January 2011

“Twenty-One” contestants first were told the category they would be quizzed on and then chose how many points they wished to try for. The higher the point value, the harder the question. Points were worth five hundred dollars each in the first round of play, rising by five hundred dollars with each succeeding round. The object of the game was to score twenty-one points.

Here are the first twelve questions Jack Barry, the program’s host, put to Charles Van Doren on November 28 and December 5, 1956:

1. World War II

(9 points, at $500 per point) . Lake Ladoga played a large part in a particular phase of World War II. Name the two countries whose troops opposed each other at Lake Ladoga.

Answer: Finland and Russia.

2. Medicine

Like many other Detroiters, I was very familiar with the writings of General Marshall (“The Secret of the Soldiers Who Didn’t Shoot,” by Fredric Smoler, March issue). In fact, his military column in the Detroit News , coupled with an abundance of World War II films (which always seemed to star John Wayne), probably influenced my Army enlistment as a seventeen-year-old private during the Korean War.

It is not difficult to understand why so many career Army officers of World War II failed to come forward to defend the American infantryman against Marshall’s assertions regarding the ratio of fire. It seems to me Marshall was an icon not to be questioned if an officer sought promotion.

If I were young and contemplating enlistment, second thoughts might arise in reading that only one-quarter of my buddies would fire at an enemy prepared to kill me. Perhaps this statement would not have received such wide currency if someone had had the audacity to simply check his claims of glory during World War I.

I saw S. L. A. Marshall from a unique perspective. I was his personal assistant in Europe for more than a year. I shared a jeep, pup tent, and foxhole under fire with him. I followed his later career and, in the end, I stood beside his casket as he was buried. I doubt that any other person has used his after-action interview technique as often as I have, or been called on as often to explain Marshall and his methods. Bud Leinbaugh and Roger Spiller, who are quoted in your article, were among the many who have come to me for information about Marshall.

It is easy to criticize Marshall. All who really knew him were aware of his tendency to overdramatize himself. It was for this reason I declined to edit his autobiography. I must admit, however, that Leinbaugh’s revelation that Marshall wasn’t the World War 1 combat soldier he claimed took me by surprise. Marshall swapped stories with the “old warriors,” and I never heard a murmur of doubt. Perhaps I should have suspected that a man with such a keen ear for music but who couldn’t distinguish between a shell coming and going probably hadn’t had much combat experience.

"Beside [our] little front porch … lay two dead Union soldiers. I had never before seen a dead man, yet I do not recall that I was shocked, so quickly does war brutalize.”

New York’s World of Tomorrow wasnt the only world’s fair of 1939; on the other coast, San Francisco played host to the exposition commemorated on this souvenir plate. A California fairgoer’s memories of that year appear inside.

How much money did it take in 1800 to be called rich? According to Henry Adams, in the first chapter of his History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison , “In New York and Philadelphia a private fortune of one hundred thousand dollars was considered handsome, and three hundred thousand was great wealth.” By 1988 you didn’t make Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans unless you could command at least $225 million. This year the minimum will undoubtedly be higher.

In October 1956, the 29-year-old scion of an illustrious American literary family took up a suggestion that countless Americans were then making to their more erudite friends and relations. He could use some extra money; Columbia University paid him meagerly enough to teach English alongside his famous father, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren. So why not try to get on one of those new television quiz shows? If he happened to get lucky, he might win a few thousand dollars. From this innocuous impulse flowed a complex moral tale.

U.S. Infantrymen under Fire U.S. Infantrymen under Fire U.S. Infantrymen under Fire U.S. Infantrymen under Fire So Much the Worse Give It the Gas The Father on Film Quotes Wanted

In a free market, if the price of a commodity, such as sugar, drops substantially, the price of everything made with that commodity—candy, bakery products, soft drinks—will drop as well, and the effects of the new price will ripple through the economy. If the price of something used in every commodity plunges, however, a tidal wave of change may result and a new economic universe be created.

The collapse in the prices of transportation in the first half of the nineteenth century produced just such a fundamental transformation. Cheap transportation created an integrated, worldwide economy out of a myriad of local ones. Writing in the 1880s, the American economist Arthur T. Hadley noted that “two generations ago, the expense of cartage was such that wheat had to be consumed within two hundred miles of where it was grown. Today, the wheat of Dakota, the wheat of Russia, and the wheat of India come into direct competition. The supply at Odessa is an element in determining the price in Chicago.”