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As long as man has gone into battle,

man has studied war

An extraordinary anthology of work from the foremost writers on military

history today, all recipients of the Pritzker Military Museum and Librarys
annual Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing

James M.
McPherson
Pulitzer Prizewinning author of
more than a dozen
books on the Civil
War and its legacy

Allan R. Millett
award-winning
military historian
concentrating on
the Marine Corps,
World War II, and
the Korean War

Gerhard L.
Weinberg
World War II veteran
and author of A World
at Arms: A Global
History of World War
II and other books
on that confict

Rick Atkinson
three-time Pulitzer
Prize winner, author
of the Liberation
Trilogy, a narrative
history of the U.S.
military in Europe,
19421945

Carlo DEste
acclaimed author
of World War II
battle histories and
biographies of the
wars major leaders

Max Hastings
author of more
than 20 books,
many of them
histories of major
battles and
campaigns of
World War II

Order your copy today! Item: WHGOW $27.00 (incl. S&H)

HistoryNetShop.com1-800-358-6327
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Tim OBrien
Vietnam War
veteran and author
of several awardwinning works of
fction based on
his experience in
that confict

American History
April 2014

44

Sanford Gifords
Civil War canvases blend
history and the illuminated
landscape, as in this depiction
of Gifords New York militia
unit in camp near South
Mountain, Md., in 1863.

Features
30
coveR sToRy

36

Washington Cuts Loose

on a cold new Jersey night, a
dinner party for continental
Army ofcers and their wives
revealed a little-known side
of the commander in chief
by Edward G. Lengel

The Man of Force

Who Saved Belgium
before Herbert Hoover became
the scapegoat for the great
Depression, he led one of the
greatest humanitarian relief
eforts in history

44
50
58

by Richard Ernsberger Jr.

A Day in the Life of a Soldier

The illuminating civil War
paintings of Hudson River
school artist sanford giford
by Sarah Richardson

Think Positive
european mesmerism inspired
an American healing faith and
the growth of a self-help credo
by Erika Janik

DeTAIL fRom Camp of the seventh reGiment near frederiCk, maryland (1863),
neW yoRk sTATe mILITARy museum, DIvIsIon of mILITARy AnD nAvAL AffAIRs

Peoples Palaces
colossal buildings decked
out in cotton, corn and coal
put Americas heartland
bounty on grand display
by Richard Selcer

on The Cover:
Washington, age 47,
commander in chief
GeorGe WashinGton, cA. 1779,
JeAn bAPTIsTe Le PAon, fRAnce,
couRTesy of geoRge WAsHIngTons
mounT veRnon

APRIL 2014

WHG

71

W EIDER H ISTORY G ROUP

Roger L. Vance

GRouP MaNaGiNG EditoR

A Civil War soldier

is ready for anything
with his pipe, sword
and minstrel banjo.
The banjos scrolled
head and neck is
characteristic of
instruments made in
Baltimore by William
Boucher in the 1850s.

Vol. 49, No. 1

APRIL 2014

Roger L. Vance

EditoR

Peyton McMann
Christine M. Kreiser
Richard Ernsberger
Sarah Richardson
Patty Kelly
Gene Santoro

diGitaL

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Gerald Swick
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PRESidENt & CEo

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Departments
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Letters

adVERtiSiNG

24

American Mosaic

Times toll on silent flms;

the long, strange history of
missionary squirrels; D-Day
underwaterand more

29

The First

banned book
encounter

bob Dylan plays

Woody guthrie

68

here Is Where

A north carolina prisoner

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Details

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presentation sword

74

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Interview

Zbigniew brzezinski, Jimmy

carters national security
adviser, on the perils of
international intervention
Letter From American
history

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Hoovers compassionate turn
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Advertisement

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Letters
Dysfunction Junction
I quite agree with Thomas Manns
concerns about the dangers from
the radical right of the
Republican Party (Interview,
February 2014). But he
only tells half the story. As a
political writer and observer
for more than 50 years, I
have watched the Democratic
Party make a comparable
shift to the left. That was
plainly evident at the 1972
(McGovern) and 1984 (Mondale)
Democratic National Conventions,
both of which I covered, and that trend
continues. Then U.S. Senator Fred R.
Harris of Oklahoma told me in a 1972
interview that as national chairman
he set out to profoundly change the
Democratic Party with emphasis on
what he called New Populism and
a push for redistribution of income,
wealth and power. And U.S. Senator
David Boren of Oklahoma told me
in interviews at the 1984 and 1988
Democratic conventions that he was
dismayed by what he termed his partys
shift leftward. A moderate who felt
increasingly estranged from party
leadership, Boren quit the Senate during
his third term.
Lets face it: The dynamic driving both
parties is far from the middle ground
that most of the American public
occupies and where governmental
consensus is achievable. As long as that
continueson both sideswe will have
political dysfunction.
Jenk Jones Jr.
Tulsa, Okla.

I am a huge American history

enthusiast and have enjoyed your
magazine for a couple of years now. But
Im writing to express my astonishment
and disappointment at your interview
with Thomas Mann. I was interested in
reading about the historical perspective
to the current state of affairs. Instead,
the interview became a forum to lay
the complete and total blame for the

current partisan rancor on the GOP

without any share being given to the
Democratic Party. I think most people
would reasonably place the
blame on both. Frankly,
Im dismayed by both
political parties and the
inappropriate statements
they sometimes make. But
I dont think either side is
blameless. Instead of giving
an unbiased historical
account of how the current
state of affairs compares to the times
since our founding, your contribution
has made it worse. Congratulations.
Stephen Sisneros
Dallas, Texas

Fuzzy Math
In Failed Gambit (December 2013),
author David Sicilia writes that twothirds of the states had to ratify the
16th Amendment on the creation of an
income tax before it could be adopted.
Article V of the U.S. Constitution says
that three-fourths of the states, not
two-thirds, must ratify in order for a
proposed amendment to be declared
valid. Two-thirds is the minimum
number of votes needed in the U.S.
House and in the Senate in order to
submit an amendment to the states.
R.S. Cannon
Melbourne, Fla.

Lackluster Address?
Regarding the interview with Garry
Wills on the Gettysburg Address
(December 2013), I have a few
observations. You describe the address
as being enthusiastically received.
The historical record suggests
otherwise. After delivering his speech
at the Gettysburg battlefeld, Lincoln
said to his friend and aide Ward Hill
Lamon that the speech wont scour,
believing that it was a failure. Many
leading Northern newspapers derided
the speech as silly remarks worthy
of oblivion and ludicrous, dull, and
commonplace. Such commentary is

representative of the negative reactions

to Lincolns words. To be fair, some
papers and journals offered praise and
accolades. Therefore, a much more
accurate description would have been
that the speech received mixed reviews,
hardly the enthusiastic reception
suggested by your interviewer.
Joseph A. Colasurdo
Sterling, Va.

While enthusiastic might have been

an overstatement, history suggests that
Lincoln did not consider his Gettysburg
Address a failure. Lincoln scholars
believe it was Lamons opinion, not the
presidents, that the speech wouldnt
scour. In Lincoln at Gettysburg, Wills
wrote that the Lamon story, though
widely circulated, has no basis in fact.
Regardless of how it was received at the
time, the Gettysburg Address is now
rightly celebrated as a masterful work,
so much so that last November one of
its harsh critics, the Patriot & Union
newspaper (now the Patriot-News) of
Harrisburg, Pa., offcially retracted its
negative review of the speech.

When the Spirit Moves

I read with interest Reagan Reborn,
by H.W. Brands (August 2013), and
was gratifed to see Brands bring light
to an oft-overlooked facet of the Reagan
years, namely the extensive use of
astrological charts prepared by Joan
Quigley for scheduling and presumably
policy issues. After her husband
left offce, Nancy Reagan promoted
astrology on TV talk shows, stating that
she didnt know where else to turn
for spiritual sustenance. One wonders
how this jibes with the Reagans
public alliance with Jerry Falwell and
fundamentalist Christians.
Bill Golden
Asheville, N.C.
American History
19300 Promenade Drive
Leesburg, VA 20176-6500
americanhistory@weiderhistorygroup.com

APRIL 2014 7

Weider Reader

Selections from our sister publications,

chosen by the editors of American History

mILITarY HISTOrY

WILD WEST

CIvIL War TImES

Rebel of the Cause

Tourist Traps

Mosby Bags a General

any in Ireland
would have
thought Michael
Collins the last person
to offer the hope of
peace. He had earned
an international
reputation as the most brilliant,
ruthless and effective guerrilla leader
of his day andin the words of one
recent biographerwas arguably the
originator of modern urban terrorism.
Collins joined the clandestine Irish
Republican Brotherhood, an order
committed to establishing a republic
through armed revolution. In Dublin
in April 1916, 25-year-old Collins
participated in the ill-fated Easter
Rising against British forces. In its
grim aftermath 16 men were courtmartialed, put against a wall and shot;
another was hanged. Collins narrowly
escaped execution and was among
the hundreds of men sent to English
internment camps.
Predictably, Irish poets extolled the
tragic glory of the Rising. William
Butler Yeats wrote Easter, 1916 with
its haunting refrain, A terrible beauty is
born. Collins, however, languishing in
a British prison camp, wrote, I do not
think the Rising week was an appropriate
time for the issue of memoranda
couched in poetic phrase.On the
whole I think the Rising was bungled
terribly, costing many a good life. He
had learned a valuable lesson: Irish
independence could never be attained
by a frontal assault on one of the worlds
most powerful nations. As Collins saw
it, the goal was not to die nobly for the
Cause; it was to win, by taking the war
to the enemy and using his own tactics
against him.
From Michael Collins: Rebel of the
Cause, by Ron Soodalter, March 2014
8 AMERICAN HISTORY

he robbing of
Yosemite stages
was a serious business.
A drop off in stage
fares due to fear of
robberies also meant
a drop off in sales for
the local merchants. The Wisconsin State
Journal, half a continent away, reported
at the time: Highwaymen are infesting
the Yosemite Valley route. A few days
since, a stagecoach flled with California
tourists was waylaid and the members
of the party plundered to their last cent.
Several robberies have occurred on the
route during the past month.
Grim as a stage holdup might be,
the benefts in humor were often
worth it, as reported by a Madera stage
offce clerk at the time of a May 1885
robbery. One traveler denounced the
cowardly victims. Demonstrating what
his own response would have been, he
frantically searched his pockets for the
key to his valise, then unlocked it and
produced a small bundle. More minutes
were spent in undoing knots to expose
a small pistol that, according to an
observer, would make a highwayman
as mad as blazes if he were shot with it.
The owner then carefully rewrapped it
and restored it to the valise.
Do you think they will rob us?
giggled a woman passenger in the
offce. Oh, no, madam, said a male
passenger, there is no danger at all. You
neednt be in the least alarmed.
Oh, she said, I do wish they
would! and her face fairly beamed with
enthusiasm at the idea of a romantic
encounter with real, live robbers in the
dark mountain forests.
From Stagecoach to Yosemite, by
William B. Secrest, April 2014

t actually was a dark

and stormy night
when Confederate
Captain John Mosby
and 29 of his Rangers
rode quietly into
Union-controlled
Fairfax Court House, about 15 miles
west of Washington, D.C., at 2 a.m.
on March 8, 1863. Rain had begun to
fall just as evening had settled over a
landscape already obscured by mist.
There were a few [Union] sentinels
about the town, but it was so dark that
they could not distinguish us from
their own people, Mosby recalled in
his memoir.
Before the wars outbreak, Fairfax
Court House had been a quiet
crossroads centered on a brick
courthouse and a hotel. Plantations
fanned out around it, and the mansions
of wealthy residents loomed over its
dirt roads. By the night of Mosbys raid
the felds were overgrown, the fences
were torn down, and perhaps 2,500
Union soldiers were camped nearby. A
tent on the courthouse lawn sheltered
a telegraph operator, and the hotel was
serving as a hospital. The mansions
provided housing for high-ranking
Union offcers, among them Brig. Gen.
Edwin H. Stoughton, at 24 the armys
youngest general. It was the possibility
of capturing a general that brought
Mosby behind enemy lines that night.
The Rangers spent just an hour in the
village without fring a shot, but they
left with 58 captured horses and 33
prisonersStoughton among them.
That one escapade made Mosby an
instant hero in the South and sent a
tremor through the Union lines.
From Mosbys Female Super Spy, by
Roger DiSilvestro, April 2014

avIaTIOn HISTOrY

WOrLD War II

Brothers in Arms

Held Hostage

colorful fight of
German Albatros
D.IIIs swept high
above the shell-blasted
wasteland of northern
France on April 13,
1917, hunting for
prey. Second Lieutenant Lothar von
Richthofen saw his fight commander
and older brother Manfred, the
Red Baron, suddenly dive to the
attack, and followed him down.
Like screaming hawks, the Germans
pounced upon a squadron of British
Royal Aircraft Factory R.E.8 two-seat
observation planes.
Manfred quickly bagged his
opponent. I looked around and saw
that my brother sat behind a British
machine from which fames shot out
and which then exploded, the Red
Baron recalled. Near this Englishman
few a second. [Lothar] did nothing
else to the frst, who had not yet gone
down and was still in the air. He turned
his machine-guns on the next one and
immediately shot at him even though
he had barely fnished with the other.
This one also fell after a short fght.
Back at the airfeld at Douai, Manfred
continued, Lothar asked quite proudly:
How many have you shot down?
One, was the modest answer. Turning
his back to his brother, Lothar replied,
I got two, and walked away. The days
action and ensuing exchange perfectly
illustrate Lothar von Richthofens style:
bold, ambitious and impulsive. The
fedgling airman scored his fourth and
ffth victories that day, while his famous
brother got his 41st.
From The Reckless Richthofen, by
OBrien Browne, March 2014

merican divebombers roared

across Manila and
over the Dominican
University of Santo
Tomas. The Marine
Corps pilots were
reconnoitering the campus, where the
Japanese had interned nearly 4,000
civilians from Allied nations after
taking over the city in 1942. As one
SBD few by, a gunner dropped a note
reading, Roll out the barrel. Santa
Claus is coming Sunday or Monday.
I was 8, and had lived at Santo Tomas
for more than two years with my
mother and my sister. The next night a
fare went up, illuminating American
tanks with GIs alongside. An American
voice yelled through a megaphone for
everyone to get down. Machine guns
began fring. When they stopped guards
came into our room to peer out the
windows. They made us sleep on the
foor. At daybreak, when my friend Nick
opened his eyes, he saw, dangling from
the bed above, a hand holding a grenade.
What followed was one of the Pacifc
wars most amazing episodes, in which
we internees played an unwilling role.
Facing the choice between a fght to
the death and surrenderthe supreme
disgrace for any Japanese offcerLt.
Col. Toshio Hayashi found a third way.
He held us hostage while trying to
negotiate safe conduct for him and his
men out of the enemys grasp.
From Hostage Swap in Manila, by
Rupert Wilkinson, March/April 2014

To order these or any other

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visit: www.HistoryNet.com
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APRIL 2014

American Mosaic
Compiled by Sarah Richardson

Lost Treasures of Silent Film Tallied

Theda Bara, whose risqu

Screen siren Theda Bara (top) smolders in

Raoul Walshs 1915 Carmen. Known for his
brilliant physical comedy, Buster Keaton
(above) sails the seas in The Navigator in 1924.

costuming rivaled Madonnas, was

once as famous as Mary Pickford and
Charlie Chaplin, but only two of her
39 flms still exist intact. Fewer than
half of the flms of Raymond Griffth,
a comic talent equal to Chaplin or
Buster Keaton, survive. Of the 28
early features John Ford directed at
Universal, only three remain. Though
American silent flms represent the
fowering of an art form, 70 percent
of the nearly 11,000 silent flms made
between 1912 and 1929 have been
lost. According to a study by David
Pierce sponsored by the Library of
Congress and Council on Library
and Information Resources, only 14
percent of surviving flms still exist
in their original format, 11 percent
in a different format and 5 percent
are incomplete. Indifference played a
role, as well as fragility. Nitrate flm
is highly fammable, and studios like
Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox
lost a huge amount to fres in the 1930s.
While MGM preserved 68 percent of its
flms, Universal Pictures destroyed its
backlist in 1948. Meanwhile, stars like
Pickford, Chaplin and Harold Lloyd,
who owned their flms, made sure they
were preserved.
By 1926 the movie business was
even brisker than it is today: Movie
attendance averaged 46 million per
weekrepresenting 38 percent of

the U.S. population, fve times the

percentage that now attends a weekly
picture show. Americans werent the
only viewers enthralled. Silent flms
were potent cultural ambassadors
their themes were universal, their
characters appealing and subtitles
easily translated. While only 50 silent
flm reels were exported to Central
Europe in 1913, by 1926, the number
had risen to 20,000. That dispersion
helped rescue some flms from
oblivion. Among them are Fords
early flms as well as rarities like
three of the 19 silent flms created by
Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering black
director who was the frst to cast Paul
Robeson in a movie. In fact 886 of the
3,331 silent flms that exist in any form
have been found in overseas archives.
In addition to quantifying the
astonishing loss of a distinctly
American cultural creation, the
report outlines important steps for
repatriating and preserving surviving
reels. In related news, the National
Film Registry announced that among
the 25 movies selected for preservation
at the Library of Congress this year are
three silent flms: Daughter of Dawn,
a 1920s flm featuring an allNative
American cast, and two flms starring
actresses famous in their day but now
little known: Constance Talmadge in
A Virtuous Vamp (1919) and Colleen
Moore in Ella Cinders (1926).

Missionary Squirrels Storytelling

In a 1910 debate over the
practice of introducing gray
squirrels into U.S. public parks,
naturalist and Boy Scouts
co-founder Ernest Seton
contended that these
missionary squirrels helped
encourage boys to be kind to

10 AMERICAN HISTORY

animals. Theodore Roosevelt

disagreed, arguing that Seton
sentimentalized the relationship
between humans and wild
animals. Etienne Benson
explores the surprisingly long
and quixotic history of squirrels
in urban parks in the December

2013 issue of the Journal of

American History. While parks
raised funds to feed squirrels in
the winter, in rural areas, the
animals were largely regarded
as pests best controlled by
hunting. See jah.oxfordjournals.
org/content/100/3/691.full.

TOp: BETTMANN/CORBIS; MIDDlE: THE EvERETT COllECTION; BOTTOM: BROOklYN MUSEUM/CORBIS

Rare Tlingit War Helmet Found

For more than a century,
a remarkable artifact was
hidden in the collections
of the Springfeld Science
Museum in Massachusetts.
Labeled an Aleutian hat, the
object was recently identifed
as a mid-19th-century war
helmet from the Tlingit
people of southeastern
Alaska. It will be displayed in
Springfeld for the frst time
since it was acquired by the
museum in 1899. Fewer than
100 such helmets are known
to exist today.

New Civil War

Center Forged
The Museum of the
Confederacy and the
American Civil War Center in
Jeferson Davis
Richmond have announced
that the institutions will merge into one facility
for Civil War displays and storytelling. No name
for the new institution has been announced,
but the entity will be established at the
current site of the American Civil War Center
at the Tredegar Ironworks site in Richmond.
Although the collections of the Museum of the
Confederacy will be transferred to the virginia
Historical Society, the White House of the
Confederacy, which tells the story of president
Jeferson Davis and his family, will remain at its
current location.

Jim CrowEra Railroad Car Installed at Museum

The NaTioNal MuseuM of
African American History has been a
long time coming, but two artifacts
so large they had to be positioned so
that the building can be constructed
around themare now in place. Their
arrival on November 17 depended
upon a complex logistical performance
involving a nine-truck convoy and
500-ton cranes. One item is a concrete
guard tower from Angola Prison in
Louisiana, a facility made infamous

by the slave-like conditions in which

African-American inmates served
their terms.
The other itema Jim Crow
era railroad caris part of a more
complex story. Lonnie Bunch, director
of the museum, had been looking
for a Pullman railroad car to honor
the crucial importance of Pullman
porters in African-American history.
Not only did the jobs establish steady
incomeand mobilityfor men

Car 1200, built by Pullman in 1919, was partitioned into segregated sections in South Carolina in
1940. The refurbished car was lowered into its permanent home in the African American Museum.
TOp lEfT: COURTESY Of SpRINgfIElD SCIENCE MUSEUM; TOp RIgHT: lIBRARY Of CONgRESS;
BOTTOM: COURTESY Of NATIONAl AfRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

of color, but the employment led to

the founding of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. Led by
A. Philip Randolph, the union became
a powerful agent in the recognition of
African-Americans civil rights.
When Pete Claussen, railroad buff,
Smithsonian board member and
CEO of the Gulf & Ohio Railways,
heard what Bunch was looking for,
he donated Car 1200, which had
been used between 1940 and 1960
on Southern rail routes. The car was
built by Pullman as an open-window
coach without berths. Its 44 seats were
divided into separate compartments
for blacks and whites, each with its
own restroom. The car allows us to
see and understand how segregation
and the sense of inferiority of blacks
was reinforced, said Bunch.
The museum is scheduled to open in
Washington, D.C., in 2015. Among its
holdings are Harriet Tubmans shawl,
Emmett Tills casket, neon signs from
Soul Trainand the cap of a sleeping
car porter.
ApRIl 2014

11

American Mosaic

Top Bid

$40.5 million
Saying Grace by Norman Rockwell
brought $46 million at a recent Sothebys
auction, while a lesser-known and
more intriguing work, East Wind Over
Weehawken (1934) by Edward Hopper,
sold at Christies for a robust $40.5
millionabout 25 percent more than
anticipated. The painting had been in
storage at the philadelphia Museum of
fine Art when the decision was made to
sell it and reinvest the proceeds in new
works. Depicting a streetscape along
the bluf of New Jersey across from
Manhattan, the paintings bleak palette,
somewhat distorted plane and the red
sign of a foreclosed home establish
an unsettled feeling that suggests the
uncertainty that swept the nation during
the great Depression.

Bladensburg Battle Honored

a BroNze TaBleau will soon
commemorate the tumultuous battle
of August 24, 1814, at Bladensburg,
Md., that scattered American forces
and left the British a path to move on
to the burning of Washington. Sculptor
Joanna Blake created the 8-by-10foot image, which depicts a wounded
Captain Joshua Barney, an American
naval commander; fanked by Charles
Ball, an African American; and an
unidentifed Marine. Barneys men
did not give ground easily, unlike the
citizen militiamen who folded under
British attack. The commander himself,
who had hurried to Bladensburg with
his men to cut off the British approach
to Washington, was wounded before
he ordered a retreat. When British

General Robert Ross came upon the

last of the Americans, he turned to his
colleague, Admiral George Cockburn,
and said, I told you it was the fotilla
men. Cockburn replied, Yes, you
were right, though I could not believe
youthey have given us the only

fghting we have had. The sculpture,

Undaunted in Battle, will be installed
August 23 at Balloon Park, along with
a granite marker explaining the battle.
Visitors can also enjoy a walking tour
of the battle site. For more, go to www.
princegeorges1812.org.

The name of the bronze monument depicting

the Battle of Bladensburg was changed from
Undaunted in Defeat to Undaunted in Battle.

12 AMERICAN HISTORY

TOp: CHRISTIES IMAgES lTD., 2013; BOTTOM: TRISH DONNAllY

Our Friend,
the Boll Weevil
Enterprise, Ala., is home to an
unusual tribute to the destructive
boll weevil. A type of snout beetle
found in the South since the 1880s,
it devastated cotton crops for
decades. When Tuskegee Institutes
George Washington Carver urged
farmers to diversify, the local
economy soon rebounded. In 1917
Cofee County produced the largest
peanut harvest in the nation, and
two years later, Enterprise erected a
statue celebrating the evil weevil as a
Herald of Prosperity.

WIToLd SkRyCzAk/ALAmy

Middle Creek National Battleeld

There was a mountain stillness in Eastern Kentucky during much of the Civil
War, but the Battle of Middle Creek painted a unique wartime story. Imagine a
steep mountaintop climb, a thick dense forest, and a short distance between
enemy re. Today, the mountains echo as reenactments bring the battle to life.
And, the memory of Union Commander James A. Gareld, the hero of Middle
Creek, gives a glimpse on his assent to the American White House.

www.prestonsburgky.org 1-800-844-4704

APRIL 2014

13

American Mosaic

Fossil Honors Freedmen

a rare and unusual
fossilized fower
discovered among
specimens from a 1970s
archaeological dig in
Virginia has turned a
spotlight on the forced
labor of AfricanAmerican freedmen in
the Civil War. Nathan
Jud, a doctoral student
at the University of
Maryland, and colleagues
found the fossil while
going over specimens
removed from a bank at
Dutch Gap, a site along
the James River, where
the Union Army carved
a canal to shorten the
distance to Richmond
and avoid having to sail
past Confederate forts.

The fossilized fower is

about the size of a dime.

The fossilkin to todays

bleeding-heart fowers
was a welcome surprise:
At least 115 million years
old, it is probably North
Americas oldest fowering
plant. But the story of
the workers whose labor
had exposed the bank
containing the specimen
proved an ugly surprise:

Juds colleague, Steve

Miller, turned up a letter
drafted by the workers
in 1864 and submitted to
commander Benjamin
Butler complaining of
poor treatment, stolen
rations and no pay. The
mentaken by force
from the Roanoke Island
freedmens colony
were among many freed
people put to work for
the Union Army. Jud
decided to commemorate
the workers by naming
the species Potomacapnos
apeleutheron: The
frst word refers to the
specimens location in the
Potomac escarpment and
the second is the Greek
word for free man.

D-Day Flashback
Modern sonar mapping has revealed
the wreckage of ships, submarines
and tanks of the coast of Normandy.
Among the submerged vessels from
the D-Day invasion is this barnacleencrusted Sherman tankthe only
American item discovered. The tanks
design was supposed to allow it to
swim from the landing craft to shore,

14 AMERICAN HISTORY

but unexpected turbulence sank it. The

goal of the projecta collaboration of
a French TV producer and the United
Kingdom Hydrographic Ofceis to
create a TV show commemorating the
70th anniversary of the invasion in June
and to gather information enabling the
underwater legacy to be recognized as a
UNESCO World Heritage site.

TOp: NATHAN JUD; BOTTOM: MC4/lCl pRODUCTIONS

ADVERTISEMENT

Alabama
Gulf Coast

History is repeating itself. Te 150th anniversary of the Battle of Mobile Bay will bring historic forts to life! Te Battle of Mobile Bay Civil
War Trail comprises more than a dozen sites
where action took place during both the battle of
the bay and the Overland Campaign.
Historic Forts Morgan and Gaines take center stage among them for this 150th anniversary.
Te stories of ship captains, fort commanders and
common fghting men are told through archives
on display, living history demonstrations and
detailed re-enactments.
Visit www.BattleofMobileBay.com.

Suddenly,
youre in a whole different state of

remembrance.

Known for its important role in the 1864 Civil War Battle of Mobile
Bay, Fort Morgan stands today as a testament to perseverance
and resolve. See history come alive. And commemorate the
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The First

by Christine M. Kreiser

Banned Book Goes Up in Flames

ten years after the frst bookThe Bay Psalm Book
was published in the New World, another religious tract
was banned by the Puritan fathers of Massachusetts. In
October 1650, the General Court decreed William Pynchons
book The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption to be false,
eroneous [and] hereticall and ordered it burned in the
Market Place, at Boston, by the Common Executioner. Why
the uproar? Pynchon questioned the Calvinist doctrine that
formed the bedrock of New England Puritanism. Among
other points, Pynchon argued that Jesus Christ did not suffer
Hell-torments when he died for the sins of the world.
To believe otherwise was to believe God had mercilessly
punished him twice. Until Pynchon delved into theology, he
was a respected and infuential man. He founded Springfeld
in 1636, prospered in the fur trade and served as a magistrate.
Now he represented a challenge to the established order, and
the General Court summoned him to Boston to answer for
blasphemy. Pynchon tried to appease his accusers, to no avail,
and entreaties from England urging the court to reconsider
its position were rebuffed: Mr. Pincheon might have kept his
judgment to himself, as it seems he did above thirty years.
Pynchon returned to England in 1652 and continued to write
about religion. None of his other works attained the notoriety
of Meritorious Price, fewer than a dozen copies of which are
known to exist today. The reclusive modern writer Thomas
Pynchon, known for his unconventional and complex novels,
is a descendant of William.

Too Hot to Handle

Obscene, lewd or lascivious
Anthony Comstock, u.S. postal inspector
and founder of the New York Society for
the Suppression of Vice, was credited
by a biographer with destroying 50 tons
of vile books, including information on
contraception, between 1873 and 1913.

16 AMERICAN HISTORY

Dont join the book burners. Dont think

you are going to conceal faults by concealing
evidence that they ever existed
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

Parental Discretion Advised

Salacious comic books prompted
protests like this one in winslow,
Maine, in 1954. boy Scouts rounded
up objectionable material for the fre.

Perilous Prose
John Steinbecks Of Mice and
Men (1937) and Harper lees
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
came in at No. 5 and No. 21,
respectively, on the American
library Associations list of 100
most banned or challenged
books of the last decade.

TOp RIgHT: COuRTESY Of THE

CONgREgATIONAl lIbRARY, bOSTON;
COMSTOCk IMAgES: THE gRANgER
COllECTION, NEw YORk;
EISENHOwER: lIbRARY Of CONgRESS;
COMICS buRNINg: Ap

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Encounter

by Peter Carlson

Bob Dylan Plays Woody Guthrie

He was a scrawny kid with a baby face. He grew up in Hibbing, a tiny
town in northern Minnesota, and in 1959, at age 18, he went off to college in
Minneapolis. He rarely went to class. Mad for folk music, he spent most of
his time listening to records and performing in coffeehouses. His name was
Robert Zimmerman but he called himself Bob Dylan.
One day in 1960, a friend sat Dylan
down and played some old records by
Woody Guthrie, the legendary Dust
Bowl troubadour, singing his classic
songsThis Land Is Your Land and
Pastures of Plenty and Pretty Boy
Floyd. It changed Dylans life forever.
It was like a million megaton
bomb had dropped, Dylan wrote four
decades later in his memoir, Chronicles.
All these songs together, one after
another, made my head spin. It made
me want to gasp. It was like the land
parted.Guthrie had such a grip on
things. He was so poetic and tough and
rhythmic. There was so much intensity
and his voice was like a stiletto.The
songs themselves, his repertoire, were
really beyond category. They had the
infnite sweep of humanity in them.
Dylan played the records over and
over for weeks, learning the words
and trying to imitate Guthries dry
Oklahoma drawl. A friend named Dave
Whittaker told him about Bound for
Glory, Guthries lyrical, fctionalized
1943 memoir, and Dylan scrambled
around Minneapolis to fnd a copy.
The book sang out to me like a radio,
he wrote in Chronicles. Guthrie writes
like the whirlwind and you get tripped
out on the sound of the words alone.
Dylan buttonholed acquaintances and
made them listen as he read passages
from the book aloud. Obsessed and
fanatical, he began to talk like Guthrie,
dress like Guthrie, hold his guitar like
Guthrie did in an album-cover picture.
At parties, hed sing Guthries songs as
long as anybody was willing to listen
and sometimes longer.
18 AMERICAN HISTORY

I said to myself I was going to be

Woodys greatest disciple, he recalled.
It seemed like a worthy thing.
Some people on the Minneapolis
folk scene found Dylans Guthrie
fxation charming. Others thought he
was obnoxious or pathetica middleclass Jewish teenager pretending to be
a Depression-era Okie hobo. A friend
used to tease him, Hows the man of
the soil today?

That boys got a voice,

Guthrie said of Dylan.
Maybe he wont
make it by his writing,
but he can sing it.
He can really sing it
Even then, Guthrie seemed like a
character from a bygone era, but he was
still alive. Born in Oklahoma in 1912,
Guthrie dropped out of school and
traveled the West, working odd jobs and
singing in bars and on the street. In the
1930s, he became the musical voice of
farmers displaced by the Dust Bowl and
workers battered by the Depression. He
wrote hundreds of songs and performed
them at countless union rallies and leftwing benefts. He also worked as a radio
personality and a newspaper columnist
while churning out scores of cartoons,
poems and stories.
By the 1950s, though, Guthrie was
gravely ill, stricken with Huntingtons
disease, a hereditary neurological
disorder that causes its victims to twitch

uncontrollably, gradually destroying

their ability to walk and talk. By 1960,
when Dylan became his self-proclaimed
disciple, Guthrie was unable to sing
or play guitar and he was confned to
Greystone Park Hospital, a grim state
psychiatric institution in New Jersey.
Dylan learned of Guthries condition
from Dave Whittaker, the friend whod
touted Bound for Glory. One morning,
after a long night of music and
drinking, the two men called Greystone,
and asked to speak to Guthrie. Bob
just had to call him, Whittaker recalled
in an interview with Dylan biographer
Anthony Scaduto. So, we called. We got
as close as the doctor on the ward, who
told us Woody was too sick to come to
the phone. He cant move, the doctor
told us. And Bob said, Im going to New
York right now.
In January 1961, Dylan bummed a
ride to New York, arriving on a freezing
day after a blizzard dropped 9 inches of
snow. He wandered around Greenwich
Village, ducked into a coffeehouse
called the Caf Wha? and asked if he
could sing a few songs.
Sure, the manager said. So Dylan
made his New York debut performing
Guthrie songs, and he found somebody
in the audience willing to put him up
for the night.
Within a few days, Dylan made
the frst of many visits to Greystone
Hospital. The place was really an
asylum with no spiritual hope, he
wrote in Chronicles. Wailing could
be heard in the hallways. Most of
the patients wore ill-ftting striped
uniforms and they would fle in and
out walking aimlessly about while I
played Woody songs.
Guthries arms twitched
uncontrollably and he had trouble
speaking, but he enjoyed hearing Dylan
sing. Sometimes hed request a specifc

song and the young man with the guitar

would play the song that the old man
had written but could no longer sing.
After his frst visit, Dylan sent a
postcard to his friend Whittaker: I
know Woody. I know him and met him
and saw him and sang to him. I know
WoodyGoddamn.
Dylan wasnt the only fan visiting
Guthrie. An electrician named Bob
Gleason and his wife, Sidsel, who lived
near the hospital, got permission to
bring Guthrie to their apartment on
Sundays, and Guthries relatives and
friends would drop by to talk and sing.
Soon, Dylan joined the gatherings.
He said little except that he loved
Woody and wanted to spend time with
him, Sidsel Gleason recalled in an
interview with Scaduto. He looked
like an archangel almost, like a choir
STEPHEN kRONINgER

boy with that little round face and the

beautiful eyes.
One Sunday at the Gleasons
apartment, Dylan took Guthrie aside
and sang Song to Woody, a tribute
hed composed for his hero.
Thats good, Bob, Woody said when
Dylan fnished. Thats damn good.
That night, after everybody else had
left, Guthrie praised Dylans talent. That
boys got a voice, he told the Gleasons.
Maybe he wont make it by his writing,
but he can sing it. He can really sing it.
Guthrie underestimated his disciples
songwriting ability. Within a few years,
Dylan was a folk music sensation,
hailed as the greatest songwriter of
his generation. Later, he angered folk
purists by playing an electric guitar and
becoming a rock-and-roll superstar.
Meanwhile, Guthrie got sicker, his

weight sinking below 100 pounds, his

pale skin stretched thin over his brittle
bones, his body too weak even to
twitch. He died on October 3, 1967.
When Dylan heard the news, he was
recovering from a motorcycle crash
that had nearly killed him. But he called
Guthries manager and said he wanted
to participate in whatever service was
being planned.
A few months later, at a memorial
concert in Carnegie Hall, Dylan and his
backup band played rocking versions
of two famous Guthrie songsGrand
Coulee Dam and I Aint Got No
Home. Dylan also sang an obscure
Guthrie tune, Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,
Woodys eulogy for FDR. The song
contained a refrain that seemed to sum
up Dylans feelings about Guthrie: This
world was lucky to see him born. n
APRIL 2014

19

Here Is Where
by Andrew Carroll

A Carolina Moonshiner Helps Win WWII

SEVERAL SHOTS SEEMED to come out of nowhere. One bullet whizzed past
Sheriff N.H. McGeachys face, almost nicking his nose, and another clipped
Deputy Bill Wests ear. McGeachy had seen at least three men with guns
scurry toward a wooded area when he drove up to David Williams Godwin,
N.C., moonshining operation in July 1921, but they had all disappeared into
the trees before opening fre. As McGeachy and West dropped to the ground,
Deputy Al Pate, still standing, suffered a direct hit and died within seconds.
Williams turned himself in, though
he claimed innocence. Indeed, the
evidence against him was weak and
mostly circumstantial, but his legal
team advised him to plead insanity.
They even enlisted his brother, the
Rev. J. Mack Williams, to testify that
David was clinically paranoid and
his mania for guns could be traced
to his childhood days hunting in
the backwoods of Godwin. It was a
risky legal strategy (Williams himself
wasnt too pleased about being called
unhinged) but a single juror remained
stubbornly convinced that Williams
was insane, and the judge declared
a mistrial. Williams agreed to lesser
charges and received a 30-year sentence.
He maintained his innocence but knew
that if he had attempted a second trial
and lost, he could have faced life in
prison or the electric chair.
[David Williams] was a sandyhaired, broad-shouldered youngster,

Caledonia Prison Farm

Degrees Minutes Seconds:

Latitude ...................36 18 11 N
Longitude ............ 77 27 14 W
Decimal Degrees:
Latitude ........................36.30293
Longitude ...................77.45386

his light-blue eyes hard and unsmiling,

wrote Captain H.T. Peoples in a lengthy
1951 article about Williams and his
time inside North Carolinas Caledonia
Prison Farm. Peoples was the prisons
superintendent, and he remembered
Williams well. In the frst month I
dont believe young Williams spoke
more than twenty words to anyone.
Williams kept mostly to himself,
failing even to correspond with his
parents. When Peoples nudged him to
send a letter to his distraught mother,
Williams opened up for the frst time
Caledonia Prison
Farm was located
on the grounds
of J.C. Johnstons
7,500-acre
plantation on the
Roanoke River.

20 AMERICAN HISTORY

and told him that he didnt want to

write home from a prison postmark.
A week later Williams requested a
pencil and some paper, which Peoples
gladly provided. When he caught
Williams scribbling away after the
other prisoners had gone to sleep, he
saw that Williams was doodling instead
of composing a letter. Peoples was
disappointed at frst but then noticed
the hard, bitter eyes were softening.
Whatever he was doing, it was making
him a little happier.
Williams knack for fxing hopelessly
broken-down machines earned him a
coveted job running the metal shop. One
night Peoples walked in on him slaving
away with draft instruments; drawing
boards and sketches were scattered
everywhere. Williams made no effort to
hide his handiwork, and the two men
looked at each other for a moment.
Itsa new kind of gun, Williams
said. Then he broke into a rare grin.
Dont worry, this has nothing to do
with an escape. I wouldnt try to escape
now if the gate was wide open. Ive got
too much work to do, and this is a good
place to do it.
Superintendent Peoples not only
encouraged Williams to keep at it but
allowed him to pick through the prison
junkyard for parts. Williams plunged in,
collecting old tractor axles, Ford drive
shafts, walnut fence posts and other
scrap items that he fled down, pieced
together and manipulated to construct
half a dozen rifes. Guards stopped by to
have Williams work his magic on their
guns, too, whenever they needed repairs.
And it was at Caledonia that Williams
constructed the prototype of what
would become his most infuential
innovation: the short-stroke piston.
In early models of semiautomatic
carbine rifes, the entire barrel kicked
back almost four inches to hit the
breech mechanism. Williams cut that
to one-tenth of an inch without losing

Williams scrounged materials from

the prison metal shop to modify this
Remington Model 8. The gun houses a
prototype of the short-stroke piston.

substantial frepower. You know

how you can hit one croquet ball a
long distance by holding your foot on
another ball and transmitting the shock
of the mallet? Williams explained
to Peoples. Its the same idea. This
alteration alone led to the production of
a shorter, lighter and more dependable
rife: the M1 carbine.
I didnt know it then, of course,
but what this young prisoner was
telling me that night would one day
be considered by frearm experts one
of the most revolutionary advances
since Brownings development of the
machine gun, Peoples later wrote.
The notion of a cop-killing inmate
Carbine Williams
(left) and a pal in
prison stripes, 1922.
Before he landed in
Caledonias metal
shop, Williams
worked on a
chain gang.

assembling a small arsenal of handmade

weapons behind bars didnt sit well
with some folks, and Peoples was
summoned before the North Carolina
prison board in Raleigh to explain
himself. According to one report,
Peoples stated that he was so confdent
Williams wasnt plotting to break out
that he offered to serve the remainder
of Williams sentence if he did.
That wouldnt be necessary.
Newspaper articles and word of
mouth soon transformed the young,
self-taught engineer into something
of a local hero. By the late 1920s, a
number of infuential fgures had
joined Peoples in lobbying Governor

Angus McLean to release Williams

early: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover,
Sheriff McGeachy and reportedly even
Deputy Pates widow. On September
29, 1929, almost eight years after his
conviction, David Marshall Williams
was pardoned.
The Winchester Repeating Arms
Company hired Williams after he was
released, but corporate life proved
almost more arduous to him than
prison. Paranoid that his colleagues
would steal his ideas and feeling stifed
in the bureaucratic environment,
Williams became a raving hothead
who stormed out of meetings and
threatened his colleagues when he felt
ignored or underappreciated. Winchester
considered fring him but recognized
that, despite his tantrums, Williams was
a genius.
When the U.S. Ordnance Department
requested designs for a light rife
prototype, Winchester submitted
a semiautomatic carbine that
incorporated Williams short-stroke
piston concept, making the rife more
compact and reliable.
On October 1, 1941, Winchester
offcially received word that it had won
the contract for the M1 carbine. During
World War II and the Korean War, an
estimated 8 million M1s were produced,
more than any other American small
arm, and the rife was widely considered
one of the strongest contributing factors
in the Allied victory in the Pacifc.
By the time Williams died at age 74,
he had been credited with dozens of
patents and earned numerous awards
and tributes. In 1952 the feature flm
Carbine Williams, starring Jimmy
Stewart, was released, and a state
marker was erected near Williams
Godwin home that says: 19001975,
Carbine Williams, designer of shortstroke piston, which made possible M-1
carbine rife, widely used in WWII.
And, to top it all off, in 1968, ex-felon
David Williams was made an honorary
deputy U.S. marshal. n
If you would like to share a little-known
site where history happened, please visit
www.HereIsWhere.org.

PHOTOS: COuRTESY Of NORTH CAROLINA MuSEuM Of HISTORY

APRIL 2014

21

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Details
by Sarah Richardson

High-Caliber Commander
In July 1863, after the long, arduous
campaign to take Vicksburg, Miss.,
troops of the Union Army of the
Tennessee presented this elegant sword
to their tenacious commander Ulysses
S. Grant. Collier and Co. of Hartford,

Conn., made the steel blade, and Tiffany

and Co. made the gold and silver
ornaments. An image of Athena, Greek
goddess of war, is crafted in silver on the
grip. One side of the blade is inscribed
1776; the other side bears the date

1863. The nightmarish advance on

Vicksburg across rough and muddy
terrain lasted six months, and ended
with the six-week siege of the city.
General Grant accepted the surrender
of the Confederate forces on July 4.

1
1 Seed of Strength
The decorative tassel
is tipped with an acorn
replicaa common symbol
of strength and endurance.
2 Goddess of War
The banner in Athenas
hand is an American
fagwith stars visible
topped by a laurel wreath
symbolizing victory.
One foot rests on
a cannonball.

3 Tools of the Trade

2
3

A rife is sculpted along

the handle; on the
reverse is a pike.

4 Military Might
An eagle and a horse
symbols of powerappear
on the grip; beneath them
is a cannon barrel.

5 Rough Rider
A scene of a mounted
commander leading troops
into battle graces the hilt.
6 Metal Marvel
A knight in armoralong
with foral and military
ornamentationis etched
in gold on the steel blade.

5
6

couRtesy of the cIvIL wAR museum of PhILAdeLPhIA

APRIL 2014

23

Interview
by Richard Ernsberger Jr.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

When Should the United States Intervene?

When a crisis develops in a foreign nation, American

presidents often confront a tough question: Should the United

States take action to resolve the situation? Zbigniew Brzezinski is
uniquely qualifed to discuss this issue. A political scientist and
geo-strategist, he served as national security adviser to President
Is intervention in a foreign crisis the
toughest call a president can make?
It is probably the most diffcult and
painful decision that the president
has to make, except perhaps if he is
confronted by the specter of defeat in
some conventional confict and our
national interests are so threatened
that he could be forced to contemplate
the use of nuclear weapons. That is an
unlikely but possible scenario.
George Washington and Thomas
Jeferson both warned against
entangling alliances. What did
they fail to foresee?
What those two presidents failed to
foresee was the fact that major conficts
abroad could pose fundamental threats
to Americas long-term independence
and security. President Wilson
recognized that around 1915.
To what degree has Americas
physical isolation contributed to
isolationist sentiment historically?
I think isolationist sentiment was
a normal reaction to the prevailing
circumstances. Distance was an
enormous factor in the defnition of
our national security. That distance has
now been almost entirely eliminated
by the vulnerability of everyone to acts
of violence that transcend distance in a
dangerously effective manner.
With the approaching centennial of
World War I, what strikes you most
about that late U.S. intervention?
What I found most striking about it
was that less than 150 years after our
independence, many hundreds of
24 AMERICAN HISTORY

Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, during which time he worked

on the Camp David Accords and the second Strategic Arms
Limitation Treaty. He is now a professor of American foreign
policy at Johns Hopkins University and a scholar at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

thousands of young Americans were

shipped to fght in a decisively effective
manner in a massive European war. It
was the beginning, at least to me, of an
entirely new concept of the world, in
which ones national security is more
vulnerable to conficts even far away.
Other than the two world wars,
what would you say were the most
successful military interventions in
American history?
I would venture some of the Mexican
campaigns in the 19th century, and
also the military intervention in Iraq in
1990-91, which was limited in its goals
and benefted from a large coalition.

We deposed some
regimes because we
felt they threatened
us. Maybe the
judgment was wrong,
but the policy was
not driven purely
by ideology

Our 20th-century interventions

in Korea, Vietnam and many other
places involved the fght against
communism. Was it the right policy?
I think we fought the Korean and
the Vietnamese wars not because the
opponent was communist but because
the opponent in each case wanted to
have the entire cake, so to speak. In the
former case, the policy prevailed and
was therefore correct. In the latter case,
it failed and was therefore wrong.

In 1979, when Iranian

revolutionaries took Americans
hostage in Tehran, did you and other
Carter advisers rue the 1953 U.S.British coup that ousted a legitimate
Iranian premier and reinstalled an
unpopular shah?
We didnt have time to rue the 1953
coup, but we were determined not
to repeat it. In other words, while we
hoped that the regime would not fall
into extremist hands, and while we did
encourage the existing government to
deal more effectively with its domestic
challenges, the Carter administration
was not prepared to become an active
intervener, especially militarily, in the
internal Iranian crisis.
The 2011 U.S. and NATO efort in
Libya has been hailed as a model
intervention. Do you agree?
I wouldnt call it a model intervention
but rather a necessary response to a
situation in which Libya in effect split
into two entitiesone still under
the extremist rule of Gaddaf and the
other under a chaotic revolutionary
arrangement, and hence some
involvement was needed. However,
beyond the military domain, I do not
feel that it has been very successful.
The Syrian confict seems similar
to Libya, and yet there has been
no meaningful intervention
there. Why get involved in one
but not the other?
I dont think Syria is similar to what
happened in Libya. In Syria, you
had a deliberate intervention by two
Sunni Arab states, which promoted

Zbigniew Brzezinski (left) meets

with President Jimmy Carter on
January 22, 1977, the day the National
Security Council was reorganized
to include a Committee on Special
Coordination chaired by Brzezinski.

direct attempts to overthrow a

rather authoritarian regime that
was somewhat more moderate on a
religious level than they are.
Is the current disarray in Libya
part of the messy transition
to democracyor another
cautionary tale of the unintended
consequences of intervention?
I dont think that postwar disarray
in Libya has been inevitable, but it
has been the consequence of
no systematic follow-up by the
two leading sponsors of the
initial interventionFrance and
Britain. That is why I am skeptical
when some European countries are
so eloquent in suggesting American
intervention. The European capacity
for large-scale military involvement
AP

is clearly limited, and the Europeans

are leery of becoming involved in a
prolonged intervention.
Is there a threshold for intervention
in a humanitarian crisis?
There isnt any fundamental formula
for initiating an intervention. It really
depends on the circumstances, and
these may differ: In some cases they
can be compellingly humanitarian,
but in other cases they may also
be a compelling threat to our own
national security. Moreover, I think it
is sensible to frst look and see whether
there are neighbors to an area facing
a humanitarian crisis that should be
more directly involved in seeking to
solve it while also benefting from
outside help, which of course would
include the United States.

The U.S. has deposed democratically

elected leaders who were Marxist
or nationalist or perceived as averse
to American interests while we have
supported dictators sympathetic
to our interests. What does this say
about our foreign policy history?
We deposed some regimes not because
they were Marxist or nationalistic
but because we felt they threatened
us. Maybe the judgment was wrongin
some cases it probably wasbut the
policy was not driven purely by ideology.
Why have you called the 2003
military invasion of Iraq a historic,
strategic and moral calamity?
I think the United States undertook
a war that was not imposed on it but
that involved an outright attack on
a country that was in no position to
APRIL 2014

25

Youve said that the 21st century

could be even more turbulent than
the 20ththe central threat being
global chaos. Does that mean more
tough intervention decisions await
future American leaders?
American leaders will have to be much
more deliberate in deciding which
interventions are truly necessary and

wHITE HOuSE PHOTO

threaten us. We justifed our action to

the world by assertions that were false
and that, ultimately, even those who
sponsored that war had to know were
false. Thats because they were so active
in generating alleged consensus and
intelligence to justify their invented
excuses, designed to make the war
look like it was some sort of defensive
undertaking. Additionally, the events
subsequent to the end of military
hostilities have proven devastating to
Iraq, which in itself contains a moral
message. Few Americans are aware
that probably more than 100,000 Iraqi
civilians perished because of the U.S.
military action.

On January 4, 1980, Brzezinski briefs President Carter and Congressional Liaison Frank
Moore on the newly created Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force.

which are more likely to provoke

the expansion of confict in regions
where aroused masses are not likely
to be easily subdued by outside
forces. Acting with other countries,

preferably some located in areas

proximate to the sources of violence,
would make sense as a key criterion
for decisions pertaining to the use
of U.S. military power. n

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Letter From
American History

Resist the seduction

of reduction

Boiling down history has a way

of reducing the most complex and multidimensional ideas and individuals into
little more than simplistic and contourless symbols. As much as historians and
biographers have explored the resources to
reveal the details that reside in the recesses
of key fgures from our past, so many still
know so little about the real-life people
who shaped our history.
Take Herbert Hoover, for example. For
the vast public, washed and unwashed
alike, the name of the 31st president of
the United States is virtually synonymous
with the most catastrophic economic
disaster ever, the Great Depression, and
all the misery that came with it. Hoovers
responsibility for the global collapsethe
stock market crash came eight months
into his presidencyand his failure to
grasp its magnitude and implement
policies to blunt its impact is highly
debatable. Nonetheless, Herbert Hoover
equals misery and gloomand every
attribute of the rich, bloated, uncaring privileged class
that stood idly by as millions starved and suffered.
All true. Except for the fact he may have been the
greatest humanitarian of the 20th century: When
millions were starving and suffering in the midst of an
unprecedented global war, Hoover sprang into action
to engineer a vast and intricate relief effort.
The incredible story of humanitarian Herbert Hoover,
which was long ago submerged by the shameful story
of heartless Herbert Hoover, as told by American
History Senior Editor Richard Ernsberger Jr., begins
on page 36.
Another hidden facet is examined in our cover story
on our frst president and a little-known incident
that occurred on a cold night during the winter of
1779-80. While whispers of scandal spread among
the elite echelons of Revolutionary America, a clearer
picture of what transpired has been pieced together
only through the letters of writers who never intended

getty ImAges

them to be widely shared. No less an authority than

historian Ed Lengel, University of Virginia professor
and editor in chief of The Papers of George Washington,
offers a glimpse of the fun-loving side of our founding
father. In the following pages, illustrator Victor Juhasz,
whose work typically takes on the foibles of current
notables for the likes of Rolling Stone and Esquire, lends
a hand to illuminate Lengels tale of a wild night with
Washington at Morristown, N.J.
Two youngsters solicit donations in
1932 at a Washington, D.C., Hooverville.
These encampments of the homeless
dotted the country and forever linked
President Herbert Hoover to the sufering
of millions during the Great Depression.

APRIL 2014

29

by Edward G. Lengel
Illustrations by Victor Juhasz

George Washington

Cuts Loose
A dinner party for Continental Army offcers
and their wives takes a notorious turn

n a bitterly cold evening near Morristown, N.J., George and Martha Washington trudged arm-in-arm through the
snow. Passing half-frozen sentries, the
couple entered a gaily lit building and

threw off their overcoats. Brightly dressed offcers and women

welcomed them with smiling faces and open arms. Thus began
one of the most notable parties of the entire Revolutionary War.
The sentries shivering outside would not have noticed anything
unusual as the festivities commenced. Servants passed to and fro
with food and drink, and there was the usual clinking of glasses and
laughter as toasts were offered. Perhaps there was more drinking
than usual, but who could refuse the revelers the right to keep off the
chill? Offcers called for more wine, and the joyful evening lengthened into night.
In time the guests pushed back their chairs from the table. More
windows brightened in the house as the men and women followed
tradition by separating into adjoining rooms. This was usually the
signal to settle down and relax. This time, however, the party grew
rowdier. The sentries would have heard mens and womens voices
mingle in a chorus of laughter and boisterous shouts, and possibly
the sound of feet trampling across foorboards. After that, perhaps,
doors slamming, fsts pounding on wood, and a cacophony of voices
raised in excitement. At last, a ladys sudden shriek punctuated the
mayhem. A period of quiet followed before the lights began winking
out. The front door opened, disgorging men and women with reddened cheeks and grave expressions.
A distinct whiff of scandal accompanied the emerging offcers and
their wives. Within a few months, bedchambers and ballrooms up
and down the East Coast were echoing with whispers of some shocking episode that had taken place that night between General Washington and one of the offcers wives. Almost 160 years would pass before
the full details of that evening at Morristown would come to light.
30 AMERICAN HISTORY

The Washingtons
enjoyed more gracious
living at Morristown
than the troops, but
the general recalled
the winter as intensely
cold and freezing.

APRIL 2014

31

Washington was an
elegant dancer who
understood the rules
of posture, precision
and pattern. As a
1735 dancing manual
explained, Good
Breeding, in Regard to
those with whom we
dance, requires our
not being careless.

Just before World War II, a workman conducting repairs on the musty attic of a historic
mansion in Germantown, Pa., came across a water-stained trunk. Inside he discovered a bundle
of letters tied with a ribbon. A note in a feminine
hand covered the letters. It read: Let them not
to be exposed to anybody, unless some misstatements should hereafter appear in some gossiping
memoirs of the time.
A vital, closely guarded aspect of George Washingtons personality was about to be exposed.

merican participants would remember the 1779-80 winter encampment near Morristown for many
generations. No one had ever seen
so much snow. Day and night the
fakes tumbled from leaden skies, settling 4 to 6
feet deep and blowing into house-size drifts. The
whitened fairyland scene was pretty enough to gaze
upon after the sun appeared, but the paralyzing
cold defed anyone to stay outdoors for long. After brief intervals of sunshine the clouds would
roll back in and dump more snow. Topographi-

32 AMERICAN HISTORY

cal features disappeared under the monotonous

white blanket.
Washington and his bedraggled soldiers had
endured diffcult winters before. Few had seemed
worse than the brutal 1777-78 encampment at
Valley Forge, Pa., where the army had come close
to starvation, mutiny and dissolution. Thanks to
the hard work and leadership of Washington and
his staff offcers, strengthened by the presence of
their determined wives, the soldiers had overcome that ordeal. This time, though, nature itself
seemed to have declared war on the Americans
and joined forces with King George III to extinguish the fame of rebellion.
Monstrous piles of snow clogged the roadways,
making horse-drawn transportation impossible.
The weather cut off Morristown from outside
supplies for days and weeks at a time. But snow
and cold were not the only enemies. Corrupt and
incompetent commissaries and civilian offcials
bungled their responsibilities, leaving the soldiers
short of camp equipment, clothing and food.
We were absolutely literally starved, recalled
Private Joseph Plumb Martin. I do solemnly

Forced to choose between food or liquor, offcers told

their men to tighten their belts and doled out the rum
declare that I did not put a single morsel of victuals into my
mouth for four days and as many nights, except a little black
birch bark, which I gnawed off a stick of wood, if that can be
called victuals. I saw severalmen roast their old shoes and
eat them, and I was afterwards informed by one of the offcers
waiters that some of the offcers killed and ate a favorite little
dog that belonged to one of them.
In such trying circumstances, men sought solace where they
could. Forced to choose between cutting the food or liquor
ration, offcers told their men to tighten their belts and doled
out the rum. Washington relaxed his usually strict enforcement of rules against gaming. In log huts and stables, soldiers
whiled away the nights with cards, dice, singing and other entertainment. Women joined their recreation and took charge
of essential duties such as cooking, sanitation, needlework and
shelter maintenance.
No one worked harder than George Washington, his offcers and their wives. Many of the same men and women who
had seen the army through Valley Forge stood by him here
as well. Generals labored day and night on countless vital details of army administration, striving to assure that their men
had shelter, clothes to wear and food to eat. Far from acting
as mere helpmates, Martha Washington and the other women
managed many aspects of day-to-day operations at headquarters, supervising domestic arrangements and venturing out to
purchase and allocate food and other household supplies.
No one begrudged Washington and his staff a little entertainment, given how strenuously they worked to keep the
army in being. On many a winter evening, offcers and their
wives trekked through the snow to attend dinner parties at
one or another headquarters building. Unlike the sumptuous
banquets often thrown by Washingtons British counterparts,
these were usually down-to-earth affairs. The food was modest, but sometimes there was music and dancing. And the
wine was copious and strong. Meandering footprints and occasional spills into snowdrifts attested to the quality of the evenings pleasures and the quantity of the wine that the guests
had imbibed.
Legend has it that Washington was an aloof and humorless
man. One imagines him presiding sternly over a silent dinner
table, glowering at his uncomfortable guests. In fact he was
an entertaining and gracious host. As a young man, he had
learned all of the social graces from his friend (and erstwhile
love interest) Sally Cary Fairfax at the famous Fairfax estate
in Belvoir, Va. Women found him particularly pleasant companyand not just because he was strong and handsome.
Unlike many men of his day, Washington sought out and
enjoyed the company of women, and treated them with a
combination of gentle courtesy and respect. Often awkward
with men, Washington was always a fne conversationalist
with his female friends.

Washington demanded and made tremendous personal sacrifces in the pursuit of independence from Great Britain. But his
headquarters were anything but austere. He liked to surround
himself with dashing young offcers like Alexander Hamilton
(also a notorious firt), and lively and cheerful women. Martha,
who has been transformed by legend into a bespectacled grandmother knitting in a corner rocking chair, was as socially oriented as her husband and a constant and active presence in camp.

he 18th century, unlike the later Victorian era,

was a vivacious age. Although the clothing styles
and dances seem formal to modern eyes, horseplay and ribald humor were the order of the
dayeven among the smart set. Washington,
being a man of the times, was not afraid to relax and let his
hair down. And while treachery and incompetence could certainly bring out his temper, he also possessed the ability to
lighten moods when circumstances were grim.
Washington enjoyed good food. Fish was a particular favorite, along with oat cakes drenched in honey. Unfortunately,
the plates set before him at headquarters often left him feeling distinctly queasy. Instead of raging at servants or hurling
plates to the wall, however, he turned an ugly situation into an
occasion for dry humor.
In August 1779, a few months before entering camp at
Morristown, Washington fretted about how a number of lady
guests would receive his cooks greasy concoctions. Writing
to his friend Dr. John Cochran, the general joked: Since our
arrival at this happy spot [West Point], we have had a Ham
(sometimes a shoulder) of Bacon, to grace the head of the tablea piece of roast Beef adorns the footand, a small dish
of Greens or Beans (almost imperceptible) decorates the center. When the Cook has a mind to cut a fgurewe have two
Beef-steak Pyes, or dishes of Crabs in addition, one on each
side [of] the center dish, dividing the space, & reducing the
distance between dish & dish to about Six feet, which without them would be near twelve apartOf late, he has had the
surprising luck to discover, that apples will make pyes; and its
a question if, amidst the violence of his efforts, we do not get
one of apples instead of having both of Beef.
Two ways to forget a miserable meal, and perhaps stave off
indigestion, were wine and dancing. Washington indulged
freely in both. He wrote to a French offcer whom he had befriended during the Yorktown campaign in 1781, asking the
Frenchman to promise to partake very often of that hilarity which a Glass of good claret seldom fails to produce.
Fueled with wine, Washington could dance endlessly with the
right partner. Marthawith whom George was very much in
loveonly enjoyed dancing in moderation, so at times the
general had to turn to other women to satisfy his craving for a
twirl around the parlor.
APRIL 2014

33

As a young man,
Washington embraced
the Rules of Civility
& Decent Behaviour,
an etiquette manual
that dates to the 16th
century. Rule 58: In all
causes of Passion admit
Reason to Govern.

Washington found an ideal dancing partner

in 24-year-old Caty Greene. Lively, energetic and
gorgeous, she possessed a clever tongue and
loved both good wine and parlor games. She also
adored dancing. Unfortunately her husband,
Nathanaelone of Washingtons best generals
had a gimpy leg and so had to retire to the sidelines when the dancing lasted too long. George
and Caty thus often found themselves in each
others arms, dancing the night away. On one occasion, they danced together for three hours
straight. Jealousy of this close friendship between
General Washington and Mrs. Greene, together
with rumors of Catys allegedly loose morals, may
have contributed to the scandal at Morristown.

he exact date of the Morristown party is unknown. The bundle of letters

that the workman found in the attic trunkwhich included missives
from Caty Greene, her rival Deborah Olney and General Washingtons aide Tench
Tilghmannevertheless revealed enough details
about the affair to remove any doubt that it actually took place.
That evening, a large company of men and

34 AMERICAN HISTORY

women assembled to dine at Colonel Clement

Biddles headquarters. Guests included General
and Mrs. Washington, General and Mrs. Greene,
Deborah Olney and her husband, George, a civilian auditor serving in Greenes quartermaster
department, and many others. Whether they
ate meat or apple pies is uncertain, but they undoubtedly consumed large quantities of wine
and perhaps liquor as well. At one point George
Olney, resisting what Deborah labeled an unpolite and irrational attempt to sink him below the
brute Creation by getting him drunk, bluntly
refused General Greenes efforts to ply him with
another glass. By that time, however, Olney and
others had already imbibed more than was good
for them or their self-control.
After the dinner concluded and the fnal round
of toasts had been drunk, the guests rose from
the table. The women then retired into an adjoining room. So far so good, except that George
Olney then walked (or perhaps staggered) off to
join the ladies. The men noticed his absence, and
after conferring someone suggested, according
to Tilghman, that a party should be sent to demand him, and if the Ladies refused to give him
up, that he should be brought by force. As was

Would Washington be willing to affrm or deny that

Deborah Olney had threatened to tear out his hair?
only appropriate, General Washington proposed to lead the
raiding party.
Tilghmans version of events, written with Washingtons
approval and calculated to still gossips tongues, described
how the party proceeded with great formality to the next
room and sent in a summons to the women to surrender Olney. They indignantly refused, whereupon Washington led
the assault. A scuffe then ensued, said Tilghman, such as
any good natured person must suppose. However good natured it was, the raid quickly degenerated into hand-to-hand
combat. Shouting and laughing, the combatants yanked at
the hapless George Olney and also grappled each other. General Washington snatched Deborah Olneys hand. Try as she
might she could not free herself from his powerful grip.
Rearing up in a violent rage, Deborah Olney stunned the
guests by crying out that if he did not let go her hand, she
would tear out his eyes, or the hair from his head; and that
tho he was a General, he was but a Man. At least, that is what
Caty Greene claimed had happened. Washington let go and
withdrew, and the ladies were victorious, said Tilghman, as
they always ought to be. Afterward, however, General Greene
took the Olneys aside, and lectured them both for their rude
behavior. Caty was in a rage, and showed it as the party broke
up and the guests wended their way home.

s Caty Greene and the other women departed

Morristown in the spring with the opening of
the campaigning season, rumors began to fy
concerning the events of that winter evening.
Caty told one of her friends, a Mrs. Bowen,
about Deborah Olneys behavior at the party. Mrs. Bowen
was, so Caty claimed, the soul of discretion, but Caty was not
the only one who had witnessed the incident. Some people approached Caty and asked her to confrm horrifying additional
details that she said never escaped my lips. As always, the
rumor mill probably exaggerated what really happened.
Whoever was to blame, news of the party spread to ballrooms and parlors up and down the East Coast. In Boston in
March 1781, Deborah Olney frst learned of a very extraordinary story, current there, extremely prejudicial to my Character, in which she was said to have behaved outrageously at the
Morristown party. Tracing the storys origin, she determined
that it came from none other than Caty Greene. Snatching pen
and paper, she composed a furious letter to Caty, concluding
that I am not ambitious of nor do I wish the acquaintance of
any Person, however high their rank and station in Life may
be who, by painful experience, I have found can in one moment; with a seeming pleasure, smile in my face, and the next
sacrifce my character.
Deborahs husband, George, had also been implicated in the
gossip, so he had written to Tilghman a few days earlier asking whether Washington would be willing to affrm or deny

that Deborah had threatened to tear out the generals eyes and
hair. Tilghman had passed the letter on to Washington, who
authorized his aide to state in writing that the whole affair had
been a jest in which the highest good humour and gaiety
prevailed. Although he did not explicitly address Mrs. Olneys supposed outburst, he did attest that she made use of
no expressions unbecoming a Lady of her good breeding, or
such as were taken in the least amiss by the General.
Deborah Olney triumphantly enclosed a copy of Tilghmans
letter in her letter to Caty, and challenged her to take issue with
Washingtons account. But Caty refused to back down. Her reply to Deborah dripped sarcasm. I thought for some time, she
wrote, that [your] letter had been forged as I could have no
idea of such a one from a lady of such good Breeding. Surely
it is not the same Mrs. Olney that I used to know and love. I
knew a lady of that name who possessed many virtues and but
one faulta fault, however, that Caty refused to specify. While
admitting that Deborah had never threatened the generals eyes,
Caty did insist that she had screamed she would tear out his
hairand claimed she could bring sworn evidence to the truth
of it. It might have been jest, as Col. Tilghman says, but I believe
he is the only one that was there who thought so.
Still, Caty professed her hope that she and Deborah could
remain friends. But Deborah was having none of it. In a long
letter that closed the correspondence between the two women,
she once again insisted that she had said nothing amiss, and
offered for proof that on a recent meeting with General Washington he noticed me more, and was more sociable with me
than he ever was before.
I shall only add, Deborah concluded, that when the Day
comes in which the secrets of all Hearts will be known, and the
truth of every Circumstance in life discovered you will then see
you have done me injustice. Until that day, or until Caty confessed her fault, Deborah could never with sincerity subscribe
myself your friend. Apparently, the two women never spoke
again.
Granted a time machine to revisit the founding era, some
people might like to participate in Washingtons crossing of
the Delaware, or witness the British surrender at Yorktown.
Others might prefer to join the memorable winter party at
Morristown in which Deborah Olney threatenedsome
saidGeneral Washingtons august visage. Whatever may
have happened, the details are no longer very important. More
signifcant is the infamous Morristown partys revelation that
the Father of Our Countrywho stood frst in war, frst in
peace and frst in the hearts of his countrymenwas adept at
the simple art of having fun. n
Edward G. Lengel is the editor in chief of the Papers of George
Washington at the University of Virginia and the author of
Inventing George Washington: Americas Founder in Myth
and Memory (Harper).
APRIL 2014

35

The Man of Force

Who Saved Belgium
Before Herbert Hoover became the scapegoat for the Great Depression, he was an
international hero who led one of the greatest humanitarian relief efforts in history
by Richard Ernsberger Jr.

elgium was vital in the summer of 1914. It

was a thriving center of industry, fnance
and international trade, and owned vast
mineral deposits in its African colonies.
Closer to home, Belgium was neutral in
the looming confict between the Central
Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary
and the Triple EntenteFrance, Britain
and Russia. That didnt prevent Germanys fearsome war machine from rumbling into Belgium in August of that year and
encasing the peaceful constitutional monarchy in a malevolent ring of steel. The Great War had begun.
Germanys occupation paralyzed Belgium. All international
trade ground to a halta grave problem for a country that imported three-quarters of its food. Reserve stores of four and
other foodstuffs were quickly exhaustedand then the German army grabbed most of Belgiums 1914 agricultural harvest.
Worse, the generals made clear that, though it violated international war protocol, they were not going to supply food to
Belgiums 7.5 million people or to the 2 million people in the
swath of northern France that they also occupied. Germany
had supply diffculties of its own because Britains Royal
Navy had established a military blockade of the North Sea,
cutting off Germany and the other Central Powers.
The Germans argued that Belgiums incipient
food crisis could be averted if Britain would
lift its blockade, but since that was out of
the question the effectively imprisoned
people of Belgium and northern France
faced the grim prospect of malnutrition and starvation.
Herbert Hoover, go-getter, 1914.
A poster (opposite) by Belgian artist
Josef Pierre Nuyttens promoted the
sale of forget-me-nots in American
cities to raise money for childrens
relief funds in 1918.

36 AMERICAN HISTORY

In September a delegation from Belgium, including mile

Francqui, a prominent banker, and Hugh Gibson, frst secretary of the American legation in Brussels, arrived in London
to plead for help getting food into the country. The U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, William Hines Page, summoned an American expatriate to the embassy to meet with
the groupa reserved, brusque, well-connected businessman
said to possess an indomitable will. In 1914 Herbert Hoover
was one of the worlds preeminent mining experts. Hed spent
most of the previous 20 years tramping in remote corners of
the world, managing mines, making deals and profting from
what he later called the Golden Age of American engineers in
foreign countries. After graduating from Stanford University
in 1895 with a degree in geology, Hoover worked in Australia,
Burma and New Zealand. In Tientsin, China, in 1900, he and
his wife, Lou Henry (also a Stanford-trained geologist), survived a monthlong siege of the citys foreign settlement during the nationalistic frenzy known as
the Boxer Rebellion. On the eve of World War
I, according to biographer George H. Nash,
Hoover was a director of 18 mining and fnancial companies with a combined 100,000
employees. He was a millionaire and had stakes
in sundry mines potentially worth many times
more. He had spent the last several years
in London, managing a consultancy and
living comfortably.
Hoover lacked social graces but was a
tenacious problem-solver with one controlling passion, according to Nasha
determination, a drive, to succeed.
Hed already put his administrative
skills to work solving a crisis of the
Great War. When the fghting started, some 150,000 American tourists
and expats were stranded in Europe.
Most eventually made their way to

LIbRARY Of CONgRESS; OPPOSITE: HERbERT HOOvER PRESIdENTIAL LIbRARY

APRIL 2014

37

London, where they found banks closed and

ships diverted to military purposes. Hoover came
to their rescue, organizing, with the help of several engineering colleagues, a successful effort to
secure passage for all back to the United States.
The job involved a lot of creative fnancial work
for the many people who didnt have the money
to get back to America.
Now Page, Gibson and Francqui urged Hoover
to lead a food relief effort for Belgium. Francqui
noted Hoovers wide administrative experience,
knowledge of the world and the fact that he had
the confdence of U.S. and European ambassadors. And importantly, Hoover was an American and, thus, neutral. Hoover himself wasnt
daunted by the administrative challenge of Belgian reliefthe purchase, overseas shipment and
internal transport of large quantities of material;
he said, Any engineer could do that. But, he acknowledged, there were other phases for which
there was no former human experience to turn
for guidance. It would require that we fnd the major food
supply for a whole nation; raise the money to pay for it; get
it past navies at sea and occupying armies on land; set up an
agency for distribution of supplies for everybody justly; and
see that the enemy took none of it. It was not relief in any
known sense. It was the feeding of a nation.
Herbert Hoover was 40 years old and ready for a career
change. He once said, If a man has not made a fortune by 40
he is not worth much, but now, he told a friend, Just making money isnt enough. Hed been yearning for a career in
public service and aimed to get into the big game. There was
nothing bigger, as one relief offcial later put it, than the heartbreaking, nerve-stretching race against death in Belgium. So
Hoover stepped away from his business duties and accepted
the relief job, on the condition that he receive no salary and be
given free rein, as chairman, to run the organization.
What came next was one of the greatest humanitarian
achievements in all of history. Hoover and a small group of
menAllied diplomats and businessmen, many of whom
A well-marked
relief ship in transit
in 1915. To avoid the
war zone, CRB ships
were advised by the
German Admiralty to
sail north of Scotland
then down the eastern
part of the North Sea
to a shipping lane
along the Dutch coast.

were American engineerscreated the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) that, with the help of private donations,
massive Allied government grants and loans and thousands
of volunteers, would feed nearly 10 million people in a war
zone every day for four years. Large and complex, and at risk
of being shut down at any time, the CRB was an operation
without precedent, not that Hoover grasped the enormity of
the undertaking at frst. He fgured the war would last less than
a year. The knowledge that we would have to go on for four
yearsto fnd a billion dollars, to transport fve million tons
of concentrated food, to administer rationingwas mercifully hidden from us.
Hoover did not just work on behalf of Belgium. After the
United States declared war on Germany, in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed him director of the new U.S.
Food Administration, charged with stimulating farm production and reducing food consumption for the American war effort while continuing his CRB duties. And then after the war,
as a member of the Supreme Economic Council and head of

German soldiers
search Belgian
farmers for weapons
in 1914. The invading
army met surprisingly
stif resistance, and
fear of francs-tireur
snipersand other
guerrilla activity
resulted in mass
civilian executions.

the American Relief Administration, Hoover organized food

relief for hundreds of millions of people in 26 nations facing
severe food shortagesincluding Germany, Poland and Bolshevik Russia. His humanitarian efforts turned the tough, taciturn Hoover into an international and American heroand
after a stint as secretary of commerce for Warren Harding and
Calvin Coolidge, he was elected president in 1928. His timing,
of course, was terrible: Hoovers presidency coincided with
the worst-ever U.S. depression. Hoover, a Republican, tried
to revive the economy but his initiatives came to nothing, and
he was thrashed in his reelection bid by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Hoovers failure to save the U.S. economy tarnished his reputationso much so that he is forgotten for what Russian author Maxim Gorky called his unique, gigantic achievement:
saving millions of Europeans from starvation.

resourceful man with an extraordinary energy level, Hoover jumped into action after
accepting the Belgian relief job. Even before
the CRB was formed on October 22, 1914,
hed called a broker and placed an order to
buy 10 million bushels of Chicago wheat futures, knowing that the war and Belgian food needs were sure
to raise prices. After the organization was created, as a private
partnership, Hoover put various engineering colleagues in key
roles. One took charge of the CRBs London offce, another
the Brussels offce and a third was assigned to open the shipping offce in Rotterdam, Holland, designated as the destination for all Belgian food shipments. A fourth engineer took
command of purchasing and shipping for the operation. CRB
representatives began leasing cargo ships, and Hoover enlisted
the support of ambassadors from the United States, Holland
and Spainnoncombatants in the European warto make
clear our neutral character and for their aid and protection
in negotiations with the belligerent governments. (After the
United States, Holland and Spain played the most crucial
gERMAN PHOTOgRAPHER (20TH CENTuRY)/ Sz PHOTO/SCHERL/THE bRIdgEMAN ART LIbRARY;
OPPOSITE, MAP: PEYTON MCMANN; bOTTOM: HERbERT HOOvER PRESIdENTIAL LIbRARY

national roles in Belgian relief.) When Hoover needed gutsy

American volunteers to monitor the distribution of food in
Belgium, he found 15 American Rhodes Scholars at Oxford
University. To preempt the possibility of accusations of fnancial malfeasance, Hoover persuaded a leading British auditing
frm to handle the CRBs books at no charge.
Hoover understood how news stories infuenced public
opinion, and hed collected a lot of noteworthy American and
British journalist friends. He asked the Associated Press general manager in London to ventilate the poignant Belgian
storya plucky nation caught between the millstones of an
occupying army and a naval blockadeand publicize the creation of the CRB and the dire need for charitable donations.
The international response was strong. Belgian Relief Committees were set up in 40 American states as well as countries
around the worldAustralia, Argentina, Japan and South Africa, to name a fewand $2 million was raised in a few weeks.
The CRBs job was to get food into Belgium under the aegis of
American neutrality. A separate Belgian organization headed
by Francqui, the Comit National de Secours et dAlimentation,
would, with thousands of volunteers, transport it to provinces
and regions and then to thousands of local communes, from
which it would be distributed, under the watch of burgomasters and mayors, to individuals and families.
Within a week the CRB could claim success. With informal
German permission, some 20,000 tons of cereals, peas and
beans had been picked up in Holland and delivered to large
Belgian cities by canal boats. And within six weeks, wrote
Hoover, we had delivered 60,000 tons of food from overseas,
thanks to the help of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward
Grey, who secured temporary permits for CRB ships to pass
through the blockade and dock at Rotterdam. The cities were
saved for the moment, wrote Hoover in his memoir.
Then came a raft of diffculties. By January 1915, the CRB
had raised and spent about $15 millionmost coming from
the foreign assets of Belgian banksand had millions of dolAPRIL 2014

39

lars of debt. We were approaching bankruptcy at a high

speed, wrote Hoover. He estimated that at least $12 million a
month was needed to feed the Belgians and residents of northern France. And an additional $10 million of food had to be
in the pipeline at all times. As Hoover realized, There was no
hope of saving the Belgian people unless we could get government support somewhere.
He meant Britain and France. The British, for one, were
not of a mind to support the CRB. Most of Prime Minister
Herbert Asquiths Cabinet, including Minister of War Lord
Kitchener, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George
and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, opposed

his book about the relief effort, Fighting Starvation in Belgium,

The German government [in Brussels and Berlin] has shown
itself consistently favorable in principle, even if often troublesome in specifc matters, to the Commissions work.
Hoover, sensing that the German concessions might create some negotiating leverage with the British, made another
impassioned pitch to Lloyd George. This time the chancellor
was movedand two days later it became clear that he, Grey
and Asquith had overruled Kitchener and Churchill: Britain
agreed to contribute nearly $5 million a month to the Hoover
Fund. The CRB chairman then traveled to Paris and met with
the French minister of foreign affairs who was also reluctant
to reward German barbarities with relief food. But a
day after Hoovers return to London, a French banker
appeared at the CRB offce and presented him with
two checks from the French government totaling
$7 million, after which the country contributed roughly $5 million every month for relief in both Belgium
and northern France. Lord Eustace Percy of the British Foreign Offce said that Hoovers very soft heart
and very hard head alike prompted an instinctive attitude to all governments which could best be summed
up in the words kindly get out of my way.

he CRB was in businessand quickly became a sophisticated operation

managed with what Hoover called
engineering effciency. Functioning almost like a government entity,
the committee had its own fag (triangular, with the letters CRB stitched in red), ships,
letterhead, buyers and accountants. The New York
offce bought staples from around the worldcorn
and meat from Argentina, beans from Manchuria,
A worker stacks four in a Brussels warehouse. Between November 1914 and
rice from Burmawherever they could get the lowAugust 1919, the CRB imported 3.4 million metric tons of bread, grains and four.
est price. The CRB leased about 60 oceangoing cargo
ships to transport food and clothing, and 150,000 tons of mathe idea of delivering food to Belgium, fearing that it would
terial arrived in Rotterdam every month. For safety the ships
end up in the bellies of German soldiers. Undeterred, Hoover
all displayed CRB fags, pennants and deck clothes and folpersonally confronted Asquith, asking for regularized passage
lowed specifc routes to Rotterdam laid out by the Germans.
of CRB ships through the blockade along with fnancial assisStill, over four years the CRB lost about 20 ships, a handful
tance. Asquith was amenable to the idea of regularized North
of them sunk by German subs. Germans inspected every ship
Sea passage, but any fnancial help, said one Foreign Offce
docking in Rotterdamany discovery of contraband could
offcial, was impossible.
have ended the entire relief effortand then its cargo was
Hoover wouldnt accept that. He was both intuitive and
quickly offoaded onto canal boats. Belgiums excellent translogical, helped by what he described as a naturally combative
portation system, with its many miles of canals and extensive
disposition. He set off for Berlin, the frst of 40 North Sea
light rail, was a logistical saving grace. Some 5,000 canal boats
crossings he would make as CRB head, to besiege the Germade deliveries from Rotterdam to Belgian cities, from which
man government at the top directly and on all fronts. The
light rail and horse carts moved the food to provincial and
Big Chief, as Hoover was known within the CRB, imposed his
district warehouses, and then to 4,200 communes.
personality on the generals and got what he needed mosta
CRB relief in Belgium was split between basic provisionwritten guarantee that all imported food would be free from
ing for the citizenry and a benevolence operation for the
requisition by the German army. Whats more, Germany ofdestitute, meaning the poor and the hundreds of thousands
fcially agreed that CRB foodstuffs could be brought into
of people thrown out of work by the war. The provisioning
Belgium by way of Holland, that CRB offcials would have
unit took control of every mill, bakery, slaughterhouse, dairy
freedom of movement in Belgium, and that oceangoing CRB
and restaurant in the country, while the charity group beships would be left alone by German submarines. It was a macame our effective armor against periodic attempts by British
jor breakthrough. Vernon Kellogg, a top CRB offcial, noted in
40 AMERICAN HISTORY

and German militarists to suppress or restrict our activities,

explained Hoover.
Feeding Belgium was no simple matter. Biographer Nash,
in The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, quotes CRB
delegate Joseph C. Green on what the equitable distribution of
food entailed, with bread as an example. First the Provincial
Representative has to fgure out periodically the exact population of his province, and the exact quantities of native wheat
and rye and of imported grain necessary to cover a certain period. This he reports to Brussels, and Brussels to London.In
the meantime, Brussels has decided upon the exact quantities
to be shipped to each mill in the country.

The daily pint of soup

and ten ounces of bread
doled out in the soup
lines, wrote one relief
ofcial, was all that stood
between many Belgians,
like this Brussels man,
and starvation.

PHOTOS: HERbERT HOOvER PRESIdENTIAL LIbRARY

That was just the beginning. When the four is fnally milled,
the real work of distribution begins. Sacks must be provided
and kept in rotation. The exact quantity of four required by a
given Commune for a given period must be ascertained. Shipments by canal or train or tram or wagon must be made to every
Commune dependent upon the mill. Boats and cars and horses
must be obtained.When the four has reached the local committee, it must be distributed among the bakers in accordance
with the needs of each. Baking involves yeast, and the maintenance of yeast factories, and the disposal of byproducts.All
this involves fnancial problems, and bookkeeping, and checking and inspection, all along the line; and the whole process
to the tune of endless bickering with Germany
authorities high and low. Bakers were closely
monitored to ensure that they did not hoard
four or otherwise violate CRB rules. We certainly did have trouble with the bakers, wrote
CRB offcial Kellogg. Those suspected of violations were brought before a bakers court
and, if found guilty, Monsieur le Boulanger had
his baking privileges suspended.
Ration cards were sold or given to every family or citizen. Early on, most Belgians paid for
their cards. Prices were kept reasonably low.
The price of wheat and four in Belgium never
exceeded its price in London or Paris and was
often lower. In fact, cash receipts from rations
surpassed the needs of the charity group, so
the surplus money was used to pay police and
teachers, in the latter case so schools could be
kept open. The situation further improved in
1915 when the Germans agreed to reserve for
the civilian population all wheat, barley, rye
and oats grown in Belgiumand that accord
was subsequently extended to other foods.
And what did the Belgians eat? The basic
daily ration consisted of bread, bacon, lard,
rice, dried beans and peas, cerealine (similar to
corn fakes), potatoes and brown sugar. In total
it amounted to roughly 1,800 caloriessuffcient to maintain health and fght off disease
but, according to Kellogg, hardly more than
half enough calories for a man at work. Each
full ration cost the CRB about 8 cents a day.
Added Kellogg: It is a ration worked out very
carefully to make money go as far and effectively as possible in providing a scientifcally balanced, readily transportable and storable and
easily divisible food supply to a people whose
whole eating could be controlled and directed.
Many Belgians lived on this ration almost
exclusively for more than three years. Those
who could afford it bought vegetables, fruit,
milk, eggs and some meat. Farm families kept
enough of their harvest to feed themselves
and sold the rest to the CRB at a proft. The
CRB and its Belgian counterpart meticulously
APRIL 2014

41

monitored food consumption, constantly adjusted the volume

Still, problems were constant: German soldiers arbitrarily
of foodstuffs transported to particular localesand wasted no
arrested CRB couriers. Canals froze in the winter. Food was
money. Amazingly, an organization that raised and spent more
smuggled across the border with Holland. Hoover regularly
than $925 million kept its overhead costs below 1 percent.
shuttled between London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin to re
Feeding the children was a priority. It was our task to main
solve fnancial, logistical, political and military complica
tain the laughter of the children and not
tions, which meant fnding agreement
dry their tears, said Hoover. In addition
between two European allies that were
to establishing soupes for the poor, the
often at odds and three different German
This was the daily ration that kept
CRB set up hundreds of canteens to pro
governmentsone in Berlin, the others
Belgians alive during the German
vide young Belgians with a hot meal every
in Brussels and Charleville, France. The
occupation of World War I*
day at noona hearty stew, condensed
worry that the Germans would steal CRB
Bread ............................................12 oz.
milk and other staples. Children need fat
food never materialized. I can honestly
Bacon ..............................................1 oz.
in their diet, so the CRB developed what
say that the Germans got practically none
Lard ............................................... oz.
Hoover described as a big, solid cracker
of the food, wrote Kellogg.
Rice ...................................................2 oz.
with fats, cocoa, sugar and four, contain
Through all the despair, a spirit of
Dried beans, peas, cerealine...... 1 oz.
ing every chemical for growing children.
sacrifce and humanity prevailed. Some
Potatoes ...................................10 oz.
One was served every day to 2.5 million
50,000 Belgian volunteers shouldered the
youngsters and expectant mothers. The
relief work every day. Many were women,
Brown sugar ................................. oz.
emblem of Belgium during the war should
who ran the soup kitchens and charity
have been a child carrying a soup bucket, *at cost per person of 8 cents daily
clothing centers. When donated sweat
wrote Hoover in his memoir. From the rebuilding of the vi
ers from America arrivedpart of a total of 55 million tons
tality in the children came the great relieving joy in the work.
of clothing donationsseamstresses would unravel them and
The troops of healthy, cheerful, chattering youngsters lining
knit them into shawls, the Belgian version of a sweater. Wrote
up for their portions, eating at long tables, cleaning their own
Hoover: The women developed a zeal that sprang from the
dishes afterward, were a gladdening lift from the drab life of
spiritual realization that they were saving their race. And, in
an imprisoned people. When the war ended it was found that
turn, the CRB took a turn at helping the women. Some 40,000
the mortality and morbidity rates for children in Belgium and
of the countrys talented female lace workers were made un
northern France were lower than at any time in their history.
employed by the German invasion. The CRB put them back

Feeding the People

Children in Brussels sit down to a meal

provided by the CRB. A Hoover lunch
included hearty vegetable soup and
white bread. It was like the sun coming
out, recalled one child whod subsisted
for a year on black bread and crackers.

Belgian women turned

empty four sacks into
clothes, like these
bloomers (above), and
colorful accessories,
like this embroidered
pillow Hoover kept on
his couch in New York.
An American soldier
(far right) considers
an interesting item in
a Belgian shop. Sales
of four sack souvenirs
benefted the relief fund.

to work making lace and paid them for their output. After the
war the CRB owned $4 million worth of lace that was sold with
substantial dividends to the lace workers.

hen the United States declared war

on Germany in April 1917, the CRB
altered its operation. All Americans
were pulled from Belgium and replaced by Dutch and Spaniards.
Hoovers appointment as head of
the Food Administration meant a move from London to New
York. By then the Germans were engaged in unlimited sub
warfare, and the Belgian relief situation had become more diffcult. Some 60 percent of Belgians were unemployed, destitute and daily receiving food from a soupe or some other form
of assistancetens of millions of people. The CRB had fewer
cargo ships, which, when combined with global food shortages brought on by the war, meant smaller rations.
Still, Hoover continued to run the CRB, and the CRB kept
the food moving. American money began to fnance most of
the relief effort, American soldiers joined the war effort, and
the long, vicious military confict came to an end on November 11, 1918. That didnt end Belgian relief, however: Hoover
opted to keep the CRB going for another six months, until
international commodities trading and shipping could properly resume. When the organization was liquidated, the CRB
had a surplus of $35 million. Hoover gave $18 million of it to
various Belgian universities and other educational institutions
TOP RIgHT: NATIONAL ARCHIvES; ALL OTHER IMAgES: HERbERT HOOvER PRESIdENTIAL LIbRARY

as cash gifts, and with the remainder created two U.S-Belgian

cultural and educational foundations that still exist.
Led by its master of effciency, as the British newspaper
The Independent called Hoover, the CRB had persevered and
kept a nation alive. Hoover and his staff refused to retreat before the unremitting pressures and troubles that beset [them]
at every turn, according to Nash. A man of lesser nerveor
less than total commitment to his missionwould have had
his ships requisitioned by the Admiralty, his independence
whittled away by the Germans.Not Hoover. Time and again
the CRBs desperate circumstances required the intervention
of a man of force. It is doubtful that the relief work would have
lasted if a gentler, less assertive person had been at the helm.
American ambassador Walter Hines Page agreed, saying of
the Commission for Relief in Belgium: There never was anything like it in the world before, and it is all one man, and that
is Hoover.
Hoover had established a global model for international
relief, one that he carried over to central Europe and Russia
after the war when he became what General John J. Pershing
called the food regulator for the world. Hoover wasnt a
sentimental man, and he didnt like the idea of getting European decorations. When all is said and done, he said, accomplishment is all that counts. Still, he agreed to accept a
singular honor from Belgian King Albert when he visited the
country in August 1918: Ami de la nation Belge. n
Richard Ernsberger Jr. is a senior editor at American History.
APRIL 2014

43

A Day in the Life of a Soldier

Landscape painter and Civil War veteran Sanford Gifford turns his brush to camp life
by Sarah Richardson
Gifford, the GorGeous, lotosloving [sic] Gifford, was revealed to me
on that evening; a quiet, self-contained
and gentle mannered man, with only a
slight hint of his dangerous mania in his
eyes, wrote an art critic after meeting
painter Sanford Robinson Gifford in the
artists New York City live-work studio
in February 1862.
44 AMERICAN HISTORY

Gifford, at 38, had established himself

as an accomplished loner whose luminous landscapes ranked with the bold
panoramas created by his friends Albert
Bierstadt and Frederic Church of the
Hudson River School. By 1861 Gifford,
the son of a wealthy businessman, had
left his comfortable life to volunteer with
the 7th Regiment from New York, a state

militia assigned to defend Washington,

D.C. Over the next few years, between
three stints in the militia, he would paint
four Civil War scenesnot of combat,
but of soldiers daily life in camp.
Though Gifford survived his military
service unscathed, the war struck close
to home. His eldest brother, Charles,
killed himself at the outset of the war

Gifords unit, the 7th

Regiment of New York State
Militia, goes about its day,
writing letters, preparing
food, hanging laundry,
napping under a makeshift
tarp. In 1863, Giford, shown
below, wrote to his father
about the site, located three
miles from Marylands South
Mountain: It did not take
long to strip the neighboring
fences of their remaining
rails, and thatch them with
sheaves of wheat from the
next feld. That summer,
Giford witnessed the
Confederate retreat from
Gettysburg and the New
York City Draft Riots.

Camp of the 7th Regiment Near Frederick, Maryland

in May 1861 with a dose of chloral hydrate; another brother, Edward, died of
typhoid fever in late summer 1863 after escaping from a Confederate prison
in Louisiana and swimming across the
Mississippi River. In January 1865, his
brother Frederick died.
Gifford never again painted soldiers,
and the landscapes he completed just after the war are shadow-flled and melancholy. His 1863 work, The Coming Storm,
was bought by Edwin Booth, brother of
Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, and
put on display at the 1865 National Academy of Design exhibition in New York,
where its brooding play of light and dark

was interpreted by many as an expression

of mourning for the slain president.
Two of Giffords postwar landscapes,
including a twilight scene, were chosen,
along with Winslow Homers Prisoners
From the Front, to represent American
art at the International Exposition in
Paris in 1867. Giffords reverence for
nature was shared by his godson, Gifford Pinchot, who went on to become
a pioneering forester and advocate for
preserving Americas wilderness.
Three of Giffords Civil War paintings,
along with artifacts and other images, are
on view through March 23 at the New
York State Museum in Albany.

AbOvE: NEw YORk STATE MILITARY MuSEuM, NEw YORk STATE dIvISION Of MILITARY ANd NAvAL AffAIRS;
RIgHT: dETAIL fROM ORIgINAL, SANfORd R. gIffORd duRINg THE AMERICAN CIvIL wAR, CA. 1861/uNIdENTIfIEd
PHOTOgRAPHER, SANfORd RObINSON gIffORd PAPERS, ARCHIvES Of AMERICAN ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITuTION

APRIL 2014

45

46 AMERICAN HISTORY

Each of Gifords four Civil

War paintings captures a
diferent time of day, and
this unusual nocturnal
scene shows the 7th serving
near Washington, D.C., in
1861. Raised in a privileged
familyGiford was the only
artist of the Hudson School
to have attended college
he nonetheless had felt it his
duty to serve and enlisted in
the New York State Militia in
April 1861. Although critics
praised the dreamy quality
of Gifords landscapes, his
scenes retained a strong
grounding in reality. One
critic remarked that Giford
expressed serenity without
weakness.

Night Bivouac of the 7th Regiment New York at Arlington Heights

NEw YORk STATE MILITARY MuSEuM, NEw YORk dIvISION Of MILITARY ANd NAvAL AffAIRS

APRIL 2014

47

48 AMERICAN HISTORY

A trip to the Adirondacks

after his fnal wartime
service in 1863 inspired
this scene of a fast-moving
storm, painted after
the death of Gifords
brother Edward. Actor
Edwin Booth, John Wilkes
Booths older brother
and a Union supporter,
purchased the painting
before the end of the war
and the assassination of
President Lincoln. When
the painting was displayed
at an exhibition in April
1865, it was easy to see
it as a premonition of
Lincolns murder. Herman
Melville honored the
composition with a poem
alluding to the pain of
Edwin Booth. Following the
war Giford continued to
explore landscape painting,
traveling to the Middle
East and the Far West.
In 1870 he was among a
group of 50 who drafted
documents establishing the
Metropolitan Museum of
Art. Gifords work was the
subject of the institutions
frst retrospective
exhibition.

The Coming Storm

PHILAdELPHIA MuSEuM Of ART/ART RESOuRCE

APRIL 2014

49

50 AMERICAN HISTORY

In America, the European fad

of mesmerism morphed into a
self-help credo: The good life
can be yours when you

Think
Positive

by Erika Janik

n 1862, a miserable Mary Patterson entered the Portland, Maine, offce of mental healer Phineas Quimby. Pale, weak
and emaciated, the 42-year-old Patterson, her wavy brown hair pulled back
from her face, could barely carry herself
up the stairs into the waiting room. She

had been sick her entire life, missing school as a child

and writing despairing poems about death and the
meaninglessness of life as a young adult. Lethargic,
emotionally unstable and subject to spells of pain,
Patterson tried regular care, homeopathy, hydropathy and a Grahamite vegetarian diet, but nothing
worked. Most of her life had been consumed by a
constant search for someone who could provide
her with lasting relief. She desperately hoped that
someone might be Quimby.

Franz Anton Mesmer theorized that animal magnetism could

cure physical ailments. An 18th-century painting shows French
patients gathered around a drum flled with magnetized water.
Tubes and ropes attached to the drum direct the magnetic
fuid to the afected body part. For example, the woman in the
foreground holds a tube to her childs ear to relieve an earache.
wellcoMe librAry, london

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, or Park to his friends, had experimented with mesmerism and magnetic healing since 1838.
Concluding that a patients trust and rapport with the healer
led to cures, Quimby attempted to connect with his patients
mentally and physically. He talked over their disease, massaged
their hands and arms, tried to feel their symptoms himself and
encouraged them to think differently about life and health. His
success with this method made him a national fgure.
After only a week in Quimbys care, Pattersons health improved dramatically. The woman so enfeebled she could not
step out of her carriage alone was, only days into her treatment,
climbing the 182 steps to the dome on top of Portlands city
hall unassisted. No one was more astonished than Patterson
herself, who before long was devoting her days to the practice
and further study of Quimbys method. Only a few years later,
Patterson, soon to be known through marriage as Mary Baker
Eddy, would introduce her own new medical system. She called
it Christian Science, and it quickly became the largest homegrown healing faith in American history, following in the long
and potent path of mental cures and magnetic fuids that had
begun more than a century earlier in Europe as mesmerism.

n the 1770s, Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer

began to test an idea hed frst had in medical school
about the bodys vital force. Just as gravity affected the
behavior of the sun, moon and planets, Mesmer proposed that the nervous fuids that coursed through the
body made humans as susceptible as the tides to the universes
invisible gravitational forces. He based his theory on those of
the 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus, who had suggested that
the human body could attract corresponding planetary effects.
The idea of bodies infuenced by unseen and unexplainable
powers was nothing new in medicine, nor even unusual in a
world that seemed alive with powerful unseen forces. Isaac
Newtons gravity, Benjamin Franklins electricity, even the miraculous hot-air balloons of Jacques Charles and the Montgolfer brothers were just a few of the powerful new forces turning
heads and fring scientifc thought in Europe.
Unlike his predecessors, though, Mesmer suggested that
a physician could learn to control the fow of these invisible
forces from outside the body and restore the internal harmony
that signaled health. He theorized that illness might be cured
with magnets. Since they, like celestial bodies, could infuence

Mary baker eddy (left, circa 1867) was deeply infuenced by the work
of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (right), whose mental healing rid Eddy
of chronic illness. Both believed in the power of the mind to afect the
body, but in developing Christian Science, Eddy also credited her holy,
uplifting faith as key to maintaining good health and happiness.

52 AMERICAN HISTORY

LEfT: THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PubLISHINg SOCIETY, uSEd wITH PERMISSION;

RIgHT: COuRTESY Of THE bELfAST, MAINE, HISTORICAL SOCIETY

other physical entities without actual contact, he wondered if

magnets could also redirect the bodys nervous fuid. In 1774,
Mesmer tested his theory on 29-year-old Franziska Oesterlin,
a hysteric who experienced convulsions with vomiting and
fainting. Mesmer treated and observed Oesterlin for two years.
During an attack, Mesmer placed one magnet on her stomach
and another on each of her legs. Almost immediately, Oesterlin reported feeling painful currents of a subtle material
moving within her that eventually traveled to her extremities.
Her spells soon subsided and did not return for hours. Mesmer
repeated the treatment many times over the following weeks
with the same success. He fnally declared her entirely cured.
Some people were so taken with Mesmers powers that they,
too, wanted to practice animal magnetism. Mesmer was at
frst reluctant to reveal his methods, convinced that he alone
truly understood them. He eventually agreed to share parts of
his systembut not without a monetary and psychological
price to those who wished to learn. Mesmers more affuent disciples paid an enormous amount of money for the honor of
membership in the Society of Universal Harmony, a semisecret
organization he founded in Paris in 1783 that mixed business,

Just as gravity affected

the behavior of the
sun, moon and planets,
Mesmer proposed
that nervous fuids
in the body made
humans as susceptible
as the tides to invisible
gravitational forces

A mesmerist uses magnetic passes (left) to induce sleep. Practitioner Frank

Randall wrote in 1896 that a pass should end with a move to throw ofany
foreign infuence that may have collected on your fngers. A subject in a cataleptic
state (above) is as stif as a bar of iron, and utterly insensible to surroundings.
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APRIL 2014

53

Disease is something
made by belief or
forced upon us by
our parents or public
opinion, wrote
Quimby. If you can
face the error and
argue it down you can
cure the sick
mesmeric education and fraternalism. Mesmer demanded absolute devotion from his disciples, but he felt no need to show
any gratitude in return. No one was allowed to modify anything
without his permission. Anyone who suggested alternative or
contrary ideas was thrown out.
Despite these restrictions, chapters of the society soon existed in most major French cities. Men from some of Frances
most illustrious and aristocratic families joined, including the
French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette. Benjamin Franklins grandson William Temple Franklin, who was living in France, also joined, though he would
later tell his grandfather that he was merely curious. The society made Mesmer rich. It also transformed one mans closely
guarded secret into the common knowledge and shared enthusiasm of an infuential group.
In 1784, one of these new members, Amand-Marie-Jacques
de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puysegur, made a spectacular discovery. The eldest of three brothers in a respected aristocratic
family, Puysegur began experimenting with magnetism on the
peasants who worked his estate in northern France. They proved
willing subjects for his new healing art. Among the frst was a
young shepherd named Victor Race, who had spent several days
in bed with what appeared to be pneumonia. Puysegur magnetized Race and found to his surprise that the young man fell into
a strange peaceful sleep. Although he appeared to be sleeping,
Race soon began to talk about his problems. Puysegur worried
that these unhappy thoughts might aggravate Races illness, so
he tried to change the subject to happier topics. He suggested
that Race imagine himself dancing at a party and taking part in
a shooting contest. Puysegurs suggestions set Race into motion.
He stood up and began walking. He pantomimed dancing. He
shot a gun. Race not only appeared to be awake and aware of his
surroundings, he also seemed more intelligent and well spoken
than normal. After an hour Puysegur brought Race back to consciousness. Race recalled nothing that had happened.
Quite inadvertently, Puysegur had discovered the human
54 AMERICAN HISTORY

dr. John elliotsons public displays of mesmerism cost him his job at
University College Hospital in London in 1838. Charles Dickens attended
a display and became an avid supporter of the doctor and his methods.

unconscious, a strange new world just below the threshold

of ordinary consciousness. Although Mesmers name is the
one remembered, Puysegurs discovery indicated that the remarkable effects produced by mesmerism seemed to have not
a physical cause, as Mesmer had claimed, but a psychological
origin, the mechanisms of which would consume many scientists, philosophers and doctors in the 19th century.
Puysegur explained his therapeutic success as a mental effect produced by the mesmerists will over the vital power.
The crucial variable in the mesmerizing process, according to
Puysegur, was the magnetists ability to gain some control over
the patient that then allowed the patient to slip into the somnambulistic state. I believe in the existence within myself of a
power. From this belief derives my will to exert it, explained
Puysegur in a 1785 address to the Strasbourg Masonic society.
The entire doctrine of Animal Magnetism is contained in the
two words: Believe and want. I believe that I have the power to
set into action the vital principle of my fellow-men; I want to
make use of it; this is all my science and all my means.

services by 1843. Dozens of books with do-ityourself instructions tempted would-be home
mesmerizers with the promise of health and
self-improvement.
One of those Americans was Phineas Parkhurst
Quimby, who expanded mesmerist philosophy
into a total philosophy of life. A clockmaker by
trade, Quimby sat spellbound in the audience as
Poyen demonstrated the astonishing powers of
animal magnetism on a stop in Belfast, Maine, in
1838. After the lecture, Quimby nearly assaulted
Poyen with questions about this mysterious mental fuid. Poyen told Quimby that he, too, could
develop his own mental powers if he devoted
himself to study. That was all Quimby needed to
hear. He set aside his clocks and followed Poyen
from town to town until he mastered the practice
of mesmerism. His dedication prompted Poyen
to compliment his exceptional magnetic powers
and great power of concentration. Before long,
Focused magnetism concentrates the mesmerists power. Group the fngers, wrote
Quimby had a magnetic practice of his own.
Frank Randall, and with a slight tremulous motion of the handrelease the vitality, at
Starting from the assumption that the human
the same time breathing steadily down the fngers to assist the activity of the fow.
mind comprised all beliefs, Quimby rationalized
esmeric mania fnally hit American shores
that if a person is deceived into a belief that he has, or is liable
in the 1830s. Although some educated
to have a disease, the belief is catching and the effects follow
Americans knew of it already from its infrom it. Quimby wasnt the frst mesmerist to suggest a psytroduction in the 1770s, mesmerism gained
chological origin for disease, but unlike his predecessors who
widespread popularity in the United States
pointed to a magnetic fuid imbalance as the primary problem,
only with the arrival of Frenchman Charles Poyen de Saint
Quimby specifcally identifed faulty ideas as the main cause.
Saveur. A 20-year-old medical student and self-styled ProfesAll sickness is in the mind of belief, he proclaimed. To cure
sor of Animal Magnetism, Poyen came to Boston in 1836 to
the disease is to correct the error, destroy the cause, and the efspread his magnetic faith. But much to his surprise and dismay,
fect will cease. His theories moved mesmerism one step closer
he found that few Americans knew anything about mesmerism.
to clinical psychology.
Poyen embarked on a lecture tour of New England soon afQuimbys mind cure had an appealing simplicity, even as
ter he landed. He did little to transform the theory he had frst
the explanations he offered for his healing powers often delearned in Europe. Poyen believed that Puysegurs discovery
fed reason and verged on the fantastic. Quimby himself fully
of the somnambulistic state was the most important scientifc
admitted that he did not completely understand what was ocdiscovery of animal magnetism, and perhaps the most imporcurring, but he knew that it worked. The key element, Quimby
tant in all of science. Larding his lectures with medical magic
counseled, was to identify internal rather than external refertricks, Poyen demonstrated the magnetic state of consciousence points of self-esteem and worth, a message so modern
ness to awestruck audiences.
and familiar it would ft right in any self-help book today.
During his lectures, Poyen picked volunteers from the audiDisease is something made by belief or forced upon us by our
ence to undergo trances. They sat onstage while Poyen waved
parents or public opinion, wrote Quimby. Now if you can
his arms over and around them to heighten the activity of
face the error and argue it down you can cure the sick. Listen
their internal animal magnetism. Poyen usually succeeded in
to your inner voice. Dont let other people distract you from
hypnotizing about half of his volunteers. Loud hand clapping
the life you were meant to live. Quimby was the Oprah of the
and jars of ammonia passed under their noses failed to evoke
19th century.
even the slightest response. To the audience, these volunteers
By 1865, nearly 12,000 patients had come to Quimbys Portappeared to have withdrawn completely from the physical
land offce for treatment. Mary Baker Eddy was one of those
world. Crowds thronged to see family and friends transformed
patients, and she was so inspired by the process that, once well,
before their eyes. The gossip of the city is of Animal Magneshe resolved to take up a career in Quimby-style mental healtism, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson to his brother William on
ing. A few months later, Eddy gave her frst public lecture on
January 13, 1837. Three weeks ago I went to see the magnetic
P.P. Quimbys Spiritual Science Healing Disease as Opposed
sleep & saw the wonder.
to Deism or Rochester-Rapping Spiritualism, the last a referThe United States soon crawled with itinerant mesmerence to the mysterious and ghostly knockings that inauguratists. In Boston alone, more than 200 magnetizers sold their
ed the Spiritualist movement in Rochester, N.Y., in the 1840s.

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55

Eddy negated the

existence of the
physical body. In
theory, she wrote, a
man could live just
as well after his lungs
had been removed
as before, if he but
thought he could
With this talk, she anointed herself Quimbys frst spokesperson. Unfortunately for Eddy, her mentor died the next year.
Two weeks after Quimbys death, Eddy discovered the path
to her future. After a fall on an icy street left her largely confned to bed, Eddy found sudden relief from her painful injuries while reading passages from the Bible on Christs healing
ministry. The presence and power of God seemed to food
her whole being and she stood up healed. She could not explain what happened, but she knew beyond a doubt that her
recovery resulted from her reading of the Gospel. From this
experience, she developed a theory based on the premise that
disease resulted from ones alienation from God. Like Quimby,
she believed that illness existed in the mind; her reading of
the Bible told her that it was not inherent in Gods creation.
Since God is good and God is all, Eddy reasoned that evil,
a category under which disease naturally fell, therefore could
not possibly exist.
She then took the extreme step of negating the existence
of the physical body itself. Eddy argued that God lived in the
spirit that existed in the mind, and since God was everything,
what people thought of as their physical body was in reality
only another misguided belief. In theory, she wrote, a man
could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as
before, if he but thought he could. She named her new approach to healing Christian Science, ignoring or perhaps
not caring that Quimby had sometimes used that name for
his system. She also disavowed any debt to her mentor and
claimed only divine revelation, even though her theory appeared to be little more than Quimbyism embellished with
biblical references.
Eddy published her fndings in Science and Health With Key
to the Scriptures in 1875 and four years later she founded the
Church of Christ (Scientist). The church soon became one of
the fastest-growing denominations in the country, counting
56 AMERICAN HISTORY

more than 200,000 members by 1925. Local churches and instructional institutes opened around the country, and several
thousand Christian Science healers, more than 80 percent of
them women, began practicing. Eddy also opened a school, a
frst for any of the mesmerist and magnetist mind cures in the
United States, in 1881. The Massachusetts Metaphysical College graduated hundreds of doctors of Christian Science, who
helped spread her message and technique from coast to coast.
Shed begun teaching students more than a decade before, in
1868, promising lessons in a method with a success far beyond any of the present modes.
Few irregular theories struck regular doctors as more ridiculous than Christian Science, particularly Eddys denial of
the very existence of physical bodies. American journalist Ambrose Bierce got in on the fun, writing in his Devils Dictionary that Christian Science was superior to regular medicine
because it will cure imaginary diseases, and they cannot.
Despite Eddys critics, Christian Science only continued to
grow. Letters in the Christian Science Journal found followers
coming to Christian Science primarily for healing but also for a
more satisfying understanding of God. Both men and women
confessed to being unable to reconcile themselves to the idea
of a God who caused or even allowed so much suffering in
traditional religion. Eddys insistence that God did not cause
evil in any form and her advice to have a hopeful state of mind
comforted those theologically and medically disillusioned.

hristian Science was not the only mental healing group to emerge after Quimbys death. Two
other Quimby patients, Warren Felt Evans and
Julius Dresser, along with Dressers wife, Anetta,
interpreted the growing public interest in mental
health as a calling, and they set up mental healing practices
in Boston. Unlike Eddy, they fully acknowledged their debt
to Quimby. With no prior training other than what they had
observed from Quimby, Evans and the Dressers continued to
clarify and refne their intellectual understanding of mental
healing, picking up pieces of nearly every metaphysical idea
they happened acrossChristian, Spiritualist, Transcendentalist, Buddhist, Swedenborgian, mystic or otherwise. Their
enthusiasm proved contagious and helped to spread their
increasingly popular brands of healing around the country.
This contributed to what became known as the New Thought
movement, a loosely organized group that shared a convictionif little elsethat the mind can solve all human problems. Minds are forces, they argued, and could be harnessed
with proper instruction.
Publishing a stream of articles and books, New Thought authors attempted to systematically apply the principles of mesmerism and other metaphysical ideas to everyday life. They
advised readers to adopt mental habits that duplicated the
thinking associated with the mesmeric state of consciousness,
in effect taking the right beliefs that Quimby sought to place
in peoples minds and turning them into complete descriptions of how people ought to think and act. This resulted in a
food of surefre mind-cure solutions to problems in marriage,

work or home life. Books such as Thought Is Power, How to Get

What You Want and Making Money transformed belief in the
ability of the mind to cure illness into a life philosophy largely
centered on positive thinking. Within yourself lies the cause
of whatever enters your life, advised Ralph Waldo Trines 1897
In Tune With the Infnite, which sold more than 2 million copies. To come into the full realization of your awakened interior
powers, is to be able to condition your life in exact accord with
what you would have it. Frank Channing Haddock offered
practical, hygienic advice for acquiring magnetism and what
he called success-magnetism in his Mastery of Self for Wealth,
Power, Success, recommending scrupulous cleanliness of the
body, without and within, sweet, sound and early sleep,
and a balance of work and recreation. These books, many of
them bestsellers, dramatically increased the number of people
who came into contact with American mesmerist ideas while
obscuring mesmerisms history and original applications.
While mental healing systems that grew out of mesmerism proliferated, by 1900 mesmerism itself had quietly disappeared as a subject of popular interest. American practitioners
had never established mesmerism as a professional medical
science. No offcial schools of mesmerism were founded, no
professional organizations formed. Many magnetic healers
abandoned their practices after a few years in favor of more
metaphysically inclined psychological theories.
Mesmer was the frst to elevate the mind to primacy in the
healing process, inspiring waves of cures and healing movements based on mental powers. Puysegurs discovery of the
unconscious mind, however, led to the frst truly psychological treatment, and his emphasis on the psychological, rather
than Mesmers focus on the physical, became the standard
form of mesmerism practiced in the 19th century. Puysegur
observed and recorded all of the core elements of modern
hypnosis: the idea of a therapeutic connection between the
magnetizer and subject, an altered state of consciousness
with noticeable lucidity in some patients and the near total amnesia of the trance experience that followed. Experimentation with somnambulism led to the development of
dynamic clinical psychology as scientists, including Sigmund
Freud, used data provided by entranced patients to formulate the rudiments of psychoanalysis.
But if mesmerist practice mostly disappeared in its original
form, the pop-culture image of a famboyant doctor turned
mystical scientist and the idea of altered states certainly did
not, becoming a staple of books and movies. Think of the
Matrix movies, Avatar and Inception. Books promoting the
power of thought to change lives continue to sell briskly.
Mesmerism spoke to a deep-seated desire to unlock the potential of the mind for human use. To know and understand
ourselves and others, to be better people, to cure what ails us
these are goals humans are still striving to achieve. The idea
that the answers might lie within continues to mesmerize. n

in June 1903, Mary Baker Eddy invited

Christian Scientists to Pleasant View,
her home in Concord, N.H. Local press
reported that Eddy wore a regal purple
velvet gown and ermine cape when she
addressed the faithful from her balcony:
Trust in Truth, and have no other trusts.

Adapted with permission from Marketplace of the Marvelous:

The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine, by Erika Janik, published January 7, 2014, by Beacon Press. All rights reserved.
COuRTESY Of THE MARY bAkER EddY LIbRARY

APRIL 2014

57

Peoples Palaces

58 AMERICAN HISTORY

Colossal buildings
decked out in cotton,
corn and coal
put the bounty of
Americas heartland
on grand display

by Richard Selcer

he second half of the 19th century was the Great

Age of Expositions, kicked off by Britains Crystal Palace in 1851. The United States followed suit
in 1876 with the Centennial Exhibition in Phila-

delphia and in 1893 with the Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Grandiosely described as Worlds
Fairs, the expos all had two things in common: national
pride and the celebration of progress and technology.

Rural Americans72 percent of the U.S. population in 1880

had something else to celebrate: nature and the bountiful produce
of the earth. Between Reconstruction and the turn of the century,
ambitious rural expos in towns such as Sioux City, Iowa; Waco,
Texas; and Pueblo, Colo., put that bounty on display for all to see.
The heartland was bursting with civic pride, and local boosters
were eager to attract new investment and new blood. And at the
dawn of the Age of Recreation and Leisure, Americans had the
time and the money to explore their world. They focked to palaces built in a highly ornamental style inspired by designs from
medieval Europe and the ancient Near East.
The expos were ruled largely by Kings Cotton, Corn and Coal.
Atlanta got into the act with an International Cotton Exposition
in 1881. The city wanted to show how far it had come since the
Sioux Citys 1887 Corn Palace (left)
celebrated the citys incorporation
in 1857. The bounty of Midwestern farms,
like that of J.W. Wampler of Kansas (below),
made the crop-palace craze possible.

LEfT: COuRTESY Of THE SIOux CITY PubLIC MuSEuM, SIOux CITY, IOwA; RIgHT: fINNEY COuNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

APRIL 2014

59

Civil War and to position itself as a model for the businessoriented, forward-looking New South. The New South,
however, was built on the Old Souths number one product, and the expos boosters promoted the tools, methods,
products, and processes affecting the growth and culture of
cotton. Financing of $100,000 was raised by subscription,
and promoters even ventured north to sell shares in Boston
and New York. Six exhibit halls were built at Oglethorpe
Park, home to the annual Georgia State Fair, to showcase
1,113 displays from around the United States and seven
foreign countries. Between October 5 and December 31,
384,000 people visited the Cotton Expo, which banked a
tidy $3,000 proft. It was the biggest thing to hit Atlanta
since General Sherman.
Waco, Texas, opened its Cotton Palace in November
1894. The town had good reason to hail its white gold:
Waco, larger than Dallas or Fort Worth, was a booming rail
hub that connected Texas cotton farmers with the rest of
the world. The palace featured exotic Moorish architecture
with a turreted main building topped by an onion dome.
Its outer walls were covered with cotton, grains, and grasses, minerals and timber and Texas products of every kind.
The main attention-grabber was an eagle with a 20-foot
wingspan made entirely of red and yellow corn. The Cotton
Palace had other attractions, including a horse track and
a football feld, and its frst season ended with impressive

60 AMERICAN HISTORY

The Mitchell Corn

Palace, below in
1909, still stands,
and new murals
created every year
celebrate South
Dakota heritage
(opposite). Detailed
graphs (left) plot
the position of 12
diferent colors of
locally grown corn.
Mural construction
begins in August,
after the annual
Corn Palace Festival,
and is completed
in the fall.

attendance and only a small outstanding debt, inviting a

second glorious season. Unfortunately, the main building
burned to the ground in January 1895.

orn was the moneymaker farther north. In 1887, Sioux

City, Iowa, created a $250,000 Corn Palace. With an
onion dome and soaring towers, the palace was touted as the eighth wonder of the world, and visiting
VIPs on opening day, October 3, included President Grover
Cleveland and railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Cleve-

MiTChell, S.D., borroweD The Corn PalaCe iDea for

an 1892 exPo. iT waS builT wiTh The uSual TurreTS anD
MinareTS anD CovereD in grainS anD graSSeS

TOP: LIbRARY Of CONgRESS, CAROL HIgHSMITH COLLECTION; bOTTOM: fRANCk fOTOS/ALAMY;

OPPOSITE TOP: AP; OPPOSITE bOTTOM: wEIdER HISTORY gROuP ARCHIvE

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Mitchells multicolored Corn

Palace was covered in 3,500
bushels of corn. The swastika
used on this 1907 palace was
likely inspired by Native American
designs. The symbol, common
to ancient cultures worldwide, is
often associated with abundance.

land, who was touring the South and Midwest, announced,

This is the frst new thing that has been shown me since
leaving Washington. The Corn Palace proved so popular it
was brought back for four more seasons before the novelty wore off, leaving nothing but a pile of unpaid bills and
countless souvenir tokens that have since become collectors items. Mitchell, S.D., borrowed the Corn Palace idea
for an 1892 expo. City fathers hired an architect to build an
all-wooden structure, with the usual turrets and minarets
bringing to mind One Thousand and One Arabian Nights,
and covered the whole thing with grains and grasses. Unlike its Sioux City predecessor, the Mitchell Corn Palace still
stands, attracting annual crowds of 500,000. It is redecorated every year using a dozen colors of naturally grown
corn as well as grains and native grasses.

62 AMERICAN HISTORY

Some areas depended not on what was grown above the

ground but on what could be mined from under it. In 1889,
three Ottumwa, Iowa, boosters had the idea of showcasing
the local coal industry with a modest exhibition center.
The resulting Coal Palace was a strange mix of Gothic and
Byzantine detailsall made of coal. The turrets, recalled
Carl B. Kreiner in 1922, were veneered with cubes of coal
laid so as to expose three sides and refect the light from
the different faces. Inside, corn, oats, wheat, rye, barley, millet, blue grass, timothy, clover, and fax were skillfully arranged in brilliant masses of color, and there were
beautiful panels containing pictures in corn symbolical
of agriculture, industry, mechanics, music, art, literature,
geography, and commerce. The most unusual feature was
a miniature working coal mine below the main foor that

exPenSe be DaMneD: The SPring PalaCe woulD be a ProPheCy

anD a revelaTion of The fuTure, The Pole STar of eThiCal aMeriCa
contained what was said to be the largest collection of minerals and fossils gathered under one
roof anywhere in the world. Dominating the exhibition were two giant fgures: the 14-foot-tall
King Coal, made of coal, diamonds and diamond dust and seated on a pedestal of copper and
nickel, and the 16-foot Queen Silver.
The ore-wealth of the Rocky Mountain region
would reign in the abiding place of progress,
and the palace of industrious peace, wrote Stanley Wood, editor of the Great Divide, a monthly
magazine so taken with Colorados riches that
gemstones were offered as premiums to new subscribers. The Mineral Palace was one of the showplaces of the Western states, but by 1895 with the
country in the depths of a depression, it was in
fnancial trouble. The grounds were turned into
a city park while the building struggled along as a
museum until 1935.

he most ambitious of all the late-19th-century agricultural expositions was the Texas
Spring Palace in Fort Worth. Conceived in
1888 by General R.A. Cameron, immigration agent of the Fort Worth & Denver Railway,
and eagerly embraced by city fathers, it aimed at
nothing less than showcasing the bounty of every
county and major city in Texas, more than 200 in
all. Scores of exhibitors sent their fora, minerals,
The 1890 Texas Spring Palace featured a 155-foot-high central dome that
fsh and fowl, and even a giant sea turtle. Promotwas second in size only to the U.S. Capitol dome. But the palaces pine frame
ers hit up every business and citizen in town for
and acres of fammable cotton, grains and grasses met a disastrous end.
funding, collecting $38,000 in their frst appeal.
visitors could tour in mule-drawn pit cars. Iowa Governor They even coined a new word to describe their creation:
Horace Boies opened it on September 16, 1890, and it ran karporama, a mash-up of the Greek words karpos, meanfor three weeks. President Benjamin Harrisons October ing fruits or resources, and rama, meaning a view.
9 visit helped attract a crowd of 40,000. The Coal Palace
In 1889, 100 hired men plus unnumbered women volwas such a public relations success it reopened for a second unteers went to work on a site at the southern edge of the
season in 1891. But fading interest and rising maintenance Fort Worth business district to craft, in the words of the
costs spelled doom for the palace; it was razed in 1892, and Texas Spring Palace Catalogue, the Temple of Ceres and
the grounds converted to a city park.
Art in the city of railway centers, as an evidence of her fuPueblo, Colo., in 1891 opened a Mineral Palace with the ture empire of wealth and beauty. From ground level to
help of deep-pocketed real estate promoter William H. cupola, the structureshaped like a St. Andrews cross
Coin Harvey. The cost ran to $150,000 (about $3.5 mil- topped with a massive Moorish domewas completed in
lion in current dollars). The domed building adopted an just 30 days; it took another six weeks to decorate. Inside
Egyptian motif highlighted by 2,200 electric light bulbs and and out, the walls were covered with the products of feld

COuRTESY Of HERITAgE AuCTION gALLERIES, dALLAS; OPPOSITE: LIbRARY Of CONgRESS

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Ottumwas Coal Palace marked

Iowas place as the largest
coal-producing state west of
the Mississippi River in 1890.

The ore-wealTh of The roCky MounTain region woulD reign in The

abiDing PlaCe of ProgreSS, anD The PalaCe of inDuSTriouS PeaCe
and forest, soaked in linseed oil to keep it all looking fresh
as long as possible. The boosters commissioned a stage play
and a Spring Palace March and brought in the nationally known Elgin Watch Band from Chicago to perform.
They also invited the presidents of Mexico and the United States (both declined), and when the whole thing was
almost blown away in a storm just two weeks before the
opening, everyone pitched in and rebuilt it. The exhibition
ran nearly four weeks and was seen by 100,000 visitors, according to reports.
When the karporama closed June 20, it was $23,000 in
the red, but that did not prevent the directors from planning for another season. Expense be damned: They had

64 AMERICAN HISTORY

promised the Spring Palace would be a prophecy and a

revelation of the future, the pole star of business and ethical America. For the 1890 season the directors borrowed
French Impressionist artwork and a Civil War cyclorama,
and hired a skydiving balloonist. The expo was open for
three weeks and drew as many as 10,000 to 12,000 visitors a
day. But on closing night, May 30, the Spring Palace caught
fre and went out in a 15-minute blaze of glory. Miraculously, thousands of visitors escaped and there was only
one fatality, a volunteer freman. Total loss was estimated
at $115,000, a fraction of which was covered by insurance,
but Fort Worth had set a standard only slightly below the
national exhibitions hosted by Philadelphia and Chicago.

PAuL C. juHL COLLECTION, STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY Of IOwA

The exterior of Colorados Mineral Palace (left)

was not as fanciful as the corn palaces, but its
interior housed equally impressive exhibits. Queen
Silver (above left) and King Coal represented the
mining communities of Aspen and Trinidad, Colo.,
respectively. One-sixth of the nations silver came
from Aspen in 1891, while coke made from Trinidad
coal fueled the burgeoning U.S. steel industry.

orn palaces, mineral palaces and even ice palaces dotted the American heartland well into the 1890s. Their
onion domes and faux medieval turrets were part of
the fantasyland appeal for rural Americans who would
never see real palaces in exotic locales. The palaces were all
public-private ventures: Cities looking to put themselves
on the map partnered with railroads, trade associations
or wealthy individuals hoping to proft from the attention.
After Atlantas 1881 Cotton Expo, they all lost money, although their boosters treated the high costs as an investment in the future. In every respect but fnancial we were
a success went the standard disclaimer.
The Panic of 1893 hit agriculture particularly hard and
put many of the smaller-scale expositions out of business.
Millions of acres of western land had been opened to farm-

dENvER PubLIC LIbRARY, wESTERN HISTORY COLLECTION, CALL NuMbERS x-10715, x-10723 ANd x-10721

ing after the Civil War, and countless miles of railroad had
been laid to get the goods from farms and mines to market.
Now, everyone was overextended, and the worst depression
in U.S. history until the 1930s settled over the country. The
age of grandiose displays made of food and fuel were over.
Thirty-fve years after the Sioux City Corn Palace opened
its doors, John Ely Briggs of the State Historical Society of
Iowa remembered the spirit that inspired all of the magnifcent palaces of the late 19th century. They served, he
wrote, as signifcant memorials of substantial achievement, erected by a grateful, joyous, and prosperous people
who lived in a land of plenty. n
Richard Selcer of Fort Worth, Texas, is a local historian and
college professor. He operates Fort Worth Tours & Trails.

APRIL 2014

65

Reviews
Edited by Gene Santoro

The Bully Who Stepped Up to the Pulpit

heres some of whats in Doris
Kearns Goodwins latest tome:
progressive Republicans who insist
that the working poor have rights,
too; magazines that regularly publish
long-form investigative journalism not
only because its the right thing to do,
but because people demand to read it;
reporters whose opinions and input are
actively sought and, once in a while,
acted upon by a sitting president.
At which point, you wonder if
the woman who arguably holds the
unoffcial title of Americas Historian
has veered into epic fantasy.
But the era Goodwin chronicles to
sweeping, near-exhaustive effect really
did happen a century ago, though
even with all the books facts in order,
theyre still hard to imaginewhich
says more about how government and
journalism work (or dont) now than
how they did back then.
The Bully Pulpit is three epochal
stories in one. The meteoric rise of
Theodore Roosevelt from legislative
backbencher to big-city police
commissioner to Rough Rider
to U.S. president receives yet
another run-through here.
It is interwoven with the less
pyrotechnic but spectacularin-its-own-way ascension of
William Howard Taft, from
Ohio magistrate to governorgeneral of the Philippines to
Roosevelts secretary of war and
hand-picked successor, whose
warm friendship with his
predecessor was transformed
by ideological differences into
frosty antagonism.
Goodwins third narrative,
her most fascinating if less
Reporters scribble away as TR
commands center stage. Roosevelt
developed an unprecedented
relationship with the Fourth Estate.

68 AMERICAN HISTORY

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt,

William Howard Taft, and the Golden
Age of Journalism
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster

prominent, concerns the cadre of

journalists, notably Ray Stannard
Baker (who looked deeply into the
abuse of workers rights), Lincoln
Steffens (who attacked big-city bossism
with incisive fair) and Ida Tarbell
(who cogently laid out Standard Oils
rapacity in the American free market).
Whether writing for the visionary,
mercurial magazine publisher S.S.
McClure or for their own publication,
American Magazine (after McClures
mood swings proved too much to
endure), these and other activistwriters effectively unearthed Gilded
Age rot piling up at the turn of the
20th century. In the process, they
spearheaded a wave of reformist
energy so galvanic not even politicians
could resist it.

A prolifc writer himself, Roosevelt

had a real affnity with journalists. He
courted and sought advice from Baker,
Steffens and the capitalist-turnedprairie-populist newspaperman
William Allen White. He even
showed some of them early drafts of
speeches and policy statements, and
they showed him some of their stories
before publication. Nowadays, wed
at least arch our collective eyebrows
over such freewheeling interaction,
but Goodwin makes a convincing
case that these transactions helped to
balance social inequities the Industrial
Revolution hadnt yet addressed.
The momentum couldnt lastand
didnt. Tarbell, for instance, loved
Teddy when he busted trusts in
America, but detested him when he
fashed his imperialism elsewhere. And
in 1906, Roosevelt, in a ft of
exasperation over expos mongers
lacking the cool of McClures crew,
tarred all of them with the muckraker
epithet, though future generations of
investigative journalists would
wear that name with honor.
Team of Rivals, Goodwins
last acclaimed book, centered
on Lincolns willingness to work
with political enemies for the
greater good, pointedly offering
a sadly ignored lesson for today.
With The Bully Pulpit, she is
clearly hoping that the past
glories of crusading journalists
working with energetic
politicians will inspire their
contemporary counterparts. Im
not sure whether her optimism
is misplaced or not. But I am
sure that she has a knack for
vivid characterization and
narrative drive that could make
you believe anythingeven
that it could happen again.
Gene Seymour

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

Bridget Bishop was well known
to Salem authorities. Quick-tempered
and sharp-tongued, Bishop did what
she pleased and said what she thought.
On at least one occasion she was
sentenced by the court to stand in
the marketplace with a gag in her
mouth, punishment for calling her
A convicted witch is marched to the
gallows in Howard Pyles illustration
of the Salem hysteria. Verdicts rested
on spectral evidence, in which the
spirit of the accused was claimed to
torment the aficted.

THE EvERETT COLLECTION; OPPOSITE: gETTY IMAgES

abusive husband many opprobrious

names on the Sabbath. On another,
she was charged with stealing brass
from the local gristmill. Abrasive?
Defnitely. Unpleasant? Certainly. But
was she a witch?
That was not a strange question
in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in

Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story

of the Accused and Their Accusers in
the Salem Witch Trials
by Marilynne K. Roach, Da Capo

1692, when accusations of dabbling

in the dark arts were rampant. Bishop
was tried, convicted and sentenced to
death, the frst of 19 women and men
hanged for witchcraft in Salem (a 20th
victim was pressed to death under
heavy stones for refusing to stand trial
on the charges against him).
In Massachusetts, as in Europe
at the time, most suspected witches
were women. Marilynne K. Roach,
longtime independent scholar of
the Salem hysteria, profles six local
women caught up in the frenzy:
Bishop; Rebecca Nurse, also hanged;
Mary English, a well-to-do woman,
accused and jailed; Ann Putnam,
mother of one of the accusers;
Tituba, the West Indian slave of the
Salem Village minister; and Mary
Warren, the white servant of another
prosperous family, whose accusations
condemned many, including her
employer, John Procter.
In Roachs richly detailed tapestry
of life in 17th-century Salem, its
sometimes easy to lose the thread.
Court transcripts provide much of the
narrative, and as the crisis escalates,
it can be tricky to keep track of whos
accusing whom of what. But perhaps
thats the lesson of this whole tragic
episode: Its origins are murky, its
consequences unthinkable and, in the
end, it fades away.
We continue to be fascinated by
Salem and the frightening speed with
which gossip, petty grievances and
fear of the unknown enveloped entire
communities. Of course, that could
never happen again. By the way, did
you see the latest tweet about that viral
video? Christine M. Kreiser
APRIL 2014

69

Reviews

The Man Who Broke the Mollies

in the late 19th century,
Pennsylvania coal mines were a-boil
with intrigue and violence, thanks
largely to an Irish secret society called
the Molly Maguires. The way Beau
Riffenburgh tells it, they werent really
much like the heroic Robin Hoods
portrayed in Hollywood movies
or recent revisionist history. Bent
on controlling jobs and extorting
cash, this gang of murderous thugs

Railroad and took over mining in

Schuylkill County, and decided the
secret societys chokehold over the
region and its riches had to be broken.
So he turned for help to Allan
Pinkertons National Detective Agency,
which was foundering near bankruptcy
in the wake of the Civil War. Pinkerton
tapped James McParland, a native
Irishman with a quick tongue and quick
fsts, to infltrate the Molly Maguires

James McParland (right) infltrated the Molly Maguires in 1873 and lived as one of them for two
years. Violence was endemic in Pennsylvanias coalfelds, with the murder (left) of Welshman
Gomer James by Irishman Thomas Hurley just one example of the areas complicated loyalties.

terrorized union workers and mine

owners, themselves regularly at odds,
with near-equal ferocity. They were so
successful, in fact, that they managed
to drive most of the small mine owners
out of business and the union into
helpless irrelevancy.
Revisiting archives and
reintroducing historical context,
Riffenburgh unfolds a measured,
thought-provoking tale of minecentered mayhem. The Molly
Maguires, their extortion, numbers
and greed growing apace, provoked the
attention of Franklin Gowen, an exdistrict attorney turned wealthy lawyer.
Politically astute and ambitious,
Gowen became head of the Reading
70 AMERICAN HISTORY

and end their reign of terror. After

several months of risky undercover
workso stressful McParlands hair
fell out and his health suffered
permanent damagethe job was
indeed done: Key leaders were
arrested, most went to jail, and the
deadly societys power was smashed.
McParland became a hero, so famed
across America and elsewhere that
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle framed The
Valley of Fear, one of his best Sherlock
Holmes novellas, around the slightly
fctionalized adventures of McParland.
This part of McParlands saga is
fascinating. Faced with very limited
data from McParland himselfmany
of the Pinkerton records he wrote

Pinkertons Great Detective:

The Amazing Life and Times of
James McParland
by Beau Rifenburgh, Viking

or appeared in, for instance, were

destroyedRiffenburgh has unearthed
a trove of collateral information that
allows him to create a credible if fawed
human hero at the center of this dark
maelstrom. Responding to latter-day
charges that McParland exaggerated
or lied, Riffenburgh admits he
could sometimes stretch his yarns,
pointing out that leading a potentially
lethal double-agents life for as long
as McParland did is likely to bend
anyones sense of absolute truth. More
crucially, Riffenburghs painstaking
attention to the agents court testimony
over various trials demonstrates
that on the witness stand, at least,
McParland was usually very consistent.
Along the way, Riffenburgh
explains how the very different legal
parameters of that time put strange (to
us) limits on police and prosecutorial
powers. That, for example, is why the
Pinkertons were hired to take on what
we would see as a straightforward job
for offcial law enforcement agencies.
Since McParlands adventures were
less spectacular after his daredevil coal
mine work, the books latter sections
tail off somewhat in intensity. And the
authors need to defend the Pinkerton
mans achievements against the last
few decades of assault on his character
and glamorization of the Molly
Maguires is illuminating, but can
slow the pace at times. Nevertheless,
Pinkertons Great Detective delivers an
engrossing tale with rewarding insights
into a country coping with massive
economic and political changes. That
processand many of its resultsstill
echoes meaningfully today.
Gene Santoro

LEfT: ALLAN PINkERTON, the mollie maguires and the detectives (1880); RIgHT: LIbRARY Of CONgRESS

American Music
Divided & United: Songs of the American Civil War (ATO)

We Also Like
n Heir to the Empire City: New
York and the Making of Theodore
Roosevelt by Edward P. Kohn (Basic).
How a scion of the uppermost crust was
exposed to the Gilded Ages rampant
problems on the citys meanest streets,
and decided to take themand anyone
who tried to stop himon.
n Roy Wilkins: The Quiet
Revolutionary and the NAACP by
Yvonne Ryan (Kentucky). The frst bio
of a crucial, if now-overlooked, fgure.
Solid and thought-provoking.

CAll THIS TWO-CD SET Singing the Civil War. With fair and imagination, its
32 tracks span the gamut of tunes the boys in blue and gray and their loved ones
at home shared. Famous (Dixie, When Johnny Comes Marching Home) and
lesser known (Day of Liberty, Two Brothers), they embrace tales of leave-taking
and battle, victory and death, hope and despair, as well as spirituals and minstrel
and abolitionist songs. The musicians assembled likewise bridge generations and
regions: Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Ralph Stanley, Vince Gill, Cowboy Jack Clement,
Steve Earle, Jorma Kaukonen, Taj Mahal, Chris Hillman, T-Bone Burnett, Joe Henry,
Chris Thile and the Carolina Chocolate Drops are among the whos who roster
that revives and reshapes the sounds of the era. Diverse and rewarding, the set is
inspiring and sobering to listen toeven more so when you ponder the countrys
vicious divisions back then (and now) while soaking up its ecumenical, open-minded
and inventive programming. Gene Santoro

n To Raise Up a Nation: John Brown,

Frederick Douglass and the Making
of a Free Country by William S. King
(Westholme). Sweeping, well-written
history centers on catalysts Brown and
Douglass as it stretches from pre to
postCivil War eras.
A Union corporal
poses with his viola.
Camp music, wrote
poet John Reuben
Thomas, Subdued
the sternest Yankee
heart/Made light the
Rebels slumber.

n A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth

of Race From the Colonial Era to
Obamas America by Jacqueline
Jones (Basic). Tracing six lives spanning
American history, this MacArthur
Fellow argues that race has been the
smokescreen masking the real economic
and cultural divides among us.
n The Burglary: The Discovery of
J. Edgar Hoovers Secret FBI by Betty
Medsger (Knopf). In 1971, an unlikely
bunch led by a physics professor broke
into the FBI ofces at Media, Pa., and
released the fles they stole to the
media; that began the long overdue
process of reining in Hoovers shadowy,
unconstitutional activities. The frst
time the full story has been told, with
obvious echoes today.
n Our America: A Hispanic History
of the United States by Felipe
Fernndez-Armesto (Norton). Starts
with Spains colonies, instead of Virginia
and New England, and continues its
enlightening way from that perspective.

LILJENquIST FAMILy CoLLECTIoN, LIBRARy oF CoNGRESS

Kid Stuf
American Revolution Interactive Timeline
Touchzing Media, available at the App Store

WITH MORE THAN 500 pop-up

articles on people, places and events,
and visuals that include contemporary
paintings, illustrations, artifacts and
maps, this new iPad app ofers a
remarkably good overview of Americas
bloody birth. Its fexibility creates an
engaging, efective vehicle for making
history more approachable and vivid,
especially for tweens and teens.
Amid the essential and expected
the Boston Massacre, Patrick Henry,
George Washington, the Stamp Act

are surprise enrichmentsAdmiral

Lord Richard Howes attempt to talk
peace in fall 1776 on Staten Island
with John Adams and Ben Franklin
and overlooked fguresHessian
commander Wilhelm von Knyphausen.
In addition to all the data, perhaps the
most salient efect of this multimedia
approach is its subtlest: The apps user
absorbs a strong, almost subliminal
sense of how far-fung and diverse
the people, places and events of the
Revolution really were. Gene Santoro

APRIL 2014

71

Reviews

On DVD

Guitarist Doc Watson

and the Watson Family
open the Newport Folk
Festival in July 1963.

Jimi Hendrix:
Hear My Train A Comin
American Masters, 2 hours, PBS

JIMI HENDRIx died at 27, with only

four albums to his credit. but the
revolution he triggered in rock guitar
and rock musicduring his meteoric
career still resounds as if hed lived to
be 70, which he would be now. To feed
his ever-growing posthumous cult, the
last four decades have brought piles of
books, stacks of concert videos, endless
album reissues, mountains of bootlegs
and repeated visits to the vaults to pull
out unfnished recordings, often just
scraps, that have been overdubbed with
additional musicians or issued in raw
form. following dramatic changes in
leadership and direction at the Hendrix
estate, the biographical experts at
american masters have entered the
fray. Not surprisingly, they have done

a stellar job in going back over familiar

turf and fnding fresh nuances, even bits
of new material, and putting it all into
a well-designed, evocative package.
The live footage has never looked or
sounded better; some, like Hendrixs
1968 Miami Pop festival shows, has
never been seen. Home footage
shot by Hendrix and drummer Mitch
Mitchell adds bittersweet touches.
Theres the usual pop-culture quotient
of overstatement wrapping genuine
insights from the well-chosen talking
heads, and some sidestepping of
unpleasantness like Hendrixs spiking
drug use and managerial problems
before he died. but overall, Hear My
Train A Comin creates a real sense of
the shy, fragile, single-minded person
behind the famboyant musical genius.
Thanks to longtime Hendrix engineer
Eddie kramer, it also demonstrates
the guitarists farsighted use of rapidly
expanding studio possibilities for
composing and arranging. The DvD
package includes a bonus reengineered
CD of the Miami performances.
We want our sound to go into the soul
of the audience, said Hendrix, and see
if it can awaken some little thing.

72 AMERICAN HISTORY

Ballads Blues & Bluegrass

directed by Alan Lomax, 35 minutes
Making Ballads Blues & Bluegrass
directed by John Melville Bishop,
25 minutes
Media Generation

TWO FILMS ON ONE DVD ofer a

tantalizing glimpse inside the real 1961
New York folk scene fctionalized by
inside llewyn davis, the Coen brothers
recent movie smash. Alan Lomax,
with his pioneering father, John A.
Lomax, was arguably the premier feld
collector of American roots music
from the Depression era on. In 1961
he flmed a New York hootenanny and
interviewed participants, including the
infuential banjoist Roscoe Holcomb
(who personifed the high lonesome
sound bill Monroe transformed into
bluegrass), a young guitar-picking Doc
Watson (in his frst flmed appearance),
blues greats Willie Dixon and Memphis
Slim and folkies Ramblin Jack Elliot and
the New Lost City Ramblers. Incisive
as Lomaxs short is, bishops follow-up
adds historical depth, via interviews
with the Ramblers John Cohen.
gene santoro

TOP: AP; bOTTOM: COuRTESY Of MRPI/AuTHENTIC HENDRIx, LLC.

At the Museum
One Life: Martin Luther King Jr.
National Portrait Gallery,
Washington D.C., through June 1
www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhMLK.html

THIS ExHIBIT is just one room with

33 artifacts and photos, but its
compression paradoxically gives the
viewer a sense of the hurtling events
Dr. Martin Luther king Jr. shapedor
was shaped byduring his 39 years. A
panoramic photo of king at the 1963
March on Washington covers the

Make Room for the

Memories.
An adventure of historic proportion is waiting
for youat two living-history museums that
explore Americas beginnings. Board replicas
of colonial ships. Grind corn in a Powhatan
Indian village. Try on English armor inside a
palisaded fort. Then, join Continental Army
soldiers at their encampment
for a rsthand look at the
Revolutions end.
Dont forget your
camera. Because
the history here
is life size. And
your memories
will be even
bigger!

King (left) and Ralph Abernathy ride the

frst integrated bus in Montgomery, Ala.

doorway, reminding us that he

seemed larger than life, with hopeful
dreams for America. Inside, though,
we glimpse the struggles and setbacks
that made the man and forged the
leader, like the 1961 Albany Movement
in georgia, where he landed in jail
three times. Here king joined a
pre-existing coalition of radical-tomainstream black groups already
successfully organizing nonviolent
protests. The local sherif, unlike so
many of his peers, exercised restraint
and kept his men disciplined as they
swept protesters up in mass arrests.
The movement collapsed, but that fall,
segregation legally ended in Albany.
king, however, felt Albany was a
limited success because the
movement attacked desegregation
generally; he wanted specifc victories.
from that came his strategy of
focusing on desegregating lunch
counters and buses in birmingham
and Selma, where bloody responses
from local police fed growing national
horror and support for the civil rights
movement. gene santoro

NATIONAL PORTRAIT gALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITuTION

Save 20% with a combination ticket

to both museums.

Last Call

America, or the New World

Theodor de Brys lively engravings introduced the Old

World to the mysteries of the New World. In 1590 de Bry
reprinted Thomas Hariots A Briefe and True Report of the
New Found Land of Virginia and illustrated it with engravings
of paintings of native peoples by John White, governor of the
Roanoke Colony. It marked the beginning of Grand Voyages,
de Brys popular multivolume collection of maps and images
depicting European exploration in the Americas. This 1596
map, America sive novus orbis (America, or the New World), was
published in the sixth volume of Grand Voyages and was based
on a 1594 world map by Petrus Plancius. De Brys map was

74 AMERICAN HISTORY

the frst to include information recorded by White and Jacques

Le Moyne de Morgues, a member of the French expeditions
to Florida in the 1560s, in its depiction of the southeastern
Atlantic coast. But it is the stunning imagery that sets this map
apart. De Bry, a native of present-day Belgium, popularized
decorative map design, and here he pays tribute to some of the
greatest European explorers of the age, clockwise from top left:
Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Francisco Pizarro
and Ferdinand Magellan. The map is part of a rotating display,
New World, Old Maps, on exhibit at the American Museum
of Britain in Bath, England, through 2014.

COuRTESY Of THE AMERICAN MuSEuM IN bRITAIN

Photo credit: North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy.

How Jesus
became
the most
infuential
fgure of
all time!
Who he was
What he taught
Where he walked
How he became...

Jesus of History
Item: WHGJES
Print - $11.99 (includes S&H); Digital - $9.99

hether we believe he was the Son

of God or simply a sage country
rabbi, Jesusa Jewish carpenter from
Nazareth born some 2,000 years ago
became the most infuential single
individual in history.
In this special issue from Weider History,
scholars, historians and theologians trace
the life, times and teachings of Jesus,
and explore the history of this dynamic
personality and the lasting imprint he has
lef on humankind for the past 20 centuries.

Supplies
are limited.

Order
TOday!
available in bOTH prinT and digiTal!

1-800-358-6327 HistoryNet.com/Jesus-special
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Here, There and Everywhere

Now enjoy American History on your mobile devices

History is not static. In fact its bursting with action. Whats more, going back in time is a
gripping journey in itself. Now you can have it all at your fngertips, wherever you go.
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