“I Wish I’d Been There”

The great event that made all of human history possible, including this magazine. occurred some sixty-five million years ago. Its primary evidence lies in America.

Few people know that mammals evolved at the same time as dinosaurs, more than two hundred million years ago. They did not arise later and drive dinosaurs to extinction by their superiority. They lived, rather, for one hundred million years as small, rat-sized creatures in the interstices of an ecological world ruled by dinosaurs. In no way did they challenge or displace dinosaurs. Then, some sixty-five million years ago, dinosaurs were wiped out along with many other forms of life in one of the great episodes of mass extinction that have punctuated the history’ of life. The small mammals survived and took over a world emptied of its former rulers. We evolved much later as a result of this good fortune ‘we are a cosmic accident. not the result of a predictable process1. If the extinction had not occurred, dinosaurs would probably still dominate the earth, and conscious creatures would not have evolved.

But what wiped out the dinosaurs’ We now have good evidence that a large extraterrestrial body—an asteroid or comet —struck the earth at this time, perhaps sending aloft a cloud of dust making the earth too cold and dark for large reptiles the “nuclear winter” scenario is based on the same argument. I would like to have seen the explosion and its aftermath; I only hope I would have known when to duck.

Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biology, Harvard University,

I would like to have had an extra long life, and to have sat on a pier between 1200 and 1300. to see who besides Columbus and Sebastian Cabot showed up

Noel Perrin, Professor of English, Dartmouth College.

The amazingly scrupulous records we have of Anne Hutchinson’s trial in early November of 1637 tantalize me into wishing I could have been there. Hers was a religious culture and ours is pluralist and secular, but the troubling issues from back then have analogies now. In facing state (John Winthrop) and church (John Cotton), she represented dissent against establishment. As so often since, neither side looked good, and, from other angles, both sides made a case. They fought over the covenant of grace and the covenant of works, ideas almost incomprehensible to many today. Yet they are signal issues about liberty and license versus law and responsibility, and remain alive.

Why go to Europe for Joan of Arc when in America someone on trial also claimed to have heard voices? That is, instead of sticking to the letter of the text, she claimed the spirit spoke directly. What are claims of authority even now? How much do we, must we, live by the book? And there are classic woman-man issues here. Without question, her accusers-prosecutors-judgessentencers, who were one and the same persons, and who banished her, were harder on her because she was a woman, not a mere dissenter or heretic.

The personalities draw me: Anne Hutchinson—gifted, charismatic, often wild, destined to be killed in an Indian massacre. John Winthrop—judgmental and yet enthralled. John Cotton—half leaning toward Hutchinson but not daring to be caught there. Here was a combat of minds and spirits more interesting than massacres or wars; it still haunts.

Martin E. Marly, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago.

On May 18, 1675, a handbell rang from the east shore of Lake Michigan. It was the only sound that afternoon in all the vast wilderness of lake and hills and forest, and it marked the passing of a Jesuit Father, Jacques Marquette. His great and stirring mission among the Illinois Indians had come to an end on Easter morning when he celebrated mass before five thousand of them. They had stood in rings around him in an open field—old men, chiefs, and warriors, with women and children on the outer fringe. No Indian had ever experienced anything like that service: if not all of them were converted, all were deeply moved. The young men escorted Marquette and his two French companions from their town to the head of Lake Michigan to say farewell. They did not try to keep him with them but begged him to come back when he was able. They knew that he was very ill, and had been desperately so when he had returned the fall before to winter with them according to his promise.

His canoe, paddled by Pierre Porteret and a voyageur, Jacques Largillier, followed the eastern shore. When, days later, they came to a stream beside a small hill, Marquette told them to stop there so he could end his life on land. All winter, besides other ailments, he had suffered from dysentery; now it was a raging, bloody flux.

When he died, one of the men whispered the names of Mary and Jesus in his ear as he had asked. The other rang the bell.

I wish I might have been there to hear those small and lonely notes. They marked the end of the most spiritual and also down-to-earth of all the Jesuit missionaries, and also the end of a simplicity and faith that were not to be reborn in America.

Walter D. Edmonds, Concord, Massachusetts. Author of, most recently, The Night Raider.

I would like to have been in the British ranks on the Plains of Abraham on the morning of September 13, 1759, at the moment when Wolfe’s British army defeated Montcalm’s French forces. Rarely have single battles proved decisive to history, but those that have so proved were usually enormously decisive. Wolfe’s victory was one such engagement.

Although more war would follow, that battle essentially ended the French empire in North America, an empire that had contended with the English colonies over the course of one hundred and fifty years for die culture, the economy, the native inhabitants, the soil, and the soul of North America. Wolfe s victory ensured that North America would be mostly Englishspeaking, but it also, because of British imperial policy, ensured that a French culture would survive in a British Canada.

British Canada was one of the many causes of the American Revolution that resulted in an independent United States. American opposition to, and then friendship with, British Canada figured in many major events in American history, from the westward movement to the Civil War, to the titanic struggles against Germany in the twentieth century.

The language we speak, the culture we embrace, the American history we study, and the policies our government follows today, we owe in part to that fateful engagement west of Quebec city.

Franklin B. Wickwire, Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

July 8, 1776, was a warm, sunny day in Philadelphia, and as the hour of noon approached, people began to gather in the statehouse yard. Residents mingled with others who had traveled from the surrounding countryside. Although one observer commented, “There were few respectable people among them,” those present included Mayor Samuel Powel, other city officials, and some members of the Continental Congress. As the yard began to fill, the people waited patiently, their eyes occasionally seeking the platform of the crudely constructed structure erected in 1769 for observing the transit of Venus.

The crowd had become restless when, shortly after twelve, Philadelphia’s sheriff, William Dewees, arrived and climbed the observatory stairs followed by his acting deputy, Col. John Nixon. As Dewees approached the railing and prepared to speak, the people quieted. “Under the authority of the Continental Congress and by order of the Committee of Safety,” he began, “I proclaim a declaration of independence.” Colonel Nixon then stepped forward and proceeded to read the document.

The people listened attentively as he read, and when he had finished, they demonstrated their approbation with three hearty huzzahs. There was little comment as the crowd dispersed. Some followed the speakers to the courthouse, where the document was again read, and then observed as the king’s arms were removed first from the courthouse and then from the statehouse. Others made their way to Armitage s tavern to while away a few hours. For most of them the Declaration was not new, for it had been published in the Philadelphia newspapers two days earlier and again that morning.

It was not until evening that the city properly celebrated the momentous decision that had been announced that day. It was a pleasant night, the sky filled with stars, and great bonfires were lighted throughout the city. The arms of King George III were taken out to the commons, placed on a pile of casks, and burned as the crowd watched and cheered. All through the night the bells of the churches tolled, reminding the people that they had been witnesses to the beginning of a new era in American history.

Silvio A. Bendini, Keeper of the Rare Books of the Smithsonian Institution.

I would most like to have been once in the presence of George Washington. In that rich lifetime were many revealing moments, but my choice would be March 15, 1783. Britain had conceded the military triumph of the American colonies. Fighting had ceased. But despite the promise of impending peace, a binding treaty was not in place. Washington held warily to “an old and true maxim that to make a good peace, you ought to be prepared to carry on tue war.” Yet to his dismay, throughout his officer corps, the indispensable backbone of the army he must hold intact, raged such anger against the indifference of Congress to their needs that an ugly proposal of mutiny had won support. Washington called a meeting and addressed his malcontents in person. He asked for their continued patience with Congress, implored them not to sully their glorious achievement by a disgraceful act, and promised his intervention on their behalf. As he read his remarks, he paused. He took out his spectacles and begged his audience’s indulgence while putting them on, observing that he had grown old in their service and now found himself growing blind. That gesture, an officer remembered later, “forced its way into the heart.” And Washington prevailed. It was a quintessential Washingtonian gesture, genuine but also studied, for he had mastered the histrionics as well as the dynamics of leadership. It was one of his great moments, and to have been there would have been one of mine.

George F. Scheer, free-lance historian, editor, and author of several works on Revolutionary America.

My wish would put me in Thomas Jefferson’s study when he got his comeuppance as a bird watcher. The President, a dedicated naturalist, was a subscriber to The American Ornithology, a pioneer work by Alexander Wilson (often called the father of American ornithology) and he had asked Wilson to identify a rare species that had mystified him for years. It was, he wrote, “heard… but scarcely ever to be seen but on the top of tallest trees from which it perpetually serenades us with the sweetest notes… clear as those of a nightingale. I have followed it for years without ever but once getting a good view of it. ”

Flattered at being appointed presidential adviser on birds, Wilson tried to track down the elusive singer and came to a disappointing conclusion. To avoid a kind of ornithological lèse majesté, however, he never informed Jefferson directly but noted in a volume of his Ornithology that he had been asked about a puzzling bird by a “distinguished gentleman whose name, were I at liberty to give it, would do honor to my humble performance.” And he identified the bird as a wood thrush, which, though a very sweet singer, anything but rare or even uncommon.

Most bird watchers keep life lists of birds they have seen. I keep one of watchers. So I would like to have been with Jefferson as he read this and to have seen his chagrin at realizing he had succumbed to the watcher’s perennial weakness—an eagerness to puff up his list by making a rarity out of a familiar species. I’ve seen it happen with many birders, but a rara avis like Jefferson would be a notable addition to my list.

Joseph Kastner, editor. Author of A Species of Eternity, a history of early American naturalists.

Ten years ago I stood on a remote, nondescript rock outcropping in northern Idaho, and in my mind’s eye I conjured up a vision of some men who had preceded me there by more than a century and a half. They were Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery; their arrival at Sherman Peak was the climax of their crossing of the LoIo Trail, the Indians’ old buffalo road through the northern Rockies—and in some ways it was the climax of their transcontinental journey.

Lewis and Clark were such extraordinary leaders that much of their great exploration seemed remarkably uneventful. The outcome was in doubt only during those excruciating days on the LoIo. Winter was coming on, game was scarce, the terrain almost impassable to man or beast; the men were exhausted, their feet were freezing, they were on starving times. They ate their horses, a raven, a coyote.

It was a near thing, but when they stumbled up onto Sherman Peak, they could see open prairie to the west, and they knew that their ordeal was over. Soon after, they met a band of Nez Perce Indians. It was the first contact between white men and that estimable tribe, and the amicable Nez Perce received the explorers warmly, provided them with buffalo meat, salmon and camas root, and then guided them down the Snake and the Columbia to the Pacific, thus making possible the completion of a journey that would irrevocably shape the future. Although Lewis and Clark didn’t find the Northwest Passage they were looking for, they would draw the nation west, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Don Moser, editor of Smithsonian magazine, Author of The Snake River Country.

I would like to have been in St. Louis toward noon on September 23, 1806, when Lewis and Clark and their men returned from the Pacific. Word had preceded them, and a mixed crowd of French, Spanish, blacks, Indians, Canadians, and Americans, some in broadcloth and some in buckskin, were waiting when they pulled into the boat landing at the levee. Gunfire, cheers, excitement.

We in St. Louis knew by then that our country had increased its size majestically by purchasing the Louisiana Territory. We knew—some of us at least—that beyond the Rockies was a river called variously the Oregon and the Columbia, to which the otter trader Robert Gray had established a claim for the United States—a claim Great Britain disputed.

But what did it all mean? Well, we’d know now. We’d hear it from those burned and bearded homecomers who’d crossed endless plains black with buffalo and had gaped at great, grizzled bears they could hardly believe in; who’d followed the trails of unnamed tribes through deep forests of evergreens, past snowy peaks incalculably high, on and on into what became the American dream of the West. For the first time we could feel it in our bones: our only bound was the western sea. We were truly a continental nation.

David Lavender, author of The American Heritage History of the Great West and River Runners of the Grand Canyon.

I’d like to have been a waiter at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel in the City of Washington in the year 1830. While I would like to confine my duties to a single evening, April 13, it would be worth a year carrying dishes just to be there that evening. The dinner menu doesn’t matter—no one now remembers. It was the toasts that counted. And not the twenty-four regular ones (real drinkers there were in those days) but the volunteers. The President of the United States had decided to use the occasion. He was ready for his many enemies in rebellious South Carolina, where the wretched word nullification had been heard again in regard to a federal tariff. Hayne had opposed Webster in the Senate, and the President had had enough of it. In the days before the dinner he had scribbled out several possible toasts and pitched them into the fire until he got the right one. Holding up his glass that evening, white hair shining, everyone on his feet, Martin Van Buren on a chair so he could see, Old Hickory fixed his glance on John C. Calhoun: “Our Union: It must be preserved.” Calhoun had risen with the rest, and his hand trembled so that a little yellow wine trickled down the side of his glass.

Robert H. Ferrell, Distinguished Professor of History, Indiana University, Bloomington. Author of, most recently, Truman: A Centenary Reminiscence.

I would have liked to visit Thoreau’s hut: nothing in our past interests me more. The Gettysburg address perhaps, but it was a big crowd and I would get tired waiting. The tea party in Boston sounds like an escapade that became big news; but the hut—that I would like to have seen, with a tape measure to verify the figures in Walden, and check up on other details—not to put down Henry David but simply to see what the distance was between the facts and his fancy. He had such a large fancy.

Leon Edel, Emeritus Citizen Professor of English, University of Hawaii.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Scottish friend Thomas Carlyle said of Daniel Webster: “No man can be as great as that man looks.” Looked and sounded. I elect to have heard and seen him; but I don’t choose one of the famous set-piece occasions (in the Supreme Court, or the Senate, or at Bunker Hill, where an attentive multitude listened for hours in the hot sun). Instead I go for a more relaxed, almost neighborly set of vignettes, spread out over several days in August 1843.

Webster had come to Concord, Massachusetts, to argue a case before the Suffolk County bar. Emerson went along to observe and was enchanted. Even among prominent attorneys Webster was, said Emerson, “a schoolmaster among his boys.” His rhetoric was “perfect, so homely, so fit, so strong.” He dominated the scene, even to adjourning the court, “which he did by rising, & taking his hat & looking the Judge coolly in the face.”

In the evenings I would with Daniel be entertained in local parlors, where Emerson found him irresistibly “goodnatured” and “nonchalant.” A glowing Concord lady said Webster was “magnificent,” as prodigious as Niagara Falls.

What a President Webster might have been! But history is full of if and alas. In a few years New Englanders—and Emerson—were denouncing him as a compromiser over slavery. In that heady week of 1843, though, they (and I) would have been content merely to appreciate the magic of “godlike Daniel.”

Marcus Cunliffe, University Professor, The George Washington University.

This is an invitation to fantasy—to see the unseeable, to witness the unwitnessable, to summon the past into the present. Since we are entering an imaginary world through the looking glass, why not go for broke? Why not choose to recover what no one has ever seen, not even the participants, not even the protagonist? Many of the most important events of history never had any witnesses, were in fact invisible. Yet they happened, and historians are always writing about them. They were the decisions, the fateful commitments, and they took place entirely within the mind and heart. If we may enter the mind as we enter the looking glass, many temptations present themselves. No accounting for choices in such matters. Forced to pick one, I would look in on the mind of Col. Robert E. Lee on being offered the command of Union forces in 1861.

C. Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Yale University.

The incident that I would like to have witnessed is that described in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment. He writes of a ceremony in South Carolina on January 1, 1863, celebrating the coming into effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. The ceremony was conventional and simple until Higginson got up to speak and waved the American flag before the audience of black soldiers, white civilians and officers, and a large number of slaves, who at that moment were legally receiving their freedom for the first time. As the flag was being waved, Higginson tells us, “there suddenly arose … a strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly), into which two women’s voices instantly blended, singing, as if by an impulse that could no more be repressed than the morning note of the song-sparrow—

” ‘My Country, ‘tis of thee, Sweet Land of Liberty, of thee I sing!’ ”

The ceremony ended as the former slaves sang on, irrepressibly, through verse after verse. Higginson motioned the few whites who began to join in to be silent. The moment, as he said, was electric. “Nothing could be more wonderfully unconscious; art could not have dreamt of a tribute to the day of jubilee that should be so affecting; history will not believe it. …”

This incident epitomizes the most profound moment in America’s social history: that point when millions of people ceased to be slaves in the home of the free and set in motion the historic challenge that white America make real its own vision.

Carl N. Degler, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford.

I would like to have witnessed the attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, by Federal troops on the evening of July 18, 1863. The fort—a massive affair made of logs, earth, and sand—stood at the northern tip of an island that curved around into Charleston Harbor. Its capture was to be preliminary to taking the city.

The assault was led by the 54th Massachusetts, the first black regiment recruited in a free state. In command was Col. Robert Gould Shaw, of Boston blue blood and of true heroic character. At starlight, the regiment—600 troops and 22 officers— made for the earthwork at the doublequick, with orders to seize it by bayonet assault. The Confederate forces within opened up a devastating fire from cannons, naval guns, and mortars. Men were falling on all sides; every flash of fire, a survivor would say, showed the ground dotted with the wounded or killed. Colonel Shaw gained the rampart before he was shot through the heart.

Among the 158 wounded from the 54th was Wilky James, 1st lieutenant and adjutant to Colonel Shaw; the eighteen-yearold younger brother of William and Henry James. There were 12 known dead, but there were 100 missing, some dead, some captured. Half of the 54th Massachusetts was wiped out; successive attacks by other units during the night ended with 1,515 casualties (the Confederates suffered 174).

It was a complete disaster. But something about the “brave black regiment,” as it came to be called, so gallantly leading the way in this venture (at this moment in a war that many believed to be about slavery and freedom) ignited the Northern imagination. It was celebrated over the years in poems by Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Robert Lowell, and many others, and in essays by Frederick Douglass, Justice Holmes, and others. When the memorial frieze to Colonel Shaw and the 54th by Augustus Saint-Gaudens was inaugurated in Boston in 1897, the chief speaker was William James.

R.W.B. Lewis, Neu Gray Professor of Rhetoric, Yafe University. Author of, most recently, Edith Wharton: A Biography.

I would choose to be at one of the cabinet meetings of early 1865, as the Civil War was ending, when Abraham Lincoln, out of all the strange and glorious forces widiin him, had totally matured as a statesman-saint. An especially revealing meeting must have been the one at which Lincoln talked of an appropriation of four hundred million dollars, an immense sum for the time, to help the South recover. Though Lincoln had assumed virtually dictatorial authority over the conduct of the war, he did listen to his cabinet, even invited them to vote, and then from time to time outvoted them. “Seven no and one aye, the ayes have it,” was his legendary summation of the powers of the President vis-á-vis his cabinet. But the Lincoln cabinet meetings were far from the perfunctory sessions of the recent Presidencies. (I worked in the Carter White House for a year; there were four cabinet meetings while I was there, meaningless gatherings of forty to fifty people.) Lincoln’s cabinet dissuaded him from proposing his magnanimous Reconstruction grant. They felt the Congress wasn’t ready. Lincoln made it clear he would set aside the idea only temporarily. The dialogue must have illuminated the ways in which Lincoln, at the height of his powers, could strike the balance between “practical politics” and longer-range purpose and vision. I would like to have listened.

Hedley Donovan, Fellow of the Faculty of Government, Harvard University.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I would ride with a young carpenter, Ed Beall of Alton, Illinois, in the last week of April 1865, on assignment for the Chicago & Alton Railroad. In Springfield the Lincoln house at Eighth and Jackson streets was to be draped in mourning. Ed was a rangy youth with a long reach. While comrades on the roof paid out a rope, he slid down, headfirst, to the eaves, where black “droopers” were set in place. Then the crew moved on to the Illinois statehouse to build a catafalque in the assembly hall.

On a railroad siding in Chicago lay a special train, twelve days’ slow journey from Washington. Its black-draped coaches carried a military company in dress uniforms. In the next car were Gen. “Fighting Joe” Hooker, Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, Gov. Richard Yates, and Lincoln’s old friend Chief Justice David Davis. Inside the last car, bearing the President’s seal, a large coffin rested beside a small one. The small casket contained the body of twelve-year-old Willie Lincoln, who had died three years before in Washington. Now he was to be buried beside his father in Springfield.

At midnight the train began to move. It crept through Joliet, Wilmington, and Bloomington, where acres of people waited in silence. The last downgrade carried it into Springfield. There, on the crest of Oak Ridge Cemetery, Ed Beall and his mates were building a platform. At sunrise their work was done.

On an empty lumber wagon Ed jolted through streets thronged with carts, traps, carriages, and folk on foot—all pressing toward the C & A Depot. When the funeral train halted, the multitude engulfed it. From the rear coach strode General Hooker. He broke stride at a man reaching for a spectator’s wallet. One of his brisk feet sent the pickpocket sprawling. Drums throbbed and bells tolled as thousands moved to the statehouse where Ed Beall in his overalls divided the lines filing past a draped coffin. At noon a final procession marched to Oak Ridge, where the two coffins were placed in a hillside tomb. It smelled of evergreens on the dim stone floor.

Slowly the crowd dispersed, and Springfield grew as quiet as the country town where Lincoln had come in 1837. From his assignment with history, Ed Beall caught a freight train and returned to repairing boxcars on the Chicago & Alton run.

Walter Havighurst, Research Professor of English, Miami University, Ohio.

I would like to have witnessed Jacob Brodbeck’s first manned aircraft flight over Luckenback, Texas, in 1865. Newspaper clippings attest to the fact that there were witnesses, but they do not describe what the craft looked like, except to say that it was powered by a large clock spring. Brodbeck decided to call his machine an “airship.”

William Goetzmann, Stiles Professor of American Studies and History, University of Texas, Austin.

My choice would be that cool and bright Monday out in Promontory, Utah, when top rail officials, their guests and dozens of track workmen watched as token touches were made on a $400 golden spike by a silver sledge.

The flamboyant, nationwide celebration marked an event as important to Americans as the opening of the Suez Canal —also in 1869—was to western Europeans. The antebellum generation of railroad development saw an iron network connect eastern seaports with established towns and cities, and by 1860 reach the edge of the frontier from Wisconsin to Texas. In the 187Os and 188Os the westward reaching trans-Mississippi rail lines moved well ahead of the frontier, created new communities, and pulled millions of settlers into the West. In the last decades of the nineteenth century these new rail lines were taking the Texas longhorn from the Kansas cow town to Chicago, were serving the gold and silver miners of Leadville and Virginia City, and were moving to eastern markets the crops of the prairie homesteader and farmer. Well before 1900 these Western railroads had helped close the last American frontier.

John F. Stover, Professor of History, Purdue University.

I would like to have witnessed the dawn meeting that took place in the Fifth Avenue Hotel on November 8, 1876. Present were John C. Reid, the managing editor of The New York Times, Zachariah Chandler, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and one or two other politicians. The subject: How to steal the Presidency of the United States.

During the preceding night it had become apparent that Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic candidate, was ahead by some two hundred and fifty thousand in the popular vote. Almost every newspaper in New York, including the Republican Tribune, had conceded victory to the Democrats. But John Reid discovered that not even the Democrats knew who had carried Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, three states the Republicans theoretically controlled, thanks to the federal troops still stationed on their soil. If the Republicans could hold these states, their candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, would win by one electoral vote.

As a lifelong student of American politics, I would love to know what they said —and thought—as they went about perpetrating the most terrific act of corruption in our history. Reid soon persuaded Chandler to send telegrams to Republican leaders of the disputed states, containing such pointed suggestions as “Don’t be defrauded.” Within hours, emissaries with bags full of money were riding south to make sure that the officials counting the votes were properly motivated.

Each state had a “canvassing board,” which was empowered to throw out the vote of a county if it was tainted by fraud or violence. Enough counties were disqualified to provide Republican majorities—in Florida’s case a breathless fortyfive votes. A few years later, copies of telegrams found in the files of Western Union and leaked to the press revealed that the Democrats had also tried to buy up the canvassing boards on November 8, 1876, but thanks to John Reid and Zachariah Chandler, the Republicans got there firstest with the mostest cash.

All in all, it makes Watergate look like tiddlywinks.

Thomas Fleming, novelist and historian. Recent book: The Officers’ Wives.

Hull House was a pioneering social settlement, established in Chicago in 1889 by twenty-nine-year-old Jane Addams. It was the model for settlement houses in cities all across America, staffed by people who shared Addams’s vision of political reform and the need to develop the new field of professional social service.

The Hull House community included the most imaginative and energetic reformers and social activists of their generation: Alice Hamilton, who would be a pioneer in industrial disease and the first woman member of the faculty of Harvard Medical School; Florence Kelly, translator of Friedrich Engels, first factory inspector in Illinois and tireless investigator of industrial conditions; Julia Lathrop, first head of the federal Children’s Bureau. They were joined by dozens of younger women, representatives of the first large generation of college-educated women, driven by their conviction that they should use their education to improve society. They helped organize trade-union women, walked picket lines, established residences for single working women, ran a day nursery for working mothers, devised and lobbied for progressive legislation. Hull House offered an array of evening classes, concerts, and dramatic readings to nurture the minds of those it served.

Those who lived in Hull House apartments could order food from a central kitchen, but most came each night to the main dining room, where idealism ran high and the activities of the day and plans for the future could be discussed over dinner with guests like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Gov. John P. Altgeld.

The Hull House community was perhaps the most formidable group of intellectuals and social activists gathered in this country since Jefferson’s dinners at the White House. I would love to have observed a Hull House dinner—even if I couldn’t eat more than would a fly on the wall.

Linda K. Kerber, Professor of History, University of Iowa.

My one scene occurred in the Municipal Court of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, over three weeks ending November 2, 1898. It was the jury trial of Thomas I. Kidd, George Zentner, and Michael Troiber, all of the Woodworkers’ Union, on a charge of conspiracy to injure the business of the Paine Lumber Company. The trial helped to establish a union’s right to strike free of conspiracy charges. Counsel for the men was Clarence Darrow, then forty-one and starting to be known as the “Attorney for the Damned” after his defense of Eugene V. Debs in the Pullman Strike of 1894.

Kidd and his associates had been arrested in a strike for a wage increase and union recognition. In the trial, George M. Paine, proprietor of the company, was called as a witness, giving Darrow an opportunity to cross-examine with singular effectiveness. His questions exposed the “infamy of Paine’s business methods —the inhumanity and contempt he displayed toward the men who worked in his factory, his hypocrisy and rapaciousness in dealing with his workers,” as Kevin Tierney phrased it in Darrow’s biography.

Darrow’s speech to the jury took two days and was delivered without notes. “While you have been occupied for the last two weeks in listening to the evidence in this case, and while the court will instruct you as to the technical rules of law under which this evidence is to be applied, still it is impossible to present the case to you without a broad survey of the great questions that are agitating the world today,” he began. “For whatever its form, this is not really a criminal case. It is but an episode in the great battle for human liberty, a battle which was commenced when the tyranny and oppression of man first caused him to impose upon his fellows and which will not end so long as the children of one father shall be compelled to toil to support the children of another in luxury and ease.”

Darrow’s peroration was a classic. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I leave this case with you. Here is Thomas I. Kidd. It is a matter of the smallest consequence to him or to me what you do; and I say it as sincerely as I ever spoke a word … I do not appeal for him. That cause is too narrow for me, much as I love him.… I appeal to you, gentlemen, not for Thomas I. Kidd, but I appeal to you for the long line—the long, long line reaching back through the ages, and forward to the years to come—the long line of despoiled and downtrodden people of the earth.”

The jury was out for fifty minutes. Returning, it announced that it had voted acquittals for all three men. For his work in the Kidd case Darrow received a fee of two hundred and fifty dollars.

Alden Whitman, book critic and historian.

Coatesville, Pennsylvania, August 18, 1912: In a rented room of the Nagel Building, opposite the church, John Jay Chapman, aged fifty, the literary critic from Boston who had in his younger days fought for reform with Theodore Roosevelt in New York, is holding a prayer meeting in memory of “the Negro Zacharia Walker,” lynched in Coatesville on August 13 of the previous year.

Renting the room, advertising the meeting in the paper, and answering the suspicious questions of Coatesville citizens had been trying. Chapman was acting alone, but nobody believed this. Civil rights were words not yet thought of, but here surely was their first self-appointed champion, performing a symbolic act.

Chapman read his text, which begins: “We are met to commemorate the anniversary of one of the most dreadful crimes in history—not for the purpose of condemning it, but to repent of our share in it.” Those listening were: Miss Edith Martin, a friend of the Chapmans, from New York; “an anti-slavery old Negress who lives in Boston and was staying in Coatesville”; and “a man who was … an ‘outpost’ finding out what was up.”

I wish I had been a fourth member of that audience.

Jacques Barzun, past president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

I would like to have been present at Aeolian Hall, February 12, 1924. That was the evening when Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was first performed.

I like Gershwin, but I also know that Rhapsody in Blue (the very title is a maudlin one, with the touch of a cliché) is not the best of his compositions: it is a period piece. But what a period! That night in 1924 represented the coming of age of American genius. In one polyphonic and saxophonic swoop the creative talent of America swept ahead of Europe, of all the modernisms of Europe. That odd young man, the son of uneducated Jewish immigrants, brought up in the nearslums of New York, created something that was, and remained, quintessentially American, strident at times but suffused with a melancholy elegance of harmonies beyond the imagination and sensitivity of almost anything that the Old World could have produced at that time. It was modern, in a way in which no other achievement had been modern: not Whitman’s poetry, not Berlin’s ragtime, not the Brooklyn Bridge, not the Woolworth Building, all of which still bore traces of the sentiments of an American Victorianism.

I would have wanted to sense the reactions of that audience: the quality of the applause, and perhaps a moment of silence before the nervous chatter began in the steamheated foyer, outside of which the high-wheeled large cars were hooting and the electricity glittered in the winter evening of New York. The sour vulgarities of the reign of Coolidge notwithstanding, it was then that America sparkled at the top of the world.

John Lukacs, Professor of History, Chestnut Hill College. Author of Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century.

Among the thousands of baseball games I would give an eyetooth to have seen was the third game of the 1932 World Series. Little rode on the game itself: the New York Yankees, nearing the end of the RuthGehrig era, would take four straight games from the Cubs, outscoring the Northenders 37 to 19. The august New Yorkers, winners of seven pennants in twelve years, disliked the Cubs for their tightfisted treatment of an ex-teammate, Mark Koenig; they hoped to humiliate them.

This was the setting for Babe Ruth’s appearance at the plate in the fifth inning. The Wrigley Field faithful cheered encouragement to Cub pitcher Charlie Root. Ruth, belly advancing in front of his dainty feet, walked to the plate and dug into the lefthanders’ batter’s box. (I have a seat behind the third-base dugout with an unimpeded view of Ruth’s round face.) One strike; then another.

Suddenly, according to popular account, Ruth pointed to the stands, predicting with his gesture a home run on the next pitch. Root’s right-hand delivery met the thirty-seven-year-old Bambino’s bat head on; the ball arced into the stands for a home run; Ruth had “called his shot”!

Is this true? Eyewitness accounts differ. Maybe Ruth had nothing so specific in mind. But what if he did? It would be a stunning achievement. As others have written, even hitting a major leaguer’s pitched ball may be the single most difficult of all athletic feats. Home runs are another matter altogether. A fairly typical home-run champion of our own day might hit a home run every thirteen or fourteen official at bats—every fifteen plate appearances including bases on balls. In his entire career, Ruth averaged one home run every 14.6 plate appearances, in the 1932 season one every 14.3. So the odds against even the mighty Babe smacking one over the fence were too long for most betting men. What humiliation if he had struck out!

But did Babe Ruth worry about odds? If so, what bold defiance of the averages! My mind’s eye sees an unmistakable, if casual, gesture, as though to say, “seven ball in the side pocket. ” Only those who have held both a pool cue and a Louisville Slugger in their hands can realize the monumental gap between calling for the one and calling for the other.

One of the greatest moments of bravado in our history, and I would have wanted to judge for myself what happened.

Robert L. Beisner, Chairman, Department of History, American University.

I would have enjoyed witnessing the private conversations between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the young congressman from Texas, Lyndon Johnson.

There were a considerable number of these informal talks, and not merely because Roosevelt was fond of Johnson. In explaining the frequency with which the President would invite Johnson for breakfast chats (with the President sitting up in bed with a blue Navy cape around his shoulders) and to the Oval Office (Johnson had already set his sights on the White House, and one can only imagine his feelings during those conversations in that bright, sunny room in which he longed to sit in his own right), Roosevelt’s aide James H. Rowe said: “You’ve got to remember that these were two great political geniuses,” and that FDR could talk to LBJ on a level on which he could talk to few men. “A most remarkable young man,” the President said shortly after he first met the twenty-eight-year-old congressman from the remote Texas hill country, and familiarity reinforced that opinion. Roosevelt not only told Harold Ickes that Johnson was “the kind of uninhibited young pro he would have liked to have been as a young man” (and might have been “if he hadn’t gone to Harvard”), but added that “this boy could well be the first Southern President.” To anyone interested as I am in the inner workings of politics, these talks between the President who was already such a master of the subject and the young man who was already known as “the wonder kid of politics” would have been fascinating. Lady Bird Johnson says that “every time” her husband came back from the White House, “he was on a sort of high. ” Listening to those conversations would have given me a high, too.

Robert A. Caro, author of The years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power.

The scene is not America, it is London. It is late evening of December 7, 1941, and Winston Churchill has just heard the news of Pearl Harbor. “So we had won after all,” he said, “England would live, Britain would live; the Commonwealth and the Empire would live.… Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious we should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. Hitler’s fate was sealed, Mussolini’s fate was sealed.” The next day he went to the House of Commons to make the announcement. That is the scene I should most like to have been a part of, the address I should most like to have heard.

Listen to Churchill, and recall, as you do, that sonorous voice, the veritable voice of History and, as it turned out, the voice of Doom: “The enemy has attacked with an audacity which may spring from recklessness, but which may also spring from a conviction of strength. The ordeal to which the English-speaking world and our heroic Russian Allies are being exposed will certainly be hard.… Yet when we look around us over the sombre panorama of the world, we have no reason to doubt the justice of our cause or that our strength and will-power will be sufficient to sustain it. “We have at least four fifths of the population of the globe upon our side. We are responsible for their safety and their future. In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.”

Henry Steele Commager, Professor Emeritus and John W. Simpson Lecturer, Amherst College. Author of, most recently, The Empire of Reason.

I would like to have been present on that post-election morning in 1948 when Harry S. Truman heard that he had won over the invincible Thomas Dewey.

I would love to have seen his face and heard his feisty remarks. His victory was so personal and so double-edged it proved how wrong we all were about the man. In the campaign he was underestimated and demeaned. We were oblivious to his nature, his strong characteristics. He refused to accept defeat, he came out fighting. He had faith in himself and his purpose, he ran a remarkable underdog campaign. He captured the imagination of America and pulled off one of the most amazing campaign upsets in American history. We should have learned from this victory never to underestimate this man again, this haberdasher from Independence, Missouri, who grew in the job and made the tough decisions at a time when our nation needed tough decisions.

Time is giving us a more constructive historical perspective of Harry Truman. Many of us are now cognizant of how wrong we were about him. I would love to have seen his face on the morning that was the beginning of his triumph and our future understanding of him.

Victor Gotbaum, Executive Director, District Council 37, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO.

I would like to have watched Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I make this choice because I was there—in spirit, at least. I have always been somewhat split between North and South, by parentage if not conviction. It happens that I was visiting Louisiana relatives that weekend, or whatever it was, that included July 4, 1964—the act was passed in June, but the actual signing took place July 2. On that day some of the rektives had taken me out yachting, and we were anchored at Pass Christian. Some people were talking about the civil rights workers who had disappeared. Somebody said they were probably buried a long way down in Mississippi soil. I was not sure if the speaker thought that good or bad: I was busy trying to make out the strange flags that were being flown by a lot of our neighbors.

“What’s that?” I asked at last. “What’s that funny flag on that launch over there?”

They scoffed at me. “It’s the Confederate flag,” they explained at last.

Then word came through on the radio about the signing.

Emily Hahn, free-lance writer. Author of, most recently, Love of Gold.