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Did Castro Ok The Kennedy Assassination?
On September 24, 1964, a copy of the official Warren Commission Report was delivered to President Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office. Its conclusions were, in hindsight, as accurate as possible, given the commission's impossibly short investigative calendar and its utter lack of foreign intelligence. It named, correctly, Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone shooter, hypothesizing that in shooting John F...
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Lincoln’s Legacy
During the campaign of 1860, and throughout what Henry Adams would justly call the “Great Secession Winter” that fell like a shadow after that year’s momentous presidential election, a convincing case could be made that Abraham Lincoln was totally unprepared to assume the nation—s highest office, particularly at the hour of its gravest domestic crisis. At best a dark horse, Lincoln had...
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Lincoln & Douglass
At dusk in early April 1866, a large crowd filed into Representatives Hall of the imposing Illinois Capitol in Springfield. Just 11 months earlier, President Lincoln’s rapidly blackening body had lain here in state as thousands of townspeople had filed past to say goodbye.Now many of the same people gathered to hear a lecture entitled “The Assassination and Its Consequences,” delivered by the...
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Lincoln The Orator
On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln stood before a crowd of 1,500 at Cooper Union Hall in New York City. Until he had declared his candidacy for President of the United States, the former one-term Congressman had drawn little attention outside his home state of Illinois. Now the rail-thin prairie lawyer attracted a sizeable audience, including the “pick and flower of New York culture,” along...
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Lincoln And The Navy
In May 1862, two months after the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack ) fought to a draw in Hampton Roads, Virginia, President Abraham Lincoln traveled south from Washington on a revenue cutter to visit the Army of the Potomac, intending to prod his recalcitrant general, George B. McClellan, into action. The president took with him Secretary of War...
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If Lincoln Hadn’t Died...
What would have happened had Abraham Lincoln not been assassinated? Every time I lecture on Lincoln, the Civil War, or Reconstruction, someone in the audience is sure to pose this question—one, of course, perfectly natural to ask but equally impossible to answer. This has not, however, deterred historians from speculating about this “counterfactual” problem.The answer to the question depends in...
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Wall Street’s First Collapse
Wall Street’s first bubble swelled burst in the spring of 1792, exerting a profound effect on American politics and society. Nine years after the Treaty of Paris and the acknowledgement of the former colonies— independence, both Europe and America lay in turmoil. The French Revolution was showing its first symptoms of radical violence. In March an assassin’s bullet felled Sweden’s King Gustav III...
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The Battle Of The Little Bighorn
Act 1: The CharactersIN LATE MAY 1876, SITTING BULL climbed a butte near the Rosebud River, just south of the Yellowstone. Not far from this eroded projection of rock-capped earth was a village of more than 400 tepees spread out for almost a mile along the bright green valley of the north-flowing river. The great Lakota Sioux leader was about 45 years old, his legs bowed from a boyhood of riding...
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The Pony Rides Again (and Again)
Shortly before last Christmas, a prominent New York auction house put up for bid a collection of 63 postmarked envelopes and stamps that the daring riders of the Pony Express had carried 150 years ago. Experts estimated that the rare collection, owned by Thurston Twigg-Smith, an 88-year-old philanthropist and former publisher of the Honolulu Advertiser, might net $2.5 million. It drew $4 million...
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Franklin Charms Paris
By the time John Adams arrived in Paris in early 1778 to replace American diplomat Silas Deane, there was only one American name on everyone’s lips: Ambassador Benjamin Franklin. “His name was familiar to government and people,” groused the envious Adams. “To foreign courtiers, nobility, clergy and philosophers, as well as plebians, to such a degree there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a...
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Sizzling Satchel Paige
April 1926Leroy “Satchel” Paige, arguably the greatest pitcher ever to throw a baseball, was as green as a big league infield that April day in 1926 when he joined his first professional team, the all-black Chattanooga White Sox. Everything he owned—a couple of shirts, an extra pair of socks, underwear wrapped in an old pair of pants—still fit into a brown paper sack, the same as it had eight...
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Roanoke’s Lost Colony Found?
One hot august day in 1590, the heavily armed privateer Hopewell dropped anchor off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. John White had returned to resupply the 118 men, women, and children whom he had left on Roanoke Island three long years earlier.Sweating and cursing the humidity, White and his men left their ship and rowed toward the island. Crewmen sounded familiar tunes on trumpets to alert...
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Compromise 1: Philadelphia Story
In September 1789, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote in dismay to his old friend Thomas Jefferson, who was an ocean away in Paris. “I hazard an opinion,” he lamented, “that the plan should it be adopted will neither effectively answer the national object nor prevent the local mischiefs which everywhere excite disgust against the state governments.”Madison had come...
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Compromise - Finding A Way Forward
Compromise has become a bad word for many in the political sphere. Yet our history shows that it’s the way things get done and how the country moves forward. From our founders who cobbled together the Constitution to the genial dealmaking of Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, the will to compromise has proven not only a virtue but our saving grace in times of crisis. Of course, fierce political...
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Compromise 2: Missouri, Slave Or Free?
On February 13, 1819, 35-year-old Congressman William Cobb unfolded his six-foot frame from his chair in the chamber of the Old Brick Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and locked his gray eyes on James Tallmadge Jr. of New York. There was little love lost between the grandson of Georgia’s most famous patriarch and the accomplished city lawyer. They had tangled on issues before, Cobb...
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Compromise 3: Clay and The 1850 Debate
On a raw evening in winter of 1850, a weary-looking, feeble, and desperately ill old man arrived unannounced at the Washington, D.C. residence of Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky had come to seek Webster’s help in his battle to save the Union. He believed that Webster’s legendary eloquence would be essential in preventing what appeared to be a headlong rush by...
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Compromise 4: Whittling Down The New Deal
Not long after Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in on March 4, 1933, he began work on his “big bill.” It embraced several of his highest aspirations: universal health care, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and more, including a provision to make the federal government the employer of last resort in what many economists considered a “mature” economy whose private-sector employment...
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Compromise 5: Medicare’s Complicated Birth
In 1965, after winning in a landslide against Barry Goldwater and helping to carry Democratic supermajorities into both houses of Congress, President Lyndon Johnson set out to enact a battery of Great Society reforms, including Medicare, government insurance for seniors. Despite his political mandate, 60 years of conservative opposition to such a measure meant proceeding with caution. Later,...
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America's Bloodiest Battle
On October 11, 1918, late in the afternoon, a platoon of American doughboys marched to the front in eastern France, passing shattered villages, forests reduced to matchsticks, and water-filled shell craters. At every step the Americans struggled to free their boots from the slopping mud. Icy wind and rain slashed at their clothing, and water poured in steady streams from the rims of their helmets...
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The Summer Of Our Discontent
On the first day of summer in 1964, three young activists piled into a blue station wagon in Meridian, Mississippi, and headed into Klan country.Across America, it was Father’s Day, a lazy holiday of picnics, barbecues, and doubleheaders. Transistor radios blared early Beatles hits. TV commercials urged motorists to “Put a Tiger in Your Tank.” High above in Air Force One, President Lyndon Johnson...
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The Speech That Made The Man
On the frigid and stormy evening of February 27, 1860, so the newspapers reported, Abraham Lincoln climbed onto the stage of the cavernous Great Hall of New York’s newest college, Cooper Union, faced a room overflowing with people, and delivered the most important speech of his life.Or so the myths maintained. In truth, a quarter of the hall’s 1,800 plush seats remained empty for the evening’s...
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The Sparck Of Rebellion
On the evening of December 16, 1773, in Boston, several score Americans, some badly disguised as Mohawk Indians, their faces smudged with blacksmith’s coal dust, ran down to Griffin’s Wharf, where they boarded three British vessels. Within three hours, the men—members of the Sons of Liberty, an intercolonial association bent on resisting British law—had cracked open more than 300 crates of...
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Madison’s Radical Agenda
On May 5, 1787, James Madison arrived in Philadelphia. He was a diminutive young Virginian—about five feet three inches tall, 130 pounds, 36 years old—who, it so happened, had thought more deeply about the political problems posed by the current government under the Articles of Confederation than any other American.Madison had concluded that the loose confederation of states was about to collapse...
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"Little Short Of Madness"
As mayor of New York City and later as governor of New York State, De Witt Clinton crusaded so zealously for a canal connecting Albany to Buffalo that the project became known as “Clinton’s Ditch.” It was a dream of pharaonic proportions—a 363-mile-long artificial waterway that most people considered impossible. President Thomas Jefferson called it “little short of...
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What Hath God Wrought
On May 24, 1844, Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, seated in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, tapped a message into a device of cogs and coiled wires, employing a code that he had recently devised to send a biblical text: “What hath God wrought.” Forty miles away in Baltimore, Morse’s associate Alfred Vail received the electric signals and returned the message. As those who...
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The Golden Touch
On February 5, 1895, the Jupiter of American banking, J. P. Morgan, took the train from New York to Washington to see the president. He had no appointment but came to discuss matters of grave national interest. The crash of 1893 had thrown the country into deep depression, exposed a schizophrenic monetary policy, and now the nation’s gold standard stood on the brink of collapse. The origin...
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“A Machine Of Practical Utility”
On the morning of October 5, 1905, Amos Stauffer and a field hand were cutting corn when the distinctive clatter and pop of an engine and propellers drifted over from the neighboring pasture. The Wright boys, Stauffer knew, were at it again. Glancing up, he saw the flying machine rise above the heads of the dozen or so spectators gathered along the fence separating the two fields. The machine...
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Placards At The White House
By New Year’s Day 1917, Alice Paul, leader and founder of the National Woman’s Party, had made up her mind. Ever since coming home from studying abroad in 1910, the University of Pennsylvania PhD in political science had observed the ineffective American women’s suffrage movement with increasing impatience. She believed that for women to gain the vote—no matter how radical such a step might seem...
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Miracle Workers
On April 26, 1954, six-year-old Randy Kerr stood first in line at his elementary school gymnasium in McLean, Virginia, sporting a crew cut and a smile. With assembly-line precision, a nurse rolled up his left sleeve, a doctor administered the injection, a clerk recorded the details, and the next child stepped into place. “I could hardly feel it,” boasted Kerr, America’s first polio pioneer. “It...
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First Blood In Vietnam
On the evening of July 8, 1959, six of the eight American advisers stationed at a camp serving as the headquarters of a South Vietnamese army division 20 miles northeast of Saigon had settled down after supper in their mess to watch a movie, The Tattered Dress, starring Jeanne Crain. One of them had switched on the lights to change a reel when it happened. Guerrillas poked their weapons through...
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Shooting The Moon
Gazing up at the Texas night sky from his ranch, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson did not know what to make of Sputnik I, the first artificial Earth satellite launched into orbit by a Soviet missile on October 4, 1957. But an aide’s memorandum stoked his political juices. “The issue is one which, if properly handled, would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic party, and elect...
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King Maker
On April 12, 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr., faced the prospect of failure in his most significant civil rights campaign. For all his generally acknowledged leadership in the escalating southern black protest movement, King had actually never initiated a major demonstration.Depicted in the press as America’s Gandhi, he had disappointed some of his youthful admirers when he...
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The Great Chief Justice
By every sensible standard, John Marshall deserves superbly his sobriquet of “the great Chief Justice.” He deserves it, that is, by every standard save only the mincing and squeamish view of a “proper” judicial attitude that prevails in these milk-toast times. For, almost all that the man believed and lived and brought to life would be sheer anathema to those who honor his name in happy ignorance...
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A Check List Of New Books
High Moment edited by Wallace Brockway. Simon & Schuster. $3.50. A collection of stories about the moments of crisis in a number of great men’s lives, told by notable authors. Louis Kronenberger tells how Gibbon was inspired to write The Decline and Fall ; Irwin Edman how Socrates chose to become a martyr to freedom of thought; Claude Bowers about Jefferson’s part in the Virginia and...
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Benjamin Franklin On His Religious Faith
Reverend and dear Sir, I received your kind letter of Jan’y 28, and am glad you have at length received the portrait of Gov’r Yale from his Family, and deposited it in the College Library. He was a great and good Man, and had the Merit of doing infinite Service to your Country by his Munificence to that Institution. The Honour you propose doing me by placing mine in the same Room with his,...
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Riddle Me, Riddle Me, What Is That?
In the year 1629 there appeared on the streets of London a pamphlet “printed for Michael Sparke, dwelling in Greene-Arbor, at the sign of the Blue Bible.” The pamphlet, in the English of the day, bore the title: The Booke of Meery Riddles, together with proper Questions and witty Prouerbs to make pleasant pastime, no lesse usefull than behoouefull for any yong man or child to know if he be quick...
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Truth And History
Some capricious and discontented artists have affected to consider portrait-painting as unworthy of a man of genius. Some critics have spoken in the same contemptuous manner of history. Johnson puts the case thus: The historian tells either what is false or what is true: in the former case he is no historian: in the latter he has no opportunity for displaying his abilities: for truth is one: and...
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Ah, Winter!
Fifty years ago winter was still pretty much the season of discontent. Time out of mind poets had abused and libeled it. They said that winter brought snarling gusts to nibble the juiceless leaves. They charged that plague and pestilence came with it. Every mile was two in winter. It tamed man, woman and beast. He who passed a winter’s day escaped an enemy. A sad tale was best for winter.These...
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The Lost Love Of A Bachelor President
One of the strangest mysteries in American history is the story of Ann Caroline Coleman and James Buchanan, a tale of blighted romance which ended with the tragic death of the lady and a pledge of lifetime bachelorhood by the future President. Although dozens of people circulated conflicting versions of this pathetic affair during Buchanan’s lifetime, none of those who were in a position to know...
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Mutiny At West Point
The academic staff-Professors Mansfield, Ellicott, Berard, Douglass and Crozet—had just presented the President with burning indictments of the existing regime. In particular, Mansfield had written:”… Men, not principles, are intended to prevail … this noble institution is calculated on as an instrument to gratify the capacity of individuals, in subserving the interests of friends &...
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The Washed Window
Older people in Arlington, Vermont, have a special interest in the last house you pass as you leave our village to drive to Cambridge. It was built and lived in for many years by our first, local skilled cabinetmaker. In the early days nearly every house had one or a few good pieces of professionally made furniture, brought up from Connecticut on horseback or in an oxcart. These were highly...
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Posters U.S.A.
The American of the early Nineteenth Century did not have many pictures to look at. No illustrated journals, no bright electronic images presented themselves to him; only a handful of “museums” offered him a glimpse of art. Consequently the introduction of the poster, suddenly decorating fence and shed and rural barn, was an instant success with a people starved for excitement and works of...
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Glory In Stone
That sum was raised, and more than half of it came from America, much of that from the Corn Belt (the so-called stronghold of isolationism), Lincoln, Nebraska, giving especially generously to Lincoln, England. The many donors were most of them not rich, nor coreligionists of the Church of England. Few had ever seen, or expected to see, Lincoln cathedral. They gave purely, without thought of...
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Chats With Henry Adams
The actual conversations of great men of the past—saving Samuel Johnson, perhaps, and a legendary Socrates—have seldom been recorded. How instructive and interesting would it be now had some posterity-conscious person recorded a conversation of Benjamin Franklin as he talked with friends at the City Tavern or Junto Club in Philadelphia, or Thomas Jefferson’s after-dinner discussions with guests...
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Maiden Voyage
Able Seaman William Lucas scampered up a ladder that dangled down the side of the new White Star liner Titanic. It was 11:50 A.M. —ten minutes before Southampton sailing time-on Wednesday, April 10, 1912. The gangplanks were already up, and Lucas was the last man aboard. A dozen stokers who appeared just after him were told they were too late.They were missing the maiden voyage to New York of the...
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The Garden Of Eden And The Deacon’s Meadow
Mrs. Stowe published this delicious piece of cultural history in 1869, purporting to describe a New England of about 1790; actually, she was pushing back into an Eighteenth-Century setting everything she remembered (and she remembered everything) about the world of her childhood, in Litchfield, Connecticut, around 1820. In New England, but also in every intensely Protestant community within the...
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The Man Who Didn’t Shoot Washington
The rather astounding narrative which appears here is contributed by a British historian who enjoys poking about in the vast Public Record Office in London. There, “in a dusty corner,” he recently found a mass of correspondence, and especially one letter, which casts new light on an almost forgotten episode in American history, yet one fraught with vast implications. John Andrews, an early...
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How Steam Blew The Rowdies Out Of The Fire Departments
The first steam fire engine was built in England by Braithwaite & Ericsson in 1829. By 1832 six steamers were in use in London, but it was to be twenty years before another was acquired. Meanwhile, Captain Ericsson came to the United States, where his inventive genius subsequently was to produce the ironclad Monitor. In 1840 he won a gold medal that had been offered by the General Society of...
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Christopher Columbus, Mariner
”I reached the conclusion,” writes Samuel Eliot Morison, “that A what Columbus wanted was a sailor biographer, one who knew ships and sailing and who had visited, under sail, the islands and mainland that he discovered.” Accordingly Professor Morison organized the Harvard Columbus Expedition, which in 1939–40 retraced the great navigator’s voyages.  ”I reached the conclusion,” writes...
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A Communication
From time to time AMERICAN HERITAGE will publish letters which seem to have special interest for its readers. The following letter from the U.S. Ambassador at the United Nations deals with the article on the elder Henry Cabot Lodge which appeared in the August issue. Dear Sirs:There are three specific points concerning your article about my grandfather, the late Henry Cabot Lodge, by John A...
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