January 2011

On October 7, 1798, the streets of Philadelphia were ominously deserted. A yellow-fever epidemic was at its height. Anyone who could had fled the city, and few would enter it voluntarily. Nevertheless thirty-three-year-old Aristide Aubert Dupetit-Thouars, a captain in the French navy, arrived there on foot from Wilmington and was anxiously seeking The Mansion at Spruce and Third streets. He had been warned to avoid the capital, but French refugees from Santo Domingo had also told him it was in Philadelphia that he might find an answer to his immediate need to subsist and to the fulfillment of a life’s dream. At the splendid house of financier and statesman William Bingham, the refugees said, he would find a compatriot, Vicomte Louis-Marie de Noailles. It seemed that Noailles had been dreaming dreams similar to his.

Despite their many differences, Queen Anne’s North American colonies all shared a decent respect for propriety—or at least the appearance thereof. Why, then, did the early-eighteenth-century inhabitants of New York and New Jersey put up for years with a governor who paraded about in women’s clothes? One reason, no doubt, was that they were impressed by the governor’s royal connections and hoped to derive some benefit from them. For Edward Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, eldest son of the Earl of Clarendon and grandson of Charles n’s lord chancellor, was a first cousin of the queen—whom he resembled, it was said, to a marked degree.

The book from which the following excerpt is drawn is to be published later this month by W. W. Norton O” Company; it is one of a series of bicentennial state histories being prepared under the aegis of the American Association for State and Local History.

Man’s muscles were still the primary source of power. Nothing could be done if they could not do it; they set the limits, and although for a long time they had been helped by the muscles of horses and oxen, this did not greatly change the basic rule: you can do what you are strong enough to do, and no more. So when the first assault on Michigan’s pine forests was made it was exactly the kind of job King Hiram of Tyre would have understood when he set out to provide the cedar for Solomon’s Temple. You took saws and axes and went to work.

Since 1789 the members of the Cabinet have been a major source of Presidential power. As advisers, official spokesmen, and administrative assistants to the nation’s Chief Executive they are the modern equivalent of those highly placed councillors Aristotle called “the many eyes and ears and hands and feet” of ancient kings. Without them, it is fair to say, the colossal power now lodged in the Oval Office would be substantially reduced. We offer here a brief review of the Cabinet in the American past.

At the present time ten Secretaries and the Attorney General serve the President as his Cabinet. Through the executive departments each of them heads, they supervise the expenditure of more than $292 billion annually—or roughly 90 per cent of the federal budget—and direct the activities of some 1.8 million civilian employees who constitute about 61 per cent of the federal bureaucracy.

“I have been absorbed in interest in the Boer War,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt to his friend Cecil Spring Rice in 1899. He was not alone. Most Americans took a keen interest in this remote conflict. Leading newspapers sent their correspondents to the front; the war was debated in Congress and discussed iin Cabinet meetings; private organizations sprang up to help one side or the other; a surprising number of Americans actually made their way to South Africa and joined the fight; and toy stores stocked up on two new games, Boer and Briton and The War in South Africa.

The struggle of two small pastoral republics—the Orange Free State and the Transvaal (its formal title was the South African Republic)—to retain their independence by braving the might of the British Empire evoked strong feelings of sympathy in the breasts of most Americans. They saw it as the small and weak pitted against the large and powerful, republics against monarchy, and it reminded many of our own revolution against this same empire.

Our cities began as muddy accidents. First settlers would set up shop on a promising spit of land; a steamer would tie up at a convenient bend in a river; two railroads would cross on an empty prairie; and soon there would be some warehouses, a saloon, a brothel, a jail, a church—a city. For the most part the cities grew up unplanned, a sort of cancerous response to the wealth being produced in and around them. Smoky, rough, and full of sin, they were a constant source of moral unease to the populace of an America that still was proud of its rural wellsprings. We have a whole literature of lugubrious songs, stories, and poems about healthy country types who went to make their fortunes in the cities, only to wallow in the fleshpots there and perish in terrible degradation. But these cautionary effusions probably discouraged only those who couldn’t have made a go of it in the first place. The fact is that the years between 1880 and 1910 marked an unparalleled migration to urban areas, one that drew its impetus not so much from European immigration as from native Americans leaving the farm for more profitable- if less comforting—fields.

How a nation regards its past is itself a fact of considerable historical significance, and it will be interesting to observe the treatment of the Founding Fathers during the Bicentennial celebration. Indications are that in some quarters at least the military heroes of the Revolution may not fare very well. “They wrote in the old days,” Ernest Hemingway noted some years ago, “that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.” To men who have experienced the agony and frustration of American involvement in Vietnam—in fact, to virtually anyone who seriously considers the possibility of nuclear annihilation- that statement has to make a good deal of sense. Clearly, however, it does not represent the spirit with which some of our predecessors fought the Revolution, least of all John Laurens.

Our query about the Great Detroit Clock, which appeared in the October, 1975. issue, was almost immediately answered. Sally Ann Birks of Mt. Clemens, Michigan, writes: My great-granduncle Felix Meier, inspired by a dream, built his masterpiece over a period of ten years. It was completed and first displayed in Detroit at Merrill Hall in 1879. (I know this conflicts with Ash’s information- 1876—but Felix refined his clock several times during the ten years, so perhaps he didn’t consider it ready for public display until 1879.)

He estimated that it cost him thirty thousand dollars to build. He formed a company with four other men and raised an additional fifty thousand dollars to exhibit the clock in various cities and expositions in the United States. He called it “The AmericanNational Astronomical Clock.” It was shown for little more than a year before all the profits were consumed by the expense of packing and shipping it (Felix’s propensity for drinking and gambling also played a part in this dismal showing).

BENEATH THE RIVER MEIER’S WONDERFULL CLOCK

Now in her ninety-fourth year, Laura Merrill of Wellesley, Massachusetts, is setting the record straight on a small but significant role she played in one of the great engineering triumphs of the turn of the century:
Recently, in going over a scrapbook I kept when I was a young woman, I came across several newspaper clippings from the years 1906 and 1907. One of them reads, in part: “For the first time since the world began, a woman walked beneath the waters of the East River yesterday and she was Miss Emmeline V. Smith, a girl of 19…”

Now, sixty-nine years later, I would like to say that Miss Smith was not the first woman to walk through the East River subway tunnel. I was.