The National Archives in Washington, D.C., recently announced the establishment of the Center for the Documentary Study of the American Revolution, which will centralize all information on the pre-iySg records of the national government that are in the custody of the federal government. The center welcomes all inquiries pertaining to the Revolutionary period and hopes to be of material assistance to students of the era throughout the Bicentennial celebration and thereafter.
ALDERMEN IN CHAINS
Professor Laurence Senelick of Tufts University has solved the riddle of the menu: In answer to your query on the last page of the April, 1975, issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE, “aldermen in chains” was a culinary nickname for suckling pigs, roasted and festooned with garlands of pork sausages. It began as an ironic reference to the annual banquets of the Corporation of the City of London, when aldermen were supposed to gorge themselves silly on turtle soup and the roast beef of old England. There may be something patriotic in the American decision to adopt this gastronomic satire of the British magistracy, but in this particular case the association of municipal politics and overfeeding seems to have been naturalized in the New World.
A TALE OF A TUB
On December 28, 1917, there appeared in the New York Evening Mail an article entitled “A Neglected Anniversary.” It purported to be a history of the bathtub in America, but it was in fact made up from whole cloth by the formidable H. L. Mencken. Those who wish to check the particulars of Mencken’s fantasy can refer to page 102 of last February’s issue, where we ran it, having picked it up from the “Gilcrease Gazette.” A full score of readers caught us helping to keep Mencken’s durable hoax alive, among them Arthur P. Underbill of Massillon, Ohio, who wrote that we were “foxy enough to state at the end of this column that ‘any resemblance to actual fact is strictly incidental.’” We were not so much foxy as fortunate, for that authoritative little history has surfaced again and again, defying all attempts to quash it. After it began to catch on, Mencken said (somewhat disingenuously, one suspects, for he tended not to overestimate the perspicacity of the American public): “My motive was simply to have some harmless fun in war days. It never occurred to me that it would be taken seriously.” But it was. A decade after the article first appeared, Mencken wrote:
Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous “facts” in the writings of other men. They began to be used by chiropractors and other such quacks as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They began to be cited by medical men as proof of the progress of public hygiene. They got into learned journals. They were alluded to on the floor of Congress. They crossed the ocean, and were discussed solemnly in England and on the continent. Finally, I began to find them in standard works of reference.
In 1926, for instance, Fairfax Downey wrote a history of the bathtub drawing almost entirely on Mencken’s spurious facts, and five years later the story was seriously alluded to in the Baltimore Evening Sun, in whose offices Mencken had a desk. In the early iQSo’s Harry Truman told the tale to White House visitors, and at last it has filtered into our pages. We repudiate and deny the story, but that won’t do any good—it will be around forever.
MONUMENTAL GALL
When David Lander of New York City found himself some fifty miles southwest of Kalamazoo in the town of Buchanan, Michigan, he quite naturally asked his business associates there if there was anything worth seeing in Buchanan. There was indeed, and on a freezing winter morning he was taken out to the town’s cemetery to visit one of the most remarkable monuments in America.
When in 1870 Joseph Coveney, a respected citizen of the town, planned to erect a memorial monument, the Common Council of Buchanan granted him the best space in the cemetery. Rumors had it that the stone was going to cost three thousand dollars and would be one of the most beautiful monuments in southwestern Michigan, a source of considerable civic pride. Imagine, then, the general outrage and consternation when in 1874 the monument was unveiled to reveal graven on its surface what a local newspaper called “slanderous inscriptions… against Christianity.”
People were particularly baffled because the author of the violent atheistic sentiments on the stone had a great reputation for generosity and love of his fellow man. This sort of dichotomy is perhaps less puzzling today, but to the Christian citizenry of Buchanan in the 70’s it was completely inscrutable.
But Joseph Coveney had early in his life witnessed some of the grimmer effects of Christianity. He was born in County Cork in 1805, to a Catholic family that was forced by England to contribute one tenth of its total income to the Protestant Church. By the late 1820’s Coveney apparently had had a bellyful of Christians of both sects, and he set out for the United States. By the time he reached Michigan in 1833, he was a skilled carpenter, and he prospered. Whatever his religious feelings, he was able to reconcile himself to marrying a minister’s daughter, and the couple purchased property near Buchanan, where they spent the rest of their lives.
Coveney was a rich man and was paying half the expenses of the local school when his controversial monument appeared. On its east face was inscribed
Sunday Reading
Thirty-two thousand virgins given by command of the Bible God to an army of twelve thousand to debauch Numbers 31. A poor consolation to Mothers.
The offending monument was quickly defaced by indignant towns-people, who scribbled on it with red chalk, broke off small ornamental decorations, and spewed tobacco juice over the inscriptions. Bridling in particular at damage caused by a minister’s son, Coveney proclaimed: “I was raised in a Catholic country, but it remained for a Protestant Christian to try to refuse me the right to maintain this monument in a public cemetery.”
The town council attempted to smooth things over by denouncing the vandalism and calling attention to Coveney’s many good works, but the ripples spread as far as Chicago, where the influential Daily Times deplored the inscriptions and their author.
But in time the furor died away; and when in 1897 Coveney went to rest beneath his curious tombstone, the local obituary was calm enough, mentioning the stone and adding that Coveney ”… was a follower of Paine. Mr. Coveney left one of the largest estates in Berrien County.”
A group of freethinkers made a yearly pilgrimage from Chicago to view the stone up until the igSo’s, but they are gone now, and Coveney’s radical sentiments have been largely obliterated by time and the elements.
SLINGS AND JEERS
David K. Engen of Salem, Oregon, a supremely knowledgeable reader who, we suspect, would be perfectly at home discussing fine points of rigging with John Paul Jones himself, has come upon some errors in Don Troiani’s drawing of the fight between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard that appeared in our October, 1974, issue: The very spirited painting of the battle deserves praise for the skill with which the fury of a close-range naval action is illustrated and critical comment for the technical deficiencies. A few of the more obvious errors in the maintop and rigging are:
The deadeyes in the topmast shrouds are upside down.
The head of the lower mast should be square in plan.
There are no main-yard slings or jeers in evidence.
The mizzen topmast stay should pass through a block just abaft the mast.
The starboard main-yard lift is improperly led.
The topmast shrouds should be secured to the deadeyes with throat seizings and round seizings above.
To securely set up and stay the masts, hold and control the yards, and handle the sail of an eighteenth-century ship required a mass of rigging that, however like a cobweb it appeared to the uninitiated, was very logical in its position and use. Since much of this rigging passed through or near or was belayed in the top, it can readily be understood that the fighting top contained many more blocks, lines, cleats, battens, eyebolts, etc., than shown.
LEST WE FORGET
The Bicentennial Commission of Warren, Rhode Island, in order to honor the sons of Warren who served in the Revolution, has painted all the fire hydrants in the old section of town to look like Continental soldiers.
J. JOSEPHS, HOUSE, SIGN, & FANCY PAINTER
For those who might have thought us guilty of exaggeration when we said that the gaudy frontispiece of our February, 1975, issue was a pretty accurate representation of Joseph Josephs’ sign shop, here is a photograph of that remarkable edifice.
WHAT DID LENIN SAY?
In the Editor’s Letter for October, 1974, describing the inflation of the language, we quoted two remarks supposedly once made by Lenin as ways of bringing down the capitalist world. One was “Debauch their currency,” and the other was “Confuse their vocabulary.” We had both quotes from secondary sources, and upon being challenged by M. K. Stone of Philadelphia and Professor Albert Resis of Northern Illinois University, we are embarrassed to say that we cannot trace them to Lenin’s works, although we have not the means of making an extensive search. Mr. Stone was kind enough to point out that the supposed quote about debauching the currency may have come from John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he merely states that “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way …” We apologize for not having checked these apocryphal quotes more carefully, but they did not play a very important role in the article concerned.
CONGRESS
Claiming historical firsts is sometimes a risky business, as we were reminded by a reader’s letter not long ago. Allan L. Damon had written that Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was the first woman to be elected to the Senate in her own right ("Congress,” October, 1974). Edward P. Kelly of Glens Falls, New York, suggests that the honor properly belongs to Hattie Wyatt Caraway, an Arkansas Democrat, who was appointed to the Senate in November, 1981, as a replacement for her late husband, Thaddeus. Mrs. Caraway subsequently won a special election in January, 1932, and the regular election nine months later. She was re-elected in 1938 and served in the Senate until iQ45, when her seat was taken by William J. Fulbright. Mrs. Smith, however, remains the first—and thus far the only—woman to have served in both the House and the Senate.
Clement F. Trainer, of Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, has pointed out another misstatement in the article. Mr. Trainer writes:
Under the subtitle “Exclusion, Censure, and Expulsion” Mr. Damon makes the statement that “the Senate has excluded only one individual, Pinckney B.S. Pinchback. … After three years of delay and debate the Senate refused to accept his credentials.” I can cite at least one other situation, curiously involving an identical span of time, in which the Senate took similar action.
William S. Vare of Philadelphia, a Republican member of the House for fifteen years, won a contested primary election for United States senator from Pennsylvania early in 1926. Shortly thereafter a special committee of the Senate began a probe of the election as a result of charges of fraud and excessive expenditures. In November of” the same year Vare won the general election, and his opponent filed charges of fraud. When Vare presented his credentials, he was, in his words, “stopped at the threshold of the chamber as though 1 were some common thief. …”
The issue was resolved on December 6, 1929, after Vare, a broken man, was allowed to appear on the floor ot the Senate and personally plead his case. He was denied his seat on the grounds of allegedly excessive expenditures in the primary election, although acquitted of the charges of fraud in the general election.
In the same article we gave Alaska’s date of admission to the Union as 1960; it was in fact 1959.
