January 2011

Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865 The Great Circus Street Parade in Pictures First Generation: Oral Histories of Twentieth-Century American Immigrants

In a gazetteer of the geography of high society, Tuxedo Park, New York, might properly be described as a village (pop. 972), 40 miles NW of the Union Club in New York City, once famous for its rarefied social climate. And for the lexicographer, it is thought to be the place of origin in America of the dinner jacket—ä man’s full dress suit with the tails lopped off—commonly, though improperly, called the tuxedo.

Founded in 1886 to provide a spring and autumn sanctuary for a select flock of that migratory species that follows the sun from Newport to Palm Beach, Tuxedo Park was the nonpareil of the secluded enclaves of the rich. Though widely imitated, its original select blend of vintage money, congenial habits, and impeccable social antecedents has never been successfully duplicated.

By the time Charles Dickens came to America in 1842 he was already the most popular writer of his day, and when he landed in Boston he was offered no end of things to do. None of them, however, interested him as much as his visit to a thirteen-year-old girl. “Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure,” he wrote. “Her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and simplicity … her writing book was on the desk she leaned upon.… A doll she had dressed lay near.…” When Dickens picked up the doll, he found a green ribbon wrapped around its eyes, a miniature of the one worn by the girl herself. Her name was Laura Bridgman, and she was a blind deaf-mute.

She had once lived in a sort of cell, said Dickens, “impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help.… Long before I looked upon her the help had come.”

Carlos Cortez Coyle did not know much about art, at least not in the formal sense. But he knew whom he liked, and he painted his heroines and heroes with naive enthusiasm. Coyle was born in Kentucky in 1871 and did not begin painting seriously until he was fifty-nine, after a knockabout career as a shipbuilder and lumberman. But from the first day he put brush to canvas, he took himself very seriously indeed and, apparently in the interest of future historians, kept a log in which he listed expenses and explained the significance of his ingenuous, obsessive canvases. His winsome, 1937 portrait of Wallis Simpson (left), for instance, which Coyle believed “one of my best productions,” was based on a newspaper photograph. Coyle saw the Baltimore divorcée for whom Edward VIII gave up the British crown as “the tall, stately looking American girl, who is not afraid.”

When in April of 1861 he first learned that the Confederate States of America had forced Federal troops to evacuate Fort Sumter, seventeen-year-old Daniel F. Kemp of Buffalo, New York, immediately wanted to enlist; but not until late summer of the next year, sometime after his eighteenth birthday, did Kemp’s parents consent to his signing up for a one-year hitch in the United States Navy. That service at once sent him west to join the freshwater flotilla which in cooperation with the Army was working its way down the Mississippi River.

When he left the navy fifteen months later (his discharge papers were three months late in reaching him), Kemp was a seasoned sailor who had participated on the broad river itself in two expeditions against Vicksburg, taken part on the Arkansas River in the foray against Fort Hindman, seen action near the mouth of the Red River against Confederate guerrillas, and survived the war’s only instance of an ironclad vessel sunk solely by gunfire.

Of the mechanical wonders placed on view in the Crystal Palace, the great iron-and-glass exhibition hall erected in New York City in 1853 to house America’s first world’s fair, one of the most popular was a towering machine that was destined to transform the look of the world’s cities and the feel of city life. The machine was a freight hoist, or elevator, and it was the invention of a Yonkers, New York, factory engineer named Elisha Graves Otis. Like earlier inventions of Otis’—they included a semiautomatic lathe and a safety brake for railroad trains—he had constructed it out of his own head, in freehand fashion, without bothering to work out its design on paper.

In the second-floor map room of the old French Ministry of the Marine in Paris is the great Carte de l’Amerique Septentrionale , drawn by Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin, map maker for the king in the 1680’s. The ivory parchment, as big as a tablecloth, has red and blue border decorations, a flowered scroll, and a colored vignette of Quebec City as seen from the east. It shows an inviting waterway—a strong green line on this map of many colors-leading west to “Missilimackinac.”

Beneath that broad, bold line lay endless bends and turns, a hundred menacing rapids and thirty-six rugged portages, but for a century it was the French highway to the heart of North America. Over it passed explorers and priests, Indians and traders, French officials and lawless coureurs de bois . Whatever their destination, they all passed through the strait that commanded the commerce of Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior.

Alexander Henry, the young American who was one of the few “Englishmen” to escape the massacre at Fort Michilimackinac in 1763, later wrote a memoir called Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories in which he vividly described the hair-raising event. The lacrosse game that set it up, he explained, took place just outside the gates of the fort, and “In the ardour of contest… nothing could be less liable to excite premature alarm, than that the ball should be tossed over the pickets of the fort, nor that having fallen there, it should be followed on the instant, by all engaged in the game. …” By this Trojan stratagem the Indians swarmed upon the English garrison before any of them were aware of what was really happening.

Luckily for Henry, he had been delayed at his home writing letters, and so was a spectator rather than a victim when the killing began. “Going instantly to my window, ” he related, “I saw a crowd of Indians, within the fort, furiously cutting down and scalping every Englishman they found.…

The pelts of beaver, the dust of placer gold, the tongues and hides of buffalo, the proteinaceous feed of native grass, the smeltings of precious and commercial minerals, the viscous gush of oil: these have been the elementals of the American West shipped eastward to enrich the nation while the West historically went begging, went bankrupt, struggled to recover before being exploited anew. Bernard DeVoto defined the cycle of mercantilism and misuse in a celebrated essay in Harper’s in 1934. “The Plundered Province,” he titled it, coining a bitterly resented phrase. Today the cycle repeats again, at greater scale and perhaps for the last time, and now its justification is energy and the name of the plunder is coal.