A treaty of peace, ending the eight years of warfare between the Colonies and England, was signed in Paris on September 3. It began: “In the name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity. It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of the most serene and most potent Prince George the Third, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith … and of the United States of America, to forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore; and to establish such a beneficial and satisfactory intercourse between the two countries, upon the ground of reciprocal advantages and mutual convenience.…
1858 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
“Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” Many joyful sermons were preached on these words of the Psalmist in August: the first cable had been laid across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Old World was in telegraphic communication with the New. Back in 1843 Samuel Morse had predicted “with certainty” that this would happen. In 1854 Thoreau had observed that Americans were “eager to tunnel under the Atlantic,” but he was not impressed with the idea; England and America might have as little to say to each other as Maine and Texas.
The feat was incredible, given the technology of the time, and it is due almost entirely to the heroic perseverance of one man, Cyrus West Field. He began to raise money for the project in 1854. The first try was in 1857 when a British ship, the Agamemnon, and an American, the Niagara, tried several times to lay a cable (seven strands of copper wire twisted together and weakly insulated) between Ireland and Newfoundland. It always broke at sea. In 1858 they rendezvoused once more in mid-ocean, spliced the cable, and went their ways. The Niagara sailed west, the Agamemnon east. Three times the cable broke, three times it was repaired. On August 5 Field radioed his success from Newfoundland: 2,350 miles of cable were intact on the floor of the Atlantic.
On August 16 a ninety-eight-word message was sent by Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. It took sixteen and a half hours to get through, but this seemed like a miracle of speed and efficiency. Field was the toast of the continent. On September 1 the line went dead. Field was now called a fraud, and there was some suspicion that the whole thing had been a fake from the start.
Undaunted, Field began again. This time the cable was played out from the largest ship afloat, the steamer Great Eastern, and on July 29, 1866, New York received this message from Newfoundland: “We arrived here at 9 o’clock this morning. All well. Thank God the cable is laid and in perfect working order. Cyrus W. Field.”
AUGUST 21: The first of seven Lincoln-Douglas debates is held in Ottawa, Illinois.
AUGUST 23: The temperance drama Ten Nights in a Barroom opens in New York City. Second in popularity only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it included the famous song “Father, Dear Father, Come Home With Me Now.” It ran, on and off, for a century.
1933 Fifty Years Ago
The Blue Eagle—the American thnnderbird with outstretched wings- began to appear in office and plant windows in August, soaring above the proud motto “We Do Our Part.” This was the emblem of the National Recovery Administration established by Franklin Roosevelt in the hope that American industry, in a spirit of selfless concern for the commonweal, could and would regulate itself, stop destructive competition, rehire the jobless, and stimulate spending. Congress suspended the antitrust laws for two years and authorized the formulation of legally enforceable industrial codes designed to shorten hours, raise wages, and so forth. The public was urged to boycott businesses operating without the Blue Eagle and, to some extent, it did.
Roosevelt appointed Gen. Hugh S. Johnson to lead the NRA. Johnson, with great prescience, was not optimistic: on his appointment he remarked that “it will be red fire at first and dead cats afterwards. This is just like mounting the guillotine on the infinitesimal gamble that the ax won’t work.” His angry war against “chiselers,” as he called them, was not conducive to a spirit of cooperation with the industrialists, and Roosevelt forced him to resign after a year. The United States Supreme Court declared that the NRA was itself unconstitutional (Schechter v. United States) in May 1935, on the grounds that Congress had delegated too much power to the code authorities. The defendants, four brothers who were engaged in slaughtering chickens in New York City, were not involved in interstate commerce.
AUGUST 2: Carl Hubbell of the New York Giants pitched his forty-fifth consecutive scoreless inning.
AUGUST 18: Lou Gehrig breaks the record for consecutive games played: 1,308.
1953 Thirty Years Ago
On September 14 appeared Sexual Behavior in the Human Female by Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, and Gebhard of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. It caused quite as much stir as had the companion volume on men, published five years earlier- more of a stir, perhaps, for those were days before the media had made fodder as familiar as the television listings of women’s hopes, fears, troubles, and joys. And it was then a given that only men talked openly about sex. That women consented to answer Kinsey’s questions was in itself something of an innovation. “Neither younger girls nor older women discuss their sexual experiences in the open way that males do,” said Kinsey.
He described his book as a “much more human document” than its predecessor. He meant by this that he wanted to root his statistical findings in a context of emotional and social reality itself immune to numerical description. Some of this (rightly or wrongly) would today be dismissed out of hand: a woman, he concluded, marries “to establish a home, to establish a long-time affectionate relationship with a single spouse, and to have children whose welfare may become the prime business of her life.” A man is more likely to marry because of “passion.” He held that women seldom daydream about sex and are less readily stimulated by the mere sight of the loved one, and he cited, in support, the one-sided nature of pornography. His claim that there was no such thing as purely “physical” frigidity is more likely to be accepted by contemporary researchers.
In commenting on the book for Life magazine, the novelist Kathleen Norris expressed amazement that it took years of research to establish that women are “less susceptible to sex impulses and less enslaved by the urge for sex experience than men are. … There is not a woman in the world who has not been aware of it since her earliest teens.” But Fannie Hurst looked forward instead of back. “It is, of course, conceivable that with women’s economic independence only in its infancy, security may some day come to mean something different from mere security-in-trousers. … the social revolution through which we are now muddling will find its middle of the road. And the Kinsey reports will likewise find their quiet and deserved place in the march of knowledge.”
SEPTEMBER 21: A North Korean pilot lands his MIG near Seoul and wins the $100,000 reward promised by Gen. Mark Clark, the United Nations commander.
SEPTEMBER 30: President Eisenhower names Earl Warren Chief Justice of the United States.
