January 2011

The participants in this pageant of hair all belong to one family; these are the Bond sisters, with their mother at far left. As their descendant H. Hart Nance, of Waco, Texas, explains, “When the second of James Bond’s eleven living children announced her intention to marry, around 1910, he arranged for a family portrait. Their mother, Elizabeth Ann, cautioned her daughters to dress in ‘going to church’ clothes. They adhered to her instructions as they had done all their lives, although the two who had walked to the photographer’s studio did appear slightly windblown. The photographer ushered the women into an anteroom to make any necessary repairs. When Bess, the bride-to-be, fourth from the left in this photo, reappeared, the family was shocked to see her hair hanging to her waist, while the other ladies were carefully coifed. Bess insisted that her future husband preferred to see her this way. The diplomatic photographer settled the impasse by persuading Bess to put her hair up for one dignified family portrait, and then he somehow talked the entire family into loosening their locks for this shaggy picture.”

As has been said of pornography, great art is impossible of complete definition, but we know it when we see it. And the greatest athletes, as with great generals and great violinists, are master artists. A million kids play baseball. One was Babe Ruth. Guys punch each other in the nose. One and only one was Jack Dempsey. The equal of these two in capacity and status during their mutual golden age of sports was the jockey Earl Sande. Anyone can ride a horse, sure. But, said Damon Runyon, someone like the Handy Man, Handy Earl Sande, comes along once in about every 90 years.

On September 13 a force of nearly fifteen hundred state and local police, corrections officers, and National Guardsmen stormed New York’s Attica State Correctional Facility, forty miles east of Buffalo. Holed up inside were about a thousand inmates who had taken over Cellblock D to protest a variety of restrictive rules and policies.

In the immediate aftermath of the inmates’ takeover four days before, early developments had been encouraging. Officials agreed to most of the prisoners’ demands were dropped. Observers reported that the more than thirty guards and employees taken hostage were being treated well. But two days into the occupation, a guard who had been injured in the initial struggle died; some reports said that he had been thrown from a second-story window.

From then on, positions hardened. Inmates refused to budge from their demand for complete amnesty, which state officials would not consider. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller declined requests to come to Attica and direct negotiations in person. After another two days, the troopers moved in.

The September 16 issue of Life magazine revealed that the former child star Shirley Temple, now a budding young woman of eighteen, would be seen drinking hard liquor in her forthcoming movie The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer . The “aquabibulous Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin,” president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, predictably condemned the news, but Life explained that Temple’s screen character would take a sip only to appear sophisticated and would instantly spit it out (understandably so; her cocktail of choice was Scotch-andbourbon). The article was accompanied with a photo showing the only other known instance of the perpetually innocent Temple imbibing: her wedding the previous year, which she toasted with champagne.

A week later, with a cold war under way, Europe in turmoil, labor unrest at a peak, and a red-hot congressional election brewing, Life continued its hard-hitting reportage with a cover story about a dog that liked to play with a cat.

On Saturday, September 3, Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle checked into the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The rotund comedian had just finished filming three features simultaneously and was planning to relax over Labor Day weekend with a pair of friends. On Monday morning Virginia Rappe, an actress who had worked with Arbuckle at Keystone Studios years before, turned up in the hotel lobby. One of Arbuckle’s friends invited her to stop by an ongoing party in their suite, which she did later that day. Arbuckle and friends checked out on Tuesday morning, while Rappe, sick from drinking too much, rested in a separate room. Two days later she was moved to a hospital, where she died at one-thirty the next afternoon.

What had happened between Rappe’s arrival and Arbuckle’s departure immediately became the subject of intense, lurid speculation. A series of sex and drug scandals was coming out of Hollywood, so an aroused public was ready, perhaps eager, to believe the worst.

On September 4 federal troops disparsed thousands of armed coal miners who were besieging a ridge called Blair Mountain in Logan County, West Virginia. The action ended a week of skirmishing between the miners and an improvised local militia that had left somewhere between ten and thirty dead and at least a hundred wounded.

Strikes and violence had been flaring up in the West Virginia coalfields for a decade, but the immediate cause of the Logan insurgency was the assassination of Sid (“Two Gun”) Hatfield a month earlier. Hatfield, a descendant of the famous feuding clan, had been the police chief of Matewan, in neighboring Mingo County, just across the border from Kentucky. In 1920 he became a hero to miners by shooting a group of enforcers from the hated BaldwinFelts Detective Agency, who were trying to evict pro-union miners from their homes. So when Hatfield was gunned down on the courthouse steps by Baldwin-Felts agents (who were eventually acquitted), union men from the Charleston area up north reacted with rage.

In the September 5 issue of Harper’s Weekly , the novelist and critic William Dean Howells reported on a visit to Rockaway Beach in Queens. The bathers were rather too numerous for the refined Howells, a self-described “friend of quiet and seclusion” who was clearly out of his element, but otherwise their behavior was exemplary: “The popular joy of our poorer classes is no longer the terror it once was to the peaceful observer. The tough was not visibly present, nor the toughess, either of the pure native East Side stock or of the Celtic extraction; yet there wert large numbers of Americans with rather fewer recognizable Irish among the masses, who were mainly Germans, Russians, Poles, and the Jews of these several nationalities.” While regretting that “you can no longer know citizen and countryman apart by their clothes, still less citizeness and countrywoman,” Howells surmised that the “Americans” came mostly from Long Island while the “foreign-looking folk” were city dwellers.

On September 28 Cochise, chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, surrendered to government agents at Cañada Alamosa in southwestern New Mexico Territory. The capitulation ended a decade of bloody fighting between the Chiricahuas and the Southwest’s growing white population. The two groups had been on fairly good terms at first, but in February 1861, as the rest of the country was falling to pieces, the situation in Arizona unraveled as well. Federal troops, mistakenly suspecting the Chiricahuas of kidnapping a young boy, took some of them hostage in what was either “an astoundingly stupid piece of treachery” (by one account) or “a procedure that was common on the frontier” (by another). Cochise escaped, took hostages of his own, and began ambushing white travelers. Both sets of hostages were killed, and from then on things only got worse.

On September 23 about fifty Mexican residents of Los Angeles surrounded the small Army garrison there and proclaimed a rebellion against American rule. The episode was the latest twist in a turbulent year for Southern California, which was seeing its fourth ruler (nominally, at least) in as many months. In June a group of filibustering frontiersmen, inflamed by rumors of incipient hostilities, had captured the northern town of Sonoma and claimed the entire territory in the name of the so-called Bear Flag Republic. In July, with war officially declared, regular American naval forces landed at Monterey and made short work of subduing the territory’s ten thousand or so Mexican civilians. “We simply marched all over California, from Sonoma to San Diego, and raised the American flag without protest,” wrote a member of the expedition. “We tried to find an enemy, but could not.”

On September 10 Elias Howe of Cambridge, Massachusetts, received U.S. Patent No. 4,750 for his “Improvement in Sewing Machines.” As the title indicates, Howe’s device was not the first attempt to automate sewing; such machines had been a favorite of inventors in many countries since at least the 1750s. Most of them were too slow to compete with hand labor; one required users to transfer the thread between two needles after every stitch. Yet efficient sewing machines had been built, in Europe and the United States, only to be withdrawn in the face of opposition from hand sewers. Howe was the first patentee to put as much energy into promotion as he had into invention; in one demonstration he outsewed the combined output of five seamstresses with a single machine.