January 2011

THE QUEEN CITY VINDICATED THE FIRST BATHRUB TRANSPOSED PATROONS BURKE IN THE NEW WORLD A BRIEF EXCURSION INTO THE OBVIOUS ANCESTORS CIVIL WAR ARTISTS GENTILZ LOST COUNTRY

Stephen Z. Starr, director of the Cincinnati Historical Society, has called us down on a blithe assertion we made last summer: The caption of the beautiful cover of your August, 1974, issue reads in part: “‘The Queen City of the West,’ Cincinnati, seems to deserve its proud—and doubtless sell-bestowed —nickname …” (emphasis mine). It is not local pride but a desire for historical accuracy that impels me to take you to task over that “doubtless self-bestowed” phrase. (With some reluctance I overlook the word “seems” in “seems to deserve.”)

While we are redressing the wrong we did Cincinnati, we will give that city the credit it deserves by reprinting this interesting note, which appeared in a recent issue of the “Gilcrease Gazette,” the newsletter of the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma: Portable bathtubs were in use in the early 1800’s, but they were not placed in a “bathroom” as we know it today. Following the English custom, in the larger homes, these sometimes strange devices were carried to the sleeping room when a bath was desired. Water had to be carried for such tubs and, of course, they had to be emptied by hand. There was no standard shape or style, and more often than not, the bathtub was simply the family washtub.

The town of New Madrid in southeastern Missouri looks out over a treacherous stretch of the Mississippi River, studded with bars and laced with stumpy shores—a graveyard of rivercraft, and haunted. Some of the ghosts are dead dreams.

In the spring of ig44 the United States Marine Corps formed its last rifle regiment of World War n, the agth Marines, in New River, North Carolina. The first of its three battalions was already overseas, having been built around ex-Raiders and parachutists who had fought on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan. Great pains were being taken to make the other two battalions worthy of them. The troops assembling in New River were picked men. Officers and key noncoms had already been tested in battles against the enemy, and though few riflemen in the line companies had been under fire, they tended to be hulking, deepvoiced mesomorphs whose records suggested that they would perform well when they, too, hit the beach. There was, however, one small band of exceptions. These were the nineteen enlisted men comprising the intelligence section of the agth’s second battalion. All nineteen were Officer Candidate washouts. I, also a washout, led them. My rank was Corporal, acting Platoon Sergeant—Acting John.

She was eighteen—pretty and sensitive, to judge by her photograph, taken in 1863. For many another girl, that age would have represented a new chapter in life in the form of a husband, children, a home of her own. But not so for Anna Lindner, for she had been crippled by polio when an infant in Germany, before her parents came to America; she could get about only on crutches, and was otherwise confined to a wheelchair. Instead 1863 marked the year of her first known dated painting. For a half century Anna painted hundreds of water colors, all of them imbued with warmth and affection for her immediate surroundings. Her works encompass a span from the Civil War to World War I . Yet though she was not oblivious to the world outside, Anna depicted only what she could see from her window or the porch—a limited view, to be sure, but sunny, filled with family pleasures. Self-taught, Anna spent her days meticulously rendering the most commonplace—and happy—scenes of her own small world.

One of Benjamin Rush’s biographers has compared him to quicksilver, the brilliant and elusive element mercury that changes so unpredictably yet so curiously reflects the images around it. The metaphor is appropriate in another sense, too, for not only was Rush mercurial as a person, but as an eighteenth-century physician he freely resorted to the use of mercury in its various forms to purge patients of certain “morbific” or disease-making substances that were supposed to lurk in their bodily fluids. Dr. Rush, who practiced from 1769 to 1813, believed that illness could be expelled from the human frame in exactly the same way that evil could be driven out of human society. At the bedside, in the lecture room, and in the whole arena of politics and life Dr. Rush saw himself as a purifier.

In a sense, the museum of the United States Military Academy was in existence years before the academy itself was founded. When Burgoyne’s army surrendered at Saratoga, its cannon and other ordnance were shipped overland to West Point and placed in storage there. The Point was then a fortified camp of the Continental Army, and doubtless some curious souls went to peer at the guns of George III, come to grief in the New World. When in 1802 Congress authorized the organization of a corps of engineers to “be stationed at West Point … and [which] shall constitute a military academy,” many of these trophies were still around, and they formed the nucleus of one of the finest military collections in the world. The museum grew slowly at first; but relics accumulated, and after the Mexican War, West Point became the national depository of military trophies.

Rogers once remarked that Florida would still be known mainly for turpentine rather than for its sunshine resorts if it hadn’t been for Carl Graham Fisher, a brisk little entrepreneur and promoter from Indianapolis. Fisher was the creator of Miami Beach, the focal point of Florida’s boom as a popular winter-vacation resort in the 1920’s, where he is hailed in an inscription on a monument to his memory as a pioneer who “carved a great city out of a jungle.”

It was obvious that something very special was needed to confront the ironclad that the Confederacy was furiously building if the Union was to be saved. Yet it took a personal visit of Abraham Lincoln to the somnolent offices of the Navy Department to force the issue, and by then it was so late that the Navy Department had to have a miracle. In short, the contractor would have to build, in a hundred days, a kind of ship that had never been built before, and build it in a desperate race against time.

To sign a contract calling for a miracle in a hundred days was all very well, but there had to be a miracle man to do it. There was probably only one man in the world who could. He was John Ericsson, the great inventor.