Victor Murdock (1871-1945) led a long productive life as a congressman, newspaperman, and power broker. After touring much of Europe, including the French front, first hand in 1915 and early 1916 he believed the Great War’s end to be imminent.

That is what former Kansas Congressman Victor Murdock said one hundred years ago today when he stepped off the Nieuw Amsterdam in Manhattan after returning from Europe. That was a bold, curious statement to make with the Battle of Verdun now raging in France. At least a quarter of a million German men were involved in that butcherous campaign, with their French enemies vowing determinedly that “They shall not pass.”

It is easy to scoff but Murdock was no lightweight. He was a respected Midwestern politician and newspaperman. Six months earlier his daughter had married Harvey Delano, a cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Murdock was also a Bull Moose Progressive, and good friend and political ally of Theodore Roosevelt as well. Indeed he was the National Chairman of the Progressive Party. With the Roosevelts Murdock campaigned for Preparedness ever since the war had begun in 1914. When Theodore Roosevelt declined to run for the White House in 1916 Murdock supported Wilson over Charles Evans Hughes. Thankfully for Murdock the world did not remember his February 24, 1916 statement about peace in our time coming before the end of the year. For his efforts Wilson appointed Murdock a Federal Trade Commissioner.

(image/Library of Congress)

Three images of the Reverend S. Parkes Cadman from his Brooklyn Daily Eagle obituary, 13 July 1936

I’m sorry about the lack of posts this week. It was a hectic one with the start of classes, a meeting in the city toward mid-week, and the wrapping up of a blog post to appear elsewhere later this coming week at another site. I’ll post that when the time comes. The Learning Places class I am co-teaching is off to a good start. We had our first field trip to Cadman Plaza this past week. Before venturing out I spoke to the students about the Reverend S. Parkes Cadman, about whom I knew little before starting my prep for the class. I was making a comparison with Cadman to such figures as Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Knute Rockne’s Four Horsemen, the point being that they all became public figures in the 1920s via the mass communication of radio. Twenty years earlier none of these individuals could have reached the masses in quite the same way that they did. Cadman’s sermons were broadcast nationally from his Central Congregational Church in Brooklyn every Sunday. It is strange that he so forgotten today.

I did not know until starting this thing that he served with the 23rd Infantry Regiment on the Mexican border during the Punitive Expedition. His papers are at the Brooklyn Historical Society and I am hoping 1-2 students pick up the baton and dig a little into why he may not have served a year later in the Great War. We shall see. He later became an outspoken opponent of Hitler and Mussolini. In some ways Cadman was the anti-Father Coughlin. Cadman died in July 1936 and so did not live to see the Second World War.

(image/Brooklyn Daily Eagle via Brooklyn Public Library, courtesy newspapers.com)

Hemingway in Paris, circa 1924: less than a decade removed from his years as a WW1 ambulance driver and during the time he was writing the notebooks that became A Moveable Feast

An interesting thing has been taking place in France this week: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has been making its way up the best-seller list in the wake of last week’s ISIS attacks. Hemingway’s widow published AMF in 1964 three years after the writer’s death. It is a collection of vignettes Hemingway wrote in notebook form while living in Paris in the 1920s as a member of the Lost Generation. He tinkered with the manuscript in the 1950s and prepared what was essentially the final draft before his suicide. Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound are just a few of Hemingway’s protagonists. Though I’m sure it was coincidence the book was published fifty after the onset of the First World War, which was fitting being that the events of 1914-18 were what set the stage for the anxieties and opportunities of 1920s Paris.

Hemingway in many respects was a stereotypical artist. The multiple divorces, the alcoholism, the posing and sheer blowhardedness, the chaotic personal life and, eventually, the suicide. It was all so messy; yet when it was time to put pen to paper he could bring it like nobody’s business, and all in such a straightforward, no bullshit style. It is no wonder people are tuning to Hemingway and his Paris memoir again at this anxious time, 50+ years after its original release.

(image/Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

The Grover Cleveland Birthplace is today managed by the State of New Jersey.

Yesterday a friend and I ventured out to Caldwell, New Jersey to visit the Grover Cleveland Birthplace. We were spurred on by a recent New York Times article extolling the virtues of seeing the presidential sites of our more forgotten leaders. It proved surprisingly easy to do; the trip entailed little more than an hour’s bus ride from the Port Authority. As I wrote about a few months back, Grover Cleveland was a good friend of James Roosevelt, FDR’s father. The 22nd and 24th president was born in Caldwell in 1837 and lived there for four years until the family relocated to the Empire State in the early 1840s. Cleveland’s father was a minister and served in numerous churches in Upstate New York, which was expanding in these years just after the completion of the Erie Canal.

The beautiful Frances Clara Folsom Cleveland Preston as she was around the time of the start of the First World War

Cleveland married the 21-year-old Frances Clara Folsom in the White House on July 2, 1886. The couple went on to have five kids. The media was not yet as intense as it would be during the Theodore Roosevelt Administration but the Cleveland kids, especially little Baby Ruth, captured the country’s imagination. Cleveland died in 1908 and the home in Caldwell opened as a historic site in 1913. That same year Frances–still just in her mid-40s–remarried. She and her husband were living in London when the Great War broke out a year later. The newlyweds returned to the United States. Frances was active in the Allied cause throughout the Great War, and indeed was involved in most of the issues of the period. She worked with Theodore Roosevelt on a Liberty Bond drive and became active in the Needlework Guild. Frances also opposed the vote for women, to the extent that she became president of the Princeton branch of the New Jersey Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. She was vice-president of the state organization as well.

In February 1918 she signed her name to a petition urging the Wilson Administration to ban the production of beer and malt liquor. This initiative had the back of some 6,000,000 signatures. Their main argument was that cutting production of beers and malts would save precious grain for the war effort. There was merit to the argument. That same week representatives from the baking industry were meeting with the Federal Food Board. Herbert Hoover had recently authorized the twelve-ounce loaf, as opposed to the standard sixteen-ounce loaf, in response to the shortage of foodstuffs. The grain petition, as everyone knew, was also part of the wider strategy of the Temperance Movement. Indeed the initiative had the support of the WCTU, with whom Frances had a complicated relationship over the decades.

We tend to think of this stuff as ancient history and yet Frances Cleveland Preston lived until 1947. As my friend and I noted when talking to our tour guide yesterday, Frances and Grover Cleveland’s youngest child, died on 8 November 1995, twenty years ago today.

(bottom image/Library of Congress, permalink: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005011955/)

Another summer is winding down. That can only mean that the white bucks go back into the box until the next Memorial Day Weekend. I had a fun and productive summer. I made headway on the Roosevelt Sr. book project and wrote a journal article about which I hope to hear about soon now that Labor Day has come and gone. The Hagedorn piece is moving along. I wrote about 500 words today and reached that point in these type of projects where you know you have enough material to carry you to the end. I don’t know if it will get published but were I not to write it at all the odds would be 0%, wouldn’t they?

The Roosevelts are fascinating on so many levels. This piece begins in the 1850s and ends in the 1950s and the Roosevelt Centennial. The Roosevelt family is quintessentially American, but one thing that is so interesting about them is how integral they were to international events. I suppose that was unavoidable give that both TR and FDR rose to power during the rise of the American Century. Kaiser Wilhelm I, Lincoln, Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Leonard Wood, Woodrow Wilson. These are just a few of the protagonists in the Hergdorn/Roosevelt story.

My gosh, I was looking at the calendar; this is shaping up to be a busy week. Football starts Thursday. The US Open enters is last stages. The pennant races heat up. Enjoy your fall, everyone.

No prude or shrinking violet, Warren G. Harding loved good cigars, a social drink, and the company of women.

I am halfway through Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. It is one of those bucket list books that was always on my back burner until I made the leap a few days ago and down-loaded it to my Kindle from the public library. Too often in WW1 historiography we end the story with Versailles; much in the way we end the story of the Civil War with Appomattox. I believe we do this because wars and battles are so easy to follow, while their aftermaths and consequences are so convoluted and messy. We do the same thing with World War II, as if the carnage ended with the signing ceremony on the Missouri and all was well after that. It’s all so…unheroic.

So many of the problems of the 1920s stem from the Great War. It is not a coincidence that Prohibition–with its disastrous consequences that few foresaw–went into effect when it did. The Red Scare and the tightening of the immigration laws were other by-products. I have always been eager to know more about the three presidents elected in that decade. To the extent that we even think about Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, it is so easy to fall into caricature. The tendency is to jump from Wilson to FDR and skip past these three altogether. Admittedly, it’s tough to get excited about Silent Cal. Still, the best thing one can do for oneself is embrace complexity and avoid easy cliché.

The reason I say all this is because in one of those strange coincidences it was revealed yesterday via DNA evidence that Warren G. Harding indeed had an illegitimate daughter with his mistress Nan Britton. This was no one night stand or Clinton/Lewinsky thing where it was a few trysts and that was it. Britton and Harding were from the same sometime in Ohio and carried on a relationship for over six years. Their affair began in 1917 when he was a senator during the war and it continued after he promised a return to normalcy in the wake of the race and labor riots, veterans housing crisis, Versailles negotiations and everything else. The relationship lasted until his death in 1923.

Apparently there is a bit of a rift in the current Harding generation, with some accepting the news and others not having yet processed it. You would have to think they will come around. The DNA doesn’t lie and they will only look petty if they hold out.

(image/Library of Congress, permalink: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002706913/)

Another early Sunday here. It’s going to be a hot one today; summer is kicking in here in the city. One of the great things about Governors Island is that there is always that great breeze coming off the harbor. Remember, the island is open seven days a week this season.

I was at the New York Public Library doing some research yesterday when I saw the attention-grabbing title you see above.

It is hard to believe that the WW1 Centennial Trade Show in Washington was a year ago today. That was a fun and productive session. It has been interesting seeing many of the things discussed come to fruition. The next few years are going to offer even more exciting projects and events. Attending that conference was one of the best things I have done. There were so many dynamic people there doing interesting and creative things.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Edwin Booth, 1833-1893

I suppose there will be all sorts of articles about the Booth family online and elsewhere throughout the week. So, I should not have been surprised when I came across this piece about Edwin in yesterday’s Boston Globe. It’s about he and his brothers’  ties to The Hub. As nineteenth century actors the Booths were nomads. It is not surprising they had ties to many locales. The accompanying photos include a picture of John F. Fitzgerald, John F. Kennedy’s grandfather, paying his respects at Booth’s grave. I had an idea for an interpretive program for the TRB to be held in Union Square on the anniversary of the Lincoln funeral procession passing the Roosevelt household on 14th Street. For unfortunate reasons outside of my control that did not come to pass.

We really were fortunate to visit his Gramercy Park home last week on the anniversary of Appomattox. We were speculating that night where Edwin was buried, and guessed it was either in New York or Baltimore. I knew it was not Green-Wood Cemetery because, well, that’s something I would have known. As it turns out, he rests today on Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. Crazily, at the exact moment of his 1893 funeral a terrible accident at Ford’s Theater in Washington killed several people. It was something straight out of a Shakespearean tragedy.

(image/By Midnightdreary (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)

I’m sorry for the lack of posts this past week. The semester is now in full swing and I have been focusing on getting things in order on the work front. I did manage to get to DC over Presidents Day Weekend, where I saw One Life: Grant and Lee: “It is well that war is so terrible. . .” at the National Portrait Gallery. The NPG put together a number of worthwhile exhibitions over the Civil War sesquicentennial. This one concentrated more on the events of the Wilderness Campaign through Appomattox. Focusing on this period was a wise move, and not just because of the sesquicentennial; a few years ago the New-York Historical Society already had a show that focused on the two men’s lives in their entirety.

General Wood in his dress whites, Cuba early 1900s. Wood was a longtime friend of the Roosevelt family. If I am not mistaken that is a poster from the 1900 presidential election behind Wood. It reads “The Governor and the Governor,” meaning Roosevelt and McKinley.

I was doing some work on the Roosevelt Senior project the other day. As I mentioned last week I am fascinated with the provenance of the house itself. One of the unique aspects of the Birthplace was the Roosevelt Medals the RMA awarded each year. They were so serious about this that they awarded the first awards before the house even re-opened. The RMA announced on June 1, 1923 that Henry Fairfield Osborn, Leonard Wood, and Louisa Lee Schuyler would be the inaugural recipients. Things then moved quickly. President Warren G. Harding presided over the ceremony himself in the East Room of the White House on June 15. The Birthplace opened as a historic site on October 27. It is a testimony to how serious the RMA was taking its work.

Wood himself was not there in the White House that day. He was attending his duties in the Philippines. It was probably just as well. He had of course made a presidential run in 1920 and lost the Republican nomination to Harding.

(image/NYPL)