William Henry Harrison, the Whig who had defeated the incumbent President Martin Van Buren in the election of 1840, died of pneumonia on April 4, after only four weeks in office. Harrison had delivered his inaugural address in a severe March chill, speaking for an hour and forty minutes. Afterward the sixty-eight-year-old President developed a lingering cold that grew into pneumonia. A month to the day after his swearing in, he was dead. Mrs. Harrison, who was also ill, had not yet even taken up residence in the White House. Harrison’s Vice President, John Tyler, arrived in Washington just as the sun rose on the day of the funeral. Although the constitutional rules for succession were still in doubt, Tyler took the oath of office at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, in time to attend the funeral as President.
“We were all a little mad that winter,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, looking back on the winter of 1841, when his transcendental theories had inspired New England gentry to take up communal farming. “Not a man of us did not have a plan for some new Utopia in his pocket.” The first of these communities was established early in April, when George and Sophia Ripley and a number of their Boston friends rode nine miles out to settle a West Roxbury farm under the principles articulated in Emerson’s Nature. One settler had been converted not by reading Emerson but while setting one of George Ripley’s articles about him into type. At the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, labor was going to be efficiently shared according to personal preferences, and everyone would have time left over to hear visiting lecturers and contribute to the collective’s magazine, the Harbinger.
The young novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne came to the farm later that first month, having quit his job at the Boston customhouse. He invested $1,000 with the Ripleys, hoping to write in the evenings and eventually to save enough to marry his fiancée, Sophia Peabody. A snowstorm met his arrival at Brook Farm, and after six weeks working the manure pile (the “gold mine” to the farmers), he complained to his future wife, “It is my opinion, dearest, that a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.”
Hawthorne had often been fined at college for skipping chapel, and he never became a favorite at the farm. He lasted until August and was unable to get back all of his $1,000 from the Ripleys when he left. Although the farm was not thriving, general disaffection had not yet set in, and notable speakers continued to visit, among them Margaret Fuller and Emerson himself. It wasn’t until 1843 that the farm began to fall apart. Hawthorne sued and was awarded his remaining $530, plus legal expenses, in 1846. In August of the following year the colony finally dissolved completely, leaving the Ripleys with all the farm’s debts. “I can now understand,” said George Ripley, “how a man would feel if he could attend his own funeral.” He would continue to edit the Harbinger out of New York City until 1849, when he became literary editor at Horace Greeley’s Tribune.
“No other public teacher lives so wholly in the present as the Editor,” wrote Horace Greeley, who, though not the author of the phrase for which he is best remembered—“Go west, young man”—did found a great newspaper, the New York Tribune, whose first issue appeared on April 10.
Greeley had come to New York City as a twenty-year-old, with twenty-five dollars and a few belongings in a bundle. He already had one apprenticeship at a failed newspaper behind him, and he took typesetting jobs at several New York papers before starting his own journal, The New-Yorker, in 1834. His first paper failed, but not before winning acclaim for being lively and evenhanded. Greeley went on to edit various political weeklies before founding his Tribune in a city that already supported twelve dailies. The paper’s object, he wrote in his memoirs, was to become “a journal removed from servile partisanship on the one hand, and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other.” The Tribune would survive its founder by almost ninety-five years.
1866 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
To revive its Civil Rights Act of 1866, vetoed in late March, the Senate on April 9 mustered its first override ever of a presidential veto. In part a response to the Supreme Court’s notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision as well as to the black codes being enacted by many Southern legislatures, the act guaranteed the rights of citizenship for “all persons born in the U.S. and not subject to any foreign powers, excluding Indians not taxed …”
1916 Seventy-five Years Ago
On April 5 Charles Spencer Chaplin became the highest-paid star in Hollywood when he signed a one-year contract with the Mutual Film Corporation for the sum of $670,000. Just three years earlier the English actor had left the London vaudeville stage to make his first one-reeler for Mack Sennett. “Well,” Chaplin declared upon signing, “I’ve got this much if they never give me another cent—I guess I’ll go and buy a whole dozen ties.” In another two years the Little Tramp would sign with First National for one million dollars.
Throughout much of April newspaper readers followed reports of scouting patrols of National Guardsmen pursuing the Mexican nationalist Francisco (“Pancho”) Villa and his followers across the desert. The going was often dogged. Pack mules sank knee-deep into the sand; the terrain was bewildering, and captured enemy troops denied ever having seen Villa. The hunt became so frustrating that when the U.S. Cavalry discovered fresh snow tracks in the mountains, it made the front pages.
Maj. Frank Tompkins thought that he knew where Villa was, and his scouting party set out in search on April 2 only to be attacked ten days later by rioting Villistas at Parral, Mexico. The riot expanded to a skirmish between the Americans and Mexican government troops stationed there. Tompkins took a bullet in his shoulder in the initial fighting.
As his outfit attempted to ride north out of the town, the government troops made a final charge—“without formation, hell-bent-for-election, … yelling like fiends,” as Major Tompkins described it, and “making a … beautiful target.” A second cavalry troop arrived and put an end to the fight. Major Tompkins returned to General Pershing’s headquarters without Villa.
Ever since Porfirio Diaz had been forced out of power in 1911, competing revolutionary factions had been fighting for control of Mexico. While the faction warred, President Wilson assembled Latin American leaders to advise his State Department in choosing among them. The Five Power Conference recognized Gen. Venustiano Carranza as de facto president in October 1915, provoking Villa’s particular ire. He struck on January 10, 1916, at Santa Ysabel, killing sixteen American engineers, and soon four hundred Villistas attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico. It was a week after that that General Pershing’s six thousand troops followed Villa’s men into Mexico.
Combat was rare. Villa, who President Carranza said was “everywhere and nowhere,” liked to hit fast, then retreat into the fathomless mountains. Although Villa himself always escaped Pershing’s traps, one of the general’s young officers, George S. Patton, Jr., managed to hunt down and kill his bodyguard. “We have a bandit in our ranks,” announced Pershing. “This Patton boy! He’s a real fighter.” In eleven months of campaigning, Pershing’s scouts never found their man. The U.S. Army finally retreated north in time for Carranza’s formal election, on March 11, 1917.
1941 Fifty Years Ago
In April Charles A. Lindbergh became a national political figure as the star member of the America First Committee. He had already made known to Congress his pessimism about France and Britain’s chances against Germany, and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, had written a curious book, The Wave of the Future, dreamily equating totalitarian and democratic “sins.”
On April 17 in Chicago Lindbergh made an address for America First. He said Britain was doomed. In New York five days later he followed by announcing, “France has now been defeated,” and urged America to be pitiless in both cases.
As soon as Lindbergh joined the committee its membership swelled from three hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand. The flier became a worry to the administration, for unlike the committee’s other famous members—professional pacifists and movie stars and a millionaire publisher—he was a national hero seemingly above personal interest. Lindbergh, for his part, said it especially pained him to be working side by side with pacifists when he’d rather be fighting a war he could believe in.
After unsuccessfully offering Lindbergh a new cabinet post as Secretary of Air, Franklin Roosevelt thought of another way to silence him. At a press conference, Roosevelt was asked about “calling up” Lindbergh, an Army Air Corps reservist, and quieting him that way. The President instead compared the flier to Clement L. Vallandigham, the Civil War congressman who had been arrested and sent into the Confederacy for making speeches compromising the security of the North. Lindbergh resigned his commission in the Air Corps on April 28, after a tortured weekend of writing and revising a letter to the President. “I take this action with the utmost regret,” he wrote, “for my relationship with the Air Corps is one of the things which had meant most to me in my life. I place it second only to my right as a citizen to speak freely to my fellow countrymen …”
Lindbergh did not resign his membership in America First but kept making speeches right up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, after which he grew silent and faded from public notice.
1966 Twenty-five Years Ago
In April Dr. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson published the results of eleven years’ research in their book Human Sexual Response. The volume would become a national best seller despite writing technical enough to require a glossary and too dry to please readers hoping for descriptions more colorful than those of “reacting units” experiencing “tension increment.” Masters and Johnson reported on 382 female and 312 male volunteers who had been observed in thousands of couplings as well as alone. The volunteers all came from the St. Louis area. They were paid for their trouble.
Dr. Masters, who had worked previously in obstetrics and gynecology, had begun studying prostitutes in the mid-fifties. He then recruited Virginia Johnson, a psychologist, and discovered that ordinary people could be persuaded to submit their sexual lives to clinical scrutiny if interviewed by a man and a woman together in a scientific environment.
Many reviews of Human Sexual Response expressed shock that human sex had been directly observed and frustration with the authors’ cool jargon. But the book was well received, and the researchers took their case to television talk shows. “Science by itself has no moral dimension,” Masters told one reporter. “But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built.”
On April 28, with twenty-five seconds remaining before his Boston Celtics won their eighth straight National Basketball Association championship, their coach, Red Auerbach, who had announced his retirement, lit up a cigar. The gesture set off a celebratory roar throughout Boston Garden. The only drama in this seventh and final game of the championship came in the last seconds, when the Los Angeles Lakers drew within two points of the Celtics for the only time all night. The game ended 95-93, making Auerbach’s Celtics champions for the ninth time in ten years, an accomplishment unique in professional sports. Bill Russell, who scored twenty-five points in the game, would double as a player and the National Basketball Association’s first black coach the following year.
