Category: History

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An Old Impulse

I’ve mentioned Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Writer’s Almanac” before. Kate started getting it a while ago and started reading me some of the poetry and literary notes that are part of the daily email. Then she signed me up, and then I signed my dad up. It’s the best day-to-day email “newsletter” I’ve ever gotten and usually superbly written and edited.

A recent example: While I was back in Chicago, I missed the almanac for Sept. 11 (the archiving isn’t ideal; you’ll have to scroll down to find the day’s entry). The poem offered that day was “To a Terrorist,” by Stephen Dunn (from his book “Between Angels“):

“For the historical ache, the ache passed down

which finds its circumstance and becomes

the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there’s nothing,

not even revenge, which alleviates

a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father’s ashes

to the wind, a gesture

when there’s nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you:

I hate your good reasons.

I hate the hatefulness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included.

Perhaps you’re hating me now,

I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular,

so smug, it thinks its terror is meant

only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,

one man’s holiness another’s absurdity.

Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I’m just speaking out loud

to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,

doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder

and, for a while, believed

thunder had an ear and a choice.”

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Ambushed by History

Philip Roth had a long essay in the Sunday New York Times book review section. The subject was his new novel, a sort of reimagining of American history if the isolationist, anti-semitic Hitler apologist Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940 instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most of the piece is an explanation of the book’s origins and an exploration of method. But he takes a detour near the end to puncture our most comforting national myth: That the purity of our devotion to freedom has made us somehow indestructible, immune from history:

“History claims everybody, whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not. In recent books, including this new one, I take that simple fact of life and magnify it through the lens of critical moments I’ve lived through as a 20th-century American. I was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power and F.D.R. was first inaugurated as president and Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor of New York and Meyer Ellenstein became the mayor of Newark, my city’s first and only Jewish mayor. As a small child I heard on our living room radio the voices of Nazi Germany’s Fuhrer and America’s Father Coughlin delivering their anti-Semitic rants. Fighting and winning the Second World War was the great national preoccupation from December 1941 to August 1945, the heart of my grade school years. The cold war and the anti-Communist crusade overshadowed my high school and college years as did the uncovering of the monstrous truth of the Holocaust and the beginning of the terror of the atomic era. The Korean War ended shortly before I was drafted into the Army, and the Vietnam War and the domestic upheaval it fomented — along with the assassinations of American political leaders — clamored for my attention every day throughout my 30’s.

“And now Aristophanes, who surely must be God, has given us George W. Bush, a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one, and who has merely reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else’s: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy. We are ambushed, even as free Americans in a powerful republic armed to the teeth, by the unpredictability that is history. May I conclude with a quotation from my book? ”Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.’

“In writing these books I’ve tried to turn the epic back into the disaster as it was suffered without foreknowledge, without preparation, by people whose American expectations, though neither innocent nor delusional, were for something very different from what they got.”

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Disappointed Office-Seeker, redux

HarrisonAs I mentioned in today’s post on the James A. Garfield assassination, the stock phrase used to describe his killer is “disappointed office-seeker.” Google turns up a bit that comedian Robert Klein once did based on that cliche. But Garfield wasn’t the only elected official of his era done in by someone who expected an appointment that didn’t come through.

Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison was shot to death in October 1893, the day before the scheduled closing of the World’s Columbian Exposition in the city. The killer was an apparently mentally ill man named Prendergast who believed he he merited an appointment to a senior position for services rendered to Harrison. He didn’t get the job he fancied, general counsel for the city, so he went to Harrison’s home with a gun.

Harrison was a five-term mayor (though terms were just two years in his day). His death prompted an orgy of mourning. By one account, the day of his funeral, more than half a million people lined the route to the cemetery. Later, his son, Carter Harrison II, also won five mayoral elections (so the Richards Daley were not the first to pull off that feat).

The other day, when Dad and I went down to Randolph and Desplaines streets to take a look at the new Haymarket statue, he mentioned he thought the original Haymarket sculpture, which depicts a cop trying to calm the waters of unrest, might be over in a park a few blocks to the west. We drove by, and found Union Park. On one edge is Spaulding Elementary School, where my mom’s mom, Anne O’Malley Hogan, taught back in the 1920s. We could see driving by that there was a statue in the park, but it was obscured by trees and I couldn’t see whether it was the Haymarket cop.

Dad went back down there today and called from the statue to report his findings. It’s a statue of Carter Harrison, who it turns out lived nearby when he was assassinated. (And, to connect back to Haymarket, was on the scene of the bombing before it took place. The Chicago Historical Society has a great writeup of the event, and Harrison’s part in it, here.)

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Infospigot: The Misinformation

Reading Minnesota Public Radio’s “Writer’s Almanac” today, I see a mention that today is the anniversary of the death, in 1881, of President James A. Garfield. Reading the item brings me face to face with the unpleasant truth that for years I’ve been spreading a spurious story about his death and in fact have confused certain details of Garfield’s assassination with the story of William McKinley‘s assassination 20 years later.

The story as I’ve told it: Garfield was visiting Buffalo. He was shot in the abomen by a “disappointed office-seeker” (the stock phrase) as he passed through a train station. Emergency surgery was performed by the only available doctor, who turned out to be a veterinarian. Garfield appeared to be recovering from his wounds, which included a damaged intestine; but the vet’s botched work led to infection, gangrene, and a horribly protracted death nearly three months after he was shot.

The “Writer’s Almanac” version of events was at odds with my tale, so I was compelled to check my “facts.” I discovered my story is an amalgam of the Garfield-McKinley events, with one wholesale fabrication thrown in. So from checking a couple of reliable-looking Web resources (here and here), here are the key points in the long and painful demises of the two presidents.

GarfieldFirst, Garfield:

–On July 2, 1881, Garfield was leaving Washington, D.C., on a trip. While preparing to board a train, the “disappointed office-seeker” — actually a nut job with a .44-caliber revolver, Charles Guiteau — shot him twice. One bullet grazed Garfield, the other struck him in the back.

–Garfield was taken back to the White House and doctors summoned. Not a veterinarian in the pack. The physicians believed it was crucial to determine where the bullet had lodged and whether it had struck any vital organs. To do this, and a veterianarian would have done just as well, they began sticking their unwashed fingers and other probes into Garfield’s deep back wound to see if they could feel the slug or damaged organs. They kept at that effort for days or weeks without finding the bullet. Their patient was conscious for most of the poking and gouging and subsequent pus-drainings.

–Despite initial optimism that Garfield would recover, the wound became infected, and the president died on Sept. 19, 1881, an astonishing and no doubt excruciating 80 days after he was shot.

–The most interesting detail of the efforts to treat Garfield is technological: At one point, Alexander Graham Bell was called in to use a metal detector he and aides had developed to try to find the bullet. The device was foiled, apparently, by an innovation in sleep technology: The test was conducted while Garfield was lying on a mattress equipped with newfangled metal springs.

MckinleyNow for McKinley:

–In September 1901, the president went to Buffalo to visit the city’s PanAmerican Exposition. After visiting Niagara Falls on the morning of Sept. 6, he returned to the fair to shake hands with the public.

–One of the people in the reception line was Leon Czolgosz. His abbreviated descriptor: anarchist. Call him a nut job with a .32-caliber pistol.

–Czolgosz, who would have changed his name to Lee Charles if he had had an agent, shot McKinley twice: one shot deflected off the president’s breast bone, the other struck him in the abdomen and tore through his stomach.

–McKinley was rushed to the rather poorly equipped hospital on the exposition grounds. Doctors were summoned, and they agreed immediate surgery was necessary to save McKinley’s life. Again, no veterinarians within scalpel’s reach of the presidential wounds. The doctor on the scene deemed most qualified to operate was a gynecologist, Dr. Matthew Mann. Contending with poor lighting in an improvised operating theater, he couldn’t find the bullet that had wounded McKinley, and settled for patching up the obvious damage and closing the president up again without draining the wounded area.

–Despite initial optimism that McKinley would recover, his wounds became infected, he developed gangrene, and died early on Sept. 14.

So it’s clear my Garfield story is mostly McKinley, with a dash of Garfield and a dollop of outrage — can you believe they let a veterinarian operate on the president?! One question I have for myself: Where did the fiction come from? I do make up stories occasionally — friends and coworkers will testify to that — but usually for the sophomoric pleasure of tricking someone or to make a point. I usually don’t knowingly pass off fanciful historical tales like this as truth; my guess is that, never really having read anything in detail about the Garfield and McKinley killings, I did something fairly common among us humans: jumble some vaguely remembered details together into a plausible narrative (and a narrative all the more entertaining for its key improbable element).

This all makes me wonder whether I’ve told my version of the Garfield story to someone who knew the actual details and thought, “What a load of crap!”

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Haymarket

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Saw in the Tribune on Wednesday morning that a new statue commemorating the Haymarket Riot (more politically correct designations, such as “Haymarket Affair,” have been adopted over the years) was unveiled the day before. It’s good to see that people in Chicago will still turn out to argue the disputes of 118 years ago:

At the dedication, angry calls of “Anarchists!” were heard as Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon read a list of men executed or sent to prison after the riot. And hecklers, some who waved anarchist flags, booed and uttered obscenities at (Fraternal Order of Police) President Mark Donahue.

Dad and I went down to Randolph and Desplaines streets — the first time I ever visited the spot. The statue’s interesting, I guess: It’s an attempt to interpret the history of the moment rather than represent it literally. (An earlier statue on the spot, of a police officer holding up his hand and saying, “In the name of the people of Illinois, I command peace,” was attacked so frequently that it has been relocated to the city’s police academy). But I’m not an art critic. More interesting to me: An older couple showed up while we were out there. After a few minutes, I asked them what had brought them out. It turned out they have retired to the city and live on Randolph, over by the lake. They had seen the story in the paper, too, and decided to investigate. Cimg2023_1“When I read about this, I asked my kids, ‘What world-famous historical incident took place nine blocks west of where we live,” the man said. “One said, ‘It’s got somethng to do with labor.’ That was pretty good. Another one said, ‘Stop torturing your children.’ ”

Dad and I visited just in time. Chicago’s late-summer warm-wave was about to break, and thunderstorms had started to move across the city; five minutes after we were back in the car, it started to rain.

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Road Blog: Tolono 09.11.04

Dad and I headed south from Chicago, leaving the North Side about 9:30 a.m., going down Lake Shore Drive and the Dan Ryan before peeling off to the southwest on Interstate 57 with a destination of Cairo, all the way at the southern tip of the state. We stayed on that all the way down to Tolono, a small town that’s the subject of a railroad song by Utah Phillips (I wrote briefly about the song earlier this year).

The old Illinois Central (now Illinois Central Gulf) and Wabash (now Norfolk Southern) lines come together in town. In his song, Phillips describes the place as a flag stop — a place too small to have regular service. That looks like it was probably true, though there are so few passenger trains now that I’m sure it’s been decades since even a flag stop was made.

We got off the interstate just northwest of Tolono and drove into town on U.S. 45. I noticed while we were heading through that there was a sign for a historical marker. But as we passed the spot indicated — the entrance to a gas station — I didn’t see a marker. We drove out the south end of town, turned around, and tried again. We turned in at the gravel entrance to the gas station, but still didn’t see anything historic looking. But we did see a local constable parked in his Tolono squad car, apparently waiting for speeders . He lowered his passenger-side window as we rolled up.

“We were looking for that historical marker,” I said.

“What?” he answered.

“Do you know anything about the historical marker that’s supposed to be here?”

“A drunk took it down last winter. State still hasn’t put it back up.”

“Do you know what it was for? What the marker was for?

“I don’t know. State’s supposed to put it back up again.”

I had my camera out, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask whether I could take the officer’s picture. I also didn’t ask how long he’d been living in the area that he had no idea what this marker was about. Inquiries like that could be a threat to homeland security and speed-zone enforcement. Instead, Dad and I drove off to see Tolono; I was hoping there’d been an old station or stop of some kind I could photograph so I can send a shot to my old friend Gerry, who used to play the song so well. But there’s not a whole lot happening in town, certainly no evidence of a rail-passenger platform anywhere. I shot a couple scenes along the Norfolk tracks anyway. Then we headed back to U.S. 45 to go south for a few miles and get back on I-57.

We passed the historical marker sign again, and going by the gas station I finally saw the monument. It was a tablet set into a boulder in among some sort of ever-greenery. The bushes kind of looked like landscaping for the gas station, and the boulder hadn’t been visible when we were consulting local law enforcement about markers of historical significance. The police officer had been parked no more than 100 feet from the spot.

We halted again, and it turned out to be worth it this time. The marker commemorates what is said to be Lincoln’s last speech in Illinois, on February 11, 1861, during a brief stop on his journey east to be inaugurated. One site notes that Lincoln stopped further east, too, in Danville, and spoke to a crowd there. A railroad-centric account of the journey mentions Tolono, but not Danville.)

Lincoln’s brief Tolono speech is on the marker:

“I am leaving you on an errand of national importance, attended as you are aware with considerable difficulties. Let us believe as some poet has expressed it, ‘Behind the cloud the sun is still shining.’ I bid you an affectionate farewell.”

Monument commemorating Lincoln’s stop in Tolono, Illinois, (just south of Champaign) in February 1861.
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Faulkner’s Take

Here’s an oft-quoted passage from William Faulkner (from “Intruder in the Dust,” which no, I have not read) that grabs a lot of people:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago….

As a northerner and as someone who grew up believing (and who still believes) that the Civil War was fought in the most just of causes — ultimately, to end slavery — it’s probably impossible to fully appreciate the feelings Faulkner’s evoking there. Yes, history’s full of moments of barely missed opportunity, of heroes thwarted, of big “what if” moments. What if Lincoln hadn’t been at Ford’s Theatre? What if Bobby Kennedy had lived? But what Faulkner is talking about is where history blends into myth. In some important way, it doesn’t take into account a moral dimension of the event it interprets. What if Lee had prevailed at Gettysburg (that’s the premise for a series of historical novels being written by Newt Gingrich, by the way)? Yeah — and what if the Soviets hadn’t stopped Hitler at Stalingrad? Sure, we have a wish that true valor had some reward beyond a glorified version of “nice try” and a bullet in the chest. But part of the reason we can look back and daydream about these episodes is because they came out the way they did. The Faulkner quote reminds me of another that kicks around in my head, from Grant’s account of Lee’s surrender at Appamattox:

“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.”

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Three July Days

If you’re of a certain persuasion, the first three days of July mean Gettysburg. And by “certain persuasion,” I don’t mean a Civil War “buff,” whatever that is, or a re-enactor type. At least not necessarily. I mean someone who might be struck sometime at this time of year by the events of those three days and what they mean still, and the fresh meaning the history has in light of what we’re going through today.

There’s a good piece at Salon.com — which you can’t read in full unless you pay for it — a Q and A with Mario Cuomo about his book on Lincoln and Lincoln’s relevance in our war-on-terrorism world. An excerpt:

Would Lincoln have had anything to say about President Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war?

Yes. He specifically condemned preventive war on the grounds it would allow a leader to start a war cynically or unwisely. He thought it better to allow constitutional devices to work, which means going to Congress and obtaining a declaration of war. Lincoln also made it clear that you should avoid at all costs doing two wars at once. During the course of the Civil War, he was tempted by everyone around him to intervene with the British on the Trent affair [sparked by the Union’s capture of two Confederate diplomats aboard a British mail steamer] and with the Mexicans [who were fending off a French attack aimed at installing a puppet government]. But he avoided it, saying we needed to concentrate our effort, which is precisely the critique that [Florida Sen.] Bob Graham was making of Bush during the Democratic primary elections.

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Anniversary: Third-Rate Burglary

It’s June 17, the thirty-second anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Man, does Nixon look good now. But I digress. To mark the occasion, a minor-league baseball club in New Hampshire called the Nashua Pride is sponsoring a giveaway: The first 1,000 fans through the gates will get Richard Nixon bobblehead dolls. And that’s not all! Anyone named Woodward or Bernstein will be admitted free, public-address announcements will be suspended for 18 and a half minutes. (This news by way of a segment on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

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Bill and Ivan in WWII

On the Mother Jones site today, there’s a mini-essay that makes the point about the Soviet role in defeating Hitler much more clearly and completely (if also more shrilly) than I did (it’s the part titled “Remembering Bill and Ivan, about halfway down the page):

“… It is no disparagement of the brave men who died in the sinister hedgerows of Normandy or in the cold forests around Bastogne, to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried on the Russian steppes not in French fields. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately forty ‘Ivans’ died for every ‘Private Ryan.'”