Monthly Archives: July 2019

Saturday morning coffee

20 Saturday Jul 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial

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Revolutionary Summer runs through September 15 at the New-York Historical Society.

I hope everyone’s July has been going well. I’m having my morning coffee before heading off to Federal Hall in a bit. I think it’s going to be a busy one today with folks coming in to escape the heat. A friend is coming in for me to show him around, after which he and I are going to get a quick bite to eat before I go back. It will be a fun day.

A friend and I intended to visit a historic home in the Bronx yesterday but decided to pass for now with the heat wave now on. Instead we visited the New-York Historical Society to take in among other things the Revolutionary Summer exhibit. I took some pictures over the course of the day that hopefully will turn into social media posts for Federal Hall over the next week or so. We did not get to see the facsimile George Washington headquarters tent because they were not doing that this past Friday. It was just as well because that is an outdoor activity and with the temperature such as it is staying indoors was better and safer. I saw the original at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia last year and you could have heard a pin drop when the curtain went up. The N-YHS never fails to please and we spent many hours taking in the permanent displays, the LIFE exhibit, the show about the history of the Hudson Valley, and other things. It’s strange to have reached a point in my life where things that took place when I was a kid are regarded as “history.” Such it was with the Hudson Valley exhibit. I remember the initiatives in the the 1970s and 80s that led to the clean-up. It is so good that New Yorkers from Staten Island north up the river have been discovering their shore line again.

Enjoy your weekend and be careful in this heat.

District of Columbia Stadium, July 1962

12 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by in Baseball, Washington, D.C.

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JFK and Stan Musial meet before the start of the All-Star Game at District of Columbia Stadium, July 10, 1962.

I’m still reading the coverage about the late Jim Bouton. He led an extraordinary life. Though there was one game played yesterday, Major League Baseball fully starts its second half today with a complete schedule.

When we went to the Braves-Nationals game a few weeks back we took in some of the photographs and memorabilia on display showcasing the long history of baseball in the nation’s capital. It goes back well over a century. I don’t recall the above image being there but I stumbled across it yesterday and found it intriguing. It is John F. Kennedy and Stan Musial at the 1962 All-Star Game in the then sparkling new District of Columbia Stadium, renamed RFK Stadium after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy six years later.

From 1959-62 Major League Baseball played two All-Star Games each season. The proceeds went to the players’ pension fund. This was the first one, played on July 10, 1962. Musial had campaigned for Kennedy in the 1960 election, unlike the Red Sox’s Ted Williams, who was a Nixon man. LBJ is there in the right hand corner. From 1964-67, after the Kennedy assassination, Musial was chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. I remember the Council vividly, and earning a patch in elementary school for doing five chin ups or what have you.

Kennedy was to throw out the first pitch. The AT BAT 24 on the scoreboard was the Pirates’s Dick Groat. Musial was forty-one years old when this photograph was taken and playing in his twenty-second All-Star Game. He came in as a pinch hitter in the sixth inning and broke a scoreless tie to give the National League a lead it would not relinquish. The Senior Circuit won the game 3-1.

Enjoy the second half.

(image/JFK Presidential Library and Museum)

 

Jim Bouton, 1939-2019

11 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Baseball, Those we remember

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Jim Bouton as a Yankee in 1963

I have been texting a few people over the past hour about the death of Jim Bouton. I had read several years ago that he was suffering from a degenerative brain disease but his death, as death always does, came as a shock. His Ball Four was so much more than a “sports book” or tell-all, but really one of the great memoirs of its time. Published in 1970, Ball Four was part of the zeitgeist of the moment. As I told a friend earlier, I always loved the way Bouton stood tall against the likes of Mickey Mantle and Bowie Kuhn. At the end of the day there was nothing the Baseball Establishment could say or do. They knew it was true. And the truth has a value all its own.

I could go on talking about Bouton but instead will give him the last word. As the pitcher said in Ball Four’s closing line:

“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

(image/Baseball Digest, August 1963)

James Monroe’s Ash Lawn – Highland

10 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, Florida, George Washington's Mount Vernon, Heritage tourism, Interpretation, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson

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Scholars at James Monroe’s Ash Lawn – Highland are incorporating the stories of the local African-American community into the history of the historic site. Many local residents descend from the original enslaved community at the Monroe estate.

One of the most fortunate things about volunteering at Federal Hall National Memorial this summer has been its broadening of my interests. The experience has less taken me in a different direction than expanded my awareness of American and even international history. This is especially true of the Revolutionary and Early American periods. I have a larger, more holistic approach to my scholarship than I did at the start of the summer, and really dating back to the beginning of the calendar year when we became members of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Among other things I have been following the social media pages and online resources of various people and institutions with which I was unfamiliar just two months ago. One of them linked the other day to this extraordinary New York Times piece about James Monroe and the enslaved persons who lived and worked on his Virginia estate.

The parlor of Casa Bianca near Monticello, Florida. Some enslaved persons from Ash Lawn – Highland lived and worked here.

In a living example of Faulkner’s notion about the past being neither over nor past, it has developed that upwards of one hundred African Americans still live within a short distance of Ash Lawn – Highland, the 3,500 acre property Monroe purchased in 1793 while a U.S. senator from Virginia. Highland is adjacent to Jefferson’s Monticello. By all accounts as known today, Monroe did not father children in the manner Jefferson did with Sally Hemings; the Monroe connections to this local community relate to the conditions of servitude. Scholars have been piecing the history together over the past several years and adding this new knowledge to the interpretive experience at Ash Lawn – Highland, which is today owned by James Monroe’s alma mater William & Mary. The story extends further than Virginia however; to pay off debts Monroe sold some of his enslaved persons to an estate near Monticello, Florida in Jefferson County called Casa Bianca. Some of them, or more likely their descendants, showed up on census records and voter rolls after the Civil War. Read the whole thing.

(top image, RebelAt via Wikimedia Commons; bottom, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory)

Happy 4th

04 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Happy 4th of July. I’m having my morning coffee before heading to Federal Hall in a bit. I thought I would share these images from ninety years ago today. This is Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt at the dedication of the Tammany Society wigwam at Union Square and 17th Street on July 4, 1929. The 4th was Tammany’s biggest day of the year. Al Smith, among others, was there too, but by now Smith’s time had passed. The Happy Warrior had been a fixture at these Tammany Independence Day events for years, and was being touted by his Tammany brethren for the presidency for much of the 1920s at these 4th of July observances. Now on this Independence Day in 1929 Tammany was touting FDR as the next president, and in Smith’s presence no less. Ouch.

Tammany built this structure in the late 1920s while at the height of its power and influence. That they were forced to sell it less than fifteen years later, in 1943, demonstrates how quickly Tammany declined.

Go get some of what should be a beautiful summer day.

(images/NYT)

FDR’s Tammany Society

02 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, Fiorello La Guardia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Robert Moses

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Franklin Roosevelt wrote this letter to the Tammany Society on July 2, 1936. It was read aloud two days later at the Tammany wigwam on 17th Street and 4th Avenue during the Tammany Society’s annual Independence Day celebration.

I came across this letter in my prep for a small talk I hope give on the 4th of July at Federal Hall about the history of Independence Day in New York City. It’s a missive from President Roosevelt to the Tammany Society in the lead-up to Tammany’s annual 4th of July event. When we think of Tammany we immediately think of Boss Tweed. In reality, Tweed was a very small part of Tammany’s long story. The Tammany Society dated back to the 1780s; it was a response to the Society of the Cincinnati, a Revolutionary War organization for officers who fought in the conflict. The organization continued for decades after Tweed’s death and would be at the height of its power in the 1920s and 1930s. Roosevelt himself had taken on, or tried to take on, Tammany in the early 1910s when he was a young state assemblyman, but soon realized the futility and so made his peace with the organization. Governor Roosevelt was there–as was Al Smith, Jimmy Walker, Herbert Lehman and others–when Tammany opened its new wigwam across from Union Square on July 4, 1929.

Now president, Roosevelt did not attend Tammany’s 1936 July 4th event. Instead he attended an Independence Day ceremony at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. It’s a story for another time but it’s funny how the reputations of the Founding Fathers rise and fall in relation to one another, especially Jefferson and Hamilton, who was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati. Right now Hamilton is upland Jefferson is down. In the mid-1930s however the opposite was true. Before he was all done Roosevelt would put Jefferson on the nickel and dedicate the memorial to the philosopher, secretary of state, and third president on the National Mall. Tammany men were more inclined toward Jefferson as well. Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ironically the Age of Roosevelt accelerated Tammany’s decline.The Society’s influence waned when New Deal federal dollars began pouring in shortly after Roosevelt took office. Men like Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses found they could sidestep Tammany and get their funds directly from Roosevelt.

(source/150th Anniversary Celebration, 1786, July 4, 1936)