January 2011

Never was the election of a President so much a foregone conclusion and yet so tortuous in consummation. The Electoral College met on February 4, 1789, but its unanimous vote for Washington could not be official until the president of the Senate, temporarily elected for the purpose, opened the ballots in the presence of both houses. Congress was due to convene in New York on March 4. On the fifth, only eight senators and seventeen representatives —pitifully less than a quorum—had appeared.

As the most unpleasant season of the farming year moved slowly by, Washington waited at Mount Vernon in a frustration that was increased by the non-arrival of some promised grain seed, which prevented him from carrying out that year’s stage in his longrange plan for the rotation of crops. ”£500 would be no compensation,” he wrote, “for this disappointment.”

In the late summer of 1857, Charles Melville Scammon, captain of the 181-ton brig Boston , presented his crew with a dangerous proposition. Their voyage, he reminded them, had thus far failed to yield a single barrel of oil or a single sealskin. If the ship returned empty to its home port of San Francisco, there would be no bonus money for the men. Their eight-month contracts were about to expire; what Scammon wanted them to do was to extend their tours and follow the migrating gray whales to a hitherto undiscovered breeding lagoon on the coast of Baja California, in Mexico.

The crew of the Boston agreed, but not without hesitation. Hunting the slow-moving grays in the confines of a shallow lagoon might appear tame compared with the hazards of open-sea whaling, but it was not without hazards of its own: many a tombstone in the cemeteries of New England whaling ports bore the inscription “Killed While Lagoon Whaling.”

My maternal grandparent. Patrick Sweeney, was indeed a giant among men. To me he was Thor, Atlas, Hercules, Paul Bunyan, and Saint Patrick, all rolled into one. When I knew him, back in the eighteen nineties, he was very old and nearing the end of his time. Still, he was straight as a rod, his lionlike head topped by a mass of rumpled hair, once red but by then a snowy hue. Steel-blue eagle eyes peered keenly from under heavy, frosty brows; a full white beard, worn long but with no mustache, framed his rugged face.

Standing six feet and seven inches, “Granther” had shoulders of yardstick span. Even then, approaching ninety years of age, he was amazingly strong, and I could well believe the stories I heard of his fantastic physical feats when he was younger. During the years 1846 to 1851, Patrick Sweeney had labored mightily in the building of the first railroad along the east-bank, water-level route of the Hudson River from New York to Albany, a distance of some hundred and forty-three miles, thereafter, he became a railway switchman on the Hudson River Rail Road, as it was then known.

The First World War was a battle of banners, a conflict in which the French Tricolor, the British Union lack, the red, white, and blue Russian ensign, the black, red. and gold imperial German standard, and America’s own Old Glory seemed, in the eyes of all they summoned, to emblazon their nation’s righteousness.

In this whirlwind of patriotism the artists of the world were not about to be left standing in the trenches. If the Duchess of Portland could pack parcels for Queen Alexandra’s Field Force Fund and the Countess Manon von Dumreicher give 5,000 cork legs for maimed soldiers in the Austrian military hospitals, the artists certainly must do something. Very early in the war the governments of Great Britain, Canada, France, and Australia began sending famous painters to the front to cover all phases of the conflict; the list included John Singer Sargent, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Wyndham Lewis, and Muirhead Bone.

To the early European settlers of North America, this land had one serious shortcoming: it lacked visible signs of a past. Egypt had her pyramids, England her Stonehenge, Greece her Acropolis; but those who came to this green New World failed to find those traces of awesome antiquity on which romantic myths could be founded. It was not cheering to feel that one was entering an empty land peopled only by naked, wandering savages. Mexico and South America had yielded stone temples and golden cities, but here in the north was, seemingly, a continent only of woods and plains, inhabited by simple huntsmen and equally simple sedentary farmers. Were there no grand, imagination-stirring symbols of vanished greatness? In all this mighty domain, was there nothing to compare with the antiquities of the Old World?

The big city and the political boss grew up together in America. Bossism, with all its color and corruption and human drama, was a natural and perhaps necessary accompaniment to the rapid development of cities. The new urban communities did not grow slowly and according to plan; on the contrary, huge conglomerations of people from all over the world and from widely varying backgrounds came together suddenly, and in an unplanned, unorganized fashion fumbled their way toward communal relationships and a common identity. The political bosses emerged to cope with this chaotic change and growth. Acting out of greed, a ruthless will for mastery, and an imperfect understanding of what they were about, the bosses imposed upon these conglomerations called cities a certain feudal order and direction.

He came out of the Horseshoe, a teeming slice of downtown Jersey City that owed its name to a gerrymander of earlier decades. From the brutal poverty of those narrow waterfront streets crammed with saloons and slum tenements, Frank Hague rose to plush accommodations at the Plaza and a mansion on Biscayne Bay, to dinners at the White House and at the homes of the wealthy, to annual trips to Europe in the royal suites of luxury liners, to made-to-order shirts and silk underwear from A. Sulka Uc Company. A few years before his death he secretly acknowledged that he was worth eight million dollars. The lawyer who extracted this figure, a former attorney general of New Jersey, says: “The real amount was probably ten times higher.”