The Annals of Newberry XV

June 2, 2015 in Newberry, Quakers, Slavery No Comments Tags: Newberry, Quakers, slavery

Quakers were given that nickname because of their manifestations of movements of the Spirit, much like Pentecostals today. Chief Justice O’Neall (who was descended from Quakers) recounts an event motivated by a charismatic, in the strict sense, preacher. The departure of Quakers from Newberry had a religious cause, in a double sense.

First of all, Quakers developed an antipathy to slavery:

In the beginning, Friends were slave owners in South Carolina. They, however, soon set their face against it, and in their peculiar language, they have uniformly borne their testimony against the institution of slavery, as irreligious. Such of their members as refused to emancipate their slaves, when emancipation was practicable in this State, they disowned.

Note the remark about “when it was practicable.” As in New York, there were restrictions on emancipation, and they increased in the South.

Then a motion of the Spirit led to an exodus.

Between 1800 and 1840, a celebrated Quaker preacher, Zachary Dicks, passed through South Carolina. He was thought to have also the gift of prophecy. The massacres of San Domingo were then fresh. He warned friends to come out from slavery. He told them if they did not their fate would be that of the slaughtered Islanders. This produced in a short time a panic, and removals to Ohio commenced, and by 1807 the Quaker settlement had, in a great degree, changed its population.

Newberry thus lost, from a foolish panic and a superstitious fear of an institution [i.e., slavery], which never harmed them or any other body of people, a very valuable portion of its white population.

O’Neall did not include Africans in the category of “people.” Although there was never a general slave revolt, whites lived in constant fear of it, and the events of 1861-1865 were not pleasant for the inhabitants of Newberry. Those who had moved to Ohio were far better off.

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William Jay Schieffelin, The Straightest of Arrows

June 1, 2015 in Uncategorized 2 Comments Tags: Genealogy

William Jay Schieffelin (1866-1955) was the great great grandson of Jacob Schieffelin and of Hannah Lawrence, the poetess. William was therefore my wife’s fourth cousin, twice removed. As his middle name indicates, he was also the great great grandson of John Jay. William married Maria Louisa Vanderbilt Shephard (1870-1948), the daughter of Elliott Fitch Shephard and Margaret Louis Vanderbilt. The Vanderbilt fortune and the Schieffelin fortune combined nicely to support of life of both luxury and philanthropy.

William Jay Schieffelin

Maria Louisa Shepard

The marriage of William Jay and Maria Louisa on February 5, 1891 was a marvel of the Gilded Age.

It was one of the premier social events of the year. Before the ceremony, 600 guests attended a wedding breakfast in the two picture galleries of William Vanderbilt’s double mansion. Among the astonishing array of wedding gifts were a silver dinner service for twenty-four, given by Mrs. William Vanderbilt; two silver dishes sent by President Benjamin Harrison and the First Lady; and “a completely-furnished house, the gift of the bride’s mother,” as reported in The Times.

The house was on 57^th street, just west of Fifth Avenue.

But commerce encroached, and Mrs. Shepard purchased a double lot at 5 and 7 East 66^th St, next door to the former home of Ulysses S. Grant. She chose as architect Richard Howland Hunt, the son of Richard Morris Hunt. He designed a Parisian townhouse for the young couple.

Here are some photographs of the house when the Schieffelins occupied it with their eight children.

The Lotus Club moved in in 1947, and here are some of the rooms as they are today.

As would be expected, the house was the scene of lavish entertainments for the cream of New York’s social circles. When, for instance, on December 5, 1909 Mrs. Schieffelin gave a tea dance to introduce her daughter, Louise Vanderbilt Schieffelin to polite society, she was assisted by her sister, Mrs. Ernesto Fabbri, Mrs. James Henry Hammond and her daughter Emily Sloane Hammond, Cornelia Vanderbilt and Mrs. J. Cameron Clark.

The Schieffelins had a summer place, Islecote House, at Pointe d’Acadie on the Vanderbilt estate in Bar Harbor. The house was designed (1902) by Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, nephew of the poet. Ten horses were stabled there so the whole family could ride.

Islecote House

One of Bar Harbor’s favorite sights was the entire Schieffelin family riding out the gate on horseback, each young Schiefflin on a successively smaller horse, with the youngest bringing up the rear on a pony.

The house and the rest of the Vanderbilt estate was sold in 1921 and torn down in 1940

But then William Jay bought Tranquility Farm, now Schieffelin Point, away from the Bar Harbor social scene.

The Schieffelin Family

In 1925 the Schieffelins moved to an apartment at 620 Park Avenue.

660 Park Avenue

But life was not all tea dances and rides in Bar Harbor.

William Jay Schieffelin, Republican, Christian, Reformer,

received his Ph.B. from the Columbia School of Mines, phi beta kappa
received his Ph.D. with honors in chemistry from Munich
was president of Schieffein and Co,
was president of the National Wholesale Druggists Association
was vice-president of the American Pharmaceutical Association
was vestryman of St. George’s Church
was manager of the American Bible Society
was president of the American Church Missionary Society
was president of the Laity League
was chairman of the Social Service Committee of the Men and Religion Forward Movement
was president of he American Mission to Lepers
was president of the Huguenot Society of America
was chairman of the Board of Trustees of Hampton Institute
was chairman of the Board of Trustees of Tuskegee
was president of the Armstrong Association
was chairman of the Defense Committee for the Scottsboro Boys
was Colonel of the 369^th Harlem regiment
was chairman of the Colored Men’s Department, YMCA
was president of the Citizens Union
was organizer of he Committee of One Thousand that drove Mayor Jimmy Walker from office
was vice president of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage
was president of the Serbian Child Welfare Association
was chairman of the Volunteer Christian Committee to Boycott Nazi Germany
etc. etc. etc.

Where to begin?

The Businessman

The history of Schieffelin and Co. was covered in the blog on the founder, Jacob Schieffelin. William Jay testified before a Congressional Committee and gave full-page interviews about the problem of addictive substances. He was asked why it was such a large problem in America. He responded:

The drug business is a very large industry. I suppose that half of it, in money received, comes from patent medicines. Americans believe in and practice self-medication. Some patent medicines, when in liquid form, contain alcohol. Others contain narcotics. Previous to the enactment of the pure food and drugs act of June 30, 1906, the manufacturers of parent medicines were not required to print on their labels the ingredients of their preparations.

But the 1906 law changed that and took the onus off of druggists to warn customers.

The law compels the manufacturer to print the habit-forming ingredients on every bottle of his medicine. If a customer can read he knows what he is taking. The publicity required by law has driven certain catarrh cures in which there is cocaine out of the market. Self-medication in the past, through ignorance, mostly, caused the use of so many habit-forming drugs as to become a serious danger to the country.

Although William Jay did not believe cannabis was as dangerous as cocaine he thought it might as well be classified with cocaine, where it remains to this day, with endless complications for law enforcement and conflict of laws.

The Churchman

William Jay was an active Episcopalian, vestryman at St. George’s Church. He was a proponent of the Social Gospel, the movement that proclaimed that Christians were supposed to be the light of the nations and help establish the Kingdom by ridding the earth of evils. The Social Gospel was especially directed to men, who did not see much point in pious exercises, but could be told that an active role in combatting evil was an expression of masculinity. That is why William was active in the Men and Religion Forward Movement. The Episcopal Church more than any other church was affected by this Movement and had the greatest increase in the percentage of men in its congregations.

The Soldier

During the Spanish American War William was a captain and adjutant in the Twelfth Regiment of the National Guard.

In the First World War he was a colonel of the 369^th Infantry, the Fifteenth Regiment, a “colored” unit. Afro-American units had white officers. Black men wanted to fight, because they wanted to prove they were men, as masculine as the whites who regarded themselves as superior.

The Regiment consisted of African-Americans and African Puerto Ricans and was known for being the first African-American regiment to serve with the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. Before the 15th New York National Guard Regiment was formed, any African American that wanted to fight in the war either had to enlist in the French or Canadian armies. The regiment was nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters, the Black Rattlers and the Men of Bronze, which was given to the regiment by the French. The nickname “Hell Fighters” was given to them by the Germans due to their toughness and that they never lost a man through capture, lost a trench or a foot of ground to the enemy. The “Harlem Hellfighters” were the first all black regiment that helped change the American public’s opinion on African American soldiers and helped pave the way for future African American soldiers.

White American soldiers refused to fight with this unit, so it was assigned to the French, who were delighted to have it.

Two Medals of Honor and many Distinguished Service Crosses were awarded to members of the regiment. The most celebrated man in the 369th was Pvt. Henry Lincoln Johnson, a former Albany, New York, rail station porter, who earned the nickname “Black Death” for his actions in combat in France. In May 1918 Johnson and Pvt. Needham Roberts fought off a 24-man German patrol, though both were severely wounded. After they expended their ammunition, Roberts used his rifle as a club and Johnson battled with a bolo knife. Reports suggest that Johnson killed at least four German soldiers and might have wounded 30 others. Usually black achievements and valor went unnoticed, despite that fact over 100 men from the 369th were presented with American and/or French medals. Among those honors Johnson was the first American to receive the Croix de Guerre awarded by the French government. This award signifies extraordinary valor. By the end of the war, 171 members of the 369th were awarded the Legion of Honor or the Croix de Guerre.

Recipients of the Croix de Guerre

The Lincoln Republican

William Jay was a Republican of the school of Lincoln and strongly advocated the rights and advancement of Afro-American citizens.

William Jay was the chairman of the board of trustees of Tuskegee and of Hampton Institute; he was also president of the Armstrong association in New York, named after General Armstrong, founder of Hampton Institute.

William Jay worked closely with Booker T. Washington in raising funds for the colleges. In 1906 William Jay presided over a fund-raising meeting at Carnegie Hall. The prime attraction was Mark Twain, who knew his audience and entertained them with a barbed wit directed at the type of wealthy New Yorker who was likely to be in the audience:

“There being nothing to explain, nothing to refute, nothing to excuse, there is nothing left for me to do, now, but resume my natural trade – which is, teaching. At Tuskegee they thoroughly ground the student in the Christian code of morals; they instill into him the indisputable truth that this is the highest and best of all systems of morals; that the nation’s greatness, its strength, and its repute among the other nations, is the product of that system; that it is the foundation upon which rests the American character; that whatever is commendable, whatever is valuable in the individual American’s character is the flower and fruit of that seed.

“They teach him that this is true in every case, whether the man be a professing Christian or an unbeliever; for we have none but the Christian code of morals, and every individual is under its character-building powerful influence and dominion from the cradle to the grave; he breathes it in with his breath, it is in his blood and bone, it is the web and woof and fibre of his mental and spiritual heredities and ineradicable. And so, every born American among the eighty millions, let his creed or destitution of creed be what it may, is indisputably a Christian to this degree – that his moral constitution is Christian.

Two Codes of Morals

“All this is true, and no student will leave Tuskegee ignorant of it. Then what will he lack, under this head? What is there for me to teach him, under this head, that he may possibly not acquire there, or may acquire in a not sufficiently emphasized form? Why, this large fact, this important fact – that there are two separate and distinct kinds of Christian morals; so separate, so distinct, so unrelated, that they are no more kin to each other than are archangels and politicians. The one kind is Christian private morals, the other is Christian public morals.

“The loyal observance of Christian private morals has made this nation what it is – a clean and upright people in its private domestic life, an honest and honorable people in its private commercial life; no alien nation can claim superiority over it in these regards, no critic, foreign or domestic, can challenge the validity of this truth. During 363 days in the year the American citizen is true to his Christian private morals, and keeps undefiled the nation’s character at its best and highest; then in the other two days of the year he leaves his Christian private morals at home, and carries his Christian public morals to the tax office and the polls, and does the best he can to damage and undo his whole year’s faithful and righteous worth.y.

“Without a blush he will vote for an unclean boss if that boss is his party’s Moses, without compunction he will vote against the best man in the whole land if he is on the other ticket. Every year, in a number of cities and states, he helps to put corrupt men in office, every year he helps to extend the corruption wider and wider; year after year he goes on gradually rotting the country’s political life; whereas if he would but throw away his Christian public morals, and carry his Christian private morals to the polls, he could promptly purify the public service and make the possession of office a high and honorable distinction and one to be coveted by the very best men the country could furnish. But now – well, now he contemplates his unpatriotic work and sighs, and grieves, and blames every man but the right one – which is himself.

“Once a year he lays aside his Christian private morals and hires a ferry boat and piles up his bonds in a warehouse in New Jersey for three days, and gets out his Christian public morals and goes to the tax office and holds up his hand and swears he wishes he may never-never if he’s got a cent in the world, so help him! The next day the list appears in the papers – a column and a quarter of names, in fine print, and every man in the list a billionaire and a member of a couple of churches.

“I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal intercourse with the whole of them. They never miss a sermon when they are so as to be around, and they never miss swearing-off day, whether they are so as to be around or not. The innocent man can not remain innocent in the disintegrating atmosphere of this thing. I used to be an honest man. I am crumbling. No – I have crumbled. When they assessed me at $75,000 a fortnight ago, I went out and tried to borrow the money, and couldn’t; then when I found they were letting a whole crop of millionaires live in New York at a third of the price they were charging me, I was hurt, I was indignant, and said: ‘This is the last feather! I am not going to run this town all by myself.’ In that moment – in that memorable moment – I began to crumble.

Mark Twain Disintegrates

“In fifteen minutes the disintegration was complete. In fifteen minutes I was become just a mere moral sand pile; and I lifted up my hand along with those seasoned and experienced deacons, and swore off every rag of personal property I’ve got in the world, clear down to cork leg, glass eye, and what is left of my wig.

“Those tax officers were moved; they were profoundly moved. They had long been accustomed to seeing hardened old grafters act like that, and they could endure the spectacle; but they were expecting better things of me, a chartered professional moralist, and they were saddened. I fell visibly in their respect and esteem, and I should have fallen in my own, except that I had already struck bottom, and there wasn’t any place to fall to.

William Jay commented on “progress” in racial relationships (and this in 1925!)

As an example of the improved racial situation Dr. Schieffelin pointed out that the lynching of negroes in the country decreased 50 percent during the past year.

In 1932 William Jay became the chairman of the defense committee for the Scottsboro Boys.

The Scottsboro Boys were nine African-American teenagers accused in Alabama of raping two White American women on a train in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, a frameup, all-white juries, rushed trials, and disruptive mobs. It is frequently cited as an example of an overall miscarriage of justice in the United States legal system.

On March 25, 1931, several people were hoboing on a freight train traveling between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee. Several white teenagers jumped off the train and reported to the sheriff that they had been attacked by a group of African-American teenagers. The sheriff deputized a posse comitatus, stopped and searched the train at Paint Rock, Alabama and arrested the African-Americans. Two young white women also got off the train and accused the African-American teenagers of rape. The case was first heard in Scottsboro, Alabama, in three rushed trials, in which the defendants received poor legal representation. All but twelve-year-old Roy Wright were convicted of rape and sentenced to death, the common sentence in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women, even though there was medical evidence to suggest that they had not committed the crime.

With help from the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the case was appealed. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed seven of the eight convictions, and granted thirteen-year-old Eugene Williams a new trial because he was a minor. Chief Justice John C. Anderson dissented, ruling that the defendants had been denied an impartial jury, fair trial, fair sentencing, and effective counsel. While waiting for their trials, eight of the nine defendants were held in Kilby Prison. The cases were twice appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which led to landmark decisions on the conduct of trials. In Powell v. Alabama (1932), it ordered new trials.

The case was returned to the lower court and the judge allowed a change of venue, moving the retrials to Decatur, Alabama. Judge Horton was appointed. During the retrials, one of the alleged victims admitted fabricating the rape story and asserted that none of the Scottsboro Boys touched either of the white women. The jury found the defendants guilty, but the judge set aside the verdict and granted a new trial.

The judge was replaced and the case tried under a more biased judge, whose rulings went against the defense. For the third time a jury—now with one African-American member—returned a third guilty verdict. The case returned to the US Supreme Court on appeal. It ruled that African-Americans had to be included on juries, and ordered retrials.^[4] Charges were finally dropped for four of the nine defendants. Sentences for the rest ranged from 75 years to death. All but two served prison sentences. One was shot in prison by a guard and permanently disabled. Two escaped, were later charged with other crimes, convicted, and sent back to prison. Clarence Norris, the oldest defendant and the only one sentenced to death, “jumped parole” in 1946 and went into hiding. He was found in 1976 and pardoned by Governor George Wallace, by which time the case had been thoroughly analyzed and shown to be an injustice. Norris later wrote a book about his experiences. The last surviving defendant died in 1989.

The Political Reformer

William Jay became the Civil Service Commissioner in 1896.

William Jay became vice present of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, although he was not as rigid as Comstock or Sumner. William Jay rejected tactics of entrapment, such as persuading a book dealer to sell a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He also persuaded Sumner to tolerate some writings on birth control. In a speech to Italian Presbyterians about the Men and Religion Forward Movement, William Jay said

If we are really going to follow the teachings of Christ and become “fishers of men,” we must go out into the world and mingle in friendly fashion with all those we come in contact with…There are many people already in the Church who don’t believe in playing cards, using tobacco, or going to the theater. But if doing these things is going to enable me to bring people who now do them into the Church I am going to do them

The men of his country are beginning to realize that they have cared too much about comfort and too little about character in the past. If you are going to join our movement, study the conditions in your district, prevent immorality, stop the bad moving picture shows, co-operate with the officers of the law, and never fail to vote.

He organized the Citizens’ Union

to secure the nomination and election of men who are not only honest and capable, but in fact represent the real sentiments of their constituencies.

William Jay grew more and more disgusted with the corruption of the Jimmy Walker administration in New York. There were the usual financial irregularities, which New York was not shocked by, but it learned that run of the mill corruption could lead to murder. He organized the Committee of a Thousand which eventually got rid of Jimmy Walker.

Increasing social unrest led to investigations into corruption within his administration, and he was eventually forced to testify before the investigative committee of Judge Samuel Seabury, the Seabury Commission (also known as the Hofstadter Committee). Walker caused his own downfall by accepting large sums of money from businessmen looking for municipal contracts.

One surprise witness in the Seabury investigation was Vivian Gordon. She informed the investigators that women were falsely arrested and accused of prostitution by the New York City Police Department. For this, the police officers were given more money in their paychecks. After her testimony, Vivian Gordon was suspiciously found strangled to death in a park in the Bronx. This event demonstrated to New Yorkers that corruption could lead to terrible consequences and that Walker might ultimately, in some way, be responsible for her death.

Mayor Jimmy Walker

With New York City appearing as a symbol of corruption under Mayor Walker, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt knew he had to do something about Walker and his administration. Knowing that the State’s constitution could allow an elected mayor to be removed from office, Roosevelt felt compelled to act on this. But if he did this, he risked losing Tammany Hall’s support for the Democratic nomination. On the other hand, if Roosevelt did nothing, or let Walker off easy, the national newspapers would consider him weak.

Facing pressure from Governor Roosevelt, Walker eluded questions about his personal bank accounts, stating instead that the money he received were “beneficences” and not bribes. He delayed any personal appearances until after Roosevelt’s nomination for President of the U.S. was secured. It was at that time that the embattled mayor could fight no longer. Months from his national election, Roosevelt decided that he must remove Walker from office. Walker agreed and resigned on September 1, 1932, and went on a grand tour of Europe with Betty Compton, his Ziegfeld girl. Walker stayed in Europe until the danger of criminal prosecution appeared remote. There, he married Compton.

___________________

William Jay Schieffelin was without doubt a superior man. His intellect was demonstrated by his attaining a Ph. D. in Chemistry from Munich, which meant that he was not simply a brilliant chemist, and fluent in German, but fluent in scientific German. His energy, dedication, and zeal were inexhaustible, and he devoted much of it to helping the downtrodden.

Reformers can be tedious, and occasionally William Jay let slip what he thought of us lesser mortals, white and black:

The bad Southerner, the poor white trash, complain that they cannot get work owing to the competition of educated colored men…

The negro is not economically fitted to be a city dweller. His impulsive nature, for one thing, unfits him to meet the excitement and strain of city life.

But his Christianity preserved him from the dark folly of eugenics, which some members of his extended family fell into.

The morality of society, like any system, is subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy. Any system, unless it receives energy from outside, tends to disorganization and chaos. William Jay was one of the people who put lots of moral energy back into the system. They are not easy to live with, but the world goes to hell without them.

Maria Louisa died on August 18, 1948; William Jay died on April 29, 1955. They are buried in the Schieffelin Mausoleum in the uptown Trinity Churchyard.

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Men Adrift

May 29, 2015 in Men in church No Comments Tags: education, men, men and religion, Unemployment

The Economist has a feature article on the state of blue collar men in developed countries: Men Adrift. It is good in its statement of facts.

Blue collar men are sinking in the economic scale and are becoming unemployable and unmarriageable. Their future in the new economy does not look good.

Although men dominate at the top of society, they also dominate at the bottom, which is far larger. There are a far more male prisoners than there are male CEO’s.

Men still dominate risky occupations such as roofer and taxi-driver, and jobs that require long stints away from home, such as trucker and oil-rig worker. And, other things being equal, dirty, dangerous and inconvenient jobs pay better than safe, clean ones. But the real money is in brain work, and here many men are lagging behind. Women outnumber them on university campuses in every region bar South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In the OECD men earn only 42% of degrees. Teenage boys in rich countries are 50% more likely than girls to flunk all three basic subjects in school: maths, reading and science.

Men are either unemployed or are simply not there.

For every 100 African-American women aged 25-54 who are not behind bars, there are only 83 men of the same age at liberty. In some American inner cities there are only 50 black men with jobs for every 100 black women.

This situation is similar among other groups, if not as extreme.

The Economist admits that

Single motherhood is much better than living with an abusive partner. But the chronic instability of low-income families hurts women, children and men. The poverty rate for single-mother families in America is 31%, nearly three times the national norm. Children who grow up in broken families do worse in school, earn less as adults and find it harder to form stable families of their own. Boys are worse affected than girls, perhaps because they typically grow up without a father as a role model. Thus the problems of marginalised men tumble on down the generations.

The Economist holds Sweden up as an egalitarian model, but admits that Swedish men are not very happy with this situation and that Swedish boys have the hardest time in school of all the countries surveyed.

Disaffected men are attracted to parties of the far right and far left.

The Economist’s solution: men should become more like women.

The Economist, resolutely secular, completely ignores the role of religion.

One of the main motives for men to become a father involved with his family (instead of a stud service) is religious. The Jews alone in the ancient Near East revered the father, and fatherhood remained central to Orthodox Judaism throughout the ages. Christianity and Islam both inherited that centrality. Paul’s epistles tell men they should be loving, affectionate, sacrificial husbands and fathers.

The Reformation and the Counter Reformation both emphasized the role of the father in the family. Today Evangelical Protestantism does the best job of convincing men to be affectionate, involved fathers, what Wilcox calls soft patriarchy: spiritual headship.

The Pew poll on religion showed that the gender situation is the same in the US as other surveys showed in England. The type of person most likely to be involved in church is a middle class, older woman; the type of person least involved was a young, uneducated man.

No doubt economic factors play a role; but they too are affected by religion. Men were given a privileged position in the economy so that they could head and support a family.

Mainline Protestant churches and the Catholic Church show little interest in attracting men, especially young men, especially poor young men. The constituency of these churches is women, and these churches try to keep this constituency happy. Men are an afterthought at best, or even actively discouraged.

When I was in Montreal once about a conference on fatherhood, a sociologist (a woman) presented the data on the increase in suicides among young men in both Canada and other developed countries. Gregory Baum, the liberal theologian, rose from the audience audience to respond; he asked why we wear wasting our time on such a topic, when the real, urgent, overwhelmingly important problem was that there was a glass ceiling in universities that prevented women assistant professors from rising to full professorships, especially in theology – that is what we should be discussing. That seems to be indicative of the attitude of liberal Christians to discussions of male problems.

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William Effingham Lawrence, Thespian

May 28, 2015 in Lawrence Family No Comments Tags: Genealogy, William Effingham Lawrence. Intolerance

William Effingham Lawrence

William Effingham Lawrence ( August 22, 1896 – November 28, 1947) was the son of James Armitage Lawrence and Ida Taber, the nephew of William Van Duzer Lawrence (the founder of Sarah Lawrence College), and the grandson of the wife of the 3rd cousin 5 times removed of my wife.

He also went by the names W. E. Lawrence, Babe Lawrence, L. W. Lawrence, W. A. Lawrence, W. E. ‘Babe’ Lawrence. You will note the absence of Effingham. He also gave up “Babe” Lawrence after 1924, because “”Babe” Lawrence (no relation) had committed a spectacular murder and was in the headlines.

W. E. appeared in 120 films, mostly silent, the most famous of which is W. G. Griffith’s Intolerance, in which he played Henry of Navarre.

Dead Reckoning(1947) as Stewart .
Cigarette Girl(1947) as Doorman .
The Man Who Dared(1946) as Jury foreman .
Tonight and Every Night(1945) as Waiter .
The Fighting Guardsman(1945) as Innkeeper .
The Black Parachute(1944) as Doctor .
West of Carson City(1940) as Card man .
Within the Law(1939) as District Attorney .
It’s a Wonderful World(1939) as Guest .
Broadway Serenade(1939) as Burke .
Frontier Town(1938) as Clem Brooks .
The Rage of Paris(1938) as Steward/Doorman .
Black Aces(1937) as Boyd Loomis .
I’ll Love You Always(1935) as Furniture salesman .
Unknown Woman(1935) as Harmon .
She Couldn’t Take It(1935) as Photographer .
The Whole Town’s Talking(1935) as Customer .
Fighting Youth(1935) as Detective .
Lady by Choice(1934) as .
Broadway Bill(1934) as .
Blind Date(1934) as Patron .
Coming Out Party(1934) as .
I’ll Fix It(1934) as .
Best of Enemies(1933) as August .
Hell Bound(1931) as Ham .
The Costello Case(1930) as Babe .
Hard Boiled(1926) as Gordon Andrews .
A Man Four-Square(1926) as Jim Clanton .
The Whispered Name(1924) as Robert Gordon .
The Reckless Age(1924) as John Paddock .
The Law Forbids(1924) as Monte Hanley .
Cameo Kirby(1923) as Tom Randall .
The Thrill Chaser(1923) as Prince Ahmed .
Blinky(1923) as Lieutenant Rawkins .
A Front Page Story(1922) as Don Coates .
They Like ‘Em Rough(1922) as Richard Wells, Jr. .
Forget-Me-Not(1922) as .
Blood and Sand(1922) as Fuentes .
The Love Gambler(1922) as Tom Gould .
Fightin’ Mad(1921) as Francisco Lazaro .
The Kiss(1921) as Audre Baldarama .
Morals(1921) as Sebastian Pasquale .
Habit(1921) as John Marshall .
Ducks and Drakes(1921) as Tom Hazzard .
The Snob(1921) as Capt. Bill Putnam .
Get Your Man(1921) as Arthur Whitman .
Body and Soul(1920) as Howard Kent .
Bride 13(1920)
Caleb Piper’s Girl(1919) as Tracy Carter .
The Girl-Woman(1919) as Bob .
Common Clay(1919) as Hugh Fullerton .
Mile-A-Minute Kendall(1918) as Philip Lund .
The Narrow Path(1918) as Dick Strong .
A Japanese Nightingale(1918) as John Bigelow .
The Slacker(1917) as .
The Little Princess(1917) as Ali-Baba .
The Spirit of ’76(1917) as Captain Boyd .
Flirting with Fate(1916) as Harry Hansum .
Daphne and the Pirate(1916) as .
The Old Folks at Home(1916) as Stanley .
The Flying Torpedo(1916) as William Haverman .
The Children in the House(1916) as Fred Brown .
Intolerance(1916) as Henry of Navarre .
Up from the Depths(1915) as Lestrade .
Bred in the Bone(1915) as Her leading man .
The Outlaw’s Revenge(1915)
The Battle of the Sexes(1914)

He starred with Douglas Fairbanks in Flirting with Fate (1916).

Lawrence and Fairbanks

and was billed in many others: W. E. Lawrence still \ W. E. Lawrence 4

W. E. Lawrence 3

W E lawrence 1916 \

He seemed to play mostly himself: upper crust, old family WASP.

He does not seem to have married. He died in 1947.

P.S. I have noted the discrepancy in the birth date. As an actor, in various documents he seems to have made himself a little younger than he actually was.

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The Annals of Newberry XIV

May 28, 2015 in Newberry No Comments Tags: Newberry, revival

Acts 2:1-4. When the day of Pentecost came. Pastel & pen. 26 May 2012.

Sudden irruptions of the Holy Spirit are often accompanied by what looks likes erratic behavior. The Apostles were accused of being drunk by those who witnessed Pentecost – Peter had to explain, “no, we’re not drunk. It’s only nine o’clock in the morning – people get drunk in the afternoon on this feast.” Judge O’Neall remembered the great revival of 1802, and passed a tentative judgment on the phenomenon accompanying it.

In 1802 was that great revival of religion, which may have been several times since equaled, but has certainly never been surpasses. It seemed as if the spirit of the living God was pervading the whole community, and that all were rising up and crying out, “men and brethren, what shall we do to be saved?”

That many extravagancies were enacted, and much which, to us of a more sober day, seems to be no work of the gentle spirit of Christian grace, was present is true. The falling of many, and the spasmodic action of others, called “the jerks” occurred under the preaching of the ministers, who then and there proclaimed their Master’s word.

Whether such things be or be not of the Spirit it is not for such an one as I to say. Still I would venture to suggest, that there is much more of human sympathy and terror than repentance in such scenes. But still many were truly converted, and became bright and shining lights in the Lord’s house.

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The Annals of Newberry XI

May 26, 2015 in dance, Men in church, Newberry No Comments Tags: Newberry

One of the battlefields on which young men and the clergy fought was the matter of the dance.

John Vianney, when he arrived at Ars, announced his aim: above all, to stop the dancing.

His vicar, Raymond, explained that in Ars

These young people were crazy about a certain pleasure called dance which they had every Sunday and feast day with a type of drunkenness and fury. The good pastor saw in the dance a block to the growing piety in their hearts. He saw in it the ruin of good morals, a path to debauchery by the adulteration of morals, through the too great liberty that parents too often gave to the young persons who were in the presence of boys

The parents said that they had danced when they were young, that how else were future spouses supposed to meet? John Vianney

deplored such blindness; he wept about it before the Lord; he prayed; he exhorted; he threatened; he menaced with the judgments of God.

He refused absolution to those who refused to give up dancing. He told them “if you do not stop going to dances, you are damned” and that “dancing …is the chain by which the devil pulls most souls into hell.” He had a motto painted on the chapel of St. John the Baptist: “His head was the price of a dance.”

This was the almost universal attitude of the clergy toward dancing. Martin Luther was an exception: he saw no harm in village dancing.

But by the time the Lutherans had made it to up-country South Carolina, they had joined in the general condemnation. They saw their mission as twofold: to preach the Gospel, and to obliterate dancing. A choreophobic Lutheran Synod in 1814 decided:

Resolved: That negro slaves be instructed in our holy religion, and be received into our Church as members; and that the congregations should make proper arrangements in their houses of worship to give the slaves also the opportunity to hear the Gospel. It was also Resolved, That all our ministers unite themselves to labor against the pernicious influence and consequences of dancing and seek to prevent it in every possible way

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Eugene Schieffelin and the Multitudinous Murmurations

May 26, 2015 in Schieffelins No Comments Tags: American Acclimatization Society, Eugene Schieffelin, Genealogy, sparrows, starlings, William Cullen Bryant

All throughout North America, one has only to look to the skies to see, all too often, a living memorial to the work of Eugene Schieffelin (1827-1906). Eugene was the grandson of Jacob Schieffelin and Hannah Lawrence, and therefore my wife’s second cousin, four times removed.

Kim Todd meditates upon Eugene:

I imagine him a quiet, unassuming man. While his relatives were making headlines all through the 1800s – stewing in jail on charges of bigamy, leading expeditions to the West, being captured by Crow Indians and being released moments before death, amassing large fortunes in business and giving interviews to the New York Times about the servant problem – Eugene Schieffelin was working for the family drug manufacturing company, attending meetings of the New York Zoological Society, and reading Shakespeare.

This combination lead Eugene down dangerous paths; he joined the American Acclimatization Society and became its chairman.

As part of globalization in the nineteenth centrum, Europeans transferred animals and plants from continent to continent, often for economic reasons. The Caribbean islands were the recipient of tropical plants from all over the British and French empires. In 1854, the Société zoologique d’acclimatation was founded in Paris and urged the goverment too introduce foreign animals both to provide meat and to control pests. The group inspired the formation of similar societies around the world, including the United States. In 1877 the American Acclimatization Society was founded.

It is said (although some sceptics deny it) that Eugene was a devotee of Shakespeare, and wanted to introduce every bird species mentioned in the Bard’s works.

William Cullen Bryant admired the Schieffelins and wrote his poem The Olde-World Sparrow after spending an evening with the William Henry Schieffelin, who had just released a shipment of sparrows into his yard, but some suspect it was Eugene who did it or at least inspired it.

We hear the note of a stranger bird

That ne’er till now in our land was heard.

A winged settler has taken his place

With Teutons and men of Celtic race;

He has followed their path to our hemisphere

The Old-World Sparrow at last is here.

He meets not here, as beyond the main,

The fowler’s snare and poisoned grain,

But snug-built homes on the friendly tree;

And crumbs for his chirping family

Are strewn when the winter fields are drear,

For the Old-World Sparrow is welcome here.

The insects legions that sting our fruit

And strip the leaves from the growing shoot,

A swarming, skulking, ravenous tribe,

Which Harris and Flint so well describe

But cannot destroy, may quail with fear,

For the Old-World Sparrow, their bane, is here.

The apricot, in the summer ray,

May ripen now on the loaded spray,

And the nectarine, by the garden-walk,

Keep firm its hold on the parent stalk,

And the plum its fragrant fruitage rear,

For the Old-World Sparrow, their friend is here.

That pest of gardens, the little Turk

Who signs, with the crescent, his wicked work,

And causes the half-grown fruit to fall,

Shall be seized and swallowed, in spite of all

His sly devices of cunning and fear,

For the Old-World Sparrow, his foe, is here.

And the army-worm and the Hessian fly

And the dreaded canker-worm shall die,

And the thrip and slug and fruit-moth seek,

In vain, to escape that busy beak,

And fairer harvests shall crown the year,

For the Old-World Sparrow at last is here.

Very quickly sparrows wore out their welcome. In 1881 Fred Mather versified:

The starling is mentioned in Henry IV, Part 1 when Hotspur considers using its vocal talents to drive the King mad. Since King Henry was refusing to pay a ransom to release his disloyal brother-in-law Edmund Mortimer, Hotspur says: “I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but “Mortimer,” and give it him, to keep his anger still in motion.” Eugene did not notice that Hotspur regards the starling as a pest.

Schieffelin released starlings twice. The first time didn’t take so he did it again. On March 6, 1890 he released 80 European starlings in Central Park. They took. By 1928 they were found as far west as the Mississippi. By 1942 they were in California.

By the mid-1950’s they numbered more than 50 million. They are now over 200 million, often in flocks of over a million, called a murmuration.

Farmers are unhappy with starlings.

Roosting in hordes of up to a million, starlings can devour vast stores of seed and fruit, offsetting whatever benefit they confer by eating insects. In a single day, a cloud of omnivorous starlings can gobble up 20 tons of potatoes.

What they don’t eat they defile with droppings. They are linked to numerous diseases, including histoplasmosis, a fungal lung ailment that afflicts agricultural workers; toxoplasmosis, especially dangerous to pregnant women, and Newcastle disease, which kills poultry.

Farmers have tried

Helium balloons

Roman candles

Rockets

Whirling shiny objects

Noisemakers shot from fifteen-millimeter flare pistols

Firecrackers blasted from twelve gauge shotguns

Explosions of propane gas

Artificial owls

Airplanes

Distress calls broadcast on mobile sound equipment

Chemical’s derived from peppers

Chemicals that cause erratic behavior

Chemicals that cause kidney failure

Chemicals that wet feathers in the winter and keep them wet until the birds freeze to death

Nothing works. People keep trying

Few creatures have inspired so much folly. In 1948 the superintendent of sanitation in Washington, D.C., having failed to rout the birds with balloons and artificial owls, tried exposing them to itching powder. The police used mechanical hawks. An Interior Department consultant proposed placing grease around starling feeding sites, hoping they would track the gook back to their nests and cover their own eggs, preventing them from hatching.

Later, electricians laid live wires across the Corinthian columns of the Capitol and other prominent buildings to discourage starlings from roosting. They simply took up residence in whatever nearby structures were not hot-wired. When the White House grounds were plagued, speakers were set up to broadcast recordings of starlings rasping out their alarm call. (The birds vacated to sycamore trees on Pennsylvania Avenue, whose branches were then smeared with chemicals to irritate their feet.) Later, the war against starlings turned nasty. In the early 1960’s a Federal Government experiment with poisoned pellets killed thousands of starlings in Nevada. From 1964 to 1967 nine million starlings were poisoned in California’s Solano County in an effort to protect feed lots. During that same period the California Department of Agriculture experimented with irradiating captive starlings with lethal doses of cobalt-60. In Providence, R.I., officials set off Roman candles near flocks.

The most innovative solution, though, was advanced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1931. ”When the breasts of these birds have been soaked in a soda-salt solution for 12 hours and then parboiled in water, which is afterwards discarded, they may be used in a meat pie that compares fairly well with one made of blackbirds or English sparrows.” But, cautioned the author, the gamy taste was not for everyone.

Starling pot pie

Starlings are terrorists:

In 1960 a Lockheed Electra plummeted seconds after taking off from Logan Airport in Boston, killing 62 people. Some 10,000 starlings had flown straight into the plane, crippling its engines. Any bird in the wrong place can pose such a danger, but it is the ever-present starling that pilots fret over the most.

Nor is the damage that starlings caused confined to commercial crops, health, and airplanes. Starlings are vicious little buggers and drive out native species.

If starlings have a noteworthy genetically programmed personality characteristic, it is aggression. They wait until other birds have created cavities for nests, then harass the architects until the abandon the site. Sometimes a starling enters a hoe while the owner is gone. When the bird returns, the starling leaps onto its back, clinging and pecking it all the way to the ground. Even when it has claimed a nesting cavity, a starling may continue to abuse other birds breeding nearby, plucking their eggs out of the nest and dropping them in the dirt. One ornithologist watched a starling dangle a piece of food in front of the nesting cavity of a downy woodpecker. When the young woodpecker reached out of the hole for the bait, the starling dispatched it with a quick jab of the beak.

My wife witnessed such an incident. Two flickers had built their nest in the hollow of an old maple tree at Waterhole Cove. Starlings moved in and evicted the flickers. What the starlings did not know is that the tree had another resident. My wife saw the starlings bolt of the tree, screaming. Their incessant chatter had awoken the snake that had been peacefully sleeping in the base of the tree, and he was investigating upstairs to see what was causing the racket.

Eugene is seen by modern biologists as “an eccentric at best, a lunatic at worst.” The society’s effort to introduce Shakespeare’s birds into New York’s public parks was described as “infamous” by the ecologist John Marzluff, who also called the establishment of a breeding population of starlings the society’s “most notorious introduction.” By 1898 the Federal government took alarm, and by 1900 the Lacey Act tried to control the importation of dangerous species. Ah, the classic barn door.

Eugene died of paralysis at his home in Newport, August 15, 1906. He married Catherine Tonnele Hall in 1858 but had no descendants. His works live after him.

“What hast thou done?” Titus Andronicus 4.2.

For a further meditation, read Charles Mitchell’s The Bard’s Bird.

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The Annals of Newberry XIII

May 26, 2015 in Newberry No Comments

War leads to disorder, both in its conduct and its aftermath. Both victorious and defeated armies lack discipline.

Captain F. N. Walker of the Confederate Army recounts this incident that occurred in Newberry as the defeated Confederate soldiers made their way home. The Confederacy, whatever its attitude toward Africans was very welcoming to Jews, both in the highest positions (Judah P. Benjamin was Confederate Secretary of State) and the most humble. This Confederate soldier of the House of Israel perhaps remembered the story of Samson and bees, but with different results.

I will never forget a thing that occurred in Newberry as we came home after the surrender. The soldiers raided the government stores in that town, and in every other town as we came on home. At Newberry they rolled some barrels of molasses into the streets and knocked in the heads, and each man as he passed by dipped in his canteen and filled it with “treacle,” as they call it in England.

We had with us a low, squatty, duck-legged Jew, a jolly good fellow, not more than five feet high, if that tall. Levi was exceedingly anxious to fill his canteen, but the molasses had gotten down so low that he could not reach it over the chime of the barrel, and his taller Gentile friends were too busy helping themselves to wait in him, so he jumped with his stomach on the chime of the barrel and reached down and began to fill his canteen. Some wicked Gentile just behind, with a keen eye for fun, took Levi by the off hind leg and set him square on his head in the barrel, where the molasses was a foot and a half or two feet deep. Some kind friends pulled him out and laid him on a plank to dry. I do not think I would be putting it too strong to say he was the sweetest looking Jew I ever saw. Levi was “as mad as an old wet hen,” as the old saying goes.

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Edward Lawrence Schieffelin, Founder of Tombstone

May 25, 2015 in Lawrence Family, Schieffelins 1 Comment Tags: Ed Schieffelin, Genealogy, Tombstone

Edward Lawrence Schieffelin (1847–1897) was the son of Clinton Emanuel Del Pela Schieffelin and Jane Walker. Edward was the second great-grandson of Jacob Shieffelin, the founder of the Schieffelin pharmaceutical company. Edward was therefore my wife’s third cousin, three times removed, but he preserved the Lawrence family connection in his middle name.

Edward was born in Western Pennsylvania but his family moved to the Rogue Valley in Oregon Territory. At age 17 he set out on his own as a prospector. Ed began looking for gold and silver all over the West: Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, California,

In 1876, David P. Lansing of Phoenix, Arizona, described Schieffelin as

about the strangest specimen of human flesh I ever saw. He was 6 feet 2 inches tall and had black hair that hung several inches below his shoulder and a beard that had not been trimmed or combed for so long a time that it was a mass of unkempt knots and mats. He wore clothing pieced and patched from deerskins, corduroy and flannel, and his hat was originally a slouch hat that had been pieced with rabbit skin until very little of the original felt remained.

Nothing had come of all the prospecting. In 1877 Ed enlisted as an Indian scout to assist the Army in its fight against the Apaches. He looked at the San Pedro river area, only a few miles from Geronimo. One German miner had already been murdered – the first of many murders in that area.

There are several versions of the origin of the name Tombstone:

When fellow Army scout Al Sieber learned what Ed was up to, he told him, “The only rock you will find out there will be your own tombstone“. Another version is that Edward was told, “Better take your coffin with you; you will find your tombstone there, and nothing else.” Or he was told “If you are determined to go, take along a chisel with you and when you get lost among the hills and come to die, chip your name on a stone and we’ll stumble across it someday and put up a tombstone for you there.” Another version is that the name came from a rock formation: “The name by the way, was bestowed as follows: a thin unpromising vein in a granite formation was followed until it widened and threatened opulence amid a kind of rock which projected from the surface roughly resembling the headstone of a grave.”

Ed found what he thought was a vein of silver ore and he filed a claim, naming it Tombstone. He had some samples but there was no assay office in Tucson and everyone he showed the samples to thought they were worthless. Edward tried to find his brother Al. He travelled hundreds of miles but was broke, and had to stop for a few weeks to run a crank at a mine to earn enough money to continue.

When Ed finally located his brother in February 1878, Al asked the foreman at the McCraken mine to look at brother Ed’s ore specimens. The foreman thought the samples were mostly lead. Unconvinced, Schieffelin showed the samples to 20 or 30 others who had some expertise, and they all thought the ore worthless. Frustrated, Schieffelin threw his ore specimens out his brother’s cabin door, as far as he could throw, but at the last minute held on to three of them. For the next four weeks he worked in the McCracken Mine, wielding a pick and shovel.

Ed learned about the McCracken Mine’s recently arrived assayer, Richard Gird, who had a reputation as an expert. Taking his last three ore samples, Ed Schieffelin asked Gird if he thought they were worth assaying. Gird took a look and said he’d get back to Ed. Three days later, Al shook Ed out of his bunk and said Gird wanted to see him now. When they met, Gird told Ed that he valued the best of the ore samples at $2,000 a ton. Ed, Al Schieffelin and Richard Gird formed a partnership on the spot.

The three partners formed the Tombstone Gold and Silver Mining Company to hold title to their claims. Gird built a crude assay furnace in the cabin’s fireplace. He found that Schieffelin’s initial find of silver ore was valuable, but within a few weeks of mining the vein, Ed discovered it ended in a pinch about three feet deep. His brother Al and Gird were despondent but Ed was optimistic he could find more ore deposits. He continued his search for many more weeks until one day Al found Ed joyously exclaiming over another sample of float ore he had found. Indifferently, Al told Ed he was a “lucky cuss,” and that became the name of one of the richest mining claims in the Tombstone District. The ore samples assayed at $15,000 a ton. Ed shortly afterward identified another claim, the “Tough Nut” lode.

On June 17, 1879, Schieffelin showed up in Tucson driving the blue spring wagon carrying the first load of silver bullion valued at $18,744 (about $474,424 today). The mines in the area eventually produced about a billion dollars of silver in 2015 dollars.

Tombstone 1882

Tombstone 1932

Tombstone today

The town was built to work the mines. When Cochise County was formed in January 1891, Tombstone became the county seat. In 1881 Ed’s’s brother Al built Schieffelin Hall as a theater, recital hall, and a meeting place for Tombstone citizens. It is the largest adobe structure in the southwest.

(His great-niece Mary Schieffelin Brady reopened it in 1964.)

Tombstone was the site of the gunfight at the OK corral on October 26, 1881.

Ed sold part of his interests in the mines but was still wealthy. He was convinced there was a band of mineral wealth all long the mountains from Alaska to the Andes, and financed an expedition to Alaska.

Steamer “New Racket”

50 below

The cold discouraged him, and he returned to California. In 1883 he married Mary Elizabeth Brown, and lived in Los Angeles for a while. He returned to the Rogue River area and bought a ranch near his brothers Eff (Effingham) and Jay (Jacob). He continued prospecting. He was found dead of a heart attack in his cabin on May 12, 1897.

The legend is that they found

his body slumped ever so peacefully across a worktable where samples of the gold ore were being worked. Ore that was eventually tested at more than $2,000 to the ton. But Ed Schieffelin did not leave behind a map or directions to his discovery. That would be up to others to locate. The last entry in his journal simply read, “Struck it rich again, by God.”

In his will he specified:

It is my wish to be buried in the garb of a prospector, my old pick and canteen with me on top of the granite hills about three miles westerly from the city of Tombstone and that a monument such as prospectors build when locating a mining claim be built over my grave and no other monument or slab erected. And I request that none of my friends wear crepe. Under no circumstances do I want to be buried in a cemetery or graveyard.

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The Many Lives of Jacob Schieffelin

May 23, 2015 in Health, Lawrence Family, Quakers No Comments Tags: aspirin, Bayer, cannabis, Genealogy, heroin, Jacob Schieffelin, Johnny Walker, Manhattenville, Moet et Chandon, Prohibition

The Schieffelins were from Swabia. Johann Jacob Scheffelin (1702-1750) settled in Philadelphia. His sons Jacob the elder and George, followed him. Jacob the elder married Regina Ritzhauer in 1756, and begot our Jacob, who was born in Philadelphia in 1757. Jacob the elder moved his family to Montreal in 1760. It had just passed into control of the British, and Jacob the elder had a business furnishing supplies to the British.

The Loyalist

In 1775 our Jacob, the younger, (1757-1835) joined the British army at the age of 18 to oppose the American invasion of Canada (one of the more disgraceful incidents in American military history. And we lost). Schieffelin went to Detroit, then a British fort, and ran a store supplying the army. Governor Hamilton of Detroit appointed Jacob to the Detroit Volunteers, giving him the status of an officer.

Schieffelin went with the force that captured Vincennes from the Americans; however, he in turn was captured by the Americans and taken to Virginia. He escaped and made his way to New York speaking French along the way, as the French were allies of the Americans, He reached New York July 19, 1780. There he met Hannah Lawrence, my wife’s fourth great grand aunt, and anti-British poetess, arranged to be billeted with her family, and married her August 13, despite Quaker disapproval. They made their way back to Montréal, All this is described in her blog.

While he was in Montreal and Detroit, Jacob had been engaging in business and in real estate speculation, some of which was with the Indians, and therefore illegal under British law. He showed an entrepreneurial spirit which would blossom into a family fortune.

After the end of the American Revolution, Jacob went to London to lobby for benefits for loyalist soldiers. Presumably he met with Effingham Lawrence, the brother of his wife’s father. This Effingham had moved to London to engage in the drug business, and was the father of the Effingham whose drug business in Manhattan Jacob would later take over.

The New American

Jacob returned to Montreal with a shipment of goods which he would sell. He had remained on good terms with his American relatives, and in 1794 moved to New York and took over Effingham Lawrence’s drug business on Pearl Street.

When Schieffelin and John Lawrence entered into the drug business, the trade was primarily conducted by wholesale houses in New York and Philadelphia. Before the Revolutionary War, drugs and botanicals had been mostly supplied by the English. By the time of the Revolution, about half of the drug manufacturing in England was controlled by the Quakers. Quaker pharmacists in America had ready access to the latest and most up-to-date information thanks to their coreligionists in England. At the end of the eighteenth century, druggists provided a wide array of medicines, botanical products, cooking spices, surgical supplies, medicine chests, as well items found today in hardware stores — paints and glassware, for example — to general stores, physicians, farmers, plantations, ships, and apothecary shops. Soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century, many druggists and apothecaries had expanded into chemical manufacturing, an activity that accelerated during the Revolutionary War, when, cut off from England, druggists learned new manufacturing techniques to produce the embargoed chemicals.

Jacob was well positioned: he had Quaker contacts, he had British contacts, he had business experience, and he knew how to speculate in real estate. Most of all he had an extended family involved in various businesses.

Manhattanville

Jacob bought up land in upper Manhattan. He built his country house, Rooka Hall, where 144^th St. now joins the Hudson, and sold land to his friend Alexander Hamilton for a country estate.

In 1806 Schieffelin and his brothers-in-law, Thomas Buckley and John B. Lawrence, joined the lands they owned individually and jointly in northern Manhattan and requested that surveyor Adolphus Loss lay out the plan for Manhattanville, which was incorporated as a village the same year. Manhattanville was organized around a street grid that followed the natural topography of the area, on land that had long been cattle pastures and farms. Harlem Cove formed the heart of the commercial waterfront. Stables, warehouses, icehouses, and factories blossomed along Manhattan Street, which in turn became a major transportation route moving goods from what was then Kingsbridge Road to the Hudson River. The Public Advertiser in 1807 described Manhattanville as

a flourishing little town, pleasantly situated near the banks of the Hudson, about eight miles from City-Hall… first projected and laid out twelve months ago by Mr. Schieffelin and others, since which an Academy has been erected, where are taught by persons of superior qualifications, the Latin, French and English Languages… A very excellent public house has been built and opened, together with many private houses and a ferry established to the opposite shore of the North [Hudson] river… and a market is contemplated to be finished in the course of the present summer.

When established, the streets carried the names of Schieffelin, Effingham, Buckley, Lawrence, Hamilton, and Manhattan.

The Schieffelins had six sons and one daughter: Edward Lawrence (1781-1850), Henry Hamilton (1783-1865), Anna Maria (1788-1845) Effingham (1791-1863), Jacob (1793-1880), John Lawrence (1796-1866), and Richard Lawrence (1801-89). These are my wife’s first cousins, five times removed.

Jacob Schieffelin died in New York on April 16, 1835 of apoplexy and was buried in the family vault at St. Mary’s Church.

A Very Brief History of the Schieffelin Businesses

Although Hannah was read out of meeting when she married a soldier, Schieffelin remained on close terms with all the Quaker relatives, and the Quakers dominated the drug business in England, possibly because they were trusted, the same quality that gave them an advantage in the finances of New York His partnership with John Lawrence proved successful.

Another Lawrence brother, Richard ran a business on Pearl St4reet that imported and sold leads, steel, pots, kettles, and other hardware. The success of these businesses encouraged others in the family to open their own firms and in May 1801 two of Schieffelin’s sons, Edward L. and Henry Hamilton, purchased the stock of the late Dr. Nicholas S. Bayard and entered into co-partnership at 193 Pearl Street, next door to their father.

In July 1802, Schieffelin expanded his business and was appointed the wholesale and retail agent for P. Paterson, M.D, of London, and began selling Paterson’s “restorative vegetable drops” as well as his “nervous cordial pills.” In 1803 his son, Edward started selling Glauber’s salts — a hydrate of sodium sulfate used widely at the time for its medicinal properties — as well as an antidote to the “dangerous effects of impure wines, otherwise undescribed.” Jacob’s (3) brother.

J & E Schieffelin & Co., operated out of 179 Pearl Street, where they had taken over the store of James Thomson. In 1805, Jacob and his son Henry joined together under the name Jacob Schieffelin & Son, and announced that the goods in their several warehouses would be of interest to dealers of drugs and medicines “on the continent of America, and the West-Indies.”

Following the Civil War, the four Schieffelin brothers retired from active participation in the company. William H. Schieffelin, son of Samuel B. Schieffelin, became the lead partner In 1882, Schieffelin established the finest pharmaceutical laboratory in the United States. It had sales offices located in Chicago and San Francisco, and served Europe through its operations in London, England.

ECPKBM (King1893NYC) pg917 W. H. SCHIEFFELIN & CO., WILLIAM AND BEEKMAN STREETS

The Lawrences and then the Schieffelins had always been deeply concerned about drug purity. In 1906 it became the first company in the United States to file proofs of purity to federal regulators, receiving Guaranty Number One. Because of their excellent reputation, the Schieffelins were chosen by Bayer (Farbenfabriken) the distributors for their new drug, aspirin. Bayer also helped Schieffelin introduce another substance to the United States: heroin. The Schieffelins already handled cannabis indica.

The Schieffelins therefore were involved when Congress started to regulate such substances. In 1910 Dr. William Schieffelin, President of the National Druggists Wholesalers’ association, testified

So he was at least in part responsible for the problems that stem form including cannabis with opium in that class of controlled substances.

Because of Prohibition, Schieffelin’s business would start to specialize in “medicinal” alcohol. it was alcohol intended for medicinal purposes, especially Hennessy Cognac and Moët & Chandon Champagne. Distilled spirits were a traditional remedy for chest pain, but I wonder what champagne was prescribed for. In 1962 the company gave up pharmaceuticals for alcohol.

In 1980, Moët-Hennessy acquired Schieffelin. In 1987, Moët-Hennessy reached an agreement to merge Schieffelin with Somerset Importers Ltd., owned by Guinness.

The new company specializes in high end products:

Dom Perignon

Moët & Chandon

Oban

Johnnie Walker

Tanqueray Gin

Grand Marnier

So many thanks to the Lawrences, especially various Effinghams, for helping to establish business that has contributed mightily to the happiness quotient of the United States.

Malt does more than Milton can

To justify the ways of God to man.

Not to mention heroin and cannabis.

Acknowledgments to Susan Lukesh, “Jacob Schieffelin, the Philadelphia-born son of a German immigrant businessman, engaged in furnishing stores and provisions for the British Army in Canada, was an entrepreneur who moved vigorously into commerce and real estate speculation wherever he found himself.”

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The Annals of Newberry XII

May 23, 2015 in dance, Newberry No Comments Tags: cakewalk, Newberry, the dance

Although the clergy disapproved, the Germans in upcountry South Carolina continued dancing. They had an interesting custom, which looks like it must have been brought over from Germany. Is this the origin of the cakewalk?

The Dutch Fork people were very fond of dancing – there was no other kind of dances but reel dances. What a great time they would have at weddings! As soon as the bride and groom were married, which was generally around twelve o’clock, then the young folks would walk for the cake hanging up in the house, nearly as large as a grindstone, with a gold finger ring in its centre.

Each young man would take a partner to walk for the cake, there being generally about a dozen couples. In walking for the cake they would walk around the hose, and the man who started in front had a walking stick in his hand, and when he would get around the house to the place where he started from he would give it to the man next behind him, and he to the next when they again came around, and so on until they heard the firing of a gun, when he, in whose hands the stick then happened to be, won the cake.

About the firing of the gun, be it known that a man had been sent off with a gun charged with powder only, clear out of sight, with orders not to shoot in less than half an hour.

After the firing of the gun, the young lady, the partner of the winner, cut the cake and gave the gold ring to the bride. By this time dinner was ready. A long table was set in the yard loaded with everything that could be had to make a good dinner. As soon as dinner was over the commenced dancing, and kept it up frequently for two or three days. They danced the old-fashioned reels. Not only the young women and the young men danced, but the married women and the married men also took part in the amusement.

Only the old women who could dance a jig. Two straws were crossed on the floor; the fiddler would begin to play a lively, quick tune; the old woman would pull up her dress high enough to keep it from moving the straws, then dance the jig over and between the straws for several minutes without moving a straw. It was very amusing and really wonderful to see how light and nimble, and how fast they could use their feet.

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The Annals of Newberry X

May 22, 2015 in Uncategorized No Comments

The upcountry South Carolinans were a merry lot. Religious language and Biblical imagery were on everyone’s lips, in contexts both serious and not. John Thweatt was a fondly remembered wagoner.

Driving his wagon on a warm day, in the spring, on a return trip from Charleston, along the old road, above Orangeburg, he came opposite to a clearing, in which a man and his sons had been engaged in burning the logs. They were as black and dirty as lightwood smoke and sand could make them; as soon as John saw them, he leaped from his horse, and kneeling down, he prayed in a loud voice “Great God, be pleased to send a shower to wash these poor people, for I have often heard that nothing unclean shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, and if they should now be cut off in their present unclean condition, they never there can enter.” The amazement of his auditors may be imagined, it cannot be described.

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Arthur Lawrence Gilman, Music Critic

May 22, 2015 in Lawrence Family, Music No Comments Tags: Genealogy, Lawrence Gilman

Lawrence Gilman and the World of Music

Arthur Lawrence Gilman (1878-1939) always used the name Lawrence Gilman. (See his father’s entry for a possible explanation of his omission of Arthur.) He was the son of Arthur Coit Gilman (1855-1890) and Bessie Amelia Lawrence (1858-1937). He was therefore the second cousin, three times removed, of my wife.

He was a painter and taught himself music theory and composition, piano, and organ. He set three of W. B. Yeats’ poems for voice and piano: “A Dream of Death,” The Heart of a Woman,” and “The Curlew.” He also wrote an unpublished opera in the style of Wagner.

The very young Lawrence Gilman

He was most active American music critics of the first part of the twentieth century. He was the music critic of the New York Herald-Tribune, and of Harper’s Weekly, the annotator of orchestral programs for the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the radio commentator for broadcasts of New York Philharmonic concerts. His comments are still quoted in contemporary program notes.

A contemporary remembered Lawrence:

Lawrence Gilman of the Herald Tribune was a…suave, sensitive and rather morose individual of extremely aesthetic appearance who wore a fur-collared overcoat, worked for hours over each carefully turned paragraph, and produced a type of elegantly tortured prose that many New York concertgoers regarded as literature. Gilman shut out the coarse sounds of the nonmusical world by wearing plugs of cotton in his ears, except when he was on the job. At concerts, he would remove his overcoat, sit, remove his earplugs, and listen with polite concentration. When he left the concert hall the earplugs would be back securely in place.

The young Lawrence Gilman

Here is a video with Lawrence’s voice in 1934 introducing Otto Klemperer conducting Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9.

Books

Lawrence wrote prolifically: Phases of Modern Music (1904), The Music of Tomorrow (1906), Stories of Symphonic Music (1907), A Guide to Strauss’ Salome (1907), A Guide to Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande (1907), Edward MacDowell: A Study (1909), Aspects of Modern Opera (1908), Nature in Music (1914), A Christmas Meditation (1916), Music and the Cultivated Man (1929), Wagner’s Operas (1937), and Toscanini and Great Music (1938).

Invective

Lawrence had a sharp tongue.

He, like his parents, was a Wagnerian:

Since that day when, a quarter of a century ago, Richard Wagner ceased to be a dynamic figure in the life of the world, the history of operatic art has been, save for a few conspicuous exceptions, a barren and unprofitable page.

He did not like bel canto:

A plain-spoken and not too reverent observer of contemporary musical manners, discussing the melodic style of the Young Italian opera-makers, has observed that it is fortunate in that it “gives the singers opportunity to pour out their voices in that lavish volume and intensity which provoke applause as infallibly as horseradish provokes tears.”

Webern was not to his liking:

Webern’s Five Pieces were as clearly significant and symptomatic as a toothache…Men of our generation…aim, in such extreme cases as Webern, at a pursuit of the infinitesimal, which may strike the unsympathetic as a tonal glorification of the amoeba…There is undeniably a touch of the protozoic…scarcely perceptible tonal wraiths, mere wisps and shreds of sound, fugitive astral vapors…though one or twice there are briefly vehement outbursts, as of a gnat enraged..the Lilliputian Fourth Piece is typical of the set. It opens with an atonal solo for the mandolin; the trumpet speaks as briefly and atonally; the trombone drops a tearful minor ninth (the amoeba weeps)….

Stravinsky pleased Lawrence not:

The History of a Soldier is tenth-rate Stravinsky. It is probably the nearest that any composer of consequence has ever come to achieving almost complete infantilism … Regarded as a sort of musical comic strip, it is abysmally inferior, in wit, comedic power, and salience of characterization, to Mr. Herriman’s “Krazy Kat,”for instance.

He did not like Gershwin, who did not follow Wagner’s dictates about music drama:

Perhaps it is needlessly Draconian to begrudge Mr. Gershwin the song hits which he has scattered through his score [Porgy and Bess] and which will undoubtedly enhance his fame and popularity. Yet they jar it. They are its cardinal weakness. They are the blemish upon its musical integrity. Listening to such sure-fire rubbish as the duet between Porgy and Bess, “You is my woman now,”…you wonder how the composer could stoop to such easy and needless conquests.

He didn’t like Gershwin’s orchestral music either:

How trite and feeble and conventional the tunes are [in the Rhapsody in Blue]; how sentimental and vapid the harmonic treatment, under its guise of fussy and futile counterpoint!…Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!

Massenet was a mess:

There have been brave men in France; but of them all, surely the bravest was the late Jules Emile Frederic Massenet. This intrepid composer, gifted with the spiritual distinction of a butler, the compassionate understanding of a telephone girl, and the expressive capacity of an amorous tomtit, had the courage to choose as a subject for music the greatest of all tragi-comedies, the most exquisitely piteous figure in the imaginative literature of the world. Monsieur Massenet, composer of Manon and the Meditation Réligieuse, selected as the theme for an opera the Don Quixote of Cervantes, and with it he did his worst. The result of this incredible adventure was displayed to us on Saturday afternoon.

Opera in modern settings tended to bathos:

In choosing the subject for this music-drama, Puccini set himself a task to which even his extraordinary competency as a lyric-dramatist has not quite been equal. As every one knows, the story for which Puccini has here sought a lyrico-dramatic expression is that of an American naval officer who marries little “Madame Butterfly” in Japan, deserts her, and cheerfully calls upon her three years later with the “real” wife whom he has married in America. The name of this amiable gentleman is Pinkerton—B.F. Pinkerton—or, in full, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. Now it would scarcely seem to require elaborate argument to demonstrate that the presence in a highly emotional lyric-drama of a gentleman named Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton—a gentleman who is, moreover, the hero of the piece—is, to put it briefly, a little inharmonious. The matter is not helped by the fact that the action is of to-day, and that one bears away from the performance the recollection of Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton asking his friend, the United States consul at Nagasaki, if he will have some whiskys-and-soda. There lingers also a vaguer memory of the consul declaring, in a more or less lyrical phrase, that he “is not a student of ornithology.”

The Critic Criticized

Lawrence made a passing remark about a supposed decision of a Council that women have no souls. This provoked the ire of the Jesuits at America.

But who is Mr. Lawrence Gilman? A thousand pardons! Thumb your Who’s Who, brother, and when found, make a note on’t, that Mr. Lawrence Gilman is a gentleman with a weakness for music, a young-eyed cherub, fond of harmony,,, he has written a guide to Strauss’s Salome; he is said to be an authority on Certain Aspects of Modern Drama; and – be it spoken – he is the musical critic on the staff of the North American Review, Higher than this dizzy eminence, fame mounts but slowly; yet one gathers from the modest reticence of the Who’s Who paragraph, that Mr. Gilman likewise plays very prettily upon the organ and piano.

Seated one day at the organ, Mr. Gilman was borne on the strains of melody into new fields. He had lately read a treatise by Herr Emil Lucka, “a young Viennese philosopher whose remarkable book Eros attempts no less staggering a task than the study of the evolution of human love.” “Young” is a pat phrase, even as is “staggering” yet each is superfluous, for none but a young man would choose this topic, and even the most matured intellect would stagger under the burden. But, O woful day, on which music and metaphysics, with a dash of poetry and a hint of mysticism, met together in the heaving bosom of Mr. Lawrence Gilman! They met, but they kissed not; the fought; the dust of the battle and the shouting possessed the brain of the unhappy organist; the resulting phantasmagoria ran into Mr. Gilman’s pen to issue forth on page 910 of the North American Review: “In the beginning of the twelfth century a new and unprecedented emotion – spiritual love of man for woman based on personality – made its appearance. Woman, one despised –woman, to whom at the Council of Mâcon a soul had been denied – became now a queen, a divinity.”

This was of course nonsense. America continued

The statement then, that woman was denied a soul by the Council of Mâcon or any other Council, indicates in him who makes it, either ignorance, or a disregard of the Eighth Commandment. In Mr. Gilman it indicates ignorance, the outcome of a trusting gentle nature. His poetic mind views with amiable tolerance the hoary legends of the past; he is devoid of the critical spirit; his head is in the clouds. Very likely some suffragette, impatient of Romish conservatism, whispered this tale into his guileless ear.

And so on.

Family

Lawrence Gilman married Elizabeth Wright Walter (1875-1964) on August 1, 1904. They had one child, Elizabeth Lawrence Gilman (1905-2006). Lawrence Gilman died at Sugar Hill, in Grafton, New Hampshire September 8, 1939. The New York Philharmonic broadcast a memorial concert for him on October 22, 1939, with Siegfried’s Funeral March and the closing scene of Gotterdammerung.

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Edward Coit Gilman: A Life Cut Short

May 21, 2015 in Lawrence Family, Uncategorized No Comments Tags: Edward Coit Gilman, Genealogy

Edward Coit Gilman (1879-1909) was the son of Bessie Amelia Lawrence and Arthur Coit Gilman. Edward was the second cousin, three times removed, of my wife and the grandnephew of Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president of Johns Hopkins University. After his father’s death, Edward and his brothers grew up in Queens at their grandparents’ house. His grandfather and namesake Edward was Secretary of the Board of Missions of the Congregational Church. Edward attended the Lawrenceville School and went into real estate.

On January 8, 1909 Edward and a group of friends went to an entertainment at the Good Citizen League in Flushing.

The entertainment was followed by a dance, and the party did not leave until after midnight. They were introduced to Merwin Lee, and they all piled into the new car which he had just received as a Christmas present form his grandparents. The car was driven by a chauffeur, Frank Brennan. But Lee wanted to drive and the chauffeur sat in the rumble seat.

Lee took the Floral Park Road toward Little Neck. The road as it passed the Vanderbilt estate was on a steep hill and for a short stretch was paved with granite Belgian blocks. When the car met the blocks, the front axle snapped. The front end of the car went down and the car veered sharply right. All the occupants were thrown from the car.

Several were injured, some seriously. Edward fell on his head against a stone curb, and two of the girls fell on him, somewhat cushioning their fall. Their screams roused a worker who lived on the Vanderbilt estate. He found

Miss Bogert wearing a handsome ball gown with a fur coat thrown over her shoulders sitting by the roadside holding Mr. Gilman’s head in her lap. Blood was flowing form a deep would in his head.

The worker summoned a physician, but Edward was dead at the age of thirty.

He was buried in the Lawrence family cemetery in Bayside.

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The Annals of Newberry IX

May 20, 2015 in Newberry, Quakers, Slavery No Comments

John Beltin O’Neall, as we have seen, encountered the worst behavior that slavery enabled, but he kept insisting that slavery need not be inhumane. He noticed the anti-slavery principles of Quakers, but did not agree with them, The Quakers were not always anti-slavery; anti-slavery sentiment grew among them, not only in the North but in the South.

In the beginning, Friends were slave owners in South Carolina. They however soon set their faces against it, and in their peculiar language, they have uniformly borne their testimony against the institution of slavery, as irreligious. Such of their members as refused to emancipate their slaves, when emancipation was practicable in this State, they disowned. Samuel Kelly, who was the owner of a slave or slaves in ’02, when he came from Camden, refused to emancipate his, on the grounds that he had bought and paid for them: they were therefore his property; and that they were a great deal better off as his property, than they would be if free. He was therefore disowned.

His brothers’ children manumitted theirs. Some followed them to Ohio; others have here free, it is true, but in indigence and misery, a thousand time’s worse off than the slaves of Samuel Kelly and their descendants. For the far-seeing old gentleman took good care in his last will, that the bulk of his slaves who were left to his widow, should not be emancipated, by giving her the power to dispose of them at her death, provided it was to some member among his family.

Was it true that free blacks in the South were worse off than slaves held by humane masters? It might be; but it does not seem that freed slaves ever sought to sell themselves into slavery again.

It is also interesting to note that Quakers practiced church discipline in both marriage affairs and political matters. The Inner Light was not simply an individual matter; the community as a community was also guided by the Inner Light.

An individual might decide that the Inner Light informed him that he might own slaves or be a soldier; but the community buy its discernment by its Inner Light would expel him from the meeting.

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