William W. Scranton: Born 100 Years Ago

William W. Scranton, a former governor of Pennsylvania and one of the now extinct moderate national Republicans, would have been 100 years old today.  He died in 2013.  Scranton, a rising political star less than two years into his governorship, unsuccessfully challenged Barry Goldwater for the 1964 presidential nomination.

Scranton was young, attractive, wealthy and had an appealing family.  As a one-term congressman, 1961-1963, he voted for some of JFK’s social programs.  The same age as the president, he was sometimes called a “Kennedy Republican.” 

Prohibited by the then state constitution to one term, Scranton left elective politics in 1967.  He subsequently served as chair of the commission investigating Kent State and campus unrest in 1970, which issued the “Scranton Report,” and also was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.  I remember when he entertained United Nations delegates at his home near Scranton, Pennsylvania.  He also took on troubleshooting roles for several presidents.

Although his bid against Goldwater was doomed from the outset, he was probably the only serious presidential aspirant from Pennsylvania in the past century.  Bill Scranton believed in public service and was committed to his hometown, where his family had deep political and economic roots to the northeastern Pennsylvania city that they helped found

Northern Virginia Prison Housed Political Activists

This past weekend I visited the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia, the former home of the Lorton Reformatory, in Northern Virginia.  Originally opened in 1910, it is now a series of art galleries and working studios.

The artwork and various special programs that are offered by the nonprofit which runs the cultural center is impressive, but so too is the history of the prison, which closed sixteen years ago.  In addition to hardened criminals, it also housed political protesters such as Norman Mailer, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Noam Chomsky.  Mailer describes his brief incarceration there in “The Armies of the Night.” 

The grounds also housed a Nike missile site complete with nuclear warheads.   In fact, the first Nike site was the first in the nation (1954)—part of the Washington, D.C., defense program at the height of the Cold War.

But perhaps the most interesting story of the prison was the incarceration of suffragists in 1917.  Known as the Silent Sentinel, they protested outside the White House in 1917.  Among those imprisoned for their activism were Alice Paul and twenty-year-old Dorothy Day.  Some women began a hunger strike there and were force fed by order of the warden.  This is captured in the movie “Iron Jawed Angels,” a 2004 movie featuring Hilary Swank as Alice Paul.

Paul, who had been given a jail house door pendent for an earlier political imprisonment, had 81 pins created for these women protesters.  The arts center museum sells a copy.

The 19^th amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was ratified in 1920.

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ONE HUNDRED BOOKS FOR THE JFK CENTENNIAL

There has been a massive number of books written about John F. Kennedy, and more have been released during this centennial year.  As the nation celebrates his 100th birthday on May 29, 2017, I have compiled a list, which in my opinion, are the one hundred best books by or about the late president. This is obviously a subjective list although many are essential works. Certainly all these books are worthy of consideration. Hopefully, this will be a valuable checklist for those interested in immersing themselves in the life and times of the nation's thirty-fifth president.

Books by John F. Kennedy

As We Remember Joe

Why England Slept

Prelude to Leadership: The Post-War Diary of John F. Kennedy

Profiles in Courage

The Strategy of Peace

The Public Papers of John F. Kennedy (3 vols.)

The Burden and the Glory (posthumous)

A Nation of Immigrants (posthumous)

Biographies of John F. Kennedy

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power

Ted Sorensen, Kennedy

Joan and Clay Blair, Jr., The Search for J.F.K

Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero

Alan Brinkley, John F. Kennedy

Ernest Hemingway and Numismatics

It has been 55 years since the death of Ernest Hemingway, one of the great writers of the twentieth century. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway, suffering from serious physical and mental problems, committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.

 

I have been studying Hemingway in connection with other research.  In the process, I have come across several coins and medals that honor him and well as some other numismatist connections. Cuba, where the author lived for twenty years and had ties for much longer, has issued four Hemingway coins. 

Hemingway loved Cuba and the Cuban people, and he was treated as a celebrity.  He had a grim view of Castro’s predecessor, Fulgenico Batista, and was hopeful that Fidel Castro would improve the lot of the Cubans.  Castro later seized Hemingway’s house, nine miles outside of Havana, and today it is a shrine owned by the government.

Three of the Cuban coins were issued in 1982:  a silver five-peso with Hemingway’s image on the obverse along with his life dates; a five-peso which paid tribute to his Nobel Prize and The Old Man and the Sea novel (there is an image of a fisherman, presumably “Santiago,” in the small boat on the reverse); and another five-peso coin with Hemingway’s fishing boat, Pilar, on the reverse.

The fourth, and perhaps the most interesting, coin is a 2010 Cuban five-peso copper with Hemingway and Castro on the reverse.  It commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the only meeting between the two men.  Castro participated in Hemingway’s marlin fishing tournament, and won. 

Elsewhere in the region, Jamaica issue a seven-coin proof set in 1994, and one of the coins was a five-dollar Hemingway coin with the image of the author and the fisherman on a boat in the water.

There also is a spare, not very attractive Hemingway piece that was issued as an unofficial coin in Croatia.  A website says it was “being used as a ‘voucher’ for consumption.”  The 47-mm medal has a crude image of Hemingway on the obverse and an “H” on the reverse.  And a gold-plated commemorative (non-denominated) Cook Islands coin featuring Hemingway in his iconic bulky turtleneck sweater was issued in 2005.

In the United States, the Franklin Mint issued a medal of Hemingway as part of its Longines Symphonette Society “Great American Triumphs” series.  It was one of a set of sixty 39-mm silver medals released in the early 1970s.  Apparently, there also is a bronze variant.

But for me the most noteworthy numismatic item of Hemingway is an 81-mm bronze medal produced by the French-Spanish medalist Andre Belo.  It has an obverse portrait of Hemingway and an impressionistic account of Santiago, the old fisherman, struggling to reel in a marlin on the reverse.  The legend in lower-case letters:  “le vieil homme et la mer” [the old man and the sea].

A copy of this medal sits in my office, sometimes offering inspiration for writing.  Although certainly not rare, it is one of my favorite medals. It was issued in 1976 by the Monnaie de Paris (Paris Mint).

Among other works by Belo, who was born in 1908, are medals of composer Henri Sauguet, literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve, musician Erik Satie and writer George Sand (Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin)--all French--as well as “The Afternoon of a Faun.”

There are some other interesting items related to Hemingway and numismatics.  He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 and donated his gold medal to a provincial Cuban Catholic church.  The medal was stolen in the 1980s, but was recovered and is now closely held by the Catholic Church.  When the Nobel Prize of Dr. James Watson, a distinguished scientist but not as famous as Hemingway, came up for auction in 2015, it was sold for $4.1 million.

There is no evidence that I know of that Hemingway’s interest in money extended beyond spending it freely.  However, there are two items of note.  As reported by Ron Abler in The E-Sylum in 2012, a 1934 Lincoln Head cent is preserved at the author’s home in Key West, a testament to his hectoring his second wife about her free spending:  http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v15n50a14.html

And in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the University of Texas at Austin Henry R. Ransom Center there are coins as well as European currency, presumably money Hem or family members simply accumulated.

There is at least one coin allusion in Hemingway’s writing.  In A Moveable Feast he described a girl as only he could:  “She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin.”

Finally, on Hemingway’s grave in Idaho, tourists leave coins, mostly pennies.  While this is probably a simple spur-of-the-moment thing, leaving coins on graves actually goes back to ancient Greek mythology; the money would be used to help pay for ferry service on the River Styx in the afterlife.  Hemingway probably would have liked that idea.

[This article first appeared in the September 20, 2016 issue of Numismatic News.]

 

Tippecanoe and Harrisburg Too

If the delegates to the Democratic National Convention have free time this coming week or after, they might want to travel the one hundred miles to Harrisburg to see the site of another important political convention, this one coming two decades before the Civil War.

It was in this state capital with a population of about 6,000 people in a politically important state that the fledging Whig party met on December 4-10, 1839 to select its candidate for the following year’s presidential election.  Harrisburg has the distinction of the smallest city to hold a major national political convention.

Convening as the Democratic Whig party, two hundred and fifty delegates representing twenty-two states–the largest delegation was from New York—met at Zion Lutheran Church on South Fourth Street, not far from the Susquehanna River.  The church’s first building, constructed in 1815, burned down in 1838.  The new church was completed only one month before the convention was held.

The convention, which lasted for five ballots, was a race between Henry Clay and William Henry Harrison.  Henry Clay was one of the most esteemed public figures in America.  The sixty-two-year-old Kentuckian, had been speaker of the house, secretary of state and was currently serving for the third time as a United States senator. He had been a candidate in the wild 1824 presidential election and was the National Republicans’ nominee against Andrew Jackson in 1832.

Harrison, four years older than Clay, had been a congressman, senator and Indiana Territory governor.  Because of his success at the Battle of Tippecanoe during Tecumseh’s War in 1811, he was widely known as “Old Tippecanoe.”  He achieved his greatest fame on the frontier in that skirmish and during the War of 1812, which then-Speaker Henry Clay had done so much to bring about as a War Hawk.  Subsequently, Harrison had been one of four sectional candidates for the Whigs in 1836 and came in second to Martin Van Buren in the general election.

Clay and Harrison were also competing against Winfield Scott at the Harrisburg convention.  Scott was a military man, also achieving fame in the War of 1812 and then participating in various Indian wars.  He would achieve his greatest fame later in the 1840s during the Mexican-American War.

Although Clay led on the first four ballots, Harrison picked up fifty-seven votes, mostly from Scott, and won on the fifth and final ballot.  Apparently giving little thought to the consequences, the Whigs chose John Tyler as his running mate.  Tyler, who served Virginia in the state legislature and then Congress, was a Democrat and opposed Whig policies.  Newspaper editor Horace Greeley, a Harrison enthusiast, called the Harrison-Tyler alliance “the strongest possible ticket.”

The convention concluded with a lengthy speech by Judge Jacob Burnet of Cincinnati, who have in effect was a keynote speech which outlined the life of Harrison and the challenge that was being met by the Whig party.

In summarizing the proceedings, Burnet said, “The great object which brought us here, from every part of the Union, is accomplished.  That object was to produce unity and harmony of action, in the great struggle we are on the eve of commencing; a struggle to save the liberty, the morals, and happiness of the people and to rescue the constitution from the hands of profligate men, under whose management it is sinking to decay.”

The election of 1840 was memorable.  Accelerating the political battles of the previous decade, this election saw a full-scale effort to influence voters.  The new, consolidated Whig Party launched the original “log cabin” myth, torchlight parades and other mass efforts.  One peculiar practice was rolling large balls of leather and metal from one town to the next to dramatize the campaign.  Despite the hoopla, the party had no platform.

Interestingly, while Harrison was portrayed as a simple backwoodsman, his pedigree belied that.  He was the scion of an important Virginia family—his father was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a Virginia governor in the 1780s—and he was learned man, who attended Hampden-Sydney College and the University of Pennsylvania.  His grandson, Benjamin Harrison, would be elected president in 1888.

The “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” ticket easily defeated the incumbent Martin Van Buren, beleaguered with the country’s economic woes.   The Whig elected their first president.  And while Tyler’s presence might have been a nuisance over a four-year term, it became something much different when Harrison died after only one month in office.

Tyler quickly took the oath of office and then delivered a speech—a sort of inaugural address—in which he cited the Constitution for his unquestionable accession to power.  But, of course, there was no precedent—no previous president had died in office—and when political differences soon arose, there were challenges to his authority.

In assuming the office, Tyler noted, “The spirit of faction, which is directly opposed to the spirit of a lofty patriotism, may find in this occasion for assaults upon my Administration.”  When he then veered away from Whig policy, he was proved to be a prophet.

Called by foes “Acting President” or more viciously, “His Accidency,” Tyler’s policies forced a political crisis.  Five months after assuming office, Tyler’s inherited cabinet, with the exception of the ever-ambitious Daniel Webster, resigned.  This, after they tried to get him to resign.

But Tyler plunged ahead.  In his first major report to Congress in December 1841, he made no mention of the legitimacy of his presidency, providing a broad tour d’horizon of current affairs and only briefly mentioning the departed political opponents from his administration.

Tyler served out his term and before he died in 1862 was chosen for the Confederate Congress.  His mark on public policy for minimal, but his impact on the role of the vice president was significant.

This chain reaction of events began with Whig delegates meeting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  Congregants of Zion Lutheran church are proud of its history, and commemorated the 175^th anniversary of the convention in December 2014. 

The modest brick church still stands at 115 South Fourth Street in downtown Harrisburg, a short distance from the state capitol building. Visitors can tour the interior of the church which has some artifacts and furnishings which go back to the nineteenth-century.  Pastor Karin Pejack and her husband are very knowledgeable about the church’s history, and they were very gracious in explaining it during my recent visit there.

 (A modified version of the post appeared in the June 2016 issue of The Political Bandwagon).