January 2011

It was the Summer of 1945. The fighting was over in Europe, Japan was on the brink of collapse, and I was on the island of Tinian in the Marianas, putting out a mimeographed newspaper and worrying the war might end before I got anywhere near the action. But in the coming weeks I found myself an obscure player in three immense events: the birth of the atomic age, the surrender of Japan, and the start of the Cold War.

One afternoon early in August I sat sweating in a Quonset hut complaining about distribution problems of the Tinian Times to Capt. Joe Buscher, an intelligence officer with the 393d Bombardment Squadron, a somewhat mysterious B-29 outfit. Buscher seemed preoccupied, and he interrupted our talk with a strange suggestion: “If I suddenly have to leave, why don’t you follow me, stick right with me, and if anybody asks who you are, tell them you’re with me. It’ll be something you’ll never forget.”

Gardens were my excuse to cruise the Mississippi River last April on the stern-wheeler American Queen. They were the focus of a five-day roundtrip from New Orleans, with stops in Louisiana and Mississippi to enjoy the region in its lush spring flowering. But before long I succumbed as much to the charms of the Delta Queen Steamboat Company’s newest and most luxurious vessel as I did to the attractions onshore.

When the news hit early this year that America Online, founded only 15 years ago, would buy Time Warner, a media giant whose history reaches back into the early 1920s, The New York Times devoted almost two-thirds of its front page to the story. That is not surprising. At $165 billion, it was by far the largest merger in American corporate history.

It was Henry Luce, founder of the Time half of Time Warner in 1923, who dubbed the 20th the American Century. But if this merger is any indication, the 21st century might turn out to be equally American, thanks to among other things the internet, the home turf of AOL.

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After seeing last April’s “Readers’ Album,” with its photograph of five brothers who enlisted in the Army, Navy, and Marines during World War II, Hazel Taylor thought her own story might interest us.

On April 14 HMS Nautilus arrived in Boston with a letter for Gen. Thomas Gage, governor of Massachusetts and commander in chief of the British army in North America. It had been written in late January by Britain’s colonial secretary, Lord William Dartmouth, to express concerns that the rebel element in Massachusetts was getting out of control. Since taking office in May 1774, Gage had been wary of cracking down too hard on dissent, fearing that his force would be inadequate should the colony rise in open rebellion. But Dartmouth had seen enough of Gage’s timidity; the time had come to act.

On April 8 the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts delivered its opinion in Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston , America’s first major school desegregation case. The plaintiff was a five-year-old girl who had been refused enrollment at Boston’s white public schools and steered to a black one far from her home. Her legal team included a pair of prominent civil rights activists: Robert Morris, the nation’s second black lawyer, who in 1851 would be arrested for helping to free a fugitive slave, and Charles Sumner, who was soon to begin a twenty-three-year Senate career during which he would be severely assaulted and seriously injured by a Southern congressman for his vigorous criticism of slavery.

At ten o’clock on the evening of April 29, the engineer John Luther Jones pulled his Illinois Central train into Memphis after a 190-mile run from Canton, Mississippi. It was a passenger express from New Orleans that was known, like many fast trains, as the Cannonball. The thirty-six-year-old Jones—nicknamed Casey for his hometown of Cayce, Kentucky—expected to stay over in Memphis along with his fireman, Sim Webb, before making the return trip the following night (though in Webb’s version of the tale, recorded several decades after the fact, he and Jones arrived in Memphis on the morning of April 29 and spent the day resting). When they learned that the scheduled engineer for the southbound Cannonball was ill, however, Jones and Webb agreed to take over the run.

On April 10, a few months past the chronological center of the 1920s, Scribner’s published the novel that would epitomize the decade better than any other, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby . So completely does the book symbolize its era that Gatsbyesque has come to be an all-purpose description for anything twenties-related. No other novel in American history is so inextricably identified with its decade—despite the recent efforts of Tom Wolfe.

The title character is Jay Gatsby, a World War I veteran who has become fabulously wealthy in an unspecified but illegal business. At his palatial estate on Long Island Sound, east of New York City, he throws bacchanalian parties for throngs composed almost entirely of strangers. All the while he is plotting to attract the attention of Daisy Buchanan, his old flame from before the war, who lives in a mansion across the bay. Eventually he manages to see her, and tragic complications ensue.