“Texas Charlie” Bigelow, a U.S. Army scout, was patrolling Indian Territory when he contracted a fever that left him so weak he could barely open his eyelids. An Indian chief took pity on Bigelow and nursed him back to health using a mysterious medicine he called sagwa. When Bigelow begged for the recipe of this wonder drug, the chief sent five tribal medicine men to accompany the scout to the East Coast, where they created “Kickapoo Sagwa,” the magic elixir sold in medicine shows that traveled America from 1881 to 1912.  

Or so the story goes, as recounted in countless Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company advertisements. But the story—like the medicine itself—was totally bogus.  

Bigelow was never an Army scout and never healed by an Indian chief. He grew up on a Texas farm in the 1850s, then fled the rigors of the plow for a life peddling patent medicines across the West and on the streets of Baltimore. In 1881, Bigelow teamed up with John “Doc” Healy, a former Union Army drummer boy, shoe salesman, proprietor of a traveling theatrical troupe called “Healy’s Hibernian Minstrels,” and the inventor and chief pitchman of a bogus liver medicine and a dubious liniment he dubbed “King of Pain.” When he joined forces with Bigelow, Healy concocted a new product, a fake “Indian” medicine he called “Kickapoo Sagwa.” And he proposed a brilliant idea for promoting it.  

“His plan was to hire a few Indians, rent a storeroom, and have the medicine simmering like a witch’s brew in a great iron pot inside a tepee,” recalled “Nevada Ned” Oliver, a veteran pitchman hired by Healy and Bigelow.  

Healy set up his first Kickapoo showroom in Providence, R.I., then moved to Manhattan before settling in New Haven in 1887. In a huge warehouse decorated with tepees, shields, spears, and other Native American curios, Healy hired Indians—none of them from the Kickapoo tribe—to entertain audiences with songs and dances while stirring huge pots of fake medicine. He advertised his Sagwa as a secret Indian recipe consisting of “Roots, Herbs, Barks, Gums and Leaves,” but it was actually a completely Caucasian concoction containing sugar, a mild laxative, and a dollop of alcohol.  

From their headquarters, Healy and Bigelow dispatched teams of real and ersatz Indians, plus vaudeville performers, and pitchmen posing as doctors to stage shows across America. The shows proved popular and the “doctors” sold oceans of Kickapoo Sagwa, as well as spinoff products—Kickapoo Buffalo Salve, Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, and Kickapoo Indian Worm Killer. Healy and Bigelow became, as historian Stewart Holbrook wrote in his classic 1959 book, The Golden Age of Quackery, “the Barnum and Bailey of the medicine show business.”  

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The two partners didn’t invent the traveling medicine show: For decades, patent medicine pitchmen roamed rural America, attracting crowds with musicians and other entertainers. Nor did Healy and Bigelow invent the notion that Native Americans were “children of nature” who possessed a mystical knowledge of healing plants. Throughout the 19th century, Americans bought books purporting to reveal the secrets of Indian medicine—The Indian Guide to Health and The Indian Doctor’s Dispensary, among others. What made Healy and Bigelow rich was their ingenious combination of the age-old appeal of miracle cures with the whiz-bang theatricality of Barnum’s circus and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.    

Early in the 1880s, Kickapoo shows were modest affairs—a few Indians performing dubious native dances, a few White singers and acrobats and a fake doctor, who sold Sagwa and served as master of ceremonies. One of those “doctors” was Nevada Ned Oliver, who described the shows decades later in a magazine article.  

“The show customarily began with the introduction of each of the Indians by name, together with some personal history,” Oliver recalled. “Five of the six would grunt acknowlegements; the sixth would make an impassioned speech in Kickapoo, interpreted by me….It was a most edifying oration as I translated it. What the brave actually said, I never knew, but I had reason to fear that it was not the noble discourse of my translation, for even the poker faces of his fellow savages sometimes were convulsed.”  

By the 1890s, Healy and Bigelow were dispatching more than a dozen Kickapoo shows across America every summer. The larger troupes played for weeks in big cities, staging elaborate spectacles in tents that held 3,000 seats. Admission cost a dime and shows included a dozen performances, interrupted by three or four pitches for Kickapoo cure-alls. The shows were wildly eclectic. The Indians performed war dances and an “Indian Marriage Ceremony,” and sometimes staged brutal attacks on wagon trains. The White performers included singers, acrobats, contortionists, comedians, and fire-eaters. Occasionally, Texas Charlie Bigelow himself appeared, a cowboy hat perched theatrically atop his shoulder-length hair. Billed as the world champion rifle shooter, Texas Charlie demonstrated feats of marksmanship and told dubious tales of his adventures.  

“Later, there were aerial acts, a great deal of Irish and blackface comedy, and such exotic novelties as a midget Dutch comic, the ‘Skatorial Songsters,’ who performed while gliding around the stage on roller skates, and Jackley, ‘the only table performer on earth’ who turned somersaults on a pile of tables that extended 25 feet in the air,” Brooks McNamara wrote in Step Right Up, his 1975 history of medicine shows.  

“If the combination of burning wagon trains and blackface minstrel routines was somewhat eccentric, “ McNamara continued, “no one seems to have cared or even noticed—especially not Healy and Bigelow, who refused to trouble themselves about complex artistic questions so long as the Kickapoo shows continued to attract crowds and sell medicine.”  

The crowds kept coming, and kept buying Kickapoo potions, into the 20th century, enabling Healy and Bigelow to purchase expansive mansions near Kickapoo’s Connecticut headquarters.  

In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, regulating the contents and the advertising of medicines—which put a damper on the more…um…poetic claims of Kickapoo’s pitchmen.  

By then, Healy had sold his half of the operation to Bigelow and moved to Australia. In 1912, Bigelow sold the company for $250,000 to a corporation that continued selling Kickapoo Sagwa in drugstores but ended the traveling medicine shows.  

Texas Charlie moved to England, where he manufactured a potion much like Sagwa. He called it “Kimco,” a tip of his cowboy hat to the scheme that made him rich—the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company.  

Decades later, the hillbilly characters in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip drank a potent moonshine called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” In 1965, the Monarch Beverage Company introduced a citrus-flavored soft drink called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” It’s still around, and quite popular in Southeast Asia. The company never claimed the soda cures ailments, but it does brag that it contains enough caffeine “to give you the kick you crave.”  

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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On October 5, 1869, just more than four years after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House and 34 years before the Wright Brothers took off, Watson Fell Quinby was granted this patent for a human “Flying Machine.” The contraption used two side wings and a “dorsal wing,” supported by the shoulders and waist, powered by stay-cords attached to the feet, and guided or steered by hand. To our modern eyes, the device looks comical, of course. Had it worked, the old joke, “I just flew in from Newark, and boy are my arms tired,” would have been a reality. And it must have seemed ridiculous to those who lacked Quinby’s vision or foresight in an age without air travel.  

“We hardly think he will be able to compete with the swallows in this harness,” an 1871 article in Scientific American quipped about Quinby’s invention. “We would advise him to start from some low point at first, so that, if he should fall down, it will not hurt him much.”

He did not heed this advice. Quinby, born in 1825 and a successful physician, reportedly built his machine secretly in his carriage house in Newport, Del. When it came time to test it, he donned a skin-tight suit, strapped the machine to his body, and leapt into the air from the roof of a small building. He soon discovered its failings. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured, and family members who had gathered to witness the flight test, rescued him from the wreckage. Quinby’s dream of flight was undeterred. He patented an improved “Flying Apparatus” in 1872 and “Aerial Ship” in 1879. Neither of those inventions ever took off, either.  

He did live long enough to see powered air flight become a reality, and even become a factor in war. When he died in 1918 at the age of 93, the Wilmington Morning News penned his obituary, and wrote: “From boyhood Dr. Quinby delighted in mechanical experiment, and during his mature life has invented several useful devices since completing his airship, a rotary digger, a method of arch construction without the use of forms and centers, a conduit for underground wires and pipes.”

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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Artemisia absinthium is a green, leafy plant native to Europe, but one that has since migrated to North America. Commonly called the wormwood plant, its flowers and leaves are the main ingredient of absinthe, one of the world’s most unusual liquors that was first distilled in Switzerland. Absinthe is naturally green in color, and potent, usually 90 to 148 proof.

That potency led many to believe absinthe had hallucinogenic powers, and controversy has plagued the drink since it was first distilled. Before coming to America, it was extremely popular in France. And then, Jean Lanfray killed his family after imbibing the “Green Demon.”

The Lanfray killings happened in Commugny, a small agricultural village in southwest Switzerland, nestled along the border with France. Lanfray was a tall, brawny vineyard worker and day laborer. Like many in the area, he was a born Frenchman; he had served three years in the French Army. At 31 years old, he lived in a two-story farmhouse with his family: his wife and two daughters living upstairs, and his parents and brother, with rooms downstairs.

On August 28, 1905, he woke at 4:30 in the morning. He started the day with a shot of absinthe diluted in water—not uncommon for him or for many Europeans at the time. He let the cows out to pasture, had some harsh words with his wife, and set off to a nearby vineyard to work. Along the way, he stopped for more alcohol: a creme de menthe with water, followed by a cognac and soda. By then it was 5:30 a.m.

Investigating the killings, Swiss authorities established a careful timeline of Lanfray’s prodigious drinking, learning that he would sometimes drink five liters of wine a day. Around noon, he lunched on bread, cheese, and sausage. He also had six glasses of strong wine over his lunch and afternoon break. And another glass before leaving work about 4:30 p.m.

At a cafe on his way home, he had black coffee with brandy. Back at the farmhouse, he and his father each polished off another liter of wine while Lanfray bickered with his wife. Their long-simmering grievances came to a head, and he rose from his seat, took down his rifle from the wall, and shot his wife through the forehead, killing her instantly.

As Lanfray’s father ran from the house seeking help, his daughter Rose came into the room—Lanfray shot her in the chest. He then went to the crib of his younger daughter, Blanche, and killed her, as well. He struggled to kill himself with the rifle, but it was too long to easily aim at himself and still reach the trigger. Using a piece of string, he finally pulled the trigger but succeeded only in shooting himself in the jaw. With blood running down his face, he picked up Blanche and carried her to the barn, where he lost consciousness. Police found him minutes later.

It was a senseless tragedy, the kind that leaves bystanders helplessly grasping at explanations. The fact that a man could get drunk, kill his entire family, and have no memory of it—that may have struck too close to home for Lanfray’s neighbors, who worked in vineyards and drank beside him. No, there had to be something else, something other.

At a public meeting soon after, the people of Commugny railed against the supposedly corrupting power of absinthe. Lanfray was known regularly to drink it (as did many, many others), and had drunk two glasses on the day of the murders (along with liters of wine). A story began to form, an explanation. Lanfray wasn’t simply an angry drunkard; he was an Absintheur.

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It was a story many were ready to hear. Absinthe already had a dangerous reputation, despite its widespread use throughout Europe. Even aficionados cautioned that “absinthe is a spark that explodes the gunpowder of wine.”

Lanfray’s killings provided potent fuel for a moral panic around absinthe that had been growing for decades. Politicians now had a scapegoat—and a crusade. The press feverishly covered “the Absinthe Murder,” putting it on front pages throughout Europe. One Swiss newspaper called absinthe “the premier cause of bloodthirsty crime in this century,” a sentiment echoed by Commugny’s mayor, who declared, “Absinthe is the principal cause of a series of bloody crimes in our country.”

In the region, a petition to outlaw the drink gathered 82,000 signatures within weeks. After an absinthe drinker in Geneva, Switzerland, killed his wife with a hatchet and a revolver, an anti-absinthe petition quickly gained 34,702 signatures. The public, too, had found a villain.

The following February, Lanfray went on trial. His defense hinged on proving him absinthe-mad, consumed by his addiction to that foul drink whose demonic grip had driven him to murder. If absinthe had made him do it, he couldn’t be held completely responsible for his actions.

The argument leaned on a folk understanding of “absinthism,” a collection of maladies supposedly known to afflict the chronic absinthe drinker, including seizures, speech impairment, disordered sleep, and auditory and visual hallucinations. Absinthism was the road to insanity and death; even as millions of people from every walk of life enjoyed absinthe, medical professionals and the press warned of asylums rapidly filling with former Absintheurs, now lost in the throes of madness.

It was known as “une correspondance pour Charenton,” a ticket to Charenton, the insane asylum outside Paris. (It’s unclear whether absinthism actually existed as a syndrome at all, rather than arising from misunderstandings about alcoholism and mental health more generally.)

Not every doctor gave credence to the more lurid claims about absinthism. In Lanfray’s case, however, Albert Mahaim, a professor at the University of Geneva and the head of the regional insane asylum in Vaud, examined the defendant in jail and later testified that “without a doubt, it is the absinthe he drank daily and for a long time that gave Lanfray the ferociousness of temper and blind rages that made him shoot his wife for nothing and his two poor children, whom he loved.” The prosecution, naturally, disagreed.

Whatever the public sentiment toward absinthe, Lanfray was found guilty on four counts of murder—his wife, it turned out, had been pregnant with a son. Three days later, Lanfray hanged himself in his cell.

Less than a month after his death, Vaud, the canton containing Commugny, succeeded in banning absinthe, with the canton of Geneva quickly following. Then it was banned nationwide. Belgium had already banned absinthe in 1905; the Netherlands in 1909. Even France, which consumed more absinthe than the rest of the world, and where it was, as historian P.E. Prestwich put it, “inspiration of French poets and the consolation of French workers,” banned the drink in 1914.

The Green Fairy to its advocates and the Green Demon to its detractors, absinthe was exiled from much of Europe. (The United Kingdom and the Czech Republic were notable exceptions.) While anti-alcohol movements had agitated in countries around the world for decades, absinthe was the first alcoholic drink singled out for a ban. Its outsized, bewitching reputation had been turned against it.

Before the exile, absinthe had a long history in Europe, particularly in France. In its modern form, it likely began as a patent remedy concocted by a French doctor living in Switzerland in the late 1700s. Its name derives from the Greek absinthion, an ancient medicinal drink made by soaking wormwood leaves (Artemisia absinthium) in wine or spirits. It was said to aid in childbirth, and the Greek physician Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine, recommended it for menstrual pain, jaundice, anemia, and rheumatism.

Wormwood persisted as a folk remedy through the ages; when the bubonic plague ravaged England in the 17th and 18th centuries, desperate villagers burned wormwood to cleanse their houses. Wormwood drinks were likewise medicinal—including that early patent remedy.

In 1830, France conquered Algeria and began to expand its empire into North Africa. Soon 100,000 French troops were stationed in the country, where the heat and bad water led to sickness tearing through the occupiers. Wormwood helped stave off insects, calm fevers, and prevent dysentery, and soldiers started adding it to their wine. When they returned home, they brought with them “une verte”—the potent drink with the unique green color.

Absinthe quickly became intertwined with French society, first as a harmless vice of the upper and middle classes. As its reputation (exotic, revelatory) grew, so did its popularity; even among those not looking for a hallucinogenic experience, the high alcohol content proved a key selling point, as you could easily dilute absinthe and still get a great bargain, proof-wise. Everywhere in France seemed to celebrate l’heure verte, the “green hour” of the early evening devoted to absinthe.

Absinthe became intricately connected to French culture and identity. So it is no surprise that when the drink found its way to the United States, the most famous venue for absinthe indulgence would be in a city with a distinctly French flavor: New Orleans, “the little Paris of North America.”

The French sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, and the region’s uniquely French culture became a point of pride. As absinthe took off in France, it also appeared in New Orleans, though without the same fanfare and popularity. In a town already famous for carousing, absinthe was one drink among many.

Following the Civil War, a barman named Cayetano Ferrer, formerly of the Paris Opera House, began serving absinthe in what some clever marketing called “the Parisian manner.” A glass of the emerald drink would be placed on the bar beneath a pair of fountains, and water would slowly drip, creating a milky opalescence in a glass—a process called the “louche.”

Ferrer’s ritual proved a compelling spectacle for the tourists who flocked to the city of sin. The building became the Old Absinthe House. Thought to be the city’s first saloon, it hosted famous luminaries from Mark Twain and Walt Whitman to O. Henry and William Makepeace Thackeray. Oscar Wilde, of course, attended. No visit to New Orleans, by then “the Absinthe capital of the world,” could be complete without a round at the Old Absinthe House.

While Europeans of all classes drank absinthe, in the United States it remained a cosmopolitan indulgence little known outside the city. New York had its own Absinthe House, and large metropolitan areas such as Chicago and San Francisco catered to the artists, bohemians, and wealthy, gilded-age poseurs who wanted to associate themselves with absinthe’s dark allure.

Absinthe’s relative obscurity in America didn’t prevent the press from warning of its fearsome reputation, however. Against the backdrop of a growing temperance movement, in 1879, a Dr. Richardson offered his perspective on absinthe to The New York Times. “I cannot report so favorably on the use of Absinthe as I have on the use of opium,” he began, describing rising absinthe use in “closely-packed towns and cities.” He warned that the drink was commonly adulterated, and that frequent imbibers could become addicted. “In the worst examples of poisoning from Absinthe,” he wrote, “the person becomes a confirmed epileptic.”

Later that year, the Times reiterated: “The dangerous, often deadly, habit of drinking Absinthe is said to be steadily growing in this country, not among foreigners merely, but among the native population.” It ascribed “a good many deaths in different parts of the country” to a drink “much more perilous, as well as more deleterious, than any ordinary kind of liquor.”

Absinthe, the writer claimed, had a subtlety lacking in other alcohol; addiction could sneak up quickly. “The more intellectual a man is,” the Times cautioned, “the more readily the habit fastens itself upon him.” It had already taken its toll in Europe: “Some of the most brilliant authors and artists of Paris have killed themselves with absinthe, and many more are doing so.” The Times closed by warning that absinthe, previously found only in large cities, had permeated everywhere, “and it is called for with alarming frequency.”

Much of absinthe’s mythology came from an accumulation of confusions, misunderstandings, and motivated lies. Some, though, did try to cut through the green fog and get to the truth—at least as best they could. Valentin Magnan, physician-in-chief at Sainte-Anne, France’s main asylum, saw rising numbers of insane people as a sign of his country’s social decay. (More likely, the increase resulted from improved diagnostic techniques.) Like many, he saw absinthe as the culprit, and set out to prove his case.

In 1869 he published his results. He had arranged an experiment. One guinea pig was placed in a glass case with a saucer of pure alcohol; another was placed in a glass case with a saucer of wormwood oil. A cat and a rabbit also got their own cases and their own saucers of wormwood oil. The animals breathing wormwood fumes were wracked with seizures, while the sole alcohol-breathing guinea pig just got drunk.

This and other experiments convinced Magnan (if he hadn’t been already) that absinthe was uniquely toxic. He extrapolated his results to humans, and claimed that “absinthistes” in his asylum displayed seizures, violent fits, and amnesia. He pushed for banning the Green Demon.

Fellow authorities disagreed, pointing out that guinea pigs inhaling high doses of distilled wormwood couldn’t be compared to humans consuming tiny amounts of diluted wormwood. They suggested that wormwood likely had little effect, and whatever damage absinthe wrought was no different from typical alcoholism. Rhetorically, however, Magnan’s support for the concept of “absinthism,” separate from alcoholism, enabled those concerned citizens who wanted to ban absinthe without committing to full prohibition. Absinthe, after all, posed a unique medical danger, while other alcohol (including France’s beloved wine) was surely fine for responsible adults.

In the United States, absinthe never became the burning social question it was in Europe. The media took occasional potshots, reflecting a general sense of absinthe’s depravity, without ever raising banning it to the height of a moral crusade.

An 1883 cartoon in Harper’s Weekly, for example, had the caption, “Absinthe Drinking—The Fast Prevailing Vice Among Our Gilded Youth.” The picture above featured a strapping young man on the left, and on the right a broken, aged specter of dissolution, “after two years’ indulgence, three times a day.” An earlier article in the magazine declared: “Many deaths are directly traceable to the excessive use of absinthe. The encroachments of this habit are scarcely perceptible. A regular absinthe drinker seldom perceives that he is dominated by its baleful influence until it is too late. All of a sudden he breaks down; his nervous system is destroyed, his brain is inoperative, his will is paralyzed, he is a mere wreck; there is no hope of his recovery.”

In the early 1900s, public opinion in Europe began to turn against absinthe, generally as part of the long-simmering temperance movement, and more specifically because of the Lanfray murders. As countries began to ban the drink, Harper’s Weekly reported in 1907 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had begun to investigate “the green curse of France.” Four years later, with little fanfare at the end of 1911, the department’s Pure Food Board announced starting January 1, 1912, importing absinthe into the United States would be prohibited.

Give it a shot!

Tenth Ward distilling in Frederick, Md., is one American distiller now
producing absinthe. Check them out at (tenthwarddistilling.com).

The head of the board told the Times that “Absinthe is one of the worst enemies of man, and if we can keep the people of the United States from becoming slaves to this demon, we will do it.” (The board also announced new restrictions on opium, morphine, and cocaine.)

News reports from the time show that, unsurprisingly, Americans didn’t immediately cease drinking absinthe. In a preview of the Prohibition era, authorities particularly in California seized caches of the emerald beverage. British mystic and provocateur Aleister Crowley wrote his famous paean to the Old Absinthe House, “The Green Goddess,” in 1916, well after the ban. “Art is the soul of life and the Old Absinthe House is heart and soul of the old quarter of New Orleans,” he wrote. And he struck a familiar note about the bewitching, destructive power of the Green Fairy: “What is there in Absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The effects of its abuse are totally different from those of other stimulants. Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister perversion of pride that they are not as other men.”

Crowley’s line evoked a demimonde particular to that time and place, but in 1920 the arrival of Prohibition blunted much of absinthe’s mystique in the United States. Jad Adams writes: “The surreptitious nature of drinking in the prohibition era—serving alcohol from hip flasks, barmen squirting a syringe of pure alcohol into soft drinks they were serving—was not conducive to absinthe, which was a drink of display and provocation.”

New Orleans continued imbibing and became known as “the liquor capital of America.” The Old Absinthe House was closed by federal agents in 1925 and again in 1926, the 100-year anniversary of its opening. Yet it outlasted prohibition and remains a fixture of New Orleans culture to this day.

Absinthe, too, persevered. It went further underground, particularly in America, and that burnished its appeal among bohemians and the counterculture. Ernest Hemingway and Jack London fondly recalled their absinthe experiences beyond the reach of U.S. law; Hemingway’s cocktail, Death in the Afternoon, is likely the country’s most lasting and well-known contribution to absinthe culture.

And eventually, like green shoots emerging after a long and punishing winter, the Green Fairy rose again. After nearly 100 years of targeted prohibition, in 2007 the United States once again allowed absinthe to be imported and consumed. The green hour had come back around again, at last.

Jesse Hicks writes about science, technology, and politics. Based in Detroit, his work has appeared in Harper’s, Politico, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

How Do You Drink Absinthe?

(Ask Hemingway)

Well, it requires a fancy slotted spoon, for one thing. The following is the most traditional and common method for preparing the drink. You place a sugar cube on the spoon, and then place the spoon over a glass of absinthe. Pour iced water over the sugar cube so you end up with about 1 part absinthe and 3–5 parts water.

The water brings out the anise, which gives absinthe a licorice taste, and fennel that are also distilled with the leaves and flowers of the wormwood plant. If the mix is correct, the liquid will turn milky and opalescent in appearance.

Ernest Hemingway was a fan of absinthe—why is that not surprising? His favorite way to drink it was a simple cocktail he called “Death in the Afternoon,” the same name as his 1932 book about Spanish bullfighting.

Death in the Afternoon ingredients:

1½ ounces Absinthe

4 ounces chilled Champagne

Hemingway published the recipe in a 1935 book, So Red the Nose, or Breath in the Afternoon, which featured 30 drink concoctions from celebrities. He explained, “Pour one jigger Absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly.” Yes. Very slowly.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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In the first years of the 20th century, despite the humiliating constraints of social segregation, thousands of African Americans made a living in show business. In Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Manhattan’s Harlem, there were top-tier vaudeville houses that headlined Black acts for Black audiences, and the Theaters Owners Booking Association signed up Black acts for almost 100 smaller venues around the country that catered to Black audiences. There were night spots like the Cotton Club in Harlem that for White audiences mounted lavish all-Black musical revues and Harlem theaters for full-scale Black musicals.

But the pinnacle was Broadway. As early as 1900, there were all-Black musicals there, but the concept really took off after the Eubie Blake–Nobel Sissle musical Shuffle Along opened in 1921 and ran an astonishing 504 performances. Producers sensed that the high stepping and raucous humor associated with Black performers were a money maker, and over the next decade 22 more all-Black shows opened on Broadway. These shows slotted the Black performers into stereotypical roles of shuffling gait and slurred speech, but they also opened the door for dozens of performers to have lifelong careers that eventually allowed them more dignity.

The money woes of the Great Depression of the 1930s made it tough to find backers for any Broadway shows, and the Shuffle Along type minstrelsy all-Black show virtually disappeared. But by then, two important corners had been turned: top-billed performers such as Paul Robson and Ethel Waters had moved out of the racial show business ghetto to earn star billing in otherwise White shows, and the classic American operas Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts had opened on Broadway, giving African Americans roles as complex three-dimensional human beings.

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While a number of enslaved African Americans looked on, 40-year-old Thomas Jefferson, shovel in hand, began poking into the side of the large Indian mound. Spherical in shape and 40 feet in diameter, it sat on the flood plain of the gently flowing Rivanna River, six miles north of Monticello, his mountaintop home. Jefferson was standing in a ditch surrounding the “barrow,” as he called it, when he commenced. “I first dug superficially in several parts of it,” he wrote, “and came to collections of human bones, at different depths, from six inches to three feet below the surface. These were lying in the utmost confusion….”

Americans can usually rattle off a few of Thomas Jefferson’s titles and achievements. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson, our third president, was the driving force behind the Louisiana Purchase and the wildly successful Meriwether Lewis and William Clark Expedition. But he was much more. Jefferson was a true Renaissance man, a brilliant polymath with an eclectic and dizzying array of interests.

Of these, he called science his “passion,” and over the course of his busy life, despite devoting more than 30 years to public service, Jefferson made contributions to botany, paleontology, meteorology, entomology, ethnology, and comparative anatomy. He was also an amateur archaeologist, and in 1783, spurred on by a document sent him by the French government, Thomas Jefferson excavated a Monacan Indian burial mound. It was one of his greatest scientific accomplishments. “In applying his innate sense of order and detail,” wrote science historian Silvio A. Bedini, “he anticipated modern archaeology’s basis and methods by almost a full century.”

Born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, his father’s plantation in the Virginia Piedmont—the western edge of European settlement—Thomas Jefferson studied in private schools prior to his 1760 enrollment at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. There, as he later wrote, it was his “great good fortune” to study under and befriend, Dr. William Small, a disciple of the Scottish Enlightenment who “probably fixed the destinies” of his life. “[F]rom his conversation,” Jefferson wrote, “I got my first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed.”

It was in Williamsburg, too, that young Jefferson had an encounter that helped foster his fascination with Native Americans. In the spring of 1762, a party of 165 Cherokee from the Holston River Valley accompanied their chief to Williamsburg prior to his journey to London. Called “Ontesseté,” this chieftain delivered a stirring farewell oration the evening before he departed. Enthralled, Jefferson looked on from the edge of the native’s camp. “The moon was in full splendor,” he later wrote, “and to her he seemed to address himself….His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people…filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.”

After college, Jefferson practiced law for seven years. Then, following service in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the Continental Congress, and the Virginia House of Delegates, he was elected governor of the Old Dominion in 1779 during the American Revolution. In October 1780, the same year he was reelected governor, Jefferson received a fascinating set of 22 queries—in essence, a questionnaire—from the secretary of the French legation to the United States, François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois (who in 1803 would play a large role in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase). The questionnaire sought out some of the basic statistical information on the nascent American states, then embroiled in a war with France’s common enemy.

The Virginia copy had been forwarded to Jefferson by a member of the state’s congressional delegation. Query number three, for example, asked for “An exact description of [the state’s] limits and boundaries,” while seven inquired about “The number of its inhabitants.” Others sought out details on the state’s religions, rivers, mountains, flora, seaports, colleges, commercial productions, and military force, as well as customs and manners.

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An inveterate compiler of data, Jefferson was well-prepared to respond. As he later noted in his Autobiography: “I had always made it a practice whenever an opportunity occurred of obtaining any information of our country [Virginia], which might be of use to me in any station public or private, to commit it to writing. These memoranda were on loose papers….I thought this a good occasion to embody their substance, which I did in the order of Mr. Marbois’ queries, so as to answer his wish and to arrange them for my own use.”

Although burdened with the responsibilities of his governorship, Jefferson began working on his reply immediately. Unfortunately, the declining state of military affairs in Virginia for Jefferson’s last seven months as governor meant that he had to set aside the project that so sparked his enthusiasm. During this tumultuous time, he was forced to flee twice from Richmond, the new state capital he had established. And—after Jefferson and the legislature relocated to Charlottesville to escape the enemy—he was compelled to even abandon Monticello when a British raiding party rode up the “little mountain” and captured his neoclassical home.

Although Jefferson later termed this troubling period the very nadir of his public career, the termination of his governorship in early June 1781 did nevertheless give him the time he needed to focus on the French questionnaire. Organizationally, each query became the topic of a chapter. In December 1781, Jefferson had the first version sent to Barbé-Marbois, but he immediately began enlarging the manuscript—indeed, tripling the length—until it was published in Paris in 1785 and then in London two years later by John Stockdale as Notes on the State of Virginia.

Most of the information came from Jefferson’s personal papers, his large library at Monticello, and his numerous learned correspondents. One query, however, animated him to travel afield. It asked for: “A description of the Indians established in the State….An indication of the Indian Monuments discovered in that State.” After writing about Virginia’s “upwards of forty different tribes”—and compiling a table of their numbers, “confederacies and geographical situation”—the former governor tackled the query’s second section. “I know of no such thing existing as an Indian monument…,” he wrote, “unless indeed it be the Barrows, of which many are to be found all over this country.”

Jefferson penned that these were “of considerable notoriety among the Indians,” and that one stood in his neighborhood. He recalled that, in the mid-1750s, a party of Native Americans “went through the woods directly to it…and having staid about it some time, with expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow, they returned to the high road” about six miles distant. (While some writers claim that young Jefferson, then only 10 to 12 years old, witnessed this incident himself, it is much more likely he heard this story secondhand.)

These Native Americans were most certainly Monacans, a Siouan-speaking people who, in the dim past, had journeyed from the Ohio River Valley across the Appalachian Mountains. Up through the late 1600s, the Monacan Nation—a confederacy of like-speaking Native American tribes—controlled a vast region of the fertile Virginia Piedmont, including the valleys of the Rivanna and upper James Rivers. By the time of the arrival of Europeans in the Piedmont in the 1720s, the Monacan had long since removed to the southwest.

Monacan men stalked elk, deer, and small game through the open woods and sometimes pursued bison over the beautiful Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. Dressed in animal skins, and sporting wildly cut manes, they adorned themselves with necklaces made of copper they had mined. Much prized, the copper they sometimes traded with the Powhatan, an Algonquin people who occupied Tidewater Virginia to the east. The Monacan and the Powhatan also frequently fought.

The Monacan women raised crops of corn, beans, and squash in the fields surrounding their villages. Often comprising scores of bark-covered domed structures, these villages were surrounded by 7-foot-high palisade enclosures (a feature that made them resemble the English-built forts). One such town, Monasukapanough, had once stood near the Rivanna River in close proximity to the “barrow” in Jefferson’s neighborhood. He noted the connection between the two sites when he wrote that the mound was located “opposite to some hills on which had been an Indian town.”

To better answer Marbois’ query and to satisfy his own curiosity, Jefferson determined to “open and examine” this mound thoroughly. Prior to the excavation, however—in anticipation of what was later termed the “scientific method”—he posited questions he hoped to find answers for in the earth. It was obviously a repository of the dead, but when was it constructed? How was it constructed? Was it true that those interred were the casualties of Native American battles fought nearby? Was it the common sepulcher (or tomb) of just one town? This supposition came from a tradition, Jefferson wrote, “handed down from the Aboriginal Indians, that, when they settled in a town, the first person who died was placed erect and earth put about him, so as to cover and support him….”

When another person died, the dirt was removed, he was reclined against the first, and then the earth was replaced. (In this manner, therefore, a burial mound would grow outward from the center.) Another question—inferred but never stated exactly—was this: Rather than being related to just one Indian village, was this barrow a sacred burial place for an entire section of the Monacan Nation?

Interestingly, a theory at the time—popular among members of the nation’s foremost scientific organization, the American Philosophical Society, which Jefferson had been elected to in 1780—claimed that Native Americans were too primitive to have erected the barrows, also called “tumuli,” which had been encountered in numerous states. Instead, they attributed their construction to a much earlier people descended from either Phoenicians, Israelites, or perhaps even Scandinavians (think Vikings). These ancient “Mound Builders,” they theorized, were subsequently driven away by the barbarous ancestors of the Native Americans with whom they were familiar. Some of the Mound Builders journeyed south, they believed, and founded the Aztec civilization. While Jefferson was certainly familiar with this racist hypothesis, it is unknown whether he was considering it as he began his dig.

Unfortunately, too, the exact date of the excavation is not known. Concerning this important detail—and so uncharacteristic of Jefferson, who was normally minutiae-obsessed—his Notes on the State of Virginia is silent. Historian Douglas L. Wilson, however, who studied the original manuscript at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the “setting copy” for the 1785 Paris edition, has concluded that the dig “must have been performed after…the summer or early fall of 1783 and before [Jefferson] left for Philadelphia on 16 October.”

The circular barrow was large, 40 feet in diameter, encircled by a ditch five feet across and five feet deep. It had been 12 feet high, Jefferson observed, “though now reduced by the plough to seven and a half, having been under cultivation about a dozen years.” Prior to that, it had been covered with a small stand of trees one foot in diameter.

Restored Honor

Finally recognized as an official state tribe by Virginia in 1989, the Monacan Indian Nation has made considerable strides in reestablishing its ancestral legacy. Its headquarters is located on Bear Mountain, Va., not far from Lynchburg. For more information, visit www.monacannation.com.

Jefferson’s poking around quickly established that the mound contained human bones. They were lying in disarray, “some vertical, some oblique, some horizontal…entangled, and held together in clusters by the earth. Bones of the most distant parts were found together, as, for instance, the small bones of the foot in the hollow of a scull…to give the idea of bones emptied promiscuously from a bag or basket….”

These were “secondary burial features,” wrote University of Virginia anthropology professor Jeffrey L. Hantman, “the comingled remains of numerous individuals” who had been initially buried elsewhere, “then moved collectively at designated ritual moments….”

Jefferson marveled at the number of remains he uncovered; the vast majority being skulls, jaw bones, teeth, and the bones or arms, legs, feet, and hands. Some he extracted intact, but others, such as the skull of an infant, “fell to pieces on being taken out” of the mound.

Next began the most commented-upon aspect of Jefferson’s archaeological endeavor. “I proceeded then,” he wrote, “to make a perpendicular cut through the body of the barrow, that I might examine its internal structure. This… was opened to the former surface of the earth, and was wide enough for a man to walk through and examine its sides.” Typical of Jefferson’s writings, this passage disguises the fact that he alone could not possibly have performed this labor. Surely, the “perpendicular cut” was dug by a rather large number of enslaved African Americans, perhaps as many as 30 or 40, whom he had either transported from Monticello or leased from a nearby plantation owner. These sentences, too, reveal Jefferson’s utter insensitivity to the site’s sacred status.

Now the amateur archaeologist was able to determine how the barrow was constructed. “At the bottom, that is on the level of the circumjacent plain,” he wrote, “I found bones; above these a few stones brought from a cliff a quarter of a mile off…then an interval of earth, then a stratum of bones, and so on.”

At one end of the trench he found four strata of bones; at the other, three. The bones in the strata closest to the surface were the least decayed. Down through the ages, therefore, the barrow had grown taller with recurring layers of bones, stones, and earth. Next, he was able to determine whether any of those interred had fallen in battle. Of the bones he pulled from the mound’s various strata: “No holes were discovered in any of them, as if made with bullets, arrows, or other weapons.”

What of the other questions? Naturally, Jefferson wasn’t able to determine when the Monacan burial mound was initiated, but—thanks to his methods—he was able to answer two others. For the following reasons, he wrote, it was obviously not one town’s common sepulcher: The number of skeletons it contained (he “conjectured” 1,000); None of them were upright; The bones lay in different stratas, with no intermixing; And, the “different states of decay in these strata” seemed to indicate “a difference in the time of inhumation.” This burial mound, therefore, must have appertained to a fairly large region of the Monacan Nation. “Appearances certainly indicate,” he wrote, “that it has derived both origin and growth from the accustomary collection of bones, and deposition of them together….”

In the balance of his response to the aborigine-related query, Jefferson briefly mentioned two other barrows (one of which also contained human remains), presciently noted “the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia,” and urged the collection of Native American vocabularies so that those skilled in languages could “construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race.” He concluded with a seven-page table listing the tribes residing within, and adjacent to, the United States, their names, approximate numbers, and the locations of their tribal lands.

Ambitious in scope, Notes on the State of Virginia—with its double-entendre title—won for Jefferson considerable notoriety. In 1785, the year of its French publication, Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson, a fellow member of the American Philosophical Society, called it “a most excellent natural history not merely of Virginia but of North America and possibly equal if not superior to that of any country yet published.”

Wrote English professor William Peden, who edited a 1954 edition of the work: “The Notes on Virginia is probably the most important scientific and political book written by an American before 1785; upon it much of Jefferson’s contemporary fame as a philosopher was based.”

And no small amount of that fame was due to the “sage of Monticello’s” archaeological dig (the only such of his lifetime). Unfortunately, other than what was published in Notes on the State of Virginia, there is no other information about the Monacan burial mound. Jefferson left no field notes. Its exact location has never been pinpointed, although many individuals have tried, including professor Hantman and a team of anthropology students from the University of Virginia.

Unfortunate, too, is the fact that Jefferson never mentioned refilling the trench. If it was indeed left open, the examined remains strewn across the ground, the Rivanna River, which frequently inundates the plain upon which the mound stood, would have washed it away within a few decades. Jefferson obviously believed that the benefits of scientific inquiry greatly trumped the barrow’s importance to the Monacan people.

All that being said, the dig was nonetheless a major scientific achievement. “The importance of Jefferson’s experience and his report of it cannot be overstressed,” wrote science historian Silvio A. Bedini, “for he introduced for the very first time the principle of stratigraphy in archaeological excavation.” With this discipline, examining the layers—“strata,” Jefferson called them—provides a calendar for determining the age of items or human remains contained therein. In his description, Jefferson “not only indicated the basic features of the stratigraphic method, but also virtually named it,” wrote German archaeology writer C.W. Ceram, “although a hundred years were to pass before the term became established in archaeological jargon.”

Most important is the fact that thanks to his excavation of the Monacan Indian burial mound—and the detailed account of his posited questions and scientific methodology—Thomas Jefferson became known as the “father of American archaeology.”

Rick Britton is a historian and cartographer who lives in Charlottesville, Va., in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson’s “Little Mountain.”

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Donald Trump launched his third campaign for the White House amid a blizzard of legal investigations. In New York City, he was indicted for falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. He was also slapped with two civil lawsuits: one for fraudulently overvaluing his assets; a second for defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll when he denounced her belated claim that he had raped her in 1996.

In Georgia, a grand jury pondered whether he had violated state election laws by fielding a slate of bogus Trump electors after Joe Biden won the state en route to the presidency in 2020, or by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” the votes he needed for him to win it. The FBI wanted to know why documents labeled “Top Secret” had been squirreled away at his Palm Beach home Mar-a-Lago, while Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith grilled a raft of witnesses to his alleged attempts (not just in Georgia) to overturn his 2020 loss. Smith’s bag included his veep Mike Pence.

Donald Trump likes to define himself in superlatives: biggest, richest, best. But he is not the first politician to seek office under a legal cloud. For example, James Michael Curley, four-time Boston mayor and all-time symbol of the big city Democratic pol, got an early boost from a jail sentence. Curley was the son of poor Irish Catholic immigrants. Throughout his long career, he pitched himself as the champion of his ethno-religious clan and class of origin, steering gifts, jobs and public works to friends and followers (and kickbacks to himself). He proclaimed his good intentions in a rich, rolling voice that one drama critic compared to actress Tallulah Bankhead’s.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Curley won elections to the lower houses of the Boston and Massachusetts legislatures. But in October 1902 he pushed the politics of generosity too far: he took a civil service exam for a would-be letter carrier who doubted he could pass it himself. In September 1903, the impersonator was convicted in federal district court of “conspiring…to defraud the United States,” and sentenced to two months in prison. Nothing daunted, Curley turned the verdict into a campaign slogan. He ran for the Board of Aldermen, the upper house of the Boston legislature, that November, boasting of his bogus test-taking: “[H]e did it for a friend.” Curley was elected and, after his appeals had been exhausted, re-elected in November 1904 while serving his time in the Charles Street jail. “I read…every book in the jail library,” he recalled, “and I made a lot of new friends among the authors.” His flesh and blood friends propelled him, over the following decade, to the U.S. House of Representatives, and his first term as mayor of Boston.

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Another jail house office seeker was Eugene V. Debs, whose fifth presidential race was run behind bars.

Debs’ parents, immigrants to Terre Haute, Ind., from Alsace, named him after French novelists Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. But Debs’ political idols were all-American: Tom Paine, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln. As a teenager he worked as a fireman, or stoker, on train engines; as an adult he became a labor journalist, a union organizer, and the perennial presidential candidate of the fledgling Socialist Party. Debs ran four times from 1900 to 1912, barnstorming the country.

One listener described the effect of his oratory. “When Debs says ‘comrade’ it is all right. He means it. That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man….As long as he’s around I believe it myself.” In the 1912 free for all between Woodrow Wilson (D), Theodore Roosevelt (Bull Moose) and William Howard Taft (R), Debs polled 900,000 votes for a respectable six percent.

The overriding issue of the decade became the World War (it was not yet called I). True to socialism’s international spirit, Debs deplored America’s entry: “the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” After a speech in Canton, Ohio, he was arrested for encouraging resistance to the draft and sentenced to ten years in prison. Debs’ concluding speech to the court was radical poetry. “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free.” Debs was imprisoned first in Moundville, West Virginia, then in Atlanta. So it was that he ran his last presidential race from the slammer. “It will be much less tiresome,” he joked, “and my managers and opponents can always locate me.”

Although Debs had the sympathy of non-socialists who thought him ill-treated, he polled barely more than he had in 1912, while his percentage of a popular vote broadened by women’s suffrage fell to 3 percent. Americans were tired of causes, foreign and domestic. New president Warren Harding commuted Debs’ sentence to time served on Christmas 1921.

James Michael Curley, after four decades in and out of office in Massachusetts, had a second stint in jail. This time the crime was mail fraud. During World War II, Curley fronted a firm that claimed to help small businessmen get defense contracts, while in fact it only helped itself to its clients’ retainers. Curley, indicted in September 1943, did not go to trial until November 1945. Late in the interim he was elected to his fourth term as mayor of Boston. “Curley gets things done!” was the winning slogan.

Twelve days after his inauguration in January 1946, a jury in federal district court in Washington, D.C. found him guilty. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but in June 1947 the septuagenarian mayor was taken to Danbury, Conn., to serve a six month sentence. He kept up a brave front. “The guests at this hotel,” he wrote of his fellow inmates, “give me cigars, oranges and razor blades….I am fortunate to have friends everywhere I go.” But the prisoner suffered from diabetes and a heart condition. President Harry Truman knocked a month off his time at Thanksgiving. The recidivist returned to City Hall.

Politicians in humiliating circumstances can retain the loyalty of their supporters, and even win elections, for a variety of reasons. Debs and Curley both spoke for the aggrieved—burdened workers, snubbed ethnics. Their personalities, however different, conferred an aura upon them: Debs the idealist, Curley (in biographer Jack Beatty’s epithet) the rascal king. They were stars. But they sought stardom—or seemed to seek it—in the service of others. The others rewarded them with their votes.

Debs ran no more races after he got out of jail. He died in 1926, age 70, appealing for the convicted anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Curley ran for a fifth term as mayor, unsuccessfully, but won something more important: a fictionalized, and sanitized, account of his life as Frank Skeffington in Edwin O’Connor’s best seller The Last Hurrah. His favorite part, he told the author, was “where I die.” He died in 1958, age 83.

At least one of Donald Trump’s legal cases will never land him in jail. In May the jury in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. If their verdict survives appeal, Trump will only be out monetary damages. Even hard time might not end his political career. You can be in the government and a guest of the government at the same time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Factory bells governed the day in early 19th-century Lowell, Mass. They summoned the mostly young women workers to the cotton mills at 4:30 a.m., signaled meal breaks, sent them home to company boardinghouses after their 12- to-14-hour shifts, and sounded curfew at 10 p.m.

The keepers of the boardinghouses were both caretakers and disciplinarians. They cooked meals and enforced moral codes. They made sure the “mill girls,” America’s first factory laborers, went to sleep on time and to church on Sunday.

This was life in a company town—the first planned company town in the United States. It wasn’t devised that way from the start, however. When the company founders traveled northwest of Boston in late 1821, it was simply to assess a potential factory site on the Merrimack River. Mainly, could the falls there reliably power textile machinery?

The answer was yes, and they bought the land. In 1823, the first machinery started processing raw cotton into cloth. Three years later, the land was incorporated as Lowell, named after the company’s late co-founder Francis Cabot Lowell.

The workers were mostly single women ages 15 to 30 from financially strapped families in the outlying areas. They needed places to live, so the company built the boardinghouses. A town with shops, churches, and other destinations eventually rose up.

With production growing fast, recruiters visited farms and villages to find help. The families there needed the money but were skeptical about sending their single daughters to live away from home. The promise of cash pay caught their attention. The living situation in Lowell sealed the deal, as many families concluded their girls would be protected, nurtured, and provided for.

By 1850, red brick boardinghouses and five- and six-story factory buildings lined the river for nearly a mile, the work force surpassed 10,000, and Lowell was the top textiles manufacturing location in the country. The mills continued operating another 70 years after that. They slipped into full decline only after World War I and the disappearance of military contracts.

Red Brick and Mortar

The Lowell National Historical Park spotlights preserved 19th-century mills and boardinghouses, as well as the network of canals that allowed boats to pass around the Pawtucket Falls for incoming deliveries of supplies and outgoing shipments of finished textiles.

The 88 water-powered looms at the park’s Boott Cotton Mill still run as they did back in the day, giving visitors an up-close look at the operation that gave the town its reason to be.

The 1840s boardinghouse exhibit in the Morgan Cultural Center, with kitchen and communal dining room downstairs and bedrooms upstairs, tells the story of the day-to-day life of the workers in company housing.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Reconstruction is a tough story to tell. The promise was so great and the ending so disappointing. It’s hardly a surprise that it took a century and a half to open a national historical park portraying what happened. In January 2017, a site was established as a national monument and rededicated as Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in 2019. The location is in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, where Reconstruction can be said to have begun and for a long while succeeded. Rich Condon arrived as park ranger a year later, around the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. The temporary closure of the National Park Service site gave him time to acclimate to his new situation and to the touchy subject matter with which he would be dealing.

The attempt to reconstruct the South after the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves didn’t go according to plan. But what was that plan? What were the goals at the start?

Here in the South Carolina Sea Islands, U.S. troops arrived in November 1861. They drive out a large portion of Confederate troops and White plantation owners. What’s left are about 10,000 African Americans. They make up 85–90 percent of the population.

A lot of questions start to surface. The U.S. troops are being asked: Am I free? Can I go to school? Can I carry a rifle? There are goals of providing education, building schools. There’s the goal of eventually arming newly freed African American men. You have the start of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, the first Black regiment to don the U.S. Army uniform. Things like land ownership and labor reform. All that’s part of Reconstruction.

What’s special about this site is that all that stuff happens here starting in 1862 through the rest of the war, when it isn’t really happening in many other places throughout the South. This becomes what historians have called a rehearsal for Reconstruction. All those goals are outlined here, and they attempt to execute them during the postwar period in many other places across the South. The success rate varies. Here, it’s a massive success. It takes hold and lasts probably the longest of anywhere.

How did the grand designs for Reconstruction go wrong?

For a long time, Reconstruction was portrayed as a failure. It wasn’t a failure. It was defeated. It was dismantled and defeated in large part by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, the White League—groups of White supremacists who did not want to see African Americans in U.S. Army uniforms. Seeing them in a position of authority didn’t sit well for people who used to call a lot of these men “property.”

Reconstruction takes root and is doing well for a while. In most places it’s lasting 12-plus years. If you look at most definitions of Reconstruction, people look at it beginning with the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the passing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and ending about 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes is elected president and pulls U.S. troops from the South.

Here we have a much broader definition. We start in 1861 with the arrival of U.S. troops and we extend it to about 1900, because even in the 1880s and 1890s, there are Black public officials being elected to office. Where it goes wrong is some of these more isolated areas like the South Carolina Upcountry, where you have the Klan presence—White supremacist violence and voter intimidation. In many parts of the North, White Northerners were losing interest in Reconstruction. All these are contributing factors to the process going into a steady decline.

In the end, what were the most significant changes, good and bad?

We see the legacy of Reconstruction in a lot of different places, even into the 20th and 21st century. Some of the good changes: African American land ownership. African American citizenship. “Citizenship” was defined largely by Black U.S. military veterans from the Civil War before 1868. Before the passing of the 14th Amendment in 1868, “citizenship” was not clearly defined.

The bad side is that at the end of Reconstruction, you have the start of the Jim Crow era, which lasts well into the 1960s. Here in South Carolina, the 1868 state constitution was a restructuring of society. It allowed African American men to vote. It extended public education to everybody, regardless of sex or race. Almost 30 years later, in 1895, a new constitution is passed in which segregation is codified, in which African Americans are seen as less than citizens and are largely disenfranchised. This was happening across the South at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, and the ripple effects of that last much longer than people like to remember.

This is one of the newest national historical parks. Can you talk about how it came to be?

There was plenty of interest in the local community of having a park here addressing Reconstruction. Broad and diverse support ranged from community leadership to churches to average citizens. They have a vested interest in this story being told.

This site was established initially as a national monument through an executive order in January 2017, and it becomes a national historical park in March 2019. And really what that did was allow for the expansion of this story. It allowed for the establishment of the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, which is operated by the park. We have national parks across the country that are part of this network. We also have sites that are not managed by the federal government that have a Reconstruction story to tell. It allows this story to become more familiar to people across the nation.

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How do you manage to maintain a balance in your portrayal of controversial subject matter like this?

We talk about the hopes and successes of Reconstruction, but we also talk about the dismantling, and that includes things like racial violence, attacks on African Americans and their allies in the South. We talk about the reactions to things like African American progress, to moving from the state of enslavement to freedom to working toward equality. I think we give it a fair treatment, which in other places it had not been given in a long time.

I’ll note that we didn’t have a lot of violent push back on the Sea Islands during Reconstruction. That’s because the population remains about 90 percent African American, so you don’t have groups like the Klan or the Red Shirts operating. You also didn’t have bridges that connect these islands to the mainland until the 1920s.

Can you describe briefly what’s most important about each of the distinct sites that make up the park?

We have three, you could say three or four, sites. We have our main visitor center in downtown Beaufort. There is a plethora of things we can cover here, one of them being African American financial autonomy. The Freedman’s Bank, one of the first in the nation, is still standing. We can talk about land ownership and labor reform. The majority of the homes and lots in this area are African American–owned by 1864–1865.

Out on Saint Helena Island, a 15-minute drive from here, we have the Penn Center Historic Landmark District. We operate a site there called Darrah Hall, and we also have an easement agreement with Brick Baptist Church right across the road. At Darrah Hall, education is the big story. The people who attended classes there at Penn School, who were enslaved just a couple of months earlier, were prevented by law from learning to read and write. This is their first opportunity to change that. Knowledge is power. That’s the last thing a plantation owner wants the people he calls “property” to have.

The last one is Camp Saxton, down in Port Royal, about 4 miles south of here. This is the site where the 1st South Carolina was recruited and trained for service, the first Black men to wear the U.S. Army uniform.

You learn, in a larger sense, how military service, especially for African Americans, is kind of this direct pathway toward citizenship. During Reconstruction, when the nation’s trying to figure out who deserves citizenship, 200,000-plus African American veterans raised their hands: we fought for this country and prevented it from falling apart.

Here is also the site where about 5,000 African Americans gathered on January 1, 1863, for an impartation of the Emancipation Proclamation. They’re hearing the words that declare their freedom for the first time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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James Michael Curley’s first arrest came in 1903, when he was a 28-year-old Massachusetts state legislator. He was charged with conspiring to “defraud the United States” for taking the federal Civil Service exam while pretending to be one of his constituents, an Irish immigrant who hoped to become a mailman.

“He couldn’t spell Constantinople,” Curley explained, “but he had wonderful feet for a letter carrier.” Sentenced to two months in jail, Curley responded by running for Boston alderman on the slogan, “He did it for a friend.” He won easily.

Curley’s second arrest came in 1943, when he was a 68-year-old congressman charged with mail fraud in a scheme to extract bribes from companies seeking federal contracts. “I’m being persecuted,” he said, by “Communists and radical reformers.” Under indictment in 1944, he won re-election to Congress. Awaiting trial in 1945, he was elected mayor of Boston. Convicted in 1946, he served as mayor while serving time in a Connecticut prison.

In the 40 years between sojourns in the hoosegow, Curley was elected mayor of Boston four times, governor of Massachusetts once, and congressman four times. For half a century, he dominated the state’s politics with his pungent wit, his orotund oratory, his Machiavellian shrewdness—and the support of working-class Irish Americans who saw him as the embodiment of their hopes. And he lived to see himself portrayed as a lovable rogue in the best-selling novel The Last Hurrah, and played by Spencer Tracy in the 1958 movie version.

Son of Irish immigrants, James Michael Curley was born in Boston in 1874. His father, a laborer, died when James was 10. To help his mother, a scrubwoman, support the family, James began working at 11, selling newspapers. He quit school at 15 to work in a piano factory, then finished high school at night, while spending his days delivering groceries by horse and wagon.

Eager to enter politics, he volunteered to run social activities at a Catholic church and worked for the Ancient Order of Hibernians—thus building a political base among the Boston Irish. In 1899, he won a seat on the city’s Common Council, running as a Democrat, the party of Boston’s immigrants, and entertaining Irish voters by mocking the “Boston Brahmin” elite as old, weary has-beens with “dogs and no children.”

He created a political organization, “The Tammany Club,” named after New York’s Democratic machine, and organized picnics and Christmas parties for the poor. He did favors for constituents—providing a meal or a job and, as we’ve seen, taking a Civil Service exam “for a friend.” He recorded each favor in a notebook, expecting recipients to thank him with their votes. And they did, electing Curley state representative in 1902, alderman in 1904, and congressman in 1910.

Three years later, he was elected mayor, using a trick so outrageous it became legendary. Curley learned that the incumbent mayor, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald—the grandfather of President Kennedy—was having a fling with a barmaid nicknamed “Toodles.” A Curley crony informed the mayor’s wife of the affair in a letter, demanding that Fitzgerald withdraw from the race. But Fitzgerald refused, so Curley announced his plan to deliver a public lecture titled “Great Lovers in History: From Cleopatra to Toodles.” Fitzgerald quit and Curley won.

As mayor, Curley exhibited the political philosophy that would continue all his life—a proto-New Deal two decades before FDR’s election. Calling himself “the mayor of the poor,” he spent city money hiring workers to pave roads, expand the city hospital and build schools, sewers and playgrounds. He cut the pay of the highest-paid city workers, and raised the pay of the lowest. Recalling his mother’s years scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, he famously issued long-handled mops to City Hall’s scrubwomen, declaring that no woman should go down on her knees except to pray.

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“Government was not created to save money and to cut debt, but to take care of people,” he said. “That’s my theory of government.”

He did take care of people—but not nearly as lavishly as he took care of himself. Curley was as crooked as a pretzel. He forced city employees to fund his campaigns by purchasing tickets to Tammany Club dinners. He signed sweetheart deals giving city contractors huge profits, provided that they split the booty with him. He hardly bothered to hide his graft. Bostonians watched as construction companies with lucrative city contracts built Curley a 21-room, 10,000 square foot, neo-Georgian mansion with marble fireplaces—and charged him next to nothing.

“Even his core voters knew Curley was dishonest,” Jack Beatty wrote in his excellent Curley biography, The Rascal King. “For many Bostonians, his good works would ever stay their dudgeon at his bad deeds.”

In 1934, Curley was elected governor. As he had done in Boston, he hired the unemployed to build roads and schools. But he also purged the state Finance Commission, which was investigating corruption in Boston’s government, a subject Curley preferred to keep hidden. He fired one member, appointed another to a judgeship, and replaced both with toadies uninterested in investigating their boss.

For lesser jobs, Curley appointed cronies. His chauffeur got a state job; so did his gardener. A man who had served time for forgery was hired as an auditor. Curley also displayed unusual sympathy for prisoners, pardoning or paroling 254 on Christmas Day 1935—an act of mercy inspired by generous gifts to the governor from the prisoners’ attorneys.

Soon, newspapers and magazines began attacking Curley’s corrupt regime. “Governor Curley appears to be suffering now from delusions of grandeur,” a Springfield Union editorial charged, “and sees himself becoming dictator of this Commonwealth a la Huey Long.”

Realizing he couldn’t win re-election in 1936, Curley ran for the Senate instead, but he was trounced by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1937 and 1941, he ran for mayor of Boston but lost both races.

He seemed finished, an aging relic of a bygone era. But in 1942, Boston voters elected him to Congress, and in 1946 they elected him mayor. After spending five months of his term in federal prison, he ran for mayor three more times, though never winning again.

He was 82 and sickly in 1956, when Edwin O’Connor published The Last Hurrah, his novel about a very Curley-esque politician. Curley loved the book but sued to prevent release of the movie version, claiming it violated his privacy. The producers responded that they had already paid him $25,000 for his permission. Curley denied ever receiving their money or giving his permission. Anxious to avoid a lengthy court battle and eager to premier the movie in Boston, the studio paid Curley another $15,000.

That was his final scam, his last hurrah. When he died, two months later, 100,000 mourners filed past his coffin.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Around 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 14, 1906, Washington, D.C., residents spotted an oblong shape floating across the Potomac River toward the city. The thing was immense—62 feet long, 16 feet in diameter—larger than any familiar moving object except a locomotive, with a golden sheen that glowed in the morning sun. A noisy gasoline engine drove a propeller at the nose pulling the object along. A man on a platform hanging from the rig somehow was steering the airborne conveyance.

The mysterious craft sailed up the National Mall and landed near the Washington Monument. The occupant stepped off the platform. His name was Lincoln Beachey, he said. He was a dirigible pilot, and he had taken off that morning from a new amusement park in Arlington, Va., where dirigibles were among the attractions. His destination was the White House; he had paused to make a repair. He deliberately lingered on the Monument grounds to let word spread of his airship’s presence. A crowd formed and swelled. Soon, “the drives were lined with grocery wagons, laundry wagons, automobiles, bicycles and other kinds of vehicles and the east side of the Monument was black with a mass of humanity,” The Washington Post reported. Beachey stepped back aboard, fired up the engine, and took off, circling the Monument before heading toward the White House, three blocks north.

Dirigibles descended from hot-air balloons. Brothers Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier pioneered the first piloted balloon ascent over Paris in 1783. Union and Confederate forces used balloons for reconnaissance and fire control in the 1860s. But these early gasbags had to remain tethered lest the breeze carry them off. Dirigibles, introduced in the late 1600s but not practicable until nearly two centuries later, were rigid, herring-shaped, and self-propelled. To build a dirigible, artisans bolted together a wooden frame, usually of pine or spruce, over which they stretched a thin, tough skin of high-quality Japanese silk, tightly sewn and made airtight with coatings of oil or varnish.

Netting helped maintain the rigid shape. Hydrogen, a gas lighter than air, gave the ungainly airships buoyancy. Operators usually generated their own hydrogen by pouring sulfuric acid over barrels of iron filings and piping the resulting hydrogen into their airships to inflate them. Ropes held the airship in place until an “aeronaut” had mounted a wooden platform slung beneath the craft and tethered by wires and poles of bamboo, wood, or metal. The platform held a gasoline engine that drove a propeller below the aircraft’s nose.

Once untethered and on his way, the pilot controlled his craft—dirigible is derived from the French diriger, meaning “to steer”—using a large wooden rudder aft of the platform, in effect sailing on air. He controlled pitch—the angle of rise or descent—by walking forward and back on the platform. A successful dirigible pilot was hearty, daring, and willing to risk falling out of the sky to his death.

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Experimenters worked their way through steam engines—too heavy—and battery-powered electric motors—unreliable—before settling on gasoline-powered internal combustion engines. Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont started building reliable dirigibles in 1898 and in 1901 famously circumnavigated the Eiffel Tower. German inventor Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched a version in 1900. The dirigible entered American popular culture as entertainment. One of the first successful airship builders, Thomas Baldwin, started out at 21 as a circus acrobat and trapeze performer. Bitten by the urge to fly, he got onto the county-fair circuit piloting hot-air balloons and in 1885 became the first American to parachute from a balloon gondola.

Designating himself “Captain Tom,” Baldwin began building dirigibles at his shop in San Francisco in 1903. Available engines proved too weak. In 1904, an unfamiliar make of motorcycle zipped past his shop. Baldwin investigated and learned that the two-wheeler ran on a powerful but lightweight four-cylinder gas engine built by Glenn Curtiss of Hammondsport, N.Y. Baldwin ordered a Curtiss engine by telegraph, mounted it on his airship, rigged a drive train to a propeller, and took to the air.

Dirigible operators transported their craft by rail, for each appearance breaking down and rebuilding the entire assembly to fit into a boxcar. Bookings focused on fairs, expositions, and amusement parks—settings that drew sizable crowds over several days, weeks, even months. In October 1904, Baldwin took his Curtiss-powered dirigible, California Arrow, to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Finding himself too heavy for his airship, he deputized skinny employee Roy Knabenshue, an experienced balloonist, to take it up. Navigating in lazy circles over the fairgrounds, Knabenshue astonished onlookers and landed safely. California Arrow was the first successful dirigible in the United States.

Baldwin set about building a fleet of dirigibles using five-horsepower Curtiss engines. He was hunting for additional hands when a youth came by in March 1905 seeking work. Growing up nearby in San Francisco, 18-year-old Lincoln Beachey had raced bicycles and motorcycles, in the process becoming an adept mechanic. Baldwin put Beachey on his ground crew. In 1905 Roy Knabenshue went home to Toledo, Ohio, to build his own dirigibles. That August, aboard Toledo II, Knabenshue departed New York’s Central Park and soared above Manhattan’s skyscrapers, putting dirigible flying on the map.

Knabenshue’s exit left Baldwin short a pilot. Beachey, compact, athletic and eager, fit the bill. He proved deft at piloting airships at county fairs and other events but, itching for more pay than Baldwin was offering, joined Knabenshue. The two worked the seasonal exhibition circuit. In June 1906, they contracted to fly at Luna Park, a new amusement park in Cleveland. One show Beachey was at 500 feet when two bamboo platform spars failed. The pilot’s platform buckled, shoving the propeller into and through the airship’s skin. The deflating dirigible dropped slowly. Beachey, woozy from inhaling hydrogen, hung on until he was about 20 feet from the ground and jumped, hitting the dirt unconscious but quickly reviving.

The Cleveland operation was part of a growing chain. Knabenshue landed a contract with a new branch in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac from the nation’s capital. “The new Coney Island,” as Washingtonians were already calling their Luna Park franchise, featured a roller coaster, a ballroom, a theater, restaurants, and an arena big enough to accommodate elephant shows and circuses. Besides its bill of concerts, dances, and extravaganzas, the park quickly became a popular setting for company picnics and amateur athletic events. An advertisement in the June 7, 1906, Washington Post urged readers to “KEEP YOUR EYE ON KNABENSHUE’S AIRSHIP June 12 to 18.” As part of his ballyhoo, the aviator told reporters he might just fly across the Potomac, land on the White House roof, and deliver a message to President Theodore Roosevelt. People scoffed. No airship had ever flown into Washington, D.C.

Beachey lobbied to make the trans-Potomac flight. He had proven a capable, daring stunt flyer and coverage of his recent misadventure in Cleveland had lent his name notoriety. If Beachey came to grief, Knabenshue reasoned, he could blame pilot error. If Beachey succeeded, their Luna Park stand stood to sell out. Knabenshue told his protégé yes and boarded a train to appear in Buffalo, where he flew in another dirigible and wound up in Lake Erie but was fished out unhurt. On June 14, Beachey inflated his airship, performed his pre-flight check, revved the Curtiss craft, and, just after 10:00 a.m., took off.

After his theatrical pause at the Washington Monument, Beachey landed at the south edge of the executive mansion’s lawn. Another crowd gathered. Gawkers jumped the low picket fence that constituted the security perimeter. President Roosevelt was two miles away, giving the annual commencement address at Georgetown University (“Don’t flinch, don’t foul and hit the line hard,” he was exhorting the graduates about the time Beachey came calling). First Lady Edith Roosevelt emerged, chatted with the pilot, and examined his dirigible. “That fellow is only seeking an advertisement,” Presidential secretary William Loeb, irked by the spectacle of an airship drawing a crowd so close to the White House, told an assistant. “He has no invitation or permit to come here.” Police shooed onlookers and told Beachey to take off. He insisted on giving Loeb a letter for the president. The message is lost to history; Loeb may have thrown it away.

Beachey took off, banking east over the Treasury Building and following Pennsylvania Avenue NW toward the Capitol. He kept his altitude low, 150 to 500 feet, to give spectators a good look. “Business in Washington was practically at a standstill,” a newspaper reported. “The streets were filled with people, the roofs of houses were covered with them and heads were protruding from every available window, all craning their necks upward to get a glimpse of the aeronaut.”

The unfamiliar sound of an engine putt-putting in mid-air and the sight of a dirigible closing on the Capitol disrupted congressional deliberations. A stampede of senators, representatives and civil servants piled outside to watch the contraption land near the Capitol’s east steps. “I guess I am about the only private individual who has ever stopped Congressional legislation,” Beachey quipped later.

Newsmen and Washingtonians of all sorts came to gape as Beachey held forth. The flight would open a new era in aerial history, he predicted. Beachey asked for volunteers to hold his machine in place and, fuel can in hand, went for gasoline. Returning, he gassed up, bounded onto the airship’s catwalk, and started the engine. Taking off, he circled the Capitol dome and flew back to Luna Park. The calm, capable “Boy Aeronaut” became an instant celebrity. The dirigible landing was the talk of the capital. “White House and Capitol Upset by an Airship,” a headline read. “Sky Pilot Soars Over City, Thousands Staring,” blared another. Witnesses took to wearing typewritten labels on their lapels that read “I Saw It!”

Beachey took fame in stride. “It was the easiest flight I have ever made,” he told reporters. “The air was just calm enough, the sights were beautiful, and everyone I saw had on a pleasant smile and a mouthful of cheers. Washington looks like a huge flower garden full of block houses and bugs as seen from the sky. The question of navigating is no longer an experiment. I can go to breakfast in my airship.”

Beachey performed for overflow crowds for the rest of the engagement at Luna Park. He soon went solo, setting records for speed and maneuvers. Winning races and mastering stunts, Beachey was soon recognized as America’s best dirigible flyer. In June 1907, he took off from seaside Revere, Mass., flew into Boston, and landed on Boston Common to cheers. Airborne again, he circled the State House’s golden dome. Over Massachusetts Bay his engine quit; fishermen rushed to his rescue and towed his craft to shore. “The distance from the earth did not cause me the least worry,” he said. “It is a hard place to adjust a cranky motor.”

Later that month, he performed at newly opened Happyland Amusement Park on Staten Island, N.Y. To promote his show, he bombarded Fort Wadsworth, nearby on Staten Island, with balls filled with passes to the park. He flew over Brooklyn, then Manhattan, landing at Battery Park. As usual, a crowd materialized. Police dispersed the onlookers and ordered Beachey to fly off. He vowed to land atop the 20-story Flatiron Building, but a propeller malfunction and uncooperative gusts dumped him into the East River. Boaters fetched him and his aircraft. Soon Beachey was back at Luna Park in Arlington. At the Washington Post’s behest, he flew to the capital, dropped passes to the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition in Norfolk, Va., again circled the Washington Monument, landed near the Post building, and returned to Luna Park.

“There’s really nothing to it,” he told a newsman. “It’s just the same as being on the ground so far as nervousness is concerned. I stand on this two-inch [thick] beam along the underside of the framework…and think nothing whatever about being 2,000 feet in the air. It’s just as safe up there as it is down here if you don’t get scared, and scared people have no business in an airship.” Beachey stuck with dirigibles until he worked an air meet in Los Angeles in 1910. Among the aircraft on hand was a fixed-wing biplane. “Boy, our racket is dead!” he told a pal.

He was right. In 1903, brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright had gotten a fixed-wing aircraft aloft and soon went into biplane production. Mechanical genius Glenn Curtiss was installing his motorcycle and dirigible engines into biplanes he designed and built. On July 4, 1908, Curtiss made the first public flight sanctioned by a professional association. Two years later, he pioneered a flight from Albany to New York City. The Wrights sued, claiming he was infringing on their patent.

Curtiss, determined to prove that his airplanes stood apart from and surpassed the Wrights and other competitors, started the Curtiss Exhibition Team, in 1911 hiring the nation’s leading aeronaut, Lincoln Beachey. Beachey cracked up his first Curtiss biplane, but quickly mastered the machine. He set speed records, was the first American to loop the loop, and flew upside down. After a flight over Niagara Falls, he swooped back under the bridge across the river. He learned to combine fast climbs followed by vertical plunges that he called “Death Dips,” pulling up at the last second. He partnered on tour with famed race-car driver Barney Oldfield, flying low over Oldfield’s head as the racer steered around dirt tracks, sometimes nudging Oldfield’s hat off with a tire. At Yale University, he dropped baseballs from his plane while the Yale catcher tried to snag them. Other flyers attempted to copy Beachey’s moves but none came close and a few crashed trying. “Beachey is the most wonderful flyer I ever saw,” Wilbur Wright said.

In May 1911, back in Washington, D.C., flying a Curtiss plane in an aerial competition at Benning Race Track, Beachey left the pack to head downtown. He circled the Capitol dome, then flew over the city in swirling winds. “Five years ago, I satisfied a strong desire to circle the Capitol in a dirigible and since that time I have always wanted to do so in an aeroplane,” he told newsmen afterward. “The Capitol loomed in the distance and I could not withstand the temptation.”

Beachey was back again in September 1914, this time announcing his flight beforehand. He circled the Capitol, looped the loop three times, flew upside down, and sailed over the White House as president Woodrow Wilson watched from an upstairs window. His purpose, Beachey said, was “to bring America first in things aeronautic” and demonstrate airplanes’ military potential. The event’s excitement was marred slightly by what may have been the first mid-air collision: his plane struck and killed a carrier pigeon.

Beachey’s luck ran out on March 14, 1915. He had parted with Curtiss, put biplanes behind, and was flying a flashy single-wing aircraft of his own design. At a San Francisco airshow, after looping and flying upside down at high speed, he dove sharply, eliciting cheers and gasps that turned into screams when his aircraft’s wings broke off and his plane plunged into San Francisco Bay. “The Daredevil of the Air” was dead at 28.

Curtiss had won a contract to build planes for the U.S. Navy; the Wrights and others were building planes for the Army. World War I accelerated aircraft development, including the use of dirigibles and planes to drop bombs. In Washington, the capital’s vulnerability from the air became clear. The city no longer welcomed airborne daredevils and, over the years, layers of municipal and federal regulation restricted and controlled the capital airspace. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a “flight restricted zone” excluded aircraft lacking Federal Aviation Administration authorization from entering DC’s airspace. Anyone trying to fly an aircraft to the White House would be chased by military jets or downed by anti-aircraft fire—a far cry from that tranquil day in 1906 when Lincoln Beachey alighted in the White House yard.

Dr. Bruce W. Dearstyne is a historian in Albany, N.Y. SUNY Press published the second edition of his book The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History which includes a chapter on Glenn Curtiss, and his newest book, The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era, in 2022.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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On February 7, 1825, Samuel Morse’s wife, Lucretia, died suddenly, at the age of 25, while Morse was working in Washington, D.C. By the time he was notified by letter and had returned home to New Haven, Conn., she had already been buried.

Perhaps motivated by his regret, in the early 1830s, Morse began perfecting his version of an electric telegraph and, with the help of researchers Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, produced a single-circuit version. By pushing a key, the operator sent an electric signal across a wire to a receiver at the other end. Soon thereafter, Morse and Vail developed the code that would translate the pulses and silences to language.

On May 24, 1844, Morse sent his first telegraph message, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Md.: “What hath God wrought!”

Indeed. Its invention forever changed communication, and with it, transformed everything. A message, a military order, a money transfer, a piece of news, that once took weeks to deliver by horse and carriage, could now be exchanged almost instantly.

On April 11, 1846, the patent shown here specified a combination of devices to move and mark a paper roll to record the incoming message; and, more importantly, the use of a magnet in the telegraph receiver to amplify the current, enabling the telegraph to receive messages over longer lines—a long-distance call.

By 1866, the first permanent telegraph cable had been successfully laid across the Atlantic Ocean.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Historic Boston Inc. recently unveiled the completed 1912 Upham’s Corner Comfort Station in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood after a $1.9 million rehabilitation project that converted the long abandoned former public bathroom building into a full-service restaurant.

The restaurant, Comfort Kitchen, above, owned by four local Dorchester residents, features “comfort food” of the African and Asian diasporas and emphasizes the importance of immigration to the food and restaurant industry.

Historic Boston Inc. was designated by the City of Boston to redevelop the Comfort Station in 2015. Through shared networks, HBI and Comfort Kitchen’s partners met and agreed to work together to restore the building for a restaurant and café.

Labor of Love Preservation Maryland’s national workforce development program The Campaign for Historic Trades is leading the national movement to strengthen and expand historic trades careers, providing all tradespeople with clear pathways, secure employment, and accessible education. The Campaign is currently creating numerous open-education training resources that will be available online in both English and Spanish. Partnering with the Centro de Conservación y Restauración de Puerto Rico, Inc., The Campaign is working to translate existing printed educational materials, as well as video assets, into Spanish. Instructional videos will also include audio transcriptions and subtitles so both English and Spanish speakers can use the preservation training resources.

‘Moving on Up’ Preservation Buffalo Niagara has teamed up with the Empire State Development “East Side Avenues” program to provide $5 million in stabilization funds for the East Side of Buffalo, NY. The program provides up to $150,000 per applicant to complete critical structural work repairs to help stop further decay and prevent demolition. In 2023, the groups are working to distribute nearly $2 million of the fund to building owners. Submitted project applications are reviewed and prioritized based on: property location, National Register eligibility, likelihood of future redevelopment, urgency of stabilization measures, impact on the neighborhood, community support, the applicant’s residency, the applicant’s development experience, and preservation easement: Building owners who are willing to enter into a 10-year preservation easement on the property with Preservation Buffalo Niagara are given preference.

Gimme Shelter Since 1926, Billy Webb Elks Lodge has served African Americans in Portland, Ore., as a Black YWCA, USO center, refuge for those displaced by the 1948 Vanport flood, NAACP headquarters, Urban League and Congress of Racial Equality meeting place, and as Black Elks Lodge at a time when the Elks prohibited Black membership. In 2020, the preservation organization Restore Oregon listed the lodge as an Oregon Most Endangered Place.

In September 2021, a fire left the building uninhabitable. Restore Oregon is assisting the Billy Webb Elks Lodge with technical support, project management, and fundraising. The lodge recently received a $140,000 grant award from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to hire staff and a $20,000 grant from Oregon Heritage to restore its historic wood windows. Additional local funding requests are in process, and construction was scheduled to begin this summer.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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In 1858, Abraham Lincoln casually and unknowingly created a time capsule of his contemporary mindset on both slavery and race relations—not hidden in a cornerstone but taking the form of a 3.25- by 5.78-inch black campaign notebook shared with Capt. James N. Brown, a longtime friend and fellow campaigner.

It was the waning days of Lincoln’s senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and Brown was running for Illinois state legislature, partly at Lincoln’s encouragement. Brown, however, was assailed for his ties to Lincoln. Virulent opponents said that Lincoln—and therefore Brown, by association—supported and wanted to bring about social and political Negro equality.

Brown beseeched Lincoln for a clear statement on that Negro equality, what Brown referred to as the “paramount issue” of the day. Lincoln acceded, annotating what he called a “scrapbook” with news clips of his speeches on the subject, and a definitive 8-page letter, transcribed here.

Brown used the notebook from Lincoln during his campaign’s waning days. It didn’t help. He lost the election.

The scrapbook was cherished by Brown and, after his 1868 death, by his sons William and Benjamin. Eventually they sold it to New York rare-book dealer George D. Smith, who found a customer in Philadelphia Lincoln collector William H. Lambert, who believed Lincoln’s words warranted wider distribution and published a version of the notebook in 1901 as Abraham Lincoln: His Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original with an Explanatory Note by J. McCan Davis.

After Lambert’s death the ‘scrapbook’ was auctioned in 1914; and purchased for Henry E. Huntington’s San Marino, California library.

In his career Ross E. Heller, holder of a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, has been a journalist, U.S. Senatorial press secretary, lobbyist, association executive, entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and now, editor/author. Researching this book, he is also discoverer of new facts of America’s most-storied life; a life about which no one could imagine anything new could ever be found.

This article is an excerpt from By Abraham Lincoln: His 1858 Time Capsule, edited by Ross E. Heller and published by CustomNEWS, Seaside Books.

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This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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In November 1850, Gottfried Kinkel was locked up for life in Berlin’s Spandau Prison. The university professor had been among leaders of a spate of unsuccessful revolutions to sweep German-speaking regions of Europe in 1848-49. A student and revolutionary follower of Kinkel’s, Carl Schurz, vowed to spring his mentor. Schurz, 21, also had been incarcerated for his politics, but he had escaped confinement and fled to Zurich, Switzerland, from which he secretly returned to Berlin with a jailbreak scheme in mind. Through like-minded friends, Schurz met and cultivated disaffected Spandau jailer George Brune, who for a price agreed to spring Kinkel.

The prisoner was in a third-floor cell. One evening, as fellow guards were celebrating a birthday at a nearby inn, Brune, seeing an “all-clear” signal flashed by lantern, looped a rope around Kinkel’s waist and lowered him out his cell window to Schurz, waiting below. As Kinkel had feared, he loosened bits of the old prison’s masonry walls during his descent—but to their good fortune, the clatter was obscured by a passing horse cart with iron-rimmed wheels. Kinkel and Schurz quickly boarded a waiting carriage, traveling 150 miles north to the North Sea port of Warnemunde. Posing as merchants and using aliases, they sailed to Edinburgh, Scotland, and then headed to London. In 1852, Schurz left Britain for America, where he became the most prominent of an influx of energetic and influential European emigres, who have come to be known as “48ers.”

Understanding the 48er phenomenon demands familiarity with Europe’s revolutions of this period. After the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the continent came under the “Metternich System” of autocracy. Royal families ruled every state in the region; even once-revolutionary France had reinstalled its monarchy. But beneath a veneer of order maintained by repression, republican dissatisfaction roiled, especially among the educated. Starting in Sicily in January 1848, uprisings spread to France and soon engulfed the entire continent, reaching as far as Ireland.

The German Confederation comprised 39 states sharing Teutonic cultural identity and the German language. Liberals around the Confederation, intent on corralling those 39 principalities into a unified republic, formed the Frankfurt National Assembly—an impressive sounding but powerless entity. Hardliners urged armed revolt; German radicalism had its base in the southwestern state of Baden, which saw several uprisings. In April 1848, radical lawyer Friedrich Hecker proclaimed a republic, then led a march through Baden, hoping to spawn a mass movement. He miscalculated and had to flee to Switzerland. Tavern-goers hailed him in the Heckerlied or “Hecker Song”:

When the people ask, is
Hecker still alive?
Can you tell them?
Yes, he’s still alive.
He’s not hanging from a tree
He’s not hanging on a rope
He has his dream of
A free republic

As had happened in Baden, revolutions across the German principalities foundered after they confronted the strength of the rulers’ armies. Revolutionary leaders were imprisoned, executed, or were wanted men with a price on their heads, although the movement’s foot soldiers were granted amnesty, according to The German-American Forty-Eighters, edited by Don Heinrich Tolzmann. Some took refuge in Switzerland, England, or France, but 4,000 to 10,000 ended up in the United States.

German speakers were not the only 48ers; some hailed from Hungary and Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, and other European locales. But most did come from the Fatherland. “The typical Forty Eighter,” writes Dann Woellert in The Cincinnati Turner Societies, “was a male in his twenties, unmarried, in excellent physical condition, politically enlightened, and financially stable or coming from a family of means.” The average 48er was anti-clerical, which understandably could set off conflict with devoutly religious German Americans.

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When Friedrich Hecker arrived in New York in October 1848, thousands of freedom-loving German Americans lined the wharf to welcome him. In Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and other large cities, he was likewise celebrated. Non-celebrity 48ers had it rougher. An 1887 reminiscence by M.J. Becker, included in Tolzmann’s anthology, recalls that Becker, who in the old country had studied mathematics and engineering, found himself on Long Island tending radishes and onions. Becker’s friend, an accomplished sculptor, was getting by carving cigar-store Indians. Those who mastered English were able to resume Old World professions such as law, medicine, pharmacy, and teaching. Some flocked to journalism that did not require learning a new tongue: wherever German immigrants clustered, German-language newspapers proliferated. Others went into business or agriculture. Carl Schurz tried farming in Watertown, Wis., before passing the bar in 1858. Hecker had a successful farm in Summerfield, Ill., where he often received fellow refugees.

Some 48ers favored New York, Philadelphia, and other established Eastern immigrant centers. Midwestern cities with existing German populations also drew newcomers; the most prominent were Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. A heavily Germanic Cincinnati neighborhood across the now-defunct Miami & Erie Canal from downtown, became known as Over the Rhine for its location, growing into a “veritable Deutschland” rich in taverns, breweries, music halls, German bakeries, and cigar-makers.

German and Czech 48ers settled in smaller numbers in the Hill Country of central Texas, to which Germans had been coming since the 1830s. Luckenbach, Texas, was named for German nobleman Jacob Luckenbach, one of the first settlers. Tejanos—descendants of the original Mexican settlers of Texas—also populated the region where, thanks to German and Czech influence, the polka and the accordion worked their way into Tejano music.

The 48ers had a hand in popularizing physical fitness in the United States. In Germany, many had been members of the Turnverein, or Turner movement, a discipline that stressed gymnastics, exercise, and “a sound mind in a sound body.” When Hecker visited Cincinnati in late October 1848, several recent immigrants asked him about establishing a Turnverein there. Hecker enthusiastically approved, calling the movement “the carrier, developer and apostle of the free spirit.” Soon, Turner societies were spreading nationwide.

Fresh from the whip of monarchic rule, 48ers fervently opposed slavery. “The Louisville Platform,” an 1854 manifesto by 48ers in that Kentucky city, called slavery “a political and moral cancer” and demanded repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. But 48ers’ anti-clerical bent put them at odds with the Abolitionist movement, whose mainstays often were preachers. Many abolitionists also advocated strict temperance, anathema to lager-loving Germans. They found political haven in the new Republican Party, formed in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened the Kansas and Nebraska territories to slavery. Officially, Republicans opposed the extension of slavery into the Western territories, but many, if not most, had a “hidden agenda”: ending slavery altogether. When the party ran John C. Fremont for president in 1856, Illinois Republicans chose two electors-at-large—Hecker and Abraham Lincoln. In 1860, Hecker and Schurz campaigned for Lincoln, Hecker mainly speaking in German and the younger Schurz orating in both German and English.

The Civil War was the 48ers’ finest hour. More than 200,000 German-born immigrants enlisted in the Union Army, first among them many 48ers seasoned at combat by the 1848 revolutions. Entire Turner societies joined en masse. The highest-ranking German American officer during the Civil War was Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel, a 48er from Baden. A commander in the revolution of 1849 there, he came to the United States from England in 1852, became a teacher, and rose to be superintendent of St. Louis schools. After Sigel accepted the politically motivated offer of colonelcy in the Army, Germans throughout the Midwest volunteered to fight “mit Sigel.” Irish American tunesmith John F. Poole, known for writing the song “No Irish Need Apply,” turned the phrase into a comic dialect number sung to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me”:

I’ve come shust now, to tells you how
I goes mit regimentals
To schlag dem voes of liberty
Like dem old Continentals
Vot fights mit England long ago
To Save de Yankee eagle
Und now I get my sojer clothes
And goes to fight mit Sigel
CHORUS: Ja, das ist true, I speaks mit you
I goes to fight mit Sigel!

Sigel had his best moment of the war in March 1862 at Pea Ridge, Ark., where his men surprised a Confederate force, pounding the foe with artillery until they retreated. At Wilson’s Creek, Mo., in 1861, however, he had left a flank exposed, leading to a devastating Confederate counterattack. Sigel stumbled at Cedar Mountain, Va., in 1862 when he delayed because he was waiting for a supply train to deliver meals for his troops; and in 1864 at New Market, Va., when less than half his troops were on the battlefield as fighting began. Sigel was contentious, often bickering with fellow officers. Henry Halleck, the Union commander in chief in 1862–64, harped about Sigel in a letter to Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, griping about the “damned Dutch” (a corruption of Deutsch, meaning “German” in German) who “constitute a very dangerous element in society as well as the Army.” After fighting at Harpers Ferry in July 1864, Sigel was relieved of his command.

Like Sigel, Schurz was a “political general,” appointed by Lincoln to curry favor with German Americans. Schurz’s division in the Army of the Potomac’s 11th Corps included several German regiments. Though better regarded than Sigel by fellow officers, Schurz too came in for criticism. The press reviled Schurz and the German troops as “flying Dutchmen” for retreating when overwhelmed by Confederate forces at Chancellorsville. Schurz demanded a hearing by a military court, but got none. At Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, Schurz’s troops fought well, but had the bad luck of deploying on terrain that was hard to defend, as well as being outnumbered. His regiments withdrew to Cemetery Hill, where he regrouped and the next day helped drive back the Confederates.

Hecker also received a commission as a colonel, and in 1862 was given command of the 82nd Illinois Volunteers, mainly German in composition but leavened by Scandinavians and a Jewish company organized in Chicago. Hecker, who was wounded at Chancellorsville while fighting under Schurz, also saw action at Missionary Ridge and elsewhere. The invective aimed at Sigel and Schurz did not splatter him; an inquiry into a disappointing showing by troops that he and other officers led at the Battle of Wauhatchie, Tenn., in 1863 found, “So far as the conduct of Colonel Hecker is concerned, it is not deserving of censure.”

When the fighting ebbed, 48ers in blue relaxed together, enjoying Gemutlichkeit, or “good feelings.” Sigel once invited General James Garfield to his headquarters for tea; Sigel and Schurz entertained Garfield with their piano playing. Toward the end of the war, at Lookout Mountain, Tenn., Schurz and Hecker amused themselves with the German card game Skat.

Military or civilian, German Americans in the North saw supporting the Union as a way to gain acceptance as Americans. Few Germans had emigrated to the South, where opposition to the Confederacy was a black mark. In Texas, German-majority counties voted against secession in 1861. When Texas joined the Confederacy, Germans there formed a militia—the Union Loyal League—and resisted the draft. In April 1862, Confederate troops came to the Hill Country to enforce conscription, burning homes and making mass arrests. That August, 60-odd Germans took off for Mexico, planning to reach Union-held New Orleans from there. Confederate pursuers caught them at Nueces, killing 19 and wounding others. Texas Germans rejoiced when the Union won the war.

After the war, Schurz continued in public life. In the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson sent him South to examine “the Negro problem.” Schurz found that powerful Southern Whites still believed that coercion was the only way to get African Americans to work, that African Americans were being deprived of their rights, and that they were constantly in danger. Johnson, a Unionist who championed the poor Whites over freed Blacks, ignored Schurz’s report.

In 1868 Schurz was elected as a Republican U.S. Senator from Missouri. He soon did a seeming about-face: In 1870, he helped found the “Liberal Republican” faction whose adherents believed equality for African Americans in the South had been achieved, and that the priority now was to restore self-government in the former Confederate states. In 1871, he voted against the Ku Klux Klan Act, which permitted federal action against that terror organization, on the grounds that the measure gave too much power to the president. The Liberal Republicans disappeared after their presidential candidate, Horace Greeley, also endorsed by the Democrats, decisively lost to incumbent Ulysses S. Grant. In the Senate, Schurz was noted for his advocacy of civil service reform, a major issue in that era of the spoils system.

Schurz lost his Senate seat in 1874. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him secretary of the Interior. In 1879, Schurz took a well-publicized trip to the West, meeting with Native American chiefs. In Washington, Schurz met with Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca tribe, which had been forced to leave Nebraska and resettle in Oklahoma. Schurz expressed sympathy with the tribe’s hardships. But when Standing Bear and his people tried to return home without permission, Schurz ordered the Army to arrest them and turn them back, drawing sharp criticism. Upon leaving Interior in 1881, Schurz moved to New York and turned his efforts toward journalism. Omaha Daily Herald Assistant Editor Thomas Tibbles publicized the case of the Poncas, and aided by lawyers working pro bono, Standing Bear sued for his release and won. The Hayes administration shortly permitted some to return to their homeland in Nebraska.

Other 48ers also went into public service. Some, like Lorenz Brentano and Julius Stahel, were appointed as diplomatic envoys. Others, like Thomas Meagher and Wlodzimierz Kryzyzankoski, were named to high posts in the Western territories and in the Reconstruction-era South. Sigel briefly edited the German-language Baltimore Wecker, then moved to New York and ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state. In the 1870s and 1880s he held local offices, including city registrar, pension agent for the New York District, and district inspector for the common (public) schools of New York. Despite his sketchy military reputation, Sigel remained a hero to German Americans. For years, in certain Midwestern taverns, veterans who had “fought mit Sigel” could get a free lager.

Hecker returned to his farm, occasionally hitting the lecture circuit. In 1871 he applauded the achievement of one of his dreams—a united Germany. But on a visit to the old country in 1873, he was dismayed at the lack of a national bill of rights, the Kaiser’s elevated role, the huge military budget, and rampant anti-Semitism.

In the 1890s, the 48er generation began to die off, but traces remain. A statue of Sigel stands in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, about a mile from Grant’s Tomb. Manhattan also has a Carl Schurz monument and a Carl Schurz Park. Monuments to Hecker stand in St. Louis and Cincinnati. And in Comfort, Texas, the Treŭe der Union (Loyalty to the Union) monument honors those killed in the Nueces Massacre.

Raanan Geberer writes from New York City. He occasionally leads historical hikes and walking tours and plays in several amateur rock bands.

A Baker’s Dozen of 48ers

Mathilde Franziska Anneke, feminist pioneer. During a Baden uprising in 1849, she assisted her husband, Friedrich by delivering messages. They fled to Milwaukee, and Mathilde published the first female-owned feminist publication in the U.S. She lived in Switzerland during the Civil War and wrote anti-slavery fiction; afterward, she returned to the U.S. and devoted herself to women’s suffrage.

Hans Balatka, a Czech conductor and composer, promoted European classical music. As a student in Vienna, he joined a revolutionary group. In America, he settled in Milwaukee and conducted at music festivals there and in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and elsewhere. Moving to Chicago, he led the Liederkranz Society, the Mozart Club, the Chicago Musical Society and other groups.

Lorenz Brentano served as president of the Baden provisional revolutionary government in 1849. He lived in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and finally Chicago, where he became a lawyer. While in Pennsylvania, he founded a German-language anti-slavery publication. He was elected as a Republican to the Illinois legislature during the Civil War. He was U.S. consul in Dresden 1872-76, then served one term in Congress.

Edward Degener, Texas Unionist. Degener, a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, came to the U.S in 1850 and farmed in the Hill Country. During the Civil War, he was convicted of sedition by a Confederate court. After the war, he was a delegate to two Texas constitutional conventions, served as a Republican congressman in 1871-72 and on the San Antonio City Council from 1872-78.

Dr. Abraham Jacobi, pioneering pediatrician. Jacobi, as a young doctor, was one of several members of the Communist League who were tried in Cologne for revolutionary activities, and he later stayed with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in London. Arriving in the U.S in 1853, he taught at New York Medical College, where he was its first chair of children’s diseases, New York University, and Columbia University. At Mount Sinai Hospital, he established the first Department of Pediatrics at a general hospital. He was a close friend of Schurz; each had a cottage on Lake George at Bolton Landing, N.Y. Jacobi served as president of the American Medical Association 1912-13.

Wlodzimierz Kryzyzankoski took part in the 1848 Polish uprising against Prussia, then fled to the U.S. As a civil engineer and surveyor in the 1850s, he helped railroads push west. During the Civil War, he raised a Polish regiment, was appointed as a general, and fought at Gettysburg and in other important battles. He served as governor of Georgia during Reconstruction.

John Michael Maisch, pharmaceutical pioneer. He came to the U.S. in 1849 and worked in drugstores while studying pharmacy. By 1861, he was teaching at the New York College of Pharmacy. During the Civil War, he was chief chemist at the U.S. Army Laboratory in Philadelphia. He became the editor of the American Journal of Pharmacy and secretary of the American Pharmaceutical Association. In 1869, he drafted a model state law regulating pharmacies.

Thomas Meagher was a leader of the failed “Young Irelander” rebellion in 1848. Exiled by the British to Tasmania, he escaped to New York and founded an Irish weekly. When the Civil War came, he organized the Union Army’s Irish Brigade, was commissioned as a brigadier general, and led the brigade through several battles. Later, he served as territorial governor of Montana.

Bertha Ochs was the mother of New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs. Bertha Ochs came as a teen during the uprising in Bavaria and lived with an uncle in Natchez, Miss. She was a staunch supporter of the Confederacy, and her son Adolph, who became publisher of the Chattanooga Times and later The New York Times, donated to Confederate commemorations. According to author David J. Jackowe, flaglike tile mosaics resembling the Confederate banner that once adorned the Times Square subway station were a nod by designer Squire Vickers in 1917 to the Ochs family’s fondness for the Confederacy.

Oswald Ottendorfer took part in uprisings in Vienna, Saxony, and Baden. Arriving in New York, he started in the Staats Zeitung newspaper’s counting room and worked his way up, eventually serving as publisher 1859-1900. While he leaned Democratic, he supported Lincoln’s war effort. He served one term as an alderman, ran for mayor in 1874 on an anti-Tammany platform, and was known for philanthropy.

Edward Salomon, first Jewish governor of Wisconsin. A revolutionary student at the University of Berlin, he fled to the U.S. in 1849. After working as a teacher and court clerk, he passed the bar in 1856 and practiced law in Milwaukee. He was elected lieutenant governor as a Republican in 1860 and became governor following Governor Lawrence Harvey’s death in 1862. He later moved to New York, where he represented German interests as an attorney.

Margarethe Schurz was Carl Schurz’s wife. She was active in the kindergarten movement, a German creation, and in 1856 opened the first American kindergarten—a German-speaking school, like most kindergartens of the day, in Watertown, Wisconsin. She died at 43 after giving birth.
Julius Stahel, Hungarian 48er and Civil War general. He took part in Lajos Kossuth’s 1848 uprising, fled to England, and in 1859 came to the U.S. Stahel, a German speaker, helped raise a German-speaking regiment. He saw action at both Bull Run battles, Cross Keys, and elsewhere, and received the Medal of Honor. After the war, he served as U.S. consul in Japan and China. He also worked as an engineer and insurance executive. —R.G.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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On January 8, 1902, the morning rail commute into Manhattan took a tragic turn. In one of many tunnels beneath Park Avenue, a New York Central locomotive bound for Grand Central Station rammed the rear of a commuter train waiting to enter the terminal. The steam engine plowed through the parked train’s last two cars, killing 17 on impact and injuring three dozen, many of whom were scalded horribly by steam from the locomotive’s ruptured boiler. The wreck made national news in stories salted with grisly details.

A jury acquitted New York Central engineer John Wisker of manslaughter, ruling that there was no way Wisker could have seen the stop signal in the congested tunnel, obscured as the marker was by steam and smoke from heavy coal-fired locomotive traffic.

Authorities deemed the New York Central ultimately responsible for the accident because “during the past ten years said officials have been repeatedly warned by their locomotive engineers and other employes [sic] of the dangerous condition existing in said tunnel… and they have failed to remedy said conditions.” The next year the New York State Legislature passed a law prohibiting steam locomotive traffic on Manhattan Island after July 1, 1908.

Steam had powered locomotives since 1830, when the Baltimore & Ohio became the first common carrier railroad in the United States. But after 70 years and 193,000 miles of track, steam locomotives were falling behind the times—a burgeoning nuisance and a hazard in the new century’s expanding cities.

Rail-borne steam and smoke obscured not only signage but skylines. Tunnels were darkly satanic. Locomotives, loud and dirty, often required switching that knotted up train movement. Steam trains’ immense water tanks and Brobdingnagian maintenance infrastructure gobbled real estate in areas where space was at a premium. America, on the verge of becoming a global manufacturer, needed locomotives to run on something more dynamic and forward-looking than water brought to a boil under pressure. America’s railroads needed electricity.

As long as there had been railroads, engineers and inventors had been experimenting with electricity to power them. Electric motors, generators, and power grids delivered mixed results, and advances in electrifying railroads came slow. The first big leap came in 1880 when Thomas Edison ran the nation’s first generator-powered locomotive on a test track at his Menlo Park, N.J., laboratory.

One young engineer drawn to the possibilities of electrified rail was Frank J. Sprague. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate with a sharp mind and a keen interest in electricity, Sprague was already developing an improved design of his own for an electric motor in 1883 when he went to work for Edison. Sprague had hoped to work with the famous inventor on electric motors for rail and other applications, but Edison had eyes only for his incandescent lighting system, which he believed would change life more fundamentally than would electric trains.

Sprague built power stations for Edison’s incandescent light system for a few months before resigning. With savings and a loan, he founded Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company in 1884. He was not the first engineer to take on rail electrification. Other innovators, intent on outdoing horse-drawn trolleys, had tried to electrify streetcars, but the results were uncomfortable rides on unreliable machines. Sprague developed a self-regulating, constant speed motor that caused a sensation at the 1884 International Electrical Exhibition in Philadelphia. Observing Sprague’s unit in action, Edison remarked, “His is the only true motor.”

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In 1887, the Richmond Union Passenger Railway of Virginia hired Sprague to build an electric
trolley system for that city. By summer 1888, Sprague’s operation was running 40 cars over
12 miles of track. Sprague’s system became the standard for electrified urban transport, inspiring other municipalities to follow suit. The benefits were evident and manifold. Compared to horses, electric trolleys were smoother, faster, easily handled—and manure-free. Within a decade some 900 electric streetcars were rolling on more than 12,000 miles of track in American cities. Horse-drawn trolleys passed into novelty.

Rail electrification held great potential beyond streetcars and trolleys. Matched against a steam locomotive of comparable weight, an electric locomotive could produce more horsepower and exert more of the tractive force needed to pull a train. Electrics had fewer moving parts, reducing operational issues and maintenance needs, and were free of steam and smoke.

The first successful conversion of rail from steam to electric took place in 1893, when the Kentucky and Indiana Bridge Company electrified its Daisy Line, a five-mile light rail service that since 1886 had been shuttling commuters between New Albany, Ind., and Louisville, Ky. The conversion consisted of replacing steam locomotives with electric motor cars running on current transmitted by an overhead wire. The line ran 18 hours a day, and the smooth, clean 15-minute trip between cities proved immensely popular with passengers.

This and other early successes in electrification drew the attention of Charles P. Clark, president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. Clark saw mainline and branch line electric service as an attractive alternative to steam. The New Haven’s many branch lines served one of the country’s fastest growing regions, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York City and environs. But by the 1890s the railroad’s almost exclusive focus on passengers over freight left it vulnerable to the rise of electric streetcars. Trolleys running parallel to New Haven branch lines peeled off passengers by offering uninterrupted, precise schedules that the railroad’s steam locomotives could not match owing to inadequate accelerating power and inability to run continuously.

Aiming to squelch trolley competition and retrieve passengers, the New Haven converted several lines. The first was a seven-mile stretch linking summer resort communities on Boston’s South Shore. The Nantasket Beach line, which opened on June 28, 1895, featured an electric motor car capable of pulling two 96-passenger trailers. The New Haven built a dedicated steam-driven power plant to generate electricity for the operation.

Within three years, New Haven traffic had doubled. Electricity was to “be promptly adopted by the company at other points on its lines,” Clark declared. The railroad made good on that promise, electrifying another 105 miles of track in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts between 1896 and 1907.

Two days after the Nantasket Branch conversion sparked to life in 1895, the first mainline electric railroad passed beneath Baltimore’s streets. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s Belt Line rail extension, which began construction in 1889, was originally designed to be a steam-powered cure to a transport bottleneck in the Maryland port. This 7.2-mile line included a 1.4-mile double-track tunnel under Howard Street, and that’s where the B&O ran into problems. The city prohibited venting steam and smoke from the tunnel into the air. B&O decided to electrify, and in 1893 hired a new company, General Electric, to wire the Howard Street Tunnel.

Aided by financier J.P. Morgan, GE had coalesced the year before as a conglomeration of smaller companies. These included Edison’s several electric enterprises and his recent acquisition, Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company. The new concern quickly marked itself as an innovator by building a 30-ton electric locomotive, its motor three times larger than any in existence, capable of 30 mph. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, GE billed the behemoth as “the first practically operational high speed electric locomotive in the world adapted to the requirements of the steam railroad.”

The firm designed and built a locomotive for B&O powerful enough to muscle a 500-ton passenger train at 35 miles per hour or a 1,200-ton, 30-car freight train at 15 miles per hour up a 0.8 percent grade. To run the beast, GE also built a steam-driven power plant. The Belt Line was a local sensation when it debuted on July 1, 1895.

General Electric’s lunge at electric dominance drew a challenge from George Westinghouse, inventor of the railroad airbrake and founder of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. Eager to explore electrification, the Pennsylvania Railroad hired Westinghouse to convert its seven-mile Burlington to Mount Holly, N.J., branch line, which went into regular electric service on July 22, 1895.

The near simultaneous debut of the mainline Belt Line and those Nantasket and New Jersey branch electrifications positioned electricity well as a motive power for railroads. But major issues prevented other railroads from doing likewise. Going from steam to electricity cost dearly, requiring the purchase of new locomotives and equipment to generate, transmit, and distribute power all down the line.

There was also the question of which system was better, alternating current or direct current. Westinghouse and Edison took sides, and the resulting War of the Currents reached far beyond rail electrification. Edison single-mindedly embraced direct current, and consequently GE favored DC for rail. DC motors and transmission and generation infrastructure were lightweight and easy to operate, suiting them to light rail and short-line railroad electrifications. But low-voltage DC systems were not suitable for heavy loads or great distances. They required large current flow, demanding heavy cables and multiple power substations along a line.

Westinghouse stood with alternating current because AC addressed DC’s shortcomings. Transformers enabled users to step AC voltage up or down from generation to distribution, providing transmission efficiency that DC could not match and suitable for heavier loads over longer distances. In the early 1890s the Westinghouse Company perfected the rotary converter, enabling the transfer of power from a high-voltage AC power supply to a low-voltage DC electric motor. Around that time GE independently built a rotary converter, one of many technology overlaps between the rival innovators. In 1896, Westinghouse and GE entered into a patent pooling and cross-licensing agreement, clearing the way for broad use of rotary converters and other equipment and technologies and making long distance electrification a practical reality.

Generator capacity, transmission lines, motors, and other electric railroad equipment got better as well. In 1897, Sprague, who continued to innovate even after GE bought his company, developed a multiple-unit control system enabling an engineer to manage the controls of any car on a train from one location. Multiple-unit control enabled power to be evenly distributed throughout a train, improving tractive ability. These developments laid the foundation for conversion from steam to electric motive power across the rail network. The 1902 Park Avenue accident and New York’s ban on steam locomotives in Manhattan sparked the nation’s railroads into action.

The New York Central was the first to move, bringing the sprawling Grand Central rail hub into the modern era. Hemmed in on all sides by some of the world’s most expensive real estate, Grand Central had no room to grow and thereby accommodate rising rail traffic. Electrifying the terminal not only solved the pollution problem but created elbow room by eliminating steam-related infrastructure. Now Grand Central could add trackage with multi-level underground rail tunnels and platforms.

The new Grand Central Station opened for business on February 3, 1913. Electricity supplied by two new GE-built power plants powered a terminal that contained 31 upper-level tracks for long-distance trains and 17 lower-level tracks for suburban traffic.

The New Haven Railroad began a significant extension of its electric network, converting a 33-mile stretch from Grand Central to Stamford, Conn., featuring some of the nation’s heaviest passenger rail traffic. Westinghouse, partnering with Pennsylvania’s Baldwin Locomotive Works, provided locomotives, a dedicated power plant, and the first-ever AC power infrastructure. The first electric trains ran in 1907, with electrification later stretching to several branch lines through southern and central Connecticut and downstate New York. By 1915, the New Haven had doubled its commuter traffic in and out of Grand Central.

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s entry into electrification signaled a major boost in growth of mainline and branch line electric rail. At the turn of the 20th century, the Pennsylvania was one of the nation’s largest railroads, operating over 10,000 miles of track throughout the Northeast as far west as Illinois. Fortune magazine called the railroad “a nation unto itself.” But the Pennsy had no rail access to the thriving New York metropolitan area.

To compete with the New York Central, the New Haven, and other rivals, the big company developed a bold strategy. In 1900, the Pennsy purchased the Long Island Railroad, an extensive steam-powered network serving New York’s largest suburb but stopping short of Manhattan at the East River. The Pennsy faced a similar problem on Manhattan’s west side; all its east-bound traffic stopped in New Jersey at the Hudson. The Pennsy would bring these lines into Manhattan and erect a massive midtown terminal at which they would meet. And the whole operation would be electrified.

Work on the eight-acre Pennsylvania Station began in 1904, as did excavation of rail tunnels under the East and Hudson Rivers. Simultaneously, electrification of the LIRR began with a 38-mile stretch connecting Brooklyn, Queens, and Far Rockaway and opening in 1905. By 1913, the LIRR had electrified 188 miles of track. By 1920, passenger traffic had increased over 350 percent with more than 64 million passengers annually.

Pennsylvania Station opened on November 27, 1910, serving LIRR traffic and for the first time bringing eastbound Pennsy trains into Manhattan. The neoclassical terminal, designed by the architecture firm McKim, Mead and White, occupied two full city blocks and included a 30,000-square-foot waiting area with a 150-foot ceiling that made it the largest railroad station in the world. The subterranean levels featured 16 miles of track.

A dedicated power station in Long Island City managed both the LIRR and the Penn Station terminal—one of the last times a railroad built a dedicated power plant to serve its electric needs. Public utilities had grown in number and sophistication and could satisfy electric rail’s heavy power needs. Railroads also saved money on electrical infrastructure and maintenance by contracting their electricity needs to the power companies.

Growth in passenger service in large part drove rail electrification in the Northeast. The area around New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., was the country’s most densely populated region, a steady source of high demand for efficient, modern transportation. But electrification’s uses went beyond shuttling passengers among eastern metropolises, and innovation was not confined to one region.

Electrification projects in the early 1920s in the Appalachians demonstrated electric rail’s freight hauling capabilities. The Norfolk and Western Railway and the Virginian Railway ranked among the nation’s largest coal haulers, taking coal from mines as far as eastern Kentucky directly to ports in Norfolk, Va. These rivals both turned to electricity to cut time and cost crossing the rugged Appalachian terrain.

Unlike passenger lines, freight haulers required power systems able to handle heavy tonnage when demand for coal surged. Advances in electrical engineering led to a system in which high voltage AC electricity was transmitted along the line to power a rugged motor capable of high-energy output.

The 208-track-mile Norfolk & Western electrification in West Virginia and the 229-track-mile Virginian line were completed in 1925, saving the railroads a fortune in time and expense. Electric locomotives pulled 50 percent greater tonnage in less time at a cost savings of 12.5 percent compared to steam.

The Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad obtained similarly satisfying results from its 1927 electrification of nearly 900 miles of track. Running from Harlowton, Mont., to Seattle, Wash., and known to all as the Milwaukee Road, this railway was a remarkably versatile system that carried eastern manufacturing, Midwestern agriculture, Northwestern logging, and transcontinental passenger traffic. After electrification, passenger trains ran more smoothly through high mountain passes and kept tighter schedules. Freight service carried double the tonnage of the steam era.

Back east, the Pennsylvania Railroad was running almost at capacity. By 1928, the Pennsy’s eastern lines were carrying the densest freight and passenger traffic in the country, and all data pointed to those numbers growing in years to come.

Understanding that more track alone could not forestall catastrophic service disruptions, Pennsy leadership announced a bold electrification program that eclipsed any such project undertaken to that point.

In the course of 10 years, the Pennsy electrified more than 2,000-track-miles to connect New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and many points between. At the project’s peak in 1934, amid the Great Depression, the electrification work engaged 12,000 men, with another 12,000 manufacturing 139 electric locomotives, equipment, and infrastructure.

The Pennsy electrification, completed in 1939, was a resounding success. In the next five years freight and passenger run times shrank, freight tonnage more than doubled, and passenger traffic quadrupled. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s electrified rail network became the nation’s largest and busiest, suggesting a bright future for electrification.

In 1939, the United States had approximately 6,300 track-miles of electrified rail, more than any other country and one-fifth of the world’s total. Though that number marked the peak of electrification in the country, it nonetheless represented only two percent of the nation’s rail network. World War II brought a halt to new electrifications. Assumptions and hopes that the return of peace would mark a rebirth of electrification quickly withered.

Starting in the late 1940s, rail companies lost revenue as freight and passenger traffic melted away with the industrial decline of the Northeast, construction of the interstate highway system, and the rise of commercial air transport. As railroad fortunes dwindled, so too did plans for post-war electrifications. By the 1970s, virtually every American rail company had gone out of business, merged with competitors, or been consolidated and taken over by the federal government.

Another hurdle to widespread electrification was the diesel-electric locomotive. First used in the early 1920s as railyard switcher engines to push train cars into position for locomotives, diesel-electrics used a diesel-powered engine to drive an alternator that produced electricity to run the locomotive, in effect a self-contained electric running off its own power plant instead of wires or third rails.

Diesel locomotives were not as efficient or environmentally friendly as pure electric locomotives but they provided a greater return on investment. Diesel fuel was cheap and the conversion from steam to diesel did not require an entirely new system with a dedicated power infrastructure the way electrification had. Many electrified lines were converted to diesel or made obsolete by railroad mergers or other forms of transport.

The dream of widespread rail electrification lives on. The United States has roughly 1,000 miles of electrified rail, mostly in the Northeast Corridor. Many cities and suburbs operate electric mass transit. The call for faster, cleaner, and more economical transportation is as strong as it was a century ago. The drive to dump fossil fuels in favor of cleaner technologies also invites the promise of electric rail’s resurgence. All that remains is the will to reinvest.

Richard Brownell is a frequent contributor to American History magazine. A passionate historical writer, he is fascinated by rail history.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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People living near Titusville, Pa., had long been aware of the gooey substance seeping out of the ground. For thousands of years, the black ooze was used for medicinal purposes. Small doses were used to treat scabies, respiratory illnesses, and even epilepsy. The native Seneca people, on whose land present-day Oil City is located, used it for ointments and insect repellant. But it also fouled the water. No one realized this rural section of northwestern Pennsylvania would become the cradle of the modern petroleum oil age.

By the 1850s, scientists and entrepreneurs knew that the substance had a potential to replace the whale oil that lit homes across the country and to lubricate the engines of the booming Industrial Revolution. The problem was getting the oil out of the ground fast enough and at enough quantity to make it worthwhile. Enter Edwin Drake, a former New York railroad worker hired by the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company of New York to attempt to drill for oil on a plot of land along Oil Creek, near Titusville, in 1857. Drake had no background in geology or drilling and it appears his job for the oil company was due to having invested $200—his life savings—in the company and having a railroad pass.

Drake hired William Smith, a blacksmith who had some experience working on salt wells, as his driller. A way to get to salt deposits without shaft mining, salt wells involved drilling down to a deposit, flooding it with water, and pumping the saline solution to the surface to evaporate. Even with Smith’s expertise, water from Oil Creek kept filling up the well. Finally, in early August 1859, Drake and Smith developed the “drive pipe” method of drilling, which inserted a cast iron pipe down the well to protect the drill and keep water at bay. Drilling three feet a day, they struck oil at the depth of 69.5 feet on August 27, 1859.

Soon after, despite a civil war, people flooded into Titusville, a hamlet of 250 people. By 1865, the population had grown to 10,000. That same year, a new town with the illustrious name of Pithole City was founded near another well. In just six months, Pithole City boasted 16,000 people, dozens of hotels, banks, stores, and saloons, and a daily mail delivery of more than 6,000 letters. Unreliable oil markets, fires, and decreasing oil production led to Pithole’s demise, just as quickly as it appeared. By 1877, it was a ghost town.

“Oil Fever” still burned in Western Pennsylvania, though it was much tempered after the early decades. Focus turned to refining the oil the wells brought to the surface, producing kerosene for the new lamps in people’s homes. In 1901, oil was found in Texas and all eyes shifted to the Lone Star State, where Pennsylvania drills and refining equipment supplied a new oil boom.

Derricks and Ghost Towns

Drake Well Museum and Park, 202 Museum Lane, Titusville, Pa., is home to a reproduction of Drake’s well house over the original well. Administered by the Pennsylvania History and Museum Commission (PHMC), it offers indoor and outdoor exhibits and programs both at the well and at the Pithole City ghost town.

Western Pennsylvania is well-known for its football history. Johann Wilhelm Heisman, son of German immigrants, was raised in Titusville. In high school, he excelled in baseball, football, and gymnastics, as well as theater. Upon graduation in 1887, he played football (a sport his father hated) at Brown University and then at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to coach at eight different colleges, was a proponent of the forward pass, and developed the center snap. In the late 1920s, he became director of the New York Downtown Athletic Club, where he introduced an award for the best collegiate football player. In 1936, the club renamed this award the Heisman Memorial Trophy.

Hike the hills and valleys that early oilmen trod. Visit Oil Creek State Park, which offers camping, fishing, biking, kayaking, and other outdoor experiences: 305 State Park Road, Oil City, Pa.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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William Sidney Mount, one of America’s finest 19th-century genre, or scene, painters, created glorious portraits of Black and multiracial people, among others. In politics, he was a Jacksonian Democrat, who favored states’ rights to choose slavery as America’s borders expanded westward. Later on, he would vote against Lincoln. And yet, unlike most White artists of the mid-1800s, who portrayed Black people in demeaning caricatures, Mount painted his subjects with humanity, realism, and psychological depth. Before the Civil War, photography wasn’t common and Black individuals were rarely portrayed in fine art. Mount’s paintings are extremely valuable to the historical record both because of their rarity and their quality. Out of several hundred paintings Mount made in his lifetime, his dozen works that feature Black and multiracial individuals are among his best.

Mount lived his whole life on the rural North Shore of Long Island, N.Y., aside from several years in Manhattan. He never married. From the local farming homesteads, held by his siblings, extended family, and their neighbors, he chose his models, both Black and White. He was also a fiddler, and he liked to illustrate country folk, both Black and White, making music. Due to New York’s partial manumission acts beginning in 1799 and the state’s abolition of slavery in 1827, all Mount’s Black models were free.

Wealthy, White, urban, East Coast businessmen, such as Henry Breevort Jr., Edward L. Carey, Gouverneur Kemble, and Luman Reed purchased Mount’s rural scenes of the 1830s and 1840s. “Yankee” themed artwork became popular in America during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, from 1829 to 1837, which Jackson billed as the “era of the common man.” Mount’s farming scenes won him accolades at the National Academy of Design exhibitions in Manhattan. Racial diversity added to the marketability of such paintings, but with one caveat—that Black and White individuals be segregated within the illustration. As art historian Elizabeth Johns points out, White American buyers were not interested in artwork that challenged the existing segregated and hierarchical social order.

In the 1850s, Mount created three large portraits of Black and multiracial musicians for an entirely different clientele: European buyers of lithographic prints. Mount’s New York agent for the Paris-based international art dealership, Goupil, Vibert & Co. (later Goupil and Co.), commissioned paintings that put Black people front and center in the composition. Europeans were apparently more open-minded about portraying Black people than were their American counterparts.

This portfolio is adapted from The Art of William Sidney Mount: Long Island People of Color on Canvas, The History Press, 2022, $23.99

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This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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The Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C., houses an impressive collection of nearly 30,000 objects made and used prior to the Industrial Revolution. As the museum’s director and chief curator, Heidi Campbell-Shoaf oversees the museum staff, works with the National DAR organization that serves as the museum’s executive board and helps curate the collections that the museum exhibits in accordance with its current mission statement. “We want to use the lens of the different interpretations of home,” she says, “to inspire conversations about the American experience and encourage people to discover commonalities between different American life experiences.”

What is the history of the DAR Museum?

The museum was founded in 1890, at the same time the national organization of the Daughters of the American Revolution was crafted. The museum’s intent was to collect and preserve historical artifacts, many of which were donated by DAR members. The DAR is a lineage organization which requires a woman to have a direct descent from somebody who aided the American Revolution. Soon after the museum was founded, the collection shifted to focus less on artifacts that people would assume to be related to the Revolution—namely military items such as muskets, swords, powder horns, and uniforms—to objects that the Revolutionary generation had in their homes. From that point on, it has been a museum that collects and preserves and interprets objects used in American homes of the past.

Can you tell us about the history of the period rooms?

Some of them date all the way back to the initial building of the DAR Headquarters and Museum in Memorial Continental Hall in 1910. As the headquarters, Memorial Continental Hall was built with a lot of offices in the building. The DAR is organized very similar to our government, with a central executive, state organizations, and within those state organizations, local chapters. The state organizations donated money to help build Memorial Continental Hall and in return secured the right to put the state name on an office room. The period rooms today still have state affiliations because they started as the state sponsored office space. When the organization outgrew the first building and built an addition and moved offices there, those rooms became the period rooms, and the states would furnish them as historic interiors. In the late 1930s, all of the period rooms were moved under the control of the museum, and it’s been that way ever since. The museum maintains the rooms and interprets historic interiors from the 1600s through the 1930s in them. They’re furnished as bedrooms, dining rooms, living rooms, parlors, etc. Most museums have somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of their collections on display, but we have well beyond that because of the period rooms.

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What do the gallery exhibits focus on?

The exhibits have a wide range of topics. Our curators have specialties to the collection they manage, care for, and develop, and they conduct original research and put together exhibitions. The topics are in part pulled from the curator’s expertise or research interest. But they all have some relationship to the American home. Our current exhibition is about portraiture and power in the American home and looking at these portraits that many of us see in museums. They are by and large painted for people to hang in their homes, so what does that say about the people who have the portrait painted, the people painting the portraits, the people seeing the portraits in the homes? What is that statement being made? It all circles back to the home in some way.

When you purchase something for the museum, how are you looking to expand the collections?

Each of our curators look at their collections, and have a statement of collecting for each different category. For example, fine art, glass, ceramics, etc. We look at the mission and we look at the collections and we say, ‘Do we have everything we need to tell particular stories?’ Of course, much of our collection has been donated to us over the years by DAR members. So that reflects much of the demographic of the DAR membership, which in the past, up until the 1970s, was primarily White, middle and upper class. The membership is becoming much more diverse, and we want to make sure that our collections reflect that and that we are not just interpreting the DAR homes of the past, but a broader interpretation of American homes. It’s all American homes. Not just those related to the American Revolution. That means we need to look at the collections and see where we have gaps in representation. For instance, a few years ago we purchased a sampler from California that was made by somebody of Mexican ancestry, and of course, early California was Mexico. We have purchased objects made by native Hawaiians. We’ve acquired objects made by African American people or that portray the picture of African American people. We look at what’s missing and we also look at what we have and determine whether it’s the best example of the object we can display. Is it displayable? Then we may decide we need to have a better example of something we already have.

What’s a favorite object of yours in the collection?

That’s a tough question! What’s amazing about the DAR Museum collections in general is that there are so many of the objects that have stories associated with them—family history, historic events at which this object was present. And many of the objects are amazing examples of historic craftsmanship. So, that’s a hard question. I could pick many things for different reasons. One example, there’s a painting in our current exhibition, it’s on the cover of our current exhibition catalog. She’s dressed in clothing from the 1810s. She’s holding a green parrot. It’s a fabulous painting I think, for a lot of different reasons. It’s well done. But, also, why do you choose to be painted with a parrot in your hand? You can tell she has money, because why else would she have a parrot? Dolley Madison had a parrot. The average person is not going to have a parrot. She also wears a tiara with gold and coral. The colors are fabulous.

America will be celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2026. What is the museum planning for its celebration?

We are planning programming as we get closer to the 250th. We are also planning an exhibition. People may be surprised to find out that we don’t have a lot of Revolutionary War–related objects in the collection. Because of the ongoing emphasis on objects that are found in the home, they aren’t by and large militaria. We’re looking at an exhibition focused on people who were writing about the Revolution, prior to the Revolution, and through the Revolution. We’re using some of the collection housed in the DAR Americana Collection, which is a collection of historic manuscripts and documents. We’re working to combine some of that collection with some three-dimensional items from the museum collection to create that exhibition. Leading up to that, we have an exhibition in 2025 that focuses on Black craftspeople and their fight for freedom and liberty and what that means for them, not just in the Revolutionary period but all the way through the 19th century, as well.

Do you find that visitors have different expectations of what the museum will hold or the stories it will tell?

I think so, yes. When people come to a museum like ours, they often want to find confirmation of their own interpretation of history. Sometimes they find that and sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, that’s when education happens. We do have people who come with perceptions of what the DAR is as an organization, which has evolved since the one incident that people remember—in 1939 Marian Anderson was denied an opportunity to perform at the DAR Constitution Hall because of her race. That perception has stuck in people’s mind for decades, so they think they know what they will find when they come to the museum, but I think some of them are pleasantly surprised that we provide a wide lens onto American history.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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Poor Kamala Harris. The vice president took office in January 2021 trailing a cloud of firsts: first woman to hold the job, first African American (thanks to her Jamaican father), first Asian-American (thanks to her Indian mother). But the job itself has been a cavalcade of vexations. President Joe Biden saddled her with an unattractive assignment—managing and explaining the migrant mess at the southern border. She is reputed to be hard on her staff in private, and she is often tongue-tied in public. Even media outlets friendly to the administration have run hit pieces on her. According to The New York Times, “dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation” said (anonymously) that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.”

The office of vice president was devised in the home stretch of the Constitutional Convention as a flywheel in the machinery for picking an executive, and a successor in case the president died or was removed from office. Along the way, Elbridge Gerry worried that veeps would be too closely allied to the presidents alongside whom they served, which provoked a snort from Gouverneur Morris: “the vice president will then be the first heir apparent that ever loved his father.” Initially the vice presidency went to the runner-up in the Electoral College’s vote for president; the 12th amendment (1804) ensured that the veep would be the running mate of the winning presidential candidate.

The office got off to a rough start. John Adams, first vice president under George Washington, was the first (though not the last) to feel that he had nothing to do. Thomas Jefferson, second vice president under Adams, spent his term undermining his old friend and plotting to supplant him. Aaron Burr, third vice president under Jefferson, was shut out of all patronage, denied renomination when Jefferson ran again, and spent his post–vice presidential years plotting to break up the United States.

Most modern vice presidents, beginning with Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s number two, have been given substantive responsibilities, and have worked well with their number ones. Four of them—Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Joe Biden—have run for president themselves, two—Bush and Biden—successfully. But two vice presidents of an earlier era anticipated the problems bedeviling Harris today.

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Henry Wallace was the scion of an Iowa family of farmer/journalists (they published a magazine called Wallace’s Farmer). His father served as secretary of Agriculture under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge; Henry, crossing party lines, held the same job for FDR. In addition to his interests in crop cycles and new plant strains, Wallace had a passion for oddball religions. In the 1920s he came under the spell of Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré painter and seer who dressed in Tibetan robes and claimed to be the reincarnation of a Chinese emperor. Wallace and Roerich exchanged hundreds of letters, in which they referred to each other and to famous acquaintances in mystical code: Roerich was the Guru, Wallace was Parsifal or Galahad, FDR was the Flaming One, or the Wavering One, whenever Wallace felt disappointed in him.

In 1934 Wallace got Roerich attached to an Agriculture Department expedition to Mongolia seeking drought-resistant grasses. Roerich was also seeking the Holy Grail on the side. American diplomats reported that he was traveling the steppes with a bodyguard of White Russian Cossacks, trying to set up a Central Asian Buddhist kingdom. Wallace, embarrassed, cut ties with him.

The Flaming One, tired of his crusty Texan veep John Nance Garner, tapped Wallace to be his running mate when he sought a third term in 1940. FDR wanted a man of liberal views, and Wallace fit the bill. One potential landmine threatened the new ticket. The Republican National Committee had procured copies of 120 Guru letters. The GOP candidate Wendell Willkie nixed using them, however, afraid that the Democrats would expose his long-running extramarital affair with a prominent New York journalist. Roosevelt and Wallace cruised to victory.

Wallace found new soul mates post-Roerich—American Communists, whose designs he naively failed to penetrate. The Soviet Union was a wartime ally, and Communists were billing themselves as liberals in a hurry. Alarmed Democratic bosses told FDR in 1944 that he must dump Wallace, so the nod for his fourth run went to Missouri Senator Harry Truman, who became president when Roosevelt died three months into his last term. When Wallace ran for president himself in 1948 as candidate of the left-wing Progressive Party, the Guru letters finally hit the papers. Wallace won a meager 2.4 percent of the popular vote, and carried no states. Repenting of his pro-Soviet backers, he lived until 1965.

Richard Nixon was tied to Dwight Eisenhower politically and personally. He served as Eisenhower’s veep for two terms, 1953–1961. After Nixon won the White House himself in 1968, his daughter Julie married Ike’s grandson, David Eisenhower. Yet his relationship with Ike was always fraught.

Nixon had been put on the ticket in 1952 as a sop to the conservative wing of the GOP that Ike had defeated in winning the nomination. The two barely knew each other, however. There was a 23-year age gap between them. In September, the press revealed that Nixon had a campaign expense account, characterized in headlines as SECRET RICH MEN’S TRUST FUND. Ike’s advisers, fearful of any taint on the war-winning hero, pressured Nixon to resign from the ticket. Instead he made a half-hour television speech, defending his innocence (the account was legal), attacking Democrats (Ike’s rival, Adlai Stevenson, had his own campaign account), and pledging to keep Checkers, a cocker spaniel that a supporter had given Nixon’s daughters. The Republican National Committee got millions of letters, telegrams, and phone calls praising the put-upon Nixon. Ike embraced his feisty running mate.

But their relations never warmed. Nixon was intelligent and hard-working, but too political and ambitious for his old boss. In August 1960, at the end of Eisenhower’s second term and the start of Nixon’s first presidential run, against Sen. John F. Kennedy, the president was asked at a press conference what role Nixon had played in his administration. Had the vice president offered any “major idea” that Ike had subsequently adopted? “If you give me a week,” Eisenhower answered, “I might think of one. I don’t remember.” The Kennedy campaign gleefully used the line in an attack ad. Had Ike meant it as a flat-out diss? Probably not. But he hadn’t made a ringing endorsement either. The 1960 race was razor thin. Could a love-bombing Eisenhower have pulled Nixon over the line? Nixon would have to wait eight more years for a second shot.

The Vice President is a constitutional fixture and a political anomaly—a high official with hardly any defined role; a successor whom the president picks but cannot fire until and unless he runs again. Wallace was a deficient veep whom the president—and almost only the president—liked. Nixon was a work horse the president never truly admired. Kamala Harris seems to enjoy the worst of both worlds: low achievement, low esteem. With Biden determined to run again, will she be replaced a la Wallace, or retained a la Nixon? All the political termites of D.C. will be gnawing on that question.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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The stock market had been falling for a month, slowly at first, then faster. On Friday, October 18, 1929, the decline hastened in heavy trading. On Monday, prices fell again. On Tuesday, they rose a bit, only to plummet on Wednesday. On the morning of Thursday, October 24—the day dubbed “Black Thursday”—prices tumbled so fast that spectators in the gallery began to weep.

At 1:30 that afternoon, Richard Whitney, acting president of the New York Stock Exchange, appeared on the trading floor and strode briskly to Post Number 2, where stocks in U.S. Steel were traded. Tall and distinguished, Whitney stood silent for a moment, with a golden pig—the symbol of his Harvard dining club—dangling from the watch chain encircling his prosperous paunch. He had just convened a meeting of the nation’s most powerful bankers, who agreed to put up $20 million to stop the sell-off and stabilize prices. The room fell silent as traders strained to hear what Whitney would say.

He asked the price of U.S. Steel’s stock and was informed that it had fallen below $200 a share. “I bid 205 for 10,000 Steel,” he responded.

Then he moved to other posts and paid generous prices for other blue-chip stocks. It worked: the market rallied and Whitney became a hero. “Richard Whitney Halts Stock Panic,” read one headline, and tabloids dubbed him the “White Knight of Wall Street.”

The rally didn’t last long—the market crashed five days later, leading to the Great Depression—but Whitney’s fame endured. He served five years as president of the New York Stock Exchange, and became a symbol of America’s old-money, blue-blood elite—first for his coolness in crisis, then for his arrogance and corruption.

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He was born in Boston in 1888, to a family that had arrived in Massachusetts in 1630. His father was a bank president. His uncle and his brother were executives in J.P. Morgan’s financial empire. At Groton, Whitney was captain of the baseball team. At Harvard he rowed on the varsity crew. He married a rich woman and started his own brokerage firm—Richard Whitney & Co.—which, thanks to his connections, became the official broker for the House of Morgan. He bought a five-story townhouse on East 73rd Street in Manhattan and a 495-acre estate in New Jersey, where he raised thoroughbred horses and served as Master of Fox Hounds for the Essex Hunt.

As president of the Stock Exchange during the early 1930s, Whitney found himself battling another graduate of both Groton and Harvard—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When FDR backed a bill to create the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock market, Whitney led the battle against it. The regulations were a “menace to national recovery,” he said, and if they were adopted, “grass will grow on Wall Street.” There’s no need for government regulation, he insisted: “The exchange is a perfect institution.”

Whitney’s lobbying failed to convince Congress, which passed the bill creating the S.E.C. Then Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy—a savvy former stock manipulator himself—as S.E.C chairman, reasoning that Kennedy knew all the dirty tricks of the trade and could therefore crack down on them.

Whitney detested Kennedy as a traitor to the exchange but he admired Kennedy’s financial wizardry. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Kennedy made a fortune importing Haig & Haig Scotch and Gordon’s Gin. Inspired, Whitney decided to get into the booze business. He founded the Distilled Liquors Corporation and began producing an applejack called Jersey Lightning. It failed to catch on. He imported 106,000 gallons of Canadian rye whiskey, but that didn’t sell either. When Distilled Liquors’ stock plummeted, Whitney tried to boost the price by borrowing millions to buy more shares. It didn’t work. Apparently, nobody wanted his booze or his stock. Desperate, Whitney borrowed more money from his wealthy friends to finance various get-rich-quick schemes. But they, too, failed.

So “the White Knight of Wall Street,” started stealing.

Whitney’s first theft was $150,200 in bonds belonging to the New York Yacht Club, for which he served as treasurer. But that wasn’t enough to save his crumbling empire, so he stole from his brokerage firm’s customers—Harvard University, St Paul’s School, his father-in-law’s estate, his wife’s trust fund. And he embezzled more than $1 million from the New York Stock Exchange’s Gratuity Fund. That fund paid benefits to the families of deceased members of the Exchange, so Whitney’s theft, wrote Wall Street historian John Steele Gordon, “amounted, almost literally, to stealing from widows and orphans.”

Inevitably, Whitney’s schemes collapsed. Rumors spread on the street that his company was failing. Officials of the exchange investigated and discovered that Whitney was embezzling from his customers. Undaunted and arrogant, Whitney tried to convince Charles Gay, his successor as president of the exchange, to cover up his crimes.

“I am Richard Whitney,” he told Gay. “I mean the stock exchange to millions of people. The exchange can’t afford to let me go under.”

In Whitney’s heyday, the exchange’s old-boy network might have protected him. But, as Gay understood, in the new era of S.E.C watchdogs, that was no longer an option. So, on the morning of May 7, 1938, Gay announced to the exchange that Whitney and his company were suspended for “conduct contrary to just and equitable principles of trade.”

“Not Dick Whitney!” President Roosevelt said when aides told him the shocking news about his fellow Groton grad. “Dick Whitney—I can’t believe it.”

“Wall Street could hardly have been more embarrassed,” The Nation magazine noted, “if
J.P. Morgan had been caught helping himself from the collection plate at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.”

Indicted for fraud and embezzlement, Whitney pled guilty and was sentenced to 5–10 years in prison. The next day, a crowd packed Grand Central Station to gawk as cops loaded five handcuffed prisoners onto a train bound for Sing Sing Prison—a rapist, two extortionists, a holdup man, and the former president of the New York Stock Exchange.

Whitney served three years and four months before he was paroled in 1941. Barred from the securities business, he managed a family-owned dairy farm in Massachusetts. His wife took him back and his brother repaid every dollar Whitney had stolen.

When he died in 1974, at age 86, his obituary in The New York Times noted the irony that Whitney’s shocking scandal had led to the enactment of the regulations he had fought so hard against: “It hastened the adoption of drastic reforms governing stock market dealings, long pressed by the Securities and Exchange Commission and resisted by an old-guard clique on the Street whose powerful leader had been Mr. Whitney himself.”

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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