1884

 

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History and the “money subjects.”

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NOTE TO TEACHERS: It always seemed important to me to convince students that the people in the history books were like us. Below, then, a brief mention of Teddy Roosevelt and his grief.

 

“History is the study of people,” I assured my classes, “and more than any other subject, it will help you understand people.”

 

As for math and science, I called them the “money subjects.” If students wanted to make money, I suggested those were classes they might want to take seriously.

 

When Teddy Roosevelt’s first wife died, at age 25, in 1884, two days after giving birth to their first child, he was distraught. “I fear he sleeps little for he walks a great deal in the night and his eyes have the strained red look,” a friend wrote. Roosevelt was always known for boundless energy; and when he headed west to work on a cattle ranch, and forget his sorrow, he wanted to be accepted by the other cowboys. He drove himself, shared their harsh living conditions, once worked eighteen hours with a broken rib.

 

Same day: The Ohio River crests at Cincinnati standing at “seventy-one feet and three-quarters of an inch,” a new record. Much of the downtown is flooded.

 

* 

March 28-30: Cincinnati is staggered by a bloody riot. Benjamin Andrews describes the scene. 

Riot followed flood. In March two confessed murderers had come off with a conviction for mere manslaughter. As twenty other murderers were in prison, respectable citizens assembled to demand reform in murder trials. Noisy leaders of the mob element tried to capture the meeting, which was adjourned to prevent mischief. A young man rushing out shouted, “To the jail! Come on! Follow me and hang Berner.” The door was burst open, but Berner had been smuggled to Columbus at the first alarm. Meantime the militia were secretly introduced through the same tunnel which afforded him exit. After a skirmish the rioters were driven out, leaving some of their number prisoners. Partly from chagrin, partly to secure the release of the captured leaders, and partly to indulge their lawless humor, the hoodlums set the court-house on fire, robbing an armory and two gun-stores to provide themselves arms. Other shops were broken into and sacked. They fired volley after volley of musketry at the militia, and fiercely attacked barricades which these had erected against them. After repeated warnings retaliation was meted out with terrible effect. The disorders continued six days, when the law was so far vindicated that business could be resumed. The most authentic list put the killed in this riot at forty-five, the wounded at one hundred, thirty-eight. (11/389-390)

 

 * 

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.” 

May 10: Samuel Clemens buys a “penny-farthing” bicycle and sets out, with the help of an instructor, to learn how to ride. 

Riders go "wheeling."

 

Looking back on the experience, he later remarked, “I must have been rather young for my age then, for I was trying to tame an old-fashioned bicycle nine feet high.” 

Twain later turned his experiences into a short story titled “Taming the Bicycle.” He refers to his instructor, a German employee who worked at the bicycle factory, “The Expert,” and says he explained briefly how the machine worked, 

then he got on its back and rode around a little, to show how easy it was to do. He said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to his surprise and joy, that all he needed to do was to get me on to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself. Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record. He was on that side, shoving up the machine; we all came down with a crash, he at the bottom, I next, and the machine on top.

 

They examined the bicycle, Twain “applied some Pond’s Extract,” a salve reportedly good for healing wounds, and they resumed. His trainer remarked that nothing less than dynamite could destroy one of these “steel spiders,” and “limped” away, out of danger, to observe. At one point, Twain “got up a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and I went over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on the instructor’s back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air between me and the sun.” The bicycle crashed down, landing on both men, but they broke its fall. 

Twain said it was five days before he could be carried out of his home on a stretcher, and he went “down to the hospital, and found The Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few more days I was quite sound.” 

His lessons soon resumed. He now learned that mounting and dismounting a tall machine could be challenging, much like trying to learn German, Twain said, and he took all kinds of creative spills. 

Finally, he was deemed competent, and told he could go for a solo spin whenever he felt ready. The Expert inquired about his muscles. “I was able to inform him that I hadn’t any,” Twain said. “He said that was a defect which would make up-hill wheeling pretty difficult for me at first.” But riding would build up his muscles. “He wanted to test mine,” so Twain “offered my biceps – which was my best.” 

The Expert compared the feel of his arm to “an oyster in a rag.” 

Twain took his first solo ride on a quite Sabbath, on a wide avenue near his Hartford, Connecticut home. A boy “munching a hunk of maple syrup” sat on a gate-post, and watched the new rider try and fail several times to get going. “The first time I failed and went down he said that if he was me he would dress up in pillows, that’s what he would do. The next time I went down he advised me to go and learn to ride a tricycle first.” When Twain crashed a third time, the boy remarked that he didn’t see how the writer could ride on a trolley car without tumbling off. 

When Twain finally got going, he went so slowly that the boy was able to “loaf along the sidewalk and keep pace and observe.” When a little girl passed, and giggled at the scene, the boy called out, “Let him alone, he’s going to a funeral.” 

Twain wobbled down the street, as far as he dared; but when he tried to turn around and head home, he traced a “jerky and perilous zigzag,” rather than a gentle arc. Naturally, he lost control: 

Then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all prayers and all your powers to change its mind – your heart stands still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight on you go, and there are but a couple of feet between you and the curb now.

 

He forgets all his lessons, strikes the curb hard, and goes “sprawling on that granite-bound inhospitable shore.” 

Twain pulls himself together again, and finally heads home, with the boy still following and observing. A farmer, with a wagon full of cabbages, is approaching from the opposite direction. The boy shouts to the farmer, “To the left! Turn to the left, or this jackass ’ll run over you!” Twain catches the flank of one of the farmer’s horses and goes “down in a pile” once more. 

In the next few days, with practice, he gets better. The boy can no longer keep up, walking along, and has to sit on his gate-post “and content himself with watching me fall at long range.” Twain runs into stepping-stones placed in the street and goes crashing down. He finds that dogs are always in his way, and he runs over every dog that comes along and down he goes once more. 

“They all liked to see me practise, and they all came,” he explained, “for there was very little going on in our neighborhood to entertain a dog.” 

Still, the writer lived to tell the tale. 

Finally, he noted, “I can steer as well as I want to, now, and I will catch that boy out one of these days and run over him if he doesn’t reform.” 

He offered this last bit of advice to his readers: “Get a bicycle, you will not regret it, if you live.”

 * 

Bud Hillerich, 17, takes a day off work from his father’s wood shop and heads to the ballfield to catch a Louisville Eclipse game, the city’s major league team. Mired in a slump, which continues that day, Pete Browning, a star for the Eclipse nine, breaks his bat in anger. Hillerich asks afterward if he could make a new one to whatever specifications Browning wanted. 

In his first game with the new bat in his hands, Browning cracked three hits. He was hooked. Browning’s nickname, “The Louisville Slugger,” was transferred to the new company that began producing the lumber that major leaguers came to love. Louisville Slugger dominated the market for years; but by the summer of 2020, had fallen to third place. 

(With the COVID-19 virus running rampant in the spring of 2020, the fate of the baseball season hung in the balance.)

  

* 

June 22: Three years have passed since Lieutenant A.W. Greely set out on his Arctic expedition; and no word has been heard since from anyone, regarding the fate of Greely or his men. A rescue party is sent out under commander W.S. Schley. 

Three vessels were made ready by the Navy Department, and a fourth by Great Britain. After a long search Greely and six companions were found on the point of starvation and five were brought home safely. During their stay in the Arctic, they had reached a point within 430 miles of the North Pole, the farthest north any white man had then gone. (97/411)

* 

July 23: Baseball rules are changed to start the season, allowing pitchers to throw overhand for the first time. One pitcher, Charlie Radbourn, one of twenty children growing up, sticks with his old underhand delivery, which allows him great control. (In 1883 Radbourn had won 49 games for the Providence Grays of the National League.) 

Beginning on July 23, he started 26 of the Gray’s last 30 games, won 18 in a row, and 26 of 28, by the time the season ended on September 21. In one four-game series, against the defending champions, the Boston Beaneaters, Charlie won four times. Peter Wallen, writing about the games later, says the Beaneaters lost the fourth game because their catcher treated one pitch like “a poisonous reptile” which allowed a Grays’ runner to advance and then score when the next batter lashed a single to plate the winning run.

 

“Old Hoss,” as Charlie was known, was rewarded at season’s end by what writers at the time described as a “huge envelope bursting with lawful currency of the United States.” Radbourn finished with a record of 60-12, worked 679 innings, struck out 411 (it still took four strikes in those days), threw 11 shutouts and posted an ERA of 1.38. 

“Hoss” got a $2,000 raise the following season, but his arm had gone dead, and he posted a 26-20 record. By 1891, he was suffering from syphilis, and finished 12-12 for the Cincinnati team. He was badly injured in a hunting accident three years later, and dead at age 43 in 1897.

 

*

“A corrupt, licentious man.”

July 24: From Smithsonian magazine: The Buffalo Evening Telegraph breaks a story that 

many in upstate New York had long known to be true – that 10 years earlier, a woman named Maria Halpin had given birth in that city to a son with the surname Cleveland and then been taken to a mental asylum while the child was adopted by another family.

 

Cleveland’s campaign, knowing there was no refuting the allegations, was almost blasé in admitting that yes, Cleveland and Halpin had been “illicitly acquainted.” At the time, the campaign provided this rationale: Cleveland was a bachelor, and Halpin had been rather free with her affections, including with some of Cleveland’s friends – prominent Buffalo businessmen all. As the only unmarried man of the bunch, Cleveland, though not certain the child was his, claimed paternity and helped Halpin name the boy and place him with a caring family. Really, he’d been looking out for his friends and for a woman in unfortunate circumstances. The scandal was, of course, unfortunate, but the governor’s involvement was far from nefarious, and certainly shouldn’t preclude him from serving as president (especially not when Blaine had already made it clear he was not a man to be trusted). (See: October 31.)

 

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October 31: Reporters manage to track down Halpin. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, she proclaims, “The circumstances under which my ruin was accomplished are too revolting on the part of Grover Cleveland to be made public.” Halpin, the Tribune reported, was a 38-year-old widow, in 1874, when: 

Halpin said that Cleveland had pursued her relentlessly, and that she finally consented to join him for a meal at the Ocean Dining Hall & Oyster House. After dinner, Cleveland escorted her back to her boarding house. In an 1874 affidavit, Halpin strongly implied that Cleveland’s entry into her room and the incident that transpired there was not consensual – he was forceful and violent, she alleged, and later promised to ruin her if she went to the authorities.

 

She told Cleveland at the time that she never wanted to see him again; but a few weeks later, her pregnancy forced her to approach him for help. Reporters also tracked down doctors who said Halpin’s claim, that she had not had some kind of mental breakdown, were true. 

Halpin also expressed outrage when asked about the paternity of her son, named Oscar Folsom Cleveland, and adopted by another family. “There is not and never was a doubt as to the paternity of our child, and the attempt of Grover Cleveland or his friends to couple the name of Oscar Folsom or any one else with that of the boy, for that purpose, is simply infamous and false.” 

Words like “harlot,” “ruined woman,” and descriptions of Cleveland as a “common libertine” kept the campaign interesting (you might say). 

One anti-Cleveland attack involved the chant, “Ma, ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.” 

Pastor Henry W. Crabbe, of Buffalo’s United Presbyterian Church, condemned Cleveland in no uncertain words: 

I am very sorry to say that he is a corrupt, licentious man. He has never been married, and is notoriously bad with women. Cleveland is well known here, and it is a reproach to the city that he ever got into the Gubernatorial chair. I most sincerely and earnestly pray that he will not be our next President. His public life is revealing his true character. It may be said these stories are put in circulation for political effect, but the trouble is they cannot be refuted.

  

* 

November 4: Grover Cleveland wins one of the closest presidential races in history, defeating James G. Blaine. He becomes the first Democrat to gain the White House since Buchanan in 1856.

 

In elections of this era it was common to “wave the bloody shirt,” and remind voters that Democrats had been for secession in many cases. Now, two decades later, that tactic failed.

 

The result of the election turned upon the vote of New York. Outside of that State Blaine had 182 electoral votes and Cleveland 183. The contest in New York was so close and the outcome so doubtful that it was not known for several days after the election which of the two candidates was elected. It was finally determined that the Democrats had carried the State by 1,047 votes. Thus Cleveland was chosen by an electoral majority of 37. Andrew C. McLaughlin; p. 509, A History of the American Nation (1911).

 

Benjamin Andrews sums up the campaign this way. It “was bitterly personal, attacks upon the characters of the candidates taking the place of a discussion of principles. … The total popular vote was over 10,000,000 – the largest ever cast. Cleveland had 4,911,000, a plurality of 62,000 over Blaine.” (IV, 230)

 

*

 

In the Tennessee Mountains by Charles Egbert Craddock is published. Reuben Post Halleck, writing in 1911, tells the story of the author:

 

Miss Mary Noailles Murfree, better known as Charles Egbert Craddock, was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in 1850. For fifteen years she spent her summers in the Tennessee mountains among the people of whom she writes. Her pen name of Charles Egbert Craddock deceived her publishers into the belief that she was a man. Both Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich accepted her stories for the Atlantic Monthly without suspecting her sex, and Aldrich was a surprised man the day she entered his office and introduced herself as Charles Egbert Craddock.

 

The stories that suggested to her editors a masculine hand are lively recitals of family feuds, moonshiners’ raids, circuit court sessions, fights over land grants, discoveries of oil, and many similar incidents, which make up the life of a people separated from the modern world by almost inaccessible mountains. The rifle is used freely by this people, and murder is frequent, but honor and bravery, daring and sacrifice, are not absent, and Craddock finds among the women, as well as the men, examples of magnanimity and heroism that thrill the reader.

 

The presence of the mountains is always imminent, and seems to impress the lives of the people in some direct way. To Cynthia Ware, for instance, in the story, Drifting Down Lost Creek, Pine Mountain seems to stand as a bar to all her ambitions and dreams:

 

“Whether the skies are blue or gray, the dark, austere line of its summit limits the horizon. It stands against the west like a barrier. It seems to Cynthia Ware that nothing which went beyond this barrier ever came back again. One by one the days passed over it, and in splendid apotheosis, in purple and crimson and gold, they were received into the heavens and returned no more. She beheld love go hence, and many a hope. Even Lost Creek itself, meandering for miles between the ranges, suddenly sinks into the earth, tunnels an unknown channel beneath the mountain, and is never seen again.”

 

And, finally, after a tremendous self-sacrifice, when all appears lost and her future looks colorless and hopeless, she fears that the years of her life are “like the floating leaves drifting down Lost Creek, valueless, purposeless, and vaguely vanishing in the mountains.” All of the stories are by no means so tragically sad as this one, but all are overshadowed by the mountains. Among the best of the novels, Down the Ravine and The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountain may be mentioned.

 

(If I were still teaching, I’d probably check them out.)

 

Murfree.