January 2011

Hernando de Soto had a noble ancestry, wealth, fame, good looks, and a lust for gold. This last quality dominated his life. After his lucrative plundering of Peru, the Spanish crown granted de Soto the title of governor of Florida in 1538. He sailed from Spain with a volunteer force and landed at Tampa Bay on May 30, 1539.

Pursuing rumors of gold fields, de Soto’s 550-man army cut its way through the swamps and forests of the Southeast, slaughtering or enslaving any Indian tribes that resisted. De Soto was a man who could, in the presence of Dominican friars, mutilate the face of an Indian prisoner before killing him, yet piously observe mass the next day. His party celebrated the first Christmas in what would become the United States.

The expedition accumulated a grisly record of cruelty. Ironically, no gold was found in three years of campaigning before de Soto died at the mouth of the Arkansas River in 1542. A year later his men finally left North America for Spain, equally infamous and emptyhanded.

Middle-class New Yorkers led by a furniture and wallpaper dealer named William Mooney founded the Society of Tammany on May 12, largely in opposition to the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of upper-class former Revolutionary War officers.

Tammany began as a fraternal and charitable brotherhood with arcane Indian rites, but its social antagonisms soon brought it into the political arena on behalf of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party. By 1805 it controlled the New York Democratic party, and it would do so off and on for more than a century, even after the name of Tammany Hall virtually came to define corrupt big-city machine politics. Reformers hindered Tammany throughout its history, often ineffectually but in the end fatally, killing it off for good in 1961.

General-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant was unique among Union commanders in that he conducted the war with only one goal: to destroy Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of the Tennessee. Grant’s plan was simply, as he wrote, “to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources until by mere attrition, if by nothing else, there should be nothing left.” Grant sent Gen. William T. Sherman against Johnston in Georgia and went after Lee himself, beginning with the Battle of the Wilderness of May 5 and 6.

On May 7 the Johns Hopkins Medical Hospital was dedicated in Baltimore. The hospital’s benefactor, Johns Hopkins, had been a banker and railroad executive in Maryland who decided to administer his fortune “for the good of humanity.” His seven-milliondollar bequest in 1867 provided for the joint construction of a hospital and medical school run on the most advanced European principles. The Johns Hopkins Medical School opened in 1893 and revolutionized the training of doctors. Most American medical schools had been little more than trade schools that accepted even high school graduates; after a year or two of lectures, students were free to practice medicine, though many had never even touched a real patient. Johns Hopkins from the beginning required a college education and a demanding entrance examination from its applicants, and its students learned medicine both in labs and at patients’ bedsides. Within a decade Johns Hopkins became one of the country’s preeminent centers for medical care and research.

President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Mother’s Day on May 10. The idea of setting aside a day each year to honor the mothers of a nation may be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, but the American holiday owes its origins almost entirely to the efforts of one woman, Anna M. Jarvis.

Jarvis’s mother had spent almost thirty years trying to organize an annual memorial to mothers; upon her death in 1905 her daughter undertook this mission with inspired tenacity, organizing services in her native West Virginia and writing thousands of letters to public officials across the country.

The governor of North Dakota issued the first Mother’s Day proclamation in 1908, and within three years every other state had done the same. President Wilson’s proclamation made the second Sunday in May, the anniversary of the death of Anna Jarvis’s mother, a national holiday in “expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”

The immediate success National Comics enjoyed in 1938 with Superman inspired its editor to introduce another costumed superhero in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics . The new character was a crime-fighting avenger called the Batman, and like Superman, he was an instant sensation.

Early sketches of Batman too closely resembled Superman, so the editors added bat ears and a hood to his costume. They need not have worried about comparisons. Batman was a complete original. As drawn by Bob Kane and written by Bill Finger, the first Batman comics evoked the atmosphere of the era’s gangster films, presenting its hero as a ruthless vigilante who hounded criminals by exploiting psychological weaknesses, especially fear of the night. An orphan driven to crime fighting by memories of the murder of his parents, the early Batman was not above simply gunning down a lawbreaker.

On May 30 A. J. Foyt won the fortyeighth Indianapolis 500 with an average speed of 147.35 miles per hour. A fiery crash on lap two piled up seven cars and delayed the race almost two hours. It was Foyt’s second of four victories at Indy.

Seven days into his presidency, George Bush held a quick, almost spur-of-the-moment news conference in the White House press room, something like a student voluntarily subjecting himself to what once upon a time was known as a snap quiz. He earned, in my judgment, only a C in history—with an answer misleadingly half-right, but one that opened windows on a larger subject.

Ronald Reagan had just reportedly signed agreements to write his memoirs, deliver lectures, and edit collections of his writings, all for a sum estimated as somewhere between three and five million dollars. A reporter asked Bush if he didn’t think his predecessor was “cashing in” on the presidency. Bush replied: “I don’t know that I’d call it ‘cashing in.’ I expect every president has written his memoirs and received money for it… Grant got half a million bucks. That’s when half a million really meant something.”

The elegant pitcher across the page represents the first flowering of the porcelain industry in America. It was made at the Philadelphia factory of William Ellis Tucker. There’s an irony in the fact that Tucker and his family made their mark as manufacturers of this most delicate kind of ceramic: the business they ran between 1826 and 1838 was a rough one, involving constant struggle and iron dedication. The pitcher is not only a handsome American artifact: it is also an emblem of the most dogged American entrepreneurship—and of the risks of premature innovation. It’s a miracle, in retrospect, that the enterprise survived for twelve years.

In the graveyard just outside Mokelumne Hill, California, the tombstones bear the usual spare summary of the lives of the people beneath them; then, after the name and the dates and the fragment of Scripture, there appears something unique to this part of the country. “A native of Virginia,” one epitaph ends; “from Fairfield Vermont,” says another; “native of Germany”; “Born in Butler County Kentucky”; and “né à St. Erme, Department de L’Ain (France) Décédé à Chili-Gulch.”

They were not settlers. They never planned to stay. Home was Butler County or St. Erme. Yet here they are, and thousands more nearby—men and women who were just stopping by until their luck changed and instead built the American West.