LEGACY OF A FIRE EATER

 

I want to explain the political term, "fire brands". The original definition was a piece of kindling, a bit of burning wood used to start a larger fire. And those who start political fires for a living can be called "Fire Brands." And the most famous fire brand in the history of  American politics, one of the first self described political demons, was William Lowneds Yancey. 

Yancey’s (above) South Carolina family were strongly pro-Federalist, and at an Independence Day celebration in 1834 as a young man, he told a crowd, “Listen, not then...to the voice which whispers…that Americans…can no longer exist…citizens of the same republic…”  He also championed the Federal Union as editor of the newspaper the “Greenville Mountaineer”...

...at least until 1835, when he married an Alabama widow with an Alabama plantation and 35 slaves. Once his comfort and profit came to depend on treating human beings as property Yancey converted to pro-slavery.  And then the economic panic of 1837 slashed cotton prices and wiped out William Yancey’s new found fortune and social status. That traumatic event also converted Yancy into a radical. 

Yancey went back to the profession he knew best, and in 1838 he bought a failing newspaper. Needing to make money quickly, Yancey's very first editorial was sure to please the money people of Alabama - a passionate, radical defense of slavery.  In a follow up editorial he even favored reopening the slave trade with Africa, which had been closed down by British Naval patrols since 1819. Yancey publicly opposed the compromises of 1850, which sought to establish a balance between slave states and “free” states within the Union. By now anything short of total domination by slave states was a cowardly compromise,  in Yancey’s view.

Also in 1838 the true nature of the man was revealed, when an alleged political insult led to a street brawl between Yancey and his wife’s uncle. Yancey shot the man dead on the street. He  justified this hot blooded murder, writing he had been,  “Reared with the spirit of a man…and taught to preserve inviolate my honor…”,  which seems to me an admission of a fragile ego. . He was convicted of manslaughter but served only a few months before being pardoned by the Alabama Governor. His reputation as a murderous hot head did nothing to prevent him from being elected to first the Alabama legislature and then, in 1844,  to the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 1858 Yancey wrote what Horace Greeley called, ‘The Scarlett Letter’, in which he first used the term "fire eater" to describe himself.  He pledged that with like minded southerners, he would, “…fire the Southern heart – instruct the Southern mind …and at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton states into revolution.”  This was why Yancey was called the “Orator of Secession”. 

He worked hard to split his own (Democratic) party on the issue of slavery, believing the election of a Republican (anti-slavery) presidential candidate in 1860 would further his cause and radicalize the south. He was, in the words of that genius Bruce Catton, “…one of the men tossed up by the tormented decade of the 1850’s (John Brown was another) who could help to bring catastrophe on but not do anything more than that.” 

That the North had twice the population of the South, that the North had ten times the industrial and agricultural capacity, that slavery was already dying in the upper South, that the North would not fight to end slavery but would fight to preserve the union, that Lincoln did not believe the Federal government had the power or the right to outlaw slavery, all this meant nothing to Yancey. 

William Yancey (above) wanted secession not despite the destructive effects it would have on the South, but, it seemed, almost because of them. President-elect Abraham Lincoln described the problem of dealing with the fire eaters like Yancey. "Not only must we do them no harm, but somehow we must convince them that we mean to do them no harm". 

It was William Yancy who greeted Jefferson Davis to his 1861 inauguration as Confederate President by saying, "The man and the hour have met". Tom Yancy could always deliver a phrase.  But once war broke out Jefferson Davis sent William Yancey to England to seek recognition of the Confederacy.  A diplomatic mission seemed like an odd choice for this violent aggressive  man, so perhaps Davis really had little hope of Britain ever recognizing the Confederacy, and he just wanted to be rid of Yancey. 

Henry John Temple (above),  Lord Viscount Palmerston III, the British Prime Minister, eventually met with Yancey, but then asked if he had been serious about his call for a resumption of the slave trade. Yancey denied it, but as had been in print for decades without denial, that merely made him an obvious liar. And just asking the question indicated there was no chance that England would recognize the South, at least as long as Yancey represented a significant political voice. 

Yancey returned home in frustration and defeat. He now served in the Confederate Senate, opposing Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ power to draft troops into national service and in the spring of 1863 blocking Davis’ attempt to form a Confederate Supreme Court.

It was during debate over the court when Yancey and Senator Benjamin Hill (above) of Georgia, got into a brawl on the Confederate Senate floor. It was almost a repeat of the 1838 shooting.  When the hot headed Yancy reached for his gun,  Hill grabbed the only weapon he had at hand - an ink stand. He beaned Yancey on the head with it, cold cocking him. The Confederate Senate censured Yancey and took no action against Hill.  I guess they had judged his true character.

So it seemed that even his political allies and friends did not like William Yancey very much. And this was one of the men the South had staked its future upon. I believe it was William Yancey whom Jefferson Davis was thinking of when he said the epitaph of the Confederacy should be, “Died of a Theory.’

After censure, Yancey returned to Alabama,  where he died of Kidney failure in July of 1863, just 2 weeks before his 49th birthday. He had lived just long enough to see the twin defeats of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, which together sealed the doom of the Confederacy.  But even then the fire eaters kept up their arson. More southerners died in the last year of the war, than in the previous 3 years. 

The product of William Yancy's life’s work was the death of 750,000 men, women and children -  the vast majority of them southerners - the gutting of the southern wealth for a century, the  total abolition of slavery in America and the ultimate victory of Federalism over State’s Rights. It is an estate today's fire eaters ought to take note of.  But I doubt they will.

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IRONY AS FUEL, The Triangle Factory Fire

I guess the first irony was that if it had to happen, this was the best of all possible places and times for it to happen. It was a Saturday, so the streets around Washington Square Park, at the bottom of 5th Avenue and the junction of West 4th Street, were not as crowded as they would have been on a regular work day. That meant the rescue efforts were not slowed by traffic.

The building in which the fire had been sparked was the ten story Asch Building -now called The Brown Building -  a modern “fire proof” structure.  

And the flames were born just after 4:30 p.m., so it was still daylight. The early spring darkness would have made the hell that was about to descend on lower Manhattan, just that much worse. It was 25 March 1911, and it was the best of all possible times and places for hell to be unleashed.

The first alarm was sent in from Box Number 289 on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, just one block East of Washington Square Park. It was just 4:40 p.m. The fire at that moment was less than five minutes old. The alarm first sounded at Company #18 on 12th street.

At the sound of the bells, the three horses on each unit began to move from their stalls on their own. In addition the lead horse in each team had been trained to pull ropes that opened the fire house doors. The fire horses were eager to answer the alarm. It was in their blood. Upstairs the firemen, just as eager, leapt to their lockers, pulled on their boots, baggy pants and great coats. 

By the time they were sliding down the brass pole all the horses were waiting in place beneath the traces, which were hanging from the ceiling. The traces were dropped onto the team’s backs and the crews slapped on the leather. Within 3 minutes the “steamers” (pumpers, able to produce 1,000 gallons of water a minute), the hook and ladder wagon (company #20, carrying the tallest extension ladders in the city - another piece of good luck), the hose wagon (company #72) and the supply wagons, with all their human  crews hanging on for dear life, were speeding their way toward Washington Square Park.

In a squat block-sized building at the junction of west 10th Avenue, West Side Avenue and Gransevoort Street, the same alarms sounded. Here, in the Granesvoort Pumping Station, was the city’s answer to the invention of the skyscraper; five Allis-Chalmers electrical centrifugal pumps, able at the flick of a switch to send 300 gallons of water a minute into the pipes. 

The new High Pressure System was less than five years old and was designed to increase water pressure at each fire hydrant in the district from 25 to at least 90 pounds per square inch. In tests this system had been able to send a stream of water as high as a tenth floor of an office buildings. 

As soon as the alarm sounded on this Saturday afternoon, the pumps were turned on. Within three minutes the lines were fully pressurized, before a single firemen had even arrived on the scene. But it was already too late to save the women and girls.

It was 4:44 p.m.; four minutes since the alarm had been sounded - less than ten minutes since the fire had broken out.  As the first pumper turned the corner onto Greene Street (above), the horses, heading on their own toward the fire plug, reared and suddenly stopped. The firemen on board were almost thrown to the ground. One fireman dismounted to see what had spooked his horses.

He saw a bolt of cloth lying in the street. He moved to pick it up, before he realized it was a woman’s body, crumpled on the pavement.

As he stood in shock a second woman plummeted to the ground in front of him with a sickening thud and a spay of blood.  Looking up, the fireman saw smoke pouring out of the upper story windows. On the sidewalk and street around him were the bodies of previous jumpers. At about the same moment “Hook and Ladder Company # 20” had barely made the turn onto Washington Place, when these horses also reacted with horror to the carnage on the street. 

Firemen grabbed blankets and nets, designed to catch people leaping out of buildings. But these women, some as young as 13, were dropping from the ninth floor and tenth floors. They ripped right through the fabric of the nets and blankets and thudded onto the concrete.

A few even landed on the iron doors covering service elevators. They smashed right through the metal  and landed in the basement below. The rescue nets and blankets were useless.

As Fire Chief Edwin Corker arrived, firemen were leading their horses and pumpers through the rain of bodies into position. Chief Corker immediately sent in a second alarm. It was 4:48 p.m. As soon as the pumper and ladder units were in position, firemen disconnected the horses and led them to the safety of Washington Square Park, where they could be watered and calmed down.

Immediately upon their arrival fireman from Company 18 began to fight their way up the stairs against the stream of frantic civilians, pouring down. The firemen found fire on the 8th floor, and per their training, they stopped there to fight it. To have gone higher would have put them above the fire, a suicidal position in a building blaze.

But just one floor above them, victims were dying, some not leaping to their deaths until the flames began to engulf their clothing.

Outside, the ladder companies began to crank their extensions toward the huddled victims on the ninth floor window ledges. But the ladders only reached to the seventh floor. The streams of water from the high pressure hoses, even with the aid of pumpers, could only manage to reach the sixth floor. 

The desperate women and girls, with the flames licking at their backs, and seeing salvation fall two stories short, stepped into space and dropped to their deaths. Some waited too long and fell like flaming meteors.

The corpses were piling up on the street like discarded dolls. Some were so badly burned it was impossible to tell if they were male or female. Some were so broken by the fall , they were gathered into bushel baskets (above) and carted away.

Firemen were now dragging their high pressure hoses into the building and up the stairwells, hitting the fire directly. At 4:56 p.m. Chief Corker sent in a third alarm. At 4:57 p.m. the last body thudded to the pavement on Greene street. By 5:10 p.m., when the fourth alarm was sounded, the fire was well out.  As David Von Drehle has noted, “The entire blaze, from spark to embers, lasted half an hour.” (“Triangle, the fire that changed America”)

In that brief span of time the fire had killed 141 people, most of them seamstress for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Searching the 9th floor, fireman found "...bodies burned to bare bones, skeletons bending over sewing machines".  The fireproof building, true to its name, did not burn. Only the furniture, the fabric and thread on the sewing machines and the human beings did. The building still stands today.

It was a day in American history when everything went right. It was a day when 141 working class women died in less than 30 minutes. 

It was a day so piled high with irony, it could have been fuel for the fire. 

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KEEPING TIME

 

I remember a proverb that says opportunity knocks only once. That may be true, but it is also true that having heard the knock you still have to open the door. And, when the scientists at the Royal \Observatory at Greenwich, England heard that knock in 1835 they were mightily annoyed. So they pawned off the job of dealing with the disturbance to one of their servants. He turned that disturbance into a career. In fact he made three life long careers out of simply telling the time.  

The Royal Observatory was founded by Charles II  (above) in 1765 as part of his restoration and “re-scientific-ication” of government after the religious fanaticism of that great Puritan villain Oliver Cromwell. The observatory was to use the stars to perfect “the art of navigation.” 

But the builders, despite going over budget by all of twenty pounds, went cheap on the materials, and the observatory, which was to house the most accurate telescopes of the day, was constructed 13 degrees out of alignment. The Royal astronomers, like the NASA astronomers dealing with the deformed mirrors on the orbiting Hubble telescope, have had to make mathematical adjustments from that day to this.

But besides powerful telescopes, the scientist at the Greenwich observatory also needed accurate clocks. In order to say a particular star was at a particular point in the sky at midnight, they had to know precisely when midnight was. So in the special built Octagon Room were installed two pendulum clocks, (above, center) built by Thomas Tompion, and  by comparing them to each other the time keepers could be accurate to within seven seconds a day.

By 1833 (sixty-four years later) the observatory had done its job so well that ships’ captains and navigators had come to rely on the precise time provided by Greenwich to follow the charts provided by Greenwich. That year the observatory began a practice they follow to this day. 

At exactly 12.55 p.m., (they do it then so as not to interfere with the weather observations made at noon) a large red “time ball” is raised half way to the top of a mast erected atop the observatory.

 At 12.58 the time ball is pulled all the way to the top (above). And then at 1:00 P.M., exactly, the ball is released and quickly falls to the bottom of the mast. If you have ever wondered why they use a ball to mark midnight on New Years Eve in Times Square, New York City, this is it. 

Any ship’s captain waiting in the Thames River to set sail could now synchronize their shipboard watches and clocks with the official time as they set off from the “prime meridian”....

....or “longitude naught” - "0" degrees, "0" minutes and "0" seconds east/west, because Greenwich is where the longitude starts (above, gold line) - as well as time.  

But our story properly begins in 1835, when the observatory got a new boss, George Biddle Airy (above). He figured his primary job was to perfect the astronomical observations for those ships of the British Empire, and he hired human “computers” to do just that.

Now, in the 19th century "computers" were actually men and women who did the dull and boring math required to confirm and correct the stellar charts used to navigate on voyages to the far flung corners of the empire. So, in 1835, when London merchants appealed to Mr. Airy to share in the time service he saw them as an annoyance. But it was not one he could ignore.

He gave that job to his second assistant, John Henry Belville, who had worked at Greenwich as a "Jack-of-all-trades" since 1811, when Belville was just 13 years old.  John Henry dropped his Christian  French name after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 to avoid anti-French bigotry. Over the years he became responsible for maintaining the  “Galvano-Magnetic” clock at Shephard's Gate,  (above,) until 1856, when it was replaced with an electric one, and for raising and lowering the red time ball every day. And to preform his new job of dealing with the merchants, Airy provided John Henry with a very accurate and dependable pocket watch.  

This particular watch  (above) had been originally owned by Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex and by the sixth son of King George III of England. He was the favorite uncle of Queen Victoria and the man who gave her away at her 1840 wedding to Prince Albert.

The watch, number 485/786,  had been assembled by John Arnold & Sons in 1794. It had a spring detent escapement workings, a jeweled movement with a diamond end stone, all enclosed in a silver case (above), with a white enamel dial with gold spade hands and a subsidiary seconds dial.  The mechanics were accurate to within one tenth of second per day.

Each Monday John Henry would present himself and “Faithful Arnold”, the watch, to a clerk at the observatory time desk. The clerk would set the watch and then hand John  a certificate asserting to the watch’s accuracy for that day. 

Then John Henry would make his way by carriage and rail to London, where he would literally deliver the time to some two hundred customers; shops, factories and offices. The fees he charged for the service supplemented his small salary from the observatory.  For most of the people in London, John Henry was the face of official time, and he was earning four hundred pounds a year doing it when he died in 1856.  

After John’s death  the prigs at the government accounting office refused his widow, Maria, a pension. So she begged the observatory to allow her to continue the time service as a private business, and they agreed. Every Monday Marie strode up the observatory hill, watched while Arnold was synchronized at the "Time Desk (above)" and then went on her rounds by rail and on foot. 

To those who saw her trudging across the streets of London, Maria Bellville became known as the Greenwich Time Lady. 

By 1884 some 25 countries had agreed to set their watches by Greenwich time, and every clock at every railroad station in England was connected directly via telegraph lines with the Royal Observatory. And still, the time delivered by Marie Belville was just as accurate, if slightly less convenient. Maria retired in 1892 (above), and her only daughter Ruth now took over the employment,  carrying the tool of her trade, which she simply called Arnold, in her handbag.

Beginning in 1924 the BBC Radio began broadcasting from the observatory and added the six “pips” on air before each hour announcement. In 1936 the Royal Observatory set up a “talking clock” (above) which anyone with a telephone could dial up at any time to get the correct time to within a hundredth of a second. In most of the rest of the world this technology replaced the quaint "time keepers" of the past. But the English have more respect for keeping what works, particularly if it is a living person. 

A hundred years after her family business had begun,  Ruth Belville (above) was still making her rounds every Monday; having Arnold set by the Royal Greenwich Observatory staff, getting a paper validation of the event, and then serving more than fifty paying customers. 

Finally, in 1940, Ruth celebrated her 86th birthday and decided to retire.  And, since she had no one to pass the task on to, when Ruth retired the Belville family work was finally completed.

Ruth received a pension from  “The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers” guild , where "Faithful Arnold" was also granted a place of rest and honor.  Then on the evening of Tuesday, 7 December, 1943, Ruth left a gas lamp burning in the bedroom of her home in Beddington, Surrey. Sometime during the night the flame sputtered and went out and Ruth suffocated in her sleep, at the age of 89.

In effect, she ran out of time.

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