The afternoon of August 26, 1933 was warm and sunny in Poughkeepsie, and a large crowd had gathered on the Vassar College campus for a Dutchess County reception in honor of the area’s most illustrious citizen, Franklin Roosevelt. The new president had motored over from Hyde Park, and his open Packard had brought him to within a few steps of the outdoor platform from which he would speak. As he finished his remarks, a local physician named Harold Rosenthal stationed himself next to the car. He had his 16mm movie camera with him and was eager to get some close-up footage of FDR to show his family and friends. The result—less than a minute of silent black-and-white film recently deposited at the FDR Library in Hyde Park—is a unique historical document.
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Late in 1876, William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, rejected an opportunity to purchase from Alexander Graham Bell and his associates all patents relating to Bell’s telephone for $100,000. Since Bell’s patents are generally considered the most valuable ever issued by the United States Patent Office, Orton’s refusal to buy them earned him an odd immortality: he is the man who made the worst decision in American business history.
Few things are more amusing than the failure of our ancestors to foresee the future. Generous souls might refrain from making fun of Orton, but I do not think we should spare him. He goofed, and though any of us might have goofed as badly, that does not excuse him. Our children will not deprive themselves of the opportunity to laugh at our mistakes, so why should we deprive ourselves of an opportunity to laugh at the mistakes of others?
General William Tecumseh Sherman was a good hater, and he hated few things more than newspapermen. His encounter with the correspondent Floras B. Plympton of the Cincinnati Commercial in September 1861, five months into the Civil War, was typical. Plympton approached the general on a railroad platform in Kentucky and asked him for an interview. He handed over letters of introduction, including one from Sherman’s brother-in-law. Sherman’s response was a fierce glare and the demand that Plympton take the next train back to Louisville and out of the war zone. “Be sure you take it; don’t let me see you around here after it’s gone!”
“But, General!” Plympton protested. “The people are anxious. I’m only after the truth.”
“We don’t want the truth told about things here. That’s what we don’t want! Truth, eh? No, sir! We don’t want the enemy any better informed than he is. Make no mistake about that train!”
One week in August 1942 ,several stories on the British war effort appeared on the wires of the Associated Press, written by an AP reporter based in London named Drew Middleton.
What the readers did not know was that Middleton had spent part of that week not in England, but under enemy fire in a boat off the coast of France, watching an Allied commando raid on a German strongpoint.
The Germans didn’t know either, which was the point.
Prior to 1885, Niagara Falls resembled a carnival. At every turn, landowners forced visitors to pay tolls, and hackmen, hawkers, and showmen besieged them with their importunate cries. That ended on July 15 of this year. The American portion of the falls, eighty thousand surrounding acres, and several islands were transferred from private, exploitative hands to the sovereignty of New York State. The area became the nation’s first state park.
“No longer shall the pilgrim to Niagara suffer for his devotion,” reported The New York Times shortly after. “Him no longer shall the wily occupier fleece. Henceforth he is free of the soil, without fear of toll or charge.” Another advantage was to befall the devotee on Niagara’s becoming a park, according to the Times : “All the abominable obstructions of the late occupiers are to be swept away. These include shanties, cottages, [and] mills, ingeniously placed so as to be visible from all points [and] glaringly hideous in general.”
During Glenn Curtiss’s pioneering airplane flight between Albany and New York, an as yet unheard of use for the airplane dawned on him. He announced it to the press upon landing: “All the great battles of the future will be fought in the air. I have demonstrated that it is easy to fly over cities and fortifications. It would be perfectly practical to drop enough dynamite or picric acid down on West Point or a city like New York to destroy it utterly.… Take my word for it, the days for big warships are numbered.”
Toward the end of his life, the Cheyenne Indian chief Two Moon (a.k.a. Two Moons) became resigned to the ways of the white man and posed, for money, for photographers at various resorts along the Jersey shore. This picture was taken around 1914; the children are unknown.
Thirty-eight years earlier Two Moon had led his warriors, alongside the Sioux, to a famous victory against Custer at Little Big Horn.
When the U.S. Army, bent on revenge, sent fresh troops into the area, the Indians dispersed. Sitting Bull led one group to southern Canada; Two Moon came down the Tongue River to Fort Keogh, where he surrendered to Gen. Nelson Miles. He was later recruited as a scout for the Army, and the remainder of his life was peaceful. He made several visits to Washington, D.C., met President Wilson in 1914, and became chief of the Northern Cheyenne on the reservation, where he died in 1917, at the age of seventy.
The photograph was sent to us by Melvin W. Whitesell of Jupiter, Florida.
Having been an editorial cartoonist for the newspaper PM in New York City during the Roosevelt years, I was delighted with Charles Monaghan’s piece about political art (October/November 1984). Naturally I kept close watch on the party conventions in those days. Permit me to take exception to one statement in a picture caption: “Truman was assailed as incompetent but joined the ticket… after Roosevelt dropped Wallace as too radical.” FDR did not drop Wallace willingly. He fought hard to keep him, but powerful conservative Democrats continued threatened to block FDR’s nomination. It was they, not he, who considered Wallace a radical. World War II was still on, and FDR wanted to finish the job, so he accepted Truman, thus getting an unprecedented fourth term.
As to Truman’s competence, he was too competent. His senatorial committee investigating war contracts and procurement procedures was doing such a good job that a lot of people wanted him out of the Senate at all costs.
Spurred by the story on military medicine in the October/November 1984 issue, Lester Huested, a doctor and a trustee of the Glens Falls (New York) historical society, retrieved from his attic a medical officer’s letter describing a particularly unwelcome duty. “During the Civil War,” writes Dr. Huested, “my great grandfather, Dr. James E. Pomfret, was appointed surgeon of the 113 N.Y. Regiment of Infantry, which later became the 7th N.Y. Heavy Artillery Regiment. He wrote the following letter when he was with Grant’s army during the siege of Petersburg.”
Before Petersburg, Va. Sept. 2nd 1864
My Dear Wife,