January 2011

What did the early settlers find to eat and drink? What was their daily fare? How much did they depend upon their own garden plants grown from seeds and roots and bulbs and cuttings brought from England? How much upon skills learned in the Old Country and how much upon those learned from the Indians? How was it, really?

Facts are hard to come by. Nontruths have charm. Our lavish Thanksgivings have transformed what was originally set aside as a day for fasting and prayer. And our modern concept of the Puritans allows them to be brave but not bright, attractive, or good company. If one does not like a people, one seldom likes their food. Scholars have never considered the . New England Puritan diet tempting, even as a subject for research. And yet to find out what they ate may be one way to find out what they were really like.

Soon after he became President, John Adams wrote forlornly from Philadelphia to his beloved Abigail about the exorbitant tost of maintaining his position. Glumly he declared, “I expect to be obliged to resign in six months because I can’t live. Fortunately, he had just received a gigantic cheese as a gilt from the state of Rhode Island. Perhaps, he mused, when his money was gone he could live oil the cheese.

If not all our Presidents have felt so discouraged about their personal finances, very few have been able to live without self-consciousness of their estate. They have learned that the American people respond ambivalently to the fact of a President who is wealthy: to some it implies that he is accustomed to managing large affairs successfully, but to others it seems to suggest that he cannot possibly be attuned to the needs of the ordinary citizen.

The woman’s voice, high-pitched and lacking the assertiveness of an experienced public speaker, trembles slightly in midsentcnce. The crowd stirs in the afternoon heat, impatient to have done with the two-minute formality of listening to the candidate. Her election, she explains, will enable her husband to continue his nationwide opposition to those trends that would “destroy the local government and the free-enterprise system upon which it was founded.” The audience, alert—despite its rural appearance—to the full implication, nods in agreement. Hehind the mobile speakers’ platform, the musicians quietly pack up their electric guitars, while at her right her husband, hands tightly clasped, sits studying the crowd. The cheering begins as soon as she assures them that he will be her “Number One assistant in the next administration.” Suddenly he is at her side, holding her arm aloft with one hand, groping for the microphone with the other.

Although he was not there, his mother, his Aunt Delia, and two of his brothers gathered in New York City early in January, 1903. and, after due deliberation, drafted a report: William Howard Taft was to be President of the United States.

For two reasons this was a remarkable, if not amazing, decision. First, the occupant of the White House at the moment was Theodore Roosevelt, who showed no disposition to move out for another six years to accommodate William Howard Taft or anyone else; and second. William Howard Taft did not want to be President.

Wherever man has delved, dredged, or drilled the earth to win its precious minerals he has created centers whose names are synonymous with both misery and joyous bonanza—Virginia City, Silver City, Sutler’s Mill. One of the most spectacular of these Eldorados sprang up just before the Civil War in the rolling farm country of northwestern Pennsylvania around the towns of Titusville and Franklin. The region was an unlikely setting for an economic boom, save for one peculiarity: It abounded in a foulsmelling, foul-looking, foul-tasting substance that polluted wells, slicked the tops of ponds and canals, and seeped into newly plowed fields. The locals called the bothersome stuff “Seneca oil,” after the Indians who had used it as a kind of cure-all. Out of exasperation they even named one of the streams in the area Oil Creek.