Thomas Fleming’s story on West Point (April) is a fine one, vividly showing that the Military Academy is a historic treasure house of the nation’s roots and a repository of the nation’s values. Which, in turn, explains why so many Americans travel each year to walk around this hallowed spot. Incidentally, I have placed a copy of the issue prominently in the Superintendent’s home here, with a marker at Fleming’s story.
The Washington Monument opened to the public on October 9. Visitors crowded into a lumbering steam elevator for the twelve-minute ride to the top of the 555-foot obelisk.
On September 4, George Eastman received a patent for his Kodak camera, enabling the Eastman Company to bring photography within the reach of the unskilled amateur by processing the film for the customer. This simple, fixed-focus camera sold for twenty-five dollars, with a one-hundred-exposure roll of film and a case included. With the “Kodak System,” wrote Eastman, “the mere mechanical act of taking the picture…is divorced from all the chemical manipulations of preparing and finishing pictures.”
The Kodak was a phenomenal success. Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1893 operetta Utopia Limited even featured a chorus of Kodak-wielding girls and two blushing maidens singing, “To diagnose/Our modest pose/The Kodaks do their best:/If evidence you would possess/Of what is maiden bashfulness,/You only need a button press—/And we will do the rest.”
Weather forecasts called for merely “overcast with rain,” but on September 21 a hurricane tore across Long Island, drowned Providence, Rhode Island, with a ten-foot tidal wave, and lashed Cape Cod with 150-mile-per-hour winds. In its wake the storm left sixty thousand families homeless, damage totaling half a billion dollars, more than six hundred dead and missing, and for the survivors, haunting, indelible memories of the Hurricane of 1938.
Robert Sherwood’s play Abe Lincoln in Illinois opened in New York on October 17 with a memorable performance by Raymond Massey in the title role. The drama chronicled the three decades preceding Lincoln’s election to the Presidency, including his ill-fated romance with Ann Rutledge and his hesitant marriage to the volatile Mary Todd. “Mr. Sherwood has looked down with compassion into the lonely blackness of Lincoln’s heart,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times , “and seen some of the fateful things that lived there.”
The American political campaign as we know it today was born on August 28, 1934, when Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author and lifelong socialist, won the Democratic primary for governor of California. Sinclair’s landslide primary victory left his opponents with only ten weeks until election day to turn back one of the strongest mass movements in the nation’s history. Extraordinary campaign tactics were clearly called for, and the Republicans pioneered strategies against Sinclair—including the first use of motion pictures to attack a candidate—that have now become the norm in the age of television.
“The Republican success,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has observed, “marked a new advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor.” In another two decades, according to Schlesinger, “the techniques of manipulation, employed so crudely in 1934, would spread east, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.”
WE LOOKED DIFFERENT
Contemporary observers of early-19th-century America left a fragmentary but nonetheless fascinating and revealing picture of the manner in which rich and poor, Southerner and Northerner, farmer and city dweller, freeman and slave presented themselves to the world. To begin with, a wide variety of characteristic facial expressions, gestures, and ways of carrying the body reflected the extraordinary regional and social diversity of the young republic.
Lured by Indian tales of gold, the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñnez de Balboa led 190 men through dense, steaming jungles and rugged mountains across the narrow isthmus of Panama. On September 25, Balboa encountered the Pacific Ocean. According to
the early Spanish historian Antonio de Herrera, Balboa “commanded his armie to halt, and himselfe went alone to the toppe, where, having sighted the Mar del Sur , he knelt down, and raising his hands to Heaven, pouring forth mighty praises to God for His great grace in having made him the first man to discover and sight it.”
Cannon shot boomed across the waters of Lake Erie as Oliver Hazard Perry, in command of the flagship Lawrence , led his small, undermanned fleet into battle against the British, commanded by the one-armed Robert Heriot Barclay, on the morning of September 10.
Perry’s second officer, Jesse Duncan Elliott, commanding the 480-ton brig Niagara , mysteriously held back (later he lamely asserted that his ship had been stalled by a lack of wind), leaving Perry to engage the enemy’s two most formidable vessels with just his own ship and two small schooners.
Unusual sightings reported in September included “a monstrous longtailed snake” in Indiana, “grasshoppers so ravenous in Maryland that they devour hoe-handles, ploughshares, and harrows,” and several ghosts.
In October began the twelve-hundred-mile journey of the Cherokee nation from its Georgia homeland to Oklahoma. The migration was not a voluntary one. White settlers hungry for land in the Southeast had already pushed the Creeks and Choctaws across the Mississippi. But the Cherokees, a proud people with a rich land lovingly tended, did not go easily.
In 1835 the government coerced a small minority of Cherokees to sign on behalf of the entire nation a treaty agreeing to cede all lands owned by them east of the Mississippi River. They had two years to clear out.
Gen. William S. Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland had the Confederates in Tennessee on the run. A daring series of maneuvers severed the Rebels’ supply line and forced Braxton Bragg’s army to retreat from Chattanooga. “Old Rosy” led his men straight into a sudden counterattack on the banks of Chickamauga Creek on September 19.
Bragg had picked up reinforcements from Knoxville and from Mississippi and Virginia and was now ready to go on the offensive again. Rosecrans found his campaign in tatters. Casualties totaled thirty thousand in the course of the two-day battle.
Threatened with a rout, the Federals retreated to Chattanooga. Bragg and his troops closed in, and the Army of the Cumberland found itself facing the beginning of a bitter siege.