On a fine summer day in 1636, Roger Williams and a handful of followers paddled down the Seekonk River, pulled ashore where a fresh spring surfaced at the foot of a high hill, and declared the site their new home. Williams named it Providence, in gratitude for the “freedom and vacancy of this … place and many other providences of the most holy and only wise.”
Williams had much to be thankful for. Five years earlier he had arrived in Puritan New England and found a society as rigid and intolerant as the one he’d left behind in England. Church and state were indistinguishable, and religious life was strictly controlled. Williams became an outspoken critic of what he saw, but not because he held dear some secular notion of liberty. This “divinely mad” man, as a contemporary called him, was guided by his religious beliefs to the conclusion that only in a free society can sinful men and women undertake the spiritual pilgrimage.
And so Williams aired his views, enraging civil and religious authorities from Boston to Plymouth. Asked to serve as a minister in Boston in 1631, Williams refused on grounds that the congregation had not disavowed the Church of England. Such Separatist views infuriated the Boston ministry. After Williams openly accused the magistrates of unjustly wielding what he considered to be their excessive power, Boston’s animosity toward him became so great that he moved to Plymouth, where he remained long enough to antagonize the colony’s leading citizens by telling them they had illegally appropriated Indian land. In 1634 Williams aroused Salem citizens’ ire by insisting that, among other things, residents could not be forced to swear to obey the civil authorities: taking oaths was an act of worship, Williams said, and no business of the General Court. Furthermore, Williams argued, the civil authorities had no right to punish transgressions against the first four Commandments. Any attempt to make Christian belief a citizen’s duty, he knew, tainted that belief.
In Puritan New England, such dissent could not go unpunished for long. On October 9, 1635, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay banished Williams, and, three months later, prepared to seize him and deport him to England. Warned of the plan, Williams fled in the midst of a blizzard and headed south to live among the Indians. With the arrival of spring, he set out to find his new home.
Shortly after selecting the site for Providence, Williams and his followers signed a “town fellowship,” on June 16, 1636, in which they agreed to “active or passive obedience to all such orders as shall be made for the public good … by the major assent of the present inhabitants … and such others whom they shall admit unto them, only in civil things.” Roger Williams, the “divinely mad,” had founded America’s first democratic community where complete religious liberty would be practiced.
1886 One Hundred Years Ago
On June 2 the first and last presidential wedding took place in the White House: President Grover Cleveland, a rotund forty-nine-year-old bachelor, married the statuesque Frances Folsom, twenty-three. Cleveland had known Frances since her infancy, when he had helped her parents purchase her baby carriage. She was the daughter of Cleveland’s former law partner, and upon her father’s death, when she was twelve, Cleveland effectively became her guardian. He called her “Frank” and she called him “Uncle Cleve.” Frances and her mother accompanied Cleveland to numerous functions through the years, and if anyone suspected he had anything but an avuncular interest in the Folsoms, it was assumed he had his eye on the elder of the two.
But when Frances entered Wells College and bloomed into womanhood, Cleveland took to sending her flowers and, with her mother’s permission, began exchanging letters with her. After Frances graduated in June 1885, she became engaged to the President, but no public announcement was made for nearly a year. Up until a month before the wedding, in fact, columnists wondered whether the anticipated bride would be Mrs. or Miss Folsom. “I don’t see why the papers keep marrying me to old ladies,” President Cleveland complained.
The wedding itself was small and simple, for the bride’s grandfather had died shortly before. There were no attendants, and only twenty-eight guests. The couple exchanged vows in the Blue Room, where they were surrounded by mounds of roses and pansies, as well as by guests and reporters who were delighted with the President’s beautiful bride.
One society writer seemed smitten with Frances merely for the manner in which she maneuvered her fifteen-foot train: it was “marvelous how she handled it in a small well-filled room, for it was nearly as long as the room itself and would have reached easily, during the ceremony, from the spot where the vows were pledged into the corridor through which the bridal party had come, but for the bride’s deft management, whereby it lay in a glistening coil at her feet.”
Historians testify that theirs was a happy marriage, despite rumors spread in the next presidential race by Cleveland’s opponent. Those whispered stories characterized Cleveland as a brutal drunkard who once drove poor Frances from the White House into a raging storm.
In the years following the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, the great arching span and its spreading web of cables inspired most New Yorkers with awe, some with gratitude, and a few with greed. Steve Brodie fell into the last category. A twenty-three-year-old unemployed Irishman with a wife and three kids, Brodie got it into his head that jumping from the Eighth Wonder of the World would set him up for life. Since the fatal leap of a Washington, D.C., swimming instructor in May 1885, Brodie had often bragged that he would one day make the jump himself. And then, on July 23, 1886, Brodie returned dripping from the East River and proclaimed the feat accomplished.
It had, however, been preceded by an uncharacteristic lack of fanfare, and close friends were the only witnesses Brodie could produce. A barge captain did sign an affidavit stating that he had hauled Brodie from the river, but skeptics alleged that Brodie’s friends had dropped a dummy from the bridge, and that all Brodie had risked was a swim from shore to barge.
Brodie’s claim, false or not, nevertheless earned him the fame and wealth he sought. He opened a saloon on the Bowery with himself as the main attraction, and business boomed. He also starred in On the Bowery, which opened in 1894; what was undoubtedly Brodie’s favorite scene came when he leaped from the set’s Brooklyn Bridge to rescue his sweetheart, who had been shoved off by the villain.
The play was a hit in New York and went on to tour the country, yet for all the times Brodie reenacted his feat onstage, he refused to silence his skeptics by jumping once more from the great bridge itself. “I done it oncet,” he insisted. “I done it oncet.”
•July 3: The first page of newsprint—the New York Tribune’s front page—is produced by Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine, which sets and justifies type automatically. Until now all newspaper type has been set by hand.
1936 Fifty Years Ago
It was nearly called Another Day. For a month it was Tomorrow Is Another Day, followed in quick succession by Tomorrow and Tomorrow, There’s Always Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Will Be Fair. But when it was finally published on June 30, it was called Gone With the Wind, and the 1,057-page novel set in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction became a phenomenal best seller overnight.
The thirty-five-year-old author of this blockbuster, Margaret Mitchell, of Atlanta, Georgia, came naturally to her subject matter. “She was very much the unreconstructed Southerner,” an Atlanta editor once said. “She had almost a reverence for the Old South traditions and legends.” Keenly aware of her city’s history, it didn’t take long for Mitchell to pick her topic: “A day came when I thought to myself ‘Oh, my God, now I’ve got to write a novel, and what is it going to be about,’ ” she later said. “That day I thought I would write a story of a girl who was somewhat like Atlanta—part of the Old South; part of the new South; [how] she rose with Atlanta and fell with it. and how she rose again ”
It took Mitchell ten years of often interrupted work to complete her only published book, years in which her enormous manuscript collected in odd corners of the small apartment she shared with her husband, John Marsh. For a time the manuscript was even used to prop up a collapsing sofa. That it was ever published is a wonder, for when a Macmillan agent visited Atlanta and asked to see her novel, Mitchell refused. But at the last minute she changed her mind and raced down to the train station with a suitcase twice her size, in time to give it to the surprised agent before he boarded. A contract was soon signed, and, after the book’s release, Mitchell found—to her dismay—that she had become a celebrity.
Critical reception of Gone With the Wind was mixed. It was praised for its readability but condemned for sentimentalizing the Confederacy and all it stood for. Malcolm Cowley described it as an “encyclopedia of the plantation legend … false in part and silly in part and vicious in its general effect on Southern life today.” But the reading public didn’t care. America was struggling through the Depression, and Gone With the Wind was just the antidote people needed to forget their troubles. From the day it appeared, bookstores couldn’t keep enough copies on hand; sales reached fifty thousand a day, and in three months, half a million copies were sold. By Christmastime that figure had doubled. In 1937 Gone With the Wind was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and in 1939 the film version was released, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable—a film destined to become one of the most valuable properties in the industry. Today, with twenty-five million copies of Gone With the Wind sold, there are few Americans who don’t instantly recognize the names Scarlett O’Hara or Rhett Butler. Nor are there many who don’t tingle at the words, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
•June 23-27: The Democratic National Convention, meeting in Philadelphia, renominates Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Presidency.
•June 30: Employees of companies with substantial government contracts give thanks to the Walsh-Healy Act, which establishes for them a minimum wage, an eight-hour day, and a forty-hour workweek.
