January 2011

Call the Independence Tourism Office at 800-810-4700, or visit www.ci.independence.mo.us , for general information on local attractions and events. During the first week in May, Independence throws a birthday party for Truman, offering discounts on admission to all its historic sites and serving free birthday cake in the town square. There are many things to do and see in Independence, but except for a few bed-and-breakfasts, there aren’t many places to stay. I recommend finding a place in Kansas City, a fifteen-minute drive away, whose many urban attractions serve as a counterpoint to Independence’s rural charms.

As you drive in from Kansas City, Independence doesn’t look as if it has much to offer. The two-lane highway rolls away from the interstate in gentle waves, but the landscape is littered with fast-food restaurants and discount stores. It isn’t until you’ve reached downtown Independence that you notice the change. The neat blocks of glass-fronted two-story buildings, the streets that seem to trail off into the Missouri prairie, and the orderly calmness bring on a sudden sense of nostalgia. It’s as if you’ve returned to a time when life revolved around the town square, which, as it happens, is the case with Independence.

“We have reached the epoch of the nanosecond. This is the heyday of speed … a culmination of millennia of evolution in human societies, technologies, and habits of mind.” So writes the science journalist James Gleick in his bestselling book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. It’s a theme we keep hearing lately: Technological change just keeps getting faster, and it speeds up everything else in life with it.

Businesspeople, even very savvy ones, make economic mistakes. In 1899, Asa Candler, the owner of Coca-Cola, thought the soft drink’s future lay with the soda fountain and gave away the bottling rights. In the American folk memory, the Ford Motor Company’s Edsel has become for corporate disasters what the Titanic is for shipwrecks. The reason for these lapses is simple enough. Humans are quirky, and predicting their future behavior, in the marketplace or anywhere else, is hard to do.

But capitalism forces businesspeople to try, and because their own future well-being depends on it, they try very hard. Politicians, however, don’t have to worry about market share or profits; they have to worry about getting reelected. That is why politicians have a far worse record in economic decision making than do businesspeople. Again, the reason is simple: Politicians don’t really make economic decisions; they make political ones.

In the April 1999 issue Bruce Edward Hall told about peeling back layers of his family’s history in New York City’s Chinatown. Since then, he writes us, he has made a further discovery:

Early on the morning of June 17, Gen. Thomas Gage, governor of Massachusetts and commander in chief of British forces in North America, awoke in his Boston home to learn of a serious new threat. On the Charlestown peninsula, which was connected to the mainland by a narrow neck of land, rebel soldiers were building military fortifications on a rise known today as Breed’s Hill. If left alone, they would surely fortify neighboring Bunker Hill as well. Gage conferred with his officers and decided on an immediate attack.

On May 19, at the end of a three-hour hearing, a Chicago jury declared Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of President Abraham Lincoln, to be insane. Mrs. Lincoln’s trial came just over ten years after her husband’s assassination, which was the worst of many trying events in a life filled with tragedy. The blows started early: Her mother had died when she was six, to be replaced by a stepmother who had little use for her. A turbulent courtship with the promising but unpolished Lincoln ended with their sudden marriage in 1842, when she was twenty-three. The couple had four children, all sons, three of whom died before reaching adulthood.

On May 31 the customers at Jasper Dobson’s speakeasy in Kiowa, Kansas, were startled to see a determined, grim-faced middle-aged woman stride through the doors. She wore the sedate outfit of a church deaconess, but Carry Nation’s attire was the only thing demure about her. With a six-foot, 175-pound frame strengthened by years of physical labor running a Texas rooming house, Nation hurled bricks and rocks in all directions to destroy the saloon’s bottles, glassware, and furnishings. She wrecked two more “joints” (as speakeasies were called) that day, and officials soon closed the rest of the dozen saloons in Kiowa, a town of eight hundred.