Growing up in the last Century: WASHINGTON IN THE 1970s; FIRST TASTE OF CAPITOL HILL

        

US Capitol, circa 1970.

1973 had been a big, messy, turbulent year in my life.  That January, I’d gone to Rome, Italy, for a study abroad semester, then promptly dropped out of school.  I spent the next six months floundering.  I landed first in Israel where I lived mostly on a beach in Eilat with hippies and other dropouts, doing day labor, putting my parents through purgatory.  Back home, I managed to graduate college (Brown University) without showing up, relying on old Advance Placement credits and snubbing my own graduation ceremony. 

Growing up in the last Century: DAD'S POLITICAL CAREER

 

 

One day shortly before my father passed away almost 30 years ago, in late 1994 at age 86, he started talking to me about his brief career in politics back in the 1930s.  It was an old story.  My sisters and I knew bits and pieces.  Dad had been a 30-year-old struggling lawyer in Brooklyn back then, had no background in politics, no money, the wrong personality (bookish and introverted like me), and no friends in high places.  Still, he decided to throw his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination for a seat in the New York State Assembly.  

Growing Up in the Last Century-- MY FIRST TASTE OF POLITICS: GETTING KICKED OUT OF THE POLLS BY THE ALBANY MACHINE, June 1972

        

Albany's long-time Mayor Erastus Corning with Democratic Party Chairman Dan O'Connell (with hat), circa 1970.

        This story is complicated, so bear with me.

        I was just a 20 year-old college kid when I got my first real bloody nose – figurative and almost very literal – in the political world.  Welcome to Albany, New York, my hometown (scenic aerial photo above), back in the days of the Democratic machine, party boss Daniel P. O’Connell, and mayor-for-life Erastus Corning.

Growing Up in the Last Century: TEAR-GASSED in WASHINGTON, D.C., May 1970

  

       I was just 18 years old, a college freshman, on May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen in Ohio opened fire and killed four student protestors at Kent State University.  Fifty years later, I still remember the looks on peoples’ faces as news of the shootings spread like lightning across my own college campus a thousand miles away at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Boss Tweed Audiobook : The Images and a five minute sample

  

   Click here for latest reviews of Trotsky in New York,1917:

 

Grisha Ziv on Trotsky, 1917, translated from original Russian

                                       

 Trotsky, right, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, standing, and Ziv, front, circa 1898.

Coverage of Trotsky's arrival in New York, from the German and Yiddish press

 

Trotsky's take on the Carnegie Hall anti-war meeting, February 8, 1917, from the original Russian

 

A new Crimean War? Really?

As a historian watching Vladimir Putin's Russia flout international law to send troops into Crimea – part of the separate country of Ukraine – it is truly hard not to marvel.  Another Crimean War?  Really?  Why would anyone want to repeat that particular horror?

Yiddish Theater: Don't Forget Molly Picon

Yiddish is not beautiful.  Harsh and gutteral, it makes you twist your face to get the sounds out. Many of its words are bastardized from German, Slavic, Polish, Hebrew, English, French, you name it.  And worse, Yiddish today is rapidly dying.  Millions of people spoke it  a few decades ago-- the Jewish national tongue -- but today it has grown largely irrelevant.  American Jews speak English, French speak French, and Israelis speak Hebrew.  Even the old Jewish Daily Forward, once the largest Yiddish-language newspaper in the world, still survives but now publishes also in English.

Guest Post: David Taylor on Anzia Yezierska, Part II

Anzia Yerierska as a teenager in 1910s New York.

Click here for Part I on Anzia’s rise, novels, films, and craft.

Anzia Yezierska paid a price for being a renegade.  During the Depression, when popular tastes turned against stories about immigrants, her career guttered, and she had few reserves in terms of money and contacts to keep her afloat.  But even down and out, she nurtured her rebel side.

Guest Blog: David Taylor on Anzia Yezierska, America's Immigrant "Hungry Heart" of the 1920s

Publicity photo of Anzia Yezierska from Goldwyn studio period, circa 1922.

Click here for Part II on Anzia, her legacy on Broadway, on more. 

You’ve probably never heard of Anzia Yezierska.  But not too long ago, this foreign-sounding name was the toast of New York publishing and Hollywood films.  Anzia Yezierska got attention because she wrote in a voice that demanded it.  She spoke not only for the flood of new immigrants flooding New York’s lower East Side in the early 1900s – Jews, Poles, Italians, and the ethnic strangers to Old America – but also for women carving out a strong new role.

More from Alice Longworth's scrapbook.

German newspaper clip shows Alice socializing with ladies aboard the steamer Schiffes in 1905. 

Click here for

  -- Alice and Nick Longworth engagement photos from the scrapbook

  -- Luck in Politics?  Ask Nick Longworth.

As promised, today a few more clippings from the wonderful overstuffed scrapbook of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, irrepressible oldest daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt -- a fantastic find at the Manuscript Room of the Library of Congress.  

Alice Roosevelt and Nick Longworth: The actual engagement photos

Alice wasn't shy in saving photos of herself.  This spread filled two full pages of the oversized scrapbook.  

-- Click here for post on Lucky Nick Longworth

It's easy to like Alice Roosevelt Longworth, oldest daughter of TR and owner of Washington, D.C.’s sharpest tongue for 96 years (1884-1980).  Among others she’s credited with--

•                "If you have nothing nice to say about anyone, come here and sit by me."

Luck in politics? Ask Nick Longworth (R-Ohio), Speaker of the House,1925-1931.

Page from 1887 Longworth scrapbook, Manuscript Room, Library of Congress.

Click here for
    --  Alice and Nick's engagement photos
    -- More photos from Alice Longworth's scrapbook

"I'd rather be lucky than good."  That's what NY Yankee pitching ace "Lefty" (Vernon Louis) Gomez famously said about baseball back in the 1930s, but it goes just as well with politics.  And when a politician is both lucky and good, it takes real skill to see it and recognize which is which.

Health food claims? Nothing new here.





From the New York City's Jewish Daily News, July 12, 1926.

"Zeit Gezunt!" says the headline.  "Be Healthy!"

This quarter-page ad for the "Natural Health Food Store" comes from the July 1926 Jewish Daily News, a favorite among Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants on New York's crowded lower East Side back then, almost 90 years ago.  But the ad could have come from any health food store, then or now.  People have always wanted to eat well, eat healthy, eat smart.  But back then, long before claims were checked by any government agency like the US Food and Drug Administration, the chance of being fooled by smooth-talking nonsense was much greater.

FAMILY HISTORY: Anniversary- One hundred years in America.



Copy of the original ship's manifest.  Our family is listed at lines ten through fourteen.  From Ancestry.com.

I can't let this September go without marking an anniversary for my own family.  It was exactly one hundred years ago this month that my father, Bill Ackerman, landed in America.  My mother would come a few years later, in 1926, and they would meet on the lower East Side of NYC.  The rest, as they say, is history.

GUEST BLOG: Civil War- Antietam 1862 and its terrible general, George B. McClellan

Oil painting of General George Brinton McClellan, from a photograph by Matthew Brady.

  

With all attention these days on the national political campaign, let's not forget another big item this month, the 150th anniversary of Antietam, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history.  With 23,000 casualties, Antietam marked a turning point in the Civil War, prompting President Abraham Lincoln to move ahead with his Emancipation Proclamation while also ending the military career of the Union's controversial general, George Brinton McClellan.  McClellan's refusal to chase the enemy, either before or after the battle, finally would led Lincoln to take away his command.

Guest Photo: Roger Staubach and J. Edgar Hoover

To celebrate the return of NFL football this week, our friend Sally Mott Freeman has given us this gem of a photo showing none less that Roger Staubach, star quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys during the 1970s, standing with J. Edgar Hoover, Director-for-Life of the FBI.  The man wearing glasses on the left is Sally's Dad,  then-retired Navy Rear Admiral William C. Mott, who happened to be the one who brought them together.