Ohio History Journal


The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

 

VOLUME 64 ?? NUMBER 1 ?? JANUARY 1955

 

 

 

 

The Correspondence of George A. Myers

and James Ford Rhodes, 1910-1923

Edited by JOHN A. GARRATY*

 

In the eighteen eighties, when James Ford Rhodes was still a

Cleveland ironmaster, he was in the habit of being shaved and

having his formidable "Picadilly Weepers" trimmed by a young

Negro barber named George A. Myers. Later, after Rhodes had

retired from business to take up his distinguished career as a his-

torian, Myers continued to serve him, and gradually took on the

task of bringing Rhodes the books necessary for his work from the

library of the Case School of Applied Science. "Me and my partner

Jim are writing a history," Myers once told a mutual friend who

had inquired about an armload of books the barber was carrying.

"Jim is doing the light work and I am doing the heavy."

In 1891 Rhodes moved East to Cambridge and Boston. Myers, by

that time owner of the Hollenden Hotel Barber Shop, went on to

become a power in Negro Republican politics in Ohio. But

the two did not forget each other, and an occasional correspondence

(now lost) continued for some years. Every six months or so

Rhodes made a practice of sending his friend a selection of his old

ties, which Myers refurbished with a combination of "energine and

elbow grease" and put to his own use.

But beginning in 1910 and especially after 1912 the pace of their

correspondence quickened and obviously became more important to

both, for each began, quite independently, to save most of the other's

 

* John A. Garraty is associate professor of history at Michigan State College. He has

recently written a life of Henry Cabot Lodge, a contemporary of Rhodes.

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