January 2011

James Smithson, bastard son of the Duke of North-umberland, was a man who kept one eye on posterity. After leaving his fortune to what would one day be called the Smithsonian Institution, he wrote: “My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles of the Xorthumbcrlands and the Percys are extinct and forgotten.”

A debatable prophecy, perhaps. But the name of Smithson has certainly eclipsed that of Joseph Henry, Rrst secretary of the Smithsonian, who set the Institution on a course of research and publication that has made it known and respected the world over, and who, with the possible exception of Benjamin Franklin, can be called the foremost among America’s early scientists.

In New York Harbor. on January 19, 1904, a coffin bearing the remains of a man who had never been in the United States, and is not known to have had a single American friend, was transferred from a British ship, the Princess Irene , to an American ship, the Dolphin . Draped with an American Mag, the coffin was conducted by Alexander Graham Bell and an escort from the United States War Department. The skeleton in the coflin was that of the natural son of an English nobleman—the remains of James Smithson, whose unexpected bequest of his entire estate, seventy-five years before, had provided for the establishment of the institution that now bears his name.

That institution, the famed Smithsonian, has grown to a sixe undreamed of by its founders. But although it is the largest museum complex in America and is renowned the world over for its promotion of scientific research, nobody has ever been able to explain completely why an Englishman of royal descent left his half-million-dollar fortune to the United States.

HELEN (Steps on balcony. It crumbles beneath her.): My God, it is falling! Help! Help! (She goes down with balcony, but catches on cliff. At same moment War field enters above, followed by Major and Norwood.)

WARFIELD (Rushes to edge.): Helen, hold! I’ll save you! Ah, the flag! (Swings down on flag.) Hold! I am coming!

HELEN: I cannot. My hands are slipping. Good-bye. God bless you.

WARFIELD: Hold! I will reach you! (Grasps her. Major and Norwood begin to raise them by the flag. Curtain.)

Passion, Pathos, and Adventure “Thank heaven I arrived in time…” Next week—“East Lynne”! (laughter) Ladies of the Lithograph “For this relief, much thanks”

The 1850’s have been called the tormented decade of American history. In those years the slavery question got entirely out of control. In 1850 the problem might still have been settled by debate, compromise, and mutual arrangement, but by 1860 it was insoluble, and war had become virtually inevitable. The nation’s political machinery became progressively less and less able to deal with the nation’s foremost political issue, and finally it collapsed, at a cost which has not yet been entirely paid.

Symptomatic of the process was the increasing resort to violence. To shoot an antagonist came to seem better than to try to persuade him. Taking up arms against a sea of troubles, men simply made the sea stormier, and while they were doing it, violent action began to look reasonable, even praiseworthy. The readiness to go to war in 1861 rested at least partly on this foundation.