January 2011

In 1841, about a year before his untimely demise at the end of a rope aboard the Somers , young Philip Spencer was a student at Union College in Schenectady, New York. He had already failed in his studies at another college, and was to be dismissed from Union, too, after a scrape with the authorities. But he remained long enough to help found what has since become a national fraternity, Chi Psi.

According to Chi Psi tradition, the young man was not hanged for mutiny at all, but for refusing to reveal or explain his fraternity affiliation: his judges believed his Chi Psi oath conflicted with his oath of allegiance to his country. History fails to support the tradition, but it survives in a fine old Chi Psi song; two of its many verses will give some sense of their flavor:

Who was Catherwood? The name is uncommon enough, yet anyone who has been interested in the history of those strange and haunting Mayas who reared stone cities in the jungles and plains south of Mexico will recognize it instantly: Frederick Catherwood, companion of John Lloyd Stephens and illustrator of his books, the first revelation of the Mayan wonders to the modern world. But Catherwood was much else besides: a pioneer in the archaeology of the Middle East; the friend of Keats and Shelley; an architect who raised many mansions and monuments in London, New York, and San Francisco; a surveyor who built the first South American railway. Author, traveler, artist, engineer—he was many things, and all in vain.

Many naval historians dispute whether there ever was a mutiny in the history of the U.S. Navy, though they do agree that several near-outbreaks have occurred. In response to an inquiry from AMERICAN HERITAGE, Rear Admiral E. M. Eller, Director of Naval History in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, had this to say:

Few people today remember the name of Ignatius Donnelly. Mention it, and often as not it will tall forth the wary half smile of someone who hopes he is not having his leg pulled. Yet in Donnelly’s time—the last half of the nineteenth century- his voice was one of the most forceful in the whole farm protest movement, which swept through the Midwest and large sections of the South.

It’s the invisible something in a picture which makes it a good one. The feeling yon have when you think of those mysterious people … ,” Harvey Dunn liked to tell his painting classes back in the 1930’s. By that time he had been a successful illustrator for many years, but the special quality he tried to achieve is less apparent in his commercial, polished works than in his paintings of old Dakota Territory, where his parents were ox-team land-seekers and where he was born in a homesteader’s shack.

As the Civil War ended, all of New York City was wedged into the lower third of Manhattan Island. The city was compact, teeming, jammed with more than 700,000 people. Thousands more poured in every day as immigrants and refugees. The streets were clogged with horse-drawn vehicles and traffic moved an inch at a time. Public transportation consisted of overloaded streetcars and omnibuses dragged along by ponderous six-horse teams. Axles broke, horses shied, harnesses became snarled, and competing drivers got into fist fights. Silks and broadcloths were ruined in the crush inside the cars. Watches and breastpins vanished into the hands of pickpockets. The air was poisonous; it was said that a healthy person could not ride a dozen blocks without a headache. Traffic was so dense that it might take an hour to move a few yards. “Modern martyrdom,” one critic summed it up, “may be succinctly defined as riding in a New York omnibus.”

The situation was desperate. What could be done to speed up public transportation?

Suddenly, one fine morning, New York woke tip and found that it had a subway.

The dark Depression years of the logo’s were n time of economic hardship such as the nation has rarely known: by 1932, unemployment had risen to the thirteen million mark. As more and more banks failed- over five thousand closed their doors between 1930 and 1933—one of the most serious problems was the critical scarcity of money in circulation. In desperation, some communities turned to the barter system: but this hardly seemed a satisfactory solution. The magazine Judge probably summed up the general sentiment when it defined barter as “giving somebody u pig and a couple of ducks they don’t want in exchange for an overcoat that doesn’t fit for the benefit of the newsreel movie people.”

On a brisk November day in Washington in 1933, two spare, tall American officials of high rank and collected demeanor emerged from under the mansards of the old State Department building to journey to Union Station and there greet a squat, rotund, grinning foreigner who in the eyes of many of their compatriots was a dangerous revolutionary. The moment itself was revolutionary, even in a sartorial sense. Protocol prescribed that when our Secretary of State and his assistants received the visiting foreign minister of another sovereign power, formal morning dress be worn. Yet on this occasion, so Under Secretary William Phillips recorded of the trip across town that he and his chief, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, undertook that day to welcome Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinow, “None of us wore top hats because [Litvinov] came as the representative of a government not yet officially recognized by the United States.”