Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Martin scattered throughout lower Manhattan glass bottles containing a highly flammable phosphorous liquid known as “Greek fire.” Their mission

was to burn the city to the ground in what would be the first major domestic terrorist strike on New York.

far from charitable; the forty-five-year-old Kentuckian was secretly collecting soiled bedsheets and garments to ship back to the States in sealed trunks. He hoped the linens and clothing could then be used to unleash an

North. He especially wanted to get a “gift” of fancy—and contaminated—dress

dress shirts into the hands of Abraham Lincoln. (The war would be over by the time ...

“Since the publication of the Roberts Commission Report,” California governor Culbert Olson declared on January 27, “[the people of my state] feel that they are living in the midst of a lot of enemies. They don’t trust the Japanese, none of them.” Buried in the report, and unmentioned by Olson and like-minded politicians, was the fact that the U.S. soldier who led the raid on Niihau to hunt down Nishikaichi was a Japanese American lieutenant named Jack Mizuha. Mizuha went on to serve heroically in the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, one of the most highly decorated units in American military history.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent, many of them American-born citizens. The Niihau incident was not solely responsible for the order, but it galvanized the public and fortified Roosevelt’s decision to uproot thousands of families from their homes for the duration of the war.

Although Judge’s flight from Philadelphia wasn’t as harrowing or elaborate as other escapes, by remaining in New Hampshire she was publicly defying the most powerful and admired man in the country. Her master had won the War of Independence, helped craft the Constitution, and, among many other legislative acts, signed the fugitive slave law

effect inside the very house from which she had run away. Ona Judge’s master was the president of the United States, George Washington. As a dower slave, Judge legally belonged to Washington’s wife, Martha, but the president was for all intents and purposes her owner as well, and he was adamant that she be returned to him. The situation, though, had to be handled delicately. “Enclosed is the name, and description of the Girl I mentioned to you last night,” President Washington wrote to Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott on September 1, 1796. “She has been the particular attendant on Mrs. Washington since she was ten years old; and was handy

makes Ona different is that she was a slave and, therefore, a reminder that New Hampshire was a slave state for quite a long time—until 1857, actually. There are some aspects of our history, I think, we’d just rather ignore.”

figured this might be the case months ago while preparing my full itinerary. When I first started phoning around Portsmouth to inquire about George Washington’s slave, I received the same reply in so many words as when I called other cities about unpleasant periods from their past. I heard it when I asked the Cincinnati Zoo about the exhibition of live Native Americans there in 1887; the Owensboro, Kentucky, chamber of commerce about America’s last public execution next to the old courthouse on August 14, 1936 (the circuslike atmosphere at the hanging mortified the nation); and the Sonoma Developmental Center in Northern California about the forced sterilizations conducted there on thousands of men and women labeled “subhuman”

in the 1920s through 1950s. “That’s just not something,” I was told time and time again, “w...

“Bad guys are more interesting,” Harry replies. I’d be disingenuous to suggest that I don’t find them alluring as well. Indeed, what initially drew me to Harry’s father was the fact that his real name was Vincenzo Capone. Richard “Two Gun” Hart was Al Capone’s older brother. Born outside of Naples,

often without even knowing it. Fortunately, for every site like Ely Parker’s house or César Chávez’s ranch that remains hidden, new possibilities constantly reveal themselves. As I’m leaving Nebraska, I get a call from a woman named Marjorie Teetor Meyer, who’s responding to the message I had recently left asking about her father, an influential inventor, and their family home in Hagerstown, Indiana. Marjorie kindly gives me the address, and although I doubt I’ll have a chance to stop by during my upcoming trip to Indiana, I can save it for another visit. Marjorie’s father, Ralph Teetor, was a brilliant mechanical engineer who built a full-sized car at the age of twelve and, after graduating from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania in 1912, developed a revolutionary procedure for balancing turbine rotors in warships. Teetor received numerous patents throughout his life, mostly related to cars, and he served as president of the Society of Automotive Engineers. And he did all of this despite being blind since childhood; at the age of five, Teetor was jimmying open a locked drawer with a penknife when the blade slipped and pierced his eyeball. Both retinas became infected and Teetor lost all vision. Although extremely independent and familiar with every component of an automobile, Teetor obviously couldn’t get behind the wheel of a car and drive himself. While riding around one day with his attorney, Harry Lindsey, he became annoyed by Lindsey’s lurching, gas-and-brake...

design a regulating system for cars that maintained their speed with just the touch of a button. He christened it the Speedostat. Automakers loved the invention, and Cadillac was among the first to offer it commercially, in its 1959 models, with one slight change. The company called it “Cruise Control.”

In a follow-up piece on remote viewing, Jack Anderson claimed that former CIA director Stansfield Turner and General William Odom, the Army’s intelligence chief, were concerned that the Soviets might surpass the United States in psychic research. “Inside the Pentagon, [Odom] has raised the question of whether the Soviets could use psychics to penetrate our secret vaults,” Anderson stated in a sober tone. “This has led to talk in the backrooms about raising a ‘psychic shield’ to block this sort of remote viewing.” Anderson recognized how crack-potty this all seemed but still defended it: “At the risk of being ridiculed over a ‘voodoo gap,’ advocates like Rep. Charlie Rose (D-N.C.), support continued research into the more promising areas of this mysterious field. After all, the atomic bomb was once thought to be a harebrained idea.” And Grill Flame was an idea with consequences. Whether the program led to actionable intelligence (and there’s debate about this) or was really just a major disinformation campaign to spook the Soviets, it consumed tens of millions of federal tax dollars and thousands of manpower hours that critics argue could have been used more productively. By the mid-1990s remote-viewing operations were shut down and declassified. After reading through hundreds of pages

Blass, reminisced. Our identity was kept secret for the simple reason that we were posing as other Allied troops in order to fool the enemy.… [We were] pretending to be Patton’s armor, the Fifteenth Tank Battalion. Except, that instead of Shermans, we had rubber ones that we inflated at night and left in his same tank tracks. We even had ways of faking tank fire and noise, which the men in the sonic unit blasted all night long at the Germans. So when Von Ramcke looked the next morning through the haze and battle smoke with his field glasses, he thought he was seeing Patton’s forces. In a matter of hours he would have known it was a ruse, but by then, Patton had attacked somewhere else,

and we and our portable dummy tanks had vanished.

Hundreds of artists, many with theater and design backgrounds, served in the so-called Ghost Army painting inflatable rubber “tanks” to make them look real, constructing fake ammunition dumps and troop cantonments to dupe German air...

I meant what I said; I’m honestly not picking on Sonoma or suggesting it should advertise the more chilling aspects of its past, but it is a significant historic site. California wasn’t the first state to enact laws encouraging forced sterilizations (that would be Indiana, in 1907, followed by the majority of American states), but once the legislative green light blinked go in 1909, the state quickly made up for lost time and eventually surpassed all others. Out of sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations nationwide, one-third to a half of them were performed in California. And Sonoma bears the sad distinction of having carried out more than any other similar facility. With its neoclassical buildings and

law gave doctors wide discretion in deciding who was eligible, and the labels “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron” were actual medical categories determined by intelligence tests. Idiots were a mental age of one to two, imbeciles three to seven, and morons eight to twelve.

One of the doctors most responsible for implementing this doctrinal shift in Nazi medical policies was Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and the head of the Third Reich’s euthanasia program. Buried among the thousands of documents from Brandt’s trial at Nuremberg is this damning quote: “A strict selection by exterminating the insane or incapable—in other words, the scum of society—would solve the whole problem in one century, and would enable us to get rid of the undesirable elements who people our prisons, hospitals, and lunatic asylums.” Although the passage articulated Brandt’s opinion to the letter, he didn’t write it. The excerpt, submitted by his lawyer as evidence that Brandt’s views could not be judged abhorrent, came from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Brandt was later hanged for war crimes. “Do you want to see our petting zoo?” Karen asks me. My gut reaction is to say no. I have to catch a flight out of San Francisco at 7:00 P.M., and I want to avoid rush-hour traffic on Highway 101. I check my watch and decide a few minutes probably won’t matter after all. It doesn’t seem completely relevant to my visit, but I also don’t want to appear rude. “Sure,” I say. As we drive up to the little farm, which has an indoor aquarium and an outdoor aviary, Karen familiarizes me with the animals. “We have llamas, ducks, rabbits, a guinea pig, sheeps, goats, and Pedro the bilingual parrot.” “Pedro the bilingual parrot?”

(With more than fourteen million members today, Mormonism is now the largest American-born religion in the world. Early Mormons were especially hated and persecuted for engaging in “plural marriages,” and the LDS Church banned polygamy among its followers in 1890.)

September 11, as the Arkansans were being escorted out of the valley by militia members, the commanding officers yelled to their men, “Do your duty!” Hearing the prearranged signal, the Mormons suddenly raised their rifles and began shooting the unarmed Arkansans where they stood, sparing only eighteen infants and children considered too young to be witnesses. (After leaving the parents’ bodies to rot, the Mormons took the children home to raise as their own. When the Arkansans’ remains were found two years later by U.S. Army investigators, most of the children were located and returned to relatives.) None of the Mormon militia members were punished except Colonel John Lee, who was excommunicated from the church, tried by an all-Mormon jury, and sentenced to death. Under Utah territorial law, Lee could choose whether he wanted to be hanged, beheaded, or shot, and he chose the last. Authorities brought him back to Mountain Meadows, where he was placed before a firing squad and executed. According to my contact at the Caldwell County sheriff’s office, a historical marker once stood at Haun’s Mill describing in detail what had occurred here, but it was repeatedly defaced and then stolen. And that one was the replacement for another sign that had also been vandalized. “Ancestors of the militiamen still live around there,” I was told. “It’s not a proud moment in local history, and the signs kept getting torn down.” Which is a pity because remembering places like Haun’s Mill and...

with stealing a drunken sheepherder’s payday coins and, after being locked up briefly, left the state in a huff, changed his

dozen who fled into the night are believed to have died in hiding. One small family perished together; the baby

and mother succumbed to dehydration and exposure, and the father, surrounded by wolves, shot himself. Whether it was twenty-five or more, the September 2, 1885, Rock Springs riot remains the single deadliest attack against

School graduate named Charles Loring Brace. Major eastern cities teemed with indigent children, and they were overwhelming orphanages, prisons, hospitals, and asylums. Brace spearheaded

Bible Students) dates back to the late 1800s, when their founder, a charismatic Pittsburgh haberdasher named Charles Taze Russell, preached that Armageddon was imminent and that Christ had already returned to earth “invisibly” in 1874 but would be back for real about four decades later. Russell also claimed that, due to divinely inspired climate change, global temperatures would rise and the world would revert to a balmy, Genesis-like state. Russell’s followers endured no end of insults, and this was before his successors encouraged door-to-door proselytizing, for which the Jehovah’s Witnesses are perhaps best known and most ridiculed. Beginning in the summer of 1940, mockery

Both a district judge and a U.S. Court of Appeals sided with Gobitas, but the school board continued fighting until the cases landed before the nine justices of the Supreme Court. When they handed down their decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis (a lower court misspelled Gobitas, and the error stuck), the final tally wasn’t even close; 8–1 against Gobitas, with only Justice Harlan Stone dissenting. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote the majority opinion. “National unity is the basis of national security,” he argued.

Almost overnight, Jehovah’s Witnesses came under attack, vilified by their assailants as un-American. “In June a mob of Legionnaires dragged some of Jehovah’s Witnesses from their automobiles as they were sitting in the Court House Square at Jasper and beat them up,” John Adams of Beaumont,

Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

“That would be nice. Thank you.” Of course, I’m the one indebted to Marie for sharing her memories, which shed light on a Supreme Court ruling I knew almost nothing about and, indirectly, introduced me to the surprising evolution of the Pledge of Allegiance itself. The original 1892 version was first published in a wildly popular magazine called The Youth’s Companion, and it made

mention of God; Francis Bellamy, the socialist minister who authored it, initially wrote: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” And while Bellamy was by all accounts a patriotic man, creating a “Pledge of Allegiance” was the brainstorm of The Youth’s Companion’s promotional wizard, James Upham. Several weeks later, Bellamy added a “to” before “the Republic” because he thought it sounded better. In 1923 “my Flag” was altered to “the flag of the United States” and “of America” was tacked on a year later. In 1942 a major change was made to the gesture that accompanied the Pledge. Traditionally, after students recited the words, they stretched their right arm straight out and at a raised angle, giving what was known as “the Bellamy salute.” Small problem: This looked awfully Nazi-ish, so students were encouraged to place their hands over their heart instead. “Under God” was included by an act of Congress in 1954. President Dwight D. Eisenhower enthusiastically signed the bill and proclaimed that the new addition would “strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.” Ike’s words were a verbal volley aimed directly at the Soviet Union and “godless communists” everywhere. Francis Bellamy had considered including “equality” along with “liberty and justice for all” in the original Pledge, but decided that in an era—the late n...

embrace equal rights. And some, like the woman whose spontaneous act of defiance against segregation would bring me to an old jailhouse in the ...

years later she earned a master’s degree from Queens College. Morgan moved back to Virginia in 2002 and passed

away at the age of ninety. From her obituary and the few local newspaper articles written about Irene Morgan,

what emerges is a portrait of a devout, humble individual who downplayed her actions and f...

accolades she believed were undeserved. When Howard University wanted to grant h...

for winning one of the first major national victories in the battle for civil rights, Morgan ...

for the offer. But, having worked hard to receive her other degrees, she politely declined, explaining to universi...

There’s no reason she should have, since it’s entirely made up. Beatosu is a “paper town,” one of countless fictitious entries—along with fake roads, alleyways, streams, mountains, lakes—that lurk on various U.S. and foreign maps. Cartographers include these on road atlases as either boredom-killing pranks or, more legitimately, as “copyright traps” to catch competitors who’ve duplicated their information instead of doing original research. Beatosu was snuck onto the map I’m carrying by Peter Fletcher, chairman of the Michigan State Highway Commission and a proud University of Michigan alumnus who couldn’t resist poking fun at the Wolverines’ archrival, Ohio State University. Beatosu’s more accurate pronunciation is “Beat OSU.” Since mapmakers are reluctant to compromise their product’s overall integrity, they usually place the traps in remote areas or make only subtle manipulations to real geographical points, like giving an actual street some slight wiggles when in reality it’s perfectly straight. Print and online reference editors have their own tricks to snare copycats. The New Oxford American Dictionary once included the word esquivalience—defined reproachfully as “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.” And years ago the New Columbia Encyclopedia profiled Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer and accomplished photo-essayist from Bangs, Ohio, whose life was tragically cut short “at the age of thirty-one in an explosion while on assignmen...

Leading the charge against Jacobellis was the Citizens for Decent Literature, an Ohio-based group founded by Charles H. Keating Jr. (the same Charles Keating caught up in the savings-and-loan scandals three decades later and sentenced to prison by a young Judge Lance Ito—of O. J. Simpson trial fame—for conspiracy, fraud, and racketeering). “By definition ‘obscenity’ appeals to lustful interests and emotions,” Keating stated in his Jacobellis amicus curiae brief. “It does not contain ideas of value. It is not in the competitive market place of ideas. It contributes nothing in the search for truth or the development of civilization.” Jacobellis won, 6–3. “We recognize the legitimate and indeed exigent interest of States and localities throughout the Nation in preventing the dissemination of material deemed harmful to children,” Justice William J. Brennan wrote in the Court’s judgment on June 22, 1964. “But that interest does not justify a total suppression of such material, the effect of which would be to ‘reduce the adult population … to reading only what is fit for children.’ ” Under Roth v. United States, obscenity had been defined as something “utterly without redeeming social importance.” In Jacobellis, Brennan latched onto “utterly” and used the word to make it considerably more difficult to ban any work, asserting that, if the material had even one iota

Thomas Edison’s counsel to Henry Ford proved right in the end, and electric cars ultimately couldn’t beat out their fuel-guzzling competitors in the early 1900s for the same reasons they still haven’t entirely caught on today—they’re more expensive and they can’t go as far on a single charge as gas-powered cars can travel on a full tank. Their failure a century ago partly accounts for why Morrison himself has been forgotten. Not that he’d have cared. “I wouldn’t give ten cents for an automobile for my own use,” Morrison told a reporter from the Des Moines Register and Leader in 1907. Despite his $5,000 boast about being first (a wager he would have lost to a number of other Europeans but to no American), Morrison wasn’t passionate enough about cars to go around embroiling himself in patent lawsuits. What interested him most were the batteries inside the vehicles, and before moving to California to try his hand at gold mining, he received eighty-seven patents, most of them related to battery storage. Little is known about his life out west except that he made a small fortune and then passed away in 1927. (The exact year of his birth isn’t known, but Morrison was in his mid- to

They moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and then to Salt Lake City, where Brigham Young University gave Farnsworth an underground bunker lab to pursue his research in nuclear fusion. Crippling depression and ailments plagued Farnsworth for the rest of his life, and he died of pneumonia on March 11, 1971. By the time of his death at age sixty-four, he’d been awarded three hundred U.S. and foreign patents that led to advances in electron microscopes, radar, peaceful uses of atomic energy, and air-traffic control.

our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive

After Barbara Berka and I spend some time walking around Goddard’s old home, we drive several miles away to see the Robert Goddard Monument, which wasn’t unveiled until May 12, 2006. Barbara was instrumental in getting the Worcester memorial built, and the eight-paneled polygonal structure features a ten-foot-high stainless steel rocket standing side by side with the American flag. Barbara wrote the accompanying text on each panel, and Clark University and WPI helped with funding. I ask Barbara if NASA chipped in, too. “No,” she says. “I guess they did name the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland after him.” “They did that as part of a patent-infringement settlement!” Barbara says. “NASA had been using many of Goddard’s inventions without permission, so Esther had to sue. She won a million dollars and an agreement from NASA to name the Center for her husband. She ended up giving most of the money to the Smithsonian because they believed in him from the start.” Barbara, a retired science teacher who serendipitously got involved in the Goddard Memorial Association back in 1998, can’t understand why Goddard is so underappreciated considering his contributions to the space program and society at large. “When I speak at schools, I make a point of telling the students how much their lives are influenced by Goddard,” she says. “Along with his more than two hundred patents, you have all of the spin-offs from the space program.” These include everything from conveniences like s...

Pedic foam mattresses, to more critical innovations such as GPS, self-righting life rafts, and flame-retardant fabrics. NASA’s crowning triumph, of course,

Sadly, two of the men most responsible for this moment were no longer alive to witness it themselves. President John F. Kennedy was killed two and a half years after he’d stood before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, and declared that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” On the morning of July 21, 1969, a note was found on Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery that read simply: “Mr. President. The Eagle has landed.” There’s no account of any

Webster was found guilty and, despite offering a posttrial confession to lessen his punishment, sentenced to die. Webster’s trial was historic not because of his or George Parkman’s social standing, though that certainly spiced things up, but because Webster was the first American convicted of murder based on forensic science. In this case, odontological evidence.