WHO’S ON FIRST? THE AMERICAN LITERARY HERITAGE
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January 2011
IN MAY the Library of America—the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to put the best of American literature into the hands of the general reader—entered its second year of operation. Between May and July, four more handsome, compact volumes will come out, thus adding to the eight that saw publication in 1982. When the project is completed, a total of one hundred uniform books will have been issued, and the library will serve as a true act of literary preservation. Major American authors will be represented in the series by several volumes each—often their complete works.
IN THE EARLY summer of 1775 the rebeb of Virginia evicted their royalist governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, from his capital at Williamsburg and drove him to refuge aboard a British warship. With only three hundred Royal Marines at his disposal, Dunmore lit upon a controversial recruiting stratagem. On November 7 he seized Norfolk, established his headquarters there, proclaimed martial law throughout Virginia—and went on to state: “I do hereby further declare all indentured servants [and] Negroes … free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops, as soon as may be. …” Within a week Dunmore had mustered three hundred runaway slaves into his “Ethiopian Regiment,” whose slogan, “Liberty to Slaves,” was presumed to represent British policy. Within a month the “Ethiopians” were sufficiently armed and drilled to put to rout militia under Col. William Woodford at Kemp’s Landing.
HE WAS ON his way to becoming a naturalist long before he knew it. One of his earliest memories was of bouncing across the cold dazzle of the Aar glacier to the Alpine hut where his father was developing radical theories about the Ice Age. That was in 1841, when Alexander Agassiz was five years old. His father, Louis Agassiz, was already well known as a geologist and zoologist, and on his way to becoming famous.
Alexander was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, a place evidently conducive to the natural sciences: in a very few years the district produced Pasteur and Cuvier as well as the elder Agassiz. This atmosphere, and his vigorous father, engaged Alexander from the start. He early became interested in zoology and began dissecting specimens with unusual skill. But where Louis Agassiz was big, florid, and gregarious—there was always a touch of Barnum about the great naturalist—Alexander had his mother’s reticence and slight build. This troubled his father; perhaps the boy would prove too shy to cope with the world.
No one can tell exactly how many colonists were loyal to the throne: “Loyalist” was a term that embraced those who actively supported the British cause, those driven from their homes to seek protection behind British lines, and those merely scorned as “Sunshine Patriots.” Tory property had been seized and distributed or sold as early as 1776. By 1782 all the states had passed acts of confiscation. “With malice toward none” was an idea whose time had not vet come.
By the time it was all over, some one hundred thousand Loyalists had fled the country; about half of them to Canada. The last group left New York on April 27, 1783, their exile hastened by the imminent departure of the British army. On April 15 Congress had ratified the text of the provisional peace treaty signed in Paris.
“The Green Sward Our Carpet, Azure Canopy Our Canvas, No Tinsel, No Gilding, No Humbug! No Side Shows or Freaks.” So declaimed the posters created by press agent “Arizona John” Burke for “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s great Wild West Show which opened at the fairgrounds in Omaha on May 17.
The show had had a sort of tryout the year before. William F. Cody’s fellow citizens in North Platte resolved to put on an “Old Glory Blowout” to celebrate the Fourth of July and asked Buffalo Bill to take charge.
They assumed he would produce a rodeo of some kind, but Cody had long been thinking along other lines and he seized the moment. He hired Indians, bought the old Deadwood Stagecoach, and, with the help of local cowboys, reproduced a famous stagecoach holdup. There were horse races and a sharpshooting contest, and it was all a sensational success. “I tried it on my neighbors and they lived through it and liked it, so I made up my mind right then I’d take the show East.”
No mere flick of a switch would do to open Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition on May 27: The Genius of Science and the Industry of Man were to be celebrated. A wondering public learned that the miles of neon tubing were set aglow by rays from the star Arcturus focused on photoelectric cells, transformed into electricity, and transmitted to Chicago. These rays, they were told, had left Arcturus at the moment the Columbian Exposition had opened forty years earlier.
But it was not all Science and Learning. The New York Times remarked that ”… to some extent the hiatus between what science knows and what the public knows will be bridged. At the same time the average sensual man will have his needs ministered to and will not be asked to strain his intellect.”