January 2011

In early August cases of “malignant fever” broke out among Philadelphlans along the city’s waterfront. Like the last epidemic, thirty years before, it would turn out to be yellow fever. By August 19 Dr. Benjamin Rush knew that an epidemic was under way and felt certain (wrongly) that its cause lay in rotting coffee left on the Bell’s Arch Street wharf in July by a Santo Domingan sloop, the Amelia . The spoiled coffee’s effluvium had permeated the air around the docks, Rush theorized, conducting the hated fever into the lungs of waterfront residents. When he consulted with two of his colleagues about the symptoms they were seeing, the meeting was reported in the local newspapers as confirmation of a city health crisis. “I have not seen a fever of so much malignity, so general,” he wrote to Dr. James Hutchinson on August 24, “since the year 1762.” Dr. Rush stood apart from many of his peers in his belief that rotten coffee was the agent and in his prescription: he was a purge and bloodletting man.

When the National Theater of Breckenridge, Texas, opened for business, on May 20, 1921, the local paper just knew that on this grand occasion the town was about to be brushed by the wings of history. This “marks a photoplayhouse era in Breckenridge,” a reporter predicted. The article went on to enumerate the attendant wonders of this “era”: “A balcony is provided for those addicted to the smoke habit”; overhead “is a night-sky scene—in which stars twinkle, and clouds lazily hang on the horizon.” The organ had cost two hundred thousand dollars and was the largest in Texas, “equal to a 30 piece orchestra.”

In 1921 Breckenridge was just starting to take such marvels in stride. An oil strike a few years earlier in nearby Ranger had transformed all of West Texas. In the space of a single year—1920—Breckenridge grew from a place with about fifteen hundred inhabitants to a city of thirty thousand. Not long before, according to a local historian, “an automobile would occasionally bump into . . . town and attract considerable attention and comment.”

This country’s long, acrimonious observance of the Columbian quincentenary is finally over, but it won’t be soon forgotten. during it, the much-abused figure of Christopher Columbus seemed to offer an irresistible target at which all sorts of present-minded concerns could be hurled. His case should remind us of how forcefully the shifting needs of the present affect our visions of the past, just as when a moving automobile changes direction, it transforms the vista in its rearview mirror. The contentious tenor of the 1992 quincentenary was surely affected by growing concerns about the American future and by the premonitions of national decline that ran like a dark thread through the public discourse of the late eighties and early nineties.

“The world’s greatest achievement of the departing century was pulled off in Chicago,” said George Ade, one of the city’s first important writers. “The Columbian Exposition was the most stupendous, interesting and significant show ever spread out for the public.” The fair drew an estimated 27,000,000 people, making it the greatest tourist attraction in American history. And it was a cultural phenomenon of profound importance. Richard Harding Davis, the leading correspondent of the day, called it “the greatest event in the history of the country since the Civil War.” The exposition that was to celebrate—one year late—the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World marked America’s emergence from the carnage and bitterness of the war as a reunified nation of unrivaled power and wealth.

A hot August night a decade ago found me in my stepson Geoff's’s room grappling with a tough First Amendment issue. He was away for the evening, and I had entered his domain of early-adolescent squalor to retrieve a shirt he’d borrowed from me. Sloping fields of dirty laundry yielded up a carton of ossified lo mein, 400 Grateful Dead albums—and then a cache of “adult” magazines. He knew very well he wasn’t to bring these into the house etc. etc., and I fretted about whether to confiscate them.

I started to leaf through a Playboy and immediately found a short story by Lawrence Block called “By the Dawn’s Early Light.” It featured a detective named Matthew Scudder and it seemed uncommonly well-written. The plot was absorbing, but there was more to it than that. “All this happened a long time ago,” Block began, although it was set in 1975. “Abe Beame was living in Gracie Mansion, though even he seemed to have trouble believing he was really the mayor of the City of New York …”

After the fall of his financial empire, William Levitt remembered with some satisfaction the story of a boy in Levittown, Long Island who finished his prayers with “and God bless Mommy and Daddy and Mr. Levitt.” Levitt may well have belonged in this trinity. When he sold his company in 1968, more Americans lived in suburbs than in cities, making this the first suburban nation in history, and his family was largely responsible for that.

Jim and Virginia Tolley met William Levitt in 1949 after waiting in line with 3000 other ex-GIs and their families to buy houses. Bill Levitt pointed to a plot on a map spread out on a long table and advised the Tolleys to buy the house he would build on that spot. Thanks to a large picture window with an eastern exposure, the Tolley’s home, Levitt promised, would have sunshine in the coldest months of winter, and its large overhanging eaves would keep them cool in the summer. The Tolleys, who lived in a three-room apartment in Jackson Heights, bought the unbuilt house.

It is not a coincidence that Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and what would one day be the world’s wealthiest nation should both have burst upon the global scene in 1776.

Before Smith, the prevailing economic doctrine was mercantilism. This theory had at its core the notion that only one party benefited from an economic transaction. Economics, it held, was therefore a zero-sum game. If that was true, then it stood to reason that detailed regulations were needed to see to it that a country was on the winning side as often as possible when its merchants traded with foreigners.

It was in the eleventh grade that I knew I would be a writer. The conviction grew out of two awarenesses that dawned at about the same time. I became aware of the world of realistic adult fiction, with all its power to inform and enchant and absorb one utterly. I became aware, too, of my own talent with words. I seemed to be capable of doing with them what I had been unable to do with a baseball bat or a hammer or a monkey wrench or a slide rule.

And so I wrote—poems, sketches, stories, the usual juvenilia. Artistically, my childhood had been one of deprivation, in that I was not the product of a dysfunctional family. Accordingly, the things I wrote derived less from experience and inner turmoil than from other writings that I admired.

I choppered into Khe Sanh in 1967, just in time to celebrate Christmas. In April 1968 I left, a passenger in a jeep that drove out of the base on a convoy through the heart of Indian Country and beyond. Every molecule of chlorophyll had been obliterated; not by herbicides but mechanically, with explosives. The trees had been blown over, stripped of their leaves and branches. A headless body lay like a rusty beer can by the roadside near the first bridge. It was quiet and calm again, finally, although nearly five hundred Marines and ten thousand North Vietnamese had died here since January, during the seventy-seven-day siege.