January 2011

William Henry Harrison defeated President Martin Van Buren on December 2 with a popular vote of 1,275,390 to 1,128,854. A lasting effect of the election was the popularization of the new Americanism, “O.K.,” which had first appeared in print the year before. Supporters of Van Buren gave him a nickname, “Old Kinderhook,” for his native Hudson River town in old Dutch New York, and formed O.K. clubs during the campaign. Though the true origin of O.K. remains clouded, Martin Van Buren’s failed reelection effort helped give it a national currency that remains strong to this day.

Almost nine months following General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, the Thirty-ninth Congress assembled on December 4 and voted to create a Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction. Drawn from both houses, the committee was charged with inquiring “into the condition of the States which formed the so-called Confederate States of America, and [to] report whether they, or any of them, are entitled to be represented in either House of Congress, with leave to report at any time, by bill or otherwise.”

As the House clerk went through the roll call, he skipped the names of new representatives of Southern states, many of whom had been Confederate officers only months before, thus giving a hint of the years of sectional rancor to follow.

The last, sad engagement of the Indian wars, at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, on December 29, left over 150 Sioux men, women, and children dead, and scores of wounded later died of exposure. Twenty-five U.S. soldiers were killed and thirtynine wounded. The trouble had begun the autumn before, when Sioux tribes gathered near Pine Ridge Agency for a ghost dance and added to this form of mystical resistance the new concept of “ghost shirts,” garments that would protect warriors from white bullets.

The war shirts caught the attention of the Army, which developed various plans to arrest and remove the dance’s suspected leaders. Bored journalists sent to the Pine Ridge Agency filed stories of imagined battles and Indian atrocities. On the fourteenth, Indian agents of the U.S. government shot and killed the Hunkpapa chief Sitting Bull while trying to arrest him. At the sound of rifle shots, Sitting Bull’s horse, a gift from his friend and former employer Buffalo Bill Cody, pranced as it had been trained for the Wild West revue.

After celebrating the building of his one-millionth automobile earlier in the year, Henry Ford sailed for Norway on December 4 aboard his “peace ship,” the Oscar II . His mission, said Ford, was “to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.” Ford’s proposal for a general strike Christmas Day by the armies dug in along the Western Front could “best be described as piffle,” wrote The New York Times that week, but Ford would not be swayed. “I have faith in the people,” he declared.

On December 21 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald and his companion, the gossip columnist Sheila Graham, were sitting in her Hollywood apartment listening to the recording of the Eroica Symphony he had bought for her when Fitzgerald unexpectedly stood, gripped the mantle, and fell dead of his third heart attack.

The novelist had wondered throughout his life about the possible destructiveness of his craft, of becoming “used up.” “I have asked a lot of my emotions,” he confided in his notebooks, “120 stories. The price was high … there was one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these in every story. … Now it has gone and I am just like you now.” Many of his obituaries confirmed this fear, declaring him a wasted writer in the end. Even his admirer John O’Hara lamented that Fitzgerald had become “a prematurely old little man haunting bookstores unrecognized.” Though he had largely quit drinking by his last year and was doing his first serious work in several years, it was too late.

The gleaming Toastmaster 1Al on the opposite page didn’t always deliver a perfect piece of toast—what toaster ever has?—and it could process only one slice at a time. Nevertheless, American consumers found it all but irresistible when it was introduced in 1926. To them, it represented more than a good breakfast; it was nothing less than a four-and-ahalf-pound symbol of modernity.

During the 1920s the machine age changed the look of America. An unprecedented growth in advanced technologies spurred by the First World War created both the need for new industrial designs and the materials and processes with which to produce them. The modern style that resulted was a revelation—ahistorical, nontraditional, and, thus, non-European.

At Christmastime, when dusk comes early to Jekyll Island and festive white lights shimmer on the branch of a live oak tree, the place seems to hold its secrets close. This former Gilded Age enclave off the coast of Georgia has a tantalizing way of slipping in and out of focus, of moving around in time.

For information on Jekyll and the other barrier islands off the Georgia JL coast, contact the state tourist office at 1-800-VISIT-GA (P.O. Box 1776, Atlanta, GA 30301). The Jekyll Island Visitors Bureau (1-800-841-6586, P.O. Box 3186, Jekyll Island, GA 31520) will provide a calendar of events and information on accommodations. Various packages are offered by the Jekyll Island Club Hotel (912-635-2600, 371 Riverview Drive, Jekyll Island, GA 31520). Jekyll is located seventy miles up the coast from Jacksonville, Florida, and is accessible via a causeway that the state built in the 1950s to replace the old ferry service. To set the scene, The Jekyll Island Club , by William B. McCash and June H. McCash (University of Georgia Press), is a good recounting of the early days, with a wealth of evocative photos. The full story of the State Era has yet to be written.

1790 Two Hundred Years Ago 1840 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1865 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago 1890 One Hundred Years Ago 1915 Seventy-five Years Ago 1940 Fifty Years Ago 1965 Twenty-five Years Ago

We were steaming as a part of the Standing On-CaIl Force Mediterranean. It was quite a combination: warships of Turkey, Spain, Italy, Greece, the United States, and our ship, the Federal Republic of Germany’s destroyer Schleswig-Holstein . Our time sailing together as a task group was drawing to a close, and the tempo of our operations was letting up just enough to allow for the simple agreeable routines that build an understanding between shipmates, their ships, and the sea.