washington, DC, in the New York Evening Post in 1862. “It is a face strong with intellect, and heart, with enough of beauty left to tell you that it was more beautiful still before wrong and grief shadowed it.” The journalist was describing seamstress Elizabeth Keckly years before Keckly endured her life’s most historic and shattering event. Keckly’s painful early times were all too common in the antebellum South. She was born enslaved to Aggy Hobbs, a mixed-race Black, and Hobbs’s White owner, Armistead Burwell, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. When the girl was 18, Alexander Kirkland, a White neighbor, repeatedly raped her, leading to a pregnancy. That son, passing as Caucasian, served—and died—in the Union Army. Keckly spent the years 1842 to 1855 in Petersburg, Virginia, and St. Louis, Missouri, both home to thriving free black communities. In 1855, Keckly, 37, purchased her freedom. She went on to be a successful dressmaker, at the apex of her career becoming modiste and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln. The quietly determined Keckly’s life moved from extraordinary to unique thanks to her groundbreaking 1868 memoir. Behind the Scenes, Or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, circulated first as a White House tell-all, hugely embarrassing to the widow Lincoln and surviving son Robert—and unnerving to White elites, costing Keckly
THE READING ROOM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
BY SARAH RICHARDSON
THE WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
THE READING ROOM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
depicts a girl and young woman of disciplined defiance and resolve. Born Keckly’s intimate portrait enraged her former into a prominent slaveholding family, she learned to read and write. She client, shattering their relationship. Robert had to leave her extended family in Dinwiddie and move with her own- Todd Lincoln throttled distribution of the er’s son, Robert, to Hillsboro, North Carolina, scene of a bitter ordeal for memoir, which not only quoted from but her. She fought back during a schoolmaster’s beatings, demanded by her reproduced nearly two dozen letters to Keckly mistress to “subdue her stubborn pride,” and endured Kirkland’s repeated from Mrs. Lincoln, as well as a letter to the rapes, the genesis of son George. Keckly por- widow from Frederick Douglass offering the Unseemly Display trays the abuse with little detail or sentiment. Black community’s aid. Keckly maintained she In New York City, She then was taken by Armistead Burwell’s never meant to publish the letters but had procuriosity seekers and daughter, Ann, to Petersburg, then St. Louis, vided them to the publisher only as substantiabargain hunters where she briefly wed fellow slave James tion. There is no record of the manuscript’s rummage through Keckly, an alcoholic who had lied that he was preparation except for a neighbor’s recollection Mary Todd Lincoln’s free. She gives her proud exit from bondage of well-known abolitionist journalist and pubwardrobe. more coverage: rather than flee North, she lisher James Redpath visiting Keckly. The insisted on buying her freedom. White friends and dressmaking clients ruckus, including a racist parody titled “Behind lent her the $1,200 (well over $30,000 today), which she repaid in full. the Seams,” quashed any hope Keckly had of Keckly then brought her enterprise to Baltimore. When business setting the record straight and benefiting from slowed, she moved to DC, where she met prominent customers like Mary her experience. Even so, the letters’ contents Custis Lee, wife of Colonel Robert E. Lee, and Varina Davis, wed to Sec- do document Keckly’s value to the otherwise retary of War Jefferson Davis. In 1861 Mary Lincoln, new to the capital friendless and oft-distraught Mary, who in the and White House life, became a client, making Keckly her confidante. midst of the clothing sale scandal beseeched Keckly saw Lincoln’s wife through the deaths of son Willie and husband her to “write me every day.” Keckly struggled the rest of her life. Son Abraham, personally preparing Willie Lincoln’s body for burial. Keckly recalls moments ranging from standing with the president watching the George’s Civil War service provided a small family goats frolic in the White House yard to traveling with the family pension, but to obtain it she had to lie that she had married his father, the rapist into Richmond after the rebel capital fell, Kirkland. For a time, she taught where, for a moment, the former slave sewing in Xenia, Ohio, at the colseated herself where Jefferson Davis and lege George had attended: WilAlexander Stephens had sat to lead the berforce University, founded in Confederacy. She describes Mrs. Lincoln 1856 for Blacks—often the mixedsummoning her the night her husband was shot and how she “soothed the terrirace children of White slaveholdble tornado as best I could.” Keckly paints ers. By 1895, she was back in DC, Abraham Lincoln as a gentle savior, and where she had helped establish his wife as a politically astute but volatile the National Home for Destitute woman prone to excesses of everything Colored Women and Children, from grief, jealousy, and other emotions where she died in 1907. Her pasto outlays on clothing and White House tor, the Reverend Francis Grimké, furnishings. Mary Todd Lincoln appears who had his own complex ancesto be everything Keckly is not—yet the try as a mixed-race nephew of the two enjoyed a mutual ease likely born of activist Grimké sisters through familiarity with plantation life and the their brother Henry, eulogized her. shared travails of their sons’ deaths. He recalled Keckly as the “personiAfter Lincoln’s murder, the women fication of grace and dignity…She shared a problem: lack of money. When was not an educated woman, in the sense that she had passed through Mary Todd Lincoln sought Keckly’s help any educational institution, but she managing the sale of gowns from her was a woman of marked intellidays as a First Lady, people gawked but no one bought. The Modiste gence and had made good use of What the widow had intended as a private event proved Elizabeth Keckly in the opportunities that she had of to be a humiliating public spectacle. 1861, the year she met According to Keckly, she wrote and published her the Lincolns thanks to improving her mind. No one who ever saw her, or had any contact memoir to generate sympathy for Mary Todd Lincoln— her reputation as a with her, even casually, would ever and to make money. Exactly the opposite occurred. Mrs. dressmaker in the Lincoln’s instability and indulgence were well known. nation’s capital. be likely to forget her.” H APRIL 2021 25
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Greeting the Modern Age Hoover, listening to a crystal radio receiver in 1928, overcame an orphaned boyhood to enjoy great success as an engineer and renowned humanitarian.
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Fall from Grace Herbert Hoover, the limits of efficiency, and the pitfalls of political reality By Roger Forsgren
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he October 1929 Wall Street collapse had left the American economy in ruins. After prolonged but ineffective optimism at the White House and robust debate on whether to tax imports to protect American farmers and manufacturers, on July 17, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill. More than 1,000 economists had petitioned Hoover not to do so, as had the greatest industrialist of the age, Henry Ford—in person—and sages from the world of finance. “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Smoot-Hawley Tariff,” Thomas Lamont, a partner at J.P. Morgan, said later. “That act intensified nationalism all over the world.” Current wisdom holds that Smoot-Hawley may have put the “great” in the Great Depression, exporting Wall Street’s woes globally, and raising the question of why one of the most intelligent men ever elected president of the United States made so colossal a blunder. Simply put, Hoover was an engineer, and when things or systems break, engineers instinctively try to fix them. Amid the 1929 collapse, Herbert Hoover did what had always worked for him: attack a problem with cold logic and characteristic implacable efficiency. But logic and efficiency aren’t always reliable tools—especially in politics. As Hoover struggled to address the crisis, which bled into his re-election campaign, his engineer’s personality, once an indomitable asset, brought on his downfall. Herbert Hoover was born to Quaker parents on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa. His father, the town blacksmith, died when the boy was five; Herbert’s mother died four years later. Relatives divvied the couple’s three orphans. Herbert ended up in Oregon with an uncle whose own son recently had died. His uncle’s household was one of hard work and self-reliance—traits the youth made his own. He took up fly fishing, an immersive solitary pastime emblematic of his personality; it became a hobby for life. OPPOSITE PAGE: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; HERBERT HOOVER NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE
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Team Player At Stanford, Hoover, seated left, excelled on the survey team. He later made news feeding starving Belgians, below.
Hoover got his chance at “the big game” when Europe went to war in 1914. Hoping for a knockout punch at France, German forces trampled neutral Belgium on their push toward Paris. On
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Upon earning a degree in geology in 1895 as a member of Stanford University’s inaugural class, Hoover spent years mining gold, zinc, and other metals in Australia, China, and Russia. Colleagues remarked on his fascination with efficiency. “We may say there is no cleverer engineer in the two hemispheres,” a colleague said. In 1908 Hoover started a consulting firm, a step he later said made him “as rich as any man has a right to be.” In 1912, as he was settling into life in the world’s financial capital, London, he wrote, “just making money isn’t enough.” He wanted to enter public service and, as he told an old friend, “get into the big game somewhere.”
At war’s end, President Woodrow Wilson, noting Hoover’s talents, named him national food administrator, assigned to coordinate domestic farm production. In 1919 Hoover founded the American Relief Administration, intended to combat starvation in combat-ravaged Europe. In 1922, four years after an armistice ended the First World War, that entity still was shipping provisions east, providing extensive famine relief in the civil war-torn Soviet Union, where Hoover’s people were feeding more than 10.5 million Russians daily. “You have saved from death three and one-half million children, five and onehalf million adults,” Russian author Maxim Gorky wrote in a letter to Hoover. “I know of no accomplishment which in… magnitude and generosity can be compared to the relief that you actually accomplished.” Humanitarianism made Herbert Hoover a household name worldwide. He became known as the “Great Engineer.” America’s political parties vied to enlist him as a candidate. In 1920, talk arose among Democrats of teaming Hoover with young Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Hoover is certainly a wonder,” Roosevelt said. “I wish I could make him president of the United States. There could not be a better one.” But Hoover embraced the GOP, and in 1920 Republicans Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge defeated the Democratic ticket of James Cox and Roosevelt. In 1921 Harding appointed the Great Engineer his secretary of commerce. That summer poliomyelitis laid Franklin Roosevelt low. In public highly reserved, even shy, Hoover was ill-equipped for the political side of public service. In private he could be warm and considerate, but his relentlessness and intensity could make him appear aloof. If during a conversation a compelling thought came to him, he might stand and walk away, leaving his companion in mid-sentence. As the nation was industrializing in the early 1920s, a vogue developed for the theories of Frederick Taylor, the “father of industrial engineering.” Harding’s presidency was all about business, exemplified by banker Andrew Mellon serving as treasury secretary. At Commerce, once a bureaucratic backwater, Hoover recast the agency. In contrast to
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Belgium’s behalf, ally Britain threw in against the Kaiser. An ensuing bloody stalemate included a British blockade that caused famines on the Continent. Hoover initially undertook to repatriate American citizens from Europe. His effectiveness at that task led the American ambassador in London, Walter Page, to enlist the mining engineer to try to save seven million Belgians left starving by the conflict. Hoover organized a Commission for the Relief of Belgium and negotiated with the British to let foodstuffs and humanitarian supplies pass through their blockade. He persuaded the Germans to allow relief distribution across Belgium, exacting promises that the goods would not go to the German Army. Belgians nicknamed the program’s outlets “Hoover restaurants.” During 1914-18, Hoover’s operation raised almost $1 billion and fed nine million people daily in Belgium and northern France. Across the region street signs still bear his name.
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Man of Parts Besides consulting, Hoover’s path included overseeing construction of the dam named for him, organizing flood relief in Mississippi in 1927, and as national food administrator oversaw the country’s management of agriculture. styles), wire fencing (552 styles), hot water tanks (120 models), plumbing traps (1,114), paintbrushes (480), and milk bottles (49), among thousands of overburdened product lines. The seven western states fed by the Colorado River had long disagreed on how best to harness that huge stream as a source of water and power. Hoover negotiated a deal to dam the Colorado, ending the decades-long dispute. Years in the making, the dam from the start was named for him. In the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River flooded catastrophically, inundating 27,000 square miles and displacing hundreds of thousands of people; 250 died. Hoover was called upon to mount a gargantuan relief effort.
the Wilson administration’s quarrelsome approach to business, Hoover pursued partnership, enthusiastically taking up Taylor’s recommendations regarding streamlining regulations and developing standards to help American businesses run better, especially abroad. Hoover worked ceaselessly to make government and industry more efficient. He jumpstarted the Bureau of Standards, which dated to the nation’s founding, into a business-friendly juggernaut, orienting the venerable office toward standardizing products to achieve simplicity in manufacturing, inventory control, and distribution. As an example of a sector needing simplification, he pointed out that American stone works were marketing paving stone in 66 sizes, creating a jumble of molds, handling methods, and inventory management. The commerce secretary had his staff comb industry for similar inefficiencies. The next step was to set standards to erase redundancies, such as in nails and tacks (428 sizes), shovels (4,460 types), bolts (1,500), sheet steel (1,819 sizes and gauges), files and rasps (1,351
The Great War propelled America into the Roaring Twenties—a decade of Prohibition and ebullience bordering on mania. From 1922 on, the largely unregulated American stock market grew annually almost 20 percent. Many investors were buying on margin, acquiring shares for a down payment of as little as 10 percent. In August 1923, President Warren G. Harding died suddenly. Vice President Calvin Coolidge, a small-government advocate, succeeded him. In 1928, Coolidge surprised his party and the nation by declining to seek a second term of his own. Hoover never had run for office, but his name was coming up more and more often as a possible candidate. Many Republican bosses doubted his laissez-faire credentials, but sheer popularity made the Great Engineer the party’s logical selection. Accepting the nomination in Kansas APRIL 2021 29
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Entering office in March 1929, Hoover went to work with characteristic speed. Internationally, he moved to improve relations with Latin America, which had been bruised by a century of American policy rooted in “manifest destiny,” a secular faith in American triumphalism. Domestically, concern about financial inequality led Hoover to close tax loopholes and create the Farm Board to “establish for our farmers an income equal to those of other occupations.” Soon after he was sworn in, Hoover and wife Lou bought a parcel 100 miles south of the capital on the Rapidan River in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains on which to build a vacation retreat. The Hoovers, who had lived in many a rough mining camp, paid $1,045 for the 109-acre site and another $23,000 for materials to erect a rustic cabin and outbuildings constructed by crews of U.S. Marines overseen by Mrs. Hoover; in time, the couple arranged construction of a schoolhouse to serve the area’s children. At Camp Rapidan, away from Washington’s bustle and clamor, Hoover could interact with locals and wade into the river and do what he loved most—fly fish in a setting whose remoteness reminded him of his days as an anonymous mining engineer in the Outback. On Tuesday, October 29, the stock market collapsed, triggering national,
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City, Hoover hailed American individualism and voiced trust that engineering efficiency would mean a “final triumph over poverty.” Despite his paucity of political experience, in November 1928 Hoover took 58 percent of the popular vote against Democrat Al Smith, an unprecedented margin. Speaking at his inauguration, the victor revealed an unexpected streak of progressive thinking. “Regulation of private enterprise and not government ownership or operation is the course rightly to be pursued in our relation to business,” the new president declared, endorsing “rigid enforcement” of laws addressing industry and public utilities as “the very base of equal opportunity and freedom from domination for all our people…I have no fears for the future of our country. It is bright with hope.”
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On Top of the World Campaigning in San Francisco in August 1928. Hoover went on to defeat Democrat Al Smith by a record margin.
then international chaos. By November 2 investors had lost a sum equivalent to what the United States had spent fighting World War I. As Hoover’s term ground on, American industrial production shrank by more than half. Stocks lost 90 percent of their value, erasing millions of households’ life savings. Disposable income dropped nearly a third. One American in four had no job—13 million families lacked a paycheck.
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Treasury Secretary Mellon counseled that Black Tuesday was but an overdue correction; the market soon would rebalance itself, he predicted. Hoover disagreed. As an engineer, he saw the world in binary terms; when a mechanism broke, you fixed it. He urged companies not to lay off workers or cut wages, despite staggering loss of demand. He deported more than 500,000 migrant workers to Mexico, hoping incorrectly that Americans would step into their jobs. On principle, he refused to use federal dollars for public relief. Wanting Americans to return to work rather than grow dependent on handouts, Hoover encouraged state and federal public works projects like the great dam under construction on the Colorado River. Terrified Americans, caught in an unprecedented economic storm, sought leadership that steered not with cold technical expertise, but with an air of optimism, compassion, and warmth—the opposite of Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s mostly ill-advised stab at intervention, the Smoot–Hawley Act, imposed tariffs on most imports. Hoover defended this “progressive advance” as a way to “remedy inequalities.” Rather than reinforcing the economy, the protectionist law sapped it. Other nations retaliated. Sales of American goods abroad withered. Tariffs worsened domestic woes and exported the Depression. Hoover began to act more forcefully to address the sagging economy only after years of businesses dying and farms falling into foreclosure. In January 1932, with his first term running out, he undertook a series of stimuli. In hopes of increasing employment by encouraging construction, forestalling a wave of farm foreclosures, and reinforcing banks, he established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make loans to financial institutions, railroads, and other businesses. A month later, he signed the Glass-Steagall Act, a banking reform measure. He released $750 million in gold reserves to underwrite additional business loans. In July, he signed the Emergency Relief and Construction
Before the Deluge The Hoovers at their camp on the Rapidan River, meeting a group of disabled military veterans, and an editorial cartoon foreshadowing the shellacking he was in for over his efforts to cope with an everworsening depression.
Act, which funded public works and infrastructure projects nationwide. The act also provided loans to private companies to build low-cost housing for the poor—the debut of federal low-income housing. Hoover pressed the Farm Board to create the Grain Stabilization Corporation, a government mechanism that would attempt to strengthen the grain market by paying above-market prices. However, that program had the opposite effect. Farmers hoping to cash APRIL 2021 31
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in planted and grew more grain, further sapping agricultural commodity prices. Ever the engineer, Hoover sought to balance every equation, including the federal budget. In signing the Revenue Act of 1932, he raised taxes on all incomes; the top rate soared from 25 percent to 63 percent. But he was raising rates in an environment of scarce profits. In 1931 federal tax revenue had been $834 million. The 1932 figure was $427 million; 1933, $353 million.
The Twenties and their prosperous optimism now seemed a dream. In summer 1932 more than 17,000 World War I veterans marched on Washington, DC, demanding that bonuses promised for army service, set to be distributed in 1945, be paid immediately. Protesters camped around the capital. Tension over the former doughboys’ presence led to violence in which city police and U.S. Army troops, using armored vehicles, rousted the veterans from their ragtag habitats. Amid images of this unrest Hoover’s air of aloofness played very badly. Nationwide others emulated the Bonus Army, erecting “Hoovervilles”—makeshift tent cities populated by the legions of the unemployed and homeless families. Hoover, avatar of maximum efficiency, was now struggling to hold the nation together, a task compounded by his seeming inability or unwillingness to relate to people on a personal level.
As Americans went to the polls on November 8, 1932, Hoover was expecting the nation to reward his direct approach to and hard work on the economic crisis and spurn the rival he regarded as glib and shallow. To Hoover’s utter astonishment, Roosevelt defeated him by a landslide that was greater than Hoover’s own record-setting win of four years earlier. A final indignity awaited. With Roosevelt’s
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Grim Images DC police evict Bonus Army campers from a tent city in the capital in 1932, top. Nationwide, shanty towns that residents labeled “Hoovervilles” came to haunt their namesake’s last years in the White House.
Hoover ran for reelection in 1932 beset by an economy in freefall and a forlorn population, facing an opponent of unprecedented personal style and political shrewdness. A Hudson Valley patrician, former assistant Navy secretary, failed vice-presidential candidate, governor of New York, and polio survivor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran a clever and hyperbolic campaign (“Landslide,” June 2016). He jabbed at Hoover as the candidate of profligacy and big government, accusing the incumbent not only of “reckless and extravagant spending,” but of weakening local and state power to concentrate “control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.” Deriding Hoover’s efforts at recovery, FDR’s running mate, Texas congressman John Nance Garner, claimed Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.” Roosevelt dismissed the incumbent’s professional background. “The presidency…is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient,” the Democrat told The New York Times. “It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.” Declaring himself “no engineer,” the jovial New Yorker, who had chosen as his campaign theme song “Happy Days Are Here Again,” vowed if elected to apply “simple rules of human conduct.” Hoover on the hustings delivered a drone of seemingly endless monologues, a refugee in the political wilderness far from his career comfort zone. Trying to soften his rigid delivery, aides begged him to lighten up but Hoover, oblivious to the nuances of political life, believed his message to be more important than his performance as a messenger. After visiting the president to seek funds for his stone sculpture under way at Mount Rushmore, sculptor Gutzon Borglum said, “If you put a rose in Hoover’s hand, it would wilt.”
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Hoover “had these great skills,” historian Jonathan Alter said. “He was probably one of the three or four brightest American presidents in terms of his IQ, but in terms of what they call EQ, his emotional intelligence, his ability to relate to people, and to intuit what they were thinking and respond to them, he was in the bottom group.”
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swearing-in weeks away, hordes of nervous bank customers began emptying savings accounts, imperiling the financial system. On February 17, 1933, a desperate Hoover wrote Roosevelt urging that they jointly declare a bank “holiday” temporarily closing banks to calm the populace. FDR, who later claimed that his response must have gotten lost, did not answer for 12 days. When he did, the president-elect called a bank holiday needless. On March 4, Roosevelt took the oath of office; on March 6, he declared a bank holiday. Furious and feeling publicly betrayed, Hoover could only stew in private. Roosevelt followed Hoover’s cues until, seeing little progress, he took more radical steps, albeit in the same vein. “I once made a list of New Deal ventures begun during Hoover’s years as secretary of commerce and then as president,” economist and FDR adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote. “The New Deal owed much to what he had begun.” After his defeat, Hoover doggedly attempted to claw his way out of ignominy. Greatly annoying Roosevelt, he took to the speaking circuit assailing New Deal “radicalism.” In a stream of essays and books, he predicted that Roosevelt’s foreign policy would bring on another world war. The world did go to war again, though not in the way that Hoover had anticipated. Hoover remained in the wilderness until 1945 when, with Europe again in rubble, President Harry Truman asked for and got his help organizing famine relief for the Continent as well as Hoover’s advice on rebuilding the former Axis nations’ shattered economies. In 1947, realizing the mammoth bureaucracy created by the New Deal and another world war had to adapt to peace and prosperity, Truman also enlisted Hoover to make the executive branch more efficient. Amid fierce infighting between New Dealers wanting to preserve FDR’s legacy and conservatives bent on erasing it, Hoover chaired the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch. The “Hoover Commission” achieved
Clashes of Style and Substance Hoover, top, endorsed “rugged individualism” as the cure for economic malaise, while Roosevelt harped at his opponent’s “big government” approach. bipartisan reforms Truman claimed were among his most significant accomplishments. Years later, speaking at the dedication of the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, Truman said, “I feel that I am one of his closest friends and he is one of my closest friends.” When Herbert Hoover, 90, died in 1964, his early achievements got their due. The New York Times wrote, “He fed more people and saved more lives than any other man in history.” H APRIL 2021 33
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Going Dutch
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New York inherited a big hunk of its soul from the Netherlands By Raanan Geberer
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n Tuesday, August 27, 1664, New Amsterdam, a harborside settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, was bustling. Carpenters were hammering. Coopers were assembling barrels out of staves and metal hoops. Tavernkeepers were sweeping floors. The town was a miniature Babel, home to speakers of more than 15 languages. Africans, enslaved and free, were everywhere. In multiple Dutch Reformed churches, “dominies,” as the sect called ministers, were preparing sermons. Butcher Asser Levy was serving fellow Jews and anyone else wanting a nice piece of kosher meat. The sight of four warships in the harbor electrified all who saw the vessels, which were flying the English colors. Lately the Netherlands, which owned the colony of New Netherland, had been at odds with England. King Charles II had granted John Winthrop, governor of the English colony Connecticut, a charter assigning Winthrop claim to all territory between Narragansett Bay and the Pacific. That grant included much of New Netherland. English residents of Dutch-ruled towns in Long Island had been chafing under Dutch control, complaining to Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s autocratic director-general. When Winthrop, sent by the British as an emissary, debarked from one of the ships and handed Stuyvesant what the English called “Articles of Capitulation,” Stuyvesant tore the papers to shreds. Piecing together the tatters, other Dutchmen thought the articles’ terms generous—Dutch colonists could keep their property, come and go as they pleased, worship freely, trade as always, and keep their inheritance rules. Local officials would serve out their terms. The tetchy Stuyvesant wanted to fight. So did the 150 or so Dutch soldiers at Fort Amsterdam at the island’s edge, despite being far outnumbered by the English troops aboard the ships. Most residents feared that if the soldiers got their way they would lose everything. “Those lousy dogs want to fight because they have nothing to lose,” a woman said. “Whereas we have our property here, which we should have to give up.” Other eyes were watching from across the river in Breukelen on Long
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Toehold on America Dutch colonists laid claim to a bit of the New World when they set themselves up on Manhattan.
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Changing Hands Peter Minuit, at center in sash, and his men struck a deal in 1626 to acquire Manhattan on behalf of the Dutch East India Company.
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Early Days The colony of New Netherland wore its purpose on its seal, which featured a simple rendering of a beaver, bearer of the fur that made many a fortune. Right, an early map illustrated the tiny settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.
In 1609, representing the Dutch East India Company, a publicly held entity organized by the government to trade on the far side of the world, Captain Henry Hudson sailed into a North American estuary giving onto the Atlantic. The Englishman’s bosses had the backing of one of Europe’s newest and most powerful nation states, the Netherlands. A watery region on the shoulder of the Continent between German-speaking territory and Belgium, the Netherlands had been breeding sailors for centuries. Having cast off Spanish control and declared independence, the Dutch set up their East India Company in 1602, quickly generating profits from trade in cotPREVIOUS SPREAD: LEN TANTILLO; GRANGER, NYC; NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY; COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Island—Englishmen who began forming militias, ready for combat and plunder. Stuyvesant holed up in the fort. A gunner awaited his order to fire on the invaders. Leading citizens canvassed New Amsterdamers with a petition endorsing capitulation. Tension reigned as August gave way to September; the petition had 93 signatures, including that of Stuyvesant’s son Balthazar, 17. Confronted with the petition, Stuyvesant relented, declaring, “I would much rather be carried out dead.” On September 6, he sent a delegation to work out the details with the English. Two days later, at his 62-acre “Bouwerie,” or estate, north of the town limits, Stuyvesant joined Admiral Richard Nicolls and their deputies
in signing the Articles of Capitulation. Thus ended Dutch rule and New Netherland’s 40-year history, but not Netherlanders’ presence. New York, both city and state, abound with traces of their colonial beginnings. In the city are Dyckman Street, Van Cortlandt Park, Flatbush Avenue, New Utrecht High School, Lefferts Historic House, Harlem, and the Knickerbockers. The colony stretched from the harbor at Manhattan’s foot north through to what became Albany and Schenectady, east across Long Island and west into New Jersey. The Dutch settled along the Delaware River, where they tangled with and eventually drove off the Swedes; and the valley of the Connecticut River, where a tide of English colonists did to the Dutch as the Dutch had done to the Swedes. However, the Dutch left a broad, deep cultural imprint that lasted for more than 250 years.
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Kiliaen van Rensselaer
ton, textiles, porcelain, and especially spices. Bound by Business Henry Hudson’s reports about arable soil and The Dutch traded with many beaver and other fur-bearing animals on the Indians, above what he called the North River led to commerce right, under patroons with native tribes and, in 1624, the arrival of a like Kiliaen van Rensfirst wave of colonists. The Dutch West India selaer, who functioned as liege lords on their Company, successor to its easterly predecessor, enormous holdings. intended to have the newcomers lock down the Below, peg-legged Peter Hudson Valley fur trade. Stuyvesant. Beaver was the big attraction. “If you lived in Europe in the 17th century, you had to have a hat,” said Dr. Charles Gehring, director of the New Netherland Research Center, “And you needed fur to make those big black hats.” Demand for fur encouraged a relaxed attitude toward Native Americans, who did the trapping, skinning, and curing of pelts, trading the fruits of their labor to the colonists. The earliest Dutch settlement was in the harbor, on Nut—now Governor’s—Island. A Dutch party traveled 150 miles upriver to establish a bastion at Fort Orange, named for a band on the Dutch flag. Outgrowing Nut Island, colonists claimed the southern tip of a larger island they called Manhattan, a corruption of its Indian place name. Peter Minuit, a Belgian businessman, arrived in 1625, and within the year was the colony’s director, or governor. Minuit offered to buy Manhattan from its historic occupants, the Lenape. Indians saw humans not as owners of land but its stewards. According to Russell Shorto in his book The Island at the Center of the World, the Lenape, seeking an ally to defend them against rival tribes, thought that in accepting Minuit’s offer they were granting the Dutch temporary use of their territory in exchange for taking their side. Between 1624 and 1664, however, about 200 shiploads of immigrants arrived, taking up permanent residence. Not all were Dutch. “It was hard to get the Dutch to immigrate here because the Netherlands’ standard of living was much higher than the rest of Europe,” said David Voorhees of the New Netherland Society. “So they also allowed people to come from other regions.”
enterprise; his other main expense was the cost of passage for his people and a 5 percent duty on goods they brought, excluding farm tools and cattle. On his turf, the equivalent of a land grant, a patroon could appoint government officials, administer justice and provide security, buy more land from Indians, and have a monopoly over the products of hunting, trapping, and fishing. The patroon could trade in all products of the land except furs, which custom the Company reserved for itself. The patroon’s people had to pay him rent and swear fealty to him. The patroon system generally was a bust. Under-capitalized and beset by Indian trouble, most patroons went broke. The system’s one success was Rensselaerwijck—or Rensselaerwyck— which stretched along 24 miles of both Hudson banks near Fort Orange. Gem merchant Kiliaen
To lure investors willing to develop parcels in the wilderness beyond Manhattan, the Dutch West India Company in 1629 introduced the patroon system, an update on feudalism. A lord-like patroon, who need not necessarily come to his holding himself, could send 50 people to the colony and, out of his pocket, stake out land on which to undertake an independent APRIL 2021 37
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New Netherland stood apart from North American colonies under English dominion—especially in regard to trade, religious tolerance, and cultural variation. In 1609, Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius delineated the doctrine of Freedom of the Seas. Grotius stipulated the oceans to be open to use for trade by all nations, a rebuke to the closed English system, under which that nation’s commercial fleet served and profited from its colonies. The Dutch, who under the Spanish thumb and after had evolved an openminded approach to trade, religion, and skin color, were free traders in commerce and in thought. The Netherlands in 1579 established the right to be free of persecution for practicing one’s faith. In New Netherland, only the Dutch Reformed Church had the right to establish congregations. However, in the colony as at home, religious dissenters encountered less oppression. New Amsterdam’s Lutherans, for example, had leave to worship in their homes. Besides ethnic Netherlanders, New Amsterdam’s populace came to include not only French-speaking Walloons, Scandinavians, Germans, English—often arriving from neighboring colonies—but Scots, Italians, Sephardic Jews, Native Americans, and Africans. From the start, New Netherland benefited from enslavement. African bondsmen helped clear land and build structures, doing the heavy lifting and living in cramped quarters. Still, Black slaves in New Netherland had more rights than their counterparts in English colonies—those held in bondage by the Dutch could learn to read, marry, be baptized, testify in court, bring suit, and hire themselves out for wages on days off, a phenomenon that regularly increased the ranks of Blacks in the colony who had purchased their freedom.
the dutch way, with its freebooting outlook, had a decidedly less harsh approach to matters across the board.
The Company recalled Minuit to Amsterdam in the early 1630s, briefly replacing him as director Sebastiaen Krol, then Wouter Van Twiller. Van Twiller, who served 1632-37, increased fur trade with Native Americans and trade with neighboring English colonies, but was recalled for enriching himself extravagantly. His successor, Willem Kieft, arrived in 1638. Kieft oversaw many changes, beneficent and harsh. In 1639-40, the Company dissolved its fur monopoly, opening the trade to all. According to Dutch New York, edited by Roger Panetta, this led to the subsequent economic boom and population growth in towns like New Utrecht, Midwout—”Midwood,” also known as Flatbush—and Amersfoort in today’s Brooklyn; Vlissingen— Flushing—in what is now Queens; Haarlem on the upper reaches of Manhattan Island; and Wiltwijck—Kingston—in the Hudson Valley. He also appointed the colony’s first advisory body, the Council of Twelve, with whose members he frequently found cause to quarrel. Kieft undid decades of amity with Native Americans. Against colonists’ advice, he sought to tax local Indians since, he reasoned, Dutch soldiers and sailors were protecting them from other tribes. Resentment toward the levy brought violence and retribution. In February 1643, Dutch soldiers invaded a Lenape encampment where Jersey City stands, slaughtering more than 80 men, women, and children at the start of “Kieft’s War.” That fall, about 1,500 Native Americans invaded New
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van Rensselaer ruled his namesake fief from Amsterdam, never visiting but underwriting his enterprise into profitability.
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At the Center of the World New Amsterdam quickly developed into a municipality, here bustling as the mail arrived.
Netherland, destroying villages and burning farms. Amid mutual brutality, groups of settlers and individual tribes began to negotiate separate peace treaties until, in 1645, Kieft and representatives of key tribes signed a general accord.
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Shortly before peace returned, Kieft, responding to a petition by 11 enslaved Africans, created “half-freedom.” This status, given only to the 11 and their families but later extended to others whom the colony knew and trusted, such as Black members of the town watch, the volunteer security force, allowed slaves to own land and residences, provided they worked for the colony Changing the Guard as needed and paid an annual fee. Children of Fort Orange, above, half-free parents were still slaves. New Amster- eventually became dam created a hamlet for these residents called Beverwyck—”place “Land of the Blacks,” centered in today’s Green- of the beavers”—and wich Village and sited, Kieft hoped, to serve as a then Albany. Below, Stuyvesant yields to buffer against Indians. the British at New The peace treaty did not erase colonists’ rage Amsterdam. at Kieft and his disastrous war. Recalled in 1647— he died on the way in a shipwreck—Kieft was replaced by Peter Stuyvesant, who soon faced two challenges. The first came from Adrien van Der Donck, a liberal lawyer serving on Stuyvesant’s advisory Council of Nine, successor to Kieft’s Council of Twelve. Van der Donck and supporters wanted to throw off Dutch West India Company control. In its place, they proposed to have New Netherland governed by a representative body answering to the crown. In Amsterdam, van der Donck argued for the change before the States-General, the national legislature. The States-General approved the plan in 1652. The First Anglo-Dutch War prevented implementation. The
Treaty of Westminster ended that conflict in 1654 but van der Donck’s plan remained in limbo. He returned to his large estate north of Manhattan, where he was known as the “Yonk Herr”—“Young Gentleman”—which evolved into “Yonkers.” Stuyvesant’s second challenge occurred up north. On land adjoining Fort Orange, a freebooting, beaver pelt-trading village took root. The hamlet’s wealth interested both Stuyvesant and Brant van Slichtenhorst, director of Rensselaerwyck. Claiming ultimate authority over Rensselaerwyck, van Slichtenhorst forbade the Dutch West India Company from quarrying stone or cutting wood on its lands. Director van Slichtenhorst began building houses next to Fort Orange; Stuyvesant, for security reasons, then forbade construction within cannon range of the fort. Van Slichtenhorst ignored his orders. The standoff lasted until 1652, when Stuyvesant sailed upriver with troops and declared the settlement to be the Company’s. He named the village Beverwijck—pronounced “bay vurr vake”—from the Dutch for “place of beavers.” Under Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s habitual religious freedom was severely tested. In 1653, Lutherans there requested permission to bring over a pastor. In response, Stuyvesant forbade even private Lutheran services, fined violators, and forced the baptism of Lutheran children as Dutch Reformed congregants. The crown countermanded his strictures. In 1654, a ship arrived carrying 23 Jewish refugees; they were fleeing Recife, Brazil, a Dutch colony conquered by the Portuguese. Strident Dutch Reformed believer Stuyvesant, calling Jews “such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ,” petitioned the Company for permission to expel the newcomers. The Company, whose stockholders included Jewish investors, ruled that Jews had freedom to worship in New Netherland. Stuyvesant also took out after Quakers. In 1662, Vlissingen resident John Bowne, an English immigrant, APRIL 2021 39
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Dutch Traces
Huguenot Street Historic District Senate House
third Anglo-Dutch War, the Netherlands took back its colony. New York City became “New Orange.” Within the year the combatants came to terms with the second Treaty of Westminster. Britain got New York back while the Dutch got Surinam, on the northeastern coast of South America, with its valuable sugar plantations. In the late 1600s came a new stream of immigrants. French Protestants, or Huguenots, founded the town of New Paltz in the Hudson Valley. Huguenots, like the Dutch, were Calvinists, and the groups formed a bond. Dutch settlers soon started moving into the town. Many Huguenots learned Dutch, married Dutch spouses, and attended Dutch Reformed services. Distance from cosmopolitan New York City reduced the Hudson Valley’s exposure to influences other than the Netherlands. No matter who controlled New York, Dutch residents there maintained their language and customs into the early 1800s, and longer in some locales. The Dutch Reformed Church helped maintain use of the Dutch language in New York. For decades after the British takeover, congregations’ dominies came directly from Holland; naturally, they conducted services in Dutch. In 1754, American congregants founded their own governing body, or “classis.” As more Dutch Reformed clergymen trained in the colony and later the state, an interregnum began in which most churches offered services in both Dutch and English. Brooklyn’s Old First Reformed Church “was bilingual from 1737 to 1824,” said the Reverend Daniel Meeter, that congregation’s current minister. “By that time, many people spoke a Dutch dialect [with many English words], but church services were always in ‘good Dutch’ or ‘book Dutch.’ Many people who spoke vernacular Dutch found it easier to understand English than ‘book Dutch.’” The church’s Dutch character, Meeter added, “slipped away” as congregants intermarried with other ethnic groups.
Americans of Dutch ancestry have continued to distinguish themselves: New York City Mayor John. V. Lindsay, actors Henry Fonda and Humphrey Bogart, and rock star Bruce Springsteen, whose father’s family is part-Jersey Dutch. Dutch houses, barns and churches dot the former New Netherland. Most date to the English and early American periods, built by Dutch families in a Dutch style. —Raanan Geberer
1777 the Ten Broeck resident hosted the state Senate’s first meeting. Furnishings include many paintings by John Vanderlyn, a Kingston-born Dutch American artist renowned in the early 1800s
On Huguenot Street in New Paltz, New York (left top), seven 18th century stone houses, some in the vintage gable-roofed Dutch style, are open to the public.
The Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn, began as a farmhouse built in 1699 by Dutch immigrant Claes Vechte and son Hendrick. In 1776, the dwelling played a pivotal part in the Battle of Brooklyn. In the 1880s, it served as a clubhouse for the team that later became the Brooklyn Dodgers. Destroyed in 1897, in the 1930s it was reconstructed using many original stones. Today, it’s a museum.
Senate House in Kingston, New York, (left bottom) was built in 1676 by Wessel Ten Broeck. After independence, Kingston was New York State’s capital, and in
The Schenck House was built by Jan Martense Schenck in Flatlands—then a rural town, now a Brooklyn neighborhood—in 1675. In the 1950s, the
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The Treaty of Westminster had been keeping the peace between England and the Netherlands for 10 years when that August 1664 English display of arms at New Amsterdam surprised residents. However, the preceding March England’s King Charles II had promised his brother James, Duke of York and Albany—York was an English city, Albany a Scots city—that he could have New Netherland, and now James had sent a force to make that be so. When New Netherland became New York, New Amsterdam became New York City and Beverwyck became Albany. One of the Dutch government’s last acts was to emancipate “half-free” Africans, lest the English enslave them anew. A second Anglo-Dutch War in 166567 had no effect on New York. In 1673, during a
time, mixed marriages, and myriad effects of distance from the homeland eroded the dutch hold on colonists’ habits.
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allowed a Quaker meeting in his house. Stuyvesant had Bowne arrested. Assessed a fine, Bowne refused to pay. He was sent to Holland for a Company trial. The Company ordered Stuyvesant to leave Quakers be. Stuyvesant was more kindly toward Native Americans. The one major Indian/Dutch conflict on his watch, the “Peach Tree War,” did not involve peaches or land but fury on the part of the Susquehannock nation, close trading partners of Swedes settled along the Delaware River. In September 1655, the Susquehannocks attacked New Amsterdam and settlements in the Hudson Valley in retaliation for Stuyvesant’s conquest of New Sweden. Afterwards, Stuyvesant bought back land the tribe had taken west of the Hudson.
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Washington Irving
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Dutch practices lived on from enslaved enclaves to the upper crust. Isabella Baumfree, an African American who later became an anti-slavery crusader and renamed herself Sojourner Truth, grew up in the Hudson Valley and until age nine spoke only Dutch. One highlight of Afro-Dutch life was the annual spring “Pinkster” (Pentecost) festival. The book Dutch New York Histories describes Pinkster in the Albany of the early 1800s. Slaves got time off to participate. Festivities included a parade, games, music, drinking, and dancing to the fiddle and African drum. An Angola-born man known as King Charles, dressed in British military costume, presided over the merriment. Albany outlawed the festival in 1811, possibly out of fear that the event could promote a slave uprising. New York State abolished slavery in 1827. In the early 1800s, writer Washington Irving popularized Dutch New York culture, first with his History of New York under the pseudonym “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” then with “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and other short stories rooted in Dutch Hudson Valley folklore (“What’s in a Name?” August 2017). These tales traded in nostalgia
Brooklyn Museum moved the house inside its building, renovated it and furnished it with colonial furniture. Lefferts Historic House in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, was built by Continental Army Lieutenant Pieter Lefferts in 1783. The Lefferts family held onto the wooden Dutch-style gabled farmhouse through much of the 19th century. Visitors are invited to participate in candle-making, butter-churning, and sewing and take part in seasonal celebrations, including Pinkster. Dyckman Farmhouse in Inwood, Upper Manhattan, was built in 1784-85 to replace a house destroyed in the Revolution. The Dyckmans owned the property until the 1860s. Let out to tenant farmers and allowed to deteriorate, the house was bought back by the
for a bygone era when life presumably was more rural and less hurried. Spoken Dutch hung on. “Women in the countryside held onto Dutch the longest,” said Gehring. “The men had to go out into the world and speak English, but rural women still spoke Dutch at home and taught it to their children.” As late as 1910, researchers counted 200 older residents of nearby Bergen County, New Jersey, speaking “Jersey Dutch.” However, compulsory schooling in English, mass media, and waves of Englishspeaking suburbanites doomed the old language. When Dutch withered, so did Dutch handicrafts. Collectors prize them. “We had several kasts [elaborately carved wooden cabinets] that were handed down in our family,” said Voorhees. “When they went out of fashion, they were used as chicken coops.” Assimilated Dutch Americans became conspicuous in New York’s political and financial elite. Three American presidents—Martin Van Buren—who spoke only Dutch until he started school—Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had Dutch ancestry. The wealthy Schermerhorns were used by Martin Scorsese to symbolize Manhattan’s Civil War-era upper class in his film The Gangs of New York. During the Gilded Age, Cornelius Vanderbilt rose from ferryboat operator to steamship and railroad magnate. Still, Voorhees said, it’s “a great myth” that the Dutch as a whole became wealthy and powerful. “A handful became prominent,” he said. “The rest were farmers, or whatever.” H
Dyckmans in 1915. The family restored the house and grounds and presented the parcel to New York City as a museum. In the HBO series “Mad Men,” the character Pete Campbell is a Dyckman descendant. Van Cortlandt House Museum in the Bronx was built in 1748 by Frederick Van Cortlandt on land where he grew and milled grain using slave labor. The English manor style house has a front stoop, carvings of grotesque faces above the front windows to ward off the “evil eye” and other Dutch features. In 1888, the family sold the property to the city, which converted the plantation into a park. The house became a museum in 1897. During the 1680s and 1690s, Dutchborn Frederick Phillipse, a merchant,
farmer and slave trader, built elegant Phillipse Manor Hall in Yonkers, the smaller Phillipsburg Manor House further north in Sleepy Hollow, and the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow. The loyalist Phillipses fled to England after the Revolution. The church, invoked throughout “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” especially when Ichabod Crane thinks he can escape doom by reaching the church bridge, still is a place of worship. The manor houses are museums. New Netherland may be history, but its presence persists in everyday speech. The Dutch Sinterklass evolved into “Santa Claus.” “Boss” derives from baes. Cookie comes from koekje, cole slaw from coolsa, and the Dutch brought donuts, which they called oylkoek. APRIL 2021 41
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Half in Love with Death 42 AMERICAN HISTORY
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Before antibiotics, tuberculosis was a leading killer, a national fixation, and a disease to die for By Mary Fuhrer
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Morbid Messaging Consumption inspired visual and literary themes effectively celebrating the ailment’s awful toll.
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enry Baldwin spent the month of May 1849 keeping vigil at his young wife’s bedside in Newport, New Hampshire. “Here I sit in the dear chamber—the ‘bridal chamber’—where one short year ago I first pressed to my heart a young and pure and blooming wife,” the engraver and illustrator wrote in his diary. “Then how fair and hopeful and beautiful she seemed, with the bloom upon her cheek . . . Now, alas, she lies all pale, stricken, and dying.” Marcia Baldwin, 21, had consumption, an inscrutable wasting disease that terrified and obsessed Americans. Antibiotics’ arrival in the mid-20th century defanged consumption, as tuberculosis was once known, but earlier the disease—responsible for as many as a third of deaths in America— brought terror. The ailment was especially feared in New England, where settlement and living patterns—the close quarters of farmhouses and small, tightly knit villages—encouraged its spread. When Rhode Islander Samuel Tillinghast tracked mortality among acquaintances in the 1750s and 1760s, he found that over half had fallen to consumption. Transforming life, altering ambitions, and reshaping the very culture, consumption morbidly fascinated Americans. Marcia Baldwin’s husband recorded the young woman’s eight-month ordeal. “I have watched her gradual decay,” he wrote. “I have seen the full, round, and rosy cheeks fade away, the elastic steps grow weak and altogether fail, the ringing, pleasant tones of her gentle voice subside to the feeble & broken whisper.” In March 1849, Marcia, undone by “a distressing attack of bleeding at the lungs,” took to her bed—for good. Henry bathed her through enervating fevers, held her as convulsions and crippling pain wracked her emaciated frame, and tried to position her so she could breathe. “What a dreadful scourge is consumption. It seizes upon the loveliest of earth’s flowers and blights and withers them away,” he wrote in early June. “It loves the ruddy cheek, and vampire-like delights to feed upon the ruby lips. Ghostliness and pallor alone remain to mark its desolation wheresover it passes.” An entry made weeks later reads, “The scene is closed. My beloved Marcia has gone and left me here alone!” But not for long; in 1855 Henry, 39, followed Marcia to the grave. APRIL 2021 43
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The ancient Greeks called tuberculosis Φθίσις or phthisis, meaning “wasting.” In early America, doctors trained in the tradition of the ancient Roman physician Galen employed that term, but lay folk said “consumption.” Tuberculosis has long been present in North America; traces appear in the bones of pre-contact indigenes. English settlers recognized the disease John Bunyan termed “the captain of all those men of death.” Smallpox, plague, and cholera were known to be contagious, but English and American doctors did not believe consumption communicable. In truth, no one knew how the disease spread—but everyone knew a
consumptive or feared becoming one. Apprehension begat obsession. By the early 1800s, consumption—with its inscrutable and unpredictable course—was haunting American life. Some patients died quickly, of “galloping consumption.” Others suffered a prolonged “lingering death.” A few survived in relatively good albeit delicate health, or even saw their symptoms resolve. Uncertain prognosis fostered both terrible fear that each cough was a death sentence, and fervent hope that it was not. Cruelly, most consumptives were in the bloom of youth. The disease could claim a generation of a family, taking child upon child until the nest was empty. In her diary, Caroline Seabury dolefully recorded the deaths in the 1850s of seven of her eight siblings on Cape Cod from the disease. In 1816, between losing two sisters, Phebe Melven, 14, of Concord, Massachusetts, stitched a family history on a sampler. Her closing verse reads Unhappy he who latest feels the blow/Whose eyes have wept o’er every friend laid low/Drae’d lingering on from partial death to death/’Till dying all he can resign is breath. The Concord Yeoman’s Gazette
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Marcia and Henry Baldwin both died of Song of the Vampire pulmonary tuberculosis [See “Talking TB, p. Into the late 1800s, the 49], aka “the White Plague.” No one knew its record shows, Americans cause or its cure, but everyone knew its were disinterring TB casualties’ corpses as symptoms. First, a cough, persisting, perhaps a defense against the unremarked upon, for weeks or months. feared rise of the undead. Next, an intermittent—or “hectic”—fever that weakened its host. Patients lost vigor, grew pale and paler, bodies ever more fragile. The White Plague seemed to digest flesh, as if consuming the life force. Breathing became labored, and pain tortured the chest and sides. As lesions in the lungs putrefied that tissue, coughing brought up blood. Morning chills alternated with evening fevers that soaked the body in sweat. At the end, many patients seemed mere skeletons sheathed in papery skin, beset by coughing spasms, unable to draw breath, drowning in bloody phlegm—a horrifying, mesmerizing display of mortality.
in private, realistic medical personnel would admit that the only genuine treatment for the disease was “opium and lies.”
But attitudes began to shift. By the 1790s, Americans were beginning to embrace the Enlightenment values placed on reason, science, and technology. Confidence emerged in individuals’ capacity to shape their destiny. Old tropes of fate and faith faded; unpredictable and uncontrollable death now unnerved people. Doctors decried “the alarming increase in Consumption in the United States,” and warned that the rising generation’s “doomed hopes” threatened the nation’s future. Though consumption incidence had not risen, concern about consumption had, generating an intense focus on its imagined causes and inescapable effects. Unaware of germs, patients and doctors suspected heredity, environment, and behavior to be at play. Consumptive elites were thought to pass along a predisposition to the malady; a sensitive temperament and a delicate frame, it was said, foretold wasting death. So, it was theorized, did genius, for what burned brightest burned fastest—artistic brilliance literally consuming possessors. The middle classes risked consumption in their behavior, said doctors, urging young men not to exhaust their souls with excessive study or desk work and cautioning young women against immodest fashions, rib-crushing corsets, and the excessive pleasures of dancing and reading novels. Consumption among the poor was often attributed to immorality: promiscuity, insobriety, filthy habits. Environment in the form of chill night drafts and miasmas—noxious vapors gusting from swamps and boarding houses alike—could fell anyone anytime.
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noted in 1826, “Though father and mother live to advanced age, their children and grand-children fall before them by a disease which no human skill has yet been found able to cure.” Puritan New Englanders stoically accepted youngsters’ deaths as a heart-wrenching manifestation of God’s will. Of his dead offspring, poet Edward Taylor wrote, “I say, take, Lord, they’re thine./I piecemeale pass to Glory bright in them./I joy, may I sweet Flowers for Glory breed,/Whether though getst them green, or lets them seed.” When all but three of preacher Cotton Mather’s 15 children died young, Mather kept his grief to his diary; neighbors praised his family for being “in full possession of themselves, in patience and benevolence,” resigned to God’s will.
spotted oval leaves of lungwort, a plant believed to resemble a set of diseased lungs. In rural Hallowell, Maine, domestic healer and midwife Martha Ballard made for consumptive niece Parthenia Pitts “a Syrup of Comfrey, Plantain, Agrimony & Soloman’s Seal leaves.” Parthenia continued to decline. She followed her aunt’s counsel and “rose about an hour by Sun in ye morn, went out & milkt ye last milk from ye Cow into her mouth & Swallowd it.” Some patients slept in barns crowded with livestock so as to inhale cows’ reputedly healthful exhalations; others inhaled fumes from white pitch and beeswax heated over flames. Concoctions made from snails and their slime were popular for soothing coughs and easing breathing. The better off patient might consult a physician trained in bodily humors, an ancient Greek theory that in its effort to balance the four humors—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm—embraced “heroic” therapeutics: bleeding and deliberately induced vomiting, diarrhea, and sweating. One treatment—based on Enlightenment faith in chemical cures—dosed patients with mercury. Among medical practitioners, realists admitted privately that the only treatment for consumption was “opium and lies.” The market flung up an extraordinary range of regimens and products. Homeopaths believed in plants’ medicinal and spiritual powers, and some packaged botanical kits and published books. William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine and John C.
Once consumption “settled” in a patient, the focus shifted from prevention to remedy. Consumptives consulted lay healers, or physicians, or both, and both sectors competed with a gabble of self-described experts, patent medicine floggers, and purveyors of commercial treatments, all promising cures and all driven by the profit motive. Care took place mainly in the home, and was provided mainly by women. Caregivers relied on accumulated generations of lore. They brewed broths, distilled elixirs, molded lozenges, boiled steamy fumigants, and mixed plasters to relieve coughing, fever, and pain. Alcohol was a mainstay. Many domestic remedies relied on the magical belief that “like treats like.” Blood being Fatally Fashionable thought the font of vigor and spirit, remedies The consumptive’s often ran red or invoked it—broth from the meat pallor and sloping of a red rooster, milk from a red cow. A vogue shoulders became a developed for concoctions made from the desirable look. APRIL 2021 45
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HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; NMUIM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Another treatment was to hit the road. Theorizing that fresh air worked wonders, doctors advised patients to journey on horseback or by sea.
Fearing the supposedly baneful effects of damp northern air, consumptives able to afford southern sojourns sought balmier locales. In 1784, minister Elisha Parmele, 29, asked his Lee, Massachusetts, congregation’s leave to travel again to Virginia; two earlier stays had rejuvenated the ailing preacher but only temporarily. Congregants assented. Parmele trundled south with his wife in a wagon trailed by their cow. He died en route. Touring the Caribbean to document life among formerly enslaved people, consumptive abolitionists simultaneously escaped the northern winter. The White Plague became conjoined with the struggle against bondage. Southerners insisted the flood of consumptives to their region proved its way of life healthier, but visiting patients, seeing slavery first-hand, often returned foes of the peculiar institution. The travel cure spurred demand for accommodations, encouraging construction of health resorts and spas. Turnpikes, canals, and railroads brought patients to facilities at the seashore, in the mountains, and near mineral springs. One man, revisiting a New Hampshire village once known only for commercial fishing, noted that consumptives had replaced cod as a business proposition. The seaside hamlet now counted three hotels—“large, furnished, and supplied with convenience for the accommodation of the sick,” plus private bathing and showering facilities and other “inducements to the invalid.” Mountain resorts sprang up from the Adirondacks to the Appalachians. Spas featuring cold or hot mineral waters, such as White Sulphur Springs in what was then western Virginia, became particularly popular. Spa proprietors
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; FOTOTECA GILARDI/GETTY IMAGES
Gunn’s Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend described treatments in lay language and often represented isolated rural or frontier settlers’ only medical resource. Entrepreneurs hawked disease-specific chairs, stoves, and often elaborate breathing apparatuses such as that “great preventative of consumption, and unfailing cure for pulmonary disease…the medicated fur chest protector.” Sales of “patent” medicines exploded. A February 1825 advertisement for Dr. Relfe’s Asmatic Pills informed Columbian Centinel readers that “a lady of Hampden, Me., …seriously afflicted with consumption…and expected to die within a few hours,” instead had been restored to health by a single box of that nostrum. Preparations and pamphlets invoked links to Indian methods. The Indian Vegetable Family Instructer promised that its Willow, Weep for TBA “selected Indian prescriptions” would To serve a grief-wracked cure consumption “after every other rem- populace, printers designed memorial images that often edy had failed.” In the 1840s, Brother Corfeatured willows and blank bett’s Wild Cherry Pectoral Syrup began a spaces in which to inscribe long reign as a preferred treatment. the dearly departed’s name. Purified botanicals marketed by the Below, patent medicine ad. Shakers, a Protestant sect, were thought efficacious against consumption (“Complicated Gifts,” February 2019). Some customers trusted Shakers even more deeply. The Bradleys of Concord, New Hampshire, a self-described “sick family” with both generations consumptive, sent youngest daughter Cynthia to live at nearby Canterbury Shaker Village in hopes of saving her. Her brother, Cyrus, visited Cynthia in 1833. He was impressed by the Shaker doctor and his botanical garden. Cynthia, it seems, was impressed with the Shakers. Cyrus noted: “She has gained much in her health, but nothing can induce her to leave the people who have treated her so well.” Cynthia never returned to her family, but she survived them all.
HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; NMUIM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; FOTOTECA GILARDI/GETTY IMAGES
often enclosed springs in elaborate pavilions, staging concerts and social programs designed to lure the business of upper class invalids. Some healers created and thrived on cults of personality. In a volume touting his methods, New York City-based Dr. Samuel Fitch claimed to have achieved “a complete cure” for patients through a regimen of “medical inhalation,” medicines, and “instruments.” Rivals derided Fitch’s book as a “quack advertisement” and a “great farce and a complete humbug,” but patient Harriet Tappan of Panton, Vermont, was among many who came to his clinic. Following three months under Fitch’s care, Tappan lived long enough to marry but within a year of treatment had died. Jacksonville, Florida, emerged as a winter haven for phthisis patients. Among treatments available there an observer listed, “the milk cure, the beef-blood cure, the grape cure, the raw-beef cure, the whisky cure, the health-lift cure, the cure by change of climate, and many more...”
Lydia Huntley Sigourney
Consumption’s highly variable course and the survival of but a fraction of patients lent many specious treatments a whiff of validity. Hoping for a miracle, patients mixed medicines and treatments. Julia Pierce of Winsor, Massachusetts, wrote to her sisters in the early 1840s of their younger brother’s efforts to regain his health. Addison Pierce tried roots, horseback riding, cold water showers, homeopathy, an Indian doctor’s advice, “taking the waters,” sea voyages, and care from a doctor promising a cure or no charge, his sister said. “If it appeared to have any efficacy, they were willing to give it a try,” historian Sheila Rothman wrote. Desperation powered participants in a bizarre treatment pursued by some families who had lost multiple children. In 1788 Congregational minister Justus Forward of Belchertown, Massachusetts, having buried three children, had two more grow dangerously ill. Neighbors claimed vampirism lay at the root Thanatography of consumption. They recommended “therapeu- From top, eulogist tic exhumation.” Among the recently deceased, Sigourney, an image of Fantine’s passing, these savants proposed, someone was “undead” and a latter-day and rising supernaturally at night to siphon poster encouraging away living siblings’ blood. To neutralize this Americans to hold killer, the Forwards had to disinter their dead fast against TB. children, identify the vampire, and burn its heart or scatter its bones. At first horrified, the Forwards in time consented. In his research into the ghoulish phenomenon, folklorist Michael Bell has documented instances of 80-plus therapeutic exhumations undertaken to cure consumption in New England between independence and the Civil War. The practice survived until the late 1800s, its persistence testament to the desperation of families stalked by consumption. With its cause a mystery, its cure unknown, and its prognosis unpredictable, consumption permeated everyday life in the America of the 19th century. Youths suspected of predisposition to the ailment were advised to quit school, change jobs, and postpone wedlock or hurry into marriage. Families relocated to supposedly healthier climes. Grown offspring were pressed to return to the homestead to nurse kin or keep a farm running. Bereaved parents lived with punishing loss; dying parents gave their children away to family or friends. At society’s margins, consumptives faced death on the street or in the almshouse, as did their families. Consumption troubled many leading cultural lights: authors Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne; and Edgar Allen Poe; philosopher-writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; poet William Cullen Bryant, artist Thomas Cole, and musician Stephen Foster. Death and APRIL 2021 47
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Mountain Medicine
“Consolation literature” emerged—prose and verse saturated in sentiment and crooning of early partings and doomed affection—romantic, filial, or platonic—as in the 1832 Philadelphia Scrap Book & Gallery of Comicalities poem, “To a Friend Lingering With the Consumption”: Consumption’s lean and greedy worm/Is feasting on thy frame;/And soon, oh! Soon thy worried term/Shall end, and quench life’s flame. The 1836 Mourner’s Book compiled verses along the lines of “Then wasting pain and slow disease traced furrow on the brow, The grasshopper, alighting, is felt a burthen now. . .” Teacher and poet Lydia Sigourney, a master of this genre whose own consumptive son had died at 19, frequently was hired to memorialize a schoolmate or child. Morbid poetasting became a thing. Schoolchildren exchanged “friendship albums” into which they copied morose verse on themes like forget-me-nots, broken bonds, and imminent partings. Sabbath School Society booklets told of faithful children patiently enduring as death neared, such as 9-year-old Ann Elizabeth Pierce of Massachusetts telling her parents in 1833, I have sometimes wished I was well, but I do not now; I had rather die and be with my savior. The deaths of consumptive innocents became plot points in potboilers. Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is perhaps the best known sick little saint, but consumptive lit had a seamier side. The widely circulated magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book featured stories populated by characters undone by vanity, pride, ambition, or lust. Consumptive heroines and their seductions made the pop-gothic novel a mainstay. Taking the Air From Clarissa and Charlotte Temple to The “fresh air” theory Les Miserables’ Fantine, the Lady of the generated a vogue for Camellias, and La Boheme, fallen women sanitaria located in rode unbridled passions to consumptive high, cold places where ends, tragically beautiful to the last. patients submitted to Graveyard humor arose. The Monthly a rigid regimen of rest. Traveler, in December 1830, noted that
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invalidism drove a melancholy undercurrent in art and literature. Images of mourning maidens bent over funeral urns framed by weeping willow branches were emblematic of the era. Printers did brisk business selling mass-produced “memorial prints,” lithographs of generic onlookers mourning at graveside, the stone marker’s front left blank for personalization.
ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; GRANGER, NYC; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
In 1885, Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, left, following a German plan, opened the first American sanitarium at Saranac Lake in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Trudeau, himself in remission from TB after adhering to a course of rest and a healthy diet in mountain air, wanted to replicate that treatment. As a test, he offered poor New Yorkers lodging, board, and a regimen he oversaw. Within 15 years, Trudeau’s rural rest cure experiment had grown from a few cottages to a sprawling institution. For patients able to afford them, such open-air retreats grew fashionable. The movement spread rapidly as municipalities and states tried to stop consumption from infecting middle and upper-class residents by isolating poor TB patients. Tuberculosis came to be seen as a disease of the immigrant, the poor, and the dissolute. In 1900 there were 34 sanitaria; by 1925 there were over 500, with more than half a million beds. Many patients found themselves “committed” to isolated facilities imposing strict bed rest for weeks, even months, sometimes on open-air porches, followed by sitting outdoors in “invalid” chairs offering the optimum angle for breathing. Waking and retiring, diet, even conversation were often strictly supervised. Many patients reported frustration, boredom, hostility, powerlessness, and shame at being sequestered. Arrival of streptomycin undid the sanitarium movement, whose legacy persists in sleeping porches, Adirondack chairs, mountain resorts, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and the recorded memories of former inmates of the “rest cure.” —Mary Fuhrer
“a gentleman met another in the street, who was ill of a consumption, and accosted him thus: ‘Ah, my friend, you walk slow.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the man, but I am going fast.’” New York periodical Minerva offered verses “On a Gentleman Who Married a Consumptive Lady” in August 1823: With a warm skeleton so near,/And wedded to thy arms for life/When death arrives, it will appear/Less dreadful—’tis so like thy wife.
OXFORD SCIENCE ARCHIVE/PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES; SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; GRANGER, NYC; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
Beauty standards made room for gloom. Unlike smallpox or plague, consumption did not disfigure. Rather, its visible effects—slender, delicate body, pale skin setting off feverish red lips and cheeks, sunken eyes, overly dark and large, whispered breath—made the consumptive seem more beautiful and romantic, not less. Dressmakers emphasized these aspects in women, along with the small waist, flat chest, protruding spine, and sloped shoulders associated with the disease, to create tragic beauty. Robust fashionettes used cosmetics to mimic the consumptive’s pallid, feverish face. Belladonna eyedrops caused pupils to dilate with febrile intensity. The poet Lord Byron said he wished to die of consumption, “because the ladies would say: ‘Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.’” Byron was among those Romantics holding that consumption brought on a good death, killing slowly, sweetly, beautifully; malaria likely killed him. Consumption’s prominence as a protomeme faded as the 19th century progressed. One factor was the Civil War’s industrial-strength killing. Photographs of rotting corpses on battlefields like Gettysburg and Antietam took the fun out of morbidity and mortality. In 1882, German scientist Robert Koch identified Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, a discovery that earned Koch the 1905 Nobel Prize. The revelation that a germ caused consumption not only grounded doctors and patients in medical reality but launched the age of the sanitarium at the turn of the century. (see “Mountain Medicine,” p. 48). After World War II, antibiotics caused tuberculosis to fall out of the popular imagination in the United States, although HIV-AIDS, by compromising immune systems, engendered a resurgence. Worldwide, however, the disease remains one of the top ten causes of death, yearly killing 1.5 million. For many, consumption is yet “the captain of all those men of death.” H
The Pursuer Dr. Robert Koch, who identified consumption’s cause, at work in his laboratory.
Talking TB
Tuberculosis is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a bacterium spread by contact with infected sputum. Inhaled bacilli invade soft tissue and multiply, forming nodular lesions that break down and kill tissue. These “tubercules” can affect many organs, but most commonly attack the lungs. Onset can be quick, but the disease can remain latent for years, emerging under stress. Some patients defeat the disease unassisted, but without antibiotics people with active pulmonary tuberculosis usually experience a chronic, progressive decline marked by cough, fever, chest pain, extreme weight loss, and malaise. As tubercules destroy lung tissue, hemoptysis—coughing or “spitting blood”—results. Weakened bodies eventually succumb to respiratory failure—in effect, suffocation. A characteristic profound curvature of the upper spine occurs when tuberculosis of the lungs spreads to the spine. This causes a deformity in the upper spine that makes the shoulder blades prominent and the shoulders appear curved or sloped toward the front. Formally called Pott’s Disease, this “hump” was understood to be a feature of consumption. Until antibiotics arrived, TB dominated the popular imagination; fear of contagion was called “phthisophobia.” When in 1926 Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne gave Christopher Robin “the wheezles and sneezles,” the poem’s doctors warned “if he freezles in draughts and in breezles, the phtheezles might even ensue.” TB remains the most common form of infectious disease-related death in the world. —Mary Fuhrer APRIL 2021 49
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PHOTO CREDIT
Strike Up the Band Sadler’s mobile extravaganza, a legacy of railroading’s heyday, rolled with every new wrinkle in transport.
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Tent Show King
PHOTO CREDIT
Harley Sadler brought show business to Texas, and vice versa By Barbara Finlay
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Featured Player Sadler in his get-up as Cowboy Toby, the stock character he portrayed in a variety of costumes.
O
n a balmy day in 1928 in a remote Texas town—Muleshoe, maybe, or Sweetwater or Spur or Dickens, perhaps Big Springs, Junction, Eldorado, or Matador, the big state has so many such places—folks from near and far jam either side of Main Street, drawn to the opening fanfare of what promises to be a thrilling week. Along comes a slickly uniformed marching band led by an exuberant fellow whacking a big bass drum, often off the beat, as he smiles and greets onlookers. “Hi Butch, how’s the family? How Ya’ doin’, Mitch?” Harley Sadler calls out. “Mornin’ Millie! George out of college yet?” Behind the musicians trail brilliantly costumed performers smiling and waving to fans. When the procession reaches the town square or the central park, Sadler sets aside his drum and starts his “ballyhoo,” as he calls it, describing the show that will occur at dusk that evening—a panoply of dramatic and comedic sketches, musical interludes, dance troupes, raffles—something for everyone, conveniently staged at the edge of town, and priced at only a quarter for adults and 15 cents for kids. The band plays a few rousing songs. Sadler takes up his drum and leads the ensemble to the big tent. Grownups head for the ticket booth. As always, boys follow, volunteering to set up folding chairs in exchange for admission. Roustabouts have unpacked and put up the big tent, a huge rectangular canvas affair; above the entry hangs a sign: “The Harley Sadler Show.” Stagehands are making last-minute adjustments as customers queue for a three- or four-act play punctuated by announcements, candy hawkers, and “specialty acts.” The script might be new or a long-time favorite, but always it’s an engaging melodrama leavened by humor and populated by characters familiar to rural audiences. The script is tailored to each locale, mentioning places and events the crowd knows. The specialty acts include child dancers or singers, jugglers, magicians, trained dog acts, and vaudeville comics. More than one customer will be back for more than one performance during the week-long residency. Sadler is on the road March to December. When the operation reaches San Angelo, Sadler pauses to throw a Christmas banquet, then proceeds to Sweetwater, his home base, to stow most of the costumes, props, and gear, dusted with black pepper to repel roaches and rats, for the winter. A scaled-down edition of the production plays theaters in Waco and other towns until spring, when the circuit calls again, resuming the two-year schedule of bookings that brings most of West Texas and eastern New Mexico a heaping dose of spangles and glamour and show-business excitement. The tent show helped forge the character and content of American theater. Immensely popular from the 1850s through the 1920s, the phenomenon survives today as a phrase in a classic-rock oldie, but in its heyday no amusement held Americans in a tighter grip. Beneath the rubric of the traveling tent show gather circuses, medicine shows, Chautauqua gatherings, and such, but one subspecies was traveling tent theater,
or “rag opries.” In 1927 The New York Times counted 400-some tent-theater troupes nationwide, annually reaching audiences of 76 million at a time when mainstream playhouses were drawing 48 million theatergoers a year. A typical tent show worked towns of 10,000 or fewer, setting up for a week or two to the delight of residents who otherwise had scant access to big-bore entertainment. The two-to-three-hour program of skits, playlets, and comic sketches took place under canvas, sometimes before 2,000 or more spectators on chairs or bleachers. Tent theater had its zenith in the years preceding Black Tuesday—October 29, 1929, when Wall Street crashed, triggered a depression that, along with radio, talking pictures, and increased personal mobility, doomed the traveling show. While the good times lasted, though, Harley Sadler was America’s tent show king.
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Born in 1892 in Pleasant Plains, Arkansas, Harley Sadler arrived after brothers Luther, Edgar, and Leonard. Junius E. and Lula T. Sadler soon moved their boys to Texas, where they tried and failed to farm at several locations. In 1905, Junius quit the harrow and the plow to open a general store in Stamford, near Abilene. By that time there were two more Sadler children, daughter Fanny and Ferdinand, called Ferd. As a youth Harley worked for his dad and held other part-time jobs. At school he played trombone, acted, and made the baseball team. In 1909, intent on a life in show business, he ran away from home to join the Houston-based Parker Brothers Carnival as a trombonist but wound up hawking candy and popcorn. He soon returned home, recruiting two pals into a vaudeville act that made it as far as Kansas City before the other fellows dropped out.
Harley and Billie The Sadlers loved one another and loved the limelight, taking infant daughter Gloria along for the ride as they toured all over Billie’s native Texas.
Harley remained on the road, taking show-related jobs like posting promotional flyers, sometimes for traveling shows like Roy E. Fox’s Popular Players. His folks moved to Avoca, Texas, and opened another store. Illness brought Harley home. He opened a tailor shop and tried studying law on the side, but a traveling show caught his attention. He hired on with the troupe, hopscotching the region acting, singing, and telling jokes. Laughs became his stock in trade. In late 1914, Roy E. Fox hired him, and Harley Sadler settled into professional show business life, progressing to second and then first banana, on an appearance in Avoca wowing the crowd but prompting his mother to ask when he was going to get a job. A few days later, in Cameron, Texas, Sadler met and eloped with Willie Louise “Billie” Massengale. Harley won over his shocked in-laws and hopped from Fox to the Glen Brunk Company as its principal comedian and stage manager, making a better salary while acquiring more
Show Biz Kid Sadler, circled above, settled into his stage career as a bit player with impresario Roy E. Fox. managerial experience—especially when, in 1917, Brunk was drafted to serve in the American Expeditionary Forces fighting in Europe. Onstage Sadler delighted audiences; backstage he kept the operation profitable. By the time Brunk mustered out, Sadler had decided to go out on his own. In an amicable split, he left Brunk’s employ and at the end of December 1921 began organizing “Harley Sadler’s Own Show” as he and Billie prepared for the birth of a child. Gloria Sadler, named for actress Gloria Swanson, arrived at home in Cameron, Texas, on March 10. Harley and troupe began performing that month, with Billie, babe in arms, soon joining the outfit. Traveling by rail through the 1920s, the show had its own gaily painted promotional baggage and coach cars. The entourage timed arrivals for Monday mornings, met by local draymen who moved the show’s components to the lot it would occupy. “From the baggage car spilled forth heavy bundles of canvas, poles, coiled ropes, stakes, marquee, lights, wardrobe, bleachers, chairs, scenery, ticket booth, stage platforming, curtains,” Sadler biographers Clifford Ashby and Suzanne DePauw May wrote in Trouping Through Texas. The tent could seat about 2000. The raised stage spanned 30 feet, with dressing rooms at either side and an orchestra platform for holding 12 to 15 bandsmen. APRIL 2021 53
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As in most tent shows, Sadler brought his entire family in on the action. Billie acted in skits, sold tickets, helped with costuming, and filled in as needed. Her brother, Burnie Massengale, was a “canvas man,” overseeing tent work. Mother Louise “Mama Lou” Massengale served as a dresser and seamstress while minding Little Gloria—who also took to show business, as a toddler dancing and singing in specialty acts. Ferd Sadler handled promotion; his wife Gladys sold tickets; their daughters Marie and Toby stayed home during the school year but spent summers with the show as a vaudeville act. Nephews and nieces might be on the payroll. The 50-to-60-member company often included married couples and small family groups, a factor in the stability of crew and cast. Ages of Man The shape-shifting Sadler could play young, as Toby the bellboy, or, with help from the makeup and costume departments, the ancient figure “G-String,” posing here with wife Billie.
Sadler’s library of scripts—in a weeklong residency the troupe staged several—mixed down-home humor and moralizing. The usual performance included a play of three or four acts written by Sadler or a stock tent-show warhorse. One example was Ten Nights in a Barroom, an adaptation of a popular 1854 temperance novel about the evils of drink and a sot’s redemption by his angelic daughter’s deathbed plea. Another Sadler favorite was Honest Sinners and Saintly Hypocrites, a play by Charles Harrison that pitted rural virtue against urban corruption. Sadler adapted scripts and
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Sadler the entertainer became Sadler the showman, a model impresario adept at memorizing and recalling names and faces, a skill enhanced by a generous, sincere manner. He made sure to support local enterprises and organizations like Rotary clubs. Making a point of attending local church services and civic events, he cultivated friendships at every stop and insisted employees do the same. At all times show staff were to dress neatly and display courtliness—no cursing, no quarreling, no drinking on or off the clock. Shows reflected the values of the folks who filled the stands for entertainment Sadler kept clean and family oriented. Working through 60-some stops every two years, Sadler and team developed a rhythm. About three days before the troupe was to hit a town, advance man Ferd Sadler arrived to connect with the local sponsor—an American Legion post, volunteer fire department, the Lions’ Club—which in exchange for 10 percent of ticket sales arranged a tent site. Ferd called on retailers, distributing passes in exchange for displaying posters. Here getting a shave, there patronizing a café, glad-handing the newspaper editor, Ferd left a trail of goodwill and free and paid advertising. Ferd’s checklist included churches, civic organizations, the mayor’s and sheriff’s offices, fire and police department, and so on, distributing passes and offering free performances by troupe members, including Harley Sadler himself. A team of performers might play the local baseball nine. If the town had a furniture store, Ferd paid a visit, asking to borrow props, usually provided gladly, and items to be awarded to raffle winners. As Ferd was finishing his way-straightening, the train pulled in, crews jumped out, and up went the tent, dressing rooms, stage, and bleachers. Show folks donned their glad rags and stepped out in Harley Sadler’s enthusiastic wake to whet the locals’ appetite for an evening of razzle-dazzle. In most towns, performers and staff roomed at hotels or boarding houses, though as a last resort the dressing rooms could serve as shelter. Sadler’s strict controls on troupe member behavior—violations were generally a firing offense—limited trouble with host towns.
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Ballyhoo by the Barrelful To keep the big tent filled to capacity the Sadler organization relied on billboards, posters, newspaper ads, and an in-house baseball team that played local athletes.
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A soft touch, Sadler was always ready to advance a Busted pal money, a trait that sometimes had him taking eggs as payment.
Winners claimed their booty onstage to cheers and applause. In 1923, Sadler leased the Lyric Theater, a cinema in Sweetwater, to store gear and rehearse; when he went on the road, the Lyric resumed showing movies. In 1927, he bought a lot on James Street and built a tile-roofed brick residence for his extended family. When Gloria began school, she, grandmother Mama Lou, and housekeeper Elnora held the fort while her parents were on the road. Summers through high school Gloria traveled with the show. The show was an expensive proposition but also a moneymaker, regularly bringing $3500 a week in revenue. By 1929 Sadler was grossing perhaps $150,000 annually. Besides his home and company, he owned farms in three counties and lots he had bought in cities on his tour schedule to guarantee a suitable place for the show to go on. Never careful about money, Sadler was quick with a loan for a friend in need, a trait that often put him in financial trouble. He not only “lent” friends and family money, but strangers telling tales of hardship; busted farmers and townsmen got handshake loans. By 1930, according to his treasurer, Charles Meyers, Sadler was holding more than $80,000 in unsecured debt owed by parties all over West
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characters to a given crowd and location as well as to his performing style. Audiences most loved his pet character Toby, a genial hayseed, naïve and gullible but in the end usually victorious as an unwitting hero. Toby wore a loud shirt, patched overalls, and broken-heeled, curly-toed boots, all topped by a red wig and a flimsy hat. Besides his footlight turns in the company’s plays, Toby appeared at intermissions to tell stories and hawk candy, drawing wild applause with self-deprecating tales like one about a Wednesday night in Dallas that he and his pa registered at a fancy hotel. The accommodations featured a second room outfitted with a big porcelain tub, fluffy towels, and cold and hot running water. “And me and Paw just stood there looking at it all, wishing it was Saturday night,” Toby said wistfully. Between acts and during scenery and costume changes, the stage filled with tap or ballet dancers, ballad singers, ventriloquists, magicians, jugglers, harmonica players, or cowboy singers. From age four, Gloria Sadler tapdanced. An actor might step offstage and pick up a band instrument, tootling away in costume. Vendors, including the head Sadler himself, hawked “bally candy,” salt-water taffy rolled and packaged in small boxes. In some boxes were tickets good for prizes ranging from stuffed animals to diamond rings. At the boss’s signal a curtain flew back to reveal the loot, augmented by rocking chairs, radios, cookware, and other items from local merchants. Cowgirls in the Sand Daughter Gloria, third from right, joined the show at four, eventually becoming an equestrian.
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Texas and Eastern New Mexico. Playing San Antonio one winter, cast members saw a line of jobless actors outside the theater, waiting for Sadler. He sent each one on with cash and a pat on the shoulder as he turned to hear the next hard-luck story. The impresario’s lackadaisical approach to money tripped him up as the Depression deepened and ticket sales withered. Losses began to show in 1929, but for three years Sadler met his $70,000 annual payroll before he had to cut wages. For a while the box office accepted eggs, produce, and chickens as payment. Despite the downward spiral, in 1931 Sadler bought a new 100x180-foot tent, new scenery, and better seating. That year’s stand in Austin drew 2,500 ticket buyers, but the bigger top, costly to handle, was too large for small towns. To compensate, Sadler started playing Waco, Galveston, Dallas, San Antonio, and other burgs, staying a month at each. However, city folk were less easily entertained, and downtowns had movie houses, nightclubs, and other attractions absent in the hinterland’s hamlets.
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Sadler’s sprawling operation began to bleed red. Fires and windstorms damaged his equipment and his business. And he still was giving away money. By 1935, revenues were nearly invisible and debt a dark, looming mountain. That summer Sadler hired on with a friend’s circus as ringmaster, a desperation move he abandoned after three months. Hoping to capitalize on the Lone Star State’s 1936 centennial, he wrote a play, The Siege of the Alamo, but Texas cities all had their own centennial programs, and Sadler’s script was a clunker. At the end of 1935, Harley and Billie returned to Sweetwater. They sold their home and show equipment and mortgaged their other real estate, but even so still owed $25,000. In a rented cottage, the couple set about getting out from under. Harley wrote to 100-odd creditors, asking for time and promising payment in full. Going on the road with a reduced company of players and a small dilapidated tent leased for $1 per day, he worked the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Audiences there still loved the old format, but their enthusiasm did not translate into his former revenues. Ashamed to bring his tatterdemalion troupe onto stomping grounds where he had strutted proudly, Sadler, through frugal living and strict repayment scheduling, retired his debt. He regained solvency in 1938 and resumed touring West Texas by truck, boasting on his letterhead that he was “completely motorized using Chevrolet Trucks exclusively.” He shrank bookings to a day or two, in 42 weeks playing 112 towns. In the late 1930s, Sadler bought several oil wells. His wildcatting went spottily, sometimes hitting big and sometimes running dry, never generating steady income. In 1941, he ran for the Texas House of Representatives, winning the seat representing the three counties around Sweetwater. Gloria died in childbirth, along with the daughter she was carrying, devastating Harley and Billie. He stopped touring, sold his show gear, and took refuge in politics, serving on legislative committees overseeing the petroleum industry, teachers’ pay, and prison reform. He was always in the office early and always attentive to constituents. A 1947 attempt at a show business comeback proved his last onstage hurrah. Voters returned him to
Another Form of Show Business Sadler’s gift for self-promotion and connection served him well as a Texas state senator. Here, in light suit, he looks on as Governor Allan Shivers signs a Sadler-sponsored bill. office twice more. In 1950, he and Billie moved to Abilene, where he ran again for the House and won. Two years later, running unopposed, he was elected that district’s state senator. Harley Sadler’s health began to decline, in step with finances eroded by a lifetime of generosity. Big Spring Herald reporter Joe Pickle observed that Sadler, though broke, insisted on paying when they met for lunch. In October 1953, emceeing a Boy Scouts benefit in Avoca, Sadler had a heart attack. He died two days later. His memorial service, in Abilene, drew hundreds, including Governor Allan Shivers. But mostly the crowd watching the funeral procession consisted of fans of the Harley Sadler Show, who remembered the fellow in the hearse at the front of the cortege leading a happier parade down some back-country Main Street. H APRIL 2021 57
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Ahead of His Time Benjamin Lay’s adjurations to fellow Quakers took decades to take hold among believers.
Quaker Awakening The Friends had to be hectored into becoming abolitionists By Alice Watts
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hat Benjamin Lay, a hunch-backed dwarf with an oversized head and spindly legs, stood out in his opposition to enslavement would be an understatement. Lay, a Quaker, was among the most strident American abolitionists of the early 18th century. He pricked the consciences of coreligionists fearful of bucking Quaker doctrine with theatrics that traded on his startling appearance. Born in Colchester, England, and now a Pennsylvanian, Lay agitated against Quakers’ role in slavery as owners, traders, and participants in businesses reliant on bondage. Lay’s protests, carefully planned and uproarious, left an indelible impression. One wintry Sunday morning in 1733-34, Lay—coatless, right foot and leg bare in the snow to remind onlookers of how cruelly slaveowners treated their human chattel—posed outside a Quaker meetinghouse in Philadelphia as a Meeting for Worship ended. Congregants admonished him not to make himself sick. “Ah, you pretend compassion for me but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half clad,” he replied. On Friday, September 19, 1738, Lay attended a large Quaker assembly, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, in Burlington, New Jersey. Wearing a military greatcoat over a soldierly uniform, complete with sword, he carried a book. In a hollow between the covers, he had fitted an animal bladder brimful of pokeberry juice, which runs a rich red. When his turn to speak came he hefted the oversize volume, railing at Friends whose hands Lay decried as soiled by bondage. “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures!” the strange little man shouted, throwing off his coat, pulling his blade, and stabbing the book. Gouts of red splattered him and all nearby, shocking everyone at hand. Ejected from the hall, Lay went along without protest. Soon after, disowned—excommunicated—by his home Monthly Meeting in Abington, Pennsylvania, Lay dropped from sight and the Quaker community, living for 20 years as a hermit in a cave outside Abington. Before Lay’s performative but compelling protests, other Quakers took their fellows to task for participating in the American colonies’ slave-driven economy. William Southeby, John Farmer, and Ralph Sandiford challenged mainstream Quaker values, decrying enslavement and laying the foundation for what became the abolitionist movement and a nation’s grudging redirection toward emancipation.
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At home and abroad, English society assumed less commercially minded Friends to be anti-government. Quaker missionaries Mary Fisher and Anne Foster sailed from Barbados to Boston in 1656, encountering the wrath of the city’s Puritan leadership. After five weeks behind bars, the two were shipped back to Barbados. They got off light; during 1659-61, the gibbet at Boston Common saw four Friends hanged for merely entering the colony. Around this time, Quaker preachers also were reaching the southern American colonies. From a small cadre of zealous missionaries, the 17th-century Quaker presence in North America grew rapidly as Friends flocked to new colonies and many other settlers converted. Quakerism persisted in Massachusetts and flourished in Rhode Island and the Chesapeake colonies. In the 1670s-80s Quakers founded the colonies of West Jersey and Pennsylvania. Beginning with communities in New England in 1661, the Quakers had by 1700 established six regional Yearly Meetings in the colonies, mirroring arrangements in England. In the colonies, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was first among equals. Not a few Quakers embraced the slavery already entrenched in the colonies, even though owning another person violated Quaker philosophy. Many Friends settling in North America were wealthy Barbadians, bringing along their slaves and indentured servants. By the 1680s more than half the ships in Boston harbor were involved in the West Indian trade in sugar, rum, cotton—and slaves. Via Barbados, the ports of Newport, Bristol, and Providence, Rhode Island were leading 60 AMERICAN HISTORY
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George Fox
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Geologic Progress Friends founder George Fox was among the faithful who were a very long time turning away from enslavement as the ethical and commercial anathema that Benjamin Lay and a few others denounced.
George Fox was born in Leicestershire, England, in 1624. At age 21, after years of spiritual searching, Fox reported hearing God say, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, what can speak to thy condition.” In 1652, after a vision in which Christ revealed to him “a great people” to be gathered, Fox founded the Religious Society of Friends—dubbed “Quakers” by skeptics for their tendency to “tremble at the Word of the Lord.” Fox was a charismatic leader; by 1660, he had 50,000 followers in England divided geographically into “meetings” each named for a city in that region. Quakerism opposed the ritualistic Church of England. The Friends had no set ceremony, no minister. They believed “there is God in every man” and posited that an “inward Light” led to personal salvation without clerical intermediaries; in God’s sight, all were equal, they said. Citing the Golden Rule, Quakers refused to serve in the military or take judicial oaths. Despite the deliberate absence of a clergy, someone had to organize matters, leading to the creation of committees, or “overseers,” of particular functions, including the publishing of tracts by individual Friends. Quakers’ radical stances brought condemnation. English authorities beat, whipped, and imprisoned as many as 15,000 Friends—Fox was jailed eight times—until the 1689 Toleration Act granted the sect freedom to practice. By that time many Quakers had fled England for relative safety in North American and Caribbean colonies, particularly the West Indies, where Quaker missionaries first arrived in 1655. By 1700, approximately 10,000 Friends had settled in Jamaica, and substantial numbers in Barbados. Barbados functioned as a strategic hub for England and its North American colonies, exporting sugar, rum, tobacco, cotton, indigo—and enslaved Africans. Slaving drove the Barbadian economy. Wealthy Quakers—plantation owners, merchants, ship owners—were among the many entrepreneurs active in the business.
for all their palaver about the golden rule and equality, many quakers were accepting of trade in and ownership of kidnapped africans.
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Their Own Problems In the New England colonies, Puritans, top, brought the whip down on Friends for challenging the accepted order until tolerance began to creep into the culture and Quakers could meet without fear, right.
centers of the slave trade. William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” of Pennsylvania was not immune. In 1690, less than ten years after founding the colony, Penn reported that ten slave ships had arrived from the West Indies in a year.
For all their palaver about the Golden Rule and equality, many Quakers, like others of their time, saw importing and owning Africans as acceptable. Those enriched by bondage scorned talk of equality, even by the sect’s founder. Fox himself spoke up on behalf of the enslaved, albeit blandly, in a 1657 epistle, To Friends Beyond Sea, that have Blacks and Indian Slaves. Friends, Fox said, should “have the mind of Christ, and to be merciful, as your heavenly Father is merciful” and preach the Gospel to “every creature.” In 1671, accompanied by a dozen English and Irish colleagues, Fox spent five months in Barbados and Jamaica. He shuddered to see the condition of slaves, even those owned by Friends, on Barbados. Fox mildly admonished followers there to teach their slaves the Gospel and treat them kindly but stopped short of advocating emancipation. Continuing to the North American colonies in early 1672—they landed at Patuxent on Chesapeake Bay—Fox and company, intent on organizing monthly and general meetings like those back home in England, crisscrossed the colonies north and south from Maryland for 13 months. No doubt Fox, while among slave-holding believers, communicated his concern for the well-being of their human property. In 1676, Fox published Gospel Family-Order, Being a Short Discourse Concerning the Ordering of Families, Both of Whites, Blacks and Indians. This slightly more incisive pamphlet incorporated his 1671 sermons on Barbados. Friends were not to slight “the Ethiopian, the black man, neither man or woman upon the face of the earth, in that Christ died for all” and “to let them go free, after a considerable term of years,” he wrote. In 1679, Fox again addressed slavery, but—as in all his writings—without flatly condemning the practice. In To Friends in America Concerning Their
Negroes, and Indians, the founder admonished Quakers in America to convert persons they held in bondage, beginning his epistle, “All Friends, everywhere, that have Indians or blacks, you are to preach the gospel to them, and other servants, if you be true Christians.” William Edmundson, an Irish-born minister who had traveled with Fox on the founder’s first trip to North America, took the step that Fox would not. On his return to the colonies in 167576, Edmundson attacked slave ownership outright: “And many of you count it unlawful to make slaves of the Indians,” Edmundson asked. “And if so, why the Negroes?” These and other goads began to turn Quakers away from benign neglect and toward activism. On February 18, 1688, Friends living in Germantown, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, staged the first formal anti-enslavement protest in the colonies. Two months later, also from Germantown, came a broadside against enslavement likely drafted by attorney Francis Daniel Pastorius, the Bavarian émigré who had founded APRIL 2021 61
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The Philadelphia Meeting was not at all alone in shillyshallying on slavery. Meetings throughout Martyr to the Cause the colonies discouraged anti-slavery expresSentenced to die for her faith, sion by members. However, John Hepburn’s Quaker missionary Mary Dyer local Meeting in New Jersey did not blink in marches to Boston’s gibbet in 1659. 1715 when the former indentured servant pubGermantown. Signed by Pastorius lished his incendiary American Defence of the and three others, including the Christian Golden Rule, Or An Essay to prove the clerk of their Meeting, the docuUnlawfulness of making Slaves of Men, the lonFrancis Daniel Pastorius ment began, “These are the reasons gest and most logically written attack on slavery why we are against the traffick of menyet to be circulated in the American colonies. Sumbody as followeth,” that enslavement viomarizing the anti-enslavement debate, Hepburn articulated the Golden Rule, that tolerating the lated the theology behind his condemnation—mankind’s practice would give Pennsylvania a bad name, free will comes from God, and enslavement denies Africans their free will. and that keeping slaves meant a risk of a slave Hepburn emerged from notoriety unscathed. revolt. “Now consider well this thing, if it is good Visiting English minister John Farmer wasn’t as fortunate. Farmer or bad?” the paper asked. brought an epistle, Relating [sic] Negroes, to the 1717 New England Yearly The Monthly Meeting at Dublin, Pennsylvania, Meeting at Newport. His message incensed the Yearly Meeting’s leaders, ignored the Germantown declaration, finding wealthy slave-owning and -trading Quakers. They “advised” he not pubenslavement “so weighty that we think it not lish. Farmer published and was disowned. Unapologetic, he traveled to expedient for us to meddle with it here.” The peti- Philadelphia and read his epistle at every opportunity, incurring the tion wound its way to the Philadelphia Yearly enmity of the city’s obdurate Quaker elite. The Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, whose members forwarded the message Meeting upheld Farmer’s disownment, as did the Philadelphia Yearly to the London Yearly Meeting. Meeting in 1720, one of Quaker history’s rare double disownments. After Both bodies declined to pursue the matter. the Southeby and Farmer episodes, no Friend from any Philadelphia Individual Quakers and local Meetings embraced Meeting spoke out for almost a decade. Antislavery sentiment was slowly the abolitionist cause, the first Christian denomi- spreading among rural Friends, but when English emigrants Ralph Sandination to do so. The Germantown protest exerted ford and Benjamin Lay arrived in Pennsylvania—Lay, disowned by his little direct impact, but its accompanying text congregation in England for disrupting meetings, came from England by
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inspired Quaker abolitionists into the 19th century. In 1693, the Keithians, a splinter group founded by Quaker George Keith, published An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negroes. Largely ignored by mainstream Quakers, the Exhortation called enslaved persons captives of “war, violence, cruelty, and oppression; and theft and robbery of the highest order.” The Golden Rule applied to all regardless of “what generation, descent or Colour they are.” Enslaving Africans is a sin, the Keithians said. In 1696, prodded by multiple Friends, including prominent minister William Southeby, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting began to grapple with slavery’s moral implications. Termed the “first native-born American to write against slavery,” Southeby, a Marylander who converted from Catholicism, was the leading anti-slavery Friend of his day. Southeby’s essay, To Friends and All It May Concerne, interwove arguments by Fox and Edmundson, the Germantown Friends, and the Keithians. Southeby’s exhortation and salvoes by Robert Pyle and Welshman Cadwalader Morgan persuaded the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to formulate the advice that “Friends be Careful not to Encourage the bringing in of any more Negroes.” Southeby found that language mealy-mouthed and likely to be ignored. So vigorously did he issue jeremiads that Philadelphia Quaker leaders twice censured him, though they apparently did not disown him, perhaps because, to preserve unity, he seems to have cooled his ardor. He was a Friend in good standing when he died in 1722.
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way of Barbados—the pro-slavery perspective remained in comfortable control of Quakerdom’s Philadelphia establishment. Sandiford, a merchant from Liverpool who bristled at sympathetic fellow Quakers for not speaking what they clearly felt, began attacking enslavement soon after he landed. In 1729, after a warning not to proceed from the Overseers of the Press, Sandiford published A Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times, questioning the injustice “to rob a Man of His Liberty, which is more valuable than Life?” The Philadelphia Monthly Meeting ostracized Sandiford. With slavery weighing on his mind such that “the sense of it [had burdened his] life night and day” a year later he issued The Mystery of Iniquity; in a Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times, by the foregoing and the present Dispensation. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting disowned him. Sandiford retired to a farm outside Philadelphia. In his later years he and Benjamin Lay became friends. Sandiford died brokenhearted in 1733. Lay regarded Sandiford as a martyr, and after his friend’s death intensified his outspokenness, penning All Slave Keepers, That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. In it, Lay called keeping enslaved persons “a Practice so gross and hurtful to Religion, and destructive to Government, beyond what words can set forth.” Benjamin Franklin printed the book in 1738. Three weeks later Lay pulled off his pokeberry juice exploit and was disowned—the last Friend to be cast out for fighting slavery. Printer’s Prerogative Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin printed Benjamin Lay’s book,which drew much attention in Quaker meetinghouses like the historic one at Burlington, New Jersey, top.
By staking out extreme positions, Lay, Farmer, and Sandiford had laid a firm line of resistance. Mainstream Quakers needed a figure less strident to get them into action. John Woolman, a merchant and tailor from Mount Holly, New Jersey, and a minister of the Burlington Monthly Meeting, became that leader—according to historian Thomas Drake, “the greatest APRIL 2021 63
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Outspoken French-born Anthony Benezet became a forceful presence in the Quaker abolitionist camp.
By 1760, 50,000 to 60,000 Quakers lived in seacoast colonies, about half in areas around Philadelphia and in Maryland. Other Christian sects now outnumbered Quakers in North America. The Friends downplayed proselytizing, instead turning inward and institutionalizing their doctrine with such strictures as prohibiting marriage outside the Meeting and threatening disownment for “errant” Friends, stances that cost them members. Friends’ pacifism came to the fore during the French and Indian War, at the cost of political power. In 1756 Quaker legislators stormed out of the Pennsylvania Assembly to protest war taxes, relinquishing control of the government, abandoning provincial politics, and focusing on social issues. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s endorsement of emancipation came at a propitious moment. Woolman had an influential ally in Anthony Benezet. Though not nearly as dramatic as Lay, Benezet, an émigré from France via London, worked tirelessly within the Quaker system. A prolific writer, he penned many pamphlets and petitions, beginning with 1759’s Observations on the Enslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes. Benezet said if Friends believed God
Hoisting lay’s guidon, thinkers like woolman, Benezet, and Mifflin kept up a chorus of rhetoric that in time took hold among Quakers.
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intensified in 1758 when the Yearly Meeting approved “without spoken dissent” a recommendation that Friends free those they held in bondage. Lay learned of the advice shortly before he died in 1759.
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Quaker of the eighteenth century and perhaps the most Christlike individual that Quakerism has ever produced.” Woolman spent his youth unconcerned about enslavement. However, in 1742, when he was 22, his employer had Woolman draw up a bill of sale for an enslaved woman. The transaction deeply unsettled the young man. In 1746, he joined other missionaries preaching in the southern colonies, traveling as far south as North Carolina, seeing slavery up close for the first time. Slave-owning Friends reacted coolly when he counseled emancipation, but he persevered, visiting and revisiting, a gentle persuader who gradually changed a Society’s thinking. Returning home to New Jersey, Woolman wrote Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes: Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination. “All men by nature,” Woolman argued, “are equally entitled to the equity of the Golden Rule, and under indispensable obligations to it.” However, he waited until 1753 and a change in makeup of the Philadelphia Overseers of the Press to present his tract for review. Approval and the pamphlet’s publication in 1754 marked a major shift in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s attitude. That shift
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was in every man, bondage must be a sin. Teaching black children in his home at night, he promoted the novel idea that all people are capable of learning and thus are equal and deserving of freedom. Benezet and allies among the Friends made their arguments to government as well as to fellow believers. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s advice became a movement. Yearly Meetings from New England to North Carolina took steps toward banning enslavement within their Meetings, to find that many Friends preferred to keep their slaves and be disowned. Even Quakers willing to free their slaves could not necessarily do so. Virginia and the Carolinas sharply restricted the freeing of slaves except with government approval and only for meritorious service. Slave-owning Friends wishing to manumit had to choose: be disowned or leave the state. Hundreds of Quakers relocated west in Ohio and Indiana, taking their human chattel and liberating them upon arrival in the “free” territory. Some Northern Virginia Friends immediately freed slaves, but most waited until 1782 when that state’s anti-manumission law was changed after heavy lobbying led by abolitionist planter Robert Pleasants. A friend of Benezet and Woolman, he also presided over the short-lived Virginia Abolitionist Society in 1790. Pleasants, a planter and abolitionist, persuaded Virginia legislators to legalize manumission by last wills and testaments or other writings validated in a county court by two witnesses. Upon the legislative revision, he freed his slaves and hired them as paid workers.
Judge William Gaston
During the American Revolution, Quakers throughout the colonies struggled to remain neutral; many had property and goods forfeited and some were exiled, but Benezet, now an “old white-haired busybody of good works scurrying around with a petition in one hand and an article against John slavery in the other,” never quit. Woolman Neither did Warner Mifflin. Mifflin, a charismatic abolitionist in the Benjamin Lay mold, was the physical opposite of his antecedent, standing just under seven feet tall. After Benezet died in 1784, Mifflin became the most widely known Quaker in America, serving as the bridge between the early abolitionists and the wave of activists aris- Paper Cuts Deep Woolman cannily waited ing in the 1830s. A Delmarva Peninsula planter’s son, Mifflin for a reorganization of owned slaves until a serious illness in his late 20s, the Philadelphia press overseers before bringing during which he was “fully persuaded in my conout his pamphlet, right, science that it is a sin of a deep dye to make slaves a choice that allowed his of my fellow creatures.” perspective to take hold The younger Mifflin freed his enslaved persons in the mainstream. in 1774 and paid them reparations, one of the first slave owners to do so. He persuaded his father to do the same. After the Revolution, Mifflin became a prominent lobbyist, promoting abolition, a cause that began to attract non-Quakers. Southerners called him a “meddling fanatic,” while fellow abolitionists praised his efforts. The North Carolina Yearly Meeting took an extraordinary step in 1808 to end-run that state’s pro-slavery laws—the Meeting itself became the agent of its members’ enslaved persons. Friends “gifted” their slaves to the Yearly Meeting, which treated them as “free.” Slave owners challenged the program in court, but Judge William Gaston ruled that under a 1706 state law the Quaker trustee system was constitutional. By 1814 the yearly meeting “owned” 350 slaves; by 1826, 729. The trusteeship was dissolved on January 1, 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in Union-occupied territory. H APRIL 2021 65
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Candidate Carter in 1976 as he was campaigning for what would be a one-term White House stint.
post-presidency has been mildly overrated, chastising certain Carter efforts at informal diplomacy as meddlesome or self-serving. To a striking degree, Carter governed as a genuine progressive. His administration’s scorecard of successes includes enacting a wide range of environmental legislation and new consumer protections. He appointed an unprecedented number of women and people of color to positions of federal authority. In foreign policy, his impressive record goes well beyond the Camp David Accords. Examining Carter’s successful negotiation of the Panama Canal Treaty and normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China, Alter describes, in a broader sense, how after Vietnam Carter helped revive America’s reputation as a global force for good—until the
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His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life By Jonathan Alter Simon and Schuster, 2020; $33
Asked to sum up Jimmy Carter, many Americans would describe a kindly, gentle man not up to being president who, upon departing Washington, did many nice things. Former Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter adds significant nuance to that conventional thumbnail in this thorough, entertaining biography. Alter had the former president’s cooperation, interviewing Carter multiple times, but Best never feels like an official biography as Alter works blow-by-blow through the ten decades of struggles and triumphs that shaped Carter’s public and private lives. Alter argues persuasively that as president Carter was underrated—much tougher backstage and far more adept at bending Congress to his will than his reputation. Less persuasively, Alter maintains that Carter’s celebrated
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considering carter
Iran hostage crisis. Alter paints Carter as distracted by other domestic and diplomatic matters for much of that bruising episode, leading to what the author characterizes as an inconsistent response. The literal and figurative siege torpedoed Carter’s try for a second term. Focusing as he does on Carter’s presidency, Alter at times seems to be rushing to render his subject’s preceding decades, odd for a book the size of a Whitman’s sampler. Nevertheless, this
definitive portrait largely succeeds at presenting a man in full. No matter a reader’s politics, it will be difficult to close Best without regarding Carter not only as thoroughly decent but also as profoundly accomplished. —Clayton Trutor teaches history at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. His book Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta and Atlanta Remade Professional Sports is due soon from University of Nebraska Press.
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getting schooled A lawyer and the most scholarly of the Founding Fathers, John Adams (1735-1826) has seen his reputation rise dramatically, partly because that reputation had fallen so low. Bernstein, an admirer and also a lawyer, admits that the curmudgeonly Adams neither courted nor captured the popular imagination. A hardscrabble farmer’s son, he entered Harvard, then practiced law fulltime 1758 to 1774, intermittently until 1777, and nevermore. The only time legal skill worked to Adams’s advantage was 1774-77 when, in the Continental Congress, he argued persuasively for independence. Adams largely wrote the 1780 Massachusetts constitution, known for its balance of power—bicameral legislature, independent judiciary—presaging that which emerged in Philadelphia in 1787. Bernstein stresses that while Paine’s and Jefferson’s vivid, though less substantial, insights still thrill readers, Adams’ ideas on government ring out only to scholars willing to slog through his dense prose. Sent to France with Benjamin Franklin in 1778 to forge an alliance, Adams remained the lawyer, keen to press and win arguments, instead of acting the diplomat, who knows to avoid them. In love with the agreeable Franklin, France’s leaders hated Adams and his hectoring. Back to America in 1788, he was picked for
vice president, likely as a regional counterweight to George Washington, who never warmed to him. Alexander Hamilton had long disliked him. After two miserable terms in Washington’s shadow, Adams, denying party affiliation, won the 1796 presidential election by a whisker with de facto Federalist leader Hamilton working to defeat him. Hewing to his apolitical ideals, President Adams retained his predecessor’s cabinet; its members, and Vice President Jefferson, often publicly opposed him. Historians remember Adams for the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were not his idea though he did not object to their imposition. Even hostile observers say Adams dealt brilliantly with a hostile France despite abuse from both Hamilton’s war hawk Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans under Jefferson, whose rosy view of revolutionary France had long since departed from reality. Outsted after a single term, Adams spent the rest of his days griping, probably correctly, about having been misunderstood. Quarrelsome and prickly, Adams could not match the cosmopolitan Jefferson’s glow. Adams may have been the deepest thinker among the Founding Fathers, Bernstein notes, but in American politics personality trumps brains. Jefferson’s ideas were often nonsense, but when inconvenient he ignored them. Adams always meant what he said, a crippling liability in any elected official. An astute biography by a legal scholar and a fine contribution to Adams’s rehabilitation. —Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.
The Education of John Adams By R.B. Bernstein Oxford, 2020; $24.95
Grouch Adams was not a hail fellow well met but a deep thinker given to prickliness and even contumely. APRIL 2021 67
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believed “that the country required new rules for a new century; that the government must be able to regulate business, hold businessmen to account, and promise to be fair.” In parallel mini-biographies, Berfield traces the milestones each man achieved on his journey to a pinnacle of power and the views each acquired that made them opponents but also, at times, allies (Morgan, Republican to the core, donated $100,000 to Roosevelt’s 1904 election campaign.). Berfield details their mutual interest in American prosperity in her account of how in 1902 Roosevelt persuaded a reluctant Morgan to step in and force mine owners to compromise with striking coal miners, sparing the country a miserable winter. That intervention marked a turning point, she explains—“a confrontation between a past where power was concentrated and a future where it was shared.” Hour’s centerpiece is Roosevelt’s use of the Sherman Antitrust Act to undo Northern Securities, the holding company Morgan had assembled to control the Great Northern,
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The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle to Transform American Capitalism By Susan Berfield Bloomsbury, 2020; $30
The Hour of Fate explodes the assumption that economic history must be dull. Bloomberg News reporter Susan Berfield blends exhaustive research and gripping style to explain how at the turn of the 20th century the United States dealt with the development of huge conglomerations of business power. Berfield shapes that story as a clash between two patrician scions of wealth, arguably the era’s most powerful Americans: President Theodore Roosevelt and financier J.P. Morgan. The author’s brilliance lies in how she casts their encounter not as one pitting an advocate of laissez faire against a stalking horse for regulation, but one between contrasting visions of how capitalism had to be transformed. Morgan felt that the fierceness of fin de siècle business rivalries was wasting resources and that “the surest route to efficiency was to centralize power,” Berfield explains. “He preferred alliances to rivalries, self-regulation over government regulation, and, above all, order and stability.” In contrast, Roosevelt
NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
by the numbers
Working It Out Roosevelt, left, with Root and Morgan as they discuss the 1902 coal strike.
Northern Pacific, and Burlington railroads. In its first 14 years, the Sherman Act primarily had served as a weapon to portray unions as combinations in restraint of trade. Roosevelt’s application of the law against a corporate target, his subsequent shaky 5-4 Supreme Court victory, and Morgan’s acquiescence ushered in a new era of government. Washington would go on to regulate railroad rates, meat
packing, and drug making, set mine safety rules, and ban child labor—in short, in Roosevelt’s 1905 words to Congress, recognize that it was a “delusion that the standard of profits, of business prosperity, is sufficient in judging any business of political question.” —Daniel B. Moskowitz, a frequent contributor and columnist, for many years covered antitrust issues for BusinessWeek magazine.
America loved its heroes and hated its enemies a hundred years ago no less than today, a parallel that will not escape readers opening this entertaining portrait, with a heavy emphasis on the city of Boston, Massachusetts, of 1918 America. The authors build their narrative around three prominent but atypical figures of that time. A search for the Great War’s most illustrious Yank might lead to Sergeant Alvin York or Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, but the authors choose Charles Whittlesey who, most readers will need reminding, commanded the fabled “Lost Battalion.” A bookish, bespectacled Harvard-educated lawyer who enlisted in the army in 1917, Whittlesey led a mixed battalion of the American Expeditionary Forces’ 77th Division during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the war’s largest American action and notable more for frontal assaults, heavy casualties, and confusion than for intelligent leadership. Advancing too far in October 1918, Whittlesey’s unit was cut off. Breathless news reports describing five days of bitter fighting before relief arrived made Whittlesey a national hero. That adulation persisted in peacetime, a burden so depressing Whittlesey’s death in 1921 probably was a suicide. Karl Muck, celebrated conductor of Boston’s prestigious symphony, was born in Germany and unashamedly proud of his native culture. The wacky superpatriotism that swept the nation upon the declaration of war led to Muck’s pillorying when he did not open a 1917 concert with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Muck became the poster boy for what fantasist zealots believed to be a fifth column of German agents in America. After months of harassment authorities arrested and interned him—an 18-month confinement terminated in mid-1919 only after the conductor promised to self-deport. Clearly more bent on baseball than war, the authors devote more space to George Herman Ruth. The Babe had German ancestry and spoke that language. Nobody cared. In 1918 on the Boston roster, Ruth, baseball’s best left-handed pitcher, already was better known for hitting home Baby Babe runs. The war battered baseball as enlist- A young George ments and conscription jerked players into Herman Ruth in his days with the Sox, other uniforms. To avoid service, some big who owned the future leaguers took defense jobs, playing for phenom 1915-1920. industrial teams. Marriage shunted Ruth to a less eligible draft classification, and he never was called up. Fending off cries to shut down, team owners insisted ballgames stimulated civilian morale. Compromise produced a short season and the only September World Series. A colorful, definitely not nostalgic slice of American life a century ago. —Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Beantown as Battle Zone
War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War By Randy Roberts & Johnny Smith Basic, 2020; $30
APRIL 2021 69
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In the mid-20th century, Mike Nichols was a major force—arguably, the major force—in rearranging Americans’ standards for popular entertainment. First, he and Elaine May replaced the bing-bang-boom style of stand-up comedy with scripted sketches and improvisations finding the humor in awkward situations in which ordinary persons often find themselves. Next the duo proved that comedians could move their acts out of the clubs and onto Broadway and succeed with non-imbibing ticket buyers. Nichols and May turned that stage act into best-selling LPs. Nichols then took up directing. His first go on Mike Nichols: A Life Broadway, Neil Simon’s comedy Barefoot in the By Mark Harris Park, ran 1,530 performances, replacing that catPenguin 2021; $35 egory’s hoary zinger-ridden format with verisimilitude, generating laughs with the little odd things people really do in private. Moving to film, Nichols extracted an Oscar-winning performance from Elizabeth Taylor in the difficult lead role in 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and in 1967 again broke ground with The Graduate. A further dive into humor arising from alltoo-human foibles—and the year’s highest-grossing movie—The Graduate showed moviegoers to be eager for a new approach to comedy. Detailed decision-by-decision histories of how Nichols achieved each of those landmarks are among the highlights in Mark Harris’s comprehensive new biography. Harris tracks Nichols from his 1939 emigration
out of Nazi Berlin—at age 7, with only his younger brother for a traveling partner—to his death at 83 in 2014, along the way picking up an Academy Award and nine Tonys. Harris, who seems to have read every interview Nichols ever gave, artfully separates probable truth from tall tales Nichols spun to beguile interrogators. The author also draws on lengthy interviews he did with dozens of players in Nichols’s professional life, from big stars to script girls. As in his dissection of five movies in his penetrating 2008 Pictures at a Revolution, Harris illuminates the choices, the errors, and the unexpected breaks, good and bad, that resulted in what Nichols brought to screen and stage. The result is an impressive, and always readable, achievement that nonetheless leaves open the question of whether 660 pages is just too much Nicholsiana. And, despite its subtitle, Mike Nichols gives its subject’s personal life short shrift, focusing on the creation of 21 movies and 41 theater productions. That list includes pantheon-worthy masterpieces, but the sea of detail does get a bit numbing. —Daniel B. Moskowitz created the magazine’s SCOTUS 101 column.
JACK MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES
protean presence
On Broadway Nichols in 1976 on the set of David Rabe’s play “Streamers.”
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Coming in April from Gregory Lalire, the editor of
The most complete study ever compiled of films about the second World War, from those made even as the conflict loomed on the horizon, through the war years, and up until today for a full vision of the conflict that haunts and fascinates us still.
M AGAZ I N E
MAN FROM MONTANA JACK MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES
by Gregory J. Lalire
Available from Amazon.com: Volume I, ISBN: 1629335215 — Volume 2, ISBN: 1629335231 or directly from: bearmanormedia.com
THE LAST JAPANESE HOW MANY TIMES SOLDIER HAS THEFROM DESIGN WORLD OF THE WAR U.S.IIFLAG SURRENDERED CHANGED? IN THIS YEAR
This historical novel follows adventurer Woodie Hart to the 27, 31, 36 or 40? violent goldfields of what would - 1945 become Montana Territory. - 1947 Woodie discovers the boomtowns AHP-210400-001 of Virginia City, BannackDoug andBrode 'From Hell'.indd 1 - 1950 - 1974 Hell Gate and faces the twin terrors For more,search visitDAILY QUIZ of road agents looking to get rich For more, WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ quick and vigilantes intent on at HistoryNet.com. MAGAZINES/QUIZ dishing out cruel justice. PRICE: $25.95 / 370 PAGES HARDCOVER (5.5 X 8.5) / ISBN13: 9781432871178 TIFFANY.SCHOFIELD@CENGAGE.COM FACEBOOK & TWITTER: @FIVESTARCENGAGE
HistoryNet.com ANSWER: 1974. PRIVATE TERUO NAKAMURA, A TAIWANESE NATIONAL,27. ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943. ANSWER: THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN HE HELD OUT ON 1960 MORTAI IN INDONESIA HE WAS CAPTURED PLACE SINCE WHEN THE FLAGUNTIL WAS MODIFIED IN DECEMBER 1974. EARLIER THAT YEAR, HIRO ONODA, WHO TO INCLUDE THE 50thFINALLY STATE. SURRENDERED. HELD OUT INHAWAII, THE PHILLIPINES,
JACKET DESIGN BY KATHY HEMING
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…came into being in the 1600s, when Dutch farmers who had traded the Tappan Indians for land 15 miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan gave that tribe’s name to a hamlet they platted. On a lot he bought in 1754 on today’s Main Street, merchant Casparus Mabie opened Tappan’s first public house. During the Revolution, General George Washington, who occasionally quartered down the street in a residence that still stands, imbibed with his officers and local patriots at Mabie’s Inn. In September 1780, Major General Benedict Arnold conspired with Major John André, head of British intelligence in America, to surrender the fort Arnold commanded at West Point. André was upriver carrying plans for the deal when rebels captured him. Hauled before Washington in Tappan, André spent three days confined at Mabie’s awaiting a trial for espionage to be held in the Reformed Church across the way. Convicted, André was marched up the steep hill behind the sandstone tavern and hanged; a memorial marks the spot, now a suburban cul de sac. Mabie’s survives as the ’76 House, where patrons can toast or scorn André over a meticulously restored dark wood bar and Delft-tiled fireplace. —Jessica Wambach Brown writes from northwest Montana. Colliding Destinies At Tappan institutions Mabie’s, left, and the Reformed Church, John André’s life inched ever nearer to its violent end.
BRIAN LOGAN/DREAMSTIME; NEW YORK HERITAGE
Tappan, New York…
72 AMERICAN HISTORY
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Jackpot! Hoard of 1883-O Morgan Silver Dollars Found & Secured Mintage accounts for only 1.33% of all Morgan Silver Dollars Struck!
In 1859, Nevada’s Comstock Lode was discovered, and soon its rich silver ore made its way across the nation, including to the fabled New Orleans Mint, the only U.S. Mint branch to have served under the U.S. government, the State of Louisiana and the Confederacy. In 1883, some of that silver was struck into Morgan Silver Dollars, each featuring the mint’s iconic “O” mint mark. Now you have the chance to add these historic, 90% pure U.S. silver coins to your collection!
Scarce 1883-O Date
The Morgan Silver Dollar was struck from 1878 to 1904, and again in 1921. In the 100 years since, most of these beautiful U.S. Silver Dollars have been worn out or melted down for their silver. It’s estimated that as little as 15% of all Morgans struck exist today in any condition. Even fewer come from this particular mintage. Here’s the breakdown: in 1883, just 4.33% of the total Morgan series was struck. Less than a third of those coins came from New Orleans. In the end, the 1883-O Morgan Silver Dollar accounts for just 1.33% of the entire series—and that’s before the mass meltings that have left so few coins for collectors to secure. And we can expect that even fewer of the survivors are of collector grade...
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Historic Morgan Silver Dollars Minted in New Orleans 1883 date 138 years old 26.73 grams of 90% fine silver Hefty 38.1 mm diameter Certified collector Mint State-63
The Morgan Silver Dollar is the most popular and iconic vintage U.S. coin. They were the Silver Dollars of the Wild West, going on countless untold adventures in dusty saddlebags across the nation. Finding a hoard of Morgans doesn’t happen often—and when it does, it’s a big deal. So when we came across a recent hoard of 710 Morgan Silver Dollars—all struck at the historic New Orleans Mint in 1883—it was like hitting the jackpot!
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Look elsewhere and you’ll find 1883-O Morgans in the same MS63 graded condition selling for as much as $159. But you won’t pay that here. For this special offer, we’re offering these collector-grade, 1883-O Morgan Silver Dollars for just $99 per coin. That’s 138 years of American history for just 72 cents per year! The 1883-O Morgan Silver 1.33% of the entire series Dollar accounts for just 1.33% All Morgan of all Morgans Silver Dollars struck. Relatively few of these coins still exist in any condition, with even fewer Morgans certified by NGC or PCGS as MS63 condition. Don’t miss out. Call 1-888-324-9125 and use the special offer code below to secure yours today while our limited supply lasts!
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GovMint.com • 14101 Southcross Dr. W., Suite 175, Dept. MHG211-01, Burnsville, MN 55337 GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affiliated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2021 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.
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1/13/21 4:56 PM
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