American History February 2021

Nantucket’s Trial

By Firestorm American Legacy in Japan’s Shadow Women’s Suffrage on the Big Screen The Luxury Craft That Sailed to War

FDR’s Power Move He shocked Big Business— and electrified America

February 2021 HISTORYNET.com

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FEBRUARY 2021

FEATURES 26 Electric Warriors

When Frankin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie dueled over getting power to the people By John A. Riggs

34 Up In Flames

A fiery disaster on Nantucket helped recast the island from whaling center to resort By Paul F. Bradley

42 Combat Yacht

After cushy years as a plutocrat’s plaything, a luxury vessel sailed straight into WWII By Stuart D. Scott

50 Suffragette Cinema

Your Girl and Mine lobbied for women’s voting rights

By Mary Mallory

58 Orphans of Empire

Islands at the edge of Asia attracted American settlers who dreamed of annexation By Mike Coppock

DEPARTMENTS

50

6 Mosaic

News from out of the past.

12 Contributors 14 Interview

Spencer Critchley believes democracy depends on Americans replacing acrimony with shared values.

16 Déjà Vu

Parties have always used the lame-duck lag to tilt the judicial system their way.

20 American Schemers

Self-made satanist Anton LaVey wanted everybody to go to the devil.

22 SCOTUS 101

PHOTO CREDIT

How the Court came to factor public interest into regulating commerce.

58

24 Cameo

20

Anton LeVey’s The Satanic Bible, an admixture of wayout philosophy and self-indulgence, sold a million copies.

Martha M. Harper parlayed business flair and sisterhood into a pioneering empire.

66 Reviews 72 An American Place Acton, Massachusetts

ON THE COVER: FDR’s bold campaign to electrify America—and kill utility holding companies—made a political rival of businessman Wendell Willkie.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: © MYSTIC SEAPORT MUSEUM, ROSENFELD COLLECTION, 1984.187.47394F; NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION; EVERETT COLLECTION; HISTORY OF BONIN; EVENING STAR; COVER: VCG WILSON/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

FEBRUARY 2021

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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

Visit Historynet.com/AmericanHistory and search for online-only stories like these:

H.L. Mencken Scorned His Compatriots Outrageous, snide, and cynical, the caustic newspaper stylist considered his fellow Americans a lower species.

In the aftermath of World War I, Mencken wrote a manifesto exposing his countrymen’s most mortifying habits and beliefs. They loved it. bit.ly/malignmencken

A Basket of Failures and Misadventures

Almost 100 years before Jamestown, European powers began taking stabs at planting their flags in the New World.

Famine, disease, and aristocratic arrogance doomed Roanoke and other amateurish attempts at colonization. bit.ly/coloniesdisappear

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FEBRUARY 2021 VOL. 55, NO. 6

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by Sarah Richardson Based on Bondage New research shows that Hamilton, inset, was enmeshed in slavery, along with his in-laws, the Schuylers, whose Albany home is shown.

6 AMERICAN HISTORY

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NAOMI ROE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; AP PHOTO/ROGELIO V. SOLIS

Alexander Hamilton, the West Indian striver who elbowed his way into the front ranks of the Founding Fathers, has been revealed to have been a lifelong slave owner and slave trader.

Jessie Serfilippi, historic interpreter at Hamilton’s former estate—now Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New York—combed sales records from 1782 to 1801 and other receipts and letters among Hamilton’s papers. What the self-taught historian and fan of the musical Hamilton discovered challenges portrayals of Hamilton by high-profile biographers who have depicted the politician as having opposed bondage because of his experience in St. Croix, the West Indian island where he grew up in a household with at least seven enslaved people before arriving in New York in 1772. Hamilton has been hailed, for example, for joining the New York Manumission Society. But such memberships didn’t preclude owning slaves, and in her analysis Serfilippi meticulously itemizes records showing Hamilton facilitating slave transactions for others, owning slaves himself, and representing slave owners in court. Serfilippi points out that Hamilton’s wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, belonged to the Albany area’s second-largest slaveholding family. Early biographers described Hamilton’s slaveholding, but such references nearly vanished from biographies written in the 20th century. When writers noted Hamilton’s slaveholding at all, they did not explore further. In a thorough review of primary sources, “a rarely acknowledged truth becomes inescapably apparent: not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” Serfilippi writes. “The denial and obscuration of these facts in nearly every major biography written about him over the past two centuries has erased the people he enslaved from history. It has also created and perpetuated a false and incomplete picture of Hamilton as a man and Founding Father.”

PHILIP SCALIA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Hamilton’s History, Out of Hiding

Scholars have long puzzled over how humans came to domesticate grain crops, which need much work to plant, harvest, and process compared with hunting and gathering. Results of a study at the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie in Oklahoma, the

Prairie Food Companion

NAOMI ROE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; AP PHOTO/ROGELIO V. SOLIS

PHILIP SCALIA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

world’s largest protected remaining patch of that biosphere, suggest bison played a crucial role. Archaeology professor Natalie Mueller of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has been trying to raise “lost crops” cultivated by native Americans, but had had scant luck with goosefoot, sumpweed, erect knotweed, little barley, and maygrass seeds from the wild. Then Mueller visited the 29,000-acre Williams preserve, stocked with 300 bison in 1993. Studying the herd, now tallying 3,000, Mueller found that when bison move en masse, their browsing and trampling not only creates paths but leaves stands of the plants Mueller was trying to cultivate. Along these paths Mueller found far more specimens of “lost crop” plants than she did where no buffalo roamed. She thinks bisons’ renewed presence restored an ancient ecosystem where people not only had access to functional trails

and happenstance harvests but the opportunity to observe these plants in such profusion that they could conceive of cultivating them. Scholars had not thought of the prairie as a locus of plant domestication, Mueller notes. “We don’t think of the plants they were eating as prairie plants,” she said. “However, this research suggests that they actually are prairie plants—but they only occur on prairies if there are bison. I think we’re just beginning to understand what the botanical record was telling us.

People were getting a lot more food from the prairie than we thought.”

On November 3, 2020, Mississippians voted to adopt a state flag showing a magnolia blossom, the state flower, replacing the old Confederate banner. Activists had long pushed without success to change the flag, including a defeat in 2000. This year, following the death of Black American George Floyd on May 25 while in Minneapolis police custody, the redesign campaign gained traction. The Mississippi Baptist Convention endorsed the change. The National Collegiate Athletic Association threatened to cancel competitions in the state unless the revision occurred. On June 28, the Mississippi legislature voted to find a new flag design, and Governor Tate Reeves ordered the old flag removed from state buildings within 15 days. The design showcasing the Confederate symbol dated to 1894, roughly coinciding with a wave of Jim Crow laws enforcing second-class status for Blacks. No evidence exists that Confederate veterans pushed for adding the secessionist emblem to the state flag.

Flying a New Flag FEBRUARY 2021 7

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12/14/20 5:27 PM

Work in Progress The historic mill housing the Hall of Fame is being repurposed in stages.

The National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, has moved into a spacious new setting. Previously housed in a historic bank facing Wesley Chapel in Women’s Rights National Historical Park, where activists gathered for the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention, the Hall of Fame now resides in a new $10 million center. The facility occupies a renovated mill a stroll across the Seneca River from the park. The Seneca Knitting Mill, built in 1844 and in operation until 1999, is being renovated. The first floor will showcase Hall of Fame inductees and the mill’s history, workers, and mill trustees Charles Hoskins and Jacob Chamberlain, abolitionists who processed only wool, not cotton harvested by enslaved workers. Hoskins and Chamberlain were among 32 men who added their signatures to those of 68 women endorsing the Declaration of Sentiments. That women’s rights manifesto, inspired by the Declara-

Goodbye, Columbus

tion of Independence, was composed by Seneca Falls resident Elizabeth Cady Stanton and publicized at the 1848 meeting. The move into the mill emphasizes that Seneca Falls, now largely a tourist destination, was in the 1800s a bustling industrial hub. Besides mills, the Seneca River powered tanneries, distilleries, and other businesses. A local canal connected purveyors to the Erie Canal, opened in 1826. The museum hopes to open this summer and is raising funds to renovate the upper three floors for displays, an event space, and community center (womenofthehall.org).

Dozens of statues of Christopher Columbus have been removed or toppled in the wake of cross-country protests.

Sparked by the killing of George Floyd (see “Flying a New Flag,” p. 7), the protests have targeted White supremacy— and the Italian explorer’s central role in launching European engagement in the enslavement and oppression of Blacks and indigenous people in the New World. In Chicago, Illinois, and Columbus, Ohio, among other cities nationwide, authorities have taken down statues of Columbus for protection and relocation. In Boston, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Richmond, Virginia, to name a few examples, protesters have damaged or destroyed Columbus images originally installed with benevolent intent by Italian Americans seeking to combat prejudice against—and persecution of—Italian immigrants arriving between 1880 and 1920 and at the time derided as non-White and unwelcome. Reflecting as they do a classic American story of striving to gain status and recognition, Columbus statues exist in a cultural context more complicated than mere glorification of a White conqueror, Italian American scholars say.

COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL WOMEN’S HALL OF FAME; PHOTO BY TIM BRADBURY/GETTY IMAGES

New Hall of Fame Home

8 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Slavery Studies A marvelous new online resource, Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (enslaved.org), catalogs stories and information about more than 400 years of bondage. The site features 80 brief biographies of enslaved people from throughout the Americas. Better-known stories from America include those of poet Phillis Wheatley, right, of Boston, Massachusetts, and Marie Bernard Couvent, who founded the oldest Catholic school for Blacks in the country. Lesser-known individuals include Ibrahima Abd Al Rahman, a Muslim in Natchez, Mississippi, who was later recommended by Henry Clay for repatriation to Africa and “Gullah” Jack Pritchard, who helped plot Denmark Vesey’s 1822 slave rebellion in South Carolina. Users can probe databases for names, places, and events. The site is a clearinghouse of information, although searching requires a specificity possibly daunting for lay users.

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The first self-portrait by an astronaut in space sold for about seven times the estimated price at Christie’s on November 15, 2020. Pilot Buzz Aldrin made his spacey selfie with the pilot’s hatch open on November 14 during the Gemini XII mission, November 11-15, 1966. The customized Hasselblad camera is at lower left, with the antenna of the docking vehicle above it; the African coast appears in the background.

On October 6, 2020, Greensboro, North Carolina’s city council acted to close an ugly chapter. The council issued a formal apology relating to the killings of five members of the Communist Workers Party during a rally against the Ku Klux Klan on November 3, 1979. After the fact it emerged that city police had learned of the planned attacks from a paid informant belonging to the KKK but neither warned protesters, shown above being arrested, nor interceded to foil the attacks. The council voted 7-2 to make a formal apology for the “Greensboro Massacre,” and to honor the victims by endowing a scholarship of $1,979 to benefit five high school seniors chosen for their expressive works on the theme of social justice.

No convictions were obtained in the murders. Police arrested 14 men; an all-White jury acquitted them. A second trial, in 1983, on new charges, resulted in more acquittals. A 1985 civil suit brought against the City of Greensboro by survivors of those killed in 1979 resulted in settlements for some plaintiffs. A 2009 apology by the city had drawn scorn as vague.

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Rank Will Out Coppock

Mallory

Bradley

Keep up your great work. As a longtime subscriber, I look forward to each issue, which I read cover to cover. FYI: While “JFK’s Other Boat” (October 2020) describes John F. Kennedy’s wartime heroics as a lieutenant (jg), the accompanying photo shows him with a full lieutenant’s twin bars.

M. E. Elliott Manteca, California

Recovering from History

Scott

Riggs

Besides American History, Paul F. Bradley (“Up in Flames,” p. 34) has written for America’s Civil War, Civil War Times, and national newspapers. He recently completed a play about John Wilkes Booth and is working on a Civil War novel and a nonfiction book about corporate America. He lives in Yardley, Pennsylvania.

Mike Coppock (“Orphans of Empire,” p. 58) contributes regularly. He has written about the Klondike gold rush, an obscure battle that tilted Alaska into the American sphere of influence, the colonization of Liberia, and an epic 19th-century trans-Pacific scientific expedition.

Los Angeles, California-based writer and historian Mary Mallory specializes in LA and film history. She is the author of four books and serves on Hollywood Heritage’s Board of Directors. “Suffragette Cinema” (p. 50) is her first article for the magazine.

John A. Riggs has been an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy, staff director of a congressional energy subcommittee, and director of the Aspen Institute’s Energy and Environment Program. He adapted “Electric Warriors” (p. 26) from his book, High Tension: FDR’s Battle to Power America, published in November by Diversion Books.

Stuart Scott (“Combat Yacht,” p. 42) retired from the State University of New York at Buffalo after a career as an archaeologist and professor. He previously has written about a civil lawsuit brought by an ancestor of his against Thomas Jefferson and the transportation to Van Diemen’s Land of Americans convicted of trying to overthrow the British colonial government of Canada. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

I agree with Walter Buenger (“Overtime at the History Works,” August 2020): politics can’t be entirely left out of history and textbooks. As a special education teacher, I instructed children with brain damage when the medical establishment officially was labeling such individuals “idiots,” “morons,” “imbeciles,” and the like. In the late 1960’s, institutionalization began to yield to group homes, whose impacts include a more familial feel and the kinder tag “special needs.”

Tim Donovan Prospect Park, Pennsylvania

True Blue

Pity we can’t compel our president to read about Dr. Rupert Blue (“Infection Hunter,” October 2020)—but then, he has made abundantly clear that he doesn’t give a William Shakespeare about reading. Stay healthy, folks. And keep up the good work.

Edward Keller Central Islip, New York

Mainiac

I teach at the Senior College at UMaine in Augusta. As a person from away—I grew up in Minnesota—I find Maine history compelling. I’ve subscribed to American History since age nine and have seen good articles and outstanding articles. Stephanie Bouchard’s “Splitting States” (December 2020) is outstanding! I hope to see more of her work.

Mike Bell Manchester, Maine

12 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Reconciliation In 1913, veterans of Gettysburg reach across a wall at the Bloody Angle, scene of some of the deadliest fighting of the 1863 battle.

CULTURE CLASH

BY RICHARD ERNSBERGER JR.

Critchley observes that there is a long historical tradition of distrust of reason across a wide swathe of serious thinkers as well as reactionaries.

You say America’s political divide is about two groups who differ greatly in their thinking—a gap you trace to the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. The Founders thought they had created a new kind of nation based on Enlightenment reason—the civic nation. But there has always been a Counter-Enlightenment resistance, fighting for faith, tradition, culture, and ties to the land—the

ethnic nation. The two nations live within different world views, with different ways of thinking and even different ways of defining truth. When people say it’s as if the two sides are in different realities, they’re right. For example, when President Trump says something that is factually untrue, to his supporters that remark may sound like a higher truth, one that makes mere facts seem small.

Why, for centuries, have theologians, artists, monarchists, traditionalists, philosophers, and others recoiled against reason? Some saw the triumph of reason as a threat to their power, whose source was claimed to be God. But serious thinkers also believed reason, on its own, to be soullessly reductive. Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico argued

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Besides working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, communications consultant Spencer Critchley of Boots Road Group counts the U.S. Department of Labor and others as clients. He contributes to national media outlets.

His book Patriots of Two Nations: Why Trump was Inevitable and What Happens Next was published this year by McDavid Media.

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that science could tell you only about what was scientific, saying nothing about what mattered more: meaning. The Romantics were Counter-Enlightenment thinkers as well. They believed a world ruled only by reason would be unnatural and immoral.

What is “motivated reasoning”? How does it figure in this schism? Although we like to think our opinions are based on facts and logic, the reverse is often true: We believe what we want to believe and use reason to justify it.

This seems to be an evolutionary feature of our minds, which are designed to make quick, survival-based decisions first and to think later, if ever. This feature is exacerbated by tabloid media, social media, and search algorithms, because they show us just what we want to see. Our best defense against motivated reasoning is valid reasoning—using impartially sourced facts, sound logic, and skepticism about what we want to be true.

America was founded on rational Enlightenment philosophy, but from the very start Counter-Enlightenment opposition was evident, including Thomas Jefferson’s. How so? Two of the most important manifestations were in religion versus science and the South versus the North. Jefferson saw freedom as “the firstborn daughter of science,” but the Pilgrims saw America as God’s City on a Hill. These views coexist in tension to this day. Meanwhile, the South-North conflict, which also persists, can be seen as the Counter-Enlightenment vs. the Enlightenment: rural, traditional ethnic nationalists vs. urban, progress-oriented civic nationalists.

That conflict existed within Jefferson as well: this Enlightenment rationalist was also a Americans seem to have lost the willingness slave owner who believed an agrarian socito compromise. What happened? Ironically, ety was a more virtuous one. one cause was progress towards our founding vision of equality. In the early days, our new What are examples of America’s Countcivic nationalist map happened to match an ethnic nationalist territory: we were ruled by er-Enlightenment history? Among others I White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. With the peohighlight the religious Great Awakenings, ple running things all belonging to the same slavery and other identity-driven institutribe, cooperation was easier. But as that tions, Andrew Jackson’s ethnic nationalism, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War; American changed, the map was torn apart, revealing Romanticism and Transcendentalism, the divisions that it used to conceal. Meanwhile, Scopes “monkey trial,” the tribalism of the technology and media helped segregate us 1960s counterculture and the “traditional more, into physical and online communities of values” reaction to it, the Tea Party revolt people like ourselves. Many of our compatriagainst globalism, and the presidency of Donald Trump or someone like ots became strangers to us. Civil debate him, which I see as having been inevitable, given our history. devolved into a tribal war of good vs. evil.

shared values build trust, and exist behind almost any dispute. by restoring trust we can move from hate to debate.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

To Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, the idea of a shared culture is paramount—and they fear its loss. Is that fear valid? The Counter-Enlightenment belief in ethnic identity mixes race and culture in varying shades. At one end of the spectrum are those with an irrational belief in the superiority of the White “race,” even though race is not a scientific concept. At the other end are people who aren’t racists, but who fear that multiculturalism will dissolve their own culture into a denatured globalism, as if we were all to replace the beauties of our native tongues with Esperanto. Enlightenment people tend to underestimate the power of culture, possibly because they don’t see past the looming ugliness of racism, or because they themselves are thriving under globalism, and so it’s easier for them to welcome it without fear.

Does that fear explain belief in ideas or suppositions that have no basis in fact? At least sometimes, all of us find value in being non-rational. Setting aside reason can open you up to good things like creativity or love. But it can also make you vulnerable to bad things like conspiracy theories. This is especially so in the face of fear—say of economic struggles or cultural change. Demagogues exploit conspiracy theories, each stepping forward as the lone hero who can defend us from the conspirators lurking in the shadows.

You say each side must work to connect with the other. Can it be done when the sides perceive events so differently? I’ve never before been afraid for American democracy; I am now. But I believe we can heal the divide, and each of us must help do that. Set arguments aside. Where trust is gone, no argument will win, but where trust exists, arguments are the healthy essence of democracy—an eternal debate over how to achieve good in an imperfect world. Imagine how that world can look fundamentally different to someone, how a belief that makes no sense to you can look exactly right to that person. Then find shared values. They exist behind almost any disagreement—whether we are for or against abortion rights, for example, all of us agree children are precious. Shared values build trust. As we restore trust, we can move from hate to debate.

It’s up to us, not just to politicians. Democracy, after all, means rule by the people. H FEBRUARY 2021 15

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FULL COURT PRESS

Old School A restored 1770s courtroom at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia offers a window into early American justice.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the 87-year-old Supreme Court justice, died on September 18, 2020. Eight days later President Donald J. Trump announced that he would be nominating Appellate Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a 48-year-old conservative Republican, to replace the liberal Ginsburg, a Democrat. In a two-week span—October 12 through 26—Barrett was whisked through the Republican-controlled Senate on party line votes whose speed and timing stoked Democratic wrath. Vox populi, the Democrats argued, was due to speak on November 3, when the nation indeed did reject Trump’s bid for re-election. By quick-marching Barrett onto the High Court bench beforehand the incipient lame duck and his Senate partisans had pre-empted the people’s choice.

The Founders knew all about judicial power plays, which they pulled not just in the fourth quarter but after the whistle blew, in the interval between defeat and leaving town.

In November 1800, as his term was ending, President John Adams asked Congress to expand the federal judiciary. There were sound good-government reasons for doing so. Federal circuit court judges, and the Supreme Court justices who then heard cases alongside them, had to cover enormous swaths of territory—a mere three circuits served the entire country. Riding circuit, often a literal activity, involved traveling hundreds of miles on execrable roads and untamed waterways. Mishaps ensued. Justice James Iredell, assigned to the Southern Circuit, was thrown out of his carriage by a runaway horse; Justice Samuel Chase of

the Middle Circuit fell into the Susquehanna River when the ice on which he was crossing gave way. Increasing the number of magistrates and regrouping them into smaller circuits would reduce wear and tear on judicial bodies and make justice more accessible.

However, judicial expansion was also a jobs program for Adams’s Federalist Party, which badly needed employment.

The election of 1800 had been a debacle: Adams lost the White House to Thomas Jefferson, while Federalists took a beating in both houses of Congress. Gouverneur Morris, one of the Federalist survivors, explained in a letter to a friend what his party was about to do.

Foundering as the Federalists were in “a heavy gale of adverse wind,” Morris wrote, “can they be blamed for casting many anchors to hold their ship through the storm?”

The lag between federal elections and winners taking office was twice as long as now, from November until early March. The Federalists used every day of that interval.

DAVID STUCKEL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

BY RICHARD BROOKHISER

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Hampshire district court—the level below circuit courts—in March 1804. That was an easy task—Pickering had lost his mind and taken to drink. The same month, the House took aim at bigger game, impeaching Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase.

The Jeffersonians indulged in modest court packing of their own in 1807, adding a justice to the Supreme Court. Like the Federalists before them, they had a good government reason—beyond the Appalachian Mountains lay three new states, increasing the caseload.

As the Federalists had, the Jeffersonians filled the newly created seat with a good party man, Kentuckian Thomas Todd.

The Jeffersonians’ most minor juridical chore concerned commissioning the District of Columbia’s justices of the peace.

In the Adams administration’s last remaining hectic hours, John Marshall, despite his new judicial eminence, still served as secretary of state. Somehow, Marshall failed to present William Marbury with his official commission. When the Jeffersonians found the certificate on a State Department desk, they refused to deliver it.

Not every one of these countermeasures worked. Chase survived his Senate trial in March 1805 when the House bungled his prosecution. Marbury sued unsuccessfully to obtain his commission, the Supreme Court ruling that the remedy he sought was technically unconstitutional. However, that opinion, a monster written by Marshall, was a long scold of the Jefferson administration for not giving Marbury his job in the first place.

Other retorts succeeded. The courts refused to overturn the Judiciary Act of 1802 when a litigant claimed it to be unconstitutional. Jefferson’s man on the expanded Supreme Court bench would serve for many years—as would justices Jefferson and his successors appointed when Federalists died or retired. To Jefferson’s dismay, the newbies all ended up siding with Marshall, which veers into the x-factor zone of personal and intellectual leadership.

The Constitution’s authors took that document seriously. They would not violate it—but they would wring from it every drop of political advantage they could. Elections allow the people to elevate and to rebuke. But losers serve— and may act—until the moment they leave office—when the winners begin the labor of demolishing predecessors’ handiwork. H

PICTURES NOW/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

A crucial Supreme Court vacancy needed filling. Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, beset by kidney stones and gout, wrote Adams in December that he was stepping down. To replace him, Adams turned to diplomat, wartime spymaster, and Federalist Papers author John Jay. Easy call— Jay had been chief justice 1789-95. The Senate quickly confirmed him— and Jay as quickly responded that he had been there and done that and the hell with it. The High Court, he wrote Adams, lacked “the energy, weight and dignity which are essential to it.” Jay would stay home.

The man who handed Jay’s rejection letter to Adams was his secretary of state, John Marshall. “Who shall I nominate now?” Adams asked.

Marshall had no suggestions. After a minute’s thought, Adams decided, “I believe I must nominate you.” Marshall’s only judicial experience had been serving as a judge advocate in the Continental Army at Valley Forge; his only legal training had been home schooling, plus a semester of introductory law at William and Mary. He had, however, been practicing law successfully in Richmond, and he was right there on the spot, meaning no time would be lost to exchanging correspondence. The Senate confirmed Marshall on January 27, 1801.

In February, Congress addressed Adams’s November suggestion by passing a Judiciary Act that split each federal circuit in two and Marshall’s Way created 16 circuit court judgeships to adminisThe chief justice ter them. The District of Columbia Organic Act began his lengthy added three more circuit judges sitting in the and influential nation’s newly established capital. tenure on the court This episode of court packing on a grand amid disputed scale bowed to nepotism as well as partisanefforts to reorganize ship—one new DC judge was a nephew of that branch.

President Adams, another appointee there was James Marshall, younger brother of the chief justice.

Adams finally named 42 justices of the peace for the District of Columbia, responsible for hearing minor cases. In a burst of fair-mindedness, not all Adams’s choices were Federalists—only three-quarters of them, including a Georgetown banker, William Marbury.

In the space of three months, Adams and Congress had nominated and confirmed two chief justices of the Supreme Court, created and filled 19 circuit court slots, and appointed a slew of capital district dogberries. Not bad for a flock of lame ducks.

The victorious Jeffersonians answered push with enthusiastic shove.

Most important was ridding the system of those new circuit court judges. The Constitution, in Article III Section 1, says federal judges serve “during good Behaviour”—i.e., for life, unless they commit some offense. Instead of removing the new judges from their jobs, the Jeffersonians took the jobs from the judges. A new Judiciary Act, passed on party line votes in March 1802, kept the smaller circuits, but pared the number of magistrates to its pre-1801 total.

And what if Congress were to decide that a Federalist judge had behaved badly? The Constitution empowers the legislature to impeach and remove jurists from office; see Article I Sections 2 and 3. Congress began by knocking off John Pickering, a Federalist judge of the New 18 AMERICAN HISTORY

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AMERICAN SCHEMERS

LaVey’s best seller enumerated the precepts of its author’s commercially tinged faith in the goodness of embracing evil.

When Anton Szandor LaVey decided to start a religion in San Francisco in 1966, he figured he’d better shave his noggin. Medieval executioners, carnival strongmen, and black magicians shaved their heads, he thought, so he shaved his. LaVey’s pale, naked pate combined with his jet-black goatee and all-black wardrobe to create the perfect Mephistophelian image for presiding over the devilish ritual that launched The Church of Satan.

In the unconventional city by the bay, LaVey, 37, was already a well-known eccentric.

He played the organ at the Lost Weekend nightclub. He drove a hearse and walked a pet leopard. He painted his house on California Street black and delivered midnight lectures there, at $2.50 a head, on occult subjects— vampires, werewolves, love potions. The night he discoursed on cannibalism his wife served

BY PETER CARLSON

listeners roasted chunks of a human thigh that a doctor pal had swiped from an autopsy.

And now he’d founded a devil-worshipping church. The media couldn’t resist, especially when LaVey staged stunts worthy of P.T. Barnum. He started with a “satanic wedding” in the parlor of what he called “Black House.” The groom was a former Christian Science Monitor reporter; atop the altar lay a beautiful redheaded woman, stark naked. So many photographers and cameramen covered the event that LaVey had to repeat the ceremony five times to accommodate them all.

A few months later, in May 1967, LaVey summoned the media to Black House for the “satanic baptism” of his daughter, Zeena. The three-year-old sat on the altar—featuring, of course, a naked woman—while Zeena’s dad, draped in black robes and sporting a horned

JACK GAROFALO/PARIS MATCH VIA GETTY IMAGES

Friend of the Devil

Black Magic Man In the cryptlike cellar of his San Francisco home, LaVey, née Levey, waxes devilish as can be for the lens.

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AMERICAN SCHEMERS cowl, invoked the new faith’s old lord: “In the name of Satan, welcome a new mistress, Zeena, creature of ecstatic magic light…We dedicate your life to love, to passion, to indulgence and to Satan, and the way of darkness. Hail Zeena! Hail Satan!”

LaVey’s genius for flackery quickly made him famous, the subject of articles in Life, Time, Newsweek, and Cosmopolitan. He made the cover of Look holding a human skull. He bantered with radio interviewers and performed a satanic good-luck ritual on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

In countless interviews, LaVey told his story: At 16, he dropped out of school to play oboe in the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra. He worked as a lion tamer for the Clyde Beatty Circus, and as a carnival fortune-teller. He played the organ in burlesque shows at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, where, he claimed, he had had a fling in 1948 with a stripper named Marilyn Monroe. Later, he became a crime scene photographer and “psychic investigator” for the San Francisco police department.

Life at society’s margins convinced LaVey that God didn’t exist and that traditional churches were hypocritical. So he founded a religion that embraced the pleasures of the flesh. “The highest form of spirituality,” he said, “is the carnal.”

In his 1969 book, The Satanic Bible, LaVey elaborated on his philosophy, an amalgam of Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Ayn Rand, and, of course, Beelzebub: “Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence!...Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek!...Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental or emotional gratification!”

The Satanic Bible sold nearly a million copies and spawned sequels— The Satanic Rituals, The Satanic Witch, and Satan Speaks! LaVey hosted “witches’ workshops” and weekly “black masses.” Within five years, LaVey’s Church of Satan was claiming to have enrolled 10,000 members in “grottos” around the world.

Adopting the looks and manner of a cartoon villain made LaVey a celebrity. He became a consultant on Hollywood horror films and hobnobbed with Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr. “He collects classic cars,” The Washington Post reported, “and has several luxurious houses and a 185-foot yacht at his disposal.”

But LaVey soon wearied of playing the “Black Pope.” His followers got on his last satanic nerve. Most of them weren’t too bright, he grumbled, and many satanists were obnoxious bores—men seeking sex with the kind of women who were willing to lay naked on satanic altars, along with women who wanted to dress up in witch costumes.

“It became rather embarrassing,” LaVey said. “I’d step off the plane and there they’d be, all huddled together in their black robes…I was trying to present a cultured, mannered image and their idea of protest or shock was to wear their lodge regalia into the nearest Denny’s.”

In the 1980s, American media abounded with sensational tales of “satanic ritual murders,” most of them never proven to be such. Naturally, reporters called the High Priest of the Church of Satan for a quote.

No, LaVey would say, he didn’t advocate murder, rape, or child abuse.

JACK GAROFALO/PARIS MATCH VIA GETTY IMAGES

‘their idea of protest or shock was to wear their lodge regalia into the nearest denny’s,’ lavey griped about his ardent followers.

Misanthropic and grouchy, he hunkered in the sanctuary of Black House, watching noir films and entertaining friends by playing 1940s pop songs on keyboards.

“I have decided to withdraw, to give up my citizenship in the human race,” he told reporter Lawrence Wright in 1990.

Wright was interviewing LaVey for Rolling Stone magazine. Investigating his subject’s life story, the reporter found much of it fictitious, starting with the high priest’s name, which was actually Howard Stanton Levey.

He’d never played oboe for the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra. He’d never tamed lions for the Clyde Beatty Circus or worked for the San Francisco police department. He’d never backed up strippers at L.A.’s Mayan Theater, and Marilyn Monroe never danced at the Mayan, either. “He has made an allegory of his life—not his real life but the fantasy life of the Anton LaVey persona,” Wright concluded.

Wright’s revelations shook the Church of Satan, which was already rattled by an occupational hazard of religion—schism. In 1975, Michael Aquino, editor of the Church of Satan newsletter, The Cloven Hoof, quit to form his own satanic church, The Temple of Set, accusing LaVey of heresy for claiming that Satan was merely a metaphor, not an actual being.

Other former LaVey disciples ginned up similarly satanic sects—the Church of Lucifer, the Order of Baal, the Temple of Nethys.

Worse, in 1990, LaVey’s daughter Zeena— star of that satanic baptism 23 years earlier— resigned as spokeswoman for Daddy’s church.

She joined the Temple of Set and denounced her father, calling him “ungrateful and unworthy” and accusing him of chronic sloth and cruelty to her puppy. On October 29, 1997, LaVey died of heart failure. He was 67. The next day, Zeena LaVey announced on a radio show that she’d offed the old man by performing a ritual that put a lethal curse on him.

The Church of Satan survived its founder’s death, though without his theatrical flourishes.

Reigning High Priest Peter H. Gilmore casts the faith’s current incarnation as a “more scholarly and professorial approach.” The Temple of Set also lives on but without Zeena, who quit in 2002 to establish yet another breakaway sect, the Sethian Liberation Movement.

These days, the formerly satanic toddler is a Berlin-based artist and musician who practices Tibetan Buddhism. H FEBRUARY 2021 21

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SCOTUS 101

Innovator at Work Stands full of Grangers listen to Charles W. Greene, secretary of the National Agricultural Congress, an umbrella agrarian interest group, at Edwardsville, Illinois, in September 1873.

EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS American commerce changed in 1877 when the Supreme Court broadly authorized states to regulate businesses, a dramatic shift. Noted The New York Times, the ruling settled “one of the most important questions ever considered by the court.” The great recasting began with one federal bureaucrat who thought he knew more about farming than most farmers—and, in fact, did. As a farmer in Benton County, Minnesota, before taking a job with the new Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC, Oliver Kelley had been a voracious reader of agricultural journals, enthusiastically adopting new techniques. He was the first farmer in Minnesota to plant timothy to feed his horses and to own a mechanical reaper. His spread survives as a “living history museum" maintained by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Kelley’s superiors at Agriculture sent him to report on the woes of Southern farmers struggling to recover from the Civil War’s devastation. These agrarians’ parlous condition, Kelley reported, stemmed from being “ignorant” and “using a system of farming that was the same as that handed down by generations gone by.”

His solution was not to import experts from

Washington, but to persuade farmers themselves to band together, collectively develop better techniques, and pass those methods on to peers. Kelley rounded up seven like-minded associates and in 1868 founded the first chapter of the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry. In 1871, he became the group’s fulltime secretary.

The Grange was the right idea at the right time. Within a decade, Kelley's organizational abilities had Grange chapters proliferating nationwide. Membership reached 1.5 million; Ohio alone counted 900 chapters. These local entities not only preached modern farming but ran stores where members paid less than what commercial retailers charged. Chapters pooled resources to buy equipment members could share. Beneficent self-interest produced political awareness—and clout. The Grange pushed for free rural mail delivery, direct election of senators, and woman suffrage. Its earliest legislative success came in getting state legislatures to curb fees charged to store and haul crops—rates that since the Civil War had been rising steadily. States had not previously done anything of the sort. While railroads operated

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MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

MUNN V. ILLINOIS 94 U.S. 113 (1877) THE STATES MAY REGULATE THE USE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY “WHEN SUCH REGULATION BECOMES NECESSARY FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD.”

CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

BY DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ

MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

SCOTUS 101 under state charters under which they could have set rates, the states wanted to attract rail service and so avoided using that clout. The new limits vexed commercial interests. Eight individual suits that contested “Granger Laws” in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin ended up together at the Supreme Court.

Seven of those suits involved a state dictating what railroads were allowed to charge for carrying agricultural products.

The eighth suit, Munn v. Illinois, took narrow aim at grain warehouses in Chicago. These facilities—tall, hollow towers called “elevators”—were unique to American agriculture.

Chicago was enjoying a 20-year reign as a rail hub with no equal in the country. Grain shipped there aboard western railroads filled those privately owned elevators to be stored until hauled east by barge or local rail line.

The elevators helped define the city's skyline, stretching as they did along the Chicago River in what is now the Loop shopping and entertainment district. Built on railroad land, the elevators were owned and operated by independent companies. The largest such enterprise—Munn & Scott—could warehouse 2.3 million bushels in its four elevators, which had survived the massive 1871 Chicago fire unscathed. The Illinois Granger law set the maximum charge for storing grain at 2 cents a bushel for up to 30 days. After 30 days, an elevator operator could charge a half cent for each additional 15 days.

In attacking the price curb, the railroads and elevator operators seized as a weapon the 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1868 and in the 1870s still a subject of developing jurisprudence. The amendment, second in a Reconstruction triptych intended to accord the formerly enslaved full citizenship, said that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The companies argued that by denying them the freedom to charge what they wished the Granger laws in effect were depriving elevator companies of property.

Of the eight suits, the justices picked the action by Munn & Scott to be fully briefed and argued; the idea was that a ruling in one case would yield a precedent to cite in decisions on the other seven. The choice was an odd one, giving Munn “an importance altogether disproportionate to the pecuniary interests directly involved in it,” John Jewett, a lawyer

for Munn & Scott, argued before the High Court.

In fact, before enactment of the contested legislation Munn had been charging farmers the same 2 cents a bushel—though for 20 days’ storage, not 30, and rarely holding grain longer than 20 days.

The central question, however, was not money but whether state lawmakers could find an activity so important to the public weal that they could impose any regulation at all. Railroads, operating under those state charters, more clearly exerted such impact; were the High Court to find that Chicago grain elevators did too, that holding would be much more sweeping. Decisions in the other seven cases were announced immediately after release of the Munn outcome.

In a decision the Ottawa (Illinois) Free Trader called “certainly broad enough to please any Granger,” the court by a 7-2 vote upheld the Illinois regulation. Chief Justice Morrison Waite tried in his opinion to walk a fine line. Ever since Magna Carta, he noted, governments have been restrained from impinging on a person's private affairs. But, Waite found, long legal precedent “does authorize the establishment of laws requiring each citizen to so conduct himself, and so to use his own property, as not unnecessarily to injure another.” Judges’ duty, then, is to decide whether an economic activity the government wants to regulate is “affected with a public interest”—that is, has the public come to depend on using that private property? If so, regulation is permissible; if not, jurists should strike down attempts to regulate. Waite had no trouble concluding that operation of the Chicago elevators—integral to shipping grain—had such a public interest component.

Waite went even further: he held that, once courts decided a business could be regulated, they could not rule on the regulation’s reasonability and fairness. That, he said, was a political question, up to voters to answer.

Founding Farmers Within a dozen years, the High Court had A National Grange retreated from its holding in Munn that courts button featured the should not consider the reasonableness of last names of the men rate limits and prices or other operational who established the strictures imposed on businesses by states. agrarian association.

But the basic precept Waite laid down—that states may curb property rights only for those activities “affected with a public interest”—remained for half a century the yardstick by which courts measured the validity of regulations imposed on business. Application of that standard did not always appear consistent. In various cases, the justices found that meatpackers, employment agencies, and gas stations did not clear the bar for regulation, while fire insurance companies and tobacco warehouses did. But the standard itself remained inviolate until 1934. That year, in Nebbia v. Illinois, the court not only OK’d regulation of milk prices but threw out the whole Munn rationale. That 5-4 Nebbia decision found there to be really no category of business lacking a public interest, and that any regulation was constitutional as long as it was reasonable and properly enacted. H FEBRUARY 2021 23

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At the peak of her long career, diminutive powerhouse Martha Matilda Harper was overseeing some 500 hair salons around the country, in Canada, and across Europe that promoted her Harper hair care method.

From an impoverished child indentured in Ontario, Canada, she matured into a pioneering businesswoman in Rochester, New York. Though not the first American woman to make her fortune in hair care, Harper created one of the earliest business franchises in the United States, along the way enlarging opportunities for women to take charge of their economic lives. She built an empire that blossomed, then languished forgotten until 2ooo, when Rochester resident Jane Plitt published Martha Matilda Harper and the American Dream: How One Woman Changed the Face of Modern Business. In her book, Plitt chronicled in detail how Harper founded one of the first commercial hair salons for women, created the reclining salon chair, managed a thriving business for decades, and found inspiration in the new religion of Christian Science.

Born in 1857, Harper was the fourth child of a self-centered tailor in a village outside Oakville, Ontario. She was seven when her father hired her out to relatives living 60 miles away, and at 12 she went to work for a local doctor who had his own line of hair tonic. The girl spent nearly a decade in his household and in 1882, not long after his death, left Canada for Rochester, New York, taking along her late employer’s hair tonic formula. In Rochester she worked in the home of an older couple. In 1887

she began producing and marketing the tonic.

Encouraged by the couple, who remained her support system for decades, Harper in 1888 opened a salon specializing in women’s hair and skin care, the front window bearing a picture of Harper and her floor-length tresses. As a logo she trademarked the horn of plenty. She patented her product, Mascaro Hair Tonique.

Sickened by exhaustion and pressure, Harper recovered thanks to treatment by a Christian Science practitioner. She never forgot those restorative ministrations.

Prior to Harper’s innovations, most women had their hair done at home. Harper cultivated affluent customers, opening her first shop in a grand building that was owned by Rochester bigwig Daniel Powers. Persistence won her a month-to-month lease and access to wellheeled clients. Fortune favored her location when a music studio opened next door; she offered her lobby as a waiting room for women accompanying children taking music lessons.

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HN ARCHIVES

BY SARAH RICHARDSON

COURTESY OF THE ROCHESTER MUSEUM & SCIENCE CENTER

HAIR POWER

Sisterhood and Style At Harper’s headquarters in Rochester, she trained poor women in the methods she developed.

HN ARCHIVES

COURTESY OF THE ROCHESTER MUSEUM & SCIENCE CENTER

She made cleanliness and exemplary service Harper hallmarks. Noting the annoyance customers experienced when wash water ran down their necks, she devised a salon chair that reclined to suspend an occupant’s head over a complementarily shaped marble sink.

To polish her affect and make up for a lack of schooling she took night classes at the nearby University of Rochester. Her motto reflects her servant’s background: “Be equal to any problem that arises. Never give up. Be the master.”

Harper had forebears and role models.

Madame C.J. Walker, a famous contemporary, was born enslaved as Sarah Breedlove. Walker over the years outlasted several husbands as she was establishing a hair care product line— and sales force—so successful that her operation came to include banking and insurance. In 1919 Walker was recognized as the first Black female millionaire. Other women managed businesses ranging from steel mills to almond orchards. Some inherited enterprises or wealth, such as department store founders I. Magnin and Lane Bryant. Some ran taverns, mills, millinery shops, and other concerns with their husbands, the couples working jointly.

However, Harper, Walker, and a few others fit a different category: women who founded, expanded, and oversaw enterprises without significant involvement by a male partner or relative. These female entrepreneurs may have stood tall but their achievements stand overshadowed by the record of women as paid and unpaid workers and attention paid the lives of prominent women activists and writers.

Diverging from other business pioneers’ paths, Harper reached beyond goods and services. She created not only a public commercial institution for women, but economic opportunities for Harperites—female salon owners and operators the founder trained to establish their own Harper Method salons, adopt and replicate her techniques, and sell her products.

Unlike subsequent cosmetics magnates such as Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, Harper promoted health and wellbeing, not cosmetics and beauty. Her salons did not offer permanents or hair dyes, but hair and skin care, including scalp, facial, and shoulder massage. She offered evening hours, flexible work schedules, and childcare. Harper was in the business of serving and promoting women. She granted the first 100 salon franchises she licensed to working-class women.

Harper carved her particular niche. The pioneer of franchising in America is said to have been Benjamin Franklin, who licensed printers to reproduce his popular Poor Richard’s Almanac. Other franchisers were sewing machine inventor Isaac Singer and mechanical reaper inventor Cyrus McCormick, who had deals with salesmen to distribute their products. Harper’s model stood apart from antecedents: she not only closely supervised the operation of Harper Method salons, but her contracts incorporated such niceties for franchise holders as group insurance, intense and ongoing training, a regular newsletter, and annual meetings. The first woman to be inducted into the Rochester Chamber of Commerce, she was still running her franchise business in her 80s. Her husband, whom she married at 63, took over the business after her death in 1950. He failed to sustain the sense of personal mission Harper instilled in franchisees. Ultimately the business was bought. It folded in the 1970s.

In explaining how a woman less than five feet tall from unremarkable origins developed an innovative business model, biographer Plitt highlights the role of place: Rochester, a boomtown home to women of means and a hotbed of activism, provided a strong customer base. Suffragist and local Susan B. Anthony was a patron and friend. More fundamental inspiration likely came courtesy of Christian Science. Founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy in Boston, Massachusetts, the sect not only stressed the power of belief and prayer as a means of managing life and its setbacks, but also promoted equality of the sexes as an aspect of the deity. As Harper had, Eddy overcame illness and many obstacles, and her credo stressed health of both mind and body.

Besides a key to wellbeing, Christian Science offered a horizontal organizing principle that may have influenced Harper’s vision for her far-flung salon network.

Eddy’s writings were the religion’s mainstay, but satellite churches had no clerical leaders. Instead, congregants delivered Eddy’s readings. In effect, these satellites functioned as branch offices, and may have provided a blueprint for Harper’s salon franchise arrangement.

Eddy did not pronounce herself a feminist or suffragist, and neither did Harper.

But each affirmed her autonomy in the Founding Formula institutions they founded and managed Harper appropriated over the courses of their lives. According her formula from a deceased employer. The to Plitt, Harper’s manual stated: “[W]e are logo, a horn of plenty, helping women attain the best that life has was her brainchild. to offer—self expression.” H

Harper’s clientele could book evening sessions.

Her workers enjoyed flexible schedules and access to training.

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26 AMERICAN HISTORY

Electric Warriors When Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie dueled over getting power to the people

By John A. Riggs

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idway into his first term, President Franklin Roosevelt went to war with the American electric utility empires. The November 1934 elections had increased already large Democratic majorities in Congress, positioning Roosevelt to fulfill one of his campaign promises. In his January 4, 1935, State of the Union address, he urged abolition of “the evil of holding companies,” referring to the multi-layered, closely held financial structures that since the 1920s had dominated the power trade, raking in huge, opaquely accounted-for profits (“Pyramids of Power,” p. 40).

Confronting the Depression during 1933-34, FDR had focused on jobs programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority, created to construct dams and promote development in one of the country’s poorest regions. At the head of the opposition to this expanded government role in the marketplace stood the charismatic Wendell Willkie, president of Commonwealth & Southern, the area’s major utility holding company. The Roosevelt/Willkie confrontation set off what historian Thomas McCraw called “one of the most intense struggles between government and business in American history.”

Now, with the TVA fight and other ongoing New Deal battles as a backdrop, the president wanted to reform the entire power industry, further pitting him against Willkie.

Roosevelt had laid out his vision for an electrified America in the 1932 campaign. Speaking in Portland, Oregon, in a presentation broadcast nationwide on radio, he attacked holding companies and called for a massive federal program of dam-building and rural electrification. “The question of power,” FDR declared, “is primarily a national problem.” He lambasted utilities for an “unprincipled campaign of misinformation” that had flooded newspapers and airwaves with self-serving claims and even circulated school lesson plans extolling utilities and justifying higher rates for customers.

Critics portrayed Roosevelt as a revolutionary, but at heart he was a reformer. Expecting to be blasted for advocating socialism, he insisted that Things to Come “development of utilities should remain, with certain exceptions, a funcPower from the New Deal’s immense dams tion for private initiative and private capital.” FDR did not believe, howpresaged the growth ever, that state governments could effectively regulate holding companies. of the modern electriAfter the 1934 elections had widened his edge in Congress, he asked his cal grid system. staff to draft legislation that would destroy these corporate behemoths and FEBRUARY 2021 27

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Roosevelt was sympathetic to enacting an incorporation law, under which corporations operating interstate would have to obtain federal charters. However, according to Lilienthal, Willkie’s rudeness shocked his fellow utility executives “as if Willkie had suddenly produced a gun and started shooting.” The discussion degenerated, with Roosevelt bristling as Willkie continued to “bark and point his glasses. Finally Willkie said, ‘Do I understand then that any further efforts to avoid the breaking up of utility holding companies are futile?’ The President gave him one look and said simply, ‘It is futile,’” Lilienthal concluded.

Some in Congress wanted to nationalize utilities—a route Roosevelt did not want to take.

Eager to send a bill to Congress, he summoned his advisers on January 21 to decide whether to regulate holding companies’ structures or to tax them to death by going after their intercorporate dividends. Following an animated discussion the president embraced the regulatory approach.

FDR insisted, though, on eliminating multistate holding companies. Under his proposal, holding companies would have to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which during a period of adjustment would work with holding companies to flatten them by eliminating layers and geographically limiting their reach.

That restructuring would be voluntary. But after

Butting Heads The President, above signing the TVA Act, encountered a strong foe in utility chief Wendell L. Willkie.

January 1, 1938, the SEC would have authority to eliminate any holding company that controlled more than one geographically integrated system.

This provision became known as the “death sentence,” a label for which Willkie claimed credit. The death sentence option became the target of allout electrical industry resistance.

On February 6, 1935, Senator Burton Wheeler (D-Montana) and Representative Sam Rayburn (D-Texas), chairs of the congressional commerce committees, introduced the Public Utilities Holding Company Act. The bill included both the registration requirement and the death sentence. Press reaction was mixed. Some papers suggested that FDR was proposing to kill

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the threat they posed to ratepayers, although not the operating utilities they controlled. He met with utility leaders, including Willkie, who diplomatically told reporters he was “very favorably impressed with President Roosevelt’s attitude on the power question.” The utility magnate showed more candor in a telegram to his wife: “CHARM EXAGGERATED STOP I DIDN’T TELL HIM WHAT YOU THINK OF HIM.” In January 1935, Willkie and two fellow holding company chiefs met with FDR, Federal Power Commission officials Frank McNinch and Basil Manly, and TVA Director David Lilienthal. As Roosevelt was enumerating holding company abuses, Lilienthal later wrote in his journal, Willkie “was getting hotter and hotter.”

Finally, Lilienthal noted, the normally affable CEO leaned in and, gesturing forcefully at the president with his spectacles, told Roosevelt, “‘If you will give us a federal incorporation law, we can get rid of holding companies.’ He didn’t preface it by ‘Mr. President,’ and he didn’t say it with the courtesy that you would accord if you were addressing the vice president of a bank, much less the President of the United States.”

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off holding companies when all they needed was proper regulation. New York Times correspondent Arthur Krock, however, wrote that the bill represented “essential politics” for Roosevelt as well as “personal conviction.”

For five weeks, the ensuing lobbying campaign “raised such a hue and cry as had not been raised against a single measure, perhaps, since Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill,” wrote Roosevelt biographer Kenneth S. Davis. Utilities urged shareholders to write their congressmen.

“Quick death for the holding companies by execution is proposed,” Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Willkie’s Commonwealth & Southern, said in its company newsletter. “And slow death for the operating companies.”

The bill’s backers went into similarly high gear.

Alluding to the difficulty of overseeing utilities that out-of-state companies controlled, humorist Will Rogers joked in his newspaper column, “A Holding Company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.” An outpouring of criticism followed. “Well I dident [sic] figure that little half witted remark would upset the whole holding company business,” Rogers wrote a few days later. “But I forgot that a remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.”

Rayburn scheduled House hearings for the week after he introduced the bill, with Willkie as industry’s leadoff witness. The Indiana-born Wall Street executive with the down-home Hoosier manner paced up and down, alternately blustering and whispering as he defended holding companies, attributing industry lapses to a few bad actors. Yet Willkie voiced support for all the bill’s provisions except the death sentence. Some colleagues strongly disputed this concession, but Willkie’s persuasive, reasonable demeanor and his rhetorical skill enhanced his position as the industry’s national leader.

Wit and a deft hand with the press helped, too. Departing New York to testify in Washington, Willkie said that he was going to the capital “to see that my contempt for the New Deal remains founded on familiarity.”

In private committee talks, Rayburn came to see that he lacked the votes for the death sentence. On May 14, Wheeler’s Senate committee reported out a version of the bill with the death sentence intact, but Democrats in the full Senate were divided. Following two weeks of heated

At Home with Cheaper Power The introduction of larger generators helped save money, realizing the dream of rural electrification across the continent. debate, Senator William Dieterich (D-Illinois) announced he would offer an amendment to strike the death sentence.

Wheeler rushed to the White House to urge Roosevelt to oppose Dieterich’s amendment publicly. The president was having breakfast in bed. Scrawling a note affirming his opposition to the amendment, he handed it to Wheeler. “You can show this to the boys,” FDR said.

That afternoon, when Dieterich claimed on the Senate floor to have gotten Roosevelt’s support for his amendment, Wheeler read aloud the president’s note. The amendment to kill the death sentence lost by one vote. However, the utility lobby’s strength was on display; 28 Democrats, including 20 New Deal stalwarts, had voted to delete the death sentence— the first serious break in Roosevelt’s bloc. The Holding Company Act passed with a comfortable Senate majority, 56 to 32.

The House Commerce Committee remained split; on June 22, Rayburn reported the bill out without the death sentence. A preliminary House count indicated FDR was 40 votes shy of a majority that would

Adapted from High Tension: FDR’s Battle to Power America by John A. Riggs with permission from Diversion Books.

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restore the fatal sanction. The perpetu- Legislative Success Black’s special investigative committee opened its ally optimistic Roosevelt thought he Aided by allies like Sena- hearings Friday, July 12. “Tell the boys of the press to could hold most Democrats, provided tor Burton Wheeler come in!” he shouted. “The show is about to begin.” The they had to vote on the record, setting (D-Montana), above first witness was Philip H. Gadsden, chairman of the him up to reward loyalists and punish right, FDR got the HoldCommittee of Public Utility Executives, a lobbying dissidents. However, Rules Committee ing Company Act enactgroup. Only that morning, Senate investigators had Chairman John J. O’Connor (D-New ed. In 1946, the Supreme surprised Gadsden in his office and rushed him to Court confirmed its Capitol Hill. The unprepared executive disclosed that York) would allow only a “teller” vote, constitutionality. industry’s Edison Electric Institute had established and so called because in that process two members of Congress tallied votes uttered by guided his committee in response to the Wheeler-Rayburn bill, instructing colleagues walking past, with no record kept of him to take no minutes and to hide the connection between the two bodindividual positions. On July 1, House tellers ies. Those revelations fueled further investigation.

While waiting for information from holding companies, Black heard counted only 146 votes for restoring the death sentence and 246 votes against, the first major from Representative Dennis Driscoll (D-Pennsylvania), who had received House defeat of Roosevelt’s presidency. On July over 800 telegrams opposing the bill. All the messages had come from 2, the weakened bill passed 323 to 81.

Warren, a small town in his district.

With the August congressional recess a little Nearly three sender names in four began with letters early in the alphabet, suggesting they had come from a directory or list of utility customers.

Many supposed senders denied authorship. Black’s staff found that the local office of Associated Gas & Electric, a 10-layer holding company pyramid, had had a salesman generate the telegrams. AG&E also had paid messengers three cents for each signature the boys obtained. Black called as a witness one of them, Elmer Danielson, 19, asking if petitioners had known what they were signing. To much laughter, the unsophisticated youth said he had explained the complicated Wheeler-Rayburn bill. “Another revelation like that, and we will compel the House to approve the death sentence,” Black told a friend.

But Black needed a higher-profile villain than a messenger boy. He had been trying since July 14 to subpoena AG&E founder and president Howard C. Hopson. In a farcical two-week game of cat and mouse, Hopson evaded committee investigators, changing hotels in Washington and driving around Virginia and West Virginia. Eventually he agreed to appear before the friendlier House committee. As Hopson was leaving the House hearing, a Senate process server appeared. Hopson’s security staff muscled

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more than a month away, Roosevelt continued to hope the House-Senate conference committee would report out a bill incorporating the death sentence. Rayburn, who expected the conferees to eliminate the provision, told the president that the utility sector had established the “richest and most ruthless lobby Congress has ever known.” Roosevelt instructed Vice President John Nance Garner to appoint supportive Senate conferees and to direct them to hold strong against industry’s might.

By July pressure for and against the bill had grown so intense that both houses began investigating lobbying excesses. Little came of the House inquiry. In the Senate, though, a panel chaired by New Dealer Hugo Black of Alabama was especially vigorous. Black, who had denounced holding companies as “a blood-sucking business,” believed exposure of utility lobbying practices would undercut industry’s credibility.

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Poster Boys The patrician Roosevelt had the common touch, as above with farmers near Warm Springs, Georgia.

Evasive utility executive Howard Hopson tended toward the other end of the political spectrum.

the man aside. After another chase, which a reporter compared to “Eliza crossing the ice, hotly pursued by bloodhounds,” and another subpoena— the utility executive ignored it—a unanimous Senate issued a warrant for Hopson’s arrest on charges of contempt of Congress.

Hopson’s testimony proved to have been worth the effort that obtaining it had required. Making use of the executive’s tax return, which Roosevelt ordered released to the dismay of civil libertarians, Black harvested a wealth of evidence. Hopson’s company had diverted to him money owed shareholders as dividends. Prodigious revenues wrung from ratepayers had gone for lobbying, phony telegrams had inundated Congress, and AG&E had destroyed records. Hopson became the poster boy for holding company sins. But even these revelations were not enough to break the conference

committee logjam. With that strong House vote against the death sentence reinforcing House conferees’ resolve and the Black hearings and administration pressure fortifying their Senate counterparts, debate intensified.

As the House-Senate conference stretched into mid-August, Roosevelt adopted a plan suggested by Harvard Law School professor and frequent advisor Felix Frankfurter. The president asked the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee to bottle up a highly popular tax bill in committee as a means of keeping Congress in session until conferees were able to come to terms on the Holding Company Act. FDR said the House bill was unacceptable but hinted at compromise by acknowledging that no particular legislative wording was necessary.

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The utilities went to court, petitioning a friendly U.S. district court judge to declare the law and its de facto death sentence unconstitutional. SEC

Holding companies, which largely were responsible for America’s electrification, were elaborate structures that utilities and investment banks created in the 1910s and 1920s to provide capital to a rapidly growing industry starved for funds. By the end of the 1920s, nine holding companies held control of utilities producing 75 percent of the nation’s power. A few owners controlled these holding companies and all the utilities under them with a relatively small investment in the voting stock of the holding company at the top of each pyramid. Critics complained that the operating utilities controlled by holding companies overcharged, and that those operating across state lines were impossible for individual states to regulate. Rather than allowing subsidiary utilities to reinvest profits, holding companies often siphoned revenues up the pyramids as dividends paid to the ultimate owners. According to the Federal Trade Commission, in 1924 rates of return to these owners on their investments ranged from 19 to 55 percent. Some engaged in insider trading and inflated their holdings’ value with various financial shenanigans. During the 1920s, whether motivated by greed, zeal for growth, or both, many utilities and holding companies borrowed recklessly to expand. As long as share prices rose, they could cover their debts. After the Crash of 1929, though, multiple utility holding companies went under. Many middle-class investors, expecting safety and rapid growth, had bought utility stocks or bonds and lost their life savings. —John A. Riggs

Pyramids of Power

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and regulation, and no more than two holding company levels would be allowed above an operating utility. These conditions would spell the breakup of Willkie’s and many other large holding companies.

A determined press by Democratic leaders persuaded the conference committee to accept that arrangement, and the previously disapproving House passed the revised bill 219 to 142. Signing the measure, Roosevelt said that if Congress “had done nothing more than pass this bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time.”

Willkie was undeterred. “While a straitjacket will keep a man out of trouble,” he complained, “it is not a suitable garment in which to work.” He hoped that the closely divided Congress might make possible a reconsideration in 1936.

the court ruled the Holding Company Act valid in 1946, ringing a tocsin that had been waiting a decade to sound.

Chairman James Landis derided those proceedings as a “sham,” but a favorable ruling in November triggered suits by many holding companies. Those actions attempted to void a requirement that they register with the SEC by that December 1. Willkie went further, announcing that Commonwealth & Southern not only would not register but also, joined by 18 other utilities, would file another suit to challenge the law’s constitutionality.

The government parried, quickly filing a complaint against Electric Bond and Share, one of the largest holding companies. The federal suit highlighted the new law’s registration provision, which the SEC thought would be more easily defensible than the implicit death sentence. Federal lawyers petitioned to delay the case, hoping one or more conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices would retire—as did occur. In 1937 Justice Willis Van Devanter gave up his seat, filled by Senator Hugo Black. Justice George Sutherland retired in 1938, replaced by Solicitor General Stanley Reed.

In March 1938, the High Court ruled on Electric Bond and Share v. SEC. Reed recused himself because as solicitor general he had signed briefs in the case. Justice Black participated, although The New York Times noted that as a senator he had “attacked holding companies as ‘rattlesnakes’ and urged their destruction.” Declining to rule on the law’s constitutionality, the justices voted 6-1 to uphold mandatory registration.

Though the Holding Company Act’s constitutionality was still up in the air, the Electric Bond and Share ruling allowed the SEC to impose mandatory registration. Within hours of the decision Willkie announced that Commonwealth & Southern would be complying. In March 1940 the SEC notified the company that it was in violation of the law. Willkie wrote shareholders, “We expect to do all in our power…to prevent the forced sale of our properties.” However, others would have to carry that torch. Willkie’s fervent opposition to Roosevelt’s power policies had gained him

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Hard Evidence Pennsylvania postal telegraph manager Luther Coleman examines sheaves of telegrams generated to fight the Holding Company Act.

Republicans’ admiration and catapulted him to national prominence, and after winning the Republican nomination for president in June 1940 he resigned from the utility to campaign.

Political Afterlife Thanks to his performance on behalf of industry, Willkie developed enough popularity to run against FDR in 1940.

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By 1941, with the war in Europe imposing steep demands on the power sector as American manufacturers increased production, a number of holding companies sought to delay SEC action so they could ramp up production without fear of enforcement. SEC chairman Edward C. Eicher stood firm. “The present scattered systems have ‘Balkanized’ the utility assets of this country,” Eicher said. “The resultant hodgepodge utility operations require the surgery of [the death sentence] in order that integrated utility properties may be developed in accordance with the power needs of the area served.” As it happened, new government dams in the Tennessee and Columbia river valleys wound up satisfying much of the nation’s increased wartime power demand.

In 1946 the Supreme Court ruled the Holding Company Act constitutional. Multistate companies had to seek the best deal they could from the SEC. Most did not survive. Between 1938 and 1950, non-contiguous or multi-layered companies had to dispose of 759 subsidiaries. As of 1958, only 18 registered interstate

companies remained in business.

“No company died that seemed to have the slightest excuse for living,” economic historian Harold Underwood Faulkner concluded.

Willkie’s effective defense had forced a compromise, but Roosevelt supporters pointed to electricity rates as evidence of his policies’ success. From 1920 to 1932, when holding companies claimed they were providing efficiencies through management and system integration, inflation-adjusted residential electric service fees were flat. From 1933 to 1942, with government pressure on holding companies and competition from federally produced power, rates fell about 40 percent in real terms. And, per Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign promise, the utility industry remained largely private. H

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A disaster on Nantucket helped recast the island from whaling center to resort

By Paul F. Bradley

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wabbies in the U.S. Navy of the mid1800s coveted coastal survey duty.

Crews doing this work mapped such details as depths, shallows, obstructions, and tides along the American coasts. Survey duty meant regular shore leave, fresh food, and slim chances of combat. On Monday July 13, 1846, the crews of cutter USS Gallatin and schooner USS Wave completed a day of surveying the waters off Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and Martha’s Vineyard, a large island 13 miles from Cape Cod’s south shore. Sailing east, the warships anchored outside the harbor at Nantucket, the main town on an island of the same name about 35 miles east of the Vineyard. Around midnight, a sailor standing watch noticed a glow over Nantucket. The seaman alerted his superiors that the 48-square-mile island seemed to be on fire.

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The Wampanoag, Nantucket’s aboriginal natives, had long scavenged the remains of beached whales for oil, meat, and bone to make tools. In the late 1600s, the island began to

attract members of the Society of Friends. When Quakers came to New England to escape persecution in England only to encounter persecution by the region’s dominant Puritans, Quaker missionaries encouraged coreligionists to relocate to Nantucket, which was home to no organized sect. Nantucket’s first Quaker meeting established itself in 1708. As more and more Friends took up residence, the Wampanoag passed along their whale-scrounging skills.

Quakers, who lived simply and dressed plainly, opposed war, drink, and, sometimes, slavery. They were industrious, establishing banks, businesses, and philanthropies as well as founding on a Nantucket harbor opening to the northwest a town they initially called Sherburne.

Soon rudimentary three-and four-story buildings lined Sherburne’s narrow streets. Other towns and fishing villages, including Siasconset, eight miles east, took root. By 1742, the island’s Quaker population numbered 2,400.

From beachside carrion-picking, islanders progressed to sailing the globe in pursuit of live whales, which could weigh

Out of Control Highly combustible whale oil, wooden buildings, narrow streets, and summer’s ocean breezes conspired to set the town of Nantucket ablaze.

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65 tons. Setting off from ocean-going ships in rowboats, whalers ambushed surfaced cetaceans, hurling barbed lances called harpoons and fixed to a whaleboat with a stout line paid out around a hub. A successful strike set off a “Nantucket sleigh ride,” as the wounded animal NANTUCKET dove, not infrequently dragging its tormenters HARBOR to their doom. In 1820, Nantucketer George Pollard was captaining the whaleship Essex when a sperm whale stove in his ship’s bow and sank it.

After the whaler Two Brothers wrecked in 1823, killing his seagoing career, Pollard retired to a job as one of his hometown’s night watchmen.

Whaleships were floating factories. Upon AT L A N T I C slaying an animal, a crew, which could OCEAN B O S TO N number 40, secured the enormous carcass to the hull. Deploying long-handled Roaming the globe—a voyage could exceed three bladed tools known as flensing knives, years—Nantucket whalers made their home port the NANTUCKET men removed blubber, or fat, in strips. prosperous center of a robust industry. Warehouses MILES Rendered in cauldrons, the whale flesh storing barrels of whale oil became fixtures along the 0 30 was boiled into oil prized for use in cooking town docks, as did enterprises—coopers, chandlers, sailand illumination. The oil went into barrels, each makers, provisioners, shipwrights, and rope walks where line capable of holding 35 to 40 gallons. An average was made by workers twisting together strands of hemp as they strode— whaling ship held 1,200 barrels. found in any industrial harbor. In 1795 residents renamed Sherburne for Another byproduct was spermaceti, a waxy the island. During the American Revolution and again when war with product of a cranial organ whales use to control Great Britain erupted in 1812, Nantucket declared itself neutral. One their buoyancy and gauge direction. Sperma- motivation was Quaker pacifism. Another was money, which did not last. ceti, an excellent lubricant for fine machinery, Whaling suffered a decline, as did Nantucket’s fortunes (“Boom and Bust,” made candles that burned brighter, longer, and p. 30). By mid-century, the island, home to 8,000, was a genteel backwawithout smoke. Ambergris, generated by the ter with multiple churches, a nationally acclaimed library called The Athmammal’s digestive tract, went into perfume. eneum, and three newspapers: The Daily Warder and the weekly

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Epic Struggle The lure of profits from whale oil and other commodities derived from the great cetaceans powered a worldwide industry and made many a fortune.

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Nantucket Inquirer and Nantucket Weekly Mirror. Pacific Bank cashier William Mitchell and his daughter, Maria, were noted amateur astronomers whose celestial observations were critical to coastal surveys. William built an observatory atop the bank. Maria cataloged the Atheneum’s collections. Nantucket still was home to spermaceti candle factories, ropewalks, sailmakers, and blacksmiths. Warehouses along five wharves held thousands of barrels of whale oil.

Built mainly of wood, early 19th-century American towns were tinderboxes. Residents feared flames—but they also feared firefighters, given fire squads’ ineptitude and avarice, little changed from the time of Marcus Licinius Crassus. In Rome of the last century B.C.E., Crassus would arrive at a blaze with his 500-man force and offer to buy the property for a pittance. If the owner accepted, the crew doused the flames and Crassus added to his immense holdings on the cheap. If the property owner refused, the building burned. So too with American firefighting units of the early 1800s; after a fire squad’s visit, Built for Burning it was not unusual for possessions to be An early photograph shows the town of missing. Firefighters stopped flames by Sherburne, later renamed Nantucket, insmothering them with earth or spraying cluding the narrow streets that in 1846 water delivered by bucket brigade and contributed to the fire’s devastation. later wheeled pumper. Another tool for containing fires was gunpowder, used to blast firebreaks by knocking down flamExcept for five prominent brick mable buildings. Every residence mainstructures—Philip Folger’s house, tained a leather bucket bearing the name Jared Coffin’s house, Aaron Mitchof the property’s owner, whose family ell’s mansion, the town offices, and was expected to help fight blazes. the Pacific Bank—Nantucket’s busiMaria Flames were a scourge of urban life. ness district was all wood, and its Mitchell On April 10, 1845, a fire consumed a third streets no wider than in Sherburne of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That July, a days—30 to 40 feet across. On June New York City candle factory caught fire; 2, 1838, a ropewalk caught fire. Men 345 buildings burned, 30 people died, and rolled barrels of oil into the harbor, looting broke out. Damages nearing $10 only to have flying embers ignite the resultmillion could have been far worse; New York recently had begun requir- ing slick. The blaze destroyed 20 houses and ing new construction to be of brick, masonry, and iron. businesses, inflicting more than $100,000 in Nantucket was a standard American municipality, with little regula- damages. After the fire department deftly hantion and minimal public services. Firefighting was largely private and dled an October 1840 candle factory fire, howmakeshift. An 1836 blaze that started at 4 Main Street consumed the ever, minutes taken of a Selectmen’s meeting Washington House hotel and neighboring structures but was held to suggested Nantucket enjoyed sufficient fire pro$50,000 in damages because residents pitched in. Seeking a better sys- tection. In 1846, the selectmen allocated a $2 tem, in 1838 the town’s seven-member Committee of Selectmen char- annual stipend for each fireman, with a 50 pertered the Nantucket Fire Department. A board of three, led by the chief cent increase to apply in 1847. director and a clerk, was to oversee the department. The town was divided into 20 fire districts led by officials called wards. Each ward was to iden- The summer of 1846 was very dry. Monday tify buildings to demolish with gunpowder in a fire emergency. night, July 13, was warm and windy. The moon The charter called for the creation of ten independent fire companies was full. However, Nantucket was dark. Islandof 45 volunteers apiece led by a captain. Each company was to be outfit- ers thought streetlights too costly. The business ted with a hand-pumped wheeled water engine, fed by cisterns strategi- district was quiet except for late doings at Wilcally located around the harborside business district, like the one in front liam H. Geary’s hat shop at 4 Main Street. To of the Pacific Bank. Rainwater from building downspouts topped off the heat irons for flattening felt brims, Geary kept a cisterns, which had hand-cranked pumps and leather hoses for supplying coal stove going year-round. The vent pipe fire wagons; to reach distant fires, wagons could be linked by hoses. pierced his shop’s ceiling. On the second floor, FEBRUARY 2021 37

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consumed Joseph Hamblin’s hayloft. A flaming tendril snaked west, nearing Orange Street, where Philip Folger’s brick house momentarily checked the blaze. The fire directors and wards decided to demolish buildings, starting with Dr. Nathaniel Ruggles’s house, just in from the corner of Main and Orange.

Gravitating north, the fire immolated every wooden building in its path. The crew of No. 4 engine, the Deluge, could not draw water from a cistern. Flames destroyed the rig. The wind rose.

An updraft became a fiery vortex that shot a fireball from the corner of Federal and Main over seven streets to land on North Water.

Some Nantucketers bribed firefighters to save possessions, weakening the fire line. Residents

Legend dates the start of modern whaling off Nantucket to 1712, when a gale blew a Captain Hussey and crew out to sea and into a pod of sperm whales, a few of which the men captured. Whaling soon was an island trade. By 1775, Nantucket was the third-largest municipality in Massachusetts, trailing only Salem and Boston. In 1820, Nantucket’s whaling fleet numbered 150 vessels. Owing to the emergence of kerosene as a fuel and to competition from railroad-accessible mainland ports like New Bedford and Sag Harbor, New York, whaling began to pall on the island in the 1830s, a trend worsened by a sandbar that kept larger whalers out of Nantucket Harbor. The Great Fire destroyed the island’s trades necessary for whaling, deflecting immigrants first to mainland ports, then to the California gold fields and Colorado silver mines. By 1853, Nantucket’s fleet comprised 15 whalers. Discovery of petroleum at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 put Nantucket whaling into a death spiral that the Civil War concluded; 400 Nantucket men joined the Union Army. Confederate commerce raiders left Nantucket’s meager fleet all but inert. The last whaler left Nantucket in 1869; abandoned hulks dotted the harbor. By the early 1900s, American commercial whaling had petered out. The United States banned the trade in 1971, a stricture eased for the Makah of the Pacific Northwest, for whom whaling remains sacramental, and subsistence whaling by tribes in Alaska. Whaling survives on Nantucket in mementoes such as scrimshaw carvings like the one at left (nha.org/visit/museums-and-tours/whaling-museum). —Paul F. Bradley

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the stovepipe, enclosed in wood, elbowed into a chimney. Finishing work that Monday night, Geary checked his stove for embers and sparks. Finding none, he closed up shop around 9 p.m. Around 11 p.m., a watchman in the south tower of the Unitarian Church on Orange Street spotted smoke over Main Street and shouted “Fire!” Passersby entered the hattery. Finding the wall behind the chimney hot, they soaked it with water. The wall collapsed, revealing flames rising into the adjacent building.

The crews of two water engines, the No. 6 Cataract and the No. 8 Fountain, arrived simultaneously. Deciding they needed a double-pumper arrangement, the captains debated whose engine would spray and which would pump from the cistern. While the captains, William H. Farnham of No. 6 and William C. Swain of No. 8, dithered, the blaze spread. By the time Cataract began spraying the hattery, the fire was out of control.

“At the outset, a smart stream of water would have quenched the fire in the Geary store,” a witness said later.

Flames spread east to Union Street, leaped Washington Street, and

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Flesh into Fuel At sea or, as at left, in Nantucket harbor, whalers sliced free blubber and meat, to be cooked down into oil. Thousands of barrels of the liquid gold filled warehouses along the waterfront.

hitched cartloads and let their horses gallop. Others draped waterlogged carpets over their houses’ roofs. The improvised defense did not work well.

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Navy captains Lieutenant Charles H. Davis of Gallatin and Lieutenant John R. Goldsborough of Wave ordered their crews into town. As the fire was nearing The Atheneum on Federal Street, sailors, library workers, and patrons moved the building’s contents three times. The building and the collection within were lost. Sailors wrested the Pacific Bank vault’s contents out of harm’s way. Water from the cistern out front mostly saved the bank’s wooden exterior but its rooftop observatory and astronomy equipment burned.

Adjacent to the Pacific Bank, the wooden-pillared facade of the Methodist Church caught fire.

The wards decided to sacrifice the chapel. Seamen emplaced kegs of gunpowder. According to island lore, Maria Mitchell argued against demolition; the wind was blowing away, she said. The fuses went unlit. The Methodist Church survived. Trinity Episcopal, just inside the corner of Broad and Centre Streets, did not. Built of wood plastered to suggest stone, Trinity went up quickly, its bell tolling as flames collapsed the belfry.

News-minded Martha Washington Jenks ran to the Daily Warder office to set and print an account of the fire, figuring to distribute broadsheets to departing vessels in the morning, if they saw morning, so news of the fire would reach the mainland.

The crew of No. 5 water engine, the Nantucket, abandoned their machine at E.W. Gardner’s Candle and Oil Factory. The engine itself went up. Flaming oil badly burned the captain. Along the harbor, barrel after barrel of whale oil exploded. Stored rope, canvas, lumber, and candles fueled the blaze. “One of the peculiar incidents of that wild night was the rare sight of the harbor on fire,” Fred Elijah Coffin recalled. “Many barrels of whale oil on the wharves had burst, and their contents flowed over the water of the harbor and there, taking fire, presented the grand spectacle of a sea of fire.”

Four wharves burned; only Commercial Wharf survived. Coffin said he saw bystanders on Old North Wharf trapped “between the devil and the deep blue sea” until boatmen rescued them. A man in Siasconset reported that around 1 a.m. a cannonade-like boom roused him to see the “heavens were red with fire.” Residents of Falmouth, 32 miles northwest on Cape Cod, could see the flames.

The town’s few brick structures and the Atlantic stopped the fire’s spread. As dawn was breaking Tuesday, firefighters and residents, exhausted and grimy, gathered at the Pacific Bank. Where once had stood 33 acres of homes and businesses, nothing blocked the view of the smoking harbor. More than 300 structures had burned. A thousand Nantucketers were homeless but none had died. Martha Jenks distributed her summary of the fire to ships raising sail.

Residents assessed the damage at $1 million—today, $31 million.

Burning Bright The fire riveted spectators, many of whom joined the island’s firefighters in trying to quench the blaze. Below, an example of a mid1800s fire control apparatus.

The Selectmen set aside $5,000 in town funds to go to the worst off. The blaze destroyed two engines and hoses and cistern pumps worth $3,000. Demolishing 20 buildings, the town had run out of gunpowder. The Selectmen swore in additional constables to discourage looting and keep the peace, and on July 15 drafted an appeal sent to Boston, New York, and other cities: “Friends—The undersigned Selectmen of the Town of Nantucket, have been constituted…to ask at your hands such aid as you may feel able to render to our unfortunate and distressed people. Onethird of our town is in ashes. A fire broke out on Monday evening last, a few minutes before eleven o’clock and raged almost uncontrolled for about nine hours…We need help— liberal and immediate. Please direct anything which you may Martha send to the Selectmen of the Jenks Town of Nantucket, and we pledge ourselves to dispense whatever you FEBRUARY 2021 39

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A donation of $330 from church congregations in Charlestown, Massachusetts, arrived on July 21. The city of Troy, New York, sent 21 stoves.

Steamship Bradford Durfee sailed from Fall River, Massachusetts, carrying over $1,000 cash and nearly $3,000 worth of food and other essentials. Nantucket received $6,400 in goods and $56,498 in cash. A committee worked up a more fire-resistant street grid that the Selectmen approved on August 14, 1846. The revised city layout eliminated Independent Lane, Coal Lane, Brown’s Lane, and Black Horse Lane.

Through purchase of land by eminent domain at $7 to $23 per 16’5” measure, the safer grid doubled the width of the seven major downtown streets. On paper, Federal Street now measured 60 feet across; Broad Street, 55; and Main Street 92 feet, narrowing to 80 feet as the roadbed turned east. The street plan, including plotting, grading, and paving, was implemented within six months, under budget. The Selectmen encouraged residents to rebuild in brick; more than 60 did so.

Nantucketers submitted loss claims. Selectman Charles C. Coffin kept the ledger, disbursing donated funds to 533 recipients. George Pollard, the unlucky former whaling captain and night watchman—he had not been on duty the night of the fire—received $50. Most petitioners were disappointed. Peleg West, 75, filed for $3,183; he got $450 in cash and provisions. Only Lydia Ruggles, 13, was paid her entire loss claim; she requested $100. The town officially hailed the U.S. Navy for its sailors’ “unremitting exertions,” as did Navy Secretary George Bancroft.

The three papers carried classifieds pleading for the return of property “lost” during the fire. Samuel Jenks complained that many men acted with an “appalling lack of civic responsibility.” Nantucketers spoke ill for years of neighbors who tried to profit from the blaze. A February 8, 1847, analysis criticized the two fire companies whose members lost their engines and the citizens and firefighters who, amid the disaster, sought private enrichment. The report also obliquely blamed the No. 6 engine’s captain for Artifacts A household bucket of the sort used to fight the fire, left, a partially melted pitcher salvaged afterwards, and a post-facto map showing the burned-over district.

“refusing to obey a fire ward.” The report recommended better training for fire wards and a fire department reorganization.

The loss of The Atheneum weighed heavily.

“Many were the sighs and heavy hearts, as we gazed on the ruins of that favored institution, as in the general distress, what was there to hope for in the future, as far as the rebuilding of any building was concerned?” William Macy wrote.

Rebuilt of wood and rededicated on February 1, 1847, the library received donated books from every state, as well as manuscripts and other curios. Appearances at the new building by star speakers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Lucretia Mott helped restore The Atheneum to national prominence.

Investigators attributed the Great Fire of Nantucket to that wooden soffit enclosing hatmaker William H. Geary’s stovepipe elbow. Among urban fire scapegoats, the hatter escaped the infamy heaped upon the Emperor Nero for burning Rome in 64 C.E. and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow for starting the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

If there was a villain, he was William H. Farnham, captain of No. 6 engine, the Cataract, and, surprisingly, grand marshal of a commemorative July 13, 1847, Nantucket parade.

By 1896, however, Farnham’s star had grown tarnished. “It has always been claimed by many that but for the obstinacy of the Cataract Engine Company, the flames could never have gone

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residents were urged to rebuild in brick rather than wood.

More than 60 did so, not only cutting fire risk but changing the nantucket aesthetic.

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may bestow, faithfully, and to the best of our ability, judiciously.”

Pleasure Island

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beyond that store (Geary’s),” the editors of the merged Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror wrote on the 50th anniversary. In a letter to the editor, Farnham’s son Joseph affirmed his father’s culpability. “The Cataract No. 6 and the Fountain No. 8 reached the cistern about the same time,” the son wrote. “An argument arose between the ‘skippers’ of the two engines as to who should drop the suction hose into the cistern. My father, captain of the No. 6 was…critically blamed for this most unfortunate condition.”

Nantucket approached rebuilding as it once had taken to whaling, diligently and methodically. In a 1917 timeline, the Inquirer and Mirror recorded the nadir of the island’s decline as 1870. Still, the isle remains legendary for its whaling past. Although the author Herman Melville never visited Nantucket before publishing Moby-Dick in 1851, he had briefly worked aboard a whaler, and found inspiration in the 1820 sinking of the Essex for his masterpiece, which enjoyed popularity in the early 1900s that continues today. The same is true of the island itself, although traces remain of yesteryear. The island’s fire department, for example, still prohibits open fires anywhere on Nantucket. H

Back in Business Within only decades of the fire, Nantucket was presenting a serene, welcoming look.

As early as 1828, Nantucket, to some islanders’ disdain, was trying to lure vacationers. As whaling was declining, silk, stove, and straw-hat manufacture and other enterprises proved neither lucrative nor sustainable. The Great Fire sent the population into freefall; the 1870 census counted 4,123 year-round residents; much larger Martha’s Vineyard, 30-some miles west, was home to only 3,787 but doing a robust touristic trade. Nantucketer Frederick Coleman Sanford—merchant, bank president, raconteur—began to promote the island in the press, romanticizing old Nantucket in tales of “Sea King” captains and their brave crews. Emulating purpose-built Vineyard resort town Oak Bluffs, Nantucket began to market itself. When Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Chester A. Arthur visited, Sanford was their guide. Lower income families left the island, but power brokers stayed, putting old money to work building restaurants, hotels, guesthouses, and other attractions. Articles in Harper’s Magazine and Scribner’s touted the Nantucket experience. Celebrities like Frank Gilbreth, efficiency expert and subject of the best-seller Cheaper by the Dozen, at left with his family, began summering on the island. Buildings raised in the town of Nantucket after the blaze aged into a time capsule of small-town life. The seasonal economy galloped into the post-1945 decades through to the present day.

Real estate became the new whale oil. As of September 2019, the median home price on Nantucket was $1.7 million. —Paul F. Bradley

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Combat Yacht After years as a plutocrat’s plaything a luxury vessel came to a violent end

By Stuart D. Scott

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Before the Deluge Between wars the good ship Hi-Esmaro plied the Atlantic and the waters off the East Coast strictly for its owners’ enjoyment. .

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Work on the pleasure craft destined for combat began in July 1928, when American asbestos magnate Hiram Manville, proprietor of the Johns-Manville Company, put a down payment on a diesel yacht at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. By June 1929, when, with most of Bath’s population watching, the 267’, 1,333-ton white-hulled vessel slid from a shipyard cradle into the Kennebec River estuary, change orders had run the original $769,827 price beyond $900,000—today, in excess of $12.6 million. The first syllables of the names of father Hiram, daughter Estelle, mother Romaine, and Manville

comprised their ship’s appellation—Hi-Esmaro, the same tag the family bestowed on its 150-acre estate at Pleasantville, New York.

Romaine Manville christened the yacht, built for pleasure and to display status. On the boat deck beneath the bridge and chart room, the forward deck house featured a sunroom from which occupants had an unobstructed view of what lay ahead. Aft of the sunroom were the captain’s stateroom, equipped with a bath and a large wardrobe, and the wireless room. The owner’s suite, also on the boat deck, comprised a beautifully furnished double stateroom with sitting room and bath. Four other double guest staterooms each had private baths. Hi-Esmaro also had two bachelor rooms, plus accommodations for maids and valets. The main deckhouse incorporated a sedate but attractively decorated main salon and dining room paneled in solid teak.

Estelle Manville, 24, had married into the Swedish royal family in 1928; replicas of that nation’s crown hung over the stateroom beds. Designed by yacht architect Henry J. Gielow, Hi-Esmaro

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avaged by aerial attack, the auxiliary tender, heavily burdened with a load of ammunition, depth charges, and aviation fuel, was wallowing in open water between the Solomon Islands and New Guinea on Friday, May 22, 1943. The vessel’s 136-man crew had abandoned ship. A tin fish deliberately loosed by a friendly boat set off explosions that blew the tender to pieces. The pieces sank in the South Pacific. The ship that vanished and its mercy killer both belonged to the U.S. Navy. However, while the attacking craft, though wooden-hulled, was strictly military—a Patrol Torpedo (PT) boat—the vessel destroyed was made of steel and had had a complicated career. Originally an industrialist’s yacht more accustomed to hosting big shots than serving swabbies, USS Niagara had been commissioned for the duration. Now its war was over.

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Days of Sweet Lines and Poses Cosseted by a crew of 50 to 60, the Manvilles, with daughter Estelle, below in 1938 leaving St. John’s Church, Pleasantville, New York, with new husband Count Folke Bernadotte, rode the waves aboard the pride of their motor yacht’s designers.

had two Bessemer diesel engines and a sister ship, Vanda, built simultaneously for a Boston investor. A crew of 50 to 60, sometimes including a surgeon and a barber, staffed each vessel.

For ten years the Manvilles, members of the New York Yacht Club, made abundant use of Hi-Esmaro, often to travel to sailing and crew races up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

One popular entry on the yachting calendar was an annual Harvard-Yale rowing competition along Connecticut’s Thames River. The finish line was a bridge inland from Long Island

Sound linking riverside towns Groton and New London, Connecticut. On June 19, 1931, Groton-born canoeist Louis Grimmer, 12, got an eyeful of the Manville yacht. He particularly admired that rakish clipper bow and the mermaid bowsprit.

Louis had been paddling with friends through the spectator fleet anchored at the finish line when guests aboard Hi-Esmaro called down to the boys, “Good morning—who is going to win?”

Harvard did, finishing the four-mile downstream course in 21:29, 13 seconds ahead of Yale. Louis Grimmer never forgot his glimpse of Hi-Esmaro. “I used to dream at night of how I would like to own a yacht, such as this, and travel the world,” he recalled later.

The Manville yacht twice crossed the Atlantic to Europe, where Hiram and Romaine visited with Estelle and her husband, Count Folke Bernadotte. Once, the Swedish royal family joined the Manvilles for a Mediterranean cruise. In spring 1939, when Crown Prince Gustav Adolph and Crown Princess Louise visited New York to open Sweden’s exhibit at the World’s Fair, Manville put the royal couple up aboard the yacht. That September, Germany invaded Poland and the Atlantic became a combat zone.

After growing massively during the Great War, the American military had shrunk, especially the Navy, tightly hemmed by arms-control treaties until resurgent international tension reversed that. In 1938, authorized U.S. Navy tonnage began to rise. By 1940 the Navy had some 2,000 ships and FEBRUARY 2021 45

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Lou Grimmer was startled to Be serving aboard a vessel he recalled coveting as a boy. seeing thAT ship stripped for combat DUTY grieved him.

The colonial capital of French New Caledonia, Noumea offered whoever controlled its harbor domination of the Coral Sea and southern Solomon Islands. The sheltered anchorage, now a vital Allied forward naval and air base, was home to an immense armada. The streets of the port were crowded with aviators, sailors, and Marines attached to battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, repair ships, and smaller vessels.

One transient resident of Noumea was Frederick Ludwig, MD. The Michigan native, a Navy reservist, had left his medical practice in Port Huron to go on active duty. After a hurried two-week indoctrination at Great Lakes Training Center, Dr. Ludwig had sailed by Liberty ship out of San Francisco, debarking at Noumea in November 1942.

He thought it prudent to observe protocol by reporting for duty to his commanding officer clad as the Navy handbook prescribed. Pulling a rumpled, mildewed formal uniform from his seabag, Ludwig, 32, donned his heavy wool dress blues and in tropical heat sweatily quickstepped to headquarters, where a yeoman led him to a darkened room. As Ludwig was entering, a voice boomed, “Come in!” Proffering his orders with a salute to

So This Is War USS Niagara, center, acquired a different air in the company of true warships like cruisers Leander (New Zealand), left, and USS Chicago.

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vessel patrolled the islands until November 29, when Niagara joined a convoy escorting transports and heavy cruiser USS Northampton to Cavite, Philippines, by way of Fiji.

At sea when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Niagara, unable to keep pace with genuine combat vessels, was ordered to Pearl to assume such supporting duties as convoy escort and service as a tender to PT squadrons. In April 1942 the gunboat sailed east to guard approaches to the Panama Canal.

Overhauled that summer at New York, Niagara returned to Newport as a school ship. However, with the war in the South Pacific gaining scope and intensity, the Navy in that theater, now thick with PT boat squadrons requiring regular refueling, needed tenders—floating resupply vessels stocking fuel and armaments and providing repair services.

Shipfitters equipped Niagara with reserve fuel tanks capable of holding 50,000 gallons. In late November 1942, Niagara sailed west via the Panama Canal and the Society Islands, en route officially designated the Navy’s first Motor Torpedo Boat Tender, Auxiliary Gun, Patrol (AGP-1).

The crew anchored at Noumea, New Caledonia, on January 17, 1943.

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

was eager to acquire anything afloat serviceable enough to commission for coastal patrol and similar duties. That October the government bought Hi-Esmaro from Romaine Manville for $150,000; eventually more than half of the 500odd vessels owned by New York Yacht Club members entered active service. Work began immediately to convert Hi-Esmaro into a warship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Connecticut canoeing enthusiast Lou Grimmer had joined the Navy. When his destroyer finished a cruise by docking in New York, he got orders to join the crew of a gunboat, USS Niagara (PG-52), as a storekeeper. “I will never forget the thrill I received when I walked down to the dock and found it was the old Hi-Esmaro,” Grimmer said later. It grieved him to watch shipyard workers transmogrifying the yacht for battle, a process that sacrificed not only most of the deluxe interior but also those beautiful lines.

Assigned with other sailors to shovel clear the snowbound pier at which Niagara was berthed, Grimmer and mates reached the bow as “the workmen were in the process of removing a bosomly mermaid whom we were all attached to and we pelted them with snowballs, as if we could stop them from their assigned duties.” The yacht-turned-auxiliary-gunboat now was armed with two .50-cal. machine guns as well as two 3-inch guns. The crew totaled 136. The Navy assigned Lou Grimmer elsewhere.

Commissioned at New York in January 1941, Niagara was ordered south. At Miami and Key West, Florida, and at Guantanamo, Cuba, Navy men who were training to go to war in PT boats lived aboard the former yacht. Returning to New York for repairs, Niagara relocated to Newport, Rhode Island, to resume its dormitory role at the Naval Torpedo Station. In August 1941, assigned to the Pacific theater, Niagara departed for Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Anchoring there October 9, the

PHOTO © USIS-DITE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; AP PHOTO

NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

the silhouette in the shadows, the young doctor said, At Ease mosquito-borne tropical disease malaria At Noumea in French “Lieutenant Fred Ludwig reporting for duty, sir.” made a patient of U.S. Marine Corps Caledonia, above left, The backlit officer stood. fighter ace and future South Dakota Governor Joe Foss. In 1943, Dr. Ludwig was “My God man, take off those blues!” he barked. even commander Vice ordered to assume the duties of medical “We only wear fatigues out here and never with a tie.” Admiral William F. Halsey eschewed wear- officer aboard AGP-1, bound for the cenThere was another officer present. ing a dress uniform. tral Solomons. He busied himself stocking “Are you the Dr. Ludwig just assigned to my hospisurgical instruments and supplies and familiartal?” Captain Fred Conklin asked. izing himself with running a commissary. To “Yes, sir,” Ludwig answered.

Conklin introduced Fred Ludwig to his host, Vice Admiral William F. improve ventilation in the crew quarters, Lud“Bull” Halsey, commander of the South Pacific Theater of Operations. wig oversaw the installation of screened doors, “We’re out here to fight a war,” Halsey said, now speaking in a warm voice. as well as wire mesh over the portholes. The “Getting dressed up in coats and ties is a total waste of time.”

Navy had not obliterated every trace of Hi-Esmaro’s former life. The officers’ mess was panFrom Noumea, Halsey and subordinates were directing the American eled in teak, “with linen and silver services that offensive in the Solomons, sometimes losing badly to Japan’s powerful had belonged to Manville,” Ludwig said. “It was fleet. Combat in the central Solomons was intense. At the Noumea hospi- the only tender where the master could push a tal, Dr. Ludwig saw most of the casualties from those clashes. A case of the button and the entire bulkhead would fold back and expose an extra bed.” On January 27, 1943, Niagara departed Noumea with Motor Torpedo Boat Division 23, Squadron 8. After stops at Efate and Espiritu Santo, the gunboat took up station at Tulagi on February 17.

Tiny Tulagi, off the larger island of Florida, was chief port and administrative center of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, and one of the 900-mile chain’s best anchorages. At the start of the war in the Pacific, Tulagi’s coconut planters, traders, missionaries, and government officials had been in the path of Japanese forces sweeping south. A small garrison of Australian infantrymen guarded the civilians and a squadron of amphibious patrol planes and assisted FEBRUARY 2021 47

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C’mon in, Bunkie!

Upon arriving in the Solomon Islands, Lt. (jg) John F. Kennedy, left, lived aboard Niagara before being assigned command of a Patrol Torpedo boat and crew.

After the attack, Dr. Ludwig treated wounded men, mainly for burns, shrapnel injuries, and stress. Niagara resumed its routine. Repair work continued at a floating drydock. At the Tulagi government wharf, supplies and replacements occasionally arrived. Waiting to take command of a PT boat, newly arrived Lieutenant (jg) John F. Kennedy briefly bunked aboard Niagara.

In May 1943, as Halsey’s South Pacific naval forces were continuing their slow progress north and west, AGP-1’s captain, Lieutenant Commander David B. Coleman, got orders to establish a base on Woodlark Island, 500 miles due west of Tulagi and 150 miles from the immense island of New Guinea. At a British agricultural station on Malaita Island, Ludwig reprovisioned, loading up on fresh tomatoes, lettuce, and beans.

The crew topped off Niagara’s hold and tanks.

Early on the morning of Friday, May 22, 1943, Tulagi harbor’s anti-submarine nets opened and AGP-1, laden with 50,000 gallons of aviation fuel plus stocks of torpedoes and depth charges, passed into the sea, escorted by six PTs and

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PHOTO CREDIT

One morning, enemy “Val” dive bombers strafed the anchorage on the maliali. american Gunners took out all but two of the attackers.

oilers USS Kanawah and USS Aaron Ward and Royal New Zealand corvette Moa and did damage to British-built four-masted schooner USS Erskine Phelps, the oldest ship on active sea duty in the U.S. Navy. When nine two-man Aichi “Val” dive bombers swept up the Maliali at treetop level, machine gunners aboard Niagara and minesweeper USS Rail, moored outboard of the tender, opened fire. The lead Val, damaged and flaming, crashed and exploded in mangroves 1,000 yards aft of Niagara. Two Vals got through, but the fourth was hit. Trailing white smoke, the Val crashed behind hills to the north. The last of the raiders made strafing runs, but in passing through heavy fire from Niagara they too were shot up and crashed in the jungle.

PHOTO BY ©CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES (2); OPPOSITE PAGE: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

what historian Samuel Eliot Morrison called a “Gilbert and Sullivan army of 15 whites, 5 Chinese and 130 native police in defending their base.”

In May 1942, the Australians evacuated Tulagi; Japanese forces took over. An Allied victory that same month in the Battle of the Coral Sea stopped the Japanese advance.

By the time that Niagara reached Tulagi, the island had been recaptured and repurposed into a PT base.

AGP-1 and the PT boats the former yacht supported operated at Tulagi in relative safety, though the small fleet’s anchorage was within range of shore-based aircraft using a major Japanese bastion 650 miles northwest at Rabaul, on New Georgia, and other enemy-held islands north and west.

For concealment, AGP-1’s crew moored north of the Florida Island harbor, tying up to tree trunks against the Maliali River’s high, jungle-rimmed banks. The crew settled into the cycle of tendering: making repairs, restocking torpedo boats with water, fuel, ammunition, and weapons, meanwhile providing communication services for PTs sortieing from Tulagi on nightly security patrols around Guadalcanal.

Only 10° south of the equator, Tulagi was plagued by flies, mosquitos, and a fug of humidity and stale air thickened by daily afternoon rains.

Besides doctoring common but vexing tropical maladies—dysentery, ear infections, ringworm, fungus—Lieutenant Ludwig treated combat casualties.

At midmorning on Wednesday, April 7, 1943, coast watchers reported an ominous bustle at Japanese airfields on Bougainville, 380 miles northwest: many planes taking on fuel and bombs. About noon, a message confirmed that a huge Japanese air fleet was bearing down on the Guadalcanal-Tulagi area.

Fighter pilots scrambled from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal to intercept more than 170 Japanese attackers. Every ship and shore battery on Florida, Guadalcanal, and Tulagi joined in the defense. Japanese bombs sank

main diesels going. Fires were burning below decks forward. Coleman, knowing the result if his stores went up, gave the order to abandon ship.

Tropea was about to leave when he saw flames in an officers’ quarters near an ammunition locker. He and a shipmate brought an extinguisher to bear. When the men ran low on flame retardant, Tropea dashed topside for another extinguisher. A bomb blast knocked him down a gangway, injuring one of his knees. He and the other man kept up their firefighting until an officer ordered them over the side. Most of the crew had already abandoned Niagara for lifeboats or PTs. Tropea, later awarded a Silver Star for valor, wrote, “I had a profound affection for that ship and I would have done anything to prevent it from going down.”

In the engine room, over the sound of bombs and 20mm fire, Seamen Tommy Knight and Cotton Wheeler got an urgent summons. “KNIGHT AND WHEELER, SECURE THE ENGINE ROOM!” the public address system blared. “IF THERE ARE ANY OTHER VOLUNTEERS, LEND KNIGHT AND WHEELER A HAND BEFORE YOU ABANDON SHIP!” PT-110 commander Lieutenant Patrick Munroe recalled “the Japanese pilots giving us a jubilant wave before they left.” PTs 146 and 147 knifed toward the tender, closing in at either side of the stern to take off men still aboard. The tender was in grievous shape—generators out, pipelines severed, pumps smashed. The foredeck was in flames, bow to bridge.

Captain Coleman ordered a coup de grace by PT-147. The torpedo struck amidships, sending gasoline flames 100 yards high. Black smoke momentarily obscured the vessel, which buckled, bow and stern folding together before sinking beneath a billow of white smoke. Below the surface a lone depth charge detonated with a muffled boom.

Not one of Niagara’s 136 men had been Last Moments killed or seriously wounded in the action. ResDamaged beyond repair

by Japanese bombs, USS cue vessels landed them at Tulagi early the Niagara had to be aban- next morning. U.S. Navy records show that 14 years after being christened as the luxury doned. A torpedo from one of the tender’s client yacht Hi-Esmaro the USS Niagara received a battle star for World War II service. H PT boats did the job.

PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO BY ©CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES (2); OPPOSITE PAGE: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

bound for Woodlark Island.

By midday, Niagara had swung south of Guadalcanal and was sailing west. Dr. Ludwig was in the galley anticipating a salad from the Malaita gardens to accompany the noon meal.

Crewman Joseph Tropea, topside on watch, noticed a silhouette against the sun: a Mitsubishi 97 heavy bomber.

Tropea alerted the bridge. In a twitch, all hands were racing for their assigned stations to a chorus of “GENERAL QUARTERS…GENERAL QUARTERS…MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS.” As the Mitsubishi was closing, Captain Coleman ordered a tight turn to starboard at flank speed. As the 97 was releasing four bombs, Coleman ordered a swing hard to port. Three bombs struck water to starboard, the last near enough to disable the tender’s steering and dislodge the 3-inch gun. “We could not train it, but we could elevate it,” Tropea said. “So we kept firing to keep him from coming down on us.”

The bomber broke off. The crew got the steering working. In less than an hour the same 97 returned, accompanied by five other warplanes.

One bomb in a pattern of more than a dozen hit Niagara’s forecastle. Concussions from near misses caused more damage, including a 14-inch hole six feet below the tender’s waterline. Seawater began flooding two storerooms and a passageway. The power failed. Dead in the water and listing dangerously to port, Niagara had no recourse against attack. Engine room gangs were able to get one of the two

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Fair’s Fair In Your Girl and Mine suffrage movement leader Anna Howard Shaw, in black, addresses a rally for women’s rights.

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Suffragette Cinema Your Girl and Mine lobbied for women’s voting rights

By Mary Mallory

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

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Senator Ben Tillman

husbands and confused or neglected children.”

Intended to present females as the butt of jokes, these cinematic vehicles instead rallied women and attracted men to a previously obscure cause.

Gaining knowledge and expertise, many filmmakers were producing probing pictures revealing the medium’s power to shape public opinion.

In his 1909 one-reeler A Corner in Wheat, David Wark Griffith—soon to be better known as “D.W.” and as the creator of the far more controversial The Birth of a Nation—wove film, politics, and social issues into a compelling demand for change that inspired middle-class moviegoers to seek social and economic reform. Griffith’s work resonated strongly with other filmmakers who in such films as The Power of the Press (1909) and The Jungle (1913) confronted inequalities and injustices. Cinema emerged as a powerful tool with which to energize Americans on behalf of governmental change. The Adventures of Kathlyn, a 1913 13-part serial by Chicago-based Selig Polyscope Pictures, made history by introducing what became known as the “cliffhanger” episode ending and by featuring as its protagonist a strong, independent woman.

Suffrage organizations quickly grasped cinema’s potential for persuasion. In 1912, acting on this awareness, suffragists convinced motion

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FROM THE WILLIAM SELIG PAPERS OF THE MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES; EVERETT COLLECTION; KEAN COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

The July 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, inaugurated a prolonged campaign on behalf of voting rights for American women. Decade by decade the movement grew, branching into multiple organizations advocating enfranchisement through protests, marches, and lectures. At every step opponents like U.S. Senator Ben Tillman (D-South Carolina) stoutly resisted, but suffragists persisted, adopting new media— postcards, posters, sheet music lyrics, pageants, and newsreels—to enlist, educate, and invigorate supporters. In 1914, an unlikely alliance formed between the movement and the motion picture industry. The result was a proto-feminist action film meant to challenge gender stereotypes and bring the suffragist message to millions of moviegoers. That ground-breaking film was titled Your Girl and Mine.

The male-dominated motion picture production companies of the early 1900s mostly frowned on female suffrage. The movement came in for relentless cinematic parody and ridicule; many moving pictures made a point of depicting women as combative shrews or hapless spinsters. Shorts like A Suffragette in Spite of Himself (1912), Oh, You Suffragette (1911), Was He a Suffragette? (1912), A Cure for Suffrage (1913), and A Busy Day (1914) sometimes featured male actors in drag flamboyantly playing what Kay Sloan in her book The Loud Silents called “man-hating suffragists, bumbling

What Women Shouldn’t Want Most men opposed granting women equal rights. Senator Ben Tillman, above right, railed against suffrage and a cross-dressing Charlie Chaplin mocked the notion of equality in films such as 1914’s A Busy Day.

EVERETT COLLECTION (2)

I

n November 1914, American voters in seven states were to consider proposed state constitutional amendments that would enfranchise women. That September, the suffragist movement prepared to employ a new medium by making a cinematic thriller meant to enlist the men voting to the cause by showing viewers scenes of physical violence, kidnapping, fire, and child labor. To make the movie, producer William N. Selig had worked closely with the National American Woman Suffrage Association and activist Ruth Hanna McCormick. Selig shipped an early copy to Chicago city censor M. L. C. Funkhouser and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures in New York City. Both censors reflexively cut an entire reel that portrayed a man attacking a woman.

They fight hand to hand until she stabs him to death with scissors. A bowdlerized Your Girl and Mine circulated nationwide for two years, meeting an untimely demise but not without leaving a memorable imprint.

William Selig

FROM THE WILLIAM SELIG PAPERS OF THE MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES; EVERETT COLLECTION; KEAN COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

EVERETT COLLECTION (2)

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw

picture companies to produce one- and two-reel films promoting the movement for theatrical distribution. These shorts introduced movement leaders, explained the cause, and promoted its advancement. The Woman’s Political Union partnered with The Eclair Film Company of Fort Lee, New Jersey, to create the 1912 comedy Suffrage and the Man. In 1913 Unique Film Co. brought out What Eighty Million Women Want.

Also in 1912, the venerable National American Woman Suffrage Association, which dated to 1869, produced the short Votes for Women in conjunction with Reliance Films, also based in Fort Lee. NAWSA was known for chronic caution and a tendency to delay and even squelch actions rather than risk embarrassing the cause.

Movie magazine Photoplay called the group’s unexpected step into cinema “one of the best publicity moves which the Suffrage Association has yet taken.” Votes for Women turned out to be a great fundraising tool, a draw for local and state

meetings featuring Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Jane Kathlyn Courageous Addams, and other movement figures, and a call- Movies helped suffragists ing card for the group’s reform-minded idealism. gain traction. Producer In 1914, the electorates of Missouri, Montana, William Selig’s serial The Nevada, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, and Adventures of Kathlyn starred Kathlyn Williams South Dakota were to decide on women’s voting as a woman Anna Howrights, with the U.S. Congress set to vote in Feb- ard Shaw could admire. ruary 1915 on a proposed constitutional amendment that would establish woman suffrage. In its attempt, as the Chicago Examiner put it, to “accomplish as much for their cause as the novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, did for the anti-slavery movement,” NAWSA adopted cinema as a fund-raising and propaganda tool. The organization predicted that its productions would overshadow any previous release on suffrage. The aim, Shelley Stamp writes in Movie-Struck Girls, was to straddle the line between conventional views of women and motherhood and advocating bigger societal roles and civil rights for women.

The New York Times and other papers reported on July 2, 1914, that the New York Woman Suffrage Association was offering $50 for a “graphic” story that would “put suffrage before the people in a popular way.” The winning idea would be adapted as a photoplay—the term then used for “script”—by a major production company and produced as an eight-reel FEBRUARY 2021 53

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Ruth Hanna McCormick was tired of NAWSA’s wary plodding. A strong-willed heiress to political power and a newspaper tycoon’s wife accustomed to flexing economic muscle, she was a daughter of Ohio Republican kingpin and former U.S. Senator Mark Hanna and wife of Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill McCormick. As a girl she had accompanied her father on campaigns; later, she served as his secretary. When her husband, a depressive alcoholic, entered progressive politics, she helped with his equilibrium and his races. She herself joined the Progressive Party in 1912 to press for solutions to political, civic, and industrial problems. In 1913, Ruth McCormick shifted allegiance to NAWSA, bringing along her pragmatic outlook and her wealth. Within a year she was chairing the group’s Congressional Committee.

Convinced she could make a better film than NAWSA by playing to rather than preaching at moviegoers, McCormick contacted fellow Chicagoan William Selig. Selig’s company had made The Adventures of Kathlyn, the first motion

‘Your girl and Mine’ was to sideline the polemics and give viewers a thrilling, action-packed story that delivered its message with drama instead of drone.

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ALPHA STOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; EVERETT COLLECTION

feature starring well-known performers and suffrage movement leaders. The competition was open to all, but the organization also took care to invite well-known writers and suffrage advocates Irvin Cobb, Rupert Hughes, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to compete.

picture serial featuring cliffhanger endings and a massive hit. A former traveling magician, Selig had formed one of Chicago’s earliest film companies in 1896 and in 1909 established the first permanent moving picture studio in Los Angeles, California, behind a Chinese laundry. In 1910 Selig relocated to a new production plant resembling the San Gabriel Mission on Glendale Boulevard in Edendale—now Echo Park, Los Feliz, and Silver Lake—and later set up a zoo in East Los Angeles. In time, Selig shuttered his Chicago shop. McCormick pitched Selig Polyscope Film Company on an action-oriented suffrage film that she would bankroll. The reform-minded Selig bought in, reopening his Chicago studio so the film could premiere in time to affect the November elections. He commissioned Kathlyn screenwriter Gilson Willets to pen a thriller illustrating the proposition, as later stated by Moving Picture News, “that suffrage can be as thrilling as pirates or poisoned daggers.” Other themes would include factory worker rights, improved tenement conditions, the eight-hour workday, and abolition of child labor.

Bowing to McCormick’s ideological savvy and Selig’s business clout, NAWSA dropped its film plans and threw in with the pair. The expanded alliance’s aim “was to produce a photoplay which would appeal to every man and woman regardless of whether they knew anything about the suffrage movement or cared anything about it,” the Chicago Examiner wrote.

“There are no long-winded arguments in Your Girl and Mine…it is packed with thrills and ‘action,’ which serve even better, we think, to carry our message,” McCormick declared. “We are going to reach people who flatly refuse to read our neat, cogent little pamphlets. If our plans go through, there will not be a spot in this country, from the mining camps of Alaska to the Everglades of Florida, which will not understand, vividly, what women mean when they talk about ‘the right to vote.’”

With McCormick as an adviser, the Selig company dotted the film’s

FAY 2018/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; FROM THE WILLIAM SELIG PAPERS OF THE MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES

Movers and Shakers Ruth Hanna McCormick, with husband Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill McCormick, convinced William Selig to shoot Your Girl and Mine at his Chicago studio.

ALPHA STOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; EVERETT COLLECTION

FAY 2018/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; FROM THE WILLIAM SELIG PAPERS OF THE MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES

400-plus member cast with stage stars. Thespian Katherine Kaelred played a lawyer, ingenue Olive Wyndham starred, and Grace Darmond appeared as “Equal Suffrage,” a wraithlike figure created with a primitive double exposure technique. Equal Suffrage materialized intermittently to stress the moral set forth in every plot turn. NAWSA leader Dr. Anna Howard Shaw portrayed herself addressing a suffrage convention. Giles Warren, supervising producer of the Selig Chicago lot, directed. Warren conferred daily with McCormick on production and adherence to message.

McCormick’s enthusiasm convinced suffrage supporter Selig to reopen his recently mothballed Chicago lot. Producing the film in the Windy City rather than in Los Angeles allowed McCormick greater control over its production, as well as access to realistic shooting locations.

Synopsizing the seven-reel Your Girl and Mine, a copyright notice provided to the U.S. Library of Congress says the action occurs in an “unnamed non-woman suffrage State” whose laws oppress women. Heroine and heiress Rosalind Fairlie marries male lead Ben Austin. The wastrel Ben emotionally abuses Rosalind and their children, draining his wife’s wealth to cover his debts. When Ben is confronted by Kate Price, his former mistress, he bullies her. They fight. Kate stabs Ben to death with a pair of scissors. Freed of her abusive spouse, Rosalind seeks custody of their children—but under patriarchal guardianship laws, Ben had placed the children in his father’s care. The old man puts his oldest grandchild to work in a factory. Rosalind rescues the children from their terrible circumstances; the authorities arrest her and charge her with abducting her own offspring. The trial reveals how the law facilitates Rosalind’s persecution, suggesting that if women were able to vote, the result would be more humane outcomes for women, children, and the working class.

Newspapers claimed every incident dramatized in Your Girl and Mine arose from the life of Ben Tillman III, son of the anti-suffrage South Carolina senator. When his wife divorced him and won custody of their two children, the younger Tillman fought her in court. His father tried without success to get custody of his grandchildren. In announcing the film’s New York City release, The Times stated, “The situations depicted are all based upon laws which are now operative in many States, and which suffragists believe are the best arguments for the need of giving woman a voice in the making of the laws under which she and her children live.”

Though censors deemed the picture’s pivotal scene, a fierce portrayal of female rage, too graphic and ordered the whole reel cut, many newspaper advertisements for the film incorporated a still of the violent scene.

Completed in late September, Your Girl and Mine premiered in a matinee at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre on Wednesday, October 14. The audience reacted with enthusiasm. That day’s Daily Tribune noted that NAWSA intended to show the film in at least seven states, a women’s movement first. Grace Wilbur Trout of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association praised the film and its guiding spirit.

“Mrs. McCormick should have the gratitude of every suffragist for the great idea of presenting the objectionable laws so concretely,” Trout said.

Because Missouri was among states with women’s suffrage on the November ballot, Your Girl and Mine would screen there quickly, with all proceeds benefiting the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

To handle distribution and booking, Selig and McCormick engaged New York-based World Film Corporation, led by Lewis J. Selznick. “In less than half an hour after I met Mrs. McCormick I was a convert to her cause,” Selznick, known as “the P. T. Barnum of the motion pictures,” told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “I gave her $50,000 for her picture film and 25 per

Katherine Kaelred

Olive Wyndham

Grace Darmond

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The committee’s letter encouraged NAWSA members to support Your Girl and Mine and suggested ways to do so: appointing a woman in each state to manage screenings and related paperwork; having a woman in each city visit newspaper editors pitching story ideas and selling advertising, with an ally calling on theater managers asking when they planned to show Your Girl and Mine and distributing information about the film; and arranging for local notables to attend openings.

Accompanying the communiqué was a model letter to the editor. Drafted

by McCormick, the template detailed how screenwriter Willets developed the film’s story, deliberately setting it in 1902, when the legal conditions featured in the film actually existed across the United States.

To ballyhoo Your Girl and Mine, World Film Corporation organized a special advertising department. That unit printed elaborate illustrated programs distributed at screenings as well as magazine and newspaper ads featuring both illustrations and production stills like those of the stabbing scene. Streetcar panels in black, white, and yellow, the suffrage movement colors, mapped which states had no suffrage laws.

Reviewers mostly heaped praise on Your Girl and Mine. Poet and critic Vachel Lindsay described the photoplay as a pioneering and “crusading” film. Trade journal Moving Picture World wrote, “Your Girl and Mine proved that moving pictures…will accomplish more for the cause than all that eloquent tongues have done since the movement was started.”

The January 24, 1915, Atlanta Constitution stated, “Suffrage is the dominant motive of the production, but it is unquestionably a drama of heart interest and a vivid bit of real life.” The New Oxford, Pennsylvania, Item wrote, “It will bring on the argument that women are fighting for the ballot because their economic and social interests and demands that they share in gov-

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

For Profit and Cause Ads for Your Girl included Gibson Girl-style cartoons and touted the collaboration of Ruth McCormick and film mogul Lewis J. Selznick.

MOTION PICTURE NEWS (2); HISTORIC COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

cent of the receipts and telephoned the results to my New York office and was told I must be crazy.”

A different story appears in a letter circulated by McCormick’s Congressional Committee. According to that document, the organization received 50 percent of gross earnings, thanks to Selznick’s interest in “promoting our cause.”

World Film created coupon books NAWSA would sell, featuring “two 5-cent tickets and four 10-cent tickets,” redeemable in any theater presenting the film. State and local NAWSA affiliates kept 25 percent of coupon sales. The parent organization also received a larger percentage of profits from the coupon books than from box office receipts, and the book tickets offered reduced prices to suffragists buying them.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

MOTION PICTURE NEWS (2); HISTORIC COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

ernment, and not merely because they want to vote for the sake of voting.”

Anti-suffrage groups and papers like The Reply denounced Your Girl and Mine, posting excerpts of editorials purporting to document falsehoods in the film, and mocking Ruth McCormick for financing the project.

The Bridgeport, Connecticut, Evening Farmer compared suffragism to socialism and Mormonism.

As a gesture of support for the organization as it lobbied Congress in advance of the February 1915 vote on the national suffrage amendment, Your Girl and Mine was screened in Nashville, Tennessee, at the NAWSA’s national convention in November 1914. Around the country, screenings and related events, such as an exhibition in the New Hampshire Legislature under the auspices of Clementine Churchill, wife of the British political figure, sought to sway male voters and legislators.

Unlike general-interest features booked by theater circuits across the country, Your Girl and Mine received only intermittent screenings whenever a town’s suffragists could convince local theater owners to show the film. This factor hurt revenues, particularly when the men the film was created for mostly failed to turn out at the box office.

Your Girl and Mine exerted little impact in western elections or on races for the U.S. Senate. Nevada and Montana approved woman suffrage in November 1914 but the five other states voted it down. In the two years following its premiere, though, Your Girl and Mine played in 24 of the 48 states, including communities in the South and Midwest dead set against woman suffrage. Despite Selznick’s efforts, distribution was not consistent enough to generate profits. Box office take failed to cover shipping, advertising, printing, and other costs. Your Girl and Mine did inspire female viewers to continue the suffrage fight, however. The 19th Amendment passed Congress on June 4, 1919 and was added to the United States Constitution on August 26, 1920. The same year NAWSA reorganized as the League of Women Voters.

Wearied by producing, distributing, and promoting Your Girl and Mine, Ruth McCormick stepped away from NAWSA in 1915 to raise her children and nurse her alcoholic husband. She served on the Republican National Committee’s Executive Woman Committee 1918-24. Joseph McCormick died in February 1925. Seven months later his widow announced she would seek the Republican nomination to run for her late husband’s old at-large seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. Suffragist Ida Clyde Clarke declared Ruth McCormick to be one of three women equal to the task of being president, along with philanthropist Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, and tart-tongued writer and socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, eldest child of Theodore Roosevelt.

Astute and savvy, McCormick exhibited great skill and discipline. Visiting every town in Illinois, attending ward meetings, and appearing at African-American churches, McCormick sailed away with the 1928 statehouse election, winning the at-large seat by a margin of nearly 500,000 votes. Within a month of taking her seat, she declared her candidacy for the 1930 U.S. Senate race, the first woman to campaign for that chamber. The race would be a grudge match pitting McCormick against incumbent Senator Charles S. Deneen (R-Illinois) who four years earlier had gained his seat by beating Joseph

though not boffo at the box office, ‘your Girl’ inspired viewers to keep fighting for suffrage, a cause that eventually prevailed in august 1920.

Rep. Ruth Hanna McCormick McCormick. Deploying her fortune, McCormick spent lavishly on ads, rallies, and campaign materials. She confronted Deneen head-on, in person and in print, defeating him by around 200,000 votes. The Chicago Tribune called her nomination “the first conspicuous and unequivocal acknowledgement of the full implication of the Nineteenth Amendment.”

However, going into that fall’s general election, McCormick unexpectedly shifted positions on significant issues. For example, she threw her full support behind Prohibition even as Illinois was turning wet. She spent heavily and visited every county but lost to Democrat J. Hamilton Lewis. She retired from political life. Ruth Hanna McCormick died on New Year’s Eve 1944 at her home in Chicago.

Once Your Girl and Mine completed its two years in distribution in 1916, the handful of release prints, relegated to storage in vaults, never were screened again. Like 75 percent of all silent motion pictures produced in the United States, Your Girl and Mine disappeared, a victim of nitrate-based film’s tendency to decompose, storage costs, production company closings, and the addition of sound to cinema, which for a time made silent films seem so old-fashioned that they simply were junked. One of many powerful tools inspiring women towards political freedom, Your Girl and Mine in its fleeting existence served a great purpose, illustrating in compelling cinematic terms the profound need for woman’s suffrage and giving dramatic voice to women’s demands and issues. H FEBRUARY 2021 57

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Orphans of Empire Islands at the edge of Asia attracted American settlers who dreamed of annexation

By Mike Coppock

Paradise as it Was A 19th-century lithograph portrays Kanaka, a village in the Bonins, as it might have looked when British sea captain Frederick W. Beechey, inset, encountered the chain.

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W

est by northwest of California, across 5,000 miles of Pacific Ocean, swells break against the volcanic rocks of the Bonins, a small island chain that takes its name from the Japanese for “uninhabited.� Japan is 600 miles north; Guam a thousand miles southeast. The 30 Bonins comprise about 32 square miles of land; nine-mile-square Chichi Jima, the largest of the islands, is dotted with 1,000-foot peaks. In the 1830s, Americans landed here, in an Orient where Japan and Korea rebuffed foreigners and China let them in at only a few ports. The pioneers held out against piracy and Imperial Japan, hoping the United States would annex the Bonins. That never happened in the way they envisioned it, but this motley of Americans boldly

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T O K YO

JAPAN P A C I F I C O C E A N MILES

Spanish sea captain Bernardo de la Torre was the first European to arrive at the Bonins in 1543.

Japan credits their discovery to Sadayori Ogasawara in 1593. Japanese expeditions landed in 1670 and in 1675. By the 1790s, Japanese and European cartographers were including the Bonins on maps—inaccurately. All that time, the islands lived up to their name. But when Captain F. W. Beechey, sailing HMS Blossom, visited in 1827, he had a copper plate from his ship’s hull pounded into a tree trunk with an inscription claiming the chain for the British Empire.

Beechey gave the largest island the name “Peel” after British Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel.

Word of the Bonins’ existence spread across the Pacific as mariners updated charts and courses.

To the east 3,400 miles, the Hawaiian port of Honolulu was a human hodgepodge at which Polynesians, European sailors, and missionaries worked from tents on the beach.

Here and there were wood frame buildings.

Vessels from around the world choked Honolulu harbor. Trading ships from the Pacific Northwest carrying otter pelts to China anchored for provisions, water—and sandalwood, forests of

BONIN ISLANDS

which blanketed Hawaii. Sandalwood brought top dollar in Chinese markets for use as incense.

To wring maximum returns—he received a quarter of the take—King Kamehameha I rationed the sandalwood harvest, conserving that resource while enriching the crown.

Whaling ships came too, more than 100 a year. Grog shops and whorehouses lined the strand. Hawaiian women boarded ships for extended stays. For a sea-weary sailor, Honolulu was a dream come true. Farms and cattle ranches fed the fleet. A discontented seaman could jump ship certain of finding work as a farm or ranch hand or lumberjack, and when the mood struck catch an outbound vessel.

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In 1819, Kamehameha I died. His son, namesake, and successor let loggers have all the sandalwood they wanted as fast as Hawaiians could fell it.

Missionaries began arriving from New England, led by William Richards.

God’s representatives saw the seamen as agents of Satan and whaling ships as “floating castles of prostitution.” Leaning on the Hawaiian court, clerics engineered controls on drinking and whoring, leading to friction.

When Richards had a whaling captain arrested for taking four women aboard, the whaler’s crew fired on the missionary’s house. The king had to open a police station in Honolulu. In 1830, Hawaii ran out of sandalwood, impoverishing the work force that had depended on it.

An unemployed, hot-tempered native of Genoa, Italy, Matteo Mazzaro (also Mazarro), wanted to leave Hawaii for the Bonins. He asked British consul Richard Charlton to underwrite the outfitting of a schooner in which Mazzaro, his English friend John Millicamp, and companions would sail west and claim the orphan chain for the Empire, founding a settlement Mazzaro portrayed as pre-missionary Honolulu, only smaller.

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Staking a Distant Claim In settling the Bonins, above in an early 19th century sketch, would-be American colonizers were extending the national presence abroad nearly to Asia.

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established a colony in hostile waters a half a world away from the United States, maintaining and expanding their settlement to the present day—gradually becoming Japanese, then Americans again, and back to Japanese, all the time holding onto their heritage and language.

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Charlton went along. Mazzaro and Millicamp enlisted Americans Aldin Chapin and Nathaniel Savory, and a Dane, Charles Johnson. Savory, 35, a sailor from Bradford, Massachusetts, had hurt a hand at sea; while he was ashore in Honolulu seeking a doctor’s care, his vessel hoisted anchor, leaving Savory high, dry, and nine-fingered.

With 13 Hawaiian men and women, he and the other Westerners left Honolulu on May 21, 1830.

In the schooner’s hold were pigs, goats, chickens, and a stock of yams, vegetables, and sugar cane plants Savory had brought to grow for making rum. Thirty-six days and 3,400 miles later, Mazzaro was hoisting the British flag over his hut on Chichi Jima, which had plenty of water and timber and waters rich in sea life.

Settlers found the tropical climate excellent for farming and raising livestock. Savory processed cane sugar into rum. Comrades opened bordellos. Settlers favored dishes that had made it across the ocean from as far away as New England, such as a dumpling soup. Ships’ captains unable to find a friendly port in Japan flocked to the settlement for provisions and recreation. In 1833-35, 24 ships visited, 22 of them whalers. When female sex workers ran short, colonists kidnapped women from other island chains such as the Carolines and even Hawaii.

An 1836 ship’s log entry regarding the island recorded male residents with “one or two wives,” unchecked carnality, and infanticide, sometimes at the hands of victims’ mothers.

The islanders fought chronically, with Mazzaro

prominent among the brawlers. Neighbors mocked the Italian’s claims that the British had put him in charge of the enterKing prise. In response to Mazzaro’s Union Jack, Kamehameha I Savory hoisted the Stars and Stripes over his hut. Islanders gravitated to Savory’s leadership.

In 1838, Mazzaro tried to hire a whaler to kill Savory. “He said for me to make friends with Savory and when he turns his head to beat his brains out with a club, and if that did not kill him, to stab him with a knife until dead and throw him into the sea,” the seaman told American naval officers. In 1842, Mazzaro, leaving Millicamp to represent him, sailed to Honolulu to convince the new British consul to recognize King him as the Bonins’ British governor. The Kamehameha II consul proffered another Union Jack and a letter “recommending” Mazzaro to serve as governor. Returning with those and more settlers, Mazzaro found Millicamp gone to Guam and Savory in control. The Union Jack’s days in the Bonins were over. Yet more settlers arrived in ones and twos from visiting whaling boats.

The island’s resident Washington family descends from a Portuguese African cabin boy who jumped ship in 1843, taking that last name. More arrivals, many of them Pacific islanders, came in 1846 aboard the whaling vessel Howard. Mazzaro died in 1848. Savory took in and wed his widow.

Lacking affiliation with a country of subWilliam Richards stance, the roughly 50 Bonin islanders were at the world’s mercy. In 1849, French whalers raided FEBRUARY 2021 61

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Commodore Matthew C. Perry

in Annexing the Bonins in 1862, Japan was making clear that the islands were too close to tokyo to be under a thumb not Japanese.

acres of land at Ten Fathom Hole, a bayside anchorage, to use as a navy coaling station.

Perry hired Savory to operate the station, assisted by Seaman John Smith.

Renaming Chichi Jima Peel Island and writing a constitution titled “Organization of the Settlers of Peel Island Colony,” Perry appointed Savory chief magistrate and residents James Maitley and Thomas Webb councilmen. Perry left behind Seaman Smith, four cattle, five sheep, and six goats. Savory, 55, named his infant son Perry.

After his epic voyage and success in opening Japan’s markets, Perry, an avid advocate for annexing the Bonins, supplied Savory with seed, tools, and flags. In an 1856 speech in New York City, Perry stressed the islands’ strategic importance. But he died in 1858, and civil war drew American eyes away from Asia.

Perry’s mission had alerted Japanese officials to the greater world’s imminence and the Bonins’ strategic value. The islands were too close to Tokyo to be under a thumb not Japanese. In November 1861, Japan informed American

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HISTORY OF BONIN (3)

American commercial interests were expanding in the Orient. Driven by demand for whale oil, used for lamps, soap, and cooking (see “Up in Flames,” p. 34), many of the country’s 746 whaling ships were entering Japanese waters, risking violent mistreatment, even execution by beheading, for putting a foot ashore. To resolve the impasse, the United States sent an armada under Commodore Matthew Perry to open Japan. En route to Tokyo, Perry arrived in the Bonins on June 14, 1853. He landed two shore parties on Chichi Jima and sent a third to map the chain’s northern portion. For $50, Savory, the last of the original settlers, sold Perry 12

Opening Time Bringing his U.S. Navy squadron into Tokyo Bay, Perry muscled Dai Nippon into opening markets to American goods.

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Chichi Jima, stealing provisions, Savory’s gold, and Savory’s wife. Savory described his spouse being thrown over a captor’s shoulder and struggling as he hauled her aboard; others said she not only went along willingly but showed the interlopers the way to the hidden gold. In 1850, Captain Thomas Page of the USS Porpoise reported that the crew of a vessel out of Hong Kong had kidnapped a woman from the Chichi Jima strand to sell elsewhere. Page expressed worry for the islanders. From time to time, American, British, and Russian warships anchored at the islands for extended periods, temporarily imposing order.

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ambassador Townsend Harris of the empire’s plans to occupy the Bonins. Harris commented only that he expected Japan to respect the rights of Americans already on the islands. A Japanese force reached the Bonins on January 19, 1862. The Japanese governor met with Savory, 67, to announce the annexation and to confirm settlers’ rights. The landing force distributed gifts of sake, cloth, and toys to the residents and built a warehouse, a shrine, and an administrative building. Japan officially named the main island and settlement Chichi Jima.

Japanese colonists landed in August to settle across Chichi Jima Bay from the American settlement. After a year that saw friction between the camps, the Japanese newcomers suddenly left, claiming to fear a British attack prompted by an incident in Yokohama that had left a Briton dead and spurred the Royal Navy to shell Japanese towns. The likelier reason was tension between Japanese and American islanders. Japanese officials turned management of abandoned structures and fields over to Savory as caretaker, saying they would be returning.

A tidal wave slammed the islands in 1872, causing considerable damage, including the loss of the detailed record Savory, in declining health, had been keeping since his arrival. Islander Benjamin Pease told the American legation in Yokohama in 1873 that the colony tallied 68 residents, including 25 “pure blood” Americans. Pease complained that the island’s 26 children went unschooled and nearly naked, voicing hope that the United States would assume control of the islands “again.” In 1874, Savory died. His eldest son, Horace Perry Savory, took control of the colony. In November 1875, the crew of a Japanese warship sailed into Chichi Jima Bay demanding to see the colony’s leaders, asking that they pledge loyalty to Japan, and offering interest-free loans to American residents becoming Japanese citizens. By 1882, all Americans in the Bonins had become naturalized Japanese.

In December 1876, Japan formally annexed the islands, the empire’s the first territorial acquisition. The government banned foreign settlement in the islands and offered settlers relocating from mainland Japan to the Bonins interest-free loans. Thinking to replicate Hawaii’s success with sugar cane, Japan clear-cut the islands’ forests. Descendants of Americans and Japanese colonists segregated themselves in two villages. The American community was called Chichi Jima—unofficially, “Yankeetown.” The other village, Omura, was Japanese.

Though Chichi Jima was seen as an American community, most residents had Caucasian and Polynesian features, reflecting ancestry tracing to Caucasian, Hawaiian, Micronesian, Portuguese, and African roots. Their language evolved into a unique pidgin also called Bonin English, which borrowed from their Japanese neighbors. For example, “Are wa itsu taberu tabemomo” translates to “When is it you eat that food?” and “You no ojisantoo, he had lots of stories” means “Your grandpa too, he had lots of stories.”

Island Life The newcomers embraced local and regional customs and industries—from top, basket weaving, sugar cane cultivation and processing, and use of outrigger canoes for transportation and fishing.

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In 1946, the impossible seemed on the verge of occurring. The United States declared the Bonins an American protectorate, ordering all civilians off the islands save 129 descendants of the original American settlers. A roster of island family names from U.S. naval records showed 15 Savorys, 11 Washingtons, five Webbs, three Gilleys, and two Gonzaleses. The families organized the Bonin Islands Trading Company to do business with the U.S. Navy. Among the explanations for allowing them to remain was that these Americans had 64 AMERICAN HISTORY

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After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, life in the Bonin Islands took on a harsh edge. Police officers asked schoolchildren what language their families spoke at home. English-speaking parents were interrogated and the language banned. Americans had to take Japanese names. One of Nathaniel Savory’s grandsons burned his grandfather’s effects, including the flag Commodore Perry had given the old man. Civilian naval workers arrived, as did hundreds of farmers to feed military and civilian personnel.

As island-by-island fighting was creeping toward mainland Japan in February 1944, authorities in the Bonins began evacuating civilians, relocating 6,800. To supply food for the Imperial Army garrison, 825 men were ordered to stay behind. Four were descendants of original settlers: Simon and Jimmy Savory, Frank Washington, and Jeffrey Gilley.

American planes began to bomb the islands, prompting soldiers there to tie Gilley to a stake in the open for 24 hours in hopes that his Caucasian features would persuade attackers to veer away. The gesture made no difference, but Gilley survived. In September 1944, defenders shot down several attacking American planes, including one piloted by 20-year-old Lieutenant George H.W. Bush. Bush was the only one of nine airmen downed near Chichi Jima to evade capture by Japanese troops.

Transplanted to mainland Japan, American descendants from the Bonins encountered bias among native Japanese who refused to believe these seeming foreigners were countrymen. Police in Japan had to rescue an islander named Savory when he was mistaken for a downed American pilot and attacked with bamboo spears. Another displaced islander, Fred Savory, was working on the docks in Yokohama when soldiers returning from the Bonins told him their commanders had gone mad. Japanese officers at Chichi Jima, rattled by the fall of Iwo Jima, only 170 miles away, and coming under heavy American bombing attacks, Bloody Neighbor had beheaded and cannibalized their eight Iwo Jima, below in American prisoners, the soldiers said. Jeffery February 1945, lies Gilley, serving in the Bonin militia, unwittingly 170 miles from Chichi Jima, where Japanese ate a gift from the garrison’s officers: human meat served with curried rice. troops beheaded and After Japan surrendered, American occupacannibalized eight tion troops suspected a cover up of late-war American POWs. events on Chichi Jima. Fred Savory, who had returned to Chichi Jima with a Japanese wife, reported the rumors he had heard in wartime Japan. A Korean cleric held on Chichi Jima as a forced laborer named the offending Japanese officers. Fred Savory testified at their war crimes trial on Guam. In 1947 five former Imperial Army officers were hanged and eight were sentenced to between five and 20 years in prison.

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The older generation refused to allow their children to intermarry with the Japanese. Suddenly the Americans, who never were overtly religious, built an Anglican church as if to underscore the message that they differed from the Japanese, who returned the sentiment. “When we boys left Yankeetown to go to Omura, we never went alone,” Charlie Washington, 91, recalled decades later. “The Japanese taunted us, called us barbarians or worse and a fight usually followed.”

These were the Bonins’ quiet years. Besides working small farms and provisioning passing ships’ crews, resident Americans also hired out as mariners. Other Americans came to the Bonins as sailors, like 17-year-old Jack London. The writer to be was a seaman onboard a threemasted seal-hunting ship when he and two friends took shore leave in 1893. London went on a ten-day bender, waking up on a stranger’s porch in time to return to his vessel, sans wallet and several articles of clothing.

Japan gave up raising sugar cane in the Bonins. That effort had ballooned the population to around 4,000 as Europe was about to erupt in what became World War I. After the war, hordes of construction workers—and farmers to feed them—arrived in the Bonins, influxes brought on by Japanese military buildups.

One, undertaken to create a massive yard for building warships at Chichi Jima, ended in 1924 when terms of the Washington Naval Conference were registered officially with the League of Nations—the world’s first attempt at arms control. The second buildup began in 1937 when Japan deepened its incursion into China.

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suffered wartime discrimination at the hands of Japanese authorities and that their forefathers had assisted Commodore Perry. However, Chichi Jima, once a U.S. Navy coaling station, also housed nuclear weapons. As part of its management of that stockpile, the Navy bulldozed properties vacated by exiled Japanese and ran the Bonins for 23 years—“Navy Time,” Western residents called it. Islanders got free dental care and the Navy shipped produce harvested on the island at no cost. For the first time in decades, islanders grew up not speaking Japanese.

During Navy Time many American descendants worked for the U.S. and looked forward to becoming actual Americans. In 1956, islanders petitioned for American annexation, to no response. In 1968, without consulting the American descendants, the United States announced the return of the Bonins to Japan, with former Japanese colonists allowed back. Descendants such as the Washington, Webb, Gonzales, and Savory families complained of learning the news on the radio. American descendants had a stark choice: retain Japanese citizenship or become American citizens and repatriate to the United States. Three Savorys were among the handful that departed for the country their ancestors had left a century and a half before. The majority remained in the islands as Japanese citizens.

Initially some 600 Japanese relocated to the islands, arriving in 1969 and doubling in number by 1975. The island’s population peaked in 2000 at 2,445 residents, the American portion numbering a few hundred. The Navy Time

generation of American descendants who Changing and Not decided to stay is now approaching its At a 1968 ceremony, the Uniteighth decade, members gradually enlarg- ed States returned the Bonins to Japanese control. The ing Chichi Jima’s Western graveyard.

Called by Japanese neighbors obeikei, or blended culture remained in “half-blood,” reflecting the history of inter- evidence, such as the outboard motor mounted at the stern of marriage between settlers and descena traditional outrigger canoe. dants with Pacific Islanders, these Bonin residents seem intent on maintaining traditions brought by original settlers in 1830 and flavored by Polynesian and other regional influences. John Washington, owner of a local inn, hoisted the Stars and Stripes each morning for decades well into his seventies.

Many still attend the Anglican church where Isaac Gonzales had been the pastor up to a few years ago. Etsuko Savory taught her children how to make traditional New England dumpling soup.

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Tender Pressure During a 1941 radio address, Eleanor Roosevelt urged her fellow Americans to donate to combat infantile paralysis.

connect them to its readers. In Michaelis’s telling, the story of how Eleanor became Eleanor is unremarkable in its beginnings. Born to wealth and status, she embraced her class’s anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny, for example opposing the 19th Amendment. But after marrying cousin Franklin and giving birth to six children in quick succession she left behind both her reproductive duties and her hidebound thinking. When polio struck her philandering mate, she became the political body to his political mind, their marriage no longer a romantic partnership but a political alliance. Both would find emotional—and oftentimes physical—solace elsewhere.

In Eleanor’s eyes, her “most important task” proved to be her role in realizing a shared dream of hers and Franklin’s—a Universal

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Eleanor

By David Michaelis Simon & Schuster 2020; $35

It is not as if no one knows who she was: first lady among First Ladies, doer of enough good deeds during and after her husband’s presidency to last multiple lifetimes, inspiration and model for all successors. ER’s life has generated several biographies, including Blanche Wiesen’s three-volume Eleanor Roosevelt, so a fresh entry is unlikely to be revelatory, whether by discovering new facts or uncovering longkept secrets. Happily, David Michaelis’s Eleanor goes deeper, offering besides an account of a life well-lived a commentary on how Americans can understand themselves as a people and as a nation by understanding this particular historical figure. It’s not the social, cultural, and political highlights of Eleanor Roosevelt’s life that make Michaelis’s work compelling but the links that connect those highlights and

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A Woman for All Seasons

Declaration of Human Rights, drafted for the United Nations by a committee she headed.

That document’s signing in 1948 marked a charged and rare moment, as the world, coached by the United States through Eleanor Roosevelt, showed itself willing to look at all people, in all countries, as equals.

In building to that historic point, Michaelis illuminates the mechanics by which Eleanor

emerged as a public figure, painting her quest for personal meaning, acceptance, and love as a political act mirroring millions of individuals’ growth and development. It would doubtless give the lady herself enormous satisfaction that when readers look into this mirror and glimpse a collective visage, they see the face of a woman. —Dr. Carlos Schröder is professor of English at NOVA, Alexandria, Virginia.

At an awful moment in the history of American restaurants, with nary a one safe from the pandemic’s killer shadow, here is a volume honoring joints and cafes and posh establishments that already have shuffled off the mortal coil in one California community. In researching and writing this nicheiest of niche books for the latest entry in a series of community-oriented paperbacks by American Palate (arcadiapublishing.com), Liz Pollock lovingly eulogizes places in her adoptive town that are gone—and offers likeminded gourmets and gourmands nationwide a model for mourning and celebrating beloved hometown third places taken down by Covid-19. A transplant Santa Cruzan since her college days, Pollock worked at and patronized not a few of the spots whose tales she presents. Her years as a bartender inform the book’s occasional side of cocktail recipes. As proprietor of Santa Cruz store Cook’s Bookcase (cooksbookcase.com), the author specializes in ephemera and scarce texts on cookery and wine, a focus that clearly informed the sleuthing required to snag family photos, matchbooks, business cards, and menus—not only from restaurants but from supply and service companies—that movingly illustrate Lost Restaurants of Santa Cruz County. Pollock is a dedicated reporter and engaging interviewer, running down stories that otherwise might have died with their tellers or ballooned into myth. Toggling between oral and narrative history, she covers the Santa Cruz version of the decades from the 1940s to the 1990s that saw Americans maintain historic affection for traditional meals but also open up to innovative flavors, ingredients, and cuisines. Alas, changes in taste can augur ill for old reliables, and today’s fresh and fabulous upstart is tomorrow’s castoff.

Pollock profoundly understands how narrow a margin separates a neighborhood institution from a “FOR RENT” sign in the window, and how fragile a bubble encloses an independent restaurant.

Her story is one of ever-changing establishment names and ownerships, each underpinned by an entrepreneurial conviction that this place at this time in this town is going to beat the odds and be around in 40 years. In Santa Cruz, a few places like Adolph’s had runs that long, but many more blossomed, enjoyed a brief hegemony, and faded. Pollock has made it her business to learn about them all, and the reader who dips into her Santa Cruz of memory will be rewarded by that. —American History editor Michael Dolan’s first three jobs were stadium vendor, steakhouse busboy/dishwasher, and soda jerk.

Lost Restaurants of Santa Cruz County

By Liz Pollock History Press, 2020; $21.99

HISTORY PRESS

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Places That Are Gone

Bye-Bye Bandstand One of the classic local Santa Cruz joints for which Liz Pollock sings a sweet, sad song of recollection.

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Grow Up with the Country In the late 1900s, westbound immigrants wait for trains in Omaha, Nebraska.

author writes. Here there was—and is—an “unprecedented cultural mixing.”

“Foreign” has two meanings: “from elsewhere” but also “strange.” Over time, the United States has striven to erase both distinctions. As Borstelmann notes, “confronted with new ideas and new peoples, American culture proved persistently adept at bumping up against and then incorporating and absorbing these.”

Pace and priorities waxed and waned as for decades the country struggled with the impacts of that absorption. “Ambivalence and contestation about newcomers remained a constant theme,” Borstelmann writes. “Excitement about new workers, new skills, and new energies, along with pride in the nation’s attractiveness to others and the provision of refuge to many jostled against concerns about foreign ideas, different cultural values, public health, and competition for jobs.”

That tension has only grown in recent times.

Exposure among ordinary Americans to the foreign has exploded through international

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Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners

By Thomas Borstelmann Columbia University, 2020; $32

Historians use many lenses through which to view nations’ growth and changing values over the centuries. University of Nebraska professor Thomas Borstelmann has come up with a viewpoint both off-beat and rewarding: the shifting American definition of and attitude toward the “foreign.” Just Like Us does not recount patterns of changing U.S. immigration policy—it analyzes the attitudes that have shaped and reshaped that policy.

Humans have always migrated. But most countries express a heritage shared by people who have been within a set of specific borders or something like them for more than a millennium, embracing traditions that, at least in legend, stretch back as far. By contrast, the United States—like Canada, Australia, and a few other nations—overran its indigenous inhabitants, creating a country out of newer arrivals—“foreigners,” if you will—and mashing up diverse cultures. “Nowhere in the modern world has there been more movement and more contact that in the lands of the United States,” the

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Nation of Nations

travel and the choice by tens of millions of them to live abroad. On the other hand, the bulk of newcomers are darker-skinned than preceding generations of immigrants, feeding into longheld notions, developed in response to historic attitudes towards indigenous people, African Americans, and Asians, that these newcomers are somehow more different, more “foreign.”

The current administration speaks for a slice of the population in demonizing immigration even as Americans accept into the mainstream foreign cultural artifacts that 50 years ago would have seemed beyond exotic: think K-Pop and tacos and guac. Just Like Us makes clear that that complexity is an inherent element of American history. —American History SCOTUS 101 columnist Daniel B. Moskowitz has a foreign-born wife and a foreign-born son-in-law.

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

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Primus inter Pares “Hominem te memento,” the Romans said.

Remember you’re human. The axiom was uttered during triumphal processions following military victories, repeated to generals in case they had short memories. Many Americans have the same short memories regarding George Washington’s humanity, a misapprehension Washington scholar Peter R. Henriques aims to address in First, not through debunking exaggeration but by presenting his hero as man rather than demigod.

Strict realism shows Washington to have been an impressive individual, with many natural strengths—including the ability to recognize and overcome many of his own flaws even when those tasks required extraordinary will. While disposing of such erroneous myths as Washington’s alleged preference for a presidential term limit, Henriques demonstrates the degree to which the Foundingest Father’s true values undergird many obviously apocryphal yarns. And if First must needs admit that Washington served as his own spin doctor in forging an enduring public image, it also leaves no doubt that he saw that image as an ideal against which to measure himself and toward which to strive.

First does deserve commendation for refusing to blink at less than flattering facts. One is Washington’s ordering after Yorktown the retaliatory killing of a British officer, violating surrender terms and revealing a darker side of his character only partially mitigated by Henriques’s emphasis on Washington having second

thoughts, passing the buck to Congress, and, in response to a French clemency request, reversing himself, saving the life he imperiled.

Enumerating the reasons why a generally decent person of Washington’s day might have owned slaves similarly highlights the positive without negating an inability to account for Washington’s harsh treatment of slaves over trivial matters that First documents.

In terms of historical impact, chief among Washington’s flaws were arrogance and a domineering tendency, as when he returned to military command during John Adams’s presidency and used threats of resignation to diminish Adams to a rubber stamp. He did surround himself with talented men willing to disagree with him but he could be implacable toward anyone whose opposition he considered outside the bounds of Team Washington.

Huzzah to Henriques for highlighting an aspect of Washington’s personality in so much need of further study. —James Baresel is a freelance writer based in Annandale, Virginia.

First and Always: A New Portrait of George Washington

By Peter R. Henriques University of Virginia Press, 2020, $27.95.

Good With his Hands Washington loved land not as an observer but as a participant.

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Buttery Smooth Sculptor Caroline S. Brooks thrilled fairgoers with works rendered in the slippery stuff.

Craft: An American History

By Glenn Adamson Bloomsbury, 2021; $30

Through most of the history of history, those chronicling the past relied on documents, leaving out of the story the mass of the population unable to write or disinclined to create books, journals, and official reports of the sort historians relied on. More recently, practitioners have cast a wider net for evidence offering insights into past events. Since 1995 or so, some historians have concentrated on crafts—Colonial-era silversmiths’ work, say, or antebellum Southern folk artists’ output. In Craft, Glenn Adamson ambitiously tries a next step, promising “a single view of craft in America...to tell the story of America through the eyes of its artisans.” He sets himself a challenging goal and deserves kudos for the extent to which he succeeds, even if conceptual flaws keep the volume from being all he intended.

At its best, Craft presents interesting Americans of considerable achievement who have been obscured by time. In the first decade of the 19th century, clockmaker Eli Terry became the first manufacturer to use truly interchangeable parts. With butter her medium, sculptor Caroline Shawk Brooks thrilled visitors to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, staged in Philadelphia.

Nung-beh-yong’s coiled pottery, fashioned in the Pueblo cultural pattern using a technique she learned from her Tewa grandmother, was sought out by collectors in the early 1900s. African-American jeweler Art Smith’s oversized asymmetrical pendants had customers flocking to his Greenwich Village workshop in the 1950s.

Craft emerges as a scrapbook of objects and their origin stories both well-researched and engrossing, but two flaws keep it from cohering into the story of America Adamson posits.

Focusing on particular arts and artisans in every period, he ignores everything else that was going on among craftsmen. And Adamson never really defines the line separating hobbyists and the craft creators he wants to spotlight. He praises craft as “a way to bind together people who talk past one another,” asserting that regardless of skill level a shared love of a particular handiwork can make a community of persons holding warring political and social views. But he concentrates on creators who profitably market their wares, paying virtually no attention to millions of amateur knitters and woodworkers. —Daniel B. Moskowitz writes the SCOTUS 101 column.

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

crafty is as crafty does

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TODAY IN HISTORY DECEMBER 18, 1934 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT VISITED BEAR RUN IN SOUTHWESTERN PENNSYLVANIA AND REQUESTED A SURVEY OF THE AREA AROUND A PARTICULAR WATERFALL. PITTSBURGH BUSINESSMAN EDGAR J. KAUFMANN HAD COMMISSIONED WRIGHT TO BUILD A COUNTRY HOME WITH A VIEW OF THE WATERFALL. THE FAMOUS ARCHITECT SURPRISED HIS CLIENT

BY INSTEAD DESIGNING THE HOME OVER THE WATERFALL. FALLINGWATER COST $155,000 TO COMPLETE IN 1941. THE HOME WAS MADE AVAILABLE TO VISITORS IN 1964.

For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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. . .lies between the Massachusett and the Nipmuc tribes’ former ranges. Arable soil, Assabet River tributaries able to drive mills, and ponds for harvesting ice drew settlers. In 1735 Acton residents, wanting to build their own church, detached from the town of Concord.

In 1738, the Faulkner family began running a wool mill at 5 High Street (ironworkfarm. org). On Wednesday, April 19, 1775, in colonists’ first organized defense against British troops, Minutemen from Acton marched east to defend Concord’s North Bridge, a route now known as the Isaac Davis Trail. Captain Davis, Private Abner Hosmer, and schoolteacher James Hayward, who all died in that day’s fighting, lie beneath a monument on Acton’s common. A mile away stands the Hosmer family’s 1760 saltbox (actonhistoricalsociety.org). By the 1800s, roads were carrying pencils, piano stools, and other Acton products 25 miles to Boston. Rail enhanced that trade and helped Acton grow. The 1900s brought a municipal water system and fire department that proved invaluable when a 1913 fire imperiled the town’s west end. Completion in 1960 of the Yankee Division Highway, aka State Route 128, spawned a suburban high-tech zone for which Acton became a bedroom community. —Larry C. Kerpelman writes in Acton, Massachusetts.

Heard ’Round the World Isaac Davis’s revolutionary sacrifice, inset, and those of two fellow Minutemen are memorialized along Concord Road, a stone’s throw from Acton Town Hall, in background.

EVERYDAY ARTISTRY PHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; ARTOKOLORO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Acton, Massachusetts...

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Un o 13 pen 8 Y ed ea fo rs! r

Discovered! Unopened Bag of 138-Year-Old Morgan Silver Dollars Coin experts amazed by “Incredible Opportunity”

 Historic Morgan Silver Dollars  Minted in New Orleans  Struck and bagged in 1882  Unopened for 138 years  26.73 grams of 90% fine silver  Hefty 38.1 mm diameter  Certified Brilliant Uncirculated

The Morgan Silver Dollar is the most popular and iconic vintage U.S. coin. They were the Silver Dollars of the Wild West, going on countless untold adventures in dusty saddlebags across the nation. Finding a secret hoard of Morgans doesn’t happen often—and when it does, it’s a big deal.

by NGC

 Certified “Great Southern

Treasury Hoard” pedigree

How big? Here’s numismatist, author and consultant to the Smithsonian® Jeff Garrett: “It’s very rare to find large quantities of Morgan Silver Dollars, especially in bags that have been sealed... to find several thousand Morgan Silver Dollars that are from the U.S. Treasury Hoards, still unopened, is really an incredible opportunity.”

-Jeff Garrett But where did this unique hoard come from? Read on...

Morgans from the New Orleans Mint

In 1859, Nevada’s Comstock Lode was discovered, and soon its rich silver ore made its way across the nation, including to the fabled New Orleans Mint, the only U.S. Mint branch to have served under the U.S. government, the State of Louisiana and the Confederacy.

In 1882, some of that silver was struck into Morgan Silver Dollars, each featuring the iconic “O” mint mark of the New Orleans Mint.

Employees then placed the freshly struck coins into canvas bags...

The U.S. Treasury Hoard

Fast-forward nearly 80 years. In the 1960s, the U.S. government opened its vaults and revealed a massive store of Morgan Silver Dollars—including full, unopened bags of “fresh” 1882-O Morgan Silver Dollars. A number of bags were secured by a child of the Great Depression—a southern gentleman whose upbringing showed him the value of hard assets like silver. He stashed the unopened bags of “fresh” Morgans away, and there they stayed...

 Limit five coins per household Actual size is 38.1 mm

third-party grading service Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC), and they agreed to honor the southern gentleman by giving the coins the pedigree of the “Great Southern Treasury Hoard.”

These gorgeous 1882-O Morgans are as bright and new as the day they were struck and bagged 138 years ago. Coins are graded on a 70-point scale, with those graded at least Mint State-60 (MS60) often referred to as “Brilliant Uncirculated” or BU. Of all 1882-O Morgans struck, LESS THAN 1% have earned a Mint State grade. This makes these unopened bags of 1882-O Morgans extremely rare, certified as being in BU condition—nearly unheard of for coins 138 years old.

Don’t Miss This Rare Opportunity—Order Now! Regular 1882-O Morgans sell elsewhere for as much as $133, and that’s without the original brilliant shine these “fresh” 138-yearold coins have, without their special NGC hoard designation, and without their ability to tell their full, complete story from the Comstock Lode all the way to your collection.

Given the limited quantity of coins available from this historic hoard, we must set a strict limit of five coins per household. Call quickly to secure yours today as supplies are sure to sell out quickly!

1882-O Morgan Silver Dollar NGC Certified BU from the Great Southern Treasury Hoard — $99 ea.

The Great Southern Treasury Hoard That is, until another 50 years later, when the man’s family finally decided to sell the coins— still in their unopened bags—which we secured, bag and all! We submitted the coins to respected

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GovMint.com • 14101 Southcross Dr. W., Suite 175, Dept. MSH287-01, Burnsville, MN 55337 GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affiliated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2021 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.

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