Frederick Pabst was captain of a Great Lakes steamer when Maria Best came aboard his ship and caught his attention. He started courting her, the daughter of the owner of Milwaukee’s Phillip Best Beer Company, and they married in 1862. It didn’t take long for his new father-in-law to talk him into giving up the wheelhouse for the brewhouse.  

Just as the German immigrant worked his way up from cabin boy to captain, he rose from the bottom to the top of his new trade and turned Best into America’s largest brewery. In 1889, he renamed the company Pabst, and four years later, his beer was competing head-to-head against its archrival, Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis, at the Chicago World’s Fair. The judges chose Pabst. The captain put his blue ribbon on the label, and it survives to this day as the beer’s instantly recognizable branding.  

If Pabst became America’s king of beers that year, he already had his castle. In 1890, he had hired an architect to design him a mansion, a building that took shape with an exterior fashioned in the Flemish Renaissance Revival style to complement a Neo-Rococo and Neo-Renaissance interior. When construction wrapped in 1892, the family moved in.  

You could say the mansion was more than what one family needed. The 20,000-square-foot, three-story building featured dozens of well-appointed large rooms and a dozen bathrooms. Priceless works of art and furniture filled the interior. Expert craftsmanship and ornate detailing were everywhere. The home boasted the city’s first central heating and electrical systems.  

Family members lived here until 1908, when they sold the property to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee. “The Pabst Residence on Grand Avenue is one of the most handsomest in the city,” Yenowine’s Illustrated News had written of the building that was now home to Milwaukee’s five archbishops. “It is a model of what wealth, luxury and good taste can secure.”       

Brewhouse and Home  

Pabst brewed beer in its hilltop facility northwest of downtown Milwaukee until 1997. The complex was purchased in 2006, and residential units, offices, storefronts, and the like popped up alongside a tavern and event facility called Best Place at the Historic Pabst Brewery. A statue of Frederick Pabst stands watch in one of the courtyards. Best Place offers a beer history tour that tells what happened on these grounds during a century-and-a-half of beer production.

When the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee sold the Pabst Mansion in 1975, it was almost torn down to put in a parking lot for a hotel. A crusade to save the historic building ended with its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. The doors were opened to the public in 1978. The renovated site is open for tours as efforts continue to restore the house to its 19th-century glory.

This story appeared in the 2024 Spring issue of American History magazine.

It’s about time we get to know Gerald Ford. We know his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who handed his vice president the presidency by resigning during the Watergate proceedings in 1974. We know the man who defeated him in the presidential election two years later, Jimmy Carter, and the man who in turn defeated Carter, Ronald Reagan, and went on to redefine the Republican Party.  

Ford has been left to us as the bumbler from Michigan who stumbled into the Oval Office for a brief stint, pardoned his shamed former boss just to please the Republican Party, and then pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers.  

The historian and biographer Richard Norton Smith is trying to change that impression. He spent 10 years researching and studying the life and presidency of Gerald Ford, culling from numerous documents not previously available and conducting 170 personal interviews, including enough personal discussions with Ford himself that Ford asked him to deliver the eulogy at his funeral.  

The conclusion of that effort is An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford, the 832-page book published in 2023 that aims to recast the image of modern America’s accidental commander in chief from a punch line into a respectable Oval Office alumnus.  

What would you say Gerald Ford is best known for?

There’s my generation: mention Gerald Ford and they’re as likely to think of Chevy Chase impersonating him on Saturday Night Live. It was a proxy. It wasn’t just physically clumsy. It was that Ford was intellectually deficient. That that was the implication. I don’t think he felt defensive about any of that. The one thing that really bothered him was the notion popular in some quarters that he was a party hack, that he was just a party guy. He knew that the first line of his historical obituary would revolve around his unelected status as vice president taking over as president after Richard Nixon resigned, and that the second line would include his pardon of Nixon for involvement in any covering up of the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Then there was Ford’s conditional amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders, which happened about three weeks before.

How are these takes on Ford unfair?

Ford played football at a national level at the University of Michigan and yet finished in the top third of his class, a feat that he repeated at Yale Law School while simultaneously working full time as an athletic coach. And by the way, the clumsy reputation, you know, the man falling down the steps of Air Force One. It was a football injury. That literally haunted him.   As for the pardon of Nixon, there are all sorts of criticisms that could be made. Probably, strategically, Ford had very few options other than to do what he did, but how he did it and when he did it, that’s certainly open to criticism. I’ve always believed that one reason contributing to Ford’s precipitous decline in the polls at the time was that even conditional amnesty for the draft evaders came as such a shock to his natural constituency.  

What should Ford be known for that he may not be? Would you say he’s underrated as a president?

Certainly, in foreign policy, the Helsinki Accords, which were widely criticized from both ends of the political spectrum in 1975, are now seen very differently in light of everything that’s happened since. I think it’s a consensus that they are at the very least a major milestone on the road leading to the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and ultimately the Soviet Union itself.  

The economy, if you look at the domestic front, economic deregulation, which is something we take for granted today. It’s hard to make Generation Y believe that there was a time, not so very long ago, in this country when the Federal government determined where planes could fly and what truckers could carry, and where you could get a home mortgage. The fact is that there has been lip service for years, particularly on the right, about deregulating the economy. For some people, that was part of a wide directive to undo or reverse the New Deal. Ford never bought into that. Ford was first of all a classic sort of Midwest right-of-center pragmatist who grew up in the shadow of the New Deal. He was part of that consensus generation that had the shared experience of the Great Depression and World War II.  

The common perception may be that Ford lucked into his job. Did he deserve it? Was it something he aspired to?

He sure didn’t think of it that way. He never wanted to be president. He never wanted to be vice president. Well, no, I’ll take that back. He did want to be vice president, in 1960, years before he became one. Because he had proved to be such a vote getter early in his career, he was approached repeatedly about running for governor of Michigan or the Senate seat. He was offered an appointment to the Senate seat in 1966 by Governor George Romney. But he wasn’t interested in the Senate or being governor. He wanted to be Speaker of the House.  

After he left the presidency, I think he felt a degree of guilt, particularly the burden that in some way his absences and all the additional demands placed on his wife, Betty, contributed in some ways to her problems. Now we know that much about alcoholism is genetic. Her father was an alcoholic. She had a brother who was also an alcoholic. Clearly there was evidence that she was vulnerable.  

And she basically raised the kids, as he made it very clear. By the way, he said more than once in his later years that he thought when the history books were written, she, her impact, her contributions to the culture, would outweigh his own. I don’t think that’s necessarily accurate, but… Most people who become president want to be president to the exclusion of almost everything else, and that’s what makes him unique, because he never wanted to be president.  

Kristie Miller, author of Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson’s First Ladies, wrote of An Ordinary Man that “Rare is the history book that rewrites history. This is one.” How might you agree or disagree with that assessment?

I certainly didn’t say, OK, I’m going to sit down and write a work of revision. The thought never occurred to me. If people choose to reinterpret their take on history as a result, that’s up to them. I mean that people could draw their own conclusions. I’ve spent 40 years at this now, and I’ve always tried as hard as I could to avoid being a special pleader, and that means trying to present both sides, if not more than two sides, to most issues and the personalities that deal with them. I thought long and hard before doing this, and it wasn’t that I ever doubted, seriously, whether I could be objective, whatever that means—detached, critical. I remember something the great Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Kennerly said to me, that if you’re not critical, you’re not credible, and I believe that very, very much.  

So this ordinary man of your title—underrated, unappreciated, and oft-forgotten—turns out to be a bit of an extraordinary president. How should we remember Gerald Ford?

I think his presidency is much less of a coda than it is a curtain raiser. It’s much more about what followed, including the Carter presidency and the Reagan presidency. One thing for which Ford gets no credit and the ’76 campaign at the height of the challenge from the right, from Ronald Reagan on the eve of the Texas primary, Ford sends Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Africa because Ford has decided to do a 180-degree shift in U.S. policy toward White minority governments, beginning in Rhodesia. He is basically sending Kissinger to let them know that their days are numbered and that the United States henceforth is embracing the notion of Black majority rule. The implications of that are enormous. And, of course, on the day of the Texas primary, he got shut out by Ronald Reagan. It was a bad night, but it doesn’t matter because we did what was right and foreign policy is not going to be determined by the Republican primary schedule. That, in a nutshell, is what makes Gerald Ford relevant, and in many ways, the kind of president we say we want. He probably is, as we said earlier, more remembered for Chevy Chase’s pratfalls than for reversing American policy toward Black Africa. But that’s why people write books.

This interview appeared in the 2024 Spring issue of American History magazine.

On August 30, 1813, a war party of 750 enraged American Indian warriors attacked a haphazard stockade known as Fort Mims in the southwestern corner of present-day Alabama, 50 miles from Mobile. After killing most of the 146 defending militiamen, the warriors turned on nearly twice that number of White, Black, and Métis (mixed indigenous and white) noncombatants, slaughtering scores of women and children with sickening ferocity.  

The victorious assailants called themselves the Red Sticks, after the traditional red war clubs they carried. Until 1812, they also had belonged to the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy, a loose alliance of largely autonomous villages, or talwas, that claimed a sprawling domain comprising modern Alabama and the western and southern portions of Georgia. Contact with British colonial traders in the late 17th century wrought the first significant change in the Creek domain. Those Creeks residing north and west of the trade route from the Carolinas became known as the Upper Creeks, those below it the Lower Creeks. The distinction was more than a matter of nomenclature. Living nearer to Whites, the Lower Creeks slowly shed much of traditional Creek culture in favor of accommodation. Upper Creeks tended to be traditionalists, profoundly distrustful of White encroachment, particularly once the American Revolution gave rise to an expansionist young Republic.  

At nearly 25,000 members, the Creeks were the most numerous Indian people in the American South. The other indigenous tribes in the region were the Cherokees in northern Georgia and western North Carolina, and the Choctaws and Chickasaws, who occupied the northern two-thirds of present-day Mississippi. All three would side with the United States in the pending conflict. Spanish Florida would prove sympathetic to the Red Sticks but remained effectively neutral.  

With the Fort Mims massacre, what had begun as a Creek civil war in 1812 metastasized into war with the United States. An outraged nation demanded vengeance against the Red Sticks. Total war was to be the price they paid, retaliation complete and unsparing. There was just one catch. The U.S. government, preoccupied with the War of 1812 against Great Britain, possessed neither the resources nor the will to confront the Red Sticks threat. Prospects consequently seemed good for the Red Sticks, who hoped not only to subdue the Lower Creeks, but also perhaps roll back the border with Georgia and expel White and Métis settlers from southwestern Alabama. Although the future of the Deep South hung in the balance, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Mississippi Territory would have to defeat the Red Sticks largely on their own. Georgia and the Mississippi Territory contributed invading columns to the conflict, but they made only brief and inconclusive gains. It fell to Tennessee to press home the fight.  

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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Enthusiasm for war ran high in the Volunteer State. “I hope to God,” said a Tennessee senator after Fort Mims, echoing the sentiments of his constituents “that as the rascals have begun, we shall now have it in our power to pay them for the old and new.” Tennesseans need look only to their own recent past, when Indian attacks were frequent and the state neglected by the federal government, to emphasize with the citizenry of the Tensaw. None reveled more in the prospect that victory offered to open vast new lands to Southern speculators and settlers than did the fiery, 46-year-old commander of the West Tennessee militia, Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson.  

“Brave Tennesseans,” he proclaimed in a florid general order that exploited both frontier fears and avarice to spur recruitment, “your frontier is threatened with invasion by the savage foe. We must hasten to the frontier, or we will find it drenched in the blood of our citizens.” Jackson and Governor Willie Blount both were clear on the unique opportunity that the present crisis presented. Victory over the Red Sticks would be but the prelude to dispossessing all Creeks of their lands, dislodging the Spanish from West Florida, and preventing the pernicious hand of Great Britain from grasping the Gulf Coast.  

Volunteers flocked to the banner. From his home in the quaint settlement of Kentuck, Tenn., the 27-year-old farmer and expert marksman David Crockett saddled his horse and journeyed 10 miles to join a new regiment of mounted riflemen. Crockett enlisted over the earnest objections of his young wife, Polly. They had only just settled on their latest homestead—the peripatetic Crockett frequently uprooted his family—and had two young boys and an infant girl to raise. David wrestled with his emotions. (The future American icon—the “king of the wild frontier”—never cared for the nickname “Davy.”) Although a proficient game hunter, he doubted his fitness for combat; he had killed plenty of bear, but never a man. “There had been no war among us for so long, that but few who were not too old to bear arms knew anything about the business,” he recalled. “I, for one, had often thought about war and had often heard it described, and I did verily believe that I couldn’t fight in that way at all.”  

Then, too, there were Polly’s pleas to consider. “She said she was a stranger in the parts where we lived and that she and our little children would be left in a lonesome and unhappy situation if I went away.” Loyalty to a larger cause won out, however. “It was mighty hard to go against such arguments as these,” Crockett ruminated, “but my countrymen had been murdered, and I knew that the next thing would be that the Indians would be scalping the women and children all about there if we didn’t put a stop to it.” Besides, the term of service was merely three months, and the prospective pay hardly paltry. And so, on September 24, 1813, Crockett enlisted as private in the Second Regiment of Mounted Riflemen in General John Coffee’s cavalry brigade.  

Crockett’s baptism by fire came little more than a month later. Jackson had penetrated the wild, mountainous northern fringe of the Red Sticks country hopeful of striking deep into the heart of the enemy domain. First, however, he must clear his left flank of 2,000 Red Sticks warriors purportedly gathered at Tallushatchee, a talwa resting eight miles from his newly constructed Coosa River supply-depot. Jackson assigned the task to Coffee’s mounted brigade.  

Dawn on November 3, 1813, broke clear and chill over the clearing that cradled the clapboard cabins of Tallushatchee. As the darkness melted, General Coffee and 900 troopers glided undetected through the pine barrens. Two friendly Creek warriors guided them. Three miles short of Tallushatchee, Coffee divided his command into two parallel columns—the left element comprised of the cavalry, the right of the mounted riflemen clad in coarse linen trousers, long-tailed civilian shirts, and caped jackets called hunting shirts. Some men donned animal-skin caps, but not Crockett; he thought they made him look short. Suddenly, recalled Coffee, “the drums of the enemy began to beat, mingled with their savage yells, preparing for action.” Armed with bows and arrows, their sacred red war clubs, and a handful of muskets, the outgunned and outnumbered warriors (fewer than 200 actually were on hand) spilled from their cabins.  

Coffee opened the fray. As the Red Sticks formed a hollow square, he hurled a company of mounted rangers at them. The rangers galloped to within musket range, fired some scattered shots, and then dared the Red Sticks to pursue. With a series of yells, the warriors complied “like so many red devils,” said Crockett, who watched from his position in the militia column. Catching sight of Crockett and his comrades, the massed Red Sticks veered toward them, unaware of the long line of cavalrymen in the timber on the opposite side of Tallushatchee. “We gave them a fire,” Crockett recalled, “and they returned it, and then ran back to their town.” Coffee ordered the encircling files to advance dismounted.  

Pandemonium ensued. “Women and children darted from the cabins to surrender. Crockett saw seven women clutch at the hunting shirt of a stunned militiaman. He also counted 46 warriors running into a single cabin for a last-ditch defense. As Crockett’s company approached, a woman sitting in a doorway prepared to resist. “She placed her feet against the bow she had in her hand,” Crockett marveled, “and then took the arrow, and raising her feet, she drew with all her might and let it fly at us, and she killed a lieutenant.” The dead subaltern’s enraged men fired at least 20 musket balls into the woman. Her death elated the Tennesseans, who showed the Red Sticks in the cabin no mercy. “We now shot them like dogs,” Crockett confessed.  

Bullets penetrated the thin clapboard walls handily, shredding those inside with splinters, balls, and buckshot. To complete the carnage, Crockett’s detachment set the cabin ablaze, burning the wounded inside to death. The gore made an indelible impression on Crockett. “I recollect seeing a boy who was shot down near the house.” Crockett would wrote in his 1834 Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of Tennessee. “His arm and thigh was broken, and he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him. In this situation he was still trying to crawl along, but not a murmur escaped him, though he was only about twelve years old.”  

Scarcely a warrior escaped death, while Coffee counted just five of his men killed and 40 wounded, most slightly. Returning in triumph to Jackson’s supply depot, the victors, who had been on half-rations for days, discovered that the contractors engaged to feed the army had failed to deliver provisions. A ravenous Crockett and several of his companions returned to the battlefield in search of food. Combing the charred cabins and blood-soaked grounds, they found a potato cellar under the wreckage of the same cabin that had claimed the lives of the 46 doomed warriors. They hauled out a large cache of nauseating tubers. “Hunger compelled us to eat them,” remembered Crockett, “though I had a little rather not, if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them, and [the potatoes] looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.”  

Five days later, Crockett again saw combat. An allied Creek chief had called upon Jackson to save his people, whom he said a large Red Sticks war party had besieged at the fortified post of a trader named Lashley near Talladega, a talwa just six miles distant. Jackson’s scouts returned with a heartening report. The Red Sticks had not encircled the friendly Creeks. Rather, they were congregated in a shrub-choked valley below the hilltop fort.  

At sunrise on November 9, Jackson halted on the northern rim of the valley, his presence undetected by the Red Sticks. He quietly arranged his troops in battle order, telling Coffee to deploy his mounted men on the high ground to the east and west of the valley and join their flanks behind Lashley’s fort. To Crockett’s delight, the friendly Creeks streamed from the stockade, waving and crying, “How-dy-do, brother, how-dy-do.” After aligning his infantry on the northern rim of the valley, Jackson opened the action with an old Indian tactic. He sent three companies into the valley to roost the Red Sticks from their camp, and then wheel and dash back to the infantry lines. Painted scarlet and stripped to their breechclouts, the Red Sticks took the bait and chased the soldiers straight into Jackson’s ranks. Smoke rolled down the ridge, and the Red Sticks reeled in confusion. Repelled on one front, the Red Sticks rallied and then charged Coffee’s line.

“They came rushing forward like a cloud of Egyptian locusts and screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose, with the old devil of all at their head,” wrote Crockett. “The warriors came yelling on, meeting us, and continued until they were within shot of us, when we fired and killed a considerable number of them.” Crockett described the ensuing slaughter. “They broke like a gang of steers and ran across to our other line, where they were again fired on; and so we kept them running from one line to the other, constantly under a heavy fire.”  

After an hour of futile battering at Jackson’s lines, several hundred Red Sticks survivors slipped through a gap between two units and fled. Nearly 400 Red Sticks died in the one-sided struggle. Jackson had inflicted a shattering but by no means war-ending defeat on the Red Sticks; they were too numerous and dispersed to collapse under the twin losses at Tallushatchee and Talladega.  

David Crockett had no desire to stick around for the denouement. Together with most of Jackson’s volunteers, he quit the war at the expiration of his term of enlistment. In late January 1814, Crockett returned home to a joyous Polly, with $65.59 in pay and allowances in his pockets. Crockett would reenlist nine months later for a brief stint against the British in the Gulf Coast, but he saw no combat, his service ending before the Battle of New Orleans. “This closed out my career as a warrior, and I am glad of it,” he later wrote. Crockett had seen slaughter enough, and as his Narrative reveals, it clearly sickened him.  

The 21-year-old fellow Tennessean Sam Houston began his Creek War odyssey a few weeks after David Crockett headed home from his first enlistment. A non-conformist by nature, at age 15 Houston abandoned the Kingston general store in which he clerked to live with the Cherokees, whose country abutted his family’s East Tennessee farm. The Cherokees took to the strapping white adolescent. The chief of the band adopted him, naming Houston “the Raven” after the bird the Cherokees believed symbolized good luck and wanderlust. Houston had not bucked the family traces entirely, however. He regularly visited his widowed mother and siblings, wheedling money from her with which to purchase a generous quantity of gifts for his adopted Cherokee kin.  

In 1811, Houston returned to frontier society, fluent in Cherokee but intent on filling the gaps in his white education. He studied under a tutor and then opened a school for local children. Debt, however, soon drove him to resume clerking as well. Houston loathed the work no less than he had three years earlier. When in March 1813 the opportunity to enlist in the 39th U.S. Infantry regiment, then recruiting in East Tennessee, ostensibly for service against the British in the ongoing War of 1812, presented itself, Houston hastened to seize it. Being underage—the legal minimum age for service in the Regular Army was then 21—Houston first needed to obtain his mother’s permission, which she granted with an apparent admonition to never “turn his back to save his life.” That said, she slipped onto his finger a thin gold band with the word “Honor” etched in the inner curve.  

A friend remembered when Houston “took the silver dollar.” Following the custom of the day, a recruiting detail from the 39th paraded up the dirt thoroughfare of Kingston with fife and drum. Silver dollars glinted on the drumhead as tokens of enlistment. Houston stepped forward, snatched a coin, and “was then forthwith marched to the barracks, uniformed, and appoint the same day as a sergeant.” Shortly after Houston left Kingston, admiring friends secured for him an ensign’s commission. Promotion to third lieutenant came apace. Lieutenant Houston cut a fine figure in uniform. Powerfully built, at six feet, two inches tall, he towered over most of the men of his platoon. His deep, commanding voice and eyes, as brilliant a shade of blue and as transfixing as those of Andrew Jackson, enhanced Houston’s natural gift for leadership.   On the morning of March 27, 1814, staring intently at a gun-smoke-draped barricade, behind which thronged confidently jeering Red Sticks, the young lieutenant awaited his first test of combat.    

At last awakened to the danger a Red Sticks victory posed for the South, particularly if the British were to land on the Gulf Coasts, early in 1814 the War Department diverted the untried 39th U.S. Infantry to service under Andrew Jackson. With a command now numbering 3,200 men, Jackson advanced from his central Alabama supply depot on March 25, 1814, to challenge the strongest remaining Red Sticks contingent, nearly 1,000 warriors defending an enclave in a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Tallapoosa River, 70 miles northeast of present-day Montgomery. Along the south bank of the river rested the Red Sticks village of Tohopeka. Across the land approach to the village, the warriors had fashioned the most formidable obstacle American Indians would ever construct in their century of conflicts against the United States. A 350-yard-long wall of massive pine logs held in place with upright pine posts and props zigzagged across the neck of the 100-acre peninsula. In places the breastworks rise to a height of eight feet; nowhere were they less than five feet high. Clay chinking filled gaps between the logs. Two rows of firing ports were cut in the logs at regular intervals.  

Jackson had devised a simple but ingenious plan—theoretically at least—to obliterate the Red Sticks and their refuge. At daybreak, General Coffee would ride down with his mounted brigade of Tennessee militia and 500 Cherokee warriors. They were to ford the river, come up on the Red Sticks from behind, and throw a cordon around the far bank of the horseshoe-shaped bend to prevent escape. Jackson, meanwhile, would march directly against Tohopeka with the infantry and an artillery company, batter openings in the breastworks with his two cannons, and then launch a grand bayonet charge against the weakened defenses. The 600 blue-coated soldiers of the 39th U. S. Infantry would lead the attack.  

The battle did not unfold according to plan. The small cannon blasted away for two hours without even denting the barricade. Aligned in close order within musket range of the Red Sticks, the Regulars took casualties from enemy sharpshooters. Sam Houston and his comrades grew restless. Not until the Cherokee warriors spontaneously surged across the Tallapoosa and seized the Red Sticks village, causing warriors to stream from the barricade to rescue their families, was Jackson able to launch his assault.  

The fight at the barricade was bitter but brief. Cheering Regulars rapidly punched gaps in the sagging Red Sticks ranks. On the extreme right of the regimental line, Lieutenant Houston climbed the wall with his platoon. He slashed at Red Sticks with his sword until a barbed arrow buried itself in his right groin. Hobbling about exhorting his men, Houston kept on his feet until the warriors opposing his platoon retreated to a log-roofed redoubt in a ravine beside the riverbank. Then he sank to the ground, bleeding and helpless.  

Houston begged a fellow officer to extract the arrow. The man tried, but the arrow refused to budge. He tugged at it again with the same result. Furious and perhaps delirious with pain, Houston lifted his sword and threatened to cleave the officer’s skull if he failed a third time. The man yanked, and the arrow came out, together with a mass of tissue and a torrent of blood. Houston righted himself, struggled back to the barricade, and delivered himself to the regimental surgeon, who staunched the flow of blood.  

After the collapse of the barricade, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend degenerated into a five-hour slaughter of Red Sticks that ended only with nightfall. Nearly 300 warriors died trying to flee across the Tallapoosa. Those who remained behind fought and died until only two clusters remained, one of which was the redoubt in the ravine near where Houston had been wounded. Jackson personally called for volunteers to storm the place. Houston, who lay near enough to hear the summons, labored to his feet, grabbed a musket, and summoned his men to follow him. Stumbling down the rocky ravine as twilight settled over the forest, Houston came within 15 feet of the redoubt before two musket balls struck him simultaneously, one in the right arm, the other in the shoulder. Drawing on his last reserve of strength, Houston turned to order his men to charge, only discover that he was alone. Houston staggered back up the ravine before collapsing. After dark, soldiers burnt the redoubt, immolating the occupants.  

Night fell. The occasional musket shots, which signified Red Sticks survivors rooted out and dispatched, at least ceased. Surgeons, meanwhile, attend to army wounded, which numbered 159 in addition to 47 killed. Jackson’s Cherokee and Lower Creek allies suffered 23 dead and 47 wounded. The Red Sticks force had been all but annihilated, with nearly 900 dead and fewer than three dozen escaping unhurt. The Battle of Horseshoe Bend effectively ended the Creek War. It also catapulted Andrew Jackson to national fame and earned him a major general’s commission in the Regular Army.  

On the battlefield that night, Sam Houston received only cursory care from the surgeons. A doctor bandaged his groin and extracted the bullet from his right arm. He was about to probe for the second musket ball when another surgeon suggested he desist. Houston, he said, had lost too much blood to survive the night, better not to torture him gratuitously. Laying Houston on the ground, the surgeons ministered to men whose odds of recovering they judged better.  

Houston, however, refused to die. Shivering with cold, tormented by thirst, and racked with spirit-shattering pain, he passed the night of March 27, alone and ignored. When daybreak confounded the surgeons’ prediction, Houston was placed on a litter and carried swinging and jolting between two horses 60 excruciating miles to Jackson’s forward supply depot, where me might expire in relative comfort. Instead, he lingered on. Placed on another litter and fortified with whiskey between blackouts, Houston made it home alive. It would take him three years to recover fully.  

David Crockett and Sam Houston had faced their respective baptisms by fire in the most consequential war between American Indians and the United States in the nation’s history. The Creek War opened the Deep South to the Cotton Kingdom, setting the stage for both the expulsion of all Indians from the South in the Trail of Tears in the 1830s and the Civil War three decades thereafter.  

Destiny would eventually lead Crockett and Houston to Texas, where Crockett would meet his end on a merciless March 1836 morning at a crumbling former Spanish mission called the Alamo, and Houston would chart the course of Texas independence from Mexico. For both, the road to glory had begun in battle against the Red Sticks.  

Peter Cozzens is the author of A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023)

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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History has long since established FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover abused his position, gathering defamatory information on elected officials, using his agents to intimidate and harass and beat suspects, and condoning flagrant abuses of civil rights. Hoover never forgot nor forgave anyone who made the FBI and himself look bad. He made inordinate efforts to destroy reputations and careers of men and women on his famous blacklist. But there was another facet to Hoover’s personal and professional character. As with the fictional John Riley Kane of “Citizen Kane,” Hoover had his own “Rosebud.”  

Her name was Kate “Ma” Barker.  

During the crime wave that swept the Midwest in the early 1930s, the names of John Dillinger, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and George “Machine Gun” Kelly became as famous as Charles Lindbergh. The early years of the Great Depression spawned gangs of bank robbers, murderers, kidnappers and auto thieves the likes of which have not been seen since. Among the list of criminals of the era were a murderous gang of Missouri hillbillies that carried out several bank robberies and two audacious kidnappings before they were tracked down. They were the Barker-Karpis Gang.  

According to Hoover, the head of the gang was an evil, scheming and notorious criminal genius named Kate Barker. In his 1938 book Persons in Hiding, Hoover wrote that Kate Barker was the “most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade.” This was in a decade that included John Dillinger, easily the most clever criminal of the age, and Lester J. Gillis, better known as “Baby Face” Nelson, who topped the list of true psychopathic killers. Yet Ma Barker had earned Hoover’s particular wrath. “In her sixty or so years,” Hoover continued, “this woman reared a spawn of Hell. Her sons looked to her for guidance, and obeyed her implicitly.”  

In truth there is no evidence that Ma Barker ever robbed so much as a filling station or participated in any crime. But Hoover, ever vengeful, labeled Ma Barker as the mastermind of the Barker-Karpis Gang. Not only was she never arrested or charged with any crime, she was completely unknown until after her death. She was plump and short, with black hair she liked to twist into rings and curls. She was a simple, nearly illiterate country woman who would have looked at home in a church knitting bee or pulling carrots from her backyard garden. Nothing more than a frumpy hillbilly woman, her only interests, other than her family, were to listen to the radio and assemble jigsaw puzzles. Hardly the image of a matriarchal head of an outlaw gang.  

She was born Arizona “Ari” Donnie Clark in 1874 in rural Missouri. Her father John either died or left shortly after her birth. Her mother Emaline married Ruben Reynolds, and by 1885 the small family moved to Lawrence County. In 1892, when she was 18, Ari married George Barker, and they moved to Aurora. There they had three sons. Herman, born that same year, followed by Lloyd five years later, and Arthur, known as Doc, was born in 1899.  

There is no census record of where they were living when Fred, the last son, was born in 1901, but by 1910 they were at Webb City in Jasper County. George supported his family with menial jobs. There is nothing to indicate he ever broke the law. The same could not be said of his four sons, all of whom became criminals. Physically, they were short and wiry, with black hair and sallow skin. As a sign of the times, neither Ari nor George made an effort to put their sons through school. All four were more or less illiterate. Fred, the youngest, was his mother’s favorite. She ruled the family with what was described as strong discipline. The eldest son, Herman, was remembered by local residents as being fascinated by Jesse James and the Youngers, both Missouri outlaws of the previous century.  

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Early on Sunday morning, March 7, 1915, Herman and another boy held up five men playing cards in the back of a grocery store in Webb City. Arrested the following day, Herman was released for lack of evidence. Ari packed up the family and moved to Tulsa, Okla., where she hoped her oldest son would have a fresh start. It did not happen. All four boys, even the 14-year old Fred joined a gang of boys and young men who committed small-time burglary and car theft in Missouri, Minnesota, and Oklahoma.  

Hoover later called this gang a “school of crime, with Ma Barker being their teacher.” This is an example of how Hoover later inserted fictional vignettes of Ma Barker’s early rise in the criminal underworld.  

Herman was in an out of jail several times over the next 12 years, and died  in 1927 during a shootout with police in Wichita. Lloyd Barker, the next eldest, was arrested for robbing the U. S. Mail and sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in January 1922. Coincidentally, this was when Robert Stroud was raising his canaries there and was already known as the Birdman.  

One month later, Arthur “Doc” Barker was sentenced to life for murdering a night watchman during a botched robbery at a Tulsa hospital. Doc had always shown a lack of sense and tended to be rash and violent despite his mother’s discipline. He was sentenced to life at the Oklahoma State Prison.  

The family was left with young Fred, who was sent to live with a family friend, Herbert “Deafy” Farmer near Joplin. Farmer, whose own life as a criminal would span the next ten years, was a mentor to Fred until the young man was sent to a reformatory.  

It was there that Fred met a young hood named Alvin “Ray” Karpis, the Canadian-born son of Lithuanian immigrants. Born in 1907, and a dead ringer for the horror film star Boris Karloff with glasses, Karpis was one of the Depression era’s most successful criminals, as well as the last one still alive in the 1970s. He would be the longest-serving inmate of Alcatraz.  

Sometime in late 1928, George Barker either left in disgust with his criminal sons, or was thrown out by Ari, who had by now taken to calling herself Kate.  

Karpis, after being released from the reformatory, went to find Fred and it was then he first met Kate Barker. She was living in a shack near some railroad tracks. “As I approached,” he said later, “she was wearing a pair of bib overalls over a man’s sweater.” He introduced himself and she invited him in. The shack had no electricity nor running water. A ramshackle outhouse was in the back yard. “There were flies everywhere.” But Ma Barker liked Karpis, and virtually adopted the young hoodlum, who eventually became as close as Fred.  

Alvin Karpis, who later came to hate Hoover with a vehemence because of the FBI director’s self-proclaimed genius as the nation’s best investigator, said that Kate Barker was “gullible, easily led, simple, and generally law-abiding. The idea that she was the mastermind,” to use Hoover’s own words, was the most “ridiculous story in the annals of crime.”  

Her only role was as a cover for the gang so they would look less conspicuous when they traveled. Convicted bank robber Harvey Bailey, who was well-acquainted with Kate Barker and her sons, said years later “Ma Barker couldn’t plan breakfast, let alone a major crime.” Rather than a criminal overlord, she was nothing more than an overindulgent mother who traveled with her sons and benefited from their ill-gotten gains.  

So far the Barkers had not come to the attention of the Bureau of Investigation in Washington. It would not acquire the word “Federal” until 1935. The agents in Oklahoma and Missouri had never heard of the outlaw family, and certainly knew nothing of Ma Barker. Only the local city, county, and state police knew of them, even though Doc was in prison for a Federal offense.  

Fred arrived from Joplin, and together he and Karpis began nighttime burglaries around Tulsa. They were both arrested. While Karpis was released, Fred later escaped. They took Ma and her current boyfriend, a drunk named Albert Dunlop, to southern Missouri. There they pulled their first bank robbery. Fred used the money to buy his mother a small farm. The boys did not remain. When a West Plains, Missouri police officer came to question them about a burglary, Karpis panicked and shot the lawman. Running just ahead of a posse, they took Ma and Albert to Herb Farmer’s place outside Joplin.  

Farmer suggested to the boys they go to St. Paul, Minn., where the police were easily bribed. St. Paul, already considered the crime capital of the Midwest, was the home of a man who, while never indicted nor prosecuted, was one of the most notorious partners of crime in the state. Chief of Police Tom Brown took bribes and protected criminals while lining his pockets.  

The Green Lantern Tavern, a favorite hangout for outlaws, was run by a portly man named Harry Sawyer. In December of 1931, Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis entered the big leagues of the Midwest’s criminal underworld. The Green Lantern often hosted Chicago gunmen and bank robbers, including Harvey Bailey and the soon to be infamous Machine Gun Kelly.  

Where was Ma during all this? She was in a small home rented for her and Dunlop, where she kept house, listened to Amos ‘n’ Andy, and assembled puzzles. She was happy as long as she had her son, a roof over her head and something to do.  

Sawyer took to the new arrivals and introduced them to more of his patrons. After one successful bank robbery, Karpis and Fred were sought for the crime. Tom Brown sidetracked the investigation while warning the boys. They suspected Dunlop as alerting the cops. They took the drunk out to the woods and shot him. This act alone disputes that Ma was a leader of the gang. She was lonely, and would not have allowed Dunlop to be killed. Fred, who was intimidated by his mother, rarely went against her wishes. But Dunlop was a threat.  

In June 1932 , with Harvey Bailey, they robbed another bank in Fort Scott, Kan.. By autumn, they had enough money for the next step, getting Doc Barker out of prison. This was accomplished with the help of Tom Brown. A $200 dollar bribe to corrupt state Senator Preston Lester put Doc back on the street. Another bribe also released Volney Davis, another outlaw. There is some discrepancy on this matter, as many sources state Doc was paroled. But historians, going through FBI files, determined that Doc was released early due to bribery.  

Now calling themselves the Barker-Karpis Gang, the four men joined up with George Ziegler, whose real name was Fred Goetz, and Brian Bolton, both from Chicago.  

Goetz and Bolton, along with another man, Fred “Killer” Burke, were the then-unknown gunmen of the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in a Chicago garage in 1929.  

Amazingly, Fred and Doc Barker, whose standing in the fugitive hierarchy was hardly worth mentioning, had been joined by the men who murdered seven of Chicago gang leader Bugs Moran’s men on the orders of Al Capone. Rarely in the underworld did the world of organized crime and the Depression-era hoodlums come together. Neither Goetz nor Bolton ever met Ma Barker, being content in her small and quiet apartment.  

Sawyer, knowing Karpis wanted to find a less dangerous and more lucrative crime than armed robbery, told him about William Hamm, the scion of the old Hamm’s Brewery in St. Paul. He would be an easy target for kidnapping and ransom. Curiously, even though the June 1933 Hamm kidnapping yielded far more money than even John Dillinger had ever robbed, the Barkers were still unknown to the FBI. This was the crime that brought them into the hunt, since the passage of the Lindbergh Law in 1932 made interstate kidnapping a Federal crime.  

Ma was still in St. Paul working on her jigsaw puzzles. She was aware of her sons’ crimes, but probably not the scale. As long as they came home with nice clothes and took her out for fun in the evenings, she was content. To be sure, Kate Barker was not a model of American motherhood.  

The Hamm kidnapping yielded $100,000 in cash, which the gang laundered through their connections in St. Paul, Cleveland, and Chicago. Ma was shuffled from city to city as the gang kept ahead of the law. In August of 1933 Karpis was associated with Baby Face Nelson, and introduced him to other bank robbers. Karpis, always cautious, found Nelson to be too unstable and violent. Nelson, who often bragged about his connections in the criminal underworld, which included Dillinger, never mentioned even meeting the supposed matriarchal mastermind behind the Barker Gang. Furthermore, Nelson was very much a chauvinist, and would never have let a woman tell him what to do.  

When the ransom money was distributed, the corrupt Tom Brown received $25,000 with the gang splitting the rest. But even in the 1930s, the money, with their profligate spending, did not last long. Fred sent Herb Farmer $2,500 to help pay his legal expenses when he was on trial for conspiracy.  

Another kidnapping, that of businessman Edward Bremer on January 17, 1934, infuriated Hoover, who knew Bremer had connections to President Roosevelt. Hoover, who micromanaged the field agents to the point of verbally criticizing any typographical errors in their written reports, still knew nothing of Ma Barker. He rode the field officers mercilessly, to find out who had kidnapped Bremer. At last one of Doc Barker’s fingerprints was found on a cache of four gas cans left on a rural road where the gang had refueled their vehicles. Hoover’s men scoured the Midwest looking for Karpis, Fred, and Doc Barker, but no mention of Ma Barker turned up in their files or list of suspects.  

It took months to launder the $200,000 in Bremer ransom money. The Departments of Justice and Treasury had posted the serial numbers to every bank in the country. Some of it was sent to Cuba, where it would spread to Mexico and South America. It was time to lay low. In September, Karpis, needing some time out of the country, visited Cuba with his girlfriend Dolores Delany. While there, he sent a letter to Ma in Chicago and invited her to come down. They spent a week fishing, boating, and relaxing in the beach house he had rented. But Cuba was under virtual martial law from the violence between the government and the revolt under Fulgencio Batista. Karpis returned to the states and began looking for another bank to rob.  

Then Doc, never the brightest of men, was arrested by Special Agent Earl Connally in early January. Among his personal effects was a map of central Florida, with a red ring circled around Lake Wier near Ocklawaha. That was where Fred and Ma were staying.  

With Dillinger, Floyd, Nelson, and the Barrow Gang dead by this time, the Karpis and Barkers drew the full attention of Hoover’s agents. Earl Connally flew down to Florida and, with the help of Miami agents and local police, set up a cordon around the two-story lake house where Fred and Ma were staying. Karpis had visited the house only a few days before and felt it was too exposed. He advised them to find a better place. But Ma liked how quiet it was.  

On the morning of January 16, Connally and his men, armed with tear gas grenades, rifles, shotguns and Thompson submachine guns, yelled for Fred to come out. Gunfire erupted from an upper window, then shifted to another. It was obvious only one person was shooting, as the shots never came from more than one window at a time. After firing tear gas and riddling the house with bullets, the agents waited, then called again. After three hours of more tear gas and fusillades of gunfire, the shooting ceased.  

Connally, not willing to risk his men’s lives, sent the house’s caretaker, Will Woodbury, in to see if the Barkers were dead. Told by Connally that he would be okay, the frightened Woodbury went inside the house, still reeking of tear gas. A few minutes later he called out that both Fred and Ma were dead.  

When agents finally summoned up the courage to enter the house, they found Ma and Fred dead, the latter riddled with bullets. Ma was lying nearby with a single bullet hole in her head. Not far from her left hand was a Thompson submachine gun. Almost immediately the story circulated that Ma had been found with a “smoking machine gun in her hand,” but the truth is more logical if not lurid. Kate Barker was right-handed. At ten pounds, the Thompson was a heavy weapon, almost impossible to handle when firing at full automatic. There was no way she could have used it;. The gun was Fred’s. Ma Barker was simply in the wrong place.  

But Hoover, delighted to have the case closed, immediately told the press that she had been killed while fighting the agents. There is no doubt he wanted to spin the news away from the fact that his agents had murdered an old and unarmed woman. Thus the legend of the nefarious criminal mastermind Ma Barker was hatched and has persisted to this day.  

Even though the Barkers were active longer than any of the more famous Depression-era criminals, they were hardly known to the general public. Ma Barker’s notorious role was posthumous. Not being alive to defend herself, Hoover had full control of the outrageous legend. He never tired of talking about her. In fact, even as he directed the FBI through the Second World War, the McCarthy Era, the Cold war and several presidential administrations, he never stopped maligning the criminal fiend, Ma Barker.  

Mark Carlson’s articles have appeared in numerous national magazines. He is currently working on the definitive account of the Lincoln Assassination.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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Before there were strip malls and shopping centers, Walmart, or Target, and certainly before there was any Amazon.com, there was Sears.  

Established in the late 1880s, by Richard W. Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck as a mail order catalog company selling watches and jewelry, A.C. Roebuck Watch Company would become Sears, Roebuck & Co. in 1893 and expand its product offerings to compete with general stores selling select high-priced supplies and goods to rural farmers on credit. General store owners often negotiated prices with the farmers based on creditworthiness. The Sears catalog offered fixed pricing on a much larger selection of goods. That formula worked, and business boomed. In 1893, sales were more than $400,000 (about $12 million today), and by 1895 they topped $750,000 ($20 million today). The catalog grew, eventually surpassing 1,000 pages and included a vast array of items, such as sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, groceries, and even automobiles.  

In 1906, Sears and his then-partner and brother-in-law Julius Rosenwald decided to take the company public. The successful initial public offering (IPO) was the first major retail IPO in American financial history.  

That same year, Sears opened a new catalog plant and the Sears Merchandise Building Tower in Chicago. The building was the anchor of what would become the massive 40-acre Sears, Roebuck and Company Complex of offices, laboratories, and mail-order operations at Homan Avenue and Arthington Street. The complex was the base of the mail-order catalog business until 1993 and served as corporate headquarters until 1973 when the Sears Tower was completed.  

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The company opened its first retail store within the Chicago complex in 1925 and many more followed. Similar to its catalog, Sears stores followed an unconventional business model, located in middle-class and working-class neighborhoods, far from the main downtown shopping district. They offered easy parking in lots, and large, modern, spacious, boxy buildings, with myriad products aimed at men and women, including hardware and building materials, kitchen and home goods, and family-oriented items. Instead of high-end fashion clothing, Sears carried practical, everyday clothing, on racks and shelves, allowing its customers to select goods without the aid of a clerk.  

During the 1980s, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States, and many of its stores became anchors for malls across America. Ironically, its innovative 19th-century and early-20th century business model may ultimately have been its demise, as the late 20th and early 21st century brought new versions of the box store. Walmart, K-Mart, Target, and other large retail stores popped up in every conceivable neighborhood of Middle America, offering goods at bargain prices.  

Sears discontinued its famed catalog in 1993 and laid off the massive 50,000-plus workforce that created it and filled its orders. In the 21st century, the ease and convenience of online shopping continue to deliver a devastating blow to brick-and-mortar shops and malls.  

On December 13, 2022, Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and began shuttering the remainder of its once-vast network of more than 3,500 stores. As of May 2023, only 11 Sears stores remained open.  

In its heyday, its operations were massive and multifaceted. After its 1906 Chicago complex opened, Sears commemorated the occasion with a card set of 50 stereographic views of its inner workings. A detailed description of each scene is printed on the card’s backside. A sampling of the set is shared here—a fascinating glimpse into the birth of a new American consumerism.  

Melissa A. Winn is a writer, editor, photographer, and collector of historic photographs. She’s a member of the Professional Photographers Association, Authors Guild, and the Center for Civil War Photography.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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Henry Clay, nicknamed the Star of the West and the Great Compromiser, served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. Senator from Kentucky, but he’s less known today than he was in his own time and for most of the 20th century. Time often takes a toll on the famous, even when they’ve accomplished great deeds, but Clay, a moderate politician during the turbulent antebellum decades before the Civil War, should stand as one of our perennial American heroes because his efforts in the national government consistently brought the country back from the brink of disaster. Today, when compromise seems to be a bad word in politics, Clay lets us remember that the give and take of politics is precisely what keeps a democracy alive.  

He was born in Virginia in 1777, less than a year after the Declaration of Independence. As a young man, he read law in Richmond and clerked for the famous attorney and scholar, George Wythe of Williamsburg, before moving to Kentucky. Later in life, he claimed humble origins for himself, but his father (who died young) and his mother (who later remarried) firmly belonged to the frontier class known as the middling sort.  

In Kentucky, Clay practiced law with extraordinary skill and attracted clients who expanded his network of political contacts and social climbers among the elite of Lexington, the seat of Fayette County in the heart of the Bluegrass region. Soon he developed a reputation for hard work and hard play: he perfected his public speaking skills, modeling himself on Patrick Henry, wooed jurors to hand down verdicts in his clients’ favor, and relaxed by playing cards, gambling on horses, and drinking.  

In 1799, he married Lucretia Hart, the daughter of one of Kentucky’s leading political figures. Marriage and the subsequent birth of 11 children did not slow him down—not in his work as an attorney nor as a carouser who enjoyed nothing more than a card game lasting into the wee hours of the morning and a glass of smooth Kentucky bourbon by his side. Friends and admirers called him “Prince Hal,” a reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V. When asked if she minded Clay’s gambling, Mrs. Clay replied coolly: “Oh! dear, no! He ’most always wins.” Meanwhile, while he wasn’t in card games or at the racetrack, he found comfort at his impressive house, Ashland, a sprawling, whitewashed brick mansion just outside of Lexington. Visitors approaching the stately house often heard wafting melodies sent aloft by Clay on his fiddle or Lucretia on her piano.  

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Tall and slender in stature, with wispy blond hair that revealed a high forehead, an angular face with round eyes, a long narrow nose, full lips, and protruding ears that kept him from ever being described as handsome, Clay rose quickly in state and national politics. After being elected to the lower house of the Kentucky legislature in 1803, he briefly filled a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate, successfully defended Aaron Burr against charges of conspiring to invade Spanish territory (only later did President Thomas Jefferson order Burr’s arrest for treason, but lack of evidence led to Burr’s acquittal), and became speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives. Although even tempered, his blood could sometimes run hot, and he, like other Westerners, protected his personal honor with a rigor that occasionally led him into folly. In 1807, for instance, he quarreled with a fellow legislator over Jefferson’s Embargo, and when his political opponent called him a liar, he challenged the man to a duel, a showdown that ended with both men wounding each other. It was not the only duel he fought over politics.  

Starting out as a Jeffersonian Republican, he slowly drifted toward Hamiltonian domestic policies that looked to the federal government for support of economic development, a policy that would aid commerce in the West and tie the nation’s separate regions together. Clay took a moderate position on the issue of slavery (he argued for the gradual manumission of slaves and later became a founder of the American Colonization Society, a group of prominent national leaders who sought to free slaves and pay for their return to Africa) and maintained an unbridled belief that the West was the great stronghold of democracy. In 1810, he filled a vacant U.S. Senate seat once more and spent a great deal of time crying out against Great Britain’s impressment of American sailors on the high seas and its failure to comply with the stipulations of the peace treaty of 1783 that ended the Revolutionary War—in particular, British refusal to abandon their forts and outposts in the West.  

Clay and others, who became known as War Hawks, worked diligently in Congress for a declaration of war against Great Britain. Always eloquent and authoritative, Clay’s rousing speeches prompted John Quincy Adams to remark that the Kentuckian was a “republican of the first fire.” Over his long political career, he would become known as “the greatest natural orator the world ever produced,” which, naturally was a gross exaggeration, but his effectiveness in delivering a speech was never in doubt.  

Having become a household name, Clay won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, which he preferred to the “the solemn stillness of the Senate Chamber.” When he took his seat in November 1811, he was elected Speaker of the House, an achievement that revealed how politically astute he was and how popular he had become. But the War of 1812 went badly for the country, so much so that Washington, D.C., fell into enemy hands, and the British unceremoniously burned the city, leaving behind the charred stone shells of the Executive Mansion, the Capitol, and the Library of Congress. In the meantime, President James Madison asked Clay to serve as one of five American envoys—John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, James A. Bayard, Sr., and Jonathan Russell—to negotiate an end to the war with a British delegation in Ghent.  

In Belgium, the ebullient Clay played in earnest, often staying out all night, gambling and drinking to excess. His wanton behavior annoyed his more staid colleagues and damaged his otherwise high political reputation. After agreeing on a peace treaty that returned the warring nations to status quo ante bellum, which meant that the document failed to address any of the issues that caused the war in the first place, Clay returned to Congress, held the speakership once again, and began to put together the political components of what would become his “American System,” arguing for a high protective tariff to encourage domestic industry, a charter for a strong national bank (that is, a continuation of Hamilton’s Bank of the United States), and government support of internal improvements (roads, canals, steamboats), all of which he saw as steps to improve American unity, prosperity, and, in particular, Western progress. Clay promoted his American System not only for what he believed would be the benefit of the entire nation but also for the sake and well-being of his constituents—Westerners whose nationalistic and patriotic propensities soared just as high as his own.  

But Clay, who was immensely popular in Kentucky and the Old Northwest, could not avoid making political enemies. Clay opposed nearly every policy advocated by President James Monroe and his administration. His forceful and capable wielding of political power as Speaker of the House earned him respect, but also the disdain of friends and foes alike. He redeemed himself, however, by playing the mediator during the political battle that erupted in Congress over the admission of Missouri into the Union.  

Privately Clay opposed slavery in Missouri, but in the House of Representatives he worked selflessly and tirelessly for compromise, a sign of his Western practicality and commonsense approach to overcoming political standoffs. He did not, as many have assumed, frame the basic provisions of the compromise, but he ensured—sometimes using questionable parliamentary tactics—that the separate legislation to admit Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state passed in the House.  

Clay’s role in the Missouri question won him national acclaim. The president of the Second Bank of the United States, Langdon Cheves, lavished him with praise: “The Constitution of the Union was in danger & has been Saved.” In Missouri, the state’s new U.S. Senator, Thomas Hart Benton, called Clay the “Pacificator of ten millions of Brothers.”  

His skill at forging compromise became a hallmark of his political style and character. As early as 1813, he had declared his view that “the true friend to his country, knowing that our Constitution was the work of compromise, in which interests apparently conflicting were attempted to be reconciled, aims to extinguish or allay prejudices.”  

Decades later, as he brokered the legislation in Congress that would become the Compromise of 1850, he said: “I go for honorable compromise whenever it can be made. Life itself is but a compromise between death and life, the struggle continuing throughout our whole existence, until the great Destroyer finally triumphs. All legislation, all government, all society, is formed upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy; upon these, everything is based. …Compromise is peculiarly appropriate among the members of a republic, as of one common family.”  

At the same time, his adroit ability as an orator boosted his fame and his popularity. Some regarded him as the “Cicero of the West,” thus placing him within the great pantheon of exceptional ancient orators. A colleague in the House of Representatives heard Clay deliver a four-hour speech and drew a memorable portrait of the great speaker in action: “His mode of speaking is very forcible—He fixes the attention by his earnest & emphatic tones & gestures—the last of which are however far from being graceful—He frequently shrugs his shoulders, & twists his features, & indeed his whole body in the most dreadful scowls & contortions—Yet the whole seems natural; there is no appearance of acting, or theatrical effect.”  

In 1821, after the close of the Sixteenth Congress, Clay resigned his seat and returned to Lexington, where his personal finances lay in considerable disarray, mostly caused by the Panic of 1819. Two years later, after reestablishing his financial solvency, Clay won reelection to the House and regained his seat as speaker. He succeeded in advancing the cause of the American System, shepherding legislation through the House for an extension of the National Road beyond Canton, Ohio, and for a new protective tariff that raised custom duties, much to the consternation of Southern opponents. Almost from the moment he returned to Washington, he began running for the presidency.  

Competing in a field of four (the others were John Quincy Adams, William Crawford of Georgia, and Andrew Jackson) in the election of 1824, Clay was the odd man out—a Westerner, like Jackson, but one who lacked strong support in the Southern slave states. He came in fourth, but none of the other candidates won a majority of the electoral votes, so the election went to the House of Representatives, in adherence to the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution. As speaker, Clay decided to vote for Adams, who won on the first ballot.  

When Adams appointed Clay Secretary of State, Jackson and his followers cried foul and accused the president and his cabinet nominee of having entered into a “corrupt bargain” before any votes were cast in the House. It is unlikely that Adams and Clay made a deal before the House could decide the presidential election, but even if no explicit words were spoken or no handshake occurred between the two men, they each understood that Clay would vote for Adams and that the latter would thus feel obliged to reward the Kentuckian for his support. Whatever the case, Clay’s acceptance of the nomination and his tenure as Secretary of State haunted him for the rest of his political career, not because he had engaged in corruption but because the public believed that he had.  

All things considered, he proved to be a mediocre Secretary of State. Clay’s temperament did not fit well with the requirements of an administrative position. Despite his celebrated affability, he kept making enemies, stepping on toes, offending his allies, and rubbing nearly everyone the wrong way. At the end of Adams’s term, Clay took to the stump to campaign for the president—something that no cabinet member had ever done before. Jackson, who had once more thrown his hat into the ring, attacked Adams and Clay relentlessly, keeping the epithet of bargain and corruption alive. In the end, Jackson won the presidency in 1828, and Clay was out of a job. He returned to Ashland, picked up his law practice, and plotted his return to politics. His eye was on the presidential election of 1832. In 1831, the Kentucky legislature obliged him by electing him a U. S. Senator, a political post he no longer scorned. Clay assumed a leadership role in the National Republican Party. In Washington, he opposed Jackson with fierce determination and took a stand to support the Second Bank of the United States, which Jackson succeeding in eliminating during his first term by vetoing a bill to recharter the bank, claiming that it was an aristocratic and monarchial institution created to supply exclusive privilege and other benefits to the rich.  

The Bank War, as the political contest came to be called, took center stage in the election of 1832. Clay ran a spirited campaign, but he could not overcome the breadth and depth of Jackson’s huge popularity. Nevertheless, Clay continued his leadership of the National Republicans, who soon changed their name to Whigs, the opposition party to King Andrew I. Even so, Jacksonian democracy ruled the day, and Clay’s attempts to push his American System in the Senate came to nothing. Instead, Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road Bill, which proposed extending the National Road into Kentucky.  

In the meantime, a sectional crisis—far worse than the Bank War because it threatened the survival of the Union itself—descended onto the shoulders of the nation, this time precipitated by South Carolina’s nullification of the Tariff Act of 1828, an action taken in 1832 on the basis of John C. Calhoun’s theory of nullification, which held that a state possessed the constitutional authority to abrogate any federal law it disliked.  

Well-known is President Jackson’s forceful response to South Carolina and his equally electric condemnation of the nullifiers. After asking Congress for a Force Bill to threaten South Carolina with military invasion if necessary, Jackson sought to avoid such a calamity by also requesting Congress to pass a tariff more acceptable to Southern interests. Into the breach stepped Henry Clay, the Great Pacificator. He worked behind the scenes, lining up crucial support for a compromise from Southern ultras (including Calhoun) and Northern pro-tariff manufacturers. Clay put together a compromise measure for a new tariff that would gradually lower rates over a period of nine-and-a-half years to a uniform 20 percent ad valorem. On March 1, 1833, Congress passed Clay’s compromise tariff and Jackson’s Force Bill together. The nullification crisis was over.  

Clay was committed not only to the principle of compromise but also to the idea of Union. Yet, like many Westerners (including Abraham Lincoln) and Americans in general, Clay’s adherence to the Union came less from an ideological commitment to Union as a political idea and more from a visceral, emotional love for the Union as a unique thing in the world. Nowhere else in the world could such a federation of separate provinces (practically nations in their own right) be found. At the simplest level, the Union was something historical and something tangible, something to be loved with one’s heart, not with one’s head.  

In the immediate aftermath of the tariff dispute and the consummation of the compromise Tariff of 1833, Henry Clay’s reputation soared even higher than before. But, as the Age of Jackson advanced, despite all the disagreements over tariffs, slavery, antislavery, and banks, Americans were nevertheless gaining more sophistication about how they perceived their political leaders and greater understanding of the forces that motivated men like Henry Clay. For the applause he received, many wondered just how much of him was selflessly devoted to the Union and how much was simply lust for political distinction and personal aggrandizement. To some, he was the “Savior of the Union.” To others, he was “a most precious scoundrel.” It is hardly surprising that Clay’s greatest popularity could be found in the West, among people who thought of him as their own. To Westerners, Henry Clay was “the Star of the West.”  

Westerners set great store by him, relied on him, looked to him to keep their section advancing toward a bright horizon of progress and protect the Union from being torn to pieces by pro-slavery apologists and antislavery proponents. Over and over again, his supporters in the West nominated him as a presidential candidate, but that prize eluded him, much to his own disappointment and that of those who loved him so dearly. His bad luck on the national political scene, however, never discouraged his dedicated followers.  

It did, however, delight his enemies. “Harry the Available,” they called him derisively, but Clay put up a good front and continued in the Senate to serve Kentucky, his region, and the Union as best he could. Westerners found comfort in Clay the man and Clay the legend. At times in Congress, he was arrogant, cruel, domineering, jealous, and irritable, but his adherents in the West heard little about his less attractive traits unless they happened to read an anti-Whig newspaper, which they knew already could never be trusted to tell the truth. On the contrary, Westerners trusted Clay and never believed what his opponents might say about him. To them, Henry Clay was “the help and the hope of the West.”  

In the years that followed Clay’s brilliant success in 1833, Westerners like Abraham Lincoln watched him display his formidable sagacity and shrewdness in the political arena and studied him as a political exemplar, the man in public office most worthy of emulation. In time, Abraham Lincoln came not only to admire Clay and his Whig politics, but held his fellow Kentuckian in such high esteem that he called the Great Compromiser the “beau ideal of a statesman.” Clay, said Lincoln, was someone he had supported “all my humble life.” Lincoln was not alone in his sentiments. Lincoln never met Clay, but he did see him deliver a speech once in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1847.  

But Clay’s great powers could not last forever. At home, his beloved mansion, Ashland, began to crumble when its bricks became so porous one could stick a finger in them. The implacable deterioration of Ashland was a fitting metaphor for what Clay was witnessing, experiencing, and trying to remedy as his country drifted through the decades, suffering its own share of sudden fissures, impermanent mends, and unrelenting declension—all the result of the South’s ceaseless demands for political accommodations that would protect slavery forever, even while the turmoil over the peculiar institution weakened the ties that once had held the nation firmly together in a Union that many Americans, North and South, East and West, truly hoped would be perpetual.  

After Clay’s unsuccessful attempt to obtain passage of the Compromise of 1850, a single piece of legislation—called an “Omnibus Bill”—with eight disparate parts, he let Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, a Democrat, push the compromise through Congress as separate bills. For a short time, the Compromise of 1850 quieted the Southern extremists who had begun shouting for secession. In the meantime, Clay grew weak and ill. Death, rather than Life, had caught up with the Great Compromiser. On June 29, 1852, Clay died of tuberculosis in a Washington hotel. He was 75. With him—although no one could see it at the time— the Whig Party died, too.  

On July 6, Lincoln delivered a lengthy eulogy on Clay at the Hall of Representatives in the Illinois State Capitol. For this memorial gathering, Springfield businesses were closed, citizens stopped their normal routines, “and everything announced the general sorrow at the great national bereavement.” In Clay, Lincoln found the essence of America in his rise from poor family circumstances to one of the greatest political leaders in the country. “Mr. Clay’s lack of a more perfect early education, however it may be regretted generally, teaches at least one profitable lesson; it teaches that in this country, one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.” Needless to say, Lincoln could have been describing himself and his own path in life. For all his great contributions during his lifetime, said Lincoln, the nation should be more grateful for how Clay stood firm as a defender of the Union: “In all the great questions which have agitated the country, and particularly in those great and fearful crises, the Missouri Question—the Nullification Question, and the late slavery question, as connected with the newly acquired territory, involving and endangering the stability of the Union, he has been the leading and most conspicuous part.”  

In Kentucky today, Clay is less remembered than he should be and less a household name than Senator Mitch McConnell. Kentucky’s other U.S. Senator, Rand Paul, takes pride in occupying Henry Clay’s Senate desk. But even Daniel Boone, never accomplished as much as Clay did. He served his constituents well by elevating Kentucky’s political prestige on the national stage. At the same time, he served his country with love and fidelity, nobly earning another nickname, the “Savior of the Union.” He was—and remains—one of the greatest U.S. Senators this nation has ever had, this man who deeply loved the Union, this Henry Clay, the Star of the West.  

Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History Emeritus at Western Kentucky University. He has written often for American History.

Clay’s Slavery Compromise

No matter how passionate Henry Clay felt about the Union, his was a Union in which whites alone enjoyed the blessings of liberty. But Clay’s emotion for the Union was a white man’s concupiscence. “I am,” pronounced Clay, “no friend of slavery. The searcher of all hearts knows that every pulsation of mine beats high and strong in the cause of civil liberty. . . . But I prefer the liberty of my own country to that of other people; and the liberty of my own race to that of any other race. The liberty of the descendants of Africa in the United State is incompatible with the safety and liberty of the European descendants.” Clay preferred to dream about colonization, although as a practical measure no one could afford to buy the enslaved their freedom and cover the costs of shipping them to Liberia, Africa.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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The Wilson Novelty Company produced this “Wilson Walkie” U.S. Army soldier toy sometime between 1936 and 1949 at John Wilson’s small garage factory in Watsonville, Pa., along the Susquehanna River north of Harrisburg. Wilson started the company after he lost his carpenter’s job in 1935 at age 63.  

A penguin, nurse, clown, and Santa Claus were some of the many other models. Wilson’s popular toys supported a cottage industry and 80 full-time and 20 part-time workers during the Depression. Housewives, high school students, and unemployed male workers did piece work at home making clothing and parts for the dolls. At peak production, 10,000 dolls a day were completed!  

Wilson died in 1948. The company hung on for one more year until the toys took their final stroll down the production ramp.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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If you travel through Northeast Ohio, take the time to get off the turnpikes and interstates to travel through towns like Burton, Mesopotamia, or Hudson. You’ll notice that they, along with many other hamlets, have a decided New England feel to them in their early architecture and the way they are organized around a common green, or open space.

That’s because that area was known as Connecticut’s Western Reserve, dating back to a royal charter in 1662 that awarded Connecticut a claim from “sea-to-sea.” Over the decades, New York and Pennsylvania took some of the land, and by 1786 Connecticut’s Western Reserve was reduced to a strip of land 120 miles long, about 3 million acres, from the Pennsylvania border to Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie. The southern and northern boundaries were established by Connecticut’s borders.

In 1795 Connecticut sold most of the land to the Connecticut Land Company for $1.2 million. One of the company directors was named Moses Cleaveland. You’ve heard that name before, except without the first “a.” Cleaveland negotiated a treaty with native people to acquire Western Reserve land east of the Cuyahoga River. Land company surveyors laid out five-mile-square townships, creating the grid system now so familiar in the Midwest.

Connecticut held on to the far western edge of the Reserve, 500,000 acres known as the “Firelands,” to compensate families that had suffered loss from British raids during the Revolutionary War.

In 1800, Connecticut ceded its claims to the region, and the area became part of the Northwest Territory, and eventually Ohio when it became a state in 1803. But by then, New England settlers had moved to the region and given it a different feel from the rest of the state. Hale Farm and Village, a re-created Western Reserve settlement in Bath, Ohio, preserves and interprets the region’s distinctive culture and architecture.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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The view is spectacular from the ancient cliffside villages in the Southwest’s Four Corners region—chiseled canyons; orange, coral, and copper sandstone; desert flora; a sky that stretches forever.  

But this view was just a bonus for the Pueblo ancestors who constructed these dwellings not far from the point where Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico meet. No one’s sure quite why the Ancestral Pueblos decided to build these houses in cliffside alcoves instead of on the ground. Theories include: the apartment-like clusters were sheltered from the elements; stored food was safer here from animals; and the ground below was freed up for planting. Then there was security from enemies. Gene S. Stuart, a writer with an exploration party for National Geographic, summed up the obvious defensive advantage: “One toddler with a long-stemmed lily could have held me at bay.”  

The Ancestral Pueblos started settling into different pueblos (Spanish for “villages”) in the region around 900 CE, a time of increased rainfall in the desert that promoted their transformation from hunter-gatherers into farmers. Pueblos at Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Betatakin, and Keet Seel featured as many as hundreds of rooms that could house thousands.  

The people may have concentrated their homes like this for the sake of easier trade or to form tight religious communities. The largest Pueblos had dozens of kivas, circular rooms where ceremonies were held. It may have been religious leaders who were able to persuade the residents to build the multistory sandstone structures, staircases, roads, and the reservoirs and canals that managed water to make the dry environment livable.  

Eventually drought won out. By about 1300, lack of water had forced the inhabitants to flee Four Corners for more habitable locations. The ruins they left behind remain here due in large part to the Antiquities Act of 1906, which banned unauthorized digging on federal and Native American lands. Regional authorities acted quickly after that to establish cliff dwelling locations as protected places.

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This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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Yellowstone National Park. More than 4 million people a year visit this 3,648-square-mile, seemingly unbounded paradise to watch boiling springs. They come to see thundering waterfalls and majestic mountains, elk and bison—the pure, unadulterated Northwestern wilderness.

Humans didn’t enter this scene for millions of years. Then more than 20 tribal nations discovered Yellowstone and used it as a thoroughfare, hunting ground, and ceremonial site. Fur trappers and traders appeared in the early 19th century, but no one believed their stories of bubbling springs and exploding geysers. Then, in 1871, the federal government sent an expedition to explore and map Yellowstone territory in pursuit of valuable natural resources. In a historic twist, the Reconstruction Era Congress enshrined the land as the world’s first national park.

Megan Kate Nelson, whose book The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in history, focuses on three often-at-odds protagonists as she unravels the park’s founding story in Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, which recently came out in paperback.

Can you explain how the expedition to Yellowstone came to be?

Ever since the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1805, the federal government had been funding expeditions and surveys into lands across the continent. The goal was to map these areas and determine how they could be developed for agriculture and/or mining.

Until the 1850s, military officers led these explorations and took some artists and scientists along with them. One of the scientists who joined several expeditions in this period was Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, an ambitious and energetic geologist. After serving as a U.S. Army surgeon in the Civil War, Hayden returned to his first love: exploration. In 1867, he convinced the state of Nebraska to appoint him as one of the first civilian leaders of a geological survey and led several expeditions into the Rocky Mountains.

Like most scientists, Hayden had heard rumors about the many wonders of Yellowstone, but in 1870 it was terra incognita to most Americans (although Indigenous peoples had used it for thousands of years). It was so isolated and its visitation season so short, May–September, that it had been, until 1869, inaccessible for survey leaders coming from the East Coast. That year, the completion of the transcontinental railroad cut travel times considerably. Now Hayden would be able to reach Yellowstone and spend at least a few months exploring it before the winter set in.

And so in January and February 1871, Hayden lobbied Congress for funding to take the first federal team into Yellowstone. He was convincing. In March, they gave him $40,000 to fund the survey. Hayden assembled his team and left for the Rocky Mountains in May 1871, and they entered the Yellowstone Basin in mid-July.

How did Yellowstone become America’s first national park?

When Ferdinand Hayden set out to survey Yellowstone, he was not thinking about preserving it. He was intent on figuring out what was there, collecting specimens to send to the Smithsonian Institution, and writing up scientific papers that would establish his reputation as a renowned geologist. When he returned to Washington, D.C., in October 1871, his only plan was to write his survey report, as required by Congress.

But Hayden found a letter waiting for him from a PR man working for the Northern Pacific Railroad, whose financier, Jay Cooke, hoped the railroad would be the nation’s second transcontinental line. The letter suggested that Yellowstone would make a wonderful national park and that perhaps Hayden could mention this in his report.

Why was Jay Cooke interested in this plan? He was having trouble selling bonds to build the Northern Pacific. He figured that the preservation of Yellowstone would help him advertise the region and bring both tourists and possible settlers to the Northwest.

Hayden immediately saw the utility of this idea because preservation would provide a scientific laboratory for him. With Cooke’s help, he lobbied Congress in November 1871, and in December, the bill to create Yellowstone National Park was introduced. In January and February 1872, the Senate and the House debated the bill. Most Republicans voted in favor of it, and given their large majority, the bill passed.

President Ulysses S. Grant (not Teddy Roosevelt, as I think many Americans assume) signed the bill into law on March 1, 1872, creating the first national park in the nation, and the world.

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The idea must have started quite an argument among parties with conflicting interests.

Indeed! As I noted, the vote on the Yellowstone bill was not unanimous. Seventy percent of Democrats and about 11 percent of Republicans voted against it. They had two objections.

First, they believed that this was federal overreach. To create the park, the federal government would take lands from the territories of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming and give them over to the Department of the Interior to manage. There was no precedent for this. While the federal government often took lands, particularly from Indigenous peoples, usually it surveyed them and sold them to private landowners. In 1864, during the Civil War, Congress had preserved Yosemite and Mariposa Grove—but gave them to the state of California to manage. To conservatives in Congress who believed in small government, the Yellowstone Act seemed like a dangerous precedent.

Second, those who voted against the bill saw it as a violation of landowner rights. The ability to purchase lands and farm, ranch, or mine them had been a core component of both the American Dream and Manifest Destiny since the early 19th century.

Many congressmen, including several of them from Western states and territories, felt that all lands across the continent should be available for White settlement and private development.

You’ve said that the park’s founding is a metaphor for America in the Reconstruction Era. How so?

I came to believe that some Americans saw in Yellowstone an apt metaphor for the country during Reconstruction. Here was a place (and a country) that was remarkable and beautiful in so many ways. And yet underneath the surface, there was this violent undercurrent. This was a period that saw the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan across the South and other forms of postwar violence. And no one knew when or where it would bubble up or explode. So Yellowstone really represented those tensions at the heart of American society after the war. And it still does today.

What lessons can Americans today can take from all this?

There are a couple of lessons, I think.

One is that Reconstruction, which is a period we usually associate with only the South, was a much more complex time than we usually acknowledge. And the administrations in power during this period were very interested in controlling the West as well as the South.

Another is that all national parks were originally Indigenous lands, and the tribal nations who lived and still live there were and are effective stewards of these lands. Yellowstone National Park, as part of its 150th anniversary celebrations, has begun to integrate Indigenous voices and practices into the park’s sites and programming. All the national parks should be doing this because we need to know and appreciate Indigenous histories in these places—and realize that these peoples are still there.

Another takeaway is that we should not take our national parks for granted. The arguments against the Yellowstone Act—federal overreach and violation of land rights—are still with us today and are still powerful. Yellowstone and the other 62 big national parks are relatively safe because it would take an act of Congress to remove their park status. But many of the nation’s preserved places were saved as a result of executive action (under the Antiquities Act of 1906). Therefore, it will take only one really focused president to dismantle many of these parks. President Donald Trump attempted this during his term, but he did not have enough time and was stymied by lawsuits. But I try to remind people that it is possible to lose these places, so we need to be vigilant in our defense of them.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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His fans compare it to the Second Coming, his enemies to the second coming of January 6. So far Donald Trump’s 2024 run for president seems most like a 1980s arcade game with an outlandish hero bouncing among indictments and own-goal interviews in pursuit of the big prize.  

Trump is not the first ex-president to try to win one more time. (He does not think he is quite an ex-president, of course, since he believes contrary to all evidence that he won in 2020.) For nearly 200 years losers and voluntary retirees alike have sought to reoccupy the White House.  

Five of the first seven presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson—chose to step down at the end of their second terms. The one-termers had their own choices to make. After John Adams lost his reelection bid in 1800 he went home to Quincy, Mass., to lick his wounds for 25 years. His son John Quincy Adams was more ambitious. Elected in 1824 and beaten in 1828, he angled for the nomination of the new Anti-Masonic Party in 1832. JQA offered to reveal the secrets of Phi Beta Kappa, his undergraduate fraternity. The Anti-Masons were not interested. After this rebuff, he contented himself with the lesser office he already had—congressman from Massachusetts.  

Another disappointed one-term president was already struggling to get back, with even more determination.  

Martin Van Buren of Kinderhook, N.Y., was the first president to be born an American citizen (in 1782), and the only one whose first language was not English (his was Dutch). Van Buren rose in local, state, and finally national politics on the strength of populist principles, an easygoing manner, and hard work. He helped create the modern Democratic Party, uniting vote-rich New York with the South, and served its first champion, Andrew Jackson, as Secretary of State, then vice president. Van Buren succeeded his mentor—or had he really been his protégé?—in 1836.  

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Van Buren’s term was almost immediately blighted by the depression of 1837. A new party, the Whigs, rose up to fight him. They appealed to Americans writhing under hard times by depicting Van Buren as a dude: Van Buren, son of a shabby innkeeper, had always worked a little too hard at his wardrobe. His 1840 campaign against William Henry Harrison was a disaster.  

The Whigs soon encountered disasters of their own. Harrison died after 30 days in office and his veep and successor John Tyler quarreled with every other Whig. Van Buren took a nationwide listening tour in 1842—he spent one Illinois evening trading stories with a young Abraham Lincoln—and offered himself to the 1844 Democratic convention.  

The party had a rule, however, that the nominee needed a two-thirds vote, not a simple majority. Although Van Buren had appeased the slaveholding South throughout his presidency, he had announced that he would not now annex the rebellious Mexican province of Texas: he didn’t want the political headache of integrating a new slave state. Angry expansionists withheld their support, and after 10 deadlocked ballots the convention turned to former Speaker James K. Polk.  

Van Buren made slavery the linchpin of his last campaign, as candidate of the Free Soil Party in 1848. The party touted new territories and states whose soil for free White men, not Black slaves. Van Buren won only 10 percent of the popular vote, but that took up enough votes to prevent pro-slavery Democrat Lewis Cass from winning New York, helping Zachery Taylor gain the White House.  

Throughout the 19th century, some ex-presidents, following JQA’s example, sought lower office: John Tyler was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, Andrew Johnson to the U.S. Senate (both men died before taking office). Other exes aimed for the top: Whig Millard Fillmore, who succeeded Zachary Taylor at his death in 1850, ran in 1856 as the candidate of the anti-immigrant American (or Know-Nothing) Party. The Know-Nothings, wrote one contemporary, “came out of the dark ground, crawled up the sides of the trees, ate their foliage in the night, chattered with a croaking harshness, split open their backs and died.” Fillmore got 21 percent of the popular vote, and carried only Maryland.  

Ulysses Grant, after serving two terms, took a triumphal tour of the world, and tried a third run for the GOP nomination in 1880. But the nominating convention tapped Ohio Rep. James Garfield instead. But one defeated president—like Van Buren, a New York Democrat—managed to win back the White House.  

Grover Cleveland was a Buffalo, N.Y., lawyer, noteworthy for his capacity for heavy labor, and heaviness: he “eats and works, eats and works, works and eats,” wrote one reporter. He was also personally honest and a stickler for administrative responsibility: noteworthy qualities in the post-Civil War era when an enlarged government was awash with cash to spend and contracts to assign. Cleveland became successively sheriff of Erie County, Mayor of Buffalo, and governor of New York. By the 1880s the Democrats had not won the presidency for a quarter-century. They ran urban machines like New York City’s Tammany Hall, and could count on a solid white-power South after the end of Reconstruction. But to win nationwide they needed the support of Republican defectors concerned with good government. Cleveland was the perfect candidate to lure them.  

His opponent in 1884 was James G. Blaine, a Republican workhorse—congressman, senator, Secretary of State—who had, however, taken a bribe from a railroad earlier in his career. Republican researchers learned that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child (he had done more than work and eat, it seemed). But a late-breaking anti-Irish screed by a Blaine supporter tipped New York, and the election, to its homeboy.  

Cleveland’s run for reelection in 1888 did not go so well. His vice president, Thomas Hendricks, had died in office, so the party gave him for a running-mate Allen Thurman, a 74-year-old congressman so feeble he could not finish speeches he began. Cleveland and Tammany meanwhile quarreled over the New York governorship. The GOP, led by former senator Benjamin Harrison, managed to carry New York by 1,400 votes, out of 1.3 million cast. Despite losing the national popular vote, Harrison won in the Electoral College.  

Cleveland bided his time. In his 1892 rematch with Harrison, New York returned to the Democratic column, and Cleveland to the presidency.  

How had Cleveland done it? The narrowness of his 1888 loss gave his party hope for a rematch; there was a dearth of viable challengers to the former POTUS. The key to victory was obviously New York, and that reality compelled both Cleveland and Tammany to stop feuding, if not to kiss and make up.   Cleveland might better not have bothered. A depression in 1893 destroyed his term and his standing in his own party. Debt-pressed farmers in the South and West embraced populism, which marooned men of his stamp.  

Trump counts on beating a Joe Biden enfeebled by age. But Trump himself is no spring chicken, and he has an array of legal issues to contend with. The lure is great, but the path is long and steep.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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“Texas Charlie” Bigelow, a U.S. Army scout, was patrolling Indian Territory when he contracted a fever that left him so weak he could barely open his eyelids. An Indian chief took pity on Bigelow and nursed him back to health using a mysterious medicine he called sagwa. When Bigelow begged for the recipe of this wonder drug, the chief sent five tribal medicine men to accompany the scout to the East Coast, where they created “Kickapoo Sagwa,” the magic elixir sold in medicine shows that traveled America from 1881 to 1912.  

Or so the story goes, as recounted in countless Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company advertisements. But the story—like the medicine itself—was totally bogus.  

Bigelow was never an Army scout and never healed by an Indian chief. He grew up on a Texas farm in the 1850s, then fled the rigors of the plow for a life peddling patent medicines across the West and on the streets of Baltimore. In 1881, Bigelow teamed up with John “Doc” Healy, a former Union Army drummer boy, shoe salesman, proprietor of a traveling theatrical troupe called “Healy’s Hibernian Minstrels,” and the inventor and chief pitchman of a bogus liver medicine and a dubious liniment he dubbed “King of Pain.” When he joined forces with Bigelow, Healy concocted a new product, a fake “Indian” medicine he called “Kickapoo Sagwa.” And he proposed a brilliant idea for promoting it.  

“His plan was to hire a few Indians, rent a storeroom, and have the medicine simmering like a witch’s brew in a great iron pot inside a tepee,” recalled “Nevada Ned” Oliver, a veteran pitchman hired by Healy and Bigelow.  

Healy set up his first Kickapoo showroom in Providence, R.I., then moved to Manhattan before settling in New Haven in 1887. In a huge warehouse decorated with tepees, shields, spears, and other Native American curios, Healy hired Indians—none of them from the Kickapoo tribe—to entertain audiences with songs and dances while stirring huge pots of fake medicine. He advertised his Sagwa as a secret Indian recipe consisting of “Roots, Herbs, Barks, Gums and Leaves,” but it was actually a completely Caucasian concoction containing sugar, a mild laxative, and a dollop of alcohol.  

From their headquarters, Healy and Bigelow dispatched teams of real and ersatz Indians, plus vaudeville performers, and pitchmen posing as doctors to stage shows across America. The shows proved popular and the “doctors” sold oceans of Kickapoo Sagwa, as well as spinoff products—Kickapoo Buffalo Salve, Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, and Kickapoo Indian Worm Killer. Healy and Bigelow became, as historian Stewart Holbrook wrote in his classic 1959 book, The Golden Age of Quackery, “the Barnum and Bailey of the medicine show business.”  

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The two partners didn’t invent the traveling medicine show: For decades, patent medicine pitchmen roamed rural America, attracting crowds with musicians and other entertainers. Nor did Healy and Bigelow invent the notion that Native Americans were “children of nature” who possessed a mystical knowledge of healing plants. Throughout the 19th century, Americans bought books purporting to reveal the secrets of Indian medicine—The Indian Guide to Health and The Indian Doctor’s Dispensary, among others. What made Healy and Bigelow rich was their ingenious combination of the age-old appeal of miracle cures with the whiz-bang theatricality of Barnum’s circus and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.    

Early in the 1880s, Kickapoo shows were modest affairs—a few Indians performing dubious native dances, a few White singers and acrobats and a fake doctor, who sold Sagwa and served as master of ceremonies. One of those “doctors” was Nevada Ned Oliver, who described the shows decades later in a magazine article.  

“The show customarily began with the introduction of each of the Indians by name, together with some personal history,” Oliver recalled. “Five of the six would grunt acknowlegements; the sixth would make an impassioned speech in Kickapoo, interpreted by me….It was a most edifying oration as I translated it. What the brave actually said, I never knew, but I had reason to fear that it was not the noble discourse of my translation, for even the poker faces of his fellow savages sometimes were convulsed.”  

By the 1890s, Healy and Bigelow were dispatching more than a dozen Kickapoo shows across America every summer. The larger troupes played for weeks in big cities, staging elaborate spectacles in tents that held 3,000 seats. Admission cost a dime and shows included a dozen performances, interrupted by three or four pitches for Kickapoo cure-alls. The shows were wildly eclectic. The Indians performed war dances and an “Indian Marriage Ceremony,” and sometimes staged brutal attacks on wagon trains. The White performers included singers, acrobats, contortionists, comedians, and fire-eaters. Occasionally, Texas Charlie Bigelow himself appeared, a cowboy hat perched theatrically atop his shoulder-length hair. Billed as the world champion rifle shooter, Texas Charlie demonstrated feats of marksmanship and told dubious tales of his adventures.  

“Later, there were aerial acts, a great deal of Irish and blackface comedy, and such exotic novelties as a midget Dutch comic, the ‘Skatorial Songsters,’ who performed while gliding around the stage on roller skates, and Jackley, ‘the only table performer on earth’ who turned somersaults on a pile of tables that extended 25 feet in the air,” Brooks McNamara wrote in Step Right Up, his 1975 history of medicine shows.  

“If the combination of burning wagon trains and blackface minstrel routines was somewhat eccentric, “ McNamara continued, “no one seems to have cared or even noticed—especially not Healy and Bigelow, who refused to trouble themselves about complex artistic questions so long as the Kickapoo shows continued to attract crowds and sell medicine.”  

The crowds kept coming, and kept buying Kickapoo potions, into the 20th century, enabling Healy and Bigelow to purchase expansive mansions near Kickapoo’s Connecticut headquarters.  

In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, regulating the contents and the advertising of medicines—which put a damper on the more…um…poetic claims of Kickapoo’s pitchmen.  

By then, Healy had sold his half of the operation to Bigelow and moved to Australia. In 1912, Bigelow sold the company for $250,000 to a corporation that continued selling Kickapoo Sagwa in drugstores but ended the traveling medicine shows.  

Texas Charlie moved to England, where he manufactured a potion much like Sagwa. He called it “Kimco,” a tip of his cowboy hat to the scheme that made him rich—the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company.  

Decades later, the hillbilly characters in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip drank a potent moonshine called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” In 1965, the Monarch Beverage Company introduced a citrus-flavored soft drink called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” It’s still around, and quite popular in Southeast Asia. The company never claimed the soda cures ailments, but it does brag that it contains enough caffeine “to give you the kick you crave.”  

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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On October 5, 1869, just more than four years after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House and 34 years before the Wright Brothers took off, Watson Fell Quinby was granted this patent for a human “Flying Machine.” The contraption used two side wings and a “dorsal wing,” supported by the shoulders and waist, powered by stay-cords attached to the feet, and guided or steered by hand. To our modern eyes, the device looks comical, of course. Had it worked, the old joke, “I just flew in from Newark, and boy are my arms tired,” would have been a reality. And it must have seemed ridiculous to those who lacked Quinby’s vision or foresight in an age without air travel.  

“We hardly think he will be able to compete with the swallows in this harness,” an 1871 article in Scientific American quipped about Quinby’s invention. “We would advise him to start from some low point at first, so that, if he should fall down, it will not hurt him much.”

He did not heed this advice. Quinby, born in 1825 and a successful physician, reportedly built his machine secretly in his carriage house in Newport, Del. When it came time to test it, he donned a skin-tight suit, strapped the machine to his body, and leapt into the air from the roof of a small building. He soon discovered its failings. Fortunately, he was not seriously injured, and family members who had gathered to witness the flight test, rescued him from the wreckage. Quinby’s dream of flight was undeterred. He patented an improved “Flying Apparatus” in 1872 and “Aerial Ship” in 1879. Neither of those inventions ever took off, either.  

He did live long enough to see powered air flight become a reality, and even become a factor in war. When he died in 1918 at the age of 93, the Wilmington Morning News penned his obituary, and wrote: “From boyhood Dr. Quinby delighted in mechanical experiment, and during his mature life has invented several useful devices since completing his airship, a rotary digger, a method of arch construction without the use of forms and centers, a conduit for underground wires and pipes.”

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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Artemisia absinthium is a green, leafy plant native to Europe, but one that has since migrated to North America. Commonly called the wormwood plant, its flowers and leaves are the main ingredient of absinthe, one of the world’s most unusual liquors that was first distilled in Switzerland. Absinthe is naturally green in color, and potent, usually 90 to 148 proof.

That potency led many to believe absinthe had hallucinogenic powers, and controversy has plagued the drink since it was first distilled. Before coming to America, it was extremely popular in France. And then, Jean Lanfray killed his family after imbibing the “Green Demon.”

The Lanfray killings happened in Commugny, a small agricultural village in southwest Switzerland, nestled along the border with France. Lanfray was a tall, brawny vineyard worker and day laborer. Like many in the area, he was a born Frenchman; he had served three years in the French Army. At 31 years old, he lived in a two-story farmhouse with his family: his wife and two daughters living upstairs, and his parents and brother, with rooms downstairs.

On August 28, 1905, he woke at 4:30 in the morning. He started the day with a shot of absinthe diluted in water—not uncommon for him or for many Europeans at the time. He let the cows out to pasture, had some harsh words with his wife, and set off to a nearby vineyard to work. Along the way, he stopped for more alcohol: a creme de menthe with water, followed by a cognac and soda. By then it was 5:30 a.m.

Investigating the killings, Swiss authorities established a careful timeline of Lanfray’s prodigious drinking, learning that he would sometimes drink five liters of wine a day. Around noon, he lunched on bread, cheese, and sausage. He also had six glasses of strong wine over his lunch and afternoon break. And another glass before leaving work about 4:30 p.m.

At a cafe on his way home, he had black coffee with brandy. Back at the farmhouse, he and his father each polished off another liter of wine while Lanfray bickered with his wife. Their long-simmering grievances came to a head, and he rose from his seat, took down his rifle from the wall, and shot his wife through the forehead, killing her instantly.

As Lanfray’s father ran from the house seeking help, his daughter Rose came into the room—Lanfray shot her in the chest. He then went to the crib of his younger daughter, Blanche, and killed her, as well. He struggled to kill himself with the rifle, but it was too long to easily aim at himself and still reach the trigger. Using a piece of string, he finally pulled the trigger but succeeded only in shooting himself in the jaw. With blood running down his face, he picked up Blanche and carried her to the barn, where he lost consciousness. Police found him minutes later.

It was a senseless tragedy, the kind that leaves bystanders helplessly grasping at explanations. The fact that a man could get drunk, kill his entire family, and have no memory of it—that may have struck too close to home for Lanfray’s neighbors, who worked in vineyards and drank beside him. No, there had to be something else, something other.

At a public meeting soon after, the people of Commugny railed against the supposedly corrupting power of absinthe. Lanfray was known regularly to drink it (as did many, many others), and had drunk two glasses on the day of the murders (along with liters of wine). A story began to form, an explanation. Lanfray wasn’t simply an angry drunkard; he was an Absintheur.

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It was a story many were ready to hear. Absinthe already had a dangerous reputation, despite its widespread use throughout Europe. Even aficionados cautioned that “absinthe is a spark that explodes the gunpowder of wine.”

Lanfray’s killings provided potent fuel for a moral panic around absinthe that had been growing for decades. Politicians now had a scapegoat—and a crusade. The press feverishly covered “the Absinthe Murder,” putting it on front pages throughout Europe. One Swiss newspaper called absinthe “the premier cause of bloodthirsty crime in this century,” a sentiment echoed by Commugny’s mayor, who declared, “Absinthe is the principal cause of a series of bloody crimes in our country.”

In the region, a petition to outlaw the drink gathered 82,000 signatures within weeks. After an absinthe drinker in Geneva, Switzerland, killed his wife with a hatchet and a revolver, an anti-absinthe petition quickly gained 34,702 signatures. The public, too, had found a villain.

The following February, Lanfray went on trial. His defense hinged on proving him absinthe-mad, consumed by his addiction to that foul drink whose demonic grip had driven him to murder. If absinthe had made him do it, he couldn’t be held completely responsible for his actions.

The argument leaned on a folk understanding of “absinthism,” a collection of maladies supposedly known to afflict the chronic absinthe drinker, including seizures, speech impairment, disordered sleep, and auditory and visual hallucinations. Absinthism was the road to insanity and death; even as millions of people from every walk of life enjoyed absinthe, medical professionals and the press warned of asylums rapidly filling with former Absintheurs, now lost in the throes of madness.

It was known as “une correspondance pour Charenton,” a ticket to Charenton, the insane asylum outside Paris. (It’s unclear whether absinthism actually existed as a syndrome at all, rather than arising from misunderstandings about alcoholism and mental health more generally.)

Not every doctor gave credence to the more lurid claims about absinthism. In Lanfray’s case, however, Albert Mahaim, a professor at the University of Geneva and the head of the regional insane asylum in Vaud, examined the defendant in jail and later testified that “without a doubt, it is the absinthe he drank daily and for a long time that gave Lanfray the ferociousness of temper and blind rages that made him shoot his wife for nothing and his two poor children, whom he loved.” The prosecution, naturally, disagreed.

Whatever the public sentiment toward absinthe, Lanfray was found guilty on four counts of murder—his wife, it turned out, had been pregnant with a son. Three days later, Lanfray hanged himself in his cell.

Less than a month after his death, Vaud, the canton containing Commugny, succeeded in banning absinthe, with the canton of Geneva quickly following. Then it was banned nationwide. Belgium had already banned absinthe in 1905; the Netherlands in 1909. Even France, which consumed more absinthe than the rest of the world, and where it was, as historian P.E. Prestwich put it, “inspiration of French poets and the consolation of French workers,” banned the drink in 1914.

The Green Fairy to its advocates and the Green Demon to its detractors, absinthe was exiled from much of Europe. (The United Kingdom and the Czech Republic were notable exceptions.) While anti-alcohol movements had agitated in countries around the world for decades, absinthe was the first alcoholic drink singled out for a ban. Its outsized, bewitching reputation had been turned against it.

Before the exile, absinthe had a long history in Europe, particularly in France. In its modern form, it likely began as a patent remedy concocted by a French doctor living in Switzerland in the late 1700s. Its name derives from the Greek absinthion, an ancient medicinal drink made by soaking wormwood leaves (Artemisia absinthium) in wine or spirits. It was said to aid in childbirth, and the Greek physician Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine, recommended it for menstrual pain, jaundice, anemia, and rheumatism.

Wormwood persisted as a folk remedy through the ages; when the bubonic plague ravaged England in the 17th and 18th centuries, desperate villagers burned wormwood to cleanse their houses. Wormwood drinks were likewise medicinal—including that early patent remedy.

In 1830, France conquered Algeria and began to expand its empire into North Africa. Soon 100,000 French troops were stationed in the country, where the heat and bad water led to sickness tearing through the occupiers. Wormwood helped stave off insects, calm fevers, and prevent dysentery, and soldiers started adding it to their wine. When they returned home, they brought with them “une verte”—the potent drink with the unique green color.

Absinthe quickly became intertwined with French society, first as a harmless vice of the upper and middle classes. As its reputation (exotic, revelatory) grew, so did its popularity; even among those not looking for a hallucinogenic experience, the high alcohol content proved a key selling point, as you could easily dilute absinthe and still get a great bargain, proof-wise. Everywhere in France seemed to celebrate l’heure verte, the “green hour” of the early evening devoted to absinthe.

Absinthe became intricately connected to French culture and identity. So it is no surprise that when the drink found its way to the United States, the most famous venue for absinthe indulgence would be in a city with a distinctly French flavor: New Orleans, “the little Paris of North America.”

The French sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, and the region’s uniquely French culture became a point of pride. As absinthe took off in France, it also appeared in New Orleans, though without the same fanfare and popularity. In a town already famous for carousing, absinthe was one drink among many.

Following the Civil War, a barman named Cayetano Ferrer, formerly of the Paris Opera House, began serving absinthe in what some clever marketing called “the Parisian manner.” A glass of the emerald drink would be placed on the bar beneath a pair of fountains, and water would slowly drip, creating a milky opalescence in a glass—a process called the “louche.”

Ferrer’s ritual proved a compelling spectacle for the tourists who flocked to the city of sin. The building became the Old Absinthe House. Thought to be the city’s first saloon, it hosted famous luminaries from Mark Twain and Walt Whitman to O. Henry and William Makepeace Thackeray. Oscar Wilde, of course, attended. No visit to New Orleans, by then “the Absinthe capital of the world,” could be complete without a round at the Old Absinthe House.

While Europeans of all classes drank absinthe, in the United States it remained a cosmopolitan indulgence little known outside the city. New York had its own Absinthe House, and large metropolitan areas such as Chicago and San Francisco catered to the artists, bohemians, and wealthy, gilded-age poseurs who wanted to associate themselves with absinthe’s dark allure.

Absinthe’s relative obscurity in America didn’t prevent the press from warning of its fearsome reputation, however. Against the backdrop of a growing temperance movement, in 1879, a Dr. Richardson offered his perspective on absinthe to The New York Times. “I cannot report so favorably on the use of Absinthe as I have on the use of opium,” he began, describing rising absinthe use in “closely-packed towns and cities.” He warned that the drink was commonly adulterated, and that frequent imbibers could become addicted. “In the worst examples of poisoning from Absinthe,” he wrote, “the person becomes a confirmed epileptic.”

Later that year, the Times reiterated: “The dangerous, often deadly, habit of drinking Absinthe is said to be steadily growing in this country, not among foreigners merely, but among the native population.” It ascribed “a good many deaths in different parts of the country” to a drink “much more perilous, as well as more deleterious, than any ordinary kind of liquor.”

Absinthe, the writer claimed, had a subtlety lacking in other alcohol; addiction could sneak up quickly. “The more intellectual a man is,” the Times cautioned, “the more readily the habit fastens itself upon him.” It had already taken its toll in Europe: “Some of the most brilliant authors and artists of Paris have killed themselves with absinthe, and many more are doing so.” The Times closed by warning that absinthe, previously found only in large cities, had permeated everywhere, “and it is called for with alarming frequency.”

Much of absinthe’s mythology came from an accumulation of confusions, misunderstandings, and motivated lies. Some, though, did try to cut through the green fog and get to the truth—at least as best they could. Valentin Magnan, physician-in-chief at Sainte-Anne, France’s main asylum, saw rising numbers of insane people as a sign of his country’s social decay. (More likely, the increase resulted from improved diagnostic techniques.) Like many, he saw absinthe as the culprit, and set out to prove his case.

In 1869 he published his results. He had arranged an experiment. One guinea pig was placed in a glass case with a saucer of pure alcohol; another was placed in a glass case with a saucer of wormwood oil. A cat and a rabbit also got their own cases and their own saucers of wormwood oil. The animals breathing wormwood fumes were wracked with seizures, while the sole alcohol-breathing guinea pig just got drunk.

This and other experiments convinced Magnan (if he hadn’t been already) that absinthe was uniquely toxic. He extrapolated his results to humans, and claimed that “absinthistes” in his asylum displayed seizures, violent fits, and amnesia. He pushed for banning the Green Demon.

Fellow authorities disagreed, pointing out that guinea pigs inhaling high doses of distilled wormwood couldn’t be compared to humans consuming tiny amounts of diluted wormwood. They suggested that wormwood likely had little effect, and whatever damage absinthe wrought was no different from typical alcoholism. Rhetorically, however, Magnan’s support for the concept of “absinthism,” separate from alcoholism, enabled those concerned citizens who wanted to ban absinthe without committing to full prohibition. Absinthe, after all, posed a unique medical danger, while other alcohol (including France’s beloved wine) was surely fine for responsible adults.

In the United States, absinthe never became the burning social question it was in Europe. The media took occasional potshots, reflecting a general sense of absinthe’s depravity, without ever raising banning it to the height of a moral crusade.

An 1883 cartoon in Harper’s Weekly, for example, had the caption, “Absinthe Drinking—The Fast Prevailing Vice Among Our Gilded Youth.” The picture above featured a strapping young man on the left, and on the right a broken, aged specter of dissolution, “after two years’ indulgence, three times a day.” An earlier article in the magazine declared: “Many deaths are directly traceable to the excessive use of absinthe. The encroachments of this habit are scarcely perceptible. A regular absinthe drinker seldom perceives that he is dominated by its baleful influence until it is too late. All of a sudden he breaks down; his nervous system is destroyed, his brain is inoperative, his will is paralyzed, he is a mere wreck; there is no hope of his recovery.”

In the early 1900s, public opinion in Europe began to turn against absinthe, generally as part of the long-simmering temperance movement, and more specifically because of the Lanfray murders. As countries began to ban the drink, Harper’s Weekly reported in 1907 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had begun to investigate “the green curse of France.” Four years later, with little fanfare at the end of 1911, the department’s Pure Food Board announced starting January 1, 1912, importing absinthe into the United States would be prohibited.

Give it a shot!

Tenth Ward distilling in Frederick, Md., is one American distiller now
producing absinthe. Check them out at (tenthwarddistilling.com).

The head of the board told the Times that “Absinthe is one of the worst enemies of man, and if we can keep the people of the United States from becoming slaves to this demon, we will do it.” (The board also announced new restrictions on opium, morphine, and cocaine.)

News reports from the time show that, unsurprisingly, Americans didn’t immediately cease drinking absinthe. In a preview of the Prohibition era, authorities particularly in California seized caches of the emerald beverage. British mystic and provocateur Aleister Crowley wrote his famous paean to the Old Absinthe House, “The Green Goddess,” in 1916, well after the ban. “Art is the soul of life and the Old Absinthe House is heart and soul of the old quarter of New Orleans,” he wrote. And he struck a familiar note about the bewitching, destructive power of the Green Fairy: “What is there in Absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The effects of its abuse are totally different from those of other stimulants. Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister perversion of pride that they are not as other men.”

Crowley’s line evoked a demimonde particular to that time and place, but in 1920 the arrival of Prohibition blunted much of absinthe’s mystique in the United States. Jad Adams writes: “The surreptitious nature of drinking in the prohibition era—serving alcohol from hip flasks, barmen squirting a syringe of pure alcohol into soft drinks they were serving—was not conducive to absinthe, which was a drink of display and provocation.”

New Orleans continued imbibing and became known as “the liquor capital of America.” The Old Absinthe House was closed by federal agents in 1925 and again in 1926, the 100-year anniversary of its opening. Yet it outlasted prohibition and remains a fixture of New Orleans culture to this day.

Absinthe, too, persevered. It went further underground, particularly in America, and that burnished its appeal among bohemians and the counterculture. Ernest Hemingway and Jack London fondly recalled their absinthe experiences beyond the reach of U.S. law; Hemingway’s cocktail, Death in the Afternoon, is likely the country’s most lasting and well-known contribution to absinthe culture.

And eventually, like green shoots emerging after a long and punishing winter, the Green Fairy rose again. After nearly 100 years of targeted prohibition, in 2007 the United States once again allowed absinthe to be imported and consumed. The green hour had come back around again, at last.

Jesse Hicks writes about science, technology, and politics. Based in Detroit, his work has appeared in Harper’s, Politico, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

How Do You Drink Absinthe?

(Ask Hemingway)

Well, it requires a fancy slotted spoon, for one thing. The following is the most traditional and common method for preparing the drink. You place a sugar cube on the spoon, and then place the spoon over a glass of absinthe. Pour iced water over the sugar cube so you end up with about 1 part absinthe and 3–5 parts water.

The water brings out the anise, which gives absinthe a licorice taste, and fennel that are also distilled with the leaves and flowers of the wormwood plant. If the mix is correct, the liquid will turn milky and opalescent in appearance.

Ernest Hemingway was a fan of absinthe—why is that not surprising? His favorite way to drink it was a simple cocktail he called “Death in the Afternoon,” the same name as his 1932 book about Spanish bullfighting.

Death in the Afternoon ingredients:

1½ ounces Absinthe

4 ounces chilled Champagne

Hemingway published the recipe in a 1935 book, So Red the Nose, or Breath in the Afternoon, which featured 30 drink concoctions from celebrities. He explained, “Pour one jigger Absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly.” Yes. Very slowly.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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In the first years of the 20th century, despite the humiliating constraints of social segregation, thousands of African Americans made a living in show business. In Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Manhattan’s Harlem, there were top-tier vaudeville houses that headlined Black acts for Black audiences, and the Theaters Owners Booking Association signed up Black acts for almost 100 smaller venues around the country that catered to Black audiences. There were night spots like the Cotton Club in Harlem that for White audiences mounted lavish all-Black musical revues and Harlem theaters for full-scale Black musicals.

But the pinnacle was Broadway. As early as 1900, there were all-Black musicals there, but the concept really took off after the Eubie Blake–Nobel Sissle musical Shuffle Along opened in 1921 and ran an astonishing 504 performances. Producers sensed that the high stepping and raucous humor associated with Black performers were a money maker, and over the next decade 22 more all-Black shows opened on Broadway. These shows slotted the Black performers into stereotypical roles of shuffling gait and slurred speech, but they also opened the door for dozens of performers to have lifelong careers that eventually allowed them more dignity.

The money woes of the Great Depression of the 1930s made it tough to find backers for any Broadway shows, and the Shuffle Along type minstrelsy all-Black show virtually disappeared. But by then, two important corners had been turned: top-billed performers such as Paul Robson and Ethel Waters had moved out of the racial show business ghetto to earn star billing in otherwise White shows, and the classic American operas Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts had opened on Broadway, giving African Americans roles as complex three-dimensional human beings.

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While a number of enslaved African Americans looked on, 40-year-old Thomas Jefferson, shovel in hand, began poking into the side of the large Indian mound. Spherical in shape and 40 feet in diameter, it sat on the flood plain of the gently flowing Rivanna River, six miles north of Monticello, his mountaintop home. Jefferson was standing in a ditch surrounding the “barrow,” as he called it, when he commenced. “I first dug superficially in several parts of it,” he wrote, “and came to collections of human bones, at different depths, from six inches to three feet below the surface. These were lying in the utmost confusion….”

Americans can usually rattle off a few of Thomas Jefferson’s titles and achievements. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson, our third president, was the driving force behind the Louisiana Purchase and the wildly successful Meriwether Lewis and William Clark Expedition. But he was much more. Jefferson was a true Renaissance man, a brilliant polymath with an eclectic and dizzying array of interests.

Of these, he called science his “passion,” and over the course of his busy life, despite devoting more than 30 years to public service, Jefferson made contributions to botany, paleontology, meteorology, entomology, ethnology, and comparative anatomy. He was also an amateur archaeologist, and in 1783, spurred on by a document sent him by the French government, Thomas Jefferson excavated a Monacan Indian burial mound. It was one of his greatest scientific accomplishments. “In applying his innate sense of order and detail,” wrote science historian Silvio A. Bedini, “he anticipated modern archaeology’s basis and methods by almost a full century.”

Born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, his father’s plantation in the Virginia Piedmont—the western edge of European settlement—Thomas Jefferson studied in private schools prior to his 1760 enrollment at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. There, as he later wrote, it was his “great good fortune” to study under and befriend, Dr. William Small, a disciple of the Scottish Enlightenment who “probably fixed the destinies” of his life. “[F]rom his conversation,” Jefferson wrote, “I got my first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed.”

It was in Williamsburg, too, that young Jefferson had an encounter that helped foster his fascination with Native Americans. In the spring of 1762, a party of 165 Cherokee from the Holston River Valley accompanied their chief to Williamsburg prior to his journey to London. Called “Ontesseté,” this chieftain delivered a stirring farewell oration the evening before he departed. Enthralled, Jefferson looked on from the edge of the native’s camp. “The moon was in full splendor,” he later wrote, “and to her he seemed to address himself….His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people…filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.”

After college, Jefferson practiced law for seven years. Then, following service in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the Continental Congress, and the Virginia House of Delegates, he was elected governor of the Old Dominion in 1779 during the American Revolution. In October 1780, the same year he was reelected governor, Jefferson received a fascinating set of 22 queries—in essence, a questionnaire—from the secretary of the French legation to the United States, François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois (who in 1803 would play a large role in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase). The questionnaire sought out some of the basic statistical information on the nascent American states, then embroiled in a war with France’s common enemy.

The Virginia copy had been forwarded to Jefferson by a member of the state’s congressional delegation. Query number three, for example, asked for “An exact description of [the state’s] limits and boundaries,” while seven inquired about “The number of its inhabitants.” Others sought out details on the state’s religions, rivers, mountains, flora, seaports, colleges, commercial productions, and military force, as well as customs and manners.

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An inveterate compiler of data, Jefferson was well-prepared to respond. As he later noted in his Autobiography: “I had always made it a practice whenever an opportunity occurred of obtaining any information of our country [Virginia], which might be of use to me in any station public or private, to commit it to writing. These memoranda were on loose papers….I thought this a good occasion to embody their substance, which I did in the order of Mr. Marbois’ queries, so as to answer his wish and to arrange them for my own use.”

Although burdened with the responsibilities of his governorship, Jefferson began working on his reply immediately. Unfortunately, the declining state of military affairs in Virginia for Jefferson’s last seven months as governor meant that he had to set aside the project that so sparked his enthusiasm. During this tumultuous time, he was forced to flee twice from Richmond, the new state capital he had established. And—after Jefferson and the legislature relocated to Charlottesville to escape the enemy—he was compelled to even abandon Monticello when a British raiding party rode up the “little mountain” and captured his neoclassical home.

Although Jefferson later termed this troubling period the very nadir of his public career, the termination of his governorship in early June 1781 did nevertheless give him the time he needed to focus on the French questionnaire. Organizationally, each query became the topic of a chapter. In December 1781, Jefferson had the first version sent to Barbé-Marbois, but he immediately began enlarging the manuscript—indeed, tripling the length—until it was published in Paris in 1785 and then in London two years later by John Stockdale as Notes on the State of Virginia.

Most of the information came from Jefferson’s personal papers, his large library at Monticello, and his numerous learned correspondents. One query, however, animated him to travel afield. It asked for: “A description of the Indians established in the State….An indication of the Indian Monuments discovered in that State.” After writing about Virginia’s “upwards of forty different tribes”—and compiling a table of their numbers, “confederacies and geographical situation”—the former governor tackled the query’s second section. “I know of no such thing existing as an Indian monument…,” he wrote, “unless indeed it be the Barrows, of which many are to be found all over this country.”

Jefferson penned that these were “of considerable notoriety among the Indians,” and that one stood in his neighborhood. He recalled that, in the mid-1750s, a party of Native Americans “went through the woods directly to it…and having staid about it some time, with expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow, they returned to the high road” about six miles distant. (While some writers claim that young Jefferson, then only 10 to 12 years old, witnessed this incident himself, it is much more likely he heard this story secondhand.)

These Native Americans were most certainly Monacans, a Siouan-speaking people who, in the dim past, had journeyed from the Ohio River Valley across the Appalachian Mountains. Up through the late 1600s, the Monacan Nation—a confederacy of like-speaking Native American tribes—controlled a vast region of the fertile Virginia Piedmont, including the valleys of the Rivanna and upper James Rivers. By the time of the arrival of Europeans in the Piedmont in the 1720s, the Monacan had long since removed to the southwest.

Monacan men stalked elk, deer, and small game through the open woods and sometimes pursued bison over the beautiful Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. Dressed in animal skins, and sporting wildly cut manes, they adorned themselves with necklaces made of copper they had mined. Much prized, the copper they sometimes traded with the Powhatan, an Algonquin people who occupied Tidewater Virginia to the east. The Monacan and the Powhatan also frequently fought.

The Monacan women raised crops of corn, beans, and squash in the fields surrounding their villages. Often comprising scores of bark-covered domed structures, these villages were surrounded by 7-foot-high palisade enclosures (a feature that made them resemble the English-built forts). One such town, Monasukapanough, had once stood near the Rivanna River in close proximity to the “barrow” in Jefferson’s neighborhood. He noted the connection between the two sites when he wrote that the mound was located “opposite to some hills on which had been an Indian town.”

To better answer Marbois’ query and to satisfy his own curiosity, Jefferson determined to “open and examine” this mound thoroughly. Prior to the excavation, however—in anticipation of what was later termed the “scientific method”—he posited questions he hoped to find answers for in the earth. It was obviously a repository of the dead, but when was it constructed? How was it constructed? Was it true that those interred were the casualties of Native American battles fought nearby? Was it the common sepulcher (or tomb) of just one town? This supposition came from a tradition, Jefferson wrote, “handed down from the Aboriginal Indians, that, when they settled in a town, the first person who died was placed erect and earth put about him, so as to cover and support him….”

When another person died, the dirt was removed, he was reclined against the first, and then the earth was replaced. (In this manner, therefore, a burial mound would grow outward from the center.) Another question—inferred but never stated exactly—was this: Rather than being related to just one Indian village, was this barrow a sacred burial place for an entire section of the Monacan Nation?

Interestingly, a theory at the time—popular among members of the nation’s foremost scientific organization, the American Philosophical Society, which Jefferson had been elected to in 1780—claimed that Native Americans were too primitive to have erected the barrows, also called “tumuli,” which had been encountered in numerous states. Instead, they attributed their construction to a much earlier people descended from either Phoenicians, Israelites, or perhaps even Scandinavians (think Vikings). These ancient “Mound Builders,” they theorized, were subsequently driven away by the barbarous ancestors of the Native Americans with whom they were familiar. Some of the Mound Builders journeyed south, they believed, and founded the Aztec civilization. While Jefferson was certainly familiar with this racist hypothesis, it is unknown whether he was considering it as he began his dig.

Unfortunately, too, the exact date of the excavation is not known. Concerning this important detail—and so uncharacteristic of Jefferson, who was normally minutiae-obsessed—his Notes on the State of Virginia is silent. Historian Douglas L. Wilson, however, who studied the original manuscript at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the “setting copy” for the 1785 Paris edition, has concluded that the dig “must have been performed after…the summer or early fall of 1783 and before [Jefferson] left for Philadelphia on 16 October.”

The circular barrow was large, 40 feet in diameter, encircled by a ditch five feet across and five feet deep. It had been 12 feet high, Jefferson observed, “though now reduced by the plough to seven and a half, having been under cultivation about a dozen years.” Prior to that, it had been covered with a small stand of trees one foot in diameter.

Restored Honor

Finally recognized as an official state tribe by Virginia in 1989, the Monacan Indian Nation has made considerable strides in reestablishing its ancestral legacy. Its headquarters is located on Bear Mountain, Va., not far from Lynchburg. For more information, visit www.monacannation.com.

Jefferson’s poking around quickly established that the mound contained human bones. They were lying in disarray, “some vertical, some oblique, some horizontal…entangled, and held together in clusters by the earth. Bones of the most distant parts were found together, as, for instance, the small bones of the foot in the hollow of a scull…to give the idea of bones emptied promiscuously from a bag or basket….”

These were “secondary burial features,” wrote University of Virginia anthropology professor Jeffrey L. Hantman, “the comingled remains of numerous individuals” who had been initially buried elsewhere, “then moved collectively at designated ritual moments….”

Jefferson marveled at the number of remains he uncovered; the vast majority being skulls, jaw bones, teeth, and the bones or arms, legs, feet, and hands. Some he extracted intact, but others, such as the skull of an infant, “fell to pieces on being taken out” of the mound.

Next began the most commented-upon aspect of Jefferson’s archaeological endeavor. “I proceeded then,” he wrote, “to make a perpendicular cut through the body of the barrow, that I might examine its internal structure. This… was opened to the former surface of the earth, and was wide enough for a man to walk through and examine its sides.” Typical of Jefferson’s writings, this passage disguises the fact that he alone could not possibly have performed this labor. Surely, the “perpendicular cut” was dug by a rather large number of enslaved African Americans, perhaps as many as 30 or 40, whom he had either transported from Monticello or leased from a nearby plantation owner. These sentences, too, reveal Jefferson’s utter insensitivity to the site’s sacred status.

Now the amateur archaeologist was able to determine how the barrow was constructed. “At the bottom, that is on the level of the circumjacent plain,” he wrote, “I found bones; above these a few stones brought from a cliff a quarter of a mile off…then an interval of earth, then a stratum of bones, and so on.”

At one end of the trench he found four strata of bones; at the other, three. The bones in the strata closest to the surface were the least decayed. Down through the ages, therefore, the barrow had grown taller with recurring layers of bones, stones, and earth. Next, he was able to determine whether any of those interred had fallen in battle. Of the bones he pulled from the mound’s various strata: “No holes were discovered in any of them, as if made with bullets, arrows, or other weapons.”

What of the other questions? Naturally, Jefferson wasn’t able to determine when the Monacan burial mound was initiated, but—thanks to his methods—he was able to answer two others. For the following reasons, he wrote, it was obviously not one town’s common sepulcher: The number of skeletons it contained (he “conjectured” 1,000); None of them were upright; The bones lay in different stratas, with no intermixing; And, the “different states of decay in these strata” seemed to indicate “a difference in the time of inhumation.” This burial mound, therefore, must have appertained to a fairly large region of the Monacan Nation. “Appearances certainly indicate,” he wrote, “that it has derived both origin and growth from the accustomary collection of bones, and deposition of them together….”

In the balance of his response to the aborigine-related query, Jefferson briefly mentioned two other barrows (one of which also contained human remains), presciently noted “the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia,” and urged the collection of Native American vocabularies so that those skilled in languages could “construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race.” He concluded with a seven-page table listing the tribes residing within, and adjacent to, the United States, their names, approximate numbers, and the locations of their tribal lands.

Ambitious in scope, Notes on the State of Virginia—with its double-entendre title—won for Jefferson considerable notoriety. In 1785, the year of its French publication, Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson, a fellow member of the American Philosophical Society, called it “a most excellent natural history not merely of Virginia but of North America and possibly equal if not superior to that of any country yet published.”

Wrote English professor William Peden, who edited a 1954 edition of the work: “The Notes on Virginia is probably the most important scientific and political book written by an American before 1785; upon it much of Jefferson’s contemporary fame as a philosopher was based.”

And no small amount of that fame was due to the “sage of Monticello’s” archaeological dig (the only such of his lifetime). Unfortunately, other than what was published in Notes on the State of Virginia, there is no other information about the Monacan burial mound. Jefferson left no field notes. Its exact location has never been pinpointed, although many individuals have tried, including professor Hantman and a team of anthropology students from the University of Virginia.

Unfortunate, too, is the fact that Jefferson never mentioned refilling the trench. If it was indeed left open, the examined remains strewn across the ground, the Rivanna River, which frequently inundates the plain upon which the mound stood, would have washed it away within a few decades. Jefferson obviously believed that the benefits of scientific inquiry greatly trumped the barrow’s importance to the Monacan people.

All that being said, the dig was nonetheless a major scientific achievement. “The importance of Jefferson’s experience and his report of it cannot be overstressed,” wrote science historian Silvio A. Bedini, “for he introduced for the very first time the principle of stratigraphy in archaeological excavation.” With this discipline, examining the layers—“strata,” Jefferson called them—provides a calendar for determining the age of items or human remains contained therein. In his description, Jefferson “not only indicated the basic features of the stratigraphic method, but also virtually named it,” wrote German archaeology writer C.W. Ceram, “although a hundred years were to pass before the term became established in archaeological jargon.”

Most important is the fact that thanks to his excavation of the Monacan Indian burial mound—and the detailed account of his posited questions and scientific methodology—Thomas Jefferson became known as the “father of American archaeology.”

Rick Britton is a historian and cartographer who lives in Charlottesville, Va., in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson’s “Little Mountain.”

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Donald Trump launched his third campaign for the White House amid a blizzard of legal investigations. In New York City, he was indicted for falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. He was also slapped with two civil lawsuits: one for fraudulently overvaluing his assets; a second for defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll when he denounced her belated claim that he had raped her in 1996.

In Georgia, a grand jury pondered whether he had violated state election laws by fielding a slate of bogus Trump electors after Joe Biden won the state en route to the presidency in 2020, or by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” the votes he needed for him to win it. The FBI wanted to know why documents labeled “Top Secret” had been squirreled away at his Palm Beach home Mar-a-Lago, while Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith grilled a raft of witnesses to his alleged attempts (not just in Georgia) to overturn his 2020 loss. Smith’s bag included his veep Mike Pence.

Donald Trump likes to define himself in superlatives: biggest, richest, best. But he is not the first politician to seek office under a legal cloud. For example, James Michael Curley, four-time Boston mayor and all-time symbol of the big city Democratic pol, got an early boost from a jail sentence. Curley was the son of poor Irish Catholic immigrants. Throughout his long career, he pitched himself as the champion of his ethno-religious clan and class of origin, steering gifts, jobs and public works to friends and followers (and kickbacks to himself). He proclaimed his good intentions in a rich, rolling voice that one drama critic compared to actress Tallulah Bankhead’s.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Curley won elections to the lower houses of the Boston and Massachusetts legislatures. But in October 1902 he pushed the politics of generosity too far: he took a civil service exam for a would-be letter carrier who doubted he could pass it himself. In September 1903, the impersonator was convicted in federal district court of “conspiring…to defraud the United States,” and sentenced to two months in prison. Nothing daunted, Curley turned the verdict into a campaign slogan. He ran for the Board of Aldermen, the upper house of the Boston legislature, that November, boasting of his bogus test-taking: “[H]e did it for a friend.” Curley was elected and, after his appeals had been exhausted, re-elected in November 1904 while serving his time in the Charles Street jail. “I read…every book in the jail library,” he recalled, “and I made a lot of new friends among the authors.” His flesh and blood friends propelled him, over the following decade, to the U.S. House of Representatives, and his first term as mayor of Boston.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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Another jail house office seeker was Eugene V. Debs, whose fifth presidential race was run behind bars.

Debs’ parents, immigrants to Terre Haute, Ind., from Alsace, named him after French novelists Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. But Debs’ political idols were all-American: Tom Paine, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln. As a teenager he worked as a fireman, or stoker, on train engines; as an adult he became a labor journalist, a union organizer, and the perennial presidential candidate of the fledgling Socialist Party. Debs ran four times from 1900 to 1912, barnstorming the country.

One listener described the effect of his oratory. “When Debs says ‘comrade’ it is all right. He means it. That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man….As long as he’s around I believe it myself.” In the 1912 free for all between Woodrow Wilson (D), Theodore Roosevelt (Bull Moose) and William Howard Taft (R), Debs polled 900,000 votes for a respectable six percent.

The overriding issue of the decade became the World War (it was not yet called I). True to socialism’s international spirit, Debs deplored America’s entry: “the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” After a speech in Canton, Ohio, he was arrested for encouraging resistance to the draft and sentenced to ten years in prison. Debs’ concluding speech to the court was radical poetry. “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free.” Debs was imprisoned first in Moundville, West Virginia, then in Atlanta. So it was that he ran his last presidential race from the slammer. “It will be much less tiresome,” he joked, “and my managers and opponents can always locate me.”

Although Debs had the sympathy of non-socialists who thought him ill-treated, he polled barely more than he had in 1912, while his percentage of a popular vote broadened by women’s suffrage fell to 3 percent. Americans were tired of causes, foreign and domestic. New president Warren Harding commuted Debs’ sentence to time served on Christmas 1921.

James Michael Curley, after four decades in and out of office in Massachusetts, had a second stint in jail. This time the crime was mail fraud. During World War II, Curley fronted a firm that claimed to help small businessmen get defense contracts, while in fact it only helped itself to its clients’ retainers. Curley, indicted in September 1943, did not go to trial until November 1945. Late in the interim he was elected to his fourth term as mayor of Boston. “Curley gets things done!” was the winning slogan.

Twelve days after his inauguration in January 1946, a jury in federal district court in Washington, D.C. found him guilty. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but in June 1947 the septuagenarian mayor was taken to Danbury, Conn., to serve a six month sentence. He kept up a brave front. “The guests at this hotel,” he wrote of his fellow inmates, “give me cigars, oranges and razor blades….I am fortunate to have friends everywhere I go.” But the prisoner suffered from diabetes and a heart condition. President Harry Truman knocked a month off his time at Thanksgiving. The recidivist returned to City Hall.

Politicians in humiliating circumstances can retain the loyalty of their supporters, and even win elections, for a variety of reasons. Debs and Curley both spoke for the aggrieved—burdened workers, snubbed ethnics. Their personalities, however different, conferred an aura upon them: Debs the idealist, Curley (in biographer Jack Beatty’s epithet) the rascal king. They were stars. But they sought stardom—or seemed to seek it—in the service of others. The others rewarded them with their votes.

Debs ran no more races after he got out of jail. He died in 1926, age 70, appealing for the convicted anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Curley ran for a fifth term as mayor, unsuccessfully, but won something more important: a fictionalized, and sanitized, account of his life as Frank Skeffington in Edwin O’Connor’s best seller The Last Hurrah. His favorite part, he told the author, was “where I die.” He died in 1958, age 83.

At least one of Donald Trump’s legal cases will never land him in jail. In May the jury in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. If their verdict survives appeal, Trump will only be out monetary damages. Even hard time might not end his political career. You can be in the government and a guest of the government at the same time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Factory bells governed the day in early 19th-century Lowell, Mass. They summoned the mostly young women workers to the cotton mills at 4:30 a.m., signaled meal breaks, sent them home to company boardinghouses after their 12- to-14-hour shifts, and sounded curfew at 10 p.m.

The keepers of the boardinghouses were both caretakers and disciplinarians. They cooked meals and enforced moral codes. They made sure the “mill girls,” America’s first factory laborers, went to sleep on time and to church on Sunday.

This was life in a company town—the first planned company town in the United States. It wasn’t devised that way from the start, however. When the company founders traveled northwest of Boston in late 1821, it was simply to assess a potential factory site on the Merrimack River. Mainly, could the falls there reliably power textile machinery?

The answer was yes, and they bought the land. In 1823, the first machinery started processing raw cotton into cloth. Three years later, the land was incorporated as Lowell, named after the company’s late co-founder Francis Cabot Lowell.

The workers were mostly single women ages 15 to 30 from financially strapped families in the outlying areas. They needed places to live, so the company built the boardinghouses. A town with shops, churches, and other destinations eventually rose up.

With production growing fast, recruiters visited farms and villages to find help. The families there needed the money but were skeptical about sending their single daughters to live away from home. The promise of cash pay caught their attention. The living situation in Lowell sealed the deal, as many families concluded their girls would be protected, nurtured, and provided for.

By 1850, red brick boardinghouses and five- and six-story factory buildings lined the river for nearly a mile, the work force surpassed 10,000, and Lowell was the top textiles manufacturing location in the country. The mills continued operating another 70 years after that. They slipped into full decline only after World War I and the disappearance of military contracts.

Red Brick and Mortar

The Lowell National Historical Park spotlights preserved 19th-century mills and boardinghouses, as well as the network of canals that allowed boats to pass around the Pawtucket Falls for incoming deliveries of supplies and outgoing shipments of finished textiles.

The 88 water-powered looms at the park’s Boott Cotton Mill still run as they did back in the day, giving visitors an up-close look at the operation that gave the town its reason to be.

The 1840s boardinghouse exhibit in the Morgan Cultural Center, with kitchen and communal dining room downstairs and bedrooms upstairs, tells the story of the day-to-day life of the workers in company housing.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Reconstruction is a tough story to tell. The promise was so great and the ending so disappointing. It’s hardly a surprise that it took a century and a half to open a national historical park portraying what happened. In January 2017, a site was established as a national monument and rededicated as Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in 2019. The location is in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, where Reconstruction can be said to have begun and for a long while succeeded. Rich Condon arrived as park ranger a year later, around the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. The temporary closure of the National Park Service site gave him time to acclimate to his new situation and to the touchy subject matter with which he would be dealing.

The attempt to reconstruct the South after the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves didn’t go according to plan. But what was that plan? What were the goals at the start?

Here in the South Carolina Sea Islands, U.S. troops arrived in November 1861. They drive out a large portion of Confederate troops and White plantation owners. What’s left are about 10,000 African Americans. They make up 85–90 percent of the population.

A lot of questions start to surface. The U.S. troops are being asked: Am I free? Can I go to school? Can I carry a rifle? There are goals of providing education, building schools. There’s the goal of eventually arming newly freed African American men. You have the start of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, the first Black regiment to don the U.S. Army uniform. Things like land ownership and labor reform. All that’s part of Reconstruction.

What’s special about this site is that all that stuff happens here starting in 1862 through the rest of the war, when it isn’t really happening in many other places throughout the South. This becomes what historians have called a rehearsal for Reconstruction. All those goals are outlined here, and they attempt to execute them during the postwar period in many other places across the South. The success rate varies. Here, it’s a massive success. It takes hold and lasts probably the longest of anywhere.

How did the grand designs for Reconstruction go wrong?

For a long time, Reconstruction was portrayed as a failure. It wasn’t a failure. It was defeated. It was dismantled and defeated in large part by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, the White League—groups of White supremacists who did not want to see African Americans in U.S. Army uniforms. Seeing them in a position of authority didn’t sit well for people who used to call a lot of these men “property.”

Reconstruction takes root and is doing well for a while. In most places it’s lasting 12-plus years. If you look at most definitions of Reconstruction, people look at it beginning with the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the passing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and ending about 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes is elected president and pulls U.S. troops from the South.

Here we have a much broader definition. We start in 1861 with the arrival of U.S. troops and we extend it to about 1900, because even in the 1880s and 1890s, there are Black public officials being elected to office. Where it goes wrong is some of these more isolated areas like the South Carolina Upcountry, where you have the Klan presence—White supremacist violence and voter intimidation. In many parts of the North, White Northerners were losing interest in Reconstruction. All these are contributing factors to the process going into a steady decline.

In the end, what were the most significant changes, good and bad?

We see the legacy of Reconstruction in a lot of different places, even into the 20th and 21st century. Some of the good changes: African American land ownership. African American citizenship. “Citizenship” was defined largely by Black U.S. military veterans from the Civil War before 1868. Before the passing of the 14th Amendment in 1868, “citizenship” was not clearly defined.

The bad side is that at the end of Reconstruction, you have the start of the Jim Crow era, which lasts well into the 1960s. Here in South Carolina, the 1868 state constitution was a restructuring of society. It allowed African American men to vote. It extended public education to everybody, regardless of sex or race. Almost 30 years later, in 1895, a new constitution is passed in which segregation is codified, in which African Americans are seen as less than citizens and are largely disenfranchised. This was happening across the South at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, and the ripple effects of that last much longer than people like to remember.

This is one of the newest national historical parks. Can you talk about how it came to be?

There was plenty of interest in the local community of having a park here addressing Reconstruction. Broad and diverse support ranged from community leadership to churches to average citizens. They have a vested interest in this story being told.

This site was established initially as a national monument through an executive order in January 2017, and it becomes a national historical park in March 2019. And really what that did was allow for the expansion of this story. It allowed for the establishment of the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, which is operated by the park. We have national parks across the country that are part of this network. We also have sites that are not managed by the federal government that have a Reconstruction story to tell. It allows this story to become more familiar to people across the nation.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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How do you manage to maintain a balance in your portrayal of controversial subject matter like this?

We talk about the hopes and successes of Reconstruction, but we also talk about the dismantling, and that includes things like racial violence, attacks on African Americans and their allies in the South. We talk about the reactions to things like African American progress, to moving from the state of enslavement to freedom to working toward equality. I think we give it a fair treatment, which in other places it had not been given in a long time.

I’ll note that we didn’t have a lot of violent push back on the Sea Islands during Reconstruction. That’s because the population remains about 90 percent African American, so you don’t have groups like the Klan or the Red Shirts operating. You also didn’t have bridges that connect these islands to the mainland until the 1920s.

Can you describe briefly what’s most important about each of the distinct sites that make up the park?

We have three, you could say three or four, sites. We have our main visitor center in downtown Beaufort. There is a plethora of things we can cover here, one of them being African American financial autonomy. The Freedman’s Bank, one of the first in the nation, is still standing. We can talk about land ownership and labor reform. The majority of the homes and lots in this area are African American–owned by 1864–1865.

Out on Saint Helena Island, a 15-minute drive from here, we have the Penn Center Historic Landmark District. We operate a site there called Darrah Hall, and we also have an easement agreement with Brick Baptist Church right across the road. At Darrah Hall, education is the big story. The people who attended classes there at Penn School, who were enslaved just a couple of months earlier, were prevented by law from learning to read and write. This is their first opportunity to change that. Knowledge is power. That’s the last thing a plantation owner wants the people he calls “property” to have.

The last one is Camp Saxton, down in Port Royal, about 4 miles south of here. This is the site where the 1st South Carolina was recruited and trained for service, the first Black men to wear the U.S. Army uniform.

You learn, in a larger sense, how military service, especially for African Americans, is kind of this direct pathway toward citizenship. During Reconstruction, when the nation’s trying to figure out who deserves citizenship, 200,000-plus African American veterans raised their hands: we fought for this country and prevented it from falling apart.

Here is also the site where about 5,000 African Americans gathered on January 1, 1863, for an impartation of the Emancipation Proclamation. They’re hearing the words that declare their freedom for the first time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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James Michael Curley’s first arrest came in 1903, when he was a 28-year-old Massachusetts state legislator. He was charged with conspiring to “defraud the United States” for taking the federal Civil Service exam while pretending to be one of his constituents, an Irish immigrant who hoped to become a mailman.

“He couldn’t spell Constantinople,” Curley explained, “but he had wonderful feet for a letter carrier.” Sentenced to two months in jail, Curley responded by running for Boston alderman on the slogan, “He did it for a friend.” He won easily.

Curley’s second arrest came in 1943, when he was a 68-year-old congressman charged with mail fraud in a scheme to extract bribes from companies seeking federal contracts. “I’m being persecuted,” he said, by “Communists and radical reformers.” Under indictment in 1944, he won re-election to Congress. Awaiting trial in 1945, he was elected mayor of Boston. Convicted in 1946, he served as mayor while serving time in a Connecticut prison.

In the 40 years between sojourns in the hoosegow, Curley was elected mayor of Boston four times, governor of Massachusetts once, and congressman four times. For half a century, he dominated the state’s politics with his pungent wit, his orotund oratory, his Machiavellian shrewdness—and the support of working-class Irish Americans who saw him as the embodiment of their hopes. And he lived to see himself portrayed as a lovable rogue in the best-selling novel The Last Hurrah, and played by Spencer Tracy in the 1958 movie version.

Son of Irish immigrants, James Michael Curley was born in Boston in 1874. His father, a laborer, died when James was 10. To help his mother, a scrubwoman, support the family, James began working at 11, selling newspapers. He quit school at 15 to work in a piano factory, then finished high school at night, while spending his days delivering groceries by horse and wagon.

Eager to enter politics, he volunteered to run social activities at a Catholic church and worked for the Ancient Order of Hibernians—thus building a political base among the Boston Irish. In 1899, he won a seat on the city’s Common Council, running as a Democrat, the party of Boston’s immigrants, and entertaining Irish voters by mocking the “Boston Brahmin” elite as old, weary has-beens with “dogs and no children.”

He created a political organization, “The Tammany Club,” named after New York’s Democratic machine, and organized picnics and Christmas parties for the poor. He did favors for constituents—providing a meal or a job and, as we’ve seen, taking a Civil Service exam “for a friend.” He recorded each favor in a notebook, expecting recipients to thank him with their votes. And they did, electing Curley state representative in 1902, alderman in 1904, and congressman in 1910.

Three years later, he was elected mayor, using a trick so outrageous it became legendary. Curley learned that the incumbent mayor, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald—the grandfather of President Kennedy—was having a fling with a barmaid nicknamed “Toodles.” A Curley crony informed the mayor’s wife of the affair in a letter, demanding that Fitzgerald withdraw from the race. But Fitzgerald refused, so Curley announced his plan to deliver a public lecture titled “Great Lovers in History: From Cleopatra to Toodles.” Fitzgerald quit and Curley won.

As mayor, Curley exhibited the political philosophy that would continue all his life—a proto-New Deal two decades before FDR’s election. Calling himself “the mayor of the poor,” he spent city money hiring workers to pave roads, expand the city hospital and build schools, sewers and playgrounds. He cut the pay of the highest-paid city workers, and raised the pay of the lowest. Recalling his mother’s years scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, he famously issued long-handled mops to City Hall’s scrubwomen, declaring that no woman should go down on her knees except to pray.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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“Government was not created to save money and to cut debt, but to take care of people,” he said. “That’s my theory of government.”

He did take care of people—but not nearly as lavishly as he took care of himself. Curley was as crooked as a pretzel. He forced city employees to fund his campaigns by purchasing tickets to Tammany Club dinners. He signed sweetheart deals giving city contractors huge profits, provided that they split the booty with him. He hardly bothered to hide his graft. Bostonians watched as construction companies with lucrative city contracts built Curley a 21-room, 10,000 square foot, neo-Georgian mansion with marble fireplaces—and charged him next to nothing.

“Even his core voters knew Curley was dishonest,” Jack Beatty wrote in his excellent Curley biography, The Rascal King. “For many Bostonians, his good works would ever stay their dudgeon at his bad deeds.”

In 1934, Curley was elected governor. As he had done in Boston, he hired the unemployed to build roads and schools. But he also purged the state Finance Commission, which was investigating corruption in Boston’s government, a subject Curley preferred to keep hidden. He fired one member, appointed another to a judgeship, and replaced both with toadies uninterested in investigating their boss.

For lesser jobs, Curley appointed cronies. His chauffeur got a state job; so did his gardener. A man who had served time for forgery was hired as an auditor. Curley also displayed unusual sympathy for prisoners, pardoning or paroling 254 on Christmas Day 1935—an act of mercy inspired by generous gifts to the governor from the prisoners’ attorneys.

Soon, newspapers and magazines began attacking Curley’s corrupt regime. “Governor Curley appears to be suffering now from delusions of grandeur,” a Springfield Union editorial charged, “and sees himself becoming dictator of this Commonwealth a la Huey Long.”

Realizing he couldn’t win re-election in 1936, Curley ran for the Senate instead, but he was trounced by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1937 and 1941, he ran for mayor of Boston but lost both races.

He seemed finished, an aging relic of a bygone era. But in 1942, Boston voters elected him to Congress, and in 1946 they elected him mayor. After spending five months of his term in federal prison, he ran for mayor three more times, though never winning again.

He was 82 and sickly in 1956, when Edwin O’Connor published The Last Hurrah, his novel about a very Curley-esque politician. Curley loved the book but sued to prevent release of the movie version, claiming it violated his privacy. The producers responded that they had already paid him $25,000 for his permission. Curley denied ever receiving their money or giving his permission. Anxious to avoid a lengthy court battle and eager to premier the movie in Boston, the studio paid Curley another $15,000.

That was his final scam, his last hurrah. When he died, two months later, 100,000 mourners filed past his coffin.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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