January 2011

The back cover of our April/May, 1979, issue featured a Mother’s Day card with an anchor as its motif, a characteristic we described as “inexplicable.” Now, the Reverend Charles A. Platt of Newton, New Jersey, and John Scheckter of Iowa City, Iowa, write to explain the inexplicable.

“The artist,” Reverend Platt tells us, “got his inspiration from the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews 6:19: ‘We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the Holy of Holies within the veil. ’ That text also inspired Edward Mote, a distinguished British divine, to write a hymn which was very popular in the early years of this century, ‘My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less.’ One stanza includes the following couplet:‘In every high and stormy gale,/ My anchor holds within the veil.’ ”

The sun had gone down on a warm Florida winter day (it was seven in the evening of February 15, 1933) when Vincent Astor’s Nourmahal tied up at a Miami dock after twelve days of cruising through the Bahamas. She was one of the largest private yachts afloat—virtually a small liner with her 263 feet of length, her diesel-powered speed of sixteen knots, her cruising range of 19,000 miles—and she had been much-publicized ever since her maiden voyage to New York from Friedrich Krupp’s Kielgaarden shipyards in Germany ( Astor had bought her there) in the summer of 1928. No doubt her gleaming white beauty would have attracted a good deal of attention in normal circumstances, even on a waterfront habitually crowded with luxury craft. As it was, hundreds of people watched her mooring with avid interest: aboard was the President-elect of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was to replace Herbert Hoover in the White House in just seventeen days.

In 1803 the United States Military Academy was authorized by Congress to hire “one teacher of drawing, to be attached to the Corps of Engineers,” whose pay should “not exceed” that of an Army captain. The first few drawing instructors were apparently restless types, for the turnover was fairly rapid until the artist Robert Weir was appointed to the post in 1846. Although he fretted over his salary—he eventually had a stunning total of sixteen children to raise—and was vexed by what he saw as slights from the professional soldiers on the staff, he was well liked and stayed with the academy as art instructor for thirty years.

The whole curious enterprise puzzled Americans in the 1920’s. Here was mighty Henry Ford, the man who said history was “more or less bunk,” collecting on a titanic scale every jot and tittle of the American past that he and his emissaries could lay hands on—four-poster beds, banjo clocks, cigar-store Indians, old boots, gas lamps, rusty old threshers, and wooden flails. Here was the near legendary “Motor King,” who once told the press that he wanted only to “live in the Now,” conducting visitors to his family homestead in Dearborn and showing them, with a soft gleam in his eyes, how he had restored it to the way it had looked in 1876 when he was a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. Here was the “father of mass production” collecting old stagecoach stops, rude machine shops, antique bicycles, and Conestoga wagons. “It is,” said The New York Times , “as if Stalin went in for collecting old ledgers and stock-tickers.”

When the cold, fastidious Mississippian rose to speak, a hush fell over the crowded Senate chamber. It was January 21, 1861, and Jefferson Davis and four other senators from the Deep South were here this day to announce their resignations. Over the winter, five Southern states had seceded from the Union, contending that Abraham Lincoln’s election as President doomed the white man’s South, that Lincoln and his fellow Republicans were abolitionist fanatics out to eradicate slavery and plunge Dixie into racial chaos. Though the Republicans had pledged to leave the peculiar institution alone where it already existed, Deep Southerners refused to believe them and left the Union to save their slave-based society from Republican aggression.

The advanced Republicans on Capitol Hill who relentlessly pressured Lincoln toward emancipation were all white, of course. But blacks, too, played their part in influencing the cautious President. Most prominent among them was Frederick Douglass, the eloquent abolitionist speaker and writer, who was himself a former slave.

Douglass liked Lincoln personally. “In all my interviews with Mr. Lincoln,” he wrote, “I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race. He was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color. …”

But when Douglass was invited in 1876 to dedicate the Emancipation Monument, a Washington, D.C., statue of Lincoln freeing a slave, he put personal friendship aside and offered what is still among the shrewdest judgments ever made of the President’s role in the struggle against slavery:

For a good many years after the appearance of trained historians on the academic scene in the 1880’s and 1890’s—all of them sanctified with a doctoral degree and most of them openly disdainful of any upstart “amateur” who dared invade their sacred precincts—the study of local history was relegated to jobless spinsters, retired lawyers, and time - on - their hands parsons whose unimaginative works, blending irrelevant facts, lifeless anecdotes, and laudatory biographies of contemporaries willing to pay for immortality, still burden library shelves. “True” historians, who ill concealed their down-the-nose attitude toward these antiquarians, had weightier matters to consider, such as the development of stirring new techniques with which to analyze human behavior and universal “laws” to explain its complexities.

Mary Baker Eddy was, against all odds, one of the most influential women of her age. Born into unpromising circumstances, she never mastered the limited education that was available to her. She lacked literary talent and any real vocation for family life. She struggled against a social order and a century which permitted women only the narrowest range of life choices. And yet, having decided at an early age that she would become a successful author, rich and respected, she succeeded even though her first real chance did not come until she was forty-five. Then she seized upon the little pebble of opportunity that life dropped in her path, developed it with single-minded insistence, and made the best possible use of its every aspect. She succeeded not only in becoming rich and respected for what she had written, but she became as well the founder, architect, and builder of a burgeoning church and the discoverer of an enormously successful way of integrating mental healing with religion.

Barre, cried one Vermont newspaper in 1893, was “The Busy Hustling Chicago of New England,” and the town itself cheerfully claimed to be the “Granite Center of the World.” Not of the world, perhaps, but certainly of the United States: in the years following the Civil War, the national enthusiasm for statues, public memorials, mausoleums, ornate tombstones, and obelisks created a tremendous market for the millions of tons of fine granite buried in the hills above the town, and by 1910 Barre was shipping $2,500,000 in quarried granite all over the world. At its height, the industry included seventy individual quarries, one hundred finishing sheds (where the rough stone was shaped into finished blocks and where statuary and other ornamental work was produced), and employed some five thousand men drawn from England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Poland. Today that polyglot industry has all but vanished; there are now only five quarries left, employing a little over two hundred men.

He began life as Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey, but soon .dropped the two middle names and shortened the first to Melvil. For a while he even tried to spell his surname “Dui.” He felt that, like most things in the world, his full name was a disorderly waste of time; and he devoted his life to setting things in order and saving time.

Melvil Dewey was born in upstate New York in 1851. His niece says that as a child “it was his delight to arrange his mother’s pantry, systematizing and classifying its contents. ” His reformer’s zeal was fully developed by the time he was fifteen, when he badgered his father into dropping from the stock of his tiny store that notorious thief of time, tobacco. His father acceded, the store failed, but Dewey rejoiced in being “morally ryt.”