Now I Know More (8 page)

In 1947, the inhabitants of a three-block residential area in Ohio decided to incorporate as a municipality called the village of New Rome. By the year 2000, the village had grown—but only slightly. It encompassed two-hundredths of a square mile, and per the census that year was home to sixty people. Nevertheless, fourteen of the sixty were police officers who patrolled the area and its one main road—and the village leaders apparently wanted even more officers. The reason? The New Rome speed trap, a notorious feature of Ohio travel, and a lucrative one for the tiny village.

West Broad Street, a relatively busy roadway, runs through the area. Decades ago, it was the main road coming out of the state capital of Columbus, five or ten miles away, before I-70 was built in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Nevertheless, it still has a steady flow of traffic—one that New Rome treated like a honey pot. The posted speed limit on West Broad is forty-five miles per hour, but until 2003, the tiny section that ran through New Rome had a lower speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour. The well-staffed New Rome police force watched the area nearly around the clock with ticket books at the ready, waiting for the inevitable speeding violations caused by the sudden drop-off.

The program was quite lucrative. In an average year, New Rome brought in $400,000 in gross revenue through traffic tickets. But the volume of the tickets issued wasn't the only reason why the village made so much money—zealous (overzealous, likely) enforcement was also a key element. Almost all the ticketed drivers lived outside of New Rome, but that didn't stop the small village from taking extreme measures to enforce the tickets. As
Car and Driver
reported, “Once stopped, drivers [were] routinely asked where they work. Fail to pay the fine on time, and a New Rome cop or two may appear at your work place the day after, handcuff you in front of the boss, and haul you off for payment discussions.”

A $90 fine for speeding wasn't the only thing drivers were typically faced with. If you were pulled over in New Rome, there was a good chance that you'd find yourself on the wrong end of a laundry list of fines. Have tinted windows? Tack on another $105. No front license plate? $55 more. Make an unsafe lane change—and you can imagine how subjective that is—another $90. In total, you could be ticketed for more than a dozen various violations as officers conveniently found ways to run up the tab.

The good news for travelers along this route? The speed traps are gone. For that matter, so is the entire village of New Rome—but not because of the abusive traffic controls. In 1979, New Rome held an election for village council and never did so after that. The council members—almost all members of the same family—just kept re-appointing one another to vacant seats, arguing that the others in the municipality weren't interested in running. Further, the state of Ohio noted, the village didn't actually provide many (if any) meaningful services to the public. Most were provided at the township, county, or state level. Based on these factors, the state forcibly dissolved the village (over the protests of many of New Rome's residents) and mandated that it be absorbed into the surrounding township.

Ask any college football fan about rivalries, and the long-standing friendly (okay, not so friendly) “hatred” between Michigan and Ohio State will undeniably make their list. The annual matchup, once ranked by ESPN as the top rivalry in sports, dates back to 1897 with more than 100 gridiron battles since.

But Michigan and Ohio once went to war—real war, with militias, and perhaps even bayonets and horses.

Ohio became a state in 1803. Two years later, the U.S. government formed the Michigan Territory, a pre-statehood area encompassing the modern states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and parts of North and South Dakota. However, map-making at the time wasn't all that great. Maps were often best guesses as to the true geography and topography of the area, and when reality struck in late 1834 or early 1835, it turned out to be different from what the maps suggested. A nearly 500-square-mile strip of land between Michigan and Ohio, dubbed the “Toledo Strip” after the major city in the area, was suddenly in dispute. Both sides wanted the land, particularly because it was clear that the location of Toledo was perfect for a port city, and therefore, an economic boon awaited the ultimate owner.

In April 1835, President Andrew Jackson tried to stave off the conflict. Unfortunately, he, too, was conflicted. He asked his attorney general to investigate whether Michigan's or Ohio's claim was legally correct, but quickly realized that Ohio—like now—was a “swing state” in the presidential election. He decided that it'd be best to appease Ohioans and give them the Strip, hoping to entice them to vote for the Democratic candidate in the 1836 election. However, Jackson's attorney general reported back with contrary findings, concluding that Michigan's claim would carry the day. Jackson decided to try and pull an end-around, asking to re-survey the line (with the expectation that the new survey would put the Strip in Ohio). Michigan, flatly, said no.

Unable to settle the issue amicably, the two sides raised militias and occupied the area—the Michigan forces on one side of a key river, and Ohio's on the other. Thankfully, few shots were fired, most of them warning shots aimed at the sky. The only bloodshed in the entire months-long skirmish occurred on July 15, 1835, when Joseph Wood, a Michigan sheriff, went into Toledo to arrest Benjamin Stickney, an Ohioan major, for trespassing on Michigan soil. One of Stickney's sons (named Two—really) stabbed Wood with a penknife; the wound was not fatal.

With hostilities boiling and on the brink of eruption, Jackson tried again to resolve the conflict. In June 1836, he signed an act that would allow the Michigan territory to become a state, under the condition that it ceded any claim to the Toledo Strip to Ohio. (As part of the deal, Michigan would get most of what is now known as the Upper Peninsula.) Michigan again refused, and it seemed an escalation of the war was likely. Ohio had authorized $300,000 to raise its militia; Michigan one-upped Ohio by authorizing $315,000 for similar efforts.

This last action ended the “war”—not because Michigan now had the better militia, but because it had more debt. At the close of 1836 the Michigan territory was teetering on bankruptcy and, not being a state, was not eligible for a 5 percent commission on the sale of federal lands, which would have netted Michigan roughly half a million dollars. The federal government was running a budgetary surplus at the time, and $400,000 was to be distributed to the states—but Michigan wasn't one yet.

On December 14, 1836, Michigan accepted Jackson's terms. In January, it became the twenty-sixth state in the Union. A month earlier, in the presidential election, Martin Van Buren, a Democrat (like Andrew Jackson), won—but not because of Andrew Jackson's efforts in Ohio. Ohio's electoral delegates voted for William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate.

When many people think of New York City, they focus on the borough of Manhattan, the island that features the Empire State Building, Central Park, Grand Central Terminal, and other things nonresidents know about. There are four other boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx—but to get from any of those to Manhattan, you have to take a bridge or tunnel, with the rare exception of a neighborhood called Marble Hill. It's not part of Manhattan Island—rather, it is connected to the Bronx. But if you're voting or called for jury duty, you do so as a Manhattan resident.

Its history gives us a brief glimpse into America's early attitude toward Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Manhattan is separated from the Bronx by the Harlem River, which connects the Hudson River to the East River. In 1890, a section of the Harlem River that was a few thousand yards from the Hudson was very narrow, and seafaring vessels had difficulty in navigating it. The Army Corps of Engineers decided to reroute the Harlem River, creating a wider passageway south. In doing so, it cut off a piece of Manhattan—Marble Hill—turning it into an island. When the county of the Bronx was created by the state on January 1, 1914, Marble Hill—still an island—was officially included as part of Manhattan. Unfortunately for mapmakers everywhere, the old path of the Harlem River fell into disuse and was filled in sometime during that same year. Marble Hill was, from that point on, a neighborhood in Manhattan that was paradoxically attached to the Bronx but not to Manhattan itself.

For more than two decades, no one seemed bothered by this. However, in 1939, Bronx borough president James F. Lyons tried to capitalize on this curiosity and turn it into some publicity for himself. He went to the neighborhood—“unarmed and escorted only by his chauffeur,” in the words of the
New York Times
—and climbed to the summit of a rocky hill, where he planted the flag of Bronx County. Symbolically, he was claiming the neighborhood for his borough. While residents of Marble Hill jeered him, Lyons was unperturbed, comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln and noting that some disliked Honest Abe for freeing the slaves.

The news media ate it up, just as Lyons had hoped. The
Times
article featured a picture of him, grinning widely, holding the Bronx County flag on a rock atop the hill, his chauffeur-assistant standing stoically next to him. Everyone seemed to appreciate the joke, but the
Times
, for some reason, did not carry Lyons's self-comparison to Abe Lincoln. Instead, they saw a different person in Lyons, one who doesn't seem so funny to modern ears: Adolf Hitler.