A Pocketful of History

by Jim Noles

  Other evidence of Keller’s political proclivities included a letterhead from the United American Spanish Aid Committee— yet another reputed Communist organization—and a report of a congratulatory letter celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army. Another source identified her arriving at a reception at the Soviet consulate in New York and declaring, “Finally, I am on Soviet soil.” Still another reported friendly correspondence between Keller and the American Communist Mother Ella Reeve Bloor. Keller’s signature on a March 1948 letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives protesting the House Committee on Un-American Activities gained further unfavorable comment, as did her sponsorship of the Committee of One Thousand, another “Communist-created and controlled front organization.” So did a warm 1957 letter to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Communist leader, then in jail for violating the Smith Act.

  In another touch of irony, Keller, who was apparently unaware of the FBI file compiled on her during the height of the Red Scare period, later included FBI chief Herbert Hoover in her mailing list of solicitations for donations for her American Foundation for the Blind. “Inasmuch as it is a form letter and in view of the large number of similar requests received by the Director, it is not felt that this letter should be acknowledged,” an internal FBI memo stated.

  Other aspects of Keller’s social activism did not need to be ferreted out by the FBI. She publicly supported the socialist Eugene Debs in his quixotic race for the presidency in 1920 and even joined the militant labor union Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

  “I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind,” Keller once said when questioned about her membership in the IWW. “For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.”

  Over the years, Keller’s political and social views found voice in a number of her writings, notably 1938’s Helen Keller’s Journal. In it, Keller not only condemned Germany’s Nazi Party but also encouraged the sitdown strikes of the Committee for Industrial Organization and berated Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind for sentimentalizing Southern slavery.

  Less controversial, at least to many modern sensibilities, were her campaigns for the right of women to vote and to have access to birth control. Furthermore, as a natural advocate for the blind and disabled, she traveled extensively to raise funds for the American Foundation for the Blind. It was no coincidence, therefore, that Alabama’s state quarter became the first American coin to have Braille imprinted on it. Nor is it coincidental that the quarter bears the appellation “Spirit of Courage” emblazoned on a banner underneath Keller’s straight-backed pose, where she sits on the reverse of the quarter between a longleaf pine branch and a sprig of magnolia.

  Keller’s appearance on Alabama’s quarter resulted from a statewide competition for Alabama schools to submit concepts for the Alabama quarter. After a review of thousands of concepts submitted, Governor Don Siegelman forwarded three themes to the U.S. Mint for its consideration: Helen Keller, Alabama’s role in social movements, and Alabama’s social and economic history. The Mint reciprocated with five candidate designs; in the end, Governor Siegelman selected Helen Keller and the “Spirit of Courage” to grace what would one day be 457.4 million state quarters.

  When it came time to unveil the new quarter on March 24, 2003, at Ivy Green, a new governor, Bob Riley, occupied the governor’s mansion. Although his politics differed from those of the former governor, his speech that day made it clear that he shared his Democratic predecessor’s affinity for the Helen Keller quarter— regardless of Governor Siegelman’s, or Keller’s, own politics.

  “Her life and accomplishments cast a wonderful reflection upon the State of Alabama, the United States, and upon all mankind,” Riley declared. “And having her image on a national coin—Alabama’s coin—shall remind us all of the courage and strength that exists in the most unlikely places.”

  23

  MAINE

  The Maine Attractions

  The year was 1635. It was less than thirty years after the English first settled Jamestown, scarcely a decade into the permanent settlement of what would one day be Maine, and at the height of the so-called Great Migration of some 70,000 English Puritans to New England and the Chesapeake Bay area.

  Some of those Puritan migrants sailed westward in large, well-organized fleets, such as John Winthrop’s 700-settler expedition of eleven ships to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Other would-be colonists, however, trusted their lives, families, and fortunes to smaller ventures—as did the 100-odd men and women who, in the spring of 1635, booked passage on the galleon Angel Gabriel in Bristol, England, and sailed for the New World.

  At the time, the hardy Angel Gabriel, crewed by twenty-three sailors, was a slow but steady 240-ton twenty-year veteran of the Atlantic. Sir Walter Raleigh had commissioned the vessel’s construction in 1615 and named it Starre; two years later, for his expedition to Guiana, he renamed it Jason. The ship was renamed a third time, to become the Angel Gabriel, after Raleigh’s arrest upon his return to England. An ancient sailors’ superstition warns that it is unlucky to rename a ship; in the Angel Gabriel ’s case, the superstition would prove tragically accurate.

  A summer voyage brought the Angel Gabriel—separated during the voyage, owing to slow speed, from the other four accompanying ships—to the shores of Maine. For the surviving ninety-eight colonists, who had weathered seasickness, an outbreak of smallpox, and two months of close quarters with the twenty-six cows and calves that accompanied them on board the ship, Pemaquid Point must have been a welcome sight.

  On the afternoon of August 14, the Angel Gabriel, battling increasing winds and a stiffening breeze, anchored off the Maine coast and began unloading passengers. Nightfall not only interrupted the unloading but cloaked the arrival of a catastrophic hurricane, one of the worst in New England’s recorded history.

  By the wee morning hours of the following day, the storm surge was running as high as twenty feet. The boiling surf and raging winds pushed the hapless galleon into John Bay, where it was slashed apart by the bay’s treacherous shoals and split open beneath Pemaquid Point’s granite cliffs. Fortunately, with many of the ship’s party already ashore, the disaster only claimed the lives of one sailor, between two and four settlers, and most of the cattle and cargo. In return, it left a stern reminder of the perils of navigation along Maine’s rocky coast.

  Other stretches of shoreline witnessed similar disasters as the years passed, but it was not until 1716 that a lighthouse first illuminated America’s shores, specifically, the Boston Lighthouse on Little Brewster Island. Nevertheless, Congress underscored the importance of lighthouses when, in only the ninth statute that it enacted, it passed “An Act for the Establishment of Lighthouses, Beacons, and Buoys” in 1789. Two years later, Maine’s first lighthouse began operation at Portland Head.

  Even after the passage of what became known as the Lighthouses Act of 1789, it took another quarter of a century for Congress to appropriate $4,000 to construct a lighthouse at Pemaquid Point in 1826. The first lighthouse, completed shortly thereafter, soon crumbled—a demise caused, some suspected, by its builder’s use of saltwater in his lime mortar.

  Learning from its earlier mistake, the government’s subsequent contract specified that only fresh water be used, and by 1835, the thirty-eight-foot stone tower was in place, an edifice that still stands today. Because of its setting on a rock ledge, the lighthouse actually rises nearly eighty feet above the surf, and because of its fourth-order Fresnel lens (now fully automated), it can be spotted from fourteen nautical miles out to sea.

  Back in the nineteenth century, however, lighthouses required rugged individuals such as Issac Dunham to serve as tenders and keep the lights lit.
Dunham, Pemaquid Point’s first tender, earned $350 a year for his work, a supplement to his income from a small farm nearby. As far as his lighthouse was concerned, though, Dun-ham was more than satisfied. Inspecting his new charge, he stated, “I will venture to say, a better tower and lantern never was built in the state.”

  By 1869, the lighthouse was in the capable hands of Marcus Hanna, a Bristol native and Civil War veteran. Hanna had served in both the U.S. Navy and in a regiment of Massachusetts volunteers during the war; while with the latter during the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, he earned the Medal of Honor. After his tour of duty at Pemaquid, he transferred to the Cape Elizabeth Light on Portland Head. There, he earned another medal—the Gold Lifesaving Medal—for rescuing two sailors from the shipwrecked schooner Australia in 1885.

  Even with the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse in place and men like Marcus Hanna tending it, the waters off Bristol remained dangerous. Even the tenders tasked with keeping the lighthouse stocked with supplies rued their trips to Pemaquid Point, where they had to anchor amid the dangerous rocks and ferry the supplies ashore in launches. And on September 16, 1903, there was nothing that the lighthouse or its keeper, Clarence Marr, could do to prevent a terrible tragedy from occurring under its very nose.

  That day, a sudden gale caught the fishing schooner George F. Edmunds at sea. The skipper decided to make a run for South Bristol harbor; it proved to be a fatal mistake. Caught on the same shoals that had claimed Angel Gabriel over two and a half centuries earlier, the George F. Edmunds was dashed to pieces on the unforgiving rocks. Thirteen men, including the schooner’s skipper, lost their lives. Only two survived.

  Despite such tragic undercurrents lurking in its history, Pemaquid Point and its lighthouse remain one of the most visited and photographed tourist spots in Maine. And unlike the Angel Gabriel and the George F. Edmunds, most of Maine’s sailing stories have far happier endings, such as that of the Victory Chimes.

  First launched at Bethel, Delaware, in 1900, the Victory Chimes is a three-masted schooner built of Georgia pine and Delaware oak with three Douglas fir spars soaring eight stories high above its decks. Originally named the Edwin and Maud, after the first skipper’s two children, the 170-foot-long schooner earned its keep as a merchant ship for the first half century of life. Later, during World War II, the vessel performed patriotic duties in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, helping to patrol and maintain the bay’s defensive network of anti-submarine nets and minefields. In the end, however, the Edwin and Maud was ill-rewarded for wartime services. Peace brought with it a glut of surplus cargo ships, and an old sailing schooner like the Edwin and Maud was poorly equipped to meet the challenge they posed.

  For a time, the old schooner survived as an excursion boat for vacationers in the waters off Annapolis. But in 1954, new owners provided a new lease on life. They brought the ship from Annapolis to Maine, newly christened the Victory Chimes, and put it to work as a Windjammer charter boat. In 1997, the schooner became one of only 127 vessels designated an American National Historic Landmark. Today, sailing out of Rockland, Maine, Victory Chimes remains the largest American flagged pure sailing vessel still in operation.

  Given the prominent imprint of Pemaquid Point and the state’s popular Windjammer fleet on Maine’s subconscious, it was not surprising that in a popular vote, the citizens of Maine opted for the design featuring Pemaquid Point and the Victory Chimes. The design bested three other final concepts—“Nation’s First Light,” “Where America’s Day Begins,” and Mount Katahdin (the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail).

  According to some accounts, however, the accurate depiction of Victory Chimes only occurred following eleventh-hour changes to the U.S. Mint’s proposed design. According to Paul DeGaeta, one of Victory Chime’s two captains and owners, the original design looked suspiciously like the two-masted topsail schooner Pride of Baltimore.

  “That was never going to fly,” DeGaeta said. “People in Maine know their ships!”

  Less controversial was the U.S. Mint’s selection of Pemaquid Point to celebrate the quarter’s official launch. “Pemaquid Point is a spectacular setting for this historic event,” Governor John Baldacci declared at the ceremony on June 9, 2003, “and our state quarter depicts a scene that demonstrates part of what makes Maine such a special place.”

  Some had hoped that the ceremony’s scene might include Victory Chimes sailing off the coast. Conflicts in the charter schedule, however, prohibited the schooner from making an appearance. Given the heavy fog that blanketed the area, it was unlikely that the ship would have been visible anyway. It was a fact not lost on DeGaeta, who telephoned his co-captain, Richard “Kip” Files, on the day of the event. DeGaeta was at sea; Files was in attendance at the launch ceremony as a guest speaker. Upon hearing of the fog, DeGaeta had a practical suggestion.

  “I told Kip, hell, it’s so damn foggy out there, just tell them that we’re here—they’ll never know the difference!”

  24

  MISSOURI

  Show Me (the Money)

  Willard D. Vandiver represented Missouri in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1897 to 1905. In 1899, while attending a banquet, he was offered the podium to respond to an earlier speaker’s comments. Vandiver, a former college president, stood up and, according to legend, said, “I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.” If the legends are to be believed, that moment marked the conception of Missouri’s nickname as the “Show Me State.”

  Missouri’s state quarter, however, does not include its famous nickname. Instead, it depicts Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s historic return to St. Louis down the Missouri River (seemingly paddling through an anachronistic Jefferson National Expansion Memorial [Gateway Arch] in the background). The inscription “Corps of Discovery 1804–2004” commemorates the expedition’s bicentennial.

  And for that reason alone, an inscription reading “The Show Me State” would be redundant. With his eye on a route to the distant Pacific, President Thomas Jefferson had ordered: “Show me.” In response, Lewis and Clark responded magnificently with an epic 8,000-mile journey that began and ended in St. Louis and showed the young nation a Western landscape of unparalleled promise. Show me, indeed.

  The genesis of the Lewis and Clark expedition lay in the late summer of 1802, when President Thomas Jefferson read of the Scots trader Alexander MacKenzie’s journey from Alberta, Canada, across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. Spurred by Great Britain’s challenge for the Pacific Northwest, Jefferson decided to mount an American expedition overland to the Pacific. In requesting the $2,500 needed to finance such an expedition from Congress, he expressed his goals in the following terms:

  The interests of commerce [to wit, challenging Great Britain’s fur trade in the Pacific Northwest] place the principal object within the constitutional powers and care of Congress, and that it should incidentally advance the geographical knowledge of our own continent can not but be an additional gratification. (Ambrose 1997, 78)

  To head the expedition—which, by the spring of 1803, enjoyed the added impetus of the need to explore the recently acquired Louisiana Purchase—Jefferson had to look no further than his trusted personal secretary and fellow Virginian, Captain Meriwether Lewis of the U.S. Army. Jefferson explained his decision simply:

  It was impossible to find a character who to a complete science in botany, natural history, mineralogy and astronomy, joined the firmness of constitution and character, prudence, habits adapted to the woods, and a familiarity with the Indian manners and character, requisite for this undertaking. All the latter qualifications Captain Lewis has. (Ambrose 1997, 76)

  For his part, Lewis set about putting together a company of explorers— the so-called Corps of Discovery—to chart America’s overland course to the Pacific. To help him lead the expedition, Lewis tabbed William Clark, a hardy army ve
teran, skilled at watercraft, mapmaking, and perhaps most important, leading soldiers. Like Lewis, Clark was a Virginian by birth; he had, however, moved to Kentucky as a young boy. At the time of Lewis’s invitation to join the expedition, he was thirty-three years old, three years older than Lewis.

  Traveling down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh by keelboat with the Corps’ first three members—John Colter, eighteen-year-old George Shannon, and Seaman, a Newfoundland dog—Lewis rendezvoused with Clark and his slave York in Clarksville, Kentucky, on October 15, 1803. Joined by seven handpicked woodsmen, Lewis and Clark floated down the Ohio and then battled the current up the Mississippi to St. Louis.

  The expedition members arrived in St. Louis in early December. They found 1,000 inhabitants in the town, which perched on a bluff over the Missouri’s flood plain. The settlement had, in four short decades, become the vortex of the West’s fur trade. It was just the place for the expedition to stock up on supplies and add new men, which Lewis and Clark did as they holed up for the winter at nearby Wood River.

  The following spring heralded the official beginning of the expedition when, on May 21, 1804, Lewis, Clark, York, Seaman, three sergeants, and twenty-three men pushed off into the Missouri River from the small upriver settlement of St. Charles and pointed the bows of their boats north. George Drouillard, a seasoned frontiersman, born of a French Canadian father and Shawnee mother, sailed with them as well. So did a detachment of local soldiers and eight French Canadian voyageurs who would accompany them for part of the journey at least as far as the next winter’s camp.

  For the rest of that spring and summer, the Corps of Discovery edged its way up the Missouri River, skirting modern-day Iowa and Nebraska and finally crossing into the Dakotas. They covered 1,600 miles, suffering snakebites, battling grizzly bears, and finessing their passage among the region’s Indian tribes. Despite the challenges, only the death of Sergeant Floyd, probably from a ruptured appendix, marred the first leg of the epic journey.