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.”

* 

“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)

 

* 

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)