Having passed the Senate by a vote of 60 to 31, and the House by 317 to 17, the Lend-Lease Act was signed by President Roosevelt on March 11, making an initial seven billion dollars available to the Allied cause, particularly to a desperate Great Britain. Three days before, in a radio address to the nation, Roosevelt had declared that the American “democratic way of life” could not withstand “the death of democracy over the rest of the earth.” Through the course of the war, the United States would send more than fifty billion dollars to the Allies through lend-lease.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
Bobby Hull of the Chicago Black Hawks broke hockey’s single-season scoring record, slapping home his fifty-first goal on March 12 against the New York Rangers to best his previous high of fifty, reached in 1962. The Chicago forward would finish the season with fifty-four goals.
The same day, Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” entered radio’s Top Forty. The tribute to the Special Forces achieved number-one status later that year, driven as much by strong feelings over the American presence in Vietnam as by any virtues of the tune itself. Two years later it served as the anthem for The Green Berets , a John Wayne war movie, which outgrossed all of the star’s other films. Barry Sadler, a former combat medic in the Special Forces, sold nine million copies of the tribute and wrote more than twenty novels about mercenary soldiers over the years. He later trained rebels in Nicaragua and Guatemala, where he was shot in an apparent robbery in 1988. Partially paralyzed in the shooting, Sadler died as a result the following year.
Bank failure is as American as apple pie. The first American failure took place in Rhode Island in 1809, when a bank capitalized at forty-five dollars issued eight hundred thousand dollars in bank notes, a sum equal to more than seventeen thousand times the resources behind it. In the 1990s the latest bank failure, alas, almost certainly took place less than a week before you began reading this article, as another savings and loan association was taken over by the government.
The 182 years between have been marked by literally tens of thousands of bank failures. In sharp contrast, Great Britain, whence most of American banking theory and practice comes, has not had a major bank failure in well over a hundred years.
In a crude log bunk room in the midst of a dense forest in Oregon, the afternoon light is dim and greenish. Outside, the rain pounds down, and with only a slice of window cut into the wall and a small open doorway, the room fills quickly with smoke from the fire on the hearth. Any traveler prefers sun to rain, but on this occasion a visitor to the reconstruction of Lewis and Clark’s winter campground found the downpour entirely suitable. ”… rained all the last night,” wrote William Clark of the place he and Meriwether Lewis named Fort Clatsop. “We covered our selves well as we could with Elk skin & set up the greater part of the night, all wet I lay in the wet verry cold.” In the diaries of the two explorers there are many moans about the weather; out of the 106 days they spent here in 1805 and 1806, they saw only 12 dry days.
For information on Special Expeditions’ Columbia River cruises, call it at 800-762-0003. YachtShip CruiseLine also runs a boat through these waters (206-623-4245), and Clipper Cruise Line follows a similar route (800-325-0010). The Sea Lion is a small vessel (twenty-three times around the deck equals one mile), offering correspondingly snug but comfortable cabins and pleasant dining. It is rich, however, in the things that matter most: in its questing staff of historians and naturalists and in its well-traveled passengers, who share surprising funds of knowledge with one another. Good background reading includes Stewart Holbrook’s 1956 volume The Columbia ; Dayton Duncan’s Out West (1988), in which the author follows Lewis and Clark’s route; and, of course, the published journals of the two great adventurers.
Events in New York City in late February led to fatal rumors that a conspiracy of black slaves and white indentured servants was planning to overthrow the city government. At the time, New York was a city of ten thousand people, one-fifth of whom were slaves and black freedmen. A series of fires as well as thefts of silverware had put New Yorkers on edge by the time the governor’s house burned down on March 18. The lieutenant governor publicly blamed workmen who’d been repairing roof gutters, but this explanation was forgotten as soon as Peter Warren’s West Village mansion burned a week later, followed by the home of a Dutchman known for whipping one of his slaves to death. Pipe embers were cited in the latter blaze, but the rash of fires did not stop.
The November rain came steadily down, cold, persistent, promising snow, as it had for days. The last fallen leaves of autumn floated down the streets, carried along by the steady streams flowing toward the stormsewer gratings. Some people thought the rain was caused by the firing of the guns in Europe, where the Great War had gone on for more than four years. Others said, no, there had been many other Novembers with rain like this, at the beginning of winter. In northern France the armies—German and Austrian on one side; French and British, and lately American, on the other—had dug miles of trenches, facing each other across the torn and ravaged strips of earth known as no man’s land. From time to time men from one army or the other would climb on crude ladders from the trenches, going “over the top” to try to take the positions held by their opponents. They advanced through no man’s land, in the face of rifle and machine-gun fire, artillery and mortar shells, and, if weather and wind were favorable, poisonous gases.