From New Mexico to New England it is a long way, and the stories of these separate colonies are very different; yet it is possible to suspect that some of the principal actors in Catholic New Mexico and Protestant New England would have understood one another very well, even if their ways of speech and the objects they were trying to attain were in substantial contrast. In each case the great conditioning factor was the empty American continent itself. What men thought they were doing turned out, in the end, to be quite unlike what they actually did. In each case, America was the place where a fresh start could be made, the land (to repeat) of dreams come true; and in each case it was demonstrated, once more, that the dream you finally lay your hands on is apt to differ substantially from the dream you started out with.
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January 2011
On June 7, 1916, the national conventions of the Progressive and Republican parties were about to open simultaneously in Chicago. Of the many presidential candidates who would be suggested at the Republican convention only two, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, seemed to have a real chance of being nominated.
She was born Carry Amelia Moore in Kentucky, in 1846. By the time she came into the public eye she was Carry A. Nation, an amazon nearly six feet tall who kept her weight clown to 175 pounds by the prodigious wrecking of saloons. The odd spelling of her first name was clue to the imperfect learning of her father. Her mother lived for many years in the delusion that she was Queen Victoria and died in the Missouri State Hospital for the Insane. In 1867 Carry met and married a young physician, Dr. Charles Gloyd, who showed up at the altar smelling of cloves and alcohol. Marriage did not perform a miracle. In less than two years he was lowered into a drunkard’s grave. Ten years later Carry married David Nation, and together they faced a quarter of a century of bickering, battles, and wandering, while the incompetent Nation almost but never quite made a living with his combined talents as a lawyer, an editor, and a minister of the Gospel.
It was the way they worked the cord and changed the steam pressure that made the whistle almost seem to talk. Of course, there was a regular language of signals—two long blasts for starting up; one long tremolo for approaching a station; and, at grade crossings, the familiar whoooo, whoooo, hoo, whooooooooo! mournful and infinitely expressive—but within these supposed rigidities there was plenty of room for individuality. An engineer was a man of importance, admired by young and old, and the whistle was his signature. It was the notes of a whippoorwill, they say, that signified to the Mississippi field hands that Casey Jones was roaring by in his fast ten-wheeler, No. 382. But down in the cornfield, alas, you no longer hear that mournful sound, for not only Casey but also most of the steam locomotives in America have gone to the Promised Land, and all there is to hear is the blast of the diesel air horn.
For more than a hundred years everybody has been writing about Daniel Webster and some have written well, but it can be plausibly argued that only one has written truthfully. There are twelve formal lives of Webster listed in the Dictionary of American Biography , and this takes no account of shorter studies by historians, philosophers, journalists, orators, and every known brand of politician. Few Americans have been more assiduously studied’ over so long a period.
