American History Autumn 2022

The Grain Future’s Civil War Roots Avid Loyalist’s Bitter Fate The Our American Cousin Backstory Baseball’s Early Brush with Unions

FDR’s Purge

In 1938 Roosevelt went after conservative Democrats

Autumn 2022 HISTORYNET.com

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President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and unidentified companion at his Hyde Park, New York, home in the mid-1930s.

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Actor, producer, and impresario Laura Keene, left, made "Our American Cousin" an enduring hit.

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24 AUTUMN 2022 FEATURES

24 Urge to Purge

In 1938, FDR uncorked a campaign to defeat fellow Democrats who had bucked him. By John A. Riggs

32 Killer Cousin

The night of comic theatrical Americana that drew Abraham Lincoln to his doom has an extraordinary history. By Daniel B. Moskowitz

40 Playing Hardball

The Gilded Age saw baseball players sign up and line up on their own behalf against tyrannical team owners and leagues. By Peter Dreier and Robert Elias

48 The Loyalist

Not every colonial American supported the Revolution, and many of those who didn’t paid a fearsome price. By Jonathan House

56 Inventing the Future

Intent on securing the Union Army supply chain, a little-known Lincoln appointee created an innovative way to trade in grain. By Scott Reynolds Nelson

22

DEPARTMENTS

6

Mosaic

History in today’s headlines

12 Contributors 14 American Schemers

Madam Polly Adler made a name on the wrong side of the law.

16 Déjà Vu

Sometimes the job of leadership amounts to acting the part.

20 SCOTUS 101

In Worcester v. Georgia, the Court loosed a tide of tears.

22 Cameo

20 CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY; ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO; P5172, COLLECTION OF THE NEWPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY, COURTESY OF THE RHODE ISLAND BLACK HERITAGE SOCIETY; GETTY IMAGES SPORT; GRANGER, NY; COVER: FPG STAFF/GETTY IMAGES

Oysters were the basis of the Downing family’s success.

66 Reviews 72 An American Place

Mohonk Mountain House holds the old ways in high esteem.

An infielder's mitt manufactured circa 1890 illustrates the primitive conditions under which players toiled, on and off the baseball diamond.

—see page 40

ON THE COVER: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at his Hyde Park, New York, home with an unidentified friend and supporter in the mid-1930s.

AUTUMN 2022

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American History Online

MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER

Visit Historynet.com/AmericanHistory and search our archive for great stories like these:

AUTUMN 2022 VOL. 57, NO. 3

MICHAEL DOLAN EDITOR SARAH RICHARDSON SENIOR EDITOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP DESIGN DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JON C. BOCK ART DIRECTOR DANA B. SHOAF MANAGING EDITOR, PRINT MICHAEL Y. PARK MANAGING EDITOR, DIGITAL CLAIRE BARRETT NEWS AND SOCIAL EDITOR CORPORATE

Using imaging technology, scientists visualize what Manhattan looked like to Henry Hudson. /paradise-found/

Grabbing for the Gold

Railroad speculators Jay Gould and James Fisk amassed a fortune playing by their own set of rules. /gold-grab/

Hard-Rocking Cradle

Among shows the Federal Theatre Project funded, few were as memorable as an Orson Welles-produced musical "strike play" called "The Cradle Will Rock." /the-cradle-that-rocked-america/

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Mosaic

Belated Brigadier General Young

Parker, an escaped slave who ran a prosperous foundry near the Ohio River and had helped hundreds of enslaved people cross the river to freedom. Parker mentored and loaned books to Young, who excelled at Ripley’s high school, where he was the only Black student. Admiring his father’s service in the Union Army, Young took the exam to enter West Point in 1884, and, despite fellow cadets’ racist hostility, graduated in 1889.

After retirement, with the country at war, Young, who had asked that, if the army had no billet for him stateside, he be posted to France, was enlisted to train Black soldiers in Ohio for wartime duty.

His last posting, in 1920, was as military attaché to Liberia; he died on January 8, 1922, while visiting Lagos, Nigeria. Thousands welcomed the return of his remains to Washington, DC, in May 1923. On June 1, 1923, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His former colleague Du Bois eulogized him. In 2013, President Barack Obama proclaimed Young’s residence in Wilberforce, Ohio, the Charles Young National Buffalo Soldiers Monument.

Man of Parts Colonel Young was by turns a warrior, an educator, and a diplomat.

OPPOSITE PAGE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; THIS PAGE: STOCK MONTAGE/GETTY IMAGES; NOAA

A century after his death, U.S. Army Colonel Charles Young was promoted to brigadier general on April 29, 2022, the first Black elevated to that rank. During a remarkable life as a pioneer in the American military, Young was the third Black to graduate from West Point. He served in Nebraska as an officer in the all-Black 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments—the legendary “Buffalo Soldiers.” The first Black superintendent of a national park, he oversaw management and road construction in California’s Sequoia National Park. Fluent in six languages, Young was the nation’s first Black military attaché, serving in France, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Liberia.

While teaching military science at Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, he became friends with political scientist W.E.B. Du Bois and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The army retired Young in 1917, citing medical reasons that he dramatically but unsuccessfully disputed by riding 500 miles on horseback from Ohio to Washington, DC. Believing Young to have been long and unfairly denied promotions that would have placed him in command of White troops in the then-segregated army, greatniece Renotta Young and members of Omega Psi Phi fraternity, to which Young belonged, have been seeking a posthumous promotion for half a century, according to CNN. Born in Mays Lick, Kentucky, in 1864, to enslaved parents, Young grew up in nearby Ripley, Ohio.

Ripley also was home to John

by Sarah Richardson

6

AMERICAN HISTORY

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Whaling ship Industry sank in the Gulf of Mississippi when both masts broke in a storm on May 26, 1836. Originally spotted a decade ago during an energy company survey, the wreck was noticed again in February 2022. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed that the hulk is indeed a whaler. The vessel’s tryworks—huge iron cauldrons mounted on deck for rendering blubber into oil, are clearly visible. Westport, Massachusetts-built Industry, 64’ long, is the only whaling ship known to have sunk in the Gulf out of more than 200 whaling voyages there between the 1780s and 1870s.

Whaling was a popular trade among free Blacks and escaped slaves but whaling while Black in the Gulf of Mississippi was risky. Robin Winters, a librarian at Westport Free Library in that Massachusetts town recently found evidence that Industry’s entire crew was rescued by another whaler and returned to Westport. Those men’s identities are not known, but on previous voyages Industry’s crew included the son and son-in-law of Paul Cuffe, a Black whaler turned prominent shipbuilder, entrepreneur, and antislavery activist. The younger Cuffe had served as navigator, and the son-in-law was an officer.

“Today we celebrate the discovery of a lost ship that will help us better understand the rich story of how people of color succeeded as captains and crew members in the nascent American whaling industry of the early 1800s,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, PhD. “The discovery reflects how African Americans and Native Americans prospered in the ocean economy despite facing discrimination and other injustices.

It is also an example of how important partnerships of federal agencies and local communities are to uncovering and documenting our nation’s maritime history.”

Sunken Whaler Pinpointed

OPPOSITE PAGE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; THIS PAGE: STOCK MONTAGE/GETTY IMAGES; NOAA

Ben’s Bet In 1790, with death near, Benjamin Franklin put money on America’s workers. In a tacit rebuke to the University of Pennsylvania, the school he founded but which he felt had gone elitist, Franklin set aside money in his will to fund a centuries-long experiment in Boston and Philadelphia. Michael Meyers, in his new book, Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet: The Favorite Founder’s Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity, explains those undertakings. Each city received £1,000—today, $136,000—to be managed by volunteers. The funds’ managers were to disburse small loans to workers wishing to start businesses, as Franklin had.

Repayments were to go for “public works, which may be judged of most general utility to the inhabitants.” The arrangements took a while to gel and each city handled its bequest differently, but two major institutions emerged from the projects. Boston, with money from Franklin fund admirer Andrew Carnegie, established the Franklin Union school, whose students learn trades. Philadelphia built the Franklin Science Museum.

DNA Data Enhance Tribal Claim

Anchoring Evidence Cameras aboard a NOAA submersible documented Industry’s resting place.

State-mandated research at proposed utility building sites near San Francisco turned up DNA evidence from 2,000-year-old human remains linking the location to the Muwekma Ohlone tribe of Native Americans, Smithsonian Magazine reports. The Ohlone were living in coastal California as Europeans were settling there, but, over time forced to labor in Spanish missions and lacking immunity to Old World diseases such as smallpox, many died. The Indians’ numbers so dwindled that the federal government never formally acknowledged the Muwekma Ohlone, a step that confers tribal rights. Individuals of Muwekma Ohlone descent, knowing two sites to be related to their history, had suggested studying the locations. Discovery of human remains led to a match with DNA from living Ohlone, strengthening the group’s decades-old claim to tribal standing.

AUTUMN 2022

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The National Park Service has added 16 sites in 11 states to the Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a collection of locations designated to honor individuals and places involved in enslaved people’s flight to freedom. The newly added sites range from burial grounds of escaped slaves in Detroit, Michigan, to commemoration of individuals enslaved on the Mackall Plantation at St. Mary’s City, Maryland, who freed themselves by escaping to volunteer with British troops in the War of 1812. The Network to Freedom, established in 1998, now counts more than 700 sites. An interactive map may be accessed at bit.ly/3N4TSSx. The network’s 2022 expansion coincides with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Harriet Tubman, who guided some 70 enslaved relatives and friends from Maryland to freedom. Bicycle tours to network sites are available at adventurecycling.org. Sites associated with the Underground Railroad may apply for inclusion on the map and related resources at bit.ly/3NaFJTO.

Freedom Train Site Tally Tops 700

A 7’ statue of Thomas Jefferson displayed in the New York City Council chambers for more than a century now stands at the New-York Historical Society. Council members requested that the figure be displayed where Jefferson’s legacy as a slaveholder can be addressed. Created by French artist Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, the sculpture is the plaster original from which was cast a bronze of Jefferson displayed in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol since Uriah Levy donated it in 1834. Levy, the U.S. Navy’s first Jewish commodore, had commissioned the statue to honor the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s commitment to religious freedom. Levy’s interest in Jefferson extended to Jefferson’s mountaintop home, Monticello. Levy bought the property, which had fallen into disrepair, in 1834 and worked to restore the residence although he seldom lived there, owing to his naval career and business interests in New York City.

8

At St. Mary’s City, Maryland, a “cabin” invokes the memory of enslaved people who lived there.

In 1626, Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford recorded details of a shipwreck off Cape Cod that had occasioned the rescue of two English merchants and several indentured Irishmen who were passengers on the vessel. The likely location of the hulk—referred to as the Sparrow-Hawk and the oldest known colonial shipwreck in North America—came to public notice in 1863 when a storm revealed a surprisingly intact frame that was relocated in 1889 to a local museum. The wreck’s location jibed with what Bradford had written. A recent study, published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, firms up the hypothesis. Using tree rings to date the ship’s timbers, researchers found a match for oaks and elms lumbered in southern England between 1556 and 1646. The Irish indentures were rescued by the Nauset, a local tribe whose members knew some English. The workers stayed a year with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony before heading to Virginia for work on tobacco farms.

Jamestown, Virginia, had been the doomed ship’s destination.

1626 Shipwreck Confirmed

NEW YORK TIMES; NPS PHOTO

Jefferson Statue Relocated

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Will Minnesota Reflag?

Minnesotans may adopt a new flag.

Objections have arisen to the state flag, originally adopted in 1893. The main visual element depicts a farmer plowing a field while a Native American on horseback rides into the sunset. Critics say the graphic suggests Native Americans are fleeing—an image softer than that adopted in 1893 and picturing a rifle and powder horn near the farmer. Those ominous touches were removed in 1983.

An alternate design, the “North Star” flag, is a simple tricolor with a star at its center. “L’Étoile du Nord,” French for the North Star, is Minnesota’s state motto.

In recent decades, researchers have come to understand that Native Americans skillfully managed land and its resources, such as using fire to create open spaces attractive to game; promoting growth of useful grasses; reducing pests; and creating trails. A study in the Klamath Mountains of northern California—above, the Trinity River there—has found that forest cover in the vicinity is dramatically denser than during a millennium of Native American management. Researchers counted fire scars on trees and examined growth rings. Sediment cores from the bottoms of two lakes in western National Klamath Forest collected charcoal residue and tree pollen on which to base a portrait of ancient and modern forest composition. Conclusion: the forest is not only thicker now than under Native management but also different in composition, with fire-resistant oaks and maples scarcer and flammable Douglas firs more prevalent. The Karuk and Yurok tribes traditionally managed forests by selective burning. The Karuk are partnering with the U.S. Forest Service and other entities on the Klamath Restoration Project, aimed at implementing techniques based on Indian methods.

10

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HOUSE IMAGE; ALPHA STOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; CHRISTIE’S IMAGES

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Read On! Back in the USSR

House Nelson

Elias

Dreier

Moskowitz

Riggs

Peter Dreier (“Playing Hardball,” p. 40) is Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and founding chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.

His most recent books, coauthored with Robert Elias, are Baseball Rebels: The Players, People and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America (University of Nebraska, 2022) and Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles Over Workers’ Rights and American Empire (Roman & Littlefield, 2022). “Playing HardContributors ball” coauthor Robert Elias is Dean’s Scholar and Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at the University of San Francisco. His 11 books include The Empire Strikes Out, Baseball and the American Dream, The Deadly Tools of Ignorance, and The Politics of Victimization. He’s writing a biography of Danny Gardella, one of the first major league baseball players to challenge the reserve clause, for the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jonathan House (“Loyalist,” p. 48) is a Washington, DC-based writer whose topics include the experiences of women during the American Revolution. His most recent article in these pages was “Camp Follower” (December 2020).

Besides writing the SCOTUS 101 column, Daniel B. Moskowitz, an ardent theatergoer, regularly contributes features such as “Killer Cousin” (p. 32) along with a steady stream of reviews.

Scott Reynolds Nelson, who is Athletic Association Professor of History at the University of Georgia at Athens, adapted material from his new book, Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World (Basic, 2022), to write “Inventing the Future” (p. 56). He also is the author of Steel-Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend; A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters; and other books. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

John A. Riggs (“Urge to Purge,” p. 24) is the author of High Tension: FDR’s Battle to Power America. He has been an assistant secretary at the Department of Energy, staff director of a Congressional energy subcommittee, and director of the Aspen Institute’s Energy and Environment Program. His most recent article was “Electric Warriors” (February 2021).

12

Thanks for the timely memoir by Albert Schmidt (“Cold War Chronicle,” June 2022). It was of particular interest to me as in 1989 I visited Moscow and St. Petersburg with my Soviet history students and last month read Amor Towles’s novel A Gentleman in Moscow. By ’89 things had changed considerably from 1961; the wheels were about to come off the Soviet machine.

Daniel F. Rulli Alta Loma, California

Letters

Dear American History readers: Beginning with this issue, American History is moving to a quarterly publication schedule. But worry not: existing subscriptions will be extended, so you’ll get all the issues you paid for.

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That Summer Feeling Adler, bottom, with business partner Edna Kirkwood and an unnamed gal pal at Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey in 1923.

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Of course, some customers complained. Joe DiMaggio grumbled about Polly’s trademark silk sheets, claiming they were so smooth he couldn’t maintain proper traction while in action.

Running whorehouses is an unsavory profession illegal in most jurisdictions, but Adler rode the red-light path from poverty to Manhattan’s highest social, literary, and theatrical worlds.

“Polly was young, hip and funny,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Debby Applegate wrote in Madam, her superb recent biography. “There was prestige in patronizing Polly’s: her sky-high prices and exclusivity were proof that a man had connections and plenty of dough to burn.”

She was born in Yanow, Russia, in 1900, eldest child of a Jewish tailor, and grew up amid brutal

AMERICAN HISTORY

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FROM THE POLLY ADLER COLLECTION COURTESY OF ELEANOR VERA

“I WAS DETERMINED,” Polly Adler declared, “to be the best goddam madam in all America.” A questionable goal, perhaps, but one that Adler unquestionably attained. From the Roaring Twenties through World War II, the Russian-born entrepreneur ran a series of high-end Manhattan brothels with a charismatic pizzazz that made her a legend and earned her reams of praise from her establishment’s many famous customers.

“She was a petite, gregarious lady with great charm, whom everybody loved,” said bandleader Duke Ellington.

“The world knew Polly as a madam,” said comedian Milton Berle, “but her friends knew her as an intelligent woman, fun to be with, and a good cook.”

Gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano hailed Adler for helping to preserve traditional, old-fashioned sex. “I didn’t go for any of that leather and whip crap,” Luciano said. “I liked good-looking girls who could screw good and that’s what Polly always sent me.”

FROM THE POLLY ADLER COLLECTION COURTESY OF ELEANOR VERA

by Peter Carlson

anti-Semitic pogroms. In 1913, her father sent her to accompany a cousin with a ticket to America. But the cousin got scared and refused to board the ship, so Polly sailed alone, arriving with only the clothes she’d stuffed into a potato sack.

Heading to Springfield, Massachusetts, Adler roomed with a family friend who’d agreed to care for her. She excelled in school, but her guardian demanded she pay her way, so she dropped out and went to work making envelopes. She hated the job and fled to a relative’s home in Brooklyn, laboring in a corset factory for $5 a week.

The foreman invited her on a date, then raped her. She got pregnant and spent her life savings on an abortion. “I had lost my virginity, my reputation and my job,” she wrote.

She was 18 when she moved to Manhattan in 1919 to spend her nights in Broadway dance halls catering to men willing to spend money on dancing girls. For the rest of her life, she was coy about turning tricks, self-deprecatingly dismissing the subject.

“I had to be a madam,” she’d say. “I was never pretty enough to be a hustler.”

She became a madam in 1920, as Prohibition was kicking off a decade-long national bacchanal. A pimp offered her an arrangement involving an apartment near Columbia University where he entertained his mistress.

When he wasn’t using the place, he said, Adler could run it as a whorehouse.

“I jumped at his offer,” she recalled.

To staff the joint, she recruited Broadway girlfriends and then trolled dance halls and speakeasies looking for men looking for a good time.

“It wasn’t long before three girls were coming in several nights a week to entertain acquaintances I had made along the Great White Way.” Success kept her moving her operation to larger, fancier apartments. She hired beautiful women, including Ziegfeld Follies showgirls eager to earn extra dough. Her big break came in 1923, when gangster “Smiling George” McManus—proprietor of Manhattan’s famous high-stakes floating crap game—began bringing winners to Polly’s to celebrate. “Whoever won the crap game paid the bill,” she wrote. Soon her pad, with its bar and bedrooms, had become a hangout for mobsters—“a sort of combination club and speakeasy,” she joked, “with a harem conveniently handy.”

Gangsters ran showbiz during Prohibition, enlivening their speakeasies by hiring jazz bands and comedians, and those entertainers began falling by Polly’s place. So did writers—playwright George S. Kaufman, humorist Robert Benchley, and Benchley’s friend Dorothy Parker, who played backgammon with Polly while her male colleagues cavorted with Adler’s employees.

Polly became so famous that columnist Walter Winchell quoted the line she uttered in her Russian accent whenever a customer paid his bill: “It’s allvays a business doing pleasure mit you.”

Adler enjoyed the notoriety; it was good for business. “I wanted my name to be a byword and the expression ‘going to Polly’s’ a euphemism for the world’s most popular indoor sport,” she said. Promoting an illegal service is

FROM THE POLLY ADLER COLLECTION COURTESY OF ELEANOR VERA

FROM THE POLLY ADLER COLLECTION COURTESY OF ELEANOR VERA

Adler made the leap from dance hall hostess to madam when a pimp pal said she could use his pad as a setting for a bordello.

Keeping it Real Adler, at left decked out for the 1927 Dempsey-Tunney heavyweight fight in Chicago, often explained that she had to become a madam “because I wasn’t pretty enough to be a hustler.” tricky but Adler found a way. She’d ostentatiously parade her hottest girls into championship boxing matches and trendy speakeasies, then discreetly hand around business cards showing only a picture of a parrot and a phone number.

In August 1924, seeking to attract old Manhattan money, Polly brought a bevy of beauties upstate to Saratoga Springs, where patricians gathered for the thoroughbred racing season.

The angle worked. “At last I’d made contact with the clientele I’d been looking for,” Adler recalled.

Years later, one of her blueblood customers, John Hay “Jock” Whitney—heir to one of America’s largest fortunes and a future ambassador to England—urged Polly to upgrade her operation from its latest location on seedy West 54th Street to the opulent East Side. Whitney even helped her find an elegant 12-room set of digs on Madison Avenue. The apartment featured a dining room seating 50 and a wood-paneled library that Dorothy Parker stocked with good books, many written by customers.

Polly prospered for another decade, investing her profits in stocks. But she wearied of the grind.

Working long days and longer nights for 25 years, she’d been robbed, slugged by drunks, arrested a dozen times, and denounced in headlines as “New York’s Vice Queen.” In 1945, she decided it was time to retire.

She moved to Los Angeles, bought a two-bedroom bungalow, adopted poodles, and cultivated roses. She earned a high school diploma then enrolled in Los Angeles City College, eventually earning a degree in English and on the way writing an autobiography. A House is Not a Home, published in 1953, reached #2 on The New York Times bestseller list, just below Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. The paperback edition sold two million copies; Shelley Winters starred in a tepid movie version.

In 1955—seven years before her death—Adler traveled to Europe and Israel to promote French and Hebrew editions of House. Interviewed in Paris, she proved she still had a genius for salesmanship. Whenever cops raided whorehouses in California, she bragged, they found her memoir on many a hooker’s nightstand: “It’s kind of like a Gideon Bible to many of the girls.” H AUTUMN 2022

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Hitting His Marks California governor and future two-term U.S. president Ronald Reagan in 1968. His years acting in front of cameras shaped his public persona.

Thespians in Chief AMERICANS HAVE FINALLY FOUND A POLITICIAN they can admire—Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Since Russia invaded his country on February 24, 2022, Zelensky has blanketed the news, a model of patriotism, toughness, humanity, even humor.

Whether inspiring his people, mourning the dead, or lecturing the world, Zelensky has seemed made for his moment.

He prepped for his job by playing it on Ukrainian television. From 2015 to 2019 he starred in Servant of the People, a satirical series in which a high school teacher gets elected president after an anti-corruption rant he delivers in class goes viral. In 2019 the entertainer ran for president for real and won.

Americans of all people should not be surprised by the arc of Zelensky’s career. Our 40th president, Ronald Reagan, starred in Hollywood before he ascended to the White House. But he was not the only American politician to savor and master the dramatic arts. As biographer Noemie Emery put it, Reagan was not our first actor president—though he was the first to have acted in movies for money.

The first thespian-in-chief was that figure of so many firsts, George Washington. He brought several sets of skills to his role as America’s

Déjà Vu

16

leading man. First was a fan’s appreciation of the craft. Washington had a lifelong love of the theater, soaking up any performance that came his way, from puppet shows to Shakespeare. Theatrical metaphors dot his writing.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, in a letter to Lafayette, Washington compared his new country to an actor “treading this boundless theater”— that is, the world stage. On his last day as president, writing to Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull, Washington compared himself to an actor about to make his exit: “The curtain drops on my political life…this evening, I expect for ever.”

Washington lacked certain qualities we associate with performers—he was neither eloquent nor witty—but he brought other natural endowments to the job. He was tall and imposing, assets he emphasized with his posture, his composure, and, as a soldier, his uniforms, typically of his own

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

by Richard Brookhiser

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design. His presence astride a horse—where most people saw him—enhanced the overall effect.

Thomas Jefferson, himself no mean equestrian, called Washington “the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback.”

Washington made use of the late 18th century’s understanding of the word character.

We think of character, good or bad, as internal.

But to Washington and contemporaries, character was how you carried yourself. Character was “a persona that one deliberately selected and always wore,” historian Forrest McDonald explained. “If one chose a character that one could play comfortably and played it long enough and well enough, by degrees it became a ‘second nature.’” Every man— and woman—was a character actor. Washington simply was aiming to get top billing.

Abraham Lincoln, like Washington, was a playgoer. He adored Shakespeare and was of course murdered at the theater—by an actor (see “Killer Cousin,” p. 58). But Lincoln had to adapt the role of president to his own talents—and lack thereof. He did not obviously look the part. He was tall and strong but his frame was gangly, topped by a face as homely as a shovel, especially after he grew that unfortunate beard.

Like many a funny-looking person, Lincoln decided early on to be funny, and became a master storyteller known for his humorous bits. He learned at home: his father Thomas, whom young Abe did not particularly like, was a fine yarn spinner. Lincoln the lawyer used stories to win over juries, and as a politician to woo audiences, repeating some tales so often they were known as Lincolnisms. He also used loquacity to keep people at bay. Leonard Swett, an Illinois crony, described him fending off importuning jobseekers during the interval between his first election and his first inauguration: “He told them all a story, said nothing, and sent them away.”

As he entered middle age, and the country entered the home stretch to civil war, Lincoln still used humor—his favorite answer to Democratic charges that the new Republican party believed in race mixing was that just because he didn’t want a Black woman for a slave did not mean that he wanted her for a wife: he could just leave her alone. But he also began to rely on elevated rhetoric drawn from Shakespeare and the Bible. Lincoln was no orthodox Christian, but like every Protestant American he had been reading and hearing the King James Version all his life. By the time he reached the

Like many a funnylooking person, Abe Lincoln decided early on to be funny and became a master storyteller.

18

White House he could channel it, from musical effects (the Gettysburg Address phrase “four score and seven years” echoes Psalm 90, “the days of our lives are three score years and ten”) to expatiating on the Almighty’s will (his Second Inaugural address offered a war-torn nation Psalm 19: “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether”). In our time, actor Jim Caviezel has played Christ; Lincoln could play God the Father.

Franklin Roosevelt made his run for the White House in a wheelchair, albeit one concealed from the public. He brought to his auditions a good profile—the dime carrying his image is our most attractive coin—and a million-dollar smile: just what America needed in the depths of the Depression. FDR also brought a melodious tenor voice, well suited to the new medium of radio. His accent—an amalgam of New England r-dropping (he was a Groton/Harvard alum) and haute WASP pseudo-Brit—strikes our ears as too theatrically rich by half. But listeners of his time heard the tones of a genial aristo. FDR emphasized the friendliness by using simple constructions and contractions; one speechwriter who helped him dial it down was Broadway scribe Robert Sherwood. Radio itself made FDR seem friendly: he called his periodic addresses “fireside chats” because they came into homes through consoles by his listeners’ firesides—or stoves, or radiators.

One of Roosevelt’s last performances was a live marathon. His fourth run for president in 1944 was dogged by rumors about his ill health. To refute the chatter, he made an all-day campaign swing that October in an open car, in pouring rain, through four of New York City’s five boroughs, ending with an appearance at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. A mid-ride change of clothes and a shot of bourbon kept him going. He died six months later; the rumors of bad health had been true. But only after he had won his race.

Our most recent performer president was Donald Trump. Unlike Zelensky, Trump never played a national leader. But he did play a CEO on 14 seasons of The Apprentice—a run which, along with his last-century books on his career as a real estate mogul, accustomed Americans to him being presented as being in charge. No matter that his real estate deals often went sour or that The Apprentice dealt in scripted stakes: the show went on.

Zelensky won Ukraine’s presidency as a corruption fighter. He now finds himself fighting a sadistic superpower. The role of a lifetime may become the role of his deathtime. In real life, scripts change without warning. H

MPI/GETTY IMAGES

When in Doubt, Act the Leader George Washington, here on July 15, 1776, accepting command of the Continental Army, long harbored an appreciation for dramatics.

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Winning But Still Losing Worcester established Native American tribal sovereignty but the Cherokee nonetheless were uprooted from their historical lands.

Tearful Traces

20

notion of real estate ownership as historically understood under Anglo-Saxon law.

Those cases all involved competing claims by American citizens who had purchased Indian land, not the tribes themselves. Finally in 1831 the Cherokee Nation got the high court to consider a case to which that tribe was a party—a challenge to a land grab by the state of Georgia.

After gold was discovered on Cherokee land in 1828, Georgia intensified an existing campaign to get the Indians to move west. Legislators passed a series of laws confiscating Indian land, nullifying Cherokee law within those parcels, and forbidding meetings of the Cherokee legislative council.

The Supreme Court took the tribe’s case contesting the Georgia laws as having no constitutional basis. The high court’s opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Marshall, acknowledged that the

AMERICAN HISTORY

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

DURING ITS FIRST DECADES, the United States Supreme Court struggled mightily to define the legal status of Indian tribes and their land claims. “Their Worcester v. story is that of courts caught in a collision between law Georgia, 31 U.S. and morality on the one hand, desire and force on the (6 Pet.) 515 (1832) other,” retired Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a treaDefining tribal tise on those cases. “That story forces us to examine sovereignty in the the relation between law and politics.”

United States The litigation reached its apex in 1832 in Worcester v. Georgia; the Justices made clear that dealing with the Indians was the sole province of the federal government. The ruling in Worcester not only marked a major legal victory for the Indians— although one giving tribes no immediate help—but also was a decision that brought the reputation of the Supreme Court to its nadir. Miraculously, the court quickly bounced back.

In the earlier series of related cases the Justices suggested—incorrectly—that the Indians did not cultivate or settle on their lands, rendering their title to the property more a permission to hunt than the

Scotus 101

GRANGER, NYC

by Daniel B. Moskowitz

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

GRANGER, NYC

Cherokee had a strong case, but gave the Indians no solace. The holding: the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to settle the dispute. The Cherokee had invoked the Court’s authority over suits involving foreign nations, but Marshall insisted Indians constituted not a foreign nation but a “domestic dependent nation,” akin to wards, with the federal government as their guardian.

The Cherokees’ lawyer was William Wirt, a former U.S. Attorney General. Wirt wasn’t ready to give up and searched for a case the Justices would have to give full consideration. He found one among the Georgia laws meant to so squeeze the Cherokees that they would leave the state; the legislation denied non-Indians the right to live on reservations unless they swore to support all the state’s laws. Eleven misWilliam sionaries who were working Wirt among the Cherokee refused to take the oath, and were prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to prison at hard labor. Nine accepted an offer from the governor of a pardon in return for taking the oath.

The other two—Samuel Worcester and Elizer Butler—were encouraged to stand firm as a way to set up a legal challenge to the Georgia laws.

The missionary group for which the pair worked assured them that “the most intelligent members of Congress are of the opinion that the Supreme Court will sustain the Indians and that the people of the U.S. will yield and a settlement will be made....This is of immense importance to this country and to the civilized world.”

By going to prison, Worcester and Butler set the stage for Wirt to mount a case the Justices could not sidestep. Georgia insisted that the Supreme Court’s involvement amounted to “an unconstitutional and arbitrary interference” in state authority and refused to appear to defend the laws, but in February 1832 the Justices heard three days of arguments. The case riveted Washington; so many members of Congress came to the courtroom to hear the oral arguments that the House had to postpone its session. Wirt noted that the Cherokee held their lands under treaties with the federal government—in effect a contract—and that prior cases had established that a state cannot ignore or amend a valid contract.

Six of the seven Justices accepted Wirt’s argument. Just ten days after the arguments, Chief Justice John Marshall spent 75 minutes reading the opinion aloud in open court.

Marshall made three basic points: the statute under which Georgia imprisoned Worcester and

Butler was invalid and “repugnant to the constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States;” the defendants were therefore cleared of all criminal charges and lower court decisions upholding those convictions were overturned; and the Cherokee Nation occupied its own territory “in which the laws of Georgia have no force.”

The Justices well understood that they had taken a legal and moral stance but had no power to enforce what would be in some quarters a very unpopular decision. “Thanks be to God, the Court can wash their hands clean of the inequity of oppressing the Indians and disregarding their rights,” Justice Joseph Story wrote his wife shortly after the decision was announced. “The Court has done its duty. Let the Nation now do theirs.”

The nation, personified by the administration of President Andrew Jackson, had no such intention. Jackson, a committed advocate of moving the Cherokee westward, was disinclined to face down Georgia, which threatened to quit the Union rather than accede to the Court’s ruling. Jackson flatly refused to obey a Supreme Court order to effect the release of Worcester and Butler, shaming the judiciary as a toothless, politically flaccid branch of government. The court’s image plunged.

And the Cherokee, despite winning their legal battle, lost the political war. In a phony conclave in late 1835, a few hundred Cherokee (none in any way officially chosen to represent the tribe’s Georgia population of 17,000) signed a treaty agreeing to move west. The Senate endorsed that instrument, and Jackson authorized the Army to enforce the deal. Some 3,500 Indians died on the 5,000-mile trek to what is now Oklahoma along what became known as the “Trail of Tears.”

The outcome turned out to be better for the Supreme Court. Its image—and power—decisively rebounded the year after the Justices issued their Worcester decision. That turnaround had a totally unexpected source. Congress had, starting in 1816, been incrementally raising tariff rates, and finally in 1832 South Carolina passed an Ordinance of Nullification saying that that state considered the tariffs inoperative within its borders, and if the federal government tried to collect those fees the state would secede. Jackson could not let an individual state dictate national policy, and quickly requested—and got—legislation giving him the clear power to stop South Carolina from interfering with federal customs officials.

To persuade Congress to act, Jackson promised to enforce any Supreme Court decision finding a state action unconstitutional. That meant he could not continue to ignore the Worcester decision, and so he pressured Georgia to pardon the prisoners and persuaded Worcester and Butler to accept, thereby writing an end to the case.

The ensuing congressional action not only strengthened the Jackson administration’s hand but also expanded courts’ jurisdiction to hear cases involving tax collecting and smoothed the way for appealing state court decisions to federal courts. South Carolina’s threat had made the American public see the need for a strong national government comprising three powerful branches. As Charles Warren wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1922 book, The Supreme Court in United States History, “The Court, which had done so much to establish such supremacy, now found itself in a stronger position than it had been for the past fifteen years.” H

Forced to trek the 5,000-mile “Trail of Tears” that carried them to Oklahoma, some 3,500 displaced Cherokees died.

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establishing an elegant Manhattan oyster bar that elite Whites came to favor. His establishment, at Broad Street and Wall, faced the New York Stock Exchange, guaranteeing a stream of customers preferring to gulp oysters in a setting more lavish than the rough cellars in which most workers washed down their oysters with beer.

Though remarkably well known as a restaurateur and caterer, Downing pursued another career to which he was equally committed: civil rights activist. He and his son George became unusually prominent and prosperous—and also emerged as unstinting advocates for the aboli-

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A WONDER OF THE NEW WORLD, the vast oyster beds supported by the great estuaries of the mid-Atlantic shore allowed free Blacks—and fugitive slaves—to carve out less-surveilled lives as self-employed watermen. These aquatic entrepreneurs included Thomas Downing, born in Chincoteague, Virginia, in 1791 to parents who were freed after their owner converted to Methodism (“Rehearsal for Rebellion,” June 2022). At 21, Thomas headed north, first to Philadelphia and then to Manhattan.

The New York diet so celebrated the oyster that locals called shellfish-bearing outcroppings in the harbor Great Oyster Island and Little Oyster Island, later renamed Liberty Island, site of the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, scene of immigrant processing. Downing started out oystering, but soon showed a landward entrepreneurial streak,

P5172, COLLECTION OF THE NEWPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY, COURTESY OF THE RHODE ISLAND BLACK HERITAGE SOCIETY

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meet enlistment quotas. Massachusetts Govertion of slavery and the equality of Blacks and Whites.

In 1836, Thomas Downing cofounded the Antislavery Society in New nor John Andrew offered George Downing a York City, and in the damp cellar where he stored shellfish he sometimes colonelcy in a colored militia; Downing refused harbored fugitive slaves. In 1836, he presented a 20’ long, 620-signature unless the term “colored” was stricken from the petition to legislators in Albany asking that New York State grant voting unit’s name. The governor acceded. For years, rights to all “without distinction of color.”

George emulated his father, encouraging educaThe gesture failed. Downing founded schools tion and doggedly campaigning to desegregate Stepping Up for Blacks in New York City, also trying but fail- schools in Rhode Island. After nearly a decade of George T. Downing, ing to get New Haven, Connecticut, to permit a effort, his campaign ended in 1866—with success. center, carried on his In February 1866, Downing, as head of the father’s business acumen college for Blacks to open there. He was among many Blacks to challenge segregation as prac- National Convention of Colored Men, led a group and civil rights activism.

His resort helped make ticed on streetcars in New York City, and one of of distinguished personages, including Frederick Newport, Rhode Island, two confrontations over that matter left him Douglass, to meet with President Andrew Johna tourist destination and with cuts to his ears and a badly bruised and son to ask Johnson’s support for Black suffrage he helped desegregate swollen leg. He could be prickly, refusing in and equal rights. In the grip of the puzzling that state’s schools.

1860, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott notion that freed Blacks somehow were aligned decision declaring Blacks to be non-citizens, to tell a census-taker his real with wealthy Whites against poor Whites, Johnestate’s value, noting that property could not own property. Nonetheless, son dismissed the requests. The petitioners used Downing managed to balance activism, enterprise, and generosity, and is the encounter to highlight the hollowness of credited with quietly loaning his White customer Gordon Thomas Bennett, Johnson’s stance on Black equality. publisher of the New York Herald, money to keep Bennett’s paper running.

In 1868, through his friendship with Charles Thomas Downing died in 1866, and obituaries nationwide celebrated his Sumner, George Downing got the contract to run equanimity, dignity, and industry. Black abolitionist the U.S. Capitol cafeteria, widening and Martin Delany described him: “Benevolent, kind, and strengthening his contact with promiliberal minded, his head was always willing, his heart nent politicians—and prompting the ready, and his hands open to give.” New York’s ChamKu Klux Klan to threaten him by letter. ber of Commerce closed for a day in his honor.

The elder Downing quipped to the Downing and his wife had five children. One, George Providence Free Press in 1864 that in the 46 years he spent building his oysThomas, developed an even bolder profile than his father in business as well as in activism. He attended ter business, he “gave my boys an eduone of a handful of African Free Schools in Manhattan cation and they got out on Wall Street and, at age 14, created a discussion group on how to and caught the bad habits of white peoimprove Blacks’ lives. Attending Hamilton College in ple. They would be politicians. It is not upstate New York, he met his future wife, Serena my fault but that of white people.”

DeGrasse, enrolled at a female seminary nearby. Their Over time oysters had faded as a wedding in 1841 joined the Downing family to another path to prosperity. The window for of distinctive pedigree: one DeGrasse ancestor was an Black success in that industry closed as immigrant from India who arrived as adopted son of shellfish beds were privatized, a mechRevolutionary War Admiral Comte François Joseph anized dredging technique took hold, Masses of Mollusks Paul DeGrasse; another was Abraham Van Salee, one and a flood of industrial waste fouled Thomas Downing packed of two sons of a Dutch seafarer turned Moroccan New York City’s waters. By 1927, polluoysters into stoneware admiral. Likely born to an African woman, the young tion had gotten so bad that the local crocks that bore the Broad Street address of men emigrated to New Amsterdam around 1630. oyster trade was banned. The Downing his establishment.

Anthony, the younger son, tangled with locals and was children moved into other occupaexiled to Brooklyn, where he was an early settler. tions. Son Philip became an inventor; In 1850, with his father, George Downing formed the Committee of 13 to his best-known creation is the U.S. Postal Service oppose the seizure of escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law. By then, mailbox, unchanged from his original design.

George had extended his father’s business into Providence and Newport, George Thomas Downing died in 1903 in NewRhode Island. Around 1855 George built a resort that—despite a suspected port, where Downing Street honors his 1854 arson—helped Newport’s nascent tourist trade take root and flourish. donation to help buy land for Touro Park.

George Downing counted among his friends and correspondents aboliIn an 1892 letter Frederick Douglass had writtionists Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Gerritt Smith, and U.S. Senator ten to his friend, “Our lives have been long in the Charles Sumner. A year after John Brown was hanged, Downing sponsored land and we have both done something to leave a commemorative event in Boston. Though threatened by a mob, he did not the world better than we found it.” flinch. During the Civil War, he was among a handful of highly effective Shortly before his death, George Downing was Union Army recruiters highlighting the need and opportunity for Blacks to talking with churchmen. “I was a fighter as well enlist. Downing and other private recruiters were key to filling musters in as an urger,” he told them, pointing to a picture of some states because unlike state workers they could cross state lines to his father. “I owe it all to that man.” H AUTUMN 2022

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Urge to Purge In 1938 FDR tried to oust “disloyal” Democrats

By John A. Riggs

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Oracle or Over-Reacher?

FDR at his 1937 inauguration, shortly before the rumpus over his proposal to enlarge the U.S. Supreme Court.

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IN MARCH 1933, WITH THE ECONOMY IN FREE FALL and multiple banks failing every day, Roosevelt acted quickly and decisively. He summoned Congress for a three-month special session, which led to his famous “First Hundred Days” of legislative action. Two days after taking office he imposed a bank holiday, and three days later, by voice vote, Congress passed his Emergency Banking Act. Reassured by the president’s first “fireside chat” explaining that their deposits would be insured, people retrieved their money from under mattresses and deposited that cash in banks.

Civilian Conservation Corps job creation, Agricultural Adjustment Act farm subsidies, Tennessee Valley Authority dam construction, and wage

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and price regulation by the National Recovery Administration were sponsored under laws enacted early on. Social Security for the elderly and the Rural Electrification Act for farmers followed. With an enhanced Democratic majority in Congress after the 1934 mid-terms, FDR continued to focus on economic recovery while also stressing economic reform.

From the beginning, Roosevelt had been able to score some of his progressive victories thanks to support reluctantly lent by certain conservative Democratic senators and despite outright opposition by others. But solons running for re-election in 1936 avoided publicly criticizing Roosevelt and happily rode those long coattails. He defeated Alf Landon in the most resounding presidential election victory since James Monroe ran virtually unopposed in 1820. Already large Democratic majorities in Congress swelled.

WINNING EVERY STATE except Maine and Vermont, Roosevelt believed he enjoyed a resounding mandate for his progressive initiatives. His agenda was far from implemented, and, declaring in his 1937 inaugural address, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” he signaled a

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resident Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933 in the depths of the Depression. Virtually all of FDR’s major New Deal programs were enacted during his first term. An improving economy added to his popularity. The 1934 mid-term elections enhanced his Democratic Congressional majorities, and his landslide re-election and long coattails in 1936 brought the United States closer to one-party government than the republic had been since Reconstruction. But events that occurred during Roosevelt’s second term, notably the defeat of his 1937 proposal to add justices to the U.S. Supreme Court (see “Unpacked,” p.

30), emboldened Democratic critics. Conservative Democrats began to be more critical of FDR’s progressive agenda, inflicting his first significant legislative defeats. Roosevelt’s solution, “primarying” disloyal Democrats in the 1938 election by endorsing their more progressive opponents, proved to be a political blunder second only to his Court enlargement proposal.

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Happier Days Gone By FDR in Savannah, Georgia, marking the city’s 1933 bicentennial. From left: Roosevelt; Mayor Thomas Gamble; Sara Delano Roosevelt, the president’s mother; and Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge. Man in front seat is unidentified.

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Coattails, Conflict determination to push to obtain additional assisRoosevelt’s landslide tance for the poor and unemployed.

1936 victory over After his Court-packing bill flopped, other Alf Landon greatly setbacks followed. The Fair Labor Standards expanded Democratic bill, designed to raise starvation wages, was control of the Hill but buried. That measure would have particularly his attempt to enlarge benefited the South, but many Whites there the Supreme Court turned out to be a step opposed the bill in part because it would have too far for his party. included Blacks. Passed by the Senate late in July 1937, the labor standards bill was bottled up by the House Rules Committee. That panel’s chair, John O’Connor, a New York City Democrat and Tammany Hall loyalist, was a fierce Roosevelt enemy. O’Connor had strong support from conservative committee Democrats Eugene Cox of Georgia and Howard W. Smith of Virginia.

A failed economic initiative early in his second term further sapped Roosevelt’s popularity and his influence over Congressional Democrats.

During his first term the improving economy had been his greatest political asset, but in 1937 he bowed to pressure to cut spending and the federal deficit. This restrictive policy, incorporated into that year’s Congressional appropriations bills, magnified the impact of decisions by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve that cut the money supply. The combined effect was to put the brakes on the recovery. Unemployment, which had shrunk from 24.9 percent in 1933 to 14.3 percent in early 1937, began rising, and the stock market began to fall. The 1937-38 downturn was called “the recession within the Depression” or, by opponents, “the Roosevelt recession.” Although the president declined to engage personally, key liberal assistants like Harold Ickes, Thomas Corcoran, and Harry Hopkins sought to divert criticism by blaming businesses for causing the slide by withholding investment to undercut Roosevelt.

ANOTHER PAINFUL ROOSEVELT DEFEAT involved a government reorganization bill. The March 1938 proposal was based on recommendations by a commission with impeccable credentials, and FDR considered the bill a non-partisan, good-government proposal. After all, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover had tried to achieve similar reforms by streamlining the executive branch. But some Democrats chafed at FDR’s dominance of their party and at talk of him seeking an unprecedented third term in 1940. Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina, who had seconded Roosevelt’s nomination at the 1936 convention, wrote to the editor of The Charlotte Observer that Roosevelt “wants a party of his own, molded to his own conceptions.”

The bill, which would enlarge the White House staff and integrate almost all independent agencies into cabinet departments, amplified critics’ concern about “one-man rule.” The Senate narrowly approved the bill, with 24 Democrats voting nay. But the House, despite a 344-to-88 Democratic majority, recommitted the bill to the Rules Committee, again subjecting the measure to Chairman O’Connor’s wiles. “The fact is, there hain’t goin’ to be no dictator in this country,” O’Connor declared, “not as long as some of us have a voice and two strong hands.” The Chicago Tribune reported the defeat with the headline “Kill Dictator Bill: 204-196.”

By late spring 1938 the previous year’s restrictive financial policies had been relaxed, and the recession was easing. The stock market, after dropping 48 percent in seven months, bottomed out. Unemployment started to decline again after peaking in June at 19 percent. But the political damage had been done, and Roosevelt’s popularity and influence with Congress failed to recover as quickly as the economy.

THESE SETBACKS, AND ROOSEVELT LIEUTENANTS’ EFFORTS to

blame the recession on business, split the Democratic Party and made it even easier for conservative Democrats to vote with Republicans. To lend the growing aisle-crossing alliance coherence, North Carolina’s Bailey and other senators from both parties began to compile a bipartisan list of conservative principles. Nearly all Democrats who had worked to kill the Court-packing bill participated. Leaked by Senate Minority Leader Charles McNary of Oregon, who feared the statement would overshadow a Republican platform being developed, the document was headlined by the Washington Post on December 15. Bailey immediately read the contents into the Congressional Record, and critics soon labeled the statement a “conservative manifesto.” New York Times AUTUMN 2022

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Claude Pepper

president’s declining popularity and the coalescing of conservatives across party lines made new domestic initiatives more difficult. During Roosevelt’s first term, the economic emergency had made possible bipartisan alliances, but by the middle of his second term FDR was trying to solidify Democratic ideology. Though not expecting Republican support, he hoped to neutralize Democrats who had been opposing his proposals.

Roosevelt’s main recourse was to strike out at disloyal senators up for re-election by supporting more progressive opponents in state primaries. This tactic radically broke with tradition—presidents rarely intervened in individual races. Critics branded the campaign a “purge,” with all the inflammatory connotations suggested by Joseph Stalin’s recent show trials and subsequent executions of supposedly disloyal Communist Party members.

AS IN THE COURT EPISODE, Roosevelt again overestimated his power and gambled his prestige. Party Chairman James Farley recommended

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Declaration of Intent Roosevelt, above in Georgia as he dedicated a rural electrification project, was heartened about his wager on the primary process by Floridian Claude Pepper’s defeat of a conservative challenger.

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; FLORIDA MEMORY

Washington bureau chief Arthur Krock predicted that the bipartisan alliance would make the passage of progressive legislation as difficult as “pulling hippopotamus teeth.”

Roosevelt fought back in a nationally broadcast speech at the Democratic Party’s Jackson Day dinner in January 1938. He depicted himself as the leader of a largely progressive party concerned with the welfare of the nation as a whole, one that had no place for those giving regional issues higher priority. His message was a scarcely veiled threat to conservative Democrats, mostly Southerners. He repeated the argument in an April fireside chat, during which he called for more federal spending to boost consumption and get more Americans working again. But he also hinted that the larger goal was not merely economic. Unemployment and poverty had led some European countries to embrace fascism, and FDR implied that the survival of the American republic and its system of government were at stake.

But, as journalist Krock had foreseen, the

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against the gambit, saying, “Boss, I think you’re foolish.” But two primary victories encouraged the president to press on. Congressman Lister Hill overcame conservative former Senator Howell Heflin in a Senate primary for an open Alabama seat, and Senator Claude Pepper defeated a conservative foe in the Florida primary. FDR was also cheered on by liberal advisers Harold Ickes, Thomas Corcoran, and Harry Hopkins.

Roosevelt initially targeted three House members and 10 Democratic senators for defeat. In the House he went after O’Connor, Cox, and Howard W. Smith of the Rules Committee. Including O’Connor made clear the primary treatment was not just an attack on conservatives in the “solid South” but also on those with ties to centrifugal elements of the party, including state and local machines and other interests that outweighed loy- Head to Head alty to the unified national party Roosevelt sought. From top: Senator His target list shrank. Among the senators, Walter George, center, Guy Gillette of Iowa faced the voters first and listens as FDR backs his won his June primary by a ratio of almost two to primary foe at a rally; one. Four senators were soon dropped from the Senator Ellison D. "Cotton Ed" Smith; hit list—they seemed too secure or their primary Roosevelt with opponents too weak—Alva Adams of Colorado, Democratic Chairman Augustine Lonergan of Connecticut, Pat McCar- James Farley. ran of Nevada, and Champ Clark of Missouri. In Tennessee, George Berry lost his primary without Roosevelt’s intervention because he crossed Memphis political boss Ed Crump. Indiana’s Frederick Van Nuys avoided a primary by orchestrating his renomination by acclamation at the Democratic state convention. That left three senators in Roosevelt’s crosshairs: Walter George of Georgia, who since 1933 had been voting against Roosevelt’s initiatives one third of the time; Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, who had opposed the president almost half the time; and Millard Tydings of Maryland, who had voted against Roosevelt a stunning 77 percent of the time.

In August, returning to Washington from the West Coast, Roosevelt stopped in tiny Barnesville, Georgia, where about 40,000 people had gathered in a stadium. Some had come for his dedication of a project built by an electric cooperative built with a Rural Electrification Administration (REA) loan, but most were probably there for political fireworks.

Not only had the president telegraphed his planned purge, without names, in a fireside chat eight weeks earlier, but the day before, at the Warm Springs rehabilitation facility FDR considered his second home, he had endorsed one of Senator George’s primary opponents.

George, a gentlemanly former state Supreme Court judge, sat on the platform behind Roosevelt, as did George’s two primary opponents. The better known was Eugene Talmadge, an uncouth, race-baiting former governor given to bragging that he was “mean as cat shit.” Roosevelt’s candidate was Lawrence Camp, the young U.S. Attorney for Atlanta.

The president described the problems facing the South and his determination to use federal programs to fix those problems. But to do that, FDR said, he needed Congressional support. The principal issue in the campaign was therefore liberal versus conservative. Senator George “will always be my personal friend,” he said. But, he added, George “cannot possibly in my judgment be classified as belonging to the liberal school of thought.” Of Talmadge, Roosevelt said, “I am very certain in my own mind that his election would contribute very little to practical progress in government.” Camp, he concluded,

“believes that many things must be done and done now to improve the . . . conditions of the country.”

The Atlanta Constitution, among the earliest of the major newspapers to endorse Roosevelt’s presidential candidacy, editorialized that FDR was seeking senators “who would unquestionably support every legislative proposal the White House saw fit to make. He has asked Georgia to furnish one of these ’yes men.’”

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ral address, with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes sitting a few feet away, FDR hinted at his resolve not to remain at the mercy of unelected judges who would thwart the democratically expressed will of the people.

That February 5 Roosevelt struck, sending Congress an audacious proposal that would allow him to appoint up to six new justices. That Court-reform bill—so often called by critics his “Court-packing scheme” that the phrase stuck— dominated the news into the summer of 1937.

Opposition from Congressional Republicans was to be expected, but many Democrats withheld their support or cheered only tepidly.

George Gallup, who had earned his polling spurs by predicting that FDR would handily win re-election in 1936, reported that 51 percent of the public opposed the bill. The New York Times predicted that the bill “will be moved steadily to passage,” but key support was absent from the start. On the drive back to the Capitol after the president’s last-minute briefing of key members of Congress before the

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AT THE END OF HIS FIRST TERM, the biggest threat to Franklin Roosevelt’s ambitious agenda appeared to be the U.S. Supreme Court. Beginning in 1935, the Court had overturned six of his initiatives, including the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Challenges to the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Tennessee Valley Authority were before the Court or moving through lower courts. In his January 1937 inaugu-

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Unpacked

bill’s official debut, Rep. Hatton Sumners of Texas, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said to colleagues, “Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips.” An hour later, as the proposal was being read to the Senate, Roosevelt’s vice president, conservative Texan John Nance Garner, stood in the cloakroom doorway holding his nose and turning thumbs down.

In an early March "fireside chat" Roosevelt invoked the recovery’s fragility.

“We are only part-way through,” he warned. “The courts, however, have cast doubts on the ability of the elected Congress to protect us against catastrophe.” Three weeks later the Court partially undercut the bill’s rationale, unexpectedly upholding 5-4 a state minimum wage law backed by Roosevelt.

Hughes wrote the ruling and, underlining its importance, read it from the bench. In April the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act and in May the Social Security Act. Many perceived all three actions as stabs at foiling the Court-reform bill by softening the image of a Court implacably opposed to the New Deal.

Conservative Justice Willis Van Devanter announced in mid-May that he would retire at term’s end.

Poised to name a justice, and with the Court having backed off from undoing the New Deal in its 193637 term, Roosevelt could have declared victory and withdrawn his proposal. But the supreme confidence that had served him so well all his life overpowered him, and he fought on.

In stunningly vituperative language, a Senate Judiciary Committee report described his bill as “a needless, futile, and utterly dangerous abandonment of constitutional principle…. [that] would subjugate the courts to the will of Congress and the President….”

The report bore the signatures of seven Democrats. New York Times columIn FDR’s Sights nist Arthur Krock considered the attack on The 1937-38 Supreme Court.

Seated from left: Justices Roosevelt to be an attempt by conservatives Sutherland and McReynolds, to seize control of the party as much as to Chief Justice Hughes, Justices defeat the bill.

Brandeis and Butler. Behind, In June Gallup stated that opposition to left to right, Justices Cardozo, the Court bill was now 59 percent and that Stone, Roberts, and Black.

FDR’s favorability down from 65 to 60 percent. His standing with Congress was at its lowest ebb since he took office.

Any slim hope of salvaging the plan died in July with Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson of Arkansas, a well-liked conservative who supported the bill. Widely expected to be the president’s first Supreme Court nominee, Robinson succumbed to a heart attack two weeks into the Senate debate, and the bill’s opponents announced a day later that they had the votes to send the measure back to committee. Despite a 76-16 Democratic majority, the motion to send the bill into oblivion passed, 70 to 20.

In a press conference the next day, Roosevelt hid his disappointment, claiming to have achieved his goal of influencing Court decisions. But his closest advisers had seen his anger.

“He isn’t going to take his defeat lying down,” Democratic Party Chairman James Farley noted in his diary. “He has been double-crossed…by people who should have been loyal supporters.” —John A. Riggs

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indicated that FDR might have been less confident than he appeared during the speech.

At ceremony’s end, the president forgot the official purpose of his appearance; he failed to throw an open switch by his side to send electric current to an REA sign on the field and through the 144 miles of wire of the project.

Later the same day Roosevelt delivered a similar but oblique message at Greenville, South Carolina.

On the rear platform of his Washington-bound train he was introduced by moderate Governor Olin D. Johnston, whom FDR had persuaded to challenge “Cotton Ed” Smith. The incumbent had earned his nickname with a pledge early in his career to “keep the N-----s down and the price of cotton up.” In opposing Roosevelt’s Fair Labor Standards Act Smith had called the minimum wage an assault on free enterprise and said farmers in South Carolina could live on 50 cents a day. The president didn’t mention Smith by name—he hardly had to after voicing his enthusiasm for Johnston—but he ended his informal remarks with a line everyone grasped: “I don’t believe any family or man can live on 50 cents a day.”

Roosevelt intervened most actively in the Maryland primary, giving six speeches backing Congressman David Lewis over the Labor Day weekend. Lewis was the House sponsor of the Social Security bill and a Roosevelt loyalist.

Though FDR never spoke Tydings’s name, he made clear what he thought of party disloyalty: “Any man—any political party—has a right to be honestly ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal.’ But the Nation cannot stand for the confusion of having him pretend to be one and act like the other.”

Like his colleagues in Georgia and South Carolina, Tydings made Roosevelt’s intervention in the election the main issue in his campaign.

FDR HAD MISCALCULATED BADLY. All three incumbents won handily. George received 44 percent of the vote, defeating Talmadge by nearly

40,000 votes and Roosevelt’s candidate Camp by On the Hustings nearly 65,000. Smith trounced Johnston 55 per- Left, Senators Tydings and cent to 45 percent. Tydings whipped Lewis 59 George at the Democratic Caucus on New Year’s Eve percent to 39 percent. All were easily re-elected 1938. Earlier that year, that November. Smith was asked after the elec- FDR with Representative tion if Roosevelt was his own worst enemy. “Not and Senate candidate as long as I am alive,” Cotton Ed crowed.

David Lewis in Maryland.

Roosevelt did savor the defeat of Congressman O’Connor, saying, “Harvard lost the league but won the Yale game.” But November offered him small consolation as Republicans gained eight Senate seats, 81 House seats, and 13 governorships. Democratic losses were disproportionately concentrated among New Deal supporters.

Instead of strengthening his hand in Congress, the president had strengthened the conservative alliance. Timesman Krock wrote, “The New Deal has been halted; the Republican party is large enough for effective opposition; the moderate Democrats in Congress can guide legislation.” Roosevelt’s pratfall cost him in three ways. It seemed to confirm his opponents’ view that he was power hungry, it turned some Democratic skeptics into strong opponents, and it made him look weak.

The attempted purge stemmed not only from FDR’s commitment to the New Deal but also from his conviction that the nation needed two responsible political parties, one liberal, the other conservative. He failed to achieve his goal, at great personal cost.

With the exception of largely bipartisan support for the war effort, the conservative coalition dominated the Senate for two decades until another landslide Democratic election in 1958 flipped a record 13 Senate seats. This influx of new senators representing states in the North and West rearranged what had been a nearly even liberal-conservative split within the Democratic caucus to about two-thirds liberal.

Roosevelt’s goal of two parties with separate and coherent principles would not begin to be met until the 1960s and 70s, when irreconcilable tensions within the Democratic Party exploded, spurred largely by the Democrats’ adoption of a civil rights agenda. By the end of the 20th century, many officeholders and voters, mainly in the South, had switched party allegiance. The “solid South” was solid no more, and Roosevelt’s goal for two ideologically distinct national parties was coming closer to reality. H

Not naming Tydings, FDR made clear his scorn for disloyalty.

Tydings made the president’s intervention his main issue.

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Hiya, Cousin!

Actor Joseph Jefferson, in costume in the late 1850s as the ever clever Asa Trenchard.

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Killer Cousin An accursed comedy’s curious saga.

By Daniel B. Moskowitz

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Papering the House Theater owner John Ford’s brothers James and Henry, stymied by slow ticket sales, invited the Lincolns to see the show in order to drum up business.

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ames and Henry Clay Ford had a problem. Their brother John had booked into the theatre he owned in Washington, DC, a two-week run by famous actress Laura Keene and her touring repertory company.

Keene and fellow players had done well with popular classics such as She Stoops to Conquer and School for Scandal, but ticket sales were sluggish for the final offering of the Washington stand—a popular comedy, Our American Cousin—the night of April 14, 1865. John Ford had decamped to Richmond, leaving his brothers in charge, having overlooked the fact that April 14 was Good Friday, not an evening on which the pious would attend a theatrical performance—or one on which the less pious would want neighbors to see them attending the theatre.

James and Henry Ford had an inspiration. They had hand delivered to the White House a personal note to Mary Todd Lincoln, inviting the First Lady and her husband to be guests that Friday night. The Civil War had ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, and the president was exhausted, trying to find the strategy to reassemble the nation. He just wanted to stay home, but his wife persuaded him that an evening of laughter was the tonic he needed. Her acceptance in hand, the Fords circulated a handbill trumpeting that the Lincolns would be attending Our American Cousin; the news made the early edition of that day’s Washington Evening Star. Ticket buyers rushed the

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KEENE OPENED HER COMEDIC REBOOT in New York in October 1858. Critics rated Cousin as formulaic, but with much to please less-discriminating theatergoers. Fitz-James O’Brien, reviewing the opening performance in Saturday Press, found much fault but ended his assessment, “Our American Cousin, in spite of all these drawbacks, was greatly relished by the audience, and may be pronounced successful.” Successful indeed. The authoritative multi-volume Annals of the New York Stage published by Columbia University in 1931 observed, “The show set new standards for New York theatre and theatrical success.” The reworked version’s two-week run stretched to 150 performances. Multiple successful productions came and went for the next seven years.

“It was one of those plays that showed American ingenuity,” notes Noreen Brown, a theatre professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“It said something positive about the American spirit.” Within a year popular playwright Charles Gayler had penned a rip-off that he called Our Female American Cousin, in time unveiling Our American Cousin at Home.

The real Our American Cousin takes place at

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Tom Taylor

box office and filled the 1,700-seat house.

Halfway through Act Three, actor John Wilkes Booth, 26, an ardent supporter of the Confederacy, entered the Lincolns’ box and shot the President. Pandemonium broke out, but Keene came onstage, managing both to calm the audience and organize an orderly emptying of the theater.

Booth got away and was not captured until April 26. Lincoln died of his wounds at 7:22 the morning after the shooting, the first time an American president had been assassinated.

The tragedy made Our American Cousin a footnote in American history. But the play had already achieved a noteworthy spot in popular culture as arguably the best-loved script of its era.

Cousin was a mid-career work by prolific British writer Tom Taylor, for decades a regular contributor to Punch and author of some 100 plays. Our American Cousin debuted as a serious drama in London in 1852—and flopped.

But Keene saw the show, recognized the humor hidden in the story, and grasped how to recast Cousin as a comedy that would tickle American audiences. She bought the U.S. rights for $1,000.

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“Sic semper tyrannis!”

After shooting Lincoln, Booth leaped to the stage, injuring his leg and quoting a phrase from Roman times before making his getaway down an alley behind Ford’s.

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the English country estate of Sir Edward Trenchard. The baronet’s guests include Lord Dundreary, a rather befuddled sort, and widowed Mrs. Mountchessington, towing two daughters for whom she is relentlessly hunting husbands.

Problems abound: Sir Edward is busted and Richard Coyle, his estate agent, is threatening to plunge him into bankruptcy if he does not repay an old loan. Coyle offers an out: he will destroy the loan document provided Sir Edward lets Coyle marry Sir Edward’s daughter, Florence.

Florence, of course, not only detests Coyle, but is in love with Navy lieutenant Harry Vernon. The couple cannot marry until Vernon gets his own ship; Lord Dundreary has the connections to make that happen but refuses to help.

THE PLAY BEGINS WITH the Trenchard family absorbing startling news. Sir Edward’s Uncle Mark, who had quarreled with his children years before and moved to the United States, has died.

In the States Mark reconnected with a Vermont branch of the Trenchard family that had moved to the New World in the mid-1600s. Still angry at a now deceased daughter for marrying without his consent, Uncle Mark, rather than let his British holdings—now worth some $400,000—go to the dead daughter’s child, has left the inheritance to a young man from the American branch. And that fellow, Asa Trenchard, is at that moment on his way to collect the fortune.

Asa, described by one writer as “noisy, coarse, and vulgar, but honestly forthright and colorful,” arrives and throws everyone into a tizzy with his peculiar vocabulary and apparently complete ignorance of the manners of society.

But over the next two acts his inventiveness and good heart manage to solve the Trenchard family problems. “I’m a rough sort of character, and don’t know much about the ways of great folks,” Asa muses. “But I’ve got a cool head, a stout arm, and a willing heart, and I think I can help.”

Asa finds and filches Dundreary’s hair dye, holding the goop hostage until the peer gets Florence’s beloved command of a Royal Navy ship. He sneaks into Coyle’s office and finds documentation that the debt Coyle has been holding over Sir Edward’s head has long since been retired. He threatens to expose Coyle’s skullduggery unless the estate agent covers all of Sir Edward’s debts and then resigns so Coyle’s much put-upon clerk can become Sir Edward’s estate agent.

And to cap the evening, Asa even aids Mrs. Mountchessington in getting one of her daughters betrothed to Dundreary.

There’s one more character: Mary Meredith, Uncle Mark’s shortchanged granddaughter. She’s living on the estate too, as a milkmaid, tending a

The Woman to See Laura Keene had a full house of theatrical cards that she did not hesitate to play: skilled and seasoned performer, deft and dedicated impresario, theater owner. small herd of cows and a flock of chickens and selling butter and eggs. She’s poor but an uncomplaining and happy soul. Pretty, too.

She so enchants Asa he burns the will leaving him the English fortune. With no will, the boodle goes to the late Mark’s next of kin, Mary. Asa’s selflessness has a payoff when Mary accepts his proposal of marriage.

IT’S NOT RANDOM that Cousin Asa hails from New England. The unsophisticated but clever and compassionate Yankee had long been a staple of American stage comedies in which a protagonist solves problems bedeviling folks richer and better educated but much less imaginative. Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural historian Howard Mumford Jones noted that this stock character had “the heart of gold which the Americans associate with a shagbark exterior.” The combination of simplicity and practicality was the way citizens of the new nation liked to see themselves. The character may have been standard but in that AUTUMN 2022

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VERSION BY VERSION, in the decades after The Contrast, that clever rustic evolved from

second banana to the spotlight role. The core humor in these fish-out-of-water comedies derived from cultural clash. The homespun simplicity of the untutored American and the effete culture of the upper-class British—and their mutual misunderstandings—may have in Our American Cousin been exaggerated for comic effect but the set-up contained enough grains of truth to elicit belly laughs of recognition. For example, told that an English relative who was visiting Vermont had gone on a hunting trip, a character comments, “Yes, shooting the wild elephants and buffalo what abound there.”

And the heroine, trying to imagine her soon-to arrive American cousin’s looks, says, “They are all about 17 feet high in America, ain’t they?

And they have long black hair that reaches down to their heels.”

When Asa presents himself at his relative’s manor house, the butler explains, “He didn’t tell me his name, and when I asked him for his card he said he had a whole pack in his valise, and if I had a mind he’d play me a game of Seven Up.” Offered lunch, Asa answers that, on the way, “I worried down half a dozen ham sandwiches, eight or ten boiled eggs, two or three pumpkin pies and a string of cold sausages, and, well, I guess I can hold on ’til dinnertime.” Encountering his first shower bath, Asa can’t figure out the gizmo. He pulls the cord thinking it will summon a servant to explain, drenching himself.

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Thespian Gentlemen Clockwise from top: Joseph Jefferson; Edward Askew Sothern in character as Lord Dundreary; a cigarette trading card featuring an illustration of the fictional nobleman.

capacity served as “a generic folk figure capably illustrating cheeky traits of the American temper,” explains Richard M. Dorson, long-time director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University.

“His words, like his manners, smacked of the farm and the countryside,” chock full as they are of vernacular slang and social goofs, Dorson said.

The stereotype’s origins lay in the first produced play by an American citizen, Royall Tyler’s 1787 The Contrast. As an avatar the character Jonathan, an honest bumpkin working as a servant to a Revolutionary War hero, is peripheral to Tyler’s story of mismatched engagements.

But Jonathan’s comic woes navigating Manhattan and interacting with upper crust Gothamites became a template for later playwrights.

He mistakes a streetwalker for a deacon’s daughter. He roars boisterously at anything he finds funny and proves an incapable student when another servant tries to pass on the rules of polite laughter. And Jonathan speaks a stage exaggeration of Yankee lingo; after kissing a maid, he struggles to explain the resulting joyous feeling: “Burning rivers! Cooling flames! Red-hot roses! Pig-nuts! Hasty pudding and ambrosia!“

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ALL THE WAY THROUGH Cousin, Asa speaks in a backwoods slang that might convey more than a hint that he might be putting those precise English folks on. This trace of uncertainty delighted audiences. He calls the widow trying to fix him up with her daughter a “sockdologizing old man-trap.” At one point he describes himself as “all-fired tuckered out.” Wooing Mary, Asa swears to the object of his interest, “I’m filling over with affections which I’m ready to pour out all over you like apple sass over roast pork.”

The part of Asa originated with Joseph Jefferson. At 29, Jefferson had been eking out a living as an actor since age three; being cast at Asa made his career. Not only was the play a hit, but Jefferson brought into being a new performing style that dropped set stage conventions, presenting Asa as a real person with feelings and not just a walking, talking collection of punch lines.

After other triumphs, Jefferson signed on with a theatrical adaptation of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. His work in the title role was such a sensation that he continued to play that part—and seldom any other—in various productions for the last 30 years of the 19th Century.

Jefferson persuaded English actor Edward Askew Sothern to play Lord Dundreary in Our American Cousin. Sothern, the talk of Manhattan for his performance in Camille, hesitated to take on what was essentially a minor character, feeling the part was too small for his new-found fame. Jefferson’s retort: “There are no small parts, only small actors.” He was right. The public adored the way Sothern played the vain, stupid titled gentleman, with his unique way of twisting aphorisms—“birds of a feather gather no moss,” for example. Sothern kept adding shtick to his portrayal, delivering lines with a lisp, adding coughs and grimaces, and inserting ad libs. His Dundreary became a popular sensation, as retailers hawked Dundreary scarves, Dundreary shirts, and Dundreary collars based on his stage attire. Sothern went on to a distinguished career on both the New York and London stage, intermittently returning to the footlights as Dundreary in at least three copycat vehicles.

NEITHER JEFFERSON NOR SOTHERN were in the Our American Cousin company that performed at Ford’s that fateful night in 1865. But the star of the original production was there, billed in big type above the title for the Ford’s performance. Her part was neither the biggest nor the most demanding, but there is no doubt that she was the dominant figure. Laura Keene was one of the most popular actresses of the time, as well as a major force in American theatrical life.

No other woman had achieved a presence any-

where near hers. She not only owned the American rights to Our American Cousin but also designed and owned the theatre where that vehicle’s comic reworking premiered in the States and ran the company that performed there.

Englishwoman Keene, born Mary Frances Moss, was left at age 25 with two children and no means of support when her husband, convicted of unspecified crimes, was transported aboard a prison ship from England to confinement in Australia (“Hard Labor,“ June 2019).

Moss’s aunt was the actress Elizabeth Yates, who opened the door for her niece to take to the stage. Using the name Laura Keene, the young performer immediately displayed a natural talent, in her first year as an actress appearing at three London theatres. She attracted the attention of James Wallack, who lured her to the States to be the lead actress in his stock company. She debuted in New York in September 1852 and quickly developed a devoted fan base.

Keene was no beauty, with features heavier than deemed ideal, but, Jefferson acknowledged, “Her rich and luxuriant auburn hair, clear complexion and deep chestnut eyes, full of expression, were greatly admired. It was her style and carriage that commanded admiration, and it was this quality that won her audience. She had, too,

Fatal Choice of Seats The presidential box at Ford’s, where Abraham Lincoln was seated on the right when assassin John Wilkes Booth fatally wounded him.

James Wallack

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BUT KEENE, AMBITIOUS AND BOLD, wanted much more than avid fans. At the end of 1853, she relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, arranged a three-month lease on the Charles Street Theatre, and not only starred in plays there but directed shows and managed the theatre. “While theatrical management was a risky endeavor compared to the relatively secure position of a leading lady in a first-class New York Theatre, it offered great potential for power and profit,“ writes Wake Forest College professor Jane Kathleen Curry. “As a manager Keene would be able

to control play selection and casting, hire all performers and staff, supervise all elements of production, and by assuming financial risk, take a chance of gaining greater financial reward.”

After ventures in Australia and California, Keene returned to New York in 1855 and took over the Metropolitan Theatre, renamed it Laura Keene’s Varieties, and again directed and starred in a string of plays. She proved a tough cookie. She put scenery on her stage and costumes on her actors that were far more detailed than the norm.

She aggressively promoted her productions, running ads twice the size of those other theatre managers placed. And she drew theatergoers by hiring away popular actors from other companies. “Laura Keene was known to possess the

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the rare power of being able to vary her manner, assuming the rustic walk of a milkmaid or the dignified grace of a queen.”

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Queen Keene’s Palace The Keene, located on Broadway just above Houston, became the only theatre in town to maintain its own full company of actors and to stage plays all summer.

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coolest head in the theatre industry,” historian Mark A. Lause wrote recently. Other managers— already openly unhappy that a woman was muscling into their ranks—kept her busy in court parrying breach of contract suits.

But none of the theatres she had managed fit Keene’s conception of what a theatre should be.

So she lined up investors, hired architect J.M. Trimble, and plunged into building her own. The Laura Keene Theatre, on the east side of Broadway just above Houston Street, won raves when it opened with As You Like It on November 18, 1856.

“The hall is paved with black and white marble, and looks elegant, especially at the part where it is surmounted by the ornamental dome,” The New York Times told readers the following morning. “The stage itself appears to be unusually well-proportioned and is fifty-two feet in depth.

Most of the decorations of the house are in white and gold with the exception of the ceiling, which is beautifully and elaborately painted with allegorical figures.” The Keene became the only theatre in town to maintain its own full company of actors, alone in presenting plays throughout the summer. Our American Cousin remained a staple of the facility’s repertoire.

AFTER THE ASSASSINATION, given that Lincoln’s slayer was an actor, the entire Our American Cousin cast at Ford’s came under suspicion.

Booth had had nothing to do with Keene’s troupe, but she and other members were arrested. She quickly convinced authorities that she had no connection to the killing and resumed her tour in Cincinnati. In 1869, she took over management of the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia for six months, then resumed touring with her company. But she was slowly weakening from tuberculosis and gave her final performance on July 4, 1873. She died exactly four months later, at 47.

After Lincoln’s assassination, Our American Cousin immediately went from widespread popularity to cultural exile; producers assumed Americans would find nothing funny about a play with such horrid associations. Edward Askew Sothern was beloved enough as Lord Dundreary that he managed to mount two revivals in the 1870s, but that was pretty much it—until memory shifted.

Over the decades the sense that Cousin was cursed drained away and the script was such an effective laugh machine that some show business personalities began testing the waters reviving it.

The ultimate proof that Our American Cousin no longer was a pariah of a play came on December 12, 1907, at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, DC. E.H. Sothern, after years of touring in period costume dramas and the plays of Shakespeare, took on his famous father’s most famous

role, the buffoonish Lord Dundreary. To denature the play’s notoriety Sothern the younger retitled it Lord Dundreary, fooling no one.

(Newspaper coverage referred to the play as Our American Cousin.) “The audience enjoyed the performance immensely, laughing as heartily over the jokes as their forefathers before them,” reported The New York Times. But the most significant proof that time had dispelled the gloom enveloping the play was that sitting in a proscenium stage box were President Theodore Roosevelt and wife, Edith. (In 1915, Sothern fils played in the show on Broadway for 40 performances.)

Our American Cousin’s unsophisticated structure grew long in the tooth and vanished from the boards only, like Cousin Asa getting himself or someone else out of a jam, to find in the 21st Century new life as a blend of historical oddity and enjoyable night of theatre. The scene of the crime, restored as an active showplace in 1968, rebuffs frequent calls to mount the comedy; that “would make Ford’s too much of a monument to what an assassin did there,” management explains. Others see it differently.

Vanity Fair contributing editor Bruce Handy recently wrote that “the play had a charming deliberate goofiness, a sense of humor about its own dumbness, that is not so far removed from the tone of a lot of contemporary film comedy.” In 2009, the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, Monmouth College’s theatre staff had success staging the play in nearby Galesburg, Illinois, where in 1858 Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas in his failed bid for a Senate seat.

Then in 2015, the assassination’s 250th anniversary, a surge of revivals included stagings in Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Those productions may have had about them a whiff of historiography, but the play really doesn’t need that.

“After 150 years, the plot line is still capable of capturing the imagination of a wide audience,” argues Morgen Stevens-Garmon, associate curator of the theatre collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

In 1861, the play had been a huge success in London, running a phenomenal 500 performances. Its renewed and continuing viability was proved in 2015, when London’s Finborough Theatre found such enthusiasm for a revival that management had to schedule extra performances. All were completely sold out. H

After falling out of favor, Our American Cousin began to enjoy a renascence as a historical oddity and enjoyable evening of theater.

National Shrine Ford’s Theatre, on 10th Street NW in the nation’s capital, remains a very popular tourist stop but steadfastly refuses to restage the theatrical vehicle that drew Abraham Lincoln to his violent death.

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Spikes Up! By 1891, the time of the game in New York pictured, major league baseball had become a hotly contested labor arena.

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Playing Hardball Baseball’s Gilded Age labor wars saw players and owners battle furiously.

By Peter Dreier and Robert Elias

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To the Victors, the Spoils John Montgomery Ward, right, presents a championship cup to Roger Bresnahan as New York NL players look on.

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On Strike, Shut It Down Steelworkers at Homestead, Pennsylvania, took up arms as they tried to close the Carnegie works.

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n 1892, Andrew Carnegie’s steel plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania, across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, was booming while thousands of steelworkers were toiling there seven days a week 12 hours a day and enduring unsafe conditions and a 22 percent pay cut. The Homestead workers went on strike, leading to a 12-hour gun fight with 300 armed Pinkerton agents that killed nine workers and three guards.

Shortly after the Homestead battle, the Brooklyn Grooms baseball team arrived to play the Pittsburgh Pirates. Led by John Montgomery Ward, charismatic leader of the sport’s first players union, the Grooms were visiting Homestead to show solidarity with the strikers. Their escort was Pirate star pitcher Mark Baldwin. City and state authorities arrested strike leaders, charging them with conspiracy, riot, and murder. Alleging similar crimes, officials soon rounded up another 160 individuals, including Baldwin, who admitted having been present during the steelworks violence but only as a spectator. The Pittsburgh Dispatch printed rumors that Baldwin had “furnished his fellow citizens with two Winchester rifles on the memorable morning of the battle.” For lack of evidence, Baldwin avoided trial. A week later, Pennsylvania Governor Robert Pattison declared Homestead under martial law, and 8,000 state militiamen arrived to back Carnegie, who staffed his factory with non-union workers and broke the strike.

The Homestead strike showcased a new class of worker activist amid the labor turmoil of the Gilded Age: professional baseball players. Baldwin’s roots were in Homestead, where he grew up a steelworker’s son and steadfast labor supporter. At Pennsylvania State University and then with amateur teams, he pitched and played shortstop. In 1886 he signed with the Chicago White Stockings of the National League, becoming a star until he demanded a raise and owner Albert Spalding fired him. Blackballed by every

IN 1866 THE NATIONAL LABOR UNION (NLU) became the first largescale organization to reach across industries and unite skilled and unskilled laborers, farmers, and factory workers. Against blacklists, lockouts, goon squads, and yellow-dog contracts that required workers, on penalty of dismissal, to promise not to join a union, the National Labor Union fought for higher wages, shorter hours, better conditions, and pro-labor legislation.

Another union, the Knights of Labor, organized workers across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and occupation. The Knights Throwing Hard campaigned for an eight-hour day, restrictions on Player-activist Mark child labor, and worker-run cooperatives.

Baldwin, son of a In 1877, during a depression, West Virginia rail- steelworker, grew up road workers, in response to wage cuts, struck. in Homestead and The West Virginia walkout spread to Maryland embraced the union and Pennsylvania; strikes multiplied nationwide. cause from an early The Great Railroad Strike—the first mass action age, putting him in diametric opposition to involving so many different workers—was vio- team owner Spalding. lently suppressed, but union membership grew.

In 1886, Knights membership was 750,000 when a bomb thrown at a labor rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square killed several workers and policemen.

Labor’s reputation sank. Union ranks declined. A new organizing approach emerged with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Led by Samuel Gompers, the AFL dropped the cooperative party line to focus on skilled, White, male craftsmen. For its fraction of America’s working class, the AFL won significant victories in pay, hours, and working conditions.

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team in the league, Baldwin joined the Columbus Solons of the rival American Association. He bolted again in 1890, when ballplayers themselves formed the Players League, made up of teams jointly owned by its athletes and at least one investor. Baldwin became the key recruiter for the Chicago Pirates, encouraging fellow players to jump from other leagues. In 1890, he led the Players League in wins (33) and strikeouts (206).

Baldwin was among players who recognized the exploitation in professional baseball, which emerged in the Gilded Age, an era marked by the rise of corporate monopolies, the concentration of wealth and power in elites, and the proliferation of urban factory work. Those on the well-upholstered side of that divide regarded the imbalance between industrialist and wage earner as “social Darwinism,” with survival going to the fittest. Steel titan Carnegie and fellow robber barons felt entitled to use force against those who resisted. Control over baseball players would follow but in a more legalistic guise. A handful of players, sensitive to labor struggles, fought back.

FIRST-GENERATION BASEBALL OWNERS viewed themselves as entrepreneurs exploiting an increasingly lucrative industry. Spalding claimed that between 1895 and 1889, the eight NL teams made a total of at least $750,000. That translates into an annual $562,900 profit per team in 2022 dollars. Emulating the robber barons, baseball owners saw their profits as rooted in controlling wages set by skinflint contracts. Owners colluded and incorporated the reserve clause, which bound ballplayers to teams, into every contract. Pocketing triple their profits in the 1880s, owners in those years nevertheless skimped on salaries, required players to perform unpaid duties such as taking tickets, cleaning stadium seats, and grooming the field.

Teams also charged players for meals. The leagues were no different from other industries, fighting attempts to organize ballplayers with penalties, intimidation, blacklists, Pinkerton spies, and docking pay.

Players initially went along. But, realizing their worth and chafing at managerial mistreatment, ballplayers, galvanized by John Montgomery Ward, began to organize. Born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in 1860, Ward attended Penn State and in 1875 helped that school develop its first baseball team.

Albert Spalding

Pitching for semi-professional teams in Pennsylvania towns hot with pro-labor sentiment, Ward joined the National League’s Providence Grays in 1878. Immediately a star, Ward pitched Providence to the 1879 pennant, that year going 47–19 with 239 strikeouts and a 2.15 earned-run average. In 1880 he pitched a perfect game and in 1882 an 18-inning complete game shutout. An arm injury took him off the active roster, and in 1884 the Grays traded him to the New York Gothams.

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plan capped and lowered players’ wages, set salary classes to stir jealousy among players, ranked players by off-field conduct as well as abilities, and allowed their release on only 10 days’ notice.

The Brush plan infuriated Ward. His rage grew when he learned the Giants had sold him to the Washington Nationals for a record $12,000. His threat to quit if he wasn’t paid a portion of the proceeds nullified the deal. Ward began organizing fellow players while leading the Giants to their second straight championship in 1889.

Ward reasoned that since players, not owners, produced the game’s profits, players should share equally in the proceeds and control their destiny.

Rather than strike, in July 1889 he and other players founded a league of their own. Codifying the Players League’s ethos, Ward issued “The Brotherhood Manifesto,” observing that owners’ eyes “are upon the turnstile. Men have come into the business for no other motive than to exploit it for every dollar in sight . . . Players have been bought, sold and exchanged as though they were sheep, instead of American citizens.”

In Players League clubs, players shared in managerial duties and profits. Eight-member boards comprised of four players and four investors ran the league’s eight teams, and a senate, equally representing players and investors, governed the league. Players owned team stock and clubs divided revenue evenly. Contracts included no reserve clause; there was no classification plan. Player contracts ran three years and trades required a player’s consent. Three-quarters of all National League players and the top stars in both leagues jumped to the Players League.

In 1890, the new league’s first year, Congress

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John Brush

renamed the Giants, had Ward, right arm healed, starting at shortstop and batting left-handed to be closer to first base. He was the only major league player to win more than 100 games as a pitcher and to get more than 2,000 hits. He stole 540 bases and drove in nearly 1,000 runs. He managed the Giants, played on two more championship teams, and became a successful baseball executive.

Ward also learned five languages, wrote for newspapers and magazines, published a book, and completed a B.A. and a law degree at Columbia University—all while suiting up. His legal training alerted him to the standard baseball contract’s unfairness. The American Association set out to rival the National League, but by 1883 both leagues were cutting pay, imposing terrible working conditions, and undermining player value and mobility. In 1885, Ward organized the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, the first athletes’ union. In his 1887 Lippincott’s article “Is the Base-Ball Player a Chattel?”, he accused owners of “wage slavery” and likened players’ situation to the recent days of chattel bondage. The reserve clause in all player contracts was “an inherent wrong, for by it one set of men seized absolute control over the labor of another,” Ward wrote. “And the blacklist was waiting for any man who dared assert the contrary.”

Following the 1888 season, de facto National League president Spalding organized a World Baseball Tour by a team of star players, including Ward, to spread “America’s game”—and expand Spalding’s sporting-goods empire. While Ward was barnstorming abroad, the league imposed the Brush Classification Plan, named for its creator, baseball team owner John T. Brush. The

PHOTO BY MARK RUCKER/TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES; DETROIT PUBLIC LIBRARY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Half a World Away Above, Spalding, center in suit, with the Chicago White Stockings in Melbourne, Australia, as National League teams were circling the globe in the off season. Scorecards, right, emerged as an advertising medium.

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PHOTO BY MARK RUCKER/TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES; DETROIT PUBLIC LIBRARY; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

enacted the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to restrain corporate monopolization. The Sherman Act outlawed curbs on free competition and commerce across state lines—until a conservative U.S. Supreme Court voted to exempt corporations from trust busting and instead targeted unions.

Though corporations operated across state lines, the Court claimed these enterprises to be engaged primarily in in-state manufacturing, putting them outside Congressional authority over interstate commerce. Unions, according to the Court, were “combinations” whose work protests limited production and limited goods crossing state lines, thus subjecting them to the Sherman Act.

John Montgomery Ward

WARD RAN THE UNION, recruited investors and players, rented ballparks, created a league schedule, handled press relations, and battled the baseball establishment’s counterattack—all the while serving as player-manager for Ward’s Wonders, the Brooklyn Players League team. In the 1890 season, he hit .335, stole 63 bases, led league shortstops in assists, and piloted his club to second place.

Ward had crucial support. James O’Rourke, son of Irish immigrants, had joined the Boston Red Stockings in 1873. After returning with the team from a European tour, owner Arthur Soden charged each player on the tour $100 to cover what Soden claimed were his losses on the trip. O’Rourke balked but paid—the last time he gave in to an owner.

In 1876, the Red Stockings joined the National League. O’Rourke would not sign the proffered contract, protesting a three-year freeze the deal would have imposed on his sal- School, he coached the Yale baseball team to a ary. Prevailing despite the risk of a blacklisting, he doubled his pay. When winning season. The eloquence that had gotten Soden tried to dun players for meals on the road, O’Rourke refused. Soden him dubbed “Orator” only improved. O’Rourke’s relented. In 1878, O’Rourke protested Soden’s policy of housing the team in Yale studies intensified his activism. He helped fleabag hotels, slashing meal allowances, making spouses pay to attend Ward form the Brotherhood of Professional Basehome games, and charging to wash uniforms. In September 1880, ball Players in 1885 and took the lead in recruiting trying to avoid having to pay October salaries, Soden displayers and campaigning for the Players League through his ties to civic organizations. banded the team. O’Rourke sued and won a settlement.

O’Rourke’s older brother John was also a gifted baseANOTHER WARD LIEUTENANT, Tim ball player. The brothers enjoyed playing together on Keefe, was born in 1857 to Irish immithe Red Caps, but John eventually dropped out of baseball to work as a railroad baggage handler. He grants in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He continued the O’Rourke activism as an organizer followed his father into carpentry as an with the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, which apprentice, in his spare time playing represented 20,000 brakemen, switchmen, yardmasball. He began playing professionally in 1878 and in 1880 joined the Troy Trojans. ters, conductors, and baggage handlers, hundreds of Keefe and Ward met playing winter ball in whom died each year on the job. To reduce that human New Orleans, Louisiana, where they discost, John O’Rourke helped lobby Congress to mandate automatic brakes and couplers on freight trains. In 1910, cussed pitching strategy and their ire at the the brothers joined a protest march by 800 rail union reserve clause, which the Trojans invoked Triple Threat members through the streets of Los Angeles, California. against Keefe for the 1881 season, forcing Outfielder, catcher, James O’Rourke’s resonant self-representation helped him to accept $1,500 for two seasons. and lawyer James other players see that owners weren’t deities. In 1885, “I was considered a robber because I “Orator” O’Rourke in O’Rourke agreed to join the New York Giants—if he were 1894 after his Giants tried to hold out for $2,100,” Keefe recalled. exempt from the reserve clause and if the team paid for again won the world He jumped in 1883 to the New York Metrohis off-season legal education. Enrolling in Yale Law politans in the new American Association, championship.

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HAVING FOILED THE PLAYERS League challenge, baseball owners in 1922

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which had not yet adopted the reserve clause. In time Keefe became one of baseball’s most dominant pitchers. He wrote two pitching manuals and, during the off-season, mentored pitchers at Harvard University, near his home, eventually doing likewise for teams at Amherst, Dartmouth, Williams, Princeton, and Tufts.

In 1888, Keefe led the National League in victories, winning 19 games in a row, still a single-season record. He held out again for a raise for the 1889 season; the Giants finally relented. When owners capped salaries and refused to negotiate with the union, Keefe attacked “the arrogant despotism of these dictators,” insisting that “the players will revolt against the contemptuous disregard for their rights as men and laborers.”

Ward and Keefe were earning large salaries—$4,250 in 1889; today, $133,000—but as sons of the working class both men identified with the average player. Ward became Brotherhood president. Keefe served as the union’s secretary and treasurer, overseeing recruitment. He also drafted the 1890 Players League profit-sharing plan, coordinated ballpark building, and handled the press.

The union’s nemesis was White Stockings owner Spalding. When the Players League recruited National League players and began

outdrawing the establishment league, Spalding and other owners sued jumpers for breaking their contracts. Judges found the contracts unfair, whereupon Spalding formed a “War Committee” whose members bribed reporters and circulated anti-union propaganda. Owners labeled the Players League “hot-headed anarchists,” “socialists,” and “ultra-radicals.”

Renowned sportswriter and Spalding employee Henry Chadwick called unionized players “terrorists” and condemned Ward as the mastermind of the “secessionists,” invoking the Confederacy’s treason.

Labor leaders, including AFL president Gompers, backed the league; some member unions fined workers caught attending nonunion games.

Although the maverick league was outplaying and outdrawing the establishment leagues, owners had deep pockets. Spalding appealed to Players League investor-directors’ avarice, promising them outright ownership of new teams in a reconfigured National League.

Enough investors went for the bait that the Players League, overly dependent on outside capital, folded after one season.

Spalding and other team owners quickly killed off the American Association, effectively reinstating the National League’s monopoly.

Between 1891 and 1893, owners slashed player salaries 40 percent, blacklisted labor agitators, broke long-term contracts, reinforced the reserve clause, and commandeered minor league teams for replacement labor to intimidate players and discourage activism. Debuting in 1901, the American League initially challenged the established order, but the two leagues soon joined forces to reinforce the reserve clause and other player restrictions.

PHOTO BY MARK RUCKER/TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

O Say Can’t You See...

Shut out of the stadium grandstands, masses of New York area baseball fans crowd the margins of the Polo Grounds during an 1890 Players League game. A man at right uses a wagon to gain an edge.

PHOTO BY MARK RUCKER/TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES

PHOTO BY MARK RUCKER/TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

tightened their grip, thanks to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that exempted professional baseball from anti-trust laws, characterizing the sport not as a business but as an “amusement” that focused on “giving exhibitions of baseball, which are purely state affairs” outside of interstate commerce. As a legal monopoly, the leagues could and did block creation of new teams, increasing existing clubs’ value and profits.

O’Rourke returned to the Giants, ending his ballplaying career in 1893 as the Washington Senators’ player-manager. He batted .311 over 21 seasons playing outfield and catcher. His 2,678 base hits rank second among all 19th-century players.

O’Rourke returned to his hometown, where he created the minor-league Bridgeport Victors, as well as the Eastern Association (née Connecticut State League). He was the Bridgeport club’s player-manager for eight years while practicing law and overseeing his real estate interests. In 1895, he lost a close election running as a Democrat for the Connecticut state legislature.

In 1902, O’Rourke helped found the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, formed to ward off raids on minor league rosters by the major leagues. In 1904, he returned at 54 to the Giants to catch in a crucial, pennant-winning game. For many years, O’Rourke remained the oldest man to play in a major league game. In 1912, at age 62, O’Rourke played in his last professional game, for the New Haven minor league club—his 51st season playing professionally. He was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1945; his plaque mentions none of his battles on behalf of players.

Keefe ended his playing career with 342 wins, a 2.62 earned-run average, and 2,562 strikeouts.

He was the first pitcher to log three seasons of 300-plus strikeouts and won games in 47 major league ballparks—still the record. Yet in the first Cooperstown election for entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936, Keefe got only one vote.

Long after his death in 1933, he was ushered into the Hall by a Veteran’s Committee vote in 1964.

With the demise of the Players League, Mark Baldwin joined his hometown Pittsburgh Pirates.

He won 47 games the next two seasons, but after the Homestead strike, the Pirates released him, ending his major league career in 1893.

Baldwin played minor league ball until 1896, when he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, also coaching the university’s baseball team. He transferred to New York’s Bellevue Medical College to study dermatology and trained in surgery at Roosevelt Hospital. In fall 1898, he moved to Baltimore Medical College, where he played baseball and football, completing his medical degree in 1899.

Baldwin opened a practice in Homestead but

also assisted a New York City coroner and stud- We Are the Champions ied advanced surgical techniques at Minnesota’s The 1888 National League Mayo Clinic. In 1914 he joined the Johns Hop- champion New York Giants kins University Medical School faculty. Ballplay- included Tim Keefe, Roger Connor, James O’Rourke, ers were among his surgical patients. He died in Buck Ewing, Monte Ward, Pittsburgh in 1929. and Mickey Welch.

John Ward reluctantly returned to the role of player-manager, now with the National League’s Brooklyn Grooms, leading that team to two second-place finishes. In 1893, he managed the New York Giants and played second base, hitting .328, scoring 129 runs, and stealing base 46 times. In 1894, he led the Giants to sweep the Baltimore Orioles in four games to win the postseason Temple Cup and, after 17 seasons, retired to practice law. His first clients were players being sued by owners. In 1909 he pursued the National League presidency; the owners killed his candidacy.

In 1911, Ward became part-owner and president of the Boston Braves and in 1914 business manager of the Brooklyn Tip-Tops, in the upstart Federal League, which revived the fight against the reserve clause. Ward retired from baseball in 1915 to farm, run businesses, and win several high-profile golf tournaments. He died in 1925. A seeming lock for the Baseball Hall of Fame, Ward was inducted only in 1964, seven decades after his final professional game and four decades after he died—his penance for challenging the baseball establishment. Ward’s plaque at Cooperstown ignores his labor activism.

Two years after Ward was inducted into the Hall of Fame, another players union— the Major League Baseball Players Association—hired Marvin Miller as its first full-time executive director. Though not a professional athlete, Miller had been an official with the United Steelworkers of America. He was steeped in the history of the Homestead strike and the labor movement as well the Players League and baseball’s early labor wars. Under him, the union in 1968 negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports and in 1972 staged the first strike among pro ballplayers. In 1975, 88 years after Ward called the loathed reserve clause “wage slavery,” Miller helped the union bring an end to the clause, leading to dramatically better salaries, working conditions, and benefits. Treating him as it had Ward, baseball’s establishment, ignoring endorsements by Hank Aaron, Tom Seaver, and other stars, blacklisted Miller, keeping him out of the Hall of Fame until 2021, 39 years after he retired and nine years after he died. H

Even in death Ward drew the owners’ ire, denied a spot in the Hall of Fame until 1964, his labor activism not getting a lick of attention.

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No Tories Need Apply Independence Hall in Philadelphia after British forces abandoned the city.

The Loyalist

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PHOTO CREDIT

Philadelphian Grace Galloway endured the Revolution—on the losing side

By Jonathan House

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The city’s so-called commissioners for forfeited estates really were out to punish Grace’s husband Joseph, a prominent politician who had aided the British army during its recent occupation of Philadelphia. When in recent months the army pulled up stakes, Joseph had fled. Peale had warned Grace on Wednesday that he would be coming to take possession of the Galloways’ Philadelphia home.

Face to face with Peale and his men, Galloway declared that “nothing but force should get me out of my house,” she wrote later in her diary. One interloper said he knew how to deal with that: They would throw her clothes into the street. Onlookers, including friends of Galloway’s, appeared. After a

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ists banged on Grace Galloway’s front door early on the morning of Thursday, August 20, 1778. From the entryway where she and a servant had been awaiting unwanted visitors to her stately home at Market and Sixth Streets, a block from the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, Galloway shouted that she would not be admitting anyone. Her callers, all male, circled the house trying every door, finding each locked. Using a scrubbing brush, the men stove in the kitchen door. Red-faced and short of breath, the intruders rushed to where Galloway stood. First among the raiders was Charles Willson Peale, an artist and fervent American Patriot who that day was acting in his official role as a commissioner in charge of confiscating property from foes of the Revolution. Peale and companions had come to evict the Galloway family.

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On the Outs Dedicated Loyalists had to be prepared to undergo rude searches, harassment, and much worse.

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while a carriage arrived for Galloway, and one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest women reluctantly walked out to join tens of thousands of Americans dispossessed by the Revolution.

Sparked by hated new taxes, hostility to Britain had emerged and spread rapidly in the Crown’s North American colonies in the decade before the colonies declared independence. But only about 40 percent of their 2.5 million inhabitants ardently desired independence. Another 40 percent were on the fence.

About 20 percent, known as Loyalists or Tories, wished to remain part of Britain. Not only were Patriots waging war against the world’s mightiest empire—they were conducting a campaign to bring along Loyalist neighbors, whether by persuasion or by violence. Patriots whipped up mobs, confiscated property, and forced Loyalists into exile. Many Loyalists fought back in armed militias or in the British army. But in nearly any area lacking a sizable British military presence, zealous Patriots gained control of local government and stamped out dissent. Grace Galloway’s diary and letters provide a window into the experiences of this internecine conflict’s losing side.

A MERCHANT’S DAUGHTER, Grace Growden married Joseph Galloway, an up-and-coming Philadelphia lawyer, in 1753. Upon their father’s death, Grace and her sister Elizabeth inherited multiple estates covering thousands of acres of A Woman of Wealth and Taste property collectively valued at more than £110,000. Grace bore several chilGrace Galloway moved comfortably among the dren, but only one, also named Elizabeth, survived infancy. Joseph’s career upper strata of colonial Philadelphia society, but took off. Elected to the Pennsylvania assembly, he served as that body’s the Revolution knocked her family for a loop. speaker from 1766 to 1775, during which period onerous new colonial taxes prompted widespread rioting, attacks on symbols of British authority, and Executive Council. The council replied that a bans on British imports.

When the colonies convened the First Continental Congress in 1774 to wife automatically ceded to her husband ownercoordinate resistance, Galloway attended as a member of the Pennsylvania ship of property she brought into the marriage. delegation. Decrying the new taxes but fearing a bloody, Should a husband prove treasonous, the state futile confrontation, he proposed converting the could seize his holdings, with title reverting to Congress into an American parliament with power his widow or her heirs following his death. to block British legislation affecting all the coloOn August 19, Peale gave Galloway until 10 the next morning to vacate her home. nies. Congress, voting colony by colony, rejected Galloway’s plan by a single vote, opting instead THE REALITY OF EVICTION disfor a comprehensive trade boycott.

To enforce that boycott, Congress created tressed Galloway but left her relieved local committees. These bodies forcefully that the protracted tussle had ended cracked down on attempts to sidestep the bans and hopeful that she would recover her and gradually took over local militias and other property. She moved in with her friend functions of governance. Such hard line tactics Molly Craig and her husband, noting in Charles alienated moderates like Galloway, who stayed her diary that after lunch they visited Peale away when Congress convened again in May 1775. other friends. “I did not seem to be much The colonies hurtled toward a declaration of indeconcerned,” she wrote. Benjamin Chew, a forpendence and the carnage he had predicted. A little over mer chief justice of the Supreme Court of Penna year later, Galloway crossed over to the British side to offer his services, sylvania who had urged Galloway to fight her and when General William Howe occupied Philadelphia in September 1777, eviction as unlawful, advised her to sue the comhe made Joseph Galloway his chief of police. missioners of forfeited estates, alleging illegal Within the year, forced to reassign troops due to France’s entry into the forced entry. Galloway demurred. At the end of war, the British had pulled out of Philadelphia. Soon, so had Joseph Gallo- her diary entry for that day she wrote, “I am just way, taking daughter Elizabeth with him to New York. Grace stayed behind distracted, but glad it is over.” Still, her newly to try to protect their holdings. The commissioners for forfeited estates reduced circumstances chafed. “People are soon came calling to say they would be seizing these properties, many of which tired with intruders,” she wrote, adding later, she had inherited from her father, and evicting her from her Philadelphia “Mrs. Craig I think is tired and what she does is home. Aided by powerful friends, Galloway appealed to the Pennsylvania really through charity.” Her hosts’ own political AUTUMN 2022

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Joseph Galloway

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Joseph Reed

Benjamin Chew

John Dickinson

HER DAUGHTER’S ABSENCE tore at Grace. “My child is dearer to me than all nature and if she is not happy or anything should happen to her, I am lost,” she wrote in her diary. “Indeed, I have no other wish in life than her welfare.” Joseph’s welfare, less so. It came to Grace that she didn’t miss her husband, recalling him as imperious and unkind. “The liberty of doing as I please makes even poverty more agreeable than any time I ever spent since I married,” she wrote that November.

“I want not to be kept so like a slave as he always made me in preventing every wish of my heart.” As she grasped that his financial arrangements were making her life more difficult, her rancor grew.

The state now controlled the Galloway holdings, but some tenants still paid her rent—except those with whom Joseph had made side deals. One man told her that at her husband’s request he had advanced him £400 in rent before Joseph left town. “This unhappy man has ruined himself and I find he conceals all he can from me,” Grace wrote of her husband. “His base conduct with me when present and his taking no care of me in his absence has quite made me indifferent toward him.”

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divisions complicated the situation. Mr. Craig was a “strong” Patriot, Mrs. Craig a “violent” Loyalist. After two months, Galloway began bunking with her friend Debbie Morris. One evening, walking to Morris’s home, Galloway saw her former carriage pass by—a reminder of all she had lost. “My dear child came into my mind and what she would say to see her mamma walking 5 squares in the rain at night like a common woman and go to rooms in an alley for her home,” Galloway wrote in her diary.

In New York City, the hub of the British war effort, Joseph and Elizabeth Galloway were poised to sail for London. As they waited they corresponded frequently with Grace in secret, smuggling letters in pen quills and other hiding places.

Patriot authorities, who sometimes expelled Philadelphians after intercepting messages residents had sent containing information deemed to be of military value, intercepted an affectionate farewell note Joseph Galloway had sent his sister and published the contents in local newspapers.

“It did him no dishonour,” Grace noted in her diary, though the episode unsettled her. In an early letter to Grace, Joseph Galloway asked if her hardships were as he had heard them described,

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and, if so, urged her to come to New York. She refused, citing their daughter’s welfare. “Should I leave this place…then perhaps, my dearest child may become a beggar,” Grace wrote of Elizabeth.

“Therefore, while I have the least shadow of saving something for her, I will stay.”

A Spouse’s Dilemma Joseph Galloway, above, had to flee his hometown for his life because he had sided with the Crown.

He and his wife smuggled letters to one another.

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GRACE’S DIARY ENTRIES for late 1778 often cite health problems. Christmas Day was snowy and extremely cold, and Galloway noted her pleasure at having been able to procure firewood. She sat alone most of that afternoon, sleeping. “Am so unwell can hardly keep up,” she wrote in her diary. On New Year’s Day she summoned doctors.

“Before they came, I was taken with a puking and found it was a true bilious colic,” she wrote. “By the time the doctors came, I got ease; but they all thought me in a dangerous way. Oh, my dear child, how did I then think of you…I got up in the evening and was better but continued ill for many days after.” Mostly bedridden through February, she ignored her diary until March.

Lonely, impoverished, and ill, Galloway relied for aid on a robust network of friends. Colonial-era America was a close-knit society, and among Philadelphia’s upper classes, personal history seems to have prevailed over current-day politics. Galloway’s diary frequently refers to meetings with friends, some of them such

A Fond Welcome prominent Patriots as Continental Congress A 1783 print portrays delegates John Dickinson and Elias Boudinot. steadfast Loyalists being But wariness was afoot. Many in her circle hesgreeted as they arrive in itated to have Galloway in their homes, a harsh Britain after the Revolution. turn for a person of once exalted standing.

Men of her acquaintance, especially, worried that receiving an accused traitor’s wife could raise community eyebrows.

“Why must I have people by dozens that will not get me to their houses but let me dine at home; so that I can give them a dish of tea tis all they care,” she wrote. “The whole town are a mean pack.” Some friends grew standoffish.

Benjamin Chew, initially solicitous, became less willing to help with her legal troubles, and Galloway noted with disgust that Chew and family, despite their Loyalist sympathies, consorted with French officers and radical Patriots. “I know [the Chews] are no friends to me and mine,” she wrote.

“Chew is for keeping in [with] both sides but suspected by all.”

Meetings with friends offered a much-needed opportunity to vent frustrations. “I told them I was the happiest woman in town, for I had been stripped and turned out of doors, yet I was still the same,” Galloway wrote after one such encounter. “It was not in their power to humble me, for I should be Grace Growden Galloway to the last…that if my little fortune would be of service to them, they may keep it, for I had exchanged it for content.” Ranting brought her happiness, though she noticed one witness AUTUMN 2022

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LOOSE TALK OF LOYALIST ideas could be dangerous. Patriots generally imprisoned and executed only individuals who aided the British war effort—which fate might have befallen Joseph Galloway had he remained in Philadelphia. A lesser but still horrifying punishment, tarring and feathering, involved stripping accused individuals bare and slathering them in molten tar topped with a coat of feathers, then parading the unfortunates through the streets. In May 1779, shortages of many basic goods in Philadelphia prompted rioting by Patriot militia and violence against Loyalists. “A mob is raised in the town, and they are taking up Tories,” Galloway said in her diary. “I was much alarmed…We put away our valuable things thinking they will search the house for [flour] and stores.” Rioters demanded that all Loyalists be expelled from the city. “I am afraid to be sent away,” Galloway wrote.

A couple of months later, authorities advertised Galloway’s estate for sale in local newspapers. Galloway, who had been thinking of sailing to London to find Joseph and Elizabeth, agonized over whether to make a new claim on her properties or try to buy them back. She feared this could amount to acknowledgement of Patriot authority, risking charges of treason or wrecking her reunion plans. Friends and acquaintance gave conflicting advice. Patriot authorities “knew they had no right to my estate, and that I would not ask that as a favour, which I had a right to command,” she wrote in her diary, “and that I never did or would acknowledge their authority, as I was an Englishwoman.” Upon reflection a few days later, she wrote, “I am yet undetermined how to act. I think it best to leave it, but my child’s interest argues for buying…I am almost out of my wits.”

Merchant Abel James offered to buy a couple of Galloway properties being auctioned and hold the parcels in trust for her to preserve stands of trees—a valuable source of firewood. She gratefully accepted, but James was outbid.

Through early 1780, Philadelphia newspapers carried notices of sales of Galloway properties. By now many prominent Loyalists had left town, their downtown mansions occupied by new owners. Executive Council President Joseph Reed

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IN THEIR HIGH STAKES BID for independence, American Patriots, unwilling to tolerate potential enemies in their midst, made Loyalist neighbors choose: Change sides or leave. These efforts gained steam after the First Continental Congress in 1774. Patriot committees and mobs, and later state legislatures, required that citizens renounce the Crown and swear allegiance to their states of residence. Those who balked first suffered social and economic isolation and, if they persisted, physical attack and property confiscation. Eight states banished prominent Loyalists, threatening execution if they returned.

This treatment spurred many Loyalists to flee, first to British-held areas such as New York City and after the war elsewhere in the empire. Men branded traitors often left behind wives and children in efforts to hold onto property otherwise apt to be seized. Sometimes authorities allowed wives to retain such property, or at least portions thereof. This apparently was what the Galloways were hoping for when Grace stayed in Philadelphia, though husband Joseph’s notoriety probably precluded any leniency toward Grace Galloway.

The largest number of émigrés went north to Quebec and Nova Scotia, where the British helped them resettle with free land, seed, tools, and provisions.

Others went to Great Britain, where authorities started paying refugees pensions and offering compensation for their losses. In 1783, Parliament established a commission in London to hear Loyalist claims.

Hitting the Road Before the evacuation of Neighbors’ ire and governmental pressure British troops and Loyalpropelled many Loyalists out of their homes ist residents from New and into an uncertain future elsewhere.

York City that same year, commission representatives traveled there, as well as to Quebec, Montreal, St. John, and Halifax, to allow refugees to file for compensation. By 1788, a total of about £3 million had gone to more than 4,000 claimants. One was Joseph Galloway, granted £500 a year. Galloway initially remained active in politics, advising the British government on policy toward its rebellious American colonies and writing pamphlets on the subject.

At a parliamentary inquiry into the conduct of the former head of the British war effort in America, William Howe, Galloway criticized Howe for neglecting to make more and better use of Loyalist civilians to reassert British control and of alienating disaffected colonists by failing to rein in his troops’ excesses. —Jonathan House

wincing. Sometimes Galloway worried in entries that she should show more caution. Shocked to discover in conversation that a friend was a Patriot, she worried afterwards that she might have said something improper to the woman. “[I] am vexed about Sally Zanes,” she wrote. “I wish I could always be on my guard.” One night after a gathering at which she feared she had said too much, she awoke in a fright. “I dreamed I was going to be hanged,” she recorded in her diary.

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Forced Out

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Pledging Allegiance—To the King Many colonists who fervently believed in the Crown signed public oaths of allegiance to the monarchy, above. These recorded displays of fealty sometimes meant that it was best for signatories to get out of town, left, when British armed forces retreated.

was living in the Galloway house. Deteriorating health forbade Grace to travel to London and smuggling missives had become difficult, but she continued to write letters to Elizabeth that she hoped to show her daughter one day. In one of the last, Grace Galloway wrote, “It is now going on three years since I was left in this dreadful situation, and my health now so impaired that I never

hope to have it in my power to see my relations or native country more. Want of health and to save your inheritance alone detains me. If by it, I save my child, all will be right.” She died on February 6, 1782. She was in her fifties.

The war was winding down. A decisive defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 prompted the British to begin negotiating with the Americans and withdrawing their troops. The crown maintained a strong sense of responsibility toward the faithful who had stood fast. Decamping from Charleston, Savannah, and New York City, British troops took with them tens of thousands of Loyalists who feared for their safety.

During the war, at least 60,000 Loyalists fled the former colonies, mostly relocating in other parts of the empire. The Peace of Paris signed on September 3, 1783, committed the Americans to ending persecution of Loyalists and returning their property. Initially authorities mostly ignored that mandate, as Elizabeth Galloway discovered when from London she began to try to recover her mother’s estate. But over the years Pennsylvania authorities allowed Elizabeth to gain ownership of most of the family properties. The state dropped any claim to the Galloway estate when Joseph Galloway died in 1803, 26 years after Grace Galloway’s eviction. H AUTUMN 2022

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PHOTO CREDIT

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Amber Waves, a Strain Until Peter Watson rethought quartermastering, the Union Army had to struggle to get grain from the fields to its troops and horses.

Inventing the Future PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO CREDIT

The effort to keep the Union Army fighting created the commodities market

By Scott Reynolds Nelson

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PETER WATSON WAS BORN in Whidby Yorkshire, England, in 1819. Around 1830 his family emigrated to Toronto, Canada. His father’s participation in a failed 1837 rebellion precipitated his banishment from Britain and its holdings, propelling the family to Rochester, New York.

Peter and brother William, both mechanically minded, wound up in Rockford, Illinois, running a foundry and machine shop. Peter eventually studied law, specializing in patents. In the 1840s he worked for such clients as Samuel F.B.

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establishment of reliable supply lines to support Union general Ulysses Grant’s critical campaign in the west, and Watson’s most enduring legacy: creation of what became the futures market.

The War Department’s drafty offices crawled with spies working for either the Confederacy or some military contractor. All wanted to learn the size, disposition, and direction of Union forces— the enemy, to stop those forces; contractors, to gouge the army. To foil these agents, Watson often operated out of a railway car. He communicated most of his orders to his lieutenants via hand-delivered message or telegraphed in code.

He had his own secret police force. Watson’s remarkable success at security has kept him nearly unknown to historians, along with his world-changing feat of transforming trade in grain and other agricultural commodities.

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n the Washington, DC, of 1862, Peter H. Watson’s powerful, hefty frame and red Amish-style beard made him instantly recognizable around the Department of War. Before being named assistant secretary of war, Watson had been a high-profile corporate patent lawyer. In 1854 he was employed as chief counsel for Rockford, Illinois-based J. H. Manny & Company, a maker of wheat-harvesting equipment. When rival Cyrus McCormick sued the Manny company over a patent on a reaper, Watson hired attorney and politician Edwin M. Stanton as his assistant. For additional support, Stanton contracted with an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Watson initially found Lincoln grating but came to admire the lanky fellow's skills. Watson advised Stanton to keep the tall attorney on retainer. These associations had repercussions. The connections linking railway barons, grain dealers, and the lawyers who represented them coalesced into the Republican Party. From California to Chicago, New York to Pennsylvania, many of the new party’s wealthiest supporters were merchants, railway men, and lawyers. Their collective power was undeniable.

Watson was ruthless. So that a client’s machine design would appear older than it actually was, he artificially aged a mechanical reaper's wooden components. He was arrogant. Meeting Abraham Lincoln in 1855, Watson derided the other man as a “railsplitAdapted by the ter from the Wild West” before coming to recognize author from his book Lincoln’s gifts. Within a few years Lincoln was a Oceans of Grain: How American president at war; to help prosecute that war, he Wheat Remade the recruited Watson to remove the taint of scandal from World (Basic Books, the War Department. Results of that hiring included 2022; basicbooks. com) a great expansion of the nation’s railroad systems,

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Agent of Change Watson envisioned and implemented a grain buying system that would allow Union Army supply trains like the one at left to keep to reliable schedules and prices.

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Simon Cameron

Thomas Scott

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former legal client Peter H. Watson. Watson refused the ill-paid position, suggesting Lincoln instead hire Edwin Stanton, who was Watson's right-hand man. Watson told Stanton that becoming war secretary was his patriotic duty.

Stanton acceded. A few months later, Stanton demanded that Watson replace the corrupt Scott as his assistant. Watson grudgingly stepped up.

Stanton persuaded Congress to authorize the president to seize railroads as needed for war purposes. Meeting with rail executives in February 1862, Stanton laid out a plan to strengthen and consolidate competing railways between the Midwest and the East. The arrangement included a discount for the military. Watson almost certainly established the terms that would join the railways to the Union war effort.

The president’s wartime authority included both stick and carrot. Railways would give the government a 50 percent discount on published rates or risk seizure by executive order.

In return, the War Department authorized railroads to consolidate management, regularize track gauges, and share cars. System builders could ignore state and local laws that for 25 years had been hindering interstate consolidation of rail lines between the Midwest and the Atlantic Ocean. By 1863, four extended lines had expanded under consolidated management: the Erie, the Penn, the New York Central, and the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O). All soon were connecting the midwestern grain states to eastern ports, though until 1873 most traffic still came by way of lakes and canals to New York City.

The New York Central’s Cornelius Vanderbilt,

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©CIVIL WAR ARCHIVE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Edwin Stanton

Morse and Goodyear. His skills brought him to Manny & Co. and elevation into the ranks of Republican power brokers. He joined the Lincoln administration following a scandal that engulfed Lincoln’s first Secretary of War, Simon Cameron.

When the Confederacy shut down North-South transport of goods on the Mississippi River, that blockade at first forced most of the grain trade to the Great Lakes, so that between 1859 and 1862 the amount of grain received in Buffalo, New York, tripled, benefiting a monopoly held by a single line, the Northern Central Railroad. Just before the war started, that railway, connecting Maryland to Pennsylvania, had been acquired by Cameron, then a Senator representing Pennsylvania. When named secretary of war by President Lincoln, Cameron placed the Northern Central under the control of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which by then was running from Washington, DC, to Lake Michigan. Cameron chose as his assistant secretary the company’s vice president, Thomas A. Scott—Watson’s predecessor. As assistant secretary of war, Scott set rates for shuttling troops and supplies; as vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, he collected those fares and fees. Under the newly reorganized Pennsylvania Railroad, a single railway trunk line soon stretched from Alexandria, Virginia, to wheat fields in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

A congressional investigation reported numerous cases of outright fraud by Scott, including the disappearance of millions of dollars.

Charges were brought in Congress as well as in the Pennsylvania legislature. Lincoln cashiered Cameron. To replace him, Lincoln tried to recruit

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (4)

Feeding on the Run The vexatious challenge of sustaining the army's vast numbers of fighting men and immense herds of horses complicated the task of waging war until Watson's approach took hold.

©CIVIL WAR ARCHIVE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Edgar Thomson, and the B&O’s John Garrett have been credited with building interstate railroads after the Civil War. But the moving force was Peter Watson. Watson and Stanton would establish the complicated public-private partnership under which army engineer Herman Haupt and Major General Henry Halleck were to perform brilliantly.

Watson’s consolidation of the Union Army’s supply chain in the North synched with the operations of the Quartermaster Corps and establishment of military railway corridors through the South. By the middle of 1863, as Watson’s eastwest railroad corridors from Chicago were beginning to emerge, the army had begun standardizing its provisioning and its personnel structure. The army reorganized each squad of eight men into a “flying column” able to move quickly. Historically American soldiers had carried necessities in a haversack—a flapped pouch dangling from a single strap, which could be cumbersome. Now the Union army adopted the knapsack, which snugged onto a man’s back using two shoulder straps. Into and onto the knapsack went 60 rounds of ammunition, eight days’ rations of salted meat, crackers, rice, and water, and either a blanket or an overcoat. Most also carried cooking utensils. Individual provisioning meant fewer wagons per regiment. With commodities like wheat and corn arriving at Louisville, Kentucky, and Alexandria, Virginia, from which they were shipped into the field to complement packaged vegetables and meats, quartermasters could assemble and pack rations such that a federal soldier could sustain himself for eight days before needing to be resupplied.

AND THIS WAS JUST THE BEGINNING. By September 14, 1863, the Union railroad operation had assumed control of all railways in federal

possession and all rail construction and reconWhat They Carried Top left, knapsack from struction in the Confederacy. These undertakthe 21st Massachusetts ings were aided by the cheap labor of tens of Regiment. Above, Private thousands of formerly enslaved Black men who Henry F. Lincoln of Co. B, had escaped into Union territory. By war’s end 47th New York Infantry the Union controlled and had regraded 2,105 Regiment, with bayoneted miles of track through the Confederate states. rifle, canteen, haversack, In October 1863, New York newspaperman knapsack, and bedroll.

L.A. Hendricks characterized the army’s virtual annexation of the railway corridor as an “unwritten chapter” of the Civil War. “The railroad is the bowels of the army,” Hendricks wrote. “The railroad is the channel through which the army is fed, nourished and kept alive; by means of the railroad the army lives and moves, and has its being. Cut off the railroad and the army dies.” The Alexandria, Virginia, depot, the reporter noted, covered 200 acres. Depots at Nashville, Tennessee, and Jeffersonville, Indiana, were of comparable size. By 1863 the Nashville depot AUTUMN 2022

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LOGISTICAL SOLUTIONS, however, work only if there are supplies to be moved, and in late 1863, Watson’s most pressing problem was lack of feed for starving horses. To keep in good flesh, one warhorse needs approximately 22 pounds of oats or forage a day. The War Department owned more than 200,000 horses, a gigantic herd that each month consumed 2.5 million bushels of oats. The animals were scattered from Texas to New York to Florida. Most were clustered at Alexandria, Virginia; at a cavalry outpost in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and at the leading edge of the Union Army, now attempting to invade the South but besieged in Chattanooga,

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FOR OVER A CENTURY, nations at war had been issuing paper currency and rationing goods. As of February 1862, the War Office paid for supplies with U.S. Treasury notes called "greenbacks" for the ink used to print them. Unlike prewar currency, greenbacks were not backed by government gold or silver David reserves. Unstable in value, they might trade Dows for as little as 35 cents to the gold dollar. This variability led to two-tiered pricing: one amount for goods bought with gold and a higher sum paid by customers proffering greenbacks.

Overlapping and competing state-supervised supply systems compounded the problem. Although Watson was designated to clean up the mess, in June 1863 Congress imposed its own solution: a centralized national purchasing system. The Alexandria depot would serve the eastern armies; the depots at Louisville and Jeffersonville would serve troops in the west. Contractors were to file sworn bids, signed in quintuplicate and enforced by the threat of court-martial. Centralization sharply narrowed the field of bidders. Only about a dozen merchants in the United States had the wherewithal to bid on supplying the 10,000 bushels of oats standard in an army contract. “A large combination of men and money,” assistant quartermaster general Captain Samuel L. Brown said, was “controlling the supply of oats and corn then acceptable for supply of the Army.”

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was warehousing five million rations and delivering 300,000 rations a day to Union soldiers, refugees, and freed people who worked on its grounds and in its corridors. Western commissary-general Henry Clay Symonds declared that, from Nashville, he was also “running a cracker bakery with 400 barrels of flour a day; a bread bakery with 150 barrels of flour a day; a soldier’s rest, with from one to five thousand meals a day (on one occasion [it] furnished 15,000 meals); three pork houses, each packing about one thousand hogs a day; a pickle factory, putting up six thousand gallons of pickles a day, and was receiving about one thousand head of cattle a day,” in addition to “provid[ing] for twenty-one hospitals, with 20,000 patients.”

Tennessee. The Union supply lines that fed these herds and the soldiers who used them stretched from the main eastern depot in Alexandria and the main western depot at Jeffersonville through Confederate territory to hundreds of camps all over the country.

In late 1863 Watson’s security operatives smashed a scheme in which crooked Union quartermasters had been bilking the government out of a fortune by manipulating stocks of horse feed. The defendants and their civilian accomplices were court-martialed.

In the course of the investigation, word got out that the War Department lacked contracts to deliver the 2.5 million bushels of oats Union Army horses needed every month to stay alive. In response, contractors holding oats more than doubled their rates over the previous year’s. Crisis loomed.

B CHRISTOPHER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Greenback Dollar Unfettered from government reserves of gold and silver, a new type of currency nicknamed for its ink meandered in value, leading to the establishment of a two-tiered payment system for grain.

Walking That Chow Line Watson created his surreptitious purchasing system to ensure that troops in the field were going into combat with full stomachs.

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B CHRISTOPHER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The big 12 “demanded increased (and constantly increasing) prices for grain.” By December 1863, the price for oats had more than tripled, exceeding $1 per bushel, and army horses still needed 2.5 million bushels of oats per month, never mind feeding the soldiers using those animals.

TO EASE THE BIG 12'S STRANGLEHOLD and feed the army and its mounts at a reasonable cost, Watson proposed an innovation. Instead of signing large contracts, he was going to use the Chicago Board of Trade to fracture Union purchases into hundreds of tiny contracts, each for 1,000 bushels. Watson ordered assistant quartermaster general Brown to be at a telegraph office at 113 Broadway, near the New York Produce Exchange, on December 20, 1863. Once Brown had ensconced himself, grain trader David Dows helped him send a series of coded telegrams to the Chicago Board. Brown and the Board negotiated over 100 contracts for oats, with months of delivery for each fixed. A week later the War Department sent Brown $500,000 to make good on those contracts. Dows had a trusted agent in Chicago arrange to pack the contracted lots of oats onto ships at the Chicago wharves for shipment across the Great Lakes, then by water to

the Alexandria supply depot and to the forward depot at Fort Monroe, Virginia. Other shipments made their way to Jeffersonville, Indiana. At Jeffersonville the commissary-general was authorized to write as many ad hoc contracts as needed to feed the horses and mules in Chattanooga and across the entire western theater of the war. In small lots bought by intermediaries on behalf of the government, affordable grain flowed to soldiers and their mounts. The power of the 12 to act as a cartel and dictate high prices was broken. Instead of depending on contractors to deliver grain to the seat of war, goods purchased in peacetime Chicago could be packed and then delivered over multiple railway routes to supply depots hundreds of miles away.

This arrangement fit with Congressional requirements, interpreted broadly. Congress had authorized suspension of army contracting rules “when required by the public exigency” for an “open purchase or contract.” Watson and the acting commissary-general invoked half-starved horses and monopoly power as exigencies. Brown saw the arrangement’s sneakiness for what it was. He declared in his report that Watson had ordered him to “forestall” the market for oats. “Forestalling,” a medieval term, means buying goods for resale. In the 18th century forestallers had joined cutpurses, forgers, prostitutes, and other criminals in the pillory, but times had changed. In forestalling on behalf of the army that day, Brown had entered into more than 100 of what now are called futures contracts.

Fracturing the Union's buys into tiny deals stipulating delivery to central locations pulverized the Big 12's grip on the grain market.

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Farm to Mess Hall Table In war three considerations rule: logistics, logistics, and logistics. The Union had to get grain from the field, left, to sites like Petersburg, Virginia, shown below as the first Union wagon train arrived at what would be a key army distribution center.

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SUCH CONTRACTS WERE NOTHING NEW; elements of them went back centuries. Since the early 1800s parties had been writing “forward contracts” for goods stipulating delivery at a fixed price and in a fixed quantity, based on examination of a small sample. But the army’s version of this contract incorporated innovative features: a fixed month of delivery; a fixed percentage paid by each party to guarantee the transaction (the “margin”); a standardized quality based on third-party inspection; and a standardized —and smaller­—quantity of 100 or 1,000 bushels, that came to be known as the “contract.” A third-party arbiter, the Chicago Board of Trade, collected the margins. The arbiter possessed legal authority to punish buyer or seller for non-performance. An Illinois state charter ensured that the board’s arbitration committee had authority over these contracts. The harshest sanction for mischief was expulsion from the Board of Trade.

The entire innovative package—which the Chicago Board of Trade called “time contracts”—required new rules that were written between 1864 and 1865. For Watson, who relied on secrecy to camouflage the army’s vulnerability to price gouging, a key advantage of this system was that both buyer and seller could be anonymous. The Chicago Board took margins from buyer and seller and graded grain by its own standards.

A futures contract is thought of as “self-enforcing,” though it was properly enforced by the Chicago Board. The board’s enforcement of the contract erased the need to judge individual trading partners’ trustworthiness.

IN DECEMBER 1863, however, only one entity was doing business in this way: the U.S. Army. But eventually what began as a series of ad hoc secret telegrams intended to relieve a desperate military attempting to maintain 1,000-mile wartime supply lines became an opportunity to speculate on supply of and demand for grain.

The most radical feature of the futures market, signaled by its origin in telegraphic communication, was the extent to which the new approach squeezed delivery costs. Until the 1850s, information and goods moved at roughly the same speed.

With telegraphy, buyers and sellers could negotiated prices before goods arrived, often reducing uncertainties and streamlining expenses.

Watson seemed to have thwarted the dozen merchants who had been driving up the army price for oats, but opportunities for market influence still existed. Controlling a large warehouse of grain mattered, of course. A sharp operator could issue more futures contracts than he had grain in his warehouse when prices were high and quietly buy contracts to fill those orders when prices dropped. A “combination of men and money” had impelled Watson to persuade the Chicago Board to generate a bunch of identical,

ILBUSCA/GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The only variables were date and price.

Reorganized in this way, the market came to operate as a kind of bank for grain or any other commodity. In the grain trade, a futures contract provided a “convenience yield,” comparable to a bank account balance, because, unlike previous contracts, this contract was instantly salable. On any business day one simply brought contracts to a broker with a seat on the Chicago board and had him sell them at the market price.

The futures market also guarded against price swings: a farmer needing credit could contract with a local broker, selling a thousand bushels for future delivery. Selling a portion of his crop this way also protected the farmer from price drops that might come at harvest; flour millers could buy these futures contracts to guard against price jumps. Relatively small incremental “contracts” of 100 bushels allowed speculators with fewer assets to bet on rises and falls based on analyzing information that might affect prices.

Entry of more buyers and sellers increased flexibility in the market, which, according to neoclassical economic theory, protected against wild price swings, improving everyone’s life.

Prefiguring Peacetime Processes Establishing control of the rails to get provisions and materiél to where they were needed foreshadowed a business model that rearranged the world.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

ILBUSCA/GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

standardized contracts. Now any shopkeeper or small-time buyer who held enough warehouse receipts had a silo in his pocket whose contents he might sell when the price rose slightly. The dozen merchants’ power over a market might be more easily broken, but a single large buyer or seller, such as the federal government, might be invisible to everyone else in the market. A government’s desperation, carefully hidden by anonymous purchases on a distant futures market, could crack the cartel’s monopoly.

FEEDING THE UNION ARMY’S half-starved horses required a confluence of circumstances: a plugged Mississippi, a group of railway barons, and a new model of military logistics. These factors interleaved to allow Watson to deliver mountains of oats to the horses and then an ocean of wheat and other grains to the soldiers in Chattanooga. This, more than anything, made a Union victory possible. A futures market with a centralized depot system had unified command in the Union’s eastern and western theaters. The futures market also allowed Sherman in the west and Grant in the east to surround, cut off, and finally engulf the Confederate army. A waterborne east-west route in the American North, a futures market for supply, and railroad corridors extending into the southern interior allowed the Union Army to feed soldiers and horses both,

dramatically increasing military units’ mobility. Watson resigned from the War Department in July 1864. He went into the mining business.

Immediately after the Civil War, merchants in Montreal, Liverpool, New York, and London began to take note of the Chicago futures contract. That distinct and puzzling entity, a uniquely American form of banking, attracted capitalists to invest in long-distance food trading. Merchants in those cities required more than a decade to rethink and abandon “forward” contracts—and embrace Chicago’s rigid method of futures contracts. Eventually the New York Produce Exchange (1874) and the Liverpool Corn Exchange (1883) adopted Chicago’s rules for grain. In 1884 the British Empire designed futures contracts for Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, India, that were letterpress copies of the Chicago contract. New trading methods emerged from the distinct features of the futures contract, including what is now referred to as pillaring, strangling, and collaring.

These methods allowed multiplying the profit on a price rise, betting on volatility, or betting on a moderate rise while protecting against a drop.

Once peace returned to the United States, the construction of a civil logistics pathway to furnish goods to the world became a political priority for the merchants and railroad directors who stood to inherit the Union Army’s wartime infrastructure. Nitroglycerin was already being tested in California and Virginia as a means of blasting tunnels through mountains and extending railways toward deep-water ports. By then, Peter H. Watson had become president of the Erie Railroad, which he had helped bring into being. He was 66 when he died in New York City in 1885. H

The futures contract, a uniquely American instrument, fascinated merchants abroad who in time came to embrace it.

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Driven by Delusion German Chancellor Adolf Hitler, center, returns a salute from the Reichstag and his generals on December 12, 1941, the day he declared war on the United States.

Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War

By Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman Basic, 2021; $35

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A fantastic new crop of revisionist histories focused on World War II’s staggered beginnings and endings is adding nuance to scholarly and popular understanding of the global conflict. Marc Gallachio’s 2020 Unconditional presents the intense debates across Washington, DC, on how to end the war in the Pacific as a durable triumph of liberal internationalism over historical American anti-interventionism. Frederick Taylor’s 2020 book 1939 addresses extraordinary efforts made by many European leaders and diplomats to avoid another world war. To this list add Brendan Simms’s and Charlie Laderman’s similarly excellent Hitler’s American Gamble.

Few books demonstrate the superfluousness of counterfactual “history” as well as this one does. The coauthors offer a gripping blow-by-blow of the five-day span between Pearl Harbor and Germany’s December 12, 1941, declaration of war on the United States.

In retrospect, many parties to the larger conflict, particularly those taking the American side, have cast American participation in a

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multi-theater war against the Axis as inevitable.

Through an intensive transatlantic search of relevant archives, the authors show this not to have been so, recreating all sides’ uncertainty at a fraught moment. Each for its own reasons, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and Japan eagerly sought Germany’s entry into a shooting war with the United States. Debate reigned in Washington and Berlin on how to handle the putative foe.

Hitler’s decision to declare war—the titular gamble—was more rational than often portrayed.

The Führer was betting America would not be able to ramp up its war machine and continue to maintain the flow of Lend-Lease materiél, initially to Britain and then to the USSR. He expected a shortfall that would sap British capacity to repel German assaults and force the island nation to submit.

Beefing with the Americans turned out to be Hitler’s ad hoc version of the Kaiser’s Schlieffen Plan of a quarter century before. By kayoing Britain and quickly Nazifying Western Europe, the former corporal theorized, the Reich could steel its forces to counter whatever the world’s largest industrial power might muster as a cross-ocean counter punch. It didn’t work out that way, in

SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Boldly Betting Badly

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large part because the Allies did a remarkable job of coordinating their efforts while the Axis powers failed at forging a global strategy. Gamble’s dissection of December 1941 is unquestionably one of the most compelling and eye-opening monographs on World War II in recent memory. —Clayton Trutor teaches History at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. His book Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta and Atlanta Remade Professional Sports is available from the University of Nebraska Press.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

By John Markoff Penguin, 2022; $32

The Age of Astonishment: John Morris in the Miracle Century—from the Civil War to the Cold War

By Bill Morris Pegasus, Cambridge UK 2022; $27.95

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In the Thick of It Not a few readers first encountered Stewart Brand in the opening scene of The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s whirligig chronicle of the Merry Pranksters, Bay Area refugees from the humdrum who in the early 1960s coalesced around novelist Ken Kesey and a passel of hallucinogens, including LSD, then legal. Wolfe opens his tale in late 1966 in the bed of a pickup truck rocketing around San Francisco. With Wolfe are a crazily garbed kid called Cool Breeze, a young woman known as Black Maria, and “a half-Ottawa Indian girl named Lois Jennings, with her head thrown back and a radiant look on her face. Also, a blazing silver disk in the middle of her forehead alternately exploding with light when the sun hits it or sending off rainbows from the diffraction lines in it.” Driving the truck, whose bumper sports a sticker reading “Custer Died for Your Sins,” is “…Lois’s enamorado Stewart Brand, a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead, too, and a whole necktie made of Indian beads. No shirt, however, just an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it…”

That was Brand at 27, happily but temporarily ensconced in one of his substitute families. Wolfe initially meant to profile Kesey but his research ran away with him. By the time Acid Test debuted in 1968, Brand, who as with all his affiliations was in the Pranksters but not of the Pranksters, had moved on. Moving on, as John Markoff engagingly documents in Whole Earth, is what Stewart Brand has always done best, with sometimes prescient, often spectacular result. A scion of a Rockford, Illinois, family whose antecedents had made a comfortable amount of money in lumber and hardware, Brand was a midwestern mandarin edition of that classic American type, the walking contradiction: a polymath given to serial obsessions, a gifted leader made itchy by crowds; an innovator who chafed at having to keep his creations on the rails; a conservative soul with an anarchic bent. Before allying with the Pranksters, Brand had grown up the youngest child of an engineer-turned-advertising man, prepped at Phillips Exeter, attended Stanford, been a U.S. Army

paratroop officer—to his endless chagrin, he washed out of Ranger school—a freelance writer and photographer, an organizer of events social and artistic, and auteur of a multimedia show he titled America Needs Indians! For Kesey and ilk, Brand put together the Trips Festival, an epochal acid-drenched extravaganza that helped launch the hippie phenomenon, lent the Grateful Dead propulsion, and pointed Bill Graham toward the life of a countercultural impresario. While tripping in February 1966 Brand was moved to ask himself, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?”

His rhetorical query begat the Brand-helmed Whole Earth Catalog, a best-selling 1970s paperback compendium of endorsements for tools, books, riffs, gear, and philosophy that Steve Jobs called “Google before there was Google.” Anyone who ever cracked a copy of the catalog, hunting, say, rural real estate, and came upon $50-an-acre land through the United Farm Agency, or, needing to know how to repair VWs, had at hand a copy of John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual for the Compleat Idiot when a Microbus’s accelerator cable snapped east of Berlin, Ohio, on Labor Day weekend 1971, will appreciate this deeply researched and empathetic portrait of a truly original character who, among other coups, coined the phrase “personal computer.”

In Whole Earth, Markoff, a former New York Times reporter and author of Machines of Loving Grace, What the Dormouse Said, and other books, acknowledges, accepts, and succeeds at the formidable challenge of portraying each successive variant on the Brand brand; by the way, brandwise, this is an authorized biography. As Markoff puts it in his subtitle, across the last half century and then some there have been many Stewart Brands, each invented by the man himself, not infrequently in evolutionary reaction to his preceding incarnation—a restlessness that extended to putting himself at a distance from his family of origin (though accepting as his due modest infusions of family dough to fund his various enterprises). “Stewart has always wanted to be at the cutting edge, and he’s trapped there,” older brother Mike said ruefully. Perhaps seeking successors to that original familial group, Brand has worked serially at developing connections with other clans and tribes. He is a Venn diagram of selves and latter 1960s American and global eras.

Besides his paratrooper-into-Prankster phase and those preceding it, Brand, 84, has changed lanes from editor and publisher to political strategist to eco-warrior to conservationist to digital visionary to corporate consultant to author, always striving to adhere to an adjuration of his that admirer Jobs adopted: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Whole Earth locates Stewart Brand and

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his remarkable array of experiences and impacts in the larger context of the history he has lived through and influenced. —Michael Dolan

Witness to History This ingenious biography tells of an ordinary man who lived through an amazing century—and not the current one. During recent decades medicine has produced no miracles to match antibiotics, vaccines, and aseptic surgery, journalist Bill Morris writes. Passenger jets travel only a bit faster than in the 1950s. Smartphones greatly improve on rotary phones but hardly constitute a revolution.

For Morris, the century of truly unrivaled progress began in 1870. Instead of penning a standard history, he writes of his grandfather, born in 1863 and a college professor of no particular note, detouring regularly to recount the great milestones. His oddball take works.

John Morris was born on a Virginia plantation during the Civil War. With its slaves freed at war’s end, Morris the elder found work as an English professor at the University of Georgia. Like most southern public institutions even before the Civil War, the university was underfinanced and behind the times, but Morris’s father made sure his sons— though not his daughters—received a university education as, a few hundred miles north, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers, and other innovators were working their magic, while in Europe Pasteur, Koch, and Nobel were not exactly slacking off.

Having graduated, John taught for a few years, obtained a law degree, and failed at a law practice in Birmingham, Alabama. Collecting himself, he spent a year in Germany at the renowned University of Berlin where he took up philology, the study of language.

Following his father to the University of Georgia in 1894, John taught for 50-plus years, modestly adding to an obscure field and witnessing the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. A rare Georgia progressive, he endorsed Black civil rights, women’s rights, and pacifism but was no activist, limiting himself to deploring matters.

Southern racial troubles fill much of the text, but Professor MorrisShip repeatAMHP-220802-002 Index 1-2Vert.indd edly notes events elsewhere. From electric lighting to flush toilets to the

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Doing Well Doing Harm Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution

By Eric Jay Dolin Liveright, 2022; $32.50

A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age

By Philip Dray Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022; $29

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Pirates but for a scrap of parchment, American privateers wreaked havoc on British shipping during the Revolution, contributing far more to victory at sea than the nascent U.S. Navy. Though exact records are not available, roughly 1,600 American privateers seized more than 1,800 British vessels. Privateering aligned with Americans’ spirit of free enterprise. Indeed, a mania erupted among American ship owners and sailors for taking British ships—and getting rich in the bargain.

Most naval history focuses on battles between national fleets, and so the swaggering history of the Revolution’s American privateers may have sailed past some readers. Eric Jay Dolin’s comprehensive effort helps correct that oversight.

A form of commerce raiding during the age of sail, privateering involved outfitting privately-owned ships, often converted merchantmen, with cannon, muskets, and cutlasses to “annoy” enemy commerce. The legal fig leaf for this thievery was the letter of marque—a document issued by a government giving a privateer an official commission. Seized ships, or “prizes,” were sold at special vice admiralty courts, the proceeds divvied among owners, captain, and crew. Privateer crews received a larger slice of prize sales than naval crews, making sailing on a privateer more attractive than enlisting. A single cruise could leave even lowly crewmen wealthy. Lucky privateer owners made fortunes. The privateer brig Holker of Philadelphia, dubbed “the swiftest sailing vessel…from America” by the British, took 10 prizes on one cruise. This haul was worth £2 million—today, roughly $300 million—including a sizeable profit for her owner, Irish-born merchant Blair McClenachan.

Besides examining privateer vessels, crews, and fights at sea, Dolin also studies how privateering fit American war aims, how the strategy’s popularity affected the strength of both the navy and the army, and how privateers’ successes buoyed public spirits. He also touches on how this freebooting practice discomfited certain American leaders. Benjamin Franklin, an early proponent, came to dislike privateering, calling the practice “…a remnant of the ancient piracy” and writing that it made war profitable and thus more likely.

The only drawback to Dolin’s fascinating effort

might be an excess of detail on congressional political machinations and the Revolution’s general history and not enough on the exciting sea stories and battle accounts of these partisans-for-profit. —Tim Queeney is editor of Ocean Navigator magazine in Portland, Maine.

Bleak Look Back On February 23, 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced placement of plaques memorializing Robert Lewis and Robert Mulliner, Black men lynched in the New York towns of Port Jervis and Newburgh in the late 1800s. Philip Dray’s timely A Lynching at Port Jervis tells Lewis’s story.

He was accused of assaulting Lena McMahon, a White woman, on June 2, 1892, on the banks of the Neversink River. Several White Port Jervis residents sought to ensure Lewis’s trial by due process, but that night a mob seized, tortured, and hanged him from a tree in the front yard of a White judge, who also attempted to intervene.

That a horror generally associated with the Jim Crow South happened in a northern railroad town was shocking. More shocking were efforts by Port Jervis residents to befog the guilt of those “persons unknown” behind the gang murder and to erase the lynching from collective local memory. A transcript of the coroner’s public inquest into Lewis’s death vanished and remains missing. In keeping with the times, authorities sought and recorded little input from contemporaneous Black sources. Nevertheless, making use of robust national and local press coverage and personal recollections, Dray weaves a compelling narrative.

A Lynching is as much an analysis of Port Jervis and its people as of lynching as mob “justice.” Dray flatteringly describes the town’s social strata and key figures, including the alleged victim, her parents, and her paramour, who may have conspired in the alleged assault. The author also chronicles how literary luminaries Ida B. Wells and Stephen Crane tried to spotlight the town’s hidden shame.

The book has nits. Illustrations often go unexplained, sending the reader repeatedly to the index. A Lynching would have benefited from more detailed maps of the Delaware & Hudson Canal, pertinent rail lines, regional topography, and the ostensible and actual crime scenes. A Lynching at Port Jervis is a fast-paced account of a terrible episode and how an American town buried the crimes. Dray portrays the atrocity early, then sifts the evidence and the suspects toward a coroner’s inquest and two grand jury reviews, in the mode of an episode from a steampunk version of Law & Order—except that in television procedurals evildoers usually come to grief. In the Port Jervis of the 1890s, the persons unknown who slew Robert Lewis evaded justice. —Paul F. Bradley is a regular contributor.

AMERICAN HISTORY

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PHOTO CREDIT

creation of scientific medicine in the 19th century to cinema, radio, automobiles, television, world wars, and the nuclear age in the 20th, he lived through them all. He was never a significant figure, even at his university, but the author has done a fine job recounting his grandfather’s career and domestic life as he passively witnessed what would be his grandson’s favorite century. — Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.

From Gregory J. Lalire, the editor of

MAGAZINE

THE CALL OF McCALL

BY GREGORY J. LALIRE THIS HISTORICAL NOVEL follows Confederate veteran Zach “the bastard” McCall, his African American bear-wrestling pal Jasper Washington and half-brother Jack “Crooked Nose” McCall from the Daniel’s Den (a bordello in Boonesborough, Kentucky) to Springfield, Missouri, to connect with Wild Bill Hickok. The trio watches Wild Bill win a shootout with cardsharp Dave Tutt and then follows the famous lawman-gambler to the Kansas cow towns of Hays City and Abilene. In the end, they all arrive in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, where one of the Wild West’s most famous murders takes place—during a poker game at the No. 10 Saloon.

PRICE $25.95/447 PAGES HARDCOVER (5.5 X 8.5)/ISBN13:9781432892722 TIFFANYSCHOFELD@CEGAGE.COM FACEBOOK & TWITTER: @FIVESTARCENGAGE

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In 1869, after several summers vacationing in the highlands west of New Paltz, New York, Albert Smiley paid $28,000 for a lake and 300 rocky, often vertiginous acres there. The parcel, which included a hotel, occupied a slice of the Shawangunk Mountains, a bedrock spine stretching theatrically for 50 miles through the Hudson River Valley between New Jersey and the Catskills. On their chunk of the “Gunks,” later enlarged through additional purchases, Albert and identical twin Alfred created a resort reflecting their family’s rigorously austere Quaker values. Those values led the Smileys to sponsor decades of conferences studying Native Americans’ wellbeing and the pursuit of world peace at what they called Mohonk Mountain House (mohonk.com). Ever since, beneath the rubric of Smiley Brothers Inc., generations of descendants have operated the beloved facility, adjusting the austerity but retaining the rigor, expanding the calendar from five months to year-round, and developing an enviable farm-to-table gustatory experience. Guests can hardly name an activity that is not on the resort’s schedule, from dancing to archery to ice skating to hiking to swimming to kayaking and on and on—but habitual television watchers are out of luck unless they bring their own digital devices. —Michael Dolan

An American Place

72

Preserving the Old Ways Despite inevitable concessions to the modern world, Mohonk envelops guests in a welcoming blanket of old-fashioned fun, athletic rigor, and pure relaxation.

BILL GOZANSKY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD./ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Rock Steady

AMERICAN HISTORY

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