January 2011

I believe it was Harry Truman who said “the only thing new under the sun is the history you don’t know.” Frederick E. Alien’s column “Behind the Cutting Edge” in May/June 2000 certainly shows this to be true. I’m hoping you’ll have Mr. Alien’s column available on your Web site, for it would be of enormous help to students in a class I teach called “Exploring the Digital Future.” I spend the first week of class giving a lesson in what I call “A History of the Future.” We start with the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition and move into the 1990s by week’s end. The point of this lesson is precisely the point of Mr. Alien’s column: that many so-called cutting edge technologies were designed many years before. Here is an example:

25 YEARS AGO

March 20, 1976 Patricia Hearst, the daughter of the publishing magnate Randolph Hearst, is convicted of participating in a 1974 armed robbery after being kidnapped by terrorists.

March 29, 1976 By a vote of 6 to 3, the U.S. Supreme Court declines to prohibit states from making homosexual acts illegal.

50 YEARS AGO

February 26, 1951 The Twenty-second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is approved. It bars anyone from serving more than two complete terms as President.

March 14, 1951 United Nations forces recapture Seoul, Korea, from the communists.

March 29, 1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of espionage for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. They will be electrocuted in June 1953.

100 YEARS AGO

On February 15, 1851 in Boston, a black coffee-house waiter named Shadrach Minkins was seized by federal marshals at the behest of John DeBree of Norfolk, Virginia, who claimed him as his property. The waiter, also known as Frederick Wilkins, had fled Virginia months earlier, and, until recently, Boston’s relaxed attitude toward fugitives had protected him against arrest. But the new Fugitive Slave Act, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, had given slave owners a much more powerful legal weapon by placing enforcement in the hands of federal officials.

WHEN F. E. ABERNETHY, THE SECRETARY-EDITOR OF THE TEXAS FOLKLORE SOCIETY , did some digging at the Museum of East Texas in Lufkin, he came up with documentary proof that a local legend was true. The conclusive photo he found, he writes us, “shows John Young Fowler standing on the walkway to his liquor store built over the Neches River. Previously, Fowler had had a honky-tonk—a dance hall and beer store— on State Highway 94, on the Angelina County bank of the Neches River.

It was 1938 and I was 11 years old. My father, a captain in the Medical Corps Reserve, had to put in two weeks every summer on active duty. This year he was assigned to Carlisle Barracks, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He decided to take me with him.

While Dad was marching and learning, I wandered freely around the barracks with my box Brownie, taking what turned out to be terrible pictures. A major in the Japanese army was taking far better ones. He had been invited to Carlisle by the U.S. Army. Ambulances, field hospitals, even Army boots became subjects for him. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why. The major developed the pictures himself at night in his room at the guesthouse where I was also staying. He and I became good friends. He was always solicitous and polite.

Now, more than 60 years later, I have come to realize that the major was probably a spy. Regardless, I remember him fondly.

One of the outstanding afternoons of my childhood 60-some years ago was spent watching a broadcast of The Shadow. I got there at the invitation of a neighbor I’ll call Fred. Fred was just then beginning his career in advertising and, as far as I know, had no experience in radio or the theater, but he had been assigned to direct The Shadow , presumably because his father had founded the agency that was producing it. Fred knew I never missed a broadcast and invited me to sit in on one.

If I am not mistaken, the Marine in David Douglas Duncan’s photograph in your November 2000 “Frontispiece” is a fellow named Bill Sievers. Bill did indeed live to fight another day and raise a family. I worked with him at a private school in North Carolina. Bill didn’t like to speak of Korea, but I do remember asking him at breakfast one morning why a Southern boy such as he didn’t eat grits. He told me that in the military he ate grits three meals a day for months on end, and he vowed that if he ever got home, he wasn’t eating grits again.

I enjoyed the discussion of Clinton’s place in history in “In the News” in December 2000 (“Clinton’s Legacy,” by Kevin Baker). Calvin Coolidge is definitely an interesting comparison. I would like to offer another one.

I agree that some great Presidents are made by their circumstances, and FDR is definitely one of those, made by the Great Depression and World War II. My impression is that there is one important difference between Coolidge and Clinton: Clinton wanted to make his place in history, and Coolidge never pondered such personal laurels. In this respect, I think Clinton better compares to President Theodore Roosevelt.