January 2011

Outnumbered Outnumbered Duke, Duchess, and Füfchrer Duke, Duchess, and Füfchrer Business School Kuhler Classic N.F.S. How to Read a Photograph

As one who served as a junior officer on board a cruiser in the U.S. Pacific Fleet during the terrible first year of World War II, I salute you and Capt. Edward L. Beach for publishing the most succinct, accurate, and moving account I have ever read of how our greatly outnumbered Navy halted the Japanese invasion forces that year (“The Biggest Theater,” December).

I wish a monument in the form of a great lighthouse could be erected somewhere in the Pacific Ocean in memory of the brave aviators and sailors who gave their lives for our country in those dark days. The inscription, to borrow a tribute to the three hundred Spartans who died holding the pass at Thermopylae against 180,000 Persians:

Go tell the Americans, thou who passest by That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

Among those sitting rapt in the Capitol building on April 6 as President Woodrow Wilson requested a declaration of war from Congress was Jeannette Pickering Rankin, representative from Montana. Shortly after taking her seat as the first woman member of the United States Congress, Rankin faced the central decision of her life. At a time when most American women had still not achieved the vote, Montana’s new women voters had sent one of their own to Washington. There, at three in the morning on the day of the House vote, the “lady from Montana” voted against the President’s request, saying, “I want to stand for my country, but I cannot vote for war.”

Four months after Pearl Harbor it turned out that Japan could be surprised too. On April 18 the world-renowned aviator Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle commanded a daring reprisal mission of sixteen B-25 bombers. The idea for the “Doolittle Raid” had grown out of a December letter by a Fort Worth newspaper publisher, recommending that five hundred American bombers strike Tokyo. A thirty-page Navy analysis of the idea had led to an audacious plan that relied on launching heavily modified Army bombers from the carrier Hornet while it was deep in Japanese-controlled waters but still eight hundred miles from Japan itself. There was no thought of returning to the carrier; the planes would drop their bombs, then fly on another one thousand miles to land in China.

After a World Cup soccer final won an impressive Nielsen rating on American television in 1966, three groups of United States Soccer Football Association potential franchise owners applied to start soccer leagues in the United States, but only one group agreed to the terms: 4 percent of the gate and 10 percent of any television rights to be paid in tribute to the U.S.S.F.A., as well as a twenty-five-thousand-dollar franchise fee charged to each league team. The new league’s season began in head-to-head competition when it took the field as the United Soccer Association or U.S.A.

They’re like brothers who, as only the family knows, couldn’t be more different. With a landscape of open, rolling farmland and small villages with white-steepled churches, Vermont is the most rural state in the Union, according to Census Bureau statistics. From an environmental point of view, it’s also the most politically liberal. New Hampshire, so heavily forested that it was once described by Vermont’s Richard Ketchum as looking “like a summer camp that’s been closed for the winter,” is the nation’s fourth most industrialized state and as politically conservative as any you can name.

A handful of graduates from my college have gained notoriety, but none, certainly, was more notorious than Sally Rand. In the fall of 1976, early into my senior year at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri, Sally came back for a visit—and then some.

I was a student of the music department, and all of us in the performing arts had been apprised of her forthcoming participation in an alumni (read that fund-raising) variety show. I was not as prepared for the knock on my dorm-room door by a breathless co-ed saying, “We’re trying to furnish a room for Sally Rand. Can you contribute anything?” The college had made arrangements for Ms. Rand at the finest hotel in town. She had countered by stating emphatically that she wanted to stay in the same dorm she had stayed in as a girl, St. Clair, now the “Nancy-can-we-have-your-bedspread?” dorm. Reportedly Sally had said, “I just want to be one of the girls.”

In October of 1957, in an astonishing series of events, I found myself at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., as an all-expenses-paid delegate to the First Congress on Better Living, sponsored by McCall’s magazine.

At the time, I was a typical fifties housewife, with a split-level in the suburbs, a husband, three kids, and a dog. However, I had a closet vice—I entered contests. McCall’s had announced a Remodel-A-Room contest and I sent away for an entry blank. The builder of our house had skimped on eating quarters, so I sent off as my entry a plan to convert our garage into a dining room. Early one morning in April the phone rang. It was McCall’s “House and Home” editor. She wanted to fly out to see if the plan I’d entered was feasible. She came, she measured, she nodded: it was. I’d won! In the fall the room I’d designed would be built.

1842 1917 1942 1967

Declaring in their People’s Constitution that “all political power and sovereignty are originally vested in, and of right belong to, the people,” the followers of Thomas Dorr elected their man governor of Rhode Island on April 18, in defiance of the state government in Providence. The move very nearly led to local civil war.

Dorr and his fellow reformers had been angered by their state’s outdated system of apportionment, which granted a town like Newport six representatives to Providence’s four, although the latter was now more than twice Newport’s size.

Dorr had begun his activist political life as a state representative in the Whig party. When the Whigs resisted his reforms, he jumped to the Democrats, and when they proved equally gutless in his eyes, he helped form the Rhode Island Suffrage Association in 1840.