When Dan Sickles was born, New York City was confined to the twenty-three square miles of Manhattan, and had fewer than 150,000 residents. When he died nearly a century later, the city had expanded to include Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, a metropolis of about three hundred square miles, with a population of around five million. In Dan’s youth, New York was the biggest, busiest city in America. When he died, it was well on its way to being the capital of the world.
For all that New York’s business leaders had initially feared and resisted General Sickles’s war, they had seized the opportunities it presented to amass capital, create new industries, and expand their markets, laying the foundation for the city’s booming growth in the decades that followed. On balance, the war so many New Yorkers had argued, voted, and rioted against was good for the city.
In the half century since the war ended, memories of New York’s highly controversial role in it had faded. The war itself was now more myth than memory. The gray-haired veterans who marched in Sickles’s funeral procession celebrated it as a glorious epoch of valor and honor, not a holocaust of hatred and slaughter. Lincoln too was passing into mythology, from the barely elected, widely reviled, and often questioned politician to the giant, godlike figure enshrined in the Lincoln Memorial, construction of which began in March 1914, two months before Sickles died.
In 1914, relations between black and white Americans were reaching a post–Civil War nadir. Jim Crow and segregation laws enforced an American apartheid. New forms of white nativism spread hatred of blacks, as well as Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. Lynchings of blacks reached their peak in this period. Minstrel music, which had once expressed a confusion of love and hate, had devolved in the 1890s into the immensely popular form called the “coon song,” which reduced blacks to a small set of repulsively racist signifiers.
Released the year after Sickles’s death, The Birth of a Nation, produced and directed by D. W. Griffith, son of a Confederate officer, presented a stunningly racist revisionist interpretation of the Civil War that cast the Ku Klux Klan, born during Reconstruction, as white knights who heroically defended the South and Southern white womanhood from evil blacks and carpetbaggers. It prompted a resurgence of Klan activity and popularity. Klansmen actually recruited in some theaters screening the movie. It would remain the most controversial American film of the twentieth century—and one of the largest-grossing.
To the young intellectuals, artists, and radicals who gathered in Mabel Dodge’s apartment, Dan Sickles was just the crusty old man who lived downstairs, as much a relic as the memorabilia that surrounded him. This new generation of New Yorkers was entirely focused on its own moment, on the new century and its promises and problems: the modern European art of Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, which they introduced to Americans in the 1913 Armory Show; modern theater, music, dance, and literature, all of which they were pioneering; the new psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, who visited New York in 1909; women’s suffrage, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom; socialism, anarchism, and organized labor; and the terrible deterioration in race relations.
Starting in July 1914, two months after Dan Sickles died, there was a new war as well. It came to be called the Great War, and opinions about it would be as divided as always in the heterogeneous metropolis.