Steaming through the calm waters off Cuba on November 8, the British Royal Mail packet Trent was accosted by the USS San Jacinto. The event nearly led to war between England and the already embattled Union. The warship fired twice across the packet’s bow; the Briton slowed to a stop, and its outraged captain bellowed through a speaking trumpet: “What do you mean by heaving my vessel to in this way?” His answer came when three boatloads of Union men clambered aboard the Trent and—against the law of the high seas—seized James M. Mason and John Slidell, the Confederacy’s newly appointed commissioners to Great Britain and France, who were en route to those countries. The Trent’s indignant passengers heaped abuse upon the Yankees, shouting, “Pirates! Villains!” and threatening to toss the Union lieutenant into the sea. But their anger was nothing beside the storm of fury that broke in England when news of the Trent affair reached its shores.
The habitually vitriolic London press fanned the flames of British resentment. The Times excoriated Capt. Charles Wilkes, commander of the San Jacinto: “He is an ideal Yankee. Swagger and ferocity, built on a foundation of vulgarity and cowardice, these are his characteristics. …” The London Morning Chronicle lambasted Secretary of State William Seward, whom they described as “exerting himself to provoke a quarrel with all of Europe, in that spirit of senseless egotism which induces the Americans, with their dwarf fleet, and shapeless mass of incoherent squads, which they call an army, to fancy themselves the equal of France by land, and of Great Britain by sea.”
British statesmen leaped into the fray. Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, and Lord John Russell, secretary for foreign affairs, wrote to Washington requesting to be informed whether Captain Wilkes had acted under orders. If he had, their note made clear, hostilities would result. Without awaiting an answer, they dispensed eight thousand troops to Canada and ordered the British fleet to be made war-ready.
In the meantime the Union had been toasting the capture of Mason and Slidell as a brilliant victory. Captain Wilkes was paraded down Broadway in New York to a City Hall reception, and Congress hailed his “brave, adroit and patriotic conduct.” But the celebration was brief. The Union had no wish to antagonize the European powers into aiding the Confederacy; a diplomatic dodge was deemed necessary. Before long Seward surrendered Mason and Slidell to the British in a document that achieved the remarkable feat of simultaneously lauding Wilkes while upholding the law of the freedom of the seas. Handing over the Confederates “was a pretty bitter pill to swallow,” President Lincoln said later, but to the disappointment of the South, Britain was satisfied, and war averted. The President nevertheless harbored hopes “that England’s triumph would be short-lived,” he said, “and that after ending our war successfully we would be so powerful that we could call her to account for all the embarrassments she had inflicted on us.”
October 1: The Army Balloon Corps is formed. Under the direction of T. S. C. Lowe, balloons are sent aloft above battlefields to determine enemy strength and movement.
October 24: The first transcontinental telegram travels from Chief Justice Stephen J. Field in California to President Lincoln in Washington, D.C.
1936 Fifty Years Ago
The crowd roared. Cowbells clanged, and horns blared. It was October 31, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had taken the podium before a capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Angered by Republicans’ recent attacks on what he considered his finest work—Social Security—and unrestrained by his advisers, who were absent that evening, Roosevelt was about to deliver one of his most fiery and unforgettable speeches, the last of his reelection campaign.
The din of the ovation lasted nearly fifteen minutes before the President requested silence with raised arms and then began to speak. His were “the old enemies of peace,” he said: “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism and war profiteering.” The audience interrupted him to voice its deafening approval. “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.” Again the crowd roared. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” Roosevelt said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
The President himself was the issue in the 1936 campaign, a fact Roosevelt had recognized months before. His Republican opponent, Gov. Alfred M. Landon of Kansas, had done his best to discredit him. The governor implied that Roosevelt was a communist, said that he would behead his critics if elected, and allowed the GOP national chairman to accuse Roosevelt of complicity in the murder of Spanish priests. But AIf was a difficult sell for the GOP; he was a decent but dull man with little oratorical skill. To Landon’s aid came the forces of money. The Republicans spent nine million dollars on him, nearly twice that given to FDR. More than a million Republican dollars was sunk into radio spots, and the Hearst newspaper chain provided lavish partisan support, printing front-page editorials accusing Moscow of running the Democratic campaign.
Large employers did their part: Ingersoll Rand, Johnson & Johnson, and others inserted notices in pay envelopes informing workers that a Roosevelt victory would mean their jobs. And then, in October, workers learned from signs posted in their factories and more slips in their envelopes that Social Security funds would derive solely from their pay. “You’re sentenced to a weekly pay reduction for all your working life,” read one sign—which was true enough. “You’ll have to serve the sentence unless you help reverse it November 3.” Hoaxes were perpetrated: It was said that all workers would be fingerprinted and forced to wear steel dog tags bear- ing their Social Security numbers.
By the end of October, Roosevelt’s patience had worn thin. In the conclusion to his speech in Madison Square Garden, he challenged his opponents and all they stood for: “I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said”—he paused a moment for the cheering to subside—“I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.” Long after Roosevelt had been helped from the podium, the shouting, applause, and ringing bells continued to shake the hall. Three days later Roosevelt was swept into office, taking every state but Maine and Vermont.
Henry Luce, co-founder of Time Inc., wanted to start a new weekly magazine—a news picture magazine. “He’s got it in his blood bad,” a colleague said in early 1936. Photojournalism had developed rapidly in recent decades, partly due to the advent of miniature cameras such as the Leica, which allowed quality photographs to be snapped quickly under the worst conditions. But “the cream of the world’s pictures,” Luce said, had yet to be made accessible within one publication. Neither had anyone tried to “edit pictures into a coherent story,” he argued, “to make an effective mosaic out of fragmentary documents which pictures, past and present, are.” On November 19, after months of frantic labor at Time Inc., some two hundred thousand copies of the magazine went on sale. It was called Life, and most copies were snatched from newsstands before the day was out.
From the cover of Vol. I, No. 1, loomed the towering piers of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam, photographed by Margaret Bourke-White while under construction. Inside were pictures of the dam’s WPA builders celebrating Saturday night at a local watering hole; shots of Fort Knox as well as Fort Belvedere, country retreat of Edward VIII; Broadway and cinema stars, Brazilian natives, Chinese schoolgirls, and color reproductions of John Steuart Curry’s paintings; a one-legged Swiss mountain climber, a royal hunting party, and a step-by-step portrayal of a black widow spider devouring her mate. Many of the pictures were taken by Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Thomas D. McAvoy, and Peter Stackpole. The combination proved irresistible. The first issue sold out, as did the second, third, and fourth. Life broke all the records, selling a million copies a week as soon as the presses could turn them out and doubling that by the end of its second year.
Luce’s premise for Life explained it simply enough: “People like to look at pictures.” Of course he intended to give them more than that. “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon,” this was the prospect Life held before its readers. Life’s was a new kind of journalism, and it soon inspired imitations around the world.
