If celebrity death tells us about celebrity life, then one great celebrity death of 1997 was a mother lode of information. The untimeliness contributed to the universal sense of shock, as did the violence, while the unsolved mysteries of the case added a macabre police-blotter spell. But a quick, rough, unexplained end alone did not account for the emotions that were unleashed—from Elton John’s distress at the funeral to the many flowers left at the death site of Gianni Versace.
In November 1932, when I was twelve years old, my parents decided to return to what was then called the Soviet Union. They had emigrated, separately, to America in 1917, when both were about seventeen years old, my father from near Minsk and my mother from Odessa. They met several years later at night school in the Bronx, where they were learning English. My parents were both quite radical, in complete sympathy with the Russian Revolution. Had it occurred just a few months earlier, they probably would have remained in Russia.
It was March 1961, and I was a thirty-year-old cultural affairs officer with the U.S. Information Agency assigned to our embassy in Buenos Aires. My job had a faintly sub rosa flavor. I was to induce Argentine publishers to produce Spanish translations of books that would reflect favorably on the United States. The inducement was a guaranteed purchase of perhaps a few hundred copies, which we would distribute to libraries throughout Latin America.
Watergate broke slowly upon us. It was simply a nuisance story throughout the presidential campaign of 1972 and still appeared as barely a blip on our national radar as winter gave way to spring in 1973. But several events occurring in a short period of time that March spurred the Senate to convene a special panel to investigate the break-in and its connections to the Nixon administration. As all the networks began to cover the steady parade of witnesses appearing before the seven senators and their counsels, the public became spectators to the proceedings. Soon many of us became addicted.
But as thorough as these hearings appeared to be, all the facts seemed open to question because the only serious charges tying the break-in to the Oval Office came from one man, John Dean. Further, his account of events was sharply disputed by others of greater stature within the White House.
A tourist’s itinerary published by the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce deals briskly with the Cape’s oldest town: “11:00 A.M. Arrive Sandwich, Visit Sandwich Glass Museum, Dexter Grist Mill, Shawme Pond. 1:00 P.M. Depart Sandwich.” This not-unreasonable agenda is more or less the way I first saw Sandwich, more than twenty years ago. Because it is the first major town you encounter after crossing the Sagamore Bridge, which spans the Cape Cod Canal, you tend to give it an hour or so and then head on up the Cape.
But even then, I remember thinking this wasn’t enough time, and over the years, Sandwich stayed fixed in my memory. With its shady lanes, peaceful town green, mirrorlike pond, and old Dexter gristmill (in operation from 1655 until 1881, later a tearoom, and now restored), the town seemed to turn its back on the normal concerns of a resort in summer. Then too, there was the glass museum.
It is one of the most famous oneword lines in the history of Hollywood: “Plastics.” But however intergenerationally challenged that half-drunk friend of Dustin Huffman’s parents may have been in The Graduate, he was right about the importance of the materials revolution in the 20th century.
It has been a curiously silent revolution, however. When we think of the scientific triumphs of this century, we think of nuclear physics, medicine, space exploration, and the computer. But all these developments would have been much impeded, in some cases impossible, without.. . plastics. And yet plastic remains, as often as not, a term of opprobrium.
The thunder of distant drums is sounding again as protectionists and free traders respond to President Clinton’s efforts to get fast-track authority to negotiate multilateral trading agreements in advance of congressional approval. He lost his last bid, in the autumn of 1997, and I was much struck at the time by the almost universal acceptance of his arguments by the editorialists of major newspapers and major spokespersons for the business community. They all agreed broadly that the march toward unfettered global trade was irresistible and certain to benefit the American economy in the long run.
As a historian, I am intrigued by the popularity of free trade doctrine in corporate-oriented “pro-growth” circles, simply because just a century ago the precise opposite was true. In the 1890s, the idea that U.S. prosperity and high tariffs were tightly linked was big business—and especially Republican—gospel. The current U-turn is a reminder that nothing is permanent. And the change is evidence not only of seismic alterations in the nature of our economy but of a shifting philosophy of what the nation is all about.
When J. P. Morgan formed U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation, in 1901, it marked not only his signature deal but the apogee of banker power in America. The negotiations would feature Morgan in his most famously histrionic mode: knocking heads together, barking out prices for properties, and forcing titans to truckle to his will. In the end, he fused together a trust that controlled 60 percent of the steel industry and employed 168,000 workers. This colossus encompassed everything from Andrew Carnegie’s massive steelworks to John D. Rockefeller’s iron ore and shipping interests in Minnesota.
As the deal’s impresario, Morgan forever altered the balance of power between American industrialists and New York’s financiers. Relations between the two camps had been cool ever since the industrial boom that followed the Civil War. Many manufacturers were plain. self-made men who had no use for Wall Street pashas and inherited wealth. Fierce individualists, they were determined to shield their firms from intrusive bankers who knew little about the grimy realities of smokestack America.
In Tony Scherman’s penetrating article about Constance Rourke’s study of the elements that have gone into the making of the American character (“Why These Three Men Are Part of Your Soul,” December), you reproduce a painting of a “backwoodsman” striding alongside a grizzly bear. This painting was based on a publicity print showing none other than James Capen Adams and Ben, his favorite bear. Born in New England, Adams worked as a cobbler before decamping in 1849 for gold-rush California, where he eventually ended up living alone in the Sierra Nevada foothills. He was no typical backwoodsman; he fought grizzly bears with pistol and knife, survived many serious wounds thus suffered, and actually tamed at least three grizzlies to the point where they followed him everywhere and even shared his bed, such as it was. Later he shipped many of his captive animals around the Horn to New York City and went into partnership with P. T. Barnum. That painting is a fair representation of his rapport with bears. Grizzly Adams was one of a kind!