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POSTSCRIPTS
GETTYSBURG, A LITTLE NOTE OF LONG REMEMBERING SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
War breeds long memories, some of them short on fact. We were reminded of this by the response to the late Bruce Catton’s “The Day the Civil War Ended” (June/July, 1978), his account of the 1913 reunion of Confederate and Union soldiers at the Gettysburg battlefield. Reader Warren F. Bietsch of Yardley, Pennsylvania, for example, wrote to remind us that there was yet another Gettysburg reunion, this one held in July, 1938, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the battle. Mr. Bietsch and his family attended, and, in contrast to the several thousand veterans who showed up for the 1913 reunion, he tells us, only eighteen hundred made it twenty-five years later. Among them was a dapper gremlin who identified himself as General Paul Sanguinetti, C.S.A., seen at left (top photograph) in front of his tent with the Bietsch daughters, Heather and Nancy. General Sanguinetti seems to have been alone in the conviction that he served at Gettysburg; his name appears in none of the references we checked. If the old gentleman was not just stretching memory a bit and did in fact take part, we would be delighted to hear about it.
Other readers objected to the close of the article, in which the old Union and Confederate veterans re-enacted Pickett’s charge (bottom left), then “fell upon each other—not in mortal combat, but re-united in brotherly love and affection.” They cited a bit of persistent folklore best described—and discounted—in Paul Angle’s Crossroads: 1913: “Years ago the author heard from an old newspaperman … that at this point several old Confederates in their exuberance jumped over the wall to embrace their former enemies. The Union response was instantaneous: ‘You sons-of-bitches, you didn’t get over here in ’63 and you ain’t coming over now!’ Fists flew, and only the presence of military police averted a riot. All my efforts to confirm the tale have failed, so I am forced to conclude that it is apocryphal. I wish it weren’t.”
So do we.
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CONCERNING THE LITERACY OF POLONIA
In W. S. Kuniczak’s “Polonia: The Face of Poland in America” (April/May, 1978), the implication was made that most Polish immigrants to this country in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were illiterate—certainly in English, and also in the several dialects of their native Poland. Colonel Francis C. Kajencki of El Paso, Texas, disputes the latter point. “They were mostly unskilled, true,” he writes. “But not illiterate. … A report of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service shows that, for the years 1899—1909, in which specific nationalities are identified, 65 per cent of the Poles were literate (based on a recorded total of 742,753 Polish immigrants, age 14 and over). The Polish literacy rate exceeded that of some other European groups, such as the Russians, Italians, Portuguese, and Yugoslavians. The relatively high Polish literacy rate is, indeed, a tribute to the peasants themselves, for they attained the educational basics under the most adverse conditions, when Poland lay torn among three partitioning powers that showed little concern for the well-being of a subjugated people.”
We agree—and stand corrected. The misimplication, we should say, came out of the adaptation of material in author Kuniczak’s recently published book, My Name Is Million: An Illustrated History of the Poles in America; the responsibility was ours, not his. It is interesting to note, too, that in his book Kuniczak points out that while there are perhaps fewer than five hundred thousand Polish-Americans today who are literate in the old language, they support three major daily and several weekly and biweekly Polish-language newspapers. Literacy in Polonia is not only a fact, it appears, but a tradition.
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MARK TWAIN AND THE HEARTBREAK OF STICKY FINGERS
Mark Twain, we noted in “Twain, the Patent Poet” (June/July, 1978), dabbled in the mysteries of invention from time to time, even going so far as to take out several patents. The only one of these that ever came to much was his self-pasting scrapbook, a gimmick patented in 1873, manufactured by the Slote & Woodman Company, and advertised as a sovereign remedy for the “usual and well-known annoyances of paste, mucilage, and sticky fingers, with all their accompanying evils.…” Twain himself was not above doing a little huckstering for the product, though a close reading of the “letter” in the advertising leaflet shown here will reveal that his sales pitch was at least as raucous as it was persuasive.
However light we, or even Twain, might make of his scrapbook, the fact was that it apparently worked, and worked well—as we are informed by Henrietta C. Failing of Portland, Oregon. She has in her possession, Miss Failing tells us, three scrapbooks used by her father in the 1870’s. Two of them are Twain’s model, and are clearly superior: “The third scrap book of his set was earlier,” she writes, “and the scraps were put on with glue; in some places the scraps are difficult to read, while there is no difficulty with Twain’s books. I think he would be pleased at that after one hundred years.”
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STRAIGHT BOOZ
Readers of Spencer Klaw’s “West Point: 1978” in our June/July, 1978, issue will remember the author’s discussion of turn-of-the-century hazing practices at the academy, particularly one instance in which a cadet “had died after drinking bottle after bottle of Tabasco sauce.…” Subscriber Daniel J. Cragg of Arlington, Virginia, took issue with the Tabasco allegation, declaring that he was “skeptical that any cadet, no matter how susceptible to intimidation by upperclassmen, could put down enough of the stuff to do himself permanent, even fatal, injury.” Mr. Cragg went on to identify the unfortunate cadet involved, one Oscar L. Booz, and pointed out that Booz had resigned from the academy in October, 1898, and had died, more than two years later, from tuberculosis. He also quoted the report of the testimony of West Point’s post surgeon during a subsequent congressional hearing, to the effect that the surgeon “did not believe it possible that an application … of that sauce would produce any ulceration of the throat, and … positively and emphatically stated that it would be impossible for the administering of this sauce to stand in any causative relation, direct or indirect, to the death of Cadet Booz.…” Finally, Mr. Cragg notes that in the investigation there was no mention of “bottle after bottle” of the sauce being forced down Booz’s throat.
When presented with Mr. Cragg’s evidence, author Klaw made the following reply: “I was, indeed, aware, from the source I used—Thomas J. Fleming’s West Point—that no connection had been established between the Tabasco drinking and the cadet’s subsequent death. My purpose in citing the incident was to illustrate the kind of hazing to which plèbes were subjected. … But I realize that the way I wrote the sentence might easily lead a reader to jump to the conclusion that it was the Tabasco sauce that had done poor Booz in. I must plead guilty, too, to authorship of the phrase ‘bottle after bottle.’ As I recall Fleming’s account… he said that Booz had been made to drink ‘large quantities’ of Tabasco sauce, and when I went out to the kitchen and looked at our bottle of the stuff I concluded that ‘large quantities’ would have to mean bottle after bottle.…
“I’m not sure that forcing cadets to swallow any amount of Tabasco sauce (except in a Bloody Mary) is likely to make better men or generals out of them, but that’s a different topic.…”
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WILL THE REAL GEORGE WASHINGTON PLEASE SIT DOWN?
The band of heroes on pages 32-33 is made up of George Washington—alone. Every one of these eighteenth-century European engravings was solemnly offered by its publisher as a true representation of the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. The artists either added their own whims to earlier portraits, or summoned what they took to be an imposing military type from imagination alone. Nevertheless, they all insisted that their products were accurate; the brooding Mediterranean figure at the top right of page 33, for instance, was published by C. Shepherd of London, who claimed it was “Drawn from life by Alexr Campbell, of Williamsburgh in Virginia.” Washington said he’d never heard of the man.
Though far from shy about posing, the general was a busy man, and often hard to get to. One resourceful artist named Joseph Wright, having failed to arrange a sitting, was forced to resort to a mild ploy; he inveigled a seat in the pew opposite Washington’s in St. Paul’s Church in New York and, working unobtrusively, produced the profile below, which served as a point of departure for several more fanciful European likenesses.
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