The Algonquin Indians, legend has it, called the natives who inhabited the mountains of upstate New York ” Adirondacks,” or “Those Who Eat Bark.” And so the mountains got their name—although by the end of the nineteenth century not many of those who came to the mountains would have been driven to eating bark. Consider the 1883 summer excursion of the banker and philanthropist Anson Phelps Stokes, which included, according to his daughter, “Anson Phelps Stokes, wife, seven children, one niece, about ten servants … one coachman, three horses, two dogs, one carriage, five large boxes of tents, three cases of wine, two packages of stove pipe, two stoves, one bale china, one iron pot, four washstands,… seventeen cots and seventeen mattresses, four canvas packages, one buckboard, five barrels, one half barrel, two tubs of butter, one bag coffee, one chest tea, one crate china, twelve rugs, four milkcans, two drawing boards, twenty-five trunks, thirteen small boxes, one boat, one hamper.”
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January 2011
Every man is the prisoner of his own experience; and no artistic production can escape the impress of its time. That is why works of art, properly utilized, can be valuable historical sources—as, oddly enough, Marx and Engels were more prepared than academic historians to recognize. Dickens and Thackeray, Marx wrote, “have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together.” Engels said he had learned more from Balzac about post-Revolutionary France “than from all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together.”
On March 17,1786, Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, met his former sovereign. The occasion was George Ill’s levee, and it produced one of the most durable chestnuts in American history. The original, indeed the only source for what is supposed to have happened is Jefferson’s Autobiography , published thirty-five years after the event. Accepted as canon by successive generations of scholars, it has nonetheless received at intervals more than an ordinary number of embellishments. Like barnacles attached to the hull of a merchantman, they threaten to overwhelm the vessel—and the truth.
Eleven days earlier, Jefferson, minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the Court of Versailles, hastily left Paris for London, responding to an urgent summons from John Adams, American minister plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James’s. Jefferson arrived late on the evening of Saturday the eleventh and hurried at once to Adams’ house in Grosvenor Square.
Just as this issue of A MERICAN H ERITAGE was about to go to press, the President issued an extraordinary executive order: for the first time in our history, the U.S. Coast Guard was authorized to intercept on the high seas and turn back ships carrying illegal immigrants. It is too soon to tell, of course, how long this order will stand or what its impact will be, but it does serve to underscore the urgency of the current national debate over our immigration policy.
In times of stress and change, we tend to look to the past, partly for reassurance, but more important, in hopes of finding there clues to what the future holds. In order to offer some help in this, AMERICAN HERITAGE is, with this issue, reviving the series “A Look at the Record,” which makes accessible the salient historical facts about major issues: in this issue we examine immigration; soon we will deal with welfare and the draft.
The great swarm of birds on the preceding two pages (a detail of which appears below) was painted by Michigan artist Lewis Luman Cross in 1900. Even at that date, it had to be painted from memory, for by the turn of the century the million-membered flocks of passenger pigeons that once darkened the Midwestern skies had been driven to the edge of extinction by hunters. Fifteen years later they were extinct, the last pigeon dying in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914. The painting, then, is both a tribute to a vanished species and a silent commentary on the effectiveness with which man too often assaults the natural world.
Another kind of tribute was paid to the passenger pigeon in 1947. In the spring of that year, a monument to the bird’s memory was dedicated at Wyalusing State Park, Wisconsin. The featured speaker was Aldo Leopold (1886-1948), thepioneer American ecologist. The address was later included in the 1966 edition of his classic, A Sand County Almanac . Portions of it are reprinted here by permission.
Much of the most glorious of Cheyenne art appears on the lined and paginated leaves of old ledger books. Created by warrior artists in the late nineteenth century, the scenes show victories and events from the days of freedom before the white invasion and continue through the period of conflict that ended in the loss of Cheyenne liberty. By the 1880’s, the vibrant, spirit-filled life depicted by these warrior artists was gone.
Cheyenne ledger-book art was a continuation of traditional male realistic painting on buffalo robes, war clothing, and tipi covers and linings. Who the specific artists were is largely unknown, but we do know the paintings were made between 1865 and 1885, and the painters—mostly Northern Cheyenne s—either took part in the actions they portrayed or painted scenes described by warriors who had been there.
To its owners it was “The Eighth Wonder of the World … The Acme of Mechanical Science,” and even if those claims seem a little inflated, the Great Historical Clock is undeniably a wonder. It was built by Roland Hurlburt, a Boston carpenter who apparently was enchanted by a similar monumental clock he saw at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Working with his son, he completed it around 1884, and probably exhibited it at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Thereafter it followed a restless career, traveling as far as Australia with Bent & Batchelder’s Anglo-American Christy’s Minstrel Show before coming to its current home at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Historv. It’s a rare clock that can draw a crowd, but this one stands thirteen feet tall, covered with animated figures, and every inch teems with historical incident. Turn the page for a look at what happens every quarter hour.
The history of the American labor movement has more than its share of fascinating stories, but not many of them are tinged with the supernatural (Joe Hill really did die, after all). But now Bryan Miller, a former Associated Press reporter, passes along the following Gothic tale: “While touring the eastern Pennsylvania town of Jim Thorpe, a photographer friend and I encountered rumors about its ‘famous’ Carbon County jail and the ‘amazing’ phenomenon inside. As we poked around further, local folks repeated the legend with varying degrees of authority, although no one could verify it empirically.
FDR, CLOSE UP…
January 30, 1982, marks the centennial of the birth of an American colossus. Possessed of limitless energy and indefatigable charm, Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed to his countrymen the most accessible of Presidents. But in fact he was so closed and private that even his closest aides admitted he remained an enigma to them, and one wrote that FDR played his cards so close to his vest that he “put every possible obstacle” in the way of future biographers. Fortunately, this was only partly correct, and in our next issue we draw upon a hitherto unknown cache of material to present a uniquely intimate .portrait of FDR, the chief executive—jaunty, shrewd, passionate, amused and amusing, and always in command.
Opening to the East…