January 2011

In 1959, I was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, a pilot in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), flying B-47s out of Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire.

The late 1950s were the height of the Cold War, and some airplanes, loaded with nuclear weapons, were always in the air, where no surprise attack could destroy them. Many more sat at the end of runways, their crews waiting in nearby bunkers.

Fifteen minutes after an alert sounded, every B-47 at Pease not on stand-down could be in the air, headed for the Soviet Union with a nuclear payload we were trained to launch in a sort of toss, diving the plane and then pulling up as we released the bomb so that it would arc up and away from the plane, giving us, it was hoped, time to clear the area before the multimegaton blast obliterated the target and everything for miles around.

None of us placed much faith in our ability to survive both the Soviet airdefense system and the detonation of our payloads. We had accepted that we were America’s kamikaze pilots and that our flights in a war would be oneway only.

Call the Louisiana Office of Tourism (800-285-3086) or the Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission (800-346-1958) for information on the bavou country. Two re-created nineteenth-century villages in Lafayette—Acadian Village (800-962-9133) and Vermilionville (800-992-2968)—feature authentic period cottages that have been restored and furnished with vintage Cajun artifacts, and in December they are decorated for Christmas. They’re open to the public seven days a week, except for the major holidays. In the city, I stayed at the Lafayette Hilton, but if I had it to do over again, I’d opt for one of the smaller; charming inns around town or nearby plantation houses.

Fred’s Lounge is a small place with a plain red-brick facade on the main street in Mamou, Louisiana. When I was there, late last December, Fred’s was packed. Members of a five-piece Cajun band took up most of the space inside and ignited the room with their rowdy fiddle music. Right in front of them a dozen couples bounced elbow to elbow on the tiny dance floor, while a waitress wove her way through, carrying trays of beer to two booths in the corner. A waist-high barrier separated the dance floor from the bar area, where patrons were clustered three-deep under drooping tinsel and plastic pine boughs, smoking and talking noisily while not being served; the female bartender was taking a turn as the band’s lead vocalist. I pushed my way through to the waitress to ask her a question, and she smiled warmly and shook her head to say she couldn’t help me. I was looking for breakfast. It was ten in the morning.

The Mississippi is flooding again as I write. The waters will have subsided by the time these words are printed, but the cleanup and the payments will continue inexorably. Congress has just voted some $2.5 billion in federal flood relief. That adds to the billions spent in flood preparation since a mighty and devastating inundation in 1927. That disaster inspired the River and Harbor Act, followed (in 1936) by the Flood Control Act, under both of which the Department of Agriculture and the Army Corps of Engineers shared the responsibility for creating a huge system of darns and locks on the nation’s major river systems. These would serve a variety of economic purposes: make the rivers easier to navigate, channel some of their flow into irrigation ditches and hydroelectric power generators, help prevent soil erosion along their banks—and keep them from drowning farms, homes, and townships in rainy-season overflows.

It was a banking system. The act that made it possible slipped through Congress with hardly any debate and little attention to economic reality. Many of its highest-ranking officials knew little or nothing about the peculiar nature of the banking business. More than a few were incompetent, and some were plain crooks. When it failed to flourish, Congress expanded the sorts of investments it was permitted to make, without regard to the risk involved. It collapsed at great cost.

No, it was not the savings and loan industry in the 1980s. It was the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company in the 1860s and 1870s. But to read Carl R. Osthaus’s worthy book on its sad history, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud, is to know déjà vu on a historical time scale.

Sometimes, if you wait long enough, things just work out. More than 20 years ago, when I was living in Boston and editing a long-vanished magazine called Audience, I was lunching with Gerald Lauderdale, the adman who handled our direct-mail solicitations, and mentioned to him idly that I was thinking someday of writing a book about my great-grandfather. Gerry listened politely until I said that I’d recently been to upstate New York to have a look at the old family home in Geneseo. “Geneseo!” he said. “That’s where my family comes from. We have books of my grandfather’s letters. He was a doctor in the Civil War. Would you like to see them?

I said I would. A Dr. Walter E. Lauderdale had been my family’s doctor in those years, I knew, and the Lauderdales had been members of the Old School Presbyterian congregation over which my great-great-grandfather, the father of my subject, presided. The letter writer must have been one of Dr. Lauderdale’s sons.

In a sharp and lively colloquy, Willie Morris and William Ferris, the founder of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, discuss why students from Finland and Japan are drawn to a regional culture whose appeal seems to be global … the latest in our American House Styles series examines adobe architecture … and, to send you and the month out like lambs, more.

Not long ago the historian Douglas L. Wilson discovered in an obscure, short-lived Illinois newspaper a stinging satire on a local political figure. It is long, fierce, and very funny—and it is almost certainly the work of the young Abraham Lincoln.

To the singer Susannah McCorkle, it is Ethel Waters, and in a fascinating insider’s profile McCorkle investigates the heartbreaking triumph of an underrated genius.

When America entered it in 1917, the Great War was just that—an immense and ennobling effort we were making on behalf of all mankind. Ten years later it was the murderous scam of munitions brokers and Wall Street—a message that seeped deep enough to persuade the nation that Hitler didn’t pose a real threat. Now a new wave of revisionism is rolling over Europe, and John Lukacs thinks it’s on its way here. In an important essay, he traces the course of its predecessors and tells why this one might be especially dangerous.