Armchair Travel
Thursday, April 27, 2006
  Ernie Pyle Goes to Hollywood
Here's another example of Ernie Pyle making a story out of not getting a story:

"A friend of mine in Winnemucca, Nevada, once said that the next time I came to Hollywood he wanted me to find out if Myrna Loy is really as sweet in person as she is on the screen. He said she was the only movie actress he cared about, and he just knew she had to be wonderful in real life or she couldn't be that way in pictures.

"Well I certainly tried to find out. I think my Winnemucca friend is right, but I can't prove it. It's sort of hard to tell in sixty seconds whether a woman is sweet or not.

"Myrna Loy was working in a picture called 'Test Pilot' with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. After a week of negotiating it was finally arranged that I should spend a half a day on the set, and sandwich my 'interview' between scenes.

"Well I'm no good at this kind of formal reporting. It's too stiff and hurried. And in this case there weren't any between-scenes for our interview anyway. Miss Loy was on the set nearly all the time, while I stood around on the edge trying to look as though I had kept my vanished dignity.

"But finally she did move out of the set and sit down on a nearby canvas chair. At that point her man, who had the jitters almost as bad as myself, hauled me over and introduced us. We said, 'Howdy' or something, and then the director said, 'Quiet,' because he was rehearsing somebody else.

"So we sat there for a minute, neither of us saying a word, and then she had to go back to work. At that point I said to the man, 'Okay, let's kill it.'

"Around the studio they say Myrna Loy is very sweet, and very quiet. My Winnemucca friend will have to get along with that.

"As a matter of fact, I am sick unto death of trying to write about the great women stars of the movies. It is true that those I have finally been permitted to see have been very nice. But the rigamarole you have to go through, the stalling around and waiting, the few little precious minutes they finally give you, their apparent inability to break down and talk plain talk, all gives me a pain.

"The stars are harassed to death, I know, and they do have to put up with all kinds of impositions from reporters, and they are justified in being suspicious and cagey about what they say, and you can't blame them for trying to preserve some privacy.

"What I'm sore about, you see, is that they don't distinguish between ordinary newspapermen and a fellow like me with polished manners, a learned mind, and a heart of gold!"
 
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
  Hunting Stories With Ernie Pyle
Before he became famous as a war correspondent, Ernie Pyle was kind of famous as a columnist. In 1934, when he was managing editor of the Washington News, he had a severe case of flu and took time off to recuperate. His doctor had suggested a warm climate so he and his wife went to Arizona and California and then took a three-week cruise back to the East Coast.

When he got back he showed some columns he had written to the Scripps-Howard people and they liked them and gave him an assignment as a roving columnist. He spent five years criss-crossing the United States and making trips to Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico and South America.

In 1938 he invited E.H. "Shafe" Shaffer, editor of the Albuquerque Tribune, to take a trip with him, and Shaffer described the way Pyle worked:

"He works methodically on those stories that read so easily and casually, sparing no effort to get what he's after. He keeps a tip book in which he notes down names, addresses and ideas as he hears about them.

"He clips newspapers and pastes items in the book. Perhaps a year or two later he'll be at the place where one of those items originated, and then he'll go and get a story about it.

"At Monticello, Utah, Ernie said suddenly, 'This is where a story is.' So he got out his little book, and, sure enough, there was a clipping about a hermit named Roy who had trapped some incredible number of mountain lions.

"We asked around, and someone said the hermit was in his cabin, high up on Blue Mountain. So we went up Blue Mountain, which is twelve thousand feet. There's a one-way road, twelve miles long, and you can't turn around on it until you get to the end. Well, we got to the end, and there was the cabin, but it was abandoned -- apparently hadn't been occupied for months.

"I'd have squealed like a pig caught under a fence if it had been I that had driven up that mountain after a story and found no story. Ernie just rolled a cigarette and said, 'Shucks, it probably got too crowded up here for Roy.'"
 
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
  Ike's Advice Considered
I've heard endless arguments, all of them circular, about why we had to drop the atomic bomb on Japan to save American lives. If I, Stephen Hartshorne, were to state that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, there's no reason anyone ought to pay any attention to my opinion.

But if you were an American president making a decision like that, wouldn't you at least ask Eisenhower what he thought?

There have been a number of documentaries on the subject in recent years and they all involve: #1 the immense cost in US casualties of an invasion of Japan, #2 the insistence of the Japanese on keeping the emperor at any human cost whatsoever and #3 the imminent entry of the Russians into the Pacific war.

Now the critical consideration is whether the US should allow the Japanese to keep the emperor. In fact, in the end, we did, largely to maintain civil order during the occupation. If we had agreed to this before dropping the bomb, we wouldn't have had to drop it. And if allowing the Japanese to save face in this way was unacceptable, then why did we end up doing it anyway.

You have to remember the Japanese emperor was utterly and completely insane. Even after the SECOND atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, he was more worried about keeping his sacred mirror and his sacred tea cozy -- or whatever it was -- than on his responsibility to his subjects.

I had this discussion with my friend Ed, and he said, basically, "The bastards deserved it and it prevented the loss of American lives." So I said, "If they were willing, prior to the dropping of the bomb, to surrender and allow us to occupy their homeland if only we would allow them to save face, why not do it?"

"I don't want them to save face," he said. OK let's turn that around. Would we have sacrificed hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more American lives in an invasion to prevent the Japanese from saving face? Of course not. Or should we have killed millions of innocent people, who had no part in starting the war, simply to prevent the emperor from saving face?

Or should we have fulfilled all our war objectives and simply let an idiotic old man keep his sacred mirror and his sacred tea cozy -- as we eventually did anyway.

I am afraid that Truman dropped the bomb as a demonstration to the Soviets or anyone else who wanted to challenge our supremacy in the post-war world. It gives me the shivers to say it, because it represents beastly, inhuman reasoning, but I can see no other motive except complete and utter stupidity.
 
Monday, April 24, 2006
  Ike's Advice Unheeded -- The Clincher
When I started writing entries on the theme of "Ike's Advice Unheeded" many moons ago, I suggested that millions of people died needlessly because Ike's advice was not taken by those in power.

The advice I cited, if it had been followed, would have averted the French war in Indochina, the US war in Vietnam and the American occupation of Iraq. So you're saying, "That's only a few hundred thousand lives at the most."

OK you're right, but here's the clincher. When I first read it I had to sit back in shock and amazement and consider what would have happened if this bit of advice had been heeded. We would live in a completely different world than the one we know today.

"In 1945 Secretary of War Henry L. Stinson, visiting my headquarters in Germany [Ike was then head of NATO], informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan.

"I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.

"During his recitation of the relevant racts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

"It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.' The secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude, almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions."

Imagine what the world might be like today if Harry S. Truman had had enough working brain cells to ask for Ike's advice -- and follow it.
 
Friday, April 21, 2006
  More Ike's Advice Unheeded
Back in 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt and leader of a pan-Arab movement in the Middle East, proclaimed that he was nationalizing (taking over) the Suez Canal. US President Dwight Eisenhower received a message from the British that they intended to "break Nasser" and to initiate hostilities.

Britain, France and Israel then attacked Egypt and destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. British paratroopers took control of the canal, which the Egyptians had blocked by sinking a ships full of concrete.

The US proposed a cease-fire resolution in the United Nations which passed 64 to 5 with Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand and Israel opposed.

The Soviet Union, which had been cultivating Nasser as an ally, proposed that a joint US-Soviet force should go in and stop the fighting. Ike announced that such a proposal was "unthinkable" and cancelled leave for American service personnel in case the Soviet Union decided to send in troops unilaterally.

At the same time two hundred thousand Soviet troops with four thousand tanks were engaged in an extremely bloody bit of work suppressing the Hungarian uprising, reportedly killing more than 50,000 Hungarians in Budapest in a single day.

Eisenhower was able to diffuse the situation in the Middle East by constituting a UN force from countries besides the US, the USSR, Britain and France.

The Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent wrote Ike, "Never have I seen action on the part of a government that excited me more than the rapid way you and your government moved into the breech with your proposal for a United Nations force to go to Suez. You did a magnificent job, and we admire it."

In his memoirs, Eisenhower states, "Some critics have said that the United States should have sided with the British and French in the Middle East, that it was fatuous to lean so heavily on the United Nations.

"If we had taken this advice, where would it have led us? Would we now be, with them, an occupying power in a seething Arab world? If so, I am sure we would regret it."

And regret it we do.

I know it would be too much to ask the butthead currently residing in the White House to read a big book with no pictures; but I just wish that someone had read it to him and explained it to him in words of one syllable.

It would have saved thousands of honorable US servicemen and woman from being killed and maimed and would have saved the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens.
 
Thursday, April 20, 2006
  Yet Still More Dame Shirley
Here's another descriptive passage from "The Shirley Letters" by Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp, a.k.a. Dame Shirley, describing life in the mining camps of California in 1851:

"You must know that today is the anniversary of the Independence of Chile. The procession got up in honor of it consisted, perhaps, of twenty men, nearly a third of whom were of that class of Yankees who are particularly conspicuous in all celebrations where it is each man's most onerous duty to get what is technically called 'tight.'

"The man who headed the procession was a complete comic poem in his own individual self. He was a person of Falstaffean proportions and coloring; and if a brandy barrel ever does 'come alive' and, donning a red shirt and buckskin trowsers, betake itself to pedestrianism, it will look more like my hero than anything else that I can at present think of.

"With that affectionateness so peculiar to people when they arrive at the sentimental stage of intoxication -- although it was with the greatest difficulty that he could sustain his own corporocity -- he was tenderly trying to direct the zigzag footsteps of his companion, a little withered-up, weird-looking Chileno. Alas for the wickedness of human nature! The latter, whose drunkenness had taken a Byronic and misanthropical turn, rejected with the basest ingratitude these delicate attentions.

"Do not think that my incarnated brandy cask was the only one of the party 'who did unto others as he would they should do unto him;' for the entire band were officiously tendering to each other the same Samaritan-like assistance. I was not astonished at the Virginia fence-like style* of their marching when I heard a description of the feast of which they had partaken a few hours before.

"A friend of mine who stopped into the tent where they were dining said the board -- really board -- was arranged with a bottle of claret at each plate; and after the cloth -- metaphorically speaking, I mean, for table linen is a mere myth in the mines -- was removed, a twenty-gallon keg of brandy was placed in the center, with quart dippers gracefully encircling it, that each one might help himself as he pleased.

"Can you wonder, after that, that every man vied with his neighbor in illustrating Hogarth's line of beauty?** It was impossible to tell which nation was the most gloriously drunk; but this I will say, even at the risk of being thought partial to my own beloved countrymen; that though the Chilenos reeled with a better grace, the Americans did it more naturally."

It's great fun to track down Dame Shirley's allusions, something that would be impossible before the "Age of Google." Both she and her sister Mary jane, to whom she wrote "The Shirley Letters," were extremely well read, so the letters have hundreds of interesting allusions that will have you Googling to beat the band.

*A "Virginia fence" is a fence of crossed rails supporting one another and forming a zigzag pattern.

**In "The Analysis of Beauty" (1753) William Hogarth writes:

"It is to be observed, that straight lines vary only in length, and therefore are least ornamental. That curved lines as they can be varied in their degrees of curvature as well as in their lengths, begin on that account to be ornamental. That straight and curv'd lines join'd, being a compound line, vary more than curves alone, and so become somewhat more ornamental. That the waving line, or line of beauty, varying still more, being composed of two curves contrasted, becomes still more ornamental and pleasing, insomuch that the hand takes a lively movement in making it with pen or pencil."
 
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
  Still More Dame Shirley
On her way to the mining camps to join her husband, Dame Shirley, author of "The Shirley Letters," witnessed a practice as old as humanity and described it in a letter to her sister Mary Jane:

"We passed one place where a number of Indian women were gathering flower seeds, which, mixed with pounded acorns and grasshoppers, forms the bread of these miserable people.

"The idea, and the really ingenious mode of carrying it out, struck me as so singlular that I cannot forbear making a description.

"These poor creatures were entirely naked with the exception of a quantity of grass bound round the waist and covering the thighs midway to the knees perhaps. Each one carried two brown baskets (which, I have been told, are made of a species of osier) woven with a neatness which is absolutely marvellous.

"Shaped like a cone, they are about six feet in circumference at the opening, and I should judge them to be nearly three feet in depth. It is evident from by the grace and care with which they handle them that they are exceedingly light.

"It is possible my description may be inaccurate, for I have never read any account of them and merely give my own impressions as they were received while the wagon rolled rapidly by the spot at which the women were at work.

"One of these queer baskets is suspended from the back and is kept in place by a thong of leather passing across the forehead. The other they carry in the right hand and wave over the flower seeds, first to the right and back again to the left alternately, as they walk slowly along, with a motion as regular and monotonous as that of a mower.

"When they have collected a handful of the seeds, they pour them into the basket behind and continue this work until they have filled the latter with their strange harvest. The seeds thus collected are carried to their rancherias and stowed away with great care for winter use.

"It was, to me, very interesting to watch their regular motion, they seemed so exactly to keep time with each other; and with their dark shining skins, beautiful limbs and lithe forms, they were by no means the least picturesque feature of the landscape."

Loren Eisley, who wrote a lot of interesting books about anthropology and climatology and things like that, points out that humankind came on the scene at the same time as flowering plants, and this may be no coincidence. Surely the harvesting of flower seeds was a precursor to the systematic cultivation of grains that so transformed the life of humanity.
 
Monday, April 17, 2006
  More Dame Shirley
I was delighted to find that other readers enjoy Dame Shirley as much as I do. We even had a comment from our friend Mridula in India!

I thought I would include a passage from "The Shirley Letters" which dispels one stereotype of the '49er and the '50ers and the '51ers -- that is, the intrepid miners who first reached Rich Bar. This settlement was high up in the Sierra Nevadas, accessible only by a treacherous road through the mountains.

"Ten miles this side of Bidwell's Bar, the road, hitherto so smooth and level, became stony and hilly," Dame Shirley writes. "For more than a mile we drove along the edge of a precipice, and so near that it seemed to me, should the horses deviate a hair's breadth from their usual track, we must be dashed into eternity.

"Wonderful to relate, I did not oh! nor ah! nor shriek once; but remained crouched in the back of the wagon as silent as death. When we were again in safety, the driver exclaimed in the classic patois of New England, 'Wall I guess yer the fust woman that ever rode over that are hill without hollering.' He evidently did not know that it was the intensity of my fear that kept me so still."

Upon reaching Rich Bar, Dame Shirley and her husband boarded at "The Empire," a ramshackle hotel which she describes in detail and then sums up:

"It is just such a piece of carpentering as a child two years old, gifted with the strength of a man, would produce if it wanted to play at making grown-up houses. And yet this impertinent apology for a house cost its original owners more than eight thousand dollars. This will not be quite so surprising when I inform you that, at the time it was built, everything had to be packed from Marysville at a cost of forty cents a pound."

"It was built by a company of gamblers as a residence for two of those unfortunates who make a trade -- a thing of barter -- of the holiest passion, when sanctified by love, that ever thrills the wayward heart of poor humanity.

"To the lasting honor of miners, be it written, the speculation proved a decided failure. Yes! these thousand men -- many of whom had been for years absent from the softening amenities of female society and the sweet restraining influences of pure womanhood -- these husbands of fair young wives, kneeling daily at the altars of their holy homes to pray for their far-off ones -- these sons of gray-haired mothers, majestic in their sanctified old age -- these brothers of virginal sisters, white and saint-like as the lilies of their own gardens -- looked only with contempt or pity upon these, oh so earnestly to be compassionated creatures!

"These unhappy members of a class to one of which the tenderest words that Jesus ever spake were uttered left in a few weeks, absolutely driven away by public opinion. The disappointed gamblers sold the house to its present proprietor for a few hundred dollars."

Now if those gamblers had tried the same speculation a few years later they might have done a whole lot better. Turns out the '52ers and '53ers and '54ers were not so intrepid, nor so honorable as the first miners on the scene, as Dame Shirley relates in later letters.
 
Sunday, April 16, 2006
  Benedict Arnold Saves the Day Twice - Continued
OK where were we? Oh yes. General Philip Schuyler is falling back southward through the Hudson Valley before the army of Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, which includes 6,000 British regulars and more than 1,000 auxiliaries.

General Barry St. Leger, with 800 tories and British regulars and more than 1,000 Iroquois warriors has defeated the colonial militia in the Mohawk Valley and threatens to take Schuyler in the rear, so to speak, allowing Burgoyne to link up with General Howe in New York and split the colonies in two.

St. Leger just has to capture Fort Stanwix, whose brave defenders have refused to surrender despite being greatly outnumbered and threatened with massacre by the Indians.

In response to urgent pleas from Schuyler for reinforcements, General Washington has sent one guy, Benedict Arnold, in hopes that he can save the day. Arnold's heroics are legendary and Washington hopes he can raise enough troops to save Fort Stanwix.

This is all from an article by James Thomas Flexner in the February 1956 edition of American Heritage entitled "How a Madman Heleped Save the Colonies."

Arnold is having trouble raising troops because the militia of the Mohawk Valley has already been defeated and General St. Leger has issued a warning that the whole valley will be massacred or enslaved unless the fort surrenders.

"The resulting terror was so great," Flexner writes, "that Arnold, whose name usually worked like magic on militia levies, was able to add only some hundred frontiersmen to the few regulars he led."

Arnold halted at German Flats (Herkimer, N.Y.) to "await reinforcements from some direction which hope said must exist, even if it was not visible. The crucial reinforcement arrived unheralded and unrecognized, raving and in irons."

That would be our madman, Hon Yost Schuyler.

Hon Yost Schuyler was actually a distant cousin of the Continental General Philip Schuyler, but his parents had gone to live among the Iroquois. Their son Hon became famous because he was considered mad.

"Rising to strange exaltations, raving in unknown tongues," Flexner writes, " he appeared to the Indians to be in special contact with the supernatural powers, a prophet who spoke for the Great Spirit."

He also made himself useful in other ways. On one occasion that we know of, Hon Yost was called upon to tomahawk two women accused of being witches. A sweet, sensitive, spiritual soul, he was one of the commanders of St. Leger's Indian auxiliaries.

It turns out that the British had actually held a recruiting rally behind the patriot lines and Hon Yost had been captured. He was tried and convicted of being a spy and sentenced to hang. Then his mother and his brother Nicholas showed up to plead for his life. That's when Arnold had an idea. I'll let Flexner tell it:

"Arnold, his light eyes burning with menace from his dark face, asked Hon Yost if he could use his special powers to make St. Leger's Indians flee. Instantly the shouting ceased and the meeting got down to efficient business. Hon Yost expressed complete confidence in his ability to save Fort Stanwix; Nicholas agreed to remain as a hostage until the result was known."

Hon Yost borrows a musket and shoots some holes in his clothes to back up his story of a perilous escape from Arnold's camp, then takes off into the woods. He enlists some friendly Oneidas to help him orchestrate his presentation.

He rushes into a tribal council of the Iroquois, raving loudly and incomprehensibly and pointing to the holes in his clothes. Gradually he begins to describe Arnold's enormous army, saying they are as numerous as the leaves on the trees. Then one of the Oneidas appears with a belt of wampum from Arnold saying he has no beef with the Indians and will let them depart unharmed -- if they desert the British.

Then one after another Oneidas appear "each with a more grievous tale."

The last one tells of "a talking bird which had croaked from a dead tree that the Indians had better flee before it was too late." That clinches the deal.

The Iroquois demand a retreat. When St. Leger refuses, they riot and loot the officers' baggage, seize the rum supply and become, according to St. Leger, "more dreadful than the enemy."

The Iroquois then attack the British, who flee in panic leaving their artillery, their supplies, their tents, and even their packs.

The defenders of Fort Stanwix, who were "steeling themselves for a last-ditch fight," are amazed to notice a strange silence over the British lines. Scouts go out and find no one except a bombardier who had fallen asleep. The siege is lifted! The British have been routed by one guy.

This is good news for Arnold, too, because he had resolved to try to relieve the fort with his small force of several hundred men.

Well then Arnold went up and won the Battle of Saratoga, which is a great story in itself. He had been relieved of command by the loathsome General Horatio Gates, who had taken over for Schuyler, but Arnold charged onto the battlefield anyway and led several decisive charges that won the day for the Americans and led to Burgoyne's surrender.

The victory at Saratoga and the careful manipulations of Benjamin Franklin convinced the French to enter the war on the side of the colonies.

And Hon Yost Schuyler? Well he was released and went back to the British and led several raids on the Mohawk Valley doing what he did best -- killing defenseless people.
 
Thursday, April 13, 2006
  Benedict Arnold Saves the Day Twice
As I have said several times before in this blog, you really can't get more bang for the buck than old American Heritage magazines. They're cheap and they have loads of great stories and illustrations.

One of the neatest stories I've seen in AH is one called "How a Madman Helped Save the Colonies" by James Thomas Flexner in the February 1956 edition. It's about Hon Yost Schuyler, a thoroughly unappealing character, and a loyalist at that, without whom the American Revolution would almost certainly have failed.

You see tons of stories of this kind: If so and so had not done such and such, the rebellion would have been defeated, the US would not have won its freedom, and we would not enjoy the blessings of Liberty today. We'd be little better than ... Canadians!

I've mentioned two such stories in this blog: the Barbara Tuchman book "The First Salute" about Admiral deGrasse, who bottled up Cornwallis at Yorktown, and the two British fleets that failed to engage him; and the story of John Honeyman (also from American Heritage) who gave Washington the information he needed to decide on his bold stroke at Trenton AND disinformed the Hessian commander so he failed to heed the warnings he received from Loyalist farmers.

There's also the story of the British sharpshooter who had Washington in his sights but for some reason, perhaps decency, he did not shoot him. As I recall he only found out later that it was Washington.

And then, of course, there's Benedict Arnold. He went down in history as a traitor, but he saved the rebellion at the Battle of Ticonderoga when he led a charge at the exact right moment and defeated "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne and his enormous army that had threatened to cut the colonies in two. You can read about that battle in a historical novel by Kenneth Roberts called "Rabble in Arms."

General John Stark (Mr. "Live Free or Die") also did his part at the Battle of Bennington, capturing a British foraging party.

Well it turns out Benedict Arnold saved the day not once, but twice. The second time was at Ticonderoga. The first time was when he defeated the army of 1800 British, Tories and Indian allies who were beseiging Fort Stanwix in what is now Rome, New York, with only 750 defenders. The Mohawk Valley militia under General Herkimer sent to relieve the fort had been defeated by the Iroquois in a bloody ambush.

A quick sketch of the situation. Burgoyne is coming south from Canada, threatening the Hudson Valley. He is opposed by General Philip Schuyler who hasn't been able to do much of anything to slow down Burgoyne. He has been continually falling back and has had to abandon Fort Ticonderoga "on which all defense plans had been based."

"If St. Leger overwhelmed Stanwix," Flexner explains, "as seemed probable since his army so outnumbered the defenders, he could sweep on to Albany, cutting General Schuyler's supply lines and leaving him in the wilderness north of that city at the mercy of Burgoyne."

The defenders of the fort were growing desperate. "A tunnel dug under the direction of British engineeers approached the mud walls to the sound of scalping knives being sharpened."

Three British officers approached the fort and were let in blindfolded. They stated that the Indians were "numerous and exasperated." If the fort surrendered at once, the British could control them, but 'should resistance continue it will be impossible to prevent them from executing their threats to march down the country and destroy the settlement with its inhabitants. In this case, not only men but women and children will experience the sad effects of their vengeance."

The fort's commandant -- we don't learn his name in the article -- refused to surrender. Then the British commander, General Barry St. Leger, issued a proclamation to all the inhabitants of the Mohawk Valley saying, politely, that they would all be slaughtered if they didn't talk the garrison into surrendering.

General Washington sent one guy to reinforce Schuyler. That guy was Benedict Arnold. And damned if Arnold didn't defeat St. Leger's army with only one guy -- Hon Yost Schuyler, the Tory madman.

Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion.
 
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
  Dame Shirley, Queen of the Mining Camps
It's always a thrill for me to read firsthand descriptions of different places and times in history. When you find a primary historical document that is also a great read, well that's a real thrill.

I just started rereading "The Shirley Letters" by Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp, a.k.a. Dame Shirley, who traveled with her doctor husband to the mining camps of Rich Bar and Indian Bar in the Sierra Nevadas in 1851, right when they were just getting started.

Louisa, an orphan from Amherst, Massachusetts, wrote a series of letters to her adoptive sister Mary Jane which are not only an important historical source, but a real delight from beginning to end. Louisa's lovely, lilting style describing the coarse and often brutal nature of life in the camps give it a feel like "Ann of Green Gables visits Dodge City."

I haven't been able to discover any connection between Dame Shirley, the orphan who wrote "The Shirley Letters," and Anne Shirley, the orphan in "Anne of Green Gables," written in 1908; but the two are an awful lot alike in their cheery disposition and their love of literary allusion.

Dame Shirley's letters were published in a San Francisco magazine called "The Pioneer" in 1854 and 1855, where they caught the eye of Bret Harte, who purloined from them freely for his famous story, "The Luck of Roaring Camp."

They were published in book form in 1922 and 1949, but these editions are rare. The one I have was published by Peregrine Smith, Inc. in 1970.

The first time I read this book I couldn't put it down. And I can't put it down this time either. Here are the opening lines:

"Rich Bar, East Branch of the North Fork of the Feather River, September 13, 1851

"I can easily imagine, dear M__, the look of large wonder which gleams from your astonished eyes when they fall upon the dateline of this letter. I can figure to myself your whole surprised attitude as you exclaim, 'What in the name of all that is restless has sent Dame Shirley to Rich Bar? How did such a shivering, frail, home-loving little thistle ever float safely to that far away spot and take root so kindly, as it evidently has, in that barbarous soil?

"'Where in this living breathing world of ours lieth that same Rich Bar? And, for pity's sake, how does the poor little fool expect to amuse herself there?'

"Patience, sister of mine. Your curiosity is truly laudable; and I trust that before you read the postscript of this epistle it will be fully and completely relieved."

There are a number of selections from this charming book that I will be posting, but the one that I think best shows the contrast between Dame Shirley's affected delicacy and the brutish reality of her subject matter is her account of the execution of one William Brown, who was convicted of stealing:

"The execution was conducted by the jury, and was performed by throwing the cord, one end of which was attached to the neck of the prisoner, acrosss the limb of a tree standing outside of the Rich Bar graveyard; when all who felt disposed to engage in so revolting a task lifted the poor wretch from the ground in the most awkward manner possible.

"The whole affair, indeed, was a piece of cruel butchery, though that was not intentional but arose from the ignorance of those who made the preparations. In truth, life was only crushed out of him by hauling the writhing body up and down several times in succession by the rope that was wound round a large bough of his green-leafed gallows.

"Almost everyone was surprised by the severity of the sentence; and many with their hands on the cord did not believe even then that it would be carried into effect, but thought that at the last moment the jury would release the prisoner and substitute a milder punishment.

"It is said that the crowd generally seemed to feel the solemnity of the occasion; but many of the drunkards, who form a large part of the community on these Bars, laughed and shouted as if it were a spectacle got up for their particular amusement...

"The body of the criminal was allowed to hang for some hours after the execution. It had commenced storming in the earlier part of the evening; and when those whose business it was to inter the remains arrived at the spot, they found them enwrapped in a soft, white shroud of feathery snowflakes, as if pitying Nature had tried to hide from the offended face of heaven the cruel deed which her mountain children had committed."
 
Monday, April 10, 2006
  "Don't Join the Book Burners"
As the public attacks by Senator Joseph McCarthy on supposed communists and "fellow travelers" became more and more outrageous, many of Eisenhowers friends and advisors urged him to censure McCarthy "in the hope of destroying his political position and his capacity to distort the American ideal before the world."

"I even had letters from Americans arguing that, as President, I should 'fire McCarthy' -- a circumstance that made me wonder wryly, at times, how much the average citizen really knows about the institutions and composition of his government," Ike says in his memoirs.

"If I were to attack Senator McCarthy, even though every personal instinct so prompted me, I would greatly enhance his publicity value without achieving any constructive purpose."

Some historians say that McCarthy's attacks on Truman and the Democrats helped Eisenhower to get elected and that Ike put up with McCarthy as long as it served his purpose. That's the kind of claim that can't be proved or disproved because it concerns an individual's motivations, but Ike won the popular vote by a pretty hefty margin -- six and a half million votes -- and won the electoral college 442 to 89, so it would be pretty hard to prove that McCarthy's antics had much to do with it.

At one point McCarthy demanded that the government get rid of all the books in its overseas libraries that were written by "communists, pro-communists, former communists and anti anti-communists" or just anyone accused by McCarthy of disloyalty.

Eisenhower learned of this while visiting Dartmouth College and responded with an
"impromptu talk" that seems pretty timely today if you take out "communism" and stick in "terrorism."

"Don't join the book burners," Ike told the students (and reporters). "Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

"How will we defeat Communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It is almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

"And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn't America."

McCarthy eventually claimed that Eisenhower was "soft on communism," but by then his power was broken by the fiasco of the Army-McCarthy hearings, and he spent the next three years drinking himself to death.

But the spirit of Joe McCarthy lives on in the White House today - smear your opponents using half truths and outright lies.
 
Sunday, April 09, 2006
  Ike's Exam
On December 12, 1941, five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, then on maneuvers at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, got a call on the base's direct line to the War Department.

It was Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, later to become Ike's chief of staff. "The Chief says for you to hop a plane and get up here right away. Tell your boss that formal orders will come through later." The Chief was General George Marshall, army chief of staff.

Ike was disappointed. He had spent "eight years of desk and staff duty in the rarefied atmosphere of military planning and pleading" and had only just been able to get himself assigned to troop duty.

He had tried to get a command overseas in World War I, but was given the assignment of training recruits for the newly-formed tank corps. After Pearl Harbor, like so many other soldiers, he was anxious to see action.

"I reported to General Marshall early on Sunday morning and for the first time in my life talked to him for more than two minutes," Ike relates. "Without preamble or waste of time, the Chief of Staff outlined the general situation, naval and military, in the western Pacific.

"All the evidence indicated that the Japanese intended to overrun the Philippines as rapidly as possible, and the problem was to determine what could now be done. General Marshell took perhaps twenty minutes to describe all this, and then abruptly asked, 'What should be our general line of action?'

"I thought a second and, hoping I was showing a poker face, answered, 'Give me a few hours.'"

When Ike returned he gave this assessment, "It will be a long time before major reinforcements can go to the Philippines, longer than the garrison can hold out with any driblet assistance, if the enemy commits major forces to their reduction.

"But we must do everything for them that is humanly possible. The people of China, of the Philippines, of the Dutch East Indies will be watching us. They may excuse failure but they will not excuse abandonment. Their trust and friendship are important to us.

"Our base must be Australia, and we must start at once to expand it and to secure our communications. In this last we dare not fail. We must take great risks and spend any amount of money required."

"He merely replied, 'I agree with you.' His tone implied that I had been given the problem as a check to an answer that he had already reached. He added, 'Do your best to save them.' With that I went to work."

So even though we knew we were going to lose, we did all we could to defend the Philippines in order to maintain the trust of our allies. Ike passed his exam.
 
Monday, April 03, 2006
  Bronson Alcott, Full-Time Dingaling
If you're familiar with Lousia May Alcott's book "Little Women," you know "Marmee," the mother, whose energy and good cheer kept their little family housed and fed and clothed while the dad was off somewhere.

For part of the book the dad is off serving in the Civil War, which Alcott did not, being a pacifist, but the rest of the time he's just away somewhere and it's unclear why he isn't helping out his family.

In the August 1957 issue of American Heritage (the same one with the story of Jane Honeyman and the story about the Battle of New Orleans and the picture of Robert E. Lee on Traveler) there's an article by Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger called "The Philosopher's Wife and the Wolf at the Door" about Abigail "Abba" May Alcott, who had to work like a drudge to support her family while her husband met with his philosopher friends in the apple orchard and talked about lofty matters.

"Mr. Alcott cannot bring himself to work for gain," she wrote in her journal, "but we have not yet learned to live without money or means."

She had to get money from her brother and accept gifts of clothing and food from neighbors and friends. For a time she made a living as a social worker in Boston, but the family moved twenty-four times in twenty-six years.

A cousin said when she visited the Alcott's in Concord, "I did not dare to go to Concord without carrying tea and coffee and cayenne pepper and a small piece of cooked meat in case my wayward stomach should crave it."

So then this cousin gives Abba some clothes for the children and old Bronson, the full-time dingaling, remarks to his wife, "I told you that you need not be anxious about clothing for the children; you see it has come as I said."

If I'd'a been the cousin I might have had a few choice words.

Then there's the whole matter of "Fruitlands," the appropriately named commune Bronson started that Louisa May made fun of in "Transcendental Wild Oats."

One of the great things about the commune, from Bronson's point of view, was that the women did all the work! Everybody wore dumb looking brown tunics and ate only plants that grow "upward," probably based on Bronson's readings in the Greek philosopher Pythagoras who, besides discovering his famous theorem on right triangles, had a lot of nutty views about diet.

Pythagoras opined that beans contained the spirits of your ancestors and if you ate the beans, your ancestors would speak to you. Interesting idea.

Anyway at Fruitlands they ate only brown sugar, bread, potatoes (don't they grow down?), apples and squash. They had the right idea about vegetarianism, but they didn't know beans (ha-ha) about nutrition. Anyway the commune went bust and the family nearly starved to death.

Abba did a bit of venting in her diary when she suggested that while she appreciated her husband's "quiet reliance on Divine Providence," she thought, "A little more activity and industry would place us beyond most of these disagreeable dependencies on friends. They have to labor. Why should not he?

"It is certainly not right to incur debts and be indifferent or inactive in the payment of the same."

Now Alcott's admirers, and there are many, will point out that he was self-educated and developed many new ideas about education that were ahead of his time. Indeed a school he opened in Boston had to close because after he admitted black students, most of the other parents withdrew their children. This is mentioned in "Little Women" as a kind of explanation for the family's straitened circumstances.

So what did Bronson Alcott do with his days? Well he liked to take an early morning walk, have breakfast and work on manuscripts all morning then walk and chat with friends like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau. Emerson was seriously rich, so I don't know why he didn't help out. Thoreau had issues of his own about making a livelihood, but he didn't have a family. Alcott also spend a lot of time helping to found The Town and Country Club.

Upon his wife's death, Alcott read his wife's diary. "My heart bleeds afresh," he wrote, "with the memories of those days, and even long years, of cheerless anxiety and hopeless dependence.

"I copy with tearful admiration these pages, and ALMOST REPENT (emphasis mine) my seeming incompetency, my utter inability to relieve the burdens laid upon her and my children."
 
Sunday, April 02, 2006
  A Sure Cure for Rickets
You parents out there, don't you hate it when your kid comes down with rickets? They get all crippled and can't run errands for you.

Since rickets is caused by a deficiency of B-vitamins, you could just give your kid some broccoli, but here's an old New England remedy from the 1600s that's much more fun. It's taken from "Cutoms and Fashions in Old New England," by Alice Morse Earle who got it out of an old medical book:

"The admirable and most famous Snail Water: Take a peck of garden Shel Snails, wash them well in Small Beer and put them in an oven till they have done making a Noise, then take them out and wash them well from the green froth that is upon them and bruise them, shels and all, in a Stone Mortar.

"Then take a Quart of Earthworms, scowre them with salt, slit them and wash well with water from their filth, and in a stone mortar beat them in pieces. Then lay in the bottom of your distilled pot Angelica, Celandine, Rosemary flowers, Dock roots, Bark of Barberries, Bretony wood, Sorrell, and rue. Then lay the Snails and Worms on top of the herbs and flowers. Then pour on three Gallons of the Strongest Ale and let it stand overnight.

"In the morning put in three ounces of Cloves, beaten, sixpenny worth of beaten Saffron, and on top of them -- this is the important part here -- six ounces of shaved Hartshorne. Then set on the Limbeck, and close it with paste and so receive the water by pintes, which will be nine in all, the first is the strongest, whereof take in the morning two spoonfuls in four spoonfuls of small Beeer, the like in the Afternoon."

Take my word for it, it works like a charm.

Earle describes another affliction in 17th century New England that had no known cure. Massachusetts Governor John Wintrhop relates the sad tale:

"The Governor of Hartford upon Connecticut came to Boston and brought his wife with him (a godly young woman and of special parts) who has fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason which had been growing upon her diverse years by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books.

"Her husband being very loving and tender of her was loath to grieve her; but he saw his error when it was too late. For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, she had kept her wits and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her."

A tragic case of terminal bookishness.
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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