One good measure of our apparently inexhaustible interest in Abraham Lincoln is that this year eight hundred thousand of us will be led through his house at the corner of Eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield, Illinois. So many people edge past the horsehair furniture and stomp up and down the narrow stairs that the National Park Service had to close the place down in 1987, take much of it apart, and put it back together again, newly decorated and sturdily reinforced with steel, to withstand the next generation of pilgrims.
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January 2011
Though the American financial community was pleased by President Johnson’s continuation of John F. Kennedy’s pro-business policies, it was briefly stunned by two judicial decisions in April. On the sixth the Supreme Court of the United States nullified the merger of two Lexington, Kentucky, banks on the grounds that any combination of companies that were “major competitive factors” in the same market violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The merged bank would have held more than 50 percent of the assets of all banks in Kentucky’s Fayette County.
The next day a federal grand jury indicted eight major steel companies for having conspired to fix prices in the late 1950s. Two years earlier President Kennedy had blocked an industrywide attempt to raise prices and had initiated the litigation against the steel companies. The indictment led economists to question whether the inflation that had followed the Korean War had resulted from natural forces in a free market or from a criminal conspiracy.
I drove 20,000 and got just one real bargain. That was up the Hudson River on a boisterous, wind-scrubbed October day 15 years ago. My friend Harris is an antiques dealer who at the time was specializing in live steam: elegant old working models of freight locomotives, tugboats, ocean liners. He had spotted a tiny ad buried in the part of The New York Times where they usually herald auctions of kitchen equipment; it announced a live-steam sale that Saturday in Claverack, New York. Harris was jubilant. No other dealer would see the ad. He would come home loaded down with finely crafted rarities.
In April the Federal Red River campaign degenerated into exactly the kind of misguided side show that the new supreme commander, Ulysses S. Grant, had vowed to eliminate from his war effort. The former chief of staff, Henry Halleck, had devised the campaign in the hope that U.S. troops in Mexico could frighten off the puppet dictator that the French emperor, Napoleon III, had installed in Mexico. Grant replaced Halleck too late to prevent a Union column under Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks from marching north through Louisiana in an attempt to invade Texas. The naval force under Adm. David Dixon Porter that followed Banks up the Red River was more interested in seizing cotton than in battling the Confederates.
America’s settlement of its western frontier had for a century followed a pattern of steady migration that gradually filled up an area, built up towns, and pushed back the Indians. On April 22 the first Oklahoma settlers telescoped this process into one frenzied afternoon.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had transplanted eastern Indian tribes at great hardship into what is now Oklahoma, a land that no white settlers wanted. The Indians brought with them President Andrew Jackson’s promise that the land would belong to them “as long as the grass grows, or water runs.”
April 1: With his military victory all but complete, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain received formal diplomatic recognition of his fascist government from the Roosevelt administration. In also lifting its arms embargo against Spain, the United States became the last Western power to concede that the Spanish Civil War was over. The war had killed almost one million people by the time Franco’s troops marched into Madrid, the final Loyalist stronghold, two days later.
Kentucky has an especially vigorous office of tourism (800-225-8747). You can spend the night at Shakertown (606-734-5411), and you should; you’ll be fed marvelously, but if you want a drink before dinner, you’ll have to make your own arrangements—Monroe County is dry. In Louisville the Seelbach is a sedate delight (502-585-3200 or 800-626-2032), and the Filson Club downtown houses a particularly engaging small museum of local history.
In January, when the 101st Congress of the United States assembled to begin a third century of constitutional government, The New York Times noted: “The dominant issue in the months ahead ….will almost surely be how to reduce the federal deficit, whether through taxes, budget cuts or some combination of the two.”
A hundred years earlier, in December 1889, the 51st Congress gathered to begin a second century under the Constitution. The Republican majority was under fierce pressure to resolve a vexatious problem that had occupied the country for nearly a decade. There was simply too much money in the Treasury. The only answer was to spend it.
At the end of the 1700s only one American family in ten owned a clock. By 1844 an English visitor could write, “Wherever we have been in Kentucky, in Indiana, … in every dell of Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.” That change can be laid to one clockmaker and one clock: Eli Terry and his pillar and scroll.