dual personalities

Tag: History

August 2, 2023

This and that

by chuckofish

On August 2nd, 1923–100 years ago–Vice President Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace were on vacation at Coolidge’s family farm near Plymouth Notch, Vermont in the Green Mountains.

The farm house had no electricity and a phone that only occasionally worked. The couple went to bed early, but a little before midnight, they were awakened by a loud knock at the front door. A moment later, Coolidge’s father called up to Calvin to come down. President Warren Harding was dead.

Coolidge got dressed. He prayed with his wife. And in the early morning hours of August 3rd, he was sworn into office by his father John Calvin Coolidge Sr. who was a Vermont notary public and justice of the peace. By the light of a kerosene lamp, Calvin Coolidge became the 30th President of the United States. Since it was 2:47 in the morning, President Coolidge went back to bed.

With the 1924 election just around the corner, many expected Coolidge to be a lame duck President, but on his train ride back to Washington he began immediately to plan how to build upon Harding’s most important policies. His first order of business…limiting the government itself.

We could use old Silent Cal these days, don’t you think?

Well, it is August now and we are well into the Dog Days of Summer. We are finally getting out of town tomorrow–heading to Saratoga, NY to attend the wedding of my nephew Tim and Abbie.

We are very much looking forward to the festivities and to seeing our DP and her family, but the air travel will no doubt be arduous. Please pray for travel mercies for the OM and me, the boy, daughter #1, and daughter #2 and her petite famille.

In the meantime, here are some good links to worthwhile things:

August on TCM is Summer Under the Stars month with a different star celebrated every day. At first glance it’s not a great selection, but there are some good days in there!

This is the Introduction to the graphic novel, The Grand Inquisitor, but it serves as an excellent overview of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This novel is very relevant today in view of our culture’s desire to find technological/scientific solutions to the problem of Evil. “This way of thinking appalled Dostoyevsky. With his profound grasp of psychology, he regarded the materialists’ view of human nature as hopelessly simplistic. Deeply suspicious of what intellectuals would do if they ever gained the power they sought, he described in greater detail than any other nineteenth-century thinker what we have come to call totalitarianism. Even in its less terrifying forms, rule by supposedly benevolent experts was, he thought, more dangerous than people understood.”

Also, I read recently that the New York Times is disbanding its sports department. Oh really? If our local paper got rid of its sports department, there would be (literally) nothing left to read. Another nail in the coffin of print journalism I guess.

We are looking forward to a guest post from DN on Friday, so stay tuned!

The painting is “The Swearing In of Calvin Coolidge by His Father” by Arthur I. Keller, 1923.

3 Comments
August 1, 2023

Nil sine Numine*

by chuckofish

Today we celebrate the day in 1876 when U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant signed a proclamation admitting Colorado to the Union as the 38th state. Because the country had just celebrated its centennial a few weeks earlier, Colorado became known as the “Centennial State”.

Several months prior, in December 1875, leading Colorado citizens gathered to draft a state constitution, among them our great-great grandfather John Simpson Hough, who represented Bent County.

He received 240 votes in the sparsely populated county.

Delegates to the convention came from every district in the soon-to-be state. They met at the Odd Fellows Hall, upstairs from the First National Bank, on Blake Street in Denver. Modeled after the United States Constitution, Colorado’s Constitution set the terms and duties of state government officials, and outlined the manner by which a law could be introduced and passed. It established the State Supreme Court, as well as district and county courts. A program for the supervision and maintenance of a public school system was created.  A state tax system was developed, rules that regulate railroads and other corporations were adopted, and provisions created to amend that State’s constitution.

So join me tonight in a toast to the state of Colorado and to John S. Hough.

In science news, please note that the first of two full moons in August will reach its peak today, August 1, so be sure to check it out. And as an added bonus, both of the full moons this month are also supermoons!

And here’s a poem about the moon by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Have a good day! Read some history. Look up at the night sky.

The painting is “Moonlight Study” by Christian Friedrich Gille, 1831 .

*The motto of the state of Colorado: “Nothing without the Deity”

4 Comments
July 6, 2023

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

Recently I was reading about Esther Forbes (June 28, 1891 – August 12, 1967), the American novelist and historian. She wrote a number of historical novels, but she is mostly remembered for writing the Newbery Medal winner Johnny Tremain, published in 1943. She also won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1942 for Paul Revere and the World He Lived In.

My grandmother, Mira Sargent, was about the same age as Esther and they grew up in the same social circle in Worcester, Massachusetts. Both were descendants of old Colonial families with roots in the seventeenth century. Esther attended Bancroft and Mira went to Miss Hall’s School in Pittsfield. Their paths continued to cross throughout their lives–in New York City, Boston and back in Worcester. My father always said they were friends but who knows.

Anyway, I decided to read Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, although my expectations were low, having read other books by mid-century female authors of this ilk. How wrong I was! From the first paragraph I was engaged:

There had been week upon week of the cold grey fury of the North Atlantic, for it was mid-winter when the little refugee, Apollos Rivoire, made his crossing. At such a season only the hardiest of passengers ventured much above deck. Bunks were dank, bread wormy, beef tainted, and many of these small sailing ships never made port, but at least the Atlantic was crossed in great company. God brooded upon the face of these waters. His hand parted the mountainous waves. He upheld the ship. Even if one drowned, it was the Providence of God. Apollos did not drown. He entered Massachusetts Bay late in 1715 or early 1716.

Apollos Rivoire was the father of Paul Revere. He came to Massachusetts as a 13-year old Huguenot refugee, fleeing persecution in France. His family owned great vineyards, but they saw no future for him in France, so he was sent to America as an indentured servant who was apprenticed to learn the silversmith trade. I did not know that! As usual, there is a lot I do not know, but this book is filling in the blanks in a delightfully readable manner.

So read an old book; learn something new!

The painting at the top is by Albert Anker (1831-1910)

5 Comments
July 5, 2023

Old dead white men (and women)

by chuckofish

Here’s a reminder that knowing your past will guide your future.

“…[W]e are probably the first generation in human history that doesn’t really know the communities from which we come. I can’t name any of my eight great-grandparents. (Perhaps you can, but I would ask, respectfully, what do you know about them?) As Alasdair MacIntyre has famously argued, we speak of justice with verve and passion but are unlikely to know what justice really means or from whom we inherit the very concept. We’re so eager to throw off the shackles of our received traditions that we’ve wholeheartedly loosed our roots from the loyal land and bound ourselves instead to that great banality of modern self-actualization, “you do you.”

I do know the names of my eight great-grandparents, although I admit I don’t know much about my great-grandmother Isabel Stanley Sargent’s line. I only know she was from Maine and that she left her husband and two children and fled to Chicago. She was a shocking skeleton in the family closet, but undoubtedly there was a lot more to that story. I have a fair knowledge of the rest of my great-grandparents compared, I suppose, to my contemporaries.

Since I retired I have had it in the back of my mind to “organize” all the genealogy notes and notebooks I have stored in my office. I tell myself I should write some kind of narrative account of our family. I know from experience researching that there is very little written down out there in the way of personal history and a lot of it is full of mistakes anyway. Nevertheless, anything written down and preserved is good, if not always helpful. I think of my mother’s cousin Jane who wrote “a family history…at the request of her brother” for the “elucidation of our children and grandchildren.” A noble effort it was, which my mother and her sister Susanne tore apart and corrected and generally ridiculed. True, Jane made a few undeserved snarky comments about their mother, but beyond that and the multiple mistakes, it is still a valuable resource (with pictures).

So we shall see if I can get started. Starting is always the hard part.

Meanwhile my grandkids celebrated the 4th in patriotic red-white-and-blue style…

Cuties.

*The ODWM pictured is Joseph Warren Sargent, my great-great grandfather.

4 Comments
May 30, 2023

Lest we forget

by chuckofish

Yesterday morning I got up bright and early and drove with daughter #1 to Florissant, MO to the historic Cold Water Cemetery, the oldest Protestant cemetery west of the Mississippi still in use, for an annual DAR event. There are some Revolutionary War veterans buried in this cemetery, so the DAR has been caretaking the cemetery for 60 years. We enjoyed the ceremony, especially the Lewis and Clark Fife and Drum Corps…

It was good to see some twelve-year old boys (probably all home-schooled) interested in history. We also liked these guys from the Militia de San Carlos and the Sons of the Revolution…

They gave a musket salute as well.

And we got to ride in one of these “shuttles” down to the cemetery…

It was almost like being on a hayride!

As is my tradition, I also watched They Were Expendable (1945), which is the best war movie ever.

Listen, son: you and I are professionals. If the manager says, “Sacrifice”, we lay down a bunt and let somebody else hit the home runs. We know all about those destroyers out of commission, tied up around San Diego. We could use them here. But they’re not around. They won’t be. Our job is to lay down that sacrifice. That’s what we were trained for, and that’s what we’ll do. Understand?

So keep showing up. Pay attention. Pray hard for your country.

3 Comments
May 24, 2023

Watching the river flow

by chuckofish

Today we toast Bob Dylan on his 82nd birthday! Huzzah!

Recently, when I awaken in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep, I have been re-reading Chronicles, Volume I by BD. He is one of the best-read guys you could know. He never wasted his free time in his youth, but read whatever was available on the bookshelves of whoever’s apartment he was crashing in. And he remembered what he read.

I read the biography of Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican. He lived in the early part of the 1800s and was quite a character. He’s from Gettysburg and he’s got a clubfoot like Byron. He grew up poor, made a fortune and from then on championed the weak and any other group who wasn’t able to fight equally. Stevens had a grim sense of humor, a sharp tongue and a white-hot hatred for the bloated aristocrats of his day. He wanted to confiscate the land of the slaveholding elite, once referred to a colleague on the floor of the chamber as “slinking in his own slime.” …He got right in there, called his enemies a “feeble band of lowly reptiles who shun the light and who lurked in their own dens.” Stevens was hard to forget. He made a big impression on me, was inspiring. Him and Teddy Roosevelt, maybe the strongest U.S. president ever. I read about Teddy, too. He was a cattle rancher and a crime buster, had to be restrained from declaring war on California–had a big run in with J.P. Morgan, a deity figure who owned most of the United States at the time. Roosevelt backed him down and threatened to throw him in jail.

Good stuff. So read some history, some poetry, and listen to some BD today: pick a good one.

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet 
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul
4 Comments
May 18, 2023

‘That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,”/Let no man know is my Desire.’*

by chuckofish

Today is the 174th anniversary of the great fire which pretty much destroyed the St. Louis waterfront–levee, wharf and business section–back in 1849. Fifteen blocks became engulfed in the firestorm. Can you even imagine?

At the time of the fire, the population of St. Louis was around 63,000, and the city was about ¾ miles wide with three miles of riverfront. A fire alarm sound at 9:00 p.m. on May 17, 1849 when the paddle-wheeled steamboat “The White Cloud” caught fire. It was located on the river at the foot of Cherry Street and St. Louis’ volunteer Fire Department immediately responded. Unfortunately, the moorings that were holding the steamboat burned through, allowing the burning White Cloud to drift down the Mississippi River, eventually causing 22 other steamboats as well as several flatboats and barges to catch fire.

From there, the flames from the burning boats jumped to buildings on the shore, and soon everything on the waterfront levee was burning for four blocks. After moving westward to Main Street and crossing Olive Street, the fire completely gutted the three blocks between Olive and 2nd Street. It also went as far south as Market Street. Finally the fire subsided after the Fire Department blew up six buildings. The fire was contained after 11 hours. In all, 430 buildings were destroyed, 23 steamboats along with over a dozen other boats were lost, and three people died including Captain Thomas B. Targee who was killed while trying to blast the fire break.

(Daguerreotype by Thomas Easterly. Missouri Historical Society Collections)

Let’s not forget that this was also the year of the cholera epidemic which decimated the city. Good grief! But as is often the case, the tragedy redefined St. Louis and certain reforms, such as legislating for brick buildings and the development of a safe water supply, were put in place. The city was rebuilt and the population jumped to 77,580 residents in 1850, which translated into a 372.8% increase from the 1840 census.

In other news, Ida is four months old!

*Anne Bradstreet wrote this poem after her home in Massachusetts burned to the ground in 1666–read the entire poem here.

5 Comments
April 26, 2023

Just another Wednesday–more things of minor consequence

by chuckofish

Today we toast Kevin James and Channing Tatum on their birthdays!

In case you were wondering, they did actually make a movie together. The Dilemma (2011) directed by Ron Howard is not a great movie, but you might want to give it a whirl. I am always in the mood for these two.

Today is also the anniversary of the day in 1865 when John Wilkes Booth was surrounded in a barn in Maryland and killed. And, hey, Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote a song about it.

Meanwhile Ida is crushing tummy time…

And here’s a poem: “Days” by Billy Collins–

Just another Wednesday–make it a good one.

3 Comments
April 11, 2023

The shape of the world

by chuckofish

Today we celebrate the crowning in 1689 of William III and Mary II in London as King and Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Huzzah! This occasion inspires me to want to watch Captain Blood (1938) with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.

We all cheer, “Aye”.

It is interesting that in 1938 they could make a movie about Monmouth’s Rebellion and the Bloody Assizes and the Glorious Revolution and people could actually follow the story line. I doubt that is the case nowadays or at least Hollywood no longer makes that assumption. Well, what ho, c’est la vie.

You will recall that a few years later in their reign on February 8, 1693, King William III and Queen Mary II of England signed the charter for a “perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences” to be established in the Virginia Colony as “The College of William and Mary in Virginia.” The first chancellor was, of course, Henry Compton, Bishop of London, who had crowned them.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Mr. Smith got very dirty cavorting on the driveway on Sunday…

…and was quite a mess. He had to have a bath–always a two-person job–so the OM was shanghaied into helping with that.

So a toast to William and Mary, Captain Blood, Henry Compton, current Comptons, and dirty dogs everywhere.

And this made me laugh:

3 Comments
April 3, 2023

Postcards from the weekend

by chuckofish

How was your weekend? Ours was punctuated by a lot of weather disparities which we are kind of used to in the midwest. Thankfully the really bad stuff went around us this time.

On Saturday daughter #1 and I took part in a DAR “field trip” to the historic Daniel Boone home in the rolling hills of wine country overlooking the beautiful Femme Osage Valley. I had been to the house back in the 1960s when I was a child and again in the 1990s when my own children were small. It is a lovely 1810 home built of native limestone.

I was surprised to find that the nearly 300-acre site now includes not only the historic Daniel Boone home, but the adjoining Village historic site, and surrounding property which was given to the people of St. Charles County by Lindenwood University in 2016. I’m sure I knew that but I had forgotten. The home and property now is called The Historic Daniel Boone Home at Lindenwood Park. The dozen buildings in the village were moved there, originating from within 50 miles of the property, and include several other houses, a general store, a schoolhouse, a church, and a grist mill. It is extremely well done.

Unfortunately, as you can see from these photos, it was an unexpectedly cold, gloomy and very windy morning! Boy, were we cold!

After our tour, we all hustled to our cars and drove down the road to the Defiance Ridge Winery where we had reservations for lunch. We warmed up and enjoyed a convivial time. As always at mid-MO wineries there was live entertainment and a happy crowd.

I also enjoyed becoming reacquainted with the legendary frontiersman who really was quite the exceptional guy. And as you know, this is a kind of guy that really appeals to me.

Boone spent his final years in Missouri, moving here in 1799 when it was still part of Spanish Louisiana and a pretty wild place. He lived here for twenty years and died on September 26, 1820, in the home of his son Nathan Boone on Femme Osage Creek which we visited.  (How he lived to the ripe old age of 85, leading such a life as he did, is amazing.)

Boone was buried next to his wife Rebecca, who had died on March 18, 1813.The graves, which were unmarked until the mid-1830s, were near Jemima (Boone) Callaway’s home about two miles from present-day  Marthasville, Missouri. In 1845, the Boones’ remains were disinterred and reburied in Frankfort, Kentucky. Resentment in Missouri about the disinterment grew over the years, and a legend arose that Boone’s remains never left Missouri. According to this story, Boone’s tombstone in Missouri had been inadvertently placed over the wrong grave, but no one had corrected the error. Boone’s Missouri relatives, displeased with the Kentuckians who came to exhume Boone, kept quiet about the mistake and allowed the Kentuckians to dig up the wrong remains. No contemporary evidence indicates this actually happened, but in 1983, you may recall, a forensic anthropologist examined a crude plaster cast of Boone’s skull made before the Kentucky reburial and announced it might be the skull of an African American. Both the Frankfort Cemetery in Kentucky and the Old Bryan Farm graveyard in Missouri claim to have Boone’s remains. But as our guide said, the Boones are both in heaven, so what does it matter?

(“Daniel Boone escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap” by George Caleb Bingham, collection of Washington University)

Yesterday, of course, was Palm Sunday.

“There was a vast multitude crying ‘Hosanna’ … But Christ at that time had but few true disciples; and all this was at an end when he stood bound, having a mock robe put on, and a crown of thorns; when he was derided, spit upon, scourged, condemned, and executed. Indeed, there was a loud outcry respecting him among the multitude then, as well as before; but of a very different kind: it was not ‘Hosanna, hosanna,’ but ‘crucify him, crucify him.’” (Jonathan Edwards)

Onward to Easter.

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