January 2011

The Basics

Teetering on the border between Montana and Idaho, on Interstate 90, the Garden City (so called because of its abundance of greenery) is the heart of the Northern Rockies and the crossroads of all kinds of cultures. Before you pack, you might want to get some help planning. The Missoula Area Convention & Visitors Bureau is a good place to start (825 East Front Street, 800-526-3465; www.missoulachamber.com ), as are the state-sponsored Travel Montana Office (in Missoula, 800-VISIT-MT; www.visitmt.com ) and Glacier Country Regional Tourism Commission (in Missoula, 800-338-5072; www.glacier.visitmt.com ), which specializes in introducing newcomers to the peculiarities of western Montana.

Where to Stay

New Yorkers knew they were in for a long, hot summer this year when Hillary Rodham Clinton made an early political foray into their state and was greeted by demonstrators whom the state GOP had urged to dress up as blackflies. One of Mrs. Clinton’s aides had made the mistake of remarking that the First Couple would not be vacationing in the Adirondacks because of the flies. As it turned out, there were no human flies, but her presumed senatorial opponent, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, was not about to let the public forget those were New York flies she was talking about. The latest race of the century was on.

On September 4, in the Blackwell’s Island prison in New York City, a woman named Maria Monk died at the age of thirty-three. The cause of her death was not recorded, but it presumably was the wages of more than a decade spent as a drunkard and a streetwalker. Mentally unbalanced since she jammed a slate pencil into her head at age seven, Monk had taken to prostitution as a teenager and borne two illegitimate children. Her last known address was a brothel in the city’s notorious Five Points section, where she had recently been arrested for picking the pocket of one of her customers.

While such stories were all too common at the time, Monk’s biography held an especially tawdry twist. In between her wretched youth and sordid death, the ill-fated girl from rural Quebec had written a fabricated memoir, as popular as it was scurrilous, that inspired riots, looting, church burnings, and countless other acts of hatred, doing for anti-Catholicism what Protocols of the Elders of Zion would later do for anti-Semitism.

On September 14 Henry H. Bliss, a sixty-eight-year-old New York City real estate broker, became the first person in America to die in an automobile accident. The fatal encounter had taken place the evening before as Bliss was helping his companion, a Miss Lee, to alight from a streetcar at Seventy-fourth Street and Central Park West. At that same moment a taxicab identified as Automobile No. 43 swerved to avoid a truck. Bliss, who was somewhat hard of hearing, evidently did not hear the cab —which, being electric, would have been rather quiet in any case- and was run over. The occupant of the cab was David Orr Edson, who happened to be a doctor as well as the son of Franklin Edson, a former mayor of New York. He did what he could to help Bliss until an ambulance arrived, but since (according to a news report) “his brain substance [was] escaping from the compound fracture of his skull,” it was too late. The victim died in a hospital early the next morning.

In France, September brought the denouement of the infamous Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer had been framed in a spy scandal to shield one of his colleagues. Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of treason by a court-martial in 1894, had languished on Devil’s Island for five years before the emergence of exculpatory evidence led to a retrial. When a kangaroo court announced a renewed verdict of guilty in September, Americans rushed to join the global chorus of condemnation. “It was incredible to the Anglo-Saxon mind,” wrote the determinedly Anglo-Saxon Harper’s Weekly , “that the judges should find for guilt when there was not the slightest proof of guilt, and, moreover, deny to the prisoner the right to present the only direct proof of innocence possible, beyond his own word.”

On September 23, in a brief written statement distributed to reporters, President Harry S. Truman revealed the chilling fact that would dominate American foreign policy for the remainder of the century: “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.”

By itself the development was not unexpected. Everyone had assumed the Soviets would build their own bomb eventually; the worrisome part was the timing. Although the scientific principles behind the atomic bomb had been widely known for a decade, the engineering details of America’s nuclear arsenal were a tightly guarded secret. Experts had predicted a Soviet bomb around 1952. The achievement of a successful explosion so much earlier meant one of two things: Either the Soviets were a lot smarter than we had thought or they had spies in America’s laboratories.

On September 12 Boston’s public schools opened under a court-ordered scheme in which eighteen thousand of the city’s ninety-four thousand students would be bused (and twenty-seven thousand otherwise transferred) outside their neighborhoods to achieve racial balance. In a city whose schools, like the neighborhoods they served, had always been severely segregated, there was bound to be resistance. Yet on the first day the only major trouble came in the strongly Irish Catholic neighborhood of South Boston.

In Southie, as it was known, virtually no white students went to school. Most of them congregated instead on the streets, often with their parents, to jeer and stone the buses bringing students from Roxbury, a black neighborhood. In the following days and weeks, matters only got worse. White students stayed home in protest and blacks in fear for their safety. With attendance hovering around 20 percent through the fall, beatings and stabbings multiplied, causing interracial strife that spread to other schools.

On September 8, at Twin Falls, Idaho, approximately fifteen thousand rowdy fans gathered to watch the daredevil Evel Knievel jump over the Snake River Canyon. Knievel, a former juvenile delinquent, thief, cardsharp, pimp, and insurance salesman from Butte, Montana, had achieved fame by jumping his motorcycle long distances over such hazards as buses, trucks, sharks, rattlesnakes, and fountains. His vehicle for the Snake River stunt, dubbed the Sky-Cycle X-2, was no motorcycle but a thirteen-foot-long jet-propelled capsule. Despite the SkyCycle’s space-age appearance, its source of power was something from a much earlier epoch: steam.

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I discovered, in the little library that served the Cape Cod town of Dennis, where I was spending the summer, a book about the turn-of-the-century— this century—war between Britain and France. The pictures drew me in: an invasion force wading ashore in the south; British rifle companies breaking up French cavalry assaults on the London road; the Kentish countryside in flames. Channel fighting! Dreadnoughts and destroyers and torpedo boats in a great promiscuous close-packed muddle, hammering it out nearly hull to hull.

I read the book with fascination. I don’t recall ever wondering why nobody seemed to have taken photographs of these interesting events; the grisaille illustrations were perfectly satisfying. I believed in this Anglo-Franco war for an embarrassingly long time and may well have gone into high school still wondering how the two countries had come to patch things up to the point where they could fight side by side as allies a mere decade later.