1901

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“We bought the son of a bitch, but he wouldn’t stay bought.” 

Henry Clay Frick on Teddy Roosevelt

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January 10: The first big Texas oil strike, Spindletop, comes in. Drillers hit a “gusher” which produces 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil per day.

 

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Harry Mozley Stevens serves the first wiener in a bun during a baseball game at the New York Polo Grounds. By 1992 Harry M. Stevens Inc. was selling 20 million boiled hot dogs annually, an estimated 1,893 miles of frankfurters, laid end-to-end. (Ohio Magazine, July 1993, p. 21)

 

Stevens was born in 1855, in London, and in his early adulthood, served as a lay minister. In 1882 he crossed the ocean with $5 in his pocket and a family, and settled near Youngstown. For five years, he worked as an iron puddler, until a strike closed down his place of work.

 

By this time, he had a wife and five children to support. He began selling books, door-to-door, and found he had a natural talent for sales. A chance trip to a Columbus Senators baseball game in 1887 led to Stevens – who could not understand the game – making an offer to the team. He would pay $500 for the right to print all their scorecards, to be paid later. Within days, he sold $700 in advertising, quit his book-selling job, and became a concessionaire. Harry often stood at the stadium entrance, hawking his cards. His business expanded to other baseball towns, including Toledo, Wheeling, and Pittsburgh. In 1893 he decided to move to New York City, although his family remained behind in Niles, Ohio, and arrangement the couple maintained for the rest of their lives.

 

In New York, Stevens expanded, selling beer, popcorn, and hard-boiled eggs to baseball fans.

 

Ohio Magazine notes,

 

William Payne Whitney, a Wall Street tycoon, describes Stevens as the man who “parlayed a bag of peanuts into a million dollars.” During those early years, after he put straws in soft drink bottles, Stevens was credited with popularizing soda pop. That way, a dedicated fan could take a drink without tilting his head and missing the action.

 

It was his son, Frank, who came up with the idea of selling dachshund sausages to patrons at Madison Square Garden, during bicycle races, rather than beer and sandwiches. Harry remembered telling his son that “bike fans preferred ham and cheese.” One cold day at the Polo Grounds, however, Harry revived the idea. He boiled a supply of wieners, put them on split buns, and told his vendors to go out and sell them, shouting, “Get your red hots. Get ’em while they’re hot.” In the crowd that day was a cartoonist for the New York Herald Tribune, Thomas Aloysius Dorgan. He couldn’t spell “dachshund,” and instead labeled the new delicacy the “hot dog.” Later, Dorgan would call Stevens the “Columbus of the frankfurter.” (22-23)

 

After a tough loss by the team, Stevens might quote the classics, including this one from Addison: “’Tis not in mortals to command success; but we’ll do more, Sempronius. We’ll deserve it.”

 

When he died in 1934, his wife had him buried in a cemetery in Niles, even though they had lived apart for four decades.

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February 20: In the wake of the capture of Peking, in August 1900, Ellis notes that prolonged “negotiations for peace and compensation” are finally settled

 

practically on the basis outlined by President McKinley in his message to Congress of the previous December, expressed in these words:

 

The policy of the government of the United States is to seek a solution which may bring about permanent safety and peace in China, preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity, protect all rights guaranteed to friendly Powers by treaty and international law, and safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.

 

It was also stipulated that the prominent leaders of the “Boxer” movement should be punished in the following manner:

 

General Tung Fu Sian, to be degraded and deprived of his rank; Prince Tuan and Duke Lan, to be disgraced and exiled; Prince Chuang, Ying Lien, and Chao Shu Chiao, to commit suicide; a Hsu Chen Yu, Yu Hsien, Ki Hain, to be beheaded.

 

In compliance with this agreement Hsu Chen Yu and Ki Hain were decapitated in Pekin[g], February 20, 1901, on the spot where four members of the Chinese foreign office had been put to death for favoring foreigners. Those condemned to die by their own hands executed the sentence upon themselves within the time specified. (33/2126) 

 

*

 

May 1: The Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York opens and runs until November. Visitors are tricked into believing that a ten-foot-tall stone statue, the “Cardiff Giant,” is a petrified man.

 

The “giant” was first “unearthed” from its grave in 1869, near Cardiff, New York, where it had been buried by a hoaxster named George Hull.

The Cardiff Giant.

 

*

 

May 3: Fire sweeps across Jacksonville, Florida, driven by high winds, and made worse by drought conditions. Before it can be extinguished, 146 city blocks are reduced to ashes and 2,368 buildings are destroyed. Ten thousand people are left homeless. It is the third worst fire in U.S. history, after Chicago (1871) and San Francisco (1906).

 

*

 

In 1901, during one of their own glider tests, Orville Wright stalled out and their craft began plunging to earth. Only a lucky design feature saved them. They had a small “elevator” attached to the front of the plane. This small wing could be adjusted, and Orville pulled hard and caught enough air underneath it to pull his nose up, although he still landed hard.

 

By 1901, the two brothers were deeply discouraged and predicted that man might not fly for a thousand years.

 

*

 

Writing in Everybody’s Magazine, Percy Stickney Grant, expressed a common horror of cities:

 

Cities have been called ulcers. They swell and fester on the surface of human population, which is only healthy in its sparser distribution. They are full of filth, poverty and vice. They breed criminals. They graduate thieves, murderers and panderers as naturally as universities graduate scholars.

 

This is not the worst. Cities not only produce vice and crime, they also consume virtue. More horrible than a disease, they appear like diabolical personalities which subsist upon the strength, health, virtue and noble aspiration produced in the country. A city is a Moloch; the fagots of its fires are human bodies and souls.

 

Teddy Roosevelt is elevated to the highest office in the land.

 

*

September 14: The assassination of President McKinley triggers a backlash against anarchists. Voltairine de Cleyre is one. Born in Leslie, Michigan in 1866, she had long questioned the position of women in society. In 1890, for example, she gave a lecture on the topic of “Sex Slavery.” 

“Let woman ask herself, ‘Why am I the slave of man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work not paid equally with his?’” she told the assembled crowd. 

At 19, De Cleyre became a free thinker. She called for prison reforms, increased wages and improved conditions for labor, and rejected marriage as an institution. Twice she rejected proposals. According to The New York Times she established a reputation as a “transfixing speaker.”

 

The following story shows us how far we have come without realizing. Not only can women vote, even the most idiotic member of Congress would not dare call for the murder of other Americans. The Times explains: 

The assassination of President William McKinley by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901 unleashed a wave of anti-anarchist sentiment. When Senator Joseph R. Hawley of Connecticut offered $1,000 to anyone who shot an anarchist, de Cleyre responded with a letter telling him to save his money; he could kill her.

 

“I will stand straight before you at any distance you wish me to, and you may shoot, in the presence of witnesses,” she wrote. “Does not your American commercial instinct seize upon this as a bargain?”

 

The following year de Cleyre had her own brush with an assassin. A former student of hers who had become romantically obsessed with her shot her in a jealous rage. She survived, and then worked for his release on her recovery.

 

“It would be an outrage against civilization if he were sent to jail for an act which was the product of a diseased brain,” she wrote.

 

At times, de Cleyre felt lost in a world that rejected her most fervent beliefs. “I can see no use in doing anything,” she wrote in 1910. “Everything turns bitter in my mouth and ashes in my hands.” 

Yet, before she died, she took a stand: “Let me keep the intensity of my soul, with all the limitations of my conditions, rather than become the spineless and ideal-less creation of material needs.” 

She died on April 17, 1912, of an infection.

 

* 

A teacher supposedly asks a student: “Who made the world, Charles?”

 

He replies, “God made the world in 4,004 B.C. But it was reorganized in 1901 by James J. Hill, J. Pierpont Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller.”

 

James J. Hill was born in Canada in 1838, but by the time the Civil War started, he was living in St. Paul, Minnesota. He tried to join the Union Army, but a childhood accident had left him blind in one eye, and he was rejected. Hill was, on the plus side, a hard worker. “I often worked in my office until one in the morning,” he said. “One night my wife said she would go to the office with me and bring me home at half past ten. It was a summer night and I gave her a book and a chair by the window, where she presently fell asleep.” At 2 a.m. he woke her and they went home. Eventually, he and his wife Mary built a 36,000 square foot home overlooking the Mississippi River. It had a grand foyer, thirteen bathrooms, a sky-light, and housed Hill’s growing art collection. (“The First Empire Builder of the Northwest,” Smithsonian, 136)

 

Sen. John Sherman once described the powerful combination of trust so: “the new industry giants “are not satisfied with…competing with each other, and have invented a new form of combination…that seeks to avoid competition.”  (139)

 

Hill got a good deal of hate mail after the depression of 1893 hit. Hill’ Great Northern RR weathered the crisis by laying off a thousand men, and cutting the pay of those who remained. When workers organized the American Railway Union, Hill decided to send agents to Helena, Montana to fire any ARU workers there. This led to the union’s first strike, against the Great Northern, in 1894. Meanwhile, he and Morgan agreed to buy the bankrupt Northern Pacific, which ran almost parallel, to the south.  The two agreed to “form a permanent alliance defensive, and in case of need offensive, with a view of avoiding competition.” One letter, sent to his wife, warned her husband, “IT would be a fitting climax if you should be taken by your employees and hung by the neck till dead, from one of the triumphal arches so recently erected at the expense of the very people you are now defrauding of their hard earnings.”

 

Hill expanded his railroad empire, but soon ended up in a bidding war to control his own Great Northern. His nemesis in that case was E. H. Harriman. One Monday the stock was selling for $114. By Thursday it was $1,000. The New York Times called Harriman and Hill “cowboys on a spree…shooting wildly at each other in entire disregard of the safety of the bystanders.” (141)

 

For years, it is said, schoolchildren would recite the rhyme, “Twixt Hill and Hell there’s just one letter. Were Hill in Hell we’d feel much better.”

 

Hill died in 1916. (144)

 

*

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“The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be — with the Anglo-Saxon race.”

 

John Knox, presiding officer at the Alabama constitutional convention

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November 21: Delegates in Alabama have finished efforts to rewrite the state constitution. John Knox, who presided over the convention, urges voters to adopt the new document, and on November 21, it is adopted. “The new Constitution,” Knox proudly proclaims, “eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be — with the Anglo-Saxon race.”

 

A request from women to be granted the vote is, as expected, rejected. Section 177 limits the vote to “male” citizens; and Section 178 further limits the vote to males who can afford to pay all poll taxes.

 

Among other features, the new constitution included Section 102, an outright ban on interracial marriage. “The Legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a negro, or descendant of a negro,” it now read. (This ban was not removed, by voters, until 2000, despite the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967.) Section 256 also made clear: “Separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race.”

 

(And, who knew? The Alabama Constitution is the longest of any state constitution, and also likely the one most often amended. For example, Amendment 315 was passed in order to allow “promotion of [the] soybean industry.” And you can’t say the state isn’t interested in catfish. Amendment 492 allows for promotion of the “catfish industry,” too. Amendment 732 addresses “bingo games in the town of White Hall,” and last, but not least, if you live in Tallapoosa County, Amendment 827 grants authority to local officials to “provide for the enforcement of motor vehicle and traffic laws on private roads in private gated communities in the county.”)

 

* 

You might say that Warren G. Harding is having a particularly good year – although that involves cheating on his wife, with Carrie Phillips, the wife of Mr. Harding’s friend. Warren is a randy 36, Carrie only 28. (She will later move to Germany, and ditch her husband for good.) 

In The New York Times, we catch a glimpse of some of their correspondence (Carrie will later blackmail Harding when he runs for president). “If it’s sex you’re looking for, Warren G. Harding will meet your expectations,” he writes at one point – we assume at the dawn of their relationship. Later, her expectations apparently met, he tells her, “I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief until I take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts.” 

Even more fun – we have the adventures of “Jerry” and “Mrs. Pouterson,” Harding’s nicknames for his and Phillips’s genitals.  

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Clearly we’re not going to share all these details; but it is good to humanize the people we study. A surprising number of future presidents, or presidents in office, commit adultery.