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Al Marder, The Oldest Living Communist Victim of the Red Scare
Al Marder at 94 years old is a World War II veteran, president of the Amistad Committee, chairman of Connecticut’s Freedom Trail and one of the last surviving Communists persecuted during the Red Scare of the Cold War Era. Click for more.
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Edgar Allan Poe Writes A Story Based on a Boston Harbor Legend
Edgar Allan Poe based the macabre short story, The Cask of Amontillado, on a legend he heard while serving in a fort in Boston Harbor. Fifty years after he published the story, evidence surfaced that it wasn’t just a legend. Click for more.
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The Peterkin Papers – (Not So) Shocking Secrets of the Hale Family
In the Peterkin Papers, Lucretia Hale turned taking jibes at the haplessness of over-educated, citified folk into an art form. Click for more.
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Al Capp Invents Sadie Hawkins Day — Sort Of
Centuries before Al Capp started the Sadie Hawkins Day fad in his Li’l Abner comic strip, women in Scotland and Ireland asked men to marry them during Leap Years.
Click for more.
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Boston’s J. Wright Boott – A Tale of Orchids and Insanity
In March of 1845, J. Wright Boott wrote a letter to his old friend and business partner, John Amory Lowell; with it he enclosed his will and wrote that he planned to kill himself. ‘Please don’t think any less of me,’ he added. Click for more.
Eugene O’Neill lay dying in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel in Boston just before Thanksgiving in 1953. For years he had suffered from depression and what doctors diagnosed as Parkinson’s Disease. They later determined he had cerebellar cortical atrophy.
The rare illness caused hand tremors that prevented O’Neill from writing.
No wonder he was depressed.
Ultimately, pneumonia killed him in that residential hotel suite on Nov. 27, 1953, at the age of 65.
Eugene O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey, and his doctor, Harry Kozol, stayed by his deathbed. They heard him whisper his last words:
I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and, goddammit, died in a hotel room.
Not happy
Eugene O’Neill
Eugene O’Neill was born in the Barrett House on what is now Times Square in New York City on Oct. 16, 1888. His alcoholic father, James O’Neill, was a well-known actor who immigrated to the United States from Ireland. His mother, Mary Ellen Quinlan, also Irish, suffered from mental illness.
Because his father traveled so much, O’Neill attended boarding school. He then entered Princeton, and left it after one year. He spent summers at his family’s home, the Monte Cristo Cottage, in New London, Conn. (which you can now visit in the summer).
Monte Cristo Cottage
Depressed and drinking heavily, O’Neill went to sea aboard a tramp steamer for several years. He joined the Maritime Transport Workers Union of the IWW, or Wobblies, and wrote plays.
He found his stage in 1916 with the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod. Four years later he published his first play, Beyond the Horizon, and won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Over his lifetime he steered American theater away from the frothy comedies of George M. Cohan and Charles Hoyt. His characters often belonged to the working class and used vernacular to express hope, despair, disillusionment and pessimism.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature during his lifetime as well as three Pulitzer Prizes. Only the plays of George Bernard Shaw were more widely produced.
Postscript
Eugene O’Neill left written instructions not to publish his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, until 25 years after his death. His wife published it three years after he died, and O’Neill received another Pulitzer Prize for it posthumously.
The story is a semi-autobiographical account of one day in the life of his mother, father, brother and himself at their seaside cottage. Tension escalates throughout the day as they spar over addiction, blame and regret while trying to show love and sympathy for each other.
The year after Eugene O’Neill died, Boston University bought the hotel and turned it into the Shelton (now Killachand) Hall dormitory.
Kilachand Hall
BU students say they’ve heard or felt O’Neill’s ghost. The elevator sometimes opens for no apparent reason. They hear strange scratching sounds. Lights dim suddenly and toilets flush themselves.
O’Neill’s ghost is described as benevolent. Perhaps it really is the specter of the playwright, at last at peace. In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, his autobiographical character Edmund recalls the bliss of getting lost in fog during his sailing days:
The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.
The floor was named ‘Writer’s Corridor’ in 1984, and every spring its residents put out a collection of writing called Eugene’s Legacy.
This story about Eugene O’Neill was updated in 2022. Images: Monte Cristo cottage By Ntiprog – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64209889. Kilachand Hall By ForksForks – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86395697.
In January 1794, Elias Hasket Derby was eagerly awaiting the return of his ship the Grand Sachem in Salem, Mass. Capt. Jonathan Carnes had sailed away more than a year before on a voyage to India, and Derby wanted news. But the news he got that January was bad
Salem during the American Revolution, as imagined by engraver Balthazar Frederic Leizelt; produced for the European market, where interest in America was strong.
The ship was lost. The crew was safe, but the vessel and its contents were almost all destroyed off Bermuda. These were the risks of Salem traders. A ship could return with a fortune or it might be a total loss.
On October 7, 1794 Carnes himself arrived back in Salem and enjoyed a brief – very brief – rest. Because while Carnes had lost the Grand Sachem and its cargo, what he had brought back was worth far more.
John and Jonathan Carnes
Carnes had information. But he didn’t share it widely, apparently not even with Derby, the man whose ship he had just sunk. Instead, he went to his wife’s relatives with his incredible information: pepper grew in abundance in the west of Sumatra.
While the ships going to the region had in the past brought the precious spice back as part of their cargo, they never had it in large quantity.
There were hints that the Carneses and the Derbys weren’t always best friends. Jonathan and John Carnes were both sea captains – brothers. John, a year older, distinguished himself as a privateer in the Revolutionary War. Jonathan, too, won his share of praise, but John’s exploits were legendary.
John Carnes commanded seven ships between 1778 and 1782, capturing multiple prizes until he was captured by the British ship Enterprise in 1782.
John Carnes
At war’s end, however, the two men’s fortunes apparently went in different directions. Both men chose brides. John married Lydia Derby, Elias’ sister. The Derbys had enormous wealth, thanks to Richard Derby’s successes as a privateer in the Revolution. The Derby family and her friends opposed the marriage.
Salem diarist William Bentley, without being specific about the nature of John Carnes’ shortcomings, makes no bones about the fact that he was a ne’er-do-well. John Carnes died in 1796.
Writing in the obituary for Carnes’ widow several years later in 1800, Bentley noted: “She was early attached to Mr. Carnes and all the entreaties of her friends could not prevent the marriage. But he was a Villain, and by his vices, to waste her patrimony and to bring her to abject dependence. Still she never forsook him and in her dying moments made provision for his mother out of such estate as by the death of her brother had fallen into her hands.”
Peeles and Vans
Jonathan, meanwhile, married Rebecca Vans. Her family was identified with the Boston banking firm Freeman & Vans. And she had relatives in the Peele family of prosperous Salem merchants, as well. The Peeles and Carneses had done well teaming up to back privateering ventures during the war. Jonathan Carnes chose to tell Jonathan Peele the secret of his pepper find.
A black pepper plant.
They wasted no time in arranging for Jonathan to make another trip to Sumatra. Joining with Ebenezer Beckford of Salisbury, they outfitted him with the ship, Rajah, and in November of 1795, he was off. The men had managed to keep their plans a secret. When the Rajah set out, no one thought anything other than that she was headed toward Sumatra.
It would be more than 18 months before Carnes would return, and he came close to never returning at all. Carnes arrived in Sumatra, near the end of the pepper growing season. He procured what he could, but decided he needed to wait for the next season to make the voyage profitable. In January of 1797, the Rajah came under attack.
Mistaken Identity
The attackers boarded the Rajah and Carnes’ men began fighting. The two sides quickly realized that the matter was a case of mistaken identity. The attackers were French and they believed the Rajah was a British ship, while Carnes thought he was under attack by local Malayans.
The fight cost a French lieutenant his life and a member of the Rajah’s crew lost a hand. But the matter ended with an apology from the French ship.
Fully loaded with pepper—140,000 pounds worth—the Rajah set off for America. No one had ever brought so much pepper to America before. The load the Rajah carried dwarfed any other shipments. There was a chance, Carnes feared, that so much pepper pouring onto the market at one time would kill the price.
It did not. There are varying accounts of Carnes’ return. Some say he first stopped in New York to sell some of his cargo, setting the gossip in motion so that there was a huge clamor for his final arrival in Salem. Others make no mention of this.
In any event, his arrival in Salem shocked the town. The customs office charged more than $8,000 for the cargo (at 6 cents per pound) and Carnes’ backers realized a 700 percent return on their investment. The merchants, meanwhile, lined up to buy. Much of the pepper was sold throughout the United States, but the majority was exported to Europe.
The Cat Got Out of the Bag
Carnes again kept his mouth shut about where he had gone, and he arranged a return trip. As he left the harbor, several other shipowners sent ships to follow him and see where he went. The crafty Carnes eluded them, however, and returned to Salem with another bonanza. He had all but cornered the U.S. pepper trade.
By his third trip, however, the secret had come out. Carnes found the ports in Sumatra crowded with competitors. It’s not clear how the others deduced the location. Perhaps one of the sailors on Carnes’ second trip paid closer attention to their destination, or it maybe someone found out by asking around Sumatra.
Either way, Carnes’ journey kicked off an era when Salem reigned as the world’s pepper capital. It lasted into the 1840s. Even well into the 1900s, whole black peppercorns in places were known as Salem Pepper in places like Australia.
This story was updated in 2022.
John Godfrey Moore loved Maine and money – not necessarily in that order. But it’s fitting that Acadia National Park, the state’s most popular destination for visitors, would not be what it is today if it weren’t for this son of Steuben. He went to New York to make his fortune, but left some of it behind for his native state to enjoy.
John Godfrey Moore
Moore was born in 1847, the son of a Steuben sea captain. Both he and his cousin Henry would leave Maine to make their fortunes. Henry in railroading and tobacco, John in the telegraph industry and then in finance.
His first success came in partnership with John Evans. Moore had moved to New York as a young man and worked for his uncle, trading lumber. He and Evans launched their own firm, National Dredging Company, and prospered as contractors for the War Department.
But the men saw a better opportunity in telegraphs. They built a telegraph company, American Union Telegraph Co., in competition with Western Union. They had one goal: to get so big that Western Union would have to buy them out. Moore and Evans succeeded and made a fortune. They then began building the Mutual Telegraph Co.
John Godfrey Moore Makes the Big Bucks
This time, Evans would die before the men completed their plans, but Moore managed to battle Western Union to a draw. The big company would lease Moore’s lines, making him even wealthier. Western Union put him on its board of directors, apparently preferring to cooperate rather than compete with him. But Moore didn’t stop there. He believed the way to bigger money was in banking, and he and Grant B. Schley established the banking and brokerage firm Moore and Schley.
Grant Schley
Moore was the money; Schley was the hustle. Moore would serve on more than 20 boards of directors for the largest corporations in America, and his firm served as private bank and stockbroker for many of the famous fortunes of the gilded age – Whitney, Morgan, Rockefeller, Havemeyer.
In 1893, he became a hero to the wealthy Wall Streeters when he sued the government charging that the newly enacted income tax was unconstitutional. He won, too, delaying implementation of an income tax until 1913. Timing, shrewdness, hard work and good fortune were his hallmarks.
The Sugar Trust
His luck would hold again when his firm narrowly avoided being swept up in the Sugar Trust scandal of 1894. Rhode Island senator Nelson Aldrich was at the heart of that scandal. Aldrich accepted payoffs for years from wealthy Wall Street bankers who wanted a friend in the Senate.
Aldrich very publicly intervened for sugar importers in setting tariffs to benefit their industry, and he turned the floor of the Senate into a circus with his parliamentary maneuvering on their behalf. The spectacle raised eyebrows, but there was probably nothing corrupt about it initially. He was truly arguing his position.
Elverton Chapman
By 1890, however, Aldrich needed money. His Senate salary was not providing an adequate income, and he began spreading the word about his plan to retire from politics so he could earn more. His industry friends’ blood ran cold at the thought of a future without Aldrich to represent them. So they stepped up with a straight-ahead bribe – an offer of more than $1 million – and more to come – so he could buy and improve the Union Railway Company. The investment Aldrich made in the railway made him a millionaire.
The manipulation of the sugar tariffs began to stink too much, however. President Taft allowed the tariff bill to become law, but he would not sign it because he didn’t want his signature on it.
The cry went out for an investigation, and senators convened an inquiry. Moore and Schley’s broker, Elverton Chapman, was called to testify. The senators wanted to know if other senators ever traded on insider information about the tariffs and other pending regulations. They also wanted to know whether Moore and Schley was the conduit for potential payoffs
Chapman stood up under fire. He refused to testify. The standoff continued until the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that Chapman had to talk before the Senate or go to jail. Chapman still refused, and he went to prison. Aldrich went on serving in the Senate until 1911.
Far From the Wolf
And John Godfrey Moore continued making money. In Maine, Moore had begun buying land in Winter Harbor. He enjoyed, he said, the horse-trading that went into assembling his 2,000-plus acre estate on the Schoodic Peninsula. He named his house (which was foreclosed and taken by a bank in 2014), “Far From the Wolf,” a reference to its comfortable distance from Wall Street.
Moore planned a luxury hotel, grand houses and a fine summer resort to match Bar Harbor. Best of all, he said, he could see his hometown of Steuben from the highest points on the land. Moore made as many waves in Maine as he did elsewhere, participating in a contentious fight to separate Winter Harbor from Gouldsboro to lower his and his neighbors’ property taxes.
Who knows what Moore might have made of his property if illness hadn’t intervened? At age 51, in 1899, he died. Moore’s second wife Louise and daughters Ruth and Faith did not share his aspirations for Winter Harbor, and their visits to the area became less frequent. His daughter married a British nobleman, and both Ruth and Faith moved to England.
George Dorr
His wife remarried, and keeping up with the taxes on the Schoodic land became a drain on the family finances. In 1922, more than 20 years after his death, Moore’s widow spoke with George Dorr about whether he might like to add the Moore property on Schoodic to the property on Mount Desert already set aside as a national park.
Acadia National Park (Jordan Pond and the Bubbles)
Dorr jumped at the opportunity. First they discussed adding only Louise’s share of the land, but soon they realized his daughters, too, were not eager to keep the property and might be willing to give it up as a permanent memorial to John Godfrey.
Before the deal could be realized, Louise died. But negotiations continued fitfully until just one minor hurdle remained – the name. Moore’s daughters were anglophiles, but Mount Desert has a deep French history. In creating Acadia as a park, it was first named Sieur de Monts National Monument for the French colonial governor who had overseen the area beginning in 1603.
Even after the American Revolution, the state legislature had seen fit to honor French land grants in Mount Desert, in part to recognize French support during the war. Sieur de Monts National Monument seemed a fitting name in 1916 when President Wilson commissioned it. In 1919, when he officially declared the land the first National Park east of the Mississippi, it was renamed Lafayette National Park for the French general who aided the American Revolution.
Such an honor for a French hero the Moores could not be a party to. And so Dorr, long accustomed to catering to the egos and peccadillos of the wealthy landowners that he needed to make his dream of Acadia come true, set a plan in motion.
Naming Acadia
He reached back to the name Acadia, a reference to the Greek region of Arcadia that early explorers from the 1500s, such as Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano, applied to the America. He told Ruth and Faith that he always thought it a very fitting name for the park, that it reflected the heritage of the region. With their blessing, be persuaded the government to change the name in order to clear the way for the gift of land, which was added to the new Acadia National Park in 1929.
The Schoodic slice of the park, roughly five percent of its total, isn’t the only charitable legacy left by the Moores. John’s cousin Henry provided funding for the Henry D. Moore Parish House and Library, which still serves Steuben today. And Ruth and her husband spent part of her fortune restoring an English country estate, Chequers, which they gave to the government of Britain. It is used to this day as the Prime Minister’s retreat and country house.
This story last updated in 2022.
Image of Jordan Pond and the Bubbles: By Plh1234us – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6837274.
Benjamin Edes instigated and paid for the Boston Tea Party – and, to his death, guarded the secret list of all who participated.
Edes along with John Gill published the Boston Gazette and Country Journal, a leading voice for American independence. The Royal Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver called it ‘that infamous paper.’
“The temper of the people may be surely learned’ from it,” Oliver said.
Benjamin Edes‘ son Peter was convinced his father would have been hanged or sent to England to be tried if he had fallen into British hands. Peter himself served 3-1/2 months in prison for cheering the patriot side during the Battle of Bunker Hill.
“If my father had been like some other men, he might have been worth thousands on thousands of dollars; but he preferred the liberties of his country to all,“ wrote Peter Edes.
Benjamin Edes
Benjamin Edes was born Oct. 14, 1732 in Charlestown, Mass., one of seven children of Peter Edes and Esther Hall. He married Martha Starr sometime around 1754. The next year he and Gill took over the Boston Gazette.
Edes helped form the Sons of Liberty and, through the Gazette, agitated against the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts and the tea tax. The newspaper broke news about tax disputes, the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, and it also served as a mouthpiece for Samuel Adams.
On Dec. 16, 1773, Benjamin Edes hosted a group of men in his parlor before they set out for the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver.
The Boston Tea Party, instigated by Benjamin Edes
His son Peter, who would turn 17 the next day, saw some of what happened. In a letter to his own grandson in 1836, Peter Edes recounted what he remembered of that event.
“I knew but little about it, as I was not admitted into their presence, for fear, I suppose, of their being known,” he wrote.
But he knew more than most.
He remembered that a number of gentlemen met in his father’s parlor in the afternoon before they destroyed the tea. Peter’s job was to make punch for them in another room. He filled the bowl several times.
(The punch bowl now belongs to the Massachusetts Historical Society.)
Eyewitness Account
The men stayed in the house until dark, he supposed to disguise themselves as Native Americans. When the sun set, they left the house and went to the wharves where the vessels lay.
Once the men left, Peter went into his father’s room. But Benjamin Edes wasn’t there. So Peter decided to walk to the wharves where he saw 2,000 people.
“The Indians worked smartly,” wrote Peter Edes.
“Some were in the hold immediately after the hatches were broken open, fixing the ropes to the tea-chests; others were hauling up the chests; and others stood ready with their hatchets to cut off the bindings of the chest and cast them overboard. I remained on the wharf till I was tired, and fearing some disturbance might occur went home, leaving the Indians working like good industrious fellows.”
Benjamin Edes did not fall into the hands of the British. During the Siege of Boston, Edes escaped arrest by disguising himself as a fisherman. He boarded a fishing boat and landed on one of the islands in Boston Harbor, from which he escaped to the mainland
He moved to Watertown, Mass., where he continued to publish the Gazette until 1798. Benjamin Edes died on Dec. 11, 1803.
How the Names Got Lost
Peter Edes later wrote that it was ‘a little surprising’ that the names of the Tea Party remained secret. [My] “father I believe, was the only person who had a list of them, and he always kept it locked up in his desk while living.
“After his death Benj. Austin (a Boston selectman) called upon my mother, and told her there was in his possession when living some very important papers belonging to the Whig party, which he wished not to be publicly known, and asked her to let him have the keys of the desk to examine it, which she delivered to him; he then examined it, and took out several papers, among which it was supposed he took away the list of the names of the tea-party, and they have not been known since.”
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The semiquincentennial of the American Revolution is just around the corner. Find out how to be a part of New England’s Revolution 250 celebration in “Revolutionary War Sites in New England.” Click here to order your copy today!
This story was updated in 2024.
