On November 2, 1920, for the first time in history, more than eight million American women exercised their newly won right to vote in precincts all over the country. A caravan of automobiles shuttled seventy residents of a home for elderly women to the polls on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In Rhode Island a candidate for state office could not contain her joy. “Now we know what a political earthquake is,” she said. In Philadelphia large numbers of women voters turned out—despite a new city ordinance meant to discourage them by insisting that women declare their ages to the registrars. In Atlanta seventy-five black women went to the polls only to have their ballots nullified by technicalities. In Baltimore an elderly judge who had overseen elections in one precinct for twenty years found himself with little to do; according to the Baltimore Sun, “the women had taken almost everything out of his hands.” “I’m going to let them carry the ballot box downtown,” the Judge said. Of the twenty nuns at St. Catherine’s Normal Institute in the same city, ten went to the polls.
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January 2011
Far be it from me to quarrel with an eminent historian like James M. McPherson about his article on alternate history (“Gettysburg, 1862”), but when I last closed my Civil War history book, the Union navy had all Confederate sea and river ports captured or blockaded. Would foreign powers recognize as a nation a landlocked Confederacy that couldn’t even exchange ambassadors other than by a successful blockade run? Would Britain and France have brought their powerful navies to bear against the weaker Union navy in order to open links to this new Confederate nation? The influence of seapower has once more been overlooked, even though in 1862 Alfred Mahan had yet to write about it. Incidentally, isn’t it ironic that the tiny Confederate navy proved such a tactical and technological innovator pioneering with mines, submarines, and so forth? Lucky for the North the South had no resources to fund these new concepts as the Germans were to do so successfully.
Very enjoyable, the special section on alternate history (September), though the North might have won the war sooner if McClellan had taken that minnié ball in 1861.
SAY YOU WANTED TO BRING UP TO DATE CHRISTIAN SCHUSSELE’S 1862 MASTERPIECE Men of Progress , a heroic four-by-six-foot scene of nineteen innovators of the age. Whom would you put in it? Who are the men of progress, or the men and women of progress, or whatever you would call them now, of the twentieth century? The administrators of Cooper Union, which owns that painting (a copy hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington), decided recently to find an answer. To do so, they commissioned one of their most illustrious graduates, the artist Edward Sorel, to paint a sequel. We unveil it here.
A couple of months ago, walking down Third Avenue, I committed an honest-to-God Elmer Fudd double-take: Tuesday’s was gone! Or, more accurately, transformed into Sal Anthony’s Scheffel Hall Movement Salon, offering gyro-tonics, ancestor- channeling, and other New Age piffle. All that was left of what it had replaced was a mural up near the ceiling where, varnished by decades of cigar smoke, monks still lifted steins in a dim yellow carouse.
By the fall of 1864 no army in either Europe or America was as mobile, self-supporting, and lethal as William Tecumseh Sherman’s, which was composed of soldiers in prime physical condition expert in the handling of modern firearms. Their general was in some sense not merely the most powerful man in America but also the most dangerous person in the world. The Macon Telegraph warned its readers: “It would seem as if in him all the attributes of man were merged in the enormities of the demon, as if Heaven intended in him to manifest depths of depravity yet untouched by a fallen race…. Unsated still in his demoniac vengeance he sweeps over the country like a simoom of destruction.”