January 2011

On the morning of January 10, 1901, in a cow pasture four miles south of Beaumont, Texas, a group of oil drillers paused to replace a worn bit. They were working in a slightly elevated area known as Sour Spring Mound, where surface indications had convinced a few visionaries that oil lay underneath. The men installed a new bit, but before they could drill the 1160-foot hole any deeper, mud began to spurt out the top with enough force to break off pieces of the wooden derrick. A few minutes later, a column of oil erupted.

It quickly grew to six inches across and 120 feet high—a size never before seen outside Russia’s Baku oil field. Five days later, the gusher was still going strong; in fact, its height had increased to 150 feet. Finally, after nine days, the drillers managed to cap it. By that time, speculators had already begun to descend on Beaumont. In late March, when a second well started gushing, Beaumont’s population had nearly tripled. At the end of the year, the Spindletop field, as it was known, had 138 producing wells; by the following October, the total was 440.

In 1963 I was fifteen and living a bucolic existence in the farmlands of southern New Jersey, plunging into every activity high school could invent. Abruptly my father was transferred to Birmingham, Alabama. I jetted overnight into a world completely foreign. Teenagers I met drove cars, not bicycles, had cotillions instead of sock hops. We could barely understand each other’s dialects.

But such differences were only superficial; the real trouble lay much deeper. The Old South and the civil rights movement were fighting a duel to the death. As we arrived, a black church was bombed and children killed. The Commissioner of Public Safety, Bull Conner, turned fire hoses on peaceful demonstrators. I was bewildered to see BLACK and WHITE signs everywhere, even on opposite sides of the same drinking fountain.

One morning on my second tour of duty in Vietnam, this time with the 101st Airborne, my squad leader announced, “Men, day after tomorrow we’re all going to become cowboys.” The plan was to evacuate a valley in Quang Ngia Province of all residents and farm animals. Then we would spray something that would remove the leaves from the trees so that Charlie couldn’t hide. People and smaller livestock would be choppered out in Chinooks, but the large stuff, maybe 500 head of cows and water buffalo, we would herd to the mouth of the valley.

The operation began as scheduled. Even before we’d moved out to our starting positions, someone in the battalion started a tuneless recital that quickly caught on:

“Everybody now, say good morning to the world.”

“Morning, world.”

“Now, good morning, Nam.”

“Morning, Nam.”

“Good, Now let’s all say good morning to the lifers [career soldiers].”

“Morning, lifers.”

Your article “‘Aircraft 53-1876A has lost a device’” (September 2000), about the dropping of an atomic bomb on Mars Bluff, South Carolina, triggered ancient memories of my own. Another U.S. Air Force B-47, earlier in that same year, 1958, was near Hunter Air Force Base, at Savannah, Georgia, when it collided with an F-86 and was forced to jettison its atomic bomb before making an emergency landing. The exact location of the drop was not determined, but it was near the city of Savannah. No further details were given.

Douglas MacArthur wrote of the Purple Heart: “… it is the only decoration which is completely intrinsic in that it does not depend upon approval or favor by anyone. It goes only to those who are wounded in battle, and enemy action alone determines its award.” But while the criteria for earning the decoration are apparently simple and straightforward, the ambiguities of modern war have clouded perceptions of what actually constitutes a “wound.”

On October 24,1998, Chief Warrant Officer Steven McCoy was piloting his UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter during peacekeeping operations in Bosnia when a powerful laser was directed at his ship for four or five seconds. Both McCoy and his crew chief, Sgt. Juan Villareal, were temporarily blinded. The Wall Street Journal reported that an Army eye specialist had concluded that they had suffered “mild to moderate” burns.

The “Big Road” (October 2000), by Stephen E. Ambrose, is greatly appreciated; he revealed or renewed knowledge of so many aspects of this achievement. However, I was sorry to find no mention of an unusually gifted American, now unappreciated and much maligned, who contributed significantly to the Big Road.

In his article on anti-Catholicism ("In the News,” September 2000), Kevin Baker finds it necessary to distance himself from the Catholic League’s criticisms of the Terrence McNally play Corpus Christi . He objects that my “vituperative attacks” were launched before the play even opened. There is a reason for this: The portions of the play that I read, along with statements by McNally, were quite disturbing. Besides, I find it impossible to believe that a play about Jesus having sex with the 12 apostles could be anything but offensive. If Baker disagrees, I’d love to hear his explanation.

As president of the Henry George Foundation, I’m thankful that Henry George— although prematurely consigned to the ash heap of history by Mr. John Steele Gordon ("The Business of America,” September 2000)—is given due credit for inspiring history’s most successful board game, Monopoly. But let’s be clear about Henry George’s other legacies.

I’d dispute the claim that George’s idea of a single tax on land was “never taken seriously by mainstream economists.” Several recent Nobel Prize winners in economics have agreed that a land value tax makes sense, notably the late William Vickrey ("It guarantees that no one dispossesses fellow citizens by obtaining a disproportionate share of what nature provides for humanity") and Paul Samuelson ("Pure land rent is in the nature of a ‘surplus’ which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency").