The highly unusual daguerreotype below reflects in its silver surface a grim symbol of the early tumult that eventually culminated in the Civil War. Captain Jonathan Walker (1799-1878) was born on Cape Cod but operated out of Florida. He was strongly sympathetic to the abolitionist cause and in 1844 tried to help a group of seven slaves escape to the West Indies. The venture failed, and Walker was captured, fined six hundred dollars, and thrown into solitary confinement for a year. Before he was released, the letters S.S. were branded on the palm of his right hand. Of course, Walker’s captors hoped to disgrace him with the stigma of “Slave Stealer,” but Walker did not bear his scar with shame. For years he delivered antislavery lectures, and he inspired John Greenleaf Whittier, himself an implacable foe of slavery, to write the following thundering stanzas:
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
“The author of this history, who is eight years old …” So begins the preface that introduces the youngest published American writer on record.
The Boer War, A History , printed in 1902, is a forgotten but still unique treasure of the Rare Book Division in the Library of Congress. The unsigned preface is obviously the contribution of a pedantic adult: it lacks the charm of the mistakes the work itself contains in abundance, such as “new commers,” “Britian sent trupes.” “Atention,” “Calvery.” “he might ot had the gold …” According to the writer of tlie introduction, “the humane purpose; for which this book was written, and the perseverance and originality of the author, will commend it to all readers of history.” He goes on to explain the circumstance’s in which the book was produced:
At a place called Paardeberg on the Modder River in the Orange Free State, General Piet Cronjé was in trouble. The sixty-year-old Boer farmer had fought fiercely and well against the British; now he was one of the most famous military figures in the world, but time had run out for him. His five thousand weary burghers were outnumbered five to one and hemmed in by British artillery. On February 27, 1900, after a ten-day siege, General Cronjé surrendered to Lord Roberts. In time the war petered out, but Cronje’s career was not over. A few summers later the old Boer was relighting his battles twice a day in a huge amphitheatre, to the great enthusiasm of American audiences.
John Mason Hutchings, an Englishman, first, saw Yosemite Valley in 1855 and never got it out of his system. Nine years later he returned to the valley to be innkeeper of the Hutchings House, the frame hotel at left. Before long the hotel’s cooks—Hutchings’ wife and mother-in-law—demanded a separate kitchen. But when it came time to build, an obstacle presented itself in the form of a huge cedar, twenty-four feet around at the base. “I had not the heart to cut it down,” said Hutchings, “so I … built around it.” A few years later the room was floored and turned into a parlor where Ralph Waldo Emerson and James A. Garfield, among others, took their ease. Three funerals were held at the tree’s base—one, in 1902, for Hutchings himself. By 1940 the Park Service declared the hotel beyond restoration, and Civilian Conservation Corps boys began to tear it apart. Today the tree (bottom right, opposite), still bearing a few scars from the roof line after its seventy-four-year confinement, is slowly dying, though not prematurely; it has long outlasted a cedar’s average life-span of 331 years.
Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor for twelve years during the New Deal, was the first woman Cabinet officer in this country’s history. She was well qualified for the job. After graduating from Mt. Holyoke College in 1902, she worked first as a social worker and later in increasingly important jobs among reform groups who iuere fighting for humane and safe working conditions for factory employees.
For his biography, Madame Secretary: Frances Perkins, from which the following excerpt is taken, George Martin has drawn (among many other sources) on interviews recorded for Columbia University’s Oral History Project to get the personal recollections of people who were Frances Perkins’ friends, associates, and adversaries. The book will be published by Houghton Mifflin later this month.
When our story begins, Miss Perkins is 28 years old and is executive secretary of the Consumers’ League of New York. In that role she is about to learn the wily art of lobbying.
In most ways and in most places, Labor Day weekend in 1949 was the quiet, lazy end-of-summer occasion that Americans long have cherished. There were parades and barbecues and last days at the swimming pool, and between innings of local softball games spectators and players alike tuned in on the progress of the pennant-winners-to-be, the Yankees and the Dodgers. But in Omaha there was an unpleasant reminder of growing political tensions; a fight broke out when several people attempted to distribute Communist Party literature. And back East, near Peekskill in suburban New York State, there was an ugly lesson in how bad those tensions had become—and in how the fear of communism, only four years after the great wartime alliance with Russia, had taken hold of the American psyche. In Peekskill, for the second time in nine days, war veterans and teen-age adventurers attacked an assemblage of leftists gathered to hear Paul Robeson, the black singer-actor and advocate of Communist causes.
I first became a junkie when I was nine years old, but I was finally forced to give it up when I reached fourteen. Although almost everyone around Denver’s Curtis Park was a junkie in those days, no one seemed as deeply involved as I was. For five long years it was touch and go every Saturday morning, week after week, until mid-July in 1934, when my junking came to an abrupt and nearly tragic end.