January 2011

When Constable Samuel Staples of Concord, Massachusetts, placed Henry David Thoreau under arrest for nonpayment of his state poll tax in late July of 1846, he had no idea that his act would bring about international repercussions a century later. On a less important but perhaps equally interesting level, neither of them evidently was aware that the arrest was extralegal—a fact that has just now come to light.

For those who might have thought us guilty of exaggeration when we said that the gaudy frontispiece of our February, 1975, issue was a pretty accurate representation of Joseph Josephs’ sign shop, here is a photograph of that remarkable edifice.

In the Editor’s Letter for October, 1974, describing the inflation of the language, we quoted two remarks supposedly once made by Lenin as ways of bringing down the capitalist world. One was “Debauch their currency,” and the other was “Confuse their vocabulary.” We had both quotes from secondary sources, and upon being challenged by M. K. Stone of Philadelphia and Professor Albert Resis of Northern Illinois University, we are embarrassed to say that we cannot trace them to Lenin’s works, although we have not the means of making an extensive search. Mr. Stone was kind enough to point out that the supposed quote about debauching the currency may have come from John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace , in which he merely states that “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way …” We apologize for not having checked these apocryphal quotes more carefully, but they did not play a very important role in the article concerned.

Claiming historical firsts is sometimes a risky business, as we were reminded by a reader’s letter not long ago. Allan L. Damon had written that Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was the first woman to be elected to the Senate in her own right ("Congress,” October, 1974). Edward P. Kelly of Glens Falls, New York, suggests that the honor properly belongs to Hattie Wyatt Caraway, an Arkansas Democrat, who was appointed to the Senate in November, 1981, as a replacement for her late husband, Thaddeus. Mrs. Caraway subsequently won a special election in January, 1932, and the regular election nine months later. She was re-elected in 1938 and served in the Senate until iQ45, when her seat was taken by William J. Fulbright. Mrs. Smith, however, remains the first—and thus far the only—woman to have served in both the House and the Senate.

On December 5, 1974, Mrs. Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman, who had won more national tennis titles than any other player in the history of the sport, died at her home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. She would have been eighty-eight on December 20. During several days late in November, two weeks before her death, Mrs. Wightman reminisced with an AMERICAN HERITAGE editor, talking humorously, lucidly, and often bluntly about her career in tennis, about the current state of women’s tennis, and about her unflagging devotion to the game.

When David Lander of New York City found himself some fifty miles southwest of Kalamazoo in the town of Buchanan, Michigan, he quite naturally asked his business associates there if there was anything worth seeing in Buchanan. There was indeed, and on a freezing winter morning he was taken out to the town’s cemetery to visit one of the most remarkable monuments in America.

When in 1870 Joseph Coveney, a respected citizen of the town, planned to erect a memorial monument, the Common Council of Buchanan granted him the best space in the cemetery. Rumors had it that the stone was going to cost three thousand dollars and would be one of the most beautiful monuments in southwestern Michigan, a source of considerable civic pride. Imagine, then, the general outrage and consternation when in 1874 the monument was unveiled to reveal graven on its surface what a local newspaper called “slanderous inscriptions… against Christianity.”

David K. Engen of Salem, Oregon, a supremely knowledgeable reader who, we suspect, would be perfectly at home discussing fine points of rigging with John Paul Jones himself, has come upon some errors in Don Troiani’s drawing of the fight between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard that appeared in our October, 1974, issue: The very spirited painting of the battle deserves praise for the skill with which the fury of a close-range naval action is illustrated and critical comment for the technical deficiencies. A few of the more obvious errors in the maintop and rigging are:

The deadeyes in the topmast shrouds are upside down.

The head of the lower mast should be square in plan.

There are no main-yard slings or jeers in evidence.

The mizzen topmast stay should pass through a block just abaft the mast.

The starboard main-yard lift is improperly led.

The topmast shrouds should be secured to the deadeyes with throat seizings and round seizings above.

The Bicentennial Commission of Warren, Rhode Island, in order to honor the sons of Warren who served in the Revolution, has painted all the fire hydrants in the old section of town to look like Continental soldiers.

The National Archives in Washington, D.C., recently announced the establishment of the Center for the Documentary Study of the American Revolution, which will centralize all information on the pre-iySg records of the national government that are in the custody of the federal government. The center welcomes all inquiries pertaining to the Revolutionary period and hopes to be of material assistance to students of the era throughout the Bicentennial celebration and thereafter.

Professor Laurence Senelick of Tufts University has solved the riddle of the menu: In answer to your query on the last page of the April, 1975, issue of A MERICAN H ERITAGE , “aldermen in chains” was a culinary nickname for suckling pigs, roasted and festooned with garlands of pork sausages. It began as an ironic reference to the annual banquets of the Corporation of the City of London, when aldermen were supposed to gorge themselves silly on turtle soup and the roast beef of old England. There may be something patriotic in the American decision to adopt this gastronomic satire of the British magistracy, but in this particular case the association of municipal politics and overfeeding seems to have been naturalized in the New World.