Monthly Archives: March 2019

Opening Day 2019

28 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Baseball, Robert Moses, Style

≈ 2 Comments

Professional and college baseball players such as the 1919 University of Michigan baseball team were returning to the field in that first spring after the Great War’s end.

The days have been busy and full this week, which is a good thing. We took our students to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade yesterday afternoon to view and discuss the construction of Robert Moses’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I concluded the presentation with a brief reading, just two paragraphs, from Truman Capote’s 1959 Holiday magazine article “A House in the Heights.” Capote lived in at least two rented homes in Brooklyn Heights during his time in New York City. I pointed out to students the one at 16 Pineapple.

I would be remiss if I were not to note that today is Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season. Today is the earliest Opening Day ever. It makes sense to push up the start of the season to accommodate the longer post-season; they just don’t want it falling into November. I came across this photograph of the 1919 University of Michigan baseball team and find it extraordinary on a number of level. First of all is the stunning clarity of this image, taken not on the field but within the control of a photographer’s studio. The menswear of both the players and coaches/managers is intriguing as well. One of baseball’s most special features is that you get dressed up to play it. Baseball uniforms are not so much gym clothes but style wear. There is a reason the Yankees wear pinstripes.

When this photo was taken ball players were returning from Europe and rejoining their college and pro teams. I’ll probably come back to it in October, but as it would turn out the 1919 Black Sox scandal, and subsequent trial, would add to the bitterness and cynicism of the post-Great War milieu in the early 1920s.

Enjoy the season.

(image/Rentschler’s Studio, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Bentley Historical Library)

Sunday morning coffee

24 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in Beatles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Style, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

≈ Comments Off on Sunday morning coffee

A First Army field jacket seen at Brooklyn Flea, March 2019

I hope everyone’s week was good. Blogging will continue to be light in the coming days while the semester is in full swing. There is just so much going on. Yesterday I began Eric Rauchway’s new book Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt and the First Clash Over the New Deal, which is about the four month interregnum between the November 1932 election and March 1933 inaugural. Almost fifteen years ago now I read Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America for a class on the Gilded Age with David Nasaw. I’m only about fifty pages in but the tone so far is very harsh toward Hoover. I’ll come back to it with more observations when I finish the book.

I was at Brooklyn Flea across the street from the Barclays Center yesterday, where I bough a small leather wallet and a pair of cuff links. I’m transitioning to wearing suits more and am making French cuff shirts part of my arsenal. I have three suits now and intend to get a solid grey worsted or flannel number over the summer in time for the fall semester. All in due time.

When I was at the flea market yesterday I saw what I though might be a pasteover Beatles Butcher cover. I don’t own any vinyl, nor do I plan on going down that rabbit hole, but when I saw a copy of Yesterday and Today in a bin I had to stop and look. The anodyne trunk photograph was pasted on, which led me to think it might have been a second state copy. I mentioned it to the vendor, telling him what he may have on his hands, and even got him to take a picture of me with the album cover. When I got home I examined the photo while reading online about ways to tell if a record is indeed a Butcher second state. (First and third state versions are obvious.) To make a long story short it was not a Butcher cover, and the giveaway was right there even though I was unaware of it in the moment: the copy I saw had an RIAA Gold Record seal, an indicator that this was a later pressing. And that was the end of that.

I did see and photograph the First Army field jacket you see above. Even had it been in my size I would not have purchased the coat. Putting it mildly, it is bad form to wear military gear with patches if one has not served with said unit. Seeing it though was something special. I always wonder when I encounter such things in second-hand places how they got where they did. Who owned it and where & when did he serve? Two years ago I bought a heavy winter coat, made in England many decades ago, in a thrift store in Pompano Beach. It is entirely speculation on my part but I can surmise that the double-breasted, full-length coat once belonged to a retiree who brought the piece down with him from the Northeast only to bring it to Goodwill upon realizing he would never need it in sub-tropical Florida. I think of him and who he might have been every time I put it on, and try to live up to his legacy.

A little Sunday reading

17 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in 23rd (106th) New York State National Guard Regiment, Fiorello La Guardia, Memory, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Robert Moses

≈ Comments Off on A little Sunday reading

The New York City Mayor’s Committee on Permanent War Memorial’s official rendering for the unrealized enduring monument.

Here is a little something to read over the remainder of one’s weekend: my piece at Roads to the Great War about the temporary Victory Arch built in Madison Square in the winter of 1919. This is the article I was alluding to last week when I posted the pictures of the return of the 27th Division. I have always found it interesting the way civic leaders built such ornate edifices knowing they would be used hard for a few short months or years and then torn down. Almost all of the facilities built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago for instance, were temporary assemblies built not of marble or granite but timber and plaster of Paris. The White City in all its majesty appeared poised to stand for centuries when in reality its wood and plaster would not have withstood more than one or two Chicago winters. At least we have the stories and photographs to remember them by.

Enjoy your Sunday.

(image/New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections)

 

La Guardia & FDR, October 1936

16 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by in Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert H. Lehman, New Deal, Robert Moses

≈ Comments Off on La Guardia & FDR, October 1936

Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt break ground on the “tube” connecting Manhattan and Queens one month prior to the 1936 national election. Members of Local 184 made Roosevelt an honorary member during the ceremony. After this long day, Roosevelt traveled north of the city to his home in Hyde Park. New Deal funds totaling $58,000,000 in 1930s dollars went into building the tunnel, which opened one month ahead of schedule in October 1940. Roosevelt was the first to drive across.

I wish the image quality were higher but there is surprisingly little documentation of this historical moment. Here we see Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and President Roosevelt at the groundbreaking for what we now call the Queens–Midtown Tunnel. The photograph is from the 3 October 1936 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the day after the groundbreaking. I was not aware until I began co-teaching this course in January of the size and scope of the infrastructure projects built in New York City under the New Deal. Of course I was aware of such efforts as refurbishing Civil War battlefields, tidying parks, planting trees, building small-scale restrooms and picnic areas along byways. But large scale infrastructure is something on a whole other magnitude.

Municipal leaders outside Gotham believed the fix was in between Roosevelt and La Guardia. That is understandable given that Roosevelt had previously been the governor of New York and that he and Eleanor still owned a house on East 65th Street. The reality though was that New York City and State entered the New Deal process earlier than most locales because men like Herbert Lehman, Robert Moses, and Fiorello La Guardia were ready from the outset with plans. As the 1930s went on other municipalities caught up in real dollars.

This image we see here, grainy as it is, was taken about one month prior to the 1936 national campaign in which Roosevelt ran for re-election against Al Landon. La Guardia was a Progressive Republican supporting Roosevelt. Both men understood the power of publicity and the photo op. Roosevelt’s radio address was broadcast nationally. More than 100,000 people, many of them schoolchildren, turned out on 2 October 1936 to see Roosevelt speak, Mayor La Guardia, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and Senator Robert F. Wagner also sharing the stage. (Earlier the same day this photo was taken La Guardia and Roosevelt together attended Game 2 of the Yankees-Giants World Series at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, a game the Yankees won 18-4.) While many did not realize it at the time–though given his political instincts Roosevelt almost certainly did–the 1936 presidential election sealed the coalition of conservative white Southern Democrats, blue collar trade unionists, rural populists, African-Americans, and ethnic voters that largely held together until the tumult of the 1960s.

The return of the 27th Division

10 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in 27th (New York) Division, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Writing, WW2

≈ Comments Off on The return of the 27th Division

The Eagle captured the excitement of the Leviathan’s return while noting signs of the coming difficulty in securing the peace. The Mauretania returned this same day with another 3,500 men from the 27th Division.

A few minutes ago on this rainy Sunday morning I hit send and submitted something that hopefully will appear in an online venue toward the end of the month. I suppose this will give away the topic, but in my research I found these incredible images we see of men from the 27th “New York” Division returning from France 100 years ago this week. Nearly 15,000 of O’Ryan’s Roughnecks returned aboard the Leviathan and Mauretania on March 6, 1919. I always found it extraordinary the way the men packed in to these huge ocean liners by the thousands like this for the voyage home. During the Second World War Dwight Eisenhower and other military officials gave the men the choice of coming home the way the doughboys had a generation earlier, or staggering the launches with more crossings and thus fewer men to make the passage more comfortable. The thing was, that also meant more time in getting everyone back. Eager to get home and move on with their lives, the dogfaces chose the former virtually to a person.

Men of the 27th Division aboard the Leviathan arrive in New York Harbor, March 6, 1919. Arrivals such as this, with ships crammed stem to stern with doughboys, were almost a daily occurrence in winter 1919.

The Leviathan pulls in to New York Harbor on March 6, 1919. Dockworkers returned from strike to ensure the Leviathan and Mauretania’s safe arrival in the city with the men of the 27th.

(bottom images/Library of Congress)

Snow day

04 Monday Mar 2019

Posted by in Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Robert Moses

≈ Comments Off on Snow day

What is one to do when arriving at work and finding it closed for a snow day? Go to Panera Bread and get a little reading and work done.

This was me at 8:45 this morning after I got to work and discovered that my college was closed for the day.

When I arrived I pulled on the door to find it locked; then, I went around the corner to another entrance where the special officer told me of the snow day and closing. At first I was irritated with myself while retracing my steps down the street. So I went to Panera Bread, where I had a coffee and did some class work for 75 minutes before going to Trader Joe’s and stocking up on some things. The book here is Mason B. Williams’s City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York. As the title suggests the book examines the relationship between the American president and New York City mayor during the Great Depression and Second World War. I am about 1/3 of the way through and it is becoming one of those books that takes me in a different direction.

Co-teaching this course with its focus on Robert Moses over the Spring term has been a revelation; there are so many threads to pursue and I am learning something new literally every day.