An exhibition of commemorative objects from Lafayette’s 1824–25 farewell tour of America will be on view at the Queens Museum in Flushing, New York, from June 9 to August 13, after which it will travel to the Philadelphia Historical Society and the Museum of Our National Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts. The Hero of Two Worlds , a catalogue with essays by Anne C. Loveland, Marc H. Miller, and Stanley Idzerda, published by the University Press of New England, will accompany the exhibition.
Amid the thunder of British cannon and a Washington mob’s cries of “Hang Madison!,” Dolley Madison scurried around the White House collecting documents and valuables to save from the advancing British army. Across the Atlantic in the Flemish town of Ghent, British and American diplomats were negotiating an end to the war, but their efforts were of no help to America’s capital city on August 24. The President’s wife managed to save an embossed copy of the Declaration of Independence and a painting of George Washington attributed to Gilbert Stuart, but the British were satisfied with what she left behind: a lavish banquet that had been prepared for President Madison earlier in the day, and an abandoned city.
By 1889 bareknuckle boxing matches were illegal almost everywhere in the United States, including the rural Mississippi town of Richburg, where on July 8 John L. Sullivan fought Jake Kilrain for twenty thousand dollars in the country’s last bareknuckle match. At the age of thirty Sullivan had deteriorated into a flabby parody of his top form, but for this fight he trained hard for several weeks. By the day of the match he had lost more than forty pounds and still outweighed Kilrain by thirty.
Sullivan may have been past his prime, but he had more than enough power left to dismantle Kilrain. Though the challenger drew first blood, he managed to stretch the fight out to seventy-five rounds only by backpedaling and wrestling with Sullivan, who cursed and taunted him to “stand up and fight like a man.”
Woodrow Wilson was pacing the empty corridors of the White House, agonizing over his wife’s deepening illness, when war broke out in Europe during the first week of August. Wilson immediately offered to mediate any differences between the European powers but received only complaints from the belligerents about the way the other side was conducting the war.
Louis (“Lepke”) Buchalter, the man J. Edgar Hoover called the most dangerous criminal in the United States, surrendered by secret agreement with the FBI chief on August 24 after evading a nationwide manhunt for several months. Lepke had made his fortune controlling unions in the New York garment industry, but his notoriety came from his role as head of a group of underworld assassins known as Murder Inc.
Ever since technology began to permit it, men of power have sought immortality in stone. Knowing that their deeds, however important, were ephemeral in the nature of things, they hoped that their tombs and statues and palaces might remind the world of their greatness. Shelley, in his haunting sonnet on Ozymandias, showed the essential barrenness of this idea, but that hasn’t stopped men in the least from erecting monuments to their own memories.
Before the Industrial Revolution, politics and military conquest were the main roads to power. With the advent of the steam engine the instruments of choice by which men sought power began to change, as did the means by which they displayed it. The opportunities for military conquest shrank nearly to the vanishing point, but the opportunities to make a great fortune in business vastly expanded.
We often hear solemn pronouncements about the need to learn the “lessons of history.” But which ones? A single event can offer a variety of lessons.
I was powerfully reminded of this when, around the start of this year, a great battle over beef appeared to be brewing between the United States and the European Community. The member nations of the EC were preparing to halt imports of American beef from animals treated with hormones to speed up and increase their growth. European health authorities forbid the practice to their own farmers, even though it enhances profits.
U.S. officials issued bristling rejoinders. Americans, they said, showed no ill effects from the meat in question. The alleged “health issue” was a shield behind which the EC was wrongfully imposing a protective tariff. The United States could and would strike back. TRADE RETALIATION READIED IF EUROPE BARS MEATS OF U.S. , said one headline. Was the United States defending its farmers in a fair fight? Or trying to bully other governments out of their duty to protect their own people as they saw fit?
The artisan who wove this beautiful sarape sometime between 1840 and 1860, in the so-called Classic Period of Navajo weaving, would have been shocked by the price it recently brought at auction: $93,500. She probably wouldn’t have been surprised, though, that it ended up on the block. Art and commerce have been densely interwoven through the long history of Navajo textiles. That this piece brought such a stiff price only confirms the high standing of Navajo weaving in the history of American decorative arts.
Expectations are everything where travel is concerned, and when I set off last July for Colorado Springs, a Victorian-era resort a mile high in the Rocky Mountains, most of mine were wrong. There are no springs in town, for one thing, so no park takes shape around them, no pattern of streets and alleys converges there, no ramshackle hotels or tidy storefronts line the route to and from the waters. The famous Antlers Hotel, which conjures up visions of a shingle-style edifice crammed with hunting trophies, turns out to be a high-rise built in 1962, its two previous incarnations having long ago been destroyed. I drove the city’s clean, wide avenues for half an hour before giving up and asking where the center of town was, only to find I was in it.
Within a day or so I’d found the touchstones I was looking for; they just were scattered. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Colorado Springs began as that phenomenon we’ve all read about—a resort created out of thin mountain air by the railroads.