On June 24 John Cabot, a Genoaborn English mariner, became the first European since Viking days to set foot in North America, when he landed on what is now called Newfoundland.
Or something like that. An event resembling the one in the preceding paragraph did take place in 1497, but virtually every detail is subject to question. Cabot left no written record of his journey, and the few surviving secondhand sources contradict one another. Even basic biographical facts are skimpy. Records show that John Cabot (or Caboto, Cabotto, Kaboto, Calbot, Caboote, Cabote, or Talbot) was a naturalized citizen of Venice, but his place of birth is uncertain—most likely Genoa, possibly Gaeta. He may or may not have lived in Valencia, Spain, in the early 149Os. In 1496 King Henry VII of England granted him a charter to sail west and monopolize trade, presumably in spices, from what he thought would be eastern Asia. After an abortive journey that spring, Cabot’s ship, the Mathew (or Matthew) departed from Bristol the following year.
Bristol was the natural choice because, according to local tradition, ships had been sailing from there to Newfoundland since the 148Os. Does this mean Cabot was scooped? Some historians dismiss such tales as mere gossip, asking why Cabot would bother to discover something that was already well-known. Yet documents show local merchants outfitting a number of westward excursions before Cabot. Why would they keep going if they hadn’t found anything? Perhaps the North Atlantic’s rich fisheries were the lure.
In any case, the Mathew left Bristol on May 20—probably (a few shaky sources say May 2). It arrived in North America on June 24—probably. Authority for the latter date is an inscription on a map made by Cabot’s son Sebastian, a notorious truth stretcher, forty-seven years after the fact. Nonetheless it is widely accepted, with occasional grumbling about the unlikely speed of crossing it would have required. (A few scholars assert that the year was actually 1494, to general derision.)
Cabot’s point of disembarkation elicits the most controversy. Based on a few scraps of maddeningly vague description, historians have located the site everywhere from Labrador down to Maine, with Newfoundland the most popular choice. Wherever they were, upon landing Cabot and his crew planted English and Venetian flags and then looked around a bit. Seeing cut trees, the remains of a fire, and some dung, which they somehow decided was from domesticated animals, they deduced that the land was inhabited. Pausing to pilfer a few game traps and a double-pointed stick probably used to make nets, they collected fresh water and went back to their ship.
Maybe they hadn’t intended to tarry, or maybe the signs of inhabitants scared them away. One historian suggests it was the mosquitoes. At any rate, once back on board, they spent four more weeks exploring the coast without leaving their ship. They then headed for home, arriving in Bristol on August 6. The king gave cash and a pension to Cabot, who styled himself an admiral, dressed in silks, and was mobbed by well-wishers as he strolled through Bristol.
Cabot’s season of fame was brief. He left on another transatlantic voyage in 1498, and no further record of him exists. A contemporary chronicler says his ship sank, though one conjectural account has Cabot surviving the crossing, trading with Labrador residents, and sailing down to Cape Cod, only to return home empty-handed. Another has him exploring the Greenland coast. As with so much else about John Cabot, the facts will probably never be established, thAigh that won’t stop historians from reshuffling the pieces and coming up with fresh versions of the truth.
1647 No Smoking or Jesuits
Three Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
In late May, New England’s colonial legislatures passed laws to guard against a variety of menaces within and without. On May 25 the legislature of Connecticut addressed a pair of vices that had recently been causing much trouble: tobacco and alcohol. In a convoluted set of regulations, it restricted tobacco smoking to those “allreddy accustomed … to the use thereof,” although a non-addict could qualify by procuring a doctor’s certificate “that it is vsefull for him.” Smokers could not indulge in the streets, nor in the fields or woods unless they were on a journey of at least ten miles or it was dinnertime. They could puff away freely in their homes, but only if no more than one other person “who vseth and drinketh the same weed” was present. And to fight “that great abuse which is creepeing in by excesse in Wyne and strong waters,” the legislators made it illegal to drink in a tavern for more than half an hour at a time—leading, no doubt, to increases in pub-crawling.
The next day, the Puritans of Massachusetts took firm action to combat something they viewed as an even greater threat: Catholicism. Blaming “the great warrs and combustions which are this day in Europe” on “the secrit practices of those of the Jesuiticall order,” the colony decreed that “no Jesuit or eclesiasticall person ordayned by the authoritie of the pope shall henceforth come within our jurisdiction.” Anyone convicted of violating the law would be banished; those who came back a second time would be put to death. The ordinance mercifully excepted Jesuits cast ashore by shipwrecks and those who came on commercial or diplomatic business, provided that they would leave as soon as possible and “behaue themselves inoffenciuely during their abode here.”
And finally, the new colony of Rhode Island took steps to protect itself against Connecticut and Massachusetts. Over the previous decade, four settlements had sprung up around Narragansett Bay, peopled mostly by religious exiles from the adjoining colonies. With their legal status unclear, these settlements were being claimed by their larger neighbors, including the still independent colony of Plymouth. In 1644 Roger Williams, who had founded Providence eight years before, went to England and obtained a charter to merge the settlements under a central authority. After some grumbling—not surprising from a group of committed dissenters—they finally agreed to unite.
On May 21 Rhode Island’s General Court met for the first time in Portsmouth and established the mechanism of a colonial government. It also passed a number of specific measures, such as banning witchcraft and selecting an anchor as the state seal. Burglary was made a capital crime except when committed by children, the insane, or “poore persons that steale for Hunger.” Game playing in taverns was prohibited, and archery practice was mandated (“Forasmuch, as we are cast among the Archers, and know not how soone we may be deprived of Powder and Shott, without which our guns will advantage us nothing …”). The law of slander was set out in great detail, with an eloquent preamble (“Forasmuch as a good name is better than precious ointment, and Slaunderers are worser than dead flies to corrupt and alter the savour thereof …”) and then a long list of particulars, from calling someone a criminal or a prostitute to saying “that a Tradesman maketh nothing but bad wares.” The law for nagging wives, by contrast, was brief and to the point, reading in its entirety: “It is ordered, Common Scoulds shall be punished with the Ducking Stoole.”
1772 The Gaspée Incident
Two Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
On June 9 the British revenue schooner Gaspée ran aground in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay while chasing a suspected smuggler. Word quickly spread among the merchants, sailors, and smugglers of nearby Providence, who, like all Rhode Islanders, hated anything to do with duties and tariffs. The colony’s residents had been attacking customs officers and ships ever since a 1764 sugar tax imperiled local rum distillers, whose product was used to buy slaves in Africa. But they especially resented the Gaspée because of the zeal and high-handedness of its captain, Lt. William Dudingston.
He had started out poorly upon his arrival in February, when he contemptuously refused to show the governor his commission to enforce the customs laws. Since then he had searched even the smallest boats on the flimsiest of pretexts, seized goods illegally, fired on vessels, stolen cattle and lumber from local farmers, and been generally arrogant and haughty. So when news arrived that the Gaspée was sitting helpless on Namquit Point, Providence’s always enterprising citizens seized their opportunity.
That evening John Brown, a wealthy merchant, rounded up about a hundred men—close to 5 percent of Providence’s adult male population—by having someone beat a drum in the street. Shortly after midnight they piled into longboats and rowed out to the Gaspée. When a hastily awakened Dudingston appeared on deck to ask who they were, Abraham Whipple, who captained one of Brown’s slave ships, shouted that he was the sheriff of Kent County, come to arrest him. One of the men in Whipple’s boat shot Dudingston, who fell badly wounded. The Providence men boarded the ship, bound and evacuated the crew (making sure to dress Dudingston’s wound), and set the Gaspée on fire.
Authorities launched an investigation, but though all of Providence knew about the attack, they found no witnesses willing to name names, not even for a whopping thousand-pound reward. One frustrated naval captain beat a confession out of an indentured servant by threatening to whip and then hang him. (This punishment was slightly less severe than what the rioters faced for their treason: being partially hanged, then disemboweled while still alive, then beheaded, then cut in quarters, after which the remains would “be at the king’s disposal.”) A royal commission ruled the servant’s coerced confession worthless. After considering the meager evidence, and in view of Rhode Island’s independent spirit (one dismayed commissioner called the colony “a downright democracy”), it recommended letting the matter drop, which the British government reluctantly did.
Before doing so, the government managed to extract the maximum amount of resentment from the situation. The king had decreed that anyone implicated in the attack would be taken to Britain for trial, and rage over this violation of the right to a trial by one’s peers spread through all the colonies. In the Providence Gazette a letter-writer signing himself “Americanus” vigorously protested the “open violation of Magna Charta” and roused his fellow citizens with these words: “To live a life of slaves, is to die by inches. Ten thousand deaths by the halter, or the axe, are infinitely preferable to a miserable life of slavery in chains.” And in March 1773 Virginia’s House of Burgesses, angered at the “flagrant attack upon American liberty,” established a Committee of Correspondence—the first such body to be officially sanctioned by a colonial legislature. Similar committees sprang up in the other colonies to circulate information and coordinate responses, bringing America another step closer to open revolt.
1897 Sousa’s Greatest
One Hundred Years Ago
On May 14, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, John Philip Sousa premiered his most inspired and glorious march, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” As might be expected, it brought down the house. A joyous audience made the Sousa Band repeat it twice more, and critics in the next day’s papers were just as ecstatic. One called the new piece “stirring enough to rouse the American eagle from his crag and set him to shriek exultantly while he hurls his arrows at the aurora borealis.” As the band continued its tour, reviews in Washington, Baltimore, and Boston were equally enthusiastic, if less eloquent. Only in Toronto did one sorehead, understandably lacking in Yankee patriotism, grumble that it was “rather noisy.”
The components of the march had come to Sousa as he strolled the deck of the steamship Teutonic while crossing from Liverpool to New York the previous November. He filed them mentally, and on Christmas Day, two days before his band embarked on a nationwide tour, he wrote out a piano score. In late April he finished the band arrangement in a Boston hotel and gave it to an assistant for transcribing. The musicologist James R. Smart believes it was first played in public on May 1 in Augusta, Maine, as an untitled encore and may have been repeated at other stops before receiving its official premiere in Philadelphia.
Many critics at the time remarked on the march’s “jingoistic” or “martial” character, which reflected the times (war with Spain was brewing) more than any intention on Sousa’s part. His first set of lyrics had included the phrase “Death to the enemy!” but the official version, published in early 1898 (and as little known today as the real words to “Louie Louie”), omitted the belligerent phrase in favor of purely patriotic sentiments like “The emblem of the brave and true / Its folds protect no tyrant crew.”
Although Sousa was already known as the March King, it took “The Stars and Stripes Forever” to make him immortal. Until his death in 1932, no audience would let him leave the podium without conducting it at least once. The masterpiece is still cherished by Americans everywhere, especially by piccolo players, who would never get noticed at all if not for the shimmering obbligato written for them near its end. (Smart cautiously calls this piccolo passage “one of the most famous in music literature,” in recognition, no doubt, of the many other famous piccolo solos to be found in popular music.) “The Stars and Stripes Forever” is unforgettable for its get-up-and-march rhythms and red-blooded melodies that virtually demand to be air-conducted. Yet in the final analysis, the piccolo obbligato is the piece’s truest expression of the spirit of America—a place where even the tiniest instrument in the band gets a chance to be heard.
Deathless Words
On June 2 Mark Twain, perhaps America’s most original writer ever, gave American journalism one of its sturdiest clichés. Twain and his wife were in London, where they had quietly taken up residence following the death of their daughter Susy the previous August. In a rented house in Tedworth Square, Twain lay low, grieving for Susy and writing what would become Following the Equator. When months passed with no word from him, rumors about his fate started crossing the Atlantic.
On May 8 the Associated Press reported: “The canard circulated in the United States, saying that Samuel L. Clemens, ‘Mark Twain,’ was dead, had not the slightest foundation. Mr. Clemens is in London and in better health and spirits than for a long time past.” But the rumors refused to go away. William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal, sent another reporter to see whether Twain was really “dying in poverty.”
According to the resulting article, published on June 2, Twain “was undecided whether to be more amused or annoyed” at such gossip. He explained that a cousin of his, James Ross Clemens, had been gravely ill in London (though he had since recovered), and that “the report of my illness grew out of his illness.” Twain went on: “The report of my health was an exaggeration. The report of my poverty is harder to deal with.” He said he was besieged with lecture offers but had chosen instead to finish his book.
A few days later a rival New York newspaper, the Herald, sent its own reporter. This time Twain, no doubt weary of the attention, came up with a mildly wry rejoinder: “Of course, I am dying. But I do not know that I am doing it any faster than anybody else.” The Herald solicited donations to relieve his supposed poverty until Twain asked it to stop. At this point the flurry of rumors came to an end, and Twain—who was, in fact, having severe money problems—found other ways to pay off his debts.
In 1912 Albert Bigelow Paine published a biography of the recently deceased Twain, based on Twain’s oral reminiscences. By this point his straightforward factual remark to the Journal correspondent had taken on a sardonic tone. Paine wrote: “A reporter ferreted him out and appeared at Ted-worth Square with cabled instructions from his paper… . His orders read:
“‘If Mark Twain very ill, five hundred words. If dead, send one thousand.’
“Clemens smiled grimly as he handed back the cable.
“‘You don’t need as much as that,’ he said. ‘Just say the report of my death has been grossly exaggerated.’”
And in that form, with minor differences in wording, the anecdote has been passed down ever since. In 1925 the Clemenses’ maid, Katy Leary, included it in her memoirs with greatly substituted for grossly. Virtually every subsequent biography, along with dozens of quotation anthologies, recounts the line using one or the other of these adverbs, or sometimes none at all, with other minor variations from book to book.
Yet all these repetitions are unnecessary, because a typical American already encounters the quip at least once a week. Every time a politician rebounds from an electoral defeat, every time an entertainer returns to the public eye after six months’ absence, every time a sports team wins a game after losing two, deadline-plagued writers nationwide reach for Twain’s allpurpose, ready-made lead (second in popularity only, perhaps, to Rodney Dangerfield’s lament about receiving insufficient respect). In an irony that Twain himself would have had a hard time inventing, the name of this most thoughtful of writers is constantly invoked by reporters too busy to come up with anything fresh—and all because of a marginally funny wisecrack that he probably never made.
1922 The Herrin Massacre
Seventy-five Years Ago
On June 21, labor violence erupted at the Southern Illinois Coal Company’s strip mine near Herrin, Illinois. The United Mine Workers (U.M.W.) was in the midst of a nationwide strike, but it had agreed to let members of the steam-shovelmen’s union remove dirt from the site. In mid-June, however, the shovelmen started loading coal. In the strikers’ eyes, this made them scabs—not a good thing to be in Williamson County, where 90 percent of the work force, even shopkeepers and farmers, held U.M.W. cards.
The fighting began on the morning of June 21 when a truckload of laborers, recruited from Chicago without being told they would be strikebreakers, was stopped on the way to the mine. Accounts differ as to who shot first, but gunfire was exchanged on the road and, shortly after, at the mine. One strikebreaker and two strikers were killed, and a third striker was mortally wounded. Within hours, union men from surrounding communities were flocking to the mine, liberating guns and ammunition from stores as they went.
A brief skirmish convinced the men inside the mine that they were vastly outnumbered. They surrendered and agreed to stop work in return for a promise of safe passage out of the county. On the morning of June 22, some fifty or sixty workers filed out of the mine with their hands up. The strikers began marching them toward town, pausing only to kill the mine’s elderly, one-legged superintendent, whom they held responsible for the previous day’s killings.
After several miles, the column reached a barbed-wire fence. By this time, whatever discipline had existed in the mob was completely gone. The scabs were lined up against the fence and told to run for their lives. As they clawed desperately at the wire, the union men opened fire. Some fell down dead or mortally wounded; others escaped into the woods, where strikers continued to hunt them down. One man saved his life by giving the Elks’ secret sign and finding some fellow members among his would-be murderers. An unlucky few were captured, marched to a cemetery, and shot; those who were still breathing then had their throats cut. The final death toll was twenty-one, with most of the survivors badly injured.
The massacre’s follow-up, while less bloody, was nearly as dispiriting. Prosecutors obtained 214 indictments, but when the first few resulted in acquittals by sympathetic local juries, the rest were dropped. The strikers’ victory was hollow, however. Repugnance over the massacre spread across the country, leading miners to desert the U.M.W. in droves. John L. Lewis, the union’s president, sent his men back to work under the old contract, and the dissension-wracked U.M.W. continued to lose power and membership through the rest of the 1920s.
1947 GI Joe’s Sex Life
Fifty Years Ago
In the aftermath of World War II, Americans in many fields struggled to absorb the conflict’s lessons. Tacticians analyzed its military successes and failures; scientists worked to apply technical advances; diplomats groped toward an understanding of the new global politics. And in the May 1947 American Journal of Sociology, a pair of psychiatrists reported the results of their own wartime research in a paper called “The Sex Lives of Unmarried Men.”
The study’s authors, Leslie B. Hohman and Bertram Schaffner, had given psychological exams to forty-six hundred Army draftees, most of them in their early twenties, during the summer and fall of 1941. Their chief finding: Of the unmarried white men in the sample, nearly 80 percent had already had sexual intercourse. More shocking still, 71 percent of these (or 56 percent of the entire group) had had intercourse with “nice” girls—ones they would have married and introduced to their mother and sister. (All female sex partners other than nice girls were classified as prostitutes.) To readers concerned for what these results said about their daughters’ morals, the authors offered dubious reassurance: “It does not follow from this, of course, that half of all ‘nice’ girls in a community have had sex relations,” since “several men might be reporting intercourse with the same girl.”
Jews (16 percent) and Catholics (19 percent) had lower virginity rates than Protestants (27 percent), but the authors cautioned against a religious interpretation. Many of the Jews and Catholics, they explained, retained “a recent heritage from Latin and Slavic countries” and were quite understandably adopting some American customs less eagerly than others. Perhaps for related reasons, the virginity rate decreased among poorer men and those with less education. Only 12 percent of grade-school dropouts were virgins, compared with 32 percent of college men.
At the same time as Hohman and Schaffner’s study was published, a group of Army medical officers reported their experiences in dealing with the vexing problem of homosexuality among recruits. “To screen out this undesirable soldier-material,” Newsweek said, “psychiatrists in induction-station interviews tried to detect them (1) by their effeminate looks or behavior and (2) by repeating certain words from the homosexual vocabulary and watching for signs of recognition.” But these methods were not completely effective in excluding “inverts”; neither were urine tests for female hormones. Moreover, “frequently, a latent homosexual, who had no knowledge of his predilection, was inducted into the service, only to develop alarming symptoms in camp and on the battlefield.”
Homosexuals who managed to slip past suspicious recruiters, or those whose passions were awakened by barracks life, made important contributions to the war effort despite their “abnormality.” They scored higher in intelligence than the average recruit, and “in spite of nervous, unstable, and often hysterical temperaments, they performed admirably as office workers. Many tried to be good soldiers.”
Still, the Army’s review convinced it of the need for what Newsweek called a “stiff new policy.” Instead of the wartime “blue” discharge, which was neither honorable nor dishonorable, soldiers found to be homosexual would be given an “undesirable” discharge, even if they had not committed any specific offense. But the Army could be lenient when circumstances warranted. To show its appreciation of those homosexuals who had lived through artillery fire, land mines, malaria, and C rations to subdue the Axis despite being “neuropsychiatrie cases,” it allowed that “a few of this group with outstanding combat records might receive an honorable discharge.”
Invaders From Space
On the afternoon of June 24, a group of supersonic spacecraft from an alien planet, most likely Mars or Venus, appeared in the vicinity of Mount Rainier in Washington State. A private pilot from Boise, Idaho, named Kenneth Arnold spotted them and told a local newspaper. The next day a report of “nine bright saucerlike objects flying at ‘incredible speed’” went out over the AP wire. The incident attracted little notice outside the Northwest for a couple of days; since flying saucers were still unheard of, no one knew what to make of it. The news eventually got out, though, and by early July sightings were pouring in from across the country.
The invading aliens displayed a shrewd grasp of human behavior. They realized that each genuine sighting would trigger dozens of hoaxes or mirages, calling the whole phenomenon into question. For additional protection, they built their spacecraft in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. They took care to emerge from their ships only in the presence of mentally unstable people, who they knew would not be believed. In the rare cases when they crashed, the invaders were able to disguise the remains as downed weather balloons, broken ashtrays, furnace slag, cymbals, and clumps of dirt. And they prudently broke off their first series of fly-bys after two weeks, knowing that to be the life span of a typical fad.
The visitors covered their tracks so well that polls showed most people thought the flying saucers (or “celestial crockery,” as The New York Times called them) were a secret military project, either American or Soviet. Similar events had attracted brief flurries of interest in the past, including a mysterious glowing airship over California in 1896–97 and the luminescent, disk-shaped mirages that World War II pilots called “foo fighters.” Those episodes were quickly forgotten, but this time the subject would not stay quiet for long. A number of fresh sightings in 1948 received widespread publicity, and as earthlings started taking their own first steps into space, unidentified flying objects (or UFOs, as they were soon called) became a nationwide craze. Books and movies proliferated as the extraterrestrials continued their sporadic visits, dropping by most often during times of great national stress or after articles on UFOs appeared in national publications.
Some scholars believe that aliens now live among us, pointing to the anomalies surrounding the Kennedy assassination and the mysterious Pet Rock craze of the 1970s (in fact, just about everything that happened in the 1970s). Regardless of who’s right, repeated waves of sightings over the decades have spawned accusations of a massive government cover-up, diminishing confidence in elected officials and the military. All part of the aliens’ plan, no doubt.
