Neddy's Palaver

Vanquished, Vanished

Come, come, come …
Let us ponder the America of our memories:
We sang like the birds of the field; we sang of freedom;
When we sought opportunity, we found it awaiting us.
America was a dream, a vision of seekers;
America was a dream that lasted ten score and thirty years.
The dream that was America encountered the anarchy of liberty;
And was felled by the anarchy of immorality.
We beg forgiveness of our founders, our fathers;
We weep for the blood they shed for us.
The America that was their dream is now our master.
Freemen no longer, we are serfs to toil land that is not ours.
We live the lives of the slaves of old, lives of quiet desperation;
We beat our breasts in despair knowing we sold our posterity into bondage.
We still pray, but not to God; We still sing, but not of freedom.
We tell tales to our children and they laugh,
For, as we recollect our remembrances,
Our children hear fairy tales of long, long ago.
We talk to those who sacrificed for freedom,
And they ask: “Did we win or did we lose?
Was God with us or were we against God, in those days?
Was freedom worth the blood we spilt?
Or was freedom but a mysterious nothing,
A mere longing of our souls?”
We will soon go away too, we who have the memories.
When we are gone, will seekers ever dream that dream again?

Who were Harry Thaw, Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White?

I have been listening to an audio book of “Ragtime,” which I purchased because I have tickets to the play “Ragtime” that is scheduled for the Kennedy Center in May. Halfway through the book, I have decided that Evelyn Nesbit and Harry Thaw are featured characters that I should know more about. To learn more about them is quite easy, as, before reading “Ragtime” I had never heard anything of either of them; for all I knew, they were figments of the author’s imagination.

After the author’s coverage of Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt, Admiral Byrd, the famous psychiatrists Freud and Jung, I decided that murderer Harry Thaw, Gibson Girl Evelyn Nesbit and Evelyn’s lover Stanford White must have been historical characters. In 1906, Harry Thaw’s trial for the murder of White was labelled the “Trial of the Century.” Of course, OJ Simpson had not yet been born, and his trial for murder was fated for the end of the same century.

I find “Ragtime” interesting reading as it covers the historical events of my father’s boyhood. He was born 1901, and came to the U.S. as a teen. Also, my grandmother and my mother had grown up on a Virginia plantation of the family of another Gibson Girl, Irene Langhorne Gibson. I remember my grandmother recounting how she and her siblings played with the discarded drawings of Irene’s artist husband, Charles Dana Gibson. This is all doubly intriguing, as E.L. Doctorow links all of his historical characters with one another, and with his created characters, and I have found that my own family is linked to the very same people of his novel.

Well, back to “Ragtime” and Evelyn Nesbit, I finally Googled her this morning. (I’m not sure if “Google” the verb should be in caps or not.) She and her star-crossed lovers are in Wikipedia as real American characters and she even has her own web page: “The Story of Evelyn Nesbit.”

The image, Evelyn Nesbit, was originally uploaded by westiemom. It is posted here from Barneykin’s Flickr account.

Visit Neddy’s Archives for more of Edna’s writings.

Who Was

• The first president born in a log cabin?
• The first president nominated by a political party?
• The first president to ride on a railroad train?
• The first president victimized by an assassination attempt?
• The only president to find himself an orphan and an only child at the age of fourteen.
• The only president to have been a prisoner of war?
• The only president to have killed a man in a duel.
• The last president who was a veteran of the Revolutionary War.

Hint, Hint; They were all the same person. The answer is at http://tinyurl.com/djt7q6.

The Choral Group from Carl Sandburg Middle School, directed by Jeanne Crowley, concluded their presentation for Nelly Custis DAR chapter with "We Wish You A Merry Christmas," performed on the main staircase of the Woodlawn Mansion, Woodlawn, Virginia. Regent Pamela wanted her chapter to experience a brief moment from a long ago Virginia holiday. It was as though we had been transported back to those early American days of Nelly Custis Lewis and her family when they celebrated Christmas at Woodlawn Plantation, with no radios, televisions, cds and computers.

The talented young women sang a musical round also that I have not the title. The video is posted here: My Flickr Album.

In the mid 1600s, the Catholic BRENT family sailed across the Potomac from Maryland to Aquia, Virginia and settled at the Colony of Brenton. This was the first Catholic settlement in English Virginia. When the BRENTS were colonizing Maryland, Giles BRENT had done just as John ROLFE, who had married an Indian princess at Jamestown. BRENT’s bride was a 12-year-old student or ward of his spinster sister Margaret BRENT, who was operating a school for the Piscataway children. When GILES claimed almost all the land of the Maryland Colony due to his marriage to the Piscataway chief’s daughter, he got himself, and his BRENT sisters, into a dangerous situation with the Lord Baltimore government. The BRENTS were forced to cross the river and live in Virginia.

Margaret BRENT was America’s first suffragette, but few have ever heard of her. She was an outstanding, accomplished women. She acted as Lord Baltimore’s attorney, and in fact was probably running the government of the colony. She was able to own property, because she never married, and she even demanded the right to vote. It was denied of course, but the Marylanders did bestow upon her the title of “Gentleman” Margaret BRENT. After the move to Virginia, she seemed never quite so powerful, probably because of her “out of favor” Catholic religion.

This plaque is at the Crucifix Monument on the east side of Jefferson Davis Highway, at Telegraph Road, in Aquia, Virginia.

Fly your flags this week, September 16th through 23rd, in tribute to the United States Constitution. This coming week is Constitution Week.

“The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution encourages you to celebrate Constitution Week, September 17 through 23. This year commemorates the two hundred twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of the United States of America. In 1955, the DAR began the tradition of celebrating Constitution Week by successfully petitioning Congress to set aside this week annually to officially observe the oldest document still in active use that outlines the self-government of a people.” ( www.dar.org, September 2007)

This photograph is from “My Picasa Albums.” It is of Constitution Hall, Washington, DC, which was built in the 1920s by the Daughters of the American Revolution as a tribute to the U.S. Constitution. In 1928, the Daughters of the American Revolution began work on a building as a memorial to the United States Constitution. They commissioned John Russell Pope, architect of the Jefferson Memorial, to design a concert hall. DAR Constitution Hall is the only structure erected as a memorial to the Constitution of the United States of America. DAR is the largest women’s patriotic organization in the world, with over 165,000 members in all fifty states and eleven foreign countries.

• Honoring the Constitution
• Constitution Week 2005
• Constitution Week II

The image, Constitution Hall, was originally uploaded to the Internet by barneykin. It was posted here by Neddy of .

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“On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive, Who remembers that famous day and year….” ~~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”

In honor of this day and the many American patriots who fought for freedom during the years of the American Revolution, I have created a slideshow of some of those patriots’ graves: Patriots of ‘76.

If you would like to listen to appropriate music while viewing the Patriots’ Graves slideshow, click this little arrow to hear America’s Liberation Song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and then open the slideshow in a new tab or page. It is music that expresses the spirit that once motivated America, “a giant filled with a terrible resolve, unleashed against tyrants and oppressors.” It was performed at the funerals of Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, and at the memorials for the victims of September 11th in Washington, New York and London. This version is sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in the language style of the Old Testament of the Holy Bible.

Come Again No More
Life in America’s early days was not quite as easy as it is today.

“There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears,
Oh, Hard times come again no more.“

Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864) was one of America’s most prolific and best songwriters, leaving behind more than 300 songs of many varieties. As he aged, Foster focused on writing nostalgia songs with feelings of lost youth, home, family, and friends. Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” (published 1855) falls into that category. The basis for the melody was a tune that Stephen Foster had heard as a small child in an Negro church in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania.

Foster was writing of the “hard times” in America, prior to the Civil War. He sang this particular song quite often in his latter days, which proved tragically prophetic for Foster as when he died on January 13, 1864, at the age of 37, he had only 38 cents to his name.

Hard Times, Come Again No More” has always been one of my favorites, bringing tears to my eyes as I think of the “hard times” endured by my family who trod this Virginia soil during the era after the War Between the States. This song is performed by vocalist Thomas Hampson and instrumentalist Craig Rutenberg. It is from the Library of Congress, courtesy of the Van Cliburn Foundation, Cliburn Concerts and the Bass Performance Hall, Fort Worth, Texas.

Thank you WaPo for remembering our greatest American, George Washington.

Fleshing Out a Founding Father - washingtonpost.com

Mount Vernon Additions Provide New Entree to George Washington’s World

By Jacqueline Trescott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 24, 2006; Page A01

A decade ago, the people who run Mount Vernon noticed many of their visitors knew little more about George Washington than that he was the country’s first president.

Beginning Friday, visitors there will be able to learn much more about him in two new buildings. On their way to the historic mansion, they’ll pass through an orientation center where they will get history about Washington and his home (one short film is narrated by game show host Pat Sajak). And on their way out, they will pass through an extensive museum and education center.

During wartime, some give all, some give some, and some are left to tell their tales. Lola was blessed to return home from World War Two and her tale is now published on the Internet: “Lola Was a Soldier”.

Lola was one of those courageous young American women who signed on for volunteer service as a soldier during World War II. She participated in the European and North African theaters of the war. Amazing young women like Lola served and sacrificed for freedom. Younger generations need to be reminded of the incredible wartime contributions of the people who went before them. Lola’s name is entered at the Woman In Military Service For America Memorial where she is a charter member.

Lola Anderson was but a young woman during wartime when she observed the poster of Uncle Sam pointing his finger directly at her, saying “I want you for the U.S. Army”. She signed up, and she says that in those days in the Army, there was NO “hurry up and wait”, as she was quickly trained and sent out to do her duty, as her patriotic forebears had done in earlier times. Lola is Lola (Anderson) Peach, a member of Fairfax County Chapter, NSDAR, of Vienna, Virginia.

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The image, World War Two Soldier, was originally uploaded to the Internet by barneykin. It was posted here by Neddy of .