January 2011

Newburyport, Massachusetts, which lies at the mouth of the Merrimack River 40 miles north of Boston, was the third-richest city in the state after the Revolution and today claims the nation’s largest group of Federal buildings. These reflect the town’s early-nineteenth-century role as a shipbuilding and trading center, as well as its lively commerce in rum and whiskey distilling and printing. In fact it was here in his hometown that the young William Lloyd Garrison got his start as an apprentice at the Newburyport Herald and later would stamp his words across America’s conscience.

On November 3, amid widespread reports of massacres and looting by Indians, the General Court (legislature) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted a series of emergency laws. “The righteous God,” declared the court, “hath heightened our calamity, and given commission to the barbarous heathen to rise up against us, and to become a smart rod and severe scourge to us.” To counter these divinely inspired attacks, which are known today as King Philip’s War, the Puritans resorted to desperate measures. One of their most powerful weapons was the haircut.

“Whereas,” the legislators continued, “there is manifest pride openly appearing amongst us in that long haire, like weomens haire, is worne by some men, either their oune or others haire made into perewiggs, and by some weomen wearing borders of haire, and theire cutting, curling, & immodest laying out their haire, which practise doeth prevayle & increase, especially amongst the younger sort… the County Courts are hereby authorized to proceed against such delinquents either by admonition, fine, or correction, according to theire good discretion.”

On November 17 Congress assembled for the first time in the brand-new city of Washington. No quorum was present in either chamber, so the opening of business had to be postponed until the eighteenth in the House and the twenty-first in the Senate. On the afternoon of the twentysecond, President John Adams delivered his annual message. (It was the last time a President would read his address in person until 1913, and no great loss either, for the protocol of the day required both houses to return the favor by calling on the President to make an address of their own, to which the President had to reply with yet another elaborate speech.) At the beginning of his address, Adams congratulated the government on its successful relocation from Philadelphia and predicted hopefully that “although there is cause to apprehend that accommodations are not now so complete as might be wished, yet there is great reason to believe that this inconvenience will cease with the present session.”

On November 4 the Hudson River steamer Chancellor Livingston , gaily decorated and towing a canalboat named the Seneca Chief , arrived in New York Harbor. The elegantly furnished Washington , filled with New York City dignitaries, hailed the Chancellor Livingston with the traditional inquiry “From whence came ye?”

“An escort from Lake Erie!” was the reply.

“Where bound?”

“To the Atlantic!” And the cheers were deafening, for the brief colloquy showed that after eight years of construction, at the cost of more than seven million dollars, New York State had finally managed to unite the Atlantic seaboard with the continent’s rich interior.

On November 11, delegates from the Southern states assembled in Nashville, Tennessee, to discuss the recent congressional acts regarding slavery. Assorted speakers advocated responses that ranged from sullen acquiescence to a commercial boycott to outright secession. Resolutions bristled with Southern defiance against Northern encroachments on the region’s rights, institutions, and very way of life. Yet for all the delegates’ bluster, very few Southerners paid any attention to the convention, and those who did generally mocked it. The failure of the South to rally behind the Nashville rhetoric revealed how effective the Compromise of 1850 had been in defusing, or at least deferring, the nation’s sectional tensions.

Those tensions had already been mounting for two years when Mississippi’s legislature proposed a Southern convention in October 1849. By June 1850, when the convention first met in Nashville, disunion seemed a real and imminent possibility. Even so, only nine states sent delegates, and many of them were chosen by informal or irregular means.

On November 9, in White Plains, New York, proceedings began in the trial of Alice Beatrice Jones, who was being sued by her husband, Leonard Kip Rhinelander, for annulment of their marriage. The groom was the scion of one of New York City’s oldest and wealthiest families, while the bride was the daughter of a New Rochelle cabdriver. They had secretly married the previous fall, and when Rhinelander’s father found out, he quickly sent a lawyer to whisk the youngster away. Now the Rhinelanders were trying to annul the marriage on the grounds that Alice had hidden a terrible truth: She was “colored and of colored blood.”

In a November 11 news item titled SUGAR HANDY AID FOR A-BOMB VICTIMS , Science News Letter reported that America’s resourceful sugar industry had found a promising new atomicage market for its product: “future atom bomb victims.” According to the magazine, Dr. Robert C. Hackett of the Sugar Research Foundation had told a conference that “dextran, a water-white mucilaginous compound produced only from sugar by the action of certain bacteria… could be used as a substitute for blood plasma,” which would be in great demand in the vicinity of ground zero. In addition, invert sugar (“a liquid mixture of dextrose and levulose easily made from common sugar”) would make an ideal food “for patients who cannot eat and must be nourished by solutions injected into their veins.”

It was truly great to read about the new D-Day Museum in the May/June issue, but I’d like to take issue with the statement that it is the only national museum dedicated to World War II. The National Museum of the Pacific War, in Fredericksburg, Texas, the hometown of Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, the fleet commander of the Pacific forces, is also dedicated to telling the story of World War II. This new world-class museum, which opened in June 1999 to the acclaim of tens of thousands of visitors, describes the events that led to the attack upon Pearl Harbor, the heroes and sacrifices of the battlefront and the home front, and finally the winning of that war in the Pacific. The museum contains over 700 artifacts, most unique, all poignant, which need to be seen to be appreciated. You are invited to pay us a visit.

I would add only one observation to Terry Golway’s delightful and persuasive discussion of the continuing importance of party nominating conventions in this primary-driven, media-saturated era (“The Conventional Wisdom: Why It’s Wrong,” July/August issue). The sole important function of modern conventions that Golway neglects is their role in providing the nominees with the opportunity to unify their parties prior to the general election campaign.

In “Overrated & Underrated” (May/June issue), Jeanine D. Basinger mentioned Colleen Moore among the silent film stars (she was the original wearer of the geometric haircut L Louise Brooks made famous). Colleen Moore used her movie money to build an elaborately furnished Fairy Castle that toured America from coast to coast, raising almost $650,000 between 1935 and 1939 for children’s charities.

After the Depression, the Fairy Castle went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It has been there on exhibit for the past half-century, and today close to a million people view it each year. During a mid-1930s visit to Chicago, it drew 22,000 visitors in a single day. One of them, my widower father, persuaded Colleen Moore to abandon California, move to cold, windy Chicago, marry him, and raise his two children. As my mother could attest, he was obviously a salesman.