1912

__________ 

“I don’t believe your old bastard theory of evolution, … I believe it’s pure jackass nonsense. … If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a skunk, a hypocrite, and a liar.”  

Billy Sunday

__________

“For Wallace, on the occasion of our engagement. From Maria.”

 

In 2013 the maple and spruce violin played by 33-year-old Wallace Henry Hartley, the bandleader on the doomed Titanic, sold for $1.45 million at auction. The musicians played on as the vessel wallowed lower and passengers’ fears grew, trying to present an air of calm. They were among the 1,517 to lose their lives in the disaster.

 

The Washington Post tells the story of how the violin was found and passed down:

 

Hartley’s body was found about 10 days after the ship sank, but the violin was not listed among the inventory of items found with it.

 

Yet a string of reasons persuaded the auction house that the violin found in 2006 in an attic in northern England was indeed genuine. For instance, the violin has a silver plate screwed onto the base with the engraving: “For Wallace, on the occasion of our engagement. From Maria.”

 

Maria Robinson, Wallace’s fiancée, wrote in her diary that the violin had been saved and returned to her. She never married. After she died in 1939 her sister donated the violin to a local Salvation Army branch, where it was passed to one of its members, a violin teacher. The teacher, in turn, gave the violin to a student, Eve, the last owner’s mother.

 

The violin was found with a brown leather case bearing the initials W.H.H. and containing other items, such as water-stained sheet music of songs known to have been played on the ship and personal effects of Hartley’s, including a silver cigarette case and a signet ring.

 

At that time the most expensive artifact ever sold was a 32-foot-long schematic of the Titanic, used in the official British inquiry into the tragedy. That sold for $356,000.

 

The following pictures are from a book published shortly after the sinking.

*

 

It will take one hundred and ten years, but Jim Thorpe will finally be declared the sole gold medal winner at the 1912 Olympics, in both the decathlon and pentathlon. As The New York Times writes:

 

Thorpe headed to the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm to compete in the decathlon and another now-defunct track contest, the pentathlon. He won both, was hailed internationally and joined a ticker-tape parade for Olympics stars up Broadway in New York. The Times reported that Thorpe received the most cheers, alongside Pat McDonald, a shot-putter who was a Times Square traffic policeman.

 

But the next year it emerged that Thorpe had earned $25 a week playing minor league baseball a few years before. Under the strict amateurism rules of the era, he was stripped of his gold medals.

 

His amateur status revoked, Thorpe began a major-league baseball career, playing outfield from 1913 to 1919 for the New York Giants, Cincinnati Reds, and Boston Braves. Remarkably, he shifted to professional football in 1920 and played until he was 41 with six teams, including the New York Giants.

 

The athletes who were declared champions by the I.O.C. after Thorpe’s disqualification — Hugo Wieslander, a Swede who placed second in the decathlon, and Ferdinand Bie of Norway, who finished behind Thorpe in the pentathlon — expressed great reluctance to accept their gold medals after Thorpe had been stripped of his victories in 1913. …

 

In 1950, he was chosen as the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century in an Associated Press poll of sportswriters.

 

Thorpe died in 1953. His New York Times obituary called him “probably the greatest natural athlete the world had seen in modern times.”

 

    What was Thorpe like? A book review in the Times offers us plenty of examples, rave reports, if you will. Fittingly, the book is titled, Path Lit by Lightning.

 

    Abel Kiviat roomed with Jim at the Olympics, and never forgot the experience, as he explained to a reporter. 

    “Thorpe!” Kiviat’s eyes sparkled when he said the name. “What you could never know is: It wasn’t just he was the greatest athlete. Greatest runner. Greatest jumper. Greatest hurdler. Greatest football player. Played in the World Series. He won trophies for ballroom dancing! But see he could watch you do whatever you did best, and then he could do it better.” He tapped the CNN flag on my microphone. “He could take this out of your hand and five minutes from now, he’d be better at it than you are.”

 

    A 22-year-old football opponent from the Army team named Dwight Eisenhower agreed with Kiviat. Thorpe, he later said, “could do everything anybody else could do and do it better.”

 

    A New York Times reporter described watching him play football, in November 1912. “At times the game itself was almost forgotten while the spectators gazed on Thorpe, the individual, to wonder at his prowess.”

 

    A college instructor, the poet Marianne Moore, was similarly awed. Watching him on the field, she saw, “Equilibrium with no strictures, but crouched in the lineup for football he was the epitome of concentration, wary, with an effect of plenty in reserve.”

 

    Yet at that exact moment, Thorpe could not have hoped to become a citizen of the United States – with that right not granted to Native Americans until twelve years later.

* 

“The result may be little short of a revolution.” 

Woodrow Wilson decides to run for president, and explains some of his basic beliefs:

 

Nothing makes America great except her thoughts, except her ideals, except her acceptance of those standards of judgment which are written large upon these pages of revelation … parties are reformed and governments are corrected by the impulses coming out of the hearts of those who never exercised authority and never organized parties. (10/205-206)

 

Walworth writes:

 

Wilson sensed at first hand the spirit of revolt that was agitating the West. The Socialist mayor of a town in Nebraska – a railroad laborer clad in jumpers – boarded the train and explained that he had been elected by a vote that was 20 per cent Socialist and 80 per cent protest. This seemed to sum up the feeling of the country. “Taft will be renominated by the Republicans,” Wilson said. “Unless the Democrats nominate someone whom the people can accept as expressing this protest, there will be a radical third party formed and the result may be little short of a revolution.” (10/207)

 

Wilson sometimes became depressed. He once wrote a friend, “the world grows sometimes to seem so brutal, so naked of beauty, so devoid of chivalrous sentiment and all sense of fair play, that one’s own spirit hardens and is in danger of losing its fineness. I fight on, in the spirit of Kipling’s ‘If,’ but that is oftentimes a very arid air.” (10/220)

 

* 

    Meanwhile, the battle to provide birth control information and materials to more people is gaining ground. 

    Margaret Talbot, in a review of Stephanie Gorton’s book on Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett, gives us Sanger’s background: 

    In her early thirties, Margaret went to work as a visiting nurse in the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many of her patients begged her for contraception, but she had none to give. “Middle-class women,” Gorton writes, “were far more likely to have a diaphragm, sponge or douching solution on hand.” The women Margaret was seeing “passed each other advice about how to use a knitting needle, or a cup of turpentine, or a strategic fall to end an unwanted pregnancy.” On a hot summer day in 1912, she was summoned to Grand Street by a father of three whose twenty-eight-year-old wife had become unconscious after trying to abort her latest pregnancy on her own. In the story Margaret often told about her epiphany, she called the woman Sadie Sachs. Three months later, she returned to the same apartment, where a comatose Sachs was now dying from another self-induced abortion. … “After Sadie Sachs’s death, Sanger went home to her sleeping household, where she stayed awake all night,” Gorton writes. Sanger, in a memoir, recalled vowing to “tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard.”

 

    Sanger began writing a column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” but ran into postal inspectors, who were working to enforce the provisions of the Comstock Act (including a ban on mailing of contraception and abortion information). 

Her last column ran as a blank box under the headline “What Every Girl Should Know: NOTHING! By Order of the Post Office Department.” 

 

She later combined her columns into a book, now online, including chapters on “Puberty,” “Sexual Impulse,” ”Reproduction” and “Some of the Consequences of Ignorance and Silence.”

 

As a nurse, Sanger believed providing basic knowledge to the young would help them avoid sexual problems.

 

For too long, discussion of sex had been barred by religious objections or cloaked in shame. “Fortunately this condition of affairs is changing,” she wrote, “and the knowledge of the human body, which for ages has been most carefully locked within the medical libraries, is fast taking up its abode in the homes of the people – where it belongs.”

 

As an example of the dangers of ignorance, she explains:

    Only a few weeks ago I had occasion to talk to a woman about her oldest son, whom I considered sick from overwork and lack of nourishment. She informed me, however, that this was not so, and whispered confidently that he was 16 years old and “in that age when he needs a woman.” She further remarked that she and “the papa” had talked it over with the result that the father had told the boy, when he had “the desire for a woman,” that he, the father, “would give him money enough to get one.”

 

    Think of that boy’s attitude toward women, and the danger to become affected with venereal diseases that he was likely to contract. Yet both parents had the sincerest wish to do their best for that boy; they gave the best advice they knew.

(It was feared, in that era, that if young men did not engage in sex at an age where they first became able, they might lose their abilities to perform and even their interest.)

*

July 2: The Democratic nominating convention raps up its business in Baltimore. Champ Clark gains a majority of the votes for president, 556, on the tenth ballot. For 68 years, no Democratic candidate has ever achieved a majority and not gone on to win the required two-third’s vote. It takes thirty-six more ballots before Wilson can meet the mark and secure the prize. 

Walworth explains Wilson’s thinking: “Only as Princeton [where he had taught and served as president of the school] served the nation had he thought its existence justified; only as the Democratic Party served the United States could Woodrow Wilson act as its sponsor.”  

The platform also committed the candidate to a pledge of a single term in office, with which Wilson disagreed. (10/234) 

America came into the world in 1776, Wilson once said, with “a spirit and a mission” that was inherited from the Bill of Rights; and she had grown as if my predestination. As apostles of liberty and self-government, Americans had special responsibilities. Repeatedly proclaiming a sense of duty that was extra-legal, the prophet had declared: “I will not cry ‘peace’ so long as there is sin and wrong in the world. … America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.” Mere national patriotism, he had told his Princeton boys, was a narrow and provincial feeling. It was America’s destiny to show other nations “a fortunate way to happiness,” to “go to the ends of the earth carrying conscience and the principles that make for good conduct.” (10/344)

 

“Big business is not dangerous because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.” (10/238)

 

* 

September 15: Woodrow Wilson, running for president, expresses some of his views: “The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power.” (10/245)

 

The Democratic Party has stood steadfast in a deep rooted faith…a faith as old as human liberty. It is…the only faith that has ever made the intolerable burden of life possible to bear, namely, the faith that every man ought to have the interest of every other man at his heart. The faith that would set up a government in the world where the average man, the plain man, the common man, the ignorant man, the unaccomplished man, the poor man had a voice equal to the voice of anybody else in the settlement of the common affairs, an ideal never before realized in the history of the world. (10/250)