MAGNUM FORCE

Photographer Robert
Capa and the agency
he helped found
OVERTIME TIME
The Supreme
Court’s path
to extra pay
for extra work
TRIAL BY
STAGECOACH
Noah Webster
became immortal
with a road trip

George’s
Dunkirk
A Great Escape that
Saved the Revolution
Plus
December 2017
Brooklyn Battlefield Sites Today HistoryNet.com
 MIAMI, FL/EAST COAST JEWELRY · BOCA RATON, FL/ECJ LUXE · CHARLOTTE, NC/DIAMOND DIRECT · BEVERLY HILLS, CA/DAVID ORGELL · SAN FRANCISCO, CA/SHAPUR
MENLO PARK, CA/CECI WONG JEWELERS · LOS ANGELES, CA/FELDMAR · COSTA MESA, CA/WATCH CONNECTION · NEW YORK NY/KENJO · COLTS NECK, NJ/J. VINCENT
ENGLEWOOD, NJ/TIMEPIECE COLLECTION · GAMBRILLS, MD/LITTLE TREASURE · CHICAGO, IL/NEW YORK JEWELERS · DENVER, CO/RIGHT TIME · HOUSTON, TX/STYLE JEWELERS
TORONTO, ON/MYLES MINDHAM · VANCOUVER, BC/TIME & GOLD · ST THOMAS, USVI/TRIDENT · JAMAICA, WI/HOUSE OF DIAMONDS · ST MARTEEN, DWI/BALLERINA
 TURBINE PILOT
Manufacture caliber. Turbine Technology.
48 mm stainless steel case. Screw-down crown at 3 o’clock.
Bidirectional inner dial ring, circular aviation slide rule.
Black 12-blades revolving Turbine. Black calfskin strap.

Ref. A1085/1A
 52

44

2 AMERICAN HISTORY
December 2017

FEATURES

34 34 George’s Dunkirk
Scrambling after a lopsided 1776 loss, Washington
improvised a mass escape By George M. Daughan

42 Battleground Brooklyn
Where hipsters tread, an American army learned the
ropes of regimented combat By Raanan Geberer

44 Trial by Stagecoach
Noah Webster made his name by enduring the nation’s
inaugural book tour By Rosemarie Ostler

52 Smiling Through
FDR gave ill health a run for its money By Emily
Berquist-Soule, Sukumar Desai, and Robert Dorfman

60 Magnum Force
Legendary lensman Robert Capa gets a graphic bio; the
Magnum agency celebrates itself By Michael Dolan

DEPARTMENTS
6 Mosaic
14 Letters
16 Déjà Vu
If words could kill, utterers
would swing
20 Interview
Dr. Lee Newman on the challenge
of tracking beryllium disease

22 American Schemers
Bernarr Macfadden muscled his way
to the top of the publishing world
24 SCOTUS 101
20
Manhattan Project
workers on the
A run-of-the-mill Oregon legal action job a year got a
wound up establishing overtime pay commemorative pin.

26 Cameo
Abby Gardner’s months in captivity lasted a lifetime

60
ON THE COVER: Charles Willson Peale painted George
Washington after his 1777 victory at Princeton, working in
Hessian banners, prisoners of war, and Nassau Hall of the
College of New Jersey, now Princeton University.
28 Style
A fresh look at life and fashion, American-style
66 Reviews
72 An American Place
At Walnut Grove Farm, a leap forward in reaping
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; HNA ARCHIVES; OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY;
FLORENT SILLORAY AND FIREFLY BOOKS LTD.; GRANGER, NYC; COVER: PAINTING BY CHARLES
WILLSON PEALE, COURTESY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
 O
TO RD
IN REC ER
TI EI B
M VE Y
FO YO OC
E
R UR T
VE C O
TE ER B
RA TI ER
NS FIC 2
DA AT 7
Y. E

it’s not just a brick.

it’s their story.
WITH A BRICK AT THE NATIONAL WWII MUSEUM, you can create a lasting tribute to loved ones who served
their country. These fathers and grandfathers, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors overcame a once-in-a-generation
challenge, and they deserve a memorial that will last for generations to come. To learn more, visit www.ww2brick2.org.
American History
BRICK TEXT

(Please Print Clearly) 18 characters per line including spaces

Mrs. Mr. Ms. ___________________________________________________________________________________

Address _______________________________________________________________________________________
City ______________________________________ State ________________ Zip ______________________
Telephone (Day) _________________________ (Evening) __________________________________
PLEASE RESERVE MY PERSONALIZED BRICK(S)
Number of Victory Bricks _______ at $250 each.
Add a Tribute Book at $75 each ____________ Total $__________
Please make check or money order payable to: The National WWII Museum.
Card # ________________________________________________ Exp. _________________ Signature ______________________________________________________________
Check/Money Order MasterCard VISA Discover AMEX
Forms must be received on or before 10/27/2017. Fax orders to 504-527-6088 or mail to:
The National WWII Museum, Road to Victory Brick Program, 945 Magazine Street, New Orleans, LA 70130.

877-813-3329 x 500 bricks@nationalww2museum.org

The brick program at The National WWII Museum celebrates the American Spirit as well as the shared appreciation for the Allied effort during World War II.
The Museum reserves the right to refuse to engrave any messages or material it deems inappropriate, such as personal contact information, political statements,
suggestive wording, and messages that might be considered offensive to those who served and sacrificed during the WWII era.

Plans for
Fort Stir Spat
Musician and producer T-Bone Burnett is
championing a mixed-use development
adjacent to Nashville, Tennessee’s Fort Neg-
ley. The Vauban-style star-shaped limestone
keep rose on St. Cloud Hill in 1862, after
Union troops that February swept into
Nashville, taking Forts Henry and Donelson
and routing the city’s Confederate defend-
ers. Free blacks and escaped male and
female slaves, pressed into labor on behalf
of the Union, constructed the fort, named
for the local union commander. The job took
four months, during which some 600 to 800
Ruckus re: Revival contrabands died. Access to the Cumber-
T-Bone Burnett's land River and railroads made the fort a hub
ideas for Fort Neg- for the duration, and camps of escaped
ley, in the 1800s, top, slaves sprang up nearby. After the war the
and now, inset, are facility fell into disrepair. Partly restored by
stirring strong emo- 1941 as a Works Progress Administration
tions in Nashville.
project, the premises were closed in 1945,
though adjacent fields were used for sports.
6 AMERICAN HISTORY
by Sarah Richardson
Herschel Greer Stadium, erected in 1978,
was home to the Nashville Sounds baseball
team until 2014, when the stadium closed.
An expensive restoration burnished the fort
FROM TOP: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; BRIAN JANSES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; C FLANAGAN/GETTY IMAGES
in 2004; in 2007, a visitors center opened
there. The stadium was left to molder.
Burnett, who noticed the decaying ball-
park while traveling to a Nashville recording
studio, proposes to replace the stadium
ruins with green space and mixed-use con-
struction that combines affordable housing
and room for businesses. He portrays the
undertaking he calls his “legacy project” as
an “arts and music generator.” Some critics
want the Fort Negley park returned to its
original state, likening its significance to
that of New York's Ellis Island. Arguing for
restoring Fort Negley and environs, they are
urging city authorities to hold off pending
results of a cultural survey required as a
preliminary to any development on the site.
 CIA Iran Coup Beam Up,
Replays on Paper Scotty
A detailed chronology of the CIA’s hand in the 1953 overthrow of
Iranian premier Mohammad Mossadegh appears in declassified docu-
ments the agency released in June. Multiple accounts have described
the American role in removing the democratically elected Mossadegh,
replaced by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, above with President
Harry Truman. Until now the CIA has been loath to disclose involve-
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTO BY CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; SCOTTISH VIEW/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; COURTESY THE ART MUSEUMS OF COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG
Yellow pine timbers from a mill taken
down in Lowell, Massachusetts, are
replacing beams damaged in a 2014 fire
at Scotland’s Glasgow School of Art. Late
last year eight 23’x16”x12” longleaf pine
beams, salvaged in 2016, were shipped to

ment. The CIA collaborated with British intelligence agency MI6 to
oust Mossadegh because he attempted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian
Company—Britain’s oil interest in Iran—and then cut diplomatic rela-
tions with Britain, irking American policymakers. The new materials
portray the coup in real time through telegrams and intelligence sum-
maries exchanged between agents in Tehran and Washington, DC. Of
an Iranian army officer, a telegram says simply, “Momtaz had to be
killed.” Mossadegh, convicted of treason, lived under house arrest until
his death in 1967. Pahlavi ruled until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Charleston’s Early
Days Pictured
An engraving based on an oil by English artist Thomas Leitch and
painted shortly after Leitch's arrival in Charleston, South Carolina,
in 1773 has been acquired by the Colonial Williamsburg Founda-
tion. The image, nearly three feet wide, portrays the port’s harbor.
Views of Revolutionary-era colonies are rare, and views of south-
ern harbors even more so, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation cura-
tor Ronald L. Hurt told artdaily.com.
Glasgow. The beams came from the
Picker Building, once part of a mill com-
plex in Lowell, on the Merrimack River.
The nation’s first large-scale planned
industrial city, Lowell, incorporated in
1823, featured cavernous brick factories
in which workers produced cotton tex-
tiles for more than a century. Rising five
stories on Bridge Street, the 1911 Picker
Building is among the last of its kind in
Lowell to be converted to residential use.
By chance, the salvaged Picker beams
are of kindred vintage and dimension to
timbers lost in the Glasgow art school’s
scorched, iconic Mackintosh building,
top, an architectural jewel designed by
and named for Scottish architect Charles
Rennie Mackintosh.
The city of Lowell has further con-
nections to Scotland: entrepreneur
Francis Cabot Lowell, who pioneered
industrial cotton milling in Massachu-
setts, lived in England and Scotland
from 1810 until 1812. During that time,
Lowell acquired textile production
experience and knowledge that he
applied at home. He died in 1817. A few
years later his former partners honored
Lowell by naming the mill town they
had founded for him.

2017 77
DECEMBER 2017
DECEMBER
 Touro
Congregants
Remain
Renters
For congregants of Jeshuat Israel in
Newport, Rhode Island, possession is
not nine-tenths of the law after all. A
2016 suit over ownership of New-
port’s Touro synagogue—the nation’s
oldest shul—and its contents led to a
finding for Jeshuat Israel, which has
used the synagogue for 120 years.
The court rejected a claim by New
York City Congregation Shearith Is-
rael, which has leased the Touro fa-
cility to that congregation since 1903.
In August, however, Judge David
Souter of the First Circuit Court of

Louisiana
Appeals in Boston reversed the lower

TOP LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NPS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

court decision. Shearith Israel re-
mains lawful owner of the Newport
synagogue and its historic contents,

Cold Case
the retired U.S. Supreme Court jus-
tice ruled. The congregations went to
court after Touro congregants’ 2014
effort to sell torah scroll handles
made by a renowned colonial silver-
When reporter John DeSantis moved to Thibodaux, smith spurred Shearith Israel to ob-
Louisiana, in 1995 from New York City, he heard talk ject. According to The New York
of an 1887 massacre in the town. Lore had it that Times, Jeshuat Israel is considering
amid a sugar cane strike vigilantes killed 30 to 60 courtroom options—again.
African American workers and their families. The
topic intrigued the newcomer, but, as DeSantis
learned, few first-hand accounts existed and fami-
lies habitually kept histories off-limits. Reticence
evaporated in 2015 after white supremacist Dylann
Roof murdered nine black congregants at Eman-
uel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Based
on legwork, DeSantis began a book about the 1887
attacks. With his deadline impending, the writer
discovered a widow’s pension file at the National
Archives detailing the crimes. The file, related to the service of U.S.
Army veteran Jack Conrad in the 75th Regiment of the U.S. Colored
Troops, included an affidavit stating that Conrad was injured in the 1887
attacks, in which his son Grant, a striker who belonged to the Knights of
Labor, the largest labor organization of the day, was shot and killed. Fol-
lowing publication of The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the
1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike (History Press, 2016), DeSantis learned that
massacre victims’ bodies were dumped in a charnel field for farm ani-
mals. A move is afoot to raise money to search for and properly inter
those remains.

8 AMERICAN HISTORY
 A Must-Have
Keepsake for Every
Patriotic American
JUST RELEASED: 2017 John F. Kennedy
Centenary of Birth Dollar

J
ohn F. Kennedy was born May 29, 1917 in Brookline,
Massachusetts. After attending Harvard, where he graduated
cum laude with a B.A. in Government, Kennedy joined the
United States Naval Reserve in 1941. During WWII, he threw
himself into danger to save the crew of his torpedo boat after it
was rammed by a Japanese destroyer in the Pacific.

Awarded the Purple Heart

Despite his own injured back, Kennedy led his crew several miles
to safety. These heroic actions earned him the Navy and Marine
Corps Medal as well as a Purple Heart. He retired a full Lieutenant.

In 1960, Kennedy ran against incumbent Richard Nixon for

President of the United States. The historic campaign included
the first-ever televised U.S. presidential debate. In one of the
closest presidential races of the century, Kennedy won the
popular vote by just two-tenths of one percent.

A New President—A New Direction for the Country

As the 35th President of the United States, Kennedy was
notable for his Irish heritage, Roman Catholic Faith, and for
being the youngest candidate to be elected to the office. During
his Inaugural Address he spoke the famous words “Ask Not
what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for
your country.”

Own a Piece of Presidential History

Now you can own a piece of presidential history with this JFK
Centenary of Birth Dollar, struck in celebration of John F.
Kennedy’s 100th birthday. Only a limited number of these coins
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 Luna
Landing
An ill-fated
Spanish colony
at what is now
Pensacola,
Florida, cov-
ered 27 acres,
archaeologists
with the University
of West Florida report.
The Luna settlement’s dimensions
were not previously known.
Designated by its founder’s
name, Luna was not only
the most populous early
Soybean-
European toehold in North
America but predated Spain’s
founding of St. Augustine in
Savannah
1565; France’s Santa Elena in
1566; and England’s Jamestown
in 1607. Arriving in 11 ships from
Connection
Veracruz, Mexico, in August 1559, Soybeans, native to East Asia, got a roothold in the American colonies
Tristan de Luna y Arellano and in 1764 when American sailor Samuel Bowen left London and arrived in
his force of 1,500 Spanish soldiers, Savannah, Georgia, bringing seeds for what he called “Chinese vetch.” A
settlers, slaves, and Aztecs meant historical marker at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah
to keep France from colonizing the now outlines the tale. Bowen grew soybeans near Skidaway Island, out-
Carolina coast. A hurricane in Sep- side Savannah, on a friend’s plantation. In 1769, Bowen obtained a pat-
tember sank most of the ships and ent for a means of making soy sauce to export to England, along with

spoiled much of the expedition’s
food, but the Luna colony held on
for two years before its populace
withdrew to Mexico.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF WEST FLORIDA; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; SOTHEBY'S
soybean noodles. In 1914, agricultural chemist George Washington
Carver—he of peanuts and sweet potato fame—touted soybeans not only
as a protein source but also a cover crop. The 2016 soybean crop in the
United States—4 billion-plus bushels—brought an estimated $38 billion.

TOP BID
Papa’s Got an Old Moon Bag
$1.8 million The last item from the Apollo 11 lunar mission to
remain in private hands sold July 20 at Sotheby’s. The rock sample de-
contamination bag has a tortuous backstory, according to artdaily.com.
All other Apollo 11 items went to the Smithsonian; overlooked, the moon
bag was sold to a Kansas collector. When on other matters FBI agents
came after the Kansan, the bureau seized and auctioned the bag, which
a canny buyer snagged for $995. That party sent the outer-space artifact
to NASA for testing that revealed lunar dust inside.

10 AMERICAN HISTORY
 Own a piece On the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth entered Ford’s Theater
and shot President Abraham Lincoln. In Lincoln’s pockets that night
of Americana! were 9 items, one of which was his favorite pocket knife purchased in
Abraham Lincoln’s Kentucky, a 6-blade ivory handled Congress engraved Wm. Gilchrist’s
Pocket Knife Celebrated Razor Steel, made in Sheffield, England.
This pocket knife, that you may own, is an Exact & Faithful replica of
the Sheffield, England, UK classic Congress style pocket knife
owned by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s original is now in the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Ford’s Theater

Contents
Contents of Lincoln’s pockets
ofthe
Lincoln’s
night he was assassinated.
+ Celebrated Razor Steel Blades
GREAT + Brass Pins & Nickel Silver Bolsters
HOLIDAY + Deluxe Ash Case with Velvet Cushion
$
GIFT IDEA!

11900
(Shipping & Handling Included)
+ Certificate of Authenticity
+ Collector’s prize, not available after this offer!
To order visit:
www.LincolnPocketKnife.com
 CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY LOMPOC MURAL SOCIETY; NORTHWIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967), "LITTLE BOY LOOKING AT THE SEA" N.D., INK ON PAPER, 4.5 X 3.5 IN. THE ARTHAYER R. SANBORN HOPPER COLLECTION TRUST.
DeSoto’s
Hateful
Signs Found of Herd
Figuring to herd fresh meat on the

Ancient Channel hoof as he wandered the Americas,

Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto

Island Residents brought pigs. Four centuries later,

A chain of islands about 30 miles off Santa Barbara, California, has
long drawn archaeologists hunting for evidence of early settlement. On
Santa Rosa, the Channel Island archipelago’s second-largest land mass,
recent surveys found artifacts perhaps 12,000 years old beneath the
foundation of the 1860s-era Vail and Vickers residence. Discoveries in-
cluded a barbed point and a crescent, both fashioned from local chert.
The presence together of such stone objects signifies habitation dating
back 10,000 to 12,000 years, University of Oregon archaeologist Jon Er-
landson told the Ventura County Star. In prehistory the islands, a na-
tional park since 1980, mainly were home to the Chumash, above, whose
name refers to shells that the tribe circulated as currency.
feral porkers are a worsening nui-
sance, especially in Mississippi. In
1988, only 4 percent of the state’s
land harbored feral pigs; now the big
fellows, which can top a quarter-ton,
are rooting up 38 percent of the state.
The hogs, which breed like crazy and
ravage crops, are advancing their
hegemony, aided by hunters who find
the wild beasts a satisfying challenge
to stalk with bow or bullet. A possibly
feral pig offed recently in Culpeper,
Virginia, tipped the scales at 565 lbs.

Young An accomplished sketch that

Edward Hopper, 9, inked on

Hopper’s the back of his third-grade

report card was among items
the artist’s descendants recently
Chops donated to Hopper House in
Nyack, New York. The Arthayer
R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust provided more that 1,000
artifacts, drawings, memorabilia, and related books, articles,
and papers to the dwelling—now a museum—where Hopper
was born and lived until age 28. edwardhopperhouse.org.

12 AMERICAN HISTORY
Immerse yourself in America’s Civil War with a visit to
Tupelo, MS. The Battle of Brice’s Crossroads, the Battle of
Tupelo/Harrisburg, and the Battle of Old Town Creek were
the last stands of the Confederate cavalry in Northeast
Mississippi, during the summer of 1864. Today, visitors can
walk in the footsteps of soldiers who defended this land
and delve deeper into these decisive battles that occurred
in and around Tupelo.
The Mississippi’s Final Stands Interpretive Center serves as
a guide to enthusiasts interested in Mississippi’s place in
the Civil War. The center’s many interpretive exhibits ex-
plain the state’s role in the Civil War and how the battles
fought here were significant to the progress of the war. A
film also chronicles the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads and its
significance to the war and military history.
Located just minutes from the center is Brice’s Crossroads
National Battlefield where guests can walk the1,600-acre
hallowed ground. A one-acre site maintained by the Na-
tional Park Service at the site of the Brice house contains
a monument and two cannons which commemorate the
Battle of Brice’s Crossroads. Adjacent to the monument is
Bethany Historic Cemetery which contains a mass grave of
Confederate soldiers and markers for ninety-six Confeder-
ate soldiers who were known to have been killed during the
Battle of Brice’s Crossroads.
The Tupelo National Battlefield site is marked in the heart
of town. The first day of the Battle of Tupelo/Harrisburg
was fought here with over 20,000 soldiers and was the last
time that Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s
renowned cavalry fought Union infantry during the Civil
War. Across town, the Battle of Town Creek interprets the
second day of fighting during the Battle of Tupelo/Harris-
burg.
Tupelo’s Civil War history is further preserved through the
Heritage Trails Enrichment Program, marking significant
sites throughout town. From makeshift hospitals and pris-
ons to homes where famous generals stayed, visitors can
gain a deeper understanding of what life was like for sol-
diers and residents of Northeast Mississippi during the war.
Paid Advertorial by Tupelo Convention and Visitors Bureau

Desai Berquist Soule
Geberer
Dorfman
Daughan Ostler
Robert Dorfman, Emily Berquist Soule, and
Sukumar Desai, MD (“Smiling Through a Personal
Apocalypse,” p. 52) are, respectively, a research fel-
low in plastic and reconstructive surgery at North-
western University; an associate professor of history
at California State University, Long Beach; and an
assistant professor of anaesthesia, Harvard Medical
School/Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston. They
also write for HistoryNet’s World War II.
George C. Daughan (“Fight Again Another Day,” p.
34) holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. His
books If By Sea and 1812: The Navy’s War won the
Samuel Eliot Morison Award. He lives in New
Hampshire.
Raanan Geberer (“Google-Mapping the Revolu-
tion,” p. 42) has been a journalist for 35 years, 20 of
them as managing editor at a Brooklyn newspaper.
This is his first article for American History. He and
his wife, Rhea, live in Manhattan.
Rosemarie Ostler (“Trial by Stagecoach,” p. 44)
writes about Americans and language. Her most
recent book is Founding Grammars. She is at work
on a book about the beginnings of American
English. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her hus-
band, Jeff, and tweets at @ostlerwords.
14 AMERICAN HISTORY
A Brother’s Memory
“Praying for Clarity” (June 2017) called to mind my late
brother’s role in the 1963 Baltimore school prayer case.
Arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in Murray v. Curlett,
Leonard J. Kerpelman successfully challenged a 1905
requirement that school days in Baltimore start with a Bible
reading or the Lord’s Prayer. Soon after the court ruled on his
case, I visited my brother’s office. Leonard had proudly
framed letters excoriating him, including one ending, “I hope
you rot in hell, you dirty, rotten, Communist, Jew bastard.”
Larry C. Kerpelman
Acton, Massachusetts
Give the People What They Want
I was pleased to receive the August issue, and enjoyed
American Style. Consider covering American-nurtured
businesses and ads reflecting America’s past. And offer an
email address for reader comments.
Professor Jack Mandel
Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
Flay or fete us at Americanhistoryletters@historynet.com.
More Westward, Ho!
The Verendrye expedition (“Losing the West,” August 2017)
reached the upper Missouri River. Near what is now Fort
Pierre, South Dakota, the French explorers buried a plate
claiming the region. Children found the plate in 1913 (nps.
gov/nr/travel/pierre_fortpierre/verendrye_site_pierre.html).
Milbert Kurtz
Mooresville, North Carolina
Bullish on Benjamin
Thank you for “The Franklin File” (October 2017). In Colonial
Williamsburg we enjoyed a brilliant armonica concert by
Dean Shostak (glassmusic.com), an adventure in music that
surely had Dr. Franklin beaming. His innovations and service
to our country could and should fill an entire issue.
Barry and Ronnie Fingerhut
Brooklyn, New York
Work It On Out
With interest in the labor movement’s historical influence
rising, not just in America but worldwide, it might be a good
time to come out with a magazine called “Labor History.”
Stiofain G. Mac Geough
Pocatello, Idaho
CORRECTION: Donald R. Williams (“Not Washington—
Wytheville,” October Letters) lives in Floyd, Virginia.
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Murder
Most
verbal BY RICHARD BROOKHISER
As spring turned to summer, America’s polit-
ical conversation was all about killing Donald
Trump. You would have thought you were in a
book by Bill O’Reilly. In May comedian Kathy
Griffin had herself photographed holding a
severed simulacrum of Trump’s head. During
the shoot, she joked that she and the photogra-
pher would have to flee to Mexico. They didn’t,
but the ensuing uproar cost the comic her New
Year’s Eve sinecure on CNN.
In May and June, a Public Theater produc-
Provocateur tion of Julius Caesar cast in the title role a big
Philip Freneau guy with sandy hair and a red power tie. Trump
imagined George supporters heckled Caesar’s death scene,
Washington going
shouting “This is violence against Donald
to the guillotine.
Above, anarchist Trump!” Lost in the ruckus was Shakespeare’s
Leon Czolgosz moral: Caesar’s assassins are destructive boobs
shoots President who bring on the very dictatorship they fear.
William McKinley, American political rhetoric has ever been
September 1901. incendiary, from broadsides reviling the Stamp
16 AMERICAN HISTORY
Tax to President Trump’s tweet storms. Work-
aday political words—campaign, war room,
battleground states—imply violence. More fre-
quently than we like to admit, these terms
cross the line from implication to incitement.
The first president to have his life threat-
ened symbolically was George Washington,
during his first foreign policy crisis, in summer
1793. The French Revolution, initially wel-
comed in America, had devolved into anarchic
spectacle, plunging France into war and send-
ing Louis XVI to the guillotine. On France’s
fate, Americans split. The Republican Party,
led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, ad-
mired France at its bloodiest. Washington and
Federalist allies, led by Treasury Secretary Al-
exander Hamilton, wanted America to steer
clear of France’s wars.
Handling France became a theme of cabi-
net debate. In April 1793, Washington had is-
sued a proclamation of neutrality; need he go
public with further explanations? The Republi-
can newspaper in Philadelphia, the national
capital, was the National Gazette. Editor Philip
Freneau put out the paper while moonlighting
from a day job as a State Department clerk; Jef-
ferson fed him useful tidbits. In August, Frene-
au published “A Funeral Dirge for George
Washington,” describing in verse the president
being led to the guillotine. Secretary of War
Henry Knox, a Federalist, showed that issue of
the Gazette at a cabinet meeting. In his private
journal, Jefferson described the effect: “The
president was much inflamed, got into one of
those passions when he cannot command
himself. [Washington ran] on much on the per-
sonal abuse which had been bestowed on
him….[He said] that he had never repented but
once…having slipped the moment of resigning
his office, and that was every moment since.
That by God he had rather be in his grave than
in his present situation. That he had rather be
on his farm than to be made emperor of the
world…That that rascal Freneau sent him
three of his papers every day, as if he thought
FROM TOP: INTERFOTO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; GRANGER, NYC
he would become the distributor of his papers,
that he could see in this nothing but an impu-
dent design to insult him. He ended in this
high tone.” Added Jefferson, “There was a
pause.” No kidding. Imagine the best cabinet
secretaries ever, sitting like schoolboys, won-
dering what the great man would blurt next.
A hundred years later, another wish for a
president’s death ran in the New York Journal,
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 whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, pio-
MCKINLeY neered use of cartoons, banner headlines, and
WAS human-interest reporting. Hearst had political
ATTENDING ambitions, presenting himself as a people’s tri-
bune. In the 1896 and 1900 elections he and his
A WORLD’S papers backed populist Democrat William Jen-
FAIR IN nings Bryan against pro-business Republican
BUFFALO William McKinley. The Journal played rough.
On January 30, 1900, Kentucky Governor-elect
WHEN AN William Goebel was shot; he died four days later.
Anarchist Humorist Ambrose Bierce, a Hearst columnist,
SHOT HIM. marked the event in verse: “The bullet that
pierced Goebel’s chest/Cannot be found in all
HE DIED the West/Good reason: it is speeding here/To
EIGHT DAYS stretch McKinley on his bier.” A Journal editorial
LATER. surveyed past assassinations and executions:
French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, stabbed;
Charles I, beheaded; and, of course, Julius Cae-
sar. Those deaths, the Journal said, had good
outcomes. “We invite our readers to think over
this question,” the editors wrote. “The time de-
voted to it will not be wasted.”
Washington never responded to Freneau’s
jabs, keeping silent amid French demands that
rallied the public to him. When he died in bed,
in December 1799, the nation mourned.
Hearst’s abuse, doggerel and otherwise,
failed to dent McKinley at the polls. He twice
whipped Bryan, both times carrying New York
by landslides. In September 1901, six months
after his second inauguration, McKinley was
attending a world’s fair in Buffalo when an as-
sailant shot him. He died eight days later. En-
raged Republicans blamed Hearst. In his first
Happier Days message to Congress, McKinley successor The-
At his election in odore Roosevelt condemned “the reckless ut-
1896, McKinley terances” of journalists who “appeal to the dark
foresaw smooth and evil spirits of malice and greed, envy and
sailing ahead. sullen hatred…They cannot escape their share
of responsibility for the whirlwind that is
reaped.” In 1905, when Hearst ran for governor
of New York, TR confidant Elihu Root revived
Roosevelt’s charge, declaring that TR had
Hearst in mind when he made it. Freneau and
Hearst survived their brushes with odium. The
National Gazette folded after a yellow fever ep-
idemic in Philadelphia; Freneau later wrote po-
etry still sometimes reprinted. Defeated for
governor, Hearst remained a media mogul,
decorating his castle, San Simeon, with art and
a movie star mistress.
Freneau’s maledictions obviously had no
bad impact. Did Hearst’s? Could Kathy Griffin’s
stunt, or the Public Theater’s casting? Pundits
and historians talk about climates of opinion,
expressed and molded by words; themselves
writers, they naturally like to think that words
make a genuine difference. But it’s difficult to
trace the extent to which scattershot expres-
sions of hatred, no matter how lethal or detailed,
have practical effect. McKinley’s assassin, Leon
Czolgosz, lived in Cleveland; he likely never saw
a copy of the New York Journal.
This does not make political assassins mo-
tiveless madmen. All our murdered presidents
died at the hands of men of political conviction:
John Wilkes Booth was a Confederate partisan;
Czolgosz, an anarchist. Lee Harvey Oswald, a
Marxist, had lived two years in the USSR. The
craziest presidential assassin, Charles Guite-
au—James Garfield’s murderer—claimed to be-
long to the Stalwarts, a Republican faction
opposing Garfield’s nomination.
On June 14, Republican congressmen and
staffers practicing for a charity ballgame in Al-
exandria, Virginia, came under fire by a rifle-
man who wounded four people, including
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who spent
a month in the hospital. A Capitol police officer
at the scene killed shooter James Hodgkinson,
who had traveled from his Illinois home to the
Washington, DC, suburb to kill Republicans, a
mission Democrats repudiated.
On a Change.org petition, Hodgkinson, a
backer of independent Bernie Sanders, wrote
“Trump Is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our
Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
Sanders called the shooting despicable, adding,
“Violence of any kind is unacceptable.”
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NYC
It would be wrong to pin Hodgkinson’s ram-
page on any Democrat, even an internet frother.
He made his own decision. But he, and other
killers, have their reasons. +
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 DEATH BY DUST Since 1984, pulmonologist Lee Newman, MD,
a professor at the Colorado School of Public
Health in Aurora, has been studying a dis-
ease caused by beryllium. Often alloyed with
copper, steel, aluminum, and other metals,
beryllium is a health risk. Its use in nuclear
weapons exposed many workers at levels
once believed safe.
Why do bomb makers need beryllium? Be-
ryllium is used to line nuclear weapon trig-
Long Time Coming gers. Beryllium surrounds the “pit,” or plutoni-
Dr. Lee Newman um core, helps it reach critical mass, and by
directs the Center reflecting neutrons boosts the blast’s power.
for Health, Work
& Environment at How does beryllium cause harm? Beryllium
dust can cause allergic sensitization and dis-
the University of
ease. The immune response can include
Colorado, Aurora.
granulomas—inflammations that can scar
Top, with fellow
the lungs. Chronic beryllium disease can af-
former weapons
fect other organs and may be fatal.
worker Ann Or-
rick, Sam Ray,
When did beryllium disease appear? In
using a voice am-
1933 in Germany. In 1941, two women work-
plifier, testifies at
ing at a Salem, Massachusetts, lamp factory
House hearings in
that used beryllium were misdiagnosed with
2000.
tuberculosis. In 1943, the facility that treated
20 AMERICAN HISTORY
BY AMANDA MILLER
them admitted an engineer with the same
symptoms who worked in the same building.
More cases appeared. American medical au-
thorities called this disease “Salem Sarcoid”
because of the resemblance to sarcoidosis.
No one knew the link to beryllium.
When did that link come to light? In 1947,
Dr. Harriet Hardy proved the connection. She
alerted the Atomic Energy Commission. Fif-
ty-some Manhattan Project workers devel-
oped the disease; it took years to detect, often
in hindsight. My first beryllium disease pa-
tient, Herbert Anderson, was a retired atomic
physicist. He was 28 when he was exposed to
beryllium in 1942 working with physicist En-
rico Fermi in Chicago. He was diagnosed in
TOP: AP PHOTO/DENNIS COOK; COURTESY DR. LEE NEWMAN
1949. When we met, he had shortness of
breath, cough, fatigue, weight loss, and side
effects from treatment. He died in 1988.
Concern about the disease rose. In 1949, the
Atomic Energy Commission—now the De-
partment of Energy—adopted a beryllium ex-
posure standard and began chronicling cases.
The registry fell out of use in the 1970s. A 1983
paper based on registry data stated, “No case
 Thanks for Your Service
A silver commemorative pin
honored Manhattan Proj-
ect workers who spent more
than a year on the job.
of acute chemical pneumonitis has been re-
ported among beryllium workers in about 15
years, and the number of chronic cases has diminished
greatly despite a marked increase in the use of beryllium.”
This proved to be false and misleading.
How did you get involved? I moved to Colorado in 1984
to become a specialist in lung diseases such as sarcoid-
osis, whose symptoms include granulomas like those
caused by beryllium disease. I thought beryllium disease
could give clues to sarcoidosis. In 1985, Willie, a machin-
ist, came to my clinic reporting a sarcoidosis diagnosis.
He worked at the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado, casting
and milling beryllium parts for nuclear weapons.
LEFT: FROM THE HISTORY OF ATOMIC ENERGY COLLECTION, OSU LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES RESEARCH CENTER; RIGHT: RUE DES ARCHIVES/THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK
How many people were working with beryllium then?
From 1952, when Rocky Flats started making bomb parts,
until production ended there in 1989, more than 15,000
workers were exposed. In 1985, about 3,000 workers
could have been in exposure situations. Tens of thou-
sands more were exposed at Los Alamos National Labo-
ratory in New Mexico, Hanford Reservation in Washing-
ton, Y-12 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and elsewhere.
What did you do? We tested 50 or so people at Rocky Flats.
Five workers machining beryllium had sensitization; four
had the disease. In time we tested almost 900 Rocky Flats
workers. Secretaries, guards—people not working with
beryllium—were developing the disease. This told us that
remarkably low levels of exposure could be causing it.
The scope widened. I’ve gone into probably 30 plants in
the United States and Canada—machine, casting, and ce-
ramics shops, aluminum and copper alloy plants, aero-
space and defense sites, recycling plants, nuclear weapons
production sites—to help solve problems with beryllium.
What did you conclude? Beryllium is arguably more toxic
than plutonium. Doctors don’t ask, “Do you work with be-
ryllium?” so it’s often mistaken for other diseases. Compa-
nies using the metal have not focused on identifying work-
er exposure. Limiting exposure could prevent almost every
case. That fired my passion for getting the word out. We
improved the blood test. By 1999, it was the standard for
workplace screening and for diagnosing beryllium disease.
You also work on policy. In the ’80s and ’90s, I focused on
getting the Department of Energy to `fess up to the prob-
Doomsday Factory
The bomb plant at
Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
was one of several.
lem and offer a safer workplace. Many people contributed.
In May 2017, the Occupational Safety and Health Adminis-
tration adopted a beryllium exposure rule.
How did industry react? Some recommended against
the research. Some said it threatened national defense.
They took a page out of the tobacco industry play-
book—“advisory groups” created to sow doubt about our
science. Workers started to sue beryllium manufactur-
ers. At one point, I had to go through every file on beryl-
lium and produce it for lawyers wanting to depose me.
What is the situation overseas? I think there’s an interna-
tional epidemic. There’s beryllium disease in Japan, South
Korea, England, Germany, Israel, and Kazakhstan; that’s a
partial list. In Kazakhstan, workers have been exposed to
beryllium at levels 10 times greater than in the United
States. They were getting even higher rates of disease. Be-
tween 600,000 and 1 million people worldwide have been
exposed and are still living with the risk of disease.
What about insurance? A worker with the disease would
be told to file a workers’ compensation claim that the insur-
er would deny. Patients got lawyers. I worked with the De-
partment of Energy and congressional offices to pass the
Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation
Program Act of 2000 to compensate Department of Energy
workers, not just for beryllium but for other diseases that
occurred because they worked at an energy facility.
How will this play out? The goal is eliminating exposure.
The best outcome would be safer materials. For now, beryl-
lium will remain a favorite for products needing light-
weight, durable metals and alloys. We hope employers will
use it only when necessary, be more diligent in educating
and protecting workers, and screen for symptoms. Willie
and other patients always said, “I want to help research so
that others don’t have this happen to them.” +
DE C E M B E R 2 0 1 7 21
AMERICAN SCHEMERS
PUTTING THE “FAD”
IN MACFADDEN Bernarr Macfadden walked around New
York City barefoot so his soles could
absorb the earth’s magnetic forces. He
slept on the floor so his blood would be
able to flow according to its natural mag-
netic rhythm. He exercised his hair folli-
cles by rhythmically yanking his mop,
producing a disheveled appearance to
match his threadbare suits. Guards at a
Manhattan office building once barred
him from entering until they realized
that he owned the place.
Macfadden made millions selling
Americans on his eccentric theories
about health. He created Physical Cul-
Skin King ture magazine, formed the Macfadden Institute
In his monthly, of Physical Culture, and opened the Physical
Macfadden Culture Hotel, whose lobby featured a statue of
emphasized the Macfadden naked. He founded Physical Culture
scarcely clad City, a New Jersey town that banned phenom-
human form, ena its proprietor deemed unhealthy—alcohol
usually but not and tobacco, doctors and medicines.
always female. “Medicine has had its day,” Macfadden said.
Above, at 80 on “It belongs to the ignorance of the distant past.”
the day he wed Born Bernard Adolphus McFadden on a Mis-
Johnnie Lee in souri farm in 1868, he was orphaned at 11, then
April 1948. apprenticed to a farmer who worked him merci-
lessly but made him strong. After two years, he
22 AMERICAN HISTORY
BY PETER CARLSON
ran away, hopping freights to work on farms
and construction sites. He pumped iron, wres-
tled, and boxed. At 18, he opened a gym in St.
Louis, billing himself as a “kinestherapist” and
“teacher of higher physical culture.”
Hungry for fame and riches, he moved to
New York. But first he changed his name. “Ber-
narr” sounded like a lion’s roar, he explained,
and “Macfadden” set him apart from America’s
many prosaic McFaddens. Reborn, he opened
a Manhattan gym decorated with photos of
him posing as Hercules, and taught wrestling
FROM TOP: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO BY TRANSCENDENTAL GRAPHICS/GETTY IMAGES
and physical fitness. In 1899, he debuted Physi-
cal Culture, featuring articles by him illustrated
with photos of his ripped form, nearly nude.
He coined the magazine’s motto: “Weakness is
a crime; don’t be a criminal.”
Macfadden’s magazine propounded his phi-
losophy: vigorous exercise, fresh air, fruits and
vegetables—and prolonged fasting, which he
claimed could cure maladies from asthma to
epilepsy. He crusaded against drinking, smok-
ing, coffee, corsets, high-heeled shoes, vaccina-
tions, medicines, and doctors, who he mocked
as quacks. His goal, he said, was “the physical
emancipation of the human race.”
His timing was perfect. America had entered
one of its periodic fads for fitness. President

Teddy Roosevelt was advocating “the strenu-
ous life.” Muckrakers were exposing bogus pat-
ent medicines. Congress passed the 1906 Pure
Food and Drug Act. Men exercised with Indian
clubs and medicine balls; women marched to
ban booze. Macfadden sold millions of copies
of Physical Culture and a women’s spinoff,
Beauty and Health. He penned a novel whose
weakling protagonist, thanks to the Macfad-
den method, becomes A Strenuous Lover.
In 1905, he rented Madison Square Garden
for a “Monster Physical Culture Exhibition,”
advertised with posters of muscular men and
women, minimally dressed. Anthony Comstock,
head of the Society for the Suppression of Vice,
seized the posters and arrested Macfadden for
obscenity. The court convicted him without
penalty. The hoopla drew 20,000 customers.
Police again arrested Macfadden in 1907,
when a New Jersey postmaster charged that a
Physical Culture article about venereal disease
was obscene. The jury convicted Macfadden;
the judge sentenced him to two years in prison.
He filed an appeal, meanwhile traveling the
country denouncing prudes and censors. But
the appeals court upheld his conviction. Facing
prison, Macfadden urged fans to write to Presi-
dent William Howard Taft. Deluged with letters,
Taft—America’s fattest president—pardoned the
musclebound media king.
Macfadden loved sex. He married four
women, cheating on all of them. His exercise
regimen included a vacuum device designed
to enlarge the penis. In 1913, lecturing in
England, he offered a cash prize to “the most
perfect specimen of English womanhood.”
Hundreds of women competed. Swimmer
Mary Williamson, 19, won; soon Macfadden,
45, had made her wife number three. The pair
toured England, billed as “the world’s healthi-
est man and woman.” In performance, he lec-
tured on his theories while she exercised in
flesh-colored tights. At the show’s finale, he
stretched out on the stage, wearing only a
breechcloth. She climbed onto a high table
and jumped feet first onto his rock-hard abs.
Mary bore seven children. The family fol-
lowed the Macfadden fitness regimen—plenty
PAUL FEARN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
of fruits, vegetables, and exercise, no doctors, no
medicines. When their infant son Byron went
into convulsions, Mary begged Bernarr to call a
doctor. He refused, plunging the baby into a hot
sitz bath. An hour later, Byron died in his moth-
er’s arms. Macfadden tried to quash the story,
AMERICAN SCHEMERS
lest readers lose faith in his wisdom.
Many readers valued that wisdom. Hun- when his
dreds wrote him long letters, telling sad stories “true”
of romantic folly and seeking advice. A sam- magazines
pling published in Physical Culture proved so
popular that Macfadden solicited reader sto- ran short
ries for a magazine he introduced in 1919—True on real
Story, which sold so well he ginned up True stories,
Romances, True Experiences, and True Detec-
tive. When letters from readers ran short, staff- staffers
ers banged out fictitious “true” stories. Nobody banged
seemed to mind, least of all Macfadden. By out bogus
1930, he was worth $30 million.
To spread his ideas, the media mogul created tales.
the Bernarr Macfadden Foundation and pub- Nobody
lished America’s most outrageous tabloid. The seemed
New York Evening Graphic specialized in sex,
scandal, and violence, earning the nickname to mind.
“the Porno-graphic.” The Graphic lost millions
and folded in 1932 but achieved one goal—pub-
licizing Macfadden, who decided he should be
president. In 1935, he set up a campaign office,
declaring himself “the perfect Republican nomi-
nee in 1936.” Republicans disagreed. In the
1940s, he ran twice for governor of Florida. In
1953, he campaigned for mayor of New York,
Do the David
promising to “purge the city of communists.”
In 1905 the
None of his campaigns succeeded. Macfadden
publisher posed
Publishing stockholders sued him for spending
in the mode of
$900,000 in company funds to run for office.
the Michelangelo
Macfadden lost that suit and was ousted from
sculpture.
the company he’d created and built. But he kept
his foundation, and continued his proselytizing.
In 1947, he started a religion he called Cos-
motarianism, preaching that people who took
care of their bodies would go to heaven. Few
disciples signed on. In 1948, at 80, he married
Johnnie Lee, a 42-year-old fitness buff. Two
years later she caught him in bed with another
woman. He sweet-talked her into forgiving him.
But when Johnnie again caught Bernarr en fla-
grante, she filed for divorce.
The fitness pioneer and genius publisher and
promoter, found himself alone, broke, and—
worst of all—ignored. Living in a seedy Jersey
City, New Jersey, hotel, he was jailed twice for
missing alimony payments. In October 1955,
stomach pain drove him to fast for three days.
He lost consciousness; the hotel manager called
an ambulance. At the hospital, doctors—mem-
bers of the profession he’d mocked for most of
his 87 years—stuck him with needles and fitted
him with a catheter. Within days, Bernarr Mac-
fadden was dead of a urinary tract infection. +
SCOTUS 101
ARGUING
OVER TIME
BUNTING V. In 1913, business was booming at Lakeview
Flouring Mill in southern Oregon. Farms
OREGON, 1917 bordering Goose Lake were producing plenty
243 U.S. 426 of wheat grown without irrigation, resulting
STATE AUTHORITY in flint-hard kernels that made for a higher
TO IMPOSE A grade of flour. Now Lakeview could package
a finer grind, perfect for baking cakes. De-
10-HOUR mand for the pricier product outran supply
WORKDAY until Franklin Bunting, who ran the mill,
asked chief miller George Hammersley to ex-
tend his usual 10-hour shift. Hammersley
agreed, worked three more hours a day–and,
when he asked for overtime pay, set off a dis-
Workdays, not Pay pute that ended up at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice Joseph In 1917, justices for the first time made clear
McKenna limited his that states had authority to regulate working
majority opinion to conditions in all businesses for all workers.
hours, not salary. This marked a key development in a central
issue of the early 1900s: rebalancing employ-
ers’ rights and workers’ rights.
Oregon, among the country’s most progres-
sive states in labor legislation, had decreed in
1913 that “no person shall be employed in any
mill, factory or manufacturing establishment
in this state more than ten hours in any one
day.” One big exception: employers could ask
workers to put in as much as three extra hours
a day if they paid a bonus rate of time-and-a-
half. When Hammersley sought time-and-a-
half for his overtime, Bunting refused, calling
the state law unconstitutional. Oregon fined
24 AMERICAN HISTORY
Grinding It Out
Except for the power
source, grain milling,
Bunting’s focus, had
scarcely changed.
BY DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ
Lakeview $50. After the state’s highest court
upheld the statute’s validity, the case came to
the U.S. Supreme Court. Bunting had prece-
dent going for him. But on his side Hammers-
ley had the march of history—and a couple of
the nation’s sharpest legal minds.
Business interests supporting Bunting
mainly argued that in trying to regulate hours
of work the legislature was usurping Ameri-
cans’ constitutionally protected right to do
their own bargaining over wages and working
conditions. The high court had said as much
in 1905 in Lochner v. New York, when the jus-
tices threw out a state law that limited the
number of hours bakeries could require em-
ployees to work. New York had argued that its
statute was within the state’s general police
powers. The high court majority said that the
state had failed to show a valid public health
FROM TOP: CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
reason for the regulation.
To win in Bunting, reformers had to show a
link between limiting shift length and public
health. Lawmakers in a few states had begun
cautiously to move in that direction by limit-
ing the length of shifts in mines, smelters,
sawmills, and other particularly dangerous
workplaces. Other states based shift limits not
on how dangerous the work was but how vul-
nerable workers were. Only three years after
Lochner, lawyers for Oregon persuaded the
U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a 1903 state law

limiting the number of hours women could
work at a time in bakeries. In his opinion for a
unanimous court in Muller v. Oregon, Justice
David J. Brewer explained that “as healthy
mothers are essential to vigorous offspring,
the physical well-being of women becomes an
object of public interest and care in order to
preserve the strength and vigor of the race.”
Exceptions to Lochner were piling up, but it
was by no means certain that the justices were
ready to OK a law as sweeping as the 10-hour
limit Oregon applied to virtually all workers in
all manufacturing. In its role as primary de-
fender of the Oregon law on female bakery
workers, the National Consumers League had
engaged attorney Louis Brandeis. Brandeis
firmly believed that no matter how good legal
arguments might be, facts more effectively
persuaded judges. For the Muller appeal to the
U.S. Supreme Court, Brandeis devoted only
two of his brief’s 100 pages to legal arguments.
The rest of his submission summarized re-
ports by factory inspectors and hygiene com-
missions characterizing how long shifts posed
a particular health hazard to women because
of what Justice Brewer eventually would char-
acterize as “their special physical organiza-
tion.” In his opinion, Brewer took the rare step
of lauding Brandeis by name and invoking the
attorney’s “copious collection” of reports.
The court, “by praising Brandeis’s presenta-
tion, declared publicly that it was ready to be
persuaded by compilations of social facts,”
notes Woodrow Wilson International Center
fellow Philippa Strum.
For Bunting, Brandeis and his sister-in-law,
NCL labor law committee chairwoman Jose-
phine Goldmark, began gathering all the evi-
dence they could find that long shifts harmed
workers and society. The two had nearly com-
pleted their fact-finding when, in a surprise
move, President Woodrow Wilson in January
1916 named Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme
Court. Obviously, Brandeis had to step away
from Bunting; Harvard Law School professor
Felix Frankfurter, who had aided on the Muller
brief, replaced him. And the case was chal-
lenging. “With women, you could talk about
maternity, motherhood, the next generation
and so on,” Frankfurter recalled decades later.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“Well, you couldn’t talk about maternity in the
case of men workers.”
The advocates still found plenty to talk
about. The brief they finally filed—an eye-pop-
SCOTUS 101
Recuse Me
During Bunting, Louis Brandeis went
from litigator to Supreme Court justice.
ping 1,021 pages—offered evidence that even
in positions that were not inherently danger-
ous, long hours led to fatigue and a higher inci-
dence of accidents, on the job and after hours.
And long hours posed a moral danger, the stat-
ute’s defenders wrote: “Laxity of moral fiber
follows physical debility. After excessive labor,
the overtaxed worker is left stupefied or re-
sponds more readily to coarse pleasures and
excitements....Intemperance often results from
the worker’s craving for some stimulant or the 1,021-
support for exhausted energies.” page brief
Brandeis and Goldmark also argued that a
long working day directly damaged the state
offered
by leaving workers without time to read or at- evidence
tend lectures and in so doing become better that long
citizens—a special problem in Oregon, which
relied heavily on initiative, referendum, and
hours led
knowledgeable voters to create state laws. to a higher
Of course, Brandeis stayed out of the high incidence of
court deliberations, but of the remaining eight
justices five were persuaded by his brief—
accidents,
and Frankfurter’s oral arguments—to find the on the job
Oregon law valid. Justice Joseph McKenna and after
noted that limiting the normal workday to 10
hours was a reasonable rule for the Oregon
hours.
legislature to establish, especially since na-
tionally shifts averaged 9.75 hours.
And what of the Lochner precedent hold-
ing that state regulation of working hours in-
terfered with employees’ constitutional right
to negotiate their own job conditions? The
Bunting decision in essence overruled Loch-
ner, though in his majority opinion McKenna
didn’t mention the other case—and the three
justices who voted to overturn the Oregon
hours law did not even issue a written dis-
sent. Not until 1992 did the high court for-
mally overrule its Lochner holding.
Bunting allowed states to proceed in limit-
ing shift length but in his opinion McKenna
adamantly limited its impact to work hours,
not pay. The court refused to let stand state
laws setting minimum wages until 1937, when
it upheld a Washington State law demanding
employers pay female fulltime workers at
least $14.50 a week. That paved the way for
the 1938 Federal Fair Labor Standards Act, a
national standard work week of 44 hours, and
a 25-cent hourly minimum wage. +
DECEMBER 2017 25
 SURVIVOR Early in March 1857, a band of Dakota Sioux
approached Spirit Lake, a tiny settlement in
northern Iowa. The Indians, led by a chief
named Inkpaduta, had come from their usual
locale, along the border between the Minne-
sota Territory and the state of Iowa, to look for
food. The six white families homesteading at
Spirit Lake had arrived the previous summer
in time to build cabins but not to plant. They
expected to survive the Midwestern winter
on stockpiled provisions. The winter had
been harsh. No one had enough to get by on.
Taken...in 1857 Hunger and other ills had been stalking the
Abbie Gardner, who
Indians. Inkpaduta, 55, had lost a grandchild
stayed alive despite
to starvation. A drunken whiskey trader had
her travails as a
prisoner, later made killed his brother; when Inkpaduta reported
a career of telling her the slaying to white authorities, the local
story of survival. prosecuting attorney merely nailed the mur-
dered man’s head above his door. Other Da-
kota factions had signed a treaty with the
American government, but Inkpaduta had
not, becoming a renegade. He belonged to a
people with 50-some lodges in an area now
infiltrated by white settlers, and along his
band’s path that March he led raids that esca-
lated in violence and destruction. These at-
tacks turned murderous at Spirit Lake, where
Inkpaduta and fellow raiders kidnapped
Abbie Gardner, 13, who before being repatri-
26 AMERICAN HISTORY
BY SARAH RICHARDSON
ated spent nearly three months in captivity.
Inkpaduta became a notorious figure in Iowa
frontier history. Decades later, Abbie Gardner
bought the family cabin at Spirit Lake and
chronicled her ordeal. From the one-room
dwelling, she told her story and sold post-
cards and Native American items, establish-
ing one of her state’s earliest roadside
attractions. It remains one today.
Abbie Gardner’s father, Rowland, with his
wife, children, and in-laws, had arrived in the
Spirit Lake area in July 1856 to find a handful
of active homesteads. The nine-member fam-
FROM TOP: NIDAY PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; PAUL FEARN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
ily threw up a rough log cabin in which to live
and store provisions. By February, snow
around Spirit Lake was four feet high. The
Gardners were not sure of surviving to spring.
On the morning of March 8, 1857, Inkpaduta
and a dozen men came to the settlement,
asking for and getting food and departing
without incident. Around 3 p.m., the group
returned, again seeking sustenance at the
Gardner cabin. When Rowland Gardner
turned to reach for something to give the
visitors, an Indian shot him dead. A melee
erupted; by the time the killing was over, 40
settlers had died. Surviving Indians—no
count was made of deaths among their party—
abducted Abbie and three other young women.
 Vengeance is Ours
U.S. Army soldiers surround a gibbet on
which 38 Sioux convicted for the Dakota
War were about to be hanged in 1862.
The girls’ captors put them to work. Abbie later
reported having to haul a 70-pound load—
“eight bars of lead, one pound of bullets, one
tent-cover made of the thickest and heaviest
kind of cloth, one Indian blanket, one iron bar
about four feet long and an inch thick, a stick
of wood of considerable weight, a heavy gun,
and in addition to all this a flat piece of wood
about four feet long to keep the back strait.”
Now the renegades’ property, Abbie had
her head and face painted red and her hair
greased by Indian women. The squaws did
all the band’s work, Abbie later noted. “We,
poor captives, were slaves of slaves,” she
wrote. The Dakota diet of roots and meat dis-
gusted her. She showed the Indians how,
using soda and cream of tartar, to make
dough, a process her captors called “growing
bread.” The Indians put the white girl in the
sun, she wrote, perhaps to darken her skin.
Over the next 81 days, Abbie lost the compa-
ny of her fellow captives. Two died, one from
illness and exhaustion; Indians shot the
other when she fell into a river and sold the
third girl to another tribe. The renegades
traded Abbie to a friendlier Sioux faction.
On March 24, around 100 pioneers assem-
bled at Fort Dodge, 100 miles southeast of
Spirit Lake, to go north to bury the settle-
ment’s dead and search for the kidnapped
girls. Two searchers froze to death. Federal
officials, fearing that if pursued aggressively
the Indians would slay their prisoners,
worked cautiously. On May 30, three friendly
Indians dispatched to rescue the band’s cap-
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK; COURTESY THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF IOWA
tives located Abbie. The emissaries obtained
the girl’s freedom in exchange for two horses,
12 blankets, two kegs of powder, 20 lbs. of to-
bacco, 32 yards of blue squaw-cloth, 37 and a
half yards of calico, and a quantity of ribbon.
When Abbie and her rescuers stopped at the
Yellow Medicine Indian Agency, one escort
presented her with a war cap, “a token of
respect for the fortitude and bravery I had
manifested and it was because of this that
Inkpaduta’s Indians did not kill me,” she
wrote. In time, Abbie Gardner married. She
bore two children, and parted with two hus-
bands. At Spirit Lake, notoriety arising from
the massacres attracted a wave of settlement
that included construction of a fort that with-
in only two years was dismantled, to be re- President
placed by a hotel. Abraham
On the larger canvas, tensions with the
Sioux persisted. The Civil War interfered with
Lincoln
payment to the tribe of promised federal funds, sentenced
and again, as at Spirit Lake, starvation ravaged some 300
the Sioux, leading to a two-month uprising in
1862 near New Ulm, Minnesota, that left more
Santee
than 600 settlers dead. In retribution, Presi- Sioux to
dent Abraham Lincoln sentenced some 300 death, a
Santee Sioux to death, a punishment he com-
muted for all but 39. Inkpaduta participated in
punish-
the fighting, but eluded capture, never surren- ment he
dering and in 1876 fighting at Little Big Horn commuted
alongside Sitting Bull and other Sioux against
U.S. Army General George Custer and the 7th
for all
Cavalry. He died in Manitoba, Canada, in 1881. but 39.
Haunted by the lingering effects of abduc- One got a
tion, Abbie Gardner scraped by, residing in
Ohio and elsewhere. In 1885, she published a
reprieve.
memoir of her ordeal in which described how
she searched for the Indians who helped free
her and found Chetanmaza, 68 and nearly
blind. By letter from South Dakota, Chetanma-
za recalled to Abbie how when he and his com-
panions encountered her she had been sitting
“on the ground squaw fashion, with your hair
greased and smoothly combed, and parting
painted red, and both cheeks painted red, with
red leggings and squaw dress on.” In 1891,
Abbie, 47, returned to Spirit Lake and bought Scene of the Crime
the land on which stood her family’s dilapidat- Located in Ar-
ed cabin. She restored the structure, decorated nold’s Park, Iowa,
it with Indian artifacts and paintings of the Abbie Gardner’s
massacre, and opened her residence to the cabin stands as a
public, for a fee. In 1895, Abbie and Chetanma- reminder of a girl’s
terrifying forced
za were part of a crowd of 7,000 at the dedica-
journey and the
tion of a 55-foot granite monument, topped by
life she made af-
an arrowhead shape and bearing the names of terwards. iowacul-
the Spirit Lake dead and volunteers who pur- ture.gov/history/
sued Inkpaduta. Abbie Gardner died in 1921. sites/abbie-gard-
Her descendants still live in the vicinity. + ner-sharp-cabin
DECEMBER 2017 27
28 AMERICAN HISTORY
 STYLE
We showcase how John Stevens Shop
stone cutters enhance mouments
and institutions with their artistry;
imagine the good times aboard
Blount Small Ship Adventures; and
hoist a glass to Laird AppleJack.

E A TOUR
AK
T

1964 Independence
Avenue, SW,
Washington, D.C.
nps.gov.com
M

AL

K
M E O RI
L

Quotations incised by Stevens

artisans, Martin Luther King Jr.
Memorial, Washington DC.

DECEMBER 2017 29
STYLE
STYLE

Nicholas Waite Benson, owner; below, carving the John Everett Benson discussing the
Pledge of Allegiance, U.S. Capitol Visitors Center, central title design of the Boston Museum
Washington, DC. of Fine Arts with architect I.M. Pei, 1981.

PHOTOS: Michael A. Dunn

30 AMERICAN HISTORY
Four Freedoms Park,
STYLE
Roosevelt Island,
New York City.

H A VIS
RT I
O
W

Roosevelt
ARK
F D R FO

Island, NYC
FDRFour
Freedoms
SP

Park.org
R
M
U

MONUMENT F RE E DO
Carved in Stone
Since 1705, artisans with the John Stevens Shop have wielded mallet, chisel, and hammer—lately guided by computer—to
render in graceful stone lettering the thoughts and hopes that underpin and illuminate the country’s most significant
memorials, monuments, and institutions. The Rhode Island-based company’s exquisite work enhances Arlington National
Cemetery’s memorial to President John F. Kennedy, the National Gallery of Art and the Vietnam Memorial in the nation’s
capital, the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial on the island that
bears FDR’s name in the New York City’s East River, Boston’s Prudential Center, and many other sites. “We don’t make
mistakes,” says third-generation owner Nicholas Waite Benson. “No, seriously, we are removing such a small amount of
stone at any given time that there isn’t much room for technical errors.” (johnstevensshop.com)
DECEMBER 2017 3131
STYLE

TRAVEL

Bon Voyage
Leave behind those
coats and ties.
Blount Small Ship
Adventures pitches
casual adventures
more akin to sailing
aboard a friend’s
yacht. For 2018,
Blount is offering
Great American
Waterways, a 16-
day meander along
the indigo-blue
waters of four Great
Lakes and through
the historic Erie
Canal. The voyage
stretches from
Chicago to ports
in New England to A ship in one of the Erie
destinations acces- Canal’s 35 locks. These
sible by water only marvels enable vessels
in small vessels. to traverse a 565-foot
(blountsmall- elevation change.
shipadventures.com)
32 AMERICAN HISTORY
STYLE STYLE
E A TOUR
AK
T

501 Shirley
Plantation Rd
SHIR

Charles City, VA
(804) 829-5121
N
IO
E
L

Y
P L A N TA
T

SPIRITS

Still Goin’ Strong

In 1780, at tiny Scobeyville,
New Jersey, Robert Laird
founded America’s first
commercial distillery,
issued License No. 1 from
the U.S. Department of the
Treasury to make spirits
from apples. Members of
the latest generations of
the Laird family, steered
by Larrie W. Laird, are still
producing AppleJack.
(lairdandcompany.com)

Master distiller
Danny Swanson
and Lisa Laird Dunn
review historic
documents.

AppleJack Facts:
To manufacture a barrel of the
100-proof edition of AppleJack, Laird
reduces three and a half tons of fruit to its
fermented essence. A gallon of 100-proof
AppleJack uses a hundredweight of apples.
Depending on the particular proof and aging
involved, to fill a 750ml bottle with its various
AppleJack products the company carefully
puts 6-, 16-, 20-, and 30-lb. loads
of fruit through a rigorously managed
process of distillation.

DECEMBER 2017 33
 NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Under Cover of Darkness

Washington, shown astride
his horse, devised the watery
evacuation that saved his army.

34 AMERICAN HISTORY
Fight Again
Another Day
Facing disaster in Brooklyn, Washington
rolled the dice across the East River—and won
By George C. Daughan

W hen he learned late on August 27, 1776, that

British troops had routed the Americans on Long Island, Admiral
Lord Richard Howe must have thought that his chance to be the
peacemaker who saved the colonies for the empire finally had
arrived. Howe moved quickly. He took it for granted that the king’s
men had trapped George Washington’s army on Brooklyn Heights,
where the Americans would surrender in a day or two. General
William Howe, the admiral’s brother, was so confident of victory
that he was not requesting any additional support from the navy.
Admiral Howe wrote to Commodore Hotham, “I have the satisfac-
tion to hear from General Howe that he has every reason to be
contented with the prospects before him.”

DECEMBER 2017 35

I
ndeed General Howe was. He and his brother,
the admiral, believed they had achieved their
primary aim—defeating Washington’s army.
Lord Howe expected the war to end, ushering in a new era in
relations between colonies and mother country. Instead of
concentrating on penning up Washington’s army in Brooklyn
Heights, Howe focused on getting negotiations started right
away. He ignored the obvious need to patrol the East River. He
could easily have sealed off that waterway and made certain
Washington was trapped. No matter what the weather, Howe
had the resources to keep the river clear of rebel boats.
Instead, Howe forgot about the East River and turned his
mind to the Continental Congress and the Long Island defeat’s
effect on the delegates. He hoped the loss would change
enough minds to set in motion a new dialogue. Preoccupied
with the peace initiative, Howe never considered that the rebel
army might survive. Even though there were unmistakable
signs that Washington might try to retreat across the river, Lord
Howe ignored them. He overlooked the unusual amount of
36 AMERICAN HISTORY
Land the Landing Force
British troops rowed from
Staten Island to Long
Island on August 22, 1776.
rebel activity on the water, as men collected large numbers of
boats to bring the defeated army back to Manhattan.
On August 28, as fighting continued in Brooklyn, Howe
invited to his flagship, the Eagle, captured American generals
William “Lord Stirling” Alexander and John Sullivan, hosting
his prominent prisoners at dinner for a long conversation about
the possibilities of peace. Sullivan, captivated by the talk,
agreed to go to Philadelphia to convince Congress of the impor-
tance of at least listening to what Admiral Howe had to say.
That same day, Washington reinforced his army on Brook-
lyn Heights, bringing the total to 9,500. Among his troops were
Colonel John Glover and his regiment of mariners from Mar-
blehead, Massachusetts. Washington had decided to fight it
out. He was not going to surrender, even though the odds
against him were daunting. His men were tired and downcast,
many of them sick or wounded, and for the most part, without
shelter. The enemy was less than a mile away. British artillery
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK
was firing, and General Howe was beginning a formal siege,
digging trenches 500 yards away that would bring troops and
guns within easy striking distance without undue exposure.
But a heavy rain developed, halting the siege work as the Brit-
ish moved into their tents.
The evening of the 28th, the rain let up. While Lord Howe
was having dinner with Stirling and Sullivan, General Howe,
 assuming Washington had no place to go, resumed his siege, seemingly impossible job of bringing Washington’s troops,
with engineers again digging trenches. horses, and equipment across the East River at night under the
As newer patriot militiamen listened with dread to shovels noses of the Royal Navy and its renowned fighting admiral.
moving dirt and stone, even Washington was having second As the sun set, strong winds were blowing from the north-
thoughts. When he rode over the ground early on August 29, he east, keeping Lord Howe’s big warships out of the East River.
realized there was no hope if he stayed put. He had made a ter- Smaller British craft with swivel
rible mistake, splitting his amateur army and trying to defend guns at their prows easily could
Brooklyn Heights against a force more than twice the size of have worked up the river to disrupt
his. Washington’s close confidant, Adjutant General Joseph Washington’s operation. Fortu-
Reed, confirmed this dismal view. Washington quickly decided nately, Admiral Howe was preoccu-
to attempt a retreat, even though Lord Howe controlled the pied with organizing peace. His
East River. As Congress required, the American leader called a boats were nowhere to be seen.
council of senior officers, who agreed that the entire rebel army In a gamble of a high order,
should leave that night. Washington hoped to bring off all
Before the dramatic council meeting, Washington had 9,500 men, with their horses, equip-
already sent orders to General William Heath to round up all ment, and supplies. As Glover and
available boats and assemble these craft on the Manhattan side Hutchinson raced to ready and crew
of the East River, across from the encampment at Brooklyn every boat, Washington watched for Excerpted from
Heights. If Admiral Howe was paying attention, Washington the Royal Navy. He naturally wor- Revolution on the
wanted him to think he was bringing more troops from Man- ried that Lord Howe’s small boats Hudson: New York
CHAPPELL,THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK

hattan to Brooklyn. might sound an alarm, triggering a City and the Hud-
Heath ordered Colonel Hugh Hughes, assistant quartermas- frontal assault by the other Howe. son River Valley in
ter general in New York, to round up every boat he could lay The navy then could have wreaked the American War
hands on. Once the boats were in place, he could have Glover havoc on Glover’s small boats, of Independence by
and Colonel Israel Hutchinson man them from their regiments loaded with men, at the middle of George C. Daughan
of mariners from the Massachusetts towns of Salem, Beverly, the East River. (W.W. Norton &
Gloucester, Cape Ann, Danvers, and Marblehead. Tough fight- But Admiral Howe, who had a Company, 2016,
ers and excellent seamen, the New Englanders would have the well-deserved reputation for atten- $28.95)

Stirling Performance
“Lord Stirling” rallies his
troops on Long Island.

DECEMBER 2017 37
Brother in Arms
Admiral Lord
Richard Howe
and sibling fought
together for Britain.
tion to detail, hadn’t the least suspicion what was up. His confi-
dence that Washington wasn’t going anywhere enlarged when
that vicious storm blew in on August 29.
Pelting rain seemed to make it even less likely that the reb-
els would attempt to withdraw over the water.
Actually, the storm made that very process easier, by con-
cealing activity on either shore. The operation began at 8 p.m.
with Washington everywhere, directing and encouraging. The
northeast wind threatened to sweep the rescue craft downriver
and into the arms of Lord Howe’s sailors.
Despite the conditions, the Massachusetts mariners rowed
men and equipment across the East River through the night.
The wind abated around 11 p.m., making the going far
easier but also renderinging the rebel flotilla more visible and
vulnerable. Glover and his men kept at it. At daybreak, a
providential fog covered the final stages of the retreat. Incred-
ibly, General Howe’s men did not discover what was going on
until the Americans had nearly finished their evacuation,
executing Washington’s plan as perfectly as could have been.
British soldiers fired on the last of the retreating patriots but
succeeded in wounding only four. None was killed. The Brit-
ish captured three loaders who had stayed behind. Admiral
Howe’s failure to detect or prevent the retreat was a colossal
oversight that would cost him and his cause dearly.
38 AMERICAN HISTORY
Sailor’s Sailor
New Englander John
Glover and his boatmen
saved the day.
Washington’s departure left General William Howe in con-
FROM LEFT: PAINTING BY JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY, NIDAY PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; CLASSIC IMAGE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
trol of Brooklyn Heights with a minimal loss of personnel.
New York City lay at Howe’s feet.
The rebel army was in retreat and in disarray, a surpassing
achievement. The only thing marring the British triumph was
the wanton and indiscriminant cruelty of the Germans and
some redcoats as they pillaged and raped in Queens and Kings
counties. Word of their depravity spread fast and hurt the
Howes’ cause, as would the sadistic behavior of their jailers,
only just beginning and as yet not generally known.
News of the victory on Long Island reached London on
October 10. Britain was ecstatic. King George assumed that his
force soon would be suppressing Washington’s army, followed
by the joining of British forces at Albany and, soon after, the
submission of Congress. The king’s vision of the way to pre-
serve the empire had been vindicated. The ambitions of France
were frustrated. It was a great triumph. King George made
General Howe a Knight of the Bath and wrote the soldier a per-
sonal letter promising a lucrative sinecure when he returned.
While the king and his kingdom celebrated, the negotia-
tions that Lord Richard Howe had set in motion on August 28
proceeded—albeit with Washington’s army, although defeated
and humiliated, still in the field.
 Nevertheless, the prospect of being the great peacemaker so
dazzled the admiral that he hoped easy victory on Long Island
would suffice to make Congress reconsider independence.
Howe persuaded Sullivan, but not Stirling, to help arrange a
conference on Staten Island with a congressional delegation.
Howe wanted to inform Congress of terms that might follow if
the patriots surrendered. Secretary of State Lord George Ger-
main and the king had insisted, as a key part of Howe’s instruc-
tions, that until the rebels gave up, no discussion of the terms
of reconciliation could take place. And even then, anything
Howe agreed to had to be approved in London.
On August 30, Sullivan, who was on parole, visited Wash-
ington. Sullivan requested permission to go to Philadelphia and
present Howe’s request for a conference. Washington thought
Sullivan naïve to think Howe had anything real to offer, but
agreed that the matter was for Congress to decide. The follow-
NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
ing day, Sullivan set out for Philadelphia.
By September 2, Sullivan was hard at work trying to con-
vince delegates that no harm could come from listening to
what Howe had to say. After considerable discussion and argu-
ment, Congress agreed.
Three delegates were selected—one from the North,
another from the Middle States, and a third from the South:
John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of
Pennsylvania, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina. The
Unlucky Man
Rebel general
John Sullivan
was taken
prisoner.
three left Philadelphia on September 9 and in two days
reached Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The admiral’s barge was
waiting to take the delegates to the landing at Captain Chris-
topher Billopp’s estate on Staten Island, where Lord Howe
welcomed the Americans. Billopp’s two-story stone mansion,
being used to house military guards, was as “dirty as a stable,”
according to Adams. In an effort to enhance the occasion,
Lord Howe had had two rooms cleaned.
Franklin knew Howe fairly well; the others had not met
him. They spoke at dinner. Not surprisingly, the parties found
no common ground, as none existed. Howe was frank in telling
his guests that only after the colonies surrendered could real
negotiations about the future take place. That was a non-
starter—as Howe’s betters meant it to be. Germain and the king
had imposed the requirement to keep total control of any talks.
In spite of this, Howe insisted that acceptable terms could be
worked out after surrender, but he wasn’t convincing.
Franklin told Howe that it was too late for the colonies to
return to the empire. Too much had been inflicted on Ameri-
cans for them to reverse course. “Forces have been sent out and
towns have been burned,” Franklin said. “We cannot now
expect happiness under the dominion of Great Britain. All for-
mer attachments have been obliterated.”
Adams and Rutledge felt the same. Discussion continued,
however. Franklin wanted to suggest a real alternative. Not
expecting the British admiral to agree, the American wanted to
open Howe’s mind to the possibility of an approach that might
avoid needless slaughter. To begin with, Franklin argued, inde-
pendence was inevitable. Even if, in some sense, Britain won
the war under way, victory would only mean an indefinite
period of unrest requiring a large army of occupation. Perpetual
resistance inevitably would move London to try to remake
colonial society, which could never work. British troops would
become a permanent fixture, as in Ireland, keeping down a
hostile population and impoverishing both countries.
Instead of compounding Britain’s errors and fighting a long,
expensive war that Britain could never win, Franklin said, Lon-
don should accept American independence, which would cost
nothing. Trade between the two countries could flourish,
enriching both, as trans-Atlantic commerce had in the past.
Britain and America had been each other’s principal trading
partners. They could be again. Why not bring that lucrative
business back to life, as an alternative to endless bloodshed? In
time, even an alliance was possible. Why would that future not
be better than constant, costly strife?
Even though Franklin knew he and his colleagues had no
chance of persuading Howe’s superiors, he did not feel the
exercise was a waste of time. Franklin wanted the admiral to be
aware of an attractive alternative to civil war. The Pennsylva-
nian did not expect to change Howe’s mind about indepen-
dence, but he did want to give Howe something to think about.
What Howe actually thought was that the war would con-
tinue. With his brother he wrote a joint letter to Germain, tell-
ing the secretary of state, “We do not yet perceive any symptom
DECEMBER 2017 39
Leading by Example
Washington kept his
composure through the
retreat to Manhattan.
of that disposition to allegiance and submission to legal gov-
ernment, which would justify us in expecting to see public
tranquility soon restored.”
In the same letter, Howe said that Franklin and cohort
“were very explicit in their opinions, that the associated colo-
nies would not accede to any peace or alliance, but as free and
independent states; and they endeavored to prove that Great
Britain would derive more extensive and more durable advan-
tages from such an alliance, than from the connection it was
the object of the commission to restore.”
Franklin could not even convince Lord Howe, never mind
King George III, that independence was a realistic way out of
the bloody mess they were in.
The king could never accept an independent America.
Independence would avert a war, save a fortune, and preserve
thousands of lives—but also would diminish England’s power
and prestige, diminish the empire’s place in the world, and that
was intolerable. The benisons of renewed friendly relations,
trade, even an alliance aside, the king abhorred the thought of
destroying Britain’s dominion over North America.
Germain and the Earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admi-
ralty, felt the same. After that spectacular victory on Long
Island, the king’s men expected submission, not a negotiated
settlement, and certainly not independence. Their fixation on
military power was too strong to consider any alternative, par-
40 AMERICAN HISTORY
ticularly when they appeared to be winning.
Adams shared his impressions of the meeting in a letter to
wife Abigail: “Yesterday morning I returned with Dr. Franklin
and Mr. Rutledge from Staten Island, where we met Lord
Howe and had about three hours conversation with him. The
results of this interview will do no disservice to us. It is now
plain that his lordship has no power but what is given him in
the act of Parliament [the Prohibitive Act]. His commission
STEEL ENGRAVING BY JAMES CHARLES ARMYTAGE AFTER A PAINTING BY MICHAEL ANGELO WAGEMAN,
authorizes him to grant pardons upon submission, and to
converse, consult, and advise with such persons as he may
think proper upon American grievances, upon the instruc-
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK; OPPOSITE” ENGRAVING BY ALONZO CHAPPEL
tions to governors and the acts of Parliament, and if any
errors should be found to have crept in, His Majesty and the
ministry were willing they would be rectified…His lordship is
about fifty years of age. He is a well-bred man, but…his head
is rather confused.”
The Staten Island talks did not serve Lord Howe well,
making him appear to be a negotiating novice out of his depth.
but these interactions were of great importance to the patriots,
giving their military forces critical time to recover somewhat
from that terrible beating on Long Island.
Had General Richard Howe, instead of pausing to allow his
brother time to negotiate, immediately followed his victory
with an attack on Washington’s depressed army in Manhattan,
that assault likely would have been fatal to the Revolution. +
No Sale
Lord Howe, right, tried and
failed to wring a surrender
out of, from left, Adams,
Rutledge, and Franklin.

DECEMBER 2017 41
 Google-
Mapping
the
Revolution
In a New York City borough,
traces remain of a great
confrontation in 1776
By Ranaan Geberer
The Battle of Brooklyn, also
known as the Battle of Long Island,
took place six weeks after the rebel
colonies declared independence
and ranged across Kings County,
the same geographic area as today’s
borough of Brooklyn. The British
won that August 26-28, 1776, fight,
but a retreat across the East River
(see “Fight Again Another Day,” p.
34) saved the American army from
destruction, presaging a years-long
war ending in freedom. The
miasma of defeat long overshad-
owed the battle’s significance—
namely, that ragtag Americans,
outnumbered 27,000 to 10,000,
could outwit the world’s mightiest
army. Here are Brooklyn battle sites
today, courtesy of Google Maps.
For an expanded version, visit
www.historynet.com/google-
mapping-american-revolution.htm
42 AMERICAN HISTORY
TRADER JOE’S COBBLE HILL
OLD STONE HOUSE
TRADER JOE’S, BATTLE HILL Flatbush Road, felling a
COBBLE HILL On Tuesday, August 27, century-old oak to block
On August 27, as his American and British the way. Hearing of the
men were fighting and troops struggled to con- fighting along the Shore
dying, many of them at trol the highest ground Road, their commander,
the Stone House, rebel in Brooklyn—a 220-foot General John Sullivan,
leader George Washing- rise now part of Green- sent several hundred
ton was atop Fort Cobble Wood Cemetery. “It’s the men to help. That
Hill, also called Ponkies- place where the Ameri- reduced the patriot
berg, watching the Brit- cans were able to inflict complement at the pass
ish ravage his forces. the most casualties on to fewer than 800 sol-
“Good God,” he cried. the British during the diers. Of those, only 60
“What brave fellows I Battle of Brooklyn,” says survived an attack by
must this day lose!” staff historian Jeff Rich- Hessians and Highland-
Later, having occu- man. Battle Hill is now ers, spending their time
pied Brooklyn, the Brit- the site of the “Altar to as prisoners of war at
ish leveled Ponkiesberg Liberty” and a statue of hard labor.
lest the foe again use Minerva, Roman god- City authorities pre-
that prominence as a dess of wisdom, posi- served Battle Pass. In
command post. Today at tioned to salute the the 1850s, landscape
the site—the corner of Statue of Liberty across designer Frederick Law
Atlantic Avenue and New York Harbor. Olmsted, in laying out
Court Street—a plaque of Prospect Park, incorpo-
Washington on horse- BATTLE PASS rated the pass into his
back adorns a bank East of Battle Hill, design. A marker at the
building repurposed as a Americans were guard- location invokes that
grocery store. ing a pass on the terrible day in 1776.
 BATTLE HILL
MARYLANDERS’ BURIAL PLACE
OLD STONE HOUSE
As August 27 bled on,
Americans across
Brooklyn were losing on
every front. Rebel com-
mander General Wil-
liam Alexander, who
despite his patriot affili-
ation proudly called
himself by the Scottish
title of Lord Stirling,
maneuvered to catch
the British off guard.
Stirling sent most of his
troops to safety across
Gowanus Creek, a
waterway about a mile
west of what is now
Park Slope and Green-
wood Heights. There,
Americans had held the
line until a tide of Brit-
ish reinforcements
rolled over them. Again
and again Marylanders
GOOGLE (6)
charged the British, who
poured rifle and cannon
BATTLE PASS
FULTON FERRY LANDING
fire onto them, killing MARYLANDERS’ somewhere near Third casualties, decided
256 rebels. The BURIAL PLACE Avenue between Sev- against a direct assault
Vechte-Cortelyou House, The Maryland men slain enth and Ninth streets. on American redoubts
aka the Old Stone at the Cortelyou house An American Legion near the Brooklyn shore
House, survived. At one were buried in uniform post at 193 Ninth St. dis- of New York Harbor.
time it was the club- in a mass grave on what plays a sign honoring Most surviving Ameri-
house for the Brooklyn was then a farm belong- the “Maryland heroes.” cans made it to these
Superbas baseball team, ing to Adrian Van Brunt. In 2012, The New York friendly fortifications.
which became the Dodg- In 1897, as that vicinity Times reported that At first, Washington
ers. In 1897, the house was becoming urban, the local historian Roger resisted the impulse to
burned; in the 1930s it city of Brooklyn installed Furman and planner order a retreat. But a
was recreated using a stone reading, “Burial Eymund Diegel, using fierce, unseasonably
many original compo- place of ye 256 Mary- aerial photos, had pin- cold rain further demor-
nents. Today it’s a land soldiers who fell in pointed the gravesite in alized his exhausted,
museum with a perma- combat at ye Cortelyou a vacant lot on Eighth hungry troops, who
nent interactive exhibit House on ye 27th day of Street, slightly east of were now running out
on the battle. August 1776.” In the early where that artery inter- of ammunition and fac-
“The Old Stone 1900s, during a widening sects Third Avenue. ing a British siege.
House: Witness to War— of Third Avenue, the On Thursday, August
an Exhibit Exploring the marker vanished, reap- FULTON FERRY 29, Washington and his
Battle of Brooklyn and pearing in 2008 when a LANDING staff decided to evacu-
the Occupation, 1776- factory building was By Wednesday, August ate. That night, boarding
1783” enables visitors to demolished. 28, except for minor small craft oared by
follow their interests in For years, historians skirmishes, the battle mariners from Massa-
aspects of the war theorized that the was over. British Gen- chusetts and obscured
(theoldstonehouse.org/ Maryland burial site eral William Howe, per- by fog, the rebel army
exhibitions). was in Gowanus, haps to avoid excessive fled to Manhattan. +
DECEMBER 2017 43
 Trial by
Stagecoach
Noah Webster’s prescient book tour was an
exercise in survival By Rosemarie Ostler
44 AMERICAN HISTORY
 “I
curse all stage Waggons,” a furious Noah Webster wrote in his diary entry for
May 18, 1785. Webster had been on his way that day from Baltimore, Mary-
land, to Alexandria, Virginia, when the coach in which he was a passenger
overturned, bouncing him back to the Maryland port. The next day, still
cursing stagecoaches, Webster hired a horse, arriving in Alexandria that
evening after a 50-mile ride.
Webster was undertaking what likely was the first multi-city book tour by
an American author. The writer had left his home in Hartford, Connecticut,
on May 2, planning to range as far as South Carolina, selling books in major
towns along the way. Webster also wanted to do what he could to keep his work from being pirated by
printers—a constant danger in the days before federal copyright laws—so he planned personally to
register his books with individual state legislatures.
A recent Yale graduate and would-be lawyer, Webster was Webster, the boy grew up on a farm in the hamlet of West
teaching school in Hartford when he wrote the Grammatical Hartford. As was true for most farm children, his formal edu-
Institute of the English Language. The three-volume set, which cation consisted of a few years at the local grammar school.
Webster published between 1783 and 1785, addressed the core But he loved books and words; according to family lore, while
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK

of 18th-century literacy: a grammar book, a speller, and a
book of practice readings. His books were the first language
textbooks written by an American for Americans.
Noah Webster arrived at authorship by an unusual route.
The fourth of five children born to John and Mercy Steele
working in the fields he carried a Latin grammar that he read
on breaks. By age 14, he knew he wanted to attend college.
Alone among his siblings, he did so; his years at Yale set him
firmly on the path to a life of scholarship and writing. He first
set out to be a lawyer, but when legal work proved scarce in
the post-Revolutionary War depression, he took up teaching,

DECEMBER 2017 45
which led him to try his hand at textbook writing. Webster
harbored hopes of producing volumes that would replace the
British imports most American schools used.
Webster had some success with the speller, but sales of the
other two volumes lagged. Most schools persisted in relying
on grammars and readers from England. To enhance his pro-
motions, Webster devised an innovative scheme: he would
pitch books to buyers state by state and city by city, rather
than flog them regionally and wait for orders.
The 18-month promotional trip was a gamble, economi-
cally and physically. But the effort paid off—for the man and
for his country. That road trip inspired the monumental
dictionary known to the world as “Webster’s.”
Webster had his eye on more than sales. A patriot, he
believed that fellow citizens deserved textbooks designed for
them, not English imports. His books featured material of
interest to Americans, such as lists of place-names and mon-
etary values. Webster promoted the study of homegrown
American English, and he was willing to pay a personal price
to get out the word.
The writer usually traveled on horseback, stowing his pos-
sessions in two heavy saddlebags. Between towns, as in the
Baltimore-to-Alexandria run, the author occasionally went
by coach. He shipped his inventory aboard sloops that darted
along the coast to serve ports and transporting goods and
people inland by way of rivers. Sometimes Webster himself
traveled by sloop, although stagecoach did offer attractively
cheap and convenient passage between towns. Had Webster’s
May 18 trip not come to grief, he would have spent less than a
day on the road, probably for only a few dollars.
The 1,300-mile Main Post Road connected Wiscasset,
Maine, and Savannah, Georgia, with stagecoaches,
typically pulled by four-horse teams, departing
either terminus several times a week. In
between, coaches stopped at major coastal cit-
ies. Each leg was called a stage, giving the
vehicle its name. Also known as stage wag-
ons, coaches were about the size of freight
wagons, with a rounded underside and a
light roof set on four narrow pillars. The
coach rode suspended on leather thorough
braces. Canvas or leather curtains attached
46 AMERICAN HISTORY
to the roof could be rolled up or left hanging, depending on the
weather. Inside, three backless benches seated three passen-
gers each. There were no side doors; passengers scrambled in
over the front of the coach—and, if boarding late on a run, over
seated passengers. A tenth traveler could sit beside the driver.
A coach trip meant hours bouncing on the hard benches,
awash in luggage, mail, and other goods, leaning against fel-
low passengers as the vehicle swayed along. When the coach-
man dropped the curtains, the interior was plunged into
darkness. Accidents were common. Wheels could collapse. A
snapped central brace could drop a coach to the ground.
Breakdowns too serious to repair sent passengers and coach-
man walking to the nearest town.
Outside towns, roads were rough and poorly maintained,
dotted by stumps, boulders, and other obstacles and for much
of the year impassable to wheeled vehicles thanks to mud and
snow. Corduroy roads—tree trunks laid sideways in low-lying
areas prone to sogginess—ensured dry passage at the expense
of a jaw-jarring, spine-shattering ride. Rural areas, especially
in the South, had few public roads. In such settings, travelers
in coaches cut across fields and through woodlands.
Travelers generally relied on horses, surefooted and deft at
avoiding obstacles. Riders bought mounts at the beginning of
trips and sold them at the end, or hired a series of horses from
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK; NOAH WEBSTER SADDLEBAGS, NEW HAVEN MUSEUM, 2017.100
livery stables, often allied with inns or taverns where a rider
could eat and bunk and where horseback travelers could put
up their animals.
Horses were not without risk. On a trip between Freder-
icktown and Baltimore, Maryland, on January 18, 1786, Web-
ster’s mount fell, so badly injuring the author’s leg—which, he
does not specify—that he limped for days. He man-
aged to return to Fredericktown and rent another
horse. In a historical footnote, the New Haven
Museum owns Webster’s remarkably mod-
ern-looking saddlebags from this trip—alas,
not on display but stowed in the basement.
Sloops were the most comfortable way
Bagging It
Webster’s saddlebags survive
at the New Haven Museum.
GL ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The Lexicographer
Webster sat for telegraphy
pioneer and artist Samuel
F. B. Morse in 1823. Top left,
an 1856 carriage calamity
near Lynchburg, Virginia.

DECEMBER 2017 47

to travel. Introduced by the Dutch, these small—40 to 60 feet
stem to stern—light, and quick single-masted vessels first
showed up on the Hudson River in the 1600s. In Webster’s
day, fleets of sloops transported cargo ranging from timber
and furs to dry goods and rum, hugging the Atlantic shore
and tacking along rivers connecting cities and towns. Along
with cargo, most sloops could hold at least a dozen passen-
gers in quarters far more spacious than a stagecoach. Sloop
passengers also got meals.
The little vessels’ primary drawback, as Webster learned
sailing from Baltimore to Charleston, was the wind, or lack
thereof. Webster set sail on May 31, 1785, expecting to spend a
few days between ports. However, the sloop struggled with
headwinds, then was becalmed, sometimes for days, taking
two weeks to reach Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. By then
food and water supplies were low; diarist Webster reports that
crewmen harpooned a dolphin—“an excellent dinner”—and a
few days later, a shark. Soon the captain was rationing water,
“two quarts a day per man.” Not until June 26 did the belea-
guered craft make Charleston Harbor.
Besides posing discomfort and danger, transport modes
were slow. Even a fast horse covered only 40 or 50 miles in a
day, so trips of any distance meant overnight stays. Leaving
Connecticut, Webster headed for Baltimore, his anticipated
base for forays to Virginia and the Carolinas. From Hartford
he reached New Haven, overnighting before setting sail for
New York City, a trip of two days. After several days in Man-
hattan visiting friends, the author spent six days on the road
in New Jersey and Philadelphia before reaching Baltimore.
Total time to cover those 320 miles: two weeks.
Webster sometimes stayed with friends, enjoying meals
and drinks with acquaintances—although on extended inter-
ludes he usually rented a room in a private lodging house.
Occasionally he stayed overnight at an inn en route. In New
York, Webster notes, “Find many friends that I have not seen
a long time.” He records, among other encounters, tea with
Theodosia Prévost Burr, wife of Aaron Burr and a friend from
the Revolutionary War years.
Webster encountered more famous figures, like George
48 AMERICAN HISTORY
Washington, at whose home, Mount Vernon, the author spent
a night. The author and his host and family discussed educa-
tion, among other topics. When Washington remarked that he
was considering hiring a Scot to tutor his stepgrandchildren,
Webster convinced the founding father to look homeward for
pedagogical talent. What would European countries think,
Webster asked, if, having displayed “great talents and achieve-
ments” during the War for Independence, Americans went
abroad to recruited professional men?
Late in his tour, Webster met Benjamin Franklin, another
student of the American language. The two began a corre-
spondence. When Webster decided to travel north to lecture,
Franklin arranged for his new friend to use a room at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania.
Bookstores were scarce, so everywhere Webster went, he
hawked his wares, stacking his stock wherever he could rent
or cadge space—often in a residence’s front room. In Charles-
ton, he reports, “Open my books at Mr. Timothy’s and adver-
tise them.” In Baltimore, Webster displayed his books at Mr.
Snow’s, then at Miss Goddard’s. Ashore briefly in Norfolk,
Virginia, the author left three dozen copies for a printer to sell.
As opportunities arose en route, he sold printing and regional
distribution rights to printers.
Webster had a sharp and calculating eye. He counted the
number of houses in nearly every town he passed through,
sharing his data with other statistically minded friends and
foreshadowing the first census. He recorded that Baltimore
had 1,950 houses, along with 150 “stores and public buildings.”
Charleston boasted 1,560 houses until a fire at the heart of
town burned 19 dwellings to the ground.
Alexandria had 300 houses; Williamsburg—of which Web-
ster writes, “This is the most beautiful city in Virginia”—230.
He thought Williamsburg houses “well-built” and the College
of William and Mary “large and elegant.”
Among the peripatetic author’s pleasures were eating the
season’s first cherries, witnessing a balloon ascent, and enjoy-
ing Independence Day in Charleston, which featured a can-
non salute and a flourish of fireworks.
Intent on registering his books with state legislatures,
Webster worked his schedule around those bodies’ sessions,
sometimes revisiting a city or loitering there for weeks, wait-
ing to catch legislators on duty. Between repeat excursions to
Charleston and Richmond, Webster cooped in Baltimore,
whose port and population of 8,000 offered myriad diver-
sions. Almost daily, Webster socialized, took walks, dined, or
had tea with new companions. He attended public balls.
Twice he walked to the docks and toured vessels from the
East Indies. He undertook to study French.
Lectures were a popular diversion, and Webster attended
several, conforming to Americans’ enthusiastic belief in
self-improvement. Lecture halls—a town of any size had at
least one that booked representatives from the stream of
inventors, scholars, preachers, and other personalities riding
GETTY IMAGES
the circuit—were fonts of ideas and trends, stirring the intel-
lectual pot in the context of a social event. Crowds at talks

Hand Work
Webster’s holographic
version brought $34,655
at auction in March.
that Webster attended on topics as disparate as electricity and
philosophy probably inspired a project the author launched to
earn money while pursuing his love of language.
After several months on the road, Webster had run short
on cash. He was selling books—and engineering advertising
and copyright efforts that would boost sales—but it was a
slow business and travel was expensive. Thinking to start a
singing school, Webster held classes in Baltimore’s First Pres-
HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS (2)
byterian Church on Fayette Street, where he and Patrick Alli-
son, the young pastor, had become friendly. But American
English remained Webster’s chief interest. One August after-
noon he started writing his thoughts about the native tongue’s
history and use. By early October he had completed five
A Man of His Words
Pages in the author’s hand.
essays—“dissertations,” he called them. Over tea Webster read
his musings to Reverend Allison, who liked the discussions
well enough to offer his church as a setting in which Webster
could present his thoughts to the public—for a modest fee.
Webster gave his first lecture on the evening of October 19,
1785, before 30 paying customers who had anted up a quarter
for that presentation or seven shillings sixpence—$1—for the
full series of five. That night Webster spoke about the impor-
tance of a national language. “As an independent nation, our
honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as
well as government,” he said. Over the centuries, North Amer-
ica’s English speakers had evolved their own vocabulary and
speaking style, he explained. Webster wanted Americans to
take pride in their distinctive native speech rather than imi-
tate the British.
Listeners raved. Each succeeding lecture drew a larger
crowd. Fresh from winning the Revolution, Americans were
in a patriotic mood, and caught up in the question of how
different they should be from Brits. Webster was among the
first advocates to encourage the embrace of specifically
American English.
After his fifth performance, on October 26, Webster wrote
in his diary, “The lectures have received so much applause
that I am induced to revise and continue reading them in
other towns.” Soon he was traveling again, speaking in
DECEMBER 2017 49
 Top Town
The College of William and
Mary in Williamsburg, for
Webster’s money “the most
beautiful city in Virginia.”

PHOTO CAPTION

Hitting the Charts Hall of Fame

By 1828, Webster’s work was Faneuil Hall in Boston was
part of the American fabric. the scene of a triumphant
Webster appearance in 1786.
50 AMERICAN HISTORY

OPPOSITE FROM TOP: CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; IAN G DAGNALL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; THIS PAGE: WEBSTERS DICTIONARY/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Words, Words, Words
Advertisements for Webster’s chief
stock in trade became ubiquitous.
Richmond, Alexandria, Annapolis, and other locales.
Turning north to make for Dover, Delaware; Philadelphia,
and Princeton, New Jersey, Webster moved quickly, cov-
ering 50 or 60 miles at a clip. He continued marketing his
books in person and contracting with printers, but his
talks about language had become as important a source of
revenue and status as his other activities.
Webster returned to Hartford in June 1786 after nearly
13 months, staying only briefly. Soon he was touring New
England, speaking in venues as small as “Mr. Hunt’s
schoolhouse” and as large as Boston’s Faneuil Hall. In
New York City, the author drew a crowd of 200.
Success did not inoculate Webster against disaster.
Bound from Connecticut to New York in December 1786,
he drove his sleigh into a snowdrift. Trudging to a town,
the writer set out the next day during another storm, again
burying himself in snow. Pushing on, he reached his des-
tination after four “very cold” days. Despite having horses,
he “walked much,” he notes.
Not long after those misadventures, parties in Phila-
delphia offered Webster a position as a schoolmaster in
that city. He accepted the job, bringing his 24-month
sojourn to an end. He counted his self-promotional ven-
ture a commercial success. Part I of the Grammatical
Institute of the English Language, the speller, would
become one of the first American best sellers. Parts II and
III, the grammar and reader, became classroom fixtures
despite low sales.
Webster’s innovative idea about the primacy of Ameri-
can English paid off in a remarkable way. He devoted sev-
eral years to employment, including practicing law and
editing a weekly newspaper, but never lost his yen to ana-
lyze and explicate this new language. In 1806, 20 years
after his book tour, he published the first major American
dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Lan-
guage. A larger, more complete volume, An American Dic-
tionary of the English Language, appeared in 1828, defining
12,000 Americanisms not previously recorded, such as ice-
berg, glacier, and magnetize. Webster included new coin-
ages like parachute and safety-valve, and new verbs such
as revolutionize, electioneer, quarantine, patent, and the
only word the author claimed to have coined himself:
demoralize. He formally defined the slang negative “ain’t.”
and introduced new spellings—such as “waggon” instead
of “wagon”—but not precipitately. His 1806 dictionary lists
“waggon” as both noun and verb (“to convey in a waggon”),
but the 1828 dictionary drops the second “g.”
In similar style, thanks to Webster, Americans write
music not musick, center not centre, color not colour, and
plow instead of plough. Maybe most significantly, Web-
ster gave Americans pride in their speech.
Nearly 200 years later, American English is still build-
ing on Webster’s foundation, as the dictionary that bears
his name goes into its fourth edition—online. Noah Web-
ster changed the American language in lasting ways, and
it all started with a road trip. +
DECEMBER 2017 51
 Smiling Through a
Personal Apocalypse
FDR got polio, but polio didn’t get him
By Robert Dorfman, Emily Berquist Soule,
and Sukumar Desai

Nothing But Blue Skies

Franklin Roosevelt in
Washington, DC, before
his illness. Left, the family
at Campobello in 1920.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Clockwise: FDR, mother

Sara, wife Eleanor, and
children James, Anna, Elliott,
Franklin Jr., and John.

52 AMERICAN HISTORY
 A s the 20th century dawned,
American summers stopped
being times of fireflies, base-
ball, and beaches to become seasons of terror. Each year with
warm weather came some new proscription for parents: Keep
children away from crowds, ice cream parlors, public swim-
ming places. Do not send kids to the movies or let them overex-
ert, or get too hot, or too cold. Keep little ones away from dusty
streets, swat their fingers away from their noses. Let no fly
remain alive inside any house. Keep windows closed. No one
could follow all those rules, but parents had no other way to try
to safeguard children from the scourge of poliomyelitis, a viral
disease then called infantile paralysis, and now known as polio.
Polio dates to prehistory, but not until 1894 did the disease
break out on a large scale in the United States. That summer’s
epidemic, in northern New England, sickened 123 children.
Outbreaks multiplied and intensified as the three strains—one
mild and flu-like, another characterized by paralysis, and the
most acute, bulbar polio, sometimes causing death—mutated.
In summer 1916, all three strains converged in New York City,
striking 8,900 people and killing 2,400 children, 80 percent age
4 or younger. Panicked city officials barred children from sub-
ways and trains, closed summer camps, and mandated screen-
ing of doors and windows in residences. Trying to contain the
urban outbreak, health inspectors searched the suburbs for
fleeing city children, placing polio refugees under house arrest.
The virus spread to 26 other states, causing another 27,000
cases and 6,000 more deaths.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Polio hit quickly—youngsters at play one afternoon found
themselves the next morning in ambulances. Polio ward
staffs isolated suspected carriers from their families, stripped
away and incinerated clothes and belongings assumed to be
infected, and put terrified youngsters through excruciating
spinal taps. Patients with confirmed diagnoses donned hospi-
tal-issue pajamas; a large red dot on the back advertised
infectious status. In confinement, patients passed through a
week or more of high fever, difficulty breathing, nausea, and
muscle spasms. Some came away paralyzed. Paralysis could
affect the limbs, but also the abdominal muscles, causing
them to tighten so much some patients bent permanently at
the waist, perhaps forced to walk on hands and knees. Cases
could involve two years of rehabilitation—if a “crippled polio,”
as patients were called, was lucky.
Bulbar polio struck the muscles employed to swallow and to
breathe, killing by respiratory failure. A bout often began with
severe headache, sweating, and vomiting. Soon the patient,
unable to cough or to swallow, was gasping and turning blue
from lack of oxygen. In an infant, the danger sign came when a
baby suddenly stopped crying; doctors would rush to intubate
the child, an emergency procedure often undertaken too late.
Adulthood conferred no immunity. As early as 1921, medical
authorities were downplaying use of the adjective “infantile”
because the disease overtook older children and even young
adults, though only a few people in their thirties. But more vir-
ulent viral mutations broadened the age range. In 1916, 80 per-
cent of New York City polio patients were 4 or younger, but by
1955, 25 percent would be 20 or older.
Adult onset polio was quite rare when, on August 10, 1921,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt fell ill. The gregarious, cheerful pol-
itician was vacationing with wife Eleanor and their five chil-
dren on Campobello Island in New Brunswick, Canada, when
he experienced chills, a fever, and loss of feeling in his limbs.
DECEMBER 2017 53
 Standing Tall
FDR met at Poughkeepsie,
New York, in August 1924
with fellow Democrats
NATIONAL ARCHIVES

George Lunn, left, and

John W. Davis.

54 AMERICAN HISTORY
 At 39, Roosevelt stood just over six feet the Times
tall. A vigorous, athletic fellow in the prime of
his life, he golfed, played tennis and field
reported
hockey, and ran cross-country. He chopped that
trees, sailed iceboats, and sledded with his Roosevelt
young children. A scion of a wealthy old Hud-
son Valley family, Roosevelt had a law degree
was
but, under the influence of energetic presi- “seriously
dential cousin Theodore, he had gravitated to ill” but
public service. In 1910, the younger man won
election to the New York State Senate. During
“improving.”
the world war, he served as assistant secre- the article
tary of the Navy, and in 1920 had been the did not
Democratic candidate for the vice presidency.
He was looking forward to a bright future.
mention
However, within 24 hours of taking to his polio.
bed at Campobello, Franklin Roosevelt could
not even stand. Local doctors attended him.
Nine days later, his paralysis had spread. He
could feel nothing from the neck down.
On August 25, a physician summoned from Boston diag-
nosed polio. In time Roosevelt’s arms worked again, but not
his legs. Even so, through sheer will he resumed his political
career to extraordinary result. Never denying that he had
polio—and never identifying as its victim—Roosevelt held
himself up as having defeated the disease and its paralysis,
and, with the same vigor, worked to help his country defeat
polio as well. In the words of biographer Roger Daniels, the
story of FDR and infantile paralysis is “not what polio did to
Roosevelt, but what Roosevelt did for polio.”
A vacationing Franklin Roosevelt was celebrity enough that
bad news involving him intrigued the press. Interest built
among local reporters when Roosevelt delayed his departure
from Campobello until after Labor Day, ostensibly to avoid
traveling in hot weather. Political manager Louis Howe
announced that FDR would be leaving his family home by
boat and landing on the docks at Eastport, Maine. While
newshounds milled around the wrong end of town, Howe
was having the stretcher-bound Roosevelt transported by
launch to a different dock and delivered to the railway depot,
where handlers loaded him onto a baggage cart and trundled
him into his private car. By the time reporters found the cor-
rect platform and rail car, the object of their attention was
seated happily at an open window, smiling and joking. Roos-
evelt, his doctors, and his family rolled back to Manhattan.
Only then did the world learn he had polio.
If his mother had had her way, Roosevelt would have
retreated to the family estate at Hyde Park, New York, and
lived as an invalid, but FDR responded to his condition with
resilience and determination. He needed round-the-clock
help—someone to carry him up and down stairs, maneuver
him into and out of bed, wash him, help him empty his bowels,
lift him into and out of chairs and vehicles. Yet Roosevelt man-
aged his life so successfully that his “disability was of little
interest to the voters,” wrote historian David Oshinsky.
“The doctors are most encouraging,” Roo-
sevelt claimed in September 1921, declaring he
had “been given every reason to expect” that
he would overcome paralysis. In addition to
his family’s status and considerable fortune, he
had the support of George Draper, his personal
physician and a childhood friend.
Draper, who harbored grave doubts about
whether his pal would walk again, kept quiet
about how he was “much concerned at the
very slow recovery” FDR was making. Draper
wrote later that he hesitated to quash his
friend’s hope of reversing paralysis through
hard work “because the psychological factor in
his management is paramount.”
Roosevelt’s optimism extended to his polit-
ical career, which for now had to defer to his
recovery. Even so, almost from the moment his
employer fell ill, Howe was mounting a cheer-
fully optimistic—or willfully deceptive—line of
reasoning in the press. A day after physicians at Presbyterian
Hospital confirmed the polio diagnosis, The New York Times
was reporting that Roosevelt was “seriously ill” but “improving.”
The article did not mention polio.
“His physician is confident of his ultimate recovery,” the
New York World wrote.
Roosevelt “will not be crippled,” Draper had told the Times.
“No one need have any fear of permanent injury from this
attack.” Newspapers across the United States reproduced the
statement. The Washington Post reported the increasingly
famous patient to be “nearing recovery.”
Six weeks into his stay at Presbyterian, Roosevelt still could
not stand. But the fact that he could wrestle himself into a
wheelchair persuaded doctors to discharge him. He returned to
his East 65th Street townhouse, three blocks from Central Park.
He and his medical staff developed an exercise regime meant
to restore the use of his legs and help him cope. Hoisting him-
self on straps dangling above his bed, he did sets of pull-ups. To
keep his abdominal muscles from shortening and distorting his
posture, doctors encased him for weeks in a full body cast—a
circumstance Eleanor Roosevelt described as “torture” that her
husband bore “without the slightest complaint, just as he bore
his illness from the very beginning.” Stamina revived, Roosevelt
donned leg braces. These contraptions let him practice stand-
ing on his own—until he fell. Someone would pick him up, and
he would fall again. He imitated the act of walking by gripping
parallel bars and using his increasing upper body strength to
drag his inert lower frame forward. He rehearsed rescuing him-
self in a fire by throwing himself from bed or chair to the floor
and with hands and elbows dragging himself to an exit. Seeing
her husband demonstrate this hard-learned technique, Eleanor
ran from the room crying.
By May 1922, Roosevelt’s condition had improved enough
to permit him to travel to Boston. At Massachusetts General
Hospital, technicians fitted him with new braces and taught
him a new exercise and movement regime. He began using
DECEMBER 2017 55
 Image Making
He mastered the
art of strategic
stabilization.

Top of the Hill

At Hilltop, a cottage
at his Hyde Park,
New York, estate, with
caretaker’s daughter
Ruthie Bee and
Scotch terrier Fala.

Landslide!
FDR reading
of his 1932
election victory.

56
56 AMERICAN
AMERICAN HISTORY
HISTORY

crutches, which sufficed until October. One day that month, as
he was traversing a Manhattan building lobby with a chauf-
OPPOSITE PAGE: CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK; NATIONAL ARCHIVES; PHOTO BY CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; THIS PAGE: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
feur’s aid, the crutch tips slipped. Roosevelt came to spectacu-
lar grief, tumbling to the polished floor—in front of a crowd.
Realizing scenes like that would doom him politically no
less than the sight of him in a wheelchair, Roosevelt deter-
mined to walk—or at least appear to. Standing arm in arm with
someone large and strong enough to ballast him—often adoles-
cent son James—he rehearsed holding a cane and executing a
shoulder-powered shuffle that shifted his weight from side to
side, moving his useless, braced legs. The process was arduous
and Roosevelt struggled to maintain an even emotional keel.
The real test came in June 1924—less than three years after he
was stricken—when Roosevelt’s party invited him to address
its quadrennial national convention in Manhattan. On the
appointed afternoon, the man of the hour summoned his
resources and labored to the podium at Madison Square Gar-
den. Beaming at the cheering horde with a wide smile, Roos-
evelt entered New York Governor Al Smith’s name into
contention for the Democratic presidential nod.
For the next three years, however, Roosevelt retreated from
public life. In October 1924, he first visited Warm Springs, Geor-
gia, a resort town south of Atlanta. Word was that upon exercis-
ing in the 88o mineral-rich pools there, several crippled polios
had found they could walk. Immersed, Roosevelt found he
could stand upright unassisted, move his legs, even walk and
swim. He happily relayed to Eleanor that “the walking and gen-
eral exercising in the water is fine and I have worked out some
special exercises.” The Atlanta Journal reported on the benefits
Roosevelt experienced in the waters at Warm Springs, adding
that he planned to build a cottage of his own and “spend a por-
tion of each year there until he is completely cured.” By 1926,
Big Cool Friend
With Renee Daly of Spring Valley, New York,
and Jerry Gould of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Roosevelt so believed in Warm Springs that he stretched his
strained personal finances to buy the property. In 1927 he
established the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, a non-
profit that could receive tax-free gifts and grants that would
allow the facility to help others in his situation.
Accustomed to seeing Roosevelt use only two canes, ambu-
lating with his tortured shuffle, advisors and pundits began to
tout him as the Democrats’ man for the presidency in 1928.
Impossible, Roosevelt said; he barely was able to walk with
with the assistance of braces, crutches, and canes, and often
had to be carried. He continued his rehabilitation—and the
publicity campaign positing his inevitable recovery.
To maintain his upper body, Roosevelt doggedly worked
out, sometimes spending three hours a day on the parallel bars.
By September 1928, in the privacy of his Warm Springs cottage,
he had managed several steps without cane or crutch. That
autumn, he sought and won New York’s governorship.
“I just figured it was now or never,” he told one of his sons.
Throughout the gubernatorial campaign and Roosevelt’s
tenure as governor, Louis Howe continued to ballyhoo his
boss’s physical fitness, taking care to douse rumors that Roos-
evelt’s health problems came from untreated syphilis and that
physical disability had sapped his mind.
The highlight of the effort to sell FDR’s strength and vigor
was a grandiose declaration that “every rumor of Franklin Roo-
sevelt’s physical incapacity can be unqualifiedly defined as
false.” This assertion appeared in the July 25, 1931, edition of
Liberty magazine. The popular weekly’s article began with jour-
nalist Earle Looker challenging Roosevelt to prove his health
and suitability for the nation’s highest office.
The theoretical candidate responded head on, submitting to
a thorough examination. Three medical specialists unequivo-
cally declared him “physically fit,” with healthy organs, an
aligned spine, and no known disease. Liberty left out the detail
that Looker, a Roosevelt family acquaintance, had confected
the whole thing. In 1932, Looker published a biography, This
Man Roosevelt, a fluffier version of the article.
Better conditioned, more seasoned in his adaptive strategies,
and blessed with an opponent, Herbert Hoover, who had the
Depression draped across his shoulders, Roosevelt easily won
the 1932 election. In his March 4, 1933, inaugural address he
reassured a fretful nation that “the only thing we have to fear is
fear itself.” Less well known is his next sentence, in which he
defined fear as “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which
paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” That
double entendre invited listeners to take heart from FDR’s
determination to apply the rigor he had shown in overcoming
paralysis and taking the White House to the task of restarting a
ravaged economy and uplifting a demoralized populace.
Organizing what disability advocate Hugh Gallagher called
a “splendid deception,” FDR mobilized all available resources to
DECEMBER 2017 57
Life and Legacy
In June 1932, the candidate relaxed
at Warm Springs, Georgia. Below,
a decade after FDR’s death, San
Diego doctor William S. Burgoyne
inoculates Michael Urnezis, 6,
against polio as his sister, Joanne,
looks on. Right, polio vaccine
developer Dr. Jonas Salk.

58
58 AMERICAN
AMERICAN HISTORY
HISTORY
 Consigned to History
Vaccination reduced
the need to put
patients in iron lungs.
maintain the optimism-cum-pretense that had carried him to
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. He ordered leg braces in an
unobtrusive black finish. He had his touring car fitted with a
bar he could grip while standing to address crowds. He
expanded the Secret Service’s role; besides keeping the chief
executive safe, agents searched for alternate entrances so the
president could get into buildings away from the public eye.
Roosevelt’s guardians installed ramps, made bathrooms acces-
sible, and bolted down podiums. When FDR moved on foot in
public, he did so at the center of a knot of Secret Service men,
some of the men supporting him by the elbows.
The press helped maintain appearances, adhering to FDR’s
wish that he not be photographed or filmed in awkward or vul-
nerable positions, such as exiting a vehicle or struggling from
chair to chair. When Roosevelt did submit to photo sessions, he
stage-managed them, as often as possible in the form of press
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conferences he conducted in the Oval Office. Seated at his clut-
tered desk with an air of informal industry, he—and his inter-
locutors—all could overlook his paralysis.
Polio remains incurable, but in 1930, Philip Drinker and
Louis Agassiz Shaw of Harvard University invented the iron
lung. These ponderous metal cylinders, big enough to hold a
person, forced air in and out of the lungs of patients lying
within, keeping some alive—but also immobilizing them, sep-
HERALD ARCHIVE/SSPL/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO BY ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
arating them from human touch, and reducing their field of
vision to what they were able to see reflected in a mirror.
And those were the fortunate few. In 1939, a year of hospi-
talization for polio cost around $900, a tad more than the
average American’s annual income. No federal agency funded
treatment or rehabilitation, and less than 10 percent of Amer-
ican families had health insurance.
Against the backdrop of polio’s seasonal terror and the
specter of lives spent in iron lungs, President Roosevelt threw
his clout into fundraising and research. In 1934, he hosted a
“Birthday Ball” to benefit the Warm Springs Foundation. That
first January 29, more than 6,000 parties took place nation-
wide, with the premier event, at New York’s Waldorf Astoria
Hotel, featuring a 28-foot-wide cake that fed 5,000 guests.
That year’s balls raised more than $1 million, and became an
institution. In 1938, Roosevelt founded the National Founda-
tion for Infantile Paralysis, focused on finding a cure for polio
and assisting patients. The foundation’s efforts kicked off
with the March of Dimes—entertainer Eddie Cantor’s pun on
the popular “March of Time” newsreels—as mothers went
Looking Backward
Polio epidemics once
filled hospital wards
with young patients.
house to house around the country asking neighbors to con-
tribute ten cents to help advance polio research. That first
campaign raised $2,680,000.
Reelected three times, beloved by millions—and pilloried by
other millions—overseer of the economy’s recovery, pillar of
the war against the Axis, Franklin Roosevelt in the execution of
his duties as wartime commander-in-chief was “a marvel,”
Winston Churchill commented. Even Soviet dictator Joseph
Stalin was observed to respond to FDR’s fortitude, affection-
ately patting his ally’s shoulder during meetings. Gas mask
draped on his wheelchair, Roosevelt in wartime left Washing-
ton more than he ever had. On some visits with wounded
troops, he allowed GIs to see him in his wheelchair. However,
his schedule forced him to give up his exercise routine, and in
early 1944 his health entered into rapid decline.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in his cottage at Warm
Springs on April 12, 1945, probably of a cerebral hemorrhage.
The following year, the U.S. Treasury Department fittingly
memorialized his support for polio research by putting his face
on the ten-cent piece.
By the 1950s, thanks to the March of Dimes, the National
Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and heightened public sup-
port, more than 80 percent of American polio patients were
receiving significant financial and medical aid.
Donations to these entities helped fund Dr. Jonas Salk’s
research into the vaccine named for him. First made available
in 1955, the Salk vaccine was outstandingly effective: in the
early 1950s, the U.S. averaged over 45,000 polio cases per year.
By 1962, fewer than 1,000 cases were presenting annually.
As generations unfamiliar with polio or President Roosevelt
have come of age, an impression has arisen that FDR was “hid-
ing” what polio had done to his body. This is not true. Ameri-
cans may not have always recognized or remembered that their
president was a paraplegic, but Roosevelt’s limitations were
popular knowledge, as was his dedication to polio research and
treatment. FDR’s legacy is not that he conned fellow Ameri-
cans, but that he overcame polio’s limitations to become one of
the greatest advocates on behalf of fellow patients. In her auto-
biography, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that for her husband polio
was “a blessing in disguise, for it gave him strength and courage
he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of
living and learn the greatest of all lessons—infinite patience
and never-ending persistence.” +
DECEMBER 2017 59
 ©MARC RIBOUD/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Pushing Peace
Jan Rose Kasmir
and National
Guard troops at the
Pentagon, 1967,
by Marc Riboud.

60 AMERICAN HISTORY
MAGNUM
FORCE
New books bring photographer Robert Capa to life
and the agency he helped found into focus
DECEMBER 2017 61
 Getting Closer
From left: New York

C
City, 2001, by Gilles
Peress; Huntsville,
Texas, by Danny
Lyon; from RFK
funeral train, 1968,
by Paul Fusco; Los
Angeles, 1967, by
Dennis Stock.

apa: A Graphic Biography and Mag-
num Manifesto perfectly complement one another. Capa
chronicles the life of the legendary photographer who helped
found the legendary agency from which Manifesto takes its
title and gripping contents. Florent Silloray’s account of
Robert Capa’s meteoric arc, rendered in sepia but without
nostalgia, takes off from the lensman’s own epigram: “If your
photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not getting close
enough.” Manifesto in hundreds of images and a few thou-
sand words shows and explains how close Magnum members
get—sometimes close enough to get themselves killed, as
Capa did in 1954. Capa begins that year with its protagonist, a
Hungarian Jew named Endre Friedman, so bored at tony
Klosters, Switzerland, that he decides to resume the battle-
field work that landed him on those luxe slopes. “This is my
last winter,” Friedman/Capa says, staring down the reader.
only photog to cover the first-wave D-Day landings—postwar
ennui, Israel’s war for independence, France, Japan, and the
mainstream success that drove him to make a final trip to
Southeast Asia, where he kept an appointment with a land-
mine. In the final frame, a darkroom tray holds a print of the
final frame Capa exposed in Vietnam. Throughout, Silloray,
with low-fi precision, references Capa’s best-known work.
Amid an Iberian shootout, he portrays Capa from behind a
Republican soldier the photographer is immortalizing at the
second a Francoite slug is killing the man, appropriating the
classic splay of legs, arms, and rifle. On Omaha Beach, trying
to survive the bloody littoral
among smudged versions of
his blurrily deathless photos,
cartoon Capa curses as he
cranks his Contax. Evoking
©GILLES PERESS/MAGNUM PHOTOS; ©DANNY LYON/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Cut to 1936 in Paris, where the talented, struggling Friedman his man’s talent for self-in-
heeds assistant and lover Gerda Taro’s suggestion that to get vention, Silloray fills a panel
more work and get more for it he pose as an elusive, expen- with a spring 1947 lunch at
sive American freelance. Friedman, 23, takes the dare. He the Museum of Modern Art
becomes “Robert Capa”—the last name Hungarian slang for during which Capa and fel-
“shark” and very quickly, like “Kodak” and “Leica,” synony- low aces Henri Cartier-Bres-
mous with picture-taking. Capa and Taro, a Polish Jew also son, David (Chim) Seymour,
using an alias, cover the civil war in Spain, earning huzzahs Maria Eisner, George Rod- Magnum Manifesto
and a good buck. Capa survives that conflict; Taro does not, ger, and Bill Vandivert form a Edited by Clément
and for the rest of his brief life he mourns her. The rest of photographer-owned agency Chéroux with Clara Bou-
Capa’s economical but vivid 86 pages track the photographer to be named from the Latin veresse (Thames & Hud-
through the United States, China, World War II—he was the for “great.” Except, Magnum son, 2017, $65)

62 AMERICAN HISTORY
 Florent Silloray, right, author and illustra-
tor of Robert Capa, A Graphic Biography,
responded to questions by email from his
home in La Rochelle, France, where he also
illustrates children’s books and other works.
American History: How did Robert Capa
come to interest you?
Florent Silloray: I know this man in the way
that everybody in France does, especially his
pictures of D-Day on Omaha Beach. Each of
his photos is a graphic treasure.
In 2012, I had just brought out Le Carnet de
Roger, about my grandfather, who was a pris-
oner of war in German stalags between 1940
and 1945; that graphic novel has not yet been translated into
English. Looking for another subject, I read the novel Wait-
ing for Capa by Susana Fortes, in which I encountered Gerda
Taro and came to understand why she was so important to
Capa. Their love story and the way she built his persona
fascinated me. I read everything about Capa that I could
and decided he would be a fantastic character. Casterman,
a leading European publisher, accepted my proposal. People
there kindly extended me great freedom and helped me
negotiate with the Capa Foundation and the International
Center of Photography in New York, which authorized this
project. I am especially grateful to Cynthia Young, head of
ICP, for her support.
AH: Why a graphic treatment of Capa’s life?
FS: Photography is about freezing a moment in time,
as are the frames in a graphic novel. You can approach
©PAUL FUSCO/MAGNUM PHOTOS; ©DENNIS STOCK/MAGNUM PHOTOS
your character very intimately, putting the reader just
behind his shoulder on the battlefield and in tender
moments with lovers. All of this results in a very human
and complex character, a multifaceted hero.
AH: What challenges did you encounter?
FS: To immerse readers in the world of 1934-1954, I had
to build a database of 20,000 pictures of everything from
vehicles and boats to fashion to military uniforms to furni-
ture to locations. ICP required that I not reproduce exactly
any Capa photograph, so I enlarged material from within
his frames and portrayed Capa at work.
AH: His life seems tough to fit into 80 pages.
FS: I focused on Capa’s life from the early
1930s to his death in Indochina in 1954.
It was important to begin the book with his
arrival in Paris, to depict his relationship
with his soul mate, Gerda, and to show
how she pushed young Endre Friedman to
become Robert Capa. Gerda has been left
too deep in the shadow of history!
AH: In his way, Capa was a superhero
of still photography.
FS: Yes, but I didn’t want to depict him
only as a superhero. He was a very brave man—his pic-
tures prove that—and quite a gambler, but close friends,
people like Ernest Hemingway, John Huston, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, and others, describe Robert Capa as
the best friend any one could have. My goal was to draw
him in such a way that at the end of the book you’re sad.
I also wanted to portray the women he loved, especially
Gerda Taro and Ingrid Bergman. Knowing about these
romances help you to know him better.
AH: How well did Capa’s life lend itself to your medium?
FS: The graphic book is a perfect medium for telling
Robert Capa’s life story. You’re working with ink and
paper, but the budget has no limit; if you need to, you
can draw thousands of soldiers in a single frame. And
many people have Capa’s pictures locked in memory.
I tried to reinforce the obvious link between drawings
and still photography with color. Sepia tone lends a look
of the past, and triggers our memory archives. I used
brown paper with black china ink and, for contrast,
white acrylic paint. This references Capa’s best-known
work—although he made great color photos that are not
as well known.
AH: What’s your next project?
FS: I am at work on a graphic novel about the American
producer, aviator, and adventurer Merian C. Cooper,
who co-directed the 1933 film King Kong.
DECEMBER 2017 63
 Manifesto declares, no such lunch occurred.
Of the ostensible founders, only Capa and
Vandivert were even in Manhattan that day,
Clément Chéroux writes, noting that a May 22,
1947, certificate of incorporation filed by the
collective’s lawyer is the only hard evidence of
Magnum’s genesis. This unblinking mode
appears to be Manifesto’s aim: to deflate myth
and uphold fact, presenting the men and women
of Magnum not as others might view them but
Robert Capa: A as a gang of artists-cum-artisans relentlessly
Graphic Biography, drawn to a big tent they believe encourages
by Florent Silloray, them to produce their unalloyed best. Imagine a
lettered by Guy Buhry photographer whose work you remember and
(Firefly Books, 2017, that name likely will have been on the Magnum
$19.95) roster; picture a picture you cannot forget, and a
64 AMERICAN HISTORY
Magnum member likely made it. Famous photos
punctuate Manifesto’s 416-page gush of arrest-
ing images, standing out only because repetition
has hammered them into memory. Less familiar
pictures display no less ambition, no less art-
istry, no less commitment, no less power.
The persona of the camera-draped nomad, at
ease in settings from civil war to haute couture
and able no matter what to get close enough, has
been alive and well ever since Robert Capa
invented it, embraced by generations of eagle-
eyed inheritors validated by the Magnum brand
and embodying former executive editor John
Morris’s 1953 observation, “No Magnum photog-
rapher is typical of the rest.”
—Michael Dolan is editor of American History
FLORENT SILLORAY AND FIREFLY BOOKS LTD. (2)
 Drawn from Life
Omaha Beach,
Normandy,
June 6, 1944.
©ROBERT CAPA ©INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY (2); FLORENT SILLORAY AND FIREFLY BOOKS LTD. (2)

Decisive Moment
Near Cordoba, Spain,
September 5, 1936.

DECEMBER 2017 65
HERITAGE TRAVEL &
LIFESTYLE SHOWCASE
Home to more than 400 sites, the Civil
War’s impact on Georgia was greater
than any other event in the state’s
history. Visit www.gacivilwar.org to
learn more.
Greeneville, TN
Founded in 1783, Greeneville has a rich
historical background as the home for
such important figures as Davy Crockett
and President Andrew Johnson.
Plan your visit now!
Richmond,
Kentucky
“Part of the One and Only Bluegrass!”
Visit National Historic Landmark,
National Civil War Trust tour, historic
ferry, and the third largest planetarium
of its kind in the world!
Are you a history and culture buff?
There are many museums and
attractions, Civil War, and Civil Rights
sites just for you in Jackson, Mississippi.
Fayetteville/Cumberland County, North
Carolina is steeped in history and patri-
otic traditions. Take a tour highlighting
our military ties, status as a transporta-
tion hub, and our Civil War story.
Explore Maryland with once-in-a-
lifetime commemorations—all at one
destination. Create your family history
by exploring ours. Go to visitmaryland.
org to plan your trip today.
Walk where Civil War soldiers fought
and died. A short trip from Nashville and
a long journey into America’s history!
Call (800) 716-7560.
ReadySetRutherford.com
Edward S. Curtis: The North American
Indian. Historic exhibition of the full col-
lection. Only at the Muskegon Museum
of Art. May 11–September 10, 2017.
Experience living history for
The Battles of Marietta Georgia,
featuring reenactments, tours and
a recreation of 1864 Marietta.
www.mariettacivilwar.com
H I S T O R I C
Roswell, Georgia
Whether you love history, culture, the
peacefulness of the great outdoors, or the
excitement of entertainment, Roswell
offers a wide selection of attractions and
tours. www.visitroswellga.com
There’s no other place that embodies
the heart and soul of the True South
in all its rich and varied expressions—
Mississippi. Find Your True South.
Join us for our Civil War Anniversary
Commemoration including
attractions and tours, exhibitions,
memorials and a selection of artifacts
from Fort Fisher.
A vacation in Georgia means
great family experiences that can
only be described as pretty sweet.
Explore Georgia’s Magnolia Midlands.
Experience the Old West in action with
a trip through Southwest Montana.
For more information on our 15 ghost
towns, visit southwestmt.com or
call 800-879-1159, ext 1501.
Over 650 grand historic homes in three
National Register Historic Districts.
Birthplace of America’s greatest play-
wright, Tennessee Williams. The ultimate
Southern destination—Columbus, MS.
To discover more about Tennessee and
to order your free official Tennessee
Vacation Guide, visit:
TNVACATION.COM
or call 1-800-GO2-TENN
Lebanon, KY is home to the Lebanon
National Cemetery, its own
Civil War Park, and it’s part of the
John Hunt Morgan Trail.
VisitLebanonKY.com today.
Experience the Civil War in Jacksonville
at the Museum of Military History.
Relive one of Arkansas’ first stands at
the Reed’s Bridge Battlefield.
jacksonvillesoars.com/museum.php
The Mississippi Hills National Heritage
Area highlights the historic, cultural,
natural, scenic and recreational treasures
of this distinctive region.
www.mississippihills.org
Six major battles took place in Winchester
and Frederick County, and the town
changed hands approximately 72 times—
more than any other town in the country!
www.visitwinchesterva.com
Known for sublime natural beauty,
captivating history and heritage and
warm hospitality, West Virginia really
is the great escape. Start planning your
getaway today.
History lives in Tupelo, Mississippi.
Visit Brice’s Crossroads National
Battlefield, Natchez Trace Parkway,
Tupelo National Battlefield, Mississippi
Hills Exhibit Center and more.
Explore the past in Baltimore during
two commemorative events: the War of
1812 Bicentennial and Civil War 150.
Plan your trip at Baltimore.org.
Once Georgia’s last frontier outpost,
now its third largest city, Columbus is
a true destination of choice. History,
theater, arts and sports—Columbus
has it all.
Tishomingo County, MS
With a variety of historic attractions
and outdoor adventures,
Tishomingo County is a perfect
destination for lovers of history
and nature alike.
 History surrounds Cartersville, GA,
including Allatoona Pass, where a fierce
battle took place, and Cooper’s Furnace,
the only remnant of the bustling
industrial town of Etowah.
ALABAMA HISTORICAL COMMISSION
Confederate Memorial Park is the site of
Alabama’s only Home for Confederate
veterans (1902-1939). The museum inter-
prets Alabama’s Confederate period and
the Alabama Confederate Soldiers’ Home.
Cleveland, TN
Near Chattanooga, find glorious
mountain scenery and heart-pounding
white-water rafting. Walk in the footsteps
of the Cherokee and discover a charming
historic downtown.
If you’re looking for an easy stroll
through a century of fine architecture or
a trek down dusty roads along the Blues
Trail, you’ve come to the right place.
www. visitgreenwood.com
Vicksburg, Mississippi is a great place
to bring your family to learn American
history, enjoy educational museums and
check out the mighty Mississippi River.
Prestonsburg, KY - Civil War &
history attractions, and reenactment
dates at PrestonsburgKY.org. Home to
Jenny Wiley State Park, country music
entertainment & Dewey Lake.
Tennessee’s Farragut Folklife Museum
is a treasure chest of artifacts telling the
history of the Farragut and Concord
communities, including the Admiral
David Glasgow Farragut collection.
Williamson County, Tennessee, is rich in
Civil War history. Here, you can visit the
Lotz House, Carnton Plantation, Carter
House, Fort Granger and Winstead Hill
Park, among other historic locations.
Charismatic Union General Hugh
Judson Kilpatrick had legions of
admirers during the war. He just wasn’t
much of a general, as his men often
learned with their lives.
Southern hospitality at its finest, the
Classic South, Georgia, offers visitors a
combination of history and charm mixed
with excursion options for everyone
from outdoorsmen to museum-goers.
Follow the Civil War Trail in Meridian,
Mississippi, where you’ll experience
history first-hand, including Merrehope
Mansion, Marion Confederate Cemetery
and more. www.visitmeridian.com.
Search over 10,000 images and primary
documents relating to the Civil War Battle
of Hampton Roads, now available in The
Mariners’ Museum Library Online Catalog!
www.marinersmuseum.org/catalogs
Seven museums, an 1890 railroad, a
British fort and an ancient trade path can
be found on the Furs to Factories Trail
in the Tennessee Overhill, located in the
corner of Southeast Tennessee.
Explore the Natchez Trace. Discover
America. Journey along this 444-mile
National Scenic Byway stretching
from the Mississippi River in Natchez
through Alabama and then Tennessee.
Sandy Springs, Georgia, is the perfect
hub for exploring Metro Atlanta’s Civil
War sites. Conveniently located near
major highways, you’ll see everything
from Sandy Springs!
Alabama’s
Gulf Coast
Relive the rich history of the Alabama
Gulf Coast at Fort Morgan, Fort Gaines,
the USS Alabama Battleship, and the
area’s many museums.
'PSU.PSHBOPSH
r

Fitzgerald, Georgia...100 years of bring-
ing people together. Learn more about
our story and the commemoration of the
150th anniversary of the Civil War’s
conclusion at www.fitzgeraldga.org.
Historic Bardstown, Kentucky
History, bourbon, shopping, sightseeing
and relaxing—whatever you enjoy,
you’re sure to find it in beautiful
Bardstown, KY. Plan your visit today.
www.visitbardstown.com
Through personal stories, interactive
exhibits and a 360° movie, the Civil War
Museum focuses on the war from the
perspective of the Upper Middle West.
www.thecivilwarmuseum.org
Come to Helena, Arkansas and see
the Civil War like you’ve never seen
it before. Plan your trip today!
www.CivilWarHelena.com
www.VisitHelenaAR.com
Treat yourself to Southern Kentucky
hospitality in London and Laurel
County! Attractions include the Levi
Jackson Wilderness Road State Park and
Camp Wildcat Civil War Battlefield.
Just 15 miles south of downtown
Atlanta lies the heart of the true
South: Clayton County, Georgia,
where heritage comes alive!
CIVIL WAR MUSEUM
of the Western Theater
Hundreds of authentic artifacts.
Voted fourth finest in U.S. by North &
South Magazine. Located in historic
Bardstown, Kentucky.
www.civil-war-museum.org
Confederate Memorial Park in Marbury,
Alabama, commemorates the Civil
War with an array of historic sites and
artifacts. Experience the lives of Civil
War soldiers as never before.
The National Civil War Naval Museum
in Columbus, GA, tells the story of the
sailors, soldiers, and civilians, both free
and enslaved as affected by the navies
of the American Civil War.
Join us as we commemorate the 150th
anniversary of Knoxville’s Civil War
forts. Plan your trip today!
www.knoxcivilwar.org
Hip and historic Frederick County
boasts unique shopping and dining
experiences, battlefields, museums,
covered bridges, and abundant outdoor
recreation. Request a free travel packet!
St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Visit Point
Lookout, site of the war’s largest prison
camp, plus Confederate and USCT
monuments. A short drive from the
nation’s capital.
Come to Cleveland, Mississippi—the
birthplace of the blues. Here, you’ll find
such legendary destinations as Dockery
Farms and Po’ Monkey’s Juke Joint.
www.visitclevelandms.com
Destination
Jessamine, KY
STEP BACK IN TIME at Camp Nelson
Civil War Heritage Park, a Union Army
supply depot and African American
refugee camp. Museum, Civil War
Library, Interpretive Trails and more.
 The Other
Forever War
Early in the PBS series The Vietnam War,
a montage runs in reverse. Napalm flames
retract into silver canisters that reassem-
ble to fly intact from unscorched earth.
Tracer rounds and rockets withdraw from
dust clouds and blasts. Soldiers levitate
backward from bog and elephant grass. All
this suggests things didn’t have to happen
as they did. But those things did happen
The Vietnam War that way, as they had to, propelled as they
10 episodes, on PBS were by America’s 19th-century imperial
and streaming project, 20th-century superpower hubris,
September 17, 2017 and opposition to global communism.
Pace Dexter Filkins’s brilliant The For-
ever War, a 2008 book on conflict in the
Middle East, America has another forever
war, one whose course Ken Burns, Lynn
Novick, and Sarah Botstein have charted
in a gripping meditation on bad judgment,
good intent, valor, malignity, and folly.
Anyone anywhere on the spectrum of
opinion on Vietnam will find something
here heartbreaking, infuriating, or both.
America’s history in Vietnam is worth
painful reconsideration. The war killed mil-
Plei Ho Drong, lions, wrecked the Johnson and Nixon
August 1965 presidencies (Nixon’s plumbers’ first job
Aboard Bell UH-1 was burgling the office of a therapist treat-
Iroquois helicopters
ing Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ells-
known as “Hueys,”
troops of the U.S. berg), opened rifts that still gape, and, it
173rd Airborne might be said, foiled the GOP’s stab at kill-
Brigade arrive at a ing Obamacare; Senator John McCain
mountain village to (R-Arizona) may have waited until a crucial
search for the foe. vote to repay Donald Trump in full for the
68 AMERICAN HISTORY
latter’s boorish cruelty in the 2016 cam-
paign regarding McCain’s years of torment
as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese.
The producers begin with France’s
19th-century mission civilisatrice to kill,
subdue, coopt, and exile enough indigenes
to prey on what then was Indochina, a
struggle never fully resolved. Dodging the
Burns trap of elegiac elegance, the open-
ing episode’s exercise in backstory jump-
cuts between French generals describing
aperçu le bout du tunnel and American
generals jawing about lights at the end of
tunnels. The series in its entirety is just as
crisp, with touches like Miles Davis’s “So
What” as the musical bed for President
John F. Kennedy’s inaugural vow to pay
any price, face any foe, et cetera.
Along with scores of less well-known
veterans from both sides, participating
witnesses include novelists and Vietnam
veterans Tim O’Brien, Philip Caputo, and
Karl Marlantes and journalist Neil Shee-
han, whose analysis in his 1988 A Bright
Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America
in Vietnam permeates this series. Not only
the footage but the personal sagas are
vivid and fresh and so, so sad. The Viet-
nam War will rake loose troubling recol-
lections for viewers of a certain age and
AP PHOTO/HORST FAAS
offer their offspring insight into the con-
flict Dad and Mom never quite got over.
—Michael Dolan is editor of American
History
founding
frenemies
In studying giants at odds, Wood shows how,
amid many commonalities, Adams and Jefferson
“remained divided in almost every fundamental
way: in temperament, in their ideas of govern-
ment, in their assumptions about human nature, Friends Divided:
in their notions of society, in their attitude John Adams and
toward religion, in their conception of America, Thomas Jefferson
indeed, in every single thing that mattered.” By Gordon S. Wood
Penguin Press,
Pugnacious and sarcastic, Adams spewed
2017, $35
opinions. Jefferson so reined himself in that his
public views, especially on politics, stayed veiled. Every inch the aristocrat,
he advocated democracy—except for blacks—while Adams declared that
“Democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization.” Bibliophiles both, each
read omnivorously. Jefferson was speaking for two when he said, “I cannot
live without books.” Adams went broke amassing a library. Reading and
intellect jelled his reputation as an honest broker. Expertise as a Massachu-
setts lawyer with an “incredible mastery of English law and history” pro-
pelled him into the vanguard of the Revolution. Jefferson’s brilliance,
exemplified by his “clear and succinct” draft of the Declaration of Indepen-
dence—he claimed to have been channeling the “harmonizing sentiments
of the day”—provided in quality a counterweight to Adams’s effusion of
books and newspaper articles. Eschewing ad hominem attacks on King
George III and instead making a common foe of Parliament, Adams and Jef-
ferson complemented one other, an interleaving Wood silkily interweaves.
How did good friends become fierce enemies? Partly due to disparate
reactions to the French Revolution, its riots, and busy guillotine. Jefferson,
a Francophile, embraced that era’s excesses to the extent that Adams the
Anglophile railed at them. The men also clashed over America’s Constitu-
tion. Aristocrat Jefferson favored a weak executive, subject to the will of the
people. Republican Adams sought to place the president above the aristoc-
racy, er, Senate. The chasm widened when Jefferson, envisioning a nation
of enlightened agriculturalists, served as vice president under Adams. The
latter, a fan of at least some industry, so favored the British model that
Jefferson referred to Adams’s “apostacy to hereditary monarchy and nobil-
ity.” Jefferson tried surreptitiously and failed to undermine Adams, who left
the capital in 1801 before Jefferson was sworn in as his successor.
The fracture began to knit in 1812, when Benjamin Rush, who corre-
sponded faithfully if separately with each, undertook to reconcile the
feuding Founding Fathers. He prevailed; for 14 years, Adams in Quincy,
Massachusetts, and Jefferson at Monticello, Virginia, each professing
love for the other, were devoted quill pals, Adams often needling Jeffer-
son with jabs the Sage of Monticello parried by pivoting to less fraught
themes. Their 158-letter volley lasted until, as the nation was celebrating
the Declaration’s 50th anniversary on July 4, 1826, the reunited compatri-
ots died, six hours and 564 miles apart.
—Richard Culyer is a writer in Hartsville, South Carolina

Coattailer
Chronicle
This first full biography of Edwin M. Stan-
ton in 50 years portrays a consummate pol
navigating choppy national waters, tacking
depending on his current course and on the
company of the moment. Not for nothing did
contemporaries refer to the protean Ohioan
as “something of a chameleon” in his utter-
ances and allegiances. To render those many
facets, Stahr, whose previous book detailed
the life of William Seward, President Abra-
ham Lincoln’s secretary of state, has mined
government documents, newspapers, previ-
Stanton: Lincoln’s ous biographies, and diary entries by many
War Secretary of his era’s major figures, at times perhaps
By Walter Stahr excavating too assiduously.
Simon & Schuster, Stanton befriended ambitious, successful
2017, $35 men whose wakes he rode. His big break
came as James Buchanan’s presidency was
waning. Having in the late 1850s done excel-
lent legal work exposing a gigantic California
swindle involving fraudulent Mexican land
grants and fake seals, Stanton was invited to
Pilloried
Stanton, right, faces serve in the Office of the U.S. Attorney Gen-
a Columbia furious eral. In December 1860, Buchanan named
at Lincoln and his him to the top job at the Justice Department.
generals for losses Stanton used his influence to persuade the
at Fredericksburg in inept president to support Major Robert
December 1862.
70 AMERICAN HISTORY
Anderson at Fort Sumter, shortly to be shelled
in the first battle in the Civil War.
Back in private practice after Lincoln took
office, Stanton, who thought the new presi-
dent a “low, cunning clown” and privately dis-
paraged him, was hired to argue cases before
the Supreme Court. He comported himself
well and, when Lincoln shuffled out Secretary
of War Simon Cameron, Cameron recom-
mended Stanton to succeed him. Assigned to
work with governors, Congress, and the press,
Stanton skillfully organized the Union mili-
tary effort. In that capacity, he built the repu-
tation that led historian George Templeton
Strong to rank him with Lincoln and Ulysses
S. Grant in a trio that “did more than any
other three men to save the country.”
An early backer of General George McClel-
lan, Stanton, losing faith in Little Mac for his
aversion to fighting, helped get him fired.
Enemies badmouthed Stanton’s work and
blamed him for Union defeats, but he basked
in Lincoln’s favor. Lincoln’s death made Stan-
ton responsible to Democrat Andrew John-
son, who in time sought Stanton’s resignation.
Stanton’s refusal drove Johnson to boot him,
uncorking a constitutional nightmare. The
Republican-heavy Congress accused Johnson
of violating the Tenure of Office Act, which
forbade a president to remove an official
approved by the Senate, and other “high
crimes and misdemeanors.” In the subsequent
trial, senators voted 35-19 to impeach, one
vote short of the two-thirds needed to remove
a president. Stanton promptly resigned. On
Christmas Eve 1869, four days after newly
installed President Grant realized a lifelong
dream of Stanton’s by naming him to the
Supreme Court, Stanton, 55, died.
Acquaintances called Stanton “arbitrary,
capricious, tyrannical, vindictive, hateful, and
cruel,” “duplicitous” and “deceitful,” and
“insubordinate”—yet others paint him as fear-
less, honest, and highly competent. “It seemed
that no detail was too small for the secretary’s
personal attention,” Stahr writes. The same
might be said of his tome, which leaves no
Stantonesque pebble unturned and no Stan-
ton minutia unexamined. Thus, this blow-
by-blow of major events involving Stanton—
and tap-by-tap discursions into crannies and
nooks the author could have skipped.
GRANGER, NYC
—Richard Culyer is a writer in Hartsville,
South Carolina
 tales of bruised
ulysses
Ulysses S. Grant died a hero in 1885, but soon
historians were casting him as a butcher in war
and as president a weakling unable to stem
corruption consuming his inner circle. Besides,
they said over and over, Grant was a drunk.
Now new biographers, including Ron Cher-
now and Ronald C. White, are analyzing the
Grant enigmatic Grant, clearing away some of the mud
by Ron Chernow slung at him and reintroducing a historical fig-
Penguin Press, ure worthy of more compassion and regard.
October 2017, $40 White rehabilitates Grant, citing his wartime
leadership and reminding readers that as presi-
dent he championed civil rights for freedmen
and Native Americans and reset the nation’s
damaged relationship with Britain. At home,
Grant resisted inflationary urges that would
have helped western farmers but undercut the
credit markets now recognized as the most pow-
For information on placing a Direct Response or Marketplace
erful engines of economic growth. ad in Print and Online contact us today:
Recounting Grant’s war, White hews to famil- American History 800.649.9800 / Fax: 800.649.6712
iar denials about his drinking, quoting letters amh@russelljohns.com / www.russelljohns.com
and reports by Grant’s official family and laying
blame for his questionable reputation on jealous
American Ulysses:
Union generals and sensationalist newspaper- ★ EXPLORE COLUMBIA, A SOUTH CAROLINA GEM ★

A Life of Ulysses S.
men. White casts Grant’s wife, Julia, as the tem-
Grant by Ronald C.
perance enforcer whenever they were together.
White, Random
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Cher-
House, 2016, $35
now more completely addresses Grant’s demons. Debate
rages over

He nails him as an alcoholic, showing the protective role played by chief

the future of
Confederate
statues.

of staff General John Rawlins, who more than anyone, including Julia 15

HISTORIANS
Grant, kept the general as sober as he was capable of being. Chernow ties WEIGH IN

Grant’s failings to insecurities seared into him by conniving father Jesse WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN TO

Root Grant and religious zealot mother Hannah Simpson Grant. Through- CONFEDERATE
MONUMENTS
out life, Ulysses so feared rejection that anyone offering the semblance of ★ GETTYSBURG WIDOWS ’ ORDEAL
★ REBEL PHOTO EYE- OPENER
friendship got gratitude and loyalty, even when proven corrupt.
October 2017

★ CONQUERED BY A BUG HistoryNet.com

The landslide winner of 1868 should be recalled for his civil rights
record, not his senior advisers’ well-known Gilded Age venality. What
is sometimes lost is that many of his betrayers were either kin or cher-
ished comrades in arms. It is painful to read how often evidence of
aides’ malfeasance astounded the president.
The canonical explanation for Grant’s blindness to perfidy is that,
being an honorable man, he took on faith that others were as upright
as he. White and Chernow point to another defining trait: hatred of
confrontation—a hallmark of the abused child.
—Nancy Tappan is senior editor of American History
 Walnut Grove
Farm…
…outside Raphine, Virginia, is
where, in 1831, Cyrus McCor-
mick, 22, reconceived the design
for a horse-drawn reaper that
had been preoccupying his fa-
ther for 16 years. The device, de-
veloped on Robert McCormick’s
plantation with help of the en-
slaved Jo Anderson, transformed
agriculture. To reap six acres of
grain, 12 workers wielding
scythes had to spend hours;
using McCormick’s machine,
one man could make short work
of the same harvest. In 1847,
after Robert McCormick died,
sons Cyrus and Leander moved
McCormick Harvesting Ma-
chine Company to Chicago,
Illinois. The company evolved
into International Harvester.
Elements of the original McCor-
mick home and dependencies,
including the smithy and a mill,
still stand on the 620-acre Vir-
ginia spread. The family donated
Walnut Grove Farm in 1954 to
Virginia Tech, which uses the
property to research sheep and
cattle breeding, sustainable
farming, and stream restoration.
The farm—Virginia.org;
540/377-2255—is open at
no charge daily 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

PAT & CHUCK BLACKLEY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; INSET: IVY CLOSE IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Besides wandering among the
buildings, visitors can stroll
along a creek dotted with
plaques and labels identifying
trees and other speci-
mens. Cyrus McCor-
mick’s final words are
said to have been
“Work, work, work.”
—Sarah Richardson

Reaping Invention
The McCormick
farm recalls days
when Cyrus, inset,
was tinkering.

72 AMERICAN HISTORY
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