After 194 years the federal government has formally gone out of the silver business. During most of that time the U.S. Treasury had purchased only the silver it needed to mint coins, but it began to stockpile the metal in 1934 to bolster the depressed mining industry. Then, with the increase in photographic and other industrial uses after World War II , the Treasury turned seller in an effort to keep the price of silver down, so that its own coins would not become more valuable to melt down than to use as money. Since the phasing out of most silver coins and their replacement by lead-colored “sandwiches” of nickel and copper, the Treasury’s role as a holder or seller of silver has disappeared. Last October it auctioned off its last marketable silver, 1.5 million ounces, at $1.84 per ounce. (The Treasury still has thirty-five million unrefined ounces left; they are earmarked for Eisenhower silver dollars.) With bimetallism for all intents and purposes now a dead issue, one Treasury official commented that “William Jennings Bryan must be spinning in his grave.”
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January 2011
Governments pass laws constantly, but the only ones with any lasting force are those unofficial ones provided us by Newton, Gresham, Acton, Parkinson, and others like them who have observed the basic cussedness of things. In the business of history we have a little rule of this kind that is (or ought to be) known as Parson Weems’s Law. It has given us Washington and the cherry tree, Pilgrims jumping onto Plymouth Rock, young Lincoln courting Ann Rutledge, the unstained innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti—but enough examples. Let us state the law:
Historical fancy is more persistent than historical fact.
The indefatigable Mr. Howe also recalls another great epitaph, which will perhaps amuse the Latin scholars among our readers. It is a parody by Longfellow of the one Dr. Samuel Johnson composed for Oliver Goldsmith: “ Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit .” Longfellow called his, “Epitaph on a Maid of All Work:” “It has been stylish, even during his lifetime, to laugh at Longfellow as a linguist,” concludes Mr. Howe, “but I think that translating ‘maid of all work’ as ‘ancilla quae omnia egit’ is a tour de force that Dean Swift himself could not have excelled.”
We were purposely vague about the year of birth of Willa Gather in introducing the article she wrote about the fortieth anniversary of Brownville, Nebraska, in the October, 1970, issue (“Ghost Town on the River”). However, Virginia Faulkner, editor of the University of Nebraska Press, insists that there is “no uncertainty” at all about the birth date; it was December 7, 1873:
Dr. Gilbert Highet, long the noted Anthon Professor of Latin at Columbia University, recently wrote us, saying: I was looking at some old furniture in East Hampton when I remembered something once told me by an American officer who heard me speak at West Point. … He said that you could always tell the date of a piece of nineteenth-century furniture if it had the American eagle on it, because if the country had been at war when the piece was made, the eagle was looking to the side in which it held the lightning bolts, and if we were at peace, it had its head turned to the side of the olive branch. Is there any truth to this?
George L. Howe, a contributor to this magazine in the past and a long-time subscriber, took a look at the gravestone rubbings by Avon Neal and Ann Parker in our August, 1970, issue (“Graven Images: Sermons in Stones”) and was prompted to try to identify an old epitaph he had often seen quoted: “Young to the pulpit did he get, / And seventy-two years in’t did he sweat.” As Mr. Howe puts it, “Even in that sudorific age, seventy-two years must have come close to the record for clerical perspiration.” He believes he found the holder of said record in the Biographical Dictionary compiled in 1809 by John Eliot, corresponding secretary of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The man who fits the bill, Mr. Howe says, is the Reverend John Higginson, who was born in England in 1616 and came to the New World when he was twelve. The son of a minister, Higginson assisted the pastor of Guilford, Connecticut, from 1643 to 1659, when he moved to his father’s church in Salem, Massachusetts. He was ordained its pastor in 1660 and died at the age of ninety-two in 1708.
With the current wave of interest in black history, authentic Negro heroes have been eagerly sought in the American past. It has been hard going, since the disposition of the white majority from colonial times until rather recently was to prevent blacks from playing any role that could possibly be viewed as heroic, and to ignore the exceptions that failed to conform to majority prejudices. And indeed, where a black man’s historical reputation has overcome all this, it has sometimes been in despite of honest historical evidence. There is little to prove, for example, that Crispus Attucks, the hero of the Boston Massacre, was not more of a hoodlum than a patriot.
It is therefore pleasant to celebrate a black man who quite unexpectedly became something of a hero, whose credentials are indubitable, and who has remained curiously neglected.
In the spring of 1915 a handsome fifty-nine-year-old man with a marked resemblance to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan boarded ship in New York, bound for England. Other passengers stared unabashedly at his long black Prince Albert coat, his outsize black tie, his almost shoulder-length tresses topped by a Stetson hat. There was indeed nothing ordinary about Elbert Hubbard. When the Lusitania was torpedoed in the Irish Sea a few days later, his death was reported across the United States in the same paragraph that recorded that of the multimillionaire Alfred Vanderbilt. The Literary Digest described Hubbard’s loss, along with that of several theatrical notables, as a “Blow to Arts and Letters.” And forty thousand Americans wrote their condolences to his son in East Aurora, New York.