January 2011

In December New York’s Museum of Modern Art was showing, in addition to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and some nice stands of French woods by Cézanne, a lot of cutting-edge American war propaganda—200 screaming scenes from among 2,224 posters submitted to the Office of Civil Defense. Many of the artists had cribbed from President Roosevelt’s rousing State of the Union message, laying quotations from it over images of Jap and Hun doing their hideous work or of sailors drowned by “loose lips.” Along the museum’s hallways Nazi daggers plunged through church windows or ripped the Stars and Stripes; Hitler sneered over a smoldering battlefield at the picture of a crying orphan. The most effective of the visceral works would be reproduced and mass-distributed by the Office of War Information to win civilian hearts and minds.

Some of the newest toys for young boys were miniatures of the grim modern machinery that was just beginning to cut down their fathers and older brothers across the water. The new Lionel set (“For a million thrills, get a Lionel Train!”) came with not only elegant New York Central Pullman cars but also, for five dollars more, the Lionel “Armored Battle Car,” with a revolving gun turret. December magazines also carried ads for Gilbert toys featuring, along with the traditional Erector set, the new Gilbert machine gun. “Bang-bang-bang!” snapped Gilbert’s copywriters. “Quick as lightning it works … 10 shots per second.” The Gilbert gun—like the Gilbert replica submarine G-150 —was painstakingly real and came with instructions for forming your own neighborhood machine-gun company.

Prohibition forces were approaching a tremendous victory when on December 17 the Senate passed a resolution to send an amendment to the states that would outlaw the “manufacture, sale or transportation” of beverage alcohol. The proposed Eighteenth Amendment, which originated with the dry, godly Sen. Morris Sheppard of Texas, soon whipped through thirty-six state legislatures. The coincidence of wartime strictures, strong sponsorship in the Congress, and prejudice against the high proportion of brewers with German names gave the movement its peculiar strength. The amendment’s passage came as an ugly shock to those wet lawmakers who had voted for it certain that it could never clear the necessary three-quarters of the states in the allotted seven years. In fact, it was the law of the land within thirteen months. (Only thirteen states were completely dry at the time the amendment was proposed.) Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, an abstainer himself, predicted that the latest addition to the Constitution would “last as long as the preamble.… The saloon is as dead as slavery!”

On December 7 the familiar four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony became the first ones ever performed by the New York Philharmonic—or the Philharmonic Society of New York, as it was then known. One of the orchestra’s founders, the young violinist Ureli Corelli Hill, conducted the sixty-three performers in New York’s Apollo Rooms; the orchestra followed with various shorter pieces. Hill was a largely self-taught musician who had held first chair for the New York Sacred Music Society and there conducted the American full-length premiere of Handel’s Messiah , in 1831.

The death of the German-born pianist Daniel Schlesinger in 1839 had brought together the New York musical powers who would form the country’s first significant orchestra. An American orchestra of European quality had been Schlesinger’s dream. After its first three concerts in 1842, the Philharmonic gave the American premiere of Beethoven’s Third Symphony the next season and in 1846 performed the American premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth.

Raise the Baton Patrons of Husbandry Good-bye, Whiskey, Good-bye, Gin For Christmas, an Armored Battle Car Faces of the Enemy Swoon Song U-238

March 16, 1966. Gemini 8 was successfully in orbit, more vindication for the American space effort after a shaky start and a source of undiluted pride for a nation preoccupied with the growing involvement in Vietnam. Neil Armstrong and Maj. David Scott were aloft, preparing to test the hardware and prove the concepts that would put an American on the moon.

For my ten-member Air Force searescue crew on alert in Okinawa, the flight had special significance. In case of an emergency re-entry, we were ready to dash to rescue the Gemini crew. But with this successful launch, our alert, like several before it, was falling into a familiar pattern: practice rescues, then wait, sweat through the critical launch and re-entry, admire the precision of the splashdown—always close to a waiting aircraft carrier—then quietly return to the real business of rescuing downed pilots from the waters off North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Call the San Diego Convention and Visitors’ Bureau (619-232-3101) for a list of special events, including the Parade of Lights, a twenty-year-old local tradition in which scores of boats decked out in Christmas lights wind through the harbor. On one weekend in December the museums in Balboa Park host “Christmas on the Prado,” with carolers and candlelight processions. Old Town presents a Spanish Christmas custom known as Las Posadas, a re-enacting of Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter.

Out on Point Loma the lighthouse that guided mariners from 1855 to 1891 is open to the public. For most of the past thirty years Barbara Jones of the Point Loma Garden Club has decorated it for Christmas the way the lighthouse keeper’s family might have done it. Her deliberately scrawny tree, her strands of popcorn and chili peppers, and her ornaments made of walnuts gilded to look like expensive blown glass are arranged with artful simplicity and look just right.

Sprawled across the extreme southwest corner of the United States, just sixteen miles from Mexico, San Diego is about as remote as you can get from a traditional New England Christmas. But except for a dusting of snow, the city puts on all the trappings of the season. The temperature, which reaches the sixties during the day, falls to about forty at night, cool enough for hotels and restaurants to light fires in their fireplaces. And residents throw themselves into matters like outdoor lighting with uncommon zeal. On San Diego Bay, pleasure boats, Navy destroyers, and the three-masted Star of India are all strung with lights. At the San Diego Wild Animal Park, part of the city’s world-renowned zoo, giraffes and zebras constructed of lights stalk the grounds. And in residential neighborhoods houses and curbside palm trees blink and glow all night.

Whoever is appointed (or reappointed) to the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts by the incoming President in 1993, we can be sure of one thing: He or she will not find life easy. The battle over federal funding of artistic activities won’t end on inauguration day. Conservative public officials like Sen. Jesse Helms will continue to insist that taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize works and exhibits offensive to their moral values. Members of the “creative community” will cling to the position that public support of uncensored art and artists is a hallmark of any civilized state. The debate will not die, because it touches on broad and perennial issues of what (and why) government “ought” to undertake and encourage at public expense.