The first American tried for war crimes, Henry Wirz, was hanged on November 10 to the sound of four Union companies chanting, “Remember Andersonville!”
Whether or not the prison was viciously run, as charged in Wirz’s trial, Union soldiers at Andersonville, Georgia, certainly suffered there. Under Gen. John H. Winder and, later, under Wirz, crowding, dysentery, scurvy, and malnutrition killed upwards of thirteen thousand men. There was little protection from the weather, and the single stream running through the camp was a foul morass. “The swamp now is fearful,” one inmate told his diary, “water perfectly reeking with prison offal and poison. Still men drink it and die.”
By war’s end the camp crowded 31,678 prisoners onto twenty-six and a half acres. The guards, at one point outnumbered twelve to one and suffering themselves from measles, left the prisoners to police or rob one another.
Winder had worked himself to death the February before, and so his successor, Henry Wirz, became the first American war criminal. He may have been right to claim, as others have since, that he was merely a functionary. As they shook hands over the gallows, the Federal officer charged with Wirz’s execution expressed his regret at carrying out the order. “I know what orders are,” Wirz replied. “I am being hung for obeying them.”
On November 18 the New York Saturday Press published a short story by one Mark Twain called “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” The tale had its genesis the winter before, when a twenty-nine-year-old California prospector named Samuel Clemens made a cryptic note from an evening of camp talk: “Coleman with his jumping frog—bet a stranger $50.—Stranger had no frog and C. got him one:—In the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot and he couldn’t jump. The stranger’s frog won.”
Clemens had promised a story for his drinking friend the humorist Artemus Ward to include in a collection. None of the occasional sketches he was publishing in the California papers seemed right to Clemens for the book. Then “one dismal afternoon” Clemens was “about determined to inform Artemus that I had nothing appropriate” when “a still small voice began to make itself heard. Try me! Try me! O, please try me! Please do!’ It was the poor little jumping frog.”
Clemens wrote the story, but Ward’s publisher didn’t want it. After the Saturday Press ran it, however, the story got taken up by a variety of American and British newspapers and was finally entitled “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
Twain himself later told his wife he thought it “the best humorous sketch America has produced yet,” and the “Jumping Frog” has lived in the anthologies since. Writing in his autobiography, Twain recalled that his story “certainly had a wide celebrity … but I was aware that it was only the frog that was celebrated. It wasn’t I. I was still an obscurity.”
1940 Fifty Years Ago
On November 4 Americans went to the polls to choose between a third term for Franklin Roosevelt and a first one for Wendell Willkie. Willkie, the upset-nominee of the Republicans, who’d changed parties only the year before, faced a President who four years earlier had beaten Alf Landon by the greatest margin in U.S. history. Yet the margin was only 52 to 48 percent in the final Gallup poll. Willkie crossed the country, charging that Roosevelt had signed “secret agreements” and had left the country’s defense ill prepared. Roosevelt began the campaign by not campaigning, appearing at news briefings instead, and rarely mentioning his opponent by name. In the final six weeks, however, he entered the race in earnest, declaring famously, “I will not pretend that I find this an unpleasant duty. I am an old campaigner, and I love a good fight.”
Willkie appealed across parties, as a Republican and former New Dealer and as an internationalist and civil libertarian. He forced a pledge from Roosevelt that the United States would have no part in the war “unless attacked.”
Roosevelt next took up Willkie’s charges of ill-preparedness in his “Martin, Barton, and Fish” address at Madison Square Garden. These three congressmen represented an isolationist wing of the Republican party that had repeatedly voted down FDR’s defense appropriations. “When I heard the President hang the isolationist votes of Martin, Barton, and Fish on me, and get away with it,” Willkie later admitted, “I knew I was licked.” He was. The election went to Roosevelt, 27,244,160 votes to 22,305,198.
The epic animated feature Fantasia opened in New York City on November 14 and reversed the fortunes of Mickey Mouse. Two years earlier Walt Disney’s trademark character had been surpassed in popularity by two more idiosyncratic cartoon colleagues, Donald Duck and Goofy. Eager to revive Mickey’s career, the animator devised a short feature based on Paul Dukas’s 1897 orchestral work The Sorceror’s Apprentice. Enlisting the aid of the conductor Leopold Stokowski, Disney set out to create an elaborate experimental vehicle for Mickey’s talents.
The idea evolved into a featurelength project entitled Fantasia, encompassing eight pieces of classical music, all conducted by Stokowski and interpreted by Disney’s army of animators. The film, which took two million dollars and two years to make, struck Bosley Crowther of The New York Times as “a creation so thoroughly delightful and exciting in its novelty that one’s senses are captivated by it.” But purists were angered by the film makers’ abbreviations of the composers’ works to fit the pictorial format. “If Beethoven had lived to see the inside of a Nazi concentration camp,” the journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote, “his tormentors might have driven him mad by the performance of Mr. Stokowski and Mr. Disney.”
Fantasia flopped upon its initial release. The highbrow crowd shunned the film, and the mainstream audience seemed scared off by its erudite concept. Subsequent revivals proved more successful, particularly in the late 1960s, when younger people attributed psychedelic properties to the lush combinations of sight and sound.
1965 Twenty-five Years Ago
The power in New York City went at 5:28 P.M. on November 9. In the Time and Life Building reporters finished their afternoon’s stories by the light of burning grease pencils. Customers caught in a dark midtown crystal shop were afraid to move for fear of breaking something expensive. Trapped in an elevator high inside the Empire State Building, a group of men sang and joked for more than five hours. Hundreds of New Yorkers took over intersections to direct confused traffic. According to one columnist, the first to produce flashlights in the crisis were the city’s prostitutes.
There were only ninety-six arrests citywide during the thirteen-hour blackout, and just two deaths: one heart attack from climbing stairs and one fall down a dark stairwell.
A power surge along the trip-conductor line from Niagara Falls to New York City was to blame for the blackout, which darkened eighty thousand square miles and affected thirty million people from Ontario to New York and throughout New England, excluding Maine. In New York City alone between six and eight hundred thousand subway riders were stranded. Theodore White wrote that week: “Luck, goodwill and a brilliant moon saved New York from disaster.”
In the weeks before their November 22 heavyweight title bout, Floyd Patterson refused to recognize the champion’s new religion and repeatedly called him Clay rather than his adopted Muslim name of Muhammad AIi. In return Ali questioned Patterson’s Catholicism, labeled him a white man’s challenger, and promised to “make him suffer” for his remarks. But the prefight arguing was less ugly and one-sided than the bout itself. “What’s my name?” Ali taunted, hitting Patterson and calling the black ex-champion “America’s white hope.” Patterson, overmatched and having reinjured his back early on, uselessly pursued the nimble champion until the referee stopped the fight in the twelfth round.
