The “American Character” in last December’s issue was MeIvil Dewey, the librarian who became famous as the father of the Dewey decimal system. The historian John Maass read the article and responded by sending us one of his own, which appeared in 1972 in the Wilson Library Bulletin —and which claims that Dewey cribbed his great idea.
Reader Marcello Maestro of Manhattan has recently passed on a curious footnote to the spread of American ideals after the Revolution: “There are in the United States many towns and cities that have been named after European communities, sometimes with “New” preceding the name, such as New York or New Orleans. The list is very long, and the same name often is given to several towns in different states. What may come as news to many people, however, is the fact that at least one European town was named after an American city—Philadelphia, the very birthplace of American independence.
Like early American art, early American medicine was uniformly primitive. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (whose own typical mid-nineteenth-century methods would appall a modern patient) described his colonial predecessor’s standard treatment. “His pharmacopoeia consisted mainly of simples,” he wrote, “St. John’s wort and Clown’s All-Heal … with opium in some form. … He would perhaps have a rheumatic patient wrapped in the skin of a wolf or a wild cat, and in cases of malignant fever … prescribed a certain black powder, which had been made by calcining toads in an earthen pot.”
It sits like an exclamation point at the easternmost tip of Long Island and has done so for 184 years—making the Montauk Point Lighthouse one of the oldest in the United States. It also has the distinction of having been authorized by President George Washington himself. One of the first federal agencies created by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was the Lighthouse Service—later absorbed by the Coast Guard—and one of the first areas chosen for a government light was Montauk Point, which guarded the entrance to Long Island Sound and had been the scene of many fearsome wrecks. In 1792 the government bought a patch of land at the point for $255.12, then invited bids for the construction of a lighthouse.
A great deal has happened since I last took this podium to speak to you a summer ago. We have endured a bewildering profusion of economic woes, we have withstood a seemingly interminable siege by foreign religious fanatics, we have seen a wholly new American government take over from the one then in power. And in the streets of our capital city, the new President narrowly escaped death at the hands of another madman with a gun. Ours is not a magazine geared to follow day-to-day events, but it surprises me how often articles we plan for other reasons turn out to be—to use that overworked but inevitable term—relevant. For instance, originally we had planned to publish the piece on the trial of Garfield’s assassin in this issue because it was a hundred years ago this July that the President was shot. Now it means the more to us to be able to see how our forebears grappled with all the questions raised by the enormity of that crime. Sadly, the piece has taken on a new significance.
“Again, the seas smashed over her. In a sudden shift of maddened wind, the whole mainmast went overboard—sails, yards, rigging, everything. As the dismasted hull floundered in the tumult of freezing waters, the broken spars flailed the hull, leaks started, the sea came down below. The pumps were smashed. … Soundings showed three feet of water down below, rising. Again, she had to turn back, this time to the Falkland Islands. It was for the last time.”
David McCullough’s name will be familiar to long-time readers of this magazine, not only for his books, but because he was, for a time, one of its editors. He says, in fact, that what got him started “in the history business” was coming across a spectacular photograph of the official unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, showing it to the editors of AMERICAN HERITAGE , and being invited to write a short piece on the subject. He has written three widely acclaimed books, The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge , and The Path Between the Seas —the last of which won a National Book Award in 1978—and he has just published Mornings on Horseback (Simon & Schuster), a study of the first twenty-seven years of Theodore Roosevelt’s life. In his home on Martha’s Vineyard, he spoke with contributing editor Bernard A. Weisberger.
How do you get from two books on engineering to a work on Theodore Roosevelt?
Golf wasn’t the only thing to suffer miniaturization during the fadhaunted twenties: for a little while “Tom Thumb Weddings” flourished. Spectacles of relentless cuteness, they involved dressing small children in formal attire and running them through mock nuptials.
These affairs tended to give more pleasure to the spectators than to the participants; the members of the lavish 1928 affair below are responding to the fun with expressions ranging from confusion to horror. The picture was sent us by Mrs. Stephen M. Chalmers of Phoenix, Arizona, who is the woebegone member of the wedding, second from left.
The quartet at right includes Robert B. Walls, who writes that the wedding “was engineered by a lady representative of some entrepreneur who came to our small town, Washburn, North Dakota, with all the necessary paraphernalia. I’m sure this must have been some type of promotional scheme to make a profit for someone, so there was probably a public presentation involved, but this I don’t recall.