January 2011

For the first few years of his long retirement,; Adams was obsessed with establishing nisi proper place in recent American history. “How is it,” he asked Benjamin Rush, his closest confidant outside the family, “that I, poor, ignorant I, must stand before Posterity as differing from all the other great Men of the Age?” He then went on to list his gallery of “greats”—Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison—and concluded that even when his own name was admitted to the list, it was usually accompanied by the judgment that Adams was “the most vain, conceited, impudent, arrogant Creature in the World.”

To most of their contemporaries they were America’s odd couple. John Adams was short, plump, passionate to the point of frenzy. Thomas Jefferson was tall, lean, serenely enigmatic. True, they had served together in the Continental Congress during the blossom days of the American Revolution. But, throughout the remainder of their distinguished public careers, as Adams himself acknowledged, they had “look’d at the world through different ends of the telescope.”

Along with baseball cards and other ephemera, Classics Illustrated have become pricey nostalgia items for those who grew up in the supposedly halcyon years after World War II. But the comic-book series, whose mission was to promote the reading of “great literature,” has always been more controversial than other cultural icons of the time. I first encountered them at the age of seven, when, after each weekly trip to the library, I’d buy a fifteen-cent CI in the local drugstore. (My first purchase was The Iliad, which I chose out of fascination with the cover design: chariots and men wearing skirted armor.) The stories had the imaginative energy of fairy tales but seemed more satisfyingly real and serious than the Disney and DC comics available on the same rack.

Starting in March 1993, six states whose territory were crossed by the trail launched a variety of special events to mark the 150th anniversary of the first organized wagon train. A main attraction is an actual wagon-train journey, but financial constraints will keep it from crossing all the states, as originally planned; it is following the trail only in Idaho and Oregon, starting in late June and ending in September. For details on the many other celebrations, contact the following: Oregon Trail Coordinating Council (503-22-TRAIL), Missouri Division of Tourism (314-751-4133), Kansas Travel & Tourism Division (913-296-2009), Nebraska Travel & Tourism Division (402-471-3796 or 800-228-4307), Wyoming Division of Tourism (307-777-7777 or 800-225-5996), Idaho Division of Tourism Development (208-334-2470 or 800-635-7820), and Oregon Tourism Division (503-523-2481).

NATIONAL FRONTIER TRAILS CENTER Independence, Missouri. At the corner of Pacific and Osage stands the home of the National Frontier Trails Center, which doubles as the national headquarters of the Oregon-California Trails Association. This is an obligatory stop for anyone interested in the overland trails. In addition to a well-stocked library, permanent and rotating exhibits, and an extremely helpful staff, the Trails Center runs a good bookstore where you can view a preparatory film and purchase maps, contemporary and historical literature about the trails, and other useful guides.

ALCOVE SPRING Five miles south of Marysville, Kansas, between Route 77 and the Big Blue River, on private property owned by Mrs. Stella Hammett. Permission to visit the spring must be obtained from the owner.

COURTHOUSE ROCK, CHIMNEY ROCK, AND CASTLE ROCK South of (and easily visible from) Route 92 between the towns of Bayard and Minatare, Nebraska.

One of the most impressive items in the FORBES Magazine Collection is a wonderful letter that John Adams wrote in June 1817 to a historian named William Tudor. In it, the aging revolutionary looks back across half a century to assess which of his old comrades had been most valuable to the cause. It’s pure Adams —of a piece with the spikily eloquent assessments that glitter throughout Joseph Ellis’ article about Adams and Jefferson in this issue. “It is the Opinion of the World in the present century,” writes Adams, “was so of the last, and will probably be so of all future ages, that Franklin and Washington were the two great Agents in the American Revolution; the two Guardian Angels.…” Forget it! “This opinion, if I have any knowledge of any thing, I know to be a delusion.” All their glory was reflected: “They were Moons illuminated by Suns concealed from the sight of Nations.” They were often “usefull Instruments,” he concedes, “but to my certain knowledge they were as often terrible Embarrasments. They were both not only Superficial but ignorant.”

A couple of miles south of Marysville, Kansas, not far from the east bank of the Big Blue River, lies one of the most moving places on the Oregon Trail. Back in a shadowy sanctuary of oak and ash and cottonwood trees, just a few hundred yards from where the emigrant trail used to run, a cold black spring sparkles from the ledge of a little rock alcove and pours into a stony basin ten feet below. It’s a beautiful place, impressively quiet and a little gloomy. Edwin Bryant, a literate traveler from Massachusetts and Kentucky on his way to California in 1846, thought so when he chanced upon this wild green tabernacle of tangled shrubs and trees in late May. “Altogether it is one of the most romantic spots I ever saw,” he wrote. “So charmed were we with its beauties that several hours unconsciously glided away in the enjoyment of its refreshing waters and seductive attractions. We named this the ‘Alcove Spring;’ and future travellers will find the name graven on the rocks, and on the trunks of the trees surrounding it.”

When the decade of the fifties began, sex was still something of an illicit subject in America. Nor had there been any serious modernization of the technology of birth control in more than forty years. Never mind that an event as transcending as World War II had profoundly changed people’s attitudes on many subjects, including a far greater candor about things sexual among younger adults; these changes were nowhere noticeable in American mass culture. But in the decade ahead ordinary Americans were about to become infinitely more open and sophisticated about their sexual habits and practices. Even as the 1950s progressed, a team of brilliant scientists was speeding forward on its way to discover a simple birth-control device that its developers hoped could be taken orally each day—a kind of pill to control pregnancy. At the same time, by the middle of the decade there were the first signs of new social and political attitudes among American women that would surface in the next decade as the women’s movement. In short, a revolution was beginning.

In the early summer of 1949, my psychological life was not tightly held to reality by the usual tethers. On June 19, I married the woman I loved, and a few days later, I prepared to consummate a dream that I had concocted over the preceding months—to privately charter an airplane to fly 46 students and my wife and me to Europe. My plan had been developed during the busiest year of my life: it was my first year of medical school, and I was simultaneously courting my fiancée at a campus 120 miles away. That I survived the rigors of medical school and long-distance courtship is a marvel matched only by the story I am about to tell.