“What country on Earth, then, did ever give birth
To such a magnanimous saint?
His acts are excel all that history tell,
And language too feeble to paint, my brave boys.

“Now, to finish my song, a full flowing bowl
I’ll quaff, and sing all the long day
And with punch and wine paint my cheeks for my saint,
And hail ev’ry First of Sweet May, my brave boys.”

~ From “The First of May, a New Song, in Praise of St. Tammany, the American Saint,” sung to the tune of “The Hounds Are All Out, &c” ~ Via St Tammany and the Origin of the Society of Tammany, by Edwin P. Kilroe, 1913

* * *

The WPA artwork above is believed to have been inspired by the figure of St. Tammany that once stood atop an 85-foot-high pole at York Road and Wood Street in Philadelphia.

In Travels in Philadelphia (1920), Christopher Morley writes:

As I turned off Callowhill street, at the oblique junction of York avenue, leaving behind the castellated turrets of a huge brewery, I came upon an interesting sight. Where Wood street cuts York avenue and Fourth street there stands a tall white flagpole, surmounted by an enormous weather-vane representing an Indian with bow and quiver, holding one arm outstretched….

That pole, which is still standing, is eighty-five feet from ground to truck. The Indian figure is nine and one-half feet high; it stretches nine feet from the rear end of the bow to the outstretched hand. The copper ball beneath it is sixteen inches in diameter. Mr. Renner says the figure is of wood, several inches thick, and sheathed in iron. He thinks that the hand alone would weigh 150 pounds. He thinks it quite remarkable that though many church steeples in the neighborhood have been struck by lightning the Indian has been unscathed. On holidays Mr. Renner runs up a large flag on the pole, twenty-one by thirty-six feet.

No sign of the Indian Pole remains today. Philadelphia historian Harry Kyriakodis writes:

I liken the mysterious Indian Pole to the Colossus of Rhodes, the huge statue of the Greek Titan Helios erected between 292 and 280 BC. That hundred foot tall work was destroyed in an earthquake after standing only 56 years, but remained (broken) on the ground for 800 years–!–for travelers to see. Yet the Indian Pole, standing on the same spot in Philadelphia for at least twice as long, is entirely and utterly gone, including all memory of it. You’d think that the final removal (or the toppling over) of a 9.5 feet tall wooden Indian figure from up high would have been recorded somewhere.

“Tammany, the tutelary saint of America, as a character stands unique,” writes Edwin Kilroe:

Much has been written concerning his virtue, prowess and achievements; and about his memory a kind and bounteous tradition has woven numberless romances which rival the tales of Heracles and Theseus and give him a place in the Indian lore of America analogous to that held by those demi-gods in ancient Greek mythology.

According to Native American legend he once fought mammoths:

The Evil One sent a great drove of mammoths and other monstrous and destructive creatures from beyond the great lakes to consume the corn and fruits of the Delawares. Again Tammany was relied upon to rid the land of this plague also. He soon found that their hides were too thick to be penetrated by arrows and that some other means must be devised to destroy them. Now these animals were in the habit of going down to the salt licks so Tammany caused many great pits to be dug which he covered over with branches of trees and shrubs completely concealing them and so these destructive creatures were all caught and slain in these traps and there it is said that their bones may still be found.

So rightly we take walrus tusks and Tammany Cocktails in hand to say:

To Tammany let well-fill’d horns go round;
His fame let ev’ry honest tongue resound.

* * *

(Images: Vintagraph * American Folk Art Museum * Florida Memory)

Rallying the Bull Moose vote in Morrisville, Vt.

A stag roars while wearing a crown of bracken during the rutting season in Richmond Park. Photographer Mark Smith says: “The deer take different strategies in the rutting season. Some pick a spot, whereas others will run around following females, hoping to set up a harem. If you’re as big as this guy, you can stay put and the does will migrate to you.”

Via the Daily Telegraph

A painting by Richard Caton Woodville (American, 1825-55).

Presidential campaigns peaked with massive late October rallies. In a mostly rural nation, political events gathered far-flung citizens who would not otherwise have met. Campaigners became showmen, aping P.T. Barnum and inventing eye-catching contrivances to draw spectators. At first, partisans favored pastoral symbols: log cabins on wheels; smoke curling up from working chimneys; or caged (and very angry) raccoons and foxes, symbolic of the Whig and Democratic Parties. With the Civil War, they turned to ornately uniformed marching clubs, bearing blazing torches reeking of turpentine. Spectators could usually smell a procession before they could see it. And there were always barrels of cider, or lager, or whiskey, or rum, a tin dipper set out as a shinning invitation to enjoy the party’s hospitality. ~ ‘Riling up the Shrewd, Wild Boys,’ Jon Grinspan, NYT

When I doodled ballplayers as a kid they looked like this guy.

The Sox wore 1936 unis versus the A’s. Jimmie Foxx lives.

With your lobster be sure to enjoy a Tammany Cocktail:

1 jigger Mount Gay Rum
1 jigger Dark Rum (e.g., Black Seal)
1 T Fresh Lemon Juice
1 T Fresh Lime Juice
Dash of sweet vermouth
1. Fill cocktail shaker with ice
2. Add ingredients.
Shake vigorously and
pour into a chilled cocktail glass.
Stir with a walrus tusk.

Image via Retronaut

Removing the modern black paint layer revealed the historic finish, earlier repairs, and bullet holes in this St. Tammany weathervane.

Fr. Gerald Beirne of the Boston Braves Historical Society examines the evidence.

“Who was Gaffney?” everyone asked. Harold Kaese wrote that he was the New York foot patrolman who turned to Tammany politics and contracting to become a millionaire several times over. He was Tammany’s Man of Mystery, a big, red-faced, healthy looking specimen, modest, quiet and retiring. Even while owner of the Braves, he was the subject of an inquiry into the awarding of lucrative construction contracts in New York. Gaffney renamed his team, the Braves, the same nickname coincidentally as Tammany Hall with the same Indian head in resplendent head dress logo.

Photo: Manager John McGraw of the Giants and Manager Mitchell of the Boston Braves greet each other before the game at the Polo Grounds opening the 1923 National League Championship season, 4/26/23. NYPL Digital Gallery

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The Buck Printing Co. sign was a Fenway Park landmark in the years before the Jumbotron scoreboard and giant Coke bottles.

A member of the family that owned the printing company comments:

“The sign was on our building at 145 Ipswich St at the corner of Landsdowne. As a kid, I used to watch the Sox from the top floor with binoculars!”

Taft 2012: A Novel
Jason Heller
Quirk Books, 320 pp, $14.95

Imagine the ghost of William Howard Taft hijacked to serve as a spokesman for the snarky secular Left. That’s what seems to be happening in the social-media campaign accompanying the new novel Taft 2012, a satire in which Taft gets caught in a time warp and emerges in the present day as a most unlikely presidential candidate.

The jolly, avuncular, corpulent Taft is the Rodney Dangerfield of presidents. If he is remembered today it is for his size — he weighed more than 300 pounds — and for coming in a resounding third as the incumbent in a three-man presidential race in 1912. (His 1908 campaign song: “Get on a Raft with Taft.”) “Big Bill” Taft, governor-general of the Philippines and secretary of war under Theodore Roosevelt, didn’t really want the presidency as much as his wife Nellie wanted it for him, but he was bitterly hurt when his friend and patron TR turned on him and became his rival, sealing his re-election defeat, to Woodrow Wilson. Taft’s true desire — happily later realized — was to be chief justice of the Supreme Court: he remarked in the 1920s, “I don’t remember that I ever was President.” He did invent the seventh-inning stretch and throwing out the first ball on Opening Day, and was part of a remarkable five-generation Ohio family political legacy that included his son, “Mister Conservative,” Senator Robert Taft. But he tends to be remembered today for being the only president ever to get stuck in the bathtub, which is why some of us maintain a soft spot for the old boy, joining Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl in the toast, “God Bless President Taft” — and welcoming the recent release of the novel Taft in 2012.

In the new book by pop-culture journalist Jason Heller, the 27th president is preparing for the inauguration of his successor, Woodrow Wilson, in 1913 when he is caught in a time warp and transported, Rip van Winkle-like, to the present day. He awakens flabbergasted — and hungry: “I will gladly grant a Cabinet position, of your choice, to the first upright citizen who brings me pudding cake and a nice Lobster Thermidor,” he declares. Taft discovers Twinkies and Wii Golf, meets his great-granddaughter, a congresswoman from Ohio, and her biracial family, becomes a media sensation, and after he is made sick by processed food manufactured by a sinister conglomerate, becomes immersed in a new campaign for the presidency, inveighing against the “foisting of unwholesome foods on the American public.”

Part Confederacy of Dunces, part Meet John Doe, this satire on today’s political and media culture is a fanciful if cartoony diversion. His grassroots supporters project their causes onto Taft, seeing him as an empty vessel to be filled with their hopes and aspirations.

In their social-media campaign to promote Taft 2012 the book’s publishers appear to be doing the same thing.

From website and Twitter and Facebook, candidate “William” holds forth on issues of the day. In his guise as blogger and tweeter, the champion of the GOP Old Guard of 1912 has become the Daily Show’s — dare we say the Daily Kos’ — idea of a common-sense independent; a Progressive, no longer a Republican; Lincoln Chafee as walrus. Determinedly non-partisan (after a decidedly liberal Democratic fashion) he tweaks Rick Santorum for wielding “the word ‘theology’ the way a thug wields a club” and “Two Bit Mitt” for not paying his fair share in taxes, and allows that this Barack Obama seems a fine fellow. He is dismayed at what has become of his old Republican Party. “My heart has been cleft in twain by this sad, bedraggled tatterdemalion that once was my beloved GOP,” he writes. He expresses the wish that the party, in his day, “a beacon of Progress,” would evolve into “a GOP that will not view the lawful Separation of Church and State to be a war on religion” (i.e., Tippecanoe and the HHS mandate, too); that will “not fear the vital and essential enlightenment of Science” (i.e., there’ll be a hot time for embryonic stem cell research tonight); and that “will not sanctimoniously preach fiscal restraint while allowing corporations and the wealthy to evade their fair responsibilities” (i.e., never mind your Lobster Thermidor; eat the rich).

Of course he ardently champions a “woman’s reproductive choice” — it not having taken long for him to embrace the sanitized euphemism favored in NARAL talking points. “The attacks on reproductive choice—both contraception and abortion—have been fervent of late,” he declares. “Granted, I have been asleep for a century, so my knowledge of the current situation had to come from books, colleagues, and the Internet. But it seems to be that this issue was decided by the Supreme Court, definitively, forty years ago.

“Allow me to make my position clear: Should the American people grant me the honor of a second term as President this November, I will uphold Roe v. Wade. Furthermore, I will defend it passionately against all those who would seek to curtail it… [U]ltimately, our own conscience must dictate the course of our moral current. In that light, the issue becomes simple. A woman’s body is her own. I would not ask her to surrender that sovereignty any more than I would ask her to dial back the clock a hundred years and relinquish her right to vote.

“This stance may not make me popular among certain segments of my following. So be it. I have been chastised for my inclusive faith and progressive beliefs before. The cause of progress is larger than me, or any one of us. And it is certainly larger than those certain stunted souls who would forge fresh chains for the women of America.”

You know, I can’t help but think Old Bill is being ill-used here, dragooned by the folks in the publishing house’s marketing department as a soldier in the culture war, to proclaim — in the name of independent-minded common sense — the conventional wisdom of the Secular Left. This says more about their politics and assumptions than Taft’s.

Not that the real Taft’s record doesn’t provide some fodder for the Planned Parenthood-inclined. As a Supreme Court justice in the 1920s he did join with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis in a majority opinion upholding compulsory sterilization of the “unfit.” Eugenics is not a pro-life virtue.

That said, being a cad about dispensing with unplanned pregnancies was frowned upon in those days. Theodore Roosevelt, paragon of the Progressive movement, described in his autobiography how as governor of New York he had refused pardons to men who had seduced girls and induced them to commit abortions. Such requests for leniency made him angry, he wrote; indeed, in one such case, he had responded to the petitioners that he “extremely regretted” it was not in his power to increase the sentence.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that Taft, like TR, would be aghast at the likes of Sandra Fluke. Nonetheless, on his blog, our good-hearted blimp of an ex-president who is scandalized by corporate malfeasance in the processing of food embraces as Progress an industry that takes the lives of more than a million unborn children a year in the United States.

While we cannot say with certainty how a person from a century ago would react to modern developments, I am willing to bet that William Howard Taft, awakening in our time, would find the abortion license shocking. How many generations does it take to become inured to the abhorrent? Can it happen overnight?

If Bill Taft’s time machine pointed him in the direction of 1857, and they had the Internet back then, would he be tweeting favorably on the Dred Scott decision as settled law — the disregard for another’s personhood in the name of one’s own liberty being at the heart of defenses of both slavery and “reproductive choice”?

As a fan of one our most overlooked and under-appreciated presidents, whose heart was as big as his avoirdupois, I would like to think that he would not. At least I would hope he would not. Am I projecting my own beliefs onto this imaginary Taft? Perhaps.

True conservatism celebrates human complexity and quirkiness, which our man Taft had in spades, and which thus makes him a conservative’s delight. Beware those who approach the making of government with a cookbook, the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott warned. That goes double for the social-media people who have given this latter-day incarnation of the gourmand Taft his recipe book.