American History October 2021 by HistoryNet

Ferries to Flatcars: Colorado Crossing Godly Notes on the Church Bass John Jay, Staunch Foe of Slavery Orville Wright’s Toymaking Days E X C L U S I V E from PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR Louis Menand

Rock ’n Roll ’n Race The truth about Elvis’s musical roots

October 2021 HISTORYNET.com

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OCTOBER 2021

FEATURES 26 Rock ’n Roll ’n Race

A contrarian look at the influences underpinning Elvis Presley’s rocketing rise to fame. By Louis Menand

36 John Jay, Abolitionist

A Founding Father traveled a path from slave ownership to embracing abolitionism. By Karen Whitehair

44 Life on the Colorado

For a blink, riverine geography made Yuma, Arizona, a prosperous seaport—in the desert. By Bill Heard

52 Going Low

In the heyday of the church bass, Abraham Prescott’s instruments had a tone of their own. By Darcy Kuronen

60 Toymaker of Hawthorn Hill

Aviation pioneer Orville Wright never abandoned his love for aerial playthings. By Michael Ray O’Brien

DEPARTMENTS 6 Mosaic

News from out of the past.

12 Contributors 14 Déjà Vu

Conniptions over quorum counts are as American as cherry pie

18 Interview

Jeff Shesol on how the right stuff carried John Glenn to fame

20 American Schemers

A phony Russian prince cut a pseudo-royal swathe across America

22 SCOTUS 101

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52 ON THE COVER: Elvis Presley and Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Big Mama Thornton had much in common but Presley’s success had less to do with race than widely supposed, says author Louis Menand.

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The Court took a tortuous path in addressing urban/rural apportionment

24 Cameo

Agnes De Mille infused the American musical with a fresh vision of dance

66 Reviews 72 An American Place

Confidence man Hershel Geguzin blew through multiple identities before getting real in the restaurant business.

Isle Royale, Michigan

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OCTOBER 2021

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Visit Historynet.com/AmericanHistory and search for online-only stories like these:

Andrew Jackson Had It In for the U.S. Bank

Pugnacious President Andrew Jackson saw the Second Bank of the United States as an enemy of his people. bit.ly/JacksonBattlesBank

Where Those Rockets Got Their Red Glare A key phrase in the national anthem traces to a fellow foe of the British—a king who fought the empire by air. bit.ly/RocketsRed

When the City of the Angels Ruled

In 1974 Los Angeles hit its peak as an an all-encompassing influence in American popular culture. bit.ly/CaliforniaTakesControl

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assailants’ intent was to drive Black Republicans from the premises following a much-disputed statewide election. The plaque, installed in 1950, mischaracterized the slaughter as a riot marking “the end of carpetbag misrule in the South”—presenting the outcome as one of White rule rightfully restored. The marker’s “presence on public property perpetuated the Going...Going...Gone A marker installed 71 myth that Black political power repreyears ago outside Grant sented disorder,” Barber and Crawford Parish Courthouse to wrote. “To us, the marker’s existence also honor an 1873 White condoned violence as a valid avenue for supremacist riot is gone. those dissatisfied with the democratic process.” The two note that prisoner-journalists at the inmate-edited publication The Angolite in the Louisiana State Penitentiary had campaigned without success to remove the marker in 1989. According to Barber and Crawford, pointing out the inaccuracies to the Grant Parish Police Jury, on whose land the sign stood, had no effect. Parish officials dragged their feet until a White descendant of a veteran of the fight spoke up for removal and a state employee discovered that a different law governed ownership of the sign. The marker was removed peaceably on May 15, 2021.

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COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY; ERIN EDGERTON/THE DAILY PROGRESS VIA AP

After years of effort, Louisianans succeeded in removing a much disputed marker in front of Grant Parish Courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana. The marker commemorated one of the most blatant and violent assaults on postCivil War Black political power. At Journal of the Civil War Era [bit.ly/CivilWarEraJournal], Tom Barber, who holds a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, and LSU graduate student Jeff Crawford credited LeeAnna Keith’s powerful 2008 book, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror and the Death of Reconstruction, with alerting them to the marker’s celebration of White supremacy. Keith’s study, which the two read in 2016, details events long called the Colfax Massacre. In that April 13, 1873, melee, an estimated 150 Black men and three White men died violently when White supremacist mobs converged at the Grant Parish Courthouse. The

GRANT PARISH COURTHOUSE; ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES

Colfax Correction

Declaration Reprint Discovered A paper facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, right, in the American Philosophical Society’s collection is one of only eight extant copies of 201 such printed in 1823, the society says. After removing a heavy, dulling varnish from the document, Anne Downey, the institution’s head conservationist, noticed the artifact had a three-dimensionality associated with engravings made on wove paper, manufactured with a technique that produces a sturdy sheet. That texture is not found in facsimiles printed on paper made from flax or wood pulp. Further analysis lent support to Downey’s observation. After delegates to the Second Continental Congress had signed the original Declaration over a span of several months beginning on August 2, 1776, the parchment was rolled and kept at different

locations through the Revolutionary War. Travel and handling left the Declaration dark and difficult to read. In 1820, U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams arranged to have an exact replica printed on paper rather than parchment. Engraver William Stone spent three years rendering an image of the document on copperplate and in 1823 printed 201 copies for distribution to surviving signers, government officials, and prominent institutions. Stone kept one for himself. The Philosophical Society obtained its copy from U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster in 1842. “This find adds yet another piece to what may be one of the best collection of Declarations in the world,” Society librarian Patrick Spero said. “The APS holds Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten draft of the Declaration, two Dunlap copies, one of which is the only known oversized copy, the first printing in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, and the first printing in Europe. We also have the chair that Thomas Jefferson is believed to have sat in to write the Declaration. Discovering that we have a Stone copy completes this story.” [bit.ly/ RarePaperDeclarationDiscovered]

COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY; ERIN EDGERTON/THE DAILY PROGRESS VIA AP

GRANT PARISH COURTHOUSE; ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES

Charlottesville Removes Contested Statues Four years after a violent August 2017 White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, opposing removal of a monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, workers peacefully removed that statue and one of Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on Saturday, July 10 as hundreds watched. A suit opposing the removal ended

with a 2021 Virginia Supreme Court decision supporting the city’s authority to remove the Lee monument. Plaintiffs had claimed the statue to have the status of war memorial under a 1997 Virginia statute governing approval for removal of monuments to veterans. The ruling said that that law only protects monuments installed after 1997, not monuments put in place before that. On the same day that the Confederate figures came off their plinths, the Charlottesville town council approved immediate removal of a statue depicting 1804 Corps of Discovery expedition leaders Meriwether Lewis and George Clark, with Shoshone guide and interpreter Sacajawea crouched alongside them, from its prominent location in town. The 1804 expedition was authorized by University of Virginia founder Thomas Jefferson, and the statue, erected in 1919 as part of a railroad promotion, may be displayed in Charlottesville’s Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center. Heavy Lifting The Jackson statue, left, and one of Robert E. Lee had occasioned a campaign to keep the Lost Cause-era images on their plinths. OCTOBER 2021 7

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Treasures Amid Trash Ephemera dating from the 1600s to the 1800s turned up in the attic of a 200-year-old house being demolished in the spring near Chestertown in Kent County, Maryland. The preserved documents constitute a snapshot of everyday contracts and news clippings, offering glimpses of actions and transactions involving searches for runaway bondsmen, below, owners hiring out their slaves and, in one instance, a free Black purchasing a bondsman with the intent of manumitting that individual. The documents were posted online by an auction house, where the listing was spotted by local resident Darius Johnson and purchased by supporters of Chesapeake Heartland Project, which explores Black history in Kent County.

Joining a Select Society As of May 4, 2021, 769 different women had argued a case at the Supreme Court for a total of 1,555 appearances, the Supreme Court Historical Society reports. The most times an individual woman presented arguments is 41. In the late 1960s, the number of women arguing before the Supreme Court skyrocketed, and between 2000 and 2016, women attorneys argued more than 500 times. First to crash the gates to the Supreme Court Bar—in 1880—was Belva Lockwood, attorney and presidential candidate in 1884 and 1888. She had to lobby congressmen and male attorneys to pass legislation allowing her admission to the ranks of attorneys who were permitted to bring cases before the court. Lockwood lost that first case, which ironically involved her arguing that a client’s debt should not be collected because she was shielded under coverture, the doctrine that women were under the legal authority of their Belva Lockwood husbands. Lockwood made history instead.

BILL BARLOW FOR THE PRESS; WILL NEWTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST; THE FRENT COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Tubman Museum Opens in Cape May

On Juneteenth—June 18, 2021—the Harriet Tubman Museum opened in Cape May, New Jersey. Tubman, portrayed at right by sculptor Wesley Wofford in Halifax, North Carolina, worked in the Cape May area as a cook in the 1850s. She is credited with helping nine enslaved workers flee Delaware for Cape May. A hub of anti-slavery activism with a substantial Black community; the resort town was a place where free Blacks could find jobs and a magnet for runaways from Delaware, a slave state. Cape May was home to Stephen Smith, that era’s richest free Black man, who fitted railcars with hideaways for runaways. Next door to Smith’s house was the Banneker Hotel, owned by a friend of Smith’s and the scene of abolitionist meetings. Because of the Smith home and the Cape May Trolley Tour that highlights Black history sites in town, Cape May is now on the NPS Network to Freedom Trail. [bit.ly/ TubmanCapeMayHaven]

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Florida Site Pinpointed On Big Talbot Island, left, 29 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida, archaeologists believe they have pinpointed the site of a Native American village known as Sarabay. Dig director and University of North Florida archaeologist Keith Ashley told First Coast News that indigenous settlements existed on the island 1,500 years ago. The village of Sarabay, described by the French in 1564 and by the Spanish in 1587, had wooden palisade walls, houses, public buildings, and granaries. The earliest inhabitants based their way of life on fish and shellfish; subsequent residents also grew corn. The village was home to the Mocama, who spoke a dialect of the Timucua language. The researchers have found bits of indigenous and Spanish pottery and are looking for signs of houses and other buildings.

Sharpened, stained turkey bones uncovered southwest of Nashville, Tennessee, have been shown to be the world’s oldest known tattooing tools. In the June 2021 Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, researchers described how they matched experimental tattoo instruments made from modern deer bones with the black and red staining found on the ancient turkey bone implements to determine that the latter were used for inking skin. The instruments date back at least 3,620 years old, extending by 1,000 years the known history of tattooing in eastern North America. Researchers suspect that stained seashells at the site may have held the ink used for tattooing.

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A bottle of Old Ingledew whiskey dating to at least 1802 sold for well more than three times the estimated high bid of $40,000 at Skinner’s Auction in Marlborough, Massachusetts, on June 30. Withdrawing a bit of fluid through the cork by hypodermic needle allowed carbon dating of the alcohol, likely distilled before 1802. Old Ingledew was a brown liquor with North America roots brewed primarily from corn. Bottled at La Grange, Georgia, the whiskey was likely sold before the Civil War as no distilleries existed in Georgia after that time. Financier J.P. Morgan reportedly bought the bottle on a visit to Georgia. His son Jack later gave it to New Deal figure James Byrnes, a U.S. senator, Supreme Court justice, and governor of South Carolina. Byrne gave the bottle to a neighbor whose descendants eventually put it up for auction. Ingledew is an English surname believed to derive from the Norse name Ingialdr, meaning “Ing’s tribute.”

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Bill Heard (“Life on the Colorado,” p. 44) has written for On Point: The Journal of Army History, Wild West, Battlefield Dispatch, and other publications. He is a member of the Western Naval History Association, and vice president of the Miramar National Cemetery Support Foundation. A retired Navy Reserve captain, Bill writes from San Diego, California. For 30-plus years, Darcy Kuronen (“Church Bass,” p. 52), a specialist in early American instruments, was curator of musical instruments at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His credits include organizing the acclaimed exhibition Dangerous Curves: Art of the Guitar in 2000. He is curator for the instrument collection at Boston’s Symphony Hall.

Heard

Louis Menand is Bass Professor of English at Harvard University, as well as a critic and essayist. His best-selling book The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20thcentury America, received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. “Rock’n’ Roll ’n’ Race” (p. 26) is adapted from his latest book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). Menand Kuronen

O’Brien

Whitehair

Michael Ray O’Brien took up writing about history mostly as an alibi for reading so darned much of it. A graduate of the University of Kansas, he lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where both sides rehearsed for the Civil War. “Toymaker of Hawthorn Hill” (p. 60) marks his first appearance in the magazine. Independent historian Karen Whitehair worked for 30 years as a staff collections manager with the Smithsonian Institution, the National Park Service, and historic sites in and around Washington, DC. “John Jay, Abolitionist” (p. 36) is her first contribution to the magazine.

For nearly 40 years, I have enjoyed your wonderful, incomparable magazine. It’s always read cover-to-cover. The columns, the variety of topics, the reviews—all without fail are interesting and informative. The smallest of small things: the pictures of Susan B. Anthony on pages 25 and 26 of the June 2021 issue appear to have been taken at the same time—same dress, same scarf, same cameo, same hair, same stern expression—but one is dated 1870 and the other 1881. Are you sure? Brad Funk Princeton, Missouri Both photographs date to 1870. The editor regrets his error.

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QUORUM QUACKERY On May 30, the tail end of the Texas legislature’s session, Democrats in that state’s House of Representatives blocked passage of a bill that, they charged, would trample voting rights; the measure’s Republican sponsors claimed their proposal would institute necessary reforms. The Democratic solons prevailed not by voting the bête noir bill down— Democrats were not numerous enough in that chamber to pull that off—but by vamoosing, thereby depriving Getting Physical the House of the necessary quorum. A quorum is the minimum number of In September 1787, muscle came into play qualified persons who must be present at a in Philadelphia, above, meeting in order to conduct business. Quo- to kick off the process rums in political bodies are a good govern- of state ratification for ment measure, keeping tiny minorities from the Constitution. ramming through stealth legislation. The Constitution sets the quorums for the U.S. House and Senate at a majority of each body; quorum requirements at the state level and abroad range higher and lower. The House of Commons, for example, can function with only 40 of 650 MPs. But quorums are not cure-alls; they invite their own sleight of hand, when prospective losers go home,

taking everyone’s ball with them. Americans have been gaming quorums since day one. An early quorum fight concerned the Constitution itself. On September 18, 1787, the day after the Constitutional Convention wrapped up business at the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, the state’s unicameral Assembly, shunted to the second floor for the duration, came back downstairs to consider the new document. The Constitution stipulated that conventions called in each state were to vote on whether to ratify; nine approvals would put the Constitution over the top. Its supporters wanted to get Pennsylvania, the second most populous state, into the pro column ASAP; they also hoped this show of enthusiasm would lure the nation’s capital back to Philly from its then-home in New York City. They had to move quickly though. The

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WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING HOLLYWOOD ACTORS NEVER PORTRAYED WILLIAM F. “BUFFALO BILL” CODY ONSCREEN? Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, Keith Carradine, or Lee J. Cobb?

For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ MAGAZINES/QUIZ

HISTORYNET.com ANSWER: LEE J. COBB. 1953’S PONY EXPRESS FEATURED CHARLTON HESTON AS CODY. IN 1976 PAUL NEWMAN STARRED AS CODY IN ROBERT ALTMAN’S BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON. IN 1995 KEITH CARRADINE PORTRAYED CODY IN WILD BILL, A CAREER LOW POINT FOR LEGENDARY DIRECTOR WALTER HILL.

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Assembly was set to adjourn in 11 days. On September 25, lawmakers voted to print and distribute 3,000 copies of the Constitution, 1,000 of them in German, the state’s second language. On the morning of the 28th, they began hearing motions to elect a state ratifying convention. Skeptics asked, why the rush? Pennsylvania was a huge state, its westernmost reaches beyond the Alleghenies. As yet, many residents outside Philadelphia hadn’t even heard of the Constitution. Besides, what did the old Congress, which the Constitution proposed to replace, think? The Assembly had heard no word from New York. When members convened for its afternoon session, only 44 showed up—two shy of the 2/3 quorum. The sergeant at arms found most of the absentees, Constitution-skeptics all, at a local boarding house. But they refused to return. The next morning an express rider from New York galloped into town bringing news that the old Congress had indeed decided to let state conventions vote the Constitution up or down. But this report did not constitute an official notification. Suddenly desperate, Constitution supporters resorted to muscle. A four-man posse led by the sergeant-atarms accosted two truants on the street and quick-marched them to the State House. One, James M’Calmont, protested that he was there “contrary to his wishes” and demanded to leave. A crowd at the door barred his way; the majority, quorum secure, got its. An 1840 quorum rumpus in Illinois is of note for the identity of one of the no-shows. Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer and state rep, was a rising stalwart of the Whigs, a new political party originally devoted to hatred of Andrew Jackson. The Whigs had a good 1840 cycle— William Henry Harrison, their presidential candidate, ran a populist campaign highlighting his alleged abode (a log cabin) and drink of choice (hard cider). Lincoln, even at 31 showing his serious streak, focused his pitch instead on the Whigs’ economic program, which called for government sponsored banks. Jacksonian Democrats blasted such entities as tools of the rich and well-connected. But, Lincoln argued, by offering credit responsibly, they made Americans “prosperous and happy.” Illinois had a state bank, at the time far from prosperous. Illinois law allowed the bank to make payments in its own paper currency so long as the legislature was in session. But once that body adjourned, the bank would have to pay in hard money, which it didn’t have. Anti-bank Democrats planned to put the bank out of its misery by calling a snap adjournment on December 5, between the end of one session and the start of the next. The Whigs determined to keep the bank on life support by denying a quorum, and therefore any chance for a motion to adjourn. The state House of Representatives, to which Lincoln belonged, was meeting for the first time in the new state capital of Springfield—not in the new state house, still under construction, but in the cramped quarters of a nearby church. Lincoln and two lieutenants stayed behind to demand a roll call, in order to prove the House under strength. Then a few under-the-weather Democrats straggled into the session from their sickbeds—enough, along with the Whig observers, to make the quorum after all. The Democrats locked the doors for good measure.

Lincoln and cohort had thought to tangle up the whigs by walking out, but the gag was on them when the roll got called.

Lincoln and pals jumped out a second-story window. But since they had been recorded as present on the roll call, their desperate defenestration accomplished nothing. Nothing, that is, but a laugh for Democrats. A nyuck-nyuck account in local newspapers was picked up and reprinted nationwide: “We have not heard whether these flying members got hurt in their adventure, and we think it probable that at least one of them came off without damage, as it was noticed that his legs reached almost to the ground!” Maybe, the story went on, the new State House should be raised an extra floor, so that “Mr. Lincoln will in future have to climb down the spout!” Lincoln, unamused, referred to the episode as “that jumping scrape.” The antics embarrassed Illinois Whigs. Philadelphia’s 1787 quorum breakers claimed the moral high ground, telling the nation about getting the bum’s rush, being “forcibly dragged through the streets,” with “their clothes torn.” Such “outrageous proceedings” confirmed the worst suspicions of the Constitution’s opponents nationwide. How good could the proposed document be if its partisans had to resort to thuggery to call a ratifying convention? The Constitution’s supporters realized that another such win likely would destroy them. When Massachusetts, the country’s third most populous state, debated the document early in 1788, Federalists, as pro-Constitution forces had come to be called, made their case and answered objections with arguments, not hustle, finally winning over even the crusty old patriot Sam Adams. In the summer, James Madison in Virginia and Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in New York wooed their respective states by the same means. Which expresses a larger truth about quorum fights. Knowing procedural fine points and how to wield them is like Billy Martin managing a baseball team. You can win innings and even games by cleverness, but seasons are won by good fundamentals—and lost without them. Compelling a quorum helped win Pennsylvania for the Constitution, but only persuasion could win over the country as a whole. Two generations later, Whig economics failed politically because it was never successfully tried; no local quorum fight could save it. Lincoln would be remembered for championing a greater issue with higher stakes and deeper support. H

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DEATH FROME ABOV

A Scottish Hero? The Somers Mutiny Ted Williams at War Israel’s Close Call Riding a Torpedo Cedar Creek, 1864

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In one week, Robert E. Lee, with James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, drove the Army of the Potomac away from Richmond.

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Night of Terror Enemy Commandos Invade U.S. Base

The Fatal Romance of Consumption New Netherland’s Enduring Shadow Dragging Quakers to Abolitionism Lone Star State’s Tent Show King

HOMEFRONT Richard Roundtree becomes John Shaft

Green Berets Dramatic scenes of Special Forces in combat FIRST IN A FOUR-PART SERIES

A U.S. Special Forces leader directs local militiamen atop a hill in Ha Thanh.

Eyes in the Sky The pilots who directed airstrikes to save the troops below

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f-107 ultra sabre: best fighter the USAF never bought?

Fall From Grace Brilliant but star-crossed, Herbert Hoover followed a landslide victory with a landslide defeat

The ’Nam

Marvel Comics enters the war

slow but deadly

the sbd dauntless dive bomber sank japan’s pacific war strategy pan am clippers: when luxurious flying boats conquered the world

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aerial minesweeping: ingenious solution to an undersea menace

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In World War II the famed “Fighting 79th” slugged its way through Nazi strongholds

gall’s last stand

FitZ John Porter

Scapegoat

army artillery forced his 1881 surrender in montana territory

The general was a rising star in the Union Army until blamed for defeat at 2nd Bull Run Rebel artillery commanders Plus! feud on the road to Gettysburg Rare 1861 images of 1st Massachusetts Cavalry

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Reach Out and Touch the Sky Fellow WW2 combat veterans Glenn and Kennedy with the capsule that carried Glenn around the earth and into history.

RESTORING AMERICA’S MOJO Speechwriter, cartoonist, and author Jeff Shesol was a founding partner of Washington, DC-based consulting firm West Wing Writers. He wrote speeches for President Bill Clinton from 1998-2001. From 1994 to 1998 he wrote Thatch, a nationally syndicated comic strip. Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy and the New Battleground of the Cold War (Norton, 2021) is his third book. Rocket Man Shesol sees Glenn’s flight as a leap forward for the American space effort and an immense boost for American confidence.

Was the Mercury program strictly a panicked reaction to the USSR reaching space first? The idea of manned space flight was not new. In the mid-1950s, the Air Force, Navy, and Army each had been working on competing plans. Those rivalries drove President Dwight Eisenhower to strip the military services of their authority over spaceflight and

award it to NASA. Starting with Sputnik in 1957, however, every Soviet space “first” heightened anxiety, even terror, in the United States. The creation of NASA and Project Mercury signaled America’s intent to catch up. The idea that the USSR might militarize space was especially galvanizing. The Soviets insisted their purposes were peaceful, but with a wink. Cosmonauts lied that they could maneuver their capsules and land anywhere on earth, as if a spacecraft was as agile as a fighter plane. They hinted, also falsely, that their spacecraft could carry bombs. Experts, senators, and much of the American public believed them and expected that, before long, the USSR would be building a nuclear missile base on the moon.

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OPPOSITE PAGE: PARIS MATCH ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

BY RICHARD ERNSBERGER JR.

Nobody knew President John Kennedy’s thoughts about NASA, but he gave the agency the push it needed. What drove that? During the 1960 campaign, JFK hammered Richard Nixon and the Eisenhower administration for letting America come in “second in space,” but he had no notion of how to catch up to the Soviets. He had other priorities, and the program remained in a state of suspended animation. Kennedy’s own advisers couldn’t predict whether he would accelerate Project Mercury or cancel it. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets forced his hand. Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight made him the first man in space, set off weeks of anguished White House meetings—and in May JFK proposed to send Americans to the moon by the end of the decade. John Glenn, your protagonist, was the quintessential All-American success story—country boy turned fighter pilot, test pilot, and space pioneer. Movies and books depict Glenn as “the Boy Scout”—wholesome, sunny, slightly cornball. He was all these things, but he was also more interesting than that—edgier, fiercely competitive. Baseball player Ted Williams, who served as Glenn’s wingman during the Korean War, said, “The man is crazy.” He had seen Glenn fly dangerously low through sheets of anti-aircraft fire, returning to base with his plane full of holes. So, yes, Glenn was a Sunday school teacher, but he also had a steely sense of calm when his capsule’s autopilot stopped working more than a hundred miles above the earth. He didn’t play the part of a tough guy; he simply was one.

OPPOSITE PAGE: PARIS MATCH ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Most of the other Mercury astronauts resented him. Envy played a big role. Glenn was the only one of the seven Mercury program participants who had been famous before becoming an astronaut, and he was the favorite of the press and the public. His strict moral code was another strike against him. He insisted that the astronauts, as role models, ought to “keep their pants zipped.” The others didn’t, and they resented him for saying so. Everyone expected Glenn to be making the first manned American space flight—but Alan Shepard did. How did Glenn react? Badly—bitterly, in fact. He was not accustomed to disappointment. He lobbied his superiors, trying to change their minds. His main Talking Technology grievance was that the astro- In September 1959, Convair exec J.D. nauts themselves had been Dempsey, with escape module given a voice in the decision, model, met Mercury team members and the decision went for Wally Schirra, John Glenn, Gus Shepard, which Glenn saw as Grissom, Alan Shepard, Gordon Cooper, and Scott Carpenter. the group’s revenge for his insistence on clean living. For weeks, he remained sullen and withdrawn, even from his own family. Eventually, though, Glenn made his peace with the situation and gave Shepard his support.

Going into space third worked in Glenn’s favor. Being backup to Al Shepard and Gus Grissom was almost too much for Glenn to take. But that indignity turned out to be a stroke of luck. Shepard and Grissom made suborbital flights, up and down in 15 minutes. When it was Glenn’s turn, NASA went for “the big one”: the first orbital flight. The Mercury program operated in public and endured several failures, creating an air of impending disaster. The astronauts saw it as inevitable: one of them would die before Project Mercury was through. The longer Glenn’s launch was delayed, the more likely that flight seemed destined to end in disaster. Reporters asked a NASA spokesman whether Glenn would be carrying a cyanide pill in case he got stuck in orbit and was unable to return before his oxygen ran out. President Kennedy himself sought assurance from Glenn that NASA had done everything in its power to assure his safety. Glenn told him it had. Privately, he was not so sure. Why didn’t the USSR try to put a man on the moon? Early in the space race, with the USSR well ahead, there was a good deal of defeatist talk about the inability of a fractious democracy to move as quickly and effectively as a dictatorship. But in the end, the communist system’s defects caused the Soviets to lose the race to the moon. Their program was bogged down by bureaucracy, subject to the Politburo’s whims, and plagued from top to bottom by a lack of accountability. For all its difficulties, the Mercury space program had a profound impact on the American psyche. Mercury generated excitement from the start, but until Friendship 7 the program seemed a shadow of the Soviet program. Response to Glenn’s success—“wild mob scenes” in New York, as UPI reported, people weeping in public—reflected years of pent-up insecurity and fear. The lift Glenn gave to the national mood was profound; he helped restore the nation’s belief in itself. H OCTOBER 2021 19

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AMERICAN SCHEMERS

Making Up Mike

his mother gave her boy to relatives emigrating to New York. Hershel’s new family settled in a Lower East Side tenement. He ran away, then got sent to an orphanage. He escaped, and was sent to another orphanage, then another. At 15, officialdom shipped Hershel west on an orphan train, to be placed with a farm family in Hillsboro, Illinois. He ran off and was found sleeping in a churchyard. A banker took him in. A tutor found him highly intelligent. Hershel—now Harry—had learned the art of charming people who could help him. In 1909, age 19, he sailed to England on a cattle ship. In Oxford, he worked as a tailor and a valet. He studied British toffs and learned to ape their accents, their manners, their casual snobbery. He became Willoughby de Burke, a charming aristocrat given to buying on credit, then ignoring the bills. Scotland Yard arrested him but couldn’t ID him, labeling him “a Rogue of Uncertain Origin.” Authorities dispatched

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ROMANOFF’S

The Royal Scam Romanoff, top, in his apartment after his stunt swim across New York harbor, and, above, dragged up in traditional Cossack regalia.

He fought in the British army in World War I, led a Russian Cossack regiment, and served in the French Foreign Legion. Or so he said. He also said he was born in New York. And that he was born in Russia. That he studied at Harvard. And at Oxford. Oh, and Heidelberg, where he’d killed a German nobleman in a duel, causing him to spend World War I behind bars. He also claimed the Bolsheviks jailed him after the Russian Revolution. But not before he helped murder the mad monk Rasputin. He said his name was Harry Ferguson. He also said it was Willoughby de Burke, Count Gladstone, and William Rockefeller, among others. Finally, he settled on Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Obolenski Romanoff, nephew or sometimes half-brother of Czar Nicholas II, who was assassinated with his family in 1918. Actually, he was born Hershel Geguzin in Lithuania in 1890, son of a Jewish shopkeeper who died before his son’s birth. Ten years later,

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BY PETER CARLSON

ROMANOFF’S

BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES (2)

AMERICAN SCHEMERS him to a mental hospital, then into prison. “When the war started, I enlisted at once and was sent to France,” the fantasist told an American reporter in 1923. “I was wounded four times… At the close of the war, I held the commission of Major…” None of his biographers believe that. Nor do they believe his tales of commanding Cossacks and fighting in the Foreign Legion. He probably spent the war in England. After the war, he surfaced in Paris, posing as an Oxford graduate to snag a job at the American Library. His co-workers included two refugees from the Russian upper crust. He borrowed their haughty mien and re-invented himself as Prince Michael Romanoff. He found people eager to buy drinks and meals for a charming royal who told stories of war, revolution, and killing Rasputin. Some even loaned him money while he was waiting for his riches to arrive from the Motherland. “Mike was in great demand in Paris, not only because he was a Romanoff but because he was entertaining,” wrote Alva Johnston in a 1932 New Yorker profile. When the prince sailed to New York in 1922, officials at Ellis Island detained him, suspecting—correctly—that he wasn’t an American citizen. He stowed away on a ferryboat. Two weeks later, he staged a press conference, announcing that he’d fled red Russia to start a new life in America but was so tormented by heartless immigration bureaucrats that he’d swum from Ellis Island to Manhattan, his possessions bundled in a scarf tied to a walking stick he clutched in his teeth while swimming. The resulting coverage made him famous. He earned money lecturing on “Russia, Past and Present.” In 1923, wearing morning coat and top hat, he charmed the swells at Harvard. He threw a fête at Boston’s Copley-Plaza Hotel featuring Champagne and caviar. Handed the bill, he waxed umbrageous. “This is most presumptuous,” he declaimed. “My people are accustomed to receive annual statements only. I shall never patronize your hostelry again.” For a decade, Prince Michael roamed America, gulling rich people and snookering reporters who glorified his bogus adventures. The checks he wrote inevitably bounced. He was arrested in Boston, New York, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles. Newspapers that had gushed florid encomia now spewed scathing exposés. In 1932, federal agents busted him as an illegal

immigrant and deported him to France, where he was soon arrested for stealing an American passport. He did six months in stir before the French deported him back to America, where he was promptly re-arrested. Rich friends bailed him out. Soon, Prince Michael was on the vaudeville circuit, playing…Prince Michael. His lawyers cut a deal with the embarrassed feds; the prince pleaded guilty in return for a suspended sentence. Now he was free. But he was famous as an impostor and a confidence man, sharply curtailing his ability to make a dishonest living. In 1936, the prince made his smartest decision. He settled in a place where many prominent residents had come from somewhere else, changed their names, and made millions pretending to be fictional characters. That place was Hollywood. He fit right in. He worked as a chauffeur and won bit parts in movies, playing British aristocrats. He charmed fellow actors who knew he wasn’t a prince but were impressed that he never stopped pretending to be one. He was, they recognized, a full-time performance artist. In 1939, he convinced a dozen pals—James Cagney, Charlie Chaplin, and Humphrey Bogart among them—to invest in an elegant joint he was hoping to create. Some investors suspected him of running yet another scam. He wasn’t. Romanoff’s opened on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in 1939 and was immediately successful. A French chef cooked delicious haute cuisine while the Prince served as maître d’hotel, hobnobbing with stars and beguiling customers with autobiographical anecdotes that were sometimes almost semi-true. He opened an even bigger Romanoff’s in 1950. He married a beautiful woman, bought a mansion in Beverly Hills, spent pleasant nights drinking and laughing with Bogey & Bacall & Sinatra. In 1958, Congress passed a bill declaring Michael Romanoff a legal resident of the United States. A judge granted said Romanoff American citizenship—but only after he officially renounced his fictitious Russian title. He ran his royal ruse until the day he died in 1971. “He did not pretend to be Prince Michael Romanoff of Russia,” wrote journalist Alistair Cooke. “He pretended, and managed to be, a great comic pretending to be Prince Michael Romanoff of Russia.” H

His fame for rooking the gullible cut sharply into the fake prince’s ability to make a dishonest living.

The Real Deal Out of a lifetime of conmanship, Mike Romanoff finally confected a sweet niche for himself by sticking to the bogus persona he’d created.

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SCOTUS 101

In the Arena From left, plaintiffs’ attorneys Hobart Atkins, Harris Gilbert, Z.T. Osborn Jr., Warren Chandler, and C.R. McClain in May 1962.

TOWN AND COUNTRY BAKER V. CARR 369 U.S. 186 (1962) IN A SUIT OVER INEQUITABLE APPORTIONMENT IN TENNESSEE, THE JUSTICES HELD THAT REDISTRICTING CHALLENGES, ONCE DEEMED “POLITICAL,” COULD BE HEARD IN FEDERAL COURT.

No case has tested the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court more than 1962’s Baker v. Carr. The Court had to hear a second set of oral arguments six months after the first, then hand down six opinions for eight justices. The ninth justice, Charles Evans Whittaker, found trying the case so upsetting he had a nervous breakdown and skipped the final vote. He resigned right after the decision and soon after died. Yet Chief Justice Earl Warren called Baker v. Carr the most important decision rendered in his 16 years on the High Court. Baker occurred because Charles W. Baker, mayor of Millington, Tennessee, nine miles north of Memphis, tired of his town getting the short end of the state legislative stick. He signed on as lead plaintiff in a suit the League of Women Voters and other reform organizations organized. The goal was rebalancing

state-level representation of residents of cities and suburbs. Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and environs had 63 percent of Tennessee’s people but only 13 of 33 state Senate seats. A rural voter enjoyed disproportionate clout: the Memphis area’s seven state senators each represented 20 times the number of residents the senator from farm-filled Moore Country did. Tennessee’s constitution called for reapportioning the legislature every ten years, but the state still was basing voting districts on the 1900 census. The 1920 census had shown for the first time more Americans living in cities than in rural areas. That shift held, unacknowledged in legislatures. Rural lawmakers were using their legislative majority to starve cities with skinflint outlays for public needs. The condition was nationwide, with urbanites shortchanged in as many as 40 states. The

JOE RUDIS/THE TENNESSEAN

BY DANIEL B. MOSKOWITZ

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JOE RUDIS/THE TENNESSEAN

SCOTUS 101 6 million living in the Los Angeles County area had the same punch in California’s legislature as a rural district of 14,000. Burlington, Vermont’s capital (pop. 33,155), had one rep in that state’s lower house; so did Vermont’s least populous district, with just 38 residents. The situation was profoundly anti-democratic, but city folk had scant recourse. Neither of the routes normally open to political reformers was available to them. Asking legislatures to reapportion to reflect population reality was futile, since rural lawmakers hated to yield power. Going to court was ineffective; judges’ hands were tied by a 1946 Supreme Court mandate in Colgrove v. Green that redistricting was a political question courts were to eschew. After Baker’s challenge was denied, the justices decided to rethink that 1946 precedent. In oral arguments in April 1961, the lawyer asking that Tennessee’s districts reflect population claimed the extant setup so diluted urban residents’ power as to deny them equal protection as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Lawyers for Tennessee Secretary of State Joe C. Carr admitted to the inequalities but insisted the matter was one for the state to address, leaving federal courts no role. In conference, the justices split harshly, haranguing one another. Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, both dissenters in Colgrove, were joined by Warren and William Brennan in backing mandatory redistricting. Felix Frankfurter, who had written the Colgrove decision, was adamant about upholding its ban on federal court action; he feared that too much intervention in everyday life would cost courts the public’s trust. He had immediate support from conservative John Harlan. Tom Clark hesitated to let federal courts wade into what he saw as political disputes, and Whittaker, though sympathizing with those for redistricting, would not lend a fifth vote to override Colgrove. Potter Stewart ended the discussion by saying he could not make up his mind. That meant additional oral arguments— three hours in October, in the court’s first-ever morning session. Whittaker was still wrestling with his decision, but Stewart indicated he was leaning toward siding with those who saw in Tennessee’s apportionment a 14th Amendment problem. Clark was in the Frankfurter camp but in trying to write a dissent listing options for would-be redistricters, he realized none existed and tentatively switched sides.

Even with Whittaker still on the fence, the Warren side now had a comfortable six votes—if they could hold Clark and Stewart. To achieve that tricky end, Warren’s means was to assign the job of writing the majority opinion to Brennan, rather than to Black or Douglas, longtime foes of malapportionment. Brennan carefully crafted a holding that would not alienate those two wavering pillars. He acknowledged that the courts had to stay out of political questions, but then focused on the core—and never previously addressed— question of just what constituted a political question. He explored six themes, saying a matter was “political” if 1) the Constitution assigned the decision-making power to a specific department; 2) no judicial standard exists for resolving the issue; 3) any decision would involve making policy beyond the courts’ powers; 4) the court cannot resolve the issue without displaying “lack of respect” for the political branches; 5) “an unusual need” militates against questioning a political decision already made; and 6) a potential for embarrassment impends if various branches of government are making conflicting rulings. Applying those factors, the decision Brennan wrote did not order Tennessee to redraw its legislative map but did tell reformers they could make their 14th Amendment claims in federal court. That careful solution garnered six votes, but three added their particular views. Douglas underscored that all barriers to apportionment challenges had been removed, Clark said Tennessee was so malapportioned the court should have concluded that it was violating the Constitution, and Stewart insisted that the ruling still left lower courts free to OK a rational apportioning scheme not based on population. Harlan and Frankfurter each wrote dissents. Frankfurter’s was his final opinion in 23 years on the court; he suffered a stroke seven days after Baker was decided and four months later resigned. Reapportionment advocates had little trouble winning challenges in lower courts. And when states sought relief from the Supreme Court in those redistricting rulings, they got no support. Just ten months after the Baker v. Carr decision, the court in a case that originated in Georgia enunciated the “one person, one vote” standard. The next year the justices applied that principle to drawing district lines for the U.S. House of Representatives. Four months later the Court decreed states could not follow the national pattern of a Senate with representation for geographic areas but had to redistrict both houses of their legislatures only by population. “Legislators represent people, not trees,” Warren wrote. (By then Whittaker and Frankfurter had been replaced by Byron White and Arthur Goldberg, two justices who joined the camp seeing a more expansive role for the federal judiciary in enforcing the guarantees of the 14th Amendment.) Either under pressure from court cases or the realization that failure to act would trigger such suits, within two years of the Baker decision 26 states had reapportioned their legislatures; 46 had by 1966. That’s why Theodore Olson, solicitor general under President George W. Bush, says, “the decision in this case changed the way we are governed in this country in a very dramatic way.” H

Baker v. Carr set in motion a cascade of decisions that remade legislatures across the country as states bowed to the new paradigm.

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DE MILLENNIUM BY SARAH RICHARDSON

Years after Clive Barnes had panned her work, choreographer Agnes De Mille ran into the theater critic at a party. Barnes greeted her warmly. She replied, “Am I supposed to kiss your axe?” Humor and boldness were defining features of Agnes George De Mille, an unlikely dancer/ choreographer turned arts maven with a matchless pedigree. Daughter of film mogul Cecil B. De Mille’s brother, playwright William De Mille, she was also granddaughter on her mother’s side of Henry George, who made a name for himself as a journalist and economist opposing oppressive land policies and pushing populist concerns. Her compositions would blend theatricality and populism in the nascent field of American ballet, a field being transformed by émigré talents such as George Balanchine and Anthony Tudor. Sporting a nimbus of curly red hair and an irrepressible spirit, De Mille incorporated

personality into gesture and merged traditional folk steps, tap, everyday movements like skipping, modern dance innovations, and balletic classicism into dances that remade the American musical from a singing variety show to a narrative theatrical form. De Mille displayed a piquant perspective in several highly entertaining memoirs. Louis Horst, choreographer Martha Graham’s musical director, nicknamed her “Agony De Mille” for her legendary sense of tribulation, and even she deemed herself a “virtuoso self-pitier.” But De Mille’s struggles got her much of what she wanted, and far, far more than most women of her day usually were able to achieve. Wags referred to “De Millennium” when she broke through and for a time was choreography’s biggest name. Her ticket was her groundbreaking dance “Rodeo,” which led to her greatest acclaim, as dance mistress of the 1943 musical Oklahoma! Born defiant, she nonetheless shaped a life able to accommodate both a distinguished career and a 40-year marriage to booking agent Walter Prude that lasted until his death in 1988. Agnes De Mille was determined to have it all, and, somehow, she gloriously did. Born in 1905 in uptown Manhattan, she grew up in a circle of theatrical and literary artists that enlarged when her parents moved to Hollywood, California. She was an avid reader and distinguished student, but it was dance—then considered a disreputable trade for an American woman—that she chose for herself at 13 after watching Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova perform. She got dance lessons only because younger sister Margaret was prescribed ballet to treat flat feet. Ballerinas were long and lithe. Agnes was neither, but she was hooked and, more important, undeterred. “You want to dance and to hell with everything else,” she said. She embraced a freedom in movement that felt complete, especially when societal expectations were constricting women in all matters. De Mille received a college degree in English literature from UCLA but went all in for dance. In California, she steeped herself in every

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Hello, Cowgirl on the Stage Imbuing Aaron Copland’s stirring melodies and rhythms with muscle and sinew, De Mille took a star turn as the high-kicking heroine of Rodeo.

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newest form. Pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Weidman were creating performances that drew not from European classical dance but from the East. Predecessor Isadora Duncan also had broken free of ballet entirely. De Mille trained during a spell in London where she, her mother, and sister lived for a time after her parents divorced. They returned to New York City, where Agnes met Martha Graham, who was introducing movements that focused on the torso and a relationship to the ground, not ballet’s ethereal airborne style. Graham became a cordial rival and one of the young artist’s best friends. De Mille began creating solo and duo dances rooted in story, humor, and pathos. According to Carol Easton’s De Mille biography No Intermissions, she stole the show in 1930 when she performed a characteristically De Millean dance as part of a concert program loaded with other choreographers’ more abstract approaches. The De Mille name drew attention, sometimes unhelpful; she often felt slighted as a “rich amateur.” Though she was stupendously rich in connections and determination, she didn’t have as much family money as outsiders supposed. “In many ways the hardships were beneficial,” she recalled. “I played the piano for rehearsal, I arranged and copied music, I designed costumes, shopped for material, cut and stitched, packed, pressed and hung. I learned lighting, lit and ran performances, I rehearsed groups and myself. I took charge of the printing, wrote copy and advertisements, organized photographic sessions, signed leases, devised and signed contracts, made up the payroll and kept the books. I also devised all my dances and performed them. The first time I walked into a theater as a director-choreographer, I was master of the situation, although I had never directed before in my life.” Her dances drew on unfamiliar corners of American life: her Black Ritual, created in 1940 about voodoo practices, was the first formal performance in the United States choreographed for Black dancers. Another landmark in her choreography career was Rodeo, premiering at the Metropolitan Opera House in October 1942. De Mille imagined a dance evoking the wide-open, cattle-roping West, indelibly annealing movement to composer Aaron Copland’s rhythms and melodies. Nothing like this had ever appeared in classical ballet. Agnes played the role of the spirited cowgirl, drawing a standing ovation and 22 curtain calls. A reviewer called Rodeo “the kind of ballet that Mark Twain might have written if his mind had run to ballets.” These dances of De Mille’s might be called character studies, a distinction allowing her creative latitude in the musical context to employ dance not as a lyrical interlude but as a mechanism to drive the story line. Rodeo led the next year to choreographing Oklahoma! Set on the Great Plains, the book recounts the story of a gamine with a choice of suitors. Created by composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma! exuded an optimism that De Mille recognized as a tonic for Americans battered by war. Improbably, she herself was reveling in delirious joy. Observing her friend enduring a string of difficult romances, in 1943 Martha Graham set Agnes up with handsome,

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What needed doing De Mille did, from playing piano to sewing costumes to lighting to copywriting, bookkeeping, and leasing.

taciturn, music-loving booking agent Walter Prude. Diving into a brief courtship, the two fell madly in love, married while he was serving in the U.S. Air Force, and, though Prude never seemed to comprehend why choreography so enthralled De Mille, remained devoted partners through four decades of marriage. De Mille went on to choreograph musicals Carousel and Brigadoon; her own ballet Fall River Legend, inspired by Lizzie Borden’s 1892 hatchet murders of her father and stepmother; and other shows, often feuding with producers. She struggled to control her material and to force her theatrical instincts on collaborators. Even so, she loved the test of creating characters with gesture and developing stories that rang true to American audiences. She chafed at the paucity of recognition accorded choreographers and dancers for contributing so much to musicals’ vitality and popularity. Thanks only to her insistence, De Mille is credited for the dances that she composed for Oklahoma!—the first time a musical’s credits officially acknowledged the creator of the production’s dances. A long nightmarish dream sequence ballet, conceived after De Mille convinced the producers to ditch a circus scene, forever changed the trajectory of American musicals. Easton notes that 46 of the next 72 American musicals produced included a ballet. De Mille agitated constantly for more recognition of choreography. In 1959, she helped found the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers—now the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society—to represent theater directors and choreographers in the U.S. De Mille was president and for a time the only female head of a labor union. Voraciously self-interested, she also closely attended to others. Her observations of collaborators and artistic contemporaries are penetrating and frequently hilarious. Over the decades, she became a grande dame of dance and the arts and a prolific author and lecturer. She survived a debilitating stroke and the loss of her husband before dying at her New York City home in 1993 at 88. Someone once asked Agnes De Mille about heaven and whether she would be comfortable with perfection there. “Oh, I hope it’s not like that!” she replied. “I don’t want perfection. The struggle is everything!”—a fitting remark from a woman who once quoted Socrates: “The best dancer is also the best warrior.” H OCTOBER 2021 25

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Rock’n Rol

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A fresh look at the keystone of the Presley legend By Louis Menand

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oll ’n Race

On the Road Again At the Fox Theater in Detroit, Michigan, May 25, 1956. OCTOBER 2021 27

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Presley was born in East Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935. His father, Vernon, was a laborer who moved from job to job. The Presleys lived for a time in a Black neighborhood in Tupelo (though in a “White” house). They did not consider themselves, and there is no evidence that they were, racially intolerant. Elvis was an only child—a twin brother was stillborn—and he was especially close to his mother, Gladys. Gladys was dynamic; people liked her. But the family was somewhat insular. In school, Elvis was a bit of an

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to do what I can do best,” as he said. But he didn’t sing only for the money. He sang because he was a singer, and his enormous popularity exposed people to genres of popular music they otherwise might not have paid attention to.

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ffstage, Elvis Presley was the opposite of the type conventionally associated with the music of which he is universally considered the supreme exponent. He was not remotely rebellious, delinquent, or “animalistic” (a term used in denunciations of his performance style). He was shy and deferential and devoted to his parents. “Nice” is a word often used to describe him. Presley had had no intention of becoming a rock ’n’ roll singer and he never really considered himself one. He sang rock ’n’ roll songs, but he sang all kinds of songs. He understood that pop music was a business in which a lot of money could be made; if rock ’n’ roll could make him more, he was happy to sing rock ’n’ roll. “I have

At the Source Elvis Presley, Bill Black, and Scotty Moore at Sun Records with owner/ producer Sam Phillips.

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outsider and sometimes got picked on. He stood out not because of any special talent, but because, as a teenager, he dressed up: bolero jackets, a scarf worn as an ascot, dress pants with stripes down the sides. His demeanor remained reserved and respectful. In 1948, the family moved to Memphis, where Presley attended Humes High. (Schools were segregated by law in Tennessee.) The summer after he graduated, in 1953, he walked into the Memphis Recording Service to cut a record. The Memphis Recording Service was more than a recording facility. Its founder, Sam Phillips, had a vision. Like Presley, Phillips came to Memphis from the deeper South. He was born in 1923 in a small town in Alabama called Lovelace Community, near Florence. His father was a flagman on a railroad bridge over the Tennessee River. Phillips got his start in radio, working in Decatur and Nashville and finally, in 1945, making it to Memphis—in his mind what Paris was for Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. In 1950, he opened the Memphis Recording Service in a tiny space on Union Avenue a block away from Beale Street, the heart of the Memphis music scene. “We record anything—anywhere—anytime”

At school Elvis was a bit of an outsider and got picked on. reserved and respectful, he did display a dramatic sense of sartorial style.

was the studio’s slogan. This meant a lot of church services, weddings, and funerals. But Phillips’s dream, the reason he set the studio up, was to have a place any aspiring musician could walk into and try out, no questions asked. Phillips would listen and offer suggestions and encouragement. If he liked what he heard, he would record it. For a fee, the performer could cut his or her own record. Phillips was patient with the musicians; he was adept with the technology; he was supportive. He thought that music is about self-expression. He liked blues songs especially, but he liked any song that sounded different. The pop sound in 1950 was smooth and harmonic; Phillips

Antecedent and Inheritor Arthur Crudup did not make a dime off Presley’s “That’s All Right, Mama,” but then, to compose it he had borrowed heavily from a Big Joe Turner tune, “That’s All Right, Baby.” OCTOBER 2021 29

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Presley came in to make a record for his mother. At least, that’s the legend; according to a friend, the Presleys did not own a phonograph. He paid 30 AMERICAN HISTORY

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preferred imperfection. It made the music seem spontaneous and authentic, qualities that would become key attributes of rock ’n’ roll. Word got around, and musicians no one else would record, many of them Black, turned up at the Memphis Recording Service. Phillips was the first to record Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, and B.B. King. A musical genre boils down to a certain kind of sound, which is why songs can be covered in different genres. As much as anyone, Phillips helped create the sound of rock ’n’ roll. To have his recordings pressed and distributed, Phillips relied on independent labels such as Modern Records and Chess. But he found the men who ran those outfits untrustworthy—he felt that they tried to poach his artists or cheated him on royalties—and so in 1952, he started up his own label, Sun Records. That was relatively late in the history of independent labels.

$3.99 plus tax to record two songs, “My Happiness,” which had been a hit for several artists, including Ella Fitzgerald, and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” an Ink Spots song. Whether Phillips was in the booth that day or not later became a matter of dispute (he insisted that he was), but someone wrote next to Presley’s name, “Good ballad singer. Hold.” A year later, Phillips invited Presley back to try out a ballad he’d come across. The song didn’t seem to work, and, per his standard operating procedure, Phillips had Presley run through all the material he knew, any song he could remember. After three hours, they gave up. Phillips decided to pursue the experiment, though, and he put Presley together with a couple of country musicians, Scotty Moore, an electric guitarist, and Bill Black, who played stand-up bass, and invited them to come into the studio, which, on July 5, 1954, they did. They began the session with a Bing Crosby song, “Harbor Lights,” then tried a ballad, then a country song. They did multiple takes; nothing seemed to click. Everyone was ready to quit for the night when, as Elvis told the story later, “this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago and I started kidding around.” The song was “That’s All Right, Mama,” an R&B number written and recorded by Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup. “Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them,” Moore said. Phillips stuck his head out of the booth and told them to start again from the beginning. After multiple takes, they had a record. Phillips was friendly with a White disk jockey, Dewey Phillips (not related), who played some R&B on his show on WHBQ in Memphis. Sam gave the acetate to Dewey and Dewey played it repeatedly on his broadcast. It was an overnight sensation. To have a record that people could buy, they needed a B-side. So

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

In the Beginning Was the Word With songsmiths Mike Stoller and Jerry Lieber, Elvis studies the sheet music for “Jailhouse Rock,” a movie title as well as a song title.

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MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Presley, Moore, and Black recorded an up-tempo cover of a bluegrass song, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and in July 1954, Elvis Presley’s first single came on the market. In his promotional campaign, Phillips emphasized the record’s appeal to all listeners, pop, country, and rhythm and blues. “Operators have placed [“That’s All Right”] on nearly all locations (White and Colored) and are reporting plays seldom encountered on a record in recent years,” he wrote in the press release. “According to local sales analysis, the apparent reason for its tremendous sales is because of its appeal to all classes of record buyers.” [author’s emphasis] The trade press picked this up, for, three months after a Billboard article about R&B and White teenagers, it was exactly what the industry was primed to hear. “Presley is the potent new chanter who can sock a tune for either the country or the r. & b. markets,” Billboard noted. “...A strong new talent.” (Crudup never got a dime from Presley or Sun, but as it happened, Crudup had borrowed much of the lyrics and music for “That’s All Right, Mama” from a Big Joe Turner boogie-woogie number called “That’s All Right, Baby,” recorded in 1939 with Pete Johnson on piano.)

“That’s All Right, Mama” started as a joke. Elvis said he had never sung like that before in his life. But it worked, and they tried to figure out why.

the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” He denied it. But it is clear that if he was looking for such a person, he would not have picked Elvis Presley to be the one. Phillips called Presley in as a ballad singer, and that is what Presley believed he essentially was. Presley’s favorite among his own songs was “It’s Now or Never,” which is neither bluesy nor rock ’n’ roll, but Neapolitan. Musically, “It’s Now or Never” is a cover of “O Sole Mio.” “That’s All Right, Mama” started as a joke. Moore and Black thought it was a joke, too. It worked, but it was completely unpremeditated. Presley later admitted that he had never sung like that before in his life. It is interesting, though, that he remembered the song and that Moore and Black knew how to play it. They just never assumed it was a song that White artists performed. Rock ’n’ roll was not “manufactured” by Phillips, Moore, Black, and Presley in Memphis any more (or any less) than the drip paintings were “manufactured” by the artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and art critic Clement Greenberg on Long Island. They tried something out, and then they tried to figure out why it worked. “That’s All Right, Mama” was only a regional hit, and not even No. 1 in Memphis. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was equally popular. Presley didn’t make it onto the national charts for another year; by then, many White performers had stopped refurbishing R&B songs in a pop style and had started imitating them. In 1954, WDIA became a 50,000-watt station reaching the

Phillips was reported to have said, “If I could find a White man who had the Negro sound and Pioneers and Prophets Top, kinetic songwriter Chuck Berry and his pyrotechnic picking inspired generations of would-be guitar heroes. Elvis, seen after signing with RCA—note company mascot at far right— did likewise for an endless army of lead singers. OCTOBER 2021 31

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Made for the Medium Performing transformed Elvis from a shy mumbler into a gyrating fireball with an unbelievably sexy sneer. Opposite, cupping hands to ears let him hear himself amid the tumult he raised.

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entire mid-South, and by 1955, more than six hundred stations in 39 states were programming for Black listeners—which suggested that not only Black people were listening. Producers could see where the sound was headed. So when, for example, Pat Boone walked into Dot Records, in Gallatin, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955—before Presley had had a national hit—he was shocked to be asked to sing a rhythm and blues song. Like Presley, Boone saw himself as a ballad singer. But he recorded Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” and it went to No. 1 on the pop chart. The same summer, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” went to No. 1 after it was heard in the movie Blackboard Jungle. Black performers began to benefit from the popularity of the new sound, too. In May 1955, Chuck Berry recorded “Maybellene” for Chess Records; Chess rushed the record to top New York disc jockey Alan Freed, and it went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 5 on the pop chart. Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” was released a few months later. By January, it had reached No. 17 on the pop chart. Boone and Presley both covered it. Boone’s went to No. 12, Presley’s to No. 20 as the B-side to “Blue Suede Shoes.” Presley was therefore just one of a number of singers, Black and White, trying to meet the demand for songs with an R&B sound. And among those artists, Presley was originally identified not with rock ’n’ roll, but with country, or “rockabilly,” music. The first article about him in a national publication—in Life in April 1956— referred to him as a hillbilly singer. What transformed him into a breakthrough figure in the evolution of pop music? A big part of the answer is television. In 1948, 2 percent of American households had television sets. In 1952, it was about a third. But by 1955, 65 percent of households had television sets, and 86 percent had them by 1959. Prime time in those years was dominated by variety shows, hosted by people like Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Milton Berle, and Perry Como, that booked musical acts. Since most viewers received only three or four channels, the audience for each show was often enormous, in the tens of millions. Television exposure became the best way to sell a record. On television, the performer’s race is apparent. Many sponsors avoided mixed-race television shows, since they were advertising on national networks and did not want to alienate

White viewers in certain regions of the country. This was true to some extent for advertisers on broadcast radio as well, but there were hundreds more stations. Listeners need not feel trapped. In the first years after it went national, American Bandstand did not book any Black acts. There were few local television stations, and they did little programming. Television desegmented the media audience all over again. Radio had opened the door to music for different audiences; television closed it. Presley was made for television, and not only because of his race. With a microphone and in front of an audience, he was transformed from a shy young man who tended to mumble into a gyrating fireball with an unbelievably sexy sneer. He made his first television appearance on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s Stage Show on CBS in January 1956, but his big break came in June, when he sang back-to-back versions of “Hound Dog,” the second time as a slow-motion bump-and-grind routine, on The Milton Berle Show. Forty million people watched. Berle later claimed he received 500,000 negative letters from viewers—and that was when he knew that Presley was a star. Presley sang “Hound Dog” the same way in September in his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sixty million people watched that show—83 percent of all television viewers. By then, “Hound Dog,” with its B-side, “Don’t Be Cruel,” had become the first single to top all three Billboard charts. The same month, Presley’s first LP, Elvis Presley, was released by RCA Victor; it went to No. 1 on the pop albums chart and stayed there for ten weeks. The song that introduced Europeans to Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel,” entered the British pop charts in May 1956. OCTOBER 2021 33

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Lieber and Stoller heard “Hound Dog” as a raunchy Blues but Thornton crooned it until Jerry Lieber showed her how they wanted it sung.

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In October, Presley’s album was released in Britain on the HMV (His Master’s Voice) label and went to No. 1 there as well. The revolution was accomplished. On the level of reception, White performers were adopting a “Black sound.” That is how the charts made things appear. On the level of production, it was a different story. For there is no such thing as a “Black sound” or a “White sound.” “Hound Dog,” which turned out to be one of Presley’s biggest hits, was originally released on the Peacock label by a Black singer named Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton in 1953, when it went to No. 3 on the national R&B charts. Thornton didn’t write the song, however. It was written by two Jewish 20-year-olds living in Los Angeles, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, on commission

from Thornton’s producer at Peacock Records, Johnny Otis. Peacock was based in Houston, as was Thornton, but the song was recorded in L.A. (Everyone believed that Johnny Otis was Black. In fact, he was Greek-American; his given name was Ioannis Veliotes. He used to say he considered himself “Black by persuasion.”) As Leiber and Stoller tell the story, they wrote “Hound Dog” “in a matter of minutes.” They thought they had written a raunchy blues number, but when they brought it into the studio, Thornton insisted on crooning the lyrics. Leiber had to sing it for her so she could hear how it was supposed to sound. Otis sat in on the session and played the drums—he was also a musician—and took co-writing credit. If Thornton’s singing on that record comes across as a parodic imitation of the blues style, that is why. She was copying a sound. Leiber and Stoller would go on to write many standards of the rock ’n’ roll era, including “Kansas City,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Stand By Me.” “Hound Dog” would be covered well over 200 times, including in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and by four

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; VAL WILMER/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

Present at the Creation Elvis in Memphis, Tennessee, singing hymns with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton, recorded the original “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” in Los Angeles.

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES (3); PHILLIP HARRINGTON/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

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country and western artists. It inspired a parody version, known as an “answer” record, called “Bear Cat,” sung by Rufus Thomas, a Black R&B singer, and recorded on the Sun label by Sam Phillips. But Presley didn’t cover Big Mama Thornton’s version. He decided to add the song to his repertoire when, during his unsuccessful first Las Vegas gig, he saw it performed at the Sands by an all-White Philadelphia act called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, who recorded on the Teen label. The group had rewritten Leiber and Stoller’s lyrics to change it from a song about a lover who won’t go away to a song about, actually, a dog. It was a gag number, in other words, and that’s how Elvis performed it—in the goofing-around spirit in which he first sang “That’s All Right, Mama.” When he sang “Hound Dog” on The Steve Allen Show, a basset hound was brought onstage, and Presley sang to the dog. Presley’s bump-and-grind performances of the song on Berle’s and Sullivan’s shows were therefore tongue-in-cheek, a joke—because Freddie and the Bellboys’ version of the song had erased any sexual content. At that point, the song’s chain of custody extended from the Jewish 20-yearolds who wrote it for a fee, to the African American singer who had to be instructed how to sing it, to the White lounge act that spoofed it, to the hillbilly singer who performed it as a burlesque number. Presley’s version of “Hound Dog” isn’t inauthentic, because nothing about the song was ever authentic. Presley recorded “Hound Dog” in July 1956, in a session—which he directed—requiring 31 takes. The B-side, “Don’t Be Cruel,” has a completely different, doo-woppy, country sound. “Don’t Be Cruel” was written for Presley by Otis Blackwell, who would give him two more songs with the same sound, “Return to Sender” and “All Shook Up.” Blackwell was Black. Most musicians’ tastes are much more eclectic than their fans’. If he had nothing else to do, Presley sang gospel, as did Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash, three other Sam Phillips discoveries. (A recording of the four of them jamming in the studio in 1956 was discovered and released several years after Presley’s death.) Muddy Waters sang “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Robert Johnson sang “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” James Brown liked Sinatra and disliked the blues. Leadbelly was a Gene Autry fan. Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” was a cover of a country and western song called “Ida Red,” recorded in 1938 by a White band, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Race had a lot to do with the music business in the United States. It had much less to do with the music. H

A Universe of Influences Clockwise: Little Richard Penniman, 1956; lounge act Freddie Bell and the Bellboys; Greek-American bandleader Johnny Otis, christened Ioannis Veliotis; Elvis and Scotty backstage in Dayton, Ohio, May 27, 1956. OCTOBER 2021 35

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John Jay, Abolitionist Besides his career in statesmanship and governance, the eminent New Yorker fought bondage tooth and nail By Karen Whitehair

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he USS Confederacy limped into the harbor at St. Pierre, Martinique, on December 18, 1779. A storm had broken the 36-gun warship’s masts, damaged its rudder, and killed a crewman. Among passengers debarking from the frigate that Saturday was U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain John Jay, en route to his new posting in Madrid. Accompanying Jay were his wife Sarah, her slave Abbe, a nephew of theirs, and Jay’s personal secretary. Awaiting repairs to Confederacy or a replacement vessel in which to continue their trans-Atlantic journey, Jay and party explored the French-held island. Sarah wrote home about the sugar-producing colony’s superb markets and exquisite beauty. Her spouse took note of a contrasting side of Caribbean life that also caught the attention of Captain Joseph Hardy, commander of Confederacy’s complement of U.S. Marines. In his journal that December, Hardy, in the spelling and locution of the day, explained that passengers and freight moving to and from ships in St. Pierre’s harbor traveled in canoes “rowed by five or six Negroes whose Lives appear to be as wretched as any part of the Human race. Some of them are chained by one leg to the Boat and others shews the stripes of cruelty on their Body’s in this manner these unhappy Mortals row in these Boats for Weeks without 10 hours intermission and as Naked as the moment of their Birth not even the Galley Slaves in Barbary is more misirable.—It is not only these that feels the stripes of inhumanity but many on shore are to be seen with a heavy Iron ring around his Neck from which leads a heavy chain to another ring around his Waist and from that another Ring round his anckle and others dragging by one foot 50 or 60 lb. of Chain and in this situation are obliged to go thro’ their usual service.” Martinique’s sugar industry ran on slave labor. The fervently religious Jay, convinced the rights of man extended to all men, was haunted the rest of his life by such scenes, which literally put flesh on a reality that had surrounded him all his life. Jay, born in New York City, had spent his childhood in Rye, New York. He had grown up in wealth, his family connected by blood and wedlock to elite New York clans of Dutch and French descent. All owned slaves; in time, so did John Jay. His father, Peter Jay, and his grandfather, Augustus Jay,

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Scion of Slaveholders In embracing the abolitionist cause, Jay broke with generations of family history and tradition. OCTOBER 2021 37

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JOHN JAY HOMESTEAD; NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Peter Augustus Jay

visceral reaction to the slave-driving he witnessed in Martinique was not enough to dissuade him from buying a 15-year-old slave named Benoit and taking the youth along to Spain and his other postings. In September 1780, while in Spain negotiating to gain that monarchy’s support for the American cause, Jay pondered the horrors he had seen on Martinique. In a letter to friend and New York State Attorney General Egbert Benson, Jay wrote, “The State of New York is never out of my mind and heart. An excellent law might be made…for gradual abolition of slavery. Till America comes into this measure, her prayers to Heaven for liberty will be impious. This is a strong impression, but it is just. Were I in your legislature, I would prepare a bill for the purpose with great care, and I would never leave moving it till it became law or I ceased to be a member. I believe God governs the world, and I believe it to be a maxim in his as in our court, that those who ask for equity ought to do it.” The conflicted Jay had acted fitfully against slavery, backing a failed abolition provision in New York’s 1777 state constitution. Early in the Revolution, he had worked with his friend Alexander Hamilton to convince General George Washington to allow bondsmen to toil as laborers and later to carry guns for the American cause, with freedom their reward if the rebellion succeeded. Like many fellow revolutionaries, Jay took as gospel Enlightenment rhetoric extolling the innate rights of man. He avidly ingested such philosophy and political theory entering adulthood in the 1760s. He began acting consciously to make those ideals manifest in his homeland as part of the rebellion against Great Britain. His early steps against slavery had been theoretical and tepid. Now, having seen the phenomenon unvarnished, John Jay meant to eliminate its scourge in New York.

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a French Huguenot, had been prosperous merchants, fastidiously diversifying holdings that included investing in slave ships, a common and profitable colonial-era practice. In terms of numbers of slaves living and working within its boundaries, New York City rivaled Charleston, South Carolina. In 1740, five years before Jay’s birth, enslaved persons had made up almost 20 percent of the total New York population. Jay’s

Encountering Unassailable Evidence Marooned temporarily on Martinique, Jay saw firsthand the brutal reality of bondage.

JOHN JAY HOMESTEAD; NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

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William Jay

Jay started his personal crusade in Europe, just after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. In November 1783, Sarah’s slave Abbe ran off, going to ground in the French capital. Jay wrote to a friend that Abbe’s flight “was not resolved upon in a sober moment.” He explained that he “had promised to manumit her on our Return to America, provided she behaved properly in the mean Time.” He surmised that “Indulgence and improper Company have injured her. It is a Pity.” Jailed as a runaway bondswoman—the empire kept human chattel on a tight rein—Abbe took sick. She was returned to her owners, whose best efforts at care could not keep her alive. Soon after Abbe died, Jay wrote a manumission contract for Benoit, now 19, in which Jay declared, “hav[ing] served me until the value of his services amount to a moderate compensation for the money expended for him, he should be manumitted; and whereas his services for three years more would, in my opinion, be sufficient for that purpose.” Jay made good on that proposed arrangement and in later years repeated the gesture with other slaves that he bought, often paying his enslaved workers wages in the bargain.

After freeing Benoit under a contract he wrote for that explicit end, Jay repeated the gesture with others, often paying his enslaved workers in the bargain.

Early in 1785, Jay and other New York leaders, including Hamilton, founded the “New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May Be Liberated,” better known as the New York Manumission Society. Pursuing the larger aim of abolishing slavery in New York, the Society legally assisted enslaved people and former slaves against kidnap and worked to ensure their rights as citizens of New York. The group also educated free Black children. Organizers elected Jay their first president. Almost from its founding, the Society began pushing a gradual emancipation bill in the state legislature. Contrary to similar measures elsewhere, this proposal would manumit the currently enslaved, though, as a palliative to owners, to gain freedom men would have to serve 25 years of indenture and women 22. Enthusiasm for the concept eroded amid resistance to the details. Slaveholders and their allies balked at the indenture arrangement. Others worried about how freedmen would fit into society, some voicing doubt of manumitted Africans’ readiness for citizenship and suffrage. In a bitter 1785 defeat, the bill foundered on the shoals of property rights, economic stability, and racism. Not only had Society members assumed naively that egalitarian principles expressed during the Revolution regarding all persons would persist in peacetime, they had readied no effective retort for proslavery arguments. But they did succeed in 1785 in getting New York to ban import of slaves into the state. Unsatisfied with that baby step, Society members began laying groundwork for more campaigns. Jay corresponded at home

Sarah Jay

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Quakers, by now a strong voice on behalf of abolishing slavery. In running its school, the manumission organization embraced Quaker practices such as visiting students’ homes to enforce moral behavior in the household. To counter racist assumptions about Blacks, the Society carefully recruited and selected the students it enrolled. The Free School operated until 1835, when the New York City school system absorbed it. Meanwhile the organization encouraged members and all others to manumit persons held in bondage. Society officers believed that “the good Example set by others, of more Enlarged and liberal Principles, and the face of true Religion, will, in time, dispel the mist which Prejudice, self Interest and long habit have raised….”—an awkward sentiment, given that Jay and many other members owned slaves. Many slaves confiscated from Loyalist owners during the Revolution and held by the state government had been sold back into bondage. The Society demanded and got an amendment stipulating that all remaining slaves still held by the New York government be freed. And the Society’s efforts to find and unshackle freed Blacks who had been kidnapped and sold south led in 1788 to a ban on exporting bondsmen and -women for sale to buyers in slave states, infuriating slaveholders.

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In 1787, the Manumission Society founded an African Free-School in lower Manhattan to educate the children of free Blacks. Many society members belonged to the Society of Friends, or

Early Step Forward The African Free-School carefully selected students to counter racist assumptions.

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and abroad with fellow abolitionists. These exchanges often found Jay on the defensive. Reassuring Dr. Benjamin Rush of his group’s commitment, Jay wrote that he “wish[ed] to see all unjust and unnecessary discriminations everywhere abolished and that the time may soon come when all our inhabitants of every colour and denomination shall be free and equal partakers of our political liberty.” Answering Welsh moralist Richard Price, Jay wrote, “That men should pray and fight for their own freedom, and yet keep others in slavery, is certainly acting a very inconsistent, as well as unjust and, perhaps impious part; but the history of mankind is filled with instances of human improprieties.” The best anyone can do is to persevere against evil and dutifully work toward a just society, he added.

Matthew Clarkson

“every man, of everY colour and description, has a natural right to freedom,” Jay declared as he vied to become governor of New York.

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NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

On September 26, 1789, the Senate unanimously confirmed John Jay as the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. To avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, Jay resigned the Manumission Society presidency, but informally continued his abolition work. In New York, a proslavery legislative backlash arose. When Society member Matthew Clarkson introduced a gradual emancipation bill in

Chief Justice John Jay

Governor George Clinton

1790, that piece of legislation stalled, as did kindred efforts to strangle the slave trade. In 1792, the backlash broadened. That year Jay did as many Federalists suggested and challenged fourtime governor George Clinton at the polls. Jay seemed poised to win until opponents played the abolitionist card. Jay would not renege on his principles. “Every man, of every colour and description, has a natural right to freedom,” he declared. “And I shall ever acknowledge myself to be an advocate for the manumission of slaves.” Clinton won a fifth term. Events began to work in abolition’s favor. America’s conflict with Algerian pirates who enslaved White Americans refocused discussion: Why go to war over enslaving Whites but not Blacks? Slavery suffused the debate over ratifying the Constitution, which nowhere contains the word “slavery” but instead refers to enslaved persons, leaving inspecific the governmental role regarding abolition of slavery. These debates also raised the issues surrounding the end of the foreign slave trade, slated in the U.S. Constitution for 1808, and the formulation of the Three-Fifths Compromise, an equation that increased Southern states’ political power by mandating that slaves be counted in the national census as three-fifths of a White person. Against this backdrop New Yorkers debated what kind of society they wanted and worried about bondage’s potentially negative economic impact. Thanks to the Manumission Society’s work and a growing population of free Blacks, journalists were filling the state’s periodicals with reports of Blacks integrating successfully into the majority society. Meanwhile, the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, was OCTOBER 2021 41

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On March 29, 1799, the New York legislature passed a gradual emancipation bill taking effect that July 4. Children born to enslaved mothers after Independence Day 1799 would be free but would have to serve their birth mothers’ masters under indenture until age 28 for males, 25 for females. As of July 4, slaveholders would have to register children newly born to enslaved mothers, not only to record manumissions but also to document emancipation as a defense against attempted kidnap or transport south. Abandoned slave children would become wards of local jurisdictions. The bill allowed unrestricted manumission of elderly or unproductive slaves. Jay’s son William wrote years later that his father felt “no measure of his

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eventually to overturn French rule and emancipate Haiti’s slaves, heightening concerns about slave revolts as a feature of a slaveholding society. In New York, the state’s White population growth had shifted north and west, coming to be dominated by farmers and merchants who owned no slaves and were not about to support slave interests through taxes or other means. While Jay was in England during 1794-95 negotiating a treaty to ease tensions with the crown, New York held another gubernatorial election. Jay’s friends nominated and won him the office, advocacy he may or may not have known of. Jay returned having accomplished his diplomatic mission to find himself governor-elect—and pilloried for what became known as Jay’s Treaty, an achievement that may have benefited the abolition cause by helping to “nudge New York past an obstacle to gradual abolition,” according to historian David N. Gellman. Although Jay’s treaty focused on issues that lingered between America and Britain after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, that document ignored the matter of compensation to colonial slaveholders for slaves said to have been “stolen” by the British during the war. Gellman argues that

after the American colonies’ fight for liberty from Britain, Jay and others felt loath to compensate slaveholders for enslaved persons who sought emancipation by fleeing to and fighting for the British. Proslavery forces continued to challenge every abolition bill floated in New York. Jay, determined to keep his 1780 promise, thought it prudent to absent himself from the public process, lest he become the focus of debate. In January 1796, state Representative James Watson, acting as Jay’s proxy, introduced a gradual abolition bill. The measure stalled when slaveholders argued against citizenship rights such as suffrage for manumitted persons. Naysayers insisted the state compensate former owners for freeing their bondsmen. However, abolitionists had learned their lessons. The Manumission Society had begun making effective use of the legal system to free numerous slaves and to rescue free Blacks at risk of kidnap back into bondage. The cost to appeal the resulting court rulings was giving slaveholders pause. Emergence of governmental and charitable aid to the needy was weakening the argument that, once freed, help for indigent Blacks would create an unworkable drag on the state. Most importantly, abolitionists realized that they needed to find a way to work with slaveholders. A 1798 effort also stalled, mainly over remuneration, but abolitionists engineered a compromise.

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Chickens Home to Roost The horrors of the Haitian revolution that so unnerved slaveholding New Yorkers gave hope to those held in bondage.

administration afforded him such unfeigned pleasure” as that bill’s passing and enactment.

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Taken to Tormented Task Foes burned Jay in effigy to protest the treaty he negotiated to ease tensions with Britain.

Alexander Hamilton

Jay had achieved what he envisioned almost 20 years before, but that achievement continued to come under attack, as did free Blacks’ political rights. A gap in the 1799 bill had relegated Blacks born into slavery in New York before 1799 to continued enslavement. In 1817, Jay’s eldest son Peter, a member of the legislature, worked with Governor Daniel Tompkins to order that, effective July 4, 1827, those born before 1799 would be deemed free. Another son, William Jay, fought slavery nationally and as a judge stated that he would not abide by any laws requiring the return of fugitive slaves. Jay’s grandson John Jay II maintained a similar stance. Retiring in 1801, John Jay continued to correspond with fellow abolitionists, at times lending support while trying to avoid national political entanglements—save for an episode in 1819. That year New Jersey lawyer Elias Boudinot, who had founded the American Bible Society, wrote to Jay asking about the constitutionality of extending slavery into Missouri, which had petitioned for statehood. “I concur in the opinion that it ought not to be introduced nor permitted in any of the new States; and that it ought to be gradually diminished and finally abolished in all of them,” Jay replied. “To me the constitutional authority of the Congress to prohibit the migration and importation of slaves into any of the States does not appear to be questionable.” Because Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution mandated in 1788 an end to the foreign slave trade in 1808, Congress had the right to restrict slavery, he continued, claiming “that from and after that period [1808], they were authorized to make such a prohibition, as to all the States, whether new or old.” He went on to explain, “It will, I presume, be admitted, that slaves were the persons intended. The word slaves was avoided [in the U.S. Constitution], probably on account of the existing toleration of slavery, and of its discordancy with the principles of the revolution….” He encouraged those trying to keep slavery out of Missouri, but, pleading poor health, declined to join that fight. On May 17, 1829, John Jay died of a stroke in Bedford, New York. In 1854, Empire State newspaperman Horace Greeley wrote, “To Chief Justice Jay may be attributed, more than to any other man, the abolition of Negro bondage in this state.” H OCTOBER 2021 43

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Life on the Colorado

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Steamboats made a desert river the Mississippi of the West By Bill Heard

Against the Current In 1865 the stern-wheel steamboat USS Explorer ranged far into the upper Colorado River.

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.S. Army Major Thomas Dunn was furious. At 2 a.m. on Sunday, September 30, 1877, construction noise had wakened the commander of Fort Yuma in the Arizona Territory. Below the bluff on which the fort stood, Southern Pacific Railroad workers, violating Dunn’s direct order, had resumed bridging the Colorado River. The structure was to span the Yuma Crossing, an ancient Indian encampment that had become a bustling port. Most of the fort’s 64 troopers were away fighting the Nez Perce, but Dunn, 55, mustered a medical officer, a sergeant, two privates, and a prisoner sprung from the stockade. He and his ad hoc force charged downhill toward the job site, 300 yards away. The Army had established Fort Yuma, now a five-acre motley of some two dozen metal-roofed adobe structures, in 1851. The fort’s role was to control local Indian tribes, protect settlers, and safeguard the Southern Emigrant Trail linking Santa Fe to San Diego and Los Angeles, California. In the late 1850s, the Army built a second riverside bastion, Fort Mojave, 200 miles north of Yuma. In February 1877, Arizona’s territorial legislature granted the Southern Pacific, laying track east from California, a charter to build a line along the 32nd parallel in the territory’s southern reaches. That path ran through Fort Yuma. The War Department permitted the railroad to cross the military reservation and to bridge the Colorado, but barred laying tracks across the bridge until Congress had settled a right-of-way dispute. Dunn’s duties included enforcing that federal stop-work order. Now, the major and his ragtag squad, wielding rifles with fixed bayonets, faced down the construction crew. Track laying stopped until a donkey engine pushing a carload of rails forced the troopers to leap aside. Dunn arrested the worksite superintendent but, unable to make his order stick, retreated to the fort. Work resumed. Shortly after sunrise, September 30, 1877, a locomotive chuffed across the bridge into Yuma. Later that day, villagers greeted the flag-draped Arizona Express as it hissed to a stop on Madison Avenue to deliver Yuma’s first rail freight, mail, and passengers. The travelers and the goods had come from San Francisco, 713 miles northeast. Ferrymen and steamship operators anxiously observed the celebration. Ferries had long been crucial to western migration. For a quarter century, paddle wheelers had been maintaining the Colorado as a vital link in a transcontinental supply chain. Now, with the Arizona Express crossing the new bridge, their heyday was coming to a close. For six million years, the Colorado River had surged out of the Rocky Mountains and across the Sonoran Desert to the Gulf of California, carving steep canyons and frequently flooding expanses 15 miles or more beyond its banks. In spring the river was a rush of snowmelt; for much of the rest of the year it ran slow and shallow—in dry spells, the channel depth could be less than two feet—punctuated by countless sandbars and snags. The only natural crossing in the desert along the river’s 1,450-mile course was in the far southwest. At the Yuma Crossing, where bluffs pinched the river to less than 1,000 feet, the Yuma, Cocopah, Quechan (“quit-sawn”), and other tribes had been fishing and hunting for centuries. They helped the occasional traveler by swimming livestock across the river OCTOBER 2021 45

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Crossing Over Clockwise from above, vintage ferries on the Colorado in the 1880s, crossing the desert by way of the dry bed of the Gila River in the 1840s, ferryman Louis Jaeger with unidentified man, early 1860s.

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City—both destroyed in an 1862 flood—and later Arizona City, renamed Yuma in 1873. Travelers from Texas, New Mexico, and California reached the Yuma Crossing by horseback, stagecoach, mule train, or ox-drawn wagon. The Gila Trail between Santa Fe and Yuma stretched 750 miles or more. Along the 170-mile path between Yuma and San Diego, the forbidding Algodones Dunes—a 45-mile ridge of sand six miles wide—required wagon and mule trains to divert south into Mexico. Hauling freight to Yuma from either east or west was slow and, at $500 to $800 a ton, expensive. In early 1850, Abel Lincoln’s Yuma Crossing ferry was so profitable that notorious scalp hunter John Glanton and his gang muscled into Lincoln’s business. The outlaws ran the Indian ferrymen off the river. In April, vengeful Yumas massacred Lincoln, Glanton, and all but three of Glanton’s men. A survivor reported that at the time of the attack, Lincoln had $50,000 in silver and $20,000 to $30,000 in gold. In San Francisco, a

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and ferrying goods on crude rafts. Europeans intermittently visited the Yuma Crossing. Spanish explorer Hernando de Alarcon arrived at the Crossing in 1540; Juan Bautista de Anza, in 1774. Franciscan missionaries arrived in 1780. In the 1840s came wagon trains following the Southern Emigrant Trail. Forty-Niners trekked through, headed for the California gold fields. American ferrymen like Dr. Abel L. Lincoln began competing with the Indians. The Army laid out Fort Yuma on the river’s west bank in 1851, and later built a depot on the east bank. Regular ferry service and the Army’s presence encouraged development of villages optimistically named Jaeger City and Colorado

The transcolorado ferry trade generated so much money that desire to control the business led to violence wreaked by many parties.

George Alonzo Johnson, born August 16, 1824, in upstate New York, had come to San Francisco at 25, lured by gold fever. Except for a short stint in the mines, he worked as a stevedore while he watched for his chance. Learning of the carnage and ferry profits at the Yuma Crossing, Johnson corralled seven partners, including Louis F.J. Jaeger, Benjamin M. Hartshorne, and William J. Ankrim. Each anted up $500 for boat-building equipment and supplies. Enlisting five seamen, the group sailed to San Diego, bought ox teams and wagons, and set out in early May 1850 for Yuma. At the crossing, the Yuma ferrymen had resumed their makeshift operation, struggling to serve a stream of wagon trains, Army units, and other travelers. Trying to negotiate with the indigenes to share the ferry route, Johnson and company got nowhere. Finally, as Douglas D. Martin describes in Yuma Crossing, the Americans built “a stockade of sharpened, nine-foot logs, inside of which they put up shelters and dug a saw pit.” By August 1850, the new outfit had built and launched a 35-foot scow and was doing a brisk business—though not as profitable as hoped. In early 1851, Johnson and most of the partners sold their shares to Jaeger and two others. Jaeger eventually became the sole owner. His critical role in the region’s development earned him wide respect as “Don Diego the Ferryman.” After selling out to Jaeger, Johnson and Hartshorne contracted with the Army to supply Fort Yuma by water. In February 1852, the pair assembled two flatboats at the Colorado’s mouth, loaded them with 250 tons of cargo, and attempted to pole the 150 miles upriver. One flatboat sank. The other carried too few supplies to serve the garrison. Johnson and Hartshorne gave up and returned to San Francisco.

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young Easterner named George Johnson read the bloody tale in the San Francisco Star and saw opportunity.

Captain James Turnbull. Sometime in 1852, out of secondhand parts he had transported to the delta, Turnbull assembled Uncle Sam, a 65-foot sidewheel steam tug. That November, wrestling with the boat’s cranky engine, Turnbull spent 15 days fighting the river’s stiff current, sandbars, and snags. On December 3, a boisterous crowd greeted Uncle Sam at Yuma. Turnbull’s success lit a fire under the sleepy riverside settlement. Uncle Sam hauled freight up and down the Colorado until April, when the tug sank while it was docked downstream of the fort. Busted, Turnbull fled to Mexico, leaving his creditors in the lurch. Word of Turnbull’s brief rise attracted George Johnson back to the Colorado. In late 1853 the George A. Johnson Company shipped parts from San Francisco to the river delta, where crews assembled the 104-foot General Jesup, built in the classic shallow-draft style to carry freight on deck. Crammed with 50 tons of cargo, General Jesup churned upriver, mooring near Fort Yuma, on January 18, 1854. Johnson established a schedule of shuttling between fort and delta in four or five days. At $75 a ton, a trip was worth $4,000. Johnson soon was grossing $20,000 a month, about $616,000 today. He commissioned a second vessel, Colorado I, in 1855. Johnson’s monopoly in the Colorado steamboat trade made him wealthy. He moved to San Diego in 1858, and in 1859 married Maria Estéfana Alvarado, niece of California Governor Pio Pico. The couple lived on the Rancho Santa Maria de los Peñasquitos, a wedding gift from her parents. Johnson also built a house in Yuma. The Johnsons had nine children, of whom two lived to adulthood. In 1863, and again in 1866,

By the mid-1800s, it cost less to ship goods 1,900 miles by sea from San Francisco around Baja California to the Colorado delta and shuttle them another 150 miles upriver to Yuma than to cart freight between the California coast and the river port. Like the Mississippi River, the Colorado ended in a braided delta of islands and lowlands. The delta had no port facilities, but transports could anchor in deep water and offload cargo into shallow-draft steam-powered riverboats. Midstream transfers also spared shippers Mexican customs duties. The first entrepreneur to ship freight by steamboat up the Colorado was The Man To See and the Place To Be Top, view of Yuma and its bridge from the U.S. Army fort. Right, on his second attempt at taming the big river, George Johnson made a startlingly successful go of commercializing the Colorado, getting rich and inspiring a new generation of riverboat captains.

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discoveries of silver and gold spurred a population surge that drew hordes to the region, boosting demand for better means of transport.

Times of Change Top, construction under way of the railroad bridge across the Colorado. Above, a Native American watches as a westbound wagon train passes through a landscape that his people once had to themselves.

Yuma, home to 1,500 and, as of 1873, seat of Yuma County, was the largest town on the Colorado and the third largest in the Arizona Territory. On the outskirts of town lived 500 or so members of the Yuma tribe. Yuma proper swarmed with riverboat crews and passengers, soldiers, muleskinners, cowboys, outlaws, and trappers. Stagecoaches loaded with passengers and mail and 20-mule-team freight wagons piled high with cargo delivered by steamboat left daily for Phoenix, Tucson, and other inland settlements. Steamboats lined the landing just downriver. Yuma had a newspaper—the Arizona Sentinel—and a brewery, essential for an Army garrison town that drew its share of gamblers and prostitutes. Not surprisingly, the Arizona Territorial Prison was established at Yuma in 1876. People began to speak of the Colorado as the “Mississippi River of the West,” and like that other big American river, the Colorado spawned a retinue of celebrity pilots like George Johnson’s star navigators Isaac Polhamus and John Alexander (Jack) Mellon. Polhamus was skilled at “reading the water”—gauging a given stretch’s depth and pinpointing shoals and sandbars easily disguised by weather and light. “It’s all in a pilot’s eye,” he told a reporter in 1909, explaining why he was known as “The Dean of the Colorado River.” In 1864 as captain of Mohave, Polhamus set a speed record of ten days, two hours on the 365mile run between Fort Yuma and Eldorado Canyon. Mellon had fans as well. One was Martha Summerhayes, an Army officer’s wife. In her 1908 book Vanished Arizona, Summerhayes described a sweltering 11-day journey she took by steamer from Yuma to Fort Mojave, portraying Mellon as “the most famous pilot on the Colorado…very skillful in steering clear of the sandbars, skimming over them or working his boat off, when once fast upon them.” Mellon had two preferred techniques for crossing sandbars. One was the familiar pilot’s method, “grasshoppering.” To grasshopper, a boat crew ferried an anchor over the bar. A heavy line attached the anchor to the ship’s steam-powered capstan. Meanwhile, on either side of the bow,

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For all the business being done in its vicinity, the settlement at Yuma Crossing remained a straggle of low adobe structures, retail establishments, and saloons laid out along treeless streets hardly more than sandy trails. The population, estimated at 130 in 1860, included Indians, Mexicans from Sonora, and a handful of Anglos. Ferry service made the crossing a riverside hub where California-bound wagon trains and travelers could re-provision. Freighters constantly ran the river. At Yuma, pilots edged their vessels’ shallow-draft bows into the riverbank to debark and board passengers and goods.

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Johnson served in the California Assembly, leaving his senior captain, Isaac Polhamus, at the company’s helm.

In the spring of 1861, prospectors discovered rich silver deposits in Eldorado Canyon in what is now southern Nevada. The following January, prospectors happened upon placer gold—nuggets often encountered loose at the surface in dry canyons and gulches—some 20 miles north of Yuma at Laguna de la Paz, triggering the “Great Colorado River Rush.” Thousands of miners, traders, and settlers poured into the region. By late 1863, more than a dozen mining districts stretched along both banks of the Colorado from Yuma to Eldorado Canyon, some 365 miles upstream. Demand ballooned for fast, reliable freight and passenger service. Teamsters charged $250 a ton to haul freight to Yuma from San Francisco or San Diego. Delivering by ship, Johnson asked less than half that. The Army hired him to transport troops and supplies the 200 miles between Fort Yuma and Fort Mojave. Johnson’s fleet grew in 1862 with stern-wheelers Colorado II and Esmeralda. He incorporated in December 1869 as the Colorado Steam Navigation Company, and over the next 14 years built five more steamboats. The company dominated service on the river.

Quest for Glory

Edward Beale

Hardly had the first paddle wheeler nosed into the riverbank at Yuma than speculation began: How far up the Colorado River could a steamboat captain push? George A. Johnson meant to find out. In 1856, Johnson persuaded California legislators to endorse an expedition to locate the Colorado’s “head of navigation,” meaning the upriver limit of large craft. With that leverage, he convinced Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to ask Congress for $75,000 to cover the venture. Davis got the money. His successor John B. Floyd assigned the project to U.S. Army Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, who had married Floyd’s niece. After his success in Arizona and Washington, Johnson was furious that Floyd shunted him aside and was further outraged when the government refused to lease two of his steamers for the expedition. Ives instead had a boat built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, disassembled, and hauled to the Colorado delta for reassembly. The ungainly 54-foot Explorer had a cabin in the stern, its boiler amidships, and a howitzer at the bow. Ives started upstream on New Year’s Eve, 1857, and moored at Yuma on January 9, 1858. Two days later, he headed north to pinpoint the Colorado’s head of navigation. Johnson was way ahead of him. As the lieutenant had been reassembling Explorer, Johnson was fitting out General Jesup for his own expedition and arranging to bring troops from Fort Yuma to protect his vessel. Defended by soldiers and a mountain howitzer, Johnson had steered out of Yuma December 20, 1857, three weeks before Ives reached town. Not far out of Yuma, Johnson piloted General Jesup through the first of many deep canyons. Above the Chocolate Mountains, stiff currents swirled around a rock thrusting 100 feet high. Beyond, the river widened and the current eased, but miles of very low water slowed General Jesup. At Mohave Canyon, Johnson had to negotiate a rapids, but once through

the canyon and past pinnacles called The Needles, he was chugging through the picturesque Mohave Valley. More rapids complicated the course north, including a stretch of white water at the mouth of Black Canyon. In mid-January, Johnson reached the 35th parallel, 74 miles above Fort Mohave and 34 miles above The Needles. Naming the spot Eldorado Canyon, he declared this the “head of navigation,” and turned toward home. In 1857, to facilitate westward migration, President James B. Buchanan had assigned General Edward Beale, of Mexican War fame—shown above in younger days—to survey and build a 1,000-mile wagon road connecting Fort Defiance in New Mexico Territory—now northeast Arizona—with the Colorado River. About January 1, 1858, Beale’s expedition, with 60 dragoons, a herd of mules, and a U.S. Army Camel Corps unit (“Camel Corps,” April 2019), started east from the vicinity of Los Angeles. Beale’s force was nearing the Colorado on January 23 when an aide sighted a steamboat. Johnson had moored and was loading firewood when he spotted Beale’s column. “In a few minutes after our arrival, the Steamer came alongside the bank and our party was transported at once with all our baggage to the other side,” Beale later reported to Floyd. “[B]idding the Captain goodbye, he was soon steaming down the River toward Fort Yuma, three hundred and fifty miles below.” En route, Johnson met Ives, still struggling north near present-day Parker, Arizona. Though Johnson had achieved his goal, to the end of his days he resented Ives for trying “to take from me the honor of being first to explore” the Colorado above the Yuma Crossing. However, Ives did make the more significant contribution, according to Clifford E. Trafzer, author of Yuma: Frontier Crossing of the Far Southwest: The lieutenant detailed the geography, geology, botany, and zoology and “…described life along the river, including the cultural life of the many Indians he encountered.”—Bill Heard

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Rolling on a River Steamboat captains Jack Mellon and Isaac Polhamus, seated left and right in a late 1870s photo, worked the Colorado River for almost 50 years. Polhamus co-founded the town of Ehrenberg, 65 miles north of Yuma, in 1863. He was among owners of a mine in the La Paz district, and had a large ranch in the Chemehuevi Valley, near present-day Lake Havasu. The misspelled town of Mellen—now Topock, Arizona— originally was named to honor Mellon. Buying the Colorado Steam Navigation Company in 1886, Mellon and Polhamus continued to supply silver mines and the Army, helped rebuild railroad bridges, and took a crack at the tourist trade. A June 1894 advertisement offered a “Grand Excursion…full of thrilling interest” from Yuma through Black Canyon, now the site of Hoover Dam, and “dark, ghoulish” Devil’s Gate Canyon, now flooded by Lake Mead. Turn-of-the-century gold strikes near Fort Mojave briefly kept the company busy. By late 1905, when Laguna Dam opened, company steamboats had retreated to Yuma. —Bill Heard —Bill Heard OCTOBER 2021 49

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Johnson hauled most of the freight from the railhead to northern and central Arizona. As the railroad pushed into the Territory, however, waterborne business withered. In 1877, the Southern Pacific bought Johnson out, and he retired to San Diego. Polhamus ran the company until 1886, when he and Mellon bought it from the Southern Pacific. The partners, operating four steamboats and several barges, enjoyed a profitable surge beginning in January 1891 when gold was discovered in mountains west of Needles, California, some 280 miles north of Yuma. For another ten years, the company’s steamers and barges kept busy supplying mines and ore mills and provisioning Indian agencies around Fort Mojave. However, the expansion of rail service into the region and new competitors on the river turned the boom to bust. Johnson was 79 when he died in 1903. His family’s last residence now houses a Victorian shop in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park. In 1904, Polhamus sold out to Mellon and two partners. The three stuck it out until 1909, working on irrigation projects, bridge repairs, and, finally, one of the many dams that have come to characterize the Colorado. After 56 years in business, the company folded. Polhamus died at age 94, in 1922. Mellon, the “Wizard of the Great Colorado,” was 83 when he died in 1924. Today Yuma—population 95,000—sprawls across 121 square miles. The historic village overlooks a river tamed to a languid stream (see “Servant and Savager,” opposite). The Quartermaster Depot and the Yuma Territorial Prison are state historic parks. Of the railroad bridge that vexed Major Dunn, only a concrete pivot point for the swing bridge remains. Nearby, the 1909 Southern Pacific steam engine No. 2521 stands on a few yards of track aimed down the old alignment on Madison Avenue. No ferries ford the Yuma Crossing. Fort Yuma is no more. The cheerful whistle of riverboats has faded into history, leaving only memories of a time when the Colorado River was a major waterway that opened up a remote and inhospitable area, and made Yuma the “Seaport of Arizona.” H

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Johnson bought his first ocean steamer in 1871 and a second in 1873, to ship cargo from San Francisco, charging $50 a ton to deliver goods to Yuma and another $60 per ton to Eldorado Canyon. By the mid-1870s, the Colorado Steam Navigation Company was shipping at least 7,000 tons of freight and carrying 1,000 or so passengers, grossing more than $750,000 annually. For another year or so after the Southern Pacific began using the Yuma Crossing bridge in 1877,

Past and Future Above, Fort Yuma being established on the Colorado circa 1854. Right, Hoover Dam and Black Canyon in 1938.

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deckhands hammered wooden poles, or spars, into the river bottom so that they stuck up like a grasshopper’s hind legs. Sailors strung lines secured to the spars through pulleys on deck to the capstan. Turning the capstan tightened the lines and lifted the boat a few inches onto the bar. With the stern wheel churning and the capstan heaving around on the anchor line, the vessel crawled ahead. Alternating his port and starboard lines, Mellon could sashay a steamboat over the bar. Caught on a sandbar, Mellon often worked loose by crawfishing, a method of his own creation. Placing an anchor as far as he could up the bar, he turned the boat’s stern to the sandbar and reversed the engines. As the paddlewheels whirled away the sand, the capstan hauled on the anchor line, pulling the boat over the collapsing bar. “Brave, dashing, handsome Jack Mellon,” Mrs. Summerhayes rhapsodized. “What I would give and what would we all give, to see thee once more, thou Wizard of the Great Colorado.”

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Servant and Savager For humans, the Colorado River poses a paradox: destructive force of nature made benevolent servant or ongoing environmental disaster? The Colorado was key to settling the American Southwest, yet the river often was out of control— flooding, changing course, smashing irrigation canals, making and abandoning lakes. Over the past century, hundreds of dams and other water projects addressed such problems—but also sparked controversy. Flood damage to crops and property along the lower Colorado and its tributaries led to the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act, creating what is now the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The first Newlands Act project, Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River some 100 miles east of Phoenix, generates hydroelectric power and provides water for irrigation and municipal use. The Laguna Diversion Dam, the first on the river’s main stem, began operations in 1909. The next major project was Boulder Canyon (now Hoover) Dam. Opened in 1936, this dam was the world’s tallest—726 feet—and powered the world’s largest hydroelectric plant. Lake Mead, created by that impoundment, provides 90 percent of the drinking water consumed in Las Vegas.

In 1956, the federal government began construction of Glen Canyon Dam near Page, Arizona, over objections by California, which protested diversion of water from that state, and environmentalists, who wanted to preserve the canyon’s natural features. Brought online in 1966, Glen Canyon generates enough hydroelectric power for more than 500,000 households. Behind the dam Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest man-made reservoir, stores water for seven western states. The 14 large dams along the 1,450-mile main channel and hundreds more on tributaries have reduced the river’s natural flow by more than two-thirds. This subjugation has become a lightning rod for environmental activists. The Sierra Club opposes any further dam construction on the Colorado; the Glen Canyon Institute wants the dam decommissioned and Lake Powell drained. “The Colorado is probably the most heavily exploited river in North America, possibly the world,” says Michael Hiltzik, author of Colossus, a history of Hoover Dam. “And that water, every molecule gets used over and over and over again. And, by the time the river reaches its delta, it’s barely more than a trickle.” —Bill Heard OCTOBER 2021 51

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Going Low Abraham Prescott built a legend making instruments that take music way down By Darcy Kuronen

awrence Wolfe loves his double bass, an imposing four-stringed instrument whose low insistent tones underpin and anchor higher-pitched notes and chords and melodies in nearly every musical genre; Wolfe’s is classical. More than 50 years ago, playing that instrument, a new acquisition, he auditioned successfully for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, becoming its youngest member, in time advancing to assistant principal of the bass section. Wolfe describes his bass’s tone as “deep, resonant, and having great projection, especially from its lowest notes.” The flexible, multi-layered sound enhances solos, chamber ensemble performances, and orchestral work. But he adds a caveat: his big-bodied instrument’s very generous volume can be “a bit too much,” becoming “overly dominant” in some settings. Since Wolfe bought the bass, around 1968, the imposing instrument has undergone repairs, but still retains the characteristics associated with its maker, a sometime farmer, insurance salesman, and Baptist deacon active in instrument making in southern New Hampshire in the 1820s and 1830s. His name was Abraham Prescott.

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Holding It Down, Blessedly A late 19th-century engraving imagines how church choirs once stayed in tune and on time.

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Early New Englanders sang most often at church, though rarely to accompaniment. For centuries, European churches had used organs, large instruments driven by human-powered bellows to generate notes through

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European stringed instruments played with a bow—violin, viola, cello, and bass—have a long history, especially in northern Italy, where they debuted in the mid-1500s. Cremona, a city in that region, is famous as the hometown of Antonio Stradivari and other celebrated stringed-instrument makers, or luthiers. The particular evolution of the bass is elusive; the lowtoned instrument shares features with the violin family and an earlier instrument, the viola da gamba. Called a viol in England, the viola da gamba had a flat back and six strings. Basses had a flat back and the same tuning, though generally only three strings until the 19th century, when orchestral demands led luthiers to begin making basses with four strings, like the rest of the violin family. Bass nomenclature is tangled. Much confusion surrounds the term “bass viol,” a term that New Englanders used between about 1780 and 1850 to mean a large, cello-like four-stringed instrument used in church. Bass viol size varied by maker. Thousands were made, and many survive, some still in church hands, hence references to bass viols as “church basses.” Other synonyms include double bass and contrabass, both denoting an instrument that plays an octave lower than the cello. In modern times players and listeners began to use the term “string bass”—as opposed to the bass tuba—“standup bass,” referring to the endpin on which players balance the instrument, and the slangier “doghouse bass”

Early Relics of American Music Clockwise from top, an unusual layout of sheet music, the label used by the luthier Benjamin Crehore, and a Crehore bass from 1800. 54 AMERICAN HISTORY

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and perform music. Itinerant singing masters—James Fenimore Cooper assigned that trade to a character in his novel Last of the Mohicans—traveled town to town. Boston singing master and blacksmith William Billings (1746-1800), one of America’s earliest composers of sacred music—he was said to have introduced pitch pipes to help choristers find their starting notes—may have introduced the idea of using a large cello-like instrument in church; a distant cousin of his made such instruments.

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flute-like pipes made of lead or wood. In the New World, however, no one was making pipe organs, which were not only large and costly to import but scorned as an ostentatious fetish of Roman Catholicism by Christian sects arising from the Reformation, especially the severe Calvinist strain. Hymn-singing Puritans, whose meetinghouses dotted New England, traditionally shunned instrumental accompaniment. Few Americans underwent musical training, and nowhere was the discordant result more evident than in church. Ministers’ diaries report congregations dragging the tempo and singing woefully off key. One remedy was the singing school, whose proprietors trained pupils to read

In 17th-century England some Anglican churches supported congregants’ singing with small bands—violin, flute, clarinet, and, to provide a bass line, a low-pitched cello or bass played with a bow. That tradition emigrated to the colonies to a limited degree. An ocean away from the training and discipline of European trade guilds, American colonists, who fashioned every object, whether utilitarian or decorative, out of the only material at hand—wood—were slow to develop as instrument makers. After the Revolution a handful of woodworkers began manufacturing instruments commercially. By the 1790s New England luthiers were fashioning a kind of oversized cello favored by an increasing number of churchmen to keep their congregations’ choirs in tune and on tempo. Many believers who wanted instrumentation

A bass suggests a six-foot violin, including a scrolled head with tuning pegs, raised off the floor by an endpin.

in church preferred bass viols to the shrill pipe organ. With bodies generally longer, wider, and deeper than were a cello’s, bass viols projected robustly to a meetinghouse’s furthest corners, effectively guiding singers. Congregants called the bass viol “God’s fiddle” to distinguish it from the “Devil’s fiddle”—the violin, long associated with dancing and pleasure. Bass viols varied in size, shape, method of assembly, decorative elements, and materials. Luthiers typically fashioned them of locally lumbered maple and white pine. Some displayed remarkable finesse; others worked more in the The Interloper Above, a Prescott bellows-driven melodeon of the sort that came to replace the church bass. Below, a Paul Revere engraving illustrates a 1770 hymnal by William Billings.

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and “bull fiddle.” Miniature versions of the instrument were sized to fit young musicians and players of smaller stature, and an informal fractional system came to distinguish among the sizes of bass that a given manufacturer marketed: ¼, ½, ¾, 1/1, 5/4—the last towering so high and wide as to seem to defy playing. The ¾ label fits most current-day basses, making that size the standard. The double bass, originally a three-stringed instrument, was common in Europe in the early 19th century. Documentation is scarce of the double bass being used in churches on the Continent, but based on Abraham Prescott’s output and the instrument’s longstanding presence in American churches, it’s reasonable to assume they were. A bass suggests a six-foot tall violin, including scroll-shaped head, raised off the floor by an endpin. Body size and shape vary. Many basses have sloping shoulders like those seen on a viola da gamba; others sport violin-style rounded shoulders. One eye-catching outline, the so-called Busseto model, named for Italian luthier Giovanni Maria del Busseto, features decorative bumps at the lower corners of the body. Metal knobs control gears on either side of the tuning head, or pegbox. Players use these worm-geared “tuning machines” to adjust the strings’ pitch.

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Portrait of the Luthier Abraham Prescott, above circa 1820, converted a knack for handicraft into a trade, making fine instruments like this 1823 three-string bass. 56 AMERICAN HISTORY

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COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON, FRANK B. BEMIS FUND; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY

The most prolific and widely known New England bass luthier was Abraham Prescott,

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realm of folk art. Few craftsmen, especially in rural areas, could make a living fabricating only instruments, so they often were hyphenates: luthier-cabinet maker, -cobbler, -barber, -farmer. The earliest extant bass viol from New England, dated 1788, was made by Benjamin Crehore, the cousin of composer William Billings. Besides musicianship, manual skill ran in that extended family. An “ingenious mechanic” who lived in Milton, Massachusetts, Crehore fashioned pianos, stage machinery, and, for a war veteran, an articulated artificial leg. His bass viols clearly found a market; eight are known to survive, and a double bass almost certainly made by him recently turned up at the First Church of Dorchester, likely purchased around 1800 by that congregation. Historians have documented at least 30 makers of bass viols who were active in the New England states, largely in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Crehore, who stopped making instruments around 1810, might have inspired younger luthiers. A few bass viols by other Massachusetts makers, such as William Green in Medfield and Benjamin Willard in Lancaster, predate 1820, and so might reflect Crehore’s influence.

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with much of New England still made up of primeval forest, prescott surely had access to a steady supply of old-growth wood.

who made Lawrence Wolfe’s instrument. He was born in 1789 to a well-established and successful family in Deerfield, New Hampshire. As a youth Abraham taught himself how to make a bass viol, though it is unclear what he used as a model. With much of New England still primeval forest, however, the young man surely had access to superb old-growth wood. Prescott made his first bass viol in 1809 and his first double bass in 1820. Like many European versions of his era, his basses all had three strings. In a 40-year career Prescott, according to legend, is said to have produced 2,400 instruments—an astounding average of 120 annually during 1820-40, his shop’s peak years. Half that number seems more plausible, and would still be a prodigious tally, equal to far more bass viols than all other New England makers combined built. Like Crehore, Prescott had relatives who were good with their hands. He likely learned woodworking from a cousin, James Prescott, who eventually became Abraham’s father-in-law. James also helped his cousin at the shop, and in 1822 the two took on as an apprentice 12-year-old David Dearborn, from nearby Pembroke. In 1825 the Prescotts hired David’s older brother Andrew. The Dearborns worked for Prescott for years before starting shops of their own, as did subsequent Prescott employees, giving rise to a “Prescott school” of instrument making. Prescott, raised in the puritanical Congregational Church, converted to Baptism at 26. The Baptists, then a minor sect in New Hampshire, offered emotional spirituality, flexible doctrine, and music—all characteristics that appealed to young Prescott, then experiencing a crisis of faith. He became a choir master and eventually a deacon at Deerfield Baptist Church. His shop’s output and sales grew. In 1831 Prescott moved his business to Concord, the state capital and a port on the Merrimack River with easy access to Boston and beyond. He opened a music store. His work force grew to as many as 18, including his four sons. Certain Prescott artisans inscribed and dated their names on interior surfaces of instruments they worked on. One viol component in particular required precision metal-working skill: the worm-geared tuning machines that Prescott began installing on his instruments in 1821. By holding each string in place at the proper tension, tuning machines kept strings from changing pitch, an occasional problem with wood tuning pegs that relied only on friction. The Prescott imprimatur helped machine tuners become fairly common on bass viols. Prescott also made other stringed instruments. A workshop ledger mentions tenor violins, presumably used to play the tenor line in hymns. Prescott double basses boasted a robust, resonant tone, and would have been used to reinforce the line played by the bass viol, but an octave lower. Their oversize sound chambers, topped by thin but fine-grained and strong pine wood, projected notes with great power. Treasured Artifact A four-string Prescott bass of maple and pine dating to 1833-45, top, featured the metal tuning heads whose embrace by the master helped assure their widespread adoption by the instrument industry. OCTOBER 2021 57

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terms “double bass” and “single bass,” throwing in an occasional “cello.” He exhibited instruments at trade fairs in Boston and New York City. The judges in Boston called his work “much in need of improvement.” In New York, however, judges were “agreeably surprised” by Prescott’s instruments, described as being “of the highest order.” Music stores in Boston, such as John Ashton’s and Henry Prentiss’s establishments, carried Prescott-made goods. Surviving bass viols by Prescott and other early New England makers now largely belong to museums, as they are too cumbersome to be played effectively as cellos and too expensive to resize. Realistically, Prescott produced some 200 double basses that earned plaudits for delivering a deep, powerful sound to support choristers. A few New England makers, some trained by Prescott himself, produced double basses prior to 1850, though Prescott’s instruments outrank theirs. Prescott produced three models in varying sizes. Some had arched backs. Others had flat backs. Some had sloping upper shoulders, some rounder shoulders. Later models had an outline with Busseto corners. But as orchestral playing developed, three-stringed basses came to be considered inadequate. Most Prescott basses still in use—about 100 are thought to exist—have been converted to four strings. Properly restored, they are prized by both classical and jazz players. A Prescott that sold in 1828 for $50 can bring $50,000 today. Billerica, Massachusetts, musician and instrument restorer Volker Nahrmann, who owns seven Prescott double basses and six of the master’s church basses, has restored dozens of other Prescotts. He appreciates their “highly resonant sound with a deep fundamental tone” and deeply admires Prescott’s design and craftmanship. Nahrmann attributes much of the luthier’s historic success to his access to high-quality oldgrowth wood, positing that at some point Prescott must have had access to a “well-made European bass, most likely from Mittenwald, Germany, on which he based his later designs.” To assure his production line of a source of wood, Prescott built a sawmill. He frequently bartered for goods and services with bass viols. He stepped away from active instrument making in the late 1840s. When two fires within two years consumed the buildings he owned in Concord, Prescott became an insurance agent, a trade he practiced for the rest of his life. Enthusiasm for ecclesiastical bass viols crested in the 1830s. Congregations, especially in At the Deep End rural areas, regularly used the instruments until Boston Symphony at least the 1840s, when a new type of organ Orchestra bassist appeared. These instruments, known as melodeLawrence Wolfe ons, had a compact bellows that moved air past prizes his Prescott for its great small brass reeds rather than through large flue projection. pipes. A melodeon could provide four-part

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It’s unclear how direct a hand Prescott had in instrument production once his business took off. He probably weighed in on quality control, but definitely leaned in on sales, initially at his store in Concord. As a Baptist deacon, he was acquainted with neighboring congregations and had ready access to marketing opportunities. He reportedly traveled southern New England with a wagonload of instruments, selling church to church—a bass viol cost $50. Contributing to the confusion over what to call the instruments he was selling, in advertisements Prescott used the

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chorded harmony as well as a bass line. Portable, reliable, and relatively inexpensive, melodeons made bass viols obsolete. One of the most successful early makers of reed organs was Prescott’s firm, by now called A. Prescott and Son(s), then Prescott Brothers. Around 1845 the company dropped stringed instruments to focus on the reed organ trade. Various styles of playing the double bass emerged as American music branched out. The instrument became a fixture in popular music, particularly bluegrass, jazz, and, until the introduction of the solid-body electric bass, rock ’n roll (p. 50 this issue; “The Deep End,” August 2019). In recent years the rise of a strain of pop known as Americana has brought a double bass resurgence. Whatever the category, Prescotts have a special resonance among enthusiasts. One tragically legendary Prescott belonged to jazz prodigy Scott LaFaro, famous starting in the late 1950s on his own and as a member of pianist Bill Evans’s groundbreaking trio, which also included percussionist Paul Motian. In 1961, looking for a smaller bass to fit his compact frame, LaFaro bought a ¾ Prescott made around 1825 and brought the instrument from Los Angeles to New York to have bass expert Samuel Kolstein restore and set it up. LaFaro, who recently had played his Prescott when making the LP Sunday at the Village Vanguard with Evans and Motian and appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival with saxophonist Stan Getz, was traveling between Geneva and Canandaigua, in upstate New York, on July 6, 1961, when the vehicle in which he was riding crashed and burned. LaFaro died in the wreck. The collision and fire all but destroyed his Prescott. The LaFaro family presented Scott’s bass to the Kolsteins for conservation. From 1986 to 1988, Samuel’s son Barrie painstakingly restored the LaFaro instrument. Kolstein Music still cares for this bass, now the property of the International Society of Bassists; worthy musicians may borrow it for performances and recordings. Musicians who have used the instrument rave about its playability all along the fingerboard as well as its commanding timbre. Lawrence Wolfe’s Prescott bass has served him well for nearly a half century. Its big sound is admired by many, especially at Boston’s Symphony Hall, where an important aspect of his role in the orchestra is to respond to what the first-chair bassist is doing and relay his musical

Prodigy Gone Too Soon Scott LaFaro, at Monterey in 1960, was 25 when a car crash took his life in 1961.

musicians who have used the Lafaro bass rave about its robust timbre and ease of playing all along the fingerboard.

gestures to the section’s ten or so other members. BSO players say the orchestra’s bass section always sounds better when Wolfe is present, a characteristic he credits to his Prescott. Though a fervent Baptist, Abraham Prescott in his later years seems to have reconnected with the dour Calvinism of his youth. In an 1853 letter to his son-in-law, he told the younger man, “I have been led in my meditations at various times to look upon the world of mankind around us as one great Musical Instrument miserably out of tune—not being in Harmony with the Will and Word of God.” Abraham Prescott died in Concord, New Hampshire, on May 1, 1858. H OCTOBER 2021 59

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Man and Boy Orville Wright’s childhood interests reverberated throughout his life.

Toymaker of Hawthorn Hill Orville Wright never lost his capacity for finding inspiration in playthings By Michael Ray O’Brien

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hough profoundly shy, Orville was the “fun” Wright brother—fond of jokes and pranks and given to tinkering with toys, two of which bookmarked the younger Wright’s career. The first plaything sparked his and Wilbur’s fascination with heavier-than-air flight, the other brought Orville, late in the arc of his journey, into a new chapter of a multifarious life.

The Wrights’ odyssey into aviation began with a toy helicopter. The miniature contraption, which was fashioned of wood and paper, got its power from a twisted rubber band that drove a propeller. French aviation pioneer Alphonse Penaud had invented this gizmo in 1870, extrapolating on a version called the “Chinese top” made in 1796 by Englishman George Cayley. Cayley’s device used a whalebone spring to spin a feathery propeller whose rotations carried the device aloft. A serious experimenter, Cayley wrote of aviation in detailed letters that laid the foundations for later scientific inquiries. Cayley’s work was well known to any flying enthusiast, whether Penaud or Wilbur Wright. “Helicopter,” from the Greek helix, meaning whirl or spiral, had been coined in 1861 by archaeologist Gustave Ponton d’Amécourt. He made up the word to describe a steam-powered flying machine he built and unsuccessfully tested that year. Also that year Confederate inventor William C. Powers,

seeking a way to attack Union warships that were blockading Southern ports, drew upon drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci to conceive a similar aeronautical mechanism that never flew. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian army besieged Paris, Penaud’s hometown. Bored and laid low by a bone disease, the 24-year-old distracted himself by improving on Cayley’s plaything, substituting rubber bands for bone. Friends and acquaintances enjoyed watching the propeller hoist his toy-like contraption skyward. When peace returned, Penaud continued to fiddle with miniature flying machines. At the Gardens of the Tuileries in central Paris, he demonstrated a rubber band-powered “planophore.” The unit had two bat-like wings with a span measuring 20”, a long narrow body, and a vertical stabilizer. A propeller’s spoon-shaped blades pushed the mechanism aloft. Members of the Société Aéronautique watched the thing rise and circle to a gentle landing—the first self-powered flying machine resembling OCTOBER 2021 61

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mr. wright told his sons to watch. he tossed a penaud helicopter their way. the toy rose, hovered, and descended.

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PHOTOS BY DAVE PECOTA (2); SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES; WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES (2)

Penaud’s miniature helicopter design survived him, crossing the Atlantic to be marketed as a children’s toy. In 1878 Milton Wright, a circuit-riding bishop of the United Brethren, a Protestant sect, bought one of these toys while traveling among congregations in Ohio. Milton and wife Susan lived in Dayton. They had five children; their youngest sons were Orville, seven, and Wilbur, 11. Arriving home for one of his brief stays, Milton summoned Orville and Wilbur and told his sons to watch. He tossed a Penaud helicopter their way. The toy rose to the room’s ceiling, hovered, and descended. Fascinated, Wilbur and Orville tried to build larger versions. This first collaboration started a partnership that matured and deepened. Among the brothers’ first discoveries was that any increase in size hampered the task of getting the model to fly. In time the Wrights’ wind tunnel research showed to that if a flying machine’s weight doubled, its motive power had to increase by a factor of eight to keep the machine aloft. This reality, which had vexed Penaud and other would-be aviators, drove the Wrights to keep tinkering until, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, they got their wood-and-fabric biplane Wright Flyer aloft, pushed by a propeller connected to a 12-horsepower four-cylinder water-cooled internal combustion engine with an aluminum crankcase. Orville, who had won a coin toss, was at the controls. Press coverage enveloped the brothers, who explained that a toy had set them on their path. Both Wrights described Penaud’s helicopter as a “bat”—Orville

Inspiration and Innovation From above left: His bat-like plaything never evolved into an actual flying machine, but with it inventor Alphonse Penaud provided the spark that sent Orville and Wilbur Wright onto imaginary runways and in time sent the Wright Flyer into the air over Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

HNA; HISTORIC IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; MYLAM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

what became the airplane. Penaud, who credited his yen for aviation with mitigating his bone condition, undertook a series of unsuccessful flying projects with beautiful and imaginative designs. In 1876 he took his own life.

PHOTOS BY DAVE PECOTA (2); SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES; WRIGHT STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES (2)

HNA; HISTORIC IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; SCIENCE HISTORY IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; MYLAM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

doing so when being deposed for a patent lawsuit. The Penaud helicopter became known as the “Wright Bat,” and as such is still being sold. Wilbur and Orville Wright were anything but alike. Wilbur was the deep thinker, the eager public speaker with the inner drive and intellectual focus to make manned flight happen—an eventuality his brother would have been unlikely to achieve on his own. Instead, Orville was an inveterate tinkerer, always ready to grab a pair of pliers and apply them inventively. Success at flying and then at selling airplanes brought the brothers fame and no small fortune—Orville built a large house in Dayton called Hawthorn Hill where he lived with their sister, Katherine—but also woes in the form of imitators and frauds they pursued in court at much cost to Wilbur’s health. He contracted typhoid and in 1912 died. Orville ran Wright Aeroplane Company, working with chief mechanic James Jacobs to invent the split-flap, which improved control during dives—a key factor for divebomber pilots during World War II. By the 1920s Orville had sold most of his aviation holdings, forsaking commerce for research, a path to which he hewed until his death in 1947. He worked closely with NASA’s ancestor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. He had a hand in designing civilian and military aircraft, created automatic aircraft stabilization systems, worked with Chrysler on streamlining automobiles, helped with wartime code-breaking, and more. Without his brother and their epic quest to focus his tinkering, though, Orville came to concentrate on making things that made life easier and entertained him. He added a Lazy Susan to a dining room table. To haul provisions from the icehouse, he constructed a miniature railroad powered by a repurposed outboard motor. To cool his head and ward off insects he perforated the crown of a felt hat, covering the holes with mosquito netting. He made a toaster that worked on his oil-fired kitchen stove. A chronic practical joker, he had an artisan make two identical small wooden chests configured so he could swap

their contents unseen, befuddling victims. He was fixing the front doorbell when a heart attack killed him at 80. But before that, a second toy changed Orville Wright’s life. Among nieces and nephews who often visited Hawthorn Hill was Ivonette Miller, the married daughter of his older brother Lorin. Ivonette was there at Christmas 1923 when Orville demonstrated a toy he had made, based on one he had played with as a boy. “It was a contraption with a narrow base board about 18 inches long,” Ivonette wrote later. On one end was a springboard fitted with a seat holding a little wooden clown with wire hooks for arms. “On the other end of the base was a revolving double trapeze with a counter balancing clown holding to the bottom side,” Ivonette wrote. “When a similar clown was released from the springboard, it flew through the air and caught the top side of the trapeze to revolve.”

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The mechanism delighted all onlookers. Ivonette’s husband, Harold S. Miller, recently had become co-owner of a toy company, Miami Wood Specialties. Miller was always looking for new lines to enhance his company’s inventory. His wife’s famous uncle’s gizmo appealed to Miller, and he asked Orville’s permission for Miami Wood Specialties to market it. Orville agreed, and spent hours making the figure drawings needed to manufacture “Flips and Flops, the Flying Clowns,” which he submitted to the U.S. Patent Office. On January 25, 1925, the government duly granted Orville Wright Patent No. 1,523,989—his sixth and final patent, which he assigned to Miami Wood Specialties. Production started small; clown figurine blanks originally were brought home for the Wright women, including Ivonette, to paint, but soon production had scaled up. Miami Wood may have licensed the toy to other manufacturers; Dutch Novelty Shop of Holland, Michigan, marketed a nearly identical toy, “Flying Clowns,” which carried the same patent number. Priced at $7.80—today, $115—Flips and Flops initially flopped, and not in a good way. For his prototype, Orville had used a wooden slat as a springboard. Miami Wood did the same in mass production but found that wet weather warped

the wooden part, disabling the first 10,000 units. A steel springboard solved the problem, leading the toy to gain such popularity that Miami Wood began having trouble meeting demand. As an infusion of capital, Lorin Wright bought into the company, made back his investment in six months, and bought out his son-in-law’s partner. Lorin Wright signed the company over to Harold Miller and his brother Horace. The clan was now in the wooden novelties trade, with Uncle Orville an active participant. According to Ivonette in her memoir, Wright Reminiscences, after millions of sales, Flips and Flops lost momentum, though records for Miami Wood’s successor company show the product on sale as late as 1946. Decades later Ivonette, told by an interviewer that his personal Flips and Flops was short a clown, rummaged through her bedroom and found a spare that she gave him. To counter waning Flips and Flops sales, the family got into balsa wood airplanes, both as individual retail items and for sale in bulk to clients who had the planes printed with company and product names. Orville designed a machine capable of printing on balsa. Miami Wood put it to work. Some toy planes bore the origin mark “Wright, Dayton.” Most resembled today’s simple balsa planes, but some were quite complex. The slingshot-launched “Wright Seaplane,” a biplane

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orville spent hours making the figure drawings needed to manufacture “Flips and Flops, the Flying Clowns,” Which he submitted to the U.S. patent Office.

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Where the Wizard Lived Orville Wright’s beloved mansion, Hawthorn Hill, in the 1940s.

PHOTOS BY DAVE PECOTA (2)

CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

design, had an adjustable tail and cost fifty cents. On its fuselage, the Seaplane wore a small drawing of a Wright Flyer. Several sources claim Orville helped design the balsa planes, but no source confirms this. However, James Jacobs, who as chief mechanic at Wright Aeroplane Co. had helped Orville Wright invent the split-flap—and later went to work at Miami Wood Specialties—obtained patents for five toy gliders on which Miami Wood based its designs. One of Jacob’s best designs was the Autogiro, which, like other toy flying machines, had a shaped balsa fuselage. However, the narrow wings were attached with hinges and were mounted vertically rather than horizontally, as most aircraft wings were mounted. This allowed the Autogiro’s wings to fold flat against the fuselage. Aimed straight up by a slingshot-like rubber band-powered launcher, the Autogiro, upon reaching its apogee, extended its folding wings and rotated earthward standing on its tail. Lorin Wright’s death in 1939 sapped family interest in the toy business. The Millers sold Miami Wood to Lowell Rieger, who changed the name to the Wright-Dayton Company. Rieger traded heavily on the Wright connection, incorporating Orville and Jacobs into his advertising copy, until 1947, which saw the company introduce its final product, the Wright-Dayton Collapsible Wood Ironing Board. H

Swag Before There Was Swag Top, a biplane assembled from a kit and printed with an advertisement using a technique Orville Wright devised. Above, James Jacobs’s clever slingshot-propelled Autogiro. OCTOBER 2021 65

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Fellowship Congregants exit a church in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1920

Christianity as a vaccine against insurrection, but African American churches in fact became the primary defenders of congregants’ social, cultural, and physical survival. The author and his many sources argue compellingly that the church was the foundation stone for all Black businesses, schools, and political entities. Gates particularly grasps the church as an incubator of expression. Naturally he scrutinizes spirituals and gospel, bases of a Black vernacular in which are blended group participation, improvisation, and the language of liberation. From out of choir lofts and pews that vernacular flowed into secular America, inspiring and influencing popular music. Gates similarly dissects the tradition of calland-response preaching, font of the ecclesiastical and oratorical idiom of what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “nation within a nation,” the

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The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song By Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Penguin, 2021; $24.99

“Watching and waiting, looking above, filled with His goodness, lost in His love,” congregations have sung for 150 years in the country’s every nook and cranny. Amid perils past and present, the African American churches from which these verses often float have held firm. The church has been a prominent source of the stability and the sublime that are heralded by “Blessed Assurance,” the beloved spiritual whose chorus subtitles Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s new history of Black America’s first and still foremost institution. Augmenting Gates’s recent PBS series, The Black Church examines in depth how, across five centuries, the church has been a physical space, a congregation, and a system of cultural meaning, preserving continuity and firing demands for change, a haven and a wellspring of joy and inspiration. Many slave owners saw

SMITH COLLECTION/GADO/GETTY IMAGES

Sanctified lifeLine

heading Gates gives a section of the book. The Black Church reaches beyond celebration to critique how denominations that have fought racism without relent until recently clung to outdated hierarchies of gender and sexuality. Gates writes about the “prosperity gospel” preached by Bishop T.D. Jakes and cohort not as an aberration but as part of a modern tradition the Black church describes

as “New Thought,” equal parts Norman Vincent Peale and conspicuous consumption. An excellent introduction as well as a work of synthesis scholars will welcome, The Black Church concisely serves the more and less familiar terrain that Gates covers so well. — Clayton Trutor, a regular contributor to these pages, teaches history at Norwich University. He tweets as @ClaytonTrutor.

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SMITH COLLECTION/GADO/GETTY IMAGES

Brothers in Loathing Brown and Lincoln never met, but both disdained slavery, reason enough to shoehorn them into this excellent dual biography. Brands, professor of history at the University of Texas, reminds readers that Brown remains the only major White figure of his time to embrace Black-White equality without qualifications. No president measures up—including Lincoln, who deplored slavery but kept his thoughts on it to himself and a circle of friends. He wanted to get elected, which required telling White men what they wanted to hear. The Republican Party coalesced after 1850, a reaction to Southern control of Congress and a like-minded White House—Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan were all Southern sympathizers—that threatened to open territories to slavery. Resistance proved a vote-getter in the North, forcing Democrats onto the attack. A favorite tactic was to label Republicans as lusting after Black flesh. Lincoln’s arguments to the contrary make for uncomfortable reading. Brands stresses that he opposed slavery’s spread as bad for Whites, since slaves worked for nothing. Even after war broke out, Lincoln protected slavery in the South during the conflict’s early years. For a long interlude following his death, historians suspected John Brown of having been crazy. Stephen Oates’s 1970 biography likely was the first to portray him as not insane. Now rehabilitated, Brown as Brand paints him—his

magnetism impressed men like Frederick Douglass but his religiosity had a Talibanish rigor—is hard to admire. He supported the Underground Railroad and fought in 1850s Kansas, lengthening that bloody ground’s list of atrocities when his band slaughtered five unarmed proslavery men. But for the reverberations from his failed 1859 insurrectionist stab at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Brown would have remained a niche figure. His only plan was to seize the arsenal, which proved easy. Then his fantasies took over. Even after local slaves did not rise up, as he had imagined they would, Brown dawdled until overwhelming force arrived. Partisan hyperbole and Brown’s noble bearing in irons riveted Northern media and inflamed a risible South, making a historical pair of him and Lincoln. These events and these men have generated acres of writing, but readers will not regret opening this latest example. —Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom By H.W. Brands Doubleday, 2020; $30

No Quarter Brown’s unalloyed hatred for slavery imbued him with righteousness to the point of seeming derangement. OCTOBER 2021 67

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Kidnapped In the cramped conditions aboard slave ships, some captives began to conceive of freeing themselves.

Yorkers’ disparate, contradictory experiences. Some were given menial roles, others, skilled work. Some were abused, others, respected. Some drew abominable quarters, others private rooms. Some owners punished savagely, others gave their human chattel freedom of movement and choice. But enslavement is enslavement; ultimately those in bondage rebelled. On June 4, 1711, a slave ship carrying 55 Akan people arrived in New York, bringing the Dutch city’s Black population to almost 1,000 (by contrast, there were about 5,000 Whites). It was a tense time —Britain tried and failed that year to wrest Canada from France and an Indian attack on the New York frontier had thrown the colonies into fearful hysteria exacerbated by a hard winter. Those enslaved fared worst, and the Akan newcomers endured “hard usage . . . from their masters.”

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

When I Die, I Shall Return to My Own Land: The New York City Slave Revolt of 1712 By Ben Hughes Westholme, 2021; $30

Painstakingly researched and well written, When I Die interweaves three narratives. One details New York City’s sociopolitical development, beginning with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1626, two years after the first Europeans. Multiple cultures— Dutch, English, Spanish, French, German, Belgian, Norwegian—and faiths—Dutch Reformed, Catholic, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, Quaker, Huguenot, Jewish— resulted in the kaleidoscope that became New York City. Another thread is the history of Africa’s Gold Coast (today the nations of Ghana and Ivory Coast), home to most of the Black souls caught in the American slave trade. The third theme rises about halfway through as Hughes describes the horrors of the Middle Passage, the system’s benefits for African slave traders and their ship-owning European partners, and enslaved New

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Rising in revolt

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

CHRONICLE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Without defining what drove the April 6-7, 1712, rebellion, Hughes credits Akans with planning and leading the revolt, which resulted in the deaths of nine Whites. Admitting his narrative’s speculative element, the author characterizes the insurrection, its rapid quashing, and the ensuing brutal reprisal in a manner that comports with those of kindred insurrections. Of the 25 to 30 participants, 18 enslaved men and one woman were tried,

convicted, and put to death, whether broken on the wheel, hanged, or burned alive. Hughes’s writing is highly readable and intensely detailed. He names almost every conspirator, their owners, and the cruel specifics of their deaths, augmented with detailed maps and illustrations. Three books for the price of one—quite a deal. —Larry C. Kerpelman contributes frequently to American History from Acton, Massachusetts.

Overtime at the Word Works

tinged with class conflict, and welcoming of immigrants. It implied a vision of nationhood, and a subtle idea of patriotism, that was firmly grounded in the details of American life.” Borchert organizes Republic around the FWP experiences of four of its most famous participants: novelists Richard Wright and Nelson Algren, Harlem Renaissance folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, and Idaho regional novelist Vardis Fisher. His chapters on each range widely. Borchert has read hundreds of articles, letters, and memos in dozens of repositories, and he never lets relevance to the subject at hand get in the way of a good anecdote. The guides, indispensable to an actual trip or a journey undertaken by armchair, offered a deeper lesson, Borchert makes clear: “There’s a philosophy of history at work in the guides, a sense of possibility in how we might relate to the past and sort through the things we’ve inherited from it—such as a national story or a way of governing.” —Daniel B. Moskowitz took his first road trip—across seven states—with his parents in 1948.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in March 1933, unemployment was nearing 25 percent. Priority one for the incoming administration was getting Americans to work, which meant a lot of hiring by the federal government. A maze of programs rerouted people off relief to create parks, build roads, bridges, and dams, and bring electricity to the hinterlands. The alphabet soup of new Washington agencies included one specifically organized to hire word workers. In Republic of Detours, Scott Borchert tells the crazy, convoluted story of the Federal Writers Project, which employed some 4,500 writers, editors, librarians, teachers, and holders of related communications skills. The project produced about 450 pamphlets, booklets, and books comprising what Borchert calls “a social portrait of the nation.” He gives pride of place to the FWP’s crowning glory: guides to each state in the Union that combined travel writing, history, folklore, and stories of ordinary people into useful and informative volumes that commercial houses vied to publish. The guides synthesized library research, legwork, and tales interview subjects told to roving Writers Project questioners into prose that captures the magnificence of the country, warts and all. The American scene the guidebooks presented was, Borchert writes, “unapologetically diverse, permanently changing, shaped by economic struggles,

Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America By Scott Borchert Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021; $30

Guiding Light Federal Writers Project materials enlightened travelers while keeping some 4,500 word workers working with words. OCTOBER 2021 69

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Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote By Craig Fehrman Simon & Schuster, 2020; $30

That American presidents decisively influence the country’s life, including its culture, is a given. Author in Chief looks at presidents and literature, revealing how some key architects of America’s political order helped lay the foundations of American writing. The new nation had little literary heritage amid an era in which, even in the Old World, professional writers were rare. The sole colonist to star in the field was Benjamin Franklin, while the Low Church Protestantism and certain strands of the Enlightenment widespread in America shared a moralism averse to literature as entertainment. Politician-writers such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson hardly could have been expected to break with a tradition strong enough to persist until the 20th century, when authors shifted from moral and political fiction to storytelling set in America. Early American writers did establish a tradition of “good letters”—writing that was erudite, educated, and cultured rather than dryly pedantic or crudely popular—gaining the United States a toehold on the global literary map. That’s only the first of Author’s many surprises. Cultivated John Quincy Adams was a

published poet. Andrew Jackson’s philistine persona masked a presidential life incorporating moderate appreciation for intellectual life by a president who commissioned and micromanaged an official biography that amounted to the first ghostwritten campaign book. Comparably rough around the edges was best-selling memoirist Ulysses S. Grant. Taciturn Calvin Coolidge composed an extraordinarily personal autobiography. Emphasis on such little-known aspects of its topic is among the chief strengths of Author, which could easily have focused more on Theodore Roosevelt’s famously voluminous literary output or Woodrow Wilson’s well-known scholarship. Covering the presidency’s entire span, Author brings the reader to the present, when the literary-political tradition is pro forma and ubiquitous, and reality is denatured. In Jefferson’s day politicians wrote if they knew how for a readership weaned on Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon. Their inheritors publish under their names volumes composed by others and tailored for a world of televised talking points. —James Baresel is a freelance writer living in Annandale, Virginia.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

White HOUSE Writers

A True Deadline Former president Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoir knowing he was dying of cancer.

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From Gregory Lalire, the editor of

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Isle Royale, Michigan, . . .

Nature Heals Once timbered and mined to a fare-thee-well, Isle Royale has drawn wildlife and humans back across 15 miles of Lake Michigan.

CARL TERHAAR, WWW.SHARETHEEXPERIENCE.ORG; GARY A NELSON/ DEMBINSKY PHOTO ASSOCIATES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

. . . lies 15 miles off Lake Superior’s northwest shore. Its 207 square miles make it the third largest island in the contiguous United States. The region’s indigenous people, who called the island Menong, meaning “good high place,” hunted and fished there. They also mined high-quality copper, fashioning implements and ornaments for use and trading. Jesuit missionaries renamed Menong for the French throne. Under treaties signed in 1842 and 1844, the Ojibwe—also Anishinaabe— ceded the island to the United States. During the ensuing 100 years of mining and logging, workers unearthed stone hammers, copper items, and other prehistoric artifacts but depleted the island’s resources. In 1940, Isle Royale and 400-plus surrounding smaller outcroppings became a national park. An arboreal renascence began. In the 1950s, drawn by abundant moose and hare, wolves returned. Besides wildlife, the island now boasts a mix of boreal and northern hardwood forest—spruce, fir, pine, birch, aspen, maple, and ash. Lacking a permanent population, paved roads, and vehicles, Isle Royale National Park (bit.ly/IsleRoyalePark) is open April 15 to November 1. Tent sites, trails, and seasonal settlements serve campers, hikers, anglers, boaters, and nature enthusiasts. —Larry C. Kerpelman, a writer in Acton, Massachusetts, contributes regularly.

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