January 2011

Of the three great pronouncements uttered by “malefactors of great wealth” in the latter half of the nineteenth century, William H. Vanderbilt’s “The public be damned” is surely the most famous. It lacks the insouciance of Boss Tweed’s “Well, what are you going to do about it?” and the moral grandeur of Jim Fisk’s “Nothing is lost save honor”—but it encapsulated, neatly, what was generally feared to be the attitude of the great capitalists of the day.

Vanderbilt was traveling west in three private railroad cars to inspect his lines, which crossed the country. As the train halted at Michigan City, two newspapermen came aboard; John Sherman of the Chicago Tribune and Clarence Dresser, a free-lancer. Vanderbilt agreed to talk to them. They asked him, among other things, about the new train he had instituted to cut the New York-Chicago run to twenty-four hours. “Does it pay?”

“No, not a bit of it,” came the answer. “We only run the limited because forced to by the action of the Pennsylvania Railroad.”

There were fifty-one thousand witnesses, including Gov. Franklin Roosevelt, and still the matter is unsettled. Did George Herman Ruth, in the third game of the World Series at Comiskey Park, actually point to the centerfield bleachers before hitting a home run to that very spot? Years later, in his autobiography (“as told to” Bob Considine), Ruth said yes, and the moment is enshrined in the movie version of his life. But contemporary accounts agree only that there was a good deal of gesticulation at the plate: Ruth was keeping track of the count and mocking the Chicago players who were riding him from the bench; a “pantomime act” John Drebinger called it in the New York Times . Charlie Root was pitching for Chicago, Gabby Hartnett catching—the two men in the best position to know. Their testimony is:

Root : Ruth did not point at the fence before he swung. If he had made a gesture like that, well, anybody who knows me knows that Ruth would have ended up on his ass.

During the summer of 1919 a group of dissident members of the Socialist party, including the radical journalist John Reed, published a manifesto in the left-wing newspaper Revolutionary Age attacking the party’s more moderate elements and calling on workers in the United States to rise up and “overthrow the political organization upon which capitalistic exploitation depends.” The only uprising their “Left Wing Manifesto” engendered was a walkout by Reed and his comrades at the Socialist party’s national convention that August (the one depicted in the recent film Reds). But to government officials caught up in the frenzy of a postwar Red Scare, publication of the manifesto was considered highly incendiary. Several members of the newspaper’s managing board, including Reed, were indicted under New York’s criminal anarchy statute, which made it a felony to advocate, “by word of mouth or writing,” the violent overthrow of the government.

I am rereading the complete file of A MERICAN H ERITAGE magazine. I have just finished your October 1973 issue, in which you state in “Postscripts” that you have no explanation for the mysterious Thing hovering over the dear ladies who are repairing the original Star-Spangled Banner in the August 1972 issue.

Although the information comes almost ten years late, you will be pleased to know that the Thing is a life-size model of the rare giant squid. This creature can measure up to sixty feet in length and weigh up to half a ton.

At the time or your photo the papier-mâche model was hanging in the Great Hall of the Smithsonian Castle. Mike Sweeny of the department of Cephalopods at the Smithsonian told me that the model is no longer in existence. I recall seeing a similar model, probably from the same mold, hanging from the ceiling of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum back in the 1920s.

I very much enjoyed Stephen Sears’s fine article in the April/May issue, “Shut the Goddam Plant!” There is, however, one minor point of contention. The strike is referred to as the “first sit-down strike.” A few early instances of sitting-in can be put aside as being unrelated to the modern labor movement, but the strike, in 1934, against the General Tire and Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio, cannot be so easily dismissed. That dispute had two aims: to gain wage parity with the big three of rubber manufacturing—Firestone, Goodyear, and Goodrich—and to gain union recognition for the AFL local. The company refused both, arguing on the latter point that the workers already had an “Employees Representation Plan”—a euphemism for company union.

The sit-down was suggested by the union president, Rex Murray, as an alternative to conventional strike methods. The sit-down only lasted a few days, after which, assured of noninterference from the courts, the workers walked away from the plant and continued their strike outside. The sit-down became a viable tool in the CIO’s drive to organize the mass-production industries.

It gave me a pleasant surprise, almost a shock, to see the picture at the bottom of page 67 in the April/May issue of A MERICAN H ERITAGE showing the three children burying their pet rabbit. I knew that picture as a child and never before saw its duplicate.

Many years ago peddlers roamed the countryside with merchandise for sale or trade. My mother obtained a large, colored, framed copy of that picture from such a huckster. She traded two hens for it. That must have been about 1913.

My mother was attracted to this picture because her three children were the sizes of the ones in the picture. My brother, Harold, had a brown wool suit like the one in the picture. My younger brother, Marvin, wore a “Russian suit” and golden curls as the picture shows. I was the girl.

As a student of and writer on hand-papermaking I was delighted with your article on the Japanese paper balloon-bombs of World War II (April/May 1982). I first ran across this story years ago in doing research on the subject of paper. If I remember rightly, one of the balloons drifted as far east as Michigan.

However, your readers who are acquainted only with machine-made paper and newsprint are going to be puzzled that a paper balloon could survive such a rigorous journey. Professor Prioli neglected the aspect that truly made these balloons possible: the quality of Japanese paper. In all probability the balloons were made in large part of sheets of handmade kozo paper, which has an exceptionally long, strong fiber. They may have been put together of the paper used then for shoji screens.

Historically Japan has used paper for many more purposes than Western culture, partly because of the strength and longevity of the various fibers used and the purity of the process. Actually, a paper balloon is one of the less exotic applications the Japanese have devised.

1832 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1882 One Hundred Years Ago 1932 Fifty Years Ago

Thomas A. Collier, Jr., found this old, uncaptioned photograph in a flea market just outside the town of Mt. Joy, Pennsylvania. Who, he wondered, were these children? Boys all in military caps, girls in their checkered jumpers. He bought it and began his research.

He found the answer in a book published in 1876, Pennsylvania’s Soldier Orphan Schools . These were the orphans of the Mount Joy School, founded in 1864, to provide for children left destitute by the Civil War. The dress of the children is described: “The girls and boys were neatly and uniformly clothed—the former in brown hoods, black cloth cloaks, and checked frocks, and the latter in dark blue gold-laced caps, blue roundabouts and gray pantaloons.”

When AMERICAN HERITAGE went to press with “The Story Behind the Tapes” in the February/March 1982 issue, my own curiosity in regard to the 1940 Oval Office recordings was far from satisfied. From the very beginning I had tried to learn as much as possible about the RCA machine itself. Tape recorders are a household item today but they did not exist in 1940. I knew that film had been used as a recording medium, but beyond that I could say very little else about the machine. Neither Henry Kannee nor Jack Romagna, the official White House stenographers during the FDR years, had any clear memories of the device, even though each of them had used it. This is not too surprising. The Continuous-film Recording Machine was in operation during a brief eleven-week period in the autumn of 1940 and thereafter was virtually ignored, if not entirely forgotten.