This classic 1938 illustration features Harpo Marx’s backfired prank.

Practical jokes have a bad reputation. We tend to think of them as unimaginative annoyances, like putting salt in the sugar bowl, making prank phone calls, or taping a “kick me” sign on someone’s back. But, as the Post reported, a good prank is of a different class altogether.

We’ll start with the case of Humorist Oliver Herford whose exceedingly clever gags arguably approached the level of high art, as Post Contributor Julian Street describes them in “More or Less Practical Jokes.”

In the 1890s, Herford announced to his friends that he had just been invited into a highly exclusive club. From his rapturous descriptions of the Farragut Club, many of his friends hoped they would also be chosen for membership. What they didn’t know was that Herford was the only member of the Farragut Club, which he’d dreamed up just to torment his good friend Richard Harding Davis, who was a bit of a social climber. For years, Davis repeatedly begged Herford to nominate him for membership. Again and again, though, Herford had to tell his friend, with sighs of deep regret, that one member had anonymously voted down his nomination. It’s possible Davis never learned who that one person was.

An Audience Of One

Professor Clyde Miller of Columbia University was another prankster who appreciated subtlety, as Author Fred C. Kelly described him in the Post article “He Sets Them Wondering.”

Whenever a publisher sent Miller a book to review that he found impossibly dull, he’d mail it to a friend along with a note, signed with the author’s name, saying, “I hope you will like the references in this little volume to yourself and that you will not mind the free use that I have made of your name.” Miller enjoyed imagining his friend wearily reading the entire book just to find where his name was mentioned.

Once, as part of a printer’s advertisement, he was sent a stack of sample Christmas cards left over from various jobs. On the inside were the names of complete strangers—a Dr. Montgomery, and a George and Helen McFarland. He mailed these cards to his friends with a brief personal note from Montgomery or the McFarlands, telling the recipient “Cousin Frank finally got the job. He would love to hear from you,” or “Ben and Sarah have a new baby. They are naming it after you.”

The Educational Joke

The Post stories of practical jokes also include a few that served an educational purpose, teaching a lesson to people who might not learn any other way.

Actor Rowland Buckstone, for example, taught fellow Actor E.H. Sothern, how it felt to have a practical joke sprung on him. For years, Sothern had played pranks on Buckstone, who had always accepted the joke with a good-natured laugh. Then, one night, Buckstone saw an educational opportunity for his friend.

It happened the night that Sothern announced to his fellow actors that he’d just become engaged to Virginia Harned, the leading lady in his current play.

Buckstone met Harned backstage while the play was in progress and congratulated her on the engagement. He added that Sothern was a brave man for telling her about the … um, sensitive issue. He knew it must have deeply pained Sothern to share with her the secret he kept from so many people.

“What are you talking about?” Harned asked.

Buckstone pretended to be shocked that Sothern hadn’t told her his great secret. The woman pleaded to know what her fiancé was hiding. At last, with a great show of reluctance, Buckstone said, “His glass eye.”

Harned couldn’t believe him. Buckstone offered to prove it. He told her that Sothern had plenty of spare eyeballs and kept them in several hiding places. He quickly led her to the dressing room of Sothern, who was then onstage. He opened the door and pointed to the dressing table, where a glass eye lay in a saucer, just where Buckstone had placed it minutes before.

Harned was aghast. Buckstone began digging through the pockets of Sothern’s clothes where he ‘chanced’ to find another glass eye. Just then, they heard Harned’s cue. She rushed through the wings and onto the stage with Buckstone strolling after her in a contented mood. Standing behind the curtain, he watched her play the love scene with her husband-to-be. He noticed that Harned seemed distracted that night, and spoke her lines haltingly. And, from where he stood, Buckstone could see that her gaze kept shifting back and forth between Sothern’s eyes, trying to figure out which was the glass one.

As soon as they got offstage, Sothern learned of the hoax and cleared up any doubt Harned had. They then began hunting through the theater for Buckstone, but never found him that night.

A Joke For Marital Equality

Julian Street also offered an example that shows a woman as capable as a man in the field of educational pranks.

When his friend, Art Editor Ray Brown, married, he and his wife agreed they would remain independent, and never demand to know where the other had been, or what he or she had been doing.

So on the first night they visited Paris, Mrs. Brown attended a concert and Mr. Brown went strolling alone through the artist’s district. Hours after she arrived back at the hotel, he came staggering in and collapsed on the bed. True to their code, she didn’t ask where he’d been.

The same thing happened for the next two nights. Mrs. Brown sat alone in their room under he would come stumbling to the door in the small hours.

On the fourth night, Mrs. Brown came to a decision. She put on her best evening gown and waited by the window overlooking the street. In the middle of the night, she saw a cab pull up to the hotel door and her husband step out. She immediately left the room and hurried upstairs to the floor above. There, she silently paced the corridor for a half hour before returning downstairs and knocking at the door of their room.

As Street describes it, Mr. Brown opened the door and Mrs. Brown sauntered in, cheerfully saying, “Oh, you got home first.” She yawned, slipped off her wrap and began to make ready for bed, aware, as she did so, of his anxious, questioning gaze.

“During the remainder of his stay in Paris, Ray Brown was given to fits of abstraction in which he would stare at his wife with brooding, speculative eyes. And she was always there to stare at, for he did not leave her any more.”

Years later, as Street was writing this article for the Post, he sent Mrs. Brown a letter asking permission to use the story. She wrote back with the permission and the news that, until her husband had read Street’s letter, he’d never known where she was that night.

Blowing Up in the Joker’s Face

Finally, we consider a category of practical jokes that are rarely reported: the ones that backfire.

According to Alva Johnston’s 1938 article, “What Larks!” Harpo Marx once entered the Tiffany & Co. jewelry store to shop for some expensive jewelry. He was dressed in street clothes. Without his trademark wig and top hat, few would have recognized him. A salesman showed him several trays, but Marx said he saw nothing he wanted. He turned and was heading to the door when he ‘accidentally’ pulled an open bag from his pocket that spilled diamonds, rubies, and pearls across the showroom floor. Several salesmen started toward Marx, then stopped. Even from 60 feet away, they recognized the look and sound of costume jewelry hitting the tiles. They remained where they stood, fixing Marx with an icy stare. No one even helped him pick up the fake jewels.

Humiliated, Marx quickly rounded up the fake gems, handed them to the doorman, and darted outside.

He didn’t dare to show his face inside Tiffany’s again until he returned, ten years later, as a legitimate customer looking for a silverware pattern. Even though a decade had passed since his joke backfire, he had taken only a few steps into the store when a salesman stepped up and said, “No jokes, Mr. Marx.”

Pranks for the Memories The Saturday Evening Post

Bad news may travel fast, but at the time of the Alamo siege, it rarely moved faster than the walking pace of a horse or the cruising speed of an early steamship.

So on April 9, 1836, readers must have thought the Post’s news from Texas appeared with unusual speed. A mere four weeks after the event, it reported the Mexican army was besieging the Alamo of San Antonio de Bexar and would likely obtain possession of the place.

The shocking news had barely sunk in when the next issue brought a report on the fall of the Alamo and the merciless slaughter of prisoners. Under the headline “Horrible Butchery, Highly Important from Texas,” the Post reported: “… On the 6th March, about midnight, the Alamo was assaulted by the whole force of the Mexican army, commanded by [Gen. Antonio López de] Santa Anna in person. The battle was desperate until daylight, when only 7 men belonging to the Texian Garrison were found alive, who cried for quarters, but were told that there was no mercy for them—they then continued fighting until the whole were butchered.

“… Gen. [Jim] Bowie was murdered in his bed sick and helpless. [The Mexican] General Cos, on entering the fort, ordered the servant of Col. Travis to point out the body of his master. [When] he did so, Cos drew his sword and mangled the face and limbs with the malignant feeling of a Comanche savage.”

General Antonio López de Santa Anna

The victory was as decisive as it was brutal, but Santa Anna’s success only inspired Texans to take arms against him. Hundreds of settlers who had previously refused to support the Texan army before now rushed to offer their services.

These settlers had moved from the U.S. into the Mexican territory of Texas at the invitation of the Mexican government. The leaders in Mexico City hoped they would develop its dry northern plains and build a buffer of loyal inhabitants between themselves and the United States. Under the Mexican Constitution of 1824, the government granted the American immigrants both land and a fair degree of autonomy.

By 1830, however, Santa Anna had become Mexico’s dictator. When he dissolved the country’s legislature, several states in Mexico rose up in rebellion. Santa Anna ruthlessly put down all opposition, and then turned his attention to the northeast and the Texans who showed little inclination to recognize any government.

He decided he could waste no time or mercy suppressing the rebellion, and so marched on San Antonio with 1,800 soldiers to confront a small army of Texans encamped at the Alamo. The commander of the garrison, Col. William Travis, sent out urgent pleas for reinforcements. One of the Texan commanders he was hoping would march over the horizon to his rescue was Col. J.W. Fanning. But Fanning had troubles of his own. As the Post reported: “Distressing news has reached us of the horrible massacre and butchery of the entire command of Col. Fanning, by the tyrant monster Santa Anna and his forces. … Col. F. being overpowered by the Mexicans … capitulated upon the promise of Santa Anna, that himself and soldiers should be treated as prisoners of war. But no sooner had the fiend of hell fastened them in his clutches than he secured their arms, and early next morning ordered them all to be shot.

“The men under the immediate command of Colonel Fanning were all killed but FIVE!” (“Late and Important from Texas,” May 7, 1836).

Post readers had only two weeks to digest this news when the conflict suddenly ended with a surprising victory. On May 28, under the headline “Particulars of the Capture of Santa Anna,” the Post gave a report of the battle at San Jacinto by a Col. Hockley of the Texan army: “We commenced the attack upon them at half-past 5 o’clock, P.M. by a hot fire from our artillery.

“We marched up within 175 yards, unlimbered our pieces and gave them the grape and canister, while our brave riflemen poured in their deadly fire. In fifteen minutes the enemy were flying in every direction, and were hotly pursued by us. They left 500 of their slain behind them.

“Never was there a victory more complete. Gen. Cos was taken and killed by a pistol ball from one of our men, who instantly recognized him.”

Santa Anna was pursued by the Texans for 15 miles until his horse became bogged down near the Brazos River. Abandoning his horse, he ran for the nearby woods with his pursuers close behind. Once among the trees, his trail disappeared. As the Post described these events in an article dated May 28, “The pursuers then spread themselves, and searched the woods for a long time in vain, when it occurred to an old hunter that the [escaping officer] might have ‘taken a tree.’ The tops were then examined, when lo! the game was snugly ensconced in the forks of a large live oak.

“The captors did not know who their prisoner was until they reach the camp, when the Mexican soldiers exclaimed, ‘El General, El Jefe! Santa Anna.’”

Gen. Houston did not execute Santa Anna in reprisal for his slaughter of prisoners, but held him hostage to prevent further actions by the Mexican army.

Santa Anna’s brutality, by general opinion, was both immoral and stupid. Yet he declared he had the right to execute prisoners. Hadn’t he issued a proclamation that branded all supporters of Texan independence to be pirates? Hadn’t he flown a red flag at the Alamo? Didn’t the Texans know this meant he would take no prisoners?

He felt no mercy to foreigners who crossed his border to build their own communities, speak their own language, become prosperous, and aspire to political power.

Santa Anna was eventually returned to Mexico, where he became president again. Breaking the conditions of his release from the U.S., he marched into Texas in 1842, was again defeated, then overthrown, captured, and sent into exile in Cuba. He returned in 1846, declared himself president, was overthrown, and went into exile again. In 1853, he once more returned to Mexico and named himself dictator-for-life. Within a year, he was removed from power, and went into exile. In 1869, he died in New York while trying to raise money for an army that would return him to power.

How the Post Reported the Alamo Story The Saturday Evening Post

Halt of Wilcox’s troops in Caroline Street, Fredericksburg, previous to going into battle. Photo courtesy The Saturday Evening Post (January 17, 1863).

No country can win a war if its military strength isn’t matched by the determination of its people. If a war lasts too long, the public’s resolve runs out before the ammunition does. Case in point: it would have been extremely difficult if not impossible for the administration to maintain public support for the Vietnam War for its entire 14 years. More recently, our country’s determination has been challenged by 11 years in Afghanistan that have produced no decisive victories.

It was no easier 150 years ago, when the Union Army was still recovering from its December 1862 defeat at Fredericksburg. A growing number of Americans were demanding that President Lincoln negotiate with the Confederate government.

In this winter of discontent, the Post responded to the “gloom and dissatisfaction which secessionists are striving to spread over the land” by comparing the achievements of the Northern and Southern armies. In “What We Have Done and What the Rebels Have Done” (February 14, 1863), the editors credited the Union with 33 victories and the Confederacy with just 17.

This ratio of battlefield successes—nearly two-to-one—gives the impression the Union Army was outfighting its Confederate counterpart. But, if truth be told, Post editors were fiddling with the numbers for reasons that were hardly journalistic. The publication had an agenda to stir up waning enthusiasm for Lincoln’s war efforts.

There had been plenty of support for the war when it began in March 1861. Young men throughout the North rushed to enlist, their only worry being the war would be over before they had a chance to prove themselves. After all, they presumed, this would be a short, decisive war.

Then the long list of Union defeats began. In July 1861, the Confederates defeated General McDowell at Bull Run. In March 1862, they defeated General McClellan on the Virginia Peninsula. In August, they defeated General Pope, again at Bull Run. In December, they threw back General Burnsides at the battle of Fredericksburg.

The only place where the Union seemed to advance was in the western states, where Ulysses Grant was making a name for himself with a string of river victories. But Kentucky and Tennessee were a long way from Richmond, Virginia, the seeming invulnerable Confederate capital.

So Post editors rewrote the war to put the Union Army and Navy in a more positive light, using standards that consistently favored the North. For example:

• Three of the Union “victories” were not achieved by combat but reflected territories fell into Federal hands after the Confederates abandoned them.
• The “Evacuation of Manassas” was, in fact, a retreat.
• Two of the Confederates’ major wins at Bull Run were listed as just one victory.
• The editors counted five Union victories in the Peninsula Campaign, but gave the Confederates just one for winning the entire campaign. Moreover, everything the Union gained at Yorktown, Williamsburg, Hanover Courthouse, Fair Oaks, and Malvern Hill, they lost when driven from these battlefields as they retreated down the peninsula.
• Overall, the editors also didn’t weigh the Union and Rebel successes on the same scale: the South’s victories at Bull Run, the Virginia Peninsula, and Fredericksburg were a greater feat of arms than the minor battle of Drainesville or Mill Spring, but reading the Post article, you’d never know that.

Southerners would have recognized the true disparity in the two armies’ successes. They knew that, for all the North’s small victories, the South had kept them from advancing into Virginia for two years. What they couldn’t see in 1863 was how these little victories were quietly adding up and reducing their ability to wage war. The Confederacy still put its faith in winning with a decisive victory in one, big battle. It had been true in Napoleon’s day, but was no longer. Modern wars, waged across the breadth of a nation, were won by countless small wins with little glory and savage fighting.

But a campaign that relies on countless small wins, as we’ve seen in our current fighting in the Middle East, doesn’t look like progress.

The Post’s Civil War Half-Time Report The Saturday Evening Post

Pelican Bay State Prison is designed to house California’s most serious criminal offenders. Photo courtesy California State Department of Corrections.

We are facing a crisis in America. The crisis is largely hidden from view, but like a cancer, it threatens the very health of society. We have become a superpower of incarceration. Today we warehouse 2.2 million inmates according to the most recent U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report.

That’s more than the entire population of Houston. More than two-thirds that of Chicago.

China, with more than four times the U.S. population, is a distant second with 1.5 million inmates. The United States imprisons 760 people per 100,000. The number for France is 96, Germany 90, and Japan 63. As an NAACP advertisement points out, we are 5 percent of the world’s population and we house 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

How did we get here? Between 1925 and 1972, our state inmate population increased 105 percent—roughly proportionate to the country’s overall growth. Since 1973, when stiffer sentencing came in—particularly the so-called Rockefeller drug laws providing lengthy minimum sentences for possession of small quantities of banned substances—the number of prisoners has increased more than 700 percent. That’s about 14 times the country’s overall growth.
The costs are staggering. In a survey of 40 participating states, the Vera Institute of Justice concluded that U.S. taxpayers were shouldering an annual bill of $39 billion. And that’s just the direct costs. Indirect costs, which tend to be carried by government agencies other than corrections departments, are incalculable.

“The system is so skewed,” laments Bob DeSena, executive director of Council For Unity, an anti-gang initiative headquartered in New York City. “As a society we are completely focused on punishment. People are willing to spend hundreds of thousands on incarceration, but they don’t want to spend a few dollars on programs that are proven to prevent them from becoming criminals in the first place.”

What to do with criminals—what warrants imprisonment, for how long, and how to reintegrate released men and women—is one of society’s most difficult challenges. In modern times, the great philosophical debate has been whether the mission is to reform or to punish. And possibly no society has cycled quite so widely between the two extremes as America.

The prison reform movement started more than 200 years ago, in the throes of the Industrial Revolution when a surge in the urban population came with a steep rise in crime. At the time, jail was little more than a means of segregating malefactors from the rest of the population. Perpetrators who weren’t killed outright (Pennsylvania, the first state to outlaw capital punishment for theft, didn’t do so until 1786) were dealt with harshly, confined in dungeons or tawdry, violent, and often disease-ridden jails.

One early attempt at reform was nearly as harsh as the system it replaced. New York’s Auburn Prison, built in 1816, was governed by the then-radical notion that prisoners were capable of change. Hence, prisoners were put to work, and community activity was encouraged during the day. But strict silence was enforced at all times, and prisoners were isolated in solitary confinement at night. Prisoners who so much as broke the silence were flogged or hung by their wrists or had their heads locked in iron cages.

Jailhouse Blues The Saturday Evening Post

In 1900, Otis T. Mason predicted that we would no longer need stairs because of the introduction of a pair of small elevators, which, being perfectly automatic, would require no attendant.

Now that the end of the world has come and gone—again—we really must get serious about planning.

It would help if we could just get a good idea of what will happen in the future. Unfortunately there seems to be a shortage of dependable predicting these days.

Some will argue that forecasting in the 21st century is particularly difficult because of the rapid rate of change. American politics, technology, and society have all evolved so much in recent years, it’s nearly impossible to see what will happen next. But, as this 1900 article shows, it’s possible to make some fairly reliable predictions even in the middle of disruptive times.

Americans at the turn of the century had seen change on a scale we might appreciate today. The U.S. was just starting to realize the global power of its wealth. Progressive politics was changing government and society. And technology was introducing such epoch-defining products as the telephone, the automobile, the phonograph, and the motion picture.

Yet even in this unprecedented age, Otis Tufton Mason managed to accurately predict home life in the future. A curator at the Smithsonian Institution in 1900 (like John Elfreth Watkins, another uncanny predictor) Mason’s “The Dwelling House of the Twentieth Century” described some of the features of the American home in 1950.

• Central power: Electrical energy “comes in a single current through a heavy wire from a distributing station, and on the premises is split up as required for heating, for lighting, for cooking, etc.” A network of copper wires runs through the home, hidden behind moldings and decoration, to carry power for lights, heaters, and appliance throughout the house.

• Central heating: Instead of shoveling coal into a furnace, homeowners would only have to “set the automatic governor of the heating apparatus at seventy-two degrees, let us say, and the temperature of the whole establishment is maintained at that point for months.”

• Central air conditioning: Cooling will be just as common as heating. It, too, would be “perfectly automatic” so that a single control would keep the temperature always at the same point.

• Modern lighting: Rooms would no longer be illumined by a single, bare gas jet in the middle of the ceiling, leaving one part of a room bright and the rest in relative darkness. Instead, electric bulbs would provide shaded and indirect light for “a warm and cheerful glow” throughout a room.

• Better food packaging: Women would buy groceries in “insect-proof packages” and store perishable food items in a electronically cooled storage compartment.” (This was still the age of iceboxes; the modern refrigerator wasn’t even developed for another 13 years.)

• The energy-efficient kitchen: No more smoke, coal, ashes, or fire that needed constant tending and feeding. “No time is lost in kindling fires. … When a meal is to be prepared, the current is turned on by a twist of a button, and immediately the electric range is ready for service.” And many kitchen chores, like mixing and beating, would be performed by electric appliances.

• Modern furniture: The massive, Victorian-era furniture would be long gone. In its place, would be tables, chairs, and dressers made of the lightest material possible so they can be easily moved and will take up far less space. (They will also decorate their homes with “photographs in natural colors.”)

• Cleaner roads: Automobiles—vastly superior and safer—would replace horses, eliminating the problem of manure, which bred flies and spread disease.

• Environmental concerns: Homeowners would consider the air and water around their home as part of their property, and would regard other people’s smoke or pollution “as an infringement and a cause of action for trespass.”

Mason was certainly not infallible. He predicted homes would be cooled by “liquid air” instead of refrigeration. Homes would not include cellars because occupants no longer needed storage space for coal or firewood. Most Americans would still rely on domestic servants and use elevators instead of stairs.

Still, more than 60 percent of his predictions proved correct—an average any modern forecaster would be proud of.

How the 1950 Home Looked in 1900 The Saturday Evening Post

Please Touch: Giant sculptures like Charles Despiau's "Assia" in MoMA's outdoor garden have visceral appeal that transcends questions about meaning.

“Horrible.”

“Shameful.”

“Obscene.”

When the early impressionists began exhibiting their works in the 1800s, the art critics of Europe couldn’t find enough words to attack their paintings. “Shocking.” “Degenerate.” “Works of idleness and impotent stupidity.”

The public could be just as critical. A visitor to an exhibit of Matisse and Picasso works gave a typical verdict: “Godalmighty rubbish.”

Had those long-ago critics controlled public opinion, modern art would have died in its infancy. Today, painters would be competing with photographers to produce pictures in life-like detail.

But modern art survived and eventually earned general acceptance. Today, we barely notice the cubist still-life hanging in a bank lobby or the enormous abstract painting in a restaurant. Furthermore, the works of Van Gogh and Monet, so loudly condemned in their day, are among the most popular paintings in the world. In 1990, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million, making it one of the world’s most expensive paintings.

But what does it mean? A perplexed museum-goer confronts a Henry Moore sculpture (Figure, 1937) in this photo from "The Museum and the Redhead," April 1947.

How did modern art survive and gain a popular following, despite the hostile reception that critics and the public gave it?

According to a classic article in the Post (“The House that Art Built,” January 1965), much of the credit goes to The Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA. The then-revolutionary museum opened on November 7, 1929, barely a week after the great stock market crash. Its first exhibit contained paintings by Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Seurat, drawn from the collections of three women. For one of them, art collector Lillie P. Bliss, the exhibit was a chance to bring her Picassos out of the attic, since her mother had forbidden her to hang them in their house.

Visitors were enticed to the museum by its innovative and unpredictable exhibits. They also appreciated its informal atmosphere, and the fact that the museum didn’t take itself too seriously. After all, the museum’s director admitted, not all the works on display could be masterpieces. The museum would be lucky, he said, if one-twelfth of its paintings kept their value for 20 years.

Real life imitating art? A pair of visitors to the MoMA in front of Picasso's "Girl Before A Mirror."

Still, the new museum proved surprisingly popular with the public. The growing crowds at exhibits forced the museum to keep moving into larger galleries. Ultimately it came to rest in a Manhattan building that a 1947 Post article (“The Museum and the Redhead,” April 1947) described as “a fancy, six-story jack-in-the-box that is continually popping out with something new and remarkable.”

The MoMA also helped create the city’s booming market in contemporary art. The Post reported that, between 1930 and 1965, the number of New York galleries dedicated to contemporary art had grown from less than a dozen to 400.

Many visitors were still baffled and challenged by the museum’s experimental works from such artists as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. But even if they didn’t understand it, they seemed to accept modern art as significant. Americans’ opinions about new art were changing, said a museum lecturer told the Post. He could tell because people used to tell him that a 5-year-old could paint as well as the artists whose works hung in the museum. “Now, it’s gone up to 7- or 8-year-olds.”

But one museum, alone, couldn’t have lead to Americans’ growing acceptance of modern art. A larger influence was at work in the U.S., as Brenda Ueland observed in her 1930 article “Art, Or You Don’t Know What You Like.” (Continued on page 2.)

How America Learned to Love Modern Art The Saturday Evening Post

A man asks his doctor how to live to be 100.
The doctor asked the man, “Do you smoke or drink?”
“No,” he replied. “Never.”
“Do you gamble, drive fast cars, or fool around with women?” inquired the doctor.
“No, I’ve never done any of those things either.”
“Well, then,” said the doctor, “why do you want to live to be 100?”

It was a question that might have occurred to pollster George Gallup as he concluded his 1959 study “The Secrets of a Long Life,” for The Saturday Evening Post. (Read the full story here.) For the report, the Gallup Organization had spent months interviewing 402 Americans from across the country who had all lived 95 years or longer.

When all the data was collected, Gallup drew two surprising conclusions.

"I'm not a salad eater or a fruit eater, and if it were true that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, I'd be dead long ago; I don't eat an apple a year," 96-year-old Dr. John Edward Rhetts of Salem, Indiana, told the Post. The cane, he said, was to make him look distinguished.

First, if you wanted to live to a very ripe old age, it didn’t matter what you ate or drank or how much you exercised.

Second, you’ll live a lot longer if your life is dull.

Nothing helped the human body reach a ripe old age better than an unexciting life of regular habits, little  variation, and low stress. The interview subjects weren’t motivated by driving ambitions. They hadn’t even tried to achieve a long life. (Only 9 percent of the group had ever expected to reach their 90s.) “For many,” Gallup wrote, “their only outstanding accomplishment is that they have lived longer than most other humans. … Living to be old is probably the most exciting thing that ever happened to these people.”

They were admirable people, Gallup argued: honest, hardworking, law-abiding citizens and parents. But these elderly men and women had shaped their lives for contentment, not achievement. They were not risk-takers. When the great tide of migration swept westward, they remained where they had been born—usually in a small town.

In their lifetimes, stress wasn’t the buzz word it is today. They might have talked instead of discomfort, worry, nerves—whatever the word used, these subjects had figured out how to avoid it.

“If this still sounds dull,” Gallup concluded, “the chances are that you’ll never make 90.”

Gallup had commenced his research by asking subjects if they could attribute their long lives to any one factor. Fully one-third of the subjects said, “I don’t know.”

Others offered these explanation:

• God’s will (22 percent)

• Adaptability and a good sense of humor (17 percent)

• Hard work (16 percent)

• Good genes—parents or siblings who lived into their 90s (11 percent)

• Keeping regular habits (9 percent)

It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that most of the interview subjects lived lives of moderation—they didn’t eat or drink to excess, and they didn’t smoke. But a significant minority broke these rules.

In 1959, William Perry, 106, of San Francisco had ham and eggs, beans, fried fish, and coffee for breakfast.

Take the issue of drinking, for example. Over half of the people interviewed had never touched liquor in their lives, which might seem like an argument for abstinence. And yet, there was 115-year-old Uncle Charley Washington who, throughout his life, had drank “as much whiskey as he (could) afford.” Also, there was the testimony of 101-year-old Mrs. Marie Renier. For 80 years, she had drunk a quart of whiskey, and in many decades, as much as a gallon of beer a day.

As for food, there’s no consistent answer, either. Some ate lean, others ate richly. Meals tended to be heavy on the starch and protein. If a vegetable made it to their table, it was usually overcooked. Half of them had eaten fried food regularly all their lives.

Overall, there was enough contradiction among the subjects’ answers, aside from the uniform dullness, to rule out any other “secrets” for extending lifespan.

Even adopting a healthy pattern of living—regular hours, healthy diet, regular exercise, etc.—was no guarantee. As Gallup noted, “the only apparent value of their testimony is to give some sort of comfort to those of us who do not conform to the pattern and who covet long life.”

In other words, no matter what rules you lived by, you still had a chance at long life. And if you had followed all the generally accepted rules for good health, you still had no guarantees you’d make it to 100.

Americans today have a one-in-6,000 chance of living 100 years, which is probably why there are more centenarians living in America than any other country. We of the modern age still believe we can improve our odds with a better diet and more exercise. But if the real secret is living a life that is horribly, painfully dull, would any of us truly want to live to 100?

The average lifespan was 70 years
when the Gallup articles were published in 1959
and 78.5 in 2012.

Do You Really Want To Live To 100? The Saturday Evening Post

Lucian Cary looked through the spotting scope to discover his first shot was a bull's-eye.

Writer Lucian Cary didn’t think he was a “gun crank.” He simply had an enthusiasm for rifle shooting, like other people had for golf, fly fishing, or antique collecting. The difference, Cary assured Post readers in 1935, was that his was “a reasonable enthusiasm. …  I do not go in for collecting guns. I never buy a gun unless I really need it. As a matter of fact, I really need a dozen, or say 14, more guns than I have now.”

If he were writing today, Cary might be denying he was a “gun nut”—a term that has gathered some ugly connotations that crank never had. But if you step back from all the political and psychological analyses about gun collectors, you might see there’s little difference between gun nuts and enthusiasts in other fields: all the geeks, devotees, fanciers, wonks, and nerds of our population. There is small difference between the people who fuss over different grades of gunpowder and those who fuss over different database software.

American enthusiasts—whether car restorers, bird watchers, or quilters—are fascinated by details, technique, and different styles. They endlessly tinker with equipment and methods, always trying to make some improvement. They are the tinkerers who gave us radio and TV technology; the inexpensive family sedan and high-performance sports car; the Internet, microbrewed beers, and fantasy baseball.

And, in the 18th century, they were the people who developed the American longrifle, also known as the Kentucky rifle. It was an improvement on the musket and greatly improved the survival odds of the early country and its pioneers.

A traditional rifle of that time required its shooter to literally hammer his bullet into the breech before firing. The Yankee innovation was a greased patch of cloth or buckskin, which was pushed in front of the bullet and into the barrel. In a 1955 article, “All American Weapon,” Ashley Halsey Jr. explained that the greased patch filled the grooves, eased the bullet down, and partly cleaned the barrel when fired out of it.

This innovation made it possible to build rifles with long, slender barrels that didn’t have to endure hammering. “The longer barrel helped the bullet to pick up more speed before leaving the gun. Hence a smaller bullet delivered about the same wallop as the slower, bigger ones then in use. … The smaller bullet required only about a fourth as much lead to make, and half as much powder to shoot, both precious savings in the backwoods,” Halsey wrote.

During the Revolution, General Washington was delighted to find recruits with long rifles who could hit an 8-by-10-inch sheet of paper at 1,300 feet. But they were scarce. Most soldiers of the time used smooth-bore muskets, which were easier to load, though not nearly as accurate. Occasionally a long-barrel marksman might decide a battle by picking off a British general who thought he was safely out of range. The accuracy of the long rifle soon became legendary and proved to have a psychological power as great as its hitting power, as Halsey wrote.

“[A British general was outraged] that certain uncouth American frontiersmen, who wore their shirttails hanging out down to their knees, picked off his sentries and officers at outlandishly long ranges. Forthwith, the general ordered the capture of one specimen, each of the marksmen, and his gun. A raiding party dragged back Cpl. Walter Crouse, of York County, Pennsylvania, with his long rifle. At that point, the British … made a psychological blunder. They shipped their specimen rifleman to London. … Crouse, commanded to demonstrate his remarkable gun in public, daily hit targets at 200 yards—four times the practical range of the smoothbore military flintlock of the day. Enlistments faded away, so the story goes, and King George III hurriedly hired Hessian rifle companies to fight marksmanship with marksmanship.”

In the War of 1812, the Kentucky rifle had a chance to prove what it could do in battle when used in significant numbers. On January 8, 1915, outside New Orleans, Andrew Jackson threw together an army of soldiers, militiamen, pirates, and about 2,000 Kentucky and Tennessee woodsmen to meet men a British force twice its size. When the assault began, the American artillery opened fire but was unable to break the charge. Then, Halsey wrote, “the 2000 Kentuckians and Tennesseans, standing four deep, began taking turns with their long rifles. … At less than 200 yards, the advancing redcoat ranks melted away. … The British lost more than 2,000 killed and wounded; the Americans, eight killed and thirteen wounded. Scarcely ever have battle losses been more lopsided.”

Long after the war, the Kentucky rifle continued to prove its worth. Its incredible accuracy let pioneers and farmers hit predators and game at the very edge of visibility. As Lucian Cary explained, the long rifle meant survival in the wilderness to men like Daniel Boone and the settlers who followed him. “How could Boone have done what he did if he had carried an English Brown Bess, with its smoothbore, its heavy bullets, and its inability to hit what it was aimed at, instead of the instrument of precision he had? He lived by the rifle. He couldn’t have lived by a blunderbuss.”

In 1941, Cary’s fascination with rifles brought him to Friendship, Indiana, to the national shooting championship of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association. Here, he was surrounded by gun cranks even more fanatic than himself. And he marveled at the techniques of the champion marksmen.

“Rifle matches are as hotly fought as any other kind of contest. But rifle shooters make every effort to remain calm. They don’t want to talk when they are in a match. They don’t want to laugh or hear anybody else laugh. If they have any walking to do, they walk slowly. They don’t want to raise their heartbeats. They know that one mistake, one bad shot, will make all the difference between a good score and a poor one.

“Their sport requires its own special kind of nerve, the nerve to wait under pressure, to resist the natural human impulse to snatch at the trigger as the sights swing fast across the bull, to hold until the gun steadies, slows down, edges toward the center, and then, promptly but without haste, to put the last necessary quarter-ounce pressure on that trigger.”

Great marksmanship, as Cary described it, sounded like Zen mastery. “When everything is going well, the gun seems to fire itself. But it won’t do that for a man who is excited, or even for one who is trying too hard.”

This week, the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association will again hold its annual championship in Friendship, Indiana, as it has since 1933. Perhaps the event hasn’t changed much in the 71 years since Cary described it “as American as a church sociable, or the Fourth of July, or a horseshoe-pitching contest, and reminded me of all three.” But it will probably still give enthusiasts the opportunity to debate powder, shot, barrel riflings, and shooting technique; in other words, that American mixture of innovation built on tradition.

Gun Cranks and the Spirit of Innovation The Saturday Evening Post

In case you hadn’t noticed, fashionable clothing for men has barely changed over the past 200 years.

The coat-tie-trousers-hat ensemble was established in the 1820s. The only significant change has been the abandonment of the hat, once the most personal and most expressive item in a man’s wardrobe.

While the basic elements have remained constant, men’s clothing has seen countless variations over the past two centuries. Each year, it seems, brings new coat lengths, tie widths, and lapel cuts. But as this 1930 advertisement shows, there is a strong resemblance between the suit of today and of 70 years ago.

In the ’30s, a Post article posed the question that has occurred to most men who’ve wandered the aisles of a clothing store and shaken their head at the strange, new fashions: “Where do they come up with this stuff?” Based on his experience as a buyer, Arthur van Vlissingen declared that new styles weren’t dictated by either clothing retailers or manufacturers; neither could afford to gamble on an upcoming trend.

New styles become popular only when men see other men wearing them. “Men, unlike women, seldom discard a garment simply because the style has meanwhile changed. The average man who buys one of our suits wears it until, from his standpoint, it is worn out. … But men are none the less sensitive to style. They will [only] buy clothing which is … the fashion in their social circles, whatever these circles may be. They are determined to start even with their fellows every time they get new outfits,” Vlissingen wrote.

But this only explains how styles grew, not how they were born. He explains that, ultimately, new fashions were started by men who had their clothes made for them. These men included the successful executive, who needed to prove his ability to sense a new trend and his willingness to invest in it. Also included was the salesman, who had to demonstrate to his customers that he was aware of the latest developments, both in his own business and in fashion.

Younger men followed “styles which take shape at the places where the country’s leisured and socially prominent loaf, such places as Palm Beach and Newport, Aiken and Southampton, White Sulphur and Virginia Hot Springs.”

Another major influence on fashion in the 1930s was college—one university, in particular. “The fashions in clothing worn by our male population, between the ages of 14 and perhaps 25, usually get their start at Princeton,” Vlissingen wrote.

“Harvard is a very large university, in a great city which influences the students’ styles heavily. [But] it holds to a tradition of careless dress—well-made clothes seldom dry-cleaned and never pressed. Yale is more compact and more finicky, but New Haven is also a large city. Princeton is in a smaller town, off by itself where it can incubate a style effectively. Practically every Princeton student is well dressed, whereas only one-third or so of the Yale men can qualify by our standards.”

Whether they were at a resort or on a campus, these young men made up “a selective group of people, to whom adheres social prestige, [which] absents itself from cities all over the country. During their absence these men quite unconsciously decide what sorts of clothing they wish to wear. Then they scatter to their homes and are imitated by their friends, from whom, in turn, the style spreads in ever-widening circles.”

In addition to the fashion example set by the successful executive or the big man on campus, American men’s tastes were strongly influenced by the clothing they saw actors wearing in motion pictures.

Mr. Jinks, the well-known wholesale grocer of a mid-Kansas town, would indignantly and honestly deny that he buys his clothes according to what he sees at the movies. But the chances are that his clothier can recognize in Mr. Jinks’ halting description of the suit he wants, the outfit against which Marlene Dietrich pillowed her comely cheek at the Lyric last night.

No longer can a New York salesman come into Mr. Jinks’ store wearing a shepherd-plaid suit with two-inch checks, a red necktie, with a diamond horseshoe, and a pair of high-yellow shoes—not if he wants Mr. Jinks to think he’s dressed in the latest style.

Mr. Jinks may not be particularly alert about styles, and maybe he has not been in a town of more than 25,000 population for two years. But, like almost everyone else on the North American continent, Mr. Jinks goes to the movies. So does the traveling salesman. Which helps to account for the fact that the old-fashioned traveling man in loud clothes has gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Douglas Fairbanks and his well-dressed fellows have done him to death.

Gone are the days when movies introduced men to elegant dinner jackets, stylish sport coats, and raffish neckwear. Today’s movies are more likely to reflect the style du jour: work pants, T-shirt, and baseball cap, which are worn by movie moguls, software tycoons, and every big man on campus. Perhaps the 200-year-old fashion for men will, at last, be replaced.

Why Do Men Dress That Way? 1930s version. The Saturday Evening Post

The hard life of a circuit preacher in the 1860s.

Is America losing its faith? Recent polls show less than half of us belong to any organized religion. The percentage of Americans regularly attending church is even smaller (about 25 percent), and this figure continues to drop.

We seem to have come a long way from the early 1800s, when European visitors remarked how much religion influenced the conduct of Americans. The country seemed immersed in the Christian ethic back then. Its cities were crowded with churches; its art and literature filled with references to God, salvation, and the Bible.

Yet the religious influences in American society were probably not as great as they seem now. In many American communities, church membership never rose much higher than 50 percent. And though the national average reached 75 percent by the 1950s, it had been climbing slowly from the turn of the century. In those days, ministers and pastors had been alarmed at the poor church attendance which, they argued, had been caused by science, the modern novel, and Ford’s new Model T.

In those years, Rebecca Harding Davis regularly contributed articles to the Post about the changes she’d seen in her 73 years. In 1906, she wrote that nothing reflected the change in modern America like the decline of Christianity as her grandparents had practiced it. Recalling her youth in western Virginia in the 1830s, she wrote, “The dominant fact about a man at that time was his religion. … It was the important fact then about every man—as it is not today.”

An open-air, gospel camp meeting of the 1840s.

Religion then possessed every man’s thoughts, partly because there was not much else to possess them. Living was simple and cheap. … Each individual worked his way alone upon his narrow path. There were no guilds or leagues or unions to absorb his thoughts. Hence his brain was busied with his own little life and the two agents at work in it—God and the devil. You felt them near you at every turn. You heard of them every moment of the day.

The God, of whom our forefathers talked … was no awful or unknown Creator. … Blacksmiths and ditch-diggers talked as familiarly of [God’s] acts and intentions, as if they had been in His cabinet of advisers when the world was made. They gave Him the human qualities that were most admirable in their own eyes—chief of all, an unreasoning will, and inexorable, merciless justice.

This grim Deity was a real fact to these people. Religion in their souls was not so much a glad, absolute trust in a loving Father, or a brotherly kindness for their neighbors, as a perpetual terror and fearful expectation of judgment.

Strange, horrible ideas grew up out of this ignorance and fear, and made their lives miserable. One of these was the unpardonable sin: an undefined, nameless crime that God never pardoned, even when the sinner had borne eternities of hell. In almost every village there were slow-witted men or starved, anemic girls who believed that they had been guilty of this mysterious crime.

To her grandfather, Christianity was a matter of dogma; to her peers it was a matter of deeds. The older generation believed it could avoid hell only by holding fast, without question, to certain doctrines. Its grandchildren were more likely to ignore creeds “and strive for a life of honesty, purity and brotherly love.”

But the religion of her grandfather was far from heartless and demanded more than belief alone. It directed him to take care of his family and neighbors.

Foreigners counted for nothing to him, but he was loyal to the death to his kin and to his neighbors.
These old forebears of ours built no hospitals, but should one of their neighbors fall ill with typhus they all took turns in nursing him, day and night, for weeks.

If he died and his children had no kinsfolk, they took them home and brought them up as their own. It was simply a matter of course then that these things should be done. There was scarcely a family in our village which had not its orphan child—’to bring a blessing on the house.’

What this faith lacked in flexibility, it made up for in durability—an essential quality in faith for people with hard lives, few comforts, and little security. And if these men didn’t always extend charity to strangers, at least they required integrity in themselves.

Rebecca Harding Davis, 1831-1910.

Our stern old grandfather was as merciless to his own sins as to those of his neighbor. He never had heard of graft. He wronged no man of a penny.

He might berate his old wife, but he was true to her. You heard of no divorces then. His life was narrow and hard, perhaps, but it was clean and true. He had an intense, jealous love for his own kin … but I confess he had not much for outsiders. None of his hard-earned money went to the help of unknown strangers.

He strove with God without ceasing all of his life for the salvation of his own family. It was a common custom for these old fathers and mothers to rise long before the day to wrestle alone in prayer for their boys and girls.

There was, too, more outward reverence shown then by children to parents than there is today. [A father] was apt to impress upon his boys several times a day his conviction of his divine right to rule them. There was seldom any intimacy between them, however deep the affection might be. [And] often, with the purest and highest motives, [these fathers] made home so bare of comfort or pleasure that their sons were driven outside to find it.

American religion had grown more compassionate, Ms. Davis believed, because less was demanded of it. Life had become easier. Americans now lived with prosperity and peace their grandparents had never known. Fewer tragedies and disasters forced them to seek explanation or solace from religion.

But when tragedy returns, as it did on September 11, 2001, so does the need for faith.

The Decline of Old-Time Religion The Saturday Evening Post

"Another Voice for Cleveland"

There’s always the hope, with the start of every presidential campaign, that this time it will be different. This year, maybe the candidates will offer intelligent, practical solutions to the country’s problems. They emphasize what they’ll do, not dwell on the many shortcomings of their opponent.

And usually we’re disappointed. No matter how earnest and well-intentioned a presidential campaign begins, by the time it approaches the finish line, it usually assumes an atmosphere somewhere between a carnival midway and a bar fight.

We had an intelligent, respectable election once, and the winner was George Washington. By the time the next election came around, the gloves were off and the tar buckets filled, as Jack Anderson pointed out. [The Pulitzer-prize winning author's article—"The Dirtiest Campaign Tricks in History"—appeared in the Post on November, 1976]

In the 1796 election, John Adams suffered a blow when the Boston Independent Chronicle alleged that during the Revolution he had publicly supported Washington while surreptitiously attempting to have the General cashiered. In truth, it was Adams’s second cousin, Sam, who had sought Washington’s scalp.

Adams’s opponent, Thomas Jefferson … was accused of being the son of a half-breed Indian and a mulatto father. Voters were warned that Jefferson’s election would result in a civil war and a national orgy of rape, incest, and adultery.

Andrew Jackson's ultimate goal, according to opponents.

Andrew Jackson [was portrayed by his opponents] as a bloodthirsty wild man; a trigger-happy brawler; the son of a prostitute and a black man… his older brother had been sold as a slave [and] Jackson … had put to death soldiers who had offended him. Worst of all, Jackson and his wife were depicted as adulterers. Through a technical mixup, Rachael Jackson had married Andrew before her first husband divorced her. “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?” screamed the Cincinnati Gazette. Rachael succumbed to a heart attack before the couple could move into the White House, and many of Jackson’s advocates attributed her death to the calumnious campaign of 1828.

In 1839, Martin Van Buren was accused of being too close to the Pope, when, in fact, he had done little more than correspond with the Vatican in his job as Secretary of State under Andrew Jackson. His opponents, nevertheless, spread the canard that a “popish plot” was afoot to ensure Van Buren’s election.

During the Polk-Clay race of 1844 the Ithaca, New York, Chronicle [quoted] … one Baron Roorback … [who] had witnessed the purchase of 43 slaves by James K. Polk. The entire story was a hoax. Polk had purchased no slaves; in fact, there was no Baron Roorback. But that didn’t keep the story from gaining wide attention.

During the campaign of 1864, Lincoln was tagged with every filthy name in the political lexicon, from ape to ghoul to traitor. Midway through his first term, his detractors accused his wife of collaborating with Confederates, a charge which compelled the President to appear, uninvited, before a Senate committee which was secretly considering the allegations [and swear to his wife’s innocence.]

In a rather complicated cartoon, Satan lures James Polk toward war with Britain over the Oregon territory.Click image to enlarge.

The campaign of 1884 held the dubious honor of being the dirtiest in American history. … In July, the Buffalo Evening Telegraph … accused Cleveland of fathering an illegitimate son a decade earlier in Buffalo. It turned out that Cleveland, a bachelor, had dated the child’s mother, as had several other men. The boy, therefore, was of questionable parentage. Yet the inherently decent Cleveland had provided for him. A chant soon arose in Republican ranks: “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha! ha! ha!”

Cleveland’s opponent, James G. Blaine … involved in a business scandal. A railroad line had permitted him to sell bonds for a generous commission in return for a land grant. “Burn this letter!” Blaine instructed one cohort in a cover-up attempt. Thus evolved the Democratic comeback to Cleveland’s critics: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the State of Maine.”

Warren Harding… became the subject of a whispering campaign about his ancestry. A great-grandmother, it was alleged, had been a Negro, and a great-grandfather had Negro blood.

The dirty tricks don’t end once the ballots had been cast, either.

Candidate Lincoln, according to Pro-South Democrats, would lead the country straight into insanity.

In the election of 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular election but fell one electoral vote shy of a majority. The electoral tallies in several states were counted and recounted, juggled and changed, until finally the election was thrown into the Congress. A Republican Senate and a Democratic House set up an Electoral Commission to decide the winner. Through some political maneuvering that fairly reeked of scandal, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the victor.

Lyndon Johnson first won his Senate seat in 1948 by an 87-vote margin when 203 previously unnoticed ballots were miraculously discovered several days after the election. The “voters,” curiously, had approached the polls in alphabetical order, and 202 of them had cast their marks beside the Johnson name. This election gave LBJ his nickname of “Landslide Lyndon.”

Dead men not only vote in American elections; occasionally they are candidates. Philadelphia’s Democratic party bosses, for example, ran a dead man in last April’s primary. The cadaverous candidate was Congressman William Barrett, who departed the scene fifteen days before the election. The party hacks kept Barrett’s name on the ballot in the hope that uninformed voters would select him anyway. Thus the bosses could handpick his replacement.Barrett won.

 

Next: The Big Change in Presidential Campaigns

The Long Tradition of the Smear Campaign The Saturday Evening Post

The subject of over 10,000 books, Lincoln has become our most familiar president. He is also one of the most popular. A Post editorial in 1961, claimed that people around the world, “feel for Old Abe a reverence, trust and affection that they reserve for their truest friends. He… always steps down from his monuments and—plain, decent, wise, tolerant, good and great—puts out his hand to help us.”

The problem with this image is that it doesn’t fully agree with the evidence. In fact, it often contradicts the accounts of people who knew him well. In his 1959 essay on Lincoln, Jacques Barzun offered the personal recollection of William Herndon who worked closely with Lincoln for years as his law partner. Herndon had known Lincoln the man before he became the martyr and national icon.

He said that Lincoln was a man of sudden and violent moods, often plunged in deathly melancholy for hours, then suddenly lively and ready to joke;

that Lincoln was self-centered and cold, not given to revealing his plans or opinions; and ruthless in using others’ help and influence;

that Lincoln was idle for long stretches of time, during which he read newspapers or simply brooded;

that Lincoln was a man of strong passions and mystical longings, which he repressed because his mind showed him their futility, and that this made him cold-blooded and a fatalist.

As we know from other sources, Lincoln was subject to vague fears and dark superstitions… He was subject, as some of his verses show, to obsessional gloom about separation, insanity and death.

None of which denies that Lincoln could be sociable, funny, or statesmanlike. But there was undeniably a side of Lincoln that he kept hidden, even from his closest friends. The key to understanding this hidden side, Barzun believed, was knowing the one thing Lincoln valued all his life: language.

Not one but several persons who remembered his childhood remarked on the boy’s singular determination to express his thoughts in the best way. [According to] his stepmother… “He didn’t like physical labor. He read all the books he could lay his hands on. . . . When he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper and keep it there till he did get paper, then he would rewrite it, look at it, repeat it.”

Years later, Herndon said Lincoln could be a “very patient man” but when people began talking to him in vague abstractions, glittering generalities, and misty ideas, he could become enraged.

Language was vitally important to Lincoln. He spent hours mastering his skills of expressing himself powerfully through deceptively simple language. His legal studies helped him sharpen his genius for expression.

Legal thought encourages precision through the imagining and the denial of alternatives. The language of the law foresees doubt, ambiguity, confusion, stupid or fraudulent error, and one by one it excludes them. [It must avoid] misunderstanding, and this is the foundation of any prose that aims at clear expression.

His ability to convey complex ideas to any audience, said Barzun, set him apart from his peers and convinced him he was marked for a special destiny. If you read Lincoln’s words, his letters, speeches, and debates, he added, you realize Lincoln’s personality was not that of a shrewd, humorous, saintly man, but a combination of traits that are found in the biographies of great artists:

passionate, gloomy, seeming-cold, and conscious of superiority.

Lincoln’s faith in his power to communicate led him to believe in a great personal destiny. The opinion of others was less important to him than his relationship with the greater Lincoln he felt inside himself. He believed his talent for expression had set him apart for greatness. It had lifted him up from a life of splitting rails and running a failing grocery store. It enabled him to distract listeners from his early struggle, his election failures, and his occasional gloom and doubts.

As he focused increasingly on the man of destiny inside himself, he grew detached from others.

William Herndon called Lincoln a man of sudden and violent moods. (Photo by Matthew Brady, 1864, first published in a 1947 Post.)

In conduct, this detachment was the source of his saintlike forbearance… Lincoln’s detachment was what produced his mastery over men.

Had he not towered in mind and will over his cabinet, they would have crushed or used him without remorse. Chase, Seward, Stanton, the Blairs, McClellan had among them enough egotism and ability to wreck several administrations. Each thought Lincoln would be an easy victim.

[Yet] their dominant feeling was exasperation with him for making them feel baffled. They could not bring him down to their reach.

John Hay, who saw the long struggle, confirms Herndon’s judgments: “It is absurd to call him a modest man. No great man was ever modest. It was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner could never forgive.”

Lincoln’s extraordinary power was to make his spirit felt—a power I attribute to his peculiar relation to himself.

He regarded his face and physique with amusement and dismay, his mind and destiny with wonder. Seeming clumsy and diffident, he also showed a calm superiority, which he expressed as if one half of a double man were talking about the other.

It may be that, even after another 10,000 books, the true, inner nature of Lincoln will remain unknown to us. But if he always remains a mystery to us, it’s possible that it was always a mystery to himself.

What Lincoln Was Hiding The Saturday Evening Post

The watchman conveyed the request on to Edison, who replied,

“Go back. Tell that fellow that I say the expiration of those patents won’t amount to a hill of beans.

“Tell him that Mr. Edison says he has never had exclusive use of his inventions and never expects to in this world.

“Tell him the expiring of a patent has no effect whatever upon the fortunes of an inventor.”
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hearing Edison’s response, Crawford wrote another note: “What do you mean by ‘no exclusive use’? No protection? Must see you.” Eventually the great inventor admitted Crawford and gave him this statement:

“There is no such thing in this country as an inventor’s monopoly. The moment he invents something that is an epoch-maker in the world of science and commerce, there will be pirates to spring up on all sides and contest his rights to his ideas.

“I might invent a new monkey wrench which could go without infringement, but the moment I take certain forces and work out a moving picture for the first time in history… mark you how the pirates rise up and call it their own.”

Thirty years later, Crawford was back at Edison’s laboratory, again asking about patents and their profitability. Having invented the sustainable electric lighting, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, Crawford asked him, “Why aren’t you the richest man in the world today?”

Edison’s reply:

The only patent that ever made money for Edison.

“Nearly $10,000,000,000, they tell me, are invested in modern industries which developed from ideas embodied in my inventions and my patents.

“A billion or so dollars, I am told, may be the annual total income to artisans and workers in fields thus created.

“But I have made very little profit from my inventions.

“In my lifetime I have taken out 1180 patents, up to date. Counting the expense of experimenting and fighting for my claims in court, these patents have cost me more than they have returned me in royalties. I have made money through the introduction and sale of my products as a manufacturer, not as an inventor.”
 
 

Edison was one of the fortunate few inventors who knew that great engineering, on its own, never earned a dime. The success of any technology is due to its business model. And the protection of its copyright.

Unfortunately, Edison said, the U.S. had a “miserable system” for protecting inventions from infringement.

Edison in 1906.

“I have never enjoyed a monopoly upon anything that I have ever invented, with this single modification: the producers of motion pictures did pay me royalties until my patents expired. But even in that case I had to fight a long time in court over my claims.

“I frankly acknowledge that on one of the patents I had filed claims that were a little too ambitious, too broad, and one of the courts threw us out.

“But we modified our claims and the patent was reissued to us, and the picture people recognized our rights and paid us royalties until the patents expired.”
 
 
 
 
 

The foundation of America's tattoo-parlor industry: Edison's Stencil Pen from the 1870s.

“I have known of several inventors [whose] ideas would have made them millionaires. But they were kept poor by the pirates who were allowed through our very faulty system of protection to usurp their rights.

“Do you see that little incandescent lamp hanging over my head? Well, I fought in the courts of this and other countries for fourteen years to establish my rights as inventor, even after I had the patents. My associates and I had to spend more than $1,000,000 to prove our rights to the incandescent light, even though our claims had been duly vouched by the United States patent office.

“Everywhere, all around the earth, the pirates kept picking on that little lamp, and they were able to keep me out of the profits on my patents until there were but three years left out of the seventeen. So, while the light was a boon to the world at large, to the inventor the patent was well-nigh useless.”

 

“The first step is to hire a sharp lawyer—one who can make any judge unfamiliar with technology believe that black is white. They set up the claim that they, and not the inventor, should be recognized as the originator of certain ideas. They boldly strut into court and enjoin the inventor from manufacturing anything from his own creations and formulas, even though the inventor may hold in his hands a patent issued by the United States Government.

“Pirates can readily get all the money they require—millions, if needed—to carry on their contests.”

As always, when facing a problem, Edison came up with a solution. The answer to high-tech piracy was a high-tech court.

The source of endless patent battles.

“A separate and special court. Take the whole business out of the regular judicial system. It has never belonged there.

“What does the average judge of our district courts, or circuit courts of appeal—or even of the Supreme Court, for that matter—know about the technical phases of chemistry or physics? These judges have been lawyers all their lives, and they are—some of them—distinguished for their ability as jurists. But when it comes to understanding a contest over amperes, or ohms, or the atomic theory, or subatomic energy, they can be fooled by a smart lawyer quite as soon as… any farmer from the hinterlands.

“I would appoint, to this special court for trying patent cases, judges from the faculties of colleges of technology, men who know something about science. They could travel around the country and hold court, if need be, in the factories and workshops of the inventors and their competitors, and get first-hand data upon each issue involved in the litigation, just as President Wilson’s War Labor Board, headed by William Howard Taft, went around during the war settling labor disputes in the mills, right on the ground. There wouldn’t be much quibbling on the part of lawyers before these scientist judges. Then, and not till then, will an inventor stand some show of being rewarded for the long, tedious labors he has expended through ceaseless experimentation to gain the fruition of his ideas.”

Perhaps Edison’s court of scientist-judges would make more intelligent decisions about the theft of patented technology. It might also spare businesses the overwhelming costs of time, money, and resources for such suits. (Surely the legal profession will profit more from the pending lawsuit of Apple and Google than the technology developers.)

However, an American court would be of little help in protecting U.S. patents in the global markets. According to our International Trade Commission, China’s theft of Americans’ intellectual property, in 2009 alone, cost U.S. businesses $48 billion and 2.1 million jobs.

Edison and The Pirates: The Inventor’s Solution to Copyright Theft The Saturday Evening Post

The War Horse, Model 2011: U.S. Special Forces on horseback in Afghanistan.

The horse was also conscripted during the Korean War. A war horse named Reckless served the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Marines on the Bunker Hill-Panmunjom line with such distinction that she earned the rank of sergeant.

Her story, written for the Post by Col. Andy Geer U.S.M.C.R., began when a Marine raiding force was nearly cut off by Chinese troops as it fought its way back into Allied lines. To cover the incoming marines, the battalion created a ‘fire curtain’ using recoilless rifles — called “Reckless Rifles.”

Ammunition carriers ran over hills and across paddies in an exhausting race against time and space. It was a killing job, man-packing the 75-mm. artillery shells to the firing positions. The fire of the recoilless weapons was slowing to an intermittent cough when the last of the raiders married up with the main body.

The battle convinced 2d Lt. Eric Pedersen a horse was required to supply his portable artillery pieces… The next day, though suffering from leg, hip and face wounds, Pedersen hooked a trailer to his jeep and took the rough road south.

His destination was a race track in Seoul, where all racing had been canceled for the duration of the war. There he met breeders eager to sell the horses they could no longer race. Pedersen found a promising young Mongolian mare and paid $250 of his own money for her. Her name had been ‘Flame of the Morning,’ but the Marines soon rechristened her ‘Reckless.’

T/Sgt. Joseph Latham put the recruit through ” hoof ” camp. Long hours were spent in the hills, teaching the little sorrel to become accustomed to a friendly firing and not to bolt when the recoilless rifles back-blasted their horrendous pathway of destruction.

Latham taught her how to cross over communication and barbed wire and to move into a tent or bunker without invitation. Although the marines had built her an open-faced bunker, Reckless roamed the camp, and when it began to rain she walked into the nearest tent. Upon her appearance, a marine would say, “Here’s Reckless,” while the rest simply pulled up their legs or shifted a sleeping bag or two to make room.

By the end of her training, Reckless was routinely carrying ten rounds of 75mm shells: 220 pounds in all. Then, in July, the Chinese launched an all-out attack on four Marine outposts.

The savagery of the battle for the so-called Nevada complex had never been equaled in Marine Corps history.

A 75 mm. recoilless rifle in use during the Korean War.

Reno [had been] lost with all hands aboard. Vegas was lost with heavy casualties. Elko and Carson held tenuously.

Orders came from higher command to recapture Vegas. The second battalion, 5th Marines, was ordered in for the counter-attack, with Reckless and her rifles in close support.

The fury of the battle reached such heights that veterans of the first and middle wars are unable to compare it with previous engagements. Enemy in-coming artillery and mortar shells were judged to be at the rate of 500 rounds a minute.

Losses were staggering. Capt. John Melvin’s D Company of the second battalion (over 600 men) was shot away from a full complement to sixteen men in less than two hours. E Company of the same battalion suffered nearly as badly.

It was under these brutal conditions that the Marine’s war horse showed her indomitable spirit, following her orders without supervision or even guidance.

To supply the guns that were supporting the assault units, the little sorrel had to carry

Reckless and her combat trainer, Sgt. Joseph Latham.

her load of 75-mm. shells across a paddy and into the hills. The distance to the firing positions of the rifles was over 1800 yards. Each yard was passage through a shower of explosives. The final climb to the firing positions was at a nearly forty-five-degree angle.

Because of the steepness of the climb, Latham loaded her with only six rounds.

On the first few trips Latham or Pfc. Gary Craig or Monroe Coleman — particular friends of hers— led her from to the front lines. After the fourth or fifth trip she returned from the forward position to the dump alone.

Upon being loaded, she took off across the paddy without order or direction. Thereafter she marched the fiery gauntlet alone.

Fifty-one times Reckless delivered her load of explosives. All three weapons were kept in action; one fired so fast the barrel crystallized.

Vegas was retaken and held against murderous counterattacks. The violence of battle ebbed, Vegas was secure (until Turkish forces from the U.N.) relieved the marines.

When the fighing was over the battalion’s gratitude toward Reckless was only exceeded by their pride their war horse.

When the 5th Marines held a regimental parade honoring the heroes of the Vegas battle, Reckless passed in review with her unit. She had become a celebrated marine. Generals and colonels came to call on her; newspapermen interviewed her and she appeared on television.

None of this, however, can be said to have affected the distance between her ears. She was content to do her job, live on marine chow and, of a hot day, have a beer before turning in.

The battalion was still on the front line when the Korean cease-fire was signed. The entire unit, plus its war horse, was assembled for a final parade before returning state-side.

At a ceremony as formal as could be arranged on a wind-swept Korean field, Reckless

Reckless welcomed at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. Lt. Eric Pedersen is shown on right.

was cited for her bravery. Maj. Gen. Randolph Pate, division commander, pinned sergeant’s chevrons to her shiny new red-and-gold silk blanket. It was Sergeant Reckless now.

Her farewell citation said, “Disregard for her own safety and conduct under fire were an inspiration to the troops and in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service. Reckless’ attention and devotion to duty make her well qualified for promotion to the rank of sergeant. Her absolute dependability while on missions under fire contributed materially to the success of many battles.”

The Marines refused to leave Reckless behind in Korea. Thanks to considerable string-pulling, favor-cashing, and public support stirred by Reckless’ story in the Post, she was eventually brought to California. She spent the rest of her life as the 1^st Marine Division’s mascot at Camp Pendelton. In 1957, the Post offered this one final postscript to the Reckless’ story.

Combat experience is the best preparation for motherhood: Reckless and Fearless in 1957.

Last month Andy Geer got a phone call from Camp Pendleton, California, where Reckless had been pastured with other horses, announcing that the Sergeant, who is lady, had that day foaled a son, named Fearless.

Go to www.sgtreckless.com to learn more about this remarkable war horse, and how you can help build her a memorial monument.

A War Horse Earns Her Sergeant’s Stripes: 1953 The Saturday Evening Post

If you correctly foresee events a century before they occur, none of your contemporaries will still be alive to remember your predictions. Furthermore, the marvels you forecast—manned flight, say, or the internet—will seem inevitable and obvious after the fact, robbing you of any credit for foresight. And if you’re wrong, you’ll probably sound ridiculous.

Yet each new year, a new batch of predictors offer us their forecasts for the future. Most are promptly forgotten. One who deserves to be remembered, though, is John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., a Post writer in the early 20th Century.  Back in December 1900, he wrote his ideas about “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years” for the Post’s sister publication, the Ladies’ Home Journal.

Where he was wrong, he was very, very wrong:

A cynical view of the future from 1898, entitled "A Sunny Day in 1910."

Nicaragua (i.e. Panama) will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.

There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.

Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been practically exterminated… There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct.

A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.

A university education will be free to every man and woman.

Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes… The meal being over, the dishes used will be packed and returned to the cooking establishments where they will be washed… These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles.

But this selection is hardly fair to Watkins. Some of his predictions were only partly wrong.

Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour.

High-speed trains are traveling over 300 mph. Just not in the United States.

Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today.

This is just barely true. In 1900, work horses sold for $225 to $250. Adjusting for inflation, that price is approximately $6400, which will buy a new, low-end, import, budget car.

[The future American] will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present.

In fact, the overall life expectancy in 1900 was 47.8 years. And in 2000, it was 77.

There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century.

The figure is high, but at least Watkins was guessing in the right direction. America’s population had grown 14000% between 1800 and 1900. If that rate had continued, the total would have exceeded 1 billion in 2000. Instead, it grew just 360%, reaching 280 million at the start of the new century.

Where Watkins was correct, however, he was unusually far-sighted.

Americans will be taller by from one to two inches.

The average American male in 1900 was 66-67” tall. By 2000, the average was 69”.

Photographs will reproduce all of nature’s colors… [They will be transmitted] from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.

Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn.

Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span.

Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times. Homes will have no chimneys, because no smoke will be created within their walls.

Refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.

Fast-flying refrigerators on land and sea will bring delicious fruits from the tropics and southern temperate zone within a few days. The farmers of South America… whose seasons are directly opposite to ours, will thus supply us in winter with fresh summer foods which cannot be grown here.

There is one last peculiarity to Watkins’ article.

Every one of his predictions involved an improvement in the lives of Americans. He saw only positive change in the new century. Today’s predictors don’t see the future so optimistically, but will they see it as clearly as Watkins?

The Predictor Who Got It Right (Mostly) The Saturday Evening Post