American History June 2022 by HistoryNet

A Yank’s Cold War Stay in the USSR Alaskan Air War Aimed at Bears Methodist Schism Over Abolitionism Sports Mascots’ Twisted Origins

Franklin’s Gambit Playing chess schooled him for diplomacy

June 2022 HISTORYNET.com

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ntil Stauer came along, you needed an inheritance to buy a timepiece with class and refinement. Not any more. The Stauer Magnificat II embodies the impeccable quality and engineering once found only in the watch collections of the idle rich. Today, it can be on your wrist. The Magnificat II has the kind of thoughtful design that harkens back to those rare, 150-year-old moon phases that once could only be found under glass in a collector’s trophy room. Powered by 27 jewels, the Magnificat II is wound by the movement of your body. An exhibition back reveals the genius of the engineering and lets you witness the automatic rotor that enables you to wind the watch with a simple flick of your wrist. It took three years of development and $26 million in advanced Swiss-built watchmaking machinery to create the Magnificat II. When we took the watch to renowned watchmaker and watch historian George Thomas, he disassembled it and studied the escapement, balance wheel and the rotor. He remarked on the detailed guilloche face, gilt winding crown, and the crocodile-embossed leather band. He was intrigued by the three interior dials for day, date, and 24-hour moon phases. He estimated that this fine timepiece would cost over $2,500. We all smiled and told him that the Stauer price was less than $100. A truly magnificent watch at a truly magnificent price! Try the Magnificat II for 30 days and if you are not receiving compliments, please return the watch for a full refund of the purchase price. The precision-built movement carries a 2 year warranty against defect. If you trust your own good taste, the Magnificat II is built for you.

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For many generations before Russian and American colonizers arrived, Alaska's Alutiiq people shared Kodiak Island with its enormous bears. The native tribe's culture included ritual masks like this one.

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JUNE 2022 FEATURES

24 Franklin’s Gambit

Benjamin Franklin ranked chess high among tools that sharpened his statesmanship. By Matthew Smith

32 Cold War Chronicle

A sojourn studying in the USSR during a fraught period enriched an American historian's grasp of international relations. By Albert J. Schmidt

42 Rehearsal for Rebellion

American Methodists distressed over bondage and the abolitionist cause fought one another all the way to the splitting point. By Karen Whitehair

50 Mascot Memories

Those jolly overstuffed characters and oversize bobbleheads now dotting ballparks each summer had their origins in a very different day. By Allen Abel

58 Bear Wars

World War II veterans raising cattle on an island off Alaska found themselves fighting a ravenous fourpawed foe that stood 10' tall. By Mike Coppock

DEPARTMENTS

24 42

Mosaic

History in today’s headlines

12 Contributors 14 American Schemers Speed merchant Carl Fisher created a city out of sand.

16 Déjà Vu

Tech trickster Elizabeth Holmes had plenty of antecedents.

20 SCOTUS 101

How the Justices reworked the concept of what defines privacy.

22 Cameo

Mathilde Anneke brought a European angle to feminism.

66 Reviews 72 An American Place CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: SEPIA TIMES/GETTY IMAGES; THE STANLEY WESTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; FREEMAN'S AUCTIONS; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; GREAT COLLECTIONS COIN AUCTIONS, COVER: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, FREEMAN'S AUCTIONS/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN WALKER

Astoria, Oregon, started in the fur trade and then went fishing.

What might have been the debut coin in the first U.S. Mint run of American silver dollars brought $12 million at auction. —see page 6

ON THE COVER: Born in Boston and seasoned in Philadelphia, Ben Franklin wrote and published the first American chess manual, middle left, and credited the game with honing his diplomatic skills.

JUNE 2022

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American History Online

MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER

Visit Historynet.com/AmericanHistory and search our archive for great stories like these:

JUNE 2022 VOL. 57, NO. 2

MICHAEL DOLAN EDITOR SARAH RICHARDSON SENIOR EDITOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JON C. BOCK ART DIRECTOR DANA B. SHOAF MANAGING EDITOR, PRINT CLAIRE BARRETT NEWS AND SOCIAL EDITOR

Ready for That Big One to Drop

A resort was to shelter Congress in an atomic war. bit.ly/3KluPd2

TR's Deliverance

Rocked back on his heels by personal tragedy, Theodore Roosevelt took refuge way out West. bit.ly/3hIGvuh

A Thoroughly Unreasonable Man

John Brown's uncompromising hatred for slavery still stands as an example of obduracy in action. bit.ly/3hR7y6o

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4 AMERICAN HISTORY

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Salute Iwo Jima’s Heroes E X C L U S I V E 7 5 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y 9 9. 9 % S I LV E R - P L AT E D P R O O F Admiral Nimitz’s famed quote

Dates the battle was fought

Genuine black sand from Iwo Jima

Depicts a U.S. Marine heading into battle Design subject to change. This fine collectible is not legal tender and bears no monetary face value. Shown larger than actual size of 38.6mm.

Remembering Uncommon Valor

KEY DETAILS SPECIAL COMMMEORATIVE RELEASE: New Proof coin salutes the 75th Anniversary of Iwo Jima, the gruelling island battle that paved the way for the surrender of Japan.

LIMITED AVAILABILITY: Issued to honor this historic anniversary, editions are strictly limited. Due to the extremely low quantity available, only the earliest applicants will be able to successfully secure this superb tribute. EXCLUSIVE DESIGN: Intended as a collectors’ item, this exclusive commemorative is offered in coveted Proof condition. Richly plated in 99.9% silver and depicts the famed flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, plus an image of a U.S. Marine rushing into action. SPECIAL ENHANCEMENTS: Accented with genuine black volcanic sand from Iwo Jima island and era appropriate sepiatoned printing. SECURED AND PROTECTED: Your superb coin arrives sealed in a crystal-clear capsule to preserve it for years to come.

eventy-five years ago, in February and March of 1945, the tiny island of Iwo Jima became sight of some of the bloodiest warfare in the Pacific theatre. It was viewed as the gateway to an invasion of the Japanese mainland. From February 19 through March 26, 1945, U.S. forces, led largely by the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, pounded the island into submission, fighting bravely for every inch of it against entrenched Japanese forces who fought nearly to the last man. Now The Bradford Exchange Mint proudly salutes this upcoming 75th Anniversary with The 75th Anniversary of Iwo Jima Proof Coin. 75th Anniversary Tribute. This all-new commemorative tribute is richly plated in 99.9% fine silver for enduring value. On the reverse, special sepia-toned printing recreates the world-famous image of the second flag-raising by American Marines on the top of Mt. Suribachi. But better still, genuine volcanic sand from Iwo Jima itself is permanently affixed to the coin, bringing a genuine piece of the battle home. Specially prepared Proof-quality coining dies create its polished, mirror-like fields and raised, frosted images. The obverse portrays a Marine in action plus Admiral Nimitz’s famous quote about the bravery of those who served on Iwo Jima: Uncommon valor was a common virtue. It arrives secured in a crystal-clear capsule for heirloom preservation. Strictly Limited ... Order Now! Order now at the $49.99*, issue price, payable in two installments of $24.99 each. You need send no money now, and you will be billed with shipment. Your purchase is backed by our unconditional, 365-day guarantee and you may cancel at any time simply by notifying us. Strong demand is expected for this early release 75th anniversary tribute, and editions are very limited. So don’t delay, mail the coupon today. The Bradford Exchange Mint is not affiliated with the U.S. Government or U.S. Mint.

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107

Daguerreotypes belonging to passengers who lost their lives in a notorious 1857 shipwreck have been recovered surprisingly intact, Guardian.com reports. Bound out of Panama for New York City, SS Central America sank in a storm 150 miles off South Carolina. Aboard were miners and their families returning from the California gold fields laden with tons of gold coins, ingots, and nuggets. Of 400-plus passengers, perhaps 153 survived, but the loot that earned Central America the sobriquet “Ship of Gold” went to the bottom. In 1988, investors began underwriting searches for the wreck—until the lead researcher landed in jail, claiming ignorance of the gold’s whereabouts. In 2014, salvage efforts resumed and now a different treasure—glass-plate photographs depicting miners and their families—has been brought to the surface from a mile and a half down.

Mosaic

Up from the Depths When Central America sank in 1857, the “Ship of Gold” took down other treasures.

AMERICAN HISTORY

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ARK.NEYMAN-NV MEDIA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; HOAGE FAMILY; GETTY IMAGES

by Sarah Richardson

COURTESY OF PAUL MESSIER STUDIO/COURTESY OF THE CALIFORNIA GOLD MARKETING GROUP; NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, LONDON

Photo Finish

Installed in 1940 in front of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, an equestrian bronze of Theodore Roosevelt flanked by a Native American man and a Black man on foot was removed on January 20, 2022. For decades, activists complained of the work’s subservient depiction of non-Whites, asserting it represented Roosevelt’s well-known prejudices regarding race. In June 2020 city officials said the bronze would go, but controversy persisted. Artnews.com reported that activists protested a museum plan to donate the statue to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, observing that portions of the site of the new library, expected to be completed in 2026, had been taken from local tribes. Last fall the TR Library, acknowledging the controversy, said it was conferring with indigenous groups, Blacks, scholars, and historians on how to present the statue in context. The deal with the city of New York requires that the municipal Public Design Commission approve the transfer and any display plans. “Museums are supposed to do hard things,” said Edward F. O’Keefe, chief executive officer of the library foundation. “It is said that ‘those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,’ and our job is to forthrightly examine history to understand the present and make a better future.”

Taking Teddy Down

An international research team tracing two millennia of sea level rise has pinpointed 1863 as the first year that the modern era of the phenomenon emerged from existing data, which dovetails with the Industrial Revolution and its dependence on fossil fuel. Sea level rise first spiked in the American mid-Atlantic region in the mid-to-latter 19th century, with 20th century increases noted in Canada and Europe. “We can be virtually certain the global rate of sea-level rise from 1940 to 2000 was faster than all previous 60-year intervals over the last 2,000 years,” said Jennifer Walker, lead author of the study and postdoctoral associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

ARK.NEYMAN-NV MEDIA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; HOAGE FAMILY; GETTY IMAGES

COURTESY OF PAUL MESSIER STUDIO/COURTESY OF THE CALIFORNIA GOLD MARKETING GROUP; NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, LONDON

Wet Work Assateague Island, Maryland

Long Way Home On February 12, 2022, Rutherford, New Jersey, celebrated Black history and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday with a new historical marker at 127 Donaldson Avenue. The borough’s plaque honors a Black man’s Civil War-era flight to freedom and his unusual path to a life Harriett and Lafayette Hoage in Rutherford. Lafayette Hoage escaped enslavement in Virginia, wound up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in a military hospital met Captain Alonzo Lorenzo Mabbett of Company 1, 24th Connecticut Infantry. Mabbett, badly wounded, was recovering after an 1863 battle at Port Hudson, Louisiana, in which the Union Army strove to break Confederate control of the mouth of the Mississippi River. Mabbett lost his right arm but survived. Hoage, 26, cared for him. When Mabbett, son of Quakers who aided slaves fleeing the South, returned to Rochester, New York, Hoage went with him. In 1867, Hoage married Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, seamstress Harriett Henon. In 1868, the couple settled in Rutherford, building a substantial home and barn at 127 Donaldson Avenue. Records suggest they were the first Blacks to own land in the borough. Lafayette worked as a coachman for prominent publisher David Brinkerhoff Ivison. The couple had seven children. Son David Brinkerhoff Ivison Hoage attended Long Island Hospital medical school, practiced medicine in Harlem, and cofounded the New York Negro Tennis Association, becoming vice president of the American Tennis Association in 1927. Youngest son George Lafayette Hoage worked closely with eight governors in Minnesota. Rutherford Borough historian Rod Leith helped assemble the story, passed down in the Hoage and Mabbett families, as well as to owners of the former Hoage residence. JUNE 2022

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Tribal Status Rethought

Morris Sheppard, a Freedman, with his family.

The Cherokees had their own experience of being enslaved and enslaving others, which with the arrival of European colonizers expanded to include enslavement of Blacks. Descendants of those enslaved, right, known as Cherokee Freedmen, were long excluded from full tribal membership. In 2021, a tribal Supreme Court decision removed the phrase “by blood” in official references to Cherokee citizenship, affirming that Cherokee Freedmen are fully Cherokee. Details of that status are memorialized in the United States 1866 Treaty with the Cherokee, the last agreement between the tribe and the U.S. government. The tribal court decision followed a similar 2017 U.S. district court ruling. Results of recognition include a push to record oral histories of Cherokee Freedmen and flesh out knowledge of the lives of the enslaved and their descendants.

The Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia acquired from a private collection some 200 documents related to service by men of color in the Continental Army. While the British Army incited enslaved Blacks to escape to the British side, offering liberty in exchange for fighting on behalf of the Crown, the Continental Army also had men of color in uniform. Acquisitions, above, include muster lists, pay vouchers, and discharge forms rich in names and signatures of men otherwise unknown to history. One item is the 1779 pay list of the First Rhode Island Regiment, comprised of Black and Native American men and the only unit mustered on the explicit promise of freedom “to every able bodied negro, mulatto, or Indian man slave” enlisting. Portions of the collection will be in rotation at the museum, and others will be featured in a February 2023 exhibition on the Fortens, a Black family prominent in Philadelphia.

Brutal Beauty

18532, WPA SLAVE NARRATIVES, OHS; THE MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION; WONDER COFFEEHOUSE

Preserved Paperwork

The construction in 1897 of a huge Buffalo, New York, grain elevator marked that city’s apogee as a hub for grain distribution throughout the Great Lakes region. Archer Daniel Midlands, owner of the Great Northern elevator, wants the elevator, at rear below, demolished. Preservationists, likening the immense structure to a cathedral, want to preserve the 187-foot elevator as an epic artifact of the lakeside city’s economic history. A local preservation organization notes that grain elevators were invented in Buffalo in the 1840s. Driven by electricity generated at Niagara Falls, the Great Northern elevator was one of the first electrical versions of the familiar device. Inspired by grain elevators’ immensity and hulking profiles, European architects drew on that monumental, unadorned, industrial scale to create the Brutalist school of design. One example of Brutalist architecture stands in Buffalo itself: the City Court Building, constructed in 1974. A court in December 2021 approved an emergency petition to demolish the Great Northern elevator, but the Campaign for Greater Buffalo History in February 2022 won a preliminary injunction to preserve the structure. The issue is headed for appeal in the New York Supreme Court.

AMERICAN HISTORY

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he very best hunting knives possess a perfect balance of form and function. They’re carefully constructed from fine materials, but also have that little something extra to connect the owner with nature. If you’re on the hunt for a knife that combines impeccable craftsmanship with a sense of wonder, the $79 Huntsman Blade is the trophy you’re looking for. The blade is full tang, meaning it doesn’t stop at the handle but extends to the length of the grip for the ultimate in strength. The blade is made from 420 surgical steel, famed for its sharpness and its resistance to corrosion. The handle is made from genuine natural bone, and features decorative wood spacers and a hand-carved motif of two overlapping feathers— a reminder for you to respect and connect with the natural world. This fusion of substance and style can garner a high price tag out in the marketplace. In fact, we found full tang, stainless steel blades with bone handles in excess of $2,000. Well, that won’t cut it around here. We have mastered the hunt for the best deal, and in turn pass the spoils on to our customers. But we don’t stop there. While supplies last, we’ll include a pair of $99 8x21 power compact binoculars and a genuine leather sheath FREE when you purchase the Huntsman Blade. Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. Feel the knife in your hands, wear it on your hip, inspect the impeccable craftsmanship. If you don’t feel like we cut you a fair deal, send it back within 30 days for a complete refund of the item price. Limited Reserves. A deal like this won’t last long. We have only 1120 Huntsman Blades for this ad only. Don’t let this BONUS! Call today and beauty slip through your fingers. Call today! you’ll also receive this

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Celebrating Blackness The U.S. government recently honored two Black women: a new postage stamp features 19th-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and a new 25-cent piece features 20th century poet/ author/activist Maya Angelou. Born to a Black father and a Chippewa mother in upstate New York, Lewis was reared by her mother’s tribe and attended Oberlin College. She established herself as a sculptor in Rome. Unlike colleagues, she herself did the stone carving to ensure that her work was seen as her own. Her stamp, 45th in the Postal Service Black Heritage series, debuted in January 2022. Angelou, best known for her 1969 memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” is on the first coin in the American Women Quarters series, introduced on February 7, 2022.

TOP BID

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Sun Globe In 1875 Ellen Eliza Fitz, 44, of St. John’s, New Brunswick, Canada, received a U.S. patent for a mount to hold a globe in a fixed position that illustrates solar exposure on Earth. Globes were common educational devices, and Fitz’s invention allowed teachers and students to grasp the relationship of solar exposure to seasonal differences in light. Fitz, an experienced educator, was born in 1835 in Kingston, New Hampshire. She moved with her family to Massachusetts, where she received the education that enabled her to become a governess and teacher in Canada, where she spent most of her career.

A silver coin, possibly the first silver dollar produced at the U.S. Mint, sold for $12 million at Great Collections Coin Auctions of Irvine, California. The coin’s pristine condition suggests it was a first specimen of a run of 1,758 silver dollars produced in 1794 in Philadelphia for circulation alongside European coins then in use. The dollar coin ranked as the world’s rarest and most valuable coin until last year when the 1933 SaintGaudens Double Eagle gold $20 coin sold for $18.9 million.

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AMERICAN HISTORY

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The U.S. Mint Just Struck Morgan Silver Dollars for the First Time in 100 Years!

D E T I M I L Y R VE Out at the Mint! Sold

Actual size is 38.1 mm

t’s been more than 100 years since the last Morgan Silver Dollar was struck for circulation. With a well-earned reputation as the coin that helped build the Wild West, preferred by cowboys, ranchers, outlaws as the “hard currency” they wanted in their saddle bags, the Morgan is one of the most revered, most-collected vintage U.S. Silver Dollars ever. Struck in 90% silver from 1878 to 1904, then again in 1921, these silver dollars came to be known by the name of their designer, George T. Morgan. They were also nicknamed “cartwheels” because of their large weight and size.

Celebrating the 100th Anniversary With Legal Tender Morgans

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the last year the Morgan Silver Dollar was minted, the U.S. Mint struck five different versions in 2021, paying tribute to each of the mints that struck the coin. The coins here honor the historic New Orleans Mint, a U.S. Mint branch from 1838–1861 and again from 1879–1909. These coins, featuring an “O” privy mark, a small differentiating mark, were struck in Philadelphia since the New Orleans Mint no longer exists. These beautiful coins are differO PRIVY MARK ent than the originals for two reasons. First,

they’re struck in 99.9% fine silver instead of the 90% silver/10% copper of the originals. And second, these Morgans were struck using modern technology, serving to highlight the details of the iconic design even more than the originals.

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A+

3/17/22 1:30 PM

Read On! My compliments on the audio version of the December 2021 issue from the National Library Service. Reader Mary March displayed a high level of refreshing and enjoyable talent in her rendering. As a semi-retired radio producer and user of the NLS program for over 10 years—an allergy to paper keeps me from reading in the traditional way—I often cringe at recorded readings, especially efforts involving volunteers who, bless their generosity, can fall short on style and pronunciation. Please invite Ms. March back to read American History. Jim Kent Hot Springs, South Dakota

Letters

Abel

Whitehair

Coppock

Smith

Schmidt

Allen Abel (“Mascot Memories,” p. 50) has reported from 100-plus countries, including stints as a White House and China correspondent, TV reporter, and documentary scriptwriter. His latest nonfiction book is The Short Life of Hughie McLoon—A True Story of Baseball, Magic, and Murder. Frequent contributor Mike Coppock often spends summers working in the Alaskan backcountry, where he encountered the threads of narrative he wove into “Bear Wars” (p. 58).

Contributors

During his six months as a resident scholar in the Soviet Union in 1962, Albert Schmidt kept a journal and wrote many letters home. These sources were the basis for “Cold War Chronicle” (p. 32), his first article for the magazine. He and his wife live in Washington, DC. Matthew Smith (“Franklin’s Gambit,” p. 24) teaches American History at Miami University’s Hamilton, Ohio, campus, and is Director of Public Programming at Miami’s Hamilton and Middletown campuses. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he lives in greater Cincinnati. His hobbies include bluegrass music appreciation, chess, and word puzzles. This is his first appearance here. Karen Whitehair (“Rehearsal for Rebellion,” p. 42) is a freelance writer, copy editor, and researcher specializing history, natural history, and museum practice. She last wrote about Founding Father John Jay and his conversion to the abolitionist cause.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The National Library Service (loc.gov/nls/), part of the Library of Congress, offers American History and other content on audio at no charge to those with temporary or permanent low vision, blindness, or a physical, perceptual, or reading disability keeping them from using regular print materials. Through cooperating libraries, NLS circulates books and magazines in braille or audio formats instantly downloadable to a personal device or delivered by mail for free. CORRECTIONS: The 13th Amendment to the Constitution (“Hunting Antelope,” April 2022) was ratified on December 6, 1865…The name of Virginia’s governor in 1966 (Poison Pill,” April 2022) was Mills Godwin not “Goodwin.” The editor regrets his errors. American History readers wanting to pillory, praise, or query the publication: write to mdolan@historynet.com.

AMERICAN HISTORY

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AMERICANA & POLITICAL Signature® Auction | May 7 Property of a Distinguished Collector

The Atlantic Charter. Signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The only “Enigma” Encrypting Machine Used by known signed copy. the German Military in WWII, 1944.

Dwight D. Eisenhower. Personal 2-Star signature “Eisenhower jacket” and Overseas Cap, 1942.

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Fisher, Fun, and Fortune

American Schemers

business affairs and worries while they stood gaping in open-eyed astonishment,” the Indianapolis News reported, “as the giant balloon and its unusual load drifted lazily across the city.” With a partner, Fisher bought the patent for a headlight and began making vehicle lamps. The business succeeded and in 1909 Fisher used his profits to build an enormous auto-racing track in Indianapolis. During the debut race, the pavement disintegrated, causing two fatal crashes. Fisher spent $150,000 to repave the track with three million oversize bricks. The speedway reopened, attracting 60,000 spectators to the first annual 500-mile race on the track still known as “The Brickyard.” In 1913, he sold his headlight company and pocketed $5.6 million—today, nearly $150 million. With that boodle, Fisher, 39, could have retired into opulent ease. Instead, he went searching for more excitement. He found it in Florida. Fisher and wife Jane bought a vacation house in Miami. He saw an unfinished wooden bridge

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CARL FISHER CRAVED EXCITEMENT. He raced on bicycles and on ice skates, in cars and in speedboats. He played high-stakes poker, flew hot-air balloons, and once pedaled a bike across a tightrope strung high above a street in the city of Indianapolis. He drank oceans of Scotch and chain-smoked cigars, sometimes as he was chewing tobacco. A compulsive womanizer, he patronized a New Orleans whorehouse—while on his honeymoon. During Prohibition, he smuggled Scotch from the Bahamas to Florida on his speedboat—not for profit, just for fun. And after making millions of dollars in the automobile parts business he blew it all on his crazy idea of creating an American Riviera on a swampy sandbar off the Florida coast. Born in 1874 in Indiana, Fisher quit school at 12 to hawk newspapers and snacks on trains. To attract male passengers’ gaze, he pinned a picture of a naked woman under his apron and flashed it at them. That boosted sales—and foretold his future as a genius of hoopla. In his teens, Fisher won bicycle races, then opened a bicycle shop. He took up auto racing, and in 1904 set a world speed record—two miles in 2.02 minutes. He opened one of the country’s first automobile dealerships, promoting the operation in 1908 with an audacious stunt: He perched in the driver’s seat of a Stoddard-Dayton roadster floating over Indianapolis under a huge red hot-air balloon. “People forgot their

COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY

Entrepreneur Carl Fisher never met a dare he wouldn’t take, a bet he couldn’t make, or a real estate deal he was unable to forsake. by Peter Carlson

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

COURTESY OF THE INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY

Hitting the Bricks The field for the 1909 Wheeler-Schebler 300-mile marathon peels away from the line at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

leading from Miami to a barrier island across Biscayne Bay. Curious, he looked up John Collins, who owned the island and had begun work on the bridge but had run out of money. Fisher agreed to loan Collins $50,000 in return for a deed to 200 acres of the island. When Jane visited her husband’s new property, all she saw was a steamy, stinking swamp. “Mosquitos blackened our clothing,” she recalled. “Creatures that made me shudder were lying in wait in the slimy paths or on the branches of overhanging trees.” Her husband used a stick to sketch in the sand what he planned to build there—a city with houses, hotels, parks. “I know now that he was seeing Miami Beach, in its entirety, rising from that swamp,” she said. Jane was skeptical. Carl was determined. He bought more of the island and hired laborers, arming crews with machetes to clear mangrove swamps and kill alligators and rattlesnakes. He brought in dredges to suck sand out of the bay bottom—three million cubic feet of it—that they piled onto the island, raising it five feet. Atop the beefed-up land mass, workers spread tons of topsoil planted with lush lawns and flowering trees. “Transformed from a wilderness into a park,” the Miami Metropolis reported in 1913, “Miami Beach today seems a fairy land.” But Fisher wasn’t finished. He hired contractors to install streets, sidewalks, houses, hotels, golf courses. Jane suggested he construct a place of worship. “I’ll build you the best goddam church there is,” he told her. By 1917, he’d spent millions and was ready to sell houses. He planned to peddle his development to the old-money elite who wintered 75 miles north in Palm Beach. But the coupon-clippers turned up their noses at this nouveau riche upstart’s vulgarity, never mind his rehabbed swamp. “I’d been trying to reach the wrong crowd,” Fisher said. “I needed to go after the live wires.” He meant fellows like him—newly affluent and eager to

enjoy their lucre. He lured prospects the way he’d sold snacks on trains—with cheesecake. Over the winter he sent northern newspapers photos of pretty girls in bathing suits. Sometimes he posed the beauties atop Rosie, his pet pachyderm. In January he splashed an image of a leggy, curvaceous babe across a billboard in Times Square with the message, “It’s June in Miami Beach.” In December 1920, President-elect Warren Harding visited Miami. Somehow Fisher lured Harding onto his speedboat, whisked him to Miami Beach, set him up in the penthouse of his Flamingo Hotel, and started a poker game. Harding stayed several days, went deep-sea fishing, and played golf—with Rosie the elephant serving as his caddy while photographers snapped pictures. The goofy stunts worked. Miami Beach boomed and Fisher had no problem selling houses and filling his hotels with tourists. By 1925, he was worth $76 million. “The dream city was at last complete,” Jane Fisher recalled. Her husband was 51 and she urged him to slow down. He refused. “Miami Beach is finished,” he told a friend. “There’s nothing left for me to do there but sit around in white pants looking pretty like the rest of you goddam winter loafers.” He needed excitement, so he decided to create another dream city, this one at Montauk, on Long Island’s eastern tip. He spent $2.5 million to buy land there and began building his second city when on September 17, 1926, a massive hurricane nearly washed Miami Beach away. Fisher spent millions rebuilding and lost more when that winter’s Carl tourist season fizzled. Fisher Three years later, the stock market crashed, costing Fisher multiple more millions and destroying his dreams for Montauk. With creditors foreclosing on his properties, he sold his mansion and his yachts. But that wasn’t enough to save him. He declared personal bankruptcy in 1935. By then Jane, sick of his drinking and philandering, had divorced Carl. He remarried but wife two left him, too. He began his days breakfasting on Scotch. “I’m a beggar—dead broke, no family to fall back on,” Fisher told a friend. “You know, I promoted Miami Beach here. The grateful people got up a purse—$500 a month for me. That’s what I live on. I used to make dreams come true. Can’t do it anymore. I’m only a beggar now.” After he died in 1939, Miami Beach erected a bronze monument to him. The inscription reads, “Carl Graham Fisher: He carved a great city from a jungle.” H JUNE 2022

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Playing With Fire A satirical engraving mocks Duer, left, and Macomb for betting on a bail-out.

Overreachers AT THE DAWN OF THE MILLENNIUM Elizabeth Holmes was a poster child for the American dream generally and Silicon Valley exuberance in particular. In 2003 Holmes, a 19-year-old Stanford sophomore, founded a company to develop and produce cheap, easy blood tests. The enterprise’s eventual name, Theranos, combined therapy and diagnosis—and had about it a whiff of ancient wisdom. Holmes was hard-working, energetic, and über-presentable. She wore black turtlenecks a la Steve Jobs, and it did not hurt that she looked good in them. George Schulz, Henry Kissinger, and Rupert Murdoch decorated her board. She raised multi-millions from venture capitalists and made deals to use her blood test with Safeway, Walgreens, and the Cleveland Clinic. Then in 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that Theranos’s testing relied on existing gear from other firms, not its own super-duper tech. The implication: Holmes was a hype artist. She defended herself: “This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world.” But the story drew blood. The feds circled. Investors fled. In 2018 Theranos announced it was going out of business. Holmes was indicted on 11 counts of wire fraud or conspiracy to commit it. Holmes is hardly unique. The history of American business, and of American investment, is rife with bubbles, frauds, and dodgy schemes.

Déjà Vu

Holmes at least claimed to offer a new product. William Duer, her earliest predecessor, rose on confidence in his well-positioned mentor Alexander Hamilton—and went to jail when that mentor left him twisting in the wind. Duer and Hamilton had superficially similar resumes. Hamilton, of course, was the West Indian immigrant, founding patriot, and financial whiz. Duer, born in England, had lived on Antigua and Dominica as a young man. Moving to New York in the early 1770s, he served during the Revolutionary War in New York’s legislature and the Continental Congress. Under the Articles of Confederation, he was secretary of the Board of the Treasury, the Treasury Department’s antecedent. Yet in all these roles Duer gave off an air of flash and insubstantiality. He was an Eton-educated planter’s son, not a self-made man. He offered to write pro-Constitution essays for Hamilton’s newspaper series, later known as the Federalist Papers, but Duer’s work wasn’t good enough to be included in the published set. He left the Board of

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the “animal spirits” that move markets. Duer’s animal spirits were rabid. The best read on him came from Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup: the “poor man is in a state of almost complete insanity.” Duer’s play was too bold; for all their efforts, he and his friends lacked the wherewithal to pull off their imagined coup. The crash came a few months later, in March 1792, when the Treasury Department required Duer to settle his accounts from his 1780s job at the old Board of the Treasury. Duer wrote Hamilton begging him to keep the duns at bay: “For heaven’s sake, use for once your influence to defer this….If a suit should be brought…my ruin is complete.” Hamilton answered empathetically but sternly: “Have the courage to make a full stop.” Full stop for Duer was a New York City debtor’s prison, where he landed within days. There at least he was safe from crowds of lenders who raged in the street, demanding their money or, failing that, Duer’s hide. Other speculators, including Macomb, joined Duer in stir. Founding fathers distrustful of modern financial markets—e.g., Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson— found in the debacle proof for their prejuAlexander dices. Hamilton limited the bust’s effects by Hamilton using Treasury funds to stabilize the market. A group of New York brokers formed an agreement, named for a Wall Street buttonwood tree under which they met, to limit their own numbers—the prototype of the New York Stock Exchange. The American economy shuddered and moved on. William Duer gambled in stocks; Elizabeth Holmes sought to revolutionize medical testing. They resembled each other in their confidence— and their ability to inspire fealty in others. Many infamous financial flameouts have been outright crooks—Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff, for instance. But others have honestly believed in their ability to make good on the grand bet or the great invention. If they cross the line into illegality, they expect to emerge all right in the end. They are at once outliers and parodists of the free market. After delays caused by Covid and by pregnancy—Elizabeth Holmes got engaged in 2019— jurors found her guilty this January on four of the charges against her. Sentencing is due to take place in September. Whatever the judge may hand down as punishment is unlikely to be as harsh as the fate of William Duer, who spent the rest of his days behind bars, dying in his cell in 1799. H

Duer and cohort did not have the funds to pull off their would-be coup and soon after Treasury accounts of his came due, landing him in debtor’s prison.

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the Treasury with his accounts $239,000 in arrears. Yet Hamilton liked him, and in 1789, upon getting the nod to be the first Treasury Secretary, he tapped Duer to be his assistant. Duer departed his Treasury job after a year, heart set not on public service but on speculating in land and securities. Hamilton eyed these proclivities with concern. “You are sanguine, my friend,” he William warned. “You ought to be aware of it Duer yourself, and to be on your guard against the propensity…it might carry you further than was consistent either with your own safety or the public good.” Further indeed. At the end of 1791 Duer partnered with Alexander Macomb, a wealthy fur trader and land speculator based in New York City. Duer, Macomb, and friends began amassing bank stock, angling to corner the market. There were at the time only five banks in the country—one each in Baltimore, Boston, and New York and two in Philadelphia, including Hamilton’s brainchild, the Bank of the United States, repository of the federal government’s funds. The Duer group bought stock in the Bank of New York, simultaneously seeking a charter for a new institution, known as the Million Bank after its self-proclaimed worth. (By way of comparison, the capital stock of the Bank of the United States was limited to $10 million.) The Million Bank’s charter allowed that institution to merge with the Bank of New York, and rumor held that the resulting financial behemoth would then merge with the Bank of the United States. Duer’s past government jobs, and his known friendship with Hamilton, lent this construct credence. The rush to buy shares in the new venture was dubbed “bancomania.” One offer of 4,000 shares found buyers willing to acquire over five times as many. Hamilton, who dreamed of midwifing a flourishing market economy, not a gamblers’ den, called the frenzy “a dangerous tumor…. The superstructure of credit is now too vast for the foundation. It must be brought within more reasonable dimensions or it will tumble.” Unbeknownst to Macomb, Duer was selling his own shares in the Bank of New York. Some economic historians believe he was hedging his bets, aiming to profit from either a bull or a bear market. If so, he did not hedge nearly enough. Investors threw money at him, and he borrowed wherever he could, from “merchants, tradesmen, draymen, widows, orphans, oysterman, market-women, churches,” plus “a noted bawd, Mrs. McCarty.” John Maynard Keynes would write of AMERICAN HISTORY

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TODAY IN HISTORY JANUARY 16, 2001 THEODORE ROOSEVELT BECAME THE ONLY U.S. PRESIDENT EVER TO RECEIVE THE MEDAL OF HONOR. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON AWARDED THE MEDAL TO ROOSEVELT POSTHUMOUSLY FOR HIS SAN JUAN HILL BATTLE HEROICS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT JR. ALSO RECEIVED THE MEDAL OF HONOR AS THE OLDEST MAN AND ONLY GENERAL TO BE AMONG THE FIRST WAVE OF TROOPS THAT STORMED NORMANDY’S UTAH BEACH. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

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Olmstead Overturned Seattle bootlegger Roy Olmstead, center, lent his name to a ruling on privacy that reigned until Katz and his challenge came calling.

Pondering Privacy

Seattle bootlegger, also a city policeman, was convicted on the basis of details federal investigators amassed in months spent monitoring Olmstead’s phone conversations using a wiretapping system, even though Washington State had outlawed wire taps. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Chief Justice William Howard Taft noted that the surveillance had involved no physical intrusion on private property, and likened wiretapping to overhearing a conversation in a public place. Although police had access to ever more intrusive spying devices, Olmstead remained the law of the land for 39 years. In deciding whether a warrantless electronic probe was constitutional, the emphasis was on the physical structure in which the surveillance occurred. Thus in 1942 the court

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A RECURRING PROBLEM for the Supreme Court Justices is applying the demands and prohibitions of the Constitution to technology developed many years Katz v. United after the Constitution was written—technology ever States, 389 farther beyond the most fertile imaginings of the U.S. 347 (1967) founding fathers. One of the most vexing such knots is What constitutes delineating the limits of electronic surveillance. The “search” and Fourth Amendment guarantees “the right of the peo“seizure” under ple to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and the Fourth Amendment? effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” This ban clearly means that government agents can’t, without a court warrant, break into a house or office and search for suspicious documents or other incriminating evidence. But to what extent does the Fourth Amendment limit spying techniques capable of gathering information without ever breaching a physical barrier? The high court first wrestled with modern information-gathering techniques in 1928. During Prohibition, Roy Olmstead, a big-time

Scotus 101

MOHAI

By Daniel B. Moskowitz

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MOHAI

threw out a conviction based on conversations heard on a “spike mic,” because the surveillance involved literally ramming a microphone into a wall. But as late as 1960 the Justices were suggesting there would be nothing wrong with electronic surveillance in “an open field.” As such devices grew more sophisticated—and more intrusive—permissiveness about spy tools came into question. In June 1967, by a 6-3 vote, the Justices held unconstitutional a New York law allowing wiretapping without a warrant; the court said even though the word does not appear in the text, the Fourth Amendment does protect “conversation” and using electronic devices to capture a conversation constituted a search. Six months later the Justices officially overturned Olmstead and tightened strictures on electronic surveillance; there was only one vote to preserve the Olmstead precedent. As Justice Samuel Alito was later to note, “the Supreme Court said this isn’t a sensible way to apply the Fourth Amendment principle under the conditions of the modern world.” The ruling that undid Olmstead came in the case of Charles Katz, an analyst of college sports so acute that his lawyer, Harvey A. Schneider, dubbed Katz “probably the preeminent college basketball handicapper in America.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation considered Katz’s activities unlawful, so FBI agents listened in on calls in which he gave his odds to bookies in Miami and Boston. The eavesdropping was done by affixing a microphone atop the bank of three public phone booths nearest Katz’s apartment in the 8200 block of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. An agent watching Katz’s apartment alerted a colleague when Katz left the building. The second agent would run to the phones and activate the mic, which transmitted to a tape recorder in a vehicle parked in a nearby alley. The listening device covered two booths. To steer Katz to either of them, the FBI, which did not have a warrant for the operation, had gotten the phone company to disable the third booth. Recordings of his conversations over six days led the feds to charge Katz with the crime of interstate transmission of wagering information over phone lines. He was convicted three months later and fined a modest $300. Both the trial court and the appellate court concluded that under the Olmstead precedent the tapped conversations could be used to prosecute the hoops handicapper. But the High Court found not only that the eavesdropping was unconstitutional, but that the whole Olmstead approach of deciding whether a physical structure had been penetrated had it backwards. “The Fourth Amendment protects

people, not places,” Justice Potter Stewart wrote in the Court’s opinion. “What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” The Justices now needed a legal yardstick to give lower courts to replace the clear rule that to violate the Fourth Amendment a police probe Potter had to intrude physically. Going into oral arguStewart ments in Katz, the absence of such a standard was tilting Stewart toward finding for the FBI. At oral arguments defense attorney Schneider provided the solution, but only by breaking the rules for Supreme Court arguments—an infraction none of the Justices flagged. Those rules say that in making oral arguments lawyers must stick to the legal rationales they made in written briefs already filed with the Court. In his written arguments, Schneider had insisted that penetration of walls wasn’t necessary, but he still stressed physical structure, arguing that a phone booth was a space in which a user expected privacy—a subjective test that would be difficult for trial courts to apply. Prepping for oral arguments, Schneider had what he called an “epiphany.” Only three years out of law school, he was working for one of LA’s best known criminal defense lawyers. He says that because those law school lessons were still so fresh, he happened to think about the law of torts, which says that a plaintiff can collect damages from a defendant who has done what an average reasonable person would not do or has not done what an average reasonable person would do. Assessing actions by that hypothetical reasonable person was so much a norm in court that it was considered an objective test. In a major departure from his written brief, Schneider offered it as a standard for privacy cases. The Justices bought it. The Katz standard became the basis for all future assessments of whether electronic spying required a warrant. But while Stewart made clear that, in deciding if spying constituted a search, courts should focus on the person and not the place, he didn’t spell out a rubric judges could easily apply. Courts now most often quote not the Stewart opinion, but Justice John M. Harlan Jr.’s concurrence, which closely tracks Schneider’s oral argument. “The Harlan opinion is the one that matters,” says law professor Jamil Jaffer of James Mason University. “It is a clear two-part test. Did the subject act in a way that showed he or she expected privacy (closing the door of a phone booth, say). And was that expectation “one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable’”? If both answers are yes, investigators need a warrant before using any device to gather data. Legal scholars—and some Justices—worry that the Katz standard may no longer be the best approach, given electronic data-gathering’s ever more pervasive presence. If the standard is the average person’s expectation of privacy, is that standard eroded as more people become comfortable with widespread storing and sharing of information about individual use of electronic devices? Nonetheless, Katz remains the rule: in June 2018, the High Court cited Katz in finding it unconstitutional for the government to collect cell phone location data without a warrant. Since then, well over 1,000 other court rulings have cited that decision. H

Justice Potter Stewart said publicly accessible information can be private if the subject has tried to keep it private.

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Revolutionaries Mathilde and Fritz Anneke with soldiers of the Pfalz Palatinate in 1849.

Wisconsin Warrior

Cameo

States, where Madame Anneke, as she was called, inspired Susan B. Anthony, who became a friend, on the cause of women’s rights. The story of this “Amazonian orator,” as the New York Herald described her, threads a narrative of immigrant self-discovery into the fabric of 19th century social turbulence and political change in Europe as well as the United States. In 1842, shed of Tabouillot, Mathilde moved to Münster in Rhine-Westphalia, where she wrote prayerbooks, women’s almanacs, and newspaper articles. Through a debating society, she met Anneke, a fellow Prussian and former artillery officer, whose political circle included Karl Marx. The couple wed in 1847, relocated to Cologne,

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WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

IN 1848, MATHILDE GEISLER ANNEKE, 31, stepped out of ordinary women’s roles and into a literal combat zone. A skilled equestrienne, she acted as orderly and cavalry courier for her second husband, Fritz Anneke, in the fight to unify Germany. Her quasi-military service was only the most striking in a string of Anneke’s boundary-breaking activities in her homeland and the United States. Born in 1817, eldest of 12 children in a bourgeois Catholic family in Prussia, Mathilde Geisler was 19 when she married wealthy wine merchant Alfred von Tabouillot. She wed less for love than to gain her father access to money to pay debts. Within a year, she had left the abusive wine seller, in time fighting for custody of their daughter and winning a divorce in 1843. Exposing the mistreatment visited on women, her self-published pamphlet Women in Conflict with Social Conditions brought her renown and prompted a change in the law regarding marriage and divorce. In 1849, she and Fritz Anneke emigrated to the United

GENERAL STATE ARCHIVE

by Sarah Richardson

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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and founded a newspaper covering labor issues. When the authorities jailed Fritz for organizing workers, Mathilde published the paper herself until the government shut it down. In September 1848 she founded the first feminist newspaper, Die Deutsche Frauen-Zeitung. When that year’s tumultuous rebellion failed, the couple, part of a wave of some 6,000 well-educated German-speaking revolutionaries known as 1848ers, sailed to America. The Annekes joined relatives in Milwaukee, a town of 20,000, about a third of whom were German immigrants. Mathilde resumed her political activities, touring to lecture on German literature and politics and contributing to German-language newspapers. In 1853, she spoke at a convention in New York City for women’s rights held at the Broadway Tabernacle, where mobs inside and outside the hall shouted insults at her and other orators. Speaking in German and helped by a translator, Mathilde bridged the divide between American activists, who focused on temperance and tradi- Soulmates tional gender roles, and European immigrants in Mathilde, standing, her mold who regarded men and women as equal and companion of six agents. “Before I came here, I knew the tyranny years Mary Booth, and oppression of kings,” she said. “Here at least, with whom Mathilde shared adversities we ought to be able to express our opinions on all while they lived in subjects; and yet it would appear there is no free- Zürich, Switzerland. dom even here to claim human rights, although the only hope in (Germany)…for freedom of speech and action is directed to this country for illustration and example, that freedom I claim…” Building on her experience in Cologne, Mathilde started a newspaper focused on politics and women, employing female typesetters and regarded as having been as the first feminist newspaper in the United States. Male printers boycotted her operation, shutting it down. The family spent several difficult years in Newark, New Jersey, losing four children before returning to Milwaukee in 1858 with youngsters Percy Shelley Anneke and Hertha Anneke. In 1859, with civil war looming, the family headed to Zürich, Switzerland, accompanied by Mary Booth, a writer/activist 14 years Mathilde’s junior, and Booth’s young daughter. Booth was fleeing notoriety brought on by the prosecution of her husband, the abolitionist editor Sherman Booth, for raping a teenaged babysitter. Fritz shortly returned to the United States to join the Union Army. He was one of several 1848ers, including Carl Schurz and Franz Sigel, to defend the Union cause in uniform. In Zürich, Mathilde and Mary grew close, depending on each other emotionally, financially, and physically. They bonded in grief over the deaths of children—Mathilde had lost four, Mary one—along with the commonalities of penury and frail health. Mary had heart disease; Mathilde, gout and jaundice. Neither husband managed to support his family, and Mathilde and Mary eked out a living selling articles and short stories. Both wrote novels. Mathilde’s focused on enslaved characters acting to free themselves, weaving into a single narrative the plights of women and the enslaved. The relationship linking Mathilde, Fritz, and Mary during the Civil War is the theme of Radical Relationships (University of Georgia Press, 2022). Letters between Mathilde and Fritz indicate mutual respect; Mathilde’s often include a teasing line or two added by Mary. Letters between Mathilde and Mary convey a passionate tenderness. As the war was ending, Mary returned to New York to see her eldest

When she found herself hobbled at writing by language barriers, Mathilde turned her talents to education, eventually co-founding a school. daughter and died within a year. Heartbroken but resilient, Mathilde never resumed her marital relationship with Fritz. “In me you still have the old faithful heart that knows you, loves you, and highly regards your character traits, the good ones,: she wrote in 1864. “But this heart after a long time of probation has finally regained its independence and I will from now on seek to keep it for the sake of your freedom and mine…” Her efforts to write hobbled by language barriers, Mathilde turned her talents to teaching. She forged a close relationship with fellow educator Cecilie Kapp, who, while adoring of Mathilde, proved a stronger willed partner than Mary Booth. Mathilde and Cecilie eventually founded an academy for women in Milwaukee, headed by Kapp until Vassar College hired her. Anneke ran the school on her own, maintaining a long-distance intimate relationship with Kapp. Never at ease speaking English, Mathilde continued to advocate for women’s rights. She was a speaker at the 1869 convention where the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, headed by Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, launched a campaign to win the right to vote by constitutional amendment—after having opposed the 15th amendment that granted suffrage only to Black men in 1869. Mathilde invoked as her guide “Reason, which we recognize as our highest and only law-giver, which commands us to be free.” Mathilde Anneke served as honorary vice president for Wisconsin in the National American Women’s Suffrage Association. She died in 1884, at 67. Her beloved son Percy, who looked strikingly like his mother, moved to Duluth, Minnesota, and went to work for the Fitger brewing company, founded in 1881 and still at it in 2022. H JUNE 2022

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By Matthew Smith

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As a diplomat, the Sage of Philadelphia was a player in more ways than one

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Hiding in Plain Sight As cover for secret talks with Lord Richard Howe, Franklin arranged chess matches with Lady Caroline Howe.

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Franklin, Frankly When he posed for her, French painter AnneRosalie Bocquet-FIlleul clearly perceived in Franklin a touch of the libertine.

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ne evening in the fall of 1777, Benjamin Franklin was sitting at the chess table, deep in a game with close friend and neighbor Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard. Le Veillard was the mayor of Passy, the elegant Parisian suburb where Franklin resided. The Sage of Philadelphia had arrived the year before, commissioned by Congress to negotiate an alliance with France, but seemed to spend more time absorbed in pastimes like the one before him than engaged in diplomacy. The players had an audience of one. As was her habit, Franklin’s mistress, Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy, was watching the game from her enclosed bathtub, whose wooden cover preserved her modesty. The play lasted into the small hours. Immersed so long, Brillon’s skin turned prunish, later prompting her lover to apologize by post. “I’m afraid that we may have made you very uncomfortable by keeping you so long in the bath,” Franklin wrote. “Never again will I consent to start a chess game with the neighbor in your bathing room. Can you forgive me this indiscretion?” “No, my good papa, you did not do me any ill yesterday,” Madame Brillon replied. “I get so much pleasure from seeing you that it made up for the little fatigue of having come out of the bath a little too late.”

origins and evolution, likening its influence to that of civilization itself. The game’s origins, he wrote, lay “beyond the memory of history,” having formed “the amusement of all the civilized nations of Asia, the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese. Europe has had it above 1000 years; the Spaniards have spread it over their part of America, and it begins lately to make its appearance in these northern states.” While acknowledging the antiquity of chess, he insisted, “[t]hose…who have leisure for such diversions, cannot find one that is more innocent; and the following piece, written with a view to correct (among a few young friends) some little improprieties in the practice of it, shows at the same time that it may, in its effects on the mind, be not merely innocent, but advantageous, to the vanquished as well as to the victor.” FRANKLIN IS RIGHTLY CONSIDERED American chess literature’s founding father, but his willingness, even eagerness, to avail himself of the board amid often tense treaty negotiations at Versailles tells its own story. When Franklin described the game as “the image of human life, and particularly of war,” he was commenting in deadly earnest. And though he loved chess and played it constantly, for him the game was never “merely an idle amusement.” Chess, he insisted, inculcated in enthusiasts valuable habits “useful in the course of human life.” These included

IN HIS LIFELONG ENTHUSIASM FOR CHESS, Benjamin Franklin had company among his fellow revolutionaries. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison competed avidly in four-hour games. In a pen-and-ink sketch artist John Trumbull showed George Washington and Israel Putnam at the board. But Franklin stood head and shoulders above them all, not only as a player of the game but as a writer on the subject. The practice and discipline that chess instilled in him helped Franklin to achieve diplomatic triumph during the Revolutionary War. Far from being a distraction, he insisted, the time and energy that he devoted to the game were crucial to moving America along the path to independence. Franklin published numerous essays on his favorite pastime, dating to his days in the 1730s as the young proprietor of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Notably, in his Autobiography he mentions a friend from that period with whom he was studying Italian, a fellow who “used often to tempt me to play chess.” Franklin agreed to play provided “the victor in every game should have a right to impose a task, either parts of the grammar, to be got by heart, or in translations.” He and his companion being wellmatched on the board, Franklin drily remarked, “we thus beat one another into that language.” This was classic Franklin—mixing enterprise with pleasure, play with self-improvement. Although Franklin’s Autobiography contained his most widely known references to chess, his 1779 essay “The Morals of Chess” is by far his most revealing. Before he published this brief, humorous “bagatelle,” or trifling amusement, no American had brought out a book or article on the subject. No copies of its original French imprint are thought to have survived, but a 1786 reprint in the Columbian MagaBy the Book zine introduced that essay to American readers. In 1802, Franklin, harkening to his beginnings, wrote and published the first American handbook on the game of chess. Franklin began his discourse by sketching the game’s

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Play Up, Play Up, and Play the Game Appearing in 1774 before the British lord's council, Franklin, standing alone at left, conveyed the cool demeanor of a practiced negotiator.

WITH THE CUNNING of a master chess player, Franklin grasped the power of appearance in an image-obsessed world. Arriving in France in December 1776, he presented himself as a rustic philosopher, a colonial rube jarringly out of place amid the sophistication at Versailles. “Figure me in your mind as jolly as formerly, only a few years older; being very plainly dress’d wearing my thin gray strait hair, that peeps out from under my only coiffure, a fine Fur cap, which comes down from my forehead almost to my spectacles,” he wrote an old flame shortly after his arrival. “Think how this must appear among the powder’d heads of Paris!” The French adored this incarnation of Franklin, who rode his notoriety to become an unlikely sex

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He claimed to experience “not the least Apprehension that any political Business could have any Connection with this new Acquaintance.” As it turned out, their chess playing was a prelude for communicating with her brother, British Admiral Lord Richard Howe, who shared Franklin’s hopes for a peaceful outcome. Those talks came to nothing, however, and upon the outbreak of war, the Royal Navy dispatched Admiral Howe to blockade the American coast. Franklin remembered Lady Caroline Howe fondly, but never said who won their games.

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“foresight,” “circumspection,” “caution,” and, crucially, “the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs.” That chess could furnish such an education was only natural, he believed. “For life,” he wrote, “is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors and adversaries to contend with, and competitors or events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it.” Franklin dedicated the original “La Morale des Échecs” to Madame Brillon, circulating copies of the work among his close-knit circle in France. These chess-playing friends, neighbors, and enhancers of his diplomacy included the polymath Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, who in the 1760s had introduced French readers to Franklin’s experiments, electrifying a cult of personality that developed around the American scientist. Another ally was Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard, with whom Franklin jousted on the square board beneath Madame Brillon’s eye. But none of these allies made the same impact as Franklin’s formidable network of female friends and supporters. French society was staunchly patriarchal, but aristocratic women like Madame Brillon wielded power both in the salon and the boudoir—in ironic contrast to the domesticated ideals of womanhood prevailing in revolutionary America. Even before the Revolution, Franklin was leveraging his relationships for diplomatic ends. In London, as late as 1774 and despite having lost official favor as Pennsylvania’s overseas representative, he continued to pursue reconciliation between the Crown and his fellow rebellious colonists. Franklin described how a colleague at the Royal Society told him of “a certain Lady who had a desire of playing with me at Chess, fancying she could beat me.” Franklin duly visited the woman, whose name was Howe, at her home and played a few games. Finding Madame Howe “of very sensible Conversation and pleasing Behaviour,” Franklin agreed to meet for another round of chess.

Americans in Paris: A Study in Contrasts Franklin, far left, arriving in the French court, and John Adams, right, reacted antipodally to their experiences as diplomats there.

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symbol. He cultivated multiple intense friendships with his female admirers, including the chess-loving Madame Brillon, four decades his junior. The widower described his married companion as “a lady of most respectable character,” whom he chided for being too demure. In return, she doted on “my dear papa,” and gave herself to public displays of affection, including sitting in Franklin's lap and kissing his bald head. FRANKLIN’S TIGHTLY BUTTONED fellow diplomat John Adams could hardly have been less suited for the delicacy of their mission. Franklin’s dalliance with Madame Brillon, not to mention French manners in general, perturbed the unrelenting New Englander. It was bad enough that Adams could not understand his hosts’ language—worse, he did not even play chess. Conceding that Brillon was “one of the most beautiful women of France,” Adams dismissed her husband as “a rough kind of country squire.” The Brillons noticeably kept company with a “very plain and clumsy woman,” he grouched, to which Franklin matter-of-factly commented that the lady was Monsieur Brillon’s mistress. “I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship and indeed without cutting each other’s throats,” Adams blustered. “But I did not know the world.” Still bristling some 17 years after Franklin’s death, Adams related a scandalous anecdote to Mercy Otis Warren, the pioneering female historian. At a banquet in France, “in company with Archbishops

and Bishops,” an engraving was handed around the table to “much diversion,” Adams told Warren. Eventually, a pair of smirking French abbés showed Adams the titillating image. “With all the skill of the finest artists in Paris, America was represented as a Virgin naked,” Adams said. “And the grand Franklin, with his bald head, with his few long scattering straight hairs, in the Act of debauching her behind her back. Can you imagine any Ridicule more exquisite than this both upon America and Franklin?” To the puritanical Adams, such displays of decadence only confirmed his worst fears regarding France, as well as his fears regarding Franklin. THE LOUCHE PERSONA FRANKLIN INHABITED so enthusiastically, and which Adams so despised actually accounted for the former’s enviable success as a diplomat. With independence in the balance, Franklin seemed to Adams to be frittering away time and goodwill gossiping and playing chess with French nobles. Adams recorded his profound dismay in a 1778 diary entry. “The Life of Dr. Franklin was a Scene of continual dissipation,” he wrote. The contrast between the two men was near complete. Not only was Franklin given to breakfasting late—Adams habitually rose at five—but the older man spent his afternoons entertaining visitors over tea, and evenings “hearing the Ladies sing and play upon their Piano Fortes…and in various Games as Cards, Chess, Backgammon, &c. &c.” As Adams noted, however, “Mr. Franklin never play’d at any Thing but Chess or Checquers.” Leisure pursuits exerted no pull on Adams, anxious always to get down to business. The New Englander believed France to be stalling efforts by the United States to activate an alliance, finally formalized in February 1778. He began pressuring French officials for greater economic and military commitment. His targets included France’s foreign minister, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, who in the summer of 1780 responded to Adams’s hectoring by issuing an exasperated response. “The King,” he wrote, “did not stand in need of your solicitations to direct his attentions to the interests of the United States.”

Franklin made no secret of the enjoyment he sought and experienced during his tenure as America's envoy to France.

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IN LIFE AS ON THE BOARD seldom making a bad move, Franklin was a master of tact and diplomacy, even while stabbing a colleague in the back. In chess terms, Adams was a blunderer; as Franklin put it, despite certain admirable qualities his fellow diplomat was “sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” Reflections of Franklin’s relationship with the testy Adams abounded in “The Morals of Chess,” in whose columns Franklin rebuked players who interrupted their opponents. “If your adversary is long in playing, you ought not to hurry him, or express any uneasiness at his delay,” he wrote. “You should not sing, nor whistle, nor look at your watch, nor take up a book to read, nor make a tapping with your feet on the floor, or with your fingers on the table, nor do anything that may disturb his attention. For all these things displease. And they do not show your skill in playing, but [only] your craftiness or rudeness.” Had Adams only been seasoned at playing the literal game, he might have had the wit to take greater care figuratively to survey “the whole chess-board, or scene of action, the relations of the several pieces and situations, [and] the dangers they are respectively exposed to,” and avoid causing near-disaster. Instead, his blundering redounded in Franklin’s favor. Eschewing Adams’s battering-ram approach, Franklin’s chess-conditioned crisis diplomacy secured

RETURNING TO AMERICA IN 1785, Franklin

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Scrambling to the rescue, Franklin kowtowed to Vergennes, expertly displaying a sense of where the game was going and gently pressuring it into a fresh direction. “Mr. Adams…thinks, as he tells me himself, that America has been too free in expressions of gratitude to France,” Franklin told the French noble. “I apprehend that he mistakes his ground, and that this Court is to be treated with decency and delicacy. The King, a young and virtuous prince, has, I am persuaded, a pleasure in reflecting on the generous benevolence of the action in assisting an oppressed people, and proposes it is as a part of the glory of his reign. I think it right to increase this pleasure by our thankful acknowledgments, and that such an expression of gratitude is not only our duty, but our interest.”

Mover and Shaker Franklin, above, at the court of King Louis XVI in Versailles in 1778, credited chess with teaching him to work at highstakes diplomacy.

its reward. At Vergennes’s insistence, Franklin effectively assumed the role of sole diplomatic voice for the United States at Versailles. With Franklin as with chess, appearances did not always match reality. Though emphasizing good sportsmanship in “The Morals of Chess,” he was in fact a poor loser, soon tiring of opponents, disarranging their pieces if they left the room, and frequently drumming his fingers on the table. Thanks as much to a competitive temperament as to a razor-sharp mind, Franklin is said to have won more often than he lost—though, since none of his games was formally recorded, his prowess remains a mystery. In Paris, he frequented the Café de la Regence, where the day’s best players— including legendary French master François-André Danican Philidor—plied their skills, likely sending him home to Passy in defeat. But without doubt, Franklin’s most famous loss came at the hands of an opponent ostensibly not even human. In 1783, while negotiating the terms of independence from Great Britain, Franklin played the Mechanical Turk, a remarkable specimen of automaton then touring Europe. Anticipating the super-intelligence of modern chess machines, the Turk was—as Franklin deduced—an elaborate hoax. In its base hid a talented human player, who, using a complex array of pulleys and magnets, manipulated the chess pieces above him. The Turk’s operators left no detail to chance, even redirecting smoke from the hidden player’s candle through the effigy’s pipe. The automaton’s Austrian designer, Wolfgang von Kempelen, surely merited the approval lavished on his creation—which defeated Benjamin Franklin.

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Charles Gravier

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served in 1787 as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention, burnishing his distinguished career by becoming the only founder to sign not only the Declaration of Independence, but the Franco-American Treaty of Alliance, the Treaty of Paris, and the United States Constitution. Regarding the last, a woman encountering Franklin on the steps of Independence Hall famously demanded, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” Franklin's tone of wariness expressed volumes. Embroiled in the infighting surrounding the fate of the young republic, he had begun to question the validity of his lifelong conviction that politics was a game of logic. “We must not expect that a new government may be formed, as a game of chess may be played, by a skillful hand, without a fault,” he confided in a letter to the former mayor of Passy, his friend Le Veillard. “The players of our game are so many, their ideas so different, their prejudices so strong and so various, and their particular interests independent of the general seeming so opposite, that not a move can be made that is not contested; the numerous objections confound the understanding; the wisest must agree to some unreasonable things, that reasonable ones of more consequence may be obtained, and thus chance has its share in many of the determinations, so that the play is more like tric-trac with a game of dice.” Having left behind the diplomatic life that had

helped the United States win its hard-fought independence, Franklin settled back in Philadelphia. He grew rueful, waxing nostalgic for days at Passy gone by and never to be repeated. Political factionalism already was riling the United States, and across the Atlantic deadlier trouble was brewing. When Parisians stormed the Bastille in 1789, Franklin had a year of life left. He did not live to hear of the Reign of Terror, whose victims included his friend and chessboard foe Le Veillard. As events accelerated, Franklin slowed. Increasingly, he turned away from chess and to cards and cribbage, and in a 1786 letter to the daughter of his London landlady, confessed a dread of mortality. “But another reflection comes to relieve me, whispering: ‘You know the soul is immortal; why then should you be a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you?’” he wrote. “So being easily convinced…I shuffle the cards again, and begin another game.” And if, in the end, life was more a game of chance than of skill, Franklin never despaired, playing that game for all it was worth. H

Turkish Trickery The chess-playing automaton Mechanical Turk, below and right, hid a human player within its confines and represented the resulting moves as having been arrived at by the machine.

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Moscow in Autumn The Russian capital in October 1962, a few months after Albert Schmidt finished his stay.

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Notes from a sojourn into the heart of the Soviet Union By Albert J. Schmidt

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TRAVELING IN JANUARY 1962 by rail to New York and on RMS Queen Elizabeth to France, Schmidt paused in Paris, then toured the Loire Valley. He and fellow program participant George Karcz, Polish-born survivor of years as a POW of the Soviet army turned professor of economics, entered Eastern Europe at Prague, Czechoslovakia. “People have been quite courteous but rarely take the initiative in speaking,” Schmidt wrote while in the Czech capital. “I think they sense that George & I are foreigners but seem genuinely surprised that we are Americans. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that we offer to converse with them in Russian… “…The train from Prague to Moscow via Chop (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) was dirty and with few amenities, but the ride was an experience to treasure. The train was essentially a local, making many stops, taking on and dropping off people, mostly peasants. Some even carried chickens. The toilets on the train approximated an ancient privy in both looks and stench; nor was there anything resembling a dining car. One simply hopped off at a village or town stop, hurriedly bought bread and sausage and filled one’s cup with

tea and jumped back on before the train departed. The ride took a disturbing turn when we passed through Slovakia near the Hungarian border. George and I shared our compartment with two very sleazy-looking fellows who kept eyeing us…I opened my knife taking an extra-long time slicing our sausage. Suddenly, both rose and seemed almost to lunge toward me. I braced myself. They drew back, sheepishly revealing their intent: they were ethnic Hungarians who wished merely to show us Hungary. We conversed henceforth in Russian and shared our sausage… “…Generally, the train was cold and it grew colder still as we passed through the Carpathian Mountains during the night and approached the Ukraine. At Chop, as with all Soviet border crossings, it took some hours to negotiate entrance— and adjust our wheels to the gauge of Soviet tracks. I supposed that a major reason for the long delay was my art book parcel. The customs guard opened each page of every book, seemingly enjoying the work immensely. Nothing was confiscated or refused, although he did have some questions… “…The ride from Chop via Kiev to Moscow (11:00 p.m. Sat. to 7:30 a.m. Monday) was a lark. It was comfortable (comparatively speaking) as we

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Brothers in Arms On May Day 1962, as Albert Schmidt was in the USSR, Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev were riding high.

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n 1961, the Cold War was running hot. The same week in April that a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba by antiCastro exiles flopped spectacularly, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth, another first to go with the USSR’s 1957 Sputnik satellite coup. Riding high at a summit in Vienna that June Premier Nikita Khrushchev pummeled President John Kennedy. Back home the Soviet premier was demoting predecessor Joseph Stalin and plunging the Soviet state more deeply into global politics. In August the Berlin Wall went up, putting the U.S. and the USSR eyeball to eyeball. The nuclear superpowers, as if acknowledging the risk of mutually assured destruction, had begun people-to-people exchanges. That fall one such program was seeking American scholars to spend 1962 living and learning in the USSR. The opportunity appealed to Albert Schmidt, an assistant professor at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A World War II veteran who as an undergrad majored in history thinking to teach high school, Schmidt instead pursued and got a PhD and spent the Fifties teaching and studying at colleges and universities. In 1961 he was on a postdoctoral fellowship at Indiana University. He was learning Russian and strengthening his grasp of Eastern European history. Schmidt’s mentor at Indiana, Robert Byrnes, a French historian turned Sovietologist, encouraged his young friend to apply to spend 1962 in the USSR. Schmidt, 36, was accepted. But the program only funded spouses, and Albert and Kathryn Schmidt had three young daughters. As a compromise, Al arranged a semester-long solo foray. He hoped to reside in Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg, but was told he would have to live at Moscow University, known by its Cyrillic abbreviation, “MGU.” Stocking up on art books as gifts for Soviets he expected to encounter, Schmidt prepared to leave. He promised he’d write often, which he did, also keeping a journal January through June 1962. The following narrative, adapted from a memoir that is cited at albert-schmidt.com, synthesizes material from those sources kindly provided by Al and Kathy Schmidt, who since 1990 have been enjoying retirement in Washington, DC.—Michael Dolan

“...Moscow had a fascination all its own; moreover, there was a Classical Moscow, which was barely known in the West."

had sleepers (a board with a mattress). Slovak students returning to Moscow from vacation were eager to talk English & about America so they were in our compartment often. Very interesting to compare them with Coe students—same age, looks, good nature—generally a lot more serious.

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Springtime at the Kremlin Personally as well as professionally, Schmidt, right, exulted in being able to explore the Soviet capital as a resident.

“…MY FIRST AND LASTING IMAGES of the USSR were the snow-covered and frozen fields as we rolled through the Ukrainian farmland. We stopped in Kiev and surged on to Moscow, where we were met by our old friend Mal Brown, grinning broadly in his beaver hat. Filling us in on life in Moscow, he shepherded us to Em-gay-oo, or Moscow University, where we would be living for the next four and a half months. “…Although I had requested being placed in Leningrad, I took quite enthusiastically to Moscow…besides the old Kremlin at the juncture of two rivers, there were successive rings around the citadel…Moscow also was the center of the USSR; Leningrad was in some respects a provincial city. Moscow had a fascination all of its own; moreover,

there was a Classical Moscow, which was barely known in the West. “…Today we saw the foreign office head & got our pay for February (surprise!)—$130. This afternoon I shopped at GUM! Bought cap, spoon, lock, etc. Hats very expensive…Tonight I was invited to dinner by an American couple. Now I am in my room. Must wash it down; have already sprayed it. Tomorrow I see my adviser, go to the embassy to shop & get mail. MGU is a fabulous place—everything is done the hard way—great inefficiency, yet the 20,000 students here must be accomplishing something. They come from all parts of the world. I expected a suitemate from North Vietnam. Instead got one from Omsk... “…I ride downtown each day from Lenin Hills where the university is located. I can take a bus but it’s slow and crowded. The metro is sleek, fast, but requires a 10-minute walk to the station. Weather is the deciding factor. The atmosphere in bus or metro is decidedly impersonal and at times even rude, but New Yorkers are not always courteous either. Moscow is dotted with new apartment houses, though they age quickly, it seems. Muscovites dress plainly but rarely shabbily. Virtually everyone wears a fur hat. I don’t know whether all Russians detect that I am not Russ—but few know that I am American. Today when I went to the embassy the police closed ranks on me, but when I spoke they smiled and let me pass… “…Thursday night Mal Brown & I celebrated getting $25 from Intourist on a part of a ticket not used getting here. We went to one of Moscow’s exclusive restaurants—the Uzbekistan—and had shashlik (skewered beef ), JUNE 2022

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“…TODAY WAS PERHAPS THE BEST sightseeing that I have had. Ed K. & I went to Kolomenskoe—the setting for an important 16th-century palace and a 17th-century palace. I felt upon arriving in the village that this could be the 19th century & not Soviet Russia. The quaintly decorated wooden houses might well have existed in the same form during the days of Gogol. After passing through the village, we came to the palaces & churches—snow covered, as was the whole village, set on a bluff overlooking a bend of the Moscow River… “…Thursday morning I went into town & walked to the Kremlin. I went to a number of the churches & marveled at their beauty. They are now museums. The icons are magnificent. I have a pretty fair feel for the city now and have no trouble on my own. I feel like a real Muscovite…

“…You have never seen so much fussing as on the buses here. Two women were giving a young fellow hell for not giving up his seat. They implied he was a pensioner. Finally he blew up & said he had been working all day & was tired. Yesterday a woman was accused by the checker [kontroll] of not paying. When a man bought her a ticket, the checker turned on him… “…A Moscow evening newspaper stated that the embalmed body of Stalin would be removed from the mausoleum in Red Square, where it had lain next to Lenin since 1953. A couple weeks earlier I had waited in line to see the two bodies. The next morning, I rushed to Red Square and joined a large crowd. The granite monolith over the door still had the names of both Lenin and Stalin, but a small sign informed the public that the

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salad, and dry Georgian wine and a delicious bread. It was the best meal that I have had since arriving. We sat with two distinguished-looking men with whom we eventually conversed. The one next to me leaned over and referred to his companion as ‘my general.’ The other was a colonel in the Red Army. When they found that we were Americans, the discussion turned political—the horrors of atomic war & the values of our sitting together eating & drinking. They even shared their champagne….”

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Secular Worship Site To glimpse the remains of Soviet leader Nikolai Ilyich Lenin, right, sightseers queued for hours. After sharing a mausoleum with Lenin for less than 10 years, the corpse of successor Joseph Stalin was suddenly removed before Schmidt could get to the tomb.

Soviet Shoppers Whenever he visited retail stores during his stay, Schmidt found himself absorbed into bustling crowds of eager consumers, as at GUM, left.

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mausoleum was zakryt no remont (closed for repairs). This evoked a laugh. Not infrequently when one goes to a shop, a barber or shoe-repair shop, say, one is likely to find the store closed with an identical sign. By the next morning another monolith had been put in place containing only Lenin’s name… “…I went to the Lenin Museum & found the materials pertaining to Lenin & the rise of Bolshevism immensely interesting…At the Moscow Art Theater Museum I looked over a mass of stuff on Stanislavsky & the MAKhAT from its beginning in 1897—very, very interesting. I found several books that I needed. I have become very absorbed in an 18th century sculptor, Fedot Shubin. My Russian reading is coming along well & even the speech is improving… “…Stopped at Hotel Moskva and ordered two tickets for Borodin’s opera ‘Prince Igor’ at the Kremlin Palace Theater Monday night. Whether I get them remains to be seen. I do have a ticket tonight for the Red Army Ensemble—Russian Dancing & singing. Everyone says it’s first-rate. Tickets are so cheap—$1.30. The opera is a bit more. David Oistrakh is $1.20!” “FROM THE MOSKVA I went to the Institute for the Theory & History of Architecture. The director was out but someone there wished to see me. This someone was a very vivacious woman in her forties who has just completed a work on contemporary American architecture. She spoke excellent English, and we talked for 2½ hrs. Alexandra C. is the wife of a prominent soviet architect and mother of a 15-year-old son. She was thrilled that I had seen some of the places she knew and could discuss points of her theme. She emphasized that she “is in love with American architecture” but not reluctant to criticize it. Feels there is a growing trend toward eclecticism, especially in the interior—Philip Johnson in particular. Know him! She’s very critical of urban development & making cities for cars instead of pedestrians. She

feels urban renewal is a lost cause because of private ownership of property & “monopolies” that prevent long range planning & appropriate government action. I staggered her when I told her that if she were going to write an honest account, she ought to delete such political cliches as ‘monopolies.’ I admitted that Big Business often opposes planning but there is equally strong opposition from individuals who do not like the government playing an increased role. I pointed out that though planning is needed in our urban development we are not inclined to run rough shod over individual rights to achieve it. She had a number of stereotypical notions of Americans— publicity seekers, etc. I assured her that not all of us are from Madison Ave. She was amazed that I did not smoke; she thought all Americans did.” “…THERE IS NEVER A STORE where one does not have to wait in a line. Great hunger for consumer products of all kinds. You should see the mobs in GUM and SUM—the largest department stores. Every night there is a large number of shows, concerts, operas, etc.—always sold out, and a different show each night at every theater & opera house, no runs of one show as in New York or London. Everybody eagerly awaits the return of Boris Godunov which was here just before I arrived… “…Had a special thrill last night as I rode home on the bus from Dead Souls. Passed along the Moscow River & looked up at the high Kremlin walls & the illuminated church & palaces, very impressive. On the other side of the Kremlin

Nationalized Treasure After centuries of private ownership, the Arkhangelskoe estate was taken over by the state and converted into a museum. JUNE 2022

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Land of Contrasts From performances in Moscow by the Red Army Chorus, left, to timeless agricultural scenes in rural Georgia, below, Schmidt saw humanizing aspects of the USSR absent from the political rhetoric of the day.

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“…LAST EVENING, after leaving Andronikov Monastery, I stood admiringly watching a small

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beneath the walls is the Alexander Garden—a lovely area for walking. It is snow-covered now and exceptionally nice for walking & meditating. The city is fascinating & I mean to know it from stem to stern before I finish.... “…Ed & I went to the Usupov Palace at Arkhangelskoe, perhaps 15 miles outside the center of the city. We saw a good deal of old frame architecture which is fast disappearing in favor of colorless apartment houses. The palace & park were lovely. The mansion was yellow with lovely gardens & statues surrounding it, and filled with lovely paintings by French, Italian, & even English painters. It was a superb example of cultural intercourse between Russia & Western Europe during the 18th & early 19th centuries. It was interesting, too, to see an unfamiliar Van Dyck, several Tiepolos, and a Gros. “On returning to Moscow we found we had time to visit Tolstoy’s Moscow estate, a frame house built in 1808. Everything was much as the great writer had left it—clothes and all. The photographs were interesting. From the

Tolstoy house we went to the Hotel National for dinner & what a good dinner we had. I had a beef fillet (tough but good!), green salad, wine (Georgian, dry—excellent). Ed had chicken—good, too. We went to the Kremlin Theater for the Vienna Philharmonic. The program was something of a disappointment as the only thing played all evening was Strauss. Waltzes are all right, but a whole evening? Yet the audience ate it up & got one encore after another. We observed the conductor looking up into the box just beyond us. We peered, too, and got a real eyeful. The whole Presidium was there: Premier Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Koslov, Suslov, Brezhnev, Kalinin, along with the Austrian ambassador (I suppose) and other Russians I was not able to identify. Khrushchev got a great hand from the audience & returned the applause. The concert was fun. The director played the violin as he conducted. The only thing missing was the beer & beer garden...”

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Outer Space and Inner Space Yuri Gagarin's orbit, above, put the USSR one up. Gardens at Moscow University harkened to past times. boy learning to ride his new bike. His grandfather was there, quite proud. We talked for a bit and before long were in deep political discussion. He observed that the American people were good and peace-loving, but that our government was bad. I assured him that we were responsible for our government and that I did not share his opinion. Naturally, neither convinced the other, but it took 45 minutes to achieve this. I still do not find it easy to argue in Russian... “We are often treated too well. In the dining room at breakfast one day there was an incident. A table had been set aside for us and a peasant sat down at it. When asked to leave by the hostess, he replied angrily that he was a Soviet man and didn’t have to. Quite an argument ensued. We were embarrassed but admired his pluck. After all this is what is preached here.” “…Yesterday five of us left Moscow at 7:00 a.m. & got back about midnight. We went by bus to Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy estate. It is a lovely place about 120 miles from Moscow, near the city of Tula. We saw a good deal of back country life. The villages & collectives did not appear so prosperous as in the north & east. A typical Sovhoz (state farm) or Kolkhoz (collective farm) includes a number of villages. They consist of unpainted wooden structures (houses, barns, sheds, outhouses), picket fences, stacks of twigs for firewood, roofs of sod, grass, or tin, chickens, geese, goats, sheep (many black), a private garden plot as well as the collective one, men & women working, wells, and horse carts as well as tractors. People we encountered seemed a bit more backward— many bearded peasants, more horse carts, etc. All this was very photogenic but it is not at all appropriate or sage to take such pictures so, alas, you will not see rural Russia quite as I saw it. “Now that the snow has left & the mud has

dried, there is dust. Tula was especially dusty. Yasnaya Polyana is 20 minutes out of Tula. It is a lovely place. Tolstoy’s house was a comfortable white one—not so large as some of the palaces I have visited around Moscow—but more delightful in its intimate character. The house is on a large estate, most of which is birch forest. It is enchanting. I was reluctant to visit the grave but was glad I did for it is located in a lovely spot in the glen, surrounded by tall pines & birches, almost a fairyland setting. We brought a picnic lunch & ate it by one of the small ponds. When we got back to Moscow, we were filthy.”

In Russia students were keen to watch an American film to see the masses of vehicles that owners parked at the Pentagon.

“…RUSSIAN STUDENTS are always interested in learning about the U.S. They are fascinated by a much-publicized documentary that’s circulating— not so much by the clips of the Pentagon but by the number of cars in the Pentagon parking lots. I have been able on a weekly basis to obtain permission to bring bundles of Time magazines from the U.S. Embassy to the university dorms—truly a first! Students fight for copies. Another positive indicator was my securing permission to invite Russian students—and, just as surprising, their eager acceptance—to come to the U.S. Embassy to see a film of John Glenn’s space flight. Space rocketry since Yuri Gagarin’s flight of several years earlier was a source of unending pride among Soviet citizens. The students were intensely interested in the Glenn flight…” “…TODAY WAS A PRASNIK, or holiday, to end all holidays—May Day. Only the most essential worked. The big event is, of course, the huge military parade in Red Square & vicinity. Without a ticket there was almost no possibility to get past the numerous cordons of militiamen. We—George Karcz, Stan, & I—did the next best thing. We went to the U.S. Embassy which the parade passes. “A demonstration passed, with people carrying banners, huge placards of Soviet leaders, flowers, signs such as Miru, Mir! (To peace, peace!) & marching bands. Apparently most of the demonstrators were from certain sections of the city & included men, women & children. Since the papers have had much to say about the resumption of atomic testing, I thought there might be a demonstration at the embassy, but the parade was most orderly. JUNE 2022

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“…I FINALLY MADE IT TO LENINGRAD. Stan Z. & I left last night at 11:00 & arrived here this morning at 8:15. Since the transportation was largely financed by the Exchange Committee, we took a cab through Moscow & rode 1st class on the train. We shared a compartment with a Russian with whom we talked and drank & ate. The hours before retiring were quite pleasant.

From the vantage point of the American Embassy, Schmidt and fellow American scholars watched the May Day parade up close.

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Demonstrations converged at the Place of the Insurrection, an important point in the 1917 episode & just down the street from our embassy. The buildings & streets were decorated in every conceivable fashion. Radio & TV carried only the martial music & commentary on the parade. “After the citizen marchers came the military: amphibious cars, troop carriers, anti-tank vehicles, troop carriers pulling cannon, & rocket carriers. Some cannon were probably capable of delivering atomic warheads. After the parade we went to the Hotel Warsaw for a good dinner.”

“We are staying at one of the old pre-Revolutionary hotels, the Europe, or Evropeiskaia. Our room is deluxe for only $2 or $3 each per day. It is more expensive here than in Moscow, especially eating. First day we met Mal Brown & another couple & had breakfast. Then Stan & I started down the Nevsky Prospekt, the main street. There is a charm here which is altogether absent from Moscow. For one thing the architecture is not so depressing. “We made our way to the Neva River & there saw the famous Admiralty spire, the Winter Palace, home of the Hermitage Museum on Winter Palace Square, where so much history was made in 1917. We walked along the beautiful Neva until we came to the statue of Peter. There we saw a boat. We decided to use it. It was a good move as we were abroad for more than an hour & saw a tremendous amount of Leningrad. Had lunch at the Europe & then went shopping at a bookstore where I found a book for which I had been looking for months. “The city is fantastically rich in architectural monuments. When one walks down Nevsky Prospekt, one is almost overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Kazanskii Sobor, a church modeled in some respects after St. Peter’s in Rome—especially the dome and colonnade. It is now an anti-religious museum. “…Yesterday, because it was raining, we went to the Hermitage gallery, which includes the Winter Palace. We trod through the Winter Palace room by room, one more magnificent than the former. The baroque staircase was one of the most ornate pieces of architecture I’ve ever seen—white marble & gold paint as well as swirling & curving figures sculptured in every conceivable place on the wall & staircase. The splendor continued in each room. Delicate bas-relief on walls & ceilings, lavish use of gilt, indescribably beautiful parquet floors, marble columns of various colors, displays of porcelain, clothing, portraits, etc… “…I wandered down to the Neva & watched children playing by the huge Admiralty fountain. It was a warm, lovely night &, as in Paris, everybody takes to the streets & parks. I sat on a bench near an elderly lady. When two little girls came to her, I asked if they were her grandchildren. She said yes. ‘Your Russian is different,” she said. “You are not from Leningrad.’ I agreed & she asked from what city did I come. I said that I was from America & she was visibly surprised; she had thought I was Estonian. As I walked back

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Martiality on Display The traditional May Day parade featured masses of well-drilled troops and military equipment as well as processions by civilian marchers.

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Conservation and Demolition Leningrad's Hermitage, left, was a Schmidt favorite. He also witnessed the erasure of Stalin, exemplified here by a surreptitious photo of a huge statue of the dictator being blown to bits.

along the Nevsky a voice behind me said, ‘Good likeness of Stalin waving us on. As we entered the hotel we were greeted by a evening, my friend.’ It was some young kid trying huge Stalin in the lobby. Needless to say, we made much over it—perhaps too to buy clothes, etc. I answered in Russian that I much. That night we heard hammering. In the morning Stalin was nowhere knew no English. He proceeded to guess from to be seen. We were told that the monolith had had to be removed for repairs. where I came—Czechoslovakia, Germany, More than likely he (it!) had been demolished during Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia. Finally, I the night. Had our ado over the statue hastened told him & we had a good laugh… de-Stalinization in Stalin’s hometown?” “…Sitting in the cafe waiting for Ed K. to come to breakfast, I was surprised to (RETURNING TO MOSCOW VIA JET—his first such see him greet & shake hands with the gentrip—Al packed up and made ready to travel west by train through several Eastern Bloc countries before tleman at the table next to me. The fellow crossing Europe to board a ship for New York. He was was obviously Russian so I wondered how to arrive in Cedar Rapids on July 10.) Ed knew him. Well, he didn’t; he was “…I reached the Russian-Polish border at Brest. introducing himself to Dmitry ShostaRussian officials made me leave the train as I did not kovich, the composer. Shostakovich Dmitry Shostakovich have the internal Russ passport which university offigreeted both of us as he left." cials had insisted I give them in Moscow. The border (AT SEMESTER’S END, before departpolice held the train until they phoned Moscow. When ing stateside, Schmidt and companions traveled the call did not go through I was told to get my baggage & prepare to stay a south to the Caucasus to visit some of the Soviet while in Brest. Did I boil—in Russian! Just as I finished packing to get off the train, word came from Moscow that I was OK. The train started seconds republics.) “…It is most fascinating to see how non-Russ later. Talk about a tight squeeze. Did I breathe easier in Poland! “But then another problem!! It is illegal to export Soviet currency or peoples in the USSR live. I sense a strong national feeling & pride. Yerevan [Armenia], only a few import Polish currency. In Czechoslovakia an exchange official had conmiles from the Turkish border, seems much like verted money on the train but not in Poland. So I arrived in Warsaw with no an Arab city. In the older section are clay or adobe money. For a pack of cigarettes, I got a taxi ride to the hotel but there they houses and in the marketplace Kurds appear in had no record of my reservation. I was patient & finally got a lovely room & bright-colored dress, almost like Gypsies. The some money—so all’s well… market is quite a sight, especially the fresh straw“Warsaw is different. Guess what I read in the hotel lobby while waiting berries of which I partook. They were delicious.... for a room—the Sunday edition of The New York Times. Never once had I “…Monuments to Stalin had been removed seen it in Moscow! Had a supper like I’ve not had since Paris—mushroom everywhere. In Prague, Moscow, and Leningrad omelette, tomato salad, delicious rolls & butter, Polish beer and a delightful there were only empty bases. This was true every- conversation in Russian with a Polish engineer. Finished eating at 12:30 a.m. “This morning I’m tired but satisfied. I am going to enjoy this swing in where but in Georgia. As our bus entered Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, there was a mighty stone Eastern Europe, but I can hardly wait until July 10...” H JUNE 2022

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Rehearsal for Rebellion

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Muzzled fpr Speaking Out Reverend George Storrs was dragged from the pulpit for speaking to the Anti-Slavery Society at Northfield, New Hampshire, on December 14, 1835.

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The Methodist Episcopal Church schism of 1844 prefigured America’s sundering By Karen Whitehair

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METHODISM BEGAN IN GREAT BRITAIN as a sect within the Church of England. Its Oxford-educated founders, brothers John and Charles Wesley, had served 1736-38 as missionaries in the colony of Georgia. They returned to England disillusioned by their experiences in America, prominent among them exposure to the institution of slavery. In 1836, Charles wrote in his journal about his experiences in Charleston, South Carolina, referring to “shocking instances of diabolical cruelty” levied against slaves, such as an incident in which a dance master nearly beat a slave girl to death for over-filling a teacup. Charles abhorred the colonial government’s inaction. “I can look

La Roy Sunderland

Orange Scott

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ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

n November 8, 1842, in Providence, Rhode Island, three well-known ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church announced they were seceding from that church. Jotham Horton, La Roy Sunderland, and Orange Scott all had made reputations as foes of slavery. Now they were protesting what they saw as infiltration by slave interests into the Methodist leadership so thorough as to be systematically silencing the church’s historic antislavery views. In a broadside, The Grounds of Secession from the M. E. Church, written by Scott, the men declared that their main reason for secession was that “The M. E. Church is not only a slave-holding, but a slavery defending church.” This gesture shocked moderate Methodist clergy who had been trying to walk a line between antislavery colleagues in the northern and border states and ingrained proslavery sentiment among Methodists in the South. Southern members declared the seceders “radico-abolitionists” and boasted of having purged the church of their sworn foes’ influence. Many northern ministers rallied to the side of the seceders, including moderates who found the proslavery political and moral response to this secession threadworn, if not disturbing. Proslavery Methodists further entrenched themselves. That faction’s conviction regarding adherents’ right to own slaves and sense of moral superiority for “braving the pestilent malaria,” encountered in the South, to save enslaved souls led to a bitter 1844 schism. Imported into the colonies in the 1760s, Methodism by this time had grown to be the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The run up to and the repercussions of this sundering mirrored events in the rest of the country.

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Kindred Spirits The Wesley brothers— John standing, Charles seated third from left, at a prayer meeting in Oxford.

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upon [it] as no other than a public act to indemnify murder,” he wrote. The transcendental evangelical movement of the 1730s and 1740s in Britain and America known as the First Great Awakening swept up the brothers upon their return to England. Always concerned about the downtrodden, the Wesleys began to preach for social reform, including decrying slavery. John’s sermons and writings throughout his life condemn the practice as the “sum of all villanies.” Having met enslaved persons, he firmly believed they were made in God’s image and so deserved the same treatment as everyone else. In his groundbreaking 1774 work Thoughts Upon Slavery, John Wesley wrote, “Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air; and no human law can deprive him of that right which he derives from the law of nature.” John ranked those buying or selling slaves as “manstealers.” A year later, with war looming, he castigated as hypocritical slave-holding colonists’ outcries against British tyranny: “…one is screaming Murder! Slavery! the other silently bleeds and dies.” Building on Bible study practices dating to their days at Oxford, the brothers established a profusion of small Bible study groups, slowly generating communities of like-minded believers. Soon the Wesleys had developed a theology combining lay and clerical roles guided by “disciplines” known as the General Rules. Their highly methodical approach begat the name “Methodist.” Neither Charles Wesley, who died in 1788, nor John, who died in 1791, ever broke with the Church of England; Methodism remained largely an internal sect until, in the late 1700s, the Methodist message caught the popular imagination. The informal ranks ballooned, leading to an official break in 1795. THE EARLIEST PROTO-METHODISTS in America arrived around 1760 as proselytizing immigrants. Most of these lay ministers settled in Maryland and Virginia, but one of the staunchest congregations, formed in Philadelphia in 1767, attracted both White and Black worshippers. In 1771, Francis Asbury, one of the best known of the early Methodists, arrived in the colonies. Asbury saw that to be effective in this new setting Methodism needed structure, so in 1773 he convened fellow ministers in Philadelphia. This conclave formalized a system of itinerant ministers and regular assemblies and strongly endorsed English Wesleyans’ “Disciplines,” including their dictum that slavery was an incontrovertible evil. Once the American Revolution officially ended, John Wesley recognized that the church’s American arm needed formal change, foremost by establishing an official American church. He sent Thomas Coke as superintendent in November 1784 to oversee this transition. Wasting no time, Coke organized that December’s now famous Christmas Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. Ministers from all walks of life attended, including Black ministers Harry Hosier and Richard Allen. The Christmas Conference established the Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1785 the new institution published its first official American Discipline. That operational guidebook prescribed an itinerate ministry and a structure of quarterly and annual conferences for local districts as well as a quadrennial general conference for meetings of the whole. These rules came down hard on slaveholding. “We therefore think it our most bounded duty to take immediately some effectual method to extirpate this abomination [slavery] from among us,” they stated. To accomplish this end, the Discipline described the process in detail, which began with giving any slaveholder notice by a church “assistant.” Once this conversation ended, a slaveholding congregant had 12 months to “execute and record”—Virginians had two years according to state law— the emancipation of all enslaved persons to which he or she had title, within prescribed age ranges. The assistant was to record in detail all legal transactions in a formal journal. Only non-slaveholders could receive communion.

John Wesley

Charles Wesley

Any person who was caught buying or selling slaves or giving them away to other slaveholders was to be immediately expelled “unless they buy them on purpose to free them.” THESE PROSCRIPTIONS INFLAMED debate. On April 9, 1785, Coke, speaking to a crowd in a barn somewhere in Virginia, boldly decried slavery and promoted emancipation, oblivious to his audience’s financial stake in slaveholding. An irate female listener offered a reward for anyone giving that preacher a hundred lashes, and a mob pursued Coke. But for a local magistrate’s intervention, serious harm might have befallen him. This was only one among many such instances involving church officials nationwide. Violence cowed the church into suspending—though not JUNE 2022

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began barring emancipation. revoking—its 1784 rules on slavery, the first of many Thus began the withering of a once-roefforts to appease slaveholders. bust antislavery creed among MethodAsbury and Coke faced a dilemma. Hewing to ists in the United States. By 1808, a new Wesley’s stark perspective on slavery would stiprovision in the Discipline stated that fle the church's growth, but ducking the issue each Annual Conference was to “form by strictly preaching the Gospel might afford their own regulations relative to buyministers greater access to both masters and the enslaved and perhaps allow the church’s ing and selling of slaves.” Other provimessengers “to ‘soften’ the masters’ attitudes sions began to reflect local and regional towards their slaves, and ‘sweeten the bitter cup’ attitudes where, in many cases, saving Thomas Coke of servitude.” As historian Donald Matthews charsouls superseded freeing slaves. Asbury wrote in 1809, “What is the peracterized their response, Asbury and Coke “had to choose between purity and popularity.” sonal liberty of the African, which he may The pair chose popularity. The first official reframing abuse, to the salvation of his soul….” came during the 1796 General Conference. The church continued to label That tap dancing paid off. Methodist missionslavery a great moral evil; to bar laity and clergy from trading in human ary efforts began to gain traction and memberchattel; and to require slaveholders joining the church to emancipate their ship in the sect, especially in the South, grew. By human property within a prescribed period of time. But these require- the time Asbury died in 1816—Coke had died in ments applied only in those states where emancipation was legal, a status 1814—Methodist membership had gone from increasingly limited to states in the North. 57,858 nationally in 1790 to 217,000—172,000 Church leaders were caught in a divide over slavery that had emerged after the Revolution. Throughout the Revolution, the focus on individual Battleground liberty jibed with antislavery rhetoric, and emancipations of the enslaved— The General Conference of the Southern both by individuals and by state legislatures—rose during and after the Rev- Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia, grew olution. Countering this trend, more and more states, largely in the South, out of sharp discord over owning slaves.

Influential Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's incendiary newspaper, founded in 1831, galvanized many Methodists to band together to fight slavery.

DISCORD OVER SLAVERY within the Methodist Episcopal Church mirrored discord in the nation at large, where hypocrisy reigned on the issue of slavery. Amid constant confrontations, some church members found a reprieve in the American Colonization Society. Founded in 1816, this enterprise sought to ship freed Blacks to Africa. Initially, many Methodists backed the arrangement. For some of those believers, this alternative assuaged guilt over human bondage; others hoped to ease racial tensions by sending freed Blacks—who likely had never lived in Africa—“back” to Africa. In many religious zealots’ eyes, colonization had another benefit: using formerly enslaved Blacks to preach the gospel to Africans. Others watched with alarm as proslavery views expanded within the church. Britain’s Slave Emancipation Act of 1833, which freed slaves thoughout the British Caribbean, South Africa, and Canada, fed that fire. Rage at American inertia began to boil. The first spark came with William Lloyd Garrison and his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Antislavery Methodists joined the fight. In December 1833, a group of staunch believers met in Philadelphia. “No man had or can have a RIGHT to hold a fellow man…in bondage as PROPERTY,” they stated in the resulting Appeal, written by La Roy Sunderland. “Wesley defined slaveholding to be a sin against God.” Besides hardening the conviction of church members convinced the time had come to abolish slavery, the Appeal called out wafflers. Reading it, a young minister, Orange Scott, instantly apprehended his calling. He would become one of the loudest voices in the Methodist abolitionist movement. NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY; NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

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White and 45,000 Black. Methodism’s opposition to slavery continued to appear in print, but in practice had been neutered, setting the institution up for division.

IDENTIFYING AN EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGE, bishops and other Methodist leaders prepared to squelch the abolitionist menace. “We have marked with deep solicitude, the painful excitement which…has been producing disturbances on the subject of immediate abolition of slavery in the slaveholding States,” members of the clergy explained in a 1835 communiqué known as the Pastoral Letter. “These measures have already been productive of pernacious [sic] results, and tend to the production of others yet more disastrous, both in the church and the social and political relations of the country….” The leadership recommended a policy of non-confrontation: “We earnestly exhort to discountenance such practices, both by their counsel and example. And, if any…go beyond their own bounds…to agitate

Francis Asbury other societies and communities on this subject, we advise our preachers, the trustees, and the official and other members to manifest their disappropriation, and to refuse the use of their pulpits and houses for such purposes.” Church pressure against abolitionists, in the form of demands for silence, followed. Bishops attending annual meetings throughout the North, especially in New England, tried to stifle debate by refusing to discuss the subject and tabling or silencing petitions and dissent, threatening persistent voices with expulsion—an ecclesiastical variant on the 1836 Gag Rule imposed by Congress. In this act, Congress banned discussion of abolition, a proscription not lifted until 1844. Tensions were high going into the 1836 General Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. Bishops and proslavery members, abetted by moderates, came determined to muzzle radical members through an address that sought not only to rationalize the JUNE 2022

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Historic Moments Top, the ordination of Bishop Asbury. Below, Methodist Church founder John Wesley, left, engages in conversation with British politician William Wilberforce, whose abolitionist views eventually came to prevail in their homeland.

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NOW A CALL AROSE TO CENSURE obstinate abolitionists, starting with George Storrs and Samuel Norris, who before the General Conference had attended an abolitionist meeting. Despite an eloquent defense by Orange Scott, the conference censured both. The circulation of an anonymously produced antislavery pamphlet said to be full of “palpable falsehoods” triggered additional witch hunting. Scott rose to his feet and admitted he had written the inflammatory document, which, he argued, merely extended members’ defense of slavery to its logical conclusion: If God accepts slavery, then drunkenness, debauchery, theft, and so on, were equally acceptable. For that, Scott was also censured. Sensing after the 1836 melee in Cincinnati that they had won, the bishops set about driving abolitionists from the fold with smears and fear tactics. Orange Scott, George Storrs, and other ministers still were flying the abolition flag, railing at the 1835 Pastoral Letter. In 1837, abolitionist diehards organized a Methodist antislavery convention, producing a report enumerating grievances against the bishops and their actions. Backs against the wall, the bishops, adopting a seemingly conciliatory mien, deployed the conference system to try to destroy the abolitionists. During the 1838 New England Annual Conference, members voted to pass a statement that came to be known as “A Plan for Pacification.”

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hierarchy’s preceding actions but to exhort members to abandon radical undertakings to preserve both church and national unity. Accommodationists viewed slavery as a political issue, not a moral matter, and thus requiring no ecclesiastical involvement. “Inflammatory speeches and writings” would only hurt slaves and do more harm than good, the party line went. “The only safe scriptural, and prudent way for us…is to wholly to refrain from [this] agitating subject….” Next came William Lord, a delegate representing the British Wesleyan Methodist Church, who stressed the need for unity among Methodists. Lord said he hoped that the American church would insist upon “evangelical purity” by which slavery is held to be “contrary to the precepts of Christianity.” He called on the American church to demand “a unanimous rejection of slavery and its social mischiefs, on the ground of its repugnancy to the laws of Christ.” The bishops scolded the British as ignorant of the American system and blind to their demands’ “evil” ramifications. Making a weak apology, the Britons restated their premise, reminding the bishops of their church’s doctrinal history, for which abolitionists sent a discreet note of thanks.

The document set forth measures that appeared to permit antislavery actions. The catch was that those actions required approval by the proper authorities. Other conferences passed this plan only to realize afterwards that the actual goal was to mute abolitionist voices. Trepidation was in the air at the 1840 General Conference. Abolitionist agitation had impelled the country as a whole nearer the view that slavery was repugnant and should be abolished. Methodist slaveholders stuck to their guns, bringing on a bloody-minded impasse. Throughout, bishops continued to silence abolitionist memorials, as petitions were called, and passed the Few Resolution, proposed by Ignatius Few, which prohibited Black witnesses from testifying against White defendants in church trials. Many read this as implying an endorsement of segregation of the races in all church activities. La Roy Sunderland left the meeting depressed and saddened. Others, like Orange Scott, renewed the fight to abolish slavery. Moderate northern Methodists began to see that if slavery was ever to end, action had to occur. The idea that Blacks

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Waiting for a Ship At the Mount Olivet Baptist Chapel, refugees from Arkansas bound for Liberia seek a vessel to transport them across the Atlantic

might not be able to take communion filled the dissenters with despair. By fall 1841, these activists saw that to remain a Methodist demanded one’s departure from the Methodist Episcopal Church. On November 8, 1842, Jotham Horton, La Roy Sunderland, and Orange Scott took that step. Luther Lee and Lucius C. Matlack followed. By the time the Methodist Wesleyan Connection officially formed under Scott’s leadership in 1843, 22 ministers and 6,000 members had signed on. This new church grew rapidly. Proslavery bishops and allies crowed that they had purged the wicked abolitionists, called them “reckless incendiaries,” and disparaged the new church as heretical by calling its congregants “Scottites.” Northern moderates given to cosseting southerners began to see this as dishonorable and cruel. By the 1844 General Conference, many former moderates had set their hearts against the hierarchy. At the 1844 Conference, accommodationists George continued to deny Methodism’s historic doctrines, Storrs giving the proslavery faction the impression of victory. As if to solidify that assumption, enslavers insisted on installing as a bishop the much respected James Andrews, who had come into human holdings through marriage and who, except for that blot, would have been elevated. But moderates saw in Andrews’s encumbered candidacy an opportunity to pull the church back from the brink. The Conference closed without action on Andrews. Fed up, on May 1, 1845, Southern members chartered the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. For decades the two branches squabbled over revenues from real estate and publishing, reuniting only in 1939. The United States ended its secession problem in 1865, although the resolution on slavery and its legacy is still under way. H

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Mascot Memories

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The phenomenon of the sports team mascot had theatrical, sometimes demeaning origins By Allen Abel

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High on the Happy Warrior On October 8, 1928, mascot Eddie Bennett,right, and New York Yankees Babe Ruth, Earle Combs, Bob Meusel, Mark Koenig, Joe Dugan, Tony Lazzeri, Lou Gehrig, Waite Hoyt, and Benny Bengough tout the presidential candidacy of Democrat and fellow Gothamite Al Smith. JUNE 2022

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Yesteryear's Magic Philadelphia Athletics mascot Louis Van Zelst, above by the dugout and at top seated center with the team, owed his career to a childhood accident that wrecked his spine and set him on a life of pain and sports-world notoriety.

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n the lam from personal bankruptcy in his native Britain and the unceasing scandal of his brother’s notorious love affair with writer Oscar Wilde, Scottish nobleman Percy Sholto Douglas, 10th Marquess of Queensberry, fetched up in Manhattan in October 1911. Douglas had come to write about one of America’s grandest and—to a Briton—least comprehensible spectacles: the opening game of the World Series, pitting the New York Giants against the Philadelphia Athletics at the brand-new Polo Grounds. “There was no difficulty getting in, no disagreeable crowding, thanks to the wonderful efficiency of the New York police,” the baron gushed in copy syndicated to American newspapers. The Marquess—then “Marquis”—had joined a mob of nearly 40,000 fans, until that time the largest crowd ever to attend a baseball game. “I have just seen two lady fans on the lower stand,” the red-blooded blueblood wrote. “They are both pretty. I wish I were sitting near them. They have blue flags, and one has a peacock feather in her hat and the other mauve ostriches. They must have come from Philadelphia, they have such good lungs.” Douglas spied a small, uniformed figure. “I have just seen the little hunchback who is mascot to the Athletics. I am afraid I am superstitious and my money goes to Philadelphia,” he wrote. “At Monte Carlo we always try to touch a hunchback before entering the room, and many’s the time I have won after touching some irate hunchback, whom everyone is trying to pat without his knowing it. The mascot has just been on the home plate to pick up a flung away bat. Does it portend a hit? I believe

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in mascots. I am sure it does.” Douglas had company in his conviction. He had encountered baseball at the zenith of the game’s Age of Magic, during which many professional and amateur teams and individual athletes across the continent employed a disabled White child, an African American boy, or any figure suitably lunatic or freakish, to tend players’ bats and serve as a human totem thought capable of bringing victory by virtue of oddity, deformity, race, and the brightness of his smile. Beginning with baseball’s earliest codification in the 1840s, ritualistic players had embraced any gimcrack or talisman that they believed might tilt the balance of fate at the plate: a rabbit’s foot, an amulet, a garish cravat, a four-legged chicken, a tailless dog. In time that taste would come to center on a youth regarded as lucky precisely because of his personal misfortune. AT THE POLO GROUNDS IN 1911, trust in the supernatural powers of a boy’s twisted frame gathered in a 15-year-old Philadelphian. Louis Van Zelst was the beloved “Little Van,” mascot of the defending World Champion A’s. “Probably there are a million kids in this country who would swap their hope of eternal life to be in the shoes of little Louis Van Zelst,” a newspaper reporter had written. The son of Dutch immigrants who ran a café near the University of Pennsylvania campus, Louis was, a headline blared, the “most envied boy in the country . . . the proudest kid in President Taft’s dominions.” As the Giants and A’s were clashing in their second Series in seven years, Van Zelst was in his second full season as Athletics mascot, a job he owed to miserable luck. In 1904, at age eight, he had fallen—or been pushed by a schoolmate—from a rolling wagon, wrecking his spine and leaving him a hunchback with no hope of treatment or recovery. After serving as human good-luck charm for Penn baseball and football players who frequented his parents’ cafe, in 1909 Louis tapped an A’s outfielder for a pass to Shibe Park. The fielder ushered him in. Noticing the boy, A’s manager Connie Mack invited him to mind the team’s bats that afternoon, beginning a partnership between Mack—“the Grand Old Man of the Grand Old Game”—and the child who became a cherished icon of the manager’s superstitious stars. In 1910, even though “often wracked with pain and bodily torture,” the boy became the team’s salaried mascot, working home games and traveling to spring training and the World Series with the club. In 1911, he received $571—today, nearly $16,500—as a World Series share. “Rub my hump!” he would chirrup from his post near the

dugout. “Better rub my hump for a hit this time!” Farcical Origins When the Athletics vanquished the favored Chi- Imported to New York cago Cubs in the 1910 Series, Mack and Little Van from France in the 1880s, led the victory parade down Broad Street. “Never the musical farce "La Mascotte" proved a was a mascot better liked—no, loved,” said the durable theatrical vehicle Pittsburgh Gazette Times. “In the misshaped as well as the means by body of Louis Van Zelst,” the Philadelphia Daily which "mascot" entered News declared, “had been placed the soul of a into common parlance. saint and the fortitude of a martyr.” Athletes reliant on mascots agreed, though in less poetic terms. “A hunchback is regarded by ball-players as the best luck in the world,” Giants star Christy Mathewson explained in his ghostwritten bestseller, Pitching in A Pinch, after his team lost to Van Zelst’s Athletics in 1911 four games to two. “If a man can just touch that hump on the way to the plate, he is sure to get a hit, as any observant spectator will notice the Athletics’ hitters rubbing the hunchbacked boy before leaving the bench. . .” Mathewson, the game’s most idolized player of the nineteen-teens, was no gullible yokel but a Bucknell graduate. “College men are coming into both the leagues, more of them each year, and they are doing their share to make the game better and the class of men higher, but they fall the hardest for the jinxes,” he wrote. “I don’t know as it is anything to be ashamed of.” Hunchbacked mascots were fixtures in boxing as well. In 1913, when JUNE 2022

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THE SPORTS MASCOT had theatrical origins. On May 5, 1881, New York’s Bijou Opera House staged the American premiere of a French musical whose heroine was Bettina, a farmer’s daughter from Provençe able to bring good fortune to

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lightweight José Ybarra, fighting as “Mexican Joe Rivers,” met “Knockout Brown,” née Valentine Braunheim, in a 20-rounder in Los Angeles, California, each brawler had a disabled man in his corner. Brown entered the ring with “Tobey,” whom he had brought all the way from New York. Mexican Joe had enlisted Eddie Burnell especially for the occasion to out-voodoo his opponent’s hoodoo. Tobey’s mystical powers were sufficiently whammied. Mexican Joe knocked out Knockout.

anyone who “possessed” her, provided Bettina remained a virgin. In Provençale argot, such a figure was a mascotte—from the colloquial masco, meaning “little witch”—hence playwright Edmond Audran’s title for his musical farce. “It was no easy matter to write an amusing, and in many parts original, piece,” the London Age had written when the show opened in Paris. “But to coin a new word that will hold its own on the Boulevard for no short period is an effort of genius that any dramatic author may be proud of.” The New York production of La Mascotte was an instant hit; other companies would stage the show for more than 30 years. Performers still revive certain of the show’s ridiculous duets featuring Bettina and her lustful pursuers, including “Gobble Gobble,” whose lyrics include the exchange “I love you more than my turkeys/I love you more than my sheep...” La Mascotte’s popularity in New York brought into common parlance the terms mascotte and then the anglicized “mascot,” along with the concept that a human being somehow could be as lucky as the hind paw of a rabbit or a hideous necktie. Superstitious hit-starved baseball players, the best among them barely able to reach base once in three at bats, quickly took to the notion. If a fourlegged chicken could make the difference between striking out and hammering a triple off the outfield wall, players reasoned, imagine how many hits a man could make with a Quasimodo, a Rigoletto, a General Tom Thumb handing him his war club? By the mid-1880s, many teams had begun to recruit disabled children, adult little people, the congenitally unusual—one Detroit team employed a

TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Moments in the Sun Clarence Duval, above center with scepter, traveled as a mascot with an all-star baseball team organized in 1888 to tour the world. Left, unidentified Black mascots with Philadelphia Nationals pitchers Abe Rachlin, Ad Brennan, Jim Moroney, and Frank Scanlan in 1910.

Cobb hid his personal Black mascot in a trunk beneath his Pullman berth that he also used to smuggle the youth into segregated hotels.

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Sunshine and Shadow Stars from the mascot era included Christy Mathewson of the New York Giants and Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers. The latter had his own personal mascot. Below, obituary for much-mourned Philadelphia Athletics Louis Van Zelst, who was 19 when he died in 1915. boy “who had been born with a full set of teeth”— and African American boys to ward off evil spirits, tend the bats, and lead the players’ daily procession from their hotel to the ball park. Baseball historian Larry G. Bowman attributed the players’ faith in the supposed magical powers of Black children to African belief in evil spirits and “hoodoo”—and White Americans’ racist interpretation of these traditions. In Omaha in 1888, all-star players bound for a round-the-world tour to spread the American game saw a teen-aged African-American named Clarence Duval tap-dancing outside the stadium. The ballplayers shanghaied the young man, saw that he was “given a bath he did not want,” and hauled him as far as Australia and Egypt, making Duval, in Bowman’s words, “the model mascot.” “If a little Negro, black as the ace of spades, dwarfed in every limb, and with crossed eyes could have been secured,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in 1890, “the ideal mascot would have been presented to the gaze of the base-ball world.” THE LATE 1800s and early 1900s marked the apogee—or the nadir—of exploitation of ostensible African

American enchantment. In Canada, Willie Hume, “a very small and very fat coloured boy whom the Torontos picked up at Syracuse, travels with them as their Mascotte,” the Toronto Globe wrote in 1886. The team outfitted Hume in a “gorgeous uniform with gold lamé trimming an inch wide.” In 1901, a Black veteran of the U.S. Army, L. Marshall Williams, joined the Philadelphia Phillies as mascot. “Lucky” Williams was forced to travel “on roofs, in the baggage, and other unconventional places.” In 1908, Detroit Tigers batting champion Ty Cobb claimed a personal mascot, a homeless African American child Cobb had found sleeping in the Bennett Park grandstand. Christening the youth “Lil’ Rastus,” Cobb hid the youth in a trunk underneath his Pullman berth that he also used to smuggle him into segregated hotels. White mascots abounded too. Louis Van Zelst, during whose five-year full-time tenure the Athletics won four American League pennants and three Series, had plenty of company. In 1914, when the A’s fell to Boston’s “Miracle Braves” in four straight games, Boston writers attributed the sweep to “Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson Johnnie Baked Beans Connor, a typical Boston highbrow,” as they dubbed a bespectacled batboy. In 1915 Philadelphia’s National League team, the Phillies, brought on board hunchback Raoul Naughton. With Naughton tending their lumber, the Phillies captured their only pennant of the first half of the 20th century. By then, Louis Van Zelst had died; he was JUNE 2022

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I can close my eyes and see you now, an Elfin dauntless shape, As you squatted in holes you had dug for luck while the home crowd hung agape. And while the jumping, joy-crazed crowd ripped a yell that was heard a mile, I saw you turn with a grave, slow glance to the bench for Connie’s smile... “You pulled them through, you Louie,” I said, and you raised a visage grave. “I did my best,” you answered low, and I marked the smile so brave...

Greetings for a Successor Louis Van Zelst's successor with the A's, Hughie McLoon, inspired verse about his valor and went on to run a speakeasy during the Depression. 19 on St. Patrick’s Day 1915 when his time ran out. Many of the period’s most celebrated mascots lived only into their teens and twenties, brought down by the conditions that had made them famous. A week after Louis was interred at Holy Cross Cemetery, the Philadelphia Press published “The Mascot’s Death,” by Richard J. Beamish:

IN 1916, THE A’S, who following Little Van’s death had tumbled from first place to last, anointed a disabled 13-year-old to renew their luck. “Mack’s Midget Mascot Puts Kibosh on the Jinx,” papers crowed that July. New mascot Hughie McLoon weighed in at only 58 lb. He owed his disability—a hunched back, though not as grievous as Louis Van Zelst’s—to a fall from a seesaw at age three; he later was able to play baseball and basketball for amateur teams that he managed. But his touch failed to lift the Athletics, routinely mocked as the Pathetics, and after two and a half seasons at Shibe Park McLoon transferred his allegiance to heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey and lightweight slugger Benny Leonard. During Prohibition in the summer of 1928, while running a downtown speakeasy and snitching for the police, McLoon was caught in a gangland shootout. He died at 26 with 25 cents in his pocket. In New York, the Yankees were winning championship after championship, thanks surely to having acquired Babe Ruth from the Red Sox and possibly to Ruth’s recruitment of a hunchbacked Brooklyn orphan named Eddie Bennett as a mascot. Through the 1920s, Bennett’s mitt was the first the Sultan of Swat would shake after each titanic homer. Ruth’s pregame

Around 1909, Burke found work as a bellboy at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel at Yellowstone National Park. En route home from Los Angeles, California, August Herrmann, owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, stayed at the Mammoth. Encountering young Burke, the team owner found him “an intelligent and well-read person,” wrote the Pittsburgh Daily Post on April 29, 1912. Herrmann asked the youth to be the Reds mascot; after

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WHEN THE UNITED STATES entered World War I in April 1917, Frank J. Burke, a major league baseball mascot, repeatedly but at first unsuccessfully tried to join the American Expeditionary Forces. “A perfectly formed midget” according to one description, Burke, nicknamed “Brownie,” stood between 4’3” and 4’7” and weighed 90 lbs. Undeterred, Brownie Burke pressed on, eventually wearing a doughboy’s uniform, earning the rank of corporal, and seeing duty on the Continent. Born at Marysville, Montana, on May 19, 1893, Frank J. Burke was the fourth of eight children of a carpenter. He grew up amid a gold and silver boom there and later in Helena. Diminutive size propelled him into becoming a drum major and, in tune with the times, mascot and batboy for Helena-area baseball teams. “I mascotted the Helena team in the Inter-mountain league and they won 25 out of 27 games they played before the league was busted up,” he said years later. He also played shortstop; the April 29, 1907, Helena Independent-Record describes him as the area’s leading batter and fielder at that position. “Brownie is 40 inches high, weighs 40 pounds, bats .440 and fields .940,” the paper wrote. “Base ball must be his forte.”

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Pintsize Powerhouse

warmup included mischievously—or cruelly— tossing a ball just high enough that his disabled foil could not catch it. Before hiking to the mound, Yankees ace pitcher Herb Pennock would rub Smiling Eddie’s hump for luck. Bennett enhanced the Yankees’ karma “mostly by crouching in front of the dugout and concentrating,” according to a 1932 New Yorker profile of the beaming young man. Bennett, too, died in agony. On the Upper West

consulting his mother, Brownie, 16, signed on. In Cincinnati and on the road, he performed pantomimes and comic routines to entertain fans, interrupting his antics to chase stray balls for umpires and collect bats for players. He sent home his salary—a sum he said considerably outclassed the $35 a month he had been earning as bellboy—in part to help one of his sisters study music. “The highest salaried mascot in the business,” the August 6, 1909, Knoxville Sentinel wrote of him. During his six years with the Reds, Burke accepted an invitation from the Orpheum Stock Company to join that vaudeville troupe. When not on the diamond or in the dugout he was treading the boards on the B.F. Keith circuit, whose theaters dotted the big cities of the East Coast. In addition to playing children, he filled roles that included Buster Brown, mascot of the Brown Shoe Company, and “a dunce” in a popular Maude Adams play, “Quality Street.” In October 1913, Burke, with ballplayers, team managers like Clarke Griffith of the Washington Senators, and other baseball figures, called on President Woodrow Wilson at the president’s country retreat in Cornish, New Hampshire. “He sure is a fine guy,” Burke said of Wilson. With the country’s entry into the Great War, Burke’s ambitions drastically changed. According to the May 10, 1918, Salt Lake Telegram, his relentless pursuit of military service led General Henry T. Allen, commander of the U.S. Army’s 90th Division, to instruct examining officers to overlook Burke’s size. He was

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Relentless Though only a shade over 4' tall, Brownie Burke worked as a drum major and during WWI managed to get himself inducted into the AEF.

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Side in the middle of the 1932 season, a taxi ran over him, crushing his legs and feet and leaving him unable to squat or play catch with the Bambino. Liquor assuaged his pain. In January 1935, surrounded by photographs of the Yankees and baseballs signed by George Herman Ruth, Smiling Eddie Bennett died of alcohol poisoning in his West 84th Street room. Fifty years after a French farce introduced Americans to the human mascot, the Age of Magic was over. H

Seizing Opportunity The enterprising McLoon, at left with boxer "Lanky Ralph" Smith, whose career he managed after leaving baseball, in 1927. Above, Yankees mascot Eddie Bennett escorts the Babe off the field after Ruth hit a home run during that same year's baseball season.

sworn in and at first assigned a clerical position. He joined the 90th Infantry Division’s headquarters on June 1, 1918. Within weeks the 90th had landed at Le Havre, France. After training at Ain-Le-Duc and Cote d’Or, near Dijon, the 90th Division engaged in combat in the St. Mihiel sector and later in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, one of the war’s largest and deadliest American operations. The division logged 78 days on the battle line. Brownie served for 13 months—12 of those in the 90th’s headquarters detachment—in France and in Germany with the Army of Occupation in Germany. “Every soldier and the Germans in Bernkastel knew this fellow,” American Legion magazine wrote in 1940. He was honorably discharged on June 18, 1919. Brownie moved to California in 1921, resuming his acting career and affiliation with baseball. In his final season in baseball, 1927, he managed the Martinsburg, West Virginia, Blue Sox, a Class D club in the Blue Ridge League. He died suddenly in Bakersfield, California, on November 7, 1931, of a lung disorder. He was 38. — Journalist and author Brian D’Ambrosio—dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com—lives in Montana and New Mexico. JUNE 2022

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Ursine Islander The Kodiak brown bear evolved just far enough off the Alaskan mainland to become a subspecies.

Bear Wars

PHOTO CREDIT

Ranchers on Kodiak Island didn’t take kindly to cattlechomping omnivores By Mike Coppock

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Bay. He ran cattle until 1963, when he sold the Flying H to a couple from the Aleutian Islands. Henley had found cattle ranching on Kodiak to be a difficult proposition. The problem was bears, specifically the Kodiak Brown Bear. Native to the island, Kodiaks reach 1,500 lbs., stand 10 feet high, and love the taste of fresh beef. A large Kodiak can drag a 1,000-pound steer half a mile up an almost vertical slope through dense alder thickets. Kodiak Island cattlemen, feeling threatened by the bears’ depredations, had been taking to the air to kill their herds' tormentors on the sly. Besides not wanting to risk a public outcry on behalf of wildlife, the ranchers wanted to avoid the attention of Kodiak’s professional hunting guides, whose livelihood depended on having an ample bear population for customers to hunt. The surreptitious shooting went on until a Sunday morning in fall 1963 when, after strafing four Kodiaks, Henley saw that he was low on fuel. Too short on gas to get to the landing strip and fuel tank on his ranch, he landed at Kodiak’s municipal airport. Guides who happened to be present spotted his plane's armament and asked about the Garand. Henley refused to answer, taking off as soon as he had fueled up.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

large man with a GI haircut, Dave Henley so completely filled the cabin of his single-engine Piper Cub that he left little room for anything else. The mere sight of the bullnecked Henley crammed into the small wing-over plane’s cockpit would have aroused curiosity. But the real attention-getter rode atop the Piper’s wing, onto which Henley had mounted a war surplus .30-caliber M-1 Garand semiautomatic rifle, positioned so that shots from the weapon passed four inches above the tips of the plane’s propeller blades. A button on the pilot’s control stick served as the trigger. When he had emptied the M-1’s eight-round magazine, Henley could swap in a fresh clip through a sliding hatch in the cockpit ceiling. Aiming with a Nydar sight set to zero in at 150 yards, Henley could pump slugs into a 3’ circle from a distance of a football field and a half. In late 1963, Henley was a veteran of a year of airborne marksmanship over Kodiak Island, off the Alaska coast. He was after one particular species—the Kodiak Brown Bear—and meant to kill every one of the big carnivores he could find. That year's tally had been 13, some shot with the Garand, others by fellow Kodiak cattleman Norm Sutliff, firing from the shoulder at the Piper’s rear. The hunters’ associates in the Kodiak Stock Growers Association, of which Henley was president, paid for the sorties. During World War II Henley had hunted big game that could shoot back, flying 23 missions over Europe in Mustang P-51 fighters until he was downed in 1944 and taken prisoner by the Germans for the duration. He had come home to Utah and in 1946 moved to Kodiak with his wife and children, becoming a bush pilot and buying the Flying H, a small ranch along Kalsin

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTO BY EDWARD MANN; THIS PAGE: UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA, ARCHIVES & MANUSCRIPT DEPT.

A Feed Lot in More Ways Than One Ranchers' efforts to raise cattle on Kodiak exposed herds to the real risk of being preyed on by huge bears.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTO BY EDWARD MANN; THIS PAGE: UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA, ARCHIVES & MANUSCRIPT DEPT.

ROUGHLY 23 MILLION YEARS AGO, tectonic forces pushed a large island chain from beneath the North Pacific 30 miles off what is now mainland Alaska. The Kodiak Archipelago, a cluster of 35 islands and outcroppings, features jagged shorelines, steep cliff faces, and now and then long narrow beaches of black sand and tidal flats. On some of the islands, significant rivers, home to salmon, empty into the sea, fed by mountains high enough to nurture scores of small glaciers. The archipelago, 177 miles long, angles northeast to southwest. The largest island, Kodiak, is 100 miles by 60-some miles, at 3,959 square miles slightly larger than the nation of Cyprus and the second-largest island in the United States. Other notable locales dot the archipelago. Just north of Kodiak, 700-square-mile Afognak Island is 43 miles long and 23 miles wide, making it the 18th-largest island in the United States. Nature was extremely kind to the islands, positioning them within the robust Alaska Current, an offshoot of the Kuroshio Current, which flows from Japan. Bathed in those relatively warm waters, the islands, unlike mainland Alaska, rarely experience winter temperatures below freezing. However, frigid winter air from that mainland colliding with the current’s warm air generates violent, volatile weather, including heavy horizontal rains and deep snow. The current also mixes minerals and plankton with ocean waters, especially in Shelikof Strait, which separates Kodiak from the mainland. As a result, the strait hosts large whale migrations and rich fisheries. In Alaska one type of flora usually dominates a region: rain forests in southeast Alaska, birch and black spruce in the interior, and, in treeless west Alaska, tundra. But on Kodiak Island, while dark green spruce forests blanket the north end, the island’s midsection supports woods and grazing lands, with open tundra preeminent in the south. Thousands of years ahead of humans, specimens of North American Brown Bear reached the islands—by what means no one knows; the archipelago never was connected to the mainland. The pioneer predators—they will eat anything, making them omnivores—found themselves the only large fauna on the island. Consuming a diet of protein-rich salmon the island’s bears grew

prodigiously, creating a subspecies, the Kodiak Brown Bear. Though they are solitary by nature, as many as 60 of these behemoths can crowd the same stretch of stream to fish. To avoid conflict amid the enforced proximity of island existence the bears evolved a communications system of complex signals using both body language and sounds. HUMANS APPEAR TO HAVE ARRIVED on Kodiak Island nearly 8,000 years ago. Around 2,000 years ago Yupik fishermen from Alaska’s western portion made the crossing from the mainland. On Kodiak the Yupik encountered Aleuts migrating east. The two cultures mixed, producing a people calling themselves the Alutiiq, or their ancestral name, Sugpiaq, which they still sometimes use. The indigenes named their massive island home Koniag, which Russians and then Americans corrupted into “Kodiak.” Chasing highly prized sea otter pelts, Russians began island-hopping eastward through the Aleutian chain in 1745, on the way prosecuting a war of extermination against those Aleuts they did not enslave. By 1763 Russian

A Different Kind of Strafing Alarmed at losing animals to bears, P-51 Mustang pilot turned cattleman Dave Henley armed his Piper FA-11 with a semi-automatic Garand M-1 rifle and went after the predators from the air. JUNE 2022

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From the start, cattle ranching on Kodiak was a dicey proposition, with herds at risk from hungry bears and high cliffs.

ARCTIC OCEAN

RU S S I A

ALASKA BERING SEA KODIAK ISLAND ALEUTIAN ISLANDS

PACIFIC OCEAN

CANADA

WHEN THE U.S. BOUGHT ALASKA from Russia in 1867, Kodiak had a population of 288. Construction of a fish cannery at Larsen Bay in 1888 sent commercial fishing off Kodiak skyrocketing. Soon some 30 canneries had opened across the archipelago. Fishing quickly became an economic mainstay of Kodiak Island. The Alaska Commercial Company set up both dairy and beef herds but owing to bear attacks had to move its livestock to another island. A federal agricultural station took on cattle raising in 1906 using Galloway cattle, a breed that originated in southwest Scotland; that experiment ended in 1925. A Seattle firm tried raising cattle outside the town of Kodiak, but within a year 140 out of 200 head died, killed by bears or falls from cliffs. The Kodiak Baptist Orphanage imported a herd in the 1890s. Famed gunman and troubleshooter Jack McCord tried his hand at ranching on Sitkaliclak Island off Kodiak in the 1920s. The orphanage and the shootist both lost stock to Kodiak bears. Trophy hunters particularly prized the majestic Kodiak bear. To conserve this revenue-producing resource, the territorial government began regulating commercial hunting and bear hide sales. As of 1925, nonresidents hunting on Kodiak had to be accompanied by a registered big game guide. The territory introduced other trophy species around the archipelago—Sitka deer and caribou in 1924, Roosevelt elk in 1928, mountain goats in 1953. But a Kodiak bear was the money shot. In the 1930s both conservationists and Kodiak guides began worrying about the animal’s fate. After much lobbying, in 1941 President Franklin

Grid? What Grid? Kodiak and its namesake location are washed by the Alaska Current, which brings a challenging blend of benign winters and wild weather.

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KODIAK HISTORY ARCHIVES (2); FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICES IMAGE

of harems, could take only one Native woman and that Russian men had to marry the Native women they took. In addition, he barred excessive cruelty to indigenes, with punishment for violations prescribed by law. Baranov wed an Alutiiq chief’s daughter and set up schools to educate Native children—the first such facilities along the west coast of North America. Russian Orthodox monk Herman Alyaskinskiy ran the school in Kodiak, becoming such a beloved figure that in 1970 he was elevated to sainthood. Orthodox believers annually make a pilgrimage to a shrine honoring Saint Herman of Alaska on nearby Spruce Island. Baranov moved the colonial capital to Sitka in 1804, but Kodiak remained a trade hub for most of Alaska. During the California Gold Rush, Kodiak entrepreneurs sold ice to San Franciscans and ventured into commercial fishing. In 1837 a smallpox epidemic reduced the Alutiiq population to seven villages.

ANCHORAGE MUSEUM

hunters had reached Kodiak. The Alutiiq inhabited 60 villages along the archipelago and were settling Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and Prince William Sound. Grigory Shelikhov founded the first Russian settlement on Kodiak at Three Saints Bay in 1784. That year Shelikhov and 130 Russian hunters massacred hundreds of Native families on nearby Refuge Rock as a demonstration of Russian might. Shelikhov’s company hired Alexander Baranov to govern the Czar’s Alaskan holdings in 1792. Baranov moved administrative activities to a new settlement on the island that would become a town also called Kodiak. Russian settlers came in 1793 and in 1795 imported cattle, along with large, aggressive dogs to ward off bears. The empire made Baranov governor of Russian America in 1799, with Kodiak as the colonial capital. Though he paid them, Baranov required Native men in his service to go on extended hunts and to fight under him in campaigns against other tribes. Baranov issued a decree that Russians, some of whom had been keeping the equivalent

Roosevelt created Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, a 1,990,000-acre protected reserve comprising the southern two-thirds of Kodiak Island.

KODIAK HISTORY ARCHIVES (2); FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICES IMAGE

ANCHORAGE MUSEUM

AFTER WORLD WAR II, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, to encourage cattle ranching on federal holdings on Kodiak and in the Aleutians, opened grazing rights for 200,000 acres in those island chains. Veterans enjoyed preference. On Kodiak, 14 ranches, each of 22,000 acres or more, divvied up grasslands south of Kodiak town on Hunters' HQ the Chiniak Peninsula, adjacent to the wildlife The airport at Kodiak preserve. Many would-be cattle barons sank their in 1950, the scene of a last dimes into ventures in settings decades from stream of arrivals by hunters eager to bring electrification, getting by with kerosene lanterns home trophies. The and gasoline-powered generators. unidentified fellow at Bill Burton’s experiences typified those of the right likely collected his era. Arriving on Kodiak in the early 1960s, he and thanks to guidance his brother Jim snagged 22,000 acres, in 1967 provided by a cadre of adding another 160. The Burton brothers learned local hunting outfitters confident enough to to cope with long, hard winters, heavy snows, and guarantee clients that punishing winds. One winter, 20 head bunched they would not return up on a lake that had not quite frozen enough and empty-handed. fell through the ice. Bears cost Burton as much as 12 percent a year of his livestock. Fellow rancher Ron Hurst lost 400 head to bears over a 20-year ranching stint. “He liked to claim that for every head he lost, he went out and shot a Kodiak,” Burton claimed. TRADING TALES OF BEARISH ATTRITION, Kodiak ranchers itched to do something. Joe Zentner decided to try spotting bears from the air and leading hunters to them. In 1952 Zentner, who was not a pilot, traveled to Kansas, where for $3,800 he bought a used Piper Cub. He hired a flier to ferry the Piper to Kodiak for $1,200. High winds damaged the plane, adding $2,500 for repairs to Zentner’s investment. Zentner signed up for flying lessons from former fighter pilot Dave Henley. Henley took Zentner on training flights, but the day Zentner was to solo Henley was late. Zentner read the manual, took off alone, and from that day flew, no more lessons and nary a license. A Kodiak sheet metal worker volunteered his time to build a hanger on Zentner’s ranch. Guiding bear hunters from the air was a legal gray area, especially in territorial days, but Zentner and Henley made a practice of doing so. Aerial spotters may have aided hunters but bear attacks did not diminish. In 1958, Zentner lost ten head to bears. Ron Hurst lost six. Joe Beatty lost four, Ned

Roberts two, and Henley one. In 1960 the U.S. Bureau of Land Management hired Ivan Marks and his dozen bloodhounds to hunt Kodiak bears. The 6’6” Marks had won fame pursuing Sasquatch in California. Federal agents reasoned that he and his hounds could control Kodiaks. Bears ate his dogs. Kodiak ranchers’ anti-bear campaign nettled the island’s professional guides. Bear season in the 1960s ran from September to June. A guide earned $2,000 or more when a client bagged a bear. Guide Alf Madsen had invested $100,000 in camps and guiding equipment. JUNE 2022

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In 1962 bears on Kodiak inexplicably began killing notably more livestock. Guides and their customers began having trouble pinpointing bears near populous areas, requiring hunters to range farther afield. Guides suspected cattlemen were behind the new pattern. THE RANCHERS WERE TAKING a more aggressive but secretive tack. Instead of tracking bears from the scenes of cattle kills or catching predators in the act, the strategy was now to shoot as many bears as possible. Bears were being killed 20 miles from the nearest cow or steer. Zentner and Henley armed their planes. Zentner mounted an M-1 above his cockpit with a Nydar sight taped to his windshield to enhance his aim. Henley copied him. The idea was simple. Given the terrain, the best way to “thin” the bear population was to hunt from the air. Ranchers met at Tom Feldon’s cabin to discuss the details. In an atmosphere resembling a tent revival, participants handed Zentner checks for fuel and whatever else he might need to get the job done. He was to thin out the bears once and for all. Alaska had achieved statehood in 1959. On Kodiak, the tyro state Fish and Game Department was trying to protect both bears and cattle, a difficult task made more so because the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge butted up against ranchers’ land. Newly elected Governor Bill Egan felt Kodiak could sustain both bruins and cattle—once the bears were in check. The Egan administration sent spotter planes and game agents to help take out cattle-killing bears. Alaska Fish and Game agents knew the ranchers were shooting from aloft but said nothing as the state, too, made war on Kodiaks.

State agents Ovid McKinley and Johnny Morton killed six bears from spotter planes in 1963. HENLEY AND FELLOW flying ranchers were off the official aviation grid, operating from clearings on their ranches in small planes fitted with soft oversize tires suited for rough terrain. They made sure to stay clear of Kodiak town and other communities, but in the bush if pilots suspected bears were below, they dropped firecrackers into the underbrush, hoping to flush the animals. Buzzing a stretch near Anton Larsen Bay, Henley set a valley ablaze using this technique. Governor Egan assigned more Fish and Game agents to do a “bear-cattle study” that apparently required bear specimens. In 1963 alone, agents killed 35 Kodiaks from the air and on the ground. These agents also enforced state hunting and fishing regulations, putting them in contact with guides and clients. When guides asked about rumors that ranchers were shooting bears, agents professed to know nothing or promised to look into the matter—until Henley taxied up to that gas pump at the Kodiak airport. Within 24 hours, cries denouncing the bear slaughter on Kodiak Island had reached Egan’s office and those of Alaska’s congressional delegation. Ten professional guides tipped off a hunting magazine that wrote an exposé about the aerial hunts. Sportsmen nationwide began weighing in. Condemning the slaughter, the National Wildlife Federation

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UAF-1970-28-1308/W.F. ERSKINE COLLECTION/ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA/FAIRBANKS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES

STUART LUTZ/GADO/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF GUY DENTON

Drawn to the Wild Left, unidentified hunter provides a sense of scale for the skin of a Kodiak bear. Below, Dave Henley, Sr. and Al Cratty and friends.

A New Meaning for "Bear With Me..." Cattle ranchers still keep herds on Kodiak, and bears, their numbers moderated by hunters, nonetheless still take their share of beefsteak.

UAF-1970-28-1308/W.F. ERSKINE COLLECTION/ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA/FAIRBANKS; NATIONAL ARCHIVES

STUART LUTZ/GADO/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF GUY DENTON

declared ranching on Kodiak Island a mistake. Egan ordered the cattlemen to disarm their aircraft; ranchers ignored him until the governor’s office told ranchers their planes could not fly owing to lack of insurance. Ranchers inquired about getting planes insured—not possible, the Egan administration said, citing an “insurance snarl.” The ranchers pulled in their horns— except for Zentner, who spotted bruins from the air for hunters below until a 1972 storm destroyed his Piper Cub. Ranching still held its luster. In 1968 the Kodiak Junior Chamber of Commerce staged a rodeo at the abandoned federal dairy farm on Kalsin Bay, drawing a crowd of 500 to eyeball livestock from the surrounding ranches. Less lucky specimens provided the ingredients for a rodeo barbecue dinner. THE NEXT CHAPTER in the bear saga involved not bullets but barriers. Rancher Ron Hurst proposed bisecting the island with a fence similar to the State Barrier Fence in Western Australia, installed to keep rabbits, an invasive species, from overrunning Oz. At his Salty Cove Ranch, where bears had cost him 61 head valued at $250 per animal, Hurst had installed 11 miles of woven wire fence that diverted bears from his stock. “Nobody enjoys watching an old brownie fish a salmon stream more than I do,” Hurst told author Wanda Fields. “But, I lose a darn sight more beef to bears than I market. Civilization is moving north, and the bear is going to have to give way.” Alaska Stock Growers Association president John Grounds and Alaska Fish and Game Department director James Brooks also endorsed a “bear-free zone” on Kodiak. The result was a plan for 16 miles of 9’ fence along the base of the Chiniak Peninsula, home to most of the cattle ranches. Skeptics

The idea of a bear-proof fence caught on among islanders until someone wondered if a fence might wind up steering bears to herds.

wondered if any fence could keep a mature Kodiak Brown Bear from going wherever it wanted. Even so, the bear-proof fence, whose cost was pegged at between $200,000 and $750,000, did not seem that absurd. Trophy Kodiak bears and Kodiakraised cattle each had generated $100,000 in revenues in 1963. But Zentner warned that even if a barrier fence went up, its presence would not immunize ranchers from public outcry, because for the fence to work, every Kodiak on the wrong side of the wire would have to be destroyed. U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), about to announce a presidential bid, was willing to introduce an appropriations bill with $750,000 to go toward a barrier fence on Kodiak. Though not the specified 9’ size, steel posts ranging from six to eight feet tall already secured through federal funds were warehoused in the island town of Womens Bay. The Fish and Game Department began studying fence designs—until rancher Tom Feldon asked what if, instead of the barrier leading bears away from cattle, the fence led bears to cattle? Terrified that the reverse logic would be borne out, the ranchers aligned against the once-popular idea, and the bear-proof fence died unbuilt. Goldwater abandoned his appropriations effort. Some ranchers traded cattle for American bison, seeing the huge horned ruminants a source of meat and money that could defend itself against Kodiak bears. Hunters now take some 180 Kodiak bears a year; non-residents pay as much as $21,000 for state-mandated guide services. Modern corrals and pole barns dot the Kodiak State Fairgrounds, site each August of the Kodiak Rodeo, an echo of the days of Zentner, Henley, Burton, and the rest. Most of the post-war ranchers are gone, claimed by age or illness. A bronze plaque where Zentner ranched honors his memory. Some spreads, like Burton’s and Charlie Dornan’s, remain, raising mostly bison. At slaughtering time, a portable abattoir mounted on a trailer makes the rounds. A few eloping bison have gone feral, enlarging Kodiak Island’s roster of trophy beasts. Farmers still raise cattle on Kodiak, and still lose stock to those namesake bears. It is not unusual to encounter a cattleman on horseback battling 40 mph winds and horizontal rain to see if his animals are all right and, coming upon fresh bear tracks, unslinging the rifle he always keeps at hand. H JUNE 2022

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Pandemic Past Volunteer nurses tend to flu patients at the Oakland, Calif., Municipal Auditorium in 1918.

Plagues in the Nation: How Epidemics Shaped America By Polly J. Price Beacon 2022; $28.95

POLLY J. PRICE, highly regarded, well-published Professor of Global Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and Professor of Law at Emory Law, draws upon her extensive knowledge of her core subjects to deliver a fascinating, incisive history of American epidemics and public health crises from early days to the present. “History teaches that effective disease control is a matter not just of containing (or better yet, killing) pathogens but also of implementing effective laws and governance,” she writes. Price addresses both outbreaks and health scares including smallpox, yellow fever, the “Spanish flu,” polio, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19, among others. She details each crisis in compelling and illuminating fashion, showing that many problems associated with COVID have antecedents. In the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic, for example, medical experts did not always agree on local government’s role. The most common steps taken were school closures, bans on public gatherings, transportation

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curbs, limited closure of businesses, and. . .facemask ordinances—though health and government officials were not always in accord with how to respond. Face-mask mandates and quarantine orders often aroused ire, spawning resistance. As occurred in other epidemics, flu-mitigating measures often were implemented unevenly due to racial and class discrimination. Price combs the past to explain how Americans could have been prepared for many aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic but were not. The end of a crisis inevitably brings a gust of relief but also clouds the need to pass laws anticipating future outbreaks. In the present crisis, measures encouraged by medical and public health experts met grassroots resistance solidified by a lack of consistent national leadership, distrust in government, conflicts between state and federal authorities, and misleading social media advice, the last a factor absent from previous epidemics. Price unspools an excellent overview of how well and how badly the United States has dealt with health crises across the nation’s arc. Her prose is gripping, her references solid, and her main conclusion more than a little disturbing.

UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

Epidemics as Influencers

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Plagues in the Nation should be essential reading groups inherently inferior and decry, even fight, and a wake-up call for readers hoping to be ready attempts at achieving equality. And he closes with a call for vigilance to protect when, not if, the next pandemic breaks out.—Barthe Declaration’s aspirations. “Adherence to that bara Finlay is a regular contributor. great discovered truth, that we are all equally human,” he writes, “demands the continuation of The statement in the Declaration of Indepen- the struggle.”—Daniel B. Moskowitz writes the dence that “We hold these Truths to be self-evi- Scotus 101 column. dent, that all Men are created equal” was not operational but aspirational. Rendering that credo practical has not been easy. As historian In Chasing History Carl Bernstein, whose birthMichael Bellesiles writes in Inventing Equality, day is February 14, offers a valentine to his home“American history can be seen as a battle to rec- town and to his entry into the trade that made oncile the large gap between our stated ideals and him a journalism legend. The town was Washington, DC; the trade, newspapering. Bernstein grew the realities of our republic.” The nation has come far but has far to go. As up in the former after World War II and there Bellesiles makes clear, progress has proceeded apprenticed in the latter 1960-65. Neither now not steadily but stutteringly, with gains reversed exists in the form he chronicles. This lends his and significant periods in which a majority of mash note an elegiac tone. He mourns less for Americans had real doubts about equality. Even mossback Jim Crow DC than for the Evening Star those advocating greater equality have differed, (1852-1981), the highly regarded afternoon daily some envisioning full political rights, others at which he spent those five formative years. focusing on economic rights: the ability to enjoy Bernstein was a school-shirking 16-year-old the fruits of one’s labor. wisenheimer when his despairing dad engineered From the get-go, the American deck was a job interview for him at the Star, hoping the stacked in favor of well-to-do White men. paper would hire his wayward son as a copyboy. Progress toward equality meant securing more Yielding to fatherly concern, opportunity, and rights for women, for the less prosperous, for reli- curiosity, the unruly kid had the wit to recognize a gious minorities, for immigrants, and, most espe- path that might impose order on his adolescence. cially, for African Americans, most of them It did, in the bargain steeping him in skills that a enslaved. Northern delegates to the 1787 Consti- decade later earned him a slice of Pulitzer Prize tutional Convention and those from the South for reporting that toppled a president. The task of disagreed so irreconcilably on slavery that they pursuing information came naturally to this oldest child of crypto-communist parents whose ended up not defining citizenship. At its core, Inventing Equality recounts how McCarthy-era lives Bernstein dissected in his the Civil War led to the three great Reconstruc- 1989 book Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir. But first, except for typing, in which he’d tion-era amendments to that Constitution: the 13th, banning slavery; the 14th, decreeing anyone enrolled as his class’s lone male and at which he born in the United States a citizen; and the 15th, excelled—an accurate 90-wpm showing got the outlawing race as a reason to deny a person the Star to hire him—he had to learn the rudiments. Bernstein took to that drill with gleeful resolve, vote. Bellesiles then sadly chronicles how angry racists and indifferent enforcement for a half cen- embracing the rhythms of the newsroom, a familtury effectively neutralized those advances. ial setting without the tension that twanged at Bellesiles does exactly what a historian writing home, and learning to work the phones, the cops, for a general audience should—he states broad and the streets until he was as hardened as he themes that he fleshes out with anecdotes and needed to be to get that story, whatever that story quotes from public and private sources. He nar- was. Chasing is just that—a brisk, engaging lope, part Baedeker to a Washington known only to rates with clarity and pace. But these very virtues eliminate subtlety, a flaw locals and part how-to whose implicit lessons that has made him controversial in academia. transcend time and technology. Its protagonist progresses from copyboy to dicUnfortunate Supreme Court decisions are “constitutional monstrosities,” for instance, and tationist to legman to reporter, coming of age on Inventing ignores basic antebellum differences the job and in real life. He perceives his and his between the North and South other than slav- parents’ and his grandparents’ city with ever ery—international trade, for one. sharper eyes. He barely escapes high school and Nonetheless, Bellesiles has coupled an import- flunks out of college while flourishing under ant telling of America’s history to an eminently deadline. Before departing, as he must, he manreadable style. ages to be present for or within range of a wallopHe spotlights persistent forces that judge some ing, galloping half-decade of American history.

Twixt Ideal & Reality

Newspaper Years

Inventing Equality: Reconstructing the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War By Michael A. Bellesiles St. Martin’s, 2020; $28.99

Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom By Carl Bernstein Holt, 2022; $29.99

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Any reader who has worked in a newsroom or Atlanta Remade Professional Sports is available come to see a hometown for what it is will nod now from the University of Nebraska Press. with recognition at Bernstein’s acute portrayal of his origins and early career. —Michael Dolan In 1913 Charles A. Beard published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United In his 11th book Chuck Klosterman gets to the States, a book that, Willard Sterne Randall writes, heart of what he’s been writing and talking about “rocked the foundations of normally staid and all along. Essayist, critic, and novelist Klosterman hagiographic American history.” By making the has been entertaining a large readership for more case that the American colonies’ revolt against than 20 years with his unique interrogations of Great Britain and the subsequent shape of the popular culture, particularly the arenas of sports, government of the United States were undermusic, and movies. His latest effort seems like a girded by economic interests, Beard changed how culmination. The Nineties has a more scholarly Americans thought about their past and taught feel, clearly reflecting much primary source read- that history to their children. Beard’s always controversial thesis that money ing, though fans will recognize the voice and timand not ideology spurred the quest for indepenbre in this collection of interrelated essays. The Nineties differs from its antecedents, David dence seemed unpatriotic during the mid-20th Halberstam’s The Fifties (1993) and Bruce J. Century, but his focus on economics remains a Schulman’s The Seventies (2002). Those authors key element in the full picture of what happened flipped the scripts accorded their respective eras in the America of the 18th Century. by convention. Klosterman contrarily posits that In the century-plus since Beard’s opus arrived, the sensibilities associated with the 1990s deeply considerably more documents from the founding reflected those times. period have surfaced. In Fortunes, William Sterne Detached from politics, residents of Kloster- Randall uses those sources “to update Professor man’s 1990s showed little of the interest that pre- Beard’s famous hypothesis by providing a deeper decessor cohorts exhibited in “getting ahead.” He understanding of the financial lives of the Foundacknowledges that the self-aware apathy he cites ers, of their interests, and what acted as the drivrefers most specifically to the outlook of col- ers of their decisions.” Readable and prolific—Founders’ Fortunes is lege-educated individuals who came of age during the decade, but that Weltanschauung exerted a his 13th book on early American history—Randall wider reach. The unmooring of personal identity analyzes episodes that formed the nation, in from conventional badges of success or grand effect recounting 30 pivotal events, from Benjanarratives of social progress or moral clarity min Franklin’s publication in 1729 of the first ediserved both to close out the post-war monocul- tion of the Pennsylvania Gazette to Congress ture and begin the cultural splintering so pro- passing the first U.S. bankruptcy law in 1800. nounced in the last two decades. Randall shows the most successful founders To a great extent, this fragmentation arose building their fortunes: George Washington outfrom technology—though not necessarily the maneuvering rivals to win the hand of wealthy usual tech suspects, as Klosterman shows in his widow Martha Custis, John Hancock developing chapter on video cassette recorders and video a chain of stores, Robert Morris and Silas Deane stores. The surge into the market of tens of thou- funding privateers that capture French ships and sands of rental titles as the 1980s became the selling off the vessels and their cargoes. More significantly, he demonstrates the ways 1990s promoted a silo-shattering aesthetic diversity akin to that later visited upon popular music in which punitive British tax and trade policies by Napster and file sharing. Suddenly, film fans virtually forced the colonies to quit the empire anywhere, availing themselves of near borderless and how in the 1780s the suffering of farmers and access, were privately constructing their own urban tradesmen from the dollar’s devaluation canons while rejecting received wisdom about highlighted fatal flaws in the existing loose conwhich movies truly mattered. federation of states, making a stronger central The Nineties feels like punctuation to the sen- government a necessity. tence Douglas Coupland began in his era-defining Randall refutes Beard’s thesis that the Consti1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated tution was a means of further enriching its forCulture. With time on his side, Klosterman, gaining mulators; he notes that at the Constitutional depth through distance, deconstructs an era and a Convention the five richest participants refused youth culture that was self-involved from its outset. to sign the final edition. But he makes clear that —Clayton Trutor teaches History at Norwich Uni- Beard was right that economic concerns were, versity in Northfield, Vermont. His book Loserville: alongside desire for political freedom, central in How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta and shaping the nation. —Daniel B. Moskowitz

Halfway Backing Beard

Chucking It All

The Nineties: A Book By Chuck Klosterman Penguin, $28

The Founders’ Fortunes: How Money Shaped the Birth of America by Willard Sterne Randall Dutton, 2022; $29

AMERICAN HISTORY

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! t u O t i k c e Ch

THIS WEEK IN

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Astoria, Oregon, spreads along the bank of the Columbia River, 10 miles upstream from the Pacific Ocean. Established in 1811 as an outpost of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, Astoria, named for the industrious German immigrant who had founded the enterprise, was the first American settlement west of the Rockies. When the fur trade’s luster faded, the town turned to lumbering, shipping, and fishing. Cannery and mill workers, sailors, and fishermen packed Astoria’s brothels and 57 saloons. Per capita, the city was “perhaps the most wicked place on earth,” wrote the Oregonian. A boom/bust pattern set in. World War II brought prosperity—and peril. One of the war’s few seaborne attacks on the Lower 48 came in June 1942 when the crew of Japanese submarine I-25 shelled nearby Fort Stevens. In the 1950s, Astorian Maila Nurmi won fame as TV horror flick hostess Vampira. Local inventor Eben H. Carruthers revolutionized fish canning in 1960 with a machine that sliced tuna into uniform shapes but by 1980 nearly all of Astoria’s canneries had closed. Today, tourism has brought new life to the waterfront. Visitors can stroll the 6.4-mile Riverwalk, sample the wares of micro-breweries and boutiques that occupy refurbished warehouses, and learn more about Astoria at the Columbia River Maritime Museum (crmm.org). —Richard J. Goodrich writes in Spokane, Washington.

An American Place

An Evolution from Furs to Fun Astoria long ago shed its pioneering origins, top, but the harbor hosts a newer relic—former lightship Columbia, whose beam once kept in- and outbound vessels on a safe course at the mouth of its namesake river. Commercial Street, below left, reflects the city’s boomtown days.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: AGEFOTOSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; DARRYL BROOKS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; MARK A. JOHNSON/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

River City

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