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January 2011
When we scheduled John Lukacs’s article about Americans in Venice to run in the previous issue, we assumed that it would be the easiest of stories to illustrate: After all, that city has been living on its looks alone for more than two centuries now.
But getting pictures to work with a story is sometimes a mysterious and perplexing process, and when we had laid in the photographs we’d gathered, all of it—the lagoon, those clusters of prettily tilting poles, those melting spires—looked like calendrical boilerplate.
Now what? We talked it over and decided to illustrate the story entirely with photographs of Americans in Venice over the years. That meant going to Bettmann. And as was very often the case with Bettmann, the results were terrific: the young Eleanor Roosevelt on her honeymoon; an equally young Jack Kennedy feeding pigeons in St. Mark’s; and the only picture of Woody Alien and Soon-Yi that we’ve ever had occasion to run.
Start by calling the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts for a calendar of events (800-275-4278) or visit its Web site, www.capemaymac.org. This year the center is sponsoring a Spring Festival complete with house and garden tours, April 28-29 and May 4-6; a World War II History Cruise (exploring nearby bunkers, gun emplacements, and submarine lookout towers), June 6; and Cape May’s celebrated Victorian Week, October 5-14. The Web site also has links to historic inns and hotels. The Welcome Center on Lafayette Street has maps and brochures for nearby attractions like Historic Cold Spring Village, an outdoor museum open from Memorial Day to mid-September. For information about bird watching, call the Cape May Bird Observatory (609-884-2736) or visit its Web site, www.njaudubon.org. Emil R. Salvini’s The Summer City by the Sea is a compact illustrated history; Robert Santelli’s Guide to the Jersey Shore contains helpful information about hotels and restaurants.
“It’s supposed to rain,” I mentioned to my editor on the eve of my departure for Cape May, New Jersey, I thinking he might suggest I postpone the trip. Commanding the very southern tip of the state and celebrated for its beaches, its Victorian bed-and-breakfasts, and its hospitality to flocks of migrating birds, Cape May would be paradise in fine weather. But in the rain in the coldest April in living memory?
“Cape May looks good in the rain,” Richard answered.
“It’s going to rain for three days,” I said grimly to the bird watcher on staff, still hoping for a reprieve.
“When the rain lets up, the birds sing their loudest,” Fred replied, “and that’s the best way to spot them.”
Our interminable national argument about education now seems to have boiled down to the debate over school vouchers, both left and right having more or less accepted the idea that we must have “standards.” Moreover, with George W. Bush’s recent initiatives to both provide vouchers and aid “faith-based” organizations, the battle has reverted to an even older national argument. When it comes to public schools, just how far should the establishment clause of the Constitution go in separating church and state?
For all the heat generated by this issue, it is doubtful that many on either side know its peculiar and contradictory history—that is, the fact that the American public school system was begun with the express idea of providing religious instruction to all pupils. Or that our nation’s fine Catholic parochial school system came about in good part to escape forced school prayer.
For the first time in more than 70 years, the United States is dealing with the politics of surplus. Between 1930 and 1997, the government ran surpluses in only 10 years, and they were small ones. Meanwhile, the national debt ballooned by a factor of no less than 340, from $16.1 billion to about $5.5 trillion. But now the government has taken in more money than it spent for the last four years, and it does not appear that will change in the near future.
What to do? Well, there are only three things a government can do with surpluses: It can spend them on new programs, use them to reduce the national debt, or cut taxes. All three approaches have their advocates in the body politic, and doubtless all three will get a piece of the surplus. The fight will be over exactly how to divide the pie. But while deciding what to do about billions of dollars of unneeded revenue might seem like political heaven, it can be tricky economically. Consider what happened in the 1830s.
It began, as legend has it—and, in this case, the legend is true—in a one-car garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California, in 1938. There, William Hewlett, who died this winter at the age of 87, and David Packard flipped a coin to see whose name would come first and started the company that started Silicon Valley. They did it with a limited budget—$538—and limitless imagination. Packard was 26 years old; Hewlett was 25.
Packard, tall and good-looking, and Hewlett, short and stumpy and dyslexic, had met when they were freshmen at Stanford University and tried out for the football team. Packard made it; Hewlett didn’t. They had become fast friends two years later, when they discovered a mutual love of hiking and a mutual admiration for an electrical engineering professor named Frederick Terman.
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was such a shock to the American system that it took eight years for a film about it to reach the screen. For those not sated with the carnage of the epic Pearl Harbor , to be released this month, such earlier versions are worth looking into.