importance—Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago _Tribune_. Mr.
Medill had been one of the reporters at Bloomington in 1856 when the
speech was made who found himself in the end on top of the table without
a note! He thought Mr. Whitney’s version was close to the original.
Indeed, he wrote to Mr. McClure a long and interesting letter giving his
recollections of the Convention. In that letter he said:
Mr. Whitney has reproduced with remarkable accuracy what Mr. Lincoln
said, largely in his identical language and partly in synonymous
terms. The report is close enough in thought and word to recall the
wonderful speech delivered forty years ago with vivid freshness.
Well, that seemed to us reason enough for publishing Mr. Whitney’s
report along with the story of how I had found it, what the people who
heard the speech in the first place said about it, both for and against.
And that we did.
But out in Illinois there were a number of people who did not want to
give up the tradition. The Lost Speech was the greater to them because
it was lost. As long as it was lost you could make it bigger than any
speech any man ever made, and nobody could contradict you. And so you
will find those who claim that the Lost Speech is still lost. And of
course you can take it or you can leave it.
More than once when I plumed myself on a “discovery” I encountered the
loyalty of men to their legends. There was the Herndon story of
Lincoln’s failing to appear at the first wedding arranged for him and
Mary Todd. I realized he rather lets his “historical imagination” loose
in his description, but I never had questioned his story until by chance
I mentioned it to one of the family, a woman who would have been there
if there had ever been such a wedding ready. She froze me with her
indignation. “Mr. Herndon made that story up out of whole cloth. No such
thing ever happened.” Amazed, I flew around to see what other men and
women of the circle said. They all denied it. A sister of Mary Lincoln
was particularly indignant because Mr. Herndon had put the bride in
white silk. “Mary Lincoln never had a white silk dress until she went to
Washington,” she sputtered.
But in spite of all the documents and evidences I collected demolishing
the episode, I reaped only sour looks and dubious headshakes. I had
spoiled a good story or tried to. It still remains a good story. Every
now and then somebody tells it to me. A biographer who tries to break
down a belittling legend meets with far less sympathy than he who
strengthens or creates one.
The most important piece of ghost writing I ever did came in the course
of the Lincoln work—Charles A. Dana’s “Recollections of the Civil War.”
Mr. Dana, at that time the active editor of the New York _Sun_, had had
an exceptional war experience dating from 1862 to 1865 as assistant to
Secretary Stanton. He had spent much time in the field; he had been with
Grant at Vicksburg, with Rosecrans and Thomas at Chattanooga, again with
Grant in the Peninsular Campaign. “The eyes of the government at the
front,” Mr. Lincoln called him.
No man in the administration had had better opportunity of judging
Lincoln, particularly in relation to the conduct of the war, and none
was a better judge of character.
Could I get the whole story as far as it concerned Lincoln? I hesitated
to ask it. The truth was, I was afraid of Mr. Dana. I knew him only on
the editorial page of the New York _Sun_. He was too clever, too
quick-witted, too malicious for me to get on with, I feared. They
laughed at me at the office when I voiced my qualms. Nobody was held
higher there than Charles A. Dana. He had been a customer of the McClure
Syndicate from the beginning, and they believed in his professional
integrity, admired his detestation and relentless pursuit of fakers,
honored and tried to imitate his editorial motto, “If you see it in THE
SUN it’s so.”
“Why should you feel this way?” reproved Mr. Phillips. “Mr. Dana is a
gentleman.”
“Nonsense! I’ll take care of it for you,” said Mr. McClure, and he
rushed to the _Sun_, office. He did fix it and more, for, returning, he
told me with glee that Mr. Dana was willing to give his whole war story,
that is if I would do the work and arrange some practical plan for the
interviews. The first step, of course, was to find what Dana material,
published and unpublished, was in the war records. The editing of the
records then under way was in charge of J. Leslie Perry. Mr. Perry did
not believe in women fussing with history, particularly with Civil War
history. War was man’s business.
“How can you understand it?” he shouted at me.
However, I insisted on my rights, and nobody could have been more
helpful when he considered a thing an obligation of his official
position. To the end Mr. Perry’s chief satisfaction came when he caught
me slipping. “That’s what comes from allowing a woman to write history,”
he would say jubilantly.
Between us we brought together a grist of Dana’s dispatches and reports.
I crammed on the campaigns, and by appointment appeared at the end of
Mr. Dana’s day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, for my first
interview.
His desk was stripped of everything that pertained to the newspaper, but
held a row of the latest books, not only in English but in three or four
other languages, as well as a copy of the _Cosmopolis_, an ambitious and
rather pretentious review in three or four languages issued for a short
time in the late nineties.
Mr. Dana had already repented of his promise to Mr. McClure. “I am not
interested in what I did in the past,” he said irritably. “I am
interested only in the present; I am trying to keep up with the world of
today. I am studying Russian now—a very fascinating language. I don’t
want to bother with what I did in the Civil War. What do you propose?”
What I proposed was that he let me come to him with a stenographer and a
set of prepared questions, say three times a week. He agreed, and for a
good many weeks of the winter of ’96 and ’97 I went regularly to the
_Sun_ office after the paper was put to press. By the summer of 1897 I
had my manuscript well in shape. Mr. Dana had never seen any of it.
“Send me the proofs, I’ll read them.”
Publication was to begin in November of 1897. Mr. Dana went to London
for the summer. I sent the proof of the first chapter over with a good
many qualms, for it was all in the first person—“I” and “We.” It came
back with only a few verbal corrections—no comments. He was never to
read more of his Recollections. The number of the magazine which carried
the first chapter carried the notice of his death.
We published the entire story, and later the articles were put into a
book, but with no credit to the ghost!
Taking it all in all it was the most impersonal job I ever had. I do not
remember that Mr. Dana ever volunteered a word in all the many
interviews I had with him except on the subject in hand, and that in
answer to my questions. We never talked of the things which I knew he
loved—pictures, orchids, poetry. It was a businesslike operation from
start to finish. Probably it was his way of punishing me for being
afraid of him.
Another and more important series which came out of the Lincoln work was
Carl Schurz’s “Reminiscences.” Here I acted not as a ghost but as an
editorial representative. Mr. Schurz had given me liberally for my story
from his rich Lincoln experiences—the most important unpublished item
being the part he played in helping Mr. Lincoln launch his plan for
compensated emancipation.
As I reported these interviews the office became more and more convinced
that here was a great series of reminiscences—just the kind of thing
that Mr. McClure had hoped for when he first commissioned me to gather
Lincoln material. Could Mr. Schurz be persuaded to write his
reminiscences? When I broached the subject he almost immediately said:
“No, no, I refused Gilder [Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the
_Century_]. I cannot do it for anybody else.”
But I felt so convinced that he ought to do it that I persisted in my
begging, and finally he began to yield. The handsome sum _McClure’s_ was
willing to pay had something to do with it, for Mr. Schurz was not a
rich man and here was a chance to leave to his family this extra money.
Once he had made up his mind to the task, he thoroughly enjoyed it; and
no one could have been more anxious to use material to suit the needs of
the magazine. Working with him was a joy. He was gay, companionable,
full of anecdotes, frank in comment. I remember him best at his summer
home at Lake George where it was necessary for me to go two or three
times to settle some editorial point. Here you would hear him in the
morning as he was getting ready for breakfast giving the Valkyrie cries,
singing motive after motive of the Wagnerian operas, in a clear youthful
voice. Sometimes he would spring up from the table where he was at work,
and seating himself at the piano would improvise dashingly until the
mood which had taken him from his desk passed; then back to his labor.
The house stood in the upper corner of a park of fifty or sixty acres of
woodland—not over-cleared—and open by winding paths down the hillside to
the lake. Every turn, every rock had its name usually celebrating some
Wagnerian scene, and as you passed Mr. Schurz would roll out the
appropriate song. There never was a more lovable or youthful man of
seventy than Carl Schurz.
The completion of the Life of Lincoln did not end my interest in the
man. He had come to mean more to me as a human being than anybody I had
studied. I never doubted his motives, and he never bored me. Still,
whenever I have the opportunity I pick him up. The greatest regret of my
professional life is that I shall not live to write another life of him.
There is so much of him I never touched.
10
REDISCOVERING MY COUNTRY
The four years I put in on “The Life of Abraham Lincoln” did more than
provide me with a continuing interest. They aroused my flagging sense
that I had a country, that its problems were my problems. This sense had
been strong in my years on _The Chautauquan_, but the period following
had dimmed it. Now I was beginning to ask myself why we had gone the way
we had since the Civil War. Was there not enough of suffering and of
nobility in that calamity to quiet the greed and ambitions of men, to
soften their hates, to arouse in them the will to follow Lincoln’s last
counsels—“With malice toward none; with charity for all ... let us ...
do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves and with all nations.” But greed and hate and indifference to
the sufferings and rights of others had been rampant since the war. Did
war as a method of righting wrongs so loosen the controls which man in
times of peace establishes over himself that he is incapable of
exercising the charity, the peaceful adjustments for which Lincoln
called? Was there always after war an unescapable crop of corruption, of
thirst to punish and humiliate and exploit the conquered? Must men go
back where they had started, go back with controls weakened and burdened
with a load of new and unexpected problems? True, this war had ended
slavery as a recognized institution, given the black man legal freedom,
but how about opportunity, discipline for freedom? And then again was a
war necessary to destroy slavery? Was it not already doomed? Lincoln
thought so. Doomed because it was showing itself unsound economically as
well as because it outraged man’s sense of justice and humanity. And how
about the effect of this war on democracy? Were the problems it loosed
less threatening to democratic ideals than slavery had been? Were they
not possibly a more subtle form of slavery, more dangerous because less
obvious?
A nice box of problems to tease me as I worked on Lincoln’s life and out
of the corner of the eye watched what was going on in the country. The
number of things in America I was beginning to want to find out about
was certainly dimming the things in France I had wanted to find out
about. Unquestionably these new interests were helping to wean me from
the plan on which I had settled. The process was painful. More than once
I told myself that the sacrifice of my ambitions, of my love for Paris,
for my friends there, was too much to ask of myself. I could never
replace those interests and associations; but I was replacing them and
suffering as I realized what was happening, revolting that nothing in my
life seemed to last, to be carried through. By nature I was faithful. To
give my time to new friends, neglect old ones in spite of never
forgetting them, as I never did, was disloyal. I was beginning to repeat
dolefully as well as more and more cynically, _“Tout lasse, tout casse,
tout passe.”_
Washington was helping in my weaning. The city as I knew it in the
1890’s is lost in the Washington of the 1930’s. The pivots on which it
swings, the Capitol, the White House, were there then to be sure. So was
the Washington Monument; but they stood by themselves, the near-by
flanking unpretentious, often squalid. Today they are almost lost in the
piles of marble heaped about them to accommodate the ambitions and
creations of the last frantic twenty years. The town has stretched
unbelievably to the northwest. Where once I knew wide lawns, wooded
tracts, pleasant walks, are now acres upon acres of apartment houses and
hotels. They have engulfed the delightful Woodley Lane where my friends
the Hubbards lived in summer, and they have changed no less the quarter
in which their fine town house stood—Connecticut Avenue where it merges
into Dupont Circle. Great houses were only just beginning then to find
their way into the Circle. George Westinghouse had built there, so had
Mrs. Leiter of Chicago. Old Washingtonians sniffed at their houses and
their ways, laughed at Mrs. Leiter’s “spinal staircase” as she was said
to call it, and professed disgust at Mrs. Westinghouse’s “reported”
white velvet tablecloths. They resented the invasion of rich women
attracted by the social possibilities of a diplomatic circle, of rich
men attracted by the field for lobbying furnished by a Congressional
circle.
But of this side of Washington I saw nothing. My social life was shaped
largely by the continued kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard. I had become
almost one of the family, was freely invited to meet their friends.
Their circle was wide, including diplomats and statesmen and eminent
visitors, though its core was the large group of distinguished
scientists which made up the working forces of the Smithsonian
Institution, the Agriculture Department, the Geological Survey, the
Bureau of Mines, the Observatory. An important group they were, and
nobody in town appreciated them more or took more pains to show his
appreciation than Mr. Hubbard. Naturally the center of this group was
Alexander Graham Bell, married to the Hubbards’ daughter, Mabel.
The Bells lived across the Avenue from the Hubbards, and I soon had the
good fortune to be welcomed there—a great privilege, for both Mr. and
Mrs. Bell were rare persons. Mrs. Bell’s story is well known, but it was
only in seeing her with her husband and daughters that one could realize
what a fine intellect and what an unspoiled and courageous character she
had. She had been deaf and dumb from infancy, and Mr. Hubbard had
determined to open life to her. Among the teachers of speech he brought
to her was a young man then at Boston University—Alexander Graham Bell.
Under his tutelage she made rapid strides, and the two young people
learned to love one another. At that time Mr. Bell was giving his nights
to trying to “make iron talk.” I once heard Mr. Hubbard say that when he
found Mr. Bell had made iron talk he told him he must develop his
telephone to a practical point or he could not have Mabel. Probably no
other argument would have persuaded Alexander Graham Bell, for he was
the type of inventor whose interest flags when he has solved his
problem. Let somebody else take care of the development. He would be off
on a new voyage of discovery.
At the time I came into the circle Mr. Bell was, I think, the handsomest
and certainly the most striking figure in Washington. It was amusing to
hear people discussing who was the handsomest man in town. There were
various candidates—General Miles, General Greely, Colonel John Foster;
but while I conceded they all had their points no one of them had the
distinction of Alexander Graham Bell, and no one of them certainly had
the gay boyish appetite for what he found good in life. He was more like
Massa Henry Watterson in that than anybody else I have ever known,
though the activities and interests of the two were utterly different.
Mr. Bell’s plan of living was modeled to suit himself. Often he slept
through the day when interruptions naturally came and the telephone most
often rang! If restless at night he played the piano. Mrs. Bell could
not hear, and the rest of the family, being young and devoted, were
never disturbed. He was up and began his day around four to six. Often
there were guests for dinner, for everybody of note the world over who
came to Washington wanted to meet him. On Wednesdays after dinner there
usually gathered a group of scientists and public men to talk things
over. Mr. Bell was something to see at these dinners and gatherings, the
finest social impresario I ever saw in action, so welcoming,
appreciative, eager, receptive. I thought then I had never seen anybody
so generous about what others were doing. He loved to draw out great
stories of adventure and discovery and would silence all talkers when
once such narrating was started. Partly this was because of Mrs. Bell,
his intense desire that she enjoy everything that was going on; and she
did, thanks to the intelligent devotion of her daughters, Elsie and
Marian, the first now the wife of Gilbert Grosvenor, one of the founders
and the present editor of the _National Geographic Magazine_, the second
the wife of David Fairchild, botanist and explorer, the organizer in the
Agriculture Department of the work now known as the Division of Foreign
Plant Exploration and Introduction—two men to whom the public owes big
debts for services.
The most distinguished member of this Washington group of scientists
after Mr. Bell was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, the head of the
Smithsonian Institution, at that time agonizing over the problem of
flying.
When I first met Dr. Langley in 1894 he was working on his air runner or
aerodrome, a machine which, as I gathered from the talk I heard and did
not too well understand, was to run on the air as an engine does on
rails. He finally came out with a machine weighing about twenty-five
pounds made up of a pair of rigid wings, twelve to fifteen feet across,
and an engine which weighed not over seven pounds. It had cost him four
years’ work to develop the engine to that lightness. But would it fly?
Could it be launched? Attempts were made from a houseboat down the
river. These experiments were carried on with the utmost secrecy, for
Dr. Langley was a taciturn man, proud, dignified, always awesome to me.
He knew that there was a public that thought him a little touched in the
head and wondered that the Government kept, as director of a great
national institution, a man who held the crazy notion that one day
people would fly, and who was willing to give his days and nights to
proving it.
Dr. Bell took the most genuine and enthusiastic interest in Dr.
Langley’s experiments, was always present, I think, when an attempt to
launch the air runner was made. I recall his disappointment when it
fell, his rejoicing when it did finally fly. This was one day in May of
1896. I have heard him tell how suddenly the air runner rose to one
hundred feet and flew in a big circle. It did not fall but made a
perfect landing. Again it was launched and again it flew; and this time
it went over the land and over the treetops, came back to the river and
when its power was exhausted settled quietly on the water.
Inside that little circle at Dr. Bell’s there was the consciousness of a
great discovery, a certain solemnity that again it had been proved that
labor, training, thought, patience, faith are not in vain.
Mr. McClure was as excited as any one of the Washington group over the
news. He must immediately have an article from Dr. Langley himself, and
I was commissioned to get it. I think perhaps it was a little strain on
Dr. Langley’s good will to have a young woman come to him and say: “Now
we want the whole story of how you have done this thing, what it means;
but no scientific jargon, please. We want it told in language so simple
that I can understand it, for if I can understand it all the world can.”
Which, knowing me, he probably knew was true. He consented, and I had
the privilege of talking with him occasionally about the article, of
reading what he did and saying when necessary, “I don’t see quite what
this or that means,” of seeing him docilely make it clear enough for me
to understand. A year after the Langley contraption first flew we had in
_McClure’s Magazine_ the whole story.
As a reward for my persistent effort to see that article come out to his
satisfaction, he gave me what I think he considered the greatest treat
he could give his friends. He took me to the Rock Creek Zoo after the
crowds had gone and, with the help of the director, Dr. Baker, made the
kangaroo jump and the hyena laugh.
But the public interest in his air runner, the fresh honors that now
came to him did but little to wipe out the bitterness that ridicule had
stirred in Dr. Langley. “There was a time,” he said as he was going to
England to take a degree which Oxford University (I believe it was) was
giving him, “there was a time when I should have been glad of this. It
means little now.” Yet he had his moments of strong emotion. Rarely have
I been more moved than at a dinner at Mr. Hubbard’s soon after the
Greco-Turkish War began in 1897. A half-dozen men of seventy or
thereabouts were at the table, among them Senator Hoar of Massachusetts,
Major Powell, Edward Everett Hale, and Dr. Langley. They talked only of
Greece and her helplessness before the Turk. They recalled the wave of
sympathy which in their boyhood had swept over the country when the Turk
attacked Greece. It was to Greece, said Senator Hoar, that he first gave
money of his own, a long treasured twenty-five-cent piece. Dr. Hale and
Dr. Langley fell to quoting Byron. Their voices shook as they declaimed,
“The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece!
· · · · ·
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae.”
“It was Byron,” said Dr. Langley with an emotion of which I had thought
him incapable, “who first stirred in me an enthusiasm for man’s
struggles for freedom, with a desire to join those who fight for it.” He
thought Byron first opened England’s eyes to her duty to the oppressed
of the Continent of Europe and at the same time opened the eyes of the
Continent to the love of liberty, the sympathy with the helpless, in
English literature. Certainly here was a Dr. Langley I had never before
glimpsed.
This was not all of Washington I was seeing. As in Paris I set aside
time for learning the city. How thin and young and awkward Washington
seemed compared with the exhaustless life and treasures of Paris! Here
was none of that wisdom of experience, that subtile cynicism, that pity
and patience with men which made Paris like a great human being to me.
Nor was there here the ripe charm of old palaces, quaint streets, hidden
corners. Everything was new, sprawling in the open. But if Washington
had little to offer but promise it had that in abundance, and it did not
know its own lacks. It was too full of pride in what it had done since
John Adams moved into the White House and Congress into the Capitol. And
then I had a problem to think about—the Washington Lincoln knew—and I
went about with him from White House to War Department, up to the
Congress, down to the Arsenal, into this and that hospital, up to the
Soldiers’ Home, over to Arlington. The pain and tragedy behind almost
every step he took in the town dignified its unfinished streets, gave a
meaning and a sanctity to its rawness. By such steps I told myself did
Paris come through the centuries to be what she is.