January 2011

Sometimes, historical changes march onstage to the sound of trumpet fanfares. And sometimes they arrive with what seems remarkably little notice by a distracted audience. Such, at least, were my own feelings last spring when the Senate voted 80—19 to approve the admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. How could NATO, a defensive anti-Communist coalition of 1949, come to embrace three former Soviet satellites and presumptive U.S. enemies almost ten years after the simultaneous end of the Cold War and the U.S.S.R.?

It’s not that there were no counter-arguments at all. Plenty of editorial columnists declared that the move was provocative and unnecessary, but these views persuaded only nineteen senators out of a hundred, and the issue got relatively little headline play. My personal recollection was that more sound and fury had surrounded the original creation of NATO almost half a century ago, more awareness that the United States was taking a giant step away from a powerful tradition of “no entangling alliances” and crossing a historic divide.

The fin-de-siecle, an arbitrary phenomenon created by calendars of our own construction, elicits some mighty peculiar behavior in that biological oddball known as Homo sapiens —from mass suicides designed to free souls for union with spaceships behind cometary tails to trips to Fiji for a first view of the new millennium. Among the more benign manifestations, we might list our own propensity for making lists of the best and the worst where calendrical cycles end by our own fiat.

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The summer before last, as part of its “Talking History: Conversations With Local Residents” program, the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton, New York, presented a program entitled “When Montauk Highway Was Called Moonshine Lane” and offered the Long Island summer people who attended a glimpse into a very different Hamptons lifestyle.

At the start of October, although the Watergate scandal had been snowballing all year, President Richard Nixon still had hopes of keeping it from turning into an avalanche. Despite numerous damaging accusations, a substantial fraction of the public still believed the President or was willing to suspend judgment in the absence of firmer evidence. His lawyers had plausible constitutional arguments for keeping tapes of his Oval Office conversations secret. And with a sleazy hack poised to succeed him, many citizens worried what would happen if Nixon were removed from office. Then, in less than two weeks, the wheels fell off the wagon. By Halloween, instead of boldly challenging Congress and the courts, Nixon was desperately scrambling to stave off impeachment.

On October 27 the famous Washington Elm, under which George Washington supposedly took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775, collapsed onto Garden and Mason Streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Workers had been removing branches to ease the strain on the ailing tree (whose trunk had rotted into “a mere mass of punk,” in the words of a later historian) when they tugged too hard and accidentally knocked the whole thing down. Local residents swarmed over the site to gather souvenirs, but enough wood was salvaged to fashion into more than a thousand assorted tokens and relics, including gavels for the legislatures of all forty-eight states. A botanist estimated the tree’s age at 210, meaning that it had been around 60 in Washington’s day.

On October 22 the Senate Committee on Public Lands held its first hearings on the affair popularly known as Teapot Dome. The inquiry related to two parcels of oil-bearing land, Teapot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills in California. The parcels had been set aside to provide petroleum for naval vessels, and in 1921 Interior Secretary Albert Fall had secretly leased them to a pair of oil drillers without soliciting bids.

The first week of testimony was a disappointment for anyone seeking scandal. Geologists reported that wells on neighboring land were sucking oil out of the area, which explained why Fall had found it necessary to start drilling. A few days later Fall (who had resigned as Interior Secretary) testified that he had not asked for bids because he knew he could get a better price without them. In any case he had wanted to avoid publicity for fear of making other countries think America was beefing up its Navy.

On October 31 the Spanish man-of-war Tornado , acting on a tip, sighted an American-registered freighter named Virginius off Morant Bay, Jamaica. It immediately started in pursuit. The Virginius was a notorious gunrunner, bringing arms, recruits, and supplies to anti-Spanish rebels in Cuba from supporters based in New York City. The Spanish navy had been chasing her for three years.

The Basics

Sitting at the conjunction of three states—Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi—and on the banks of a great river, Memphis is a breeze to find. I-40, the great east-west interstate highway, and I-55, running north and south, pass through it; Northwest Airlines has a hub at the Memphis International Airport; and the legendary Illinois Central train called the City of New Orleans, now run by Amtrak, connecting Chicago and the Crescent City, stops in Memphis twice a day.

One day in 1946, twenty-one-year-old Riley King, of lndianola, Mississippi caught a ride on a grocery truck all the way to Memphis, about 140 miles north. He had a good job as a tractor driver, but was filled with restlessness and vague ambition; a part-time gospel singer and street-corner guitar picker, he wanted to sing on the radio and make records. He stayed in the big city a few months, got homesick, and returned to lndianola. But, in 1947, he was back in Memphis, and would soon metamorphose into the well-known radio personality B. B. (for “Blues Boy”) King, spinning records on radio station WDIA by day and burning up the surrounding countryside at night with his hot guitar.

At 73, B. B. King is an authentic American hero, and Memphis was his launching pad, where he polished the Delta blues of his childhood into the stinging, unmistakable sound that made him King of the Blues, one of the world’s greatest and best-known performing artists. —Tony Scherman