January 2011

Give me your tired, your poor, your distracted ... What Americans Know Pioneer Lawmen The Lesson The Japanese Relocation

“It makes you want to go there” is our editors’ highest accolade for an article that successfully combines travel and history. We think you’ll want to visit all the places we’ve presented in this issue. I know I do. And when the manuscript on Holland and America arrived on my desk and I first read about Rotterdam’s Hotel New York, I immediately felt I had to see it. Soon after, I did. You’ll catch up with the hotel in Bart Plantenga and Nina Ascoly’s story, but here’s a preview, plus a visual aid on the opposite page: As the authors explain, this former headquarters of the Holland America Line stands in Rotterdam’s harbor as a reminder of the wave of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration. The ships sailed from the Wilhelmina Pier, which still runs along the waterfront in front of the hotel, and their destination was New York. Even as emigration gave way to tourism, transatlantic travel remained lively in Rotterdam, until passengers finally abandoned the seaways for the jet stream. In 1971, the Nieuw Amsterdam departed from the Wilhelmina Pier on the final Holland America crossing.

We were excited when we heard the news. The gang of would-be entertainers, musicians, and magicians who hung around Special Services at Fort Bliss that fall of 1958 was going to have its own live television show. KROD, the local CBS outlet, was going to give us half an hour of airtime. Sure, it was public service programming, and it would be broadcast on a Saturday afternoon opposite a Texas Western football game, but it was live TV! We decided to name our show “Fort Bliss at Ease.”

Then we found out about the Public Information Office. If we were going to present anything to the public as an example of military entertainment, we would be supervised by the brass. The public information officer at Fort Bliss was a self-important first lieutenant who wore jodhpur boots and carried a swagger stick—mahogany with a real gold tip. When you talked to him, he had the annoying habit of tapping his boots with the stick and then, ignoring everything you had to say, announcing, “I have a better plan.”

In the fall of 1961 I was practicing law in Springfield, Illinois, and feeling restless. The thought of running for Congress passed through my mind more than once. We were in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a conflict that seemed on the brink of turning hot. I decided to go see for myself what was going on.

It was not difficult to make reservations for Moscow; for good Cold War reasons the route was hardly crowded with tourists. I arrived on the afternoon of October 28, and the next day my In-tourist guide took me to Red Square, where she inserted me near the front of a long line of people slowly shuffling toward the entrance to the tomb where Lenin and Stalin lay. The line stretched clear out of the square almost to the monument of the Soviet Unknown Soldier, and I objected politely to what I considered rudeness to those who had been waiting, but my guide insisted this was a courtesy regularly granted foreign visitors. Then she left for the day.

For information on Georgia’s Antebellum Trail, including a map and a guide, call the Macon-Bibb County Convention and Visitors Bureau at 1-800-768-3401 or visit www.milledgevillecvb.com . Each town has its own local organization that can help you plan your trip; for contact information, see the Antebellum Trail guide.

In November 1864, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman began to strangle the life out of Georgia, the economic center of the Confederacy. He was determined to prove that the South was too weak to defend itself anv further, and he believed that if he destroyed Georgia, the Confederacy would crumble. His sixty thousand men moved slowly and deliberately from the charred remains of Atlanta to the Atlantic, methodically looting and torching everything in their path. Sherman wanted to shred the very fabric of Southern life, and his men left behind them a sixty-mile-wide path of destruction that was as much spiritual as it was physical and economical. Just before he began slashing through the state on his March to the Sea, he wrote, “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity-seeking.” Georgia did indeed howl, and today, along the state’s Antebellum Trail, one can still hear the echo.

History is full of misnomers that, like it or not, we are stuck with. Columbus, understandably confused about where he was, thought the people he encountered in the Bahamas were “Indians.” Like it or not, they have been ever since. Another undoubtedly permanent misnomer in American history is the phrase "robber baron." The original robber barons, for whom the phrase was coined, were men who owned castles overlooking the Rhine River in the Middle Ages. They made tidy livings forcing those who sought to use the river for commerce to pay tolls to pass their castles. These men were, economically speaking, parasites, no better than the racketeers who in a later age would extract “protection money” from local merchants.