Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha

by Harvey Rachlin

  Even in Grant’s time, the dangers of tobacco were suspected, and some didn’t hold back in letting the general know it. In an open letter to Grant that appeared in the Chicago Times in April 1867, George Trask, a Massachusetts gentleman who railed against the health risks of smoking, took him to task for his habit and the example he set:

  Public men we regard as public property; hence their public acts are legitimate subjects of public animadversion. Newspaper reporters … identify you with your cigar, and find pleasure in proclaiming … that you are a great smoker as well as a great general. Whether they report you in one battle or another, in the siege of Richmond or the capitulation of Lee, receiving the homage of fair women or the noisy applause of men, they “ring the changes” on “Grant and the inevitable cigar.” You conquered, general, in spite of your cigar. … We address you, general, with sincere respect and gratitude; still … we make no apologies for assaulting a vice which you persistently obtrude upon public notice. The war we wage is simply defensive. Your habit is contagious, and, associated with your powerful name, is doing irreparable mischief in the great community. … Dear general, we ask you to set a better example to our military and naval schools, to our army and nation. You have conquered a city; the world calls it a great achievement. We ask you to conquer a despotic habit … and God’s Word will justify us in calling it a great achievement.

  Evidently, this warning, and others that he undoubtedly received, did not deter Grant. In May 1868, Grant wrote to H. Bernd of Danbury, Connecticut, “Please forward to my address, pr. Adams Ex. One Thousand ‘Colfax’ segars to collect on delivery.”

  Grant was elected president in 1868, and when he took office the following year for the first of two terms, he continued his cigar smoking in the Executive Mansion (later officially called the White House), spending considerable amounts on orders for new cigars. In the early 1870s, for example, he sent checks to John Wagner, a Philadelphia cigar dealer, in the amounts of $118, $182, and $240, not insubstantial sums at the time, and on several occasions ordered a thousand or two thousand cigars at a time. The fact that he was president did not deter people from continuing to bestow stogies upon Grant. In February 1873, William Gouverneur Morris, the U.S. marshal for California, wrote to Grant’s private secretary, Orville Babcock, “I send to your address a couple of boxes of Manillas, commonly called ‘Philopenas’ which I imported myself from the Phillipine Islands, and beg to request, you will ask the President if he will honor me by accepting them.”

  Grant was reelected in 1872, and the Republican Old Guard tried to have him nominated for a third run in 1880, after the intervening term of Rutherford B. Hayes. On June 3, 1880, he was waiting anxiously in an office in Galena when a convention wire arrived reporting that James Garfield had received the Republican nomination for president. Disappointed, Grant strode out of the office and threw to the ground what was left of the stogie he had been puffing, then extracted a new one. Leo LeBron, looking out the window of his jewelry store across the street, attentively observed this scene and sent a boy to retrieve the butt the former president had just dropped. Even as mundane an object as a cigar butt was appreciated by LeBron because of its association with the celebrated Civil War general and president of the United States, and LeBron determined to save Grant’s cigar butt (Galena-Jo Daviess County Historical Society & Museum, Galena, Illinois).

  Ulysses S. Grant's smoking stand at this home in Galena, Illinois.

  The years of continuous cigar smoking took their toll on Grant’s health; by the mid-1880s, when he was retired from public life, he was a dying man. But unfortunately, even in his last years, his health wasn’t the only thing in his life in ruins. He was also at this time insolvent after investing with a Wall Street swindler. Out of desperation he pledged all his possessions of value, including medals, swords, proclamations, and commissions as collateral against a loan from the industrialist William Vanderbilt, who was embarrassed about receiving these items and later offered them to Grant’s wife, but finally gave them to the Smithsonian Institution.

  In the fall of 1884, Grant’s physicians did not expect him to live past the following April. Grant was dying from cancer and in great pain—he was being administered cocaine and morphine—but did live to see the following April, and beyond. He was believed to have kept himself alive by sheer will, determined to finish the personal memoirs he was writing to provide some money for his wife and children.

  On July 23, 1885, the former Civil War general and U.S. president succumbed to throat cancer at the age of sixty-three at Mount McGregor in upstate New York. Just days before, however, Grant had finished his two-volume Memoirs, which became a valuable work of literature and a great historical contribution, not to mention a commercial triumph that provided substantial income for his family.

  As a result of his habit of smoking cigars, Ulysses S. Grant was defeated by carcinogenic toxins in his ultimate battle, but we have today a grim reminder of his insidious habit, a brass smoking stand with the Civil War hero’s initials inscribed on the goblet that rests on top of it.

  LOCATION: U. S. Grant Home State Historic Site, Galena, Illinois.

  JUMBO THE ELEPHANT

  DATE: 1885.

  WHAT IT IS: The remains of the famous nineteenth-century circus elephant.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The bones are currently disassembled.

  Six tons of walking, breathing bulk, he stood a towering eleven and a half feet tall and drew cheering, adoring crowds wherever he stomped his thunderous legs. Trapped in the wilds of Africa, Jumbo was the bush elephant that captured the world’s imagination, only to meet a tragic fate when he lumbered into the path of modern technology.

  Jumbo was born in freedom in the late 1850s on the continent of Africa. There are different accounts as to when and where he was captured, but most likely it was near a river in Abyssinia, which later became Ethiopia.

  The gentle young animal landed in a Paris zoo, then was shipped across the English Channel to the London Zoo. The older he got, the more he ate. By the time he was seven, he was devouring gargantuan supplies of food, supposedly even including whiskey. Jumbo became huge.

  As the floppy-eared beast was making a name for himself, he caught the attention of an American showman—Phineas Taylor Barnum. Born in 1810, Barnum achieved fame in the 1830s for displaying an elderly black woman slave he had purchased, whom he claimed was George Washington’s nurse. He had continued to make large sums of money exhibiting freaks such as the dwarf General Tom Thumb, or sponsoring talent like opera singer Jenny Lind, known as “the Swedish Nightingale.”

  The celebrated showman, who fancied himself “the Shakespeare of advertising,” knew that the pachyderm would be a popular attraction for his Greatest Show on Earth. In a low-profile deal that created a storm of controversy, Barnum purchased Jumbo from the London Zoo for the then large sum of $10,000. The people of England were enraged that their beloved giant elephant had been taken from them—although one story has it that Jumbo had grown too violent to keep at the zoo, perhaps because he was suffering from the pain of an impacted wisdom tooth.

  In America, Jumbo thrilled crowds, whether plodding up Broadway in a festive procession or in the Barnum, Bailey & Hutchinson circus shows that toured the country. Displayed in the early 1880s, when the country was still recovering from the Civil War and the era of cowboys and Indians was drawing to a close, Jumbo was a lively diversion, a genuine wonder.

  But in 1885, after only a few years on the new continent, the African bush elephant’s destiny became disastrously intertwined with the technology of the civilized world. At 9:30 on a mid-September evening, as a Barnum, Bailey & Hutchinson performance was taking place in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada, all thirty-one of the circus’s elephants save Jumbo and the dwarf elephant Tom Thumb had been loaded into their cars. These two were being led along a track by their caretaker, Mr. Scott, known as Scotty, to their cars. A freight train was heading their way, but only when it drew within five hundred yards w
ere its lights visible to Scotty, and likewise the engineer couldn’t see the pachyderms on the track until it was too late. Mr. Scott urged the animals along, and while they did speed up, the train could not stop in time, despite the engineer summoning three times for the brakes. The train first struck Tom Thumb, then smashed into Jumbo from behind. Tom Thumb, hurled into a gully, was badly injured but survived the crash. Jumbo died fifteen minutes later, as workers were trying to free him from underneath the locomotive.

  From the late nineteenth century to 1975, when his hide burned, Jumbo was displayed at Tufts University's Barnum Museum of Natural History, which later was renamed Barnum Hall and became the location of the school's biology department. A tradition had developed among biology students facing a difficult exam to stick a coin Jumbo's upturned trunk for good luck.

  Even Jumbo’s death couldn’t stop the huckster Barnum from capitalizing on the animal’s fame. To keep Jumbo’s name in the headlines, Barnum invented stories of how Jumbo had heroically saved Tom Thumb even at the cost of his own life. Barnum had Jumbo stuffed—when Jumbo was cut open the technician found the enormous stomach full of everything from trinkets to coins—and his bones mounted at the famous Rochester, New York-based Professor Henry A. Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. He exhibited the mammoth preserved corpse in his traveling circus.

  As Barnum’s business ventures took a different course, he donated Jumbo’s hide to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and his bones to the American Museum of Natural History. Over the years, Jumbo, in his stuffed reincarnation, lived on as the mascot of Tufts University. But even the beast’s effigy met a tragic fate. In 1975, the hide was consumed by a fire. Jumbo’s bones survive, however, a reminder of the nineteenth-century beast that captured the world’s imagination and whose name entered the English vocabulary as an adjective applied to anything very large.

  LOCATION: American Museum of Natural History, New York City.

  FREUD’S COUCH

  DATE: 1890.

  WHAT IT IS: The couch, or divan, used by the psychiatric patients of Sigmund Freud’s practice.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The couch has a scroll headrest covered with a loose cushion at one end and is upholstered in heavy cotton, over which is draped an Iranian Qashqa’i rug (dated to the 1920s). The couch measures 5 feet 7.32 inches from one end to the other, 2 feet 3.95 inches high from its base to the top of its pillow at the rear, 1 foot 4.93 inches from its base to its top at the front, and 2 feet 9.46 inches across.

  It was the stage upon which patients of the founder of psychoanalysis uttered whatever thoughts came to their minds, leading Sigmund Freud to formulate the theories that revolutionized our understanding of human nature and behavior. Like its Jewish Viennese owner, this famous symbol of psychotherapy—a couch—narrowly escaped being destroyed by the Nazis after Austria was invaded by Germany.

  Freud pioneered his psychoanalytic method to treat emotional disorders such as insecurity, confusion, and anxiety by encouraging the patient to speak spontaneously about early childhood, dreams, and personal experiences. Freud believed that the emotional scars of traumatic episodes, disappointments, and embarrassments of people’s early years lingered in the subconscious, where they could cause difficulties later in life. The methods of psychoanalysis, he claimed, served to relieve neuroses and other psychological problems.

  Freud actually began his work in psychotherapy using hypnosis, during which patients were guided to recall the feelings and events that were causing their present symptoms. But around 1896 he dropped these techniques in favor of a new technique he had developed, which he called free association.

  During psychoanalysis, the patient, referred to as the analysand, reclined on Freud’s couch. Freud sat in a chair behind and out of view of the analysand, so as not to be a distraction when the person free-associated. Freud would begin treatment by telling analysands they were to talk about themselves, but that rather than trying to impose a logical structure on what they said, they should simply utter whatever came into their minds, no matter how seemingly absurd, trivial, or disconnected.*

  Free association, Freud believed, provided the raw material for understanding the unconscious thoughts and fantasies that influenced the patient’s conscious ideas and behavior. This raw material offered a window into what was going on beneath the surface—that is, beneath the conscious and logical thinking of the analysand—and from it the forces operating at that level could be understood and interpreted to the patient. When Freud first started using free association, he thought that allowing the analysand to say whatever came to mind was itself therapeutic, but he quickly came to realize that the so-called cathartic effect was short-lived and of little value to the patient. It was connecting the unconscious impulses revealed by free association with the analysand’s conscious state that offered the potential for therapeutic integration.

  Freud's couch, with its pillows and coverings, was comfortable for patients undergoing the psychotherapeutic process.

  To Freud, the couch was a practical tool for learning about what went on in a patient’s psyche, much as a stethoscope is a valuable instrument for discovering what is taking place in a patient’s body. The couch provided a way to reduce external stimuli that might be distracting to the patient, who, in a recumbent position and unable to see the psychoanalyst, would not be tempted to guess at the meaning of the psychoanalyst’s facial expressions or bodily movements. Rather, the couch made it possible for the analysand to relax and speak freely, inspired solely by the promptings of his or her own internal impulses.

  The couch was given to Freud in about 1890 by an appreciative patient, Mme. Benveniste. Freud placed the couch in his office in Berggasse 19, a five-story building in Vienna. The couch was in the style of a divan, with a scrolled headrest at one end. Freud always kept the couch covered with an oriental rug.

  Freud wrote scholarly monographs about the psychoanalysis of his patients, whose real names he did not, of course, reveal. Instead, these patients became known by nicknames that summarized their fantasies—such as the “Rat Man,” who had obsessive thoughts about being attacked by rats, and the “Wolf Man,” who had a pivotal dream in which a tree outside his bedroom was filled with wolves—or were otherwise descriptive, such as “Little Hans” for a young boy.

  From 1891 to 1938, Freud lived and practiced psychiatry at Berggasse 19, using the couch in psychotherapy sessions with his patients. But after the Germans invaded Austria on March 11, 1938, life became dangerous for Jews in the country. In Vienna, Nazis poured onto the streets shouting “Death to Judah!” In the climate of terror that permeated the city, Jews were beaten and arrested, and their property was seized.

  On March 15, Nazis went to Berggasse 19, where a swastika flag was already hanging above the building doorway. They forced their way into the Freud family’s apartment, confiscated the Freuds’ passports, and seized their money.

  Freud’s friends, including Princess Marie Bonaparte, beseeched the internationally celebrated psychoanalyst and his family to leave Vienna. Having lived in Vienna for nearly half a century and now ill with cancer, the eighty-two-year-old Freud was reluctant. But on March 22, after his daughter, Anna, was taken from the Freud home by the Gestapo and detained and questioned, Freud decided his family should flee to England.

  Getting out of Austria was no easy task. Diplomatic intervention by William C. Bullitt, the U.S. ambassador to France, helped, but there was also the matter of paying an exit tax to the Nazis. The Nazis’ seizure of Freud’s bank account had left him nearly penniless. But Marie Bonaparte came to his rescue and paid the tax. Most refugees left Austria without any money or belongings, and for a time it appeared this would be the case with the Freuds as well. But ultimately, because of Freud’s fame and the diplomatic efforts on his behalf, he was granted unusual permission to take his personal possessions out of the country.

  There were many items Freud wanted to take with him to England. A passionate collector of antiquities,
he had a large collection of statues and objects from ancient Greece, China, Egypt, and other lands. The Viennese firm of Bauml was hired to handle the shipping arrangements for Freud’s possessions, including his celebrated couch.

  On June 4, 1938, two days after he received his tax clearance, Freud left Vienna with his wife, Martha, daughter, Anna, and two friends. (Four older sisters of Freud stayed behind, ultimately dying at Auschwitz.) The party arrived by train in Paris the next day, where Freud was greeted by Marie Bonaparte and Ambassador Bullitt. Then the Freud party crossed the English Channel.

  The "father" of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

  In England, Freud was greeted with the fanfare accorded a distinguished guest. Freud wrote, “For the first time and late in life I have experienced what it is to be famous.”

  Freud briefly took up residence at 39 Elsworth Road in London, but on September 27 he moved to 20 Maresfield Gardens in the London suburb of Hampstead. It was to this residence that Freud’s possessions, including the analytic couch, were sent. Freud used the couch for his therapy sessions until he closed down his practice on August 1, 1939, when his medical condition became grave. He died seven weeks later, on September 23.

  Freud’s teachings, including how people’s sexual development explained their behavior patterns, have always been controversial. Since the development of antidepressant, antipsychotic, and other types of effective medications, as well as various forms of short-term talk therapy, many modern clinical psychotherapists have discarded Freud’s painstaking psychoanalytic approach to treatment, considering it cumbersome and outmoded, although it nevertheless remains a viable treatment method used by some practicing psychotherapists. But Freud’s influence on how we think about the dynamics of the human psyche has been profound, permeating all aspects of our culture.