January 2011

On November 24 Joseph F. Glidden of De Kalb, Illinois, received U.S. patent 157,124 for an invention that would be just as important as railroads and the Colt .45 in shaping the West: barbed wire. As the frontier advanced, stockmen and farmers existed side by side, which meant the farmers had to protect their crops from roving animals. Since trees were extremely scarce on the Great Plains, wood fences were too expensive. Plain wire fencing was cheaper, but it could easily be knocked over by a hungry beast. Barbed wire eliminated this problem with sharp attachments that animals learned to avoid.

On the morning of November 21, Vice President Garret A. Hobart died at the age of fifty-five at his home in Paterson, New Jersey. Hobart’s health had been failing for most of a year, and in recent weeks his heart problems had taken a turn for the worse. With sad eloquence, a journalist reported that the night before his death, “as the clock at midnight sounded the passing of another day into the void of unrecallable time, the consciousness of things mundane faded forever from his mind. A few hours later, at 8:30 o’clock, he breathed his last …”

On November 4 voters in two states struck blows for equality by electing America’s first female governors, Miriam A. Ferguson in Texas and Nellie Tayloe Ross in Wyoming. Both women were Democrats, and both of their husbands had been governors before them. Ferguson, known as “Ma” because of her initials (which fortuitously yielded a folksy nickname), was running to vindicate her husband, Jim, who had been impeached in 1917 for financial irregularities and prohibited from holding office again.
Her campaign also benefited from a growing disenchantment with the Ku Klux Klan. A Klan-endorsed candidate had finished first in the July primary, with Ferguson second. For the run-off the anti-Klan forces—including men who had fought to impeach her husband—united behind her, and she easily won a race that one newspaper said gave voters a choice “between a bonnet and a hood.” She went on to defeat her Republican opponent in November with 59 percent of the vote—a comfortable margin, though much closer than usual in Democratic-dominated Texas.

The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul; our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgement; our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe, with her woman, Friday, on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.

Secondly, if we consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles of our Government.

Thirdly, viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same—individual happiness and development.

Fourthly, it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, which may involve some special duties and training. …

Among the many things I did not know about Elizabeth Cady Stanton when I set to work on the script for Not for Ourselves Alone and the book meant to accompany its showing on public television was that she was an extraordinary writer. In an age when political rhetoric was often self-consciously ornate, Stanton’s best writings were crisp, clear, and to the point. In 1850, just two years after first demanding the ballot for women, she laid out the case against the men who ruled her world for an Ohio women’s meeting with the wit and gusto that would characterize her prose all her life:

In his story “Hot Rods Redux” (July/August), Brock Yates writes, “late-night runs when the desert was cool were made without headlights, but nobody remembers why.” As the owner of a veteran Ford flathead, I can throw some light on that. You can get more speed if you reduce weight and wind resistance, and the smart rodder shed his (or her) lights and generators and raced with a total-loss battery system.

The article was great, but the “Little Deuce Coupe” should have adorned your cover.

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Abraham Lincoln was unquestionably the best writer among American Presidents. More than one participant in Harold Holzer’s interesting symposium “How I Met Lincoln” (July/August) cites the “mystic chords of memory” passage at the end of the First Inaugural as an example of his mastery.

But in the interests of full disclosure, one must note that William H. Seward, the Secretary of State—designate, provided Lincoln with a speech draft that concluded: “The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in the ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.” Lincoln condensed this orotund sentence into the marvelous: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Lincoln was not only a great writer. He was a great editor.