Category: History

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‘Personal Regret, Bitter Sorrow’

Doing a little research on presidential inaugurations, I came across this, the first sentence in the inaugural address delivered by Franklin Pierce on March 4, 1853:

“My Countrymen: It is a relief to feel that no heart but my own can know the personal regret and bitter sorrow over which I have been borne to a position so suitable for others rather than desirable for myself.”

I haven’t canvassed all 55 inaugural speeches, but I don’t think you’ll find one more reluctant-sounding than that. There was a reason, however, beyond the assumption of office in a nation that was unraveling toward Civil War (in his 3,000-word speech, delivered from memory, Pierce seemed satisfied that the Union had weathered the controversy over slavery).

Two months before taking the oath of office, Pierce and his wife, Jane, were passengers on a train heading north from Boston with their 11-year-old son Benjamin. It was a short train, consisting of a single passenger car and a baggage car in addition to the locomotive, and the temperature outside was around zero. About 20 miles north of Boston, the car carrying Pierce’s family, and many other passengers, derailed. Here’s how the January 7, 1853, New York Times described the scene in one of several dispatches:

Boston, Thursday, Jan. 6–10 P.M.

By a special train just returned from Andover, we learn that General Pierce was uninjured, except some sprains and bruises. Mrs. Pierce also escaped serious bodily harm, but is almost frantic at the loss of her son. The poor boy’s head was nearly smashed to a jelly.”

Two weeks after her son perished, Jane Pierce wrote a letter to him; it’s one of the manuscripts that appeared in a New Hampshire Historical Society exhibition on Franklin Pierce. She wrote, “I know not how to go on without you.”

In mid-February, President-elect Pierce was obliged to begin his journey from his home in New Hampshire to Washington, D.C., to begin his term. It must have been a somber trip. Before Pierce got to New York City, his personal secretary sent word that the president-elect was not to be disturbed. As the Times reported on February 17, Pierce appeared to be “much fatigued” upon reaching the city and “did not wish any public demonstration in the way of a reception, or being compelled to receive the visits of persons at his rooms [in the Astor House hotel]. He expressed himself in plain terms on this subject, and said if his desire was not complied with he should take the first train South.” A club of New York Democrats nonetheless drafted a resolution of support for the new president in which they noted his “recent melancholy affliction.”

Pierce isn’t one of those figures you learn much about–no: learn anything about–in the ordinary course on American history. Aside from his son’s violent death, a tragedy that he and his wife seem to have endured but never gotten over, his term in office was troubled, too. Among other episodes, he presided over the harrowing events of May 1856, including the attack by pro-slavery guerrillas on Lawrence, Kansas, John Brown’s bloody adventures in the same territory, and the brutal beating of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by a South Carolina congressman on the Senate floor. Pierce’s performance was such that the Democrats ditched him, their incumbent president, in favor of James Buchanan.

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Holiday Gift-Buying Guide and Presidential Memento Treasure Chest

Vanburen

Today is just another day, unless you happen to be a “President Martin Van Buren admirer.” Fans of the eighth president convened today in Kinderhook, New York, his hometown, for the U.S. Mint’s unveiling of the handsome and valuable $1 Martin Van Buren commemorative coin (good for all debts, public and private, unless incurred in a vending-machine environment). Van Buren is a long-ago-deceased chief executive whose legacy is often associated with lack of stature–he was our second-shortest president . But his other accomplishments must be remembered. Among them is co-creator credit for the Panic of 1837. In fact, he might be looked on fondly as being one of the few presidents more economically inept than the current resident of the White House.

Vanburen1

Dwell not, though, on hard times. The holidays are near, and someone close to you might want a single Van Buren buck, a roll of them, or a whole sack. Hurry! you can get a 25-dollar roll for $35.95 and a 250-dollar sack for $319.95! Or if you want just a single handsome Van Buren proof dollar in a stunning Van Buren proof dollar folder (pictured above left), that’ll run you $5.95. It’s a chance to buy a piece of history, grab on to a conversation piece, and sock away cash for your Emergency Gruel Fund — all in one.

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And if you’re wallowing in this year’s hedge-fund profits — among the top pastimes of this site’s readers — you can secure the “2008 First Spouse Series Half-Ounce Gold Proof Coin: Van Buren’s Liberty” for only $549.95. If you’re on the fence about this purchase, consider: “The reverse … depicts Martin Van Buren as a young man at the family-operated tavern in the village of Kinderhook.”

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Today’s Time Waster

I took an online survey, which got me to thinking about whether it would be hard to come up with something like that myself. So I went to a site and cooked up … well, not a survey, but a quiz on the vice presidents. Have fun (and give me some feedback):

Know Your Veeps

[Later: OK — one thing is clearly deficient in this approach, and I'm surprised I didn't see it before I posted the quiz: there is no immediate feedback about the right answers or the quiz taker's score. Apparently, the service I'm using — SurveyMonkey — doesn't offer those options. So to partly compensate for that, I'll put the correct answers after the jump on this page. Later, I'll post the results. ]

Continue reading “Today’s Time Waster”

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Guest Observation: Russell Banks

From “Cloudsplitter,” a fictional memoir of Owen Brown, one of the sons of radical abolitionist John Brown. Not a new book–it came out ten years ago–but I just started reading it the other day. It’s beautiful and charged with the strangeness and rage of John Brown’s story.

“… Though there was never a man so detached from the sinner who so loathed sin, when it came to the sin of owning slaves, which Father labeled not sin but evil, all his loathing came down at once and in a very personal way on the head of the evil-doer. He brooked no fine distinctions: the man who pleaded for the kindly treatment of human chattel or, as if it could occur naturally, like a shift in the seasons, argued for the gradual elimination of slavery was just as evil as the man who whipped, branded, raped, and slew his slaves; and he who did not loudly oppose the extension of slavery into the western territories was as despicable as he who hounded escaped slaves all the way to Canada and branded them on the spot to punish them and to make pursuit and capture easier next time. But with the notable exception of where a man or woman stood on the question of slavery, when Father considered the difference between our way of life and the ways of others, he did not judge them or lord it over them. He did not condemn or set himself off from our neighbors. He merely observed their ways and passed silently by.

“And he knew all the ways of men and women extremely well. He was no naif, no bumpkin. My father was not the sort of man who stopped up his ears at the sound of foul language or shut his eyes to the lasciviousness and sensuality that passed daily before him. He never warned another man or woman off from speech or act because he was too delicate of sensibility or too pious or virtuous to hear of it or witness the thing. He knew what went on between men and women, between men and men, between men and animals even, in the small crowded cabins of the settlements and out in the sheds and barns of our neighbors. And he knew what was nightly bought and sold on the streets and alleys and in the taverns of the towns and cities he visited. The man had read every word of his Bible hundreds of times: nothing human beings did with or to one another or themselves shocked him. Only slavery shocked him.”

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Now It’s Done

Last weekend, NPR aired a segment on the Depression-era ballad “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” I’ve heard the song forever; I think my mom and dad had a recording of The Weavers’ Eric Darling singing it. The melancholy in the tune and lyrics always made an impression; and I always felt that my parents had a direct connection to the song, that it was about a time they had lived through. Our very own economic crash prompted NPR to do its piece: online, the segment is titled “A Depression-Era Anthem for Our Times.”

They gave the subject 10 minutes of air time, and used it well. Rob Kapilow, a composer and student of popular song, deconstructed both words and music. His summary: “Lyrically, it’s the entire history of the Depression in a single phrase: ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ ”

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‘Revolutionary Suicide’

Thirty years ago today: the Jonestown mass murder. Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle posted an MP3 of what I guess is popularly known as the Jonestown death tape. I listened this morning for the first time. Three things I wasn’t ready for: the fact that just one of the 900 people who were about to die is heard resisting Jonestown leader Jim Jones and trying to talk him out of the course he had decided on; Jones’s lisp; and the funerary music playing in the background throughout the proceeding. The recording is 44 minutes and 29 seconds long. The final two minutes are silent except for the music and what may be a distorted voice on a shortwave radio in the background. Jones’s final recorded words:

“… Take our life from us, we laid it down, we got tired. We didn’t commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

Here’s the tape, by way of the Internet Archive:

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Remembrance Day

A war ends:

What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.

General Lee was dressed in a full uniform which was entirely new, and was wearing a sword of considerable value, very likely the sword which had been presented by the State of Virginia; at all events, it was an entirely different sword from the one that would ordinarily be worn in the field. In my rough traveling suit, the uniform of a private with the straps of a lieutenant-general, I must have contrasted very strangely with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form. But this was not a matter that I thought of until afterwards.

We soon fell into a conversation about old army times. He remarked that he remembered me very well in the old army; and I told him that as a matter of course I remembered him perfectly, but from the difference in our rank and years (there being about sixteen years’ difference in our ages), I had thought it very likely that I had not attracted his attention sufficiently to be remembered by him after such a long interval. Our conversation grew so pleasant that I almost forgot the object of our meeting. After the conversation had run on in this style for some time, General Lee called my attention to the object of our meeting, and said that he had asked for this interview for the purpose of getting from me the terms I proposed to give his army. I said that I meant merely that his army should lay down their arms, not to take them up again during the continuance of the war unless duly and properly exchanged. He said that he had so understood my letter. …

***

General Lee, after all was completed and before taking his leave, remarked that his army was in a very bad condition for want of food, and that they were without forage; that his men had been living for some days on parched corn exclusively, and that he would have to ask me for rations and forage. I told him “certainly,” and asked for how many men he wanted rations. His answer was “about twenty-five thousand;” and I authorized him to send his own commissary and quartermaster to Appomattox Station, two or three miles away, where he could have, out of the trains we had stopped, all the provisions wanted. As for forage, we had ourselves depended almost entirely upon the country for that.

***

I determined to return to Washington at once, with a view to putting a stop to the purchase of supplies, and what I now deemed other useless outlay of money. Before leaving, however, I thought I would like to see General Lee again; so next morning I rode out beyond our lines towards his headquarters, preceded by a bugler and a staff-officer carrying a white flag.

Lee soon mounted his horse, seeing who it was, and met me. We had there between the lines, sitting on horseback, a very pleasant conversation of over half an hour, in the course of which Lee said to me that the South was a big country and that we might have to march over it three or four times before the war entirely ended, but that we would now be able to do it as they could no longer resist us. He expressed it as his earnest hope, however, that we would not be called upon to cause more loss and sacrifice of life; but he could not foretell the result. I then suggested to General Lee that there was not a man in the Confederacy whose influence with the soldiery and the whole people was as great as his, and that if he would now advise the surrender of all the armies I had no doubt his advice would be followed with alacrity. But Lee said, that he could not do that without consulting the President first. I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.

I was accompanied by my staff and other officers, some of whom seemed to have a great desire to go inside the Confederate lines. They finally asked permission of Lee to do so for the purpose of seeing some of their old army friends, and the permission was granted. They went over, had a very pleasant time with their old friends, and brought some of them back with them when they returned.

When Lee and I separated he went back to his lines and I returned to the house of Mr. McLean. Here the officers of both armies came in great numbers, and seemed to enjoy the meeting as much as though they had been friends separated for a long time while fighting battles under the same flag. For the time being it looked very much as if all thought of the war had escaped their minds. …

–U.S.Grant, “Personal Memoirs”

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‘A Horror Story’

Oggins1

Oggins2

Pictures that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. The images are haunting in themselves. There is a long and equally haunting story that goes with them. The man pictured was Isaiah “Cy” Oggins, Born in Connecticut in 1898 to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants and educated at Columbia. At some point he became a Soviet spy, was arrested in Moscow in 1939 (the occasion of the top photos), spent eight years in a prison camp, and was executed (on the day the bottom photos were taken).

The Times story focuses on Oggins’ son, Robin, a history professor in upstate New York. He was about seven years old when he saw his father for the last time, in the late 1930s. The second set of pictures above appeared only when a reporter for Time began researching the Oggins case. (That investigation led to the publication earlier this year of “The Lost Spy,” an attempt to reconstruct Oggins’s fate; the book got an uncharitable review from the Times, and much more favorable attention from the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. NPR reprinted the first chapter a couple months ago).

The Times piece Saturday focused on Robin Oggins’s hopes to learn more about his father’s fate. The story concludes:

Seeing the final photographs for the first time, Robin wept.

But the photographs arrived late in his life. His wife was ill with Alzheimer’s disease, his mind occupied by his own academic research. He had no means or experience to press the Russian government for help.

“I am a full-time caregiver,” he said. “I do not speak Russian. Practically, I cannot travel. To work on this, I would not know where to begin.”

Still, the photographs raise questions. What did a man, caught at the crossroads of history and reduced to such a state, know? “Abstractly, I want more,” Robin Oggins said. “Practically, it changes nothing. It is still a horror story.”

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All-Nighter

The first election night I worked in a newsroom was 1972. Nixon beat McGovern, and the election was called, not prematurely, at 6 p.m. or so, about the same time I walked into the office to start a double shift. My impression of that night is one of disappointment and bleakness mixed with the fun and satisfaction that I’ve always had in doing the news for events both great and small.

I’m not sure I recall the last election evening I was in the newsroom. For a presidential election, it might have been ’88–one that deserves forgetting.

Last night I’ll remember for awhile. Yeah, I’ll admit the outcome was satisfying (though I think my main feelings were relief and a sense of how surreal it is that what came to pass came to pass). But I’ll also remember it for the fun and satisfaction of working with a group that responded well to the work at hand. I went in at 5 o’clock with only a general outline sketched out of where we wanted reporters to go and what sort of stories we’d like them to do. I left after 6 a.m. after watching everyone generate enough good stuff that we could have filled our regular newscasts several times over (luckily, we had an expanded time slot today).

I slept a little. Not enough. I don’t have to work this evening, so I have today to regroup and reflect and hope I won the office election pool.

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On and Off the Campaign Trail: 1932

The New York Times, July 10, 1932

Hoover, Roosevelt and Radio

Voice Personality Now Has Dominant Part

In Political Campaign–Spoken Words

“Paint” Character of Candidates

Voices “paint character on the radio. Now the time has come when politicians and broadcasters alike are studying the microphone technique of Hoover, Roosevelt, Curtis and Garner. They are weighing radio’s part in the campaign. They realize that voice personalities overspreading the nation, within range of millions of voters, can play an important role in the fortunes of politics in this election.

***

President Hoover’s voice betrays deliberate effort, according to John Carlile, production manager of the Columbia Broadcasting System, who labels the Hoover voice “typical of the engineer.” He calls Governor Roosevelt’s voice “one of the finest on the radio, carrying a tone of perfect sincerity and pleasing inflection.

One advantage both Hoover and Roosevelt have in common is that their voices are not sectional, that is, they are not too Yanke, too Southern or too Western.

The New York Times, October 28, 1932

Republican Purses

Opening for Hoover

Campaign Chiefs Elated

as Funds for Final Drive

Begin to Arrive

…At the Republican National Committee headquarters a statement of M.L. Hartig, vice president of Joseph T. Ryerson & Son Inc., wholesale steel dealers, was made public yesterday in which he predicts immediate business revival in the event of Mr. Hoover’s re-election and a continued lull if Governor Roosevelt wins. …

… An identical note dominated in a radio address delivered tonight over a National Broadcasting Company network by Roger W. Straus, another industrialist who spoke under Republican Radio League auspices. Mr. Straus is the son of Oscar S. Straus, in 1912 the Progressive candidate for Governor in this State.

“Four years ago,” Mr. Straus said, “we Progressives of the Theodore Roosevelt school helped put Mr. Hoover in the White House. Looking back over four years, I am satisfied with that job. First, our man has stemmed the tide of depression and, second, he did everything that human ingenuity could devise to start us toward prosperity. He has succeeded in that, too, I think.

“Republican and Democratic economists and business men alike seem to believe that we are on our way out of our difficulties. Let’s keep in the Presidential chair a man who has done an incredibly huge job so well. When prosperity returns, he will see to it that passed around more fairly than ever before, and prosperity will return under the leadership of Herbert Hoover.”

[Both items Copyright, The New York Times]

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