For nearly sixty years, Mrs. Merle Anderson of Seattle, Washington, tried to convince the federal government that she did, too, serve a hitch with the United States Army during World War I. In the late spring of 1918, Mrs. Anderson, together with some three hundred other French-speaking American women, responded to General John J. Pershing’s call for more telephone operators to serve in France by enlisting in the Army’s Signal Corps. The “Hello Girls,” as they came to be nicknamed, proved themselves vital to Allied communications; Mrs. Anderson herself later became chief operator for the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. After that, she and the rest, with warm thanks, were discharged. But not honorably and not officially, they learned, and not with the veteran’s benefits to which they believed their service entitled them. The Army, it seemed, decided to classify the Signal Corps women as citizen volunteers; as such, it declared, they were not eligible for honorable discharges, veteran’s benefits, or even the coveted Victory Medal that went to all male veterans of the war.
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January 2011
In our June, 1977, issue, humorist Andrew Ward had some fun with a mythological President he called Roger Darcy Amboy, who, he fantasized, “appears to have held our nation’s highest office somewhere between Van Buren and Buchanan.” Remarkably enough, there was a real-life counterpart, of sorts, for Ward’s fabrication; his name was David Rice Atchison. James P. Johnson was kind enough to pass along the story: “As he neared his seventy-eighth birthday in 1885, David Rice Atchison could glory in a host of accomplishments. He had practiced law, served in the Missouri legislature, and become a major-general in the Missouri militia; he had been a judge of the circuit court, a United States senator, chairman of important committees, and even served as president pro tempore of the Senate on sixteen occasions. But in his entry for the Biographical Congressional Directory , he listed a final, unique honor: ‘President of the United States during Sunday March 4, 1849.’ ”
Jerome Horowitz of Bellmore, New York, takes issue with a caption: “Just completed the June/July, 1979, issue, and must write a note of correction. In the article ‘Neon’ by Rudi Stern, the design in the upper right-hand corner of page 103 is captioned as follows: ‘The fez lit up the window of a storefront house of worship. ’ Actually, the design involved is that of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, specifically that of Jerusalem Temple in New Orleans. I assume the confusion is caused by the fact that Shrine meeting places are denominated as ‘Temples,’ although they are definitely not houses of worship. Within these Temples are found the most wonderful Brotherhood and the most widespread Benevolence known, but no religious observances or services, as these are strictly forbidden by our constitutions. I must admit that the description of the design gave me a hearty chuckle. … Thank goodness, for we must report that Mr. Horowitz is Immediate Past Potentate of the Mecca Temple of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine.
As the current horde of presidential hopefuls takes the field, historian Louis W. Koenig reminds us that in-person campaigning by the candidates themselves is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. In “The First Hurrah,” he tells of the turbulent campaign of 1896, when William Jennings Bryan broke an old tradition and created a new one by becoming the first major-party candidate ever to mount an all-out, city-by-city, press-the-flesh search for votes.
In an excerpt from his upcoming biography, Helen and Teacher , Joseph P. Lash—winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for Eleanor and Franklin —recounts the curious story of Helen Keller’s brief, poignant career as a Hollywood movie star.
The comparisons were inevitable. Just a year earlier, in 1921, organized baseball had tried to counter the effects of the Black Sox scandal by appointing the august Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to the newly created position of commissioner. Now the motion-picture industry, faced with a clamor for censorship brought on by the wellpublicized excesses of film actors, and by Hollywood’s long-standing propensity for making salacious films, was naming William Harrison Hays, President Harding’s postmaster-general, to the directorship of their new trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA)—which would forever be known as the Hays Office. Obviously, the handful of moguls who ran the studios had hired Hays at an annual salary of one hundred thousand dollars because they wanted, as the New York Times reported, a “screen Landis”—some untainted notable who could clear the name of their industry.
Rhodes Tavern in Washington, D.C., has seen it all, or almost all. Richard Squires, the building’s unofficial historian, tells us that its cornerstone was laid at Fifteenth and F streets near Pennsylvania Avenue in 1799, the year of George Washington’s death. The tavern was there when Thomas Jefferson took his lonely inaugural walk up the Avenue in 1801 to be sworn in as President, and it has been there for every inaugural parade since. In the spring of 1814, part of it became the Bank of the Metropolis—Washington’s second bank and soon to be its largest—and in the summer of that year the tavern became temporary headquarters for British invasion forces during the War of 1812. After putting the torch to the Capitol, the Treasury, and the Presidential Palace, Squires writes, “Admiral Sir George Cockburn rode into the main room of the tavern on a mule, and dismounting, introduced himself to the startled inn-keeper as ‘the much abused Cockburn, come to sup with you, madam.’”
The Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay
by Alexander Walker William Morrow and Co., Inc. 65 photographs, 218 pages, $10.95
When Warner Brothers, in 1925, first got on to the idea of recording sound—in the form of musical soundtracks to accompany their movies—it was pointed out to Harry Warner that speech could be recorded, too. “Who in hell wants to hear actors talk?” Warner said irritably. In this lively cinema history, Alexander Walker examines the confused years, 1926 to 1929, in which the movie industry timidly backed and blundered its way into producing what were first called “talkers.”
Nineteen hundred and eleven was a bleak year for the working people of Spring Valley, Illinois. Industry was drying up, and jobs were scarce. So, naturally, residents were delighted to see the billboard below—with its carefully painted bricks and its canny perspective—rise like a promise on a hill above the Rock Island tracks. Nor were they disappointed by the man who put it there—a smooth drummer named William L. Bessolo. From a platform at the depot, he told his hungry listeners that once the factory was producing his patented wrenches, prosperity would return to Spring Valley. All he needed was a little working capital. Speaking in Italian to the largely immigrant population, Bessolo offered shares of stock. His wife sat beside him in silence, but helped his pitch by being, as residents recall, “a good-looking woman. ” The picture of her and Bessolo bears this out; the child was probably theirs.