January 2011

On the evening of March 1 the House voted 307 to 116 to exclude Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., from the 90th Congress. A jumble of charges had been assembled against Powell, who had represented New York’s Harlem district in Congress since 1945. These included misuse of public funds, evasion of the New York courts, absenteeism from congressional business, and generally living like an unapologetic playboy at the public’s expense.

Powell had been a dashing and defiant young congressman when he arrived, a black politician who spoke with exhilarating bluntness at a time when black political leaders were rare in the country. He later became a power broker and effective student of the Washington game as chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor while simultaneously railing against the “white power structure.”

Powell was, in fact, playing dominoes and drinking Cutty Sark with milk at Bimini’s End of the World pub when news of his exclusion came over the radio. “Why should I be angry,” he asked a prodding reporter, “with all these lovely friends I have on Bimini?”

In 1987, a sweeping revision of the social studies program in New York State public schools gave the curriculum a strong multicultural slant. It was not strong enough, however, for a task force on minorities appointed by Thomas Sobol, the state education commissioner, in 1989. This task force rendered a report that included an immediately notorious assertion: “Afro-Americans, Asian-Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos and Native Americans have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the European American world for centuries.” This “Eurocentric” approach had allegedly instilled an ugly arrogance in students of European descent.

Post Time The Telegraph Willful Men Separate and Unequal Adam’s Fall

There were barely one hundred post offices and no more than seven thousand miles of post roads for three million Americans when Congress passed the Post Office Act on February 20. The service it established was no bargain, and delivery—there was no service west of Pittsburgh and Albany and almost none south of Virginia…was a near-miracle. Rates were based on distance and the length of the letter: six cents to send one page thirty miles; a steep twenty-five cents to send it four hundred and fifty miles or farther. Delivery below Virginia slowed to once a week during the cold months. The act commanded that the Post Office support itself and that a greater network of post roads be established. In fact, between 1792 and 1799 more than nine thousand miles were added, bringing neglected parts of Pennsylvania, Vermont, Ohio, and Kentucky into the fold.

In the 1790s letter carriers, many of them women, took two cents in excess of postage for every missive that found its destination. There were no salaries in the early days.

On February 3 President Woodrow Wilson suspended diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany. German U-boats, meanwhile, continued to fire on Allied merchant vessels, sinking 781,500 tons during the month of February alone. The President had just won a very close election by making a virtue of his great forbearance toward the German aggressors, and he now found his cabinet almost at blows over whether or not to join the war. While he was considering his options, the British Secret Service released to him a decoded telegram from Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur von Zimmerman, to its ambassador to Mexico. The extraordinary document promised “unrestricted submarine warfare” while endeavoring “to keep the United States neutral.” Should that fail, Germany proposed an alliance with Mexico against the United States, with an understanding that in exchange “Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”

The Republican senator from Wisconsin, Robert La Follette, had been shocked by the President’s Armed Ship bill request. He saw in it a transfer of war powers in violation of the Constitution, and he marshaled his forces to oppose the bill, which opened for debate on Friday, March 2. By that time he had signed up ten like-minded senators to filibuster.

For two days and nights the Senate argued over war, neutrality, and parliamentary procedure. On Sunday the morning’s New York Times called the filibuster “an evil endeavor, in which no loyal American would have engaged.” Against this, La Follette placed the opinion of his heavily German constituents, whose telegrams were running 4 to 1 against passage. At 5:00 A.M. Sunday he got an anonymous tip on pink Senate memo paper that said he would be passed over when he himself tried to speak and a vote would then be pushed through. He instructed an aide and his son, Robert, Jr., to lay in stacks of resource materials to read aloud in the event he got himself recognized by the chair.

The elegant sofa curving across these pages is a superb embodiment of the classical-revival movement that took he young republic by storm in the early nineteenth century. Although its maker is unknown, the workmanship strongly suggests that it was produced in New York City about 1820. As well as being the summit of the cabinetmaker’s art, this sofa, with its lavish combination of woods, metals, and fabric, confirms the emergence of New York as a center of fashion and luxury. Put more bluntly, this extravagant object brilliantly exemplifies the drop-dead, second-to-none stylishness that has always gone over big in New York.

A Real Jolt Learned Discussion

Early on the evening of October 17, 1989, my husband, Tom, and I were traveling along Highway 880 near San Francisco at 5:02 P.M. , returning a rented car to the Oakland Airport after traveling around California. We had come from the University of Pennsylvania and were about to attend an international conference at Berkeley on the characteristics, including failures, of large technological systems. We little dreamed that we were about to become our own case study.