Events in New York City in late February led to fatal rumors that a conspiracy of black slaves and white indentured servants was planning to overthrow the city government. At the time, New York was a city of ten thousand people, one-fifth of whom were slaves and black freedmen. A series of fires as well as thefts of silverware had put New Yorkers on edge by the time the governor’s house burned down on March 18. The lieutenant governor publicly blamed workmen who’d been repairing roof gutters, but this explanation was forgotten as soon as Peter Warren’s West Village mansion burned a week later, followed by the home of a Dutchman known for whipping one of his slaves to death. Pipe embers were cited in the latter blaze, but the rash of fires did not stop.
A sixteen-year-old maidservant named Mary Burton gave the panic a kind of legitimacy when she told a neighbor she thought her master, John Hughson, was keeping merchandise stolen by blacks in his tavern cellar. She was arrested for complicity in the alleged crimes and quickly produced a string of names that lengthened over the coming months. She singled out slaves she remembered from her master’s tavern, in addition to her master’s wife and a prostitute named Peggy Carey. Two of the men she mentioned, slaves known only as Quack and Cuffee, were condemned to death and confessed at the last moment, implicating seven more black suspects. Confronted by a mob, the sheriff went ahead and burned the two on the spot. Eventually six of the seven they had named were executed; the seventh was spared for “telling the truth,” which netted fourteen more slave suspects. The confessions grew exponentially until, by the end of August, 154 slaves and freedmen had been imprisoned, 18 executed by hanging, 14 burned alive, and 71 banished. In addition, 24 white New Yorkers were jailed, and 4 of them, including 2 women, were hanged.
The last to die was John Ury, a former priest. After he was hanged, on August 29, more prominent citizens began to come under suspicion, and the absurdity of the theory gradually became evident. Before it ended, however, Mary Burton received one hundred pounds for her testimony. New Yorkers set aside a day in September for thanksgiving that “the delusion” had passed, a delusion that had cost even more lives than the better-remembered Salem witch trials.
1866 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
On February 3 the Lynn, Massachusetts, Reporter carried the story of a local woman’s remarkable return to health. Mary Glover had taken a bad fall on a patch of ice and injured her back. Her condition seemed grave. Then, on the third day of her recuperation, the Lynn housewife reported she rose from her bed feeling restored to health after reading the Bible. Mrs. Glover later wrote that her eye had happened on the passage in Matthew 9:2-6 where Christ commands the paralytic to rise from his bed and go home. ‘That brief experience,” she explained, “included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit. … This Life being the sole reality of existence.” Mrs. Glover often cited this moment as the wellspring of her faith when, proselytizing as the chief architect of Christian Science under the name she later took, Mary Baker Eddy.
The James Gang made its debut on February 13, robbing the Clay County Savings and Loan Association Bank in Liberty, Missouri. Greenup and William Bird, cashiers at the bank, became America’s first victims of an organized holdup gang as they packed sixty thousand dollars in currency and securities into the bandits’ grain sack. Asked to step into the vault by someone later determined to be Frank James, Greenup Bird recalled that “I hesitated and began to parley. He told me that if I did not go in instantly, he would shoot me down.” Then one of the robbers showed his familiarity with the bank by joking that “all Birds should be caged” as he closed the vault on the cashiers. On its way out of town the gang of ten passed George (“Jolly”) Wymore, a student at the local William Jewell College, crossing the town square, and one of the holdup men shot him dead. A posse followed them out of town, only to be stopped by a blizzard as the gang made it safely across the Missouri River. While it is still debated whether Jesse James rode along on his gang’s first success, he did lead them on some twenty-six other raids during the next fifteen years in and around his native Missouri, taking half a million dollars from banks and railroads. For much of this time the popular idea of Jesse James in songs and dime novels resisted all correction by reports of the gang’s actual deeds. “We were rough men,” Bob Younger said when it was over, “and used to rough ways.”
1941 Fifty Years Ago
Having passed the Senate by a vote of 60 to 31, and the House by 317 to 17, the Lend-Lease Act was signed by President Roosevelt on March 11, making an initial seven billion dollars available to the Allied cause, particularly to a desperate Great Britain. Three days before, in a radio address to the nation, Roosevelt had declared that the American “democratic way of life” could not withstand “the death of democracy over the rest of the earth.” Through the course of the war, the United States would send more than fifty billion dollars to the Allies through lend-lease.
Bloomingdale’s department store offered relief for customers anxious about the war in Europe when the Wackaroo went on sale in February. Life magazine explained how to use the small, mass-produced sculpture, which was designed to be smashed: “Take it out on the Wackaroo. When you are mad or feel like busting things, grab him quick.” The placid-looking bust, with its smooth features and small hands protruding from the head for an easy grip, was created by the sculptor Frances Ferrer. Soothing war nerves with the Wackaroo cost fifty cents a pop.
Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio and A Storyteller’s Story, died on March 8 of peritonitis, in the Panama Canal Zone. The American writer had swallowed a toothpick along with his hors d’oeuvre while on a cruise with his wife. He was sixty-four.
Anderson held a kaleidoscopic variety of jobs before he walked out of the paint factory he managed in Elyria, Ohio, when he was forty, to make his way to Chicago. There he made a success at advertising, trying all the while to become a writer of stories, many of which chronicled the lives of people who had left the Midwestern farms for the boarding houses of the big cities. He lived in Chicago, New York, Paris, and New Orleans but was a steady defender of the small town, writing nostalgically in the face of its retreat. “If any man can find beauty in an American factory town,” he challenged, “I wish he would show me the way.” Anderson eventually bought a farm of his own in Virginia and ran two newspapers—one Republican, the other Democratic.
While his quirky, lyrical stories went in and out of style with editors and the public, Anderson remained the idol of a dazzling generation of writers whom he generously encouraged. “Sherwood Anderson was the father of all my works,” wrote William Faulkner, “and those of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. … He showed us the way.”
1966 Twenty-five Years Ago
Bobby Hull of the Chicago Black Hawks broke hockey’s single-season scoring record, slapping home his fifty-first goal on March 12 against the New York Rangers to best his previous high of fifty, reached in 1962. The Chicago forward would finish the season with fifty-four goals.
The same day, Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” entered radio’s Top Forty. The tribute to the Special Forces achieved number-one status later that year, driven as much by strong feelings over the American presence in Vietnam as by any virtues of the tune itself. Two years later it served as the anthem for The Green Berets, a John Wayne war movie, which outgrossed all of the star’s other films. Barry Sadler, a former combat medic in the Special Forces, sold nine million copies of the tribute and wrote more than twenty novels about mercenary soldiers over the years. He later trained rebels in Nicaragua and Guatemala, where he was shot in an apparent robbery in 1988. Partially paralyzed in the shooting, Sadler died as a result the following year.
After grudgingly ruling on March 21 that Fanny Hill: The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was not without “redeeming social value,” the Supreme Court that same day also decided the case of magazine publisher Ralph Ginzburg, upholding a Philadelphia court’s conviction on charges of distributing obscene materials by mail.
Ginzburg had worked as a freelance writer and photographer and wrote briefly for television before taking charge of circulation promotion at Look when he was twenty-three. He became an editor at Esquire in 1956, and there he took an article of his own and turned it into the best-selling book An Unhurried View of Erotica. From this came the idea for Eros magazine, a hard-bound quarterly that he launched in the early sixties. It was the advertising for Eros, not its glib sexuality (Ginzburg chose addresses in towns such as Middlesex and Intercourse, for example, for mailing his magazine), that later swayed the opinions of five of the judges.
“We view the publication against a background of commercial exploitation of erotica solely for the sake of their prurient appeal,” wrote Justice William Brennan for the majority. “The leer of the sensualist also permeates the advertising.”
Ginzburg had been fined twenty-eight thousand dollars and sentenced to five years in jail in the decision the Court was upholding. The Ginzburg case was part of the developing “prurient-interest” standard used by the Court in a series of obscenity cases. After serving a reduced term, Ginzburg published Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison, in 1971.
To inaugurate the cool, modern hall Philip Johnson had designed for it, the New York City Opera, which had become one of the nation’s leading opera companies, chose to present a twelve-tone opera. On the night of February 22 a capacity crowd of twenty-eight hundred filled the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center to see and hear Don Rodrigo by the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera. Last-minute adjustments had been made to the hall’s acoustics. Before the lights went down, New York’s new mayor, John V. Lindsay, drew laughter from the splendidly dressed audience by promising that “just as I have no intention to interfere with the operations of the Police Department, so I have no intention of interfering with the operations of the City Center of Music and Drama.”
The cast included the rising young Spanish tenor Placido Domingo. The opera, concluded one critic, was “all very brilliant, all very powerful, but also very external,” lacking “anything touching the heart.” But to the audience that enjoyed the gala production that night, it did not matter. The City Opera, which had begun as a poor but imaginative independent outfit twenty-two years before, was now a world-class company with a hall to match its ambitions. The old building had had “an intimacy it will take some time to build here,” one patron remarked later opening night. “But we can have more elaborate productions here.”
A February issue of Look and a subsequent column by Russell Baker in The New York Times marked the advent of computerized dating in America. Some one hundred thousand students on New England college campuses, according to Look, had turned to a new “compatibility-research” group hoping to circumvent the trial and error associated with the process. Baker, in his February 9 column, “Automation Comes to Love,” quoted the computer service’s cheerful assurance: ” ‘We’re not taking the love out of love. We’re making it more efficient.’”
“Until a few years ago,” the columnist lamented, “when parking became almost impossible, there was a more amenable machine available for boy-girl compatibility research. It was called the car.” Computerized dating turned out to be a fad that faded that year, but it would reemerge complete with video aids in the 1970s to offer clients even greater selection and efficiency and it has been among us ever since.
