December 16, 2007
The Transistor Turns 60 Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 09:00 PM EST Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the invention of the transistor. Here is my take on it (at Forbes.com).
September 28, 2007
A Name Spread Far and Wide Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s mention of Endicott Peabody reminds me of his grandson Endicott “Chub” Peabody, who was governor of Massachusetts for a couple of years in the 1960s and ran one of the few campaigns by anyone ever to get nominated for Vice President in 1972. He has stayed in my mind ever since only because of what a fellow Bay Stater once said of him: that he was the only man to have four towns in the state named after him—Endicott, Peabody, Marblehead, and Athol.
September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities II Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:35 AM EST Josh Zeitz, reflecting on the growing ethnic and racial diversity of American cities, writes, “Where this all leads is anyone’s guess, though as one who has written on ethnicity and urban life, I tend to see more good than bad in this story.” That brings to mind two recent remarks. One is what the Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson said to the New York Times reporter covering the new census data Josh was talking about. Jackson, just back from a visit to Croatia, said, “There they all look alike and they’re killing each other. Here, we’re all different and we live in peace.” My own parents also just returned from Europe; they visited Milan, Basel, Strasbourg, and Cologne. They loved all those cities, and on their return, my mother said, they were struck anew not only by the unique energy of New York and its tremendously varied population, but also by how all its foreigners and immigrants “act like they own the place.” At first I feared she was saying something negative. Oh, no, she explained. The Muslims you see in France, or the Turks in Germany, look like a ghettoized underclass, stuck in the outskirts of the city, segregated from mainstream life. Nobody looks like an underclass in New York. Everyone looks like they are seizing an opportunity that America alone offers them. It’s a very heartening thing to come home to.
August 29, 2007
Historical Bathroom Humor Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:45 PM EST Apropos of the matter of Sen. Larry Craig, there’s a 1985 book of Hollywood interviews, People Will Talk , by John Kobal, that contains this historical anecdote, from the actress and bonne vivante Tallulah Bankhead (thanks to Andrew Sullivan’s blog for digging it up): “There was the time she was in Washington for a Democratic Convention honoring her ‘divine friend, Adlai Stevenson.’ . . . And during a long speech by some senator she had to go to the john, but found when she was settled in for the duration that there was no toilet paper at hand. ‘So I looked down and saw a pair of feet in the next stall. I knocked very politely and said: “Excuse me, dahling, I don’t have any toilet paper. Do you?” And this very proper Yankee voice said: “No, I don’t.” Well, dahling, I had to get back to the podium for Adlai’s speech, so I asked her, very politely you understand, “Excuse me dahling, but do you have any Kleenex?” And this now quite chilly voice said: “No, I don’t.” So I said: “Well then, dahling, do you happen to have two fives for a ten?”’”
August 14, 2007
That Which We Call a Fred/ By Any Other Name Would Be Less Sweet II Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:25 PM EST Speaking of Freds, since every other Fred here has already done so, I agree that most children dislike their first name, whatever it is. Why would any kid would want to be a John or Dick, for instance? Those are an open invitation for teasing. When kids teased me, the best they could come up with was Freddy the Freeloader or Fast Freddy. Who knew what those names even meant? I strongly agree with John that having both a commonplace first and last name can lead to trouble. If I were him, I’d be a magnificent-sounding John Steele Gordon too. I always feared I’d be confused with other people if I went simply by Frederick Allen, but I when started my career, at New York magazine, the editor there, Clay S. Felker, decreed that no one but himself could have a middle initial or name. Sure enough there was another Frederick Allen to confuse me with, a journalist for a long time with CNN and the Atlanta Constitution. By the time he wrote a very well received history of Coca-Cola, I was at American Heritage. We ran a short review of it and got a thank-you note from him. To make matters extra confusing, his personal stationery identified him as Frederick Lewis Allen III. But I am the grandson of the historian Frederick Lewis Allen, and this was no relative of mine. I got in touch with him and learned that his Frederick Lewis Allen was a Cincinnati ad man who is remembered for making Odorono into a success. FLA III told me that when he was in college he dated the daughter of a history professor, and her father couldn’t wait to meet him—figuring he was the grandson of my grandfather. He might as well have been. We have become one person, at least in one biographical sketch, accompanying an essay I wrote that has been anthologized for writing students. There it says that the author “has been, since 1990, the managing editor of American Heritage. . . . As a journalist and a political commentator he has worked for CNN and for several Atlanta TV stations. . . . He is also the author of Secret Formula (1994), a history of the Coca-Cola Company.” If the Freds of the world are to unite, they’ve already begun. As for Alexander Burns’s post a few days ago asking the rest of us how we feel about the all-time home run record, I don’t feel very strongly. I’m perfectly happy to recognize Barry Bonds as the leader—especially since Alex Rodriguez recently hit No. 500 at the youngest age of anyone ever. I think we can all comfort ourselves that there’s a chance the record will finally return where it has always belonged, with the New York Yankees.
August 4, 2007
Terrorist Attack on New York by Revolutionary War Submarine? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:25 AM EST Yesterday morning three police boats, a helicopter, and the Coast Guard converged on a suspicious craft in New York Harbor approaching the Queen Mary 2. Fearing the worst as they moved in for an arrest, they surrounded a mostly submerged plywood egg containing Duke Riley, a Brooklyn resident who according to the story in today’s New York Times “emerged from his rusty hatch without the tall-boy can of beer he had taken into his vessel when it launched.” One of the police officers present remarked, “What are we going to do with this thing? It looks like the Turtle!” The officer knew what he was talking about. The craft was, in fact, a replica of the submarine Turtle built during the American revolution by a man named David Bushnell. In 1776 Bushnell took his one-man, pedal-powered wooden sub into New York Harbor and attempted to screw a time bomb into the hull of the flagship of the British fleet. Bushnell’s Turtle was an audacious attempt at the probably impossible long before the birth of the true submarine. It didn’t blow up any ships, but Bushnell survived, and one of his descendants was assisting Riley yesterday; another living relative is Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City. Riley, a sort of performance artist who last year built a makeshift illegal tavern on Rockaway Inlet in Queens to recreate the lawless atmosphere of the area a century ago—the police quickly put a stop to that, too—actually constructed a sub that was if anything even cruder than Bushnell’s. It was of cheap plywood coated with fiberglass, rather than Bushnell’s thick sections of hardwood, lacked enough ballast to get all the way underwater, which was probably lucky, and lacked any means of propulsion. “I’m not really a very technical kind of guy. I just guessed a lot on this,” he explained yesterday. He got out into the water off Red Hook with the help of friends in a rubber raft, floated on the current toward the Queen Mary 2, and apparently had no real plan for moving along from there. His arrest may have been his goal; the Times reports that his sub will make its next appearance in a Chelsea art gallery. American Heritage of Invention & Technology ran a full account of the original Turtle and of a recent more thoroughgoing, if less headline-grabbing, attempt to recreate it a few years back. You can read it here.
August 4, 2007
A Turtle Slideshow Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 10:25 AM EST Mr. Riley has posted an entertaining slideshow about his Turtle and yesterday’s events on Flickr. You can see it here.
August 2, 2007
America’s Worst Poet Ever? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 06:20 PM EST At least Julia A. Moore enjoys the tribute of immortal infamy. For my money, John F. Bair was as bad a poet as ever lived, yet no one remembers him today. I know of him because an autographed copy of The Complete Poetical Works of Rev. John Franklin Bair, 684 pages long, published in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1907, was left to me by my grandmother, who had treasured it for most of the twentieth century. Bair’s range is positively Shakespearean, from two quatrains about a humble farmyard scene . . . There was a lot, there was a hen,
There was a garden, shoo!
The man into his garden went,
Then hen she went in too. Down he stooped and seized a stone,
The hen cried, Gookle goo!
The stone descended from his hand,
The hen descended too. . . . to the 74-page epic “Drucilla,” with this stirring scene of Captain Long leaving to fight in the Spanish-American War:
The beautiful city of Frisco now many miles in the distance,
Now it has faded completely, nought can they see now but water,
Tears very freely are flowing as the boys think of their loved ones;
Many are seized with sea sickness, see them lean over the railing,
Pouring libations to Neptune time after time from their stomachs.
Weary, they lie down and slumber, morning dawns, they are no better,
Nothing will stay in their stomachs, never saw anything like it.
Day after day thus they suffer as they glide over the ocean. Bair does not fear to address in rhyme the burning issues of the day, and sometimes his words may even be taken as prophetic: “The plague, the plague, halloo, hey, hey!/ Just see ’tis coming right this way/ Across the Atlantic Ocean route/ And we’ve no fence to keep it out!/ That plague is foreign immigration/ From ev’ry European nation,/ They’re coming, thickly, more and more,/ Each year to fair Columbia’s shore . . ./ Let the ballots of one and all/ Be used to build a monstrous wall . . ./ Let that wall be so high and strong/ That it may turn that endless throng/ Of lawless criminals away/ From our fair shores now and alway.” And he knows how to find the moral lessons in history. In his poem “Ohio’s Presidents,” he writes of Rutherford B. Hayes, “I adore him because, like a Christian so true,/ One brave noble act he determined to do,/ ’Twas to always discard the use of the wine/ Whenever with guests he would sit down and dine.” He later adds, “James Garfield, like Hayes, discarded the wine/ Whenever, with guests, he sat down to dine,/ He went to his work and with all his might/ He firmly stood up for that which was right,” before greeting the election of William McKinley with, “But we hope that he too like James A. Garfield,/ To wine and dishonesty never will yield,/ But that every time he sits down to dine/ He too will discourage the use of the wine./ We hope that McKinley successful will be,/ And that from distress we will ever be free,/ May the blessings of heaven upon him descend/ And guide and direct him till his term shall end.” He does not touch on President Grant’s drinking or not in his earlier passage on that Ohioan. Bair was such a complete poet that even lack of inspiration was inspiration: One entire poem reads, “I’m tired and I’m sleepy,/ My mind will not work right,/ So I’ve about concluded/ I’ll write no more tonight.” Should such a bard be forgotten?
July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist V Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:00 PM EST Fred Smoler and Alex Burns have basically been asking why so many Americans think Reagan was their greatest President when usually, around the world and through time, people name the winner of a major war as their greatest leader. Isn’t it possible that people think Reagan was the winner of a major war—the Cold War?
April 17, 2007
The Tragedy at Blacksburg Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 08:00 AM EST The horror at Blacksburg yesterday leaves all of us searching for answers. We aren’t even certain yet that there was only one gunman. What can history tell us? History, I think, stands silent with the rest of us at this moment. Recent history forces us to ask an especially dark question—could this be a new kind of planned, organized suicide attack, a new manifestation of the organized terror that has gripped the globe in recent years? But there is no evidence of that and no cause, at least so far, to expect any. The chance seems remote. Looking at other recent massacres—Columbine, Oklahoma City—we find no more than one or two deranged individuals behind them. Jack Kelly addressed this in his AmericanHeritage.com article on the 1966 mass murder in Austin, Texas, which was until yesterday the deadliest school shooting in American history. In that case the shooter, on the University of Texas campus, killed 15 and injured 31 over a period of an hour and a half before being shot dead himself by SWAT officers. He was a 25-year-oldd named Charles Whitman. He had a brain tumor that may have affected his behavior. He had been a heavy user of methamphetamines. He hated his father with “a mortal passion.” He had been court martialed from the Marines for disciplinary problems. But the vast majority of people who fit any of those descriptions never kill anyone. No explanation ever truly made sense of what had happened, and probably none could. As Jack Kelly wrote, “It’s no fun for us who are left to contemplate the senseless violence that erupts from the clear sky of a seemingly normal personality. We are left only with the stark tragedy itself, and its victims, who are not numbers but human beings.”
February 21, 2007
A World Without America Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 06:40 PM EST What would it be like? Check out this compilation of alternate-historical newscast clips put together by a British Web TV station to fight anti-Americanism in Britain and Europe.
February 16, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 09:00 AM EST Rep. Don Young of Alaska, in his five-minute address in the congressional “debate” over the anti–Iraq surge resolution yesterday, quoted Abraham Lincoln as saying, “Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” If you don’t recall President Lincoln coming out in favor of hanging congressmen, you’re right. (The President also tended to make noun and verb agree.) An author named J. Michael Waller wrote an article titled “Democrats Usher In an Age of Treason” for Insight magazine in 2003 that began, “‘Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exilded or hanged,’ that’s what President Abraham Lincoln said during the War Between the States.” When called on it, Waller explained that “the supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.” You can see Congressman Young delivering the phony quotation here.
January 13, 2007
Technical Snafus II Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:15 PM EST I see that the correction to today’s feature has now been made, and I thank our tech support people. However, technical issues continue to prevent us from posting blog entries from any of our other blog contributors, so I apologize to them and to you, the reader, until everything is straightened out and we can be going full speed again, which I hope will be very shortly. Thanks for your patience.
November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans II Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:45 AM EST I am fascinated by John Steele Gordon’s list of the hundred most influential Americans, below. It raises many interesting questions, but to start with I’ll just ask two related ones. How does Franklin Roosevelt come to be way down at No. 14, below the likes of Steve Jobs? It seems to me that Roosevelt gave the American political landscape its basic shape for a good half a century, at least until Reagan was President, not to mention transforming the role of the federal government and leading the country out of a Depression and to victory in a world war. And how does Jobs get to be so high on the list? I’d have thought Bill Gates had done much more to foster the spread of personal and networked computing, unless you maintain that Gates’s biggest contribution is Windows and he lifted that from Jobs’s company. I have no doubt John has very good answers to these questions, and I look forward to being enlightened. (I’m tempted to add that I’m a little surprised to see Milton Friedman nowhere on the list. But I said I’d ask just two questions.)
September 29, 2006
Torture, Then and Now Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:15 PM EST Gen. George Washington on torture during wartime, courtesy of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: video here.
September 25, 2006
About Little Rock Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 07:15 AM EST Fred Smoler is right to correct the misleading impression given by our “Today in History” listing about Little Rock yesterday. Today the lead story at AmericanHeritage.com gives a fuller and I think very accurate account.
September 15, 2006
Thoughts About Ann Richards Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:05 PM EST Amy Weaver Dorning, a friend of and frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com, found herself surprisingly stirred when she learned that Ann Richards had died earlier this week. She wrote the following to us to explain why:
“When I heard that former Texas governor Ann Richards had died on September 13, at age 73, I felt a wave of sadness, like an era had ended. Though I haven’t lived in Texas in 15 years, I still identify with my home state in a powerful way, and Ann Richards’s legacy is emblematic of what I love about being from there. Part of her appeal for me was that she reminded me of so many of the women who had colored my childhood, the kind you don’t often meet in New York or San Francisco, the two places I have called home since I left. My opinionated mother and her friends (Texas ladies though they were) drank beer, smoked, cussed, and loved to joke about men and their various foibles. Ann Richards would have fit right in. This sort of down-home feminist banter got under my skin, and having grown up around these big-haired women allows me rationalize my own occasional excesses, like the need to fill in my sentences with colorful expletives, simply to get my point across. As a native Texan, I figure it is my birthright.
“Dorothy Ann Willis Richards was born in September 1933 outside of Waco and spent most of her life in central Texas. Her parents, Cecil and Ona Willis, hailed from nearby towns of Bugtussle and Hogjaw, and the family eventually moved to Waco so Ann could attend high school and, later, Baylor University. That’s where she met her future husband, David Richards, a man with political aspirations and ambitions. They would have four children together, host many a Democratic political fundraiser, and make some important allies before they were divorced in the 1980s.
“I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin when Richards began her national political ascent from Dallas housewife (she once said her biggest fear was that her tombstone would read ‘She kept a really clean house’) and low-level politico to major player. It all started with her unforgettable speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention and culminated with her election as the second female Texas governor in 1990. Of course, the only line from the convention that has survived is the one about the senior George Bush being born with a silver foot in his mouth, but it was her bawdy sense of humor, her thick Texas accent, and her flamboyant personal style that catapulted her into the American consciousness.
“Nobody had seen anything like her—a smart, funny, and straight-talking woman politician who wanted to make some changes and throw the good-old-boy network on its, ahem, ass. She was open about her divorce and her stint in rehab for alcoholism, both touchy subjects in a conservative state. Her run for governor against the oil man Clayton Williams turned into a battle of the sexes, and she played it to the hilt, getting the majority of the female vote. Her inauguration was a time of celebration, especially for women, and she dubbed her administration the ‘New Texas.’
“My friends and I loved her straight-shooting feminism, despite the fact that her politics seemed pretty middle-of-the-road to a bunch of idealistic college students. We weren’t so interested in women getting jobs at the statehouse as in opposing the Gulf War, which was breaking out just as she took office. Plus, her beefing up of the state prison system and later support of the North American Free Trade Agreement did little to endear her to diehard liberals. But of her nearly 3,000 appointments, some 46 percent were female, 15 percent were black, 20 percent were Hispanic, and 2 percent were Asian-American. Her predecessor, GOP Gov. Bill Clements, gave more than 80 percent of his appointments to Anglos and men. Plus, had any of us known who would be booting her out of office in four years (George Bush II), we would have probably worshiped her unreservedly.
“By Ann’s second year in office, I had moved to New York to attend graduate school, but with my entire family still in Texas, I traveled home often, and paid more attention to the politics and goings-on there than I did in my new home state. Admittedly I probably exaggerated my Texan-ness at that time, partly out of homesickness, but mostly because it got me attention and set me apart from all the East Coast Ivy League types I was now spending time with. That and the fact that my libation of choice was Wild Turkey (I still shudder). Even if I didn’t agree with all of her policies, I was proud of Ann Richards and followed her career. I even pinned the July 1992 cover of Texas Monthly magazine—the famous one with Richards astride a white motorcycle in a white leather outfit—to my cubicle wall at a magazine where I was interning. The cover line, in huge font, reads ‘White Hot Mama: Ann Richards Is Riding High. Can She Be the First Woman President?’
“Of course, that never came to be, with George Bush’s path to the White House taking shape after he ousted Richards before she could serve a second term. I lost track of Ann during her post-governor years as a lobbyist and political consultant. I’m sure that until her death from esophageal cancer, she continued to be the most noticed person everywhere she went, with her silver hairdo, her crinkly megawatt smile, and her trademark ‘Hi, how ya’ll doin’?’ In his public statement of mourning for his former rival, President Bush said, ‘Texas has lost one of its great daughters.’ This daughter of Texas couldn’t agree more.”
June 15, 2006
More on Flying the Hump Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:40 PM EST Readers of Julie Fenster’s very moving post right below about the airmen who flew over the Himalayas in World War II can learn more in a wonderful article that Richard Rhodes wrote for American Heritage in 1986: “The Toughest Flying in the World”.
Here is the link:
(http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/
ah/1986/5/1986_5_66.shtml).
June 1, 2006
Join the Discussion—About This Blog or Any Article Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:30 PM EST You may have noticed that for the last couple of weeks there has been a line at the end of each blog post and article on AmericanHeritage com that says “Discuss this post,” or “Discuss this article.” We’ve been trying out a major new addition to the site, making it possible for any user to launch or join a discussion about anything on the site—or anything else. Now we’re ready to announce it and invite you in.
All you need to do is register for the site, which is free. Then click on that link at the end of this or any item, or go to the discussions homepage at www.americanheritage.com/discussions to find or create discussion topics.
We want you to be part of the wide-ranging and impassioned exchange of views that takes place on the AmericanHeritage.com blog and elsewhere. Please join us!
May 12, 2006
Did Bush Rob Geronimo’s Grave? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:00 PM EST For years there have been rumors that a bunch of members of Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale, dug up the skull of the great Apache leader Geronimo from its resting place at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, stole it, and put it on permanent display at Skull and Bones headquarters in New Haven, where new members (presumably including both Presidents Bush and John Kerry) have had to kiss it as part of their initiation rite. And one of the group that is supposed to have done this was Prescott Bush—future senator, father of President George H. W. Bush, and grandfather of President George W. Bush. It sounds very unlikely on the face of it, but now, Yale Alumni Magazine tells us, there’s new evidence supporting the old tale, in a letter that was just discovered. “The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumbed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club & the K--t Haffner, is now safe inside the T-- together with his well worn femurs[,] bit & saddle horn,” wrote Winter Mead, a member of the club, on June 7, 1918. (“K--t” meant knight, a member of the club, and “T--” meant the Tomb, the clubhouse in New Haven.) The rumor last got attention in 1986 when Ned Anderson, an Apache leader who was campaigning to have Geronimo’s bones moved from Oklahoma to ancestral lands in Arizona, received an anonymous letter from someone who said he was a member of Skull and Bones and said they had the skull. The letter included a photograph. Anderson arranged a meeting with two Skull and Bones alumni, including George H. W. Bush’s brother Jonathan (being a Bonesman seems to be a requirement for being a Bush man). The two Bonesmen showed Anderson a skull the club owned but said it was of a ten-year-old boy. Anderson thought the skull didn’t look like the one in the picture, but nothing further happened. So the matter rested until Marc Wortman, another Yale alum, discovered the new letter in university archives while researching a book about Yale World War I aviators. What does it prove? The consensus seems to be that Skull and Bones, whose lips, as ever, are sealed (it is a secret society), but which has always liked to pilfer things in a spirit of college hijinks, did dig up a skull in Oklahoma in 1918 and does keep it, or one like it, on display by the front door. But Geronimo’s grave was unmarked and overgrown in 1918. David Miller, a history professor at Cameron University, in Lawton, Oklahoma, told Yale Alumni Magazine, “My assumption is that they did dig up somebody at Fort Sill. It could have been an Indian, but it probably wasn’t Geronimo.” One thing everything agrees is that robbing the Apache leader’s grave would have seemed a lot more acceptable then than today. As the Yale history professor emeritus Gaddis Smith puts it, “There was a racial consciousness and a sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority above all others.” In New Mexico, Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo is talking to lawyers. For more, see this article in the Yale Alumni Magazine.
April 14, 2006
Brokeback Mountain Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 04:30 PM EST I finally saw Brokeback Mountain last night. I found it a beautiful and moving film, as everything I had heard about it led me to expect; I was more surprised at what a great classic love story and classic Western it was too, in its way. The very greatest, most mythic love stories have been tales of love that is taboo. Heloise and Abelard, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet are all loves that are too big and wayward for civilization itself. Brokeback Mountain is the same. The story couldn’t be older, but in an age where being a member of the enemy clan or a celibate religious order won’t do anymore for setting love against all of society, homosexuality is a natural (though it is a taboo that has rapidly eroded, and for that reason the story begins back in 1963). And it’s also very much a tale of the dream of the American West. In Brokeback Mountain as in so many Westerns, the glorious mountainous West is itself a central character, the unspoiled land beyond the confinements and contradictions of the cramped settled world. The high country where the two lovers’ romance is born is rapturously beautiful, unsullied and unpeopled, with gorgeous, soaring mountains, pure streams, and endless skies almost too blue to believe. The mundane land that the two must descend to from there is unrelievedly flat and desolate and stuffy and squalid in every scene. These two worlds are played off each other for the entire film—right down to its very last frame. The symbolism is straightforward and unapologetic; it works because it is presented with utter conviction, no less than, say, the symbolism of liberating night versus soul-deadening day in Tristan und Isolde. The open West is the ideal of spiritual redemption and liberation, exactly as in so much of American literature and in so many Western movies. The movie brought two great American novels immediately to mind for me. The first is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If that is a love story at all, it is a muted, chaste, preadolescent one, with race standing in for sex. But race was the defining taboo of Huckleberry Finn’s time as surely as homosexuality is of ours, and Huck and Jim, like Ennis and Jack, repeatedly escape, with limited success, into a primeval American Western landscape, in that case the wide Mississippi River. The second novel is Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov, in his dark comedy, had the genius to choose a love that not only was forbidden when the book was written but will and should remain forbidden, and that is, in fact, unforgivable. Again the love sends the lovers (only one of whom truly loves) fleeing into an American dream landscape, one that covers almost the whole nation, East and West, North and South, one where the conceit of the purity of the open land (like the purity of love itself) is mocked even as it is evoked, since the escape is to motel after motel after motel. F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the rhapsodic end of The Great Gatsby, writes of “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.” That is the same vision of prelapsarian perfection, but in a feminized incarnation that has been ravaged by man and time. The West of the imagination, and the Western, has always been about a rugged, tough masculine landscape, and about man trying to live up to it, and being tested by it, rather than overwhelming it. How strangely appropriate, then, that the Western, in its latest apotheosis, should get a tale of monumental, mythical love that is love between two men.
April 11, 2006
Whose Prize Is It Anyway? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:15 AM EST The historian D. M. Giangreco, and friend of and contributor to American Heritage, tells us about a rather spectacular mishap, if that’s what it is, that has just happened with the Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, which is awarded annually by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Ferrell is an esteemed diplomatic historian and professor emeritus at the University of Indiana; the prize was established in his honor in 1991. Giangreco wrote to us: “As you know Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is receiving SHAFR’s Robert H. Ferrell Prize for Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. . . . Around Christmas, I suggested to Ferrell that he move his comment on Hasegawa’s book from a footnote and up into the text in his own new book, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. Bob’s response: ‘A footnote is all it deserves.’ “Well, I’d thought that Bob’s book would not be out for a little while yet, but I found it in my mailbox a few moments ago. How ironic. The gentleman for whom the award is named says in a note on page 114 that the Hasegawa book is an ‘unfortunate contribution’ to the atom bomb debate and castigates it mightily in a 24-line endnote. It’s too bad that someone on the awards committee didn’t touch base with Bob first. Now they have a bit of an embarrassment on their hands if this attracts any attention (and, being in a Ferrell book on a rather contentious subject, it very likely will).” This was soon followed by another message from Giangreco: “It’s quite a mess, really. Bob didn’t know that Hasegawa was getting the prize until I called to tell him about it. Prompted quite a belly laugh. Laughed even harder, and harder, as I read to him the note I sent to you. He finds this all extremely amusing, but I rather doubt that some at SHAFR will find it very funny. Since sending the note to you, I’ve been informed that the good Dr. Ferrell is being honored at the same conference. Oh, my! “Anyway, in Bob’s book, he notes that ‘The literature in English regarding the effect of Soviet entry upon [Japan’s World War II] surrender is slight’ and adds that Hasegawa maintains the surrender came ‘because of the shock of the Russian entry.” Ferrell, however, gently suggests that ’Hasegawa may have speculated in this regard.’ He goes on to say: ‘The Hasegawa book seems an unfortunate contribution in another way, for it places the responsibility for use of nuclear weapons evenly on Japan, Russia, and the United States. The author ignores the behavior of the Japanese Army in its conquests beginning with the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, in which the death toll of prisoners and civilians alike ran into the millions; the United Nations figure is seventeen million, the Chinese thirty. For the Americans this meant the Bataan death march, among many other hostilities. In 1945, with the imminence of the attack on Kyushu, the vice minister of war sent out an order that when the first American landed on one of the home islands there should be the immediate execution, by any means, of all Allied prisoners held within the empire, whose numbers were estimated at one hundred thousand.’”
April 4, 2006
That Horrible Food You Loved as a Child Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 01:35 PM EST When I was a little boy in the 1950s my favorite dessert was Junket Rennet Custard. I liked it so much I would sometimes sneak into the kitchen at dawn on a Saturday to pour a box of the mix down my throat. I had a children’s book from my parents’ day called Junket Is Nice, about a strange man with a red beard who sat eating Junket as everyone for miles around wondered what he was thinking. He was thinking, it turned out at the end, that Junket was nice. I fully agreed. I have long presumed that Junket went the way of the Packard and the Automat. But to my surprise you can buy it today, at Hometown Favorites, a Web site devoted to the many humble American equivalents of that madeleine that’s so important to literature. Another one that Hometown Favorites resurrects is Moxie, the old New England cola-like beverage, which I now consider the ivory-billed woodpecker of soft drinks. But should I actually order Junket and Moxie, and learn what they taste like to an adult palate? Or shall I preserve memory undefiled? Visit Hometown Favorites and confront that crisis for yourself.
March 30, 2006
Invention & Technology Is Here Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:25 PM EST For 21 years our sister publication American Heritage of Invention & Technology has told the stories of the making of the world we live in—how everything from dental floss to the supersonic transport, from the mattress you sleep on to whole seas built by the hand of man, got that way, and the remarkable people who made them happen. The magazine has told many hundreds of entertaining and illuminating stories. In fact, those four I just mentioned are all from the very latest issue alone. Now we’ve made Invention & Technology a part of AmericanHeritage.com. Simply click on the “Invention & Technology” tab above the search window on the home page or this page or any other page to get to it, or go to www.americanheritage.com/inventionandtechnology. In addition to those articles from the current issue, you'll find nearly every issue of the magazine, from 1985 to now, on our archives page. Check it out. I think it adds mightily to the wealth of resources (and plain good reads) we’re offering at AmericanHeritage.com.
February 13, 2006
History in the Making, Part II: Grandpa Lied Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 04:00 PM EST I observed a week ago that the actor Al Lewis, aka Grandpa Munster, had died at the age of 95—or was it 82 or 83? Oddly enough, none of his obituary writers could ascertain his age to within even a decade, and amateur historians and others were scrambling to find the truth. Now it has been revealed: Grandpa Lied. He was born in 1923, though he claimed to be 13 years older. He never served on the Sacco and Vanzetti defense committee (he was four when they were executed). Nor was he a champion of the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s. There’s no evidence he was a circus clown and trapeze artist, or that he once hired Charles Manson as a babysitter, or that he escorted W. E. B. Dubois to the burial of the Rosenbergs, or that he had a Ph.D. from Columbia. How did he build such an extensive, if fictional, résumé? One theory is that it began when he feared he wouldn’t get the Grandpa job if the producers of The Munsters knew he was younger than the actress playing his daughter, Yvonne De Carlo. At any rate, the historical record is now considerably clearer—if also duller. And even his widow doesn’t seem to mind. “He always told me he was born in 1910,” she told a reporter for The New York Times. “But I don’t think it matters at all.” In other news, it has been observed that Dick Cheney is the first Vice President in more than 200 years to shoot a man while in office. His one predecessor: Aaron Burr, who of course took out Alexander Hamilton in July 1804.
February 6, 2006
History in the Making: How Old Was Al Lewis Anyway? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:30 PM EST We learned this weekend the sad news that the actor Al Lewis, best known as Grandpa on The Munsters, had died at 95. Then we learned the sad news that Al Lewis had died at 83. Or maybe 82. Then we kept learning that he had died at both ages. As of this writing, no one seems to know to within a decade when Al Lewis was born. His son says he was born in 1923. He himself always claimed he’d been around since 1910. There’s one theory that he lied about his age to get the Grandpa job, feeling that someone in his fifties had a better shot at the part than someone barely forty. The search for Al Lewis’s true age has been feverish in the several days since his death, and it’s a fascinating close-up case study in the difficulty of doing history even about someone very well known in the very recent past. Moreover, was he really a circus performer when he was six? A Ph.D. from Columbia? A member of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee? To check out some of the research that has gone on, and the back and forth in historical consensus it has produced so far, visit the “talk page” that accompanies Wikipedia’s fast-changing biography of the man, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Al_Lewis.
January 27, 2006
Mozart in America . . . or the Next Best Thing Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 07:15 AM EST Today is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 250th birthday. That may not be the anniversary to make the most of on AmericanHeritage.com—but remember Lorenzo da Ponte. Lorenzo da Ponte was the librettist—meaning he wrote the book and lyrics—for Mozart’s three surpassingly great Italian operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. He was born a Jew, ordained a Catholic priest, a poet, an adventurer, and notorious as a womanizer. In fact, he was not only a famous libertine in his own right but a good friend of Giacomo Casanova, which made him uniquely qualified to write the libretto for Don Giovanni, the tale of the downfall of Don Juan. He was also a greengrocer and deliveryman in America. In 1805, when he was 56 (and 14 years after Mozart’s death), da Ponte fled his European creditors by boarding a ship to the United States, where he had already sent his wife and children. Finding in New York a city with no opera and almost no literary community, he set up as a grocer, first in New York and then in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. After a while he started what he called the Academy for Young Gentlemen, to give lessons in Italian and other languages. In 1811 he moved to the Pennsylvania countryside to be near his in-laws. The once glamorous ex-Venetian had a hard time figuring out what to do with himself. He became a grocer again; he opened a millinery store in Philadelphia; he started a distillery; he drove a delivery truck. By 1819 he was back in New York. With his wife, he opened Ann da Ponte’s Boarding House. In 1823 he began publishing his memoirs, letting people who had seen him driving a truck or selling vegetables know that he had once been things like Poet to the Imperial Theatres in Vienna and a friend of the emperor’s. In 1825—he was 76—he became the first professor of Italian at Columbia College. In 1826 he got to see his immortal creation Don Giovanni performed in America for the first time. In 1833 he spearheaded an effort to build a house for Italian opera in New York; it opened that November, with him as co-manager. The opera house did not prosper. In 1835 da Ponte wrote, “I, the creator of the Italian language in America, the teacher of more than two thousand persons whose progress astounded Italy! I, the poet of Joseph II, the author of thirty-six dramas, the inspiration of Salieri, of Weigl, of Martin, of Winter, and Mozart! After twenty-seven years of hard labor, I have no longer a pupil! Nearly ninety years old, I have no more bread in America!” In August 1838 he died, 89 and sharp as a tack until his very last days.
January 12, 2006
Life in Hell—An Honest Portrait Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 10:15 AM EST I have just read an astonishing book. It’s a 34-year-old woman’s true account of life in Berlin from April 20, 1945, when Soviet troops are fast approaching from the east for the final battle for the city, through June 22, when the first glimmerings of life begun again are dawning. In between are days spent hiding in crowded, dark basements with no news of what’s going on outside; fighting in the streets; the suicide of Hitler; the city reduced nearly to rubble and the end of the last vestiges of civic order; the arrival of the victors raging for plunder and rapine; and struggle for survival in the starkest terms. A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City—A Diary, by Anonymous (Metropolitan Books, $23), was published in Germany in 1959, attacked for “besmirching the honor of German women,” mostly forgotten, and never published in full in English until last year, after the author’s death. She wrote it to keep her sanity, and she did so by looking her harrowing situation straight in the eye; her lack of sentimentality and self-pity is astounding. At one point, after having been raped numerous times in the first few days of Soviet conquest, she decides she must “find a single wolf to keep away the pack.” I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in the most awful effects of war, or to put it another way, in the real depths of human nature—which means just about anyone at all. As the British historian Anthony Beevor writes in his introduction, “This is a victim’s eye view, a woman’s perspective of a terrifying onslaught on a civilian population, yet her account is characterized by its courage, its stunning intellectual honesty, and its uncommon powers of observation and perception. It is one of the most important personal accounts ever written about the effects of war and defeat. It is also one of the most revealing pieces of social history imaginable.”
January 5, 2006
The History of Mine Safety Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:15 AM EST The horrifying events in Sago, West Virginia, brought to mind an article we ran in our sister publication, American Heritage of Invention & Technology, titled "Safety First, at Last." It's a look at the efforts over time to make coal mines safe in America, and though it's from 1992, I think it still has a lot that's very instructive, and it's a gripping narrative by the daughter of a coal miner. Amazingly, there was no effective federal mine-safety legislation at all until a tragedy at a mine in Illinois killed 119 people shortly before Christmas in 1951, and rescue teams weren't required at all mines until 1969. Terrific creativity has gone into enhancing mine safety since, though the business remains by its nature a dangerous and unpleasant one. To read the article, click here.
January 4, 2006
Is America Getting Dumber? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:10 PM EST Here’s another thought about why Americans seem less well-educated than they used to. I don’t disagree with the points my fellow bloggers have made, but I think there may be one more element involved. Maybe it’s partly because we expect so many more of them to be educated. In 1900, 500,000 Americans made it to high school. High school enrollment increased tenfold over the next half century, and by 1980, three quarters of all students finished high school. Nowadays half of all high school graduates go on to college. There has been a vast democratization of education in America over the past century. The farther back you look, the more you see education as an exclusive privilege of a small elite group. Maybe we can’t educate all of many tens of millions quite as well as we once educated a few hundred thousand, and maybe when we look back on a more educated time, we’re also looking back at fewer people during that time. Look at it that way, and if you add up all the knowledge out there, there’s got to be a lot more today. It’s just that our expectations have exceeded our national accomplishment in education.
December 5, 2005
An American Tragedy Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 02:00 PM EST Friday night I went to the Metropolitan Opera to see the world premiere of Tobias Picker’s much anticipated new opera, a work based on a great American novel about a once infamous historical event. Full disclosure: I have known the composer for years and consider him a friend. That said, I am very pleased to be able to report that he and the whole cast and crew have done a thrilling job. They’ve produced something worth going out of your way to see if you possibly can during its short run this month. Theodore Dreiser’s huge 1925 novel An American Tragedy tells the story of a poor boy who tries to climb in the world, gets overwhelmed by the American dream, and is led, ultimately, to murder. It’s a fascinating book not only for the tale it tells but also for its Tom Wolfe-like portrayal of life as it was really lived when the story takes place, with closely observed scenes set everywhere from a Kansas City whorehouse to a soul-deadening factory of a century ago and the grand mansion of the man who owns the factory. The novel is based on the events surrounding a real-life murder that took place in 1906 (the murder led to what was called at the time the trial of the century); the novel has in turn been the basis of two movies, a silent and the 1956 A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters. Picker and his librettist, Gene Scheer, went back to documents about the original murder, including letters written by the victim, a woman made pregnant and then forsaken by the tale’s ever-striving protagonist. They put together a tightly packed three-hour story that refracts many elements of American life both then and today. Clyde Griffiths, the main character, is the son of street preachers, and the tension between faith and irreligious freedom runs through the opera as it does through so much of life now; it dogs Clyde as he keeps seeing success grow both nearer and more costly, and some of the most stirring moments in the score have hymns running through them. Clyde Griffiths is not a bad man; as he pursues a rich, glamorous woman and tries to disentangle himself from his poorer earlier girlfriend, he is, as Dreiser wrote, “really doing the kind of thing which Americans . . . would have said was the wise and moral thing for him to do had he not committed a murder.” The greatness of the novel lies partly in its rich and detailed recreation of particular times and places in America but more in its ability to make us relate to and identify with a man inexorably drawn, by forces we all know, to murder. Clyde Griffiths is every one of us. Picker’s music heightens the power of such identification. The first reviews I’ve seen of the opera tend to praise everything about the production with the exception in at least one case of finding some of the music too accessible, too Broadway-like, as one critic put it. So if you want your music obscure and indigestible, stay away. If you want to see an electrifying story brought to life, go. The case includes several of the best opera singers in America today. Clyde Griffiths is played by Nathan Gunn, a 33-year-old baritone who looks like Montgomery Clift to some people and has gotten a cult following not only for his voice. The woman he makes pregnant is portrayed by the dazzling soprano Patricia Racette; the woman he aspires to, by Susan Graham, a young Texan with one of the richest, most seductive mezzo voices around today. They and the rest of the cast are shown to great advantage by Picker’s wonderfully imaginative vocal writing and deft orchestration. These are singers who look their parts, and who can act too. The sets cleverly combine period stage furniture with large photographic backdrops to both heighten the sense of place onstage and accommodate the mammoth scale of the Met stage without overwhelming the players. An opera based on a novel, like a movie based on a novel, is a distillation. It must replace breadth and detail with intensity and focus. An American Tragedy does so most movingly. I found it an absorbing and truly convincing artistic immersion in a timeless tale of the American dream.
November 17, 2005
AmericanHeritage.com Launches the Guide to the Best of the Web Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 09:50 AM EST We've had AmericanHeritage.com up since September as a vital Web site with rich content updated daily and archives of 50 years of articles from American Heritage magazine—and with this blog as an integral part of it too—and now we've just rolled out a major addition to our offerings. We've put up our guide to the best history-related sites on the Web, at www.americanheritage.com/bow. It's a selective, critical listing of roughly a thousand sites, organized by period of history, by state, by President, and by subject matter, such as Geneaology or African-American History. It's a big part of our effort to become the definitive site about American history. Like everything else at AmericanHeritage.com, it's just in its infancy, but already I think it's a huge resource. Check it out, use it, enjoy it—and let us know how we can improve it, by writing to comments@americanheritage.com.
November 1, 2005
The Past Is a Foreign Country Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:00 PM EST I live a block and a half from the route of the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, and over the years I've watched it grow up from an oddball neighborhood event to a commercial big deal. It neither begins nor ends in Greenwich Village now; it just passes through on the area's widest avenue, and swaths of paraders here and there through it honor corporate sponsors like Jet Blue. It maintains its mild eccentricities, though. Last night, watching it on TV (I'd rather get a bird's eye view in my living room than be buried in the crowd not far from my door), I saw people dressed as all sorts of pop figures from the past: Marie Antoinette, a surprisingly convincing self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh with his ear bandaged, Grant Wood's American Gothic, the board game Twister, every major character in The Wizard of Oz (repeatedly). But the most surprising thing I saw, and really the most exotic of anything, amid all the superheroes and vampires and transvestites and TV characters, was also the most truly historical. It stuck out like nothing else the whole night, though I saw it only briefly, in the corner of the screen, and couldn't catch the whole context. Somebody was parading up Sixth Avenue holding up a sign that said REMEMBER THE MAINE.
October 19, 2005
The Baby Boom Today Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:25 AM EST American Heritage celebrates the baby-boom generation with the cover story of its October issue, “Boomer Century,” which will appear as the main feature on AmericanHeritage.com next Tuesday, October 25. The article’s subtitle asks, “What’s going to happen when the most prosperous, best-educated generation in history finally grows up?” The magazine answers one way; the following list, suggesting new lyrics for old baby-boom hit songs (which I received from a friend), answers another: 1. Herman's Hermits: “Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Walker”
2. The Bee Gees: “How Can You Mend a Broken Hip?”
3. Bobby Darin: “Splish, Splash, I Was Havin’ a Flash”
4. Ringo Starr: “I Get By with a Little Help from Depends”
5. Roberta Flack: “The First Time Ever I Forgot Your Face”
6. Johnny Nash: “I Can’t See Clearly Now”
7. Paul Simon: “Fifty Ways to Lose Your Liver”
8. The Commodores: “Once, Twice, Three Times to the Bathroom”
9. Marvin Gaye: “I Heard It Through the Grape Nuts”
10. Leo Sayer: “You Make Me Feel Like Napping”
11. The Temptations: “Papa’s Got a Brand New Kidney Stone”
12. Abba: “Denture Queen”
13. Tony Orlando: “Knock Three Times on the Ceiling if You Hear Me Fall”
14. Helen Reddy: “I Am Woman, Hear Me Snore”
15. Willie Nelson: “On the Throne Again”
16. Leslie Gore: “It’s My Procedure and I'll Cry if I Want To”
October 14, 2005
Black Man in Blackface Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 10:50 AM EST I just received the following correspondence from David Lander, a friend of and frequent contributor to American Heritage, and thought I'd share it: “Joshua Zeitz, in his piece on The Jazz Singer that went up on AmericanHeritage.com on October 6, refers to the assimilationist aspirations of the movie’s Jewish protagonist and asks rhetorically, ‘Who, but a white man . . . needed to black up to play an African-American?’ “As the cover photo of the Winter 2005 issue of American Legacy shows, the seminal black actor Bert Williams felt he did. In the accompanying story, the late Ralph Allen, who wrote Sugar Babies and other musicals, noted that Williams and an African-American partner named George Walker developed an act in the 1890s that was ‘similar to those of the white comedians who wore burnt cork. Billing themselves as “the Two Real Coons,” they took whatever jobs were offered them [and] appeared in small-time minstrel shows, in medicine shows, and in honky-tonks. Along the way they encountered all the difficulties that black men, performers or not, [then] suffered.’ “Allen called Williams a forgotten man of his profession, emphasized that he helped create today’s ‘colorblind stage,’ and said ‘his mournful but unsentimental manner introduced a new tone into comedy.’ W. C. Fields was a great fan, and Eddie Cantor considered Williams his mentor. “Bert Williams died wealthy and famous in 1922, five years before The Jazz Singer married movies to sound. He was 46 years old, and the fact that he, a black man, had risen to prominence portraying a white man caricaturing a black man is one of American history’s ironies.”
August 31, 2005
Can New Orleans Really Recover? What History Says Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:00 PM EST History answers with an emphatic yes. It illustrates its answer with the stories of three American cities that have been destroyed by the violent forces of nature in the last century and a half. The first was Chicago. The famous fire that started there on the evening of October 8, 1871, and burned for two days destroyed 18,000 buildings and killed at least 300 people, leaving more than three square miles ravaged. On October 11 martial law was imposed. But the first post-fire edition of the Chicago Tribune carried an editorial with the title “Cheer Up.” It assured readers that “the forces of nature, no less than the forces of reason, require that the exchanges of a great nation should be conducted here.” (In fact, Chicago had been settled at a uniquely strategic point, where the waters of the Great Lakes nearly met waters that flowed down into the Mississippi-just as New Orleans is at a uniquely strategic point, where the Mississippi watershed, covering 41 percent of the continental United States, all funnels down to approach the sea, carrying all the cargo either way that that mighty river can and must bear.) Money flowed in from all over the country. The first lumber arrived the day the last flames were extinguished. By the end of November, 212 new stone and brick buildings were under construction. And ultimately the fire only sped up Chicago’s growth. The city’s population doubled every ten years until 1900, reaching a million before 1890. On April 18, 1906, San Francisco was struck by a devastating earthquake followed by fires that were even worse. There at least 3,000 people were killed, and 300,000-three quarters of the population-were left homeless. Again, aid poured in from around the country, and reconstruction quickly got underway. By 1915, the city was ready to show itself off to the world as a newly built, fireproofed, modern metropolis, displaying itself proudly as it hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. But the most amazing, and relevant, story is that of Galveston, Texas. Galveston was struck by a hurricane on September 8, 1900, that covered the entire city with water, leveled a third of it, and took an estimated 6,000 lives, the country’s most deadly natural disaster ever. Like New Orleans, Galveston seemed hopelessly vulnerable to such destruction because it lay very low right by the ocean-in fact, two miles off the Texas coast. At its highest it rose only nine feet above sea level. Like New Orleans, it had often been inundated before. After the 1900 hurricane, the Galveston city fathers performed one of the most remarkable feats of massive civil engineering in history. They built a high wall around their island against the Gulf of Mexico; they jacked up every house and building that still stood; they moved in 16.3 million cubic yards of sand; and they raised the land under the entire city by up to 11 feet. The effort took a decade. Even before it was over, in 1909, another hurricane hit, and it may have been as powerful as the 1900 one. Only eight people died. Since then, the wall and fill that make the city possible have been rebuilt and extended many times. Galveston has flourished. Rebuilding New Orleans will not be easy and it will not be fast. But history tells us there is no question that it will be done and it will be successful.
August 31, 2005
The President And the Shattered City Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:00 PM EST On April 2, 1865, with federal troops moving in, Confederate leaders-the heads of a years-long massive armed insurrection against the United States-evacuated their capital, Richmond, Virginia. Everyone else who could leave left too. That night, the city burned. Mobs overran the streets, looting whatever they could. The city was utterly destroyed. The next morning, Union troops moved in to take control. That very day President Lincoln wrote to his secretary of war, “It is certain now that Richmond is in our hands, and I think I will go there tomorrow. I will take care of myself.” And the next day he arrived, unannounced, and walked the ruined streets escorted only by ten sailors. “I know I am free,” shouted an old black woman, “for I have seen father Abraham and felt him.” There was worry that he would be assassinated, that he would be crushed to death. But he stopped to speak to a crowd: “My poor friends, you are free-free as air. . . . Liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to others, and it is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years. But you must try to deserve this priceless boon. . . . Don’t let your joy carry you into excesses. Learn the laws and obey them; obey God’s commandments and thank him for giving you liberty, for to him you owe all things.”
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