Category Archives: Those we remember

Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862

12 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by in Those we remember, Walt Whitman

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Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on this date in 1817. The writer and philosopher lived an incredibly short life; he died in May 1862 just shy of his 45h birthday. To put that into perspective, his death occurred in the middle of General McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign. I have always wondered what Thoreau might have had to say about the Civil War had he lived through its entirety. Walt Whitman gave us “Drum Taps” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” at the war’s end, and then went on to live another twenty-seven years after Appomattox. Thoreau was a mere two years older than Whitman.

Henry David Thoreau, August 1861

Perhaps intellectually Thoreau did not have the sensibility to live in and understand Gilded Age America, much in the way Theodore Roosevelt’s 1919 death spared him having to live through the Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age, to which Roosevelt would have been constitutionally unsuited. So, maybe it’s for the best that Thoreau died when he did before the full tragedy of the war unfolded. This was we remember him as we do with the transcendentalists and for the influence he later had on Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and others.

A few weeks ago I began subscribing to The Atlantic. Given certain things taking place in our world today it has never been more important to support journalism. One of the things I find most beneficial about the periodical, in addition to its great stable of contributors, is its historical memory. The Atlantic has been in publication since 1857, the year of a great financial panic and depression. Three years later came  Lincoln’s 1860 presidential victory and soon thereafter the Civil War. Here is the magazine’s online author page for one Henry David Thoreau.

(photograph by George F. Parlow/Library of Congress)

 

Richard Gilder, 1932-2020

14 Thursday May 2020

Posted by in Those we remember

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New-York Historical Society

I read with great interest this morning James G. Basker’s remembrance of investor and philanthropist Richard Gilder, who died on May 12 at the age of 87. Those with an interest in the study of the past might know that Mr. Gilder was one half of the partnership that founded The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The work they and their teams have done over these past several decades has been crucial to the dissemination and understanding of American history. One of their wisest moves has always been to focus on primary sources. Their emphasis has always been to let the people of the past speak to us in their own words via their speeches, letters, public broadsides, and recordings. At the institution where I myself work, we have applied for and won grants provided by the Gilder Lehrman Institute which have allowed us to discuss America and its role in the world and share it with the public. The ultimate investment is in people and knowledge.

Important though all that work was–and continues to be–Gilder accomplished more than that. He was instrumental to the renovation of Central Park in the hard years of the 1970s, and the revival of the New-York Historical Society among many other things. Getting older provides perspective. I have been a New Yorker long enough now to have lived through several eras and seen certain things change and change again, from the height of irrational exuberance to our current fraught moment. Has it been more than a decade and a half the Hamilton exhibit came to the Upper West Side? That was years before the Broadway play. The N-YHS slavery and Lincoln exhibits followed soon thereafter. I remember taking my late father-in-law to see the latter well over a decade ago. He and my father are now gone but they live on in the lessons I learned from both of them, combined with the places we visited and things we saw along the way.

(image/Ajay Suresh)

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)

Rufus King, 1755-1827

24 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by in Rufus King, Those we remember

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Rufus King as portrayed by Gilbert Stuart circa 1820

Founding Father Rufus King was born on this date 265 years ago today, March 24, 1755. I do not want to write too much about King right now because I am currently working on a project relating to this forgotten early American, a drafter of the Constitution, and want to save my thoughts for that undertaking. In the meantime check out this piece I wrote last summer about visiting King Manor in Queens. I had intended to write about King more this past winter but got caught up in other things. I’ll say one about the self-isolating thing: it helps one be productive and get some work done. I was texting yesterday with a friend of mine, an intelligent person who works at a New York cultural institution currently closed due to the health crisis, saying I felt I must spend this time as fruitfully as possible amidst so much turmoil and loss. He said he understood and was doing the same.

Hopefully by summer everything will be back to normal, or at least a semblance of what passes for normal in our current historical moment. Among other things I want to return to Queens to see the King family’s final resting place around the corner from King Manor. The church grounds where they lay is only open certain hours in the morning, which I did not know at the time of my first visit. I saw the graveyard itself but had no way from the sidewalk on the other side of the gate where specifically he and his family within the grounds. People walk past every day without knowing that in their midst lies this Constitutional framer, three-term U.S. senator from New York, vice-presidential and presidential candidate.

(image/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

McCoy Tyner, 1938-2020

08 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by in Jazz, Those we remember

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People have been emailing and texting these past 24 hours with the news of the passing of jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. He is the final member of the John Coltrane classic quartet to pass away. In one email back and forth I mentioned to a friend, a very observant individual and part of the New York jazz scene in the 1970s, how one can scarcely if at all articulate in words what the Coltrane classic quartet created, that they tapped into a Higher Force or whatever one might choose to call it. My friend and I wondered if even the four of them were even able to put the experience in words, or if the force passed through them and they accepted it. Years after it was all over, when asked how they accomplished what they did, the drummer in that quartet, Elvin Jones, told an interviewer, ‘You gotta be willing to die with the motherfucker.” It is not clear that Jones was joking. Maybe that’s as close to the articulation as one can get.

Here is that classic quarter playing “Naima” in Belgium in 1965. This footage is near the very end for the Tyner, Jones, Garrison, Coltrane lineup. Tyner for one would strike out on his own not long after this and pursue his solo career. Coltrane died two year later.

 

 

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868 – 1963

27 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by in Great War centennial, Those we remember, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington, D.C.

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This past weekend I purchased David Levering Lewis’s W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, volume one of Lewis’s two-part narrative of the life and times of the historian and sociologist. It’s part of a wider plan I have for a few projects that I intend to work on this academic year. I don’t want to go too into detail now, but I will say that I intend to take an international perspective on certain issues that often are interpreted through a domestic lens. Biography of a Race was released in 1993, the year I graduated and took a class on twentieth century Black Protest as an undergraduate. For that course we had to read The Souls of Black Folk, which I was too young at the time to fully comprehend and appreciate. I might delve in again this autumn. Du Bois has never been more relevant than he is today.

Du Bois as he was when attending college in the late 1880s

It is difficult to believe it was twelve years ago, but 2007 a colleague and I ordered The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois, a 19-volume set of the scholar’s complete works, for our library in our capacity as subject specialists. Du Bois is really always there. Two years ago during the Great War centennial students in a module I co-taught read him and others to gain different perspectives on the First World War. Sadly but not surprisingly some students had no idea who he was, though thankfully we changed that in our own small way. Du Bois lived in Brooklyn for a time, in a house he purchased from Arthur Miller no less.

I say all this because it had not occurred to me until reading about it on the social media platform of a journalist I follow that today, August 27, is the anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois’s death. Much like Adams and Jefferson’s passing on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Du Bois’s death had a poetic aspect: the 1963 March on Washington took place the following day. It was there on the National Mall that many heard news. Du Bois was far away in both body and spirit; he was ninety-five years old at the time of his death and had long since left America. Du Bois must have found the independence movements invigorating in the winter of his life. He died in Accra, Ghana.

(image/NYPL)

Marguerite Alice LeHand, 1896-1944

31 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Federal Hall National Memorial, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Marguerite "Missy" LeHand, Those we remember

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I hope everyone’s summer is going well. I know I have gotten away from the blog a bit but I have been doing some summer things. I have also been trying to finish a book chapter about Eleanor Roosevelt. It is almost done and I’ll turn it in to the editor sometime later in the week. It proved a little difficult to manage because when I stated at Federal Hall n early June I pivoted heavily to the Early American Period. I have no regrets and have learned a great deal. It has given me a more holistic understanding of American History, especially as I try to make sense of our own historical moment. Still, it has been a bit difficult moving from one era back to the other.

Missy LeHand holds up a dime given in the fight to find a cure for infantile paralysis, January 28, 1938

I did want to make certain to pause and remember one of the most important figures of the Roosevelt Era: Marguerite Alice “Missy” LeHand, who died on this day seventy-five years ago in 1944. Ms. LeHand was born in Potsdam, New York and grew up in the working-class Boston suburb of Somerville. She entered the Roosevelts’ world in her mid-20s around the time Franklin ran unsuccessfully for the Vice Presidency in 1920. Marguerite stayed on and proved invaluable after Franklin contracted polio in August 1921; while Roosevelt was seeking in vain for a cure that would never come, Ms. LeHand worked on his behalf. She was part of the inner circle, hanging out on the houseboat in Florida and settling in to her own room at Warm Springs. Ms. LeHand was a charter member of Roosevelt’s Cuff Links Gang, the small circle of early advisors during that Vice Presidential run to whom he each gave a set of gold cufflinks with his initials engraved on one and the recipient’s engraved on the other. Technically she was his secretary but she was so much more than that; when Roosevelt assumed the presidency she was for all intents and purposes the White House chief-of-staff. Had she been a man more people would have appreciated the role she played in his administration.Throughout the long administration others came and went; Marguerite LeHand stayed.

She suffered a debilitatingly stroke in 1941 just as the United States was on the verge of entering the war. FDR had little time to attend to Ms. LeHand as much as he would have liked, but he and Eleanor did make sure her needs were taken care of. She convalesced n the White House but after starting a fire with a cigarette and burning herself significantly she was sent back to Massachusetts. Eleanor Roosevelt, Felix Frankfurter, James A. Farley, and Joe Kennedy were just a few who attended her funeral.

(photograph by Harris & Ewing via Library of Congress)

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)

Henry Clay, 1777-1852

29 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by in Federal Hall National Memorial, Governors Island, Those we remember, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Henry Clay was one of the great American statesmen of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Here is a small story that, while I wouldn’t read too much into it, nonetheless offers a reminder of the importance of place. I was manning the information desk at Federal Hall this morning when a man came in with his two teenage sons. I asked if they were in town doing the tourist thing and the dad responded yes. The family was from Kentucky and the father was clearly an intelligent, aware fellow. It turns out he was a high school history teacher. I told him I’ve always wanted to visit Kentucky and tour Ashland, the historic home of Henry Clay. He responded that he had been there several times and that it is indeed beautiful. This led to a brief discussion about Henry Clay’s life and legacy, including his role in the struggle to save the Second Bank of the United States against the equal determination of President Andrew Jackson to quash it. Old Hickory won that struggle, and in the 1840s Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk created the Independent Sub-Treasury to carry on some of the functions of the now-gone national bank. What is now Federal Hall was the New York Sub-Treasury from 1863-1920.

An hour later I go into the room where the ranger’s desk is and ask the ranger on duty what he’s working on. He said he was writing a social media post about Henry Clay, who it turns out died on this day, June 29, in 1852. I naturally told him about the man and his family from earlier. This led to an interesting discussion on the importance of learning about and understanding the lives and legacies of the leaders who, for good and ill, gave us the nation we live in. Clay certainly fits that category.

Clay died in the National Hotel on June 29, 1852, where he lived for decades when not in Kentucky. Seen here in the early twentieth century, the National closed in 1931 and was torn down in 1942.

Later in the afternoon a couple come in and ask me and the ranger about the other NPS sites in Manhattan. It turns out the couple were from Ft. Lauderdale and are currently on an extended sailing trip across the Eastern Seaboard. They had been at sea for several weeks and had docked their boat in New Jersey for the weekend while touring New York City. They wanted to know especially about Governors Island, and so I gave them the Cliff Notes version of the island’s history. Captain Ulysses S. Grant was stationed there briefly in 1852 before his regiment was slated to sail for California via the Isthmus of Panama. In June Grant went briefly to Washington D.C. on War Department business. It was Sam Grant’s first time in the District of Columbia and his trip there happened to coincide with the passing of . . . Henry Clay, who died of tuberculosis at the National Hotel when the young captain was in town.

Go where history was made. You never know what you’ll see or hear.

(image/Library of Congress)

Captain William Wheeler, 13th New York Independent Battery

22 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by in Brooklyn, Gettysburg, Those we remember

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Captain William Wheeler headstone, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery

Captain William Wheeler as seen in an 1875 private printing of his letters

A friend took the image above on the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery and I have been holding on to it until today. Captain William Wheeler of the 13th New York Independent Battery was killed 155 years ago today at the Battle of Kolb’s Farm in Georgia. Frederick Phisterer informs us in his essential history of New York State in the CIvil War that Wheeler was the only officer of the 13th New York Independent Battery to be killed in the American Civil War. That is saying something: among other places the 13th fought at Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain, and elsewhere before Wheeler’s unfortunate death.

Wheeler was born in Manhattan in 1836, and his family moved to Brooklyn in 1847. He matriculated at Yale College in September 1851 and graduated in 1855. It must have been a heady time for an idealistic young man, what news about Bleeding Kansas, John Brown, and other outrages taking place almost daily in the lead-up to Fort Sumter. He enlisted immediately and lived to tell the story until Kolb’s Farm. By then a battle-hardened veteran at twenty-seven, Wheeler wrote to a friend from his unit’s camp in Cassville, Georgia on May 22, 1864 that “. . . to-day is a real ‘day of rest,’ unlike the last two Sundays, which were spent in fighting. . .” One month later to the day, he was killed. On July 17, Timothy Dwight V, a future president of Yale, delivered a sermon about Captain Wheeler at New Haven’s Third Congregational Church.

(bottom image/Letters of William Wheeler of the Class on 1855, Y.C.)