January 2011

Three items were often listed ax essential in the sea bag of every youngster who heeded the rail of blue-water ships and wandered down the long road to the nearest port: a knowledge of the Gospel, a pair of woolen socks knitted by his mother, and a book— The New American Practical Navigator . The ascending order of importance was never questioned. The Gospel might in time of peril provide confusing answers, and the socks develop holes, but the book would never fail. It would lead him anywhere on earth and bring him home safely and surely across the trackless ocean.

This was not always so.

The girl was twenty-five years old, stood five feet lour inches in height, and weighed about 140 pounds—just about right for a fashionable young lady of the time. She was a niece of a justice of the United States Supreme Court and the daughter of a family so wealthy that she could be called an heiress. As the flowery journalese of the era pictured her, she was “at the summit of her youth, rich, especially preferred, blessed with prospects, and to the outer eye completely happy.”

Her name was Dorothy Harriet Camille Arnold. At two o’clock on the afternoon of December 12, 1910, she stood talking to a girl friend outside Brentano’s bookshop, then located at Fifth Avenue and Twentyseventh Street in New York City. A moment later she vanished, never to be seen again—at least never by anyone who both recognized her and acknowledged her existence to the world.

It was July, 1777, the first anniversary of independence, but America’s patriots could find scant reason for celebration. George Washington and his raw little army of farmers and village tradesmen crouched behind the New Jersey hills, waiting for the British regulars and their Hessian mercenaries to begin a summer offensive that well might end the colonial rebellion. New York and Long Island had been overrun by the enemy. Philadelphia, the colonial capital, sensed that it would fall next. On the northern frontier, the fortress of Ticonderoga was about to capitulate, and Newport, Rhode Island, one of the most strategic seaports on the New England coast, had just been occupied.

Since Washington’s audacious cai^ture of the Hessian garrison at Trenton and his victory at Princeton, six months earlier, there had been little to arouse the flagging morale of the Americans. But even as the brave little Independence Day cannon salutes echoed through patriot camjjs, a plot was being hatched in Rhode Island that would prove one of the boldest and most enterprising exploits of the Revolution.

Toward the end of his days, at the close of World War I, Andrew Carnegie was already a kind of national legend. His meteoric rise, the scandals and successes of his industrial generalship—all this was blurred into nostalgic memory. What was left was a small, rather feeble man with a white beard and pale, penetrating eyes, who could occasionally be seen puttering around his mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, a benevolent old gentleman who still rated an annual birthday interview but was even then a venerable relic of a fastdisappearing era. Carnegie himself looked back on his career with a certain savored incredulity. “How much did you say I had given away, Poynton?” he would inquire of his private secretary; “$324,657,399” was the answer. “Good Heaven!” Carnegie would exclaim. “Where did f ever get all that money?”

“ Originality is not confined to one place or country, which is very consoling to us Yankees, by God!” So wrote the artist William Sidney Mount.

Mount was in America the father of “genre,” as the painting of scenes of everyday life is called. When, as a young man, he stepped, sketchbook in hand, into his own barnyard, he was almost as much of an artistic explorer as if he had stepped onto the surface of the moon, “ft is a delightful locality,” he wrote of his native Long fsland. “No wonder Adam & Eve having visions of the future, was [sic] glad to get out of the Garden of Eden …”

Washington to Adams

A solemn scene it was indeed, and it was made affecting to me by the presence of the General, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. … Methought I heard him say, “Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!”

John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams, March 5, 1997

Buchanan to Lincoln

If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.

At the White House, March 4, 1861

Adams to Jefferson

In his own time there raged about Andrew Carnegie, as about any man who pushes his head above the crowd, many a controversy. From the standpoint of his place in history, none is more important than the great strike that erupted at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, works of the Carnegie Steel Company in the summer of 1892.

Carnegie himself owned a controlling interest in the company, but when the strike broke in July he was, in accordance with his annual custom, on an extended vacation in Scotland. In charge at Homestead was Henry Clay Frick, the company’s hard-driving, forty-one-year-old chairman. Frick’s attitude toward labor unions was quite blunt: he was against them, and he was out to break the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, which represented the plant’s skilled laborers.