One-Night Stands with American History

by Richard Shenkman

  SOURCE: Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), pp. 202–3.

  THE CURE FOR MANURE IN THE STREETS

  Every decade has a far-reaching cure for its ills. Around 1900 the problem was pollution. Three million horses inhabited urban America, with the healthier ones contributing from twenty to twenty-five pounds of manure each day. On every street their presence was evident as swarms of flies circulated and pungent odors permeated the air. To add to the atmosphere, almost every block boasted stables packed with urine-saturated hay.

  Four-legged pollution was not alleviated by a change in the weather. When it rained, the streets turned to a muddy manure mush. During dry spells heavy carriage and foot traffic beat the dung to a fine dust which, as one contemporary put it, blew “from the pavement as a sharp piercing powder, to cover our clothes, ruin our furniture and blow up into our nostrils.”

  New York alone was home to approximately 150,000 horses or, pessimistically, to some ten million pounds of manure a year. The offerings of the 15,000 horses of Rochester, New York, in 1900, would have covered an acre of soil with a heap 175 feet high. In light of ever-increasing production, many Americans feared that their cities would soon disappear under the dung.

  But a godsend from turn-of-the-century pollution was becoming available. At last, rejoiced Americans, the curtain was closing on the age of equine air. Cities would now be cleaner, quieter, healthier places in which to work and live. At last, the age of the automobile had arrived.

  SOURCE: Otto L. Bettmann, The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 3.

  THE GREATEST AGENT OF CIVILIZATION

  In his autobiography, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington wrote of his experiences as a teacher in a black school. Particularly, he emphasized the importance of nonacademic lessons: “I gave special attention to teaching [students] the proper use of the tooth-brush and the bath. In all my teaching I have watched carefully the influence of the tooth-brush, and I am convinced that there are few single agencies of civilization that are more far reaching.”

  SOURCE: Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), p. 54.

  THE PRESS’S MISCOVERAGE OF T.R.’S INAUGURATION

  Following the death of William McKinley, several members of the press covered the brief swearing-in of the new president, Teddy Roosevelt. One New York reporter, particularly impressed with the ceremony, contrasted it in his article with a recent European coronation. The typesetter, however, mistakenly used the letter b instead of o in the word “oath.” The next morning the paper’s audience was informed: “For sheer democratic dignity, nothing could exceed the moment when, surrounded by the cabinet and a few distinguished citizens, Mr. Roosevelt took his simple bath, as President of the United States.”

  Not only were New York readers surprised to learn of their former governor’s first act in office, but Europeans as well received a startling introduction to America’s new president. The former Rough Rider took a presidential bath in the London papers, too.

  SOURCE: Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradlee, eds., Vanity Fair Selections from America’s Most Memorable Magazine (New York: Viking, 1960), p. 293.

  ADVICE ON THE PANAMA CANAL

  Everyone knows that Teddy Roosevelt stole the Panama Canal. But even the man who swung the Big Stick thought he had to offer the world some sort of justification for his actions. Reasoning that seizure of the land would benefit “civilization,” T.R. claimed that morally he had done the right thing. And because American actions were justified morally, the President argued, they were therefore justified legally. U.S. Attorney General Philander C. Knox offered the appropriate response to Roosevelt’s legal opinion: “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.”

  After a painstaking rationalization of his actions in a 1903 cabinet meeting, T.R. demanded to know if his justifications would satisfy worldwide objections.

  “Have I defended myself?” he asked.

  “You certainly have,” replied an all-knowing Elihu Root, secretary of war. “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”

  SOURCE: Walter Lafeber, The Panama Canal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 34.

  T.R., A GREATER MAN THAN MOSES

  “We were at Winston, North Carolina, during a term of court. The place where everybody forgathered in the evening was the old Parker and Jordan Tavern, now gone. The lobby or lounging room was a great big room about thirty feet by twenty, and there was a large fireplace at either end of the room.

  “On this particular evening—it must have been in 1900 or along there—a number of us were sitting around talking about everything under the sun, when Mr. Pruden turned to me and said, ‘Whom are you Republicans going to nominate for President this time, Mr. Meekins?’ ‘Theodore Roosevelt, I hope,’ was my reply. Mr. Pruden was an admirer of Mr. Taft, whom he considered a great lawyer. Then he asked why I wanted Roosevelt. ‘Because,’ I said, ‘I think Roosevelt is the biggest man in this country. I’d go further and say I think he is the biggest man in the world today.’

  “Mr. Pruden said, ‘Well, I expect you think he is the greatest man that ever lived.’

  “I said there were few in history who were any greater, barring, of course, the Saviour.

  “‘Do you think he is a greater man than Moses was?’

  “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know that I would say that. Moses was a wonderful leader.’

  “And at that point another man in the crowd spoke up and said, ‘Well, I don’t know if Teddy is a greater man than Moses, but I’ll bet one thing—if Teddy had been leading the children of Israel I’ll be durned if it would have taken ’em forty years to get out of the wilderness!’”

  SOURCE: J. C. Meekins quoted by John G. Bragaw, “Random Shots,” June 27, 1936, p. 11, in Manuscripts of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration for North Carolina, 1939, Archive of Folk Song, Library of Congress.

  A GENTLEMAN GOES SWIMMING

  Just because he was president and lived in metropolitan Washington, D.C., Theodore Roosevelt did not have to halt his wilderness explorations. Indeed, the chief of state would often take friends and government leaders on adventures through the marsh around the Potomac River. Jean Jules Jusserand, the ambassador from France, accompanied T.R. on many of these excursions.

  Once, as the party was hiking on a particularly rocky trail, Jusserand used gloves to protect his hands. Farther downstream, as a relief from the hot Washington weather, the President suggested that the group take a swim. The idea seemed excellent, and the government leaders immediately stripped and jumped into the water. Jusserand, however, had not removed his gloves.

  “Eh, Mr. Ambassador,” asked the nude president, “have you not forgotten your gloves?”

  Always the gentleman, the Frenchman looked down at his gloves. “We might meet ladies,” he said.

  SOURCE: Jean Jules Jusserand, What Me Befell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), pp. 335–36.

  T.R. TAKES A HUNDRED THOUSAND FROM STANDARD OIL

  A few weeks before the presidential election of 1904, Teddy Roosevelt learned that the Standard Oil Company had made a large contribution to his campaign chest. This worried the President, since he had repeatedly assailed Standard Oil as the worst of the one-eyed monster trusts. The Rough Rider freely accepted substantial contributions from other corporations—$150,000 from Morgan & Company, $100,000 from the Frick steel interests, $148,000 from New York Life—but this was different. In a letter to his campaign treasurer, released to the public on October 26, the President self-righteously announced: “I have just been informed that the Standard Oil people have contributed $100,000 to our campaign fund. This may be entirely untrue. But if true I must ask you to direct that the money be returned to them forthwith.”

  As T.R. was dictating this letter, his
secretary of state happened to walk into the room. “Why, Mr. President,” the secretary declared, “the money has been spent. They cannot pay it back—they haven’t got it.” To which Roosevelt replied, “Well, the letter will look well on the record, anyhow.” And the letter was published.

  In 1908, T.R. learned that the Standard Oil money had never been returned.

  SOURCE: Matthew Josephson, The President Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), pp. 166–67.

  THE BEST MAN FOR THE JOB

  In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt named Oscar Straus, a Jew, as secretary of commerce and labor. At a dinner celebrating the appointment, T.R. explained that he had selected the new secretary without regard to race, color, creed, or party. The President had been accused by some of courting the large New York Jewish vote with the appointment. T.R. stressed, however, that his only concern had been to find the most qualified man in the United States for the job. Jacob Schiff, who was present at the dinner, was asked by the President to confirm this. Schiff, wealthy, respectable, old, and quite deaf, nodded emphatically and exclaimed, “Dot’s right, Mr. President, you came to me and said, ‘Chake, who is der best Jew I can appoint Secretary of Commerce?’”

  SOURCE: John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 37.

  “NUTHING ESCAPES MR. RUCEVELT”

  On August 27, 1906, T.R. proved his willingness to risk controversy no matter how small the issue. Long a believer in the movement to simplify the spelling of words by eliminating silent vowels, he ordered the public printer to thenceforth use the simplified spellings of three hundred specified words in all government publications. Some of the spelling changes were minor, as in the words “honor,” “parlor,” and “rumor,” and were subsequently adopted by dictionaries. But other changes did real violence to the old words and seemed to rob them of dignity and grace. “Kissed” became “kist,” “blushed” became “blusht,” “gypsy” became “gipsy.” The s was dropped in favor of z in “artizan,” “surprize,” and “compromize,” and the e dropped altogether in “whisky.” Most disturbing of all at the time, curiously, was the change of “through” to “thru.”

  The simplified spelling movement had received the support of Nicholas Murray Butler, Andrew D. White, and David Starr Jordan, among educators, and had benefited from funding by Andrew Carnegie (he contributed more than $250,000). But the public was in no mood for spelling reform, and T.R. was assailed in all quarters for tampering with the language. Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, wrote: “Nuthing escapes Mr. Rucevelt. No subject is tu hi fr him to takl, nor tu lo for him tu notis. He makes tretis without the consent of the Senit. He inforces such laws as meet his approval, and fales to se those that du not soot him. He now assales the English langgwidg, constitutes himself a sort of French Academy, and will reform the spelling in a way tu soot himself.”

  Congress was not in session when T.R. issued his edict, but when the members returned there was a controversial debate. After a short time Roosevelt was beaten, and a resolution was adopted ordering the Government Printing Office to “observe and adhere to the standard of orthography prescribed in generally accepted dictionaries of the English language.”

  SOURCE: Mark Sullivan, Our Times (New York: Scribner’s, 1930–36), IV, 162–90.

  T.R. USES SECRET SERVICE TO BLACKMAIL CONGRESSMEN

  True or not, the story was believed to be true by a great many congressmen. And that was what mattered.

  The story was that President Roosevelt had recently become a blackmailer. Concerned about several important votes that would be close, he had dispatched the Secret Service to dig up dirty information about members of Congress. Specifically, he had ordered the service to find out which members frequented the capital’s whorehouses. Then he had used this information to force the members in question to adopt the administration’s line on key votes—or else!

  There was no proof to the story, but it did not seem entirely farfetched either. During the previous session Congress had passed an amendment requiring the Secret Service to limit its investigations to the activities of the executive branch. T.R. was now asking that the amendment be repealed. The President openly stated that the Secret Service ought to be permitted to investigate anyone—even members of Congress. Did T.R. want a private police force to blackmail congressmen? Some members thought he did.

  Clearly, most congressmen did not believe the charges against Roosevelt. But the story created tension between the President and Congress. Indirectly it made congressmen extremely sensitive about the independence of their branch of government. What did Roosevelt mean when he said the service should be allowed to investigate congressmen? Was he implying that there were congressmen who had committed crimes? Was every congressman under suspicion of having broken the law?

  Eventually the legislators became so worked up about Roosevelt’s insinuations that they decided to censure him—just two months before the end of his term. It was only the second time in history (excluding the impeachment of Andrew Johnson) that the Congress censured a president. The first time had been when the Congress censured Andrew Jackson during the controversy over the Bank of the United States. Jackson’s censure, however, was eventually expunged from the records of Congress through the efforts of Thomas Hart Benton. The censure of Theodore Roosevelt was never removed.

  SOURCE: Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), pp. 483–85.

  TRULY AMERICAN NAMES

  In 1903 an order was issued by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs requiring all Indians on reservations to adopt plain American names. The commission strongly recommended that the Indians use patriotic names. Americans at the time speculated upon the changes this would make in the news items issued from the reservations: “No longer will ‘Tail Feathers Coming’ woo dusky ‘Minnie Weeping Willow’; no longer will ‘Blanket on Straight’ journey to the portals of the sunset and on the way stop at the wigwam of ‘Two Bones,’ the ancient arrow-maker.”

  Americans suggested that news items of the future might read: “Patrick Henry has sold his interest in the Custer shooting gallery to Abraham Lincoln. Daniel Boone and Martin Van Buren have been sentenced to two days in jail by Police Judge John Paul Jones. George Washington and James Fenimore Cooper will fight tonight at the Sports Club.”

  SOURCE: Homer Croy, What Grandpa Laughed At (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1948), p. 103.

  HUCK FINN BANNED

  When Mark Twain was told in 1905 by the librarian of the Brooklyn Public Library that copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had been removed from the shelves of the children’s room, he replied, “I wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for adults exclusively, and it always distresses me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.”

  SOURCE: Anne Lyon Haight, Banned Books, 3d ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1970), p. 57.

  THAT FIRST AIRPLANE

  On Thursday, December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made history by making a plane fly for fifty-nine seconds. But no one seemed to notice.

  Printer’s ink flowed at the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, but virtually nowhere else. Not in the Wright brothers’ hometown newspaper, the Dayton Journal, and not in the big city papers. The story did appear in the New York Tribune—in the sports section.

  The muffled reaction had many causes. Partly it was due to disbelief. A noted professor, after all, had just published an article packed with charts and diagrams proving that man could never fly. Sure, the Wright brothers had shown that a plane could fly—but only for about a minute, which was hardly page-one news. Santos-Dumont had demonstrated that a dirigible could stay up in the air for nearly an hour. Then there was the belief that even if a plane could fly for longer periods of time, it would not be able to carry cargo. And virtually no one thought that planes would ever carry passengers. Finally, the silent r
eaction was due to the Wright brothers themselves. At bottom they were mechanics and inventors, not showmen. They did not have the flair of a Charles Lindbergh, or the shrewdness of a P. T. Barnum. So they had trouble persuading people of the possibilities of their contraption.

  The Wright brothers believed that one of the chief uses for the airplane would be to maintain international peace. With airplanes nations could keep an eye on one another and avoid sudden wars. The brothers would undoubtedly have been horrified to learn that their invention made war worse than it had ever been.

  Portents of the future came in 1905, when British lieutenant colonel J. E. Clapper expressed interest in the Wright brothers’ airplane. Whether for peaceful or military purposes he did not say. But negotiations fell through. In the meantime the Wright brothers furiously tried to attract the attention of Washingon. It would be far better for their own government to make use of the airplane than a foreign one. But Washington ignored them. Finally, however, just when the British offer was withdrawn, Washington came to its senses. The year was 1907. It had taken four years for the government to realize the importance of the airplane.

  SOURCE: Walter Lord, The Good Years (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), pp. 97–100.

  HENRY JAMES ASKS DIRECTIONS

  Henry James loved motoring, but did not have a sense of direction. Neither did Edith Wharton. Here Wharton describes what happened when she and James, on a trip in England, arrived in Windsor late one night:

  “We must have been driven by a strange chauffeur—perhaps Cook was on a holiday; at any rate, having fallen into the lazy habit of trusting to him to know the way, I found myself at a loss to direct his substitute to the King’s Road. While I was hesitating, and peering out into the darkness, James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. ‘Wait a moment, my dear—I’ll ask him where we are’; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.