January 2011

America swaggered off the World War II battlefields like a heavyweight champion who had just scored a first-round knockout. Our losses were tragic—292,000 dead—but they were a relative bloody nose compared with the slashings and renderings of millions upon millions of other people caught up in the carnage. Moreover, our civilian population had been spared the terror bombings, occupations, and huge displacements so commonplace elsewhere. But most important to the massive prosperity that was to define the next two decades, America’s industrial powerhouse survived not only undamaged but infinitely more muscular than when we entered the war.

The echo of gunfire had barely dissipated before Detroit was planning new automobiles for a lustful public. The war years had seen four million cars disappear through age and accidents, and millions more were in desperate need of replacement.

I was a young staffer with the United Planning Organization during the spring of 1965. UPO was the local District of Columbia agency of President Johnson’s poverty program. Its field office where I worked was in a depressed section of black Washington. But employee morale was high with the spirit of black and white together in those “we shall overcome” years.

There were so many ideas to debate, programs to start, and people to involve. But surprise problems often demanded attention. One morning we learned that a disturbance nearby between neighbors had escalated into a raucous confrontation between police and community. As the employee in closest contact with the police, I asked several of UPO’s neighborhood workers for suggestions on what should be done. Hubert Brown’s was the most thoughtful: Visit the police captain in Precinct 13 to talk with him about patrolmen being more sensitive to neighborhood tensions. Brown was just twenty-one years old, but he came across as streetwise, soft-spoken, and likable as well as being a frank advocate for poor people in the community.

My brush with history came by way of Henry Thoreau, whom I thank for connecting me with my great-great-grandfather. Ebenezer Grover was a blacksmith in 1820 Ashtabula, Ohio. He kept his business records in a sturdy ledger that survived four generations, the vicissitudes of cross-country moves, and careless progeny to fall into my grateful hands.

It’s a big book, eight by twelve and a half inches, with aging leather covers. Each customer had his own account page, with every transaction neatly recorded. Debit and contra columns show that customers paid by direct barter: “to mending whippletree—0.25,” paid for “by one pail”; “to mending pitchfork—0.12½,” paid for “by seven # of Fish.”

Tabloid Wars Family Planning The Making of the Presidents Fighting Words

The National Gazette , which Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton called “an incendiary and pernicious publication,” first appeared October 31 in Philadelphia. Hamilton claimed the semiweekly’s sole purpose was to “vilify and depreciate the government of the United States,” but in fact it was the inspiration of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to challenge John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States , in which Hamilton, under various psuedonyms, was attacking Jeffersonian republican positions.

For editor of the National Gazette , Madison chose the poet and mariner Philip Freneau, his classmate at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), who, after a stormy and peripatetic career, allowed himself to be lured from New York City to the new capital of Philadelphia. He was employed part-time by Secretary of State Jefferson as “clerk for foreign languages,” but his chief reason for leaving New York, where he had worked at the Daily Advertiser , was to edit the new journal.

On October 31, fourteen years after construction began, the last men came off Mount Rushmore, and the project reached a quiet end. The four tremendous heads sculpted from the mountainside were left without a final dedication ceremony, because federal money was being husbanded for defense in case the nation entered the spreading war in Europe. Gutzon Borglum, the man who had, in his own words, “released” the giant busts of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt from the South Dakota mountain, died six months before the last of the work ended.

In its sweeping tripartite design, its delicate ornamentation, and its rich mahogany surface, this Baltimore sideboard from about 1800 embodies one of the most handsome forms perfected by cabinetmakers in the early years of the new Republic. Though large and commodious (32½” by 5’9¾” by 26”), the piece achieves lightness of design through the lively interplay of geometric shapes and the serpentine movement of the body, through the paring down or reduction of such elements as the taper of the legs, and through a persistent, clear emphasis on line.

Me ’n’ Elvis ’n’ NATO The Rocking-Chair Man What Might Have Been A Fine “How Do Ye Do?”

In the spring of 1956 a kid out of Memphis with a greasy pompadour and a semipermanent sneer, who belted a raucous and rowdy brand of what was then known as rockabilly—a combination of Nashville country and gut-bucket Mississippi Delta blues—was drawing swarms of local belles to his appearances at the “Louisiana Hayride” in Shreveport. That, in turn, drew numerous lonely young airmen from nearby Barksdale Air Force Base, like sharks to schooling tuna.

Late one Saturday evening, after fruitless cruising at the Hayride, several other sharks and I stopped for a final cup of coffee at the Kickapoo Inn in Bossier City, just across the Red River from Shreveport. It was the last allnight café on the way out of the area, a final stop for truckers and travelers heading out.