Year: 2017
George Custer’s Reluctant Ride in a War Balloon
By Ken Zurski
In 1862, at the age of twenty-two, and nearly 15 years before his death at the Battle of Little Bighorn, the newly appointed Captain George Armstrong Custer went up in a hydrogen-filled balloon over the Virginia Peninsula, not far from Richmond, the rebel capitol.
A short and uneventful ride in a balloon is not the stuff of legends and this brief episode in Custer’s life is understandably unremembered. We know it happened only because Custer chose to write about it. And only because he chose to write about it, do we know he didn’t care for the experience as a whole.
So much for balloons in the Federal Army, right?
Not so. Abraham Lincoln certainly recognized the need. By the time Custer went up, tethered balloons were being used – albeit sparingly – for surveillance in the Civil War. A man named Thaddeus Lowe is the reason why. In April of 1861, Lowe flew one of his balloons over Unionville in the newly seceded state of South Carolina. He landed and was subsequently captured as a Union spy. Lowe claimed he was “a man of science” and let go. Despite this rather dubious start, Lincoln invited him to Washington to test the use of a telegraph wire tied to the balloon’s tether. Lowe’s first dispatch was sent directly to a service room in the White House. “This point of observation commands an area nearly fifty feet in diameter,” Lowe messaged. Lincoln immediately directed Lowe to form a Balloon Corps, more formally known as the Military Aeronautics Corps.
Lowe was given funds to make more balloons and soon enough there were eight in all with distinctly patriotic names: Union, Intrepid, Constitution, United States, Washington, and the Eagle. The first balloon used for official military purposes, the Union, ascended on September 1861 near Arlington, Virginia. From a vantage point nearly three miles away, Confederate troops were spotted in Falls Church. Instantly, telegraph intelligence improved.
But when the battles slowed, Lowe had little to do and turned to promoting his balloon business instead. He got into the habit of allowing journalists to take rides. Most of them were eager to do so because it made good copy. However, many of the enlisted men and officers, were not so easily influenced. Perhaps this was out of caution- or fear. After all one unfortunate officer named Fitzjohn Porter, a lieutenant-general, almost never made it back alive.
Porter was in a balloon that broke from its tether and flew into rebel territory, near Yorktown. The balloon drifted directly over enemy outworks and sharp shooters aim, but whether Porter was actually fired upon is unknown. Luckily he caught an “air-box,” drifted back into camp and landed onto some Union tents, not far from where he launched. Porter was fine, but his nerves were shot.
This mishap must have been in Custer’s mind when he agreed to go up in one of Lowe’s balloons. “My desire, if frankly expressed, would not have been to go up at all,” he wrote, never disclosing why he changed his mind. “If I was to go,” he continued, “company would certainly be desirable.”
Custer’s balloon mate was one of Lowe’s assistants, James Allen. “[Mr. Allen] began jumping up and down testing it’s strength,” Custer related. “My fears were redoubled. I expected to see the bottom of the basket give way, and one or both of us dashed to the earth.”
Custer wasn’t taking any chances. He sat crouched in the basket for most of the trip. “I was urged to stand up,” he wrote, and at some point did. What he witnessed impressed him. “To the right could be seen the York River, following which the eye could rest on Chesapeake Bay. On the left, and about at the same distance, flowed the James River.”
With his field glasses, Custer spotted the enemy camp. “Men in considerable numbers were standing around entrenchments…intently observing [our] balloon, curious, no doubt, to know the character or value of the information it occupants could derive from [our] elevated post of observation.” Still his attitude toward balloons was skeptical at best. “To me it seemed fragile indeed.”
Custer’s balloon ride was in April of 1862. By the end of May, Commanding General George B. McClellan had heard enough. The balloons were too important a resource to be used for entertainment. He banned all joy rides and required Union officers to have written permission from him personally before going up.
The balloons would be used for surveillance purposes only.
Although he was a bit reckless and already had a reputation for doing things his own way, thanks to this one balloon ride, Custer gladly accepted the general’s orders.
(Sources: Falling Upwards: How We Took To The Air by Richard Holmes; various internet sites)
For A Long Time U.S. Presidents Wore Facial Hair. Then They Didn’t.
By Ken Zurski
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was debatably the first commander-in-chief to wear facial hair.
Actually by being the first to sport a beard, Lincoln started a trend that lasted nearly 50 years. A trend that ended in 1912 with the election of Woodrow Wilson. There hasn’t been a mustache or beard on any U.S president’s face since. That’s 17 president’s in a span of 115 years! And the election of Donald Trump as the 45th and 47th president didn’t change that fact.
And in between Trump, is the clean shaven President Joe Biden.
Even many vice-president’s are included.
Many claim the invention of Gillette’s safety razor in the early 1900’s had something to do with the change. Suddenly shaving was easier and facial hair in general went out of style. Plus, the military banned beards too. This was not the case during the Civil War or the Spanish -American War, led in part by a future president, Teddy Roosevelt, who sported a bushy mustache.
But more recently, the convenience of shaving doesn’t explain the resurgence of mustaches which reached it’s peak with the popularity of Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz in the 70’s and Tom Selleck in the 80’s. Today, the mustache-only look is considered more nostalgic than fashionable.
Then in the 2000’s, beards became trendy again. Celebrities and sports figures sport them, some in a show of solidarity others just for fun.
Despite these cultural shifts toward facial hair, the president’s faces, 6 in all since the 60’s, have remained clean shaven.
Even Lincoln’s beard was an afterthought. Lincoln never had facial hair as an adult and only let his whiskers go after a receiving a letter from an 11-year-old girl named Grace Bedell who suggested the president-elect should grow one. “For your face is so thin,” she wrote. Lincoln reluctantly obliged.
After Lincoln, and in the eleven presidencies that followed, only Andrew Johnson and William McKinley chose to go without facial hair on a daily basis. The rest had either a beard, mustache or both. Chester Arthur was one. The 21st president, had a classic version of sidewhiskers, an extreme variation of the muttonchop, or side hair connected by a mustache.
The last president to have facial hair is William Howard Taft.
Woodrow Wilson was next. He shaved everyday and was always impeccably coiffed.
Regardless of why the trend ended with the 28th President, something as trivial as a facial hair has controversy.
Some argue that John Quincy Adams, not Lincoln, should be considered the first president to keep hair on the face. If so, that would pull the history of president’s and facial hair back nearly four decades.
Not to be. Adams chops, which extended off his ears and sloped down to his chin was not considered a full beard.
And since he did not have a hair under his nose, the sideburns only look didn’t count.
The Unusual and Anxious Inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes
By Ken Zurski
On the evening of March 3, 1877, a Saturday, President Ulysses S. Grant, the popular Civil War general turned commander-in-chief, who had served two terms and was only days from leaving office, invited several friends to the White House for a private dinner.
On the guest list that night was the man who would succeed Grant as president, Rutherford B. Hayes.
Hayes had just been declared the winner of the contentious 1876 election over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, a Yale educated lawyer and governor of New York, who some say beat Hayes outright, but lost the bitter debate that followed. On November 9, the day after the general election, tallies showed that Tilden won the popular vote and picked up more electoral votes than Hayes at 184 to 165, with 20 still undecided.
In question were the southern states where Republicans accused the Democrats of widespread voter fraud, specifically the suppression of the black vote. No winner was declared and nothing was resolved. By the end of 1876, the Centennial year, a nation was left hanging by an undecided outcome. Grant was convinced that if the blacks in the south had been allowed to vote as law permitted, Hayes would have won easily.
In January 1877, thanks to a measure passed by Congress and approved by Grant, the election was put in the hands of an appointed committee, made up of a combined fifteen lawmakers and Supreme Court justices. Party membership was evenly divided between the ten congressmen. As for the five justices chosen, four were considered partisan – two Republicans and two Democrats – and one independent, presumably the deciding vote. But David Davis, the independent from Illinois, had just been elected to the Senate and would be leaving his associate judgeship post soon. In his stead, another justice Joseph Bradley, who was considered to be most politically neutral of the remaining judges, took his place on the committee.
In a decision known as The Compromise of 1877, Bradley voted in favor of the Republicans and tipped the balance to Hayes awarding him the presidency by one electoral vote. The so called “compromise” was an agreement by Republicans to pull the last federal troops out of southern states and effectively end the Reconstruction era.
So on Saturday, March 3, just days before he was set to relinquish the office, President Grant invited Hayes to the White House along with some other close friends for a welcoming dinner.
It turned out to be significantly more.
Also in attendance that night was Chief Justice Morrison Waite, whom Grant had appointed to the high court in 1874 and was eventually nominated to replace longstanding Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who died the year before. The day of the inauguration was by law scheduled for March 4. That year, the date fell on a Sunday. Hayes refused to be inaugurated on the Sabbath and it was changed to the following day, Monday, March 5, instead.
Grant was worried Tilden, still reeling from the committee’s decision, might stir up an angry base which had hinted at a government coup. Rumors persisted that Tilden, in an unprecedented act of defiance, would take the oath of office in New York on the actual inauguration date, March 4, and in effect protest the legality of Hayes appointment.
So Grant requested Hayes take the oath that night in private. That way if Tilden tried to undermine the process, at least the Republicans could counter that Hayes was already in charge. Hayes agreed and the three men along with a few witnesses quietly exited to the Red Room where Hayes raised his right hand, read the oath, and was sworn in as the 19th President of the United States.
As it turned out, Grant’s fears about Tilden were unwarranted. Two days later, without incident, Hayes repeated the words on the east portico of the Capitol.
The private ceremony was not a secret, although it’s significance was not easily defined. In 1887, Adam Badeau, a close adviser of Grant’s, tried to give it more clarity in his book Grant in Peace: Appomattox to Mount Gregor. It is perhaps the first time the Tilden angle is revealed. Although he doesn’t state it directly, Badeau was likely in the room that night.
“It was a critical moment in the history of the country,” he clearly overstated.
Recent attitudes toward the 1876 elections paint a different picture. The decision to swear in the President-elect a few days early is either downplayed as political ostentation, based on an imminent threat to Hayes’s life, or attributed directly to Grant’s eagerness to leave the presidency.
No doubt, Grant was counting down the days.
Even though the country was still in a free fall from the war and Reconstruction was murky at best, no one was happier to get out of the Oval Office more than the former General, who planned a European tour with his wife Julia after his second term was over, which they satisfied by leaving the United States in May of 1877 and traveling abroad for more than a year. “I was never as happy in my life as the day I left the White House,” Grant wrote a friend. “I felt like a boy getting out of school.”
Hayes kept a promise to serve only one term. In the 1880 presidential election, Republican James Garfield won a close but undisputed contest over Democratic rival Wilfred Scott Hancock.
(Sources: Grant in Peace: Appomattox to Mount Gregor by Adam Badeau; Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President by Geoffrey Perret; The Man who Saved the Union by H.W. Brands)
The First National Lottery Was A Colossal Failure
By Ken Zurski
On November 18, 1776, the First Continental Congress enacted a national lottery designed to complete with state and local lotteries at the time. The reason for getting in the lottery game was a simple yet important one for delegates of the thirteen colonies: help fund the costly Revolutionary War.
Not only were more muskets and ammunition needed to fight the war (which officially began in April of that year), but the men of the Continental Army expected to get paid too, in land or money – $6 a day for privates; up to $20 a day for captains.
The Continental Congress had no power to tax the people, so money was printed – lots of it – based on specie (minted coins from precious metals). They also borrowed supplies and currency from France and the Dutch. And wealthy Americans dutifully bought war bonds. But for the average citizen, the common villager, they could do their part as well. Buy a lottery ticket, take a chance, and help pay for the war, the Congress asked.
It didn’t go as planned.
May 1, 1778 was the first scheduled drawing for the new lottery. By then, only a little over 20-thousand of the 100-thousand were sold. So the drawing was pushed back to May 27th. On that date only 36,500 tickets were sold, an increase of just more than 16-thousand in less than a month, but still far less than expected. The government was left holding 60,000 unsold tickets. At $10 a piece that was a net loss of more than $72-thousand. The government expected a net profit of $1.5 million from the lottery. They made an estimated $100,000. Certainly not enough to fund a war.
But the poor sales were only part of the problem. Three other classes of a national lottery also failed to ignite the public’s interest. Publicity marketing and distribution were some of the the reasons why. The other reason was the greatly depreciated value of the continental dollar. According to Steve Swain, a lottery historian: “At the completion of the first class lottery in May of 1778, it took 2-5 Continental dollars to equal one dollar in actual exchange value. By the completion of the second class lottery in June of 1779, it took from 13-20 Continental dollars. By the completion of the drawing a year later, the rate of exchange was over $1,000 in Continental bills to $1 in actual exchange value.”
It’s easy to see why the government was interested in cashing in on the lottery idea. Lotteries or public raffles had been in the spotlight for more than a hundred years. In fact, America’s very first lottery winner is Thomas Sharplisse, a tailor from London. We know this rather trivial historical fact thanks to a another man named John Stow who decided to chronicle English life in in the 16th century. His book Survey of London was released in 1598, a life’s work indeed, since he was dead just seven years later at the age of 80. At the start of the 17th century, however, other diarists picked up the slack, commissioned by King James I, and continued to record anecdotes and life experiences of fellow Londoners. The Stow’s Chronicles is the result.
And because of it, we know the name: Thomas Sharplisse.
Sharplisse had nothing to do with America except as other Londoners did at the time a passing interest in what was going on in the New World. It was after all 1612. The stock holding Virginia Company of London, had funded the first English colony in North America, the struggling James Towne, or more commonly known as Jamestown, named of course in honor of his majesty.
The newly established settlement (actually it was the second incarnation, the first was James Fort) was reeling from sickness, starvation and occasional attacks by hostile Indians. They were in desperate need for more supplies, but the Virginia Company was broke. So the King approved a lottery, a game of chance really, but also an opportunity for fellow countryman to invest at a time when charitable contributions didn’t exist.
Marketing for the lottery was in the guise of a song:
To London, worthy Gentlelmen,
goe venture there your chaunce:
good lucke standes now in readinesse,
your fortunes to advance
In June of 1612, Sharplisse was among the crowd that gathered in a specially constructed “Lotterie house” near St. Paul’s Church in London to watch tickets drawn in the first Great Standing Lottery.
Little else is known about Sharplisse except that he spent two-shillings-and-sixpence on the chance. And according to Stow’s Chronicles, Shaprlisse’s ticket was the Grand Prize winner – four thousand crowns in “fayre plate, which was sent to his house in a very stately manner.” It was a fortune at the time. Two Anglican churches took home smaller winnings
After the Virginia Company paid for the prizes, salesman, managers, and other expenses, the remaining revenue covered the cost of shipping people and supplies to Jamestown. It was such a vital resource that Captain John Smith referred to the lottery as “the real and substantial food.” Disappointing, however, was the turn out. Nearly 60-thousand lottery tickets went unsold. Eventually, the crown banned lotteries that benefited Jamestown because of complaints that they were robbing England of money.
More than a century later, the First Continental Congress tried a lottery to help pay for the Revolutionary War.
It failed.
(Some text was reprinted from The Lottery Wars: Long Odds, Fast Money, and the Battle Over an American Institution; Source: Colonial America Lottery by Steve Swain)
Abraham Lincoln’s Eldest Son Has a Sea Named After Him
By Ken Zurski
Robert Todd Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln’s first son, outlived his father by 26 years. He also lived 19 years more than his mother, who died at the age of 63. As for his three younger brothers, tragically, they all died young, including the Lincoln’s third son, Willie, who succumbed to illness in the White House at the age of 11. Robert was a teenager at the time of Willie’s death. And yet, despite being the only Lincoln child to live to an old age, Robert’s adult life is understandably overshadowed by the legacy of his father.
But Robert Todd Lincoln lived a fascinating life of nearly 83 years. A life filled with military service, politics, great wealth and something he and not his famous father can claim: a sea named after him.
The 25-thousand square miles of the the Lincoln Sea encompasses a location between the Arctic Ocean and the channel of the Nares Strait between the northernmost Qikiqtaaluk region of Canada and Greenland. Scientists today will point out its geographical and oceanic importance, like most seas, but not much more.
It’s desolate, extreme, and doesn’t bear resemblance to a conventional sea at all. It’s almost completely covered with ice. Due to its year-round ice cover, not many have seen the Lincoln Sea up close, or make a point to visit. The nearest town in Nunavut Canada is so remote it is almost always uninhabited and appropriately named Alert, just in case someone may stumble upon it.
When most people find out there is a sea named Lincoln their immediate instinct is to conclude that it is in honor of the 16th president.
But it’s not.
Here’s why.
In 1881, Robert Todd Lincoln was President James Garfield’s Secretary of War when explorer and fellow soldier Lieutenant Adolphus Greely took a polar expedition financed by the government to collect astronomical and meteorological data in the high Canadian Arctic. A noted astronomer named Edward Israel was part of Greely’s crew. Secretary Lincoln reluctantly approved the risky venture.
The Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, as it was called, was mostly smooth sailing at first followed by a harrowing and deadly outcome. After discovering many uncharted miles along the northwest coast of Greenland including a new mountain range they named Conger Range, Lt. Greely and the crew of the Proteus were forced to abandon several relief sites due to lack of supplies. They retreated to Cape Sabine where they hunkered down for the winter with limited food rations.
Months later, in July of 1884, nearly three years after the expedition began, a rescue ship Bear finally reached the encamped crew. It was a sobering sight. In all, 19 of the 25-man crew, including Israel had perished in the harsh conditions.
Greely survived.
Even within his own department, Lincoln was criticized for not dispatching a second relief ship (the first one failed to make it through the ice). He rebuked the claims and defended his own actions by basing the decision on information provided to him by others. “Hazarding more lives,” as he put it, was not an option. Greely also blamed Secretary Lincoln for his crew’s fate.
But that was all. Most people understood how dangerous the mission was and Lincoln outlasted the backlash. He issued a court-martial for an outspoken War Department official named William Hazen, and gave Greely a pass, although the Lieutenant’s comments irritated him.
The naming of the Lincoln Sea was a bonus for the Secretary, of course. Although it’s easy to understand why Greely – if in fact he personally named the sea after his military boss – was motivated to do so, especially as the expedition was going well, his actions after the disastrous mission would suggest otherwise. No record exists as to whether Lincoln was flattered by the attribution.
The naming itself is odd. Since President Abraham Lincoln had hundreds of cities, institutions and streets named after him, including the town of Lincoln in Illinois, which was named for Lincoln, the lawyer, before he even became president, you would think the sea distinction would be more identifiable. Perhaps the Robert T. Lincoln Sea would have been more appropriate. But that’s not the case. It’s the Lincoln Sea, plain and simple, on maps and atlases and in literature. So the confusion with the President is understandable.
Robert Todd Lincoln continued to serve as Secretary of War after Garfield’s assassination and through successor Chester Arthur’s presidential term. Under Benjamin Harrison, he served a short stint as U.S minster to the United Kingdom and eventually left public service. In 1893, Lincoln invested in the popular Pullman rail cars, made a fortune, and lived comfortably for the remaining years of his life. He died on July 26, 1926, just six days shy of his 83rd birthday.
And whether he liked it or not, the ice-covered and relatively unknown Lincoln Sea, is a part of Robert Todd Lincoln’s legacy.
Not his father’s.
The Nimrod Effect: How a Cartoon Bunny Changed The Meaning of a Word Forever
texBy Ken Zurski
nim·rod: LITERARY a skillful hunter. INFORMAL•NORTH AMERICAN an inept person (Oxford dictionary)
In 1909, British explorer and Antarctic specialist Earnest Shackleton became the first person to come as close to the South Pole as any human had possibly done. The goal of course was to reach the elusive Pole, but turning back shy by only 100 miles was an accomplishment worthy of another try at least. The fact that no one died in the expedition was even better.
Shackleton had christened the ship he chose on that journey by a term that reflected the mission’s quest. He named it Nimrod.
Yes, the Nimrod Expedition, despite its insinuation, was not a mission for dummies. That’s because the word “nimrod” at the time represented something very different than it does today. Back then, strength and courage was it’s core. A nimrod was someone who was held in high regard. The name demanded respect.
Shackleton’s hand picked ship, Nimrod, lived up to its moniker too, a reference to Nimrod, the biblical figure and “mighty hunter before the Lord” from the Book of Genesis. Nimrod was an older boat and needed work, but Shackleton had little recourse with limited funds. He would eventually praise the small schooner as “sturdy” and “reliable.”
Even before Shackleton’s journey, the term nimrod was being used to promote other noteworthy ventures. Financier and cutthroat ship builder Cornelius Vanderbilt named a steamboat Nimrod to compete with other commuter boats on New York’s Hudson River. It had to be built stronger and faster than others, Vanderbilt instructed. No doubt the naming of the ship reflected this too.
In 1899, composer Edward Elgar wrote a symphonic piece that had 14 variations each written for or about a personal acquaintance.
The ninth variation was titled Nimrod.
“An amusing piece,” Elgar said referring to his friend and subject, August Johannes Jagear, a music publisher and accomplished violinist. Rather than a slight, however, it was a compliment. Jäger in German meant “hunter.”
In 1940, however, everything about the word changed.
It’s widely reported that during a cartoon short titled “A Wild Hare,” a wise-cracking rabbit named Bugs Bunny called his nemesis Elmer Fudd a “poor little nimrod,” a sarcastic reference to Fudd’s skills as a hunter. Whether Bugs actually said it or it was Daffy Duck who called Fudd a “nimrod” is debatable. Bugs would get credit (it was after all a Bugs Bunny cartoon).
In context the use of the word meant to mock Fudd’s foolhardy abilities which kept the rabbit, Fudd’s prey, out of his cross hairs, so to speak.
Most children didn’t get the reference to Nimrod in biblical terms and the sarcasm went way over their heads. So the word became synonymous with a bumbling fool, like Fudd’s character.
At least that’s the story.
Today, as we examine the word’s usage more closely, a nimrod may have been the implication, but certainly not the description of Shackleton and his Antarctic crew. Those who wished to board the Nimrod, some might say, were playing a fools game. After all who was crazy enough to go?
Shackleton didn’t hide the discomforts and dangers of the mission when he advertised for a team of men and warned of a “hazardous journey” with “low, wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness.” If they made it back, which was “doubtful,” Shackleton expressed, “honor and recognition” would await them upon return.
Basically, only Nimrod-types need apply, he suggested.
Good thing Bugs Bunny wasn’t around to discourage them.
How the Muddy Mississippi River Became a Cinematic and Poetic Masterwork
By Ken Zurski
In the summer of 1936, documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz got the go ahead from the U.S. Government to make a short film about a rather long and tendentious subject: the Mississippi River.
Of course, there was a purpose to it all. The $50,000 budget approved by President Franklin Roosevelt would highlight the environmental and economic concerns along the river, specifically the massive and catastrophic flooding caused by industries like farming and the timber trade that inadvertently sent large amounts of topsoil down the river into the Gulf of Mexico. The film’s job was to throw more support towards the newly appointed Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a government agency created in 1933 to provide resources to the Tennessee Valley for among other things, flood control.
Two years earlier, Roosevelt had funded a mildly successful film project titled The Plow That Broke the Plains, also directed by Lorentz, which showed how uncontrolled farming led to the devastating and deadly effects of the Dust Bowl.
It’s fair to say that both Roosevelt and Lorentz had no intentions of making another documentary together. “The Plow” had gone over budget and the government balked, refusing to provide more money and forcing Lorentz to personally foot the bill just to complete the film. At some point however, attitude’s changed. Lorentz saw a map of the Mississippi River and thought it would make a good subject. Roosevelt agreed and gave him a significantly higher budget than “The Plow.” Lorentz was also extended a $30-dollar a day salary.
Immediately Lorentz went to work, filming location after location on the ground and from the air in in a lightweight “floppy winged” plane. The crew worked their way up the river from the Gulf of Mexico to Cairo, Illinois, oftentimes working for days on end until principal filming wrapped up in early January 1937. In the end the visuals showed less of the Mississippi and more of the many tributaries that branch off it. This was as much a part of the river’s history as it was the problem, the film purported.
Reaction to a film being made about the Mississippi River was mixed. Although it’s the most important body of drainage water in the U.S., perhaps even the world, and certainly an influential part of the nation’s growth, to many, the river itself, was nothing particularly pleasing to look at. In fact, visually, it’s an eyesore. The water is drab and dirty looking and along it’s shoreline there is very little rock formations or scenery to enhance it. “If driving, you become aware of its presence miles before you reach it,” author Simon Winchester surmises. “The landscape falls away. There are swamps on either side, dense hedgerows and copses, miles of small lakes of curious shape.”
Indeed the Mississippi River, especially its midsection, is banked by mostly mud. Even Mark Twain’s flourishes of the river’s attributes from the perspective of a steamboat pilot couldn’t push the attitudes toward its appearance into anything more than just a very long strip of dirt colored water and sludgy shores.
No question beauty is subjective. Hundreds of quaint cities dot the river’s shoreline and dense tree lines along the Mid to Upper sections provide a multi-colored vista in the Fall. In St Louis, a large man-made monument standing as tall as it is wide (630 feet), greet visitors at the river’s edge; a testament to the men who used the Mississippi’s offshoots to chart the west. When Lorentz made his movie, however, the idea of a symbol like the “Gateway Arch” was nearly 30 years away. But like the early explorers, Lorentz found significance in its vast network too. The tributaries and the people who live along them were the key to its resourcefulness.
The visuals, however, were just part of the overall experience of the 30-minute film. The script, dramatically narrated by an opera singer and actor named Thomas Hardie Chalmers, was not only informational, but poetic too. There’s a good reason why. To promote the project, Lorentz had written two articles for McCall’s magazine. One was wordy and statistical, he thought, so he wrote another version that was more lyrically composed.
From as far East as New York,
Down from the turkey ridges of the Alleghenies
Down from Minnesota, twenty five hundred miles,
The Mississippi River runs to the Gulf.
Carrying every drop of water, that flows down
two-thirds the continent.
Carrying every brook and rill, rivulet and creek,
Carrying all the rivers that run down two-thirds
the continent,
The Mississippi runs to the Gulf of Mexico.
McCall’s chose to publish the latter version and readers responded by writing request letters for copies. Lorentz used the more poetic prose in the film. The music, which incorporated part folk and gospel styles, was written by composer Virgil Thomson.
While the unflinching subject matter certainly raised awareness of the need for more locks and dams, the film is best remembered for it’s cinematic achievements. The film went on to win the “Best Documentary” at the 1938 Venice International Film Festival and the script was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. The noted novelist and poet James Joyce, shortly before his death at age 60, called the film’s words, “the most beautiful prose that I have heard in ten years.”
Before all the artistic accolades rolled in, upon release in October of 1937, the film titled simply “The River” received positive reviews and general widespread acceptance. The first showing at the White House , however, proved less than ideal. While Roosevelt was generally pleased, the president’s Secretary of Agriculture at the time, Henry Wallace, a Midwesterner from Iowa, didn’t know what to think.
“There’s no corn in it,” he questioned.
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