January 2011

This is culture shock. Walk over the bridge and across the border into Tijuana from the big parking lots south of San Diego and you step from Southern California into the Third World, from a spacious, prosperous green corner of the United States into a plaza jammed with people selling every imaginable kind of trinket and small children begging and peddling chewing gum. The half-mile walk from the plaza into downtown Tijuana takes you down streets lined with stalls offering tambourines, ceramic Mexican-hat ashtrays, hash pipes, gold rings, Tweety Bird garden sculptures, knives, handcuffs, ponchos, tortilla makers, and most anything else you don’t need but might for a split second want. Auto-repair shops sell Freon (illegal a half-mile north) and cheap bodywork; ultra-bargain drugstores sell over the counter what you’d need a prescription for back home; liquor stores tout inexpensive tequila and mezcal; tobacco stands offer Cuban cigars.

Democracy is usually a slow and almost always a messy business. Not infrequently, good politics trumps good policy in the process. Such was the case with America’s main banking law until Friday, November 12, 1999, when President Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act to replace it. The new legislation allows banks, insurance companies, and brokerage houses to compete with great freedom across state lines and merge with one another to form financial conglomerates. In ten years the bank at the corner will be as likely to be owned by Merrill Lynch or Aetna as by Chase Manhattan. It will be possible for a family to get only one monthly statement that covers its cash deposits, investments, life insurance, and other monetary assets.

“I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values,” lamented Paul Weyrich, the conservative activist — and coiner of the very phrase “ moral majority” — soon after the effort to impeach President Clinton collapsed.

William Bennett, the former Education Secretary who made virtue a profit-making concern, announced that he was giving up on the American people: “I will not defend the public. Absolutely not. If people want to pander to the public and say they’re right, they can. But they’re not right on this one.”

I enjoyed Peter Braunstein’s article on the disco revolution of the 1960s and 1970s (November). Purists may turn up their noses at such articles, but having grown up during that period, I found it a wonderful walk down (fuzzy) memory lane.

The piece on Willie Mays’s “second” greatest catch (“My Brush With History,” November) was good reading, but the catch was made in New York’s former Polo Grounds, not Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. The odd shape of the Polo Grounds made for a very deep center field, thus allowing Mays room to run under Wertz’s fly ball.

Thank you for “Sherman’s War.” I have lived in Virginia eighteen years and been continuously subjected to the cult of Robert E. Lee. It does my heart good to hear the other side of the story.

I grew up in Massachusetts and had three ancestors serve in the American army during that war. One was terribly wounded at Fredericksburg and another killed at Gettysburg. The third died of yellow fever not long after the war. Yet in history class I remember being repeatedly told what a great American Lee was and how Grant won in spite of his drinking. More than once I heard Grant called “the butcher.” We were even told that Lee was such a master of war that his plans were studied by the German general staff. (Were that true—which it is not—it would go a long way in explaining why Germany lost both world wars.)

On February 9 Congress met in joint session to count the electoral votes from America’s most fractured presidential election ever. With the Federalist party of George Washington and John Adams all but extinct, the ruling Democratic-Republicans had faced no opposition, but as often happens, the clawing and scratching from within proved even more fierce. The electioneering had begun almost as soon as President James Monroe—the last remaining Revolutionary leader in national politics—was inaugurated for his second term, in 1821. By the spring of 1824 the choice had narrowed to four men: Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Speaker of the House of Representatives; Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford of Georgia; Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts; and Gen. Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, who was now a senator from Tennessee.

“Mr. President, never on any former occasion have I risen under feelings of such painful solicitude.” With these words—sounding hyperbolic, yet if anything an understatement—on February 5 Henry Clay of Kentucky rose in the Senate and began the most critical speech of his long and illustrious career. A week earlier he had introduced a set of resolutions designed to end the nation’s strife over slavery. The main provisions would admit California as a free state, leave the territory of New Mexico’s slavery status unspecified, strengthen the fugitive slave law, and essentially prohibit the sale of slaves in the District of Columbia. In an impassioned oration that stretched over two days, Clay defended his plan against opponents on all sides.