HOME IS THE HERO

I go crazy when I misplace things. As anybody with even a touch of OCD will tell you, it quickly becomes more about the crazy than the thing you have misplaced.  I learned this lesson from John Paul Jones, the pugnacious and self centered Scotsman who founded the American Navy, and Teddy Roosevelt, the pugnacious and self centered American President who found John Paul Jones after he got lost.

John Paul had the first requirement for greatness; luck. While serving as third mate on board a merchantman in 1768, both the captain and the first mate died of yellow fever, instantly promoting him. Over the following years Captain John Paul acquired a reputation for brutality. And just when the bad press had brought his career to a a screeching halt, luckily, his brother in the colony of Virginia dropped dead and left him a small fortune.

Having made the voyage to collect his inheritance, John Paul decided to stay in Virginia.  And to confuse any hounding lawyers back in England, who wanted a piece of his new fortune,  Jones added a third name to his moniker. And when, luckily, the shooting started in Boston, Captain John Paul Jones packed up his resume and offered to fight for his new country as a privateer.

At first he did most of his fighting just to get a ship. But when he finally did, flying the American flag while sailing out of France, he at last justified his luck. He raided British ports. He captured British merchant ships in full view of the English coast. They branded him a pirate. He lashed his ship to an English warship and fought it out until both ships were sinking. Offered a chance to surrender, he responded, “I have not yet begun to fight.” Then the British warship surrendered to him.

When that war was over John Paul Jones was out of work. So, with congressional approval, he hired on as an admiral with the Russian Navy. But Jones was pushy, and the Czarina did not trust pushy men.. "Catherine the Great"  told the American admiral  to "go mind your own business."

So in May of 1790 Jones returned to Paris, and took a third floor front apartment at #42 Rue de Tournon (above).  And it was here, over the next two years, that the self assurance and self promotion that served Jones so well in obtaining a ship and winning battles, now isolated him.  The Marquis de Lafayette, once an admirer, could no longer tolerate his "colossal egotism.". 

And the American Minister to the Court of Louis XVI,  Gouverneur Morris, grew so weary of his badgering demands, Morris skipped Jones' sick bed for a dinner appointment. It was when he reluctantly returned 2 days later, on the afternoon of 17 July 1792,  that Morris found the 45 year old admiral lying face down on his bed, dead as a door nail.  Jones' servants and few admirers pickled the hero in rum, packed him into an iron coffin, and buried him in the old Saint Louis Cemetery, set aside for foreign protestants. The expectation was that he would be transferred home to America, as quickly as funds could be raised.

Unfortunately, three weeks after John Paul Jones was laid to rest, a mob descended on the Royal Palace of Tuileries, and captured King Louis and his Queen. To achieve this, they first had to butcher his disarmed Swiss guard (above), which the mob did with a relish. During the cleanup their bodies were dumped into a common grave,  right next to Jones' resting place. What with the revolution and the Napoleonic wars, by 1815 when peace finally broke out,  the cemetery was long abandoned and forgotten.

Over the next century,  John Paul Jones floated in rum and slowly pickled while the mundane world continued on with out him.  In time the land atop John Paul Jones came to be occupied by a grocery, a laundry, a photographic studio, an apartment house (above) and their attendant backyard sheds, toilets, cesspits  and wells.

And there John Paul Jones might have stayed, but for an anarchist and unemployed steelworker named Leon Czolgosz,  who, on Friday, 6 September 1901,  shot American President William McKinley. The President died 13 days later. 

That made Vice President Theodor Roosevelt (above), at 44, the youngest man ever to take the oath as President of the United States.

But when Teddy decided to run for his own term, in 1904, he was opposed by Republican National Chairman, Senator Marcus  (Mark) Alonzo Hanna. Hanna (above) portrayed his fellow Republican as a wild eyed lunatic, and called him  “that damn cowboy”. Hanna also said, "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second is".  To beat Hanna in 1904, Roosevelt needed something which would make him look like a stalwart defender of tradition. 

Luckily, he found what he needed when his ambassador to France,  Horace Porter (above), reported some success in his search for the lost Revolutionary War hero, John Paul Jones. 

Back in 1897 Ambassador Porter had read a new biography of Admiral Jones, which recounted his hurried burial and the subsequent mystery as to it's location. Porter had become obsessed with finding the body.  After three years of research through old maps and confusing government records Porter thought he had figured out where Jones had been buried. 

What was once the St. Louis Cemetery  was now bordered by the Rue de la Grange aux Belles - or in the more prosaic English, Street of the Beautiful Barn.  Because of all the new building (above)s, the only way to recover Jones was to tunnel into the graveyard -  not a pleasant occupation, but a great plot for a horror movie.

Before he could dig, Porter had to get the current owners’ permission. That took two years to negotiate. He eventually got a 3 month contract with all the land owners. At the same time President Roosevelt submitted a special appropriation to pay the $35,000 estimated price tag to dig up Jones’ corpse. 

John Paul would not have been surprised to discover that a hundred years had not made the American Congress any more rational. Still, on the evening of Friday, 3 February, 1905,  Mr. Porter started the work, on his own dime. Congress had tabled the President's funding request.

Heading the project was the mining engineer M. Paul Weiss (above). 

Weiss sunk the first of several shafts 18 feet straight down in a back yard (above). It wasn't long before the miners hit their first corpse. That meant that luckily,  the bodies had not been moved when the cemetery had been abandoned..

Unfortunately, despite all the construction over the graves, the ground was not well compacted, and a great deal of time and money would have to be spent shoring up the shafts, and supporting the walls of the buildings above.  

Or at least that's what Ms Weiss told Ambassador Porter (above, left) when he presented the first bill. Noted Porter, “Slime, mud, and mephitic (foul smelling and poisonous) odors were encountered, and long red worms appeared in abundance.”

Wrote Porter, “Two more large shafts were sunk in the yards and two in the Rue Grange-aux-Belles (above), making five in all.  Day and night gangs of work men were employed…Galleries were pushed in every direction and ‘‘soundings’’ were made between them with long iron tools,…so that no leaden coffin could possibly be missed."

The wooden coffins had long since corroded away and for the last century those bodies had been slowly decaying into the soil. Now the miners working for Ms Weiss (above, center)  had introduced waves of fresh air, which accelerated that decay. The stench was often overwhelming. 

Three lead coffins were found, the first on 22 February, 1905, and the second a month later. Those two had copper plates identifying their occupants. Neither was John Paul Jones.  Shortly there after they began finding the bodies of  King Louis' Swiss Guard, stacked one atop the other. And now Weiss knew he was on the right track.

On 31 March, 1905, the miners hit a forth lead coffin, this one without a copper plate.  

The miners decided they needed more fresh air before they opened it, so they dragged it into the gallery they had carved while digging. It was a lucky thing they did.

On 8 April, 1905 they finally pulled the coffin loose from the soil, and while still in the tunnels pried open the coffin lid. Ambassador Porter (above, left) was there,.as was Ms. Weiss (above, center) , to catch by flickering candle light the first glimpse of  the great hero since 1792.  

The body inside was wrapped in tin foil. The stench of alcohol filled the tunnel. Rolling back the tin foil, they gazed upon the face of John Paul Jones, a physical connection with the American Revolution. 

His nose had been bent by the weight of the coffin lid, but the face was still recognizable as matching the busts made in his lifetime. It was John Paul Jones. I told you he was lucky. After a hundred years he needed a shampoo, but that was to be expected. 

Doctor J. Capitan performed an autopsy and determined that the heart and liver were normal, but the left lung showed signs of “small patches of broncho-pneumonia partially cicatrized” The doctor came to the conclusion that “the corpse...is that of John Paul Jones”.

Teddy Roosevelt ordered up a fleet of 11 battle ships to escort Captain John Paul Jones back to America.

The French even threw in a few battle ships of their own.

On 24 April, 1906,  Admiral John Paul Jones was placed in a temporary tomb (above)  at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland. It was temporary tomb because Congress had yet to pass the appropriation to even pay the cost to recover the body, let alone so the navy could build an actual tomb. They never did.

When the hero arrived home, Teddy Roosevelt (above) gave a speech, in which he barely mentioned John Paul Jones. Instead Teddy talked a lot about his plans for the future of the American navy.

By now, Teddy had been re-elected without serious opposition in part because, luckily for Teddy, his Republican foe Mark Hanna had run a terrible campaign, and then suddenly died of typhoid fever in February of 1904. So the entire effort to rescue John Paul Jones from anonymity to save Teddy's political future, had been unnecessary. 

And it turned out the entire effort had really been about Teddy - in much the same way that John Paul Jones efforts had not been about creating an American Navy but had rather had been about John Paul Jones.  And Congress never did pass the authorization to pay for the effort because the members of Congress were under the impression that it was all about them.

Ambassador Porter (above) had to take up a collection to try and get his money back. But at least, at last, the body of John Paul Jones had been found and brought back to his adopted home, where he spent so little time.  

Still. as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote for his  own 1894 epitaph,  "Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill".

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FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT!

 

I can't help wondering why so many politicians keep calling for a new politics  Isn't the one we've been using for the last 2,500 years good enough?  Check my math, please: politicians say hysterical things, like "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight", or" Segregation Now, Segregation Forever!", or "Built The Dang Wall", and politicians get elected. Could there be a connection?  Let me give you some examples from ancient history, so no living politicians or voters feel insulted.

James Knox Polk (above) was America's eleventh President, serving a single term from 1845 to 1849. He was, until Richard Nixon, our most secretive President. He often did not even tell his own cabinet members what he was thinking. He had been Speaker of the House of Representatives and most recently the Democratic Governor of Tennessee.  But no matter what your history books tell you Polk did not campaign for President on the phrase "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight" – that came up later. 

The actual campaign centered on the divisive issue of Texas (above). Recently declared to be a slave republic, Democrats favored it's admission to the union because it would strengthen their hold on the Senate, and weaken Wig control of the House. It also extended slavery westward, toward the Pacific 

The Wigs opposed Texas admission for the same reasons, but they preferred talking about high tariff's, which raised prices for all consumers. So their candidate, Henry Clay,  merely issued a few confusing statements about Texas. And then, abruptly, in August it seemed the Wigs decided to claim that Polk was unfit to be President because he branded his slaves. And trust me, this smear was so good they still haven’t figured out who exactly was behind it.

The story was first published in the 21 August, 1844 edition of the Ithaca New York "Chronicle". It was a Whig Party newspaper. And the story claimed to be a letter to the editor, quoting a three paragraph extract from an unpublished book, titled “Roorback’s Tour Through the Western and Southern States…” 

The extract claimed to detail Baron Von Roorback's conversations with a group of slave traders on the Duck River in Tennessee. “Forty of these unfortunate beings had been purchased, I was informed, by the Honorable J.K. Polk…; the mark of a branding iron, with the initials of his name on their shoulders, distinguishing them from the rest.”  Now, even in 1844 the idea of branding human beings, even those treated as slaves, was appalling to many people...most Whigs and even some Democrats, of whom James K. Polk was the leading candidate for President.

Which was why the story was picked up by the "Albany Evening Journal", and other Whig newspapers, particularly in the 1844 “battleground states” of New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Many voters in those swing states were outraged that a man standing for President would do something so despicable as to brand human beings the same way you brand cattle. 

To Whig politicians the story from "Roorback’s Tour" was almost too good to be true.  And almost instantly the Democratic press discovered there was no such book and no such Baron. 

The details claiming to be about Polk had been lifted from a real travel book, of a run in with some slave traders on Virginia’s New River. Polk’s plantation was in Tennessee, so the inventor of the smear had shifted the scene to where it would be easier to tie the branded humans to Governor Polk. Besides, it was not common practice to brand slaves.  Like whipping scars, branding tended to reduce their value as property, since it indicated this slave had a tendency to escape. Slaves were certainly whipped and branded because in 1844, most Americans, even most Democrats, still believed black slaves were property and would have been equally offended if some government official tried to tell them how to treat their horses or how to slaughter their hogs.

Still, embarrassed at repeating what was so obviously a fabrication, the Whigs pinned the whole thing on William Linn, a lawyer and a Democratic operative in Ithaca, New York.  But why would a Democrat smear his own candidate? Well, if I were a believer in conspiracy theories, I might say that this kind of allegation against Polk was actually a fairly safe charge to make. 

Polk did own slaves, but his Whig opponent in the election, Henry Clay (above), owned even more slaves than Polk did.  And it has been suggested by some historians that the “Roorback” story was a case of nineteenth century “wedge” politics. 

Abolitionism was still a minor issue in 1844, but abolitionists formed a solid voting block in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, those key battleground states. Convince enough abolitionists in those states that the Whigs were lying to them, and they just might choose the Democrat Polk over the Whig Clay as the lesser of two evils.  Or they just might stay home and not vote at all. And the letter to the Ithaca Chronicle had been signed, “An Abolitionist”, thus adding insult to the injury.

Well, maybe....And maybe that theory implies a level of sophisticated conspiracy that did not exist in the simpler culture and times of 1844 –

...and certainly would not have existed in Athens in 415 B.C., when Alcibiades was accused of vandalizing statues of the god Hermes.

You see Hermes (above) was the mythical inventor of fire, who "...protects and takes care of all travelers...".  Each Greek home had an anatomically correct statue of Hermes standing on its front lawn, and it was common practice for visitors to pause at the stature and stroke his stone phallus for good luck before knocking on the front door. 

And when the owner left the house, they would also give the phallus a tug for good luck.  And that was why it was so shocking that on the morning that Athens was launching a massive naval assault on Sicily, the city awoke to discover that during the night many home statues of Hermes had their phallus' knocked.

It sounds to my modern ears as if the neighborhood kids had been drinking sour wine on the street corner and started smashing phalluses as a prank. But to the devout in Athens (and there were many who believed in the gods) it was also sacrilege. And rumors began almost immediately that the person responsible was the golden boy politician who had conceived the expedition, and was known for his past sacrilegious opinions, Alcibiades (above). 

Of course Alcibiades had his own theory. He thought it had been the work of his chief political opponent and co-commander of the Sicilian expedition, Nicias (above).  Two thousand five hundred years later, it is impossible to know who the phallus whackers really were or why they were whacking off in the dark.. But whether the politicians planned it all or just took advantage of the situation, the one thing we know for certain is, that the people arguing both sides of the scandal were politicians.

The point is, politicians have been gaming voters since voting was invented. And voters have been playing along, else the game would not have remained so popular. Like claiming to build a wall to nowhere.  And that is why when a politician tells me he is selling something, especially when it is something I want to buy,  my first reaction should be,  “Pull the other one.,”  When the American political system works  (which it has not been doing for a generation)  it is been based upon pragmatism, not hysteria.  When it gets hysterical, it's usually when the politicians want to distract you.

And the election of 1844 was not pragmatic, either.  Polk won 49.5% of the popular vote to Clay’s 48.1 %, and part of that razor thin margin were victories in New York and Pennsylvania - by less than 6,000 votes in both states.  Those two states gave Polk 62 Electoral Votes, out of his sixty-five vote margin of victory (170 to 105). It seems that if the Roorback story was a double blind trick, it damn well worked.

Oh,... and remember the phrase “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!”?  Well, that was actually invented by Ohio Senator William “Earthquake” Allen (above), known for his thundering speeches, and he used it after the 1844 election. 

The number was  the Southern border (54 degrees & 40 minutes of latitude) claimed by Russia when they owned Alaska.  Radical Democrats were demanding the U.S. insist on that line for our northern border with Canada, and Polk seemed to back that position.  He might have even have supported starting a shooting war over it.  However,  simple glance at a map will confirm the modern border,  agreed upon by President Polk, was (and is) the 49th parallel. 

So much for the “…Or fight!” part of the slogan.  Have you noticed how often politicians don’t actually mean what they seem to say? Like they are going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it? You might say many of them make a career out of hysteria.  And always have.  And voters keep buying the horse manure they keep dropping all over the place.  And whose fault is that?

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