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TIME MACHINE
By Nathan Ward
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Two Hundred Years Ago
The new firm of Almy, Brown, and Slater opened its water-powered spinning mill this month at Pawtucket, Rhode Island. During his apprenticeship of nearly seven years in a Derbyshire textile mill, Samuel Slater had mastered the intricacies of Richard Arkwright’s famed cloth-weaving machinery. At twenty he made secret plans to go to America, where knowledge of the spinning mills was so valuable that some state legislatures offered rewards for the Arkwright design. To accept this invitation one required gall and savvy, since the British government had made illegal both the emigration of English textile workers and the exportation of plans for textile machinery. Nevertheless, in 1789 Slater made the sixty-six-day journey to New York disguised as a farmer and carrying Arkwright’s complex design in his head. He had heard that a Quaker businessman in Providence, Rhode Island, wanted to build a spinning mill and wrote him a letter. Moses Brown replied, “If thou canst do this thing, I invite thee to Rhode Island and have the credit and the profit of introducing cotton-manufacture into America.”
He did, with immense consequences. As other mills followed, Slater adapted and simplified Arkwright’s machine until most of the tasks could be—and were—performed by children. Slater’s pirated mills were a portent of both the lights and shadows of the great Industrial Revolution they helped foment.
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One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
William Henry Harrison defeated President Martin Van Buren on December 2 with a popular vote of 1,275,390 to 1,128,854. A lasting effect of the election was the popularization of the new Americanism, “O.K.,” which had first appeared in print the year before. Supporters of Van Buren gave him a nickname, “Old Kinderhook,” for his native Hudson River town in old Dutch New York, and formed O.K. clubs during the campaign. Though the true origin of O.K. remains clouded, Martin Van Buren’s failed reelection effort helped give it a national currency that remains strong to this day.
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One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Almost nine months following General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, the Thirty-ninth Congress assembled on December 4 and voted to create a Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction. Drawn from both houses, the committee was charged with inquiring “into the condition of the States which formed the so-called Confederate States of America, and [to] report whether they, or any of them, are entitled to be represented in either House of Congress, with leave to report at any time, by bill or otherwise.”
As the House clerk went through the roll call, he skipped the names of new representatives of Southern states, many of whom had been Confederate officers only months before, thus giving a hint of the years of sectional rancor to follow.
Secretary of State Seward, having himself survived a brutal beating the day of Lincoln’s assassination, announced to the Senate the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 18. The Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier had been a war act, not the final legal settlement the country needed on the slavery matter. The Thirteenth Amendment, banishing slavery and “involuntary servitude,” was therefore passed by the Senate in April 1864 and later by the House on its second attempt. Following Lincoln’s signature on February 1, the amendment went to the state legislatures. President Johnson eventually made passage a requirement for readmission to the Union.
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One Hundred Years Ago
The last, sad engagement of the Indian wars, at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, on December 29, left over 150 Sioux men, women, and children dead, and scores of wounded later died of exposure. Twenty-five U.S. soldiers were killed and thirtynine wounded. The trouble had begun the autumn before, when Sioux tribes gathered near Pine Ridge Agency for a ghost dance and added to this form of mystical resistance the new concept of “ghost shirts,” garments that would protect warriors from white bullets.
The war shirts caught the attention of the Army, which developed various plans to arrest and remove the dance’s suspected leaders. Bored journalists sent to the Pine Ridge Agency filed stories of imagined battles and Indian atrocities. On the fourteenth, Indian agents of the U.S. government shot and killed the Hunkpapa chief Sitting Bull while trying to arrest him. At the sound of rifle shots, Sitting Bull’s horse, a gift from his friend and former employer Buffalo Bill Cody, pranced as it had been trained for the Wild West revue.
During a search for weapons by the 7th Cavalry on December 29 at Wounded Knee Creek, a young, deaf Sioux named Black Coyote refused to part with his rifle unless paid for it. As two soldiers grabbed him the gun went off, bringing on the bloody skirmish in which bullets fired by both sides pierced tepees where Indian women, some pregnant, hid with their children. The melee ended with Col. James Forsyth shelling the camp.
Afterward, Buffalo Bill purchased back the old gray horse he had given Sitting Bull years earlier and invited Kicking Bear, Short Bull, and other Indian leaders who had survived Wounded Knee to tour Europe with his Wild West Show.
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Seventy-five Years Ago
After celebrating the building of his one-millionth automobile earlier in the year, Henry Ford sailed for Norway on December 4 aboard his “peace ship,” the Oscar II. His mission, said Ford, was “to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.” Ford’s proposal for a general strike Christmas Day by the armies dug in along the Western Front could “best be described as piffle,” wrote The New York Times that week, but Ford would not be swayed. “I have faith in the people,” he declared.
In a Presbyterian ceremony performed by her minister in Mrs. Gait’s Washington home, President Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Edith Boiling Gait married on December 18. The President and Mrs. Gait had met in March. She had worried during their encounter over her muddy shoes, but Wilson, whose wife had died less than a year before, was not put off. A few months later, he wrote a friend about the widowed Mrs. Gait: “You would think that it was only love that was speaking if I were to tell you what she is like, how endowed and made distinguished in her loveliness. …” Wilson never discovered the movement among his advisers to postpone his remarriage until after the 1916 election. The idea died when Josephus Daniels, his Secretary of the Navy, wisely turned down the job of proposing it to the President.
On December 8 the The New York Times and World carried the story that the State Department had declared the operators of a German spy ring personae non gratae. The master plot was first uncovered by the Secret Service in July, when one of the Germans left his briefcase behind on a New York City subway car. The agent following Heinrich Albert claimed the abandoned case, and its contents revealed a network of spies and saboteurs.
The star of the German agents, Franz von Rintelen, had spent twelve million dollars stirring up revolution in Mexico, hoping the United States would be drawn in and its export of munitions to Europe slowed down. A most effective and clever agent, von Rintelen gave himself away by falling in love. While vacationing in Kennebunkport, Maine, he met and unburdened himself to a young woman named Anne Seward, even telling her of all his plans for sabotage. Anne Seward wrote to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who quickly sent his assistant to Maine to see her. This, together with the earlier evidence in Albert’s briefcase, eventually gave the government what it needed to act against the German ring.
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Fifty Years Ago
On December 21 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald and his companion, the gossip columnist Sheila Graham, were sitting in her Hollywood apartment listening to the recording of the Eroica Symphony he had bought for her when Fitzgerald unexpectedly stood, gripped the mantle, and fell dead of his third heart attack.
The novelist had wondered throughout his life about the possible destructiveness of his craft, of becoming “used up.” “I have asked a lot of my emotions,” he confided in his notebooks, “120 stories. The price was high … there was one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these in every story. … Now it has gone and I am just like you now.” Many of his obituaries confirmed this fear, declaring him a wasted writer in the end. Even his admirer John O’Hara lamented that Fitzgerald had become “a prematurely old little man haunting bookstores unrecognized.” Though he had largely quit drinking by his last year and was doing his first serious work in several years, it was too late.
What was left was seven hundred dollars and an unfinished manuscript, thirty-seven thousand words of The Last Tycoon, his planned novel of Hollywood. When it was published the next October, Stephen Vincent Benêt was among the first to recognize that Fitzgerald was far more than a faded relic of the Jazz Age he had christened. “You can take off your hats now, gentlemen,” Benét wrote, “and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation—and seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.”
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Twenty-five Years Ago
Under the chairmanship of the former CIA director John McCone, the Watts Commission delivered its report on schedule in early December. The eight-member commission had been appointed by California’s governor Edmund G. Brown to investigate the causes of violence following six days and nights of arson, gunfire, and looting that had torn through the largely black Los Angeles suburb the August before. The rioting had dominated an area of 46.5 miles overall, killing thirtyfive people and injuring more than a thousand.
The report described the six furious days as “an explosion—a formless, quite senseless, all but hopeless violent protest.” Rumors of police brutality in the arrest of Marquette Frye, which had produced the initial, outraged crowds, could not be verified, concluded the commission, drawing on nearly two million words of testimony.
Two chants from the riots—“Get whitey” and “Burn, baby, burn”—became ominous catchphrases in the national press, far better known than any of the conditions leading to the violence. Along with the Harlem riots the previous year, the events in Watts exposed the fragility of racial relations above the Mason-Dixon line as well as the profound anger of whole forgotten regions in the North.
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