Battle-weary and convinced there was nothing to be gained from continuing to fight, Great Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, ending the War of 1812. It had been a tense year for the American peace mission. Albert Gallatin, the American Secretary of the Treasury, and the Federalist senator James Bayard of Delaware had pined John Quincy Adams in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1813 only to learn that Britain had refused Czar Alexander’s mediation. It would be August of 1814 before the British would come to the table, in Flanders, where Jonathan Russell and Henry Clay joined the American delegation.
The United States had declared war while the British were struggling with Napoleon in Europe, and now, with the French emperor vanquished and exiled, England was in the mood to punish its remaining enemy. “There is no public feeling in the country stronger than that of indignation against the Americans,” reported the London Times. As veterans of the Napoleonic wars boarded vessels bound for North America, British conditions for peace included a revision of the Canadian border and an independent state for their Indian allies at America’s northwest frontier. The shocked American delegation, which had been instructed to accept no treaty that did not abolish impressment of American sailors by the Royal Navy and had even hoped to persuade the British to give up Canada, rejected the proposal.
Cramped living conditions only compounded the frustrations the five Americans shared at the negotiation table. Clay smoked vile cigars, emptied countless bottles of wine, and gambled until daybreak, just as John Quincy Adams was rising in the adjoining room for his daily Bible study. Bayard, who found the commissioner from Massachusetts “singularly cold and repulsive,” was probably the best friend Adams had in Ghent. Still, Henry Adams wrote later, “the whole British public service, including Lords and Commons, could not at that day have produced four men competent to meet Gallatin, J. Q. Adams, Bayard and Clay on the ground of American interests.”
While the American negotiators held firm through the autumn of 1814, the London government was losing interest in the war. Continuing to fight would require an extension of the hated British property tax, which was due to expire in a few months. As Continental powers maneuvered to fill the power vacuum left by Napoleon’s abdication, the British government began to feel uneasy about having its best regiments in a stalemated war an ocean away.
By November members of Parliament routinely condemned the war, and the Americans had decided to set aside all grievances and seek a peace that simply preserved the existing borders. With impressment off the table, the British agreed, and the two nations signed the Treaty of Ghent on Christmas Eve. Though the agreement left the remaining disputes to be settled by joint commissions in later years, it initiated a new relationship with Great Britain that would make the U.S.-Canadian border the longest unguarded frontier in the world.
1889 One Hundred Years Ago
The Chicago Auditorium, designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, opened to the public on December 9. It immediately ranked as one of the city’s architectural masterpieces. Chicago’s Commission on Architectural Landmarks would later cite “the community spirit which here joined commercial and artistic ends, uniting hotel, office building, and theater in one structure…and the genius of the architect which gave form and, with the aid of original ornament, expressed the spirit of festivity in rooms of great splendor.” In 1947 the Chicago Auditorium Building became the home of Roosevelt University.
“Wherever you see the big white electric light, with its carbons burning, you may know that death lurks overhead,” wrote Alexander Welsh, an assistant to Thomas Edison, of the enveloping tangle of electric wires that plagued New York City in 1889. “Nearly every wire you see in the open air is thick enough and strong enough to carry a death-dealing current. … A man ringing a door-bell or leaning up against a lamp post might be struck dead any instant.”
By year’s end Mayor Hugh J. Grant had seen enough of injury and death by electrocution in his city. The December 28 issue of Harper’s Weekly reported that after “loss of life so wanton that the whole country looked upon New York with amazement,” the city had begun to clear away its mesh of dangerous wires by the mayor’s order. “New-Yorkers seem to allow the streets to be abused and obstructed and neglected in every way without peremptory protest or a definite consciousness of rights,” lamented the magazine.
Crowds flocked in December to Thomas Edison’s Fifth Avenue headquarters in New York City to see the world’s first electrically lighted Christmas tree.
1914 Seventy-five Years Ago
Watch Your Step, the first of many musicals by Irving Berlin, opened at the New Amsterdam Theater in New York on December 8. Though one critic praised the show’s “mad melodies…born to be caught up and whistled at every street corner, and warranted to set any roomful a-dancing,” its most memorable song was the ballad “Play a Simple Melody.”
Theodore W. Richards became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry on December 10. Richards earned the award for his exact measurements of the atomic weights of several elements, work that would lead to modern atomic research. The Harvard professor declared himself especially thrilled to learn that iron in the earth had the same atomic weight as iron from meteorites, a discovery that gave him “an added realization of the unity of the universe.”
1939 Fifty Years Ago
The governor of Georgia declared a state holiday. The mayor of Atlanta urged the men of his city to grow Kentucky-colonel whiskers and the women to wear hoop skirts. Citizens were requested not to tear off the clothes of the visitors from Hollywood. With the Stars and Bars waving from every building in Atlanta, three hundred thousand people lined the streets to welcome Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and David O. Selznick to the December 15 opening of the motion picture Gone with the Wind.
Despite the problems associated with bringing Margaret Mitchell’s thousand-page Civil War novel to the screen, Gone with the Wind was too popular for Hollywood to ignore. The film took three years, four directors, a dozen screenwriters, and four million dollars to produce in time for its lavish opening in the seventy-fifth anniversary year of the fall of Atlanta.
From the beginning Clark Gable had been the natural choice to play Rhett Butler, but the search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara became a national obsession. Two years of polls, auditions, and screen tests finally turned up the British actress Vivien Leigh; Southerners protested that a Southern actress should have been chosen, but they were relieved that at least Leigh wasn’t a Yankee. The casting of Scarlett O’Hara remains one of Hollywood’s most cherished legends. Reported Time, “Vivien Leigh had not petted and pouted on the screen for five minutes before the fussy Atlanta audience was ready to underwrite Selznick’s choice of the little-known English actress to be the Southern belle.”
Selznick’s final problem was in getting one of Clark Gable’s lines past the censor. The Hollywood Production Code, which prohibited representations of nudity, venereal disease, and extreme violence, also barred profanity. Selznick complained to Will H. Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, that preview audiences had been disappointed by the omission of Rhett Butler’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Selznick pointed out that “on our very fade out it gives an impression of unfaithfulness after three hours and forty-five minutes of extreme fidelity to Miss Mitchell’s work.” Hays allowed the line to stay in the film.
Selznick’s fears about the linguistic and historical authenticity of Gone with the Wind were swept away with the applause, whistles, and tears of the Atlanta audience. “I feel it has been a great thing for Georgia and the South to see the Confederates come back,” said Margaret Mitchell at the premiere. But the producer still wondered whether the film was good enough to earn a profit on his investment. “At noon I think it’s divine, at midnight I think it’s lousy,” Selznick said. “Sometimes I think it’s the greatest picture ever made. But if it’s only a great picture, I’ll still be satisfied.”
1964 Twenty-five Years Ago
On December 4, FBI agents arrested nineteen men, most of them members of the Ku Klux Klan, on charges of conspiracy to murder three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The disappearance in June of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had alarmed the nation because the three young men had been working to register black voters in Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman were white. The discovery in August of their bodies revealed they had been murdered and put pressure on the federal government to prove that it could enforce civil rights laws in the South.
Among those arrested in December were the sheriff of Neshoba County, his deputy, an ex-policeman, and a clergyman. Though U.S. attorneys initially failed to get the case sent to a grand jury, they were able to win indictments against the conspirators the following January in Jackson, and in October of 1967, after more than two years of litigation, a Mississippi court convicted Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and seven of his codefendants for the murders, the first jury conviction of white officials and Klansmen for crimes against black people or civil rights workers in Mississippi. But it was only a beginning. “It’s tragic,” Rita Schwerner had said upon the disappearance of her husband, “that white northerners have to be caught up into the machinery of injustice and indifference in the south before the American people register concern.”
The Cleveland Browns, led by the dominating running of the fullback Jim Brown, defeated the Baltimore Colts 27-0 on December 27 to win the National Football League championship.
Notable works of fiction in 1964 included the best-selling novels Herzog by Saul Bellow, The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carré. The year in books also saw a legend begin to form around the memory of the slain President John F. Kennedy, in the form of a flood of biographies, collected speeches, and pictorial histories. Scores of other books on civil rights and the national election reflected America’s concern with the political scene Kennedy had left behind. But perhaps the literary event of the year was the posthumous release of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. The book’s twenty autobiographical sketches, adapted from notebooks Hemingway kept in the 1920s as a young writer in Paris, displayed for one last time the mix of affection, humor, and brutality that had always characterized Hemingway at his best.
