January 2011

Historical lessons are more like tea leaves than neon signs, so anyone who claims to see one clearly had best look again. My own imperfect vision conjures up two distinct pictures, one farsighted and one nearsighted.

The farsighted view suggests that our current national trauma is less ominous than several earlier challenges, to include the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. The fate of the American republic is not really at risk. As the shock of those horrible scenes subsides, history will restore a sense of proportion.

The nearsighted view, based on our own experiences during the Cold War, suggests that we should avoid making the campaign against terrorists into a moral crusade in the Evil Empire mode. That approach inevitably releases domestic demons of its own making and, with its rhetoric of limitless convictions, tempts us into military commitments we cannot keep.

By chance, I was reading Winston Churchill’s biography of the Duke of Marlborough. It is not quite top-drawer Churchill; the prose rolls and swaggers, but it is also marbled with phoniness. The climactic event, the War of the Spanish Succession, is very little like the war we are now in, with one important exception: The duke’s side is a coalition. Some of our wars were one-on-one—the Civil War, the Mexican War—and, in memory, we flatten out the others into the same binary pattern. Churchill gives a hint of the betrayals, cross-purposes, and fishing in troubled waters that everyone, except maybe Canada and Britain, will have in store for us.

A week after the attack on the World Trade Center, I met a young New York City fireman in a restaurant near St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he had just participated in a memorial service for his fellow firefighters who were killed in their heroic rescue efforts. He was obviously dazed as we talked about the terrible toll this catastrophe was taking on so many families. When I said good-bye, he grabbed my hand, and his expression took on a tone of utter determination as he said, “Mr. Brokaw, watch my generation now, just watch us.” It was for me another reminder of how much this generation had learned from the recent wave of interest in the World War II generation.

All the books, movies, and television accounts of that time have prompted many young people to wonder, What about my generation? Are we doing enough? They were the questions I encountered from my own children and others after I wrote The Greatest Generation . I detected a longing for the authentic tests of character their parents or grandparents had endured.

The attack on New York and Washington was shocking, but in one respect it was nothing new. The Western countries in the nineteenth century exuded a serene self-confidence in a certain kind of culture—the culture of rationality, diversity, open discussion, and change. That was the culture of liberalism. But World War I had a bad effect on the old self-confidence. With the nineteenth-century serenity in tatters, a vast fear arose in Europe. It was a fear that liberal culture was a monstrous lie and a crime, a fear that liberal culture would destroy the world unless new movements stepped forward up to oppose it. And new movements did step forward.

Lenin’s Bolshevism was the first of those new, antiliberal movements. It was followed by Italian Fascism, then by German Nazism, then by the Spanish movement to restore the Reign of Christ the King and by several other movements. And each of those movements went to war against the culture of liberalism, each in the belief that morality required nothing less.

The last time the U.S. military went into action, in Kosovo, it relied on jet-fighter aircraft and rockets or smart bombs and on electronic technology. The time before that, in Desert Storm, it relied on those same weapons plus ground troops using big, fast tanks, trucks, and jeeps. Earlier, in Vietnam, it relied on jet bombers and fighters, tanks, electronics, sea power, and ground troops equipped with modern weapons. In Korea it was air, sea, and ground firepower, plus maneuver. But this time, in Afghanistan, it will be a different kind of war, one that is more reminiscent of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, battles that were fought more than a half-century ago.

Has the present ever seemed more of a bully than it does just now? Not long after the terrorist attacks, The New York Times ran an essay that pretty much said that there was no way to view them historically. That is not, of course, a view this magazine is quick to embrace, and so we put a question to several historians: What can history tell us about how we are going to get through the time ahead? The answers appear below. Every one of them is reassuring—if not on what might be called the tactical level, certainly on the strategic one. That is to say, the differences of opinion they embody generate the kind of energy that has fueled this nation through good times and awful ones.

One day in 1994, a producer from 20th Century-Fox phoned a manufacturer in Waterbury, Connecticut, 30 miles southwest of Hartford. The Waterbury Button Company had produced the brass buttons for the uniforms worn by the Titanic ’s crew, and, more than 80 years later, the director James Cameron wanted them duplicated for his epic movie. The firm was able to accommodate him.

As displays at its Mattatuck Museum adeptly show, Waterbury, once a vigorous manufacturing center, calls itself the Brass City for good reason. Local entrepreneurs began working with the copperand-zinc alloy in 1802. They turned out buttons, buckles, pins, eyelets, thimbles, clockworks, lamps, and plumbing pipe. The product list was so extensive that by 1900 Waterbury was supplying well over two-thirds of America’s brass. The need for shell casings and related munitions products kept its plants booming through both World Wars, but then the brass age succumbed to an era of plastic, and Waterbury tarnished.

David McCullough’s John Adams (Simon & Schuster, 724 pages, $35.00) has accomplished the rarest of feats for a history book: becoming a bestseller without help from either a revisionist agenda or a juicy personal scandal. The reason is simple: writing that is as solid, straightforward, honest, and intelligent as Adams himself. McCullough captures the flavor of Adams’s life and times in a way few biographers can. His book will satisfy the most demanding scholar, and it may even convert those with a casual interest into history fans—something we at American Heritage are very much in favor of.

The largest witch-hunt in American history began in January 1692. Four girls from Salem Village, Massachusetts, began to exhibit strange behavior, and when they were asked to identify the source of their affliction, they named three women as witches. Today we would say they were suffering from hysteria, and a few days’ rest might have spared Salem three centuries of notoriety (while at the same time depriving it of a major tourist attraction). But to the Puritan mind, witchcraft was undeniably real.

Dozens of people had previously been convicted of witchcraft in New England, but what made the Salem episode uniquely tragic was the uncritical acceptance of “spectral evidence” — dreams or visions. Such evidence was considered as reliable as eyewitness testimony, and a special court eventually convicted 27 people and hanged 19 of them. Gov. William Phips dissolved the court after prominent citizens began to criticize the proceedings.