Every day throughout my summer vacation of 1960, I would walk around the block—no matter how many times it took—until I saw him. I didn’t know who he was, mostly because my grandmother’s quiet little town respected his privacy, but I knew there was something different about this old man at the house surrounded by the high wrought-iron fence that I tried climbing more than once. I was much older and far from Independence, Missouri, when I learned he had been President the year I was born, 1951. To me, he had been the character who always waved but never spoke, who sat with a blanket on his lap in the summer while a mysterious shadow of a man stood behind him. I had decided the shadow man was not a black servant like those at my great-grandmother’s in Savannah but a silent protector whose only job was to watch over the old man sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch.
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by Karen Schwarz; William Morrow & Co.; 316 pages; $21.00. Is there any college kid who came of age around 1961 who didn’t dream of joining the Peace Corps at one time or another? Many of us recall the Peace Corps and the sit-ins of the early sixties as the two great adventures designed for our generation. How directly we participated depended on how easily idealism overcame timidity, but a significant number of Kennedy’s Children were ready to take on not only the troubles of our own country but those of the world.
“I think one man is just as good as another,” he wrote, “so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.” Yet when the time came, Truman risked his career to fight for the first real civil rights legislation. William E. Leuchtenburg tells why.
In the bleak twilight of Castro’s regime, Neill Macaulay recalls his life as a revolutionist, and the political correspondent Georgie Anne Geyer reveals the truth about the dictator.
One day in 1950 a businessman found himself at the end of a restaurant meal without the money to pay for it. From his embarrassment grew an industry that changed the way we live.
Pioneering photojournalism in Colorado … American house styles: an 1683 dwelling that reflects a colonial society on the way toward revolution … and, as befits a season that celebrates bounty, more.
In November of 1962, I was living on Pinckney Street at the top of Beacon Hill in Boston, and when, on election day, I learned that John F. Kennedy and his wife were to cast their votes at the polls just around the corner, I decided to join the cheerful throng waiting there to have a look at them.
It was a predominantly Irish crowd—elderly women, some clasping cameras; hangers-on from the nearby State House; small children and their mothers; red-faced policemen—all as eager as I to see the local boy who had made good so spectacularly.
The more things change, the French are fond of saying, the more they stay the same. The French have never been exactly renowned for their respect for the free market, but nowhere is their famous proverb more true. The laws of economics that rule the market are immutable, and traders through the ages have employed the same tactics over and over in pursuing their fortunes. Sometimes they have won, sometimes they have lost, but the market, like the Mississippi, “just keeps rollin’ along.”
The most spectacular—and potentially the most remunerative—market tactic has always been the corner. A trader with a corner owns all of a commodity—whether it be corporate shares, gold, or pork bellies—that is available for sale, and thus any potential buyer must buy from him or do without. The reason a corner can be so rewarding is that short sellers, often, can not do without.
Occasionally two or three related news stories hit my historical eye in a sequence that generates a current of reflection. Such was the case recently when, first, I read one of many reports of the furor raised this spring in Washington by an exhibition in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, called “The West as America.” Readers will be aware that it consisted of a series of celebrated nineteenth-century renderings of Western images with interpretive captions explaining that these representations pandered to the prejudices and anxieties of white America in the heyday of social Darwinism. I reserve judgment, not having seen the show, and the subject is elsewhere addressed in these pages (see “The Life and Times”). I was, however, pleased to learn that visitors lined up to write angry comments in the guest book. I’d rather see history debated than ignored any day.
‘When describing his native landscape, one Tennessee statesman liked to say. “Our great state is the multum in parvo of all the lands lying between the ramparts of the Alleghenies and the majestic currents of the mighty Mississippi.” Soon after the Revolutionary War the American frontier pushed west through that densely wooded multum , leaving a lattice of primitive civilization in its wake. Much of the settlement was clustered around Jonesborough, the state’s first municipality, and its traces can still be found there.
Northeastern Tennessee is a good jumping-off point for a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains or the Cumberland region of the Appalachians. Visitors should contact the director of information at the Department of Tourist Development (Room T, Box 23170, Nashville, TN 37202/Tel: 615-741-7994). It has a clear, well-written packet of information to acquaint you with the region. For an up-to-date calendar of events around town or information on the storytelling festival, your best bet would be the Jonesborough Visitors Center (P.O. Box 375, Jonesborough, TN 37659/Tel: 615-753-5961). The town is situated one and a half hours northeast of Knoxville, and just twenty minutes west of Johnson City on Highway 321.