January 2011

Two notes on the April/May 2002 issue. In the “History Now” section, Julie M. Fenster refers to the Plymouth hood ornament as a “little boat.” It was in fact a representation of the ship that supposedly landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Though the Mayflower was not large, one can argue that it deserves better than being called a “little boat.”

In the otherwise excellent “Business of America” column about Enron and Henry Ford, John Steele Gordon perpetuates an enduring myth: that Henry Ford conceived the assembly line. Ransom E. Olds (Oldsmobile) created the first progressive automobile assembly line and, beginning in 1901, used it to produce cars. Ford and his production engineers expanded and perfected the concept.

Sally Denton replies: Like my forthcoming book on the subject, the article was based on literally thousands of pages of primary as well as secondary sources, many of them newly discovered, and was hardly the narrow recapitulation of contemporaneous anti-Mormon diatribes Mr. Briggs would like to believe.

Sally Denton’s article on the Mountain Meadows Massacre (October 2001) appears to be based on three main sources: the Salt Lake Tribune reports of the 187Os, The Confessions of John D. Lee ( 1877), and recent Salt Lake Tribune articles on the continuing Mountain Meadows saga. Using these limited sources, she unwittingly perpetuates partisan myths of the nineteenth century while spreading a few legends of her own.

MASSACRE MASSACRE NOT SO LITTLE

25 YEARS AGO

August 4, 1977 Congress creates the Department of Energy, the government’s twelfth cabinet-level department. James Schlesinger is later confirmed as the first Secretary of Energy.

August 12, 1977 NASA’s prototype space shuttle, Enterprise , makes its first free flight. After the craft is launched from the back of a modified Boeing 747 at an altitude of 24,000 feet, Fred Haise and Gordon Fullerton guide it successfully to a landing.

September 7, 1977 The United States and Panama sign a treaty under which the latter will take over the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone at the end of 1999.

75 YEARS AGO

August 2, 1927 With characteristic brevity, President Calvin Coolidge announces, “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.”

100 YEARS AGO

On September 23, 1953, Senator Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate for vice president, took to the airwaves in an attempt to save his political career. The Californian had been a rising star ever since he exposed the Communist spy Alger Hiss in 1948. Two years later, he defeated a popular Democratic incumbent to gain his Senate seat. But now, he was accused of maintaining a “secret fund” of $18,235—the equivalent of about $125,000 today—with contributions from wealthy California businessmen.

The existence of the fund was not in dispute, but its nature was. Democrats called it a “slush fund” and hinted at corruption and high living, while Republicans said that such funds were common and Nixon had not spent any of it on himself. After a week of maneuvering by party bosses and equivocation by the presidential candidate, Dwight D. Elsenhower, Nixon announced that he would make an address on television, which would be paid for by the Republican National Committee.

After Shirley Sponsler of Perrysburg, Ohio, read our December 2000 interview with Geoffrey C. Ward, author of last year’s public television series on jazz, she wrote us: “I was especially interested in the part about Louis Armstrong. Your article told much about him, but there was one important characteristic you didn’t mention. In 1967 my brother Bruce Burkart and his family were traveling in New England. They stopped for the night at a motel where Armstrong was playing, but since they were very tired, they didn’t go to hear him. The next morning, as they were leaving their room, they saw a bus and people crowding around it. They thought it was probably Armstrong’s, and, indeed, a moment later he appeared. Bruce and his son Kevin walked over and introduced themselves, and Armstrong talked to them for several minutes, even with all the other people around. Bruce asked if he could take a picture. Armstrong then said, ‘Yes, but wouldn’t it be better if your son were in it with me?’

Saturday, July 28, 1945, dawned overcast and sultry in New York City. I’d missed my train from Grand Central Station to Bangor, Maine, where I was attending a summer camp for girls. A teenager alone, with time to kill until the next departure, I decided to do the one thing my father had refused me during my two-day visit: go to the top of the Empire State Building.

Looking out over the sooty window sills of his fourth-floor Madison Avenue apartment, I marveled at what was then known as “the eighth wonder of the world.” It rose above Manhattan’s landscape like tomorrow itself. In the sunlight, its windows sparkled like crystals, and at night like stars. “Daddy,” I pleaded, “please take me up there.”

“I don’t have time, honey.” He glanced at his new wife. “Carol?”

“Don’t you ask me to take her up there, Parker!” she snapped. “It’s not safe!”

In the aftermath of last September’s attacks, there was, for the first time in my memory, a good deal of talk about the War of 1812. This most underrated (in terms of both significance and intrinsic interest) of our national conflicts saw a number of humiliating military defeats and the destruction of a good part of the capital, and now we were being reminded that this was the last time such things had taken place on American soil.

This is both true and not true. Certainly, it was the last time a foreign power made a successful foray into the United States, but we should remember that the destruction of the Civil War, though brought about by our own hand, was immeasurably greater. In last December’s issue, James McPherson pointed out that 2 percent of the population died in the conflict; if that happened to us today, it would mean five and half million dead Americans.

How does a nation absorb such losses and continue to function?