“I will repeat again today that no one presently employed at the White House had any involvement, awareness or association with the Watergate case.” Just 25 years ago this month, with national elections less than three weeks away, Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald L. Ziegler, sought with this declaration to clamp the lid on a burgeoning scandal.
In my early twenties I worked for a photographic studio in Washington, D.C. My job was to retouch photographs of important federal employees, including the President. I usually spent my lunch hour eating a sandwich in Lafayette Park.
One day after lunch I was returning to work when I saw President Coolidge walking out the front door of the White House. He was heading toward the street along a path that had a hedge beside it. After a bit he stopped, looked up, and pointed into a tree. I could not see what he was looking at, and neither could the two Secret Service men who were following along behind him. They came up between the President and the object, and while they examined whatever it was, Coolidge ducked through the hedge. Soon the men stopped looking up and turned to guard the President, who had disappeared. One raced ahead while the other ran back toward the White House.
I wish I could have taken a picture of Coolidge smiling when he peeped out from behind that hedge.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union was putting all its energy and money into a frantic effort to convert from an agricultural to an industrial economy, so that it could compete with the nations of the Western world. To help in this momentous conversion, the Soviets relied heavily on foreign engineers, offering them attractive contracts to work in the U.S.S.R. for varying periods of time.
My father signed a contract with Amtorg, the Soviet Union’s trade commission, to design and manage a factory to build radiators for Russia’s expanding truck industry. We lived in Moscow between 1930 and 1935, a period bridging the first and second Five-Year Plans and a time of political unrest.
As they raced toward industrialization, the Soviets developed an immense, omni-present propaganda machine to publicize their accomplishments. They always believed that bigger was better, and they were eager to be first with technological achievements.
It is easy to give offense when talking about religion, which is one of the reasons it’s so inviting for historians, especially in a secular culture, to avoid the subject. The trouble is that ignoring religious motivations in United States history leaves gaping holes in the overall national story, which is, in large part driven, by what various Americans at various times thought that God expected of them. With that in mind, I grasp the nettle and plunge on to speak of Heaven’s Gate, 1997, and of William Miller, 1782–1849.
Heaven’s Gate was the name of the religious group of 39 people of whose members committed suicide by swallowing barbiturates in Southern California last March. They apparently believed that they would resume their existence aboard a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. Another member killed himself several weeks later, after having spoken to his daughter of “dropping his shell” and anticipating a “future incarnation … to strengthen my connection with the Next Level Above Human.”
I’ll begin with a traditional Butte, Montana, greeting: “How yuz doin’?” I enjoyed the article “Butte, America” in the April issue.
To the uninformed eye, Butte may look as if it has one foot in the grave, but if you hang around awhile you’ll find it is very much alive, with a people quite comfortable with their past.
Butte was begun, defined, and sustained by mining. Few human efforts can claim a history any richer than mining in the Western United States, and having been an important part of this scene, Butte has had its share of heroes and villains. In this town, where nobody is a stranger, it takes little prompting to be regaled with a tale of the “old days.”
If one were to suggest that the city seems to be dying, I would reply, “You should have been here when.…” For those of us who were in Butte to witness the end of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, the city is far from death’s door and making a remarkable recovery. The current economy is soundly based on several industries, including tourism and, yes, mining.
As a graduate of the 9th Special Basic Class at Quantico in December 1951, I was fascinated by the parallels between my personal chronology and Mr. Brady’s journey from the 5th Special Basic Class to Korea (“Leaving for Korea,” February/March): same places, same experiences, and same characters, albeit with different names. I, too, joined the 1st Marine Division as a rifle platoon commander late in January of 1952 and got home months later relatively unscathed.
“I grew up in the fifties in a working-class
I neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side.” writes
I Margaret Lyzen, now living in North Carolina. “My father was killed in France during the Second World War, and money was scarce.
Our clothes were mostly secondhand, with patches
on top of patches painstakingly sewn on by our
mother. She remarried after the war. My stepdad
was a DP—displaced person—who emigrated to
the United States from Germany. Our little brother,
Alien, was born in 1951, and we adored him.
On October 1 the first three hundred families, all headed by exservicemen, moved into brand-new
Cape Cod houses in an instant suburb a dozen miles east of New York
City. Four months earlier the area had
been farmland, but since then Levitt &
Sons had built two thousand houses.
Levittown would soon become famous
for turning families of modest means
into homeowners, but at the start there
was no Levittown and no homeowners. The development was called Island Trees (it would be renamed in
1948), and its acres of nearly identical
two-bedroom houses were rental
units—spacious by comparison with
city apartments, but not meant for
long-term occupancy. As the renters
moved into their new homes on Peachtree, Appletree, and Cherry Tree Streets,
they were descended upon by milkmen, grocers, and diaper services. With
another 100 to 150 families moving
in every week, there would be plenty
of customers to go around.
On October 1 Isadora Duncan,
the world-renowned pioneer of
modern dance, arrived in New York
City to begin her latest American tour.
The trip started poorly when Duncan
and her new husband, the Russian
poet Sergei Esenin, were detained on
suspicion of being Bolshevik agents.
According to possibly embroidered
recollections, Esenin had to promise
not to sing the “Internationale,” and
the promoter Sol Hurok was stripped
naked in search of subversive literature before officials let them go.
Duncan began the tour with four
well-received appearances at Carnegie
Hall. As an orchestra played Tchaikovsky’s Marche Slav , she depicted
the hardships of serfdom and the joys
of liberation. In speeches afterward
she appealed for goodwill toward the
Soviet Union, to loud applause.