January 2011

25 YEARS AGO

November 21, 1976 Philip Glass’s avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach has its American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

50 YEARS AGO

December 20, 1951 Researchers at an Idaho test facility generate the world’s first electricity from nuclear fission.

75 YEARS AGO

December 10, 1926 Vice President Charles G. Dawes is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his 1924 reconstruction plan for Germany. (Dawes was also a songwriter whose 1912 “Melody in A Major,” remade as “It’s All in the Game,” was a number one record for Tommy Edwards in 1958.)

100 YEARS AGO

November 28, 1901 Alabama adopts a new constitution that effectively disenfranchises African-Americans.

On December 21, 1901, The Saturday Evening Post published an article about immigration policy titled “The Case Against the Chinaman.” A federal law banning Chinese immits, in effect since 1882, had recently come before Congress for renewal, and the author of the article was vigorously in favor. With the ban in place, he said, “a desirable Caucasian population has flowed naturally into the State [of California].” The Chinese, by contrast, were a “sullen, non-assimilative people” who displaced “the sons and daughters of the pioneers” by working “incessantly… for the lowest wages.”

Under headings like “Why Yellow Citizens Are Undesirable” and “The Mongolian Immigrant a Social Parasite,” the article explained that the Chinese were nothing but “automatons wound up for work,” “mere machines” unsuitable for “a republic of men.” “Having no appreciation of the blessings of liberty,” it went on, “Chinamen can make no contribution to citizenship.”

mail@americanheritage.com IN VAIN? BEFORE TRICK OR TREAT THE LIBERATOR

In December 1990, the USS Virginia left Norfolk on what was supposed to be a short training exercise. We weren’t told where we were going until we were under way, but we’d been told to pack well, to check medical and dental readiness, and so on. Shortly after we were at sea, Captain Voorheis called for “all hands not actually on watch.” We gathered on the fantail and listened with the hair standing up on our backs as he told us we were going “where the rubber hits the road.” He invoked the great history of ships named Virginia and spoke about other events “upon which history turned.” Because of the logistics of moving a fleet, we were a little behind the main task force; the captain looked at his watch and told us that the air attack was in progress. We were joining the Gulf War.

Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman (finding his commander on the first night of Shiloh): Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we? Ulysses S. Grant: Yes. Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.

Our offices are ten blocks up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square Park, whose gateway is a triumphal arch designed in the 1890s by Stanford White, flanked by two statues of George Washington, one as soldier, one as president. It’s an unsatisfactory gateway because it is undergoing what seems to be an eternal restoration and, for years, has been caged by a chainlink fence.

To the casual visitor, terminal island in Los Angeles Harbor is no more than a complex of dull warehouses and empty lots. The waterfront may feature a lonely boat or two, and the streets suffer the occasional rumbling tractor trailer, but few people come here, adding to the gloom of this industrial neighborhood.

I see a very different place. I imagine a bustling main street with lively shops. I see people hurrying to their jobs and children playing in the schoolyard. I hear the voices of my family as they discuss their daily activities. Seventy-years ago, Terminal Island was the site of a Japanese fishing village and the home of my grandfather. Then, almost overnight in 1942, it was abandoned.

I spoke with Martin Scorsese in early September about his forthcoming movie Gangs of New York. The setting was the Park Avenue offices of his Cappa production company, where he was still hard at work, editing and finishing his film. The offices were spacious and well appointed, with shelves full of bound volumes of movie magazines and framed movie posters hanging on almost every wall. There were also two portraits, done in the manner of a mid-nineteenth-century society painter, one of a prosperous-looking man who might have been a merchant, the other of a mother and child, with red-blond hair. Scorsese told me that we’d see these being burned “right up to the eyes” during a looting scene in the movie.

If you go downtown in Manhattan to the offices of the old J. P. Morgan firm at the corner of Wall and Broad, you’ll see the pocked-marble scars of the first blow that terrorists struck at America’s financial heart, the Wall Street bombing of 1920. The country recovered amazingly well from that outrage, although no one was ever brought to justice for the crime, which was, until the Oklahoma City devastation, the most deadly terrorist attack in American history. On the very next day following the explosion, the Stock Exchange and curb trading resumed, however shakily. “Like a strong man who sticks to the line after binding up his wounds and sewing on his wound stripes,” reported the New York Sun, “Wall Street, from its lowly office boy to its most stately financier, went to work yesterday morning with head up and teeth set, determined to show the world that business will proceed as usual despite bombs.”

Generals are always prepared to fight the last war, as the durable and scornful proverb goes. But preparing to fight the last war is not necessarily a foolish thing to do. If military technology is stable—as was the case, for example, in the long age of black powder and fighting sail—the lessons of the last war probably retain their authority. There are exceptions: In a world in which firearms had barely changed for a century, Napoleon consistently beat opponents who tried fighting the last war. But Napoleons are rare. Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Marlborough, Eugene of Savoy, and the Duke of Wellington are famous for having very effectively fought the last war.