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POSTSCRIPTS
POLITICAL PUFFERY
In “The Story-Telling Cigar” (December, 1978) we noted that cigar-box labels and brand names of the nineteenth century mirrored the optimism of the time.
Tony Hyman, a reader and collector of cigar memorabilia, writes from Watkins Glen, New York, to remind us that the stogie also served for a time as an unlikely predecessor to the political polls of George Gallup: “The idea of stepping up to a cigar counter, plunking down a quarter, and asking for ‘four Jimmy Carters and a Ronald Reagan’ seems a little strange to us today. But that’s exactly what many of our forefathers did. To be sure, the names were different. ‘I’ll have five Chester Arthurs,’ ‘Two Harrisons, please,’ or ‘Gimme a Garfield’ would have been more likely. When they made such requests, cigar smokers were taking part in an early straw poll popular between 1880 and 1920. Tobacconists, saloons, barbershops, drugstores, restaurants—any place men congregated was likely to take part. As election time neared, cigar counters blossomed with boxes depicting the rival candidates. Presumably, the candidate who sold the most cigars would get the most votes. As each box was sold out, the bartender or clerk would dutifully chalk up another mark on the slate behind the bar or counter. The cigars were usually wellknown local five- and ten-cent brands, renamed and relabeled especially for the election.”
Seen here, from Mr. Hyman’s collection, are a couple of cigar boxes from the 1888 contest between Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison; both are empty, which suggests the closeness of an election in which Cleveland got the popular vote but lost in the electoral college.
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ALLEGHANIA, ALLEGHANIA, GOD SHED HIS GRACE ON THEE …
Washington Irving was not a man given to idle intellectual speculation. But he was a patriotic man, and as Stephen W. Sears, a frequent contributor to AMERICAN HERITAGE, learned while doing some research in Tarrytown, New York, love of country once inspired in Irving an extremely odd notion, which he sent off to the editor of Knickerbocker Magazine under the pseudonym of “Geoffrey Crayon.” The magazine published it in its August, 1839, issue:
“We want a national name. We want it poetically, and we want it politically. With the poetical necessity of the case I shall not trouble myself. I leave it to our poets to tell how they manage to steer that collocation of words, ‘The United States of North America,’ down the swelling tide of song, and to float the whole raft out upon the sea of heroic poesy. I am now speaking of the mere purposes of common life. How is a citizen of this republic to designate himself? As an American? There are two Americas, each subdivided into various empires, rapidly rising in importance. As a citizen of the United States? It is a clumsy, lumbering title, yet still it is not distinctive; for we have now the United States of Central America; and heaven knows how many ‘United States’ may spring up under the Proteus changes of Spanish America. …
“I want an appellation that shall tell at once, and in a way not to be mistaken, that I belong to this very portion of America, geographical and political, to which it is my pride and happiness to belong; that I am of the Anglo-Saxon race which founded this Anglo-Saxon empire in the wilderness. …
“We have it in our power to furnish ourselves with such a national appellation, from one of the grand and eternal features of our country; from that noble chain of mountains which formed its back-bone, and ran through the ‘old confederacy,’ when it first declared our national independence. I allude to the Appalachian or Alleghany mountains. We might do this without any very inconvenient change in our present titles. We might still use the phrase, ‘The United States,’ substituting Appalachia or Alleghania, (I should prefer the latter), in place of America. The title of Appalachian, or Alleghanian, would still announce us as Americans, but would specify us as citizens of the Great Republic. Even our cold national cypher of U.S.A. might remain unaltered, designating the United States of Alleghania.
“These are crude ideas, Mr. Editor, hastily thrown out.…”
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A SOLDIER’S FRIEND
Our article “The Sinister Corps of William O. Bourne” (June/July, 1979) told the story of The Soldier’s Friend and the penmanship contests which that newspaper held for Civil War veterans who had lost their right arms in battle. Harper’s Weekly has provided a footnote. William Jewett, a Harper’s artist, spotted General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife on board the New York & Jersey City ferry in 1867. As usual, they were traveling incognito. Keeping his silence, Jewett quietly sketched the above tableau and added a few words about it: “While General Grant remained in the cabin of the boat,” Jewett wrote, “he was approached by one of those disabled veterans … selling the newspaper known as The Soldier’s Friend. The General drew from his pocket a $5 greenback and quietly handed it to the astonished soldier. The latter was in doubt what to do until the General, with a nod, dismissed him. As he turned away, the soldier … recognized his old leader, and would have spoken; but a glance from the General silenced him and he bowed and passed on.” |
A GENERAL ROUT
In the February/March, 1979, “Postscripts,” we questioned whether General Paul Sanguinetti actually had served at the battle of Gettysburg. Now we learn from reader Daniel T. McCaIl, Jr., of Mobile, Alabama, and Milo B. Howard, Jr., director of the Alabama Archives in Montgomery, that he did indeed. Sanguinetti, it seems, was a Corsican who came to this country in 1859, enlisted as a drummer boy in the 19th Virginia Infantry in 1862, became a private in 1863, charged with Pickett at Gettysburg, was taken prisoner by Union forces during the evacuation of Richmond, and was paroled at war’s end. He then served in the Alabama state militia for two decades, and in the last years of his life was the watchman at the State Capitol in Montgomery. He was even a general—of sorts—for that was his rank in the United Confederate Veterans, an unofficial gathering of former Rebel troops. We stand corrected—in fact, driven from the field.
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PRESIDENTIAL MEASURES
This country is headed toward the adoption of the international metric system of weights and measures, as we are reminded when we are informed by interstate highway signs that, for example, it is fifty miles or eighty kilometers to New Haven. This has been a long time coming. James Madison, writing to his friend James Monroe in 1785, observed that “next to the inconvenience of speaking different languages is that of using different and arbitrary weights and measures,” and urged that the United States lead the way in establishing “universal standards in these matters among nations.”
Among our early Presidents, Jefferson too was keenly interested in a rational system of measurement. Having spent five years (from 1784 to 1789) in France, he was well aware of proposals from various Continental savants that a standard unit of length be set up on the basis of some terrestrial distance, and that all other measures of size, volume, and weight be derived from the standard unit, using the decimal sytem for ease of calculation. Decimal coinage, with all amounts of money expressed in percentages or multiples of the dollar, was approved by Congress in 1787, making America the first country to adopt this reasonable system. The customary fondness for miles, yards, feet, inches, pounds, ounces, quarts, and (perhaps especially) pints, however, was too strong in America to allow further rationalization, and Jefferson’s proposals for a metric system of measurement made little headway. But in France, where a violent revolution had cleared the way for radical innovations, the French National Assembly in 1799 gave official sanction to the metric system, organized essentially as we know it today.
Most differences of opinion about how the new system should be arrived at had to do with the definition of the basic unit of measurement, the meter. A favorite approach was to use the length of a pendulum swinging once a second. The trouble with that was that the length varied slightly with latitude—and the French naturally wanted to use a pendulum in France, the British in England, and the Americans in America. In the end the French, borrowing an idea from the Italians, decreed that the meter should be equal to one forty-millionth of the length of a terrestrial meridian—that is, the distance on the earth’s surface from pole to pole. The most sophisticated astronomical and mathematical methods then known were used in taking this measurement, and a splendid platinum rod of precisely the right length was then made and placed under close guard in France. (It turned out, possibly to the disgruntlement of the British, to be 3.37 inches longer than a yard.) The basic unit having been determined, it was an easy matter to apply the decimal system and derive the kilometer, centimeter, liter (a cube with sides one-tenth of a meter), kilogram (the weight of a liter of water), and so forth.
More refined methods of measurement in the 1880’s revealed that the venerable platinum bar was about two hundredths of one per cent too short, in terms of the true length of a meridian, and a new standard was made, this time of a platinum-iridium alloy. Not yet entirely satisfied, the international scientific community decided in 1960 that the meter is exactly 1,650,763.73 vacuum wavelengths of the orange radiation which is emitted under specified conditions by the krypton atom of mass 86.
The British, who rather doggedly stuck to the yard-foot-inch system for many years, became alarmed in the mid-twentieth century when it was discovered that the bronze bar for the imperial standard yard was steadily contracting at a rate of about one and a half millionths of an inch per annum; so the yard was legally redefined, in 1963, as equal to 0.9144 of a meter. The U.S. National Bureau of Standards, catching the Zeitgeist, officially adopted the metric system for scientific measurements in 1964.
All of this metric trend would have pleased our third, fourth, and fifth Presidents immensely; it is less certain that it would have been looked upon with favor by our first, although he stood a majestic 193.04 centimeters tall.
Most of the above was sent to us by Marcello Maestro, of New Rochelle, New York, who has done much research into these mysteries.
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