VISITORS TO a performance by the Kneisel String Quartet in New York City one autumn afternoon in 1894 may well have been distracted from the sonorities of Beethoven by a strangely dressed man in the audience. In contrast to the stylish appearance of the rest of the music lovers, he wore a rumpled corduroy hunting suit, a battered felt hat, rubber boots, and a frayed handkerchief wound round his head and tied under his chin, as if to relieve a toothache. He carried a brown paper sack, which, when placed under the seat, leaked trails of blood on the auditorium floor. Those present may have assumed that here was some Yankee rustic, game bag in tow, who had wandered into the concert hall on impulse, and they would have been absolutely correct. They would not have guessed, however, that the man was Abbott H. Thayer, one of the best known and most highly paid society painters on the Eastern seaboard.
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January 2011
THERE ARE places on this globe to which history can point and say of a people, a nation, or an empire: “This was their high-water mark. Thus far they went and no farther.” The three legions that reached the Elbe in A.D. 9 only to be destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest were at such a point, for no Roman in arms ever saw the Elbe again. Both the Mongols and the Turks saw the walls of Vienna but never passed them. The British took Kabul more than once, but that was their outermost limit. I still feel the Yalu River was such a point. For a few hours near the Yalu, we Americans knew the intoxication of total victory. We knew America was invincible, that free men would always triumph over the mindless automatons of tyranny.
What follows is an account of the march to the Yalu and back by Battery B, 31st Field Artillery Battalion, 7th Division, put together from scribbles in a diary of sorts, the rough copy of notes for the unit journal, and memories now over thirty years old.
ST. LOUIS, DECEMBER 12 : An actress playing in the drama The Passions Slave quit because her costar insisted on giving her what was then known in theatrical circles as the “Henry V kiss.” “The man approaches from behind, takes the lady’s face with both hands under the chin, turns her mouth toward him and kisses it over her shoulder. I’m not a prude, but I do not think that anyone but a husband, an engaged lover, or a guardian should kiss me in the way Mr. Stevens kissed me in the play.”
Can any reader tell us why this was called the “Henry V kiss”?
CINCINNATI, DECEMBER 26 : A Mr. A. H. Pugh, dissatisfied with the service of the telephone company, was moved to strong language: “If you can’t get the party I want you to, you may shut up your damn telephone!” Aghast, the phone company removed its instrument from Pugh’s home. He sued to get it restored, but the courts decided in favor of the company. Damn was not to be said over the wire.
Memoirs of a Kansas homesteader…
Those who obeyed Greeley’s injunction and went west did not always have an easy time of it. On the Kansas prairies in the 187Os the difficulties—drought, plagues of locusts—were of biblical scope. Although many prevailed, many others gave up. This unusual firstperson account tells the story of pioneers who went through it all—and decided it wasn’t worth it.
Fear of the city…
Alfred Kazin traces the symbolic role that the city—as a fact and as an idea—has played in the American consciousness for two hundred years. The dread, he notes, seems to be increasingly well founded.
Three American scholars on three Americans …
John Kenneth Galbraith writes, from a special perspective, on Franklin D. Roosevelt; Jacques Barzun tells how the philosopher-psychologist William James came to choose his career; and Malcolm Cowley remembers, with unblinking clarity, life with his difficult mother.
Plus …
During this year 3,197 Americans died in the coal mines. December was the bleakest month: on the sixth occurred the worst accident in the history of American mining—362 men and children dead at Monongah, West Virginia; on the nineteenth, 239 dead at Jacob’s Creek, Pennsylvania; and on the twentieth, 91 dead at Yolande, Alabama.
At the risk of being sneered at as a NeoVictorian, I hereby admit to a nineteenth-century belief that, allowing for daily relapses Land hourly alarms, the world of man is improving. I am not by nature a Panglossian sort but, like the grandparent of a precocious child, I am overwhelmed by a sense of how far my still sprouting human species has come in so short a time.
Compared with the span of history, I am, at seventy-two, very young, but that proposition is hardly as startling as its reverse—that measured against my own age, man himself is young. Consider: If, at my birth, time had proceeded to run backward instead of in the usual fashion, I would at this moment be writing in the year 1837. The same brief span that has brought me to scarcely more than middle age would have carried me back to the year when Andrew Jackson left the White House to Martin Van Buren; when John Quincy Adams, our retired fifth President, was still scolding the House of Representatives about slavery; when young Abraham Lincoln, with only a few months at the bar behind him, moved hopefully to Springfield to open a law office.
What if any of the pre-Civil War Presidents had gone mad?
What if Andrew Johnson had been successfully impeached?
What if William McKinley had not been assassinated?
What if there had been no tape-recording system in Nixon’s White House?
THESE ARE a few of the questions on the final exam I set last spring for my students at George Washington University, where I give a course on monarchy, republicanism, and the evolution of the American Presidency. (Additional questions from the exam—together with some answers derived from the resourceful essays turned in by the class and from my own speculations—are printed under the illustrations for this article.) My immediate concern is with the status of such pedagogical exercises. Are they just harmless jokes? Are they hopelessly “unhistorical"? Or are they potentially valuable?
A RECENT VISITOR to the Lincoln Memorial accosted the National Park Service, its custodian, with a complaint. Viewing the state names and their years of admission to the Union that circle the memorial, he was surprised to find the wrong date inscribed for his home state of Ohio: MDCCCII—a year too early, he contended.
Reference books back him up: all list 1803 as Ohio’s date of statehood. It appeared that the creators of the Lincoln Memorial had made a mistake.
And yet the architect Henry Bacon and the sculptor Daniel Chester French had taken infinite pains with their masterpiece when they designed it (1912-22). The visitor’s only recourse was to check the date of the act declaring Ohio’s statehood. There it was: the Joint Resolution for Admitting the State of Ohio into the Union—approved August 7, 1953.
IN THE October 1981 issue, Terrence Cole traced the saga of President Reagan’s desk, which began life as part of the planking of the British ship Resolute . Abandoned in 1854 during the search for the lost Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, the Resolute was discovered intact by an American whaler and sailed back to the United States. There she was bought from her finders and, as the brass plaque on the President’s desk tells it, was “fitted out and sent to England as a gift to Her Majesty Queen Victoria by the President and the People of the United States, as a token of good will and friendship. This table was made from her timbers when she was broken up, and is presented by the QUEEN OF GREAT BRITAIN & IRELAND TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES , as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the gift of the ‘Resolute.’ ”
Queen Victoria’s gratitude, however, did not end here. There is another desk.