Beautiful Ohio
I sailed away;
Wandered afar;
Crossed the mighty restless sea;
Looked for where I ought to be.
Cities so grand, mountains above,
Led to this land I love.
Wandered afar;
Crossed the mighty restless sea;
Looked for where I ought to be.
Cities so grand, mountains above,
Led to this land I love.
CHORUS:
Beautiful Ohio, where the golden grain
Dwarf the lovely flowers in the summer rain.
Cities rising high, silhouette the sky.
Freedom is supreme in this majestic land;
Mighty factories seem to hum in tune, so grand.
Beautiful Ohio, thy wonders are in view,
Land where my dreams all come true!
ORIGINAL CHORUS (written by Ballard MacDonald):
Drifting with the current down a moonlit stream,
While above the Heavens in their glory gleam,
And the stars on high
Twinkle in the sky,
Seeming in a paradise of love divine,
Dreaming of a pair of eyes that looked in mine.
Beautiful Ohio, in dreams again I see
Visons of what used to be.
In 1969, the Ohio legislature adopted
"Beautiful Ohio" as Ohio's state song. Mary Earl, whose
real name was Robert A. "Bobo" King, composed the music.
Ballard MacDonald wrote the original lyrics to the 1918 song. The
song became a big hit in 1919 – almost 100 years ago as recorded by
artists such as Canadian Henry Burr and the Waldorf-Astoria Dance
Orchestra. The melody is partly based on "Song of India" by
Rimsky-Korsakov and "Beautiful Dreamer" by Stephen Foster.
In 1919, Ohio and the town of Lucasville found their beautiful way into the hearts and minds of the nation. In celebration of Lucasville, Ohio's 200th birthday in 2019, let's turn the clock back 100 years to 1919, the year of the Lucasville Centennial.
What was it like during that time?
Thanks to historical chronicles we can better answer that question.
Our town and our America were going through some defining changes.
Let's explore our past. I hope you enjoy the time travel.
In 1919, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat
from New Jersey, was president. He had been re-elected in 1916 over
Republican Charles Evans Hughes, the only sitting Supreme Court
Justice to serve as a major party's presidential nominee, in a very
close election. Wilson won the state of Ohio with 51.86 percent of the popular vote.
A declaration of war by the United
States against Germany passed Congress by strong bipartisan
majorities on April 4, 1917, with opposition from ethnic German
strongholds and remote rural areas in the South. The United States had entered World War I.
A formal state of war between the two sides persisted for another seven months, until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on June 28, 1919.
After the Germans signed the Armistice, Wilson went to Paris to try to build an enduring peace. He later presented to the Senate the Versailles Treaty, containing the Covenant of the League of Nations, and asked, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” But the election of 1918 had shifted the balance in Congress to the Republicans. By seven votes the Versailles Treaty failed in the Senate.
After the Germans signed the Armistice, Wilson went to Paris to try to build an enduring peace. He later presented to the Senate the Versailles Treaty, containing the Covenant of the League of Nations, and asked, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?” But the election of 1918 had shifted the balance in Congress to the Republicans. By seven votes the Versailles Treaty failed in the Senate.
Wilson's influence? He helped transfer
American foreign policy from isolation to internationalism. He also
had success in making the Democratic Party a “party of reform.”
The man also had the ability to shape and mobilize public opinion –
something that surely fashioned the modern presidency.
The Progressive Era
The 1890s to the 1920s was known as the
Progressive Era, a period of widespread social activism and political
reform across the country. The main objectives of the Progressive
movement were eliminating problems caused by industrialization,
urbanization, immigration, and political corruption. Doesn't that
sound familiar? I guess some things never change.
Progressives were people who believed
that the problems society faced (poverty, violence, greed, racism,
class warfare) could best be addressed by providing good education, a
safe environment, and an efficient workplace. Progressives lived
mainly in the cities, were college educated, and believed that
government could be a tool for change. A hallmark group of the
Progressive Era, the middle class, became the driving force behind
much of the thought and reform that took place in this time.
Ohio Progressives like Tom Loftin
Johnson and Samuel Jones became prominent. In 1897, Jones received
the Republican Party's nomination for Toledo's mayoral office.
Workers united behind Jones's candidacy, and he won the election.
Jones proceeded to implement Progressive reforms. During his time in
office, Jones worked to improve conditions for the working class
people of his community. The mayor opened free kindergartens, built
parks, instituted an eight-hour day for city workers, and did much to
reform the city government. Jones encouraged voters and politicians
to renounce political parties.
After World War I, the Progressive
Movement began to decline in popularity. The era of the Roaring
Twenties began, and many Americans sought a more carefree and less
moralistic lifestyle. Aspects of Progressivism remained until the
Great Depression and beyond, but it failed to exist as a concerted
movement by the early 1930s.
World War I Treaty
One of the most important dates of 1919
was June 28. On this date, the Treaty of Versailles was signed and
thus ended World War I. American losses in World War I were modest
compared to those of other major conflicts, with 116,516 deaths and
approximately 320,000 sick and wounded of the 4.7 million men who
served. The U.S. lost more personnel to disease (63,114) than to
combat (53,402), largely due to the influenza epidemic.
Many Americans felt that the Treaty was
unfair on Germany. More importantly, they felt that Britain and
France were making themselves rich at Germany's expense and that the
United States should not be helping them to do this.
The treaty would largely come to be
seen as a failure for Wilson, however. Congress, concerned about
conceding individual power in order to become a member of the League
of Nations, refused to ratify it. Wilson had been the driving force
behind the League of Nations, and while the other signatories of the
treaty embraced the League, American isolationism quashed enthusiasm
for it at home. Many were concerned that belonging to the League
would drag the U.S. into international disputes that were not their
concern. In the end, the Congress rejected the Treaty of Versailles
and the League of Nations.
In place of the Treaty of Versailles,
Congress passed a resolution, known as the Knox–Porter Resolution,
in 1921 to formally end the war with Germany. The League of Nations
would be resurrected after the Second World War with a proposal to
create a United Nations along similar lines.
Soldiers who survived the Influenza outbreak awaiting transport back
to Camp Sherman from downtown Chillicothe. c.1918
The Deadliest Pandemic: Spanish Flu
There is good argument for the flu
being the most important event of the time. The influenza
pandemic (January 1918– December 1920; colloquially known as
Spanish flu) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic. It
was recorded as the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500
million people worldwide – about one-third of the planet's
population – and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million
victims, including some 675,000 Americans.
In Ohio, Camp Sherman in Chillicothe
was affected more by the epidemic than any other training camp in the
nation. The disease swept through the camp in the late summer and
early fall. Approximately 5,686 cases of influenza were documented
among Camp Sherman soldiers in 1918. 1,777 of them were unable to
ward off the disease and died before the epidemic ended.
The National Park Service offered these
gruesome details of the pandemic …
“With the high mortality rate
at Camp Sherman, The Majestic Theater on 2nd Street in Chillicothe
became a temporary morgue. Bodies would be 'stacked like cordwood' at
the theater while it was operated as a morgue. Body fluids that were
drained during the embalming process ran off into the alley next to
the theater giving it the dubious nickname of 'Blood Alley.' Once
victims' bodies completed the embalming process, they would be
transported by wagon back to the camp so they could be sent back to
their hometowns by railway. As these wagons made their way through
Chillicothe, funeral hymns were played to reflect the somber mood. As
with all public places in the U.S., meeting places, bars and theaters
were closed to try to prevent further spread of the disease. All
personnel at Camp Sherman were quarantined from Chillicothe as well.”
Statewide in Ohio, hundreds of
thousands of people became infected and tens of thousands died from
the influenza. During the last week of October 1918, 1,541 Ohioans
died. Between October 1918 and January 1919, almost six hundred
Dayton residents perished. In an attempt to stop the spread of the
disease, many colleges temporarily closed their doors. In some cases,
campus buildings were made into makeshift hospitals to treat those
who had contracted the illness. Many other parts of the country also
experienced tragedy as a result of the influenza epidemic.
The First Red Scare
Once the United States no longer had to
concentrate its efforts on winning World War I, many Americans became
afraid that communism might spread to the United States and threaten
the nation's democratic values. Fueling this fear was the mass
immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans to the United States as
well as labor unrest in the late 1910s, including the Great Steel
Strike of 1919.
Therefore, in 1919, the U.S. was
plunged into the First Red Scare – a widespread fear of Bolshevism
and anarchism due to real and imagined events; real events included
the Russian Revolution and anarchist bombings carried out by the
Italian anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani from April through June
1919. How strange it seems that the terrorists of the day were
Italian. Yet, how much the threats of foreign and domestic terrorism
then parallel those of modern times.
At any rate, in late April 1919, at
least 36 booby trap dynamite-filled bombs were mailed to a
cross-section of prominent politicians and appointees, including the
Attorney General as well as justice officials, newspaper editors and
businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller.
Both the federal government and state
governments reacted to the fear and the events by attacking potential
communist threats. They used acts passed during the war, such as the
Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, to prosecute suspected
communists. The Ohio legislature passed a law known as the Criminal
Syndicalism Act, which allowed the state to prosecute people who used
or advocated criminal activity or violence in order to obtain
political change or to affect industrial conditions.
The obvious patriotism coming out of
World War I, as evidenced by anti-German sentiment in Ohio, helped to
fuel the Red Scare. The federal government's fervor in rooting out
communists led to major violations of civil liberties. Ultimately,
these violations began a decrease in support for government actions.
But, once again, history would repeat itself in the days of Senator
Joseph McCarthy when another Red Scare born of Cold War tensions
would fuel fears of widespread Communist subversion.
Postcard with a color image of the Seal of Ohio with a woman's face in the center. The woman's face is framed by the rising sun and the slogan "Let Ohio Women Vote." The postcard was sent from Columbus, Ohio by Elizabeth J. House to Mrs. C. L. Martzolff in Athens, Ohio, 1915.
The 18th and 19th
Amendments
And, two important amendments were
enacted in the year.
First, on January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment
to the United States Constitution, authorizing Prohibition, went into
effect in the United States. In what later become known as a
misguided and ineffective effort to fight alcoholism, family
violence, and saloon-based political corruption, activists led by
pious Protestants and social Progressives supported the ban on
alcoholic beverages. However, within a week after Prohibition went
into effect, small portable stills were on sale throughout the
country while private and large-scale bootlegging began in earnest
ushering in an era of rampant organized and widespread criminal
activity.
Considering that John Lucas, the
founder of Lucasville, operated a local tavern until his death on
July 31, 1825, at age 37, I wonder how many residents secretly
imbibed with a toast or two to the good old days. In 1919, I'm sure
many were singing the bars of the old Irving Berlin tune “The Near
Future.”
“How dry I am, how dry I
am
Nobody knows how dry I am... Hooow dryyy I aaaaaam!"
Nobody knows how dry I am... Hooow dryyy I aaaaaam!"
The other amendment that made news in
1919 was the 19th Amendment. On June 4, the United States
Congress approved the 19th Amendment to the United States
Constitution, which would soon guarantee suffrage to women, and sent
it to the U.S. states for ratification. Women had fought for the
right to vote since the mid-1800s. They marched, protested, lobbied,
and even went to jail.
Ohio women were actively involved in
the struggle for suffrage. The Women’s Suffrage Movement first
gained popularity in Ohio largely due to the second Woman’s Rights
Convention having been held in Salem, Ohio from April 19-20, 1850.
Cleveland was home to one of the nation’s earliest suffrage
conventions, in 1869. The state legislature approved women voting in
school board elections in the 1890s, but progress was much slower for
other political offices and at the state level. Women formed the Ohio
Woman's Suffrage Association in the late 1800s and participated in a
number of other local, state, and national organizations.
Ohio History Central reports …
“An Ohioan, Harriet Taylor
Upton, was instrumental in both the state and national campaigns for
women's suffrage. She served as president of the Ohio Women's
Suffrage Association for a number of years, as well as acting as
treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In
1912, supporters were able to persuade Ohio's Constitutional
Convention to take up the issue. As a result, Ohio voters went to the
polls that year and voted on an amendment to the state constitution
that would allow women to vote, but the amendment did not pass.
Women's suffrage was entangled in the debate about Prohibition by the
early twentieth century. Manufacturers of alcoholic beverages
successfully campaigned against the amendment. Brewers feared that,
if women had the right to vote, they would support Prohibition.
“During World War I, women
contributed significantly to the nation's war effort. As a result of
their service and because more and more politicians began to realize
that women could be an important source of votes, the United States
Congress supported passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the
Constitution.”
Passage of the 19th Amendment was not
easy. The United States House of Representatives originally approved
the amendment by only one vote more than required, and the United
States Senate held three different votes before passing it as well.
The majority of Ohio's representatives voted in support of the
Nineteenth Amendment.
When the amendment came before the Ohio
legislature for ratification, support was much stronger. The state
Senate voted in favor of the 19th Amendment by a vote of twenty-seven
to three, and the House of Representatives passed it with a vote of
seventy-three to six. As a result, Ohio was the fifth state to ratify
the 19th Amendment. On June 16, 1919, Ohio voted in favor of the
amendment. By August of 1920, 36 states approved the proposal and the
19th Amendment became law.
One must wonder what Lucasville lady at
the time of the Centennial led others as a local suffragette. I
believe it likely that many took an active role in favor of the
amendment. I'm certain the celebration of the town's 100th
Birthday was buzzing with hope and a little controversy. I bet this
quote by the late Susan B. Anthony was familiar to progressives of
the time: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens;
nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed
the Union. ... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their
rights and nothing less.”
The Red Summer
1919 was also the year of Red Summer, a
national racial frenzy marked by hundreds of deaths and higher
casualties across the United States, as a result of approximately 25
anti-black riots that occurred in more than three dozen cities and
one rural county.
As early a May 1, riots broke out in
Cleveland, Ohio, and in Charleston, South Carolina. In most instances
whites attacked African Americans, who, of course, fought back. The
racial riots against blacks resulted from a variety of postwar social
tensions related to the demobilization of veterans of World War I,
both black and white, and competition for jobs and housing among
ethnic white people and black people.
The highest number of fatalities
occurred in the rural area around Elaine, Arkansas, where five whites
and an estimated 100–240 black men, women and children were killed.
Violence erupted when whites attacked a meeting of black
sharecroppers who were organizing to demand fairer treatment in the
cotton market. After a white person was shot, federal troops were
called in to “quell” the violence, but instead they joined white
mobs in hunting black residents for several days.
Chicago and Washington, D.C. had 38 and
15 deaths, respectively, and many more injured, with extensive
property damage in Chicago.
The New York Times lamented the
new black militancy: "There had been no trouble with the Negro
before the war when most admitted the superiority of the white race."
A "Southern black woman," as she identified herself, wrote
a letter to The Crisis, the official magazine of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), praising
blacks for fighting back ...
"The Washington riot gave me
a thrill that comes once in a life time ... at last our men had stood
up like men. ... I stood up alone in my room ... and exclaimed aloud,
'Oh I thank God, thank God.' The pent up horror, grief and
humiliation of a life time -- half a century -- was being stripped
from me."
In the fall of 1919, Dr. George Edmund
Haynes, co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban
League, completed a report on the causes and scope of Red Summer. He
reported that “the persistence of unpunished lynching”
contributed to the mob mentality among white men and fueled a new
commitment to self-defense among black men who had been emboldened by
war service. “In such a state of public mind,” Dr. Haynes wrote,
“a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.”
I can only assume Red Summer had a
direct emotional effect on the residents of our small Ohio town. Even
though the Civil War and emancipation were in the distant past, race
relations in 1819 Southern Ohio were tenuous considering that de
facto segregation was firmly established. Integrated and segregated
mindsets surely clashed. Of course, Jim Crow laws that enforced
racial segregation in the South had been upheld in 1896 by the U.S.
Supreme Court's "separate but equal" legal doctrine.
From its beginnings, Lucasville felt
the need to confront inequality. It must be noted that the William
Lucas, father of our founder, did this in the early 1800s:
“In leaving the slave state of
Virginia for the free embryo commonwealth of Ohio, which had not as
yet been admitted into the Union, performed one of those noble and
generous acts so characteristic of the better class of those who were
bred under the patriarchal system in the olden time. He freed every
one of his adult slaves who wished to remain in Virginia, and
provided for the younger ones, most of whom he took with him to Ohio,
till they became of legal age and able to support themselves.”
The 1919 World Series
If you were a Cincinnati Reds fan, 1919
was a great year … well, kind of. It was the year of the infamous
Black Sox Scandal in which the Chicago White Sox “threw” the
World Series to the Reds. Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were
accused of intentionally losing the series against Cincinnati in
exchange for money from a gambling syndicate led by Arnold Rothstein.
On October 1, the day of Game One,
there were rumors amongst gamblers that the series was fixed, and a
sudden influx of money being bet on Cincinnati caused the odds
against them to fall rapidly.
However, most fans and observers were
taking the series at face value. On October 2, the Philadelphia
Bulletin published a poem which would quickly prove to be ironic:
“Still, it really doesn't
matter,
After all, who wins the flag.
Good clean sport is what we're after,
And we aim to make our brag
To each near or distant nation
Whereon shines the sporting sun
That of all our games gymnastic
Base ball is the cleanest one!”
After all, who wins the flag.
Good clean sport is what we're after,
And we aim to make our brag
To each near or distant nation
Whereon shines the sporting sun
That of all our games gymnastic
Base ball is the cleanest one!”
Yet, sometimes nasty rumors prove to be
true ...
On October 1 after throwing a strike
with his first pitch of the Series, Eddie Cicotte's second pitch
struck Cincinnati leadoff hitter Morrie Rath in the back, delivering
a pre-arranged signal confirming the players' willingness to go
through with the fix.
The fallout from the scandal resulted
in the appointment of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the first
Commissioner of Baseball, granting him absolute control over the
sport in order to restore its integrity.
In perhaps less-noteworthy news of
1919, people began dialing numbers for themselves as the rotary dial
telephone by Western Electric was put into public use. You can also
thank the U.S. Congress of this year for the continual cycle of
Americans aimlessly “springing forward” and “falling back”
since the often maligned daylight-saving time was first put into
effect. And, let's never forget that 1919 was the year Charles Strite
invented the Pop-Up Toaster. Still, the problem back then was that
all bread was cut by hand, making the machine largely ineffective to
uniform slices. It took another ten years during which bread slicing
machines gained great popularity to give rise to the invention of the
Pop-Up. (Sorry for the hackneyed pun.)
Just a couple more interesting notes
about 1919 to close the entry ...
Molasses Flood
On January 15, 1919, the Boston
Molasses Disaster (aka the Great Molasses Flood) killed 21 people and
injured 150 (revised totals) more in north-end Boston, Massachusetts. The event
entered local folklore and for decades afterwards residents claimed
that on hot summer days the area still smelled of molasses.
The tragedy occurred at the Purity
Distilling Company facility. At about 12:30 in the afternoon a
molasses tank 50 ft. tall, 90 ft. in diameter, and containing as much
as 2,300,000 gallons collapsed.
Witnesses variously reported that as it
collapsed they felt the ground shake and heard a roar, a long rumble
similar to the passing of an elevated train, a tremendous crashing, a
deep growling, or "a thunderclap-like bang!" [emphasis
added], and as the rivets shot out of the tank, a machine gun-like
sound.
The collapse unleashed a wave of
molasses 25 feet high at its peak, moving at 35 mph. The molasses
wave was of sufficient force to damage the girders of the adjacent
Boston Elevated Railway's Atlantic Avenue structure and tip a
railroad car momentarily off the tracks. Author Stephen Puleo
describes how nearby buildings were swept off their foundations and
crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 feet. Puleo
quotes a Boston Post report:
“Molasses, waist deep, covered
the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage ... Here and
there struggled a form – whether it was animal or human being
was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the
sticky mass, showed where any life was ... Horses died like so many
flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the
mess they were ensnared. Human beings – men and women –
suffered likewise.”
Cleanup
crews used salt water from a fireboat to wash the molasses away, and
used sand to try to absorb it. The harbor was said to be brown with
molasses until summer. (Of course this was Boston, home of the
lyrical “Dirty Water.” Sorry, I couldn't resist this colorful,
gooey reference.) The cleanup in the immediate area took "weeks"
with more than 300 people contributing to the effort.
The Curse of the Bambino
Finally, sticking to the subject of
Boston (And, excuse me once more for the tacky pun.), December 26,
1919, Babe Ruth was sold by the Boston Red Sox to the New York
Yankees for $125,000, the largest sum ever paid for a player at that
time.
Although Ruth twice won 23 games in a
season as a pitcher and was a member of three World Series
championship teams with the Red Sox, he wanted to play every day. He
was fresh off a sensational 1919 season, having broken the major
league home run record with 29 and led the American League with 114
runs-batted-in and 103 runs.
In addition to playing more than 100
games in left field, he also went 9-5 as a pitcher. With his
prodigious hitting, pitching and fielding skills, Ruth had surpassed
the great Ty Cobb as baseball’s biggest attraction.
Realizing the adulation that came with
home runs, Ruth no longer wanted to pitch. But the team needed their
star pitcher, not this home-run foolishness, so they pacified him
with bonuses or whatever else it took to get him back on the mound.
Then, sometime later, Ruth would threaten to leave, or he’d miss a
few games in protest, and the process repeated. The team finished in
sixth in 1919, and after the 1919 season Frazee started selling
players to the New YorkYankees.
After that season, Red Sox owner Harry
Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees amid controversy. The Yankees had not
played in any World Series up to that time. The trade fueled Boston's
subsequent 86 year championship drought and popularized the "Curse
of the Bambino" superstition. In his 15 years with the Yankees,
Ruth helped the team win seven American League (AL) pennants and four
World Series championships.
Te term "Curse of the Bambino"
was not in common use until the publication of the book The Curse
of the Bambino by Dan Shaughnessy in 1990. It became a key part
of Red Sox lore in the media thereafter, and Shaughnessy's book
became required reading in some high school English classes in New
England.
Postscript: Linda Scott messaged the following:
"You ask who in Lucasville might have led the charge for women’s right to vote. I think it would’ve been Alice Barker‘s mother, Bertha Rockwell Moulton. She was famous for her temperance movement activities and it was said she was responsible for Lucasville becoming dry.
"See Juli Phillips’ poem in the Backward Glance II Page 84. Women had good cause to ask for temperance because too many men were drinking up their pay And treating their families roughly. So yes, the alcohol industry had good cause to fear women’s voting because they would support temperance a as a general rule."
Here is the poem from Backward Glance:
"You ask who in Lucasville might have led the charge for women’s right to vote. I think it would’ve been Alice Barker‘s mother, Bertha Rockwell Moulton. She was famous for her temperance movement activities and it was said she was responsible for Lucasville becoming dry.
"See Juli Phillips’ poem in the Backward Glance II Page 84. Women had good cause to ask for temperance because too many men were drinking up their pay And treating their families roughly. So yes, the alcohol industry had good cause to fear women’s voting because they would support temperance a as a general rule."
Here is the poem from Backward Glance:
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