January 2011

A few months ago my twelve-yearold son and I gazed west in the twilight from an observation window at the top of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, toward our home near Kansas City. Dayton Duncan’s “If Lewis and Clark Came Back Today” (November) has put what I saw in marvelous perspective.

The present condition of what Louisiana’s purchasers did get their hands on—rivers, flora, fauna, native peoples—compares most unfavorably with the condition of what has remained beyond their grasp—“the Western sky … broiling summer heat on the plains … the startling fury of a prairie hailstorm.” That the work of the author of the Declaration of Independence, the Purchase, and Lewis and Clark’s journey comes down to this is one more irony of history to add to the list.

Will tomorrow’s “men of the Enlightenment” proceed on to civilize what has heretofore been beyond our grasp? Will they come closer to fulfilling the promise than their forebears? As long as insights such as Mr. Duncan’s are available for their consideration, my son and his contemporaries have at least as much chance as Mr. Jefferson had.

Arthur R. Kennedy’s “My Brush With History” (“Final Service,” December 1997), about the death of Will Rogers and Wiley Post, is seriously flawed. The plane in the photograph is not the Winnie Mae ; it is the hybrid Orion-Explorer in which both Rogers and Post perished, a combination of a Lockheed Orion fuselage with a Lockheed Explorer wing—not a Sirius wing as the article indicates. Lockheed did not refuse to attach floats to the plane; rather it had refused to join two aerodynamically unrelated parts (the fuselage and the wing) because it had correctly determined that the plane would be dangerously nose-heavy.

I read Gerald Bracey’s article with interest. However, I must ask the question, “So what?” While I agree in theory with the conclusion of the piece, in the real world the information is of little value. How long are we in education going to keep resurrecting the dead horse of cognitive assessment and its debatable value in the classroom?

For years we have spent countless hours and resources in assessing the cognitive abilities of students. How have we benefited from this constant analysis?

Businesses and corporations are constantly telling educational institutions that they want employees who are dependable, have a good work ethic, and can relate to others. Yet it seems that research and education assess all other educational areas but these. Maybe it’s time we allocate comparable resources to the behavioral side of the argument also and emphasize values such as dependability and hard work in the curriculum.

I agree with Mr. Bracey’s conclusions, but he fails to bring up one point that is so often overlooked with this topic (and perhaps both educators and corporate America ought to be blamed equally). From the perspective of an entrepreneur, I want to know why we do not teach children that there are other options besides getting a good education and working for someone else .

This is the dilemma with corporate America. Most people end up with two options: They get stuck in “corporate prison” or they get laid off. Why not teach more kids entrepreneurial skills?

The footwear of fighting men fills the aisles of R. C. Lorenz’s Fremont, Ohio, shoe-repair shop. The proprietor’s daughter-in-law, Bea Lorenz, sent us this World War II-era photo, explaining, “My husband’s father had the contract to repair the shoes of soldiers stationed at Camp Perry, near Port Clinton, Ohio. The shoes, two hundred pair or more a week, were delivered in duffel bags. They were fastened in pairs for obvious reasons and had to be worked on that way. Each pair required new soles and heels.

“Owning a store was quite an accomplishment considering that my father-in-law’s education didn’t go beyond the second grade. As the oldest of five children, he left school to help support the family and learned the trade by apprenticing himself to several shoemakers in the area. Then came World War I, and he left for the Army. After the armistice he returned to Fremont and opened his own shop, which grew so successful that at one point he had sixteen employees.”

On April 1 Americans awoke to find their country in the thrall of a brand-new sport: marathon dancing. The fad had begun in England in early March with an effort of nine and a half hours—a virtual sprint. A pair of doughty Scots immediately did fourteen, and within two weeks French dancers had broken the twenty-four- hour barrier. At this point, with events having clearly surpassed the bounds of sanity, it was time for the Americans to step in.

Alma Cummings of New York City started things off on March 30 and 31, dancing with a series of partners for twenty-seven hours straight (with occasional short breaks). On April 6 a pair of fellow New Yorkers logged forty. The dauntless Miss Cummings, a dance instructor, hit the floor again the next day and went fifty hours, alternating the fox trot, the one-step, and the waltz. This time she wisely discarded the high-heeled French shoes of her first attempt for flat boudoir slippers.

On April 9 Lt. Andrew S. Rowan of the U.S. Army embarked on a secret mission to Cuba. War with Spain, Cuba’s colonial master, looked imminent, and the Army needed to find Gen. Calixto Garcia, leader of the anti-Spanish rebels. Since Rowan spoke fluent Spanish and had recently cowritten a book about Cuba, he was a natural choice for the job.

Following a layover in Jamaica, Rowan set off in a small sailboat manned by Cuban rebels. Around midnight on April 24 he landed at a secluded spot and disappeared into the woods. After a week in the rugged terrain of the Sierra Maestra, Rowan reached Garcia’s camp at Bayamo. He offered America’s assistance and brought home two rebel officers, who provided useful information.

Rowan’s mission, though certainly valuable, was just one of many military intelligence efforts conducted that spring. It rates somewhere between a paragraph and a page in most histories of the conflict. The episode would have quickly passed from the public mind had it not caught the attention of Elbert Hubbard.

On April 3 the Chicago Board of Trade (CBT) held its first official meeting in rented rooms over a flour store on a muddy, unpaved path called South Water Street. Although it would eventually become the country’s largest commodities exchange, the CBT started out as an ordinary chamber of commerce. Its twenty-five directors came from many fields, including a banker, a druggist, a tanner, a meat-packer, a grocer, and dealers in coal, hardware, and books.

Chicago’s businessmen had chosen a propitious time to form their organization. That same year the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened, linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River; the city’s first railroad, the Galena & Chicago Union, began construction; telegraph service arrived in Chicago; and the city saw its first steam-powered grain elevator and its first stockyards.

The golden age of American public education is past, and I fear we’ll never again attain the level of overall scholarship we enjoyed in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Consider this: In 1939 America’s total production of airplanes—private, commercial, and military—was just 5,900. In the following five years we produced 267,482 planes, more than 53,000 per year. That’s just planes. Now consider that essentially the same ballooning of production occurred regarding land and sea vehicles and vessels in addition to munitions, guns, and other armaments. All the while we were shipping zillions of military personnel to the four corners of the globe and supplying them in force. Never in history have so many ordinary people done so many extraordinary things. That’s what freedom encourages and education permits.

On April 21 the 118-foot riverboat Virginia steamed out of St. Louis with a few passengers and a cargo of military supplies. Such departures were commonplace in the bustling river town, yet this one drew attention far beyond the usual circle of waterfront workers and loafers. The reason was its destination: Fort St. Anthony (renamed Fort Snelling in 1825), an Army post on the site of present-day St. Paul, Minnesota. For the first time a steamboat was going to travel up the Mississippi River all the way to the head of navigation.