George Washington received a jackass from the King of Spain this month. His Highness didn’t intend it as an affront, nor did the retired general interpret it as one; in fact, Washington was delighted. The master of Mount Vernon had learned of the “longevity and cheap keeping” of mules and, being an avid experimenter, had decided to breed a strain that would render the farm horse obsolete. Because most American mules were uselessly small, the stock for the animal Washington envisioned would have to come from abroad, and from Spain, if possible, where there existed a variety of jackass so prized for its size and strength that exporting it for breeding was forbidden by a royal edict.
Of course such prohibitions didn’t apply to the king himself, and when Charles III heard of Washington’s interest, he shipped over two fine specimens from his own stables, one of which died en route. Royal Gift, as the surviving jackass was named upon its arrival at Mount Vernon, was just what Washington hoped for; it stood “about 15 hands high.” Washington readied thirty-three mares for Royal Gift’s attentions.
But when Royal Gift was first led to stud, he didn’t condescend to notice the mare; over the following months, none of the others proved able to arouse his interest either. Perhaps the beast’s aristocratic heritage prevented him from partaking of “republican enjoyments,” Washington commented; the jack seemed “too full of royalty to have anything to do with a plebeian race.” In fact, the general knew that Spanish jackasses due to be exported are often damaged to make them unfit for breeding. If Royal Gift had been tampered with, he remarked, “I shall have no disinclination to present His Catholic Majesty with as valuable a present as I received from him.”
By June 1786, however, Washington had devised a means to jolt the jackass from its indifference: “A female ass which I have obtained lately, has excited desires in the Jack to which he almost seemed a stranger,” he wrote to a friend. “Making use of her as an excitement, I have been able to get several mares served.”
Not until another year had passed would Washington be able to say of Royal Gift: “He never fails.” During those months, the animal’s fastidiousness caused continuing problems. Washington dryly noted them in a letter to Lafayette: “The Jack which I have already received from Spain, in appearance is fine. But his late royal master, tho’ past the grand climactiric [sic], cannot be less moved by female allurements than he is. Or when prompted, can proceed with more deliberation and majestic solemnity to the work of procreation.”
Despite his inauspicious beginnings, Royal Gift would one day be credited by some as the source of the large mules upon which Southern agriculture depended for over a century.
1885 One Hundred Years Ago
On the afternoon of December 8, the world’s wealthiest man collapsed on the floor of the study in his Fifth Avenue mansion and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. William H. Vanderbilt, financier and “Colossus of Roads,” had ruled a web of rail that spun from New York to Buffalo and from there to points west, southwest, and beyond. He was a hard man, “public be damned” arrogance, unsavory business dealings, and all. But he had learned in a hard school.
As the eldest son of Cornelius, the Commodore, the self-made multimillionaire, William was expected to enter and eventually take over the family business. As a youth, however, his sickliness and only average abilities so enraged his father that when he was twenty-one, the Commodore banished him with his wife to a small Staten Island farm. When William mortgaged the land to enlarge his holdings, his father reportedly said: “You don’t amount to a row of pins … I have made up my mind to have nothing more to do with you.” William struggled on, adding 280 acres to the original 70 and steadily increasing his profits.
Slowly the Commodore began to take notice of his eldest son. Needing manure to fertilize his farm’s sandy soil, William once asked his father to sell him some, at four dollars a load, from the stables of one of his horsecar lines. Without defining the term load, the Commodore agreed, knowing that price to be above the market value. The next day he saw William at the dock setting out for Staten Island with a scow loaded with dung.
“How many loads have you got on that scow, Billy?” asked the Commodore, delighted to have bested his son.
“How many?” responded William. “One, of course … I never put but one load on a scow.”
A workman nearby who observed the scene later said, “The Commodore wa’n’t no gret hand to stan’ around, and I never see him stan’ so long before as he stood that afternoon on the dock, looking at the scow goin’ across the harbor.”
Shortly after the bankruptcy of the Staten Island Railroad in 1857, William was appointed its receiver, and within two years he had returned it to financial health. It was this victory that finally prompted the Commodore to recognize his son’s business acumen. Plucking William from his farm, the senior Vanderbilt made him vice-president of the New York & Harlem Railroad and installed him in a Manhattan mansion. Two-thirds of William’s life had passed by: he was fortythree and reputed to be a bitter man.
Over the next decade the Commodore’s trust in his son grew until, upon his death, he left William the bulk of his fortune. When William himself died that December afternoon, he had outlived his father by only eight years, but within that time had doubled his nearly $100 million inheritance. The long-suffering son honored his father to the end.
• December 2: The first volume of Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs becomes available.
1935 Fifty Years Ago
They were drawn like moths to the lights of New York City: amateur fiddlers and piano players, singers, tap dancers, and yodelers, mimics and comedians from all over the country. Many sold their properly to pay for the trip, some hitchhiked, and others rode freight trains into town. Their object: to audition for what was declared the nation’s favorite radio program on December 1—“Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour.”
Aired on more than sixty NBC stations coast to coast, the Sunday-evening program was hosted by Maj. Edward Bowes, a radio veteran whose showmanship was exceeded only by his knack for making money. He began each show with the line that became its trademark: “Around, around she goes,” he intoned, referring to the wheel of fortune, “and where she stops, nobody knows.” During the carefully rehearsed program, about eighteen amateurs would perform; listeners responded by phoning in to vote for their favorite act. What made the show especially entertaining, however, was the practice of cutting short bad routines with the clang of a gong. “Amateur Hour” capitalized on people’s tendency to enjoy the embarrassment of others.
It capitalized on the Depression too. By December 1935, after less than a year on the air, more than fifteen thousand poverty-stricken hopefuls applied to audition for the show each week, but only about six hundred were heard and eighteen ultimately selected (one of whom was a New Jersey boy named Frank Sinatra). What happened to all of those ukulele strummers and brass bands from places like Minot, Wichita, and Birmingham? Until they gave up on being called back by the studio and could manage to return home, they were fed and housed at New York City relief stations. Some twelve hundred amateurs requested food and shelter in September 1935 alone.
Those who went on the show—many of whom were unemployed professionals—were taken to an eat-all-you-want dinner beforehand and then were handed ten dollars, far under the current minimum for radio talent. Bowes’s overhead was thus negligible, and he took home much of the $7,500 paid weekly by the show’s first sponsor, Chase & Sanborn’s Coffee. With touring vaudeville shows spawned by “Amateur Hour” and such sidelines as Major Bowes highball glasses, alarm clocks, and fabrics, Bowes was grossing $30,000 a week by September 1936. Long before his show expired at his death in 1942, he became one of the richest men in radio; most of his performers remained among the poorest.
• December 5–15: Having set a precedent by crossing Antarctica by plane, the aviator and explorer Lincoln Ellsworth and his pilot find they have run out of gas sixteen miles from Little America, their destination. After wandering on snowshoes for ten days, they reach their goal. Ellsworth becomes the first man to have traversed both the top and the bottom of the world.
• December 16: The Frick Collection, displayed in the Fifth Avenue mansion of Henry Clay Frick, opens to the public. Critics are delighted that the public will see the works of art in the industrialist’s magnificent former home.
• December 28: The Works Progress Administration opens the WPA Federal Art Project Gallery in New York City.
