January 2011

Moving to Bodie Moving to Bodie Buffalo Tips Buffalo Tips Buffalo Tips Buffalo Tips Stars for Thomas

In the quiet New York courtroom, the little girl began to speak. “My name is Mary Ellen McCormack. I don’t know how old I am. … I have never had but one pair of shoes, but can’t recollect when that was. I have had no shoes or stockings on this winter.… I have never had on a particle of flannel. My bed at night is only a piece of carpet, stretched on the floor underneath a window, and I sleep in my little undergarment, with a quilt over me. I am never allowed to play with any children or have any company whatever. Mamma has been in the habit of whipping and beating me almost every day. She used to whip me with a twisted whip, a raw hide. The whip always left black and blue marks on my body. I have now on my head two black and blue marks which were made by mamma with the whip, and a cut on the left side of my forehead which was made by a pair of scissors in mamma’s hand. She struck me with the scissors and cut me. I have no recollection of ever having been kissed, and have never been kissed by mamma. I have never been taken on my mamma’s lap, or caressed or petted. I never dared to speak to anybody, because if I did I would get whipped.

Fashion muffled women’s torsos in this first uncorseted decade. As waistlines thickened and breasts vanished, shoulders became more interesting, and legs a new sensation. Swimwear was designed for the public display of these liberties, not the free play of active bodies.

Skimpy dancing dresses set the tone for swimsuits. Women wore as little bulk as possible and really learned to move. Thighs came into view on the beach, and the natural lines of the body showed at last. A slim and unripe figure, stripped of both fat and fabric, now had the most appeal.

Swimsuits finally suggested outdoor physical exertion and stopped imitating stage and ballroom styles. Close-fitting knits resembled athletic gear and permitted real swimming. The only theft from the evening dress was the daringly low-cut back, well adapted to the new fad for sun-bathing.

As the startling impact of visible legs began to diminish, the bosom reclaimed the center of attention. Swimwear designers molded the breasts with tucks and darts or clever shirring, while bathing beauties turned toward the camera and proudly arched their backs.

The battle for freedom of movement and display was over. The female torso became a rigid icon, boned and padded as in the last century. Swimsuits cinched the waist and supported the bust from below, allowing the upper body to emerge like a complex fleshy flower from a stiff calyx.

The Red Army occupied the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, installing Communist governments in each country. “The people of the United States are opposed to predatory activities,” said Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. “They are likewise opposed to any form of intervention on the part of one state, however powerful, in the domestic concerns of another state, however weak.” But Welles could do little more than express his government’s disapproval. By the beginning of August the three Baltic republics had been formally incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Bob Dylan had done so much to inspire the revival of folk music in the early 1960s that some proclaimed him the heir to Woody Guthrie’s legacy. Some of his followers sensed a betrayal of that legacy when, on July 25, Dylan shocked the audience at the Newport Folk Festival by taking the stage in a leather jacket and leading an amplified band in an earsplitting set of rock-’n’-roll songs. Folk purists who had expected Dylan to perform alone with his familiar acoustic guitar and harmonica registered their disapproval by booing their idol. “You could hear it all over the place,” Dylan said later. “I don’t know who they were. … I mean, they must be pretty rich to go some place and boo.” By the end of the summer, Dylan’s electric music had won him new and larger audiences, and “Like a Rolling Stone” had become his first No. 1 song on the charts.

One price of political greatness is to be forced to campaign even long after death. The Founding Fathers, particularly, have been constantly dragged from their graves for partisan purposes. The shades of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison have been invoked right up to the present by American politicians seeking to add luster to their own political agendas.

In 1923 Arthur H. Vandenberg, not yet a United States senator but already a power in Republican politics, went so far as to write an entire book called If Hamilton Were Alive Today . In it Vandenberg presumed to know how Alexander Hamilton would have reacted to the great questions facing the country in the post-World War I era. Deeply conservative himself, Vandenberg not surprisingly thought that Hamilton would come down on the conservative Republican side of all the issues.