January 2011

American infatuation with its wartime Soviet ally reached a peak in 19.13 with the motion picture, Mission to Moscow , loosely based on Ambassador Joseph E. Davies’ book, in which we see the author (played by Walter Huston) clasp hands with a genial, pipesmoking Soviet dictator. Davies-Huston, according to the Warner Brothers synopsis, has been sent to Russia to get “the truth” for President Roosevelt, and soon he “learns to respect and to admire the Russian leaders.” In the sequences which follow, the history of the years from 1936 to 1943 is rewritten in the bold black-and-white strokes of mass propaganda.

The movie ambassador, for example, attends the famous purge trials (those of 1937 and 1938 are combined for dramatic convenience) and comes to the conclusion, as an experienced lawyer, that the endless confessions of the accused are genuine, obtained “without undergoing threat or duress"! To lend credence to this tale of make-believe, the real Davies introduces the story and is later represented as discussing the film with President Roosevelt.

Aseries of eighty-five newspaper articles, hastily written for the immediate purpose of advocating New York’s ratification of the new Constitution of the United States, has become the all-time classic on the basic theory of American government. This status hardly could have been anticipated by its authors or contemporary readers; and yet the coming event did cast its shadow before. When their serialization was only two-thirds completed, the essays appeared in a book form which reportedly sold 25,000 copies in the decade following 1788—easily making them the best seller of their day. During the 173 years since then, under the title of The Federalist , they have gone through more than ninety printings and twenty-nine separate editions in half a dozen languages. They have been cited in dozens of Supreme Court opinions and in uncounted reams of congressional debates, and the very name has become an adjective of political science throughout the world to describe the unique character of United States government.

The ordeal in Wilmer McLean’s parlor took place on April 9, but Robert E. Lee remained near Appomattox for another three days, until his men stacked their arms and I surrendered the worn, laded battle Hags which they had followed for four years. Then he set out toward Richmond, pitching his tent each night, sleeping under canvas for the last time. News of his coming preceded him, and along the road women and children waited, some with gifts of food.

On the morning of April 15, 1865, at almost the same time that Abraham Lincoln was dying in Washington, Lee readied the town of Manchester on the outskirts of Richmond. William Hatcher, a Baptist minister, looking out his window at the gray, sodden landscape, saw Lee’s party ride by in the heavy downpour. “His steed was bespattered with mud,” Hatcher wrote, “and his head hung down as if worn by long traveling. The horseman himself sat his horse like a master; his face was ridged with self-respecting grief; his garments were worn in the service and stained with travel; his hat was slouched and spattered with mud …”

On September 1, 1914, a bird named Martha died in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. In covering the news of the day the New York Times devoted half a column to the change in the name of the Russian capital from St. Petersburg to Petrograd and equal space to a defeat of the New York Yankees by the Detroit Tigers. Most of the first three or four pages were, of course, filled by news of the great war that had just begun: me Allied armies were lulling back toward Paris before the initial German offensive; a “daring aeronaut” from Germany had dropped lour bombs upon the French capital; and the American colony led by the American ambassador was petitioning the United States government to protest this inhuman innovation in the conduct of war. There was nothing about the death of Martha at the age of twenty-nine. And yet her demise was the final event in the history of a slaughter as massive in the annals of the animal kingdom as the slaughter then beginning in France was to be in human history. For Martha was the last of the passenger pigeons.

Shortly after noon, on December 1, 1842, three hooded, manacled figures were hoisted to the main yardarm of the U.S. brig-of-war Somers . the captain, as was his wont in such an emergency, delivered a pious homily to the remaining 117 men and boys, many of whom were weeping. The Stars and Stripes was raised. Then the crew gave three cheers for the American flag and were piped down to dinner, leaving the bodies of Boatswain’s Mate Samuel Cromwell, Seaman Elisha Small, and Acting Midshipman Philip Spencer—the son of the Secretary of War —to swing in the rising wind.

After dinner, under the personal direction of the captain, always a stickler for form, the three bodies were elaborately prepared for burial; at dusk they were ceremoniously lowered into the sea. Thus ended the only recorded mutiny in the United States Navy—if mutiny it was.

When he died at nearly seventy-nine, in 1945, Gilbert Patten was hailed as the last of the dime novelists. Perhaps he was indeed the last. Certainly his Frank Merriwell was the best known and most revered character of the five-cent weeklies, the cut-rate branch of the dime-novel industry. And the most durable.

Frank Merriwell made his bow on April 18, 1896, in the first issue of Tip Top Weekly . Almost twenty years later, after grinding out a 20,000-word “novel” every week, for a grand total of some 20,000,000 words of pulp-paper biography, Patten put his burden down. Others carried on the Merriwell stories briefly, and they have had many revivals over the years since. They have appeared on the radio and in the comic strips. Perhaps Frank and his clean living chums will yet appear on television; there has been talk of it. In any case, this all-around, all-American boy has been a hero to several living generations of young males. Millions now middle-aged or even older will still smile at the memory.

Setting the Pattern

The first half of the nineteenth century in America sometimes appears to have been little more than an eventful and confusing prelude to the great trial by fire which was to be the American Civil War. It began with the first bright triumph of Jeffersonian democracy, and it ended with the development of sectional feelings so intense that the country narrowly escaped being fragmented; here perhaps was simply a time of preparation, in which nothing had been finally settled, a time that could do no more than germinate a conflict whose outcome could not be foretold. America was still in a process of becoming, not yet sure that it was a nation or that it could develop a genuinely national significance.

In August of 1865, four months after the end of the Civil War, the American minister in Austria wrote to a friend in the distant United States. That diplomat was John Lothrop Motley, the famous historian who had made a life’s work writing of the struggle for independence of another republic, Holland. At this moment, however, the late American conflict was uppermost in Motley’s mind; his observations, slightly edited for clarity, are reproduced here through the courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Gentlemen:

Instead of counting sheep, I am one of those who has often induced sleep by inventing perpetual motion machines of the types 5, 8, and 9 illustrated in your April issue; and in lieu of sleeping pills I have as often achieved a restful night by mentally calculating why they wouldn’t work. Your article proved somewhat comforting in that it assures me that my aberrant musings have not been wholly singular.