January 2011

When she looked back on the dark episode later, Mrs. Leland Stanford, of the California railroad empire Stanfords, San Francisco and Palo Alto, must have regretted many times the day she let That Man into her house.

It all began innocently enough, heaven knows. In 1891, she and her husband, the former governor and senator, had opened Leland Stanford, Jr., University, in honor of their dead, departed son. In 1897, to ensure the finished construction of the university’s Memorial Church, she decided to sell her extensive jewel collection (later appraised by Shreve S Co. of San Francisco at more than one hundred thousand dollars). Before packing up the jewels, she thought it would be nice to have them immortalized in paint, so that future students of the university could admire the gift that had been given them. To that end, she engaged the services of a professional artist in San Jose, Astley David Montague Cooper.

In medias res: Fort Laramie on the Oregon-California Trail, June 27,1846, a day of reckoning. Francis Parkman was there, beginning the tour that he would chronicle in The California and Oregon Trail , the Harvard man come out West for health and curiosity, patronizing, disdaining the common emigrants who halted at the fort to tighten their iron tires and recruit their oxen, effusively admiring the stylish Sioux. The Sioux were there in the thousands, camped round Laramie at the invitation of the American Fur Company to trade, at truce with the emigrants, preparing war against the Crows. Lillburn Boggs was there, former governor of Missouri who had driven the Mormons from his state and thus indirectly set them on their exodus to Utah. Boggs had just been elected captain of a large party of emigrants. William H. “Owl” Russell, Kentucky colonel, had resigned the post the week before in a dispute over campsites, and drunk now, he cornered fastidious Parkman and belched indignation.

When General William Tecumseh Sherman started his devastating march through Georgia in November of 1864, Captain James Royal Ladd, twenty-eight years old, an adjutant in the 113th Ohio Volunteers, was one of the sixty-two thousand tough veterans in his army. The huge force swept diagonally across the state, meeting little opposition, foraging, plundering, and burning as it went. When Lincoln was asked where Sherman was heading, he said “I know the hole he went in at, but I can’t tell you what hole he will come out of. “Savannah proved to be Sherman ‘s objective. During the short siege that preceded the fall ofthat city, Ladd wrote an account of the month-long trek to his wtfe, Mary, telling the whole story with a casual, even cheerful brutality. This unusually frank diary came to the attention of AMERICAN HERITAGE through Captain Ladd ‘s granddaughter, Ruth Ladd Pierson.

Head Qrs, 113th Ohio Vol., in the field 3 miles north of Savannah, Ga., Dec. 14th, 1864.

The painting at the right, done in 1831, is of the U.S.S. Constitution , a frigate which was launched in 1797, came to glory during the War of 1812, and for fifty years remained the symbolic flagship of American maritime power. The photograph on the opposite page, taken in 1941, shows men aloft to furl sail on the Kaiulani , a steel square-rigger launched in 1899 in Bath, Maine, and seen here on a lumber run from Puget Sound to South Africa. More than time, purpose, and design separates the two ships: the Constitution , lovingly restored, lies permanently berthed in Boston; the Kaiulani survives only in a few pieces stored in a San Francisco warehouse. The reasons are instructive.

Once a year or so, we drive our parents to San Francisco to spend the day in Chinatown, where they stock up on Chinese goods like picture frames, petit-point patterns, honey, mushrooms. They believe that they could not buy picture frames better than these unless they traveled to Asia. Sometimes they skip a year or two because a trip from Stockton to San Francisco is a journey into foreign territory—urban, competitive, the people like Hong Kong city slickers, not at all like the people in the San Joaquin Valley, where villager is still neighborly to villager as in the Chinese countryside they remember, helping one another, “not Chinese against Chinese like in the Big City.”

At stake, they alleged, were democracy, women’s hard-earned privileges, States’ rights, the American family, and the inalienable right to separate men’s and women’s sleeping cars on trains. These questions roused quiet women unaccustomed to the dust of politics to fight for nearly three decades against their own right to vote. They organized several state societies, most notably in New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois, and in 1912 these merged to create the exclusively female National Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women. To counter the threat of woman suffrage, the National Association testified in legislatures, supported the war effort while accusing suffragists of treason, published pamphlets and their own journals, wore anti-suffrage American Beauty roses, and generally tried to represent the best of what they thought to be “true womanhood.”

AMENDMENT XIX

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

We are pleased to announce that American Heritage Publishing Company, in association with WGBHTV, Boston, will present a special hour-long program for the holiday season. It is called “Christmas Heritage” and will include several unusual, highly personal views of the Christmas season in America: Oliver Jensen, former editor of this magazine, will show a selection of delightful and complicated antique toys and trace the surprising evolution of Santa Claus; N. Scott Momaday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of House Made of Dawn , will take us on a visit to the Navaho Indians of the Canyon de Chelly for the traditional winter storytelling; Alistair Cooke will show us how the movies have celebrated Christmas through the years; and Paul Engle will narrate a dramatization of his own “An Iowa Christmas,” a warm childhood memoir that has been a Christmas classic since it first appeared in our pages in December, 1957.