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THE TIME MACHINE
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Three Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Dutch Retreat
On July 28 Thomas Lovelace, brother of the royal governor of New York, rowed to Manhattan from his Staten Island farm with an urgent message: Dutch warships had been spotted approaching the city. Nine years earlier, with a similar naval invasion, England had taken over the Dutch colony of New Netherland, with Manhattan at its heart. Now the two countries were at war again, and as the town’s English residents had feared (and its more numerous Dutch residents had hoped), ships from Holland were back to reclaim their old territory. Since Manhattan was defended by a single creaky fort, its prospects against a naval bombardment were hopeless.
Nonetheless, Lovelace and the military commanders did what they could to mount a defense. They summoned the governor back from Connecticut and sent a messenger to Brooklyn to rouse the local militia (who, like many latter-day New Yorkers, prudently decided not to get involved). A dozen or so English citizens joined perhaps seventy soldiers in the fort and waited for the Dutch armada to arrive.
When morning came, eight warships could be seen in the harbor. Hundreds of Dutch citizens thronged the waterfront to cheer their countrymen. Some of them had rowed out to the ships the evening before and revealed how weak the city’s defenses were. Others had spiked the guns in front of city hall. A Dutch captain landed for a parley, and when Lovelace asked to see his commission, he replied, “It’s stuck in the mouth of my guns.”
Following an hour or two’s exchange of fire, a landing party demanded and got the fort’s surrender. After nine years of English rule, New York was New Netherland again. Most of the English residents were kicked out, and the Dutch established a new government and laws for the colony, which included Manhattan, Staten Island, much of Lone Island, and the Hudson and Delaware Valleys. The revised code banned gambling, prostitution, and the playing of sports on Sundays. Sunday liquor sales were also restricted, “not that a stranger or citizen shall not buy a drink of wine or beer for the assuagement of his thirst, but only to prevent the sitting of clubs on the Sabbath whereby many are hindered from resorting to divine worship.”
Although the war’s main theater was in Europe, England made halfhearted efforts to recover its lost American colony. One Bostonian urged the king to send troops, calling New York the “navel of his Majesty’s American territories.” (While he may not have considered what that would make New Jersey, the phrase was curiously appropriate, since the Dutch had renamed New York City as New Orange.) Solidarity among the English colonies was weak, however, and while neighboring Connecticut tried to stir up opposition, most New Englanders saw no reason to risk men and resources for the benefit of King Charles when they had no real quarrel with the Dutch. When the captain of an English frigate tried to raise an invasion force in Boston late in 1673, he was attacked and wounded in the street and had to be rescued by his men.
In the end the English regained New York at a table in Westminster. As Europe’s states and statelets reshuffled their alliances in the turbulent 1670s, it became expedient for England and Holland to make peace. Like a utility infielder, New Netherland became a throw-in in a deal between major powers. On October 31, 1674, on orders from home (and to the disgust of most of its inhabitants), the government of New Netherland turned over the colony to England. From that day forward the Dutch were forever gone from North America.
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One Hundred Years Ago
The White Man’s Burden
When an armistice ended the Spanish-American War on August 12, the United States found itself with three major new territories obtained in three different ways. The first was Hawaii, annexed on July 7 with the President’s signature on a joint congressional resolution. The islands, controlled by a friendly American-installed government, had shown their value as a naval base, and in the exhilaration of impending victory over Spain, America took up a long-standing offer to absorb them. Next came Puerto Rico, which was invaded in late July and conquered over light resistance with the war winding down. (Theodore Roosevelt had written to Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge: “Give my best love to Nannie and do not make peace until we get Porto Rico.”) Then there were the Philippines, which fell into America’s lap in a nineteenth-century example of mission creep: After Admiral Dewey’s sinking of the Spanish fleet there on May 1, it became necessary to secure Manila Harbor to protect and supply his ships, and security concerns eventually dictated occupation of the entire archipelago.
Nearby Puerto Rico aroused the least antagonism. The New York Times endorsed “keeping it for all time” while discouraging “doubtful experiments at self-government” by its residents. A fastidious Harper’s Weekly correspondent limited himself to mild criticism of the Puerto Ricans’ grooming habits (“Bad soap is found everywhere. . . . One seldom sees manicure sets. . .”), and the publication briefly tried calling the island’s capital St. John.
Faraway Hawaii and the Philippines elicited much more opposition, with racial considerations playing a large part. Harper’s was so fond of Europe and its people that when war broke out, it could barely admit that Spain was part of the continent: “The Spaniards are the last remnants of white barbarians, and, like their prototypes of the Middle Ages, whom they closely resemble, they have the savage instincts and methods that are found nowhere else in civilized Europe in this nineteenth century except in Turkey, and, with the exception of Spain and Turkey, are found only among the uncivilized red men of the remote regions of our own continent, and the brown and black and yellow men of Africa and Asia.”
When the Senate vote on Hawaii approached, though, Harper’s suddenly developed a sympathy for nonwhite peoples: “Say what we will against black and brown and yellow men, it has never before been contended that it is in accordance with the spirit of our institutions to seize their lands and to put them under the rule of our President or our Congress.” This time around, the color red was carefully omitted.
The New York Times was blunter: “We have opposed annexation [of Hawaii] … because we did not at all like this new brand of Americans, the least pleasant to sit with at table or in church of any human beings we could find on the habitable globe.” It stressed the need to send competent colonial officials since “there can be no voting there—in this case we must govern without the consent of the governed.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch agreed: “The majority of the Hawaiian people are hopeless barbarians, utterly incapable of self-government and unable even to understand the notion of ordered freedom.”
As for the Philippines, some Americans wondered why we had to subjugate 8 million Filipinos in order to liberate 1.6 million Cubans. But it was unthinkable to hand the islands back to Spain, and even more so to leave the locals in charge. After all, the New York Tribune pointed out: “Cannibals govern themselves. The half-ape creatures of the Australian bush govern themselves. The Eskimo governs himself and so do the wildest tribes of Darkest Africa. But what kind of government is it?” And Harper’s explained: “The Filipino is the true child of the east. His moral fibre is as flimsy as the web of the pineapple gauze of which the women make their dresses. He will cheat, steal, and lie beyond the orthodox limit of the Anglo-Saxon. His unreliability and the persistency with which he disobeys orders are irritating beyond description; besides this, his small stature and color invite abuse.” Thus did America, not without reluctance, take up “the white man’s burden.” The experiment would end in independence for the Philippines in 1946 and statehood for Hawaii in 1959, with Puerto Rico’s final status still to be determined.
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Seventy-five Years Ago
The Death and Demise of Harding
At 17:30 P.M. on August 2, President Warren G. Harding died suddenly, from either a stroke or a heart attack, in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. His death came near the end of a planned seven-week tour of the Midwest, the West, and Alaska, after which he would have sailed back to Washington through the Panama Canal. The trip had been intended to lift the President’s spirits and revive his failing health, but aides had packed his schedule with political events, leaving him little time for rest. In lackluster speeches along the way, Harding endorsed the World Court, discussed agricultural policy and railroad consolidation, and vigorously endorsed Prohibition. To support this last goal, he tried to give up drinking himself, with frequent but not total success. In an era before air conditioning, stifling heat plagued the presidential party throughout the trip. Even in Fairbanks, Alaska, the temperature reached ninety-four degrees.
As the journey went on, the President’s condition deteriorated. Alaska’s midnight sun severely disrupted his already troubled sleep, and during a speech in Seattle on July 27, he was noticeably worn out, pausing several times to compose himself. That evening his doctor, Charles Sawyer, confined him to bed, though Harding insisted on continuing to San Francisco as planned. Headlines from the San Francisco Chronicle give the remainder of the grim story. July 29: HARDING ILL, DUE HERE TODAY. July 30: HARDING CANCELS STATE TRIP; SAWYER CALLS IN SPECIALISTS. July 31: HARDING HAS PNEUMONIA; CONDITION THREATENING. August 1: PRESIDENT HARDING BETTER, THOUGH DANGER NOT PASSED. August 2: PRESIDENT RAPIDLY IMPROVING. August 3: HARDING DEAD.
Workmen tore down the festive bunting that had decorated the city and replaced it with funeral wreaths. In Plymouth Notch, Vermont, Calvin Coolidge took the presidential oath (administered by his father, a notary public) on the family Bible by the light of two kerosene lamps in the kitchen of his father’s farmhouse. An estimated three million Americans lined up to watch the train that had taken Harding across the country, now draped in black, carry his coffin back to Washington. Many laid coins on the tracks to be flattened and retrieved for souvenirs. In Omaha forty thousand people saw the train arrive at 3:00 A.M. After lying in state in the White House and the Capitol, Harding’s body was taken back to Marion, Ohio, for burial. The engineer on that trip, J. H. Cronenwett, had been a grade school classmate of the late President.
Although portents of scandal had been a great strain during his final months, Harding enjoyed a clean reputation and was widely beloved at his death. The ensuing years were not kind to him. His widow, who had been in poor health herself before the fatal trip, obtained many of his public and private papers and methodically destroyed anything embarrassing before she, too, died in November 1924. By then Teapot Dome and related scandals had diminished Harding’s stature considerably. While there was little evidence that Harding himself had been directly involved, a public unaccustomed to presidential wrongdoing was stunned at the extent of the corruption.
Then in 1927 came another shocker: Hoarding’s mistress Nan Britton published details of their years-long affair and supposed illegitimate child. At that time Americans expected their President to be faithful to his wife, and since Britton’s correspondence was not available, it could not be quoted to blacken her reputation. Harding’s memorial tomb in Marion was finished that year, but President Coolidge declined an invitation to dedicate it. Not until 1931 did President Herbert Hoover, who had served in Harding’s cabinet, agree to participate in installing the former President’s remains in their final resting place.
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