— Portrait: Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, March 1861
December 14, 2010 at 4:33 pm | Posted in -- Harpers Weekly, -- Inauguration: Portraits, -- PRESIDENTS, Abraham Lincoln, Civil War | Leave a comment
Abraham Lincoln's Inauguration, Harper's Weekly, March 16, 1861.
Abraham Lincoln had little time to celebrate his inauguration as President of the United States on March 4, 1861. Already since his election the prior November, his country had crumbled. Seven states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America and inaugurated Jefferson Davis their president. War seemed likely. Lincoln himself literally had to sneak into Washington to avoid assassination plots. Soldiers guarded his every move. His former law partner Billy Herndon described Lincoln that day as “filled with gloomy forebodings of the future.”
Still, thirty thousand well wishers crammed into Washington for the swearing in that day. After a damp and cold morning, the sun broke through by the time Lincoln reached Capitol Hill. His inaugural speech, which he read while standing beneath the unfinished Capitol Dome, would be among his finest, and both the ceremony and the ball that night went off without a hitch.
The drawing here, a full-page panorama from Harper’s Weekly, shows Lincoln and outgoing President James Buchanan riding together to the ceremony, just reaching the foot of Capitol Hill. Buchanan tips his hat to the crowd. Click on the image to see it full size. Notice the double row of soldiers with bayonets lining the route, the cavalrymen leading the carriage. One soldier on a horse just behind the carriage holds a spyglass toward the crowd. Not seen here are the sharpshooters stationed in nearby windows and on rooftops, the soldiers patrolling side streets, and the additional infantrymen marching behind — all in case of trouble.
The pomp and ceremony seem so normal in this image, and give little sign of the carnage to come. Within a few months, war would come and, before it was over, over 600,000 soldiers North and South would die and countless thousands more would be crippled or maimed for life. But on this day, the transfer of power went smoothly, crowds could still cheer, politicians could still wave their hats, and people could still be happy.
Best statues in NYC’s Central Park: Poland’s King Jagiello, hero of 1410
December 1, 2010 at 8:04 pm | Posted in -- POLAND, 1939 New York World's Fair, Battle of Agincourt, Battle of Grunwald, Fiorello LaGuardia, Henry V (King of England), Stanislaw Ostrowski, William Shakespeare, Wladyslaw Jagiello | Leave a comment
Six hundred years ago, this man atop his bronze horse in full battle regalia, pointing his dual sabers to the sky, was the single most powerful on earth. He was Poland’s King Wladyslaw Jagiello, and on July 15, 1410, he led an army of 50,000 Polish and Lithuanian knights, cavalry, and foot soldiers against a marauding horde of 32,000 invading Teutons — primarily Germans — near the small town of Grunwald.
By sundown, Jagiello’s soldiers had slaughtered over 26,000 of the invaders, utterly demolishing their army. The Battle of Grunwald, as it came to be called, would reshape Central Europe for the next 300 years, placing King Jagiello in command of a vast, united Polish-Lithuanian empire that included large swaths of modern Germany and Russia. It was also one of the most civilized places in Medieval Europe, complete with bicameral legislature, checks on royal power, religious tolerance (this is when Jewish people came to escape persecution further west), and a home to Renaissance art. Jagiello’s vistory was one of two game-changing military events of the Fifteenth Century, the other being England’s 1419 triumph over France at Agincourt, immortalized by William Shakespeare in his play Henry V. (Click here to see Kenneth Branagh delivering Henry’s terrific speech to his troops.)Personally, I had never heard of King Jagiella (damn American education system!!) until last week when I happened to come across this fantastic statue of him in New York City’s Central Park. The 
work of Polish sculpter Stanislaw Ostrowski, it served originally as centerpiece for Poland’s exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. But the outbreak of World War II, in which Poland was quickly devoured by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, left it stranded in America. New York Mayor Fiorello Laguardia fell in love it and lobbied to keep it in New York City. In 1945, the Polish government-in-exile agreed, and it was moved to its current spot in Central Park.
Next time you’re in the neighborhood, don’t miss it. It’s at the east end of Turtle Pond, near the Great Lawn, not far from Cleopatra’s Needle, and an easy walk from the Upper East Side.
Trotsky
March 5, 2010 at 7:46 pm | Posted in Battle of Warsaw, Family History, Jozef Pilsudski, Miracle on the Vistula, Trotsky | Leave a comment
In digging into the story of my grandparents and their flight from Eastern Europe in the 1920s, I was surprised to learn that two giants of the age held our fate dangling at whim at one key point. One was Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski, whom I’ll talk about next time. The other was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known by his revolutionary nom du guerre, Leon Trotsky.
What a strange man, Trotsky, a zealot among zealots. Look at him in this 1919 photo, strutting about as Commissar of War in the new post-1917 Bolshevik Russia, rousing his Red Army troops. He spoke in spell-binding sentences, brilliant as a writer, tactician, or theorist. People loved him, hated him, and feared him. Born and raised Jewish, he rejected it as a young man as bourgeois fluff. “I am a Social Democreat and only that!” he insisted when asked.
In 1920, Trotsky was still neck deep defending Red Russia in a gruesome civil war, pitting the new Leninist regime against not only White Russian reactionaries but also an international expeditionary army from Britian, France, Japan, America, and other countries. Still, that spring, on orders from Moscow (Trotsky fought the idea at first), he launched a full-scale invasion of the newly-created country of Poland — what he called a land of “oppression and repression under a cloak of patriotic phraseology and heroic braggadocio.” The plan was to spread revolution both to Poland and through Poland, reaching German and the west.
By summer, Trotsky’s Red Army had knocked Poland’s defenders on their backs, sending them into heavy retreat. Soon they were closing in on Warsaw itself for a knockout blow.
This is the war that my grandfather, Rubin Mendel Bronnfeld, then a 29 year-old father of five young children living in a tiny village shtetl called Zawichost, was asked to fight. That spring, the Polish army, desperate for soldiers, expanded military conscription to include 30 year-olds — even Jews like him. By this point, my grandfather had already seen two brothers killed in military clashes, but that wasn’t his main reason for objecting. Polish independence in 1919 had been accompanied by a wave of anti-Jewish riots, pogroms, killing hundrds. Many of the worst clashes were prompted or carried out by Polish soldiers, always citing some unproven Jewish provocation.
My grandfather faced a gut-wrenching choice: whether to risk his life for a country that had given his people pogroms and oppression, or whether to leave his family’s centuries-old home and follow a wild scheme of underground flight across war-torn Europe, hoping eventually to reunite with wife and children in faraway Amerca.
Poland’s defense against Trotsky’s 1920 invasion would be brilliant and heroic. It would stand firm and defeat the Red Army in dramatic fashion in the Battle of Warsaw, deservedly remembered in Polish history as the “Miracle on the Vistula.” But by forcing my family to uproot itself and flee, it would save us from death in a far worse crisis just over the horizon, the Holocaust of World War II.
Guardian Angel
February 18, 2010 at 10:29 pm | Posted in -- POLAND, Family History, Holocaust, Joseph Rubinsky, Ostrovtsa Rebbe, Ostrowiec, Polish Bolshevik War | Leave a comment
Meet Meir Yechiel HaLevi, Rabbi of the tiny hamlet of Ostrowiec, Poland, in the early 1900s, known as the Ostrovtsa Rebbe. He lived almost eighty years and became world renowned as a leading Hasidic figure of his time. About four months ago, I learned that this odd, pious, brilliant, often eccentric man had intervened with my grandparents about ninety years ago, back in 1920, and essentially saved our family from the Nazi Holocaust.
At a key moment of indecision, with newly-independent Poland being invaded by Bolshevik Russia’s Red Army and Jewish people in particular torn between patriotism and revulsion at escalating pogroms, it was this Ostrovtsa Rebbe who turned boldly political and insisted that my grandfather refuse to bloody his hands and instead take the family to America — a journey frought with danger and uncertainty.
For the past six or so months, I have been digging into this story and finding surprise after surprise, bombshells hiding in dusty old archives. The Rebbe turned out to be just one of many guardian angels for us. Another was a criminal smuggler named Rubinsky who spent most of the 1920s in European jails, charged with forging passports and visas for refugees trying to circumstant newly-imposed American immigration quotas.
I’ll tell you more about this in posts over the next few weeks. Stay tuned. But for now, a simple acknowledgment to Rebbe Meir Yechiel of Ostrovtsa. I’m glad to have found him.
The Bush Torture Memos
April 17, 2009 at 1:36 pm | Posted in -- Torture Memos, Bruce Ackerman, Clarence Darrow, George W. Bush, Jay Bybee, War on Terror | Leave a comment
Why James Garfield over LBJ and the Adamses?
January 24, 2009 at 6:21 pm | Posted in -- C-SPAN presidents poll, David McCullough, David Stewart, George W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Harry Truman, James Garfield, John Adams, Joseph Keppler, Lyndon Johnson, Paul Giamatti, Vietnam | Leave a commentSince I posted my Presidential rankings for the C-SPAN 2009 Historians Survey a few days ago, I’ve received pointed questions from friends about some of my choices. (See January 18 post below.)
For instance, how could I put Gerald Ford so high on the list, in the top ten, for God’s sake? And what was I thinking in ranking James Garfield, who served only four months before being shot in the back, above LBJ and both the Adamses? And, in putting George W. Bush at the near-bottom (#41 out of 43), wasn’t I just following a liberal fad that will disappear in a few years, much as Harry Truman has gained popularity over time. 
Over the next few days, I will tackle each of these. Yes, Gerald Ford deserves his high spot. Yes, James Garfield outranks LBJ, John Adams, and John Quincy. And no, George W. Bush’s bottom status is no passing liberal fancy. Bush is no Harry Truman. He will be considered as much a bottom-feeder a century from now as today.
I’ll start today with James Garfield, only because this was the first challenge to come up. Stick with me on this.
The basics are simple: James Garfield, a Civil War veteran and career Congressman, was elected President in 1880, inaugurated in March 1881, shot by Charles Guiteau four months later, and died about two months after that. He was mourned by hundreds of thousands, respected for confronting political bosses, and credited with the modern Civil Service system adopted after his death.
During his term, he prevailed over Sen. Roscoe Conkling, dictator of the NY Republican machine, is a high-profile brawl over abusive patronage peddling. His Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, started the country on a strong foreign policy that culminated in TR’s “big stick” approach twenty years later. Here is my favorite cartoon of him, by PUCK artist Joseph Keppler, showing Garfield accepting the surrender of Ulysses Grant at the 1880 Repiblican Convention after Grant’s 3rd term movement collapsed on the 36th ballot:
It was my friend David Stewart, author of that terrific book THE SUMMER OF 1787: The Men who Invented the US Constitution, who blew the whistle on me. “Whoa, big fella!,” he wrote, knowing of my own book about the Garfield assassintion, (DARK HORSE). ” James Garfield ahead of Lyndon Johnson and both Adamses? We’re dishing out some home-cooking here. Remind us again, what did Garfield do as president?”
Good question. So let’s deal with it directly.
Ranking presidents means mnaking choices. James Garfield’s presidency had only a small impact because it was so short. Even giving him maximum credit, he stand mid-pack, slightly above center, which is where I ranked him, at #18.
Now let’s lkook at the competition.
Lyndon Baines Johnson? We can start and end the conversation with one word: Vietnam. I don’t recall James Garfield ever going out and getting the country stuck in a full-scale land war half-way around the world, commiting half-a-million troops to the effort, most unwilling draftees, all based on bad intelligence and bad advice, then misleading the country as tens of thousands died, then allowing the war to spin out of control and destroy his domestic agenda, causing the country then to react by electing an even worse leader in Richard M. Nixon.
This is LBJ’s legacy. Yes, he had a sterling record on Civil Rights and passed a boatload of Great Society legislation. But his own Democratic Party was ready to kick him overboard when he declined to run for re-eleciton in 1968. Without his Civil Rights record, Vietnam easily would have sunk LBJ to the bottom half of the list. As is, I gave him much credit for his domestic agenda, with an overall rank of #19. I think he owes me a “thank you.”
Then there are the Adamses. Let’s start with John Adams, the second president, serving from 1797 to 1801, the first to be voted out of office. Yes, he came across wonderfully in that terrific HBO miniseries where he was play by the fine actor Paul Giamatti, based on the terrific biography by David McCullough. And yes, John Adams was a sterling patriot and fine man during most of his life.
Still, his presidency was a sorry mess. Its emblem was the Alien and Seditions Acts. I do not recall James Garfield ever pushing Congress to pass a law allowing him to throw dozens of newspaper editors in jail for the simple act of publicly opposing his foreign policy, as well as locking up large numbers of immigrants on trumped up claims of disloyalty — as did John Adams. The abuse was flagrant.
Adams showed his bad temperament again after losing re-election in 1880 by refusing to act civilly toward Thomas Jefferson, the person who beat him, at Jefferson’s 1881 Inauguration. I rated Adams the best I could given a bad record. He ranked #31 on my list, just above Rutherford Hayes and William Howard Taft. Once again, I am ready to accept a “thank you” note from the Adams family.
Finally, there is John Quincy, whom I rate well above his father at #25, though still mediocre. Another fine man;l another disappointing president. From the moment he entered office, his politicasl opponents branded his Administration the product of a “corrupt bargin,” and for four years the albatross stuck, fair or not.
That’s them explanation. I am very comfortable with where I’ve placed James Garfield, notwithstanding LBJ and the Adamses. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about Gerald Ford.
Thanks for listening. –KenA
Another J. Edgar Hoover?
June 16, 2007 at 4:15 pm | Posted in Albert Einstein, J. edgar hoover, Justice Department, Red Raids, War on Terror | Leave a comment
From this week’s LA Times (June 14, 2007)
The Red scare spawned the tyrannical FBI chief; will a similar homegrown villain emerge from the war on terror?
WHAT created J. Edgar Hoover? He reigned with an iron fist as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years, until the day he died in 1972. By then, Hoover had evolved into an untouchable autocrat, a man who kept secret files on millions of Americans over the years and used them to blackmail presidents, senators and movie stars. He ordered burglaries, secret wiretaps or sabotage against anyone he personally considered subversive. His target list included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, even Eleanor Roosevelt.
Yet when Hoover showed up for his first day of work at the Department of Justice in June 1917, he was a bright 22-year-old, just out of law school. He still had boyish good looks and was cocky and driven. The country had just entered World War I, and Hoover had avoided the wartime draft. Instead, he was ready to help win the war at home, to save the country from spies and subversives.
What changed this young eager beaver into the crass, cynical tyrant of later years?
The fact is, Hoover learned his attitudes and worldview from teachers at the Justice Department during his early years there, when the country was going through a period much like today’s war on terror.
In March 1919, Hoover landed a dream assignment on the staff of new Atty. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer just in time to participate in the first Red scare, in 1919-1920, and its signature outrage, the notorious Red Raids, also known as the Palmer Raids. For Hoover, it would shape his outlook for life.
On the night of June 2, 1919, bombs exploded in nine cities across the United States, leaving two people dead, including one of the bombers. One of these bombs destroyed Palmer’s Washington home, almost killing him, his wife and his teenage daughter.
These bombs capped months of escalating upheaval during which the country convinced itself that we sat on the verge of a Russian-style socialist revolution. The first Red scare came on the heels of multiple traumas: World War I, the Russian Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik uprisings in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Italy and Argentina. In the United States, the economy had collapsed, prompting waves of strikes, riots and political violence.
Americans vowed vengeance after the June 2 bombings, and the targeted Palmer pledged to crush the reign of terror. He ordered a massive preemptive strike, a nationwide roundup of radicals. To manage the operation, Palmer chose his talented new staff counsel, young J. Edgar Hoover.
Hoover seized the opportunity. With Palmer’s blessing, he laid plans for a series of brutal raids across the country. Backed by local police and volunteer vigilantes, federal agents hit in dozens of cities and arrested more than 10,000 suspected communists and fellow travelers. They burst into homes, classrooms and meeting halls, seizing everyone in sight, breaking doors and heads with abandon. The agents ignored legal niceties such as search warrants or arrest warrants. They questioned suspects in secret, imposed prohibitive bail and kept them locked up for months in foul, overcrowded, makeshift prisons.
It turned out that virtually none of these prisoners had anything to do with violent radicalism. Nearly all were released without being charged with a crime. Palmer’s grand crackdown was one big exercise in guilt by association, based primarily on bogus fears of immigrants being connected to vilified radical groups such as the recently formed American Communist Party.
Still, Hoover relished his moment on the national stage. He appeared twice at Palmer’s side during congressional hearings, and he faced off against future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in a Boston courtroom in raid-related cases. Behind the scenes, Hoover demanded more arrests, higher bail and fewer rights for prisoners.
Ultimately, the public recoiled in disgust at the excesses and illegality of the raids, and Palmer saw his political career destroyed. But his young assistant fared much better.
Hoover never lost his anticommunist religion, nor his disdain for and distrust of “liberals” who defended “subversives” on grounds of free speech and civil liberties. He also never lost his sense of entitlement to bend the rules, either to protect the country or to protect himself.
Almost 90 years later, today’s war on terror exists in an echo chamber of the 1919 Red scare. The federal government demands more powers at the expense of individual rights: secret CIA prisons, enhanced interrogation techniques, suspension of habeas corpus. Even the president openly claims powers that are beyond the reach of laws such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The same kinds of teachers who transformed the straight-laced, young Hoover in 1919 seem to be on the loose again in Washington. And that raises a troubling question: Are we today creating a whole new generation of young J. Edgar Hoovers, dedicated government agents learning the wrong lessons from the war on terror, who will stick around to haunt us for decades to come?
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