January 2011

On January 25 a half-century of unsuccessful attempts to unionize the coal-mining industry ended when miners from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan founded the United Mine Workers of America. The union’s main objectives included an eight-hour day, better safety conditions, and the end of scrip payments and child labor. “Without coal there would not have been any such grand achievements, privileges, and blessings as those which characterize the twentieth-century civilization,” said the first UMWA constitution. “Those whose lot it is to daily toil in the recesses of the earth…are entitled to a fair and equitable share of the same.”

Introducing legislation to the House of Representatives, said Thomas Reed of Maine, was like trying “to run Niagara through a quill.” The Democratic majority of the House had resisted for years all attempts to reform the procedural rules that too often caused congressional business to grind to a halt, and when a new Republican majority elected Reed Speaker in December 1889, he vowed to reform the process.

John Ford’s film The Grapes of Wrath opened in January to immediate acclaim. Though Ford and the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson softened the political anger of John Steinbeck’s novel, their haunting film captured the bleakness and despair that accompanied fugitives from the Oklahoma dust bowl on their way to California.

James Thurber and Elliott Nugent’s three-act comedy The Male Animal opened on January 9 at Broadway’s Cort Theater. Nugent, who also played the lead role in the production, and Thurber examined the issues of academic freedom and sexual jealousy “in the anti-heroic style of Mr. Thurber’s solemn drawings and crack-brained literary style,” as one reviewer wrote. Henry Fonda and Ronald Reagan would star in later motion-picture adaptations of the play.

On January 2 the New York Jets signed the University of Alabama quarterback Joe Namath to a $427,000 contract that made Namath the highestpaid first-year player in professional football history. “I realize that the football Giants are better established in New York than we are,” said the Jets’ president, Sonny Werblin. “But I remember that when I was growing up in New York, the baseball Yankees couldn’t get started in this town.…all that changed as soon as the Yankees got their Joe Namath, Babe Ruth.” Namath actually lived up to this comparison when he engineered a victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. That game elevated not only Namath and his victorious team but the entire American Football League in its struggle for respectability against the NFL, with which it was scheduled to merge in 1970.

I was surprised to find in your November 1989 article “The Gothic Awakening” an identification of a tower on the Yale University campus as Harkness Tower.

Actually the photograph is not of the much taller and more famous Harkness Tower but is of the Wrexham Tower, inspired by the Tower of the Church of St. Giles in Wrexham, Wales, where Elihu Yale is buried.

I realize that John Steele Gordon’s apologia for Jay Gould (“The Business of America,” December 1989) was purposely subjective, but I cannot resist commenting on the 1909 news clipping that would attest to Gould’s churchly charity.

Mr. Gordon suggests that Gould’s reputation suffered because he didn’t care to muster an effective public relations campaign. But the example of good works he cites has a strong smell of press agent about it. It is classic Victorian melodrama, the kind of American folklore used as filler in newspapers one might expect the characters of Our Town to read and take as gospel.

Of course I know full well that at the latter stages of their lives many of the robber barons were quite anxious to purchase some shares of Absolution, Inc. stock, particularly on margin. Some of their reported acts were true, others clearly apocryphal.

Some 20 years ago, a friend let me leaf through several photograph albums compiled by his grandfather, an Army surgeon who had spent the 1880s and 1890s stationed at dusty Western outposts, helping to keep a wary eye on the Indians, only recently subdued. There, among the tea-colored pictures of leathery one-time warriors, clusters of bored-looking officers and their still more bored-looking wives, and distant snapshots of the low-slung forts themselves, barely distinguishable from the sagebrush that surrounded them, was a striking portrait of a regimental bandmaster with bright black eyes, waxed mustache, and crisply barbered beard. Beneath it was the man’s grandiloquent signature, Professor Achille La Guardia.

On April 30, 1789, George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States on the balcony of New York’s Federal Hall, then serving as the new nation’s temporary capitol. Although it was one of the most important moments in his life, Washington, who had ordered up elegant clothes from London for many years, wore a simple brown suit with silver buttons, white stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. The hero of the Revolution had chosen his outfit with great care. Even at the very dawn of the Republic, politicians were conscious of symbolism, and Washington made certain that he was wearing a suit made of American cloth that had been woven in Hartford, Connecticut.

Nothing is more seductive and false than the illusion of golden yesterdays, a spin-off of the undying human dream of lost innocence. I thought of this recently when I saw the grisly picture of a U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel, kidnapped in Lebanon, dangling lifeless at the end of a terrorist’s rope. It was tempting to think that this could not have occurred in a simpler day, when the world was less disfigured by doctrinaire murderers and America was universally respected. But a moment of recollection brought me down to earth. For the record shows that, nearly 200 years ago, more than a hundred American mariners were the hapless captives of a North African Muslim ruler whom the United States had neither the strength nor the will to fight.

As it turned out, this particular set of “hostages” was finally freed in 1796—after the United States had shelled out a stiff ransom. The liberation was managed by an unusual emissary, and his story of the affair, in personal and official letters, tells us a good deal about what has and hasn’t changed in our dealings with peoples and leaders in the southern and eastern Mediterranean.

Simple hunks of wood like the one on the opposite page were the video games of the nineteenth century. In homes and general stores and taverns, homemade wooden game boards were indispensable implements for an evening’s recreation. They were also, almost by accident, beautiful—commonplace objects rendered extraordinary through the decoration of anonymous craftsmen. Today they are recognized as highly collectible examples of folk art.

On an outer wall of a small building in Fort Worth’s downtown, and adjacent to a parking lot, a heroic mural called The Chisholm Trail depicts a stream of longhorns. Hooves flying, heads down, the steers fairly burst their frame, ready to pound along a main street of the city that has always been proud to call itself Cowtown. In fact, the Chisholm Trail didn’t stretch this far but lay farther north, in the Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, where several feeder trails from Texas merged. One of these, the Eastern Trail, did head right up Fort Worth’s Commerce Street. Still, it’s the Chisholm that has become imprinted in the city’s memory.

My visit to Fort Worth last June coincided with the annual Chisholm Trail Round-up, which was held in the old stockyards district. The streets were crowded with country-and-western musicians and barbecue vendors, and once in a while a mock gunfight between desperadoes was staged. Taking place at the same time in another part of town was the internationally known Van Cliburn piano competition.