During an age in which nearly everyone has a horror story to tell regarding mail service, it is refreshing to look hack upon the problems, and solutions, of an earlier time—namely, the summer of 1896, when Eugene V. Debs ordered workers of his American Railway Union off the job. Ron Genini tells the story:
“Although Debs had warned his followers not to interfere with the U.S. Mails, a few mail trains were inevitably delayed—among them the Southern Pacific s run between California s San Joaquin Valley and San Francisco. On July 6, Arthur Banta of Fresrio proposed an eighteen-hour mail-delivery service to the Bay Area via bicycle. The route, in eight relays, left Fresno and went west 11 miles to Kerman before turning north to the town of Firebaugh, a 28-mile run; it continued 31 miles northwest to Los Banos, then 10 miles due west to Pacheco Pass, 14 miles over the mountains to Bell’s Station, 25 miles north to Madrone, 33 miles to Menlo Park, and the final 29 miles into San Francisco.
“The Postal authorities in Fresno had no objection. In fact, they issued a special green stamp, printed from a single die in sheets of six. Today, that stamp is worth sixty-five dollars in the world of philately. This would be small comfort to Banta. During the twelveday strike period, he carried 380 letters to San Francisco at twenty-five cents an item—and lost $25.30 on the venture.”
MAIL SCRAWL
General John J. Pershing, commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, took the matter of censorship seriously. “It was impressed upon our forces,” he wrote in his memoirs of the war, “that every person who, either willfully or inadvertently, disclosed facts of military value thus gave the enemy an advantage, and … might actually be responsible for the unnecessary sacrifice of his own comrades.”
The degree of Pershing’s concern was recently brought to our attention by reader Donald B. Robinson of St. Petersburg, Florida. After reading Elton Mackin’s ”… Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die” (February/March, 1980), an account of the battle for Belleau Wood, Mr. Robinson was moved to pass along a postcard sent by his brother-in-law during the war “from somewhere in France.” The postcard, which was standard issue for the Allied Forces, is shown here—a masterpiece of tight-lipped communication in which the soldier had only to cross out what he didn’t want to say. “Not much information,” Mr. Robinson notes, “but very welcome.”
A FORD IN THE PAST
Walter Karp noted in our December, 1980, issue, that Henry Ford’s astonishing effort to re-create the American past in Greenfield Village, Michigan, was emblematic of a paradox that still haunts us: “It is nothing less than the grand contradiction of modern American life, the San Andreas Fault in the American soul—the schism between our faith in technological progress and our gnawing suspicion that the old rural republic was a finer, braver, and freer place than the industrial America that now sustains us. If that contradiction runs through Henry Ford’s titanic reconstruction … it is because no American ever experienced the contradiction more intensely than Henry Ford himself.”
Greenfield Village, then, is a monument to paradox—and a successful one. But it was not Henry Ford’s only attempt to tinker with the past, and in this other instance the effort was a failure that pointed up not only the contradictions in the man but also his frequently quixotic nature.
Ford—whose own factory at Dearborn was the epitome of the modern urban industrial plant—wanted to decentralize American manufacturing, take it out of the cities and put it back into the rural setting in which it had begun. The theory behind what he called his “village industries” was that they would give farm families the opportunity to earn money during the long months between planting and harvest and stem the pernicious flow of young, able-bodied workers from small towns to the industrial warrens of the cities—many traveling in Model T Fords, of course. “With one foot on the land and one foot in industry,” he declared, “America is safe!”
Being a man of action as well as of theory, and rich, and in full control of his own company, Ford first implemented his notion in 1919 by converting a small mill on the River Rouge near Northville, Michigan, into a plant producing valves for Ford cars. Employing a comparative handful of workers and operating with electricity generated by its large wheel, the River Rouge plant was typical of those that followed—and by the end of the 1930’s there were eighteen of them turning out valves, starters, gauges, springs, generators, ignition coils, headlights, and other small parts for Ford products. Each plant site was personally selected by Ford himself, who also supervised the conversion of the old mills, and as late as 1938 he was happily going over a list of 212 additional possibilities.
But the Motor King’s dream of turning back the wheels of progress with the wheels of old gristmills and the like was doomed from the start—a “trivial activity,” according to Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill in Ford: Decline and Rebirth, employing fewer than four thousand people. “Nobody had any financial authority over the village industries,” they wrote, “which Ford operated for personal satisfaction. We can only guess at their gains and losses. ”
Today most of the mill plants have vanished, though a few survive as residences and small office buildings—streamside tributes to an idea whose time had gone.
ST. PATRICK’S IMPERILED
As T. H. Watkins reported in his “A Heritage Preserved” column for the December, 1980, issue, the Photo Arts Club of Toledo, Ohio, and the Landmarks Committee of the Maumee Valley Historical Society teamed up in 1979 to launch a remarkable project: the compilation of a photographic record of the architectural and decorative features of the region’s historic buildings so that there would at least be something left should disaster or the wrecker’s ball strike them down. The first building chosen was Toledo’s St. Patrick’s church.
None too soon, as it turned out. On September 9, 1980, lightning struck the huge copper-covered wooden cross on top of St. Patrick’s steeple, burning through the metal and setting the cross ablaze. The flames soon ate away most of the steeple, although after several hours of effort firefighters saved both the roof and the interior of the church from major injury. Still, water damage did its work—a grim reminder that the Photo Arts Club and the Landmarks Committee had hit upon an idea whose time definitely had come.
THE TOP HAT CONTROVERSY
In “The Residue of Assassination,” a Postscripts item in our April/May, 1980, issue, we reported that a top hat auctioned off by the firm of Sotheby Parke Bernet in November, 1979, was the one Lincoln had worn on the night of his death. Not necessarily so, says Richard Sloan, editor of The Lincoln Log newsletter: “I read with interest the article which stated that the beaver top hat worn by Lincoln to Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, eventually wound up in the collection of Roy P. Crocker, then was sold for $10,000. However, it is certainly not the one Lincoln wore on the night of the assassination. There is, in fact, insufficient provenance that the hat was ever Lincoln’s. According to a spokesman for Parke Bernet, the auction house which sold it, the only evidence that it was Lincoln’s was some notes in Mr. Crocker’s file from the dealer who sold it to him. These related only that it had ‘traditionally been associated with Lincoln through the years.’
“Checking back to the long article in your special assassination issue of April, 1965, I find a photo of another beaver hat, from the Smithsonian Institution collection, which, according to the authors, Lincoln did wear to Ford’s Theater. I checked with Smithsonian curator Herbert Collins, and he tells me that the Institution does indeeed have the hat Lincoln wore when he was shot, and that it is exhibited. ‘There is no question,’ he adds, ‘as to the documentation.’
“I would be inclined to accept Mr. Collins’s word on the matter, even though there may be some small question in my own mind. You see, I have found a clipping from the February 6, 1928, Washington Star which reports the discovery of the ledger kept by the desk sergeant of the Washington Metropolitan Police in 1865. It lists hats, pistol, etc. ‘brought to the office by Supt. A. C. Richards, and found in the vicinity of the assassination of President Lincoln.’ Although part of the entry states that one of the hats was ‘supposedly to be the President’s,’ it concludes with the puzzling statement that these articles, ‘except for the beaver hat, are supposedly to be connected with the assassination.’ Of course, it cannot be determined if this refers to the hat in the Smithsonian or how accurate the ledger is. Nevertheless, if anyone wanted to see the hat Lincoln wore that fateful night, their best bet would be to go to the Smithsonian.”
CORRECTIONS
A number of readers have written in to point out that in our “Postscripts” department for the August/September, 1980, issue, we identified Bruce and William Catton as the authors of The Glory and the Dream. William Manchester, of course, was the author of that book. The Catton book is The Bold and Magnificent Dream. As well, in the “for further reading” note that followed “God Pity a One-Dream Man” in our June/July, 1980, issue, we neglected to mention the fact that The Papers of Robert H. Goddard were co-edited by G. Edward Pendray—himself a pioneer in rocket research and a founder of the American Rocket Society, now the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Our apologies to all concerned.
