One-Night Stands with American History

by Richard Shenkman

  P. T. BARNUM’S BRICK TRICK

  P. T. Barnum describes how he snared suckers to his New York museum:

  “One morning a stout, hearty-looking man, came into my ticket-office and begged some money. I asked him why he did not work and earn his living? He replied that he could get nothing to do and that he would be glad of any job at a dollar a day. I handed him a quarter of a dollar, told him to go and get his breakfast and return, and I would employ him at light labor at a dollar and a half a day. When he returned I gave him five common bricks.

  “‘Now,’ said I, ‘go and lay a brick on the sidewalk at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street; another close by the Museum; a third diagonally across the way at the corner of Broadway and Vesey Street, by the Astor House; put down the fourth on the sidewalk in front of St. Paul’s Church, opposite; then, with the fifth brick in hand, take up a rapid march from one point to the other, making the circuit, exchanging your brick at every point, and say nothing to anyone.’

  “‘What is the object of this?’ inquired the man.

  “‘No matter,’ I replied; ‘all you need to know is that it brings you fifteen cents wages per hour. It is a bit of my fun, and to assist me properly you must seem to be as deaf as a post; wear a serious countenance; answer no questions; pay no attention to any one; but attend faithfully to the work and at the end of every hour by St. Paul’s clock show this ticket at the Museum door; enter, walking solemnly through every hall in the building; pass out, and resume your work.’

  “With the remark that it was ‘all one to him, so long as he could earn his living,’ the man placed his bricks and began his round. Half an hour afterwards, at least five hundred people were watching his mysterious movements. He had assumed a military step and bearing, and looking as sober as a judge, he made no response whatever to the constant inquiries as to the object of his singular conduct. At the end of the first hour, the sidewalks in the vicinity were packed with people all anxious to solve the mystery. The man, as directed, then went into the Museum, devoting fifteen minutes to a solemn survey of the halls, and afterwards returning to his round. This was repeated every hour till sundown and whenever the man went into the Museum a dozen or more persons would buy tickets and follow him, hoping to gratify their curiosity in regard to the purpose of his movements. This was continued for several days—the curious people who followed the man into the Museum considerably more than paying his wages—till finally the policeman, to whom I had imparted my object, complained that the obstruction of the sidewalk by crowds had become so serious that I must call in my ‘brick man.’”

  SOURCE: P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs (Hartford, Conn.: J. B. Burr, 1869), pp. 121–23.

  REPUBLICANS AND THE NEGRO

  A speech by Abram Jasper at a Negro political gathering at Louisville:

  “Feller freemen, you all know me. I am Abram Jasper, a republican from way back. When there has been any work to do, I has done it. When there has been any votin’ to do, I has voted early and often. When there has been any fightin’ to do, I have been in the thick of it. I are ’bove proof, old line and tax paid. And I has seed many changes, too. I has seed the Republicans up. I has seed the Democrats up. But I is yit to see a nigger up. T’other night I had a dream. I dreampt that I died and went to Heaven. When I got to de pearly gates ole Salt Peter he says:

  “‘Who’s dar?’ sez he.

  “‘Abram Jasper,’ sez I.

  “‘Is you mounted or is you afoot?’ says he.

  “‘I is afoot,’ says I.

  “‘Well, you can’t get in here,’ says he. ‘Nobody ’lowed in here ’cept them as come mounted,’ says he.

  “‘Dat’s hard on me,’ says I, ‘arter comin’ all dat distance. ’But he never says nothin’ mo, and so I starts back an’ about half way down de hill who does I meet but dat good ol’ Horace Greeley. ‘Whar’s you gwine, Mr. Greeley?’ says I.

  “‘I is gwine to heaven wid Mr. Sumner,’ says he.

  “‘Why, Horace,’ says I, ‘’tain’t no use. I’s just been up dar an nobody’s ’lowed to get in ’cept dey comes mounted, an’ you’s afoot.’

  “‘Is dat so?’ says he.

  “Mr. Greeley sorter scratched his head, an’ arter awhile he says, says he: ‘Abram, I tell what let’s do. You is a likely lad. Suppose you git down on all fours and Sumner and I’ll mount an’ ride you in, an’ dat way we kin all git in.’

  “‘Gen’lemen,’ says I, ‘do you think you could work it?’

  “‘I know I kin,’ says bof of ’em.

  “So down I gits on all fours, and Greeley and Sumner gets astraddle, an’ we ambles up de hill agin, an’ prances up to de gate, an’ old Salt Peter says:

  “‘Who’s dar?’

  “‘We is, Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley,’ shouted Horace.

  “‘Is you both mounted or is you afoot?’ says Peter.

  “‘We is bof mounted,’ says Mr. Greeley.

  “‘All right,’ says Peter, ‘all right,’ says he; ‘jest hitch your hoss outside, gen’lemen, and come right in.’”

  SOURCE: Melville D. Landon, Kings of the Platform and Pulpit (Chicago: Werner Company, 1895), pp. 558–59.

  CIVIL WAR GENERAL BENJAMIN WADE’S HUMOR

  “Once Wade was crossing the plains. On the train a man said: ‘All this region needs is more water and better society.’

  “‘Yes,’ growled ‘Old Ben’; ‘that’s all Hades needs to make it an ideal dwelling-place!’”

  SOURCE: Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920), II, 214.

  YALE LEARNS ABOUT EVOLUTION

  Some ideas are better left alone than refuted. Herbert Spencer, the famous English philosopher, adapted the ideas of Darwinian evolution to biology, psychology, sociology, and other fields of study. Many people, of course, did not agree with Spencer’s reasoning. At Yale University, President Noah Porter personally conducted a volunteer class on Spencer’s First Principles, trying to refute them. By the end of the term, however, every member of the class had become a believer in Social Darwinism.

  SOURCE: Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 20–21.

  LEE SCARES DUNG OUT OF YANKEES

  “[Zebulon Vance, former Confederate governor of North Carolina,] turned the tables on the Yankees when he went to Massachusetts [after the war, as a senator,] to deliver a lecture. The Bay Staters, knowing his droll manner and practical jokes, baited him by hanging Robert E. Lee’s picture in the men’s outhouse. When Vance returned from it, he disappointed them by remaining silent. Finally, they were compelled to query him.

  “‘Senator, did you see General Lee’s picture hanging in the privy?’ someone asked.

  “‘Yes,’ Vance replied indifferently.

  “‘Well, what did you think of it?’ they prodded.

  “‘I thought it was very appropriate,’ he responded. ‘That is a good place for General Lee’s picture. If ever a man lived who could scare the dung out of the Yankees, that man was Robert E. Lee!’”

  SOURCE: Glen Tucker, Zeb Vance: Champion of Freedom (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 7.

  THE WAY IT DIDN’T HAPPEN

  Years after the end of the Civil War two Confederate veterans were reminiscing about their battles around Paducah, Kentucky, when one of them bragged, “I remember when we pushed those damyankees all the way across the Ohio and up into Illinois.”

  “I was there,” the other man stated sharply, “and I’m afraid that wasn’t the way it happened at all. Those Yankees drove us out of Paducah and almost to the Tennessee line.”

  The bragging veteran suddenly took on a dour look and then wryly commented: “Another good story ruined by an eyewitness.”

  SOURCE: Alben Barkley, That Reminds Me (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), p. 35.

  THE GREATEST MAN SOUTH CAROLINA HAS EVER SEEN

  “One morning in Saratoga Governor Curtin, the old war gov
ernor of Pennsylvania, [sat down on a] balcony by Senator Wade Hampton, one of the proudest of the old South Carolina rebels. They [were] both keen wits and both gentlemen of the old school.

  “‘I tell you, governor,’ began General Hampton enthusiastically, ‘South Carolina is a great State, sir—a great State.’

  “‘Yes; South Carolina is a State to be proud of,’ said Governor Curtin. ‘I agree with you. I knew a good many distinguished people down there myself—and splendid people they were too—as brave as Julius Caesar and as chivalric as the Huguenots.’

  “‘You did, sir!’ said Senator Hampton, warming up with a brotherly sympathy. ‘Then you really knew public men who have lived in our old Calhoun State? You knew them?’

  “‘Oh, bless you, yes!’ continued Governor Curtin, drawing his chair up confidently. ‘I knew some of the greatest men your State has ever seen—knew them intimately too, sir.’

  “‘Who did you know down there in our old Palmetto State?’ asked Senator Hampton, handing Governor Curtin his cigar to light from.

  “‘Well, sir, I knew General Sherman, and General Kilpatrick, and—’

  “‘Great guns!’”

  SOURCE: Melville D. Landon, Eli Perkins: Thirty Years of Wit (New York: Cassell, 1891), p. 37.

  The Great Barbecue

  “An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.”

  ’SIMON CAMERON

  “Claim everything, concede nothing, and if defeated, allege fraud.”

  ’TAMMANY MAXIM

  SCRAPBOOK OF THE TIMES

  • Henry Ward Beecher in 1877: “Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.”

  • The one machine indispensable to modern capitalism, the cash register, was patented in 1879 by James Ritty.

  • James A. Garfield was the only man in U.S. history who was a congressman, a senator-elect, and a president-elect at the same time.

  • A short time after assuming the presidency, James Garfield blurted out, “My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get in it?”

  • While in prison for the assassination of President Garfield, Charles Guiteau received upwards of a hundred letters and telegrams a day approving his murderous deed.

  • During a lecture tour of the United States in 1881, Oxford professor of history Edward A. Freeman repeatedly remarked that “the best remedy for whatever is amiss in America would be if every Irishman should kill a negro and be hanged for it.” Freeman later claimed that he had not meant to be insulting.

  • Nouveau riche extravagances included a dinner held in honor of a dog who was given a $15,000 diamond collar, and a man who had little holes drilled into his teeth so that he could have a diamond-studded smile.

  • The Vanderbilts built a mausoleum at New Dorp, Staten Island, that cost $1,500,000, and was protected by a watchman twenty-four hours a day.

  • According to Louis L’Amour, the Western-fiction writer, the red light became associated with prostitution because late-nineteenth-century train conductors who visited whorehouses often left their red lamps hanging outside.

  • In 1884 the “latest social craze”—according to numerous advertisements—was displaying framed pictures on walls.

  • More than a million shares were first traded in one day on the New York Stock Exchange in 1886.

  • There was an advertisement in 1888 for the Bradley Two Wheeler (a carriage), which carried the headline: “Guaranteed Absolutely Free from Horse Motion.”

  • Polygamy was legal in Utah until the year 1890.

  • Electric lights were installed in the White House during the administration of Benjamin Harrison. Harrison and his wife were so afraid of electricity that they left the job of turning the light switches on and off to the servants.

  • Before his election to the White House, Grover Cleveland candidly admitted to the public that he had sired a son out of wedlock. His admission led to the jeer: “Ma Ma, where’s my Pa/Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha.”

  • As a boy Franklin Roosevelt was told by Cleveland: “Franklin, I hope you never become president.”

  THE UNSUSPECTED ORIGINS OF TAMMANY HALL

  Tammany Hall was not always dominated by Irish immigrants. The organization began in 1789 as a fraternal society of native Americans and was actually formed, in part, to oppose immigrants. The first constitution of the society provided that only whites were eligible for the exalted post of Sachem. When the organization turned to politics in the early 1800s, it refused to endorse Irish candidates for office. As late as 1817, Thomas A. Emmet, the Irish patriot refugee, was unable to win the support of Tammany Hall even after two hundred rowdy Irishmen stormed society headquarters. Not until the 1840s, when a flood of immigrants came from Ireland and the suffrage was widened in New York, did the Irish begin to assume control of Tammany Hall.

  Tammany Hall. (Harper’s Weekly, July 11, 1868, p. 433.)

  About the only similarity between early and later Tammany was the criminal and corrupt practices of its leaders. When William Mooney, founder of Tammany, served as superintendent of the alms-house in New York from 1808 to 1809, he siphoned off so much money that food rations to the poor had to be cut substantially. As would happen later, the offending leader was not penalized by the society. After leaving the superintendent’s office, Mooney was reelected Grand Sachem.

  SOURCE: Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 256–57.

  BOSS TWEED AND THE CARTOON

  In 1875, Boss Tweed was in the Ludlow Street jail awaiting trial on charges that he had defrauded the government of millions of dollars. Thomas Nast, the cartoonist, who had spent years hounding Tweed and rousing public opinion against him, was triumphant. But Nast believed that Tweed would somehow find a way to escape all or most of the punishment he deserved.

  “Tweed in Ludlow was allowed all sorts of liberties. He had the freedom of the city, and could drive out in the morning with a keeper for his coachman and a warden for his footman. In the evening he could dine at his Fifth Avenue home with a bailiff for his butler.

  “It was at Tweed’s home (Dec. 4) that he made his escape. The Deputy Sheriff had been invited to dine with him, and Tweed had requested that he might go up-stairs to see his wife. He did not return, and after hiding about New York for a time, fled to Cuba and eventually to Spain. That the great public offender in whose conviction [Nast] had been a chief instrument should have been allowed to escape was a humiliation to [the cartoonist]. . . .

  “It had become known that Tweed was somewhere hiding in Spanish territory. As early as September 30, Nast cartooned him as a Tiger, appearing from a cave marked Spain. Now suddenly came a report—a cable—that one ‘Twid’ (Tweed) had been identified and captured at Vigo, Spain, on the charge of ‘kidnapping two American children.’

  “This seemed a curious statement; for whatever may have been the Boss’s sins, he had not been given to child-stealing. Then came further news, and the mystery was explained. Tweed had been identified and arrested at Vigo through the cartoon ‘Tweed-le-dee and Tilden-dum,’ drawn by Thomas Nast. The ‘street gamins’—to the Spanish officer, who did not read English—were two children being forcibly abducted by the big man of the stripes and club. The printing on the dead wall [behind Tweed] they judged to be the story of his crime. Perhaps they could even spell out the word ‘REWARD.’

  “Absurd as it all was, the identification was flawless. Tweed, on board the steamer Franklin, came back to America to die [in Ludlow, April 12, 1878].”

  SOURCE: Albert Bigelow Paine, Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures (New York: Macmillan, 1904), pp. 318, 336.

  EDITOR’S NOTE: Great story. Would that it were true. The story circulated widely at the time and received confirmation in a Nast biography by Albert Bigelow Paine. Subsequently, scholars discovered that the story was untrue. Tweed actually had been identi
fied by a low-level American counsel in Cuba a short time before he fled to Spain. His arrest in Spain was arranged by American authorities. “The outlandish legend of his being recognized from a Nast cartoon by some simple Spaniard,” says Leo Hershkowitz, “is a complete fiction.”

  SOURCE: Leo Hershkowitz, Tweed’s New York: Another Look (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1977).

  The cartoon that captured Tweed. (Albert Bigelow Paine, Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures [New York, Macmillan, 1904], p. 337.)

  WON’T COMMIT HIMSELF

  When Tammany Hall boss Charles F. Murphey didn’t join a crowd in singing the national anthem at a Fourth of July celebration, a reporter became curious. An aide to the boss explained, “Perhaps he didn’t want to commit himself.”

  SOURCE: William Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (New York: Dutton, 1963), p. ix.

  HONEST GRAFT

  Tammany leader George Plunkitt:

  “Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I’ve made a big fortune out of the game, and I’m gettin’ richer every day, but I’ve not gone in for dishonest graft—blackmailin’ gamblers, saloon-keepers, disorderly people, etc.—and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.

  “There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: ‘I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.’

  “Just let me explain by examples. My party’s in power in the city, and it’s goin’ to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place.

  “I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before.