Hernando de Soto had a noble ancestry, wealth, fame, good looks, and a lust for gold. This last quality dominated his life. After his lucrative plundering of Peru, the Spanish crown granted de Soto the title of governor of Florida in 1538. He sailed from Spain with a volunteer force and landed at Tampa Bay on May 30, 1539.
Pursuing rumors of gold fields, de Soto’s 550-man army cut its way through the swamps and forests of the Southeast, slaughtering or enslaving any Indian tribes that resisted. De Soto was a man who could, in the presence of Dominican friars, mutilate the face of an Indian prisoner before killing him, yet piously observe mass the next day. His party celebrated the first Christmas in what would become the United States.
The expedition accumulated a grisly record of cruelty. Ironically, no gold was found in three years of campaigning before de Soto died at the mouth of the Arkansas River in 1542. A year later his men finally left North America for Spain, equally infamous and emptyhanded.
1789
Two Hundred Years Ago
Middle-class New Yorkers led by a furniture and wallpaper dealer named William Mooney founded the Society of Tammany on May 12, largely in opposition to the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of upper-class former Revolutionary War officers.
Tammany began as a fraternal and charitable brotherhood with arcane Indian rites, but its social antagonisms soon brought it into the political arena on behalf of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party. By 1805 it controlled the New York Democratic party, and it would do so off and on for more than a century, even after the name of Tammany Hall virtually came to define corrupt big-city machine politics. Reformers hindered Tammany throughout its history, often ineffectually but in the end fatally, killing it off for good in 1961.
1864
One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
General-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant was unique among Union commanders in that he conducted the war with only one goal: to destroy Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of the Tennessee. Grant’s plan was simply, as he wrote, “to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources until by mere attrition, if by nothing else, there should be nothing left.” Grant sent Gen. William T. Sherman against Johnston in Georgia and went after Lee himself, beginning with the Battle of the Wilderness of May 5 and 6.
Grant began the campaign with 11#,000 troops that were as well fed and well equipped as Lee’s 62,000 were not. Anticipating Grant’s move on Richmond, Lee maneuvered his army so that the Federals would have to attack in the Wilderness, a dense, eerie forest in northeastern Virginia. Lee hoped to repeat the whipping he had given Joseph Hooker under similar conditions at nearby Chancellorsville the year before, and for a while it looked as though he might. Grant’s advantages in artillery and manpower were all but useless in the junglelike conditions of the Wilderness, but he decided to fight anyway, and for two days the armies clashed blindly among the forest’s undergrowth. Since it was impossible, in the murky haze of combat, to see an enemy even yards away, wounded men were usually left where they fell to die in one of the battle’s many fires. The advantage turned back and forth several times, but the battle had ended in a virtual stalemate by the time both sides decided nothing more could be gained there.
The Confederates lost eight thousand men in the two days; the Army of the Potomac lost about eighteen thousand and looked beaten again. Troops on both sides expected Grant to fall back for regrouping in the pattern of McClellan and Hooker. But Grant, in the strategic turning point of the war, instead ordered his men around the Confederates’ right flank, continuing the drive to Richmond and leaving his reinforcements to catch up. Despite the hammering they had taken, when they learned that for once they were advancing instead of retreating after a fight, Grant’s men cheered their general.
Lee intercepted Grant’s army about eight miles away at Spotsylvania Courthouse and threw up fortifications with lightning speed. Grant again forced the issue, and the twelve-day battle that followed was perhaps the fiercest of the war. The Federals broke through the center of the Confederate line on May 12, but their disorganization and Confederate reinforcements saved Lee’s forces from a disastrous splitting. As Grant and Lee poured men into this “Bloody Angle,” the fighting grew so intense that musket balls completely cut through a twenty-two-inch-thick oak tree. The Union colonel Horace Porter described the battle as “chiefly a savage hand-to-hand fight across the breastworks. Rank after rank was riddled by shot and shell and bayonet thrusts, and finally sank, a mass of torn and mutilated corpses; then fresh troops rushed madly forward to replace the dead; and so the murderous work went on.”
On May 18 Grant again drove south around Lee’s flank. The war continued along these lines through the month, Grant prodding his army south and Lee keeping his between Grant and Richmond. In the month after beginning the campaign, the Union army lost fifty thousand men, almost double the Confederate losses. But while Grant’s resources were seemingly limitless, Lee was down to the last men and supplies the Confederacy could give him. Lee knew his arithmetic; when he saw that Grant would no longer allow the Union army to let up the pressure on him, he knew he would need a miracle. For the rest of the war his strategy would be to fight defensively in the hope that a political upheaval in Washington would call Grant off. When the Republican party renominated Lincoln on June 7, and Union advances through the summer in Georgia and Virginia boosted the President’s popularity, it became clear that the Confederacy would get no miracles.
∗Two New York journalists earned a prominent place in the annals of wartime profiteers on May 18. Joseph Howard, city editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, had noticed that bad war news caused New York’s financial markets to sag and the price of gold to rise; if he could anticipate bad news, he could make a quick fortune. Howard hatched a plan with a reporter named Francis Mallison to forge an Associated Press dispatch reporting dire news from the White House. President Lincoln, the dispatch said, was calling for a national day of “fasting, humiliation and prayer” on May 26 and compounding the nation’s trauma by drafting four hundred thousand more men. In preparation for Wall Street’s reaction, Howard bought as much gold as he could on margin, under several different names.
Most of the newspapers that received the bogus AP dispatch checked the story with Washington and, finding it false, discarded it. Two papers, however, the New York World and the Journal of Commerce, yielded to deadline pressure and ran the news. The stock market collapsed as expected, and the price of gold jumped by 10 percent.
The scheme, according to one observer, “angered Lincoln more than almost any other occurrence of the war period,” and he moved with uncharacteristic rashness, ordering both newspapers seized. He regretted this overreaction two days later, when the trail of evidence implicated Howard and Mallison, clearing the newspapers. The swindlers spent nearly three months in prison before Lincoln himself ordered their release. Though Henry Ward Beecher had petitioned the President on behalf of the prisoners, Lincoln was acting in his own interest as well. When the hoax broke, Lincoln had on his desk a genuine proclamation ordering the draft of three hundred thousand men; he delayed its release for two months after seeing the public’s reaction to similar news.
1889
One Hundred Years Ago
On May 7 the Johns Hopkins Medical Hospital was dedicated in Baltimore. The hospital’s benefactor, Johns Hopkins, had been a banker and railroad executive in Maryland who decided to administer his fortune “for the good of humanity.” His seven-milliondollar bequest in 1867 provided for the joint construction of a hospital and medical school run on the most advanced European principles. The Johns Hopkins Medical School opened in 1893 and revolutionized the training of doctors. Most American medical schools had been little more than trade schools that accepted even high school graduates; after a year or two of lectures, students were free to practice medicine, though many had never even touched a real patient. Johns Hopkins from the beginning required a college education and a demanding entrance examination from its applicants, and its students learned medicine both in labs and at patients’ bedsides. Within a decade Johns Hopkins became one of the country’s preeminent centers for medical care and research.
∗On May 31 the Conemaugh Reservoir’s dam collapsed after heavy rains, unleashing a thirty-six-foot wall of water through the Conemaugh Valley in southwestern Pennsylvania. Residents of Johnstown, the valley’s largest town, had ignored warnings from engineers upstream that the dam was about to collapse. The flood killed more than twenty-two hundred people in ten minutes.
Earlier the rains had caused minor street flooding, in which children on holiday from school were frolicking when the deluge hit that afternoon. Survivors would later remember a torrent that “crushed houses like eggshells,” preceded by a black fog later known as the death mist. Most victims never saw the water coming, only heard its thunder. Indeed, it seemed more like an explosion than a flood to those who made it to higher ground. The water was hidden among a grinding mass of lumber, glass, barbed wire, dead cattle, and human bodies; the air was filled with a deafening roar, flying debris, and the terrifying black mist. Wreckage that accumulated under a nearby bridge caught fire that night; one journalist described it as an inferno that burned “with all the fury of the hell you read about—cremation alive in your own home … dear ones slowly consumed before your eyes, and the same fate yours a moment later.”
Hundreds of people would never be found; many hundreds more would never be identified. The flood washed away fully 10 percent of the population of the valley.
∗Andrew Carnegie spent the first half of his life amassing one of the largest fortunes in history. In the June issue of the North American Review, he explained why he would spend his remaining years giving it away.
“Rich men should be thankful for one inestimable boon,” Carnegie wrote in an article titled “Wealth.” “They have it in their power during their lives to busy themselves in organizing benefactions from which the masses of their fellows will derive lasting advantage, and thus dignify their own lives.…” But Carnegie was far from advocating revision of the capitalist system that allowed men like him to reap immense fortunes. He wrote: “Individualism will continue but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself.”
Carnegie fulfilled the promise he made in his article, distributing $350,000,000 among a variety of educational and cultural institutions in his lifetime. He explained his charities this way: “The man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away ‘unwept, unhonored, and unsung,’ no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be: The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.’”
1914
Seventy-five Years Ago
President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Mother’s Day on May 10. The idea of setting aside a day each year to honor the mothers of a nation may be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, but the American holiday owes its origins almost entirely to the efforts of one woman, Anna M. Jarvis.
Jarvis’s mother had spent almost thirty years trying to organize an annual memorial to mothers; upon her death in 1905 her daughter undertook this mission with inspired tenacity, organizing services in her native West Virginia and writing thousands of letters to public officials across the country.
The governor of North Dakota issued the first Mother’s Day proclamation in 1908, and within three years every other state had done the same. President Wilson’s proclamation made the second Sunday in May, the anniversary of the death of Anna Jarvis’s mother, a national holiday in “expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”
Anna Jarvis had seen her dream fulfilled, but she was soon disillusioned by America’s enthusiasm for her holiday. She would spend most of the rest of her life fighting the inevitable influence of commercialism upon the holiday she had established. She incorporated Mother’s Day and sued florists and confectioners who sought to profit from the holiday, a quixotic gesture at best. By 1948 she was penniless, blind, and nearly deaf, depending upon public support. The mother of Mother’s Day died that year in a sanitarium near Philadelphia, embittered at a world she believed had corrupted the celebration of motherhood.
1939
Fifty Years Ago
The immediate success National Comics enjoyed in 1938 with Superman inspired its editor to introduce another costumed superhero in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics. The new character was a crime-fighting avenger called the Batman, and like Superman, he was an instant sensation.
Early sketches of Batman too closely resembled Superman, so the editors added bat ears and a hood to his costume. They need not have worried about comparisons. Batman was a complete original. As drawn by Bob Kane and written by Bill Finger, the first Batman comics evoked the atmosphere of the era’s gangster films, presenting its hero as a ruthless vigilante who hounded criminals by exploiting psychological weaknesses, especially fear of the night. An orphan driven to crime fighting by memories of the murder of his parents, the early Batman was not above simply gunning down a lawbreaker.
Huge success in the comics and a whimsical 1960s television show sanitized Batman’s original image, but they also popularized some of the most inventive villains in the comic genre, among them the Penguin, the Joker, and the Riddler.
1964
Twenty-five Years Ago
On May 30 A. J. Foyt won the fortyeighth Indianapolis 500 with an average speed of 147.35 miles per hour. A fiery crash on lap two piled up seven cars and delayed the race almost two hours. It was Foyt’s second of four victories at Indy.
