It was bound to happen, once women invaded the sanctuary of maleoriented offices, or unescorted ladies ran the gauntlet of the city streets: the newly liberated woman was accosted, either by some caddish employers or by a rogue out to take her purse or that which is more precious … etc. How to fend all this off? One solution, posed by the New-York Tribune Illustrated Supplement in 1904, was the “innocent hatpin.” One had been designed, the newspaper observed, “that is intended primarily for use as a weapon of defence. It is in reality a stiletto … made of fine steel … as sharp as a needle, and hardened at the end so that it can be used with deadly effect as a dagger. … With this in her hand the nervous woman is ready for the stranger, whatever his intentions.”
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The late Lucius Beebe (1902-66), sometime chronicler of New York high life, railroad enthusiast, and later the publisher of the rejuvenated Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, was an esteemed contributor to AMERICAN HERITAGE for many years. This article, hitherto unpublished, is redolent of Beebe’s gusto for the nchjolklore and legend of the Old West, an Old West probably a little more amusing and colorful than the real one. When the locale of our opening photograph for the portfolio on ghost towns, starting on page g, turned out to be Bodie, we thought this piece was just the thing to go with it. —THE EDITORS
Author John Malcolm Brinnin’s description of Fiddler’s Green as “the mythical sailor’s heaven” (“The Sway of the Grand Saloon,” October, 1971) was “too much for an old cavalryman to bear,” according to James C. McBride, of Wichita Falls, Texas. He writes: I shouldn’t hope to find a sailor there, but the shades of Stuart, of Sheridan, and of Jonathan M. Wainwright, who named his retirement home in San Antonio “Fiddler’s Green.”
The War Department’s 1948 history of the Medal of Honor quoted a song of the Sixth Cavalry:
A “smoke-filled room,” as every politician knows, is where the other party’s bosses secretly choose their candidate. One’s own standard-bearer, of course, is selected openly and freely by the divinely inspired delegates of the People. To the newsmen and television commentators a smoke-filled room is one where they couldn’t get in.
It all goes back to the Republican convention of 1920, when after a day of indecisive balloting Warren G. Hording, a dark horse, was supposed to have received the bosses’ nod in the first so-called smokefilled room, and Calvin Coolidge was then picked as his running mate. On this, Mark Sullivan commented in Our Times : …I doubt whether a nomination for the Presidency (or anything else) ever merely ‘happens,’ always it must be brought about and always somebody must play the part of brmger about. ”
Our story about the Ogontz School for Young Ladies (“A Schoolgirl’s Album,” December, 1971) was read with both interest and irritation by Charles B. Harding, of Rumson, New Jersey, retired senior partner of the Wall Street firm of Smith, Barney & Company, and the great grandson of Jay Cooke, who donated the mansion that became the school’s home. The photographs reminded Mr. Harding of ones he had seen before, for he recalled that his mother and her five sisters had all attended the school. He took exception, however, to two phrases used to describe Jay Cooke—that he was a “wily manipulator” and was known as the “so-called” financier of the Civil War. As Mr. Harding put it:
In our October, 1971, issue we published an account of the little-publicized German air raid on the port of Bari, Italy, which took place on December 2, 1943, and the tragic consequences when ships carrying highly secret supplies of mustard gas exploded. A reader who was on the scene that day, Bertram M. Rothschild, of Long Beach, New York— then a soldier in the Air Corps— expressed amazement that military doctors were unaware of the lethal cargoes. As Mr. Rothschild tells it: After the raid I had fallen into an exhausted sleep in our billet over the U.S. Air Corps finance office on Victor Emmanuel Avenue when I was awakened about midnight and ordered to empty my barrack bag and report downstairs immediately with it and a gas mask as we had to evacuate. A ship containing mustard gas had been hit and was being towed outside the harbor by a destroyer.
We loaded the money into the bags and with gas masks over one shoulder, the sacks over the other, we carried the money to a technical school on the outskirts of the city.
The following account, written by an anonymous soldier, appeared m the Army-Navy Journal on June 26, 1869. It is reprinted here through the courtesy of the Armed Forces Journal.
I was in the Infantry. Custer had command of the troops. There was quite a force of cavalry with us. … Some of the troops had been sent around so as to attack from the other side. The reds were encamped in a sort of valley, and we were within eighty rods of them for half an hour before daybreak. Just in the gray of morning the firing commenced on both sides, and we had it all our own way for a few minutes. … At length they rallied, and we could hear Black Kettle shouting and ordering.
In December, 1968, we printed “A Dakota Boyhood,” a warm, sensitive appreciation of childhood taken from an unpublished autobiography of the popular American sculptor James Earle Fraser. Fraser, the designer of our familiar buffalo nickel, died in 1953. His autobiography was discovered among his papers, subsequently presented to Syracuse University.
As well as reminiscing about his boyhood, Fraser also wrote in his autobiography about his work and his subjects. One of the most intriguing of those subjects was President Theodore Roosevelt, who had picked Fraser in a somewhat circuitous way to do his portrait. Fraser had worked as assistant to Augustus Saint-Gaudens when that famous sculptor was at the peak of his career. When Roosevelt, in 1904, wanted a portrait bust done for the Capitol, he asked Saint-Gaudens to sculpt it. But Saint-Gaudens was ill, and he recommended his ex-assistant in his stead. Fraser, then twenty-eight, was honored, elated, and a bit awed. As this account will show, it was an experience he would never forget.