Category Archives: Incorporating New York (book manuscript project)

Whitman at 200

31 Friday May 2019

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Robert Moses, Walt Whitman, War of 1812

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Walt Whitman was born in this farmhouse in 1819. The family moved to Brooklyn four years.

Walt Whitman was born in the farming community of Huntington, Long Island on May 31, 1819, two hundred years ago today. He was the second of what would eventually be nine children, one of whom died in infancy. Whitman had a strong sense of history and always believed he was taking part in a large historical narrative, probably because he was. Whitman and his family feature prominently in my book manuscript “Incorporating New York,” and I just may write a fair bit about the Whitmans over the summer. A friend and I intend to see the exhibit at the Grolier Club in the coming weeks or months. He also lived across the street from where I work, which has always made him seem that much more immediate to me. The Brooklyn printing house where he set the type for the first edition of Leaves of Grass was torn down in the early 1960s to make way for a Robert Moses project. Whitman and his siblings gloried in listening to stories of how their Long Island elders tricked the Redcoats during the British occupation in Revolutionary War.

By the time Walt Whitman was born the second round against the British—the War of 1812—had been over for nearly half a decade. During this Era of Good Feelings there was a feeling of optimism in the young republic, that the country held great possibility. A sense of history was clearly not lost on the parents; three of Walt’s brothers were named George Washington Whitman, Thomas Jefferson Whitman, and Andrew Jackson Whitman. George Whitman became an officer in the 51st New York Volunteers during the American Civil War, serving in the Army of the Potomac. It was after hearing of George’s wounding at the Battle of Fredericksburg that Walt rushed down South. His brother was okay, but what Walt saw in the hospitals horrified him. It was then that he became a nurse in the wards.

The Whitmans’ story is nothing less than the story of nineteenth century America. In addition to the Grolier exhibit I mentioned, there will be a number of other events in New York and elsewhere for those inclined.

(image/Jerrye & Roy Klotz MD via Wikimedia Commons)

Fiorello La Guardia’s Memorial Days

26 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), John Purroy Mitchel, Memory, New York City, Preparedness (WW1)

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I hope everyone’s Memorial Day Weekend is going well. I’m meeting someone on the far end of Green-Wood Cemetery in about an hour. We’re going to explore the cemetery and then get lunch before the true heat of late spring kicks in. We submitted final grades the other day but there is still some detail work and mopping up in the coming days as we cap off the academic year. I started John Strausbaugh’s Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers During World War II. Last year after completing the manuscript for Incorporating New York I read his 2016 book about Civil War New York. I intentionally held off on reading it until finishing the draft of INY because I wanted to follow my own vision for the narrative and did not want others’ ideas seeping in.

I am profiting greatly from reading Victory City, which voters many of the themes my colleague and I covered with our class this just-concluded semester. One of the major figures–how could he not be?-of the book is Fiorello La Guardia. I know so much more about La Guardia than I did at the beginning of the calendar year. I thought in recognition of Memorial Day Weekend I would re-up this post from last year.

General Wladyslaw Sikorski (saluting) with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (right) at New York City Hall, 1942

John Purroy Mitchel, New York’s boy mayor, died 100 years ago this coming July. Mitchel was in office from 1914-17, thus overlapping almost entirely with the early years of the Great War. Mitchel was a proponent of Preparedness and as such became a natural ally of Theodore Roosevelt, Leonard Wood, and others advocating for American readiness to join the fight. After Mitchel left office he joined the Army Air Service and was killed in Lake Charles, Louisiana when he fell out of an airplane during a training exercise in July 1918. Friends dedicated a memorial to him in Central Park near 90th Street and Fifth Avenue in November 1928. For years, especially throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Mitchel monument was a focal point of Memorial Day commemorations in New York City. One regular attendee was Fiorello La Guardia, who over the course of his tenure in office from 1934-45 observed at least nine of twelve Memorial Days at the monument to his mayoral forerunner, Fusion Party associate, and fellow World War 1 aviator.

New York Times, May 31, 1934: La Guardia is second from the right.

The photograph above shows La Guardia at the Mitchel monument on Memorial Day 1934. This would have been just over a year into the FDR Administration and with the Great Depression in full effect. This was also La Guardia’s first Memorial Day as mayor. There were still Civil War veterans marching in New York City’s Memorial Day parades in these years, about 25 this year. In the years after this their numbers dwindled into the single digits.

New York Times, May 31, 1944: La Guardia was pressing for full Axis surrender in the tense days before the Normandy Invasion.

The headline here in which La Guardia advocates for an “aviator’s peace” comes from the 1944 Memorial Day observation. While obviously the public did not know the exact day that the offensive to liberate France would begin, Memorial Day 1944 took place one week before D-Day. Thus we see La Guardia pressing for all out victory. Poignantly, 1944 also happened to be the first year that a Civil War veterans did not participate in Manhattan’s Memorial Day observation. Brooklyn and Queens each had one G.A.R. veteran in the ranks. Spanish-American War veterans, doughboys from the First World War now well into middle age, and active duty servicepersons including WACS, WAVES, and SPARS were all represented.

La Guardia was on hand again at the Mitchel memorial on Memorial Day 1945. He had gotten his “aviator’s peace,” at least in Europe. By Memorial Day 1945 V-E Day had passed and everyone was waiting anxiously to see what would happen in the Pacific.

(top image/NYPL)

Living with Moses

03 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Alfred E. Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Louisa Lee Schuyler, Robert Moses, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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Alfred E. Smith, seen here at age four in 1877 at Coney Island, became governor of New York State in November 1918 five days before the Armistice. He was a good friend and mentor to master builder Robert Moses.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday. Looking out the window right now I see it is clear and bright blue. How cold it might be is another story. I’ll find out when I run some errands in a bit. I spent a good portion of the morning preparing lesson plans for the week, which includes a sizable number of images to accompany the talks. My colleague and I decided to focus our course this semester on Robert Moses, who for good and ill gave New Yorkers most of the city we live in today. What we most want students to get from the class is an understanding of the complexity of Moses’s legacy, that Moses was less a psychotic power broker and more a flawed and complicated public servant who did the best he could within his circumstances to build New York City and State as he believed proper within the historical moment.

In a sense the course picks up where my book manuscript, Incorporating New York, ends. I finish my manuscript about Theodore Roosevelt Sr., Louisa Lee Schuyler, and their cohorts in 1923 with the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace. Moses gets his first position of genuine authority in 1924, when his friend and mentor Governor Alfred E. Smith appoints him leader of the Long Island State Park Commission. By this time the balance has shifted in New York City from the old Dutch and British families to the Italians, Jews and others who had arrived from the Old World over the previous several decades. The major exceptions to that of course are Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, whose stars are rising in this period and would carry on until Eleanor’s death in 1962. Moses himself holds on until six years after that, when Governor Nelson Rockefeller relieves him of the remainder of his duties in 1968. Over the years the Roosevelts would be friends, allies, and sometimes adversaries of Smith and Moses. I have been rolling up my sleeves and digging in since the start of the year and will proceed thusly until Memorial Day Weekend. It has been a great deal of work but a blast at the same time.

(image/Museum of the City of New York)

Alexander Hamilton, 1816-1889

26 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by in Alexander Hamilton, Eliza Hamilton Schuyler (mother of Louisa Lee Schuyler), George Lee Schuyler (father of Louisa Lee Schuyler), Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Louisa Lee Schuyler

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Alexander Hamilton, a grandson of the Founding Father, served in the American Civil War and was prominent in the social fabric of New York City and Hudson River Valley cultural life before and after the war.

Alexander Hamilton, grandson and namesake of the first Treasury Secretary, was born on this date in New York City in 1816. Hamilton was the younger brother of Eliza Hamilton Schuyler, which thus makes him the uncle of Louisa Lee Schuyler. Hamilton served in Spain as a diplomat on the staff of his friend Washington Irving in the late 1840s and early 1850s. When the American Civil War broke out a decade later he and his brother-in-law George Lee Schuyler served on the staff of General John E. Wool in Virginia and elsewhere. It is lost on us sometimes how close to the Revolutionary War was the Civil War; many of the figures on both sides of the Rebellion were the grandchildren of the first generation of Americans and were convinced that they were fulfilling the wishes of the Founders. It is a theme I expand upon in Incorporating New York, my book manuscript about the Civil War Era generation that came of age in the mid-1850s and lived on through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Alexander Hamilton (1816-1889) headstone, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Alexander Hamilton was a Civil War officer, prominent lawyer, and founding member & eventual president of the Knickerbocker Club. He died 130 years ago this year and is buried in the Hamilton-Schuyler plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery north of New York City, up the hill from the final resting place of his friend Washington Irving. I took the photo above when a friend and I visited early this past December.

(top image/D. Appleton & Co.: A.A. Turner, photographer)

 

Eliza Hamilton Schuyler, 1811-1863

20 Thursday Dec 2018

Posted by in Charles Loring Brace, Eliza Hamilton Schuyler (mother of Louisa Lee Schuyler), Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Those we remember

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Eliza Hamilton Schuyler was a granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton. She died in December 1863 in the middle of the American Civil War. 

Elizabeth Hamilton Schuyler died 155 years ago today. Ms. Schuyler was a granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, though they never met; she was born in 1811, seven years after the country’s first Treasury Secretary was killed in a dual by Vice President Aaron Burr. I took the photographs you see here in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery a few weeks ago.

The reverse side of Eliza Hamilton Schuyler’s headstone, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Ms. Schuyler was a friend and something of a mentor to Charles Loring Brace, whom she encouraged to become involved in philanthropy. She was also a neighbor of Washington Irving at her family’s country estate north of the city in the Hudson Valley. She and husband George also owned a house in Manhattan on 31st Street. Ms. Schuyler and daughter Louisa were active in the creation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission when the Civil War came in 1861. Sadly, she did not live to see Union victory, dying a she did December 1863 with the war still very much in the balance. She was only fifty-two.

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 manuscript 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

09 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in Heritage tourism, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Louisa Lee Schuyler, Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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Louisa Lee Schuyler was a great granddaughter of both Philip Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton. She died in 1926 and is buried an hour north of New York City in Sleepy Hollow.

A friend and I traveled north of the city yesterday to visit Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Neither of us had been there before and were not sure how it would work out logistically in terms of the distance from the train station, the size of the cemetery itself, how hilly it might be, and that sort of thing. We did not leave super early, as Sleepy Hollow is just an hour away from Grand Central. We caught 10:20, by which time the station was packed with people out enjoying the holiday season. We had a big checklist of potential headstones to visit, but only saw some of them because of the size of the cemetery. The one I was determined to see however is the one above: Louisa Lee Schuyler. Miss Schuyler was one of Theodore Roosevelt Sr.’s best friends; the two worked hand-in-hand on philanthropic endeavors for years until his untimely passing at age 46 in 1878. She carried on for almost another half a century until her own passing in 1926. They are two of the main characters in my book manuscript about Civil War Era New York City.

After trekking through the cemetery for a few hours my friend and I ventured to Philipsburg Manor, where the staff gave us recommendations on where to get lunch in Neighboring Tarrytown and helped us call a cab. They weren’t wrong about good restaurants on Main Street.

I am not going to go into the details today but will say here that, while also enjoying the holiday season, I have been laying the groundwork for some 2019 projects. Next summer I hope to spend a fair amount of time exploring Old New York in the Hudson Valley and making some connections to local and national history. The Colonial and Early American Periods are things I actually know very little about. Though I do explore the early years of European settlement a little bit in Incorporating New York I intend to explore the topic more thoroughly, including how it relates to the Hamiltons, Roosevelts, Schuylers, and other leading families.

 

On the cusp of the Armistice

10 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by in Great War centennial, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), New York City

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I hope everyone’s autumn has been good. These first ten days of November have been busy, thus the lack of posts here.

Readers may recall when I posted just after Memorial Day that I sent a proposal to an academic press regarding “Incorporating New York,” my book project about Civil War Era New City. I heard back earlier this week from the editor asking for the full manuscript. I sent it in this past Thursday. We shall see what happens. I have also been putting the final touches on a talk and interview I will be doing tomorrow for Armistice Day at All Souls Church in Manhattan. It all came about quickly when I got asked to do it a few weeks back. There is a nice bit of serendipity in the thing because All Souls plays a significant role in my history of Civil War Era New York. As Kramer would say, my worlds are colliding. The concert begins at 5:00 pm with my talk and interview an hour before that.

Seward Park, Canal and Essex Streets, November 10, 1918

The image we see above was taken in Seward Park on the Lower East Side 100 years ago today. It is the dedication of the J.W.B. Canteen Hut sponsored by the Jewish Welfare Board. Attorney, reformer, and American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early years of the Wilson Administration Abram L. Elkus oversaw the proceedings. Present also was banker and philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff. Organizers knew that the war was about to end, though they certainly were not aware that it would be the following day. Schiff told the crowd we see here “Now that the war is ending happily for everybody . . . war work organizations will for many months need our support more than ever, our soldiers and sailors will demand more attention when the grim business of battle is over and the guns have ceased. When the boys come back we want them to feel that we did what we could for them.”

The J.W.B. Canteen did its part; in just the next two months alone the site served over 8000 meals to returning servicemen. The Seward Park canteen continued its work for much of 1919 as men continued coming from Europe en route home.

(image/Records of the National Jewish Welfare Board, Center for Jewish History)

Twain, Stowe, & Hawley

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Interpretation, Joseph Roswell Hawley, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Writing

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Mark Twain house, Hartford

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I’m sorry about the lack of posts recently but with the semester in full swing things have been busy. This past Saturday I was up and out of the house at 6:00 am to meet a friend at Grand Central, from where we took the train to Hartford. There we were met by a friend who was our guide for the day. We visited the Mark Twain house and adjacent Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Literally they are right next each other. Both tours were distinctly different but uniformly excellent. I love to watch interpreters perform their craft. Twain’s house was obviously an anchor for a man who traveled so extensively, both as a younger man finding his way and later as a famous writer supplementing his income on the lecture circuit. Twain often lived out of a suitcase and the house there in Hartford was the place to which he and his family, who often accompanied him abroad, could return. He did most of his writing on the third floor. While up there I mentioned his publishing Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs. The guide turned to his immediate left and pointed out a beautiful bust of Grant on the mantel. I so wanted to take a picture but photography was not permitted in the house.

I had never been to either site before. The one that seems to have undergone the most change in recent years has been the Stowe Center. They used to give a more conventional overview of the house itself and Stowe’s time there later in her life. This is what friends of mine and I call a “furniture tour,” in which a guide focuses more on the make and model of a home’s accoutrements instead of the historical figures who lived there. The Stowe Center, thankfully, has changed its interpretive model to discuss not only Stowe’s life and times but the social and cultural issues that faced our nation then and now. We were even told beforehand when buying out tickets that it would be such. Apparently people have gotten angry during tours in the past.

Joseph Roswell Hawley headstone, Cedar Hill Cemetery

Our guide was so generous. I had mentioned a few days earlier that perhaps we might go to Cedar Hill Cemetery, to which none of us had ever been before. It is one of the old garden cemeteries and among other Connecticut luminaries is the final resting place of Joseph Roswell Hawley. We got there late in the day, as dusk was about to settle in. We had a great time driving and taking in the scenery. We had some difficulty finding Hawley however but as you can see here we eventually found him. With the Roosevelt Sr. manuscript complete I intend to spend the rest of this year and probably all of 2019 engaged in the Joseph Hawley project. It was so great to see his headstone and gives me the impetus to return to this fascinating topic.

I had not been to Hartford in several decades, when I was a very young child and my father would occasionally take us in on a Saturday to see the phone company building with its big computers and switchboards where he worked. Being there this Saturday was almost like coming home in a way. Here is to good friends who through their kindness and generosity help make our lives more meaningful.

Brooklyn, circa 1950

03 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Benjamin Harrison Namm, Incorporating New York (book manuscript 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)