Category Archives: Historiography

Robert Caro’s Al Smith

10 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Historiography, Libraries, Robert Moses

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Alfred Emanuel Smith in May 1920 during his first term as governor of New York

I was on vacation last week when I received a text message from someone who was himself away, sitting on a beach in Mexico no less, telling me that the New-York Historical Society had just acquired the extensive—200 linear feet—papers of Robert Caro. I told my friend that I remembered seeing Caro interviewed on C-SPAN 12-15 years ago and Brian Lamb asking the biographer where his papers might eventually go. Caro said at the time that he was not sure, but that he would not be giving them to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin. He had had several problems with officials there over the years, especially in the early years of his multi-volume LBJ project when at least some officials then at the archive had been personal associates of Johnson himself and thus less than forthcoming. As it happened I was reading Terry Golway’s Frank and Al: FDR, Al Smith, and the Unlikely Alliance that Created the Modern Democratic Party when my friend texted.

Caro’s papers include a great deal on Al Smith himself, one of the great and sadly forgotten figures in American history. Smith happened to enter the New York State Assembly 116 years ago this week in January 1904. Tammany boss Tom Foley, the man responsible for giving Smith his start in politics, gave Smith one piece of advice before his protégé headed to Albany that January nearly a century ago: “Don’t speak until you have something to say.” And so for that first term Smith sat as a back-bencher high above the legislative floor, taking in the proceedings and figuring out who was who and what was what. Roosevelt entered Albany politics seven years later. The word “alliance” in Golway’s title is fitting, for while Smith and FDR’s relationship was more than transactional the two very different men and never shared a friendship in any true sense. For reasons too complicated to go in to here and now, I would aver that it is not a stretch to say that without Al Smith there would be no FDR, at least no FDR as we know the man and his legacy.

I have some projects I’m hoping to accomplish involving Al Smith over the next few years and am hoping Caro’s research on the four-term New York governor and 1928 Democratic Party nominee will be available fairly soon.

(image/Library of Congress)

 

Talking Hart Island podcast

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Historiography, Interpretation, Media and Web 2.0, Memory, New York City

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I received an email recently from author and podcaster Michael T. Keene, who introduced himself and told me of his exciting new project: the Talking Hart Island podcast. For those who may not know, Hart Island is located in Long Island Sound near the Bronx and since 1869 has served as New York City’s potters field. It is the largest public burial ground in the United States. Approximately one million souls rest there today. Hart Island is still very much a working cemetery; officials estimate it has about another decade to go before reaching full capacity. One hundred and fifty years of burials dating back the days of Tammany offer many exciting interpretive possibilities for a podcast.

Today is an exciting time in the long history of Hart Island. Currently run by the NYC Department of Correction and tended by inmates from Rikers, Hart Island may soon open as a public park if the city council votes to change the island’s jurisdiction to the Parks Department. DNA is now making it possible to identify some of the unknown. These are the stories Mike Keene and his team are telling. Today I listened to the segment one featuring Russell Shorto, To start at the very beginning was a great move. Too often when the public thinks of the history of New York they think it begins with the British. In reality it was the Dutch who set the tone and character of what they called New Netherland. Much of that Dutch ethos remains with us today.

There are already three episodes of Talking Hart Island available for listening, with a new episode coming weekly. Give it a listen by clicking on the image above.

Sunday morning coffee

01 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Historiography, John C. Calhoun, Libraries

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Volumes 1-7 of the John Calhoun papers were released between 1959 and 1987. The project concluded with volume 28 in 2003.

I hope everyone’s Labor Day Weekend is going well. I am having my coffee and doing a few things. It should be a quiet day, though we plan on going out for lunch later. Here is a picture I snapped in the stacks of the DAR Library yesterday. It is volumes one through seven of The Papers of John C. Calhoun. I find these projects, which often last decades, fascinating. The Calhoun endeavor took almost half a century; volume one was released in 1959 and an internet search informs us that the editors released volume 28, the final volume, in 2003. The first installment was edited by a historian named Robert L. Meriwether, who died in 1958 as that initial volume was in galleys. A cursory JSTOR search of Meriwether’s writings reveals the strong Lost Cause sensibility of his worldview, which should not be surpassing in a white South Carolinian born in the late nineteenth century. Whatever that initial provenance, Meriwether and the editors who came after him did historiography a great service in the editing of Calhoun’s extensive papers.

I don’t claim to be an expert on John C. Calhoun but he is a fascinating figure in American history. The duality is evident: involved in American affairs for decades, he did so much to build the American republic as part of that generation that came immediately after the Founders; conversely, his unapologetic support for slavery, and willingness to secede and tear the union asunder, are also his legacy. How if at all does one square that circle? History is complicated and filled with all kinds of irony.

I remember the case a few years ago when a dining room employee at Yale destroyed a stained-glass window in Calhoun College depicting slaves picking cotton. The school was later renamed. Over a long career Calhoun served as vice president, a U.S. House & Senate member, and Secretary of State & War, among other things. He died in 1850 when that generation of Clay, Webster, and others left the scene just prior to the Civil War.

Remembering John Patrick Diggins

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in Historiography, Memory, Writing

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Andrew Delbanco, president of the Teagle Foundation and Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University, giving the 10th annual John Patrick Diggins Memorial lecture, CUNY Graduate Center, February 19, 2019

I can hear the snow melting as I type these words. I am leading a tour of Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza for a colleague’s class later this morning. It should be warm enough but hopefully not too squishy out there. This past Tuesday I went to the CUNY Graduate Center to hear Andrew Delbanco, president of the Teagle Foundation and Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University, give the 10th annual John Patrick Diggins Memorial lecture. I took a class on the Cold War with Jack Diggins in Fall 2004, fifteen years ago. He died in 2009, the same year my own father died. That these things were now so long ago is extraordinary to contemplate.

Professor Delbanco spoke movingly about fugitive slaves prior to the American Civil War, basing his lecture on his new book The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War. Delbanco is not a historian per se but an English and American Studies professor. He brought a strong narrative drive to the topic, touching on the writing of Melville, Emerson, and Frederick Douglass to name just three. One thing that made the talk so affecting was the human detail. It is one thing to say that 750,000 or more people died in the Civil War; it is another to give a sense of the human drama of individual lives a voice. As the cynical but accurate saying goes: one death is a tragedy, but one million deaths is a statistic. Delbanco also infused a sense of humility into his talk, something that is too often lacking in the writing and presentation of history. Who among us can say what we would have done had we lived in another time and place? What will our own disenchants say about us and the decisions we made, individually and as a society? One must embrace complexity. I could not think of a more fitting talk in the memory of John P. Diggins.

J.T. Flexner’s George Washington

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in Eliza Hamilton Schuyler (mother of Louisa Lee Schuyler), Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Washington, Historiography, Incorporating New York (book project)

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James Thomas Flexner’s four-volume biography of George Washington

Late last week I received in the mail a package containing the books your see above. This is James Thomas Flexner’s four-volume biography of George Washington, which the author published from the mid-1960s into the early-1970s. I won’t go too much into the details here and now but reading Flexner’s history of the first president will be part of some projects I have planned for 2019. I am already making a list of various interpretive possibilities. It may seem like a marked digression from my previous endeavors but that would be less accurate than it might seem; one of the major themes of my book manuscript, Incorporating New York, is that the Civil War generation was a bridge from the years of the Early Republic to the modern city and nation. That is one of the reasons I was so keyed up to see the Schuyler family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery last week. Just as one example of such threads: Eliza Hamilton Schuyler was the granddaughter of both Philip Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, John Jay and Isaac Roosevelt were three of the delegates who voted in favor of the adoption of the United States Constitution in Poughkeepsie in 1788.

I intend to start volume one of Flexner’s series after the holidays. I am a tabula rasa with the Founding Fathers. I started building a foundation by reading James McGregor Burns’s and Susan Dunn’s slim George Washington, part pf the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The American Presidents series, and am continuing now with Harlow Giles Unger’s “Mr. President” George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office.” These historians have extensive experience already on the presidents; Burns wrote two authoritative volumes on Franklin D. Roosevelt and Unger penned the authoritative modern biography of John Quincy Adams.

Sunday morning coffee

01 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Historiography, Memory

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A colonel at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg, Edward B. Fowler led the 14th Brooklyn in Wadsworth’s division of Reynold’s I Corps at the railroad cut.

I am finishing up my coffee before I head out the door for Grant’s Tomb. It is going to be a warm one today, close to 100. I’m trying to embrace the heat to the extent I can. Today is the 155th anniversary of Day One of the Battle of Gettysburg. I was with a friend in Green-Wood Cemetery Friday and yesterday and, with a sense of longing for Adams County, was paying close attention for headstones of men who fought and/or were killed at Gettysburg. Yesterday I took this photograph of the Edward B. Fowler headstone. He and his men served under James Wadsworth in the Union I Corps. After the war he was a prominent figure in Brooklyn. When he died in 1896 he lay in state in Brooklyn’s City Hall and then had a full military burial in Green-Wood.

On Friday I finished re-reading David Blight’s Race and Reunion. While I don’t believe the work’s arguments were as groundbreaking as some would have us believe, R&R is no doubt an extraordinary work of scholarship. I gained a lot from going back to it. One of the things that most fascinates me about Grant’s Tomb, besides the life and times of the man resting there, is how the general’s death fit in to Americans’ memory and understanding of the war. Once I have my Grant history and historiography down a bit more, I intend to explore some of these things in a deeper way. I have already begun doing that. Grand Army Men were visiting the tomb for Decoration Days well into the 1920s. After the Armistice, they marched with men from the Spanish-American and the Great War.

Decoration Day 1886

27 Sunday May 2018

Posted by in General Grant National Memorial (NPS), Historiography, Memory

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They have my article up and running at the General Grant National Memorial (Grant’s Tomb) website. It is about Decoration Day 1886, the first Memorial Day to take place after Ulysses S. Grant’s death in July of the previous year. Alas it appears the pictures did not seem to go through, but we’ll figure that out. I hope everyone enjoys the piece as much as I enjoyed writing it.

(image/Museum of the City of New York)

Nora E. Cordingley, 1888-1951

14 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Historiography, Libraries, Memory, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace (NPS)

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An excerpt from the New York Times obituary that starkly but accurately captured the details of Nora E. Cordingley’s death.

In February 1966, Esquire magazine published an article by Gay Talese called “Mr. Bad News.” The subject of that piece was Alden Whitman, a still-very-much-alive obituary writer for the New York Times. Many obituaries are written months or even years prior to the individual’s death. That’s why one sees a 2000 word overview of someone’s life published literally within the hour after they have passed. March is Women’s History Month. To mark the occasion editors at the Gray Lady have created a series they are calling “Overlooked,” for which they are writing obituaries for prominent women who did not receive recognition in the newspaper when the women originally died. Charlotte Brontë, Emily Warren Roebling and Ida B. Wells are three of the first fifteen subjects. Hopefully this will become something like “The Lives They Lived” section that appears the final Sunday of the year. I would like to see them do some figures from the First World War such as Edith Cavell. They are soliciting potential future articles. For whatever they regard it to be worth, I may submit a few ideas to the Times editors.

December 15, 1921 Library Journal announcement

I once mentioned in passing here on The Strawfoot a woman named Nora E. Cordingley, a Canadian who worked at Roosevelt House on East 20th Street starting in the 1920s. I knew then that I wanted to expand on her story a bit more but was waiting for the time. That time came a few weeks back when something came through my feeds soliciting articles for the Women of Library History blog. They are currently running their sixth annual series on women who work in the library profession. When I saw the announcement, I knew the time had come and I started working on it right away. The editor and I agreed we should publish the article today. Nora E. Cordingley died on March 14, 1951, 67 years ago today. I am really proud to have written this article. Ms. Cordingley is one of the overlooked people who kept Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy alive and she deserves to be remembered. Read the article here.

The Vietnam War: a learnable moment?

24 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Film, Sound, & Photography, Great War centennial, Historiography, Vietnam War

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Lions led by donkeys? Despite many worthwhile books and public programs in recent years, the conventional understanding of the Great War has remained surprisingly static even during the Great War centennial.

An interesting article appeared in the New York Times a few weeks back about the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick Vietnam War documentary. Its authors, Andrew Wiest and Susannah Ural, wonder if the eighteen hour documentary will be a historiographical turning point in our understanding of the war in Southeast Asia. Or, they continue, will it be the culmination of the narrative we have been telling ourselves for the past four–five decades? The answer to that doesn’t lie with Burns and Novick, who with their colleagues have already done their part by giving us the film. As they themselves have said, the documentary’s ultimate purpose is to ask more question than provide answers.

Wiest and Ural draw an interesting comparison, arguing that the documentary might do for Vietnam what historians did for World War One historiography in the early 1990s. Others are better positioned than I am to make the call, but personally I don’t see the needle as having having moved that much over the past 20-25 years. Yes, some archives have opened up and that sort of thing, but our understanding of the Great War remains much as it has since at least the 1960s. The current narrative is still very much the “lions led by donkeys” story line that has been with us for at least half a century. Perhaps a better comparison for The Vietnam War might be The Sorrow and the Pity, the 1969 documentary that nearly thirty years after the fact led the French to more closely examine their role in the Second World War.

Wars often lead citizens to question their societies, often vehemently. Americans examined their country during and immediately after the Great War, which led Prohibition, Women’s Suffrage, and the New Negro Movement in the 1920s. The same thing happened in different ways in the 1960s and early 1970s. Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, and much more all came out of the social upheaval. In addition it led to rifts that have yet to heal. So many of our current political and cultural divisions have their roots in the Vietnam War Era. Even militarily there is much that remains to explore regarding the Vietnam War. Time will tell over the next few years if we reach any new consensus on that turbulent period. Wiest and Ural make a strong case that this is the opportune time.

(image by Clara E. Laughlin from Foch: The Man)

Barbara Tuchman’s Vietnam War

27 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Great War centennial, Historiography

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William Shirer (left), Barbara Tuchman, and John S.D. Eisenhower at the Conference on Research and World War II and the National Archives, 14-15 June 1971. Tuchman was actively engaged in the discourse about the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s-70s. Tuchman gave her commencement address at Williams College the year after this photograph was taken.

These past two weeks I have been watching the Lynn Novick/Ken Burns documentary abut the Vietnam War. I have a few friends who have been watching as well. Usually in the mornings we email with a few thoughts on the previous night’s episode. For each of us, watching has been draining. Earlier today I was searching the New York Times database for some things relating to the war in 1967. The headlines read like a history lesson. Some of the names I came across in my very cursory search included Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King Jr., Secretary-General of the United Nations U Thant, Charles De Gaulle, William Fullbright, Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, Averell Harriman, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Needless to say all of these figures are now long gone, though Galbraith did not pass away until 2006.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 President Kennedy turned to historian Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August for inspiration. Five years later, for the 5 March 1967 edition of the Times, Tuchman wrote an extended piece about America’s entry into the First World War. Remember, there were still hundreds of thousands of living doughboys alive at this time just fifty years after Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. I remember seeing historian Gordon Wood on television several years ago expressing his admiration for Tuchman, though he added that she often saw her work as a historian as offering “lessons” for current times. History indeed can offer guidance, but Wood seemed to be arguing that Tuchman thought history offered a stronger template than Wood believes it does.

I knew that Tuchman’s work was often anthologized and so when I showed up at work today I searched the catalog and found a book titled Practicing History: Selected Essays, published by Knopf in 1981. Sure enough, it contains that New York Times article from 1967 that I had come across in the Times database. The anthology also contains a 1966 address to the Chicago Historical Society titled “Is History a Guide to the Future?”, in which she lays out her ideas on that subject. Her thesis, in a nutshell, is that History is more craft than science but that through due diligence it can guide and inform a way forward, at least to a degree. Practicing History includes articles about the Vietnam War that Tuchman wrote for New York Newsday in early March 1968, in the middle of the Tet Offensive; and the New York Times in May 1972. Tuchman advocated for withdrawal and explained ways the United States might have done that. In June 1972 she gave the commencement address at Williams College. Her topic that day was the war. While she was personally against it, she emphasized that people should demonize neither the military nor the soldiers. She explained why the military remained important, even when led poorly by its civilian overlords. She was particularly against the movement underway to ban the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) from college campuses.

(image.National Archives)