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January 2011
Nobody paid much attention to America’s first Olympic team until the athletes returned. Then all of a sudden everyone realized what they had accomplished over there in Greece.
There were ten men on the squad. James B. Connolly, the hop, step, and jumper, almost missed the boat when it left New York on March 20 bound for Athens, where the Olympic Games were to be revived in April. The night before, at a farewell party, he had wrenched his back. He needed help getting up the gangplank.
In addition to Connolly and his aching back, there were four athletes from Princeton and five members of the Boston Athletic Association, including the great Tom Burke in the 100 and 400 meters. Connolly, affiliated with the little Suffolk Athletic Club in South Boston, was paying his own way.
During most of the twelve-day trip to Naples, Connolly’s teammates took turns helping him in and out of chairs. Finally, “one sunny magical morning just before we reached the Mediterranean, I woke up with every pain and ache gone.”
An entire museum could be stocked with images of women who were loved by artists, and the first gallery might be reserved for portraits of the women whom painters loved before any others—their mothers. I do not claim that artists are more devoted to their mothers than the rest of us are, but they are able to make their feelings visible, and some have succeeded in immortalizing these special models. A popular stereotype contends that mothers have always inspired their children with reverence for the “finer things in life”—truth, beauty, art. Unfortunately there is no evidence that this appealing bromide is in any way true. Some did encourage their children to become artists, and some did not.
The great public figures of the land seem so distant from us that it comes as something of a shock when a private person manages to persuade dozens of eminences to act at his or her behest. The private person in this case is Bill McCloud, an Oklahoma junior high school teacher; the public figures are among the most important of the Vietnam War era. Their responses to McCloud form the heart of this issue’s cover article. Here, in the words of American Heritage’s Managing Editor, Richard Snow, is how McCloud’s story came to us: “Every editor I know hates to get anything handwritten, especially with a bold, black felt-tip pen. If it’s a proposal, it will be hard to read; if it’s a manuscript, there’s a good chance it will be a transcription of voices the author hears from time to time. Whatever it is, it will require an answer, and it won’t be useful.
Last year, the principal at my school and friend, Rick Elliott, told me that he wanted the Vietnam War to be covered more thoroughly than it had been in the social studies classes at our junior high in Pryor, Oklahoma. Although Vietnam was our nation’s most recent war, America’s combat role in it had ended before most of our students were born. When you consider that the war was the most divisive event in the past hundred years of our history, it becomes obvious that it is something that desperately needs to be taught in our schools.
I was especially interested in the subject because of my own personal history. I had dropped out of my first year of college in 1967 and enlisted in the U.S. Army, knowing I would almost certainly go to Vietnam. While I knew we were fighting to keep Communists from taking over the government of South Vietnam, I had no sophisticated understanding of the real causes of the war or how things had gotten to the point they were at in late 1967.
The evangelist George Whitefield of Gloucester arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on May 7. Whitefield’s fervent brand of preaching had already captivated congregations back in England; in America he was to foster the religious revival known as the Great Awakening.
Ordained in 1736, Whitefield joined John and Charles Wesley as one of the pioneers of the Methodist movement. He traveled extensively throughout the colonies, converting the masses and raising funds for his Georgia orphanage.
In Philadelphia a curious Benjamin Franklin showed up at one of Whitefield’s sermons. “I perceived he intended to finish with a collection,” wrote Franklin in his autobiography, “and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me asham’d of that, and determin’d me to give the silver; and he finish’d so admirably, that I empty’d my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”
Signs posted throughout Philadelphia on May 15 warned that “a convention to effect the immediate emancipation of the slaves throughout the country is in session in the city, and it is the duty of citizens who entertain a proper respect for the Constitution of the Union and the right of property to interfere.”
More than three thousand reformers gathered at the newly dedicated Pennsylvania Hall the next day as a hostile crowd formed outside. Among the speakers was Angelina Grimké Weld. She and her sister Sarah, the daughters of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner, were famous in the North for their antislavery lectures. Just two days before, Angelina had married the abolitionist Theodore Weld in an interracial ceremony.
April had been a cruel month for Federal troops in Virginia; the mud created by spring rains slowed troop movements to a miserable crawl as Gen. Joseph Hooker’s Army of the Potomac prepared to confront Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Then, as May approached, the sun came out, and the roads dried. Fresh provisions and a visit from President Lincoln cheered the Union soldiers, while Hooker looked forward to a rout. “May God have mercy on General Lee,” Hooker boasted, “for I will have none.”
“Fighting Joe” had reason for confidence: His troops outnumbered Lee’s by more than two to one. If he could lure the Rebels from their heavy fortifications at Fredericksburg, a decisive victory was almost assured.
“The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day. …” Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on June 3.
The ballad hardly seemed destined for immortality, but a young comedian and singer named DeWolf Hopper rescued it from the dugout of time. In New York City, Hopper was appearing in a comic opera called Prince Methusalem . At a special performance before the New York Giants and the Chicago White Stockings, Hopper recited the ballad in the middle of the second act. So popular was his rendition that Hopper added it to his permanent repertoire. He recited the saga of Casey’s strikeout more than ten thousand times throughout his career. “Casey” has been reprinted countless times, set to music, and even produced as an opera, making it the most popular piece of comic verse in American letters.