January 2011

In the late afternoon of Thursday, April 12, 1945, my wife and I were relaxing on the front terrace of our West Point quarters. Such a mild, sunny day seldom came to the Hudson Valley so early in the spring. Suddenly, from an open second-story window, one of our young sons who had been listening to the radio called out, “Momma, Papa—Roosevelt is dead!” We sat in stunned silence.

At last my wife spoke. “You’ll have to plan the president’s funeral.” As assistant operations training officer for the U.S. Corps of Cadets I was responsible for all cadet ceremonies and the preparation and coordination of military training programs.

I shook my head. “No, Washington will take care of everything. The Military Academy won’t be involved.”

Class VI (1-800-252-7784) plans its history trips with a night of camping on the river in between, but you are welcome to stay in one of nearby Fayetteville’s attractive bed-and-breakfasts instead. For information about accommodations, other outfitters, and additional attractions in the area, which lies about an eighty-minute drive southwest of Charleston, West Virginia, call the West Virginia Department of Commerce, Marketing, and Tourism Division (1-800-CALLWVA).

You don’t naturally associate white-water rafting with stepping back into the past, but I discovered you can do both at once. That is, you can float down the New River through a lovely unsullied West Virginia gorge, bounce through furious rapids, and all the while make stops at the shore to see beneath the trees the ruins of a populous industrial civilization that once crowded the riverbanks. I did it, guided by an outfit called Class VI River Runners, which has begun offering two-day historical rafting trips.

Late in 1994, The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, made the news in a big-time way, and the controversy still hasn’t died down.

The book’s basic thesis—surrounded by many hedgings, and with a plethora of charts and other trappings of scholarship—runs like this: Intelligence is, to a significant extent, inherited and measurable. Some races (read “blacks”) consistently score lower than others on intelligence tests, even when all variables are accounted for. Therefore, efforts to improve the “cognitive ability” and, as a result, the opportunities of African-Americans as a whole are possibly doomed to failure by the unfortunate but unmistakable limits of their common gene pool.

As it does with bowerbirds and pack rats, the urge to collect things lies deep within the human soul, and its endless manifestations can reveal that soul in startling ways.

Sometimes, the results of collecting are positive to the point of revolution. Charles Darwin’s childhood passion for insects cannot be unconnected with his subsequent career. More often, collections are merely curious. This country is fairly dotted with small museums displaying the paper-weights, farm implements, tea cozies, circus wagons, shaving mugs, swizzle sticks, and what-have-yous that otherwise forgotten citizens spent lifetimes gathering.

Not surprisingly, when a passion for collecting happens to coincide with vast financial resources, the results can be sublime. In New York City, the Frick Collection and the Morgan Library are exquisite examples of the synergy that is possible among money, taste, and the urge to own. That both have been open to the public for decades testifies to the fact that private passions often result in common benefit.

A special notice on the jacket of the 1932 first edition of Young Lonigan informed the public that the book was directed solely at “physicians, surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, teachers and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescence.”

Wow, did those publishers miss their mark! No doubt that learned observers of youth formed a percentage of Young Lonigan’s readership, and that of its successors, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan and Judgment Day, but their numbers were swamped by the adolescents themselves, millions and millions of boys over the years who came pimply-faced and heavy-breathing to Studs. You will today but rarely find a man of a certain age who does not remember.

The greatest change in my life has been the advent of video games. Since about 1980 [when the first videogame system was released], children have been playing in a more solitary way.

Before video games children read, played outside, rode bikes, and did many more physical activities, but now the majority of them mostly interact with the television. Some adults think it is a chance to have children play safely but others think that it is bad to stare at a television all day. Video games are the main topic of conversation with my friends.

I’m not sure which side I’m on: I am a great fan of video games yet I agree that they have problems.

— Matthew Collins

I think the greatest change in the world since my birth has been the drastic conversion from physical technologies to digital ones. Before computers and microchips, everything that had to be communicated over long distances was done on paper, a valuable resource recklessly abused over the last few hundred years. Now we can communicate the same way and faster. We have gone from sending letters across the sea to telegraphs and now to instantaneous delivery of any kind of written or visual material.

— Adam Thomason

I think that the most important change since 1981 is probably one of the most disturbing—the credit explosion. Credit has been helping and hurting people tremendously since 1981. It has thrown many people on the street and put many in debt.

— Isaac Simons