January 2011

Irving Berlin’s song “White Christmas” made its unlikely first appearance in August, when the Mark Sandrich film Holiday Inn was released. The movie featured Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby vying for the same woman amid tap dancing and Berlin’s music. “White Christmas” took over the airwaves from another great ballad of separation and lament, “White Cliffs of Dover,” and went on to become the biggest seller of any record to date. Among the less eternal tunes going around that militant summer were “You’re a Sap, Mister Jap” and “We’re Gonna Find a Feller Who Is Yeller and Beat Him Red, White and Blue.”

As wartime restrictions kicked in, silk stockings were among the first items to become scarce: the material was needed for parachutes. Nylon hose, made from petroleum, grew expensive, and “bottled-stocking” kits appeared on drugstore shelves that summer; Legfizz and Legstick were just two of the brands of paint-on stockings. Sales of slacks ran five times what they had been in 1941, due both to shortages and to the greater number of women going to work in factories.

Early on the morning of July 6, 316 men recently recruited by the Pinkerton Detective Agency clambered onto a flotilla of barges and, led by the steam tug Little Bill , headed up the Monongahela from Pittsburgh toward Homestead, where Andrew Carnegie’s big steel plant was surrounded by striking workers. The strike had been called because Carnegie’s lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick (his boss was on vacation in Scotland), had recently tried to break the Amalgamated Association union in his plant by firing its members.

As the makeshift Pinkerton fleet approached the works, union men opened fire. For the next twelve hours the barges lay just offshore while most of Homestead’s ten thousand citizens lined the river bank shooting at them with rifle and cannon and occasionally tossing sticks of dynamite to flush the hidden invaders from below deck. The guards shot back when they dared.

In 1961, I was elected president of the eighth-grade history club at Beaufort (South Carolina) Junior High. I don’t know why that honor was bestowed upon me, but I served to the best of my ability and, on at least one occasion, considerably beyond it.

Those were the days of the Civil War Centennial, and I had been brought up on a steady diet of that great conflict since my early childhood: We saw it, heard it, breathed it, stumbled over it. Yes, stumbled over it, for, in the 1960s, there was still a fair amount of military hardware lying around. Beaufort County had been the scene of continuous deployments, occupations, feints, and battles, and its fertile soil regularly yielded up cannonballs, minié balls, and tons of shrapnel. But, year by year, the take was getting leaner.

© NEDJEIJKO MATURA

The Waterman Ideal fountain pen on the opposite page predates both the airplane and the Model T, and it delivered a far smoother ride. The silver filigree design on this No. 412 adorned a well-balanced barrel and an efficient ink-feed system joined to a responsive solid-gold nib. The owner could write for long periods with a relaxed hand, while the flexible nib produced a line of varying width that reflected his or her personality. Over time the wear pattern of the pen’s tip would adapt to the writer’s musculature and posture. The luxurious feel of writing with the Ideal Waterman is not easily duplicated even by pens made a century later.

The Bozeman Area Chamber of Commerce (1-800-228-4224) puts out a useful forty-eight-page visitors’ guide and can answer questions about anything. For statewide information, including free maps and brochures, call Travel Montana (1-800-541-1447). The highly regarded bed and breakfast at 319 South Willson Avenue is the Voss Inn (406-587-0982); I stayed a dozen miles southwest of town at the Gallatin Gateway Inn, an airy Spanish Colonial hotel built in 1927 by the Milwaukee Railroad and recently renovated by new owners (406-763-4672). Fred Willson’s Baxter is no longer a hotel.

John M. Bozeman of Georgia was twenty-five when he went to the hills of southwestern Montana in the gold rush of 1862 and failed to get rich. Convinced there must be more money in miners than in mining, he left the goldfield in 1863 to blaze a trail there and guide others along it. He laid out the Bozeman Trail starting in central Wyoming; the depredations of the Sioux along the way were so bad that it soon was known as the Bloody Bozeman, and the trail was abandoned by 1868. But before then Bozeman finally had an idea that stuck: In 1864 he founded a town in the valley just east of the gold mines to feed and otherwise serve and make money from the adventurers in the hills—and whoever later settled in the area.

They have finally done it. The networks, hard-pressed for cash, have not only pooled their coverage of this summer’s national party conventions but reduced it to a selection of “highlights” chosen by the editors. No longer can veteran convention-watchers like me enjoy internal debates over which commentators to tune in for the most flavorsome mixture of tart skepticism, spicy insider gossip, and wholesome information. No longer can we abandon all sense of time and bask in the languorous sonorities of orators leisurely traversing familiar roads. They can’t any longer be allowed to interfere with the important things like quiz shows and sitcoms. As a media event the conventions rate far, far below the Super Bowl, and they must be cut down to appropriate size. So there goes another piece of history.

History, like most aspects of human existence, has fashions that come and go. In the nineteenth century, the Great Man theory was very popular. Columbus was certain he could reach the Orient by sailing toward the setting, not rising, sun. He talked Ferdinand and Isabella into footing the bill, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, the Great Man theory is about as outof-fashion as poor Columbus himself, and so-called people’s history is in vogue. Rather than Columbus, the fate of the native tribes he accidentally discovered and—equally accidentally—largely destroyed is now seen by many as all-important. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between.

Both these schools of history, of course, also routinely ignore the fundamental importance of technology itself. It was only because the fullrigged ship was fortuitously developed during Columbus’s lifetime that he was able to do more than theorize about the best way to reach India.

On summer evenings toward the end of his life, Robert Todd Lincoln liked to be driven up the road from Hildene, his home in Manchester, Vermont, to the Equinox House for dinner. It was a charming resort hotel, marred for the old man only by the black bellboys who hurried out to open the door of his RollsRoyce. The Emancipator’s son had come to dislike blacks, and, when any dared touch his gleaming door handle, he angrily rapped their knuckles with his cane. To keep Mr. Lincoln happy, the manager paid one youth, light-skinned enough to pass for white, ten extra dollars a week just to meet his limousine. Lincoln was said to be so pleased to be greeted by an apparently white servant that he tipped him an additional silver dollar every time he was ushered into the hotel.

John Steele Gordon writes, “Even aside from cheese, wholly North American foodstuffs are notably few in number, the cranberry and maple syrup being about all the native delicacies we have to offer.”

As I recall, when my first ancestors arrived from England, they found my Algonquian ancestors raising maize, beans, and squash (the “three sisters”) and hunting wild turkeys, woodchucks, porcupines, and opossum. Farther South they were harvesting pecans and making hominy and Brunswick stew. All around were blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, huckleberries, dewberries, gooseberries, wild grapes, watercress, mountain cress, and sassafras.