January 2011

To the ordinary circus-goer they were simply “geeks and freaks,” to be gawked at before going on to the Big Top to watch the brave lion-tamer and the man on the flying trapeze. But to David Navarro (opposite page), himself a circus Fat Man, they were friends and fellow performers, trying to live lives as normal as physical deformity and an itinerant profession would allow. He collected their pictures—usually cartes de visite made up for publicity purposes—and carefully pasted them into albums. The result was one of the most extraordinary collections of nineteenth-century strong men and “living skeletons,” midgets and bearded ladies, ever brought together; we present here a small sampling. Not much is known of Navarro himself save that he reached a maximum weight of 601 pounds and that he toured with various road shows for twenty-two years. Possibly he stood in the shadow, as it were, of his contemporary John Hanson Craig, at 907 pounds perhaps the heaviest human ever. Beside that mountain, David Navarro was a mere foothill.

In the midst of this throng of bearded and mustachioed gentlemen is the inventor of the startlingly modern conveyance behind them. Joe Vincent Meigs, sixth from the right in the second row, is as completely forgotten as is his invention. It was something new in the way of rapid transit—an elevated railway of the type we would call a monorail, various forms of which had been tried during the nineteenth century by inventors such as Palmer in Great Britain, Lartique in France, and Stone in the United States. On this bright May day in 1887, Meigs’ company was having a reception for the Philadelphia City Council so that it could ride over the 1,114 feet of track Meigs had put up in East Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Seldom has an eminent man been more conscious of his place in history than was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He regarded history as an imposing drama and himself as a conspicuous actor. Again and again he carefully staged a historic scene: as when, going before Congress on December 8, 1941, to call for a recognition of war with Japan, he took pains to see that Mrs. Woodrow Wilson accompanied Mrs. Roosevelt to the Capitol, thus linking the First and Second World Wars. As governor and as President, he adopted for the benefit of future historians the rule that every letter addressed to him, however insignificant, and copies of every document issued from his office, should be preserved. This mass of papers, mounting into the millions, soon became almost overwhelming. It might have been added, with some difficulty, to the many other official collections in the Library of Congress. But, with a strong sense of his special place in history, Roosevelt wanted a memorial all his own, a place of resort for scholars, connected uniquely with his name and his administrations.

Then there is the category of the likely legend. Sometimes a popular but mistaken story just seems so comfortably appropriate to the known historical circumstances that it gets accepted without due challenge. An article on the 1889 Oklahoma land rush in our February issue asserted that, among other “firsts” during the boom, “William Wrigley, Jr., rolled his first slab of chewing gum in a tent store at Guthrie.” Now we hear from Robert L. Bridwell, of Norman, Oklahoma, that although this claim has been long and fondly promoted, sometimes in Guthrie itself, there’s no truth in it. The great chewing-gum company has repeatedly pointed out that their founder, neither boomer nor sooner, started his enterprise in Chicago in 1893, and that, further, “he personally never made a stick of gum.” That should give the legend makers, including us, something to chew on for awhile.

Something over a year ago (April, 1965) we published a short Civil War narrative by Mary A. Benjamin, based on a biographical sketch of Union General E. O. C. Ord written by his granddaughter. It revolved around the famous scene in the parlor of Wilmer McLean, at Appomattox Court House, when Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865. The gist of the story was that McLean presented to Ord the table on which Grant wrote the surrender terms—because Ord had, a few months before, kindly let McLean’s young son, a sick Confederate soldier, pass through his lines on his way to the safety of home. There has always been much confusion and controversy about which of the two small tables in McLean’s living room Grant sat at, and which Lee; and Miss Benjamin’s version stirred that up again. In addition, we got letters, some of them quite ill-natured, attacking the story of McLean’s son as a fabrication on the ground that this son could not have been more than eleven in 1865.

A history magazine, we think, has a special obligation to be accurate, since mistaken history is worse than none at all. At the same time, we take the view that accuracy is not necessarily promoted by all the academic machinery that sometimes stultifies the pages of professedly “scholarly” journals. We do not regularly footnote our articles, for instance; but nevertheless we try to check all factual statements carefully before they go into print.

But the most experienced and learned authors make mistakes. So do editors, researchers, printers, and copyreaders; it is amazing how many pairs of practiced eyes can look hard at something and not see what turns out, later, to be an “obvious” mistake.