Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Before we get into our episode, we have a little bit of business, which is to announce a live show. Yeah, very exciting. We are going to be at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center. We are working with the Indiana Historical Society to do a show for them on Friday, July nineteenth. It is going to be an evening show and you can come for the show or there is also a ticket option where you can come and do a meet and greet with us before the show and then go to the show. We are very excited. Yeah, I really really love the Indiana Historical Society. We did a show with them before and we had so much fun. So we hope to see you there. If you are interested, you can go to www dot Indiana History dot org slash events and you want to do that because this is a show you need to register for beforehand. So again that is Indianahistory dot org slash events, and we hope to see you there. So in the first part, of this two parter about Vinnie Reim. We talked about Vinnie's early life, how she became a sculptor, and the way that her life just seemed to be constantly engulfed in drama. After her family moved to Washington, DC when she was still a teenager, she lobbied for and got a commission from Congress to create a memorial statue of Abraham Lincoln. Uh. If you didn't listen to part one, you might be a little lost here. But more importantly, you missed out on a whole lot of juicy drama. So Uh's drama. Go back for that. It'll also explain some context about how people perceived her. We are picking up her story today after she completed the model for the Lincoln statue and her next move to go to Europe to have it created in marble. The timing of any Reem's trip to Italy was somewhat good. She had been so raked over the coals in the press and in the idle gossip of Washington, DC that it was really starting to bother her. Although she was only twenty two, she had been made famous and infamous and had way more media coverage than even most celebrities were seeing in their whole lifetime. When her father traveled to Louisiana as she was wrapping up her Lincoln statue, he was startled to find that people there were gossiping about his daughter just as much as they had been back in Washington. Yeah, she was a daily source of article fodder for most papers. But before we get to talking about her time abroad, we also have to talk about why she had once again become central to a scandal. And to do that, we actually have to backtrack to yet another contentious scenario that played out in the months that Reim was finishing her Lincoln model, because Vinnie Reem was at the center of the post Lincoln power struggle in the United States. In part one of this episode, we read a quote from Vinnie Reem's recollections where she talked about listening to all the men, many of them politicians, talk while she worked, and she really heard it all. After Andrew Johnson became president in the wake of Lincoln's assassination, there were a lot of people who thought he was not strong enough in that role. Specifically, they thought Johnson was too soft on the Confederate States. In an interview in eighteen sixty five, Johnson had stated, quote, there is no such thing as reconstruction. These states have not gone out of the Union. Therefore reconstruction is unnecessary. I do not mean to treat them as inco it states, but merely as existing under a temporary suspension of their government, provided always they elect loyal men. The doctrine of coercion to preserve as and the Union has been vindicated by the people. It is the province of the executive to see that the will of the people is carried out in the rehabilitation of the rebellious states once more under the authority, as well as the protection of the Union. So a lot of people wanted the Confederate States to face serious consequences for the Civil War, but Johnson really seemed to believe he was following the path that Lincoln wanted a peaceful resolution after the horrible toll of war. But in moving to allow Confederate states to once again hold elections and send representatives to Washington relatively quickly, he fueled a lot of problems. Many Southern states, still reeling from the loss of the war, tended to vote in representatives that upheld the same ideals that had fomented the friction that led to the Civil War, they still believed their cause was right. This is something we touched on in our December twenty twenty episode on the Lost Cause. So then those Congressmen brought back that tension to Congress, and this only led to ongoing problems like restrictive Jim Crow laws, which made it difficult to impossible for formerly enslaved people to actually start their lives of freedom in the states that had been part of the Confederacy. There is so much more to the events and conflicts of Johnson's presidency that is really outside the scope of this episode. Here's how it relates to Vinny reim Though, Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who had been in favor of a complete reorganization of the Southern States, initiated an impeachment effort against Johnson. As the vote on the articles of impeachment loomed, the tide against convicting the president and removing him from office started to turn. That was something that Stevens, who was very close to the end of his life, had been worried about, and the count was ultimately determined by a senator from Kansas named Edmund Ross. Edmund Ross lived as a border with the Reem family. So when Ross cast the vote that meant that Johnson would be acquitted, Fingers immediately pointed to Vinnie Reim. She was a supporter of Johnson, and she was accused of having swayed the Kansas senator's opinion. This also came with the usual subtext that she was using her womanly wiles to do so. But this catalyzed a very difficult time for Reem. She was, as we said, nearing completion on her Lincoln model at this time, but her studio was abruptly taken from her under the auspices of needing the space as a guardroom during all of these debates, but people really thought that they were just doing it to her as a form of retribution. She ended up having to move her work temporarily into a hallway until yet another debate and another vote gave her back her workspace. So it was on the heels of once again being portrayed as a manipulative interloper in US politics, that Reem finished the first phase of her commission of that statue of Abraham Lincoln and headed to Europe. It was almost certainly a welcome opportunity to get out of DC. There's a side story about one of Rhem's many admirers, a Confederate brigadier general among other things, named Albert Pike, who was much older than Vinnie. Pike is a controversial figure in his own right, but it appears that he believed Vinnie loved him. The two of them were close. He was given charge of her two pet doves when she left for Europe, but Vinnie and her parents traveled to New York with Pike and Illinois Representative Samuel Marshall to meet the ship that was going to take the rem party across the Atlantic, and Reim's decision to spend some amount of time in private with Marshall was greatly upsetting to Pike. A letter from Pike to Reeim later said, quote, Marshall loves you, but does not worship you as I do. Just one more parting scandalous. She left the country and suddenly that relationship between Reem and Pike, like a lot of her interactions with men, is described very differently depending on the source that you look at, ranging from him being totally in love with her to being more of a grandfather figure, and this is part of why her story remains so hard to parse. It's been framed in different ways by different biographers based on letters that Pike wrote to Vinnie. Though he was clearly in love with her and thought they were going to have a life together, he wrote to her constantly while she was abroad. Keep him in mind. He's gonna come up a little bit later on. The Reims route to Rome was not direct. After leaving New York on June ninth, eighteen sixty nine, they stopped first in Liverpool, and they spent some time in London. They next moved on to Paris by the end of the month, and there Vinny became close friends with General John Charles Fremont and his wife, Jesse Benton Fremont. Through them, she met Pear Hyacinth, the very famous preacher whose real name was Charles Jon Marrie Lausson, who had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church after he spoke out against the institution and made some incendiary speeches on the nature of religion. Vinnie kept very busy in France, including taking lessons with French painter Leon Bona and the Luminaries that she met in Paris were just a taste of what was to come in Europe. She sculpted busts or medallions of many of these people, but she also did a lot of shopping in Paris, so much so that it kind of cut into her money reserves enough that she considered altering her travel plans to omit some of the cities they were planning to stop in, although she did ultimately decide against making changes. Vinnie and her parents stayed in Paris until the autumn and then moved on to Munich. She was only in Munich for a week, but managed to meet and sculpt painter Friedrich Kaulbach before heading on to her next destination, which was Florence. Honestly, this trip sounds amazing. After a couple of days in Tuscany sh she moved on to her next destination, which was Rome. The goal was for her Lincoln model to be recreated in Carrara Marble. Being in Romant, among other things, that she was exposed to other women artists from the US who had taken studio space in Rome, including ed Monia Lewis who we mentioned in episode one, Emma Strebens, and Whitney and Harriet Hosmer. They have their own whole story. Vinnie had varying opinions of these women, just put it out way. Due to a mix up, Vinnie didn't have studio space waiting as she had expected, but once she did fine studio space, she fully decorated it and called for her Lincoln Model to be delivered there. She also displayed the busts she had made in Paris, and she kept the studio open as kind of a free range salon to visitors. One of her frequent visitors was previous podcast subject franz List. At this point in his life, Liszt was living in a convent in Rome, and so the two of them were able to spend a lot of time together. Vinnie described the two of them as having an innate understanding of one another from the start. Maybe they shared the odd burden of being so romantically appealing to a lot of people that their lives were often troubled by that, I'd say, also, both of them surrounded by scandal constantly, they had some parallels to their lives. Yeah. She wrote a description of their first meeting that is really charming to me, And I'm gonna read that in our behind the scenes on Okay, we will talk about Vinnie's time in Rome after we pause for a sponsor break. Vinnie was in Rome for several months before an adequate piece of marble was found to recreate her Lincoln model. There was also paperwork involved in moving the model from Rome to Carrera. One of the biographies I read mentioned that this legal happening had was something that the Vatican had instituted so people weren't carrying important religious relics out of the city without it all being documented. But and apparently it applied to her model, even though it was not that. Once this model was gone from her studio and had moved on to Krera, she described feeling very lonely. She had also promised a lot of other commissions which she worked on in the period where the model was out of her hands and being copied by artisans outside the city of Rome. She produced a lot of work during this time. It is often considered her most artistically fruitful period, and part of the reason for her business and the fact that she was working so hard was that she actually had to round up the money to hire and pay marble cutters. She had not received that second five thousand dollars payment from the government yet and this was going to be a couple thousand dollars to like for the marble and get people to cut it. So she eventually broke heed alone with two American bankers who were in Rome at the time, and offered after some haggling and after they all had a brief falling out to co sign alone with an Italian bank for her. Once again, she met the most important people of the city and was even invited into the private apartments of Cardinal Antonelli in the Vatican to see his art collection. Antonelli spent a lot of time with Vinnie and her parents while they were in Rome. One of the most famous non photographic images of Reem was also created during this time. She was sculpted and painted by a lot of artists in her lifetime, but American portrait painter George Peter Alexander Healy was living in Rome at the time, and after the two of them became friends, he made a portrait of her. She's dressed as a woman from the Italian countryside and holding a guitar. We mentioned in Part one that Reim had taught herself guitar at an earth early age, So while this costume and the portrait is really not her style, the guitar was an apt propped. That painting is now in the collection of the Smithsonian. Throughout her stay in Rome, Vinnie often traveled to Kreera to oversee the progress on the Lincoln Marble. This was not a small trip today, getting to Krera from Rome takes more than four hours by car. She had selected the marble works at the end of May eighteen seventy. That project was completed in September, so it only took a few months for it to be carved. After inspecting it, she had it sent to the port city of Livorno, which was called Leghorn by English speakers at the time. While she had to hasten an exit from Rome due to the city being overrun during the Franco Prussian War, she and her parents went to Vienna until things had settled down, and then they returned to Rome to pack their things and their many acquisitions from their year in change living abroad and head home. Vinnie did manage to fit in. One last European romance was George Brondez, who would become a famous Danish critic, but after a little more than two weeks the pair had to part. It was time to show Washington the statue. When the Lincoln statue got to Washington, d C. It was placed in the capital rotunda, but it remained covered under a tent. The feet of the statue were visible, and they were reported on. It was first inspected by the Secretary of the Interior, James Delano, who deemed it quote completed to my entire satisfaction. While write ups and reviews based on the day of that inspection were already in the papers, the formal public unveiling took place on the evening of Wednesday, January twenty fifth, eighteen seventy one. As the statue was unveiled, a band played Hail to the Chief. Based on a lot of descriptions, this sounds like a triumphant night. Overall, the early reception was very positive, but over time critics took a less enthusiastic view of the work. They called it the like dull and lifeless. But Vinnie Reim had delivered the promised marble statue. Yeah, I think that's one of those beauty is in the eye of the beholder moments. As we know I mean, many of us have seen this statue. I think it's lovely. I couldn't make it. But simply by being back in the limelight, Vinnie Reim was once again the talk of seemingly every newspaper in the country, with wildly polarized writeups about her. Her supporters were a bullion and praise her Marble Lincoln as a perfect representation of the man in form and attitude. Because she had made good on her commission, her detractors couldn't claim that they were worried she was too young in inexperience to be given such an opportunity, so instead they just turned full sale into accusations that she had garnered her opportunity through sexual relations with older men who in turn did her favors. And in the midst of all this post unveiling press, Raim met Charles Francis Hall and Emil Bessels, who were preparing for the Polaris expedition to the North Pole, on which Hall would die. When we talked about this possible love triangle in our episode about Hall, the information related to him and ship's doctor Bessels made it sound like Bessels may have flown into a rage on the journey after learning that Hall and Reim might have had some kind of romance. But biographies of Reem characterize this love triangle somewhat differently. According to the biography Labor of Love, written by Glen V. Sherwood and published in nineteen ninety seven, quote, during the summer of eighteen seventy one, she received letters from doctor Emil Bessels and the explorer CF. Hall from Greenland. The men were leading an expedition to the North Pole. They hung a picture of the Lincoln Statue in Hall's cabin aboard the polaris. The men requested Vinie's autograph on two flags and promised to name an island after her. That really makes it seem like both of these men were friendly with her, more like they were a group of acquaintances than having like a love triangle. A bit of additional light is shed by the two thousand and four biography Vinnie Reem, an American sculptor, by Edward S. Cooper. In Cooper's account, Reeve dined several times with Hall and Bessels together while they were all in New York. Not long after the unveiling of the Lincoln statue. Vinnie had decided to leave Washington and set up a studio there. Per the Cooper biography, quote, Hall enjoyed Vinnie's company, but Bessels became infatuated with her. There is also an excerpt of a letter that Bessels wrote her in that book that does indeed sound like a man infatuated. He mentions, quote thinking of you all the time and anticipating the pleasure of seeing you. None of this really helped solve the mystery of Charles Francis Hall's death, but it does fill in some details. So we noted in our earlier episode the theory that Bessels was jealous of Hall's relationship with Reem and that that may have been what led him to murder. Still no obvious evidence, especially when it's also not really clear how Vinnie Reem felt about either of these men. But the whole of their friendships are romances are just a blip in Reim's life. In each of these biographies, I'm talking like a couple paragraphs. There's not much about this whole thing. She just didn't know them for long at all before they left for their expedition. As Vinnie was trying to carve out a life for herself in New York. Her brother turned up with a problem. During the Civil War, he had surrendered to Union troops and had been released several weeks later, and then he's alleged to have lived with the Choctaw tribe. Then he popped up again in eighteen seventy two after being arrested for larceny in Arkansas, and he was charged with selling alcohol to Native Americans. He was only found guilty on the second charge, but the sentence was six months of prison time and one thousand dollars fine. He immediately went to his famous sister for help, hoping she could leverage some of her political contacts to get him out of this jam. She tried to get him a pardon, but was not able to Uh. This was maybe some proof that her influence was already starting to lag. Her Washington Heyday seemed to have peaked and fallen already. And she was twenty five. Yeah, so young to have lived all of the life we have already talked about, right, But her brother Bob's arrest was not her only problem. She had a pretty real cash flow issue at this time. Her fame was such a mixed bag that it seemed to drive away as many possible patrons as it attracted, and in some cases, sales of the works that she had created, like her sculpture of Saffo, fell through. She made the decision to leave New York and move back to Washington in the hopes that she would have better luck there in a city where at least she knew a lot of people, and this did work out to some degree. She famously sculpted a bust of Custer in eighteen seventy six, not long before his death, in the area that would become Montana. In eighteen seventy five, Vinnie Reim entered two competitions for monument commissions. The first was for a statue of Union Major General George Henry Thomas. She did not win, and the commission instead went to John Quincy Adams Ward, who had a well established career in monument statuary. The second competition was for the commission from the US government to memorialize Admiral David G. Farragut in bronze. There were a lot of prominent names in the mix try to win this commission, including William Westmore Story and John Quincy Adams Ward. Reems won this time. There had been a bit of lobbying again, but it had a more personal tone. Farragut's widow, Virginia Dorcas Loyal Farragut, was a fan of Vinnie's work and endorsed her as the best candidate, and also helped get a lot of prominent and powerful people to do the same thing. When the busts of the competitors were all displayed together for judging, Vinnie fared better than her competitors and was granted this twenty thousand dollars commission. She conferred often with Missus Farragut as she worked on this likeness. The bronze that was used to cast Farragut was recycled. It had been one of the propellers for the admiral's flagship, the USS Hartford. Coming up, we will meet the man who finally got the much pursued Vinnie reim to settle down, and we will dig into their relationship after we pause for one more sponsor break. As she was working on the Farragut commission, re met Richard Leverage Hawxy through Farragut's son, who was named Loyal and Loyal One day brought Hoxey who was a first lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, to visit while she was working. Hoxy was very handsome and he was very tall. His height was a sharp contrast to Vinnie's very petite frame. We haven't talked about it, but she was a very tiny woman. She was a less than five feet tall, and most accounts say she never weighed more than about ninety pounds. She was very little, and Hoxy was, like so many other men, very taken with her. As Vinnie and Richard started to spend a great deal of time together, tongue started wagging about a romance between the two, and this time they were not wrong. But this caused a whole other problem, which was at Albert Pike, who we mentioned earlier was nearing seventy was still in love with Vinnie, and he started to write her some very jealous letters. When Richard proposed around the same time Vinnie finished the Farragut Statue, she accepted. The engagement was announced in April eighteen seventy eight, and they were married the following month. On May twenty eighth, General Sherman, and not Vinnie's father, gave the bride away and Richard did not choose his best man Vinnie did. It was Albert Pike, which, yes, seems like an odd choice favor of the narrative that his love for her was more paternal. That's maybe not as weird. But he literally wrote her letters about how he couldn't bear knowing another man had kissed her. So Albert's daughter Lillian and Vinnie's sister Mary were the bridesmaids. Yeah, this was a weird one to me. We'll talk about him on the Buy the Saints. I was like, okay, I like texted my best friend about it because I wanted to talk it through and be like, I'm not being irrational here. This is very odd. She's like, it is completely weird. Great. After their very lavish wedding, Vinnie and Richard went to Iowa for two weeks to honeymoon on his family's land there, and then back in Washington, the pair settled down into a home near Farragut Square. It was right by where her completed statue would eventually be installed. Vinnie had once again campaigned to get what she wanted, which was a commission for her new husband that would keep him in Washington, d C. Instead of station somewhere else. He was made assistant commissioner in the Corps with an office in DC. At this point, Vinnie's art career was for a while victim of the social standards of the time. Once she got married, she was expected to stay home and care for the household and her husband and not to have a career. This was something that Richard felt was the correct path. She did not need money. Richard was quite wealthy. He did not see any need for her to work, so after the Farragut Statue was dedicated in eighteen eighty one, she stopped sculpting really for decades. This wasn't something she just agreed to. She did pursue other commissions after Farragut, but they all kind of sputtered out. Meanwhile, her husband told her very frankly that her behavior often embarrassed him, and he worried that her bad press would impede his career. Vinnie and Richard had a son, Richard Riemhaxi, on June sixth, eighteen eighty three. The years that followed were very difficult for her. Many of the people that she had known in Washington had died. The circle of her influence shranked to almost nothingness, and then Richard was transferred first to Alabama, a move she dreaded and was deeply saddened by, and then to Pittsburgh and eventually to Portland, Maine. And then her son was seriously injured at the age of six when another child shot him in the head with an air rifle. He had a pellet lodged in his skull, and though there was a slim chance that an operation could remove it, that operation would have been highly risky, and Vinnie and Richard decided against the surgery, and their son was developmentally disabled. Then Vinnie had about of what she called heart trouble. This appears to have been a heart attack. She also had kidney issues. Her doctors diagnosed her with suppression of feeling. Wanting to work all of those years and not being able to had caused her a great deal of sadness and stress, and this seemed to manifest in a decline in her physical health. Richard was frightened by this incident and had part of their home converted into a studio and told her she could start working again. She did want to work, but she did not want to participate in any more competitions. It seems like she knew like one, she was too established to feel like she should have to do that. In two. That whole thing came with its own stress and all the lobbying that had to be done. So she came up with an interesting approach to finding new work. She found out which states did not have representation in the capital Statuary Hall, and then she started asking politicians from those states if they would like one. She first approached Iowa. This made sense because Richard's family was from there, and in nineteen oh seven she was given a contract to create a sculpture of Samuel Kirkwood, former governor of Iowa. She similarly reached out to Oklahoma about possibly creating a statue of Sequoia, who's credited with inventing the Cherokee alphabet. Reim had made a bust of Sequoia decades earlier, and managed to get another contract with Oklahoma, this time to make a full size statue starting in nineteen twelve. She was still working on this in the fall of nineteen fourteen when she collapsed while preparing to travel from Iowa to Washington. That happened in September, and Richard rushed her to Washington DC for treatment. She had chronic nephritis and died on November twentieth. She was sixty seven. Vinnie Reim was buried in Arlington Cemetery under a bronze casting of her Sappho sculpture. Her Sequoia statue was finished by another artist, George Jay Zulnay, and it was installed in Statuary Hall, where her sculpture of Kirkwood is also housed. Reem's Lincoln Statue, the first full size sculpture of him ever created, remains in the Capitol Building rotunda to this day. Richard remarried and his son with Vinnie was placed in a sanatorium. In the years after Vinnie's death, her husband also donated Vinnie's papers and remained works to various museums. Yes, that is how we have the that portrait of her that had been made when she was in Rome. Heally had sent it to her and then Hoxy donated it to the Smithsonian, and that's how they have it. Basically everywhere, almost everywhere I looked at like stuff that had been you know, her papers or whatever it always said, like donated by Richard Doxy, right no matter where it was. She lived so much life I feel like if you are a fan of Vinny Reim, we've left stuff out. There's no way not to. She was the busiest bee on the planet and all up in everybody's business. So she just was part of a lot of stuff. But she was also a pretty impressive artist. I personally do not understand all of the criticisms of her work. I think her work is lovely, So what do I know? But I do have listener mail. Okay, this is from our listener, Rebecca, who writes a little again. I'm again, So I just listened to the April twenty twenty three episode on Eponymous Drinks. I'm close in age to you both, but I grew up in a very different part of the country Hudson Valley, New York, which city people think is upstate, but the rest of the state does not. So I always find it interesting when we have very different experiences of things. I do not remember my first Shirley Temple. By the time my childhood memories begin, it was already a well established tradition that when we went out to eat at the fancy place, a sit down Chinese Polymnesian restaurant, my brother would get a brown cow and I would get a Shirley Temple, but where we went it was always made with ginger ale. Until your podcast, I did not even know there was a lemon lime soda version. When we made them at home, where we generally did not have grenadine, we would use the Marischino cherry liquid in place of the grenadine. I also apparently completely missed the negronw spagliato thing, having never heard of one before this podcast. Part of me is like, thank your lucky stars, just because it got so contentious. Maybe if you're on like Bartender two. I am, however, a big fan of Negroni. I was surprised to hear the cocktail queen Holly is not a fan, so I'm not the queen. I'm just a mere peasant in cocktail land, but I sure love them. Is not a fan, especially having heard her wax rapsodic about bitters. I was only introduced to campari relatively recently at a tasting five to six years ago, and started looking up cocktails made with it, and of course found the Negroni. I listened to the episode on my way to a spa retreat with my BFF, who first introduced me to your podcast about ten years ago, so of course I had to get a Negronie. Their version is called not Your Father's Negrony, and replaced the regular gin with rose gin and added a sprinkle of rose petals. The rose was very forefront, then it mellowed to the spices of the campari. Okay, this version I would probably have, and I think I'm gonna try that. By the way, my thought on the name Nigroni is that it's possible that the drink was named after General Pascal Olivier de Negroni. Point out there is a timeline issue with him creating the drink, but it doesn't seem beyond possibility that a stronger version of an existing drink could be named after a military hero. But really, we'll probably never know. Hope Aul is well attached. Is a rare picture of my monsters cuddled together. Although Jack and Charlie have been together since they were six and eighteen months old, respectively, they don't often snuggle with each other. They are twelve and thirteen pounds of trouble and more trouble, but I love them anyway. I hope all is well, and keep up with the wonderful work. Okay, I love all of this. First of all, this is a great idea for a negronie. Actually, I love rose flavored everything, especially in cocktails, so I'm one hundred percent gonna infuse some gin with roses and see if I can make something close to this. Second, these kiddies are real cute. They look orange. It's a little bit dim in the picture, but they both look like you know, creamsicle babies, which probably means that they are goofballs, and I hope they are because I love an orange tabby. They are the nuttiest, cuddliest goof feest cats usually. I love it if you would like to write to us and share your thoughts on drinks or history or drink history, and share your pictures of animals any animals will do. We would love to hear them or read them. I guess that address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History and if you listen to the podcast and haven't subscribed yet, very easy to do in the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Before we get into our episode, we have a little bit of business, which is to announce a live show. Yeah, very exciting. We are going to be at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center. We are working with the Indiana Historical Society to do a show for them on Friday, July nineteenth. It is going to be an evening show and you can come for the show or there is also a ticket option where you can come and do a meet and greet with us before the show and then go to the show. We are very excited. Yeah, I really really love the Indiana Historical Society. We did a show with them before and we had so much fun. So we hope to see you there. If you are interested, you can go to www dot Indiana History dot org slash events and you want to do that because this is a show you need to register for beforehand. So again that is Indianahistory dot org slash events, and we hope to see you there. So in the first part, of this two parter about Vinnie Reim. We talked about Vinnie's early life, how she became a sculptor, and the way that her life just seemed to be constantly engulfed in drama. After her family moved to Washington, DC when she was still a teenager, she lobbied for and got a commission from Congress to create a memorial statue of Abraham Lincoln. Uh. If you didn't listen to part one, you might be a little lost here. But more importantly, you missed out on a whole lot of juicy drama. So Uh's drama. Go back for that. It'll also explain some context about how people perceived her. We are picking up her story today after she completed the model for the Lincoln statue and her next move to go to Europe to have it created in marble. The timing of any Reem's trip to Italy was somewhat good. She had been so raked over the coals in the press and in the idle gossip of Washington, DC that it was really starting to bother her. Although she was only twenty two, she had been made famous and infamous and had way more media coverage than even most celebrities were seeing in their whole lifetime. When her father traveled to Louisiana as she was wrapping up her Lincoln statue, he was startled to find that people there were gossiping about his daughter just as much as they had been back in Washington. Yeah, she was a daily source of article fodder for most papers. But before we get to talking about her time abroad, we also have to talk about why she had once again become central to a scandal. And to do that, we actually have to backtrack to yet another contentious scenario that played out in the months that Reim was finishing her Lincoln model, because Vinnie Reem was at the center of the post Lincoln power struggle in the United States. In part one of this episode, we read a quote from Vinnie Reem's recollections where she talked about listening to all the men, many of them politicians, talk while she worked, and she really heard it all. After Andrew Johnson became president in the wake of Lincoln's assassination, there were a lot of people who thought he was not strong enough in that role. Specifically, they thought Johnson was too soft on the Confederate States. In an interview in eighteen sixty five, Johnson had stated, quote, there is no such thing as reconstruction. These states have not gone out of the Union. Therefore reconstruction is unnecessary. I do not mean to treat them as inco it states, but merely as existing under a temporary suspension of their government, provided always they elect loyal men. The doctrine of coercion to preserve as and the Union has been vindicated by the people. It is the province of the executive to see that the will of the people is carried out in the rehabilitation of the rebellious states once more under the authority, as well as the protection of the Union. So a lot of people wanted the Confederate States to face serious consequences for the Civil War, but Johnson really seemed to believe he was following the path that Lincoln wanted a peaceful resolution after the horrible toll of war. But in moving to allow Confederate states to once again hold elections and send representatives to Washington relatively quickly, he fueled a lot of problems. Many Southern states, still reeling from the loss of the war, tended to vote in representatives that upheld the same ideals that had fomented the friction that led to the Civil War, they still believed their cause was right. This is something we touched on in our December twenty twenty episode on the Lost Cause. So then those Congressmen brought back that tension to Congress, and this only led to ongoing problems like restrictive Jim Crow laws, which made it difficult to impossible for formerly enslaved people to actually start their lives of freedom in the states that had been part of the Confederacy. There is so much more to the events and conflicts of Johnson's presidency that is really outside the scope of this episode. Here's how it relates to Vinny reim Though, Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who had been in favor of a complete reorganization of the Southern States, initiated an impeachment effort against Johnson. As the vote on the articles of impeachment loomed, the tide against convicting the president and removing him from office started to turn. That was something that Stevens, who was very close to the end of his life, had been worried about, and the count was ultimately determined by a senator from Kansas named Edmund Ross. Edmund Ross lived as a border with the Reem family. So when Ross cast the vote that meant that Johnson would be acquitted, Fingers immediately pointed to Vinnie Reim. She was a supporter of Johnson, and she was accused of having swayed the Kansas senator's opinion. This also came with the usual subtext that she was using her womanly wiles to do so. But this catalyzed a very difficult time for Reem. She was, as we said, nearing completion on her Lincoln model at this time, but her studio was abruptly taken from her under the auspices of needing the space as a guardroom during all of these debates, but people really thought that they were just doing it to her as a form of retribution. She ended up having to move her work temporarily into a hallway until yet another debate and another vote gave her back her workspace. So it was on the heels of once again being portrayed as a manipulative interloper in US politics, that Reem finished the first phase of her commission of that statue of Abraham Lincoln and headed to Europe. It was almost certainly a welcome opportunity to get out of DC. There's a side story about one of Rhem's many admirers, a Confederate brigadier general among other things, named Albert Pike, who was much older than Vinnie. Pike is a controversial figure in his own right, but it appears that he believed Vinnie loved him. The two of them were close. He was given charge of her two pet doves when she left for Europe, but Vinnie and her parents traveled to New York with Pike and Illinois Representative Samuel Marshall to meet the ship that was going to take the rem party across the Atlantic, and Reim's decision to spend some amount of time in private with Marshall was greatly upsetting to Pike. A letter from Pike to Reeim later said, quote, Marshall loves you, but does not worship you as I do. Just one more parting scandalous. She left the country and suddenly that relationship between Reem and Pike, like a lot of her interactions with men, is described very differently depending on the source that you look at, ranging from him being totally in love with her to being more of a grandfather figure, and this is part of why her story remains so hard to parse. It's been framed in different ways by different biographers based on letters that Pike wrote to Vinnie. Though he was clearly in love with her and thought they were going to have a life together, he wrote to her constantly while she was abroad. Keep him in mind. He's gonna come up a little bit later on. The Reims route to Rome was not direct. After leaving New York on June ninth, eighteen sixty nine, they stopped first in Liverpool, and they spent some time in London. They next moved on to Paris by the end of the month, and there Vinny became close friends with General John Charles Fremont and his wife, Jesse Benton Fremont. Through them, she met Pear Hyacinth, the very famous preacher whose real name was Charles Jon Marrie Lausson, who had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church after he spoke out against the institution and made some incendiary speeches on the nature of religion. Vinnie kept very busy in France, including taking lessons with French painter Leon Bona and the Luminaries that she met in Paris were just a taste of what was to come in Europe. She sculpted busts or medallions of many of these people, but she also did a lot of shopping in Paris, so much so that it kind of cut into her money reserves enough that she considered altering her travel plans to omit some of the cities they were planning to stop in, although she did ultimately decide against making changes. Vinnie and her parents stayed in Paris until the autumn and then moved on to Munich. She was only in Munich for a week, but managed to meet and sculpt painter Friedrich Kaulbach before heading on to her next destination, which was Florence. Honestly, this trip sounds amazing. After a couple of days in Tuscany sh she moved on to her next destination, which was Rome. The goal was for her Lincoln model to be recreated in Carrara Marble. Being in Romant, among other things, that she was exposed to other women artists from the US who had taken studio space in Rome, including ed Monia Lewis who we mentioned in episode one, Emma Strebens, and Whitney and Harriet Hosmer. They have their own whole story. Vinnie had varying opinions of these women, just put it out way. Due to a mix up, Vinnie didn't have studio space waiting as she had expected, but once she did fine studio space, she fully decorated it and called for her Lincoln Model to be delivered there. She also displayed the busts she had made in Paris, and she kept the studio open as kind of a free range salon to visitors. One of her frequent visitors was previous podcast subject franz List. At this point in his life, Liszt was living in a convent in Rome, and so the two of them were able to spend a lot of time together. Vinnie described the two of them as having an innate understanding of one another from the start. Maybe they shared the odd burden of being so romantically appealing to a lot of people that their lives were often troubled by that, I'd say, also, both of them surrounded by scandal constantly, they had some parallels to their lives. Yeah. She wrote a description of their first meeting that is really charming to me, And I'm gonna read that in our behind the scenes on Okay, we will talk about Vinnie's time in Rome after we pause for a sponsor break. Vinnie was in Rome for several months before an adequate piece of marble was found to recreate her Lincoln model. There was also paperwork involved in moving the model from Rome to Carrera. One of the biographies I read mentioned that this legal happening had was something that the Vatican had instituted so people weren't carrying important religious relics out of the city without it all being documented. But and apparently it applied to her model, even though it was not that. Once this model was gone from her studio and had moved on to Krera, she described feeling very lonely. She had also promised a lot of other commissions which she worked on in the period where the model was out of her hands and being copied by artisans outside the city of Rome. She produced a lot of work during this time. It is often considered her most artistically fruitful period, and part of the reason for her business and the fact that she was working so hard was that she actually had to round up the money to hire and pay marble cutters. She had not received that second five thousand dollars payment from the government yet and this was going to be a couple thousand dollars to like for the marble and get people to cut it. So she eventually broke heed alone with two American bankers who were in Rome at the time, and offered after some haggling and after they all had a brief falling out to co sign alone with an Italian bank for her. Once again, she met the most important people of the city and was even invited into the private apartments of Cardinal Antonelli in the Vatican to see his art collection. Antonelli spent a lot of time with Vinnie and her parents while they were in Rome. One of the most famous non photographic images of Reem was also created during this time. She was sculpted and painted by a lot of artists in her lifetime, but American portrait painter George Peter Alexander Healy was living in Rome at the time, and after the two of them became friends, he made a portrait of her. She's dressed as a woman from the Italian countryside and holding a guitar. We mentioned in Part one that Reim had taught herself guitar at an earth early age, So while this costume and the portrait is really not her style, the guitar was an apt propped. That painting is now in the collection of the Smithsonian. Throughout her stay in Rome, Vinnie often traveled to Kreera to oversee the progress on the Lincoln Marble. This was not a small trip today, getting to Krera from Rome takes more than four hours by car. She had selected the marble works at the end of May eighteen seventy. That project was completed in September, so it only took a few months for it to be carved. After inspecting it, she had it sent to the port city of Livorno, which was called Leghorn by English speakers at the time. While she had to hasten an exit from Rome due to the city being overrun during the Franco Prussian War, she and her parents went to Vienna until things had settled down, and then they returned to Rome to pack their things and their many acquisitions from their year in change living abroad and head home. Vinnie did manage to fit in. One last European romance was George Brondez, who would become a famous Danish critic, but after a little more than two weeks the pair had to part. It was time to show Washington the statue. When the Lincoln statue got to Washington, d C. It was placed in the capital rotunda, but it remained covered under a tent. The feet of the statue were visible, and they were reported on. It was first inspected by the Secretary of the Interior, James Delano, who deemed it quote completed to my entire satisfaction. While write ups and reviews based on the day of that inspection were already in the papers, the formal public unveiling took place on the evening of Wednesday, January twenty fifth, eighteen seventy one. As the statue was unveiled, a band played Hail to the Chief. Based on a lot of descriptions, this sounds like a triumphant night. Overall, the early reception was very positive, but over time critics took a less enthusiastic view of the work. They called it the like dull and lifeless. But Vinnie Reim had delivered the promised marble statue. Yeah, I think that's one of those beauty is in the eye of the beholder moments. As we know I mean, many of us have seen this statue. I think it's lovely. I couldn't make it. But simply by being back in the limelight, Vinnie Reim was once again the talk of seemingly every newspaper in the country, with wildly polarized writeups about her. Her supporters were a bullion and praise her Marble Lincoln as a perfect representation of the man in form and attitude. Because she had made good on her commission, her detractors couldn't claim that they were worried she was too young in inexperience to be given such an opportunity, so instead they just turned full sale into accusations that she had garnered her opportunity through sexual relations with older men who in turn did her favors. And in the midst of all this post unveiling press, Raim met Charles Francis Hall and Emil Bessels, who were preparing for the Polaris expedition to the North Pole, on which Hall would die. When we talked about this possible love triangle in our episode about Hall, the information related to him and ship's doctor Bessels made it sound like Bessels may have flown into a rage on the journey after learning that Hall and Reim might have had some kind of romance. But biographies of Reem characterize this love triangle somewhat differently. According to the biography Labor of Love, written by Glen V. Sherwood and published in nineteen ninety seven, quote, during the summer of eighteen seventy one, she received letters from doctor Emil Bessels and the explorer CF. Hall from Greenland. The men were leading an expedition to the North Pole. They hung a picture of the Lincoln Statue in Hall's cabin aboard the polaris. The men requested Vinie's autograph on two flags and promised to name an island after her. That really makes it seem like both of these men were friendly with her, more like they were a group of acquaintances than having like a love triangle. A bit of additional light is shed by the two thousand and four biography Vinnie Reem, an American sculptor, by Edward S. Cooper. In Cooper's account, Reeve dined several times with Hall and Bessels together while they were all in New York. Not long after the unveiling of the Lincoln statue. Vinnie had decided to leave Washington and set up a studio there. Per the Cooper biography, quote, Hall enjoyed Vinnie's company, but Bessels became infatuated with her. There is also an excerpt of a letter that Bessels wrote her in that book that does indeed sound like a man infatuated. He mentions, quote thinking of you all the time and anticipating the pleasure of seeing you. None of this really helped solve the mystery of Charles Francis Hall's death, but it does fill in some details. So we noted in our earlier episode the theory that Bessels was jealous of Hall's relationship with Reem and that that may have been what led him to murder. Still no obvious evidence, especially when it's also not really clear how Vinnie Reem felt about either of these men. But the whole of their friendships are romances are just a blip in Reim's life. In each of these biographies, I'm talking like a couple paragraphs. There's not much about this whole thing. She just didn't know them for long at all before they left for their expedition. As Vinnie was trying to carve out a life for herself in New York. Her brother turned up with a problem. During the Civil War, he had surrendered to Union troops and had been released several weeks later, and then he's alleged to have lived with the Choctaw tribe. Then he popped up again in eighteen seventy two after being arrested for larceny in Arkansas, and he was charged with selling alcohol to Native Americans. He was only found guilty on the second charge, but the sentence was six months of prison time and one thousand dollars fine. He immediately went to his famous sister for help, hoping she could leverage some of her political contacts to get him out of this jam. She tried to get him a pardon, but was not able to Uh. This was maybe some proof that her influence was already starting to lag. Her Washington Heyday seemed to have peaked and fallen already. And she was twenty five. Yeah, so young to have lived all of the life we have already talked about, right, But her brother Bob's arrest was not her only problem. She had a pretty real cash flow issue at this time. Her fame was such a mixed bag that it seemed to drive away as many possible patrons as it attracted, and in some cases, sales of the works that she had created, like her sculpture of Saffo, fell through. She made the decision to leave New York and move back to Washington in the hopes that she would have better luck there in a city where at least she knew a lot of people, and this did work out to some degree. She famously sculpted a bust of Custer in eighteen seventy six, not long before his death, in the area that would become Montana. In eighteen seventy five, Vinnie Reim entered two competitions for monument commissions. The first was for a statue of Union Major General George Henry Thomas. She did not win, and the commission instead went to John Quincy Adams Ward, who had a well established career in monument statuary. The second competition was for the commission from the US government to memorialize Admiral David G. Farragut in bronze. There were a lot of prominent names in the mix try to win this commission, including William Westmore Story and John Quincy Adams Ward. Reems won this time. There had been a bit of lobbying again, but it had a more personal tone. Farragut's widow, Virginia Dorcas Loyal Farragut, was a fan of Vinnie's work and endorsed her as the best candidate, and also helped get a lot of prominent and powerful people to do the same thing. When the busts of the competitors were all displayed together for judging, Vinnie fared better than her competitors and was granted this twenty thousand dollars commission. She conferred often with Missus Farragut as she worked on this likeness. The bronze that was used to cast Farragut was recycled. It had been one of the propellers for the admiral's flagship, the USS Hartford. Coming up, we will meet the man who finally got the much pursued Vinnie reim to settle down, and we will dig into their relationship after we pause for one more sponsor break. As she was working on the Farragut commission, re met Richard Leverage Hawxy through Farragut's son, who was named Loyal and Loyal One day brought Hoxey who was a first lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, to visit while she was working. Hoxy was very handsome and he was very tall. His height was a sharp contrast to Vinnie's very petite frame. We haven't talked about it, but she was a very tiny woman. She was a less than five feet tall, and most accounts say she never weighed more than about ninety pounds. She was very little, and Hoxy was, like so many other men, very taken with her. As Vinnie and Richard started to spend a great deal of time together, tongue started wagging about a romance between the two, and this time they were not wrong. But this caused a whole other problem, which was at Albert Pike, who we mentioned earlier was nearing seventy was still in love with Vinnie, and he started to write her some very jealous letters. When Richard proposed around the same time Vinnie finished the Farragut Statue, she accepted. The engagement was announced in April eighteen seventy eight, and they were married the following month. On May twenty eighth, General Sherman, and not Vinnie's father, gave the bride away and Richard did not choose his best man Vinnie did. It was Albert Pike, which, yes, seems like an odd choice favor of the narrative that his love for her was more paternal. That's maybe not as weird. But he literally wrote her letters about how he couldn't bear knowing another man had kissed her. So Albert's daughter Lillian and Vinnie's sister Mary were the bridesmaids. Yeah, this was a weird one to me. We'll talk about him on the Buy the Saints. I was like, okay, I like texted my best friend about it because I wanted to talk it through and be like, I'm not being irrational here. This is very odd. She's like, it is completely weird. Great. After their very lavish wedding, Vinnie and Richard went to Iowa for two weeks to honeymoon on his family's land there, and then back in Washington, the pair settled down into a home near Farragut Square. It was right by where her completed statue would eventually be installed. Vinnie had once again campaigned to get what she wanted, which was a commission for her new husband that would keep him in Washington, d C. Instead of station somewhere else. He was made assistant commissioner in the Corps with an office in DC. At this point, Vinnie's art career was for a while victim of the social standards of the time. Once she got married, she was expected to stay home and care for the household and her husband and not to have a career. This was something that Richard felt was the correct path. She did not need money. Richard was quite wealthy. He did not see any need for her to work, so after the Farragut Statue was dedicated in eighteen eighty one, she stopped sculpting really for decades. This wasn't something she just agreed to. She did pursue other commissions after Farragut, but they all kind of sputtered out. Meanwhile, her husband told her very frankly that her behavior often embarrassed him, and he worried that her bad press would impede his career. Vinnie and Richard had a son, Richard Riemhaxi, on June sixth, eighteen eighty three. The years that followed were very difficult for her. Many of the people that she had known in Washington had died. The circle of her influence shranked to almost nothingness, and then Richard was transferred first to Alabama, a move she dreaded and was deeply saddened by, and then to Pittsburgh and eventually to Portland, Maine. And then her son was seriously injured at the age of six when another child shot him in the head with an air rifle. He had a pellet lodged in his skull, and though there was a slim chance that an operation could remove it, that operation would have been highly risky, and Vinnie and Richard decided against the surgery, and their son was developmentally disabled. Then Vinnie had about of what she called heart trouble. This appears to have been a heart attack. She also had kidney issues. Her doctors diagnosed her with suppression of feeling. Wanting to work all of those years and not being able to had caused her a great deal of sadness and stress, and this seemed to manifest in a decline in her physical health. Richard was frightened by this incident and had part of their home converted into a studio and told her she could start working again. She did want to work, but she did not want to participate in any more competitions. It seems like she knew like one, she was too established to feel like she should have to do that. In two. That whole thing came with its own stress and all the lobbying that had to be done. So she came up with an interesting approach to finding new work. She found out which states did not have representation in the capital Statuary Hall, and then she started asking politicians from those states if they would like one. She first approached Iowa. This made sense because Richard's family was from there, and in nineteen oh seven she was given a contract to create a sculpture of Samuel Kirkwood, former governor of Iowa. She similarly reached out to Oklahoma about possibly creating a statue of Sequoia, who's credited with inventing the Cherokee alphabet. Reim had made a bust of Sequoia decades earlier, and managed to get another contract with Oklahoma, this time to make a full size statue starting in nineteen twelve. She was still working on this in the fall of nineteen fourteen when she collapsed while preparing to travel from Iowa to Washington. That happened in September, and Richard rushed her to Washington DC for treatment. She had chronic nephritis and died on November twentieth. She was sixty seven. Vinnie Reim was buried in Arlington Cemetery under a bronze casting of her Sappho sculpture. Her Sequoia statue was finished by another artist, George Jay Zulnay, and it was installed in Statuary Hall, where her sculpture of Kirkwood is also housed. Reem's Lincoln Statue, the first full size sculpture of him ever created, remains in the Capitol Building rotunda to this day. Richard remarried and his son with Vinnie was placed in a sanatorium. In the years after Vinnie's death, her husband also donated Vinnie's papers and remained works to various museums. Yes, that is how we have the that portrait of her that had been made when she was in Rome. Heally had sent it to her and then Hoxy donated it to the Smithsonian, and that's how they have it. Basically everywhere, almost everywhere I looked at like stuff that had been you know, her papers or whatever it always said, like donated by Richard Doxy, right no matter where it was. She lived so much life I feel like if you are a fan of Vinny Reim, we've left stuff out. There's no way not to. She was the busiest bee on the planet and all up in everybody's business. So she just was part of a lot of stuff. But she was also a pretty impressive artist. I personally do not understand all of the criticisms of her work. I think her work is lovely, So what do I know? But I do have listener mail. Okay, this is from our listener, Rebecca, who writes a little again. I'm again, So I just listened to the April twenty twenty three episode on Eponymous Drinks. I'm close in age to you both, but I grew up in a very different part of the country Hudson Valley, New York, which city people think is upstate, but the rest of the state does not. So I always find it interesting when we have very different experiences of things. I do not remember my first Shirley Temple. By the time my childhood memories begin, it was already a well established tradition that when we went out to eat at the fancy place, a sit down Chinese Polymnesian restaurant, my brother would get a brown cow and I would get a Shirley Temple, but where we went it was always made with ginger ale. Until your podcast, I did not even know there was a lemon lime soda version. When we made them at home, where we generally did not have grenadine, we would use the Marischino cherry liquid in place of the grenadine. I also apparently completely missed the negronw spagliato thing, having never heard of one before this podcast. Part of me is like, thank your lucky stars, just because it got so contentious. Maybe if you're on like Bartender two. I am, however, a big fan of Negroni. I was surprised to hear the cocktail queen Holly is not a fan, so I'm not the queen. I'm just a mere peasant in cocktail land, but I sure love them. Is not a fan, especially having heard her wax rapsodic about bitters. I was only introduced to campari relatively recently at a tasting five to six years ago, and started looking up cocktails made with it, and of course found the Negroni. I listened to the episode on my way to a spa retreat with my BFF, who first introduced me to your podcast about ten years ago, so of course I had to get a Negronie. Their version is called not Your Father's Negrony, and replaced the regular gin with rose gin and added a sprinkle of rose petals. The rose was very forefront, then it mellowed to the spices of the campari. Okay, this version I would probably have, and I think I'm gonna try that. By the way, my thought on the name Nigroni is that it's possible that the drink was named after General Pascal Olivier de Negroni. Point out there is a timeline issue with him creating the drink, but it doesn't seem beyond possibility that a stronger version of an existing drink could be named after a military hero. But really, we'll probably never know. Hope Aul is well attached. Is a rare picture of my monsters cuddled together. Although Jack and Charlie have been together since they were six and eighteen months old, respectively, they don't often snuggle with each other. They are twelve and thirteen pounds of trouble and more trouble, but I love them anyway. I hope all is well, and keep up with the wonderful work. Okay, I love all of this. First of all, this is a great idea for a negronie. Actually, I love rose flavored everything, especially in cocktails, so I'm one hundred percent gonna infuse some gin with roses and see if I can make something close to this. Second, these kiddies are real cute. They look orange. It's a little bit dim in the picture, but they both look like you know, creamsicle babies, which probably means that they are goofballs, and I hope they are because I love an orange tabby. They are the nuttiest, cuddliest goof feest cats usually. I love it if you would like to write to us and share your thoughts on drinks or history or drink history, and share your pictures of animals any animals will do. We would love to hear them or read them. I guess that address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History and if you listen to the podcast and haven't subscribed yet, very easy to do in the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.