January 2011

On August 21, 1897, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World published an item that, for the astute reader, pertained not to one war but to two. The article ostensibly concerned the late of a prisoner of war in Cuba, but it was also printed to escalate the intensity of quite another conflict—in New York. Headlined GENERAL WEYLER TO THE WORLD , it read, in part, “In a Personal Cable Message to The World , the Captain-General of Cuba Says that Evangelina Cisneros, the Beautiful Cuban Girl, Has Not Been Condemned or Even Tried as Yet.” The newspaper went on to quote the cable, which was datelined Havana, August 20: “For judicial reasons there is on trial in the preliminary stages a person named Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, who, deceitfully luring to her house the military commander of the Isle of Pines, had men posted secretly, who … attempted to assassinate him. This case is in the preliminary stages and has not as yet been tried by a competent tribunal, and consequently no sentence has been passed nor approved by me.

On the late afternoon tide of August 13, 1850, over one hundred men and 160 tons of equipment sailed from New York Harbor for Matagorcla Bay on the Texas coast. The party’s goal was to draw a border of two thousand miles between the United States and its recently conquered neighbor to the south. The task would be long and arduous, for the line would run through what the survey commissioner came to call the “thorny and angular” landscapes of southern New Mexico and northern Sonora and Chihuahua—hot, barren stretches, rocky, saguaro-studded slopes, and pinonpocked mesas. The new limits of national sovereignty would be delineated by instruments carted and jostled over thousands of rough, wearying miles.

Without the American railroads there could have been no American business. With a web of rails we bound our continental spaces together and spurred them into production; on a skeleton of rails we Hesliecl out our commerce and hardened our industrial muscles. It is not too much to say that the railroads hauled an underdeveloped nation out of debt and carried it much of the way toward industrial supremacy in the world.

The men who administered the affairs of the railroads were lordly fellows who acknowledged or flouted the law as it fitted their convenience, who trafficked in congressmen like so many chattels, who dangled state legislatures like seals from their watch fobs, who took it for granted that the U.S. Army would squash any strike by their workmen, and who deigned in their spare time to instruct Presidents in the conduct of national affairs.

This couple, Ossian and Gladys Sweet,

wanted to live in this house.

The white neighborhood exploded and a man was killed. The Detroit police charged the Negroes with murder.

To their defense came Clarence Darrow, America’s noted criminal lawyer. Race prejudice,

he prophesied, would inevitably lead to tragedy.