American history 2015 04

ANOTHER LOOK
ELEVATORS
WHEN GUITARS
INNOVATE OTIS
RAISE THE ROOF RESONATE GOT REAL LOUD EVALUATE AT HUCK FINN

History
Cherokee Stand Watie’s
surrender ended America’s
Civil War, and brought
uneasy peace to the
Cherokee Nation

1778
1815
1928
APRIL 2015

HistoryNet.com


Think You’re Having a Bad Day?
Trust Us, It Could Be Worse . . .
JANUARY 1 Crappy New Year!
Fifth-century monk and martyr Telemachus stepped into the middle of a
gladiatorial fight in Rome and tried to stop the human slaughter, only to
be stoned to death by the bloodthirsty audience unappreciative of the effort.

JULY 1, 1916 No Day at the Beach: In the Jaws of Death.
Charles Epting Vansant became an unwitting American original, in a most horrific
way: he was the first to succumb to a shark attack in the nontropical waters of the

continental United States.

H

istory is full of struggle and triumph, determination
and discovery, courage and revolution, and let’s face
it—some really, really bad days. In this wickedly entertaining book, best-selling author and historian Michael
Farquhar chronicles the worst of the worst for each day of
the year. The mishaps range from eyebrow raising to world
changing—think Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn’s unfortunate
run-in with a priceless Picasso to Napoleon’s frost-ridden,
troop-depleting defeat in Russia.
For anyone who’s had a rough time, this charming romp
through history’s gloomier side will be grand company.

AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD
and at nationalgeographic.com/books

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© 2015 National Geographic Society


American History

OUR

th

50

YEAR

APRIL 2015

Features
32
COVER STORY

Stand Watie’s War
Stand Watie, a Cherokee, was
the last Confederate general to
surrender in 1865 after the long
Civil War had torn the Cherokee
Nation asunder, pitting the
Indians against the North, the
South and each other
by Theda Perdue

42

Constitution’s Last Victory
Marking 200 years since the
legendary U.S. frigate Old
Ironsides’ stunning win at sea
by Tom and Gena Metcalf

50

What Fools These Mortals Be
The beautiful—and biting—

political cartoons of turn-of-thecentury Puck magazine
by Sarah Richardson

58

Mexico’s Lindbergh
Emilio Carranza hoped to
emulate a goodwill flight made
by Charles Lindbergh, but the
daring young aviator’s dream
ended tragically in New Jersey
by Allen Barra

64

The First Whistleblowers
In 1778 the Continental Congress
set a precedent that is surprisingly
relevant today: Protecting those
who risk everything to expose
wrongdoing at the highest levels
by Steve Boisson
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

ON THE COVER:

Stand Watie, circa 1866, and
the regimental flag of his
Cherokee Mounted Rifles

32

Cherokee Indian regiments fought for the
Confederacy at the March 1862 Battle of Pea
Ridge in Arkansas, but postwar images depicted
them in stereotypical Plains dress and war paint.

WATIE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; COLORIZATION BY
SLINGSHOT STUDIOS, NORTHAMPTON, N.H.
FLAG: COURTESY OF WILSON’S CREEK NATIONAL
BATTLEFIELD, #WICR 30118

APRIL 2015

3


9

EDITOR IN CHIEF

Rhode Island was a
major participant in
the early American
slave trade, and the
Cathedral of St. John
Episcopal Church in
Providence will become
the nation’s first
museum to study the

trade in the North and
the church’s role in it.

Roger L. Vance

History ®
Vol. 50, No. 1

APRIL 2015

Roger L. Vance

EDITOR

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American Mosaic

Lincoln memorials; Mormon
Church on polygamy’s real
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feds save e-mails—and more
The First

Electric guitar

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We’ve Been Here Before

Midterms change the
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Details

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Here Is Where

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The American
Founders


Letters
I know you must agree that this period
deeply affected African Americans at
the time and their descendants, like
myself, and that those effects are still
evident today. Were slaves not affected
or did you forget to mention them?
Curtis Williams
Atlanta, Ga.

History Under Wraps
You never know when you will learn
something! I was completely unaware
of Germans in the United States being
sent to internment camps and then
back to Germany during World War II
until I read “Trade-Off ” in the February
2015 issue.
My dad was born in Berlin, Germany,
in 1912. My grandfather was in the
German army in World War I. They

came to the United States in 1927. I was
born in 1938. My grandfather’s brother
and his family were still living in Berlin,
in the Russian sector, after World War
II. The letters my grandparents received
from the family had so much material
blacked out that they eventually quit
exchanging letters.
Mein Gott! That damn J. Edgar
Hoover could have sent us to the
internment camp in Crystal City,
Texas, or to Germany. I find it very
interesting that I never knew any of
this until I read American History.
Bill Zimmer
Varna, Ill.

The Whole Truth
I read and enjoyed your articles on
the antebellum period (Interview, Last
Call, February 2015). You mention the
effects this period had on America, but
you exclude its effects on black people.
6 AMERICAN HISTORY

Limited space precludes us from covering
every detail of every story, especially
when it comes to big issues like slavery
and its impact—which span centuries
of our history. Both stories focused

largely on antebellum America and did
provide some insight into black history
of that period. As for the era’s long-term
effects—including Jim Crow segregation,
lynching and civil rights—American
History has featured those topics in the
past and will continue to do so.

of this testimony, modern-day apologists
for the South’s enslavers have no response
other than the mere assertion that it just
wasn’t that way, or that their abstract
economic speculations argue against it. I
should also add that white enslavers left
ample testimony of their own brutality
in the records of their slave labor–camp
enterprises. This is detailed and sourced
not only in my recent book, but in many
other historians’ works as well.
Secretary, Not Senator
I enjoy reading the magazine, but a
caption in the article on Andrew
Carnegie (February 2015) identifies
William Howard Taft as a senator in
1906 when the photo was taken. Taft was
Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of war at
that time; he was never a U.S. senator.
Mark Leopold
Tequesta, Fla.

The Whole Truth, Part II
I am shocked that two readers of
American History would call General
Robert E. Lee a traitor (Letters,
February 2015). The general was not
a proponent of the War for Southern
Independence, but could not raise the
sword against his native Virginia. It is
also apparent that Edward E. Baptist is
attempting to rewrite history (Interview,
February 2015). Few if any plantations
used the “pushing system.” It would
have been counterproductive. You don’t
get maximum production out of people
if you mistreat them. There was a bond
between many plantation families and
their slaves. My great-grandfather had
a family slave who accompanied him
throughout his time as a soldier in the
Confederate Army.
Robert J. Tiller
Mayesville, S.C.

Edward Baptist responds: Sadly, Mr.
Tiller is the one who is attempting to
rewrite history. Hundreds of interviews
with, and memoirs written by, the
survivors of the pushing system testify that
enslavers used torture to force people to
work harder, faster and longer. In the face

William Howard Taft went from TR’s Cabinet
to the Oval Office to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS


Weider Reader

Selections from our sister publications,
chosen by the editors of American History

MILITARY HISTORY

WILD WEST

AVIATION HISTORY

Crusaders in Crisis

A Hollywood Ending

This Is No Joke

B

y the summer
of 1192 the
Third Crusade had
ground to a bitter
halt. After a string
of early successes
King Richard I of
England, popularly
known as “the Lionheart,” had twice
led the Christian army to within sight
of Jerusalem only to be turned back
by bad weather, strategic concerns and
dissension among the Crusaders. The
French contingent—long resentful of
Richard’s leadership—openly refused
to follow him any longer, and even his
own men were dissatisfied at how their
king had shirked his sacred vow to take
the city. Worse yet, disturbing reports
from England warned Richard of his
brother John’s schemes to seize the
throne for himself. With his authority
waning on all fronts, the Crusade
seemed on the verge of collapse.
In the Muslim camp Saladin,
founding sultan of the Ayyūbid dynasty,
watched events unfold with a mixture
of relief and consternation. Though his
army still held Jerusalem, the Crusaders

controlled a swath of the Holy Land
coastline stretching from Acre in
the north to Ascalon in the south.
The latter foothold was particularly
troubling, as it provided a launching
point for Crusader operations against
Egypt, the sultan’s power base. Seizing
the initiative, Saladin formulated a bold
plan to split the Crusader territory in
two, sever their lines of communication
and defeat the Crusaders in detail. To
accomplish this he would strike where
Richard least expected it—at Jaffa.
—from “Lionheart’s Greatest Victory,”
by Alex Zakrzewski, March 2015

C

heyenne and
Lakota warriors
were in the midst of
a devastating raid
along the Little Blue
River in southeast
Nebraska in 1864
when stage driver
Robert Emery pulled in to Kiowa
Station on the morning of August 9.
Indians were to the west, but Emery
was determined to go through, not

waiting to join a slower wagon train
also about to leave the station.
About 2½ miles beyond the station
the road forked. The coach stayed
to the right on the bluff road, and
there John Gilbert saw the Indians
ahead. “They looked awful naked
sitting there on their ponies,” he said,
“their lances glistening in the sun.”
Emery decided to turn back. The
Indians saw them as they swung
around and the race began. In a scene
reminiscent of many Hollywood
Westerns, the bouncing coach
careened ahead as the Indians closed
in, with passengers leaning out to
shoot at their pursuers. With all the
jarring, probably no Indians were
hit, but two of the passengers had
bullets pass through their hats.
Emery beat the Indians to the
junction by 50 yards and kept going as
fast as the horses would pull until they
met up with the lumbering wagon train.
Emery had raced nearly three miles in
less than eight minutes. The Indians
stopped short of the wagons and pulled
back, and Emery decided that he would
go the rest of the way with the train.

I

n the early morning
hours of the first
day of 1945, Allied
pilots in northwest
Europe might have
expected to see pink
elephants before they
saw Nazi aircraft.
Since the Normandy invasion, Royal
Air Force and U.S. Army Air Forces
fighters had largely driven the Luftwaffe
from the skies. Poor late-December
weather had hindered efforts to counter
the German ground offensive in the
Ardennes—the Battle of the Bulge—
but with the new year dawning cold
and clear, all that prevented a renewed
Allied aerial assault was aircrew
hangovers.
Sergeant Peter Crowest, an RAF air
controller at Ursel, Belgium, reported
for duty at 0900 hours. “We barely
had time to judge the extent of our
hangovers from the ‘night before’ when
we heard and saw a squadron of lowflying fighters approaching. An enquiry
from my CO as to whether we were
expecting Spitfires was answered when
I said they were not Spitfires but Focke

Wulf 190s. Moments later I was firmly
gripping the ground!”
With Germans fighters raking his
field at Knokke, Belgium, Squadron
Leader G. Dickinson made an urgent
call to headquarters, only to be told,
“This is January 1st, old boy, not April
1st.” Then he heard, “My God, the
bastards are here!” and the line went
dead.
—from “Luftwaffe’s Last Blow!” by Don
Hollway, March 2015

—from “Stagecoach Attack—Roll It!”
by Gregory Michno, April 2015
To order these or any other
Weider History magazines,
visit: www.HistoryNet.com
or call 1 (800) 435-0715
APRIL 2015

7


American Mosaic
Compiled by Sarah Richardson

Crafting Colonial
Beer in Virginia
A TWO–SENTENCE, 300-year-old

recipe by 11-year-old Jane Randolph
found in the files of the Virginia
Historical Society prompted brewers
at Ardent Craft Brewery in Richmond
to concoct an unusual historical
artifact: persimmon beer. According
to Richmond.com, the result was thin
and fruity, more like wine than beer.
The brewers said the most difficult part
was getting enough persimmons—17
pounds of fruit yielded only three
gallons of beer. Participants at a
December 9 event at the brewery were
able to sample the beverage, which
contained about 3 percent alcohol.

Abraham
Lincoln’s life
and death had
global impact.

The World Grieves for Lincoln
AFTER President Lincoln died on
April 15, 1865, condolences poured in
from across the nation—and beyond.
Within the voluminous collection of
the Illinois-based Papers of Abraham
Lincoln Project are letters from abroad
lamenting the loss. They came from
heads of state as well as obscure groups

like the French-speaking Federal
Society of Gymnasts, the Mauritian
Gentlemen of Free Color in London
and the London Committee of Deputies
of British Jews. Whatever the death
of the president meant for the United
States, his commitment to human rights
and freedom resonated worldwide.
In commemoration of the 150th
anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s
death, Daniel Stowell, director of
the Lincoln papers project, solicited
comments from representatives of
governments and groups related to the
8 AMERICAN HISTORY

letter-writers of 1865. A contributor
from the Republic of China (Taiwan)
notes that the Gettysburg Address
is a must-read there for students
learning English. Japan’s note likens
the tumultuous years of Lincoln’s
presidency to the transformative years
of the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912).
Colombian president Juan Manuel
Santos notes that he drew upon
Lincoln’s tactic of assembling a team
of rivals to promote national unity.
The response from Oman focuses
on Lincoln’s honesty and integrity,

while the contributor from Greece
recognizes his mastery of Euclid’s
Elements. The ambassador from Iceland
shares a Viking saying: “Every man
is mortal: But the good name never
dies of one who has done well.”
To read the letters from 1865 and
2014, visit www.citizenlincoln.org.

Diospyros
virginiana,
the common
persimmon,
thrives in the
humid climate
of the South
Atlantic states.

Tiny Island Living?
THE REVOLUTION in navigating
technology has left the General
Services Administration, the property
management arm of the federal
government, with aging lighthouses
to dispose of. Over the past decade
some 100 have been sold or given
to preservation groups, according
to an Associated Press article, and
70 more are headed that way. As of
mid-December two New England

lighthouses were listed. Bids start at
$10,000, and nonprofits have first
dibs. Some lighthouses have sold
for more than $280,000; renovation
costs are extra. For more information,
see propertydisposal.gsa.gov/
LighthouseProgram.

LINCOLN: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; GLOBE: THINKSTOCK PHOTOS; PERSIMMON: © NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON/ALAMY


Providence Church to Highlight Slavery
A STATELY 200-year-old Episcopal
church, the now-closed Cathedral
of St. John, in Providence, R.I.,
may become the first U.S. museum
dedicated to the history of slavery and
slave-trading in the North, according
to Providencejournal.com. Dwindling
attendance shuttered St. John in 2012,
but church leaders are considering
how to use the historic stone structure,
which dates from 1810, to illuminate
Rhode Island’s role in the slave
trade. The state was home to three
major slave-trading ports, and a 2006
report by Brown University found
that 1,000 slave-trading voyages—60
percent of all those originating in the
North—departed from Rhode Island.

The prospective museum would
also highlight how church members
supported and opposed slavery.
Helping the church develop the
project is the Boston-based Tracing
Center (www.tracingcenter.org), a
group formed by descendants of the
nation’s most prominent slave-trading
family, the DeWolfs of Rhode Island.
James DeWolf, who represented the
state in the U.S. Senate, was also a

renowned slave trader who had a
distillery in West Africa, a plantation in
Cuba and a company that insured slavetrading voyages. He was reputed to be
the second-richest man in the United
States at the time of his death in 1837.
An interior view of the Cathedral of
St. John from the 1937 Historic American
Buildings Survey shows the upper-level
galleries where slaves worshipped.

Honoring Six Brothers Killed in the Civil War
SIX BROTHERS from Louisa
County, Iowa, served in the Civil
War and not one of them survived.
The story of this enormous loss
was discovered in 2011 through a
scrapbook of the Littleton family
donated to the Louisa County

Historical Society in Wapello. Now an
effort is underway to raise money for
a granite obelisk commemorating the
1862-63 service of brothers Thomas,
Noah, Kendall, William, George and
John Littleton.
The Littleton family had emigrated
in the 1840s from Ohio to Toolesboro,

Iowa, with the help of abolitionists
and the Underground Railroad, but
the mixed-race brothers—described
as “mulatto” in the 1860 census—
evidently passed for white and served
in white Civil War units. Both parents
died before the war ended. One
brother died in Andersonville Prison
in Georgia. Another drowned while
serving in Missouri. The others died
in combat or from combat-related
illnesses. Contributions for the
monument can be sent to LCHS—
Littleton Fund, P.O. Box 302, Wapello,
IA, 52653.

FROM TOP: AP; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; COURTESY OF WILL THOMPSON, ARMADILLO ARTS, IOWA CITY, IOWA

The proposed
monument of
Mesabi Black

granite will
stand 11 feet
tall and be
surrounded by
six oak trees.

APRIL 2015

9


American Mosaic
Top Bid

$36,000,000
A former Navy sailor, Jasper Johns is descended from
William Johns, a Revolutionary War soldier who rescued the
American flag at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. Perhaps
those two strands of his biography contributed to why he
decided in 1954, at age 22, to paint an American flag that
would become one of the most iconic images of modern
American art. Johns made numerous versions of his 48star flag, which is built upon newsprint painted over with
encaustic, a mix of wax and paint. A 1983 version of the
flag sold last fall at Sotheby’s for $36 million, a far higher
price than had been expected. The painting belonged to an
assistant of Johns and had never before been at auction.

50 Brides for Seven Brothers
POLYGAMY among early Mormons
is no secret, but the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints itself has
now brought the surprising origins of
the practice to light in a lengthy essay
posted on its website in 2014. The essay
details how Mormon founder Joseph
Smith introduced the practice in the
1830s after what he described as three
divine revelations, but he did not
document it until 1843, a year before
his death. The early church never
formalized plural marriages, which
were not legal, but Smith conducted
ceremonies in private. A footnote in
the essay estimates that Smith may
have had 30 to 40 wives. Ten were
teens, and some of the others were
already married.
Church leaders were apparently
motivated to publish the essay in an
effort to grapple with questions raised
by information widely available on the
Internet. According to a November 10,
2014, New York Times article, many
Mormons had believed that the practice
of polygamy originated with Brigham
Young, Smith’s successor. But the church
essay claims that in addition to Smith
and his wives, 29 men and 50 women
10 AMERICAN HISTORY

Emma Hale married Mormon founder Joseph
Smith in 1827. The LDS Church now believes
that Smith may have had more than 30 wives.

had entered into plural marriage by the
time of the founder’s death in 1844.
Interestingly, the essay addresses the
attitudes—ranging from reluctance to
abhorrence—both female and male
members faced in entering plural
marriages. In fact, Emma Smith,
Joseph’s first wife, denied in 1860 that
her husband engaged in polygamy.
The LDS Church has also digitized
Joseph Smith’s letters, diaries and
revelations. They are available online at
josephsmithpapers.org/the-papers.

Emmett Till
Commemorated
ON NOVEMBER 17, 2014, a small
group gathered on Capitol Hill around
a newly planted American sycamore to
commemorate Emmett Till, the 14-yearold African-American boy who was
killed in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly
whistling at a white woman. Senator
Susan Collins (R-Maine) sponsored the
event, which was attended by Attorney
General Eric Holder, both senators from
Mississippi and Janet Cohen, author

of Anne and Emmett, a play about
an imagined conversation between
Holocaust victim Anne Frank and Till.
Cohen, the wife of William Cohen,
former Maine senator and secretary of
defense under President Bill Clinton,
came up with the idea for the memorial.
Till, a Chicago
native, was
visiting family in
the Mississippi
Delta when he
was murdered.

FLAG: COURTESY OF SOTHEBY’S NEW YORK; OTHER IMAGES: AP


ADVERTISEMENT

Preserving American History at the Hiwassee River Heritage Center
The Hiwassee River Heritage Center opened in May
2013 and shortly after opening, the National Park Service
designated the center as a Certified Interpretive Site on the
Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.
“We were honored and humbled to be among only a handful of historic sites in the country to receive that designation
last year,” said Melissa Woody, vice president for Tourism
Development at the Cleveland/Bradley Chamber of Commerce and development chair for CCH Historical Society.
Opening the Hiwassee River Heritage Center is the first
accomplishment in an ambitious heritage development plan
for Charleston, Tennessee. The nationally

significant story of present-day Charleston
being the site of Fort Cass, the U.S. military headquarters for the entire Trail of Tears
Cherokee Removal, was in danger of being lost.
A concerned, engaged community is preserving
this important American history.
“The momentum for this project, which
includes indoor and outdoor interpretation,
has been encouraging. The partnerships and
relationships involved in a project of this magnitude have been nothing short of amazing,”
said Darlene Goins, treasurer for the CCH
Historical Society and facility manager for
Hiwassee River Heritage Center.
In March, the National Park Service conducted a community planning session and
developed an outdoor interpretation concept
plan. The CCH Historical Society recently was
awarded a $200,000 federal grant to develop
the first section of the outdoor National Trail
Experience, which will put visitors in the footsteps of history.
This first section is referred to as “voices of
the past” and will feature quotes and images
from both sides of the removal struggle, lining
opposite sides of a trail section. Construction
bids are underway.
Prior to the Cherokee Removal, the area
was the final location for the Federal Indian
Agency. Before the Agency, the area was known
as Walker’s Ferry, a thriving Cherokee village
located just across the Hiwassee River from
America, now Calhoun, Tennessee.

In the southern part of the county, Red Clay State
Park commemorates the last eastern council grounds of
the Cherokee Nation. Also certified on the Trail of Tears
National Historic Trail, this sacred ground is centered on a
sapphire spring that provided a crystal clear water source
for Cherokee leaders and thousands who gathered at Red
Clay. The park hosts an interpretive center, relics, events and
demonstrations.
These stories of human spirit, tragic sacrifice and more are
detailed in Cleveland and Charleston, Tennessee, at these
nationally significant sites.


Panzers, Landsers
and Politics
Short Stories and Epic Novels
Versailles to the Eastern Front
Jagdpa

nzer Ve
rlag

Visit our website

www.panzerschlacht.us

American Mosaic
New Walt
Whitman Poem
Found

WHILE RESEARCHING in
the Library of Congress, art history
professor Wendy Katz
noticed a poem by an
author with the initials
W.W. in the June 23,
1842, issue of the
newspaper New
Era. Katz, whose
husband happens to
be a Walt Whitman
scholar, immediately
Walt Whitman,
wondered if the author
1846
was Whitman, who
would have been 23 at the
time. Through subsequent research
published in the Walt Whitman
Quarterly Review, Katz has convinced
her peers that the poem was indeed
penned by the Brooklyn writer. The
rhymes celebrate poet and New York
Post editor William Cullen Bryant, who
was a friend of Whitman’s and who
had written favorably about Whitman a
few days before. Whitman was making
his way in the newspaper world of
New York City and had not yet begun
publishing the unconventional free

verse that would make him famous.

Women Studied
THE NEW-YORK Historical
Society announced plans for a new
Center for the Study of Women’s
History, which will be part of the
Henry Luce III Center for the Study
of American Culture. Slated to open
in December 2016, the center will
have both permanent and rotating
exhibitions. Among its features will
be a theater, conference room and
exhibit showcasing the achievements
of New York women at the turn of the
20th century and their contribution to
women getting the vote.
12 AMERICAN HISTORY


Canal House on Mall to Be Restored
THE OLDEST structure on the
National Mall, a small, dilapidated
stone house at the busy corner of 17th
Street and Constitution Avenue, will be
restored, thanks to a million-dollar grant
from American Express. The house was
constructed in 1836 for the toll-taker

who managed the lock gates for the

Chesapeake & Ohio Canal that ran
along what is now the Mall. Railroads
put the canal out of business in 1873,
and the house was used as a shed. The
grant will also support moving the
house 32 feet back from the roadway.

The lock keeper’s
house, which sits
within view of
the Washington
Monument, is
currently used by the
National Park Service
for storage.

Saving Federal
Electronic Records
ON NOVEMBER 26 President
Obama signed into law an act
strengthening the preservation of
federal government records. The act
expanded the definition of federal
records to include electronic records;
establishes that electronic records will
be transferred to the National Archives
in electronic form; and clarifies the
responsibilities of federal government
officials when using non-governmental
e-mail systems. It also establishes

the procedure by which former
and incumbent presidents review
presidential records for executive
privilege. The revision is the first
change to the law regarding archiving
procedures since the Federal Records
Act of 1950.

© DAVID COLEMAN/ALAMY; OPPOSITE: THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK

APRIL 2015

13


E X P LO R E T H E

NATCHEZ TRACE
M I S S I S S I P P I

J

A L A B A M A

J

T E N N E S S E E

A Unique Journey from Natchez to Nashville.
w w w . sc en i c t r a ce. co m | 1 - 8 5 5- 568- 7 223

Festivals and fun. Grand historic
homes. Birthplace of America’s
greatest playwright, Tennessee
Williams. Run or bike along the
scenic Riverwalk, winding
around and over the
Tombigbee River.
Shop, dine, and savor in the
ultimate Southern destination.
Columbus, Mississippi.

The city that has it all...

Go to www.visitcolumbusms.org for complete listing
of events and attractions.
7HQQHVVHH:LOOLDPV+RPH:HOFRPH&HQWHU‡800-920-3533


IMAGINEnation

M I S S I S S I P P I H I L L S N AT I O N A L H E R I TA G E A R E A

Discover the dreamers who became legends.
Imagine: The largest siege in the Western hemisphere at the “Crossroads of the
Confederacy.” A dramatic 11th hour victory that earned a general undying fame.
Surprise raids and surprisingly ingenious retreats. Former slaves whose resilience
and ingenuity led to survival during the madness of war. This is the Civil War in
the Mississippi Hills, full of daring and dreamers who became legends,
imagining a new America. Imagine the time you’ll have in their Hills.

Start planning your itinerary today!
www.mississippihills.org or stop by
MISSISSIPPI HILLS EXHIBIT CENTER
/PEN -
& s AM
PM s &REE !DMISSION
2ENASANT #ENTER FOR )DEAS s  %AST -AIN 3TREET
4UPELO
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All through the state, Mississippi’s
Civil War heritage is a key
component of America’s story.
See collections of two presidents—
Confederate President Jefferson
Davis at Beauvoir and President
Ulysses S. Grant at Mississippi
State University. Journey through
two of the most studied military
EDWWOHÀHOGV³9LFNVEXUJDQG%ULFH·V
Crossroads. Watch the story of this
WUDJLFFRQÁLFWFRPHDOLYHDW&RULQWK·V
Civil War Interpretive Center and
the Contraband Camp. Browse
VisitMississippi.org to start writing
your own chapter.

The First
by Christine M. Kreiser

Electric Guitar
ROLL OVER, BEETHOVEN, and tell Tchaikovsky the news:
Nifty electromagnets propelled the guitar from the orchestra rhythm
section to center stage and forever changed popular music. In 1931
Texas guitarist George Beauchamp developed electromagnetic
pickups—wire coiled around magnets mounted on the face of the
guitar under the steel strings. The strings’ vibrations disrupt the
magnetic field, generating an electric current in the coil. The current
is channeled through a cable to an amplifier and speaker, where it
is reproduced as sound. Once Beauchamp had working pickups,
he teamed with Adolph Rickenbacker, a tool-and-die maker who
fashioned the metal bodies of acoustic resonator guitars, to build
electric, cast-aluminum Hawaiian (or lap steel) guitars known as
“Frying Pans.” Patent examiners didn’t quite know what to make
of Beauchamp’s two applications for the Frying Pan: Was it an
electrical gadget or a musical instrument? Would it work without
frying the guitarist? By the time a patent was awarded in 1937, other
manufacturers were turning out more conventional-looking electric
models. But the Rickenbacker Frying Pan was first on the market; an
early ad touts a six-string setup with an amplifier, cords and plugs for
the princely sum of $140. Within a decade, electric guitarists would
completely redefine American music, and the old folks have been
complaining about the noise ever since.

Turn it On, Turn it Up
Chuck Berry’s
rapid-fire staccato

riffs and outré
showmanship turned
“Maybellene” (1955)
into an American
classic, and made
fast cars and faster
women staples of
rock ’n’ roll.

Charlie
Christian’s
swinging style
brought the guitar
front and center
when he was a
featured soloist
with the Benny
Goodman Sextet
from 1939 to ’41.
16 AMERICAN HISTORY

T-Bone Walker’s plaintive, crying
tone on hits like “Mean Old World” (1942)
and “Stormy Monday” (1947) set the
standard for generations of blues guitarists.

An A-22 Rickenbacker Frying Pan, circa 1935.
Guitarists were eager to find a way to be heard
above a crowd, and pickups mounted on the
guitar’s soundboard carried the music far and wide.

FRYING PAN: © MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS/CORBIS; CHRISTIAN: © PICTORIAL PRESS LTD./ALAMY; WALKER: © JAZZSIGN/
LEBRECHT MUSIC & ARTS/LEBRECHT MUSIC & ARTS/CORBIS; BERRY: EVERETT COLLECTION INC./ALAMY


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We’ve Been Here Before
by Richard Brookhiser

Scratching the Six-Year Itch
IN THE 2014 MIDTERM ELECTIONS Republicans took control
of the Senate and won more House seats than at any point in almost
70 years. “Obviously,” said President Obama the morning after, “Republicans had a good night.” Senator Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) was
more blunt: “This is a real ass-whuppin’.”
The party of a president who is
serving a second term often suffers
from the electorate’s six-year itch.
Once fresh faces have become all too
familiar. So have the majority party’s
policies. In 2006 Democrats capitalized
on George W. Bush’s Iraq War gone
wrong; in 1938 Republicans undercut
FDR’s overambitious plan to pack the
Supreme Court. But even Election Day
losers can still make bold, or desperate,
efforts to secure their legacy.
Beginning in 1868 the Republican
Party dominated national politics.
Civil War hero Ulysses Grant won the
presidency twice, and Republicans
controlled both houses of Congress. In
1874, midway through Grant’s second
term, that changed. The GOP lost
only one seat in the Senate, retaining a
solid edge. But the Republican House

delegation was cut almost in half, from
203 representatives to 110—still the
largest loss of House seats in GOP
history. Victorious Democrats saw their
ranks swell from 89 to 179. (There were
also a few Independents.)
Voters punished Republicans for
greed, corruption and hard times. In
1873 Congress had given itself a pay
raise, retroactive for two years—a
move dubbed the Salary Grab. In 1874
Grant’s treasury secretary resigned
because of irregularities in pursuing tax
delinquents. A bank panic settled into a
long, grinding depression.
But the Republican Party’s fortunes
were inextricably tied to its most
important post–Civil War policy: the
Reconstruction of the defeated South.
18 AMERICAN HISTORY

Having won the war Republicans had to
win the peace, but Reconstruction got
off to an unsteady start. In the last days
of his life, Abraham Lincoln suggested
that Rebel states be reintegrated into
the Union as soon as possible and that
at least some black men get the vote.
His successor, Andrew Johnson—no
Republican, but a pro-war Democrat

who had been put on the 1864 ticket to
balance it—pursued Lincoln’s first goal

American politics makes
room for wave elections
and rear-guard actions
but not his second: State governments
were reestablished throughout the
South, but they imposed stringent
codes regulating the labor of blacks and
denying them a political voice.
In 1867 Republicans in Congress,
led by pro–black rights Radicals like
Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens,
took Reconstruction into their own
hands, requiring Southern states to
adopt constitutions that established
black suffrage. As a last resort, the U.S.
Army would enforce federal law. The
Republicans impeached Johnson and
came within an ace of removing him
from office. Grant was elected in 1868
as the Radicals’ candidate.
Radical Reconstruction formally
allowed black civic engagement for
the first time in American history.
Southern states elected one black
governor, two U.S. senators, 14
congressmen and numerous holders

of lesser offices. Reconstruction also
empowered white Southerners who
had opposed secession—upcountry
small farmers who had been shut out
of power by planters—and Northerners
who came south to uplift blacks or,
less creditably, themselves. Southern
Democrats naturally resented their
new masters, hating politically
active blacks and branding their
white allies scalawags (if they were
natives) or carpetbaggers (if they were
newcomers). As time went on, however,
Reconstruction became increasingly
unpopular with the Northern public.
One problem was corruption.
Reconstructed state governments spent
a lot of money on schools, railroads
and other public works, and some of it
ended up in the pockets of lawmakers,
white and black. Corruption was
endemic in American political life,
from the Grant administration to
Tammany Hall, but accounts of
corruption in the Reconstructed
South were tinged with racism. South
Carolina, reported one Northern
journalist, labored under “a mass of
black barbarism.”
Reconstruction benefited the

GOP, since Southern blacks voted
Republican. But once Reconstruction
was seen as a partisan policy—“a
struggle,” as one observer disdainfully
called it, “for the loaves and fishes”—it
lost the support of liberal reformers
eager to elevate the tone of politics.
Republican liberals bolted the party
and held their own political convention
in Cincinnati in 1872, nominating
veteran journalist Horace Greeley to
oppose Grant. (Greeley also got the
Democratic Party’s nod.) Greeley,
who had a long record of supporting
high-minded causes, ran on the
noble-sounding platform of “local selfgovernment,” which in the South would


mean white rule. Grant thrashed him,
but liberals remained disaffected.
What most undermined
Reconstruction, however, was the
difficulty of enforcing it. The Ku
Klux Klan, originally a social club for
ex-Confederate officers, became, in
the words of historian Eric Foner, “a
military force serving the interests of
the Democratic Party,” intimidating
and murdering blacks, scalawags and
carpetbaggers. In 1871 Congress had

passed the Ku Klux Klan Act and Grant’s
attorney general, Amos Ackerman,
indicted hundreds of Klansmen in
the Carolinas and Mississippi. As a
result the Klan temporarily collapsed
and 1872 saw what historian James
McPherson called “the fairest and
most democratic presidential election
in the South until 1968.” But violence
resumed in Louisiana, culminating
in a pitched battle in New Orleans in
September 1874. Thirty-five hundred
members of the Klan-like White League
overpowered a force of police and
militia commanded by Confederate
turned Republican James Longstreet,
and captured city hall and the state
house. Grant sent 5,000 troops and
three gunboats to restore order. Six
weeks later Republicans were routed at
the polls nationwide.
Representative James Garfield
(R-Ohio) attributed Republican
losses to “a general apathy among the
people concerning…the negro.” The
© BETTMANN/CORBIS

election results certainly emboldened
Southern insurgents. In December 1874
Mississippi’s White League drove the

black sheriff of Vicksburg out of town,
and moved through the countryside
murdering blacks. Louisiana politics still
festered, and the balance of power in the
state legislature hung on the results of a
handful of disputed elections.
Grant held firm at first. In January
1875 he sent federal troops to
Vicksburg to restore its sheriff, and
dispatched his old cavalry commander
Philip Sheridan to evaluate the
situation in New Orleans. Sheridan
threw out the Democratic claimants,
called for martial law and compared
the White Leagues to “banditti.” Grant
defended Sheridan’s brusque behavior,
but he would not declare martial law
and accepted a congressional report
that divided control of the Louisiana
government between Republicans
and Democrats. Grant too sensed
that the North was no longer willing
to fight Southern Democrats. “The
whole public,” he wrote in September
1875, is “tired out with these annual
autumnal outbreaks in the South.”
More accurately, Grant and the public
were tired of suppressing them.
The presidential election of 1876
produced a famous deadlock between

Democrat Samuel Tilden and
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Part of
the deal by which Democrats accepted
defeat was Hayes’ pledge to end

The White League—former Confederates
and disaffected Democrats—barricades
New Orleans streets in 1874 as it readies for
battle with the Metropolitan Police, the local
enforcement arm of Reconstruction policy.
Republican president Ulysses Grant sent in
federal troops, and his party suffered a major
backlash in that year’s midterms.

Reconstruction in the South. But even a
clear win by Hayes would have produced
some such result: He had promised
during his campaign to support “honest
and capable local self-government” in
the South—Horace Greeley’s old
program rephrased. The Republicans
abandoned an unpopular policy, politics
moved on and blacks would legally be
second-class citizens for 90 years.
Democrats in 2014 faced stubborn
problems: a lingering war in Iraq, a new
war in Syria and a still sluggish economy.
President Obama’s personality had not
changed, but opinions of it had: A
demeanor that once seemed calm and

cerebral had come to look aloof and
arrogant. Congressional Democrats
paid the price. Yet Obama is still
president, and like Grant in early 1875,
he is still capable of bold moves: In
November he essentially granted
amnesty from deportation to 5 million
illegal immigrants by executive order.
American politics accommodates both
wave elections and rear-guard actions.
By design the government has many
moving parts, and they do not all move
at the same time. ■
APRIL 2015

19


The American Revolution
Taught by Professor Allen C. Guelzo
GETTYSBURG COLLEGE

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How 13 Colonies
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The story of the American Revolution is the story of how our
country was forged—through decisive strategies, intense combat,
and the efforts of ordinary and extraordinary individuals. In The
American Revolution, follow the course of the war’s events and get
a richly detailed picture of this landmark conflict between a group of
colonists and the 18th century’s most powerful empire.

Award-winning Professor Allen C. Guelzo, a prolific author and
member of the National Council on the Humanities, guides you
through an in-depth look at the military mechanics of the American
Revolution. In 24 lectures, you gain insights into everything from
the components of the British and colonial forces to the war’s
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The Ancient Constitution
“A Soldier What’s Fit for a Soldier”
“How the British Regulars Fired and Fled”
Standoff in Boston, 1775
Bunker Hill
The King, the Conqueror, and the Coward
Conquering Canada, Reconquering Boston
Common Sense
An Army Falls in Brooklyn
“A Glorious Issue”
Joy in Princeton
“Congress Are Not a Fit Body”
“America Is Not Subdued”
“A Day Famous in the Annals of America”
“Not Yet the Air of Soldiers”
With Washington at Valley Forge
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Vain Hopes in the Carolinas
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Details
by Sarah Richardson

Timeless Timepiece
DECADES BEFORE PDAs, smartphones or apps,
there was the Graves Supercomplication. The handsome
two-faced gold pocket watch offered New York banker

and watch collector Henry Graves some 24 features, or
“complications” in time-keeping parlance, including
the date, phase of the moon and Westminster chimes.
In 1925 Graves had commissioned Swiss watchmaker
Patek Philippe to create the most complicated timepiece
in the world, and it was finished seven years later.
In November 2014 the masterpiece—which
remains the most complex watch ever
made without computer assistance—
sold at Sotheby’s for $24 million.
1 Gotham Nights
Star chart of night sky
over New York City.

1

2 Bright Horizon
Time of sunrise.

3 Curtain Falls
Time of sunset.
4 Star Time
Sidereal time, shown on
this face, is calculated
based on Earth’s rotation
relative to distant stars, not
the sun. A sidereal day is
four minutes shorter than
the solar day, shown on the
conventional 12-hour dial

on the obverse face.

2

3

4

5

5 True Time?
The equation of time is used
to resolve discrepancies
between the length of a
clock day—24 hours—and
the length of a solar day,
which varies over the
course of the year because
of the Earth’s revolution.

COURTESY OF SOTHEBY’S NEW YORK

APRIL 2015

21


Encounter
by Peter Carlson

Hemingway and the Roosevelts at the Movies
“IT WAS MARVELOUS,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “The battle
was spread out before us.”
Hemingway, America’s most famous writer, was crouching in a
bombed-out building in Madrid with several other reporters, including Martha Gellhorn, who was his mistress and would later become
his third wife. It was April 1937 and they were covering the Spanish
Civil War, staring through binoculars as government troops attacked
Francisco Franco’s rebel soldiers about a thousand yards away.
“Just as we were congratulating
ourselves on the splendid observation
post,” Hemingway wrote in his
dispatch, “a bullet smacked against
the corner of a brick wall.” More
bullets rattled the walls and soon
the reporters scrambled out of the
building. “I crawled back on my hands
and knees,” Hemingway wrote.
Hemingway, 37, was reporting
for a newspaper syndicate and
collaborating with Dutch filmmaker
Joris Ivens on The Spanish Earth, a
documentary about the war. Gellhorn,
28 and already a veteran reporter, was
writing for Collier’s magazine. When
they’d met a year earlier in Key West,
Hemingway lusted for the beautiful
young blonde who possessed, as he put
it, “legs that begin at her shoulders.”
Less smitten, Gellhorn wrote to her
friend and mentor Eleanor Roosevelt,

whom she’d met in 1934 when she
was a field investigator for the Federal
Emergency Relief Administration.
She described the famous novelist as
“an odd bird, very lovable and full of
fire and a marvelous story teller.”
Neither Hemingway nor Gellhorn
was an objective observer of the
Spanish Civil War. Like most
liberals of the day, they supported
the democratically elected Spanish
Republic against General Franco’s
fascist rebels. The war was an
international cause célèbre: Hitler
22 AMERICAN HISTORY

and Mussolini sent troops to fight
for Franco while Stalin sold arms to
the Republican forces, which were
reinforced by 40,000 foreign volunteers,

‘The food was the
worst I’d ever eaten,’
Hemingway wrote of
his White House visit.
‘We had rainwater soup
followed by rubber
squab and wilted salad’
many of them communists. The United
States government remained neutral,

despite lobbying from leftists to aid
the Republic and pressure from the
Catholic Church to support Franco.
Hemingway and Gellhorn covered
the war for two months and then
sailed to New York on separate
ships. Hemingway returned to his
wife, Pauline, and children in Key
West, then took the family to Bimini,
where he edited the manuscript of
his novel To Have and Have Not,
which was scheduled for publication
that fall. Gellhorn remained in
New York, helping Ivens with the
soundtrack of The Spanish Earth.
In a long night working in a CBS
recording studio, Orson Welles
read the narration that Hemingway

wrote for the documentary, and
then they all experimented with
ways to re-create the sounds of war
to spice up Ivens’ silent footage.
In a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt,
Gellhorn described how she and
Ivens had simulated the frightening
scream of incoming shells using
“a football bladder, an air hose
and fingernails snapping against a
screen, all tremendously magnified

and it sounds so like a shell that
we were scared out of our wits.”
Gellhorn went on to ask the
first lady for help in arranging for
Spanish refugee children to enter
the United States. “As you know,
they are welcomed in England
and France,” Gellhorn wrote,
but American bureaucrats were
dragging their feet. “It seems to me
amazing that only America should
offer no sanctuary to them.”
The first lady wrote back, chiding
Gellhorn for being overly “emotional”
about the Spanish children and
suggesting that she should raise money
to take care of them in Europe. But
Mrs. Roosevelt eased the sting of that
rebuke by inviting her young friend
to screen The Spanish Earth for the
president at the White House.
Gellhorn accepted the invitation
and summoned Hemingway to meet
her in New York. On the afternoon
of July 8, 1937, Ivens, Gellhorn and
Hemingway flew to Washington.
While waiting for their plane in
Newark’s airport, Gellhorn ate
three sandwiches. This amazed and
amused Hemingway because they

were scheduled to eat dinner at the
White House in a couple of hours.
But Gellhorn, who had dined in the
White House several times, informed
him that the food there was dreadful.
Regular visitors to the Roosevelt


table, she said, always remembered to
chow down before going to dinner.
Hemingway wrote about that
memorable evening in his own muchimitated style in a long, chatty letter
to his mother-in-law, Mary Pfeiffer.
“Mrs. Roosevelt is enormously
tall, very charming and almost stone
deaf,” he wrote. “She hears practically
nothing that is said to her but is so
charming that most people do not
notice it. The president is very Harvard
charming and sexless and womanly,
seems like a great Woman Secretary of
Labor, say. He is completely paralyzed
from the waist down and there is much
skillful manoevering of him into the
chair and from room to room. The
White House, when we were there, was
very hot, no air conditioning except
in the President’s study, and the food
was the worst I’ve ever eaten. (This is
between us. As a guest cannot criticize.)

We had rainwater soup followed by
rubber squab, a nice wilted salad and
a cake some admirer had sent in. An
enthusiastic but unskilled admirer.”
STEPHEN KRONINGER

After dinner Ivens screened his
documentary and the Roosevelts were
impressed: “They both were very
moved by the Spanish Earth picture,”
Hemingway wrote, “but both said we
should put more propaganda in it.”
Gellhorn described the president’s
reaction a bit differently. She said
he suggested the film could be
made “stronger…by underlining
the causes of the conflict.”
On July 10 Eleanor Roosevelt
wrote about her three visitors
and their movie in her nationally
syndicated newspaper column, My
Day. She noted that the film bristled
with interesting faces: “No matter
what their occupations were—
farmers, soldiers, orators or village
housewives—all were interesting
types whom you felt you would like to
study.” She also noted that all profits
from the movie would go to “purchase
ambulances to help the sick and dying

in a part of the world which is at
present torn by war.”
Strangely, she did not reveal just

what part of the world that was. In
fact, she never mentioned that the
film was about Spain. And she never
revealed the name of the movie.
Why not? Perhaps she forgot. More
likely, she did not want her husband
associated with the politically
polarizing Spanish Civil War.
After his White House visit,
Hemingway flew to Hollywood,
where he screened the movie at a
fundraiser hosted by actor Fredric
March and raised $17,000 for
ambulances for the Spanish Republic.
That fall Hemingway and Gellhorn
returned to Spain to cover the war
and resume their love affair.
They got married in 1940 but it
was a short, tempestuous union.
In 1944, while they were both in
England preparing to cover the Allied
invasion of Normandy, Gellhorn
caught Hemingway in an affair with
another attractive young reporter,
Mary Welsh, who later became his
fourth wife. War seemed to bring out

the romantic in Ernest Hemingway. ■
APRIL 2015

23


Here Is Where
by Andrew Carroll

Birthplace of an Uplifting Inventor
WHILE PERUSING an obscure book on Vermont, in hopes of finding
an event or person linked to a place overlooked by history, I stumbled
on a name that immediately jumped off the page: Elisha Otis.
I’d seen that name before, of course;
indeed, I had stepped over it several
times a day going in and out of my
apartment building’s elevator. But I’d
never thought about the person behind
the company or, frankly, the history
of elevators. To me they seemed like
little more than a nifty convenience.
And Otis, I knew, hadn’t even invented
the elevator. European castles and
monasteries atop steep mountains used
pulleys and large rope-drawn baskets
big enough to hold a person as far back
as the medieval period, and Henry
Waterman constructed an elevatorlike mechanism in 1850, although
its intended passengers were barrels
and other bulky goods. Then Elisha

Otis came along and, I learned, did
more than just improve the design: He
transformed the world.
Otis hailed from Halifax, Vt., just
above the Massachusetts border,
but there’s nothing in the town to
commemorate its most famous son.
Connie Lancaster, a local historian,
who helped me piece together the paper
trail that led to Otis’ birthplace, and
Laura Sanders, town clerk since 1967,
organized a visit to the site for me.
We meet at the town hall and make
our introductions before piling into
Laura’s car and hitting the road, turning
left onto Branch then right onto Brook.
After about two miles Brook ends at
Green River Road. We turn right and
head four miles to Perry Road, where
we park. This is as far as we can drive.
“It’s about a three-quarter-mile walk
through the woods,” Connie says.
I’m warned that there’s poison ivy
along the trail, and, while looking down,
I notice bizarrely shaped animal tracks.
“Those are moose prints,” Laura tells
me, “and they’re fresh.”
24 AMERICAN HISTORY

VERMONT

Halifax

“I’ve never seen a moose before. I’m
guessing they’re pretty harmless?”
“They’ll attack if they’re in rut.”
“In a rut? You mean, like, depressed?”
“In rut. It means they’re looking to
mate.”
Laura cautions me to be careful of the
widow-makers—the large broken maple
limbs dangling precariously above
us. As I’m simultaneously watching
out for poison ivy, moose in heat and
falling branches, I see Connie stop for a
moment and check her map.
“Found it!” she calls out. From where
we’re standing, I can see a long, squat
stone wall about 40 feet away. Broken
steps lead up to what would have been
an entrance to the old house, and
there’s a hearth and central chimney
with a root cellar several feet below.
Elisha Graves Otis was born here
on August 3, 1811, the youngest of six
children. He mastered woodworking
and engineering skills on the family
farm, and at 19 started bouncing
between New York and Vermont,
dabbling in carpentry, operating his

own gristmill, running a freight-hauling
business and manufacturing high-end
carriages. In 1845 he settled in New
York with his second wife (his first
had died in 1842) and two young sons,
Charles and Norton, and was eventually
hired by a bedstead manufacturing
company to oversee the installation

of all machinery in its new factory. To
raise heavy equipment and lumber from
floor to floor, Otis erected a Watermantype hoist. Nothing fancy or unique
at first. But he knew these lifts were
inherently dangerous—ropes could
break, sending workers plummeting to
their deaths—so Otis jerry-built vertical
safety brakes using a wagon spring, rope
and ratcheted guide rails for the hoist
platform. In 1852 he built two “safety
hoisters” for his employer, Benjamin
Newhouse, and a third for a neighboring
company impressed with the concept.
Newhouse soon closed the bedstead
operation, and Otis incorporated the
E.G. Otis Company to design and build
safety hoists, for lifting not only goods
and supplies but people. There were,
alas, no takers, and by the end of 1853
he had a total inventory worth $122.71,
including two oil cans, a secondhand

lathe and the accounting ledger
that recorded his measly earnings.
Otis, doubtful he could overcome
the public’s fear and distrust of the
earlier, notoriously accident-prone
mechanisms, considered heading west
to capitalize on the Gold Rush.
Enter P.T. Barnum, who was
enthralled by Otis’ innovation. In 1854
Barnum paid Otis $100 to stand on an
elevator platform suspended by a single
rope high above gathering onlookers
inside the Crystal Palace, constructed
for the 1853 World’s Fair in New
York. Barnum’s showmanship was
infectious; the normally unpretentious
Otis doffed a top hat and, after a short
pause to ensure that he had the crowd’s
rapt attention, ordered an ax-wielding
assistant to cut the rope. When it
snapped, the platform plunged—
about two feet. Spring-released brakes
automatically locked, and Otis calmly
assured the relieved spectators, “All
safe, gentleman. All safe.”
At last he was in business. After
fulfilling orders for about three dozen