January 2011

Nearby, American sentries nervously fingered their Krag-forgensen bolt-action rifles. The captain was obviously getting nowhere with his exotic visitors, who shook their heads and glared defiance.

The captain wheeled and gave a signal to two lieutenants. One of them snapped an order, and two enlisted men trotted out of the captain’s tent, one carrying a dead pig, and the other a bucket of blood. The captain knew that his turbaned adversaries regarded pigs’ blood as the ultimate defilement; he ladled some from the pail and held it under their noses. He then drew back his arm as if to fling the blood in their faces.

In the entire history of the turf there lias probably never been anything remotely resembling the 1891 spring and fall horse-racing seasons at the old Gravescnd track at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, New York. The extraordinary events that attended the meetings resulted from an economic squeeze play on the part of the Brooklyn Jockey Club, which operated Gravesend. Then, as now, off-track betting was illegal in New York state, but then, as now, it was a popular form of gambling. To keep local betting parlors aware of all the pertinent racing data—post odds, scratches, jockey selections, weights, and results—the Poolsellers Association, a syndicate of Manhattan bookmakers, telegraphed the information direct from the various tracks to the “poolrooms”; for this privilege, the association paid the management of each track S 1,000 a day. When in the spring of 1891 the Brooklyn Jockey Club suddenly decided to quadruple the rate, the bookies refused to pay. Somehow they would bootleg the information out of the track; the Jockey Club could go hang.

Seventy years before the Potato Famine, the seaport peninsula had seen the same thing happen: on a blustery March day in 1776, General William Howc cmbarked the Boston garrison, and the provincial aristocracy sailed away with the redcoats into exile. Those proudly armigerous Brattles and Vassalls and Dudleys and Hutchinsons abandoned the town to the nonarmigerous class below them.

The reaction of Lyndon Johnson to Peter Kurd’s portrait of him is hardly unique in the annals of presidential paintings. But there was one painter—the most celebrated portraitist of his time—who turned the tables and voiced his displeasure with not one but three Presidents.

John Adams on Thomas Jefferson: “[He has] a mind, soured, yet seeking for popularity, and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.”

—on Alexander Hamilton: “This man is stark mad, or I am.” “[Consider] the profligacy of his life; his fornications, adulteries and his incests.”

—on Benjamin Franklin: “His whole life has been one continued insult to good manners and to decency. … From five complete years of experience of Dr. Franklin … I can have no dependence on his word. … I wish with all my soul he was out of public service.”

Halfway between Naples and Rome, on a mountaintop and visible for miles, stands the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, serene and benign, apparently indestructible. Of cream-colored stone, its longest side extending 200 yards, four stories tall, with a thick, battlemented base and rows of cell windows, the abbey resembles a fortress. Not particularly beautiful, it is impressive because of its massive size and commanding location. Crowning Monte Cassino, which rises abruptly 1,700 feet above the plain, the abbey overlooks the town of Cassino and the Rapido River, at its foot; to the northwest it superbly dominates the Liri Valley, stretching off toward Rome. It is built around five cloistered courtyards and includes a large church, a seminary, an observatory, a school for 250 boys, a vast library of priceless archives, and various workshops and outbuildings. Since 1866, when Italy dissolved the monasteries, the abbey has been a national monument, the monks remaining as custodians of the structure and its treasures.

It has been pointed out by Lieutenant General Julian C. Smith, U.S.M.C. (Ret.) that a statement made by Richard O’Connor in “Mr. Coolidge’s Jungle War” on page 90 of our December, 1967, issue is seriously misleading. Mr. O’Connor wrote that Carleton Beals, an American journalist and Sandino sympathizer, reported seeing a photograph of the town of Chinandega showing great destruction “after it was bombed by U.S. planes.” Actually, says General Smith—who himself served two and a half years in Nicaragua—most of the destruction was caused by ground fighting between Nicaraguan Liberal and Conservative forces, and whatever damage resulted from bombing came not from Marine Corps planes, as the statement implies, but from planes flown by “two American civilian free-lance flyers … in the service of the Conservative Nicaraguan Government…. U.S. Marine Corps Aviation was always under strictest orders not to bomb or strafe any town or area known to be occupied by civilians.” We regret the error.

— The Editors

In the telegraph room of the Panama Railroad station the operator was tapping out an anguished message to the company’s chief engineer in Aspinwall, miles away across the Isthmus: bullets were coming through the room, it said, and the telegrapher added, “I shall be shot. I must go.” But there was no place to go. It was no longer possible even to send a telegram; outside, a mob had just torn down the telegraph wires.

Downstairs, in the darkness, the battering of the doors continued. Men were piled in a human barricade against them, while scores of others crouched on the floor, trying to escape the bullets coming up from outside. At the back of the building a group of natives was bringing burning coals to set the building on fire.

In the spring of 1885, when he was less than three months away from death by cancer, General Ulysses S. Grant had a spirited exchange of letters with Adam Badeau, who was supposed to be helping him write his memoirs.

Badeau had been Grant’s military secretary during the final year of the Civil War, and some time after the war he had written a three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant . This has been a standard reference work ever since, but it had not been a great commercial success and now it occurred to Badeau that it would sink into the shadows forever, once Grant’s memoirs came out. Besides, to work on another man’s manuscript struck Badeau as sheer drudgery, he saw his own name vanishing from sight under the great weight of Grant’s name, and anyway he wanted to write a novel; so on May 2 he wrote to Grant demanding more money. Specifically, he wanted $1,000 a month, payable in advance, plus ten per cent of the entire profits from the memoirs.