Monthly Archives: October 2018

The 1902 Rochambeau Delegation

13 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in Antietam, General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Henry Cabot Lodge, Horace Porter, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Washington, D.C., William McKinley

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One of the most famous moments in American diplomatic history was the Viviani-Joffre Mission to the United States in April-May 1917. This was when the French politician René Viviani and Field Marshal Joseph Joffre, among others, came to America to discuss military and diplomatic details after the United States declared war on Germany that spring. Viviani, Joffre and officials from other Allied governments toured the entire United States for several weeks to meet the American people, many of whom, especially in the South and Midwest, were suspicious of European leaders’ intentions. Fifteen years earlier there was a lesser known diplomatic mission: the 1902 Rochambeau Delegation.

The British Museum acquired this painting of General Joseph Brugère in 1902, the same year this French military leader led a goodwill tour to the United States solidifying Franco-American relations. Many of the individuals involved would go on tour serve in the Great War.

The event was so-called because the central moment of the mission was the May 24, 1902 dedication in Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Park of a memorial to Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, the French military leader who had fought with George Washington during the American Revolution. The early 1900s were an interesting moment in diplomatic relations. The United States had recently won the Spanish-American War and was becoming a true world power; the brutal Philippine Insurrection, the final phase in the Spanish-American War, ended on June 2, 1902. One month earlier, on May 6, General Joseph Brugère boarded Vice Admiral Ernest François Fournier’s Gaulois in Toulon and sailed for Washington. One of the driving forces of this mission was Horace Porter, the United States ambassador to France.

Porter had served under Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War and went on to serve in various capacities over the next several decades. He was the driving force to fund and build Grant’s Tomb, which finally came to fruition on April 27, 1897 when William McKinley dedicated his predecessor’s final resting place. Several weeks after that dedication Porter was off to Paris, where he would be President McKinley’s representative to France. Civil War veterans were still very much running American life; the president himself had been in the Battle of Antietam; his Secretary of State, John Hay, had been one of Lincoln’s personal secretaries; and right then in 1902 Secretary of War Elihu Root was putting Ambassador Porter in for the Congressional Medial of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Chickamauga.

Brugère, Fournier and a sizable contingent visited George Washington’s resting place at Mount Vernon on the afternoon of May 22 and were hosted that evening by Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. The big event came two days later when Ambassador Porter, President Roosevelt, General Brugère, Vice Admiral Fournier, scores of dignitaries, and thousands of others turned out at Lafayette Square Park for the Rochambeau statue dedication. Henry Cabot Lodge was the featured speaker. It was all a huge success.

A few days later the Brugère/Fournier contingent would be fêted across New York City. Among other things they got a look at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, dined with mayor Seth Low, and received a tour of Columbia University from college president Nicholas Murray Butler. Columbia is conveniently located next to Grant’s Tomb and on May 28 Ambassador Porter took Brugère, Fournier and the rest of the French delegates to the mausoleum that he had done so much to build. At the time the general public could not walk down to the sarcophagi as one can today. As leader of the Grant Monument Association however Porter was naturally able to take the Rochambeau delegates down the marble steps, where they all stood in hushed stillness for ten minutes. (At the time it was still only Ulysses; Julia passed away seven months later in December 1902.) After the visit, the delegation walked north of the tomb to the Claremont Inn, where several dozen people had a sumptuous meal.

(image/The British Museum)

 

 

A World War One era Steinway

08 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in New York City

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Now here is something you don’t see everyday, let alone in a thrift store: a 1917/1918 Steinway & Sons grand piano. I saw this in the city yesterday on 23rd Street. I was a little confused at the 1917/1918 designation. I would have thought it fairly easy to trace the provenance of such a thing; as I understand it Steinways come with serial numbers and other identifying information to track their provenance. Or, maybe due to the war they were producing models on something other than an annual basis? Whatever the reasons, one can’t blame the people in the thrift store for not knowing.

This century-old 1917/1918 Model M Steinway & Son piano is currently in a thrift store on Manhattan’s 23rd Street.

Whenever I see something like this, I wonder how it got there. Was it in someone’s New York City apartment for decades until said person either passed on or moved in to a smaller place? Did the family donate the thing to a thrift store during a house cleaning? What famous pianist might have played it along the way over the past century? There is no way to know. That is the wonderful mystery of such things.

I have passed the Steinway crypt in Green-Wood Cemetery dozens of times over the years. A Wikipedia search informs us that the company was founded by Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg in New York City in 1853. Steinweg had emigrated from Lower Saxony and come to the United States with his sons after the failed revolutions of 1848. It was a wise move; the family avoided much of the tumult of the next 75 years. Steinway the Elder died in 1871 in the middle of the Franco-Prussian War. By the time of the Great War the Steinways were part of the fabric of New York City life and it does not seem they suffered from the anti-German sentiments so common during the Great War. Steinweg himself had anglicized the family name when first coming to the New Country. Perhaps the less overtly Germanic “Steinway” saved the family such grief.

Steinway pianos then and now were made in Queens. During the war the city was building a Steinway tunnel to connect Queens to Manhattan via a new subway line. Frederick Loeser & Co., a Brooklyn-based department store, was one place to buy a Steinway, among dozens of other piano makes and models. Loeser newspaper ads from 1917 and 1918, the period in which the Model M we see above was manufactured, list the original price of a Steinway grand piano at around $1000, just over $18,600 in today’s currency. Loeser’s however was selling them at a steep discount. It would be interesting to know if such discounts were customary or due to the war.

 

Geoff Emerick, 1945-2018

07 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Beatles, Those we remember

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I learned yesterday of the passing this past Tuesday of Geoff Emerick, who engineered the Beatles’s catalog from Revolver onward. If the name does not ring any bells that is not entirely accidental: producer George Martin was fiercely territorial of his relationship with the Beatles in the recording studio and did not want others getting credit for what he saw as his domain. Emerick complained justifiably in his memoir Here, There, and Everywhere of him and others being minimized cavalierly as merely “the staff” despite their important contributions. Martin’s accomplishments were of course significant but one can state with strong accuracy that had Emerick not been there in the Abbey Road studios that Revolver and Sgt. Pepper in particular would not have been the albums that we have now been listening to for half a century.

Geoff Emerick in 2003

Emerick worked in a supportive role on Beatle recordings from virtually the outset in 1962 and became their chief engineer in April 1966 when Norman Smith left to produce Pink Floyd. The first song Emerick engineered was “Tomorrow Never Knows.” He was all of twenty years old. The Beatles went on the road that summer for what would be their final tour. When they regrouped in London later that year they began the Pepper sessions, beginning with the double-A side single of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” The pressure was truly on Geoff Emerick at this time because the Beatles had made clear to him that they would no longer be touring and that the studio releases were the band’s authoritative communications. It was his job to take their ideas and and find a way to get them on tape. That was no small task in the days before digitization.

It was a seminal year in British history; 1966 came fifty years after the battles of the Verdun and the Somme, nearly twenty years after V-E Day, and a decade after Suez. England defeated West Germany in the Word Cup that summer. Austerity Britain was giving way to Swinging London. Drab greys were giving way to the technicolor uniforms the Beatles would wear in 1967, the style inspired by the nostalgia for neo-militaria that was common in Britain in those years immediately after the Empire’s collapse. So much of that seems dated and overdone today, a relic of a time gone by. I suppose none of that really matters anyway. All that is left of true importance is the magic of what happened in those studios, in which Geoff Emerick played such an important part.

(image/Clusternote via Wikimedia Commons)

Brooklyn, circa 1950

03 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Benjamin Harrison Namm, Incorporating New York (book project), Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill)

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Yesterday morning at work I was going through some boxes of archival images for a presentation tomorrow when I came across these two. These are students at what is now New York City College of Technology in about 1950, when the institution was still known by its original name, the New York State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences. There was–and still is–a strong veteran presence on campus because we began as a GI Bill school just after the Second World War. This fall I intend to get back to a project about the early years of our college, with a special emphasis on our founder: Benjamin Harrison Namm. I had intended to do it over the summer but the revisions on the latest draft of my Civil War manuscript took longer than I expected.

Namm had been a major in the First World War and returned to run the department store his father founded in Downtown Brooklyn, which he took to new heights. When the Second World War was winding down Namm understood that returning GIs needed the educational benefits and other services not afforded the doughboys of 1917-18 and became determined to do something about it. There was to be no Bonus Army this time around. I’ll leave it at that for now. The dental image is notable because the United States Air Force was one of the leaders in Restorative Dentistry. It was City Tech’s founding provenance that presumably led to the program landing at the school in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And so it remains today. I’ll have more to say on this in the coming weeks.

(images/Urulsa C. Schwerin Library Archives)