history

Christmas Comes Early: My Advance Copies Have Arrived

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My husband lifted two boxes inside the front door when he came from work on Friday. “Something for you,” he said. My mom had warned that she’d sent presents and not to open them so I paid little attention to the boxes and left them sitting by the door. Until the next morning when I happened to glance at the return address, fully expecting to see my mom’s name but instead saw: Beacon.

My books!!

The official publication date isn’t until January 7 but here’s some visual proof that this thing is real. At this time last year, I was tearing my hair out finishing the draft, rewriting, deleting, questioning everything, undoing that previous deletion, writing, deleting, repeat. Repeat.

This year is much better.

Books

Teddy Roosevelt’s Milwaukee Assassin

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On the night of October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt spoke to a crowd in Milwaukee despite having been shot by a would-be assassin.

Milwaukee was a campaign stop for Roosevelt who was running for president as the candidate of the newly independent Progressive Party. Roosevelt had already served two terms as president but his unhappiness with his successor, William Taft, led him to seek office on a progressive platform.

 

Unbeknownst to Roosevelt, New York bartender John Schrank had been stalking him for three weeks and across eight states. Obsessed with the thought of a third Roosevelt term, breaking the two term precedent set by George Washington, Schrank was convinced that Roosevelt’s election would lead to civil war so he decided he had to act. Schrank finally managed to get off a shot from his .38-caliber revolver as Roosevelt departed the Hotel Gilpatrick for his speaking engagement at the Milwaukee Auditorium. Unwilling to miss his speech, Roosevelt trivialized the wound and insisted on speaking. He even opened his vest at one point, revealing the wound, and declared, “It takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose.”

Fortunately, Roosevelt had poor vision and was long-winded. The metal case for his glasses and the thick folded pages of his speech absorbed much of the force of the bullet lodged in the right side of his chest.

Following his speech, Roosevelt was rushed to the hospital. An X-ray confirmed the presence of the bullet in his chest but doctors decided to leave the bullet in place as it posed no threat to his organs and surgery could be risky. Roosevelt carried the bullet for the rest of his life.

 

Footnote – I realized only recently that the site of the shooting was on Old World 3rd Street near Kilbourn Avenue, the current home of the Hyatt, where I have stayed several times. I hear there are even photos and a plaque! I should be more observant.

A Pirate Who Roved the High Inland Seas

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Yesterday was International Talk Like a Pirate Day (that’s September 19th in case you want to mark your calendar for next year), a day to practice your “arrrrrrrrrs” and “ahoys” and maybe adopt a pirate name.

While we tend to think of pirates as tropical characters (at least in popular lore), pirates (lumber thieves, privateers, rum – runners) roamed the Great Lakes as well. Only one, however, was actually branded a pirate and formally charged for his actions. Dan Seavey – or “Roaring Dan” as he was known – was guilty of everything from poaching to running a floating brothel aboard his Lake Michigan schooner, the Wanderer. 

Roaring Dan Seavey Source: Wikimedia

Roaring Dan Seavey
Source: Wikimedia

Born in Maine in 1865 and the son of a schooner captain father, Seavey took to the seas as a teenager, first working aboard local vessels and then for a stint in the U.S. Navy. He came to Wisconsin in the 1880s where he met and married 14-year-old Mary Plumley, the first of his three wives. The couple moved to Milwaukee in the 1890s where Seavey had a small farm and operated a tavern with a partner on the waterfront.

Seavey soon met Milwaukee beer king Frederick Pabst who encouraged Seavey to invest in a mining company in Alaska. Seavey took his advice and pulled the first of what would become several disappearing acts. He sold his business and deserted his family to seek his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. The company went bust within a few years and Seavey came back to Wisconsin but not to his family. He soon disappeared again, resurfacing in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1900.

There, Seavey married Zilda Bisner. Four years later, Bisner filed for divorce, claiming domestic abuse, and Seavey fled once again onto the lake.

Seavey ran many different businesses in Michigan, both legitimate and not. He tried trapping, logging, lumber milling, and marine transporting. On the side, he also practiced the pirate-y arts of bootlegging, poaching, smuggling, and pimping. All of these activities made Seavey a recognizable character throughout the Lake Michigan port cities. Not to mention the fact that he was nearly 6 and a half feet tall and weighed 250 pounds.

And like any good pirate, Seavey was notorious for his barroom brawls and prize fights. One fight occurred on a frozen harbor in Frankfort, Michigan, in 1904. Seavey fought pugilist Mitch Love bare fisted for two hours before cleaning the ice with Love and collecting his winnings.

Seavey also made a significant fortune off his floating brothel. It was a brilliant move considering that the jurisdiction of local authorities ended at the water’s edge. Crafty schooner captains like Seavey would load their boats with alcohol and ladies and travel from port to port. Weekends and paydays were, unsurprisingly, especially profitable in port towns.

On June 11, 1908, Seavey and two accomplices stole a schooner in Grand Haven, Michigan, and headed south to Chicago intending to sell the ship’s cargo on the black market. The theft initiated a chase with federal authorities. The federal ship Tuscarora steamed after Seavey carrying U.S Deputy Marshal Tom Currier and a warrant for Seavey’s arrest. The Tuscarora eventually spotted Seavey’s ship near Frankfort and gave chase, firing a cannon that ended Seavey’s run. Seavey was arrested and arraigned for mutiny and sedition on the high seas.

Seavey’s luck had not run out, though. Despite the government’s best efforts to prosecute him, the grand jury did not indict him and Seavey was set free. How he got off when he clearly stole the ship is a matter of speculation but the act and the case forever branded Seavey a pirate.

 

 

 

 

Fashions on the Face: Beards in American History

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[I recently appeared on the Wisconsin Public Radio show “Central Time” to talk about the history of beards and the current urban lumberjack fashion. Here’s a taste of what we talked about.]

Facial hair is contentious business.

Joseph Palmer became a martyr to his own whiskers, a long flowing beard that he insisted on wearing long in contravention of the current style. One day in 1830, Palmer was attacked by four men outside a hotel in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. His crime? Wearing a beard.

Source: Wikimedia

Source: Wikimedia

Palmer fought back, and despite being a large man, he was thrown to the ground. He managed to escape only by stabbing two of his assailants in the leg with his knife. He was later arrested and fined for causing an unprovoked assault. Although Palmer could easily have paid the fine, he refused on principle and went to jail for his facial hair crime. Even jail couldn’t protect Palmer from those who wanted to unshorn him – twice other prisoners and jailers attempted to shave his face. Palmer wrote letters from jail publicizing the case, and he was eventually released. His tombstone features a man wearing a long beard and the words “Persecuted for wearing the beard.”

A transcendentalist, reformer, and utopian, Palmer’s beard marked him as immoral and suspicious, clearly an outsider. Beards, mustaches, and goatees had been out in the United States since at least the 18th century. During the Enlightenment, a clean face signaled a mind that was open to new ideas. The nation’s founding fathers wore no beards – think of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and George Washington. In fact, no president from Washington through James Buchanan had facial hair.

During the American Revolution, soldiers were expected to keep themselves clean shaven, though judging by the number of times orders to do so appear in wartime records and letters, the men were not listening.

Views on facial hair began to change by the mid-19th century, though. As the nation became more urban and industrialized, many Americans worried about what all of these transformations would do to men and women’s characters, their essential natures. Not to mention the fact that women were gaining more of a public role. Beards were one way men could clearly demonstrate their difference from women. By the Civil War, beards signaled virility, strength, independence, and masculinity. Look only at photos from the Civil War to see a whole range of mutton chops, mustaches, and wooly beards (Smithsonian had a great feature on the facial hair of the Civil War). All the winningest generals had facial hair: Grant, Lee, Sherman, Jackson.

 

And look to the Oval Office where the first bearded president, Abraham Lincoln, took office in 1861. Lincoln, it should be noted, did not have a beard during the majority of his campaign. He supposedly grew one in the weeks before the election at the suggestion of 11-year-old Grace Bedell who suggested he might look better with a little hair on his face. By the time of his inauguration, Lincoln’s famous bearded face had taken form.

Beards remained popular for the next several decades but the winds of fashion changed course again by the 20th century. Beards gave way to mustaches in the early 20th century and finally the clean shaven face reappeared. No president has had facial hair since William Howard Taft.

A Taste of Milwaukee in an Apple

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A century ago, Milwaukee had its own apple. The seedling found growing beneath a Duchess apple tree and developed by George Jeffrey in the 1890s yielded a yellowish-green apple with a tart flavor that was a local specialty, one of thousands of varieties of apples known, grown, and beloved in North America.

Apples are one of the most widely grown and eaten fruits in the world. In North America alone, some 14,000 varieties have been named and nurtured over the last four centuries.

The industrialization of agriculture changed that world. By the mid-20th century, the Milwaukee apple along with many other Wisconsin apples had largely disappeared. The apple industry settled on a handful of varieties to promote and distribute worldwide, transforming the fruit from a local specialty into a global commodity. Today’s industrial food system has left us with only a meager sampling of the richness and diversity of the bygone apple world.

Read the rest of the story in Edible Milwaukee.

Past and Present in the Wisconsin Dells

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The Wisconsin Dells is a funny place. Like Wall Drug, its attractions scream at you from billboards all over the state – magic shows, water parks, thrills, terror (the amusement park kind), music (often cheesy or popular several decades ago – or if you’re really lucky, both), it’s all there.

As a kid, Wisconsin Dells was one of the many Wisconsin places my family visited in the summer. But not for the water parks that often draw people there today. No, we came to ride the Ducks, those amphibious boat vehicles that apparently saw action in World War II before finding a new life patrolling the woods around the Wisconsin River and Lake Delton (And in more recent years, taking tourists around big cities with some kind of duck whistle and/or silly hat. The Dells had them first). Or to take the boat cruise or visit the H.H. Bennett photography studio, Parson’s Indian Trading Post (open since 1914), or one time, to take the horse-driven canyon tour. Only once did I convince my mom to fork over the money for the wax museum.

We ate at Paul Bunyan’s cook shanty, a circus-y restaurant, and the supper club Ishnala; and we slept in motels straight from the 1950s and 1960s with holiday-themed rooms, see-saws and merry-go-rounds out back, or plastic palm trees beside pastel shades more at home in Florida or the tropics than south central Wisconsin.

Did I mention that I loved it?

Wisconsin Dells holds very specific and place-based memories for me, a mythical childhood-and-vacation Wisconsin that bares little resemblance to the Wisconsin I actually live in now.  My adult self cringes at the artificiality of the whole place with its fake Greek columns, pyramids, enormous wave pools, and log structures, and instead longs to see the striated bluffs and rock formations that first drew people to the area in the mid-19th century. And really, a dog jumps across Stand Rock in imitation of that great Bennett photo of his son leaping across the chasm from 1886, purportedly the first stop-action photo taken in the world? A trained dog?

And yet, I can’t help but smile at the sight of a green-and-white Duck driving down the parkway, and sigh with relief that the deer park is still there even though I’ve never been there to actually pet a deer and I frankly don’t like the whole petting zoo concept in any format. And phew, waterskiing shows.

What?

Maybe it’s the place and maybe its nostalgia. It’s both horrifying and fascinating to see the gaudy and destructive infrastructure atop a place so rich in natural beauty and history. But I also remember the delight of being a kid in a place so unlike anywhere else I’d been. It’s one place where my younger and older selves collide, where one idea of Wisconsin meets another, reminding me that I still have a lot to learn about this place and my place in it.

“Neuro” hype and 21st Century Phrenology

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brain

Is the brain the hottest organ in the body? That’s the argument made in a recent Slate story “The End of Neuro-Nonsense” that argues that brain hype reached its peak in 2008 and is now on the decline for a variety of reasons. Quoting from the new book Brainwashed that details the perils of brain-centrism: “Naïve media, slick neuroentrepreneurs, and even an occasional overzealous neuroscientist exaggerate the capacity of scans to reveal the contents of our minds, exalt brain physiology as inherently the most valuable level of explanation for understanding behavior, and rush to apply underdeveloped, if dazzling, science for commercial and forensic use.”

Maybe so.

But I’d argue that we’ve been living a “neurocentric,” to quote the term used in the article for our brain obsession, world for nearly 200 years. We just had a different name for it in the past: phrenology.

Phrenologists posited that the brain was made up of individual organs with specific functions and attributes. The size and shape of these organs, as read on the skull, revealed our character. Many argued that these organs – and thus our personalities – were changeable, improvable. With a little exercise, we could make ourselves better by strengthening positive traits and weakening others. With phrenology, doctors could easily determine not only how but why someone thought, felt, and coped with life in a particular way. It provided comfort and insight into our seemingly unknowable depths, a way to understand behavior and personality with seemingly scientific precision. Who wouldn’t like that?

Like the 19th century, many of us hope today, as the phrenologists did, that mapping the brain will reveal the secrets of our natures. And once known, this information will allow us to manipulate and transform ourselves into something better. We just call it “neuro” this and “neuro” that now, from neuromarketing to neuroeconomics, a transmutation of language strikingly similar to what occurred in the 19th century as phrenological terms (high brow, low brow, shrink, well rounded) passed from the lab to daily conversation. Colorful fMRI images of the brain on TV encourage us to think of almost everything through its effect on the brain, the modern equivalent of the phrenological charts that adorned the walls of pharmacies and general stores and were featured in the pages of magazines and books. Just as in the past, popular neuroscience suggests that the way to make us smarter, happier, and even more beautiful is through concentrated efforts to improve the brain regardless of how little we actually know about how the brain works. It seems to me that popular brain science is the phrenology of the 21st century, and we’re just as ravenous for that knowledge today as they were in the 19th century.

So maybe 2008 marks the most recent crest of a brain obsession with more than two centuries of history behind it that seems bound and determined to rise again.

 

“Mothers to the Motherless:” Policewomen in Chicago

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Policewomen Agnes Walsh (from left), Anna Loucks, Theresa Johnson, Anna Sheridan, Lulu Burt, Mabel Rockwell, and Miss Clara B. Olsen. Source: Chicago History Museum

Policewomen Agnes Walsh (from left), Anna Loucks, Theresa Johnson, Anna Sheridan, Lulu Burt, Mabel Rockwell, and Miss Clara B. Olsen.
Source: Chicago History Museum

On August 5, 1913, ten women were sworn in as officers – or “copettes” as one reporter called them – for the Chicago Police Department. The women, all trained as social workers, did not wear uniforms or carry revolvers but they did have a badge.

The fight for female officers had been raging for decades. Women’s groups had long argued that female detainees and juveniles needed protection from male officers and other male prisoners. Searched, interrogated, and detained in cells often beside or within sight of men, women detainees often suffered rape and sexual assault. Even outside of jails and courtrooms, advocates argued that women with police authority could keep better order and protect the morals of women and children at beaches, public parks, and other places of amusement than male officers. They could become, in effect, “mothers to the motherless.”

Few police departments and politicians supported the effort. Many labeled the crusade unnecessary and a waste of money. Others argued that women were physically incapable of being officers. Even after many cities passed ordinances authorizing the hiring of women officers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, few appropriations were made to actually make the hires.

Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison pushed the city council to hire female officers for the department in 1913. An order was passed, and Harrison appointed ten women. Police training consisted of a two hour lecture delivered by the terrifically named Chief McWeeny (especially fitting considering the pervasive belief that women were not strong enough to be officers) who told the new recruits to have compassion, not be “too strenuous,” “don’t be too nosy,” and to “present all cases fairly and squarely.” The women then received a police whistle, a book of rules, and badge.

Two days later, on August 7th, two of the female officers made their first arrest. It was of another woman, Nellie Cameron, for disorderly conduct. The novelty of women arresting women attracted a fair bit of media attention. Everyone was eager to see how women would handle a potentially physical interaction in making arrests. One officer claimed that female criminals would put up a bigger fight than normal for policewomen because they would not be afraid of another woman. Those opposed to policewomen jumped on every opportunity to show that women could not handle the work, though given the limited role and power (not to mention gear and a proper uniform) afforded these early women officers, the comparison of male and female officers could hardly be fair.

Concern about women’s physical strength led the police chief to assign a new batch of women officers to jujitsu instruction in 1914, a development that led to the New York Times to report, “Policewomen to Wrestle.”

Women’s path into police work and law enforcement was long and hard. In 1913, there were 38 in the U.S. By 1915, this number had risen to 70 in 26 cities. Most served in limited roles, mostly keeping order among women and children, in public places. It would be decades more before they earned a more equal place on the force. Even so, these early women forged a pioneering course.

There are few things in history that I love more than what I like to refer to as “women in unexpected places.” It’s usually a job or activity deemed “unwomanly” or dangerous to feminine virtue for one lame (and generally unconvincing, at least to me) reason or another. This is what draws me to policewomen and people like 19th century phrenologist, educator, and doctor Lydia Folger, who had her own medical practice (at a time when women struggled to even be educated and get adequate medical care) and wrote books and gave lectures on such taboo topics as the workings of the female body. Folger and other women like her were leaning in long before Sheryl Sandberg, and their stories have long energized and encouraged me. Really, they are the reason I do history.

Agitation for female police officers

What History Is

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The conclusion of Peter Ackroyd’s The History of England Volume I: Foundation* includes a sentence I can’t stop thinking about: “The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.” He goes on to say how convenience, circumstance, misjudgments, and errors play a large part “in what we are pleased to call the ‘development’ of institutions.”

None of this should come as any surprise. History is the story of people and who among us has not had a life of turmoil and coincidence (and if you have, I don’t want to hear from you)? Opinions change, even the most hardened beliefs transform or are discredited, everything is in a constant state of transition even if it sometimes seems just the opposite. It really is chaos with the historian struggling to piece together and interprete a whole mess of personalities into some kind of narrative that makes sense and gives us a sense of continuity and identity and belonging.

Ackroyd’s use of the word ‘pleased’ particularly pleases me because history can all seem so fated, so predetermined in hindsight as though people in the past were any different than people today. It’s easy to forget that, though. I think it’s why many people don’t (or think they don’t) like history (You do! Trust me!). Life was just as confusing and frustrating and overwhelming and wonderful 1000 years ago as today. History is the stories of people just like you and me.

I’m in the midst of deciding what “chaos” I want to take on as my next book project. It all feels so big and daunting right now with so many voices shouting for attention and roads of unknown possibilities. But it’s also exciting, like the throws of a new relationship. I’ll let you know what I find.

 

* This was a last minute “I have pounds to spare” purchase at the Heathrow airport before a flight home that turned out to be a remarkable page turner. I’ve had great luck with my hasty book buying (another great airport purchase was Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World that kept me from fully enjoying all of the entertainment options on offer in our business class “pods” because I couldn’t stop reading it), which I’d like to attribute to my good taste but is really the acumen of the store’s book buyer.

A [Museum] Walk Through Medicine’s Past

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Let me tell you about a wonderful place.

I spent the month of May abroad, touring – much of it on foot – in Ireland, Wales, and England. One of my best mornings was spent in London at the free museum and library of the Wellcome Trust (my history dorky-ness reigns unimpeded through work AND vacation times). I first discovered it online while doing research for my next book on the history of 19th century alternative health. The center is an amazing resource for understanding the history of medicine and science, and the connections between medicine, life, and art. Intriguing, right?

Even better for my little Wisconsin history heart, the foundation for the library came from the collections of Wisconsin-born pharmaceutical salesman Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853-1936). Wellcome ran a successful pharmaceutical business in London but devoted much of his time and resources to collecting books and objects related to medicine, health, alchemy, and even witchcraft from around the world.

Here’s three cool things I saw:

2013-05-29 11.11.09

1. Prosthetic limbs through time.

Prosthetic body parts have been used since at least the time of the Greeks and probably earlier (the Greeks left what is likely the first recorded use). None of these are quite that old but can you imagine wearing one of these? Near these limbs was a box of glass eyes.

2013-05-29 11.10.40

2. Phrenological Skull

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, phrenologists argued that the shape and size of various parts of the brain – these parts were known as organs – determined your personality. Your skull was supposedly a “faithful” cast of the brain encased within so rather than perform some risky operation to take a look at your brain, phrenologists could simply feel and measure the bumps on your head. Phrenology was very controversial in the medical community – and even among phrenologists themselves as this skull demonstrates. One half shows the organs as described by phrenology’s founder, Franz Joseph Gall, while the other half shows those of Gall’s disciple Johann Spurzheim.

2013-05-29 11.07.57

 

3. Charles Darwin’s Walking Stick

These are two of Darwin’s walking sticks, both intricately carved, one from ivory and one from whalebone. Darwin was a walker – he claimed to get many of his best ideas while walking. As a fervent walker myself, I loved to know that the clicking sound of Darwin’s walking stick hitting the ground became something of his calling card and signature sound.