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January 2011
“What if many of a so-called Fact were little better than a Fiction?” asked Carlyle. It is a question most historians normally don’t brood over, although the more philosophical among them have never doubted that history always was and will be, in the words of Carl Becker, “a foreshortened and incomplete representative of reality.” To say this, he added, lessens neither its value nor its dignity.
Nearly twenty years ago a review copy of a novel about the Battle of Gettysburg called The Killer Angels ended up on my desk at American Heritage. It was by a man named Michael Shaara, whom I had never heard of, and I opened it idly, full of complacent scorn that somebody should still think it worthwhile setting a story in the endlessly plundered vineyards of the Civil War. Ten minutes later I was transfixed. I didn’t do a lick of work that day; or perhaps I did, for I came away from The Killer Angels with a heightened sense of the shape and urgency of vanished events, and that cannot have hurt my performance here.
On October 21 and 22 between 50,000 and 150,000 protesters invaded Washington, D.C., for the March on the Pentagon but found the building strongly guarded. The police made 647 arrests during the two days. Antiwar protests also took place in four other cities, including Oakland, California, where Joan Baez was among a hundred people arrested outside an Army induction office. The events provoked a major policy speech from President Johnson one week later, in which he pledged unwavering support for the American effort in Vietnam. Despite the heroics of left fielder Carl Yastrzemski, who had almost single-handedly won the Boston Red Sox their first pennant since 1946, the team succumbed to the St. Louis Cardinals after seven spirited games in the World Series.
Proving perhaps that the wartime soberness had affected truly everyone, collars were shorter and less luxurious on this year’s fur coats, which cost from $185 to $500 at Bergdorf Goodman’s. Esquire magazine—the guardian of male taste—noted that the cuff was disappearing from men’s trousers. More seriously, the magazine explained in its predictions for the coming year just how much the fight against Hitler would cost the average breadwinner: “Speaking very roughly your tax bill for 1942 will be twice what you paid last year.” The single man pulling down $3,000 per year would pay $450 in taxes, up from $225 in 1941. For the married man who made $10,000 and, as the Esquire editors put it, had “not yet been visited by the stork,” his tax share of the war effort might approach $2,100.
On October 20 the suffragist leader Alice Paul was arrested at her station outside the White House, where she had been leading pickets against President Wilson’s resistance to the Nineteenth Amendment since January. After the President had grown tired of meeting with suffragist delegations, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and their newly formed Congressional Union, an offshoot of the National Woman’s party, had taken up positions outside the White House, six at the west gate and six at the east, some holding signs that read HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY ? The women kept watch six days a week, from 10:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. At first it was amicable. “Every day when [the President] went out for his daily ride,” recalled Paul, “as he drove through our picket line he always took off his hat and bowed to us. We respected him very much.” On the day of Wilson’s second inauguration, one thousand women braved a whipping rainstorm to encircle the White House.
The Dalton gang was flush from their successful hit on a railroad at Pryor Creek, Oklahoma—seventeen thousand dollars for just ten minutes’ shooting- when they planned the foolhardy robbery they hoped would secure their notoriety. On the morning of October 5 the Daltons arrived in the town of Coffeyville, Kansas, intent on cleaning out two banks simultaneously, which neither their famous cousins the Youngers nor even the James brothers had ever done. If it came off, one member explained, the double robbery would make the Daltons “outshine Jesse James” himself, since even he “never tried this!”
On October 13 a cornerstone was laid for the Chief Executive’s residence, or “President’s Palace” as Pierre Charles L’Enfant and others referred to it in the unresolved language of the young republic. Throughout its lifetime the building would also be called the Executive Mansion, the President’s House, and the White House. Pennsylvania Avenue was still a cornfield when construction began on the plot above Goose Creek.