Where the Buffalo Roam

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Tue, 02 Apr 2013 09:34:23 -0400

“The terrible rush of metropolitan life: those busy...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:07:53 -0400

“The terrible rush of metropolitan life: those busy New-Yorkers,” (1915). Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery.

In December 1866, Mark Twain left San Francisco for New York. Like generations of transplanted Westerners then and since, he found life in the big city a little disorienting. He described his feelings in a letter to the San Francisco-based Alta California.

There is something about this ceaseless buzz, and hurry, and bustle, that keeps a stranger in a state of unwholesome excitement all the time, and makes him restless and uneasy, and saps from him all capacity to enjoy anything or take a strong interest in any matter whatever - a something which impels him to try to do everything, and yet permits him to do nothing. He is a boy in a candy-shop - could choose quickly if there were but one kind of candy, but is hopelessly undetermined in the midst of a hundred kinds. A stranger feels unsatisfied, here, a good part of the time. He starts to a library; changes, and moves toward a theatre; changes again and thinks he will visit a friend; goes within a biscuit-toss of a picture-gallery, a billiard-room, a beer cellar and a circus, in succession, and finally drifts home and to bed, without having really done anything or gone anywhere. He don’t go anywhere because he can’t go everywhere, I suppose. This fidgety, feverish restlessness will drive a man crazy, after a while, or kill him. It kills a good many dozens now - by suicide. I have got to get out of it.

The paperback of my book, A Counterfeiter’s Paradise: The...

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:51:32 -0500

The paperback of my book, A Counterfeiter’s Paradise: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers, comes out today. You can buy it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, or your local bookstore.

Here’s an excerpt:

On a November night in 1876, two men passed in silence under the granite obelisk that rose a hundred feet above the tomb of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. Below the obelisk stood a statue of the slain president, the bronze silhouette glistening in the moonlight as the men moved swiftly by. Trying to make as little noise as possible, they entered Lincoln’s burial chamber and approached the marble sarcophagus. The men drew their crowbars and, straining against the handles, managed to push the large tablet that covered the coffin over the side. Inside was the cedar casket that held Lincoln’s corpse. Reaching into the sarcophagus, they began lifting the wooden box.

Suddenly a gunshot sounded outside. The men froze: the first shot was followed by another, then another, until the volley seemed to come from every direction. They dropped the casket and darted out of the tomb, fleeing the cemetery as bullets whistled past Lincoln’s final resting place.

The men were caught several days later. They confessed to trying to kidnap Lincoln’s body, which they planned to exchange for the freedom of their gang leader, a counterfeiter named Ben Boyd. The Secret Service, which had nabbed Boyd a year earlier, learned of the plan, and sent agents to lie in wait for the grave robbers. The officers sat watching the tomb for hours before the two men arrived. But before they could arrest the criminals, one of their pistols went off by accident. The others, thinking they were under attack, started firing wildly and the robbers escaped in a hail of bullets.

The irony of the scene was surely lost on the raiders of Lincoln’s tomb. The robbers hoped to exchange a counterfeiter’s freedom for the remains of a man who had done more than any other president in history to eliminate counterfeiting. Maybe they didn’t know enough history to make the connection; the Secret Service agents lying in the bushes nearby certainly did. Before the war, state-chartered banks across the country printed notes of various designs and denominations, which made counterfeiting fairly easy. Under Lincoln, the government began phasing out these banks and creating a uniform national currency. A few months after Lincoln’s death in 1865, the Secret Service was created to crack down on counterfeiters. Over the next several decades, the agency aggressively pursued its task, and by the end of the century, counterfeit cash amounted to just a slim fraction of the currency in circulation. The counterfeiters who flourished in the nation’s infancy and adolescence would almost entirely disappear, victims of an unprecedented centralization of federal authority. The golden age of counterfeiting was over.

A “continental” designed by Benjamin Franklin. In...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:23:19 -0500

A “continental” designed by Benjamin Franklin.

In 1775, the American Revolution began, and the Continental Congress started printing paper currency (“continentals”) to help fund it. They asked Benjamin Franklin to design the notes. Never one to squander a potential platform for his views, Franklin emblazoned the notes with emblems and mottos intended to instill republican virtues of hard work and self-reliance. The bill above says “Mind Your Business;” his six-dollar bill had the Latin word Perseverando (“Perseverance”), while his one-dollar bill read Depressa Resurgit (“Though Crushed, it Recovers”). As both elegantly executed works of art and cleverly disguised propaganda, Franklin’s continentals were the most visually interesting paper money that America had ever seen.

Ronald Reagan plays a Secret Service agent who busts a Mexican...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:00:05 -0500

Ronald Reagan plays a Secret Service agent who busts a Mexican counterfeiting ring in Code of the Secret Service (1939).

To promote my upcoming paperback, A Counterfeiter’s Paradise: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Early American Moneymakers, I thought I’d post a few excerpts from the book. So, here goes.

Long before the Secret Service protected Presidents, they protected American currency from counterfeiters. Founded in 1865, the agency was pretty controversial from the start: a notoriously rough bunch, with a loose interpretation of civil liberties and an aggressive (occasionally illegal) law enforcement approach. Their first chief was a man named William Patrick Wood: a fickle, despotic man with an infinite appetite for intrigue.

The challenges that Wood faced weren’t new. Moneymakers had been dodging the law for a long time, and the ways they did it hadn’t changed much. Law enforcement, in the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth, was mostly local, focused on policing individual communities, not dismantling broader criminal enterprises.

This wouldn’t have been a problem if Wood had been allowed to bypass local authorities in pursuing counterfeiters wanted for federal crimes. But since the Treasury, not Congress, created the Secret Service, its operatives didn’t have the power to make arrests or obtain search warrants. They had to collaborate with local police and federal marshals, who were not only fiercely territorial, but often had an interest in preserving the status quo. Many city cops cut lucrative deals with counterfeiters.

So Wood, always eager to exceed his mandate, came up with a way to circumvent the process. He would arrange for one of his men to buy a packet of counterfeit cash, and station other operatives nearby to watch the transaction. Then they would swoop in on the seller, making a citizen’s arrest on the basis of having observed a crime being committed. Other times Wood dispensed with this pretext altogether and seized suspects and evidence by force.

If the obstacles to catching counterfeiters weren’t new, neither were the techniques for doing it. Wood’s background in espionage helped: bringing down moneymaking rings required infiltrating them, the same way Union agents infiltrated the Confederacy during the Civil War. This meant using informants. Informants helped secure convictions by establishing intent: they could testify that the defendant knew the money was fake and intended to pass it. Informants also offered a way to gain access to the upper reaches of a counterfeiting operation. The authorities would arrest a passer, promise him money or immunity in exchange for cooperation, and then use him to burrow deeper into an organization, identifying distributors, manufacturers, and other principal players.

Wood absorbed these lessons thoroughly. He didn’t just recruit counterfeiters as informants, he hired them as full-time employees. For a wage of three dollars a day, they supplied information that led to arrests and convictions, and helped build cases against bigger targets further up the food chain. Wood didn’t shrink from colluding with unsavory characters; many of his own operatives came from the same milieu. Almost half of the original Secret Service team had criminal records. With little oversight from Wood, Secret Service operatives made illegal arrests, solicited bribes in exchange for protecting criminals, and sold bad bills they seized from counterfeiters.

Despite his men’s questionable methods, Wood delivered results. In its first year, the Secret Service arrested more than two hundred counterfeiters. His aggressive leadership laid the foundation for counterfeiting’s dramatic decline. With the Secret Service safeguarding the nation’s currency, counterfeiting lost its allure. The risks simply weren’t worth it. While a few continued forging on a small scale, the national counterfeiting industry crumbled under the force of the federal assault.

Group of “contrabands” in Virginia, May 1862....

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:00:05 -0400

Group of “contrabands” in Virginia, May 1862. Photograph by James F. Gibson.

In the opening months of the Civil War, three slaves escaped. This wasn’t anything new; in fact, it happened so often that in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law to make it easier for slaveholders to recover their “property.” The difference, as Adam Goodheart discusses in his 1861: The Civil War Awakening, was that now the North and South were at war. The escaped slaves showed up at the Union-held Fort Monroe in Virginia, and provided valuable intelligence about the Confederate fortifications they’d been building. When a Confederate officer arrived at Fort Monroe to demand the slaves be returned, the Union commander, Benjamin Franklin Butler, came up with a brilliant legal loophole that changed the course of the war. As he recalled in his memoir:

“What do you mean to do with those negroes?” [said Major Carey, the Confederate officer.]

“I intend to hold them,” said I.

“Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”

“I mean to take Virginia at her word, as declared in the ordinance of secession passed yesterday. I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”

“But you say we cannot secede,” he answered, “and so you cannot consistently detain the negroes.”

“But you say you have seceded, so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

“Contrabands” flocked to the Union lines by the thousands, serving as informants, scouts, laborers, and when the Army began recruiting blacks in 1863, soldiers. They helped pave the way for emancipation. Their status as property, as something that could be confiscated because they helped the enemy fight the war—like a cask of gunpowder—ironically helped make them free. The Civil War, especially for the North, was all about drift. What started as a conservative war—a war to preserve the Union as it existed—became a radical one, involving the abolition of slavery and the annihilation of the Southern way of life. “Contrabands” were the first crucial step.

Printing press in Brattleboro, Vermont, late nineteenth century....

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:45:39 -0400

Printing press in Brattleboro, Vermont, late nineteenth century. Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery.

Imagine an industry where seventy percent of your products lose money. You knit ten different types of wool socks. Seven don’t sell enough to cover the cost of the wool, while the other three are so popular they’re capable of keeping the whole enterprise afloat. This is the basic math of book publishing, a business model that’s evolved over the course of the last couple centuries and has alternately baffled, unnerved, and outraged the long list of hugely intelligent people who have given their lives to it. The “worst business in the world,” Doubleday’s cofounder Walter Hines Page called it, and even in flush times, the refrain is usually the same. It’s hard to think of another industry so perpetually prone to grumbling and self-hatred. As early as 1896, Publisher’s Weekly wondered whether the book business was “A Doomed Calling”—a question that, by the late nineteenth century, had already become a cliché.

Recently, the doomsaying has reached a fever pitch over the threat posed by e-books. Publishers fear that companies like Amazon will erode their margins by setting unreasonably low prices for digital books. Even more frightening is the possibility that the handful of bestselling authors who keep the industry solvent will start self-publishing through digital platforms, leaving publishers out in the cold. The apocalypse of American book publishing, after a hundred or so years of false alarms, seems finally to have arrived.

Read the rest at Lapham’s Quarterly’s Roundtable blog.

Ten thousand people pack into Madison Square Garden to...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:28:08 -0400

Ten thousand people pack into Madison Square Garden to hear William Jennings Bryan speak in 1906. Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery.

Is Occupy Wall Street the start of a new Populism for the new Gilded Age? Today’s Los Angeles Times has an interesting op-ed by Christopher Ketcham:

But perhaps the closest historical parallel is with the Populist movement of the 1890s, which, like Occupy Wall Street, was a broad, economics-driven revolt that targeted a predatory class of corporate capitalists — the robber barons of the Gilded Age.

The Populists drove the Progressive era of reform of the early 1900s. They sought to dismantle the centralized power of corporations in the economy and return economic liberty to individuals and small business. They envisioned a graduated income tax, the secret ballot, the regulation of banks. It remains to be seen if today’s 99 Percenters will be as successful at transforming the political discourse.

The Populists formed a political party with a specific platform — the People’s Party. They ran candidates who won office; they formed real-world banking and agricultural cooperatives to challenge the hegemony of corporate capitalism.

In Liberty Square, the protesters say that they have no intention of disbanding; that they’re preparing for a long, cold winter. But will their numbers increase, or will their resolve fizzle in the histrionics of street theater? Will they organize or merely proselytize? Most important, can they move enough of today’s silent majority — 99 Percenters all — off the sidelines and into the fray?

Walt Whitman and his (likely) lover Bill Duckett, in the days...

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:16:23 -0400

Walt Whitman and his (likely) lover Bill Duckett, in the days before Instagram.

The word “homosexual” didn’t appear in print until 1869, when a Hungarian writer named Karl-Maria Kertbeny wrote an anonymous pamphlet arguing against a proposed section of the Prussian legal code that would make homosexual acts illegal. Kertenby’s close friend had been gay, and he’d committed suicide after an extortionist threatened to expose him. Kertbeny wanted to make sure nothing like that ever happened again.

For most of its history, homosexuality had a language problem. Gay people lived in a world with no words for what they were, where homosexual love wasn’t only forbidden but invisible—enciphered in metaphor, perhaps, but never plainly discussed.

Enter Walt Whitman. In the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, he published his “Calamus” poems: a thinly veiled celebration of love between men.

We two boys together clinging,

One the other never leaving,

Whitman had his own word for homosexuality: “adhesiveness.” He borrowed the term from phrenology: a popular pseudoscience based on the idea that the size and shape of a person’s skull said something fundamental about their character. According to your cranial measurements, you could be classified as “adhesive”: which meant you were highly prone to same-sex friendships. As science, phrenology was bullshit—but, by linking sexuality to an unalterable fact of physiology, Whitman was making a radical point: he was born this way.

A pair of excellent signs from the Occupy Wall Street camp at...

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 11:56:05 -0400

A pair of excellent signs from the Occupy Wall Street camp at Liberty Park.

Sometimes the language of protest grows a little stale. Many oldies-but-goodies like “people over profits” have been around since the Sixties. So I was excited to find the two signs above at Occupy Wall Street. James Madison and Adam Smith—the real Adam Smith, not the one dreamt up by free-market fundamentalists—both have plenty of pithy quotes that make good fodder for protest signage. Here’s a few:

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. - James Madison

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged. - Adam Smith

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. - James Madison

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves. - Adam Smith

The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. - James Madison

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. - Adam Smith

Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant. - James Madison

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Sun, 02 Oct 2011 01:04:00 -0400

A young Iowan wearing the Wide Awake uniform in 1860. Courtesy...

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:58:53 -0400

A young Iowan wearing the Wide Awake uniform in 1860. Courtesy Floyd and Marion Rinhart Collection, The Ohio State University Libraries.

What’s the best way to create political change? The recent protests on Wall Street follow a pattern familiar from the Sixties: occupy an area, get brutalized by overzealous cops. But aren’t there more models for mass action? In 1860, on the eve of the election that triggered the Civil War, a group of young Republicans formed the “Wide Awakes.” They wore black capes and soldiers’ caps, and carried whale-oil torches that made their night marches appear especially dramatic. They built a national political network to support their candidate—Lincoln—and held social events, printed newspapers, engaged in activism. They considered themselves the vanguard of a new generation. In August 1860, William H. Seward told a gathering of Wide Awakes in Detroit:

The reason we didn’t get an honest President in 1856 was because the old men of the last generation were not Wide Awake, and the young men of this generation hadn’t got their eyes open. Now the old men are folding their arms and going to sleep, and the young men throughout the land are Wide Awake.

What I wouldn’t give to see a million Wide Awakes march down Wall Street.

“Treasure Map,” picturing San Francisco as an island...

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:00:05 -0400

“Treasure Map,” picturing San Francisco as an island with 49 jewels. From Rebecca Solnit’s tremendous Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.

Bret Harte was once America’s most popular writer. He grew up in California, and did his best writing in San Francisco. Later in life, he wrote a gorgeous essay, “Bohemian Days in San Francisco,” that’s a must-read for anyone who loves the Bay:

I could not think of San Francisco without the trade winds; I could not imagine its strange, incongruous, multigenerous procession marching to any other music. For six months they blew from the northwest, for six months from the southwest, with unvarying persistency. They were there every morning, glittering in the equally persistent sunlight, to chase the San Franciscan from his slumber; they were there at midday, to stir his pulses with their beat; they were there again at night, to hurry him through the bleak and flaring gas-lit streets to bed. They left their mark on every windward street or fence or gable, on the outlying sand dunes; they lashed the slow coasters home, and hurried them to sea again; they whipped the bay into turbulence on their way to Contra Costa, whose level shoreland oaks they had trimmed to windward as cleanly and sharply as with a pruning-shears. Untiring themselves, they allowed no laggards; they drove the San Franciscan from the wall against which he would have leaned, from the scant shade in which at noontide he might have rested. They turned his smallest fires into conflagrations, and kept him ever alert, watchful, and eager. In return, they scavenged his city and held it clean and wholesome; in summer they brought him the soft sea-fog for a few hours to soothe his abraded surfaces; in winter they brought the rains and dashed the whole coast-line with flowers, and the staring sky above it with soft, unwonted clouds. They were always there—strong, vigilant, relentless, material, unyielding, triumphant.

Edward Bellamy, visionary. When Edward Bellamy’s strange...

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:10:18 -0400

Edward Bellamy, visionary.

When Edward Bellamy’s strange sci-fi novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 appeared in 1888, it quickly became a runaway bestseller. It sold half a million copies in its first decade, putting it in the same league as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. Everyone from Mark Twain to William Jennings Bryan loved it. So how did a novel of far-out, time-traveling fantasy fiction become such an instant classic? Bellamy’s book had plenty of futuristic gadgets: credit cards, electronic broadcasting, electric light, and pneumatic tubes. But the real reason Looking Backward became so popular was because it offered an elegant solution to the crisis of late nineteenth century America: an era when the widening gap between rich and poor was threatening to destroy the country’s democracy. The utopian society imagined by Bellamy reconciles the loftiest ideals of the American Revolution with the realities of modern industrial society, a balancing act that, more than a century later, still eludes us.

I’ve written an essay about Bellamy for the new issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. It’s called “Magical Thinking” and you can read it on their website.

A 93-year-old Civil War veteran explains his medals to...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 10:00:05 -0400

A 93-year-old Civil War veteran explains his medals to Antoinette Falabella of Brooklyn at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair. Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery.

In January 1861, as the South began seceding from the Union, New York City Mayor Fernando Wood came up with an unusual idea. Declaring disunion “a fixed fact,” the Tammany Hall Democrat proposed that New York become an independent nation composed of three islands—Manhattan, Long Island, and Staten Island—called “Tri-Insula.” The city council approved the plan. “I would have New York a free city,” declared one supporter, “not a free city with respect to the liberty of the negro, but a free city in commerce and trade.” Independence would have concrete economic benefits, since it would enable New Yorkers to continue their lucrative trade in Southern cotton. The Free City of Tri-Insula might’ve become a reality, if it weren’t for the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, which triggered an outpouring of patriotism throughout the North and effectively killed Wood’s proposal. Later that year, he lost his re-election campaign, and Tri-Insula became another footnote in the long history of American secession.

A woman being measured for Women’s Measurements for...

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 10:00:05 -0400

A woman being measured for Women’s Measurements for Garment and Pattern Construction, a 1941 government report that laid the groundwork for women’s clothing sizes.

Where did women’s clothing sizes come from? In 1939, during the Great Depression, the Department of Agriculture teamed up with FDR’s Work Projects Administration to undertake an ambitious bit of research that had never been attempted before: a scientific survey of women’s body measurements. Fifteen thousand women participated. They were paid a fee—money spent on food, most likely, this being the Depression—to stand in their underwear behind a curtain while researchers took 57 different measurements of their bodies. The results, published in 1941 as Women’s Measurements for Garment and Pattern Construction, helped the garment industry develop the sizing system still in use today. In 2004, a new national survey—done with laser scanners, not rulers—found that American bodies had changed dramatically in the last sixty years. People had gotten thicker, especially around the middle. The population had become much more diverse. How do you manufacture ready-made clothes for such a wide spectrum of shapes and sizes? Maybe it’d be easier to return to the preindustrial model, when most people made their clothes at home or paid their tailor to make it for them.

A phrenological chart, mapping the different zones of the human...

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:04:28 -0400

A phrenological chart, mapping the different zones of the human brain. “Destructiveness” is near the ear; “Individuality” is right above the nose.

Why do we talk about foreheads when discussing culture? The word “highbrow” first appeared in the 1880s; “lowbrow” came into use right after the turn of the century. They came from phrenology, a nineteenth-century pseudoscience based on the (entirely false) idea that the shape of a person’s skull revealed something fundamental about their character. The creative, intellectual parts of the brain were located behind the forehead: thus Anglo-Saxons were superior to other, darker races because of their higher foreheads, or “brows.” Italians, Irishmen, Africans, Asians couldn’t create art on the level of Shakespeare or Milton because their brains simply weren’t built for it. They belonged to the “lowbrow,” on account of their lower foreheads.

Andy Warhol stars in a 1979 movie about rock musicians who...

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:00:05 -0400

Andy Warhol stars in a 1979 movie about rock musicians who moonlight as coke smugglers.

Cocaine, as Rick James said, is a hell of a drug. South Americans have been chewing coca leaves for centuries, but the drug’s modern history began in 1855, when a German scientist named Friedrich Gaedcke isolated the active ingredient. Cocaine became a popular medicine: doctors used it as an anesthetic, a stimulant, and an antidepressant. It also became popular for other, less clinical purposes. A French chemist made a wine called Vin Mariani by infusing Bordeaux with coca leaves: his customers included Queen Victoria, the Pope, and Ulysses S. Grant, who sipped it while writing his memoirs. Vin Mariani’s success inspired John Pemberton to create a nonalcoholic coca drink called Coca-Cola.

Cocaine has stimulated a lot of famous nervous systems over the years. The list includes Robert Louis Stevenson (who allegedly wrote the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in less than a week while coked out of his skull), Jules Verne, and Thomas Edison. Its best-known abuser might be Sigmund Freud, who published his first scientific paper on cocaine: “Über Coca” (1884). In June 1884, the 28-year-old doctor wrote his wife about the essay he planned to write.

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. In my last severe depression I took coca again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.

It’s tough being President. Obama shares a moment with...

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:00:05 -0400

It’s tough being President. Obama shares a moment with James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover.

In the annals of Presidential wimpiness, few chief executives rate as poorly as James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover. Buchanan fiddled while the Union disintegrated, setting the stage for the Civil War. Hoover’s muddled economic thinking helped deepen the Great Depression, creating more “Hoovervilles.” While neither President produced the crisis, both were too weak to confront it. The country had to wait for stronger leaders—Abraham Lincoln and FDR—to shepherd it through. Things had to get worse before they got better. Afterwards, once America was back on course, historians could rank the biggest winners and losers.

A cartoon of Ambrose Bierce by Jimmy Swinnerton. Courtesy of the...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:59:35 -0400

A cartoon of Ambrose Bierce by Jimmy Swinnerton.
Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery.

From The Devil’s Dictionary:

Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.