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PAST TIMES
Two Hundred Years Ago
Ever since the news of Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown had reached England late in November, the war government of Lord North had come under increasing attack. Although the prime minister had been against the war from the beginning, and for the past three years had known victory was hopeless, his sovereign, the intractable George III, was determined to keep the Colonies.
Marshaling such allies as he still possessed, the king embarked on a holding action. He provoked the resignation of the highly unpopular Lord George Germain, who, as secretary of state for the American Colonies, was responsible for running the war. (The king wanted him out so badly that, despite his lamentable record, Germain was able to extort a peerage in return.)
George III replaced him with Welbore Ellis, a malleable “hack,” according to Horace Walpole, who combined the “circumstantial minuteness of a church warden and the vigour of another Methusalem.” But getting rid of Germain postponed the inevitable for a few weeks only. On February 22 a motion in the House of Commons against further prosecution of the war failed by a single vote; on the twenty-seventh it was carried. A week later the House passed a resolution condemning as “enemies to the country” all those who continued to promote the war “for the purpose of reducing the colonies to obedience by force.”
George III, furious, refused to give up and even went so far as drafting an announcement of his abdication.
On March 15 a vote of no confidence missed defeating North by a scant nine votes. Soon afterward a group of country gentlemen who had been supporting the war dropped away. With another vote looming on the twentieth, North told the king it was finally over. “Your majesty is well apprized,” he wrote, “that in this country the Prince of the Throne cannot with prudence oppose the deliberate resolution of the House of Commons.”
The king sulkily replied that if North resigned precipitantly, he would “for ever forfeit my regard.” But on March 20 North stepped down.
He was succeeded by Lord Rockingham, whose ministry two days later decided to open direct negotiations with America.
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One Hundred Years Ago
On March 15 Jumbo’s cage was lowered into the hold of the Assyrian Monarch, and the biggest elephant ever exhibited began his journey from England to America.
He did not leave London unnoticed; Britons had been protesting his loss with mounting ferocity. For years the elephant had placidly carried children around Regent’s Park, but now the directors of the London Zoo were quietly worried that the twenty-one-year-old beast’s disposition might turn sour, with catastrophic effects. P. T. Barnum got wind of this and offered ten thousand dollars for the animal.
The Royal Zoological Society’s acceptance sparked fierce protest, though it is entirely possible that Barnum himself initially helped fuel it for publicity’s sake. In any event, John Ruskin deplored the sale, the Prince of Wales condemned it publicly, and his mother, Queen Victoria, in a startling if momentary lapse of royal rectitude, privately suggested that the contract be violated and Jumbo withheld from his new owner. “No more quiet garden strolls, no shady trees, green lawns, and flowery thickets,” lamented the London Telegraph. “Our amiable monster must dwell in a tent, take part in the routine of a circus, and, instead of his by-gone friendly trots with British girls and boys, and perpetual luncheon on buns and oranges, must amuse a Yankee mob, and put up with peanuts and waffles.” Finally some Fellows of the Royal Zoological Society brought an action in chancery against Jumbo’s departure.
But it all came to nought. Barnum bided his time, deeply pleased by the growing furor, and at last carried his massive charge off to the land of peanuts and waffles, where Jumbo earned his new owner ten times his purchase price during his first six weeks on exhibition.
In the otherwise little-noted town of Mississippi City, Mississippi, young John L. Sullivan met Paddy Ryan in a bare-knuckle fight on February 7. At stake was the American heavyweight championship—Ryan the current champion, Sullivan the challenger. Ryan didn’t stand a chance.
Sullivan, the son of sturdy Irish immigrants (his mother weighed 180 pounds), had been punching people out of rings and off exhibition-match stages ever since his first bout in 1877 at the age of nineteen. He could, it was said, “hit hard enough to knock a horse down,” an attribute that had earned him the billing of “the Boston Strong Boy.” Ryan had reason to believe it. After being battered relentlessly for eight rounds, the champion was finally pummeled senseless in the ninth. Sullivan’s purse in that innocent time: twenty-five hundred dollars.
In a story datelined Richmond, Virginia, February 9, The New York Times told of the decision of the Virginia Senate to abolish the whipping post in that state. The legislators’ concern was not, apparently, based on a distaste for barbarism. Instead, according to the Times, whipping-post opponents argued that “it is class legislation and does not affect all alike. The negroes were accustomed to the lash during slavery time, and rather got to liking it, and now oftentimes select it in preference to imprisonment.” On the other hand, they said, “White men look upon the stripe with the most perfect horror, and in many instances would as lief be branded with a hot iron.” The clincher was that whipping—of blacks or whites—didn’t seem to deter crime, or as the Times story summed it up: “This mode of punishment has been fully tested in Virginia and has been found wanting.”
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Fifty Years Ago
William Cardinal O’Connell of Boston was worried about morality in media. “I desire to speak earnestly about a degenerate form of singing which is called crooning,” he told the Holy Name Society. “No true American would practice this base art. I like to use my radio, when weary,” he continued. “But I cannot turn the dials without getting these whiners crying vapid words to impossible tunes.
“If you will listen closely when you are unfortunate enough to get one of these, you will discern the basest appeal to sex emotions in the young. They are not true love songs, they profane the name. They are ribald and revolting to true men. ”
Madame Frances Aldo, the celebrated diva, agreed. She had eight radio receivers scattered about Casa Mia, her home in Great Neck, Long Island, she said, but she rarely listened to any of them for more than five minutes because of the ubiquitous crooners singing songs “which are an offense to listeners of taste and discrimination.” Radio, she said, should instead foster a musical renaissance in America, a renaissance that would include a great many “entire opera productions.” The New York Singing Teachers’ Association concurred: crooning, its members unanimously resolved, “robs the human voice of its ability to express the higher emotions … [and] corrupts the mind and ideals of the younger generation.”
The New York Times sided with the Cardinal and his supporters, but counseled patience. “Crooners,” it concluded, “will soon go the way of tandem bicycles, mah jong and midget golf.”
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