January 2011

No country is so obsessed with the idea that monopoly is evil as the United States. The response of other industrializing societies to the development of economic hegemonies has been to regulate them, not to break them up. And no other major country has anything resembling the corpus of antitrust law that has built up here since the first statute, the Sherman Antitrust Act, was passed by Congress in 1890. The American economy has changed almost beyond recognition over the course of the twentieth century as the industrial empires of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller turned into the electronic empires of Andrew Grove and Larry Ellison. But antitrust law has hardly changed at all.

Those fortified with enough caffeine to follow our presidential race, may have noticed the frequent presence of a priest behind George W. Bush. Not so long ago, such an escort would have been unthinkable in American politics—particularly for a Republican candidate—but unfortunately the sudden appearance of the clerical collar does not mean that the issue of an old prejudice has been put to rest.

Indeed, perhaps the biggest surprise of the 2000 campaign is that the issue of anti-Catholicism has again raised its ugly head, in the wake of the now-infamous speech Governor Bush gave at South Carolina’s Bob Jones University. It wasn’t so much what Bush said as what he did not say—failing to excoriate the fundamentalist president of Bob Jones for littering the Internet with various anti-Catholic tirades.

A wounded Bush later protested that he himself was in no way anti-Catholic. He pointed out that both his father and Ronald Reagan had spoken at BJU without sparking any protests. But the clerical collars soon began to pop up anyway, as a sort of ecclesiastical insurance.

I just finished reading “The Tenement Museum” in your April issue. It brought tears to my eyes, because the stories about the families who lived there could be the stories of the refugee families my church has sponsored. St. Paul Lutheran Church in Fort Worth, Texas, has worked with refugees from Bosnia, Iraq, Sudan, Burma, Croatia, and Vietnam since the fall of 1996. These refugees still encounter prejudice in some quarters, and parents still struggle to learn English and to find jobs that will let them support their families. The joy of working with them is their children, who learn English quickly and seem to carry few scars from their past experiences. Sometimes we wish we could afford to place them in better homes, but after reading about families who lived in tenement apartments of only 325 square feet, the 1,100 or so square feet enjoyed by our refugee families seems luxurious.

This article is just the latest example of why I enjoy your magazine so much: Learning about the past is critical if we are to do a better job in the present. Keep up the good work!

I read with more than usual interest the article on Leadville, Colorado (“Silver City,” April issue). Although I have never had the privilege of visiting Leadville, for years I referred to the city in my lectures at Harvard University. I say this because, spending their lives at 10,200 feet, Leadville’s inhabitants receive the highest dose from cosmic radiation of any large group of people living anywhere in the United States: Their annual dose is more than double that in nearby Denver and four times that in lower-lying cities, such as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

In fact, the annual cosmic radiation dose in Leadville is five times the federal limit for people living near a commercial nuclear power plant. Interestingly enough, extensive studies of populations receiving these higher doses have never revealed any health effects whatsoever.

Although drive-in restaurants proliferated in the Los Angeles of the mid-1930s, this city was by no means their birthplace, as you state in the 1935 entry of your special picture issue “Seeing the Century” (December 1999).

As the author of The American Drive-In, Drive-In Deluxe , and The American Diner , I am confident in the fact that the drive-in restaurant was born more than a decade earlier, in 1921.

It was along the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway in north-central Texas that Jessie G. Kirby and R. W. Jackson opened the nation’s first restaurant with drive-in car service. They called it the Texas Pig Stand. In those days, order-takers jumped up onto the running boards of cars before they came to a stop, inspiring the term carhop .

On July 4 President Zachary Taylor attended Independence Day festivities at the incomplete Washington Monument. It was a very hot day, and the President sat in the sun for more than two hours. During his forty years in the Army, Taylor had learned to brave the elements, so he bore the heat stoically. After the ceremonies the sixty-five-year-old Taylor strolled the banks of the Potomac before returning to the White House very hungry. He dined heartily on cherries, cucumbers, and possibly other fruits or vegetables, washing them down with plenty of cold milk and ice water.

Taylor, who had long been subject to digestive disorders, was not at his best the next day, though he did manage to write two letters and sign some papers. On July 6 the President’s intestinal pains grew worse. His family sent for a doctor, who administered calomel and opium. These provided a respite, but it was only temporary. On July 7 the aches and fever became severe, with brief spells of improvement failing to lift Taylor’s spirits. “In two days I shall be a dead man,” he declared.

On August 8 some forty thousand white-robed members of the Ku Klux Klan marched peacefully up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in what the Washington Post called “one of the greatest demonstrations this city has ever known.” Enthusiastic spectators packed sidewalks and side streets along the route and kept up a steady stream of applause. The throng had turned out despite a lack of advance publicity for what had started as a small, local parade and ballooned at the last minute. Few shopkeepers had taken any notice of the event; according to the Post , “One lone Jewish merchant on Seventh street decorated his show windows with banners reading, ‘Welcome K.K.K.’”

On July 10, in Dayton, Tennessee, the trial of John T. Scopes got under way. Scopes was a high school teacher who had told his students about the theory of evolution. That violated a state law against teaching stories of human origins that disagreed with the Bible. Scopes’s lawyers, led by the famous liberal activist Clarence Darrow, attacked this law by questioning the doctrine underlying it: that the Bible is literally true.

Opposing Darrow as the prosecution’s chief adviser was William Jennings Bryan, a three-time unsuccessful candidate for President as a populist and a hero to the nation’s rural folk. He had not tried a case in court since 1897, but his rustiness was no problem. Scopes’s guilt was uncontested; he had volunteered to be prosecuted in order to test the validity of the law. Both sides spent most of the “trial” quibbling over legal points and making stump speeches to the assembled reporters and spectators (the jury was in the courtroom for a total of about two hours).