|
THE TIME MACHINE
|
Two Hundred Years Ago
On February 24 Congress appointed John Adams to be the new nation’s first minister to its late enemy, Britain. Two weeks later, on March 10, Thomas Jefferson was named minister to France.
These appointments came only two years after the signing of the Treaty of Paris and just two years before the opening of the Constitutional Convention. Both men would miss the latter because of their diplomatic duties; Adams had been present at the former and had remained in Europe ever since. For the last year the two friends had, with Benjamin Franklin, been touring the Continent seeking to forge commercial treaties with the various powers.
Adams learned of his new appointment in April, Jefferson in May. Jefferson was succeeding Franklin, who was ready for retirement, and the appointment pleased him immensely. He reacted by throwing a huge party at his hotel in Paris with a luminous guest list including John and Abigail Adams, their son John Quincy Adams, Capt. John Paul Jones, and the Marquis and Marquise de Lafayette. Benjamin Franklin would have attended but for his poor health, which kept him at nearby Passy.
Adams greeted his new job in a less exuberant mood. He had very much wanted the post, but his spirit was dampened when he learned from Elbridge Gerry, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, that Congress had, while considering his appointment, listened to arguments that Adams was too vain for the position. His response was to pen a remarkably forthright, confessional letter to Gerry on the subject of vanity —which he apparently thought better of ever sending.
It began: “The Imputation of a weak Passion has made so much Impression upon me, that it may not be improper to say a little more about it.” Far from denying his vanity, Adams laid it right out, describing it as “although a Weakness and, if you will a Vice, a real Proof of a valuable Character. It is even a Vanity which arises from the Testimony of a good Conscience. When a man is conscious of Services and Exertions, from the purest Principles of Virtue & Benevolence and looks back on a course of Years, Spent in the Service of other Men, without Attention to himself, when he recollects Sacrifices, Sufferings and dangers, which have fallen in his Way, and Sees himself preserved through all and his labours crown’d with transcendant Success there arises a Satisfaction, and sometimes a Transport which he must be very wise indeed, if he can at all times conceal….If I were to say that I have felt this Consciousness, and experienced this Joy, I should be chargeable with Vanity, although you and every Man who knows me, must know it to be true, and that it is impossible it should be otherwise. … I never knew but one Man who pretended to be wholly free from it, or whom any body thought to be so and him I know to be in his heart the vainest Man, and the falsest Character I have ever met with in life. The Pretension to have none of it is affectation and gross Hypocrisy.
“When a Man is hurt he loves to talk of his Wound, and I knew of no other way to account for this very Letter, which you see is intended only for you, and as it is not worth copying cannot be made shorter.”
The vain, false man referred to was Benjamin Franklin.
|
|
One Hundred Years Ago
On February 28 was born a business that would become over the next century one of the richest on earth: the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone only nine years before, but since then one of the most sweeping technological revolutions of all time had occurred.
Bell had received the patent for his new device on March 7, 1876, three days before he actually got the phone to work and used it to summon his assistant, Watson. In June of the same year he displayed his invention at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, and by the end of the year the device was known around the world. Nonetheless, Bell was unsuccessful in his attempt to sell all rights in the telephone to Western Union for one hundred thousand dollars.
In July 1877 the Bell Telephone Company was formed; two days later Bell was married, and he and his bride sailed off for England, where he demonstrated the apparatus for Queen Victoria. Back home the telephone was quickly becoming big business, and Western Union, in an abrupt about-face, was trying to get part of it any way it could, but mainly by challenging Bell’s patents. By now telephone wires were already darkening the skies above streets all across the nation.
By 1881—five years after the telephone was invented—only nine cities in America with populations of over ten thousand still lacked a telephone exchange. That year the first long-distance service began over wire stretched between Boston and Providence, and Bell bought the Western Electric company as a manufacturing arm. By 1884 one could pick up a phone in New York and talk to Boston.
American Telephone and Telegraph was founded in 1885, as a subsidiary of American Bell, the parent company. Its purpose was to develop the rapidly expanding long-distance lines. By 1899 Bell had prevailed in more than six hundred patent-infringement cases filed by would-be phone inventors and developers; had survived the crippling blizzard of ’88, which had wiped out most phone service throughout the Northeast; had introduced the pay phone, the automatic dial, and numerous other improvements in service; and was struggling to stay ahead of a growing legion of independent competitors springing up since the expiration of its original patents. Yet the company was still thwarted by the corporation laws of Massachusetts, under which the phone business had first been chartered. Bell needed vast amounts of capital to continue its expansion, but Massachusetts law required that any new capitalization be approved by the state legislature, and the company’s holdings in its subsidiaries were strictly limited. New York State, the home of AT&T, had much more liberal laws, so the directors of Bell, in a deft piece of corporate sleight of hand, simply transferred the parent’s assets to AT&T, folded American Bell into its former subsidiary, and moved their offices from Boston to New York. The switch took place on December 30,1899, and expansion proceeded unabated.
By the late twentieth century AT&T would become by many measures the biggest corporation on earth, the only major phone system anywhere not run by a government, and the subject of perhaps the most far-reaching antitrust agreement in history. Perhaps most tellingly, it would become the only major company known to millions by a familial, even intimate, but totally unofficial name, a name that makes light of the behemoth but at the same time hints at the complex relations one has with one’s closest of kin: Ma Bell.
|
|
Twenty-five Years Ago
Four freshmen from the state Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, went to a local Woolworth’s together on February 1, made several purchases, took seats at the lunch counter, and ordered coffee.
As they expected, being black, they were refused service. But they stayed in their seats until the store closed. The store’s manager told a reporter: “They can just sit there. It’s nothing to me.” The next day they came back. By the fourth day, some whites had joined them. A week later, students in other North Carolina cities were following suit, and within three months, thousands of whites and blacks had taken up this new form of nonviolent protest and were sitting-in at segregated lunch counters, hotels, libraries, churches, movie theaters, and other establishments across the South, and in the North as well. By the end of the summer more than sixteen hundred people had been arrested for taking part in the sit-ins, and blacks were being permitted into myriad places where they had never been allowed before.
The four Greensboro students had been inspired by an educational comic book entitled Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. It told of the events that began in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, when Rosa Parks had refused to move to the rear of a bus. Her arrest had sparked a successful citywide bus boycott led by King, then a little-known twenty-seven-year-old minister. The Greensboro sit-in not only gave the civil rights movement new momentum but also marked the beginning of widespread student activism and of massive white involvement in the cause of integration.
The Greensboro Woolworth’s gave up segregation three months after the boycott began.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
