The American Boy

Of course, what we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now, the chances are strong that he won't be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean-lived, and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom America can be really proud. . .

Nowadays, whatever other faults the son of rich parents may tend to develop, he is at least forced by the opinion of all his associates of his own age to bear himself well in manly exercises and to develop his body—and therefore, to a certain extent, his character—in the rough sports which call for pluck, endurance, and physical address.

Theodore Roosevelt - The American Boy

Teddy Roosevelt came to St. Paul’s School in June of 1906 to dedicate the Spanish American War Memorial. (Teddy had also visited SPS back in 1875, when he had retrieved his younger brother Elliot who couldn’t complete his first term due to nervous “hysteria”.) The war memorial, a bronze statue by Bela Pratt (a student of Saint Gaudens) shows a young soldier “at ease but tense, committed but with an air of youthful insouciance,” gazing off past the black waters sluicing off of Library Pond. The boys and masters and alumni of the school assembled on the terrace before the Sheldon Library that day and remembered “the noble and unselfish ardor aroused by our nation’s interference in the cause of Cuba.”

A large posse of Eastern blue bloods had enlisted in T.R.’s Rough Rider regiment, at a time when “the white man’s burden” was every young gentleman’s social obligation. Dudley Dean “perhaps the best quarterback who ever played on a Harvard 11,” Bob Wrenn “the champion tennis player of America,” Waller “the high jumper,” Craig Wadsworth “the steeplechase rider,” and Joe Stephens, “the crack polo player,” formed the core of the regimental leadership as it started the campaign towards Santiago.

Hamilton Fish (SPS 1890), the ex-captain of the Columbia crew, was in the thick of it along with five other “Paulies”. His Grandfather and namesake, the Secretary of State, (he preceded Wm. M. Evarts) had worked diligently to preserve peaceful relations with Spain, but young Ham found his destiny on the Caribbean island. Colonel Roosevelt was Ham’s close friend, and gave him a dog, “Don” which quickly became the regiment mascot. The evening before the Battle of Las Guasimas, Ham and Teddy sat together in their campground and, facing combat for the first time, talked heart to heart.

“I said, ‘Well, Fish, we have all got to die sometime, and after all, we cannot die in a better way,’ and he nodded and said, ‘That is just how I feel, Colonel, and it is one of the reasons that made me come.’”

Sergeant Hamilton Fish took a bullet to his heart the next morning; he was the first American soldier to die in the Spanish American War. (Don, his dog, went on to rush San Juan Hill, and after the war quietly retired to the Quaker town of Whittier, California, until a big touring car containing four persons rounded a corner at a high speed and the old dog, walking quietly along, could not get out of its way.)

When Teddy came to commemorate the war dead and personally express his admiration for the men who served with him in Cuba, my grandfather Edward Perkins was completing his first year as a master at Saint Paul’s School. Like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he had cast about for a vocation after leaving college, and like them he took up teaching school in New England.

He had been a boy at the school in the final years of the second Rector, Joseph Howland Coit. In 1905, the year Edward returned to teach, Dr. Henry Ferguson took over as interim Rector. St Paul’s was “a picked and purple school”; fashionable magazines of the day noted the “physical beauty, general alertness, and winsome charm of these finished little gentlemen.” Henry Vaughan had filled the pastoral landscape with the high gothic Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul, the heavy Georgian Lower School, and the massive “Tudorbethan” Upper School. The school was morphing from its early incarnation as an extension of the Coit family to a much larger and more complex educational institution. It was a time when students showed “a mixture of conformity and rebellion, conventionality with strong individualism.” Boys wore stiff collars and were expected to tip their hats to each master he passed, but beards and sideburns were grown and drinking and smoking were common throughout the school. Relations between boys and masters were often strained; boys were known to torment new masters, and prided themselves on being able to reduce the term of several new recruits to a single year.

When Edward returned to St. Paul’s in 1905 he became an instructor in Latin and Greek. For four years it was a pleasurable enough life, insulated from the many vagaries of young bachelorhood. Young masters lived on a meager salary, thread-bare aristocrats moving in upper class society without any real wherewithal to support such a lifestyle, bonding with each other and their young charges and their students’ affluent parents.

“At St. Paul’s, we believe that Latin provides a medium, unsurpassed by any other subject, for developing those qualities so necessary for scholastic success in school and college. From the first the student may be taught the importance of care and accuracy, of facing and analyzing a problem, of memorizing and learning the essential facts. A boy may learn how disastrous it is to put things off. On the other hand, he will find how inevitably and surely a well-prepared lesson brings its satisfaction. For the first time he faces a problem that taxes all his mind.”

Hobey Baker, John “Gil” Winant, and Charlie Scribner were all third formers that year at SPS, and Edward did his best to share his enthusiasm and affection for the classics with them. Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Iliad and the Odyssey presented the young master and his charges with intellectual challenges, aesthetic enjoyment, and moral instruction.

Hobey Baker, particularly handsome, “slim and defiant”, with a blond shock of hair, was making his mark in the classroom as an industrious, though not brilliant student. He was absolutely dazzling, however, on the gridiron and on the “black ice” of the Lower School Pond. Hockey was taking hold in Millville; the ice froze quickly on the shallow ponds and the thermometer sank below zero early in the winter in the Merrimack Valley. Hobey viscerally loved sport for sport’s sake; no-one could play with or against Hobey without being influenced by his contagious charisma and spirit of fair play. In his sixth form year, the St. Paul's team defeated Princeton, the Tigers' only loss that year. He was never penalized for foul play, and he went out of his way to congratulate his opponents at the close of every contest. He would become to Scott Fitzgerald “an ideal worthy of everything in my enthusiastic admiration, yet consummated and expressed in a human being who stood within ten feet of me.”

Gil Winant was a poor student at St. Paul's, but he discovered his gift as a natural leader who could inspire and persuade others with the force of his personality. Gilt was sober, serious, quiet, unassuming, idealistic and passionate about the causes of social justice. He cared little for the practicalities of money; he was indifferent to food, often forgetting to eat. He loved St. Paul's because it was a thoroughly impractical school, whose only function was to prepare students to enter Princeton or Harvard or Yale. It concentrated on learning in an ideal way, without any concerns for training its young charges for a career. This suited Winant fine. He was, above all, an impractical idealist. And St. Paul's was the only place and time in his life in which Winant was ever fully happy.

Charlie Scribner was gentle and reserved, with a bit of an Edwardian stammer; he was quite artistic, like his Flagg uncles, and had a good sense of humor. He loved horses, and with his neatly parted flaxen hair, cut a dashing figure riding the hunts of New Jersey. He did not personally have a great literary bent, but his family’s publishing house in New York had just published The Golden Bowl by Henry James, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, Barrie’s Peter Pan, and the first twenty-three volumes of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, and it was obvious he would someday go on to join the family firm.

At Anniversary, 1909, Woodrow Wilson, President of Princeton University was the principal speaker. “The tall, ascetic figure, the deeply chiselled and beautifully modeled features, the brow of the scholar, the eyes that flashed as he drove home his points” held his audience in thrall. “I am sorry for the lad who is going to inherit money; the object of college is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” Wilson warned that both St. Paul’s and Princeton were doomed to disappear unless they reformed and adapted themselves to the needs of modern life. By promoting social exclusivity, they were failing to train leaders, and today’s college men would find themselves capable of playing little useful role on graduation.

Gil Winant, Hobey Baker, and Charlie Scribner all went on to Princeton.

After four years at the school, Edward decided to move on as well. “The life and work there I enjoyed and it was with a great deal of regret that I finally made up my mind that if I remained in it permanently I would certainly find myself in middle life dissatisfied in having irretrievably renounced the interests and rewards of an active career in more expansive surroundings. But recognizing that such was the fact I entered the law school of Columbia University in the autumn of 1909.”

His younger brother Max was a cub reporter at the New York Times, Learned Hand had just been appointed Federal Judge, Harlan Fiske Stone was the new Dean of the Law School, the Columbia Law Review was nearing its second decade; New York would become his home.

VERITAS

After Father died, Max stayed at home and did not return to St. Paul’s. His grieving mother needed him near, and so did his younger brothers and sisters, particularly his six-year-old brother Louis. The family had not saved much and, while there were a few family trust funds to fall back on and his Grandfather Evarts’ estate was in the process of being settled, the financial situation for the moment was tight.

Young Edward went back to Harvard; he was just starting his sophomore year in 1902. The world was changing rapidly – Not only had Father and Grandfather Evarts and Uncle Charley Beaman and Great Uncle Ned just died, Queen Victoria had died in January of 1901 after almost 64 years on the throne, and President McKinley had been shot to death in September 1901 after four and a half years in office.

Boston was growing by leaps and bounds after filling in the Back Bay and all the way out to Kenmore Square and the Fens by 1900. The Tremont Street Subway was opened in 1897, and streetcars were reaching across the Charles and out into the suburbs. Automobiles, which were beginning to be produced on production lines, were starting to take the place of the horse and carriage.

While Henry James was still writing novels about Americans on tour in Europe, books about life as it was really lived in America, like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: a Girl of the Streets were being read by college students.

Teddy Roosevelt was President. Everything was getting big! The new Harvard Stadium designed by McKim Mead and White seated over 40,000 football fans. After an alarming series of deaths and serious concussion injuries, there was talk of dropping the game, but President Charles Eliot declared “effeminacy and luxury are even worse evils than brutality” and President Roosevelt preached from his bully pulpit “Hit the line hard: Don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard”. The topic for the big Harvard-Yale debate in 1905 was controversial, “Resolved that the intercollegiate football in America is a detriment rather than a benefit”, but there was little doubt about it, Big Time Football had arrived.

Education was becoming open to all; MIT and Harvard were considering merging into an even larger university. In 1900, Julia Harrington Duff, an Irish American Woman, was elected to the Boston School Committee; at Harvard, there were more students from Boston Latin, a public school, than from Groton or St. Paul’s.

Frank Roosevelt, the fop from Groton whose cousin had fallen into the Presidency after the shooting in Buffalo, was living in Westmorly, the most ornate, with diamond-leaded windows and oak wainscoting, of the private "Gold Coast" residence halls on Bow Street. Roger Baldwin, who would serve a year in jail avoiding service in the Great War and found the ACLU, was exploring the bounds of Harvard's tradition of tolerance and liberty of opinions in his own way: "I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal." Lothrop Stoddard was developing his argument that the absorption of the "white" race by "colored" races would result in the destruction of Western civilization (Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby reads a book titled The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard" and throughout Gatsby Tom confusedly and pathetically espouses Goddard's racial theories.)

An effort was made by the best men in the class, including Capt. Hurley and Ray Oveson of the football team, to draw seniors of class of 1905 from the big private dormitories to the “Yard” for their final year, so that senior class would occupy the yard en masse. It was hoped that the change would make Harvard more democratic and foster class spirit and college loyalty. Those who did not fall in line stood a good chance of being ostracized.

Edward was not particularly athletic, and while he was invited to join the Signet, a literary club, his junior year, he didn’t have the means or the inclination to join the Porcellian or the Fly Club. While he had been to St. Paul’s, and Perkins Hall had recently been constructed, he came a generation too late to be able to claim ostentatious wealth as his birthright. He thought he would probably go on to study law like his father and Grandfather Evarts, so he studied the classics, Latin and Greek, and literature.

Max joined him at Harvard in 1903 after things settled down at home. While Edward would keep Boswell’s Life of Johnson by his table the rest of his life, Max kept re-reading War and Peace. While Edward held to a classical course of studies, Max studied literature with Copey Copeland, joined the Stylus Club, got arrested for being drunk and disorderly after the Yale game, and in December became the first member of his class to be placed on probation. Van Wyck Brooks, who like Max, aspired to be a writer, came to Harvard as well, and shared a straw yellow house on Winthrop Street with Max, while his brother Ames, who would become a lawyer like Edward, write one slim volume of verse, and eventually walk in front of a locomotive, went off to Princeton. Max, who knew the swell crowd from SPS, made sure to introduce Van Wyck to all the right people, and helped get him into the Stylus and Signet "absolutely the nicest thing in college to belong to" and the final Fox Club. ("Foxhall Edwards" would be the editor in Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again).

"Walter Pater is in every college bookshelf. DeQuincey may be on the bottom shelf...Every college-man of culture is a life-member with Mr. Elbert Hubbard . . . we see the rooms of these intellectual devotees and patrons of the arts plastered with Mona Lisas and Vierges au Rochers . . .We are sure to find certain wall-schemes with a single Rembrandt and a couple of aesthetic candles (going, if possible, all day)." The cults of John Donne and Dante met at the home of Charles Eliot Norton, C.C Perkins old friend, but Melville, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman had no place at that time in the Harvard canon.

The Perkins boys, without the resources to take off on frequent holidays, visited their uncles’ families on weekends; their mother’s brother Prescott Evarts was the Rector of Christ Church in Cambridge, and their dad’s brother Charles Bruen Perkins, the architect, was living at Oakwood on Jamaica Pond, next door to their Cleveland cousins living at Nutwood (the city had taken the big Pine Bank house to be part of Olmstead’s Emerald Necklace park). When Uncle Prescott learned that Max had been invited to join the Fox Club but couldn't afford it, he wrote a check to cover the expenses. When they went to Newport in the summer, their Grandma Perkins gave Edward Longfellow's invitation to Uncle Ned to join the Saturday Club, and gave Max letters from Browning, Lowell, and Motley to hang on the Fox Club walls.

554 men received their Harvard College degrees in 1905. An additional 253 more men would be listed as “Special Students and Affiliated Members.” Edward Newton Perkins, having failed to complete all his physical education requirements, would fall into the latter category.

Yasnaya Polyana, New Jersey

I think of the Perkins as a raft of Boston culture, - one of those rafts that were to be found in many another American town, serenely riding the wild waters of the world around them . . . Now the Perkins were not only New Englanders, they were even doubly so, for they united the two great lines of Boston and New Haven, - Harvard and Yale, - the twin immemorial schools of the mind of New England. Max, descended on one side from the old East India magnates, - some of whom had been Loyalists in the Revolution in Boston,- was, on the other, through his grandfather Evarts, the Senator and Secretary of State, descended from John Davenport and Roger Sherman. I mention this merely because I have known few other Americans in whom so much history was palpably and visibly embodied, so that one saw it working in him, sometimes not too happily, for his mind was always in a state of civil war.

- Van Wyck Brooks

In his “hyperaesthetic youth”, Van Wyck Brooks was mortified to have been born in the dully named town of Plainfield, New Jersey. As he grew older however, he was greatly relieved to find out that Tolstoy’s place Yasnaya Polyana, where he wrote War and Peace, meant the same thing in Russian, and he eventually discovered that Plainfield in the 1880’s, had more mystery, intrigue, and personality than most simple unadorned American towns. By the time the new train station was built in 1885, Plainfield was growing into one of the affluent suburbs made possible by the railroad link to New York. With its relatively pure air, the local paper touted Plainfield as the “Colorado of the East” and a haven for sufferers of respiratory illnesses, even though it boasted no exalted Rocky Mountains. The “Town of a Hundred Millionaires” filled up with capitalists and robber barons, as well as some literary folk such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian, Julia Ward Howe’s daughter Florence, and Bret Harte’s abandoned wife and daughter. Edward and Betty Perkins moved out from Manhattan to Plainfield after the first three boys, Ned, Max, and Carley, were born. They bought a nice comfortable house on Central Avenue, and Edward, who never wore an overcoat, bought the first high wheel bicycle in town and rode it to the train station each morning to commute to his law practice at Gray & Davenport in the city. Three more children followed, Molly (1890) and Fanny (1892), and finally Louis (1896), and Edward and Betty quickly became close friends with other young parents in town, including Rowland and Fanny Cox and Charles and Sallie Brooks. The Perkins threw themselves into their new community. They were active in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, and helped found the “Shakespeare Club of Plainfield” where they read Shakespeare aloud with their neighbors (the first reading selection came from King Lear). They made sure not to miss a week, because the club had the habit of electing as president a member who was absent from the meeting. Betty and Sallie Brooks and Fanny Cox joined The Monday Afternoon Club which provided a literary outlet for women (Betty explicated Matthew Arnold's Dramatic Poetry, while Sallie addressed the club on Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Turkish, and Moorish Ornament). Edward, whose father had been on the School Board in Boston, ran for School Trustee as a Democrat, and on Sunday nights at home, he read aloud to his children from Ivanhoe, The Rose and the Ring, and the Three Musketeers. “I have watched my own career since 1885 with friendly interest, but I hardly think a particular account of it is anxiously desired by my friends and classmates, though I hope many of them will be glad to know that I have been fairly prosperous and successful." When Mr. Gray was appointed to the Court of Appeals, the firm became Davenport, Smith & Perkins, then Smith & Perkins, and then Perkins & Jackson. Edward worked hard, and his practice was successful. One of his important cases was Goetze vs. United States in which it was decided by the Supreme Court that Puerto Rico ceased, after the treaty with Spain, to be a "foreign country" within the meaning of the tariff laws. His personal style reflected his New England training and ancestry and made him a valuable member of the grievance committee of the New York Bar Association. They often travelled into Manhattan to visit Betty’s parents and their city friends. Society in New York had moved uptown and the slums had moved in around the old downtown neighborhood, but the Evarts still lived in the old house at 231 2nd Avenue. Plainfield society came into the city when Uncle Charles Bruen Perkins finally, in 1896, got married to Elizabeth Ward, a tall and sweet looking brunette. Monsignor Doane conducted the ceremony, and the New York Times took note: "a fashionable wedding in an old-fashioned New York house early in September is so decidedly a novelty". Grandfather Evarts, the Senator, was getting old and blind. In 1889 he had sailed to Europe on “La Champagne” with his son Allen and his daughter Mary to consult the best oculists in Europe. By the mid nineties, he began to find it hard to travel. The grandchildren, however, were full of life. Ned and Max Perkins made life-long friends with Ames and Van Wyck Brooks. Ned and Max were sent off to St. Paul’s when they turned thirteen. Ned entered the School in 1896, where he was an Isthmian who played on the second eleven, an assistant editor of the Horae Scholasticae Magazine and a member of the Concordian Literary Society, the Missionary Society, and the Library Association. Max, who shared his literary inclinations, followed him in 1898 and became quarterback and captain of the third Isthmian Football Team. Grandfather Evarts became increasinngly housebound in New York. Joseph Choate came to call just before embarking for England where he had been appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Evarts congratulated him and prophesied a brilliant diplomatic career, but then shook his head and said, "When I think what a care I am to my people, lying so helpless here, and that I can do nothing any more to repay their kindness, or to help in the world, I feel like the boy who wrote home from school to his mother a letter of twenty pages, and then added: 'P.S. Mother, please excuse my longevity.' " The former Senator and Secretary of State, who had moved the unanimous nomination of Lincoln, defended Johnson against impeachment, and secured Hayes disputed election, turned eighty-three on February 6th, 1901. Two weeks later, he was stricken with pneumonia. On the last day of February, he died. In the summer the family travelled to Grandmother Perkins house in Newport, Bruen Villa, a virtual museum of old paintings and objets d’art which C. C. Perkins had collected in Florence. She gave Ned and Betty a superb Michelangelo sketch for the Last Supper which they hung in the Plainfield house, (although some later challenged its provenance), and recalled stories of the old days in Italy, banditti in wild passes of the mountains and travelers robbed on the road in the middle of the night – musical soirees in Rome – the Marble Faun – “Harry” and “Willie” James and the family of Charles Eliot Norton. Great Grandmother Bruen rocked in her chair and remembered for the boys the time, when she was just a child, she saw George Washington ride on his white horse in front of New York’s City Hall. She lived to the age of 99, and died in 1892, while Grandmother Frances Davenport Bruen Perkins herself lived on in the Bruen Villa for fifty years until 1909. Every summer the family took the White Mountain Express to Windsor. Senator Evarts left the Skinner house in Windsor, as well as some property across the river in Cornish, to Betty. Fifty years later Van Wyck Brooks vividly remembered visiting with his best friend Max, and recalled "the little girls in pigtails, white dimity and sashes, playing croquet on the lawn in the golden afternoon". The children ran free - swam in Runnemede Pond, canoed on the Connecticut River, climbed Mt. Ascutney, ran through the woods in Paradise with their Evarts cousins, and caught turtles at Ohl’s Pond. You could catch turtles there from the bank, for they would poke their heads up through the weeds and you would grab just behind their head and get the turtle. One day we were doing this. Uncle Edward was looking sharply for a head. He saw one and grabbed, - and brought out a long slimey snake! You know a snake’s head is almost exactly like a turtles. Ned went on to Harvard in 1901. In October of his sophomore year, troubling news came from home. Father had developed a bad cold, and then a fever, and then pneumonia. On All Hallow’s Eve a telegram arrived; Ned rushed back from Harvard and Max was hurried back from St. Paul’s. Ned was 19, Max 17, Carlie 16, Molly 12, Fanny 10, and Louis 6, and at the age of 45, on October 30th 1902, Father was dead.

Stir up the Animals!

Betty took her boys on the train to Washington to visit their grandparents when Edward was about seven and Max was five. They made themselves comfortable in the parlor in the big house on K Street as the grown-ups socialized and the boys found their own special nooks where they could play their own special games. When the doorbell rang, the boys ran and hid under the table - A tall thin man came in with their Aunt Mary – The boys lay low, but couldn’t keep from giggling. They giggled some more, and Aunt Mary said, “Oh, those are Betty’s boys. Come out boys, this is General Sherman” The boys giggled some more, but didn’t move.

Then General Sherman, in a very deep voice, took command: “You boys come right out now or I’ll get some of my big guns and blow you out!”

The quickly terrified boys scampered out from under the table and nervously shook hands with the tall thin man with the white pin-feathery beard who marched through Georgia, and said “War is Hell!”

~

The summer of 1891 the Perkins family spent most of August in Windsor as usual. By then William M. Evarts had bought up five houses in a row on Main Street just north of the center of town, with open country, and a lake, and Paradise behind them. Evarts had given Betty one of the houses, and in this extended compound the Evarts cousins gathered en masse each summer.

Benjamin Harrison was President and he travelled through Vermont that August, stopping at Bennington on Battle Day, August 19th, to dedicate the new Bennington Monument, and then travelling on through Saratoga Springs, Castleton, Fairhaven, Middlebury, Burlington, St. Albans and St. Johnsbury, before arriving in Windsor on August 27th.

Senator Evarts and Charlie Beaman, along with the town dignitaries, met the President at the depot and escorted him to Runnemede Lodge for luncheon.

It is pleasant to be here today at the home of my esteemed friend and your fellow-townsman, the Hon. William M. Evarts. [Applause] I am glad that he has introduced into Vermont model farming [Laughter and applause], and has shown you what the income of a large city law practice can do in the fertilization of a farm. [Laughter and applause] He has assured me to-day that his farm yields a net income. I accept the statement of my host with absolute faith—and yet Mr. Evart's reputation as a bookkeeper is not the best in the world. [Laughter and applause] It is pleasant to see him and to be for a while in his genial presence, and to have this journey illuminated by a visit to his home. I hope he may dwell long with you in peace and honor, as he will always dwell in the honor and esteem of our whole people. [Applause]


Edward and Max lived in the world of boys and were not much interested in seeing the President, but when they went up to their grandfather’s house and saw the long lines of carriages drive in, with many stately men in black frock coats and silk hats, they realized something was going on. Billy Evarts, who was then about three and whose father was a clergyman said, “It looks like a funeral.”

Edward and Max were soon at the tables where the caterer’s men were working, and making the most of the opportunity. But eventually Aunt Mary, who had a different idea of their opportunities, and wanted to make the most of them, ran them down and herded them through a forest of legs and skirts, for a long distance, until the boys came into a little clearing where the President stood. He was a short man with a remarkably round chest, like a barrel, and a white beard, which rested upon it. He was surrounded by all sorts of great Republicans.

Aunt Mary said, “Mr. President, may I present my sister Betty’s children?” And the President laughed and shook their hands, and said in a remarkably deep, booming voice, “Well, I suppose you boys are good Republicans too.” There was silence all around the President, of course, when he was speaking, and there the boys stood. There was a long silence.

Their father was one of the original mugwumps who had jumped ship from the Republicans and supported Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884 rather than James G. Blaine (The Continental Liar From the State of Maine). Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, had ousted Cleveland from the presidency in 1888.

Then Edward spoke up loudly and defiantly: “No, we are not. We are Democrats!” There was a great burst of laughter, to which the President himself contributed.

Years later, Max thought it was a truly brave "magnificent thing" his brother had done and suggested as much to his mother. "Yes", she replied, "but it would have been different if you had been the one to do it. Edward always did like to stir up the animals."

Liberty

William M. Evarts tenure as Secretary of State came to an end when Rutherford B Hayes left office in 1880. President Garfield appointed Evarts as delegate to the International Monetary Conference getting underway in Paris. One of the volatile issues of the 1880s was whether currency should be backed by gold and silver, or by gold alone. Politicians from the west and the south joined in the call for the coinage of silver, while the bankers and industrialists of the northeast held firm for the gold standard. Then, as now, fair currency valuations and the availability of credit were essential to trade and the international conference was set to explore the feasibility of establishing fixed ratios at which gold and silver might be exchanged for currency.

As secretary, Evarts took along another bright young man, his daughter Elizabeth’s fiancé, Edward C. Perkins. Although young Ned came from an old Boston family and had graduated from the Harvard Law School, he had been born and raised in a villa in Florence and was just as much at ease in Europe with the diplomats of Germany, France, England, Italy and Spain as he was in Cambridge or New York.

While in Paris, Evarts and his young protégé must have met with Edouard de Laboulaye and Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and examined Bartholdi’s massive sculpture “The Goddess of Liberty” which was being constructed at the workshop of Gaget, Gauthier & Company. Evarts was leading the American arm of the Franco-American Union which was sponsoring the proposed French gift to the United States, and chaired the committee which was raising American funds for the statue’s pedestal and eventual erection on Bedloe’s Island.

When they returned from Europe young Perkins summered as usual at his Grandmother Bruen’s villa in Newport, and then clerked in the fall in a law office at Newport and over the winter at the office of Gray and Davenport in Manhattan. That spring he was admitted to the New York bar. He was a very personable young man; despite his dapper looks and continental upbringing he carried into his relations with his clients and brother lawyers a certain element which they considered “New England”. Evarts found him most charming and welcomed him warmly into his home in New York and Vermont.

Elizabeth Hoar Evarts married Edward Clifford Perkins in Windsor on August 2nd, 1882. They were both twenty-four years old. Betty was dignified and gracious and brought common sense to the marriage to compliment her groom’s aesthetic flair. She was said to always walk at the same pace, not so slowly as to seem to have no purpose, but not so fast as to be unladylike. The young couple however, made no delays in enjoying their marriage. My Grandfather, Edward Newton Perkins, was born nine months and two days after the wedding, on May 4th, 1883 in New York City. Max was born fifteen months later.

In New York the Franco-American Committee sold statuettes, photographs and pamphlets, and held benefit theatrical events, art exhibitions, auctions and prize fights to raise funds for the Liberty statue, but the New York Board of Education refused to allow school children to perform concerts in support, an appropriation in Congress failed and Grover Cleveland, then Governor of New York, vetoed a bill by the New York legislature to contribute $50,000.

~

The idea of building a colossal statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World” in New York Harbor seemed a harebrained scheme. There was an avalanche of criticism – architects declared the statue would blow over in the first storm. Some rich patrons were slow to accept the artistic merits of the statue, the New York public was apathetic and raising money outside of New York City was difficult. Eventually, Evarts enlisted Joseph Pulitzer of the World who successfully recruited school children to raise pennies for the project, and financing for the pedestal was completed by the summer of 1885.

~

In November, at the age of sixty-seven, William M. Evarts was finally elected to the United States Senate. He moved back to Washington while his daughter Betty’s young family stayed in the old house at the corner of Second Avenue and Fourteenth Streets in New York. He had to find a new house to rent in the capital – He sought out Henry Adams to see if his house was available, as he knew that the Adams and the Hays were building adjoining houses on Lafayette Park, but despite H.H. Richardson’s assurances, Adams didn’t think he would be in the new house by winter. Evarts wound up taking a house on the corner of Eighteenth and I Streets, and then moved to K Street in 1887.

Evarts thought that there were already too many laws on the books and regarded the Congress more as a debating society than a law-making body. He was the thinnest man in the Senate, weighing only a hundred and twenty-five pounds. His trousers were baggy at the knees, his coat hung loose, and his top hat seemed always crammed down to his ears. A Vermonter, seeing him for the first time declared “why he looks as though he boarded.” He may well have considered it - the Senatorship was a costly luxury – The five thousand dollar salary didn’t even cover the rent on his house and stable.

~

“For Henry Adams the past, history, was a means by which he attempted to unravel the riddles of man and the personal New England riddle of himself. For Henry James the past was part of man’s imagination; he saw it as a vast accumulation of creative awareness applicable to a palpable present. Adams was trussed up in the rigidities of ancestry and upbringing and was always struggling to be free. For James, life was an act of joyful and imaginative curiosity; for Adams it was a gloomy questioning of personal experience that he could not reconcile to the eternal flux of history. At the end the novelist was to speak of Adams’s “rich and ingenious mind,” his “great resources of contemplation, speculation, resignation.” “Henry is very sensible, though a trifle dry,” was James’s comment on the historian during this period. He added: “Clover has a touch of genius.” Leon Edel – Henry James, A Life

Evarts didn’t think much of Grover Cleveland and rarely visited the White House, but he was a frequent guest at the Little White House on Lafayette Square. Evarts loved Clover Adams’s keen intellect and her feminine scorn for the commonplace. He knew that she was distraught over the recent death of her father, and he was glad to oblige when she asked him to sit for her camera. Evarts’s eyes appear a bit rheumy in the starkly monochrome print, but he holds a steady piercing gaze, and stares out past the present day.

On December 6, 1885, Henry Adams found Clover lying on the rug before her bedroom fire. The room smelled of bitter almonds, an odor he recognized as the potassium cyanide Clover used in the darkroom, fixing the images she took from life. The newspaper the next evening reported that she had suddenly dropped dead from paralysis of the heart. Henry could rarely bring himself to write or speak of Clover again; the Five of Hearts would be no more.

~

William M. Evarts’s twelve children were mostly gone from the nest, starting their own families and careers. He was starting to have problems with his eyes, and was terribly concerned about his son Charlie, the farm manager, who had just suffered a paralyzing stroke. Even so, summer in Windsor provided a welcome respite from Washington and New York; by August the corn was shoulder high and the hay was being cut for the second time.

The young Perkins family came to spend a few weeks’ vacation. Edward, the older boy was four, and Max was about to turn three; Betty was seven months pregnant and her husband attentive to her needs as the grandsons toddled about by the pond. William M. and Helen Evarts were doting grandparents, and spent a few serene and happy days with the growing young family. They had plenty of room and invited their son-in law’s family to come visit. Charles and Fanny Perkins, the noted art critic and his wife, took the train up from Newport for a visit. They shared news of their families – the Perkins’s younger son Charlie had studied architecture with H.H. Richardson for a year and was now in Paris at The Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and beautiful Eleanor was being courted by a British naval officer. The Evarts’s sons Allen and Sherman were starting to practice law in New York, their daughter Hettie and her husband Charlie Beaman had bought the old “Blow-Me-Down” farm across the river in Cornish and were renting the old stage-coach inn “Blow-Me-Up” to the young sculptor Gus Saint-Gaudens.

On the afternoon of August 25 Wm. M. Evarts suggested that C.C. Perkins might accompany him on a carriage drive, along with an attractive young neighbor Jeannie Matthews. Charles was delighted at the opportunity and they set out to tour the valley; Perkins was full of enthusiasm at the beauty of the country, and looked forward to sketching the views of the river and Mt. Ascutney.

Suddenly when they were crossing a dyke-embankment the coachman reined in the horses, one of the bits broke, a bridle came off, and the horses ran out of control. The last thing Miss Matthews remembered was the smile Perkins gave her, as if to save her from alarm. Then the crash came; they were all thrown from the carriage - Miss Matthews was badly bruised, Evarts suffered a sprained ankle and a severe laceration on the scalp, and Charles Callahan Perkins was instantly killed.

~

On October 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty was set to be unveiled. Senator Evarts made an moving keynote speech, and at the end of a particularly eloquent passage he paused for effect and received a hearty round of applause. Bartholdi had gone up into the statue and held the rope with which he was to pull away the rain-darkened French flag which enshrouded Liberty's head, and unveil his masterpiece. A young boy gave him the "high sign"; the applause, he thought, marked the end of Evarts' oration; he pulled the rope.

The hundreds of steam craft in the harbour, discovering the giant face of Liberty, unanimously saluted her with their horns and whistles. The Senator was about to continue when the U.S.S. Tennessee, flagship of the squadron, fired a broadside. The band struck up "My Country, 'tis of Thee."

Senator Evarts went on to inaudibly finish his address in the din of the crowd, and President Cleveland - who possessed a keen sense of humor – appeared to give the speech which no one could hear his most grave and concentrated attention.

Pine Bank

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow fondly remembered Ned Perkins' wedding to Mary Spring. In the evening of June 10th, 1846, all the society of Boston drove out to the Perkins family country house Pine Bank on Jamaica Pond, where the Perkins gave a superb Fête Champêtre:

The evening, the blue lake, the boat with its white sail; the music, the dance on the greensward; the broad spreading tent, like a morning glory inverted, the well dressed crowd, the gleam of lamps through the gathering twilight, the young bride led by the white haired Mr. Otis, and then the fireworks, and as they drove away, the broad moon rose over the trees. . .

Ned inherited his mother’s loveliness and amiable manner. He was both attractive and gracious, and won friends among all sorts of men. Enthusiastic, even ardent, but perfectly simple, eager to enjoy, and as eager that others should enjoy what he did, he was a delightful companion.

He was the grandson of one of the richest men in America and had no reason or need to take up an “occupation”. Ned, a lover of books like his grandfather James, was a benefactor of the Athenaeum, for which he helped purchase part of George Washington's personal library. Longfellow shared his bibliophilia and invited Ned to join the Saturday Club. Without children of his own, he became a faithful, active trustee of St. Paul's School in 1862, where he was remembered for his constant punning and devising the school’s emblem of a pelican piercing its breast to feed its young with its own blood. He was a trustee of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and built an exquisite chapel in Northeast Harbor on his half-brother Bishop Doane’s property.

Those who knew him best thought the most of him. They appreciated his sweetness of disposition, his sense of honor, his purity, his desire to live uprightly and generously. Not blind to his defects, or dreaming that his nature had reached or closely approached maturity, his kindred and intimate friends thought him, and had every reason to think him, one of the most promising of young men.

After his marriage to Mary in 1848, Ned tore the original country house at Pine Bank down and built a year-round house. Pine Bank II was a substantial three-storied affair with mansard roof by a French architect, Jean Lemoulnier, which faced the Pond with a small terrace and balconied front entrance with fancy grillwork along the roofline.

Twenty years later, on the 10th of February, 1868 a housemaid kindled the fire in Mary's bedroom to be ready for her return from Boston. A chimney caught fire and burned furiously in the afternoon, but burned itself out.

When Mary and Edward returned early in the evening, they heard from the servants what had occurred, and carefully examined the rooms where the chimney passed and all seemed perfectly right, no smell or smoke or undue heat to be anywhere. The poor darlings being tired after a town day, took a little repose on the sofa, and Edward fell asleep. He was woken by a muffled explosion, and rushing to the window as he rushed upstairs, the glare of a large glow shone out from the burning roof and was reflected on the white lawn of snow.

The brick-work of the chimney must have cracked and opened during its burning, and burning embers must have dropped into the woodwork. Within 10 minutes all hope of saving the house had vanished. It was 7: 30 P. M. and the neighbors were all at their various homes and came so promptly, rich and poor, that all the furniture of second and lower stories, and all the books, pictures, the portraits of James and Sarah, bas-reliefs, even the chandeliers and several marble fire places were saved by their energy and kindness.

The night was very cold and very slippery. Later some rowdy men came and stole some things and many clothes, and as Pine Bank smoldered firemen emptied the superb wine cellar and consumed some excellent claret while tending the smoking ruins.

Ned started all over again on the still useable foundation. He had his cousin John Hubbard Sturgis design Pine Bank III, instructing him, "I want a house of moderate costs and dimensions". What he built was Gothic in red brick and imported English tan terracotta - a theme he had Sturgis repeat for the new Museum of Fine Arts built the following year at Copley Square (where the Copley Plaza Hotel now stands).

Frederick Law Olmstead had started work on Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system in 1878. Mary died at Pine Bank in 1882 at age 58. By then, commercial ice houses were taking over the pond, and a movement arose to protect the open space. In 1892, the City of Boston created Jamaica Park and tore down the houses on the pond. The only house left was Pine Bank, when it was decided to use it as a refectory for those visiting the park.

Ned removed the fireplace mantels and stained-glass windows, and went to live out his last years down the street with his niece Mrs. Cleveland in her house Nutwood, where, after three years of mental depression, he died in 1899.

“His wealth gave him the liberty to do as he pleased, but his nature drew him irresistibly to beauty and to service.”