Monumental

Two and a half years between posts. That's not too bad. At that rate I could go on posting for years.

The truth is that two months after I uploaded that first post I was laid off from my job in publishing, another victim of the eBook revolution. I'm less annoyed now than I was then, having received a Kindle for Xmas and seen the possibilities in it . . . like not having to trudge from Brooklyn to Manhattan in snow and ice to borrow a book when I can download one from my computer.

But even then I had begun looking into at least three possibilities for my next post--a few things that caught my attention--but I had to put them on hold while looking for another job (not yet found, unfortunately). The fact that the one I finally decided on happens to coincide with the World War I centenary is just happenstance. I didn't even think about the anniversary while I was researching it . . . and yet now it's here.

So, expect a lot of hoohah from at least the New York Times (I speak as a New Yorker) and probably other people or journals (The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, Wiener Zeitung, Corriere della Sera, et al.) as we get closer to June 28, 2014. I mention the Times because since 2011 on its Opinion page it's been running a series on the Civil War (Disunion). If it decides to honor WWI in the same way there will be an overlap of just about a year before the Civil War sesquicentennial ends. And since the U.S. didn't enter the war until 1917, the Times may even wait until 2017 before covering it.

But my preoccupation here doesn't actually involve the war itself, although I always found it very interesting as a watershed moment between two eras. I remember that we were taught in college that what was considered "modern" history began around 1815 with the end of the Congress of Vienna. But, aside from national boundaries, the world didn't change anywhere near as much then as it did between 1914 and 1918.

Still, what does World War I have to do with Manhattan, aside from the men and women who fought and died in it, among them the very popular mayor John Purroy Mitchel who enlisted when his term of office ended in 1917 and who died on active service in 1918, four months before the armistice? Stupid question, any number of things, obviously. But what I mean to say is that my interest isn't actually in the war itself but the commemoration of the soldiers afterward. The war memorials.

It's the kind of thing that would come to my mind while walking around the city because I am a pushover for memorial statues. Whenever I see a statue of someone I have to stop and check it out. For instance, while wandering around uptown after the reopening of Hamilton Grange back in 1911, I ran across Hancock Park at St. Nicholas Ave. and 124th St. The park featured a very nice oversized bust of a 19th century-looking gentleman but . . .  who the hell was Hancock?

 

It turns out that Winfield Scott Hancock was a "masterful" Civil War general who died at the age of 62 while serving as the commander of the Military Department of the Atlantic while headquartered on Governors Island (Hancock Park). In that same year the aldermen decided to name a park after him. That's not terribly surprising. What is surprising is that, according to the Parks Department website, for over thirty years the park has been maintained by volunteers from the Coalition of 100 Black Women. Surprising because  Hancock was a staunch Democrat and considered by the southern states to be a strong supporter of a conservative antebellum South. (For those not terribly interested in American history, the positions of the two major parties have switched 180 degrees from the time of the Civil War. When the Civil War ended in 1865, the Republicans were the "civil rights" party and the Democrats became the "segregationists," something that didn't even begin to change until the Roosevelt administration, and even then only because of Eleanor not FDR.) As for Hancock, President Andrew Johnson had transferred him to the Fifth Military District in the South, replacing Gen. Philip Sheridan, where he issued his famous General Order Number 40 that recommended the end of military governance in the south and the return of civilian administration. To the Radical Reconstructionists and Blacks that meant a return to the old pre-war ways of doing things, which is exactly what happened for almost 100 years until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Hancock ran as the Democratic nominee for president against Garfield in 1880, narrowly losing the election. Still, he was known mainly for his integrity and devotion to duty.

But . . . I digress. Get used to it, I always digress. I just wanted to point out how the sight of a statue in the city can make my heart race and my palms all sweaty. Who is it, WHO IS IT?

For that reason, I wondered as I wandered around the city why, among the major cities of the United States, New York City, the largest and most important city at the end of the Great War, did not have a major World War I monument. It turns out that it wasn't for lack of trying. But more of that later, all about that, in fact.

This isn't going to be like Mr. Evarts, a short post that I can handle in one evening or two. This will stretch out for some time because there is a lot to cover and, as you notice from this post, I wander from the point very easily. Also, I will be posting some of my own photographs of various World War I monuments around the city, which means using a lot of MetroCards trekking out to a lot of different parts of all the boroughs. Not easy in the winter.

So, let me end this post with what I will call "World War I for Maroons" (a la Bugs Bunny); "for Dummies" is already taken. A very quick overview of The War to End All Wars.

And there you have it, World War I in nine headlines (I love that Evening World headline, "All Europe is in Arms"!). And notice how The Evening World jumped the gun just a "leetle" (war over on November 7)? That's the kind of paper the World was, as we'll see more of when we get into the whole memorial question.

I hope it doesn't take me two more years to the next post! Good night.

Oh, sorry, an little addendum here to more or less explain this blog. I was watching an interview with David McCullough on C-SPAN a few years ago when he was talking with Brian Lamb about, among other things, his book on the Brooklyn Bridge (The Great Bridge), his second book but his first major success. He told a story about being at a cocktail party in Washington, D.C., and being introduced to a woman as a man who was writing a book about the construction of Brooklyn Bridge. He said the woman laughed and asked who would possibly want to read a book about the Brooklyn Bridge. He told Brian Lamb that this angered him throughout the party and on the way home (as he was pounding the steering wheel) until he realized that it was a perfectly valid question. Who would want to read a book about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge? The answer came to him then, he wanted to read about it and that's why he was writing it.

This is not meant to compare me to David McCullough, a man I esteem greatly, but to point out why I am posting these things. They interest ME and I feel like sharing my interest. If there is one other person out there who finds these things interesting, fine. If there is no one else out there who finds these things interesting, also fine. Good night once again.

By the way, the newspaper excerpts that are reproduced above and in future posts are from the Library of Congress.

William Maxwell Evarts

A building I pass on my walks around the city has intrigued me since I first noticed it. It’s a medium sized apartment building at the corner of 2^nd Ave. and 14^th St. Red brick with white trim.

It’s fairly ordinary for a hundred-year-old building. It’s not unattractive and could use a cleaning, though it probably won’t ever get one. But it does have, on the 2^nd Avenue side, two attractive porticoes where the building’s entrances are. One is flanked by two columns the other by four. And there is an inscription on the face of each portico, which is what caught my attention.

Over the entrance to 231 is incised: The W.M. EVARTS. Over the entrance to 235 is: THE U.S. SENATE.

They seemed like an odd pair of names to give to two buildings so I did a search for Evarts.

It turned out that William Maxwell Evarts had indeed served one term as a senator from New York, from 1885 to 1891. But it turned out, further, that this was probably the least of his accomplishments.

From the collection of the Library of Congress

First and foremost, he was at the time of his death, considered the greatest advocate not only in New York but in the country.

He was enlisted by Andrew Johnson to defend him in his impeachment trial in 1868 and his three-day argument at the end of the trial is credited with saving the president from what seemed like an inevitable conviction by the Senate.

He helped secure the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes by arguing his case after the disputed election of 1876.

And in an 1875 trial that was the 19^th century equivalent of the OJ Simpson trial, he was persuasive enough defending Henry Ward Beecher on charges of adultery to cause a hung jury when most of the evidence and testimony seemed to point to Beecher’s guilt.

He was a man of many parts, serving in Lincoln’s administration during the Civil War, as Andrew Johnson’s attorney general for a year, as Hayes’s secretary of state, and as the first president of the New York Bar Association.

He also served as head of the committee to raise money to build the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, an effort that was not particularly successful, though not necessarily through any fault of Evarts:

The Life magazine of the time (closer in spirit to today’s New Yorker than to the Henry Luce's photo journal of the same name) used to take occasional potshots at him, but they seemed to take shots at everybody. This is the mildest, from the February 5, 1885 issue as his senate term began, a crack at his habit of speaking in long involved sentences:

Besides the many advantages of having Mr. Evarts in the Senate, there are manifest disadvantages which our legislators failed to take into account when considering his candidacy.

One of the largest of our corporate interests will suffer greatly if the rumor be true that the Western Union Telegraph Company is negotiating for ten miles of extra wire for the Associated Press report of Mr. Evarts’ opening sentence in the Senate. Even with this it is feared that a few yards will lap over at each end of the line unless Mr. Evarts can be induced to cut it down to twenty thousand words.

As for those two apartment house names, I quote from his obituary in the New York Times of March 1, 1901:

William Maxwell Evarts, lawyer and statesman, died yesterday morning at his home, 231 Second Avenue, corner of Fourteenth Street.

I found reference to the house having been sold twice over the next several years and can only assume that within a few years of its being sold, the mansion was torn down in favor of the apartments as the neighborhood began to change. No doubt the builder thought to commemorate such a popular man in the names of the building.

From the collection of the Library of Congress

The photographs of him in the Library of Congress show a rather grim visaged man, but again I quote from his Times obituary:

[The Beecher-Tilton trial] served to make him, too, more of a public favorite than even his brilliant triumph before the Arbitration Commission, because it focused him more clearly in the public eye. The element of personal humor in his composition now first impressed the public, as it had long before impressed his associates at the bar, and finding him, in some sort, a humorist, the people liked him better.

I noticed in Madison Square Park this afternoon a very impressive statue of Roscoe Conkling, one of the 19th century political bosses of New York City and State. It's too bad that the city didn't erect one of Evarts instead, it sounds like he deserved the honor more.