Monthly Archives: April 2020

Fending Chaos: the Early Years of Rufus King

30 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, Founding Fathers, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Rufus King

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Rufus King Manor library & study, Jamaica Queens

The Journal of the American Revolution has posted my article about Rufus King. Of all the things I have written (so far), this may be the most rewarding. King is such an important figure and his story is so important to tell. This article ends in 1789, the year of the First Congress and Washington’s inaugural at Federal Hall. I am working on a part two right now that will bring King up through 1805, the year after his unsuccessful presidential bid and purchase of his Jamaica Queens home. The article is still very much in the early stages, but if all goes as planned it will get released sometime in early summer.

Now seems an opportune time to say publicly that I’ve decided my next book project will be about the King family in America. I had the Ah-ha moment this past Saturday and spent a good portion of this past weekend preparing some timelines. I intend to cover six generations from the early 1700s to the 1930s. Rufus King’s son, John Alsop King, plays a role in my yet-to-be-published manuscript “Incorporating New York” about Civil War Era New York City, so the topic is less of a digression than it might seem at first glance. In many ways, Rufus King’s sons and grandsons, and the generations of which they were a part, had to deal with the issues that the founders had put off, slavery, expansion, and other contentious things in particular. Rufus King himself returned to the Senate in the 1810s and dealt with such hot-button issues as the War of 1812 and Missouri Compromise. It is a story worth telling.

(image/CaptJayRuffins via Wikimedia Commons)

Fiorello La Guardia’s First World War

22 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Fiorello La Guardia

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They have my article up and running about Fiorello La Guardia’s involvement in the World War I over at Roads to the Great War. In 1917-18 he flew planes and served as second-in-command of an air base in Foggia, Italy, the place of his father’s birth. At the same time he was serving in the U.S. Congress. I had wanted to write this one for a long time but other projects kept pushing it to the back burner. I find La Guardia’s early life to be fascinating. We so associate him with ethnic New York, which makes sense being that he was born in New York City to immigrant parents. It was his experience in the Old West, however, that did so much to shape who he became. His year in Italy did much the same. This piece was a lot of fun to write. Enjoy.

(image/Library of Congress)

Patriot’s Day 2020

20 Monday Apr 2020

Posted by in American Revolutionary War, Heritage tourism

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Yesterday was the 245th anniversary of the firing at Lexington and Concord. The stamp above is a commemorative, one of a three-stamp set, from the 1925 sesquicentennial. As I understand it, one of the reasons people associate Massachusetts and Virginia–but not New York–so closely with the Revolutionary War is that in the 1920s the former two states out-hustled the latter in the heritage tourism game. It is something I intend to delve into more in these next few years during the 250th, which we are already in right now. I think the role the sesquicentennial in the 1920s played in our understanding of the Revolutionary War is under appreciated.

Today is Patriot’s Day in New England. The Red Sox would have played a morning game in Fenway concurrent with the running of the Boston Marathon. Even though I have not lived in New England for more than 40 years I still have many relatives there and feel a strong connection to Patriot’s Day. My relatives usually watch the marathon from a small town outside Boston itself. Also, I ran cross-country in high school and remember Bill Rodgers and the runners of that period so vividly. Hopefully they will get the race in this coming September as they plan.

 

Afternoon scene, Green-Wood Cemetery

19 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Brooklyn

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Brooklyn Green-Wood Cemetery, April 2020

One thing I am trying to do during this period of sheltering in place is not work too much, if at all, on Sundays. This can be difficult because I usually have a few projects in various stages of development at any given time. Typically on Sundays I put in at least a few hours researching or writing in my home office, or visiting some library or archive. Nonetheless, with no physical differentiation between home and work life–and no way to visit any restaurants, baseball games, or cultural institutions–one must buffer in some way the various roles in one’s life. One place that has thankfully remained open during the pandemic has been Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. I have been visiting the cemetery for more than twenty years now, and while the 478-acre green space always has more visitors this time of year there are many more people in the park in our current moment. I mean a ton. This is a good thing to see. Still it is not so crowded that one cannot socially distance and remain safe.

I was talking to a neighbor the other day, who told me that a few weeks ago had been his first trip to Green-Wood. I explained the nature and development of garden cemeteries, which he was surprised to learn. There is a saying that graveyards are for the dead and cemeteries for the living. This has never been truer than in our current moment. People have been visiting Green-Wood Cemetery for 180+ years now through civil war and other public crises, but the place has hardly been more relevant than right now. I, and many thousands of other Brooklynites, have been thankful to have this place to visit in these times.

History Matters (…and so does coffee!)

16 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by in Alexander Hamilton, Founding Fathers, Historiography, James Madison, John Jay

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Coffee-House Slip, (Foot of Wall Street), drawn & engraved by H. Fossette

I was telling someone last night that yesterday was the first time since beginning to shelter in place last month that I felt hemmed in and claustrophobic. Apparently I was not the only one feeling like such; my friend replied that he left the house and went for a drive to clear his head. Las week another friend, an intelligent and thoughtful high school history educator who recently returned to school for another graduate degree, asked me if I am keeping any type of journal or diary during the health pandemic. I actually do keep a journal and while I cover events of the day and the like, it is more for where I am on certain projects at home, work, and in my writing. Of course the outside world touches on all those things, so it is a sort of chronicle of the time.

I was thinking about all these things when I was getting ready for bed last night after watching last week’s premier episode of the National Council for History Education (NCHE) series with Yale history professor Joanne Freeman History Matters (…and so does coffee!). It is a weekly online series in which Professor Freeman shares a primary resource and explains how it is relevant to today’s times. History is always relevant to current times, which the wise among us understand. Last week’s document was a letter written by Alexander Hamilton in late September 1787 a week or so after the September 17 ratification of the Constitution. Ratification at the Convention was hardly the end of the story; from there the document went to the Confederation Congress, and from there to the states for a vote. Dr. Freeman read Hamilton’s letter, in which he cast doubt that the Constitution would come to pass enough states. The title of the episode was “Contingency Matters.” Freeman was trying to show that nothing is ever a done deal or set in stone. Far from being a sure thing, the Constitution hung tenuously in the balance. That was why Hamilton, Jay, and Madison soon wrote The Federalist Papers, each article of which was printed in newspapers and other venues to be read aloud in coffeeshops and other public spaces to sway public opinion.

Closely related to contingency is agency. It is important in these trying times, with the pandemic, economic uncertainty, and seemingly failing leadership on certain levels, to realize that one has more more agency than one might believe. Nothing is set in stone and circumstances change, often when we least expect. That is where contingency and our own agency come in. This was one of the points of the episode.

Check out History Matters at the NCHE website. Each broadcast appears live Thursdays from 10:00-10:30 am Eastern time, but is also available for viewing afterward.

(image/Views in New-York and its Environs, from Accurate, Characteristic & Picturesque Drawings, Taken on the Spot, Expressly for this Work; New York: Peabody & Co., 1831.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882-1945

12 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Those we remember

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I have been trying not to do too much today, which is not something that comes easily to me, but I would be remiss if I did not note that today marks the 75th anniversary of the death of Franklin Roosevelt. He died at the health spa he founded for the treatment of infantile paralysis in Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12, 1945. I am old enough to remember a time when there were still plenty of Americans–your teacher, the mailman, your Aunt Shirley, whoever–who regarded Franklin Roosevelt as essentially a family member. While I do believe it is unhealthy and unwise to venerate any public official to such a degree, it is not difficult to see why so many would have thought in such manner given the way Roosevelt had come over the radio into people’s living rooms offering a soothing, confident tone during the Depression and Second World War. One of the things that has been so devastating these past several years has been to see the erosion of everything that the men and women of the mid-century–Franklin & Eleanor, Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and Dwight Eisenhower to name just a few–be undone thread by thread. Many today do not recognize how fragile the thing is and how difficult it was to put together to begin with.

I have been perusing some of the coverage and came across this piece by Kurt Graham, the director of the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, in which Mr. Graham recounts what Truman and Roosevelt were doing on this date seventy-five year ago: preparing their separate talks for the annual Jefferson Dinner to have been held the following day. None of that happened, of course. With Roosevelt’s death Truman ascended to the president and a new era had commenced.

(image/FDR Presidential Library)

Happy Easter

12 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt

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Eleanor Roosevelt and crowd, White House Easter Egg Roll 1937

Easter Sunrise Service, Arlington National Cemetery, March 28, 1937

Happy Easter.

Here are two very different images from the 1937 commemoration. Atop we see Eleanor Roosevelt with some of the 50,000+ who gathered on the White House lawn for the Easter Egg Roll. Below is an assemblage attending the annual Easter Sunrise Service, at which (unseen in the image) First Lady Roosevelt spoke. This year’s service is being live-streamed.

Despite the enormous challenges and anxieties of our present moment, take time to pause and reflect in this time of spring and renewal.

(images/Library of Congress)

Thinking of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act while isolating in place

08 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, Harry Hopkins, New Deal

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left to right: Henry Morgenthau, Joseph Kennedy, Harry Hopkins, and Harold Ickes at the White House, 1935

Today marks the 85th anniversary of the passage of one of the most significant acts of legislation to come during the Roosevelt Administration, which is saying a lot: it was on April 8, 1935 that the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act became law. The act gave Franklin Roosevelt even wider latitude to distribute Depression emergency funds as he saw fit. Surprisingly there does not seem to be an image of the signing, which took place after Roosevelt returned from a spring fishing trip. FDR being the master politician he was that probably was not accidental, though I don’t know why. Perhaps he was trying to paper over the failures and miscues of some of the alphabet soup agencies that had come into being in the two years since his presidency began. Two central ideas of the bill were 1) that the money would be more decentralized, giving state and local leaders more input into how to spend New Deal funds, and 2) that the emphasis would shift from relief itself to public works. The biggest change that came out of the bill was the creation of the Works Progress Administration.

The WPA’s influence surrounds most Americans every day, even if they are unaware. A good many of our bridges, post offices, roads, and so much more came out of it over the next several years. Culturally it did a lot too. As I type these words I can see the WPA American Guides for New York and Washington D.C. on my bookshelf. In addition to writers they put painters such as the young Jacob Lawrence to work via the Federal Art Project. Politically the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act led to a power struggle between Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins over who would become the czar distributing these billions of dollars. Hopkins, who hardly anyone knows anymore despite all he did during the Depression and Second World War, won the struggles. The New Deal was not perfect and had all sorts of unintended consequences but I do not have the confidence in anyone within a leadership position in the current federal administration that I would have had in Hopkins, or Harold Ickes for that matter. So much of that story began eighty-five years ago today.

(image/Library of Congress)

Charles Sumner’s edition of the “Debates and Proceedings”

01 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by in Historiography, Libraries

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Charles Hale’s dedication of “Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts” to Charles Sumner

Charles Sumner Harvard bookplate

Here is something one does not see every day. In my research for a project I have been working on I pulled up the “Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” The convention to which the title refers was the Commonwealth’s 1788 gathering at which they debated ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which itself had been approved at the Philadelphia convention in September 1787. The edition of “Debates and Proceedings” from which these images came was edited by Charles Hale and Bradford K. Peirce in 1856. This was during Bleeding Kansas when the sectional crisis was coming to boil. South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks’s savage caning of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was on May 22, 1856, the same year of the publication of this book, which again I have been reading in digital format when I stumbled across the Sumner connection.

I cannot tell with 100% percent certainty but based on the introductory material this edition of “Debates and Proceedings” most likely was published after May of that year. That is, the monograph came out after the caning of Sumner, which made the Massachusetts legislator a martyr for Constitution and Union. Thus, Hale gave Sumner a signed copy–the one we see here. As we see from the bookplate above, Sumner’s personal library went to Harvard in 1874, the year he died. It was Sumner’s copy from the Harvard collection that was digitized and put online.