January 2011

The most glamorous and the most powerful of the Tammany bosses who ran New York City for much of the century between Boss Tweed and Carmine DeSapio was Richard Croker.

When he was an old man, an account of his life appeared, written in the public-relations tone of books for the very young or the very innocent about Important Public Figures. Ina deck chair on the ship that was carrying him abroad he read the opening passages (“Young Richard’s home was a scene of quiet and peace, the hall of order and religion … And the neighborhood to surround it had similar decorous atmosphere … There was no youth more moral in the city …”), flipped through a few more pages, then tossed the volume overboard.

For the citizens of Richmond, Virginia, in 1888 the city’s new trolley system was a source of inordinate pride. “All are modelled on the Broadway style and are gems of symmetry and convenience,” proudly wrote a reporter for the Richmond Dispatch of the little four-wheeled electric cars that were clanging cheerfully through downtown streets on their route between Church Hill and New Reservoir Park. “Brilliantly lighted” by incandescent lamps, heated by Dr. Burton’s patent electric heaters, and moving “almost noiselessly” through the streets at speeds as high as fifteen miles an hour, the new trolleys provided the once-ruined Confederate capital with the very last word in municipal transportation.

THE AGE OF THE TROLLEY

With amazing rapidity after its introduction in the 1880’s and go’s, the electric streetcar came to dominate the urban landscape. Soon it reached out into the suburbs, hastening the growth of American cities, and even began to compete with the steam railroads for the intercity trade. It is a rare post-card street scene of the first two or three decades of this century that does not show, somewhere, the cars or their telltale tracks, some 26,000 miles of them at the peak, about 1917. With no little regret in this age of fumes and pollution, one must record that they were clean, cheap, and also roomy. Can one say the same these days for what has so completely replaced them?

EVERYTHING BEGAN IN THE CENTRAL CITY

A CLATTER ON MAIN STREET EVERYWHERE

At this writing only a few hundred miles of authentic electric trolleys (as opposed to rapid transit) survive in North America. There are a few routes each in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Mexico City, Veracruz, Tampico, and San Francisco. Boston’s streetcars run into a downtown subway system; there is one similar subway-surface trolley route in Newark, New Jersey. Philadelphia also still has suburban trolley service, as does Cleveland, Ohio; and Texas has a short line serving a department-store parking lot in Fort Worth. All these are, alas, streamlined affairs, and the only faintly old-fashioned cars on a regular service travel the St. Charles Avenue route, the last surviving line in New Orleans, home of the famous “Streetcar Named Desire,” whose system looked so busy on page 27.

ROOSEVELT AND INDOCHINA LOOK-ALIKES

Playing the game of what might have been holds a gloomy fascination for most of us, and historians are no exception. It can be a particularly heartbreaking pastime when it shows us lost alternatives to current woes. Now, as our unhappy involvement in Vietnam creeps toward the end of its first decade, Gary R. Hess, an associate professor of history at Bowling Green State University, writes about how the whole conflict might have been avoided. In his article “Franklin Roosevelt and Indochina,” which appeared in a recent issue of The Journal of American History , Professor Hess tells of Roosevelt’s postwar plans for Southeast Asia.

In perusing our article “Art Out of the Attic” in the December, 1971, issue, a number of alert readers recognized the painting of the ruins of Fort Ticonderoga by an unknown artist as copied from a print by W. H. Bartlett. Bartlett (1809-54) was a noted English landscape painter who visited America four times between 1836 and 1852 and published a series of prints of upstate New York views.

In similar fashion a source has turned up for Grandma Knitting in Her Rocking Chair , painted by an anonymous inmate at Dannemora Prison. Vivien and Ronald Lowden, of Narberth, Pennsylvania, collectors of stereoscopic view cards, believe the painting was modelled after a photographic portrait taken in 1870 and published in an album by F. G. Weller, of Littleton, New Hampshire. Weller, the Lowdens point out, often posed members of his family in humorous scenes like this.

In the aftermath of the 1972 election we believe professional politicians might find the thoughtful essay that follows worth a little study; it might save them time and money in 1976. The author, Mr. Marshman, a former journalist with Life and a sometime screenwriter, has been a successful advertising man for a good many years and is currently with the D’Arcy-MacManus & Masius agency. As good ad men must be, he is a student of people in the mass. It is some proof of his conclusions that, with superb confidence, he sent us this piece before the November election and found it unnecessary to change a word afterward. —The Editors

Two hundred years ago men grown tired of a king shouldered arms and marched away to a quixotic and seemingly hopeless campaign against the greatest military power in the world. It was all a very long time ago, and it is perhaps too easy for us to see them as West, Trumbull, and all the artists schooled in the European tradition painted them: solemn demigods sacrificing themselves willingly on the altar of history, falling bloodlessly amid clusters ojflags beneath rich, rococo skies.

Of course, it wasn’t so. The men who fought our revolution were farmers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, accountants, schoolteachers, and businessmen who felt they were being cheated and were willing to do something about it. Unlike their British and Hessian counterparts, most of them had never dreamed of being soldiers. They knew nothing of revetments and flanking maneuvers, and they certainly didn’t want to die. But when a war came, they found they were ready for a war.