All but one of President Tyler’s cabinet members resigned on September 11. The ostensible cause was his veto of national banking legislation; what was really at issue, however, was the future direction of Tyler’s Whig party. Its leader, Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, urged the walkout as a test of loyalty to the anti-Tyler party mainstream.
Clay considered John Tyler’s administration a “regency.” Tyler, the first President to ascend to the office through the death of his predecessor, did not share most Whigs’ pro-business sympathies, and Clay wanted an issue to force the President’s hand. Tyler had less sympathy than his fellow Whigs for the idea of a revived national bank. He wanted to limit the bank’s powers by protecting the right of states to accept or refuse local “franchises” of the national system. Clay, a staunch supporter of the bank, said of his President, “I’ll drive him before me,” and created the legislation least palatable to Tyler to force a crisis.
While still Vice President, under William Henry Harrison, Tyler had made it known that he opposed any federal bank scheme imposed on the states and would prefer a national bank limited to the District of Columbia. As President he now proposed an “exchequer system” to guarantee states’ rights under the bank plan, but Clay pushed through a strictly nationalist version instead, knowing Tyler would veto it while the majority of his cabinet supported the legislation. Tyler vetoed, as expected. A second bill was passed, which the President never saw until it arrived for his signature. Feeling that this supposed compromise bill offered little change from the original, he vetoed it as well. Clay was delighted. He urged Tyler’s cabinet to resign over the issue, which they did, all but Secretary of State Daniel Webster, whose contempt for Clay was well known.
“Where am I to go, Mr. President?” Webster reportedly asked John Tyler in his White House office. Tyler replied that the decision must be Webster’s alone. When the Massachusetts Whig pledged to stay on, Tyler declared, “I will say to you that Henry Clay is a doomed man from this hour.” Indeed, Clay resigned his Senate post the next year and was Whig candidate for President in 1844, bui he was never elected, and the bank was not revived.
1866One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Leg Show
On September 12 Charles Barras’s The Black Crook made its leggy, five-hour debut at Niblo’s Garden in New York City and became the country’s first big hit burlesque. “The scenery is magnificent; the ballet is beautiful,” explained the Tribune’s critic, but “the drama is—rubbish.” Another writer noted the show’s “scenic glories and the unutterable stupidity.” What was spectacular and new about William Wheatley’s production was its use of one hundred female dancers wearing skin-colored silk tights and gotten up as lightly clad fairies suspended by wires. While some critics bemoaned the play’s length and vacuity, the public ate it up, and the ballet spectacle earned more than a million dollars in a sixteen-month run.
The Black Crook might never have seen the lights had it not been for a fire that destroyed New York’s Academy of Music, leaving a foreign ballet troupe with no place to perform. Wheatley, the manager of Niblo’s Garden, completely overhauled a play he had been producing at his theater to give it a new emphasis on dancing and brought in 110 tons of scenery and costumes along with the dance troupe. He even dug a cellar beneath the stage to hold his production’s elaborate machinery. The Black Crook became “a medium for the presentation of several gorgeous scenes,” in the words of one reviewer, “and a large number of female legs.”
After an intensive advertising effort the show opened to gasps and wild cheering from an overflow crowd. The performance ran from 7:45 P.M. to 1:15 in the morning, but most patrons saw it through to its end. A schedule was later posted outside the theater, giving the times for each dance number so that men could drop by for the famous demon dance before going home to family dinner. Charles Smyth, a Protestant minister, rented out the Cooper Institute to lecture several thousand listeners for three hours on the “immodest dress of the girls; their short skirts and undergarments of thin, gauze-like material … ladies dancing so as to make their undergarments spring up, exposing the figure beneath from the waist to the toe.” Few theatergoers were kept away by such denunciations, as The Black Crook became the second most popular production of the century. In its first week the Tribune had already called it “a symbol among us … the first attempt to put on the stage the wild delirious joy of a sensualist’s fancy.”
Other “leg shows” followed. The White Fawn, which opened at Niblo’s only a week after The Black Crook finally closed, was itself replaced by performances by the great burlesque dancer Lydia Thompson. Wheatley and Barras’s play enjoyed eight New York revivals over the years, but never again to quite the same effect.
1916Seventy-five Years Ago
Big-Screen Epic
Intolerance, D. W. Griffith’s three-and-a-half-hour epic illustrating the destructive folly of man through the ages, opened September 1. The year before, the director’s Birth of a Nation had brought him as much criticism for its racism as it had box-office success. This time he had turned a project about modern city life into a grand historical drama picturing the tragic instances of intolerance that brought down Babylon and led to the crucifixion of Christ and the massacre of Huguenots in sixteenth-century Paris. Before Intolerance was finished, Griffith proclaimed, “If I approach success in what I am trying to do in my coming picture, I expect an even greater persecution than that which met The Birth of a Nation.” He suffered worse than that: the silent confusion of the public and a massive personal debt from the film.
Intolerance presented four stories joined around the recurring image of Lillian Gish rocking an infant’s cradle, which the film maker borrowed from Walt Whitman’s “Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking, uniter of here and hereafter. …” Griffith meant his four plots to run gradually together “like four currents,” he explained, “until in the end, in the last act, they mingle in one mighty river of expressed emotion.”
The film had a sweeping look; Griffith’s budget was the biggest ever at the time. His Babylonian city—the grandest backdrop built in Hollywood—stretched a mile wide and three hundred feet in the air and was peopled by thousands of extras. Nevertheless, the same audiences that had thrilled to scenes of charging heroic Klansmen in Birth of a Nation found Griffith’s elaborate storytelling and anti-reformist message forbidding in 1916.
Griffith’s sheer ambition in creating the spectacle was not lost on later film makers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Cecil B. DeMiIIe. In addition to the simultaneous storytelling, the film pioneered other innovations, including shooting from an anchored balloon, a forerunner of the modern crane shot. Eventually Griffith released two of his narratives independently—one of BeIshazzar and the fall of Babylon, the other about modern American slum life—but he was still paying off Intolerance in the 1920s.
1941Fifty Years Ago
The Kid
Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak had died in July, and the pennant contest between the Yankees and Red Sox was effectively over in mid-August, but Boston’s Ted Williams took his pursuit of batting’s .400 mark to the final weekend in September.
Williams had been hitting .405 with a week to go, then had connected only once in seven appearances against the Washington Senators. After September 10 his average fell twelve points, to where dropping below the coveted .400 mark would be a matter of just a few outs. Joe Cronin, the Boston Red Sox manager, offered his star left fielder a chance to sit out the final three games, against the Philadelphia Athletics, and so preserve his average. But Williams—who often referred to himself as “Teddy Ballgame”—wouldn’t have it.
“You’ve got to admire the kid for being so courageous,” declared Cronin. The Kid went one-for-four in the first game, still technically leaving him at .400. He also refused to sit out the next day, a Sunday double-header that finished the season.
Connie Mack, owner of the Athletics, had threatened fines for any of his players who went easy on Williams in his last chance to top the mark. With his teammates cheering him on, Williams attacked for six hits in eight trips to the plate, smashing a four-hundred-foot home run as well as a double that crashed off the right-field loudspeaker and retired its horn. By day’s end Williams’ average stood at .406, the highest since 1930 and never equaled in the fifty seasons since. And he had also wielded power, gaining the league’s highest home-run total and nearly taking batting’s Triple Crown. “I tell you,” admitted Cronin afterward, “I never came closer to crying on a ball field than I did when Ted got that third hit. … And without asking any favors or being given any.”
Said Williams, “I never wanted anything harder in my life.”
1966Twenty-five Years Ago
The War Escalates
As part of Operation Prairie, the 3d Battalion, 4th Marines attacked North Vietnamese Army installations along Razorback Ridge in the Quang Tri province on September 22. It was the hardest fighting of the seven-week-old campaign. Helicopters assisted ground forces throughout the fighting, now and then bombing the jungle to clear the way for the Marines’ advance and resupplying the men each night to leave them free of extra gear as they searched the hills for the North Vietnamese Army. By early October North Vietnamese Army Division 324B had abandoned the fight and slipped back across the demilitarized zone into North Vietnam.
Operation Prairie was part of the Johnson administration’s new show of force in Vietnam. During Operation Rolling Thunder in July, U.S. planes had begun bombing oil depots around large North Vietnamese cities, including one target only three-and-a-half miles from the capital of Hanoi. Three thousand aircraft were engaged through August and September, making seven hundred strikes each day against storage facilities, factories, army convoys, and jungle bunkers. The President signaled he was stepping up pressure and would rely less on negotiations. “The communist leaders,” he said, “no longer really expect a military victory.” Despite the bombardment and heavy losses among the North Vietnamese, communist troops and arms moving south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail increased dramatically. The North Vietnamese Army’s ability to elude Marine forces by crossing the demilitarized zone during Operation Prairie would eventually lead to bombing of the DMZ itself.
