Tag: Megalomania

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19th Century

John Colt

Have a drink with: John Colt
Double-entry bookkeeping and axe murder

Ask him about: packing advice

You’ve probably heard of Samuel Colt, especially with gun rights so prominently in the news. Not only was Colt one of America’s most well-known gun manufacturers, he used the eager 19th century press to transform gun ownership from a largely utilitarian act into a totem of defiant individualism. An 1860 Colt corporate advertisement in Knickerbocker magazine plainly advertised pistols, rifles, carbines and shotguns to the American public as the needful way to “afford surest protection to your family, your life and your property;” and it was around this time that an oft-repeated adage made its way into American discourse: “God made little men, and God made big men. But bless Col. Colt, he made every man equal.”

But Sam was not the only blood-soaked weirdo in his family. Samuel Colt was an enterprising businessman, if narcissistic, morally flexible and utterly unconcerned with the damage his products would do (also, he once made a living hawking nitrous oxide as a “doctor”). His older brother John Colt, though, was a riverboat gambler, admitted perjurer and forger, an accountant of some note, and a semi-public figure who earned public pooh-poohs for cohabiting with his pregnant girlfriend. Oh, and he also went on trial in 1842 for axe murder.

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20th Century

The Dream of Venus

Have a drink with: Salvador Dalí
Girls, girls, girls. Plus lobsters.

Ask him about: But how do you make the giraffe explode?

The 1939-1940 World’s Fair was a tremendous attraction, drawing more than forty million visitors to New York over its two seasons to experience the “World of Tomorrow.” Built over 1200 acres on top of the site of a former ash dump in Queens, the sprawling fairground was an ode to progress and international modernity, featuring a number of attractions meant to bring people out of the emotional and economic slump of the Depression. There were technological pavilions showing off new wonders like Formica and television sets; a range of theatrical entertainments including Billy Rose’s all-swimming, all-dancing Aquacade and Gypsy Rose Lee in “The Streets of Paris;” celebrations of the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inaugural; and, looming over it all, giant modernist ball and spire sculptures called the Trylon and Perisphere. President Franklin Roosevelt became the first president to appear on television with his broadcast introductory speech.

And if you looked at this prewar proto-Epcot spectacle and said, well, this is all well and good, but it is missing one major component, and that component is a whole lot of fish, rest assured: Salvador Dalí to the rescue.

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18th Century

Judge Breckenridge’s Eggnog Bender

Have a drink with: Hugh Henry Brackenridge
Attorney, nog enthusiast, clothing optional

Ask him about: Pork as medicine

It’s the holiday season, and that means it’s time for nog.

Where did eggnog come from? If you look into it, you get a linguistic soup of suggestions (“nog” being an old word for strong ale, or “noggin” as a drinking vessel); and there are all sorts of historical links dragged out as to its origin, from medieval “posset” concoctions, to frothy egg-flips, to aristocratic milk punches (not clarified punches, which are an entirely different thing and which Ben Franklin loved). Consensus is that there is a centuries-long human history of making eggy milk drinks and pouring booze into them, which at some point syncretized into the modern concept of eggnog.

It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that eggnog existed early on in American history, thanks to British culinary tradition and the good availability of eggs and dairy in the young nation, and it frequently involved a fair quantity of whatever liquor suited the local taste and economy.

I say a “fair quantity.” We now turn to Judge Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court at the turn of the 19th century, for demonstration of the fact that there is indeed such a concept as too much of a good thing.

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19th Century

John Tyler

Have a drink with: John Tyler
His Accidency

Ask him about: Sick of that song yet?

John Tyler

In the anonymous New York Times opinion essay about staff dissent within the White House published earlier this month, the author mentioned (among many other things) deliberation over use of the 25th Amendment in response to perceived presidential instability.

To be fair, this is not a new topic: the the 25th Amendment has been a common topic in shouts and whispers over the past two years as pundits consider whether its terms would or wouldn’t realistically attach to the current occupant of the White House.

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1967 in direct response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the questions involved had well predated the 25th Amendment even if they had not been presented so directly: what to do when the Presidency changes fundamentally and irrevocably, due to death, removal, resignation, or disability?

Dealing with matters of succession and power transfer, the 25th was invoked in the 1970s around the Nixon administration, and is occasionally put into action when a sitting President is temporarily incapacitated (despite the promise of intrigue and drama inherent in the amendment, in reality it’s been used, for example, to cover the duration of each of the Bush presidents’ colonoscopies).

But for the first word on the matter of presidential succession, you’ll need to go back to 1840 and then-Vice President John Tyler, who set up a century-long American precedent on succession that boils down to a very Trumpy word: MINE.

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19th Century 20th Century

Celebrity Death Hoaxes

Have a drink with: Tom Petty
Into the great wide open…

Ask him about: Not backing down.

Skeleton hand: celebrity death hoaxes

Tom Petty recently achieved the feat, as far as the press was concerned, of dying twice in a single day.

On Monday, October 2, news outlets began reporting in the afternoon that Petty had died following a cardiac incident at his California home, following a CBS News breaking news item declaring the singer dead. Only a few hours later, amidst a social media explosion of remorse and YouTube videos, did the news squeak out that announcements of Petty’s death may, in fact, have been premature. The Los Angeles Police Department, which had been CBS’ source in breaking the news, shortly clarified that it could not in fact confirm Mr. Petty’s death, noting on Twitter: “The LAPD has no investigative role in this matter. We apologize for any inconvenience in this reporting.”

It isn’t the first time death has seemed less than final in the realm of celebrity.

Modern media culture is full of conspiracy-laden, media friendly death theories: Babe Ruth and Frank Sinatra died on the same day in 1945! Why do you think Paul McCartney’s barefoot on the Abbey Road cover? Elvis faked his death and is living under witness protection! Abe Vigoda didn’t just miss a wrap party during the 1980s, he opted out ENTIRELY. (Sorry, that’s during the 90s.) (Oughts?) (Check the website.)

Are celebrity death hoaxes an unpleasant, if inevitable, modern consequence of the Internet’s viral credibility problem?

Nope. The gleeful anticipation of celebrity deaths as mass mourning events is a particularly tawdry offshoot of modern mass media culture. But the phenomenon isn’t new. Since the 1800s, death hoaxes and premature obituaries have punctuated American history (and yes, American – we seem to specialize in both death obsession and gullibility).

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20th Century

William Randolph Hearst

Have a drink with: William Randolph Hearst
“…an especially dangerous specimen of the class.”

Ask him: How’d you like Citizen Kane?

Hearst_Bierce_MG_2676

Kentucky’s William Goebel, who has the unfortunate distinction of being America’s only governor to be assassinated in office, was shot by an unknown gunman in January 1900 during the recount of his own contested election. The author and satirist Ambrose Bierce tactlessly commented in the New York Evening Journal:

The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast
Can not be found in all the West;
Good reason, it is speeding here
To stretch McKinley on his bier.

Bierce was at the time a columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner, and neither was his employer was any fan of President McKinley’s; one of the Hearst papers famously ran an anonymous column in 1901 urging that “If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.”

Suffice it to say that when the anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York in September 1901, folks remembered what they’d read in the paper.

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19th Century

Delia Bacon

Have a drink with: Delia Bacon
“…very wise in the doctrine of consequences.”

Delia_Bacon_Gravesite_MG_2519

Ask her about: fair and balanced journalism

Once upon a time, two crazies went head-to-head in a public challenge. It was a deeply partisan fight marked by high emotions and questionable discretion, and in the end the loudmouthed, cowardly male nut job won in a maddeningly close vote by going after his intelligent but awkward female opponent with sexism and misdirection.

This was 1847, by the way.  Have we learned nothing?

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B.C.E.

Akhenaten

Have a drink with: Akhenaten
Pharaoh, gender-bender, sun-worshiper, innovator

Ask him about: Starting your own religion in five easy steps

Akhenaten_Oct_14

It’s amazing that so much interest persists in the ancient Egyptian ruler Akhenaten, a king about whom precious little is clear: no one knows when he was born or when he died, why he made the sweeping theological and societal changes that caused many scholars to call him the world’s first monotheist, or even who his successors were.

Still, it isn’t hard to see why the story’s a sticky one, and not least because company loves mystery. John Ray, writing in History Today, tossed off just a few of the speculations over which history has loved to ponder Akhenaten: “the ingredients are rich: a tormented visionary, a misunderstood poet, a visual artist of genius whose mission went unheeded, the apostle of domestic virtue, an incestuous child-abuser, a political disaster, an insane bisexual pope or ayatollah suffering from pathological endocrine disorder, a man out of his time.”

If Egyptian rulers were musicians, this guy is Gaga in a meat dress.

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