January 2011

Willard Sterne Randall’s “Thomas Jefferson Takes a Vacation,” in your July/ August issue, raises the old suspicion that Jefferson and Madison visited New York to engage in anti-Federalist “double-dealing” with Aaron Burr and Philip Freneau. There may be another explanation for such a get-together.

As Randall points out, the 1791 trip was Madison’s idea, and he made the arrangements. An alumnus of the class of 1771 at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), Madison was dropping in on a ’71 classmate (Freneau) and a member of the class of ’72 (Burr). At a time when Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale remained essentially regional institutions, Princeton was the most national of American colleges and had recently conferred an honorary doctor of law on Madison. President John Witherspoon, himself a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote that the trustees and the faculty “were not barely willing but proud of the opportunity of paying some attention to and giving a testimony of their approbation of one of their own sons who had done them so much honor by his public service.”

I was disappointed with your September cover on violence in America. The article itself is wonderful, but the overall impression is tainted by a horrifying cover image. The mass media is full of shock and graphic news bits. The last thing I want from American Heritage is more of the same.

As a first-century Christian awaited with certainty and calmness the return of his Lord, I await the resurrection of liberalism. As Churchill regarded pessimism, so I regard conservatism: I see no value in it—although I realize that it, too, will return every twenty years.

Victor Hugo summarized the end of Napoleon, “God was bored with him.” Vox populi, vox Dei . Or as my old nurse observed, “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.”

As an ex-liberal I read with interest and general agreement your well-researched article on liberalism’s demise. However, I would like to add two points:

First, liberalism isn’t dead or even in any danger. It is alive and well in institutional and statutory federal and state bureaucracy, which will not be changed any time soon, even by the new “antigovernment mood” of the people. Many of the flower children and storefront attorneys of the 1960s are functioning as bureaucrats in comfortable government management jobs exerting immense power and control over all of us.

Second, my conversion from a young liberal, who worked to defeat Goldwater in 1964, to a conservative took place over a long period of time. It came about not so much by accepting dogma from a conservative “smoothly running political machine” but through my observation over the years of the almost complete failure of liberal policies.

How ironic that Matthew Dallek’s postulate of the end of liberalism appears in the same issue as Willie Morris’s wonderful memoir of Mark Twain (October issue). Twain’s “death,” too, was reported prematurely.

On December 21 Eugene Talmadge, a virulent white supremacist who had just been elected governor of Georgia, died at the age of sixty-two. Since Talmadge had not yet been inaugurated, no one was sure what to do next. The reform-minded incumbent, Ellis Arnall, vowed to remain in office until a successor was legally qualified. The lieutenant governor-elect, Melvin Thompson, claimed the post for himself. And there was a third aspirant—Talmadge’s son Herman, who shared his father’s racist views. An obscure clause in Georgia’s constitution said that if no candidate for governor received a majority, the legislature could choose from the top two vote-getters. When the senior Talmadge’s health started to fail before the election (in which he was unopposed), his supporters quietly arranged for some voters to write in Herman’s name. That way, if Eugene died, the legislature could pick his son to replace him—maybe.

On December 24 the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was released from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, his sentence commuted by President Warren Harding. Debs had been convicted of violating the wartime Espionage Act by criticizing the Wilson administration in a June 1918 speech. He had also received almost 920,000 votes for President as a jailbird in 1920. When Harding took office in 1921, he began reviewing the cases of hundreds of socialists, labor activists, and miscellaneous troublemakers who had been imprisoned in America’s World War I frenzy over disloyalty. Debs and twenty-three other political prisoners were the first to be released.

On December 28 the evil specter of drug abuse reared its polychromatic head in the pages of the New York Herald . Under the headline WHOLE TOWN MAD FOR COCAINE appeared the sorry tale of South Manchester, Connecticut, where addiction was so widespread that “hundreds of persons have become slaves to the stuff.” The problem had begun when a local druggist compounded a cure for catarrh, a respiratory illness, out of cocaine (then a common nonprescription drug), menthol, lactose, and magnesia. The prescription worked so well that catarrh cases skyrocketed.

On January 11, 1897, in Salt Lake City, Martha Hughes Cannon took her seat in the Utah legislature, becoming America’s first female state senator. (The first female members of a state’s lower house were elected in Colorado in 1894.) Cannon, a Democrat, had been elected in November as one of five senators from Salt Lake County. Among the losing candidates was her Republican husband, Angus, who demonstrated his commitment to family values by having four wives. The arrangement appealed to Martha, who cherished having “three weeks of freedom every month.” She made the best of her free time by practicing medicine, having earned degrees from the universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania. (Federal authorities, less pleased than Martha with plural marriage, had jailed Angus for six months a decade earlier.)

The year 1696 was not a good one for Samuel Sewall of Boston. In May his wife delivered a stillborn son, and in July he heard of the deaths of a pair of favorite uncles. Furthermore, two of his older children were struggling with their religious faith. Late in the year things got even worse: His wife fell gravely ill, and their two-year-old daughter, Sarah, died suddenly. To top it all off, the Massachusetts legislature declared a day of fasting and repentance to atone for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

Sewall had served as a judge in those proceedings, which condemned twenty people and two dogs to death. Later, when the witchcraft hysteria had subsided, its instigators began having second thoughts. As often happens in the aftermath of mass delusions, a miasma of shame and guilt hung over Massachusetts. Neighbor criticized neighbor with veiled charges and allusions, and everyone involved tried to shift the blame or made futile attempts to forget the whole affair.