January 2011

On March 16 President Truman signed legislation to eliminate the ten-cents-a-pound federal tax on yellow margarine, putting the synthetic spread on an equal footing with butter for the first time in sixty-four years. The repeal ended one of the nation’s most glaring examples of a fair trade regulation degenerating into simple protectionism. The controversy dated back to the 1870s, when margarine was introduced in America. At that time it had an unsavory reputation because of its manufacturing method, which was fairly innocuous by the standards of meatpacking plants but sounded unwholesome in more delicate surroundings.

On February 9, in Wheeling, West Virginia, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin delivered a Lincoln Day address to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club. In the wake of several recent spy scandals, and with just-announced plans for a hydrogen bomb ratcheting up public fears, McCarthy bitterly denounced the Democrats’ conduct of the Cold War, which had been compromised, he said, by Soviet sympathizers in the government. The high point of the speech came when he brandished a sheet of paper and said it contained the names of 205 Communists in the State Department.

Any timetable of history reflects the personal judgments and blind spots of the person who composes it. The summary below represents developments I observed as a frontline participant during the seminal years that followed the publication of Silent Spring .

On the morning of December 12, George Washington mounted his horse as usual and rode out to inspect his Mount Vernon plantation. The weather was cold and wet, and the sixty-seven-year-old former President received a thorough chill during his five-hour tour. The next day, Friday the thirteenth, snow and a sore throat kept him indoors for most of the day. When his secretary, Tobias Lear, suggested taking some medicine for his cold, the hero of Valley Forge scoffed. As the night wore on, however, Washington’s throat condition became serious. He tried to dose himself with a mixture of vinegar, molasses, and butter but could not get it down. Shortly before dawn he called for George Rawlins, an overseer who sometimes treated Washington’s livestock and slaves. Rawlins drew about three-quarters of a pint of blood.

As the year 1899 came to an end, an issue of monumental importance monopolized the attention of Americans. It had nothing to do with the Boer War, the presidential aspirations of Admiral Dewey, the currency question, or the ultimate status of the nation’s far-flung new colonies. No, the inescapable topic in barbershops, drawing rooms, and newspaper letter columns across the country was something far more troubling and momentous: When would the twentieth century begin?

On January 21, 1950, a federal jury convicted Alger Hiss, a former high-ranking State Department employee, of perjury. In 1948, in testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hiss had denied being a Communist and having more than a casual acquaintance with Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Communist who had accused him of being a Soviet agent. When Hiss initially appeared before the committee, his firm denial and relaxed demeanor seemed to carry the day. Many observers thought his accusers’ case had fallen flat. But one committee member, a freshman from California named Richard Nixon, was determined to prove Chambers right. Under questioning from Nixon, Chambers gave intimate details of Hiss’s personal life and habits. Later he produced copies of classified documents that Hiss had given him.

This issue of American Heritage is unlike any that has ever before been published. As you’ll see, it contains just one feature story, which is not, strictly speaking, a real story at that.

We’ve given you that dangerous thing, a “special issue.” Dangerous because this usually means “single topic,” and if the reader doesn’t happen to be drawn by the topic, he or she will be nettled—quite rightly; after all, this is a magazine and not a book.

But we believe—hope, anyway—that you will like this one, whatever your particular interests. It took seed some time ago when the editors realized we were faced with the twin obligation of propitiating the gods of the millennium, while marking the magazine’s 45th anniversary. This mandated something out of the ordinary, and, once we’d begun discussing it, we found ourselves more and more drawn to the visual.

To commemorate the passing of the most eventful hundred years since the race began, we have selected one hundred pictures, one for each year, following the single (but strictly enforced) rule that each picture must have been created in the vcar it represents. The result is not an anthology of the most significant news events, or of the best art, or of the most seismic jubilations of the popular culture; but it is a narrative, and in its simulacrum of the untidy ongoing vitality of life, we hope that it conveys something of the shape, the color, and the achievements of an epoch.

— The Editors

In the spring of 1948, out of the service and still in my twenties, I was a graduate student at Columbia University. I was surprised one day to be called to report to the university provost, Albert C. Jacobs, in Low Memorial Library. He told me that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had agreed to be the university president and asked if I’d like to work for the new president and himself.

Thrilled, I began at once helping prepare plans for the general’s inauguration; the evening before the ceremony it was my duty to present a thousand guests to the General and Mrs. Eisenhower in the great domed expanse of the Low Library’s rotunda (I was especially pleased to be able to tell Mamie Eisenhower that, like her, I was Iowa born).