THE BROKEN SABER THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE SHANE’S FATHER BEFORE THE STORM A GENIUS IN THE FAMILY DUSTY ROADS HISTORIANS ARE HISTORY TOO THE GREAT QUESTION DE GAULLE EXPLAINED SAVING THE LEANING TOWER CHURCHILL WEEPS BOMBS AWAY ASLEEP AT THE CREATION: I THE PROBLEM SOLVER ASLEEP AT THE CREATION: II JAPAN ASKS FOR PEACE TRUMAN RATES FDR JOE MCCARTHY AT THE LIBRARY JOE MCCARTHY VISITS BILL BUCKLEY THE FIRST NEWS OF MARSHALL’S PLAN A COOL HAND IKE RATE
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January 2011
During my years of growing up in a county-seat town in central Illinois, the memory of Lincoln and the Civil War was still a near thing.
First, there was Decoration Day, when the graves of departed soldiers were decked with flowers and little flags. A few surviving veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic shuffled along in the march to the cemetery. I remember, too, when I was quite small, eyeing the green binding with gold lettering on the spine of my father’s two-volume Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. The “U.S.,” I surmised, was doubtless an honorific title bestowed upon the general by a grateful nation. Later an old gentleman lectured in the assembly hall of the Carrollton High School and told of being present in Ford’s Theatre the night Lincoln was assassinated. In a dramatic closing of his recital, he held up a discolored handkerchief. He said it was stained by the blood of the martyred President. One does remember an experience like that.
Newport’s Christmas hums through the entire month of December. Every week has its own special events, such as a Holly Tea in the Eighteenth Century Manner; Christmas on Historic Hill, an ecumenical service at Trinity Church; a candlelight house tour; and late in the month, a reenactment of a banquet held in Newport in 1752 and known as a Turtle Frolic. For more information contact Christmas in Newport, P.O. Box 716, Newport, RI 02840 (Tel: 401-849-6454). The city’s Visitor’s Bureau (23 America’s Cup Avenue, Newport, RI 02840/Tel: 401-849-8098) and the State Tourism Division (7 Jackson Walkway, Providence, RI 02903/Tel: 401-277-2601) both have material on sightseeing and accommodations.
Battle-weary and convinced there was nothing to be gained from continuing to fight, Great Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, ending the War of 1812. It had been a tense year for the American peace mission. Albert Gallatin, the American Secretary of the Treasury, and the Federalist senator James Bayard of Delaware had pined John Quincy Adams in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1813 only to learn that Britain had refused Czar Alexander’s mediation. It would be August of 1814 before the British would come to the table, in Flanders, where Jonathan Russell and Henry Clay joined the American delegation.
The Chicago Auditorium, designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, opened to the public on December 9. It immediately ranked as one of the city’s architectural masterpieces. Chicago’s Commission on Architectural Landmarks would later cite “the community spirit which here joined commercial and artistic ends, uniting hotel, office building, and theater in one structure…and the genius of the architect which gave form and, with the aid of original ornament, expressed the spirit of festivity in rooms of great splendor.” In 1947 the Chicago Auditorium Building became the home of Roosevelt University.
“Wherever you see the big white electric light, with its carbons burning, you may know that death lurks overhead,” wrote Alexander Welsh, an assistant to Thomas Edison, of the enveloping tangle of electric wires that plagued New York City in 1889. “Nearly every wire you see in the open air is thick enough and strong enough to carry a death-dealing current. … A man ringing a door-bell or leaning up against a lamp post might be struck dead any instant.”
Watch Your Step , the first of many musicals by Irving Berlin, opened at the New Amsterdam Theater in New York on December 8. Though one critic praised the show’s “mad melodies…born to be caught up and whistled at every street corner, and warranted to set any roomful a-dancing,” its most memorable song was the ballad “Play a Simple Melody.”
Theodore W. Richards became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry on December 10. Richards earned the award for his exact measurements of the atomic weights of several elements, work that would lead to modern atomic research. The Harvard professor declared himself especially thrilled to learn that iron in the earth had the same atomic weight as iron from meteorites, a discovery that gave him “an added realization of the unity of the universe.”
The governor of Georgia declared a state holiday. The mayor of Atlanta urged the men of his city to grow Kentucky-colonel whiskers and the women to wear hoop skirts. Citizens were requested not to tear off the clothes of the visitors from Hollywood. With the Stars and Bars waving from every building in Atlanta, three hundred thousand people lined the streets to welcome Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and David O. Selznick to the December 15 opening of the motion picture Gone with the Wind .
Despite the problems associated with bringing Margaret Mitchell’s thousand-page Civil War novel to the screen, Gone with the Wind was too popular for Hollywood to ignore. The film took three years, four directors, a dozen screenwriters, and four million dollars to produce in time for its lavish opening in the seventy-fifth anniversary year of the fall of Atlanta.
One day toward the end of his life, H. L. Mencken is said to have come upon his own obituary in the files of the Baltimore Sun. He read it through and, to the intense relief of its anxious author, pronounced it satisfactory. Then he asked that one more line be added: “As he got older, he got worse.”