January 2011

During the last week in June, I listened on cable television to the great House debate on the proposed constitutional amendment to ban “desecration” of the American flag. (In case you’ve forgotten, it got 254 votes in favor to 177 against, 46 short of the required two-thirds majority.) It sent me back to the books to find out how this particular national symbol had been doing all its long years of being unprotected. And one of the very first things I found was a complaint from a Massachusetts representative that what was “talked about as though … a rag, with certain stripes and stars upon it, tied to a stick and called a flag, was a wizard’s wand.”

This was a Yankee conservative named Josiah Quincy speaking, early in the 1800s. He was choleric at the failure of the national government to provide a strong navy, without which the American flag offered no protection to New England’s merchant ships. “You have a piece of bunting upon a staff, and call it a flag,” Quincy expostulated, “but if you have no maritime power to maintain it, you have a name and no reality; you have the shadow without the substance.”

Readers are invited to submit their personal “brushes with history,” for which our regular rates will be paid on acceptance. Unfortunately, we cannot correspond about or return submissions.

The Day I Saw Them All Doorway to Space

Like every American boy in the twenties and thirties, I revered Babe Ruth as the greatest name in baseball. What made him come alive for me was a genuine American League baseball that my father brought home after one of his trips to New York. Ruth had fouled it off, and Dad had jumped up and caught it one-handed, “just for you,” he said. That was at Yankee Stadium, the “House that Ruth built.”

Of course, I wanted to see Babe Ruth play too, but this wasn’t easy. Dad and I were Cub fans. Ruth was an American Leaguer with the Yankees, so when they came to Chicago, they played the White Sox in Comiskey Park on the South Side.

In the fall of 1932 it became clear that Babe would be coming to Wrigley Field (the Cubs and Yankees had reached the World Series). It was beyond expectation that I would actually get to see those games; I hoped that perhaps I could sneak into the coach’s office in the high school locker room and catch a few plays on his radio before the bell rang for afternoon classes.

It’s hard to believe that an entire generation has reached adulthood since that day twenty-one years ago when the world watched those grainy television images of two American astronauts cavorting on the moon. It was on July 20, 1969, that Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Ed “Buzz” Aldrin set down a funny-looking spindly-legged rig on the Sea of Tranquillity with the announcement “The Eagle has landed.” Eagle was the name given to this unlikely-looking space vehicle by the NASA people, but to the people of Grumman Aircraft (now called Grumman Aerospace) in Bethpage, Long Island, where it was built, it was the LEM, that being the acronym for “lunar excursion module.”

The lushly colored tablet on the opposite page is that rare object, a piece of show-room advertising that was so warmly received its makers found they could sell it independently. The Rookwood it proclaimed was the most important of the art potteries that moved into the production of architectural tiles like this one. At the turn of the century—or, to be more precise, for the twenty or thirty years on either side of it—America was tile-crazy. Glazed tiles not only embellished fireplace mantels and doorway frames but were set into furniture, screens, clock cases, iron stoves, and washstands. Encaustic floor tiles were laid in grand entrance halls, and bathrooms and kitchens were tiled, as were the walls of all manner of public buildings, from restaurants and butcher shops to hospitals and train stations. Tiles also existed as self-contained decorative objects and even as advertising plaques, like the one shown here.

I spent the summer of 1964, between my junior and senior years in hish school, doing yardwork for various neighbors in the village of Bronxville, New York. I was neither a diligent gardener nor a skilled one, but late one Sunday afternoon I found that my haphazard exertions over the past two days had earned me forty dollars. The next day, my friend Paul Chrystal drove me into Yonkers, where I gave the forty dollars to a man who in turn handed me the keys and registration to his ten-year-old Pontiac. The car was half the size of the apartment I now inhabit; it carried on its snout an Indian head that glowed orange at night, and it was powered by a patient, slow-breathing straight-eight engine. It ran quietly and smoothly and required nothing except the gasoline that at that time went for twenty-seven cents a gallon.

Its founders are dead; its disciples are scattered; its millions were all spent long ago. But tens of thousands of Americans in their late thirties still carry the message of New Math in their heads, if not in their hearts. Jeffrey W. Miller was one of that baffled legion bushwhacked with a catechism of sets and frames and complementation. He looks back over the brief, busy history of an educational revolution to find why it all seemed so plausible at the outset; and he discovers in the debacle lessons that we would do well to remember as America embarks on yet another cycle of educational reform.

In the spring of 1902 a stocky blond Southerner who described himself as looking like a “healthy butcher” blew into New York City with a prison term behind him and a stupendous career ahead. In the next few years O. Henry would produce a spate of short stories that did more than make him famous; they so completely caught the mood and spirit of his adopted city that even today we see it through his eyes.

Once again, our annual feature unveils a handsome gathering of paintings whose subjects range from a 1920s nightclub running full throttle to a quiet scene of Albany on a snowy night. Each has something to tell us about the past.

The novelist and historian Thomas Fleming’s dad rose in the hard scramble of ward politics to become a big cog in Boss Frank Hague’s New Jersey political machine. But he paid a steep price for it. In an affecting essay, the author comes to terms with his father’s unquiet ghost.