American History Spring 2023

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Spring

2023

Abigail Adams endured British occupation, a smallpox epidemic, and her husband’s indifference. By Jon Mael

Steel skeletons and elevators allowed architects to build higher and higher. By Dennis Goodwin

Musketry crackled and cannons thundered at the 1988 Gettysburg reenactment. By John Banks

—see page 46

Weapons

The

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Write Us!

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! For future issues, we want to fill this section with our devoted readers’ thoughts and opinions, so please write us at americanhistory@historynet.com. In the meantime, here is the famous “Remember the Ladies” letter Abigail Adams wrote to her husband on March 31, 1776, and enjoy the story about her on P. 28.

Braintree March 31 1776

Letters

I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you; and tell me if you may where your Fleet are gone? What sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence? Are not the Gentery Lords and the common people vassals, are they not like the uncivilized Natives Brittain represents us to be? I hope their Riffel Men who have shewen themselves very savage and even Blood thirsty; are not a specimen of the Generality of the people.

I am willing to allow the Colony great merrit for having produced a Washington but they have been shamefully duped by a Dunmore.

I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs. Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and christian principal of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us.

Do not you want to see Boston; I am fearfull of the small pox, or I should have been in before this time. I got Mr. Crane to go to our House and see what state it was in. I find it has been occupied by one of the Doctors of a Regiment, very dirty, but no other damage has been done to it. The few things which were left in it are all gone. Cranch1 has the key which he never deliverd up. I have wrote to him for it and am determined to get it cleand as soon as possible and shut it up. I look upon it a new acquisition of property, a property which one month ago I did not value at a single Shilling, and could with pleasure have seen it in flames.

The Town in General is left in a better state than we expected, more oweing to a percipitate flight than any Regard to the inhabitants, tho some individuals discoverd a sense of honour and justice and have left the rent of the Houses in which they were, for the owners and the

furniture unhurt, or if damaged sufficent to make it good.

Others have committed abominable Ravages. The Mansion House of your President2 is safe and the furniture unhurt whilst both the House and Furniture of the Solisiter General3 have fallen a prey to their own merciless party. Surely the very Fiends feel a Reverential awe for Virtue and patriotism, whilst they Detest the paricide and traitor.

I feel very differently at the approach of spring to what I did a month ago. We knew not then whether we could plant or sow with safety, whether when we had toild we could reap the fruits of our own industery, whether we could rest in our own Cottages, or whether we should not be driven from the sea coasts to seek shelter in the wilderness, but now we feel as if we might sit under our own vine and eat the good of the land.

I feel a gaieti de Coar [sic] to which before I was a stranger. I think the Sun looks brighter, the Birds sing more melodiously, and Nature puts on a more chearfull countanance. We feel a temporary peace, and the poor fugitives are returning to their deserted habitations

Tho we felicitate ourselves, we sympathize with those who are trembling least the Lot of Boston should be theirs. But they cannot be in similar circumstances unless pusilanimity and cowardise should take possession of them. They have time and warning given them to see the Evil and shun it.—I long to hear that you have declared an independancy—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness. H

American History readers wanting to pillory, praise, or query the publication: write to us at americanhistory@historynet.com

Lincoln’s Legacy

The Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia won the prestigious Wendy Allen Award in November.

From left: Lincoln Group President David J. Kent, artist Wendy Allen, Lincoln Forum Vice Chairman Jonathan White, and Chairman Harold

For Old Abe!

In November, the Lincoln Forum hosted its 27th annual symposium in Gettysburg. The event featured two cable news stars: John Avlon, who spoke on “How Lincoln Helped Win the Peace After World War II,” and Jon Meacham, who delivered an address on Lincoln as a moral leader.

Three biographers discussed their recent books: Walter Stahr on Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase; Elizabeth D. Leonard on Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler; and John Rhodehamel on John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln assassination.

Mosaic

Historian and Lincoln Forum Vice Chairman Jonathan White discussed his recent books about Lincoln and African Americans; Roger Lowenstein and Frank J. Williams conferred on how the North financed the Civil War; and Christopher Oakley received a standing ovation for showing how historic photographs and computer technology could pinpoint the location of the platform from which Lincoln gave his epochal “Gettysburg Address.”

Attendees at the symposium enjoyed the all-author book signing, a battlefield tour by Carol Reardon, a concert of Civil War music featuring Jari Villanueva and the Federal City Brass Band. Breakout sessions and panels featured Forum favorites such as Harold Holzer, John Marszalek, Craig Symonds, Edna Green Medford, Christian McWhirter, Edward Steers, J. Matthew Gallman, Michael Green, and Andrew F. Lang.

The Forum’s 2022 Richard N. Current Award of Achievement went to Meacham; the Harold Holzer Book Award went to Lowenstein; and the Wendy Allen Award went to the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia.

For more information on the Forum, or to join, visit www.thelincolnforum.org.

West Coast Preservation

The coastlines and backcountry of San Diego are under threat, and the city’s Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO), works to prevent major heritage losses through advocacy, preemptive negotiations, public awareness, and education. In November 2022, SOHO released its annual “Most Endangered List,” that includes seven endangered sites. Check out sohosandiego.org for more details.

The California Theatre (1927) at 1122 Fourth Ave., tops the list, as its beautiful Deco ornamentation and Caliente racetrack mural are crumbling. SOHO’s other “most endangered” sites are: Barrett Ranch House (1891) in Jamul, a two-story Victorian farmhouse with distinctive architectural features from the era. Big Stone Lodge (circa 1930) in Poway, a 1930sera resort near the route of a San DiegoEscondido stagecoach line. Granger Music Hall (1898) on East Fourth St. in National City, designed by architect Irving Gill. Presidio Park in Old Town, with rich cross-cultural history related to conflicting cultures and values. The San Diego History Center has restored the Serra Museum and added interpretive video displays, but much work remains to preserve artifacts and historical topography amid proposals for new pedestrian pathways and ADA access. 100-year-old pepper trees in Kensington, which the city had planned to remove because their roots could push up through sidewalks. Several trees have already been cut down. Red Rest and Red Roost Cottages (1894) at La Jolla Cove. A design by architects Alcorn & Benton calls for a new four-story condominium building and reconstruction of the cottages for commercial use. The design is likely to be in the spirit of the architects’ nearby Coast Boulevard Cottages, where two new stories were added behind a shingled 1909 bungalow. Plans have been submitted to the city of San Diego and California Coastal Commission, review is due for completion next year.

Enlist now! Join the volunteer army transcribing the papers and correspondence of notable figures in the collections of the Library of Congress. Launched in 2018, the Library’s “By the People” crowdsourcing campaign has several active projects in progress. Volunteers are helping transcribe, review, and tag digitized pages in the collections of Walt Whitman, Clara Barton, James Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, and more. As of December 2022, the Library has released more than 831,000 pages for transcription, and about 591,000 have been transcribed. For more information visit: https://crowd.loc.gov

Rev War Soldiers Found at Camden

The Revolutionary War in the South was a mean, snarling affair. It might even be considered our first civil war, pitting Loyalist Americans against those who sought independence.

More than 200 engagements occurred in South Carolina alone, including the August 16, 1780, Battle of Camden. The fight pitted British Lt. Gen. Lord Cornwallis against American Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga. At Camden, however, despite having numeric superiority, Gates suffered a sound defeat.

In fall 2022, Archaeologists made a significant discovery just a few inches below the battlefield’s surface, the remains of 14 casualties of the fight. The South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust announced the excavation and South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology archaeologist James Legg led the onsite field team.

Some human remains and artifacts were found less than six inches below the surface in several locations across the battlefield. Twelve of the bodies found are Patriot Continental soldiers, one is possibly a North Carolina Loyalist, and one fought for the British 71st Regiment of Foot, Fraser’s Highlanders.

South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust CEO Doug Bostick put the dig into perspective. “When these young men marched into the darkness on that summer night in 1780, they did so out of love for their country despite the consequences that may befall them. Our intent is to lay them to rest with the respect and honor they earned more than two centuries ago.”

The excavations began September 2022 and lasted eight weeks. Researchers say they hope to compile information about the soldier’s health and diet, age, gender, and race to tell the personal stories of the soldiers and compare the data to historical records. Forensic anthropologists from the Richland County Coroner’s Office are participating in the project to study the remains. To keep abreast of the project, go to scbattlegroundtrust.org.

TOP BID

Helping Hands $6,875

These Gemini G-2C high pressure spacesuit training gloves were part of a second suit produced by the David Clark company for NASA’s Gemini program. They sold in December 2022 on Heritage Auctions for $6,875. When NASA was seeking a suit manufacturer for their upcoming Gemini program, it carried out design level evaluations with B.F. Goodrich and Arrowhead. The David Clark company came in with its own company-funded prototype using its Link-net technology that had been developed for the X-15 program. NASA considered it the superior suit and the contract was awarded to David Clark in 1962 to manufacture the Gemini spacesuits. The early Gemini gloves, such as these ones, used a lace-up restraint on the back of the hand that inhibited manual mobility while pressurized. Later versions of the Gemini gloves used adjustable straps and adjustable palm restraint bars to retain the shape of the pressurized glove on the hand.

Wide Array

The artifacts in the World War II Experience Museum range from heavy tanks to the personal effects of soldiers. Tank rides are available on certain days.

Naturally, Gettysburg, Pa., is full of places to visit and sites to see related to the Civil War (see page 46), but a new attraction focuses on Gettysburg’s involvement with World War II. The World War II American Experience Museum, just a 10-minute drive from Gettysburg’s Lincoln Square, had a soft opening on June 18 and opened to the public in October. The museum is the work of Frank Buck—a retired Peterbilt truck dealer and long-time collector of World War II memorabilia—and his wife, Loni.

Gettysburg’s Greatest Generation

The Bucks invested $7 million to put up three 12,000-squarefoot buildings on 30 acres of farmland near their home about five miles northwest of Gettysburg. Frank has spent decades collecting nearly 80 World War II vehicles, uniforms, and other memorabilia.

Overshadowed by its Civil War connections, the town of Gettysburg has several ties to World War II, as well. D-Day commander and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower maintained a home in Gettysburg. The town was also the site of a secret U.S. Navy mapmaking office, an army psychological warfare training camp, and a POW camp on the Civil War battlefield where German prisoners were held. The town has applied for American World War II Heritage City status from the National Park Service.

Tickets to the museum are $14 with discounts for veterans, seniors, children, and groups.

Picture Perfect

Three American workmen pose for an 1850s image holding the tools of their woodworking trade. From left, a spoke shave and a large chisel, while the man on the right uses a sharpening stone to put an edge on a hand plane blade. Evident emotion is uncommon in images taken in the 19th century, but the quiet smiles and shining eyes of these craftsmen indicate pride in their vocation.

What is It?

What was the purpose of this metal marker?

Remember the Alamo

On March 3, 2023, amid anniversary observations for the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, the historic site in San Antonio, Texas, will open a two-story exhibition hall and collections building that will be directly behind the iconic mission. Its 10,000 square feet of gallery space will center on the 430-item collection of Alamo and Texana artifacts donated by British rock star Phil Collins and the recently purchased collection of Spanish colonial artifacts from acclaimed Alamo artist Don Yena and wife Louise.

The latter includes more than 400 items used by South western indigenous people and settlers, from swords and can nons to kitchen utensils, farming implements and ranching gear. Yena also donated six of his large paintings.

The ongoing $388 million overhaul of Alamo Plaza—a part nership between the city, Texas’ General Land Office, and the Alamo Trust—will include a new visitor center and museum in which the collections will ultimately be housed. “When people leave the Alamo,” said trust executive director Kate Rogers, “We don’t want them to say, ‘Is that it?’”

Be the first to email the correct answer to dshoaf@historynet.com, subject heading “Fireman,” and your name will be posted with the description of the item.

Made It Out Alive

It was a perfect late autumn day in the northern Rockies. Not a cloud in the sky, and just enough cool in the air to stir up nostalgic memories of my trip into the backwoods. is year, though, was di erent. I was going it solo. My two buddies, pleading work responsibilities, backed out at the last minute. So, armed with my trusty knife, I set out for adventure.

Well, what I found was a whole lot of trouble. As in 8 feet and 800-pounds of trouble in the form of a grizzly bear. Seems this grumpy fella was out looking for some adventure too. Mr. Grizzly saw me, stood up to his entire 8 feet of ferocity and let out a roar that made my blood turn to ice and my hair stand up. Unsnapping my leather sheath, I felt for my hefty, trusty knife and felt emboldened. I then showed the massive grizzly over 6 inches of 420 surgical grade stainless steel, raised my hands and yelled, “Whoa bear! Whoa bear!” I must have made my point, as he gave me an almost admiring grunt before turning tail and heading back into the woods.

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Swing Low, Sweet Brinks Truck

“SAY THIS AFTER ME,” Reverend Ike urged his flock: “I have no fear of money.”

“I have no fear of money,” the congregation repeated.

American Schemers

“Money is not against my religion,” Reverend Ike said.“Money is not against my religion,” the crowd echoed. Money certainly didn’t violate the gospel of Reverend Ike. He loved money with a religious zeal, and he urged his followers to love lucre, too. “If thy religion cannot stand money, thy religion is bad, not money,” he said. “I never understood preachers who get up and talk about how terrible money is, then, before they sit down, they ask for some.”

The audience laughed, and Reverend Ike proclaimed that he had no theological qualms about enjoying the riches his devotees donated. “Do you know how much I love the precious Lord when I sit in my Rolls Royce limousine?”

The United States was the first nation on earth to establish freedom of religion, and that freedom spawned a class of preachers who create their own churches and preach their own theologies. Among the most entertaining was Reverend Ike. He was born Frederick Joseph Eikerenkoetter II in South Carolina in 1935, son of a Baptist minister of Dutch and Indonesian heritage and an African American schoolteacher.

At 14, he became assistant pastor to his father’s congregation, later earning a theology degree at Chicago’s American Bible College. After a stint as a U.S. Air Force chaplain, he moved to Boston in 1964 and founded the Miracle Temple, where he practiced the art of faith healing.

“I was just about the best in Boston,” he told an interviewer. “Snatching people out of wheelchairs and off their crutches, pouring some oil over them while I commanded them to walk or see or hear.”

Healing the sick is noble work, but it doesn’t pay the bills, especially if you’re not a physician and can’t charge for the service. After two years, the Rev. Eikerenkoetter fled to Manhattan to preach what he dubbed “Prosperity Now.” He rented a Harlem theater, billed himself on the marquee as “Rev. Ike,” and trademarked the nickname. His materialist gospel and theatrical exhortations attracted a large, mostly Black, following and soon hundreds of radio stations were broadcasting his sermons. In 1969, he paid $500,000 for a 5,000-seat movie theater at Broadway and West 175th that he christened the Palace Cathedral. By the mid-1970s, his over-the-top sermons were airing on TV across America. “Along with Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Pat Robertson,” The New York Times noted, “he was one of the first evangelists to grasp the power of television.”

Preaching before huge enlargements of $1,000 bills and attired in expensive suits—some funereal black, others flamboyant orange or pink— Ike informed followers that the first step to getting rich was to visualize the cash they craved: “Close your eyes and see green—money up to your armpits, a roomful of money and there you are, just tossing around in it like a swimming pool.”

He encouraged disciples to write him letters detailing their problems— and to be sure to include a generous donation. In return, he’d send a prayer cloth capable of working “miracles of healing, blessing and deliverance,” plus advice on how to solve problems. His replies, he admitted, were all identical. “Most people think there are separate answers to each problem,” he told an interviewer in 1972. “There’s not but one problem. If I can get a person to believe in himself, that’s my whole ministry, simply to inspire.”

Norman wrote. “Rev. Ike was its Little Richard.”

Like Little Richard, the reverend loved to sing, and while preaching he’d spontaneously burst into song. “Lots and lots of money ready for my use,” he crooned during one 1972 sermon. “Oh, yes, it’s ready for my use.” And he sang about his favorite possession: “Swing low, sweet Rolls Royce, coming for to carry me home.” He claimed to own “10 or 12” Rolls cars: “My garage runneth over.” Driving a Rolls advertises your wealth, he said. “Therefore I boldly declare: I am rich! I am rich in health, happiness, success, prosperity and moneeeeeeeeey!”

Some preachers insist that every word of the Bible is literally true. Reverend Ike disagreed. He freely interpreted the Good Book. Sure, St. Paul said, “Love of money is the root of all evil” but, Ike explained, what Paul really meant was that “lack of money is the root of all evil.”

Sure, Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” but Ike appended a comic addendum: “Think how terrible it must be for a poor man to get in—he doesn’t even have a bribe for the gatekeeper.”

Put Your Wig on Straight

Reverend Ike didn’t invent the idea of creating a religion that married two American fixations—God and money. That’s an old tradition, known to religious scholars as the “prosperity gospel.” In the late 1800s, Russell Conwell, the Baptist minister who founded Temple University, delivered his famous “Acres of Diamonds” sermon 6,152 times, each time preaching that “it is your duty to get rich.” In 1925, Bruce Barton, an advertising executive and future congressman, published The Man Nobody Knows, which identified Jesus as “the Founder of Modern Business.” In 1952, Methodist minister Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking, a mega-bestseller that combined religion with self-help pep talks. Peale touted a vacuum cleaner salesman who got rich by repeating a mantra: “If God be for me, then I know that with God’s help I can sell vacuum cleaners.”

The reverend’s brilliant innovation was to combine the “prosperity gospel” with the exuberant flair of African American entertainers. “Norman Vincent Peale would be the movement’s Hank Williams,” journalist Tony

In the 1980s and ’90s, Ike’s oratory evolved, sounding less like Christian sermonizing and more like New Age self-help lectures. “I interpret the Bible psychologically rather than theologically,” he said. He moved to Los Angeles and discoursed on “mental reconditioning” and “The Science of Living ” and “The Power of Fascination.” Of course, he still loved money, evidenced by lectures with titles such as “The Excitement of Money” and “How to Make Money While You Are Sleeping.”

“Money is just like a woman,” he wrote. “Money has emotions. Money has feelings, and if you hurt the feelings of money she is going to stay away from you, or give you trouble.”

Reverend Ike never hurt money’s feelings, and she never left him. When he died at 74 in 2009, he left an estate worth several million dollars—certainly more than enough to bribe heaven’s gatekeeper. Upon his death, Rev. Ike Ministries issued a statement that captured the essence of the founder’s creed: “In lieu of flowers, Rev. Ike would ask that tributes and/or offerings be sent to Rev. Ike Ministries.” H

Razor’s Edge

Innovations

AS A YOUNG INVENTOR, King C. Gillette was inspired by disposable bottle caps to create another disposable item that would integrate itself into everyday use and, thus, be a profitable business venture. In 1895, Gillette worked out the idea for a razor blade that fit into a holder and could be replaced when dull. Engineer William E. Nickerson produced the thin, sharpened steel blades. In 1901, Gillette formed the American Safety

Razor Company, renamed Gillette in 1902. Production began in 1903, and Gillette was granted his patent on November 15, 1904. In 1903, Gillette sold 51 razors and 168 blades. By 1915, he had sold 450,000 razors and more than 70 million blades. Today, the disposable razor is an indispensable item in nearly every home. —Melissa A. Winn

Bad Medicine

Rising political star William Crawford’s life was upended when medicine he took for a skin ailment brought on a debilitating stroke.

If You Have Your Health…

On May 13, four days before the 2022 Pennsylvania primaries, John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor running for the Democratic Party’s senatorial nomination, suffered a stroke. Fetterman won his primary by a huge margin, and took a lead in the polls against the GOP winner, Mehmet Oz. But he did not appear in public to campaign until October, and when he did, his speech was choppy and halting. Even a friendly review of Fetterman’s performance in his lone debate with Oz conceded that “while his overall points were intelligible, it was at times genuinely difficult to understand some of his sentences.”

Fetterman was not the first American with a disability to run for office. A candidate’s ailment can be the thing that sinks him, or a mark of his gumption, as shown by the sudden onsets of paralysis that afflicted two presidential candidates, one in the 19th century, and one in the 20th.

As James Monroe, last of the “Founding Fathers” presidents, neared the end of his administration (1817-25), a pack of younger men, all belonging, like him, to the first Republican Party, panted to succeed him: John Quincy Adams, his Secretary of State; John Calhoun, his Secretary of War; Henry Clay, Speaker of the House; and Andrew Jackson,

the hero of New Orleans during the War of 1812. The favorite of the field, though, was William Crawford. Handsome, tall, with a receding hairline that gave him gravitas, Crawford had served as a senator from Georgia and as a diplomat. In 1816, he had challenged Monroe for the Republican nomination, standing down at the last minute and accepting the job of Treasury Secretary instead on the grounds that he was young enough to wait. He spent the Monroe years scheming to undermine his rivals. Adams, in a sour diary entry, called Crawford “a worm preying upon the vitals of the administration within its own body.” Ex-presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison liked the worm, however, welcoming him on visits to Monticello and Montpelier as if anointing the heir apparent.

Then, in the fall of 1823, disaster struck. Medicine that Crawford took to cure a skin condition instead brought on a stroke. At first he could not

Adapt and Overcome

After Franklin Roosevelt lost the use of his legs to polio, his mother wanted him to give up public life. Roosevelt instead worked even harder to win office.

speak, see, or move his limbs; Cabinet-level discussions of what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine proceeded without his input. Over time, Crawford’s condition improved, but progress was slow. In the new year, his supporters called for a caucus in Washington, D.C., of Republican senators and representatives to pick their party’s next presidential candidate. This was the system that had been used to select nominees for a generation. But Crawford’s rivals, sensing his vulnerability, stayed away and denounced the custom as “king caucus.” Crawford won the poll of the rump that showed up, but it was a hollow victory.

A century later, Franklin Roosevelt was considering his own White House run. His fifth cousin (and wife’s uncle) Theodore had brought the office into the family. Franklin himself, after a term in the New York Senate and eight years as undersecretary of the Navy, filled the veep slot on a Democratic ticket swamped by the GOP tsunami of 1920. Even this loss earned Roosevelt points as a show of party loyalty in hard times. But his rise was halted the following summer when, during a vacation cruise in the Bay of Fundy, he suddenly lost sensation in his legs. Decades before the Salk vaccine, he had contracted polio.

Roosevelt found that by using upper body strength he could swing himself across short distances on crutches, and stand with the help of leg braces to give a speech. But despite years of physical therapy and hot spring baths, he never recovered control of his limbs. His mother, Sara, wanted him to retire to the family estate at New York’s Hyde Park and live the life of a permanent patient. But his advisers, his wife Eleanor, and Roosevelt himself were determined he stay in public life. At the 1924 Democratic Convention, he nominated New York Governor Al Smith for president, hailing him as “the Happy Warrior of the political battlefield.” His game hobble to the mic and his gallant smile made the nickname apply to himself. When he ran to succeed Smith as governor four years later, Smith dismissed concerns about his health by saying “a governor does not have to be an acrobat. We do not elect him for his ability to do a double back flip.”

In the 1824 cycle, Crawford’s support slipped as the election approached. With the Republican Party unable to agree on a candidate, it was every man for himself. Since none of the contestants won a majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives picked the winner from among the top three finishers. Crawford made the cut, behind Jackson and Adams. But on

the eve of the House vote a friendly kibitzer wrote that even Crawford’s supporters were concerned by the state of his health. He could walk and talk again, and see well enough to play cards without spectacles. Yet his liabilities were “but too evident….I will not express a confidence which I do not feel.”

The tension wore Crawford to the breaking point. One winter day, he went to the White House to discuss with lame-duck Monroe the appointment of customs collectors. When he and the president disagreed, Crawford, cracking, swung up his cane and called Monroe a “damned infernal old scoundrel.” Monroe grabbed the fireplace tongs to defend himself and threatened to ring for the servants to throw Crawford out. Crawford blurted an apology, and left, never to see Monroe again.

When the House met to pick Monroe’s successor in February 1825, Adams won on the first ballot.

Roosevelt won the New York governor’s race in 1928, and was re-elected two years later. In 1932, in the depth of the Depression, he won the Democratic nomination for president, and carried 42 of 48 states. He would go on to win the White House three more times.

Why did Roosevelt succeed where Crawford failed? Crawford had strong rivals able to take advantage of his travails, while Roosevelt faced a GOP blasted by economic catastrophe. But the key difference was their differing disabilities. Crawford’s stroke left him blind and mute as well as immobile, and while he recovered in great part, he was never again 100 percent. As a sympathetic biographer admitted, his “intellect never regained its full tone and power.”

Roosevelt’s paralysis was total, but his mouth, his mind, and his charm were unaffected. A forgiving press never showed him wheelchair bound; eloquence, savvy and will did the rest.

John Fetterman won his senate race, 51 percent to 46.5 percent. Like Roosevelt, he was lucky in his opponent—Mehmet Oz was a TV doctor making his maiden political race. Unlike Crawford or Roosevelt, Fetterman was running for the Senate, not the White House. There are 100 senators, whose job is to vote and advise. There is only one president, who must govern and lead. Voters are more forgiving of would-be solons than candidates for Mount Rushmore. Fetterman also had 21st century science to his advantage: He used voice recognition technology to make up for his impaired hearing, and enough voters were assured by his conviction that he could, and therefore would, recover.

Medical tech can win offices, but office-holding is not for the weak. Young presidents—Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama—all step down with gray hairs. Good luck to Sen. Fetterman. H

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Hidden in Plain Sight

David Goodrich uncovered stories in familiar places on the road

The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in the open: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, retired climate scientist and author David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad. On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad covers his odyssey. It’s a comprehensive and engaging look at the history of the places he stopped at along the way, but it’s also a personal journal, documenting the journey of self-discovery both physical and emotional that happens on a bike ride of a lifetime.

What inspired you to write a book about the Underground Railroad?

I am a climate scientist and have written two books about that. I also like to ride my bike. While riding through the small town of Vandalia, Ill., I stopped at a museum and a woman there handed me a heavy brass ring and asked, “Do you know what this is? It’s a slave collar.” She said Vandalia had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and that’s what got my curiosity going, the idea that I was crossing this invisible river where people on the run were coming up from the South. The book is

based on a couple of rides over a few years. On the Eastern ride I followed Harriet Tubman’s route. She was enslaved in Cambridge, Md., and ultimately took her family to a little chapel in the town of St. Catharines, Ontario. That route took me through all kinds of familiar places that were not really very familiar to me—New York and Philadelphia. Almost like the undersides of cities, and where these formerly enslaved people were on the run.

The second part of the book is about riding from New Orleans, which was the predominant center of the slave trading market, to Lake Erie and a lot of the western routes of the Underground Railroad.

How was riding the route on a bike different than traveling it by car?

I thought that I could get closer to the experience of formerly enslaved people by being on a bike. A bike gives you the sense for the terrain. When I

was riding along the Ohio River, I got the sense of how scary it could be for the formerly enslaved people, because the slave hunters were on both banks. But once you get up in the hills above the Ohio, there was shelter. There were Quaker towns, safe houses, and Underground Railroad houses. Being on a bike can give you some kind of a feeling of what these people were going through. Of course, I was also riding during the daytime, in safety, with Gore-Tex and nice gears and spokes. You also bump into people on the bike and conversations happen. There was once when I was coming up a real steep hill in Kentucky and I was watching a squall come across a field. A guy from a nearby house says to me, “Come on inside quick!” And he gave me a whole story about working in coal mines in Kentucky. Those kind of things happen.

What was it like for you to tackle the history of somebody so mythologized as Harriet Tubman?

What’s interesting is that Harriet Tubman is very well-known now. She’s going to be on the $20 bill! But at the time, she was a wraith. Quite intentionally she made herself as close to invisible as she could. She’s a very tiny woman, but prodigiously strong. In one of her more famed escapes in Troy, N.Y., she disguises herself as the mother of the man she is trying to free. She gets into the marshall’s office and grabs him and yells to this mob outside, “Come on! Let’s get him!” And they manage to free him. At the time, the other conductors are amazed by her. She shows up in Philadelphia with another half dozen people that she’s brought up through Maryland and Delaware. She has all kinds of ingenious escapes along the way, including one in Wilmington, Del., where she smuggles freedom seekers out past slave hunters in a wagon of bricks. It was very easy to find her route in Maryland and Delaware, but after Philadelphia it took a lot of research. And she took many routes. We have all these digital footprints today, and you can’t go anywhere that somebody can’t track you. But even now people in places that are known Underground Railroad safehouses may say, “We think she was here, but we don’t know.” There’s this element even now that one of the most famous Americans is a ghost.

Did you have specific stories or sites you wanted to cover?

One of the references I found was a book in the Library of Congress by Charles Blockson, one of the eminent scholars of Black history. His book had a driving tour of Harriet Tubman sites. So, I thought, “Okay. This is where I need to go.” Then there were particular places along the way,

especially in upstate New York, Albany, the Myers Residence. We know that Harriet Tubman stayed there. In Peterboro, N.Y., there’s the National Abolition Hall of Fame built around Gerrit Smith, a prominent sponsor of the Underground Railroad and of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. It was fascinating to talk to the people who are keeping that history alive.

What was it like to tackle such a difficult subject matter as slavery?

You have to approach it with a certain amount of humility, especially from an old white guy looking at this subject. You have to be careful talking about the Underground Railroad. Best estimates are about 20,000 people traveled it to freedom, but when you compare it with the number of enslaved who were moved in the forced transport from the Upper South of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, the old tobacco plantations, to the cotton industry in the Deep South, there is a huge migration that takes place, on the order of a million people. There are places right around Washington, D.C., that are the center of this—for example in Alexandria, Va., the Franklin and Armfield firm, which some refer to as the Amazon of slave trading. People would be marched down the Shenandoah Valley, through Tennessee and onto the Natchez Trace and you can still see the signs of that.

One of the visuals we picked for the cover of the book is a photograph of the Old Trace from Nashville, Tenn., to Natchez, Miss., and it’s like a U-cut through the forest. There were thousands and thousands of chained feet that made that trek. I was riding the Natchez Trace Parkway, which is a beautiful road, and off to the side you see stretches of the Old Trace and you realize that those were people’s chained feet that formed that cut. So, the history bumps right up against you.

It’s not just a history book. It’s a travel journal. Tell us a little about the journey.

Well, I’ve done a lot of long-distance bike rides, and you get into a certain rhythm. People say it must be really hard, and because we have all our gear on the bike, it’s a pretty heavy load. I tell people, I have a job where I only have to work five hours a day. If I do 12 miles an hour and I ride for five hours, I have my 60 miles for the day. I would try to map out those days and end up someplace interesting.

A day’s ride is almost independent of the weather. Big electrical storms, yes, you need to get out of those. But otherwise, big winds, and heat, you have to ride through it. Some of the most interesting riding is in urban areas you know pretty well. Coming out of Philadelphia into New Jersey, there’s a huge suspension bridge. Bridges are windy and that was a lot different to ride on a bike than in a car. Also—the places you hear bad things about, you find out they’re not necessarily true. I had heard all kinds of bad things about Camden, N.J. It had a high murder rate, but it has changed a bit. It may not have fancy bike paths and such, but once again, we met people along the way, that wanted to help us on our way. H

A Splendid Twig

The world’s “largest baseball bat”—120 feet tall and 68,000 pounds—helps make the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory a can’t-miss destination in downtown Louisville. Opened in July 1996, this is more than a museum. Legendary Hillerich & Bradsby Co. baseball bats are still manufactured here.

Old Hickory Slugger

American Place

ON A BALMY AFTERNOON in July 1884, John “Bud” Hillerich of Louisville, Ky., did what many other teenage boys might have done in his place: He skipped work to catch a major league baseball game at the city’s Eclipse Park. That seemingly innocuous act of truancy would prove historic not only for Hillerich but also for Louisville and baseball itself, as you’ll have a chance to learn at the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory here in the heart of the Falls City’s “Museum District.” Just 17, Bud worked at the woodworking shop his father, J.F. Hillerich, had opened in 1855. The younger Hillerich had a passion for America’s budding pastime, and one of the Louisville Eclipse’s stars he ventured to see play was infielder Pete Browning, the so-called “Louisville Slugger.” Known for his hitting efficiency and power, Browning had been struggling at the plate, however—a slide that would continue that day. After Browning broke his bat, Hillerich offered to have his dad personally craft a replacement to the player’s specifications. Browning eagerly accepted, and the next game, his new weapon in hand, immediately broke out of his slump. Partial to more traditional and practical woodworking options, the elder Hillerich had no desire for bat making to become a fulltime endeavor, it should be noted. But by the time Bud assumed the company’s reins in 1894, that— and the manufacturing of sports equipment in general—would be its destiny. Bud patented the “Louisville Slugger” name in 1894, and in 1905 signed the famed Honus Wagner as a promotional spokesman. In 1916, he joined forces with Frank Bradsby to form the Hillerich & Bradsby Co. Among stars to wield Louisville Sluggers over the years were Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, and, pictured at right, Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, and Joe Adcock of the Milwaukee Braves. –Chris K. Howland

’Round the Horn

H The museum’s current location, 800 W. Main Street, is the fourth site at which the company has manufactured its sports equipment. Nearby museums of note include the Frazier History Museum, the Muhammad Ali Center, and the Kentucky Science Center.

H Prominent in the museum’s foyer is a wall featuring the signatures of every player to have signed a Louisville Slugger contract. Factory tours are available, as are batting cages where you can swing replica bats. To experience what it’s like to face a 90-mph fastball, check out the “Feel the Heat” exhibit.

H Since 2006, the company has proudly manufactured distinctive pink bats for use on Mother’s Day.

TODAY IN HISTORY

FEBRUARY 14, 1929

KNOWN AS THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE, SEVEN MEN WERE SLAIN DURING A FAUX POLICE RAID LIKELY STAGED BY AL CAPONE’S CHICAGO OUTFIT. THE VICTIMS, MEMBERS AND ASSOCIATES OF THE RIVAL “NORTH SIDE GANG,” WERE LINED UP AGAINST A BRICK WALL INSIDE A COMMERCIAL TRUCKING GARAGE AND SHOT. BRICKS FROM THE INFAMOUS WALL WERE LATER PURCHASED BY COLLECTORS. MANY ARE ON DISPLAY AT THE MOB MUSEUM IN LAS VEGAS.

For more, visit HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

Eyeing the Competition

A Small Remodel

Editorial

I AM AN ARCHITECTURE BUFF. My favorite buildings are those built in the late-18th century through the 1860s, from vernacular log structures to whimsical Gothic cottages like Washington Irving’s “Sunnyside on the Hudson.” I even live in a sort-of-fixed-up 1790s stone house. But when this country mouse goes to the big city, I’m just agog at the Brutalist, Beaux Arts, and Richardson Romanesque buildings around me. As for skyscrapers (P. 36), the Chrysler Building in New York City is my favorite. I turn into full tourist mode when I’m there, and stand and gawk at its marvelous summit when it comes into view. Ever take a Chicago River Architecture Cruise? It’s another opportunity to admire the towering built environment of a great city.

In one small way, magazines are like buildings in that their

structure allows them to be remodeled every once in a while, refreshed and updated, just as those architects tinkered with the tops of their skyscrapers. You’ll notice some changes in this edition of American History. For the near future, I’ll be the acting editor of the magazine, and some new departments are being introduced in this issue. A bit of a remodel if you will.

Our hope is that, like me when I see the Chrysler Building, you’ll stare at AHI’s pages and enjoy what you see. Please let us know what you think! And even though we are well on our way into 2023, Happy New Year! H

Life DuringWartime

Abigail Adams survived siege and smallpox, and kept her husband’s spirits up during dark times

On June 17, 1775, a vicious battle rocked Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Mass. That first major engagement of the Revolution saw British Commander in Chief William Howe lead around 2,000 Regulars in what Howe expected to be a quick victory over 1,200 colonists commanded by Colonel William Prescott. Howe guessed wrong. The fierce, bloody fighting raged through the night. From a hillside miles away, Abigail Adams, 30, and son John Quincy, 7, watched with excitement and anxiety.

The Adams family lived in Braintree, a small coastal town 12 miles south of Boston. Abigail’s husband, John, a lawyer and key figure in the insurrection, had been gone since April, when he left on a meandering journey, eventually arriving in Philadelphia to attend the Second Continental Congress that convened May 10. John’s departure began a long separation that left Abigail Adams and their four children in one of the most dangerous places on earth—a city under siege—for nearly two years. She would have to run the family farm, keep her children safe, and husband the family’s finances. Abigail’s letters to John during this time, some of the most reliable accounts of significant early events in the Revolution, influenced decisions being made in Philadelphia that shaped the nation.

John Adams and Abigail Smith met in 1759. He was 25, living with his parents in Braintree; she was 15, also at living at home in Weymouth, just to the south. Writing was the easiest way to communicate, and when they began courting in 1764, the two established themselves as exuberant letter writers. Honest, poetic, tragic, joyful, and deeply thoughtful letters flew back and forth between the young romantics. He nicknamed her “Portia,”

for the independent-minded heroine of The Merchant of Venice, and that was how she signed some letters. The couple married on October 25, 1764, when John was 29 and Abigail 19. They welcomed their first child, Abigail—nicknamed “Nabby”—the following year. By the time John left for Philadelphia in April 1775, John Quincy, Thomas, and Charles had arrived.

Like her husband, Abigail firmly believed in the American experiment and staunchly opposed slavery. She relished the Boston Tea Party. After Lexington and Concord in April 1775, she wrote to John and many friends and acquaintances, expressing joy and anxiety. In a letter to rebellious Plymouth playwright Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail described her emotions following the fighting. “What a scene has opened upon us since I had the favor of your last!” she wrote May 2. “Such a scene as we never before experienced, and could scarcely form an idea of. If we look back we are amazed at what is past, if we look forward we must shudder at the view.”

Rebel Bostonians, having stepped collectively into the unknown, feared for their future. Abigail found a tonic for unease in her excitement at seeing the patriotism she had long advocated taking

root and spreading. “Our only comfort lies in the justice of our cause,” she wrote. She urged Mercy not to leave Plymouth for relative safety inland, adding, with the characteristic vehemence that often outdid her husband’s: “Britain Britain how is thy glory vanished—how are thy annals stained with the Blood of thy children.”

AS ABIGAIL WAS WRITING to Mercy, John, now in Hartford, Conn., was writing to Abigail. He knew that in wartime even agrarian Braintree was bound to suffer. “Our hearts are bleeding for the poor People of Boston,” he wrote May 2. “What will, or can be done for them I can't conceive. God preserve them.”

In that letter, John told Abigail he had purchased books on military strategy and said that if his brothers were interested, he’d be able to train them to be officers. “Pray [sic] write to me, and get all my friends to write and let me be informed of every thing that occurs,” he wrote.

Abigail took his request seriously. In a lengthy May 24 letter, she recounted an incident in Weymouth the previous Sunday morning. She awoke at 6:00 and learned the Weymouth bell had been ringing, that cannoneers there had fired three shots to sound an alarm, and that drums had been beating. Abigail hurried the three miles to her hometown and found everyone, even physician Cotton Tufts, “in confusion.” She described a wild scene, the result of four British boats anchoring within sight of Weymouth Harbor.

According to Abigail, a rumor had spread that 300 Redcoats had landed and were about to march through town. Residents began scrambling to fight or run. Abigail’s family fled. “My father’s family flying, the Dr. in great distress, as you may well imagine,” she wrote, “for my aunt had her bed thrown into a cart, into which she got herself, and ordered the boy to drive her off to Bridgewater which he did.”

Abigail was describing the “Grape Island Incident.” According to her letter, 2,000 local men gathered to fight, but the British never sent troops ashore. Instead, on Grape Island, a minor land mass in Boston Harbor, they stocked a barn with hay. The Weymouth men procured a small boat, intending to torch barn and contents. “We expect soon to be in continual alarms, till something decisive takes place,” Abigail wrote.

THOUGH NOT DECISIVE, Bunker Hill was a British victory, earned at

great human cost and a boost to patriot morale because neophyte freedom fighters had stood their ground and were not overrun. The battle personally touched Abigail and John. Their good friend and physician Joseph Warren (no relation to Mercy) had died in action. “God is a refuge for us.—Charlestown is laid in ashes,” Abigail wrote to John on June 18. “The Battle began upon our intrenchments upon Bunkers [sic] Hill, a Saturday morning about 3 o'clock and has not ceased yet and tis now 3 o'clock Sabbeth [sic] afternoon.”

In a passage of the same letter written June 20, Abigail lamented her inability to gather quality intelligence for John about the battle. “I have been so much agitated that I have not been able to write since Sabbeth day,” she wrote. “When I say that ten thousand reports are passing vague and uncertain as the wind I believe I speak the Truth. I am not able to give you any authentic account of last Saturday, but you will not be destitute of intelligence.”

In reality, Abigail had a knack for threshing fact from fiction—over the years she heard many rumors of John’s death by all manners, including poisoning, but never believed any. Regarding Bunker Hill, she was able to assemble and recount a reasonably detailed narrative of events there, and she assured John that news of Warren’s death was true.

On the same day as the battle, George Washington was named commander in chief of the Continental Army. He rushed to Boston, intent on forcing the British to evacuate. Abigail first met him July 15, 1775, less than a month after Bunker Hill, with the city still under massive financial and military stress. The next day, she wrote that the appointments of Washington and

Abigail lamented her inability to gather intelligence about the Battle of Bunker Hill for John.

Portraits of American Destiny

This British map shows the Americans’ approach to the Battle of Bunker Hill, their earthworks, and British troops in red. At right, John Adams as he appeared during the Revolutionary War.

General Charles Lee to positions of command had given locals “universal satisfaction,” but she also pointed out that the people would support leaders only as long as they were delivering “favorable events.” Washington displayed “dignity with ease, and complacency, the gentleman and soldier look agreeably blended in him,” Abigail wrote. “Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.” By the time that note would have reached John, he was going through a grave embarrassment—one threatening both his budding political career and worldwide geopolitics.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1775, many members of Congress believed war with Britain was still avoidable. On July 8, Congress signed the “Olive Branch Petition.” Written by John Dickinson, a Pennsylvania delegate, the document was a final reach for peace. That outcome was a long shot, but the British intercepted an inflammatory July 24 letter from John Adams to Colonel James Warren, Mercy’s husband. In that communique, Adams suggested to Warren that by now the colonists should have “completely modeled a constitution,” “raised a naval power and opened all our ports wide,” and “have arrested every friend to government on the continent and held them as hostages for the poor victims in Boston.”

Circulation by the enemy of these statements sank all hopes of diplomacy. After that episode, Abigail resumed signing letters “Portia.”

Through eight months of siege, Abigail’s updates became steadier and her commentary

sharper. “Tis only in my night visions that I know anything about you,” she wrote October 21, needling John for his laggard epistolary ways but also reporting a wide range of goings-on around Boston. A wood shortage meant bakers would only be able to work for a fortnight. Biscuits had shrunk in size by half. The British were constructing a fort near the docks, and the Continental Army was short on provisions.

In that letter, Abigail also commented on Dr. Benjamin Church, a supposed patriot who had been caught passing coded information about the forces surrounding Boston to the British. Locked up by Washington’s men, Church had been dumped as the Continental Army’s “Director General” of medicine and was awaiting arraignment. “It is a matter of great speculation what will be [Church’s] punishment,” Abigail wrote. “The people are much enraged against him. If he is set at liberty, even after he has received a severe punishment I do not think he will be safe.”

Abigail was in mourning. Her mother, Elizabeth Quincy Smith, had died in Weymouth October 1. In his grief, Abigail’s father, Parson William Smith, had lost “as much flesh as if he had been sick,” she wrote, adding that her sister Betsy looked “broke and worn with grief.” She lamented John’s chronic absences, estimating that in 12 years of marriage, they had only actually been together six.

WASHINGTON’S TROOPS quietly ringed Boston in a martial noose, placing cannons on high ground that forced the British to depart by sea at the end of March 1776. The warships and transports that carried the enemy away, Abigail wrote on March 17, amounted to the “largest fleet ever seen in America;” she likened the bristle of masts and billows of sails to a forest. Washington allowed Howe’s men to leave unmolested on the proviso that the Redcoats not burn the city. The foe was as good as his word, though some Britons looted like pirates on holiday. Dirty tactics notwithstanding, though, their exit thrilled locals, Loyalists excepted.

Abigail told John she felt the burden of the British presence merely to be changing location but admitted to being happy that Boston had not been

Abigail lamented John's chronic absences, estimating they had only been together six years out of a 12-year marriage.

totally destroyed. The city’s escape exhilarated John, a fiend for independence. On March 29, he wrote to Abigail about his joy at learning Boston was free, even as he moped that he knew few details and so awaited her accounts with “great impatience.” He wanted Boston Harbor made impregnable. Abigail had neither the ability nor the desire to command troops, but John often discussed strategic ideas with her and greatly valued her opinion of them.

Most of the time.

The most famous look into Abigail’s politics arose from Patriot celebrations of the British retreat. Abigail only reminded John that he “Remember the Ladies'' after she had unleashed a condemnation of Virginia. “I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs,” she wrote March 31, 1776. “Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and Christian principle of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us.”

The letter gained fame because in it Abigail forcefully characterizes women’s second-class status in the colonies. Law and custom barred women from owning property and assigned any wages they earned legally to their husbands. “All men would be tyrants if they could,” and if a Declaration of Independence was coming, it would be shrewd not to put all of the power in the hands of one sex, Abigail argued.

She dusted her broadside with drollery. “The ladies,” she said, were prepared “to mount a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws

Abigail Adams, left, loved her husband, but found irritating his dismissive attitude toward the roles of women, and was not shy about telling him so. The above fan belonged to her.

in which we have no voice, or representation.” The letter also conveyed notes of optimism, originating as it did in one finally assured she could plant seeds on her farm or go for a walk without hearing cannonades.

But that optimism evaporated. John dismissed his wife’s adjuration to “Remember the Ladies.” In an April 14 note, he pooh-poohed Abigail’s thoughts as “saucy”—implying that she was straying from her designated societal role and venturing into arenas she should eschew. John’s shrugging response irked his wife. She wrote to Mercy Otis Warren asking if they should compose another appeal to Congress. Frustrated with John’s lackadaisical mien, she and the family faced a stout new challenge just as the absent man of the house was taking on unprecedented responsibilities in Philadelphia.

SMALLPOX HAD BEEN BLISTERING indigenes and colonizers in disfiguring, deadly waves around North America since the Europeans first arrived. In 1775-76, British occupiers and Continental Army soldiers besieging them loosed a particularly severe outbreak. Abigail first mentioned the pox in her March 17, 1776, letter to John celebrating the city’s survival. As the British were withdrawing, the port was still battling the latest epidemic. Only the previously infected were even being allowed into town, a category that would have included John Adams, who in 1764 had undergone a controversial procedure— inoculation.

To inoculate against the pox, a doctor opened a small wound and into that cut or scrape inserted matter intentionally tainted with exudate from a person with smallpox. The idea was to trigger a mild case of pox from which the recipient emerged in a few weeks enjoying lifelong immunity, as occurred with survivors of full-on cases

like George Washington. By summer 1776, inoculation had become en vogue. The “Spirit of Inoculation,” as Abigail labeled it, finally achieved such critical mass that city authorities legalized the procedure.

Writing on Sunday, July 7, Abigail invited John Thaxter, who was her cousin and John’s law clerk, to “come have the small pox with my family” that Thursday, July 12. As a clinical setting Abigail’s cousin Isaac Smith Sr. provided his sprawling Boston home. Abigail, Thaxter, the Adams children, and nearly 20 others, including Abigail’s sister Betsy Smith Cranch and her family, as well as strangers like Becky Peck, crammed the mansion to await inoculation by Dr. Thomas Bulfinch. The doctor was charging 18 shillings per week for what he estimated would be three weeks of sequestration while inoculation did its work. During that time those inoculated could expect to experience smallpox symptoms to a greater or lesser degree.

The next day, Abigail wrote her first letter to John since June 17. The children had undergone inoculation “manfully,” she reported. She wished John could have joined them, she wrote, but the opportunity had arisen on short notice, and most residences around Boston were at and beyond capacity. The group had been lucky to book a house.

That year’s hot summer would have had the city resonating around the clock with coughing and the house redolent of rotting flesh—two noxious and prominent smallpox symptoms. Abigail wrote that the children “puke every morning,” complaining to John that a maid she had hired was useless, the girl’s lone qualification being immunity conveyed by a case of the pox.

inoculated. Letters reporting the coup from Isaac Smith Sr. and young Boston attorney Jonathan Mason reached Philadelphia first, stunning John. In a letter to Abigail dated July 16, beset by worry that colleagues would think him a cad for ignoring his loved ones in their hour of need, he poured out his heart. His feelings were “not possible for me to describe, nor for you to conceive my feelings upon this occasion.” He remained steadfast in his commitment to press on with the Congress. “I can do no more than wish and pray for your health, and that of the children,” he wrote. “Never—never in my whole Life, had I so many cares upon my Mind at once [...] I am very anxious about supplying you with money. Spare for nothing, if you can get friends to lend it to you. I will repay with gratitude as well as interest, any sum that you may borrow.”

Abigail’s letter of July 13-14 arrived July 23. By then, the effects of inoculation had begun to take hold. Abigail experienced only one “eruption”—a pustule signaling infection. Nabby and John Quincy had gotten sick, but without eruptions. Thomas and Charles showed no symptoms, so she had them re-inoculated. Around this time, she got her first intimate look at the real disease. On July 29, she wrote, fellow inoculant and temporary housemate Becky Peck had symptoms of smallpox “to such a degree as to be blind with one eye, swelled prodigiously, I believe she has ten thousand [pustules]. She is really an object to look at.”

Lags between letters consigned John to anticipating past events. He wrote that Abigail’s accounts had convinced him that Charles had not yet taken the smallpox virus. By the time that news reached Abigail, she had had Charles inoculated a third time, and Nabby a second. Hundreds of pea-sized pustules covered almost all of Nabby’s body. In one letter, John referred to her as his “speckled beauty.” Abigail’s ordeal ground on until September 4, 1776, when she and Charles returned to Braintree. A treatment advertised as lasting three weeks had stretched into seven.

DURING HER SIEGE BY INOCULATION, Abigail occasionally slipped away briefly. She left the family lodgings on July 18 to attend the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. She stood in a large crowd below the balcony of the Massachusetts State House on Boston’s King Street to listen to the words her husband and his committee had helped draft. Writing to John she described a scene of great joy punctuated by church bells and celebratory gunfire. She, however, attended the fete in a state of disappointment.

OWING TO A LEISURELY POSTAL SYSTEM

Abigail’s graphic letter about those events was not the means by which John learned his family had been

In her July 14 letter, Abigail had reacted sourly to a rendering of the finished declaration that

In a July 14 letter, Abigail reacted sourly to a rendering of the finished Declaration of Independence.

John, copying it himself, had sent. “I cannot but feel sorry that some of the most manly sentiments in the Declaration are expunged from the printed copy,” she wrote. “Perhaps wise reasons induced it.” She likely meant an earlier draft Thomas Jefferson had written and shown to John. That version denounced slavery, a sentiment expunged from the version made public. It is reasonable to hypothesize that, reading the version in her husband’s handwriting, Abigail thought that John had composed the entire document and that he himself had eliminated the statement on slavery.

During the inoculation interlude, Abigail was on tenterhooks anticipating John’s return; he had asked her to direct a man with two horses to fetch him in Philadelphia. However, on June 12, John was named president of a new Committee on War and Ordinance, recasting him as a one-man defense department in charge of organizing a military, allocating that force’s finances, supplying Washington’s men, and more. Just as Abigail was preparing to return home to Braintree from the Smith house, John intuited that New York City was to be the war’s next battleground. He would have to stay in Philadelphia to nurse the infant country he had just helped found. Often in correspondence he fretted about his health.

In Braintree Abigail struggled. Farm workers were scarce. Most men had enlisted in the Army, taken up privateering, or, as Loyalists, had fled

with fellow Tories. Tea, which soothed her headaches, was at least as scarce as farmhands; John did send a tin that the courier delivered to Elizabeth Adams, his second cousin Samuel’s wife.

In November 1776 John escaped the revolution’s gravitational pull and joined his family for their first significant reunion since April 1775. The children had survived. He and Abigail had gained the independence they had sought together for years. Abigail had been the keystone, communicating crucial information to the Congress, guiding the household through smallpox, and uplifting John through good times and bad. Always appreciative of his spouse’s integral part in his public life, he wrote of his feelings for her to a friend the day after he had signed the Declaration. “In times as turbulent as these, commend me to the ladies for historiographers,” John Adams wrote July 5, 1776. “The gentlemen are too much engaged in action. The ladies are cooler spectators....There is a lady at the foot of Penn’s Hill, who obliges me, from time to time with clearer and fuller intelligence, than I can get from a whole committee of gentlemen.” H

Jon Mael is a high school teacher and author from Sharon, Mass. He has been fascinated by Abigail Adams for decades. Follow him on Twitter @ jmael2010.

Medical Success

The overwhelming success of smallpox inoculation was documented and studied in medical journals.

Sky High

New York, New York

Many of the earliest skyscrapers have defined Manhattan’s famous skyline, pictured here in the 1920s, for more than a century.

Architect William Le Baron Jenney’s spirits were sagging. Jenney had hoped his latest project would be a reputation-making edifice at Adams and LaSalle Streets meant to rise 10 daring stories above Chicago. In 1884, the city’s commercial buildings rarely stood more than four stories tall, giving him an apparently unsolvable engineering crisis: how to support his structure. Although Jenney believed he had figured out that particular riddle, he was now lacking another type of support.

On May 1, 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions was backing a citywide strike for an eight-hour work week. The striking tradesmen included members of Bricklayers and Masons International Union Local 21. Now, even if Jenney could figure out how to build his project, he would not have the materials he needed or the personnel to proceed. He would have to admit failure to his clients at the Home Insurance Company.

The Home Insurance high-rise had antecedents. In New York City, the Equitable Life Building had opened in 1870 with seven stories above ground and two below street level. In 1875, at Nassau and Spruce streets, the New York Tribune building climbed 10 stories. But those property owners had assembled parcels broad and deep enough to accommodate the fortress-like bases—walls six feet or more thick—required to support a tall building’s upper floors. With a 96-foot fronting on Adams Street and 38 feet on LaSalle, the Home Insurance parcel forbade use of that time-tested technique, as it would mean the company’s employees on the lower floors would

be subjected to toiling in cramped quarters and oppressively narrow hallways.

Word of the strike devastated the architect. Despondent, Jenney closed his roll-top desk and went home. At their house on Bittersweet Place, his wife, Lizzie, had been reading a book of considerable size. Instantly sensing her husband’s mood, she closed that volume and rose to comfort him. Wanting to stow the book but finding no space on a table on which stood a birdcage, she placed the book atop the cage. Watching her do so, Jenney was intrigued. He strode to the table, picked up the book and dropped it onto the cage several times. The spindly enclosure stood firm.

“It works! It works!” Jenney cried. “Don’t you see? If this little cage can hold this heavy book, why can’t a metal cage be the framework for a whole building?”

Jenney’s birdcage revelation sparked a youthful memory of sailing aboard one of his father’s whaling ships to the Philippine Islands. In Manila, he saw flexible lightweight bamboo used to construct entire buildings. Locals explained that despite their seeming fragility, these structures could weather typhoons and even earthquakes. Jenney’s memory of bamboo-framed forms merged with that of the book on the birdcage to provide the solution that had been eluding him. The Home Insurance Building’s walls would not need to support all the weight of the floors above, he realized, if a supporting frame could share most of that load. He would make that frame of iron, a material he had been working with since college.

Enrolling at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in 1851, Jenney came to dislike the quality of the education he was receiving. In 1853 he transferred to L’Ėcole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris to study engineering and the latest in iron construction techniques. “I took, with special interest,” Jenney would recall, “civil engineering courses with an engineer of bridges and roads, Charles-Francois Mary.” Jenney graduated in 1856, a year behind schoolmate Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel.

Returning to America, Jenney joined the U.S. Army, and during the Civil War designed fortifications for Generals William T. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. Afterward, he moved to Chicago to practice architecture. Hanging out a shingle on his own, he designed residences, parks, and railroad bridges. His experience in fashioning bridges out of iron grounded his later vision for taking that framework from the drawing board to building construction. His inspired solution to the Home Insurance Building problem impelled that undertaking to completion in 1885 and frequent mention as the first modern skyscraper.

ALEXANDRE-GUSTAVE EIFFEL had also been early to adopt iron as structural material, initially for railroad bridges. In 1879, sculptor Frederick-Auguste Bartholdi was at work in France on a huge commission to be placed in New York Harbor and requiring a sturdy internal support system. The architect devising the armature for the enormous statue suddenly died. As a replacement, Bartholdi hired Eiffel. Contemplating the wooden frame proposed for “Liberty Enlightening the World,” Eiffel, from his bridge-building days, knew no such frame would suffice and insisted on an iron structure.

The resulting 151-foot figure, now known by its nickname, the Statue of

A Strong Skeleton

From top left: The metal frame of a birdcage inspired architect William Le Baron Jenney to use a similar framework when designing the first modern skyscraper, Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, top right.; Jenney’s classmate, Alexandre-Gustave-Eiffel, was also a proponent of a metal frame structure and employed the technique when designing the famed Eiffel Tower in the late 1880s, lower left, and New York Harbor’s “Liberty Enlightening the World,” now known as the Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886.

Hot Rods

In 1856, Henry Bessemer invented a process enabling molten pig-iron to be turned into steel by blowing air through it in a tilting converter, top. The process allowed for the production of large amounts of good quality steel cheaply. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie sold some of his first I-beams to Jenney for the Home Insurance Building.

Liberty, was dedicated on October 28, 1886. Three years later, Eiffel completed another landmark, this one overtly displaying iron’s structural virtues. Built with 7,500 tons of iron and containing 2.5 million rivets, the Eiffel Tower was designed as the centerpiece of the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris and intended to be torn down after 20 years. But as a hedge against demolition Eiffel had installed a radio antenna and wireless transmitter near the top, hoping utility would make the tower too useful to demolish. It did. During the 1914 Battle of the Marne, one of the tower’s transmitters jammed German radio communica-

tion, delaying the enemy’s advance.

Observing the success of metal frame structures, commercial property owners around the United States began specifying iron and steel frames for buildings. New York City architect Bradford Gilbert put metal framing to an extreme test in 1889 when silk importer John Noble Stearns hired him to design an 11-story building to occupy a tiny plot at 50 Broadway. Stearns’ plans to buy lots on either side had fallen through, saddling him with a 21.5-foot frontage stretching only 108 feet back. The importer came to Gilbert “in despair,” the architect recalled, after multiple other designers had sent him packing.

To ease Stearns’ woes, Gilbert—another experienced bridge-builder—envisioned a cast-iron span stood on end, and that was what he designed and built. For months, New Yorkers certain that a high wind would topple the iron needle, came to Broadway on gusty days looking to watch a disaster. None ever occurred.

SOLVING THE STRUCTURAL

DILEMMA

exposed other challenges. Other than trudging stairways, how were occupants of a tall building to travel between the ground and higher floors? Steam-driven and hydraulic “hoisting platforms” debuted in hotels and factories in the 1830s in England and then in America, almost exclusively to haul cargo since they dangled on a single rope

or cable whose failure would cause the platform to plunge.

The transformation to moving people occurred in 1852. Elisha Otis, 40, undertook to revive an abandoned multi-story sawmill in Yonkers, N.Y., as a bedstead factory. The mill’s bottom floor was littered with wood shavings and other debris. Otis decided to stow the rubble on the top floor, which he didn’t intend to use. His idea of making an elevator safe for passengers didn’t come in a flash of inspiration, but from a diligent detailed effort to get himself or one of his sons, plus the junk, to the top floor. After several stumbles the Otises, relentless tinkerers, settled on a design in which the platform moved by cable but, should the cable break or go slack, a wagon spring automatically forced metal prongs known as “safety dogs” into channels in the frame.

Even after finding that invention successful, Otis thought so little about the creation that he didn’t immediately patent it. Several bedstead customers noticed the safety gadget and asked to buy one, so he and his sons set to work producing them. Orders for their bedsteads declined, so they patented the vertical transporter invention as the “Allsafe” braking system and sold them locally. That success prompted them to set their sights on reaching a national market.

In 1851, London had hosted an exposition of new inventions. Another was to take place in 1853 in New York, and at it the Otises meant to dazzle the competition, which included sewing machines, printing presses, cameras, and medical diagnostic devices. At the Otis booth, crews built a 50-foot structure within which operated a hoisting platform hung from a cable. When the exhibition opened late that September, Elisha Otis, before a small audience, rode the platform to the 50-foot mark. At his signal, an assistant swung an ax to sever the lifeline. Otis plunged…a few inches. The Allsafe brake held firm. Otis smiled and doffed his hat to gawkers below.

“All safe, gentlemen,” he repeated. “All safe.”

Otis continued the stunt throughout the exposition. With the triumph of their braking system, he and his sons began building freight elevators the same year, 1853, founding the Otis Elevator Company in Yonkers. The first commercial Otis passenger elevator was installed on March 23, 1857, to carry customers up and down the fivestory Haughwout Emporium at 488 Broadway. Eder V. Haughwout, a purveyor of fine china, cut glass and chandeliers paid the Otises a whopping $300 for the elevator.

The novel addition was so popular that people often visited the site merely to take the elevator and, to the owner’s delight, often ended up buying his products. Other buildings soon followed suit,

making “Otis” and “elevator” synonymous.

Other technologies arose that contributed to the tall building phenomenon. Once cities had been firetraps, with wooden structures cheek by jowl until municipalities mandated use of stone and brick—and electricity replaced gas as the source of illumination. Electric lights powered by basement generators were lighting tall buildings by 1878. The same decade saw the spread of forced-draft ventilation in taller buildings to clear them of smoke from coal-burning furnaces. Improvements in iron piping gave upper-story occupants hot and cold water and toilet facilities.

IN CHICAGO, Jenney once again could buy bricks and stone. Masons and bricklayers had gone back to work, having won a contract that would move them to an eight-hour day in two years. On the Home Insurance Building, their work would be more skin than structure. An internal cage would not only support the walls but hold large windows that would flood every floor with sunlight. Jenney proposed his design for approval.

“Where is there such a building?” one member

Hold the Elevator

Elisha Otis’ ingenious braking system, which he demonstrated at an 1853 New York expo of new inventions, bottom left, made the use of elevators safe for passengers traveling between floors of taller buildings. The first commercial Otis elevator was installed in 1857 at the five-story Haughwout Emporium building, top.

of the committee asked.

“Your building at Chicago will be the first,” Jenney said. Despite several wrinkled brows, the committee assented.

On May 1, 1884, construction began. Due to the substitution of an iron and steel framework for the traditional massive lower story walls, the building only weighed a third of what a masonry building did. As the workers pieced the project together, they followed up on Jenney’s promise to the Home Insurance committee that “the building will be strictly fire-proof and first-class in every respect.” Lightweight masonry walls covered the metal skeleton, acting primarily as a skin to keep out the weather. Although the city building authorities were so concerned about the stability of the new design they halted construction midway to inspect it, the resulting 138-foot structure was so solid that in 1930, when it was razed to make way for a 42-story Marshall Field

Get to the Point

Assorted Chrysler Building designs, top left, were considered, but it ultimately was given a 185-foot spire, making it the world’s tallest structure until the Empire State Building, shown bottom left under construction, was erected in 1931.

building, a scrapyard operator buying the junked metalwork said, “So far as the metal work is concerned, the Home Insurance Building could have remained standing until doomsday.”

Metallurgical innovation also helped usher in the tall building. Steel—a mixture of iron and carbon, later augmented with manganese, nickel, chromium and other elements to increase hardness and resist corrosion—had been around in crude form since the 13th century BCE, when European blacksmiths found, likely by accident, that iron seemed stronger when mixed with carbon in coal furnaces.

But steel remained difficult to produce in useful form or volume until 1856. That year English engineer Henry Bessemer introduced an effective means of blowing oxygen into molten iron and carbon to achieve steel with a carbon content of about 2 percent. Bessemer’s pear-shaped converter offered a fast, cheap way to make

The Chrysler Building’s 185-foot spire was covertly constructed inside the building from pieces.

consistently serviceable steel. His innovation coincided with the rise of the railroads, which needed massive amounts of steel to forge rails and build locomotives. Steel plants soon dotted Britain and America, and investors like Andrew Carnegie jumped full tilt into the steel industry, the seemingly endless miles of new track and ranks of rolling stock making them extraordinarily wealthy.

But growth has limits, and Carnegie and other steel magnates, seeing a day when there were enough rails in place, recognized the need to diversify. They did so by apprehending steel’s utility as a structural material. Stretching and thinning the shape of a rail transformed it into a beam that in profile looked like the ninth letter of the alphabet. Some of the first I-beams that Carnegie made went to Jenney, who had been using cast iron as a framing material for the Home Insurance Building. Jenney switched to steel beams for the remaining floors. Other designers soon followed his lead.

As architects, engineers, and builders integrated metal structural skeletons with electric lighting, safe elevators, adequate ventilation, and functional water supplies, tall buildings rose across the nation. By the end of the 1890s, Chicago’s Masonic Temple building stood 21 stories; New York City’s Park Row Building loomed 31 stories above street level.

DIVERSION OF STEEL into armament production during World War I slowed the skyhigh building boom, but the 1920s saw a revival propelled by ambition and capital. Buildings soared to unprecedented heights. Two Manhattan projects seemed bound to set records—the Bank of Manhattan Building at 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building, at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue.

Construction of the Chrysler Building had begun in autumn 1928, with 40 Wall Street starting the following May. Walter P. Chrysler, founder of the corporation that bore his name, portrayed his project as “a monument to me.” Chrysler chose architect William Van Alen, a former partner-turned-fierce-rival of 40 Wall Street’s equally strong-willed chief architect, H. Craig Severance. The Chrysler Building was to stand 77 stories tall; 40 Wall Street, 71. The skyscrapers’ final heights would depend on spires that functioned as radio aerials, lightning arrestors, and statements of power through style.

Tweaking their designs as the buildings grew, Van Alen and Severance jockeyed for height. As the Bank of Manhattan Building was nearing completion, Severance secretly ordered its spire

Mohawk “Skywalkers”

Bird on a Wire

The danger of building high bridges like this one over the St. Lawrence River, which collapsed in 1907 during construction, left, was alluring to Mohawk laborers hired by the Canadian Pacific Railroad.

IN 1886, THE CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILROAD, as part of an expansion, was planning to bridge the St. Lawrence River. The 150-foot-high cantilevered span's western end would touch down near Montreal on the Kahnawake Reservation, home to the Mohawk tribe. In exchange for the use of Indian land, the railroad agreed to hire Mohawk men as laborers assigned to unload materials. Visiting the site, young Indian men dared each other to climb to the top of the structure and walk the beams. Workers employed by Dominion Bridge Company tried and failed to chase the nimble interlopers to the ground. Mohawk youths walked narrow beams as coolly as the most seasoned riveters.

Supervisors seeing the interaction and knowing that high-steel riveting was a hard hire decided to recruit Mohawks, reasoning that it was easier to teach them riveting techniques than find workers comfortable walking in the sky. Dominion Bridge trained 12 reservation residents. All completed the training and went to work on the Canadian Pacific Railroad Bridge. Since then, Mohawk men have worked on high structures, despite catastrophes such as a 1907 Quebec Bridge collapse near Quebec City, that cost 33 Mohawks their lives. Orvis Diabo, an elderly Mohawk worker interviewed for a 1949 article, told The New Yorker that danger gave the high steel allure. “It made them take pride in themselves that they could do such dangerous work,” Diabo said. “We have as much fear as the next guy,” sixth-generation Mohawk ironworker Kyle Beauvais said. “The difference is, we do it better.” —Dennis Goodwin

extended so to surpass the Chrysler Building’s nearly finished summit. On May 26, 1930, 40 Wall Street’s designers and crew celebrated finishing the tallest building in the world.

That status lasted a day. In the morning, a 185’ spire emerged atop the Chrysler Building. The component, covertly constructed from pieces inside the building, was riveted into place in 90 minutes.

The Chrysler Building’s record reign also was to be only slightly less brief. Ten weeks before, excavators had broken ground on a structure to bear New York’s nickname, at 20 West 34th street in the heart of Manhattan. Initially drawn at 50 stories, this project, too, underwent a metamorphosis as key investor and former General Motors CEO John J. Raskob reimagined the Empire State Building at 60 stories, then 80, and eventually 102—plus an airship docking station at the 103rd floor level—as the country was sinking into a deep depression that began with the October 1929 stock market crash.

The building was modeled after two earlier Art Deco structures: One was the 21-story, 314-foottall Reynolds Building in Winston-Salem, N.C., which had been designed by William F. Lamb,

King for a Day

The 927-foot-tall Bank of Manhattan building at 40 Wall Street was completed on May 26, 1930. Pictured here in 1930 and in a modern photo, left, it was the world’s tallest building for a mere few hours until a taller spire was covertly installed the next morning atop the Chrysler Building.

primary designer for the Empire State Building’s chosen architectural firm, Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. The other was the 574-foot, 49-story Carew Tower overlooking the Ohio River waterfront in the heart of Cincinnati. As the Empire State Building raced toward the clouds, its builders incorporated innovations that remained in vogue for decades. The construction process radiated teamwork. “When we were in full swing going up the main tower, things clicked with such precision that once we erected fourteen and a half floors in ten working days,” said firm administrator Richmond Harold Shreve.

That pace required near perfect coordination of practitioners of 60 construction trades. As masons and stoneworkers were completing a floor’s exterior, electricians and plumbers were hard at work on that floor’s interior. The first 30 stories were completed before designers finalized several details of the ground floor. To minimize time lost to lunch breaks, uncompleted floors housed cafes and concession stands. A miniature transport system moved materials by cart from storage in the basement to elevators. “Sometimes we thought of it as a great assembly line, only the assembly line did all the moving,” Shreve said.

The Bank of Manhattan’s architect secretly ordered its spire extended to surpass the Chrysler’s summit.

“The finished product stayed in place.”

Despite the national malaise, work on the Empire State Building never faltered. As many as 200 trucks a day supplied 3,000-plus workers swarming the site in continuous 12-hour shifts. Often adding 4½ stories a week, the massive venture fascinated a nation desperate for good news. Newspaper and magazine readers marveled at photographs of tradesmen, many of them Native Americans (see sidebar), hundreds of feet in the air, often framed by photographer Lewis Hine while he was dangling in a crane bucket.

The Empire State Building topped out at 1,454 feet. The ill-conceived dirigible station flopped when winds gusted at 40 mph as

dirigibles were attempting to dock. Despite this, and the fact that it has long since been eclipsed by much taller buildings, it still has the world’s affection. When President Herbert Hoover symbolically turned on the building’s lights by pushing a button from the White House on May 1, 1931, thousands of onlookers cheered, unknowingly saluting William Le Baron Jenney and his resilient little birdcage. H

Dennis Goodwin has been a history buff and shortstory writer for decades. He strives to pull the reader into the ever-moving present the subject of his story happens to occupy. He lives in Snellville, Ga., with his wife.

The Big Apple Thousands of workers on the Empire State Building maintained a breakneck pace to finish the 1,454foot skyscraper in just 13½ months. One of New York’s most beloved features, the building’s design changed 15 times until it was ensured to be the world’s tallest, a title it held until the 1970s when the World Trade Center opened.

‘A Real Powder Burner’

The inside story of the epic 1988 Gettysburg reenactment

Immediately following the repulse of Pickett’s Charge at the Gettysburg reenactment in 1988, an eerie quiet fell over the field. Thousands of participants, as well as tens of thousands of spectators, stood silently on the sun-drenched former cattle farm about six miles south of the Pennsylvania town.

Then, at the representation of the Angle—the vortex of the battle on July 3, 1863—a lone, mounted bugler rode out from the Union lines and played Taps answered by another bugler somewhere on the Confederate side. When they finished, a roar reverberated from the Union reenactors, co-mingled with a Rebel Yell. Reenactors and spectators alike wept.

“A mystical thing,” recalls Tom Downes, a 1988 reenactor.

“We knew that we were a part of something that was very, very big,” another participant says.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Civil War reenacting reached a high-water mark with thousands of living historians fighting pretend battles and camping near Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, and other national military parks. (The federal government bans reenactments at all national military parks, except Cedar Creek in Virginia.) But

with hundreds of middle-aged and older reenactors putting away their muskets, kepis, and woolen garments for good, reenactments today rarely draw more than 1,000 participants. Reenactors from younger generations, meanwhile, have failed to swell the ranks.

Two Gettysburg reenactments—one in 1988 for the 125th anniversary, another 10 years later for the 135th—marked the hobby’s zenith. The 1998 event was the largest Civil War reenactment of all, with more than 28,000 participants.

But former and current reenactors speak more reverentially about the smaller event of 1988—among the first of the multi-thousand participant reenactments. About 10,000 reenactors, mostly male, endured oppressive heat, lengthy marches, omnipresent dust, thick battle smoke, and the rancid odor of sweat-stained uniforms. Some traveled from as far as West Germany, England, Poland, and Australia. An estimated 60,000–78,000 spectators watched the climactic battle, highlighted by Pickett’s Charge. The movie Glory, in which Hollywood spotlighted the courage of Black Civil War soldiers, would debut the next year. Few, if any, Black reenactors participated at Gettysburg.

“Civil War Disneyland,” Richard Smith calls the 1988 Gettysburg event. The Ohio native served in the 5th Texas at Gettysburg.

“A real powder burner,” remembers another participant.

A Gettysburg newspaper called the event “a beach party with cannons.” Spectators may have used more colorful words to describe the

A mounted bugler rode out from the Union lines and played Taps. Faux soldiers and spectators both wept.

scene, especially the traffic jams. On U.S. Route 15 heading into Gettysburg, traffic backed up seven miles. A reporter likened reenactment weekend at Gettysburg to “cramming seven families into a two-bedroom house at the shore.”

Over three searing days in late June, the event transported reenactors to July 1863 and produced enduring memories. Some of them were all-too real. Following a battle, one reenactor—a Vietnam veteran—approached his fellow reenactor, Downes.

“This is just a little too realistic,” he said. “I need to sit out the weekend.”

Doug Lape, then 24, was fresh out of college and had only been reenacting for four years. “Green as all get-out,” he says. “I wasn’t even familiar with camping.” Lape had traveled from Ohio for the event with his unit, the 8th Ohio. He soon discovered it was serious business.

“When we came off the road and rolled into camp, we were immediately given orders for guard duty,” Lape says. “‘Hey, I have road rash here from traveling and you want us to do guard duty?,’ I said.”

Hardcore living historian Robert Lee Hodge—a lead character in author Tony Horwitz’s rollicking 1998 best-seller Confederates in the Attic—became semi-famous in Civil War circles for urinating on his uniform buttons for the optimal patina. Neither Smith—who portrayed 5th Texas Private James Downey of Company A—nor Lape achieved that level of hardcore reenacting. But they and their comrades strived for realism.

Lape transferred his peach schnapps, his camp refreshment, from a modern glass to a hand-blown bottle. Smith and his comrades stripped their Enfield muskets of modern markings, replacing them with 1860 stamps. If

A Sense of Scale

Approximately 10,000 reenactors attended the historic event. Such numbers meant that some regiments and companies were re-created at full 1863 scale. Bottom right, Richard Smith's 5th Texas lines up.

someone in the company needed eyeglasses, he wore a pair appropriate for the era. In May or June 1863, the 5th Texas got new shell jackets, so Smith and his comrades made sure they did, too.

“And we would not wash any of our stuff,” he recalls. “When we got into the car, we’d go, ‘What is that smell? Is that us?’ I think we achieved the proper odor.” For the reenactment, Smith’s Company A had 33 soldiers, just as it did in July 1863. “ We were really proud of that,” he says.

During battle scenarios, Lape got theatrical. Sometimes he threw caution—and even his musket—into the wind. If opposing sides were firing from 50 yards, he expected soldiers to fall.

“I didn’t mean to be over the top,” says Lape, who has two Union ancestors who fought under William Tecumseh Sherman in the Western Theater. “But guys around me knew Lape might go flopping around like a flounder.”

Levity aside, Lape and his comrades were committed to portraying soldiers accurately and honoring their sacrifices. At Gettysburg in 1988, reenactors saw flickers of the summer of 1863. Sometimes it could be something mundane, like a dusty march, or sweat running from a soldier’s dust-covered face, or a meal of hardtack cooked with bacon and topped with dried apples. (“So freakin’ good,” Union reenactor Mick Bedard, then 40, says of that feast.)

Other times it was something jaw-dropping— the sight of the tips of Confederate battle flags rising on a ridge, or horse artillery racing across a field, or a marching column of Black Hats of the Iron Brigade. The immense scale of the event—a rarity for most reenactors—energized them.

Pennsylvanian Chuck Young, then a 29-yearold teacher, portrayed a private in the 27th Virginia of the famous Stonewall Jackson Brigade. From a ridgeline one evening, he looked in awe over the encampment of thousands of soldiers below.

“Can you imagine what it looked like if it was an army?” he told a friend.

Smith remembers patrolling as a sentry from

midnight to 4 a.m. with a handful of others. In the distance before him stood hundreds of dog tents. Flickering lanterns cast a spectral glow. The noise of snoring and coughing soldiers drifted into the hazy night air.

“I was standing there thinking, ‘I made the leap, man. It’s 1863.’” Smith recalls.

One day a reenactor portraying Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee rode into camp astride “Traveller.” The tourists, who often shot pictures and peppered reenactors with questions, were nowhere to be found. As Lee and his aides left the encampment, dozens of Confederate reenactors gathered around him.

“God bless you, General Lee,” they said.

“We love you, Marse Robert.”

Lee took off his hat and waved. Smith became teary-eyed. He swears other Rebels did, too.

“I thought to myself, ‘This is why we do this stupid hobby.’”

In the local newspaper, a National Park Service historian likened a real Civil War battle to “an unsupervised kindergarten class at recess, with the children going in all directions, falling, running, shouting.” The pretend Gettysburg battles produced a level of realism—and sometimes chaos—that often shook the participants.

At the 1988 reenactment, no one suffered a bullet wound, as a 22-year-old reenactor would 10 years later at Gettysburg. A French reenactor had unknowingly fired a .44-caliber ball into the neck of the man, who survived but soon left the hobby. Officers and others at the 1988 event enforced safety standards.

The pretend Gettysburg battles produced a level of realism–and sometimes chaos–that often shook participants.

Just

Friends for Life

Eighth Ohio officer Tom Downes, top at right, with his friend Terry Daley, now deceased. Above, troops turn spectators to watch the cavalry fight.

But damn, this was no recess.

“It was almost a continuous roar,” Young says of the battles. “You could make out individual rifle shots, a volley even. But the background behind that was a roar, a constant noise.

“It was as close to an experience of war as possible without having Minié balls whistle past my ear.”

During the Day 1 reenactment fighting, battle smoke obscured the enemy. Then, as if via a time machine, a Union regiment, its colonel, and a flag whipping in the breeze appeared in the sunlight.

“It was chilling,” says Young, the Rebel reenactor.

Few fighters knew what was happening beyond a 15-foot radius around them. Reenactors, teleported to another century, ignored spectators. Smith, portraying a file closer, rolled over a “wounded” Yankee, a friend of his from Akron, Ohio.

“Hey, Richard,” the prone reenactor said.

Gettysburg Souvenirs

The spectators and living historians who attended the 1988 reenactment were part of a long and unending fascination with the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, the largest engagement of the Civil War. Over the decades following the battle, myriad souvenirs have been produced so the hordes of visitors to the hallowed ground, often more than one million a year, could take home a memorytriggering knick knack. The objects below, some handmade but most mass produced, are just a small sample of what has been available over the years in Gettysburg-area stores.

A Jenny Wade was a sad statistic: the only civilian killed during the fight. Her home can still be toured. B This pin cushion shoe remembers Jenny Wade with a depiction of her house on its toe. C A homemade relic tower made from bullet-struck wood from the battlefield. The slug remains in the column, which is decorated with carved Army of Potomac corps badges. D Put on your makeup and think of Gettysburg while you do with this compact memorializing New York.

Downtime Confederate troops relax in their camp and enjoy a card game. Many enjoyed the camp life as much, or more, than the battle reenactments.

“Hey, Tom,” Smith replied.

When Smith swiped his friend’s shoes, spectators booed.

“That’s the only time I really noticed them,” he says.

The booming of cannons preceding Pickett’s Charge on the final day rocked the battlefield.

“One of the loudest I ever heard,” Smith says of the barrage.

Through the battle smoke, many spectators who jammed the battlefield caught only glimpses of the fighting. Some drank a beer or two. On came the Rebels, thousands of them.

A frazzled Union lieutenant turned to Downes.

“Hey, Tom, now you know why I wore my dark trousers today.”

The man had peed in his pants.

“We had never seen so many soldiers before,” Downes says.

The main Union line looked like a volcano of musketry and cannonading—albeit no real gunfire of course.

“I remember going up to a lieutenant and putting my mouth up to his ear,” Downes says. “He just looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. He could not hear me.”

Lape and his 8th Ohio comrades received orders to advance to an area where ground charges had been set up to simulate artillery. “It was a hot place,” he recalls. Literally. The grass and hay briefly caught fire.

To simulate receiving a head wound, Lape threw himself backward, unfortunately striking a rock on the ground.

“Our flag-bearer saw me go down,” he says. “I was out for a second or two, no intense pain. The flag-bearer calls over Surgeon Steve, who actually had a medical background. They get me to my feet, and I end up on a tree trunk.

Real blood is coming from my head.”

“Can I just go home with this?” Lape asked.

“No, you have to go to the hospital,” Surgeon Steve replied.

Shortly after the battle wrapped up, Lape found himself in an ambulance heading to a Gettysburg hospital with other wounded reenactors. A Yankee reenactor’s hand was bleeding from an accidental wound. As he was cutting a sliver from a modern wooden fence as a souvenir, the knife had slipped, gashing his hand.

“Why would you even want that?” Lape says, chuckling.

At a local hospital, modern physicians dressed the wounds of Civil War reenactors. A Confederate reenactor received treatment for powder burns after a Union reenactor reportedly fired a weapon into his face.

“It was almost like a movie set,” Lape says of the surreal hospital scene. “Twenty reenactors. Most were sitting up. No one was prostrate. I got seven stitches in the left side of my head. It was a glancing blow on the rock. My scalp had enough give. A full-on shot to my skull and I could have had a concussion.”

After a 1988 reenactment at Appomattox, Lape retired from the hobby. Young’s last reenactment came in 1994. Bedard fought his last battle in the 1990s. Smith, now 62, parlayed his interest in

Forage Caps, Flags, and Females

Sutlers, top, also ventured to Gettysburg to sell wares to the public and reenactors. Many women, above, attended as nurses, sanitary commission workers, or camp followers.

reenacting into a career as a public historian, specializing in Henry David Thoreau, the American poet, philosopher, and abolitionist. Downes, now 72, is still going strong.

“Most of the rest of my friends who were doing this are now dead,” he says. “Maybe I should join a Grand Army of the Republic unit.”

The memories of the reenactment—“the enormity of it all,” says Downes—remains seared into the reenactors’ brains. He says the event, managed by a history consulting firm, took two years to plan.

“Wish I had a drone to record it all,” he says.

Sweaty and satisfied, Smith surveyed the battlefield at Gettysburg 1988. Battle smoke and dust lingered. The air smelled of sulfur and musty wool. The playing of martial music by brass bands and the singing of soldiers around campfires—all that was long over.

“Why,” Smith wondered, “can’t all the reenactments be like this one?” H

John Banks writes from Nashville, Tenn., and is a frequent contributor for HistoryNet’s magazines. He has never reenacted. Nor will he if he wants to remain married to his beloved Mrs. B.

E Seventy-five years before the 1988 reenactment, surviving Gettysburg veterans traveled to the battlefield. They were given this ribbon to wear. F Blue and gray are commemorated on this silver spoon. General Robert E. Lee sits astride Traveller on the handle, while Maj. Gen. Gouverneur Warren forever gazes out from Little Round Top on the bowl. G Bang! Bang! This 1920s wooden pistol stamped with battle dates doubled as both a souvenir and a toy for a lucky young visitor. H Adults could take another type of shot with this ornate whiskey tumbler that features the Pennsylvania Monument, the largest on the battlefield.

The Golden Era

Before he became famous for chronicling Hollywood stars, Willoughby photographed jazz greats like Miles Davis, pictured here resting between sets.

Stalkingthe Decisive Moment

Bob Willoughby's striking images on set of Hollywood's top feature films defined the movie still.

Photographer Robert Hanley “Bob” Willoughby parlayed his beloved boyhood hobby into a kaleidoscopic career as a maker of indelible images. He was born in 1927 in Los Angeles, Calif., shortly after his parents, Cyril and Antoinette, divorced. Nettie Willoughby raised her son in West Hollywood. Cyril, a doctor, was not much present, but for the boy’s 12th birthday he gave his son a 35mm Argus C-3 rangefinder camera that quickly became a prominent fixture in Bob’s life. A neighbor taught the youth darkroom basics in exchange for babysitting. The sole class at school to hold his interest was art. When he was in junior high, a stroke disabled his mother, who never relented in her support for her son’s photographic ambitions. He converted the home garage on Marvin Avenue into a darkroom functional only at night owing to light leaks. He processed film and made prints to the tune of jazz broadcast by a San Francisco radio station whose AM signal reached southern California after sunset. Upon graduating from Louis Pasteur High in 1946 he apprenticed with a series of Hollywood photographers, earning $5 a week sharpening and expanding his skills. In night classes at USC, he studied under film designers and artists Saul Bass, Slavko Vorkapich, and William Cameron Menzies. He dove into LA’s vibrant music scene, photographing jazz and R&B performers. Dance magazine ran his pictures. He was 22 when his portrait of model Ann Baker graced the cover of the January 1950 US Camera; later that year eclectic label Fantasy Records recruited him to provide

A

A Still Life Willoughby was 27 when he landed his first LIFE cover in 1954. His photos were in print literally every week for the next 20 years.

LP cover art. In 1951 he signed with Globe Photo, which wrangled assignments from feature and fashion periodicals. To analyze and absorb clients’ unique styles, he haunted used periodicals stores, assembling an archive in which to steep himself in technical and aesthetic nuance. Mixing faith and commerce, he shot for Catholic magazine Jubilee; it would be easier to list the mainstream publications he did not work for than those he did. Under the spell of master magazine photojournalists Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and Irving Penn, he took on ever more fashion and feature work, at the same time establishing a toehold in and eventually a remarkably strong and creative grip on the arcane and demanding specialty of photographing Hollywood productions as they were being made, recording candid moments and scenes as shot. He first worked on contract with magazines seeking to illustrate stories about actors and coming attractions and eventually came to be relied on by studios for his unobtrusive expertise. To facilitate these efforts, he developed innovative camera brackets and electronically controlled flash systems. His facility at documenting decisive moment upon decisive moment led a commentator to label him “the man who virtually

invented the photojournalistic motion-picture still.” In 1957 he visited Ireland for the first time, forging a connection that lasted all his life. Through work he and Audrey Hepburn became long-time friends. At Elizabeth Taylor’s request, he photographed her and Eddie Fisher’s wedding in 1959. Soon after, he met Scottish flight attendant Dorothy Quigley aboard a transcontinental flight she was working. They fell for one another, wed, and raised three sons and a daughter, sometimes traveling and living abroad en famille thanks to Bob’s movie work. Over the decades, he photographed 100some feature films on sets and at locations around the world. In 1973, he retired. Seeking a pastoral routine away from the high life, the Willoughbys relocated to County Cork, Ireland, where they bought a castle and began a 17-year stay during which Willoughby produced books of verse and photos, including a 2001 memoir. Bob Willoughby was 82 when he died in 2009 in Vence, France. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, among many others. Now, with an introduction by son Christopher, Chronicle Books has published a rich and varied survey of his oeuvre titled Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life —Michael Dolan

HG Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman on a specially constructed set at Paramount during the filming of “The Graduate” in 1967. H Michael Caine on a Universal Studios set for “Gambit” in 1965. I Frank Sinatra at the craps tables at Las Vegas’ Sands Hotel in 1960. On an earlier Sinatra film set, “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1955), director Otto Preminger tried to tell Willoughby how to take his photographs. Sinatra was reportedly stunned when the young photographer dared to tell Preminger: “You look after your job and I’ll look after mine.” J Willoughby said he made himself seem invisible by blending in with the movie crew, once he realized they were invisible to the actors. His favorite muse was Audrey Hepburn, but Willoughby shot several iconic photos of Hollywood’s other elite, such as this one of Marilyn Monroe in 1960 on the set of “Let’s Make Love.”

IGThis portfolio is excerpted from the new, comprehensive monograph of Bob Willoughby’s work, Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life published by Chronicle Books in November 2022, $60.

Divided Land

Terra Firma

THIS 1892 MAP depicts the Oklahoma and Indian Territories not long after the famous Oklahoma Land Rush that started April 22, 1889, and eventually brought 50,000 White settlers into the area—a significant development in the establishment of the state of Oklahoma. Settlers who had slipped over the border before the rush’s official start date to claim land were called “Sooners.”

The eventual dissolution of Indian Territory has a sad and complex history. The term originated in 1835 when Southeastern Indian tribes were forcibly displaced from their native lands and moved west of the Mississippi River, an event the Cherokee called the “Trail of Tears.”

Over the ensuing decades, through a number of federal acts and treaties, Indian Territory continued to shrink until it consisted of the area represented on this map. Through a number of congressional decrees—33 alone in 1870–79—White settlers were allowed to move in and take up residence in Indian Territory.

After the Land Rush, the Organic Act of 1890 created the new Oklahoma Territory boundary. Plains Tribes were placed on reservations in Oklahoma, while Indian Territory remained the home of southeastern tribes. The map includes the years the treaties were drafted giving the land to the respective tribes.

Eventually, both territories were merged into one, the Oklahoma Territory, and the term Indian Territory disappeared from federal lands. After four separate plans, the state of Oklahoma was created in 1907.

Despite the colorful, engrossing appearance of this map, it actually documents one of many steps in the marginalization of Native Americans in the United States. H

Moses, Michelangelo, and the NRA

Though he rarely left the public eye for more than half a century,

Sixty Years in the Limelight

Charlton Heston (born John Charles Carter) played a vast number of historical figures on-screen, among them: Moses, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Andrew Jackson (as a general in one movie and president in another), Michelangelo, Cardinal Richelieu, Brigham Young, and Marc Antony. He is also fondly remembered for his roles in fictional movies such as Planet of the Apes, Ben-Hur, and even Wayne’s World 2.

Running the Race: The “Public Face” of Charlton Heston

Heston’s 60 years of public life set the bar for longevity. His career spanned acting (both on stage and screen), president of the Screen Actors Guild, and also leader of the National Rifle Association. Some acting roles were more enriching than others. This was made evident when receiving a role in a film based on one of William Shakespeare’s plays, Heston exclaimed, “Shakespeare is the real Super Bowl of acting. Thousands of years from now, if they are still acting, they will be acting Shakespeare.”

Heston was a shy person, yet he kept his public persona in the spotlight for the rest of his life. When assessing his own image, Heston noted, “You just can’t overestimate the importance of an audience’s perception of a performer.” Heston even exposed his one-time bad habit when he was enlisted to join several public service announcements on behalf of the American Cancer Society and Action on Smoking on Health (ASH) condemning his former vice of smoking tobacco. Having previously sold Camel cigarettes for a living, Heston’s about face was noteworthy. He elaborated that he had his children’s welfare to be concerned with and admitted, “[G]rowing evidence that smoker’s endanger not only their own health, but the health of others, which puts another adjustment on it.”

Author Wills weaves an enthralling narrative. Besides being a fun read, this book is like a walk through memory lane for Americans. Pick up a copy and enjoy the ride through Charlton Heston’s public life.

Passing and Then Some

Ilyan Woo’s Master Slave Husband Wife is as its subtitle advertises. Against all the slavocracy’s oppressive illogic and violent constraints but inspired by fellow enslaved persons who had emancipated themselves through clever ruses, Ellen and William Craft, improving on those schemes with a gambit seemingly destined to fail, instead succeeded in late 1848. In the manner of illusionists persuading a crowd that an elephant has vanished, the couple up and walked away from bondage in the midst of their enslavers.

Self-emancipating predecessors like William “Box” Brown (“Thinking Outside the Box,” December 2021) had had themselves packed up and shipped north, or, like Frederick Douglass, had posed as a freedman employed as a sailor, for example. The Crafts’ far more daring concept was to have light-skinned Ellen cross-dress and pretend to be a sickly, silent White male planter who was bound north to seek badly needed medical care, with the darker William playing that individual’s extremely devoted and highly protective chattel body man.

Thus disguised in plain sight, “master” and “slave” made their surreptitious and inexpressibly fraught way day upon day, mile upon mile, and minute upon minute by train, ship, and stagecoach from Macon, Ga., to Philadelphia to Massachusetts and eventually to true freedom in Britain.

With its dizzying central premise, Master Slave Husband Wife could have succeeded as nothing more than a perfectly satisfactory thriller, but the ambitious Woo reaches much further and digs far deeper. Besides providing detailed portraits and backstories for her protagonists, she deftly interrogates and illuminates the energetically fractious community in the North that was bent on abolition, mapping the figures and personalities comprising it, a census that temporarily welcomed, enveloped, and celebrated the Crafts. Woo also incorporates a running history of the Fugitive Slave Act and its propagation of the slave-hunting trade.

Working from the couple’s underappreciated 1860 memoir, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, whose rich material she augments with impressively broad and deep reporting, Woo, a historian and journalist, delivers a crackling, intimate melodrama grounded in the historical record.

The author renders her effort all the more engaging by couching her subjects’ story in a voice evocative of the era: stately, formal, slightly distanced and yet emotive. Though her prose does stumble over the occasional glaring anachronism (the 21st-century phrase “comfort zone,”

for instance) and at times shifts into subjunctively speculative “would have could have should have” language to keep the narrative engine revving in the absence of confirmed fact, save for these lumpy moments Woo maintains sure command of her characters and their extraordinary pilgrims’ progress Master Slave Husband Wife is a page-turning triumph that recounts a life-changing triumph.

Still Standing

A neophyte seeking an entrée to nonfiction writing about American intelligence-gathering, analysis, and resulting activities overt and covert now has a practical primer to consult prior to diving into that vast and varied catalog. Returning to a realm he has visited in multiple earlier volumes, University of Edinburgh emeritus professor Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones renders a sharply focused and crisply argued account of CIA achievements, faceplants, and oversteppings. In titling A Question of Standing, which leads with a tear through the 150odd years of spycraft and fieldwork that preceded the CIA’s 1947 charter, followed by a brisk account of the Central Intelligence Agency’s 75 years in business, Jeffreys-Jones employs “standing” in the sense of “regard,” as in being well-thought-of or not, specifically by a given presidential administration—the sine qua non of a happy spy shop.

Standing has not always developed automatically. Presidents from George Washington to Grover Cleveland pretty much could do as they liked when it came to intelligence as a function of the executive branch. But in the modern age unease, formal and informal, has intermittently dogged the nation’s meandering efforts in the shadow world. That certainly was so during the Great War, when civilian espionage entity “U-1,” dominated by Ivy Leaguers, operated under the State Department aegis.

Greater latitude greeted the freebooting World War II heyday of the Office of Strategic Services— in spy-speak, “OSS,” sometimes said to be short for “Oh So Social,” a waggish nod to the outfit’s cliquish tilt, inherited from U-1. From the CIA’s inception at the dawn of the Cold War until revelations of domestic espionage, assassinations, and other abuses brought wrenching ’70s-era reforms, the Agency waxed, sometimes wackily, as when CIA chemists schemed to make Fidel Castro’s beard fall out, and sometimes went riotously off the rails, as in a bungled 1961 agency-engineered invasion of Cuba.

Though its reason for being seemed to evaporate when the Cold War ended, the War on Terror and Russia’s renascence as an imperialist evildoer have proved reliable goads to funding and employing the agency, often in full military mode,

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA

The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink

as in the Ayman al-Zawahri takedown. Regarding standing, the current day sees the CIA not always primus inter pares among a passel of 19 officially designated intelligence enterprises. JeffreysJones, admitting to prizing brevity over completeness, selectively illuminates key surges and ebbs in the agency’s career and reputation with thought-provoking verve.

Reagan Reconsidered

Republicans have no doubt that President Ronald Reagan won the Cold War; Democrats are certain that he did not. Scholars still debate the mechanics, but all agree that in the 1980s the USSR was moribund. Having been led by three ancients who quickly died, the Soviet state was saddled with a faltering economy and no more successful fighting in Afghanistan than the Brits before or the Americans after.

Everyone agrees that Reagan entered office in 1981 as a pugnacious cold warrior. Convinced the Soviet Union, a superpower with a stronger military and a huge nuclear arsenal, was bent on world domination, Reagan held that communists, devilishly more clever than wimpy democrats, were subverting free nations right and left. He was correct only about the nukes, but his beliefs got him elected. Inboden, associate professor of history at the University of Texas, delves deeply into Reagan’s Cold War policy.

Brushing aside that advice, Reagan negotiated agreements that in 1986 vastly reduced the risk of nuclear war. The USSR collapsed in 1991. Historians mainly credit that implosion to Gorbachev, a devout Marxist with no idea how to fix his nation’s hopelessly dysfunctional economy or how to introduce democracy into a nation that had never known a democratic system.

Inboden’s expert account of American foreign policy on Reagan’s watch is more favorable than most. While denying that Reagan won the Cold War, The Peacemaker persuasively argues that he was a more positive force than those around him.

By the Numbers…and Not

The raw data that go into the decennial census— the names and individual particulars of every American—are by law released to the public 72 years after that information was gathered. So, when in 2017 historian Dan Bouk set his students at Colgate University to poring through original census documents hunting anomalies, the 1940 replies were the most recent available. Bouk wanted examples that would show that data— even data meticulously and objectively gathered—are inherently faulty and need to be read with at least a few grains of salt.

Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

Smiting the Soviets was the goal of everyone in the new administration. The defense budget ballooned. Given carte blanche, the CIA vastly expanded covert operations against governments with leftist sympathies as well as less covert arming of the Taliban freedom fighters wreaking havoc on Afghanistan’s Soviet occupiers. Everyone knew this was a brilliant idea.

Unlike earlier administrations’ reflexive politesse toward the USSR, Reagan denounced the “evil empire” for lacking free elections and democracy and for trampling human rights. Even at the time, observers complained that certain nasty dictatorships, by vociferously opposing communism, gained standing to join Reagan’s “free world.”

Few, even in his own party, claimed that Reagan possessed deep insights, but Inboden sees one. He points out that all hands, even the GOP, deplored nuclear war, agreed that it might end civilization. But many—certainly almost all Reagan Republicans—considered nuclear desolation the lesser evil. Better dead than red.

Not Reagan. He genuinely believed nuclear war to be unthinkable. He horrified advisers by voicing intent to discuss arms reduction with Russia’s latest premier, Mikhail Gorbachev. Don’t be naïve enough to trust commies, Reaganauts warned.

The shortcomings begin with the questions asked, given that practicality limits the number of queries. In 1940, officials rejected a request to ask each respondent’s “usual occupation.” The lesson, according to Bouk, is that in analyzing data it’s important to weigh why those gathering information thought certain responses more important than others. “We must look for a deeper set of values and concerns,” he writes.

The most contentious question in the 1940 census asked, for the first time, how much a respondent earned. Users of census data were united on the importance of getting this information, but the question generated a torrent of opposition to what some denounced as unacceptable governmental prying. Resistance led directly to another of the inherent data defects Bouk spotlights: respondents lie. His students found obviously comfortable neighborhoods in which respondent after respondent reported no wage income. Besides outright lying, there are the unintentional mistakes: the person being interviewed by a census taker merely guessing at a live-in maid’s age, or the census taker mishearing or incorrectly transcribing an answer. And political considerations can override facts. Bowing to State Department attempts to mollify the Mexican government, any participant whose race a 1940 census taker listed as “Mex” was recast as “white” when the data were entered onto punch cards.

And there’s the basic structural defect that for

data to be useful answers have to be fit into categories that can provide comparable totals. Real life, however, is messier than that. The 1940 census presumed that every household had a head and some number of other members having specific familial connections. Households that differed significantly from the supposed norm stymied census takers, who often resorted to the unapproved term “partner” to describe, say, a roommate. But punch cards had no hole for “partner,” so when entered into the final 1940 tally those answers were changed to “boarder.”

Bouk makes a convincing case that we need to read census numbers with an awareness of their imperfections. But he falls short of his promise to teach readers how to uncover “the stories in the data.” Given the results’ welter of misinterpretations, errors, and outright prevarications, he is unable to discern from the 1940 data the true stories of the enumerated, and so we can’t learn how, in our own reading of ancestors’ census replies, to sort fact from fancy. (Note: The 1940 census was the first on which this particular reviewer would have appeared.)

Grassroots Movement

One of the most significant contributions by the current generation of American historians is a bookshelf’s worth of serious scholarly examinations of American conservatism and right-wing politics. Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors (2001) focused on the movement-making efforts of middle-class conservative women in Orange County, Calif. This bottom-up rendering of the conservative movement begat numerous other fantastic regional and national studies, including Kevin Kruse’s White Flight (2006) and Matthew Lassiter’s The Silent Majority (2007). In recent years, a new crop of books focused on the far right have added to the bounty, most notably Edward H. Miller’s A Conspiratorial Life (2022), a biography of John Birch Society [JBS] founder Robert Welch that beats a path directly from JBS’ rabid anti-communism to the gates of QAnon. Treading the same grounds, Matthew Dallek further firms up the foundation of this now robust area of scholarly inquiry in Birchers

Many of the aforementioned works are intellectual histories in the clothing of political history—they focus on why people came to think the things that they thought. Dallek’s excellent book is more social history in the cloak of political history. He explains how the grassroots tools employed by the JBS during the 1950s and 1960s became part of the toolbox of the contemporary Far Right. He shows how the JBS made use of confrontational, direct political action, lobbied local and national political leaders, and spread

their ideas through unconventional forms of media. “Birchers,” as Dallek refers to them, got elected to school boards, harassed real or perceived political adversaries, and broadcast their ideas on out-of-the-way spots on the radio dial or through widely distributed pamphlets. Most significantly, they found a way to hang around as part of the Republican Party’s electoral coalition—never large enough to control the party but vital to any GOP hopes to win national elections.

Dallek emphasizes the professional class origins of many of the far right’s original progenitors in America. Nevertheless, the conspiratorial politics of JBS and its more recent successors such as QAnon found a large audience among disaffected white, working-class voters. Dallek attributes this to a search for succinct explanations to the social, economic, and cultural challenges they have faced in recent decades. The willingness of the Republican Party to accommodate this hard, conspiratorial right as part of its big tent for decades made possible the rise of Trump—a dynamic, well-financed candidate who tapped into a ready-made political movement that already had these old tools of confrontation at its disposal. Dallek’s book lacks some of the intellectual heft of its predecessors that wrestled seriously with ideas that many of their authors found abhorrent, but Birchers makes a serious contribution to our understanding of the logistics of how Far Right politics reshaped the Republican Party.

Extra! A Little Extra!

Given the title of this new offering from Stephen Davis and Bill Hendrick, readers might reasonably expect to find a compilation of news stories from Atlanta’s largest newspaper between 1861 and 1865. But that’s not what you get at all. Don’t be disappointed. You get something else instead, and something much better.

To illustrate how Atlantans learned about the war, the authors do quote liberally from the paper’s news, editorial, and advertising copy. But their aim is also to “show how the Intelligencer reported the war’s important events, based on the news it received; whether the paper got the facts accurately according to our study of the historical literature; and how the paper’s editorial columns reflected on those events from a distinctly pro-Confederate point of view.” Because it succeeded in all these roles, the authors contend the newspaper “had few peers in the Confederate press.”

The authors are candid about why they chose the Intelligencer as the basis for their case study of Southern newspaper reporting during wartime. The Atlanta History Center holds a virtually complete run of both microfilm and original

Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad

paper copies, something that cannot be said for most Confederate newspapers. Indeed, when Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman approached and later occupied Atlanta, the Intelligencer decamped to Macon and continued to publish, thereby preserving both copies of the newspaper and its business records. After Sherman departed in November 1864, the newspaper returned and resumed publication.

Davis and Hendrick report in detail the difficulties of maintaining a newspaper during a time of manpower and material shortages, especially in the South. Paper, ink, and skilled pressmen were in chronically short supply and competition for them was fierce and unrelenting. Getting timely war news was especially problematic since much of the reportage came by telegraph that was both costly and otherwise needed for critical war messaging. Accuracy was always questionable, leading editor Archibald Gaulding to lament, “Rumor confirms rumor and yet, we, of the press still remain indebted to nothing but rumor for all these reports.” Many newspapers, the Intelligencer among them, reprinted stories from newspapers closer to the action and, as the war lengthened, ran letters written by soldiers to the home folks or specifically to the newspaper to recount their experiences.

Besides the ongoing difficulties of reporting timely and accurate accounts of war news to Atlantans, the authors document the Intelligencer’s role as a propaganda organ for the Confederacy. Specifically, throughout the war, the newspaper fixed blame for the war on the enemy and confidently predicted victory for the Confederacy. An editorial on July 31, 1862, the paper declared “a distinguished military chief said in our hearing on a recent occasion that the prospects of the Confederacy were never brighter

since the opening of the war than they are at present.” It repeatedly vilified Union political and military leaders and accused them of perpetrating a variety of atrocities, all with the aim of stoking the morale of people on the home front. Although daily circulation never exceeded 3,000, copies of Intelligencer stories and editorials were reprinted by newspapers throughout the South.

Even as reports of General Robert E. Lee was surrendering to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in faraway Virginia began to circulate, Intelligencer editor John Steele continued to boldly support the Confederacy. On April 18, 1865, he wrote “we place no confidence in these statements, viewing them as base fabrications of an unscrupulous foe.” Commenting on dispatches reporting the assassination of President Lincoln, Steele wistfully mused that “truly the mysterious workings of Providence are past all human comprehension.”

On May 4, 1865, the Intelligencer in an editorial titled “Adversity—How to Bear It” counseled its readers to accept subjugation and face the future with bravery. The newspaper had survived the war, no small feat as more than 60 Southern newspapers had failed, but it did not survive the peace that followed. It folded in 1871 and its equipment was sold at public auction for $4,000.

Still on the Case

William Still is best known for his 1872 book recounting 995 bold escapes he oversaw during the 14 years he worked before the Civil War for the Vigilance Committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (PASS). Still’s own astonishing experiences awaited William Kashatus’ 2021 exploration not only of Still’s life but analysis and follow-up details on fugitives he assisted. Now biographer Andrew Diemer shares details of— and controversies during—Still’s career, which extended far beyond his role in the Underground Railroad.

The youngest of 18 children, Still at 23 moved to Philadelphia in 1844. He worked a few jobs, including as a servant to a rich and helpful White widow, before applying to clerk at PASS in 1847. Over time, he assumed more responsibility, lining up arriving fugitives, often hidden on boats, with handlers to move them North, at first to New York, then often to Canada.

Still’s mother had escaped from slavery in Maryland twice, the second time leaving two young sons behind. She would see only one of those sons again, decades later, after he visited the Anti-Slavery Society office in Philadelphia in 1850, where William Still recognized him as a long-lost sibling.

Among the hundreds Still aided were Harriet

When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance

Tubman and her bands of fugitives, all of whom escaped without complication. Others were less fortunate, and Diemer dives into court cases related to fugitive slaves or kidnapped free Blacks, showing how after the passage of the Fugitive Slave law in 1850 Still and his committee maneuvered in a tangled legal landscape. Still and his family routinely sheltered escapees and maintained close ties to prominent abolitionists such as Robert Purvis, Frederick Douglass, and James and Lucretia Mott.

After the Harpers Ferry raid, two of John Brown’s men made it to Still’s home; John Brown’s wife, Mary, stayed with the Stills before her husband’s execution. At this time, for his own safety, Still began stashing his notes on escapes he facilitated in a nearby cemetery.

During the Civil War, the U.S. Army recruited Still to serve as sutler at Camp William Penn, which trained U.S. Colored Troops. Following the war, he pushed for Black education and set up a body to document the conditions of Blacks in Philadelphia.

He campaigned vigorously for equal rights, not only seeking to obtain Black suffrage but also to desegregate the city’s streetcars. All the while, he kept businesses going, and by the late 1860s had become a prominent coal broker and possibly Philadelphia’s richest Black. Along the way, his proud high-mindedness and material success drew criticism and envy; a generational rift opened between him and younger activists. These included Octavius Catto, in 1871 shot dead by an associate of the local Democratic ward leader while going to vote in Philadelphia.

Drawing on newspapers and archives, Diemer’s Vigilance brings the Black experience in both antebellum and postbellum Philadelphia to life, showing the extent to which, Diemer writes, “Abolition was the beginning, not the end, of the struggle for Black freedom.”

Winds From Vichy

May 1940: German armies overran France, whose government turned over power to Marshal Phillipe Petain. Petain’s pessimism had saved lives in the trenches of World War I. Now he raised the white flag, creating the collaborationist Vichy regime.

Outside France, panic gripped politicians and generals who had assumed French forces could contain Germany until British and American military expansion turned the tide. Now conquest loomed. One panicky proposed solution? Collaborate with the collaborationists.

Who were the figures behind this thinking ? The British politicians who pushed Winston Churchill to negotiate? No. Despite the knife at

Britain’s throat, these men favored peace only if Hitler compromised and abandoned certain conquests. Otherwise, Britons meant to fight on; the jitter to befriend Vichy came from the Western Hemisphere.

Fears for American security were not as unreasonable as the Atlantic’s span suggests. Longdistance amphibious operations were possible. If Britain fell quickly, America—its military capacity as yet sharply limited—could become a target. Fighting a two-front war solo against both Germany and an increasingly hostile Japan would be disastrous.

But some feared German accomplishments beyond even Hitler’s wildest dreams. One U.S. Army memorandum suggested that Senegal—then a French colony—could serve as a German base for taking sides in Brazilian coups and countercoups, gaining an ally in the French holding and perhaps the South American country as well and closing the southern Atlantic to the U.S. Navy. The memo’s authors imagined a domino effect tilting the rest of Latin America into German hands.

To avert doom, however implausible, the American government selected three policies: Eminently sensible support for Britain, reassigning forces needed in the Pacific to counter the “Latin American threat,” and accepting the Vichy regime as legitimate. Buying time was not the only goal. Neither was keeping U.S. options open, in case Petain decided to switch sides. Rather, the Allies wooed Petain while spurning the Free French.

This nattering appalled the Free French and their British backers. American willingness to ally with a French government that oppressed its own people and collaborated in genocide contrasted with American policies aiming to weaken the reasonably benign British and French empires in favor of “self-determination,” further fueling the fire.

Vichy’s Admiral Darlan made matters even more complex. Darlan had urged war against Britain instead of remaining a “neutral satellite” of Germany. As the Allies closed in on France’s colonies of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, he decided to turn his coat. The result was a four-sided chess match in which complex maneuvers alternately imperiled vital military operations and brought those operations to a successful conclusion.

When France Fell is both a page-turner and an exhaustively researched account of the only World War II political drama to match Churchill’s takeover of the British government at the moment of crisis. And it is a fascinating “warts and all” picture of how an American government could gravely blunder while still saving much of the world.

Getting His Exercise

Pachyderm Pull Toy

THIS CHARMING PULL TOY dates from 1919–27, and it’s easy to imagine the pachyderm cycling its way around a living room, tugged along by a happy child reliving a circus visit. The small dot on the animal’s ear is a brass tack imprinted “Steiff,” the famous German toy company whose items were popular in America.

Toy Box

Many Steiff elephants were of the stuffed variety, but this “Velo” model was made of hand-painted pieces of wood, and the front legs are articulated to pedal the tricycle’s drive wheel. Just like elephants under the Big Top!

Even though the beast came from Europe, circuses there had declined due to the ravages of World War I. That conflict, however,

had brought about the “Greatest Show on Earth” in the United States. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey ’s circuses had been operating independently, but a shortage of train cars due to wartime demands brought about the merger of the two different acts in 1919, creating the circus powerhouse.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey went out of business a few years ago, but the company plans to start up again in the fall of 2023. That news is sure to keep the smile on Dumbo’s face. H

When 1982 rolled around, the U.S. Mint hadn’t produced a commemorative half dollar for nearly three decades. So, to celebrate George Washington’s 250th birthday, the tradition was revived. The Mint struck 90% silver half dollars in both Brilliant Uncirculated (BU) and Proof condition. These milestone Washington coins represented the first-ever modern U.S. commemoratives, and today are still the only modern commemorative half dollars struck in 90% silver!

Iconic Designs of the Father of Our Country

These spectacular coins feature our first President and the Father of Our Country regally astride a horse on the front, while the back design shows Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. Here’s your chance to get both versions of the coin in one remarkable, 40-year-old, 2-Pc. Set—a gleaming Proof version with frosted details rising over mirrored fields struck at the San Francisco Mint, and a dazzling Brilliant Uncirculated coin with crisp details struck at the Denver Mint. Or you can get either coin individually.

Very Limited. Sold Out at the Mint!

No collection of modern U.S. coins is complete without these first-ever, one-year-only Silver Half Dollars—which effectively sold out at the mint since all unsold coins were

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