On April 21 Hannah Dustin, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who had recently been kidnapped by Indians, turned up in Boston. She brought along two fellow captives, ten scalps, and a harrowing tale of her abduction. The Abnakis had struck Haverhill on March 15, when Dustin, age thirty-nine, was recovering from the birth of her eighth child. Her husband and the rest of their children managed to escape, but Hannah and her nurse, Mary Neff, were taken prisoner. After watching her house get set on fire and her infant’s brains dashed out against a tree, Dustin (wearing only one shoe) and Neff were marched about 150 miles and set to work as slaves for an Indian family of twelve on an island near what is now Concord, New Hampshire.
Not long afterward the Indians prepared to set out for (in the words of Cotton Mather) “a rendezvouz of salvages, which they call a town.” With them they planned to bring the two women and a boy named Samuel Lennardson, kidnapped from Worcester a year and a half earlier. One of the Indians told them, possibly in jest, that on their arrival in the town, the captives would be stripped, whipped, and made to run the gantlet. Not relishing this prospect, Dustin devised a plan of escape.
At her instigation Lennardson innocently asked the unsuspecting chief about the best method of killing someone with a tomahawk. The chief obligingly demonstrated, and a little before dawn on the morning of March 30, Lennardson and Dustin applied their newly acquired knowledge. As Mather, with the punster’s eternal penchant to poke an elbow in the ribs, explains: “The whole crew was in a dead sleep, (reader, see if it prove not so!).” They silently approached their dozing captors and began swiftly and efficiently dispatching them. One woman escaped badly wounded, and a boy whom they had befriended and meant to spare suddenly awoke and ran off. The other ten died before they could raise a murmur: nine killed by Dustin and one by Lennardson.
Dustin and her comrades immediately departed in one of the Indians’ canoes. Before going very far, however, she realized that people back home might be skeptical of her story without proof. The party turned back, scalped the corpses, and set off again. After stopping at Haverhill, they arrived in Boston, whose residents invited the celebrities to their homes and showered them with presents. The Massachusetts General Assembly gave twenty-five pounds “unto Thomas Dustan of Haverhill, on behalf of Hannah his wife,” and twelve and a half pounds apiece to the others. Francis Nicholson, the royal governor of Maryland, got wind of the massacre and sent a generous gift as well.
Following her season of fame, Dustin returned to the routine of a colonial farm wife. She had one more child and lived until 1736, surviving her husband by four years. Late in the nineteenth century, when Indian raids were a distant memory, monuments depicting her with tomahawk raised were erected in Haverhill and on the site of the massacre, an islet at the confluence of the Merrimack and Contoocook Rivers now known as Dustin’s Island.
1772Two Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Stopping the Slave Trade
On April 1 Virginia’s House of Burgesses petitioned King George III of England for “your Majesty’s paternal assistance in averting a Calamity of a most alarming Nature.” Specifically, they asked the king to let them ban the importation of slaves, which “hath long been considered as a Trade of great Inhumanity” and might “endanger the very Existance of your Majesty’s American Dominions.” Slaves from West Africa had allowed Virginia to grow and flourish over the previous century and a half, during which time the trade’s inhumanity had troubled few buyers. Now those same slave buyers wanted to cut off further imports. The reasons behind this apparent switch reveal Virginia’s ambivalent attitude toward the institution.
In general, Virginians thought a little slavery was good, but not too much. For most, the ideal of the sturdy yeoman included a few slaves laboring alongside him and his wife and children. With this system the colony could avoid creating an underclass of white laborers. It could also preserve its bogus notion of the benevolent master who treated his “servants” like family, perhaps even with vague plans for emancipation sometime in the hazy future.
Virginians shuddered when they looked at South Carolina, where absentee owners lived in Charleston mansions while overseers ran their huge plantations. By banning slave imports, Virginia hoped to avoid creating such an aristocracy. In addition, many farmers in the Tidewater region were switching to wheat after tobacco had depleted their soil. Since wheat required less labor, the change created a pool of surplus slaves and their offspring, whom the owners wanted to sell as dearly as possible. Meanwhile, those still growing tobacco wanted to keep production down to maintain prices.
Despite the burgesses’ fawning manner (“We, your Majesty’s dutiful and loyal Subjects . . . beg Leave, with all Humility, to approach your Royal Presence”), King George rejected their request. British merchants were making too much money from the slave trade to let it be banned, and the mother country wanted the colonies to produce as much raw material as they could. Nor did the king have any interest in encouraging the spirit of egalitarianism. His refusal of this and similar laws was mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and played an important role in the colonies’ decision to fight for their freedom.
In 1778 a newly independent Virginia finally outlawed the slave trade. Two years later the legislature voted to reward Revolutionary War veterans with three hundred acres of land —and a slave.
1847One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
Great Scott
On the morning of April 18, about eighty-five hundred United States troops led by Gen. Winfield Scott routed twelve thousand Mexicans at Cerro Gordo. Since capturing the seaport of Veracruz three weeks earlier, the American Army had marched inland virtually unmolested. Meanwhile, Mexico’s charismatic president, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, was rallying his scattered forces for a final stand at a mountain pass along the road to Mexico City. They had enough time to set up artillery, and as the Americans approached, their defenses looked formidable. But adept scouting by Lt. Robert E. Lee (who at one point lay motionless behind a log for hours to avoid capture) revealed that a path could be cut through dense wilderness behind the Mexican lines. The Americans attacked from front and rear simultaneously, and within three hours the overwhelmed and shattered Mexicans were fleeing in complete disarray. By April 24, having taken the cities of Jalapa and Perote without resistance, Scott could report that “Mexico no longer has an army.”
Unfortunately, the same could almost have been said for the United States. In theory, with no organized opposition, all Scott’s army had to do was march the two hundred miles to Mexico City. Moving actual troops, however, was a lot more complicated than shifting pins on a map. More than a thousand men in Scott’s command were on the sick list, and yellow fever threatened to strike many others with the arrival of warm weather. Meanwhile, the supply effort was hobbled by shortages of mules, teamsters, wagons, and money.
In addition, seven volunteer regiments were set to go home in May and June, when their twelve-month terms expired. Officers appealed to the men to re-enlist, but most had gotten their fill of military glory and did not look forward to a Mexican summer. Scott knew that any delay would allow the resourceful Santa Anna to organize a defense of Mexico City, yet he had no choice. After bloodlessly occupying Puebla, Mexico’s second-largest city, on May 15, the remnants of his army settled in for three months to recuperate, await reinforcements, and firm up supply lines.
As they paused from fighting the Mexicans, Scott and his fellow Americans enthusiastically continued fighting one another. The general was a Whig with political ambitions, while President James K. Polk was a Democrat, so each faced the difficult task of winning the war without letting the other claim any credit. Their combat had intensified on April 15, when Polk dispatched Nicholas Trist to negotiate a peace treaty. While Trist’s credentials identified him as “second in rank in the American department of foreign affairs,” Scott more accurately dismissed him as “chief clerk.” With few demonstrated abilities beyond a talent for making influential friends, Trist had apparently been chosen for the mission because he spoke Spanish.
After Trist’s arrival in Mexico, he and the general passed the time exchanging snide notes and whining to their superiors in Washington. Polk complained bitterly in his diary about the general’s high-handedness: “Gen’1 Scott arrogates to himself the right to be the only channel through which the U.S. government can properly communicate with the Government of Mexico on any subject.” Both men received stern orders to cut the posturing.
Scott made the first move in early July by sending Trist, who was ailing, a box of guava marmalade. Trist responded with a gracious note of thanks, and upon his recovery he and Scott met for the first time. They hit it off well, and soon both men wrote home begging their superiors to ignore their earlier harsh words. With one squabble cleared up (though many others remained), the American war and peace efforts would soon be ready for the push to Mexico City.
1872One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Go Plant a Tree
On April 10 the residents of Nebraska observed America’s first Arbor Day. Homesteaders across the state marked the occasion by breaking up the dreary plains with an assortment of fruit and forest trees. In establishing a day “especially set apart and consecrated for tree planting,” the state legislature had offered a hundred dollars to the county planting the most trees and twenty-five dollars’ worth of agricultural books to the most prolific individual. Whether motivated by profit or love of nature, the state’s two hundred thousand citizens planted a million trees before the day was over.
Arbor Day was the idea of Julius Sterling Morton, a pioneer settler, editor, and politician who since the mid-1850s had been offering his fellow Nebraskans advice on agriculture and numerous other subjects. There were many practical arguments in favor of tree planting: It held the soil in place, provided windbreaks, and furnished fruit and lumber. But equally important was its mitigating effect on Nebraska’s tedious scenery. In 1865 a railroad surveyor had described the area north of the Platte River as “a terrible country, the stillness, wildness & desolation of which is awful. Not a tree to be seen, nothing but a succession of hill & valley.” Two years later an Army doctor found “not a tree, bush, not even a stick of wood.” The isolation and monotony drove many early settlers insane.
Morton thought orchards could act as “missionaries of culture and refinement,” creating “a better and more thoughtful people.” He wrote: “If every farmer in Nebraska will plant out and cultivate an orchard and a flower garden, together with a few forest trees, this will become mentally and morally the best agricultural State, the grandest community of producers in the American Union. Children reared among trees and flowers growing up with them will be better in mind and in heart, than children reared among hogs and cattle.” Morton’s compatriots took his words to heart, and Nebraska was soon nicknamed the Tree-Planting State, with its farmers persisting in the practice through drought, economic depression, and infestations of grasshoppers. Within two decades they had planted almost four hundred million trees and seen Arbor Day adopted throughout the country. Today the state that pioneers found barren and treeless is home to two national forests, both planted entirely by human hands.
1897One Hundred Years Ago
“Why Harvard Does Not Win”
The April 17 issue of Harper’s Weekly addressed a growing social problem that in some quarters had come to overshadow tariffs, the Cuban crisis, and free silver. Under the headline WHY HARVARD DOES NOT WIN, John Corbin, class of 1892, struggled to account for the Crimson’s “consistent failure in athletics.” He considered and dismissed such possible causes as inadequate coaching, poor conditioning, and “the fog on Soldiers’ Field.” Instead, he concluded, “the prime source of Harvard’s weakness is social.”
The chief villain, Corbin decided, was Harvard’s byzantine club system. With social life centered on an assortment of arcane groups and subgroups bearing fanciful names like Dickey and Pudding, there was no chance for a university-wide esprit de corps to develop. The virtual elimination of required courses had also decreased social cohesion, as had the influx of students from outside the Boston area. The dreadful result: “At Harvard there is a large and growing element, even in the athletic set, that does not regard athletics as of supreme importance.” Later, in a tone more typical of his alma mater, the author sniffed: “Harvard’s very virtues as an institution of learning make it impossible to go in for sports with the all-absorbing enthusiasm of her rivals.” He suggested that as other, laggard colleges approached Harvard’s level of excellence, they would encounter the same athletic troubles.
A few weeks later Harper’s suggested another possible cause for the lack of interest in sports among Harvard men. They had, it seems, discovered better ways of passing the time. Edward Sandford Martin, class of 1877, reported that the university was finding it necessary to remind dormitory residents of “the unwritten but well-defined social rules that obtain in the community in which they are now living.” Specifically, Harvard’s frisky gentlemen had to be warned against entertaining ladies in their rooms without a chaperon, receiving them in the evening without notifying a proctor, or letting them wander through the dormitory halls unescorted. Whether the rules were meant to protect the ladies or the Harvard men was not disclosed, but Martin called them “very judicious” and said they presented “nothing which proper young men need resent.” Nonetheless they were resented.
Not to be outdone in athletic wimpiness, Harvard’s traditional rival came up with an even more shocking news item. A dispatch from Yale related the following “incredible story”: An oarsman had actually quit the crew following a disagreement with his coach. The skeptical writer called it “an impossible tale, and in direct contradiction of the Yale system, under which it has long been understood that men who can row must row.” He went on to predict a lifetime of shame for the recalcitrant Eli: “Where could he hide himself after graduation where the wrath of Yale would not reach him? What club would admit him as member? . . . What Yale man’s sister would he dare propose to?” Although peer pressure could not force the renegade back, Yale got the last laugh when its crew overcame his loss to defeat Harvard in their annual race. The reaction of Harvard’s student body is not recorded, but presumably they shrugged it off and returned to their Spinoza, or some other form of amusement.
1922Seventy-five Years Ago
The Teapot Starts to Boil
On April 15 Sen. John B. Kendrick of Wyoming introduced a resolution requesting information about “all proposed operating agreements” involving a government petroleum reserve known as Teapot Dome. The site, in Kendrick’s home state, had been set aside to provide a secure source of fuel for naval vessels, and when local oilmen heard rumors that it had secretly been leased, they asked Kendrick to investigate. He and Wyoming’s congressman, Franklin W. Mondell, had made informal inquiries at the Interior and Navy Departments and gotten a runaround. Kendrick, a Democrat, was not inclined to let charges against the Republican administration drop so easily.
Kendrick’s resolution quickly passed the Senate, and a few days later the Interior Department admitted that Teapot Dome had indeed been leased without bids being asked for. Secretary Albert Fall explained that time had been of the essence because the owners of adjoining lands were depleting the field by setting up wells along its edge. And since tensions with Japan were starting to flare up in the Pacific, Fall had thought it prudent to keep quiet his development of Teapot Dome, as well as of a similar naval reserve in California. The explanation satisfied most congressmen and the few members of the public who took any notice of the affair.
But Sen. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin smelled a rat. After decades spent fighting big business and government graft, he was not about to accept the private leasing of oil fields worth hundreds of millions of dollars (“a special privilege in value beyond the dreams of Croesus,” he called it) on the basis of a few bland assurances. On April 28 he pointed out to the Senate that during the prior three weeks stock speculators had made a thirty-million-dollar killing on shares of oil companies involved in the leases. Calling the Interior Department the “sluiceway for 90 percent of the corruption in government,” he demanded a full investigation. The Senate unanimously passed a resolution to that effect the next day.
Following this two-week flurry of attention, Teapot Dome seemed to disappear. Since La Follette was too busy to attend to the probe himself, Sen. Thomas J. Walsh of Montana took the reins. He spent a year and a half meticulously gathering evidence, chasing down leads, untangling corporate finances, and following money trails. During that time Secretary Fall retired, President Harding died, and development of the oil fields followed its normal course. By the time of the first Senate hearing, in October 1923, Teapot Dome had been virtually forgotten.
It did not stay forgotten for long. Walsh’s investigation revealed a tangle of perjury, influence buying, hush money, coded telegrams, unsecured loans, suitcases full of cash and bonds, secret meetings in private railcars, and mysterious improvements on Fall’s foundering New Mexico ranch. It also revealed a clueless Navy Secretary who was ignorant of the most basic workings of his department and thus an easy dupe for oil-business sharps. The Senate hearings stretched on for a year, and the last criminal prosecution was not concluded until the early 1930s. By that time Teapot Dome had become shorthand for a series of scandals that had permeated the Harding administration. It also symbolized the moral decadence of a freewheeling era that, as the Depression took hold, came to seem as remote as ancient Babylon.
1947Fifty Years Ago
End of the Road
On April 7 Henry Ford died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his estate in Dearborn, Michigan. The eighty-three-year-old Ford and his wife, Clara, were just back from their winter home in Georgia, and although he had been plagued by intermittent senility since a stroke in 1938, he was unusually active and chipper on what proved to be his last day on earth. He began by downing a hearty breakfast, visited his River Rouge plant, Greenfield Village, and two cemeteries, and then inspected flood damage on his estate. Heavy rains had submerged his private power plant, and the foreman suggested that he check into a hotel for the night. Ford, perhaps remembering his rural Michigan boyhood, laughed off the suggestion with “My gracious, we have fireplaces.”
That evening the electricity came back on long enough for Ford to listen to his favorite radio programs. Then it went out again. Around nine o’clock the couple went to bed. Two hours later Ford complained of a headache and a dry throat. His wife sent the chauffeur to fetch a doctor, but before one could arrive, Ford died. Power had not yet been restored in his mansion at the time of his death, and thus the greatest of all machine-age giants, whose genius had transformed American industry and brought the benefits of technology to millions of ordinary citizens, drew his final breath in a dim, chilly room heated only by fire and lit with flickering candles.
Crossing the Line
On April 15 Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in their opening-day game against the Boston Braves. In so doing, he became the first African-American to play in the major leagues since an abortive attempt at integration in 1884. Robinson’s courageous breaking of the color line would eventually have great repercussions inside baseball and out. Yet on the day of his momentous debut, fans and journalists alike were oddly blasé.
The main topic in New York newspapers reporting the game was the absence of Leo Durocher, the Dodgers’ manager since 1939, who had just been suspended for associating with gamblers. The next biggest item was Pete Reiser’s triumphant return to center field after breaking his ankle the previous year. Somewhere in the last few paragraphs most stories got around to discussing Brooklyn’s many new players, among them the “Negro lad,” who was twenty-eight at the time. On this historic occasion almost 6,000 of Ebbets Field’s 32,500 seats were empty, and the spectators who did show up were noticeably subdued, especially-by Brooklyn standards. After the game, though, about 250 mostly white autograph seekers did surround Robinson as he left the park.
Robinson’s signing of a major-league contract four days earlier had attracted greater notice. Some papers had taken it upon themselves to advise black fans on how they should act. The Sporting News offered this counsel: “To the Negro fan, let it be said that he must approach the new situation with understanding and patience, two qualities his race has long utilized in its amalgamation into American life, especially in the South.” The Amsterdam News, a local black paper, advised its readers to “have fun ... in a clean, healthy manner” without “ridiculous loud and uncouth jokes” and “fanatic dances.” It also discouraged drinking in the stands and joined The New York Times in condemning the boisterous antics of a few Robinson supporters at a recent exhibition game.
On the same day that Robinson debuted, an even more widely heralded player appeared in his first major league game, a can’t-miss kid named Clint Hartung. In 1946, against military teams stocked with big leaguers, Härtung had compiled a 25-0 pitching record and batted .567. During the next year’s spring training, as Hartung slammed home run after home run and predictions of stardom multiplied, the only question seemed to be whether the versatile New York Giants rookie would make the Hall of Fame as a pitcher or as a hitter. The Hondo Hurricane (as Hartung was dubbed after his Texas hometown) looked impressive in his first game, doubling in a run on the first pitch he saw and later singling and scoring from first on a two-base hit. Yet the lanky, laconic Hartung already showed two troubling weaknesses: He was a wretched fielder, and he could not hit a curve ball. The Giants shifted him to the mound, only to find that as a pitcher he made a pretty good hitter, while as a hitter he made a pretty good pitcher. Hartung spent six unspectacular years with the Giants before retiring in 1952. His name has since become a synonym for an overhyped phenom who fails to live up to his potential.
Naming the New War
On April 16 Bernard Baruch gave a name to something that had been developing for several years but was still inchoate in the public mind: the Cold War. In a speech before the legislature of his native South Carolina, on the occasion of the unveiling of his portrait, the venerable financier, humanitarian, and presidential adviser said: “Let us not be deceived —we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success.”
The phrase was not original with Baruch. In his autobiography he attributed it to his longtime friend the journalist Herbert Bayard Swope. As early as October 1945 George Orwell had used the same words to refer to a hostile peace, and the following March the London Observer employed them to describe Soviet policy toward Britain. Neither one drew much attention, so commentators made do with references to “current world events” or “Russia’s actions in Europe” until Baruch crystallized the situation in a compact, convenient form.
Baruch had begun his speech by comparing, rather questionably, the Allies’ plight after World War II to that of the South after the Civil War. He went on to stress the importance of industrial production in helping the country and the world rebuild. The centerpiece of Baruch’s address, a call for a forty-four-hour workweek through 1948 with pledges of no strikes or layoffs, was forgotten as instantly as his new phrase was accepted. Later in the year Walter Lippmann used The Cold War as the title of a collection of essays. The usage quickly became commonplace, and the postwar political vocabulary had its second great staple, after Winston Churchill’s coinage of “iron curtain” the previous May. A flood of clichés soon followed, such as peaceful coexistence, agonizing reappraisal, and massive retaliation, before deteriorating into reality-fogging locutions like mutual assured destruction and the blandly chilling megadeath.
1972Twenty-five Years Ago
Eat This
Early in the morning of April 7, Joseph (“Crazy Joe”) Gallo went to Umberto’s Clam House in New York City’s Little Italy for a late supper. With him were a pair of bodyguards and some family members, including his bride of three weeks. The veteran gangster, who was celebrating his forty-third birthday, had spent most of the night drinking champagne at the Copacabana. On arriving at Umberto’s at around four o’clock, he ordered what police later unhelpfully described as “Italian delicacies.” Gallo had just called for a second helping when a man burst in through a side door and started shooting at him with a pair of .38-caliber pistols. Customers screamed and dropped to the floor as Gallo’s bodyguards returned the fire. After about twenty shots were exchanged, the gunman fled in a waiting car as Gallo staggered out the door and collapsed in a pool of blood on Hester Street. Displaying the constabulary’s traditional gift for the obvious, the chief of detectives said, “This is a gangland operation.”
On the streets of Little Italy, residents discussed the hit like baseball fans analyzing a World Series game. “If you ask me,” one local told a New York Times reporter, “a bodyguard is there to shoot, not to get shot.” Another suggested that Gallo should have carried a gun himself. A man compared the incident to the previous year’s top movie: “It’s just like The Godfather. They filmed it down the block, you know. . . . You seen The Godfather’ Oh, you should. It’s really good.” In classic Little Italy style, a connoisseur implied that Gallo had deserved his fate for choosing an inferior restaurant: “I don’t know why he even went there. It’s just opened. You want decent food, you go to Vinnie’s down the block.”
The slaying was the latest episode in a feud between the Gallo and Colombo families, prominent members of New York’s underworld snake pit. As far back as 1957 Joey Gallo was thought to have assassinated the criminal kingpin Albert Anastasia in a Manhattan barbershop. In June 1971, just after his release from prison following an eight-year term for extortion, Gallo had ordered a hit on Joseph A. Colombo that left him incapacitated ("vegetabled,” in Gallo’s phrase). Since that time, as the Colombos fumed and sought revenge, Gallo had kept a high profile, associating with show-business figures (including the actor Jerry Orbach, who played a character based on Gallo in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight) and frequenting Broadway opening nights. The day before he was shot, he had started work as an “organizer” for Americans of Italian Descent, a rival civil rights group to the Colombos’ own Italian-American Civil Rights League.
Over the next week, as Gallo was buried in a five-thousand-dollar bronze coffin, at least four more gang members were killed. Prominent mobsters went into hiding, and not even Little Italy, traditionally neutral ground for all factions, was considered safe. Eventually the bloodbath subsided and the racketeers returned to their traditional occupations. But Umberto’s had acquired a reputation, and until its closing late last year, it was a rare visitor who could pass the corner of Hester and Mulberry without remarking, “This is where Joey Gallo got shot.” In fact, many neighborhood residents believe that Umberto’s notoriety is what kept it in business for so long. It certainly wasn’t the food.
