January 2011

The regional group called Mystic Coast and Country will mail brochures on the area and its attractions (1-800-MY-COAST) such as Mystic Seaport, one of America’s greatest seafaring museums, housed in more than twenty buildings set along the Mystic River on the site of an old shipyard. In Stonington visit the Historical Society at the 1840 lighthouse for an absorbing look at the town’s long, eventful span. You can pick up a copy of the excellent walking-tour brochure there. The lighthouse is open from May through October and sometimes on other weekends. Call 203-535-1440 for exact times. The curator should be able to provide dates for Stonington’s annual Fair, the Blessing of the Fleet, and the Garden Tour.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Stonington, Connecticut is that it ought to be so easy to get to and yet is so hard to find. If that geographical paradox didn’t shape its history (after all, the Pequot Indians found it easily enough to set up a fort and trading house in the early 1600s, to be followed by English settlers in 1649), it did shelter and preserve that history for today’s travelers. Stonington is located near the Rhode Island border, just a few miles off the main Miami-to-Canada artery, 1-95. It is four miles south of Mystic on a narrow point of land that faces directly out to the Atlantic Ocean, unprotected by the numerous islands that dot most of Long Island Sound.

I am informed that, whenever Rush Limbaugh has cause to mention Hillary Rodham Clinton, he cues in “Hail to the Chief” as background music. There’s nothing like subtlety. But at least Limbaugh isn’t solemn in the style of a columnist I recently read in my local paper who gravely weighed the constitutional effects of what he called, with a straight face, our “co-presidency.”

It had a familiar ring to it. Only recently I saw a collection of campaign memorabilia featuring a 1936 or 1940 lapel button that proclaimed, “We don’t want Eleanor, either.”

Mrs. Clinton may take consolation, if she needs any, in knowing that First Ladies have always had a hard time defining their roles in the public eye, and they have often been convenient targets for critics of the presidents to whom they were married. Some have tried to hide from the country’s gaze, some have knowingly courted popularity for their own and their husband’s sakes, and some have boldly confronted the hostile tide. But the common denominator among those most heartily trashed was that they were, in a word, uppity.

In May of 1927, a secretary rushed into her boss’ office shouting, “He did it! He did it! Lindbergh has landed in Paris!” The boss was unimpressed. “Don’t you understand?” she asked. “Lindbergh has flown the Atlantic all by himself.”

“A man can do anything by himself,” the boss replied quietly. “Let me know when a committee has flown the Atlantic.” The story, of course, is apocryphal, but it demonstrates a fundamental aspect of the human condition: Genius, that strange and potent combination of insight, faith, determination, and—almost always—youth, inheres in individuals.

That’s why, despite much recent talk, governments will never be any good at fostering new technologies: governments are nothing more than very large committees. Having to cater to the powerful, governments are wont to favor what is over what might be. Fearing accusations of wasting public money on crackpot schemes, governments must rely on senior experts, who all too often are set in old ways of thinking.

Learning to go to the movies

We did not easily take to the great democratic art form; at early screenings people panicked in the dark, and a whole new code of etiquette had to be invented. David Nasaw explores the thorny path that led to the final embrace between Americans and the movies.

The war is finally over

World War I, that is. John Lukacs explains why although the fighting stopped on the Western front seventy-five years ago next month, the war went on for generations. And Donald Morris retrieves the great, forgotten Marine writer-artist of the conflict.

Plus …

Bernard Weisberger on the the complex—and compelling—background of the current debate about immigration … John Fitzgerald Kennedy: a historian’s assessment thirty years after Dallas … and, should bird, stuffing, and inlaws prove insufficient stimulus for thanks, more.

On the tiny Greek island of Skorpios, the Orthodox priest arrived by helicopter and some gatecrashers from the press waded ashore when Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy astounded millions of people by marrying the shipping billionaire Aristotle Socrates Onassis on October 20. News of the sudden marriage plans had leaked out only five days before, and most of the world had not rejoiced. Although Mrs. Kennedy had already spent five years as the widow of a martyred President and was not yet even forty, the idea of her remarriage offended many who saw it as an affront to the Catholic church (she was marrying a divorced man) as well as to her late husband’s memory. Nevertheless the couple went ahead. Those who preferred to think of her as she had been when giving her 1962 television tour of the White House to Charles Collingwood were rudely shaken.

While a blood shortage continued at the front and a domestic bronze shortage was making many servicemen wait for their newly won Purple Hearts and other medals, the war correspondent Ernie PyIe reported a new type of scarcity: In emergencies, many fighting troops lived exclusively on D rations of chocolate. They were eating so many chocolate bars, in fact, that the Nestlé company proudly took out an ad explaining the shortage of this “fighting food” in the States. “Serving our fighting men comes first,” cautioned the company’s ad writers, “but Nestlé’s Chocolate Bars may still be found in limited quantities on your dealer’s shelves.”

Dogs for Defense

In New York City, eighteen cases of dogs eating their own tags were reported in early October; the new tags were made of soybeans instead of the less appealing hard rubber, which had become scarce.

I came to Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson late in life and raced through it in two days, which is rare speed for me. I was totally engrossed. It is late Twain. He is edging toward contempt for the universe, but he’s not there yet. Hannibal, the town of glorious childhood, has become Dawson’s Landing, where a man of wit and intelligence is cast out as a fool.

It’s about slavery. The plot is jerrybuilt, creaky, and based on the old mixed-up-twins story. There are implausible Italian visitors, Luigi and Angelo, whom I took to be Italian rather than, say, Russian or Turkish, only because Mark Twain had probably traveled in Italy and fallen in love with it. They do, however, serve to make the silly dueling, which is essential to the plot, slightly plausible.

While working on The Civil War series for television several years ago, I spent a fair amount of time browsing through the collection of conversations with ex-slaves recorded between 1936 and 1938 by interviewers working for the Works Progress Administration. They are fascinating, but contradictory. Some interviewees made no effort to mask their bitterness at having once been the property of others. The cracked voice of one old man is heard in the first program of the series, swearing that he would kill himself rather than ever be returned to the bondage he had endured as a boy, and it still gives me a chill to hear him, just as it does to hear the ancient man in who remembers Sherman’s soldiers riding across the plantation on which he was born and shouting to him, “All you niggers is free.”