January 2011

One Hundred years ago at 10:20 am on Friday, December 6, 1907, trapped methane gas and coal dust ignited in the Nos. 6 and 8 mines of the Fairmont Coal Company in Monongah, West Virginia, setting off a series of violent explosions that shook the earth as far as eight miles away, threw people and horses to the ground, knocked streetcars off their rails, and collapsed nearby buildings. The long horizontal mine shaft morphed into an immense cannon, shooting heavy chunks of concrete and machine parts across the Monongahela River.

A shocked nation held its collective breath as rescuers clawed through immense heaps of rubble and around railcars filled with tons of coal in a desperate search for survivors. A local chronicler reported the deaths as “74 white and colored Americans, 171 Italians, 25 Austrians, 52 Hungarians, 31 Russians, and five Turks.” Many of the 363 fatalities in the nation’s worst mining disaster were boys.

If Jamestown, England’s first permanent colony in the New World, had failed 400 years ago—and it came within a whisker of being abandoned on any number of occasions—then North America as we know it today would probably not exist. Instead of English, we might be speaking French, Spanish, or even Dutch. If Jamestown collapsed, the emergence of British America and eventually the creation of the United States may never have happened.

By the time John Smith and his fellow colonists landed in Virginia in 1607, many European colonies had failed already, owing to harsh winters, rampant disease, hostile Indians (or other Europeans), and difficulties with provisioning. The Spanish lost colonies in Florida, the French at Fort Caroline (Florida) and Port Royal (Nova Scotia) and the English at Baffin Island, Roanoke (North Carolina), and Sagadahoc in Maine. Few colonies lasted more than a year and many hundreds of colonists died, often in terrible conditions. The spread of English settlements along the North Atlantic seaboard in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was far from inevitable.

Former President Harry S. Truman once remarked that the history we don’t know is the only new thing in the world. Picking up on a related theme, the late Daniel Boorstin, an eminent historian, Librarian of Congress, and friend of mine, wrote that planning for the future without a sense of the past is similar to planting cut flowers and hoping for the best.

Today, the new generation of young Americans are like a field of cut flowers, by-and-large historically illiterate. This does not bode well for our future.

After delivering a talk at the University of Missouri, I spoke with a young woman who said that, until my talk, she had not known that all of the original 13 colonies were on the east coast. How could a student at a fine university not know this?, I wondered.

Gene Wilder, the son of russian Jewish immigrants, was born in Milwaukee in 1933. A graduate of the University of Iowa, he studied with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School before embarking on a film career that over the last 40 years has included such classics as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Producers (1968), Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask ) (1972), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), and The Frisco Kid (1979). He has directed four films and twice been nominated for an Oscar, once as a supporting actor in The Producers and once as a screenwriter for Young Frankenstein .

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50 Years Ago

April 25, 1957 The Navy sends its Sixth Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean to support King Hussein of Jordan against an uprising by pro-Egyptian army officers.

May 2, 1957 Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, one of the few non-Presidents to have a historical era named after him, dies at the age of 48 at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. He will be replaced by William Proxmire.

75 Years Ago

May 29, 1932 Veterans arrive in Washington, demanding immediate payment of a promised future bonus for their military service. By mid-June 17,000 will be camped out.

125 Years Ago

May 6, 1882 The Chinese Exclusion Act, which bars any new Chinese laborers from entering the country for 10 years and excludes all Chinese immigrants from citizenship, is passed by Congress over the veto of President Chester A. Arthur.