In a November 11 news item titled SUGAR HANDY AID FOR A-BOMB VICTIMS, Science News Letter reported that America’s resourceful sugar industry had found a promising new atomicage market for its product: “future atom bomb victims.” According to the magazine, Dr. Robert C. Hackett of the Sugar Research Foundation had told a conference that “dextran, a water-white mucilaginous compound produced only from sugar by the action of certain bacteria… could be used as a substitute for blood plasma,” which would be in great demand in the vicinity of ground zero. In addition, invert sugar (“a liquid mixture of dextrose and levulose easily made from common sugar”) would make an ideal food “for patients who cannot eat and must be nourished by solutions injected into their veins.”
A week earlier, the same publication had passed along some encouraging news about the biological effects of nuclear war. At a conference in London, scientists had agreed that “rays from atomic bombs would not cause any more grotesque types of human being than those now known, but mutations would simply occur more often.…Atomic warfare would not give rise to new and fearsome races of human monsters in future generations.” As Dr. G. C. Catcheside, a genetics researcher at Cambridge University, explained: “Geneticists would not expect any more bizarre types following irradiation (as at Nagasaki and Hiroshima) than would turn up naturally.” The magazine reported this reassuring conclusion under the headline NO NEW TYPES OF FREAKS.
1925 Seventy-five Years Ago
The Rhinelander Trial
On November 9, in White Plains, New York, proceedings began in the trial of Alice Beatrice Jones, who was being sued by her husband, Leonard Kip Rhinelander, for annulment of their marriage. The groom was the scion of one of New York City’s oldest and wealthiest families, while the bride was the daughter of a New Rochelle cabdriver. They had secretly married the previous fall, and when Rhinelander’s father found out, he quickly sent a lawyer to whisk the youngster away. Now the Rhinelanders were trying to annul the marriage on the grounds that Alice had hidden a terrible truth: She was “colored and of colored blood.”
The charge would be difficult to prove because on two occasions before their marriage Rhinelander and Alice had shacked up in a New York City hotel, the first time for a week and the second time for two weeks. Rhinelander admitted that he knew his wife’s skin was “dark” and had seen her father, who was considerably darker, but he said that he thought they were Spanish or perhaps that her father was a white man with jaundice. (Alice’s parents had emigrated from Britain, where her West Indian father and white mother had been servants on an estate.)
The trial lasted more than three weeks, with the high point coming on November 23. First some particularly explicit letters from Rhinelander to Alice were read (a reporter characterized one of them as “obscene throughout most of its length”). The judge had invited the female spectators to leave the courtroom beforehand, and when only a quarter of them did so voluntarily, he ordered the rest to be removed. Later that morning, before a small group in the privacy of the jury room, Alice removed part of her clothing to reveal the color of her skin, since her face was lighter than the rest of her.
This incident gave rise to one of the strangest episodes in the history of American journalism. No cameras were allowed in the jury room, which created a problem for the pictureheavy New York Graphic, a short-lived newspaper published by the eccentric self-improvement guru Bernarr Macfadden. The Graphic’s resourceful editors responded by inventing the “composograph,” a low-tech version of today’s Photoshop retouching software. First they photographed a group of people with a bare-backed female model in a mockup of the jury room. Then artists cut the heads from photos of the judge, the jury, the lawyers, and Rhinelander and pasted them over the heads of the people in the picture. The Graphic sold an extra 100,000 copies that day.
As the trial drew to a close, White Plains sportsmen offered odds as high as five to one that Rhinelander would win, based on the belief, it was reported, “that a jury of twelve white men would not compel Rhinelander to maintain the responsibilities of husband to the daughter of a mulatto taxi driver.” In his closing statement, Rhinelander’s attorney, Isaac Newton Mills, a former state senator and state supreme court justice, appealed directly to such sentiments. “There isn’t a father among you,” he said to the jury, “who would not rather see his son in his casket than to see him wedded to a mulatto woman.”
Mills portrayed Rhinelander as a confused and backward youth who was preyed upon by Alice. Though just a few years older, he said, Alice was much more sophisticated, since “women of her race mature quickly and often are mothers at fifteen.” Mills portrayed Alice as a “vampire” whose mother had “sent her two younger daughters out to capture white husbands for themselves.” The Johnnie Cochran tactics were not successful; after 12 hours of stormy deliberations, the jury found for Alice. The Rhinelanders proceeded to dissolve their marriage in Nevada, then known as a haven for easy divorces, with Alice receiving a payment of $31,500 plus $300 a month for life.
185O One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
The Nashville Convention
On November 11, delegates from the Southern states assembled in Nashville, Tennessee, to discuss the recent congressional acts regarding slavery. Assorted speakers advocated responses that ranged from sullen acquiescence to a commercial boycott to outright secession. Resolutions bristled with Southern defiance against Northern encroachments on the region’s rights, institutions, and very way of life. Yet for all the delegates’ bluster, very few Southerners paid any attention to the convention, and those who did generally mocked it. The failure of the South to rally behind the Nashville rhetoric revealed how effective the Compromise of 1850 had been in defusing, or at least deferring, the nation’s sectional tensions.
Those tensions had already been mounting for two years when Mississippi’s legislature proposed a Southern convention in October 1849. By June 1850, when the convention first met in Nashville, disunion seemed a real and imminent possibility. Even so, only nine states sent delegates, and many of them were chosen by informal or irregular means.
The June session passed a number of resolutions, the most important of which proclaimed the right of Southerners to settle in any territory with their slaves. In what some delegates considered a betrayal of this sacred principle, however, the convention offered to accept an extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. This would have split California into two states, one slave and one free, and made New Mexico (including present-day Arizona) a slave territory. Expecting congressional action on this issue, the delegates agreed to meet again six weeks after Congress adjourned.
By the time they reconvened in November, things had changed dramatically. The death of President Zachary Taylor had removed the biggest roadblock to the compromise’s passage, and California was admitted as a free state, with a strengthened fugitive slave law thrown in to placate the South. Outside of hard-line South Carolina, where secession fever was strong, most Southerners reluctantly decided to accept the compromise, though with a firm determination to make no more concessions, and only if the North made genuine efforts to enforce the new law on fugitive slaves.
By fall, only extremists saw any need to reassemble the Nashville Convention. Just seven states showed up this time, including a single delegate from Virginia. Very few leading politicians chose to attend. Instead of attracting a cross section of parties and views, November’s Nashville meeting turned out to be a rump of a rump.
Supporters of the Nashville meeting compared it to the Continental Congress, with oppressed citizens bypassing the established government to safeguard their liberty. Critics found it more similar to the infamous Hartford Convention, at which New Englanders opposed to the War of 1812 had set forth their grievances to an uninterested nation. Still, despite the derision with which it was met, the Nashville Convention was not a complete failure.
One of its accomplishments was to give members of the emerging secessionist movement a chance to meet like-minded men from across the region. Even more important, though, Southern fire-eaters learned that any attempt to build consensus on a radical course was likely to end in failure. Ten years later, when the sectional crisis came to a head again with the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina would not pause for consultation but would boldly take the lead and defy the other states to follow it.
1825 One Hundred and Seventy-Five Years Ago
The Wedding of the Waters
On November 4 the Hudson River steamer Chancellor Livingston, gaily decorated and towing a canalboat named the Seneca Chief, arrived in New York Harbor. The elegantly furnished Washington, filled with New York City dignitaries, hailed the Chancellor Livingston with the traditional inquiry “From whence came ye?”
“An escort from Lake Erie!” was the reply.
“Where bound?”
“To the Atlantic!” And the cheers were deafening, for the brief colloquy showed that after eight years of construction, at the cost of more than seven million dollars, New York State had finally managed to unite the Atlantic seaboard with the continent’s rich interior.
In the 182Os, as had been true for centuries, virtually all long-distance transportation had to take place by water. Railways were still in the future, and roads, where they existed, were bumpy and rutted at best, all too often turning into quagmires of mud. But with a canal, horses could tow boats on an unbroken “road” of unvarying smoothness, allowing freight to travel from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, to New York in half the time and at one-tenth the cost.
The Seneca Chiefs trip from Buffalo had amounted to a 10-day party, with banquets, light displays, bands, fireworks, artillery salutes, and endless speeches at no fewer than 30 towns along the way. After arriving in New York City, Gov. De Witt Clinton, the canal’s doughtiest supporter over the previous ten years, poured a barrel of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic off Sandy Hook to symbolize the “Wedding of the Waters.” Vials of water said to be from the Amazon, Columbia, Danube, Gambia, Ganges, Indus, La Plata, Mississippi, Nile, Orinoco, Rhine, Seine, and Thames were also emptied. Forgetting their quarrel of a decade before, British tars played “Yankee Doodle” and West Point cadets responded with “God Save the King.”
There was a parade, of course, with nearly every church, school, fire company, and social organization in the city represented. Butchers, cobblers, bakers, tanners, and other tradesmen proudly manned floats in their work clothes. As the parade progressed from the Battery to City Hall, coopers assembled barrels, including one labeled “Neptune’s Return to Pan” that would be filled with Atlantic water for the Seneca Chiefs westbound trip; printers produced copies of a ceremonial ode (“The monarch of the briny tide / Whose giant arm encircles earth / To virgin Erie is allied / A bright-eyed nymph of mountain birth”), which were tossed to the crowd of spectators; and many other workers demonstrated their crafts, though not, thankfully, the butchers.
Samuel Latham Mitchill, a distinguished physician and naturalist and a former representative and senator, made a florid speech in which he imagined the spirit of freedom and progress, as embodied in the canal and its waters, evaporating and raining down on the farthest corners of the earth. Through this agency, “at length even the sable and savage tribes dwelling in the tracts bordering on Senegal, the Gambia, and the Congo, shall lay aside their ferocity and enjoy, as we ourselves do, Liberty, under the guidance of the Law.” In fact, since slavery was still legal in New York, the Africans might well have declined the offer.
The Erie Canal’s heyday was brief, for beginning in the 183Os, railroads took an increasing portion of its business. Yet its role in connecting East and West did not end when its freight traffic began to drop. For decades after its opening, virtually every big canal, bridge, road, and railway project in the country was overseen by an Erie Canal veteran or somebody who had trained with one. In this way, the Erie Canal, along with the military academy at West Point, established the profession of civil engineering in America.
1800 Two Hundred Years Ago
Washington Under Construction
On November 17 Congress assembled for the first time in the brand-new city of Washington. No quorum was present in either chamber, so the opening of business had to be postponed until the eighteenth in the House and the twenty-first in the Senate. On the afternoon of the twentysecond, President John Adams delivered his annual message. (It was the last time a President would read his address in person until 1913, and no great loss either, for the protocol of the day required both houses to return the favor by calling on the President to make an address of their own, to which the President had to reply with yet another elaborate speech.) At the beginning of his address, Adams congratulated the government on its successful relocation from Philadelphia and predicted hopefully that “although there is cause to apprehend that accommodations are not now so complete as might be wished, yet there is great reason to believe that this inconvenience will cease with the present session.”
Writing to her sister on November 21, the President’s wife, Abigail, was less diplomatic: “I arrived about one o’clock at this place known by the name of ‘the city,’ and the Name is all that you can call so!” As expected, she found mostly “trees and stumps in plenty”; the nearest village, Georgetown, was “the very dirtyest Hole I ever saw for a place of any trade or respectability of inhabitants.” On her way from Baltimore she had gotten lost and traveled “16 or 18 miles [with] not a village. Here and there a thatched cottage without a single pane of glass, inhabited by Blacks.”
The President’s house was “twice as large as our meeting House,” making it quite cold and drafty even with 13 separate fireplaces. Despite all the trees, wood was in short supply; there were no bells for servants; and the stairs to the second floor were nowhere near finished. Still, she was determined “to be satisfied and content, to say nothing of inconvenience, etc.,” even though “we have not the least fence-yard or other convenience without, and the great unfinished audience-room I make a drying room of, to hang our clothes in.”
What offended this life-long Massachusetts resident the most was the widespread use of slave labor, which, besides its inherent cruelty, bred inefficiency, squalor, a disdain among whites for manual labor, and a general disregard for punctuality. Abigail Adams would not have to put up with such conditions for long, because in a few weeks the electoral college returns would show that her husband had been defeated for re-election. To increase the Adamses’ misery, on December 1 their son Charles died in New York City.
During their brief stay, Washington was a small enough town—perhaps 3,000 residents, of whom 137 were government clerks —that when the Treasury building caught on fire in January, the President himself manned a spot in the bucket brigade. The fashionable residential district consisted of a single row of four-story houses on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue between Nineteenth and Twentieth Streets. They stood out so starkly from the morass that they were known simply as the Six Buildings. Those not wealthy enough for such splendor, including most members of Congress, had to lodge wherever they could, often sleeping two or even four to a room on cots (though the Speaker of the House got a room of his own).
But the residents of Washington, as always, had great plans. In 1803 an English visitor spoke of “this embryo London (or to be more in tone with the American modesty this embryo Rome).” The metaphor was adopted more poetically the following year by the Irish poet Thomas Moore: “This embryo capital where fancy sees / Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees, / Which second-sighted seers ev’n now adorn / With shrines unbuilt and heroes yet unborn.” Or as Oliver Wolcott, the Secretary of the Treasury, wrote in June 1800, “There appears to be a confident expectation that this place will soon exceed any in the world.…No stranger can be here a day and converse with the proprietors, without conceiving himself in the company of crazy people.”
1675 Three Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
The Puritans Strike Back
On November 3, amid widespread reports of massacres and looting by Indians, the General Court (legislature) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony adopted a series of emergency laws. “The righteous God,” declared the court, “hath heightened our calamity, and given commission to the barbarous heathen to rise up against us, and to become a smart rod and severe scourge to us.” To counter these divinely inspired attacks, which are known today as King Philip’s War, the Puritans resorted to desperate measures. One of their most powerful weapons was the haircut.
“Whereas,” the legislators continued, “there is manifest pride openly appearing amongst us in that long haire, like weomens haire, is worne by some men, either their oune or others haire made into perewiggs, and by some weomen wearing borders of haire, and theire cutting, curling, & immodest laying out their haire, which practise doeth prevayle & increase, especially amongst the younger sort… the County Courts are hereby authorized to proceed against such delinquents either by admonition, fine, or correction, according to theire good discretion.”
Affectations of dress were also blamed for calling down the Lord’s wrath. “The evill of pride in apparrell, both for costlines in the poorer sort, & vayne, new, strainge fashions, both in poore & rich, with naked breasts and armes, or, as it were, pinioned with the addition of superstitious ribbons both on haire & apparrell” would subject dandyish offenders to a warning, with a fine of 10 shillings for incorrigible fashion plates.
Since alcohol was responsible for much unholy conduct, public houses were limited to “the refreshing & entertainment of travailers [i.e., laborers] & strangers only, and all toune dwellers are heereby strictly enjoyned & required to forbeare spending their time or estates in such common houses of enterteynement, to drincke & tiple, upon poenalty of five shillings for every offence, or, if poore, to be whipt, at the discretion of the judge, not exceeding five stripes.…” A more serious infraction, punishable by a fine of 40 shillings or 10 days in jail, was the “loose & sinfull custome of going or riding from toune to toune, and that oft times men & weomen together, upon pretence of going to lecture, but it appeares to be meerely to drincke & revell in ordinarys & tavernes, which is in itself scandalous, and it is to be feared a notable meanes to debauch our youth and hazard the chastity of such as are draune forth thereunto…”
Failure to report the use of “prophane oathes and curses” to the authorities was made a crime. Church officers were ordered to appoint “persons to shutt the meeting house doores” to keep worshipers from sneaking out early. Anyone attending a Quaker meeting, where “damnable haeresies” and “abominable idolatrys” were propagated, would be held to labor for three days and given only bread and water. Citing the Fifth Commandment and the “remarkeable judgments upon Chorah and his company” in the sixteenth and twentysixth chapters of Numbers, the court bemoaned the general “contempt of authority, civil, ecclesiasticall, and domesticall,” and directed “all persons under this government to reforme so great an evil, least God from heaven punish offenders heerin by some remarkeable judgments.”
These measures, together with a large and well-equipped army, managed to overcome the “barbarous heathen” by August 1676. From then on, although pestered with frequent raids along the frontier, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay never suffered another large-scale Indian attack. Manifest pride, profaneness, and disorder and rudeness in youth, however, would only increase in centuries to come.
