Serve past the navy’s mandatory retirement age. From 1900 until his death on January 16, 1917, Dewey served on the General Board of the Navy.
Further reading: Ivan Musicant, Empire by Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 1998); Ronald Spector, Admiral of the New Navy: The Life and Career of George Dewey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974).
—Timothy E. Vislocky
Dewey, George (1837-1917) admiral Admiral George Dewey is renowned for having defeated a Spanish fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Born in Vermont on December 26, 1837, Dewey entered the United States Naval Academy in 1854 and graduated in 1858. With the outbreak of the Civil War he was promoted to lieutenant and was the executive officer on the sidewheel steamer Mississippi in Admiral David Farragut’s fleet that captured New Orleans.
The post-Civil War period was a dark time for Dewey, since Congress allowed the navy’s ships to either rot or rust. Promotion was slow and opportunities for distinction were nonexistent. Dewey commanded steam sloops (a naval “sloop” was a vessel with guns on one deck) and served on shore in the Lighthouse Service and in 1895 as president of the Board of Inspection and Survey. In that capacity he supervised inspections of the navy’s new battleships. Dewey pined after greatness and feared that he would only be known as “George Dewey who entered the Navy at a certain date and retired as Rear Admiral at the age limit.”
But Dewey was saved from obscurity on October 21, 1897, by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, who selected him as the commander of the navy’s Asiatic Squadron. The strong possibility of war with Spain soon became a reality on April 20, 1898. Dewey had already been ordered to be ready for battle and was cabled a few days later to “use his utmost endeavor” to capture or destroy the Spanish fleet in the Philippine Islands. On May 1 at 5:22 A. M. Dewey spotted the Spanish fleet off Cavite in Manila Bay. When the American fleet was within 5,400 yards he coolly told the captain of his flagship Olympia “you may fire when you are ready, Gridley.” After shelling the hopelessly outgunned Spanish squadron for two hours, all 10 of its ships were sunk or disabled and 381 of her seamen were either dead or wounded. At 12:30 P. M. the battle ended when the Spanish hoisted white flags above the shore batteries at Cavite. For his success Dewey was promoted to rear admiral.
After the war Dewey was promoted to admiral and Congress passed special legislation that allowed him to
Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886) poet Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was a daughter of Edward Dickinson, a prominent attorney and scion of one of the most distinguished families in his community, and Emily Norcross, and was born on December 10, 1830, to a family of culture and privilege in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her formal education was limited to attendance at the Amherst Academy and a single year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary when she was 17. From the time she left school in 1848, she rarely left Amherst except for an occasional trip to Philadelphia or Boston between 1851 and 1855 and one to Washington when her father was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1854. From the age of 25 until her death she almost never went farther from the family home than her garden gate.
Finding the religious atmosphere of her community oppressive, Dickinson became increasingly reclusive as she grew older, rejecting at once the smug sanctimoniousness of the New England puritanism around her and the cultural pretensions of the academic life in her college town. She was recognized by family and friends as an original and talented woman, but she made few attempts to win public esteem for the brief, seemingly fragmentary poems she began to write around 1858, preferring to copy them out on pages she stitched together by hand and kept hidden in her bureau drawers.
The intensity of the lyrical expression in her elliptical and often gnomic verse has given rise to speculation about a star-crossed love that never came to light. She did love Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, but he loved neither her nor her poetry. Of the many poems she hopefully sent him, he published only a half dozen anonymously and compounded her anguish of rejected love by tinkering with them to achieve conventional rhyme and punctuation. Apparently these were the only poems by Dickinson published in her lifetime. Her social life dwindled to nothing, and her personal relationships were apparently limited to family, a few close friendships, and correspondence with literary celebrities of the time. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a frequent contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, generously praised her work and gave her advice, which she usually ignored, to help “clarify” her deliberately ambiguous verse. Her personal isolation increased during her 30s, and she earned a local reputation for eccentricity as she refused to meet visitors, wore nothing but white, and sent gifts of food to neighbors accompanied by cryptic messages.
After her death on May 15, 1886, nearly 1,800 of her brief, enigmatic lyrics were discovered in her bedroom, and her sister Lavinia induced a family friend to publish a selection of them in 1890. Critical response was mixed, but the work was generally dismissed as crude and obscure. Derided in the press for its “hit or miss grammar and appalling rhymes,” her lyrics on pain and death, love and loss, nature, and the quest for God nevertheless met with considerable popular success, and 11 editions sold out in the year of its publication. Two more collections and a selection of her letters appeared in 1894 and 1896 and were praised by William Dean Howells and other arbiters of literary taste. Admired by later poets of the modernist school for her innovative prosody, rebellious spirit, and emotional depth, Dickinson has had few imitators but has taken her place as one of the most influential poets in American literature.
Further reading: Richard B. Sewell, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Knopf, 2008).
—Dennis Wepman
World History
