Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
High-technology marvels keep going awry lately—in Cyberspace, where hackers have shown they can crash virtually any Web site any time, in real space, where the nation’s $60 billion missile defense system can’t hit a target, and down on plain old earth, where the most wondrous new bridge anywhere has been vibrating like a guitar string. No matter how good we get at innovation, we keep innovating failure. The latest newsworthy fiasco at this writing is that of the Millennium Bridge over the Thames in London. The bridge was designed as a companion to London’s other engineering marvels of the recent turn of the century: the London Eye (the huge Ferris wheel whose opening kept being postponed), the River of Fire (which failed to ignite at midnight on New Year’s Eve), and the Millennium Dome (which is merely highly unpopular).
Capitalism sometimes operates in unexpected ways and turns up in unexpected places. It can even be involved in what has been, legally, a monopoly of the state since the time of King Henry II—capital punishment.
Capital punishment has been much in the news lately. Its use has been increasing rapidly in this country in recent years. The number of people on death row, more than 3500 currently, has been climbing steadily. Several states that abolished the death penalty in earlier years have reinstituted it.
But, in fact, from the perspective of a longer time frame, capital punishment has been waning for centuries around the world. In the early seventeenth century, for instance, an Englishman traveling from Dresden to Prague, a distance of only 75 miles, counted “above seven score gallowses and wheels, where thieves were hanged, some fresh and some half rotten, and the carcases of murderers broken limb after limb on the wheels.”
Pity Al Gore. No matter how many times the Democrats’ nominee has switched campaign strategies, advisers, and locales, he has still found himself facing the same basic conundrum: how to run for President from the Vice President’s office. It is a deceptively difficult problem. If the outgoing President is not popular, how to distance yourself from him. And if he is popular, how to grab some of the reflected glory without offending him, lame-duck Presidents being notoriously touchy, very concerned about their places in history.
Gore’s problem has been peculiarly acute thanks to the man he’s serving under. The Vice President has been unable to avoid being tarred with the Clinton administration’s worst excesses, yet at the same time, he has been able to glean little credit for the prosperity of the Clinton years. Yet, for all of Al’s travails, it is safe to say that neither he nor any other Vice President has endured the sort of torment that Hubert Humphrey underwent during the 1968 campaign.
William H. Perkins, Jr., of Berwyn, Illinois, has sent us not one interesting photo but ten. They depict Mr. Perkins and family members with every American President from Truman to Clinton, and they unintentionally encapsulate nearly forty years of changing sartorial and hair styles. Mr. Perkins told us how he got started:
“In October 1932 Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Springfield, Illinois, as a presidential candidate. One of our Illinois congressmen, William Dieterich, was running for the Senate, and since my father knew Dieterich, he asked him to introduce us to Roosevelt. I was off on my quest to see history firsthand. I was eleven.”
2000_5_96
A QUICK GLANCE REVEALS THIS ISN’T the usual World War II snapshot of American liberators—not with four African-American flag-bearing soldiers flanking the aged Frenchman. It came to us from Preston Russell, of Savannah, who obtained the picture from his father-inlaw, Hugh Jenkins, who had been an officer with the 390th Engineer General Services Regiment, one of the first black units to land at Normandy. Jenkins recalls that a fellow officer, Capt. Gordon Watts, took the picture on V-E Day in Pont-à-Mousson, a small town in eastern France.
On September 28, an act of Congress outlawed one of the U.S. Navy’s oldest and most barbaric traditions, flogging as a means of punishment. The ban, which squeaked through the Senate on a 26-24 vote, applied to merchant vessels as well. The movement to outlaw flogging had been aroused by two very popular books that unflinchingly detailed the practice’s brutality: Two Years Before the Mast , by Richard Henry Dana (1840), and White-Jacket , by Herman Melville (1850). Within the Navy, however, opposition to the change was strong.
Since Revolutionary days, flogging had been a commonplace part of life on naval vessels. As a seaman on the USS Fairfield from 1828 to 1831, William McNaIIy wrote, he witnessed at least one flogging every day. A decade later the frigate United States saw 163 floggings in a 14-month cruise, an average of 2 or 3 per week. Treating a sailor’s lacerated back was a routine task for Navy doctors.
In September, college students returning to campus found their sex lives to be the subject of intense nationwide scrutiny. For the last several years, novels and stories from F. Scott Fitzgerald and a host of cruder imitators had depicted American college students as a group of abandoned thrill seekers with little regard for traditional morality. Smoking, drinking (which was illegal, of course), dancing, slang, cosmetics, and various extremes of attire elicited much comment in the press, but to no one’s surprise, the greatest attention was devoted to the habits of the new breed of coeds, particularly their fondness for “petting” and “necking.”
On September 3, the airship Shenandoah , the showpiece of American naval aviation, broke apart in a storm and fell to earth near Ava, Ohio. Crowds assembled at the crash site almost immediately and began looting everything of value, including the ship’s structural girders, pieces of its outer fabric, canned goods from the galley, logbooks and instruments, and personal effects of the crew members. The owner of the farm where the main section had landed charged 25 cents per person to view the wreck, or a dollar for automobiles, with water available at 10 cents a glass. Within a day a souvenir stand had been set up.