From the Archives: Woodrow Wilson in Love
In honor of Valentine’s day, I want to share one of my favorite stories about President Woodrow Wilson, reported by Secret Service agent Edmund Starling in his memoir of the Wilson White House:*
En route to his honeymoon destination with his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the president was seen dancing a jig by himself and singing the chorus of a popular song: “Oh you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll…” Starling reports that the president even clicked his heels in the air.
Look closely at the portrait of the president at the top of this post. Add a top hat, pushed back. Picture him dancing and singing. Makes me smile every dang time.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to give My Own True Love a kiss. I may even click my heels in the air and sing a love ditty.
*My apologies to those of you who’ve read it here before or heard me tell the story in person (complete with song and dance step).
Reading Your Way Through 1918
Dear Marginalia: Just stopping by with a quick recommendation of a history blog that I’m very much enjoying: Mary Grace McGeehan’s My Year in 1918: A Journey to the World of 100 Years Ago.
I’ll let her explain for herself what she’s doing:
“For the next year, I’ll be following the news and reading books and magazines as if I were living a hundred years ago. Goodbye Jonathan Safran Foer, hello Booth Tarkington. Goodbye Buzzfeed, hello Smart Set. This will be the record of my journey to a time when the world we now know as modern was emerging, but nineteenth-century attitudes were very much alive. T.S. Eliot’s poetry shared the page with faux-archaic nature verse. Women, African-Americans, and other marginalized groups were standing up for their rights, but casual sexism and racism were everywhere.”
So far, it’s been absolutely fascinating. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
From the Archives – Word with a Past: Two Bits
Somehow this piece from 2013 seems appropriate post-Super Bowl. (New stories are piling up waiting to be written. Soon, I promise.)
One of the favorite cheers for my junior high school’s football team went “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, all for our team stand up and holler.” It made no sense to me, but neither did football. When the rest of the Trojan fans stood up and hollered, I stood up and hollered. When they said glumly in the stands, I sat. By high school, my best friends were all in marching band, I was therefore freed of my weekend football obligation, and I knew that “two bits” meant a quarter–I just didn’t know why.
Turns out the phrase has its roots in the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the river of silver that flowed from the mines of Potosí to the royal coffers in Madrid. *
In 1497, their Most Catholic Majesties** Ferdinand and Isabella introduced a new coin into the global economy as part of a general currency reform. The peso (literally “weight”) was a heavy silver coin that was worth eight reales***. In Spanish it became known as a peso de ocho ****; in English it was a “piece of eight”.
The peso quickly became a global currency. It was relatively pure silver, it was uniform in size and weight, and it had one special characteristic: it could be divided like a pie into eight reales. In English, those reales became known as “bits”. Two bits were a quarter of a peso. After the new American Congress based the weight of the American dollar on the peso in 1792*****, “two bits” also referred to a quarter of a dollar.
Now I need to figure out what “Two in ten, let’s do it again” means.
*And right back out again to pay for spices, textiles and other luxury goods in the India trade.
** Their phrase, not mine.
***The important word here is EIGHT, not reales. The story would be the same if it were eight goats, eight marbles, or eight football fans.
**** For those of you who never had to count to ten in Spanish, ocho means EIGHT.
***** Choosing to base American currency on the peso rather than the pound was a not-so-subtle way to spit in Great Britain’s eye. The peso remained legal tender in the US until the 1850s.