January 2011

In the early 1970s, when Wall Street was going through a particularly bad time, it actually cost more money to buy a taxi medallion—a license to own and operate a taxicab in New York City—than it did to purchase a seat—a license to trade—on the New York Stock Exchange.

The reason was simple enough. In the 1930s, the city had frozen the number of taxi medallions, in order to keep otherwise- unemployed people who happened to own cars from going into the taxi business and competing with professional cabdrivers. New York City, in other words, created a taxi cartel, and the fortunate medallion holders have been making out like bandits ever since.

There’s a lesson here. While we still tend to think of monopolies and cartels as the product of top-hatted 19th-century plutocrats conspiring against the public good, the major combinations in restraint of trade in this century have been government-sponsored, and just as pernicious.

It has been six years since Henry Hampton’s extraordinary six-part documentary series Eyes on the Prize first ran on public television and reminded us, as nothing ever had before, of the role that ordinary citizens—black and white, but mostly black—played in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.

In The Great Depression, the seven-part series currently being aired on PBS, Hampton’s organization Blackside, Inc., has now done the same for the struggle for democracy in the 1930s. “Somehow, in the hardest of hard times,” says the narrator in the first program, nicely summarizing the whole series, “with America slipping away, our parents and grandparents found it within themselves to fight their way out... . They may have done an imperfect job, but by the time the Great Depression was over, they had done better than simply save America, they had made a new America.”

It is absurd to call the Smoot-Hawley Tariff the prime cause for the Great Depression, which was precipitated by the real-estate and stock-market busts. Tariffs had nothing to do with it.

“Free trade being necessary for national prosperity” is given the lie by what got the U.S. economy booming after the Great Depression—war production. Huge government deficits financed U.S. home production but didn’t hurt the economy because the “money” was invested in production.

Our deficits today are a killer because they finance nonproduction. Adam Smith himself debunked the mercantilist philosophy that gold is wealth. “Production is wealth,” roared Smith. He encourages free trade only when it results in high wages and low profits at home. That occurs, in part, if the lower imports’ costs are the result of natural advantages such as climate, soil, minerals, et cetera. However, our consumer-electronics home production, for example, was not extinguished because of any natural advantages abroad but rather because of the low wages there.

A hilarious epic from the early days of television when NBC and CBS were locked in (almost) mortal combat to be first to televise the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II ... the return of our popular Winter Art Show … Christmas in Cajun Country … and, because yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, more.

They did, at the submarine museum at Groton, Connecticut, where the most popular show ever mounted was of photographs of the canine mascots who endured the hardships of submarine service in the Pacific during World War II. We present a gallery of shaggy heroes.

Gen. Gordon Sullivan is Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, and in charting a course through a period of dramatic and often painful change, he finds history both a comfort and a practical help. In an interview with Roger Spiller, he discusses how he uses the Army’s past to shape its future and speaks of the lessons of history from Chancellorsville to the Persian Gulf.

For two centuries the American military has fought wars and then had to make hard choices in their aftermath. Now that we are in the midst of another round of decommissioning warships and sawing the wings off bombers, T. A. Heppenheimer surveys what the military has done in the aftermath of all our wars, and looks at the wise decisions—and the foolish ones—to suggest what may lie in store.

Builddown …and a talk with one of the men who is doing it Let loose the dogs of war Plus…

Although Yale University would not announce its plans to go fully coeducational until November 14, the college allowed seven hundred young women to visit for Coeducation Week beginning November 4. More than eighteen hundred women had applied in a two-week period for the simple honor of this limited experiment, which did not guarantee admission the next fall but was meant to convince older alumni of the relative harmlessness of coeducation. The visitors were given empty boys’ rooms and permitted to roam the campus as they might as students- hearing lectures, sampling cafeteria food, growing oblivious of the fauxGothic architecture. “This is a really serious thing,” one senior told a reporter. “We hope the sexes will meet over coffee, over lunch or whatever, and just get accustomed to each other.” Women already attended the graduate schools, and after a week of the finest representatives from Vassar and Bryn Mawr touring the undergraduate facilities, nothing terrible seemed to have happened.

Despite President Johnson’s popular Vietnam bombing halt and a closing surge by the Democratic nominee and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Republican candidate, Richard MiIhous Nixon, won the Presidency- barely—on November 5. Mr. Nixon, who had lost to John Kennedy by 120,000 votes eight years before, edged out Humphrey by a mere 800,000 this time around, with George Wallace a distant third.

In Brooklyn Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. “I am an historical person at this point,” she told a reporter shortly after, “and I’m very much aware of it.” With her rapid verbal barrages, Shirley Chisholm had gone up against the civil rights hero James Farmer for the seat from New York’s new Twelfth Congressional District and won against all expectations. Chisholm promised not to be “a quiet freshman congressman.” And from her first assignment—to the forestry and rural-villages subcommittee—she wasn’t.