January 2011

Subway and elevated ride. 5 cents.

Taxicab. 50 cents first mile or fraction thereof; 20 cents each additional half mile.

Rental car. $2.50 per hour; $15.00 per day.

Garage parking. $1.00 per day; 50 cents to a dollar for cleaning and polishing.

“Large and Expensive Hotels of the Very First Rank”

AMBASSADOR. Single, $8.00 per night; suite, $16.00.

RTTZ-CARLTON. Single, $8.00; double, $10.00; suite, $20.00.

WALDORF-ASTORlA. Single, $6.00; double, $9.00; suite, $20.00.

BILTMORE. Single, $8.00; double, $12.00; suite, $25.00.

PLAZA. Single, $6.00; double, $8.00; suite, $15.00.

New York practically has no strictly American restaurants, with food cooked in the native manner and served in the simple home style. One of the hardest things to buy in New York is genuine American cooked and served foods. The few exceptions are some of the oyster houses, dairy lunch rooms and occasional tea rooms that specialize in southern dishes prepared by a negro cook.…In the leading houses the chef is French; in a considerable portion of the others, he is German, Viennese or Italian. The waiters are almost universally foreign. In fact, the main distinction between the American and the foreign restaurant is that the former professes to cater to the American taste, while the latter tends to exaggerate its foreign features and make the most of their advertising value.

— Rider’s New York City — a Guide-Book for Travellers, 1923

Italian

Notre Dame’s quarterback, Gus Dorais, and its team captain, Knute Rockne, orchestrated an upset victory over Army on November 1, when, through innovative use of the forward pass, the Fighting Irish racked up 35 points to the Cadets’ 13.

The forward pass had been introduced in 1906, but most quarterbacks crudely lobbed the football to stationary receivers. Rockne and Dorais, who was also a star pitcher on Notre Dame’s baseball team, fine-tuned the pass play with precision throws to moving receivers. In front of three thousand amazed spectatrrs, Notre Dame premiered its new tactic, clobbered Army, and changed forever the way the game was played.

Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850 – 1917) became the first American citizen to be beatified by the Catholic Church on November 13. Mother Cabrini, who was canonized in 1946, founded schools, orphanages, and hospitals throughout the United States, South America, and Europe.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations held its first convention in Pittsburgh on November 15. The ClO, representing the interests of laborers in mass-production industries, had split from the craftsman-oriented American Federation of Labor in 1935. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers was unanimously elected the CIO’s first president.

The novelist Pearl S. Buck, who wrote of peasant life in China in such novels as The Good Earth , received the Nobel Prize for literature in November.

In South Vietnam a military coup toppled the government of Ngo Dinh Diem on November 1. Saigon had been wracked by endless feuding among military, religious, and ideological factions. The United States had tacitly encouraged the overthrow of the authoritarian and ineffectual Diem government, but it had not anticipated the brutal murders of Diem and his scheming brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.

The United States had once hailed the Diem regime as a model of progressive democratic leadership and had heavily financed the South Vietnamese army in the struggle against Communist insurgency. But Diem’s government degenerated to yet another petty dictatorship. Henry Cabot Lodge, President Kennedy’s ambassador to Saigon, saw the revolt as an encouraging development. A few days after the coup, he wrote: “The prospects now are for a shorter war.”

And still they come.

From west of the Appalachians, from the prairies of the middle border, from the shortgrass country, and from the South, young Americans troop to New York in search of fullfillment—or perhaps to get away from something.

Garrison Keillor left Minnesota for New York because, among other reasons, he wanted to be a New Yorker writer and because in his hometown, Anoka, everybody knew everything about one another. Alfred Uhry, the recent Pulitzer Prize winner as author of the current Off-Broadway hit Driving Miss Daisy, knew from the time he was a little boy that for him the action was not in Atlanta but in New York. For some the great objective is to be a buyer at Macy’s. M.B.A.s head for the corporate life. Brenda Spencer graduated from Purdue and now directs Spencer Realty on Madison Avenue in New York. But she has a box of keepsakes to remind her of her old Indiana home.

By November little doubt remained that George Washington would be the winner of the presidential election slated for the following February. Attention now focused on the runner-up, who would hold the largely ceremonial role of Vice-President.

Alexander Hamilton offered two very different reasons why John Adams should be selected for the Vice-Presidency in the imminent federal election. On November 9, in a letter to Theodore Sedgwick of the Continental Congress, Hamilton wrote that Adams had shown “an ardent love for the public good.” But writing to James Madison on November 23, he warned that if Adams did not become Vice-President, he “will become a malcontent and possibly espouse and give additional weight to the opposition to the Government.”

Faced with the onslaught of white settlers in Alabama and Georgia, the Creek Indians split into two factions. One faction, the White Sticks, re- mained loyal to the United States. The other group, the Red Sticks, wanted war.

War is what they got. In November troops under Gen. Andrew Jackson launched a bloody series of attacks in retaliation for an August massacre at Fort Minis in which Red Sticks killed more than 350 men, women, and children. On November 3 Tennessee soldiers destroyed the Red Stick settlement of Talishatchee. All 186 of the village’s warriors were killed. “We shot them like dogs,” recalled Davy Crockett, who fought in the battle.

Six days later hostile Creeks laid siege to the White Stick village of Talladega. General Jackson, with an illprovisioned force of twelve hundred infantry and eight hundred cavalry, raised the siege and killed 293 Red Sticks.

On November 19 a dedication ceremony took place at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at the site of the recent Battle of Gettysburg. The featured speaker, Edward Everett, a Greek scholar and former senator, delivered a stirring two-hour oration. President Lincoln, invited to give “a few appropriate remarks,” read a suprisingly brief address that began “Fourscore and seven years ago. …”

The disastrous Union defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga left the Army of the Cumberland besieged at Chattanooga. Gen. Ulysses Grant and his troops came to the rescue, forcing open a supply line via Brown’s Ferry. The “cracker line” kept the army from starving as reinforcements trickled in.

Gen. Braxton Bragg committed a grave tactical error when he dispatched part of his force to retrieve Knoxville from Union hands. Thus diminished, the Rebel line partially encircling Chattanooga was ill prepared for the decisive battle to come.

The American musical scene was in a sorry state, according to the November issue of The Atlantic . An article entitled “A Warning Note” lamented that “The Wagner school of music has proved itself the arch enemy of the human voice. … The unnatural demands made upon the vocal organs through Wagner’s total ignorance of the art of singing, and the abnormal development of the orchestra through the impatient yearnings of his unquiet soul, have banished for the time all chance of melody in music.”

With almost one hundred thousand more votes than his opponent, incumbent President Grover Cleveland nevertheless lost to Benjamin Harrison in the November 6 election. Despite his slim majority, the distribution by state of Cleveland’s votes gave him only 168 electoral votes to the challenger Harrison’s 233.