In the spring of 1891, nearly twenty years after Henry Morton Stanley introduced himself to Dr. David Livingstone on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, Oxford University awarded the grizzled, stumpy explorer an honorary degree. As he made his way forward to receive it, an undergraduate shouted out, “Dr. Stanley, I presume.”
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January 2011
Baseball, we are told, is the American game, and much earnest nonsense has been written about how its attributes mystically reveal the American character. Baseball mirrors American life, it is said. It requires both teamwork and individual genius, involves squandered chances and answered prayers, measures the short term of the single game and the long haul of the entire season. That is all perfectly true, but I’m not sure how it differs from life anywhere else.
What, then, makes baseball so red, white, and blue American? Well, if Calvin Coolidge was right that “the chief business of the American people is business”—and the writer of this column is not about to argue with the notion—then baseball is most certainly the American game. Baseball, you see, was a business, as well as a sport, from its very earliest days.
Here we are, then, as I write, immersed in the latest United States war—the fourth of my lifetime—now in progress in the Persian Gulf. Can history help us to retrieve usable meanings from this swift new crisis? It has been freely invoked from the start, especially the so-called Munich analogy; but with the final outcome not yet clear to us, now may be a good time to reflect on when and how this particular democracy decides to take up arms. On January 12 Congress authorized President Bush to use force at his discretion, any time after the January 15 United Nations deadline, to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Bush did not get the clarion endorsement he sought. The “force” resolution drew the vote of slightly less than three-fifths of the House (250-185) and a bare majority in the Senate (52-47). But it was legally and practically sufficient: it passed on a Saturday and the war began the following Wednesday.
On October 26, 1911, the old Life magazine published a cartoon entitled “When We All Get Wise.” The implication of the cartoon, of course, was that if the ordinary people of the country would “just say no,” this time to bankers, brokers, and capitalists, Wall Street would collapse, and all those people would have to go out and start earning an honest living for a change. John D. Rockefeller would have to give golf lessons to get by. Swift and Armour would be back to selling meat at retail (buying it from whom? one wonders). The Wall Street Journal would have to print comics to attract a readership. To many in those days it all seemed like a wonderful idea.
When photographers take pictures of Pittsburgh, they traditionally perch on the slopes of Mount Washington. So Peter Kr’fcmel did in shooting the view below in the late 1890s. Here the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, to the left and right, merge to form the mighty Ohio. Barges heavy with coal line the busy waterfront, while upriver more than a dozen mills produce two-thirds of the nation’s crucible steel.
In 1753, shortly before the start of the French and Indian War, a twenty-one-year-old major, George Washington, recognized the strategic value of the area. The following year five hundred French soldiers evicted a small force of British troops from their half-completed outpost without firing a shot and named their conquest Fort Duquesne. The land changed hands again in 1758, and the British built a new installation named Fort Pitt after the British prime minister, William Pitt; the budding village nearby was called Pittsburgh.
edited by Ken McCormick and Hamilton Darby Perry; Orion Books; 453 pages; $65.00.
The editors of this magazine anticipated the publication of Images of War with a keen professional interest. Whenever it comes to putting together a story on World War H, we suspect, we are convinced , there is new visual material out there—in the archives of the Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, and Japan, not to mention the treasures hidden in our own multiplicity of military repositories. Nothing is harder to obtain than a good, sharp color transparency of a work of art that’s been hidden away in the stacks of one of our military branches. Matters didn’t improve when, in a fit of privatization several years ago, a key Army photo lab was eliminated in favor of an outside vendor and efficiency crumbled. This is just enough spleen vented to explain why Images of War is particularly welcome in our quarters. It will become a valuable resource.
Stephen Vincent Benét confessed that he had fallen in love with American placenames, and George R. Steward, author of the classic Names on the Land, wrote that he was born with rapturous feelings towards the names and cities that “lay thickly over the land.”
Yet, neither the poet who sang of “Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat” nor the historian who savored American place-names investigated the informal and usually unofficial nicknames or slogans that make pithy comment on states, cities, even counties and villages. Travelers who run across them in regional promotional literature or on the placemats of roadside restaurants will find that in their tiny way they can be eloquent about the historical, cultural, social, and economic development of our republic.
When, in 1783, it became clear that a band of American rebels had succeeded in their insurrection against King George, Robert Pagan and 443 of his neighbors in Castine, Maine did the only thing loyal subjects of the Crown could do: they dismantled their houses and pubs, board by board and nail by nail, piled them onto schooners, and sailed for the northern Crown colonies. There, at the confluence of the St. Croix River and Passamaquoddy Bay, just a coin’s throw across the Maritime border of what is now Maine, the Penobscot Loyalists shook the dust of revolution from their heels and secured a piece of the Empire. Financed by the royal treasury and carefully laid out in advance by George III’s deputy surveyor general of Nova Scotia, St. Andrews would become a paragon of royal benevolence and Loyalist industry.