|
One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
On May 5 the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore nominated President Martin Van Buren to run for a second term. Unable to choose from a number of favorite-son candidates for Vice-President, the delegates left the selection to their “fellow-citizens in the several states.”
Thirty thousand Whigs had also descended upon the city to stage a raucous parade aimed at drawing the nation’s attention away from the Democrats. In a procession that featured log cabins on wheels and barrels of hard cider symbolizing the roughhewn image of their candidate, Gen. William Henry Harrison, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, and his Vice-Presidential candidate, John Tyler, the Whigs strutted through the streets of Baltimore on the day before Van Buren’s nomination, chanting, “Van, Van is a used-up man” and “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” The Baltimore Patriot said of the parade that “a thousand banners, burnished by the sun, floating in the breeze, ten thousand handkerchiefs waved by the fair daughters of the city, gave seeming life and motion to the very air.”
Campaigning for Harrison in June, Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky sought to show that the Whigs stood for something more than hard cider. In a June 27 speech in Hanover County, Virginia, Clay defined the Whig platform, which focused on limiting the amount of power that Jackson and Van Buren had invested in the Presidency in the previous twelve years. Clay proposed a one-term limit to the Presidency, a restriction of the veto power, congressional control of the Treasury, and a new national bank. But the Whig party’s hardcider tub-thumping would do more to elect Harrison in 1840 than all of Henry Clay’s eloquence.
Grazing animals, liquor traffic, and nearby lumbering operations had become intolerable to the commandant of Fort Snelling, on the Mississippi River in the Wisconsin Territory. On May 6 he expelled all civilian squatters from his fort. Among the group that settled four miles downriver was a whiskey salesman named Pierre Parrant, known for his “intemperate and licentious” behavior and a blind eye that gave “a kind of piggish expression to his sodden, low features.” The settlement was soon known as Pig’s Eye, after its most memorable character. Residents later decided that the name of their Catholic chapel looked better on their mail; renamed St. Paul, the town became the capital of the new state of Minnesota in 1858.
|
|
One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Fistfighting and sabotage were as important as lifesaving in the chaotic world of New York City fire fighting. Too many of the city’s volunteer fire companies would race to a blaze chiefly in order to prevent another from putting it out first. Professional fire departments in several other cities had ended the spectacle of rival companies brawling in the light of a fire they had been called to extinguish. They were also less expensive. Paid fire departments in London, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Boston, and St. Louis cost far less in insurance and maintenance combined than New York paid to support its 125 volunteer engine houses. “There is no actual fire in the City of New York which does not attract at least one thousand two hundred firemen and about as many ex-members with the different companies, the children, the nincompoops and the thieves,” complained one newspaper. “The Fire Department of New York is a costly and ridiculous farce.” On May 2 New York abolished volunteer companies and established its own six-hundred-man Metropolitan Fire Department.
To earn their seven-hundred-dollar annual salary, the fire fighters were on call continuously, with one day off per month and three free hours a day to eat meals at home. New rules of conduct prohibited drinking, profanity, and fire-engine races. New York had become a less exciting but altogether safer city.
Federal troops captured the Confederate president Jefferson Davis at Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10. “Try not to cry,” Davis told his wife as he was delivered into a Virginia prison two weeks later. “They will gloat over your grief.”
He was right. “At about 3 o’clock yesterday,” crowed the New York Herald Tribune on May 23, ” ‘all that is mortal’ of Jeff’n Davis, late so-called ‘President of the alleged Confederate States,’ was duly, but quietly and effectively, committed to that living tomb prepared within the impregnable walls of Fortress Monroe. ... No more will Jeff’n Davis be known among the masses of men. He is buried alive.” Arrested for treason, Davis was never brought to trial. He was released on bond in 1867 and pardoned the next year in the general amnesty President Andrew Johnson granted to all Southerners in one of his final executive acts.
President Johnson issued his first plans for reconstruction of the South on May 29. In his Proclamation of Amnesty Johnson granted a pardon, “with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves,” to participants in the rebellion who pledged to support the U.S. Constitution. The document made so many exceptions, though, that virtually all Confederate leaders still faced the charge of treason. Among those Johnson excluded from his amnesty of May 29 were officials of the Confederate government, military officers above the rank of colonel, citizens who had left the North to aid the rebellion, and all “voluntary” participants owning property worth more than twenty thousand dollars.
On the same day, Johnson appointed a provisional governor to organize a new government in North Carolina and prepare the state to meet the requirements for readmission to the Union. On June 13 he named provisional governors for six other Southern states as well.
|
|
One Hundred Years Ago
By the time Stephen Moulton Babcock arrived at the University of Wisconsin to teach chemistry in 1887, the dairy industry in America was in turmoil. Lacking an effective test to determine the fat content of milk, creameries were buying milk by the pound, paying the same price for a skimmed or watered product as for whole milk. Consumers never could tell the quality of the dairy products they bought. “The creamery business all over the country is going to pot,” complained the university’s dean to his new chemist. “The honest men . . . aren’t taking their milk to the creameries any more.” Two years later, on May 15, 1890, Babcock announced his discovery of the butterfat test that bears his name.
Babcock had trained in agricultural chemistry in Germany and had already been working on several milk-fat tests when he came to Wisconsin. Spurred on by the sense of urgency present in the center of America’s dairyland, Babcock devised a system that liberated fat globules by dissolving the milk’s casein in sulfuric acid and running the milk through a centrifuge. The new test made it easy for dairies to measure the purity of milk and improved the quality of cheese and butter. Though his test was invaluable to the dairy industry, Babcock refused to patent it, insisting that it be “given to the public.” According to William D. Hoard, the former governor of Wisconsin, “the Babcock Test has made more dairymen honest than the Bible has ever made.”
|
|
Seventy-five Years Ago
On May 1, as the German government was offering apologies and reparations for having sunk the unarmed American tanker Gulflight, an advertisement appeared in New York newspapers warning Americans that they traveled on British ships through the North Atlantic at their own risk. The British ocean liner Lusitania sailed from New York for England that day.
On May 7 a German U-boat torpedoed the Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, killing nearly 1,200 people, among them 124 Americans. “It is a deed for which a Hun would blush, a Turk be ashamed, and a Barbary pirate apologize,” wrote the editor of the Nation. Great Britain denied the German accusation that the Lusitania had been carrying munitions, and on May 13 the U.S. Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, sent the German government a letter demanding that it disavow the attack. On June 9, following Germany’s declaration that it stood by its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, President Woodrow Wilson sent a second, much stronger note demanding that Germany guarantee the safety of “American citizens bound on lawful errands as passengers on merchant ships of belligerent nationality.”
Bryan believed the second note invited war, and he resigned his post rather than sign it. But it was already too late to preserve the neutrality of American public opinion. “Must we,” asked the Louisville Courier-Journal, “as a people sit down like dogs and see our laws defied, our flag flouted and our protests whistled down the wind of this lordling’s majestic disdain?” Winston Churchill, in his six-volume history of World War I, would name the sinking of the Lusitania as a “direct cause of [Germany’s] ruin.”
|
|
Twenty-five Years Ago
The piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz ended a twelve-year absence from the stage on May 9 with a concert at Carnegie Hall. The “electric lightning pianist” had retired from public performance in 1953 at the height of his popularity. “I hope I am still a virtuoso,” Horowitz told the press when he announced the concert. “It’s nice to be a virtuoso.”
Though Horowitz missed several notes in his first piece before regaining his composure, his powers were clearly undiminished. “I was a little nervous, you know,” he said after the concert. “But if the record is released we must keep those notes .... Let people hear me as I really was.” The drama of a virtuoso’s return overshadowed all else. The album of the concert, with the sour notes included, won three Grammy awards in 1966.
On June 6 the United States Supreme Court struck down an eighty-six-year-old Connecticut law forbidding the use of contraceptives. Justice Arthur J. Goldberg’s concurring opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut declared that “the right of privacy in the marital relation is fundamental and basic—a personal right ‘retained by the people.’ . . .” The dissenting justices, Hugo L. Black and Potter Stewart, held that the law violated no specific clause in the Constitution but that it was “uncommonly silly.” The ruling said that the guarantees in the Bill of Rights “have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” Griswold v. Connecticut would be an essential precedent when the Court ruled eight years later in Roe v. Wade that the penumbra covering the right of privacy included a woman’s right to have an abortion.
—Arthur Nielsen
|
|
| |
|
|
|
