The Trouble with Tom (32 page)

Eternity in a Box

Accounts of the Thirteen Club, an idea surely due for a revival, can be found in abundance in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
in the late 1890s; this particular celebration is described in articles that ran on February 6 and 14, 1898.

For more on the fate of phrenology and Orson Fowler, see the histories cited in "The Talking Heads" chapter; the growing disenchantment of both Foote Senior and Junior with it can be found in speeches reported by the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
for May 11 and 23, 1896. Phrenology really was something of an intellectual tragedy. In retrospect, its basic set of propositions was surprisingly accurate: that different cognitive functions are localized to specific parts of the brain; that the brain has a plasticity that allows it to develop or atrophy at any age, but disproportionately and critically so in one's youth; and that cognition itself is a physical phenomenon. These are now the most fundamental assumptions of neurology. The observation of localized brain function underlies
MRI
scan research; neural plasticity is the raison detre of Head Start, special education, and stroke therapies alike; and the chemical basis of cognition has built a multibillion-dollar industry of antidepressants to pull you up, antipsychotics to hold you down, and sedatives to knock you sideways. Phrenology's error was believing these effects could be observed at the level of gross anatomy. Without a serious commitment to scientific methodology, this error grew until phrenology truly became the sham its opponents always said it was.

One of the only newspaper accounts of the 1905 ceremony with Thomas Paine's brain is in the
New York Times
for October 15, 1905. A number of details about Thomas Paine's memorial can also be found in the
News Letter
of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, and the commemorative booklet
Rededication
of the Paine Monument
(1909).
Rededication
contains the 1905 ceremony's speeches by Foote and other locals, some of whom were rather less eloquent than others; one Minuteman reenactor began his remarks with "I find myself somewhat in the position of an old darkey down in Virginia . . ."

Photographs of the preserved cottage, as well as a timeline of the Paine monument, can be found in the
Souvenir Program: Thomas Paine Centennial Celebration
(1909) and the
Memorial
Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of the Death of Thomas
Paine
(1909); both were published by E. B. Foote Jr. and the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, and can be found at the New York Public Library. Accounts of the cottage's near-destruction are in
Leslie's Illustrated Weekly
for January 2, 1908, and the
New York Times
for May 31, 1908, as well as the TPHA booklet
Thomas Paine and New Rochelle,
NY
(1951) and the Huguenot and Historical Association of New Rochelle's booklet
Thomas Paine Cottage and Grounds
(1931).

Aside from Paine's body, his grave itself became something of a missing relic. In September 1909,
South Place Magazine
ran 'Thomas Paine's Gravestone," which traces a large fragment of the shattered headstone with Cobbett to Liverpool. A reminiscence by William Lowes Rushton, son of the 1820s Liverpool radical Edward Rushton, includes this interesting detail about what else was in Cobbett's luggage: "I understand the gravestone was broken into fragments soon after it was laid down, and long before Cobbett visited America. I do not know how this fragment came into Cobbett's possession, but according to my remembrance of what my father said on the subject, Cobbett brought it to Liverpool with Tom Paine's bones, which he had disinterred, and gave it to my father. This fragment I remember seeing in my father's library when I was a child, and it is now in my possession."

In addition to the sources mentioned in the "Personal Effects" chapter, information on Moncure Conway's final days in Paris can be found in Edward Walker's
A
Sketch and An Appreciation
of
Moncure Daniel Conway, Freethinker and Humanitarian
(1908) and John Robertson's
The Life Pilgrimage of Moncure Daniel
Conway
(1914). But perhaps the most charming eulogy on the man came right after his death from his old friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who by now was famous as Emily Dickinson's "preceptor." Recalling trips to the theater with Conway, he wrote: "He always chose seats by preference in the very highest gallery, where rough men sat with their hats on, eating sandwiches, among their wives and daughters, and affording, as he always maintained, the best source of appreciation for good acting."

An account of the death and burial of E. B. Foote Sr. can be found in
In Memory of Edward Bliss Foote, M.D.
(1907), a compilation of addresses and newspaper clippings related to his funeral. For E. B. Foote Jr.'s final days, see the posthumous collection
Edward Bond Foote: Biographical Notes and Appreciatives
(1913). One anecdote involves the senior Foote's seventieth birthday, when the old doctor was given a wonderful present by Junior—a collection of fifty newfangled phonograph wax cylinders, each bearing birthday messages from across the country. He set one into his phonograph and out crackled the voice of his old friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton—a
very
old friend, as she was now eighty-four—and the doctor listened appreciatively as her voice spun from the revolving cylinder:

I am glad to tell you that there is no old age but old age of the heart,
and if you wish to preserve what health and youth you still have,
I
will give you three directions: First, sleep all you possibly can. Next, do
not worry; whatever you can prevent that's wrong, do so; what you
can not, accept. One more: Interest yourself crackle, crackle, crackle
in some great question of reform.

And indeed he did—they all did.