REVIEW POTPOURRI: The Great American Songbook

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Left-to-right: Frank Sinatra, James Van Heusen, Sammy Fain

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

The Great American Songbook

A 1991 CD (Reprise W2 26723), Sinatra Sings the Songs of Van Heusen and Cahn, contains 22 classic standards from the Great American Songbook, most of them composed by the team of James Van Heusen (1913-1990) and Sammy Fain (1913-1993), except for Imagina­tion, Polka Dots and Moon­beams, It’s Always You, Swinging On a Star, Moonlight Becomes You and Oh, You Crazy Moon, which Van Heusen wrote with his earlier longtime partner, Johnny Burke (1908-1964).

The remaining 16 have been given classic recordings by Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) and several other pop balladeers but it’s Sinatra who, for better or worse, remains associated with them.

The list:

Ring-A-Ding-Ding.
The Last Dance.
Indiscreet.
Come Waltz With Me.
The Look of Love.
The Tender Trap.
Come Blow Your Horn.
Call Me Irresponsible.
All the Way (a song no other singer could match Sinatra with.).
My Kind of Town.
I Like to Lead When I Dance.
The September of My Years (my personal favorite of all the recordings Sinatra ever made.).
I’ll Only Miss Her When I Think of Her.
Come Fly with Me.
Love and Marriage.
Star!

Some of the selections here had been previously recorded by Sinatra during what so many regard as his peak years at Capitol Records between 1953 and 1960. I would men­­tion that All the Way was sung more powerfully for the earlier label.

But Sinatra had a falling out with Cap­itol and in 1960 founded Reprise Records with the intent of giving the musical artists more control over their own recordings; rather strangely, since his friend, the singer/songwriter Johnny Mercer was one of the three owners of Capitol Records, Sinatra felt that label was restricting his artistic freedom.

Meanwhile, Sinatra, Van Heusen and Cahn became a musically joined at the hip Trinity for years and saw each other daily in their marathon rehearsals of new songs in which the singer had input on words and notes in their creation and drafting.

And Van Heusen, along with Jilly Rizzo, worked frequently as bodyguards in the singer’s entourage.

I own a few shelves of Sinatra’s 78s, LPs, 45s, cassettes and CDs. A few choice favorites for listening are the albums No One Cares, Sinatra/Jobim, A Man Alone and the very unfortunately underrated song cycle Watertown.

Much of this material can be heard on YouTube.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Julia Dent Grant

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Julia Dent Grant

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Julia Dent Grant

Former First Lady #18 , Julia Dent Grant (1826-1902) hated to leave Washington when her husband Ulysses (1822-1885) decided enough was enough after his two terms in the White House.

She wrote, “Dear Washington, how I love you, with your beautiful, broad, generous streets and blue skies! The sun shines always there for me.”

Born into a wealthy Missouri family, Julia had a father who re­main­ed an unreconstructured Southerner for the re­mainder of his life even when staying with his daughter and son-in-law during the White House years.

She met her future husband in 1844, married him four years later and gave him four children, each of whom, unusual for those days, survived well into 20th century adulthood.

Her White House hostessing included up to 29 courses to a meal, Roman punch further easing the stomachs of guests between the pot roast and dessert and at least six glasses of wine.

Up to that point, the Grants were the youngest couple to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Volumes of fascinating material on Grant and his life and family exist, of which some examples are offered:

He was extraordinarily skilled at breaking horses but was a so so student at West Point.

Introverted by nature, he preferred drinking by himself at the off-limits pub to any social occasions.

He loved the novels of Sir Walter Scott but read very little else.

He once stated that he had been told so often that “a noun is the name of a thing” he believed it.

There was never a day during the Civil War when he didn’t drink nor a day after when he did.

He detested dirty jokes and cussing and the troops under his command were very careful with their language around him.

He was President Lincoln’s fourth Commander-in-chief of the Union forces but the first successful one, scoring victories at Vicksburg, Chattanooga and Petersburg.

He would fight alongside his men in battle with bullets flying around him.

When Grant and General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) met at Appomattox to broker the terms of surrender, they were both suffering from migraines.

As to music, Grant knew two kinds; “one is Yankee Doodle, the other ain’t. ”

His presidency eased the national debt, and signed into law the Justice Department but otherwise was rocked by endless scandals.
Grant based his cabinet appointments more often on personal friendship than on professional qualifications .

Grant detested military parades.

His father learned to be a tanner from the abolitionist John Brown and moved to Ohio from Kentucky because he detested slavery; needless to say, he and Julia’s father avoided each other at the White House.

Grant’s sons Fred and Ulysses Junior constantly beat their father at wrestling matches.

Due to some bad investments, by 1884 Grant was destitute and dying of throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his Memoirs which the former president completed just two days before he died. The book sold many copies, left his widow and family well provided for, and is considered a classic.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Recently watched

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Keanu Reeves

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Recently watched:

John Wick is a 2014 film noir starring Keanu Reeves as a former, very skilled hitman for the Russian Mafia’s New York City kingpin. After one massive contract for his boss, he is allowed to retire to civilian life, since he had fallen in love (Blue Bloods actress Bridget Moynahan did good work here as his wife ) and gotten married.

A series of unfortunate events occur (due to space limitations, I won’t go into them), which ignite Wick’s very dangerous wrath and he is on the warpath with perpetrators of those events. They include his former boss – portrayed with sparing understatement by Michael Nyqvist (1960-2017) – and, even more of a villain, the boss’s spoiled rotten son.

Unfortunately, the film descends all too often into yet another series of nasty martial arts vendettas, although moments of relief are provided by the contributions of actors Willem Dafoe as a watchful former colleague of Wick’s and Ian McShane as the owner of a luxury hotel which caters to the criminal world as a sanctuary where any deadly activity against individuals is met with execution of the malefactors.

And a lovely moment at the end occurs when Wick adopts a pit bull puppy who had been caged in a euthanasia facility.

Handel’s Messiah

Lovro von Matacic

YouTube has a very good 1967 performance of Handel’s Messiah featuring the Croatian Maestro Lovro von Matacic (1899-1985) conducting the NHK Orchestra of Japan and a top notch chorus and soloists. I have at least 20 different Messiahs, all of them scoring individual points, and recently listened to those conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham (from 1947), Raymond Leppard and John Alldis, each of which are also accessible on YouTube.

But Matacic brought a vibrancy and eloquence uniquely his own. Highly recommended!

Elizabeth Coatsworth

Elizabeth Coatsworth

The poem Winter Splendor, by Nobleboro’s own Elizabeth Coatsworth (1893-1986):

“This is a day to be compared with lions
if one considers the yellow-maned, round-faced sun,
or with an eagle for its icy glare;
or with a stag for something tense and proud
(and perhaps the antlered thickets enter in).
If men were chosen, I’d choose Charlemagne
for what was Northern in him, haughty, clear;
horns would find here their cold and proper echoes;
“magnificent” is perhaps not quite the word
but I can come no nearer. Such a day
towers above its fellows, passing by
with chargers, ermines, pennons, and with spears.”

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Andrew Johnson

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Andrew Johnson

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Andrew Johnson

Seventeenth President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), by his own hard-working ethic and insatiable desire to honorably better himself, became the kind of speaker that one New York Times correspondent would write with grudging admiration how this individual “cut and slashed right and left, tore big wounds and left something behind to fester and remember. His phraseology may be uncouth, but his views are easily understood and he talks strong thoughts and carefully culled facts in quick succession.”

As with several other presidents, Johnson was born into poverty; his early years were spent in North Carolina, his father died when Johnson was three, and his mother apprenticed the boy to a tailor.

He became a very skilled tailor but disliked his boss and ran away, eventually relocating in the Tennessee mountain village of Greeneville where he set up his own very successful tailoring business.

When 15 year old Eliza McCardle (1810-1876) first saw Andrew, she commented to a friend, “There goes my beau;” they were married a year later in her mother’s house, the ceremony being presided over by Mordecai Lincoln, the uncle of the former 16th president, Abraham Lincoln.

She helped immensely with her husband’s education, especially in arithmetic and writing. And, when her husband became interested in politics, she fully supported his ambition, but rarely joined him in public appearances.

Johnson was elected mayor of Greeneville, served in the state legislature and five terms in the House of Representatives, and as governor and U.S. Senator before being picked by Abraham Lincoln to replace Maine’s own Hamilton Hamlin as vice-president when Lincoln was elected to a second term in 1864.

Andrew Johnson’s speeches and convictions resonated with the farmers and day laborers of the Tennessee mountains and valleys, a constituency that had little use for the wealthy plantation slave owners. Johnson was against high tariffs and wasteful government spending because they raised the cost of living for working people, spoke up for freedom of speech and religion and, although a Democrat, maintained a feisty independence in what was morally right.

Before Bill Clinton, and later Donald Trump, Andrew Johnson was the only president to undergo an impeachment trial, due to the obnoxious Radical Republicans who were doing their best to subvert the executive and judicial branches in attempts to pursue their own agendas, especially in relation to revenge against the former Confederate states and its citizens. Johnson, like his predecessor Lincoln, believed in a more moderate policy of healing and reconciliation as best for the country, which antagonized most of Congress; his acquittal was due to the vote of one man, Senator Edmund Ross, of Kansas, who was one of the subjects of JFK’s 1956 book, Profiles in Courage.

Droves of fascinating material on Johnson’s own presidency exists and could prove that his ranking as one of the worst presidents is grossly unfair.

In 1874, Johnson became the only former president to be re-elected to the U.S. Senate, was strangely given a hero’s welcome by the entire chamber including his former political enemies. Being a gentle forgiving man, Johnson shook hands with these enemies.

He died within six months of a stroke while visiting his daughter in July 1875, at the age of 66.

A visitor to the White House, Charles Dickens described Johnson’s face as “remarkable…indicating courage, watchfulness and certainly strength of purpose.”

REVIEW POTPOURRI – Movie: Dog; Christmas music; Quotable quotes

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Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Dog

Movies portraying the love of man’s best friend have been melting the hearts of cynics since the days of Lassie Come Home. Another perspective was achieved in this past February’s release, Dog.

Channing Tatum

Channing Tatum portrays Briggs, a former army Ranger who has been removed from combat due to some brain damage. Unable to adjust to civilian life, he wants reinstatement and, after constant nagging of his superior officer, is finally given an opportunity to prove himself worthy.

A fellow Ranger, Rodriguez, has been killed in an automobile accident and his burial with full military honors takes place in five days in Nogales, Arizona, itself 1,500 miles from where Briggs lives near Tacoma, Washington.

Briggs is asked to escort Rodriguez’s service dog, a very aggressive Belgian Malinois named Lulu, as a tribute to her handler. Afterwards Briggs will take the dog to the nearby White Sands base to be euthanized. Only then will he be reinstated.

Despite being crated and muzzled, the dog destroys the inside of Briggs’ van. Other incidents include Lulu being released from the vehicle by an overzealous animal rights activist, while Briggs is elsewhere, who believes the canine is being mistreated, but who then is attacked by Lulu.

Jane Adams

The dog again escapes from the car later in Oregon and leads Briggs to a marijuana farm. Its owner, Gus, shoots a tranquilizing dart in Briggs, believing him to be an intruder, ties him up but then sees reason when his wife Tamara has a calming influence on both Briggs and Lulu.

(Here, I commend the seasoned acting of Kevin Nash and Jane Adams as the married couple.).

Kevin Nash

Inevitably Briggs and Lulu begin to bond, as other obstacles, and even a few epiphanies, occur during the remainder of their journey. At this point, I simply recommend this film for the manner in which this potentially hackneyed plot is developed in a strikingly unusual manner, with a message of hope and redemption.

The film was produced at a cost of $15 million and, since its release, raked in $85 million.

A charming Christmas album

The Mills Brothers

A very charming 1959 LP on the Dot label, Merry Christmas, features the Mills Brothers applying their unique harmonizing to 12 yuletide favorites; the six on side one include such secular examples as Gene Autry’s Here Comes Santa Claus, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, and one of the finest renditions of Mel Torme’s perennially delectable Christmas Song, surpassed only by a tiny margin by the one of Percy Faith’s orchestra and ladies chorus, while the second side contains the traditional Xmas carols.

And the album can be heard on YouTube.

Quotable quote

December 3 was the 165th birthday of the great novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). I offer one of his very pertinent quotes:

“It is only those who do nothing who make no mistakes, I suppose.”

 

 

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Abraham Lincoln

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Abraham Lincoln

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) first met Mary Todd (1818-1882) at a formal dance in Springfield, Illinois, in late 1839 where he had been practicing law for two years, while she had just recently moved in with an older sister from their home state of Ken­tucky.

Mary Todd Lincoln

Despite their vast differences in background – she having grown up in wealth and he in poverty – they took an instant liking to each other and visited constantly; they shared mutual interests in literature, especially reciting and rereading Shakes­peare tragedies, along with history, geography and politics and swapping anecdotes of their early years in Kentucky.

Both of them also had a keen sense of the absurd and shared much laughter as a result.

Within a year the two were engaged but then, due to an ongoing fear of marriage, he broke off the engagement. They went their separate ways for two very long years, however, not at all losing their affection for, and commitment to, each other. Mary, already knowing of Abe’s tendencies to melancholy, prayed for that glorious day when “Hamlet will be himself again,” as she confided to a close friend.

“That glorious day” finally arrived. The couple announced their intention at the very last minute and they were joined in marriage in her sister’s parlor.

Libraries of material abound on Lincoln’s rise as a politician in Congress, his horrifically challenging presidency during the Civil War and his assassination with its radical reconstruction aftermath.

His wife had her manic/depressive ups and downs but the couple loved each other up to that fateful night of April 14, at Ford’s Theater. Of their four sons, Edward died at 4 years old, in 1850, Willie at 12, in 1862, at the White House, and Tad at 18, in 1871. The oldest son Robert died at 84 in 1926.

Losing the youngest son is believed by many to have caused several breakdowns in her mental and physical health. Robert had his mother institutionalized for a few months in 1876 but her older sister eventually secured her release and freedom, after which Mary moved to France for four years.

By late 1880, due to a paralyzing fall from a chair while hanging a picture, she moved back to the states and moved in with her sister back in Springfield, Illinois, where she died in July 1882, from a stroke.

Mary Todd Lincoln was 63.

REVIEW POTPOURRI: William Bradford

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William Bradford

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

William Bradford

Elected 30 times as Governor of the Plymouth Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1621 to 1656, William Bradford (1590-1657) began his massive history Of Plymouth Plantation in 1630 and abandoned further work by 1647.

He wrote the following entry on the first Thanksgiving in 1621, one year after the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower barely alive after the hellish two month voyage from England:

“They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck a meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports…”

Bradford’s book is well worth dipping into just for its account of the ruthless Cape Cod landscape and its rocky soil and how the original settlers carved out a living that first year.

A very happy Thanksgiving!

Dick Van Dyke

Dick Van Dyke

The October 15, 1974, episode of Columbo has Dick Van Dyke, still living at 96, guest starring as a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who murders his wife and ar­ranges it to look like a kidnapping that went wrong. I may be in a minority but I have always found his acting and comedic talents a bit overrated, whether it was his 1960s Dick Van Dyke Show with Mary Tyler Moore, Carl Reiner, etc., or Diagnosis Murder.

As the killer, Van Dyke is so wooden in his performance that he was easily upstaged by all the other cast members. I would particularly like to single out the gifted character actress Antoinette Bower in her 15 minutes as the wife who is lured by her husband to a secluded ranch house, tied up and murdered. She gave just the right snarky edge to her role.

Joyce Van Patten

Another actress, Joyce Van Patten, provided much endearing comic relief as a nun running a soup kitchen who tries to replace Columbo’s favorite old raincoat with a barely used one from the kitchen closet.

Enoch Light

Enoch Light

A 1959 el cheapo ten-inch 78 on the Prom record label features very good renditions of two hit songs from the 1950s – Wheel of Fortune and Silver and Gold. Enoch Light conducted with vocals provided by his stable of artists who were obscure then and, as far as anyone knows, have remained obscure. Prices per disc were between a quarter and 30 cents.

Prom and several other record labels that sold in dime stores were owned by the Kasen Brothers who were based in Newark, New Jersey, and who jointly owned the Synthetic Plastics Company.

 

 

 

 

REVIEW POTPOURRI: James Buchanan

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James Buchanan

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

James Buchanan

After the very sad four White House years of Franklin Pierce, that of former 15th President James Buchanan (1791-1868), with the help of his niece/hostess Harriet Lane (1830-1903), began with an inaugural ball described as follows by Christine Sadler in her 1963 America’s First Ladies:

“Five thousand revelers danced the night away in a specially built structure and between the reels they consumed ‘twelve hundred gallons of ice cream plus four hundred gallons of oysters, five hundred quarts of chicken salad, five hundred quarts of jelly, sixty saddles of mutton, and thousands of dollars worth of wine. ‘ All this in addition to a four-foot cake featuring the thirty-one states of the about-to-be-dissolved union.”

Harriet Lane

(With respect to Miss Lane, more later!)

Buchanan was born April 23rd, 1791, into prosperity in Pennsylvania, his father being a very successful store owner. He began practicing law in 1812 and became so good at it that, by the time he was 30, he was earning today’s equivalent of 220 thousand dollars a year.

Very cautious and low key in personality, he approached life as a game of chess and shrewdly assessed all angles before making any move while sustaining the sweetest, most charming one on one personality in terms of eye contact, ironic as he was near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other and was always cocking his head in the direction of anyone whom he engaged in conversation.

Buchanan was elected to the State Legislature in 1814 and Congress in 1821. Not being very good at public speaking, Buchanan focused his talent on behind the scenes committee work, slyly working his way through the treacherous labyrinths of state and national politics and its changing winds. Beginning as a Federalist in Congress, he made the safe leap to the Democratic party in 1831 during Andrew Jackson’s administration and was appointed Minister to Russia in 1832 where he served for two years before heading back to run successfully for the first of three-terms as Senator.

Buchanan would serve as Secretary of State for President Polk and as Minister to England for his predecessor Pierce, with whom he shared a rather wary rivalry as fellow Democrats but like-minded in their belief that the federal government had no business interfering with the rights of slaveholders in the South though personally detesting slavery as an institution.

By the time Buchanan assumed the Presidency for his one term in 1857, the country was split horribly and very dangerously on the slavery issue and his cautious neutrality made his Presidency a lame duck one. Details of its failures can be read about in Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Back to his niece, Harriet Lane. What little good her Uncle James accomplished at 1600 Penn­sylvania Avenue may have been partly due to her charm, beauty, wit and savory smarts as his First Lady . As hostess, she brought a level of culture and fine arts to the social gatherings on a level comparable to that of Jackie Kennedy while similarly advocating worthwhile causes, a noteworthy one being the living conditions of Native Americans on the crowded reservations.

After she and her uncle left the White House, Harriet married a wealthy Baltimore banker Henry Johnston at 36 in 1866 while the President retired to his large estate Wheatland where he died in 1868 at 77.

The Lanes had two sons but, by 1885, Harriet had not only lost her uncle but also her husband and both sons. After her own death in 1903, the will bequeathed generous amounts of wealth to, among other charities, establish a boy’s school and children’s hospital while her collection of paintings were donated to the Smithsonian.

REVIEW POTPOURRI – Music: The Penguins; Writer: Alfred Kazin; TV Show: Dragnet

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The Penguins

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

The Penguins

I own a ten inch 78 (Dootone 348) containing two songs performed by the doo wop vocal group, the Penguins – Hey Senorita and Earth Angel. It was released in late 1954 and, in early 1955 in an ironic twist of commercial fate, side one’s Senorita, even though pleasant enough, would be ignored by disc jockeys in favor of Earth Angel soaring to #1 on the rhythm and blues charts for three weeks with 4 million copies sold by 1966 and very musically deserving of its success.

At the beginning, the group consisted of the following singers:

Lead tenor Cleveland Duncan (1935-2012), Curtis Williamson (1934-1979), Dexter Tisby (1935-2019), Bruce Tate (1937-1973), vocalist Williams, Gaynel Hodge and the late, great singer Jessie Belvin, who died very young, shared credit in the writing of Earth Angel.

In 1958, the group signed a contract with Mercury Records where the musically similar Platters would score even greater success while the Penguins own sales were already waning.

In 1955, an all white group, the Crewcuts, recorded their own version for Mercury, scored an even greater success on the pop charts and began their own rise to fame.

Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) stated in his Journals on March 22, 1960, a pre-requisite for truly worthwhile writing:

“Without some kind of innocence, no writing is possible. One must give oneself to the world, uncomplainingly, no matter what….”

Interesting­ly, he complained constantly in these Journals, but still remains one of a handful of writers, most of whose books I have read. One gentleman who knew him commented to me back in the 1980s that “Alfred is not a nice man.”

On the other hand, Southern writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) invited a friend to lunch at her Milledgeville, Georgia, farmhouse and informed her that “Alfred Kazin would be joining them and that he was a sweetie.”

Dragnet

Jack Webb

Lee Marvin

One of the most underrated examples of early 1950s film noir suspense black and white entertainment are the episodes of Dragnet. One had Lee Marvin portraying a serial killer who’s also a vegetarian and takes Jack Webb’s Joe Friday and his partner to dinner at a then-existing restaurant in Los Ange­les.

However Marvin’s character, portrayed with precision-honed calm and based on an actual individual, would still be sentenced to the gas chamber which was a frequent punishment for murderers in the California of that decade.

 

 

 

REVIEW POTPOURRI: Franklin Pierce

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Franklin Pierce

Peter Catesby Peter Cates

Franklin Pierce

The 14th President Franklin Pierce came from New Hampshire, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth having a father who was a big wig in state politics, started practicing law at 22, won a seat in the State House at 24, and became its Speaker of the House at 26.

He attended Bowdoin College, in Bruns­wick, where he fell in love with Jane Apple­ton, daughter of the college p resident. Unlike her gregarious husband, she was very religious, painfully shy and an invalid most all her life. She despised anything to do with politics and, like a few other former First Ladies, did not enjoy living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue .

Jane Appleton Pierce

They had three sons; one died as a baby, the second at three years old, and the third, who was their absolute pride and joy and only living child up to when Pierce was elected president, was with his parents on a train from Boston to Concord, New Hampshire, in January, 1853, two months before the inauguration when their car went off the track down a ravine. Miraculously his parents escaped with minor injuries but he was crushed to death before their eyes at the age of 11.

At Bowdoin, Pierce was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Later Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of his good friend in 1853 and made the following observation:

“I have come seriously to the conclusion that he has in him many of the chief elements of a great ruler. His talents are administrative, he has a subtle faculty of making affairs roll onward according to his will and of influencing without showing any trace of his action….He is deep, deep, deep. ”

Unfortunately, others didn’t feel the same way. Even though Pierce abhorred slavery, he didn’t think, as did Millard Fillmore, that the federal government had any right to interfere in the South. He was pretty much more anxious to please others and blow the way the wind blows, following the advice of his father and party leaders.

Additionally, he was a close friend of Jefferson Davis, later President of the Confederacy.

In 1863 on July 4th, [after his time as president was over, he continued to be involved in politics] he gave a speech in Concord, New Hampshire, condemning the useless bloodshed of the Civil War just when word came in of the Union victory at Gettysburg. He alienated his supporters even further.

His wife died at the end of that year.

The next year Pierce took his friend Hawthorne on a trip to the White Mountains to help the writer’s frail health.

But Hawthorne died one night in an adjoining hotel room. At Hawthorne’s funeral, Pierce was snubbed sharply by the other New England writers and not included among the pallbearers.

In very poor health, Franklin Pierce died on October 8, 1869, at 65.