January 2011

The fog had finally cleared, and our departure from Russia had been set for July 8, 1974, our son’s third birthday. We had three weeks to gather our meager possessions, exchange our rubles for dollars (maximum of $90.00 per person, which came to $360.00 for our small family—myself, my wife Alia, and our two baby sons), and pack the books we would take with us into crates. Then we would bring our belongings to customs, where the books would be checked one by one, first, to see if they were eligible to be taken out of the country (any book published before 1946 was considered the property of the Soviet people and had to be left behind), and second, to see if any cash or anti-Soviet texts might be concealed between the pages, in which case our exit visas would be immediately revoked and we all would remain lifelong prisoners of the largest and most efficient maximum-security prison in the world, otherwise known as the Soviet Union.

Where is Dawson City anyway? To find that out and a great deal more, contact Tourism Yukon (P.O. Box 2703, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada Y1A2C6/403-667-5340). They’ll send you some very fine pamphlets focusing on their celebrations of the gold-rush centenary, which will continue for several years, plus a map showing that Dawson City lies about two hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle and only fifty or so miles from the Alaska border on the scenic Top of the World Highway. Any number of bus tours stop at Dawson, Whitehorse, and Skagway, traveling the Klondike and Alcan Highways. These trips pass through some of the tiny Yukon communities, now settled mainly by First Nation (indigenous) peoples, where the stampeders would have stocked up on supplies.

Last summer, I flew from Whitehorse, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, to Dawson City, center of the gold-rush Klondike. The plane was a bright yellow DC-3, the Lucky Lou , presumably named for a character in Robert W. Service’s ballad “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” It was early August, nearly 99 years to the day since the huge find at nearby Bonanza Creek that, a year later, triggered history’s last and most frenzied gold-seeking stampede. The rigorous 1897 trek to the sub-Arctic reaches of these goldfields, made mostly by unprepared young Americans, was a drama that Service mined frequently:

Gold! We leapt from our benches Gold! We sprang from our stools. Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.

Among the infinitude of unintended consequences produced by the personal computer has been the explosion of interest in genealogy in the last 15 years. The reason is simple enough. The personal computer is to genealogy what the microwave oven is to popcorn: It just does things so much better and easier. And the spread of the Internet has allowed genealogists, amateur and professional alike, to swap data easily. Today, great shoals of ancestors whiz through cyberspace via something called GEDCOM files.

Let us look across the Pacific, where much of America’s future lies, entangled as usual with its past. One of President Clinton’s first post-re-election acts was a trip to Manila for an economic summit with Asian nations. There he trod another measure of a long diplomatic dance with China’s President Jiang Zemin. The United States badly wants to strengthen its commercial ties with a huge, modernizing China. But American public opinion also wishes Clinton to press Beijing toward a better human-rights record, using trade sanctions if need be. These conflicting objectives lead to a curious kind of verbal theater of the absurd in which China is alternately wooed and scolded.

David H. Schuman, owner of the Champlain Drug Store in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1948 until 1961, took some pictures in early 1950 that, amateur though they may be, perfectly fix a moment in time. Schuman’s son Michael, who sent them to us, recalls that his father proudly told him many times how, in the unimaginable era before people in his neighborhood owned television sets, they would gather in the drugstore to watch TV on a set perched high on a back wall.

On the afternoon of June 24, a group of supersonic spacecraft from an alien planet, most likely Mars or Venus, appeared in the vicinity of Mount Rainier in Washington State. A private pilot from Boise, Idaho, named Kenneth Arnold spotted them and told a local newspaper. The next day a report of “nine bright saucerlike objects flying at ‘incredible speed’” went out over the AP wire. The incident attracted little notice outside the Northwest for a couple of days; since flying saucers were still unheard of, no one knew what to make of it. The news eventually got out, though, and by early July sightings were pouring in from across the country.

Reports of liberalism overthrown in 1966 (or since) are quite premature (“Liberalism Overthrown,” October 1996). The “vital center” never collapsed, rather its political defenders changed from liberals to conservatives. From Kennedy’s inauguration in 1960 to Reagan’s last budget in 1988, the federal budget increased more than tenfold, and not one entitlement or major federal program was eliminated. Indeed, the greatest expansion of federal spending happened after 1968, and the greatest explosion of federal debt occurred after 1980.

What did happen beginning in the mid-sixties was a classic role reversal. Liberalism abandoned Progressive New Dealism for New Leftism. Simultaneously the Right jettisoned Bob Taft’s principled anti-New Deal conservatism—a Republican, decentralized laissez-faire domestic government and rejection of foreign entanglements. Instead, born-again conservatism gleefully grabbed the mantle of preserving the progressive, New Deal federal welfare-warf are state.

When Reagan said he did not leave the Democrats, the Democrats left him, he spoke the truth.

In the aftermath of World War II, Americans in many fields struggled to absorb the conflict’s lessons. Tacticians analyzed its military successes and failures; scientists worked to apply technical advances; diplomats groped toward an understanding of the new global politics. And in the May 1947 American Journal of Sociology , a pair of psychiatrists reported the results of their own wartime research in a paper called “The Sex Lives of Unmarried Men.”