“What We Owe Jehovah’s Witnesses”
By Sarah Barringer Gordon
In a landmark decision written by Justice Robert Jackson and announced on Flag Day,
June 14, the Supreme Court sided with the Witnesses. "To believe that patriotism will not
flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is
to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds," Jackson said. "If
there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can
prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or
force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
Jehovah's Witnesses were unlikely champions of religious freedom. The sect's leaders
denounced all other religions and all secular governments as tools of the devil, and preached the
imminence of the Apocalypse, during which no one except Jehovah's Witnesses would be
spared. But their persistence in fighting in the courts for their beliefs had a dramatic impact on
constitutional law. Barnette is just one of several major Supreme Court decisions involving
freedom of religion, speech, assembly and conscience that arose from clashes between Jehovah's
Witnesses and government authorities. The Witnesses insisted that God's law demanded they
refrain from all pledges of allegiance to earthly governments. They tested the nation's tolerance
of controversial beliefs and led to an increasing recognition that a willingness to embrace
religious diversity is what distinguishes America from tyrannical regimes.
The Witness sect was founded in the 1870s, and caused a stir when the founder, Charles
Taze Russell, a haberdasher in Pittsburgh, predicted the world would come to an end in 1914.
Russell died in 1916; he was succeeded by his lawyer Joseph Franklin Rutherford, who shrewdly
emphasized that the Apocalypse was near, but not so near that Witnesses didn't have time to
convert new followers, which they were required to do lest they miss out on salvation. This
"blood guilt" propelled in-your-face proselytizing by Witnesses in various communities on street
corners and in door-to-door visits. Soon the sect developed a reputation for exhibiting
"astonishing powers of annoyance," as one legal commentator put it.
Rutherford ruled the Witnesses with an iron fist. He routinely encouraged public displays
of contempt for "Satan's world," which included all other religions and all secular governments.
At the time, the number of Witnesses in the U.S.—roughly 40,000—was so small that many
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Americans could ignore them. But in Nazi Germany, no group was too small to escape the eye of
new chancellor Adolf Hitler, who banned the Witnesses after they refused to show their fealty to
him with the mandatory "Heil Hitler" raised-arm salute. (Many Witnesses would later perish in
his death camps.) In response, Rutherford praised the German Witnesses and advised all of his
followers to refuse to participate in any oaths of allegiance that violated (in his view) the Second
Commandment: "Thou shall have no Gods before me."
With conflict looming around the world in the 1930s, many states enacted flag salute
requirements, especially in schools. The steadfast refusal of Witnesses to pledge, combined with
their refusal to serve in the military or to support America's war effort in any way, triggered
public anger. Witnesses soon became a ubiquitous presence in courtrooms across the country.
The relationship between Witnesses and the courts was complicated, in part because of
the open disdain Rutherford and his followers displayed toward all forms of government and
organized religion. Rutherford instructed Witnesses not to vote, serve on juries or participate in
other civic duties. He even claimed Social Security numbers were the "mark of the beast"
foretold in Revelations. The Catholic Church, said Rutherford, was a "racket," and Protestants
and Jews were "great simpletons," taken in by the Catholic hierarchy to "carry on her
commercial, religious traffic and increase her revenues." Complaints about unwelcome public
proselytizing by Witnesses led to frequent run-ins with state and local authorities and hundreds
of appearances in lower courts. Every day in court for Rutherford and the Witnesses' chief
attorney, Hayden Covington, was an opportunity to preach the true meaning of law to the judges
and to confront the satanic government.
In late 1935, Witness Walter Gobitas' two children—Lillian, 12, and Billy, 10—were
expelled from school in Minersville, Pa., because they balked at the mandatory recital of the
Pledge of Allegiance, and a long court battle ensued. When Gobitis v. Minersville School
District (as with Barnette, a court clerk misspelled the family surname) made its way to the
Supreme Court in the spring of 1940, Rutherford and Covington framed their argument in
religious terms, claiming that any statute contrary to God's law as given to Moses must be void.
The Court rejected the Witnesses' claim, holding that the secular interests of the school district in
fostering patriotism were paramount. In the majority opinion, written during the same month that
France fell to the Nazis, Felix Frankfurter wrote: "National unity is the basis of national
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security." The plaintiffs, said Frankfurter, were free to "fight out the wise use of legislative
authority in the forum of public opinion and before legislative assemblies."
In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Harlan Stone argued that "constitutional guarantees
or personal liberty are not always absolutes…but it is a long step, and one which I am unwilling
to take, that government may, as a supposed educational measure…compel public affirmations
which violate their public conscience." Further, said Stone, the prospect of help for this "small
and helpless minority" by the political process was so remote that Frankfurter had effectively
"surrendered…the liberty of small minorities to the popular will."
Public reaction to Gobitis bordered on hysteria, colored by the hotly debated prospect of
American participation in the war in Europe. Some vigilantes interpreted the Supreme Court's
decision as a signal that Jehovah's Witnesses were traitors who might be linked to a network of
Nazi spies and saboteurs. In Imperial, a town outside Pittsburgh, a mob descended on a small
group of Witnesses and pummeled them mercilessly. One Witness was beaten unconscious, and
those who fled were cornered by ax- and knife-wielding men riding the town's fire truck as
someone yelled, "Get the ropes! Bring the flag!" In Kennebunk, Maine, the Witnesses' gathering
place, Kingdom Hall, was ransacked and torched, and days of rioting ensued. In Litchfield, Ill.,
an angry crowd spread an American flag on the hood of a car and watched while a man
repeatedly smashed the head of a Witness upon it. In Rockville, Md., Witnesses were assaulted
across the street from the police station, while officers stood and watched. By the end of the year,
the American Civil Liberties Union estimated that 1,500 Witnesses had been assaulted in 335
separate attacks.
The reversal of Gobitis in Barnette just three years later was remarkably swift
considering the typical pace of deliberations in the Supreme Court. In the wake of all the
violence against Witnesses, three Supreme Court justices—William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy
and Hugo Black—publicly signaled in a separate case that they thought Gobitis had been
"wrongly decided." When Barnette reached the Supreme Court in 1943, Harlan Stone, the lone
dissenter in Gobitis, had risen to chief justice. The facts of the two cases mirrored each other, but
the outcome differed dramatically. Most important, in ruling that Witness children could not be
forced to recite the pledge, the new majority rejected the notion that legislatures, rather than the
courts, were the proper place to address questions involving religious liberty. The "very purpose"
of the Bill of Rights, wrote Justice Robert Jackson, was to protect some issues from the majority
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rule of politics. "One's right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of
worship and assembly, may not be submitted to vote….Fundamental rights depend on the
outcome of no elections." Jackson's opinion was laced with condemnation of enforced patriotism
and oblique hints at the slaughter taking place in Hitler's Europe. "Those who begin in coercive
elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters," Jackson wrote.
"Compulsory unification of opinions achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard." Religious
dissenters, when seen from this perspective, are like the canary in the coal mine: When they
begin to suffer and die, everyone should be worried that the atmosphere has been polluted by
tyranny.
Today, the Witnesses still proselytize, but their right to do so is well established thanks to
their long legal campaign. Over time they became less confrontational and blended into the
fabric of American life.
In the wake of the Barnette decision, the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance continued to
occupy a key (yet ambiguous) place in American politics and law. The original pledge was a
secular oath, with no reference to any power greater than the United States of America. The
phrase "under God" was added by an act of Congress and signed into law by President Dwight
Eisenhower on Flag Day, June 14, 1954. Eisenhower, who had grown up in a Jehovah's Witness
household but later became a Presbyterian, alluded to the growing threat posed by Communists
in the Soviet Union and China when he signed the bill: "In this way we are reaffirming the
transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly
strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resources
in peace and war."
Eisenhower's political instincts for the ways that religion functioned in American life
were finely honed: Support for the amendment to the Pledge of Allegiance was strong, including
an overwhelming majority of Catholics and Protestants as well as a majority of Jews. According
to a Gallup survey, the only group that truly opposed the change was the smattering of atheists.
In a country locked in battle with godless communism, a spiritual weapon such as an amended
pledge that was not denominationally specific made sense. Only after the intervening halfcentury and more does the "Judeo-Christian" God invoked in the pledge seem less than broadly
inclusive.
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Public Enemies & Keystone Cops
By Peter Carlson
The moonless night was pitch dark but the G-men shut off their headlights as they
approached a rural Wisconsin inn called Little Bohemia. They didn't want John Dillinger and his
gang of bank robbers to see them coming. When the feds slipped quietly out of the cars, guns
ready, they spotted three men hustling out of the darkness and into a Chevy coupe. The Chevy's
lights flashed on, music blared from the radio and it took off.
"Stop!" the G-men yelled. "Federal Agents!"
The car kept going. The feds unleashed several bursts of fire from their Tommy guns.
The Chevy's windshield shattered, its tires popped and it rolled to a halt. Inside, one man was
dead and two were badly wounded. None was Dillinger. The three men were local workers who
happened to stop at the inn for a drink.
At the sound of gunfire, the real bank robbers inside Little Bohemia bolted, darting out
doors and leaping from windows, shooting as they fled. The G-men responded by blasting the
lodge, then turning to fire at the cars as they raced away from the site.
When the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, one federal agent was dead and two
lawmen lay wounded while Dillinger and his cronies slipped away unscathed.
It was April 22, 1934, and once again the elusive John Dillinger had escaped his pursuers,
making monkeys of the cops who'd been chasing him for months.
Seventy-five years ago this summer, Dillinger and a dozen other outlaws were the stars of
the Great Depression's greatest show—a cops-and-robbers soap opera complete with blood, sex,
death, money and amazing, hair-raising escapes. Newspapers, eager to cover their exploits,
invented colorful nicknames for them—"Gentleman Johnny" Dillinger, "Pretty Boy" Floyd,
Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, "Ma" Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, and "Baby Face" Nelson.
They were bank robbers, which was not an un-popular occupation in 1934. In the depths
of the Depression, bankers were even less beloved than they are in 2009. In the '20s, banks
speculated in stocks, then went bust, leaving depositors high and dry. In the '30s, banks
foreclosed on farmers who'd been devastated by drought, forcing thousands off their land. By
1934 many Americans smiled when banks got robbed, and in movie theaters, audiences
applauded when newsreels showed pictures of Dillinger.
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"You robbed the bank, did you?" a North Dakota farmer asked a member of Ma Barker's
gang. "Well, I don't care. All the banks ever do is foreclose on us farmers."
The savviest bank robbers knew how to capitalize on their Robin Hood appeal. When the
governor of Oklahoma offered $1,000 for Pretty Boy Floyd's capture, Floyd wrote a letter of
protest: "I have robbed no one but the monied men."
The famous criminals of the '30s differed from the celebrated crooks of the previous
decade. The gangsters of the '20s were men of the sinful cities, many of them immigrants. The
bank robbers of the '30s were country boys and girls, all-American bands of homegrown
sociopaths from the heartland.
Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd was an Oklahoma farm boy who robbed small-town banks,
survived several shootouts with lawmen and liked to hide out with his Oklahoma relatives,
drinking Choctaw beer and baking pies.
"Ma" Barker was a short, dumpy Oklahoma farm wife who wore overalls, liked jigsaw
puzzles and raised four sons, all of them criminals. J. Edgar Hoover described her as a "vicious,
dangerous and resourceful criminal brain" but that was just propaganda. Neither Ma nor her sons
were very bright. The real brains of their gang was Karpis, a Kansas kidnapper with a scary stare
that earned him the nickname "Creepy."
"Baby Face Nelson," a member of Dillinger's gang, was born Lester Gillis, son of an
Illinois tannery worker. As a teenage mechanic, he fixed cars, then started stealing them, and
earned his nickname when a woman he'd robbed—who happened to be the wife of Chicago's
mayor—told a reporter "he had a baby face."
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow grew up in the slums of Dallas, children of poor
farmers who'd moved to the city. Clyde ushered in a movie theater, played the saxophone and
burglarized stores. Bonnie waited on tables, read movie magazines and longed for excitement.
"Haven't been anywhere this week," she wrote in her diary in 1928. "Why don't something
happen?" They met in 1930, fell in love and drove aimlessly around America with their pet
rabbit Sonny Boy, robbing stores and rural banks. They might have remained obscure petty
crooks if police hadn't raided their hideout in Joplin, Mo., in 1933. In the shootout, Clyde and his
brother killed two cops before the gang escaped, leaving behind a camera containing pictures of
Bonnie and Clyde smooching and fondling guns. Printed in countless newspapers, the photos
made them famous.
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But not nearly as famous as Dillinger, whose career in crime was wilder than anything
Hollywood could concoct. Son of an Indiana grocer, Dillinger took to crime in grade school,
forming a gang called the Dirty Dozen and heisting watermelons. He dropped out of school,
joined the navy, then deserted. Back home, he mugged a grocer and was sentenced to 10 to 20
years in prison. After nine years, he was paroled in May 1933. A month later, he gathered some
friends and robbed a bank. The gang made off with $10,600 and celebrated by robbing a grocery
store and a pharmacy that night.
Dillinger used his loot to bribe somebody to smuggle guns to his pals in prison. In
September, they escaped, only to learn that Dillinger had been locked up in Lima, Ohio. So they
stormed the jail, killed a sheriff and freed him. Then the reunited outlaws raided two police
arsenals, stealing guns, ammo and bulletproof vests.
Soon the well-armed gang commenced robbing banks. In October 1933, they hit one in
Greencastle, Ind., emptying the vault of nearly $75,000. In November, they raided one in Racine,
Wis., wounding a teller and a cop and escaping in a blast of gunfire. In January 1934, after a
three-week vacation in sunny Florida, they hit a bank in East Chicago, Ind., stealing $20,000. A
cop fired at Dillinger, hitting his bulletproof vest. Dillinger was unhurt, but the cop was killed
with a blast from a Tommy gun.
Now wanted for murder, Dillinger fled to Tucson, where he was recognized, captured,
shipped to Indiana and locked in the Crown Point jail. There, the warden let reporters interview
Dillinger, who joked about his crimes.
"How long does it take you to go through a bank?"
"One minute and 40 seconds flat," he said, smiling.
The reporters loved Dillinger's bravura performance and lamented that a murder
conviction would send the wonderfully colorful character to the electric chair. But that didn't
happen. On March 3, 1934, Dillinger, waving a pistol, captured Crown Point's warden and
several guards, locked them in a cell and fled in the warden's car. Before leaving, he showed
them his gun. It was a fake that he'd carved out of wood.
"You should have seen their faces," Dillinger wrote in a letter to his sister. "Ha! Ha! Ha!"
Dillinger wasn't the only one laughing. Newspapers mocked America's hapless cops and
prison guards. The snickering incensed J. Edgar Hoover, who was then the obscure head of the
Justice Department's obscure Bureau of Investigation. Hoover saw Dillinger as a way to win
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publicity and power for his little outfit. He ordered his Chicago bureau chief, Melvin Purvis, to
find the infamous outlaw.
But Purvis and his G-men proved inept. They raided the wrong apartments in Chicago
and Minneapolis, and when they hit the right apartment in St. Paul, Dillinger escaped in a blast
of Tommy gun bullets. Then came the debacle at Little Bohemia, which ended with a G-man and
an innocent bystander dead and Dillinger's gang still at large. Two weeks later, they robbed yet another bank, this one in Fostoria, Ohio.
"COMIC OPERA COPS," read a headline in the Milwaukee Sentinel.
Reporters speculated that Hoover might be fired for the botched job. He wasn't. Instead,
he doubled the size of his anti-Dillinger squad and dubbed the outlaw "Public Enemy Number
One," a phrase the newspapers loved.
Hoover also offered a $10,000 reward for information on Dillinger's whereabouts. That
did the trick. A Chicago madam named Anna Sage informed Purvis that her roommate was
Dillinger's girlfriend. Sage said she was going to the movies with the happy couple the next night
and agreed to wear a bright orange skirt so the G-men could pick her out of the crowd.
When Dillinger walked out of the Biograph Theater with the two women on Sunday, July
22, 1934, he looked around, saw a bunch of men staring at him and reached for his .38. The Gmen instantly blew him away.
The news spread fast, crowds flocked to the Biograph and souvenir-seekers dipped
handkerchiefs in the blood on the sidewalk.
In Washington, Hoover promised that the law would soon catch up with the rest of
America's infamous bank robbers. He was right. Bonnie and Clyde were already dead, riddled
with dozens of bullets in an ambush in Louisiana in May. In October, G-men led by Purvis
gunned down Pretty Boy Floyd. A month later, the feds killed Baby Face Nelson in a gunfight
that left two G-men dead. In January 1935, the feds managed to corner Ma Barker and her son
Fred in a Florida cottage and blew them away.
By then, only one of the "public enemies" was still at large—Creepy Karpis. Hoover,
who'd been mocked because he'd never personally made an arrest, was determined to collar
Creepy himself. In April 1936, G-men informed their boss that they'd found Karpis in New
Orleans. Hoover immediately flew down so he could join the squad that nabbed Creepy as he sat
in a parked car.
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"Put the cuffs on him, boys," Hoover said.
Alas, nobody had remembered to bring handcuffs. An embarrassed agent used his tie to
bind Creepy's wrists. The headline in the next day's New York Times read, "KARPIS
CAPTURED IN NEW ORLEANS BY HOOVER HIMSELF."
The era of the bank robbers was over but their legends lived on. Like Jesse James, Billy
the Kid and other Wild West desperadoes, the '30s outlaws became part of pop culture.
Hollywood has produced three movies called Dillinger and two called Baby Face Nelson. Pretty
Boy Floyd's story was chronicled in a Woody Guthrie song, a Larry McMurtry novel and at least
three films, one starring Fabian. Bonnie and Clyde were immortalized in a Merle Haggard song
and a blockbuster 1967 movie starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Their stolen, bulletridden "death car" is still displayed in casinos. Shelley Winters played Ma Barker in the 1970
movie Bloody Mama. The rock band Jesus Lizard cut a song called "Karpis." And the Indiana
Welcome Center on Interstate 80 houses the John Dillinger Museum, where visitors can buy a
keychain decorated with a replica of Dillinger's famous wooden gun.
This summer, the big-budget movie Public Enemies features Johnny Depp as Dillinger,
Giovanni Ribisi as Karpis, Stephen Graham as Nelson and Channing Tatum as Floyd.
But posthumous fame is a thrill that nobody lives long enough to enjoy. The real winner
of the '30s "war on crime" was Hoover. When that war began, he and his little investigative
bureau were virtually unknown. When it ended, Hoover and his newly re-named "Federal Bureau
of Investigation" were famous, hailed in newspapers, radio shows, comic strips and James
Cagney's hit movie G-Men.
The debacle at Little Bohemia could have cost Hoover his job but he was a genius in the
arts of bureaucracy and public relations and he convinced Congress to grant him more money,
personnel and power. For the next four decades, he reigned as the undisputed dictator of a law
enforcement agency that frightened criminals, spies, dissenters, congressmen, even presidents.
A few weeks after Dillinger's death, Hoover ordered his underlings to create a display
outside his office—a glass case containing the bank robber's gun, straw hat and death mask. The
strange shrine remained until Hoover died in 1972.
When the director was an old man, an interviewer asked him to name his greatest thrill.
Hoover didn't even have to ponder the question. "The night we got Dillinger," he replied.
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Uneasy About Alcohol - America and the Booze Question
By Peter Carlson
Hard drinking is a tradition that came over on the Mayflower. 400 years later we're still
struggling to find a balance between revelry and righteousness
When the news arrived from Utah, cannons boomed in New Orleans, sirens howled in
San Francisco, boats in New York harbor blasted their foghorns and the finance committee of the
Chicago City Council adjourned to a tavern so the pols could quaff a snort of legal booze for the
first time in 13 years, 10 months, 18 days, 7 hours and 27 minutes.
It was Dec. 5, 1933—75 years ago this fall—and the news that sparked the momentous
national celebration was the long-awaited passage of an amendment to the United States
Constitution: Utah voted to become the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, which repealed
the 18th Amendment, which had banned the production and sale of alcoholic beverages across
the land since 1920.
"Prohibition is dead!" an electric sign in Times Square announced, and a mob of 10,000
roared its approval. "A thousand bartenders reached in unison for the Scotch, rye or gin," wrote
reporter John Lardner, "and 50,000 customers bumped elbows for the honor of absorbing the
first legal drink."
In Manhattan, a joyous crowd celebrated by lynching an effigy of "Old Man Prohibition"
from a flagpole on Broadway. In Chicago's Drake Hotel, a scantily clad woman popped out of a
10-foot-tall champagne glass as drinkers cheered. In Boston, revelers wandered from saloon to
saloon, singing off-key renditions of old drinking songs or engaging in what the Boston Globe
described as "sidewalk displays of wrestling ability and hog-calling."
But revelry did not rule everywhere. In many places, including Georgia, Kentucky and
Washington, D.C., booze was still banned by state or local laws, which tended to throw a wet
blanket on the festivities. In Atlanta, the celebration of Prohibition's demise was not nearly as
spirited as the celebration of its birth nearly 14 years earlier, when, the Atlanta Constitution
reported, "The Anti-Saloon League, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and other dry organizations
paraded on Peachtree to Five Points, where old John Barleycorn was burned in effigy."
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Today, the long, bitter conflict between "dry" and "wet" Americans seems quaint and
absurd, a strange tale from ancient history. But that colorful clash illustrates an enduring aspect
of American life, a conflict between two sides of our national personality—the secular "pursuit
of happiness" versus the religious pursuit of righteousness. America's epic battle over alcohol is
one of the divisive cultural issues that have periodically roiled American politics, like slavery
and segregation or the more recent controversies over gay rights and abortion.
Getting drunk, plastered, loaded, tanked, sloshed, smashed, stewed and stoned is an old
American tradition. But so is preaching fiery sermons against "demon rum," attacking saloons
with hatchets and enacting laws to prevent your neighbors from getting drunk, plastered, sloshed,
smashed, stewed and stoned.
The story of alcohol in America is an inspiring tale of courageous men and women who
ventured across stormy seas, conquered a teeming wilderness, created a great nation and built an
awesome industrial colossus—and did it all while knocking back heroic quantities of strong
liquids.
Booze came to America aboard Mayflower. Like most British ships in 1620, Mayflower
carried more beer than water. One reason was that beer was safer than water, which was often
contaminated with noxious wastes. Another reason was that passengers preferred to pass the
tedious nine-week voyage in a pleasant beer buzz.
The Pilgrims drank so much beer on Mayflower that they'd almost run out by the time
they reached America, and they may have landed at Plymouth simply because they didn't have
enough beer to fuel the search for a better place. "We could not now take time for further search
and consideration," one passenger wrote, "our victuals being much spent, especially our beere."
Not long after landing, the Pilgrims began making wine out of wild grapes. They served it to the
Indians at the first Thanksgiving, although you probably didn't hear about that back in
kindergarten.
The Puritans are not known as party animals, but they arrived in Boston in 1630 on a ship
that carried plenty of beer—and 10,000 gallons of wine. Despite their well-deserved reputation
as killjoys, the Puritans didn't oppose drinking, they merely opposed drinking too much. "Drink
is in itself a good Creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness," wrote Increase Mather,
the famed Puritan preacher, "but the abuse of drink is from Satan."
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All over the colonies, settlers quaffed vast quantities of this "good Creature of God."
When they could get it, they drank imported wine, brandy and port, but such luxuries were
expensive and tended to mysteriously disappear en route from England in accidents attributed to
"leakage." Consequently, thirsty colonists began making booze out of just about everything, as
recounted in this little ditty from the 1630s:
If barley be wanting to make into malt,
We must be content and think it no fault,
For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips,
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.
Among the most popular concoctions in colonial-era taverns was a drink called "Flip."
The bartender filled about two-thirds of a mug or pitcher with beer, added a dollop of rum,
sweetened the cocktail with sugar, molasses or dried pumpkin and then stirred it with a red-hot
poker, which made the drink bubble, gurgle and steam. Good for what ails you, especially on a
cold winter's night.
Tea is the beverage most commonly associated with the American Revolution, but beer
and rum are far more deserving of that honor. Even though Samuel Adams was a devout
Congregationalist (see "The Revolutionary Gospel According to Samuel Adams," p. 42), he
recruited his Sons of Liberty in Boston taverns, causing Tories to mock him as "Sam the
Publican." And the patriots who dumped British tea in Boston harbor had fortified themselves for
their mission by downing several bowls of rum punch. Later, General George Washington
boosted his troops' morale with a daily ration of rum. "The benefits arising from the moderate
use of strong Liquor," he explained, "have been experienced in all Armies and are not to be
disputed."
Unlike today's milquetoast pols, America's Founding Fathers were eager tipplers. James
Madison liked to start his day with a tumbler of whiskey. John Adams breakfasted on what his
son described as "a large tankard of hard cider." Washington owned one of Virginia's most
productive whiskey distilleries. Thomas Jefferson was an avid wine connoisseur and so was
Benjamin Franklin, who wrote an ode to drinking that concluded with this lovely couplet:
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That virtue and safety's in wine-bibbing found
While all that drink water deserve to be drowned.
One of the first crises of the newborn United States of America was caused by whiskey—
or, more accurately, by a whiskey tax. In 1791 Congress voted to tax whiskey, which proved to
be extremely unpopular, particularly in the Appalachian Mountains, where whiskey-making was
not only a passion but a major source of cash income for subsistence farmers. In 1794, near
Pittsburgh, a motley army of tax protesters rebelled, attacking courts and tarring and feathering a
tax collector. President Washington responded by personally leading a militia army to put down
what came to be called the "Whiskey Rebellion."
By then, nearly every American farm contained a sizable apple orchard—not to make
apple pie but to make hard cider, which was the country's most popular beverage, guzzled daily
by young and old alike. "In rural areas, cider took the place not only of wine and beer but of
coffee and tea, juice and even water," wrote culinary historian Michael Pollan. "Indeed, in many
places cider was consumed more freely than water, even by children."
The cute little tykes would knock back a tumbler of hard cider with breakfast and then
proceed off to school with a pleasant buzz, and nobody worried that it would ruin their chances
to get into Harvard, perhaps because Harvard served hard cider in its dining halls.
In the early 1800s, Americans drank more booze than at any time before or since—more
than five gallons of pure alcohol per person per year. (Today's figure is about two gallons per
adult.) "Americans drank at home and abroad, alone and together, at work and at play," wrote
historian W.J. Rorabaugh in his classic 1979 book, The Alcoholic Republic. "Americans drank
before meals, with meals and after meals. They drank while working in the fields and while
traveling across half a continent."
Meanwhile, America's native-born hard drinkers were joined by hordes of hard-drinking
European immigrants who brought the alcoholic crafts of their native lands—Scots-Irish
distillers, German brewers and Italian winemakers, each contributing another ingredient to
America's melting pot or, in this case, to America's cocktail shaker.
As Americans moved west, the first sign of civilization in many new towns was a
saloon—or several saloons. In 1876, for example, Dodge City, Kan., contained 1,200 people and
19 saloons. Western saloons sold liquor, of course, but they also served as restaurants, dance
13 | P a g e
halls, casinos, brothels, courtrooms, post offices, funeral parlors and, on Sunday mornings,
churches.
Saloons also provided their customers with cultural offerings, some better than others.
"At the upper end of Main Street is a one-horse beer hall, called by courtesy a concert garden,
where a pianist and violinist have performed so far without getting shot," reported the Anaconda,
Montana, Standard in 1897. "Occasionally a woman, whose face would stop a freight train and
voice would rasp a sawmill, comes out and assists the pianist and violinist in increasing the
agony."
But America's firewater was not always sold in saloons and frequently wasn't even
marketed as liquor. Much of it was bottled in patent medicines bearing such wonderful names as
"Kickapoo Cough Syrup" and "Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound" and promoted as
healthful elixirs.
Sold in drugstores and advertised in traveling "medicine shows," patent medicines were
touted as cures for everything from colds to cancer. Actually, they cured nothing but they did
provide relief from physical, mental and spiritual pains with the same secret ingredient found in
whiskey—ethyl alcohol. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, advertised as a cure for "female
complaints," contained 18 percent alcohol. Peruna, America's most popular patent medicine, was
28 percent alcohol. Hostetter's Celebrated Stomach Bitters contained 47 percent alcohol—more
than your average whiskey—and was said to have steadied the nerves of Union soldiers at
the Battle of Gettysburg. Paine's Celery Compound, advertised as a "Nerve Tonic and
Alternative Medicine," contained a mere 21 percent alcohol, but the booze was fortified by a
dose of cocaine, which no doubt contributed to its popularity.
"More alcohol is consumed in this country in patent medicines than is dispensed in a
legal way by licensed liquor vendors," Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote in his famous 1905
Collier's magazine exposé of the hidden ingredients in patent medicines, which influenced the
1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.
Part of the popularity of patent medicines was their appeal to a growing segment of the
American population—prohibitionists. In fact, a patent medicine called "Old Dr. Kaufmann's
Great Sulphur Bitters," which contained 22 percent alcohol, targeted prohibitionists with ads
featuring an endorsement by Mrs. S. Louise Barton, "An Indefatigable and Life-Long Worker in
the Temperance Cause." For prohibitionists, such patent medicines were a godsend, enabling
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them to stay pleasantly (but respectably) tipsy while toiling in the great national crusade to rid
America of the demon rum.
Prohibition is incontrovertible proof that you don't have to be drunk to come up with a
really, really bad idea. Stone cold sober but intoxicated on the powerful elixir of righteous
idealism, American prohibitionists believed that the demon rum and its church, the saloon, were
the world's prime sources of evil. "When the saloon goes," said Ernest Cherrington, a leader of
the Anti-Saloon League, "the devil will be ready to quit."
The American temperance movement is as old as America itself, but it became a political
force in the mid-1800s, fueled in part by a bias against immigrants, including Irish and Italian
Catholics, who were stereotyped as shiftless alcoholics. After the Civil War, it spawned two
powerful groups—the Prohibition Party and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, whose
slogan was "For God, Home and Native Land."
The WCTU's most famous member was Carry Nation, a Kansas minister's wife, who led
bands of women into saloons, where they sang hymns to the patrons and greeted bartenders with
a cheery "Good morning, destroyer of men's souls!" When those efforts failed to dry out Kansas,
Nation prayed to God for direction and was awakened by a heavenly voice saying, "Go to
Kiowa." She went to the town of Kiowa, where she invaded three saloons, smashing the liquor
bottles with rocks. Soon, she replaced the rocks with a hatchet and became famous, traveling
across America, smashing up saloons with her trademark wrecking tool. Arrested dozens of
times, she paid her fines with money raised by selling little souvenir hatchets.
But it wasn't the antics of Carry Nation who won the fight for prohibition; it was the
political savvy of the Anti-Saloon League, which added clout to the crusade for salvation of
individual drunkards by strong-arming government officials. Founded in 1895, the league
pioneered many of the techniques now used by modern advocacy groups. Working through local
churches—generally rural Methodist or Baptist churches—it raised money, endorsed candidates
and successfully lobbied for laws banning liquor in many towns and counties. In 1905 the league
demonstrated its growing power by defeating Ohio Governor Myron Herrick, who had thwarted
the league's legislative agenda—an upset that terrified wet politicians.
In 1913 the league kicked off its drive for a constitutional amendment prohibiting liquor
with a march on Washington and a massive letter-writing campaign that flooded Congress with
mail. The amendment failed in 1914, but gained strength during World War I, when the league
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exploited America's anti-German hysteria by deliberately associating beer with GermanAmerican brewers. "Kaiserism abroad and booze at home must go," declared the league's general
counsel and wily Washington lobbyist, Wayne Wheeler.
It worked. Congress passed the amendment in 1918, and the states ratified it so quickly
that America's wets barely had time to finish their drinks and start fighting back. When the new
law went into effect on January 17, 1920, evangelist Billy Sunday held a funeral for John
Barleycorn in Norfolk, Va. "The slums will soon be a memory," he predicted. "We will turn our
prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs….Hell will be forever for rent."
Alas, it didn't work out that way. Prohibition not only failed to eradicate slums and
prisons, it even failed to curtail drinking, a pastime that now took on the allure of a forbidden
thrill. Booze was smuggled into the country on "rumrunner" ships, cooked up in countless illegal
distilleries, breweries and bathtubs and sold to eager customers in illicit saloons known as
speakeasies.
New York City, which had 15,000 legal saloons before Prohibition, soon had 32,000
speakeasies. They came in infinite varieties, and two newspapermen described a few dozen in
their 1932 guidebook, Manhattan Oases. The oases ranged from the prosaic Log Cabin
("designed for the visiting Shriner") to the seedy Julius's ("as weird as a witch's Sabbath and as
noisome as the psychopathic ward at Bellevue Hospital") to the elegant 19th Hole ("a nice
hideaway for bond salesmen and their customers' wives").
Prohibition made selling booze a crime, which naturally attracted criminals to the
business. Gangsters battled for control of the liquor trade, and the winners became big
businessmen, millionaires with bribe-bought political power. The most famous was Al Capone,
who survived a gang war that created 500 corpses to become one of the most powerful men in
Chicago. "Somehow I just naturally drifted into the racket," he told an interviewer from Liberty
magazine in 1931. "And I guess I'm here to stay until the law is repealed."
Dry forces were confident that the law would never be repealed. "There is as much
chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment," said Senator Morris Sheppard, "as there is for a
hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail."
Propelled by overwhelming public opinion against Prohibition, a hummingbird reached
Mars on Dec. 5, 1933, and celebrations broke out across America.
16 | P a g e
"Downtown bars were lined five and six deep," the Chicago Tribune reported the next
day. "'Sweet Adeline' and other old favorites rang in many of the bars as morning neared. Wags
made frequent requests of musicians for the WCTU song, 'It's in the Constitution and It's There
to Stay,' but nobody could remember the tune."
Repeal did not set off a wild national bender, as some dries had predicted, but it did result
in one permanent change in American drinking habits: Respectable women began patronizing
bars. "Women Flock To Bars As The New Wet Era Opens," the Chicago Tribune reported.
"Many women are crowding up to be served, something considered not quite right in the days
preceding prohibition."
Before World War I, the saloon was largely a male outpost—one reason many women
supported Prohibition. But after repeal, women, who'd recently gained the right to vote, seized
the right to drink in public.
In 1935, two years after repeal, two middle-class alcoholics with wonderfully American
names—Bill Wilson and Bob Smith—founded an organization that proved far more effective
than Prohibition in combating drunkenness. Wilson, a former Wall Street whiz kid, and Smith, a
doctor, named their group "Alcoholics Anonymous" and it has spread around the world, helping
millions of alcoholics kick the habit.
These days, American liquor stores are packed with a dazzling variety of beverages,
ranging from gourmet single-malt Scotches and domestic and imported wines, to neon-colored
concoctions like MD 20/20 Blue Raspberry, and new alcoholic "energy drinks" like Joose, which
mixes booze with caffeine, ginseng and tropical fruit juices. But the United States is, statistically
speaking, a nation of moderate drinkers, ranking somewhere around 20th in surveys of
worldwide per capita alcohol consumption, depending on how the data is calculated.
Although our intake is far behind most European countries, American life is suffused
with booze. We drink at weddings and wakes—and sometimes at baby showers, baptisms,
graduation parties, anniversaries and funerals. We drink to celebrate our triumphs and drown our
sorrows—but also just to unwind after another dull day at work.
The influence of alcohol on American culture is so widespread as to be incalculable.
Much of America's greatest literature was produced by alcoholics and hard drinkers—Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack
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London, Jack Kerouac and Sinclair Lewis, whose classic 1927 novel about a corrupt evangelist
begins: "Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk."
Much of America's best art has also been produced by hard drinkers, including Jackson
Pollock, who enjoyed spilling paint but not his beloved whiskey, and Robert Rauschenberg, who
claimed that he drank a quart of Jack Daniels a day, which might explain why he once made a
sculpture by sticking a stuffed goat inside an old tire.
Jazz, America's classical music, was born in the bars and brothels of New Orleans and
came of age in Prohibition speakeasies, including the most famous speakeasy of all, New York's
Cotton Club, whose house band was Duke Ellington's orchestra. And American popular songs
contain nearly as many references to booze as they do to love or lust:
Roll out the barrel…
It's another tequila sunrise…
Whiskey river, don't run dry…
Wasted away again in Margaritaville…
Alcohol has spawned many of the iconic characters in American pop culture—the
cowboy knocking back a shot of Red Eye, the hard-drinking private eye, the cynical reporter
with a bottle in his bottom file drawer and, of course, the anonymous protagonist of a million
jokes that begin, "A guy walks into a bar."
The United States is a sports-mad nation, and our sports are intimately connected with
alcohol. We drink a beer while eating a hot dog at baseball games and sip a Bloody Mary while
tailgating at football games. World Series winners celebrate by pouring champagne over their
teammates' heads. And stock car racing—which came into its own as a sport after World War
II—was created by moonshiners.
In the southern Appalachians, the culture of moonshine never died out, nor did the desire
to avoid paying tax on it. Moonshiners souped up their cars so they could outrun
federal "revenuers" on twisty mountain roads and, in the 1940s, the National Association for
Stock Car Auto Racing began organizing races on dirt tracks. "About all your good dirt track
drivers were involved in moonshine," Junior Johnson, the famous NASCAR driver, told me in an
interview in 1999. "That's kind of the way it started."
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At NASCAR's first official race in 1949, most of the drivers had learned their craft
hauling whiskey. Six years later, Johnson, then one of NASCAR's biggest stars, was arrested
while tending his father's illegal still in North Carolina and sent to federal prison. When he got
out, he started racing again, won the 1960 Daytona 500 and became a folk hero. In 1986
President Ronald Reagan pardoned Johnson for his moonshine conviction. By then, NASCAR's
outlaw image had helped to make it a major spectator sport.
"I think it did appeal to people," Johnson told me. "I think the exposure of you being a
good moonshiner and having the fastest car of anybody—it was sort of a glorified thing, like
Babe Ruth hitting his 714th home run."
Last year, Johnson, now age 77 and retired from racing, returned to his first love—
making whiskey. He began marketing a legal, 80-proof concoction called Midnight Moon, which
he proudly describes as the "best 'shine ever."
It just might be the perfect beverage for drinking a toast to the grand and goofy history of
booze in America.
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How the West was Spun - Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show
By Stephen G. Hyslop
When fabled bison hunter William "Buffalo Bill" Cody first staged his Wild West show
in 1883, he needed more than heroic cowboys, villainous Indians, teeming horses and roaming
buffalo to transform it from a circus into a sensation. He needed star power. And there was one
man who guaranteed to provide it: the Sioux chief widely blamed for the uprising that
overwhelmed George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn only a
decade earlier. "I am going to try hard to get old Sitting Bull," Cody said. "If we can manage to
get him our everlasting fortune is made."
It took two years, but Cody finally got his man. In June 1885, Sitting Bull joined the Wild
West show for a signing bonus of $125 and $50 a week—20 times more than Indians who served
as policemen on reservations earned. Buffalo Bill reckoned his new star would prove to be an
irresistible draw. With the Indian wars drawing to a close, and most Plains Indians confined to
reservations, Buffalo Bill set the stage for a final conquest of the frontier. Since accompanying
an army patrol as a scout shortly after the Battle of Little Bighorn and scalping the Cheyenne
warrior Yellow Hair, he was known as the man who took "the first scalp for Custer." As the man
who now controlled Sitting Bull, he symbolically declared victory in the war for the West and
signaled a new era of cooperation with the enemy. Cody excluded the chief from acts in which
20 | P a g e
other Indians made sham attacks on settlers and then got their comeuppance from heroic
cowboys. All Sitting Bull had to do was don a war costume, ride a horse into the arena and brave
an audience that sometimes jeered and hissed.
Sitting Bull's mere presence reinforced the reassuring message underlying Cody's Wild
West extravaganza, as well as the Western films and novels it inspired, that Americans are
generous conquerors who attack only when provoked. At the same time, Cody's vision of the
West spoke to the fiercely competitive spirit of an American nation born in blood and defined by
conflict on the frontier, where what mattered most was not whether you were right or wrong but
whether you prevailed. The lesson of his Wild West was that sharpshooting American cowboys
like Buffalo Bill could be as wild as the Indians they fought and match them blow for blow. The
real frontier might be vanishing, but by preserving this wild domain imaginatively and reenacting
the struggle for supremacy there, he gave millions of Americans the feeling they were up to any
challenge.
Buffalo Bill's Wild West depended on Cody's ability to draw shrewdly on his frontier
experiences to make himself a commanding figure. He earned his nickname, he claimed, by
killing 4,280 buffalo during an 18-month stint for the Kansas Pacific Railroad in the late 1860s.
Indiscriminate hunting was encouraged by the army as part of a campaign to wipe out buffalo
herds that gave subsistence to free-roaming Plains Indians. The Indians did not take well to
having this food supply annihilated. Cody told of being chased once by 30 Indians on horseback.
Cavalry guarding the tracks came to his aid, and together they killed eight "redskins," he said,
expressing sympathy only for a horse one of the warriors was riding, killed by a shot from his
trusty rifle Lucretia: "He was a noble animal, and ought to have been engaged in better
business."
Later in life Cody mused that Indians deserved better. But his early exploits on the Plains
and his autobiographical account of those feats, designed to portray him as a classic frontier
enforcer, came first. His crowning claim involved the rescue of a white woman from the clutches
of Indians. In July 1869, he was serving as a scout for the 5th Cavalry when it surprised hostile
Cheyennes in an encampment at Summit Springs, Colorado Territory, where one white woman
held captive was killed in the ensuing battle and one rescued. Official records give credit for
locating the camp to Pawnee scouts—who volunteered to serve the army against their traditional
tribal foes—and make no mention of Buffalo Bill. But Cody boasted of killing Cheyenne Chief
21 | P a g e
Tall Bull during the engagement after creeping to a spot where he could "easily drop him from
the saddle" without hitting his horse, a "gallant steed" he then captured and named Tall Bull in
honor of the chief.
This fabricated tale demonstrated Cody's knack for translating the grim realities of Indian
fighting into rousing adventure stories in which he symbolically appropriated the totemic power
of defeated warriors by claiming their scalp, horse or captives, much as Indians did in battle. But
he took care to distinguish his bravery from the bravado of warriors who refused to fight fair and
targeted women and children. Left unmentioned in his account of the Battle of Summit
Springs—which, like the Battle of Little Bighorn, he incorporated as an act in his Wild West
show—was that women and children were among the more than 70 Cheyenne killed or captured.
After returning with the cavalry from Summit Springs to Fort Sedgwick in Colorado,
Buffalo Bill met Edward Judson, who was looking for Western heroes to celebrate in the dime
novels he wrote under the name Ned Buntline. His fiction did so much to create and inflate the
reputation of Buffalo Bill that actors were soon playing him on stage. "I was curious to see how I
would look when represented by someone else," Cody recalled, so while visiting New York in
1872 he attended a performance of Buffalo Bill: The King of the Border Men and was called on
stage. He soon realized that he could succeed in the limelight simply by being himself, or by
impersonating the heroic character contrived by Buntline.
"I'm not an actor—I'm a star," he told an interviewer soon after making the transition
from frontier scout to itinerant showman. Crucial to his ascent to stardom was his awareness that
he needed to become something more than a stereotypical Indian fighter or "scourge of the red
man." He never renounced that role and continued to bank on it throughout his career, but his
genius as an entertainer lay in softening his own image—and that of the Wild West—just enough
to reassure Americans that the conquest he dramatized was a good clean fight that had redeeming
social value without robbing this struggle for supremacy of its visceral appeal.
Buffalo Bill's first appearance on stage in Chicago gave little hint of the bright future that
awaited him in show business. He and other ornery frontiersmen blasted away at Indians
ludicrously impersonated by white extras in a murky plot concocted by Buntline. One reviewer
called the acting "execrable" and concluded that such "scalping, blood and thunder, is not likely
to be vouchsafed to a city a second time, even Chicago." Nonetheless, the show proved
22 | P a g e
commercially successful, and Buffalo Bill made $6,000 over the winter, substantially improving
his take in seasons to come by forming his own troupe called the Buffalo Bill Combination.
For several years, he combined acting with summer stints as a scout or guide, honing his
skills as an entertainer by conducting wealthy dudes from the East and European nobility on
hunting expeditions and diverting them with shows of skill that sometimes involved Indians
hired for the occasion. Buffalo Bill enjoyed "trotting in the first class, with the very first men of
the land," and came away convinced that a Wild West spectacle involving real cowboys and
Indians could appeal to all classes and become, as it was later billed, "America's National
Entertainment."
Other showmen of the era tried to mine that same vein by mounting Wild West themed
circuses in which sharpshooters and bronco-busters demonstrated their skills. But when Buffalo
Bill launched his Wild West show in 1883, he set his aim higher. He wanted an epic production
with theatrical flair that defined the West and drew viewers into it. After a lackluster first season,
marred by his drunken escapades with a fellow sharpshooter and business associate named Doc
Carver, he teamed with Nate Salsbury, a shrewd theater manager, and hired director Steele
MacKaye to make the production more than a series of stunts by creating a show within the show
called The Drama of Civilization. First staged in the winter of 1886 in New York's Madison
Square Garden, where it was viewed by more than a million people, the pageant was set against
painted backdrops and included four acts that purported to represent the historical evolution of
the West from "The Primeval Forest," occupied only by wild Indians, to "The Prairie," where
civilization appeared with the arrival of wagon trains, setting the stage for further progress in the
form of "The Cattle Ranch" and "The Mining Camp."
The elaborate staging fulfilled Buffalo Bill's stated goal of offering "high toned"
entertainment, but the acts themselves suggested that the coming of the white man had done little
to tame the Wild West. The climactic mining camp episode included a duel between gunfighters
and an attack on the Deadwood Stagecoach by bandits, playing much the same role as that
performed by marauding Indians in other performances. In the grand finale, the mining camp
was blown away by a cyclone, suggesting that if wild men did not defeat those trying to civilize
the West, wild nature surely would.
At heart the Wild West extravaganza was less about the triumph of civilization than
ceaseless struggle in which "barbarism and civilization have their hands on each other's throat,"
23 | P a g e
as one observer put it. Cody could not afford to become so high toned that he robbed the show of
the smoke and thunder that many came to see, and he surely welcomed notices like that from a
reviewer who promised the public that "Buffalo Bill's 'Wild West' is wild enough to suit the most
devoted admirer of western adventure and prowess." At the same time, Cody promoted the show
as family entertainment, suitable for women and children. By hiring Annie Oakley, whom Sitting
Bull nicknamed "Little Sure Shot," Cody graced his cast with a deadly shot who was so demure
and disarming that spectators who might otherwise have been scared away by gunplay were as
eager to attend as those for whom fancy shooting was the main draw.
European blue bloods also found the show enchanting. In 1887 Buffalo Bill and an
entourage of 100 whites, 97 Indians, 180 horses, 18 buffalo, 10 elk, 5 Texan steers, 4 donkeys
and 2 deer traveled to England to help celebrate the Jubilee Year of Queen Victoria. In addition
to staging twice-a-day shows during a five-month stay in London for crowds that averaged
around 30,000, the Wild West troupe gave a command performance for the queen in which the
Prince of Wales and the kings of Belgium, Greece, Saxony and Denmark rode around the arena
in a stagecoach with Buffalo Bill fending off marauding Indians from the driver's seat. In the
process, Buffalo Bill's pop interpretation of the American frontier was validated as high culture
and for the next five years the Wild West toured the major capitals of Europe.
Despite his warm reception throughout Europe, when Buffalo Bill brought the show
home in 1893 he was shunned as too commercial by the organizers of the Columbian Exposition
in Chicago, a grandiose celebration of civilization in America that featured 65,000 exhibits in an
array of gleaming Beaux Arts buildings dubbed the White City. Undeterred, Buffalo Bill camped
out across the street and drew an audience that summer of more than 3 million people, including
a group of historians who took a break one afternoon from a conference at the exposition to see
the Wild West show and later that evening heard their colleague Frederick Jackson Turner
deliver his landmark essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."
Turner portrayed the settling of the West as a largely peaceful process, in which the
availability of "free land" on the frontier served as a safety valve, releasing social tensions by
providing fresh opportunities for Americans who might otherwise have been stifled in their
ambitions for a better life. But Cody, for all the historical distortions in his show, hit on a
fundamental truth that eluded the erudite Turner: There was no free land. Everything that
American settlers claimed, from the landing at Jamestown to the closing of the frontier in 1890,
24 | P a g e
was Indian country, wrested from tribal groups at great cost. Buffalo Bill's Wild West remains
with us to this day because he recognized that fierce competition and strife had as much to do
with the making of America as the dream of liberty and justice for all.
Ultimately, it was Indians who lent an air of authenticity to Buffalo Bill's Wild West. He
could not hire Indians without the government's permission and faced scrutiny and criticism from
officials who argued that his show displayed Indians as bloodthirsty warriors while the
government was trying to convert them to a peaceful, productive existence. But he was keenly
aware of their importance to the production and tried to ensure they were well treated. Luther
Standing Bear, a Sioux who served as chief of the Indian performers on one European tour,
expressed gratitude for the support Buffalo Bill showed when he complained that Indians were
being served inferior food. "My Indians are the principal feature of this show," he recalled
Buffalo Bill telling the dining steward, "and they are the one people I will not allow to be
misused or neglected."
Black Elk, whose dictated reminiscences to poet John Neihardt were published in 1932
under the title Black Elk Speaks, shared Luther Standing Bear's appreciation for the way he and
other performers were treated by Buffalo Bill, or Pahuska (Long Hair). When Black Elk wearied
of life on tour and said he was "sick to go home," Buffalo Bill was sympathetic: "He gave me a
ticket and ninety dollars. Then he gave me a big dinner. Pahuska had a strong heart."
But Black Elk's memories of the show itself were more ambivalent. "I liked the part of
the show we made," he said, "but not the part the Wasichus [whites] made." Like other Sioux
hired by Buffalo Bill, he enjoyed commemorating their proud old days as mounted warriors but
seemingly recognized that their role was defined and diminished by what whites made of it.
Describing the command performance of Buffalo Bill's Wild West for Queen Victoria, he
recalled that she spoke to Indian performers after they danced and sang for her and told them
something to this effect: "All over the world I have seen all kinds of people; but to-day I have
seen the best-looking people I know. If you belonged to me, I would not let them take you
around in a show like this." Whether or not she spoke such words, Black Elk evidently felt that
"a show like this" did not do his people great honor.
The willingness of proud warriors who once resisted American authority to join Cody's
show demonstrated that they were capable of adapting to the modern world. Yet the conventions
of the Wild West relegated them to the past, a vanishing world of tepees, war bonnets and scalp
25 | P a g e
dances that was the only Indian culture many whites recognized. One chief who toured with
Cody, Iron Tail, was said to be a model for the Indian Head nickel, with a bonneted warrior on
one side and a buffalo on the other—icons that became cherished as distinctively American only
when the way of life they represented was on the verge of extinction.
Sitting Bull, whose appearance in the show prompted many other Sioux to join the
traveling troupe, epitomized the wide gulf between the myth perpetuated by Buffalo Bill's Wild
West and the harsh reality Indians faced with the closing of the frontier. By all accounts he got
on well with Cody. But he hated the hustle and bustle of Eastern cities and only stayed with the
show for four months. In the years that followed, government officials grew concerned about the
emergence of the Ghost Dance, a messianic religious movement on the reservations that
promised Indians who joined in the ritualistic dance eternal life in a bountiful world of their own,
where they would be reunited with their lost loved ones and ancestors. Reports in late 1889 that
Sioux who joined this movement were wearing "ghost shirts," which they believed would protect
them from bullets, increased fears among authorities that the movement would turn violent.
When Sitting Bull began encouraging the Ghost Dancers, Maj. Gen. Nelson Miles called upon
Buffalo Bill to find him and bring him in, hoping that the chief would yield peacefully to a man
he knew and trusted.
Cody headed west to Bismarck, N.D., in December 1890 and reportedly filled two
wagons with gifts before setting off in his showman's outfit to track down Sitting Bull on the
Standing Rock Reservation. The escapade is clouded in legend and it remains unclear whether or
not Cody was serious about trying to arrest Sitting Bull. In any case he got waylaid by two scouts
working for the Indian agent James McLaughlin, who wanted credit for corralling Sitting Bull
himself. This was no longer Cody's show, and it would play out as a reminder of the grim
realities that underlay his rousing performances.
On December 15, McLaughlin sent Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull. A struggle ensued,
and shots were fired. Sitting Bull was killed instantly. His son, six of his supporters and six
policemen also died. Two weeks later, fighting erupted at nearby Wounded Knee Creek on the
Pine Ridge Reservation between a band of Sioux caught up in the Ghost Dance movement and
troops of Custer's old regiment, the 7th Cavalry, after soldiers grappled with a deaf young Indian
who refused to hand over his gun. When the shooting stopped, 25 soldiers and about 150 Sioux,
many of them women and children, lay dead. In the words of Charles Eastman, a mixed-blood
26 | P a g e
Sioux physician who searched among the victims for survivors, Wounded Knee exposed the
lurking "savagery of civilization."
The massacre marked the tragic end of the real Indian wars.
27 | P a g e
The Whole World Is Listening: WHAS Radio Coverage of the 1937 Ohio River Flood
By Chris Chandler
Hundreds dead; hundreds of thousands homeless; entire cities emptied and virtually
obliterated by one of the century's worst killer storms—all while millions of Americans followed
the drama from their living rooms, over the airwaves. Nearly 70 years before Hurricane Katrina
grabbed national and international headlines, the devastating Ohio River flood of 1937 became
the great broadcast media event of its time.
The historic disaster, which killed 385 people in a swath from Pittsburgh to Paducah and
caused a half-billion dollars in damage, was a major milestone for a still-young industry called
radio. The fledgling medium best known for Amos 'n' Andy, dance music and daytime soaps
suddenly faced its first genuine life-or-death national crisis—one with no certain outcome or end
date, and one for which no template or format existed from past experience. Broadcasters
invented, improvised, begged, borrowed and pillaged even as rising floodwaters—and history—
swirled around them. The results attained near-mythical status in the region, and became a major
(if largely unheralded) influence in forging techniques and traditions that broadcast journalists
employ to this day.
January 1937 was already a soggy one in the Ohio and lower Mississippi valleys;
eventually, rain would fall 27 of 31 days. At 11:29 a.m. on Thursday, January 21, station WHAS
in Louisville, Ky., broadcast its first flood warning. Still, as with Katrina seven decades later, the
scope of the crisis was understood only slowly, as what first seemed a serious, but hardly
historic, flooding rain de-veloped into an unending torrent. The precipitation that began falling
on January 21 simply did not stop, and by the 24th, the crisis was dire enough that the date is
remembered even now as "Black Sunday." "We thought it was the end of the world," Ohio
broadcaster Ruth Lyons remembered in 1957. In Cincinnati the river was 25 feet above flood
stage, and a massive fire threatened to engulf the city. Leaking gasoline gushed through flooded
downtown streets, and three dozen fire companies made a stand near the Crosley Radio plant as a
nationwide audience followed the drama via Cincinnati's WLW reports broadcast over the NBC
network:
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The Ohio River continues to rise at approximately 3/10 of a foot per hour…rains up and
down the river from Pittsburgh to Louisville are continuing….The fires which threatened the
entire western section of Cincinnati this morning are reported under control at this hour, although
reports are reaching us constantly of huge gasoline tanks being torn from their foundations in
various parts of the community and spewing their highly inflammable contents over the
floodwaters to be spread over large areas….Traffic across the suspension bridge connecting
Covington, Kentucky with Cincinnati has for the time being been suspended….The floodwaters
have been closing the approaches on both sides of the river….There's a most urgent need for
food, clothing, and shelter. Medical supplies are also needed.
To the south of Cincinnati, flood damage had doused most of the electricity in Louisville
and rendered the police radio inoperable. With commercial broadcasting suddenly the only
method of contact between emergency agencies, rescue crews, desperate refugees and the outside
world, WHAS station executives made an unprecedented decision to abandon all commercial
programs and broadcast only emergency announcements for the duration. Thousands of dollars
in lost revenue aside, there seemed little choice. The number of distress messages reaching the
station had mushroomed into the thousands, arriving by telephone, telegraph, ham radio and
simple word of mouth. The messages were frantically typed and edited in a cold, oil-lamp-lit
office, then "chased" to announcers waiting before the microphone, and broadcast by flickering
gaslight.
Fire patrol boats operating south of Broadway are ordered immediately to Third and
Breckinridge! All available boats are needed there at once!…Milk is needed for nine babies at
missing persons bureau at 1010 South Third Street…power boat, please deliver…Urgent! Fifty
refugees must be moved immediately by boat from 1023 West Madison Street! This is
imperative!
It was, in retrospect, often as tedious as it was historic. The tree-hugging, temper-flaring
histrionics that sometimes accompany modern storm coverage were nowhere on display here.
There was no time, no inclination, no instinct for grandstanding. Nor was there the technical
ability. "Today, media relies a lot on the sound bites and interviews," said Mike Martini of
Cincinnati's Media Heritage broadcast archive and museum. "They really didn't have the
technology at that time to do a lot of the sound bites, so they might talk for three or four minutes
29 | P a g e
without taking a breath." And even that proved a challenge. WHAS announcer Foster Brooks
delivered one report while dangling from a telephone pole, the swollen Ohio raging beneath him.
Station secretary Catherine Steele's situation was "precarious" as well; she was breathing
fumes from gasoline heaters, with nearby stacks of paper creating a perpetual fire hazard.
Typhoid shots were ordered for those hardy enough to remain on duty. "The people were calling
for help, asking for boats to be sent and asking advice," Steele remembered in a 1957 flood
anniversary program. "One woman, I will never forget her, she says 'Lady, my husband is out of
town and I have five children! What do you think I should do?'…Everything happened so fast,
and the water came up so fast."
Engineer Carl Nielsen remembered "going to the Sears store on Broadway with the store
manager and rowing up and down the aisles trying to locate battery radios, dry cell batteries, and
storage batteries….It dawned on us that some of the workers at the studio would need winter
clothes to keep warm, since we had no heat in the building." Even after discovering some of their
own homes were completely underwater ("I left the window open," cracked one technician), the
Louisville staffers never wavered. "They made the difference," said Rick Bell, author of The
Great Flood of 1937: Rising Waters, Soaring Spirits. "They were literally directing relief crews
and rescue crews to individual houses. Day and night, over and over, you heard these messages."
The emergency broadcasts continued, in an urgent but near-hypnotic monotone drone, for
1871⁄2 uninterrupted hours over WHAS alone. "Seven people marooned on house top on Lower
River Road…can't hold out much longer!…City Hall calling. 50 children marooned at church.
Get them out immediately!" The station later estimated that 115,000 separate flood bulletins had
been broadcast into remote areas via loudspeakers on trucks and even airplanes, and rebroadcast
on other stations around the country and on the BBC in England.
Relief donations arrived from as far away as France and Belgium. Broadcasters in the
United States rushed donated equipment to the flood zone, competition now completely
abandoned. Stations in Nashville and Indianapolis joined Lexington and Covington, Ky., on the
"Volunteer Inter-City Network for Flood Relief," sharing information and technical facilities.
Powerhouse WSM in Nashville surrendered its frequency and transmitter to WHAS after the last
electricity flickered and failed in Louisville. Days earlier, the stations had been cutthroat
archrivals; now, a single, precious telephone line to Nashville was all that prevented Louisville
30 | P a g e
disappearing from the air. WSM's own on-air request for refugee information produced 15,000
responses.
Ham radio operators from Memphis to Paducah to Baltimore sent word on evacuees' fates
("W9CXG, Paducah, Kentucky, calling WREC shortwave") to any possible receiver. With the
Ohio now an astonishing 38 feet above flood stage in parts of the valley, evacuation and
devastation created 200,000 refugees in Louisville alone, and smaller river communities such as
Paducah, Ky., and Cairo, Ill., were completely empty. The flood saga had become a nationwide
sensation. By January 27, the NBC network had broadcast some 70 emergency reports, including
this one from Peter Grant of WLW:
We learn that 7,500 of Dayton's 10,000 population are homeless. We learn that 75% of
the city is underwater…entire city blocks of homes have been swept down the river and will
never be found. The city of Dayton, Kentucky, is absolutely without clothing and bedding….The
Spears Hospital at Dayton had 100 patients at the time the flood reached Dayton's streets…they
were taken to the Dayton, Kentucky, high school. In this school in the last few days, we learn
that a dozen babies have been born and several operations performed….Churches are
overflowing with Dayton's refugees. There is plenty of food available, but no water. Dayton,
Kentucky needs water, clothing and bedding at once. Cincinnati's chief worry tonight is water—
water for drinking purposes and for fighting fires….A big fire now in this area might prove a
major catastrophe. Cincinnati remains on an emergency holiday basis. No business was
transacted today for a third successive day…this holiday will continue until the city can put its
house in order.
Inevitably, there were also moments of humor. Surviving photographs from the station
show that male WHAS staffers never abandoned their suits and ties for work, even at the height
of the crisis. They simply accessorized with hip-waders and galoshes. A Louisville rabbi
broadcast to the world barefoot and wrapped in a pink blanket, after his boat capsized en route to
the station, drenching his clothes. A WHAS staffer snapping "Boy! Boy!" to get an assistant's
attention later discovered the "boy" was a top company executive, old enough to be her father,
but nevertheless pliantly obeying the orders of his "boss."
WKRC, Cincinnati, broadcaster (and later WLW mainstay) Ruth Lyons recounted losing
seven pounds running up and down stairs, sleeping atop a desk with telephone phone books for
pillows and "bathing" in two gallons of clean water she'd managed to collect in a hotel bathtub. It
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didn't matter. "We realized this was the greatest crisis that Cincinnati had ever faced," she
recalled. "We felt this was the thing that we must do." The most notorious incident came on
January 28, when network commentator Floyd Gibbons, broadcasting CBS' Your True
Adventure program direct from WKRC, caused a nationwide panic by ignoring his script and
instead enacting a ludicrous melodrama in which the radio station was destroyed, flood waters
pouring into the studio and drowning switchboard operators at their posts. Thousands with loved
ones in the Ohio Valley were not amused.
That the anecdote recalls similar alarmist falsehoods in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath—
rapes and murders in the Superdome; hundreds of corpses at a New Orleans high school—is no
isolated coincidence. "There were all of these really erroneous national news reports that 900
bodies were seen floating," said author Bell of the 1937 flood. "None of that happened." In fact,
the flood had become one of the first examples of the "bigfoot": national anchors "parachuting"
into a big story and creating a presence at the scene, but often lacking the sources and perhaps
desire to separate fact from rumor. "It was a pivotal event," said Mike Martini, and one that
influenced radio journalism's development in other ways. Broadcasters "realized they're not in
direct competition with newspapers, but rather they augment the newspapers. They provide
immediacy."
Indeed, a seesaw battle for news supremacy had raged between print and broadcast media
for most of the 1930s, with radio timidly ceding the advantage in almost every case. The
networks at one point even allowed wire services to ration how much copy they could air, and
when. But with power failures and distribution breakdowns knocking flood-region newspapers
almost completely out of commission, and with thousands of lives quite literally resting upon
their performance, local radio broadcasters simply ignored the previous constructs and did what
they believed necessary. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the networks followed their lead.
Conventional wisdom holds that Edward R. Murrow and his network colleagues invented
broadcast journalism with their work in the days just preceding World War II; in fact, Murrow
and his "boys" were building upon the foundation laid by men and women in Louisville,
Cincinnati, Nashville and elsewhere, covering such stories as the Ohio River flood. Most notably
(and most grievously ignored by contemporary historians), stations including WHAS and WREC
arguably invented the concept of marathon continuous coverage, abandonment of scheduled
programs and commercials for days on end during a major crisis. It was a costly and intimidating
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undertaking that the national networks were either too frugal or too unimaginative to emulate
until the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt almost a decade later, in 1945. Blanket
multiday news coverage of John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 and the September 11, 2001,
terror attacks followed the blueprint drafted in January 1937. So did cable news' sustained vigil
in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
While it took years to sort out these historic implications, the visceral impact of the flood
coverage was instantly clear. Awards and accolades seemed to fall from the sky once the crisis
eased. The CBS network presented dramatic reenactments of its stations' behind-the-scenes
efforts. Individual announcers saw their careers blossom: Cincinnati's Peter Grant was now a
household name; Louisville's Foster Brooks later became a nationally known entertainer. Even
poetry honored the broadcasters' achievements: "Their messages brought prompt relief/To
thousands in distress/So let us not forget the boys/Of W.H.A.S." The stanza likely won no
trophies at the poetry contest, but it made its point. Said Bell, “I don't think radio has ever meant
that crucial a difference to that large a number of people—certainly not before, and maybe
since." Those who heard the flood broadcasts remembered them to their graves; even 70 years
on, the solemn intonation "Send a boat!" is instantly recognizable Kentucky slang for an
emergency.
For almost seven decades, the original flood broadcasts were believed lost, though recent
years have produced some happy discoveries. In 2003 an actual WHAS flood recording was
discovered in a private collection in Connecticut, via a station in Maryland. Of the eight-day
continuous Louisville broadcast, only this single 15-minute segment is known to survive.
In 2005 an invaluable oral history recorded by WHAS employees in 1957 turned up in a
box at the station, moments before it was tossed into the trash. And Cincinnati's nonprofit Media
Heritage rescued and preserved the NBC network material quoted above. Together, these audio
documents provide a long-impossible glimpse into one of the seminal moments in the history of
the Ohio Valley—and America's broadcasting industry.
While innovation may have devolved into cliché over the generations, the lineage
remains unmistakable: The local TV reporter who'll clutch a tree trunk in howling winds this
hurricane season—perhaps as interested in getting the network recruiter's attention as in
imparting useful information—descends in spirit directly from Foster Brooks of WHAS,
grasping a phone pole with one hand and a microphone with the other, during those dark days of
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1937. These radio pioneers invented journalistic standards and techniques still in practice during
Katrina, in 2007 and onward. Their work should not be forgotten.
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The Fox Sisters: Spiritualism's Unlikely Founders
Originally published by American History magazine.
Whether skeptic or believer, few Americans have been able to ignore the phenomenon
known as spiritualism — the belief that spirits can communicate with the living, usually with the
help of certain sensitive individuals called mediums. During the last half of the 19th century,
some Americans believed that the strange rappings heard in early séances were a spiritual
telegraph, the otherworldly equivalent of Samuel F.B. Morse's new invention. Others insisted
that the noises were a sleight-of-hand trick used to prey upon vulnerable mourners. Even so, the
religious and social movement inspired child mediums, outraged American clergymen, infuriated
scientists and, at its peak, attracted more than 1 million American adherents.
The origins of America's first spiritualist movement began humbly, in the hamlet of
Hydesville, N.Y., just a few miles outside the Erie Canal town of Newark, about 20 miles west of
Rochester. There, during the winter of 1847-48, 15-year-old Maggie Fox and her little sister,
Katy, 11 1/2, schemed to frighten their mother, Margaret Fox, by creating sounds that echoed
through their farmhouse at night.
At first, the girls tied strings to apples, then repeatedly and rhythmically dropped them on
the stairs to mimic ghostly footsteps. According to an interview Maggie gave the New York
World 40 years later, she and Katy soon learned to make popping, cracking and thumping sounds
on their own. While the exact method they used has never been fully explained, Maggie claimed
that they did so by popping or cracking the knuckles of their toes or by snapping their big and
second toes much as one snaps one's fingers. Eventually the girls became so adept that they
performed the trick in their stocking feet and even while standing in shoes. These rapidly
repeated sounds were allegedly so loud that the elder Foxes had been awakened from their sleep.
The superstitious Mrs. Fox soon became convinced that their farmhouse was haunted. In
contrast, her blacksmith husband, John, scoffed, insisting that the sounds came from a loose
board or shutter that rattled in the night winds.
Maggie later claimed that she and Katy planned a final performance for their mother in
which they would talk to the ghost. After the rapping sounds had begun in the evening of March
35 | P a g e
31, 1848, Mrs. Fox rose, lit a candle and began searching the house. When she reached her
daughters' bed, Katy peered into the darkness and boldly addressed the ghost. 'Mr. Split-foot, do
as I do, she said, snapping her fingers in the cadence of the earlier noises. The appropriate raps
followed. Maggie then clapped her hands four times and commanded the ghost to rap back. Four
knocks followed. As if on cue, Katy responded by making soundless finger-snapping gestures
that, in turn, were answered with raps.
Taking pity upon her terrified mother, Katy then offered a hint of explanation for the
sounds. O, mother, I know what it is. Tomorrow is April-fool day and it's somebody trying to
fool us, she began.
But Mrs. Fox apparently refused to consider the suggestion of a prank. The ghost, she
believed, was real and, terrified though she was, she decided to test it herself. Initially, she asked
the ghost to count to 10. After it responded appropriately, she asked other questions, among
them, the number of children she had borne. Seven raps came back. How many were still living?
Six raps. Their ages? Each was rapped out correctly. As Mrs. Fox later related, she then
demanded, If it was an injured spirit, make two raps. Promptly two knocks were returned. Mrs.
Fox then wanted to know who the ghost was in life. Maggie and Katy quickly concocted an
answer. The spirit, they claimed, was a 31-year-old married man, dead for two years, and the
father of five. Will you continue to rap if I call in the neighbors, their mother asked, that they
may hear it too?
This domestic drama might have ended there had Maggie and Katy failed to respond. But
Mrs. Fox's reaction took them aback. To confess that what they had begun as a prank had
evolved into a cruel joke was unthinkable. To do so would surely incite their parents' wrath.
After an awkward pause, the spirit rapped out its agreement to talk to the neighbors.
The first to arrive was Mary Redfield. Initially skeptical, the matron nevertheless asked
the spirit questions about her own life and received such accurate answers that she scurried
across the road to tell others.
Maggie and Katy were now in even more trouble. If they admitted their trickery, their
mother, indeed the entire Fox family, would have been widely ridiculed. We could not confess
the wrong without exciting very great anger on the part of those who we had deceived. So we
went right on, Maggie explained in her 1888 memoir, The Death Blow to Spiritualism.
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The next night, before a curious crowd of neighbors, a spirit began its rappings.
Frustrated by the clumsiness of the communication, one of the visitors proposed a code. He
assigned numbers to letters of the alphabet so that the ghost could not only spell out words but
whole sentences. (The girls would use some version of this system, often adapted and simplified,
from then on.) While frightened, the girls then knocked out messages that they claimed came
from a murdered peddler who was buried in the farmhouse basement. In reaction, the neighbors
decided to excavate the cellar to see if there was any truth to the tale. But fate intervened. Heavy
spring rains and the farmhouse's location near a creek filled the excavation pit with groundwater,
making further investigation impossible for weeks.
Rumors about the alleged haunting at Hydesville nevertheless continued to spread
throughout the countryside, and before long the Fox farmhouse was overrun with visitors who
lingered until nightfall when Maggie and Katy again felt compelled to serve as mediums for the
spirits. Inevitably, the tales of their séances elevated the girls to a new status. Some of their
neighbors now regarded them with awe, as divinely inspired individuals chosen to interpret
messages from the dead — an attitude that may have contributed to Maggie and Katy's continued
reluctance to confess to the prank.
In contrast, a restive group of locals treated the girls with contempt, convinced that they
were either tricksters or witches. Emotions ran so high in their nearby Methodist Episcopal
church that ultimately the minister asked the Fox family to leave the congregation. In his view
the girls had engaged in unholy practices and their parents must be held accountable.
Rumors of the events in the Fox house continued to spread far and wide, inspiring
attorney E.E. Lewis of nearby Canandaigua to visit Hydesville to investigate. Losing no time, he
questioned the neighbors, interviewed former tenants of the farmhouse and asked the elder Foxes
to describe the events in their own words. By late May 1848, Lewis published a pamphlet titled
A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of John D. Fox, in Hydesville, Arcadia,
Wayne County.
Once again, the story might have ended there except that Maggie and Katy's eldest sister,
Leah Fox Fish, a divorced 33-year-old mother living in Rochester, happened to read the report.
Stunned to learn that the hauntings involved her family, Leah promptly booked passage on an
Erie Canal packet boat to Newark and continued on by carriage to Hydesville. Beyond Leah's
immediate concern for her family's welfare was an even more provocative thought: Might these
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strange events be fulfillment of a prophecy about the imminent approach of the spirits that had
appeared in a recent best-selling book?
That work, The Divine Principles of Nature, written by seer Andrew Jackson Davis, was
based on the writings of the 18th-century European mystic, theologian and scientist Emanuel
Swedenborg. All human experience, Swedenborg had written, was only a reflection of a larger
spiritual universe. By 1847 Davis had popularized Swedenborg's theories by suggesting that the
material world was only the shadow of a spiritual universe. The dead, Davis claimed, were in
daily contact with the living, even if the latter did not realize it. This truth will ere long present
itself in the form of a living demonstration, he predicted. And the world will hail with
delight…that era when the interiors of men will be opened and the spiritual communion will be
established.
Leah wondered, was it possible that Davis' predictions were coming true in her parents'
home in Hydesville?
By the 1840s, American preoccupation with death was widespread. The nation's new
cities were expanding, its immigration was at an all-time high and its factories and ports
booming, all of which contributed to urban overcrowding and poor sanitation, which spawned
epidemics of cholera, whooping cough, influenza and diphtheria. The mortality rate was on the
rise. Nearly one-third of all city-born infants died before reaching their first birthday, and young
mothers — bearing an average of five children each — were often fatally struck with puerperal
fever. Death thus touched all families, leaving behind millions of relatives with memories of
those who had passed to the other side.
Simultaneously, prosperity born of America's urbanization and expanding economy
flooded the marketplace with factory-spun textiles, dishes and furniture, prompting a new hope
and materialism. In such an atmosphere, traditional religions like Calvinism, with its punitive
doctrine of original sin, no longer seemed relevant.
A more significant approach to true worship of the divine, according to some, was
brotherly concern for others expressed through meaningful social action. By the 1830s and '40s,
America's new breed of humanitarians had founded dozens of charities and embraced social
causes such as abolition, coeducation, temperance and prison reform. Still another symbol of that
mood was the establishment of 40 utopian communities in America.
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Contributing to that positive mood was America's westward expansion. Frontier towns
appeared seemingly overnight — so too did the nation's expanding railroads, interlocking
systems of canals and fleets of steam-powered boats. New inventions such as Morse's telegraph
suddenly linked once-remote cities and towns. By the late 1840s anticipation of a better life and
the concept of progress had become a national expectation. It is an extraordinary era in which we
live….The progress of the age has almost outstripped human belief, proclaimed orator-statesman
Daniel Webster in 1847.
While perhaps neither young Maggie Fox nor her sister Katy grasped the implications of
their era's zeitgeist, their eldest sister, Leah, had long hoped to embrace that promise. For years,
the single mother had struggled to support herself and her daughter by giving music lessons to
the offspring of Rochester's wealthiest citizens.
Rochester had been prosperous even before its connection to the Erie Canal. Opened in
1825, the waterway linked the city to Buffalo to the west and Syracuse, Albany, the Hudson
River and New York City to the east, and turned Rochester into America's first inland boom
town, as one historian dubbed it. Its wealth inevitably attracted swindlers, wastrels and atheists
who, according to the local population, brought godlessness, poverty and the abuse of alcohol.
During the period of religious revivalism known as America's Second Great Awakening,
scores of charismatic preachers consequently appeared in Rochester and other Erie Canal
communities to offer salvation through a variety of evangelical and innovative sects. Among
them were the Shakers, Mormons and the Millerites, whose followers abandoned their worldly
goods in preparation for a Second Coming, predicted for 1843 and '44. In the wake of the failed
coming of the Day of Judgment and other religious exuberances, a spiritual cynicism settled over
the area. To Leah Fox Fish, who had personally witnessed that evolution, the community seemed
ripe for a new religious expression. A practical woman with an opportunistic bent, she had
hastened to investigate the rappings associated with Maggie and Katy.
Determined to plumb the mystery, Leah drew her sisters aside and, promising to keep
their confidence, wrested the secret of the raps from them. Repeatedly, Leah tried to reproduce
the noises under Maggie and Katy's tutelage, but could make only the faintest of sounds. Later,
after inviting Katy to Rochester, perhaps to practice the rapping skills herself, Leah shrewdly
claimed in her memoir that the ghost had followed her to Rochester and so disturbed her
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household that she was forced to move. Yet, Leah's next residence, half of a two-family house,
was adjacent to a cemetery — an odd choice for someone eager to escape hauntings.
Mrs. Fox soon joined Leah and Katy, with Maggie in tow. No sooner were the younger
sisters united than they grew bolder, filling the house with even more raucous ghost disturbances.
Leah eventually decided that it was time to share the spirits with others. Appointing herself as
official interpreter of the raps, she demanded that Maggie and Katy conduct séances in Rochester
under her tutelage. To bolt was impossible, Maggie later explained, for Leah threatened to
accuse her and Katy of deceiving her with raps — just as they had their parents and the
Hydesville community. Thus intimidated, an embittered Maggie later told the New York World,
Katie and I were led around like lambs.
The very first to be invited were Leah's closest friends, Amy and Isaac Post, a Quaker
couple who were abolitionists, members of Rochester's underground railroad and leading social
reformers. Earlier, the middle-aged couple had rejected their Hicksite Quaker sect because of its
intolerances and thus seemed well suited to receiving Leah's new idea of spirit communication as
a faith. When Leah described the hauntings in June 1948, the Posts initially laughed and then
asked if the family were suffering under some psychological delusion.
The couple, however, like others of that era, had lost several youngsters to illnesses, and
ultimately they agreed to participate in a séance. To their surprise the messages Maggie and Katy
rapped out and which Leah translated were so personal as to be convincing. The Posts
immediately became believers and were soon enthusiastically promoting their belief in the Fox
sisters' spiritual manifestations to others.
Leah's timing had been ideal. The notion of a collective spirit — a benevolent force that
endowed each human being with the capacity to right the world's wrongs — was flowing through
American thought. Spiritualism, as Leah would casually explain then and later in her
memoir, The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, encompassed all souls regardless of race,
gender, ethnicity or other religious affiliations. Intrigued with Leah's concept, the Posts and their
circle soon accepted spiritualism as the first stirrings of a universalism or communalism — a
brotherhood of the human spirit that mirrored their own resolve to find an alternative faith
devoid of intolerance.
Before long the Fox sisters were besieged with requests for séances. Sometimes with only
Maggie, sometimes with only Katy and sometimes with both, Leah presided over the meetings.
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Once guests arrived, they sat around a table, recited an opening prayer and sang. After joining
hands and sitting in silence, Maggie or Katy fell into a trance. Then the audience heard the faint
sound of ghostly raps.
Not everyone, of course, believed them. Members of Rochester's clergy railed against
them as witches and heretics. Some citizens considered the séances evil and unnatural. Still
others thought the sisterly trio was mad. Privately, Maggie continued to wrestle with her own
concept of reality. Complicating that was Leah's sudden insistence that the spirits were real — a
concept that her youngest sister, Katy, by then 12 years old, had readily accepted. Confused by
her sisters' reaction, Maggie became increasingly introverted and moody.
Only once did Maggie decide to revolt, and she did so by refusing to rap for 12 days.
Abruptly the séances stopped, Leah grew tense and the household funds dwindled. The resultant
upheaval was too much for Maggie to bear and finally she relented. Once heard again, the raps,
Leah later recounted, [were] like the return of long absent friends.
In the fall of 1849, Leah announced that the spirits had demanded that she and Maggie
publicize spiritualism to the larger Rochester community. Hire Corinthian Hall, Rochester's
largest auditorium, they had proclaimed. The designated night was Wednesday, November 14,
the time 7 p.m., the price of a ticket 25 cents. The audience, reported the Rochester Daily
Democrat, was in the best possible humor, ready to be entertained by what they anticipated as an
exposé of the sisters who they thought were perpetrating a fraud.
That night Maggie sat timorously on a platform at Corinthian Hall next to Leah and Mr.
and Mrs. Post as a jeering audience hissed. Grudgingly, the Rochester Daily Democrat later
admitted that THE GHOST was there…[but] the more the ghost rapped with that muffled tone,
the higher rose the spirit of mirth.
Afterward, an outraged group of citizens demanded that a committee of Rochester's most
prominent citizens examine Maggie and Leah to discover the source of the sounds. The
following morning the sisters complied, but following the committee's investigation, its members
remained perplexed. That Thursday night a committee representative confessed to the restive
audience their inability to explain the phenomenon. Desperately, still other committees attempted
to test Maggie and Leah — placing them on glass, on pillows and even by appointing a
subcommittee of ladies to discover if they had concealed any machinery in their underclothes.
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With each unsuccessful committee report, the crowds at Corinthian Hall grew
increasingly raucous. On the final night, Saturday, November 17, tensions in the auditorium were
palpable: Already a barrel of warmed tar had been detected in a stairway and removed. Finally,
as a committee representative began to admit that the sounds defied explanation, Stamping,
shrieking and all kinds of hideous noises…obliged him to desist, Isaac Post later wrote. Blinding
cascades of light from firecrackers lit by raucous nonbelievers exploded in the back of the
auditorium. In the resultant smoke and din, men howled that the females must have concealed
lead balls in their dresses to make sounds and attempted to storm the stage. Thanks to police
intervention, Maggie, Leah, the Posts and other terrified spiritualists were whisked out of the
building.
Implying that the committee's studies had been at worst rigged, or at best incomplete,
the Rochester Daily Advertiser complained that the wary and eagle-eyed are kept out and
excluded from [an] opportunity of investigation. A reporter at Horace Greeley's New York
Tribune observed, It is difficult to understand why spirits, who act with as little reason as
children or idiots, would spend time thumping the wall. The attendant publicity nevertheless
transformed Maggie and her sisters into celebrities, and they were now recognized, for good or
ill, as leaders of a new social and religious movement. They began to carry their message further
afield.
In early June 1850, after touring Albany and Troy, the Fox sisters sailed down the
Hudson River and arrived in New York City, where they soon began receiving guests and giving
séances. Within two days of their arrival, they were invited to appear before some of Manhattan's
most illustrious literati — among them, historian George Bancroft; William Cullen Bryant, poet
and editor of the progressive Evening Post; poet and essayist Henry Tuckerman; Nathaniel
Parker Willis, editor of the society-minded Home Journal; and author James Fenimore Cooper.
That evening Maggie and her sisters raised the spirit of Cooper's sister and so precisely
described her fatal horseback riding accident of 50 years earlier that the famous author instantly
became a believer. The New York Tribune's George Ripley, who also had been present, wrote:
We are in the dark as any of our readers. The manners and bearing of the ladies are such as to
create a prepossession in their favor. They have no theories to offer in explanation of the
acts…and apparently have no control of their incomings and outgoings. Some newspapers that
formerly had accused the Fox sisters of devil baiting and fraud now retracted their comments.
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Even the openly scornful New York Herald admitted that its reporter believed the ladies were in
every sense incapable of any intentional deception.
Predictably, the Fox sisters — or Rochester Rappers as they were dubbed — were
besieged with requests for séances. By summer's end actress Mary Taylor crooned a new song on
Broadway, The Rochester Rappers at Barnum's Hotel. Inexpensive souvenirs were sold
emblazoned with the Rochester Rappers. Ladies, you are the lions of New
York! Tribune reporter Ripley finally told the sisters.
After that New York reception, spiritualism was hailed as one of the wonders of the age.
Periodicals with titles such as Spirit World, Spiritual Philosopher, New Era and The Spiritualist
Messenger appeared. To the nation's new believers, mediumship, with its odd knocking sounds
and eerie messages, was a spiritual telegraph — a name subsequently appearing on the masthead
of the faith's leading periodical.
Mediums appeared from Vermont to California claiming that they, too, had spiritualist
powers. Much like Maggie and Katy, many were pubescent girls and young women who were
thought to have souls so pure that they were perfect intermediaries between the two worlds. In
Boston, Mrs. Sisson, a so-called clairvoyant physician, and Lucinda Tuttle, among others,
attracted large followings; so too in Buffalo, N.Y., did a pretty blonde teenager, Cora Scott. In
Providence, R.I., Edgar Allen Poe's former fiancée, Sarah Helen Whitman, wrote trance-inspired
spiritualist poetry. In Hartford, Conn., crowds of ailing individuals waited to see Semantha
Mettler, whose trances were said to effect miraculous cures.
Spiritualism, with its guiding principle of the equality of all souls regardless of race,
gender, ethnicity or religious affiliation, was inspired by, and inspired the growth of, other
reformist movements of the time. Like the women behind those causes, female mediums broke
the rules of Victorian propriety and spoke out, albeit in a trance voice, and many became
financially independent, encouraging others to follow suit. It is no wonder that there soon came
to be a close link between spiritualism, temperance, abolition and women's rights.
But the spiritualist movement was not exclusively female. Among its most prominent
spokespersons were former Universalist ministers Reverend Charles Hammond, author of the
1852 Light from the Spirit World, and Reverend Samuel Byron Brittan, co-publisher of The
Spiritual Telegraph. In Athens, Ohio, musical spirits directed Jonathan Koons, an uneducated
farmer, to build a spirit room. In nearby Columbus George Walcutt and George Rogers painted
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portraits of people they never knew — which, eerily, relatives later identified as deceased
members of their families. In Connecticut a young Scottish orphan, Daniel Douglas Home, was
already becoming famous for his levitations during séances.
Some of America's most distinguished men also counted themselves as believers, and
several, such as General Waddy Thompson, former U.S. representative from South Carolina,
General Edward Bullard of New York and former Wisconsin Territory Governor Nathaniel
Tallmadge, were the Fox sisters' personal friends. To the astonishment of the scientific
community, their renowned colleague, Professor Emeritus Robert Hare, the University of
Pennsylvania chemist who invented the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, enthusiastically endorsed
spiritualism.
By 1852 spirit circles had been formed in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis,
Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and even across the
Atlantic in England and Europe. Paralleling spiritualism's spread was an array of new spiritual
manifestations including table tipping, spirit music and dancing lights. There were, as well,
growing demands for serious scientific investigations.
Between 1853 and 1855, spiritualism's popularity soared so dramatically that many of
America's most prominent writers, thinkers and scientists became alarmed. Transcendentalist
Ralph Waldo Emerson was so disgusted with the movement's rapid spread that he denounced it
as a rat revelation, the gospel that comes by taps in the wall and humps in the table drawer. Poet
James Russell ridiculed the idea that spirits had the ability to raise tables and move chairs.
Respect should be paid to all spiritualists, he sardonically remarked, including a certain Judge
Wells, a man who was such a powerful medium that he was forced to drive back the furniture
from following him when he goes out, as one might a pack of too affectionate dogs.
By 1854, followers, according to the spiritualists' own estimates, numbered from 1 to 2
million Americans. In the spring of that year, the prevalence of reports about uncanny spiritualist
phenomena appearing in America's cities attracted the attention of the U.S. Congress. On April
17, General James Shields, a senator from Illinois, and Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts
presented a petition signed by 15,000 Americans requesting the appointment of a scientific
commission to study spiritualist phenomena. Ultimately, in an executive session, there was a
pleasant debate during which senators suggested that the petition be referred to one of several
possible groups — including the committees on foreign relations, on military affairs or on post
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offices and post roads — the last because of the possibility of establishing spiritual telegraph
between the material and spiritual worlds. In the end the petition was tabled.
The debate continued. Spiritualism, founding editor of The New York Times Henry
Raymond lamented in September 1855, had an appeal that is wider, stronger and deeper than that
of any philosophical or socialistic theory, since it appeals to the marvelous in man. He continued:
“In five years it has spread like wildfire over this continent so that there is scarcely a village
without its mediums and its miracles….If it be a delusion, it has misled very many of the
intelligent as well as the ignorant.”
A month later, an increasingly alarmed Raymond added: Clergymen, formerly preachers
of evangelical denominations, are now lecturing on Spiritualism and its wildest heresies to large
congregations. The whole West, and to a greater extent the whole country, has been deeply
infiltrated. Yet, despite the ongoing protests, by 1856 several influential religious leaders
embraced spiritualism — among them prominent Unitarian ministers Thomas Wentworth
Higginson and Theodore Parker. Ironically, spiritualism, with its promise of a joyous afterlife,
the comfort it gave mourners and the confidence it imparted to America's early suffragists and
social reformers would ultimately betray Maggie and Katy. As new mediums appeared and
produced increasingly spectacular effects — table tippings and levitations, for example — and
subsequent investigations exposed many as frauds, the Fox sisters were often pushed from center
stage. At times believing the rappings were the manifestations of spirits and at times wracked by
guilt induced by their deceptions, the two quarreled with each other and their supporters.
In the fall of 1888 when Maggie publicly admitted that spiritualism was a fraud,
nonbelievers rejoiced. Advocates blamed it on the fact that for some time Maggie — as well as
her sister Katy — had been slipping into severe alcoholism. A year later when Maggie recanted
her confession, the credibility of the Fox sisters shriveled, and they slipped into obscurity. Katy
died of end-stage alcoholism on July 1, 1892, and Maggie on March 8 the following year.
Yet the mysterious raps heard in Hydesville in 1848 sowed the seeds of spiritualism that
have continued to sprout, evolve and flourish to the present day. Even today, spiritualism,
represented by celebrity mediums, the practice of channeling, descriptions of near-death
experiences, New Age philosophies, hundreds of books and a spate of new television shows and
movies featuring conversations with the dead, continues to fascinate.
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The Negro League: Sixty Years of Segregated Baseball
John B. Holway
Imagine major-league baseball without such stars as Albert Belle, Ken Griffey, Jr., or
'Mo Vaughn, three of the best players in the game today. Deprived of the tremendous skills that
they and many of their African-American colleagues display, this country's national pastime
would be a mere shadow of the game loved by so many. Yet, had Jackie Robinson not broken
baseball's color line in 1947, these players–simply because of their race–might never have gotten
the chance to play. Indeed, for many of the nation's best ball players before 1947, this
unfortunate scenario was the reality.
Segregated baseball lasted sixty years, from 1887 when Adrian Cap Anson, the Babe
Ruth of his day, tried to order a black opponent off the field, until 1947 when Jackie Robinson
took his place in the infield at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. During that time, many of the most
gifted players ever to grace a baseball diamond pitched, hit, and ran their way into baseball
immortality, with much of America unaware of their existence.
Some of these great players–men like Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella, and later, Henry
Aaron–having benefited from Robinson's historic move to the big leagues, followed him there.
However, many other black standouts, including Josh Gibson, John Henry Lloyd, Smoky Joe
Williams, James Thomas Cool Papa Bell, and Oscar Charleston missed out.
African Americans have played baseball since the game's beginnings in the midnineteenth century. They can trace their professional ties within the sport to John Bud Fowler,
who was born, appropriately enough, in Cooperstown, New York, in 1854. Fowler played briefly
for a white professional team in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1872, but was eventually forced to
admit that My skin is against me. The second black professional, Moses Fleetwood Walker, a
graduate of Oberlin College, played for Toledo in the American Association in 1883. When the
Association became a major league for one year in 1884, Moses and his brother Welday became
the first two black big-leaguers, beating Jackie Robinson by 63 years.
Following Walker's lead, several other black players quickly joined minor-league teams.
A diminutive second baseman, Frank Grant, played with Buffalo in the International League
from 1886 to '88, batting .340, .366, and .326 in his three seasons there. Grant drew a lot of
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walks, as pitchers tended to aim at his head rather than at the catcher's mitt. The International
League also produced pitcher George Stovey, a black Canadian who won 33 games for Newark
one year, while losing only 4. When the white leagues passed a rule ousting black players, Grant
and Stovey joined the Cuban Giants, the first black, major-league-caliber professional team.
In 1902, Andrew Foster, a preacher's son from Texas then pitching for the black
Philadelphia Cuban X-Giants, defeated the Philadelphia Athletics' star pitcher, Rube Waddell in
an exhibition game. That feat earned Foster the nickname Rube, which he carried the rest of his
life. By 1905, the Pittsburgh Pirates' star shortstop, Honus Wagner, was calling Rube the
smoothest pitcher I've ever seen. Foster later went on to form one of the great teams of all time,
the Chicago American Giants. And in 1920, he assembled eight teams into the Negro National
League, the first successful black baseball league and the model for the Negro Leagues that
flourished for many years.
In an age of unlettered, rough-neck ballplayers, a gangling shortstop from Florida named
John Henry Lloyd, whose foulest oath was Gosh bob it!, was the gentleman of black baseball,
much as Christy Mathewson was the model gentleman of white baseball at that time. Lloyd
scooped up ground balls, dirt and all. He cradled his bat in the crook of his elbow and hit
stinging line drives to all fields. His lifetime average of .350 was the third highest in the history
of the Negro Leagues, and during games against white big-leaguers he batted .306. Inevitably,
Lloyd was dubbed the black Wagner, leading Honus to reply softly that he was proud to be
compared with such a great player.
Another of the early black stars was Joe Williams. In 1917, he bested Walter Johnson, the
greatest pitcher in white baseball, by a score of 1-0. During his career, he also beat Grover
Cleveland Alexander and five other Hall of Famers. In the fall of 1917, Williams struck out
twenty of John McGraw's New York Giants in ten innings, while giving them only one hit. A
Giant player approached Williams after the game and told him, That was a hell of a game,
Smoky; from then on, the pitcher was known as Smoky Joe.
Oscar Charleston, another renowned black player, was a tough ex-soldier who hit with
Babe Ruth's power, ran with Ty Cobb's slashing speed, and played a tremendous center field.
Twice he led the Negro National League in both home runs and stolen bases. Reportedly strong
enough to loosen a baseball's cover with one hand, and fearless enough to snatch the hood from
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the head of a Ku Klux Klansman, Charleston was sometimes called the black Cobb. But those
who saw both men disagreed. Cobb, they said, was the white Charleston.
Because accurate statistics are often lacking, it is difficult to say how good many of these
black players were, but based on their exhibition play against their professional white
counterparts during the pre-Robinson years, it is clear that they were exceptional. Black teams
opposed white professional teams in more than four hundred barnstorming games between the
1890s and 1947, and came away winners sixty percent of the time. White stars like Babe Ruth,
Ty Cobb, Bob Feller, Honus Wagner, Jimmie Foxx, and Christy Mathewson were glad to make
extra money in games against blacks, and their testimony attests to the considerable skills of their
opponents.
Cuba had formed a professional baseball league as early as 1879, and American bigleague teams eventually began to schedule exhibition games against black and Cuban teams each
October. In the fall of 1910, the Detroit Tigers, led by Cobb, traveled to the island for a series
with the Havana Stars, who had borrowed John Henry Lloyd from the Leland Giants. Cobb sat in
the dugout before one of the games, ostentatiously filing his spikes and pointing to Lloyd as if to
say, This is for you. The first chance he got, Cobb dashed for second on a steal attempt, but
Lloyd, who was wearing a pair of cast-iron shin guards under his socks for protection, simply
knocked the surprised Tiger aside. In five games, the frustrated Cobb was held without a stolen
base.
By 1924, Rube Foster's Negro National League was being challenged by the new Eastern
Colored League, and black baseball was enjoying huge success. That year, the Philadelphia
Hilldales and Kansas City Monarchs met in the first Negro Leagues World Series. But by 1930,
the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of the previous year threatened to kill
the Negro Leagues, and perhaps the white minors as well. In desperation, the Kansas City
Monarchs' owner, a gentle, kindly white man named J. L. Wilkinson, sank his life savings into a
set of revolutionary portable lights. On April 6, five years before the first major-league night
game, Wilkinson, to the delight of a crowd in Enid, Oklahoma, set up his lights, and the umpire
yelled Play ball!
Three months later, under the lights at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, the Homestead Grays'
catcher suffered a broken finger when he lost a pitch in the shadows. A teenager named Josh
Gibson, famous locally for his mammoth home runs on the sandlots, was asked by Grays' owner
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Cum Posey to fill in for the injured catcher, and thus a star was born. Over the next 17 seasons,
the powerful Gibson built a reputation as the Negro Leagues' most feared slugger.
During his rookie campaign, Gibson smashed a ball over Forbes Field's center field
fence, 457 feet away. Only three other men–Oscar Charleston, Mickey Mantle, and Dick Stuart–
ever duplicated that feat. Later, in New York's cavernous Yankee Stadium, Gibson blasted a
five-hundred-foot line drive off the back of the left field bullpen between the grandstand and the
bleachers. The pulverized ball came within two feet of being the only fair ball ever hit out of the
house that Ruth built.
By 1932 Gibson, along with fellow future Hall-of-Famers James Cool Papa Bell and
Satchel Paige, had signed with the Pittsburgh Crawfords, forming perhaps the greatest Negro
League team of all time. Bell was so fast on the base paths that, according to Paige, he could turn
off the light and jump in bed before the room got dark. Once, while batting against the great St.
Louis Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean, Bell scored from second base on a Gibson sacrifice fly, and
it was not unknown for him to score all the way from first base on a bunt. For his part, the witty
Paige, gifted with a great fastball and excellent control, was surely the best known black player
in America; he and Gibson formed one of the best pitcher-catcher batteries in baseball history.
Gibson hit many of his home runs in two of the toughest parks for a right-handed hitter–
Forbes Field, which measured 365 feet down the foul line, and Washington, D.C.'s Griffith
Stadium, whose left-field fence stood 408 feet from home plate. And Gibson did not simply feast
off easy pitching. In 15 games against white big leaguers, he batted .415 and averaged one home
run every three games. There is no telling what records he might have set had such small parks
as Boston's Fenway Park or Brooklyn's Ebbets Field been on his playing circuit. In 1942, word
spread that several major-league clubs were talking about signing black players. Gibson, along
with Paige and Campanella, were mentioned, but in the end, nothing came of it.
That October, Gibson faced Paige in the Negro Leagues World Series. It marked one of
those magic moments that would have lived forever in legend if it had happened in the majors.
Gibson had told a reporter that he hit Satchel just like any other pitcher, so Paige gave him the
chance. With the game and the series on the line, he deliberately loaded the bases in order to
pitch to Gibson; then he taunted him: “You been talkin' about how you can hit me, he called to
Gibson at the plate. I ain't gonna trick you. I'm gonna throw you fastballs at the knees. Let's see if
you can hit one.” Paige then threw three sidearm fastballs, all of which Gibson took for strikes.
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The flamboyant pitcher strutted off the mound, reveling in what was for him the biggest day of
my life.
In 1945, the Monarchs' Wilkinson signed ex-Army lieutenant Jackie Robinson to a
contract. The rookie set the league on fire that season, hitting at a .387 clip over 47 games. When
rumors spread that big-league scouts were watching him, old-timers in the league worried that
Jackie, then a shortstop, did not have the range or the arm for that position. They feared that if he
missed his chance in the majors, it would be many years before another black athlete would get
such an opportunity. In addition, they felt that Jackie, although gifted with raw speed, needed to
learn the tricks involved in stealing bases. Veterans like Cool Papa Bell, too old to make the
majors themselves, coached Robinson on technique and convinced him to shift to second base.
Meanwhile, Oscar Charleston, who had been hired by Branch Rickey as a scout, urged the
Brooklyn Dodgers' president to sign Negro League catcher Roy Campanella.
Back in 1920, Rube Foster had predicted that if the Negro Leagues maintained a high
caliber of performance on the field, the players would be prepared to answer the call when the
major leagues were ready to open their doors. By 1947, despite the fact that most of the majorleague teams were not ready to accept blacks, Jackie Robinson made his historic walk onto the
Dodgers' Ebbets Field, breaking the color line for good.
Three months before that historic day, a broken-hearted Gibson, having longed for a shot
at the big leagues, died suddenly at the age of 36 from a drug overdose. That October, in an
exhibition game against a big-league all-star team in Los Angeles, Cool Papa Bell walked, and
Satchel Paige followed with a sacrifice bunt. Bell, his 42-year-old legs in bandages, streaked for
second and on to third. The third baseman came in to field the ball, and the catcher ran to third to
cover that base. Bell brushed past them both to score all the way from first. It was a symbolic
moment for the two talented veterans, and perhaps the last hurrah for the old Negro Leagues.
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The Diamond Jubilee Of Jazz
About 325,000 jazz performances have been recorded for commercial release in the
twentieth century, according to the Institute for Jazz Studies, at Rutgers University. Plus
thousands more have been taken from radio and concert events. Unknown billions of jazz
records have been sold. But it was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) that made and sold
the first jazz records seventy-five years ago this month (now reissued in a diamond-jubilee
edition by RCA Bluebird).
There is a special badge of immortality we pin on those who are the first at something
important. They don’t have to be the best, the biggest, or the most enduring. Being first is
enough, as long as what they’re first at comes to count for something. Sometimes we know from
the start it counts. When the Spirit of St. Louis bounced onto Le Bourget Field in 1927, our sense
of time and distance changed.
More often, however, an act of primacy is not so clearly understood. It comes and goes
unmarked. When recognition finally does strike, it takes the historian to go back, locate the
moment of invention, and anoint it with a retroactive immortality.
No reputable historian has ever claimed to locate a moment when jazz was invented. The
best that can be said is that it simmered and stewed in a period of New Orleans prehistory that
wound back deep into the nineteenth century. It was a folk music. It passed by ear, not by text,
and it traveled no farther than its players were inclined to take it. It was a regional music, almost
ethnic.
Before radio, television, and records, popular music moved on the back of migration. The
process was slow. It is perhaps more than a coincidence of historic juxtaposition that the crucial
breakout of jazz from the Mississippi Delta took place in the second decade of this century,
during that massive internal shift of population known as the black migration. Boll weevil
plagues and floods were blighting the Southern cotton economy at the same time Northern
industry needed cheap labor. The main route north was not the Mississippi but the Illinois
Central Railroad, a nine-hundred-mile line between New Orleans and Chicago.
By 1916 the dispersion was under way. Musicians, white and black, were playing jazz in
local New Orleans bands. Outof-towners were often astonished at what they heard. One of them
was a visiting Chicago club booker called Harry James (no relation to the bandleader), who took
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a liking to a stocky, straight-talking cornetist in the Johnny Stein Band named Dominic James
LaRocca. People called him Nick for short. He was all of twenty-five and had the best and worst
instincts of a carnival barker. James had the idea that this whooping, braying, rattletrap music
called dixieland could be a sensation up North. So he did a deal, and on March 1, 1916, “Stein’s
Band from Dixie,” with LaRocca playing cornet, opened in Chicago at Schiller’s Café on East
Thirty-first Street. Jazz had joined the migration north.
Stein’s Band was an instant, blaring hit. Naturally his musicians decided they deserved
more money. Management didn’t see it that way, of course, and Stein didn’t press the issue. So
his place in history passed to LaRocca, who persuaded the trombonist Eddie Edwards and the
pianist Henry Ragas to quit the band and follow him. They promptly got work at the Casino
Gardens, on Kinzie and Clark streets. Tony Sbarbaro joined on drums, and Larry Shields on
clarinet. By November the charter membership was in place. And the Original Dixieland Jazz
Band was poised for a date at Victor and the leap that would take jazz from the hinterlands to the
mainstream. The 1917 recording ledgers at Rockefeller Center show the time and place:
February 26, 1917, at Victor’s New York studio, probably at 42 West Thirty-eighth Street.
In a century that was inventing mass production, recording was what counted. Had jazz
stayed in New Orleans, or even Chicago, the language of American music might sound vastly
different today. That it reached New York and got recorded marks the beginning of its real
history and its extraordinary impact on the de-Europeanization of American popular music.
LaRocca and his men hit New York in January. At Reisenweber’s Restaurant at Eighth
Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, they introduced a trunkful of numbers that are still heard at jazz
festivals today: “Tiger Rag,” “Clarinet Marmalade,” “Sensation Rag,” and plenty more. Most of
these tunes had been part of the local and more or less anonymous repertoire of New Orleans.
But no one in New York knew that. So LaRocca not only said he wrote them all but claimed he
had invented jazz. The press ate it up.
So did Columbia Records, which was the first to get the ODJB under contract and into
the studio. The company knew nothing about jazz, of course. Who did? But it understood a hot
item when it saw one. Two pop tunes were cut in the Woolworth Building on January 20: “At the
Dark Town Strutters Ball” and “Indiana.” But it was a false start. The Columbia management
was so shocked by the sheer violence of the music that it deemed the discs unreleasable. The
musicians were paid fifty dollars each and sent home, the masters were interred in the vaults, and
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the privilege of launching the history of recorded jazz moved to the Victor Talking Machine
Company.
Three and a half weeks after the Columbia debacle, LaRocca and company recorded two
original pieces, “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One-Step.” It was not an easy job.
Electronic recording, microphones, and control panels were still eight years away. Charles
Souey, the Victor engineer, had never faced such an unwieldy mixture of colliding sounds. He
experimented endlessly with positioning and balance. Ragas ended up playing closest to the
horn. Then came Shields, Edwards, LaRocca, and finally Sbarbaro, who banged his cymbals,
snares, and wood blocks about twenty-five feet away. Victor released the records on March 1,
and they quickly became a national sensation. One month later America entered World War I.
Times were changing.
The ODJB was almost all shock and not much substance. It didn’t last. But it served its
purpose superbly well. Shock was precisely what jazz needed to crash the barricades of
American life. The ODJB caught a sound in the air, surged briefly with a roar, then stalled out.
But that brief roar ignited a sense among millions of people that American music—both classical
and popular—might have a voice of its own that owed nothing to its European “betters” or to
vaudeville traditions.
The ODJB made its last important records in 1923. It was by then a mostly spent force.
But that was all right because King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong,
Duke Ellington, and Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra all made their very first records that year.
The cats were out of the bag. Before the end of the decade Benny Goodman, Count Basic, and
Benny Carter had begun recording careers that would thrive for more than fifty years. (Carter is
still going strong.) The subsequent story of jazz recording is well summarized in Brian
Priestley’s recent book Jazz on Record: A History, from Billboard Books.
For the ODJB there would be one brief encore period in the middle 1930s and a final
valedictory at Victor to remake their old tunes. They sounded better than the originals, even if
the sensation was gone. Old-timers hoped there might be other reunions, but the musicians were
unable to sustain fulltime careers. One by one they retired, then died. Larry Shields was the first
to go, in 1953, and LaRocca died at seventy-one in 1961.
For seventy-five years now recording has captured a transitory performing art, given it
the permanence of a scored composition, and allowed it to multiply in the human spirit. Today
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the American Jazz Orchestra under John Lewis and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra
under Gunther Schuller and David Baker regularly perform concerts based on recordings.
Records permit Wynton Marsalis to commune with Louis Armstrong, Scott Hamilton with Ben
Webster, Christopher Hollyday with Charlie Parker.
The musicians who influence contemporary music today are not all contemporary. Jazz
on record moves not only across space but through time. When the Original Dixieland Jazz Band
recorded in 1917, jazz stopped being purely a music of the moment. It became also an undying
procession of moments.
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The Tacky History of the Pink Flamingo
John Waters’ childhood yard was an exercise in good taste. His mother, the president of a
local garden club, cultivated burgeoning flowerbeds and precise hedges. In their buttoned-up
Maryland suburb, lawn ornaments of any kind, let alone plastic pink flamingos, were anathema.
One house down the street had a fake wishing well and that was painful enough.
“I don’t remember ever seeing a pink flamingo where I grew up,” the filmmaker muses.
“I think I saw them in East Baltimore.”
In 1972, Waters released the film Pink Flamingos, which was called both an abomination
and an instant classic. The movie has almost nothing to do with the tropical fowl that stand
sentinel during the opening credits: The plot mostly concerns the exertions of a brazen and
voluptuous drag queen intent on preserving her status as “the filthiest person alive.”
“The reason I called it ‘Pink Flamingos’ was because the movie was so outrageous that
we wanted to have a very normal title that wasn’t exploitative,” Waters says. “To this day, I’m
convinced that people think it’s a movie about Florida.” Waters enjoyed the plastic knickknack’s
earnest air: Though his own stylish mom might have disapproved, the day-glo wading birds
were, back then, a straightforward attempt at working-class neighborhood beautification. “The
only people who had them had them for real, without irony,” Waters says. “My movie wrecked
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that.” Forty years later, the sculptures have become unlikely fixtures of a certain kind of highend sensibility, a shorthand for tongue-in-cheek tackiness.
But, for his part, Waters says he has completely OD’d on the flamingos. For one thing, he
learned during an ill-fated Floridian photo shoot that he doesn’t like real birds, and they don’t
like him. (“You can’t just mosey into a pit of pink flamingos. I have tried.”) For another, the
lawn sculptures have become “loaded objects,” classist tools of the well-to-do mocking the taste
of the less fortunate. The real plastic flamingo is in a sense extinct, Waters says: “You can’t have
anything that innocent anymore.”
First designed in 1957, the fake birds are natives not of Florida but of Leominster,
Massachusetts, which bills itself as the Plastics Capital of the World. At a nearby art school,
sculptor Don Featherstone was hired by the plastics company Union Products, where his second
assignment was to sculpt a pink flamingo. No live models presented themselves, so he unearthed
a National Geographic photo spread. It took about two weeks to model both halves of the bird,
brought into the third dimension by then-revolutionary injection-mold technology.
A flamingo-friendly trend was the sameness of post-World War II construction. Units in
new subdivisions sometimes looked virtually identical. “You had to mark your house somehow,”
Featherstone says. “A woman could pick up a flamingo at the store and come home with a piece
of tropical elegance under her arm to change her humdrum house.” Also, “people just thought it
was pretty,” adds Featherstone’s wife, Nancy. That soon changed. Twenty-somethings of the
Woodstock era romanticized nature and scorned plastics (à la The Graduate). Cast in flaming
pink polyethylene, the flamingo became an emblem of what Nancy delicately calls the “Tword”—tackiness. Sears eventually dropped the tchotchkes from its catalog.
But then, phoenixlike, the flamingo rose from its ashes (or rather, from its pool of molten
plastic: As demonstrated at the finale of Waters’ film, flamingos don’t burn, they melt). As early
as the 1960s, pop artists including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg had begun elevating the
low brow and embracing mass culture. And then, of course, Waters’ movie came out.
By the mid-1980s, the flamingos were transitioning from a working-class accessory to an
elaborate upper-class inside joke. They furnished colorful substitutes for croquet wickets and
clever themes for charity galas. The bird became a sort of plastic punch line, and, at worst, a way
of hinting at one’s own good taste by reveling in the bad taste of others.
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Waters got tired of it and gradually gave away his flamingo collection. “It’s a classist
thing,” he says. “People like them in a way that’s not that original anymore.”
In their yard near Leominster, Nancy and Don Featherstone typically tend a flock of 57 (a
nod to the creation year) that neighborhood college students feel compelled to thin. “They steal
’em,” Featherstone says. “You’ve got to have a sense of humor.” As for Waters’ movie, the
Featherstones haven’t seen it, and seem to regard it as a bit of a knockoff. (“My creation was out
long before he started his stuff,” Featherstone says.)
Even Waters, who these days maintains that plastic lawn flamingos should be kept inside,
“like pornography,” hasn’t hardened his heart entirely to the creatures. Visiting his hometown
one Christmas, he noticed that Santa’s sleigh had landed in his formerly tasteful childhood yard,
drawn by a dashing team of pink flamingos. “I almost cried when I saw that,” he admits. “I
thought it was so sweet!”
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Edgar Allan Poe: Hollywood’s Favorite Mad Genius
This Friday marks the release of The Raven, a Relativity Media thriller directed by James
McTeigue and starring John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe, who learns to his dismay that a serial
killer is re-enacting murders from his stories.
With his mysterious death in Baltimore never fully explained, Edgar Allan Poe is the
perfect cautionary tale of genius gone wrong. The poet’s demise haunts 19th century
melodrama—and by extension, the works of early filmmakers like D.W. Griffith.
Poe’s ignominious end was not his fault, of course—it was drink, or his broken
childhood, or the death of his consumptive love Virginia Clemm, that drove Poe to his doom.
Today we summon different demons to explain his failings, schizophrenia perhaps, or chemical
dependency, some form of Tourette’s, a bi-polar tendency, all of which he wrote about
convincingly in his stories and poems.
Our image of Poe changes through the years, as does our interpretation of his work. For
most he is a guilty pleasure of adolescence. His gruesome horror stories are like fairy tales
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collected by the brothers Grimm, peopled by tricksters and shape-shifters who betray the
innocent with elaborate, deadly, and pointless booby traps. Who but a madman would go to the
trouble to use a razor-sharp pendulum as a murder weapon? Poems like “The Bells” and “The
Raven” have an unnerving, sing-song lyricism that once learned are never forgotten.
Many readers skim Poe’s work and then outgrow him. Even his contemporaries had their
doubts. “Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,” was how poet James Russell
Lowell put it. But behind all the insanity and gore Poe was capable of extraordinary writing. “To
Helen,” for example, or this example of an Alexandrine couplet unearthed after his passing:
Deep in earth my love is lying
And I must weep alone.
It’s no surprise that early filmmakers turned to Poe. They were after all desperate for
material, and ransacked everything from the Bible to the daily newspapers for material. The
author’s influence can be seen in the scores of trick films that dazzled early 20th century
moviegoers. With his own carefully nurtured martyr complex, Griffith saw many affinities with
Poe. In 1909, he directed Edgar Allan Poe, in which actor Herbert Yost tries to write “The
Raven” while his wife dies beside him. One of Griffith’s first features was The Avenging
Conscience (1914), like The Raven a mash-up of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Annabel Lee,” and
other Poe works.
With stories like “The Gold Bug” and “The Purloined Letter,” Poe is often given credit
for inventing the detective genre. His C. Auguste Dupin inspired generations of private eyes, as
well as scores of pulp novels and films whose narratives depend on solving codes. This is an
angle The Raven hopes to exploit, although the film looks like it will dwell on the author’s use of
horror elements as well.
And here’s where Poe deserves some of the blame for the cycle of horror films
sometimes called “torture porn.” In stories like “The Premature Burial” and “The Cask of
Amontillado,” he latched onto primal fears with sadistic relish, acting out what society seeks to
repress. Poe offered a moral framework for his depictions of torture, something often jettisoned
by later writers and filmmakers. “The Premature Burial” evolved into the 1984 novel The Golden
Egg and then into The Vanishing, a ghastly 1988 Dutch film directed by George Sluizer (who
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also directed a 1993 American remake). From The Vanishing it’s a short step to Buried (2010), in
which Ryan Reynolds is buried alive in a coffin, or Brake (2012), in which Stephen Dorff is
buried alive in the trunk of a car.
Universal Studios made a fortune in the 1930s with horror films like Dracula and
Frankenstein. Director Robert Florey was pulled from Frankenstein at the last minute and
assigned to The Murders in the Rue Morgue instead. Based very loosely on the Poe short story,
the film portrayed torture as graphically as any movie of its time. Along with The Island of Lost
Souls, The Murders in the Rue Morgue helped bring about stricter censorship regulations. When
the Production Code lost power in the 1960s, producers could be more explicit about their
intentions. “The Pit and the Pendulum” was adapted into the 1967 German film The Torture
Chamber of Dr. Sadism.
Poe has attracted peculiar filmmakers: independents like James Sibley Watson and
Melville Webber, working in a stable in Rochester; or the cartoonists at UPA, who were busy in
the 1950s undermining the animation industry. Experimental filmmakers like Jean Epstein,
iconoclasts like Federico Fellini, Roger Vadim, and Roger Corman. Filmmakers responsible for
what critic Manny Farber referred to as “termite art.”
Sibley and Watson made a 13-minute version of The Fall of the House of Usher in 1928;
that same year, Epstein directed the feature-length La Chute de la maison Usher. Both relied
heavily on an expressionistic filmmaking style developed in Germany, in which foreshortened
sets and angled compositions made up for a lack of narrative clarity.
The 1930s saw an Art Deco The Black Cat, with almost no relation to the Poe story but
with one of the few pairings of horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Shepperd Strudwick
starred in 1942′sThe Loves of Edgar Allan Poe, an amusing bit of hogwash, and Joseph Cotten in
1951′s Man with a Cloak.
James Mason narrated 1953′s animated The Tell-Tale Heart, a cunning cartoon from
United Productions of America (UPA) that delved into the mind of a killer just as it began to
unravel. (A set of UPA cartoons, including The Tell-Tale Heart and Gerald McBoing Boing, has
just been released by Turner Classic Movies and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment under the
title The Jolly Frolics Collection.) Director Ted Parmelee would later go on to Rocky and
Bullwinkle.
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Producer and director Roger Corman finished House of Usher, the first of his eight Poe
adaptations for American International Pictures, in 1960. “The film was about decay and
madness,” Corman wrote in his autobiography. “I told my cast and crew: I never wanted to see
‘reality’ in any of these scenes.” His largely teen audience saw a lot of premature burials and
implied incest instead, as well as a curious mix of new stars like Jack Nicholson and veteran
actors like Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.
That blend of showmanship and exploitation continues to this day. A whiff of the
forbidden clings to Poe adaptations. Then as now they were marketed to horror fans, to
adolescents, to those with a taste for depravity and pain. A different audience than for,
say, Pollyanna or The King of Kings. We know snatches of the writer’s work now, bits and
pieces like black cats and manacles, ghosts carrying candelabras, images that as likely as not
come from movie posters and trailers. The upcoming months will see several more Poe
adaptations, including Terroir with Keith Carradine and The Tell-Tale Heart with Rose
McGowan.
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The Deerfield Massacre
By John Demos
Our traditional picture of colonial New England is essentially a still life. Peaceful little
villages. Solid, strait-laced, steadily productive people. A landscape serene, if not bountiful. A
history of purposeful, and largely successful, endeavor.
And yet, as historians are learning with ever-greater clarity, this picture is seriously at
odds with the facts. New England had its solidity and purposefulness, to be sure. But it also had
its share of discordant change, of inner stress and turmoil, and even of deadly violence. New
England was recurrently a place of war, especially during the hundred years preceding the
Revolution. The French to the north in Canada and the various Indian tribes on every side made
determined, altogether formidable enemies. The roster of combat was long indeed: King Philip’s
War (1675–76), King William’s War (1689–97), Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), Father Rasle’s
War (1724–26), King George’s War (1744–48), and the French and Indian War (1754–63). Most
of these were intercolonial, even international, conflicts, in which New England joined as a very
junior partner. But there were numerous other skirmishes, entirely local and so obscure as not to
have earned a name. All of them exacted a cost, in time, in money, in worry—and in blood.
Much of the actual fighting was small-scale, hit-and-run, more a matter of improvisation
than of formal strategy and tactics. Losses in any single encounter might be only a few, but they
did add up. Occasionally the scale widened, and entire towns became targets. Lancaster and
Haverhill, Massachusetts; Salmon Falls and Oyster River, New Hampshire; York and Wells,
Maine: Each suffered days of wholesale attack. And Deerfield, Massachusetts—above all,
Deerfield—scene of the region’s single, most notorious “massacre.”
The year is 1704, the season winter, the context another European war with a “colonial”
dimension. New France (Canada) versus New England. (New York and the colonies farther
south are, at least temporarily, on the sidelines.) The French and their Indian allies have already
engineered a series of devastating raids along the “eastern frontier”— the Maine and New
Hampshire coasts. The English have counterattacked against half a dozen Abenaki Indian
villages. And now, in Montreal, the French governor is secretly planning a new thrust “over the
ice” toward “a little village of about forty households,” a place misnamed in the French records
“Guerrefille.” (An ironic twist just there: Deerfield becomes “War-girl.”)
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Deerfield is not unready. Like other outlying towns, it has labored to protect itself: with a
“stockade” (a fortified area, at its center, inside a high palisade fence), a “garrison” of hired
soldiers, a “watch” to patrol the streets at night, and “scouts” to prowl the woods nearby. Indeed,
many families are living inside the stockade. Conditions are crowded and uncomfortable, to say
the least, but few doubt the need for special measures. The town minister, Rev. John Williams,
conducts an extraordinary day of “fasting and prayer” in the local church—“possessed,” as he
reportedly is, “that the town would in a little time be destroyed.”
The attack forces—French led, largely Indian in rank and file—set out in early February.
Steadily they move southward, on frozen rivers and lakes, with one hard leg across the Green
Mountains. They have snowshoes, sleds to carry their supplies, and dogs to pull the sleds. The
lower part of their route follows the Connecticut River valley till it reaches a point near what
would later become Brattleboro, Vermont. Here they will strike off into the woods to the south,
leaving dogs and sleds for their return. They are barely a day’s march—twenty miles—from their
objective. The rest they will cover as quickly and quietly as possible. Surprise is their most
potent weapon. The people of Deerfield, though generally apprehensive, know nothing of this
specific threat. On the evening of February 28, the town goes to sleep in the usual way.
Midnight. Across the river to the west the attackers are making their final preparations:
loading weapons, putting on war paint, reviewing plans. The layout of Deerfield is apparently
known to them from visits made in previous years by Indian hunters and traders. Presently a
scout is sent “to discover the posture of the town, who observing the watch walking in the
street,” returns to his comrades and “puts them to a stand.” (Our source for the details of this
sequence was a contemporary historian, writing some years after the fact.) Another check, a
short while later, brings a different result. The village lies “all … still and quiet”; the watch
evidently has fallen asleep. It is now about four o’clock in the morning, time for the attackers to
move.
Over the river, on the ice. Across a mile of meadowland, ghostly and white. Past the
darkened houses at the north end of the street. Right up to the stockade. The snow has piled
hugely here; the drifts make walkways to the top of the fence. A vanguard of some forty men
climbs quickly over and drops down on the inside. A gate is opened to admit the rest. The watch
awakens, fires a warning shot, cries, “Arm!” Too late. The attackers separate into smaller parties
and “immediately set upon breaking open doors and windows.”
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The townspeople come to life with a rush. Some find opportunities to escape by jumping
from windows or roof lines. Several manage to flee the stockade altogether and make their way
to neighboring villages. In half a dozen households the men leave families behind in order to
rally outside as a counterforce. In others there is a frantic attempt to hide.
The minister’s house is a special target, singled out “in the beginning of the onset”; later
John Williams will remember (and write about) his experience in detail. Roused “out of sleep …
by their violent endeavors to break open doors and windows with axes and hatchets,” he leaps
from bed, runs to the front door, sees “the enemy making their entrance,” awakens a pair of
soldiers lodged upstairs, and returns to his bedside “for my arms.” There is hardly time, for the
“enemy immediately brake into the room, I judge to the number of twenty, with painted faces
and hideous acclamations.” They are “all of them Indians”; no Frenchmen in sight as yet. The
minister does manage to cock his pistol and “put it to the breast of the first Indian who came up.”
Fortunately—for both of them—it misfires. Thereupon Williams is “seized by 3 Indians, who
disarmed me, and bound me naked, as I was in my shirt”; in this posture he will remain “for near
the space of an hour.”
With their chief prize secured, the invaders turn to “rifling the house, entering in great
numbers into every room.” There is killing work too: “some were so cruel and barbarous as to
take and carry to the door two of my children and murder them [six-year-old John, Jr., and sixweek-old Jerusha], as also a Negro woman [a family slave named Parthena].” After “insulting
over me a while, holding up hatchets over my head, [and] threatening to burn all I had,” the
Indians allow their captive to dress. They also permit Mrs. Williams “to dress herself and our
children.”
By this time the sun is “about an hour high” (perhaps 7:00 A.M.). The sequence described
by John Williams has been experienced, with some variations, in households throughout the
stockade: killings (especially of infants and others considered too frail to survive the rigors of
life in the wilderness); “fireing houses”; “killing cattle, hogs, sheep & sacking and wasting all
that came before them.” In short, a village-size holocaust. When John Williams and his family
are finally taken outside, they see “many of the houses … in flames”; later, in recalling the
moment, he asks, “Who can tell what sorrows pierced our souls?”
The Williamses know they are destined “for a march … into a strange land,” as prisoners.
And prisoners are being herded together—in the meetinghouse and in a home nearby—from all
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over town. However, one household—that of the militia leader, Sgt. Benoni Stebbins—has
mounted a remarkable resistance. Its occupants are well armed and fiercely determined;
moreover, the walls of this house, “being filled up with brick,” effectively repel incoming fire.
The battle (as described in a subsequent report by local militia officers) continues here for more
than two hours. The attackers fall back, then surge forward in an unsuccessful attempt “to fire the
house.” Again they retreat—this time to the shelter of the meetinghouse—while maintaining
their fusillade all the while. The defenders return bullet for bullet, “accepting of no quarter,
though offered,” and “causing several of the enemy to fall,” among them “one Frenchman, a
gentleman to appearance,” and “3 or 4 Indians,” including a “captain” who had helped seize John
Williams.
In the meantime, some of the attackers with their captives begin to leave the stockade.
Heading north, they retrace their steps toward the river. Then a stunning intervention: A band of
Englishmen arrives from the villages below (where an orange glow on the horizon “gave notice
… before we had news from the distressed people” themselves). “Being a little above forty in
number,” they have rushed on horseback to bring relief. They stop just long enough to pick up
“fifteen of Deerfield men.” And this combined force proceeds to the stockade, to deliver a
surprise of its own: “when we entered at one gate, the enemy fled out the other.” Now comes a
flat-out chase—pell-mell across the meadow—the erstwhile attackers put to rout. The
Englishmen warm, literally, to the fight, stripping off garments as they run. (Later the same
soldiers will claim reimbursement for their losses—and record details of the battle.) They inflict
heavy casualties: “we saw at the time many dead bodies, and … afterwards … manifest prints in
the snow, where other dead bodies were drawn to a hole in the river.”
They make, in sum, a highly successful counterattack. But one that is “pursued too far,
imprudently.” For across the river the French commanders hear the tumult and swiftly regroup
their own forces. The riverbank affords an excellent cover for a new stand; soon a “numerous
company … [of] fresh hands” is in place there, concealed and waiting. On the Englishmen come,
ignoring the orders of the officer “who had led them [and] called for a retreat.” On and on—the
river is just ahead, and the captives are waiting on the other side—into the teeth of a withering
“ambuscade.” Back across the meadow one more time, pursued and pursuers reversing roles. The
English are hard pressed, “our breath being spent, theirs in full strength.” Their retreat is as
orderly as they can make it, “facing and firing, so that those that first failed might be defended”;
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even so, “many were slain and others wounded.” Eventually the survivors regain the stockade
and clamber inside, at which “the enemy drew off.” They will appear no more.
It is now about 9:00 A.M. A numbness settles over the village. The fires are burning
down. There is blood on the snow in the street. The survivors of the “meadow fight” crouch
warily behind the palisades. The townspeople who had escaped start to filter back in through the
south gate. Time to look after their wounded and count their dead.
Viewed from close up, the carnage is appalling. Death—by gunshot, by hatchet, by knife,
by war club—grisly beyond words. And the torn bodies on the ground are not the whole of it;
when the survivors poke through the rubble, they find more. Casualty lists have entries like this:
“Mary, Mercy, and Mehitable Nims [ages five, five, and seven, respectively] supposed to be
burnt in the cellar.” Indeed, several cellar hideouts have turned into death-traps; in one house ten
people lie “smothered” that way.
And then the wounded. One man shot through the arm. Another with a bullet in his thigh.
Another with a shattered foot. Yet another who was briefly captured by the Indians, and “when I
was in their hands, they cut off the forefinger of my right hand” (a traditional Indian practice
with captives). A young woman wounded in the Stebbins house. A second with an ankle broken
while jumping from an upper-story window.
There are, too, the lucky ones, quite a number who might have been killed or injured (or
captured) but managed somehow to escape. The people who ran out in the first moments and fled
the town unobserved. A young couple and their infant son whose “small house” was so small
that the snow had covered it completely. A woman who lay hidden beneath an overturned tub. A
boy who dived under a pile of flax. Some of this is remembered only by “tradition,” not hard
evidence, but is too compelling to overlook. Here is another instance, passed through generations
of the descendants of Mary Catlin: “The captives were taken to a house … and a Frenchman was
brought in [wounded] and laid on the floor; he was in great distress and called for water; Mrs.
Catlin fed him with water. Some one said to her, ‘How can you do that for your enemy?’ She
replied, ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him water to drink.’ The Frenchman
was taken and carried away, and the captives marched off. Some thought the kindness shown to
the Frenchman was the reason of Mrs. Catlin’s being left. …” (Mary Catlin was indeed “left,”
the only one of her large family not killed or captured. And this is as plausible an explanation of
her survival as any.)
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Thus Deerfield in the immediate aftermath: the living and the dead, the wounded and the
escaped. Tradition also tells of a mass burial in the southeast corner of the town cemetery.
Another “sorrowful” task for the survivors.
Soon groups of armed men begin arriving from the towns to the south. All day and
through the evening they come; by midnight there are “near about 80.” Together they debate the
obvious question, the only one that matters right now: Should they follow the retreating enemy in
order to retake their captive “friends”? Some are for it, but eventually counterarguments prevail.
They have no snowshoes, “the snow being at least 3 foot deep.” The enemy has “treble our
number, if not more.” Following “in their path…we should too much expose our men.”
Moreover, the captives themselves will be endangered, “Mr. Williams’s family especially, whom
the enemy would kill, if we come on.”
The day after, “Connecticut men begin to come in”; by nightfall their number has swelled
to fully 250. There is more debate on whether to counterattack. However, the “aforesaid
objections” remain—plus one more. The weather has turned unseasonably warm, “with rain,”
and the snowpack is going to slush. They “judge it impossible to travel [except] … to uttermost
disadvantage.” Under the circumstances they could hardly hope “to offend the enemy or rescue
our captives, which was the end we aimed at in all.” And so they “desist” once again. They give
what further help they can to “the remaining inhabitants"—help with the burials and with
rounding up the surviving cattle. They prepare a report for the colony leaders in Boston,
including a detailed count of casualties: 48 dead, 112 taken captive. (Another 140 remain “alive
at home.”) They leave a “garrison of 30 men or upwards” in the town. And the rest return to their
home villages.
Meanwhile, the “march” of the captives, and their captors, is well under way: through the
wilderness on to Canada. There is extreme privation and suffering on both sides. The French and
Indians are carrying wounded comrades. The captives include many who are physically weak
and emotionally stricken: young children, old people, pregnant women, lone survivors of
otherwise shattered families. Food is short, the weather inclement, the route tortuous.
The captors, fearing a possible English pursuit, push forward as rapidly as possible. Any
who cannot keep up must be killed and left by the trail “for meat to the fowls of the air and
beasts of the earth.” Among the first to suffer this fate is the minister’s wife. Still convalescent
following a recent pregnancy, she nearly drowns in a river crossing, after which, according to
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John Williams, “the cruel and bloodthirsty savage who took her, slew her with his hatchet at one
stroke.” In the succeeding days another seventeen of the captives will be similarly “dispatched.”
Later in the journey the French and the Indians separate. And later still the Indians, who
now hold all the captives, subdivide into small “bands.” At one critical juncture Reverend
Williams is marked for execution by revenge-minded kinsmen of the “captain” killed at
Deerfield; a rival chief’s intervention saves him. His five surviving children are scattered among
different “masters” and, surprisingly, are “looked after with a great deal of tenderness.”
There are two additional deaths —from starvation—as the various bands move farther
north, but sooner or later ninety-two captives reach Canada. Some, like John Williams, are
ransomed “out of the hands of Indians” by French officials; others are taken to Indian “forts” and
encampments throughout the St. Lawrence River Valley.
Almost immediately their relatives and friends in New England begin efforts to secure
their release. But the process is complicated, and progress is painfully slow. Eventually some
fifty-three will be returned home, with John Williams as one of the last among them. His
subsequent account of his experiences, published under the imposing title The Redeemed Captive
Returning to Zion, will make him famous throughout the Colonies.
His daughter Eunice will become equally famous, but for a different reason: she declines
to return and spends the rest of her long life among the Indians. She forgets her English and
adjusts completely to Indian ways; she marries a local “brave” and raises a family. Another
fifteen or so of her fellow captives will make a similar choice, and still others stay on with the
French Canadians. These are the captives un redeemed: a source of sorrow, and of outrage, for
the New Englanders.
In fact, efforts to bring them back will continue for decades. “Friends” traveling back and
forth quite unofficially, and full-fledged “ambassadors” sent from one royal governor to the
other, seek repeatedly to force a change. In some cases there are direct—even affectionate—
contacts between the parties themselves. Eunice Williams pays four separate visits to her New
England relatives. Each time they greet her with great excitement and high hopes for her
permanent “return,” but there is no sign that she even considers the possibility. She
acknowledges the claims of her blood, but other, stronger claims draw her back to Canada. She
has become an Indian in all but blood, and she prefers to remain that way. She will become the
last surviving member of the entire “massacre” cohort.
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The destruction of Deerfield came nearer the beginning than the end of the Anglo-French
struggle for control of North America. And was barely a curtain raiser in the long, sorry drama of
“white” versus “red.” But it left special, and enduring, memories. Well into the nineteenth
century New England boys played a game called Deerfield Massacre, complete with mock
scalpings and captive taking. A curious bond grew between Deerfield and the descendants of
those same Canadian Indians who had formed the attack party, with visits back and forth on both
sides. And particular “massacre” memorabilia have been carefully—almost lovingly—preserved
to the present day.
Indeed, Deerfield today recalls both sides of its former frontier experience. It remains an
exquisitely tranquil—and beautiful—village, its main street lined with stately old houses (twelve
of them open to the public). But its most celebrated single artifact is an ancient wooden door,
hacked full of hatchet holes on that bitter night in the winter of 1704.
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The Golden Touch
By John Steele Gordon
On February 5, 1895, the Jupiter of American banking, J. P. Morgan, took the train from
New York to Washington to see the president. He had no appointment but came to discuss
matters of grave national interest. The crash of 1893 had thrown the country into deep
depression, exposed a schizophrenic monetary policy, and now the nation’s gold standard stood
on the brink of collapse.
The origin of the crisis lay more than two decades earlier, when Congress had decreed a
return to the gold standard, which had been abandoned during the Civil War. (The gold standard
effectively restrains inflation by requiring that a nation anchors its currency to gold at a set
price.) In 1878 Congress passed the Bland-Allison Act, which ordered the Treasury to buy the
silver then pouring out of Western mines in ever increasing amounts, at market price and to coin
it at a ratio to gold of 16 to 1.
In 1878 the market price of silver was indeed close to the 16-to-1 ratio. But as silver
output continued to swell, it dropped to about 20 to 1 by 1890. In that year Congress passed the
Sherman Silver Act, requiring the government to buy even more bullion, 4.5 million ounces a
month, and coin it, still at 16 to 1. This policy guaranteed inflation, favored by the poorer areas
of the country, such as the South and, of course, the silver-rich West.
Anyone who knew Gresham’s law (“bad money drives out good”) could have predicted
what happened next. With silver worth one-twentieth the price of gold in the marketplace but
declared to be 25 percent more when coined into money, people began to spend the silver and
hoard the gold.
With the government running big surpluses in the prosperous late 1880s and early 1890s,
the effect of this monetary policy was masked. But when the crash of 1893 rolled in, bringing
deep depression, the trickle of gold out of the Treasury became a flood. By early 1895 bets were
being taken on Wall Street as to exactly when the Treasury would run out of gold and default.
Two bond issues were sold to replenish the Treasury’s gold supply, but the gold just cycled out
again. Congress, with many free-coinage-of-silver members, refused to authorize another issue.
That’s when the deeply alarmed Morgan traveled to Washington in early February.
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President Grover Cleveland at first refused to see him, but Morgan replied, in his best
imperial manner, “I have come down to see the president, and I am going to stay here until I see
him.” Cleveland saw him the next morning.
Cleveland, his attorney general, and the secretary of the Treasury all still hoped that they
could persuade Congress to float another bond issue and thus avoid the embarrassment of having
the gold standard rescued by the very symbol of Wall Street. A telephone call from New York
informed them that the New York Subtreasury had only $9 million worth of gold left in its
vaults. Morgan informed them that he knew of $12 million in drafts that might be presented at
any moment. Cleveland’s back was up against the wall.
“What suggestions have you to make, Mr. Morgan?” he asked.
Whereupon Morgan made an extraordinary offer: he and the Rothschilds, the two most
powerful forces in international banking at that time, would purchase 3.5 million ounces of gold
in Europe in exchange for 30-year gold bonds. (Morgan had uncovered a forgotten Civil War-era
statute that allowed the Treasury to issue bonds in exchange for coin.) He also guaranteed that
the gold would not flow back out of the Treasury, at least for a while.
In effect, Morgan was offering to act as the nation’s (otherwise nonexistent) central bank,
insulating the Treasury from market forces. And it worked. The bonds sold easily in both Wall
Street and London, and Morgan and the Rothschilds, using a full battery of foreign exchange
techniques, bolstered the dollar, keeping the gold in the Treasury.
Morgan’s rescue of the dollar, despite intense criticism from the Left, changed the
country’s economic mood, and a strong recovery from the depression began. The next year the
36-year-old William Jennings Bryan would win the Democratic nomination with a promise that
the moneyed classes “shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” It was one of the most
famous speeches in American history, but his far less eloquent opponent, William McKinley,
trounced him by running on a slogan of “sound money, protection, and prosperity.”
The election proved to be the start of the revival of Republican dominance in American
politics that would last until 1932.
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Why Do Students Give Teachers Apples and More from the Fruit’s Juicy Past
The apple, that innocent bud of an Americana autumn, has pulled off one of the greatest
cons of all time. As students across the country prepare to greet a new school year and teacher
with a polished bit of produce, the apple cements its place in the patriotic foods pantheon despite
its dodgy past.
A clever bit of biology, well documented in Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire, and a
tireless cheer campaign of fall orchard visits and doctor-endorsed slogans saved the apple from
its bitter beginnings in early America. Though its standing in society today is rivaled only by
bald eagles and baseball, the apple’s journey to ubiquity was tumultuous.
Stretching back to the hills of Kazakhstan, early apples were a far cry from today’s sweet,
fleshy varieties. As Pollan explains, sweetness is a rarity in nature. Apples benefitted from being
bitter and sometimes poisonous because it allowed the seeds to spread unmolested. Because each
seed has the genetic content of a radically different tree, the fruit came in countless forms,
“from large purplish softballs to knobby green clusters.”
When the apple came to the American colonies, it was still a long way from a sweet treat.
Bitter but easy to grow, the produce made excellent hard cider. In a time when water was
considered more dangerous than consuming alcohol, hard cider was a daily indulgence. Its
distilled cousin, applejack, also became popular, according to documentation from Colonial
Williamsburg.
As anyone who grew up in the Ohio River Valley knows, the greatest champion of the
fruit was a wandering missionary named John Chapman, or Johnny Appleseed. Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Indiana and beyond bloomed in the wake of his visits. He was opposed to grafting, the
practice of inserting “a section of a stem with leaf buds is inserted into the stock of a tree” to
reproduce the same type of apples from the first tree, as described by the University of
Minnesota.
Without the human intervention, however, apples remained overwhelmingly bitter and
when an anti-alcohol fervor swept the nation in the late 19th century, the plant’s fate was in peril.
One of the fiercest of opponents, temperance supporter and axe-wielding activist Carrie Nation,
went after both growers and bars, leaving a wake of destruction in her path. Nation was
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arrested 30 times in a ten-year span for vandalism in the name of her movement, according to
PBS.
“But with the help of early public relations pioneers crafting slogans such as “an apple a
day keeps the doctor away,” the plant quickly reinvented itself as a healthy foodstuff,” according
to the PBS production of Pollan’s work.
Elizabeth Mary Wright’s 1913 book, Rustic Speech and Folk-lore, recorded the use of
apples as part of common kitchen cures. “For example,” she writes, “Ait a happle avore gwain to
bed, An’ you’ll make the doctor beg his bread…or as the more popular version runs: An apple a
day Keeps the doctor away.”
Free to produce a socially acceptable fruit, growers raced to develop sweet, edible
varieties that would replace the plant’s previous life. Shaking its association with hard cider and
reckless imbibing, the apple found a place in one of the most faultless places of American
society: the schoolhouse.
Held up as the paragon of moral fastidiousness, teachers, particularly on the frontier,
frequently received sustenance from their pupils. “Families whose children attended schools
were often responsible for housing and feeding frontier teachers,” according to a PBS special,
titled “Frontier House, Frontier Life.” An apple could show appreciation for a teacher sometimes
in charge of more than 50 students.
Apples continued to be a favorite way to curry favor even after the practical purpose of
feeding teachers disappeared. Bing Crosby’s 1939 “An Apple for the Teacher,” explains the
persuasive allure of the fruit. “An apple for the teacher will always do the trick,” sings Crosby,
“when you don’t know your lesson in arithmetic.”
By the time American scholar Jan Harold Brunvand published his book, The Study of
American Folklore, in 1968, the phrase “apple-polisher” was more or less shorthand for brownnosing suck-up. With cutting-edge technology in classrooms seen as an academic advantage,
many teachers may be asking for a completely different kind of apple: not a Red Delicious or
Granny Smith but an iPad.
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The Legacy of the Pony Express
Shortly before last Christmas, a prominent New York auction house put up for bid a
collection of 63 postmarked envelopes and stamps that the daring riders of the Pony Express had
carried 150 years ago. Experts estimated that the rare collection, owned by Thurston TwiggSmith, an 88-year-old philanthropist and former publisher of the Honolulu Advertiser, might net
$2.5 million. It drew $4 million. That the Pony Express generated such income would have
gladdened the hearts of the venture’s original founders—William Hepburn Russell, Alexander
Majors, and William Bradford Waddell—who never made a dime from the business. The heroic,
nearly 2,000-mile delivery of mail across the country hemorrhaged money, from the first day a
rider saddled up until the click of the transcontinental telegraph shut it down 78 weeks later. The
Pony Express was one of the most colossal and celebrated failures in American business history,
but its legacy, as the sale at Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries suggests, remains an enduring
and revered piece of the Old West myth. Even today, old-timers in the remotest parts of the
American West still speak of “the days of the Pony.” Few figures in that region’s history loom
larger than those true riders of the purple sage, whom Mark Twain called “the swift phantoms of
the desert.”
In its own day, the Express caused quite a stir. By beginning where the train and the
telegraph line stopped at St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1860, the service closed an information gap that
had long frustrated both coasts. The Pacific slope was a far country in those days: mail from the
East took not days or weeks but many months to cross the nation by stagecoach or to be shipped
around the stormy Cape Horn or through the fever-ridden Isthmus of Panama. The Pony cut the
time of moving information overland to 10 days or less, and on this count at least it proved a
spectacular success. It initially cost customers $5 to send one letter, although rates would
crumble as the firm desperately tried to generate business. Still, that was a lot of money in 1860,
when a laborer in Kansas might make only that in a week. Patrons of the fast service thus tended
to be banks, newspapers, and officials, including diplomats. “[The riders] got but little frivolous
correspondence to carry,” noted Mark Twain.
“No enterprise of the kind in its day was ever celebrated on the Pacific coast with more
enthusiasm than the arrival of the first pony express,” wrote historians Frank A. Root and
William E. Connelley in The Overland Stage to California (1901). “News of the arrival of the
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first mail across the continent by the fleet pony was published with flaming head-lines in a
number of the coast evening papers.” Huge crowds assembled in San Francisco to welcome the
brave rider who had brought news so quickly from so far. Only a few observers made negative
comments, claiming that the entire venture was a mere publicity stunt designed to drum up more
lucrative mail contracts.
The privately financed Pony Express was hastily thrown together in late 1859 and began
operations on the evening of April 3, 1860. After the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad train
arrived late that day with the mail, a rider and his horse were ferried across the Missouri, heading
west into history. That cargo’s goal was Sacramento, capital of the state of California, which had
been rocketed into the Union on the heels of the gold rush just 10 years before. At the same time,
another rider had set out eastward from California.
Piggybacking on existing posts along the Oregon Trail and other established overland
routes, the Pony Express set up operations with approximately 190 way stations about 10 to 12
miles apart. Someone had been hired to feed and care for the horses at each stop. The average
station, wrote the celebrated British explorer Richard Burton, who followed the route while the
Pony was running, “is about as civilized as the Galway shanty [Burton loathed the Irish], or the
normal dwelling-place in Central Equatorial Africa.” The floor of the “Robber’s Roost” station
in present-day eastern Nevada was “a mass of soppy black soil strewed with ashes, gobs of meat
offals, and other delicacies,” and the roof leaked, too. There were no real windows but what he
described as “portholes.” “Beneath the framework were heaps of rubbish, saddles, cloths,
harness, and straps, sacks of wheat, oats, meal, and potatoes, defended from the ground by
underlying logs, and dogs nestled where they found room.” The station had running water, he
noted—an actual spring leaked continually inside, maintaining “a state of eternal mud.”
Riders frequently changed horses at most stations, usually riding no more than 100 miles
before being relieved. Though speed was required, they rarely galloped, an activity particularly
hazardous when traversing deserts pocked with prairie-dog holes that could easily break a
horse’s leg. On the plains the riders often had to navigate around the still enormous herds of
buffalo. Keep moving, the riders were instructed, but take no unnecessary risks.
The 2,000-mile route touched eight present states. Starting in Missouri, it crossed the
rolling prairies of Kansas and Nebraska, clipped a corner of Colorado before trailing back into
the lonely grasslands of western Nebraska near Scotts Bluff, and then crossed Wyoming (to
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avoid the then impenetrable Rocky Mountains in Colorado) before dipping down into Utah at
Salt Lake City “of the Latter-Day Saints,” as Burton called it. From here the riders faced one of
the bleakest stretches of the continent, the near-lunar landscape of Utah and Nevada, where water
was scarce and hostile Paiute raiders were plentiful. Then the trail headed up and over the snowcovered Sierra Nevada at Lake Tahoe and into California, before snaking down to Sacramento
and on to San Francisco. It took a brave, resourceful man to ride through such rugged country.
Veteran riders interviewed in their dotage never complained about road agents or Indians,
recalling instead the hardships of winter and the dangers of losing the trail at night. Twenty-yearold Thomas Owen King rode for the Pony Express in present-day Utah, blackening his face with
gunpowder to reduce the risk of snow blindness. Popular legend to the contrary, riders were not
heavily armed—and the firm did not issue firearms. Management understandably directed that
riders should outrun interlopers, not engage them.
The undertaking was thrown together so quickly that riders seem often to have been
simply drafted on a temporary basis. Alexander Majors wrote that the Pony had 80 riders in the
saddle, generally well-mounted, lightweight young men and boys. All told, perhaps slightly more
than 300 trips were made.
Few bits of Pony Express lore are better known or more beloved than the famous
advertisement for riders that allegedly ran in California newspapers at the time:
Wanted
Young, skinny, wiry fellows, not over eighteen.
Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily.
Orphans preferred. Wages: $25 per week.
Apply: Central Overland Pony Express
Alta Building Montgomery Street
Hardly a gift shop or historic shrine exists between St. Joe and Old Sac that doesn’t offer
“an authentic reproduction” thereof. Alas, it seems that no such notice ever ran in any
newspaper. Its earliest source appears to have been an imaginative scribe at Sunset magazine in
the 1920s.
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Perhaps the most famous rider was Robert Haslam, an Englishman who rode the Nevada
route in 1860 and 1861 when he was 18 or 19 years old. Haslam was no character out of a dime
novel but the real thing, known as “Pony Bob” across the American West. Newspapers in the
1860s recalled his extraordinary record for the Express, including what was believed to be the
longest and surely the most dangerous passage across Nevada—a trip of some 400 miles, the
equivalent of riding from Boston to Baltimore, which he achieved without relief at the height of
the Paiute War. The Indian uprising shut down the routes in Nevada and Utah for a number of
weeks and brought destruction of stations and stock, further expenses for the foundering Pony.
Haslam’s celebrated ride would become part of Express lore. Despite his fame, he died
forgotten in a coldwater flat on the South Side of Chicago, having ended his days as a porter at
the Congress Hotel. Newspapers in the West eulogized Pony Bob with headlines that acclaimed
him as “the man who knew no fear.”
Equally tough were the riders’ mounts. The horses (they were not ponies) were critical to
the endeavor, and the firm invested in good horseflesh. Burton noted that the horses were
considered so valuable that it was they who often slept inside the station, not the rider. “He rode
a splendid horse that was born for a racer and fed and lodged like a gentleman,” wrote Twain. He
“kept him at his utmost speed for ten miles, and then, as he came crashing up to the station where
stood two men holding fast a fresh, impatient steed, the transfer of rider and mail-bag was made
in the twinkling of an eye, and away flew the eager pair and were out of sight before the
spectator could get hardly the ghost of a look.”
Russell, Majors, and Waddell were even more colorful characters than their riders.
Russell, a high roller who liked good times, linen shirts, fine cigars, and life back East, was more
comfortable in a hotel drawing room than on the frontier. In contrast, Majors was a deeply
religious bullwhacker and freighting entrepreneur, famous for helping to open the Santa Fe Trail.
He kept the Sabbath on the road and read the Bible to his employees. In photographs he
resembles an Old Testament prophet. Waddell was a dour bookkeeper, plain and simple. He
worried about the accounts—and had a lot to worry about.
The Express left virtually no records of its short life span—and that’s where myth has
stepped in to fill in the blanks. Although we have scraps of information about the business from
its start, the first book-length examination was published nearly a half century after the venture
folded. A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express with Other Sketches and Incidents
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of Those Stirring Times was the imaginative effort of one Col. William Lightfoot Visscher, an
alcoholic journalist whose legal address on occasion was the bar at the Chicago Press Club.
Visscher was only one in a long line of showmen, hucksters, and tale-tellers who saved—
and inflated—the memory of this American icon. In the summer of 1861, Mark Twain, then just
plain Sam Clemens, left St. Joseph with his brother Orion in a Concord coach headed for the
Territory of Nevada, where Orion had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor.
Young Sam had just deserted the Confederate army—after some two weeks of constant
retreating, he would later quip. He had never seen a Union soldier, and that was fine with him.
He had saved some money from his days as a riverboat pilot (the Mississippi was closed to
commercial navigation by the Civil War). He went west, he noted in Roughing It , because he
wanted to have an adventure.
In early August 1861, near what is now Mud Springs in remote western Nebraska, Twain
saw an Express rider. The stagecoach driver had been promising him that he would see one, and
Twain had taken to riding on top of the coach to take in the view, wearing only his long
underwear. The entire encounter took less than two minutes. Writing entirely from memory (with
his brother’s diary to stimulate him) in Hartford, Connecticut, 10 years later, Twain wrung an
entire chapter of Roughing It from that moment. He thus initiated what many a chronicler would
continue after him: he preserved the memory of the Pony, with perhaps a little embellishment.
About a decade after Roughing It , William “Buffalo Bill” Cody took things a step further
with his show, known as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World
(he did not like the word “show”). From opening day in 1883 until its final performances just
prior to the First World War, the show permanently featured the Pony Express, essentially as a
sketch demonstrating how the mail was carried across the now conquered wilderness. Cody
threw in some painted, hostile, and whooping Indians for good measure. Millions of Americans
and Europeans would see this depiction of a Pony Express rider crossing the countryside, often
with an Indian hot on his trail. In reality, Indians rarely bothered the riders after the Paiute War
in the spring and summer of 1860. (What would they want with a three-week-old copy of a
Horace Greeley editorial?)
Buffalo Bill, of course, was never a man to let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Many Americans believe that Cody himself rode for the Pony Express (books regularly recall
this information), but that is highly improbable. In memory—and in many of his
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“autobiographies,” none of which he wrote—Cody was a legendary rider who had endured the
longest stages for the Express. Whether he rode or not, Cody’s great service to the Pony was that
his show and writings remain the chief reasons why Americans can still hear the hoofbeats a
century and a half after its brief, brave, and somewhat baffling life came to an end.
Countless paintings of the Express help Americans remember, too, particularly those by
famous illustrators such as Frederic Remington and N. C. Wyeth. None of these artists ever
actually saw an Express rider, although Remington’s famous The Coming and Going of the Pony
Express is fairly accurate, based on what’s known about the service. Other illustrations feature
imagination run wild. One French illustration pictures a rider wearing what looks like a raccoon
or small fox on his head. A St. Joseph brewery commissioned a painting of a handsome rider at
full gallop, a crowd cheering, and the sun shining. Alas, the first rider of the Pony Express
always left St. Joseph after dark, when most of the crowd had gone home.
Hollywood also knew a good story when it saw one. Virtually every film or television
program, from the silent film to Technicolor blockbusters, has gotten the facts wrong. John
Ford’s classic Fort Apache begins with the fort’s beleaguered garrison learning from a brave
Express rider that Custer and his men have been massacred at the Little Big Horn, a catastrophe
that took place 15 years after the Pony went out of business. And Fort Apache was in the
Arizona desert, hundreds of miles south of the Express route. The Pony Express, which featured
Charlton Heston as Buffalo Bill in buckskins, is one of Heston’s most preposterous
performances.
Ultimately, the Pony became an American epic along the lines of Paul Revere’s ride, a
tale rooted in fact but layered with a century and a half of embellishments, fabrications, and
outright lies. There is still no agreement even on the identity of the first rider. William Floyd, an
early 20th-century chronicler of the Pony from St. Joseph, once called it “a tale of truth, halftruth and no truth at all.”
But what a story; what an American memory. The legend of the Pony Express was worth
every nickel generated by that fancy stamp auction in New York City last December. On that
count Russell, Majors, and Waddell would be in solemn agreement. Its memory remains
priceless.
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