January 2011

David Matthew, the pioneer railway engineer whose drawings appeared in the August/September 1984 issue of American Heritage, is surely an obscure figure, yet one who was involved with great men and great events in American railroad history. His life can be partially reconstructed from fragments found in the railroad trade press.

I read with interest the article in last year’s August/September issue that traced the history of air conditioning. Certainly Willis Carrier was the “Johnny Icicle” who was responsible for the cooling of America; but 1 was interested to see that the story does not describe a fantastic and forgotten public utility that cooled off customers well over a decade before Carrier set up his first installation.

In St. Louis, Denver, and Atlantic City at the end of the nineteenth century, it was possible to order refrigerant pumped to your business through street mains. Breweries, meat-packers, hotels, restaurants, and even one farsighted theater owner took advantage of this safe, convenient, economical method of cooling.

A little over a month after William Morton first administered ether at Massachusetts General, as described in your October/November 1984 issue, the poetic and humanistic Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote him a letter:

“My Dear Sir,—Everybody wants to have a hand in the great discovery. All I will do is to give you a hint or two as to names, or the name, to be applied to the state produced, and to the agent.

“The state should, I think, be called anaesthesia . This signifies insensibility, more particularly (as used by Linnaeus and Cullen) to objects of touch. The adjective will be anaesthetic …

“I would have a name pretty soon, and consult some accomplished scholar… before fixing upon the terms which will be repeated by the tongues of every civilized race of mankind .”

If indeed the “accomplished scholar” was consulted, he did not come up with anything better, and there is little reason not to believe that Holmes’s coinage will be universally used until the end of time.

The great age of advertising

was the 1920s and 1930s, when so much that is familiar to us today was invented. During those years, advertising became a vast, national industry, and its creators developed and refined such effective selling tools as guilt over how one’s child is being raised, fear of any number of brand new afflictions (halitosis chief among them), yearning for a color-coordinated bathroom where the towels match the toilet paper, and embarrassment over everything from soiled shirt collars to drooping socks. Accompanied by some classic magazine ads of the era.

The ten most important books

I am glad to see the acclaim given to your first editor, Bruce Catton. It is proper that his fellow historians have honored him by giving a literary award in his name (“Letter from the Editor,” August/September 1984).

His hometown, Benzonia, Michigan, has also commemorated him: in June of 1984 the Michigan Historical Commission unveiled a plaque honoring Mr. Catton.

This was due, in part, to the columnist Judd Arnett of the Detroit Free Press . When he traveled through the northern part of Michigan and found nothing to designate Benzonia as the hometown of the great Civil War writer, he began writing columns about this in the paper. Finally the Michigan Historical Commission got involved, and the commemoration took place.

In “Mrs. Roosevelt Faces Fear” in the October/November 1984 issue, FDR is quoted as saying, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR, as usual, failed to supply the credits.

Isn’t it Sir Francis Bacon who made this remark almost four hundred years ago? Of course, Sir Francis, too, may have been guilty of plagiarism.

A quick check in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations shows that what Bacon said was, “Nothing is terrible except fear itself.” Montaigne expressed it this way: “The thing I fear most is fear.” And Thoreau wrote in his Journal. “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.” Perhaps all were basically rephrasing the biblical proverb that says, “Be not afraid of sudden fear.”

Your August/September 1984 feature “The Dawn of the Railroad” was a delight. Such visual gems not only enrich our knowledge of our past but are also a researcher’s joy.

Richard H. Hopper’s revelation that the expression “O.K.” was popularized during the 1840 presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren, to signify his nickname “Old Kinderhook,” calls to mind another American expression traceable to the same campaign. Van Buren’s opponent, William Henry Harrison (“Old Tippecanoe”), distributed thousands of whiskey bottles in the shape of a log cabin. The name of the manufacturer was prominently stamped on the bottom: E. C. Booz Distillery of Philadelphia. Although the word “booze” has been traced back to Middle English bousen (“to carouse”), it became a synonym for cheap liquor as a result of the campaign of 1840. Apparently booze proved to be a more popular political symbol than “O.K.”—Harrison was elected.

While Mr. Hopper’s etymology was flawless, his Morse Code could stand some improvement. “O.K.” would be “dash-dash-dash dash-dot-dash” in Morse Code. The “dot-dot dash-dotdash” that Mr. Hopper suggests would be “IK,” who didn’t arrive on the political scene until a century later.

The attitude of today’s social workers toward welfare clients is sometimes criticized as callous or patronizing, but compared with their turn-of-the-century counterparts, our current case-workers are paragons of tact.

Consider, for instance, these comments from case reports of the 1900s: “Woman voted unworthy of help, as she was flashily dressed.” “Man to office for trousers, unappreciative when given shoes.” “A fine, meek family.”

These severe judgments show the attitudes of “friendly visitors,” as the social workers at the beginning of the century were called. The comments come from old case-work records of a Connecticut social agency, which was cleaning out its files. The social worker in charge of the job, appalled and amused, asked permission to copy comments from the reports she was reading. These quotations are too old to violate anyone’s privacy, but old enough to reveal attitudes from an alien era.