American History October 2020

Tinseltown Has a Sharp Turnaround Sanctuary City: 1800s Brooklyn Building with ... ATOM BOMBS? An Act of Faith: Maryland Origins

Fighting Founder

Sam Adams and the roots of public protest October 2020 HISTORYNET.com

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PHOTO CREDIT

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OCTOBER 2020

22

FEATURES 22 Puritan. Patriot. Protester.

Founding Father Samuel Adams knew what it meant to take it to the streets. By Richard Brookhiser

30 Atoms for Peace, Explosively

Project Plowshare imagined using nuclear weapons as infrastructure-building tools. By Richard Brownell

38 Sanctuary City

Free Blacks made abolitionist Brooklyn a hub of defiance against the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and a town ahead of its time. By Norm Goldstein

50 Tinseltown Turnabout

Postwar Hollywood and its hoopla encountered a stringent set of legal hoops plus competition from a new gizmo called “television.” By Daniel B. Moskowitz

58 Coming Out Catholic in Colonial Maryland

30

The Puritans weren’t the only sect seeking freedom to worship in North America. By Rick Boyd

DEPARTMENTS 6 Mosaic

News from out of the past

12 Contributors 14 SCOTUS 101

When 18-year-olds sought the vote, a single justice turned the tide.

16 American Schemers

A Texas con man hustled out of Big D and became a Las Vegas legend.

PHOTO CREDIT

20 Cameo

38 ON THE COVER: Founding Father Samuel Adams saw disruption as a sort of medicine, to be prescribed at the proper dosage and frequency to achieve a given effect.

Public health doc beat back the pest causing plague in San Francisco.

68 Reviews 72 An American Place

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum recreates primal prairie.

14

In 1970, young men were being drafted for service in Vietnam without the right to choose the politicians sending them to war.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: PICTURELUX/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; HNA; MOHAI, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLLECTION, 1986.5.50631.1; SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY; NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY; COVER: ISTOCK PHOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

OCTOBER 2020

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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:

Atomic Warfare Movie Turns Out a Bomb When Hollywood first tried to deal with nuclear war, the result was a militaristic mess. bit.ly/BlessTheBomb

Canadian Soldiers Stupefy Americans

Eight American invasion attempts in 1812-14 did nothing but solidify Canadian sovereignty. bit.ly/USGaffesAidedCanada

Privateers Prowl U.S. Waters Unprosecuted

After the War of 1812, Americans with letters of marque made millions. bit.ly/USPrivateersGetRich

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American History ONLINE EXCLUSIVES

OCTOBER 2020 VOL. 55, NO. 4

4 AMERICAN HISTORY

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A JOURNEY THROUGH TENNESSEE PIONEER LIFE

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Vestiges of the Confederacy, from statuary to the secessionist battle flag, have long been fixtures on the American landscape. Along with monuments, schools, streets, and highways, at least 10 U.S. military bases bear Confederate figures’ names. In April, amid accelerating national debate over racial injustice, the U.S. Marine Corps banned public display of the Confederate flag, a proscription the Corps extended in June to symbols incorporating that banner. Those decisions followed protests initially triggered by George Floyd’s death in police custody that soon swelled into a national furor over racial injustice. Word of a similar ban by the U.S. Navy was followed on July 17, 2020, by news reports that Secretary of Defense Mike Esper was preparing an order, to apply at all Defense Department sites, stating that “The flags we fly must accord with the military imperatives of good order and discipline, treating all our people with dignity and respect, and rejecting divisive symbol”—in effect, banning display of Confederate battle flags. On July 23, under the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress approved renaming U.S. military bases now bearing a Confederate general’s name. The bill passed with bipartisan support sufficient to override a presidential veto.

Changes in Store Fort Benning, Georgia, top, and Virginia’s Fort Lee are among military bases named for Confederates to get new monikers.

AP PHOTO; THE MILWAUKEE INDEPENDENT

Canceled

6 AMERICAN HISTORY

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES; TROIANI, DON (B.1949)/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES

by Sarah Richardson

JFK’s Other Boat

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES; TROIANI, DON (B.1949)/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES

AP PHOTO; THE MILWAUKEE INDEPENDENT

Lieutenant (jg) John F. Kennedy’s wartime heroics as captain of the doomed PT-109 are the stuff of legend, but later in World War II Kennedy helmed another Patrol Torpedo craft. Crews building a seawall on North Cove along the Harlem River off upper Manhattan encountered remnants of PT-59, The New York Times reported. The construction project’s aim is to protect a subway station damaged in Hurricane Sandy in 2012. A historian of the hulk, retired schoolteacher Redmond Burke, bought the wooden-hulled vessel at salvage in the ’70s, restoring the little warship, below during the war, into a habitat he later abandoned. A student of his claimed to have connected the hull

Dressing Up

number to Kennedy’s Navy days, and Burke worked with a Kennedy biographer to pin down details regarding its design and fittings.

PT-59’s status as Kennedyana may never be definitive, but there is enough detail to charm visitors to the area and generate talk of dividing the pieces of the wreck between the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and a display in New York City.

Amid debate over sports team names like “Redskins” and “Indians,” a scholar recalls a vogue among Americans during the Revolutionary War for Native American-style garb as battle dress, when breakaway Americans dressed like indigenes as they agitated (p. 26) and then fought for independence. At earlyamericanists.com, aka The Junto, public historian Marta Olmos posted that one proponent of such costumery was…George Washington.

Observing in a letter that the fringed, tunic-style Indian hunting shirt was “a dress justly supposed to carry no small terror in the enemy,” the general told Virginia Colonel Daniel Morgan to “dress a Company or two of true Woods Men in the right Indian Style and let them make the Attack accompanied with screaming and yelling as the Indians do,” reports Olmos, who is an interpreter at Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord, Massachusetts.

Some fighters accessorized with moccasins and warpaint. In time, Congress imposed a conventional, European-influenced uniform of blue coat, white breeches, and tricorn hat, but after the 1776 British surrender of Boston, Olmos writes, “Congress released a commemorative medal with the image of a rifleman wearing a hunting shirt and holding a tomahawk.”

OCTOBER 2020 7

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Subterranean Science Researchers prepare to collect samples beneath the surface in Chiquihuite Cave in northern Mexico.

Settlement Timeline Reset than 16,000 years. The evidence in the Chiquihuite study, by an international research team, is unambiguous: 1,900 tools for daily life, such as knives, arrowheads, and scrapers, crafted in a style previously unseen—and not explained by activities and events unattributable to humans. The cave search yielded ancient plant and animal DNA and researchers may yet find human DNA there, but at this time they cannot link the site to any known group of Native Americans. The tools’ age suggests a scenario of successive waves of migration and colonization of the New World over many millennia.

Smallpox Strains Traced In July, researchers reported on smallpox strains from five Civil War-era vaccination kits at the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a repository of artifacts and curiosities founded in 1863. At that time, vaccines were delivered by putting scabs or lymph from smallpox survivors into a small wound in the hope of causing a manageable infection that conferred immunity. Field kits for administering such treatments, likely fashioned in small batches, were roll-up leather pouches that held slides smeared with infected lymph from blisters or tin boxes containing scabs, plus a sharp for making a skin puncture. DNA from the Civil War-era smallpox strains resembled that of vaccine strains sold commercially around 1902. As the hub of 19th century American medicine, Philadelphia was home to hospitals that during the Civil War became centers for the emerging disciplines of cardiology and neurology.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DEVLIN GANDY; COURTESY OF MCMASTER UNIVERSITY

For decades, archaeologists have puzzled over the timing of human migration into the New World. The scant evidence often dated from within 15,000 years of the current day. Now a find of tools in Chiquihuite Cave, a remote shelter in northern Mexico, revises that timeline. As reported in the journal Nature, the implements conclusively date back more than 30,000 years. Because in prehistory a glacier covered much of North America, researchers had assumed there was no route south from the Bering Strait until an ice-free corridor opened inland. Until now that was assumed to have been about 13,000 years ago, and recent work points to an even later opening. Some scholars began to argue that Siberians could have come by boat—crossing the Bering Strait and traveling down the Pacific coast, but leaving little trace of themselves. That logic explains traces found in 1975 of human habitation at Monte Verde, in southern Chile, dating back more

8 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Buh-Bye, Ben

Pranking Franklin With pal Ben barely cool, Adams, perhaps recalling his wit, wrote a post-mortem skit having sport with him.

The series editor of The Papers of John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society recently shared a bit of snark from John Adams (see p. 22), not in the familiar gossipy vein of the voice the cranky patriot used in his personal letters but in the spirit of a group roast in the hereafter. Among documents in the society archive is one dated April 22, 1790, five days after Benjamin Franklin’s death. Titled “Dialogues of the Dead,” the manuscript, by Adams, imagines Charlemagne, Frederick II of Russia, colonial political activist James Otis, and French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau chatting as they await Franklin in the afterlife. Otis jibes at Franklin’s experiments, which he says “have no charm for me, transitory as sparks, meteors, fireflies, caterpillars, and sea shells.”

Chimes in Rousseau, “They are very apt to have the same effect upon all Men as they had upon us. They often produce a Melancholy, then an Extravagance, and at last a Delirium.”

Frederick: “But had not Franklin a Genius for Morals?”

Otis: “He told some very pretty moral Tales from the head and some very immoral from the heart. I never liked him; so if you please, we will change the subject.”

“Dialogues of the Dead,” reflecting a literary style popular in ancient Rome, showcases Adams’s classical training. The society will publish it and other of Adams’s papers in the upcoming Volume 20 of The Papers of John Adams, edited by Sara Georgini.

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UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF STACK’S BOWERS GALLERIES; HNA

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A “Strawberry Leaf” cent minted in 1793 sold at Stack’s Bowers Galleries on August 6. The coin, one of four such known to exist, is one of 355 types of “large cent” issued in the United States between 1793 and 1814. The nickname refers to a spray of leaves resembling the strawberry plant that appears below the bust, whose free-flowing hair represents Liberty. Many disliked the coin’s look as disheveled, and a wreath on the obverse replaced a 15-link chain some felt invoked slavery. The copper coin, about 1” across, weighs almost half an ounce. Henry Voigt, credited as its designer-engraver, was a friend of Thomas Jefferson. Voigt was hired at the new U.S. Mint based on his youthful experience working at a mint in Germany.

10 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Freelance writer Rick Boyd formerly was a reporter for and editor of Southern Maryland Newspapers, a firm located in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, site of the founding of the Maryland colony. Except for a one-year fellowship at the International Herald Tribune in Paris, he has lived in the county since 1976. “Coming Out Catholic in Colonial Maryland” (p. 60) is his first article for American History.

Boyd Brookhiser

Déjà Vu columnist Richard Brookhiser steps out of that role this issue to profile Founding Father Samuel Adams (“Puritan. Patriot. Protester.” p. 24). A prolific author and filmmaker, Brookhiser is senior editor of National Review.

Richard Brownell is an award-winning writer and author of books on history and culture. On Twitter and Instagram he is @RickBrownell, and he blogs at MrRicksHistory.com.

“Atoms for Peace, Explosively” (p. 32) is his first article for the magazine.

Goldstein

Norm Goldstein (“Sanctuary City,” p. 38) last wrote about the hunt for a notorious Revolutionary War traitor (“Chasing Benedict Arnold,” October 2017).

Besides creating and writing the SCOTUS 101 column, Daniel B. Moskowitz (“Tinseltown Turnabout,” p. 50) frequently reviews books and contributes articles.

Moskowitz

Brownell

In noting that Fred Trump hired Roy Cohn to represent him in a 1973 suit, Peter Carlson’s “Where Roy Cohn Was” (American Schemers, June 2020) is cute. That issue’s contents page highlight for Carlson’s column observing that Cohn worked for Donald Trump is just a cheap shot at the president.

Steve Edwards Yonkers, New York

We Are Blushing

Time and again your publication is first class in content. Kudos to the entire staff for publishing such a wonderful magazine. I love my National Geographic publications, but I must say, American History is now my favorite subscription.

Kevin M. Furlong San Francisco, California

Man in the Middle In death as in life, Roy Cohn, center, continues to stir controversy.

PHOTO BY HAL MATHEWSON/NY DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Facts is Facts

12 AMERICAN HISTORY

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OREGON V. MITCHELL 400 U.S. 112 (1970) DOES A FEDERAL LAW ALLOWING 18-YEAR-OLDS TO VOTE INFRINGE ON STATE POWERS?

Franchise Now! In 1969, with the war in Vietnam dividing the nation, marchers demonstrate in Seattle, Washington, on behalf of getting the franchise.

BY DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ

Never before and never since have American legislators been as eager to change the U.S. Constitution. The 26th Amendment, which gave 18-year-olds the right to vote in all elections, underwent ratification by the requisite three-quarters of states in 1971 in just three months and eight days.

The previous record—set in ratifying the 12th Amendment, mandating separate Electoral College votes for president and vice-president—was six months and six days in 1804, when the nation had only 17 states.

That rapidity did not reflect widespread agreement that 18-year-olds should have the vote; many still worried that teens were too inexperienced. In 1970, 15 states had considered referenda to lower the voting age; all but four were rejected. But 1970 also saw a game changer: Oregon v. Mitchell, a Supreme Court decision that threatened chaos at the polls unless a constitutional amendment overrode it.

The irony is that the decision, while controlling,

reflected the constitutional interpretations of just one of nine justices: Hugo L. Black.

The case centered on congressional renewal in 1970 of the Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965 to stop certain state procedures that had inhibitied minorities’ ability to vote. Besides extending the statute for five years, lawmakers curbed additional anti-suffrage practices: literacy tests and residency requirements exceeding 30 days. Idaho and Arizona challenged these bars, but the power of Congress to impose them was not in significant dispute, and the justices in Oregon easily OK’d both provisions.

Far more questionable was another amendment to the act that held it unlawful to set the minimum voting age higher than 18.

The standard voting age in 1970 was 21 but allowing younger people to vote was hardly revolutionary. Ever since the country began drafting 18-year-olds in World War II there had been a campaign to allow citizens of that age to vote. Georgia and Kentucky already were

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YOUTH QUAKE

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SCOTUS 101

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SCOTUS 101 letting 18-year-olds vote, and the minimum age was 19 in Alaska and 20 valid plus Black gave a majority to the holding in Hawaii. By 1970 protests against the Vietnam War, especially involv- that allowing 18-year-olds to vote was the law ing younger Americans, moved to the front burner the question of of the land for federal elections. whether someone old enough to be put at mortal risk should be able to However, the four justices who thought the vote. The voting rights renewal including the 18-year-old vote provision law invalid plus Black gave a majority to the passed easily: 64-12 in the Senate, 272-132 in the House. Enactment outcome that the youth suffrage provision opened the way for 11.5 million young citizens to cast ballots. would not apply to state and local elections.

President Richard Nixon signed the bill on June 22, 1970, with great Black knew his reading was so off-beat that misgivings about its constitutionality. States had always had latitude in it was unlikely any of his colleagues would granting voting rights, but when the country had previously mandated share it. As the High Court’s longest-serving expanded suffrage—barring impediments based on race, color, or sex— member, he was expected by protocol in conthe means had been a constitutional amendment. Did Congress have ference to give his views immediately after the power, through simple legislation, to impose a new rule on the states chief justice. But when his time came, Black without giving the states an opportunity to weigh in on the change? passed, hoping for the 4-4 split that in fact The governments of Oregon and Texas so fiercely believed that not to emerged, whereupon, at the very end of disbe so that they sued to stop enforcement of the law. In hopes of getting a cussion, he unveiled his unique stance. Harry ruling before the January 1, 1971, effective date of the 18-year-old provi- Blackmun, then the junior justice, later said sion, the matter was given rush treatment under a constitutional provi- Black “thoroughly enjoyed the manipulation.” sion allowing suits in which a state is a party to go directly to the Supreme The result left election officials nationwide Court. At the High Court during oral arguments, Solicitor General Erwin with a mess. They would have to maintain sepGriswold gave an unusually half-hearted defense of the contested law, arate voter registration rolls—one for voters beginning by admitting that the Justice Department had told Congress it between 18 and 21 and another for older votthought the law unconstitutional and that Nixon when signing the bill ers—and have one ballot for younger voters said he still thought it unconstitutional. Nonetheless, Griswold said, “I only listing federal candidates and another for and my associates are endeavoring to support the the rest of the electorate covering statute as vigorously as we are able.” national, state, and local races.

Congress was merely carrying out its constituIn theory states simply could lower tional duty to assure that everyone in the country their voting ages to 18, but in many had “equal protection of the laws,” he argued. jurisdictions that meant amending Lawyers for Oregon and Texas countered that the state constitution, an impossibilthat obligation—equal protection of the laws ity in time for the 1972 elections. specified in the 14th Amendment—aimed directly Other options were to have separate at protecting the formerly enslaved. Limiting votsets of voting machines—one with ing to those 21 and older is not discrimination but federal offices, reserved for younger reasonable classification—based in historic legal voters—or buying new-generation tradition—separating those mature enough to machines allowing election officials, make political judgments from those who are not, depending on a voter’s age, to switch they claimed, adding that states have exclusive between full ballot and federal offices power to make that call. “The Congress of the Needle-Threader only. Every option posed “an intolerUnited States hasn’t got any business monkeying Black’s nuanced logic able administrative burden,” Oregon with it because they don’t know what they are showed the way to the Attorney General Lee Johnson said.

18-year-old vote as a talking about,” Idaho Attorney General Robert The only way to avoid that burden constitutional amendment.

Robson insisted to the justices. was amending the Constitution to add When the members of the court convened in their private meeting a minimum voting age. Since 1942, every Conafter those arguments, the discussion revealed a similar split. “Fixing that gress had weighed such a measure, with none voting age is the business of the states,” Chief Justice Warren Burger gaining traction. In the wake of Oregon v. Mitchinsisted. Justice Potter Stewart declared unequivocally that “legislation ell, however, the bill enfranchising 18-year-olds with respect to the 18-year-old voting age is unconstitutional.” The more sailed through Congress, passed unanimously liberal justices were ready to uphold the law. But the camps’ reasoning by the Senate and 401-19 by the House. So eager differed enough that the court eventually ended up issuing a total of five were the states to avoid electoral confusion that Minnesota lawmakers accepted the amendment separate opinions that together ran to 184 pages.

Black was alone in his view; he told colleagues that, as he saw it, “Con- 27 minutes after the House of Representatives gress can prescribe who may vote in federal elections but not in state had voted for it; by the end of that day, four elections.” Simple math meant that the four justices who thought the law more states had ratified it. H OCTOBER 2020 15

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AMERICAN SCHEMERS

benny and the bets Poker Face As proprietor of the Horseshoe, top, Benny Binion put into practice a lifetime of skills he began to acquire as an itinerant horse trader’s son.

When Benny Binion ran a gambling racket in Dallas during the Depression, he discovered that an employee was stealing from him. To address the matter, he stabbed the transgressor in the eye with a pencil.

Upon learning that some fool had organized a rival racket, Binion shot the interloper dead on a crowded street in broad daylight. In those days, Benny Binion never dreamed that half a century later, 18,000 people would celebrate his birthday by chanting his name, or that the mayor of a major American city would dedicate an equestrian statue of him. On the other hand, the metropolis of Binion’s future was Las Vegas, Nevada, and Benny, now a charming millionaire who owned a famous casino there, had invented the World Series of Poker.

“No one,” wrote biographer Doug J. Swanson, “went from murderous street thug to domineering crime boss to revered businessman to civic treasure like Benny Binion.”

Born in Pilot Grove, Texas, in 1904, Lester Ben Binion quit school after second grade to wander Texas with his father, a horse trader.

The family business of buying nags in one place and selling them in another was steeped in chicanery designed to hide the four-footed merchandise’s defects. On the road Benny learned two valuable skills—how to cheat, and how to avoid being cheated. “There’s more than one kind of education,” he said decades later, “and maybe I prefer the one I got.”

During Prohibition, he smuggled booze from Mexico into El Paso. After getting arrested, he moved to Dallas and became a middleman, buying hooch from rural moonshiners and selling it to speakeasies in town. Soon, he had expanded into gambling, organizing an illegal numbers lottery in a legendarily raffish Black neighborhood, Deep Ellum. He began running dice games in a dozen Dallas hotels. He bought a piece of the legendary Top O’Hill Terrace, a

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BY PETER CARLSON

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high-end casino and whorehouse in nearby Arlington.

Binion got rich, and he shared his wealth with cops, prosecutors, and politicians. Strategic generosity helped when he was arrested, which occurred frequently. Dallas authorities picked him up for theft, for burglary, for assault—but always dropped the charges. In 1931, pleading guilty to killing a Black bootlegger, he got off with a suspended sentence.

In 1936, on Allen Street, he put three slugs into a rival hustler’s heart, then surrendered to police, claiming self-defense. The district attorney declined to prosecute. Years later somebody asked if he had bribed the D.A. “Well, I don’t know,” Benny Binion said. “Maybe I had.”

By 1940, Binion was Dallas’s king of crime. “Binion’s interests,” the FBI reported, “had complete control of all rackets in the Dallas area during the war years.”

Sick of corruption, Dallas voters in 1946 chose a new sheriff, replacing Binion’s man with an eager reformer whose victory prompted Benny to flee that December. He left town by night in his Cadillac, two bodyguards riding shotgun with Thompsons and $1 million in the Caddy’s trunk. “I had to get out,” he later explained. “My sheriff got beat in the election.”

He headed for Las Vegas, a rogue’s paradise where gambling was legal and other vices were regarded with bemused tolerance. Within days of arriving, Binion was attending the Awed Gapers The Horseshoe’s star-studded opening of mobster Benjamin main display offered “Bugsy” Siegel’s Flamingo casino—“the biggest an up-close-andwhoop-de-do I ever seen,” Benny said. Bugsy’s personal look at opulent fête marked the birth of modern Las serious money on Vegas, a city built by gangsters, and Binion the hoof. became one of its founding fathers.

Fellow mobsters sported silk shirts and pinstripe suits. The unpretentious Binion wore a cowboy hat and boots and Western shirts whose buttons were gold coins. Every night he went home to eat dinner with his wife, Teddy Jane, and their five kids. Nonetheless he became a major Sin City player, obtaining millions in secret loans from Dallas bankers that he funneled to the Vegas mob—while taking a sizable slice of every deal.

In 1951, he bought the failing Eldorado casino in downtown Vegas and renamed it the Horseshoe. Teddy Jane decorated the place—red carpeting, emerald green ceilings and steer horns on the walls— because, Benny said, “I don’t know nothing about designing nothing.”

But he did know promotion. He installed a horseshoe-shaped case displaying $1 million in $10,000 bills. Tourists came to pose for pictures with the boodle, then stayed to lose at the tables. Binion’s Horseshoe was as down-home as its owner, offering cheap food and drink and no-frills wagering. “If you wanna get rich,” Benny advised, “make little

people feel like big people.”

Already rich, Benny got richer and he continued his policy of greasing palms. But he skimped with the IRS and in 1953, Uncle Sam indicted him for failing to pay $862,000 in taxes. He pleaded guilty, then, trying to bamboozle the judge, played the bumpkin card: “I’m kinda ignorant,” he said, “and I got to gambling around and, well, you know.” The judge knew exactly—and gave him five years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.

Freed in 1957, Benny volunteered to inform for the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover was delighted, but Benny’s tips, probably designed to keep the Feds off his back, never paid off.

He hated lawmen so much that when Horseshoe customers broke bad, instead of calling the cops he had club-wielding guards whomp miscreants. “We used to just beat the goddam shit out of them,” Benny bragged.

In 1970, Binion introduced the hustle that made him famous. The World Series of Poker corralled legendary gamblers at the Horseshoe for a winner-take-all tourney.

ABC’s Wide World of Sports covered the annual event. Soon, The New Yorker and Le Monde were profiling Benny and he was entertaining America by telling droll stories on TV talk shows.

The murderous crime boss had become a lovable old rogue. In 1987, to mark his 83rd birthday, his family rented a basketball arena and threw a party. Willie Nelson entertained 18,000 guests, who sang “Happy Birthday” and chanted “Benny! Benny! Benny!”

By then, Benny was sick. Twice, a defibrillator had to jumpstart his stopped heart. He told an interviewer that during one of those episodes he had seen Jesus. The interviewer suggested he might see Jesus again in heaven.

Benny said he expected to wind up in hell. Not if you repent, the interviewer said. “That’s the problem,” Benny replied. “There’s some of it I can’t repent. I’ve tried and I just can’t.”

He died of heart failure on Christmas, 1989.

His body was interred at the Chapel of Eternal Peace in Eden Vale Memorial Park in Las Vegas. The location of his soul is unknown. H

PHOTO BY JACOBY/ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES

AMERICAN SCHEMERS

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The World’s First Guardian Angel Coin 1,680-Year-Old Coin From The First Christian Empire

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e’ve carried angel coins in our pockets for generations.

In 1465, the British Gold Angel served as a good luck charm, with coins received from the hands of monarchs believed to protect against disease and poverty. During the French Revolution, it’s said that the designer of the French “Lucky” Angel coin was saved from execution by divine intervention.

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Constantine’s Angel of Victory

Constantine was the world’s first Christian emperor, having merged worship of the sun god Sol Invictus with the worship of Christ. During his reign, he moved the empire’s capital to Byzantium, renaming it Constantinopolis.

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To mark the occasion, Constantine minted special coins bearing the Angel of Victory, bearing her scepter and shield while watching from on high. The world’s first Christian Emperor had given the world its very first Guardian Angel coin.

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Tag Team During 1906-09, Blue’s unit in San Francisco included a squad of rat taggers whose work let labs trace outbreaks.

INFECTION HUNTER

public health as a professional discipline.

Germ theory—the discovery that bacteria, and not foul air, for example, or racial ancestry, caused disease—dated only to 1882, when Robert Koch in Germany proved that an organism caused tuberculosis, previously blamed on disposition and climate. Theorists and practitioners came to recognize that innovation, including better diet and access to care, could improve public health. Little remembered today, Blue, a career public health doctor and U.S. surgeon general 1912-1920, was on the case for every one of those advances, including what he called “universal sickness insurance.”

The genial Blue arrived in San Francisco in 1901 with his wife, vivacious actress Juliette Downs. The scene was grim. When his predecessor flagged plague fatalities in Chinatown,

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THE WORLD’S WIORK

“Infectious disease is one of the few adventures left in the world,” wrote Hans Zinsser in his 1935 work Rats, Lice, and History. For medical adventurer Rupert Blue, such a chance beckoned in San Francisco in 1900. After a few deaths from plague came to light, business owners squared off with the leading local public health official, adamantly opposing a quarantine and pushing to suppress word of a mysterious ailment that was swiftly— but only occasionally—killing residents of San Francisco’s dilapidated, fetid Chinatown, where residents commonly crammed lightless subterranean quarters, defecating in latrines hacked out of the soil.

Blue, a 36-year-old physician, was assigned to manage the malady.

Born into a North Carolina family with roots extending to the Revolutionary War, Blue had grown up in Marion, South Carolina, overshadowed by older brother Victor. Completing medical school in 1892, Rupert joined the Marine Hospital Service, a federal agency founded in 1798 to care for merchant sailors. The work took him all over. His path propelled him through Genoa, Italy; Portland, Oregon; New Orleans; San Francisco; New York; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Paris, France. His career spanned breakthroughs that transformed medicine and laid the groundwork for

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE

BY SARAH RICHARDSON

THE WORLD’S WIORK

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE

the governor and local elites decried the “plague fake.” That resistance also Southerners, Black and white, and thought to drove Blue away, but in 1903 he returned—this time, backed by business have environmental or bacterial causes. Blue and political leaders dismayed as the outbreak spread beyond Chinatown held with the environmentalists, citing pellagra to infect whites. Rather than expand a quarantine bound to be disobeyed, patients’ monotonous diets. His intuition was Blue cultivated merchants and politicians and surveyed affected locales. excellent. In 1917 the doctor he assigned to Addressing Chinese cultural resistance to autopsies, Blue devised his own study the disease, Joseph Goldberger, proved hearse in which he discreetly hauled corpses to his lab. He worked closely that pellagra arose from diets relying on milled with Wong Chung, a translator and secretary who built bridges with Chi- corn, which had been stripped of the B-comnese residents and informally collected news Blue never could have. plex component now known as niacin.

Blue’s wife, weary of their penurious, nomadic life, left him.

In 1916, in his dual role as U.S. surgeon genBlue saw that conditions had to change. “Man was no longer to be eral and American Medical Association presiheld responsible for the crime,” he recalled later. “In other words, it was a dent, Blue promoted health insurance, noting new orientation of the problem whereby isolation and quarantine, if the risks to 30 million workers. “To meet the practiced at all, would be applied to the potential rodent carrier.” situation, there are unmistakable signs that He declared war on rats in Chinatown, paying bounties for trapped health insurance will constitute the next great rodents and condemning some 20 blocks of buildings whose owners had a step in social legislation,” he said. “Experience choice: replace rat-friendly wooden foundations set atop earth with con- has shown that an adequate health insurance crete or see their properties demolished. Blue’s staff dissected every rodent system should distribute the cost of sickness killed, testing for the plague-transmitting bacterium, Yersinia pestis, which among those responsible for conditions causonly had been identified in 1894. ing it and thereby lighten the burFor two years, Blue steered a carefully den on the individual. Financial aggressive public health campaign. San incentive may thus be given for Francisco had eradicated plague by 1904, the inauguration of comprehenbut when the disease roared back after sive measures for the prevention the 1906 earthquake—though not in the of disease.” area Blue had targeted—the same tactics Blue’s surgeon generalcy ended ultimately prevailed. The city’s nineduring the 1918 influenza panyear ordeal brought breakthroughs powdemic, his earlier triumphs fading ered by the realization that plague there as the new pathogen ravaged the differed from outbreaks in Asia and nation, sickening some 4 million elsewhere. In San Francisco plague people. Blue urged handwashing often occurred a case at a time, and and papered the country with bronever seemed to strike more than a chures. He invited doctors out of handful of patients. Over time, Blue’s retirement and encouraged civic lab, dubbed the Rattery, showed why. leaders to close up communities to The type of flea common in San Franhalt the disease. cisco was less efficient at spreading the But he was also busy with issues plague bacterium than the flea comarising among veterans returning mon in Asia, where plague raged. San Francisco The Man in the Arena from the war in Europe. His efforts Rupert Blue’s genial mien outbreaks caused only a hundred-some known against influenza did not meet the figured prominently in his deaths. In 1909, San Francisco rewarded him with campaigns to persuade need. The flu spread quickly and an expensive watch. His devotion to his career had communities to work at surprisingly, concentrated among cost him his marriage, but he had gained a profile as improving public health. young adults, not the old. Some a trusted public health authority.

675,000 Americans died.

His track record and temperament poised Blue for appointment in In 1920, Blue was axed as surgeon general 1912 as surgeon general of the United States, “in recognition of the by Edith Wilson, who in effect was running the remarkable development of the public health service under his direction country because a stroke had disabled her husand particularly for his efficient service in the eradication of the bubonic band, President Woodrow Wilson (“The Big plague in San Francisco…” Over several years, Blue’s agency, renamed Lie,” June 2017). Blue left for Paris to work for the Public Health Service, gained funds and personnel, tackling yellow the PHS and the League of Nations. He retired fever, leprosy, smallpox, dengue, and tularemia, an animal-borne disease in 1936 and died in Charleston, South Carolina, first studied and identified by PHS staff. Blue oversaw research on in 1948. His wide-ranging career is encapsutickborne diseases, hookworm, venereal diseases, malaria, typhoid lated in a quote attributed to him: “My greatest fever, and the mysterious pellagra, a scourge afflicting mostly poor ambition is to clean up the United States.” H OCTOBER 2020 21

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Puritan.

Patriot.

Protester.

Founding Father Samuel Adams knew what it meant to take it to the streets

By Richard Brookhiser

O 22 AMERICAN HISTORY

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PHOTO CREDIT

n the evening of August 25, 1765, Thomas Hutchinson, chief justice and lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, was having supper with his family in their three-story mansion in Boston’s North End. Mid-meal, a friend burst in to warn the Hutchinsons that they were about to receive unexpected guests. The lieutenant governor and his kin barely had time to escape to a neighbor’s home before an ax came through the front door. The mob that followed proceeded to destroy furniture, rip down wall hangings and wainscoting, demolish interior walls, plunder the cellar, and tear up the garden. For good measure, a party of marauders climbed to the roof, there to spend three hours toppling the cupola. Everything of value not nailed down was stolen—clothing, plate, £900 in cash. By four o’clock the next morning, all that remained of the house were bare walls and floors. The attack was, as historian Bernard Bailyn would write, the most violent mob action in the history of colonial America.

Proper Boston was shocked. Even Samuel Adams, a local political leader and a frequent critic of the colonial administration Hutchinson served, branded the onslaught “a high-handed enormity,” which Adams blamed on “vagabond strangers.” Three months later, one of the leading rioters—no vagabond stranger but a local cobbler named Andrew Mackintosh—marched arm in arm in a parade with a colonel of the Massachusetts militia, as if promising a new era of social peace.

The protestations of shock and the parade were all a sham. From Sam Adams’s point of view, the only enormity of the home invasion was excessiveness: its intensity conferred on its target, for a while at least, the aura of martyrdom. Adams had been defaming Thomas Hutchinson in print and in public meetings; it

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PHOTO CREDIT

A Serious Man Adams’s air in John Singleton Copley’s portrait suggests what it would have been like to have to face Adams in person.

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He encountered and absorbed other influences. At Harvard College—BA, 1740; MA, 1743—he imbibed John Locke, the great last-century philosopher of natural rights and self-rule. One Lockean point underlay all the young man’s later thinking: how could Massachusetts be justly ruled by Britain, 3,000 oceanic miles away? He was also stirred by the preaching of George Whitefield, the cross-eyed evangelical barnstormer who sparked the colonial religious revival known as the Great Awakening. Adams’s piety connected him, in his own mind, with Massachusetts’s Puritan past. He would hope all his life to wean his neighbors from the corrupting effects of “luxury”—a catch-all term of the era employed to impugn fancy dress, theatrical performances, and high-end British imports. Purified of such fripperies, Boston might become a “Christian Sparta.” But the path to achieving all these desirable goals lay through politics. And success in politics rested on knowing, and appealing, to the man in the street—as a voter, and, on occasion, a rioter.

24 AMERICAN HISTORY

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PHOTO CREDIT

The city in which Samuel Adams was born in September 1722 was a flourishing port as well as British North America’s most populous city. A visitor compared the spectacle of the masts aboard ships crowding Boston’s harbor to the floating forest on display in the Thames.

Boston’s relationship with the mother country money, to compensate for a local shortage of hard currency. Parliament was often fraught. Its Puritan founders wel- quashed the inflationary scheme, and Adams père narrowly escaped ruin comed the revolutions that executed Charles I in the bank’s collapse. and deposed James II; their descendants chafed Young Sam acquired a taste for oppositional politics at his father’s knee. at imperial policies mandated by Parliament. He also learned the nuts and bolts of vote-getting in the semi-democracy One crisis during the 1740s involved Sam that Massachusetts enjoyed, thanks to its colonial Adams’s father, also Samuel, a prosperous Forces in Collision charter. Although the colony’s highest officers—govand politically engaged brewer. The elder From studies at Har- ernor, lieutenant governor, judges—were appointed in Adams tried to set up a bank issuing paper vard, left, Adams de- London, the colonial legislature, known as the Genrived a philosophy eral Court, was elected by an unusually wide franthat set him squarely chise—perhaps three quarters of all adult males. against imperial laws Boston also had a Town Meeting, open to every voter, like the Stamp Act, at which local issues were discussed. To win office in which provoked him this system, one needed to know how to appeal to the and fellow Bostopublic—and to wire-pullers. Sam’s father was a charnians, top, to rebel. ter member of the Caucus Club, an early political machine, whose members met in garrets or taverns to smoke, drink, discuss issues of the day, and tap candidates. In later years, more radical groups, such as the Loyall Nine and the Sons of Liberty, appeared. Young Sam would join or befriend them all.

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was his polemics more than anything else that had stirred the mob up. Hutchinson in any case was, as far as Adams was concerned, a pawn in a greater game. The 1765 riot was but an episode in the yearslong campaign Adams waged to curtail, and finally terminate, Britain’s control of Massachusetts—to make that colony, and the other 12, independent. To this end, Adams employed eloquence, arguments drawn from religion and political philosophy—and Boston’s mobs, disciplined and directed by him.

and year out—was clearly not enriching himself.

Adams’s upbringing supplied him with practical and intellectual tools. British imperial policy after the Seven Years War endowed him with a cause. Britain’s victory in that war yielded glittering prizes, from Canada to India, and enormous debts. London bean counters wanted the colonies to help shoulder the burden of empire but engineering that shift meant changing the way the empire worked.

PHOTO CREDIT

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Boston, like all other cities in the 18th-century Anglosphere, had no such thing as a police force. There was a sheriff, and municipal officers were assigned specific tasks—watchmen, trash collectors, justices of the peace. Neighborhood rowdies thus had a virtual free hand when it came to everything from revelry to mayhem. The unruliest day in Boston’s year was November 5, when the mobs of the north and south ends of town paraded images of the Pope, Guy Fawkes—a Catholic who had tried to blow up Parliament—and the Stuart Pretender, another Catholic. Each mob battled to destroy the totems of its geographical rival. In time Adams would direct them against targets of more current interest.

His climb up the political ladder was steady. In his twenties and early thirties, he was elected clerk of the Boston market, then town scavenger, then collector of taxes. That Street Drama last job nearly cost him his reputation, for he was Hanging lesser offiincapable of handling money. As a businessman, cials in effigy, right, he ran his father’s brewery into the ground. As tax and chasing colonial collector, he refused to dun deadbeats—they lieutenant governor were, after all, voters—mixed receipts from differThomas Hutchinson ent years to make his books balance and took like a hunted beast, money out of the till for personal use. Only the Adams and allies exercised steely resolve austerity of his life saved him from punishment spiced by a knack for when his malfeasance came to light. A man so political theatrics. poorly dressed—he wore the same coat, year in

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Tea Time When Britain tried to muscle colonials into drinking imperial tea, Adams’s followers, clad as Native Americans, engaged in a piece of rebellious performance art that became immortal.

Occupation was a mixed bag for Adams. The redcoats imposed a complete lockdown. The soldiers inspected everyone entering or leaving the city, and aimed cannons directly at the Boston Town House in which the General Court met. On the other hand, the very heavy-handedness of the British response was rallying moderates to Adams’s side. Insults and fracases between soldiers and townspeople proliferated. Adams recounted all the rumpuses in lurid detail in a pop-up publication, “Journal of Events,” which circulated at home and throughout the colonies.

The inevitable confrontation occurred on March 5, 1770. Boys throwing snowballs at a sentry in front of the Customs House on King Street were joined by men tossing ice chunks, sticks, and cudgels. The platoon of soldiers who reinforced their comrade bore the barrage patiently for a time until one redcoat fired—the question of whether he did so with or without orders later became a point of controversy. A general volley followed, leaving four rioters and one spectator dead.

Adams denounced the Boston Massacre, as it came to be known, and the occupation that had generated it. In a meeting with Hutchinson, the summer before promoted to governor, Adams demanded that the troops be withdrawn from city streets.

Varying Visage Different artists at different times captured manifestly different aspects of Adams’s appearance and personality.

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Adams’s moment in the sun arrived with the March 1765 passage of the Stamp Act, a levy on every piece of paper colonists might use, from legal documents to playing cards.

Britain reasoned that most of the charges were so light Americans would not mind paying them. But the Stamp Act was unprecedented—a direct tax on Americans enacted by Parliament, not by their colonial governments, in which the inhabitants had a say.

Adams blasted the Stamp Act in essays in the Boston Gazette; newspapers were among the items taxed, making enemies of publishers and readers. He focused his wrath not on the royal governor, a Brit, but on Massachusetts natives like Hutchinson and his brother-in-law Andrew Oliver serving under him.

Adams wanted to make loyalty to the colonial administration odious, so he put the mob to work. His preferred technique was not wholesale destruction, but intimidation. On August 14, 1765, Oliver, who had agreed to become a distributor of stamps, was hanged in effigy at the Liberty Tree, a century-old elm near Boston Common. That night, a crowd carried the effigy to Oliver’s house, beheaded it, and broke his windows. The next day, Oliver announced his resignation from his new post.

The plundering of Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion two weeks later was a riot too far. If the mob got a taste for looting, they might target rich men siding with Adams, such as merchant John Hancock. Adams’s solution was to broker a

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peace between the North and South End mobs, sealed by a great Union Feast.

This made for a single disciplined municipal mob—and put that informal brigade more firmly under Adams’s direction. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766; meanwhile, Adams had won a seat in the General Court.

His management of the Boston mob would be tested repeatedly over the next decade. In 1767 Parliament passed a series of acts imposing duties on British imports to America and sending special commissioners to the colonies to collect those payments.

In March 1768, the second anniversary of the Stamp Act’s repeal, the commissioners assigned to Boston, well-informed by British newspaper coverage of Adams’s means and intentions, expected to be assaulted. But Adams, fearful that an attack on British functionaries would elicit a serious reprisal, ordered his foot soldiers to stand down.

As the spring passed, however, he grew cocky. Perhaps displays of popular fervor could drive out the British. In June, after the commissioners seized one of John Hancock’s ships for smuggling, Adams’s mob forced the King’s men to flee for safety to Castle William, a fort in the harbor. The British responded by stationing regiments of regular troops in Boston.

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“Standing armies in populous cities in times of peace,” he declared, inevitably brought “dangerous, ruinous and fatal effects.” Hutchinson agreed to redeploy the military to Castle William; he also promised that the eight soldiers who had fired and their commanding officer would be tried for murder in a local court.

Behind the scenes Adams arranged for the defendants to enjoy the services of two of Boston’s top lawyers. One was his cousin and protégé John Adams. Historian Hiller Zobel speculates that Adams assumed any jury of Bostonians, primed by the “Journal of Events” and other patriot propaganda, would convict the redcoats. Whatever the verdict, a regular trial with

Bloody Monday Adams, pointing at left, decried the Boston Massacre as an inevitable byproduct of the hated British occupation. He demanded that imperial troops be withdrawn and scorned a victim’s deathbed confession exculpating the soldiers whose volley had brought him to death’s door.

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The last hurrah for Adams’s mob came in late 1773. The British government, seeking to balance the East India Company’s books and raise revenue at the same time, came up with a scheme to increase colonials’ consumption of Indian tea. Americans preferred smuggled Dutch tea, which was cheaper. London discounted the Company’s brand to undercut the Dutch, even with a tea tax laid on. But principle seemed more important to Americans than bargains. Even consuming a cheap cup of tea was paying taxes to Britain, at Britain’s direction. Up and down the coast, tea ships rode low at anchor, holds heavy with tea packed in chests.

Adams had something more dramatic in mind for Boston. He summoned the captain of the first tea ship to enter the harbor and told the mariner that if he did not dock and unload everything but his tea, he would be tarred and feathered. The captain believed Adams, and complied, as did captains of succeeding ships. Now the imported tea was caught in a regulatory logjam. Having formally entered the port, cargo could not be sent back to Britain without clearances signed by Governor Hutchinson and the customs commissioners. Since doing so would have been bowing to Adams’s bullying, they declined to act. Check, Read It in the News and checkmate. Late on the afternoon of Boston periodicals December 16, Adams addressed a capacity made editorial hay crowd at South Meeting House, a Congregawith coverage of the tional church. “This meeting,” he said, “can do massacre, including nothing further to save the country.” the obituary of Patrick At this signal, men poured from the galleries Carr, who died as a reand applied Mohawk makeup; Indian imagery sult of his wounds. has long been a favorite with white Americans,

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Cousin in Law Sam’s lawyer cousin, John Adams, defended the soldiers accused in the massacre case and went on to bigger things.

Save for his hand in the appointment of george washington to lead the rebel army, adams did little in his later years but feud.

competent defense attorneys would assure moderates in America and Britain that Bostonians were civilized folk—and hence, all the more to be pitied for suffering under military rule. John Adams and his co-counsel won acquittals for the commanding officer and six of his eight men; two were convicted on reduced charges. The defense was strengthened by the deathbed confession of one of the slain rioters, Patrick Carr, who forgave the soldiers who had killed him and admitted that they had fired in self-defense. Sam Adams dismissed Carr’s testimony on the grounds that he was an Irish Papist.

Following the massacre, renewed caution on Adams’s part and the threat of military force kept deaths to zero. During this interval of relative quiet, John Singleton Copley, the greatest artist in America, painted Adams’s portrait, a commission Adams himself could never have afforded.

Hancock paid for the painting, and for a portrait of himself, and hung both in his parlor. Copley shows Adams the day after the massacre, when he confronted Governor Hutchinson.

Adams is dressed rather better than he probably ever was, though his collar is rumpled and two of his coat buttons are undone, implying carelessness. He points to the charter of the colony as justification for his demands; Copley might better have depicted him pointing to Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and the Holy Bible. Posture and setting are dignified, but there is a whiff of belligerence. Art historian Carol Troyen notes that Adams “crowds the table, pushing forward and threatening the viewer’s space.” Do what I ask, he seems to be saying, or I’ll be seeing you in the streets.

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once the neighborhood had been cleared of Indians themselves (see “Dressing Up,” p. 7). This would be no rampage. Many “braves” were shipyard workers and shipmasters, who well knew their way around vessels. They worked quickly and efficiently and in minutes deep-sixed 342 chests of tea. Parliament responded the following March with the Boston Port Act, closing the rebellious entrepot to all traffic.

The road to revolution thereafter was quick.

Adams, a leader in opening the break, faded gradually from prominence. In the Continental Congress he and cousin John, stiffing John Hancock, who yearned for the job, secured the post of commander-in-chief of American forces for the Virginian George Washington, in the interests of regional balance. Apart from that signal service, Sam Adams wasted his years in Congress in unproductive feuds. After the war he played a minor role in the ratification of the Constitution, at first vainly opposing the instrument, then converting at the last minute. One of his last public acts was to rebuke Tom Paine, his soulmate in radicalism, for Paine’s attacks on Christianity. He died in 1803.

Kindred Scenes Adams, top, at Faneuil Hall in Boston; center, Albert Pike statue falling in Washington, DC; crowds in Portland, Oregon.

Adams’s mob-craft has echoes in current-day protests, riots, and statue-cancelings, combining as both instances do means that were legal— parades, demonstrations—and illegal—vandalism and destruction of property. Both cases involved a great cause—self-rule in colonial Boston, racial justice in contemporary America.

There the resemblance ends. Adams, because he operated on a smaller scale—in one city of fewer than 20,000 inhabitants—was able to establish and maintain firmer control of his supporters.

He deplored violence that was aimless; he wanted it administered, like medicine, in prescribed doses. Adams’s ideals differed sharply from those of the hard core of today’s protesters: the founders of Black Lives Matter identify as Marxists, while the history of the 20th century suggests that Locke and Scripture may be better guides for modeling new societies.

The removal or toppling of statues of disfavored historical figures—no longer just Confederates, but Washington, Columbus, and Union Army veterans—is the most striking contrast between our moment and Adams’s. Purging statues of the dead recalls nothing so much as the North and South End mobs destroying images of the Pope and Guy Fawkes. Destruction is fun and makes a symbolic point. But Sam Adams knew that nothing changes unless someone someday gets to work. H OCTOBER 2020 29

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Atoms for Peace, Explosively Project Plowshare imagined using nuclear weapons as infrastructure-building tools

By Richard Brownell

A

t 10 a.m. local time on July 6, 1962, a quiet stretch of Nevada desert near Las Vegas erupted in violence.

The ground shook and bulged skyward almost 300 feet, then exploded in a blast that kicked up more than 12 million tons of soil. The resulting dust cloud rose 12,000 feet. The latest underground atomic test, codenamed Sedan, was taking place 65 miles north of Sin City at the 1,400-square mile Nevada Test Site, pockmarked with craters from dozens of nuclear and conventional weapons tests dating to 1951.

However, Sedan was special.

At 104 kilotons, Sedan was the largest underground nuclear test on record. Nearly seven times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945, Sedan left history’s largest manmade crater, 330 feet deep and 1,280 feet across. No nuclear test conducted in the United States produced more fallout; radioactive detritus from Sedan showered several states.

Overblown The 1962 Sedan test left a crater a quarter-mile across and showered multiple states with radioactive fallout.

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Congress established the civilian-run Atomic Energy Commission on August 1, 1946, to oversee all aspects of nuclear science to improve the public welfare, promote peace, and strengthen free enterprise. AEC scientists relished their role as the public faces of peaceful nuclear know-how. Frederick Reines, a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, speculated in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1950 about using atomic bombs “in such activities as mining, where the fission products would be confined to relatively small regions,” or to “divert a river by blasting a large volume of solid rock.” Mathematician John von Neumann and colleagues at the University of California Radiation Laboratory near San Francisco, now known as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, expressed similar ideas.

Atomic bombs could alter in seconds landscapes that men using machines needed months, even years, to reshape. Of course, there was the risk that fallout could poison those landscapes for millennia, severely limiting a project’s scope and locations. Nuclear fusion changed that.

Atomic explosions employ fission, the splitting of atoms to unleash energy. Fission-based weapons were expensive,

time-consuming to manufacture, had limited explosive potential, and produced heavy fallout. A fusion reaction, however, fuses nuclear material to create a more powerful explosion with much less fallout. Such thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bombs also cost less to make.

The first hydrogen bomb, codenamed Mike, was tested on November 1, 1952, at Enewetak, a Pacific atoll known at the time as “Eniwetok.” Mike’s 10.4-megaton blast obliterated an island called Elugelab, leaving nothing but a crater more than a mile wide and 164 feet deep.

Mike’s accidental remaking of the atoll intrigued the AEC. “We needn’t take a coastline as it happens to be,” said physicist Edward Teller, veteran of the Manhattan Project and the man primarily responsible for the hydrogen bomb. “We can make a Edward Teller

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Sedan was an exercise meant to advance Project Plowshare, a Cold War-era effort to employ nuclear weapons for infrastructure projects. The idea of harnessing the atom for civilian use dated to the end of World War II. Scientists, some of whom had worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, saw Frederick Reines nuclear energy as a tool for more than merely leveling cities. These advocates believed the technology had potential utility in medicine, the study of elements, and power generation. They also wanted to take things a step further by using targeted nuclear explosions to reshape America’s waterways, carve roads out of mountains, and mine for oil and natural gas.

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Cratered Sedan’s epic footprint, left, became a Cold War tourist destination.

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Building with Blasts?

Results of detonating an H-bomb named Mike at Enewetak in 1952 inspired Atomic Energy Commission dreams of using nuclear power to reorder the earth’s surface and interior, below.

harbor, a water-level canal, even across the American isthmus.” The October 1956 Suez Canal crisis, triggered when Egypt nationalized the man-made passage linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, further inspired talk of what Teller liked to call “geographical engineering.” Egypt’s refusal to allow Israel access to the canal led Harold Brown at Lawrence Livermore to suggest excavating a second sea-level canal for Israeli shipping by detonating thermonuclear devices.

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international shipping and construction of ever larger classes of transport vessel were diminishing the Big Ditch’s utility. In addition, the Suez Crisis, Cold War tensions, and political unrest in Panama all suggested that the Panama Canal was a highly vulnerable military target. A September 1958 Panama Canal Company report outlined alternate routes through Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Seizing on Teller’s offhand comment about creating a sealevel canal, Plowshare scientists and engineers proposed using nuclear bombs to excavate a new atomic elements for research and medicine, navigable channel across Central America. and undertake major public works. In June, the Each proposal called for multiple devices with AEC established Project Plowshare amid growtotal yields of hundreds of megatons. ing public and political opposition to nuclear To sell Americans on pursuing such a project programs. Nuclear tests routinely produced abroad, the AEC first needed a domestic dress rehearsal. AEC Chairman unacceptably high levels of fallout, and the sub- Lewis Strauss approved a plan to use nuclear weapons to create an Amerisequent appearance in drinking water, milk, can harbor in a way that would protect people and wildlife, meet data colmeat, and produce of strontium-90, cesium-137, lection requirements, and deliver long-term practical value. and other cancer-causing radioactive elements The decision was made to test-market Plowshare with 2.4 megatons of had generated a movement demanding a world- nuclear firepower at Cape Thompson, on Alaska’s northwest shore. Project wide ban on airborne nuclear tests.

Chariot would use four 100-kiloton bombs to blast a channel 6,000 feet long Scientists opted to move nuclear testing under- and 1,200 feet wide. The resulting waterway would allow vessels access to a ground. Doing so eliminated worry about atmo- basin 6,000 feet long and 3,000 feet wide created by two one-megaton spheric conditions or radioactivity, which would bombs. Technicians would bury the devices 300 to 400 feet underground, a be trapped in molten rock after a blast. On Sep- step AEC officials believed would trap about 95 percent of the resulting tember 19, 1957, the first underground test, code- radioactivity. That stray five percent did not worry them. The AEC believed named Rainier, was detonated. the region to be an uninhabited Arctic wasteland.

Other developments during this Really Big Dig Teller traveled to the newly enfranchised state to sell the time boosted government support The AEC, headed by harbor, telling reporters and politicians Plowshare could do for Plowshare. The Soviet Union’s Lewis L. Strauss, top, anything, even “dig a harbor in the shape of a polar bear,” and entertained a plan to successful August 1957 test of an declaring “Anything new that is big needs big people in order use serial nuclear exintercontinental ballistic missile plosions to excavate to get going and big people are found in big states.” and the USSR’s epochal launch of a canal across the In the July 24, 1960, Fairbanks News-Miner editor George Sundberg wrote, “We think the holding of a huge nuclear blast its Sputnik satellite that October Isthmus of Panama. infused Plowshare with urgency. in Alaska would be a fitting overture to the new era which is Nuclear paranoia was running rampant in America at the thought of the Soviets deploying nuclear weapons at will. The media obsessed over the risk of nuclear war. Films, television programs, and books portrayed a dim future with a sinister radioactive glow.

Desperate to counter doomsday thinking, AEC scientists struggled to offer practical examples that would persuade the public of the wisdom of continuing nuclear research. Plowshare advocates saw thermonuclear excavation as a selling point. Massive nuclear-driven public works would showcase American ingenuity and nukes’ civic utility, they believed. One possibility was creating a major new waterway.

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DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (3)

A proposed Plowshare test: Fire an underground 400-kiloton blast meant to create a harbor on alaska’s northwest shore

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Lewis L. Strauss

DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY (3)

PHOTO BY PAUL SCHUTZER/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

allies had killed the venture. Deprived of that showcase, the AEC began conducting underground tests intended to prove Plowshare’s viability and justify the agency’s ever larger budget requests. Project Gnome, the first underground test run for Plowshare—specifically to test heat and isotope generation for power and scientific research—took place on December 10, 1961. The blast occurred 1,200 feet down in salt beds near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The Gnome explosion had a yield of slightly more than 3 kilotons.

Gnome flopped, venting radioactive material—small amounts, the AEC hastened to note—into the atmosphere while failing to create the promised underground heat reservoir for generating power. Seven Carryall and Dwarf months later, Sedan’s massive fallout led politicians to ask if Model, top left, shows Plowshare was worth the environmental cost. Unless the the Carryall cut and AEC could come up with a winning nuclear hand, the dream drainage crater. At of a sea level canal across Central America was dead. left, the Dwarf schema opening for our state.” Local politiHope rode in by rail. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe and, above, the Dwarf cians were likewise enthused.

Railway approached the AEC in December 1962 about using outcome, with a workEnvironmental scientists, as well er handily present to hydrogen bombs to cut a passage through Southern Califoras many Alaskan locals, were not provide a sense of nia’s Bristol Mountains to level out that railroad’s route and sold. They doubted AEC estimates human scale. shorten the trip across Southern California. The California that a bomb crater harbor would be Department of Public Works got on board because highway handling $176 million in annual exports within builders could use the same cut to straighten a winding stretch of Interstate 25 years. Cape Thompson adjoined large depos- 40 and shorten the drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. its of coal and oil, but it also was iced in nine A feasibility study codenamed Carryall concluded that opening the new months out of every 12. pass would take 22 nuclear devices totaling 1.7 megatons to move 68 million And the cape was only 30 miles south of Point cubic yards of earth and cut a path 11,000 feet long and 600 to 1,300 feet Hope, an Inuit village whose residents subsisted wide. The cost of nuclear excavation would beat that of conventional digging on the region’s abundant wildlife. Irked by crit- by more than a third. The railroad and the state were adamant to have highics, Teller vented to economist George Rogers, way and train traffic using the pass by 1969, but the AEC wanted to perform “We are not interested in preserving the Eskimo more tests, including row-charge explosions of nuclear devices in Nevada. as a hunter. We are interested in giving him the opportunity of becoming a coal miner.”

Carryall’s design made it a perfect dress rehearsal for a sea-level canal— until the plan collided with the Limited Test Ban Treaty. As of October 10, Project Chariot became mired in environmen- 1963, that international agreement forbade nuclear detonations in the air, tal studies and public debates, forcing repeated ocean, and space. Underground tests could take place, but only if the nation downscalings and reschedulings. By summer involved could guarantee no fallout would enter another nation’s air space.

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Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that to accommodate large projects like Carryall the treaty would have to be rewritten. Teller believed radiation generated from Plowshare projects would be well below harmful levels, but federal officials read the treaty to mean that its language barred explosions generating any fallout at all. Frustrated, the State of California and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe walked away from Carryall in September 1966.

Plowshare kept running underground tests but notions of a Central American sea-level canal and other nuclear excavations withered and died.

The AEC had to shift gears. Perhaps a more universal goal than a harbor or a mountain railway would broaden public support.

Enter Reality no leakage of radioactivity, and El Paso reported increased natAmerica needed energy. People Under Glenn Seaborg, ural gas capacity at wells in the area. Du Pont, Gulf General Atomics, and other energy companies pitched the AEC on simiwere making more money that AEC plans collided with test ban curbs. they were spending on more lar projects. The agency scheduled more gas and oil stimulation Gasbuggy and other vehicles and more electric and Plowshare plans were projects. Plowshare finally appeared to have found its calling. gas appliances. Most estimates slammed by Wyoming However, follow-up tests at the Gasbuggy site showed that had the nation’s energy use rising Rep. Teno Roncalio. the nuclear blast had altered the composition of the affected sharply the next three decades. natural gas. Natural gas consists mainly of burnable hydrocarDomestic natural gas production was barely bons with trace amounts of carbon dioxide. Gasbuggy-produced gas was keeping pace with demand, and the United only 41 percent hydrocarbon—less than half as potent as ordinary natural States was buying more foreign oil. Inability to gas—plus carbon dioxide and large amounts of radioactive tritium, a meet the nation’s energy demands was not only byproduct of nuclear fusion. The tritium could be burned off through a an economic risk but a national security risk as process called flaring, but flaring wasted natural gas and released fallout. well. Plowshare might be able to help by reachDespite Gasbuggy’s drawbacks, the AEC ing deep-set oil and natural gas. planned Project Rulison, mostly underwritten El Paso Natural Gas agreed to work with the

by Austral Oil Company and CER Geonuclear AEC on Project Gasbuggy, an attempt to tap Corporation. On September 10, 1969, techniroughly 64 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under cians detonated a 50-kiloton device buried company-owned land in northwest New Mex8,400 feet underground at the Nevada test ico. On December 10, 1967, a 29-kiloton device site. Trying to avoid Gasbuggy’s tritium trouwas detonated more than 4,000 feet underbles, scientists used a fission bomb, believing ground. The point was to fracture rock and crethat the depth at which the blast occurred ate a cavity into which freed gas would flow, to would minimize radioactivity.

Rep. Teno Roncalio be accessed by El Paso Natural Gas drilling rigs.

A month after Rulison, the site had proGasbuggy seemed to work. Monitors detected duced more gas than conventional methods

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Glenn Seaborg

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had delivered in six years. Tritium levels were significantly lower than with Gasbuggy, but still detectable. Environmentalists sued Austral to prevent the flaring of contaminated gas. The company prevailed, but at the expense of being branded as selling a radioactive product.

Environmental groups organized protests and sued the AEC. Representative Teno Roncalio (D-Wyoming), convinced the AEC was wasting natural gas and uranium, emerged as an antiPlowshare crusader bent on killing the project.

Uranium could be put to better use in nuclear reactors, Roncalio said, adding that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was a better and cheaper way to get at underground gas deposits.

Not on Our Planet Skepticism that sprouted over AEC notions like a nuke-dug Panama canal, top, blossomed into demonstrations as the Plowshare daydream was fading.

Government spending on Plowshare evaporated, forcing the AEC to rely more heavily on private-sector money. CER Geonuclear agreed to pick up most of the tab for Project Rio Blanco, a gas stimulation test near Rifle, Colorado. Rio Blanco planned to use three 33-kiloton devices placed vertically at depths of 5,838 feet, 6,230 feet, and 6,689 feet and exploded in sequence.

In theory, staggered blasts would fracture more rock and avoid the shockwaves released by a single 99-kiloton blast.

Rio Blanco was set off on May 17, 1973. However, the staggered charges left not one large chimney that held extractable gas but three underground cavities nearly impossible to reach.

The gas that could be collected did not contain tritium, but it was loaded with the far deadlier compounds cesium-137 and strontium-90.

The AEC’s relationship with industry foundered amid complaints by energy companies that the agency frequently botched its budgets, leading to higher than anticipated costs. The agency also dragged contractors through bureaucratic hoops, with as many as 300 regulatory bodies weighing in on any given project. Environmental opposition, besides generating costly lawsuits, made energy companies involved with Plowshare look like monsters.

After Rio Blanco, the project’s final detonation, Plowshare starved to death for lack of corporate interest and federal funding. The last AEC annual report to Congress mentioning Project Plowshare came in 1974, and by 1978 the program, after 27 tests involving 35 individual nuclear detonations, had been completely defunded. Despite all the data collected during that time, the AEC never quite grasped the most important lesson to be learned from Project Plowshare. Mankind’s desire to absolutely control the power of the atom outweighed his ability to do so. H OCTOBER 2020 37

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Sanctuary City

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Goading the Foe At Plymouth Congregational, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher staged mock “auctions” to raise funds to buy and free enslaved people.

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Abolitionist Brooklyn was a town ahead of its time

By Norm Goldstein

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O

n September 26, 1850, six days after President Millard Fillmore signed the federal Fugitive Slave Law requiring Americans to aid in the capture and return of runaway slaves, two deputy U.S. marshals arrested James Hamlet in New York City as he was working at his job as a porter. Hamlet, a runaway slave, had fled bondage in Baltimore, Maryland.

He had arrived in New York by train in 1848 and, with his wife and three children, had settled near Brooklyn in a township then called “Williamsburgh.” Distance conferred only the illusion of freedom. Hamlet’s owner, Mary Brown, dispatched slave catchers—her son Gustavus Brown, son-inlaw Thomas Clare, and a hired agent. In New York, the three presented documents to a federal official who ordered Hamlet arrested and, on the spot, held a hearing at which Hamlet was barred from testifying. The presiding officer agreed that Brown owned the Black man, ordered Hamlet shackled, and had the prisoner hustled aboard a steamship to Baltimore, where Brown put her returned human chattel up for sale.

The Hamlet episode marked the Fugitive Slave Law’s debut. The case emphasized the difficulty of implementing that much-disputed measure,

enacted to compel the return to slave states of runaways in free states. Previously, slaves who reached a free state could claim freedom. Hamlet’s pursuer, Thomas Clare, told the New York press the price of his prisoner’s freedom was $800. On September 31, more than 2,000 members of Black civic organizations and a “slight and visible sprinkling of white abolitionists” packed the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Church Street in Manhattan; a pass of the collection plate met Brown’s price. Back in New York, Hamlet appeared October 5 at a “great mass meeting of colored citizens” at City Hall Park in Manhattan. He told the crowd that when he was to go on the block in Baltimore would-be purchasers heard warnings to avoid buying him because “he had tasted liberty, and therefore could never be held again in chains.”

Hamlet’s experiences and those endured by

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A Long Time Coming James Hamlet’s capture debuted implementation of the Fugitive Slave Law and boosted Brooklyn as a center of resistance.

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other runaways showed that amid Northerners’ gathering resentment toward Southern domination on the slavery question, the Fugitive Slave Law would be impossible to enforce. In particular, Hamlet’s odyssey illustrated the existence of a thriving community of activist free Blacks in Brooklyn who, along with white abolitionists, were mobilizing to resist slavery.

By 1850, Brooklyn’s 200,000-plus population included one of the country’s largest free African-American communities. Blacks had been present there since the 1600s, initially as slaves brought to Bruijkleen, an agricultural district of Dutch colony New Netherland. Slavery had been part of life in New England since the earliest colonial times, first with Indians forced into labor. Considered too dangerous to roam the colony, Native American prisoners of war were often traded to West Indies sugar planters in exchange for enslaved Africans. Farmers in Bruijkleen bought slaves because, thanks to prosperity at home, no Hollanders were desperate enough to indenture themselves, contracting to work for a stipulated number of years in exchange for passage, provisions, and shelter.

The Dutch let slaves own property, serve in the militia, and testify in court, but during winter and fallow times slaves had to fend for themselves, growing or hunting their sustenance.

Dutch slaveowners could grant long-serving or deserving slaves “half-freedom” with colonial officials’ approval—and an annual payment to the colony by the half-free individual. When England conquered New Netherland in 1664, royal proprietor James, duke of York, wanted to recast his acquisition as a European settlement instead of a trading outpost. To attract Englishmen who were used to having servants do the heavy farm work, the duke encouraged the purchase of African slaves. By 1746, more than 9,000 adult slaves were living in New York, giving the colony the largest slave population north of Maryland. The slave ranks in Kings County townships Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, New Utrecht, Brookland, and Bushwick rose from 14 percent in 1698 to 21 percent in 1738. For large landowners, the ranks of slaves owned served as status symbols. A typical small farmer owned one or two men for field work, and perhaps a female domestic. Most local bondsmen lived in small households and had to support themselves while living crammed into cubbyholes, attics, and outbuildings.

Owners could profit by renting slaves with desired skills. This made it worthwhile to train

On the Record Top, a slave auction on the New York docks. Below, a 1751 bill of sale for “one certain neger girl named Anna” for £38 to Bruekelenite Jan Lefferts.

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In a decade Pennington went from Bondage on a grain farm to pastoring congregations in New York.

Others joined the community through flight or a casual form of freeing. Britain had outlawed the old Dutch “half-freedom” but allowed owners to dispose of elderly or sick slaves by turning them loose. Runaways from rural districts on Long Island and further north in the colony often disappeared into New York’s crowded

streets, as did slaves fleeing bondage elsewhere. Some stowed away aboard ships leaving Southern ports. Others walked from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. During the Revolutionary War, British troops occupying Long Island, Manhattan, Staten Island, and New York counties east of the Hudson River offered rebel-owned slaves freedom if runaways reached Crown territory. This policy quadrupled the local fugitive slave population. With Britain’s defeat, American loyalists expatriated to Crown territories like Canada and the Bahamas, sometimes taking along their slaves. Other Blacks stayed behind, now free.

Northern colonists held thousands of slaves until the Revolution, when pressure from a lingering Puritan ethos, the rhetoric of independence, and a dearth of cash crops requiring gang labor prompted many owners to manumit bondsmen. In the 1780s, most northern states’ legislatures mandated gradual emancipation, a trend to which New Jersey and New York, more dependent on slavery, were late. New York’s elite formed the New York Manumission Society in 1785. Pressed by that body, the state dropped a requirement that owners assure good behavior by manumitted persons and made it even easier for owners to free slaves who were of diminished

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bondsmen at coopering, blacksmithing, and carpentry, and, as New York became more urban, baking, tailoring, tanning, shoemaking, and goldsmithing. When not toiling for their masters, slaves could seek paid work; many did hire out, accumulate savings, and buy their freedom, a pattern central to the growth of free Black communities in New York City and its neighbor across the East River whose name had undergone anglicization to “Brooklyn.”

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Freedom Bound Escaping enslavement in Maryland, Jim Pembroke took the name James W.C. Pennington and moved to Brooklyn.

The Rev. Samuel Cornish

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utility. Not until 1799 did the New York legislature pass a gradual emancipation bill promising enslaved children born after its enactment freedom at age 28 for men and 25 for women.

In Brooklyn, enslaved and free Blacks found work in shipyards, at rope walks—expanses on which workers made rope by intertwining strands of hemp as they strode along—and with waterfront sugar refineries, adding racial diversity to those businesses. Black sailors crewed coastal vessels. Black women worked as domestics, midwives, laundresses, and cooks.

Blacks lived in downtown Brooklyn, in the vicinity of the Fulton Ferry landing, and in a waterfront neighborhood, later called Vinegar Hill, that stretched from Bridge Street to the navy yard. Residents established mutual aid organizations like the African Woolman Benevolent Society, founded in 1810, to provide burial and property insurance, business loans, and charity. Black congregations erected churches: Concord Baptist, Siloam Presbyterian, Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal, and others. All became important social centers whose pastors preached saving money to help family and friends buy freedom. New York abolished slavery on July 4, 1827.

In the 1820s, individual Quakers in southern Pennsylvania and in an enclave in North Carolina began assisting slaves fleeing bondage, an effort that evolved into the Underground Railroad. Never the structured web of “stationmasters” and safe houses portrayed in late 19th century abolitionist historiography, the Railroad did shelter and direct northbound runaways,

who generally had white help until they had traveled well into free territory. “Conductors” were mostly fellow slaves and free Blacks willing to risk hiding fugitives and forge passes and manumission papers. New York City was a scene of pause for runaways who were heading to Syracuse, Albany, and other upstate cities known as hubs of support. Immigrants hostile to Blacks crowded Lower Manhattan; to the familiar phenomena of Catholic-Protestant rioting and anti-immigrant violence, New Yorkers added strings of white-on-Black attacks. Brooklyn, insulated by the unbridged East River, offered Blacks a degree of refuge.

Jim Pembroke, enslaved on a wheat farm near Hagerstown, Maryland, was a skilled mason and blacksmith. His owner thought him insolent and caned him for his attitude. In 1827, Pembroke ran. Detained by white men when he could not produce the papers they demanded, he slipped away in the dark. Near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a helpful toll collector sent Pembroke to William Wright, a Quaker farmer and Underground Railroad figure. Pembroke stayed six months with the Wrights. Learning to write, reading the Bible, and being introduced to arithmetic and astronomy, he took the name James W.C. Pennington, probably to honor a prominent Quaker family, and took off to Brooklyn.

A lawyer hired Pennington as a coachman; he used his wages to engage tutors. Starting in 1830, Pennington represented Black Brooklyn at yearly conventions of prominent African-Americans. In 1834-35, Yale Divinity School grudgingly let Pennington audit classes. He pastored a number of New York congregations, including Manhattan’s Shiloh Presbyterian Church, and became a leading Black writer and intellectual. During the Civil War, he recruited volunteers for the U.S. Colored Troops.

Headhunter New York City Recorder Richard Riker steered the “Kidnapping Club,” a group of white men dedicated to keeping Blacks in and returning them to bondage.

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Methodist minister Charles Ray helped found the new york vigilance committee, devoted to thwarting slave Catchers.

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Other black activists in and around Brooklyn led the antislavery movement and helped fugitives escape. Charles Ray, born free in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1807, studied at Wesleyan College in Connecticut until fellow students’ racist protests drove him away.

He farmed and learned boot making, and in 1832 opened a shoe store in New York. Ray, ordained a Methodist minister, joined the American Anti-Slavery Society at its formation in 1833. He pastored two predominantly white Congregational churches and for a time edited The Colored American, an abolitionist weekly. In 1835 Henry Ward Charles B. Ray Ray helped found the New York Vigilance Committee, devoted to foilBeecher ing slave catchers. Chapters formed in Williamsburgh and Brooklyn.

Principals included black ministers Samuel Cornish and Theodore S. Wright, both of Manhat- Riker, mainspring of the “Kidnapping Club,” a tan’s Shiloh Presbyterian, and the fiery David cabal of judges and constables who cooked up Ruggles, the committee’s leader 1835-40. The slapdash hearings and whisked Blacks, some Vigilance Committee raised money, printed and legally free, into bondage. Ruggles broke with the distributed pamphlets and broadsides, hired committee over tactics and complaints that he lawyers to argue cases on behalf of individuals diverted committee funds for his own use. snatched by slave hunters, and sheltered hundreds of northbound fugitives. Ruggles prowled Black Brooklyn grew. In 1832, chimney sweep the wharves offering aid to runaways. State law William Thomas bought and subdivided 30 restricted to nine months the term that South- acres on Hunterfly Road in Flatbush, well away erners bringing slaves into New York could from whites. He sold building lots to fellow Afrimaintain ownership of that human chattel. Rug- can-Americans. Nearby, in 1835, using profits gles made note of such visitors, confronting sla- from his boot-blacking manufacturing comvers who had overstayed their time. He often pany, “colored” Henry Thompson bought 32 struggled with New York City Recorder Richard parcels of land from the estate of slaveholder

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Follow the Drinking Gourd An 1872 lithograph portrays a group of 28 refugees fleeing north from Cambridge, Maryland, during antebellum times.

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John Lefferts, for whom Lefferts Avenue is named. An 1837 recession generally crushed American land prices.

In 1838, Thompson sold Virginian James Weeks acreage on which the buyer, a free Black stevedore, started what he called Weeksville, a development soon boasting more than 800 residents, a school, two churches, an orphanage, a cemetery, and abolitionist paper The Freedom’s Torchlight.

Weeksville and kindred Brooklyn neighborhoods attracted fugitive slaves who took up residence and helped others move along to New England and Canada.

The 1840 passage of a state law requiring a jury trial when slave catchers sought to arrest runaways discouraged bounty hunters from roaming New York in search of truant bondsmen. However, in 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act overrode such state “personal liberty” laws. The federal law barred aid to runaways and required Americans to help return fleeing slaves to owners. Violators risked a $1,000 fine and six months behind bars.

The law provided bonuses and promotions for officials remanding fugitives, heightening tension. “Let parents and guardians, and children take warning,” wrote The Emancipator, an abolitionist paper. “Our city is infested with a gang of kidnappers—Let every man look to his safety.”

Strictures against helping runaways fanned abolitionist fervor in white Brooklyn congregations like Plymouth Congregational Church on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights. Plymouth Congregational’s pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, was a younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of antislavery pot-boiler Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beecher railed at slavery from the pulpit and used donations to buy Sharps rifles he sent to free-soil settlers battling pro-slavery forces in the Kansas Territory. He was a masterful publicist. “Fugitives make their appearance continually, pleading with pathos deeper than words, for shelter and aid in their flight,” Beecher said. “I will shelter them, conceal them, or speed their flight; and while under my shelter, or under my convoy, they shall be to me like my own flesh and blood; and whatever defense I would put forth for my own children, that shall these poor, despised creatures have in my house or upon the road.” Runaways hid in the cellar beneath the Plymouth sanctuary. Upstairs, Beecher held fundraisers and “auctions” at which bidders donated money to buy freedom for runaways who were under the church’s care.

Plymouth Congregational was one of many Revenue Enhancer Brooklyn-based Underground Railroad “sta- Fees charged to run tions.” Others were in Weeksville, Carrville, and display advertisements Williamsburgh. In downtown Brooklyn, occu- identifying runaways pants of a house at 233 Duffield Street built into and offering rewards for their recapture, their residence a secret passage for use by runbelow, brought newsaways. At 227 Duffield, abolitionists Thomas and paper publishers a reliHarriet Truesdale built a tunnel that may have able source of profits. led to nearby Bridge Street Church. Rescued fugitive James Hamlet kept a safe room in his home on South 3rd Street.

At his home on Smith Street, James Pennington harbored runaways. So did wealthy white merchant Lewis Tappan, in his four-story brownstone at 86 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights (see p. 48). One escape in which Tappan participated grew out of a highly publicized international

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effort to free an extended family enslaved in Maryland—a story that was rendered particularly compelling by the family’s size and its female children’s vulnerability.

Ann Maria Weems was born into slavery in Rockville, Maryland, in 1840. Her father, John Weems, bought his freedom from, then worked as a laborer for, Rockville planter Adam Robb. After Robb’s death, his daughter sold John Weems’s enslaved wife, Arabella, and seven of their offspring to innkeeper Charles Price. Daughter Stella, 17, escaped to Geneva, New York. To endrun the Fugitive Slave Law, prominent minister Henry Highland Garnet, who had fled slavery himself, adopted Stella and took her with his family to England. Speaking to antislavery groups there, Garnet often told the Weems family story. John Weems tried hard to free his family, traveling to New York to importune the well-known abolitionist Charles Ray for assistance. Ray enlisted Garnet to raise money in England to help the family.

Garnet worked the press and, with Quakers Henry and Anna Richardson of Newcastle, raised $5,000 for a “Weems Ransom Fund.” Ray and Lewis Tappan were to get the money to John Weems. Weems returned to Maryland. Charles Price, the planter who now owned Weems’s wife and children, had moved Arabella and their five sons to a slave pen in Washington, DC, where he sold them for $3,300 to an Alabama planter. Price kept daughters Ann Maria and Catharine Weems.

Abraham Lincoln and fellow members of the new Republican Party hesitated to join calls to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act, but it became clear through the 1850s that no court in the North was going to prosecute any Northerner

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Dragged to Freedom Wearing men’s garb and boldly departing Washington, DC, at the reins of a carriage, Ann Maria Weems used Brooklyn as a waystation on her flight to Canada.

The abolitionists had sent John Weems enough money to buy one daughter. Catharine was older and at greater risk of sexual predation; her father bought her freedom. Abolitionists in the South stood ready to help Weems find and free his other loved ones; the challenge was getting money to the agents. In Alabama, a representative bought Arabella and the two youngest boys for $1,650. Three sons remained enslaved there.

Quaker attorney Jacob Bigelow of Washington, DC, offered Price $700 for 13-year-old Ann Maria. Price demanded $1,000. Bigelow returned to Washington without the girl. For a year, Ray and Tappan argued, with Tappan accusing Ray of misusing money from the ransom fund. On September 23, 1855, Ann Maria, now 14, stole away to Bigelow’s home in Washington. Two months later, an escape plan took form demonstrating Underground Railroad operatives’ ingenuity. On November 25, sympathetic physician Ellwood Harvey parked his carriage on Pennsylvania Avenue NW in front of the White House.

Ann Maria Weems appeared, hair shorn and tucked beneath a man’s cap.

Wearing a livery driver’s uniform down to the bow tie, the girl took the reins and steered the carriage north to Philadelphia.

From there, Underground Railroad conductor William Still got William Ann Maria to BrookStill lyn. Through CharlesRay, Lewis Tappan and wife Sarah used $63 from the ransom fund to buy her clothes and a carpetbag. Ann Maria and Black minister Amos Freeman rode openly by train to Buffalo. On December 1, the pair crossed the Niagara River into Ontario, Canada. Ann Maria reunited with relatives in Dresden, Ontario. She stayed in Canada the rest of her life.

In 1856, Tappan and cohort bought Ann Maria’s brothers Joseph and Adam for $1,700.

The same sum went to free the oldest Weems son, Augustus, in 1857. Usually a 22-year-old bondsman fetched more, but Augustus had tuberculosis. He died within a year.

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Stepping Up An 1888 print recalls the rumpus occasioned on a New York street when slave catchers attempted to seize a runaway.

for aiding fugitive slaves. In the Midwest and New England, the Underground Railroad was operating in the open. In New York City, where businessmen and politicians feared alienating Southern business partners, especially those in the cotton, tobacco, and rice industries, which were dependent on enslaved workers, the Railroad ran in deep secrecy. When slaveholding states seceded and civil war began in 1861, Brooklyn counted fewer Confederate sympathizers than New York City; many Brooklynites enlisted in the Union army. Several early volunteer Union regiments grew out of New York State militias, including the 14th Brooklyn Regiment, which Henry Beecher’s flock at Plymouth Congregational adopted as its own. Brooklyn contributed much to the Union effort, including the construction of the ironclad USS Monitor at Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint. Women of Beecher’s congregation made bandages, knitted socks, and sewed uniforms for “the Plymouth boys.”

At Watson’s Tobacco in Cobble Hill, black Cigar Rollers made more than caucasian counterparts, leading to a riot by white workers.

History mainly remembers New York City’s 1863 Draft Riots. That disturbance eclipsed an incident in August 1862 at Watson’s Tobacco Company in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The factory’s Black cigar rollers, many of them former slaves, were making $14 a week. White laborers, mostly Irish, made $10 a week. A Saturday night stare-down between white and Black Watson’s workers escalated into a fight. A

rumor circulated that Black men had “insulted” white women. On Monday morning, August 4, five Black men and 20 women and girls were working at the cigar-rolling factory when 400 whites stormed the building. The workers barricaded themselves in on the second floor. One Watson’s Tobacco Company employee, Charles Baker, a Black man, was beaten severely.

Police rescued Baker, who was arrested for striking an officer. Rioters, some yelling “Kill the Black sons of bitches!” and wielding pitchforks, tried but failed to torch the factory. Police arrested eight whites. Charges against Baker were dropped. In court, the defendants argued that they were standing up for their rights.

The Draft Riots started in Manhattan Monday, July 13, 1863, two weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg. By the end of the first day rioters, infuriated at being conscripted to fight for emancipation, turned their fury on any Black person they could catch. Whites lynched 11 Blacks. At least 119 people died in the riots and in a fire that destroyed the Colored Orphan Asylum. Twenty percent of Manhattan’s Black population fled the island by ferry for the relative safety of Brooklyn. Many never returned. H OCTOBER 2020 47

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Arthur Tappan

Lewis Tappan

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Tappan Brothers: Silk and Defiance

Manhattan merchant Arthur Tappan disliked conversation. The shy, bad-tempered, headache-prone silk importer hunched at a table writing correspondence while younger brother and partner Lewis, slightly less waspish, supervised their 20 clerks. Arthur Tappan & Co., in the early 1830s one of America’s richest business enterprises, sold fabrics and fashion accessories from Europe. Deeply religious, the brothers bankrolled the abolitionist movement of the 1830s and ’40s against their bankers’ wishes.

“You demand that I shall cease my antislavery labors…or make some apology or recantation,” Arthur Tappan declared. “I will be hung first!”

The Tappans, born in 1786 and 1788 in Northampton, Massachusetts, grew up in the Calvinist Congregational Church. They gave up Calvinism to join the 19th-century evangelical movement, which preached the importance of good works. Arthur started his New York business in 1815.

As he prospered, he donated money to train ministers and missionaries, promote temperance, distribute Bibles, rescue prostitutes, and educate Black youths. He initially supported an American Colonization Society campaign to expatriate free Blacks to Africa.

However, upon learning that Liberia’s American sponsors intended to sell the colony’s inhabitants rum and firearms, Arthur quit the society.

Lewis, a talented manager, joined Arthur’s firm in 1827 as a partner. In 1830, the brothers met Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, an encounter that launched their lifelong antislavery crusade.

In 1833, the Tappans and Garrison formed the American Anti-Slavery Society, outraging businessmen and newspaper editors in New York City who supported the South, along with poor white workers fearing competition from freed Blacks. Mobs disrupted the society’s first two Manhattan meetings. On July 9, 1834, toughs rifled Lewis Tappan’s house on Lower Manhattan’s Rose Street and burned his belongings in the street.

At the Tappan & Company store the next night, rioters began battering the door. Inside, Arthur Tappan passed out guns.

“Steady, boys,” he said calmly. “Fire low. Shoot them in the legs, then they can’t run!” Soldiers dispersed the mob.

In 1835, Arthur Tappan poured money into Oberlin College in Ohio in return for a pledge to admit “promising” African-Americans, treat them equally with whites, and become the first integrated college in the United States. That year the brothers funded a campaign to mail abolitionist pamphlets to churches around the South. Learning that a load of those materials had arrived at the Charleston, South Carolina, post office, a crowd broke in and seized the mailbags. Three thousand people cheered as rioters burned the pamphlets and hanged Arthur Tappan in effigy.

Southern newspapers offered rewards to anyone who kidnapped Arthur to be tried for inciting slaves to rebel. Dismissing the threats, Arthur commuted daily from his Brooklyn Heights home to his Manhattan store.

Told he had a $50,000 price on his head, Tappan said, “If that sum is placed in the New York Bank, I may possibly think of giving myself up.”

In truth, the Tappan brothers considered Blacks inferior to whites.

Arthur Tappan once sat in a church pew with a mulatto minister; mortified by the ensuing public outcry, he vowed never to do so again. Nor did he ever hire a Black man for any job but porter. Lewis disparaged Black abolitionists and Underground Railroad leaders, saying he had never met a Black man who could be trusted with money.

On December 16, 1835, fire raced through downtown Manhattan’s commercial district, south of Wall Street. The blaze destroyed 650 buildings, including Tappan & Company on Hanover Square. Black neighbors had enough time to transfer some of the Tappans’ inventory to a safe warehouse before the building and contents, including $500,000 in notes from creditors, burned. Tappan & Company went bankrupt in 1837.

To cover debts, Arthur Tappan cut back his charitable giving. The com-

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in 1859 sold the business to Robert pany limped along for a few more years before folding.

Burning Downtown Graham Dun. The outfit thrives In 1840, the American Anti-Slavery Society broke apart.

Brooklynites watch in December 1835 as a fire today as Dun & Bradstreet Inc. The conservative Tappans believed the Constitution proconsumes 650 buildings Privately, the Tappan brothers tected slavery but thought they could end the practice by in Lower Manhattan, continued their antislavery work, appealing to Southerners on moral grounds. William Lloyd including Tappan & Co. and prepared to violate the FugiGarrison’s wing of the society believed the Constitution to headquarters. tive Slave Law. Lewis Tappan, who be illegal and that only political upheaval would eradicate had moved to Brooklyn Heights, slavery. Garrisonians demanded the North secede from the Union and re-form in a federation mandating equal rights for all. The last occasionally helped Black leaders including the straw was when the radicals, flouting convention, elected a woman to the Rev. Amos Freeman hide and transport fugitives society’s business committee. The Tappan brothers and 300 adherents on the Underground Railroad. Arthur stabled a formed the conservative American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. horse near the Susquehanna River in PennsylIn the early 1840s, his health fragile and his fortune gone, Arthur withvania for fugitives’ use. drew from public antislavery activity. Lewis stepped up: In 1840, 52 AfriBy the late 1850s, overshadowed by a younger generation of radical abolitionists, the Tappans cans kidnapped in what is now Sierra Leone took over the slave ship mostly were supporting Christian missions to Amistad and ended up in New Haven, Connecticut, charged with piracy and murder. Lewis Tappan organized the escapees’ defense. It took two Blacks in the West Indies. Lewis got Arthur out years and two trials but the “Amistads” were freed. of several financial jams. Arthur died July 23, 1865, at age 79. Lewis, who spent his last years Lewis Tappan resigned from Tappan & Co. in 1841 to organize a credwriting an admiring biography of his brother, it-reporting firm, the Mercantile Agency, which for a fee researched small- died June 21, 1873, at his Brooklyn home. He was town merchants seeking capital. Lewis, determined to enforce morality in 85. His funeral took place at Henry Ward the marketplace, recruited a far-flung network of analysts including a Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church. young Abraham Lincoln. Many “correspondents” were fellow abolitionists. Beecher spoke but the service was conducted by “The M[ercantile] Agency is now quite popular here,” Lewis wrote in 1843.

Amos Freeman, Lewis Tappan’s Underground “It checks knavery, & purifies the mercantile air.” Lewis retired in 1849, Railroad compatriot. —American History senior editor Nancy Tappan is a distant cousin of insisting that bankrupt brother Arthur, by then working for a nephew, replace him. In 1854, Arthur sold his interest to Benjamin Douglass, who Arthur and Lewis Tappan.

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Tinseltown Turnabout When Hollywood and its hoopla encountered a new set of hoops

By Daniel B. Moskowitz Before the Fall Riding high on revenues from ticket sales at the theaters they owned in profusion, the studios were cruising for a legal bruising, and got one.

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n 1948 a perfect storm of legal troubles and technological change combined with an economic slump to take down Old Hollywood—the storied principality of fiefdoms ruled by men who had started out in the flicker era and which

by World War II’s end controlled every aspect of the motion picture business. After they had dominated popular entertainment by offering a steady diet of escapism through a depression and a global war, the eight studios that made up the American movie industry suddenly found conditions souring. Summing up the industry’s state at year’s end, New York Times reporter Thomas F. Brady wrote, “Profits are down, employment is down, morale is down.”

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The system’s central concept was that studios should control all levels of the industry. Studio executives believed that they alone knew what moviegoers wanted, not only at home but in Great Britain and other increasingly important overseas markets. To enforce their control, studios locked directors, writers, and actors fitting their particular visions into long-term contracts. Those contracts often ran for seven years. Top stars like Bing Crosby and Claudette Colbert might have made as much as $400,000 per annum, but had to take whatever roles their masters offered, often grinding out three shows a year. Creating as the contract structure did ensembles of personnel on

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major-market movie houses. Among the majors, Paramount far and away owned the most movie theaters, with 1,395. Twentieth Century Fox had 363, Warner Brothers 501, Loew’s (M-G-M) 135, and RKO 109. Studio-owned theaters comprised only 17 percent of the country’s picture houses, but they were the gems, together accounting for 45 percent of cinema ticket sales. The arrangement often relegated independently owned theaters to second-run status, with films coming to independent screens only after they had been shown at a theater with better connections. In “Hollywood” meant the Big Five and the Little Three. Paramount, which 38 sizable American cities, the studios owned recently had edged past Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to take over the lead posi- every first-run house. tion in the Big Five, was trailed by 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., and The studios had the muscle to ensure that RKO—the smallest of what were considered the majors. The Little Three— screens they did not own played their output, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists—completed the roster. Lesser stu- charging operators a slice of each ticket purdios, like Disney, releasing one or two animated films a year, and Republic, chased. Key to the studios’ relationship with with its stream of westerns starring Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and their ilk, independent theater owners were such practices had virtually no impact on the overall industry profile. as “blind selling”—forcing indies to book films At the time movies pervaded American life as a cultural phenomenon sight unseen—and “block booking”—tying access and a pillar of the economy. Members of a typical family religiously read to a feature much in demand to booking a passel newspaper columns and entire magazines devoted to gossip about movie of studio-selected also-rans. This stipulation stars and at least once a week took in a film, most often on Sunday, which consigned indie theater owners to showing, usufor most theaters represented 25 percent of weekly revenue. In 1948, Holly- ally for at least a week, dogs no one wanted to wood’s peak year, that habit worked out to a weekly average of 90 million see, such as Mourning Becomes Electra. That paying customers spending more than $1.7 billion to buy tickets. Films dreary 1947 version of Eugene O’Neill’s resetting accounted for more than 90 percent of Americans’ outlay on of Greek tragedy cost RKO $2.3 million entertainment, a category that included everything from The Moviegoers to make and took in a paltry $435,000 1930s Americans live theater and concerts to bowling and shooting pool. at the box office. The studios even colrelied on inexpensive Studio moguls at the Big Five had taken care to build an luded to set ticket prices, refusing to cinema tickets to economic structure in which their enterprises not only pro- take their minds off allow theater owners to experiment at duced films but owned and ran the most prestigious the Depression. pumping up box office by offering discounts on historically slow Mondays and Tuesdays and regulating whether and when theaters could show double features or stage prize nights and other promotions.

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Coming to Your Neighborhood Nabe Studio-owned cinematic palaces offered not only a respite from reality but an unsubtle reminder of who was supplying the glitter and the glamour.

both sides of the lens accustomed to working together, the system lent each studio a distinctive style: Warner’s urban gangster grit, M-G-M dramas’ rampant Anglophilia, the loose-limbed jitterbugging of Universal’s teenarama musicals.

But the system also imposed moral conformity.

To pacify bluestockings and fend off federal censorship, the studios composed and adhered to a detailed production code that defined subjects, images, and vocabulary to avoid.

Studios operated a host of related businesses.

For instance, in addition to its movie theaters, Warner Bros. had 108 subsidiaries, including a film processing lab, recording studios, booking agencies, a manufacturer of movie house furnishings, and no fewer than ten music publishers. However, Mae D. Huettig, who in 1944 undertook the first economic analysis of the studio system, discovered that theater ownership was the true font of studio profits.

The system and its vertical integration were calling out for dismantling by federal trust busters. Hollywood’s antitrust problems came to a head in 1948 thanks in part to the industry’s ear-

lier success at fighting off those problems.

the studio system and its blatant vertical integration were calling out for dismantling by federal trust busters.

In 1938, the U.S. Justice Department had filed a suit aimed at abolishing monopolistic practices in the motion picture industry. Goal one was forcing the studios to divest theaters they owned. However, political pressure, amplified by the twin Depression facts that the industry was sagging and that a strapped citizenry was relying on inexpensive nights at the movies as a rare distraction from glum times, softened the Justice approach.

Government lawyers settled that suit by engineering a consent decree. In that deal, moviemakers made minor promises: to stop forcing theaters to book studio shorts along with studio features, to limit “block booking” packages to five pictures, and to allow independent theater owners to see films at special screenings before booking them. Another provision in the decree came to bite Hollywood: unless studios demonstrated “a satisfactory level of compliance” by November 1943, the government could reinstate its suit. The studios slacked on compliance, and the government went back to court, this time vowing to stick to its principles.

United States v. Paramount went to trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in October 1945. The 20-day trial resulted in a federal judgment that OCTOBER 2020 53

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the studios had “unreasonably restrained trade and commerce in the distribution and exhibition of motion pictures and attempted to monopolize such trade and commerce.” Judge Henry W. Goddard ordered an end to block booking, blind selling, and minimum ticket prices and told studios not to expand their theater ownership. Judge Goddard let studios keep theaters they already held. Invoking a 1903 statute allowing antitrust cases to skip mid-level appeals courts, both government and the studios appealed the decision directly to the U.S. Supreme Court,

In their May 3, 1948, ruling, the justices upheld every restraint District Court Judge Goddard had imposed on studio film distribution. In what studios interpreted as a big victory, the High Court left intact the lower court’s finding that studios could keep their theaters. “I think the ruling means the end of the divestiture threat,” said an optimistic Joseph Schenck, chairman of 20th Century Fox. That reading may have been fanciful. The opinion, by Justice William O. Douglas, roundly criticized Judge Goddard’s reasoning on divestiture, calling his logic in refusing to order the studios to shed their theaters both “deficient” and “obscure.” The justices ordered Goddard to revisit the question—a directive whose tone strongly suggested the studios should be forced to sell their theaters.

Five months after the Supreme Court spoke, the Justice Department sent a memorandum to the Big Five—Paramount, M-G-M, Fox, Warner, and RKO—stating that the government was willing to forgo a new trial and to end the litigation with a consent decree, provided the studios agreed to

separate film production and film exhibition.

The studios refused.

“We have taken years to accumulate the company assets we have, and we will fight to hold on to them,” Harry M. Warner proclaimed.

That defiant unity was fleeting. Within days, maverick millionaire Howard Hughes, who had just paid $8.8 million for RKO Pictures, accepted a government deal. On November 8, 1948, Hughes signed a consent decree ending the government’s case against his studio by agreeing to sell RKO Theatres Corp.

With its 109 movie houses, RKO was a fairly minor Hollywood player but Hughes’s surrender made it apparent that cinematic vertical integration was over. All doubt evaporated in February 1949, when Paramount signed its own “divorcement” decree. At the other big studios, moguls eventually heeded lawyers’ advice that restructuring was inevitable. Warner and Fox consented to divest in 1951; M-G-M, in 1952.

Loss of their cash-cow theaters could not have hit studios at a worse time. Already in 1948, the majors had laid off around 10 percent of their 30,000 employees. Moviegoers were becoming more discriminating, sapping studio profits.

Total industry domestic pre-tax income for 1948 was $110 million, down from $151 million in 1947 and $218 million in 1946. A poignant indicator:

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the loss of cash-cow theaters to a supreme court ruling could not have hit hollywood and the studios at a less propitious time.

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Glamour Gimmick Hoping to lure back viewers increasingly drawn to TV, studios seized on technology like Cinerama, a wide-screen method.

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the annual Academy Awards fête in Hollywood, historically a luxe affair at the 6,300-seat Shrine Auditorium, had the forlorn air of a downscaled event in 1948, taking place in the 1,010-seat theater owned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Hollywood was fishing for new profit sources amid a sea of troubles.

From a boom fueled by consumer demand unleashed by peace after years of wartime rationing and shortages, the American economy suddenly slumped. Recession officially clamped down in late 1948, with GNP dropping 1.7 percent and unemployment peaking at 7.9 percent.

Even folks with disposable income were clutching their greenbacks.

Department store sales fell 22 percent, and an afternoon or evening at the movies was no longer a routine pleasure but an outlay undertaken warily. On an average week in 1949, 70 million Americans went to the movies—22 percent fewer than in 1948 and the fewest since 1934, the nadir of the Depression. A San Francisco theater chain reported business off 33 percent; a Philadelphia chain was down 45 percent.

Compounding the drop in domestic ticket sales, Hollywood’s overseas revenue was in a nosedive, as governments acted to ensure that scarce foreign currency went for necessities rather than frivolities. In Great Britain, American films accounted for more than 80 percent of movies shown. But in 1947 Parliament slapped a 75 percent tax on income from foreign—that is, American— Family Affairs families reporting drops in attendance films and in 1948 decreed that no more than half of the Small-screen stars varying between 13 percent and 84 pertotal playing time of movies in Britain could be films Lucille Ball and Desi cent. Even the lower figure was “no conmade outside the U.K. France joined Britain in curbing Arnaz, top, went into solation,” said Marcus Cohn, a lawyer producing and never the earnings American studios could take home. hired by the Theatre Owners of America looked back as the for advice on the TV dilemma. “The surTV juggernaut Along with having to pitch once-subservient indepen- rocked Hollywood veys were unanimous as to the trend,” dent theater owners on booking their films and to work studios to their cores. Cohn warned. Starved for revenue, stuto get cash-strapped consumers to buy tickets, the studios sold TV stations broadcast rights to dios had to contend with television. Once, in the words of producer Sam- vintage movies, strengthening the rival medium. uel Goldwyn, “little more than a gimmick used by tavern-keepers to To survive, Hollywood had to reinvent itself, induce patrons to linger over another drink,” TV quickly evolved into an offering viewers something they could not get in-home urban luxury and then achieved ubiquity. In 1948 America on the little screen. The display of the most popreached the million-set mark, for the studios an ominous tally. In 1950, 3.8 ular mid-priced TV set measured 10 inches cormillion American homes had a TV; in 1951, 10.3 million. In 1947, American ner to corner; even a top-of-the-line set selling manufacturers had produced 179,000 sets; that output ballooned in 1948 for $695 went only 15 inches diagonally. The to 975,000, in 1949 to 3 million, and in 1950 to 7.5 million. In 1948, televi- content was of a piece. “Television is taking over sion transmission began in Boston, Richmond, Atlanta, and New Orleans. the trivia,” said director Howard Hawks, implyIn 1949, Houston’s and Miami’s first television stations went on the air, ing that movies had to get better and go bigger. bringing the domestic station count to 77; the Federal Communications Commission had in hand 311 applications for stations. That antitrust loss proscribed movie studios from acquiring TV stations; the FCC formally announced a “strong presumption” that any business found to have been a monopolist would not be “qualified to operate a broadcast station in the public interest.”

Why should families spend shekels at the neighborhood theater to watch a routine crime drama or mildly amusing comedy when right in their living rooms they could watch Martin Kane, Private Eye and The Goldbergs and the parade of stars on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town? Applicants were telling bankers they could keep up payments on loans to buy TV sets by skipping trips to the Bijou. Surveys on TV ownership’s impact on moviegoing produced wildly different results, with movie-going OCTOBER 2020 55

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and present, Cinerama features were never going to be more than novelties. But the system did show that gigantism sold. In 1953, 20th Century Fox debuted CinemaScope, showing images 2.66 times as wide as they were high, almost double the standard boxy ratio. Paramount followed with VistaVision. A brief fad surged for films projected in overlapping images for which viewers wore special glasses to experience a three-dimensional effect.

Color, spectacle, and sex lured viewers away from TV and back into theaters, but the market clearly could absorb far fewer pictures than the volume that had sustained the studio system. In 1945, Paramount produced 25 features; a decade later, that annual total was 10. The studios began distributing films made outside the system.

When RKO in 1957 sold its production facilities to TV stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who

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The moguls understood “quality” to mean an overwhelming opulence that made the television programming of the day look like summer stock.

Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 extravaganza Samson and Delilah embodied the gambit: yes, a leaden script delivered woodenly by Victor Mature and Hedy Lamar in the title roles, but also enormous sets, ravishing costumes, and armies of extras, all rendered in vivid Technicolor—as trade publication Boxoffice put it, “the most prodigious spectacle ever conceived.” The recipe worked, drawing stay-at-homes off the sofa and into theaters. Samson and Delilah took in $11 million at domestic box offices, well more than twice the ticket sales of that year’s No. 2 film, the M-G-M World War II epic Battleground, and more than any film had ever made except for Gone With the Wind and The Best Years of Our Lives. Samson and Delilah cost around $3 million. Hollywood followed up with such Biblical extravaganzas as 1951’s David and Bathsheba and 1956’s 3-hour-and40-minute The Ten Commandments. But extravaganzas required advance planning and heaps of money, not a template a studio could impose on even a significant portion of its annual output.

However, pieces of the template could work. For instance, color. Color TV was a hothouse flower many years from mass adoption; all those millions of teeny sets were receiving broadcasts in black and white. Hollywood could paint the screen with a vivacity accentuating the little box’s drabness. Tactically, studios had reserved color film for musicals and historical films featuring extensive pageantry; only one feature in five was in color. The format was expensive; color film’s technical challenges added roughly 30 percent to production costs. Happily for Hollywood, the wizards of the lab and the camera were overcoming those challenges just as home television adoption was ballooning. By the early 1950s, Hollywood was filming 51 percent of its features in color.

Of course, beyond color Samson and Delilah and ilk had spectacle. Not every production was able to feature a Philistine temple collapsing, but Hollywood could wallop moviegoers with wow-inducing grandeur. The most dramatic innovation was Cinerama, designed as an immersive experience. Based on wartime aerial gunner training technology, Cinerama synchronized three 35mm projectors to deliver an image across a huge 146° arc.

Sandals to Suavity When the system debuted in Manhattan in Samson and Delilah’s 1952, The New York Times reported, “people sat camp spectacle did back in spellbound wonder as the scenic proboffo box office, as did gram flowed across the screen. It was really as a smooth caper flick that earned Cary though most of them were seeing motion picGrant $700,000-plus. tures for the first time.” Expensive to produce

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Goldwyn read the market the same way. “Serious producers know that only by increasing the quality of their pictures can they meet the ominous problems raised by declining box offices,” he declared.

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Change Makers Clockwise from left, Hollywood hits of the 1950s reflected and refracted dramatic shifts in the way that studios commissioned, cast, and promoted films like A Streetcar Named Desire, From Here to Eternity, and 1955’s Marty.

intended to film their popular situation comedy on the premises, it was clear that Old Hollywood was dead. The studios gave up the control that had underpinned their style of operation. Top stars and directors freed of long-term contracts could and did negotiate project-by-project deals.

As independents, popular actors coaxed studios into forking over ownership shares in their films’ profits. To star in Paramount’s 1955 To Catch a Thief, Cary Grant insisted on 10 percent of the film’s receipts. That one venture earned Grant more than $700,000, nearly double what the contract system had paid top stars to make three pictures a year.

Moguls’ narrow reading of public tastes also had to go. Television was programming some intelligent and engaging dramas, but most of its schedule was family-oriented and superficial. The marketing imperative to offer at the movies content TV could not show—and a 1952 Supreme Court decision outlawing state censorship boards—led filmmakers to push for relaxation of the industry code’s taboos and enforcement got increasingly lax.

An audience was waiting for A Streetcar Named Desire and From Here to Eternity and Pickup on South Street—films clearly aimed at adults looking for a measure of sex and streetwise dialogue—and Hollywood noticed.

The independence stars were exercising was mirrored among other creators. Companies formed by producers and directors offered studios limited but still potentially lucrative opportunities as distributors. As early as 1948, director Alfred Hitchcock, seeking artistic autonomy and economic muscle, established Transatlantic Pictures, shooting the murder drama Rope as if in a single take, a mold-breaking technique no studio would have stood for. Also in 1948, actor Burt Lancaster formed a production company that over 15 years produced 21 films distributed by United Artists. The list included Trapeze, whose $7.3 million North American box office take made that film the third highest earner of 1956.

An even more significant marker of the New Hollywood was the Lancaster company’s Marty, anointed best picture at the 1955 Academy Awards. This small, sweet romance about a working class not-so-young couple starring overweight, pug-faced Ernest Borgnine was the antithesis of Old Hollywood glamour. H OCTOBER 2020 57

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Coming Out Catholic in Colonial Maryland

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The Puritans weren’t the only sect seeking freedom to worship in North America

By Rick Boyd

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New Perspective A post-facto illustration shows the bluffs on which the arriving English made use of a village abandoned by the Yaocomaco Indians.

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The new colony’s emphasis on religious tolerance didn’t spring solely from idealism on the part of Cecil Calvert, who with his family established and essentially governed Maryland for most of the 1600s as a business enterprise.

Cecil Calvert sank every penny he had, and then some, into Maryland. He and his kin saw tolerance as a practical way to keep the peace.

Robert Wintour, an early settler of the colony, embraced Calvert’s vision for a new society, which Wintour dubbed the “Maryland designe.” The attempt at creating and maintaining a distance between religion and politics lasted only briefly and the Calverts had to struggle to keep the colony free of sectarian turmoil, but in time the founders of the United States adopted the principle. In the shorter term a high-stakes tug of war pitted Catholic colonists supported by a royal grant to Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, against a stubborn English Protestant community headed by William Claiborne, who had settled the region prior to the Catholics’ arrival.

Stepping into History In an idealized image of the 1633 landing the Calvert party parleys with the resident Yaocomaco.

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n 1633, 13 years after the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower to establish Plymouth Colony, another band of would-be settlers from England boarded a ship named Ark and set sail from the Isle of Wight. Accompanied by the supply vessel Dove, Ark and its complement headed for Chesapeake Bay, on North America’s mid-Atlantic coast.

The travelers intended to develop a colony called “Maryland” on territory carved from the existing Virginia colony.

English law had propelled some Pilgrims across the Atlantic seeking freedom to worship as they pleased. The same restrictions animated Maryland’s founders, who were Roman Catholics and whose goals included establishing a colony that separated state and church—for its era, a revolutionary thought. Nearly 150 years before the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protected religious freedom, Maryland colonial law, in a limited, imperfect, and impermanent way, codified the principle of freedom of worship.

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Cecil Calvert the land grant his father had requested. As the second Lord Baltimore, Cecil intended to do as his father had, balancing faith and fealty to the crown. In settling Maryland, Cecil Calvert assured the king, the Calverts were aiming to enlarge England’s empire in North America, not create a Catholic colony.

Cecil Calvert organized the party of about 150 men and women that would sail the Atlantic. As the crews of Ark and Dove were making ready, Lord Baltimore, who would not be going along— he never did visit his Maryland holding—ordered his managers and his brother Leonard, the colony’s governor, to sidestep religious divisions: “His Lordship requires that they be very careful to preserve peace and unity amongst all the passengers on Shipp-board and that they suffer no scandal nor other offense to the Protestants, whereby any just complaint Cecil Calvert’s business plan for Maryland called for a Coming to Terms diversified economy—farming, lumbering, fishing, fur trad- Upon arriving, Leon- may heereafter be made, by them, in ing, and mining. Instead, Maryland’s early residents piggy- ard Calvert, perhaps Virginia or in England, and for that backed on a thriving Chesapeake tobacco trade that in green hat at top, end, they cause all Acts of the Roman Virginians had developed in the 1620s. Marylanders established ties with Catholique Religion to be done as priquickly grew to depend on what colonists called “sotweed.” native residents. Anvately as may be, and that they drew White, SJ, Within three years of arriving in the New World, settlers in instruct all the Roman Catholiques to below, was a chroniMaryland were financially addicted to tobacco, a habit that cler of the settlement be silent, upon all occasions of distook centuries to kick. By 1637, tobacco was literally the at St. Mary’s City. course concerning matters of Religion currency of the colony, officially designated a medium of and that the said Governor and Comexchange. Marylanders bought goods and services, settled debts, and paid missioners treat the Protestants with as much tabs to innkeepers in pounds of tobacco. Life in Maryland revolved around mildness and favor as Justice will permit. And planting, cultivating, harvesting, and curing tobacco, an arc punctuated in this to be observed at Land as well as at sea.”

January and February by the arrival of the tobacco fleet that brought The colony’s proprietor was aiming his instrucimported goods and carried the season’s harvest back across the Atlantic. tions not so much at the Protestants in its ranks Swings in the market shaped Maryland’s monocrop economy. When as at fellow Catholics, outnumbered 4-to-1 and tobacco prices plummeted in the late 1650s, landowners responded by growing more sotweed. They did this by improving production methods, and by working indentured servants and enslaved Africans harder.

Calvert’s investment, and his entire Maryland experiment, repeatedly encountered other obstacles. Twice the Calverts lost control of their colony to Protestants from Virginia. One of those foes, William Claiborne, feuded with Cecil Calvert for four decades, supporting armed insurrections and returning to England to ask the king in person that he repeal the charter that granted the Calverts some 12 million acres hacked out of Virginia.

Long before the Calverts had a claim in the New World, the Calvert clan, a noble Yorkshire family, had trod a careful line regarding the family’s Roman Catholic faith. Under Henry VIII, who founded the Anglican Church in 1534 to defy the Pope’s refusal to allow the king to divorce Catherine of Aragon, the Calverts were compelled to embrace Protestantism.

Decades later, under King James I, England again tolerated Catholics.

George Calvert, the king’s secretary of state, reverted to the Catholicism he had known as a child. George was also named baron of Baltimore, a district in Ireland. After King James died in 1625, George asked the monarch’s son and successor, King Charles, for a royal grant in the American colonies to be named Maryland to honor the king’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. Five weeks after George died on April 15, 1632, King Charles I conferred on OCTOBER 2020 61

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perhaps inclined to throw their weight around to keep from being bullied. The Catholic contingent included three priests, among them Rev. Andrew White, SJ, of the Society of Jesus, a Catholic order especially loathed by mainstream England.

The Calvert ships sailed in November 1633.

Word of Maryland’s establishment had reached Protestant Virginia, founded some 30 years earlier, by late February, when Ark and Dove, needing supplies, docked at Old Point Comfort, Virginia. The Catholics aboard were “full of fear lest the English inhabitants, to whom our plantation is very objectionable, should plot against us,” wrote Father White. Letters from King Charles and the chancellor of the exchequer to the Virginia colony’s governor “served to conciliate their minds,” the Jesuit priest noted. Resupplied, Ark and Dove sailed north to where the Chesapeake Bay met a river called “Potomac,” a European variation of its Indian name.

“At the very mouth of the river we beheld the natives armed,” White reported. “That night fires were kindled through the whole region, and since so large a ship had never been seen by them, messengers were sent everywhere to announce ‘that a canoe as large as an island had brought as many men as there were trees in the woods.’”

From Maryland’s earliest days, Cecil Calvert faced challenges, political and martial. As early as his twenties, William Claiborne, a surveyor

Leonard Calvert

born in the English county of Kent in 1577, had owned land and exerted political sway in Virginia. Seeking opportunities, Claiborne sailed north into the Chesapeake to explore and trade with natives. On the estuary’s largest island, across the bay from what is now Annapolis, Claiborne started a fur-trading post. He named the island for his native county and made a pile of money. By the time the Calvert expedition came to establish Maryland, which by royal charter included Kent Island, the settlement there was home to 30-some people. Claiborne, who already had joined other Protestants heaping scorn on the Calverts for their papish ways, chafed at the crown giving his hard-fought turf to Catholics.

Tacking up the Potomac through a tidewater landscape thick with primeval forest, Ark and Dove anchored off an island the passengers named for St. Clement. The new arrivals used this toehold as a base from which to spend most of March 1634 exploring and negotiating with natives. From the Yaocomaco tribe the colonists acquired, in exchange for tools and cloth, 30 square miles of land on the east bank of a Potomac tributary. On March 25, Father White celebrated that purchase with a Mass on St. Clement’s Island—the first Catholic religious service in the English-speaking colonies.

From St. Clement’s Island, the colonists moved to a location on their newly acquired parcel where the Yaocomaco coincidentally happened to be abandoning a hamlet of 10 to 12 cleared acres and two dozen habitations.

The English renamed the property St. Mary’s City and the river on whose banks it stood the St. Mary’s.

Across the river was a large Indian settlement to which the hamlet’s former inhabitants moved. St. Mary’s City, high and defensible, had freshwater springs. There were no swamps nearby. The Yaocomaco now had allies with guns, should hostile tribes raid, and were willing to show the new neighbors how to plant corn. The Maryland colKing ony began in amity—for a while.

Charles I The dispute with Claiborne over Kent Island festered. Claiborne refused to leave his settlement, which now included a plantation. He also refused to recognize Maryland’s claim to the island. His supporters fought with but could not defeat Calvert’s forces. While Claiborne was in England arguing his case, Maryland seized Kent Island, a takeover endorsed in 1638 by the Lords Commissioners for Plantations, a board in England that oversaw New World settlements. The Calverts offered to allow Claiborne to keep his trading post if he paid his new masters a percentage of the profits, further enraging him.

Events in England echoed in Maryland. In 1642, civil war, partly over religion, broke out between King Charles and Parliament. Cecil Calvert sided with the king, inflaming animosity between Protestants in Virginia

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NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES (2); NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Cecil Calvert

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: THE PICTURE ART COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; ART COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

George Calvert

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES (2); NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: THE PICTURE ART COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; ART COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

and Catholics in Maryland, who though a minority held most of the political power. Leonard Calvert went home to England to consult with his elder brother. In Leonard’s absence, the acting governor ordered the arrest of Richard Ingle, a Virginia tobacco trader who had been heard to say that Charles was no proper king.

Leonard’s stand-in charged Ingle with high treason for that imprecation. Ingle escaped and fled to England. With Parliament’s backing, he returned in 1645 to invade Maryland aboard the ship Reformation. Ingle and his men seized the colony, destroying or stealing prominent Catholics’ property in what came to be called “the plundering time.” Joining forces with Ingle, Claiborne retook Kent Island.

Governor Leonard Calvert fled to Virginia.

Ingle transported prisoners, including Father White, to England, where he accused the Catholics running Maryland of conspiring to disarm Protestants there. In London, Cecil Calvert worked to fend off efforts to revoke Maryland’s royal charter. In 1647, Leonard Calvert recruited a force of Maryland refugees and likeminded Virginians and took back Maryland, now depopulated and badly weakened. Leonard died that year; to replace him, Cecil appointed a Protestant, William Stone, and named other Protestants to colonial offices. Parliamentary forces now ruled England; Cecil was gambling that his Protestant agents would remain loyal to him and deflect anti-Catholic sentiment from him.

To rebuild and restabilize Maryland, Stone recruited Protestant immigrants, including Puritans, who were unwelcome in Virginia because of their criticism of what they alleged to be traces of Catholicism in the Anglican church. This policy left Maryland Catholics even more badly outnumbered. In January 1649, King Charles I, the Calverts’ royal patron, was beheaded. Lord Baltimore was determined to draw more people to Maryland by guaranteeing that residents could practice their religions. Cecil Calvert proposed and the Maryland assembly adopted the Act Concerning Religion, the legislative legacy of George Calvert’s desire to avoid religious strife in his colony and to protect the rights of Catholics. No one in Maryland “shall from henceforth bee any waies troubled, Molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof,” the law decreed, “nor any way compelled to the beliefe or exercise of any other Religion against his or her consent.”

The language about free exercise of religion set a precedent later enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

Nemesis English-born Virginian William Claiborne, who settled and named Kent Island, top, relentlessly fought to get Maryland returned to Virginia. A sea battle at Pocomoke Sound illustrated the depth of Claiborne’s enmity for Catholics and the Calverts.

William Claiborne

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In the 19th century, popular historians began to call the law Maryland’s Act of Toleration to emphasize that linkage. Though unique in English or colonial law of the time, the Act Concerning Religion, by modern standards, rings deeply restrictive. The law’s protections applied only to those professing belief in Jesus Christ and the Trinity. Non-Christians, and for that matter Unitarians, could find no succor in it. Anyone cursing the deity or denying the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus “shalbe punished with death and confiscation or forfeiture of all his or her lands and goods to the Lord Proprietary and his heires.” Anyone “uttering reproachful words” about the Virgin Mary, apostles or evangelists could be fined five pounds, and if they didn’t quickly pay up, they could be publicly whipped and imprisoned. On the other hand, anyone speaking to someone else “in a reproachful 64 AMERICAN HISTORY

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History at Hand

Maryland colonists’ first settlement is now an 800-acre museum, Historic St. Mary’s City. Features include archaeological digs, a replica Dove, a reconstruction of a brick chapel, and recreations of a tobacco plantation and a Yaocomaco hamlet. Living history exhibits are open mid-March through November. Historic St. Mary’s City is about 70 miles southeast of Washington, DC [hsmcdigshistory.org].

Nearby St. Clement’s Island Museum on the Potomac shore adjoining its namesake land mass focuses on early Maryland history and the state’s riverine heritage—[www.stmarysmd.com/recreate/stclements -island]. St. Clement’s Island itself, where the passengers and crew of Ark and Dove first landed, is a Maryland state park and is accessible by boat. Tour boats depart from the museum weekends in season. Sotterley Plantation, built about 1703, is open in season; visitors can tour the plantation house and gardens, as well as the places where enslaved African-Americans lived and worked [www.sotterley.org]. Point Lookout, a state park where the Potomac River meets Chesapeake Bay, includes a recreation of portions of a Civil War prison camp that held Confederate POWs [bit.ly/pointlookoutpark]. In Lexington Park, eight miles north of St. Mary’s City, Patuxent River Naval Air Museum chronicles naval aviation since World War II, with special attention to the military test pilots trained at Patuxent River Naval Air Station who became astronauts [www.paxmuseum.com]. —Rick Boyd

The Act Concerning Religion, enacted in part to entice Puritans to settle in Maryland, failed to stabilize the society Cecil Calvert was hoping to create, thanks once again to events across the sea. The Puritans governing England set up a commission, whose members included William Claiborne, “to reduce all plantations within the Bay of Chesapeake to their due obedience to the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England.”

Maryland was not specifically mentioned, but after bringing Virginia into line Claiborne in 1652 invaded Maryland and took control of the colonial government. He and his allies pressed Parliament to rescind Lord Baltimore’s charter for Maryland and to restore those lands to Virginia.

In 1654, Calvert’s Act Concerning Religion was replaced by a law that denied religious, economic, and political rights to Catholics and certain other Christians.

During this arduous time, Cecil Calvert was in London, hard at work protecting his holdings.

The fray came to include Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan lord protector ruling England, Scotland, and Ireland. To Cromwell Calvert emphasized his intent to restore and enforce the original 1649 Act Considering Religion, which appealed to Cromwell’s goal of protecting the right to worship other than at the Church of England. Cromwell in 1657 backed a treaty between Maryland and Virginia that returned control of Maryland to the Calverts.

Cecil Calvert recommitted his colony to religious tolerance—provided colonists respected his role as proprietor—and said that no law should be passed contradicting the Act Concerning Religion. During this period, the colony’s Protestant attorney general, Henry Coursey, attempted to prosecute individuals under the law.

Coursey charged the Catholic priest Francis Fitzherbert, SJ, with trying to force the Protestant wife and children of a prominent Catholic to attend his church. The Jesuit argued that the Act Concerning Religion protected preaching and teaching, and the court agreed.

In 1658, Coursey charged Jacob Lumbrozo, a Jewish physician and landowner who had immigrated from Portugal, with blasphemy, alleging Lumbrozo denied Jesus Christ’s divinity. Testimony indicated that Puritans had baited Lumbrozo into attributing miracles mentioned in the Bible to necromancy or sorcery and rejecting the

MARYLAND STATE ARCHIVES

manner” about religion risked a fine of 10 shillings, with half the levy to go to the target of the reproachful remarks, the other half to Cecil Calvert. No records are known to exist of any successful prosecution under the Act.

NORTH WIND PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; IVAN DOVIN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

MARYLAND STATE ARCHIVES

Resurrection by arguing that after the Crucifixion Christ’s Catholic King James II was disciples spirited his body away. For these ostensible deposed in 1689. Parliament utterances, Lumbrozo faced the death penalty. gave the crown to his daughter, But the case never came to trial. The colonial governor, Mary, and son-in-law William honoring the ascent of Oliver Cromwell’s son, Richard, to of Orange, both Protestants. lord protector, issued a general pardon that extended to Charles Calvert, in England at Lumbrozo, not only saving his life but preserving his citizen- The Sotweed Factor the time, wrote to Maryland ordership. The once-besieged physician got a license to operate an From early colonial ing officials there to recognize Wildays until the 2000s, inn, did business with Indians, and served on juries. liam and Mary as monarchs. That For two decades, the Act Concerning Religion worked as tobacco was a pillar message never arrived. Disgruntled intended to preserve the peace and discourage religious con- of commerce in what colonists used the lag in recognizis now St. Mary’s flict. Cecil Calvert died in 1675. His County, Maryland, ing the Protestant royals as a preson, Charles, became the third whose tercentenary text to revolt and seize the colonial Lord Baltimore and the colony’s was honored in a government. The colony’s new proprietor. When at 77 William 1934 stamp.

Protestant government established Claiborne made a last attempt in the Church of England as Mary1677 to regain Kent Island, King Charles II, land’s official religion through legislation nullifyinstalled in the 1660 Restoration, rebuffed him. ing the 1649 Act Concerning Religion. Charles Claiborne died shortly thereafter. In Maryland, Calvert lost claim to the colony conceived by his peace and prosperity in the colony that he grandfather and created by his father. By the inherited lulled Charles Calvert into compla- time Charles died in 1715, Catholicism in Marycency. A less politically savvy manager than land had been driven underground. The Calverts Cecil, Charles named primarily Catholics and got the colony back only after Charles’ son, BeneProtestant relatives of his family to colonial dict, the fourth Lord Baltimore, renounced his posts, feeding resentment among his enter- Catholic faith and became a Protestant. It took prise’s less affluent Protestant citizens and the Revolutionary War and adoption of the U.S. poising Maryland to be rattled again by rever- Constitution and Bill of Rights to guarantee freeberations from the mother country. dom of religion in Maryland again. H

POlitical tumult in England periodically played havoc with MarylandeRs’ affairs, to the point of undoing civil order in the colony.

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a new identity as advocate and activist. He became a founding member of the Mattachine Society of Washington—at the dawn of the homophile movement, the precursor to gay liberation, gay rights, and lesbian, gay, bi-, trans, and queer rights organizations—giving more than 100 speeches a year. If at times in Deviant’s War, Kameny seems to be everywhere, allying with the black freedom movement, New Left, lesbians, trans advocates—it’s because he is everywhere. Ubiquity had a cost.

He was often nearly destitute, his pantry so alarming to a veteran Mattachine Society member that she left bags of food at his door.

Deviant’s War serves two purposes: documenting American cultural shifts regarding sex and sexuality from the 1950s on and reminding us that the 1969 Stonewall Riots were not the only point of inflection in the

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The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America

By Eric Cervini Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020; $35

In these times of pronoun-fluidity, it’s intriguing to discover that the phenomenon and all its implications started with a U.S. government fixation on homosexuals as “sexual perverts.” Eric Cerveni, Ph.D., in The Deviant’s War, reminds us of that fact, of how far we’ve come, and of who made the progress possible.

Cerveni’s approach is paradoxical. To show how policy affects lives, he tells the story of a man whose life became inseparable from policy. Its outline is simple: In 1957, astronomer Franklin Kameny, a Defense Department employee, receives a summons. The Pentagon suspects him of being a homosexual and fires him. Kameny fights back.

Rather than a biography of Kameny’s personal life, Cerveni delivers a biography of Kameny’s struggle: a public fight to be reinstated to do work he loved in which he forged

DOUG HINCKLE, WASHINGTON BLADE

perfectly frank

Happy Warrior Kameny and friends celebrate Gay Pride Day in 1985.

struggle for LGBTQ rights. The past reaches back a long way, and Cervini travels far. His account of carefully researched and well-documented events—Kameny’s papers, at the Library of Congress, would, if stacked, stand six stories high—does not weigh down a compelling narrative of trials, tribulations, and Kameny’s ultimate success.

The Deviant’s War is a necessary reminder not only of the history that was, but of what could have been had people like Franklin Kameny not had to fight for the right to be themselves and instead had been able to focus on following their stars. —Carlos Schröder is a professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College

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DOUG HINCKLE, WASHINGTON BLADE

Where the lights Were Shining

Every city has a distinct backstory, but the story of St. Louis is unique. Set along the Mississippi near that river’s confluence with the Missouri, St. Louis has elements of each of the quadrants that define the United States yet belongs to none. As Harvard professor Walter Johnson writes in his new book, here is “a city that is, at once, east and west, north and south, the place where the various regional histories of the United States come together.” In 1870, that centrality led to serious consideration of relocating the capital there.

The St. Louis story is so compelling that, Johnson admits, it has inspired many “truly excellent” histories. But his tale begins much earlier than others—in the 12th century, when in the vicinity Native Americans maintained a settlement with 1,500 structures and 10,000 inhabitants. There, six centuries later, adventurers from New Orleans built the first westerly outpost of what would become the United States. In 1804 Lewis and Clark jumped off from St. Louis to map a path to the Pacific. All but 20 percent of the U.S. Army headquartered there. The population almost doubled between 1880 and 1900, when 22 rail lines converged there. The 1904 World’s Fair, which drew 20 million visitors, was staged concurrently with the Olympic Games.

“During the summer of 1904, St. Louis was not simply the hub of the nation’s western empire— it was the center of the world,” Johnson writes. For decades after, local industry prospered. As the mainspring of World War II production, St. Louis made everything from aircraft engines to K-rations to enriched uranium. Peace brought decline. The population shrank 13 percent between 1950 and 1960, and 17 percent more the next decade. Now 64th in population among American cities, St. Louis is one of only four to have lost more than 5 percent of its population since the 2010 census.

Johnson blames the St. Louis arc on capitalist greed and suppression by whites of Native Americans, then Blacks. There are other valid interpretations. The city has suffered from the constant westward shift of investment and population: California has 13 cities larger than St. Louis. And city government made disastrous decisions, such as separating the municipality from the surrounding county, forgoing tax revenue from prosperous suburbs. But Johnson unspools the history of St. Louis with such an impressive mix of scholarly detail and anecdotal liveliness that one need not buy his central thesis to find Broken Heart an enlightening read. —SCOTUS columnist Daniel B. Moskowitz is a lifelong visitor to the St. Louis area, home to aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends.

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

By Walter Johnson Basic, 2020; $35.

Airborne Visitors at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair watch a hot air balloon as it begins its ascent.

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Are We There Yet? The American Automobile, Past, Present, and Driverless

By Dan Albert W.W. Norton, 2019; $26.95

For more than a century, automobiles have embodied the twinned American yearnings for freedom and movement despite changing mores and an ever-encroaching regulatory system. Polymath historian and relentless gearhead Dan Albert celebrates the open highway’s appeal while extolling the virtues of oversight, documenting an arc from Americans’ bumpy courtship of the driving life to their wary romance with cars that drive themselves.

Albert crisply ticks through milestones, invoking Henry Ford’s “missionary zeal for low, low prices,” General Motors CEO Alfred P. Sloan’s interwar introduction of manufacturer-generated auto loans, and President Dwight Eisenhower’s concrete-laying, culture-changing federal highway construction program.

Albert, an advocate for regulating vehicle safety and emissions, builds his case to a crescendo when he discusses his hero Ralph Nader’s 1965 bestseller, Unsafe at Any Speed, and the public interest crusade—safety-oriented, yes, but also strong on fuel economy and environmental concerns—that Nader inspired. From there it’s a short hop to the fuel shortages of the 1970s and Albert’s assertion that mandatory fuel mileage standards and

safety equipment helped “save automobility from itself”—or at least neutralize doomy pronouncements that cars “destroy cities” and “make mass transportation impossible.” It turned out car makers could profit by designing vehicles that continue to grow more efficient, intelligent, and protective of occupants.

Albert argues that millennials who prefer car services to even merely learning to drive never mind buying and maintaining a car make autonomous vehicles nearly inevitable.

Yet skids and wrecks involving robotic creations by Elon Musk and other pioneers show the path of technological progress to be ridden with curves and stitched with cul de sacs. The great loss may be the pleasures of greasyhanded shade-tree mechanics. Tomorrow’s vehicles will need code slingers, not torquewrench artists.

Automation may realize multitasking Americans’ dreams of an automobilic Eden free of CO2 and crunch-ups, but this vision of paradise lacks the fully engaged feel that makes driving with a manual transmission heavenly.

—Historynet.com audiobook reviewer Ryan Paul Winn teaches at College of Menominee Nation in Keshena, Wisconsin.

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Motoring Headway

Pony Car A 1968 Ford Mustang Mach 1 graced an auto show in New York Coliseum.

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HOW MANY TIMES HAS THE DESIGN OF THE U.S. FLAG CHANGED? 27, 31, 36 or 40?

For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ MAGAZINES/QUIZ

ANSWER: 27. THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN PLACE SINCE 1960 WHEN THE FLAG WAS MODIFIED TO INCLUDE HAWAII, THE 50th STATE.

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Stairway To Heaven

Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World

By Alexander Rose Penguin Random House, 2020; $32

How can a book maintain its pace when readers know the story ends with a giant airship bursting into murderous flames? Alexander Rose shows how, detailing in Empires of the Sky an old, nearly forgotten battle for commercial supremacy between lighter-than-aircraft and airplanes.

Rose, he of the rousing Washington’s Spies, intertwines two timelines, first toggling to the American Civil War. In 1863, Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin, 33, rose briefly by balloon over Saint Paul, Minnesota. Zeppelin saw balloons’ military potential, Rose writes, but found flight “not proof of the wondrous capacity of mankind but a problem to be solved.”

Zeppelin obsessed for decades about that martial solution. In the early 1900s, his publicist, Hugo Eckener, grasped the civilian angle. Upon the count’s death in 1917, Eckener steered the Zeppelin juggernaut, which never delivered anything like a return on massive investment and government subsidies. Airships had one fact in their favor: in 40 years and millions of miles of commercial flights the big gasbags killed no civilians—until the Graf Hindenburg in May 1937.

Rose pairs Zeppelin’s story with that of fellow flight fanatic Juan Terry Trippe. Bitten by the bug in 1909 when his father took him to watch Wilbur Wright circle the Statue of Liberty, young Trippe trained as a bomber pilot. The Great War ended before he could fly unfriendly skies. Graduating from Yale and tapping rich classmates, he founded a series of businesses involving flight when planes were slow, noisy, filthy, dangerous, and good only for short hops. Finally, he established Pan American World Airways. In 1936-37, Rose notes, plane mishaps killed hundreds.

Trippe commissioned safer craft and seeded global routes by building fuel stops on Wake, Guam, and Midway islands. He kept his hand steady on the tiller from the 1930s through 1968.

Empires suffers from detail. Rose keeps Trippe from entering the story for about 200 pages.

Trippe and Eckener intersect infrequently. However, Rose marshals many sources, including some rarely cited or once unavailable, making this an authoritative account for anyone curious as to why the age of airships ended with a bang at Lakehurst, New Jersey. —Glenn Fleishman assembles tiny type museums in Seattle, where he writes about cryptocurrency, satellites, and Colonial encryption.

Odd Couple Franklin and Washington: The Founding Partnership

By Edward J. Larson William Morrow, 2020; $29.99

Dual biographies of Founding Fathers are in vogue.

Here one by a veteran historian succeeds, even though Franklin and Washington, the only Revolutionary figures of international reputation, had little in common.

Larson opens in May 1787, with cheers greeting Washington’s arrival in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention. He calls first on Franklin. Their topic, no one knows—but the scene leads into an engaging history. Born poor in Boston in 1706, Franklin got rich as a printer, retired, blossomed as a scientist, and became a power in Pennsylvania as the French and Indian War was starting.

Washington, 26 years Ben’s junior, was an impecunious Virginia aristocrat. His older brother helped engineer a military commission. He served with verve but most engagements were disasters and he resigned from the King’s army in 1758 before the tide turned. His travels brought him into Franklin’s orbit, but scholars have not turned up important business.

As Pennsylvania’s advocate, Franklin in 1757 went to England, his base until the Revolution.

Washington married Martha in 1759, becoming one of Virginia’s wealthiest men. He ran a huge estate and sat in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Franklin returned for good in May 1775 to join the second Continental Congress. Washington, already there, remained for six weeks before leaving for Boston to lead the army. Any noteworthy interplay between them is lost to history.

Franklin sailed to Paris in 1776 to press for French aid. He and Washington exchanged letters.

Returning in 1785 America’s second most popular figure, Franklin aligned with advocates of a stronger central government. At 81 and sickly, he made his greatest contribution to the 1787 Constitutional Convention: a closing speech endorsing what he admitted was an imperfect document. Washington mostly contributed his stature. In the most complete record of the proceedings, James Madison recorded no significant interactions between the two. Larson does not overwork the few links conjoining these epic lives but writes insightful biographies of each man that serve as good introductions. —Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.

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HIKE THROUGH HISTORY. Old 96 District has two Revolutionary War battlefields alongside living history and hiking trails.

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Pickett’s Notorious Hangings Soldier Voten Gives Lincol the Edge in 1864

Bloody Maryland Morning

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The Frontiersmen Who Couldn't Shoot Straight The Army vs. the Pioneers 1815–1845

BY GREGORY MICHNO GREGORY MICHNO herein offers powerful vignettes on citizen fraud and public wrongdoing through the decades of expansionism in the American West. It is at once a well-documented revelation on the fabled institutions that have invested common perceptions of our frontier past that every citizen should consider. Michno is an original thinker and one of our finest interpreters of western history, as this contribution well proves. —Jerome A. Greene, author of January Moon: The Northern Cheyenne Breakout from Fort Robinson, 1878-1879 GREGORY MICHNO ranks among the most original independent scholars at work AHP-201000-001 Old 96 District Tourism Commission 1-3Sq.indd 1 today on Western history and the American experience in general. In this frequently disturbing book, he eviscerates the notion of American exceptionalism by deconstructing the myth of the frontiersman. The supposedly self-reliant pioneers who facilitated civilization’s advance into the wilderness whined endlessly for government support and protection, and then turned on that helping hand whenever it attempted to curb their incessant efforts to defraud, dispossess, and slaughter their Indian neighbors. Michno pulls no punches in this scathing and well researched indictment, demonstrating that the worst aspects of contemporary culture have dwelt in Americans’ hearts since the birth of the republic. —Gregory J.W. Urwin, Temple University

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Recreated Recreation The Arboretum’s carefully restored and maintained acreage offers visitors an immersive encounter with the primeval tallgrass prairie.

…birthplace of ecological restoration, is an airy 1,260-acre recreated primal landscape tucked into the suburban sprawl encircling Wisconsin’s second-largest city. Before Europeans came, oak savannahs and tallgrass prairies dominated the area around what became Madison. By the 1920s, 99 percent of that expanse was city blocks and farmland. In 1932, civic leaders, hoping to reintroduce indigenous plants, persuaded the University of Wisconsin to buy 245 acres of horse pasture along Lake Wingra four miles from the state capitol. At the dedication, research director Aldo Leopold described a new mode of land stewardship that would recreate “a sample of original Wisconsin.” The Arboretum snagged more acreage during the Depression. To seed the world’s first restored prairie, Civilian Conservation Corps crews around the Dairy State retrieved native sod from unaltered hillsides and pioneer cemeteries. From those plugs Indian grass, pale purple coneflower, sugar maples, and other flora sprouted and have matured, managed by UW ecologists using controlled burns and other traditional land husbandry methods. The Arboretum offers unrivaled research opportunities for conservationists, native habitat for white-tailed deer and whistling woodcocks, and 17 miles of trails for hikers, runners, and Nordic skiers. —Jessica Wambach Brown, a writer in Kalispell, Montana, contributes regularly.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE UW-MADISON ARBORETUM

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum…

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