January 2011

Historians are still puzzling over the discovery of an official White House portrait of President Roger Darcy Amboy, who appears to have held our nation’s highest office somewhere between Van Buren and Buchanan. Obscured by drapes for over a century, the painting was discovered by an Amboy descendant who had come to urethane the baseboards.

“I am frankly embarrassed,” confessed presidential historian T. Fawning Strathalmond. “He was there all along. We just naturally assumed he was Polk.”

Little is known as yet about our mystery President. Though there is not a shred of evidence to support it, Roger Darcy Amboy was probably born in the late 1700s in or around Succassuna, New Jersey. The earliest documentation, carbon-dated to about November, 1803, shows an Amboy in Bayonne receiving “seven decapods of barm fortnightly” from the Huckabuck party bigwig, Boss Nib, who would later moneybag Amboy’s possible rise to power.

Early on the afternoon of June 13, 1777, a French vessel slipped into an isolated inlet on the coast of South Carolina and dropped anchor. On board was the young Marquis de Lafayette, who had purchased the ship for this voyage, along with Baron de Kalb and a group of French nobles, all promised commissions in the “Armies of the States-General of North America” by one of the American agents in Paris, Silas Deane.

The Frenchmen were lost; they had been heading for Charleston, but were driven fifty miles up the coast by contrary winds. As it happened, some slaves belonging to a prominent local patriot, Major Benjamin Huger, were grappling for oysters in the bay. Understanding Lafayette’s predicament, they led him and KaIb to their master’s plantation, where KaIb was able to explain, in his excellent English, why they had come from France. Major Huger, himself a descendant of French Huguenots, welcomed his unexpected guests and invited them to spend the night at his home.

The question of how many angels can dance on the point of a pin stimulated debate among medieval scholars. Absurd, we say. But before we chortle, we might recall that a latter-day photographer once spent his time figuring how many men would be required to form a giant profile of Uncle Sam or a really big Liberty Bell.

The camera artist’s name was Arthur S. Mole, and in our December issue we published his living portrait of Woodrow Wilson (right). Interested readers from all over the country wrote in about it, prompting us to publish a further sampling of Mole’s monumental images.

Mole—who is eighty-eight and now lives in Florida—made about forty such photographs at military camps during World War I, shooting from specially constructed towers that were 65 to 85 feet high.

While their religion differed from orthodox Protestantism in many respects, the most “peculiar institution” of the Mormons was polygamy, which they insisted was ordained by the Scriptures. Orthodoxy disagreed, and until 1890, when the church officially renounced the practice, polygamy was a constant source of pious outrage and derision—such as in the 1877 cartoon at left, which manages to combine cruelty and prurience with a raw humor. Mark Twain was a good deal more gentle in his own remarks on the subject. He had stopped off in Salt Lake City on his way West in 1861, and in Roughing It , published in 1872, he fantasized about certain practical difficulties in the daily life of Brigham Young:

The photograph above shows the entrances to one of the largest underground complexes on earth, one carved out of the solid rock of the Wasatch Range at the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon some twenty miles east of Salt Lake City. Its access tunnels are sealed by steel doors weighing nine tons each and further protected by iron gates; uniformed guards make their rounds and a closed-circuit television system monitors all movement inside. Emergency generators lie in readiness should the occasion arise, and a reserve water system containing thirty-six thousand gallons can be tapped for the use of the eighty workers who man the files and catalogues and computers that fill the tunnels and cavernous rooms. Overhead, more than seven hundred feet of granite provides a shield against natural or man-made catastrophe.

The recent spate of revelations of bribery by American corporations of government officials, domestic and foreign, has left many with a sense that the business ethics of the nation are going to hell in a handbasket. And, to be sure, the scandal—involving as it does up to now more than two hundred corporations, including many of the largest and most respected—is alarmingly and unprecedentedly pervasive; in the past, with only a few exceptions, public scandals concerning improper business influence on government have tended to focus on a single corporation and a few government officials. Sweeping moral judgments on the new state of affairs have been made of late by congressmen, journalists, and business executives not accused, and these have served the purpose that such judgments always serve—to gratify the moral sense of everyone except the judged. Now that almost everyone is feeling better, it may be well to seek the more complicated truth of the matter.

In the month of February, 1846, when conditions for travel were as unpropitious as possible, the Mormons began moving out of their newly built city of Nauvoo, Illinois, in order to cross the ice-strewn Mississippi, on the first leg of a long and uncertain journey. A forced abandoning of barely completed homes, this time with the loss of much property and the necessity for travel in the dead of winter, was no new experience for the adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Twice before, in Ohio and Missouri, the violence of their non-Mormon neighbors had forced the “Saints” to give up newly established colonies, but Nauvoo was the worst disaster yet, for in 1844 an Illinois lynching mob had murdered Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, the man who claimed to have talked with God and angels, the man who claimed to have found and translated the golden tablets on which the Book of Mormon was engraved, the man who had directed—some would say dictated—every social, economic, political, and religious aspect of Mormon daily life.

Back in the early years of the present century the advertising industry cooked up an art form that had a quaint and brief life.

Which is to say that the industry used to get out pamphlets using fictional situations to draw attention to the merits of the product that was being advertised. These were aimed straight at the ten-year-old mind, and inasmuch as I was just ten when I first met them I became a devoted reader.