President Martin Van Buren was by all accounts a likable man, but his cultivated manners were not seen as virtuous by the voters who had elected Andrew Jackson before him. The Whig party decided to exploit Van Buren’s reputation as an aristocrat in the 1840 presidential election by reviving the log-cabin populism with which Jackson had beaten them twelve years earlier.

On April 14 the Whig congressman Charles Ogle of Pennsylvania addressed the House of Representatives on the subject of Van Buren’s White House. The President had asked Congress for $4,675 to renovate the Executive Mansion, and Ogle greeted the request with a three-day tirade in which he mercilessly vilified Martin Van Buren. The packed galleries laughed and cheered as the congressman described a plumed and perfumed dandy “strutting by the hour before golden-framed mirrors, NINE FEET HIGH and FOUR FEET and a HALF WIDE,” in a “PALACE as splendid as that of the Caesars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion.” Van Buren was too vain to eat “those old and unfashionable dishes, ‘hog and hominy,’ ‘fried meat and gravy,’ … [and] a mug of ‘hard cider,’ ” Ogle said. On the presidential table instead were gold utensils and “Fanny Kemble Green finger cups,” into which the President dipped his “pretty tapering soft, white lily fingers, after dining on fricandaus de veau and omlette souffle.”

The only response from the White House was a simple certification that “no gold knives or forks or spoons of any description have been purchased for the President’s house since Mr. Van Buren became the Chief Magistrate of the Nation.” Ogle published his “gold spoon oration” at his own expense, and copies that circulated throughout the country made him famous. Ogle had set the tone for the Whig campaign that was to propel Gen. William Henry Harrison, the “hard-cider man” and war hero, to an overwhelming victory in November.

Bad press was nothing new to the Shubert brothers, but that didn’t mean they had to like it. Banning particularly negative critics from their theaters in Chicago, Boston, and New York seemed sensible to Jake, Lee, and J. J. Shubert, but the negative reviews kept coming. “I do not mind missing Shubert openings,” said one New York theater critic. “I can always go to the second night and see the closing.” When Alexander Woollcott of The New York Times found himself physically prevented from entering Shubert theaters after he had panned one of the brothers’ productions called Taking Chances, his paper decided to fight back. On April 4 the Times informed the Shuberts that their advertising was no longer welcome on the most important theater page in the city.

The paper secured an injunction against the Shuberts and gave Woollcott a by-line and a raise. Though the New York Court of Appeals sided ultimately with the Shuberts, American newspapers crucified the brothers as never before. After a year in which Woollcott was banned from twentytwo Shubert productions, the Times had noted a rise in circulation and its theater critic had become one of the most conspicuous public figures in the city. The Shuberts gave up in 1916, informing the Times that Woollcott was again acceptable and sending him a large box of Cuban cigars as a peace offering. “The whole thing went up in a puff of smoke,” a triumphant Woollcott said.

∗The heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, a fugitive from the United States for two years, lost his title on April 5 to Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba. Johnson had fled the United States in 1913 to evade a prison sentence resulting from a conviction under the Mann Act, and Willard’s victory immediately sparked rumors that Johnson had made a deal to throw the fight in return for amnesty in the States.

Jack Johnson’s dominant boxing skills in the first decade of the century scandalized the many Americans who still believed in white racial superiority. Several cities banned films of Johnson’s victory over Jim Jeffries, the original “Great White Hope,” in 1910. But it was Johnson’s flamboyant personal life, which included marrying white women, that made him a target. Where no boxer could beat Johnson, the law did. “It comes down … to this unforgiveable blackness,” said W. E. B. Du Bois. “Wherefore we conclude that at present prizefighting is very, very immoral, and that we must rely on football and war for pastimes until Mr. Johnson retires or permits himself to be ‘knocked out.’”

Unwelcome in the capitals of Europe, Johnson agreed to fight Willard in Havana. “I did not care any more for the title of world’s champion than a child does for the stick from which the lollypop has vanished,” Johnson wrote later. “I despised it.” Johnson easily outpointed Willard for the first twentyfive rounds of the match but went down in the twenty-sixth. As the referee counted him out, Johnson held his knees in the air and shaded his eyes from the sun with both hands. At the count of ten Johnson stood and left the ring.

Boxing historians still debate whether Johnson threw the fight. In his autobiography, though, Johnson described an agreement with the fight’s promoter, Jack Curley, to lose the title for fifty thousand dollars and safe passage to the United States. The homesick boxer agreed, toying with Willard until he saw his wife in the crowd signal that she had received the “additional percentage … owed me if I lived up to my agreement to lie down.” Curley failed to provide the immunity he promised, and Johnson remained in exile, performing in exhibitions in Europe and Mexico. He finally surrendered to U.S. authorities in 1920 and served eight months of his original sentence in Leavenworth Prison.

NASA launched the first commercial satellite from Cape Kennedy on April 6. The Communications Satellite Corporation, a privately owned company that paid the government to put its eighty-five-pound Early Bird satellite into orbit, predicted the Comsat and others like it would revolutionize telephone, television, and teletype communications between distant parts of the world. “My goodness, now we’ll be able to call everybody!” said Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. “I don’t know if this is a good thing or not. We have enough telephone calls in the office already.”

∗Jack Nicklaus won the Masters golf tournament on April 11 in Augusta, Georgia. His score of 271 was a tournament record.

∗On April 26 at Carnegie Hall, Leopold Stokowski conducted the American Symphony Orchestra in the premiere performance of the Fourth Symphony of Charles Ives, who had died in 1954. The symphony, written between 1910 and 1916, had been reconstructed over the course of eleven years from fragments of rough manuscript that Ives had left to the Yale University Library. Further complicating the process was the complexity of the music itself, which at one point had twentyseven different rhythms going simultaneously and required the assistance of two subordinate conductors. Harold C. Schonberg’s review of the performance in The New York Times described a work of “wild polyrhythms, clumps of tonalities that clash like army against army, Whitmanesque yawps and—suddenly— the quiet of a New England church.”

Ives was an insurance man who wrote mercilessly complex music in his free hours and on weekends. Some of his compositions were simply unplayable. “Is it the composer’s fault that man has only ten fingers?” he once asked. An unabashedly American sensibility shone through all of Ives’s music, no matter how experimental; his most atonal pieces integrated themes from the hymns, folk songs, and patriotic marches he had grown up with.

—Arthur Nielsen