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Here’s Why Washington Remains Our Greatest President

A George Washington inaugural button, perhaps the earliest artifact that refers to Washington as the “Father of His Country,” realized $225,000 at a February 2018 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Presidential scholars typically list George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as our finest presidents. I tend to favor Washington since without him, we would probably have a much different country in so many aspects. If there were any doubts about the feats of the “Father of Our Country,” they were certainly dispelled in 2005 when David McCullough’s 1776 hit bookstores, followed five years later by Ron Chernow’s masterful Washington: A Life, which examined the man in exquisite detail. They didn’t leave much ground uncovered, but there are still a few tidbits that haven’t become overused and still interesting for those interested in fresh anecdotes.

For example, Washington wasn’t aware that on Nov. 30, 1782, a preliminary Treaty of Paris was signed that brought American Revolutionary hostilities to an end. The United States was prevented from dealing directly with Great Britain due to an alliance with France that stipulated we would not negotiate with Britain without them. Had he known, Washington would have been highly suspicious since King George III “will push the war as long as the nation will find men or money.” In a way, Washington would have been right since the United States had demanded full recognition as a sovereign nation, in addition to removal of all troops and fishing rights in Newfoundland. The king rejected this since he was still determined to keep the United States as a British colony, with greater autonomy. Ben Franklin naturally opposed this and countered with adding 100 percent of Canada to the United States. And so it went until May 12, 1784, when the documents bringing the Revolutionary War to an end were finally ratified and exchanged by all parties.

It was during these protracted negotiations that Washington was concerned that the army might lose its fighting edge. He kept drilling the troops while issuing a steady stream of instructions: “Nothing contributes so much to the appearance of a soldier, or so plainly indicates discipline, as an erect carriage, firm step and steady countenance.” After all these years of hardships and war, Washington was still a militant committed to end the haughty pride of the British. To help ensure the fighting spirit of his army, Washington introduced a decoration designated as the Badge of Military Merit on Aug. 7, 1782. He personally awarded three and then authorized his subordinate officers to issue them in cases of unusual gallantry or extraordinary fidelity and essential service. Soldiers received a purple heart-shaped cloth, to be worn over the left breast. After a lapse, it was redesigned and is now the Purple Heart medal, awarded to those wounded or killed. The first was awarded on Feb. 22, 1932, the 200th anniversary of Washington’s birthday.

The victorious conclusion of the Revolutionary War left many questions unanswered concerning American governance, prominently the relationship between the government and the military. At the end, army officers had several legitimate grievances. Congress was in arrears with pay and had not settled officer food and clothing accounts or made any provisions for military pensions. In March 1783, an anonymous letter circulated calling on officers to take a more aggressive stance, draw up a list of demands, and even possibly defy the new government! Washington acted quickly, calling for a meeting of all officers and at the last moment delivered one of the most eloquent and important speeches of his life.

After the speech, he drew a letter from a pocket that outlined Congressional actions to be undertaken. He hesitated and then fumbled in his pockets and remarked, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country.” By all accounts, the officers were brought to tears, and the potentially dangerous conspiracy collapsed immediately.

He gets my vote.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Walt Disney is Proof that Great Ideas Can Come Out of Nowhere

Walt Disney’s passport, dated Aug. 19, 1965, sold for $28,680 at an April 2007 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

I never met Walt Disney. He died four months after I joined Frito-Lay in 1966 and was among the last of a generation that smoked three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. He died of lung cancer.

However, like virtually everyone else in Southern California, we were familiar with the incredible theme park he built in nearby Anaheim. Disneyland opened to the public on July 17, 1955, and Frito-Lay had a direct relationship with Disneyland through a Mexican food restaurant in Frontierland called Casa de Fritos (Home of Fritos). It featured a unique product called a “Ta-cup” … basically, traditional taco ingredients served in a fried tortilla cup that helped with eating on-the-go using one hand.

I met the manager, Joe Nugent, during a meeting with Frito-Lay corporate officers from Dallas (The Flying Circus) who were in Los Angeles to review our zone’s 1967 profit plan and operating budgets. The only surprise was a mild rebuke to Nugent: “Dammit Joe, we told you last year that we don’t want to make a profit. The whole idea is to expose more people to Fritos and build the brand!” Joe just nodded and resorted to his previous tactic of lowering prices in the hope of lowering profits. Alas, it seemed that the more he dropped prices, the more the crowds waited in line to buy even more. What he experienced was the 1960s version of leveraging overhead costs, which lowered margins but increased total profitability. The Sam Walton slogan of “stack ’em high and sell ’em low.”

Another surprise was the mid-1967 completion of Club 33 at Disneyland, a private club with a top-notch restaurant that could only be accessed with a special card and hidden elevator. Frito-Lay was one of 33 local companies with membership, along with Carnation, Bell Telephone and Bank of America. It was the only place in the park where alcoholic beverages were served and in 2010, I read there was a 14-year waiting list for new members. Frito-Lay is now the crown jewel in the PepsiCo empire and analysts are advocating they get out of the beverage business.

From what I’ve read, Walter Elias Disney was a lot like the two men who started the Frito and Lay companies: humble beginnings, entrepreneurial and ambitious. Disney went broke when no one would buy his first animated films, Alice Comedies, so he moved from Kansas City to Hollywood in 1923, took out a home equity loan for $2,500 and rented the back room of a local real estate office where he created the studio that would become the Walt Disney Company‍. What a success story from another “garage” operation it has become.

We then moved to Cupertino in the Bay Area, where the business guys only seemed to talk about technology (using names like Ampex, Atari and H-P) and whispered about the next garage operation that would be a huge success. What we didn’t realize is that we had moved into one of the greatest wealth-creation areas in the history of the world … where two members of the Homebrew Computer Club – both college dropouts – set up shop to sell their techie friends the circuit boards one of them had invented. There are several versions of why they named their company Apple, but the consensus is Steve Jobs had been working at an apple orchard. Our old backyard is not far from the $5 billion Apple campus, but nobody tipped us about what the future might be.

We never heard the term “Silicon Valley” or about two guys in Vermont who had pooled their resources to make ice cream in an abandoned gas station after installing a 4½-gallon freezer. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were on the opposite end of the technology spectrum when they made a low-tech fortune with Ben & Jerry’s. Of course, not every inventor sticks his hand into a tin and comes up with “Chunky Monkey.” Most will fail. Even those who receive patents and set up small companies will not make these kinds of fortunes. Consider poor Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin in 1793 while working as a tutor at a Georgia plantation. His was probably the most influential invention in the 18th century and it got him into the history books, but nothing in the bankbook.

But that’s not the point. The dream that it’s possible, that an idea can come out of nowhere and can – with a lot of hard work – lead to success is more alive than ever. That kid working away or thinking about dropping out of Harvard to start his own company can change the world. Still skeptical? Just ask Bill Gates.

Frenetic Times Created Old West Scandals, Hoaxes

A carte-de-visite depicting people gathered at Promontory Point, Utah, for the official ceremony completing the Transcontinental Railroad, sold for $1,750 at a May 2015 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Undoubtedly, the greatest achievement in America during the 19th century was the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. Virtually everyone knows at least part of the story when the two railroad lines were joined on May 10 and Central Pacific President Leland Stanford drove the 14-ounce “Last Spike” (later the Golden Spike) at Promontory Point in Utah. But fewer are aware the spike was dated May 8 – bad weather caused a two-day delay – or that he whiffed and missed it. Still, the telegraph operator sent the message “Done” to both East and West Coasts in the first mass media event in history.

This was a long-overdue project that had been mired in slavery politics when Congress was unable to reach agreement on how to maintain the status quo on new states ready to join the Union. The exception was the Republic of Texas, which was added as the 28th state on Dec. 29, 1845, the same day the annexation took place, bypassing the traditional territorial phase. It also included two unique provisions: Up to four additional states could be created within the territory and Texas did not have to cede its public lands to the federal government.

However, the growth of railroads in the existing states had been astonishing. Starting from a modest base of 762 miles in 1834, 10 years later it had grown to 4,311 track miles and by Jan. 1, 1864, to a staggering 33,860! In the 1850s, an average of 2,160 miles of new track were added every year, more than the rest of the world combined. Horace Greeley, founder of the New-York Tribune, put it in perspective after an overland trip from NYC to SFO. He wrote that a railroad to the Pacific would add more growth and wealth to the nation than acquiring a dozen Cubas!

Eventually, the discovery of gold in California and the rapid growth in population combined to create a booming economy that helped balance West-to-East traffic and improve two-way profitability. It was during the frenetic times after the railroad was completed that two men walked into the Bank of California in downtown San Francisco in early 1872 carrying a canvas bag they wanted to store in the bank’s vault. They claimed to be prospectors and the cashier demanded to inspect the contents.

He found hundreds of diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires of unimaginable value. Bank President William Ralston, who had made a personal fortune mining Nevada’s Comstock Lode, was able to get them to identify themselves and get their version of this remarkable story. Thus began the saga of Philip Arnold and John Slack, who purported to be miners from Kentucky who had stumbled onto a hill where precious stones were protruding and abundantly scattered around the site. Ralston quickly formed a magnificently named company, the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company, and persuaded blue-chip investors to chip in $80,000 each for a total capitalization of $2 million.

When word got out, it created a diamond frenzy and even the great jeweler Charles Tiffany jumped in after the two men agreed to show two blindfolded diamond experts the site and they brought back another bag filled with diamonds and verified the area was saturated with precious stones. The two nervous prospectors agreed to sell their share for $300,000 each and a percentage of future profits. Naturally, it was an extremely clever scam that involved them “salting” the mine and concocting the elaborate hoax details.

Then, on Sept. 4, 1872, in the middle of the presidential election, headlines in The New York Sun were screaming THE KING OF FRAUDS… COLOSSAL BRIBERY… HOW SOME MEN GET FORTUNES. But they were talking about the biggest scandal of the 19th century: the Crédit Mobilier scam, which involved railroads, bogus companies, worthless bonds and bribes using stocks involving congressmen and even U.S. Vice President Schuyler Colfax.

It was that kind of year.

Civil War Soldiers Found Themselves in New, Far Deadlier Warfare

A Confederate Civil War enlisted man’s jacket, captured by Union soldiers at Cumberland Gap, sold for $41,825 at a June 2008 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Surprisingly, very little written about the Civil War attempts to correlate the level of carnage with changes in armaments and tactics by both sides that almost literally required sacrificing troops in battles over real estate, rather than simply destroying the other side’s capacity to wage war.

When shots first rang out, American officers – Federal and Confederate – had last faced combat in 1846-47 in the Mexican-American War, armed with smoothbore flintlock muskets with a range of barely 200 yards. Now, more modern rifle-muskets, the English-made caliber .557 or Austrian Lorenz caliber .54, were accurate up to 600 yards and capable of killing at 1,000 yards. Soldiers found themselves in a new, far more deadly sort of war.

Artillery was no longer viable within 300 yards without suffering prohibitive losses. Cavalry charges against unbroken infantry attacks were risky, costly encounters. The result was an infantryman with a rifle-musket suddenly dominated and literally forced into the use of field fortifications. Both sides began the war with the same drill manuals and same tactics, only modifying them to fit the infantry weapons. However, it was a slow process and well into 1862 before either side had a majority of rifle-muskets, and even then the slow rate of fire made it necessary to use masses of men to attack or defend.

At Shiloh in April 1862, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston’s initial attack was delivered by two corps – one behind the other – and two more held in column as reserves. The two-day casualty count was nearly 24,000, a new historic high (including the death of Johnston). At Gettysburg (July 1863), Pickett’s famous charge, “the high-water mark of the Confederacy,” was three brigades deep and at Atlanta in 1864, Confederate General John Bell Hood formed his brigades with their regiments in columns – one behind the other – giving them a depth of eight to 12 men all lined up to be slaughtered.

Perhaps the most marked tactical feature of the Civil War was the employment of heavy entrenchments, made of whatever material was available. Little-used before 1863, but after the sunken roads at Fredericksburg and stone farm fences at Gettysburg, the average soldier wisely concluded to dig in. Throughout 1864 and 1865, troops in the vicinity of the enemy, even if ordered to attack, would entrench using tin cups, discarded halves of canteens and knives or sticks.

It gradually transformed the war to one of attrition, a fact that was not lost on General Ulysses Grant, who was willing to make big sacrifices since he knew the South was resource-constrained and General William Tecumseh Sherman was on a rampage destroying everything in a broad swath through the South and confident he could stamp out the last vestiges of hope and willingness to continue in the process. It was a lethal combination that was impossible to defend against.

Though the war ended in his defeat, the Confederate infantryman earned a reputation for hard fighting, swift maneuvering, and endurance amid extreme hardships against vastly superior forces. Trusted officers could lead them against any danger, except for any West Pointers or those with pomp and circumstances, which became a moot point, since both victory and defeat killed large numbers and eventually it became impossible to replace them with men of courage and competence. Even Grant in his memoirs commented on how his men were hesitant to fight even when they had a 5-to-1 advantage at times.

A British observer concluded that the Confederate infantry could accomplish wonders – but at a cost the South could not afford.

Bell’s Influence on National Geographic Society Often Overlooked

An archive of documents from the early days of Bell Telephone Company – including correspondence by Gardiner G. Hubbard, Alexander Graham Bell’s father-in-law – sold for $10,157 at an October 2012 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In 2013, Nancy and I took a cruise from New York City to Montreal. On Sept. 23, we had the great pleasure of touring the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. We were struck by its unusual design, which is based on the tetrahedron form used in his many flight experiments with kites. There were also numerous original artifacts, photographs and exhibits of his groundbreaking scientific accomplishments.

Bell (1847-1922) was awarded patent #174465 just four days after his 29th birthday for the first practical telephone – “the most valuable single patent ever issued” in any country. Our guide informed us that Bell would not allow a telephone in his study or laboratory since he considered it a distraction to his reading and experiments. I was aware that both his mother and wife were deaf and this had a profound effect on his passion for working on sound, speech and hearing. What surprised me was the breadth of his scientific achievements. He was awarded 18 patents and collaborated on another 12 in medicine, aeronautics, genetics, electricity, sound and marine engineering.

Another surprise was that his wife Mabel was the daughter of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, founder and first president of the National Geographic Society (founded in 1888) and also the first president of Bell Telephone Company (later AT&T). Although AGB (he got a middle name only after constantly nagging his father) was not a founder of National Geographic, he was its second president, following his father-in-law. This was organizational incest on a scale that rivaled the British monarchy.

But the result was an organization that has given several generations a certain sense of where we are and where we want to go. Commanders-in-chief, explorers, schoolchildren and even daydreamers have put their full trust in the splendid maps of the National Geographic Society and their brilliant cartographers. The elegant and clearly legible typefaces for place names, one source of the map’s mystique, were designed by the magazine’s staff in the 1930s.

It was founded in Washington, D.C., at the Cosmos Club, another venerable organization founded in 1878 and boasting of membership by three presidents, two vice presidents, 12 Supreme Court justices, and 36 Nobel and 61 Pulitzer Prize winners (they don’t bother with ordinary U.S. senators).

During World War II, National Geographic maps were at the epicenter of the action, thanks in part to a U.S. president who was deeply interested in geography. The society had furnished Franklin D. Roosevelt with a cabinet that was mounted on the wall behind the desk in his private White House study. Maps of continents and oceans could be pulled down by the president like window shades; they were in constant use throughout the war.

In the early winter of 1942, President Roosevelt urged the American people to have a world map available for his next fireside chat, scheduled for the evening of Feb. 23. FDR told his aides, “I’m going to speak about strange places that many have never heard of – places that are now the battleground for civilization. … I want to explain to the people something about geography – what our problem is and what the overall strategy of the war has to be. I want to tell it to them in simple terms of ABC so that they will understand what is going on and how each battle fits into the picture. … If they understand the problem and what we are driving at, I am sure that they can take any kind of news on the chin.”

There was an unprecedented run on maps and atlases. The audience, more than 80 percent of the country’s adult population, was the largest for any geography lesson in history.

The National Geographic Society went on, expanding the scope of its focus – with maps for the amazing Mount Everest to outer space and the ocean floor. As the Society’s former chief cartographer put it: “I like to think that National Geographic maps are the crown jewels of the mapping world.”

He was right, until Google maps created a new technology in need of its own headware.

Since the Days of the Pony Express, It’s Been All About Speed

Walter Martin Baumhofer’s oil on board titled *The Pony Express, St. Joseph*, sold for $10,000 at a March 2012 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

On Nov. 19, 2007, I watched Charlie Rose interview Jeff Bezos about the new Kindle that debuted that day and sold out in 5½ hours. Books had been the last bastion of analog holdouts, although there were lots of Ebooks for sale.

The Kindle was something new.

It was a light (10 ounces) device that didn’t require a computer and would store up to 200 books in a library. One hundred and one of the 112 New York Times bestsellers were already available for $9.99, in addition to all major newspapers and magazines. You could order it from Amazon.com for $399 and when it arrived, it automatically recognized the user. Plus, there were lots of other cool features like a 250,000-word dictionary, access to Wikipedia and its 400 million pages, and you could read the first chapter of any book for free before deciding to buy it.

I immediately ordered mine and there was already a two-month waiting time. It is still around somewhere gathering dust, but my new Kindle is on my iPad (with an audio feature).

I guess we have always been an impatient culture with the “need for speed” in our DNA. Until the spring of 1860, it took 20 days for mail to get from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento … far too long for most merchants and businessmen. Stagecoaches were just too slow until one of them – Russell, Majors and Waddell of Leavenworth, Kan. – came up with an idea to cut the delivery time by 50 percent.

For a fee of $2 to $10 per ounce, depending on the distance, you could use their new innovative mail service: the Pony Express. Starting on April 3, 1860, every Wednesday and Saturday one rider on horseback would leave at noon from Sacramento heading east, and another at 8 a.m. from St. Joseph heading west. Averaging about 8 miles an hour, every 10 miles or so, they would change horses at a relay station and continue at breakneck speed.

The typical payload of 20 pounds of letters was tucked into a Mexican mochila (knapsack) with four cantinas (locked pockets) for the oiled silk-wrapped letters that kept them dry when the rider inevitably had to cross streams or rivers. The mochila was designed to slip over the saddle horn and the rider sat on it until the next change of horses. Every 75 to 80 miles was a “home station,” where the incoming rider would pass the mochila to a fresh rider and then bunk down until the mail arrived from the opposite direction. Then, somewhat rested, he was off again, back the way he came.

The young hell-bent for leather riders intrigued the nation and their dedication became a staple for many bedtime stories. Some children heard the tale about 19-year-old Jack Keetley, who rode 340 miles in 31 hours non-stop until taken from the saddle … sound asleep. Fifteen-year-old William Frederick Cody was one of the daring young riders who would later become famous as Buffalo Bill with his own traveling Wild West show.

Still, speed was what mattered and the formal record for the central route’s 1,966 miles is 7 days and 17 hours. This was of special significance since it allowed California newspapers to publish President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address. The Pony Express was, in every way, about speed. Even its history went by in a flash— 19 months, 2 weeks, 3 days and kaput! The bold experiment was finished, partially because it was costing about $30 a letter, but it was really just another victim of a new technology.

The ride lasted from April 3, 1860, to Nov. 20, 1861 … 596,501 miles, 30,700 pieces of mail and only one lost mochila! The Pony Express and its 80 dedicated riders, 400 horses and 190 relay stations all became irrelevant on Oct. 21, 1861, with the completion of the transcontinental telegraph line. That pattern of one innovation, one technology, giving way to another seems to be accelerating as our impatience and expectations continue to grow.

I just ordered four C batteries from Amazon and discovered they won’t be here until tomorrow (bummer!).

Maybe a Simple Theory Explains Nature’s Mysteries

A Charles Darwin signature is among a set of autographs by famed scientists that sold for $4,750 at a January 2017 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Cosmologists generally agree the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and Earth 4.6 billion years old. They also agree the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and is creating new space in the process. It is already so immense that even by traveling at the speed of light, you would simply end up back where you started due to the curvature of space. This eliminates one of my lifelong desires to poke my head thru and “see what’s out there.” The answer is nothing, a hard concept to grasp … at least for me.

What no one seems to know is where, when or how life on Earth began. Or, for that matter, if life (as we know it) exists anywhere other than on our small tiny orb tucked in a remote part of our modest galaxy, at the precise distance from the Sun to permit our existence.

Author Bill Bryson writes about the work of a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller, who in 1953 tried to synthesize life in a chemistry lab. He hooked up two flasks, one containing water and the other a mixture of methane, ammonia and hydrogen gases. By adding electrical sparks to simulate atmospheric lightning, he was able to convert this concoction to a green and yellow broth of amino acids, fatty acids and other organic compounds. His euphoric professor – Nobel laureate Harold Urey – exclaimed, “If God didn’t do it this way, he missed a good bet!” Since it was subsequently pointed out that Earth never had such noxious conditions, we are no closer to creating life today, 65 years later.

Others have speculated that life on Earth arrived when a meteorite crashed into the planet in a process known as panspermia. The problem with this theory is that it still doesn’t explain how life BEGAN and just moves the problem to some other remote place.

Since modern man dates back 200,000 years to Africa, I’m more curious as to why it took us so long to fly. It was only rather recently, on Dec. 17, 1903, that two brothers from Dayton, Ohio – Orville and Wilbur Wright – rose into the air in Kitty Hawk, N.C., and descended 120 feet further than the take-off point. Wilbur had tried first and stalled, but Orville took the controls and set off into a strong wind with Wilbur steadying the wingtip running alongside.

They made three more flights that morning, with the longest covering 852 feet. When a wind gust broke the airframe, they just packed all the parts and went back to Dayton. What makes this achievement even more remarkable is that neither had any formal academic education in physics, although both were high school graduates. Today, the “Flyer” hangs proudly above the entrance at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington under a long inscription that ends “…Taught Men to Fly and Opened the Era of Aviation.”

Of course, flying in the true sense has mostly been restricted to birds, as Charles Darwin theorized. In his travels aboard the Beagle survey ship, he noted that finch beaks on different islands in the Galapagos varied to exploit local resources. He speculated the birds had not been originally created this way, but had adapted themselves to gain a strategic advantage to acquire scarce resources. They had indeed, but it should be noted that Darwin did not coin the phrase “survival of the fittest” and even the word “evolution” didn’t appear until the sixth printing of On the Origin of Species. And even this book was delayed for many years since his editor urged him to write about pigeons. “Everyone is interested in pigeons.”

A lot has been written about “locomotion,” with the flight of birds being the most interesting … and the Pterosaur from 100 million years ago especially so. With a wingspan of 16 feet and weighing a mere 22 pounds, it was able to dominate eastern England by staying aloft for extended periods on rising warm-air currents … presumably as a hovering predator.

Once again, we face the same questions. How it developed is a mystery, as is its anatomy, since it couldn’t manage take-off via traditional wing flapping. Perhaps it relied on gravity and thermals to become airborne. But this would have required plunging into the air from seaside cliffs, like modern frigate birds.

My theory to cover all these mysterious questions is more simplistic: Evolution is just “one damned thing after another.”

It’s a Long Way from Hot Air Balloons to Lethal Drones

An 1887 complete set of 25 Lone Jack “Inventors and Inventions” cards, featuring Michael Faraday, sold for $3,107 at a November 2011 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Wars fought from the air can be traced back to the creation of rubber balloons first made by Professor Michael Faraday in 1824 for use in his experiments with hydrogen at the Royal Institution in London (where he would later become the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry). However, it was his work with electricity and magnetism that earned him greater fame. Virtually all electricity produced today is based on Faraday’s principles, whether it is coal, oil, gas, nuclear, hydro or wind.

Faraday (1791-1867) declined an offer of knighthood since he believed the Bible forbade earthly accumulations of wealth or honor and stated that he “preferred to be plain Mr. Faraday to the end.” He also declined to assist the British government with the production of chemical weapons, on ethical grounds, for the Crimean War (1853-1856) … a position the current government now apparently agrees with given recent activities in Syria.

I can attest to the many honorific symbols in greater London today and Albert Einstein kept a picture of Faraday on a wall next to Isaac Newton to acknowledge their enormous contributions to the extension of electromagnetism in space. Not bad for “plain” Mr. Faraday.

His work on balloons was preceded by the French Montgolfier brothers in 1783 while perched on a hillside watching a bonfire:

“I wonder what makes the smoke go up.”

“Perhaps warm air is lighter and the cold air pushes it up.”

“Then if we filled a bag with hot air, it would fly!”

Aeronautics was born.

Then on June 18, 1861, a stunned audience in Washington watched a giant balloon, the Enterprise, rise 500 feet. A man in it sent a telegraph to President Lincoln … “Sir: From this point of observation we command an area of nearly 50 miles in diameter. I have the pleasure of sending you this first telegram ever dispatched from an aerial station… T.S.C. Lowe”

This was a prelude to the short-lived formal use of aerial observations by the Armed Forces. The first balloon bought for the American military was an $850 model of raw India silk built by John Wise of Lancaster, Pa. Both sides in the Civil War were basically incapable of utilizing balloons for little more than observation of troop positions since any kind of armament was simply too heavy to be carried aloft. Aerial photography service was offered but never acted on. After viewing the First Battle of Bull Run, Lowe and other balloonists formed the Union Army Balloon Corps, but disbanded in August 1863. Confederate efforts were even more modest and legend has it that (sadly) the very last silk dress in the entire Confederacy was used to try and make a balloon.

Then a man by the name of Billy Mitchell enlisted as a private in the Spanish-American War, where he became a member of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Subsequently, he served in France during World War I and ultimately became regarded as the father of the U.S. Air Force. It was his stubborn insistence that “the day has passed when armies or navies on the sea can be the arbiter of a nation’s destiny in war. The main power of defense and the power of initiative against an enemy has passed to the air” (November 1918).

That and a statement accusing senior leaders in the Army and Navy of incompetence and “almost treasonable administration of national defense” got him court-martialed. The court, which included Major General Douglas MacArthur as one of the judges, found him guilty on Dec. 17, 1925, and suspended him for five years. Ironically, MacArthur suffered a similar fate decades later for challenging conventional military wisdom.

We are now in the era where wars are fought using lethally armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) piloted from remote locations, and cruise missiles launched from ships up to 1,500 miles away. I was hoping we had the cyber-technology to destroy an enemy’s power infrastructure, disable their communications and simply render their offensive and defensive capabilities useless.

Maybe that’s only feasible for presidential elections using Facebook.

Hollywood Westerns Embody Essential History of the United States

This original movie poster for 1953’s *Shane* sold for $5,676.25 at a November 2008 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Inexplicably, there was a 60-year gap between the first Western to win an Academy Award for Best Picture and the next one. Cimarron (1931), starring Richard Dix and Irene Dunne, was based on the 1929 novel by Edna Ferber that told the tales of the Oklahoma land rushes of 1889 and 1893. The next winner was Dances With Wolves, the 1990 Kevin Costner film that won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

This was despite the fact that there were a number of notable Western films in the intervening decades: High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), to name a few. My favorite remains Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks and introducing Montgomery Clift, the brilliant actor who was Elizabeth Taylor’s close friend and who died too young after a car accident led him to too many pain-killers (that did as advertised).

These were laconic men with a code to live by: Don’t run, stand up and don’t rely on anyone but yourself. Men who liked simple stories that seemed almost incidental to the action. In 1966, Hawks called Robert Mitchum for a role in El Dorado.

“You available, Bob?”

“Sure, Howard. Uh, what’s the story?”

“Oh, you know, Bob. There’s no story.”

Peter Bogdanovich, the director and writer, has six personal favorites and all were directed by either John Ford or Howard Hawks. His nucleus of favorites underscores the Western’s focus: clarity between right and wrong. “Certainly,” Bogdanovich wrote, “the Western is one of the most pervasive icons of Americana; a symbol of frontiers challenged and tamed; a series of morality tales of good and evil that contain within them the essential history of the United States.”

Director John Ford was reputedly prickly and fearless. From his early efforts until his last Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), his films helped hype the myth of the West and the men and women who belonged there. “When the legend becomes fact, sir, print the legend,” a young reporter tells Jimmy Stewart, playing a U.S. Senator in Liberty Valance. That is advice Ford gave and followed.

The mythic Western theme is pervasive, thanks in part to the movies and television. It was how the rest of the world saw us for a long time. We’re all cowboys, gunslingers operating under some unwritten rules way out in the open spaces. Ford’s stories were simply about the individual as the last line of defense. A man takes a stand, no matter what the price, refusing to ask for help. (He had no regard for High Noon, because “No real Western sheriff would ever ask for help.”)

Then it almost seems like television was made for the Western and in the 1950s, we had plenty to choose from on every network. Even popular radio Westerns found it easy to make the transition. The best example may be Gunsmoke, which had established itself as a Saturday night special on radio with William Conrad in the venerable role of Marshal Matt Dillon. The rotund Conrad didn’t fit the visual image, so CBS tried to lure an ex-Glendale High School football star who had lost his USC scholarship due to a surfing accident. His name was Marion Morrison.

We know him as John Wayne, who Ford had molded into a superstar in Western movies. Wayne declined the offer, but agreed to introduce the first episode in 1955 with James Arness (the elder brother of Peter Graves) in the Matt Dillon role. Not surprisingly, it became the longest-running American prime-time TV drama – 639 episodes from 1955 to 1975 and still running in syndication today, a mere 63 years later!

Personally, I’m quite happy that Wayne kept making movies, because in my opinion, he was the Western. But why? Maybe no one summed it up better than director Raoul Walsh when he said, “Dammit, the son of a bitch looked like a man.” Perhaps that’s it. He did look and act like a man, and we never read or heard anything to make us doubt it. Journalist and writer Joan Didion in a profile spoke for a lot of us when she said, “When John Wayne rode through my childhood, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.”

I miss John Wayne and all the things he stood for.

New York Times Reflects One of Our Greatest Freedoms

Bruce Braithwaite’s oil on canvas *The New York Times*, 2014, went to auction in November 2016.

By Jim O’Neal

Ah, freedom of speech, of religion, of assembly – things we all associate with the centrality of our democracy. For me, freedom of the press is the key to an open mind and an open market, the twin foundations of a truly free society. In political philosophical terms and in government, it has been a distinctly American idea since the founding of our great nation.

Others have made claims of a similar nature, but rarely endure. The classic example is the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (the Stalin Constitution), which stressed the inclusion of “freedom of the press,” but the words were cheap imitations since the press was the handmaiden of the ruling Communist Party and merely echoed the party line with absolute fidelity. It was hailed at the time as a paragon of virtue unequalled in history but, ironically, on the very eve of the reign of brutality that started the following year.

Adolph Ochs bought the bankrupt New York Times for $75,000 in 1896 when he was 38 years old. The newspaper had $300,000 in unpaid bills and was losing on average a $1,000 a day. Ochs had a humble beginning, starting as a floor sweeper at 14 with the Knoxville Chronicle. He was a typesetter and reporter with the Louisville Courier Journal at age 18 and by 20 became the owner of the declining Chattanooga Times. He had plunked down $250 of the total sale of $5,750.

The New-York Daily Times had been founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond (1820-1869), who was also credited with being the “Godfather of the GOP” after his political actions in the elections of 1856 and 1860.

Moving quickly after his purchase of the NYT, Ochs repeated what he did with the Chattanooga publication – making it into a newspaper and not a gazette of opinion, or a showcase for star writers. He avoided being a champion for the underdog or top dog or a crusader for political or social reform. Ochs had something to sell – news – and he intended to sell it dispassionately and with the guarantee that it was reliable, verifiable and not deviously insipid.

He eliminated installments of romantic fiction that earlier management believed would lure readers and eschewed scandalous stories based on gossip. Instead, he expanded coverage of financial news, business trends, real estate transactions, and the official activities of government that other newspapers had long ignored. He wanted a paper of record, one that each day would publish a record of every fire in NYC, the arrival of every mail ship, the names of every official visitor to the White House, the precise moment the sun set and the moon rose. His unbending objective was to be impartial and complete – and “not soil the breakfast linen.”

Throughout his publishing career, he made brilliant business decisions – his genius had not only been in the type of newspaper he created, but that he had made such a newspaper profitable. And on the occasion of his 75th birthday in 1933, he issued an optimistic public statement in the midst of the Great Depression in which he asserted that “we are sobering up and painfully getting our house in order. The tragic experience we are having will result in educating the people that care, caution and conservatism are as necessary in economics as in physical health and that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount cannot be ignored, nor forgotten. They should continue to be our guide to a philosophy of life.”

The New York Times motto of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has been reviewed for relevance several times and always decided in the affirmative. It’s proudly printed on the upper left-hand section of the front page every day. I wonder if anyone is still aware of its existence?