1883

 

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“Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns – the rubbish of the earth I hate” 

Frederic Remington

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January 16: The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act is passed by Congress and signed on this day by President Chester A. Arthur. 

In part, says Benjamin Andrews, revulsion over the assassination of President Garfield helped advance civil service reform. On January 16, 1883, the Pendleton Act was signed into law. Three Civil Service Commissioners were to be appointed, 

who were to institute competitive examinations open to all persons desiring to enter the employment of the Government. It provided that the clerks and the departments at Washington, and in every customs district or post-office where fifty or more were employed, should be arranged in classes, and that in the future only persons who had passed the examinations should be appointed to service in these offices or promoted from a lower class to a higher, preference being given according to rank in the examinations. Candidates were to serve six months’ probation in practical work before receiving a final appointment.

 

The bill struck a heavy blow at political assessments, by declaring that no official should be removed for refusing to contribute to political funds. A Congressman or government official convicted of soliciting or receiving political assessments from government employees became liable to a $5,000 fine or three years’ imprisonment, or both. (11/341-342)

  

*

“I don’t amount to anything in particular.” 

February: Frederic Remington uses money he inherits on the death of his father, a Civil War veteran, to buy a quarter-section sheep ranch in Kansas. Born in the town of Canton, in upstate New York on October 4, 1861, he had grown up around horses – his father having been a major in the 11^th New York Cavalry. 

In that part of the world, a young boy grew up camping, fishing, hunting, hiking, swimming and canoeing for fun. “A real sportsman, of the nature-loving type,” Remington later wrote, “must go tramping or paddling or riding about over the waste places of the earth, with his dinner in his pocket.” An army officer who knew him years later would describe Remington, still, as “a big, good-natured, over-grown boy.” 

In the fall of 1878, Frederic had enrolled at Yale, with thoughts of studying journalism, and gaining a place in the School of Fine Arts. He was a thickset fellow, “with the neck of a heavyweight boxer,” as Brian W. Dippie, writing for American Heritage once said. Remington himself described himself so, at age 15: 

I don’t amount to anything in particular. I can spoil an immense amount of good grub at any time in the day. … I go a good man on muscle. My hair is short and stiff, and I am about five feet eight inches and weigh one hundred and eighty pounds. There is nothing poetical about me. (8)

 

He fought weight much of his life (his wife would one day describe him as “my massive husband”), but at Yale he developed a love for the new game of football, in 1879 playing first-string forward, or rusher, on a team that included Walter C. Camp, later called the “Father of Football.” In February 1880, however, on the death of his father, Frederic determined to leave school. The following year, he left for Montana, some think due to disappointment in love. He had asked the father of Eva Caten for his daughter’s hand in marriage, but with no job and no particular ambition in life, the father refused him permission, and Remington went West. 

He didn’t stay long, but saw enough to realize he’d like to come back. A picture he drew, titled “Cow-boys of Arizona” was published in the February 25, 1882, edition of Harper’s Weekly.  

 

In the fall of 1882, he received most of the money from his inheritance, $9,000, and early the following year headed for Kansas, there to try his hand at sheep-raising. He managed to double the size of his ranch, but he and a group of new bachelor friends soon stirred up a bit of trouble. On Christmas Eve, 1883, they attended a celebration at the schoolhouse in Plum Grove, Kansas, and, having had too much to drink, made themselves obnoxious. As Dippie tells it in “Frederic Remington’s Wild West,” they were asked to leave the party. 

This called for retaliation and so, with the inspiration of high spirits both youthful and distilled, they piled straw outside one window, lit it, then screamed “Fire! Fire!” The aftermath was a two-day trial during which Remington suffered the embarrassment of being referred to by one of the attorneys as “Billy the Kid.” No more serious consequences resulted, and the culprits were led off upon payment of costs. But the episode was humiliating and perhaps lessened the charms of sheep ranching.

 

Remington sold his place, and moved on, taking a trip through the Southwest and down into Mexico. 

In September 1884, he headed east and married Eva Caten. The couple then returned to Kansas City, where Remington had part ownership in a saloon. 

Dippie again: 

[Frederic] was himself a heavy drinker throughout his life, perpetually climbing on and tumbling off the water wagon, as he was frank to admit in his letters. While Eva suffered from isolation and loneliness, her husband, who avoided mixed social gatherings whenever possible, whiled away the hours working on his art, selling an occasional painting, and doing pretty much what he wanted to do. He boxed, went riding, and according to one of the bartenders who worked there, spent “a good deal of time” in the saloon he jointly owned. When this enterprise failed, Remington loss the last of his patrimony and suddenly found himself strapped for funds. This may have precipitated Eva’s decision to return to New York. (10)

 

Frederic took this chance to travel widely in the Southwest, sketching what he saw, filling his art portfolio. But when he headed east, himself, it became clear. Eva was never going to agree to live in the West again. 

By 1886, however, it was clear he had a future in the world of art. He made the cover of Harper’s Weekly on January 9, a big deal in those days, and enrolled in art classes in March. Having had little formal training, he was always willing to learn and improve, and by the end of the year he was producing works for a string of commissions. He later became friends with Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, a cowboy novel, and Teddy Roosevelt. Frederic once remarked that the three of them had been lucky to witness “the living, breathing end of three American centuries of smoke and dust and sweat.” (13)

Remington's painting, "Missing," invites the viewer
to wonder what the prisoner's fate might be.

One might wonder the same of the Apaches who have him.

 

According to Dippie, the artist believed the country was already in steep decline, as early as 1893. 

And, wow, the racism! 

[Remington] despised labor protesters and strikers as un-American “rats” and fretted over the inconvenience he might be caused by a shutdown of the Pennsylvania coal fields. He saw the urban “mobs” as tainted products of Europe’s decadence and feared the pollution of the American character through “mongrelization.” “Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns – the rubbish of the earth I hate,” he declared in one remarkable outburst in 1893. “I’ve got some Winchesters and when the massacring begins, I could get my share of ’em, and what’s more, I will.” Though Remington came from staunch Protestant stock, it was not religion that concerned him. “I don’t care a d--n how a man gets to heaven.

 

 … But I do care how he votes and lives and fights.” In 1898 Remington rejoiced at the prospect of war in Cuba. It was a chance to “lick the Dagoes,” though he mourned that “it does seem tough that so many Americans had to be and have still got to be killed to free a lot of d--n niggers who are better off under the yoke.” Unlike the Civil War, however, “this time… we will kill a few Spaniards instead of the Anglo Saxons, which will be proper and nice.” (15)

Storming San Juan Hill.

 

His art was hugely popular during his day, and remains so, and he helped make the “cowboy” a cultural hero. He and Wister and Roosevelt described the typical young cowboy “as hardy and self-reliant as any man who ever breathed.” In his art, Remington seems to give the Native Americans a fair portrayal. But he once wrote that 

no white man can ever penetrate the mystery of…[the Indian’s] mind or explain the reason of their acts.” For “the red man is a mass of glaring incongruities. He loves and hates in such strange fashions, and is constant and inconstant at such unusual times, that I often think he has no mental process, but is the creature of impulse.” (18-19)

 

In fact, Remington wrote a novel about the natives, called The Way of an Indian, which was serialized in Cosmopolitan, and published as a book in 1906. 

Dippie summarizes the work: 

[The book] was once described as “the best novel by a white man about Indian life.” The reader is presented with a fictional biography of Fire Eater, a Cheyenne warrior who wallows in blood on a daily basis. War is his only passion, hatred his only emotion: “He wanted a river of blood – he wanted to break the bones of the whites with stone hatchets – he wanted to torture with fire.” He is as much animal as man: “One of those moods had come upon the savage child-mind when the surging blood made his eyes gleam vacantly like the great cats.” He is utterly without remorse: “Too often had the hunter-warrior stood over his fallen quarry to feel pity; he knew no more of this than a bird of prey, and he sank his three-pronged battle-ax into the soldier’s skull and wiped it on his pony’s shoulder saying: ‘Another dog’s head.’” (21)

"The Last of His Race."

 

By contrast, Dippie says Remington idolized the soldiers of the U.S. Army, in particular their officers, who were of a higher class, in general. 

They were, the artist wrote, “a homogeneous class….They have small waists, and their clothes fit them; they are punctilious; they respect forms, and always do the dignified and proper thing at the particular instant, and never display their individuality except on two occasions: one is the field of battle and the other is before breakfast.” They are the purest embodiments of a heroic ideal, one that Remington quite literally bestowed on the nation in the form of a vivid mental picture of the Indian-fighting army.

 

Remington enjoyed associating with such men, these “red-blooded soldiers,” as he called them. He fondly remembered riding out a Christmas blizzard in the Dakotas, along with several such men. The artist described the scene: 

The Sibley tent weaves and moans and tugs frantically at its pegs. The Sibley stove sighs like a furnace while the cruel wind seeks out the holes and crevices. The soldiers sit in their camp drawing-room buttoned up to the chin in their big canvas overcoats, and the muskrat caps are not removed. The freemasonry of the army makes strong friendships, and soldiers are all good fellows, that being a part of their business. … The cold, bloodless, compound-interest snarler is not in the army. … One man is from Arizona, another from Washington, and the rest from the other corners of Uncle Sam’s tract of land. They have met before, and memory after memory comes up with its laughter and pathos of the old campaigns. (22)

 

Remington had always dreamed of seeing action, just as his father had. When war came in 1898, he wrote excitedly about his chance to fulfill “a life of longing to see men do the greatest thing which men are called to do.” War was the ultimate test of a man, he believed, and “He who has not seen war only half-comprehends the possibilities of his race.” In June 1898 he wrote to Wister excitedly, “Say old man, there is bound to be a lovely scrap around Havana – a big murdering – sure.” 

Life as a war correspondent turned out to be less exciting than he had imagined, although he did say a Spanish sharpshooter “nearly did for me,” one day. What really told, in his experience – as almost any real soldier in history could have explained – were the ordinary difficulties of daily life in the military, “fever,…the heat, sleeping in the mud, marching, and insufficient food.” There might be excitement at the front, but to the rear, he saw, “All the broken spirits, bloody bodies, hopeless, helpless suffering which drags its weary length to the rear, are so much more appalling than anything else in the world that words won’t mean anything to one who has not seen it.”

 

An aside here: A Vietnam War veteran once told my class that he went 63 days in the jungle without changing his clothes. Students let out a collective, “eeeewwwww.” But he assured us you didn’t really notice the smell after the first week.

 

By 1900, after heading West again, he admitted he was ready to remain close to home. In a letter to his wife, he explained, “Shall never come west again. It is all brick buildings – derby hats and blue overhauls – it spoils my early illusions – and they are my capital.” (23) 

In later years, he painted night scenes, like Hungry Moon, which were popular with the public and impressed critics, who had previously considered him more of an illustrator than a true artist. Two previous exhibitions of his works had been disappointing in terms of sales, and he had turned to illustrating for magazines again to make a living. Dippie notes that in 1895, “he discovered the joys of working with ‘mud’ and gloried in the challenges that sculpting offered.” When he finished Bronco Buster, he said he had captured the “wild life of our West” in a form that would never fade or end up moth-eaten. He created a whole series of bronzes, often individuals on horseback, but including one called The Wounded Bunkie, one trooper just hit, the other supporting him in the saddle.

"Hungry Moon."

"The Wounded Bunkie."

Schreyvogel's painting.

 

In 1900, Charles Schreyvogel, then unknown, entered an oil entitled My Bunkie in a contest for the National Academy of Design, where Remington had long been a member. It was only his second try. When he won Remington took it badly, calling the picture of a cavalryman rescuing a fallen buddy, a “falsehood and fake.” Frederic nursed a grudge, until April 1903, when he publicly attacked Schreyvogel and his historical work, Custer’s Demand, which the older artist described as “half baked stuff,” a product of Schreyvogel’s “hallucinations.” 

The story of Remington’s feud no longer matters, but even Roosevelt said his friend had made “a fool…of himself.” 

Otherwise, his career continued to bloom – an honorary Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale, in 1900 – a contract with Collier’s Weekly to allow exclusive rights of reproduction of twelve of his works per year, for four years, at a rate of $1,000 per month. His “impressionistic” nocturnal works were prized, and in 1909, after a successful exhibition, he could write joyfully in his diary: “The art critics have all ‘come down’ – I have received splendid notices from all the papers. They ungrudgingly give me a high place as a ‘mere painter.’ I’ve been on their trail a long while and they never surrendered while they had a leg to stand on. The ‘Illustrator’ phase has become a background.”

 

Unfortunately, he didn’t have long to enjoy himself, dying a month later. Rum, says Dippie, and a “fondness for ‘good grub’ had played havoc” with the artist’s health. By 1897, he weighed 240 pounds, and at the end he was “pushing 300. He could no longer mount a horse or stoop over to pick up a tennis ball, and even walking had become an effort.” Children were in awe of his “big bottom,” when he came to visit. A waitress remembered, “how that man could eat. My, my, my, how that man could eat!” 

He and Eva had built a home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and it was there, a few days before Christmas, that Frederic developed a severe “belly ache.” Doctors were called to perform an emergency appendectomy. Infection had spread and the artist died the next day at age 48, leaving behind 3,000 works of art.

 

*

The federal government runs a surplus!

July 1: In this year, the federal government ran a surplus again, as it had done almost every year since 1866, and would continue to do until 1893. Andrews notes:

 

After the war the internal taxes were nearly all swept away at the earliest possible moment, until, after July 1st, 1883, only spirits, fermented liquors, tobacco, banks and bankers loaded Internal Revenue. Customs duties were also removed from nearly all so-called revenue articles, as spices, T, and coffee, not produced in this country – the tax, therefore, not being of a protective nature. (IV, 317)

 

Unfortunately, protective tariffs continued to drive up the costs of foreign-made products for most Americans. The power of the “Trusts” was becoming an issue. Almost 

every great enterprise in the land was carried on under the form of a trust. The principal corporations or men engaged in an industry would enter into combination, more or less informal, for the regulation of production and prices. Usually the result was an elevation of prices, and where the trust constituted a necessary monopoly this rise might be indefinitely perpetuated. (IV, 320)

 

If you wanted sugar, for example, a trust divided up the market, and you paid a higher price than you might have if fair competition existed. The railroads formed a trust, as did the steel makers, the beef producers, etc.

 

* 

Lewis Waterman and Frank Holland invent the modern fountain pen. (Waterman gets most of the credit today.) 

The ballpoint pen, in England, and in the U.S. during World War II, slowly puts the fountain pen companies out of business.

* 

May 23: The Brooklyn Bridge is opened, to acclaim from around the world. Writing a few years later, the historian John Clark Ridpath, describes the work of the Roebling family in its construction.

 

We may hear notice, in a few brief paragraphs, some of the great achievements belonging to the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century in the matter of physical improvements. At no other time in modern history has civil engineering been turned to a better account than in the recent public works of the United States. First among these we may properly notice a few of the remarkable bridges which have been constructed within the period under contemplation. The principal place among such works may properly be given to the great Suspension Bridge over the strait known as East River, between New York and Brooklyn. The complete and formal opening of this work, which occurred on the 24th of May, 1883, was an event of so great interest as to evoke universal attention and elicit many descriptions.

 

The Brooklyn Bridge is the longest largest structure of the kind in the world. The design was the work of the distinguished John A. Roebling, the originator of wire suspension-bridges, under whose supervision, and that of his son, Washington A. Roebling, the structure was completed. The elder of these two eminent engineers had already won for himself an enduring fame by the building of the first suspension-bridge across the chasm of Niagara, and also the still greater structure of the same character across the Ohio River, between Cincinnati and Covington. The latter structure at the time of its erection, was by a thousand feet the longest of the kind in the world. The younger Roebling inherited much of his father’s genius, and added a genius of his own. The construction of the bridge over the East River could not have been put into hands more capable if all nations had been explored for engineers.

 

The East River structure, being supported by four enormous wires, or cables, stretching from pier to pier in a single span, a distance of 1,595 feet. From the main towers to the anchorages on either side is 930 feet; From the anchorages outward to the termini of the approaches is, on the New York side, a distance of 1,562 feet; and on the Brooklyn side 972 feet; giving a total length of bridge and approaches of 5,989 feet. The total weight of the structure is 64,700 tons; the estimated capacity of support is 1,740 tons, and the ultimate resistance is calculated at 49,200 tons.

 

… The formal opening in May of 1883 drew the attention of the whole Nation to the metropolis, and proved by the interest which the event excited that even in America politics is not the best, at least not the only, vocation of mankind.

 

In passing, Ridpath does note the contribution of the wife of the younger Roebling.

 

The personal history of the Roeblings, father and son, in connection with their great work, is as pathetic as it is interesting. The elder engineer was injured while laying the foundation of one of the shore-piers on the 22nd of July, 1869, and died of lockjaw. W. A. Roebling then took up his father’s unfinished task. He continued the work of supervision for about two years, when he was prostrated with a peculiar form of paralysis known as “Caisson disease,” from which he never fully recovered. His mental faculties, however, remained unimpaired, and he was able to direct with his eye what his hands could no longer execute. While thus prostrated, his wife developed a genius almost equal to that of her husband and her father-in-law. The palsied engineer, thus reinforced, continued for five years to furnish the plans for the work. These plans were almost all drawn by his wife, who never flagged under the tasks imposed upon her. In 1876, Roebling was partly restored to health, and lived to hear the applause which his genius and enterprise had won.

 

*

 

A quick check of Wikipedia reveals that Emily Warren Roebling was the second-youngest in a family of twelve brothers and children and supported in her desire to advance her education by her brother Gouverneur K. Warren. He was the hero of the Battle of Gettysburg, during the Civil War, having realized just in time the import of putting Union troops atop Little Round Top.) She met her future husband, a civil engineer, who was serving on her brother’s staff, in 1864, while visiting his headquarters.

 

When the bridge was finally complete, Emily was the first person to cross in a carriage. At the opening ceremony, she was honored in a speech by Abram Stevens Hewiit, who said that the bridge was “an everlasting monument to the sacrificing devotion of a woman and her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred.” (Ridpath’s History of the World, Vol. IX, p. 213-214)

 

*

 

The adventures of Peck’s Bad Boy, stories about a mischievous young man growing up in Milwaukee, become popular.

 

In one typical scene, Henry, or “Hennery,” the bad boy of the title, gets in trouble at the grocery where he works. The storekeeper is angry:

 

“Say, you are getting too alfired smart,” said the grocery man to the bad boy as he pushed him into a corner by the molasses barrel, and took him by the neck and choked him so his eyes stuck out. “You have driven away several of my best customers, and now, confound you, I am going to have your life,” and he took up a cheese knife and began to sharpen it on his boot.

 

“What’s the – gurgle – matter,” asked the choking boy, as the grocery man’s fingers let up on his throat a little, so he could speak. “I haint done nothin.”

 

“Didn’t you hang up that dead gray Tom cat by the heels, in front of my store, with the rabbits I had for sale? I didn’t notice it until the minister called me out in front of the store, and pointing to the rabbits, asked what good fat cats were selling for. By crimus, this thing has got to stop. You have got to move out of this ward or I will.”

 

The boy got his breath and said it wasn’t him that put the cat up there. He said it was the policeman, and he and his chum saw him do it, and he just come in to tell the grocery man about it, and before he could speak he had his neck nearly pulled off. The boy began to cry, and the grocery man said he was only joking, and gave him a box of sardines, and they made up. 

 

Ward: A portion of the city, divided for purposes of voting.

 

Chum: Slang for an “old friend.”

 

In another incident, Henry’s boss wants to know who tied a ball of twine to the tail of  a dog and let him go running off down the street after another canine. “Everybody lays everything that is done to me,” the boy says, putting his handkerchief to his nose, “and they will be sorry for it when I die. I have a good notion to poison myself by eating some of your glucose sugar.”

 

It’s a running joke that the store owner’s business practices are suspect, selling questionable goods, offering sweet potatoes at good prices, for example, but when housewives put in an order, he sends them the smallest potatoes in the store. Says Henry, they look more like “radishes.”

The owner doesn’t buy his claim that the dog got tangled up in the twine by itself. He rejoins,

 

“Yes, and you do about everything that is mean. The other day a lady came in and told me to send up to her house some of my country sausage, done up in muslin bags, and while she was examining it she noticed something hard inside the bags, and asked me what it was, and I opened it, and I hope to die if there wasn’t a little brass pad-lock and a piece of a red morocco dog collar imbedded in the sausage. Now how do you suppose that got in there?” and the grocery man looked savage.

 

The boy looked interested, and put on an expression as though in deep thought, and finally said, “I suppose the farmer that put up the sausage did not strain the dog meat. Sausage meat ought to be strained.”

 

The grocery man pulled in about half a block of twine, after the dog had run against a fence and broke it, and told the boy he knew perfectly well how the brass pad-lock came to be in the sausage, but thinking it was safer to have the good will of the boy than the ill will, he offered him a handful of prunes.

 

On still another occasion, the boy goes out to the street and hangs up a sign on the story, reading, “Rotten eggs, good enough for custard pies, for 18 cents a dozen.”

 

*

 

The Bad Boy is often wise beyond his years and pokes fun at all kinds of people, particularly his Pa. The author, George Peck, was a Civil War veteran himself and his own experience likely informs this story:

His Pa at the Re-Union

  

“I saw your Pa wearing a red, white, and blue badge, and a round red badge, and several other badges, last week, during the re-union,” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as the youth asked for a piece of codfish skin to settle coffee with. “He looked like a hero, with his old black hat, with a gold cord around it.”

 

“Yes, he wore all the badges he could get, the first day, but after he blundered into a place where there were a lot of fellows from his own regiment, he took off the badges, and he wasn’t very numerous around the boys the rest of the week. But he was lightning on the sham battle,” says the boy.

 

“What was the matter? Didn’t the soldiers treat him well? Didn’t they seem to yearn for his society?” asked the grocery man, as the boy was making a lunch on some sweet crackers in a tin canister.

 

“Well, they were not very much mashed on Pa. You see, Pa never gets tired telling us about how he fit in the army. For several years I didn’t know what a sutler was, and when Pa would tell about taking a musket that a dead soldier had dropped, and going into the thickest of the fight, and fairly mowing down the rebels in swaths, the way they cut hay, I thought he was the greatest man that ever was. Until I was eleven years old I thought Pa killed men enough to fill the Forest Home cemetery. I thought a sutler was something higher than a general, and Pa used to talk about “I and Grant,” and what Sheridan told him, and how Sherman marched with him to the sea, and all that kind of rot, until I wondered why they didn’t have pictures of Pa on a white horse, with epaulets on, and a sword. One day at school I told a boy that my Pa killed more men than Grant, and the boy said he didn’t doubt it, but he killed them with commissary whiskey. The boy said his Pa was in the same regiment that my Pa was sutler of, and his Pa said my Pa charged him five dollars for a canteen of peppersauce and alcohol and called it whiskey. Then I began to enquire into it, and found out that a sutler was a sort of liquid peanut stand, and that his rank in the army was about the same as a chestnut roaster on the sidewalk here at home. It made me sick, and I never had the same respect for Pa after that. But Pa, don’t care. He thinks he is a hero, and tried to get a pension on account of losing a piece of his thumb, but when the officers found he was wounded by the explosion of a can of baked beans, they couldn’t give it to him. Pa was down town when the veterans were here, and I was with him, and I saw a lot of old soldiers looking at Pa, and I told him they acted as though they knew him, and he put on his glasses, and said to one of them, “How are you Bill?” The soldier looked at Pa and called the other soldiers, and one said, That’s the old duffer that sold me the bottle of brandy peaches at Chickamauga, for three dollars, and they eat a hole through my stummick. Another said, ‘He’s the cuss that took ten dollars out of my pay for pickles that were put up in aqua fortis. Look at the corps badges he has on.’ Another said, ‘The old whelp! He charged me fifty cents a pound for onions when I had the scurvy at Atlanta.’ Another said, ‘He beat me out of my wages playing draw poker with a cold deck, and the aces up his sleeve. Let us hang him.’ By this time Pa’s nerves got unstrung and began to hurt him, and he said he wanted to go home, and when we got around the corner he tore off his badges and threw them in the sewer, and said it was all a man’s life was worth to be a veteran now days. He didn’t go down town again till next day, and when he heard a band playing he would go around a block. But at the sham battle where there were no veterans hardly, he was all right with the militia boys, and told them how he did when he was in the army. I thought it would be fun to see Pa run, and so when one of the cavalry fellows lost his cap in the charge, and was looking for it, I told the dragoon that the pussy old man over by the fence had stolen his cap. That was Pa. Then I told Pa that the soldier on the horse said he was a rebel, and he was going to kill him. The soldier started after Pa with his sabre drawn, and Pa started to run, and it was funny you bet.”

 

Blogger’s Note: This urge, by some men (and now women) who served in the military, to brag about their exploits, is common throughout history.

 

The blogger served with the Marines, during the Vietnam War, but never got sent overseas (although he did volunteer twice to go to Vietnam). So he would tell his students about how, as a clerk in a supply unit he bravely defended America with a staple gun.

 

In later years, I had numerous veterans talk to my students – and later we began having veterans speak with all the history classes in our school. Those who had been in combat had never wanted to talk about it until we asked them to come for a visit. The same was true of Kelly, one of my former students, who did a tour of duty in Iraq, as a U.S. Army nurse. She always turned down invitations to come to class, saying she could not forget the trauma.

 

Joe Whitt, who was at Pearl Harbor on the day it was bombed, told us he had the same dream for many years. In his dream, his ship would explode. Joe would go flying high into the air. He’d finally start coming down, so he’d put his legs together, and place his arms at his sides, bracing for impact with the water. At the last moment, just before he hit, he’d wake up.

 

*

 

In this next story, Henry suffers a mishap, due to the poor decisions of a minister in a hurry. 

A Funeral Procession 

“Well, great Julius Caesar’s bald-headed ghost, what’s the matter with you?” said the grocery man to the bad boy, as he came into the grocery on crutches, with one arm in a sling, one eye blackened, and a strip of court plaster across his face. “Where was the explosion, or have you been in a fight, or has your Pa been giving you what you deserve, with a club? Here, let me help you; there, sit down on that keg of apple-jack. Well, by the great guns, you look as though you had called somebody a liar. What’s the matter?” and the grocery man took the crutches and stood them up against the showcase.

 

“O, there’s not much the matter with me,” said the boy in a voice that sounded all broke up, as he took a big apple off a basket and began peeling it with his upper front teeth. “If you think I’m a wreck, you ought to see the minister; they had to carry him home in installments, the way they buy sewing machines. I am all right, but they got to stop him up with oakum and tar, before he will hold water again.”

 

“Good gracious, you have not had a fight with the minister, have you? Well, I have said all the time, and I stick to it, that you would commit a crime yet, and go to state’s prison. What was the fuss bout?” and the grocery man laid the hatchet out of the boy’s reach for fear he would get excited and kill him.

 

“O, it was no fuss, it was in the way of business. You see the livery man that I was working for promoted me. He let me drive a horse to haul sawdust for bedding, first, and when he found I was real careful he let me drive an express wagon to haul trunks. Day before yesterday, I think it was - yes, I was in bed all day yesterday - day before yesterday, there was a funeral, and our stable furnished the outfit. It was only a common, eleven dollar funeral so they let me go to drive the horse for the minister - you know, the buggy that goes ahead of the hearse. They gave me an old horse that is thirty years old, that has not been off a walk since nine years ago, and they told me to give him a loose rein, and he would go along all right. It’s the same old horse that used to pace so fast on the avenue, years ago, but I didn’t know it. Well, I wasn’t to blame. I just let him walk along as though he was hauling sawdust, and gave him a loose rein. When we got off the pavement, the fellow that drives the hearse, he was in a hurry, ’cause his folks was going to have ducks for dinner, and he wanted to get back, so he kept driving along side of my buggy, and telling me to hurry up. I wouldn’t do it ’cause the livery man told me to walk the horse. Then the minister, he got nervous, and said he didn’t know as there was any use of going so slow, because he wanted to get back in time to get his lunch and go to a minister’s meeting in the afternoon, but we took it cool, and as for me I wasn’t in no sweat. Then one of the drivers that was driving the mourners, he came up and said he had to get back in time to run a wedding down to the one o’clock train, and for me to pull out a little. I have seen enough of disobeying orders, and I told him a funeral in the hand was worth two weddings in the bush, and as far as I was concerned, this funeral was going to be conducted in a decorous manner, if we didn’t get back till the next day. Well, the minister said, in his regular Sunday school way, ‘My little man, let me take hold of the lines,’ and like a darned fool I gave them to him. He slapped the old horse on the crupper with the lines and then jerked up, and the old horse stuck up his off ear, and then the hearse driver told the minister to pull hard and saw on the bit a little, and the old horse would wake up. The hearse driver used to drive the old pacer on the track, and he knew what he wanted. The minister took off his black kid gloves and put his umbrella down between us, and pulled his hat down tight on his head, and began to pull and saw on the bit. The old cripple began to move along sort of sideways, like a hog going to war, and the minister pulled some more, and the hearse driver, who was behind, he said, so you could hear him clear to Waukesha, ‘Ye-e-up,’ and the old horse kept going faster, then the minister thought the procession was getting too quick, and he pulled harder, and yelled ‘Who-a,’ and that made the old horse worse, and I looked through the little window in the buggy top, behind, and the hearse was about two blocks behind, and the driver was laughing, and the minister he got pale and said, ‘My little man I guess you’d better drive,’ and I said, ‘Not much, Mary Ann, you wouldn’t let me run this funeral the way I wanted to, and now you can boss it, if you will let me get out.’ But there was a street car ahead, and all of a sudden there was an earthquake, and when I come to there were about six hundred people pouring water down my neck, and the hearse was hitched to the fence, and the hearse driver was asking if my leg was broke, and a policeman was fanning the minister with a plug hat that looked as though it had been struck by a pile driver, and some people were hauling our buggy into the gutter, and some men were trying to take old pacer out of the windows of the street-car, and then I guess I fainted away again. O, it was worse than telescoping a train loaded with cattle.”

 

“Well, I swan,” said the grocery man as he put some eggs in a funnel shaped brown paper for a servant girl, “What did the minister say when he come to?”

 

“Say! What could he say? He just yelled ‘Whoa,’ and kept sawing with his hands, as though he was driving. I heard that the policeman was going to pull him for fast driving, till he found it was an accident. They told me, when they carried me home in a hack, that it was a wonder everybody was not killed, and when I got home Pa was going to sass me, until the hearse driver told him it was the minister that was to blame. I want to find out if they got the minister’s umbrella back. The last I see of it the umbrella was running up his trousers leg, and the point came out by the small of his back. But I am all right, only my shoulder sprained, and my legs bruised, and my eye black. I will be all right, and shall go to work to-morrow, ’cause the livery man says I was the only one in the crowd that had any sense. I understand the minister is going to take a vacation on account of his liver and nervous prostration. I would if I was him. I never saw a man that had nervous prostration any more than he did when they fished him out of the barbed wire fence, after we struck the street car. But that settles the minister business with me. I don’t drive for no more preachers. What I want is a quiet party that wants to go on a walk,” and the boy got up and hopped on one foot toward his crutches, filing his pistol pocket with figs as he hobbled along.

 

“Well, sir,” said the grocery man, as he took a chew of tobacco out of a pail, and offered some to the boy, knowing that was the only thing in the store the boy would not take, “Do you know I think some of these ministers have about as little sense on worldly matters, as anybody? Now, the idea of that man jerking on an old pacer. It don’t make any difference if the pacer was a hundred years old, he would pace if he was jerked on.”

 

“You bet,” said the boy, as he put his crutches under his arms and started for the door. “A minister may be sound on the atonement, but he don’t want to saw on an old pacer. He may have the subject of infant baptism down finer than a cambric needle, but if he has ever been to college, he ought to have learned enough not to say ‘ye-up’ to an old pacer that has been the boss of the road in his time. A minister may be endowed with sublime power to draw sinners to repentance, and make them feel like getting up and dusting for the beautiful beyond, and cause them, by his eloquence, to see angels bright and fair in their dreams, and chariots of fire flying through the pearly gates and down the golden streets of New Jerusalem, but he wants to turn out for a street car all the same, when he is driving a 2:20 pacer. The next time I drive a minister to a funeral, he will walk.”

 

* 

In the next piece, George Peck, in his own voice, explains why women, as doctors, will cause complications. 

Female Doctors Will Never Do 

A St. Louis doctor factory recently turned out a dozen female doctors. As long as the female doctors were confined to one or two in the whole country, and these were experimental, the Sun [a city newspaper] held its peace, and did not complain; but now that the colleges are engaged in producing female doctors as a business, we must protest, and in so doing will give a few reasons why female doctors will not prove a paying branch of industry.

 

In the first place, if they doctor anybody it must be women, and three-fourths of the women had rather have a male doctor. Suppose these colleges turn out female doctors until there are as many of them as there are male doctors, what have they got to practice on?

 

A man, if there was nothing the matter with him, might call in a female doctor; but if he was sick as a horse – and when a man is sick he is sick as a horse – the last thing he would have around would be a female doctor. And why? Because when a man wants a female fumbling around him he wants to feel well. He don’t want to be bilious, or feverish, with his mouth tasting like cheese, and his eyes bloodshot, when a female is looking over him and taking an account of stock.

Of course these female doctors are all young and good looking, and if one of them came into a sick room where a man was in bed, and he had chills, and was as cold as a wedge, and she should sit up close to the side of the bed, and take hold of his hand, his pulse would run up to a hundred and fifty and she would prescribe for a fever when he had chilblains. Then if he died she could be arrested for malpractice. O, you can’t fool us on female doctors.

 

A man who has been sick and had male doctors, knows just how he would feel to have a female doctor come tripping in and throw her fur lined cloak over a chair, take off her hat and gloves, and throw them on a lounge, and come up to the bed with a pair of marine blue eyes, with a twinkle in the corner, and look him in the wild, changeable eyes, and ask him to run out his tongue. Suppose he knew his tongue was coated so it looked like a yellow Turkish towel, do you suppose he would want to run out five or six inches of the lower end of it, and let that female doctor put her finger on it, to see how it was furred? Not much! He would put that tongue up into his cheek, and wouldn’t let her see it for twenty-five cents admission.

 

We have all seen doctors put their hands under the bed-clothes and feel a man’s feet to see if they were cold. If a female doctor should do that, it would give a man cramps in the legs.

 

A male doctor can put his hand on a man’s stomach, and liver, and lungs, and ask him if he feels any pain there; but if a female doctor should do the same thing it would make a man sick, and he would want to get up and kick himself for employing a female doctor. O, there is no use talking, it would kill a man.

 

Now, suppose a man had heart disease, and a female doctor should want to listen to the beating of his heart. She would lay her left ear on his left breast, so her eyes and rosebud mouth would be looking right in his face, and her wavy hair would be scattered all around there, getting tangled in the buttons of his night shirt. Don’t you suppose his heart would, get in about twenty extra beats to the minute? You bet! And she would smile – we will bet ten dollars she would smile – and show her pearly teeth, and her ripe lips would be working as though she were counting the beats, and he would think she was trying to whisper to him, and.…

 

Well, what would he be doing all this time? If he was not dead yet, which would be a wonder, his left hand would brush the hair away from her temple, and kind of stay there to keep the hair away, and his right hand would get sort of nervous and move around to the back of her head, and when she had counted the heart beats a few minutes and was raising her head, he would draw the head up to him and kiss her once for luck, if he was as bilious as a Jersey swamp angel, and have her charge it in the bill; and then a reaction would set in, and he would be as weak as a cat, and she would have to fan him and rub his head till he got over being nervous, and then make out her prescription after he got asleep. No; all of a man’s symptoms change when a female doctor is practicing on him, and she would kill him dead.

 

The Sun is a woman’s rights paper, and believes in allowing women to do anything that they can do as well as men, and is in favor of paying them as well as men are paid for the same work, taking all things into consideration; but it is opposed to their trifling with human life, by trying to doctor a total stranger. These colleges are doing a great wrong in preparing these female doctors for the war path, and we desire to enter a protest in behalf of twenty million men who could not stand the pressure.

 

Bilious: nauseous or vomiting. 

Wedge: a steel wedge. 

Chilblains: painful inflammation of small blood vessels, caused by repeated exposure to cold.

 

* 

The question of “inappropriate behavior” has long baffled society. As is most often true, the older generation disapproves of the behavior of the young. Peck offers up his own assessment: 

Shall There Be Hugging in the Parks? 

The law-abiding people of this community were startled on Tuesday, and the greatest indignation prevailed at an editorial article in the Sentinel [local newspaper] denouncing the practice of hugging in the public parks. The article went on to show that the placing of seats in the parks leads to hugging, and the editor denounced hugging in the most insane manner possible. 

The Sun [rival newspaper] does not desire to enter politics, but when a great constitutional question like this comes up, it will be found on the side of the weak against the strong. 

The Sentinel advises the removal of the seats from the park because hugging is done on them. Great heavens! has it come to this? Are the dearest rights of the American citizen to be abridged in this summary manner? Let us call the attention of that powerful paper to a clause in the Declaration of Independence, which asserts that “all men are created free and equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” When the framers of that great Declaration of Independence were at work on that clause, they must have had in view the pastime of hugging in the parks.

 

Hugging is certainly a “pursuit of happiness.” People do not hug for wages – that is, except on the stage. Nobody is obliged to hug. It is a sort of spontaneous combustion, as it were, of the feelings, and has to have proper conditions of the atmosphere to make it a success. Parties who object to hugging are old, usually, and have been satiated, and are like a lemon that has done duty in circus lemonade. If they had a job of hugging, they would want to hire a man to do it for them. 

A man who objects to a little natural, soul-inspiring hugging on a back seat in a park, of an evening, with a fountain throwing water all over little cast-iron cupids, has probably got a soul, but he hasn’t got it with him. To the student of nature there is no sight more beautiful than to see a flock of young people take seats in the park, after the sun has gone to bed in the west, and the moon has pulled a fleecy cloud over her face for a veil, so as not to disturb the worshippers. 

A couple, one a male and the other a female, will sit far apart on the cast-iron seat for a moment, when the young lady will try to fix her cloak over her shoulders, and she can’t fix it, and then the young man will help her, and when he has got it fixed he will go off and leave one arm around the small of her back. He will miss his arm, and wonder where he left it, and go back after it, and in the dark he will feel around with the other hand to find the hand he left, and suddenly the two hands will meet; they will express astonishment, and clasp each other, and be so glad that they will begin to squeeze, and the chances are that they will cut the girl in two, but they never do. Under such circumstances, a girl can exist on less atmosphere than she can when doing a washing.

 

There is just about so much hugging that has to be done, and the Sentinel should remember that very many people have not facilities at their homes for such soul-stirring work, and they are obliged to flee to the parks, or to the woods, where the beneficent city government has provided all of the modern improvements. 

Hugging is as necessary to the youth of the land as medicine to the sick, and instead of old persons, whose days of kittenhood are over, throwing cold water upon the science of hugging, they should encourage it by all legitimate means. 

When, in strolling through the parks, you run on to a case of sporadic hugging, instead of making a noise on the gravel walk, to cause the huggists to stop it, you should trace your steps noiselessly, get behind a tree, and see how long they can stand it without dying. Instead of removing the cast-iron seats from the parks, we should be in favor of furnishing reserved seats for old people, so they can sit and watch the hugging. 

It doesn’t do any hurt to hug.

 

People think it is unhealthy, but nobody was ever known to catch cold while hugging. It is claimed by some that young people who stay out nights and hug, are not good for anything the next day. There is something to this, but if they didn’t get any hugging they wouldn’t be worth a cent any time. They would be all the time looking for it. 

No, good Mr. Sentinel, on behalf of fifty thousand young people who have no organ [newspaper outlet] to make known their wants, we ask you to stay your hand, and do not cause the seats to be removed from the parks. Remember how many there are who have yet to learn the noble art of hugging, and give them a chance.

 

* 

Few students today will understand what it was like once to have to can fruits and vegetables if you wanted to enjoy them during winter. We’ve all struggled to open jars and medicine bottles today. So this selection might resonate: 

Unscrewing the Top of a Fruit Jar 

There is one thing that there should be a law passed about, and that is, these glass fruit jars, with a top that screws on. It should be made a criminal offense, punishable with death or banishment to Chicago, for a person to manufacture a fruit jar, for preserving fruit, with a top that screws on. Those jars look nice when the fruit is put up in them, and the house-wife feels as though she was repaid for all her perspiration over a hot stove, as she looks at the glass jars of different berries, on the shelf in the cellar. 

The trouble does not begin until she has company, and decides to tap a little of her choice fruit. After the supper is well under way, she sends for a jar, and tells the servant to unscrew the top, and pour the fruit into a dish. The girl brings it into the kitchen, and proceeds to unscrew the top. She works gently at first, then gets mad, wrenches at it, sprains her wrist, and begins to cry, with her nose on the underside of her apron, and skins her nose on the dried pancake batter that is hidden in the folds of the apron.

 

Then the little house-wife takes hold of the fruit can, smilingly, and says she will show the girl how to take off the top. She sits down on the wood-box, takes the glass jar between her knees, runs out her tongue, and twists. But the cover does not twist. The cover seems to feel as though it was placed there to keep guard over that fruit, and it is as immovable as the Egyptian pyramids. The little lady works until she is red in the face, and until her crimps all come down, and then she sets it down to wait for the old man to come home. He comes in tired, disgusted, and mad as a hornet, and when the case is laid before him, he goes out in the kitchen and pulls off his coat, and takes the jar. 

He remarks that he is at a loss to know what women are made for, anyway. He says they are all right to sit around and do crochet work, but whenever strategy, brain, and muscle are required, then they can’t get along without a man. He tries to unscrew the cover, and his thumb slips off and knocks skin off the knuckle. He breathes a silent prayer and calls for the kerosene can, and pours a little of it into the crevice, and lets it soak, and then he tries again, and swears audibly. 

Then he calls for a tack-hammer, and taps the cover gently on one side, the glass jar breaks, and the juice runs down his trousers leg, on the table and all around. Enough of the fruit is saved for supper, and the old man goes up the back stairs to tie his thumb up in a rag, and change his pants.

 

All come to the table smiling, as though nothing had happened, and the house-wife don’t allow any of the family to have any sauce for fear they will get broken glass into their stomachs, but the “company” is provided for generously, and all would be well only for a remark of a little boy who, when asked if he will have some more of the sauce, says he “don’t want no strawberries pickled in kerosene.” The smiling little hostess steals a smell of the sauce, while they are discussing politics, and believes she does smell kerosene, and she looks at the old man kind of spunky, when he glances at the rag on his thumb and asks if there is no liniment in the house. The preserving of fruit in glass jars is broken up in that house, and four dozen jars are down cellar to lay upon the lady’s mind till she gets a chance to send some of them to a charity picnic. The glass jar fruit can business is played out unless a scheme can be invented to get the top off.

 

Wood-box: A box, with lid, for storing firewood for the fireplaces and stoves commonly used in that era. 

Crimps: Hair clips. 

The Bad Boy's father is often in undeserved trouble in these stories.

* 

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, when looking at old literature, Peck displays the casual racism of his era in the next selection. (Paul Dunbar, the African American poet who had trouble selling his most sophisticated work, would recognize the problem Peck illuminates, while also failing to account for his own prejudices.) 

White audiences of this period preferred sentimental songs that glossed over the tragedies of slavery and Jim Crow existence. 

Colored Concert Troupes 

Sometimes it seems as though the colored people ought to have a guardian appointed over them. Now, you take a colored concert troupe, and though they may have splendid voices, they do not know enough to take advantage of their opportunities. People go to hear them because they are colored people, and they want to hear old-fashioned negro melodies, and yet these mokes will tackle Italian opera and high toned music that they don’t know how to sing.

 

They will sing these fancy operas, and people will not pay any attention. Along toward the end of the programme they will sing some old nigger song, and the house fairly goes wild and calls them out half a dozen times. And yet they do not know enough to make up a programme of such music as they can sing, and such as the audience want.

 

They get too big, these colored people do, and can’t strike their level. People who have heard Kellogg, and Marie Roze, and Gerster, are sick when a black cat with a long red dress comes out and murders the same pieces the prima donnas have sung. We have seen a colored girl attempt a selection from some organ-grinder opera, and she would howl and screech, and catch her breath and come again, and wheel and fire vocal shrapnel, limber up her battery and take a new position, and unlimber and send volleys of soprano grape and cannister into the audience, and then she would catch on to the highest note she could reach and hang to it like a dog to a root, till you would think they would have to throw a pail of water on her to make her let go, and all the time she would be biting and shaking like a terrier with a rat, and finally give one kick at last at her red trail with her hind foot, and back off the stage looking as though she would have to be carried on a dustpan, and the people in the audience would look at each other in pity and never give her a cheer, when, if she had come out and patted her leg, and put one hand up to her ear, and sung, “Ise a Gwine to See Massa Jesus Early in de Mornin’,” they would have split the air wide open with cheers, and called her out five times.

 

The fact is, they haven’t got sense.

 

There was a hungry-looking, round-shouldered, sick-looking colored man in that same party, that was on the programme for a violin solo. When he came out the people looked at each other, as much as to say, “Now we will have some fun.” The moke struck an attitude as near Ole Bull as he could with his number eleven feet and his hollow chest, and played some diabolical selection from a foreign cat opera that would have been splendid if Wilhelmjor Ole Bull had played it, but the colored brother couldn’t get within a mile of the tune. He rasped his old violin for twenty minutes and tried to look grand, and closed his eyes and seemed to soar away to heaven,—and the audience wished to heaven he had,—and when he became exhausted and squeezed the last note oat, and the audience saw that he was in a profuse perspiration, they let him go and did not call him back. If he had come out and sat on the back of a chair and sawed off “The Devil’s Dream,” or “The Arkansaw Traveler,” that crowd would have cheered him till he thought he was a bigger man than Grant.

 

But he didn’t have any sense. If some one will send a marked copy of this paper to some of these colored concert troupes, and they will take the hint, and sing nigger songs, they will make a heap of money, where now they have to live on a free lunch route.

 

Moke: Slang for a “donkey.”