January 2011

BACK BEFORE CLAUS VON BULOW ever heard of Jeremy Irons, a judge who found the news media’s attitude toward the case puzzling put a question to a friendly television reporter.

“Why do you people treat this as a big-deal court matter? It’s not precedent-setting. The lawyers are good, but they’re hardly headliners. You don’t even have a murder. Nothing, in fact, but sex and money.”

“What else do you need?” asked the reporter.

Well, one would have to admit, nothing, if the legal system’s role is entertainment. In a sense, we do think of the courtroom as theater. Every trial is inherently a dramatic production, a play, with plot, actors, audience, even authoritative critics whose collective review permanently determines success or failure. Perhaps that is why from the country’s earliest times ordinary people have derived pleasure from merely watching lawsuits.

(Note: Recordings marked by an asterisk are available directly through American Heritage’s “Editors’ Choice” department. See page 122 for details.)

•JIMMIE RODGERS—

Eight chronological CDs on the Rounder label, from First Sessions, 1927-1928 (Rounder CD 1056)• and The Early Years (Rounder CD 1057)• through Last Sessions , 1933 (Rounder CD 1063).

•THE CARTER FAMILY—

Rounder Records has a nine-CD series in progress; two are out so far: Anchored in Love , 1927-28 (1064) and My Clinch Mountain Home, 1928-29 (1065).

•BOB ‘WILLS—

Country music is one of those phenomena that remind us how much we’ve packed into the twentieth century, for it is younger than many of our parents. This is its story.

On the morning of December 8, 1969, our taxicab stopped at the main entrance of the United States Supreme Court, and my wife and I saw through the back-seat window the long sweeping steps, a portico with massive Corinthian columns, and the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW inscribed on the sculptured pediment. My hands sweating and my kidneys pumping, I climbed out of the cab, paid the driver, and trudged up the stairs with my wife, briefcase, and butterflies. I was 28 years old; I had practiced law for only three years, and my professional experience had been so humdrum that I sometimes encountered judges who had not even gone to law school. Yet there I was walking through the bronze doors, entering the Great Hall, and heading for an appearance before the nation’s highest court.

The Fort Scott National Historic Site (316-223-0310) is open every day except Christmas, New Year’s Day, and Thanksgiving, from 8:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. in the summer and from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. in the fall, winter, and spring. For information about lodging, dining, and other attractions in Fort Scott, including Dolly the Trolley bus tours of the town, call the Fort Scott Chamber of Commerce (316-223-3566). And for complete information about the whole state, call Kansas Travel & Tourism (1-800-2-KANSAS).

Poor Fort Scott. The Kansas military post and the town beside it had their share of bad luck from the very beginning, in 1842, when the site was picked for a fort just west of the Missouri border. The garrison’s purpose was to protect something called the "Permanent Indian Frontier," but the notion of such a swath of land was already fast growing obsolete. And, when the notoriously vain general-in-chief of the Army Winfield Scott learned that the little outpost had been named for him, he was insulted; it had been done, he complained, “without my knowledge and against my wishes.”

It is not exactly a historical secret that sex is here to stay. But it is only in relatively recent times in this country that sexual behavior has been so openly described, depicted, and debated in the public forum. It has also become a fit subject for scholarly research; and these new studies are downright painful when they involve life-and-death matters like sexually transmitted disease, or STD, the abbreviation of current choice. When I was in my twenties, the term in use was VD—venereal disease—more euphemistic and not quite so terrifying, since the killer AIDS had yet to stalk its victims. Syphilis and gonorrhea were treatable —although if neglected, they could do extremely unpleasant things to your mind and body, as the United States Army kept reminding me and my buddies almost obsessively during World War II.

Several million Russians learned about the downside of capitalism this summer when they were caught in a classic swindle. An outfit calling itself MMM and operating as an investment company offered fantastic returns on investments, upward of 3000 percent a year. Although Russia now has a Securities and Exchange Commission, it moved too slowly to protect naive Russian investors. Once the Russian SEC issued a warning that the dividends seemed to have come from later investments, not profits, the market value of the shares dropped from the equivalent of sixty-two dollars to about fifty cents.

Swindles like MMM date back at least to the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles that racked London and Paris in the early eighteenth century. But they acquired a name only in the early twentieth, when an American named Charles Ponzi came up with a beauty of a crooked idea in 1919.

“One of the worst things in the world is being the child of a president,” Franklin Roosevelt once said. “It’s a terrible life they lead.” Certainly, the lives of FDR’s own five children—eighteen marriages; countless failed businesses and wrecked political dreams—would seem to prove him right. Bearers of an illustrious name, they were overwhelmed, each in his or her own way, by the effort of living up to it.

Frederic Schwarz’s column “History Happened Here” in the May/June issue was excellent, except I felt that the writer left out the most interesting object in the Farmers’ Museum at Cooperstown, New York. The Cardiff Giant, probably the most successful hoax perpetrated on the American public during the nineteenth century, is on display there and deserves some recognition.