Every schoolchild knows that the Liberty Bell is cracked; the crack is almost as famous as the bell itself. But just when and why the crack appeared is a much more esoteric matter. It is sometimes assumed, patriotically but mistakenly, that the bell cracked out of overenthusiasm while being rung to celebrate the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Somewhat more solid evidence suggests that it broke in 1835, either in July while tolling a knell for Chief Justice John Marshall or on Washington’s Birthday, when a group of small boys pulled too energetically on the rope. One of the boys, Emmanuel Rauch, was interviewed in 1911 and stuck to that story, observing besides that for any funeral the bell’s clapper would have been muffled and unlikely to cause damage. In 1846 an attempt was made to put the great bell in ringing order by drilling out the edges of the crack to prevent their rubbing together. This worked about as well as the dentistry characteristic of the period; and when the bell was rung on February 23 of that year (Washington’s Birthday having fallen on Sunday), the crack suddenly split open farther.
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January 2011
Could I have died a martyr in the cause, and thus ensured its success, I could have blessed the faggot and hugged the stake.” The cause was state support for female education, the would-be Saint Joan was Emma Willard, and the rhetorical standards of the 1820’s were lofty and impassioned. The most militant feminists rarely scale such heights today. For one thing, dogged effort has finally reduced the supply of grand injustices; and today’s preference for less florid metaphor has deprived the movement of such dramatic images. Comparatively speaking, the rest of the struggle is a downhill run, leading straight to twenty-four-hour day-care centers, revised and updated forms of marriage, free access to the executive suite, and rows of “Ms’s” on Senate office doors. Glorying in our headway, we easily forget that leverage comes with literacy, and literacy for women is a relative novelty.
The patent models in our portfolio beginning on page 49 of this issue are only a minute fraction of the tens of thousands that still survive. O. Rundie Gilbert, the owner of most of them, is shown here in one of his barns, surrounded by ranks and Stacks of the models that he has recently unpacked. Somewhere nearby are hundreds of unopened crates, all filled with patent models. We can only guess at what treasures from America’s technological infancy are yet to come to light.
We regret neglecting to credit the Historical Society of York County, Pennsylvania, in our portfolio on the Kentucky rifle (February, 1973). This excellent institution was sponsor and co-publisher of the book from which our excerpt was taken.
The following letter comes to us from Dr. Sheldon Marcus, chairman of the Division of Urban Education, School of Education, Fordham University, who is the author of Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower , which will soon be published by Little, Brown and Company. I read with interest Robert S. Gallagher’s interview with Father Charles E. Coughlin in the October, 1972, issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE . Unfortunately, the article contained some misinformation. First of all, Mr. Gallagher claimed that his interview with Father Coughlin was the first one given in the past three decades in which the priest discussed his career. Since Father Coughlin’s demise as a controversial public figure in 1942, he has periodically given interviews to newsmen. I myself was able to secure interviews with him in 1970 which proved valuable in helping me write his biography.
We are pleased to report that last year an antiques dealer named Louis Miller, armed with a seventy-dollar metal detector and information from an article in our August, 1958, issue entitled “The Search for the Missing King,” dug up a long-buried fragment of the most famous statue in early American history.
by Bessie Rowland James. Rutgers University Press, 447 pp. $15.00
by Marion K. Sanders. Houghton Mifflin Co., 432 pp. $10.00
At one point in her journalistic career Dorothy Thompson, learning of a proposed magazine piece on her life, wrote: “I wish someone would present me as a female. … [It’s] heresy which the feminists wouldn’t like, but … I’d throw the state of the nation into the ashcan for anyone I loved.”