“Sherman cannot keep up his long line of communication,” said Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, as the Union general sat in Atlanta forming his strategy. “The fate that befell the army of the French Empire in its retreat from Moscow will be reenacted,” Davis told a hopeful audience in Macon, Georgia. “Our cavalry and our people will harass and destroy his army as did the Cossacks that of Napoleon, and the Yankee general, like him, will escape with only a bodyguard.” Davis was unaware that Gen. William T. Sherman had already decided to abandon his supply line and embark upon a carnival of destruction across half of the state of Georgia. On November 16 Sherman’s army left the smoldering city of Atlanta to the fifty or so families that still remained.
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The number of states in the Union grew to forty-two in November with the addition of four Western states. President Benjamin Harrison, who as a Republican senator in 1888 had fought for the new states, signed the legislation admitting North and South Dakota on November 2, Montana on November 8, and Washington on November 11. With the congressional balance between Democrats and Republicans at a stalemate throughout the 1880s, admission for any single state was impossible. But the Western territories were growing too fast for either party to continue to put off their demands for statehood. The Helena (Montana) Herald spoke for the Western viewpoint in 1879: “Our Territorial governments are false in theory, and are rendered worse by the vicious practice of making the places under those governments a sort of lying-in hospital for political tramps. With every appropriation the government nominally makes for our benefit, a dozen hungry wolves are sent with it to devour all and still more of our substance.”
The Packard Motor Company introduced the first air-conditioned automobile at a Chicago car show on November 4. Life with Father , one of the most beloved plays in American theatrical history, opened on November 8 at Broadway’s Empire Theater. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s play was based on Clarence Day’s stories about his boyhood in Victorian-era New York City. It played for eight years and 3,224 performances, the longest run for a nonmusical production in Broadway history. After serving eight years of an eleven-year sentence for income-tax evasion, the Chicago crime czar Al Capone was released from Alcatraz Prison on November 16. A virulent case of syphilis that Capone had picked up during his heyday in the 1920s had left him a physical wreck, and he was judged no longer to be a threat to society. The man who had ordered the deaths of more than five hundred men in Chicago retired to a secluded Miami mansion, his mind clouded by paresis of the brain. Capone died a powerless recluse in 1947 at the age of forty-eight.
President Lyndon Johnson took advantage of his incumbency and the negative public image of his Republican opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater, to win an overwhelming victory in the November 3 presidential election. Johnson accumulated 61.4 percent of the popular vote while carrying forty-four states.
Asked how he had managed to acquire his vast fortune, Commodore Vanderbilt is supposed to have replied, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.” As always, Vanderbilt’s perspicacity was far ahead of his grammar, and he had put his finger directly on capitalism’s secret weapon. In capitalist economies, whenever a new opportunity appears, entrepreneurs quickly find means to profit from it. But because they are free to pursue their self-interests as they see them, they profit as well from myriad ancillary opportunities initially undreamed of by most.
Consider the personal-computer industry, which did not even exist fifteen years ago. Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak got the ball rolling in 1976 when they developed the Apple 1 computer, and they have both profited handsomely from their seminal concept. But so have tens of thousands of others, often in ways far removed from the manufacture of computers.
More than a year ago, the American government began to huff and puff at the house of Panama’s military strong man, Manuel Noriega. Washington is red in the face, but Noriega’s walls are still standing. Economic sanctions tied Panama’s business life in knots, but Noriega endured. The Organization of American States has tried to broker a deal among Panamanian factions that would entice him to quit peacefully, but Noriega finds such proposals easy to resist. An American court would like to try him on narcotics charges but can’t get its hands on him. In May there was an election in Panama that his opponents obviously won. His answer was to have two of his winning rivals beaten bloody in the streets while he declared the results null and void. He seems as indestructible as he is outrageous.
The silverware pattern shown on the opposite page is neither the plainest nor the fanciest ever made by the Gorham Company of Rhode Island. Perhaps it is this balance between abundance and austerity that explains the overwhelming success of Chantilly. To date, Gorham has sold 1,800,000 pieces, making it the most popular pattern any company has ever produced. It is, in the words of the historian Charles H. Carpenter, Jr., “the silverware your grandmother and my grandmother owned.”
On a Bermuda bus I sat next to a local teen-ager who confided her interest in history. What she liked best, Judyann told me, was digging out more about a subject than her school books revealed—or her teachers knew. Like Judyann, I found Bermuda a good place to go looking for the past. And the more you search, the more you discover how closely the history of this archipelago is tied to our own.
The Bermuda Department of Tourism (P.O. Box 7705, Woodside, NY 11377/Tel.: 1-800-BERMUDA) provides excellent material on the island’s amenities and history. I especially liked the walking-tour brochures for St. George’s, Hamilton, and Somerset, a community on the western end of the island, where the Royal Naval Dockyard encircles a splendid maritime museum. It is from the fortified harbor here that a British fleet sailed in 1814 on its mission to burn Washington, D.C. Among the various properties administered by Bermuda’s National Trust, the classically beautiful house called Verdmont shouldn’t be missed. And the guided tours at the Botanical Gardens, just outside Hamilton, are especially interesting for what they reveal about the ways in which the first settlers used the indigenous trees and plants.