When Marian Anderson died recently, obituaries of the great American contralto recalled how, in the spring of 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to give a recital in Constitution Hall, their auditorium in Washington, because she was black, and how Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, offered her the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where she sang out-of-doors on Easter Sunday.
I was present at another outdoor recital that Miss Anderson gave. Though it’s less famous, it too sums up a moment in American history. The date was July 10, 1944; the place, Lewisohn Stadium, in the West 14Os in Manhattan. The stadium, which was torn down some years ago, served a dual purpose: during the academic year it was the football field of City College, and in the summer it was a music bowl. The popularly priced summertime stadium concerts made a notable contribution to the musical life of the city while they lasted. I imagine the musicians to whom the concerts gave summer employment were as pleased to be there as the capacity crowd—about twenty thousand—who turned out to hear the famous singer.
In my recollection the night sky was as velvety as Miss Anderson’s voice. New York City wasn’t as noisy during the Second World War as it is today —gasoline rationing cut down traffic on the ground, and there was no civilian traffic in the air—so the audience was very much aware of a commotion outside the stadium, sirens and car horns competing with the orchestra. But the interruption was brief, and we settled back to listen to the music until the intermission. The musicians put down their instruments, and the audience began to stand and stretch. Then the microphones picked up another, smaller, backstage to-do. Everybody turned to look. Out strode a very odd couple—New York City’s stubby, barrel-shaped mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia, and the leader of the Free French, Gen. Charles de Gaulle, looking like Cleopatra’s Needle, the Egyptian obelisk behind the Metropolitan Museum in Central Park.
The audience, astonished and thrilled, started cheering. We knew that de Gaulle was in the city after having visited Washington, where he had conferred with President Roosevelt, and from our cheering you could tell that we wished their talks had ended the long diplomatic dissension between FDR and the Free French leader. They hadn’t; they had just settled a few issues that arose after our forces had landed in Normandy a month earlier. We couldn’t accord de Gaulle formal diplomatic recognition, but we gave him an ovation. Eventually the mayor calmed the demonstration and said a few words. The conductor raised his baton, and, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic, Marian Anderson led us in singing the Marseillaise.
She was a tall woman, and, like many singers, of substantial size. She was wearing a bright-blue dress that glistened in the stage lights. Standing beside each other, the trio ought to have looked comic: besides the disproportion of their shapes and sizes, none was beautiful by the standard of Hollywood movies or Greek statuary. But they didn’t look funny; they looked noble. Each was a great person in a different way, and at that moment their greatness embodied all the idealism of the Second World War. The black woman, the French general, and the populist mayor led us in celebrating the beginning of the liberation of France, and more besides; our singing together expressed our hope that men and women of diverse nationality, ancestry, race, and talents would soon celebrate peace in freedom and harmony.
I was young that summer—I was working in New York between my junior and senior years in college— and I was to hear Miss Anderson many more times. I remember when she broke the color bar at the Metropolitan Opera singing Ulrica in Verdi’s Masked Ball. Yet her performance of the Marseillaise remains a beacon in my memory. When she struggled against prejudice she was struggling for all Americans, and when she sang for de Gaulle and France, she was singing for all humanity.
—Naomi Bliven writes for The New Yorker.
STORM WARNING
The saying has it, “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine,” and in my case it’s all too true, even though it’s been nearly thirty years since those brief three I spent on active duty with the 2d Marines.
In what history will regard as peacetime just before the war in Vietnam, I served with a few men who became lifetime friends and many others who earned my deepest professional respect and admiration.
Far from the least of these latter was a young corporal. He was a Rifle Squad Leader in H Company, 2d Battalion, 2d Marines (“Horrible Hog” of “Two-Two”) of which I was the executive officer for about six months in 1963.
During those six months I had the chance to observe this corporal at close quarters. He was a recruiting-poster . Marine, tall, broad-shouldered, blond, and, like most of us then (sigh!), very fit. Buy beyond appearance, his performance was truly outstanding. He had qualified every year as a Sharpshooter with the M-14 rifle. He led his thirteen-man squad by example, joining them in all the dirty work.
He was demanding in a quiet, efficient way, the sort of Squad Leader who, after spending Monday through Thursday training in Camp Lejeune’s distant fields, forests, and marshes and then hiking fifteen miles back to the barracks, would remain in the squad bay with his men well into the evening, cleaning and squaring away gear and weapons until everything was absolutely shipshape. Then he’d fall his men in for a formal squad rifle inspection, a highly unusual event in any company.
Both his rank and the fact that he was married were extremely uncommon for a first-enlistment Marine. It was plain he loved the Marine life, and he made it clear that he intended to make the Corps his career. Other squad leaders and even platoon sergeants noted his performance, appearance and his quiet, intelligent demeanor and quickly strove to improve their own to avoid suffering by comparison. Because of all this, Horrible Hog was a very good company in which to work.
In August 1963 I transferred to H&S (Headquarters and Service) Company of Two-Two and joined the operations staff as battalion training officer—a nice, indoor job with very little heavy lifting or camping out in the rain. I began to lose contact with most of the noncoms from Horrible Hog.
In the fall the annual training cycle wound down and there was time to get caught up on courts-martial. There were three kinds, the commonest being the Special Court Martial, a panel of about five company-grade officers who heard the evidence, rendered a judgment, and passed a sentence, typically a reduction in rank and/or forfeiture of pay and benefits for a month or so, and sometimes confinement either to quarters or in the brig.
All the company-grade officers in Two-Two were assigned to one or another of the Special Court Martial panels, known as “boards,” and cases were assigned to boards that did not contain the accused’s supervisors. It was, then, a complete coincidence that in November 1963 the Special Court Martial Board of which I was a member was assigned to hear the charges being brought against the same young corporal from H Company whom I had so admired. The charges themselves were as unusual and unexpected as the identity of the accused. The typical Special Court Martial heard charges of Unauthorized Absence (what other services call AWOL) over and over with boring familiarity, once in a while theft or brawling, but almost always UA, usually by a lovesick twenty-year-old who’d just had to visit sweet Lucille in Pittsburgh.
But the corporal was charged with some highly unusual offenses our board had never heard brought before: possession of two rounds of 7.62-mm rifle ammunition, possession of a weapon, to wit “a small caliber pistol,” ten counts of “lending money for profit,” and orally threatening to kill a fellow Marine. These charges might seem serious enough to a person unfamiliar with the Marine Corps environment of 1963, but to those of us on the board they were baffling.
The charge of possession of 7.62-mm ammunition (the standard Marine issue for the M-14 rifle) was truly bizarre. In Camp Lejeune, rifle ammunition was as common as pine straw. I doubt if there was a footlocker tray on the base that didn’t contain a few rounds. Ammunition and shell casings were used as paperweights and doorstops.
“Possession of a weapon” was almost equally surreal. We all possessed weapons: M-14 rifles, M-60 machine guns, rocket launchers, mortars, pistols, flame throwers, grenades, knives and bayonets, not to mention the nearby tanks, artillery, and fighter aircraft. A “small caliber pistol” was simply no big deal.
“Lending money for profit.” Young enlisted Marines in 1963 and, I suspect, in any year since the Corps was founded in 1775, were chronically short of cash. Their pay was ridiculously low and, even though their food, housing, and uniforms were provided by a grateful nation, they did have incidental expenses such as weekly haircuts, shoe-shine gear, brass polish, civilian clothes and the like, and beer and a pizza once in a while. Even the most naive among us knew that such Marines sometimes borrowed money from their fellows who, in turn, would be unlikely to lend if they couldn’t profit from the transaction.
Gambling in the service was, of course, unheard of.
Threatening to kill a person might sound daunting to a civilian, but in the course of the usual dialogue between 1963 Marine noncoms and the privates and PFCs under their command, it was probably a milder threat and was never taken literally.
The corporal pleaded guilty to all counts except the last, explaining to the court that all he had threatened to do to the party of the second part was “kick his teeth out.” The court went into closed session and the members scratched their collective head and wondered aloud what we could never have asked in open court: What in the world was going on? We concluded that this heretofore picture Marine had somehow managed to seriously alienate either his 1st sergeant or company commander, who had then decided to teach him a lesson.
We had no choice. We found him guilty of all counts except the last and sentenced him to be reduced to private and thirty days’ restriction. This was as mild a sentence as our board ever handed down and was received stoically by the defendant.
Life resumed at Two-Two and very shortly thereafter, my two-year cycle with the battalion being over, I lost touch with it and never did learn the story behind the corporal’s (now private’s) court-martial. When I was released from active duty six months later, at the end of my three-year commitment, I learned that the former corporal had decided not to pursue a career in the Marines and was asking to be released early so he could enroll at the University of Texas. This request was later granted.
I should mention that except when addressing or talking about one’s peers, first names were rarely used by Marines of that time. So it was that in August of 1966 when a lone rifleman went to the twenty-seventh-floor observation tower at the University of Texas and shot dead thirteen passersby, wounding thirty-one others before being himself shot dead by a police team, despite the fact that it was reported sensationally in the news media (which revealed he had also shot dead his young wife and his mother before going to the tower), the name Charles Whitman didn’t strike a responsive chord in me.
We concluded that this heretofore model Marine had somehow seriously alienated his commander.
Then the following week’s Time magazine was delivered and I glanced at the cover and saw a familiar, handsome face. My first reaction was, “What’s Corporal Whitman doing on Time’s cover?” Then I realized in a rush of horror that Corporal Whitman and Charles Whitman were the same person and that the mayhem in far-off Austin had been caused by a person I knew very well. I still get a shiver when I think of seeing that magazine cover for the first time.
The autopsy of the former Cpl. Charles Whitman, USMC, an architectural engineering student at the University of Texas, revealed a “pecan-size” brain tumor that had evidently caused his aberrant behavior. One doesn’t know whether to feel worse about the young man who had once shown such brilliant promise and whose life had ended so tragically, or about his poor anonymous victims.
—John F. Grimm lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
LONG JOHN
When I was growing up in the thirties in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there was a lot of antagonism between Yankee and Irish. I knew because my family was Irish immigrant on one side and Empire Loyalist on the other. All my friends were Irish Catholic, and the nuns at my school sometimes called me “spawn of the devil.” I was used to defending myself from all sides.
On Sundays my friends and I would go to museums just to get out of the house, and we always followed the same path; we were very ritualistic eleven-year-olds. First we would visit the art museum, where we would stand in front of each painting and count to a hundred, then the University Museum, the Civil War Memorial, and what we called the Chinese Gate. We’d finish by rolling down an incline by one of the Harvard dorms.
One spring Sunday in 1939 we were standing in front of the Civil War Memorial when one of the other girls decided to get my goat. She was relatively new in the neighborhood and was always trying to knock me down in order to move up in the group. Pointing down the street to a pink brick building, she asked, “Do you know what that is?”
Not wanting to admit our ignorance, the rest of us didn’t say anything.
“That,” she said, “is the German Museum. And do you know what they have in there? Naked statues!”
“No!” we cried.
“That’s right. Naked statues.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.
“Well, you know,” my dear friend Dorothy said, “they are Protestants, and Protestants will do anything.”
Dorothy saw the look on my face and started to apologize, but something in me snapped. “That is precisely why there are no naked statues,” I said. “Because this is Harvard, and Harvard is Yankee, and Yankees are Puritans, and Puritans don’t keep naked statues. So there!” I spun around and walked away.
Normally Dolores, our leader, walked first, but this time I led. Dolores was fuming, and by the time I stopped at the top of the incline she kept walking, and the other girls followed.
“Hey,” I said, “aren’t we going to roll down the hill?”
“Oh, no,” Dolores said. “We’re getting too old for that.”
“Well, I’m rolling down the hill.” Down the hill I went, so furious I was rigid. When I got up, I must have looked like a grasshopper. I rolled down the hill a second time. I was miserable, but I was determined to show them. I got up and decided to roll down the hill once more, just to keep them all waiting.
I started up the incline when I heard someone above me yell out, “Hey, kid, your drawers are showing.” My skirt was hiked up over the ugly pink bloomers I had inherited from my grandmother.
This was more than I could bear. I turned around and saw a student looking out one of the windows of the dorm. I ran up to him jumping up and down and shaking my fist at him, and shouted, “You, you damn Yankee, you—”
One of the other girls said, “Dorothy O’Toole, you’re swearing.”
“No, I’m not,” I said, “My grandmother always says ‘damn Yankee,’ and she never swears.”
Then the fellow said, “Well, what makes you think I’m a Yankee? I’m as Irish as you are.”
I knew this was stupid, because if he were Irish, he’d be at Boston College, not Harvard, so I said, “Well, if you’re so Irish, what are you doing in there? What’s your name?”
“John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
“Oh,” I said, “one of those—the ones who go to see the Pope every summer. Well, a fat lot of good it’ll do you.”
I was still so mad I was jumping up and down; he was just laughing. So I said, “From now on you will be known as Long John Kennedy.”
With that I turned on my heel and walked off, pink bloomers and all, with all the little dignity I could muster.
—Dorothy T. Singh is a retired nurse living in Bay City, Michigan.
THE SECRET ROOM
The early 1930s were not good to my grandmother. About all she had left were her memories of her childhood at the old home place. In Grandmother’s case the old home place was a farm outside of Glasgow, Kentucky. This was the center of her universe and now, in 1937, we were all going on vacation there for a visit.
People today accept a vacation as a God-given right, but in the Depression a vacation was a major event to be planned, discussed, and saved for. Those going were my grandmother, my mother, myself, and our boarder. Mother and Father had divorced, and the boarder had been with us for the past seven or eight years and was considered one of the family. He would do most of the driving and pay for the gasoline.
As I counted off the days, Grandma made the wait even longer by telling me that when we reached Glasgow I would see a big secret. I’d ask, “What secret?” but she would only say that I would have to wait.
I’d like to say that the trip down to Glasgow from Louisville was all fun and excitement, but that would be far from the truth. Less than twenty miles out of Louisville, the family found out that I had car sickness. By the time we reached Glasgow I was a hot, sick, and irritable little boy who was making life miserable for all around him.
Then the second blow fell: I saw the old home place. I had expected it to look like a Georgia plantation with high columns and wide verandahs. But the house was none of this. Its current owners had not been able to spare a lot of money for upkeep, and to a city boy used to urban newness, it seemed shabby and rundown.
But there was a cold pitcher of lemonade and an electric fan in the living room. Grandma asked if I would like to see the bedroom. I didn’t really want to see a bedroom, but I was pushed upstairs and into a chamber dominated by a large bed and little else. The headboard of the bed stood solid into the rear wall, and my grandmother told me I was to push against the top left of it. After one missed push, I made part of the headboard slide back into the wall.
The owner of the house came upstairs with a flashlight, and I looked into my first secret panel. I was told I could go in, but all I could see was cobwebs, and I decided I could see all I wanted from the bed. As I shone the light in, Grandma told me that this passage went around the chimney and was three feet wide by three and a half feet tall. The only way in or out was by way of the bed.
Grandma explained that after thinking hard on the subject, her granddaddy had decided that slavery was wrong. Being a man who acted on his beliefs, he had built this room and become part of the underground railroad, helping runaway slaves to freedom.
Then Grandma gave a warning. Although the Civil War (or rather the War Between the States) had been over for more than seventy years, feelings for the lost cause still ran high. If the purpose of the secret passage were known, we might no longer be socially accepted in Glasgow. I had to promise never to say a word about it.
That night and for a number of nights after, I dreamed of being Great-Great-Granddaddy’s helper taking those slaves toward freedom. Mother and Grandma promised that we could come back again to see more of the farm’s secrets; but it was not to be.
The 1930s kept us too poor for another vacation, and then came Pearl Harbor. The boarder was drafted and later came home to marry my mother. Grandma did not get back to Glasgow until the late 1940s. By then the owners had sold the property, and the house had been torn down for an industrial plant. Granddaddy’s secret passage was gone forever.
I never knew my grandmother’s granddaddy, or any of the blacks he helped to spirit North; but occasionally in dreams I still go back to Glasgow to help Great-Great-Granddaddy.
