January 2011

A good party is better than the best man that ever lived.” So said “Czar’ Thomas B. Reed, the formidable late-nineteenth-century Speaker of the House of Representatives. He was talking about his own Republican party, of course, and “Elephant Joe” Josephs, the gloriously partisan artist whose proud self-portraits appear here, would have agreed enthusiastically. For no more impassioned Republican ever drew breath than this one-man GOP whirlwind from Buffalo, New York. Most of the time, Josephs was simply the city’s best-known sign painter, celebrated only for his flamboyantly decorated shop (see A MERICAN H ERITAGE , February, 1975), and for his habit of handing out miniature elephants as a personal trademark to potential customers. But every four years between 1856 and 1880, at presidential election time, Josephs became a man obsessed.

It was the time we were working out of the Diamond Hook, Davy Stevens’ starve-out operation at Cloverdale in northern Nevada. Cloverdale was the cluster of sod and tarpaper shanties the RO Ranch was using as a line camp late that particular fall, and Davy Stevens was the eighty-year-old cowman who held title to the spread. The RO and the Diamond Hook outfits shared a corridor of range through the San Antone sand hills, and we used to help Davy with his riding. Holly Richardson and I had cut three hundred two-year-old heifers from the RO bunch and had herded them down to Miller’s Flat where they could winter on rabbit brush, browse, and alkali. The range down that way was usually free from snow cover. They would scrounge and learn to make out.

We had dropped them, loaded our tired horses into the stock truck that had been left for us, and, with indecent haste, bumped back to Cloverdale, where we submerged ourselves in the luxury of lumpy, rat-stained mattresses in place of gravel, downy sage, and rabbit pellets.

Victory in Europe seemed sure and near for the Western Allies in late summer, 1944, as their armies broke out of a shallow beachhead on the Channel coast of France and rolled, seemingly unstoppable, across Normandy, Brittany, Flanders, on to Paris, and up to the borders of Germany itself. But here, braked by worn-out men and machines and an outrun fuel supply, the advance slowed and halted. The dark winter of the Ardennes followed, and it was spring before Germany was finally reduced to the smoking, starving ruin that constituted defeat.

During the August progress of arms across France, however, any suggestion that the end to five years of devastating war could be so delayed seemed pessimistic, even unpatriotic. No such suggestion was made by the Allied press and radio. The liberation of towns and destruction of enemy formations (unfortunately the two often overlapped) was proclaimed in stark black and white: valor and daring versus, at best, a diabolical cunning. A sense of swashbuckling abandon was conveyed; something of a game of Allied hounds coursing the German hare.

PLYMOUTH , Vt, Dec., 1925-Up here in the cold, silent hills of Vermont, his old friends and neighbors are afraid that success may be spoiling Colonel John Coolidge’s son Calvin. As a boy, to be sure, he was regarded as a bit of a chatterbox, and his grandmother, Mrs. Galusha Coolidge, would lock him in the attic until he quieted down, but Amherst and law studies were supposed to have sobered him up. It was old Vermont speaking when he wrote his father that “I see no need of a wife as long as I have my health.” He was twenty-nine. Yet almost overnight, which is to say four years later and while still robust, he married Miss Grace Goodhue, a goodlooking but gadabout society girl from Northampton, Massachusetts.

Jesus stayed close to home, but Matthew’s Gospel ended with words that sent disciples running. Beginning with the first major and sometimes fanatic convert, Saul turned Paul, the Christians became missionaries and spread the good news about Jesus into all the known world. Within three centuries they had succeeded so well that the Roman Empire became officially Christian.

On January 16, 1836, the Reverend George Champion of Connecticut stood on a hill in Zululand and gazed down at a vast fenced oval enclosing almost two thousand grass huts. It was the kraal of Dingaan, king of the Zulus. Dingaan was a tyrant who ruled the most powerful black empire in southern Africa. Champion, a gentle, scholarly man of twenty-five who had graduated from a Congregational seminary a year and a half earlier, was a missionary. With two other young American missionaries, he had sailed up the Indian Ocean coast from the Cape Colony and then tramped inland more than 150 miles beside an ox wagon to ask Dingaan’s permission to preach the gospel in his land.

In late November of 1890, a newspaperman named Louis Post, who had just come west from New York to see what was going on in Kansas, heard a terrible story. He had been eating in the Union Station restaurant in Kansas City when an agitated man came over and told him about “a political episode of unprecedented degradation.” It seemed a prairie buffoon had been elected to Congress.“Why,” the unhappy man exclaimed,“they’ve elected a man … who doesn’t wear socks.” As the fellow rattled on, Post said, “there rose up in my imagination … a picture of a ragged and barefooted tramp, steeped in ignorance as well as poverty, ‘beating’ his way to Washington to take a seat in Congress. Such a Congressman seemed impossible. But my informant assured me that what he said was true, and that the man’s name was Jerry Simpson.”