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June 2004

200 Years Ago

On June 18 Alexander Hamilton—a Revolutionary leader, then a Framer of the Constitution and a farsighted Treasury Secretary, and now a successful New York lawyer and politician—received a polite but peremptory note from Aaron Burr, the Vice President of the United States. Burr called Hamilton’s attention to a letter that had been published in an Albany newspaper two months earlier. That letter, from a physician named Charles D. Cooper, said that Hamilton had called Burr “a dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government” (Burr had been running unsuccessfully for governor of New York at the time) and that he had privately expressed “a still more despicable opinion” of the Vice President. Burr demanded to know: Was this true?

In his reply two days later, Hamilton declined to answer Burr’s question. Without being told exactly what he was accused of saying, Hamilton explained, he could not confirm or deny the charge. Burr was not satisfied with this response, and the two men’s correspondence grew increasingly testy. Burr issued a challenge; seconds were recruited; an appointment was made.

Internet Piracy and Dickens and Melville 

“Yes, I read the illegal translation,” a Czech Internet correspondent known as “Hustey” wrote last summer, when the next, eagerly awaited book in J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—first appeared in bookstores. Hustey is part of a growing, worldwide fraternity of Internet users who seem to have come to the conclusion that theft is morally defensible, so long as it only involves intellectual property.

One J.C., a 36-year-old man from Kansas City, not only admitted his theft but threw in a review: “I thought it was a little slow until the second half, then it got much better”—a bit of chutzpah akin to having someone steal your car and then post a public notice complaining about its pickup.

A new museum houses a master’s photographs of how the technology that built America ended 

Drive in Transportation
Three modes of transportation in one picture—four, if you count submarine racing. 

(COURTESY OF THE O. WINSTON LINK MUSEUM)

One dour morning early this March I had to drive to eastern Pennsylvania. I’d heard that a patch of the sometime steel town of Bethlehem had been spruced up and now was a bower of postindustrial charm, so after my errand I made a detour and headed over to see it. I drove up a hill and across a bridge and came upon something so outside the proportions of the workaday world that I suffered a moment of utter incomprehension. It was like driving through a stand of trees and finding yourself on a prairie occupied by Darth Vader’s Death Star.

When does a single gaffe ruin a campaign?

Probably every American with access to a television, a radio, or a computer has heard the notorious howl with which Howard Dean ended his concession speech after the Democratic caucuses in Iowa. Dr. Dean’s weird outburst was immediately labeled a gaffe, comparable to the classic political gaffes of the past. And it was indeed comparable, being sudden, lingering—and completely ambiguous in terms of its actual consequences.

We should resist the tendency of the American media to superimpose a narrative on every event they cover.

Just what is a gaffe? It can be a gesture as much as a spoken word. Al Gore’s alleged eye rolling during his first 2000 debate comes to mind, or George H. W. Bush’s checking his watch during his last 1992 debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. Or it can be a photo op gone badly awry; see Michael Dukakis and tank. The use of outlandish words doesn’t help, as the Republican hopeful George Romney found out in the 1968 primary campaign, when he casually remarked that he had been “brainwashed” about Vietnam.

How Grand Rapids Regained its Grandeur

I’ve long held the notion that my lion-pawed oak dining table was a prime example of Grand Rapids furniture. Michigan’s second city is the birthplace of mass-produced furniture in America, but when I visited last summer, I didn’t see anything that resembled it. And I discovered a lot more to think about than tables and chairs. Except for Steelcase, the office furnishings conglomerate founded here in 1912, most of the business had decades ago moved to the American South, with its cheaper labor costs. The once-flourishing automobile-parts industry had similarly declined. Yet I found the place still humming with the kind of energy and optimism that had attended its birth.

50 Years Ago

Integration Occurs
The first day of classes at a newly integrated school at Fort Myer Army base in Virginia, September 1954. 

(COPYRIGHT BETTMANN/CORBIS)

On May 17 the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The plaintiff, Oliver Brown, had been denied the right to send his daughter to the public school nearest her home. Instead she had to attend an all-black school farther away. The Topeka board’s policy complied with the “separate but equal” doctrine, as set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). But as Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for a unanimous Court, explained in finding for Brown: “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

A student of the speech that changed Lincoln’s career visits the place where he gave it

New York City’s Cooper Union, I was not yet a teen-ager, but I was already mad to learn everything I could about the most famous man who ever appeared there. Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 Cooper Union address—his first and only campaign speech in New York—dramatically introduced the Western leader to the East. For Lincoln, it proved a personal and political triumph.

I knew few details about this milestone speech when I made my own maiden pilgrimage. But even in the early 1960s—it was, after all, the era of the Civil War Centennial—I already knew that it had somehow helped make Lincoln President. Today, having just spent three years researching and writing a new book on this very subject (Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President), and after countless return visits, I can confirm that my infant impressions were pretty much on the mark.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do,” Mark Twain once instructed his readers. “So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.”

In this eighteenth year of our special travel issue we feature explorers and dreamers, most notably the writer Rachel Snyder. Last spring, fresh from covering the war in Afghanistan, she wrote to the editor, Richard Snow, suggesting an article on America’s first highway, the Camino Real: “I’ve just come across something that I find absolutely fascinating… . a cultural system inscribed on the land itself.” Joined by Hal Jackson, a retired geologist, characterized by Snyder as “passionate about … dents and grooves in an old trail,” she set out from just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and wound up in Mexico City, a journey of some 1,800 miles taken during the dead of summer. They would be “driving the entire trail,” Snyder wrote, but “walking in the applicable areas where there is no pavement.” If that sunbaked detective hunt in the desert isn’t Twain’s sailing away from the safe harbor, what is?

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