Reference to a photograph of Tumblety in the National Police Gazette

[Chris Scott]

I have transcribed an article about Tumblety today (Boston Daily Globe 27 Nov 1888) which makes reference to an article in the "National Police Gazette" about Tumblety which included a photograph of him wearing a "United States army fatigue cap."
The section refers to this being published during "the war" which I take to mean the American Civil War.
This passage reads:

Next he was heard of in St John, when for a while his name disappeared from print. It next reappeared in the National Police Gazette of New York, which published during the war his photograph, showing him to be a good looking man with a moustache, wearing on his head a United States army fatigue cap, with a story about him, headed: "How an Irishman Became an Indian Herb Doctor."

I am posting the section in context below.
Some questions:
1) What is a "fatigue cap"?
2) Have any copies of the National Police Gazette survived?
3) Has this photo ever been traced?

Any help gratefully received?

[Archaic]

Union Army Fatigue Cap

Hi Chris, nice find!

I've attached a photo of a replica American Civil War Union Army fatigue cap. It's a simple brimmed cap also called a "kepi". The French Army started using them and they were practical so they caught on.

I think your article is more evidence that Tumblety was a poser... But I guess it would have been much easier to walk around in a fatigue cap than a spiked helmet. For one thing you wouldn't suffer personal injury if you accidentally sat on your hat.

My friend Hunter will have a Confederate one because he's a Civil War Re-enactor.

Best regards,
Archaic

[Archaic]

The National Police Gazette, 1888

Chris, here's the cover of 'The National Police Gazette' from August 1888.

Love the title of the girlie illustration "A Gay Queen of the Waves". She's surfing!

Seriously, she is! It says she's from the Sandwich Islands... hmm, good excuse to show some leg.

Best regards,
Archaic

[Archaic]

Book About 'The National Police Gazette' & Its Influence

(Sorry for the back-to-back posts, it timed out.)

There's actually a book available at Amazon.com on The National Police Gazette.
Its title is "The National Police Gazette and the Making of the Modern American Man, 1879 to 1906" by Guy Reel.

Amazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/National-Polic.../dp/140397165X

It looks like an interesting read and the reviews are informative so I pasted them below.

(from Amazon)
Review
"A fine addition to the growing literature on gender and popular culture. By celebrating the titillating boundary crossing of men and women behaving badly, the Gazette served to define the boundaries of acceptability in fin de siècle America. Reel makes that celebration, and those boundaries, more than mere abstractions or cultural tropes."--Michael Kimmel, SUNY-Stony Brook, and author of Manhood in America

"The late 19th and early 20th centuries have been described as the beginning of a cult of masculinity, but relatively little has been written on how men actually learned new codes of sexuality, competitive sports, and what it meant to be a man, at least in the ideal sense. Guy Reel tells here the compelling story of the weekly paper that taught generations of men to sexually objectify women and worship muscular and/or competitive men, no matter what sport they won at (oyster eating contests?). It is exceptionally well-written, and an eye opening look at the roots of how today’s men came to their beliefs and values. The National Police Gazette played an important role in the s******s at the saloons and barber shops of America, with its celebration of aggressive crime, cheesecake, and barefist boxing, and Reel lays out its key place in the development of an American hegemonic masculinity."--Martin D. Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Research Scholar at Ohio University


Product Description
"This book analyzes the National Police Gazette, the racy New York City tabloid that gained an audience among men and boys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking at how images of sex, crime, and sports reflected and shaped masculinities during this watershed era, this book amounts to a story of what it meant to be an American man at the beginning of the American Century. "

Apparently the National Police Gazette was founded in 1845. Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Archaic

[Chris]

2) Have any copies of the National Police Gazette survived?

It's held on microfilm by New York Public Library:

http://tinyurl.com/2wfzf2s

[Chris Scott]

Hi guys
many thanks for the quick responses and the info
Archaic - very many thanks for the info you posted
Chris - many thanks - it is frustrating cos it looks like the info is also available online but you have to be a library card holder from NY public library.

http://wu9fb9wh4a.search.serialssolutions.com/?V=1.0&L=WU9FB9WH4A&S=JCs&C=NATIPOLGAN&T=marc

Also I don't know the exact date or even the year - only that it was "during the war"
So that would be some time between 1861 and 1865 if memory serves right
However, there may be another photo of Tumblety sitting there waiting to be found...... Any library members out there???

Chris

[mklhawley]

Hi Chris and Archaic,

I don’t believe people realize the implications of this particular article you’ve discovered with respect to Francis Tumblety being a suspect. He clearly led a double life (a public one and a private one) and displayed classic aggressive narcissistic traits as demonstrated on other threads. To me, the only convincing argument against Dr. T being a viable suspect was a lack of history of violence. This was even Dr T’s counter-argument when interviewed in the beginning of 1889. If these accusations in this article were true, Dr T not only had the capacity to have others harmed, he ruthlessly acted upon them. In his usual elusive methods, he had others to the dirty work to allow for plausible deniability. Of course, he again ran out of town just after trouble stirred.

Nice find Chris!

Mike

[Chris Scott]

The url I posted in my last post lets a non member do a search but not, of course, access the article.
Frustratingly this returned a positive result for the title quoted in the article I posted in my first post:

Search criteria:
Refine or alter criteria
Refine or alter criteria
Article: How an Irishman Became an Indian Herb Doctor
Journal: National police gazette (New York, N.Y.)
ISSN: 0047-9039


Refine or alter criteria

Content is available via the following links

[Archaic]

Inter-Library Resources

You're very welcome, Chris.

Many Libraries have agreements with other Libraries & News Archives to pool their resources and allow members to access one another's online collections. There are also inter-library loans and I believe that Public Domain material can be photocopied and shared that way if you can contact a librarian who is willing to help you. You can call your local Libraries and see what inter-library associations they belong to and if they offer these services. That's how WorldCat (World Library Catalog) operates but I'm not sure if it is only for books.

Hey, I just thought of something- maybe Mike or another member who lives in New York can access it.

Best regards,
Archaic

[Chris Scott]

Here is the complete 2 part articole from which the section I quoted is taken:

Boston Daily Globe
27 November 1888

TWOMBLETY'S ODD WAYS.
More About the Whitechapel Suspect.
Incurs the Hostility of the Medical men of Montreal.
Puts a $100 Bill on the Collection Plate in an Ottawa Church.
Montreal, Nov. 26.
That Dr. Twomblety, who was arrested in London on suspicion of being connected with the Whitechapel tragedies, was formerly a resident of this city. Along in 1859 he appeared on the street in his grotesque costume of swallow tail coat, linen duster and tall hat. He was always accompanied by his dog. He bore the reputation of being a Yankee quack, and was regarded with cordial contempt by the diploma made physicians, despite whom he attained a lucrative practice and local fame. His success dates from his treatment of a Frenchman who came to him one day and said he was ill.
"You eat too much," said Dr. Twomblety, almost instantly; and for over-eating he prescribed an efficacious remedy, which operated not only to cure the Frenchman but as well to secure for the doctor a golden reputation.
Then the other physicians began to regard him as a dangerous rival, and plotted together to bring about his downfall. Finding it impossible to undermine his business by denouncing his drugs and ridiculing his professional ability, they sought to rule him out of the right to sign himself an M.D. without owning a diploma, but the Canadian laws in those days did not provide a penalty for unauthorized assumption of medical title, so his big brass door plate on Notre Dame Street remained undisturbed, and the shekels continued to pour into his coffers.
Then one of the faculty of McGill college conceived the plan of betraying the Yankee quack into illegal practice. So a girl was sent to him, complaining of being in a delicate situation and praying for relief. Apparently the bait took, for Twomblety prescribed a remedy which he guaranteed would produce the desired results. The girl carried the medicine to the waiting conspirators, and gleefully they analyzed it, expecting to find some substantial proof of the Yankee's criminal methods.
But he was too smart for them; he had fathomed their little game, and all they found in the medicine he gave the girl was innocent marshmallow.
After that the medical fraternity ceased from troubling, and the theatre men took up the battle. James B. Prior was at the Theatre Royal. In his company was Maurice B. Pike, now playing at the Hollis Street Theatre in Boston. Prior appeared in a burlesque of the eccentric doctor, and with the doctor's own dog, which had been beguiled into the theatre, standing at the tails of his absurdly grotesque claw-hammer, he sang a topical song of which the doctor himself was the subject. The first stanza went something like this:
I am the famous medicine man,
My name is Tumble Tie,
And I can cure all diseases
In the twinkling of an eye.
Twomblety deeply resented this insult, and it is said he hired toughs to waylay Prior one night. But Prior was not alone. The property man of the theatre was with him, and together they gave the sluggers a slugging. Arrests followed, and shortly afterwards Dr. Twomblety's doorplate vanished from Notre Dame Street, and the doctor's swallowtail vanished from Montreal.
Next he was heard of in St John, when for a while his name disappeared from print. It next reappeared in the National Police Gazette of New York, which published during the war his photograph, showing him to be a good looking man with a moustache, wearing on his head a United States army fatigue cap, with a story about him, headed: "How an Irishman Became an Indian Herb Doctor."
But will all his eccentricities, the people of Montreal never regarded Dr. Twomblety as a man capable of being the principal actor in the Whitechapel tragedies.

MORE ABOUT TWOMBLETY.
Globe Reporter's Recollections of the Whitechapel Suspect.

The many reports published about Dr. Twomblety, now under arrest on London under suspicion of being the Whitechapel murderer, are enough to excite the risibilities of any one who knows the man. The writer first met Dr. Twomblety in 1857, in Ottawa, where he opened an office and advertised himself as a specialist. His principal place of business at that time was in Toronto, from which city he travelled with two horses - one an Irish hunter, the other a cob - two dogs and a basket phaeton. He dressed in a very "loud" manner, and had with him a private secretary.
His first move on arrival was to make a small deposit in the local branch of the Quebec bank, and on the following Sunday, preceded by his secretary carrying a large, gorgeous prayer book, he marched up the middle aisle of the principal Catholic church of Ottawa and presented a $100 bill as his offering. During his three months sojourn he did a large business in his special line, and made lots of money.
His meals were carried in to him from a first class boarding house, at which place his secretary and big Newfoundland dog took their meals. For the latter he paid $5 per week board. After leaving Ottawa he returned to Toronto and the writer lost sight of him for some years.
Some time after the close of the war he opened an office on Fourth Street in Cincinnati, where he did a flourishing business. At that time he intimated that he was the Dr. Blackburn who was accused of trying to introduce yellow fever into the United States in infected blankets from the South, and that his private secretary of years before was involved in the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln, and had been hanged in Washington.
Dr. Twomblety must be now over 60 years old, and at the time of the writer's acquaintance with him was a very companionable man among men, but was never known to seek female society. The London police will have to seek farther for the murderer.

[Dave O]

Chris,

Unless someone with a NY Public Library card turns up, I'll put in an ILL request when I go into work tomorrow. Not sure whether it will be successful or not, I saw the hit that came up while searching their electronic database, but it's not clear to me what that actually is. It looks to me like there must be some sizable gaps in the NY Public Library's microfilm collection.

Dave

[Chris Scott]

Hi Dave
many thanks for your help - much appreciated
I'll keep my fingers crossed:-)
Chris

[Dave O]

Lol, as much help as I've received from all you Brits over the years, the least I can do is try to reciprocate.

[Chris Scott]

Thanks dave
if it's any help I'm attaching the return I got when I searched under that title in the National Police Gazette

[jmenges]

In Tim Riordan's book Prince of Quacks he mentions this article and states that it was unable to be found and so he doubts it currently exists. I'd suggest PMing Tim to see if he followed this lead. I'd be surprised if he did not, as he's such a thorough researcher.

I also recall an illustration of T wearing such a cap, looking a bit on the chubby side.

Best of luck,

JM