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Franklin Parker


Last Updated: 7/5/2009

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Age: 88
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City: PLEASANT HILL
State: Tennessee
Country: US
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Saturday, July 04, 2009 

Category: School, College, Greek
1 of 2 Parts:  Educational Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) and first U. S. Paleontology Prof. Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-99) at Yale University

By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270, USA, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Introduction

George Peabody's nephew, Othniel Charles Marsh, influenced his uncle's gifts to science and science education, particularly the founding of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, founded Oct. 8, 1866; the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, founded Oct. 22, 1866; and to a lesser extent the Peabody Academy of Science, founded Feb. 26, 1867, now the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

George Peabody's parents, Thomas Peabody (1761-1811) and Judith née Dodge Peabody (1770-1830), lived in Danvers (renamed Peabody, 1868), Mass. George Peabody was the third born and second son of their eight children. His father, a farmer and leather worker, was not successful. After four years of schooling and four years' apprenticeship in a Danvers store, George Peabody, age 16, was assistant in his older brother David's drapery shop in Newburyport, Mass. His father's death (May 13, 1811) with a mortgaged home and other debts, was followed by a Newburyport fire (May 31, 1811). Business prospects being ruined, young Peabody left Newburyport with his maternal uncle John Peabody, also bankrupted by the Newburyport fire, to open a drygoods store in Georgetown, D.C. The management of the store, opened May 15, 1812, fell mainly on George Peabody.

Serving in the War of 1812, young Peabody met fellow soldier Elisha Riggs (1779-1853), an older and more experienced merchant. The 35-year-old Riggs took the 19-year-old Peabody as junior partner in Riggs & Peabody (1814-29), a drygoods importing firm. In 1815 Riggs & Peabody moved from Georgetown to Baltimore, Md. George Peabody became the family supporter, soon restored the Danvers homestead for his mother and siblings living at home, and paid for the schooling of his younger relations. The firm continued as Peabody, Riggs & Co. (1829-45), with George Peabody as senior European purchasing agent. He lived in London from 1837 to his death in 1869, except for three U.S. visits. In London, trading on his own in U.S. state and federal bonds, he formed George Peabody & Co. (185l-64), a banking firm. He took as partner in 1854 Boston merchant Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90), whose 19-year-old son John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), began as New York City agent for George Peabody & Co. George Peabody was thus the root of the international banking firm of Morgan.

Mary Gaines Peabody (1807-34) was Peabody's younger sister whose schooling he paid for at Bradford Academy, Bradford, Mass., during 1822-23. In 1826 at age 19 she fell in love with 26-year-old Caleb Marsh (1800-?), who taught school near Bradford, Mass. The Peabody and Marsh families had been neighbors in Danvers, Mass., with the Marshes more affluent than the Peabodys. Caleb Marsh, about to marry Mary Gaines Peabody, expected financial help from or work with his future brother-in-law George Peabody. Caleb Marsh wrote to Peabody, busy traveling for Riggs, Peabody & Co., asking help in getting started in the drygoods business. Peabody, aware of pitfalls for beginners, discouraged Caleb Marsh. Caleb Marsh then wrote Peabody asking for a dowry and the conditions for giving it. Peabody provided a monetary settlement, with safeguards. Inept in several enterprises and considered later by the Peabodys "not to be the best of husbands," Caleb Marsh turned to farming in Lockport, N. Y.

Mary Gaines (Peabody) Marsh died of cholera before her 27th birthday after giving birth to her third child, George Marsh (1834-35), who soon also died. She left Caleb Marsh (he later remarried) with two children: a daughter Mary, age five, and a son, Othniel Charles, approaching age three.

O. C. Marsh, called "Othy" as a boy, lived sometimes with aunts and uncles, and with his father and stepmother in Lockport, N.Y., near the recently excavated and fossil-rich Erie Canal. By one account, in 1841 Othy wondered why fossil fish bones were in shale he found so far from water. A local engineer and fossil hunter named Colonel Ezekiel Jewett befriended the boy and explained about fossils, which they unearthed together. Although his father thought he was wasting time, this fossil hunting experience with Jewett sparked Marsh's later passion for paleontology. Otherwise, O. C. Marsh had an erratic schooling and drifted aimlessly until about age 20. Ref. 1.

O. C. Marsh at Phillips Academy and at Yale

The death of his sister Mary Marsh when she was 22 shocked O. C. Marsh into buckling down to hard private study. At age 21, inheriting property from his mother (part of the dowry George Peabody gave to Caleb Marsh), O. C. Marsh enrolled at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. His fellow students, in their teens, called Marsh, in his early 20s, "Daddy," and "Captain" (he captained the football team), more in respect than ridicule. He soon became an academic achiever and did some summer fossil hunting. A classmate later recalled that O.C. Marsh made "a clean sweep of all" Phillips Academy honors.

Peabody, in London, pleased by good reports of his nephew O. C. Marsh's academic progress from his sister Judith Dodge (née Peabody) Russell Daniels (1799-1879), helped pay his expenses at Phillips Academy. Learning that young Marsh wanted to attend Yale College, Peabody agreed to pay for his schooling there. Marsh studied geology under Yale Prof. James Dwight Dana (1813-95) and chemistry under Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (1816-85). Marsh was eighth in his graduating class of 109 students at Yale in 1860 (B.A. degree). With Peabody's approval and support, O. C. Marsh attended Yale's newly opened (1861) graduate Sheffield Scientific School. In two years he earned the M.A. degree in science (1862), at a cost to Peabody, according to science historian Bernard Jaffe, of $2,200. Ref. 2.

George Peabody as Philanthropist

George Peabody early told intimates, and said publicly in 1850, that he would found an educational institution in each town and city where he had lived and worked. By the early 1860s when nephew O. C. Marsh began to influence him toward science, George Peabody had founded Peabody Institute libraries (with lecture halls and funds) in both parts of Danvers, Mass. Danvers was divided north and south in 1852, with the name of South Danvers, his birthplace, changed to Peabody, Mass., April 13, 1868. He had also founded a five-part Peabody Institute of Baltimore, Md. (reference library, lecture hall and fund, conservatory of music, art gallery, and prizes for best Baltimore students). He founded in London in March 1862, just before becoming more involved with nephew O. C. Marsh, the Peabody Donation Fund to build model apartments for London's working poor. His other important philanthropies lay ahead.

O. C. Marsh as Budding Scholar

In 1861 Marsh wrote a scientific paper read at a Geological Society of London meeting, published in its Transactions, and reprinted in U.S. and European journals. Ref. 3. His summer vacation field work on fossils in Nova Scotia, Canada, brought praise from Harvard zoology Prof. Louis Agassiz (1807-73), world authority on fossil fishes. Agassiz wrote to Yale Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Jr.: "A student from your Scientific School, Mr. Marsh, has shown me today two vertebrae...which has excited my interest in the highest degree." Ref. 4. Marsh wrote proudly from Georgetown, Mass., to his uncle George Peabody, London, June 9, 1862: "I was so fortunate during one of my vacations as to make a discovery which has already attracted considerable attention among scientific men."

Poor eyesight kept Marsh from serving in the Civil War. In that same June 9, 1862, letter to Peabody he added: "If the plan for completing my studies in Germany, which you once so kindly approved, still meets with your approbation, I should like to go in September next [1862]." Peabody approved and sent Marsh £200 ($1,000). Ref. 5.

Always anxious to please his uncle, Marsh was upset by an article his father sent him from the Lockport Journal and Courier, reprinted from a Danvers, Mass., newspaper. He wrote his father that he was "sorry that someone had no more discretion than to preface the notice with some statements which are calculated to do me more injury than...good. The published statement that I am expecting a Professorship at Yale would do not a little towards preventing my getting it. So also that my expenses at College were paid by Uncle George and that he intended to make me his heir, were certainly very injudicious remarks." Ref. 6.

Marsh sailed for Europe in Oct. 1862. Peabody talked to his nephew in London about his [Peabody's] intended gift to Harvard University. Ref. 7.

Marsh described these talks in a letter to his mentor, Yale Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Jr. "I had a long talk with Mr. P. in regard to his future plans and donations.... I will tell you confidentially that Harvard will have her usual good fortune. So many of our family have been educated at Harvard that he naturally felt a greater interest in that institution than in Yale, of which I am the only representative. I can assure you, however, that I did [not] allow the claims of my Alma Mater to be forgotten...and I have strong hopes that she may yet be favored although nothing is as yet
definitely arranged. The donation to H. [Harvard] is a large one and for a School of Design.... I did not recommend an endowment for a similar object at Yale, partly because I did not feel so much interest in Art as in Science and partly because Mr. P. manifested so much interest in my scientific studies that I thought it not unlikely that he would be more inclined to that department. I did not propose any definite plan..., as I had then none to propose, but shall hope to do so before long as I do not intend to let the matter rest until something definite is decided upon...." Ref. 8.

Peabody's first gift idea for Harvard in 1861 was an astronomical observatory. He discussed this idea in letters to Francis Peabody of Salem and William Henry Appleton (1814-84) of Boston. Ref. 9.

The Harvard gift idea was also discussed with former Harvard Pres. Edward Everett (1794-1865). Everett thought Harvard needed a "School of Design" [i.e., art] more than an observatory. Peabody's Harvard gift idea had thus changed from observatory to a School of Design (art) when he spoke to his nephew O. C. Marsh in London in mid-Oct. 1862. Marsh's enthusiasm about science influenced Peabody, changing again his Harvard gift idea from observatory to art to science, resulting finally in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, founded Oct. 8, 1866. Ref. 10.

Science at Yale.

O. C. Marsh's letters from Germany evoked special interest among Yale's small band of scientists. By one account Prof. Silliman, Sr., had years before sounded out George Peabody about aiding science at Yale, but nothing came of it. Now, with O. C. Marsh as a budding Yale scholar, his Yale teachers had renewed hope of Peabody aiding science at Yale. Learning that Prof. Silliman, Jr., had worked out with Prof. James Dwight Dana a plan for a possible Peabody Museum at Yale, Marsh wrote on Feb. 16, 1863: "I shall see Mr. P. in the spring or early in the summer, and shall then try to bring the subject before him in a way best suited to ensure its success."

At the University of Berlin, on advice from his Yale mentors, Marsh specialized in vertebrate paleontology. When he met his uncle Peabody in mid-May 1863 in Hamburg, Germany, Marsh was better able to explain to his uncle the need for an endowed museum which would send out expeditions to find ancient animal and human remains and so reconstruct the antecedents and cultural history of man. Marsh told his uncle that Yale's Sheffield Scientific School (founded 1861) had made such a beginning. Ref. 11. He laid out Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Jr.'s, plan for a scientific Peabody museum at Yale. Satisfied that it was a sound idea, Peabody named five trustees: O. C. Marsh, Benjamin Silliman, Sr. and Jr., James Dixon, and James Dwight Dana.

Peabody told Marsh that he would soon add a codicil to his will endowing the Yale museum. Marsh wrote jubilantly from Hamburg to Prof. Silliman, Sr., May 25, 1863: "I take great pleasure in announcing to you that Mr. George Peabody has decided to extend his generosity to Yale College, and will leave a legacy of one hundred thousand dollars to promote the interests of Natural Science in that Institution." Marsh added: "Mr. Peabody suggests that the Trustees...decide upon a plan...best adapted to promote the object proposed, and to embody the main features of this plan in a clause to be inserted in his will." Ref. 12.

Peabody also told Marsh in their May 1863 meeting in Hamburg that although he set the amount to Yale at $100,000, he might raise it and that Yale would receive the gift on his death. As it turned out, Peabody gave the museum gifts to Harvard on Oct. 8, 1866, and to Yale on Oct. 22,1866, during his May 1, 1866, to May 1, 1867, U.S. visit, raising the amounts to $150,000 each.

Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Jr., urged Marsh to collect fossils, books, and scientific papers on paleontology. He explained that doing so would prepare Marsh for a Yale professorship in paleontology and would also make the need for a museum more evident to all. Prof. James Dwight Dana echoed Prof. Silliman, Jr.'s suggestion for Marsh to study further in Germany. Ref. 13.

Unlike the strong U.S. liberal arts tradition, teaching science was new and suspect after Christian fundamentalists denounced the theory of evolution in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Fundamentalists feared that belief in evolution might supplant belief in divine biblical revelation.

Amidst this conflict between science and religion, Yale's small band of scientists saw hope for their scientific disciplines in Peabody's intended museum gifts to Harvard and Yale, and particularly in the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided federal land grants to the states for science and mechanic arts (engineering) in higher education. The Connecticut legislature in 1863 voted to allocate Morrill Act funds to Yale's Sheffield Scientific School. Prof. Dana remarked, "The fact is Yale is going to be largely rebuilt, and all at once! The time of her renaissance has come!!" Ref. 14.

In July 1863 Marsh, studying at Heidelberg University, wrote to Peabody: "One...result of your [projected] donation to Yale has been to...realize my highest hopes of a position [there].... The faculty propose to create a new Professorship of Geology and Paleontology.... This Professorship...corresponds to that held by the great Agassiz at Harvard." Marsh explained to his uncle that he needed a library and fossil collection: "Such a library and cabinet...can only be obtained in Europe.... The amount necessary...would be 3 or 4 thousand dollars.... I have felt some hesitation in asking you for this assistance in view of all you have already done for me, but I have thought it much the best way to state the whole case frankly and leave the matter with you." Ref. 15. Peabody wrote Marsh from Scotland in Aug. 1863 that he would give him $3,500 to buy a library and fossil specimens. Ref. 16.

O. C. Marsh's books and fossils

Often ill and wanting to retire, Peabody cut his ties with George Peabody & Co. on Oct. 1, 1864. Without children of his own and aware that he could not control the company business after his death, he asked that his name be withdrawn from the firm. Partner Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90) urged Peabody to postpone retirement. Peabody wrote J.S. Morgan politely but firmly: "...I can now make no change, for although the continuance of the firm for three or six months, which you suggest, may appear short to you, to me--feeling as I deeply do, the uncertainty of life at the age of seventy--months would appear as years, for I am most anxious before I die to place my worldly affairs in a much more satisfactory state than they are at present." Ref. 17.

Thus was George Peabody & Co., begun informally as early as 1838 and more formally from 1851, succeeded by J. S. Morgan & Co. (1864-1909), by Morgan Grenfell & Co. (1910-1918), Morgan Grenfell & Co. Ltd., since 1918, and has continued since 1989, owned by Deutsche Bank, Germany. Ref. 18.

O. C. Marsh wrote Peabody from the University of Breslau Oct. 21, 1864: "I saw in the papers the announcement of your retirement.... Before I retire I should like to do for Science as much as you have done for your fellowmen; and if my health continues I shall try hard to do so." Ref. 19.

Marsh expected his Yale professorship in June 1864, but was disappointed when it was postponed until June 1865. Being already in Germany, he wrote his uncle that he felt he should also study at the University of Breslau (he was the first U.S. student to attend there). Peabody approved and paid his expenses. Ref. 20.

Marsh selected his library of books on geology and paleontology, for which his uncle paid $5,000. Peabody arranged with his agent-friend, Horatio Gates Somerby (1805-72), born in Newburyport, Mass., and a London-based genealogist, to ship Marsh's effects to the U.S. The books and fossils went through customs two years later weighing 2.5 tons. Marsh's fossils were the basis of the collection of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. His books formed the basis of its library collection in geology and paleontology. In Berlin Marsh met and spoke with Sir Charles Lyell (1795-1875). In Paris he met and spoke with French geologist Phillippe-Edouard Poulletier De Verneuill. In London, when he was not with his uncle, he spent time at the British Museum with the Keeper of Geology, Henry Woodward. Marsh also talked with such famous British scientists as Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) and Charles Darwin (1809-82). Ref. 21.

Back at Yale in March 1866, teaching Prof. Dana's classes in geology, Marsh wrote to his cousin Charles W. Chandler, a lawyer in Zanesville, Ohio, that their uncle George Peabody was about to visit the U.S. (May 1, 1866 to May 1, 1867).

Peabody's Advisor R. C. Winthrop

George Peabody arrived in N. Y. C. on the Scotia , May 3, 1866, for his year's U.S. visit (May 1, 1866-May 1, 1867). He conferred on May 9 and frequently thereafter with his philanthropic advisor, Robert Charles Winthrop (1809-94). Winthrop had been highly recommended to Peabody in 1862 in London by Thurlow Weed (1797-1882), the politically powerful N. Y. State editor. Weed was in London in 1862 as Pres. Lincoln's emissary to keep Britain from siding with the Confederacy in the Civil War. Weed pointed out that Winthrop was uniquely qualified to advise and guide Peabody's philanthropy. Ref. 22.

Winthrop was the distinguished descendant of first Mass. Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop (1588-1649), a Harvard graduate (1828), trained in Daniel Webster's law office, a member of the Mass.
legislature (1834-39, and its Speaker), member of the U.S. House of Representative (1840-50, its Speaker during 1847-49), was appointed to fill Daniel Webster's U.S. Senate seat (1851), and had given the main addresses at the Washington Monument cornerstone laying (1848) and at its completion (1885). Known and respected by the U.S. political and academic power structure, Winthrop agreed to help plan Peabody's philanthropy after 1866. In 1867 Winthrop helped name the Peabody Education Fund (PEF) trustees, was president of that board, and guided the PEF to his death in 1894.

When Peabody first laid before Winthrop his philanthropic plans (probably on May 9, 1866), Winthrop expressed amazement at its size and scope. Winthrop remembered Peabody's reply and quoted it in his Feb. 8, 1870, eulogy at Peabody's burial. Peabody's words, underlining added below, were later cut into the stone marker placed at the temporary grave site in Westminster Abbey, where Peabody's remains lay in state 30 days (Nov. 11-Dec. 12, 1869). Peabody had replied: "Why, Mr. Winthrop, this is no new idea to me. From the earliest of my manhood I have contemplated some such disposition of my property; and I have prayed my Heavenly Father, day be day, that I might be enabled before I died, to show my gratitude for the blessings which He has bestowed upon me, by doing some great good for my fellow-men." Ref. 23.

R. C. Winthrop's Help on the Peabody Museum of Harvard

Winthrop had a series of meetings on the Peabody Museum of Harvard: with George Peabody on June 1, 1866, at the Tremont House, Boston; on June 4 with Peabody's nephews, Yale Prof. O. C. Marsh and George Peabody Russell (1834-?, Harvard graduate class of 1856 and a lawyer) at the Massachusetts Historical Society; and on June 17 again with George Peabody, who gave Winthrop permission to consult confidentially with Harvard friends. Winthrop especially sought the advice and approval of Louis Agassiz (1807-73), the leading U. S. scientist and Harvard zoologist. Winthrop also talked to Harvard's former Pres. James Walker (1794-1874, Harvard president during 1853-60). Agassiz, Winthrop, and Walker knew that Harvard officials preferred new gifts of money to go to its library and to its Museum of Comparative Zoology rather than for Peabody's proposed museum. Pres. Walker said to Winthrop: "...When a generous man like Mr. Peabody proposes a great gift, we...had better take what he offers and take it on his terms, and for the object which he evidently has at heart.... There...will be, as you say, disappointments in some quarters. But the branch of Science, to which this endowment is devoted, is one to which many minds in Europe are now eagerly turning.... This Museum...will be the first of its kind in our country."

Winthrop communicated his conversation with Pres. Walker to Peabody on July 6, 1866. On Sept. 24, 1866, Winthrop again met with George Peabody and his nephews, Prof. O. C. Marsh and G. P. Russell. On Sept. 28, 1866, Winthrop called the first meeting of the trustees of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. The trustees accepted Peabody's gift of $150,000. His founding letter of Oct. 8, 1866, ended with these suggestions: "...In view of the gradual obliteration or destruction of the works and remains of the ancient races of this continent, the labor of exploration and collection be commenced at as early...as practicable; and also, that, in the event of the discovery in America of human remains or implements of an earlier geological period than the present, especial attention be given to their study, and their comparison with those found in other countries." Ref. 24.

Anthropology at Harvard University

Thus, O.C. Marsh, a Yale man, influenced the founding of the first U. S. museum of anthropology in the U. S. at Harvard University. It was endowed by Peabody nine years after the discovery in 1857 in Prussia of the Neanderthal skull, which renewed interest in man's origins. Ethnological items, long collected but unexamined, were soon donated to the new Peabody Museum at Harvard by New England societies, including the Massachusetts Historical Society. When the Massachusetts Historical Society's ethnological items were transferred to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, former Harvard Pres. James Walker said, "For a long time Harvard has exhausted her resources on the traditional liberal arts. The time has come for her to advance scientific knowledge. Mr. Peabody shows great wisdom in facilitating cooperation between the Massachusetts Historical Society and his Museum at Harvard through trustees of the latter who are prominent members of the former." Ref. 25.


Concluded in Part 2 of 2 Parts. About the authors: 24 book titles of Franklin and Betty J. Parker are listed in:
http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P
For writings by the Parkers in blogs, enter bfparker in technorati.com or in google.com or in any other search engine.


Franklin Parker's, George Peabody, A Biography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, Feb. 1995, 278 pp., revised, 12 photos, is out of print, but can be read freely as an E-book by accessing:
http://books.google.com/ and typing in Source:
George Peabody, a Biography, by Franklin Parker.

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Saturday, July 04, 2009 

Category: School, College, Greek
Concluding Part 2 of 2 Parts: Educational Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) and first U. S. Paleontology Prof. Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-99) at Yale University. By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270, USA, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Science historians Charles Franklin Thwing (1853-1937) and Ernest Ingersoll (1852-1946) each wrote that the Peabody Museum at Harvard University began the systematic study of anthropology in U. S. higher education. Pre-Columbian life in North America was largely unexplored; existing collections were slight and fragmentary. Ref. 26.

Many early prominent scientists were officers of the Peabody Museum of Harvard, including Frederic Ward Putnam (1839-1915). He was its curator during 1874-1909 and enhanced its reputation as well as his own. He was called by his peers the "Father of American Anthropology."

While at the Peabody Museum of Harvard, Putnam also found time 1-to help found the Anthropology Department of the American Museum of Natural History, N.Y.C., during 1894-1903; and 2-the Department and Museum of Anthropology, University of California, during 1903-09; and 3-to be secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, during 1873-98.

Famed anthropologist Prof. Franz Boas (1858-1942) wrote that F. W. Putnam pursued the subject of early man in North America with "unconquerable tenacity." Putnam wrote over 400 anthropological reports, many of them on the culture of the "mound builders," ancient ancestors of the American Indians. Ref. 27.

At its centennial in 1967, Peabody Museum of Harvard Director John O. Brew (1906-88) stated that its personnel had pioneered in studying the unique Mayan culture in Central America and had led a total of 688 expeditions worldwide to study early human life. Ref. 28.

O. C. Marsh's influence at Yale

O.C. Marsh was a convinced evolutionist when in the early 1860s he visited Charles Darwin at his country home in England. Twenty years later Charles Darwin wrote to Marsh, crediting him with finding fossils that provided the best evidence to prove the theory of evolution. Marsh also published fossil proof of the North American origin of the horse. Previously scientists believed that the horse originated in Europe and was brought to America with Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors.

Darwin's strongest defender, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), visiting Marsh at Yale in 1876, was so convinced by Marsh's horse fossil findings that he changed the content of his U. S. lectures, citing Marsh's proof of the pre-Columbian origin of the horse in North America. Ref. 29.

As Yale Prof. of Paleontology and Director of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, Marsh did not teach or receive a salary until his last years, when his private income (left to him by Peabody) was almost gone. He was an astute organizer of Yale assistants, directing their field work by telegraph and letter, overseeing their collecting and shipping railroad carloads of fossils. At Yale he assembled entire dinosaurs, toothed birds, and other extinct mammals.

 His enormous collection at Yale was still being catalogued in the 1990s. He made his major dinosaur fossil finds in the mid 1870s-80s in the Rocky Mountain region; at Comma Bluff in eastern Wyoming; Canyon City, Colorado; and elsewhere in the rugged U. S. West. He used Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History resources, student assistants, and federal funds in his capacity as U.S. Geological Survey paleontologist (1882-92) and honorary curator of vertebrate paleontology at the U.S. National Museum (1887) to find over 1,000 new fossil vertebrates, many of which he classified and described. Ref. 30.

Marsh lived like a Victorian gentleman in his 18-room New Haven, Conn., brownstone, courting and entertaining lavishly U.S. and foreign scientists and politicians. For 12 years he was president of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious U.S. scientific body. He was prominent in national science affairs and wielded influence in government and academic science circles.

Some peers and at least one assistant, Samuel Wendell Williston (1852-1918), who achieved scientific renown after leaving O. C. Marsh's employ, criticized him for publishing fossil findings of his assistants as his own. Marsh's last years were marred by lack of money and loss of U.S. government support. Ref. 31.

O. C. Marsh-E. D. Cope rivalry

Marsh's chief scientific rival was Philadelphia-born and independently wealthy paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840-97). Cope was the son of a wealthy Quaker ship owner and philanthropist. Like Marsh, Cope's mother died when he was three-years-old. Unlike Marsh, Cope grew up in a well-ordered household, did well in a Quaker school, and published his first scientific paper at age 18.

Marsh did little until age 20 and published his first paper at age 30. Both studied science in Europe. Cope, with his wife and daughter, lived in Haddonfield, N.J. When his father died (1875), Cope at age 35 inherited a fortune which he used to finance his fossil finds. Cope lived simply. In contrast, Marsh, a bachelor, lived the life of a Victorian gentleman. On frequent trips to N. Y .C. Marsh was often seen in fashionable clubs.

Marsh and Cope met in Berlin in 1862. They met again for a friendly week in the U. S. in 1868. From then on, they competed in a quarter-century race in the rugged West to find and identify new mammal fossils in scientific publications.

Cope, of brilliant mind and wider natural history interests than Marsh, had no institutional connections until, financially depleted in his last years, he became a University of Pennsylvania professor. Marsh had the knack of management and made the most of academic and federal government connections.

From this rivalry came a treasure trove of dinosaur fossil findings, 80 new kinds of dinosaurs found and described in publications by Marsh and 56 found and described in publications by Cope. From this rivalry came much of what is now known about dinosaurs. Dinosaur displays attracted visitors, particularly young visitors, made science museums popular, and furthered science education. Ref. 32.

Marsh's biographers estimate that Peabody gave Yale directly and indirectly through bequests to Marsh close to half a million dollars. The Peabody Museums at Harvard and Yale, their collections, field exploration, exhibits, famous murals (particularly at the Yale Museum), and education programs are eminently the achievements of their directors and staffs. Yet Peabody's gifts to science education, influenced by nephew O. C. March, made these achievements possible.

George Peabody's Philanthropic Gifts

Seven Peabody Institute Libraries, each with free circulating library (except in Baltimore) and lecture halls and lecture funds. Their location, year founded, and total funds are:

 1-[now named] Peabody, Mass., 1852, total $217,600.
 2-Baltimore, 1857, total $1.4 million (noncirculating special reference library for researchers, lecture hall and fund, music conservatory, art gallery, and annual prizes for best Baltimore students).
3-Danvers, Mass., 1856, $100,000.
4-Georgetown, Mass., 1868, $30,000.
5-Newburyport, Mass., 1866, $15,000.
6-Thetford, Vt., 1866, $10,000.
7-Georgetown, D.C., 1867, $15,000, now part of Washington, D.C., public library. (
Peabody's earliest library gift was to the Baltimore Athenaeum and Library, 1845, $500). Library gifts totaled $1,788,100.

Seven gifts to science and science education:
1-Chemistry laboratory and chemistry school, Maryland Institute, Baltimore, 1851, $1,000.
2-Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1866, $150,000.
3-Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, 1866, $150,000. 4-Mathematics and natural science professorship, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., 1866, $25,000.
5-Mathematics and civil engineering professorship, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, 1866, $25,000.
6-[now named] Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., 1867, $140,000 (maritime museum and Essex County historical documents).
7-Mathematics professorship, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Va. (given to then Pres. Robert E. Lee), 1869, $60,000.
Science and science education gifts totaled $551,000.

Four publication funds to historical societies:
1-Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1857, $20.
 2-Maryland Historical Society, 1866, $20,000.
3-Massachusetts Historical Society, 1866, $20,000.
4-Abstracting Maryland colonial records from English depositories for the Maryland Historical Society, about 1850, amount not known. Publication fund gifts totaled $40,020.

Model housing for London's working poor, 1862-69, $2.5 million (27,000 Londoners still live in 14,000 Peabody homes in 83 housing areas). London housing gift totaled $2,500,000.

First U.S. Arctic expedition, $10,000 for scientific equipment, Second U.S. Grinnell Expedition, 1852-54, in search for missing British explorer Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), led by U.S. Naval Commander Elisha Kent Kane (1820-57). U.S. Arctic expedition gift totaled $10,000.

Patriotic causes:
1-Battle of Lexington Monument, [now named] Peabody, Mass., 1835, $300. 2-Revolutionary War Monument for General Gideon Foster, 1845, $50.
3-Bunker Hill Memorial Monument, 1845, $500.
4-State of Maryland (Peabody declined $60,000 commission due him for selling Chesapeake and Ohio Canal part of Md.'s $8 million bonds for
internal improvements, 1837-48).
5-Washington Monument, Washington, D.C., 1854, $1,000.
6-U.S. Sanitary Commission (Civil War medical care and relief for Union soldiers, sailors, and families), 1864, $10,000. Patriotic gifts totaled $71,850.

Hospitals: 1-City of London Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, 1850-55, $165. 2-Mental Hospital, London, 1864, $100. 3-Vatican's San Spirito Charity Hospital, Rome, Italy, 1867, $19,300. Hospital gifts totaled $19,565.

Churches and other charity:
1-South Congregational Church [now named] Peabody, Mass., 1843 or '44, $250. 2-London Refuge for the Destitute, 1858-60, $115.
3-Church, Barnstead, N.H., 1866, $450.
4-Memorial Church (in his mother's hometown), Georgetown, Mass., 1866, $70,000.
5-Robert E. Lee's Episcopal Church, Lexington, Va., Aug. 1869, $100. English Charity, $15. Churches and charity gifts totaled $70,930.

Education:
1-Best scholars' medals, Peabody High School [now Peabody], Mass., 1854-67, $2,600.
2-Best scholars' medals, Holton High School, Danvers, Mass., 1867, $2,000. 3-London school, 1864, $100.
4-Peabody Education Fund (PEF), 11 former Confederate states plus W. Va., 1867-69, $2 million (GP actually gave the PEF trustees $3,484,000 in securities, but Miss. did not honor its $1.1 million bonds or Fla. its $384,00 bonds; so that PEF funds are usually given as $2 million. Education gifts totaled, $2,004,700. George Peabody's known philanthropic gifts totaled $7,056,165.

Last Will

George Peabody's last will, Sept. 9, 1869, left to former clerks at George Peabody & Co., London, $11,000 to Henry West, and $5,000 to Thomas Perman. $25,000 each to his two British estate executors, Sir Curtis Miranda Lampson (1806-85) and Sir Charles Reed (1819-81). $5,000 each to his three U. S. estate executors, nephews George Peabody Russell (1834-?) and Robert Singleton Peabody (1837-1904) and nephew-in-law Charles W. Chandler.

To the Family Trust Fund (one brother, one sister, and fourteen nieces and nephews), he left (variously estimated) $1.5 million to $4 million.

Philanthropic Influence

George Peabody's philanthropy directly influenced
1-Johns Hopkins' (1795-1873) $8 million bequest for the Johns Hopkins University, Hospital, and Medical School, Baltimore. He indirectly influenced 2-Enoch Pratt (1808-96), who served as Peabody Institute of Baltimore trustee and treasurer, to found the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore's public library. 3-He indirectly influenced PEF trustees Anthony Joseph Drexel (1826-93) to found Drexel University, Philadelphia, 1891;
4- and Paul Tulane (1801-87) to found Tulane University, New Orleans, 1884; 5-and indirectly influenced Alexander Turney Stewart (1803-76) to build his planned Garden City, N.Y., community on the plan of the Peabody Homes of London.

Honors in life

George Peabody was the
1-first American to receive the Freedom of the City of London, July 10, 1862 (also given to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1945).
2-He was granted honorary memberships in the ancient guilds of the Clothworkers' Company of London, July 2, 1862; and the
3-Fishmongers' Company of London, April 19, 1866.
4-Queen Victoria sent him a letter of thanks and her miniature portrait (estimated cost, $70,000), delivered by the British ambassador to Peabody, then in the U.S., March 1867.
 5-Peabody had private audiences with Pope Pius IX and with French Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, in 1868.
5-Sculptor William Wetmore Story's seated GP statue was erected near the Royal Exchange, Threadneedle Street, London, paid for by popular subscription, and unveiled by the Prince of Wales, July 23, 1869 (a replica was erected in front of the Peabody Institute of Baltimore, 1890.  London has monuments to only four Americans: George Peabody, 1869; Abraham Lincoln, 1920; George Washington,1821; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1948).
6-U.S. Congress unanimously passed a resolution of praise and awarded a gold medal to George Peabody, March 1867, in national appreciation for the 1867 Peabody Education Fund.
7-His birthplace, South Danvers, Mass., was renamed Peabody, Mass., April 13, 1868.
8-He was granted an honorary Doctor of Law degree, Harvard University, July 17, 1867 (for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University); and an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree, Oxford University, June 26, 1867, for the Peabody Homes of London.
9-George Peabody was considered for, offered but declined appointment as, U.S. Treasury Secretary in President Andrew Johnson's Cabinet, Feb. 1867.

Honors after death

10-A funeral service (Nov. 5, 1869) was held in Westminster Abbey, London. A floor marker, refurbished in 1995, designates his temporary burial there for 30 days, Nov. 5-Dec. 11, 1869.
11-Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone's cabinet decided on Nov. 10, 1869, to return Peabody's remains to the U.S. aboard HMS Monarch, then Britain's newest, largest warship.
12-Pres. U.S. Grant ordered the USS Plymouth from Marseilles, France, to accompany the Monarch to the U. S.
13-Pres. Grant ordered Admiral David Farragut to command a U. S. naval reception in Portland harbor, Maine.

14-Lying-in-state honors were held in Portland, Maine, and in Peabody, Mass.
15-Final burial was in Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Mass., Feb. 8, 1870, attended by Queen Victoria's third son, Prince Arthur, then on a Canadian tour. 16-GP was elected to the New York University Hall of Fame, 1900, with a bust by sculptor Hans Schuler unveiled, May 12, 1926.
17-Virginia and South Carolina legislators proposed (unsuccessfully) a George Peabody statue in Statuary Hall, U. S. Capitol, 1896.
18-Artist Louis Amateis designed (1904-08) two bronze doors for the west entrance, U. S. Capitol Building, with transom panel tableau called "Apotheosis of America," symbolizing U. S. intellectual development, featuring images of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Peabody, Johns Hopkins, and Horace Mann.

19-Tennesseans in 1941 proposed, unsuccessfully, a commemorative George Peabody U. S. postage stamp (a similar unsuccessful proposal was made in 1993 by Massachusetts citizens for a commemorative George Peabody U. S. postage stamp for the bicentennial of his birth in 1995). 20-An international George Peabody traveling exhibit was organized for the bicentennial of his birth by the Peabody Institute of Baltimore, shown at the Peabody Trust in London, Feb. 18, 1995, and shown at U. S. Peabody institutions through 1995-96. Ref. 33.


References

1. The O. C. Marsh family documents are in the George Peabody Papers and the O. C. Marsh Papers at Yale University Library Archives, used in Charles Schuchert and Clara Mae LeVene, O. C. Marsh, Pioneer in Paleontology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), hereafter referred to as Schuchert and LeVene.

2. (Marsh's cost at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, 1861-62): Bernard Jaffe, "Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899)," Men of Science in America: The Role of Science in the Growth of Our Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), pp. 279-306, 565.

3. (Marsh's 1861 scientific paper): O. C. Marsh to George Peabody, June 9, 1862, in George Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., and in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 45.

4. (Louis Agassiz on Marsh's 1861 paper): Louis Agassiz to Benjamin Silliman, Dec. 23, 1861, quoted in American Journal of Science , Vol. 33 (May 1862), p. 138.

5. (Marsh's study in Germany): O. C. Marsh to Peabody, June 9, 1862, in Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum., quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 48.

6. (O. C. Marsh to his father, Caleb Marsh, Aug. 1862): Schuchert and LeVene, p. 47.

7. (Marsh's Oct. 1862 talk with Peabody): O. C. Marsh, Liverpool, to George Peabody, London, Oct. 10, 1862, in Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

8. (O. C. Marsh to Silliman, Jr. about talks with George Peabody): Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 75-76.

9. (George Peabody's early thoughts on Harvard observatory and school of design): Francis Peabody, Salem, to George Peabody, Oct. 8, 1861, Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

10. (O. C. Marsh influenced George Peabody toward Harvard science museum gift): Schuchert and LeVene, p. 74, note 4.

11. (Marsh presented Silliman, Jr.'s Yale museum plan to Peabody): O. C. Marsh, Berlin, to Silliman, Jr., Feb. 16, 1863, Marsh Papers, Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 77-78.

12 (Peabody decides on Yale museum): O. C. Marsh, Hamburg, to Silliman, Sr., May 25, 1863, Marsh Papers, Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 78.

13. (Silliman, Jr., and Dana urge Marsh to study further in Germany): Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 52, 80-81.

14. (Dana on Yale to be rebuilt): Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 82-83.

15. (O. C. Marsh asked Peabody for library and fossil rock specimens): O.C. Marsh, Heidelberg, to George Peabody, July 12, 1863, Marsh Papers, Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 54.

16. (Peabody paid for Marsh's books and specimens): George Peabody, Scotland, to O. C. Marsh, Aug 22, 1863, Marsh Papers, Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 55.

17. (Peabody to retire): George Peabody, Scotland, to J. S. Morgan, Aug. 13, 1864, Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

18. (History of George Peabody & Co.): [Morgan Grenfell & Co. Ltd.]. Kathleen Burk, Morgan Grenfell 1838-1988: The Biography of a Merchant Bank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). oVincent P. Carosso, The Morgans, Private International Bankers, 1854-1913. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). oSteven Prokesch,
"Germans to Buy Morgan Grenfell," New York Times, Nov. 28, 1989, p. 29, continued under title, "Deutsche Bank to Acquire Morgan Grenfell, " p. 42.

19. (O. C. Marsh on George Peabody's retirement): O. C. Marsh, University of Breslau, German, to George Peabody, Oct. 21, 1864, in Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

20. (O. C. Marsh at the University Breslau): O. C. Marsh, Berlin, to George Peabody, June 13, 1864, Marsh Papers,. Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 59-60.

21. (Marsh's books and fossils arrived from Europe weighing 2.5 tons): Schuchert and LeVene, p. 67.

22. (On Thurlow Weed): Weed Collection, University of Rochester Library Archives. oThurlow Weed Barnes. Memoir of Thurlow Weed by his Grandson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884). oThurlow Weed. Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, ed. by Harriet A. Weed. 2 Vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884).

23. (On Robert C. Winthrop): Robert Charles Winthrop. Eulogy, Pronounced at the Funeral of George Peabody, at Peabody, Massachusetts, 8 February, 1870 (Boston: John Wilson & Son, 1870), pp. 3-11. oRobert Charles Winthrop. Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1879), II, pp. 312-315. oJabez Lamar Monroe Curry. A Brief Sketch of George Peabody and a History of the Peabody Education Fund Through Thirty Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1898. Reprinted New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), p. 18.

24. (Oct. 8, 1866, founding letter): Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Archives, Harvard University. oHarvard University. Endowment Funds of Harvard University, June 30, 1947 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), pp. 363-365. oBoston Daily Advertiser, Oct. 19, 1866, p. 2, c. 3-4. oTheodore Hall. "A Harvard Garner, the Peabody Museum," Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 149 (March 1932), pp. 276-297. oRoland B. Dixon. "Anthropology, 1866-1929," The Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot 1869-1929. Ed. by Samuel Eliot Morrison (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1930), Chap. X, pp. 202-215. (R.C. Winthrop on Peabody Museum of Harvard): R. C. Winthrop Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. (R.C. Winthrop consults Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz): Robert Charles Winthrop. Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1879), II, pp. 312-315.

25. (James Walker on value of Peabody Museum of Harvard): Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings. Vol. 9 (1866-1867), pp. 359-367.

26. (Thwing, Ingersoll, and Willoughby on the historical importance of the Peabody Museum of Harvard): Charles Franklin Thwing. "Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Cambridge, Massachusetts," Harpers New Weekly Magazine, Vol. 63 (Oct. 1881), pp. 670-677. oErnest Ingersoll. "The Peabody Museum of American Archaeology," Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 10 (Nov. 1885), pp. 474-487. oCharles G. Willoughby. "The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University," Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 124 (June 1923), pp. 495-503.

27. (On F. W. Putnam's historical importance): Frederic Ward Putnam. The Archaeological Reports of Frederic Ward Putnam: Selected from the Annual Reports of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 1875-1903 (New York: AMS Press, 1973, reprint), IX-XIII.

28. (Brew on the historical importance of anthropology at the Peabody Museum of Harvard): John O. Brew, ed. One Hundred Years of Anthropology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).

29. (O. C. Marsh's proof of pre-Columbian American origin of the horse): Cyril Bibby. Scientist Extraordinary: The Life and Scientific Work of Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1972). oMartin J.S. Rudwick. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. 2nd ed. (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1976), pp. 252-255. oBruce J. MacFadden. Fossil Horses: Systematics, Paleobiology, and Evolution of the Family Equidae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 29-33.

30. (O. C. Marsh's contributions at Yale): O.C. Marsh Papers, Yale University Archives. oSchuchert and LeVene. oErnest Willoughby. "The Peabody Museum at New Haven," Science, Vol. 5, No. 103 (Jan. 23, 1885), pp. 67-72 . oMark J. McCarren. The Scientific Contributions of Othniel Charles Marsh: Birds, Bones, and Brontotheres (New Haven: Peabody Museum of Natural History, 1993). oRobert M. Schoch. "The Paleontological Collections of the Peabody Museum of Natural History," Fossils Quarterly (Fall/Winter 1984-1985), pp. 4-14. oCarl O. Dunbar. "Recollections on the Renaissance of Peabody Museum Exhibits, 1939-1959," Discovery, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall 1976), pp. 17-35. oHugh S. McIntosh "Marsh and the Dinosaurs," Discovery, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1965), pp. 31-37. oRobert Plate. The Dinosaur Hunters (New York: David McKay Co., 1964). o"Dedication of the Peabody Museum: Simple Exercises Mark the Laying of the Cornerstone of New Home for Notable Collections," Yale Alumni Weekly (July 6, 1923), pp. 1249-1250. oEllen T. Drake, "Some Notes on the Beginnings of Peabody Museum," Discovery, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Fall 1966), pp. 33-35. o"Carl O. Dunbar 1891-1979: An Appreciation," Discovery, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1979), p. 44.

31. (S.W. Williston critical of O. C. Marsh): Elizabeth Noble Shor. Fossils and Flies: The Life of a Compleat Scientist Samuel Wendell Williston (1851-1918) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), pp. 3-7, 22-23, 64-71, 96-98, 117-123.

32. (Marsh-Cope rivalry): Robert T. Bakker. The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction (New York: William Morrow, 1986), pp. 37-41, 164-165, 206-213, 298-305, 365-369 . Peter J. Bowler. Fossils and Press: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), pp. 130-141. oEdwin Harris Colbert. Dinosaurs: Their Discovery and Their World (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961), pp. 28-37, 70-71, 86-87, 118-119, 146-149, 277. oEdwin Harris Colbert. Men and Dinosaurs: The Search in Field and Laboratory (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 55, 66-97, 144-145. oEdwin Harris Colbert. The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries (New York: Dover Publications, 1984). oEdwin Harris Colbert. Dinosaurs: An Illustrated History (Maplewood, N.J.: Hammond, 1985), pp. 24-27. oAdrian J. Desmond. The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs: A Revolution in Paleontology (New York: Dial Press, 1976), pp. 30-37, 106-117, 138-139, 174-177. oDiagram Group, A Field Guide to Dinosaurs (New York: Avon, 1983), pp. 52-53, 146-147, 210-211, 218-223, 246-249. oThomas F. Glick, ed. Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1972), pp. 192-213. oStephen Jay Gould. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), pp. 86-93, 139, 160-163, 170-177, 416-433. oRobert West Howard. The Dawnseekers: The First History of American Paleontology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). oBernard Jaffe. "Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899)," Men of Science in America: The Role of Science in the Growth of Our Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), pp. 279-306, 565 , pp. 279-306, 565. oUrl Lanham. The Bone Hunters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. ix-xi, 79-164, 182-183, 218-267. oBruce J. MacFadden. Fossil Horses: Systematics, Paleobiology, and Evolution of the Family Equidae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 29-33. oJohn H. Ostrom, and John S. McIntosh. Marsh's Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. v-vi, 6-11, 28-43. oNathan Reingold, ed. Science in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 236-241. oMartin J.S. Rudwick. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. 2nd ed. (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1976), pp. 252-255. oElizabeth Noble Shor. Fossils and Flies: The Life of a Compleat Scientist Samuel Wendell Williston (1851-1918) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), pp. 3-7, 22-23, 64-71, 96-98, 117-123. oGeorge Gaylord Simpson. George Gaylord Simpson: Concession to the Improbable, An Unconventional Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 16-17, 40-41, 130-131, 270-271. oTime-Life Books. Emergence of Man: Life Before Man (New York: Time-Life Books, 1972), pp. 75-83.

33. (Research on George Peabody since 1953): Franklin Parker. "George Peabody, Founder of Modern Philanthropy" (Ed.D., George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, 1956), 3 vols. oFranklin Parker. George Peabody, a Biography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995 rev. and update of 1971 ed.). oFranklin Parker, issue author. "The Legacy of George Peabody: Special Bicentenary Issue," Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Fall 1994), 210 pp. (Reprint of author's 22 articles on George Peabody, with annotations in Current Index to Journals in Education, Vol. 70, No. 1 [July 1995], pp. 149-151).
 
About the authors: 24 book titles of Franklin and Betty J. Parker are listed in:
http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P

For writings by the Parkers in blogs, enter bfparker in
technorati.com or in google.com or in any other search engine.

Note:  Explanation of authors' detailed knowledge of and appreciation for George Peabody (1795-1869):  Authors attended Graduate School, George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, TN, adjoining Vanderbilt University  (renamed Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, July 1, 1979) summers 1951, 1952, through Aug. 1956.  Betty earned an M.A., English; Franklin a doctorate in education, Aug. 1956.  His dissertation based on George Peabody papers in U.S. and British libraries entitled:  "George Peabody, Founder of Modern Philanthropy," are the basis for his Peabody publications listed in 33. above.

End of Manuscript.  Corrections, questions:  bfparker@frontiernet.net


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Saturday, July 04, 2009 

Category: School, College, Greek
“Civil Rights: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., & Myles Horton in Tennessee,” by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net


May 17, 2009 marks the 55th year since passage of the Brown v. Board of Education, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared separate white-black schools unequal and unconstitutional. In Brown's wake came the rising crescendo of the civil rights movement.


It is interesting to connect this early movement for racial justice with Tennessee where the authors live.


In 1955, after a long day cleaning well-to-do Montgomery, AL, homes, Rosa Parks boarded a nearly empty bus which quickly filled. She refused to move to the back of the bus, was arrested, jailed, and fined.


Rosa Parks belonged to a Montgomery Baptist Church whose new pastor was 26-year-old Atlanta-born Boston University-educated Martin Luther King, Jr. The Rev. King agreed with the previous pastor's and congregation's earlier decision to speak truth to power should a racial incident occur. Deciding to boycott the city buses, they held out for a full year. Foot-weary but soon aided by black and sympathetic white carpools, they finally won.


What ties Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. to middle Tennessee is Myles Horton's Highlander Adult Education Center. Well before Brown v. Board of Education Highlander, the only place in Tennessee where the races could discuss common problems, began at Monteagle, Grundy County, TN (1932-61), was closed by powerful white supremacy forces, reappeared in Knoxville (1961-71), and continues at New Market near Knoxville. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, and many other civil rights leaders at Highlander seminars learned peaceful protest techniques and ways to organize citizenship schools for voting rights.


Rosa Parks said that she first learned at Highlander to trust whites, that without Highlander experience she would not have had the courage to challenge Montgomery bus segregation.


Born in west Tennessee and a graduate of old Cumberland University, young Myles Horton organized vacation Bible schools for the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, in which he was raised. At Ozone, TN, he first got parents of his Bible school children to talk about their problems. He shared his dream of an adult education center with Crossville, TN's Congregational pastor, the Rev. Abram Nightingale, who encouraged Horton to study the social gospel at New York's Union Theological Seminary. Further study at the University of Chicago and a visit to Denmark's adult folk schools led Horton to found Highlander.


With a tiny staff, he trained coal mine union leaders (remember the 1930s Wilder, TN, and other mine strikes?), then trained textile worker union members (remember the Norma Rae film with Sally Field?), and then trained black citizenship school teachers to help unschooled black people to read and write and so qualify to vote.


Highlander used discussion, drama, and music to mellow differences, find common ground, and lift spirits. "We Shall Overcome," the freedom song heard round the world, began as an African-American folk song, became a Black Baptist hymn, and was reborn at Highlander where folk singers Zilphia Horton (Myles Horton's wife), Guy Carawan, and Pete Seeger made it world famous.


Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968; Myles Horton died in 1990. Rosa Parks died in 2005.


It is interesting to recall that what drew these three and others together to foment the early civil rights movement was Myles Horton's Highlander Adult Education Center in Tennessee.


END. bfparker@frontiernet.net

Franklin Parker's, George Peabody, A Biography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, Feb. 1995, 278 pp., revised, 12 photos, is out of print, but can be read freely as an E-book by accessing:
http://books.google.com/ and typing in Source:
George Peabody, a Biography, by Franklin Parker.
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Saturday, July 04, 2009 
"James Michener (1907-97): Making of a Famous Writer & Novelist," by Franklin Parker and Betty Parker, frontiernet.net

Note:  This imaginative dialogue explores the circumstances that made James Albert Michener a writer of world renown,  a best selling novelist, and a philanthropist of note.

Questioner (hereafter Q): Mr. M, you grew up an orphan in Doylestown, Pa., north of Philadelphia, and were raised by a foster mother. True?

Michener (hereafter M): What I knew growing up was that my widowed mother, Mrs. Mabel M, took in orphans. My father Edwin M died before I was born. We were Quakers. My older brother was Robert. We were a poor but happy family.

Q: You were 19, a freshman at Swarthmore College, when you were first told you were an illegitimate child. Who told you?

M: An uncle, Edwin Michener's brother, told me that Edwin Michener died five years before I was born.

Q: What did Mabel Michener say?

M: That she took me in when I was a few weeks old without a name or birth certificate. She raised me as her son. Others later told me different versions of my birth. I never investigated them. Mabel Michener was the only mother I knew and loved.

Q: She received little charitable help for her foster home.  She took in washing, sewed for people, and cleaned houses for a realtor in order to live rent-free. What about when she was sick and couldn't feed you?

M: She left us temporarily with her sister whose husband worked at the Doylestown, Penn.  poorhouse, a dismal place.

Q: Any bad memories of the poorhouse?

M: I remember one old man who committed suicide there. I vowed to do anything to keep from ending up in such a miserable place.

Q: At night Mabel Michener read aloud Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, The Iliad, and other poems. Her brother, your uncle, brought home an old Victrola and classical records so you would have great music in your home.

M: Yes.  Mabel Michener never earned enough to buy herself new clothes. But she shared with us great books, beautiful music, and love.

Q: You early wandered far from home. Was it because you were curious about people and places?

M: I hitched barge rides on the Delaware River. I hitchhiked out of state with a friend or alone. I sent postcards home saying that I was o.k. By age 18 I had hitchhiked to 45 states.

Q: You received an anonymous letter when a newspaper article appeared about you and your first book.  That letter stated:  "Dear Mr. 'M'???? You don't know who I am but I sure know who you are. You aren't a Michener and never were. You're a fraud to go around using that good name…. [Y]ou ought to be ashamed of yourself…. I'll be watching you, [signed] A real Michener."  Were you hurt by that letter?

M: I never bothered to find out who sent that letter and later hate mail.

Q: Male mentors who kept you out of trouble included the two men in Doylestown who told you that the local poolroom was no place for you.  And George C. Murray, a roofer, started a boys' club where you played basketball. And high school coach Allen Gardy encouraged your basketball skill.

M: Yes, these men kept me and other boys out of trouble. Sports, school, and after school jobs kept me busy.

Q: Margaret Mead the anthropologist also grew up in Doylestown, Penn., correct?

M: Yes.  She and I had the first library cards at the new public library. Once we had read all the children's books the librarian let us take out adult books.

Q: Here’s how your Doylestown classmate Lester Trauch described you as a school boy: "[Jim Michener] was the poorest boy in school, but the brightest boy. He wore sneakers so worn his toes stuck out. He was not one of the gang, liked to be by himself, was obsessed with basketball, and never wasted a minute. He walked to school reading his lessons; read in the halls between classes. When the history teacher asked a question, Michener was the only one [who knew] the answer. He had done all this extra research. The teacher was fascinated, but we [kids] just laughed."

M: Mabel Michener kept me and my second hand clothes clean. Ridicule sometimes hurt but I put it behind me. Basketball and my sports articles helped. Our high school yearbook, The Torch, listed me as "the most talkative…most prompt…most original student."

Q: Besides many after school jobs, you were also a plumber's apprentice for a time and good at that job.  But your uncle said: "Jim, you are going to be something better than a plumber." How did you get to Swarthmore College?

M: My Latin teacher recommended me and helped me win a competitive four year scholarship during 1925-29. I focused on study, books, and reading. For me, seeking independence, Swarthmore College was an ideal college.

Q: What pleased you most at Swarthmore?

M: Its Honors Program. I pursued my own last two-year self-directed program. I read English and American literary classics and wrote weekly papers.

Q: You worked in the Swarthmore College Chautauqua traveling adult program which offered public lectures, operas, and plays?

M: Yes, the summer of 1928. I did various jobs and acted in plays. I worked nights at a Swarthmore hotel, the Strath Haven Inn, as watchman and switchboard operator. I worked summers at a Philadelphia amusement park, observed people, and saw carnival chicanery of all kinds.

Q: You graduated from Swarthmore in June 1929, just before the Great Depression of the 1930s?

M: I then taught English at a Quaker preparatory school, the Hill School, in Pottstown, Penn. I taught there two years, 1929-31, read a lot and dreamed of becoming a writer.

Q: Why did you leave the Hill School?

M: Swarthmore College awarded me its Lippincott Fellowship for study abroad.

Q: You crossed the Atlantic and enrolled at St. Andrews University, Scotland.

M: I saw much poverty and many people on the dole in London, Glasgow, and Dundee. I traveled alone or with student groups in Europe.

Q: You toured Italy to study art, learned about Mussolini's fascist regime, and toured Spain, France, Belgium, and other European countries.

M: I observed at first hand early stirrings of fascism, nazism, communism, and I heard third world students complain about their colonial masters. I wasn't surprised when colonialism collapsed after World War II.

Q: You went to a remote Scottish island, Barra, in the Hebrides to collect old Celtic folk songs and legends. You traveled in Spain with bullfighters who performed in various towns.

M: Yes.  Then, a St. Andrews classmate told me about a Dutch freighter shipping company which sometimes hired students in exchange for a berth. I applied, was accepted, worked on a cargo ship in the Mediterranean, and earned British merchant marine status.

Q: Your two years abroad heightened your wanderlust. What did you find on your return to the U.S.A. in the summer of 1933?

M: I saw apple sellers and soup lines in New York City.  At 26, I taught English at the George School, a Quaker secondary school in Newtown, Penn., not far from Doylestown.

 Q: You married Patti Koon while at the George School?

M: I met her while taking summer courses at the University of Virginia. We were married on July 27, 1935. We went together to the George School.

Q: Why did you and your wife, Patti Koon,  leave the George School, June 1936, for the Colorado State College of Education at Greeley?

M: To teach social studies in Colorado State College’s High School and to study for a master's degree, which I received in June 1937. Colorado State was a progressive education college. It emphasized democratic values and the school's responsibility to help improve society. I also taught four college courses.

Q: One Greeley, Colorado, colleague wrote of your teaching there: "[Michener] was one of the most dynamic educators I have known…. He stimulated youth to comprehend interrelationship[s] among all fields of knowledge."  Please explain how this helped you.

M: The social studies looked at societal problems from historical, geographical, anthropological, and other viewpoints. I used this all-around approach in my 1959 novel Hawaii. At Greeley I learned of the opening of the American West, which I told in my 1974 novel, Centennial.

Q: During the 1936-41 Greeley years you wrote 15 journal articles, edited one social studies book, co-authored another, and wrote an essay, "The Beginning Teacher," for a third book. Pretty good for a young educator. Did you write any fiction?

M: One short story, "Who is Virgil T. Fry?," in Clearing House, October 1941, a journal for high school teachers. It was about a teacher shunned by colleagues, fired by the school board, but beloved by students because he inspired them to learn.

Q: Why did you leave Greeley? First for Harvard University and then for Macmillan Publishing Co.?

M: I took a leave of absence to lecture on the social studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education and to pursue a Ph.D. degree in Education, which I did not complete. I returned to Greeley in 1941. Macmillan's high school textbook editor, visiting Greeley, wanted me to work for him. Editing and publishing, I thought, would get me closer to writing.

Q: You were at Macmillan while Europe was plunged into World War II and Pearl Harbor was attacked. Your wife, Patti Koon M, joined the WACs. You entered the U.S. Navy.

M: I enlisted as an ordinary seaman in October 1942. In early 1943, at age 36, I was commissioned a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, received training at Dartmouth College, had assignments in the U.S., but kept asking to go to a combat zone.

Q: You were with a small military group which was transported to the South Pacific on a merchant marine ship. You never saw the captain, who was rumored to be drunk and in hiding. The unionized merchant marines ran the ship, ate the best food, and used most of the water. What happened?

M: One of our no-nonsense army captains at gun point forced our access to edible food and sufficient water. Before landing we ransacked the missing captain's quarters. My irascible bunkmate said: Michener, you talk about wanting to travel. I am typing out orders authorizing your official travel anywhere in the South Pacific, signed and stamped with an official seal.

Q: Did the forged papers work?

M: Surprisingly well, until I later got other bona fide U.S. Navy orders.

Q: One of your Navy assignments was to thank with gifts some Melanesian men who had rescued some downed American pilots near a Pacific island. Getting to the appropriate island, you explained to a group of Melanesians that you were looking for these men. They laughed and pushed forward an older girl who had seen the downed plane, dragged the Americans out, and had hidden and fed them. Specifically, describe your mission to the Pacific Island of Bora Bora?

M: Military personnel are routinely returned to the U.S. after stipulated months in combat areas. On Bora Bora some enlisted men refused to go home. Others threatened mutiny if they were forced to leave. I was ordered to investigate this unusual situation.

Q: You described Bora Bora as the most beautiful island in the world and as close to paradise as men in this world ever get.  You said that it was inhabited by beautiful Polynesian girls, that there was a party every night. There was dancing till dawn. There was good island food and a regular supply ship from the States once a month.

M: The base was efficiently run during the day. At night a skeleton crew took over. Men left the base by truck or jeep, dropping off one by one at the palm huts of their lovely Polynesian lady friends. Relationships were formed, children were born, all hush hush. I had to report on this sensitive situation.

Q: You traveled by Navy planes or ships to 49 South Pacific islands, covered about 150,000 miles, landed on hastily built air strips a few days after heavy fighting subsided. What made you finally write a draft of your first book of fiction, Tales of the South Pacific?

M: Returning in the dark from a routine mission my pilot kept missing the poorly lit New Caledonia air strip. We braced for a crash landing, just made it, and were badly shaken. If I had died, I would have left nothing behind. I was approaching 40, mind you. That near crash prompted me to draft South Pacific stories running through my mind.

Q: Your first draft was written on the island of Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides, south of Guadalcanal, in a Quonset hut, by pecking at a typewriter with your two index fingers. What was the story line?

M: Tales of the South Pacific consisted of 18 loosely connected stories about the comedy, boredom, shenanigans of Navy life on a Pacific island between military battles. The stories showed the interplay of Navy men, Navy nurses, and conniving natives; the funny aspects of military planes, jeeps, bulldozers, canned goods imposed on simple people living on beautiful islands.

Q: You sent your draft to Macmillan, whose chief editor awaited your return. You delayed your return for a last tour of duty as Naval historian in the South Pacific. Did Macmillan accept your manuscript?

M: Yes, I was discharged from the U.S. Navy with the rank of Lieutenant Commander and returned to work at Macmillan in December 1945.

Q: What happened to your wife, Patti Koon Michener?

M: We did not live together after the war. She returned to her South Carolina hometown. I lived in a Greenwich Village apartment, in Manhattan, New York City, near Macmillan, where I edited textbooks and in spare time revised my Tales of the South Pacific.

Q: Tales was to be published in 1946 but publication was delayed until February 1947, three years after you started it. Why the delay?

 M: So that two of the book’s 18 connected short stories could be published in the Saturday Evening Post in December 1946 and in January 1947. Had publication not been delayed to 1947, Tales would never have won the Pulitzer Prize.

Q: Tales was little reviewed except by New York Times book reviewer Orville Prescott, who praised it. He wrote: "This long book of 18…linked short stories is, I am convinced, a substantial achievement which will make Mr. Michener famous…. " Did your foster mother, Mabel Michener, know of your success?

M: Sadly, when I came home from the war she was senile, did not know me, did not know I wrote a book. She died in March 1946.

Q: You worked at Macmillan and in your spare time wrote your second book, an autobiographical novel, The Fires of Spring. Why were you slow to leave Macmillan for full time writing?

M: A survey showed me the great odds against freelance writing: one in 400 written novels is published; one of every 2,000+ magazine articles submitted is accepted and receives payment; the average full time novelist earned $1,800 a year. So many, many people are trying to write the great American novel.

Q: Then, on May 3, 1948, the Pulitzer Prize miracle happened.

M: I was at Macmillan editing a geography textbook with my senior colleague. The phone rang. He answered, listened, hung up, and said, "That was the Associated Press. Tales of the South Pacific just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction."

Q: You had no idea Tales was being considered.  You thought the phone call was a mistake. Why do you think your book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction?

M: I later heard this story:  that the Pulitzer selection chairman, New York Times correspondent Arthur Krock, received a phone call from Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She was Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, wife of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the matron of Washington, D.C. society. She asked Arthur Krock which 1947 novel was being considered. When told, she said: it does not compare to Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. Krock immediately put copies of Tales into the hands of his committee members.

Q: Arthur Krock later wrote: "I gave my reasons [for nominating Tales] and the Board accepted them…. That prize initiated the public and critical awareness of Michener that assured his subsequent literary prominence and success."

M: Much later, I met Alice Roosevelt Longworth at a swank dinner. She said: You certainly did well with that prize we gave you. You didn't let us down. It was daring of Krock to give you that award. Awards should be given to people at the start of their careers, not at the end. How can we be sure who will be a producer and who not? Thank you for making our gamble succeed.

Q: You’ve written that in 1946 Tales would have lost to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. In 1948 it would have lost to James Gould Cozzens' Guard of Honor. It could only win in 1947 and then only because Alice Roosevelt Longworth intervened.  How was Tales chosen as the source for the Broadway musical, South Pacific?

M: MGM movie studio heads saw no story line in Tales. The story reader who had recommended it to MGM told stage designer Jo Mielziner that Tales had stage possibilities. Jo Mielziner got composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II to read the book. They liked it and turned for help to stage director Joshua Logan and producer Leland Hayward, who cast Enzio Pinza and Mary Martin.

Q: South Pacific was a spirited musical and a compelling drama of U.S. sailors and Seabees awaiting a major battle against the Japanese on a South Sea island. There was the love affairs of French planter Enzio Pinza with Navy nurse Mary Martin, and a Navy lieutenant with a Tonkenese girl. The action was rowdy, romantic, and tragic.

M: The music was uplifting; the songs magnificent: Imagine Enzio Pinza's, "Some Enchanted Evening." And Mary Martin's, "I'm Going to Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair." And "Bali Ha'i. Come back, Come back, to Bali Ha'i," that haunting melody that evoked the sun-setting beauty of the Pacific Islands.  South Pacific had everything, even "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught," pleading with adults not to pass on their prejudices to their children.

Q: Rodgers and Hammerstein urged you to invest in the show as an angel. You had little money, had married again, and were building a home. So they lent you money to buy 6% interest in the show. South Pacific ran for 1,925 performances, almost five years, and earned you about $10,000 annually. Now what about your second wife, Vange Nord?

M: We met at a New York City party. She worked in New York City as a researcher and wanted to write. We were married on September 2, 1948. I worked at Macmillan three days a week and wrote the rest of the time. Vange Nord supervised the building of our new home in Pipersville, Pa., near Doylestown.

Q: Why was South Pacific so phenomenally successful?

M: Americans like war-inspired dramas: There were Floradora after the Spanish American War; What Price Glory? and All Quiet on the Western Front after World War I; Mister Roberts and South Pacific after World War II.

Q: Your literary agent Helen Strauss wrote about you: "…[Michener] is a man of many moods and a loner, and his interests are varied. One might be put off by his reticence, but his modesty and humility are genuine."

M: My great literary agent Helen Strauss asked Holiday magazine editors to finance my 8-month 1949 return to the South Pacific for an article series about Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand. Random House published the article series as Return to Paradise, which was made into two motion pictures, one with Gary Cooper, the other with Paul Newman. She arranged for me another late summer 1950 trip to write about Asia for Life magazine.

Q: Your Voice of Asia, published in late 1951, was selected by the Literary Guild in 1952 and translated into 53 languages. Why this public interest in Asia?

M: The U.S. and USSR competed to win Asian loyalties. I wanted to write fiction but Strauss arranged Cold War reportorial assignments for me. I went to Asia again the second half of 1952.

Q: Strauss also put you in touch with Reader's Digest founder DeWitt Wallace?

M: Yes, I met Mr. and Mrs. DeWitt Wallace in the summer of 1952. We talked about the Korean War. I analyzed it for them. We liked each other.

Q: The Reader's Digest, one of the world's most popular magazines, had 12 million circulation in the U.S. plus 37 foreign language editions. Its formula was: faith in God, family unity, patriotism, and the work ethic. Your biographer Hayes wrote: "If ever a magazine was designed for a writer, the Reader's Digest was designed for James A. Michener: teacher, patriot, student of the world, and optimist. The combination of magazine and writer was a perfect fit; one that has been rarely repeated in the history of publishing."

M: DeWitt Wallace wanted me to write exclusively for the Reader's Digest. Helen Strauss said that a freelance writer had to be completely free.

[Continued as James Albert Michener (1907-97): Novelist, Part 2 of 2 Parts." Send comments, corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net Addendum: 24 of Franklin and Betty J. Parker’s book titles  are listed in: http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P For their writings in blog form, enter    bfparker   in google.com  or in any other search engine.]

 Concluding 2 of 2 Parts. James Albert M (1907-97):  U.S. Writer-Novelist, by Franklin Parker and Betty Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Q: DeWitt Wallace then made you one of the most generous offers in publishing history.  What was that offer?

M:  He told me:  You can go anywhere in the world you want to go.  You can write anything you want to write.  We'll pay all your expenses, no matter where you go or what you do.  You let us have first shot at what you've written.  If we cannot use it, you can sell it elsewhere and you won't owe us a penny.

Q:  Besides factual writing about the Korean War for Reader's Digest you wrote a novel, The Bridges of Toko'ri, based on a real incident.  It was published in Life magazine, then as a Random House book, and filmed with William Holden. What was the story line?

M:  A World War II U.S. Navy Reserve pilot, happy with his family and civilian job, is brought back to fly a jet fighter in Korea.  His mission is to bomb four vital Communist bridges in a narrow ravine at Toko-ri.  He knows he is a sitting duck for enemy guns but executes the mission to defend American freedom.

Q:  You narrated "Appointment in Asia," a weekly half hour TV program for the State Department, were advisor to the Asia Foundation, and were asked to write about Asian problems for various agencies.  Did your wife, Vange Nord M, travel with you?

M:  Less and less and then not at all.  She wanted a writing career of her own and a husband to help her.  I was an absent husband constantly writing his next book.  She asked for a divorce, which came in January 1955.

Q:  Your 1955 novel Sayonara was timely, about interracial marriage, GIs and Japanese girls, written just before you married your Japanese-American third wife.  Where and when did you meet Mari Yoriko Sabusawa?

M:  At a Chicago luncheon, 1954.  For Life magazine I interviewed a GI and his Tokyo-born war bride living in Chicago.  At the luncheon Mari defended American-Japanese marriages, saying that most such marriages do succeed.

Q:  Mari was born in Colorado, 1920, of Japanese immigrants.  The family moved to California.   After Pearl Harbor, the family was interned.  A relocation plan for Japanese American students placed Mari in Antioch College, Ohio, where she received her degree.  She then translated Japanese propaganda for a U. S. intelligence service.

M:  She was editor of the American Library Association's Bulletin in Chicago when we met in 1954.  We were married October 23, 1955 and had 39 glorious years together.

Q:  Your biographer Hayes described her as follows: Mari regarded marriage to writer Michener as her career.  She cared about his peace of mind.  To see Jim Michener you first had to penetrate her protective wall….  She was his housekeeper, cook, secretary, travel agent, librarian, valet, hostess, chauffeur, and accountant. She freed him to work uninterrupted.  He cherished her….  Mr. Michener, how were you and Mari involved in the October 1956 Hungarian revolt against the USSR?  Why did you write The Bridge at Andau, 1957?

M:  I was in Europe in 1956 with Mari.  The Reader's Digest editor cabled me to cover the Hungarian revolt.  I saw it as a harbinger of things to come.  Soviet economics did not work.  The USSR controlled Eastern Europe by force.  On October 23, 1956, young Budapest dissidents, armed with sticks, stones, and Molotov cocktails, challenged Soviet tanks.  Soviet reinforcements crushed the revolt, killed 80,000 Hungarians, forced 20,000 to flee, most of them over a bridge at Andau on the Austrian border.  Mari, in Vienna, 50 miles away, made our home a way station for escaping Hungarians.  I interviewed hundreds of them and helped some find residence in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Q:  Your biographer Hayes wrote this of your Hungarian experience: …"Michener patrolled the border alongside ministers, rabbis, fellow journalists, and the interpreters who helped him interview refugees as they crossed the rickety wooden  footpath…near Andau.  Hundreds…who crossed the bridge received a card bearing Michener's address…and the promise of a hot meal…in exchange for their stories….  Many…wept for…their parents, children, countrymen…[left behind]….  Michener…had never witnessed an event more brutal…."

M:  World editions of Reader's Digest, March 1957, published a condensed version of The Bridge at Andau.  Random House gave its profits to Hungarian relief.  My royalties went to the Academy of Arts in Honolulu. 

Q:  How did you feel about The Bridge at Andau?

M:  It was a satisfying blow against Communism.  I then determined to write epic novels, the first about Hawaii.  In 1958 Mari and I moved to Waikiki.

Q:  The initial outline of your novel Hawaii shows its large scope from 1050 A.D. to 1954.  You described minutely each incoming group: Polynesians, Japanese, and Filipinos through family stories, by generations, each a short novel in itself.  Through successive characters you show the full range of Hawaiian history.  Mr. Michener, why was your novel about Hawaii timely?

M: Hawaii, like America, was a melting pot settled by immigrants.  It was a bridge to Asia.  It was ripe for statehood.  It had little crime and good schools.  It paid more in federal taxes than ten states.  Hawaii was published just before statehood, rode a crest of publicity, and was number three among best selling1959 novels.

Q:  A Saturday Review writer recorded this: "Hawaii is…a masterful job of research, an absorbing performance of story telling, and a monumental account of the islands from geologic birth to sociological emergence as the newest, and perhaps the most interesting of the United States."  Your biographer Hayes quoted you as saying: "With Hawaii  I finally found great faith in myself as a writer…."  Mr. Michener, why did you enter politics in the 1960s?

M:  I was chairman of the Bucks County, Pa., committee to elect John F. Kennedy in 1960.  My mistake was to run in 1962 as a Democratic candidate for Congress.  My wise wife, Mari, kept saying, "Don't do it, don't do it."  I lost and went back to writing books.

Q:  What inspired your novel, The Source, published in 1965?

M:  I was in the Mediterranean in April 1963 when I met the future mayor of Jerusalem.  He asked me to write a book about Israel similar to my book on Hawaii.

Q:  You said it should be written by a Jew but you then and there outlined such a novel for him.  He couldn't find a Jewish writer and urged you to do it. You said you would do it if you received bibliographic help.

M: Mari and I moved to Israel in May 1963, read hundreds of book, and pondered how to capture the Holy Land's long, tempestuous history.  I did it through one archaeological dig, or Tell, at Makor, which means "source," sifting 15 layers of civilization through fictional families, showing the socio-economic-religious interaction of Jews, Christians, and Arabs, through peace and war from Biblical times to modern Israel.

Q:  Mr. Michener, our time is almost gone.  We've traced you to age 60.  You lived 30 more years, wrote more books, had quadruple bypass heart surgery, a hip replacement, and 4 years of dialysis, as listed in the Chronology below.  Mr. Michener, you gave millions of readers pleasure, information, and hope.  Your tax advisor estimated that the U. S. spent $11,000 to educate you.  You repaid society by paying the U.S. Government over $68 million in income taxes.  You and Mari (she died in 1994) donated over $100 million to educational institutions.

M:  I believe in paying taxes.  It’s the price we pay for civilization.  I tried to pay back my country for the schooling it gave me.  I tried to repay the public for buying my books.

Q:  Well done, Mr. Michener.  You did well for an orphan.  Sleep peacefully in your Austin, Texas grave.

Selected Works about James Albert Michener:

Becker, George J.  James A. Michener.  New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.

Groseclose, Karen, and David A. Groseclose.  James A. Michener: A Bibliography.  Austin, Texas:  State House Press, 1996.

Hayes, John P.  James A. Michener.  Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1984.

Michener, James A.  The World is My Home: A Memoir.  New York:  Fawcett Columbine, 1992.

Severson, Marilyn S.  James A Michener.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Internet

Note:  A computer internet search under James Albert Michener (1907-79) using any major search engine (http://www.google.com   or others) will uncover a wealth of pertinent material. 

James Albert M (1907-97) Chronology of Career, Published Books, Honors

1907, allegedly born February 3, 1907, an orphan, raised in foster home run by Mabel (Haddon) Michener (d. 1946), Doylestown, Pa. (Bucks County).

1921-25, Doylestown High School, Associate Editor of Torch, 2 years; Ed. in chief, 1 year.  Basketball.  Class President.

1925-29, Swarthmore College, 4-year scholarship, Contributions to "Portfolio."  Graduated with B.A., English & History, and Highest Honors.  1928, summer, traveled with Swarthmore Chautauqua group.

1929-31, teacher, The Hill School, Pottstown, Pa. (Quaker preparatory school).

1931-33, awarded Swarthmore's Joshua Lippincott Fellowship for study/travel abroad.  Studied at St. Andrews University, Scotland.  Traveled widely in Europe. 

1935, Married Patti Koon (divorced 1948).

1933-36, teacher, The George School, Newtown, Pa. (Quaker preparatory school).

1936-39, Associate Professor, Colorado State College of Education, Greeley. M.A. in 1937.  1938-40, Co-founded Angells Club, a discussion group with Colorado State College of Education, Greeley faculty, and community members.

1939-40, Visiting lecturer, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University.

1939, Edited The Future of the Social Studies (National Council for the Social Studies).

1940, co-authored The Unit in the Social Studies: Proposals for an Experimental Social Studies Curriculum (Harvard University Press).  Introductory essay, "The Beginning Teacher," 10th Yearbook of the NCSS (Harvard University Press).  15 journal articles published, 1936-41.1940-41, 1946-49, Social Studies editor, Macmillan Publishing Co.

1942-46, U.S. Navy; sent to South Pacific, spring 1944.  1944-46, Naval historian, South Pacific; discharged with rank of Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy.

1947, Tales of the South Pacific, fiction, 18 connected short stories.  Pulitzer Prize.

1948, divorced by Patti Koon, married Vange Nord.

1949, The Fires of Spring, autobiographical novel  (New York:  Random House).  South Pacific, Broadway stage musical.

1951, Return to Paradise, non fiction, on Asian countries.  The Voice of Asia.

1952-70, Roving editor, Readers Digest.

1953, President of the Asia Institute; The Bridges at Toko-Ri, novel about Korea War.

1954, Sayonara, novel about U.S. military-Japanese marriage. The Floating World. 

1955, Divorced by Vange Nord, married Mari Yoriko Sabusawa (1920-94).

1956, Aided Hungarian refugees.

1957, Appointed to Federal Advisory Arts Commission.  The Bridge at Andau, non fiction, about 1956 Hungarian revolt against USSR rule.   Rascals in Paradise.  Selected Writings of James A. Michener.

1958, Overseas Press Club Award for Readers Digest article on Andau (The Bridge at Andau).  The Hokusai Sketchbooks.

1959, Gave collection of Japanese prints to Honolulu Academy of Arts. Hawaii.  Japanese Prints: From the Early Masters to the Modern.

1960, Chairman, Bucks County Citizens for Kennedy.  1961, Report of the County Chairman (Bucks County chairman to elect J.F. Kennedy).  Appointed by Pres. Kennedy to manage U.S. Food for Peace.  Program failed.

1962, Modern Japanese Prints.  Ran and lost as Democratic candidate for Congress from 8th District, Pa.

1963, Caravans, novel.  Helped establish Bucks County Arts Festival.  Joined Americans for Permanent Peace in the Middle East.  Received Einstein Award, Einstein Medical College.

1964, severe heart attack.

1965, The Source, novel about the Holy Land.

1967-68, President, Pennsylvania electoral college. 

1968, Iberia, story about Spain.  Gave collection of contemporary American art to the University of Texas, Austin.

1969, Presidential Lottery.  The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System.  The Quality of Life, essays.

1970, Facing East; the Quality of Life.  Gave $100,000 to Swarthmore College programs for black studies and race relations.  American-Hungarian Studies Award from George Washington University.

1970-74, Member, U.S. Advisory Commission on Information.  Gave $100,000 to Kent State University for arts program.

1971, Kent State: What Happened and Why, factual account. The Drifters, novel.

1972, Accompanied Pres. Richard Nixon to China.

1973, A Michener Miscellany, 1950-1970.  Editor, First Fruits.

1974, Centennial, novel on Colorado and the U.S. West. About Centennial.

1975, Represented Pres. Gerald Ford at Okinawa World Exposition.  Appointed to the Bicentennial Advisory Committee and to Citizens Advisory [U.S.] Stamp Committee.

1976, Sports in America.

1977, Medal of Freedom Award presented by Pres. Gerald Ford (highest award granted U.S. citizen).  TV series programs, "The World of James A. Michener."

1978, Chesapeake, novel on colonial settlement of Maryland.  Recipient of Pennsylvania Society Gold Medal.

1979, The Watermen.  Member of NASA Advisory Council.

1980, The Covenant, novel on South Africa.  The Quality of Life.  Received the Franklin Award and the Spanish Institute Gold Medal.  Gave $500,000 for the University of Iowa Writers Workshop.

1982, Space, novel, story of the U.S. space program.

1983, Collector, Forgers—and a Writer.  Poland, novel.  Testimony.  Member of board for Radio Free Europe.  Honored by the White House Arts Program for his financial assistance to artists.

1984, gave $2 million to Swarthmore College.

1985, Dedication of James A. Michener Arts Center, Bucks County, Pa.  Received Exemplar Award from Central Bucks Chamber of Commerce.  Texas, novel (commissioned to celebrate the state's 75th birthday), covers 450 years of the region's history.

1987, Legacy, novel on the U.S. Constitution on its bicentennial.

1988, Alaska, novel.

1989, Journey,  novel, an excised chapter from Alaska published separately, describing the 2,043-mile trek of 4 explorers across the Canadian Yukon. Caribbean, novel.  Six Days in Havana.

1990, The Eagle and the Raven.  Pilgrimage.

1991, James A. Michener on the Social Studies; The Novel, a novel  Gave $1 million to the University of Texas graduate writing program at the University of Houston.  Gave $5 million to Swarthmore College.  Named to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum Advisory Committee. 

1992, The World is My Home, autobiography.  James A. Michener's Writer's Handbook on the South Pacific, as told by James A. Michener [adaptation of the musical South Pacific], novel.  Mexico, novel.  My Lost Mexico, nonfiction.  Gave $600,000 to the University of Northern Colorado Library.   James A. Michener's Writer's Handbook: Explorations in Writing and Publishing, nonfiction.

1993, Creatures of the Kingdom, novel.  Literary Reflections: Michener on Michener, Hemingway, Capote, and Others, (criticism) 1993.

1994, Mari Michener died.  Recessional, novel about aging.  William Penn.  Pledged $5 million each to art museums in Doylestown, Pa. and Texas.

1995, Miracle in Seville.  Ventures in Editing.

1996, The Genius Belt: The Story of the Arts in Bucks County, nonfiction.  This Noble Land: My Vision for America, nonfiction.  Named Outstanding Philanthropist by the National Society of Fund Raising Executives.

1997, October 16, James Michener died; buried in Austin, Texas.

(Michener received more than 30 honorary doctorates in Humane Letters, Law, Theology, and Science).

END.

Addendum: 24 of Franklin and Betty J. Parker’s book titles  are listed in: http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P

For their writings in blog form, enter    bfparker   in google.com  or in any other search engine.

Send corrections, questions to bfparker@frontiernet.net    END OF MANUSCRIPT.


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Friday, July 03, 2009 
Playwright Arthur Miller's (1915-2005) Life and Influence
by Franklin and Betty J. Parker: bfparker@frontiernet.net

    Arthur Miller died at age 89 on Thursday, Feb. 10, 2005, at his Roxbury, CT. home.  Broadway lights dimmed at curtain time the next evening in his honor.  World press comments poured in, including the following quotes:

Miller's plays…were less elaborate than those of Eugene O'Neill, more approachable than those of Tennessee Williams, and more theatrical than those of Clifford Odets.  His approach to social relevance mirrored that of Henrik Ibsen, but drew from uniquely American stories.  And his plays continue to be rediscovered because they are both universal and timeless.  Tony Vellela, Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 14, 2005.

"With the passing of Arthur Miller goes the last of the great dramatists -- Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Miller -- of the American Century."  John G. Nettles, Pop Matters, Feb. 15, 2005.

"Mr. Miller's death last week meant… the loss of a great public thinker who believed strongly…that the essence of America (its greatness ) was in its promises."  Bob Herbert, New York Times, Feb. 14, 2005.

"[Death of a Salesman] is the great American Domestic Tragedy.  The Crucible is the American Political Tragedy…[which]  he wrote…to protest the horror of the McCarthy era."  David Mamet, Pulitzer winning playwright and screenwriter, New York Times, Feb. 13, 2005.

…"on the strength of his best plays, he seems…destined for immortality." Adam Cohen.  New York Times, Feb. 14, 2005.

Theatergoers who enjoyed his plays will long ponder such platitudes.  Others, less familiar with his plays, will also wonder what made him a playwright, why his best plays were so timely, memorable, had universal appeal, and insightful into our times of trouble from the 1930s Depression to the end of the 20th century.

Miller's four Jewish grandparents and his father Isadore Miller all emigrated to New York City (NYC) from a village in Poland.  His wife was Augustus Barnett, born in NYC, a high school graduate who read books and saw plays.  She married Isadore Miller, who had arrived in NYC from Poland at age six, was unschooled, worked at a sewing machine, yet by hard work and business talent became president of Miltex Coat and Suit Co.  The Millers lived well atop a 6-story apartment building on West 110th Street, facing Central Park.

Arthur Miller, born October 17, 1915, had a brother Kermit, 3 years older, and a younger sister Joan.  The Millers were not strictly observant Jews, yet Jewishness permeated their lives.  Arthur was an indifferent student who preferred sports and bike riding.  He grew lanky, tall, and Lincolnesque like his father.

The stock market crashed on October 24, 1929, when Arthur was 14.  The bankrupt family had to move to cheaper housing near relatives in Brooklyn.  Arthur's father often sat home dazed.  Brother Kermit dropped out of New York University.  For the first time Arthur, a Brooklyn high schooler, heard family arguments over their fallen status.  Early each morning before school, Arthur delivered baked goods.  He worked after school and Saturdays in an auto supply store and drove its delivery truck.

His plays reflect the Depression-era strains and family conflicts he experienced.  He graduated from high school in June 1933.  Poor grades kept him from entering low cost City College of New York.  He applied for a stock clerk job at a large Manhattan auto parts warehouse.  When no response came from his application, he phoned his former auto parts employer, who explained:

"They are Irish Catholic and have not replied because you are Jewish.  I will phone and tell the manager that you know more about auto parts than anyone else they are likely to hire."

Arthur, the only Jew at the auto parts warehouse, striving to fit in, felt the then rampant anti-Semitism.  His later one act play, A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), captures the idiom, life style, and prejudices of his blue collar coworkers.  They lived drab lives, had dead-end jobs, had many mouths to feed, and were resigned to drudgery for bare survival.  But Arthur read books on the subway and at lunch breaks, and he had hopes and aspirations.  Planning for college, Arthur saved $12 of his $15 per week earnings.  Hearing that the University of Michigan had low tuition, he applied, was turned down, not because of anti-Semitism but because of poor high school grades.
 
He worked, saved, and wrote again to the admissions dean: "I am more mature now, work full time, study at night, am saving for college, and I ask to be admitted."  The letter worked.  He was admitted.  At 19 in early Sept. 1934 he arrived by bus in Ann Arbor to find his place and follow his star.

Studying hard at the University of Michigan, Arthur held part time jobs, joined campus debates, and wrote for the campus newspaper, the Michigan Daily.  His girl friend, coed Mary Slattery from Lakewood, Ohio, a lapsed Catholic, shared his leftist socio-political views.  Needing money, he had his eye on the university's $250 Hopwood prize for the best undergraduate writing.  University of Michigan graduate Avery Hopwood, a successful Broadway playwright, had funded the prize.

In six days and nights on 120 typed pages in play form, about which he knew little, he finished and submitted No Villain, a play about his family's fall from affluence to near poverty.  It won the 1936 Hopwood prize.  Encouraged by his mentor, playwriting Professor Richard Rowe, Arthur revised No Villain.  Retitled They Too Arise, it won an award from the prestigious NYC Theater Group's Bureau of New Plays and was staged in Ann Arbor and Detroit.

 In 1938, his senior year, he won his second $250 Hopwood Award for his play, Honors at Dawn. After graduating in June 1938, still Depression time, he worked in the Federal Theater Project writing radio plays.  He later made a bare living writing radio scripts for DuPont's Cavalcade of America and other radio series.  In 1940 he married Mary Grace Slattery.  Her work for a book publisher helped support them.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, Miller was 26.  His brother Kermit became an infantry officer.  Arthur volunteered but was rejected because of a knee injury.  He chose to do heavy war work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard repairing damaged war ships.

Because movie scripts were team written, Miller declined Hollywood invitations.  An exception was his original screenplay for The Story of G.I. Joe, 1945, about beloved WWII war correspondent Ernie Pyle.  But Miller never listed it among his works because other writers had altered his screenplay.

Miller wanted his own successful hit.  No one would publish his novel, The Man Who Had All the Luck, 1941.  He revised it as a play.  It closed after four NYC performances.

Disappointed, Miller wrote a friend that he might never write another play:  "This is now my fifth or sixth play, and I seem to have gotten nowhere."  But Miller persisted.  That persistence paid off when in 1947 his play All My Sons became a Broadway hit.

All My Sons is based on an incident told him by his mother-in-law, Mrs. Julia Slattery.  It is about an Ohio girl who reported her father for selling defective airplane parts to the Air Force.  All My Sons opened Jan. 29, 1947, in NYC.  Here is the plot and flavor of All My Sons.

Act 1:  A few years after WWII.  The backyard of a comfortable suburban Ohio home owned by 60-ish Joe Keller and his wife Kate Keller.  Their son Larry, an Air Force pilot, declared missing in action for the past 3 years, is believed dead by all but his mother.  Mrs. Keller wants to believe that Larry is alive, that he will return, and that he will marry his next door sweetheart Ann Deever.  Ann Deever and her brother George left town in shame after their father was convicted and jailed as a war profiteer.

Chris Keller, the second Keller son, has returned safely from service in WWII.  He believes his pilot brother Larry is dead.  Chris also loves Ann Deever.  He has invited her to the Keller home to ask her to marry him.

Ann Deever arrives.  Her father, Steve Deever, was Joe Keller's partner in a factory with a WWII contract to make cylinder heads for Air Force P 40 fighter aircraft engines.  One day 120 cracked cylinder heads were shipped.  They caused 21 U.S. pilots to die.  An investigation cleared Joe Keller, home sick on shipment day.
 
Steve Deever claimed that Joe Keller phoned him from the Keller home.  Keller was afraid the Air Force would cancel their contract for non-shipment.  Joe Keller urged Deever to weld the cracks and ship the cylinder heads.  Joe Keller then assured Deever that an inspector would surely spot the welded cracks and junk the cylinders.  Because no record of Joe Keller's phone call could be found, Keller was cleared.  Deever was found guilty and imprisoned.

Ann Deever's brother, George Deever, phones her at the Keller home.  He says to her:  "Don't marry Chris Keller.  I talked to our father in prison.  He confirmed Joe Keller's guilt.  I'm coming to take you from that evil house."  Curtain.

Act 2.  A distraught and angry George Deever arrives.  Joe Keller glibly tells George Deever:  "When your father is released from prison, there will be a job waiting for him."  George Deever explodes:  "He hates your guts.  Don't you know that?  He's a broken, a sick man."

Joe Keller says:  "Oh?  I'm sorry he's sick.  Me, I don't have time to get sick."  Mrs. Keller unthinkingly adds:  "Joe hasn't been sick in 15 years."  George Deever freezes.  Realizing her mistake, Mrs. Keller quickly adds:  "Except for that flu.  It slipped my mind.  That flu that kept him in bed on shipment day."

Shocked at her admission, Mrs. Keller says to George Deever:  "Don't look at me that way.  Joe wanted to go to the shop that day but he just could not lift himself out of bed."

Dialogue now tense, quick.  George Deever to his sister Ann:  "We must leave this evil house."  Chris Keller to Ann:  "I love you, Ann."  Mrs. Keller to her son Chris:  "You can't marry Ann Deever.  She's Larry's girl.  Larry's coming back."
Chris to his mother:  "Larry's dead and I am marrying his girl."  His mother cries, "Never! Never!"  Joe Keller to his wife:  "Larry's dead, for Christ sake.  For three years you've been talking like a maniac."  Mrs. Keller slaps her husband's face.
 Shocked silence.
 
Chris to his mother:  "I've accepted Larry's death.  Why can't you?"  Mother Keller, hysterically, to Chris:  "Your brother is alive.  Because if he's dead, your father killed him.  Do you understand me now?"  Shocked silence again.

Joe Keller, dazed, says:  "Me?  Kill?  Larry never flew P 40s.  I'm in business.  One hundred and twenty cracked cylinders, you're out of business.  They tear up your contract.  You put 40 years into a business and they knock you out in a minute.  I swear to God I never thought they'd install those cylinders."  Turning to Chris:  "It was a chance I took…for you…  so you…could take over… a thriving business."

Chris, livid, says:  "For me!  You were killing our boys and you did it for me?  Is business all you know?  Don't you have a country?  Don't you live in the world?  No animal kills its own.  What must I do?" Curtain.

Act III.  Mrs. Keller sits dazed in a lawn chair.  Joe Keller, head bent, comes out of the house.  Mrs. Keller tells him coldly, "Joe, this thing is not over yet.  Confess to Chris.  Offer to go to prison.  Maybe he'll forgive you." 

Joe Keller rasps:  You wanted money, so I made money.  Must I be forgiven for that?

Ann and Chris come from the house.  Ann calmly tells Joe Keller and Mrs. Keller: "I have known for a long time that Larry is dead.  He sent me this letter the day he died."  Chris takes Larry's letter and reads it aloud:  "Dear Ann, Yesterday they flew in newspapers from the States.  I read about our fathers being tried and your father being convicted.  I can't bear to live any more.  I am going out on a mission.  They will probably report me missing.  You mustn't wait for me.  If I had my father here now, I could kill him."

Silence broken by Joe Keller who says hoarsely :  "Those 21 P-40 pilots who were killed.  My own son who killed himself….   He was my son.  They were all… my sons."  He stands, jaw set, whispers: "I have a price to pay."  Grimly, he strides into the house.

Mrs. Keller shakes her head and says:  "He won't last long in prison."

Silence, broken by thunderclap gunshot from the house.  In horror they realize that Joe Keller has killed himself.

(Fast action).  Ann goes to Chris.  They hold each other, cry, rock back and forth.
Mother Keller slowly rises, embraces Ann and Chris; tells them:  "It's over.  Forget now.  Wipe your tears.  Cry no more ."  Curtain.  End of Play.

All My Sons ran 328 performances, received rave reviews, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Donaldson Award, was filmed, and is still revived all over the world.

Critics, asked to explain its lasting power, point out that All My Sons is about greed, private and corporate greed.  Think of Enron, Wall Street insider trading, cover ups, pay-offs, Robber Barons past and present, Halliburton charging the government exorbitant prices.
 
Arthur Miller is saying in All My Sons that we are our brother's keeper; that all the children are our children, even the homeless and the destitute.  Like the Prophet Micah, Miller would temper justice with mercy.  All My Sons is a morality play.

Miller then 32, cheered by his first success, cast about for another play idea.  It came by accident.  He ran into his uncle, Manny Newman, who had just seen the Boston theater tryout of All My Sons.  Saying nothing about All My Sons, uncle Manny Newman instead boasted to Arthur, as he had years before boasted to Arthur's parents, about his, Manny Newman's, success and the success of his two sons.  He puffed himself up by putting down the Miller sons.

Uncle Manny Newman, braggart, failed clothing salesman, with selfish sons, was the model for Arthur Miller's Willy Loman.  Miller wanted to get inside the mind of a failed salesman at the end of his tether; a man who believed in, pursued, and could not understand why he failed to achieve the American Dream; a confused man whose mind flashes back and forth, mixes past with present.

Death of a Salesman, written in 8 months in 1948, opened Feb. 10, 1949, in NYC, exactly 56 years to the day before his death.  Here's is Death of a Salesman's plot and flavor.

Act. 1.  The curtain opens on the simple one-story one-family Brooklyn home of 63 year old salesman Willy Loman and wife Linda Loman.  The set is a cutaway of the house.  In full sight are the back of the garage, back garden, steps to opened living room and kitchen and an attic bedroom.

The two Loman sons, around 30, are in shadow in the attic bedroom.  One son, Happy, who lives there, is a ne'er do well womanizer.

His brother Biff, earlier a high school athlete and class cheat, had failed senior math.  Unable to graduate, about to lose his hoped for college athletic scholarship, Biff rushed to his father's Boston hotel to ask his father to talk his math teacher into giving him a retest.

What Biff discovered in Boston made him leave home and become a drifter.  Biff is now home on a visit.

Nighttime.  A bent Willy Loman comes in wearily from the garage, drops his heavy sample cases, sits in the living room, mutters to himself.  His concerned wife Linda from the kitchen says:  "You're home early.  Is everything all  right?  You didn't crash the car again, did you?"  Willie answers:  "No, No.  I cut my sales trip short.  Couldn't get past Yonkers.  Couldn't concentrate on driving.  Car kept veering off the road."

Linda answers soothingly:  "You're tired, Willie.  Rest now."  Willy's mind slips back 15 years. Back from a selling trip.  Bantering with his young sons polishing the family car: "That's it, boys.  What a simonizing job!….  Remember….  Be liked, be popular; you'll never want for anything.  It's the only way to win big in life."

Linda lists their unpaid bills and this pulls Willy back to reality.   Willy says:  "I'll do better next week.  I'm well liked in Hartford."  He then adds plaintively, "You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me anymore.  I talk too much, joke too much.  I look foolish."

Linda affectionately reassures him.  Willie's mind wanders to the Boston hotel room.  Biff bursts in.  Hears a woman's laugh….  Biff cries, "Liar.  Cheat…,"  ….runs out.  [Pause] Returning to the present Willy says to Linda, again plaintively, "I get so lonely on the road."

Hearing noises, knowing Willy's back, neighbor Charley enters, greets Willy, suggests a card game.  Neighbor Charley is a successful salesman who knows that buyers avoid Willy.  Charley's card games are a ruse: he loses, they argue, Charley leaves in a huff, always returns, knowing that his losses will be passed to Linda as Willy's sales earnings.

Willy's mind shifts to his older successful dead brother, Ben.  Willy asks Ben:  "What's the answer, Ben?  How did you make your fortune?"

Biff and Happy have heard everything from the attic.   They confront Mother Linda Loman.  Biff asks:  "How long has he been raving like that?"

Linda replies:  "Willy Loman is not the finest character that ever lived.  But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.  So attention must be paid.  He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.  Attention, must be finally paid to such a person."

Linda explains further:  "The man is exhausted.  Still on the road at age 63.  Worse yet, he's been taken off salary.  Like a beginner.  He  earns only commissions on what he sells.  [She holds up a rubber hose.]  I found this [shaking hose] fitted to the basement gas jet.  He's suicidal.  I hide it.  But I'm afraid."  Curtain.

Act 2.  Next morning.  Willy Loman promised Linda he will ask for an office job close to home, will ask for an advance to pay their bills.  Later, he will meet his boys at a restaurant.  They want to treat him to a dinner.  He departs.  Mother Linda implores Happy and Biff: "Be sweet to him tonight.  Be loving to him.  Because he's only a little boat looking for a harbor."

Scene shifts to Howard Wagner's office, Loman's boss.  Wagner asks: "Why are you in New York and not selling in New England?"  Willy:  "Howard,  I'm tired.  I need a change.  I'm asking for a home office job."  Howard Wagner: "But where would we put you?  We sell to buyers through salesmen on the road.  Willy, business is business."  Willy, slamming his fist on young Wagner's desk, says: "Your father made promises to me across this desk."  Wagner:  "Pull yourself together.  People  are waiting.  They're listening.  I need the office.  Now, take a long rest.  Then we'll see.  And, turn in your sample cases."

Willy, dazed, stumbles out, heads for the restaurant, hopes his boys will have some good news.  His mind wanders.  He asks dead brother Ben: "How did you do it?  What's the answer?  Nothing's working out for me, Ben, nothing."

Happy, first at the restaurant, flirts with a woman.  Biff arrives; is introduced; they talk, drink, laugh; the woman says: "I'll go and get a girl friend for you, Biff."

A subdued Willy Loman enters the restaurant, sits with his boys, asks if they got the loan they need to go into business together.  Biff says roughly:  "We didn't get it.  You know why?  Because you always filled us full of hot air.  You ruined our lives."

Willy Loman, dazed, says:  "I'm not interested…the woods are burning, …the woods are burning, boys, you understand?"  Willy blurts out: "I was fired today….  I was fired, and I'm looking for a little good news to tell your mother, because the woman has waited and the woman has suffered.…"

The boys argue with him.  But Willy's mind is in the Boston hotel room.  Biff's sudden appearance:  "I flunked math, Dad.  I won't graduate…  I won't get that college athletic scholarship.  Talk to my math teacher.  Get him to give me a retest.  You know how good you talk to people."  A woman, offstage, laughs.  Biff, shocked, cries: "Liar.  Fake."  Runs out.

(Pause.) The restaurant waiter shakes Willy Loman back to reality, says: "Your boys just left with the girls; you know, the chippies."

Later that night.  Biff and Happy return home.  Biff guiltily offers flowers to their mother.  She smashes them to the floor:  "Don't you care whether he lives or dies?  Pick up this stuff.  I'm not your maid anymore.  Pick it up, you bums….  Not one, not another soul, would have had the cruelty to walk out on that man in a restaurant.  Get out of this house."

 Still later that night.  Willy, gardening by flashlight, speaks grimly to his dead brother Ben:  "Ben, its foolproof.  Don't you think its foolproof, Ben?  Don't you think it's a guaranteed $20,000 proposition?"

Ben replies warily:  "They--might--not--honor--the--insurance-policy."

Linda from bedroom:  "Come to bed, dear." Willy, still grim:  "In a minute.  In a minute."

Willy enters garage.  Car door slams.  Ignition grinds.  Engine revs.  Car speeds out.  Linda cries from the bedroom, "No, No."  Music flares to a frenzy.  Loud crash.  Metal hits tree.  Glass splinters.  Curtain down.

[Curtain immediately rises for Requiem, Miller's creative use of the Greek chorus, setting the tragic hero against the immensity of time.]

 Requiem.  Front center stage.  Linda Loman and neighbor Charley are dressed in funeral clothes.   Linda lays flowers on Willie's grave.  She looks around and asks:  "Where are all the people he knew?"

Charley steps forward and says: "Willie was a salesman….  A salesman is a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.  When they start not smiling back—that's an earthquake.  When you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, you're finished.   Nobody dast blame this man.  A salesman is got to dream.  It comes with the territory."  Charley exits.

Linda, alone, says:  "Forgive me, dear, I can't cry….  Why did you do it?  I search and I search and I can't understand it.  I made the last payment on the house today.  Today, dear.  And there'll be nobody home.  We're debt free.  For the first time…we're free…"  Curtain.  End of play.

On opening night the audience reacted in stunned silence.  Sobs were heard here and there, mainly from men.  Voices said: "I know that family.  Willy Loman is like my father…   my uncle… my cousin….   my friend…"  Scattered applause rose to a crescendo.  Some stood…. stamped their feet.  Others whistled,…shouted,..  "Author!  Author!"  The opening night audience went wild.

Death of a Salesman ran 742 performances, won Miller his second New York Drama Critics Circle Award, a Tony Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  The published play was the first book in play form chosen by the Book of the Month Club.  Miller's reputation was established.

Tragedies hitherto had been about the fall of heroes from high places, a King Lear. a Prince Hamlet.  Death of a Salesman is about the fall of a common man, a salesman whose big dreams turn to ashes.  Yet it has been called an American tragedy, maybe the greatest American tragedy.

Willy Loman's failure in Death of a Salesman symbolizes to some the failed American dream.  Not all who work hard make it in America.  The American dream of abundance for all may be—just a dream.

And what about Miller's 3 wives?  He was never an easy husband--busy writing, involved with theater people, movie people, surrounded by alluring women.  He confessed sexual temptations to his first wife Mary Slattery.  Naturally, she was hurt.  Miller's public appearances with sex goddess Marilyn Monroe from 1951 were the last straw.  Mary told him to leave the house.

Miller moved to Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel and asked for a divorce.  Mary agreed in Feb. 1956, receiving child support plus a percentage of all his future earnings.  Awaiting his divorce in Reno, Nevada, Miller observed some local drifters.  His short story about them, The Misfits, was published in Esquire, 1957.  Had the drifters lived on the frontier 100 years earlier they might have been nation-building pioneers.

But in the Nevada desert in 1956 they were reduced to rounding up wild horses for a meat canning factory.  In 1961 Miller rewrote The Misfits as a screenplay to star his second wife, Marilyn Monroe.  In the film Marilyn Monroe, befriended by the men, watches in horror as they rope the wild horses.  Pitying the struggling roped horses she begs the men to set them free.

Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson, June 1, 1926, to a father she never knew and a depressed mother who gave her to foster homes.  She married at 16; her husband went into the Navy, soon ending the marriage.  She worked in a WW II factory folding parachutes.  Eye-catching photos of her folding parachutes led to her being a cover girl on some 30 national magazines.  She was a nude calendar girl and a Playboy centerfold.  Bit parts in films led to starring roles.  As the world knows she became a phenomenal sex goddess, but--at terrible cost.

Marilyn Monroe's public success could not hide little Norma Jeane's deep pain.  Publicly glamorous, Marilyn privately had abortions, was drug dependent, ill, late or absent from work, and unreliable.  She threw tantrums; was suicidal.

Her marriage to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio lasted only 9 months.  Desperate for happiness, she clung to older, almost fatherly Arthur Miller from 1951.  Miller, smitten, succumbed, but could not solve her emotional problems.  Her inability to work almost shut down filming of The Misfits.  Uncontrollable, she screamed at Miller as she had at others:  "get out! get out!"  Their 5 year marriage, 1956-61, ended in mutual agony.  Her death of a drug overdose on Aug. 4, 1962, made world headlines.  In death she became an even greater legend.

Was Marilyn Monroe, like Willy Loman, killed by the American dream:  Willy Loman because he could not achieve it; Marilyn Monroe because she did achieve it but at unbearable cost?  Miller, who created failed fictional Willy Loman, could not save his doomed wife Marilyn Monroe.

In 1956 Arthur Miller was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  When told he could get off scott-free if Marilyn Monroe had her picture taken with HUAC's chairman, Miller refused.  Nor would he name his communist sympathizer acquaintances.  He was held in contempt and fined, but a later court reversed that decision.

Miller's play, The Crucible, is about the Puritan witch trials in Salem, Mass., 1692.  First performed in 1953, it invited comparison with the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts.  Miller saw both witch hunts as periods of national paranoia, intolerant of dissent.  The Crucible is Miller's most often performed play worldwide, probably because of its warning against absolutism.

Arthur Miller's play in 1964, After the Fall, based on his bittersweet marriage to Marilyn Monroe, appeared too soon after her death and offended her fans.  Years later at a hotel conference a reporter salaciously asked Miller:  "Do you ever dream about Marilyn Monroe?" Miller, then 80, knocked the reporter down.
Miller remained haunted by tragic Marilyn Monroe, who in 2005, the year of his death, would have been age 79 if she had lived.  His newest play about Marilyn Monroe, entitled Finishing the Picture, was performed in Chicago and NYC in late 2004.

Miller's third wife was a still photographer on the set of The Misfits, Inge Morath.  She was born in Graz, Austria, May 27, 1923, was well educated, and spoke several languages.  She declined to join the Hitler Youth, did forced labor at Berlin's Tempelhof airport, then being bombed daily.  After WWII she was a displaced person.

Her skill at writing photo captions in magazines and books led her to Paris where she worked with master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, a founder of the international photo agency Magnum.  Working with these masters she became a leading world photographer.

Inge Morath and Arthur Miller were married Feb. 17, 1962.  It was a congenial marriage of 40 years until she died of cancer, January 30, 2002, age 79, leaving two children.  Together they wrote four books--Arthur's words to Inge's photographs.  The first was titled In Russia, 1969, about Miller's presidency (1965-69) of PEN International, a world wide writers' group.  Through PEN Miller helped free imprisoned dissident writers in countries which restricted artistic freedom.

Their other books were:  In the Country, 1977, a travel book; Chinese Encounters, 1979, and Salesman in Beijing, 1984, the last two about Arthur Miller as director of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People's Art Theater.

Miller's two children with Mary Slattery (married 16 years, 1940-56) were a daughter and son; the son is a movie producer.  Miller had no children with Marilyn Monroe, who had two miscarriages in their 5 years of marriage, 1956-61.  Miller's two children with third wife Inge Morath during their 40 year marriage were a son institutionalized with Down Syndrome and a daughter who is an actress and film director.

Miller's writing career was interrupted by a 1973 Connecticut murder case.  Some Connecticut citizens, convinced of a miscarriage of justice, sent Miller at his home in Roxbury, CT. clippings of the police interrogation report of 18-year-old Peter Reilly accused of murdering his mother.  A mixed up boy from a broken home, Peter confused and exhausted, had been coerced into signing a confession which he retracted after a night's rest.

Miller was initially reluctant to be involved.  But, sensing fraud, he hired a new defense lawyer, a criminal pathologist, and asked the New York Times to cover the retrial.  Peter was found not guilty and freed.  Not wanting to damage further the boy's life, Miller never wrote about case.  His intervention was in the Hebraic tradition: "He who saves a life, saves the world."

At the time of the Peter Reilly affair Miller was writing a semi-comic play, The Creation of the World and Other Business.  It was about the Book of Genesis; Adam and Eve, why Cain slew Abel, why God let it happen; who God is, and why each generation reinvents God.

Turning points that made Arthur Miller a playwright included coming to maturity during the Depression, attending the University of Michigan, and needing money.  He would have become some kind of writer, no matter what.  But it was the lure of the Hopwood Prize and Prof. Richard Rowe's encouragement which pointed him toward playwrighting.

The Depression also shaped his political outlook, made him a reformer.  He determined to write plays to improve society.  Being of a persecuted minority made him want through his plays to fix a broken world.

Also, the Broadway theater gave him great collaborative artists: director Elia Kazan, set designer Jo Mielzner, others.  Early failures almost made him quit.  What saw him through was his drive, creativity, determination, and luck.

Miller's hit plays of the 1940s-50s coincided with Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and others.  Yet Arthur Miller's plays seem richer.  Why?  Perhaps because his plays about our personal and national times of trouble hold up a mirror to our worse and better natures.  They show us the sinners we are, maybe the saints we could be.

All Our Sons was a paean against corruption.  Death of a Salesman questioned the America dream.  The Crucible was a warning against national paranoia  After the Fall explored why Americans worship celebrities.  Creation of the World and Other Business pondered whey we humans had to invent God.

Arthur Miller's 1987 autobiography, Timebends, A Life, is an odd retrospective, his elliptical look back on his life.  Why the strange title?   Perhaps because space is curved and both light and life seem to curve back on themselves.  We don't think from 1 to 10, A to Z.  Instead our brain cells interweave memories, thoughts, ideas, hopes, failures, successes.  Hence, Timebends.

Arthur Miller on his Connecticut farm planted many trees.  His greatest plays, like those trees, seem destined to live on and provide towering strength for a still troubled world.

Playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005) Chronology by Franklin and Betty J. Parker
1915, Oct. 17:  Arthur Aster Miller born in NYC.

1920-28: Attended Public School #24 in Harlem.

1923: Saw his first play--a melodrama at the Schubert Theater.

1928: Bar-mitzvah at the Avenue M temple.
 
1929: Father's business failed and family move to Brooklyn, NYC.
 
1932: Graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School. Registered for night school at City College, but quit after 2 weeks.
 
1932: Held various jobs, including singing on a local radio station and truck driving.

1932-34: Clerked in an auto-parts warehouse, where he was the only Jew employed and had his first personal experiences of American anti-Semitism.

1934-35: University of Michigan, studying journalism. Reporter and night editor on student paper, The Michigan Daily.
 
1936: Wrote No Villain in six days and received Hopwood Award in Drama.  Transferred to an English major.
 
1937: Took playwrighting class with Professor Kenneth T. Rowe. Rewrote No Villain, retitled, They Too Arise which received a major award from the Bureau of New Plays and was produced in Ann Arbor and Detroit.  Honors at Dawn received the Hopwood Award in Drama.  Drove Ralph Neaphus East to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain during their Civil War, and decided not to go with him.

1938: The Great Disobedience received second place in the Hopwood contest. They Too Arise is revised and titled The Grass Still Grows for anticipated production in NYC. Graduated with a B.A. in English.  Joined NYC's Federal Theater Project to write radio plays and scripts, having turned down a much better paying offer to work as a scriptwriter for 20th Century Fox, in Hollywood.
 
1939: Wrote Listen My Children, with Norman Rosten.

1940: Married Mary Grace Slattery. Wrote The Golden Years.  Met Clifford Odets in a second-hand bookstore. Traveled to NC to collect dialect speech for the folk division of the Library of Congress.

1941: Took extra job working as a shipfitter's helper at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Wrote The Pussycat and the Plumber Who Was a Man, a radio play for Columbia Workshop (CBS), and other radio plays: William Ireland's Confession, Joel Chandler Harris, and Captain Paul.
 
1942: Wrote radio plays The Battle of the Ovens, Thunder from the Mountains, I Was Married in Bataan, Toward a Farther Star, The Eagle's Nest, and The Four Freedoms.
 
1943: Wrote The Half-Bridge, and one-act, That They May Win, produced in NYC.  Wrote Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play).

1944: Daughter, Jane, is born. Wrote radio plays Bernadine, I Love You, Grandpa and the Statue, and The Philippines Never Surrendered.  Adapted Ferenc Molnar's The Guardsman and Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice for the radio.  Having toured army camps to research for The Story of G.I. Joe (film for which he wrote the initial draft screenplay; later withdrew from project when they would not let him write it his way).  He published book about experience, Situation Normal.  The Man Who Had All The Luck premiered on Broadway but closed after 6 performances, though it received the Theater Guild National Award.

1945: Focus (novel) published.  Wrote Listen for the Sound of Wings (radio play) and "Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?" for New Masses (article).

1946: Adapted George Abbott's and John C. Holm's Three Men on a Horse for radio.
 
1947: All My Sons, 328 performances, premiered and received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award.  Son, Robert, was born.  Wrote The Story of Gus (radio play) and "Subsidized Theatre" for The New York Times (article).  Went to work for a short time in an inner city factory assembling beer boxes for minimum wage to stay in touch with his audience.  Gave first interview to John K. Hutchens, for The New York Times.  Explored Brooklyn dock Red Hook area, tried to get into the world of the longshoremen working there, and found out about Pete Panto, whose story would form the nucleus of his screenplay The Hook.

1948: Built himself the small Connecticut studio in which he wrote Death of a Salesman.  Trip to Europe with Vinny Longhi where he got sense of the Italian background he would use for the Carbones and their relatives in The Hook.  He also met some Jewish death camp survivors held captive in a post-war tangle of bureaucracy.
 
1949: Death of a Salesman, 742 performances, premiered and received the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Antoinette Perry Award, the Donaldson Award, and the Theater Club Award, among others.  New York Times published his essay, "Tragedy and the Common Man." Attended the pro-Soviet Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to chair an arts panel with Clifford Odets and Dmitri Shostakovich.

1950: Met Marilyn Monroe for the first time.  Adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, 36 performances, premiered. The Hook failed to reach production due to pressure from HUAC.  First sound recording of Death of a Salesman.

1951: Yiddish production of Death of a Salesman, translated by Joseph Buloff.  First film production of Death of a Salesman, with Frederic March, for Columbia Pictures.  Inge Morath, his third wife, came to the U.S.

1951-52: U.S. tour of Death of a Salesman.

1952: Visits the Historical Society "Witch Museum" in Salem, Mass., to research for The Crucible.

1953: The Crucible, 197 performances, premiered and received the Antoinette Perry Award, and the Donaldson Award.  Tried his hand at directing, a production of All My Sons for the Arden, Del., summer theatre.  Was asked to attend the Belgian premier of The Crucible, but was unable to attend as denied passport by the U.S.
 
1954: First radio production of Death of a Salesman, on NBC.

1955 The one-act A View From the Bridge premiered in a joint bill with A Memory of Two Mondays, 149 performances. HUAC pressured city officials to withdraw permission for Miller to make a film he'd been planning about NYC juvenile delinquency.
 
1956: Lived in Nevada for six weeks in order to divorce Mary Slattery and got the material for The Misfits.  Married Marilyn Monroe. Subpoenaed to appear before HUAC.  Received honorary Doctor of Human Letters (L.H.D.) from the University of Michigan.  Went to England with Monroe to meet Laurence Olivier. Revised A View From the Bridge into two acts for Peter Brook to produce in London, England.

1957: Arthur Miller's Collected Plays published.  Convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names to the HUAC.  "The Misfits" is published as short story in Esquire.  First television production of Death of a Salesman, on ITA, England.

1958: U.S. Court of Appeals overturned his contempt conviction.  Elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

1959: Received the Gold Medal for Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

1961: Divorced Marilyn Monroe.  Misfits (film) premiered.  Recorded The Crucible: An Opera in Four Acts by Robert Ward and Bernard Stambler.  Sidney Lumet directed a movie version of View From a Bridge. Mother, Augusta Miller, died.
 
1962: Married Inge Morath.  Marilyn Monroe died.
 
1963: Daughter, Rebecca, was born.  Jane's Blanket (children's book) published.
 
1964: After visiting the Mauthausen death camp with Inge, covered the Nazi trials in Frankfurt, Germany for the New York Herald Tribune. After the Fall, 208 performances, and Incident at Vichy, 99 performances, premiered.

1965: Elected president of International P.E.N., the international literary organization, and went to Yugoslavian conference.  Ulu Grosbard's Off-Broadway production of A View from the Bridge.

1966: First sound recording of A View From the Bridge.  Father, Isidore Miller died.

1967: I Don't Need You Anymore (short stories) published.  Sound recording of Incident at Vichy.  TV production of The Crucible, on CBS.  Visited Moscow to persuade Soviet writers to join P.E.N.
 
1968: The Price premiered. Attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as the delegate from Roxbury.  Sound recording of After the Fall.
 
1969: In Russia published (Miller's words to Inge Morath's photos).  Visited Czechoslovakia to show support for writers there and briefly met Václav Havel.  Retired as President of P.E.N.

1970: One act plays Fame and The Reason Why produced. Miller's works are banned in the Soviet Union as a result of his work to free dissident writers.

1971: Sound recording of An Enemy of the People.  Television productions of A Memory of Two Mondays, on PBS and The Price, on NBC.  The Portable Arthur Miller is published
.
1972: The Creation of the World and Other Business, 20 performances, premiered. Attended the Democratic National Convention in Miami as a delegate.  First sound recording of The Crucible.

1973: TV PBS production of Incident at Vichy.

1974: Up From Paradise (musical version of The Creation of the World and Other Business ) premiered at the University of Michigan.  NBC TV production of After the Fall.

1977: In the Country published (Miller's words to Inge Morath's photos).  Miller petitioned the Czech government to halt arrests of dissident writers.  The Archbishop's Ceiling premiered in Washington, D.C.
 
1978: The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, edited by Robert A. Martin published.  Fame (film) appeared on NBC. Belgian National Theatre performed the 25th anniversary production of The Crucible, and this time Miller issued U.S. passport to attend.

1979: Chinese Encounters published (Miller's words to Inge Morath's photos).

1980: Playing for Time (film) appeared on CBS. The American Clock premiered at the Spoleto Festical in S.C., then opened later in NYC.  TV film Arthur Miller on Home Ground shown on PBS.

1981: The second volume of Arthur Miller's Collected Plays published.
 
1982: One act plays, Elegy for a Lady and Some Kind of Love Story ,are produced under the title 2 by A.M. in Conn.
 
1983: Directed Death of a Salesman at the People's Art Theater in Beijing, the People's Republic of China.

1984: Salesman in Beijing is published.  Elegy and Some Kind are published under the new title Two-Way Mirror.  Miller received Kennedy Center Honors for his lifetime achievement.

1985: Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman aired on CBS to an audience of 25 million.  Miller went to Turkey with Harold Pinter for International PEN.  He was a delegate at a meeting of Soviet and American writers in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he tried to persuade the Soviets to stop persecuting writers.

1986: I Think About You a Great Deal is published (monologue). One of 15 writers and scientists invited to the Soviet Union to a conference with Mikhail Gorbachov to discuss Soviet policies.  British production of The Archbishop's Ceiling, with a restored script.

1987: One act plays I Can't Remember Anything and Clara are produced under the title Danger: Memory! Published Timebends: A Life (autobiography), which appeared as a Book -of the-Month Club popular selection.  University of East Anglia named its centre for American studies, the Arthur Miller Centre. The Golden Years is premiered on BBC Radio.  TV PBS production of All My Sons.

1990: Everybody Wins, a film based on Some Kind, is released.  TV PBS production of An Enemy of the People.

1991: The one-act The Last Yankee is produced. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan is premiered in London, England.  Received Mellon Bank Award for lifetime achievement in the humanities.  TV production of Clara, and an interview on A&E.  South Bank Show television special on Miller.

1992: Homely Girl is published (novella).

1993: Expanded version of The Last Yankee premiered.  Television production of The American Clock, on TNT.

1994: Broken Glass premiered.  Interviewed on The Charley Rose Show, PBS.
 
1995: Received William Inge Festival Award for distinguished achievement in American theater. Tributes to the playwright on the occasion of his eightieth birthday are held in England and America.  Homely Girl, A Life and Other Stories is published (novella and short stories).

1996: Received the Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award.  Revised and expanded book of Theater Essays, ed. by Steven R. Centola is published.

1997: Revised version of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan is given its American Premier in Williamstown, Mass.  The Crucible (film with Daniel Day Lewis) opened.  BBC TV production of Broken Glass.

1998: Mr. Peter's Connections premiered.  Major revival of A View From the Bridge won two Tony Awards.  Miller named as the Distinguished Inaugural Senior Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.  Revised version of The Ride Down Mount Morgan appeared on Broadway.
 
1999: Death of a Salesman revived on Broadway for the play's 50th anniversary, and wins Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

2000: The Ride Down Mount Morgan appeared again on Broadway, also a revival of The Price.  There are major 85th birthday celebrations for Miller held at University of Michigan and at the Arthur Miller Center at University of East Anglia, England.  Echoes Down the Corridor is published (collected essays from 1944-2000).

2001: Untitled, a previously unpublished one act written for Vaclav Havel appeared in NYC.  Williamstown Theater Festival revived The Man Who Had All the Luck.  Focus, a film based on the book, is released. Miller is awarded a NEH Fellowship and the John H. Finley Award for Exemplary Service to NYC.  On Politics and the Art of Acting is published (essay).

2002: NYC revivals of The Man Who Had All the Luck and The Crucible.  Wife Inge Morath died.  Premier of  Resurrection Blues.
 
2003: Miller awarded the Jerusalem Prize.   Kermit Miller, older brother, died on October 17th.

2004:  New York City revival of After the Fall.  Premier of Finishing the Picture.  During Sept.-Oct.  the play, Finishing the Picture, about Marilyn Monroe, performed in Chicago and NYC.

2005:  Thursday, Feb. 10.  Miller died of cancer and congestive heart failure, Roxbury, CT.
 
END of Manuscript.  Corrections, comments: bfparker@frontiernet.net

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Thursday, July 02, 2009 

Category: News and Politics
1of2Parts:  General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) and Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-August 30, 1869.
By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker (see End: About the Authors)

The hot spring health spas of Virginia were the first gathering places of southern and northern elites after the Civil War.  It was during July 23-August 30, 1869, at the Greenbrier Hotel, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the most popular of the hot spring spas, that Robert E. Lee and George Peabody met by chance for a few weeks.

 For each this meeting was a symbolic turn from Civil War bitterness toward reconciliation and the lifting power of education.

Lee was then president of Washington College, Lexington, Virginia (1865-70, renamed Washington and Lee University from 1871).  Peabody had just (June 29, 1869) doubled to $2 million his Peabody Education Fund, begun February 7, 1867, to advance public education in the South.

Circumstances had made both Lee and Peabody famous in their time, Lee's fame more lasting; Peabody's, strangely, soon forgotten.  Yet when they met in 1869 Peabody was arguably better known in the English speaking world and more widely appreciated.

For Lee, age 62, hero of the lost Confederate cause, it was next to the last summer of life.  For Peabody, age 74, the best known philanthropist of his time, it was the very last summer of life.  They were the center of attention that summer of 1869 at "The Old White."  They ate together in the public dining room, walked arm in arm to their nearby bungalows, were applauded by visitors, and were photographed together and with others of prominence.

Robert E. Lee's Father

Born in Stratford, Westmoreland County, Virginia, Robert Edward Lee was the son of Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee (1756-1818), popularly known as "Light Horse Harry."  Henry Lee was a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress (1785-88), member of the Virginia Convention for the Continental Congress (1788), served in Virginia's General Assembly (1789-91), was Virginia Governor (1792-95), was appointed by George Washington to command troops to suppress the "Whiskey Insurrection" in Western Pennsylvania (1794), served in the U. S. Sixth Congress (1799-1801), and last served in the War of 1812.

Despite this impressive record (Congress voted him a gold medal for his American Revolutionary War exploits) Henry Lee was a less than satisfactory husband, a poor family breadwinner, an absentee father to his five children, was often hounded by creditors, and was several times imprisoned for debt.

Robert E. Lee was age six when he last saw his father, who left to regain his health in the West Indies.  Young Lee was age eleven when his father died.  Robert E. Lee's biographer, Emory M. Thomas wrote: "All his life, Robert Lee knew his father only at a great distance."

Robert E. Lee's Career

Robert E. Lee attended private schools in Alexandria, Virginia.  At age 18, with family finances prohibiting attending a private college, Robert E. Lee, bent on a military career, applied for admission to the tuition free U. S. Military Academy, West Point, New York.  His family and friends sent petitions and letters of recommendation to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun (1782-1850).  In the summer of 1825 R. E. Lee entered West Point as one of 107 new cadets.

Forty-seven of that entering class graduated, Lee among them.  He was an exemplary cadet, without a single demerit, held every cadet post of honor, and graduated second in his class of 1829.  He was assigned to the engineer corps where he soon won a high reputation.
 
On June 30, 1831, two years after graduating, he married Mary Randolph Custis, daughter of a grandson of Mrs. George Washington (Martha Washington, 1731-1802).

Distinguishing himself as chief engineer in river drainage and fort-building projects, he served in the Mexican War, where General Winfield Scott (1786-1866), valuing his military and engineering skills, constantly consulted him.

Lee was superintendent of West Point (1852-55).  He was the United States military officer ordered to put down the John Brown (1800-59) insurrection at Harper's Ferry federal arsenal, Virginia, October 16, 1859.  Abolitionist Brown's fanatical attempt to steal federal weapons in order to arm slaves for an insurrection against the South helped precipitate the bitter four-year Civil War.

Faced with the "irrepressible conflict," General Winfield Scott reportedly told President Abraham Lincoln that Lee was worth 50,000 men.  Lee was offered command of Federal forces, April 18, 1861, but declined.  He told Francis Preston Blair (1791-1876), who approached him on behalf of President Lincoln: "…though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States."

Loyal to Virginia, Lee resigned from the United States Army, April 20, 1861.  In Richmond Virginia, at the request of the Virginia Convention, he was placed in command of the Virginia forces, April 23, 1861.

Lee's organizing ability, grasp of military strategy, and his integrity held out for four bitter Civil War years against overwhelming Union strength in numbers, manpower, and economic resources.  Faced by inevitable crushing defeat Lee surrendered to General U. S. Grant, Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, April 9, 1865.

He told his defeated troops:  "…You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that our merciful God extend to you his blessing and protection."

With the Confederate cause lost, Lee sought obscurity and declined to lend his name to commercial ventures.  When first invited to the presidency of small, obscure and struggling Washington College, Lexington, Virginia (August 1865), Lee hesitated.  He wrote the trustees that he was "an object of censure" to the North, that his presence might "cause injury" to the college.

Knowing that Lee's name and fame would attract students, the trustees persisted.  Lee accepted.  His biographer Emory M. Thomas wrote that Lee quickly "established himself as a presence in Lexington," and that in the five years of life left to him (1865-1870) became "the savior of Washington College."

Greenbrier Hotel, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia

The first inn at what is now the Greenbrier Hotel, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, was built in 1780, long before West Virginia became a state in 1863.  It was a favorite resort for southern elites who gathered there to meet relatives and friends, to rest and recuperate, and to drink and bathe in its healthful mineral springs.  Lee, with heart trouble, needing rest, was an occasional health spa visitor, particularly at the Greenbrier.

At the Greenbrier the summer of 1868, Lee heard that some young northern visitors were receiving a frosty reception.  He asked the young southern women who surrounded him if one of them would go with him to greet and welcome the young northern guests.

The young lady accompanying him, Christina Bond, asked, "General Lee, did you never feel resentment towards the North?"  She recorded his quiet reply, "I believe I may say, looking into my own heart, and speaking as in the presence of my God, that I have never known one moment of bitterness or resentment."  The next summer of 1869 at the Greenbrier he met George Peabody for the first and only time.

Peabody's Career

George Peabody was third of eight children born to a poor family in Danvers (renamed Peabody, April 13, 1868), 19 miles from Boston, Massachusetts.  After four years in a district school (1803-07) and four years apprenticed in a general store (1807-10), the 16-year-old in 1811 worked in his oldest brother's clothing store in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

His father's death that year (May 13, 1811) left the family in debt, their Danvers home mortgaged, with the mother and five younger siblings forced to live with relatives.  The Great Fire in Newburyport (May 31, 1811) occurred eleven days after his father's death.  The fire, coming as it did during an economic depression in New England, led many to leave that town and migrate to the South.

An improvident paternal uncle whose Newburyport store had burned in the fire encouraged his 16-year-old nephew, George Peabody, to open with him a drygoods store in Georgetown, District of Columbia.

Needing credit, backed by Newburyport merchant Prescott Spaulding's (1781-1864) recommendation, Peabody secured a $2,000 consignment of goods, basis of his first commercial venture in the Georgetown drygoods store (1812).
His uncle soon left for other enterprises.  Young Peabody operated the store and was also a pack peddler selling goods to homes and stores in the D. C. area.  With Washington, D. C., under siege by the British he volunteered and served briefly in the War of 1812.

Fellow soldier and older experienced merchant Elisha Riggs, Sr. (1779-1853), took the 19-year-old Peabody as traveling junior partner in Riggs, Peabody & Co. (1814-29), Georgetown, D.C.  The firm, which imported clothing and other merchandise for sale to U. S. wholesalers, moved in 1815 to Baltimore and by 1822 had Philadelphia and New York City warehouses.

Peabody early took on the support of his family.  He sent clothes and money to his mother and siblings, and by 1816, at age 21, he paid off the family debts and restored his mother and siblings to their Danvers home.

Handling the Peabody home deed, Newburyport, Massachusetts, lawyer Ebon Mosely wrote George Peabody (December 16, 1816):  "I cannot but be pleased with the filial affection which seems to evince you to preserve the estate for a Parent."

Peabody paid for the education at Bradford Academy (now Bradford College), Bradford, Massachusetts, of five younger relatives.  He bought a house in West Bradford for his relatives studying at the academy, where his mother also lived for several years.

He later paid for the complete education of nephew Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-99), first U. S. paleontologist at Yale University; nephew George Peabody Russell (1835-1909), Harvard-trained lawyer, niece Julia Adelaide (née Peabody) Chandler (b. 1835), and others.


"Deprived, as I was…"

Peabody's May 18, 1831, letter to a nephew named after him, George Peabody (1815-32), son of his oldest brother David Peabody (1790-1841), hinted at his motive for educating his relatives and for his later philanthropies.
Particularly fond of this nephew, Peabody paid for his schooling at Bradford Academy and received regular reports of his nephew's progress.  When this nephew asked his uncle for financial help to attend Yale College, Peabody replied in  a poignant letter.

Peabody wrote his nephew: "Deprived, as I was, of the opportunity of obtaining anything more than the most common education, I am well qualified to estimate its value by the disadvantages I labour under in the society [in] which my business and situation in life frequently throws me, and willingly would I now give twenty times the expense attending a good education could I now possess it, but it is now too late for me to learn and I can only do to those who come under my care, as I could have wished circumstances had permitted others to have done by me."

Sadly, this favorite nephew died at age 17 on September 24, 1832, in Boston of scarlet fever, his potential unfulfilled.

Selling Maryland's Bonds Abroad

As purchasing partner in the United States and abroad for Riggs, Peabody & Co. (renamed Peabody, Riggs & Co., 1829-48), Peabody made four buying trips to Europe during 1827-37.

In the mid-1830s several states began internal improvement of roads, canals, and railroads requiring European investment capital through state bonds sold abroad.  In 1836 the Maryland legislature voted to finance the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.  On his fifth trip abroad, February 1837, Peabody represented both his firm and was also appointed one of three agents to sell abroad Maryland's $8 million bond issue.

In the financial Panic of 1837 the two other agents returned home without success.  Peabody remained in London the rest of his life (1837-69), 32 years, except for three visits to the United States.

Nine U. S. states in financial difficulty, including Maryland, stopped interest payments on their bonds sold abroad.  Peabody faced a depressed market, with British and European investors angry at nonpayment of interest on their U. S. state bonds.

Peabody bombarded Maryland officials with letters urging that interest payments on Maryland bonds be resumed, and retroactively.  His letters were published in U. S. newspapers.  Abroad, he also publicly assured foreign investors that interest nonpayment was temporary and that repayment would be retroactive.  He finally sold his part of the Maryland bonds to London's Baring Brothers.

The Panic of 1837 eased.  The nine defaulting states resumed their bond interest payments.  Peabody's faith that they would do so was justified and appreciated.  His integrity became known to an ever-wider circle.

Some minor fame came to Peabody when the Maryland Legislature (1847-48), realizing what he had done, voted him unanimous thanks for upholding its credit abroad and for declining the $60,000 commission due him.

He had not wanted to burden the state treasury during its financial difficulty.  In transmitting these resolutions of thanks, Maryland Governor Philip Francis Thomas (1810-90) wrote Peabody, "To you, sir...the thanks of the State were eminently due."

London-Based Banker

In London, Peabody gradually reduced his trade in drygoods and commodities.  Under the firm name of  George Peabody & Co. (1838-64) he made the transition from merchant to international banker.

He sold U. S. state bonds to finance roads, canals, and railroads; helped sell the second Mexican War bonds; bought, sold, and shipped European iron and later steel rails for U. S. western railroads; and helped finance the Atlantic Cable Co.
Asked in an interview, August 22, 1869, how and when he made most of his money, the London-based securities broker and international banker said, "I made pretty much of it in 20 years from 1844 to 1864.  Everything I touched within that time seemed to turn to gold.  I bought largely of United States securities when their value was low and they advanced greatly."

Morgan Partnership

Often ill and urged by business friends to take a partner, Peabody on October 1, 1854, at age 59, took as partner Boston merchant Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90), whose 19-year-old son John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) began his banking career as New York City agent for George Peabody & Co., London.

On retirement, October 1, 1864, unmarried, without a son, and knowing he would no longer control his firm, Peabody asked that his name be withdrawn.
George Peabody & Co. (1838-64) continued in London as J. S. Morgan & Co. (1864-1909), Morgan Grenfell & Co. (1910-18), Morgan Grenfell & Co., Ltd. (1918-89), and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell (since 1989), a German-owned international banking firm.

Peabody was thus the root of the J. P. Morgan international banking firm.  He spent the last five years of his life (1864-69) looking after his philanthropic institutions, begun in 1852 with the motto: "Education: a debt due from present to future generations."

George Peabody as Philanthropist

Peabody early told intimates and said publicly in 1850 that he would found a useful educational institution in every town and city where he had lived and worked.  His 1827 will left $4,000 for charity.  His 1832 will left $27,000 for educational philanthropy out of a $135,000 estate.

Founded Seven Libraries

Ultimately his philanthropic gifts of some $10 million included seven Peabody institute libraries, with lecture halls and lecture funds.  These were, like the lyceums and the later chautauquas, the adult education centers of their time.

Later, Andrew Carnegie's (1835-1919) libraries and other funds, John D. Rockefeller's (1839-1937) funds and foundations, Henry Ford's (1863-1947) funds, and those of others far surpassed Peabody's philanthropy.  But it was Peabody's gifts which first initiated, set policies, patterns, and inspired the later vast educational foundation movement.

The seven Peabody Institute Libraries are in: Peabody, Danvers, Newburyport, and Georgetown (all in Massachusetts); and in Baltimore, where the Peabody Institute of Baltimore (from 1857, total gift $1.4 million) consisted of a unique reference library whose books from European estates Peabody, through agents, bought and shipped to Baltimore.  The Library of Congress early borrowed from its rare book collection.

The Peabody Institute of Baltimore also had an art gallery, lecture hall and lecture fund, a Conservatory of Music, and gave annual prizes to Baltimore's best public school students.  In 1982 the Baltimore Reference Library and the Peabody Conservatory of Music became part of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.  Other Peabody libraries are in 6-Thetford, Vermont, where he visited his maternal grandparents at age 15, and in 7-Georgetown, D.C.

Three Peabody Museums of Science

He endowed the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (anthropology); the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University (paleontology), both 1866; and what is now the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (1867), containing maritime history and Essex County historical documents, including most of George Peabody's letters and papers.

Other Peabody Gifts

He gave the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of Mechanic Arts (Baltimore) $1,000 for a chemistry laboratory and school (1851); Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, $25,000 for a mathematics professorship (1866); Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, $25,000, for a mathematics and civil engineering professorship (November 1866); and former general, then President Robert E. Lee's Washington College (renamed Washington and Lee University, 1871), Lexington, Virginia, $60,000 for a mathematics professorship (September 1869).
He gave $20,000 publication funds each to the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore (November 5, 1866), and the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (January 1, 1867).

He gave to the United States Sanitary Commission to aid Civil War orphans, widows, and disabled veterans $10,000 (1864).  To the Vatican charitable San Spirito Hospital, Rome, Italy, he gave $19,300 (April 5, 1867).  He built a Memorial Congregational Church in his mother's memory in her hometown, Georgetown, Massachusetts, $70,000 (1866).

For patriotic causes he gave to the Lexington Monument in what is now Peabody, Massachusetts, $300 (1835); the Bunker Hill Memorial, Boston, Massachusetts, $500 (June 3, 1845); and the Washington Monument, Washington, D. C., $1,000 (July 4, 1854).

Peabody Education Fund, 1867-1914

His most influential U. .S. gift was the $2 million Peabody Education Fund (PEF, 1867-1914) to promote public schools in the eleven former Confederate states plus West Virginia, added because of its poverty.

For 47 years the PEF helped promote public schools in the devastated post-Civil War South, focusing on public elementary and secondary schools, then on teacher training institutes and normal colleges, and finally on rural public schools.

Without precedent, the PEF was the first multimillion dollar U.S. educational foundation.  Historians have cited its example and policies as the model forerunner of all subsequent significant United States educational funds and foundations.

Famous in his time, largely forgotten since, even underrated by most historians, George Peabody was in fact the founder of modern American philanthropy.
Many of the over 50 distinguished PEF trustees (during 1867-1914) who held high offices in the U. S. were also trustees of other later, larger, and richer funds and foundations.  They thus helped spread the PEF's influence far and wide.

The common goal of these late nineteenth century, early twentieth century funds and foundations was to use private foundation wealth as levers to help solve education, health, and economic welfare problems in the U. S. South, elsewhere in the U. S., and worldwide.

High Offices Held by PEF Trustees

Twelve of the over 50 PEF trustees were state legislators, two were U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justices, six were U.S. ambassadors, seven U.S. House of Representatives members, two U. S. generals, one U. S. Navy admiral, one U. S. Surgeon-General, three Confederate generals, seven U.S. Senators, three Confederate Congressmen, two church bishops, six U. S. cabinet officers, three U.S. presidents: U.S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Grover Cleveland (or eight U.S. presidents if Peabody Normal College and its predecessor institutional trustees are included), and three financiers.

The three financiers who were PEF trustees included J. P. Morgan, himself an art collector and philanthropist of note; Anthony Joseph Drexel (1826-93), inspired as PEF trustee to found Drexel University, Philadelphia; and Paul Tulane (1801-87), inspired as PEF trustee to found Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Permitted to disband when their mission was accomplished, the PEF trustees gave (1914): $474,000 to fourteen state university colleges of education in the South; $90,000 to Winthrop Normal College, South Carolina; and funds to the Southern Education Fund, Atlanta, still aiding African-American education.

The bulk of the PEF, $1.5 million (required matching funds made it $3 million), went to George Peabody College for Teachers (1914-79), Nashville, sited next to Vanderbilt University, which still thrives as Peabody College of Vanderbilt University (hereafter PCofVU, since 1979).

Peabody College of Vanderbilt University

Traced genealogically in Nashville for some 220 years, Davidson Academy (1785-1806) was chartered by North Carolina eleven years before Tennessee's statehood; rechartered as Cumberland College (1806-26); rechartered as the University of Nashville (1826-75); rechartered as Peabody Normal College (1875-1909, created and supported by the PEF); rechartered as George Peabody College for Teachers (1914-79), which continues as PCofVU (from 1979).

Faced with greater class and race divisions and with greater financial difficulties than counterpart colleges in other U.S. sections, what is now Peabody College of Vanderbilt University rose phoenix-like again and again to produce educational leaders for the South, the nation, and the world.

Peabody Homes of London

Wanting to alleviate the working poor of London, Peabody followed social reformer Lord Shaftesbury's (1801-85) suggestion--that low-cost housing was the London poor's greatest need.  Peabody gave a total of $2.5 million (from 1862) to subsidize low rent model housing in London.

Some 34,500 low income Londoners (March 31, 1999) lived in 14,000 Peabody apartments on 83 estates in 26 of London's boroughs.  The Peabody Trust, which built and administers the Peabody Homes of London, valued at some $1.53 billion, is Peabody's most successful philanthropy (and least known by Americans).

Peabody's Last U.S. Visit, Summer 1869

Long ill, sensing his end was near, George Peabody made his last four-month U. S. visit, June 8 to September 29, 1869, to see family and friends and to add gifts to his U. S. institutes.  Greatly weakened, he was met in New York City by intimates who also sensed this as his last U.S. visit.

The New York Times, June 9, 1869, reported his arrival "in advanced age and declining health…." "Wherever he goes," the article read, "he is worried by begging letters from individuals expecting him to get them out of some scrape…  Now that he is in America he should be left to the quiet and repose he so greatly needs."

He went to Boston (June 10, 1869), then rested in Salem, Massachusetts, at nephew George Peabody Russell's (1835-1909) home.

On July 6, 1869, his nephew wrote to his uncle's intimate business friend William Wilson Corcoran (1798-1888), who was at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia:  "...Mr. Peabody...is weaker than when he arrived....  He has...decided to go to the White Sulphur Springs...[and asks you to] arrange accommodations for himself, and servant, for Mrs. Russell and myself."

In mid-June 1869 Peabody quietly visited the Boston Peace Jubilee and Music Festival and listened to the chorus.  At intermission, Boston Mayor Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff (1810-74) announced Peabody's presence, which brought "a perfect storm of applause."

In a Sunday, June 20, sermon closing the Boston Peace Jubilee, the Reverend William Rounseville Alger (1822-1905) mentioned that George Peabody had done more to keep the peace between Britain and America than a hundred demagogues to destroy it.

On June 29, 1869, in more than doubling his fund for southern education, he wrote his trustees:  "I now give you additional bonds [worth] $1,384,000.....  I do this [hoping] that with God's blessing...it may...prove a permanent and lasting boon, not only to the Southern States, but to the whole of our dear country...."  He added $50,000 to his first Peabody Institute Library (Peabody, Massachusetts, total gift $217,600).


At the July 14, 1869, dedication of the Peabody Institute Library, Danvers, Massachusetts (to which he gave a total of $100,000), he said: "I can never expect to address you again collectively....  I hope that this institution will be...a source of pleasure and profit."

At a July 16, 1869, reception, Peabody Institute Library, Peabody, Massachusetts, his 30 guests who arrived by special train from Boston included former Massachusetts Governor Clifford Claflin (1818-1905), Boston Mayor Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner (1811-74), and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94).  Poet Holmes read aloud a poem titled "George Peabody" written specially for the occasion.

Two days later (July 18, 1869) Holmes described Peabody in a letter to U.S. Minister to Britain John Lothrop Motley (1814-77) as "the Dives who is going to Abraham's bosom and I fear before a great while...."

On July 22, 1869, longtime friend Ohio Episcopal Bishop Charles Pettit McIlvaine (1799-1873) wrote to Peabody's philanthropic advisor Robert Charles Winthrop (1809-94): "The White Sulphur Springs will, I hope, be beneficial to our excellent friend; but it can be only a very superficial good.  [His] cough is terrible, and I have no expectation of his living a year…."

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-Aug. 30, 1869

This was the background when Peabody arrived by special train at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23, 1869.  Present was Tennessee Superintendent of Public Instruction and later U.S. Commissioner of Education John Eaton, Jr. (1829-1906).

John Easton wrote in his annual report:  "Mr. Peabody shares with ex-Governor Wise the uppermost cottage in Baltimore Row, and sits at the same table with General Lee, Mr. Corcoran, Mr. Taggart, and others....  Being quite infirm, he has been seldom able to come to parlor or dining room, though he has received many ladies and gentlemen at the cottage....  His manners are singularly affable and pleasing, and his countenance one of the most benevolent we have ever seen."

Peabody's confinement to his cottage prompted a meeting on July 27, 1869, at which former Virginia Governor Henry Alexander Wise (1806-76) drew up resolutions of praise read in  Peabody's presence the next day (July 28, 1869) in the "Old White" hotel parlor. The resolutions read in part: "On behalf of the southern people we tender thanks to Mr. Peabody for his aid to the cause of education...and hail him 'benefactor.'"

Peabody, seated, replied, "If I had strength, I would speak more on the heroism of the Southern people.  Your kind remarks about the Education Fund sound sweet to my ears.  My heart is interwoven with its success."

Peabody Ball, "Old White," August 11, 1869

Merrymakers at the "Old White" held a Peabody Ball on August 11, 1869.  Too ill to attend, Peabody heard the gaiety from his cottage.

Historian Perceval Reniers wrote of this Peabody Ball:  "The affair that did most to revive [the Southerners'] esteem was the Peabody Ball...given to honor...Mr. George Peabody....  Everything was right for the Peabody Ball.  Everybody was ready for just such a climax, the background was a perfect build-up.  Mr. Peabody appeared at just the right time and lived just long enough.  A few months later it would not have been possible, for Mr. Peabody would be dead."

The PEF's first administrator Barnas Sears (1802-80), present at White Sulphur Springs that July 23-Aug. 30, 1869, recorded why Peabody's presence there was important to the PEF's work in promoting public education in the South.  Sears wrote: "...both on account of his unparalleled goodness and of his illness among a loving and hospitable people [he received] tokens of love and respect from all, such as I have never before seen shown to any one.  This visit...will, in my judgment, do more for us than a long tour in a state of good health...."

Famous Photos of George Peabody and Robert E. Lee, August 12, 1869

Peabody, Lee, and others were central figures in several remarkable photos taken at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 12, 1869.  In the main photograph the five individuals seated on cane-bottomed chairs were, left to right:  Turkey's Minister to the U.S. Edouard Blacque Bey (1824-95); General Robert E. Lee, Peabody, William Wilson Corcoran, and Richmond, Virginia, judge and public education advocate James Lyons (1801-82).

Standing behind the five seated figures were seven former Civil War generals, their names in dispute until correctly identified in 1935 by Leonard T. Mackall of Savannah, Georgia (from left to right):  James Conner (1829-83) of South Carolina, Martin W. Gary (1831-81) of South Carolina, Robert Doak Lilley (1836-86) of Virginia, P.G.T. Beauregard (1818-93) of Louisiana, Alexander Robert Lawton (1818-96) of Georgia, Henry Alexander Wise (1806-76) of Virginia, and Joseph L. Brent (b.1826) of Maryland. 

There is also a photo of Peabody sitting alone and a photo of Lee, Peabody, and William Wilson Corcoran sitting together.

Peabody's Gifts to Lee

That August 1869 Peabody gave Lee a small private gift of $100 for Lee's Episcopal church in Lexington, Virginia, in need of repairs (William Wilson Corcoran also gave $100).  Peabody also gave to Lee's Washington College Virginia state bonds he owned worth $35,000 when they were lost on the  ship Arctic, a Collins Line steamer, sunk with the loss of 322 passengers on September 27, 1854, 20 miles off Cape Race, Newfoundland.

Peabody 's petition to the Virginia legislature to reimburse him for the lost bonds had been unsuccessful when he gave Lee's college the value of the bonds for a mathematics professorship.

Eventually the value of the lost bonds and the accrued interest, $60,000 total, were paid by the State of Virginia to Washington and Lee University  With wry humor Lee's biographer C.B. Flood described George Peabody's gift:  "It was generosity with a touch of Yankee shrewdness: you Southerners go fight it out among yourselves.  If General Lee can't get [this lost bond money] out of the Virginia legislature, nobody can."

Peabody left White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, August 30, 1869, in a special railroad car provided by longtime friend, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad President John Work Garrett (1820-84).  Lee rode a short distance in the same car with Peabody.  They parted, never to meet again.

Peabody recorded his last will (September 9, 1869) in New York City, had his tomb built at Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts (September 10, 1869), ordered a granite sarcophagus to mark his grave, and boarded the Scotia in New York City September 29, 1869.  He landed at Queenstown, Ireland, October 8, 1869, and was rushed to rest at the London home of longtime business friend Sir Curtis Miranda Lampson (1806-85), where he died November 4, 1869.

End of Part 1 of 2 Parts.  Go to Concluding Part 2  of 2 Parts.

bfparker@frontiernet.net

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Thursday, July 02, 2009 
Concluding 2 of 2 Parts: General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) and Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-August 30, 1869.
By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker (see End: About the Authors)

Lee Sent His Photograph

On Sept. 25, 1869, at the request of Peabody Institute Librarian Fitch Poole (1803-73, Peabody, Massachusetts), Lee sent Poole a photograph of himself, adding that he would "feel honoured in its being placed among the 'friends' of Mr. Peabody, who can be numbered by the millions, yet all can appreciate the man who has [illumined] his age by his munificent charities during his life, and by his wise provisions for promoting the happiness of his fellow creatures."

Lee on Peabody's Death

Reading of Peabody's death in London (November 4, 1869), Robert E. Lee wrote (November 10, 1869) to Peabody's nephew George Peabody Russell, who had been with his uncle in White Sulphur Springs and there had met Lee: "The announcement of the death of your uncle, Mr. George Peabody, has been received with the deepest regret wherever his name and benevolence are known; and nowhere have his generous deeds--restricted to no country, section or sect--elicited more heartfelt admiration than at the South.  He stands alone in history for the benevolent and judicious distribution of his great wealth, and his memory has become entwined in the affections of millions of his fellow-citizens in both hemispheres."

"I beg, in my own behalf," Lee continued, "and in behalf of the Trustees and Faculty of Washington College, Virginia, which was not forgotten by him in his act of generosity, to tender the tribute of our unfeigned sorrow at his death.  With great respect, Your obedient servant R.E. Lee."

Concern Over Lee's Attending Peabody's Funeral

Lee had been invited to attend Peabody's final funeral service and eulogy, South Congregational Church, Peabody, Massachusetts, followed by burial in Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts, February 8, 1870.

But Peabody's intimates feared that Lee's attendance might evoke an ugly incident.  After President Lincoln's assassination, Congressional radical Republicans, bent on revenge, crushed the defeated South with military rule.  This anger was also strong among New England abolitionists.

Robert Charles Winthrop, Peabody's philanthropic advisor and president of the PEF trustees, who was to deliver Peabody's funeral eulogy February 8, 1870, feared that Lee's attendance might bring on a demonstration.  On February 2, 1870, Winthrop wrote two private and confidential letters, the first to Baltimorean John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870):  "There is apprehension here, that if Lee should come to the funeral, something unpleasant might occur, which would be as painful to us as to him.  Would you contact friends to impart this to the General?  Please do not mention that the suggestion came from me."

Winthrop also wrote to Corcoran: "I write to you in absolute confidence.  Some friends of ours, whose motives cannot be mistaken, are very anxious that Genl. Lee should not come to the funeral next week.  They have also asked me to suggest that.  Still there is always apprehension that from an irresponsible crowd there might come some remarks which would be offensive to him and painful to us all.  I am sure he would be the last person to involve himself or us, needlessly, in a doubtful position on such an occasion."

Winthrop continued to Corcoran: "The newspapers at first said that he was not coming.  Now, there is an intimation that he is.  I know of no one who could [more] effectively give the right direction to his views than yourself.  Your relation to Mr. Peabody & to Mr. Lee would enable you to ascertain his purposes & shape his course wisely....  I know of no one else to rely on."

One of the two Washington College trustees who planned to attend Peabody's funeral had earlier written to Corcoran (January 26, 1870): "I first thought that General Lee should not go, but have now changed my mind.  Some of us believe that if you advise the General to attend he would do so.  Use your own discretion in this matter."

Lee Too Ill to Attend

Lee explained in a January 26, 1870, letter to William Wilson Corcoran: "I am sorry I cannot attend the funeral obsequies of Mr. Peabody.  It would be some relief to witness the respect paid to his remains, and to participate in commemorating his virtues; but I am unable to undertake the journey.  I have been sick all the winter, and am still under medical treatment.  I particularly regret that I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you.

 Two trustees of Washington College will attend the funeral.  I hope you can join them."
On the same day Winthrop wrote his letters (February 2, 1870), Lee wrote his daughter Mildred Childe Lee (1846-1904) that he was too ill to attend: "I am sorry that I could not attend Mr. Peabody's funeral, but I did not feel able to undertake the journey, especially at this season."

Corcoran too replied to Winthrop that Lee had no intention of coming.  Corcoran could not imagine, he wrote, that so good and great a man as Lee would receive anything but a kind reception.  Himself ill, Corcoran wrote to Lee his regret that he could not attend to pay his respects to "my valued old friend."  Peabody's intimates were relieved at confirmation that Lee's illness would definitely keep him from the funeral.

Trans-Atlantic Funeral Overview

Lee, Corcoran, and much of the English-speaking reading public, awed by Peabody's unusual 96-day transatlantic funeral, awaited its final scene: Robert Charles Winthrop's eulogy and Peabody's final burial (both February 8, 1870).

Peabody's funeral was unprecedented in length, pomp, and ceremony; was marked by cold stormy weather; involved the highest officials of England and the United States; was vastly publicized in the press of both countries; and was observed in person by many thousands of Britons and Americans.

That funeral included: 1-Westminster Abbey service (November 12, 1869) and temporary burial there for 30 days (November 12-December 11, 1869).  When Peabody's will became known requiring burial in Salem, Massachusetts, 2-the British cabinet decided (November 10, 1869), at Queen Victoria's suggestion, to return his remains for burial in the U. S. on Her Majesty's Ship HMS Monarch, Britain's newest and largest warship, repainted for this grim occasion slate gray above the water line, with a specially built mortuary chapel.
Next came a 3-U. S. government decision (made between November 12-15, 1869) to send the United States corvette USS Plymouth from Marseilles, France, to accompany HMS Monarch to the United States.

Then followed 4-transfer (December 11, 1869) of Peabody's remains from Westminster Abbey, London, on a special funeral train to Portsmouth, England, impressive ceremonies at the transfer of remains from Portsmouth dock to HMS Monarch, specially outfitted as a funeral vessel.

Next came the 5-transatlantic crossing of HMS Monarch and the USS Plymouth  (December 21, 1869 to January 25, 1870) from Spithead near Portsmouth, past Ushant, France, to Madeira Island off Portugal, to Bermuda, and north to Portland, Maine, chosen by the British Admiralty because of its deeper harbor.

A covert rivalry had early erupted between 6-Bostonians and New Yorkers about which city could provide the more solemn ceremony as receiving port.  Thinking themselves the center of northeast society and fashion, each was disappointed when the British Admiralty chose Portland, Maine, whose deeper harbor more safely accommodated HMS Monarch's large size.

A contemporary news account described the petty jealousy:  "When the mighty men of Boston knew that England's..."Monarch" was bringing the body of the great philanthropist to his last resting place, they called a meeting and decided with what fitting honors and glories it would be received.… but, when the telegraph flashed the astounding news that little Portland was to be the port...all was changed….[Bostonians were sure] that the Portlanders...would blunder.…"

On January 14, 1870, on President U. S Grant's approval, 7-U. S. Navy Secretary  George Maxwell Robeson (1829-97) ordered Admiral David Glasgow Farragut (1801-70), a PEF trustee, to command a U.S. naval flotilla to meet HMS Monarch and USS Plymouth in Portland harbor, Maine (January 25, 1870).

HMS Monarch's captain then requested, on behalf of Queen Victoria, 8-that the coffin remain aboard the Monarch in Portland harbor for two days (January 27-28, 1870).as a final mark of respect.  Thousands of visitors, drawn to the spectacle, viewed the coffin in the somberly decorated Monarch's mortuary chapel.

Peabody's remains then 9-lay in state in Portland City Hall (January 29-February 1, 1870), viewed by thousands.  10-A special funeral train from Portland, Maine, bore the remains to Peabody, Massachusetts (February 1, 1870).  11-Lying in state of Peabody's remains took place at the Peabody Institute Library (February 1-8, 1870).

The final ceremony, the press announced to an awed public, was to be 12-Robert Charles Winthrop's funeral eulogy at the South Congregational Church, Peabody, Massachusetts, attended by New England governors, mayors, Queen Victoria's son Prince Arthur, and other notables (February 8, 1870).  Final burial would then follow at 13-Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts.

Why Such Unprecedented Funeral Honors?

Daily reports on Peabody's sinking condition in London had appeared in the British press.  After his death the London Daily News recorded (November 8, 1869):  "We have received a large number of letters, urging that the honours of a public funeral are due to the late Mr. Peabody's memory."

The Dean of Westminster Abbey, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815-81), was in Naples, Italy, November 5, 1869, when he read of Peabody's death.  Years later he recorded: "I was in Naples, and saw in the public papers that George Peabody had died.  Being absent, considering that he was a foreigner, and at the same time, by reason of his benefactions to the City of London, entitled to a burial in Westminster Abbey, I telegraphed to express my wishes that his interment there should take place."

The Alabama Claims

Peabody died during tense, near warlike U. S.-British angers over two U. S. Civil War incidents, the Alabama Claims (1864-72) and the Trent Affair (September 8, 1861).  CSS Alabama was a notorious British-built Confederate raider which sank 64 northern cargo ships during 1862-64.

Without a navy, with its southern ports blockaded by the North, Confederate agents slipped secretly to England, bought British-built ships, armed them as Confederate raiders, renamed them Alabama, Florida, Shenandoah, and others, which sank northern ships and cost northern lives and treasure.

Officially neutral in the U. S. Civil War, British officials were continually reminded of their breach of neutrality by U. S. Minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams (1807-86).  Official U. S. demands for reparations for damages from British-built raiders (from1862) were resolved at a Geneva international tribunal (1871-72), requiring Britain to pay the United States $15.5 million indemnity.

At Peabody's death, November 4, 1869, this Alabama Claims controversy was unresolved and tense.  Americans were angry; Britons were resentful.  A desire to defuse angers over the Alabama Claims was one reason British officials first, and then United States officials to surpass them, outdid each other in unusual homage to Peabody's remains during his transatlantic funeral.

Trent Affair

There was also lingering resentment over the still rankling November 8, 1861 Trent Affair.  On the stormy night of October 11, 1861, four Confederate emissaries, seeking aid and arms from Britain and France, evaded the Union blockade at Charleston, South Carolina, went by ship to Havana, Cuba, and there boarded the British mail ship Trent, bound for Southampton, England. 

The Trent was illegally stopped in the Bahama Channel, West Indies (November 8, 1861) by USS San Jacinto's Captain Charles Wilkes (1798-1877).  Confederates James Murray Mason (1798-1871, from Virginia), John Slidell (1793-1871, from Louisiana), and their male secretaries were forcibly removed and imprisoned in Boston harbor's Fort Warren Prison.

Anticipating war with the U. S., Britain sent 8,000 troops to Canada.  But United States jingoism subsided.  President Abraham Lincoln reportedly told his cabinet, "one war at a time," gentlemen, got the cabinet on December 26, 1861, to disavow the illegal seizure, and released the Confederate prisoners on January 1, 1862.  But resentments lingered.

Besides softening near war U .S.-British tensions, another reason behind the Peabody funeral honors was British leaders' sincere appreciation for Peabody's gift of homes for London's working poor.  Many marveled that an American would give that kind of gift in that large amount to a city and country not his own.  Britons also valued Peabody's two decades of efforts to improve United States-British relations.

Prime Minister Gladstone

On November 9, 1869, in a major speech at the Lord Mayor's Day banquet, Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1808-98) referred to British-U.S. difficulties and then mentioned Peabody's death:  "You will know that I refer to the death of Mr. Peabody, a man whose splendid benefactions...taught us in this commercial age...the most noble and needful of all lessons--...how a man can be the master of his wealth instead of its slave [cheers]."

"And, my Lord Mayor," Gladstone continued, "most touching it is to know, as I have learnt, that while, perhaps, some might think he had been unhappy in dying in a foreign land, yet so were his affections divided between the land of his birth and the home of his early ancestors, that...his [wish] has been realized--that he might be buried in America, [and] that it might please God to ordain that he should die in England [cheers].  My Lord Mayor, with the country of Mr. Peabody we are not likely to quarrel [loud cheers]."

Prime Minister Gladstone's cabinet met at 2:00 P.M., November 10, 1869, and confirmed Queen Victoria's suggestion of a Royal Navy ship to return Peabody's remains.  Peabody funeral researcher Allen Howard Welch wrote: "The Queen, in fact, was personally grieved, and it was her own request that a man-of-war be employed to return Peabody to his homeland."

In the handing over ceremony of Peabody's remains from U .S. Minister to Britain John Lothrop Motley to HMS Monarch's Captain John Edmund Commerell (1829-1901), December 11, 1869, Portsmouth, England, U. S. Minister Motley explained: "The President of the United States, when informed of the death of George Peabody, the great philanthropist, at once ordered an American ship to convey his remains to America.  Simultaneously, the Queen appointed one of Her Majesty's ships to perform that office.  This double honor from the heads of two great nations to a simple American citizen is, like his gift to the poor, unprecedented.  The President yields cordially to the wish of the Queen."

Praise for the Peabody Homes of London, 1862

Peabody's housing gift for London's working poor was announced March 12, 1862, while the U. S. and Britain still raged over the September 1861 Trent Affair.  Peabody's gift evoked surprise and admiration in the British press, a sampling of which follows.

London Times, March 26, 1862: "Mr. George Peabody has placed £150,000 in the hands of a committee to relieve the condition of the poor of London.  It is seldom that good works are done on such a scale as this one by an American in a city where he is only a sojourner….  [He] gives while he lives to those who can make no return….  He does this in a country not his own, in a city he may leave any day for his native land.  Such an act is rare...."

London Daily Telegraph, March 27, 1862: "The noble gift of Mr. Peabody actually takes away the public breath...and sends a thrill through the public heart….  A man gives his fortune during his lifetime for an object going back to a resolution he had held more than a quarter of a century...to elevate the poor.  Party strife and national bickering have not changed this good American; wars and rumours of wars have not turned him...from his...purpose."

London Morning Herald, March 27, 1862: "One of the merchant princes of the world has just presented [London] with a gift for which thousands will bless his name….  Whilst his countrymen are warring...with each other, this generous American is working out...good-will among his adopted people."

London Sun, March 27, 1862: " How can England ever go to war with a nation whose leading man among us thus sympathizes with and blesses her poor?  Who of us will not set the deed of Mr. Peabody...against that of Captain Wilkes....?"

London Review, March 29, 1862: "From America of late has come war, desolation, and animosity.  The close ties of...friendships that linked Englishmen and Americans...seemed dissolved....  In the midst of this comes Mr. Peabody's gift to discard prejudices on both sides of the Atlantic.  We have had a desperate family quarrel, and almost come to blows; Mr. Peabody...by a well-timed act...awakens...better sentiments."

Leeds Mercury, March 27, 1862:  "An American citizen has now come forward to excite the wonder and admiration of the world."

When friend and sometime agent Horatio Gates Somerby (1805-72), a Vermont-born London resident genealogist, sent Peabody these London newspaper clippings, Peabody replied: "I had not the least conception that it would cause so much excitement over the country."

British Honors

British honors evoked by Peabody's gift to London included membership in the ancient guild of the Clothworkers' Company of London (July 2, 1862).  He was granted the Freedom of the City of London (July 10, 1862), the first of only five American so honored; others being President U. S. Grant, June 15, 1877; President Theodore Roosevelt, May 3, 1910; General John J. Pershing, July 18, 1919; and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 1, 1945.

Peabody had been denied membership I n London's Reform Club (1844) when Americans were disdained because nine U. S. states had stopped interest payments on their bonds sold abroad.  When payment was resumed retroactively Peabody, who had publicly urged this course, was admitted to the Parthenon Club (1848), the City of London Club (1850), and the most prestigious Athenaeum Club (March 12, 1862).

The Fishmongers' Company of London made Peabody an honorary member (April 18, 1866).  When Oxford University granted him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree (June 26, 1867), undergraduates cheered, waved their caps, and beat the arms of their chairs with the flat of their hands.  Jackson's Oxford Journal (June 29, 1867) recorded: "The lion of the day was beyond a doubt, Mr. Peabody."

Peabody's seated statue, sculptured and cast by Salem, Massachusetts-born William Wetmore Story (1819-95), paid for by public subscription, was unveiled July 23, 1869, on London's Threadneedle Street, near the Royal Exchange, by Queen Victoria's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.  The only four statues of Americans in London include George Peabody (1869), Abraham Lincoln (1920), George Washington (1921), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1948).

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria's advisors had informed Her Majesty that, when asked privately, Peabody had declined either a baronetcy  or the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath.  To accept would be to lose his U. S. citizenship, which he felt he could not do.  Her Majesty's Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell (1792-1878) suggested instead a letter from the Queen and the gift of a miniature portrait of the Queen, such as was given to foreign ambassadors who signed a treaty with Britain.

The Queen's letter to Peabody, March 28, 1866, expressed thanks for his "noble act of more than princely munificence…to relieve the wants of her poor subjects residing in London.  It is an act…wholly without parallel….  "The Queen…understands Mr. Peabody to feel himself debarred from accepting [other] distinctions."  [She asks him instead] "to accept a miniature portrait of herself, which she will have painted for him, and which…can…be sent to him in America."

Peabody thanked the Queen by letter on  April 3, 1866.  He received Her Majesty's miniature portrait from British Ambassador Sir Frederick Bruce (1814-67) in Washington, D.C., March 1867.   It was 14" long by 10" wide, had been especially painted for him by British artist F. A. C. Tilt, baked on enamel, and set in a sold gold frame, said to have cost $70,000.  It was deposited in a specially built vault, with Peabody's other honors, in the Peabody Institute Library, Peabody, Massachusetts.

John Bright to the Queen on George Peabody

British statesman and Member of Parliament John Bright (1811-89), who had befriended Peabody from 1867 and had gone fishing with him on the Shannon River, Limerick, Ireland, dined with the Queen, December 30, 1868.  Bright recorded in his diary the conversation: "Some remarks were made about Mr. Peabody: it arose from something about Ireland, and my having been there on a visit to him.  [The Queen] remarked what a very rich man he must be, and how great his gifts."

[Bright recorded that Peabody] "told me how he valued the portrait [the Queen] had given him, that he made a sort of shrine for it, and that it was a thing of great interest in America.  Peabody then "said to me, 'The Americans are as fond of your Queen as the English are.'  To which she replied, 'Yes, the American people have also been kind to me.'"

Queen Victoria's Second Letter to Peabody

Leaving London suddenly on what he knew would be his last U. S. visit, Peabody was in Salem, Massachusetts, when he received Queen Victoria's second letter.  She wrote (June 20, 1869):  "The Queen is very sorry that Mr. Peabody's sudden departure has made it impossible for her to see him before he left England, and she is concerned to hear that he is gone in bad health."

The Queen continued:  "She now writes him a line to express her hope that he may return to this country quite recovered, and that she may then have the opportunity, of which she has now been deprived, of seeing him and offering him her personal thanks for all he has done for the people."

Publishing the Queen's letter, the New York Times added:  "Queen Victoria has paid our great countryman a delicate and graceful compliment.  Mr. Peabody left England unexpectedly, his departure known only to a few friends.  His feeble health became known to the Queen through London newspapers.  With her goodness of heart which Americans never fail to appreciate she sent him a personal letter."  On July 19, 1869, Peabody replied, assuring the Queen of his "heartfelt gratitude."

Queen Victoria's Last Contact

Learning of Peabody's hasty return to London (October 8, 1869), before she knew of his precarious condition, she asked her privy councilor Arthur Helps (1813-75) to invite Peabody to visit her at Windsor Castle.  Helps wrote to Sir Curtis Lampson in whose London home Peabody rested (Oct. 30, 1869):  "'Regarding Mr. Peabody, the Queen thinks the best way would be for her to ask him down to Windsor for one or two nights, where he could rest--and need not come to dinner, or any meals if he feels unequal to it; but where she could see him quietly at any time of the day most convenient to him."  But it was too late.  Largely unconscious his last days, Peabody died November 4, 1869.

U. S. Honors

Chief among Peabody's U. S. honors  was the U. S. Congressional Resolution of Thanks and Gold Medal for his PEF, passed in the U.S. Senate (March 8, 1867), in the U. S. House (March 9, 1867), and signed by President Andrew Johnson (March 16, 1867), who welcomed Peabody at the White House (April 25, 1867).  These, his Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard University (July 17, 1867), and his other honors received in the U. S. and England, are displayed in the Peabody Institute Library, Peabody, Massachusetts.

Winthrop's Eulogy, February 8, 1870

All was ready for the final act:  Winthrop's eulogy of George Peabody, February 8, 1870, a bitterly cold day.  Thousands poured into tiny Peabody, Massachusetts, by special morning trains which ran full from Boston.  Large crowds were quiet and respectful.  The 50 state troopers had little to do but give directions.

South Congregational Church filled quickly.  Queen Victoria's son, Prince Arthur (1850-1942), in the seventh pew from the pulpit, held all eyes.  His retinue, including British Minister to the U. S. Sir Edward Thornton, sat nearby.

Behind Prince Arthur sat HMS Monarch Captain John E. Commerell, USS Plymouth's Captain William H. Macomb, Admiral Farragut's staff, Massachusetts Governor William Claflin, Maine Governor Joshua L. Chamberlain, the mayors of eight New England cities, Harvard University President Charles William Eliot (1834-1926), and others.

On the first six rows sat Peabody's relatives, elderly citizens who knew him in youth, and the trustees of his institutes and funds.  Anthems were sung.  Scripture was read.  Robert Charles Winthrop rose to give the eulogy.

Robert Charles Winthrop was the descendant of an early governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a Harvard University graduate, trained in Daniel Webster's law office, member and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Peabody's philanthropic advisor, and the PEF board of trustees president.

Winthrop began: "What a career this has been whose final scene lies before us!  Who can contemplate his rise from lowly beginnings to these final royal honors without admiration?  His death, painless and peaceful, came after he completed his great dream and saw his old friends and loved ones."

Winthrop continued:  "He had ambition and wanted to do grand things in a grand way.  His public charity is too well known to bear repetition and I believe he also did much private good which remains unknown.  The trusts he established, the institutes he founded, the buildings he raised stand before all eyes."

"I have authority for saying," Winthrop continued, "that he planned these for many years, for in private talks he told me all he planned and when I expressed my amazement at the magnitude of his purpose, he said to me with guileless simplicity:  'Why Mr. Winthrop, this is no new idea to me.  From the earliest of my manhood, I have contemplated some such disposition of my property; and I have prayed my heavenly Father, day by day, that I might be enabled, before I died, to show my gratitude for the blessings which He has bestowed upon me by doing some great good to my fellow-men.'"

The words underlined above are engraved on Peabody's marker in Westminster Abbey, London, where his remains rested for 30 days, November 12-December 11, 1869.  That marker and the above words on it were refurbished for the February 12, 1995, bicentennial ceremony of Peabody's birth held in London's Westminster Abbey.
Winthrop further said: "To measure his gifts in dollars and pounds or in the number of people served is inadequate.  He did something more.  The successful way he arranged the machinery of world-wide philanthropy compels attention.  It is a lesson that cannot be lost to history.  It has inspired and will continue to inspire others to do likewise.  This was the greatness of his life."

"Now, all that is mortal of him," Winthrop said, "comes back, borne with honors that mark a conquering hero.  The battle he fought was the greed within him.  His conquest was the victory he achieved over the gaining, hoarding, saving instinct.  Such is the conqueror we make ready to bury in the earth this day.

Winthrop continued: "And so was fulfilled for him a prophecy he heard once as the subject of a sermon, on which by some force of reflection lingered in his mind and which he more than once mentioned to me:  'And it shall come to pass in that day, that the light shall not be clear nor dark; but it shall be one day which shall be known to the Lord, not day, or night:  but it shall come to pass that at evening time it shall be light.'"

Winthrop said that Peabody first heard this text, Zechariah 14: 6-7, in a sermon by the Reverend Dr. John Lothrop (1772-1820) of Brattle Street, Boston, date not known.
Winthrop concluded: "And so we bid thee farewell, noble friend.  The village of thy birth weeps.  The flower of Essex County stands at thy grave.  Massachusetts mourns her son.  Maine does honor to thee.  New England and Old England join hands because of thee.  The children of the South praise thy works.  Chiefs of the Republic stand with royalty at thy bier.  And so we bid thee farewell, friend of mankind."

Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Mass.

The New York Times described the final burial scene at Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1870:  "There were about two hundred sleigh coaches in the procession.  The route was shortened somewhat in consequence of the prevalence of the storm.  On arriving at the Peabody tomb, there was no special service, the coffin being placed reverently therein, after which the procession returned to the Institute, and the great pageantry attending the obsequies of the great philanthropist was ended."

Harmony Grove Cemetery's 65 acres of avenues and walks, first laid out in 1840, had been a thick walnut grove when Peabody was a boy.  He could see it from the attic of the house where he was born.  On a knoll where he had once played he had chosen the family burial plot on Anemone Ave., lot number 51.  There, where he had brought together the remains of his mother, father, sisters, and brothers, he was laid to rest.

Ninety-six days of unprecedented funeral honors had ended.  His works remain.  Public memory of him has since grown dim, except at his institutes and among those who care to search the records.

Memory has also dimmed of those few days that summer of 1869 at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, when two old men, one from Massachusetts, the other from Virginia, turned from Civil War strife to the healing power of education.  One, a lifelong soldier, had become president of a struggling college; the other, a volunteer for 14 days in the War of 1812, merchant, London-based banker, and creator of philanthropic institutions.  The two old men walked arm in arm, enjoyed each other, spoke of educating new generations, of reconciliation, of healing, and of better days to ahead.

Authors

The Parkers attended Berea College, near Lexington, Kentucky (1946-50), were married soon after; attended the University of Illinois, Urbana (1950); and what is now Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville (1950-56).  Franklin Parker taught at several universities including West Virginia University, Morgantown, where he was Benedum Professor of Education (1968-86), and was granted emeritus status in 1986.

Authors' Publications on George Peabody (1795-1869)

Dissertation:  Franklin Parker, Ed. D. Dissertation, "George Peabody, Founder of Modern Philanthropy," (Nashville: George Peabody College for Teachers, 1956), 3 vols., 1219 pp.   Abstracted in Dissertation Abstracts, XVII, No. 8 (Aug. 1957), pp. 1701-1702.

Books

Franklin Parker, George Peabody, A Biography.  Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971, 233 pp., reprinted in microfiche form in CORE [Collected Original Resources in Education], IX, 3 [Nov. 1985], Fiche 7 D10 (Note: CORE is a British miroform journal).  Microfilm & hard copy also sold by Books on Demand, University Microfilms, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 [ask for LC79-15,7741, O-8357-3261-4,2039482]).  The 1971 version was recorded in 2 audio cassettes, read by narrator Bruce Bortz at the Maryland State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Book Number Md-PH (MDC334), less Chap. 25  ‘GP’s Legacy’; ‘An Essay on Sources’; ‘Sources of Extant Portraits, Photographs, and Illustrations’; and Index.

 ¶Vanderbilt University Press reprinted a revised, updated, Franklin Parker, George Peabody, A Biography.  Nashville:, Feb. 1995, 278 pp, with 9 illustrations added.  The 1971 and rev. 1995 editions are both out of print.

Encyclopedia Articles

1-(With Betty J. Parker), "Peabody Education Fund in Tennessee (1867-1914)." Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998), pp. 725-726.

2-Franklin Parker, "George Peabody (1795-1869), Merchant, Banker, Creator of the Peabody Education Fund, and a Founder of Modern Philanthropy," in Encyclopedia of Notable American Philanthropists.  Edited by Robert T. Grimm, Jr. (Greenwood Press and Oryx Press, for Indiana Univ. Center on Philanthropy, due in 2002).

3-Franklin Parker, "George Peabody (1795-1869)," Encyclopedia of Philanthropy in the United States.  Edited by Dwight Burlingame (Greenwood Press and Oryx Press, for Indiana Univ. Center on Philanthropy, due in 2002).

Journal Issue

Franklin Parker, "Legacy of George Peabody: Special Bicentenary Issue" [reprint of 21 articles], Peabody Journal of Education, LXX, No. l (Fall 1994), 210 pp., published as ISBN: 0805898956, by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, sold by Peabody Journal of Education, Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, 113 Payne Hall, Post Office Box 41, Nashville, Tenn. 37203, Phone: (615) 322-8963.
 
Pamphlet

Franklin Parker, George Peabody (1795-1869), Founder of Modern Philanthropy. Nashville, Tenn.: George Peabody College for Teachers of Vanderbilt University, 1956.

Chapter in Book

Franklin Parker, "George Peabody (1795-1869), Founder of Modern Educational Philanthropy: His Contributions to Higher Education," pp. 71-99 in Academic Profiles in Higher Education.  Edited by James J. Van Patten.  Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.

Articles in Journals, 1955-98

1-"Founder Paid Debt to Education,"  Peabody Post, VIII, No. 8 (Feb. 10, 1955), p. 1.

2-"The Girl George Peabody Almost Married," Peabody Reflector, XXVII, No. 8 (Oct. 1955), pp. 215, 224-225.

3-"George Peabody and the Spirit of America,"  Peabody Reflector, XXIX, No. 2 (Feb. 1956), pp. 26-27.

4-"On the Trail of George Peabody," Berea Alumnus, XXVI, No. 8 (May 1956), p. 4.

5-(With Walter Merrill), "William Lloyd Garrison and George Peabody,"  Essex Institute Historical  Collections,  XCV, No. 1 (Jan. 1959),  pp. 1-20.

6-"George Peabody and Maryland," Peabody of Journal of Education, XXXVII, No. 3 (Nov. 1959), pp. 150-157.

7-"An Approach to Peabody's Gifts and Legacies," Essex Institute Historical Collections, XCVI, No. 4 (Oct. 1960), pp. 291-296.

8-"Robert E. Lee, George Peabody, and Sectional Reunion," Peabody Journal of Education, XXXVII, No. 4 (Jan. 1960), pp. 195-202.

9-"George Peabody and the Search for Sir John Franklin, 1852-1854,"  American Neptune, XX, No. 2 (April 1960), pp. 104-111.

10-"Influences on the Founder of the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Hospital," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, XXXIV, No. 2 (March-April 1960), pp. 148-153.

11-"George Peabody's Influence on Southern Educational Philanthropy,"  Tennessee Historical Quarterly, XX, No. 2 (March 1961), pp. 65-74.

12-"Maryland's Yankee Friend--George Peabody, Esq.," Maryland Teacher, XX, No. 5 (Jan. 1963), pp. 6-7, 24.  Reprinted in Peabody Notes (Spring 1963), pp. 4-7, 10.

13-"The Funeral of George Peabody," Essex Institute Historical Collection, XCIX, No. 2 (April 1963), pp. 67-87. Reprinted: Peabody Journal of Education, XLIV, No. 1 (July 1966), pp. 21-36.

14-"The Girl George Peabody Almost Married, Peabody Notes, XVII, No. 3 (Spring 1964), pp. 10-14.

15-"George Peabody, 1795-1869, Founder of Modern Philanthropy," Peabody Reflector, XXXVIII, No. I (Jan.-Feb. 1965), pp. 9-16.

16-"George Peabody and the Peabody Museum of Salem," Curator, X, No. 2 (June 1967), pp. 137-153.

17-"To Live Fulfilled:  George Peabody, 1795-1869, Founder of George Peabody College for Teachers," Peabody Reflector, XLIII, No. 2 (Spring 1970), pp. 50-53.

18-On the Trail of George Peabody," Peabody Reflector, XLIV, No. 4 (Fall 1971), pp. 100-103.

19-"George Peabody, 1795-1869: His Influence on Educational Philanthropy," Peabody Journal of Education, XLIX, No. 2 (Jan. 1972), pp. 138-145.

20-"Pantheon of Philanthropy:  George Peabody," National Society of Fund Raisers Journal, I, No. 1 (Dec. 1976), pp. 16-20.

21-"The Legacy of George Peabody: Special Bicentenary Issue" [reprints 22 article on George Peabody], Peabody Journal of Education, LXX, No. 1 (Fall 1994), 210 pp.

22-(With Betty J. Parker).  "A Forgotten Hero's Birthday [George Peabody]: Lion and the Lamb," Crossville (Tenn.) Chronicle, Feb. 22, 1995, p. 4A.

Electronic Journals

1-"In Praise of George Peabody, 1795-1869," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XV, No. 2 (June 1991), Fiche 5 AO2.  (CORE is published by the Carfax Publishing, Taylor & Francis Ltd, P. O. Box 25, Abingdon, Oxfordshire 0X14 30E, UK).

2-"George Peabody (1795-1869), Founder of Modern Educational Philanthropy: His Contributions to Higher Education," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XVI, No. 1 (March 1992), Fiche 11 D06.

3-"Education Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869), Founder of George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, and the Peabody Library and Conservatory of Music, Baltimore (Brief History)." CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XVIII, No. 1 (March 1994),  Fiche ??  Abstract in Resources in Education.  (Resources in Education abstracts documents published in microform in ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) since 1966 by the U.S. Department of Education).

4-(With Betty J. Parker), "George Peabody's (1795-1869) Educational Legacy," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XVIII, No. 1 (March 1994),  Fiche 1 C05.  Abstract in Resources in Education, XXIX, No. 9 (Sept. 1994), p. 147 (ERIC ED 369 720).

5-(With Betty J. Parker), "Educational Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869), George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, and the Peabody Library and Conservatory of Music, Baltimore (Brief History)," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XVIII, No. 1 (March 1994), Fiche 3 A10.  Abstract in Resources in Education, XXX, No. 5 (May 1995), pp. 133-134 (ERIC ED 378 070).  Same in Journal of Educational Philosophy & History, XLIV (1994), pp. 69-93.

6-"Educational Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869): Photos and Related Illustrations in Printed Sources and Depositories," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XVIII, No. 2 (June 1994), Fiche 1 D1Z; also abstract in Resources in Education, XXX, No. 6 (June 1995), p. 149 (ERIC ED 397 179).

7-"Educational Philanthropist George Peabody and Peabody College of Vanderbilt University: Dialogue with Bibliography," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XVIII, No. 3 (Dec. 1994), Fiche 2 E06.

8-(With Betty J. Parker). "America's Forgotten Educational Philanthropist: A Bicentennial View," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XIX, No. 1 (March 1995), Fiche 7 A11.  Abstract in Resources in Education, XXXI, No. 12 (Dec. 1996), p. 161 (ERIC ED 398 126).

9-(With Betty J. Parker). "Educational Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) and the Peabody Institute Library, Danvers, Massachusetts: Dialogue and Chronology," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XIX, No. 1 (March 1995), Fiche 7 B01.

10-(With Betty J. Parker). "George Peabody (1795-1869); Merchant, Banker, Philanthropist," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XX, No. 1 (March 1996), Fiche 9 B01.  Abstract in Resources in Education, XXXI, No. 3 (March 1996), p. 169 (ERIC ED 388 571).

11-(With Betty J. Parker). "On the Trail of Educational Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869): A Dialogue."  CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XX, No. 3 (Oct. 1996), Fiche 13 B07.

12-(With Betty J. Parker). "Educational Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) and First U.S. Paleontology Prof. Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899) at Yale University." CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XXII, No. 1 (March 1998), Fiche 7 A04.

13-(With Betty J. Parker). "Educational Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) and U.S.-British Relations, 1850s-60s." Abstract in Resources in Education, XXXV, No. 5 (May 2000), p. 122 (ERIC ED 436 444).

14-(With Betty J. Parker).  "George Peabody A-Z," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), Vol. 23, No. 3 (Oct. 1999), Fiche 11  C10.

15-(With Betty J. Parker). "General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) and Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) at White Sulphur  Springs, West Virginia, July 23-Aug. 30, 1869." Abstract in Resources in Education, XXXVI, No. 2 (Feb. 2001), p. 184 (ERIC ED 44917).

16-(With Betty J. Parker):  "Forgotten George Peabody (1795-1869); Massachusetts-born Merchant, London-based Banker, Philanthropist.  His Life, Influence, and Related People, Places, Events: A Handbook" (1200+ pp.).  Abstract in Resources in Education, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3 (March 2001), p. 156 (ERIC ED 445 998).

17-(With Betty J. Parker). "Educational Philanthropist George Peabody's (1795-1869) Death and Funeral."  CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education) and Abstract in Resources in Education (ERIC ED).  To appear in late 2002.

About Authors

The Parkers are graduates of Berea College near Lexington, Ky., where they met in 1946.  They were married in 1950; graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana, 1950; and from what is now Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 1956. 

Franklin Parker taught at the Universities of Texas, Austin, 1957-64; Oklahoma, Norman, 1964-68; West Virginia University, Morgantown, 1968-86; Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, 1986-89; and Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, 1989-94. 

Betty Parker taught high school and college English, was secretary to Belmont University's first president (Nashville), taught Reading at the University of Texas, Austin; and was a researcher, writer, and co-editor with Franklin Parker of numerous education books and articles.  The did extensive research resulting in George Peabody, A Biography, Vanderbilt University, 1971, revised 1995.   E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net

End of Manuscript.

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Thursday, July 02, 2009 
"Max Rafferty (1917-82), Conservative Educator and California State School Superintendent During 1962-70," by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, Tn 38571-8270, E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net


Rafferty, Maxwell Lewis, Jr. (born May 17, 1917; died June 13, 1982), educator, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Maxwell Lewis Rafferty, an Irish Roman Catholic store owner and auto plant worker, and DeEtta Cox. In 1921 the family moved to Sioux City, Iowa, and then, in 1931, to Los Angeles, California.
 
Young Max skipped several grades and graduated at age sixteen from Beverly Hills High School, California, where he was remembered for being studious, quick witted, and much younger than his classmates.


Entering the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he majored in history, managed the football and rugby teams, was president of Sigma Pi fraternity, joined the UCLA Americans (an anti-communist athletic group opposed to leftist students), and received a B.A. in 1938.

He then enrolled in the UCLA School of Education to become a teacher and later claimed to have reluctantly studied John Dewey's educational philosophy in order to become certified. He taught English and history and coached football at Trona High School, in Trona, California, from 1940 to 1948, having been classified physically unfit for the World War II draft because of flat feet.

He married a schoolmate in 1940, was divorced in 1943, and married Frances Louella Longman in 1944. They had three children. He earned an M.A. degree from UCLA in 1949 and an Ed.D. degree from the University of Southern California in 1955.


Asked later why he chose to be a teacher and school administrator for twenty-one years in isolated southern California desert towns, Rafferty replied that "they paid better salaries, and advancement was more rapid." From Trona, California, where he had risen to be vice principal, he became principal of the high school in Big Bear, California, a resort town in the San Bernardino Mountains, from 1948 to 1951.

He was then school superintend at Saticoy, (1951-1955), Needles (1955-1961), and La Canada, a prosperous northeast Los Angeles suburb (1961-1962), all in California.


Max Rafferty's speeches to education groups and civic clubs as well as his articles (particularly in Phi Delta Kappan, the journal of the education honor society) and books written during these years expressed his contempt for progressive education and school approaches that stressed "life adjustment."


He described leftist students of the 1950s and 1960s as "booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs." His impassioned speeches and writings soon won him admiration from the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups, many of which had growing memberships in California during these years.


His 1961 "Passing of the Patriot" speech to the La Canada school board excoriated educators for having been "so busy educating for 'life adjustment' that we forgot that the first duty of a nation's schools is to preserve that nation."
 
That speech marked a turning point in his career. Wide press coverage made Rafferty a hero of not only political right wingers but also of those who yearned more generally for a return to simple and manly virtues.


In 1962, backed by a coalition of conservative forces, Rafferty won election as state superintendent of public instruction; he was reelected in 1966. He feuded with the liberal state board of education, especially over books that he wanted removed from school libraries and as textbooks in school subjects.


But his conservative philosophy of education had little real impact because of the checks and balances and local control built into the California school system. His critics claimed that California's schools were never as progressive as Rafferty claimed.


Encouraged by conservative Republicans, he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1968, won the nomination over liberal-Republican California Senator Thomas H. Kushell, but lost to Democrat Alan M. Cranston in the general election. He also lost his third reelection bid in 1970 as California's superintendent of public instruction to Wilson Riles, a black educator whom he had appointed his deputy.

Having been rejected in California, he left in 1971 to become dean of education at Troy State University, in Troy, Alabama. He died following an automobile accident.


Rafferty presaged the New Right's ascendancy to political power through the Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and particularly Ronald Reagan. Many observers believed that Rafferty preached a conservative gospel as a means of self-promotion, rather than out of personal conviction. Despite his talent for invective, opponents as well as allies found him likable and articulate.


References


Rafferty's best-known books are Suffer, Little Children (1962); What They Are Doing To Your Children (1964); Max Rafferty on Education (1968); and Classroom Countdown: Education at the Crossroads (1970).


For biographies, see Paul F. Cummins, Max Rafferty: A Study in Simplicity (1968), and Franklin Parker, "School Critic Max Rafferty (1917-1982) and the New Right," Review Journal of Philosophy & Social Science, 10, 2 (1985): 129-40.


Obituaries are in the New York Times, June 15, 1982; San Diego Union (Calif.), June 14, 1982; Oakland Tribune (Calif.), June 14 1982; Los Angeles Times (Calif.), June 14 1982; San Francisco Examiner (Calif.), June 15, 1982; and Birmingham News (Ala.) , June 16, 1982. End of Manuscript.


Send E-mail comments and corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net

Addendum: 24 of Franklin and Betty J. Parker’s book titles are listed in: http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P

For their writings in blog form, enter bfparker in google.com or in any other search engine.)


Franklin Parker's, George Peabody, A Biography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, Feb. 1995, 278 pp., revised, 12 photos, is out of print, but most pages can  be read freely as an E-book by accessing:
http://books.google.com/ and typing in Source:
George Peabody, a Biography, by Franklin Parker.
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009 

Category: News and Politics
1 of 2 Parts: "How the U.S.A. Became the World's Policeman."

By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net


Review of with Commentary on Warren Zimmermann, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp.

Given at Book Review Group, Uplands Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, May 15, 2006.
Betty: Frank, why did we choose this particular book, Warren Zimmermann's, The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, 2002? What was our motive?


Frank: Zimmermann's point is that an aggressive U.S. foreign policy aimed at making the U.S. the world’s policeman originated in and has persisted since the Spanish American War, 1898. In that war, for the first time, we took on and defeated a European power, Spain. We consequently acquired strategic naval bases in the Caribbean and Pacific. We planned a Panama Canal which opened in 1914. That war and control of the Panama Canal led to our becoming a world power


Betty: In that 3 month imperial thrust--April 25 to July 1898--we destroyed the Spanish fleet, acquired directly and indirectly overseas naval bases in and responsibility for Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa. The imperial U.S. foreign policy then formed still guides us.


Frank: Who was Warren Zimmerman? What does the title mean: The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power?


Betty: Warren Zimmermann (1935-2004) was a Yale graduate and a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, England. He was briefly a journalist and for 33 years a U.S. diplomat, including ambassador to Yugoslavia during the Bosnian civil war. He later taught International Diplomacy at Columbia University.


Frank: The book's title, The First Great Triumph, is from a June 15, 1898 letter Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) wrote to his sister Corinne on his way to fight in Cuba: "[This] is a great historical expedition,…I thrill to feel that I am part of it…. If we…succeed…we have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement."1


Betty: Theodore Roosevelt, first of Zimmerman's…Five Americans [who] Made Their Country a World Power, was frail as a child. He overcame asthma, poor eyesight, and a weak heart through exercise and a strenuous outdoor life. His vigorous personality, staunch Republicanism, ambition for high office, and his certainty that the U.S. must reach outside its borders for world leadership were infectious.


Frank: Like-minded influential Republicans saw Roosevelt as an unstoppable ally and helped him climb the political ladder. Roosevelt's career choices were guided mainly by Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee member. Sen. Lodge was the second of Zimmerman's…Five Americans [who] Made Their Country a World Power.


Betty: Henry Cabot Lodge, 8 years older than Roosevelt, more jingoistic than Roosevelt, was the son of two patrician Boston families. Heir to a shipping fortune, he was a Harvard graduate and a Harvard history professor. Roosevelt was his student.


Frank: Lodge won a U.S. congressional seat (1886), then a U.S. Senate seat (1892), and served 30 years on the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lodge, supreme political tactician, and Roosevelt, diehard political expansionist, helped foment the Spanish American War.


Betty: You may recall Lodge's grandson and namesake, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, 1902-85. He was U.S. representative to the United Nations under Pres. Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1960) and Richard M. Nixon's (1913-) running mate as vice president when they both lost to John F. Kennedy (1917-63) in 1960.


Frank: The older Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt headed a rising Republican expansionist cabal determined to reach beyond U.S. borders for unlimited U.S. commercial success and unhampered world power. Twenty years later as Pres. Woodrow Wilson's nemesis Senator Lodge helped defeat the League of Nations. Why? Because to Senator Lodge U.S. sovereignty should not be limited by any international body.


Betty: Back to Theodore Roosevelt: at age 24 he was New York State Assembly minority leader (1882-84). At 26 he went west to raise cattle and hunt big game in North Dakota (1884-86).


Frank: At 34 he was U.S. Civil Service Commissioner (1889-95). At 36 he was New York City Police Commissioner (1895-97). He then helped elect as U.S. president Ohio Republican William McKinley (1843-1901).


Betty: Pres. McKinley named Roosevelt at age 38 Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1897-98). Having sparked the Spanish American War, Roosevelt resigned to recruit and lead the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, Cuba.


Frank: As a war hero, Roosevelt at 40 was elected New York State governor (1898-1900). As vice presidential candidate, he helped Pres. McKinley win a second term in 1900. When Pres. McKinley was assassinated (Sept. 14, 1901), Vice President Theodore Roosevelt at 43 became the youngest U.S. President. He was president during 1901-04 and re-elected during 1904-08.


Betty: We Americans don't like to hear our county called an imperial nation, or our president called an imperial president. Yet historians, including Zimmermann, say it has always been so.


Frank: For example: The American Revolution was fought to win independence and to acquire all the North American land we could get. American Revolutionary raiding parties captured Montreal but lost at Quebec. We wanted to take all of Canada several times but were no strong enough to do so.


Betty: George Washington in 1783 referred to the U.S. as a "new empire," a "rising empire." In 1786 he said: "there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires."2


Frank: With the Louisiana Purchase from France (1803), Pres. Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore (1803-06) the Pacific Northwest. Why? So that Americans could settle, develop, and profit from western lands and commerce.


Betty: John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State under Pres. James Monroe, influenced the U.S. to buy Florida from Spain (1819). He also helped Pres. Monroe issue the Monroe Doctrine (1823) which declared the Western Hemisphere to be an exclusive U.S. sphere of influence closed to any further European exploitation.


Frank: Avid expansionist Pres. James K. Polk (1795-1849) wanted the U.S. northwest boundary with Canada set at "54-40 or Fight." By winning the Mexican War (1846-48), he added 1.2 million square miles to the U.S. Pres. Millard Fillmore (1800-74) used gunboat diplomacy in sending Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) to open trade with Japan (1853).


Betty: Pres. Abraham Lincoln was imperial in suspending habeas corpus in the Civil War and jailing subversives without trial, actions that were unconstitutional. The U.S. was imperial in its discrimination against African Americans, American Indians, Chinese, and other minorities.


Frank: National U.S. post-Civil War energy went into settling the West, building roads, canals, railroads, and the telegraph to connect our vast nation. Immigrant labor abounded, business boomed; fortunes were made by Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, others. U.S. "Manifest Destiny" seemed unstoppable.


Betty: Wisconsin history Prof. Frederick Jackson Turner saw in the U.S. Census of 1890 a slight but significant shift in the U.S. center of population. His 1893 paper, "The Frontier in American History," said that the American frontier was gone, but that frontier characteristics remained: rugged individualism, restless movement, upward striving for business success, profit, and dominance.


Frank: Prof. Turner said prophetically in 1896, two years before the Spanish American War: [Frontier] "energies of expansion will…[continue in] demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries…."3


Betty: Prof. Turner was right. With the frontier gone, believers in "Manifest Destiny'" looked overseas for increased trade. To protect that trade, they needed strategic overseas bases and naval protection. Military power outside U.S. boundaries then meant naval power.


Frank: To Prof. Turner's insight that U.S. rugged individualism would expand overseas was added Charles Darwin's (1809-82) evolution theory (1859). U.S. expansionists, embracing Darwinian evolution, saw struggle for survival as natural and believed it right and proper for the U.S. to become the fittest, strongest, first, most dominant of nations.


Betty: U. S. naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) was the third of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Mahan's 1890 book on the importance of sea power influenced naval strategists world-wide. Mahan was the father of the modern U.S. Navy.


Frank: Born in West Point, N. Y., where his father taught, young Mahan graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1859. Having served in the Civil War on antiquated wooden Union warships, Mahan later irritated superiors by publishing articles urging U.S. Navy improvements. His superiors tried unsuccessfully to muzzle Mahan. One called him derisively "a pen and ink sailor."


Betty: Mahan's model was the British Navy. He wanted more, larger, better-gunned, steam-driven, steel-hull ships. He wanted better selected, brighter, well trained, highly skilled naval personnel. Instead of small ships for coastal defense he wanted large battleships for oceanic offense.


Frank: The U.S. Navy, he wrote, must be mobile, flexible, with quick passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific through a central American canal. The U.S. must also have a network of strategically located refueling and refitting stations with deep ports.


Betty: Mahan's big chance came when Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce (1827–1917), under whom Mahan once served, established the world's first Naval War College at Newport, R.I. Mahan eagerly accepted a teaching post there (1885), spent 9 months in libraries steeped in historical studies, and arrived at the Naval War College (1886) to find himself its acting head and later president.


Frank: In his second year (1887), needing a lecturer on the naval history of the War of 1812, Mahan found that Theodore Roosevelt, whom he did not know, had published in1882, age 24, a book titled The Naval War of 1812. In his lecture series Roosevelt used the word "war" 62 times. These two men thereafter reinforced each other; Mahan was Roosevelt's strategic advisor. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and as U.S. President implemented Mahan's ideas.


Betty: Mahan's lectures were published by Little, Brown & Co. The editor wisely suggested a new introductory chapter that tied his historical themes to U.S. Navy shortcomings. Mahan's book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783, published in 1890, won rave reviews. That book and Mahan's subsequent books became required reading in major navy departments worldwide.


Frank: Some quotes about Mahan: "The Influence of Sea Power…was Mahan's greatest achievement and probably the most influential work on naval strategy ever written."4 [Again]…"The Influence of Sea Power was a work of breathtaking range: a history of diplomatic and military strategy, a survey of land as well as sea combat."5 [Again]…"[Mahan's book] shaped the imperial policies of Germany and Japan…"6

Betty: To Mahan's new naval strategy was added the insatiable drive for increased U.S. trade abroad. Ohio Governor William McKinley said, before his presidency: "We want a foreign market for our surplus products."7 Indiana Republican Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927) in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War, said: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."8


Frank: Expansionist Senator Henry Cabot Lodge said: "In the interests of our commerce…we should build the [Central American] canal, and for the protection of that canal…we should control [Hawaii].., Samoa, [and] Cuba….The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth…"9


Betty: Thus, during William McKinley's presidency (1896-1901) Republican expansionists determined to advance U.S. world status by increased overseas trade protected by strategic bases in territories abroad. Wanting a pretext for war, hawkish Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War: "In strict confidence…I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."10


Frank: Spain then was weakened by guerrilla-led uprisings in Cuba under Jose Martí (1853-95) and in the Philippines under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964). U.S. Americans sympathized with oppressed Cubans, were angered at Spain's brutality, concentration camps, and resulting deaths. U.S. American anger was fanned by U.S. yellow press sensational accounts of Spanish atrocities.


Betty: Pres. McKinley, a decorated Civil War major, wanted to avoid war. But a riot in Havana on January 12, 1898, threatened U.S. residents. Pres. McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Cuba as a show of force. On Feb. 15, 1898, an explosion sank the Maine in Havana Bay, killing 268 U.S. sailors. A U.S. Navy investigation, March 21, 1898, reporting that a mine explosion outside the hull sank the Maine, stirred U.S. anger. The U.S. jingo press, bent on war, headlined that Spanish agents had deliberately sunk the Maine.


Frank: Yielding to public clamor, Pres. McKinley on April 11, 1898, asked Congress to declare war on Spain. On April 22, 1898, the U.S. Navy blockaded Cuban ports. Spain on April 24, 1898; and the U.S the next day (25th), declared war.


Betty: Seventy eight years later (1976) a re-sifting of the evidence attributed the Maine explosion to coal dust which accidentally ignited nearby gunpowder.


Frank: The cry, "Remember the Maine," sparked the Spanish American War. It was comparable to the firing on Fort Sumter in the Civil War, the sinking of the Lusitania in World War I, the attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Vietnam, and Weapons of Mass Destruction charge in the Iraq War (2003-).


Betty: The Spanish American War, 1898, was based on larger U.S. motives than the Maine explosion: 1-to acquire more territory for more trade, 2-more territory for refueling bases, 3-to attain greater U.S. status, 4-to protect the proposed Panama Canal, and—a reason given for the first time: 5-to restore human rights to oppressed Cubans

.
Frank: Cuba was the initial focus. The Philippines was an afterthought. Following Mahan's strategic advice, and in the absence of his superior, Navy Secretary John D. Long, Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt sent Commodore George Dewey's (1837-1917) Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong before war was declared. Roosevelt instructed Dewey: when war is declared, rush to Manila and attack the Spanish fleet. Dewey's fleet reached Manila Bay late April 30. On May 1 in a 7 hour battle Dewey destroyed the Spanish ships.


Betty: In Cuba a U.S. Navy squadron blockaded the remaining Spanish fleet. U.S. regular soldiers and volunteers, including Roosevelt's "Rough Riders," soon reached Cuba. Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, with spare glasses sewn into his new Brooks Brothers uniform, led the fight up San Juan Hill. On July 3, the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet in a 4 hour sea battle. A month later, Aug. 4, 1898, U.S. forces took Puerto Rico.


Frank: Total U.S. casualties: 3,289 dead. Only 332 died in battle. The remaining deaths were from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases. Spanish casualties: about 60,000 dead, only 10% in battle or battle wounds, 90% from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases.11&12


Betty: In the Treaty of Paris that ended the war (Dec. 10, 1898) Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the Pacific we annexed Wake Island (July 4, 1898) and Hawaii (July 7, 1898). We had earlier acquired Midway Island when we purchased Alaska (1867).


Frank: The U.S. Senate fiercely debated the Dec. 10, 1898 Treaty of Paris. Anti-expansionists argued that acquiring such distant non-contiguous areas peopled by alien races incapable of assimilation was against traditional U.S. isolationism. Taking the territories, they said, was inconsistent with the Monroe Doctrine and against U.S. principles of self-government. It was Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's dominant persuasion that won Senate approval by just two votes on Feb. 6, 1900.

End Part 1 of 2 Parts: Go to Concluding 2 of 2 Parts: bfparker@frontiernet.net
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009 

2 of 2 Parts: "How the U.S.A. Became the World's Policeman."

Concluding 2 of 2 Parts:"How the U.S.A. Became the World's Policeman."
By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Review of with Commentary on Warren Zimmermann, First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp.

Given at Book Review Group, Uplands Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, May 15, 2006.

Concluding Part 2 of 2 Parts follows:

Betty: Seventy eight years later (1976) a re-sifting of the evidence attributed the Maine explosion to coal dust which accidentally ignited nearby gunpowder.

Frank: The cry, "Remember the Maine," sparked the Spanish American War. It was comparable to the firing on Fort Sumter in the Civil War, the sinking of the Lusitania in World War I, the attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Vietnam, and Weapons of Mass Destruction charge in the Iraq War (2003-).

Betty : The Spanish American War, 1898, was based on larger U.S. motives than the Maine explosion: 1-to acquire more territory for more trade, 2-more territory for refueling bases, 3-to attain greater U.S. status, 4-to protect the proposed Panama Canal, and—a reason given for the first time: 5-to restore human rights to oppressed Cubans.

Frank: Cuba was the initial focus. The Philippines was an afterthought. Following Mahan's strategic advice, and in the absence of his superior, Navy Secretary John D. Long, Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt sent Commodore George Dewey's (1837-1917) Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong before war was declared. Roosevelt instructed Dewey: when war is declared, rush to Manila and attack the Spanish fleet. Dewey's fleet reached Manila Bay late April 30. On May 1 in a 7 hour battle Dewey destroyed the Spanish ships.

Betty: In Cuba a U.S. Navy squadron blockaded the remaining Spanish fleet. U.S. regular soldiers and volunteers, including Roosevelt's "Rough Riders," soon reached Cuba. Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, with spare glasses sewn into his new Brooks Brothers uniform, led the fight up San Juan Hill. On July 3, the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet in a 4 hour sea battle. A month later, Aug. 4, 1898, U.S. forces took Puerto Rico.

Frank: Total U.S. casualties: 3,289 dead. Only 332 died in battle. The remaining deaths were from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases. Spanish casualties: about 60,000 dead, only 10% in battle or battle wounds, 90% from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases.11&12

Betty: In the Treaty of Paris that ended the war (Dec. 10, 1898) Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the Pacific we annexed Wake Island (July 4, 1898) and Hawaii (July 7, 1898). We had earlier acquired Midway Island when we purchased Alaska (1867).

Frank: The U.S. Senate fiercely debated the Dec. 10, 1898 Treaty of Paris. Anti-expansionists argued that acquiring such distant non-contiguous areas peopled by alien races incapable of assimilation was against traditional U.S. isolationism. Taking the territories, they said, was inconsistent with the Monroe Doctrine and against U.S. principles of self-government. It was Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's dominant persuasion that won Senate approval by just two votes on Feb. 6, 1900.

Betty: Needing backing from Britain, then the world's leading power, President McKinley chose John Hay (1838-1905) as ambassador to Britain (1897-98), fourth of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power.

Frank: John Hay, born in Salem, IN, moved at age 3 with his parents to Warsaw, Ill. After graduating from Brown University, Providence, R.I., he joined his uncle's Springfield, IL, law firm next door to lawyer-politician Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign manager, John Nicolay (1832-1901) and John Hay had been classmates. Nicolay got Hay to help in the 1860 political campaign. Newly elected President Lincoln took Nicolay—and at Nicolay's urging, also Hay—to Washington, D.C., as his two secretaries. Hay, in 1861 at age 23, found himself living in the White House.

Betty: John Hay read Pres. Lincoln's mail and drafted replies, including Lincoln's famous sympathy letter to Mrs. Bixby on the deaths of her two sons in the Civil War. John Hay briefed Lincoln on news press items, greeted visitors and job-seekers, arranged receptions, was sent on secret missions, and played with Lincoln's sons Willie and Tad. He swapped funny stories with Lincoln and was at the assassinated Lincoln's deathbed. John Hay's Lincoln connection together with his own political skills, literary talent, wit, charm, and easy manner, led him to high office.

Frank: After Lincoln's assassination Secretary of State William Henry Seward appointed John Hay foreign service officer (1865-70). He served in Paris, Vienna, Madrid. After that, Hay's visit to a friend at the New York Tribune led to Hay's four years as New York Tribune journalist and editorial writer (1870-74). John Hay met and married Clara Stone (Feb. 4, 1874), moved to her hometown, Cleveland, OH, where investment opportunities through his millionaire father-in-law, made John Hay wealthy.

Betty: Ohio political connections led to John Hay's appointment as assistant secretary of state (1879-81), under Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-93). In Washington, D.C., Hay renewed contacts with Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and other Republican expansionists.

Frank: In Cleveland, Hay wrote a best selling novel, The Breadwinners (1883), about urban labor turmoil. Back in Washington, D.C., he wrote with John Nicolay the important 10-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History (N.Y.: Century, 1886).

Betty: Pres. McKinley, a good judge of talent, knew that John Hay as U.S. ambassador to Britain (1897-98) would help win Britain's support.

Frank: John Hay smoothed over past U.S.-British animosities over the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and Civil War angers over the Trent Affair and the Alabama Claims controversy. [Trent Affair: On Nov. 8, 1861, U.S. warship officers illegally and forcibly removed from the British ship Trent, in the Bahamas, four Confederate agents seeking arms and aid abroad. Pres. Lincoln disavowed the illegal seizure, released the Confederates (Dec. 1861), thus avoiding a U.S.-British war in the middle of the U.S. Civil War].

Betty: There was also the Civil War Alabama Claims friction with Britain: Without a navy, Confederate agents secretly bought British made ships, renamed them Alabama, Florida, etc., outfitted them with guns as war raiders. Those British built Confederate raiders cost many Union lives and much treasure. A Geneva international court made Britain pay the U.S. $15.5 million indemnity (1871-72).

Frank: Thanks to John Hay, Britain backed U.S. rule over Spain's territories, supported a U.S.-built Panama Canal, and approved a U.S "Open Door" policy (March 20, 1899), allowing U.S. to trade in China without paying high tariffs. Britain was glad for a friendly U.S. to perform international acts that also advanced Britain's interests.

Betty: The Anglo-American alliance John Hay forged lasted through our late but crucial entrance into World War I against Kaiser-led Germany, World War II against Hitler's Nazism, the Cold War against USSR domination, the 1991 Gulf War, and the current (2003+) Iraq War.

Frank: Pres. Theodore Roosevelt praised John Hay as follows: "I wonder if you have any idea what your strength and wisdom and sympathy…have meant to me."13

Betty: Zimmermann described John Hay: "As a successful businessman, he caught the rising tide of America's economic expansion. As a Secretary of State [he] knew both the world and his own country. He presided over a period of expansion with modesty, civility, and a self-deprecating humor…."14

Frank: The U.S. Army initially administered Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. But Pres. McKinley wanted civilian administrators to replace Army rule. He looked for a Secretary of War to supervise civil administrators in nation building and to lead the colonial people toward self rule. John Hay recommended Elihu Root (1845-1937), fifth of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Internationally minded Elihu Root was best at nation-building and at finding legal solutions to seemingly irreconcilable problems.

Betty: Here is how McKinley contacted Elihu Root: Pres. McKinley in the White House phoned Elihu Root in New York City. McKinley said to Root: I want you to be Secretary of War. Root said: I can't do that. I'm a lawyer. I don't know anything about war. I don't know anything about the Army. I have no experience with government. I have never been to Washington. McKinley said: I don't care about that. You're a smart lawyer and you will be the first person in the history of the United States charged with running colonies. I want somebody with good common sense, a pragmatic problem solver, a lawyer like you.

Frank: Elihu Root served Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt as Secretary of War (1899-1904). He then succeeded John Hay as Secretary of State under Pres. Roosevelt (1905-09) and was a one-term U.S. senator. He was our leading international lawyer of that time.

Betty: Elihu Root was born in Clinton, New York, home of Hamilton College where his father taught and from which Elihu graduated (1864). He taught for a year (1865), graduated from New York University Law School (1867), and began a long, successful legal career. In his twenties Elihu Root was a highly regarded corporation lawyer, by his thirties his law practice had made him rich, and in his forties he was one of most sought–after trial lawyers in the country.16

Frank: Before becoming U.S. president, William Howard Taft (1857-1930), was the first civil administrator to the Philippines. Elihu Root gave these instructions to William Howard Taft: "…the government which you are establishing is designed not for our satisfaction…but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands, and the measures adopted should…conform to their customs, their habits, and…their prejudices."

Betty: Elihu Root first and foremost served U.S. interests. But Root also helped make Cuba independent (May 20, 1902). In Puerto Rico he preserved Spanish civil law, made sure that locally generated revenues were used locally, and obtained large U.S. grants for schools. In the Philippines Root and William Howard Taft began land reform, built roads and schools, helped the Philippines attain the highest literacy rate in Asia and have the first elected legislature in Asia.

Frank: Elihu Root founded the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, both still existing. Root's work led to the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1927. He inspired the creation of the Central American Court of Justice. His urging of a World Court, leading to the International Court of Justice in the Hague in 1945.

Betty: Elihu Root served the U.S. government on many international committees and courts. He won the Nobel Peace Prize (1912) for his tireless effort to establish the principles of compulsory international arbitration.18 &19 Root died in 1937 at age 92.

Frank: Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier (1905) for helping end the Russo-Japanese War. Of his earlier jingoism, those closest to him said, it was to live down his father's decision not to fight in the Civil War but to pay someone to take his place, a common practice then. Yet young, hawkish Roosevelt gave us a powerful Navy and stiffened a wavering Pres. McKinley. Roosevelt died of heart failure in 1919 at age 61.

Betty: Alfred Thayer Mahan, the early maligned "pen and ink" sailor, was vindicated as the grand naval strategist. He was later showered with honorary degrees in England and the U.S. Mahan died in 1914, at the beginning of World War I.

Frank: John Hay, bright, witty, noted writer, political administrator, and Renaissance man, died at age 67 in 1905, having forged a lasting U.S.-British alliance.

Betty: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, as previously mentioned, was the supreme tactical Republican expansionist politician. He, Roosevelt, and Mahan's naval strategy sparked the Spanish American War. Lodge died in 1924.

Frank: In grabbing colonies the U.S. was as ruthless as the most ruthless European powers. But, wrote Zimmermann, the U.S. did better as a colonial administrator. Cuba became independent (May 20, 1902), although under conditions that assured U.S. interests. Philippine independence was delayed until 1946. Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state, (Aug. 21, 1959). Puerto Ricans consistently voted for closer ties with the U.S. The U.S. profited from its colonies, yes, but it also built roads, schools, improved health, and advanced economies. The bee fertilized the flowers it robbed.20

Betty: Author Zimmermann thus illustrated the weak U.S. before and the powerful U.S. after the Spanish American War: In 1891 in the True Blue Saloon, Valparaíso, Chile, 2 U.S. sailors were killed in a bar room brawl with local Chileans. U.S. Navy officials asked Capt. Alfred Mahan, who had been in and out of Chilean ports, for a contingency plan should the incident lead to war. Capt. Mahan, discovering that the Chilean Navy might actually defeat the U.S. Navy, advised his superiors to settle the matter by arbitration.

Frank: Now fast forward 18 years later to Feb. 22, 1909. The Great White Fleet, 16 first class U.S. battleships, returned from a year-and-a half cruise around the world; 45,000 miles, with stops at major world ports, the longest cruise taken by any navy before or since. This Great White Fleet arrived at Hampton Roads, Va., a column 7 miles long, greeted by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. dignitaries, a navy band, and resounding cheers. Theodore Roosevelt had shown the world that the U.S. was a first class nation with a first class navy. The U.S. had arrived on the world stage. We were a world power, on the way to being the world's policeman. 21

Betty: The age of U.S. imperialism, Zimmermann wrote, lasted nearly 100 years, 1898 to the end of the Cold War in 1991. What changed, he wrote, is that big corporations increasingly finance political campaigns, influencing U.S. presidents and Congress to advance business profit rather than humane needs at home and abroad. We are in transition, Zimmerman said, between the U.S. imperialist age that ended in 1991 and a new age that is unformed and undefined.

Frank: Zimmermann died in 2004. He said about the Middle East in a speech on June 14, 2002, 9 months before the U.S. invaded Iraq:"…there is more…danger to us by a military invasion of Iraq than if we dealt with [Saddam Hussein] in some other way…. [An invasion of Iraq will]…generate more terrorism in the Middle East…. [E]ven if we win…[and]…install the government of our choice, we will have to run [Iraq] for a long time because of…unsettled ethnic problems there. So Iraq becomes…an American protectorate…that will…generate among young Arabs everywhere greater anti-Americanism and terrorism."22

Betty: We end with Zimmermann's prophetic view above about Iraq today and his hope that the U.S. will always use its international power for altruistic, helpful purposes. 22

References

1-Zimmermann, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p.275.

2-Ibid., p. 6.

3-Ibid., p. 24.

4-Ibid., p. 94.

5-Ibid.

6-Uhlig, Jr., Frank. "The Great White Fleet," American Heritage, Vol. XV, No. 2 (Feb. 1964), pp. 30-43.

7-Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. N.Y.: Perennial Classics, 1999 p. 299.

8-Ibid.

9-Ibid.

10-Ibid., p.297.

11-http://www.spanamwar.com/casualties.htm

12-http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm

13-Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 419.

14-Ibid., p. 455.

15-Zimmermann, Warren. Speech, April 9, 2003, Council on Ethics and International Affairs.

16-Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 123.

17-Ibid.

18 and 19-Ibid ., pp. 487-488.
20-Zimmermann, Warren. "Jingoes, Goo-Goos, and the Rise of America's Empire, Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 22, No.2 (Spring 1998), pp. 42-65.

21-Uhlig, op cit.

22-Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 503.

Used for Background

Avram, Wes., Ed. Anxious About Empire; Theological Essays on the New Global Realities. Grand Rapids, MI, 2004. (13 religious leaders criticize post 9-11-2001 "Bush Doctrine" of unilateral preemptive strikes in Iraq).

"Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies," New York Times, December 2, 1914, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0927.html

Braun, Theodore A. Perspectives on Cuba and Its People. N.Y.: Friendship Press, National Council of Churches, 1999.

Byrd, Robert C. Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency. N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2004.

Morris, Richard B., Ed. Encyclopedia of American History. N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1953.

End. Corrections, comments to:  bfparker@frontiernet.net
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