American History Feb 2022

Ending Slavery for Seafarers Pauli Murray’s Remarkable Life Final Photos of William McKinley An Artist’s Take on Jim Crow

No Mercy Washington’s tough call on convicted spy John André

“He was more unfortunate than criminal,” George Washington wrote of Benedict Arnold’s co-conspirator.

February 2022 HISTORYNET.com

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A Life Stolen William McKinley’s assassination helped stamp photography into the American consciousness.

PHOTO CREDIT

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FEBRUARY 2022

FEATURES 24 Hanging Offense

The capture of a British spy blew up into an ethical dilemma for General Washington. By Peter R. Henriques

24

32 Slavery at Sea

The case of four seamen on a lumber ship reverberated its way into American law. By Richard J. Goodrich

40 Final Frames

The day William McKinley was shot, Buffalo, New York, was full of photographers. By Tyler Bagwell

48 Light and Dark

Artist Winfred Rembert endured Jim Crow and never forgot any of those times. By Daniel B. Moskowitz

58 Becoming Jane Crow

Pauli Murray was a one-person Venn diagram of significant American causes. By J.D. Zahniser

DEPARTMENTS 6 Mosaic

News from out of the past.

32

10 Interview

Artist and writer A.K. Fielding on a founder’s son with a yen for the west

12 Contributors 14 Déjà Vu

Confusion in Kabul had a parallel in the Washington, DC, of 1814

18 American Schemers

The religion that arrived by envelope

20 SCOTUS 101

PHOTO CREDIT

48 ON THE COVER: Benedict Arnold’s treasonous plot severely tested George Washington’s resolve and cost British intelligence agent John André his life.

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Frothingham set a limit on taxpayer status as a basis for suing Congress

22 Cameo

18

William Robinson dreamed up Psychiana as a way to make money. His mid-life creation became a mailorder religion.

A fiery founding mother crossed pens with John Adams

66 Reviews 72 An American Place

Deetjens Big Sur Inn, Big Sur, California

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; NIDAY PICTURE LIBRARY/ ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SAILOR’S UNION OF THE PACIFIC; FRANK BRUCE ROBINSON COLLECTION; UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; ART ©2021 ESTATE OF WINFRED REMBERT/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK. COURTESY HIGH MUSEUM OF ART; COVER: PAUL POPPER/POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES; NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY/PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN WALKER

FEBRUARY 2022

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American History ONLINE

MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

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

FEBRUARY 2022 VOL. 56, NO. 6

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Edison and Tesla gave one another a run for his money in a race to electrify the world. bit.ly/3Biwwmt

Mark Twain's Volcanic Adventure

The irrepressible intrepid traveler couldn't resist an excursion into the fires and fury of Kilauea. bit.ly/2XKdzM3

Master Tom and His Slaveholding Legacy An unblinking look at Thomas Jefferson. bit.ly/3CeyHsN

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by Sarah Richardson

Christopher Columbus got the biggest backers and the most press for his New World voyage, but scholars have long known of evidence that Europeans reached North American shores earlier. A group from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands now extends that timeline.

Vikings were known to have settled briefly in Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland; fresh data cite carbon-dated tool marks circa 1020 CE on specimens of three woods found at L’Anse aux Meadows, a well-known Viking site in Newfoundland. Another study was inspired by remarks in Latin by a monk in Milan in 1345 mentioning sailors in Genoa describing a northwestern region

across the ocean known as Markland. These researchers surmise this information came from Italian merchants trading with foreign seafarers who had visited the land nearly 150 years before Columbus reached the islands of the Caribbean in 1492. The third study decisively debunks the Vinland map, a sketch on parchment said to be the oldest map of the New World. Previous challenges to the map’s origins proved inconclusive, but investigators now have been able to confirm without question that metals in the ink on the document date to around 1920, not the 15th century, as was trumpeted when collector Paul Mellon gave Yale University the map in 1965.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Re-redrafting New World History

6 AMERICAN HISTORY

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY; PHOTO BY KATE MUNNING OF THE LAND CONSERVANCY OF NEW JERSEY

Debunked The ostensibly antiquarian “Vinland map” turns out to have been created using 20thcentury materials.

Governance by Typo University of Florida law professor Michael Allan Wolf previewed his research into the afterlife of a U.S. Supreme Court typographical error for an article in the October 18, 2021, New York Times. The typo occurred in a 1928 summary—a “slip opinion,” which is written before final publication—of a ruling in a zoning dispute. The flub turned the word “properly” into “property,” with the faulty sentence reading: “The right of the trustee to devote its land to any legitimate use is property within the protection of the Constitution.” The error, traced to Justice Pierce Butler, was corrected in the published opinion, but the erroneous statement persisted, according to the Times, in “14 court decisions, the most recent of which was issued last year; in at least 11 appellate briefs; in a Supreme Court argument; and in books Justice Pierce Butler and articles.” The goof was particularly pernicious because, since it made grammatical sense, it didn’t stand out as a typo. The ability to rewrite and/or correct opinions without publicizing the change, it was revealed, was a longstanding tradition, changed only after Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus in 2014 highlighted the practice, which sometimes even included withdrawing or amending legal conclusions. Since 2015, SCOTUS.gov has noted alterations to any opinion.

Game Time

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY; PHOTO BY KATE MUNNING OF THE LAND CONSERVANCY OF NEW JERSEY

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Sienna McCulley, an intern at the American Antiquarian Society, unearthed the origins of the venerable card game Authors, launched in 1861 as The Game of Authors. Originated by women in Salem, Massachusetts, the game appeared in 16 variations. Louisa May Alcott was the only female author in the original version, but gradually more were included; in one version, 11 female authors were among the 18 depicted. A new pastime also based on historical details is Spies of Liberty, which takes the form of a card game invoking the famous Culper Spy Ring whose agents worked for George Washington during the American Revolution. Creator Lisa Shaw and her teen children devised the structure and rules during the pandemic. The game’s 2-6 players try to outwit the foe using clues, ciphers, and vintage maps. escapenoticegames.com

Ramapough Site Saved Rockland County, New York, legislators voted to preserve Split Rock, above, near the town of Hillburn and heralded by the Ramapough Lenape as a sacred site, according to Rocklandtimes. com. The county no longer needed the 54-acre hilltop, adjacent to a wastewater facility, and a conservation easement bought by the Land Conservancy of New Jersey for $290,000 will keep the parcel intact. The Ramapough Lenape, who number in the thousands, are not currently recognized by New York as an official tribe, which lack of status has harmed their ability to advocate for their culture in the past.

FEBRUARY 2022 7

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Old School Sotweed The four charred seeds turned up in a hearth in the Salt Lake Desert being excavated by an archaeological team.

Old Smokes

A two-part exhibition from the Geppi Comic Collection, donated to the Library of Congress by collector Stephen Geppi in 2018, showcases American comics, including Popeye, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Black Panther—characters that originated in newsprint and comic books.

Other characters on view, such as Mickey Mouse and a host of Disney figures, debuted onscreen before appearing in print. Artifacts include graphic images used in branding Disney characters and pop stars such as the Jackson Five, Elvis Presley, and Jimi Hendrix. The first installation runs through Mid-March 2022; the second runs through spring 2222. bit.ly/3GKvlAd

REUTERS PHOTO; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Comic Collection

8 AMERICAN HISTORY

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BILL JACOBSON; EDWARD S. CURTIS PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLGY; SOTHEBY’S

Four charred tobacco seeds were found by workers with the Far Western Anthropological Research Group in a hearth at an archaeological site near a dry riverbed in northern Utah. The seeds, based on the dating of woody material in the hearth, are about 12,000 years old, making them by far the world’s earliest indication of tobacco use. A New World plant, tobacco was cultivated, smoked, and chewed by indigenous people, but until now the oldest evidence of that use—a pipe in Alabama—dated back a mere 3,300 years, according to the BBC. The researchers have no evidence of how the sotweed was used, but the leaves could have been smoked or crumpled and sucked on. Also at the site were goosefoot, red maid, and hairgrass seeds, all of which can be dried for eating by hand or ground into flour and cooked.

Sculpture Spotted In 2019 St. Louis. Missouri, art collector John Foster saw a residence displaying a small moss-clad lawn ornament, right, of two figures he thought bore the style of artist William Edmondson, according to The New York Times. The homeowners remembered the piece as having some forgotten significance; Foster urged them to get it evaluated. He suspected it was a long-lost work by master stonemason Edmondson, a self-taught Black artist from Nashville, Tennessee, who had been active for only 15 years before dying in 1952. The sculpture, one in a set known as “Martha and Mary,” has been verified as the missing Edmondson, cleaned, and promised to the American Folk Art Museum, where it will be in a show, “Multitudes,” opening January 21, 2022. bit.ly/3mE9EK9

Historians at the Movies

BILL JACOBSON; EDWARD S. CURTIS PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLGY; SOTHEBY’S

REUTERS PHOTO; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

If you like history and cinema, join Twitter followers of #HATM to watch movies with running commentary by a host historian and others. In 2018 Jason Herbert, a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, organized an online group watch of the 2004 movie National Treasure, starting a series that has attracted a large following. Commenters chime in from a range of disciplines and perspectives. Join Sundays at 8 pm EST on Twitter.

TOP BID

$1.472 Million The Nike “Air Ship” sneakers Michael Jordan wore in 1984 to launch the Air Jordan brand sold for $1.472 million at Sotheby’s on October 24, 2021. Designed by Bruce Kilgore, the pair are the highest-priced sneakers ever sold at public auction. The previous record also belonged to Jordan: Nike Air Jordan 1 Highs he wore in a 1985 exhibition game.

That pair sold for $615,000 in August 2020.

Curtis Plates to Penn Glass plates by Edward Curtis valued at $4 million were donated to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries by collector William H. Miller.

Shown: “Nootka Woman Wearing Cedar-Bark Blanket.” The 151 plates are interpositives, a step between the photographic negative and the printed image. Curtis created 2,200 images for his 1907 book The North American Indian. In 1912, Curtis exhibited his photographs at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

FEBRUARY 2022 9

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DAUNTLESS SON

BY RICHARD ERNSBERGER JR.

How hard was it to piece together his life? It was frustrating; the primary sources were so limited. Unlike his father, a prodigious writer, William left only a handful of documents. Fortunately, there is material from friends and contemporaries—letters, mostly—that helped Why a book on the sixth child of Alexander fill out Hamilton’s life. Despite this, there Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton? remain many gaps that I hope future historiMy book tells the story of America’s Midwest- ans and researchers will be able to fill. ern pioneers and continues the Hamilton saga to the next generation. I found William S. What drew Hamilton to the frontier, and Hamilton to be an exceptional personality how did his family react to his decision? The with a story screaming to be shared. Here was wild, untamed nature of the frontier appealed a man who could have easily used his name to him. He could relate to it, because he had and lived well in New York. Instead, he loved the outdoors and nature from an early dropped out of West Point and moved to the age. His mind was sharp, but New York society frontier in 1817 in order to make something of considered his habits uncivilized. Certain of

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WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Lighting Out The Black Hawk War, top, was one of two conflicts in which Hamilton served, according to biographer Fielding.

himself in a place where the only virtue that mattered was how hard you worked as an individual to achieve success.

SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

A.K. Fielding is an independent historian and an artist. She writes about early American topics so that, she says, “I can buy materials with which to paint subjects from that period.” The author of numerous articles on American history, she recently published her first book, Rough Diamond: The Life of Colonel William Stephen Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton’s Forgotten Son (Indiana University Press, 2021).

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY

SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

his contemporaries, including some family members, considered him That conflict began on April 6, 1832, and too rough. But his mother, Elizabeth Hamilton, loved him dearly and ended on August 27, 1832, with the arrest of even traveled west to visit her son.

Black Hawk. William’s contemporary, Abraham Lincoln, served in the American Army What comes through about William’s personality? Most of his friends and participated in the same conflict. in the Midwest described him as brave, shrewd, self-motivated, and industrious. He was caring and loving but quiet in his personal life. Hamilton had political ambitions. William Despite his kind nature, especially toward women, he never married. was a staunch Whig living in a society heavily Some contemporaries described him as a drunkard and a gambler. But controlled by Jacksonian Democrats. In 1824 drinking and gambling were common in frontier society, and, as far as he was elected as state representative from we know, William did not exhibit any excess.

Sangamon County, Illinois, the seat Lincoln occupied ten years later. He was later elected He lived in Illinois for a decade. What did he do there? Early on he as president of the advisory Rump Council for worked as a federal surveyor of lands near the Illinois River, where what would become Wisconsin. In 1836 he many French settlers had made claims. He next worked as a lawyer in had hoped to be appointed as the first goverPeoria. He defended a Native American accused of killing a Frenchman nor of the newly formed Wisconsin Territory, in that town’s first-ever murder trial. The defendant was twice con- but President Andrew Jackson picked Demovicted and sentenced to death by hanging, but Hamilton managed to crat Henry Dodge instead. free him by arguing that the state did not have jurisdiction over a member of the Potawatomi Tribe.

In 1849 he trekked west seeking gold. He traveled to the Sacramento region of CaliforHe then undertook to mine lead ore in nia to find gold but spent most of his time selling supplies to would-be prospectors who Wisconsin territory. Lead was so highly were arriving daily. Between running a valued for its practical uses that it was considered “grey gold,” and lead mingeneral store and his own prospecting, he ing had become a lucrative industry accumulated a tidy sum during his year in the early to mid-1800s. Hamilton in California. He had every intention of “struck rich” in Wisconsin when he returning to Wisconsin, but he never found a large tract with an abunmade it. He got sick and died—possibly dance of the malleable metal. Minof cholera, which killed a lot of prosing lead kept him in Wisconsin until pectors. He was 50 years old. the California Gold Rush in 1849.

His great-nephew Edgar wrote that He was buried in a potter’s field in William “would accumulate his tens Sacramento. An obituary ran in the local of thousands of dollars in the summer newspaper, but his grave had no headWilliam Hamilton and then with companies of gentlemen stone for twenty years. Only through the would squander it in winter by sailing down efforts of Cyrus Woodman, a former political the Mississippi River and playing cards.” rival in Wisconsin, who spent years making inquiries about Hamilton in California, was Didn’t he start a town in Wisconsin? He actually founded two towns his grave located and a marker finally placed in Wisconsin—English Prairie and Wiota. He employed several miners on it. Hamilton is now interred in a beautiful who lived in the towns with their families. He ensured that Wiota had a burial square in Historic City Cemetery in school for the children, that church services took place, and that there Sacramento, California. was a general store and post office to supply residents with a line of communications, goods, and gossip. Although English Prairie dis- Summarize this enterprising son of one of solved, Wiota still stands. There’s a sign in the town with a drawing of America’s founders. We can absolutely call Fort Hamilton, a bastion William constructed during the Black Hawk William Stephen Hamilton a brave man. He War to protect the miners and their families. left the high and refined society of New York to make a home for himself on the frontier.

He participated in two Native American wars in the Midwest. The That in itself required gumption. Everything Winnebago War took place in 1827 in the area that is now the state of he confronted in his life he met with determiWisconsin. William joined the militia and supported the Americans nation, hard work, and high intellectual capacagainst the Ho-Chunk tribe. In the Black Hawk War, William served as ity—traits often associated with America’s a scout against warriors led by Sauk Chief, who was called Black Hawk. pioneering spirit even today. H FEBRUARY 2022 11

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Orville’s Ingenuity, Cont’d

Henriques

Zahniser

Moskowitz

Bagwell

Goodrich

Tyler Bagwell (“Final Frames,” p. 40) is a folksinger and writer in Buffalo, New York, where he recently staged “The Body Electric: Songs about the Electric Chair” at the Buffalo History Museum. In 2019 that facility presented his show Low Bridge, Everybody Down: Buffalo’s Story in Song about the city’s first century.

Richard J. Goodrich teaches history at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He is finishing a book on the 1910 return of Halley’s Comet.

“Slavery at Sea” (p. 32) is his first article here. He tweets as @RJGoodrichWrite. His website is richardjgoodrich.com.

Peter Henriques (“Hanging Offense,” p. 24) is Professor of History, Emeritus, from George Mason University. He taught American and Virginia history with a special emphasis on the Virginia Founding Fathers, especially George Washington. His books include First and Always: A New Portrait of George Washington.

Daniel. B. Moskowitz (“Light and Dark,” p. 48) writes the SCOTUS 101 column as well as contributing features and book reviews.

Regular contributor J.D. Zahniser (“Becoming Jane Crow,” p. 58) speaks and writes regularly about women’s history; she wrote the biography Alice Paul: Claiming Power (2014). Her most recent article was “Just to Say ‘I Am Free’” (August 2021). She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

While producing playthings (“Toymaker of Hawthorn Hill,” October 2021), Orville Wright worked with Deeds Carillon Park in Dayton, Ohio, on how best to display the 1905 Wright Flyer III. At Mr. Wright’s urging, the local history facility set the aircraft in a low area so that visitors viewed it from above. The Smithsonian hung aircraft overhead so that they wound up being seen in silhouette, but he wanted people to be able to see how the Flyer worked and how it looked overall. A docent at the park told me that when leading a group, she often asks if anyone present is a pilot. If so, she offers a closer look. Whether weekend fliers, military personnel, or commercial pilots, she said, aviators almost always marvel.

“We still do it that way,” one pilot said.

“The controls and power are just stronger, but it’s the same method.”

K. M. Dawson Englewood, Ohio

Tracing Trails

“Life on the Colorado” (October 2021) mischaracterizes several trails. The Southern Emigrant Trail went west from Texas, not Santa Fe. None of the Gila Trail routes began at or went to Santa Fe. And, to be clear, the Beale Wagon Road was built east to west. I comment to be helpful; users had many names for the old trails and since the 1800s additional names have cropped up. American History is a great source of varied and relevant information.

Monta Pooley Port Orchard, Washington The editor regrets his mistakes.

Easy Riding

Yet again, Ancestry (“Freedmen’s Bureau Records for Free,” Mosaic, December 2021) capitalizes on years of work by volunteers and staff at the National Archives.

Daniel F. Rulli Loma Linda, California

12 AMERICAN HISTORY

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After the last American forces evacuated Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, at midnight on August 31, President Biden hailed the operation as an “extraordinary success.” At least he thought so. What the media had been showing for a week was an extraordinary debacle: desperate Afghans dropping from American airplanes as they took off; 13 troops and dozens of Afghans killed by Afghanistan’s ISIS affiliate in the crowd outside the airport; mounds of equipment, an estimated 100 American citizens, and who knows how many Afghan allies, left behind. Boomers recalled the fall of Saigon in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War. But history offers an even more chaotic wartime abandonment of a capital: Washington, DC, falling to the British at the nadir of the War of 1812.

When president James Madison asked Congress for a declaration of war in June 1812, he cited reasons why Britain deserved it: interfering with American trade, impressing American sailors into the Royal Navy, inciting Indian wars in the old northwest. Our wrath was righteous, but our readiness was low. Winfield Scott, then a young lieutenant colonel, described the officer corps at the time the guns went off thus: “imbeciles and ignoramuses….sunk into either sloth, ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking.” Secretary of War William Eustis and Secretary of the Navy Paul Hamilton had gotten their jobs because they were Madison

BY RICHARD BROOKHISER

allies reliable at capital political infighting. But Eustis, a former Army doctor, was overwhelmed trying to manage a large organization, and Hamilton was an alcoholic who quit working at noon. Madison himself, however brilliant he was as a theorist and a practical pol, had never heard a shot fired in anger.

After a year of debacles, Madison tried to clean house. William Jones, tapped to head the Navy, knew the sea from days as a merchant.

John Armstrong, in at War, replaced imbeciles and ignoramuses with hard chargers like Scott.

Armstrong, however, was a loose cannon.

Madison sometimes learned of decisions he had made by reading about them in the press.

Britain, meanwhile, had issues of its own: winning a world war against Napoleon.

But after Boney was exiled to Elba in the spring of 1814, Britain turned its full focus on its cheeky transatlantic foe.

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In Their Dreams American forces at Bladensburg showed far less mettle than imagined in this painting of their last stand at that port.

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A naval force under Admiral Sir George Cockburn had been raiding Chesapeake Bay for a year. A score of ships under Admiral Alexander Cochrane and 4,500 veteran troops under General Robert Ross joined that fray in August. Expecting such a stroke, Madison had picked a brigadier general to organize the defense of the region. But the general he picked was a bad choice. William Winder was a lawyer with only two years’ military experience. But his uncle Levin Winder was governor of Maryland. Maryland was a politically divided state: the first blood of the war had flowed in Baltimore when pro- and anti-war partisans rioted.

Madison needed the nephew Winder to keep Maryland happy.

At this moment Madison’s relations with Armstrong collapsed, never to recover. Madison sent his secretary of war a letter early in August spelling out exactly what he wanted him to say. Armstrong reacted by deciding not to say or do anything unless specifically asked.

On August 19, Ross’s troops debarked at Benedict, Maryland. Armstrong believed the enemy forces to be heading for Baltimore, America’s third largest city and a major port, 50 miles north. “Baltimore is the place, sir,” he predicted. But Washington was only 35 miles to the northwest: perhaps the Brits would instead make a detour.

Winder Their most obvious path to Washington lay through Bladensburg, a town on the east branch of the Potomac featuring both a bridge and a convenient road through the hills.

Winder, however, believed the foe would cross the east branch directly south of the capital at the Navy Yard, in present-day Anacostia. He posted his 7,000 troops, mostly militia, halfway between the two points, and wasted his time in frantic scouting and pointless activity.

At midnight on August 23 Madison learned that the British indeed had turned left and were marching on the capital. In the morning Madison conferred with Winder at the Navy Yard. After Winder left to concentrate his forces at Bladensburg, Armstrong showed up.

In a conversation epitomizing their dysfunctional relationship, Madison asked if he had any advice. Armstrong didn’t, but suggested that the Americans, militia vs. regulars, “would be beaten.” Madison “expressed to him my concern and surprise at the reserve he showed.”

The president, 63, borrowed a brace of pistols and rode for Bladensburg to see for himself. Upon arriving, he had to be warned back by an American horseman: he had ridden beyond the American front lines, and the British were already forming up on the far bank.

Madison and Armstrong, who had come to Bladensburg as well, rode up to Winder for a last consult. Muskets and artillery were already firing.

This racket spooked Madison’s horse, keeping the president away from the pow-wow. After that conclave was done, Madison asked Armstrong for his final opinion. The arrangements, the secretary said laconically, “appeared to be as good as circumstances permitted.”

The defenders outnumbered the attackers, but the British troopers

Winder, a nephew of Madison’s, had little to recommend him for his job except placating Maryland political figures.

had superior discipline, plus Congreve rockets, a new weapon both destructive and frighteningly loud. Only 500 American sailors who arrived at the last minute from the Navy Yard held their ground; their comrades broke and ran. Wits dubbed the embarrassing spectacle “the Bladensburg Races.”

Madison had already returned to the White House, deciding, correctly, that his presence during actual combat would be distracting.

Wife Dolley, given an alert ahead of time, had decamped; the Madisons’ teenaged slave, Paul Jennings, had helped her roll up Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington for transport. The president tarried only briefly before hopping a ferry to Virginia.

Over the next few days, Madison wandered the countryside, staying one night at the home of an anti-war Quaker in Brookeville, Maryland. Official Washington meanwhile had burned to the ground. Americans themselves torched the Navy Yard; the British, fired up by victory, set the Capitol and the White House aflame. “I never saw a scene at once more terrible and more magnificent,” wrote a French diplomat of the columns of fire and smoke spiraling skyward late on August 24.

Huge differences mark the routs of 1814 and 2021. Madison’s occurred after two years of fighting; Biden’s was meant to end two decades of war. Madison’s humiliating defeat was followed by victory: the British moved on to Baltimore, where a sniper killed Ross, his troops were repulsed, and a naval bombardment of Ft. McHenry produced only “The Star Spangled Banner.” Other late victories allowed Madison to end the war in an honorable draw.

We may not know for years the payoff, if any, of Biden’s Kabul pull-out.

The Kabul Derby nevertheless echoes the Bladensburg Races. Both Madison and Biden are career politicians, more comfortable in cloakrooms than in corner offices, or bestriding the world stage.

Politics influenced them, arguably too much: Madison picked Eustis, Hamilton, and Winder for reasons other than competence; Biden wanted to be known as the president who undid his predecessors’ blunders.

Yet politics does govern in a republic, whose people must believe that power is being well used, however many bumps occur along the way. May the War on Terror end at least as well as the War of 1812. H

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AMERICAN SCHEMERS

Psyched Out

biography, Psychiana Man, Robinson had led “a freewheeling, vagabond life of questionable employment history, reckless military service, alcoholism, imprisonment, compulsive lying, fraud and bankruptcy.” Of course, none of those flaws disqualify a man from becoming a religious leader in these United States.

Son of a Baptist minister, Frank Bruce Robinson was born in England in 1886. He was 10 when his mother died. In 1889, his father married a wealthy woman who repeatedly clashed with Frank. The minister solved that problem on Frank’s 16th birthday, signing the youth up for a 12-year stint in the Royal Navy.

Frank detested his time before the mast, faked an illness, and was discharged. He returned home, but not for long. In 1903, his father dispatched him to Canada as part of a shipload of orphans and paupers. For three years, he lived in an Ontario orphanage that rented its residents to farmers as cheap labor.

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UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY COLLECTIONS & ARCHVIES

Act Now! Top, Psychiana staff in 1935 sorting and compiling direct-mail entreaties to be sent prospects on behalf of boss Robinson.

In 1929, Frank Robinson invented America’s first mail-order religion. He called it “Psychiana,” a name that came to him in a dream, and hyped his creation in eyeball-grabbing magazine advertisements. “I TALKED WITH GOD,” one read. “Yes, I did, Actually & Literally.”

Robinson’s ads put readers on the spot. Did they want “Wealth or Poverty—Happiness or Despair—Which?” People preferring wealth and happiness could find those treasures, Robinson promised, by subscribing to his 20-lesson mail-order course in Psychiana, a “psychological religion” that not only revealed how to converse with God but also how to acquire godlike powers. The course cost $20—a buck a lesson—and during the Great Depression and World War II Americans by the thousands ante’d up, hoping for illumination.

If Robinson had “Actually & Literally” talked with God, it must have been an interesting chat. As Brandon R. Schrand writes in his 2020

UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY COLLECTIONS & ARCHVIES (2)

BY PETER CARLSON

UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY COLLECTIONS & ARCHVIES

UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO LIBRARY COLLECTIONS & ARCHVIES (2)

AMERICAN SCHEMERS Fleeing the institution, Robinson began a period of drink-sodden folly. In Toronto in 1910, he joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which soon expelled him for drunkenness. In Oregon in 1912, feigning American citizenship, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, which quickly ejected him as a “chronic alcoholic.” In San Francisco in 1916, he joined the U.S. Army under a pseudonym. Shipped to the Philippines, he was imprisoned for “willful disobedience of orders” and discharged.

“I was useless and just a common drunk,” Robinson later recalled.

But in 1917 he quit drinking. He worked in pharmacies, peddled stocks, and sold self-help books door-to-door. He married a judge’s daughter, and in 1928 they settled in Moscow, Idaho, where Robinson, 42, worked in a drugstore while he concocted his new religion.

Fueled by coffee and cigarettes, he spent nights pounding a borrowed typewriter, banging out those mail-order Psychiana lessons— more than 200,000 words, many of them typed in capital letters. Calling himself “Dr. Robinson,” he promised his “REVOLUTIONARY TEACHING” would reveal how to use “DYNAMIC UNSEEN POWER” to perform miracles, including healing the sick. This mystical “God Power” could be accessed through breathing exercises and by repeating “I BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF THE LIVING GOD” over and over. Robinson warned students to “obey my instructions TO THE LETTER” or else “get nowhere, and only be a loser.”

He advertised Psychiana in pulp sci-fi and detective magazines. The hype worked: Thousands bought into his mail-order theology and Robinson soon had expanded Psychiana to include a magazine, a “Psychiana Brotherhood” club—monthly dues $2—a medical clinic in Moscow, and, for patients unable to make it to Idaho, mail-order medical diagnoses at $5 a pop. Robinson soon became the town’s largest private employer and a wealthy man.

But his dubious claims sparked a federal investigation and in 1936, an indictment cited Robinson for passport fraud. At his trial, in Moscow, prosecutors proved that Robinson had sworn, on his passport application, that he was an American, born in New York—a claim the evidence showed to be false. Robinson retorted that his mother had told him he was born while his parents were visiting New York, and he believed his mom. This amazing

defense worked: hometown jurors acquitted him.

Irked, the feds moved to deport Robinson as an illegal immigrant until William Borah, Idaho’s powerful Republican senator, brokered a deal. Robinson would be deported but permitted to apply for readmission to the U.S, which was promptly granted.

“After the crucifixion comes the ascension,” Robinson crowed after his victory. “We know that divinity cannot be crucified.”

Using his legal troubles to raise money, Robinson cited his acquittal as proof that his “DYNAMIC UNSEEN POWER” really worked. He launched a radio show and a lecture tour, appearing on stage flanked by two stenographers who transcribed his every word, lest any godlike wisdom be lost. “The showman in him hungered for the energy of a live audience,” his biographer writes, “and the stage is where he felt at his best.”

In May 1940, as German armies were blitzing through France, Robinson instructed his followers to pause four times every day, close their eyes, visualize Adolf Hitler, and repeat “The spirit which is God will bring your downfall.” Robinson sent a telegram to French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, informing him of Psychianians’ efforts on France’s behalf. “Consequently, you cannot lose,” he added.

In June, the Nazis seized Paris. Two weeks later, a heart attack nearly killed Robinson. Doctors ordered bed rest. Instead, he worked day and night smoking, slurping coffee, and typing so furiously that he taped his fingertips to keep them from bleeding. In two years, he wrote hundreds of articles and nine books. His prose became ever more bizarre. He said that “God had chosen me” to enlighten humanity. He suggested he might run for the U.S. Senate. He claimed to have seen his dog pass through closed doors. He claimed that he’d healed a pig’s bleeding tail simply by expressing sympathy for the punctured porker. And he proclaimed, “THE DEAD CAN BE BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE.” After atomic blasts ended World War II, Robinson circulated a two-sided leaflet touting “The New Psychiana.” One side blared, “THIS CIVILIZATION IS DOOMED,” predicting that atomic war would soon kill most humans.

The other side proclaimed, Selling Psychiana “THIS IS GOOD NEWS,” detail- The pages of pulp magazines ing a post-apocalyptic utopia in proved to be a bountiful setting for which “all shall live FOREVER ads in which Robinson put on the WITH THE GREAT SPIRIT hard sell touting his cult.

WHICH IS GOD.” In October 1948, Frank Robinson’s “DYNAMIC UNSEEN POWER” expired; the mail-order mystic died at 62. He was not “BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE,” but his widow and son managed to keep Psychiana alive for four years, repackaging and reselling Robinson’s writings. In 1952, they closed down the operation, blaming postal costs. Newsweek discerned a different cause: “Without the dynamic personality of the founder,” the magazine reported, “Psychiana seemed to be doomed.” H FEBRUARY 2022 19

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SCOTUS 101

Maternal Matter In Frothingham, the plaintiff challenged the constitutionality of the Maternity Act by claiming standing as a taxpayer.

STANDING IN THE SHADOWS FROTHINGHAM V. MELLON 288 F. 252 (D.C. CIR. 1923) TAXPAYER STANDING TO BRING FEDERAL SUIT OVER ACTIONS BY CONGRESS

A key element of any judicial system is who can make use of that system. In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court took a big step, narrowing the range of individuals who can file suit in federal court to challenge actions by Congress.

That step came in Frothingham v. Mellon, a decision giving lawmakers significant protection from constitutional scrutiny.

In Frothingham, the Justices considered the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act, the federal government’s first venture into social welfare—until then the responsibility of state and local governments. Commonly called “the Maternity Act,” the measure sought to reduce infant mortality—then above 11 percent, far higher than in other industrialized countries—by providing expectant mothers and new parents with access to nurses and to health care information. The law provided $1.2 million yearly to go to states that would match the grants dollar-for-dollar, money to be spent however

states wished to achieve the health goals. The law was the first Congressional response to the political power granted women the year before upon ratification of the 19th Amendment. But the 1921 law was not universally hailed; foes included the American Medical Association, which feared that the legislation would open the way for persons other than doctors and nurses to provide medical services.

A problem for the program’s advocates was that it was not entirely clear that Congress had the right to enact such a scheme. Article I of the Constitution lays out in detail the powers of Congress. Since Article I says nothing about improving health conditions, it could be argued that Congress was overstepping its authority in the Maternity Act. One person certain the law was an unconstitutional expansion of federal power was Harriet A. Frothingham. A veteran political activist generally opposed to progressive-era changes

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SCOTUS 101 in American society, she had been active in the National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage. Upon passage of the 19th Amendment, many of that body’s members formed Women Patriots. Women Patriots opposed birth control and anything they thought smacked of communism or pacificism. The group garnered its greatest press coverage in 1932 with a fullbore—albeit failed—campaign led by long-time Women Patriots president Frothingham to refuse a visa to Albert Einstein.

In challenging the Maternity Act, Frothingham faced a hurdle: under the U.S. system, plaintiffs cannot just ask that courts simply tell Congress it has acted unconstitutionally.

Foes of a law must demonstrate that that measure does them actual harm, giving them standing to sue, and that what they are asking the court to do is to stop the executive branch from enforcing the act. But Frothingham’s lawyers saw a way around the issue of standing; they maintained that because she paid taxes, some of which would fund the program, their client had grounds for launching her assault on the Maternity Act. If the program was not constitutionally valid, her property— tax payments—was being taken without due process, violating the Fifth Amendment and making the defendant in the case Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon.

Frothingham’s home state of Massachusetts was a hotbed of opposition to the Maternity Act. The Bay State, along with Connecticut and Illinois, spurned the federal money, opting entirely out of the program. In fact, Massachusetts waged its own legal battle against the statute’s constitutionality, claiming that the Maternity Act infringed on matters intended to be exclusively the province of the states.

The state’s case was decided by the Supreme Court in a joint decision with Frothingham’s, and most reference works cite the ruling as Massachusetts v. Mellon.

Frothingham lost in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, where Chief Justice Walter I. McCoy decreed that “Congress is the body which in the first instance has the duty of deciding whether a proposed law may be constitutionally enacted.” She then took her case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Justices there never got around to answering Frothingham’s allegation that the Sheppard-Towner Act was unconstitutional. They found, instead, that Frothingham couldn’t bring the case at all.

As a taxpayer, they said, she didn’t have enough at stake to claim injury and make the matter a real conflict. The ruling was unanimous.

Oddly enough, in what was then its 132-year history, the high court had never ruled on whether merely being a taxpayer gave a person the right to challenge a Congressional action with only the bald allegation that it was unconstitutionally using federal revenues. When the issue had occasionally come up, the Justices decided the cases on other bases, ignoring the question of taxpayer standing.

When a city tax is involved, the connection is so “direct and immediate” that a taxpayer can challenge an ordinance, Justice George Sutherland said in the Court’s opinion. The same might apply to state legislative actions. “But the relation of a taxpayer of the United States to the Federal Government is very different,” Sutherland noted. “His interest in the moneys of the Treasury—partly realized from taxation and partly from other sources—is shared with millions of others.” This renders the impact on any single taxpayer “comparatively minute and indeterminable...remote, fluctuating and uncertain.” Moreover, he argued, to allow such suits was to open a Pandora’s box. “If one taxpayer may champion and litigate such a cause, every other taxpayer may do the same, not only in respect of the statute here under review, but also in respect of every other appropriation act and statute whose administration requires the outlay of public money and whose validity may be questioned.”

Courts since have cited Frothingham as instruction to toss challenges to federal laws by plaintiffs claiming standing because they have to pay taxes to fund the program. But, as legal scholar John M. Alexander has noted, Sutherland’s stress on how unmanageable it would be for courts to hear a case any time any taxpayer balked at any federal law means that the ruling rides on “considerations of administrative convenience” and “should be interpreted as one of self-restraint and not as a constitutional rule.”

In Flast v. Cohen in 1968 the Justices seconded that reading, saying that lower courts had been too restrained in using their powers, too sweepingly interpreting what Frothingham means. Flast leaves in place the ban on most taxpayer suits, but not all.

The Flast ruling came in a challenge to parts of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act giving aid to students in parochial as well as public schools. Just as the Maternity Act cited in Frothingham was the first federal social welfare venture, the 1965 law was Washington’s first foray into educational policy, long an exclusively local concern. Florence Flast, president of the United Parents Association of New York City, led seven plaintiffs calling the payment provision for parochial schools a violation of the First Amendment demand that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Lower courts had rejected the suit, citing Frothingham, but Chief Justice Earl Warren, with only one dissenter, essentially divided taxpayer challenges to Congressional actions into two groups. Warren explained that the Frothingham ban applies only to claims that Congress has exceeded powers given in Article I. But, Flast establishes, simply paying taxes is enough to get into court with a claim that a law violates a specific constitutional limit on Congressional power. H

FROTHINGHAM WAS THE FIRST TIME THE COURT RULED ON WHETHER TAXPAYER STATUS WAS ENOUGH TO CHALLENGE A FEDERAL LAW.

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PRESTIGE WITHOUT POWER George Washington, Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other luminaries. Her life offers a rare window seat—the perspective of an unusually privileged American woman of her time, including the abrupt losses even her comfortable class experienced as a result of illness, bankruptcy, political strife, and financial instability following the Revolution.

Like an American Jane Austen with an eye for politics, Warren entertained readers with the transparently satirical names she hung on colonial officials—Simple, Hateall, and Rapatio, to list three—and metaphorical verse suffused with moral judgment. Warren was extraordinarily well read because her prosperous farmer, businessman, and lawyer father, James Otis of Plymouth, Massachusetts, had allowed her to be tutored along with her two older brothers. Second among her prominent patrons was her brother James, a well-known lawyer and orator who in urging American independence had promoted the phrase

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As an American colonial and a woman, Mercy Otis Warren had no formal political power, before or after the break with Britain. But Warren could wield a pen, and with the support of encouraging men established herself as a founding mother amid founding fathers. Such paradoxes and reversals of fortune pepper her life. Warren was the anonymous author of persuasive satirical spurs to the Patriot cause; John Adams recruited her for her talent but later castigated her for how she depicted him in her three-volume history of the American Revolution, the first historical account of that event by a woman and the only version to allude to the rape of American women by British soldiers and American loyalists. She encouraged the establishment of an independent republic, afterward coming to decry the greed, speculation, and corruption that flowered in revolution’s wake. As powerfully as Warren pushed for American liberty and an independent republic, she never advocated explicitly for women’s rights or suffrage, though she recognized the harm of slavery and the ruin visited upon indigenous Americans. She raised five sons and outlived three. Charles died in Spain while seeking to improve his health in 1785; her favorite, wayward Winslow, died in a disastrous 1791 battle with the Miami tribe in what is now Ohio; and her youngest, Henry, died from illness in Augusta, Maine, in 1800. Warren enjoyed a long friendship and correspondence with esteemed English historian Catherine Macaulay and though she never left eastern Massachusetts exchanged letters with

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Truly a World Turned Upside Down For the Warrens and their class, victory at Yorktown, left, began a progression toward independence that included many harrowing personal experiences. “taxation without representation” in 1767. One of his speeches in 1769 provoked an altercation in which he was seriously injured. A blow to his head may or may not have influenced the onset of mental fragility that swept him from the political stage. In any case, Warren credited James Otis as the “first martyr to American freedom,” and felt inspired to take up his cause. The third was her devoted husband, James Warren, a prominent figure in the colonial legislature and a member of the Sons of Liberty who served as Paymaster General and on the Continental Navy Board during the Revolution. The fourth was the irascible John Adams, who was early to laud her gifts.

Warren’s pen promoted independence from Britain and throughout the war, she kept detailed notes and letters. She was likely inspired in her record-keeping by Catharine Macaulay, who in 1763 began an eight-volume History of England from the ascension of James I to That of the Brunswick Line. Macaulay traveled widely and in 1778, at 52, enjoyed a second marriage to a man of 21, a bold step Warren loyally defended, noting that a similar choice by a man would never even face reproach.

Warren figured in the 1791 adoption of the Bill of Rights. Opposing the strong central government proposed in the Constitution, she pressed for changes in 1788, including protection of “freedom of conscience,” freedom of the press, and trial by jury. On limiting the federal government’s role, she and her husband differed with revolutionary Federalist peers, notably John and Abigail Adams. For years the couples had been close, but John Adams’s appointment as a diplomat in Europe and 1797 election to the presidency cooled the friendship, chilled further when Warren ascribed to Adams a “partiality in favor of monarchic government” in her History of the American Revolution, published in 1805 with an impressive array of supporting documents and letters.

The two exchanged sharp letters over six weeks in 1807, then stopped corresponding. To avoid triggeriing objections, Warren had

intended to publish her history only after her death, but antifederalist Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1801 emboldened her.

After the Revolution, the Warrens, like many others, endured losses, not only in the deaths of three children but in property and social standing. Though the couple had largely withdrawn from public life, Mercy Warren did gather works she had published anonymously, along with other poems and writings, into a book published under her own name in 1790. With the Massachusetts politician Elbridge Gerry as intermediary, she mended fences with the Adamses before her death at 86 in 1814.

The privileged Warren, who could not vote yet is recalled as a champion of individual liberty, also warned against allowing the emergence of a governing elite: “That government is instituted for the protection, safety and happiness of the people, and not for the profit, honour, or private interest of any man, family, or class of men.” She hailed the character of everyday Americans, indicated in her use of the word “mediocrity,” at that time a salutatory term referring to ordinary people.

In her history of the Revolution, Warren praised the country’s origins: “But Americans born under no feudal tenure, nurtured in the bosom of mediocrity, educated in the schools of freedom; who have never been used to looking up to any lord of the soil, as how a right by prescription, habit, or hereditary claims, to the property of their flocks, their herds, and their pastures, may easily have been supposed to have grown to maturity with very different ideas, and with a disposition to defend their allodial inheritance to the last moment of their lives.”

On post-Revolutionary America, she rues the changes she sees: “…amidst the rage of accumulations and the taste for expensive pleasures that have since prevailed; a taste that has abolished that mediocrity which once satisfied, and that Mercy Otis Warren contentment which long smiled in every countenance.”

Like Benjamin Franklin, Warren worried about the republic’s fragility and feared that the “daring system of inhabitants of the United States might be lost or forgotten in a growing rabiosity for monarchy.” In a remarkable passage sketching the displacement of native inhabitants, she took a long view, perhaps engendered by her own distance and exclusion from the halls of power: “…the rivers of blood through which mankind generally wade to empire and greatness must draw out the tear of compassion, and every sympathetic bosom will commiserate the sufferings of the whole human race, either friends or foes, whether dying by the sword, sickness or remorse under the splendid canopy reared by their own guilty hands.” H

the warrens had been close with the adamses during the revolution, but that connection came to fray in peacetime.

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Hanging Offense George Washington and the André dilemma

By Peter R. Henriques

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ajor General Benedict Arnold’s 1780 plot to surrender the American fortifications and garrison at West Point to the British, one of the Revolution’s most dramatic episodes, nearly succeeded. Arnold’s treasonous undertaking failed thanks to a remarkable convergence of events—events that many, including General George Washington, could explain only as divine intervention. “In no instance since the commencement of the war has the interposition of Providence appeared more conspicuous than in the rescue of the post and garrison of West Point from Arnold’s villainous perfidy,” he said later. Scrutiny reveals the sequence’s more mundane logic, whose conflicted outcome severely tested Washington.

Predators and Prey?

Some say the British agent ran afoul of Americans more intent on crime than security.

British commanding General Sir Henry Clinton first negotiated terms with Arnold through ciphers and intermediaries, then insisted on a face-to-face meeting between a trusted subordinate and the turncoat. Clinton wanted to ascertain that Arnold’s proposition was not a ruse to set up Crown forces for an ambush. The Briton he assigned to vet the supposed turncoat Arnold and his proposal was Major John André, barely 30 years old, a dashing adjutant general Sir Henry held in much the same esteem as Washington held the Marquis de Lafayette.

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accomplished, well educated, and by many accounts charismatic. He spoke fluent German and French—his parents were wealthy Huguenots, his mother a Parisienne—and was schooled in painting, music, and verse.

He wrote poetry. Over the years a composite portrait has evolved of a charming, gentlemanly warrior.

Historian Nathaniel Philbrick is not buying it. Philbrick sees in André a bloodthirsty and ambitious careerist who “developed a chameleon-like talent for ingratiating himself with whoever might be useful to him.” There was “an edgier, even ruthless side to the British captain,” Philbrick maintains, noting that André was present at the Paoli Massacre in 1777 when British troops attacked Americans led by General Anthony Wayne. The historian quotes André as writing afterward that the British troops put “to the bayonet all they came up with and, overtaking the main herd of the fugitives, stabbed great numbers [of them]. He noted they were “stabbed… till it was thought prudent to…desist.”

There is no doubting André’s ambition. He had been involved in negotiations with Arnold from the beginning and wanted to guide them to a successful conclusion. The capture of West Point and its 4,000-man garrison could well be the turning point of the war—and of his career. As Hessian

the british officer displayed “an edgier, even ruthless side,” historian Nathaniel Philbrick says, attributing to andre a “chameleon-like” personality.

Clinton

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André

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Arnold

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Captain Johann Ewald said, “If this affair had had a successful result, it would have put an end to the war, preserved the thirteen great and beautiful provinces for the Crown of England, and made Major André immortal.”

André won his commander’s grudging approval to travel from New York City to the British warship Vulture, anchored in the Hudson about 14 miles downstream from Arnold’s headquarters. Clinton made clear that André was not to be out of his uniform or to go behind enemy lines. André made the trip on a small boat, arriving aboard Vulture on September 20.

After several false starts, on the evening of September 21, 1780, Arnold sent associate Joshua Hett Smith to Vulture. Smith brought a pass signed

by General Arnold assuring the safety of one “John Anderson.” André was to pose as “Anderson,” ostensibly a merchant conducting business involving the residence at West Point of loyalist William Robinson, whose home was serving as Arnold’s headquarters. André, his regimentals scarcely covered by a large blue greatcoat, accompanied Smith as two oarsmen ferried them to the west bank of the Hudson. Arnold was waiting on shore with

In Harm’s Way Seamen from Vulture row “Anderson” ashore to keep his appointment with destiny. horses to escort the men several miles to Belmont, Smith’s house, for the final negotiations. It was already the wee hours of Thursday, September 22. Arnold’s and André’s conversation while Smith was in another room is lost to history.

Besides locking in Arnold’s price, André obtained from the American details on West Point’s defenses. For whatever reason, the negotiations were lengthy, and daybreak was near when they finished.

At this point things went awry. Vulture was no longer within rowing range, having been driven

Riding for a Fall Anecdote has Arnold, left, urging his coconspiratorr to stow diagrams of West Point in his boot.

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Going on the Lam Inadvertently alerted, Benedict Arnold had the presence of mind to hie himself out of danger by getting to the British warhip Vulture, anchored in the Hudson below West Point.

Top, the bogus pass that André carried.

André continued alone for approximately 30 miles. Near Tarrytown on Friday, September 23, three armed civilian roughnecks accosted him.

One wore a green shirt of the style favored by Hessians fighting for the Crown. Guessing he had stumbled upon compatriots, André admitted to being with the British.

He could not have made a bigger mistake.

Later hailed as heroes by some and painted as brigands by others, John Paulding, Isaac Van Wort, and David Williams were perhaps both.

The trio apparently had thought at first to rob their quarry, but when they discovered Arnold’s maps in his boot, they refused the Englishman’s offer of a bribe and took him and his bogus pass to the American authorities. Apprised of possible monkeyshines, the slow-thinking officer they consulted, a Lieutenant Colonel Jameson, sent a message to Arnold that someone was using passes in his name, enough of an alert to give Arnold time to flee to Vulture.

André was conveyed under heavy guard to

Washington

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several miles downstream by patriot batteries on Teller Point that unaccountably opened fire on the ship. The impetus might have been the actions of Jack Peterson, a Black patriot soldier, who with a companion fired on a Vulture bumboat, killing at least one oarsman.

Denied a watery route to safety, André had to make for New York City, roughly fifty miles south, by land. This meant traveling behind enemy lines while carrying incriminating documents. Arnold insisted that André don one of Smith’s coats to cover his uniform and wrote passes for use by André and Smith who, with his body servant, was to guide André back to New York City via British-held White Plains. The pass André carried read, “Permit Mr. John Anderson to pass the guard to the White Plains or below, if he chooses, he being on public business for me.”

Not until very late in the afternoon of September 22 did André and his companions begin their trek. They crossed the Hudson River at King’s Ferry and made their way east and south toward New York City, passing several patriot positions and spending a restless night sharing a single bed. The following morning, as the three were approaching Piney Bridge, Smith dropped a bombshell. He declared he was turning back, likely for fear of the territory ahead. Smith went with the Briton as far as Piney Bridge.

Hamilton

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guessing that he was in the company of fellows who were siding with the crown, André said he was with the british, and brought woe upon himself.

Washington’s headquarters, then at the residence of a family named Robinson. There is no evidence that Washington interviewed the prisoner. Next André was taken to Tappan, a town where the main American army was camped. The patriots confined André in Mabie’s Tavern, at the foot of a steep hill in Tappan, for less than a week before a 14-member military court presided over by Major General Nathaniel Greene tried him.

Down by the River The bucolic location of the Smith house belied its strategic and tactical importance.

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As a prisoner André completely captivated Americans with whom he had contact. His chief guard, Benjamin Tallmadge, declared, “I can remember no instance where my affections were so fully absorbed in any man.” about Arnold. He desperately wanted Arnold to Alexander Hamilton waxed poetic in describing André. “To an excelpay mortally for his treachery. lent understanding well improved by education and travel, he Through unofficial channels Washunited a peculiar elegance of mind and manners, and the advanington made clear to Clinton that to tage of a pleasing person,” Hamilton wrote. “His knowledge save his beloved André the British appeared without ostentation, and embellished by a diffidence, commander had to hand over that rarely accompanies so many talents and accomplishArnold. Not wishing to discourage ments. His sentiments were elevated and inspired esteem. other prospective American turnThey had a softness that conciliated affection. His elocution coats, Clinton refused. He warned Washington against putting André was handsome; his address easy and polite.”

But charm was no guarantee against the evidence. The tributo death. “I have not any the least Tallmadge nal voted unanimously to convict the prisoner of espionage. doubt but your Excellency will be cauAndré was slow to realize that Arnold’s treachery was going to cost tious of putting to Death an Officer of him his life. When he did grasp his situation, he had only one request— the British Army under my command,” that he be shot like a soldier, not hanged, the disgraceful end reserved for spies, traitors, and their ilk. “Buoy’d above the Terror of Death by the Consciousness of a Life devoted to honorable pursuits and Stained with no Action that can give me Remorse,” André wrote to Washington. “I trust the request I make to your Excellency at this Serious period and which is to Soften my last moments will not be rejected.”

His prisoner’s request presented Washington with a dilemma. The general’s animus was personal and aimed at Arnold, not at André. Washington had trusted and supported Arnold, rewarding him with the command at West Point, only to have the man respond with “treason of the darkest dye,” a betrayal that cut the general to the quick. Washington prided himself on his ability to judge men, and it mortified him to have been so wrong

Non-Negotiable After the trial, left, Washington wrote, above, to British counterpart Clinton seeking to swap his condemned prisoner for the turncoat Arnold but Clinton was unwilling to make a deal.

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Long, Lonely Walk First-hand accounts describe the prisoner as recoiling in horror before going to his death at the top of a hill, below, with a measure of dignity and soldierly forbearance.

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The facts were compelling. André had not come ashore under a flag of truce, a fact he acknowledged. He was engaged in espionage, and he had been captured behind enemy lines out of his military uniform with incriminating documents, making him a spy and not a prisoner of war. The accepted punishment for espionage was the ignominy of death by hanging. Washington concluded he had no other option.

By all accounts, André’s execution was an emotionally charged event that left an indelible impact on those present.

The sentence was carried out before thousands of Continental Army troops at Tappan on October 2, a day later than planned due to a lastditch British proposal which proved unacceptable. Military surgeon Dr. James Thacher recalled that upon seeing the gallows on the hill overlooking Mabie’s Tavern from which he was to hang, André recoiled. “I am reconciled to my fate,” he said. “But not to the mode.” André knew hanging to be a gruesome end, often involving loss of bowel control, an affront to his soldierly sensibilities and dignity.

Quickly collecting himself, the doomed man added, “It will be but a momentary pang,” according to eyewitness Thacher. “Springing upon the cart [André] performed the last offices to himself with a composure that excited the admiration and melted the hearts of the beholders,” he wrote. “Upon being told the final moment was at hand, and asked if he had anything to say, he answered: ‘nothing, but to request you will witness to the world, that I die like a brave man.’”

The hanging outraged the british. For the rest of his days Clinton burned with anger over Washington’s refusal to spare Andre’s life.

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Clinton wrote. “And I am perfectly convinced of the real humanity which governs your conduct on all occasions and it will assuredly lead you, Sir, to not suffer too sudden an operation of so violent a measure.”

“When I saw him swinging under the gibbet, it seemed for a time as if I could not support it,” Tallmadge recalled. “All of the spectators seemed to be overwhelmed by the affecting spectacle, and many were suffused by tears. Perhaps no person ever suffered the ignominious death, that was more regretted by officers and soldiers of every rank in our army.”

In Lafayette’s words, André “behaved with so much frankness, courage and delicacy” that one could not help but lament his fate.

André’s execution outraged the British. Clinton never overcame his anger at Washington for the hanging. “The horrid deed is done W has committed premeditated murder, he must Answer for the dreadful Consequences,” Clinton wrote. In a memoir, Clinton asserted that Washington “burnt with a desire of wreaking his vengeance . . . And consequently, regardless of the acknowledged worth and abilities of the amiable young man who had thus fallen into his hands, and in opposition to every principle of policy

Seward

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and call of humanity, he without remorse put him to a most ignominious death.”

André’s close friend, Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe, excoriated Washington. “It is my most ardent hope, that on the close of some decisive victory, it will be the regiment’s fortune to secure the murderers of Major André, for the vengeance due to an insulted nation, and an insulted army,” Simcoe wrote. “It has fixed an indelible stain on General Washington’s character—a stain which no time can efface. . . His name will be transmitted to posterity with this hateful circumstance—that he was the unrelenting MURDERER of Major André.”

Hamilton was among patriots critical of Washington’s decision to hang André. “I must inform you that I urged a compliance with André‘s request to be shot, and I do not think it would have had an ill effect; but some people are only sensible to motives of policy, and sometimes from a narrow disposition mistake it,” Hamilton wrote on October 2 in a letter to his fiancée, Elizabeth Schuyler. “When André’s tale comes to be told, and present resentment is over, the refusing him the privilege of choosing [the] manner of death will be branded with too much obduracy.”

Washington did not lightly send André up that hill in Tappan. Always a stickler for protocol, he felt he had no choice. “It was the duty of General Washington to see that sentiment did not prompt leniency toward a man engaged in the most dangerous conspiracy the war had hatched,” a prominent historian wrote.

Washington held André in high personal regard, viewing him more as a victim of misfortune than as a guilty party. He wrote to but never

interviewed André. Not wanting his prisoner to dwell any longer than need be on the grotesquerie of his demise, Washington pointedly did not answer a letter from the accused requesting to be shot.

Following the hanging, the General wrote, “André has met his fate, and with that fortitude which was to be expected from an accomplished man and gallant officer.” Nephew Bushrod Washington later wrote, “On perhaps no other occasion in his life did Washington obey with more reluctance the stern mandates of duty and policy.”

Washington was inordinately sensitive to criticism, and one riposte to his handling of the André matter struck him hard. Among the most widely circulated commentaries on the incident was “Monody on Major André,” a poem by celebrated British poetess Anna Seward, a friend of fellow poet André. The first stanza reads, “Oh WASHINGTON! I thought thee great and good,/ Nor knew thy Nero—thirst of guiltless blood!/ Severe to use the pow’r that Fortune gave,/ Thou cool determin’d Murderer of the Brave!/.”

In an 1802 recollection, Anna Seward made a surprising claim that has the ring of truth. In a letter she explained that after the Revolution Washington sent an aide to see her in Britain. The man presented his hostess with copies of letters Washington had written to André during his brief captivity and André’s replies in the dead man’s own hand.

“Concern, esteem, and pity, were avowed in those of the General, and warm entreaties that he would urge General Clinton to resign Arnold in exchange for himself, as the only means to avert that sacrifice which the laws of war demanded,” Seward continued. “Washington did me the honor to charge his aide-de-camp to assure me, that no circumstance of his life had given him so much pain as the necessary sacrifice of André’s life, and that next to that deplored event, the censure passed upon himself in a poem which he admired, and for which he loved the author; also to express his hope, that, whenever I reprinted the Monody, a note might be added, which should tend to acquit him of that imputed inexorable and cruel severity which had doomed to ignominious death a gallant and amiable prisoner of war.”

History came to judge André and Washington as honorable. André is memorialized at Westminster Abbey, Washington, as the father of his country. Each did what he believed to be his duty. There is honor in that. H

In Memoriam John André’s remains lie in repose at Westminster Abbey, a resting place that Britain reserves for its most honored dead.

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Slavery at Sea

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A stand-off between sailors and captain on a lumber transport helped change seamen’s legal status

By Richard J. Goodrich

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Wood Ship, Not Free and Easy Four-masted barkentine Arago being tended by tug Traveler on the Hoquiam River in Washington in the early 1890s.

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n the afternoon of June 11, 1895, the four-masted barkentine Arago was approaching the bar at the mouth of the Columbia River. Sailors reefed the ship’s foresails while others secured a hawser that had been cast across from the tugboat that was idling nearby. Once the heavy line was aboard, the tugboat crew engaged their vessel’s propeller, and, with black coal smoke boiling from the tug’s stubby stack, towed the 176-foot barkentine upriver to the waterfront mill in Knappton, Washington. Captain Frank Perry and his crew intended to spend the rest of June in Knappton, stacking freshly sawn lumber in Arago’s holds. The freight was headed for Valparaiso, Chile, 7,000 miles south. These voyages demanded sturdy vessels and happy crews to battle the ferocious winds, savage weather, and a reef-studded shore that ate ships. Arago’s crew was far from happy.

That dissatisfaction would precipitate a constitutional crisis and force Americans to reconsider maritime laws that limited a seaman’s rights.

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The crew tied Arago alongside the Simpson Lumber Mill in Knappton, five miles across the river from Astoria, Oregon.

Night arrived. As an ebb tide chuckled through the mill wharf pilings, four crewmen—Robert Robertson, John Bradley, Philip Olsen, and Morris Hansen—slipped ashore and vanished. The four had not enjoyed the trip from San Francisco. They claimed that Captain Perry was a harsh taskmaster, a quarterdeck tyrant, and they had no intention of sailing with him to Chile. “The captain felt sure that he had us,” wrote Robert Robertson in a letter home. “On the trip he fed us on salt horse and bulldozed

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sailors still were laboring under U.S. laws adopted from ancient British precedent that shackled seamen to their ships.

When four sailors from Arago tried to desert, they were arrested, jailed, and ultimately returned to their ship, whereupon they were charged with desertion and mutiny.

The case, which went t0 the U.S. Supreme Court, showed that not all workers in the United States had escaped the bonds of indentured servitude.

Legislators, responding to public outrage and effective pressure from union leader Andrew Furuseth, crafted new laws to address this inequity, freeing sailors from their legal chains.

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They Just Said, “No!” The Arago Four—Robertson, Bradley, Olsen, and Hansen— found a staunch ally in union man Andrew Furuseth, right.

Board by Board Lumber ships’ holds had to be loaded by hand, a monotonous process fraught with the risk of injury.

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“Second mate Gerdes beat a seaman, smith; knocked him down and kicked him nearly to death,” the seaman’s union reported.

us. We went to him and told him that since we did not suit him, he had better pay us what was coming to us. This he refused to do, so we left him and our money at the first opportunity.”

Robertson cited food quality—“salt horse” was meat, usually beef or pork, preserved in salt and stored in large casks—but the desertion probably traced to a steady onboard diet of unnecessary bullying and intimidation. “Bulldozing,” a slavetrade legacy, originally had referred to a whipping harsh enough to severely injure or even kill—a “dose” of discipline suitable for a bull. In the late 1800s that meaning expanded to include the hazing, harassment, and intimidation that a master was free to heap upon slaves or a captain upon sailors who could not fight back.

The four unhappy Arago crewmen decided to run. Since towns around the Columbia River’s mouth lacked overland connections to the interior, the four crossed to Astoria, Oregon, hoping to find a ship that would bear them away. When the men were reported missing, Captain Perry alerted the Astoria authorities. Deputy U. S. Marshal Richard Stuart had no difficulty apprehending the Arago deserters.

The next morning, United States Commissioner Clifton R. Thompson listened to the runaways’ side, but when the four admitted to having signed shipping articles—employment contracts binding on signatories until a vessel reached its final destination—Thompson remanded them to the Astoria jail, there to remain until Arago was ready to cast off.

Land-based workers could escape brutal treatment by quitting their jobs. A scrappy logger might take a poke at a hard-driving foreman with little fear of consequences. Not so a sailor, who was constrained by his trade’s unique laws and traditions. Centuries-old regulations governed life afloat and denied seamen rights that were ubiquitous ashore. The right to act in one’s self-defense, for example, ended at the coastline. Sailors were

not permitted to fight back against superiors, even when assaulted. A captain could strike a seaman, but a seaman who raised a fist in self-defense stood liable to be charged with mutiny. The Coast Seamen’s Journal, the weekly newspaper of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, highlighted this inequity in the “Red Record,” an ongoing series documenting abuse.

For example, aboard the vessel Reaper: “Second mate Gerdes beat a seaman, Smith; knocked him down and kicked him nearly to death. Smith was confined to his bunk for ten days. Then he was compelled to come on deck and go aloft. A sudden lurch of the vessel threw him to the deck, and he was killed. It was reported Smith was too weak to hold on. Case brought before the Commissioner at Astoria and dismissed.”

Along with self-defense, the maritime code forbade running away. In 1790, the First Congress of the United States enacted laws that shackled a seaman to his vessel. Section 4598 of the Revised Statutes of the United States (18731874) stated that if a sailor signed a contract to perform a voyage and then left his ship “at any port or place,” that vessel’s master could have local police arrest the deserter. Jumping ship was a criminal offense. The law enjoined local authorities to commit the runaway sailor “to the house of correction or common jail of the city, town, or place, to remain there until the vessel shall be ready to proceed on her voyage.” Nineteenth-century legislation complicated and confused the matter. An 1872 federal law created FEBRUARY 2022 35

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shipping commissioners, officials who oversaw all matters related to the trade. This law confirmed the treatment of deserters, but a law passed in 1874 excluded ships sailing on the Great Lakes or between U. S. harbors from commission jurisdiction and appeared to nullify the laws against desertion for all except sailors on international voyages.

In 1890, trying to placate shipowners, Congress passed a law reinstating criminal charges if a deserter had signed his shipping articles in front of a Shipping Commissioner. The 1896 Maguire Act attempted to reassign certain freedoms to seamen, but few sailors aboard Arago understood which laws applied when the ship got to Knappton. Captain Perry, Commissioner Thompson, and Deputy Marshal Stuart believed themselves to have been acting correctly.

The four miscreants spent 16 days behind bars while Arago took on lumber. On June 29, the barkentine was ready to depart for Valparaiso.

Marshal Stuart loaded the four seamen aboard the tug that was to assist the Arago across the bar. Once the tug and Arago reached midstream, Stuart released Robertson, Olsen, Hansen, and Bradley into Captain Perry’s custody. Perry ordered the quartet to “turn to,” meaning “Get to work.” The sailors sat on the deck and ignored his commands. Their detention had been illegal,

they claimed, and they refused to work. Perry was furious. He placed the men in irons and locked them in Arago’s hold.

The quartet’s intransigence meant the rest of Arago’s crew had to stand extra watches as the ship headed south. Realizing that he couldn’t sail to Chile shorthanded, Perry decided to anchor at San Francisco, offload the troublemakers, and sign replacements. News of the rebellion had preceded the ship. As Arago approached the city on July 7, 1895, a large crowd gathered on the docks. The fatigued crew nearly went aground on the rocks of the South Channel, but a passing tug threw a line and guided the barkentine to an anchorage off Meiggs Wharf.

Captain Perry ran a police flag up the mast, signaling a request for assistance. Two officers of the San Francisco Harbor Police rowed out and took custody of the disgruntled sailors. Since the four had refused to obey his orders while under way, Captain Perry insisted on adding “mutiny on the high seas” to the charge of desertion.

The incident appeared on its face to be a mere shipboard squabble over working conditions, but some San Francisco newspaper reporters considered the dispute’s timing suspicious. Skeptics among the fourth estate wondered if the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific had staged the desertion in order to test the law in court. If that had been the

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congress passed a law reinstating criminal charges if a deserter had signed his shipping articles in front of a shipping commissioner.

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Trials of the Trade Working aboard ship bore scant resemblance to landlubber jobs. Seamen were expected to stay at their tasks amid killer typhoons, rise at ungodly hours to stand watches, and under duress be ready to wield an ax to cut a hawser.

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liberty on the ground that they are imprisoned under an old English law, copied almost bodily into the Federal statutes in 1790, a law which it is alleged is contrary to the genius of American institutions and to the whole spirit of modern civilization.”

District Attorney Henry S. Foote countered that a marine contract differed substantially and significantly from one executed on land. To protect shipowners, legislators had to require sailors to fulfill their contracts, argued Foote. Absent this assurance, ships would be unable to operate.

Sailors could quit at will, stranding vessels in remote ports and creating an economic hardship for masters and owners. case, the Arago episode would have just been one more battle in the ongoOn July 30, Judge William W. Morrow denied ing war between shipowners and the union. a writ of habeas corpus, declaring that the recalThat conflict began when sailors first organized on March 5, 1885, in citrant sailors must stand trial for mutiny and desertion. San Francisco shipowners response to a drastic pay cut. A year later, shippers countered, forming the Shipowners’ Association, an anti-union alliance. filled the courtroom gallery.

A decade on, the owners were ascendant: whenever possiWhen “the court intimated ble, they blackballed union sailors. The few union men that the men had been lawfully who did win berths afloat were compelled to sign their arrested and put on board the shipping articles in the presence of a Shipping Commisbarkentine at Astoria,” the San sioner. As more seamen acceded to the owners, memFrancisco Call wrote, “there bership in the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific declined to was a sigh of relief from the less than a quarter of its 1885 tally. Secretary Andrew merchants.” Sensible views Furuseth, the union’s leader, desperately needed to had prevailed in the confronshow the sailors that the union could improve their lot. tation’s first round.

Questioned about Arago, Furuseth denied that the Harry Hutton appealed to William Morrow men had acted with premeditation, declaring them victims the U.S. Supreme Court. of the blatant injustice that dogged every man who earned The justices heard Robertson v. his living afloat. There was no need to prearrange an incident, Baldwin on December 15, 1896. On the union boss said—it could have happened at any time. The SailJanuary 25, 1897, voting 8-1, the justices ors’ Union of the Pacific would stand with these men, working to secure confirmed the lower court’s ruling denying justice for every sailor, he declared. habeas corpus. Justice Henry Brown wrote for The union hired attorney Harry W. Hutton, who filed to have the the majority, “The contract of a sailor has always charges against the four dismissed. After a preliminary hearing, U.S. Com- been treated as an exceptional one, and involvmissioner Edwin H. Heacock scotched Hutton’s motion. He set defen- ing to a certain extent the surrender of his perdants’ bail at $50 apiece; when the men pleaded indigence, he ordered sonal liberty during the life of the contract.” The them into the Alameda County jail. Hoping to secure his clients’ release, requirement that “seamen carry out the conHutton filed a federal writ of habeas corpus claiming Marshal Stuart had tracts contained in their shipping articles, are illegally detained and returned the sailors to Arago. The shipping laws that not in conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment made desertion a criminal offense violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s forbidding slavery and involuntary servitude, prohibition of involuntary servitude, the defense attorney said. and it cannot be open to doubt that the proviIn fact, Hutton argued, Congress had no more right to punish sailors for sion against involuntary servitude was never leaving a ship than it had to punish any man who walked away from a job. intended to apply to such contracts.”

An owner could sue a worker who failed to fulfill his contractual obligaInterpretation of the phrase “involuntary sertions, but he couldn’t have him arrested and jailed. Breach of contract was vitude,” argued Justice Brown, stood at the cena civil, not a criminal matter. “If the sailors wanted to break their contracts, ter of the issue. A slave was unwillingly forced they had a right to do so,” Hutton said. “The law which says they cannot do into service; a sailor, like a soldier, entered serso is an arbitrary one, and it deprives men of their liberty.” vice freely. Both sailors and soldiers chose to The accused sailors, wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, “seek their renounce certain rights when they joined an FEBRUARY 2022 37

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Punitive Precedent The history of navies maintaining order with flogging was carried into civilian tradition.

could be abused, beaten, starved, and forced to work under horrific conditions. They could not jump ship, even when desertion did not imperil a vessel. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, a sailor signed away these rights any time that he initialed a set of sailing articles. “It is better to know that hereafter when a seaman signs articles to go on a voyage, he is a slave until the captain and shipowners have no more use for him,” wrote Robert Robertson, de facto leader of the Arago deserters. “Before this case was decided, the seamen were laboring under the delusion that they were entitled to the privileges of any other American citizen.”

The Supreme Court ruling in Robertson v.

Baldwin catalyzed outrage in San Francisco. As shipowners celebrated, Furuseth and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific plotted. When organizers asked the union to participate in San Francisco’s Fourth of July celebration, Furuseth declared, “The spectacle of a slave worshiping his chains would be less ludicrous than that of the American seamen celebrating Independence Day.” Blocked by the Supreme Court, Furuseth realized that sailors’ only recourse was to lobby to change the law. In 1898, U.S. Representative James Maguire (D-California) and U.S. Senator Stephen White (D-California)

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UC BERKELEY, BANCROFT LIBRARY; COURTESY OF SANTA CLARA COLLEGE

The high court’s decision was a blow to the defendants as well as to the union cause. The Court affirmed the laws that denied sailors rights which were enjoyed by citizens ashore. Sailors

“When a seaman signs articles to go on a voyage, he is a slave until the captain and shipowners have no more use for him,” said Robinson.

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organization, whether a ship or an army, a voluntary decision not open to a slave.

For the sake of national security and safety at sea, it was essential that sailors and soldiers remain at their posts until released from duty by their superiors, Brown wrote. By their very nature, these vocations could not tolerate desertion. Where would a country be if a soldier fled the battle or a sailor refused to do his duty in a time of peril, the justice asked.

Finally, noted Brown, the maritime laws in question had long enjoyed the imprimatur of antiquity. Precedent stretched far back to the ancient constitutions governing the Mediterranean island nation of Rhodes. Laws conceived before the common era stipulated severe penalties for crewmen who deserted their ships. The entire history of maritime law argued against a sailor’s right to desert, Brown wrote.

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Permission Denied The White Act forbade local police forces to drag runaway seamen back to the vessels they had left.

introduced a bill to address federal maritime law’s more egre- had already spent more than 200 days in jail and would be credited with time served, the district attorney may have gious aspects. This legislation, eventually known as the decided that prosecution was pointless. After their White Act, amended the U.S. Code to allow sailors moment of notoriety, the four returned to the to leave ships without obtaining a captain’s obscurity that cloaked the existences of so approval. Deserters could forfeit unpaid salary many transient seamen. and their possessions, but no longer could Besides leading to legislative reforms, captains use the police to drag runaways the Arago case also taught two important back to their ships. The White Act upheld lessons. Sailors learned the utility of pubthe premise that a sailor could not strike lic sympathy in the pursuit of an equitable an officer—a transgression that remained working environment. punishable by two years of imprisonment—but leveled the deck by outlawing San Franciscans and people across the corporal punishment. A captain could no country pressured legislators to address longer strike or flog a crewman—any officer the injustice highlighted by Robertson v.

Stephen M. White violating the prohibition risked a misdeBaldwin. The cause advanced quickly when meanor charge, punishable by three months the winds of public opinion filled its sails. to two years behind bars.

Seamen also discovered the power of collective action—the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, after It is not clear what happened to the four sailors who years of declining enrollment, proved itself able to precipitated these reforms. Robertson, Bradley, Olsen, and achieve results. As independent sailors returned to the union, Hansen spent nine months in the Alameda County jail before it became more effective with management, and, by 1910, had being released on their own recognizance. The penalty for grown into one of the largest and most powerful labor unions desertion at this time was 200 days in jail and the forfeiture of on the Pacific coast. Andrew Furuseth—still described in four days’ pay. After the Supreme Court rejected the sailors’ union annals as the “Abraham Lincoln of the sea”—welded a appeal for habeas corpus, the San Francisco Call noted that growing membership into a powerful coalition that achieved the men were to stand trial for their actions, but no subse- legislative reform, economic justice, and safer workplaces for quent reporting shows that trial taking place. Since the men those who risk their lives at sea. H FEBRUARY 2022 39

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PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO CREDIT

Moment of Impact The McKinley shooting, here fancifully rendered by an Italian illustrator, was the point from which photographers measured backwards in gauging their images’ value.

Final Frames Many photographers working around Buffalo that awful Thursday thought they had made the last image of William McKinley alive and well

By Tyler Bagwell

O PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO CREDIT

n the afternoon of Thursday, September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was in Buffalo, New York, shaking hands with well-wishers at the Pan American Exposition when an assassin shot him. The gunman, an unemployed factory worker, had been following McKinley for two days. Gravely wounded, McKinley fought for eight days to stay alive. The president’s much-ballyhooed presence at the inland port had attracted numerous camera wielders, professional and amateur. After McKinley died many of those photographers believed they had made the last exposure before the fatal moment.

Photography had come a long way. In 1827, when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made a study of a street in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, that he titled Le point de vue du Gras (“View from the Window at Les Gras)”, his camera’s shutter, which made an image by letting light strike photosensitive material, had had to stay open for hours; anything in frame that moved appeared in the resulting print as a blur. Over decades exposure times shrank to minutes, but photographic portraitists’ subjects still had to keep deathly still, sometimes using armatures. As early as the 1850s, however, leaps in technology and technique were making possible faster exposure times and more natural-seeming images.

Thomas Skaife’s Pistolgraph pioneered the concept that smaller lenses and image areas, requiring less light, could further shrink exposure times. Skaife’s use of wet plates and smaller negatives had this effect. His camera suggested a handgun, with the lens for a barrel, a resemblance said to have caused his arrest while he was attempting to photograph Queen Victoria with a Pistolgraph. Loading and processing glass and metal plates and sheet film, which required noxious solutions and total darkness, remained cumbersome and costly. Plates had to be inserted and removed from the camera one by one and, until processed, always shielded from light.

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had run out. Roll film obtained its flexibility from nitrocellulose, or guncotton. In 1888 Eastman founded a company to mass-produce his cameras and the roll film they used, and also to process the results into negatives and prints. Eastman named his company after himself and dubbed his box camera the “Kodak” because that nonsense word could be pronounced in any language. Customers mailed exposed film in the camera to Eastman Kodak, receiving in return prints, negatives, and another camera loaded with film and ready to use. “You press the button,” Kodak advertised. “We do the rest.” Camera sales and use soared as Americans took up this new and exciting activity as a hobby or as a profession.

One hobbyist was Buffalo resident Hermann A. Brunn, 26, who on Wednesday, September 5, 1901, had gotten out his camera to do a favor for his uncle. Henry Brunn was Buffalo’s leading coach builder and his nephew’s employer. For the duration of William and Ida McKinley’s two-day visit, Brunn Carriage Manufacturing Co. was loaning the presidential party a horse-drawn landau painted a deep wine red with upholstery to match.

The carriage maker’s nephew assigned himself to document this coup for posterity. “I was very much interested in amateur photography,” Brunn later told the Buffalo Courier Express. “It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to secure a picture of President McKinley in our carriage.”

At the renowned stable on the grounds of Buffalo businessman and horse breeder Harry Hamlin’s home on Delaware Avenue, Brunn learned from coachman James McGee where and when the landau driver was to fetch his famous passengers. “Knowing the police would be on guard I went to No. 6 Police Station and through Sergeant Hurley obtained permission to pass the lines of police with my camera,” Brunn told the paper.

The McKinleys, nearing the end of a transcontinental round trip, had arrived the night before by train at the railway station located at the northern end of the Exposition grounds. They were the house guests of Exposition president John G. Milburn, who also lived on Delaware Avenue, less than two miles from the fairgrounds. A little before 10 a.m. on Wednesday, September 5, young Brunn, camera in hand, was teetering atop a stepladder across Delaware Avenue from the Milburn residence. Mrs. McKinley, carrying a parasol, was stepping out through the front door when a file of mounted police officers moved into position, obstructing Brunn’s view. He abandoned his ladder. Edging between horsemen, he stepped into the middle of the roadbed, observed by Secret Service agent George Foster,

Thursday was dedicated to the urgent official leisure that presidential visits often occasioned.

Thursday morning’s Buffalo Courier Express

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LESLIE’S WEEKLY

Out for a Ride Herman Brunn captured McKinley departing host John Milburn’s house that morning.

Deemed “President’s Day,” September 5 was the focal point of the leader’s visit, centered around a speech he gave that afternoon in the center of the Exposition grounds. An estimated 50,000 people attended the event, often referred to as one of McKinley’s finest orations, in which he spoke of the nation’s “unexampled prosperity” and predicted an end to American isolationism.

There to document the moment was the exposition’s official photographer, Charles D. Arnold.

Arnold, who had had the same role at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, held the photography concession for the Pan American. He enjoyed exclusive rights to photograph on the Exposition grounds. Other photographers on the grounds faced restrictions. “No cameras exceeding four by five inches shall be allowed within the gates,” the rules stated. “Stereoscopic cameras and tripods will not be admitted under any circumstances. The fee for the admission of cameras four by five inches or under will be 50 cents for a day or $1.50 for a week.”

Not a few photographers thought the pickings were good enough to submit to the costs and controls. Famed landscape photographer B.W. Kilburn was there making numerous stereoscopic images of the President giving his speech.

Motion picture men Edwin S. Porter and James H. White of the Thomas Edison Co. had brought a tripod-mounted spring-driven camera to document the President’s movements at 40 frames per second. Francis Benjamin Johnston had her Kodak No. 4 Bullseye at the ready.

The Washington, DC-based Johnston was working as McKinley’s official photographer, as she had for predecessors Cleveland and Harrison, and also had spent the summer under contract to the Buffalo Express documenting the Exposition. During her boss’s speech Johnston stayed close to the stage, exposing one of the most enduring images of McKinley. When he finished speaking the crowd dispersed.

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assigned to protect the McKinleys.

As Brunn was tripping his shutter, Foster instinctively moved toward the curb. “As I looked into the camera I saw the sun shining on Mr. McKinley’s head,” Brunn said. “He stood hat in hand bowing to the people. The picture shows that the exposure was made at the very moment that Mr. McKinley raised his hat.”

LESLIE’S WEEKLY

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carried McKinley’s schedule, beginning with “8:15 A.M.—The President and party accompanied by mounted escort will drive from the Milburn home.” Across town Leon Czolgosz, who had been boarding for a week at Nowak’s Saloon on Broadway Avenue, read the paper. Czolgosz, an avid consumer of news, had come to Buffalo from Illinois prompted by another article. “Eight days ago, while I was in Chicago, I read in a Chicago newspaper of President McKinley’s visit to the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo,” Czolgosz testified later. “That day I bought a ticket for Buffalo and got here with the determination to do something, but I did not know just what.”

As had been the case on Wednesday, Thursday morning was sunny, prompting Ida McKinley, departing the Milburn house, to deploy her parasol again. Again, her husband, playing to the cameras, smiled and tipped his hat. Among that morning’s lensmen was Robert L. Dunn. Just shy of 27, Dunn had been assigned by Frank Leslie’s Weekly to cover the McKinleys’ excursion from Washington to San Francisco and back. Dunn was a comer. A colleague described him as “American every inch, a Tennessee man, trained in New York, he will do anything, bear anything, go anywhere, to get a beat.”

The McKinleys’ second day in the lakeside city was to consist mostly of a tour of nearby Niagara Falls State Park. From Exposition Railway Station a train would shuttle the couple to Lewiston, miles downstream of the park, where their party would board a rail car carrying them along the scenic gorge route to the falls. At the cataract the guests would ride around the park in a carriage to Prospect and Terrapin Points and other overlooks as well as visit Goat Island, which marks the Canadian-American border at the falls. The president and his entourage would lunch at the nearby International Hotel, then call at a newly built plant harnessing Niagara’s power for electricity. The six-hour circuit was to deliver the McKinleys to the Exposition grounds for a public reception at 4:00 pm.

As the McKinleys were leaving the Milburn house Thursday morning, Dunn framed them yet again. So did John D. Saulsbury of Batavia, New York. Subsequent reports, including one in the Batavia Daily News headlined “John D. Saulsbury Slave to Morphine,” characterized the lensman, who was around 24, as a “soldier,

photographer, electrical engineer, chemist and counterfeiter.” In 1899 Saulsbury had enlisted in the Army Signal Corps. Assigned to cover the Philippine insurrection as a combat photographer, he was taken prisoner by insurgents in Manila. “During my service in the Philippines I took about 27,000 pictures,” Saulsbury recalled. “About 400 of these were on exhibition at the Pan-American Exposition.”

The Exposition originally was to occur in 1899 on Cayuga Island at Niagara Falls but in 1898 the United States had gone to war with Spain, delaying the event. After the war Buffalo challenged Niagara Falls as the Exposition site and won the opportunity thanks to a larger population and superior railroad connections. The rescheduled Exposition occupied 350 acres of farmland north of town. In 1901 Buffalo—the country’s eighth largest city—was reveling in prosperity gained in 75 years as the junction between the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. Location and ambition had made more millionaires per capita there than in any other American city, with Harry Hamlin, John G. Milburn, and others lending Delaware Avenue the sobriquet “Millionaire’s Row,” while at the same time seedy, harborside Canal Street bore the tag “the most dangerous street in the world.”

The city fathers planned the Exposition to showcase their bustling town, America’s Gilded Age, electricity’s promise, and the nation’s martial eminence. The scale meant to impress. “The spectator, as he approaches the Exposition, will see it develop gradually until he reaches the Bridge, when the entire picture will appear before him and almost burst upon him,” head architect John M. Carrère wrote in the 1901 Art Catalogue to the Pan-American Exposition. The main gate led to the Triumphal Bridge and the Court of Fountains, flanked by the ornate Temple of Music and Ethnology Buildings, themselves dwarfed by the 389’ Electric Tower. By night the entirety glowed and buzzed amid spectacularly electric illumination.

Thursday morning President McKinley passed through all that splendor on his way to the Exposition Railway Station to catch his 9 a.m. train to Lewiston. At the rail station gate Leon Czolgosz was waiting, hoping for a chance to get close to the president. “I waited near the central entrance for the President, who was to board his special train from that gate,” he said later. “But the police allowed nobody but the President’s party to pass where the train waited, so I staid [sic] at the grounds all day waiting.”

Won’t You Smile for the Camera James D. Saulsbury froze the president in a moment of enjoyment for Leslie’s Weekly.

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snapshot,” showing a hot-air balloon aloft. The phrase dates to an 1860 article by British inventor John Hershel about “instantaneous photography” in which Hershel repurposed a term hunters employed to mean “a quick shot with a gun, without aim, at a fast-moving target.”

Gilbert D. Brinckerhoff, capitalizing on opportunities created by the Pan American Exposition, was running a chain of souvenir and photography stands on the fairgrounds. He had taken the day off from overseeing his operation to bring his camera on the McKinleys’ Niagara Falls excursion.

He got the first picture of the president at the falls, an image of McKinley stoically staring into the lens from a Great Gorge Route railcar.

Orrin E. Dunlap also had brought a camera to the falls. A writer, historian, and newspaperman who had edited the Niagara Gazette from 1890 to 1895, Dunlap had written extensively on the Falls and electrification. An enthusiast with serious journalistic experience behind the lens, Dunlap

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A Good Start to a Day President and Mrs. McKinley emerge into the morning sunlight from the home of their Buffalo host, local power figure John Milburn.

Aboard a Trolley Gilbert D. Brinckerhoff caught McKinley gazing from a window at the center of a trolley en route to Niagara Falls.

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In Buffalo, Czolgosz’s intentions had solidified.

As of Tuesday he had resolved to kill William McKinley. At Walbridge’s Hardware downtown, he paid $4.50 to purchase a .32-calibre Iver Johnson Safety Hammer Automatic Revolver. He may or may not have trailed the presidential party to Niagara Falls; in any event, it came to him that the 4 p.m. public reception in the Temple of Music would offer him his best shot. The McKinleys arrived in Lewiston with Leslie’s Weekly photographer Dunn, as ever, close by. As the couple was exiting their rail car Dunn exposed a frame. At Dunn’s side and at nearly the same second competitor Jimmy Hare, working for Collier’s Weekly, did the same.

James H. Hare, 45, had grown up in London, England, where he worked for his father. Camera manufacturer George Hare, whose business was large-format tripod-mounted rigs, abhorred the burgeoning trend toward the small, portable “hand cameras’’ that fascinated his son.

Leaving his father’s employ, the younger Hare became a photographer. In 1884, using a hand camera, he made what some refer to as “the first

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made six exposures of McKinley, three of the president with Milburn touring the park adjoining the falls, one as the president was climbing stairs at Goat Island—a moment also captured

by Niagara Falls stationer George S. Cowper— and two in sequence at Prospect Point.

The last frame documented Robert Dunn documenting a conversation involving the President, Exposition president Milburn, and Thomas V. Welch, the first Superintendent of the New York State Reservation at Niagara Falls.

While he and his companions were wandering Goat Island, President McKinley requested that a photo be taken. “Quick as a flash it was taken by Mr. Dunn of ‘Leslie’s Weekly,’ before the word was scarcely uttered,” National magazine wrote later. The picture shows Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson, President McKinley, and John Milburn posing together, as in the background Secret Service man George Foster hovers, peering into the lens.

When the presidential entourage repaired to the International Hotel for a luncheon, Niagara

Falls-based photographer Thomas Smith made three photographs of McKinley. The tour resumed with a circumnavigation of the new Adams Power Station, in which vicinity Dr. William H. Potter, a Niagara Falls dentist, made two photographs of the President and Milburn seated in a carriage at the stone entryway to the power station.

Around 2:45 p.m. the president headed for the train to get to his reception at the Temple of Music but once on the Exposition grounds made a surprise detour to attend a tea at the Old Spanish Mission. Buffalo entrepreneur and exposition board member George K. Birge had invited the President to see the Mission, taking care to get word to White House photographer Johnston to be present with her camera. At the tea, where the President had just enough time to smoke a cigar, Johnston made several pictures. “I never saw him so genial and expansive,” she said. “Miss Johnston caught the party fair and square with her kodak showing the president as he removed his hat to bow and smile in his own gracious and charming manner,” the Rochester Democrat reported later.

After tea, as the entourage was departing, C.J. Waddell, a banker and amateur photographer from Albany, made a picture of the president and company with the Mission building as a backdrop. Hoping for a frame of the President on the move, Jimmy Hare had installed himself at the Temple near the spot where the presidential party was to arrive. So had a mob of onlookers. To kill time, Hare photographed the crowd drawn by a chance to press presidential flesh. McKinley was stepping from the carriage when Hare caught him at mid-stride, smiling. Hare remained outside.

“Jimmy did not go into the building himself,” biographer Cecil Carnes wrote. “He paid a visit instead to his friend C.D. Arnold, official photographer of the exposition. The two men were So Many “Last” Pictures Clockwise from left, Banker C.J. Waddell, an amateur lensman, composed and exposed a creditable image of the presidential carriage outside the Mission building; McKinley, hat doffed, by his staff photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston; and by Orrin E. Dunlap an image of McKinley and companions at a distance as they look out upon Niagara.

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Walking by Water A postcard of the president and cohort on Goat Island with the falls behind them.

Closing the Distance McKinley, left, with Milburn as their carriage is about to depart the falls for the next stop.

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Brinckerhoff’s photo of McKinley looking into the lens from aboard his railcar ran in the weekly Western Electrician. “This photograph was made about four hours before the shooting on the exposition grounds and is possibly the last picture made of President McKinley in health,” the caption read. Stationer Cecil Cowper, responsible for one of two pictures of the president on the Goat Island staircase, printed a postcard of his photograph that he sold in packets of 12 for 25¢, touting the image as being “of historic value and it was about the last photograph taken of our Late President.” Robert Dunn’s photo of McKinley, Milburn, and Welch on Goat Island appeared in the front matter of Murat Halsted’s 1901 book The Illustrious Life of William McKinley, captioned “Last Photograph of McKinley, The Day He Was Shot.” Thomas Smith, who had been at the hotel

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chatting when a hurried little procession went by them bearing the president on an improvised stretcher. Horrified they heard the news.”

The news was that a fellow in line had shot the president at close range. Eyewitnesses described how “a well-knit young man, whose right hand, with seeming innocence, was in his back pocket. That hand held a pistol, and both were concealed from even the treacherous depths of the pocket by a dirty rag.” With his Iver Johnson hidden in a handkerchief Leon Czolgosz had waited his turn. As the President was offering his right hand, Czolgosz pulled his revolver and fired twice. The .32-calibre slugs tore into McKinley’s midriff.

“The smile, with its dimpled placid sunniness, left his face,” wrote journalist and eyewitness Richard Barry. James Parker, a waiter also in line, helped tackle the gunman. Secret Service man George Foster joined in the affray. Parker or Foster broke Czolgosz’s nose. A small electric ambulance rushed the wounded president to the Exposition’s emergency hospital. Expo photographer C.D. Arnold happened to be at that facility. He photographed the scene unfolding as doctors worked to stabilize their patient. Within days the president, recuperating at the Milburn residence, was said to be on the road to a full recovery. On September 14, 1901, he died.

By then the race had long since begun to get images of McKinley into print. Hermann Brunn sold his photo, taken the day of the shooting, for $10 to the Buffalo Express; it ran in Sunday’s paper, and in the next three weeks Brunn sold 1,400 prints in and around Buffalo. Gilbert

luncheon, filed his three photos for copyright under the description “The Last Photograph of William McKinley No. 1, 2, and 3.” The National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, displays one of Dr. William Potter’s photographs from the power station bearing the description “As nearly as can be determined, the above photograph is the last picture ever taken of President William McKinley.” Frances Benjamin Johnston’s “Last Photograph,” of McKinley leaving the Old Mission tea party, proved so popular George Eastman considered undertaking an advertising campaign based on the fact that Johnston had been using a Kodak. One of C.D. Arnold’s images from the chaos at the emergency hospital frequently is reprinted with the claim that a stretcher-bound McKinley is somewhere in the frame—though the optimistic caption never labels Arnold’s photograph as the last one of the president.

The British Journal of Photography in 1904 stated that Jimmy Hare, “in picturing Mr. McKinley as he mounted the steps of the Temple of Music, took the last photograph of the living President.” H

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Keeping an Appointment in Samara McKinley, left in top hat, at the International Hotel, where he and his party ate lunch.

Certified Hare’s shot of McKinley on his way into the Temple of Music got a journal’s nod as the one.

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Inside Homer Clyde’s There were three pool halls on Hamilton Avenue, the mid-20th Century mecca for Blacks residing in Cuthbert, Georgia.

Each establishment provided a companionable place for Black men, a haven from the open scorn they encountered in White parts of town. “Being introduced to Hamilton Avenue is the best thing that’s ever happened in my life,” Rembert said a half century later. The pool hall run by Homer Clyde was also a spot where teens gathered to dance and a cafe where Clyde provided free meals to those who could not pay.

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Light and Dark Winfred Rembert’s indelible imagery of life under Jim Crow By Daniel B. Moskowitz

W

hen the Black artist Wilfred Rembert died in March 2021, he was not really famous, but he was hardly an unknown either. After his career was launched with a 2000 solo exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, he had one-man shows in museums in Montgomery, Alabama; Flint, Michigan; and Youngstown, Ohio. The prestigious Adelson Galleries in New York represented him. PBS carried a 2011 documentary about Rembert’s life and art that museums and universities around the country screened; a second documentary played at the 2019 Mountainfilm showcase in Colorado. His death merited a long obituary in The New York Times. Publication in September of Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South (Bloomsbury, 2021) burnishes Rembert’s reputation and the accompanying publicity has brought his life and his work to a broader audience.

Rembert’s unvarnished retelling in Chasing of the terror and intimidation of his life in the segregated small-town South of the mid-20th century is a punch to the gut. But his artwork is a feast for the eyes. These images’ glowing power will have lasting impact. “I’m telling the story of my life,” Rembert says of his output, and that is its immense historical value. He depicts without blinking a chapter of the American story almost absent—perhaps willfully—from the general consciousness: the relentless grind of daily existence for Black Americans in a period of pervasive segregation and racial tension.

Blacks endured the strain of picking cotton sunup to sundown and constant abuse and casual brutality from a deeply bigoted White population. Castration and lynching were staples of vigilante “justice”—virtually never punished—meted out to young Black men thought to have stepped out of line. Multitudes more were sent to prison, and prison looms large in the stories Rembert recounts in his art. He was 19 in 1965 when authorities in Americus, Georgia, arrested him for taking part in a civil rights demonstration. Kept incarcerated without being charged for more than a year, he finally broke out of jail. Rearrested, he was strung naked by his heels from a tree until someone with sway deemed it better to bring him to trial than to lynch him. A court sentenced him to 27 years in prison.

Many of his most powerful images picture chain gangs, massing so many Black men in striped uniforms that the compositions verge on the abstract. As his wife, Patsy, told a filmmaker, “Rembert has a true account of how we live—how we survive—in the South.”

That survival relied on a Black community that diluted White oppression with hymn-singing joy and the camaraderie of the pool hall and the juke joint, settings where habitués could gather in “their” part of town with assurance that they were among friends. “Every place I went in and hung FEBRUARY 2022 49

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The Dirty Spoon Cafe The Dirty Spoon (opposite) was the classiest of the Blacks-only spots on Hamilton Avenue. The Spoon was “a juke joint for adults,” Rembert recalled. “They wouldn’t let kids in there. I guess they kept more rules and regulations than anyone else.”

As he later remembered it, “All the people up in that club were fashionable.” When a band played, its members dressed in red. And patrons showed off jazzy clothing bought in Columbus or other cities that offered better shopping than Cuthbert.

“It looked like you were in a club on Broadway, with all those bright colors that you wouldn’t normally wear, iridescent colors,” Rembert wrote.

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around, I got that love, that kindness from the people,” Rembert remembered decades later.

That part of his story reverberates, too, in images full of release and action and popping with vibrant colors—reds, oranges, and a range of blues. “We wore a lot of color—that’s just the way it was,” he recalled. “Everywhere you go, we had a lot of color.”

Rembert didn’t begin creating art until he was 50. His medium is unique, encountered years before through a fellow inmate. He makes drawings that he traces onto sheets of leather—some more than four feet wide—then carves the drawings into the leather. “When I start beveling, I start at the bottom and work my way up,” he says, explaining how he obtains depth of field. “I turn my bevel backward, forward, and to the side, to make the leather rise up and go down...I take a spoon to make prison cell bars pop out and finger wrap around them. You spray the leather and make it nice and wet. Then you press that spoon into an edge real hard, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until the bar and fingers look round. You’d be surprised at what you created—a round bar on a flat piece of leather.” Applying dye with a paintbrush, he colors the outlines. The end product can be rolled or bent without cracking because dyes are more flexible than paint—a choice that also makes the colors leap off the leather. For Rembert, the key quality of the dyes he uses is that the color “will never fade away—never.”

“Winfred is entirely self-taught, but he has this remarkably sophisticated sense of imagery and color and composition,” said Jock Reynolds, who as director of the Yale Art Museum organized that first Rembert show in 2000. “The work cried out to be shown.”

Even as an admired artist and a valued chronicler of the Jim Crow era, Winfred Rembert never ceased to be haunted by the terrors of his youth. “I carried this all my life, all of these things that happened to me—seeing Black people getting beat up here and there, seeing Boy lose his eye—all of these things I kept inside of me,” he writes in his memoir. “My thing around Whites was to be humble. Even if you don’t want to be humble—be humble just to get out of the situation. You could be thinking you want to hurt somebody, deep down inside of you, but in order to get out of the situation, so you don’t go to jail or get beat up, be humble. But being humble did not express my true feelings.” H

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Hamilton Avenue At 13, Rembert found that in Cuthbert some Black families were not dirt poor. They owned cars and could afford little luxuries thanks to doing business on Hamilton Avenue. “It was a place for Black people. Everything on Hamilton Avenue was Black—except the cemetery, which was a White folks’ cemetery—and I never knew Black folks could have businesses.” Many of those enterprises were by Georgia law restricted to serving Black patrons.

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Ben Shorter Besides the allure of the Dirty Spoon, Hamilton Avenue “was lined with juke joints,” Rembert said. Patrons really let loose, dancing with spirit and energy and almost total abandon—usually to records, but on special occasions to a live ensemble. Rembert and four other young men in town formed a dance group, left; “We used to stay up all night, practicing dance steps.” They would hit the Hamilton Avenue juke joints, and “people would put money in the jukebox when they saw us coming in the door.” The fellows became semi-regulars on a local Saturday morning rock music TV show in Columbus.

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The Curvey Outside Cuthbert, runoff under a railroad bridge dredged a hole that filled with water, providing local Black boys a place to swim and fish. They called it “the Curvey.” Rembert wrote, “I don’t know where the name ‘Curvey’ came from.” The swimming hole provided a refuge, not just from White oppression but from parental oversight. “It was a place where kids who didn’t go to school would hang out. Some were playing hooky and some just didn’t go to school,” Rembert remembered.

“Man, I did like the Curvey—seeing kids, talking, having fun, and fishing.”

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On Mama’s Cotton Sack Many Black families in southeastern Georgia worked plantation cotton fields from the first light of morning until it was too dusky to see. “The rows were so long sometimes it would take you a whole day to go up a row,” Rembert remembered. Until he was five, when he got his own sack and would pick a bit walking alongside her, his Mama would tug him along behind her atop her sack. Pickers made two cents a pound. A really adept hand earned $4 a day. Cotton pickers got some relief from the grinding work when all joined in to sing hymns. (For more about Rembert’s book, visit bloomsbury.com.)

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The Walk In the early 1960s, Rembert was arrested at a civil rights demonstration. After being held in jail a year without being charged, he broke out, was caught, and was strung naked from a tree. Jailed again, he was held a month before being taken to court. “They handcuffed me and shackled me. Then they marched me down Hamilton Avenue. They wanted to show all the people who cared something about me that a nigger’s life ain’t worth a dime.”

The Beginning Rembert rued the fact that “my mother gave me away when I was three months old. Her husband went away in the army and he didn’t come home like he was supposed to. So she got involved with another man. I think she didn’t want her husband to know she had me.” His mother’s aunt raised him with deep love that he reciprocated. But he never got over his resentment at being abandoned by his birth mother.

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Overseers in the Field “The owners of the plantation owned the plantation and you too,” Rembert said. Many laborers lived on site in houses the planter rented them. “Every plantation had a store run on credit. The money you owed at the commissary store was holding you there.” Laborers worked hard. But “every now and then you got a White overseer coming by on a horse. You ain’t ever working hard enough for them. Now, when Black folks see the overseer, they do get faster.”

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The Baptism Religion provided Blacks with hope. “I remember my own baptism well,” Rembert wrote. “I was wearing the gown Mama gave me, with no clothes on under. Mama took me down to the water’s edge and two deacons caught me on each side. The preacher waiting there put his hand on my forehead and said, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son...’ and when he said. `the Holy Ghost,’ he dipped me down underneath the water.

When I got back to the edge of the river Mama said to me, ‘Well, Winfred, you all protected now. The devil won’t get you.’”

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Self-Portrait Sentenced to 27 years in prison, Rembert served seven. They were brutal years, spent in traditional black-and-white garb, shackled, toiling at road work on chain gangs under the blazing Georgia sun. “The chain gang is one of the most ruthless places in the world,” Rembert said. But his years behind bars also readied him for a brighter future: fellow convicts— well-educated young Black activists doing time for civil rights work—sensed his intelligence and instructed him in reading and writing, and from another prisoner he learned to carve leather and dye the resulting images.

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Becoming Jane Crow Born straddling lines of gender and color, Pauli Murray stitched a life of extraordinary accomplishment.

By J.D. Zahniser Note: Since Pauli Murray lived in a gender-binary world, this article follows the historical precedent of using she/her pronouns.

A

Unabashed “This society is not hospitable to women, persons of color, and left-handed people,” Murray said when ordained in 1977. “I’m just trying to meet the competition.”

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Her challenges began early. Born Anna Pauline Murray in 1910 to a biracial family in Baltimore, Maryland, she lost both parents young. Local relatives took in her siblings; she grew up with her maternal grandparents and aunt in segregated Durham. With white and black forebears on both sides of the family, her Carolina kin lived in a precarious social situation.

“The world revolved on color and variations in color,” Murray wrote.

Grandfather Fitzgerald, born free in Pennsylvania, settled in Durham after his Civil War service, teaching freed people and helping them claim new lives. Grandmother Smith was the issue of a rape by a prominent local White politician; her desire to claim her rightful social status clashed with

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s a teenager in 1920s Durham, North Carolina, Pauli Murray strode each May across the Whites-only cemetery where a sea of Confederate flags marked the graves of Civil War veterans. She climbed over a fence to enter her family burial ground and defiantly planted a U.S. flag where her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald rested. “Upon this lone flag, I hung my nativity and the right to claim my heritage,” Murray later wrote. “It bore mute testimony to the irrefutable fact that I was an American and it helped to negate in my mind the signs and symbols of inferiority and apartness.”

Pauli Murray was a key mid-20th century American figure who linked the legal equity crusades of the civil rights and feminist movements. Along the way, searching for self and soul, she navigated settings in which people of color or women were unwelcome and poor people were scarce. Her skin looked too dark to some, to others too light; she didn’t feel female but didn’t appear male. She was drawn to social activism but also loved to write poetry and to research law briefs. Her private struggle to reconcile her gender identity and public persona is only beginning to be understood.

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Visiting relatives in new york city, murray encountered a different world whose gravitational pull drew her north after high school.

In New York, the eager graduate discovered the limits of her segregated education. She needed three or four more semesters of study to get into college. Rather than pay to take remedial classes, she stayed with relatives in Queens and enrolled at Richmond Hill High, the only Black among 4,000 pupils. She completed the necessary coursework within a year.

Color was not the only hallmark of segregation, as Murray discovered when she applied to her first college choice. Columbia University did not admit women—and would not until 1983. It was small consolation that she could attend Barnard, Columbia’s affiliated college for women; on her own financially, she adapted. In fall 1928, Murray matriculated at Hunter College, a publicly funded tuition-free institution for women that admitted students of all races, creeds, and ethnicities. In her later years, she acknowledged the compensations of attending a female-only school. “[T]he school was a natural training ground for feminism,” she wrote. “Having a faculty and student body in which women assumed leadership reinforced our egalitarian values, inspired our confidence in the competence of women generally, and encouraged our resistance to subordinate roles.”

In college, Murray built the foundation of her intellectual development. She was quick to make friends and found encouraging English and political science professors. After one semester,

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Gone Too Early Parents Agnes G. Fitzgerald Murray and William Henry Murray died young.

Robert Fitzgerald

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the color line. Both grandparents died during Murray’s youth. Her aunt was an educator with no option except the pitiful salaries African American teachers earned at underfunded Black schools. Murray grew up reading classic texts to her grandfather and absorbing Aunt Pauline’s tutoring. Her aunt recognized something distinctive in her niece, whose nickname was Paul; Pauline called her “my little boy-girl.”

“Paul” intensely hated segregation. She bicycled rather than ride public transportation relegating “colored” people to the back of the bus.

She refused to enter the segregated movie theater. The high school she attended did go to the 11th grade; Durham’s other Black secondary schools ended at 10th grade. She edited the school paper, joined the debating team, and played basketball, earning money selling and delivering newspapers, serving as a gofer at the local Black newspaper, and typing for a Black-owned insurance firm. In 1926 “Paul,” 15, graduated first in her class of 40, sights set on New York City, where, in the course of visiting relatives, she had glimpsed a different world.

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she moved into the Harlem YWCA, luxuriating in the majority-Black environment. The Y offered a front-row seat to the Harlem Renaissance, often presenting Black notables—writers, civil rights leaders, and political figures like Langston Hughes, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Paul Robeson.

Murray interacted regularly with people like Dorothy Height, a Y staffer who later led the National Council of Negro Women, and Ella Baker, a neighborhood regular, later a notable civil rights organizer. Murray refashioned her name as “Pauli” and began imagining a writing career.

Markers of inferior status persisted. Help-wanted ads wanted “whites only;” stopping at a soda fountain with White friends, Murray might not be served. An American history professor’s handling of Reconstruction so alarmed her that she embraced activism, spearheading an effort to create a student group devoted to the study of Negro history and culture.

The 1929 onset of the Depression complicated Murray’s marginal economic situation. When she lost her primary job as a waitress, she dropped out of Hunter. She ate less and struggled emotionally. She managed to return to Hunter and graduated in January 1933 with an English major and dim prospects. That fall, she secured full-time employment as a traveling representative for the National Urban League journal Opportunity; the resulting year of constant travel damaged her health. Her doctor urged rest at a sanitarium; an alternative yielded a surprising connection.

Camp Tera (“Temporary Emergency Relief Assistance”), in the Catskill Mountains of New York, was among the earliest of 90 New Deal sites offering women vocational training, healthy living, and community. The system came to be after Eleanor Roosevelt pushed her husband the president to help jobless women. Participants got room, board, and a $5 monthly stipend. A resident wrote, “It’s not only that I am getting enough to eat for the first time in three years, but I am beginning to think of myself as a real person again.” Pauli Murray thrived at camp and her health improved.

Nonetheless, when Mrs. Roosevelt visited Camp Tera in spring 1934, Murray felt a need to protest. She appreciated the First Lady’s efforts to establish the facility but felt the Democratic Party still was marching to the tune called by its powerful Southern wing. As Eleanor Roosevelt was crossing the dining hall, everyone but Murray stood. The First Lady took little notice, but the camp director called Murray on the carpet. She declared her right to remain seated and noted that she had washed and donned clean clothing out of respect for Mrs. Roosevelt.

Murray spent the next few years working mostly as a teacher for the Workers’ Education Project of the Works Progress Administration. Many of her co-workers, who included Ella Baker, believed in socialism or communism. Murray began studying to deepen her grasp of labor and radical history, even briefly joining a communist group. She was arrested while picketing the offices of a Harlem newspaper alongside locked-out union members and felt relieved when a judge dismissed those charges. She wrote poems and articles, some of which were published. She was coming into her own. Her desire to work at dismantling Jim Crow drew her to consider attending law school, prompting her to attempt to integrate the University of North Carolina in 1938.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had spoken at UNC and praised the university’s progressive policies, embodied in its president’s decisions to shield leftist faculty and publicly criticize fascism and Jim Crow. Murray boldly wrote to FDR, pressing him to stand against bias and call for UNC and other schools to admit Black students. Doubting the president would see her letter, Murray sent a copy to the First Lady with a personal note.

Ever Evolving Murray, from top in 1927 when she graduated high school and below in two snapshots taken in 1931, had many many looks.

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Sisterhood at Work Eleanor Roosevelt, standing center, at rear, addresses campers at a TERA facility at Bear Mountain, New York.

In fall 1941, Murray matriculated at Howard School of Law in Washington, DC. Part of an historically Black institution founded after the Civil War, Howard Law had produced the first Black female lawyer, Charlotte E. Ray. Even so, in her time at Howard Pauli Murray was the only woman in her class; women then comprised less than 1 percent of American law students. As she wrote later, her years at Howard broadened and deepened her perspective. “The racial factor was removed in the intimate environment of a Negro law school dominated by men, and the factor of gender was fully exposed,” she wrote. Murray soon coined the term “Jane Crow” to describe the multiple layers of bias facing women of color, what some now call “intersectionality.” She honed this concept for more than 20 years.

While in DC, she also joined the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), helping organize and participating in demonstrations.

She indirectly played a role in the strategizing that produced the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. In 1944, her third-year civil rights seminar was brainstorming legal strategies to combat the “separate but equal” precedent imposed in 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson. Murray wondered, instead of the current approach—showing that facilities were unequal—why not attack the very constitutionality of segregation, that is, focus on “separate”?

Her classmates stared, then erupted in derisive

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fount of legal expertise for the NAACP.

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“You do not remember me, but I was the girl who did not stand up when you passed through the Social Hall at Camp Tera,” she wrote. “I thought and still feel that you are the sort of person who prefers to be accepted as a human being and not as a paragon.” Mrs. Roosevelt replied. “I understand perfectly, but great changes come slowly,” she wrote. “Sometimes it is better to fight hard with conciliatory methods.”

That exchange began a friendship that lasted until Eleanor Roosevelt’s death. The two regularly corresponded about civil rights issues and Mrs. Roosevelt sometimes invited Murray to tea. Murray was far more militant than the First Lady, but Mrs. Roosevelt thrived on such relationships, often drawing on them as she advised the president and made her own way in politics. Murray later wrote that the First Lady “gave me a sense of personal worth.”

Pauli Murray applied to UNC graduate school about the time that the NAACP won a Supreme Court decision ordering the University of Missouri’s law school to admit a Black applicant.

When UNC quickly rejected Murray’s, she alerted the NAACP. She had support from the UNC president and some faculty and students, but her arrest record and radical ties made her too risky a symbolic defendant.

NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall declined to take the case but did recommend her Pauli Murray, 1941 to his alma mater, Howard University School of Law, a

To document the depth of Jim Crow, Murray took on a nationwide study of state legislation.

Her milestone effort, State Laws on Race and Color, came out in 1951.

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Honored for Public Service From far left, civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune with 1946 National Council of Negro Women honorees: Virginia Durr, Lois M. Jones, Lt. Col. Charity Adams, Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-California), Maida Springer, Agnes Meyer, Pauli Murray, Arenia Mallory, Ambassador Florence Jaffray Harriman, Eslanda Goode Robeson. laughter at such an outlandish thought. Murray doubled down: she bet $10 that Plessy would be overturned within 25 years.

Her final seminar paper developed the idea that citizen rights included “the right not to be set aside or marked with a badge of inferiority.” Drawing on psychological and sociological studies as well as her personal history, she argued that segregation did “violence to the personality of the individual affected, whether he is white or black.”

A decade later, NAACP lawyers working on what became Brown read her paper; Murray’s argument became integral to their Supreme Court presentation. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Brown opinion for the majority declared that separating students by race “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Murray won her bet.

Pauli Murray achieved academic success through sheer will despite experiencing increasing psychological conflict, rooted, she believed, in gender. She was what today is considered a type of transgender: she appeared female but intensely felt herself male. She rejected the idea that she was homosexual: she was attracted to heterosexual women. No glandular disorder was found. She pursued hormone treatments, then experimental in the U.S. for men deemed effeminate; no doctor she found would agree to perform the procedure. She finally had her abdomen x-rayed, believing it would reveal the existence of male organs. However, her

reproductive organs seemed normal. Physicians she consulted, though sympathetic, believed her conflict to be purely psychological.

Murray graduated at the top of Howard Law’s class of 1944. She received the prestigious Rosenwald Fellowship, usually a ticket to study at Harvard. But even with a recommendation from President Roosevelt Harvard did not admit women. Murray decamped to the University of California Berkeley to pursue a master’s degree.

She briefly became that state’s first African American Deputy Attorney General, a post she lost when Japan’s surrender ended World War II and American veterans reclaimed their jobs.

However, her poems and articles on civil rights were gaining recognition. The National Council of Negro Women named her one of 12 “Women of the Year” for 1945; a year later, Mademoiselle magazine did likewise.

Returning to New York, Murray found work alongside a prominent Black attorney. In 1948, the Women’s Division of the Methodist Church offered her a groundbreaking opportunity. That group had spent decades campaigning against lynching and racial discrimination. To encourage more systemic action, the Division consulted Murray about compiling a reference work on southern segregation laws. Murray suggested FEBRUARY 2022 63

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a sentence in Proud Shoes: “It had taken me almost a lifetime to discover that true emancipation lies . . . in deriving strength from all my roots, in facing up to the degradation as well as the dignity of my ancestors.”

Shortly after her memoir debuted, Murray was recruited by Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison, a law firm noted in the 1940s for having been the first to hire a female partner and later a Black associate. The Garrison at the firm was Lloyd, great-grandson of White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and an acquaintance of Murray’s from events at Howard Law. During her three years at Paul, Weiss, she met the woman who would be her closest companion for nearly 20 years; Irene Barlow worked as the firm’s office administrator. Though White and British by birth, Irene bonded with Pauli over their poverty-stricken early years. A spiritual bond developed from their shared Episcopalian faith. Among the women Murray met at the firm was an intern named Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

In April 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt asked Murray to join a Committee on Civil and Political Rights, part of the first President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Murray was completing a doctorate in law at Yale, meanwhile mentoring younger students like Eleanor Holmes and Marion Wright, now better known by their married names, Norton and Edelman.

Murray continued on the pioneering committee after Mrs. Roosevelt’s death six months later. Her work with the Commission led to organizing with women newly focused on sex discrimination. In 1965, Murray’s network prevailed upon Congressional contacts to ensure that the word “sex” stayed put in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as that legislation moved through Congress, a small addition that promised big dividends. Later that year, Dr. Murray proposed another trailblazing legal strategy. She developed a memo originally written for the President’s Commission into “Jane Crow and the Law.” An article co-authored with Commission staff attorney Mary O. Eastwood, “Jane Crow” advocated using the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause against sex discrimination. In 1971, Rutgers law professor Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote the ACLU legal brief for Reed v. Reed using this novel argument. In the resulting landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled sex discrimination unconstitutional under the equal

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that a nationwide study comparing segregation with anti-discrimination laws would serve their purpose better. The Methodists agreed.

The book-length States’ Laws on Race and Color, published in 1951, became a milestone in civil rights and significantly raised Pauli Murray’s profile. The ACLU bought 1,000 copies to send to law libraries and human rights groups.

Thurgood Marshall gave every litigator on his NAACP staff a copy and hailed Murray’s volume as that office’s new “bible.” The book’s impact was short-lived only because of rapid legal changes in the wake of Brown.

Murray likely considered sex reassignment in 1952, when Christine Jorgensen’s reassignment surgery made headlines (see “Ways of Being,” p.

65). In 1954, doctors identified and treated a thyroid disorder as the root of many of Murray’s health issues, including anxiety and depression.

She later wrote, “I finally settled down to the first [mental] stability I had known.” She did not waver in her attitude about her gender but did not pursue hormone treatments or sex reassignment. She may have feared the professional cost of taking a step so extreme in society’s eyes. Few people even knew of her predicament.

Murray found a publisher for a memoir of her youth in Durham. Proud Shoes came out in October 1956 to praise in The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and the New York Post, as well as in Mrs. Roosevelt’s widely syndicated “My Day” column. Two decades later, after success greeted Alex Haley’s Roots, Murray recalled

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Resonant Research Murray’s book had a brief but intense impact before Brown v. Board kicked in.

NOW Hear This National Organization for Women activists clockwise from right: author Betty Friedan, sufffragist Alma Lutz, Professor Albert M. Sacks, Murray, Dr. Mary Bunting.

protection clause. Ginsberg acknowledged her intellectual debt by naming both Murray and Eastwood co-authors of her brief.

Pauli Murray continued working with policy-minded feminists. In an October 1965 speech before the National Council of Women, she called Title VII an historic victory that “will not be adequately enforced unless the political power of women is brought to bear.” Word of Murray’s call to arms prompted a phone call from Betty Friedan, by that time widely known for her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Friedan was persuaded to join Murray and two dozen other Black and White feminists in founding the National Organization for Women (NOW) on June 30, 1966. Friedan and Murray wrote NOW’s statement of purpose, with Murray contributing, “We realize that women’s problems are linked to many broader questions of social justice.” She hoped NOW would be an NAACP for women.

Pauli Murray remained active in civil rights and feminist causes, a onewoman Venn diagram connecting divergent groups, increasingly including interfaith efforts. In 1968, Murray joined the faculty of Brandeis University in Boston, teaching there until 1973. In 1977, after Irene Barlow’s death, Pauli Murray became the first African American woman ordained as an Episcopal priest. That role drew her back to North Carolina, where she served until she died of cancer in 1985. Song in a Weary Throat, an autobiography focusing on her adult life, came out posthumously in 1987. In 2012, the Episcopal Church named her a saint, meaning that her life should serve as ongoing inspiration. In 2017, Pauli Murray’s Durham family home was designated a National Historic Landmark. H (“My Name is Pauli Murray,” a 90-minute documentary on Murray’s life, is streaming now on Amazon Prime.)

The Reverend Murray After a lifetime of firsts, in 1977 Murray notched another when she was ordained as an Episcopal priest.

The notion that a person is either male or female is endemic to Western culture, though some South Asian cultures, the Maori of New Zealand, and some Native American tribes have long accepted three or four genders. The German Magnus Hirschfeld was the first documented physician to consider sex change a legitimate part of health care. As early as 1918, Hirschfeld was using the now-obsolete word transvestite and offering patients hormone therapy and/or sex change operations. The 2015 film The Danish Girl fictionalized one of Hirschfeld’s cases. As a result of his mid-century studies, American biologist Alfred Kinsey imagined gender as a continuum, coining the term transsexual. Many Americans learned about sex reassignment when the story of Christine Jorgensen, reassigned from male to female, appeared in New York City newspapers in December 1952. New York endocrinologist and Hirschfeld student Henry Benjamin’s 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon became a milestone in health care, laying out treatment options and rejecting the notion that patients like Pauli Murray needed a cure. Use of the current designation transgender preceded Benjamin’s, appearing in the 1965 textbook Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, by John F. Olivan. These days transgender or trans is a category encompassing a range of identities including transsexuals and cross-dressers. —J.D. Zahniser PHOTO CREDIT

UTCON COLLECTION/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; AP PHOTO

Ways of Being

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Songbird Ella Fitzgerald, here in 1960, ranks among the prominent interpreters of the songwriting vein that Baby explores.

estimable researcher—more than 15 percent of Baby is notes and bibliography—he’s not much of a writer. Each chapter is a salmagundi of facts and jargon with no through line. Garber buries the reader in factoids: on a single page of his discussion of “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” he name-checks 18 singers who recorded that number, little noting what each brought to it. He can’t resist including everything he has uncovered, even passages in novels that mention a song. All this makes Baby tough going for anyone but a devoted fan of music of the period. Early on Garber admits as much, telling readers, “Please feel free to skip around.”

Garber never really links his picks to better-known standards that followed. But he does deliver on one aim: to counter the prevailing impression that a pervasive, distinctly American song style emerged from “a handful of famous geniuses.” Instead, he insists, that

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ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AMERICA

My Melancholy Baby

By Michael G. Garber University Press of Mississippi, 2021; paperback $30

Starting around 1920, songwriters in the United States forged a new pop music sound, discarding the saccharine sentimentality inherited from Europe for a style that was jazzy, vernacular, and personal—and which eventually spread worldwide and produced a corpus now often referred to as the American Songbook.

But the approach inherent in those early creations did not come out of nowhere. “There is a specific group of compositions from the years 1902 through 1913 that pioneered that new style, paving the way for the later masterpieces,” insists historian Michael G. Garber. In My Melancholy Baby Garber deeply analyzes the title song and nine other ballads from the pre-World War I era.

Each chapter adheres to the model for song biography Will Friedwald established in his superb Stardust Melodies in 2002: origin story, musicological analysis, performance history.

Garber’s difficulty is that although he is an

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

SONGWRITING STUDIES

innovation “was caused by a mass of people, moving together.” In spotlighting enduring works by songsmiths today forgotten—and even in their day frequently hardly known—he is persuasive that they are an important part of our musical heritage. If My Melancholy Baby leads performers and scholars to look

ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AMERICA

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

Monarch of ParTS Some see in George III (1738-1820) “a sardonic, preening, pompous monarch” and “that wicked tyrannical brute,” as Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense (1776). Not so, posits Andrew Roberts. The king was “well-meaning, hard-working, decent, dutiful, moral, cultured and kind.” In 28 ambling chapters, Roberts portrays a monarch of parts, “a pious Christian, honest, [and] humane.”

Essayist, music lover, and Enlightenment promoter, George had his library at Buckingham House assembled “so that he and his scholarly subjects could use it every day.” He drank little, ate moderately, dressed with “more of an eye for comfort than fashion,” and was hardly a brute. A loving family man, he “enjoyed a close and happy marriage” to Queen Charlotte, producing 15 children. “The people who knew George III best loved him the most,” writes Roberts, “which is not always the way with public figures.”

Roberts absolves George III of the American Revolution, instead indicting the uncertainty unleashed by Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War. George’s “staunchly conservative” approach to economics contrasts with that of war-mongering William Pitt, “the Great Commoner,” who oversaw “millions spent on an ever-expanding theatre of conflict.” George had “ingested the Tory concept of the Patriot King from Lord Bolingbroke.” With mentor and father figure Lord Bute at his side, he navigated as a constitutional monarchist. Factious politics, not the monarch, caused Britain’s policy gaffes with colonies coming of age. “The American Revolution is a testament not to George III’s tyranny, which was fictitious,” writes Roberts, “but to Americans’ yearning

beyond the dozen or so big-name composers, Garber will have made a useful contribution to Americans’ shared experience of our past. — SCOTUS 101 columnist Daniel B. Moskowitz leads courses in American popular song at the Osher Lifetime Learning Institutes at American University and George Mason University. for autonomy.” Neither the Revolution nor the hereditary blood disorder porphyria caused “the King’s Malady.” George had “manic-depressive psychosis,” Roberts maintains.

Roberts is a master at summarizing character, as in his skewering of “the ugly, witty, vain, rakish, talented and thoroughly incorrigible MP for Aylesbury,” John Wilkes. The author’s research—encompassing more than 200,000 pages in the Georgian Papers at Windsor Castle—is impressive. Roberts argues convincingly that George was not “fighting against some irresistible tide of democracy and universal suffrage” but a “cabal of aristocratic and gentry Whig families” convinced they had “the right to rule England in perpetuity.”

Readers may think Last King less revisionist than Roberts supposes. Sir Lewis Namier, Jeremy Black, and others have wrought balanced portraits of George III. Roberts’s exhaustive vindication of America’s final monarch is at times heavy on provocative overstatement and light on historical subtlety. —Mark Spencer is professor of history at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada.

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III

By Andrew Roberts Viking, 2021; $40

Gorgeous George Seen here as a young man resplendent in ermine and gold, the king was, Roberts says, more complex a figure than thought.

FEBRUARY 2022 67

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Enfranchised Americans voting during the 1872 election that gave Ulysses Grant a second term.

Inventing Equality: Reconstructing the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War

By Michael A. Bellesiles St. Martin’s, 2020; $28.99

The ringing statement in the Declaration of Independence that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal” was not operational but aspirational. Rendering that credo practical has not been easy. As historian Michael Bellesiles writes in Inventing Equality, “American history can be seen as a battle to reconcile the large gap between our stated ideals and the realities of our republic.”

The nation has come far but has far to go. As Bellesiles makes clear, progress has not proceeded steadily but stutteringly, with gains reversed and significant periods in which a majority of Americans have had real doubts about equality for all. Even those advocating on behalf of greater equality have differed, some envisioning full political rights, others focusing on economic rights: the ability to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor.

From the get-go, the American deck was stacked in favor of well-to-do White men. Progress toward equality meant securing more rights for women, for the less prosperous, for religious minorities, for immigrants, and, most especially, for African Americans, most of them enslaved. Northern delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and those from the South disagreed so irreconcilably on slavery that they ended up not defining citizenship. The core of Inventing Equality recounts how the Civil War led to the three great Reconstruction amendments to that Constitution: the 13th, outlawing slavery; the 14th, decreeing anyone born in the United States to be a citizen; and the 15th, barring race as a reason to deny a person the vote.

Bellesiles then sadly chronicles how angry racists and indifferent enforcement for a half cen-

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constitutional conundrum

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Th e C i v i l Wa r p l a y e d a p i v o t a l ro l e i n t h e b i r t h o f We s t V i r i g n i a a n d t h e d e v e l o p m e n t o f Ra n d o l p h Co u n t y. Fro m i n t e ra c t i v e m u s e u m s , h i s t o r i c t ra i n r i d e s a n d b a tt l e fi e l d s , t o s m a l l t o w n s s h a p e d b y t h e p a s t , Ra n d o l p h Co u n t y i s w a i t i n g t o b e d i s c o v e re d b y y o u .

TODAY IN HISTORY OCTOBER 13, 1792 AMHP-220200-001 Elkins-Randolph County CVB.indd 1

THE CORNERSTONE OF THE WHITE HOUSE WAS LAID. INITIALLY REFERRED TO AS THE “PRESIDENT’S HOUSE” AND THE “EXECUTIVE MANSION,” THE STRUCTURE WAS CALLED THE WHITE HOUSE AS EARLY AS 1812.

PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT OFFICIALLY ADOPTED THE TERM “WHITE HOUSE” IN 1901.

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

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tury effectively neutralized those advances.

Bellesiles does exactly what a historian writing for a general audience should—he states broad themes that he fleshes out with anecdotes and quotes from public and private sources.

He narrates with clarity and pace. But these very virtues eliminate subtlety, a flaw that has made him controversial in academia. Unfortunate Supreme Court decisions are “constitutional monstrosities,” for instance, and Inventing ignores basic antebellum differences between the North and South other than slavery—international trade, for one.

Nonetheless, Bellesiles has coupled an important telling of America’s history to an eminently readable style. He spotlights persistent forces that judge some groups inherently inferior and decry attempts at achieving equality. And he ends with a call for vigilance to protect the Declaration’s aspirations: “Adherence to that great discovered truth, that we are all equally human, demands the continuation of the struggle.” —Daniel B. Moskowitz writes the SCOTUS 101 column in American History.

warring over words

The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840

By Akhil Reed Amar Basic, 2021; $40

In 700 entertaining pages, Yale law professor Amar describes how early American leaders interpreted the Constitution. Amar reminds readers that the Founding Fathers were obsessing about government long before the Revolution, and that much of their quarrel with Britain involved legal matters. Bookshelves may groan with historiographical opinion but, Amar emphasizes, historians don’t know much law, and lawyers come up short on history. He bridges the gap.

Assembling a case that interweaves history, court decisions, polemics, hypothetical cases, and reductio-ad-absurdum anecdotes, Amar argues convincingly that the Constitution functions superbly. Many 21st-century thinkers, including a few Supreme Court justices, believe the Constitution to be a perfect, unchanging legal system, but everyone knows that real people decided what to include and leave out, and Amar casts a critical eye on those individuals.

Historians assign James Madison the greatest credit for the Constitution’s contents. That most scholarly among the Founding Fathers researched every available historical and contemporary writer addressing government and lobbied intensely for a constitutional convention. All participants acknowledged their colleague’s superior knowledge, consulted him freely—and often ignored his advice.

Amar notes that Madison’s ideal government imagined a weak executive elected by popular vote and a unicameral legislature that

could veto state laws. None of these ideas survived, and Madison found the Constitution a disappointment although superior to what had come before.

George Washington found the document entirely to his liking. After eight miserable years fighting Britain under the feeble Continental Congress, Washington yearned for a government with a powerful leader, and got one. He showed little interest in the makeup of Congress and none in the judiciary.

Readers will enjoy Amar’s takes on how other Founders and their inheritors exerted influence on the Constitution during its first 80 years. Washington wanted a strong presidency that Hamilton’s political skills made possible. Few paid heed to the Supreme Court until, almost out of the blue, John Marshall promoted it to a coequal branch.

Away in France, Thomas Jefferson played no part in writing the Constitution, which he never warmed to. Also abroad—in Britain— John Adams approved; it contained features of the 1780s Massachusetts state constitution that Adams had largely written. President Andrew Jackson’s endorsement of slavery and Indian genocide has blighted his reputation, but Amar hails Jackson’s fierce opposition to South Carolina’s 1832 attack on the Constitution and threat to secede. That precedent, which Lincoln followed, ends the book, but most readers will look forward to volume two of a planned trilogy. —Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.

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10. Owner: HistoryNet; 901 N Glebe Rd, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203. 11. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent of more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. 12. Tax status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13. Publisher title: American History. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: October 2021. 15. The extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (Net press run). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 30,836. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 31,684. B. Paid circulation. 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 24,048. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 24,415. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. 3. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales.

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ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943.

ANSWER: THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN HE business manager, or owner: Shawn G. Byers, VP, Audience DeHELD OUT ON 1960 MORTAI IN INDONESIA HE WAS CAPTURED PLACE SINCE WHEN THE FLAGUNTIL WAS MODIFIED velopment & Circulation. I certify that all information furnished IN DECEMBER 1974. EARLIER THAT YEAR, HIRO ONODA, WHO TO INCLUDE HAWAII, THE 50th STATE. HELD OUT IN THE PHILLIPINES, FINALLY SURRENDERED. on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanction and civil actions.

WILLIAMS’ GANG A N O T O R I O U S S L AV E T R A DE R A N D H IS CA RG O OF BL ACK CON V IC T S

“Built on an impressive mountain of archival research and relayed with vivid prose...”

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…savvy travelers rolling on State Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles know to book themselves into rustic Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn, nestled amid majestic redwoods 30 miles south of Carmel. Because the dramatic coastline reminded him of his native Norway, Helmuth Deetjen bought the six-acre parcel in 1926. Moving to the property in the early 1930s, he and wife Helen lived in a tent along Castro Canyon Creek. Sensing opportunity in tourist traffic drawn to the Carmel-San Simeon Highway, now the Pacific Coast Highway, completed in 1937, the Deetjens became innkeepers. Along a trickling creek Helmuth fashioned closely set Scandinavian-style cabins of local materials.

Out of Time A barn he had built earlier became a restauVintage craftsmanship rant. “Grandpa” Deetjen’s carpentry helped and a sense of removal create a Big Sur vernacular, and nearly 90 from ordinary existence years later the redwood lumber in lodgings combine to lend the Inn with names like Antique Room and Grandpa’s an ambience all its own..

Room still imparts a characteristic scent. Lace curtains, creaking floorboards, and wood stoves transport guests to a bygone era, a transit aided by the absence of cellular service and televisions.

The National Register of Historic Places added Deetjen’s (deetjens.com) in 1990. —Lucy Sherriff is a journalist based in Los Angeles, California.

HEMIS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; NIK WHEELER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

At Big Sur, California…

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ROMAN GLADIATORS FROZEN IN TIME FOR OVER 1,600 YEARS

Found: 1,600-Year-Old Roman Gladiator Coins Hold the Glory of Rome In the Palm of Your Hand

W

hen your famous father appoints you Caesar at age 7, you’re stepping into some very big sandals. But when that father is Emperor Constantine the Great, those sandals can be epic!

Constantius II, became Caesar at 7, and a Roman Emperor at age 20. Today, he is remembered for helping continue his father’s work of bringing Christianity to the Roman Empire, as well as for his valiant leadership in battle.

But for many collectors, his strongest legacy is having created one of the most fascinating and unique bronze coins in the history of the Roman Empire: the “Gladiator’s Paycheck”.

the Gladiators Paycheck

Roman bronze coins were the “silver dollars” of their day. They were the coins used for daily purchases, as well as for the payment of wages. Elite Roman Gladiators—paid to do battle before cheering crowds in the Colosseum—often received their monthly ‘paycheck’ in the form of Roman bronze coins.

But this particular Roman bronze has a gladiator pedigree like no other! Minted between 348 to 361 AD, the Emperor’s portrait appears on one side of this coin.

The other side depicts a literal clash of the gladiators. One warrior raises his spear menacingly at a second warrior on horseback. Frozen in bronze for over 1,600 years, the drama of this moment can still be felt when you hold the coin.

Surrounding this dramatic scene is a Latin inscription—a phrase you would never expect in a million years!

Happy Days are Here Again The Latin inscription surrounding the gladiators reads: “Happy Days are Here Again” (Fel Temp Reparatio). You see, at the time these coins were designed,

the Emperor had just won several important military battles against the foes of Rome. At the same time, Romans were preparing to celebrate the 1100th anniversary of the founding of Rome. To mark these momentous occasions, this new motto was added and the joyful inscription makes complete sense.

A Miracle of Survival for 1,600 Years

For more than sixteen centuries, these stunning coins have survived the rise and fall of empires, earthquakes, floods and two world wars. The relatively few Roman bronze coins that have survived to this day were often part of buried treasure hoards, hidden away centuries ago until rediscovered and brought to light.

These authentic Roman coins can be found in major museums around the world. But today, thanks to GovMint. com, you can find them a little closer to home: your home!

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The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/ terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2021 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.

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