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Three Centuries of Print Power Enslaved Woman Sued for Freedom Unlikely Advocate for Native Culture Cold Cash: Tales of the Ice Trade

Trigger Happy Gangsters, bootleggers, and the roots of gun control

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44

AUGUST 2021

FEATURES 28 Putting Down the Gun In the 1930s, trigger-happy gangsters prompted America to impose controls on firearms By Joseph Connor

36

36 Ice Men How pioneering entrepreneurs helped 19th-century America keep cool By Larry C. Kerpelman

44 Cover Story American magazines show a nation taking form

By Steven Lomazow, MD, and Julie Carlsen

52 Preserving the Old Ways A New York socialite defended Native American culture against the federal juggernaut By Daniel B. Moskowitz

60 “Just to Say, ‘I Am Free”’ Amid the American Revolution, an enslaved woman sued for freedom—and won By J.D. Zahniser

DEPARTMENTS

52 60

6

Mosaic News from out of the past.

12 Contributors 16 Déjà Vu Chinese Americans went from being invisible to being dehumanized.

20 Interview The immigration debate still centers on Americanness and ethnicity.

22 American Schemers Louis Wigfall rates as America’s most obnoxious politician ever.

24 SCOTUS 101 The case that cut federal courts’ ties to Britain’s common law tradition.

26 Cameo Scientist Matthew Maury modernized navigation techniques but his racist politics have made him a pariah.

ON THE COVER: Alphonse Capone was a kingpin in a gangland coterie including Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, left, whose members blasted away at American propriety during and after Prohibition.

6 An illustration by pioneering magazine artist J.C. Leyendecker rang the price gong for this issue’s Top Bid.

66 Reviews 72 An American Place Guthrie, Oklahoma CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; THE READING ROOM/ ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; COURTESY AL BREDENBERG; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; COURTESY OF STEVEN LOMAZOW COLLECTION; COVER: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; ISTOCK/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN WALKER

AUGUST 2021

3

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:

Deep Divides Roiled 1918 Midterm Election Prohibition, women’s suffrage, and war fatigue—plus a pandemic—made the 1918 election a fight. bit.ly/1918ElectionIssues

Washington’s Final Hours Were Hellish A treasured myth portraying a peaceful death camouflages the cruel truth of the General’s last ordeal. bit.ly/DeathTakesWashington

Dear Al, Got to France Thanks to Little Ships Doughboy’s smuggled letter recounts troopship voyage with U.S. subchasers and German submarines duking it out. bit.ly/DoughboyEvadesCensors

Love history? Sign up for our FREE monthly e-newsletter at: historynet.com/newsletters

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AUGUST 2021 VOL. 56, NO. 3

MICHAEL DOLAN EDITOR NANCY TAPPAN SENIOR EDITOR SARAH RICHARDSON SENIOR EDITOR STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JON C. BOCK ART DIRECTOR CORPORATE ROB WILKINS DIRECTOR OF PARTNERSHIP MARKETING TOM GRIFFITHS CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT GRAYDON SHEINBERG CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT SHAWN BYERS VP AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT JAMIE ELLIOTT PRODUCTION DIRECTOR ADVERTISING MORTON GREENBERG SVP Advertising Sales mgreenberg@mco.com TERRY JENKINS Regional Sales Manager tjenkins@historynet.com RICK GOWER Regional Sales Manager rick@rickgower.com DIRECT RESPONSE ADVERTISING NANCY FORMAN / MEDIA PEOPLE nforman@mediapeople.com SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION: SHOP.HISTORYNET.COM or 800-435-0715 American History (ISSN 1076-8866) is published bimonthly by HISTORYNET, LLC, 901 North Glebe Road, Fifth Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 Periodical postage paid at Vienna, VA and additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER, send address changes to American History, P.O. Box 31058, Boone, IA 50037-0058 List Rental Inquiries: Belkys Reyes, Lake Group Media, Inc. 914-925-2406; belkys.reyes@lakegroupmedia.com Canada Publications Mail Agreement No. 41342519, Canadian GST No. 821371408RT0001 © 2021 HISTORYNET, LLC The contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written consent of HISTORYNET LLC. PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA

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Ancient Artistry Archaeologist Carolyn Boyd studies a drawing in Panther Cave in Seminole Canyon State Park, Comstock, Texas.

After a five-year campaign, official recognition came on January 13, 2021, for hundreds of little-known and endangered rock art and wall carvings that adorn the canyonlands of the Pecos and Devils Rivers along the southwest Texas border. The Lower Pecos Canyonlands Archaeological District is now a National Historic Landmark. That status does not confer federal ownership or funding but does honor cultural significance. Using sophisticated mapping, imaging, and digitization methods, a team from Comstock, Texas-based Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center documented at least 233 rock-shelter sites. Also

6 AMERICAN HISTORY

recorded in a database dubbed the Alexandria Project is a vast pictorial library of the region’s rock art. Having gathered 36 terabytes of pictures, giga-panoramas, and 3-D modeling of the sites, the center is developing a digital platform that will allow access to the public and researchers.

Created between 1,500 and 4,500 years ago, the images resemble rock art found further south in Mexico, showing a regional continuity of culture in myths and traditions.

These depictions were first extensively documented in the 1930s on painted linens sized to scale by Dallas artists Forest and Lula Kirkland. To expand on that work, Texas State University archaeology professor Carolyn Boyd founded the Shumla center in 1998, and she has interpreted the extensive panels as cohesive murals. The White Shaman mural, for example, narrates a widely shared creation myth of early Uto-Aztecan speakers long extant in Mesoamerica. (shumla.org.)

AP PHOTO/MICHAEL GRAEZYK

Pecos Panoramas

Black History Is American History Following clashes in 2017 over public monuments and the commemoration of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, architectural historian Brent Leggs of the National Trust for Historic Preservation founded the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Under that rubric, Leggs began a campaign to raise $20 million to preserve sites related to Black history in the United States. By the close of 2020, AACHAF had funded restoration of 150 sites, adding to roughly 2,000 sites focusing on Black history among 100,000 in the National Register of Historic Places. Among projects funded are the Irvington, New York, estate of America’s first female entrepreneur and billionaire, Madame C.J. Walker; Wilfandel, a women’s club in Los Angeles, California; the childhood home of musician and activist Nina Simone in Tryon, North Carolina; the home of musicians and composers John and Alice Coltrane in Huntington, New York; historic Mitchelville, a town on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, founded in 1862 and the first governed by free Blacks after the Civil War; Africatown, a town founded in 1866 by survivors of the illegal slave trade to Alabama; the Emmett and Mamie Till Interpretive

Nina Simone Childhood Home Center in Sumner, Mississippi; Mountain View Black Officers Club at Fort Huachuca, Arizona; and the Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama, where Martin Luther King Jr. stayed in Room 30 in the spring of 1963, using the room as a war room for meetings with fellow civil rights leaders. The Action Fund’s goals, Leggs says, are to recognize Black Americans’ contributions to the nation and to “reconstruct our national identity and balance public memory.” With a tag line “tell the full American story,” the fund strives to “preserve sites of enslavement but also sites of activism, achievement, and community.”

AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURAL HERITAGE FUND; HISTORIC ST. MARY’S CITY FOUNDATION

Fort Found Since 1971, researchers have been searching for the first European fort at St. Mary’s City, Maryland. Founded in 1634 by 150 immigrants (“Coming Out Catholic in Maryland,” October 2020), St. Mary’s Fort was the fourth European settlement in the American colonies, joining Jamestown (1607), Plymouth (1620), and Massachusetts Bay Colony (1630). On March 25, 2021, Historic St. Mary’s City announced that a study begun in 2018 using ground-penetrating radar and methods for spotting magnetic signatures in soil had pinpointed the fort’s footprint on a football fieldsized expanse south of what is now Historic St. Mary’s City. The historic district’s director of research and collections, Travis Parno, had funded the study with grants from the Maryland Historical Trust and the Historic St. Mary’s City Foundation. A brief excavation confirmed the find. Before 1634, the locale had been occupied by the Yaocomaco, a group affiliated with the Piscataway people. The findings will be incorporated into a new collaboration between Historic St. Mary’s City and the Piscataway. The partnership will include excavations at the fort and a nearby indigenous site, as well as interpretative displays and programming about native and colonial culture and life in this early phase of American history. (peopletopeopleproject.org)

AUGUST 2021 7

Quilt Cure

Even before the Jim Crow era, free blacks in the United States faced constraints on their movement and financial freedom. For example, although Delaware allowed gradual freedom for enslaved Blacks there, other state laws passed between 1790 and 1840 restricted free Blacks’ mobility and specified harsh financial penalties for Blacks convicted of minor thefts and other transgressions. Left unpaid, fines doubled, quadrupled, and could lead to years of re-enslavement. In defiance of state law, slave hunters frequently seized and kidnapped both free and enslaved Blacks for transport to cotton plantations in the South. Sandwiched geographically between states that were abolishing slavery and states that were maintaining the institution, the tiny state was the scene of great tension. A video on the topic by historian Miles Stanley is being streamed on YouTube by Delaware’s Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs. (bit.ly/DelFragileFreedom)

In 1960, a month before starting to plan the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, American operatives hatched but decided not to act on a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro’s brother Raúl, according to files obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The documents reveal U.S. intelligence agents offering a Cuban pilot $10,000 and aid in making a getaway to arrange a “fatal accident” to occur on a flight carrying the younger Castro from Prague, Czechoslovakia, to Havana. By the time Castro flew to Havana, the order had been withdrawn, and the pilot, unaware of the retraction, said later that he had had no opportunity to execute the plan.

The Fiasco Before the Fiasco Raúl Castro

8 AMERICAN HISTORY

FROM TOP: SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; MARYLAND CENTER FOR HISTORY AND CULTURE; THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Crow Before Crow

An exhibition at the Maryland Museum of History and Culture honors Dr. William Dunton, who introduced quilting as an activity to female psychiatric patients in hopes of cultivating a stress-reducing focus. Now recognized for developing occupational therapy around 1917, Dunton was adapting techniques he saw at home. His mother, a well-known quilter, sometimes cut up his school ties for silk scraps to weave into her works; even as a youth he recognized the soothing effect of engaging in repetitive assembly and creation. Dunton, who became a quilt scholar himself, organized four quilt exhibits and in 1946 published a volume, Old Quilts, on Baltimore album quilts—a hobby popular there 1840-55—and their social histories. Baltimorean quilters of that era worked with new fabric cut and stitched onto the background fabric in “panes” of elaborate patterns.

The exhibit, “Wild and Untamed: Dunton’s Discovery of the Baltimore Album Quilts” will be on view through September 2022.

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Miss Digital America The Miss America pageant is going digital.

The event, originally a “bather’s revue,” debuted in 1921 and was meant to encourage more tourists to visit Atlantic City, New Jersey. It has long been a barometer of American culture. Over time, for example, the contest added scholarships for the contestants, but barred women of color until 1968. Partnering with the Miss America organization, Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, is digitizing images of Miss America tiaras, ads, capes, program books, oil paintings of winners, judges’ records, and other ephemera. The items will remain in the possession of the Miss America organization, but scholars will be able to explore the digitized collection.

Kitchen Aid

10 AMERICAN HISTORY

TOP BID

$4,200,000 The original artwork for Beat-up Boy, Football Hero, a November 21, 1914, cover for The Saturday Evening Post by influential German-born artist Joseph Christian Leyendecker, sold at Heritage Auction on May 7, 2021, for $4.2 million. Before moving into magazine work (see p. 44), Leyendecker cut his teeth illustrating Bibles and book covers. He worked mainly for The Saturday Evening Post, where he set the bar for illustrators like Norman Rockwell. The cover was his oeuvre, and children a frequent subject. Viewed as the father of magazine design, he made the case for narrative simplicity: “A cover is a poster; and more related to murals, even sculptures, than to illustration. It should, therefore, tell its story on one plane, be without realistic perspective and distance....”

MISS AMERICA ARCHIVES; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; NEIR’S TAVERN

American Express and several partners set up a $1 million fund to aid small restaurants that have been operating for at least 25 years in a historic building or district and are threatened by the pandemic. Businesses owned by members of groups more profoundly affected by the pandemic were preferred. Recipients included Ben’s Chili Bowl of Washington, DC (est. 1958), Neir’s Tavern in Queens, New York (1829), Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans, Louisiana (1941), and Galloways Landing Bar and Restaurant in Boqueron, Puerto Rico (1981). Grants were for $40,000, plus more funds from Amex partners in the program. The National Trust for Historic Preservation will administer the funds.

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Over the Top

Lomazow

Carlsen Zahniser

Connor

In the April 2021 Interview, Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. shows serious bias when he takes a cheap shot worthy of neither American History nor of Princeton University. Revealing foundational, irrational feelings of hatred and victimhood, he says of Black Lives Matter activists “....the country responded to their sacrifice by vomiting up Trump.” This was disgusting, despicable, and totally unnecessary— an insult not only to a former President but also to the country that elected him.

William Ott Montgomery Village, Maryland

Con Conspiracy

Moskowitz

Kerpelman

Julie Carlsen and Steven Lomazow, MD, curated a recent exhibition of historic American magazines at New York City’s Grolier Club. This issue’s Portfolio (“Cover Story,” p. 44) presents some of their favorite covers from that show, which featured items from Dr. Lomazow’s collection of American periodicals. A leading expert on magazine history, he is a neurologist and a trustee of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. He blogs at MagazineHistory.blogspot.com. A librarian and former college fencer, Carlsen is a seller of rare books based in Jersey City, New Jersey, and coordinator of the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

Her website is etsy.com/shop/BooksforQuacks.

Joseph Connor (“Putting Down the Gun,” p. 28), a former newsman and district attorney, regularly contributes to American History and other Historynet magazines.

Larry C. Kerpelman (“Ice Men,” p. 36) writes from Acton, Massachusetts. His most recent article was “Blood and Sugar” (June 2021).

His website is LCKerpelman.com.

Daniel B. Moskowitz (“Preserving the Old Ways,” p. 52) writes the magazine’s SCOTUS 101 department and has contributed multiple features and book reviews.

J.D. Zahniser (“Just to Say, ‘I Am Free’” p. 60) contributes regularly from St. Paul, Minnesota. Her most recent article was “All Her Trials” (June 2021).

12 AMERICAN HISTORY

Richard Brookhiser claims Abraham Lincoln, in his “House Divided” speech, identified a “genuine conspiracy” by Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Stephen Douglas, and Roger Taney “to push slavery into American territories” (“Talking Conspiracy Theory Blues,” June 2021). The Constitution created and blended two forms of government—constitutional republicanism and constitutional slavery. We seldom hear about the latter, but the Constitution’s extension of the slave trade, allowance of slavery in states choosing to permit it, and recognition of slaves as property, along with inclusion of a fugitive slave clause, all screamed belief in the ownership of man. And the Constitution’s empowering institutional slavery by its design of a three-fifths compromise and an electoral college system cemented constitutional slavery into the federal structure. Pushing slavery into American territories, a process ongoing for decades before the 1850s, was not a conspiracy but a political maneuver by a major American political party. As for slavery, it took undemocratic use of massive physical force to rip it from the Constitution’s pages.

Michael Smiddy Plattsburgh, New York

Considered Consumption The category of conditions once known as “consumption” (“Half in Love with Death,” April 2021) likely included cystic fibrosis, a continued on page 14

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

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LETTERS continued from page 12 genetic disease. The term “cystic fibrosis” was coined in 1938 by pathologist Dorothy Andersen in presenting the first modern description. Individuals inheriting a mutated protein from both parents generally develop the disease and have limited life spans. Those inheriting the mutation from only one parent often are asymptomatic but can develop the disease or aspects of it.

Mark Shumate, MD Roswell, Georgia

Edifying but Off-Base Your edifying article on corporate regulation (“Everybody’s Business,” February 2021) misnamed the 1934 case overturning the holding in Munn v Illinois. It was Nebbia v New York.

David B. Sachar, MD, FACP, MACG, AGAF Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

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

A caption with “Full Control to Colonel Tom” (April 2021) is wrong. The photo shows Elvis Presley later than stated, probably in 1969, when he was making the film Change of Habit.

Ardell Young Rembert, South Carolina

Not Adding Up When did the “M” in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) become “Medicine” (“Civics Class Is a Good Idea,” Mosaic, April 2021)? And yes, civics class, social studies, or just American History should definitely be revived in our K-12 classrooms.

J.H. Thompson Ogden, Utah THE EDITOR RESPONDS: Thanks, all. We regret our errors.

Classicist’s Complaint I enjoy American History but bemoan its use of “cell-phone” words like “lit” and “merch.” Do not cancel-culture proper language.

Ann S. Pardini Fresno, California

14 AMERICAN HISTORY

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In March a 21-year-old man killed eight people, six of them Asian, at three Atlanta area massage parlors. Cops attributed the rampage to the White perp’s hatred of his own sex addiction, but local Asian Americans saw more: “xenophobia” aimed at them, as Georgia state Representative Bee Nguyen put it. The slaughter was the most savage of a year-long spate of incidents in which Asian Americans going about their lives were insulted, harassed, or beaten, often to the tune of rants about Covid: “You are Foreshadowing infected,” “You are the virus,” et cetera ad An 1880 broadside for nauseam. “We’ve gone from being invisible to the Workingmen’s being seen as subhuman,” wrote U.S. Repre- Party plainly laid out that organization’s sentative Grace Meng (D-New York). bias against the This story began over 150 years ago. presence of Chinese.

Until 1848 there were no Asians to speak of in the future- or then-United States. The Pacific was 7,000 miles wide, and imperial Chinese edicts forbade emigration. The Gold Rush changed that. Word of a “Mountain of Gold” in California spread to the British outpost of Hong Kong, and by 1851 25,000 Chinese had defied distance and the law to take a whack at the mountain.

These immigrants took up trades besides mining. Some 10,000

16 AMERICAN HISTORY

Chinese laborers helped build and blast the Central Pacific Railroad, the first transcontinental line’s western leg, over and through the Sierra Nevada range. Charles Crocker, the magnate who employed them, noted approvingly that his crews’ ancestors had built the Great Wall of China. As California turned to agriculture, Chinese labored on farms. In cities and towns, they ran laundries and restaurants.

By 1870 there were 63,000 Chinese in the United States, almost all in the west (see p. 20).

Typical Chinese immigrants’ jobs and enterprises paid meagerly, but required little or no investment, and offered greater return than farming stones in Taishan, the impoverished district adjacent to Hong Kong from which most migrants came. Initially, America’s Chinese were overwhelmingly male. Chinese fraternal organizations steered them to jobs and collected dues as a payback. Émigrés sent

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whatever surplus remained home to their families; many intended to return to China. Typical of sojourning immigrants, they kept to themselves, as much as possible holding to the old ways.

Chinese were a new race in the American mix, and their long queues, mandated by the ruling Manchu dynasty, made them doubly conspicuous. But so long as times were flush, they were welcome enough.

In his western travelogue Roughing It Mark Twain called the Chinese “quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and…as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.” Bret Harte’s ominously titled poem “The Heathen Chinee” in fact describes White card sharps being outsmarted by an Asian mark.

After the Panic of 1873 brought bad times, however, the good will vanished and the gloves came off.

By doing scut work for low wages, the Chinese, it was alleged, were depressing the American labor market. This was not always so: The Central Pacific paid White and Chinese workers the same $35 a month—though Chinese required no company-provided meals because they cooked for themselves.

The prime anti-Chinese demagogue on the West Coast was Denis Kearney, a San Francisco drayman who was himself an immigrant from Ireland. A fellow radical described him as “a man of strict temperance in all except speech.” In rabble-rousing stemwinders delivered at the Sand Lots, a vacant parcel next to City Hall, Kearney excoriated wealthy Whites, but always signed off with “The Chinese must go.” Kearney’s vehicle, the Workingmen’s Party of California, managed by 1878 to win a quarter of the seats in the state senate and hold a fifth of the state assembly.

Congress took note of burgeoning anti-Chinese sentiment. In 1880 the United States signed a treaty with China allowing Washington to limit inflow of Chinese laborers in a “reasonable” manner. In 1881 Congress showed what it saw as “reasonable” by approving a bill, sponsored

by Senator John Miller (R-California), slamming the doors for 20 years.

President Chester Arthur vetoed the measure early in 1882, saying that two decades was an unreasonably long time and “a breach of our national faith.” Congress countered with a ten-year hiatus. Arthur accepted. The one-decade ban was renewed in 1892 and in 1902 made permanent. An unanticipated effect of excluding Chinese was to create demand for Japanese laborers, triggering demands to exclude them, too.

Unlike China, Japan was a modernized militant nation that would take a formal rebuke amiss. So President Theodore Roosevelt brokered a tacit deal, “the gentlemen’s agreement,” whereby America agreed not to stop Japanese from coming here provided Japan agreed to prevent them from leaving there. It took a world war to relax the Chinese ban—a bit. In 1943, as a gesture to our ally Chiang Kai-shek, Washington allowed Chinese to trickle in at a rate of 105 persons per year (see p. 20).

The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 ended national immigration quotas. The gates opened wide. Chinese came in families, not just as lonely men, and from the entire Middle Kingdom, not just Taishan. A gauge of the new diversity: bland Cantonese restaurants serving made-in-America

An 1881 law illustrated congress’s definition of “reasonable” by slamming the immigration doors for 20 years.

18 AMERICAN HISTORY

dishes like chop suey were joined by eateries offering fiery dishes from Sichuan and elsewhere in China. The 2018 census estimated there to be over five million Chinese Americans. (The count of Asian Americans, meaning everyone with roots from Pakistan to the Philippines, topped 20 million.) The days when Chinese laborers competed for low-wage jobs are long gone; for years Chinese Americans have been known for the traits Twain enumerated, making them a “model minority”—i.e., one that causes no trouble. The reputation adheres to Americans from near (Korea) and not-so near countries (India). This is what Rep. Meng had in mind when she said that Asian Americans hitherto have been “invisible.”

Two recent developments have brought Asian Americans into focus. One is Covid, obtusely nicknamed by Donald Trump the “kung flu.” The evidence is powerful that the Chinese government systematically concealed what it knew about the origin and spread of the coronavirus from its own people and to the world. That is on the heads of Xi Jinping and cronies, not the heads of Chinese people there or anywhere else. It is nevertheless no surprise that the ignorant, the demented, and the criminal take the pandemic out on random Asian passersby—more so when the pandemic itself is overstressing police departments.

Meanwhile, the idea of unfair Asian competition has been revived, not in regard to sweat labor, but to high-end educational slots. Asian American students are overrepresented in elite institutions, from the California state university system to New York City’s specialized public high schools (Stuyvesant High School, the jewel in Gotham’s crown, is 74 percent Asian). Efforts to modify conditions, by boosting enrollment of underrepresented minorities, get pushback from Asian American voters and parents. California Asians broke heavily against Proposition 16, a 2020 ballot measure to allow reinstatement of affirmative action in state university admissions. Meanwhile on the opposite coast a group called Students for Fair Admissions has been suing Harvard since 2014, alleging the existence of tacit quotas that cap Asian admissions. The plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to rule on their case.

When people are oppressed by inner demons or by competition, fair or unfair, they look for scapegoats—and the most convenient are people who do not look like themselves. +

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WHO’S AN AMERICAN? Jia Lynn Yang, author of One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924—1965 (Norton, 2020), is national editor at The New York Times. Earlier, as an editor at the Washington Post, she was part of a team awarded a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Donald Trump and Russia.

Yang sees the issue of immigration as one of historic complexity that revolves around whether ethnicity should define what makes an American.

20 AMERICAN HISTORY

European immigrants surged into America in the early 1900s. The situation radically changed with the 1924 Immigration Act. What were that law’s key elements? The law created a national origins quota that for the first time ever imposed numerical limits on immigration to the United States. More important, the law effectively ranked immigrants’ countries of origin by desirability, with countries in northern and western Europe

BY RICHARD ERNSBERGER JR.

given far more slots than those in southern and eastern parts of the continent. The law banned any immigrants who did not qualify for naturalization, which overnight blocked most migration from Asia. The impact was dramatic: Immigration immediately plummeted. More immigrants entered the country 1900-1910 than between 1931 and 1971 total.

Immigration foes latched onto the racist idea that people not from northern or western Europe were inherently inferior—that they lacked the bloodstock to be Americans.

Anti-immigration forces touted the widely embraced field of eugenics, which was quite powerful in those days. Adherents believed that by scrutinizing human traits, good and bad, and supposedly showing that some traits

seemed more conspicuous in certain races, humanity could perfect itself by selecting for more desirable qualities. This now-discredited theory was embraced by some of the most elite members of Manhattan society and intellectuals who studied everything from economics to environmentalism.

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Eugenics proponents Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin were a favorite resource for anti-immigration politicians. Davenport and Laughlin had a laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where they amassed data ostensibly proving some races superior to others. They were interested in shaping American laws to Homeward Bound reflect their supposed discoveries. The House Immigrants arriving Immigration Committee treated Laughlin as a in New York from bona fide expert and used his research to jusGenoa, Italy, on the tify its national origins quotas. He believed that deck of the liner SS Conte Giancamano any immigrant who did not make good because of “insanity, feeble-mindedness, moral turpiat Christmas 1953. tude or shiftlessness” should be deported. “A moron can slip through the immigration sieve…pretty easily,” Laughlin testified to Congress, and later said, “Our failure to sort immigrants on the basis of natural worth is a very serious national menace.”

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was the first major reform in 40 years. What changed? That law eliminated national origins quotas set in 1924 and set the principle that immigrants would not be subject to discrimination based on race or ethnicity. Numerical caps remained, but the order in which people were admitted now depended on criteria other than race: did they have family here already, for instance, or special skills. At the same time, the law imposed the first cap on the number of immigrants from the Western Hemisphere.

That law’s family reunification provision had unforeseen effects. Supporters of reuniting families argued that doing so would help keep America more White. By 1965 few actual immigrants remained alive in the country; the idea was to control the ethnic makeup of later arrivals, presumably European. Instead it became a major source of immigration from outside Europe, as relatives here sponsored Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada) thwarted numerous tries at immi- siblings, who could then bring in their spouses gration reform. McCarran twice chaired the Senate Judiciary Commit- and children or parents, and so on. tee, in the mid-1940s and early 1950s. Most Senate legislation had to pass through that committee, giving him enormous power. He could The debate seems to have changed little in block any bill he didn’t like, in particular, attempts to overhaul the 100 years—or has the issue grown more immigration laws. McCarran was anti-communist and argued that any complicated? The arguments have stayed move to loosen immigration would allow radicals and spies to enter largely the same, and they center on whether America and undermine the nation to define Americanness by ethnicity from within. The 1952 McCarran-Walter (see p. 16). That said, the America of Act essentially reaffirmed ethnic quo2021 hardly looks anything like the tas, though it did allow for the natural1924 or the 1965 versions. The percentization of Asian immigrants, which age of foreign-born individuals in the until then had been largely banned. population is back where it was around the turn of the 20th century, but the President Harry Truman changed the array of countries from which people immigration narrative by advocating are migrating is so much larger. The that the U.S. take in a large number of multiculturalism is unlike anything post-World War II refugees. What we’ve seen, and well beyond what anywas his reasoning? Truman felt if the one who argued for or against these country had gone to all this trouble to laws could have imagined. That can fight and win World War II, it made no make the issue seem more complex, sense to leave Europe with an untenthough I’d argue this issue was never able refugee crisis. So he pushed for simple. The country had an open border the country’s first law addressing refsystem until about a century ago. Does it ugees, establishing a foundation we consider going back to that status? Or still rely on. Truman explicitly tied does it continue down the current road immigration to American foreign pol- “Spoiling the Broth” of visas, deportations, and an aggressive icy goals, arguing that to win the Cold As Congress was debating security force at the border? And if we do cap War and be a moral actor on the world immigration reform in 1921 a the number of people we admit, how does the stage, the nation needed to update its cartoonist opposed the country decide who’s worthy of admission and immigration laws to accommodate tradition of unlimited entry who isn’t? None of these questions strikes me in overtly ethnic terms. those who had been displaced. as easy for a democracy to navigate. +

AUGUST 2021 21

AMERICAN SCHEMERS

Wigging Out Firewater and Ire Big-mouthed and ill-tempered, Louis Wigfall never met an argument he couldn’t start. In April 1861, as a civilian, he bulled his way to Fort Sumter, above, personally demanding and obtaining the Union bastion’s surrender.

22 AMERICAN HISTORY

It’s quite possible that Louis Wigfall was the most obnoxious politician in American history.

Candidates abound, of course, but few were as arrogant, racist, quarrelsome, vituperative, and violent as Wigfall. He schemed for a decade to create a Southern Confederacy based on slavery. Then he turned his talents for truculence and treachery on his allies, inadvertently helping to divide and defeat the South.

Whether with fists, pistols, or his big, acerbic mouth, “Wigfall liked a good fight,” wrote biographer Alvy L. King. He seemed, King wrote, “always to need an object for his hostility.”

Born in 1816, Wigfall was a scion of two rich, powerful South Carolina clans. His father died when Louis was two. When his mother died 11 years later, the youth came into a sizable fortune. He squandered that inheritance in a decade of bourbon, brothels, and gambling. At South Carolina College, he earned a reputation as an excellent orator and debater, a thirsty barfly, and a prolific author of petitions demanding student rights. He was, as one history of the school put it, a “nightmare to faculty.”

Graduating in 1837, Wigfall returned to his

hometown, Edgefield, where his brother, a lawyer, had become a minister. Louis inherited his brother’s practice but found the life of the law a snore. It was, he wrote, “damned practical— unpoetical.” He thought politics exciting— especially when practiced Wigfall style.

In 1840, Wigfall’s rabid support for a gubernatorial candidate sparked a feud with the prominent Brooks clan, which backed someone else. Wigfall punched out one family member, fought duels with two others—catching a slug in one thigh—and, while arguing with a fourth about the duels, shot him dead. He was arrested for murder; charges were dropped.

A year later, Wigfall married his second cousin, Charlotte Cross. She, too, came from money, which, at least temporarily, allowed Wigfall to stave off bankruptcy—until his law practice collapsed. Even reliably risible South Carolinians were not terribly keen to hire hotheaded, gunslinging lawyers.

In 1846, the sheriff jailed Wigfall for unpaid debts and to pay creditors sold his possessions—a house, three horses, and four slaves.

Ruined, Wigfall fled to Texas with his wife

NIDAY PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; NATIONAL ARCHIVES

BY PETER CARLSON

WORTHPOINT

AMERICAN SCHEMERS and two children. His cousin, a former South Carolina governor, secured him a job with a law firm in Nacogdoches but Wigfall quarreled with the partners and started his own firm in Marshall. In 1849, he won a seat in the Texas legislature, where he began advocating secession and attacking the state’s hero, Senator Sam Houston, for supporting compromises to preserve the union. In 1857, as Houston was campaigning for the governorship, Wigfall dogged the other man, after every Houston speech seizing the platform to lambaste him.

Peeved, Houston mocked the pesky troll as a “murderer named Wiggletail.”

Getting sideways with a favorite son usually is not a path to political success, but in 1859— after John Brown’s failed insurrection at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, enraged slaveowners across the South—Texas legislators elected Wigfall to the U.S. Senate, on whose floor, by tradition, freshman members refrained from orating.

Wigfall gave not a fig about tradition, seizing every opportunity to demand secession and insult Northern senators in the Senate by day and in taverns at night.

During a two-day Senate harangue, Wigfall denounced Yankees. “They think a woman is a man with a petticoat on, and a Negro a black white man, that everyone is created free and equal,” he fulminated. When Northern senators proposed a Homestead Act to provide 160-acre parcels of federal land in the West to settlers, Wigfall denounced the program as a giveaway to freeloaders and suggested that a government willing to provide “land for the landless,” should provide “niggers for the niggerless.”

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Wigfall fought all attempts at saving the union, taunting Yankee senators that the South would whip them in war. “If we do not get into Boston before you get into Texas,” he yawped. “You may shoot me.”

Most Southern senators left Washington when their states left the union. Not Wigfall.

He remained in the Senate for 26 days after Texas seceded, collecting his federal pay while spending Confederate funds to buy rifles and recruit Maryland men for the rebel army.

In April 1861, Wigfall traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, eager to witness the attack on Fort Sumter. For two days he watched the bombardment, then commandeered a rowboat and ordered three slaves to paddle him to the fort while shells burst overhead. Dressed in frock

coat and top hat, he introduced himself to the Union commander as “Colonel Wigfall” and demanded the fort’s surrender. Surprisingly, the commander did so. Wigfall recounted his escapade to a London Times reporter, who wrote that the ex-solon appeared to be fortified by “Bacchus or Bourbon” and “decidedly unsteady in his gait and thick in speech.”

Wigfall served briefly as a Confederate general in 1861, setting up headquarters in a Virginia tavern. Perhaps under the influence of Bacchus or bourbon, he sometimes woke his troops late at night to fight Yankee soldiers who were nowhere to be seen. In 1862, he quit the army to serve in the Confederate Senate, where he grated on secessionist colleagues no less than he had on Yankees.

Convinced of his military genius, Wigfall felt obliged to critique Confederate generals’ shortcomings. He harped on General Braxton Bragg, Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood—even General Robert E. Lee, for his “blunder at Gettysburg” and his “utter want of generalship.” A master of vituperation, he also insulted cabinet ministers and fellow senators—and mocked George Washington for posthumously freeing his slaves, calling Washington “the mother of his country.”

But Wigfall’s main bugaboo was President Jefferson Davis. At first, Wigfall dissed Davis behind his back, sotto voce mocking the other man’s military judgment, his “stupidity,” his “vanity,” his “pigheadedness and perverseness.”

As the Confederacy began to crumble, Wigfall went public, proposing a bill to censure the president and calling him an “amalgam of malice and mediocrity.” In 1865, when Davis urged the Confederacy to make soldiers of slaves, Wigfall proclaimed his disinterest in living in any country “in which the man who blacked his boots and curried his horse was his equal.”

When Richmond fell, Wigfall shaved his beard and lit out for Texas carrying a fake ID. A year later, fearing the hangman, he sailed to London. He and Charlotte lived there for six years, sponging off her mother. He spent his days pursuing ever-elusive business deals and attempting to instigate a war between England and the United States—a war he thought would enable the South to rise again.

Wigfall returned stateside in 1872, and in 1874 died in Galveston, Texas, age 57. He left a record of noxious obduracy so stupendous that contemporary pols can never surpass it, no matter how hard they try. +

he felt duty-bound to critique confederate generals to the point of dissing even Robert E. Lee for an “utter want of generalship.”

Flipping Wigfall During the war the Union propaganda machine’s output included envelopes mocking Wigfall.

AUGUST 2021 23

SCOTUS 101

UNCOMMON LAW UNITED STATES V. HUDSON AND GOODWIN 11 U.S. 32 (1812) FEDERAL COURTS LACK POWER TO WEIGH CRIMES DEFINED SOLELY

BY COMMON LAW.

24 AMERICAN HISTORY

In 1776, 13 British colonies in North America declared independence from Great Britain. In 1783, the Crown signed the Treaty of Paris, acknowledging that independence. In 1789, the Constitution took effect, detailing how that independent country would govern itself. And in 1812, on the eve of a second war with Britain, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its own judicial declaration of independence.

United States v. Hudson and Goodwin stated that British criminal common law would no longer apply in federal courts of the United States. The justices were dumping the process used in tribunals since the first Britons settled in North America—a process still in place in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and some three dozen other countries. Under common law, legislatures can, of course, decree certain actions crimes, but an individual can be charged with a crime without having violated a specific law. Authorities can prosecute a person for a violation of a societal norm not set out in any statute but nonetheless generally recognized as unacceptable, or previously

declared by judicial fiat to be a crime.

The U.S. Congress, in its second year of existence, had passed the Crimes Act of 1790, detailing the most obvious criminal acts. The law largely confined its attention to crimes involving the federal government, such as treason; murder or manslaughter on the high seas, navigable rivers, or federal reservations; and perjury in federal courts. The list was extensive, but there were actions that lawmakers simply had not thought of. Prosecutors still were hauling into federal court defendants accused of misdeeds not specified in the 1790 law, such as piracy, and judges still were taking the cases under common law. For instance, in 1793, a three-judge panel at a federal court in Pennsylvania OK’d the prosecution of a man for serving on a French privateer that captured British vessels, though no American law imposed an obligation of neutrality in battles between those European nations.

But the practice was generating increasing unease amid debate over the validity of jailing or fining a person for an act Congress had not

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

BY DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ

SCOTUS 101 addressed, or one considered a crime only because of British tradition.

Justice Samuel Chase went public with those doubts in 1798, in the opinion in a case involving builder John Worrall’s attempt to bribe the U.S. commissioner of revenue so Worrall could land the contract to build a 55-foot lighthouse off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

Worrall actually wrote a letter to the commissioner declaring that in return for getting the contract he would give the commissioner half of his estimated £1,400 profit.

Before the Burning Under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal The Senate side of the cases first went to local courts that consisted U.S. Capitol in 1800. of a local judge and a circuit-riding justice.

In 1812, this wing was Chase heard the dispute in Philadelphia with where the U.S. a judge of that district, Richard Peters. ProseSupreme Court cutor William Rawle admitted in court that convened. the 1790 statute outlawed only bribery of federal judges; no statute banned corruption involving other officials.

However, Rawle noted, corruption had long been a crime under common law. Chase was having none of it. “In my opinion, the United States, as a federal government, have no common law,” he said. “The United States did not bring it with them from England; the Constitution does not create it; and no act of Congress has assumed it.”

Chase’s denunciation of applying criminal common law in federal court did not become precedent. Judge Peters believed the Worrall prosecution could stand even without a specific congressional enactment to rely on, and the parties were unwilling to take the case to the Supreme Court for a conclusive ruling. Chase agreed to a compromise finding Worrall guilty but only slapping his wrist—he drew three months in prison and a $200 fine. Historians surmise that the justice informally canvassed his colleagues and discovered that most agreed with Peters.

But opinion was changing. In 1800, the Virginia legislature issued a report terming the Constitution and common law incompatible. By 1812, judicial and public opinion had reversed themselves, leading to Hudson. That ruling was “a considerable revision of the early republic’s practice,” writes legal historian Gary Rowe. “Without acknowledging it, the Hudson Court disapproved at least eight circuit court cases, brushed off the views of all but one justice who was on the Court prior to 1804, and departed from what was arguably the original intention of those who framed the Constitution.” The ruling left individual states free if desired to use common law in their courts, but Hudson made explicit “that the American system of government had broken off from its English antecedents more sharply than anyone had quite realized,” Rowe concluded.

Barzillai Hudson and George Goodwin were editors of the Connecticut Courant, predecessor of today’s Hartford Courant. On May 7, 1806, the men reprinted from a Utica, New York, newspaper a misleading story that President Thomas Jefferson had obtained in secret from Congress $2 million with which to bribe Napoleon to use French influence to get Spain to sell Florida to the United States. The government charged the editors with the common law crime of “seditious libel,” defined as

states could use common law in their courts but hudson made clear the break with precedents rooted in british legal history.

uttering any statement intended to “provoke dissatisfaction” with the government. In 1801, Congress had let a law criminalizing seditious libel expire. That left only common law as a context in which to charge Hudson and Goodwin. The case was ready to be tried in March 1808, but the jurists to hear it—Connecticut federal district court Judge Pierpont Edwards and Justice Henry Livingston—disagreed on whether they had authority to try charges brought under criminal common law. They sent the case to the Supreme Court.

The High Court could have ruled narrowly that the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom shielded Hudson and Goodwin. But the justices decided it was time to settle the criminal common law issue for good. Despite possible private reservations, no justice publicly dissented from the opinion, written by Justice William Johnson. His opinion is notable for its brevity—eight paragraphs—and for lacking legalistic analysis to support the conclusion that Chase was correct in his Worrall opinion: American federal courts could not entertain any criminal prosecution until Congress specifically established the crime.

“The legislative authority of the Union must first make an act a crime, affix a punishment to it, and declare the Court that shall have jurisdiction of the offense,” Johnson wrote.

“Although this question is brought up now for the first time to be decided by this Court, we consider it having been long since settled in public opinion.” That general acceptance could be deduced from the fact that in Hudson and Goodwin, Attorney General William Pinkney was unwilling to argue that the justices should be using common law.

Besides cutting the final cord tying American jurisprudence to Britain’s, Hudson and Goodwin reflected political reality. Followers of George Washington whose ranks formed the Federalist Party believed in a strong central government that encouraged commerce.

Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans envisioned a more agrarian country with a federal government having only limited, delegated powers. By the time the court heard Hudson and Goodwin, a majority of justices had been appointed by Jefferson or successor James Madison. In denying federal courts the common law power to make something a crime because judges said it was, the justices were acknowledging the tenor of the times. +

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CHARTER OF WINDS AND WAVES In October 1862 world-renowned scientist and former U.S. Navy officer Matthew Maury, sextant in hand, lay on the deck of a blockade runner departing Charleston, South Carolina, for England. After resigning his commission to join the Confederacy, Maury had sparred with its leaders over defending the Confederate coastline. Finding him a thorn in their sides, they had dispatched him to England, ostensibly to shop for ships. The blockade runner’s captain had lost his way, and Maury offered to chart a course by the stars. Maury, 55, had not been to sea for more than two decades but in no time, he was announcing a new course that would have the vessel to Bermuda by 2 a.m. That hour came and went, but within 10 minutes, there was the Bermuda shore, confirming Maury’s expertise at maritime navigation. Over his career, he systematized the old, amorphous method of crowd-sourcing logbook entries on winds, rain, currents, even whale migrations to deliver routes that cut some voyages by 30 days. That success opened the door for another effort Maury championed: the National Weather Service. Along the way, he devised underwater mines and torpedoes, and helped gauge the feasibility of laying transatlantic telegraph cable on the sea floor.

No figure in the Confederacy was more colorful, accomplished, and committed to White supremacy than Matthew Fontaine Maury. Born into a family descended from Huguenots arriving in Virginia in the early 1700s, Maury spent much of his youth in Franklin, Tennessee, where his

26 AMERICAN HISTORY

slave-holding parents ran a not very successful farm. Seventh of nine children, Maury set his sights on the Navy, as his eldest brother had. Over his father’s objections, in 1825 he became a midshipman. He spent nine years at sea, visiting locales ranging from Brazil to the Marquesas Islands and teaching himself navigation, Spanish, and spherical geometry. In 1839, that career came to a grinding halt. A carriage accident in Virginia crushed his right leg, disqualifying him for shipboard duty.

Over the next few years, Maury remained a lieutenant at half pay. He established himself as a writer, penning sometimes anonymous and often scathing newspaper pieces about corruption in the Navy. His criticisms caught enough official attention that when his identity became known, he was appointed in 1842 to head the navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments, a Washington, DC-based entity that doubled as the U.S. Naval Observatory. Rivals felt Lt. Maury did not deserve the position,

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BY SARAH RICHARDSON

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

lacking as he did training in astronomy, but he made up for that shortfall with other skills, creating a persona as a man of science for public benefit. Maury dove in, spending nights working at the observatory, located on a marshy stretch of Georgetown so riddled with mosquitoes that he and his coworkers regularly endured bouts of what would now be recognized as malaria. He also pushed to establish the U.S. Naval Academy.

In 1853, at Maury’s prodding, ten naval The True Zeitgeist powers assembled in Belgium for a conferA 19th-century ence that ended with an agreement that all German map based parties would collect oceangoing data and on Maury’s data share their results with the U.S. Naval Obserillustrates Atlantic and vatory in exchange for receiving U.S. ocean Indian Ocean wind charts. The United States would issue blank patterns. logbooks for recording the data, along with bottles empty but for blank logs corked inside to be tossed overboard and meant to be retrieved by passing vessels and recorded as floating markers. According to John Grady’s in-depth biography of Maury, conference host Leopold I of Belgium hailed the use of a ship as a “floating observatory, a temple of science.” By the late 1850s, more than 137,000 vessels were gathering wind, rain, and current information. The data dramatically shortened some commercial routes, saving millions in shipping costs. To help captains avoid collisions at sea, Maury proposed dedicated transatlantic sea lanes for traveling east and west.

In 1856, Maury was among Navy officers summarily retired, perhaps thanks to rivals like Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution and Senator Stephen Mallory (D-Florida), who chaired a committee on naval affairs.

Maury fought to retain his commission— and succeeded. He had devoted his life to the U.S. Navy, but as the national rupture over slavery widened, he wrote, “The real question at issue is a sectional one; and with the South, it is a question of empire.

Increase, multiply, and replenish the earth…” As many Southerners did, Maury envisioned America’s slaveholding empire expanding not only into the American West but also into Cuba and Brazil.

When Virginia seceded in April 1861, Maury submitted his resignation and Still in U.S. Navy Blue offered his services to the Confederacy. Until April 1861, when he Among its leaders was his foe Mallory. resigned his commission Maury tinkered experimentally with elec- to serve the CSA, Maury trically detonated torpedoes, and Confed- toiled to improve global erate ships deploying his inventions sank nautical record-keeping. some 55 Union ships blockading Confederate ports. In 1862, he sailed to England to trade on his celebrity and secure ships for the Confederacy if he was able. Maury procured a couple of vessels and continued devising explosives.

In November 1865, the last Confederate troops surrendered. Now a man without a country, Maury approached Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian in Mexico, peddling a campaign to recruit former Confederates and freed Blacks to establish a slaveholding settlement. His scheme foundered. In June 1867 the Mexican opposition executed Maximilian,

by which time Maury had found his way to England. In 1870, with ire against ex-Confederates ebbing, he returned to the United States and went to work at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, home of the institution that became Washington and Lee University, presided over by Robert E. Lee until his death in 1870. Maury drew the job of surveying Virginia resources to rebuild the devastated state.

But he did not live much longer, dying in 1873.

Until then, Maury promoted broad collection of weather data—an inventory of patterns and forecasts as useful to farmers as maritime data had been to shippers. Formal collection and distribution of weather reports by telegraph began around 1870. Like the National Weather Service, Maury’s books, including his 1855 The Physical Geography of the Sea, survived him. A memorable passage likened the earth’s surface to the bed of an invisible ocean of atmosphere. (Jules Verne reportedly consulted the book.) Maury wove his Christian beliefs into his observations, creating a religio-mystical tone that irritated some who questioned his scientific bona fides. Yet his insights remain trenchant—”it is the girdling encircling air that makes the whole world kin”—and vivid: “…without atmosphere,” he wrote, “the bald earth, as it revolved on its axis, would turn its tanned and weakened front to the full and unmitigated rays of the lord of the day.”

For promoters of the Lost Cause—the ideology that imagined a valiant, chivalric South pulverized by its industrial foe’s superior resources and troop numbers— Maury was an attractive hero, esteemed worldwide yet also an unrepentant White supremacist. His name peppers roads and schools, including Maury Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Wealthy preservationist Elvira Worth Moffitt led a long campaign to erect a Maury memorial on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. “Pathfinder,” dedicated in 1929 on Armistice Day—a nod toward reconciliation—portrayed Maury as a thoughtful navigator. Maury’s unrelenting fealty to expanding slaveholding into what he called the “American Mediterranean” has come to tarnish his scientific legacy. In the summer of 2020, when Mayor Levar Stoney ordered the removal of Confederate monuments and symbols from perches throughout the city, “Pathfinder” was among them. +

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PHOTO CREDIT

28 AMERICAN HISTORY

Putting Down the Gun When America imposed controls on firearms

By Joseph Connor Thursday Bloody Thursday The 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre embodied the blood tide surging in the United States.

I

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n the early 1930s, the United States had a crime problem.

Across the Midwest, heavily armed outlaws like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow, and Bonnie Parker, among hordes of less notorious characters, were robbing banks seemingly at will and in the process becoming household names. In cities, gangsters made rich and powerful by a populace fond of ignoring Prohibition emerged from that experiment’s demise in 1933 with a renewed focus on gambling, loansharking, and prostitution. Along with handguns, some hoodlums carried the .45-cal. Thompson M1921 and subsequent versions of what military armorers called “submachine guns” because they fired pistol bullets rather than the rifle rounds that machine guns fired. Able to spew slugs at the rate of hundreds per minute, a “Tommy gun” was a fearsome, if marginally accurate, weapon.

The government needed a way to curb access to these and other outlaw weapons like sawed-off shotguns but had scant power to do so. At the time, Congress enjoyed only limited authority over interstate commerce, and firearms control was seen as a matter for states to handle. The contours of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms had not been tested. In early 1934, the U.S. Department of Justice came up with a clever approach to regulate certain types of firearm by using taxation to trap gunslinging gangsters. The resulting statute was the nation’s most comprehensive gun-control measure yet.

Firearms had been on the public agenda since the early 1900s. With more Americans living in cities and cities more congested, states re-examined the need to carry firearms. In 1911, New York imposed the Sullivan Act, requiring a resident wishing to keep a gun at home to apply for a permit to do so; the law required a separate permit to carry a concealed weapon. The act got its name from its sponsor, state Senator Timothy D. Sullivan, a famous Tammany Hall fixer (“King of the Bowery,” June 2019).

California, Pennsylvania, and other states limited carrying of concealed firearms and banned sale of weapons to minors, felons, drunkards, and AUGUST 2021 29

persons “of unsound mind.” (In April 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would review the constitutionality of these laws.)

Between the late 1800s and World War I, multiple inventors had patented systems using the mechanical energy generated by shooting a weapon to fire the succeeding round. At the pull of a trigger, machine guns could hurl a storm of lead slugs. However, the units such as manufacturers Maxim, Lewis, and Browning made were large and heavy and needed several men to haul, emplace, and operate them. As the Great War was ending, U.S. Army ordnance officer John T. Thompson perfected a portable auto-fire “trench broom” that a single doughboy could use to clear

Big Tim and Two Brownings Tammany’s Timothy Sullivan, top left, lent his name to New York’s gun law. Above, AEF 2nd Lt. Val Browning with a BAR, designed by his father, at Thillombois, France, in 1918.

30 AMERICAN HISTORY

strong points. Weighing less than 10 lbs., Thompson’s 35” weapon featured double pistol-style grips and a shoulder stock. A drum or stick magazine held ready 20 to 100 .45-cal. rounds that were devastating at close range.

At 13 to 24 lbs. and nearly 4’ in length, another new military weapon, the Browning Automatic Rifle, was more cumbersome than the Thompson but also fired more powerful .30-06 rifle rounds loaded in 20- and 40-round clips.

Legitimate customers could buy Thompson guns and BARs from retailers. Fanciful advertisements pitched Thompsons to civilians with a drawing of a cowboy driving off rustlers by unloading a Tommy gun at the miscreants. Patentholder Auto-Ordnance Corp. hawked the gun as the “ideal weapon for the protection of large estates, ranches, plantations, etc.” These weapons also entered the illicit distribution chain through dubious sellers and pilferage from National Guard armories.

On the heels of World War I and the emergence of portable automatic weapons came Prohibition, a constitutional ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. The United States went dry on January 17, 1920.

Americans still wanted to drink, however, and underworld gangs accommodated them. Bootlegging in Chicago alone tallied sales of more than $100 million yearly, with violence among competitors to match. More than 700 people died in Chicago’s beer wars. Mobsters took up the Thompson, but pistols did not go out of fashion. Individuals whom some states barred from acquiring pistols in person, such as convicted criminals, could buy handguns easily by mail, spurring Congress to pass the largely symbolic 1927 Mailing of Firearms Act. That law forbade shipping handguns via the U.S. Postal Service but did not apply to shipments by private express companies. To a degree individual states—Massachusetts, West Virginia, Michigan, New Jersey, and Missouri—regulated firearms purchases, usually by barring individuals such as convicted criminals from buying pistols. Under these rules a prospective buyer often had to state that he or she was not prohibited from buying a pistol, based on the perhaps unrealistic belief that someone in a prohibited class would not buy a pistol for fear of being caught and prosecuted for making a false statement.

The night of Thursday, February 14, 1929, four men burst into SMC Cartage, a garage on North Clark Street in Chicago, Illinois. Two visitors wore police uniforms; two carried Thompsons. All were working for crime boss Alphonse Capone. SMC was an outpost of Capone rival Bugsy Moran.

Capone’s men lined up seven Moran men and opened fire, leaving a calling card of corpses and 70 .45-cal. shell casings. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre made headlines nationwide.

Also modernizing crime: the automobile, which enabled crooks to outrun police. Bandits, some lugging Thompsons or BARs, learned to hit banks and cross state lines, jumping jurisdictions in the style of robbers like Clyde Barrow, whose weapon of choice was the BAR, and accomplice Bonnie Parker. In 1932, robberies by Barrow and Parker left 13 dead. In September 1933, John Dillinger, who favored the Tommy gun, led his gang on a 10-month string of robberies that killed 10 across the heartland. With home and farm foreclosures rampant—nearly 1,000 per day in 1933—some

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fanciful ads pitched thompson guns to civilians by showing a cowboy driving off rustlers with a tommy gun.

Americans saw robbers in milder light than bankers. “And as through your life you travel/yes, as through your life you roam,” balladeer Woody Guthrie sang in “Pretty Boy Floyd.” “You won’t ever see an outlaw/drive a family from their home.” Gangster movies featured gunplay with Thompsons, despite the reality that relatively few submachine guns were loose in the land. That reality did include murderous spasms.

On June 17, 1933, agents from the U.S. Justice Department Division of Investigation, later the Federal Bureau of Investigation, entered Kansas City’s Union Station, bound 30-some miles north. The agents were escorting Frank Nash to the federal prison at Leavenworth. Nash, recently recaptured after escaping that penitentiary in 1930, six years into a 25-year sentence for mail robbery, had been running with Pretty Boy Floyd. At the train station, Floyd and two accomplices ambushed the agents escorting Thompson the Thompson Gunner Inventor John T. Thompson with his innovative “trench broom.” Below left, Chicago, Illinois, mapped to show which gangs ruled where.

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Nash. Rounds from a Thompson left Nash and federal agent Raymond J. Caffrey dead. The attackers escaped. On April 22, 1934, state policemen and federal agents tracked John Dillinger to a lodge in northern Wisconsin and staged a surprise raid. Dillinger and Lester “Baby Face Nelson” Gillis shot their way out with Thompsons and handguns, on the way murdering federal agent W. Carter Baum (see “Gunsels’ Gunsmith,” p. 35).

These and multiple other violent crimes reverberated powerfully. President Franklin D. Roosevelt vowed to spare no effort to “bring to book

Alphonse Capone

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every law breaker, big and little.” He argued for a federal gun control statute to override the vagaries of state oversight. “[W]hat is the use of making it difficult in New York to get firearms if the gunman can go over to Connecticut or New Jersey and get all he wants?” FDR asked.

Roosevelt’s point man on crime was U.S. Attorney General Homer S. Cummings. The former Democratic National Committee chairman had worked diligently to put Roosevelt into office in 1932, and as a reward for his ardor was to be appointed governor-general of the Philippines. When the president’s nominee for attorney general suddenly died, Cummings stepped into the top Justice Department slot—temporarily, he thought. He stayed until 1939.

In 1934, Congress passed 20 administration-backed crime bills. In a first, Division of

The proposal avoided the pitfalls that an outright ban posed. “[I]f we made a statute absolutely forbidding any human being to have a machine gun, you might say there is some constitutional question involved,” Cummings said. Framing the control mechanism as a tax, he said, “you are easily within the law.” The tax tack outmaneuvered criminal law’s limitations.

Federal taxation authority underpinned the 1914 Harrison Act, a foundational federal narcotics statute implemented to restrict access to opium, cocaine, and other drugs, on an international migratory fowl treaty. The U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the drug law. Tax law could reach areas the ordinary criminal law could not, as in 1931, when federal tax violations tripped up once-untouchable gangland boss Al Capone.

Born to Lose Murderous partners in crime and romance Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow transfixed the nation with a string of bold bank robberies that ended in May 1934 with an ambush near Sailes, Louisiana.

32 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Baby Face Nelson

Investigation agents now could make arrests and carry firearms. The laws’ new categories of federal offenses made the Justice Department and the Division of Investigation major players in the fight against crime. Robbing a federally insured bank became a federal crime, as did crossing a state line to avoid prosecution and interfering with or killing a federal agent. But while Cummings estimated more than 500,000 criminals were “armed to the teeth,” there still was no federal curb on firearms.

In 1934, Cummings forwarded a gun control plan to Congress. He proposed a $200 tax— today, nearly $4,000—when a machine gun changed hands. At retail, a Thompson ranged in price between $175 and $227; the federal tax presumably would price it out of the legitimate market and leave a paper trail of ownership should the weapon see illegal use.

As part of the tax scheme, Cummings proposed registering machine guns. At sale or transfer, the new owner would have to give the Internal Revenue Service the weapon’s serial number and the new owner’s photograph and fingerprints. Owners whose possession of automatic weapons predated the regulation would have 60 days to register. Failure to register would risk a five-year federal prison term and a $2,000 fine, as would possession of an unregistered machine gun.

The idea was to slap a tax on machine guns that made them too expensive to buy and created a paper trail of whoever had bought them.

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Cummings nominally characterized his proposal in terms of revenue— enactment would bring $100,000 yearly into the federal coffers, he estimated—but he really meant to box in gangsters and outlaws. “I do not expect criminals to comply with this law; I do not expect the underworld to be going around giving their fingerprints and getting permits,” he told Congress. “But I want to be in a position, when I find such a person, to convict him because he has not complied.” An unregistered machine gun was a federal charge waiting to be brought. Gangsters “will not be able to put up vague alibis and the usual ruses, but…it will be a simple method to put them behind the bars,” said Assistant Attorney General Joseph B. Keenan.

The trap had additional snares. By 1934, Texas and 27 other states had banned private ownership of machine guns. A person in any of those jurisdictions registering a machine gun with the federal government might face state criminal charges for possession of that weapon.

On April 11, 1934, Representative Hatton W. Sumners (D-Texas) introduced Cummings’s plan in the House. Not everyone was on board. Cummings’s bill overreached, some legislators said.

Besides machine guns, H.R. 9066 covered pistols, revolvers, and “any other firearm capable of being concealed on the person.” Cummings saw handguns as essential to the bill, believing a machine gun-only measure would be a halfway gesture, and the numbers supported him. Goons owned only a few hundred machine guns but had thousands of handguns, routinely concealed in waistbands and shoulder holsters. Under the bill, each handgun transfer would incur a $1 tax, and every buyer or existing owner of a pistol or revolver would have to register it.

Last Las Picture Show John Dillinger, pistol and an Thompson in hand, was shot dead d after seeing gangster film Manhattan M Melodrama d at the Biograph Theater in the Lincoln Park neighborhood h of Chicago.

Sportsmen’s groups and gun clubs vigorously opposed registering pistols. Gun owners’ main voice of advocacy was the National Rifle Association, a 250,000-member entity at the time so obscure that The New York Times, confusing the group with its monthly publication, American Rifleman, at first called it the “American Riflemen’s Association.” (The NRA dated to 1871, when, with the goal of improving marksmanship and responsible gun ownership, two Union veterans formed the organization.)

Adding to the confusion, the public associated the initials NRA with the National Recovery Administration, a controversial pillar of the New Deal.

Cummings stood firm. “Show me the man who does not want his gun registered,” he said, “and I will show you a man who should not have a gun.”

Casus Belli NRA man Milton Reckord, left, decried the idea of fighting criminals by constraining legitimate gun owners. Above, the aftermath of an infamous Kansas City shootout.

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NRA figures hammered Congress in good guy/bad guy performances at hearings by the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee. The good guy was NRA President Karl T. Frederick, who projected smooth reasonableness. The Harvard-educated lawyer, 53, had won three gold medals for shooting in the 1920 Olympics and was popular among conservationists for his efforts to preserve New York’s Adirondack Mountains as a wilderness reserve. The bad guy was NRA executive vice president Milton A. Reckord, 54, a combat veteran of World War I and adjutant general of the Maryland National Guard.

“I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” Frederick told House members. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted.” But policing crime by forcing law-abiding citizens to register pistols was overkill, he said. “I do not believe that we should burn down the barn in order to destroy the rats.”

Reckord was more strident. “[A] pistol or revolver is not dangerous; it is only dangerous in the hands of the crook,” he said. “Honest citizens…won’t obey [a pistol-registration requirement] and you are going to legislate 15 million sportsmen into criminals…with the stroke of the President’s pen.” If the administration excised handguns from the bill, the NRA vowed to lend its wholehearted support.

Gun advocates feared H.R. 9066 was only a first step. Hunting magazine Field and Stream called the bill part of an effort “to ultimately deny all citizens the right to possess firearms of any kind and for any purpose.” The NRA warned 34 AMERICAN HISTORY

H.R. 9066 failed. On May 23, 1934, Rep. Robert L. Doughton (D-North Carolina) introduced a kindred bill, H.R. 97401, which expressly exempted pistols and revolvers. Doughton’s bill covered machine guns, defined as any firearm able to fire more than one shot with a single trigger pull.

Doughton also went after sawed-off shotguns—that is, any rifle or shotgun with a barrel less than 18 inches long—and silencers. A $200 yearly tax would apply to firearms dealers selling machine guns. With little debate, the House passed Doughton’s bill on June 13, 1934; the Senate followed suit five days later. Roosevelt signed the bill on June 26, 1934.

As a revenue source, the Firearms Act misfired. In 1935, the U.S. Treasury took in $8,015 in related fees; the next year, $5,342, far less than the $100,000 per year that Cummings had predicted. Not one civilian purchase of a machine gun was recorded in 1934, but gun owners registered 15,791 weapons acquired earlier. Many were short-barreled antiques that fit the definition of a sawed-off shotgun. In 1934-36, 54 persons were charged under the act. The Supreme Court upheld the taxation portion of the statute in 1937 and the registration provisions in 1939.

The first American prosecuted under the act was Miami, Florida, hotel manager Joseph H. Adams. In September 1934, a gangster pal handed Adams, 39, an unregistered Browning Automatic Rifle for safekeeping.

Adams hid the gun in a golf bag in his office. He later handed off the BAR, serial number defaced, to a sketchy friend. That party tried to sell it under the table for $150, the government alleged.

Federal agents seized the weapon on January 22, 1935, and charged Adams with unlawfully transferring an unregistered machine gun.

Adams’s lawyers challenged the arrest on constitutional grounds. The justices declined, saying, “The Constitution does not grant the privilege to racketeers and desperadoes to carry weapons of the character dealt with in the act.” No further record of the case could be located.

Aggressive policing, not the National Firearms Act, brought down Thompson- and BAR-toting outlaws. On May 23, 1934, sheriff’s deputies ambushed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow near Sailes, Louisiana, killing both. That July 22, federal agents gunned down John Dillinger as he was leaving the Biograph Theater in Chicago. In October, Pretty Boy Floyd met

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Pretty Boy Floyd

of “disarmament by subterfuge.” Senator Royal S. Copeland (D-New York), a staunch supporter of pistol registration, called these claims absurd. His own son owned many handguns, Copeland noted, and “[i]f I were to fix it so he could not have a pistol, before they were taken away from him he would fill me full of lead, I think…”

Assistant Attorney General Keenan reassured gun owners. “[T]here are not going to be snooping squads going around from house to house to see who does and who does not possess arms,” Keenan promised.

The NRA rallied members in press releases raising the specter of “dictatorial” control under which a law-abiding gun owner would be “fingerprinted and photographed for the Federal rogues’ gallery every time he buys or sells a gun of any description.”

Support for the legislation came from the General Federation of Women’s Groups—“clubwomen,” The New York Times called the organization’s membership. The federation complained that any bill that excluded pistols and revolvers would be “a joke” but also denied any desire to “remove the rights of any honest man to legitimate protection.” FDR was silent. The congressional rumpus attracted scant press attention, and at Roosevelt’s press conferences reporters ignored the subject.

his end near East Liverpool, Ohio, in a shootout with federal agents and police. On November 27, 1934, federal agents killed Baby Face Nelson near Barrington, Illinois, in a firefight that cost two agents their lives. Urban gangsters, realizing gunplay attracted publicity and police attention, took their operations underground.

World War II was the Thompson’s heyday, with Auto-Ordnance making more than 1.7 million units, most for the U.S. military but also for Allied forces. Thompsons saw action from Bataan to North Africa to Normandy to Okinawa. Thompsons shipped to China were used against GIs in Korea and Vietnam. Eventually the U.S. military abandoned the Thompson for the more modern M-14 and M-16 rifles and subsequent auto-fire models.

Revisiting the National Firearms Act in 1968, the Supreme Court invalidated that legislation’s registration requirements. The reason was not the right to bear arms or the commerce clause, but the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. By this time, many states had banned possession of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, meanwhile outlawing possession of firearms by felons. A felon or a person in any of those states who obeyed the law and registered a prohibited weapon was admitting tacitly to committing a crime, the court ruled. The trap U.S. Attorney Homer Cummings had set for gangsters and outlaws 34 years earlier had caught the government, and later that year, Congress eliminated the act’s registration requirements. +

Bringing Down the Federal Hammer President Roosevelt signs the 1934 crime bill into law. Looking on from left: Attorney General Homer Cummings; J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Division of Investigation; unidentified; Assistant Attorney General Joseph Keenan.

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Gunsels’ Gunsmith On Sunday evening April 22, 1934, gangster Lester J. Gillis, better known by the alias George “Baby Face” Nelson, was fleeing a federal raid on a gangland hideout in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin, when he shot and killed federal agent W. Carter Baum.

The killer left a .38-caliber Colt pistol converted to fully automatic fire and fitted with an extended magazine. Using the Colt’s serial number, agents of the briefly renamed federal Division of Investigation traced the .38 from the Colt armory in Hartford, Connecticut, to a Fort Worth, Texas, weapons wholesaler who had sold the weapon to a San Antonio gunsmith, Hyman S. Lebman.

Lebman, 30, owned a saddlery and used gun shop on Flores Street. On the sly he converted Colt .38s and .45s into machine guns. Standard Colt semi-automatics, with seven-round handgrip magazines, fired one slug per trigger pull.

Lebman modified the mechanism and replaced the seven-round magazine with a 22-round clip that one of his guns

would empty in seconds when a user held down its trigger. To dampen recoil, which jerked the barrel up, Lebman installed a foregrip and muzzle compensator. Lebman’s high-power hybrids, nearly a Thompson’s equal in lethality, were easily concealed. Lebman asked no questions of customers and kept no records of transactions.

Police immediately searched Lebman’s workshop, finding a Thompson with a defaced serial number and a partially modified pistol. Questioned on April 29, 1934, Lebman grudgingly acknowledged selling machine pistols, handguns, and Thompsons to Nelson.

Lebman claimed to have known Nelson as “Jimmie Williams.” Federal agent Gus T. Jones, who interrogated Lebman, suspected the gunmaker knew more than he was saying. In a report to Director J. Edgar Hoover dated April 30, 1934, Jones called Lebman “without a doubt the biggest liar and unprincipled human that I have ever talked to.” Lebman told family members he thought his outlaw

customers were “charming, wealthy oil men who were interested in guns,” his son recalled years later.

An early version of what was to become the National Firearms Act was in the Capitol Hill pipeline. The bill proposed requiring gun dealers to register with the government, to pay a $200 yearly tax, and to file regulatory paperwork. Violators risked five-year jail terms. The measure would outlaw removal of a gun’s serial number, with parties possessing defaced weapons presumed to have done the defacing.

However, without a statute to invoke, federal authorities could not touch Lebman, prompting Agent Jones to urge Congress to pass the pending firearms bill. Texas prosecuted Lebman under its 1933 ban on machine guns. Convicted under that statute in 1935, Lebman appealed and won. A 1936 re-trial ended in a hung jury, with jury-tampering suspected. Texas prosecutors refused to try Lebman a third time. He never served a day behind bars. —Joseph Connor AUGUST 2021 35

PHOTO CREDIT

Spy Pond Caper At what in 1854 was West Cambridge, Massachusetts, Spy Pond was a busy ice-harvesting scene.

36 AMERICAN HISTORY

Ice Men How pioneering entrepreneurs helped 19th-century America keep cool

By Larry C. Kerpelman

PHOTO CREDIT

U

ntil the 19th century, ice fit for human consumption was scarce, hacked and sawn by hand, and available only locally in limited, highly prized quantities. Ancient cultures learned to harvest natural ice and, taking advantage of the weather, even to cause ice to form, storing the result in insulated pits and structures. Gentry in England and other European countries built thickly insulated icehouses set in the ground with channels to drain melt water. Colonists in New England, seeing Indians use caves, springs, and deep wells to retard food spoilage, did the same until they, too, erected icehouses in which to store ice cut from ubiquitous freshwater ponds left across the region by glaciers. Ice harvesting had to wait until deep winter froze fresh water to a depth of 14 to 16 inches, strong enough that crews with tools, horse teams, and sleds could work safely.

In January and February, laborers or enslaved workers chopped away, producing uneven slabs.

That awkwardness eased with the development of special ice saws, but freehand cutting still left blocks irregularly sized.

New World icehouses adhered to the English model: positioned to catch cooling winds, with plank floors set above a foot of drainage-ready sand to facilitate air circulation. Between icehouses’ inner and outer walls, roofs and ceilings, AUGUST 2021 37

builders packed insulation: tanners bark—oak or hickoy bark used to finish leather—charcoal, sawdust, hay, straw, or wood shavings. Workers arranged blocks in tight stacks, insulating them between layers with sawdust or salt hay. “The best ice houses often had a shrinkage of ice from between 10 to 30 percent between cutting and delivery,” a harvester claimed. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and other members of the American elite had personal icehouses to conserve that ephemeral luxury.

In 1802, needing to cool goods bound for market, Maryland farmer Thomas Moore invented what he called an “icebox”—a tin container set in a wooden tub, with crushed ice packed tightly into the spaces between. Moore’s 1803 patent for his invention was signed by President Thomas Jefferson, who so admired the device that he bought one. As the century progressed, variations on Moore’s creation wove their way into private and commercial life.

From Source to Point of Sale Above: Before the introduction of standard block sizes, cutting ice was a freehand proposition. Right: Enslaved workers on Grenada wrestle ashore ice freshly shipped from Maine.

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An entrepreneurial New Englander made ice a worldwide commodity. Frederic Tudor, third son of a lawyer with a practice in Boston, was born in that city on September 4, 1783. On a pond outside Saugus, Massachusetts, 10 miles north, the Tudors had an estate, Rockwood, that included an icehouse. Frederic could have attended Harvard College but instead went into accounting.

In the late 1700s, his grandfather left him $40,000. Partnering with older brother William, Frederic put his inheritance toward starting a business harvesting and selling ice from the Rockwood pond. In his first entry in what he titled his “Ice House Diary,” Frederic Tudor wrote, “Plan etc for transporting Ice to Tropical Climates.

Boston Augst 1st 1805 William and myself have this day determined to get together what property we have and embark in the undertaking of carrying ice to the West Indies the ensuing winter.”

Tudor’s grand idea was to export ice to climes where no ice existed.

When he broached this idea to ship owners, they rebuffed him, reasoning that a cargo of ice could make a vessel unstable at sea and likely would melt before delivery, ruining other goods. During the 1806 ice cutting

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Frederic Tudor

Tools of the Trade Left: 19th-century ice crews relied on an array of specialized instruments to cut, pry, and haul.

Below: As late as 1934 workers in some rural areas were still harvesting ice by hand.

season, Tudor, 22, bought a brig, Favorite, for $4,750. He hired crews to harvest and store ice from the family pond, hauling 130 tons of blocks to the Boston docks in wagons. Its cargo insulated with hay and sawdust, Favorite departed Boston on February 10, 1806, for St. Pierre, Martinique. “No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons [sic] of Ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique,” the Boston Gazette reported. “We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.”

Tropical St. Pierre had no icehouse, so Tudor sold such ice as survived the three-week voyage straight from the ship’s hold, losing $4,500 but establishing his concept’s validity. He continued to transport ice to the Caribbean, opening markets around the region and obtaining an exclusive on selling ice on Martinique.

Tudor turned his first profit in 1810, when despite what he called “villainous conduct” by his local agent he cleared $1,000 on tropical sales of $7,400. The 1810s proved volatile. Embargos on American shipping interrupted work, then led to the War of 1812 and cessation of shipping. Debts totaling $38,772 landed Tudor in debtor’s prison. He secured a $2,100 loan

HANSRAD COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

buying a ship, tudor cut and hauled 130 tons of ice from the family pond that he took to St. Pierre, Martinique, losing money but proving his concept.

to finance an ice harvest and start work on a 150-ton icehouse in Havana, Cuba. He leased a transport, George Washington. On November 1, 1815, dogged by creditors and steps ahead of the sheriff, Tudor sailed from Boston for Havana.

His icehouse was unfinished, but he stocked it anyway and by March was nurturing a Cuban ice market. “Drink Spaniards and be cool that I, who have suffered so much in the cause, may be able to go home and keep myself warm,” he wrote in his diary. Soon Tudor was shipping ice from Massachusetts to Cuba efficiently and profitably. Most commerce between the West Indies and Boston was northbound. Ice, handy as ballast, made a convenient southward cargo, so in addition to operating his own fleet Tudor was able to ship ice on vessels that otherwise would have left Boston laden with other ballast.

Thinking to capitalize on his own ships’ return voyages, Tudor decided to try importing produce from Cuba. In August 1816, borrowing $3,000 at 30 percent interest, he sent leased schooner Parago to New York loaded with crates of limes, oranges, plantains, bananas, coconuts, and pears packed in ice. On the month-long voyage, most of the fruit rotted, setting him back $2,000.

Again facing time in debtor’s prison, Tudor started building an icehouse in Charleston, South Carolina, where he advertised that customers paying $10 a month in advance would be able to reserve regular supplies of ice. A cargo delivered by his ship Milo sold well, and Tudor expanded that service into Savannah, Georgia.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, Frederic and William Tudor went in on an icehouse with brotherin-law Robert Gardiner, assigning their brother Harry to scout a site and manage the business.

Frederic sent carpenters and lumber. Harry at first stocked the facility with ice purchased from a competitor in Marblehead, Massachusetts. The partners were hoping to gross $10 a day; soon the New Orleans icehouse was taking in $40 a day.

As the 1820s neared, however, Tudor’s monopoly in Martinique ran out. Falling profits and loss of confidence in his agent there led him to close that venture. His icehouse manager in Cuba was killed in a robbery, and then that man’s successor died. Tudor sank into a depression.

Gardiner, heir to a fortune, advanced Tudor a AUGUST 2021 39

saving stream of cash. “I can not say what would have become of me but for his stepping in to relieve me,” Frederic Tudor told his mother in a letter. By winter 1822, Tudor had emerged from his funk. Leaving the business in Gardiner’s hands, he sailed to Havana and stayed a year.

Up in Boston, Gardiner’s stewardship revived the company. In New Orleans, Harry was continuing to outdo expectations.

Among locales in Tudor’s New England pond network was 155-acre Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nathaniel Wyeth, whose father operated the Fresh Pond Hotel, was harvesting ice that he sold to Tudor. An inventive fellow, Wyeth designed tools and systems for removing and handling the cold commodity. In 1824, Tudor hired Nathaniel Wyeth to supervise harvesting for Tudor Ice. Convinced standardization would enhance efficiency and market appeal, Wyeth devised weighted ice-cutting sleds with serrated runners.

First making a series of parallel straight cuts deepened with multiple passes, the driver repositioned his blades to the perpendicular, outlining blocks sized by the distance between runners.

Workers with long-handled chisels broke the blocks loose. The smallest, sold locally, were 22 inches square. Blocks to be shipped farther were cut larger to account for melting in storage and transport. Wyeth designed oversized tongs for muscling blocks and a means of top-loading an icehouse. Using two counterweighted horse-drawn platforms, workers hoisted blocks to a rooftop hatch. While that load was sliding inside on a 40 AMERICAN HISTORY

Semi-Industrialized As at Rockland Lake, New York, in 1846, the ice industry presented a constantly changing tableau of new and familiar technology. chute, a second crew was below, stacking the other platform with blocks to be hoisted next pass. Though intensely manual, Wyeth’s innovative systems and tools brought natural ice closer to mass production. He and others also developed steam-powered conveyors to move blocks from pond to icehouse.

In 1826, Tudor Ice Company owned several vessels, including Iceland, Iceberg, and Ice King.

From Tudor Wharves in Boston’s Charlestown harbor, the company was shipping 4,000 tons annually, a tally that reached 12,000 tons in 1836 and 65,000 tons in 1846. In 1833, Tudor shipped 180 tons of ice 16,000 miles from Boston to Calcutta, India. The transport Tuscany arrived with about two-thirds of its cargo intact, stirring great excitement, especially among resident Britons.

“The first transport of Ice, from the shores of the United States to the banks of the Ganges, is an event of no mean importance; and the names of those who planned and have successfully carried through the adventure at their own cost, deserve to be handed down to posterity with the

GRANGER, NYC

certain that selling ice in standard sizes would be more efficient and popular, wyeth came up with tools designed to bring order to the trade.

names of other benefactors of mankind,” wrote the Calcutta Courier. Within three days, Calcuttans were planning to build an icehouse—thus Henry David Thoreau’s comment in Walden that “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

cocktail-making. Tudor worked similar advertising magic in markets abroad.

Journalists likened the natural ice trade to the California gold rush. According to Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, Boston was leading the ice export league, by the 1850s annually shipping 110,000 tons to southern American cities and nearly 50,000 tons to the East and West Indies No Business for Narrow Backs Above: A promotional image from around 1840. Below: crews harvesting ice on New York’s Hudson River, circa 1870, making repeated cuts using weighted saw blades.

©MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; UNIVERSAL IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

Tudor’s success inspired competition. In 1842, Jacob Hittinger of Gage, Hittinger & Co., also harvesting at Fresh Pond, sent ice to London, where his representatives taught barmen to use it in drinks, American style. Losing $1,200, Hittinger quit the English market. Up stepped Charles Lander and Henry Ropes. They had been harvesting ice at Wenham Lake near Salem, Massachusetts, and hyperbolically touting their product, Wenham Ice, as longer-lasting thanks to being free of salts and bubbles. Queen Victoria awarded Wenham Ice a royal warrant, briefly endearing the brand to Britons.

In the 1840s, with railroads stitching the United States, Tudor Ice took to the rails. Trains extended the market for ice, and access to ice extended markets for dairy products, meat, seafood, and other perishables. With home iceboxes proliferating, the iceman with his wagon, tongs, and icepick became familiar along American streets, trailed on summer days by children trying to scrounge ice chips. The promotion-minded Tudor distributed handbills explaining how to use ice to preserve food, enliven the taste of carbonated water, and make ice cream and other frozen treats. Tudor’s salesmen went saloon to saloon giving away samples of ice and teaching

AUGUST 2021 41

From 1857 until 1910, the annual American ice harvest enlarged. Winter 1879-80 produced a bumper yield. That season, the Census Bureau estimated, 113 million tons were cut, almost a million of which the producers shipped south. On a short stretch of Maine’s Kennebec River, the report noted, “[T]here is now more capital concentrated in the cutting and storage of ice than in any other locality of equal extent in the world.” Household consumption remained strong, but by the 1880s, the largest harvesters and users of natural ice had become brewers around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the fresh food industries based in Chicago, Illinois. Mechanically frozen ice was making inroads into the marketplace but seemed unlikely to replace natural ice, according to the Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau was wrong. The natural ice industry foundered amid a sea of troubles: industrial pollution of water sources, “ice famines” caused by climate shifts, labor turmoil, and monopolistic practices by American Ice, the largest natural ice dealer.

Within decades, the market was tilting toward mechanical refrigeration, which had improved dramatically since its introduction in the early 1800s.

In 1801, engineer Oliver Evans, 46, had built the first high-pressure steam engine in the United States, opening a path toward artificial refrigeration.

Evans went on to use steam engines to compress and expand gases. These advances led to vapor compression, which puts chemicals under pressure to cool air and is the basis for mechanical refrigeration. Building on Evans’s work, in 1835 Londoner Jacob Perkins patented a machine able to freeze small amounts of water. Perkins’s device inspired two American innovators. Alexander Twining built an ice plant in Cleveland, Ohio, able to make 42 AMERICAN HISTORY

CORBIS HISTORICAL/GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Ice on the Home Front Above, women ice handlers became a common sight during the Great War. Below, during and after the war demand for ice to preserve foodstuffs ballooned amid famines across Europe.

and other foreign locales. Mid-Atlantic states could harvest locally when winters were cold enough, with ice from Boston as a fallback. In 1855, New York City used 120,000 tons from Rockland Lake, 30 miles upstate. Harvests around Cincinnati, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois, could not meet demand from area beer and food processors, leading to imports from the larger Great Lakes region. The biggest market for frozen water from Boston was the Deep South, with 520 vessels shipping out of Boston harbor in 1855 and ice comprising the largest tonnage of cargos from that port. Hunt’s estimated investment in the American ice trade at $6 million to $7 million, crediting the industry with generating 8,000 to 10,000 jobs. Ice had become a pillar of the economies of Maine, meteorologically more reliable than Massachusetts; Wisconsin, home to many food and beer companies; and Pennsylvania, a distribution center for perishables that served the Middle Atlantic states. “Ice is an American institution—the use of it an American luxury—the abuse of it an American failing,” De Bow’s Review wrote. “In workshops, composing rooms, counting houses, workmen, printers, clerks have their daily supply of ice. . .. We use it seven or eight months of the year—all the year in the south . . ..”

When Frederic Tudor died in Boston on February 6, 1864, age 80, he was a millionaire known as “The Ice King of the World.”

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half a ton of ice a day. Floridian John Gorrie received the first patent for refrigeration issued by the United States. His system was not cost-effective, but by interweaving extant principles and designs James Harrison, a Scottish journalist living in Australia, in 1851 built the world’s first functional refrigerator, a two-story behemoth.

In 1873, German professor of thermodynamics Carl Linde developed a practicable refrigerator. The Linde Ice Machine Company soon was licensing manufacture of commercial and industrial equipment in the United States and Europe.

In 1895, Cistercian monk and physics teacher Marcel Audiffren, of Grasse, France, received a patent in the United States for a home refrigerator. Within 40 years, with the development of small electric motors to drive compressors, home refrigerators were nearly everywhere, making clear, clean ice and leaving America’s natural ice industry in a puddle. + Chilling Effect Clockwise from top: German inventor Carl Linde, the manually loaded and passively chilled icebox he hoped to replace; a 1934 GE electric model; an earlier home refrigerator developed by fellow innovator Abbe Audiffren, a Cistercian monk in Grasse, France.

Cooling It Old School Traditional ice harvesting lives on at Rockywolde-Deephaven Camp on Squam Lake, New Hampshire, where guests use natural ice kept in iceboxes. Every January for more than 100 years, the family resort has harvested pond ice for storage in one of New England’s only active icehouses.

In late spring, workers move the season’s stock into a 3-foot-deep pit to be covered with insulating sawdust. All summer, staffers using 19th century ice tongs select, hose clean, and wheelbarrow blocks to antique iceboxes in guest cabins. Management tried refrigerators in the 1960s, but the resulting outcry brought back the old ways. —Larry C. Kerpelman AUGUST 2021 43

Cover Story A dedicated collector’s trove of magazines published by and for Americans stretches back to colonial times and displays a nation taking form, branching out, and evolving.

“

M

agazine” descends from the Arabic for “storehouse,” and what is a magazine but a storehouse of words, images, and ideas? In the rich and varied exhibition “Magazines and the American Experience: Highlights from the Collection of Steven Lomazow MD,” New York City’s Grolier Club examined the multifarious history of the American magazine. The winter 2020-21 show presented hundreds of covers evocative of a vibrant phenomenon dating to the 1741 debuts of Benjamin Franklin’s American Magazine and Historical Chronicle, and The General Magazine, which was published by Andrew Bradford in 1744 (p. 46). Since then, reflecting the nation’s evolution, myriad titles have come and gone, some after a lone issue, some after decades of journalistic, artistic, and commercial success.

“America was founded on the principle of making something new and better, and magazines represent the same principle,” says Julie Carlsen, who with physician and collector Lomazow curated the show. “We Americans always want to make our union more perfect and to find community. Magazines are a way for people in the same demographic to connect with one another, and for people in different demographics to discover that they share common interests. A magazine’s readership is a sort of trans-local community.”

The smartest people in town might be writing books, and the most important people in town might be who you see in the newspaper, but anyone can make a magazine and perhaps find a niche somewhere on a broad spectrum, Carlsen added.

“Magazines show that the conversations we are having today are rooted in the past, and that there have always been many shades of perspective,” she said. “Magazines present information that’s less filtered, so when you’re looking back through them you are hearing voices that challenge your assumptions. I opened a copy of The Harlemite from 1963, expecting to see a 44 AMERICAN HISTORY

lot of coverage of the civil rights movement but instead encountered a wide range of information that disrupted my expectations. The same was true of One, an openly gay magazine that was on newsstands before Playboy, which always gets credit as a landmark in the sexual revolution—another example of history correcting memory.”

Steven Lomazow had just started medical school when he fell in love with the challenge of collecting the earliest editions he could of as many magazines as he could—an avocation he has balanced for decades with a career as a successful neurologist. “There remain titles out there that I haven’t gotten; some of them I haven’t even heard of,” he said. “When I do come across something, it’s like seeing an old friend.”

Across nearly 50 years, he has built the most extensive collection of magazines in the United States and is recognized as an expert in the field. His and Carlsen’s Grolier Club exhibition is accessible online (bit.ly/GrolierShow) and available as a strikingly beautiful 337-page hardbound catalog that augments reproductions of covers with informative and illuminating essays (bit.ly/LomazowCatalog). The following spread presents covers from the exhibition captioned by the two curators, who rank these particular specimens among their personal favorites. —Michael Dolan 1916 The Saturday Evening Post Norman Rockwell began his career in 1913 as art editor for Boy Scouts of America magazine Boy’s Life, an association that lasted until 1976. The first of his legendary 321 covers for The Saturday Evening Post appeared on May 20, 1916.

Rockwell illustrated hundreds of covers, stories, and advertisements for a wide variety of magazines including Literary Digest, Ladies Home Journal, and the humor weeklies Life and Judge. His magazine illustration work made Rockwell’s name a metaphor for the idyllic American life. The artist personally inscribed this issue for Dr. Lomazow.

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1744 The American Magazine and Historical Chronicle The first successful American magazine, sold by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and other sellers elsewhere. Debuting in October 1743, it lasted three years, in large part imitating the contents and design of English predecessors.

Highlights include the earliest map in an American magazine and James Turner’s copperplate engraving of Boston for the title page.

1845 Scientific American Since 1845, Scientific American has introduced readers to a host of important advances, from Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1877 and his incandescent light bulb in 1880 to George Eastman’s Kodak camera in 1888 to the latest breakthroughs in many disciplines.

1841

46 AMERICAN HISTORY

1857 1 Porter’s Spirit of the Times The T September 12, 1857, issue of Porter’s Spirit features f an original copperplate engraving of a baseball b game at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New N Jersey—the first image in an American periodical r of what became the national pastime.

1841 841 Democratic Review Some 1800ome very widely circulated magazines 1800 1850 were published by political parties. The Democratic Review came about in the 1830s to champion Jacksonian democracy. Editor John O’Sullivan extolled the common man while criticizing the aristocratic pretensions of the Whigs. Other content included literature, such as early writings by Walt Whitman.

1845 Lowell Offering Women employed in Lowell, Massachusetts, fabric mills wrote and edited this publication. The editors sought mostly to elevate the reputation of the working girl and became more daring in the wake of labor unrest at the factories.

1859 Anglo-African The Anglo-African was founded by Thomas Hamilton to present fellow African American writers like Martin Robison Delany. This copy belonged to Charles Bustill, an Underground Railroad conductor and uncle of Paul Robeson.

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1733 The Th New-York N Y k Weekly Journal Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Bradford may have been the first entrepreneurs to publish magazines aimed at fellow Americans, but the credit for creating the first uniquely “American” periodical belongs to John Peter Zenger. He published the New-York Weekly Journal, which debuted in 1733. When the colonial governor of New York charged Zenger with libel, the resulting trial helped establish freedom of the press, a principle for which Zenger endured prosecution and imprisonment.

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1845 The American Review: A Whig Journal The American Review was established in January 1845 to oppose the policies of newly elected Democrat James K. Polk.

Like competitor The Democratic Review, it contained literature and poetry. This issue had the distinction of being the first periodical to publish Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” pseudonymously credited to “Quarles.”

1898 8 8 Sunset S t As rail began to dominate transportation, railroad magazines proliferated. Though not in the Grolier exhibit, Sunset, owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad, became the most important magazine of the American Southwest and is still in business.

1855 The Nation The first—and probably only—issue of Reverend C. Chauncey Burr’s nativist quarto monthly The Nation indicts the temperance movement, the Catholic Church, Democrats, and the newly disbanded Whigs, plumping for the nativist American Party, otherwise known as the Know-Nothings.

1888 The National Geographic Magazine The most influential periodical of its kind ever, National Geographic has entertained and educated generations. Founded in October 1888 as the National Geographic Society house organ, the magazine saw its first issue move about 700 copies. In January 1905, the Society went from text-oriented journal to the pictorial formatt whose contents, flagged by yellow borders, have held millions spellbound.

1877 Puck America’s first successful humor magazine featured a cornucopia of comic prose and poetry interspersed with lithographed full-color political cartoons by one of its founders, Joseph Keppler. Later many artists he trained contributed images. Partisan editorials complemented the cartoons, along with comic cuts of a quality never before seen in America, as well as witty short stories and breezy comic verse. Puck introduced American readers to a higher class of satire whose enduring popularity paved the way for magazines like The Masses and The New Yorker.

AUGUST 2021 47

1911 Modern Electrics The first radio magazine was started by Hugo Gernsback, an immigrant from Luxembourg, in April 1908. In 1911 Gernsback ran his story, “Ralph 124c 41+.” As literature, “Ralph” leaves much to be desired, but among its many accurate predictions are television, the videophone, solar energy, and the first accurate description of radar. The September 1911 cover is the first depiction of a solar field.

1915 The Hobo News Yes, a magazine meant for the kings of the road! This patriotic 1942 issue urged readers to “Buy Bonds to Buy Bombs to Bomb the Axis Bums.” Ben “Coast Kid” Benson, himself a hobo, published the magazine under the direction of Pat “The Roaming Dreamer” Mulkern. The publication lasted until 1948, succeeded by Bowery News. The periodical’s satirical cartoons were surprisingly well produced.

1926 Fire!!

Fire!! was an important reflection of the spirit and creativity of the Harlem Renaissance. Edited by Wallace Thurman and designed by Aaron Douglas, the magazine presents contributions by the self-proclaimed “niggerati,” including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen.

This is one three known copies and is signed by the editor and most of the literary and artistic contributors.

48 AMERICAN HISTORY

1920 The R Reader’s Digestt 920 Th d ’ Di Dewitt Wallace had an idea: create a magazine for readers lacking the time and the money to rummage around for material of “lasting interest” amid the millions of words carried by thousands of magazines that were crowding newsstands. In an experiment, Wallace collected 30 articles from magazines in his local library, condensed the copy to make it more quickly digestible, and amalgamated the result into a prototype he tagged The Reader’s Digest. The concept, two years in the fine-tuning, became one of America’s most lucrative publishing ventures, eventually adding a line of hardbound condensations of books. Shunning advertising, the Digest, thanks largely to its female readership, grew in circulation from 5,000 in 1922 to a million by the mid-1930s.

1923 Science and Invention Speculative fiction had appeared previously in American magazines, including H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds,” which was introduced in Cosmopolitan in 1897, but the “scientific fiction number” of Science and Invention at right is considered to have been the first magazine of its ilk. The term that publisher Hugo Gernsback coined to characterize the genre that he did so much to advance quickly entered common parlance. To honor Gernsback’s seminal role in science fiction, in 1953 the World Science Fiction Society introduced the annual Hugo Award, presented to the author of the year’s best science fiction or fantasy work.

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1909 The Edison Kinetogram The earliest movie magazines were vehicles of a cartel controlled by Thomas Edison, who owned most moviemaking patents. Examples include an early in-house effort, The Edison Kinetogram,and the first fan magazine, Motion Picture Story. The focus at first was plots, but editors noted that sales rose when they featured actors. The fan magazine Photoplay began a few months later.

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1938 8 The Th Crisis C ii Josh Gibson, whose record equaled or exceeded that of White counterpart Babe Ruth—he has been voted the greatest catcher of all time— starred in the relative obscurity of the Negro leagues. He made his only contemporaneous magazine cover appearance in this issue of The Crisis, official organ of the N.A.A.C.P.

1931 Television Weekly News This illustrated weekly, now exceedingly scarce, principally reported on television, but also covered stage and cinema. This appears to have been the first weekly magazine devoted to television and includes a list of all TV stations broadcasting at the time. The third issue included the weekly programming schedule of W9AXP in Chicago, almost surely the first television program listings ever published.

50 AMERICAN HISTORY

1963 The Harlemite Thi monthly, thl published bli h d by b R. R Algeon Al S tt This Sutton, explored the Harlem social and entertainment scene of the early 1960s. This premier issue’s cover features trumpeter Miles Davis and is inscribed and signed by actress Abbey Lincoln.

Possibly a unique surviving copy.

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1936 Life Life’s first-issue press run of 360,000 copies, which led with Margaret Bourke-White’s majestic photograph of the Public Works Administration’s Fort Peck Dam, sold out immediately. Within four months the weekly had a circulation of a million, driven by its novel format, a perfect blend of text plus snappily composed captions enhancing 50 pages of top-quality photos. Life showed America to Americans—the good, the bad, the joys and sorrows, the momentous events and the commonplace, as readers had never seen the country. During its 36-year run, Life was surely America’s most prestigious magazine.

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1967 Rolling Stone The creation of Ramparts refugees Ralph J. Gleason, with three decades of music journalism to his credit, and 21-year-old Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone helped cement rock ‘n’ roll into popular culture. The magazine’s mission statement called the tabloid “a new publication. . . about the things that the music embraces.”

1972 Ms. Gloria Steinem started Ms. after a 40-page insert in the December 1971 issue of Clay Felker’s New York proved wildly successful with readers. “Ms. was the first national magazine to make feminist voices audible, feminist journalism tenable and a feminist worldview available to the public,” the magazine’s website states. In asssessing the premier issue, Harry Reasoner of the “ABC Evening News” predicted on the air: “I’ll give it six months before they run out of things to say.” Ms. is still working for women.

1969 Interview Even before his pop-art style surfaced, Andy Warhol was a busy commercial artist. During 1948-87, he contributed illustrations to over 400 magazines. Warhol began Interview in September 1969—this cover is from 1979—personally distributing promotional copies around New York City’s avant-garde art scene.

19844 Macworld Launched the same year as the Apple Macintosh, the first personal computer with a graphical user interface designed “for the rest of us” and undercutting the price of a previous Xerox device by thousands of dollars, this magazine propitiated a community of buffs and tech nerds when its denizens still needed a physical medium. The influence that Steve Jobs exerted on American life is still reverberating.

AUGUST 2021 51

Preserving the Old Ways

Going to the Sources Curtis with Dionisio and child in the courtyard of the Governor’s Palace, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1917.

Opposite, her ally, President Theodore Roosevelt.

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With a president’s help, a New York socialite defended Native American culture

By Daniel B. Moskowitz

PHOTO CREDIT

D

uring the summer of 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt had fled Washington, DC’s swelter. He was vacationing at Sagamore Hill, his family home at Oyster Bay, New York, 25 miles east of New York City, when in burst Natalie Curtis. In the Manhattan socialite’s wake stepped a Yavapai Indian chief.

The chief, whose name was Pelia, was carrying an enormous handwoven basket, a gift for the president. Curtis had brought Pelia to plead his tribe’s case.

The Yavapai, an Arizona tribe, had a longstanding grievance. In the 1870s, Pelia told Roosevelt, federal authorities had uprooted the Yavapai from a reservation in the Verde River Valley to another far southeast. On their harsh 180mile winter trek, some 100 Yavapai had died. Federal officials promised that maintaining good behavior would get them back to Verde River. Instead, the Yavapai had spent 25 years docilely living alongside other Apaches distinctly different in culture and temperament. The Yavapai felt that they could never truly be themselves until they were in a separate community and back on the land that traditionally had been their home. Now their former reservation was full of squatters, the Indian leader told the president.

“Chief, tell your people that the White Chief will see that they have justice,” Roosevelt replied.

He had the band’s former reservation cleared of squatters, and by 1905 the Yavapai had returned to the Verde River Valley.

To gain the intimate access that made this correction possible, Curtis, 28, had used her family connections. The Curtises and Roosevelts were of an ilk; Natalie’s family summered next door to J. West Roosevelt, a cousin of the President’s. An uncle of hers was an ally of Roosevelt’s in the campaign to reform the civil service.

That bold intrusion on a vacationing president was typical of Curtis, who refused to live by the narrow expectations of the Victorian world into which she had been born in 1875.

“In this moment of resurgent feminism, she is

an inspiring reminder,” novelist Ellen Heath wrote in a 2018 online essay. “Natalie Curtis was one of the earliest, daring women who stepped bravely into the New World at the beginning of the 20th century.”

Natalie Curtis’s family, in patrician parlance, was not rich but merely well-to-do, though still gilded by lineage. Father Edward, a society physician, was a Son of the American Revolution and a descendant of two presidents of Harvard. Edward Curtis’s grandfather had represented Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate and served as chief justice of that state’s Supreme Court, and Edward’s father had been president of New York’s Continental Bank. Dr. Curtis, hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most widely known physicians in this country,” had assisted on Abraham Lincoln’s autopsy. He was the Equitable Life Assurance Society’s medical director. When not treating affluent patients, he was pioneering in photomicroscopy—taking pictures through a microscope. He and his family inhabited the Greek Revival mansion on Washington Place in Greenwich Village that Edward, oldest of four sons, had inherited from his late father.

Natalie attended Brearley, the highly selective secondary school for girls.

The Curtises, who had ties to Transcendentalism, a 19th-century socioreligious movement that rejected conformity and urged each person to find a role in the world, saw themselves politically as Progressives. But progressivism was one thing. Sending a daughter to college was another, and the Curtises declined to educate Natalie beyond 12th grade. However, she had talent at the piano and as a composer was impressive enough for her parents to enroll her at the National Conservatory of Music, whose faculty included some of New York City’s premier musical luminaries. Observing the young woman’s progress at composition and playing, teachers encouraged her to study in Europe. She did, first in Paris and then at Bayreuth, Germany. Hand strain and doubts about her talent kept her from AUGUST 2021 53

54 AMERICAN HISTORY

the stage. G. Schirmer published songs she had composed using as lyrics well-known poems, but Natalie Curtis decided her life’s work was not to be strictly musical.

Asthma led Curtis to a career. When her brother George, an asthmatic, took doctors’ advice and relocated to Arizona for its dry climate, Natalie followed. Traveling the Southwest, she met journalist Charles Lummis, an advocate for American native peoples. Lummis, who lived in Islata, a Pueblo village on the Rio Grande in New Mexico, fiercely opposed federal policies that for decades had discouraged, even banned, Indians from maintaining and practicing their traditions, such as living by the assumption that land belonged to all, constituting a shared resource everyone had a duty to preserve.

Through Lummis, Curtis met many Southwestern Indians. Their music enthralled her.

Before meeting Indians, she wrote later, she “was not prepared to find a people with such definite art-forms, such elaborate and detailed ceremonials, such crystallized traditions, beliefs, and customs.” Indian women’s corn-grinding songs and lullabies entranced Curtis, as did men’s Flute Dances and songs associated with traditional kachina dolls. She decided she would transcribe tribal melodies and lyrics and introduce them to mainstream America. In 1903, armed with a $38 Edison recorder and a supply of blank 25-cent wax cylinders on which to record, Curtis set up shop on the Hopi Moqui reservation in northern Arizona, hoping to be

Establishing a Presence Clockwise from top left: Curtis asks TR for unfettered access to Indians; the advocate in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Moqui Indian School; sound recording rolls like Curtis employed in the field; friend and adviser Charles Lummis. able to collect corn-grinding songs.

The task was not easy. Reservation officials were pressuring, even forcing, Indian children to attend a school that barred the Hopi language, the singing of traditional songs, and the painting of bodies. The school’s white superintendent, Charles Burton, zealously enforced federal policies designed to muscle Indians into joining white society. School officials even sheared young Indians’ uncut hair—a particular outrage because Indians saw hair as a symbol of power and identity, the human equivalent of the sweet grasses gathered for incense and seen as the hair of Mother Earth. Hopi men historically had twisted their locks into elaborate figure-8 buns, but by 1900 more typically were wearing their

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she hadn’t expected to see “such definite artforms, such elaborate and detailed ceremonials, such crystallized traditions.”

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hair loose to the shoulders. “Their long hair is the last tie that binds them to their old customs of savagery, and the sooner it is cut, Gordian like, the better it will be,” Burton wrote.

In this environment, Indian women hesitated to perform for Curtis out of fear that she would snitch to reservation authorities. “Are you sure you will not bring trouble upon us?” a chief asked.

“A friendly scientist on an Indian reservation advised me that if I wished to continue my self-appointed task of recording native songs, I must keep my work secret, lest the school superintendent in charge evict me from the reservation,” Curtis said. She persisted, gaining Indian women’s trust by approaching them as a fellow performer, singing songs she knew in return for hearing theirs and accurately transcribing their material without using her recorder.

From its first days, the United States had struggled with how to treat indigenous people. Most Native American tribes had been fighting forever among themselves for resources, land, and

power; European colonization and Manifest Destiny added better-armed Whites to that mix.

As early as 1790, Congress had passed the NonIntercourse Act, meant to keep the peace on the frontier by establishing Indians’ right to occupy— though not legally own—their tribal lands and banning individuals from claiming that land.

The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs began overseeing tribes’ welfare in 1824.

That stewardship, emphasizing coexistence, was initially benign. But soon, around 1830, the government began removing Indians from their traditional lands and relocating them to reservations—parcels reserved for a given tribe or band.

The U.S. Army began to deploy troops to subjugate tribes responding with hostility to White settlement, leading to more treaties and more reservations, a pattern shattered by the 1887 General Allotment Act, identified with primary sponsor Senator Henry L. Dawes (R-Massachusetts). Instead of allowing tribes to coexist with the American mainstream, the government now meant to assimilate Indians, if need be by force.

Well-Placed Friends Clockwise: Roosevelt’s red tape-cutting answer to Curtis’s pitch for unimpeded access to Indian culture; Curtis at a government school in Riverside, California, in 1908 holding a copy of her newly published volume The Indians’ Book, with Tewaqualtewa, a Hopi who contributed to that effort; George and Natalie flanking an unidentified chief as the three play a game; Curtis, second from right, at First Mesa in the Hopi Reservation, Arizona in August 1914.

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The Dawes Act ordered reservations defined define by treaty broken up and subdivided. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was to assign individual Indian families plots to own and work, as White settlers had done in taking title to portions of federal allotments of western lands. Indians, of course, did not believe in private land ownership. To counter and extirpate this profoundly anti-capitalist sentiment, the government undertook to eliminate Indian culture. Even the Indians Rights Association, formed by well-meaning Whites in 1882 to pressure Washington to treat indigenous people with more dignity, had as its aim “to bring about the complete civilization of the Indians.” Differences in social structure and tradition, as well as historic animosities and rivalries, kept tribes from allying in their own collective interest until the mid-1900s.

This was the churn into which Natalie Curtis was inserting herself. Most anthropologists then studying Indian folkways were seeing themselves as preserving a mode of living doomed to extinction. Mass culture had reduced the Indian to a sideshow performer in Wild West extravaganzas such as those promoted by former buffalo hunter Wild Bill Cody. Curtis wanted to keep Indian cultures alive and vibrant on their own terms. Her mission, she said, was to fight for “the right of the American to be himself, to express his own ideas of beauty and fitness.”

Curtis’s surreptitious but successful venture into recording corn-grinding songs led her to conceive of a broader, deeper effort documenting Indian culture—a project too large to pursue on the sly. Emboldened by President Roosevelt’s decision to aid the Yavapai, she wrote to him 56 AMERICAN HISTORY

urging that he replace Indian school superintendent Burton. “The Indians dislike him,” she told the president. “He is generally considered inadequate to his position.” Unmoved by Curtis’s complaints about Burton, Roosevelt responded with significantly more enthusiasm to a request from Curtis that he arrange for her to obtain untrammeled access to Indians so she could study their cultures in the open.

The package of materials that Curtis provided to Roosevelt, which included one of her song transcriptions, had pointedly couched her proposal’s potential impact in cannily prescient market-driven terms (Top Bid, April 2021).

“If the arts of the Indians of the Southwest are fostered intelligently who knows but what, in time, Arizona may become distinctively famed for her pottery and silverware, in the same way that Venice is for her glass and Dresden for her porcelain,” Curtis wrote. Roosevelt responded to her tactically astute overture with an invitation to pay a call at the White House, where during a meeting Curtis pushed her agenda, arguing that to “educate a primitive race the would-be educators should first study the native life in order to preserve and build upon what is worthy in the native culture.”

Roosevelt immediately got on board.

“Within hours of their meeting Roosevelt provided her with the necessary letters to research on Western reservations free from official interference,” Curtis biographer Michelle Wick Patterson writes.

Extolling Curtis’s arguments to Interior Secretary Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the president ordered Hitchcock to bring Curtis and Indian Affairs Commissioner William Jones together and to “do everything possible to develop the Indians’ artistic capacity along their own lines.” With brashness and fervor, Curtis had spurred a 180-degree shift in official policy on Indian culture. By 1913, the Interior Department’s Indian education branch had a supervisor of music. “The preservation of Indian music may not

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Henry L. Dawes

curtis, with her fervor and brash ways, had spurred a 180-degree shift in official policy as regarded indian culture.

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have occurred had it not been for the efforts of Natalie Curtis,” music historian Lori Shipley says.

Besides brass, Curtis had timing. Roosevelt once had held Native Americans in the same ill regard many Whites did. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are,” he said in an 1886 speech. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” However, he was capable of changing his mind and positions. By the 1890s, Roosevelt, now a U.S. Civil Service commissioner, was insisting Indian candidates get preference when government Indian schools were filling administrative and faculty vacancies. The country’s most famous adoptive Westerner encountered Curtis’s effusive advocacy as his views on government’s role toward Indians evolved.

There was little political risk in TR’s new platform. By the time Curtis bearded him at Oyster Bay, Roosevelt had already seen a clear advantage to embracing Indian causes. Whites were becoming less fearful of Indians.

This made siding with tribes less of a political liability and, in one way, a political advantage. An 1890 U.S. Army massacre of some 150 Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, had effectively ended tribal violence toward Whites. Additionally, Roosevelt, elevated to the White House in 1901 by William McKinley’s assassination, was looking to a presidential run of his own in 1904. The Republican ticket needed more votes among Roman Catholics, whose church had sent missionaries to convert Indians to Rome for generations. The church and the federal government had been partnering since 1874 to educate Indian children; schools run by the church’s Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions enrolled some 2,500 students.

Helping Indians could draw more Catholics to the Republican Party.

Peabody, after running Edison Electric and overseeing its merger into General Electric in 1906, had retired to devote himself to social causes and politics. His charitable activities included funding a Young Men’s Christian Association branch in Columbus, Georgia, and donating the land on which the University of North Carolina at Greensboro was built. He was a trustee and underwriter of historically Black Hampton University, in Hampton, Virginia, where he established an enduring collection of works on African American history. Mason came from old New York money on her mother’s side and had married physician Rufus Osgood Mason, of similar caste and circumstance. Upon his death in 1903, her fortune and philanthropy greatly expanded, with a focus on Black writers.

With multiple factors inclining Roosevelt to endorse her project, Curtis needed only money. As it had accomplished regarding presidential access, her family’s social network put largesse within reach. During her trip east in 1903 Natalie described her grand idea to investment banker George Foster Peabody and heiress Charlotte Osgood Mason. Each saw Curtis’s work with Native Americans dovetailing with their good deeds.

Performance Art Below opposite: Poster advertising the traveling Wild West show promoted by the impresario William Cody. Below: At Shonghopavi, Arizona, Hopi kachinas perform a rain dance; Hopi Moqui engaged in a snake dance.

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Once Peabody and Mason agreed to contribute to Curtis’s project, she went into the field. In Maine she transcribed war, dance, and love songs of the Passamaquoddy and the Penobscot.

In St. Louis, Missouri, she recorded Navajo, Klalish, and Crow elders brought to the World’s Fair for “Anthropology Days.” In late 1904, she began a four-month tour of Western reservations, relying on charm to bring off recording sessions but also occasionally paying for performances by Winnebago, Cheyenne, Sioux, Hopi, Pima, Navajo, Yavapai, and Apache singers. Her usual

Tuneful Moment A photograph by Charles Lummis of a piper at the pueblo of Islata, New Mexico 58 AMERICAN HISTORY

Natalie Curtis amplified her advocacy for Indian culture by tirelessly promoting her own activities. She lectured, performing Indian songs and poetry in settings her personal connections opened, such as the homes of conservationist Gifford Pinchot, Union Pacific President E.H. Harriman, and prominent suffragist Eva Ingersoll Brown. She appeared at the 25th anniversary dinner of the New York League of Unitarian Women, and before members of the Washington, DC, Society of Fine Arts. In an era when ethnographic writing was generally the province of little-known, arcane journals, Curtis was writing about Indian culture for mainstream magazines Harper’s, The Outlook, and The Craftsman. Her articles cast Indians in a romantic light that went far to erase the once-ubiquitous image of indigenous peoples as backward savages.

A proto-folklorist, Curtis argued that “the music of America is not found in universities and schools but out in the great expanse of territory that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, and from Canada to Mexico.” At George Peabody’s prodding, she widened her focus to African American culture and in 1910 began recording songs from Black students at Hampton Institute. In 1918, a year after marrying artist Paul Burlin, she began publishing what would be the four-volume Negro Folk-Songs. After World War I the couple moved to the French capital so Paul could pursue an interest in Expressionism. On October 23, 1921, a speeding motorist struck and killed Natalie on a Paris street. She was 46. +

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George Foster Peabody

approach, she wrote, was to explain to a chief that “the olden days were gone; the buffalo had vanished from the plains; even so would there soon be lost forever the songs and stories of the Indians.” She explained that “the White friend had come to be the pencil in the hand of the Indian” to immortalize that heritage.

Along with cataloging her recordings, Curtis distilled the works she had collected into a single print volume aimed, unlike existing academic works on Indian culture, at ordinary readers.

In 1907, Harper Brothers published The Indians’ Book, whose 500-plus pages presented songs and stories Curtis had collected from 18 tribes, augmented by her notes on her travels and explanations of how the contents illustrated each tribe’s unique ways. Curtis refused to Westernize the material. The result awed readers. “The music of the Indian has before no such record,” a reviewer for the Omaha Daily Bee wrote. “No emotion is absent, no expression wanting.” That year, The Indians’ Book led Dial magazine’s list of recommended Christmas gift books; “a revelation,” the entry read. The Washington, DC, Evening Star review began, “It appears to us that to overpraise this work might well be deemed impossible.” In a rave, a New York Times reviewer called the volume “the most intimate portrayal of Indian life and nature that has yet been attempted.”

Curtis sent copies to influential friends, including TR, who replied, “These songs cast a wholly new light on the depth and dignity of Indian thought, the simple beauty and strange charm of the vanished elder world of Indian poetry.” Subsequent editions of The Indians’ Book featured the president’s remarks as a frontispiece. The volume, which is still in print (see p. 59), remains the standard work on Native American song.

the indians’ book, with its trove of songs and stories from 18 tribes and notes from curtis, awed readers and is still the standard in its field.

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On for the Long Haul That The Indians’ Book is still in print and still enlightening readers is perhaps the clearest testament to the importance of Natalie Curtis’s work.

Her book introduced many musicians to Native American music’s complexity and sophistication. For instance, Italian composer/conductor/pianist Ferruccio Busoni used tunes in the book as the basis for his “Indian Fantasy,” premiered in 1915 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, and “Red Indian Diary,” a still-performed suite of short piano pieces. In 1950, New York Times book review editor Donald Adams, encountering The Indians’ Book, recommended it to readers as offering “great value to amateurs in American ethnology and to anyone who wishes to learn something about the true nature of our predecessors on this continent.” A reader review on Amazon.com praises The Indians’ Book as “proof that the social engineers and bureaucrats did not kill the spirit and culture of the rightful inhabitants of this land.” GoodReads.com recommends it as “an American treasure and classic that preserves and honors not only Native American tribes but the compassion and vision of Natalie Curtis herself.” (To hear Curtis’s recordings, visit bit.ly/NatalieCurtisRecords) Curtis’s less direct—but arguably more important—impact lay in the extent to which her efforts on behalf of Indians opened paths for subsequent scholarship. Ethnographers, archeologists, and linguists, mostly employed or funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of American Ethnology, amassed at the Smithsonian Institution an archive of Indian songs, stoThe Standard Work ries, and details on customs and practices. This In addition to collectoccurred because Indians had assurance that ing Black folk songs, they would not in the name of assimilation be Curtis produced a persecuted for sharing their culture. Theodore lasting legacy in the Roosevelt distilled his young friend’s impact in form of The Indians’ the October 1919 issue of The Outlook, describBook, a magnificent ing Natalie Curtis Burlin as one “who has done doorstop presenting a so very much to give Indian culture its proper wealth of information about Indian culture. position.” —By Daniel B. Moskowitz AUGUST 2021 59

Study in Resolve An 1811 watercolor on ivory is the only known image of Elizabeth Freeman, formerly Mum Bett. The necklace shown came to have a second life (see p. 64).

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“Just to Say,

‘I Am Free’” Amid the American Revolution, an enslaved woman sued for freedom—and won

By J.D. Zahniser

I ©MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

n 1780, with the American Revolution in full cry, one enslaved woman seized an opportunity to assert her freedom. Hearing the constitution of the new state of Massachusetts, which included the line “All men are born free and equal,” read aloud in the public square, she approached a neighbor for legal assistance.

Mum Bett, as the plaintiff was known, filed a lawsuit to gain her freedom. For the first time in America, a suit challenged slavery’s constitutionality—and succeeded.

In recent years popular understanding of slavery in America has undergone a transformation, as historians have worked to portray in three dimensions enslaved individuals who were overwhelmingly illiterate and so unable to leave accounts of their own. The only glimpses of enslaved persons’ lives incorporated into the record were those that had been observed by White officials compiling census records, White slaveowners keeping ledgers, White newspaper editors setting the type of runaway notices, and White lawyers writing legal documents. In a limited but profound way, new and deeper scholarship has begun to rebalance that skew.

Most Americans think of slavery as a phenomenon that occurred in the southern states before the Civil War, typified by plantation settings populated by gangs of enslaved people oppressed by indolent slave owners. In fact, slavery was a going concern in all 13 American colonies. Massachusetts

may be strongly associated with the abolitionist movement, but within ten years of Boston’s 1630 founding, that colonial and later state capital was a busy slaving port with people in bondage brought there to labor or be sold.

Slavery looked significantly different in New England. Historians distinguish between a “slave society”—a socioeconomic and legal system built upon slavery—and a “society with slaves,” a culture in which enslaved people were not the primary economic engine. The New England colonies—Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island— became societies with slaves. By the beginning of America’s revolutionary era, New England was home to some 15,000 enslaved people. A third of those lived in the Massachusetts colony. These Black bondsmen and -women lived among few others of their kind: only 10 percent of the region’s colonists owned more than four slaves and 35 percent held just one.

Women comprised 30 to 40 percent of the total New England enslaved population, typically sharing quarters with one or two other female slaves or even White indentured servants in a rural or urban household. That phrasing suggests an easier way of life compared with conditions down South, but slaves’ average life span—40 years—fell dramatically short of White colonists’ 70-year average.

The particular living conditions endured by enslaved persons in New England cut both ways. Any sense of Black community was scarce to nonexistent—but slaves had easier AUGUST 2021 61

Tapping Reeve

access to White conversation and discussion.

The lively, often open-air, debates occurring after 1770 about liberty and equality found an eager audience among the enslaved. And as Enlightenment concepts took hold and cultural acceptance of slavery declined, owners around the region manumitted—freed—bondsmen and -women at an increased rate. In these tumultuous years, freedom swirled around the enslaved and looked like them, too.

slaves on sugar plantations. An individual with an Indian or White parent was not considered Black and so could not be enslaved. Such colonial statutes offered legal paths to freedom. In the period before 1780 slaves in New England, 14 of them women, brought nearly 50 lawsuits.

Women seeking legal redress faced even higher barriers than men. Authorities included enslaved women under the same law of coverture that applied to White women: wives were considered their husbands’ property and could not sue on their own behalf.

Historians have chronicled the stories of several enslaved female plaintiffs. In 1741, Elisha Webb was declared free by a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, court. Born in Virginia to a White woman and enslaved Black father, Webb became free at birth because of her mother’s race. However, Virginia typically indentured such children for 8 years when they reached puberty. Seven years in, Webb’s time was transferred to a Portsmouth sea captain who dared to sell her as “Elishea [sic] a negro.” Webb, who was literate, wrote to the Virginia judge who set up her indenture.

By sending documentary evidence, she was able to prove her status as a free woman. In a similar 1767 case, Jenny Slew twice sued owner John Whipple, claiming Whipple had wrongfully enslaved her since her mother was White. On her second try, Slew won her suit in Salem, Massachusetts, and four pounds in compensation.

Ashley House, Sheffield, Massachusetts Bett lived from age seven among enslaved people owned by insurgent John Ashley.

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The New England colonies were a unique environment for enslaved persons in other important ways. Reflecting as the region’s laws did a strong religious influence, New Englanders considered slaves not only property but persons.

Some colonies also came to view only Africans as fit for slavery, even legislatively. Early in the colony’s history, natives captured in wars, considered too dangerous to remain in the colony, often were shipped to the West Indies to work as

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By 1774, when Juno Larcom brought a different suit in Salem, revolutionary rhetoric had worked its way into common parlance. The long-enslaved Larcom, a married woman, declared herself single in order to have standing to allege that she had been enslaved illegally, because her mother was an Indian.

Larcom’s impetus for bringing legal action was the sale of two of her children by an owner hard-pressed for cash. At trial, Larcom told the court, “Judge Ye Weather or noe I hadent ort to be set at Liberty.” The case was still under way when her owner died; afterward, Larcom boldly claimed her freedom. The owner’s widow gave up resistance and freed Larcom and her children, even giving the family a small residence on her property.

As significant as the Webb and Larcom cases were, only upon Mum Bett’s filing of her suit in 1780 does the language of equality appear in the legal record. Called Bet or Bett, she had been born around 1744; her precise birth date was not recorded. Her parents and their progeny belonged to Pieter Hogeboom, head of a wealthy Dutch family residing in Claverack, a town in New York near that colony’s eastern boundary with Massachusetts.

After daughter Hannah Hogeboom married John Ashley, seven-year-old Bett was sent 25 miles east to the Ashley home—now an historic site—in Sheffield, a town in Massachusetts colony. John Ashley was among the area’s largest slaveholders; Bett became one of five people he owned. Growing up in the Ashley home, she never learned to read; her story threads through historical records and White employers’ personal writings. At some point, she bore a daughter, called “Little Bett” or “Betsy.” Accounts differ regarding the father’s identity and whereabouts and the couple’s marital status.

John Ashley’s home in Sheffield was a center of pre-Revolutionary ferment. Ashley, a highly influential lawyer and local judge, had commanded a local militia during the French and Indian War. In 1773, he hosted a group of insurgents who wrote an early petition to the British crown. The Sheffield Resolves, as that manifesto became known, stated, “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.”

Though illiterate, Bett could not have helped but hear the words “equal,” “free,” “independent,”

bett’s owner inflicted a bone-deep wound to her arm when bett tried to stop her mistress from hitting bett’s daughter with a hot shovel.

and “liberty” with a thrill.

A later sympathetic account describes Bett enduring repeated abuse from Hannah Ashley yet sustaining herself with a strong will. At one point, Bett incurred a bone-deep wound in one arm because she stepped in to prevent her mistress from striking Bett’s daughter with a hot shovel. “I had a bad arm all winter, but Madam had the worst of it,” the account quotes Bett as saying. “I never covered the wound, and when people said to me, before Madam, ‘Betty, what ails your arm?’ I only answered—‘ask missis!’”

Mum Bett’s opportunity to claim a free life came in the midst of the Revolution. In 1780, she was in her late thirties. With illiteracy widespread across the colonies, the authorities commonly read aloud important documents for all to hear. That was the case with Bett and the new Massachusetts state constitution. “All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights;” she heard, “among which may be reckoned the right of

John Adams

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enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.” This document, which chiefly was authored by John Adams and which was influenced by the Declaration of Independence, was approved by Massachusetts voters in June 1780. It is unclear whether Bett heard a reading before or after voter approval.

Shortly thereafter, Bett approached a neighbor, Theodore Sedgwick. A young lawyer, an early abolitionist, and a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, Sedgwick had been among the drafters of the Sheffield Resolves. His daughter, Catherine, later sketched the scene between her

Memento A bracelet fashioned from a necklace given Elizabeth Freeman by Catherine Sedgwick.

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Mum Bett took the name Elizabeth Freeman and began to fashion a free life. John Ashley offered her a paid position, but she went to work for

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Theodore Sedgwick

father and Mum Bett. “’Sir,’ said [Bett], ‘I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom. I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?’”

Sedgwick agreed to take Bett’s case. Soon, her litigation was combined with a freedom suit brought by another enslaved person owned by Ashley, a man named Brom. Sedgwick realized that Bett’s suit could serve as a means of determining whether slavery was legal under the new state constitution. Tapping Reeve of Litchfield, Connecticut, another patriot and renowned legal educator, joined the case. Some sources suggest that Sedgwick and Reeve were looking for a test case and chose the two defendants, though it’s not clear why only two or these two particular people would be the plaintiffs.

Sedgwick and Reeve began by filing a writ of replevin, a legal action which seeks the return of property illegitimately held. Ashley responded that both Bett and Brom were his rightful property for life. After Ashley refused to comply with two further writs, the court ordered a trial.

In August 1781, at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the Berkshire County Court of Common Pleas heard the case of Brom and Bett v.

Ashley. Addressing a jury of free White men, Sedgwick and Reeve argued that the language of the new state constitution effectively outlawed slavery. Though in 1781 these veniremen were hardly a jury of the plaintiffs’ peers, few jurors hearing the case were likely to own slaves. By the next day, the jury had found for Bett and Brom: the two were free people. Bett and Brom were awarded 30 shillings in damages. Ashley was ordered to pay six pounds in court costs. Ashley appealed but within months, after a similar suit was also decided in favor of the enslaved, dropped his appeal.

Another such case brought about the legal end of slavery in Massachusetts when on July 8, 1783, the state supreme court ruled in Commonwealth v. Jennison. In that finding the judge referenced the new state constitution’s declaration that “all men are born free and equal” in stating that “slavery is in my judgment as effectively abolished as it can be. . . .”

ART COLLECTION 3/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

purchasing a house of her own not far from the sedgwicks, elizabeth freeman practiced midwifery and lived out her years in freedom.

Theodore Sedgwick. Freeman acquired a reputation as a midwife and nurse. Sedgwick’s daughter Catherine, who disliked her stepmother, came to call Elizabeth “mother.”

Catherine Sedgwick’s sentimental 1853 reminiscence first revealed the story of Mum Bett.

Catherine wrote that Elizabeth liked to recall her struggle for freedom. “I would have been willing if I could have had one minute of freedom just to say, ‘I am free,’” she remembered Elizabeth declaring. “I would have been willing to die at the end of that minute.”

The Sedgwick family employed Elizabeth Freeman until 1808, when she purchased and moved into a house of her own on nearby Cherry Hill Road. She continued to practice midwifery.

In 1811 Catherine Sedgwick’s daughter Susan painted a miniature of Freeman, the only known

likeness of her. The portrait presents a paragon of respectability wearing the white cap typical of women of that era, a blue dress, and a white neckcloth in the fashion of the day. Mum Bett wears a gold necklace given her by Catherine.

Elizabeth Freeman was about 85 when she died on December 28, 1829. She left a detailed will distributing her assets among her daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. These included five gowns, including one in black silk; “a large home made birds eye petticoat” and a black velvet hat; pieces of furniture; three “green edged pie plates;” and her gold necklace and earrings. She is buried at Stockbridge Cemetery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Catherine Sedgwick wrote on Mum Bett’s headstone, in part, “She could neither read nor write yet in her own sphere she had no superior nor equal.” +

Catherine Sedgwick AUGUST 2021 65

Doing the Lambeth Wait Londoners queue up on Lambeth Way to buy goods after a V-2 rocket attack.

Ruin and Renewal: Civilizing Europe After World War II

By Paul Betts Basic Books, 2020; $35

66 AMERICAN HISTORY

In his 1961 masterwork, The Evolution of Civilizations, legendary historian Carroll Quigley remarked that the historian’s task is to analyze the mechanisms of a civilization’s rise and fall.

Energetically taking up the Quigleyan challenge, Paul Betts examines the transition from World War II to Cold War, dissecting not only European civilization’s greatest crisis, but the concept of civilization.

Ruin and Renewal analyzes how the rhetoric of civilization—the word itself and its varying, often competing connotations—influenced the post-war globe. Interweaving topics from religion and folklore to architecture and economics, Betts exhaustively catalogs the mutations of “civilization,” illustrating ideas of the Cold War period.

Betts posits that the apogee of Europeans’ once-dominant cultures seemed in 1945 to have degenerated into refugees and rubble.

The emergence of the United States, itself a former colonial holding, as a superpower disbursing largesse while African and Asian

colonies’ demands for independence grew louder and louder dictated new approaches to international cooperation.

Yet while non-governmental organizations such as UNESCO were preaching a single, global civilization, two high-profile court cases embodied rising regional tension. The Nuremberg war crimes trials endorsed the civilizing influence of international justice, but Western and Soviet ideas of punishment for barbarism—the antithesis of civilization—soon diverged. Communist Hungary’s 1949 show trial of Cardinal Józef Mindszenty pitted the West’s entanglement of religion and politics against Eastern materialism.

America, buoyed by industrial might and belief in its own exceptionalism, assumed the mantle of defender of Western civilization, as in the Greek Civil War; in that conflict, the Truman Doctrine made clear that “civilization” equalled “anti-communism.”

The communist East employed its own ideas of civilization, intended to emphasize

©CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

civilization at the brink

PHOTO12/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES

cultural commonality with unaligned nations, promoting African anthropological and folkish heritage in hopes of pulling Africans away from lingering Western influences.

As stories and images, still and moving, of European violence in Africa were proliferating, French writer Jean-Paul Sartre articulated a crisis of European civilization, wondering how victims of World War II so quickly became executioners in Africa. Independent Ghana, Algeria, and Senegal recast the rhetoric of civilization as a weapon against imperialism,

rejecting European civilization to encourage cultural and national rebirth.

Ruin and Renewal recounts encyclopedically efforts to rebuild and re-civilize after the war. Betts tracks the mercurial concepts of civilization to portray the vast and varied perceptions of and justifications for the Cold War that presaged the ways in which semantics still frame how we understand the world. — Peter Kentz holds a graduate degree in history from the War Studies Department of King’s College, London. He writes in Washington, DC.

A Real Paine

was inducted into the National Convention.

Paine’s specialty was denouncing tyranny, but he was not a social revolutionary in the mode of Robespierre, who came to power in 1793 and imprisoned him for arguing against executing Louis XVI. It took nearly a year and a new American ambassador—the previous holder of the post disliked him—for Paine to gain release. Around this time he wrote the work that wrecked his reputation. The Age of Reason praised Jesus as an admirable moral philosopher but deplored organized Christianity and charted inconsistencies in Biblical stories—no news to most Founding Fathers and other cultured Enlightenment figures. However, these doyens did believe religion essential—not personally but for the masses, lest the mob run wild. Few of the unwashed read Adams or Jefferson but everyone read Paine.

Age of Reason brought him an avalanche of abuse and accusations of atheism. He retired to his farm where his death at 72 in 1809 produced lukewarm obituaries and a sparsely attended funeral. Until well into the 20th century, American histories often failed to mention him.

Unger’s opinionated but admiring portrait will convince most readers that Paine, now rehabilitated, was too raw a personality to enter the Founders’ genteel pantheon, but that is where he does belong. —Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.

Paine, modestly well-known today, contributed as much to the Revolution’s success as Washington’s leadership. This excellent biography explains how. Continuing a lifetime’s string of popular accounts of the period—Amazon lists 18—Unger emphasizes that “Other philosophes in the Age of Enlightenment—Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire and the like—aroused intellectuals and literate political leaders, but Thomas Paine addressed Everyman: literate or not, poor, rich, noble, ignoble…”

British-born, an auto-didact, opinionated to the point of issuing the occasional polemic, Paine impressed Benjamin Franklin, then a fellow resident of London. Franklin provided letters of recommendation when the younger man emigrated to America and became editor of a new publication, Pennsylvania Magazine.

Unger reminds readers that print was the 18th-century antecedent to social media, monitored by nearly all. When in January 1776, as the first Revolutionary battles loomed, Paine’s fiery Common Sense appeared, the pamphlet became the best-selling title in American history. The Founders loved it.

Through the war, Paine drew and held the public eye with The American Crisis—”these are the times that try men’s souls…”—as that stream of broadsides came to be called. Paine sailed in 1787 to Europe, where he wrote The Rights of Man. A sensation in England, that declaration enraged the British government. Fleeing to a worshipful revolutionary France in 1792, he

Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence

By Harlow Giles Unger Da Capo, 2019; $28

The Rights of Man Man A 1792 cartoon portrays Tom Paine defending revolutionary France and urging Britons to throw off that nation’s king.

AUGUST 2021 67

Pencil-Chewing Good As he revises the script for 1939’s Of Mice and Men, director Lewis Milestone savors the flavor of eraser.

Scoundrels and Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s

By Philippe Garnier Black Pool, 2020; $25

68 AMERICAN HISTORY

French author Philippe Garnier explores the dark alleys and byways of 1930s Hollywood and Tinseltown’s eccentric characters in his sizzling Scoundrels and Spitballers, published

by Czar of Noir Eddie Muller. An atypical dive into film history, Scoundrels features earthy vignettes dissecting the picture trade and the work of its mostly forgotten “Schmucks with Underwoods,” as studio chief Jack Warner referred to screenwriters whose storytelling and dialogue put the pepper in many a vintage Hollywood classic.

Researched through decades of legwork and dishy, detailed interviews with colorful insiders, the book presents portraits of such legends as James M. Cain and Nathanael West, felons turned crime writers Robert Tasker and Ernest Granville Booth, flimflam man Wilson Mizner, one-hit wonder Edward Anderson, and other Runyonesque specimens. These wheeler dealers, dreamers, and schemers were not about power and fame but creating and delivering a

bracing story. As Garnier writes of West, “He was never attracted to the glamour and glitter of it, being more interested in the service doors and back alleys.”

Scriptwriters adept at “spitballing”—dexterously exemplified in the recent Netflix film Mank, which has a fast-talking gang of scribblers, put on the spot by producers, collectively weave a story line out of thin air and whole cloth—had the knack for improvising a spellbinding tale on demand. Others rewrote colleagues’ and rivals’ work, adapted literary tales, or created original screenplays. They mostly worked to underwrite booze, broads, and gambling but also revered the word—whether writing for print and the movies or perusing the stacks at beloved LA bookshops Satyr and Stanley Rose, equally well known for its ample stocks of esoterica and erotica.

Garnier writes in the hardboiled, punchy prose of film noir, as in this thumbnail of Hollywood Spectator publisher Welford Beaton:

COURTESY OF MARY MALLORY

Sweetheart, Get Me Turnaround

HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES

“Mixing common sense, long-winded arguments and prudery, Beaton played Don Quixote against the Hollywood windmills, always in the name of economy.”

Garnier punctuates his crackerjack story with colorful, if not always accurate reminiscences elicited from his wordsmith protagonists, who rose or fell on their own shrewdness

or self-destructiveness. Scoundrels closes with chronologies of the book’s characters’ careers and lives. This engrossing page-turner captures the heady atmosphere and freewheeling possibilities of 1930s Hollywood before big money and conglomerates took control. — Mary Mallory writes about film and the City of the Angels from Los Angeles, California.

swords, man

Another factor was the Legion’s officiall nature as a “provincial” unit. Unlike militiass serving briefly in restricted areas, provincialss served for the duration and wherever ordered..

Both as irregulars and as a force half comprised d of cavalrymen, the Legion was ideal for opera-tions presenting the highest risk of atrocities— — scouting, foraging, and raiding. The Legion and d its atrocities, dispersed as they were acrosss time, territory, and bloody-minded hyperbole,, often cropped up in official reports.

And the Legion was effective, heighteningg animosity toward it. “Irregular” status or no, the unit not only outperformed many professional counterparts but foreshadowed the coming of the commando unit before that term existed. In a supreme irony, arguably the most proficient military force in the war that gained American independence consisted of colonists fighting to remain in the British Empire. —James Baresel is a freelance writer in Annandale, Virginia.

In popular accounts of the Revolution, the phrase “Tarleton’s Quarter” is a droll euphemism for brutality arising from a legend that Mel Gibson transmuted into caricature in The Patriot. But was Tarleton truly a beast? Nope.

Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s British Legion played a major role in the British war effort in the south. In that most savage of the uprising’s major theaters, British regulars and the Continental Army usually adhered to the rules of war, while both sides’ militias frequently committed atrocities. Tarleton, by no means a “kid gloves” type, nonetheless attempted to preserve civilians’ lives and whatever of their property Crown forces did not need. Though his Legion’s ranks inevitably included goons, its record was notably less dirty than some loyalist and patriot militias’, sinking to its worst after an influx of opportunistically coat-turning Patriot prisoners.

The Legion’s historical notoriety stemmed from a single misunderstood incident. At the 1780 Battle of Waxhaws in South Carolina, a Maryland regiment’s officers tried to surrender their unit. Some Maryland men kept shooting. A round felled Tarleton’s horse, pinning its rider to the ground and causing his men to think him dead. Assuming a murderous ruse, legionaries went berserk, slaughtering foes they mistakenly thought to have violated one of the most stringent conventions of civilized warfare. Patriots never got to hear both sides of a story they exaggerated with each telling until demonstrably inaccurate accounts appeared decades later.

War at Saber Point: Banastre Tarleton and the British Legion

By John Knight Westholme, 2020, $30

Rake’s Progress A 1782 caricature has Tarleton with a sabre and a featherheaded figure representing the Prince of Wales.

AUGUST 2021 69

Go, Joe 1950 Soviet painting shows Joseph Stalin being lauded by aides and citizens..

The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare, 1945-2020

By Tim Weiner Holt, 2020; $29.99

70 AMERICAN HISTORY

Didn’t the United Un States whip Russia in 1989?

Apparently n not, according to Tim Weiner. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Prize historian argues convincingly that while scoring a knockdown, the Americans, preoccupied p with celebrating their victory, overlooked overl the other side as it was rebuilding itself itse into a superpower rival.

Historians now agree that, despite grabby rhetoric, the U USSR was not out to conquer the world and tha that the Cold War generated a hotheaded standoff, stand avoiding nuclear Armageddon largely by luck luck. Except for the occasional small war, America fought with pressure, maneuver, and diplomacy, diploma aka “containment”—Weiner’s “political warfare. warf ” The policy worked.

Weiner agrees agr that trying to match American military spending figured in the USSR’s collapse but gives equal weight to the failed Soviet command economy, widespread corruption, and the morass in Afghanistan.

Exhilarated, American pundits proclaimed freedom to be on the march. Experts hastened to advise Russia on shifting to a free market, free elections, and democracy.

Matters did not go well. Almost immediately Russians cringed as Germany unified and were shamed by the loss of their Eastern European satellites and much of their empire. New Russian leaders made clear that expanding NATO

east to enlist parts of the old USSR would enrage them, but the U.S. did so anyway.

That free market stuff also tanked. “Democracy” to most Russians means the 1990s, an era of depression far worse than America’s grim interwar interlude, and most want no part of it.

In 2000 Vladimir Putin succeeded the ineffectual Boris Yeltsin, vowing to rekindle respect for Russia, and readers will likely agree with Weiner that he succeeded. Putin’s takeover of the Crimea and attack on Ukraine drew almost universal cheers at home. With an economy the size of Italy’s, Putin cannot match America’s military reach, but he has become a player in the Middle East and has unhinged American politics with relentless cyberwarfare.

Donald Trump got elected with a goal echoing Putin’s, but his efforts remain a work-inprogress. Weiner bluntly conveys that Trump’s fandom for Putin’s and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un’s brands of Stalinism-lite is no quirk but part of a steady retreat by democracy in favor of authoritarianism around a world in which China—but no western nation—has prospered spectacularly. Extremist jingoistic parties flourish in most western democracies.

A riveting if bleak argument that America mishandled the collapse of communism. —Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.

PHOTO12/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES

rethinking russia

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Guthrie, Oklahoma’s…

ALPHA STOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (2)

Mix Mixed Here Among the jewels in well-preserved Guthrie the Blue Belle Saloon ranks high, conveying a sense of the old days, inset.

…downtown freeze-frames yesteryear on an enchanting scale.

Originally Deer Creek, a jerkwater stop on the Southern Kansas line—later the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway—the town blossomed after an 1889 land rush brought 10,000 new residents overnight. Guthrie, renamed for a Kansas lawyer, was declared the territorial capital in 1890. That status brought the city 20 years of bustle and growth.

However, when statehood came in 1910 voters chose as capital the railroad and meatpacking hub of Oklahoma City over the smaller town of Guthrie, which took its objections all the way to the Supreme Court to no avail. Guthrie withered and emptied. Decades of disuse and impecuniousness preserved the ghostly downtown, subsequently revived and restored. Now an international magnet for Victorian architecture enthusiasts, the historic district’s 2,165 vintage buildings—no locale in Oklahoma has more—include the Blue Belle Saloon at 224 West Harrison Street, famous for having employed a handsome equestrian named Thomas Edwin Mix as a bartender from 1902 until 1904, before the former Rough Rider gained fame as silent-era movie star Tom Mix. —Mike Coppock frequently contributes to the magazine from Enid, Oklahoma.

72 AMERICAN HISTORY

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