January 2011

In the 1920s the film industry specialized in spectacle. While the movies fed America’s craving for lavish romance and adventure, a new kind of theater surrounded audiences with fantasies as compelling as anything on the screen.

by James Brady; Orion Books; 248 pages.

In 1947 a New York college boy named James Brady did a smart thing. The draft had just been reinstituted, and Brady signed up with something called the Platoon Leaders Class, which, for the small tariff of a couple of summers spent at the Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Virginia, allowed him to avoid two interminable years of Army duty. In June 1950 he graduated from college and received a second lieutenant’s commission in the USMC Reserve. A week later the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel, and by the following Thanksgiving Brady was leading a rifle platoon in freezing Asian mountains.

Connecting with Eastern Europe The second sinking of the Maine How British are we? 150 years on glass Plus . . .

With the Warsaw Pact nations remaking themselves, the historian John Lukacs—who as a young man fled Hungary in 1945 when the Russians came—examines the historical ties between the U.S. and Eastern Europe and suggests what the lessons of American democracy can and cannot offer these countries in a time of tumult and hope.

When an Oxford, Indiana, store-keeper named Dan Messner, Jr., paid the outlandish fee of $150 to have a broken-down mare called Zelica bred to a champion pacer named Joe Patchen, yet untested as a stud, his friends and fellow horsemen thought he’d taken leave of his senses. And when the colt was foaled in April 1896, Messner probably agreed with them. Little Dan Patch—“Dan” for himself, “Patch” for his sire—just didn’t look like a horse with potential. His knees were too knobby, his legs too long, his hocks curved. And unlike his ill-tempered sire, he actually seemed fond of people right from the start, a bad sign in a racehorse.

“I thought all he would be good for would be hauling a delivery wagon,” Messner said years later. “Fortunately, Johnny Wattles, a livery-stable proprietor of Oxford, saw possibilities in Dan as he began to mature. He asked me to turn the colt over to him for training purposes.”

Five buildings destroyed and eight saved. Considering that we predicted the imminent demise of all thirteen, we are more than happy to have been less than half right. A preservation ethic had taken root in America in 1970. We just weren’t aware of it yet. Although the urban renewal programs of that day seemed to be breeding upon themselves, growing ever larger and more destructive, preservation groups all over America were beginning to stand up and fight for our shared architectural heritage.

In mid-September 1904, Americans reading about Teddy Roosevelt’s conquest of the Republican presidential convention and the decisive Japanese victory over the Russians at Liao-yang came across a brief news item from Kansas: Dan Patch had taken ill in Topeka and would probably die. The announcement sent tremors of anticipatory grief not only through horse fanciers and turf followers but through millions of people who had no particular interest in the track. In the first decade of the century, almost any American could tell you that Dan Patch was no ordinary horse, not even an ordinary champion. He was a harness racer, a pacing horse that never lost a race, an opponent so formidable that after he had spent just two years on the Grand Circuit (the major league of harness racing), owners gave up pitting their pacers against him. Dan Patch paced only against the clock, before several million paying spectators at state fairs. His owner, M. W. (“Will”) Savage—a man of personal, if not commercial, circumspection called him “The Equine King of All Harness Horse Creation and the World’s Great Champion of All Champions.”

In mid-September 1904 Americans reading about Teddy Roosevelt’s conquest of the Republican presidential convention and the decisive Japanese victory over the Russians at Liao-yang came across a brief news item from Kansas: Dan Patch had taken ill in Topeka and would probably die. The announcement sent tremors of anticipatory grief not only through horse fanciers and turf followers but through millions of people who had no particular interest in the track. In the first decade of the century, almost any American could tell you that Dan Patch was no ordinary horse, not even an ordinary champion. He was a harness racer, a pacing horse that never lost a race, an opponent so formidable that after he had spent just two years on the Grand Circuit (the major league of harness racing), owners gave up pitting their pacers against him. Dan Patch paced only against the clock, before several million paying spectators at state fairs. His owner, M. W. (“Will”) Savage—a man of personal, if not commercial, circumspection called him “The Equine King of All Harness Horse Creation and the World’s Great Champion of All Champions.”