January 2011

Improbable it may seem, but an industrious, aquatic, fur-bearing rodent deserves a share of the credit for the first real effort at unifying Britain’s American colonies. Just as we tend to forget that the Americas were "discovered" by white people as a by-product of the search for pepper, the reason the beaver’s contribution has gone unsung all these years is, in the words of the journalist Henry Hobhouse, that “men have always liked to believe in their own influence.”

About 60 years ago, in July 1942, a 35-year-old coal miner from East Kentucky named Jim Hammittee packed up his belongings and traveled with his wife to Detroit, where he found work in a roller-bearing plant. “When I first came there, we only planned to stay till the war was over and then we’s moving back South,” he later recalled. “But by the time the war’s over in 1945, we had pretty well adjusted and accepted that way of life as the way we wanted to live. So we settled down....” The Hammittees raised three children in the Detroit suburbs. Except for trips to visit friends and kin, they never returned to their native South.

PALMER RAIDS—1919-20

As part of the Red Scare, thousands of suspected radicals are rounded up by FBI agents and auxiliaries. The adverse public reaction teaches J. Edgar Hoover a lesson in professionalism and highlights for the nation the issue of maintaining civil liberties during a crisis.

JOHN DILLINGER—1934

The hunt for the famous bank robber pushes the federal government into criminal law enforcement. The FBI gains full-fledged police powers during the investigation, and the resulting G-man myth shapes public perception of the Bureau for years.

ALGER HISS—1949

Three hundred FBI agents gather evidence against the State Department official accused of perjury over his Communist-party involvement. The Bureau’s assistance helps give credence to the Red Scare that culminates in the McCarthy hearings five years later.

COINTELPRO—1956

When American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, Robert S. Mueller III, had been at his post for just one week. Suddenly, he found himself responsible for both investigating the gravest crime in American history and for preventing further attacks.

The R/B River Explorer, America’s only hotel barge, is a red, white, and blue whale of a vessel. At 590 feet long and 54 feet wide, it could swallow whole schools of the brightly painted narrow boats and barges that travel the waterways of Britain and Europe. Consisting of two former petroleum barges lashed together and pushed by Miss Nari, a powerful 140-foot towboat, River Explorer ’s blocky shape betrays her commercial past, despite the softening effect of bunting and pennants. The hybrid is the invention of Eddy Conrad, a 62-year-old onetime towing operator and present-day visionary based in New Orleans. “I designed this whole project on two barges I didn’t own.” Conrad had never been on a passenger ship of any kind, and to explain his leap into new territory, he offers a cryptic analogy: “It’s like the Protestants.”

Remember September 11? Or rather, remember how it was supposed to change us all, and for the better? Among all the predictions was one that held that it would lead to “the end of irony,” the sort of earnest prognostication that is bound to seem ironic in retrospect. Yet an even more civic-minded call came from Robert D. Putnam, who let us know that this was our chance to get back to the spirit of World War II.

Dr. Putnam is the Harvard professor who blazed his way up the bestseller lists in 1995 with Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Citing the decline in participation in everything from political activism and labor unions to bridge clubs and bowling leagues, Putnam claimed that America was experiencing an alarming loss of “social capital” and “generalized reciprocity—the practice of helping others with no expectation of gain.” We were letting the very ligaments of our society ossify, abandoning our traditions as a vibrant, participatory, community-based democracy, and becoming a nation of disaffected and distrustful loners.

In March 1809, two months before his death, a sickly Thomas Paine was refused a plot at a Quaker cemetery in New York City. The pamphleteer and political activist, who had incited the colonies to rebel with Common Sense and horrified Christians with his deist The Age of Reason , resigned himself to being interred on his farm in nearby New Rochelle. He predicted to a friend, “The farm will be sold, and they will dig up my bones before they be half rotten.”

Paine was prescient. The man who unearthed him was William Cobbett, a radical English writer who wrote in 1819, “Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America. There, however, he shall not lie unnoticed much longer. He belongs to England.”