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The Birdmen At Belmont Park
The first major international aviation meet in the United States opened at belmont Park, a race track near New York City, in October, 1910, on a surge of sensational aeronautic news. Early in the month, newspapers told of leading fliers flexing their wings at Hawthorne race track, near Chicago, for a race of a thousand miles, Chicago to New York, for a price of $25,000 offered by the New York...
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The Myth Of The Happy Yeoman
The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city. From the beginning its political values and ideas were of necessity shaped by country life. The early American politician, the country editor, who wished to address himself to the common man, had to draw upon a rhetoric that would touch the tillers of the soil; and even the spokesman of city people knew that his audience had...
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“moschetoes Were Uncommonly Numerous”
Late in the evening of August 21, 1793. Dr. Benjamin Rush, Philadelphia’s most prominent physician, sat down “much fatigued” to write to his wife to inform her that a “malignant lever” had broken out on the city’s water front. The disease, which had carried off twelve persons, was “violent and of short duration.” “It had,” he wrote, “in one case killed in twelve hours,” and in no case had it...
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Pack-road To Yesterday
The sea and the deep broad bays and rivers sweeping far into the continent ottered the early American colonists their easiest and cheapest highroad for commerce and communications. There were literally tens of thousands of miles of shore line which could be reached handily by boat, yet because of some perverse streak in man’s nature it wasn’t long before a number of restless people packed their...
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William Phips And The Big Jackpot
  For over two and a hall centuries now a persistent myth has haunted the minds of certain restless Americans. It is the dream of the big bonanza, or the jackpot—the jump from poverty to affluence overnight in one supernatural stroke of fortune. Historians, of course, must be chary about naming the exact source of any legend. It is reasonable, however, to give a large share of the...
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Benjamin Franklin And The French Alliance
“Our want of powder is inconceivable,” wrote Washington in the bitter early days of the Revolution. So too was our want of guns, supplies, and everything needed in a war against one of the major powers of the earth. Above all we needed an ally. And so the man who believed that there never was a good war or a bad peace, old Dr. Benjamin Franklin, a man laden with the world’s honors who might...
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If Only Mr. Madison Had Waited—
The War of 1812 has never quite lived up to, and never quite lived down, its title of The Second War of Independence. The suspicion that it was unnecessary, the fact that it was inconclusive, the fog of disunion, apathy, and muddle that hangs about it—these provide a dismal context for its heroic episodes and figures. Even so great a reputation as that of James Madison has been somewhat stained...
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They Keep Tearing It Down
The other day they were tearing down the Irving House. It is too old; it has been built at least ten years. … New York is notoriously the largest and least loved of any of our great cities. Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years together. A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew. If he chance to...
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A Record Filled With Sunlight
Rolling plains covered with dry bunch grass stretch for miles on every side. Far on the northern horizon lifts an enormous square-topped butte, giving individuality to that quarter of the landscape. Westward, faint in the distance but brought into hard relief as the sun sets, are penciled the snowy peaks of an isolated mountain chain; and close inspection shows that near their base the country...
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It Happens Every Four Years
The national political convention is a device not provided for by the nation’s founding fathers. It came into being only after a number of presidential elections had been held, it was originally an occasional convenience rather than an established habit, and it became an essential part of political life only after the electoral machinery had developed ominous creakings. The truth of the matter...
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The Lighter Side Of Politics
America’s political conventions have always—or almost always—been deadly serious affairs, with politicians, statesmen, and just plain citizens getting together to put dignified men in nomination for the highest office in the land. But out of these portentous gatherings have come some of the most colorful and, at times, the most lighthearted effervescences of the American political spirit. Gaudy...
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Zion In The Forest
There is a legend about Roger Williams that is exceedingly popular among Americans. There is also a truth which is slowly emerging from the welter of fancies. The truth is less simple than the legend, for most legends are oversimplifications. But it has some even more dramatic aspects than the beloved myth and it accords better, too, with the mental development of the normal human being. If it...
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Mr. Smith’s American Acropolis
In 1900 the United States had an inferiority complex. It had come of age in practical affairs. It had developed, as Mr. Franklin W. Smith of Boston pointed out in his Petition to Congress, the world’s best form of government. For a century its energies and skills and intelligence had been devoted to material development, to the creation of mines, factories, transcontinental railroads, and tunnels...
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Burgoyne and America's Destiny.
Not long alter the distressing events—from a British standpoint—at Concord and Lexington, and while heavy reinforcements were pouring into Boston to aid the beleaguered General Gage, one ship was observed to have brought an indeed notable cargo. Aboard this lucky craft, the Cerberus, were three of His Majesty’s generals, all members (in absentia) of the House of Gommons, and all destined to play...
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Dynamic Victoria Woodhull
Mrs. John Biddulph Martin, widow of a rich English banker and sister of the Viscountess of Montserrat, lived to the ripe old age of 89 and, in 1927 died in the odor of sanctity, much esteemed for her charitable works. Which was a scandal in the eyes of those who esteemed themselves as right-thinkers.It was then belief, which they had done their best to translate into action, that she should have...
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Varnish For The Nabobs
When, in the Colorado mid-Seventies, the Rocky Mountain News of Denver reported that aboard “Nomad,” the narrow-gauge private car of General William Jackson Palmer, builder of the Rio Grande Railroad, there was both hot and cold running water, the old gentleman was outraged. Not only did the discussion of such intimate matters constitute a violation of privacy: it also made him—an old campaigner...
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Legend Of The South
There are many ways of looking at the now-vanished plantation society of the pre-Civil War South. One of them is the way of legend—white-pillared plantation, a leisured and courtly life centering in it, charming women and gallant men consciously living up to a tradition which has lingered on as a memory long after the reality has gone.A small bit of that legend—faithful to the magnolia-and-roses...
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The River Houses
In southern Louisiana, along the misty, turbulent lower Mississippi, can be found some of the most evocative relics of the American past. These plantation houses—a few preserved, but most in ruins now, nearly hidden by the humid lushness of cypress and hanging moss—are what remain of the last great non-urban culture in the United States.This was a culture that reached its apogee in the 1840’s and...
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One Who Survived
Day after day, the sun, the sea, and the sharks cut down the men who clung to the “doughnut” raft Of all the men who have gone down to the sea in ships, none has clung to life with more tenacity, or lived to tell a more graphic story, than Allen Clifton Heyn, gunner’s mate second class, one of the ten survivors of more than seven hundred men aboard the U.S. light cruiser Juneau. AMERICAN...
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The Good Soldier White
I enlisted in the regiment of artillery commanded by Col. Richard Gridley, the beginning of May 1775, for 8 months, as a bombardier, in Capt. Samuel Gridley’s company; but had not been very long in that capacity, before the Adjutant came to me and said, I understand that you are a good speller, I told him I could spell most any word. Why cannot you come and be my Assistant said he. … He said he...
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Jackson’s Fight With The ‘Money Power’
Editor's Note: Bray Hammond wrote this essay for American Heritage in 1956 and developed it into Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1958.“Relief, sir!” interrupted the President. “Come not to me, sir! Go to the monster. It is folly, sir, to talk to Andrew Jackson. The government will not bow to the monster...
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Reading, Writing And History
For an Emotional Understanding Think Again The Other Extreme Let the Peole Know Mr. Lincoln’ Weapons Desolate South The Town Hall
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For An Emotional Understanding
Very few facts of any real consequence still remain to be dug up about the American Civil War. History’s secrets have been largely disclosed. We know about that war just about as much as our grandchildren will know, and the area of our knowledge today is not very much broader than it was a generation ago. Most of the returns are in, and they have long since been tabulated and analyzed. Yet...
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Think Again
This re-examination of the Civil War, however, is not entirely a matter of emotional understanding. As David Donald points out, it is also a matter for the mental processes—for “rethinking,” as he expresses it, for taking the enormous mass of data and looking it over carefully, for trying to determine (now that the jury has all of the important facts) just what the verdict ought to be. Mr....
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The Other Extreme
From Lee and Lincoln to General Daniel E. Sickles is about as long a stride as one can take and still remain in the field of the Civil War. If Lee was nobility of spirit personified, Sickles was little better than an outright heel. A man of immense drive and energy, he was singularly lacking in principle. To him the whole immense conflict was little more than an opening by which a canny fellow...
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Let The People Know
The reporters who covered the war for northern newspapers were an unusual lot. They came on the scene, really, before they were ready. The concept of the newspaperman as an unbiased chap who is simply trying to tell an accurate story of important events without regard for any other considerations had hardly begun to dawn on the journalistic profession in 1861; yet here, suddenly, was a...
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Mr. Lincoln’s Weapons
Abraham Lincoln represented the frontier in many ways, not the least of which was the fact that he was an incurable linkerer. Mechanical appliances fascinated him. The frontiersman had so many chunks of hard manual labor to perform that any mechanical shortcut was bound to strike his fancy: Lincoln had tried his own hand at inventing, and the man with an interesting gadget to display could...
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Desolate South
A good part of the South was a wasteland by the summer of 1865. Where the armies had gone there was outright physical devastation; where they had not gone there was the desolation due to the collapse of an economy and a social system. Across this wasteland, a few months after Appomattox, went a Yankee reporter to take notes on what he saw and to try to render a report on what the war had left...
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The Town Hall
In the Elegant Eighties and Naughty Nineties, Town Halls flourished like mushrooms on American soil. To them flocked entertainment-hungry audiences who laughed and wept and cheered for political speakers and minstrel shows and pure-young-girls-betrayed and Mark Twain. Harlowe R. Hoyt has re-created in Town Hall Tonight the whole gaudy world of the grass roots theater, from P. T. Barnum’s...
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Lore Of The Woodworker
Today furniture is often made from just one kind of wood. In the old days, when people knew wood better, a simple rocking chair might contain as many as seven kinds of wood. The hard woods were used for pegging, with still harder wood to peg the pegs; soft wood cradled the load and springy woods carried the weight. Old chairs creak during weather changes, and creaking has much to do with their...
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The Devil And John Randolph
One day during the winter of 1831-32, an excited John Randolph of Roanoke sat at his desk inside the lonely plantation house in Charlotte County, Virginia, and began to write a letter. With his quill, he set down five jerky sentences, folded and sealed the paper, and on the Iront scrawled this address: To the Honorable Waller Holladay, Esquire, of the county of Spotsylvania, of...
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Reading, Writing And History
A correspondent first for the Chicago Times and later for the New York Herald, Sylvanus Cadwallader was attached to Grant’s headquarters during the greater part of the war. Years after the war ended he wrote his memoirs. They offer a highly intimate picture of the famous general, and if Cadwallader’s recital is accepted as authentic they constitute a source which no student of Federal army...
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The Printer Was A Devil
Proudly the sober Philadelphia type foundry of MacKellar, Smiths...
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It Was Fun Soldier
On the night of May 23, 1861, the First New York Fire Zouaves led the march across the Long Bridge, headed for Alexandria, Virginia. It was the very beginning of war, and the lovely moonlit scene, the steady tramp of boots, and the Hashing rows of bayonets made a lasting impression on the boys who were there. For each of them it was the beginning of a great adventure, and at this particular...
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The Training Of Woodrow Wilson
 On March 4, 1910, Woodrow Wilson was completing his eighth year as president of Princeton University; he had never held, or even run for, any public othce; outside academic circles he was relatively unknown. Three years later he was President of the United States. Surely in all our history no American ever vaulted to political prominence with such spectacular rapidity. Even Theodore...
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The Prince Of Swindlers
The power of the imagination to triumph over the world of practicality has so Car i’ound its chieC American exemplar not in any creative artist, philosophical visionary, or religious zealot but in a gold brick salesman. His name was fames Addison Reavis. He lent the full range of his talents to only one undertaking, but in so doing he accomplished what neither Indian tribes nor foreign nations...
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They All Were Born In Log Cabins
The United States had ten presidential elections before it had a campaign biography, but since 182 i no significant candidate has tried lor the nation’s major office without the aid of a book setting forth his IiIe story. The tradition was begun by supporters ol Andrew Jackson, as was fitting lor the first contender to appeal to the people at large. Old Hickory received the greatest electoral...
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How They Killed The Buffalo
Stories of the vast size of the buffalo herds that once roamed the Great Plains of the West sound like the imaginings of a Paul Bunyan. They would hardly be credited today except that they were attested by many reliable travelers and by early settlers. Often the herds of shaggy beasts darkened the whole horizon. In 1832, after skirting the north fork of the Platte River, Captain Benjamin...
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The Needless Conflict
When James Buchanan, standing in a homespun suit belore cheering crowds, took the oath of office on March 4, 1857, he seemed confident that the issues belore the nation could be readily settled. He spoke about an army road to California, use of the Treasury surplus to pay all the national debt, anil proper guardianship of the public lands. In Kansas, he declared, the path ahead was clear. The...
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Kate Was Too Ambitious
It was May of 1863, and the shadows of war darkened Washington and spread across the land. Hut it was spring, and as the dogwood burst into (lower, the capital turned its attention lor a moment from Chancellorsville and Vicksburg to discuss a romance. Finally, after a tempestuous courtship of two years, the fascinating Kate Chase and Senator William Sprague III were engaged. They were to...
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Brashers Birds
Rex Brasher, 86 years old and living in quiet retirement in Gaylordsville, Connecticut, is the only man who is known to have painted all the birds oi North America. This prodigious I eat was accomplished alter a lifetime spent tramping by loot over a large part oi the country, sketchbook in hand, slipping along the seaboard in a small sloop, lying motionless and observant in meadows and...
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Fire Makes Wind: Wind Makes Fire
One of America’s great disasters might just as well have happened in a void so far as public knowledge of it is concerned. This was the tragedy of the Peshtigo Iorest fire in Wisconsin, during which some twelve hundred people lost their lives on the evening of October 8, 1871. By an incomparable irony of l’a te, this happened also to be the night when, in the barn of a Mrs. O’Leary, a...
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Who Put The Borax In Dr. Wiley’s Butter?
On a hot and humid July morning in 1902, a burly, aoo-pound scientist and connoisseur of good food and drink sat hunched over his desk in a red brick building in Washington and planned deliberately to feed twelve healthy young men a diet containing borax. Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, had in mind a double objective: first, to determine the effects upon...
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Empires In The Northwest
The English were still nursing the dream of a Northwest Passage to the Orient. The Spanish were trying to nail down the ancient edict of Pope Alexander VI which made the whole Pacific a Spanish lake. The Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, thought it would be a neat coup if he could beat the maritime powers at their own game of exploration. Thus it was that the power drives of three European...
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Hats On For General Washington
It was my privilege some time ago to discuss the fundamentals of American government with President Eisenhower. The talk led to George Washington. Mr. Eisenhower said that, in his view, the great hour of Washington’s life came at Valley Forge where, militarily speaking, Washington achieved a miracle.I doubt anyone will want to gainsay Mr. Eisenhower on a military opinion. On the other hand,...
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Error By Mrs. Stowe
The slave had nothing to lose but his chains, and even second-class citizenship is a vast improvement on outright bondage. But it is at the same time a denial of one of the basic parts of the infinite American dream, and its existence brings problems of its own. The Emancipation Proclamation did not, unfortunately, do anything to end the race problem; it simply committed the country to an...
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And The Middle West
Maybe Mrs. Stowe wasn’t so big, after all. She fulminated against slavery, and a great many high-minded people listened and took fire, but the blaze that finally killed slavery was not really kindled that way. New England was the big center of abolitionist fervor, but slavery really died because of the Middle West, which had small use for fervor (outside of New England enclaves like Ohio’s...
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The Grand Army Of The Republic
“Let us cross the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” —Stonewall Jackson
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Best Prepared Pioneers In The West
In all the history of the American frontier, only two bands of pioneers achieved near-perfect order while advancing westward and planting their settlements. One was made up of the Puritans who founded their wilderness Zion on the shores of Massachusetts Bay during the early Seventeenth Century. Welded into a tight-knit social group by a fanatical faith in their God and His earthly prophets, and...
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Everybody Liked Henry Clay
He was tall and he was homely, but in a way people generally find endearing. Amid all those high stocks and flowing locks, among all those grim statesmen and noble Romans who populated the first five decades of our Nineteenth-Century political life, his is one ol the lew genial figures. Over the gap of a century, he is still warm and likeable; a modern man might, one senses, sit down with him...
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