Deservedly or not, the Daughters of the American Revolution have often been accused of racial insensitivity, in part because memories of their refusal to allow Marian Anderson to sing in the D.A.R.’s Constitution Hall in Washington, B.C., in 1939 remain fresh (see our February, 1977, issue), but also because the national organization has never had any known black members, even though some five thousand blacks fought in the Revolution.
Those East Coast readers who survived the sundry blizzards of ’78 this past winter may recall with a shiver of recognition “The Great Blizzard of ’88,” which appeared in our February, 1977, issue. Ninety years ago, as in recent months, the city of New York was all but immobilized, and those who nevertheless clawed their way to work through the drifts and driven snow were displaying a kind of loony courage. Among the hardy souls was the father of reader Fred Rinaldo of Sherman Oaks, California, and, he tells us, one of his father’s rewards was to lunch in the presence of greatness: “My old man had fought his way downtown during that one. At lunch, he and one other man were the only people in the restaurant. My dad was seventeen. The other, older, man invited him to his table, saying, ‘Anybody who’d come to work today has a sense of his destiny.’ His name was Teddy Roosevelt. It was the closest to destiny my old man ever got. ‘Fred,’ he once told me, ‘it isn’t easy to be somebody.’ ”
Among the Chicago White Stockings stars who took part in Spalding’s baseball tour around the world in 1888 (see A MERICAN H ERITAGE , October, 1977) was John K. Tener, a veteran righthander. Tener retired from baseball two years later, but, as Michael Goodman of Brooklyn, N.Y., has written us, his career had just begun. The Irish-born ex-ballplayer worked his way up to the presidency of the First National Bank of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, formed a successful brokerage firm, then entered Republican politics and, as the protégé of Pennsylvania boss Boies Penrose, became first a congressman ( 1909–11 ) and then governor of his state (1911–15).
Virginia Stevens, the niece of William Ransom Roberts, from whose Spanish American War journal we published an excerpt in our December, 1977, issue, has written that our summation of Roberts’ career after the war failed to “make the correct emphasis.” Roberts, she explains, went to the Philippines as a Regular Army enlisted man “under the illusion he would be helping to free a subject people”; instead he found himself forced to fight “to destroy the forces of Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the independence movement,” and this experience unhinged his mind; he spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals.
FORTY YEARS ON GLASS
When thirty-year-old Henry Norman arrived in Natchez, Mississippi, from Kentucky in 1870, determined to become a photographer, the old river city was only a shadow of what it had been before the Civil War. Ante-bellum Natchez was really two towns, each notable in its own way. Down along the Mississippi, on a muddy natural shelf in the shadow of the three-hundred-foot bluffs, lurked Natchez-Under-the-Hill. “For the size of it,” wrote one appalled visitor, “there is not … in the world a more profligate place.” It was a “hell’s broth” of bordellos, gambling dens, saloons, and shanties catering to the appetites of flatboatmen returning upriver with full pockets. Murder was too common to be much remarked upon.
Mark Twain, surely the most American of great American writers, was, like the country itself, a creature of stupendous contradictions—gentle and tender at any given moment, and in the next possessed of rages so intense they could rattle the bones and shrivel the mind of anyone at whom they were directed; almost hysterically prudish when his wife and daughters were concerned, yet driven time and again to exercises (though not for publication) that were both prurient and scatalogical; contemptuous of money and headlong in pursuit of it; scornful of gentility and through much of his life terrified that he did not possess it.
When Stephen Girard died in 1831, he was perhaps the richest man in America, possessed of more than $6,000,000. With the exception of a few comparatively niggling bequests, he left his entire fortune in trust to the city of Philadelphia. This utterly astonished everyone who knew him, and it particularly astonished his outraged relatives, who at once attacked the will on the ground that its provisions were against the public interest.
The Supreme Court of that day ruled against the relatives, and there matters remained for well over a century, until the Supreme Court of 1957 decreed that Stephen Girard’s principal bequest not only was against the public interest, but was in violation of the Constitution of the United States.
It is possible to have too much of a good thing. Here, for example, are seventyfive accordionists, students from Carro’s Accordion School, posed in front of the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1930. This photograph was sent to us by John Hrastar of Wheaton, Maryland, whose fatherin-law, Jack Zorc, is standing fourth from the left in the fifth row. A portrait of the school’s director, Mr. Carro, floats at upper left. As reader Hrastar points out, “to get 75 students, ranging in age from eight to over 40, all holding accordions and dressed in their Sunday best” to gather across town and pose on a hot July day was a considerable feat. When the downbeat was given for a great collective squeeze, there was at least one consolation for passers-by: “Lady of Spain” had not yet been composed.
We continue to invite our readers to send us unusual, dramatic, or amusing photographs—at least thirty years old—that they own. They should be sent to Geoffrey C. Ward, American Heritage Publishing Co., 10 Rockefeller Plaza, N.Y., N.Y. 10020.
Every schoolchild knows the name of Columbus’ flagship when he discovered America: the Santa Maria . Right? Wrong, probably. Edward T. Stone, author of the article in our April/May, 1978, issue on La Navidad, Columbus’ first settlement in the New World, sends us some surprising information derived from his many years of study in Spanish archives:
“From my research, I have become convinced that the flagship was never known in Columbus’ lifetime as the Santa Maria . Columbus in his Journal invariably referred to her as ‘La Capitana’ or ‘The Flagship.’ Columbus’ great admirer and the major historian of the Discovery, Father Las Casas, never called her by the name, either. He referred to her as ‘La Capitana’ or simply as ‘La Nao’ (‘The Ship’). Nowhere in any of Columbus’ extant journals and letters nor in Las Casas’ Historia will you find the name Santa Maria with reference to Columbus’ ship on the First Voyage.