…Most of us live our threadbare lives in places where nothing much happened,” begins a press release for a Massachusetts organization called Heritage Commons Realty Trust.”… Now along comes Virginia Long Martin with an offer to sell to anyone who has the modest purchase price of $7.76 one square inch of what is about as close to a historic landmark as you can get outside of Independence Hall.”
Ms. Martin is selling a mite of ground in Lexington, hard by the road where the minutemen fired on the British during the eventful afternoon of April 19, 1775.
The purchasers get a gold-sealed, hand-lettered deed conveying beneficial interest to their new land and a parcel number identifying their particular inch. “Beneficial interest” means that the owner is not permitted to build on his plot.
Those who feel that their threadbare lives would not be significantly improved by owning an inch of ground near a country road might consider taking part in a project of immensely larger scope.
An author and patriot named Frederick Goss Carrier, who feels that America has never erected a suitable monument to itself, has formed a nonprofit corporation called Bald Eagle Command. Carrier is proposing a bird sanctuary at least twenty square miles in diameter—the site has yet to be determined—in the middle of which will be a thirty-five-thousand-seat convention center. Atop the center, rising hundreds of feet into the air, will be a monumental statue of a bald eagle with a wingspan of 1,200 feet. (By way of comparison, the world’s tallest statue—a figure called Motherland, on a hill outside of Volgograd in Russia—rises to a mere 270 feet.)
Carrier proposes to do the whole job with volunteer efforts and contributions and hopes to dedicate the monument in 1982, the two hundredth anniversary of Congress’choosing the eagle as our national symbol. So far a New York industrialist has offered Carrier an island in Long Island Sound, but he feels that it is too small for his purposes. His sketch of the proposed convention center appears above.
THE STATE OF MONTANA VS. AMERICAN HISTORY
Last year Jim Burk, supervisor of secondary education in Montana, proposed that American history be made an elective rather than a required course in the state public schools. This, he said, would give students and guidance counselors greater flexibility.
Burke’s proposal attracted more notice than any other revision of standards suggested in recent years.
Among those who bridled at the idea was K. Ross Toole, professor of history at the University of Montana. In a letter to the “Montana Post,” the newsletter of the Montana Historical Society, he said:
While France, Germany, and England are requiring the teaching of American history, we are apparently thinking of dropping it. We are in the process of producing a whole generation of functional illiterates. … It is true that American history is very often ineptly taught in our high schools. The solution, however, is not to drop history, but to teach more of it and to teach it better.
The State Board of Education went along with Toole and, at a meeting last March, voted to retain American history as a required course.
SLAVE ART
David Driskell, an authority on black American art, has long been convinced that the celebrated wroughtiron balconies in New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina, were the work of anonymous slaves who had carried the ancient skills of West African metalworkers across the Atlantic with them.
Recently Driskell was delighted to find living proof of his thesis when he met Philip Simmons, a seventy-year-old black ironworker whose ties go back to the era when the balconies were first wrought.
At the age of eight Simmons was apprenticed to a ninety-year-old man who, in turn, had learned his trade from one of the mid-nineteenth-century slave artisans. Simmons grew up to work the old craft in the old way. At right he stands with one of his elaborate creations, the gate in front of a church on Wentworth Street in Charleston.
Examples of Simmons’ work are now on display in a large exhibition sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Philip Morris, Inc., entitled “Two Centuries of Black American Art.” The first major historical survey of the black contribution to American art, the show opened last month in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will subsequently travel to Atlanta and Brooklyn, New York.
YOU CAN FOOL SOME OF THE PEOPLE …
On Lincoln’s Birthday this year Tiffany & Co., the fastidious New York jewelry store, ran an advertisement in the equally fastidious New York Times under the heading “Abraham Lincoln said more than 100 years ago.” There followed ten quotes that presumably Tiffany thought would appeal to its clientele. Among them were “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich,” “You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer,” and “You cannot really help men by having the government tax them to do for them what they can and should do for themselves.”
When the ad appeared, a number of people complained that the quotes sounded like nothing Lincoln had ever said. And they were right. A few days later Tiffany’s ran a short statement admitting that “President Lincoln did not pen these words” and apologizing for the mistake.
But where did the quotes come from? In fact, they have been around for years, having originated in the epigrammatic mind of one William J. H. Boetcker, a former Brooklyn clergyman who abandoned the pulpit in favor of delivering lectures on industrial relations. In 1916 he published a booklet called “Inside Maxims” that contained a series of “gold nuggets.” These nuggets, an early form of the “Lincoln quotes,” were refined in subsequent pamphlets. In 1942 they turned up, along with some authentic Lincoln statements, in a leaflet distributed by the Committee for Constitutional Government, a conservative Washington lobby backed by the newspaper publisher Frank Gannett.
Seven years later Congresswoman Frances P. Bolton of Ohio, attempting to invoke Lincoln as an opponent of the welfare state, read Boetcker’s maxims—now firmly attributed to Lincoln—into the Congressional Record. Look magazine, delighted by the quotes, promptly ran them across a full page, along with a portrait of Lincoln and the stern exhortation that “it’s about time for the country to remember . .”
A cry of protest was raised that time, too, but we can see that these false Lincolnisms are with us yet. Of course, Lincoln is the object of many tenacious misattributions (for instance, he never said “I don’t know who my grandfather was, and I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be”), but few of them serve his memory so poorly as those spurious musings on the prerogatives of wealth.
Here, to set things straight, are some things he really did say about wage earners and wage payers:
I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to, where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you pay them or not! I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. …
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN SAID MORETHAN 100 YEARS AGO;
1. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
3. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
4. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
5. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
6. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
7. You cannot further brotherhood of men by inciting class hatred.
8. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
9. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative.
10. You cannot really help men by having the government tax them to do for them what they can and should do for themselves.
TIFFANY & CO.
FIFTH AVENUE & 57TH STREET NEW YORK
BERTHA NEVER LOOKED BACK
A lively Victorian love story has emerged around an infant that we once erroneously described as General Custer’s child. Last February we published a letter from the western historian Robert M. Utley, who, speaking of a photograph that ran in the June, 1970, issue, said that the people shown on a porch in Fort Leavenworth were not Custer and his wife—as we had claimed —but rather the Indian fighter Albert Barnitz, his wife, Jenny, and their daughter Bertha.
This revelation prompted Betty Byrne, the Marquesa de Zahara, to write us from her home in Ireland:
I have just received a copy of your publication, which contains a picture of my grandparents Albert and Jenny Barnitz holding their baby daughter Bertha, who is my mother.
I do think that the house in the picture must previously have been Custer’s headquarters, because when Custer was court-martialed, my grandmother Jenny wrote to her mother that she had got the Custer quarters and had three cleaning women, as “Mrs. Custer did not leave the quarters as clean as she might.”
As for baby Bertha, Leavenworth was to play a very large role in her life. Bertha grew into a handsome young woman. One day, while she was traveling on a Hudson River Day Line steamer, she caught the eye of C. A. White, who promptly dedicated to her a song called “Marguerite” that he had just written, and followed up by making her his fiancée. The entire Barnitz tribe, complete with a parrot in a cage, set forth to Europe to buy a trousseau.
Representatives from White’s publishing house—for he also published music—came to the sailing and brought the bride-to-be a bouquet of marguerites and a gold bracelet with a large heart on it containing Mr. White’s picture, and the ship’s band played “Marguerite.” It was an immensely popular song and sold two million copies, or so it says on the sheet music. It is a wistful ditty, rather unfortunately prophetic as it says: “But O, the time is coming Marguerite, when you’ll forget us all.”
No one seemed to hurry, as they took months getting the trousseau—not that it was so large. In the meantime the bridegroom was busy. He built a house for his bride, with white wallpaper adorned with gold bars of the music of “Marguerite” in her bedroom. A portrait of the prospective Mrs. White in black velvet with diamonds in her ears hung on the drawing-room mantel.
But when Bertha came home, she carried on the tradition of Leavenworth girls returning to the spawning field like salmon, and went back out west for one last visit before her marriage. One of the girls at the post persuaded a reluctant Bertha to come out to the hop on Saturday. “I’ll send Ben Byrne to fetch you,” she said. That did it. Bernard Byrne was a handsome young infantry lieutenant, and Bertha decided to marry him instead.
Ben—my father—felt she was an unusual young lady for a reason I have never heard before or since: she knew the names of all the trees they passed en route to the dance, and he was overcome.
The family kicked up a row about switching bridegrooms in midstream, but finally my grandfather said, “Damned little fool! Let her marry as she pleases!” My grandmother was elected to return the jewels to White, but Mother always claimed that a ruby ring was “forgotten” in the excitement. It clasps my pearls.
I regret to say that Mr. White cut the black velvet portrait out of the frame, burned it, and died of an overdose of morphine forthwith.
Bertha never looked back. Ten years later she and my father were still writing each other letters like a pair of romantic teen-agers.
For the fun of it, I have included a picture of Bertha in her Worth dress, in which she opened the Washington Birthday Ball at the Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine on her honeymoon, and one of her leaning on a cannon in Leavenworth.
Mother had a curious moonlight quality, very pale gold hair, dark blue eyes, and no other coloring. Very slim, alas, in an age when Lillian Russell was the toast of America. She upholstered herself to bulge in the right spots.
Mother raised me to marry into the Army, of course. Told me how to get on with the colonel’s wife, etc. I was a great disappointment, but at least my brother Colonel Bernard Albert Byrne (Infantry) saved the family face.
