January 2011

This month’s historical reflections are inspired by the presidential candidacy of David Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, whose elevation to at least marginal respectability reminds me uncomfortably of a time when the Klan was functioning openly and aboveground and was a very palpable force in American politics.

During a visit to Vancouver one is told over and over how young the city is and how recently the vast Canadian West was settled. As a wall placard at the forty-story, 360-degree lookout at Harbour Centre reminded me, by the eighteenth century virtually all of the map of America had been filled in except for the continent’s northwest coast. Here, although ships of exploration from Spain, Russia, and Britain had first poked along the shores in the 1770s, no one actually set foot on land, leaving the remote forested wilderness for a little while longer to the tenancy of its native population.

Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history, ” for which our regular rates will be paid on acceptance. Unfortunately, we cannot correspond about or return submissions.
Bottle Blonde What She Wore Mrs. Roosevelt, the Russian Sniper, and Me

One evening in November 1950 my mother asked me to pick up a bottle of sherry on the way back from work in my hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin. She needed the wine to pour over the several fruitcakes that she had baked for Christmas and which were now lying on a shelf in our fruit cellar awaiting that little touch of alcoholic aroma to bring their flavor to a peak. She wanted the least expensive sherry I could find.

I went into a drugstore near where I worked, picked out a bottle (I remember it cost sixty-nine cents), and brought it up front to pay. The clerk, the brother of the proprietor, knew me and also knew that I was twenty—a year below the legal age for purchasing alcohol. He refused to sell me the wine:

“But it’s only for my mother’s fruitcake,” I said.

“Can’t help it. You’re too young. The feds are in town checking up, and we could lose our license.”

The American Magazine Made in U.S.A.

Harry N. Abrams, Inc.; 240 pages.

Perfect for a coffee table already piled high with magazines, this book colorfully documents the 250-year history of the medium since Benjamin Franklin’s rival Andrew Bradford started in 1741 what is considered the first American magazine. Bradford was out of business in three months, but Americans quickly developed a taste for the news, gossip, and political rhetoric contained in the host of periodicals that sprang up in his wake.

In 1788 George Washington wrote, “I consider such vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.” Books were long and expensive; magazines became an affordable, alternate public forum that allowed their readers access to new ideas that would later be discussed in the drawing room, coffee house, or tavern.

Grove Weidenfeld; 403 pages.

“What have we made well?” asks the author. “How and why have we seen ourselves as often reflected in things as in institutions or places or practices? Why have we sought individuality in the things we hold in common?” He answers with a kaleidoscopic and entertaining historical look at American commonplace objects and their origins and evolutions, and he uses the stories to underline a couple of major themes about what Americans have made.

The first theme is that “two great ideals shaped American design: that of the perfect model and that of the kit of parts.” What he means by this is perfectly exemplified by the contrasting philosophies of the two car giants of the twenties. Henry Ford stuck with the perfect model, his Model T, which as the one car for everybody did not vary and would not change; General Motors answered with the kit of parts—not only varieties of makes and models but scads of options offering each buyer a personally tailored version of the mass-produced commodity.

Indy

It happens every May: Four hundred thousand people pack the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to watch the 500, the premier event in American motor sport. Next month J. M. Fenster uses the Memorial Day classic as a jumping-off point to examine the raucous and dynamic history of car racing in this country.

The health-care mess

“Perhaps the most astonishing thing about modern medicine,” says John Steele Gordon at the outset of a most significant article, “is just how very, very modern it is. Ninety percent of the medicine being practiced today did not exist in 1950.” This unprecedented burst of expansion and sophistication has brought in its wake the urgent problems that bedevil our health-care system today. In a lucid and lively essay, Gordon not only traces the crisis back to its very beginnings at the dawn of modern medicine, he also offers a prescription.

Plus…

Have you heard the story of the man who almost made a fortune in the soft-drink industry? He invented 6-Up.

All right, I know it’s a very old joke, but it illustrates a point: there are a lot more near-misses in capitalism than bull’s eyes. Many of these near-misses come about through simple bad timing or bad luck (RCA’s SelectaVision, for instance, blown out of the water by the VCR and laser disc). Others result from technological overreach (Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose).

But others happen because innovators fail to fully conceptualize the new technology they are dealing with and rely on models from the old technology they seek to replace. The first mechanical pencil sharpener was a Rube Goldbergian contraption that sought to imitate a human hand wielding a penknife. Not surprisingly, it didn’t work very well.