Paul Simons

After reading these entries I got interested in our town, in particular where its name came from, and copied this from a simple easy-read website:

“Cincinnati , Ohio, is a creative, economic, and cultural Midwestern hub nestled along the Ohio River. Its name has a storied history, with Roman military roots and connections to the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States. Delve into the history of Cincinnati’s name, and learn how the “Queen City of the West” acquired its moniker. 

Israel Ludlow, Robert Patterson, and Matthias Denman purchased the 800 acres that comprised Cincinnati’s humble beginnings in 1788. The land was located along the Ohio River and across from the mouth of the Licking River, which inspired the town’s original name: Losantiville. With Anglo-Saxon, Greek, and Latin origins, the town’s name literally meant “The Town Opposite the Mouth of the Licking.” The settlement kept this name for its first two years of existence.

Losantiville grew over the subsequent years as more settlers arrived. In 1790, the town was named the county seat of Hamilton County by Arthur St. Clair, the Northwestern Territory governor. St. Clair renamed Losantiville, bestowing upon the growing settlement the name of Cincinnati.

Cincinnati got its name from the 5th-century BC Roman soldier and hero, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. After leading the republic’s army to victory over invaders, he denied rewards, returning to a farm where he lived out the remainder of his days instead. For many people, and especially Revolutionary War-era Patriots, Cincinnatus embodied self-sacrifice, patriotic loyalty, integrity, and civic virtue. In particular, his history represented for new Americans the promise of democracy and the possibility of overcoming tyranny.

Cincinnatus’ bravery inspired both Governor St. Clair and the founders of the Society of the Cincinnati, also named after the same Roman “people’s hero.” The Society of the Cincinnati, to which the name of the city of Cincinnati was also a nod, was founded by Continental Army officers in Newburgh, New York, in 1783. The Society still exists today as a fraternal philanthropic and patriotic organization dedicated to what its members describe as the values and memory of the American Revolution.

In 1790, Governor St. Clair was the President of the State Society of the Cincinnati of Pennsylvania, explaining his deep connection to the name and its origins. Many members of the Society had settled throughout the territory he governed, making Cincinnati a particularly suitable name for the growing region.

Cincinnati was subsequently incorporated as a town in 1802 and officially recognized as a city in 1819. It would eventually become, for a time, the most densely populated city in the United States and a major center of industry and commerce.”

I’d have to say that there may be some today who would gain something by taking Cincinnatus’ example. That turn of events would benefit modern day Cincinnati and every other town in this place.

Philip Spiess

Dale:  I quite agree with you on the matter of Dickens' writing; his bust sits on my bookshelf above his complete works, and I took my Master's oral exams in English at Indiana University in Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen.  Dickens' view of the city in American Notes was written some twelve years after Mrs. Trollope had her say, and so the Foote mansion and Martin Baum's house (now the Taft Museum), as well as Shire's Garden, were but several of the elements of the city's burgeonng elegance that he would have seen.

My undergraduate thesis for Hanover College (for my Bachelor's degree in English, and for which I won the department's John Livingston Lowes Award for research) was on the visits to Cincinnati of Mrs. Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde (you can see that I've been cannibalizing it here for these vignettes).  According to Clara Longworth, Countess de Chambrun, while Dickens was in Cincinnati, her grandfather, Judge Timothy Walker, who became a good friend and correspondent of Dickens, told him the story of a Cincinnati girl of former times "who shut herself from the light of day and waited among the nuptial preparations for her bridegroom who never came."  This is, of course, the story that Dickens turned into the character of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, but I have never been able to find the original Cincinnati story on which it is based, or otherwise been able to verify it, so we'll have to take the Countess's word for its veracity.

When Dickens went north from Cincinnati to Lebanon, Ohio, he was not so well pleased, however.  He stopped at the Bradley House, long known to most of us now as the "Golden Lamb Inn," and, being in need of reviving spirits from his stagecoach ride along dusty Ohio turnpikes, was shocked to learn that the establishment he was stopping at was a temperance one.  Dickens thereby remarks, in American Notes, that the inn's tea and coffee were both very bad, and the water was worse [cf. W. C. Fields' comment on the drinking of water].  This has not stopped the present-day inn establishment from proudly advertising the fact that Dickens stayed there, as well as showing off his bedroom, in which you can spend the night (and, yes, the inn now serves alcohol, Gott sei dankt!).  

Paul Simons

Jerry it looks like there are a lot in this country whose thinking hasn't changed much from that of their ancestors who engaged in that and similar manifestations of white supremacy. One hell of a lot of them. Confederate flag paraded around the halls of Congress. About 100 new laws enacted by various State legislatures with one aim - to prevent Black folks from voting. Country's got an evil past and a hell of a lot of U.S. citizens are looking for an evil future.

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

           CLOSING NIGHT PERFORMANCE SATURDAY!

                            BUY YOUR TICKET NOW!!

"Songs For A New World" was positively outstanding! Please convey to all those who made it happen. What a gift to those of us fortunate to have seen this unique performance! Our gratitude to the Class of '64 who sponsored tonight's incredibly memorable event. 

Marlin Warner Feldman '62 and David Feldman

Ticket information on Post #5574. This is a live stream performance  viewable only on Friday and Saturday, March 5-6 at 7 PM EST.

Dale Gieringer

    Jerry -  I'm not sure about the spit, but Dickens did write, "Public opinion has, within a few years, burned a slave alive at a slow fire in the city of St. Louis;  and public opinion has to this day maintained upon the bench that estimable judge who charged the jury, impanelled there to try his murderers, that their most horrid deed was an act of public opinion, and being so, must not be punished by the laws the public sentiment had made.  Public opinion hailed this doctrine with a howl of wild applause, and set the prisoners free..."

     Today, a google search for "runaway slave roast on spit" yields dozens of porn sites.

Philip Spiess

I was not inclined, Dale, to look up the searing of human flesh on gridirons, spits, or other implements of outdoor cookery (although I have a book in my collection by Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood:  A History of the Cannibal Complex, 1975), so i guess I'm glad you did.

However, Jerry's question put into mind an incident I heard about during my years at Hanover College in southern Indiana. It was that back in the 1920s, when Indiana (not the "Old South") had the largest number of citizens belonging to the Ku Klux Klan, that an African American man had been roasted to death on a griddle by a mob in one of Indiana's southern counties that border the Ohio River, somewhere between Madison, Indiana, and Tell City.  The import of the story (which could have been folklore, but I tend to credit it) was that from that day in the 1920s to at least the late 1960s (when I heard the tale), no African American had deigned to live in that county since (and who could blame them?).

Our church has been having churchwide discussion groups since last summer on racial justice and the current situation, and, unfortunately, stories like this (and Dickens') need to be brought to light.

David Buchholz

Didn't Jonathan Swift get the party started? From A Modest Proposal...

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust."

Philip Spiess

MRS. TROLLOPE IN CINCINNATI II:  The “Infernal Regions”

The Dawning of Natural History in Cincinnati:  When we left Mrs. Trollope, or rather when she left us, heading east to London and Paris, she was determined to “tell the truth” about Cincinnati and its lack of culture.  But certain aspects of culture had been a-dawning in Cincinnati even before Mrs. Trollope got there.  The citizens may not have taken to Shakespeare initially – after all, founding a city in the wilderness of the Ohio Country took a lot of their time and attention – but one thing that they were surrounded with that would provide a productive use of time and study was natural history, exploring its productions and uses, and its economic and health benefits as well.

Accordingly, the Western Museum Society (a focus of this vignette) was founded in Cincinnati in 1818 and the Western Academy of Natural Sciences was founded in the same city in 1835.  Earlier societies of natural history had been founded along the Eastern seaboard as cities emerged from their settlement period into an era of financial prosperity, and newly wealthy gentlemen (and occasionally ladies) indulged in intellectual and cultural pursuits.  Thus, natural history societies were to be found in such cities as Charleston (S. C.), Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.  These natural history study groups organized collections (so-called “cabinets of curiosities”) of plants, rocks, minerals, fossils, birds, and animals; these all provided fuel for the speculations on the nature of the universe and “God’s plan for the world” in the 18^th-century “Age of Reason.”

Of Dr. Daniel Drake and His Labors:  The instigator of Cincinnati’s Western Museum was Dr. Daniel Drake, sometimes called “the Benjamin Franklin of the West,” as he had a finger in many of the city’s organizational, intellectual, and cultural pies.  Drake was born in New Jersey in 1785, but shortly thereafter moved with his family to Kentucky.  At the age of 15, he began his study of medicine with one of Cincinnati’s earliest doctors, Dr. William Goforth; he became a partner in Goforth’s practice, Goforth granting him a diploma to practice medicine on his own.  This was the first medical diploma granted west of the Appalachian Mountains.  Drake then studied medicine in Philadelphia, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with his medical degree.  Returning to the Ohio Valley in 1805, he opened a medical practice in Kentucky before returning to Cincinnati in 1807.  Thereafter he devoted the rest of his life to science and the cultural development of the “West” (at that time the term referred to the territory between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River, i.e., the Old Northwest Territory).

Drake developed the program of the Western Museum in his “An Anniversary Discourse on the State and Prospects of the Western Museum Society,” delivered June 10, 1820:  “At the expiration of the two years which have been spent in the collection and arrangement of curiosities, when they are prepared for public inspection, and the doors of the Museum are about to be opened, it is important that we should review the design and labors of the Society, and inquire what benefits they are likely to produce.  As the arts and sciences have not hitherto been cultivated among us to any great extent, the influence they are capable of exerting on our happiness and dignity is not generally perceived. . . .”  He went on to note that the main objective of the museum was “the illustration of our Natural History,” and mentioned that Mr. John James Audubon, “one of the excellent artists connected with the museum, . . . has drawn from nature several hundred species of American birds. . . .”  (Audubon also served the museum as taxidermist.)  Drake further described a collection of Indian utensils, weapons, and trinkets, artifacts acquired from digging in the prehistoric Indian mounds of Ohio [see Forum Post #4930], and the acquisition by the museum of “several kinds of philosophical instruments,” [this was the term at the time for what we would call “scientific instruments”] “calculated to illustrate the principles of magnetism, electricity, galvanism, mechanics, hydrostatics, optics, and the mechanism of the solar system.  The whole of these can be fabricated by our ingenious Curator, Mr. Best.”

A Brief Note on Robert Best:  So Robert Best was Curator of the Western Museum.  It was advertised (1822) that he would “repair all kinds of Philosophical and Mathematical Instruments – all the highest order of Time Keepers, and in short, every species of delicate and Complicated Machinery.”  Born in England, Best was the Rev. Elijah Slack’s assistant during the first session of the Medical College of Ohio (founded by Dr. Daniel Drake) [also see Forum Post #4943], lecturing on chemistry, on which subject he authored a book.  He died, it is said, a “nervous wreck” in 1830 at the age of forty, possibly from all of the duties he performed at the Western Museum, Cincinnati College [see below], and the Medical College of Ohio.

The Lancaster Seminary and Cincinnati College:  Daniel Drake was also a founder of the Lancaster Seminary, so-called because it taught its students by the “Lancastrian Method.”  This method of conducting schools was begun by Anglican missionary schools in Madras, India (hence it is sometimes called the “Madras Method”).  Under this method, one teacher could supervise hundreds of students by dividing them into groups of about twenty each and putting them under the direct supervision of a class monitor, said monitor being a more advanced student, one selected for his deportment and his ability in his studies.  The system arrived in England from India in 1789 via Dr. Alexander Bell, who taught the method to Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker.  By 1805 Lancaster was conducting his own school in London by this method, having one thousand students enrolled under his and his hand-picked monitors’ direction.

An early and strong American advocate of the “Lancastrian Method” of education was the prominent Philadelphia physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush (a signer of the Declaration of Independence and known as the “American Hippocrates”), who wrote a treatise on A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools. . . .  Daniel Drake undoubtedly studied medicine with Benjamin Rush during his Philadelphia years, and so no doubt learned of the “Lancastrian Method” from him.  Accordingly, Drake founded Cincinnati’s Lancaster Seminary, a private high school, in 1815.  By 1819 the seminary had become Cincinnati College, a forerunner of the University of Cincinnati; its first president was the prominent Cincinnatian Jacob Burnet.

Dr. Drake made sure that the Western Museum was housed in Cincinnati College, located at the corner of Walnut and Fourth Streets, noting that having a museum and a college under one roof was by choice and was planned to be permanent:  “[I]n some degree they are necessary to the success of one another. . .  They afford, in succession, all the aids that are essential to a liberal education.  The College is principally a school of literature, the Museum of science, and the arts.  The knowledge imparted by one is elementary, by the other practical. . . .  [B]y the help of both, [our sons] may become scholars and philosophers.”

Enter Joseph Dorfeuille:  The Western Museum, which was at first limited to the natural and ethnological specimens mentioned above, as well as to some of the scientific instruments available (art was to come later), was left by Dr. Drake to the care of Robert Best until 1823, when Robert Best left town, and the operation of the museum was turned over to one Joseph Dorfeuille.  By his own admission, Joseph Dorfeuille had been collecting natural history specimens in Louisiana as early as 1808, acquiring collections of plants, animals, and native American artifacts, and hoping to set up a museum to house his collections.  He and his collections arrived in Cincinnati about 1820, just at the time that the Western Museum was opening.

Associating himself with the naturalists and artists (such as Audubon) working at Drake’s Western Museum, eventually Dorfeuille donated his own collections to the museum.  When he took over as curator in 1823, he began to enlarge the holdings.  By 1827 the museum owned 100 mammoth and mastodon bones; 50 giant sloth bones; 33 stuffed quadrupeds; 500 stuffed birds; 200 stuffed fishes; 5000 invertebrates; 1000 fossils; 3500 minerals; 325 botanical specimens; 3125 medals, coins, and tokens; 150 Egyptian and 215 Indian artifacts; 112 microscopic pictures [presumably slides]; views of American scenery and buildings; around 500 specimens of fine art; an elephant penis; and a “preserved and beautifully tattooed” head of a South Sea Island Chieftain.

However, by 1827 a number of significant changes had occurred.  The trustees of the Western Museum, no longer being able to financially support the museum, tried to sell the collections, but to no avail, so they gave them to Dorfeuille, stipulating that their families (who had been stockholders in the Museum) continue to have free access to the museum.  In 1825 the Cincinnati College had failed also, so Dorfeuille moved the Western Museum and its collections to the northwest corner of Second and Main Streets by the Public Landing, and then to rooms on the 3^rd, 4^th, and attic floors of a building on the southwest corner of Main and Pearl Streets.

The status of the Western Museum by 1824 is indicated by a poem [excerpted here] published in the Cincinnati Literary Gazette:    

                                “Wend hither, ye members of polished society –

                                 Ye who the bright phantoms of pleasure pursue --

                                 To see of strange objects the endless variety, 

                                 Monsieur Dorfeuille will expose to your view.

                                 For this fine collection, which courts your inspection

                                 Was brought to perfection by his skill and lore,

                                 When those who projected and should have protected

                                 Its Interests, neglected to care for it more.”

For Dorfeuille had learned that the public, having seen a given natural history exhibit once, didn’t need to see it again, even if it included two-headed pigs, eight-legged lambs, and other “things unnatural.”  Therefore he now introduced a collection of wax figures of historical personages (a la London’s Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks), which were sculpted by a then young and unknown Cincinnati sculptor, Hiram Powers (he had begun his career working in a grocery, but was fired for having opened butter firkins and sculpted the butter into lizards and hissing snakes), a pump organ, and a “Chamber of Horrors” depicting famous murders, including what supposedly were blood-soaked murder weapons and the head of one Hoover, a real-life murderer, “swollen and distorted in a huge glass of alcohol” (said head no doubt paired with that of the South Sea Islander).  Scientific study, it appears, had transmogrified into flagrant crass commercialism.

Mrs. Trollope Inserts Herself:  We have seen [in Part I] that Mrs. Frances Trollope’s sojourn in Cincinnati was, she hoped, to benefit her and her family financially as well as socially.  Accordingly, she cast about for some such project to latch onto, an “intellectual” one being most desirable.  Thus her first venture began when she connected herself to Joseph Dorfeuille and his Western Museum and introduced him to her artist friend Auguste Hervieu.  (Audubon, Dorfeuille’s artist, had left the Western Museum by this time.)  You will recall [see Part I] that Mrs. Trollope was friends with the former museum exhibitor extraordinaire, William Bullock, of London’s “Egyptian Hall” fame, who now lived just across the Ohio River at Ludlow, Kentucky.  There is little doubt that she conversed with him to come up with her grand plan for the Western Museum.

Mrs. Trollope’s plan was this:  to reproduce on the second floor of the Western Museum a moving model of a scene from Dante’s Inferno.  This, she thought, would certainly inspire culture in the Cincinnatians!  So Fanny Trollope designed the tableau, Hervieu painted the backdrops, Hiram Powers (who was later to become the most celebrated American sculptor of the 19^th century, especially for his sculpture of “The Greek Slave,” with a studio in Italy and equally acclaimed in Europe as in America) sculpted the waxwork figures, and, as he had studied with Cincinnati’s celebrated clockmaker, Luman Watson, worked with Dorfeuille to invent and make the clockwork mechanisms and gas machinery that moved the life-sized figures – some thirty in all – and illuminated them.

The “Infernal Regions”:  This exhibit of “Hell,” or “Infernal Regions,” as it came to be called, was an immense success:  it contained such effects as a “central, grand colossal figure of Minos, the Judge of Hell [Mrs. Trollope apparently mixed Greek mythology with Dante], holding a two-pronged scepter.  On his right appeared a frozen lake from which emerged the heads of doomed earthlings, including Ugolino, pictured ‘eternally gnawing the head of his enemy’ [in actual history, it was the bodies of his sons; see the statue in the Metropolitan Museum of Art].  A ‘BLACK IMP’ was ‘seated on a rock dandling a young monster.’  Throngs of condemned spirits ‘in all varieties of suffering’ crowded about a fountain of flame in the midst of the frozen lake, and birds and animals of hideous form and evil omen fluttered over the heads of the sufferers.  On the left of Minos a skeleton ascended a column of icicles, the bright surface of which glared red with the reflection of hell-fire, and held aloft a standard with these lines, prepared for the occasion by Mrs. Trollope herself:    

                                “To this grim form our cherished limbs have come,

                                 And thus lie mouldering in their earthly home.

                                 In turf-bound hillock or in sculptured shrine

                                 The worms alike their cold caresses twine.

                                 So far we all are equal:  but once left

                                 Our mortal weeds, of vital spark bereft,

                                 Asunder farther than the poles we’re driven –

                                 Some sunk to deepest Hell, some raised to highest Heaven.”

It was also advertised that, true or not, all of the skeletons in the exhibit were “those of Malefactors Executed in Ohio within the past 20 years for their criminal offenses” (how these were acquired by the Museum is not explained).  Behind the view of “Inferno” gleamed Hervieu’s transparencies of “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” bright with symbols of hope and moral progress upward.  These included a boat guided by an Angel [not dissimilar from Thomas Cole‘s paintings of “The Voyage of Life,” the large set of which hung in George K. Schoenberger’s home, “Scarlet Oaks,” in Clifton, until it was transferred to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., in the early 1970s], Virgil and Beatrice, pilgrims ascending the Holy Mountain, and a golden Heaven in the distance.

Further terrors included mechanical dwarfs that grew into giants as one watched them, “ebony imps with fire darting from their eyeballs, huge snakes in the act of swallowing beautiful maidens,” and “unearthly sounds, horrid groans, and terrible shrieks. . . .  At a moment when utter darkness prevails all the sufferers, imps, and monsters are heard shrieking together till the light returns.”  To add his share of amusements, young Henry Trollope (Mrs. Trollope’s son) would dress up in a long black robe, with a lobster claw on his nose, and stand at the entrance greeting visitors as they prepared to leave by inquiring, “Do you smell sulfur?”

In order to protect the delicate waxwork figures of the display from abuse by the often untutored country bumpkin visitors to the exhibit, Dorfeuille rigged up, in front of the “Inferno,” a “massive iron grating cunningly connected by wires with an electrical machine [a hand-cranked dynamo] in the background.  Any spectator (and few could resist the impulse) who put hand or foot between the bars received a smart shock which often passed from one to another of the crowd causing shrieks of terror.”

Early Public Relations:  To properly put this exhibit – and, indeed the entire Western Museum – before the public, Mrs. Trollope wrote a verse for the Cincinnati Mirror, which included such lines [abridged here] as:

                                    “Come hither, come hither, by night or by day.

                                     There’s plenty to look at and little to pay;

                                     You may stroll through the rooms and at every turn

                                     There’s something to please you and something to learn.

                                               *          *          *          *          *

                                     And further, a secret I still have to tell,

                                     You may ramble upstairs, and on earth be in H-ll!”

The Western Museum’s “Infernal Regions,” on the Museum’s top floor, opened every night at 7:15 p.m., and a showing lasted for one-half to three-quarters of an hour [which suggests that there was probably more than one showing a night]; the admission price was 50 cents.  Once the “Hell” was open, however, it advertised itself.  Probably the subterfuge used, that of the “moral and religious” purposes of the display – as well as inviting the clergy to attend for free – helped the financial success of the exhibit.  People came from far and wide to view this miraculous spectacle, certain Christian ministers describing it as a great and glorious revival of faith in Cincinnati, and preaching sermons on the subject.

The "End Times":  Dorfeuille departed for New York in 1839, hoping to regroup his fortunes, which had been dwindling:  in 1829 he had tried to sell portions of the fossil collections to the Academy of Natural Sciences, then to the American Philosophical Society, both in Philadelphia; in 1833 he was forced to mortgage the entire contents of the museum (including “The Infernal Regions”) to one Henry Avery for $3500.  (His effort to sell the museum’s natural history collections, along with a large collection of scientific books, to the newly formed Western Academy of Sciences in Cincinnati evidently failed.)  Dorfeuille’s museum was ultimately acquired by one Frederick Franks, who had been running a competing establishment since 1828 on Front Street in Cincinnati between Sycamore Street and Broadway.  Franks and his son continued to operate the Western Museum and its “Infernal Regions” for at least another twenty-five years.  The noted American humorist, Artemus Ward, who first saw the “Regions” in 1861, declared it “the best show in Cincinnati.”  

In short, Cincinnati’s Western Museum, the forerunner of today’s venerable Cincinnati Museum of Natural History (currently housed in Cincinnati Union Terminal), was an early Cincinnati showplace, and its “Infernal Regions” was undoubtedly the most famous museum exhibit in all of America in the Victorian era (even including those in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City, which preceded his famed circus), the "Infernal Regions"'s popularity, even if it had become dowdy and well-worn (as we are told), lasting well into the 1860s.

Gene Stern

I had the pleasure of seeing "Songs for a new World", our Class sponsored live-stream event, and  felt a sense of pride that our Class of 64 Performing Arts Fund is really making an impact. Thanks to all who have supported this Fund-it is making a genuine and everlasting contribution to the betterment of current and future WHHS classes. Rick Steiner would have been ecstatic at the unique and entertaining performance of this production.

Philip Spiess

Jerry:  It's not hard to find the reasons why (deplorable as they might be) that Cincinnati didn't like freed slaves:

(1) Cincinnati was at the southern border of the free states; Kentucky, just across the river was a slave state.  Of course, any freed slave wanted to get into Ohio; hence the Ohio legislature refused to allow the completion of the Cincinnati Suspension Bridge until after the Civil War -- it would make it too easy for slaves to cross!  (We're not accounting for Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin waiting for the river to freeze -- which it did in those days -- to cross on the ice.).

(2) Freed slaves, looking for work, competed with the poorer white citizens of Cincinnati, it being easier to pay poor blacks less for the same work than poor whites.  (It was also easier to trick -- or sell -- freed slaves back into slavery, human chicanery being what it is.)

(3) The Hamilton County courts began to be filled up with presumed "freed slave" cases, particularly after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  Naturally, this impeded other types of legal cases, to the extreme irritation of Cincinnati businessmen, nor were they particularly sympathetic to these cases to begin with.

(4) The presence of freed slaves in town certainly activated the already active Abolitionist crowd and its newspapers, thus coming up against the more conservative elements of Cincinnati society (cf., the present day scuttles between far-right political elements and those accused of being "Progressives" -- or worse).

(5) I'm sure the government powers-that-were, in city, in county, and in state, frankly did not know what to do with an influx of freed slaves -- did not want even to deal with the matter -- so they made it as difficult as possible for freed slaves to exist in Cincinnati (cf., the recent voting restrictions being passed in certain state legislatures).

To review details:  see my eight Forum articles on "African Americans in Cincinnati," particularly Part I on "Black Laws and Race Riots" [Post #4528, 2-19-2020] and Part V on the "Cincinnati Schools" [Post #4674, 4-7-2020].  You may also wish to see Jim Nathan's post on the 1967 Cincinnati race riots [6-15-2020] and Ann Rueve's post on the 2001 Cincinnati race riots [6-13-2020].

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

The above discussion has compelled me to take the opportunity to enlighten this forum in an area of cultural sensitivity for future reference. The people referred to in the above posts were enslaved human beings and the use of the term has become generally anathema.  Thanks.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-column-slave-enslaved-language-people-first-debate-zorn-20190906-audknctayrarfijimpz6uk7hvy-story.html?outputType=amp

Steven Levinson

Thanks, Ann.  That was important.

Gail Weintraub (Stern)

Thank you, Ann, for your Post #5616. We needed you to post this article and enlighten us.

Like Gene's Post #5613, I watched our Performing Arts Fund sponsored Senior High Musical "Songs For A New World" with pride. Our Class of 1964 is making a sustaining impact at our alma mater. (And to those of you who have asked me in the past, Gene Stern and I are neither married nor related.)

Florence (Now Jean) Ager

THE FREEZING OF THE OHIO RIVER, ETC.

Phillip, you referred to the Ohio River freezing at an earlier time. Does that imply evidence of climate change.? I suppose the building of dams might alter the flow.

I recall the day my father took me downtown to experience the Ohio River when it was frozen over. It would have been safe to walk across, but he didn't want to risk it. That was probably in the late 1950's. My father said that, as a youth, he had frequently walked across the frozen water.

We often visited an elderly couple In Moscow, Ohio. The husband was a retired steamboat captain. He told tales of "liquid hisory" while puffing on a pipe and tapping ashes into their pot belly stove. The couple expected a yearly flood which they took in stride. They simply moved upstairs and measured the height of the water with an inserted yardstick. Their kitchen walls and ceiling were papered entirely with Christmas cards which could be replaced more readily than wall paper. It was very cheerful despite hints of dampness. 

Ira Goldberg

Thank you, Ann. History is real and hard  

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Thank you Ann for the interesting article from the Trib. Although it sadly reminds me of how isolated I am in Israel from the current mores of speech in my country of birth, it also reminded me of a funny-haha/funny-strange incident that happened to me in 1967, on the University of Cincinnati campus. I was chatting with a friend and a few other girls I knew slightly, when one of the latter suddenly broke in to ask if my friend and I were "Hebrews".

Both of us putative Hebrews stopped dead. We had recently returned from a year in Israel, and the girl who asked the question was obviously, from her accent, from the South. Not knowing if we were on the cusp of an embarrassing spectacle, Susan and I both held our breath for a beat or two. But the Southerner's face remained only calmly curious, and she seemed to be honestly waiting for an answer. 

I exhaled, and explained that we were Jewish, not Hebrews. (There were "Black Hebrews", mostly from Chicago, I believe, living in Dimona Israel who had not undergone any form of conversion to Judaism, but had just decided that they could claim to be Jews and that that should be that.) I added out loud that we SPOKE Hebrew, but WERE Jews. While the poor girl was digesting that, Susan and I excused ourselves and beat a hasty retreat to the Hebrew Union College across the street. 

Feeling somehow "safer" at HUC, we discussed what had just happened. Susan, obviously the wiser of we two, brought up that this girl, who had surely never met a Jew in her life as far as she knew, had most probably been raised to think that calling a Jew "Jewish" was a racial slur and extremely impolite.

I deeply regretted my cowardice, and wanted to invite her for a Friday night meal with my family, but it was the end of the school year, exams had begun, the 6 Day War started, and I never saw her again.

Florence (Now Jean) Ager

Judy, your sharing of an encounter on the U.C. walkway was most interesting. How kind of you to excuse the girl for her awkwardness and wish to invite her for a family dinner. Although not that naive, I was mostly unaware of who was Jewish in our class. It was obvious that there were many empty seats on certain holidays. 

Dale Gieringer

Ann -  I'm sorry to hear you find the word slave anathema, but can we please agree not to censure fellow classmates for not using the latest PC terminology on the website?  The institution of slavery is most certainly anathema. However, to my ears, “enslaved human being” sounds like a euphemistic circumlocution that whitewashes an ugly history.  I know other classmates feel similarly.   At our advanced age, it’s difficult for all of us to keep abreast of the latest twists and turns of political jargon.   I was taught by Wilma Hutchison  -- not always successfully -  to use direct language;  and no one has taught me more than Phil Spiess about Black History in Ohio.    Of course, you’re welcome to use whatever term you please, but please forgive elderly history buffs like Phil and myself if we continue to invoke the direct terms employed  by the Bible, Shakespeare, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King.  Respectfully, Dale.

Ann Shepard (Rueve)

I'll give you a pass Dale. I had no intention to chastise you or anyone else. I only meant to use this as a learning opportunity. As the Chicago Tribune article points out, words do matter.  About a year ago, one of our classmates (who rarely posts a comment, but reads everything) pointed out the difference to me in a different discussion, after reading my comment, in this forum, of my own roots and my grandfather's enslavement.  I'm as elderly as anyone else, but after making a conscious effort, the change now rolls off my tongue.

Linda Karpen (Nachman)

Hi 64ers! If you haven't seen this, it's our time, our memories and a very moving story/song.

"Hello Darkness My Old Friend"

Read the story below then listen to the Video

Beautiful Song!!  And now for the REST OF THE STORY…read it first!!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9z87viDmOo

Hello Darkness My Old Friend, a Simon and Garfunkel song inspired by a College roommate who went blind -  reveals an untold story.  Enjoy and then listen to the song itself. 

One of the best-loved songs of all time. Simon & Garfunkel's hit The Sound Of Silence topped the US charts and went platinum in the UK. 

It was named among the 20 most performed songs of the 20th century, included in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and provided the unforgettable soundtrack to 1967 film classic The Graduate. But to one man The Sound Of Silence means much more than just a No 1 song on the radio with its poignant opening lines: "Hello Darkness my old friend, I've come to talk with you again." 

Sanford "Sandy" Greenberg is Art Garfunkel's best friend, and reveals in a moving new memoir, named after that lyric, that the song was a touching tribute to their undying bond, and the singer's sacrifice that saved Sandy's life when he unexpectedly lost his sight. 

"He lifted me out of the grave," says Sandy, aged 79, who recounts his plunge into sudden blindness, and how Art Garfunkel's selfless devotion gave him reason to live again. 

Sandy and Arthur, as Art was then known, met during their first week as students at the prestigious Columbia University in New York. 

"A young man wearing an Argyle sweater and corduroy pants and blond hair with a crew cut came over and said, 'Hi, I'm Arthur Garfunkel'," Sandy recalls. 

They became roommates, bonding over a shared taste in books, poetry and music. 

"Every night Arthur and I would sing. He would play his guitar and I would be the DJ. The air was always filled with music." 

"Still teenagers, they made a pact to always be there for each other in times of trouble. "If one was in extremis, the other would come to his rescue," says Sandy They had no idea their promise would be tested so soon. Just months later, Sandy recalls: "I was at a baseball game and suddenly my eyes became cloudy and my vision became unhinged. Shortly after that darkness descended." Doctors diagnosed conjunctivitis, assuring it would pass. But days later Sandy went blind, and doctors realized that  glaucoma had destroyed his optic nerves. 

Sandy was the son of a rag-and-bone man. His family, Jewish immigrants in Buffalo, New York, had no money to help him, so he dropped out of college, gave up his dream of becoming a lawyer, and plunged into depression. "I wouldn't see anyone, I just refused to talk to anybody," says Sandy. "And then unexpectedly Arthur flew in, saying he had to talk to me. He said, 'You're gonna come back, aren't you?'  "I said,: 'No, There's no conceivable way.' "He was pretty insistent, and finally said, 'Look, I don't think you get it. I need you back there. That's the pact we made together: we would be there for the other in times of crises. I will help you'." 

Together they returned to Columbia University, where Sandy became dependent on Garfunkel's support. Art would walk Sandy to class, bandage his wounds when he fell, and even filled out his graduate school applications. 

Garfunkel called himself "Darkness" in a show of empathy. The singer explained: "I was saying, 'I want to be together where you are, in the black'." Sandy recalls: "He would come in and say, 'Darkness is going to read to you now.' “Then he would take me to class and back. He would take me around the city. He altered his entire life so that it would accommodate me." 

Garfunkel would talk about Sandy with his high-school friend Paul Simon, from Queens, New York, as the folk rock duo struggled to launch their musical careers, performing at local parties and clubs. Though Simon wrote the song, the lyrics to The Sound of Silence are infused with Garfunkel's compassion as Darkness, Sandy's old friend. 

Guiding Sandy through New York one day, as they stood in the vast forecourt of bustling Grand Central Station, Garfunkel said that he had to leave for an assignment, abandoning his blind friend alone in the rush-hour crowd, terrified, stumbling and falling. "I cut my forehead" says Sandy. "I cut my shins. My socks were bloodied. I had my hands out and bumped into a woman's breasts. It was a horrendous feeling of shame and humiliation. "I started running forward, knocking over coffee cups and briefcases, and finally I got to the local train to Columbia University. It was the worst couple of hours in my life." 

Back on campus, he bumped into a man, who apologized. "I knew that it was Arthur's voice," says Sandy. "For a moment I was enraged, and then I understood what happened: that his colossally insightful, brilliant yet wildly risky strategy had worked." Garfunkel had not abandoned Sandy at the station, but had followed him the entire way home, watching over him. "Arthur knew it was only when I could prove to myself I could do it that I would have real independence," says Sandy. "And it worked, because after that I felt that I could do anything. 

"That moment was the spark that caused me to live a completely different life, without fear, without doubt. For that I am tremendously grateful to my friend." Sandy not only graduated, but went on to study for a master's degree at Harvard and Oxford. 

While in Britain he received a phone call from his friend - and with it the chance to keep his side of their pact. Garfunkel wanted to drop out of architecture school and record his first album with Paul Simon, but explained: "I need $400 to get started." Sandy, by then married to his high school sweetheart, says: "We had $404 in our current account. I said, 'Arthur, you will have your cheque.' "It was an instant reaction, because he had helped me restart my life, and his request was the first time that I had been able to live up to my half of our solemn covenant." 

The 1964 album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, was a critical and commercial flop, but one of the tracks was The Sound Of Silence, which was released as a single the following year and went to No 1 across the world. "The Sound Of Silence meant a lot, because it started out with the words 'Hello darkness' and this was Darkness singing, the guy who read to me after I returned to Columbia blind," says Sandy. 

Simon & Garfunkel went on to have four smash albums, with hits including Mrs. Robinson, The Boxer, and Bridge Over Troubled Waters. Amazingly, Sandy went on to extraordinary success as an inventor, entrepreneur, investor, presidential adviser and philanthropist. The father of three, who launched a $3million prize to find a cure for blindness, has always refused to use a white cane or guide dog. "I don't want to be 'the blind guy'," he says. "I wanted to be Sandy Greenberg, the human being." 

Six decades later the two men remain best friends, and Garfunkel credits Sandy with transforming his life. With Sandy, "my real life emerged," says the singer. "I became a better guy in my own eyes, and began to see who I was - somebody who gives to a friend. "I blush to find myself within his dimension. My friend is the gold standard of decency."  Says Sandy: "I am the luckiest man in the world"

The attached video:  The Sound of Silence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9z87viDmOo

Paul Simons

Thanks for putting that up Linda. They sound fantastic. What a catalog - this and Mrs. Robinson and Graceland - wow!!

I can't count how many times, with my name, people say "Hey, where's Garfunkel?"  I settled on telling them "He's at the corner of 52nd Street and 8th Avenue having an Orange Julius." Then I began saying "Right now? He's with your wife."

If anyone's interested - I might have put this up before - I've been working on a collection of Buddy Holly and other tunes with Stan Hertzman who most will remember.

Some of them are at https://phsra8.wixsite.com/cd-electro

JoAnn Dyson (Dawson)

It's been a while since I've checked to read the running chat.  Comments are always interesting. 

I am adding my support to Ann's comment re the use of the word "slave".  In my opinion, too often the word is used in a fashion that recognizes the state of involuntary servitude, but does not recognize the breadth and depth of humanity of the enslaved person.  The slave is not recognized as a full human being so well demonstrated in the US Constitution.  Another example is the term "freed slave"--an oxymoron if ever there was one.  The term "freed slave" implies that the formerly enslaved person is not more than, and can never be more than the former state of enslavement. 

In the US, the term "slave" is so culturally connected to Africans who were kidnapped and taken forcibly from their homelands, families and lives that there is never an effort to define who is being referenced. The term is automatically assumed to be referencing a person of African descent.

Words do have meaning, and therefore potential power.  Just as the term "politically correct" conjures up (for me) an image totalitarian governments and their absolute power, so I never use it, the term "slave" (whether an enlaved person of the past or the present) in reference to a human being seems to strip that human being of his/her humanity and potential.

Steven Levinson

Words that have been common parlance for so long that, in some instances, their origins are unrecognizable to many, can certainly be hurtful.  "I was gypped" and "He tried to jew me down" are apt illustrations.

Paul Simons

I’m thinking that these words matter enormously as do the actions that they represent. I think this country has an absolutely hideous, abominable past that many refuse to acknowledge or even try to imagine. That’s what we must ALL do now - acknowledge it and imagine it - if we are ever going to approach being an honest country. Right now the level of deceit directly traceable to the gigantic and newly reinvigorated lie of white supremacy used to justify criminality by police and by those in and out of government who call themselves patriotic Americans is intolerable.

To use an example others have used - the experts say it will be very difficult, despite the evidence, to convict Derek Chauvin of murder. Say George Floyd was the cop, and he pressed his knee into immobilized on the pavement civilian Derek Chauvin's neck leading to his death. I don't think the experts would predict that a conviction would be difficult.

Gene Stern

Thank you Linda for that moving story about the Sounds of Silence! It will make the music so much more meaningful knowing the history behind the words.