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Who’s My Great-Great-Great-Great … Grand-Who?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

To the best of my knowledge, there are no murderers in the part of the family tree that leads directly to me. I have done my best to maintain this streak of successfully not murdering anyone, but if I am ever accused, I will not be the first person named Mark Aldrich to be charged with murder.

Almost every person with the last name Aldrich in the United States is descended from George Aldrich of Derbyshire, England, a tailor who was born in 1605 and emigrated to America in 1631, a decade after the Pilgrims. He is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather and probably the only one whose name I will know. George and his wife Katherine Seald Aldrich settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, had 10 children (one, a daughter who died in infancy, bore a classic Puritan name, “Experience”) moved to Braintree, and then moved to Mendon, Massachusetts, where his name is inscribed on a monument naming the town’s first settlers.

His second son, Joseph, is the great-great-great-great grandfather of Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich, whose daughter Abby, married John D. Rockefeller II and was the mother of several prominent Rockefellers. One son, Nelson Rockefeller, carried “Aldrich” as his middle name.

Another son, Jacob, had a dozen children, and those from his son, Joseph, were early settlers (in the 1740s) of Mattituck, on the east end of Long Island, and the Tafts, including President Taft.

One of Jacob’s other sons was named Peter, born in 1686, and he is my direct ancestor.

The sheer proliferation of Aldriches in America—when ten children have ten children, the family tree suddenly has a lot of branches on it—makes research a challenge. The genealogies have notes like, “Jacob 2 and Jacob 4 both had sons named Jacob who married wives named Sarah, or they are the same Jacob.” I exaggerated that a little.

Thus I do not know which line in upstate New York produced Mark Aldrich. The one in 1801. The Mark Aldrich from upstate New York born in 1968, that one is me, last I checked. But in 1801, Mark Aldrich was born near Lake George, New York, son of Artemus Aldrich. He is not my namesake. By the date of his death, September 1873, in Tuscon, Arizona …

Tuscon?

His death notice in the Arizona Citizen fills in some blanks: “Hon. Mark Aldrich died in Tucson, Sunday evening, of old age. … A very large number followed his remains to the grave. The Masonic Brotherhood took charge of his remains and buried him in accordance with the rights of the order.

Mark Aldrich. Not me.

Mark Aldrich. Not the me Mark Aldrich. The other one.

The deceased was seventy-one years of age. He was born in the state of New York, but subsequently settled at Warsaw, Hancock County, Illinois. We know but little of his early history, but are informed that he was three times a member of the Illinois Legislature, and served with Lincoln, Douglass, and other distinguished men who have since written their names high on the roll of fame.He came to California in 1849, and we believe engaged in mercantile pursuits. Of his history while there we are not informed.

He came to Arizona in the latter part of 1855, and has since resided in Tucson. He was the first American merchant in this town, the first postmaster, and the first alcalde.

“Mercantile pursuits” in California in 1849? Whatever might those have been? That was the year the Gold Rush started. The first alcalde of Tucson? “Alcalde” is spanish for “Mayor,” so he was the first American mayor of Tuscon, Arizona.

But the early history that the newspaper writer “knew little of?”

Hancock County, Illinois, in the 1830s was where Joseph Smith had led his followers in the Latter Day Saint Movement. Aldrich tried to sell Smith and his followers some land that he owned but Smith did not purchase. After renting the land, however, Aldrich turned into one of the worst landlords (or best, for Mormon history) and started changing the terms of the lease at whim. Smith and the early Mormons left and settled what became Nauvoo, Illinois; Smith named himself mayor and announced a run for President of the United States. Aldrich went bankrupt.

Nauvoo is in Hancock County, the same county that Aldrich’s land had been on. Now a vocal opponent of the incipient LDS movement, Aldrich was also one of those figures one still sees a lot of in small-town America: he seems to have always been in at least one elected or appointed position wherever he resided. He was a major in the Illinois State Militia, and in June of 1844, Joseph Smith had been arrested and was being held in the Carthage City Jail.

Smith was charged with ordering the destruction of the Nauvoo newspaper facilities because the paper, founded by former associates who turned against him, had printed stories accusing Smith of polygamy. The newspaper was declared a public nuisance and its press was destroyed, but so was its building. When a neighboring town issued a warrant for Smith’s arrest, he declared martial law in Nauvoo, which turned the issue into an Illinois issue and the governor ordered Smith put on trial.

Smith was held with his brother in the Carthage City Jail and on June 27, 1844, a mob of hundreds stormed the jail. The two prisoners were killed. Someone had to have let the mob in. Someone had to have directed the mob. Aldrich, a militia major with men under his command who took part in the mob, was charged with four other men. A trial was conducted and an all-non-Mormon jury acquitted the five. Aldrich ran for sheriff of Hancock County the very next year.

When I lived in Iowa, near Nauvoo, a friend invited me to visit Nauvoo. She did not know this history and I decided against risking matters.

Within a decade, Aldrich was an early settler of Tuscon and its first American mayor. And his body is, to this day, buried under the streets of Tuscon. The cemetery in which he was interred was closed by 1890 as the city grew into city-hood and paved things. Most remains were moved to other locations in subsequent decades but no record exists that states that any Aldrich relative claimed the body of the former mayor and accused-but-acquitted murderer of the founder of the Mormon Church.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 19 asks, “We all have that one eccentric relative who always says and does the strangest things. In your family, who’s that person, and what is it that earned him/her that reputation?”

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Good Old Days Ahead, Right Behind You

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In 1926, Henry Watson Fowler published “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” a book that has remained in print ever since. (The first edition and the second edition use Fowler’s sentences; the third edition, which was published in 1996, is a substantial rewriting of the classic and uses the Fowler name as a form of brand.) Fowler’s book is not a dictionary of definitions, like Johnson’s or Webster’s, it is a usage dictionary, an instructional manual for better using this beautiful tool we have devised called the English language.

Its entries give instructions on pronunciation, offer the pros and cons of employing a variety of idiomatic expressions, and argue again and again for simplicity in expression. Many style guides have followed—the MLA, the AP, the Chicago Manual—and each one is more useful in answering day-to-day questions about one’s writing than is Fowler but none is as entertaining as his. His fight was a fight against cliché, obfuscation, and empty rhetoric.

He fought against pointless rules. One might think from the description of his work that he is the reason for the commonplace rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. The opposite is true. In a two-page essay on the topic (two pages!), titled, “Preposition at end,” he writes:

It was once a cherished superstition that prepositions must be kept true to their name and placed before the word they govern in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late (‘They are the fittest timber to make great politics of,” said Bacon; and ‘What are you hitting me for?’ says the modern schoolboy). ‘A sentence ending in a preposition is an inelegant sentence’ represents what used to be a very general belief and it is not yet dead. […] The fact is that the remarkable freedom enjoyed by English in putting its prepositions late and omitting its relatives is an important element in the flexibility of the language.

Fowler then gives many examples (two pages!) of worse blunders made by pointlessly hewing to this nonexistent “prepositions go here” rule. And the way he uses his examples, for instance his pairing of the Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon with generic “modern schoolboy,” displays his desire to keep a light hand on one’s writing.

His entry on the use of the word “literally” anticipates the world in which we now live, a world in which that word means almost nothing in the way we use it:

We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression, ‘Not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking,’ we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate. Such false coin makes honest traffic in words impossible. (Emphasis mine.)

The “literally” problem has literally bedeviled anyone who cares about precision in language for almost a century.

Fowler wanted writers to avoid using the obscure metaphor merely because it is commonly employed. Hence his entry on the idiomatic expression, “salad days”:

Salad days (one’s raw youth) is one of the phrases whose existence depends on single passages (see Antony and Cleopatra, ‘My salad days when I was green in judgement’). Whether the point is that youth, like salad, is raw, or that salad is highly flavoured and youth loves high flavours, or that innocent herbs are youth’s food as milk is babes’ and meat is men’s, few of those who use the phrase could perhaps tell us; if so, it is fitter for parrots’ than for human speech.

Avoid the empty turn of phrase unless one is making a point of the phrase’s emptiness.

Fowler died on Christmas Day 1933, at the age of 75. He had recently completed his work on the first edition of the “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,” a two-volume version of the full, twenty-volume, 20,000-page, Oxford English Dictionary. In 1928, a few years before his death, Oxford offered to pay the wages of a servant to help him speed the work along (dictionaries always take longer to put together than first supposed) and he refused the help in a memorable letter. At age 68, he described his day thus:

My half-hour from 7:00 to 7:30 this morning was spent in (1) a two-mile run along the road, (2) a swim in my next-door neighbor’s pond—exactly as some 48 years ago I used to run round the Parks and cool myself in Parson’s Pleasure (an Oxford locale). That I am still in condition for such freaks I attribute to having had for nearly 30 years no servants to reduce me to a sedentary and all-literary existence. And now you seem to say: Let us give you a servant, and the means of slow suicide and quick lexicography. Not if I know it: I must go my slow way.

Help meant a slow suicide but a faster dictionary. Fowler needed no cliché to tell Oxford that he was living in his “salad days” in the here and right-now. If the friend I quoted above had not overlapped with H.W. Fowler on this planet for a year or so, and if reincarnation was an actuality … well, it would appear they were cut from a similar cloth.

For most of us—not all of us, certainly, because sadness and horror and terror are ever-present and ever-possible, but for most of us—these are the good old days. And “tomorrow is just your future yesterday,” as one former late-night host once sang it.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 18 asks, “Is there a period in your own personal life that you think of as the good old days? Tell us a story about those innocent and/or exciting times (or lack thereof).”

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‘The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Alfred Hitchcock is credited with coining the term “MacGuffin,” but not the thing itself, which has been around since people started telling stories to each other. In plot terms, but not theological ones, the apple in Genesis is a MacGuffin.

Neither of the two most famous examples of a MacGuffin in film history appear in Hitchcock films, but he used the device quite frequently in his many movies (he directed more than 50 films from the 1920s through the ’70s).

In 1962, his fellow film director François Truffaut interviewed Hitchcock. The interviews were recorded and transcribed into a book, “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” published in 1967, and the subject came up:

You may be wondering where the term [MacGuffin] originated. It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?” And the other answers, “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin”. The first one asks, “What’s a MacGuffin?” “Well,” the other man says, “it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.” The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,” and the other one answers, “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!” So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

One wonders where Hitchcock had ever heard this story or if he merely invented it, since “two strangers meet on a train” could serve as a Movie Guide description for several of his plots. Hitchcock loved floating plot ideas and ideas of plots inside plots in interviews and pursued several dozen into film immortality. One has always stayed with me and I think I read it in the “Hitchcock/Truffaut” interview.

As I recall the scene he described, his lead character, played Cary Grant or James Stewart (of course) would meet with a man who runs a factory, an automated car assembly line. In a single-camera shot, the two men would walk along the line, discussing whatever it is that Grant or Stewart is searching for, and alongside them for the whole chat would be a car as it is assembled from frame to finished vehicle. The audience is supposed to barely notice the car or that the two men have been talking alongside only one car as it has acquired an engine, a roof, doors, mirrors. At the end of the line, Cary Grant happens to open the driver’s door and a body falls out. We’ve seen the same car all the way through, from when there was no place to hide a body all the way to completion, and … I think Hitchcock dismissed it in the interview with Truffaut as being an awful lot of work with too distracting a payoff.

In “Pulp Fiction,” what is inside Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase? We never find out. Perhaps it is a “royale with cheese.” Everything in that movie has to do with getting, delivering, or protecting that case. What is Charles Foster Kane’s “Rosebud” in “Citizen Kane”? In one movie, the question is answered and in the other it is not, and one could argue that neither movie would be fundamentally different if this statement was reversed. Remember how “Star Wars” starts to unfold, what it is “about”: getting R2-D2 to Obi-Wan Kenobi because there is a message from Princess Leia hidden inside.

Complications ensue.

A MacGuffin is the reason or, really, excuse, for all the characters to be in the movie (even if one of the characters is a MacGuffin him or herself) and for all of or most of the action in the plot, but it is not what the movie is about. The “holy grail” is literally not the “Holy Grail.” In “The Maltese Falcon,” Mary Astor’s character Brigid O’Shaughnessy asks Sam Spade if he would (be doing what he is about to do) if (money had possibly been acquired). (How was that for avoiding a spoiler?)

The falcon, jewel-encrusted treasure of centuries past, or not, is an innocent bystander for the entire movie. It sure looks like it is worth multiple lives, double- and triple-cheating, the sacrifice of love both real and imagined. As Det. Polhaus says in the second-to-last line, it sure is “heavy. What is it?” Sam Spade replies, and this is no spoiler even though it is the final line, “The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.”

In any movie, if there is a box or a room that has remained locked or hidden in plain sight, the movie really is about the drive to unlock it or the search for a key and what a character might be willing to endure to acquire that key. The reward is in the journey and whatever it is you think the key is unlocking, it isn’t. In the broadest sense, having a story line at all is something of a MacGuffin.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 17 asks, “You’ve been given a key that can open one building, room, locker, or box to which you don’t normally have access. How do you use it, and why?”

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