January 2011

FOR HALF A CENTURY, THE PICTURES HAD BEEN POPPING UP occasionally in books or magazines—razor-sharp black-and-white images of life in our little East Texas farm town in the 30s. The photos were usually captionless, the subjects identified merely by occupation—farmer, merchant, teacher, banker—but in San Augustine (population 3,026), where everyone always knew everybody else, recognition was immediate.

“Look! That’s my grandpa!” or “Hey, that’s my old algebra teacher” or “Holy mackerel, that’s me ? The most extraordinary thing about the pictures, aside from their quality, was the fact that nobody seemed to remember who took them or why. Apparently, way back in the “dirty thirties” a phantom photographer had moved among us silently as a shadow, like a Comanche raider in a Texian camp counting coup in the form of negatives.

I left San Augustine in 1945 and, after a two-year hitch in the Navy, lived and worked all over the country. But the mystery followed me.

“I Saw Her Standing There”

the Beatles. Of the early Invasion singles, this one best shows Lennon and McCartney’s steel-clad confidence in their songwriting abilities. Like “She Loves You,” this song isn’t about dancing or mating or romance; it’s simply and joyfully about being young. If you need convincing, listen to Paul McCartney’s Little Richardesque falsetto “oooh” on the chorus. In 1964, when you lifted the needle from this 45, life seemed once again ordinary and dull.

“Glad All Over”

the Dave Clark Five. Handsome, clean-cut London lads in white turtlenecks, pocket squares, and double-breasted blazers, the DC5 specialized in loud, dumb tunes like “Glad All Over.” O.K., O.K., undeniably catchy tunes too. “Glad All Over” and a string of seventeen Top Forty hits make them the progenitors of frat rockers like the Kingsmen and Huey Lewis and the News.

“All Day (and All of the Night)”

More Martini Lore More Martini Lore More Martini Lore More Martini Lore Boom-and-Bust Legacy What Goes up …

Readers can direct e-mail to the editors at ahmail@forbes.com.

1963: SNEAK ATTACK

June 29: American singer Del Shannon (who’s had hits with “Runaway” and “Hats Off to Larry”) releases his recording of the Lennon and McCartney song “From Me to You.” The record enters Billboard ’s Top Hundred chart and stalls.

August 3: The Beatles’ own recording of “From Me to You” enters the American charts at No. 125 and fades from there.

September 16: “She Loves You,” which is, at this date, the No. 12 single in the United Kingdom, is released in the United States on the Swan record label. The record goes nowhere.

December 26: With Britain in the throes of Beatlemania, Capitol Records, the American subsidiary of the Beatles’ EMI record label (which so far has turned down the rights to release every single the group has released in the U.K.), issues a rush release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and its B side, “I Saw Her Standing There.”

I always used music. Pop songs were my escape chute from the austerity of postwar Britain, a drab and flaccid land where I wore thick, long underwear and Wellington boots, where I was always saying good-bye to my parents and trying not to cry. On the grimy train puffing me back to boarding school by the mud-gray sea, I would counter the clacking wheels by chanting such songs as “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)” preparing for the inevitability of rough blankets, bullies, the eating of toothpaste, the learning of Latin, and the mystery of math.

England wasn’t swinging in 1951. It was always raining, not just outside but in the heart as well. The grownups said life was much better before the war, before the Americans arrived. Why, demanded my teachers, do you read American comic books crammed with cowboys, gangsters, and sudden death? Why do you sing silly songs like “Never Trust a Woman”? (Phil Harris and His Orchestra, HMV 5623,1 could have told them.) When will you progress to Gilbert and Sullivan?

Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court spent part of May 6, 1901, writing about the death penalty, and specifically about electrocution. Earlier that day lawyers for Luigi Storti, a 27-year-old Italian laborer without a family in America, convicted for the murder of a fellow immigrant in Boston’s North End, had argued that electrocution was punishment “cruel or unusual,” proscribed by the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, a charter nine years older than the federal Bill of Rights.

“Of late, the American character has received marked and not altogether flattering attention from American critics.” The comment, from the opening page of Constance Rourke’s great, unjustly ignored book American Humor, bears one of her trademarks, a gently ironic understatement. “Not altogether flattering”—a muted characterization, indeed, of the jeremiads hurled against their homeland by the members of Rourke’s generation, the American writers who came of age just before World War I. To Pound and Eliot, Dreiser and Lewis, Lardner, Anderson and Mencken, America was barren soil for the spirit, a plutocracy whose only native values were greed and expediency. The post-Civil War years, when the nation’s prosperity had skyrocketed, were damned by Van Wyck Brooks, the new generation’s leading literary critic, as “a horde life, a herd life, an epoch without sun and stars, the twilight of a human spirit that had nothing on which to feed.” American intellectuals, it seemed, had but two choices: despair or exile.

Every April, we give over the whole magazine to the theme of traveling with a sense of history; but otherwise, we tend to be leery of single-topic issues. After all, if the subscriber isn’t interested in the topic, all that our efforts have won us is some mild ill will. And anyway, magazines are, by their nature, variety shows. Certainly, this particular issue seemed various enough while we were in the process of assembling it—rock ’n’ roll; the Irish Famine; Constance Rourke—but now, going through the layouts to do final chores, I see that it has a theme after all. Not a small one, either: This issue turns out to be about becoming American.

William Donovan, Joseph Kennedy, and James Forrestal were descendants of famine immigrants. By 1945, the centenary of the famine, they had not only surmounted the working-class status typical of Irish Catholics but scaled the bastions of the WASP elite.

Donovan, a prominent New York lawyer; headed the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. His grandfather had left Cork in 1847, landed at Grosse île in Canada, settled in Buffalo, New York, and been active in the Fenians, the secret Irish revolutionary organization.

Kennedy’s grandfather, Patrick, had left his small holding in Wexford in 1848 and died a poor man in Boston a decade later. Grandson Joe became a wealthy businessman and served as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was the highly controversial ambassador to Britain from 1938 to 1940.

Walking through the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1846, amid his solitary experiment in living close to nature, Henry David Thoreau was driven by a sudden storm to find shelter in what he thought was an uninhabited hut. “But therein,” Thoreau recounts in Walden, he found living “John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children,” and he sat with them “under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered without.”

Thoreau pitied this “honest, hard-working, but shiftless man,” a laborer probably drawn to the area to lay track for the railroad and now reduced to clearing bogs for a local farmer. He also “purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one.” “But alas,” Thoreau lamented, “the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.”