January 2011

On July 19 Tennessee became the first state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution despite the opposition of President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean himself, to the legislation. “We have fought the battle and won it,” Gov. William Gannaway Brownlow telegraphed the U.S. Senate.

The Fourteenth Amendment proposed that state legislatures be held to the same constitutional standards as the federal government, and thus it formally settled the question the war had answered: whether the United States was a single nation or a collection of states, each with its own laws. Persons born or naturalized in the United States (including former slaves) would be recognized as citizens of the United States and the states in which they lived, and all males of twenty-one years or more would be allowed to vote, with the exception of Indians who were not taxed.

By the end of July, Cyrus Field’s transatlantic cable stretched from Newfoundland to Valentia, Ireland, connecting New York and London by wire. The project that Field had begun thirteen years earlier and for which he had laid out hundreds of tons of cable was finally a success when businesses on both sides started sending messages across the water at a cost of five to ten dollars per word. The Times of London’s editor had once dismissed the cable project as “a great bore”; the United States Congress felt differently and voted to reward Field with a medal.

This was a second life for the trans-atlantic cable. A first cable had been laid in 1858; it conveyed messages back and forth for almost a month before mysteriously failing. The Queen of England had managed to send a ninety-eight-word greeting to President Buchanan while that cable worked. Her message took sixteen and a half hours to send, but letters by ship took at least two weeks.

For me he was always just Uncle Max, and she, Aunt Sophie. They lived two houses down from me in suburban Long Island. And though I spent many hours of my childhood in his company in the late forties and early fifties, I never knew who he really was.

To a seven-year-old boy, allowed to romp, read, and listen in his uncle’s study (he really wasn’t my uncle, just a close family friend), the photographs on the wall of him shaking hands with Harry Truman or presenting a hat to a young Nelson Rockefeller and the ornate, framed testimonials from something called unions meant very little. My main concern in life was whether the gods of baseball would ever allow the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the World Series.

So I whiled away the time, let Aunt Sophie stuff me with cookies, played with Uncle Max’s Webcor wire recorder, and ran home to dinner. Eventually they moved back to their original hometown, Boston, and Uncle Max died.

Near the end of the flapper era, most girls’ finishing schools were islands in a sea of young people suddenly gone mad with freedom, and Highland Hall was no exception.

Miss Keats, our principal, was dignity personified. We all loved her, but stood in great awe of her. Since an important part of our education was table manners, we had to take turns sitting at Miss Keats’ table, where, among other things, we were taught the art of table conversation and etiquette.

Most of the rules were observed without protest, but one seemed completely unreasonable: A lady must never put gravy on her mashed potatoes. This act, we felt, could not possibly be interpreted as unkind, and gravy improved the taste tremendously. But Miss Keats was adamant; no gravy on mashed potatoes.

The Japanese had surrendered. I was hurried from Manila to Tokyo in my capacity as a junior officer investigating war crimes. Although I had sampled the Japanese language while training at the Army School of Military Government at the University of Virginia in early 1945, I simply was not prepared for the total immersion in that language that came with my arrival in Tokyo. It seemed to have an explosive rhythm. I couldn’t resist parodying those exotic sounds by piecing together a few of the phrases that struck me as phonetically droll.

Here’s the way it went:

The romance of the American West—complete with stampeding buffalo herds and Indian tepees—is effectively captured by the massive wrought-iron and rawhide chandelier on the opposite page. Measuring almost four feet across, it was created around 1940 by Thomas Molesworth, a Cody decorator and furniture maker, for the insurance tycoon W. R. Coe’s Wyoming ranch. Molesworth designed the chandelier but hired the Campbell Brothers of Cody to execute the intricate ironwork. For years it hung in a forty- by fifty-foot room at the ranch, emitting a soft, diffused light.

Molesworth often included such custom-made lighting in his Western “roomscapes.” Influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, he believed not only in well-crafted furniture but that interiors should reflect a unity of style, linking architecture with interior design.

A visitor to the Victorian enclave in western New York called the Chautauqua Institution will likely notice more than one inhabitant wearing a blue sweat shirt with the legend “London, Paris, Rome, Chautauqua. ” How equal a grouping this is depends, of course, on one’s own perception. Still, it’s a measure of how far this 117-year-old Methodist campground in the woods has come.

“The stars were out and looked down through trembling leaves upon a goodly, well-wrapped company who sat in the grove, filled with wonder and hope,” recalled the cofounder, Dr. John Heyl Vincent, of the first gathering there on August 4, 1874. Vincent, a Methodist minister from Pennsylvania, had joined forces with Lewis Miller, an Akron manufacturer, to lease a fifty-acre camp on the shores of Chautauqua Lake for the training of Sunday-school teachers. Advertised widely in church publications, that first two-week session was unimaginably successful, drawing twenty-five thousand participants from twentyfive states, Britain, Canada, and India.

Today he is recognized as one of America’s greatest artists—perhaps our very greatest—but in his time Thomas Eakins was far better known for the series of sexual scandals that dogged him all his life. Jack Ram examines the painter’s turbulent career and discovers in it the keys to understanding his works.

Tom Brown in Tennessee: How the British author of one of the nineteenth century’s most famous novels planted in the backcountry South a Victorian Utopia named—after the school he revered—Rugby; another frontier closes as the mapping of America finally approaches completion; the author of a major new biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson weighs the worst of his subject against the best; we visit the spot in Maine where shipbuilders were at work before the Pilgrims landed, and which now produces the most complex vessels afloat; and, to lure you away from trimming that hedge and pulling those weeds, more.

In April of 1951, I was ten years old and living with my family on Chicago’s South Side when the newspapers reported that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was to be paraded past our neighborhood as part of the clamorous tour of American cities that followed his recall from Korea. The news put my father in a quandary. He knew that MacArthur represented a big part of our history and that it would be wrong to deny me a look at him. But he also saw MacArthur’s dismissal not as the tragedy the general and his admirers believed it to be, but as the most forceful evidence that the Constitution still mattered, that it was incumbent upon even the most exalted soldier to follow the orders of his civilian commander in chief.