January 2011

At eight o’clock on the evening of Sunday, October 16, a fifty-nine-yearold man with a prophet’s beard and a prophet’s vehemence spoke to twentyone disciples in a farmhouse: “Men, get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry.”

The Ferry was the town of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and the little army that set off into the drizzling darkness was led by John Brown. Earlier that day he had gone over his final plans: they would seize the armory and rifle works, take hostages to negotiate with the militia, hold the town while slave reinforcements came in from Virginia, and withdraw into the mountains to establish a base, which, growing ever stronger, eventually would smash the institution of slavery in America.

James G. Blaine, the Republican presidential candidate, was worn out, and he did not want to campaign in New York City. Nor did the Republican state chairman want him to. “Go up the line of the New York Central to Syracuse; stump the northern counties —they need it; and then go home to Portland.” Blaine was exhausted; the shortest road home looked sweetest to him; but New York City was New York City. He went.

Charming, cordial, and half-stupefied with fatigue, he moved through the usual ceremonies until October 29 when he fell into the hands of a welcoming committee whose spokesman was the Reverend Samuel D. Burchard. Blaine stood patiently while Burchard gave vent to a long, droning speech. Without any change of tone, the cleric muttered at one point, “We are Republicans and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” The barbed phrase slipped right past Blaine. But the shorthand reporter supplied by the Democrats caught it.

“It was near Thanksgiving Day of 1884,” wrote Dorr E. Felt, “and I decided to use the holiday in the construction of the wooden model. I went to the grocer’s and selected a box which seemed to me to be about the right size for the casing. It was a macaroni box. For keys I procured some meat skewers from a hardware store for the key guides and an assortment of elastic bands to be used for springs. When Thanksgiving Day came I got up early and went to work with a few tools, principally a jack knife.”

At 9:55 A.M. on October 25 the Union Pacific streamlined train M-10001 pulled into New York’s Grand Central Terminal after an epic race begun in Los Angeles fifty-six hours and fiftyfive minutes earlier. The run trimmed fourteen and a half hours from the previous record, and it put another nail in mainline steam’s coffin. The aluminum train weighed a mere 211 tons fully loaded; any one of its steampowered rivals would have weighed 700. M-10001 stopped only twice for fuel and drank up less than eighty dollars’ worth of diesel oil.

“I HONOR THE HUMAN race,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote at seventyseven. “When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself.” As usual she was writing from firsthand experience, for to an astonishing degree she was her own invention. It was her husband who declared that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror. …” But it was she who demonstrated that truth most vividly. As four new books about her attest in different ways, her entire life—which began a century ago this October—was a testament to her resolve to triumph over her terrors.

THE LARGE, red-wattled bird associated with Thanksgiving is native only to the eastern part of North America. Americans call this bird a turkey ; Britons do too, along with everyone who speaks English or languages strongly influenced by English. In Nigeria, formerly a British colony, turkeys are bred for food and called turkeys in both the Ibo and Hausa languages. The Japanese, who have borrowed many English words, call the bird a taki .

Yet in no other language does the word for turkey sound or look like turkey . Here are some examples: Spanish: pavo ; Dutch: kalkoen ; German: Truthahn ; Greek: galo ; Arabic: diekrumi ; Russian: ingimka .

“I Wish I’d Been There …”

December is the thirtieth anniversary of American Heritage magazine, and to mark the occasion the editors asked scores of public figures and writers—including the members of the Society of American Historians—to consider this question: What is the one scene or incident in American history that you would like to have witnessed—and why? The range of answers is amazing: they start with the dawn of life on the continent and run right to Watergate. Taken together chronologically, they turn out to be nothing less than an amusing, moving, and surprisingly complete history of the United States of America.

The world of Gluyas Williams …

For thirty years he produced graceful, intricate cartoons filled with humor warm enough to leave his targets amused rather than devastated, and sharp enough to make him the Hogarth of the American middle class.

American Gold …

Did you know that Liberty almost wound up on the bottom of the Atlantic instead of on her pedestal? Or that the young French naval lieutenant who brought her safely through an ocean storm eventually became an American citizen?

Nineteen-year-old Rodolphe Victor de Drambour commanded the small steam-and-sail gunboat Isère that carried the dismembered statue to this country. Because none of the ship’s hatches were big enough to admit the cases, he cut a hole in the vessel’s side and shoved them in as best he could, with no means of proper stowage.

On the voyage the ship ran into a heavy storm. For seventy-two hours young Drambour never left the bridge as the wildly shifting cargo threatened to capsize the gunboat at any moment. Two days after his twentieth birthday he anchored safely off Sandy Hook. When or why he left France I do not know, but in 1936, at the time of Liberty’s fiftieth anniversary, he had long been a U. S. citizen and was living in the Bronx.

The article on the Statue of Liberty triggered memories. During the years from 1931 to 1935, my father was assigned to Fort Jay on Governors Island in New York Harbor, but we, along with a number of other families, were quartered on Bedloe’s Island (Fort Wood) at the foot of the statue. We took the excursion boat to school each day; supplies were delivered to the island by Army mules pulling a wagon. In the winter we used to hitch our sleds to the back of the wagons (forbidden, of course), and in the summer we would hang on to get slivers of ice when it was delivered.

Some of the best times were had in the winter when the bay was filled with broken ice and the excursion boat could not get through. We would be marooned for a day or two—once for three days. No school! My mother, who is now in her nineties, does not remember our life there as being fun, but it was a great place to be a child during the Depression.

I have a question for you after reading the June/July issue. In the article “One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn,” you give the year 1904 for the first Finnish translation of Twain’s novel, but then on page 84 you also list 1927 for the first Finnish translation. Which year is the correct one?

The correct date is 1904.