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Our Two Greatest Presidents
The myth and the reality of American history seldom come within shouting distance of one another. What the average American believes and what the historians would like him to believe about, let us say, the first winter in Plymouth, or the Boston Massacre, or Mrs. Bixby’s five sons, are two quite different things.Occasionally, however, happy legend and hard fact match up almost exactly. An example...
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‘The Smoke, The Thunder, The Roar Of The Battle…”
It is an interesting paradox that, of the two most famous paintings of Bunker Hill, the one that most suggests a real battle was painted by Pyle, the illustrator who lived long afterward, and not by John Trumbull, the painter who saw it (albeit from a distance) and served briefly in the Revolution (see AMERICAN HERITAGE , June, 1958). I have lived so long in our American past, wrote Howard Pyle...
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Death Of A Dirigible
Over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the sky was unsettled on the afternoon of September 2, 1925. At times it was almost clear; then ominous clouds would scud across the field of the Naval Air Station and disappear as quickly as they had come. The airship Shenandoah , nose to her high mooring mast, was floating gracefully with the variable breezes. Her twenty gas bags were about 91 per cent full, her...
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The Marine Tradition
The United States Marines are a very ancient fighting corps, covered with battle scars and proud of every one of them—so very proud, indeed, that they have developed an extremely high esprit de corps , which has been defined as a state of mind that leads its possessor to think himself vastly superior to members of all other military outfits. They have fought all of their country’s official...
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Pioneers In Petticoats
I once had a conversation about the ways of the West with a wise and literate old man who had been a cowpuncher in Montana in the golden days of Charlie Russell and Teddy Blue. John R. Barrows was the author of a book called Ubet , describing the adventures of his parents who ran a stage station rejoicing in that typically jaunty frontier name. They had gone west with a wagon train from...
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The Honest Man
Around 1875, at the feverish height of the Gilded Age, when conventional citizens were in greedy pursuit of the dollar, when the executive branch was vying with the legislative and the judicial as to which would prove the most venal, when monstrous fortunes lay ripe for the hook or the crook, an elderly gentleman of benign aspect commenced to make some distressing remarks, right out loud and in...
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The Stanleys And Their Steamer
At the turn of the twentieth century, the American automobile industry was in a stage of youthful indecision. Two courses lay open to it: to follow the already well-defined path of steam propulsion, or to explore the lesser-known byway of gasoline power. Steam seemed to have the brighter future and, at this point, was heavily favored by the early auto makers. In the year 1900 more than 1,600...
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“Savages Never Carved These Stones”
On the afternoon of November 17, 1839, John Lloyd Stephens, a red-bearded New York lawyer, and Frederick Catherwood, an English artist, hacked their way through a jungle in Honduras and emerged at the edge of a broad river. Facing them across the wide ribbon of water was an ancient and massive stone wall, looming up a hundred feet out of the bush. As they crossed the river and explored the...
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The Know-Nothing Uproar
The congressional and state elections of 1854 and 1855 witnessed one of the most remarkable political upheavals in the nation’s history. Candidates whose names were not even on ballots were thrust into office; others who had been given no chance to win triumphed over long-established favorites; and a political party that had operated in such secrecy that few knew its name and still fewer its true...
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The Colonel’s Dream Of Power
“In the year 1920, the student and the statesman saw many indications that the social, financial and industrial troubles that had vexed the United States of America lor so long a time were about to culminate in civil war.“Wealth had grown so strong, that the few were about to strangle the many, and among the great masses of the people, there was sullen and rebellious discontent.“The laborer in...
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Sitting On A Gusher
Perhaps the most bizarre of all the great mineral booms of the nineteenth century took place not in a remote western wilderness, but in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, within easy reach of such well-established centers of population as New York and Pittsburgh. In this case the sought-after prize was not gold or silver but an infinitely more valuable substance, petroleum. If Edwin L. Drake’s...
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By Way Of Contrast: “Uncle Dan” Drew
Daniel Drew (1797–1879) was a short, chunky man with a face as seamed and wrinkled as a prune; he walked with a stealthy tread, like a cat; his attire was downright dowdy; he affected the bland, who-me? air of a hedgerow parson. Yet for a quarter-century this man was one of the most justly feared in the financial circles of nineteenth-century America.He began his business career as a cattle...
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He Did Hold Lincoln’s Hat
An atmosphere of tension enveloped Washington on March 4, 1861, as President-elect Lincoln and President Buchanan rode from Willard’s Hotel to the Capitol. There was the usual pageantry—gaily uniformed militia companies, a float of 34 pretty girls, carriages filled with jubilant Republican politicians and lugubrious Democrats, and so on. But observant citizens noted that far stricter precautions...
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Reading, Writing, And History
A World of Wonder Mariner’s Quest Voyage To Nowhere
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A World Of Wonder
Deeply embedded in the history of America there is a strange quality of expectancy. We have somehow inherited a sense of wonder, a feeling that our strange progress toward the future is a fantastic and incomprehensible adventure that moves constantly past the bounds of imagination. We are permanently oriented, so to speak, in the direction of the improbable, and the fact that we do not always...
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Mariner’s Quest
Between Columbus sailing west to see what might lie beyond an unknown sea, and a late-nineteenthcentury sea captain who, lacking gainful employment, went cruising aimlessly and alone all around a world whose last shores had been mapped and claimed, there is an immense gap. Yet it is by no means absurd to mention Joshua Slocum on the same page with Columbus, because all true voyages of discovery...
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Voyage To Nowhere
To complete the story, one more famous ship, and a famous voyage: the U.S.S. Indianapolis , an eight-inch-gun cruiser of the vintage of the early 1930’s, which sailed from San Francisco in the summer of 1945, carrying a cargo which made her one of the ships that change history, and then went on to a resting place two miles under the surface of the Pacific, a tragic ship whose end was mystery...
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General Clinton’s Dumbbell Code
Late in July, 1777, the British general John Burgoyne found himself trapped by a colonial army in the upper reaches of the Hudson; he was about to lose the Battle of Saratoga. In desperation he wrote to Sir Henry Clinton in New York, asking for reinforcements. But the only available troops, under Sir William Howe, were off in Maryland. Clinton’s discouraging answer was a letter which had no...
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The Great American Game
By the carefully repeated definition of men who stand to make money out of its acceptance, baseball is the Great American Game. The expression was invented long ago and it has been rammed home by talented press agents ever since, even in times when most Americans seemed to be interested very largely in something else. But what has given the phrase its sticking power is not the fact that a big...
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“Whatever You Write, Preserve”
In Philadelphia, just five days before the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress moved a momentous resolution of independence, John Adams sat writing a letter to Mrs. Adams in Braintree, Massachusetts. The day before, he told her, it being the first day of June, he had dined with a friend. “We had Cherries, Strawberries, and green Peas in Plenty. I believe the Fruits are three Weeks...
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The Case Of The Kensington Rune Stone
Did Norsemen, coining via Greenland and, perhaps, Hudson Bay, penetrate the Minnesota-Great Lakes area over a century before Columbus? A number of students and fervent Scandinavian-Americans, their belief fortified by scraps of Norse legend and literature and supported by such supposed relics as the Kensington rune stone, are sure of it. Most scholars, however, either doubt or reject the story,...
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“Go It, Washoe!”
Into the mountain-bound mining camp of Grass Valley, California, rode a weary traveler late in June, 1859. He had jogged more than 150 miles over the massive Sierra Nevada from the Washoe country in western Utah Territory. With him, mostly as a curiosity, he carried some odd-looking chunks of gold-bearing ore.Next day Melville Atwood, the local assayer, tested the rock. What he discovered made...
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The Elizabethans And America
With this account of the Great Queen and her captains and their struggle to master a great prize—the New World—we commence a series of articles specially prepared for AMERICAN HERITAGE by A. L. Rowse, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and author of many distinguished books, among them The England of Elizabeth. The series is based on Dr. Rowse’s recent George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures,...
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The Paintings Of Mr. Otis
A new talent burst on the art world a few months ago, a talent which lies somewhere between Jackson Pollock and Gluyas Williams and within shouting distance of Maxfield Parrish. His name is simply Mr. Otis, and he comes from Portland. Oregon. His work is painted laboriously, by hand, with real oil. He was sprung on an unsuspecting public by the Macmillan Company in a book called Mr. Otis. The...
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Father To The Six Nations
Warraghiyagey, He-Who-Does-Much, was the name the Iroquois gave to this Mohawk Valley immigrant whom they came to love as a father and trust even beyond the grave. William Johnson justified and returned their love. While the common attitude of eighteenth-century America toward the Indians was one of fear and contempt, seasoned by covetousness, Johnson fearlessly mixed with them as equals, spoke...
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Puccini In America
On a cold December day in 1906, the tiny Italian village of Torre del Lago was filled with excitement. Virtually the entire population—120 men, women, and children—milled about its little railroad station to bid farewell to its most eminent citizen, leaving that day for New York. One neighbor, with a kind heart but an abysmal ignorance of geography, had brought along a sausage for delivery to an...
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A Season In Utopia
In the first week of April, 1841, some eight or ten thoughtful, cultivated Bostonians bundled their possessions, their children, and themselves into country-going carriages and drove eight miles to a pleasant, roomy homestead in West Roxbury. Their destination, then known as the Ellis Farm, was later to be called Brook Farm, a name they made famous as the most literary—and, in ways, the least...
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The Voyage Of Nor’west John
In August, 1804, a young sea captain named John deWolf sailed from his native port of Bristol, Rhode Island, on a voyage to the Pacific. Four years were to elapse before he returned from a fabulous adventure that had taken him around the world. In the course of his trip, he had spent a year in the lonely outposts of Russian Alaska and had crossed the wastes of Siberia—a feat accomplished by no...
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Baranov’s Outpost In 1869: An American Officer’s Impression.
In the summer of 1869, two years after the United States purchased Alaska from the Russians and 63 years after John deWolf’s visit, a military expedition under the command of Major General George H. Thomas (“the Rock of Chickamauga”) came to survey the newest American possession. One of the places visited was Baranov’s old post at Sitka, or New Archangel. Thomas’ aide-de-camp. Captain Alfred...
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Plus Ça Change …
Captain Frederick Marryat in A Diary in America, 1839 “I am sure the Americans can fix nothing, without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; … They drink because it is hot; they drink because it is cold. If successfui in elections, they drink and rejoice; if not, they drink and swear; they begin to drink early in the morning; they...
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The Presidency:
Thus the work fell into the hands of his son, who fortunately found it wholly congenial. To be engaged in literary labors gave one social prestige in the Boston of that era, and young Charles Francis Adams, who was well-to-do and cared little for the drudgery of legal practice, was not averse to such prestige. His work on the family papers proceeded in several distinct stages. Thus the work...
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Drake’s “Plate Of Brass”
In the summer of 1936 a young man named Beryle W. Shinn was picnicking on a hillside near San Quentin, California, on the north shore of San Francisco Bay, when he found a metal plate approximately five inches wide by eight inches long. Thinking it might serve to cover a hole in the floor of his automobile, he picked it up and kept it, and only later did he notice that one side was covered with...
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The Past Is Feminine
History is the product of a temperament that delights in the past, and for which the detachment, the immobility, the deadness and the irrelevance of the past are not defects to be removed, but blessed virtues to be enjoyed. … The world has no love for what is dead, wishing only to recall it to life again and make it appear relevant to present pursuits and enterprises. It deals with the past as...
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“Charlie, Your Son Is A Genius…”
The cutouts reproduced on this page are the work of a gifted child of eight. His name was Charles Dana Gibson, and he grew up to become the illustrator who created that famous turn-of-the-century symbol, the Gibson Girl (AMERICAN HERITAGE, December, 1957 ). According to his sister, Mrs. Josephine Gibson Knowlton, in her reminiscence, Longfield, young Gibson’s family at first seemed to take his...
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The Last Of The Bosses
For the first half of this century and beyond, James Michael Curley was the most flamboyant and durable figure on Boston’s political scene. Mayor off and on for a total of sixteen years, he spent four terms in Congress and two in jail, and for two depression years he was governor of Massachusetts. At his death he lay in state for two days in the State House Hall of Flags, the fourth person in the...
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Pentecost In The Backwoods
The Great Revival in the West, or the Kentucky Revival of 1800, as it was sometimes called, was a landmark in American history. It was not some accidental outburst of religious hysteria that crackled through the clearings. Rather, it was one of many answers to a question on which America’s destiny hung during Thomas Jefferson’s Presidency. Which way would the West go? It was filling up fast in...
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Roofs Over Rivers
For a hundred and fifty years, the covered bridge has been an old American landmark. Today it is becoming increasingly difficult to find even one, but only fifty years ago the traveler encountered countless numbers of them—at cities, villages, and country crossings from Maine to Georgia and west to California.The village bridge of the past century was the meeting place of town and country. In its...
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“We Shall Eat Apples Of Paradise…"
You combine with the best heart, when you wish, the soundest moral teaching, a lively imagination, and that droll roguishness which shows that the wisest of men allows his wisdom to be perpetually broken against the rocks of femininity.” It is not Ben Franklin the essayist or philomath or pamphleteer that Madame d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy is here praising, though in these areas his...
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Of Raleigh And The First Plantation
In the marvelous 1580s everything was beginning to ripen together in the heat of the tension between England and Spain. Poetry and the drama that had been so sparse and backward were coming to a head with Sidney and Spenser and Marlowe; the first Elizabethan madrigals appear in the very year the war against Spain begins. And this is the moment when the idea of American colonization takes shape...
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The Glorious Unsafe Fourth
When laws against the use of fireworks became prevalent, there came an end to an American institution that once was firmly built into every boy’s life, making patriotism seem a joyous and understandable thing. Youngsters today do not even know the phrase, yet it was not so many years ago that a “Glorious Fourth” was as much a part of the calendar as a Happy New Year or a Merry Christmas.The...
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New York’s Bloodiest Week
"We shall have trouble before we are through,” George Templeton Strong, a wealthy New Yorker and staunch friend of Lincoln, warned in his diary one July morning in 1863. Yet the first nationwide military draft, authorized by Congress on March 3 to fill the critically depleted ranks of the Union Army, began in a festive mood.At 9 A.M. on Saturday, July 11, the provost marshal of the Ninth...
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All Join In The Chorus
It is nearly a half-century now since there occurred one of the swifter but less regrettable casualties of American culture—the passing of a form of professional entertainment known as the illustrated song. A strange phenomenon native to music halls, dime museums, vaudeville, and the early, early silent movies, the song play, as it was billed in places with pretensions, enjoyed a brief but...
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Exploit At Fayal
If there had been no battle of Fayal … there would have been no battle of New Orleans. —Andrew Jackson When Andrew Jackson and his triumphant army rode through the streets of New Orleans after crushing Sir Edward Pakenham’s veteran troops on January 8, 1815, neither Old Hickory nor his men realized how narrow their margin of victory had been.Jackson had arrived in New Orleans on December...
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How Vital Was Reid’s Victory?
Historians disagree about how crucial the battle of Fayal was to Jackson’s victory at New Orleans. Those of the nineteenth century, among them Benson Lossing, generally agreed with Jackson’s sentiments, quoted at the beginning of Mr. Baker’s article. Among more recent writers who have taken the same point of view is the late Fletcher Pratt, who in The Compact History of the United States Navy...
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The Siege Of Wake Island
For the United States forces in the Pacific, the first months of World War II were a time of unremitting disaster. Undermanned, outgunned, and hardly prepared for a struggle of such magnitude, our scattered garrisons could hope only to delay and hinder the Japanese onslaught until the nation’s war machine grew strong enough to contain it. One of the most gallant of these desperate holding actions...
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On The Care Anf Feeding Of Evangelists
Perhaps I may say a few things right here that may be of some little benefit to my brethren in the ministry. You know these are the days of sore throats and bronchial affections among preachers. … Now, without professing to have studied physiology, or to be skilled in the science of medicine, I beg leave, with very humble pretensions, to give it as my opinion that most cases of these...
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De Tocqueville’s Message For America
When the American republic was still young, and seemed in the European view to be a daring experiment that might or might not come to anything, Alexis de Tocqueville visited these shores and wrote a book, Democracy in America , which was accepted then and afterward as a brilliant examination of this strange new society. It remains a classic in its field; and now, a full century after its author...
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This Petty Pace
… Nor am I inclined at this age to the opinion that men and women who enjoy, or suffer along with, all the new gadgets are any better than their ancestors. A fool is still a fool whether he travels four miles an hour in an ox-cart or four hundred in an airplane. Wisdom is not measured by speed. Nor is gentleness exhibited in gadgets. The virtues which do honor to human nature and hold...
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The Wilderness: America’s Unique Possession
  The discovery of America meant different things to different people. To some it meant only gold and the possibility of other plunder. To others less mean-spirited it meant a wilderness which might in time become another Europe. But there were also not a few whose imaginations were most profoundly stirred by what it was rather than by what it might become.The wilderness and the idea...
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