POSTSCRIPTS TO HISTORY

REWARDS FOR SERVICE

In a tribute to one of the men who made the Bicentennial possible, last fall the House and Senate passed, and the President signed into law, a bill posthumously promoting George Washington to the rank of six-star General of the Armies. During his life, Washington had to make do as best he could with the three-star rank of Lieutenant General. The bill, which was sponsored by Representative Mario Biaggi, a New York Democrat, was intended to make Washington stand above “all other grades of the Army, past and present.”

There is, however, some question that it really does. The supreme rank of General of the Armies was established by Congress in 1799 and, while it was doubtless intended to be bestowed on Washington, he died that same year and there is no record that the appointment was actually made. The rank ceased to exist when it was not mentioned in the Act of 16 March, 1802, which formed the peacetime military establishment. But in 1919 Congress revived the grade for General John Pershing. So, it would seem that, despite the recent bill, Washington has to share his lofty rank.

But whether or not the gesture redressed an old oversight, it stirred up some dissent. The most acerbic comments came from Lucien N. Nedzi, a Democratic Representative from Michigan, who felt that Washington’s place in our history was already pretty secure. Nedzi compared the congressional tribute to “a house painter touching up the works of Michaelangelo,” and went on to tell the House that “It’s like having the Pope offer to make Christ a cardinal.”

FERD v. FRED

We recently received a letter from Michael Rosen, a long-time Colorado resident, who took issue with our spelling of Alfred Packer’s first name in a caption on page 87 of our October, 1976, issue. Packer, of course, was the man accused of having killed and eaten major portions of five companions while snow-trapped on a hunting expedition on the shores of Lake San Cristobal in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains during the winter of 1873-74. “Regarding your caption for Jackson’s Lake San Cristobal photo,” Mr. Rosen writes, “local folklore insists that Mr. Packer’s first name is too often mis-spelled, as it is in reality Alferd, not Alfred. I am a Boulder, Colorado, resident, and a University of Colorado graduate, and have eaten many a Packerburger in the Alferd A. Packer Memorial Grill,” Mr. Rosen concludes.

We called the State Historical Society of Colorado and were mortified to learn that local usage does indeed insist that Alferd is the correct spelling. “Packer,” the Society reports, “always wrote his name that way. He may have mis-spelled it himself, of course, but purists maintain that since he did spell it that way, so should everyone else.”

A further enlightening development: We had at first thought that Mr. Rosen’s reference to Packer-burgers and the Alferd A. Packer Memorial Grill was merely a witticism. Not so. As it turns out, there is in fact an Alferd A. Packer Memorial Grill and it does in fact serve something called a Packerburger. It is a snack shop on the campus of the University of Colorado. It was dedicated in 1968 with all appropriate ceremony and the accompanying strains of a jazz band. Who says the younger generation has no sense of history?

HOPPING MAD

Our vision was obscured by flying fur when we ran a photograph in last October’s Readers’ Album which purported to show jack rabbits fleeing a dust storm down the main street of a Kansas town. Among our readers who pulled the fur away was Thomas P. Elliott, president of the Barnes County Historical Society in North Dakota, who wrote us:

“Your picture has been doctored by taking part of a photo of a rabbit hunt, and cropping it to fit on the photo of a Kansas main street in the 1930’s. A close look reveals the croppingjob and the fact that the shadows of the rabbits are on the left side, while the shadows of the men to the left of the picture fall to the right. Also, the buildings on the right side of the street do not cast a left shadow, as one could reasonably expect.” Warren Johnson, who had sent us the photograph, explained that this particular picture was very much like one he had taken in the thirties, and that the two had become mixed up in his files: “Since I have moved several times over the years,” he wrote, “I probably threw away all the old pictures and negatives. Forty years is a long time back and they all fade in time. But as you know, we can all make mistakes.”

Amen.

WHAT HAS BROAD STRIPES, BRIGHT STARS, AND FLIES?

Carol M. Heyne, public relations coordinator for New Idea Farm Equipment Company of Coldwater, Ohio, feels we did the organization an injustice when, in last August’s issue, we mentioned that it was manufacturing red, white, and blue manure spreaders for the Bicentennial.

“This is not a fact!” says Mrs. Heyne. “We never retailed, nor made available for retail, red, white and blue spreaders.

“However, earlier this year, one of our Model No. 224, 10-ton manure spreaders was hand-painted with red, white and blue stars and stripes and trimmed with golden eagle decals. This spreader was displayed, along with a banner reading, ‘Proud to be a part of America’s Agricultural Heritage,’ at several fairs and farm shows this year.

“The decision that a spreader would be painted patriotic red, white, and blue, was made largely because our founder, Joseph Oppenheim, was the inventor of the manure spreader, which dates back to 1899.

“In any case, I’m certain that agriculture-oriented people from throughout the United States delighted in seeing our Bicentennial Spreader and enjoyed it as a tribute to America’s 2ooth birthday.”

Above is the spreader in the dawn’s early light.

THE BOYS IN THE BOAT

Remember in “Captain Blood” how the pirate Errol Flynn ended up with Olivia de Haviland? Well, forget it. According to B. R. Burg, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, Captain Blood and his colleagues would not have been interested in Olivia de Haviland, or any other woman for that matter. In a paper delivered before the Organization of American Historians, Professor Burg concluded that the Caribbean pirates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were homosexuals. (As for Errol Flynn, that’s another story.)

Although he admits that there are no detailed accounts of pirates’ sexual lives, Burg says that “fo’c’sle humor abounds with tales of below-deck encounters where salty bo’s’uns initiate tender cabin boys into the arcana of the sea, and even among the driest landlubbers there are few who ever assumed that tedious months aboard ship were whiled away only by carving scrimshaw and singing chanties.”

But the womanless shipboard life was only part of the reason. Another inducement was the structure of society in the English settlements of the West Indies, where the few white women went to planters and merchants, and heterosexuality among indentured servants was discouraged because it distracted the women from their duties.

Basing his findings on “situational analysis,” Burg states that the pirates did not adopt effeminate mannerisms, since such “were the distinguishing mark of the hated Spaniards who exemplified the unpirately characteristics of cowardice and passivity.” The professor, whose specialty is sexuality in Restoration England, is currently writing a book on the subject. We’re looking forward to situational analyses that he might prepare on other social groups: the Allied armies on the Western Front, monastic orders, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.

STAR-CROSSED

George Washington had his Martha, John Adams his Abigail, and when most people think of James Madison, it is the famous Dolley who usually comes to mind. But there had been another woman in Madison’s life long before he met the widow Dolley Payne. Her name was Catherine Floyd, daughter of Colonel William Floyd of New York, and she broke Madison’s heart.

In 1783, while he was in Philadelphia serving as a member of the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress, Madison fell in love with Miss Kitty. He was at the time thirty-two, and Kitty only sixteen, but this seemed to be no obstacle to their courtship. In April of that year, Madison wrote to his good friend Thomas Jefferson, “Since your departure the affair has been pursued. Most preliminary arrangements although definitive will be postponed until the end of the year in Congress.” Anticipating their forthcoming nuptials, the couple exchanged miniature portraits of themselves painted by Charles Willson Peale, and when the Floyds left Philadelphia to return to New York, Madison accompanied them as far as New Brunswick.

Madison returned to Philadelphia assured of Miss Floyd’s affection, but not long afterward received a letter from her abruptly breaking the engagement and returning his miniature. She had spurned the shy, solemn Virginian for a nineteen-year-old medical student at the College of Philadelphia, William Clarkson, whom she married in 1785.

Madison was miserable at the time and wrote to Jefferson about his “disappointment.” Jefferson returned a consoling letter, reminding Madison that “the world still presents the same and many other resources of happiness.” Despite Jefferson’s sage advice, it took Madison eleven years to recover from his blighted romance. He was forty-three when he married Dolley Payne; nevertheless, he enjoyed forty-two years of happiness with her.

Though Madison and Kitty Floyd went their separate ways, the Charles Willson Peale miniatures of them have been reunited in a special display at the Library of Congress.