Napoleon – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Are we capable of dealing with the daunting tasks that face us? Of course we are!

A 1776 broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, sold for $514,000 at an April 2016 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Two U.S. presidents have been elected by the House of Representatives. John Quincy Adams became the sixth president (1825) when his chief opponent, Andrew Jackson, failed to win a majority of the electoral votes in the 1824 election. The House held a special election to decide the winner. Supposedly, a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and House Speaker Henry Clay vaulted Clay into the Secretary of State position.

John C. Calhoun easily won the vice-presidential vote and he served four years under JQA. When Jackson bounced back and won in 1828, Calhoun continued as vice president for three more years. Then he resigned and made a run for the nomination in a new party: the Nullifiers … the second third party to form (the Anti-Masons were the first third party).

Earlier, in 1801, Thomas Jefferson had been elected by the House after he tied with Aaron Burr in the general election. However, it took 36 votes in the House to break the tie. Alexander Hamilton finally persuaded the electors from New York to vote for Jefferson since he was “the lesser of two evils.” Two years later, Burr exacted his revenge by killing Hamilton in a duel.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, was Adams’ vice president for four years and then served two terms as president. He had hoped that the young nation would expand across North America, becoming a great agrarian society. Instead, great cities evolved out of necessity to accommodate the millions of immigrants fleeing to the new republic with its fabled “streets paved with gold.” In 1800, Jefferson famously wrote: “When great evils happen, I am in the habit of looking out for what good may arise from them as consolations to us. … The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation; and I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” In Jefferson’s time, the epidemics that repeatedly swept through large cities were especially lethal.

One poignant example occurred in the summer of 1793 when a massive epidemic of yellow fever hit Philadelphia, the largest city in America and temporary capital of the United States. It was caused by the mosquitoes that flourished in the muddy swamps in the area. Yellow fever is an acute, infectious viral disease transmitted by the bite of an infected female.

This episode was responsible for 5,000 deaths, or 10% of the population. An even bigger disaster was averted when President George Washington moved the federal government and nearly 40% of the inhabitants followed. Another mitigating factor helped when a savvy group of doctors imposed a quarantine on all ships and refugees from Philadelphia. Special guards were posted to the wharfs to ensure compliance and citizens were warned not to let any strangers into their homes.

When yellow fever returned to NYC in 1795, they were better prepared with a health department. But in 1798, yellow fever killed 2,086 people (one in 30), or the equivalent of 289,000 in today’s terms. The battle continued during the entire 19th century with major outbreaks in Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans and other southern cities. Eventually, a vaccine was developed.

Thomas Jefferson was eager to obtain what would become part of the Louisiana Purchase when Spain ceded much of North America to France. He dispatched James Monroe and Robert Livingston to France with an offer to buy 40,000 square miles for $10 million. The offer was refused, but Napoleon subsequently made an astonishing counteroffer … 827,987 square miles for $15 million! The offer was quickly accepted since it provided significant benefits. First, safety for shipping on the Mississippi River … a doubling of the size of the entire United States and, mostly, acquisition of the largest, most fertile track of land on Earth. It was enough land to entice migration from the East all the way to the Pacific Ocean. With this vast new area, there would be no need to congest into cities.

However, industrial America developed rapidly as a nation, but cities grew even faster. Masses of immigrants poured into America and a vast population shifted from the country to the city. Between 1860 and 1900, the rural population had doubled, but the number of city-dwellers quadrupled! The city became the supreme achievement of modern industry, the center of civilization. It spread out, built tall skyscrapers, mechanized factories and provided all the goods and services needed for workers.

On the other side of the ledger were the evils: ghettos for the poor, suburbs for the middle-class, exclusive neighborhoods for the wealthy, and ethnic neighborhoods for the immigrants. The city offered hope and opportunity, but it also brought despair. Overwhelming social problems, diseases, poverty, crime and strife between businesses and exploited workers. So we’re left with a few problems to solve:

Rising oceans, melting polar caps, tornadic storms, raging forest fires
Partially filled office buildings and empty, closed-down malls
AI and robots replacing undereducated workers
Rising rates of inequality
Systemic racism
More complex viral diseases as we get deeper into dark spooky places
Telemedicine in place of doctors
Remote learning

Are we capable of dealing with these daunting tasks? Just think about poor George Washington who had to flee when every tenth person was dying. Of course we are, but if we give up in despair, someone (probably China) will assume the leadership role and, in the process, set the world’s agenda. Leaders lead … others follow.

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].

Does America still have ‘the right stuff’ to continue this remarkable story?

This 1903 Louisiana Purchase Gold Dollar, Jefferson Design, minted to commemorate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, realized $37,600 at an April 2017 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

The 19th century in the United States was by any standard an unusually remarkable period. In 1800, John Adams was still president, but had lost his bid for re-election to Vice President Thomas Jefferson, the man behind the words in our precious Bill of Rights. Alexander Hamilton had used his personal New York influence to break a tie with Aaron Burr, since Jefferson was considered the least disliked of the two political enemies. (Burr would kill Hamilton in a duel in 1803 by cleverly escalating a disagreement into a matter of honor.)

There were 16 states in 1800 (Ohio would join the Union as no. 17) and the nation’s population had grown to 5.3 million. Within weeks of becoming president, Jefferson learned that Spain had receded a large portion of its North American territory to France. Napoleon now owned 530 million acres, more than what the United States controlled. Fearful that losing control of New Orleans to our new French neighbor would lead to losing control of the strategically important Mississippi River, he developed a plan without including Congress.

He dispatched Robert Livingston and James Monroe to buy greater New Orleans for $10 million. They were pleasantly surprised when the French offered to sell 100 percent of their North American territories for $15 million cash … less several million in pending claims. Concerned that the French would change their offer before they could get formal approval, an agreement in principle was agreed to (later formally approved by Congress after James Madison’s assurance of its constitutionality.)

What a prize! 828,000 square miles for 3 cents an acre, virtually doubling the size of the United States and gaining control of the mighty Mississippi and shipping into the Gulf of Mexico. With this uncertainty removed, cotton production now expanded rapidly south and soon represented over 50 percent of total exports. With the aid of the cotton gin and slave labor, the United States now controlled 70 percent of the world’s production. Ominously, seeds of a great civil war were planted with each cotton plant.

For millions of people overseas, conquest or riches were not their primary ambition. Escaping the clutches of famine trumped all other hardships of life. 1842 was the first year in America’s history that more than 100,000 immigrants arrived in a single year. Five years later, the number from Ireland alone exceeded this, with Irish coming to America to escape the scourge of the Great Famine. In the 1840s and ’50s, 20 percent of the entire population of Ireland crossed the Atlantic in search of a better life. In sharp contrast to the Pilgrims on the Mayflower – who were on a financial venture supplied with rations – the Catholic Irish left in rags to avoid starvation in a mainly Protestant nation.

Concurrently, another wave from the European mainland was fleeing revolution and counterrevolution. In Germany, half-a-million left in a three-year period (1852-55) as a spirit of revolt captured the European continent. “We are sleeping on a volcano,” warned Alexis de Tocqueville. Meanwhile, two German thinkers (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) penned their intellectual nonsense, The Communist Manifesto, from the safety and luxury of London.

In the United States, just before the impending boomlet of immigration in 1846, total railroad mileage was a meager 5,000 miles. Ten years later, it quintupled to 25,000 as the influx of labor to lay iron rails was a perfect match for $400 million in capital. As famine and revolution were destroying Europe, their foreign transplants were busy transforming their new homeland. Also, the transition of coal to steam to steamboats scampering around the newly dug connecting canals would inspire new communications like the telegraph and Pony Express. While the country had been busy absorbing the wave of immigrants, it had also been in the throes of a decades-long internal migration west.

Thomas Jefferson had predicted it would be 1,000 years before the frontier reached the Pacific Ocean. Only 23 years after his death in 1826, gold was discovered in California and the fever to get rich started a westward movement that expanded globally. Once under way, the richness of the soil and massive new resources of rivers, forests, fish and bison would expand the migration to include farmers and their families. Horace Greeley shouted, “Go West, young man” and they did.

With room to grow and prosper, by 1900 the population would expand by a factor of 15 times to 76 million. They resided in 45 states after the Utah territories joined the Union in 1896. Fulfilling the vision of Manifest Destiny (from sea to sea), the rural population of 95 percent evolved as urbanization grew to 40 percent as industrialization and worker immigrants staffed the factories and cities. A short war with Mexico added California, Arizona and New Mexico, and President Polk’s annexation of Texas in 1845 filled in the contiguous states.

However, it was the railroads that created the permanence. With 30,000 miles of track in 1860, America already surpassed every other nation in the world. The continual growth was phenomenal: 1870 (53k), 1880 (93k), 1890 (160k) and by 1900 almost 200,000 … a six-fold increase in a mere 40-year period. Yes, there were problems: Illinois had 11 time zones and Wisconsin 38, but this was harmonized by 1883. Most importantly, they connected virtually every city and town in America and employed 1 million people!

Throw in a few extras like electricity, oil wells, steel mills and voila! The greatest nation ever built from scratch. Today, we have 6 percent of the people on 6 percent of the land and 30 percent of the world’s economic activity … and we are celebrating the 50-year anniversary of putting a man on the moon.

Do we still have “the right stuff” to continue this remarkable story? I say definitely, if we demand that our leaders remember how we got here.

For a While, the Tiny Mosquito was Destroying Armies

A key to the success of the Panama Canal was Colonel William P. Gorgas’ mosquito-eradication program, which saved thousands of workers’ lives. This example of a U.S. gold coin commemorating the construction of the Panama Canal and the rebuilding of the City of San Francisco sold for $152,750 at a January 2017 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

The French were no strangers to the Stegomyia fasciata. It was, after all, that tiny mosquito that wiped out the French troops Napoleon had dispatched to squash a slave uprising in Haiti and then the French-controlled colony of Saint-Domingue. From 1802 to 1803, yellow fever ravaged 50,000 troops, including their commanding officer General Emmanuel Leclerc. His replacement, General Rochambeau, retreated with a mere 3,000 soldier-survivors.

Experts estimate that twice as many soldiers were lost in Haiti than were killed in the world famous Battle of Waterloo!

Napoleon finally conceded that they were no match for this mysterious, silent killer and abandoned the ambitious plans to expand the empire into the Louisiana Territory, selling it for $15 million, which doubled the size of the young United States. It was an epic bargain for the United States and dramatically reduced the risk of future wars with France, which were almost inevitable.

Later in 1889, another Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, led a decade-long and terminally troubled attempt to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama that crumbled after 20,000 workers (one-third of his force) died from yellow fever – a highly contagious, usually fatal disease contracted from a single mosquito bite.

Au revoir, monsieurs.

In America, the fever reached epidemic proportions as well. More than 300,000 cases were reported in the United States between 1793 and 1900; at times with mortality rates of up to 85 percent. The disease attacks the liver, turns the skin yellow, raises body temperatures and causes internal bleeding before the victim lapses into a coma. More U.S. troops were killed in the Spanish-American War by yellow fever than by the enemy. Yellow fever, nicknamed “yellow jack” after the pennants that flew to signal a quarantine, arrived in Central America in mid-16th century aboard slave ships travelling from Africa. Despite countless hypotheses, the cause of the disease and its rapid spread remained a mystery.

Dr. Carlos Finlay of Cuba had long theorized that mosquitos carried and spread yellow fever. The conventional medical establishment criticized Finlay, calling him “mosquito man.” But no one had a better idea. In desperation, U.S. Army Major Walter Reed, his fellow doctors, and a detachment of soldiers traveled to Havana in June 1900 and tested Finlay’s theory by volunteering to let indigenous mosquitos bite them.

On Aug. 27, Dr. James Carroll allowed himself to be bitten, fell ill with the disease, but survived. Reed survived his bout as well. Several other colleagues died and both Reed and Carroll sustained lasting damage to their health. The soldiers refused to accept a $250 bonus, believing it would cheapen their sacrifice. Public opinion was cynical and negative. American newspapers mocked the experiment or simply ignored it. Congress even denied a pension to one soldier, the first one who developed the test even though the experiment left him paralyzed.

Yet the team prevailed and in October 1900, Walter Reed finally declared publicly that “the mosquito served as the intermediate host for the parasite of yellow fever.” The disease’s cycle was soon unraveled. Female mosquitos picked up yellow fever in the first three days of a patient’s infection and became contagious after a 12-day incubation period with the pandemic disease.

Eventually, Maj. William Crawford Gorgas eradicated the disease in Panama and the Canal Zone. He also wiped out another mosquito that spread malaria and rats that carried bubonic plague. Gorgas’ triumph allowed the United States to begin their canal dig and finish it by 1914. Panama’s death rate from yellow jack had dropped to only half that of the United States.

Problem solved.

Armies Have Been Planning Wars for Centuries

This 19-inch-high bronze of Alexander the Great, inscribed M Amodio Napoli, sold for $5,500 at a September 2017 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

The New York Times recently wrote about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, referring to a “secret plan” to deal with the growing North Korean nuclear threat to the world.

Military historians know that armies make plans. Alexander the Great had a plan for invading the Persian Empire to kill or capture Emperor Darius. Hannibal had a plan in the Second Punic War to elude the Roman navy by using war elephants to cross the Alps into Spain. King Phillip II had a plan in 1588 to defeat England using his impressive armada.

Napoleon is occasionally derided for having a “plan of the year” to guide his activities to defeat his European enemies, which included Egypt, Austria, Italy, Prussia and even Russia. But by 1870, Napoleon II had ushered in a new era of military planning, requiring meticulous details that covered every contingency. Earlier in 1810, Prussia had founded a war academy to train officers in staff duties to expand their basic skills.

After the remarkable Prussian victories over Austria (1806) and France (1870), institutions in other countries were hastily modified to conform, most notably the French École de Guerre in 1880. There would be no equivalent in the diplomatic world. As late as 1914, the British Foreign Office was still choosing entrants on the basis of relationships with ambassadors and other cronies. Diplomacy remained an art taught in embassies and despite being dedicated to national interests, there was not a shared belief that their roles were to avoid war with skillful negotiations.

The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 had been settled chiefly by diplomacy because the crisis had been isolated to national interests, as opposed to the far trickier national honor or prestige. However, in 1914, the weakest of the European powers, Austria-Hungary, was rocked by the assassination of the heir to the throne by a subversive from Serbia. Franz Ferdinand, nephew to Emperor Franz Joseph, had traveled to Bosnia to observe routine military maneuvers. The next day, he and his wife drove to the principal capital, Sarajevo.

This was an era when heads of state were often in grave danger … a Russian Tsar, an Austrian princess and an American president all felled by fanatics or lunatics. In the case of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, it was a group of assassins lying in wait with bombs and a pistol. Someone threw a bomb that bounced off the car, exploding and only wounding an officer. Forty-five minutes later, en route to visit the wounded, the driver made a wrong turn and stopped in front of an assassin with the pistol. Gavrilo Princip stepped forward and killed both Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie.

What followed was an astonishing series of interlocking alliances and mutual pacts that fell like a row of dominos and created a world war … France to go to war on Russia’s side and vice versa if either were attacked by Germany; Britain to lend assistance to France if needed; Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy (the Triple Alliance) versus the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary).

It was a conflict of unprecedented ferocity that ended the peace and prosperity of the Victorian Era, unleashing demons of mechanized warfare and mass death. An unanswered mystery is how a civilization at the height of its achievements could propel itself into such a ruinous conflict. The answer lays hidden in the negotiations among Europe’s crowned heads (all related by blood) and their doomed efforts to diffuse the crisis. By the end of the senseless war, three great empires – the Austrian-Hungarian, the Russian, and the Ottoman – had collapsed. An unthinkable outcome.

Perhaps it is as simple as the often-overused quote by Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan … until they get punched in the mouth.”

Can you hear us Rex?

After Napoleon and Nazi Germany, Russia Lives with Paranoia of Conflict

A 1953 Russian propaganda poster showing Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin sold for $2,629 at a July 2016 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, after ruling the Soviet Union for 25 years and leading the country in its transformation into a major world power. Born Iosif Dzhugashvili in 1878, while in his 30s he took the name “Stalin” meaning “Man of Steel.” After studying at a theological seminary, he read the works of revolutionary socialist Karl Marx, which inspired him to join the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

He was a protégé of Vladimir Lenin and after Lenin’s death, Stalin earned a reputation as one of the most ruthless and brutal dictators in world history (“Ideas are more powerful than guns,” he once said. “We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?”).

After an extended Cold War with the West, the Soviet Union started to unravel when its eighth and final leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, assumed control in 1988. He seemed eager to “destroy the apparat” – weaken the Stalinist structure of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. Only then could he take the bold economic steps to revamp a bankrupt system that was crumbling fast.

The West hailed Gorbachev as the tsar liberator, a political magician, or as Time magazine editorialized in January 1990: “The Copernicus, Darwin and Freud of communism all wrapped into one.” A year earlier, he was Time’s “Man of the Decade.” But in early 1990, Lithuania demanded outright independence and a crowd of 200,000 in the capital of Vilnius demonstrated to get the entire Lithuanian territory returned. This was quickly followed by an Azerbaijani Popular Front rally that escalated into a civil war along the Armenian-Azerbaijani border, with both sides clamoring for independence.

In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia declared restoration of full independence, followed by the Ukraine on Dec. 1. On Dec. 25, Christmas Day, Gorbachev resigned and the following day the Supreme Soviet voted itself and the Soviet Union out of existence.

I first met current Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg in 1992 when he was head of the Committee for External Relations, a group in the mayor’s office responsible for promoting international relations and foreign investment. We started shipping Lays potato chips from Warsaw and soon built a Frito-Lay plant near Moscow. I totally underestimated him and thought he was just another thug, a feeling that was reinforced when we started Pizza Hut in Moscow.

According to Henry Kissinger, Putin has always blamed Gorbachev for the dissolution of the Soviet Union due to his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform). “The greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.” It has always been a mystery to me why they gave up so much when the United States and others were willing to negotiate a softer landing. I haven’t read Putin’s autobiography, but I suspect the Russians will never be satisfied until there is an east-west buffer zone along the Ukrainian border.

After Napoleon and then Nazi Germany, there is an inherent paranoia that will only be exacerbated if Poland ever joins NATO. As philosopher George Santayana so wisely observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

American Forces Quickly Rallied to Face German Aggression

Tom Lovell’s *World War I Soldiers on Horseback*, painted for a magazine story illustration, sold for $8,750 at a March 2012 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

At the start of 1917, only four months before the United States declared war on the German Empire, the U.S. army totaled 107,641 men. Sixteen other nations had larger armies. Another major weakness was the lack of recent experience in large-scale military operations. It had been a full 51 years since the armistice at Appomattox had ended the Civil War and many things had become rusty in the interim.

Also, somewhat remarkably, there was no modern military equipment heavier than medium-size machine guns!

Even the National Guard was larger (132,000 men), but this part-time militia was dispersed among the 48 states, generally poorly trained, and any federal oversight was unusually lax. One sparkling exception was the U.S. Marine Corps, over 15,000 first-class troops. However, they were scattered throughout the Western Hemisphere in America’s possessions and in Central American republics, acting as police in the aftermath of the 1898 Spanish-American War.

Despite this bleak situation, and because the Germans had committed far too many acts of war, on April 2, President Woodrow Wilson requested a joint session of Congress. On April 6, the U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly to go to war. The vote in the Senate was 82-6 in favor (with eight abstentions) and 373-50 in the House, with Jeannette Rankin of Montana in the minority. In 1941, she would become the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan after Pearl Harbor.

Yet, by June 1917, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John J. Pershing, had arrived in France and on July 4, American Independence Day, elements of his 1st Division paraded in the streets of Paris. Throughout the following months, fresh units of an Army designed to reach a strength of 80 divisions – nearly 3 million men – continued to arrive. By March 1918, 318,000 men had reached France, the vanguard of 1.3 million to be deployed, and not a single one had been lost to enemy action in oceanic transport.

Rare are the times in great wars when the fortunes of one side are transformed by the sudden accretion of reinforcements. Napoleon’s enemies in 1813 when the Russian army joined Britain/Austria … the North in our Civil War when the adoption of conscription added millions versus the South’s hundreds of thousands … 1941 when Adolf Hitler’s stupid declaration of war on the United States, followed by Japan’s ill-advised action, saved an isolated Britain and an almost defeated Soviet Union.

This was another of those times, when Germany had declared unrestricted war in the Atlantic in the flawed calculation that the war would be over in Europe before the United States could mobilize.

As philosopher George Santayana so wisely observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

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 chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Bastille Day Reminds Us That Freedom Vital to Civilized World

This 20½-inch high French carved-ivory figure of Louis XVI from the 19th century realized $19,120 at an October 2006 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

It’s Bastille Day.

On July 14, 1789, an enraged Parisian mob, seeking weapons to defend their city from a rumored royal attack, stormed the crumbling fortress known as the Bastille and murdered its governor and guards. This violent defiance of royal power has become the symbol of the French Revolution, a movement that not only engulfed France, but also reverberated around the world. The ideas articulated in the revolution spelled the end of Europe’s absolute monarchies and inspired their eventual replacement by more democratic governments.

The indecisive French King Louis XVI was hardly the person to confront any crisis, especially one as serious as that facing France in 1789. In the previous century, his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, the Sun King, had established France as an absolute monarchy with all power concentrated in the king’s hands. His palace at Versailles was the most sophisticated court in Europe and a bastion of aristocratic privilege.

In October 1789, events suddenly accelerated when a vast crowd, outraged by a lack of bread in Paris, descended upon Versailles and forcibly removed the royal family to Paris, ransacking the palace for good measure. In what would become an unnerving foretaste of the violence to come, the severed heads of the guards at Versailles were paraded on stakes as Louis and his family were escorted to the capital.

By September, a kind of hysteria gripped the city. A mob stormed the Tuileries, where the royal family was held, slaughtering the Swiss Guards. Louis XVI was put on trial as a traitor and executed on the guillotine in January 1793. Eventually, order was restored by the end of 1795.

Whatever the importance of the French Revolution, it remains the subject of intense historical debate. Its goals of ending repressive monarchy and championing universal rights were confused and often violent. Furthermore, by 1804 Napoleon had effectively swapped one form of absolutism for his own, albeit more effective than any had known since Louis XIV.

Still, it remains a pivotal moment in the belief that freedom should underpin the civilized world … a principle we still embrace with every ounce of energy.

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 Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].