January 2011

61∗, released recently on video and in November on DVD, is about the 1961 home-run race between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. It is maybe the best baseball movie since Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham.

The real story is so perfect it requires no embellishment. Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane), 30, a blond god at the height of his power and popularity, is confronted by the first challenge to his sovereignty since coming to the Yankees: another blond god named Roger Maris (Barry Pepper, the sniper with the cracker accent in Saving Private Ryan). The real Maris beat out Mantle for the Most Valuable Player award in his first year on the team, 1960. The next year, each spurred on (and in large part aided) by the other man’s presence in the lineup, the two made an unprecedented assault on Babe Ruth’s single-season record of 60 home runs.

1) BEST: A Charlie Brown Christmas

(1965) Almost unique among Christmas specials, this show focuses on the real real meaning of Christmas—not caring, sharing, and giving, but the birth of Jesus. When Linus gets onstage and recites from the second chapter of Luke, the show suddenly and surprisingly shifts direction. Even more than the Vince Guaraldi music, that moment sets it apart.

2) STRANGEST: Star Wars Holiday Special

How’s this for a story? North Vietnam, 1972: Jane Fonda is in the midst of her visit when an N.V.A. officer gets an idea. He collects a group of American POWs from their septic dungeons, cleans them up, and has them mustered on parade to show his guest how well his embattled nation treats its prisoners. Fonda moves down the line, greeting each man with encouragements like “Aren’t you ashamed you killed babies?” as she shakes his hand. And, as she does, each POW palms her a scrap of paper with his Social Security number written on it. After all, she is an American; surely she’ll carry the message home to the families that their husband or son is alive.

Fonda shakes the last hand, then turns to the officer and gives him the fistful of messages. The POWs are beaten. Four die; one, Colonel Larry Carrigan, survives—just barely, but it is he who tells about the incident.

25 YEARS AGO

October 4, 1976 Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz resigns after a newspaper reports his racist remarks about blacks.

October 14–21, 1976 The United States makes a clean sweep of the Nobel Prizes, winning or sharing awards in chemistry, physics, medicine, economics, and literature. (No peace prize was awarded.)

50 YEARS AGO

October 24, 1951 Nearly 10 years after it began, President Harry S. Truman proclaims the formal end of the war between the United States and Germany.

125 YEARS AGO

October 13, 1876 Meharry Medical College, which for most of a century would remain one of a handful of medical schools for African-Americans, opens in Memphis, Tennessee.

150 YEARS AGO

On October 16, Booker T. Washington, the nation’s foremost black leader, dined at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt and his family. When word of the meal got out, Southern whites reacted with fury. The Memphis Scimitar called Roosevelt’s act “the most damnable outrage ever committed by any citizen of the United States.” Sen. “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina said, “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” The Macon Telegraph invoked a familiar specter: “A dinner given by one man to another in the home and privacy of his family means that the guest or his son may woo and win the host’s daughter.” Both Roosevelt and Washington received death threats.

In late 1942, when I was eleven, my parents and I arrived in the United States, refugees from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Fourteen members of my family were not as fortunate, and their ashes lie in the fields surrounding Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Sobibor.

Because of my early experiences, I kept my antennae out, looking for danger. No American president appeared more perilous than Richard Nixon. After his performance on the House Committee on Un-American Activities and his campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, I felt sick when he was first elected in 1968, and even worse when he won re-election four years later. When George Wallace of Alabama could not run for another term in 1966, he had put up his wife Lurleen in his place, and I studied the Constitution to see if Nixon could pull the same stunt. I found no rule against it anywhere, which added to my paranoia. Nor were my fears allayed when Nixon commissioned those pompous uniforms for the White House guards.

On August 3, 1999, a backhoe operator powered his shovel into a hard-packed mound of earth at a remote site in the southwestern corner of Utah, and to the shock of those watching, the bucket emerged with more than 30 pounds of human skeletons. The excavation, part of a renovation of a crumbling monument, had not only uncovered an old burial site but also exposed anew one of the enduring controversies in American history.

Some 30 years since the storied generation of Vietnam-era student activists began to graduate and disperse into the grown-up world, American universities seem to be emerging once again as a theater for protest and political engagement. Galvanized by debates over free trade and globalization, college students have lent critical muscle to efforts by labor and environmental groups aimed at raising public consciousness about the social costs of an unfettered market.

In 1517, Martin Luther took a stand on it. In 1926, Houdini made his final exit on it. In 1938, Orson Welles perpetrated a national hoax on it. Today, 70 percent of American households open their doors to strangers on it, 50 percent take photographs on it, and the nation drops more than six billion dollars celebrating it. The night is Halloween, of course, and the history of its rise is as unlikely as any ghost story. Halloween has become the darling of American holidays. Only Christmas outearns it. Only New Year’s Eve and Super Bowl Sunday outparty it.