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TIME MACHINE
BY FREDERIC D. SCHWARZ
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Twenty-five Years Ago
A Ford in Your Future
On December 6 Gerald R. Ford was inaugurated as Vice President, becoming the first to attain that office under the terms of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, enacted in 1967. Spiro T. Agnew’s resignation two months earlier had left America without a Vice President for the seventeenth time, and while the Republic had managed to survive on the previous sixteen occasions, this time it actually meant something. With President Richard M. Nixon getting mired deeper in Watergate every day, chances were good that whoever became his Vice President would soon succeed to the Presidency.
As the first unelected Vice President, Ford—the House minority leader and a long-time congressman from Michigan—faced much greater scrutiny than any of his elected predecessors. While the voting public usually considers nothing more profound than which candidate got off the best wisecrack in the vice-presidential debate, Congress sent out 350 FBI agents, who dug up seventeen hundred pages of evidence. One zealous G-man even interviewed a high school football opponent to see if Ford had been a dirty player. As expected, the investigation found Ford to be an unexceptionable man of ordinary capabilities, which certainly made him qualified (if not overqualified) to be Vice President. Ford had been chosen over better-known men like Ronald Reagan, John Connally, and Nelson Rockefeller precisely because of his relentlessly vanilla background.
During the confirmation hearings Ford reiterated his intention of retiring from public office in 1976. When asked about a pardon of Nixon should he succeed to the Presidency, Ford replied, “I do not think the public would stand for it.” Both houses approved his nomination by lopsided margins, and in his Inaugural address he showed his Michigan roots by saying, “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.”
As Vice President, Ford found the demands on his time oppressive and the Secret Service’s presence stifling. (Things were worse for his daughter Susan, still in high school, who suffered every teenager’s worst nightmare when her father realized he could check Secret Service logbooks to find out what time she had gotten in the night before.) The greatest strain of all was trying to remain loyal to his boss. As Nixon’s emotional stability deteriorated along with his political position, Ford got used to being called into the President’s office and patiently listening to him rant and ramble for hours. At first Ford believed Nixon to be innocent of wrongdoing, but as the revelations and evasions continued, the Vice President had to refrain from asking too many questions for fear of learning things he didn’t want to know.
One big blow came shortly after Ford’s Inauguration when a panel of experts reported on an eighteen-minute gap in a subpoenaed Oval Office tape. Nixon’s advocates had accused his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, of accidentally causing the gap by pressing the wrong pedal during a telephone call. When Woods protested that she had been on the phone for only five minutes, the President’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, scoffed: “I’ve known women that think they’ve talked for five minutes and then have talked an hour.”
On January 15, however, the panel reported that the tape contained five separate erasures that could not have been created in the way Woods recalled. Since the gap covered the time when Nixon and his aide H. R. Haldeman were discussing how to respond to the Watergate burglary, suspicion of hanky-panky was widespread. It remains so to this day among those who still care. Nothing was ever proved, however, and Nixon always disclaimed responsibility for the gap. (Ford later wrote that he believed Nixon’s denial “because I knew he wasn’t adroit mechanically.”) The culprit may have been an overzealous subordinate—always a problem for Nixon—but in the end it didn’t matter. The tapes that remained untampered with would provide all the evidence his accusers needed.
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Fifty Years Ago
The Geeks Have a Word for It
As 1948 came to an end, America’s intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals were avidly discussing the book that would launch a thousand compound words, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by Norbert Wiener. The book had come out in the fall but took a while to catch on as readers struggled with its daunting mix of mathematical notation (which pops up without warning around page 60), formal logic, metaphysics, neurophysiology, psychopathology, electronics, and socialism, all set forth in orotund sentences of baffling length and complexity. Like the latter-day Goedel, Escher, Bach and The Name of the Rose, Cybernetics became known as a book that millions bought and dozens finished. In time, however, enough readers either fought their way through or skipped the hard parts to make Cybernetics the hottest thing in faculty lounges, coffeehouses, and dormitory rooms across the country.
Wiener was a former child prodigy who had graduated from Tufts in 1909 at the age of fourteen. As a boy he had had the good fortune to be overshadowed by an even greater whiz kid, William James Sidis, who lectured at Harvard on four-dimensional bodies in 1910 at age eleven. Unlike Wiener, Sidis soon tired of academic life and fled from public view, and however abstruse Cybernetics may seem, it cannot help being more interesting than Sidis’s only publication, a three-hundred-page treatise on streetcar transfers. Wiener went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard (after getting kicked out of Cornell) in 1913 and eventually ended up in the mathematics department at MIT. Cybernetics brought together decades’ worth of his scattershot notions about intelligent machines, feedback, causality, geometry, perception, and just about everything else.
Nowadays critics tend to agree that Wiener was a much better thinker than writer. One biographer calls Cybernetics “a collection of misprints, wrong mathematical statements, mistaken formulas, splendid but unrelated ideas, and logical absurdities.” Another says: “In retrospect it is hard to understand what all the fuss was about.” Despite its flaws, Cybernetics remains influential among those stout souls with the patience to disentangle Wiener’s worthwhile thoughts from the morass. Still, the book’s most pervasive legacy is the first half of its title.
As the inventor of a new field, Wiener had the privilege of naming it. Since his ideas were all related (quite loosely in some cases) to the concept of control and guidance, he came up with a word based on the Greek kubernetes, meaning “helmsman” or “steersman.” Wiener later learned that comparable terms had been used in the 184Os by the French physicist André-Marie Ampère (cybernetique) and a Polish writer named Trentowski (cypernetyki). Further inquiry discovered a similar word in one of Plato’s dialogues.
The usefully vague neologism spread rapidly, and in the 1950s and 1960s it seemed to appear in the title of every book with pretensions of deepness: Psycho-Cybernetics, Philosophy and Cybernetics, even The Cybernetic ESP Breakthrough. Like the more recent postmodern, the word was slippery enough to apply to almost any situation, and if it was used with sufficient assurance, readers or listeners would blame themselves when they didn’t understand what it meant.
Compounds began to spring up too, such as cybernation (control by machines), cyborg (a human-machine hybrid, contracted from cybernetic organism), and the cyberpunk school of science fiction. But it took the Internet to make a prefix denoting control grow completely out of control. Once everyone had heard all the puns that could be made from the phrase information superhighway, cyber- became the favorite way to indicate that something was related to computers. Hackers were said to be in cyberspace instead of the more precise but less impressive wasting time with video games. A tabloid headline used cyberslut to describe a woman accused of making adulterous assignations via the Internet. The 1998 Manhattan telephone directory lists more than fifty businesses that start with the prefix, including the menacing Cybergrrl and the mysterious Cyberitalian. There is no telling how Wiener, who died in 1964, would have reacted to the modern bastardization of the word he coined. It’s likely, though, that he would have taken enthusiastically to Cyberspace, whose constant jumping from topic to topic can be every bit as engrossing and annoying as his book.
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Gidget Meets Frosty
On January 4, 1949, residents of Southern California awoke to find lawns covered with frost, pipes and car radiators frozen, and breath condensing into clouds when they ventured outside. On the way to work, drivers wrestled with the unfamiliar sensation of skidding on frozen pavement. The worst cold wave in anyone’s memory had brought unfathomable temperatures across the entire region: 28 in Los Angeles (that’s Fahrenheit), 23 in Pasadena, 22 in Palm Springs. Even San Diego recorded an overnight low of 27. A dense layer of smog covered the area, this time not from cars but from ten million kerosene heaters lit by citrus growers in an effort to save their crops. Although the smog was thick enough to close Los Angeles Harbor and Long Beach Airport and leave an oily film on clothes and furniture, the heaters were mostly futile against temperatures that plunged into the teens in many farming districts.
The freeze came on the heels of an equally unusual Southern California event: a Rose Bowl victory by Northwestern. After the Wildcats’ 20–14 defeat of California, a train carrying hundreds of fans got stuck in a blizzard in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The enterprising Northwestern students took advantage of the enforced layover to write and perform a short play. With equal resourcefulness, a Hollywood press agent converted the foul weather into a photo opportunity. The next week’s Life magazine featured a picture of a blonde starlet named Cleo Moore, who was holding a snowball and either smiling or grimacing as flakes fell to earth past her skimpy two-piece sunsuit. Miss Moore parlayed the shot into a career in 1950s low-budget films with titles like One Girl’s Confession and Women’s Prison, proving that even in Southern California, it’s an ill wind that blows no good.
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One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago
The Monroe Doctrine
On December 2, in his annual message to Congress, President James Monroe declared North and South America to be off-limits for any further European colonial expansion. “The American continents,” he said, “by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” Those powers could keep the American colonies they still had, Monroe said, but any attempt to expand them, establish new ones, or retake old ones, anywhere in the hemisphere, would be considered an act of hostility toward the United States. The President called his principle the American System; in the 185Os it became better known as the Monroe Doctrine.
The doctrine had been inspired by the emergence of independent republics in the former Spanish colonies of Buenos Aires, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru after Spain’s devastation in the Napoleonic Wars. The United States had recognized the new nations, but European countries, clinging to the old order, were reluctant to follow suit. When a French army invaded Spain in April 1823, overthrew the constitutional government, and restored Ferdinand VII to the throne, observers on both sides of the Atlantic feared that France’s next step would be to retake Spain’s former colonies.
Britain, which dominated trade with Latin America, was just as concerned as the United States. In August it suggested a pact between the two countries to jointly resist incursions into the region. Most of the resistance would necessarily come from Britain, whose globe-spanning navy dwarfed the United States’s tiny fleet. Monroe was interested, but Secretary of State John Quincy Adams opposed making the United States “a cock-boat to Britain’s man-of-war.” In November the question became moot when news arrived that Britain had abandoned the proposal. Monroe and Adams surmised, correctly, that France had manifested a lack of interest in taking Latin America.
Thus Monroe could propound his doctrine with little fear it would be tested anytime soon. And a good thing too: At the time, the U.S. military was no match for the fighting forces of Europe. Having witnessed the British burning of Washington less than a decade before, Monroe knew the United States could still barely defend itself, let alone the rest of the hemisphere.
France was not the only source of concern. The Monroe Doctrine also addressed the United States’s first major issue in transpacific diplomacy. Back in 1799 Russia had established the Russian America Company to exploit natural resources from the Pacific Northwest. Most of its operations took place in Alaska, but in 1821 Czar Alexander claimed the American coast all the way down to fifty-one degrees north latitude, about 140 miles north of the present Canadian border, barred all foreign ships from the area, and declared a monopoly on hunting, fishing, and trading.
Much of that territory was also claimed by the United States and Britain, and although only a handful of Europeans lived there at the time, Monroe knew it would become increasingly significant in the long term. In the short term Russia’s rulers were known to have designs on California (which was then a part of Mexico) and a strong aversion to democracy. While the Monroe Doctrine was not a direct challenge to the czar, it did serve notice of the United States’s determination to check Russia’s expansionism. In 1825 Russia agreed to restrict its claims to the area north of 54°40'.
The Monroe Doctrine stands out today as the United States’s first confident assertion of its importance in global affairs. Latin Americans welcomed it as a blow for democracy against royalist Europe. Years later, however, the doctrine would grow far beyond Monroe’s intentions into the United States’s self-appointment as an all-powerful hemispheric police officer. In that form the Monroe Doctrine would be far less popular among our neighbors to the south.
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Little Santa Claus
On December 23 the Troy, New York, Sentinel published an unsigned poem under the heading “Account of a Visit From St. Nicholas.” A prefatory editor’s note confessed, “We know not to whom we are indebted for the following. …” The poem, better known today as “The Night Before Christmas,” was an instant hit, and the Sentinel, along with other newspapers, began reprinting it every Christmas. In January 1829, responding to a query about who wrote the poem, the Sentinel described its author as “a gentleman of more merit as a scholar and a writer than many more of more noisy pretensions.” For those who were stumped by the Sentinel’s word games, an 1837 anthology finally identified the poet, an affluent New York City landowner and classical scholar named Clement Clarke Moore.
Moore made an unlikely composer of doggerel. His previously published works included America’s first Hebrew lexicon, a refutation of Thomas Jefferson’s religious views, an inquiry into America’s foreign shipping trade, and a translation from the French of Alexandre Henri Tessier’s A Complete Treatise on Merinos and Other Sheep. Moore wrote most of “A Visit From St. Nicholas” while shopping for a turkey on Christmas Eve 1822. He committed it to paper when he got home and then recited it to his family. A houseguest, Harriet Butler, of Troy, asked permission to copy the poem, and the next Christmas it appeared in her hometown paper.
Moore’s poem added several important features to the traditional St. Nicholas legend, a centuries-old accretion of religious stories and pagan myths. In 1809 Washington Irving had introduced the idea of a benevolent gift-bearing St. Nicholas flying through the air in a wagon. An 1821 children’s book published by a friend of Moore had pictured “Santeclaus” in a flying sleigh pulled by a single reindeer. Moore increased the number of deer to eight (which is much more plausible) and gave them names. He also introduced Santa’s familiar ruddy cheeks, red nose, white beard, and large belly, modeling his features after those of an old Dutchman who lived nearby.
In Moore’s version the reindeer flew only when they needed to get up to the roof; otherwise they pulled the sleigh along the ground. Bright children may have wondered why St. Nicholas didn’t just use the door, though the brightest ones surely realized that grown-ups do many things that don’t make sense. In any case Santa’s unnecessarily dramatic mode of entry required him to be the size of an elf, which accounts for the poem’s “miniature sleigh” and “tiny reindeer.” Indeed, most nineteenth-century illustrators drew a doll-size Santa Claus until the jumbo, roly-poly Thomas Nast version began to take shape in the 1860s. How such a runt could carry gifts much larger than a Cracker Jack prize was never explained, but here again, sharp children were wise enough not to question the source of their wealth.
Over the years Moore’s sturdy epic has been parodied with slang, dialect, and foreign-language variants; nights after Christmas; nights before Hanukkah and Kwanzaa; political and topical satires; musical adaptations; and innumerable versions of the poem as this or that famous person would have written it. In the last category is a memorable prose version written by James Thurber in the style of Ernest Hemingway (“‘Who is it?’ mamma asked. ‘Some guy,’ I said. ‘A little guy.’”). The secret of its continued popularity, perhaps, is that most people encounter it for the first time when they are too young to be jaded. Though Moore did not object to the unexpected fame that his spur-of-the-moment composition brought, it is ironic that a man of his scholarly accomplishments is remembered for something so whimsical—and that the deeply religious Moore, who endowed a theological seminary and a number of churches, created one of the most inescapable elements of our modern secular Christmas.
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