Union soldiers hated and feared Libby Prison at Richmond, Virginia, more than any Confederate prison camp except Andersonville. Libby had been improvised from a commandeered tobacco warehouse in order to hold the officers captured in the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 and had never been adequately provisioned. By the beginning of 1864 dwindling rations and the breakdown of prisoner exchange made life unbearable for the prisoners of a Confederacy that could barely feed its own population. Libby was dangerously overcrowded and underfed when, on February 9, Col. Thomas E. Rose led 108 other Union prisoners in the largest escape of the Civil War.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
No one seemed to realize how hard the depression of 1913-14 had hit the upper Midwest until Henry Ford announced on January 5 that his company would be hiring up to five thousand new men to accommodate its expansion from two shifts to three. Even more spectacular was the news that he would be paying every Ford worker five dollars for a day’s work, more than doubling the existing wage. Crowds of up to fifteen thousand massed around the Ford employment office throughout the week, ignoring both the company’s notices that all hiring had ceased and the icy wind of a Michigan winter. Newspapers ran stories about job hunters who had spent the last of their savings to come to Detroit and would be unable to return home.
Scientific studies linking cigarettes with lung cancer had been appearing for at least twenty-five years when Surgeon General Luther Terry introduced his report on the subject in a January 11 press conference, Incomprehensiveness and a lack of publicity had hindered the acceptance of the earlier studies; Terry was determined that his report would face no such impediments.
On a sunny November day in 1959, a tall, brown-haired Texan entered the home of a New Orleans friend. Five days later, an unemployed, bald black man walked out. The name of both was John Howard Griffin, and the journey he began that Louisiana evening was to take him to a country farther than any he had ever been in, one bordered only by the shade of its citizens’ skin.
For four weeks, Griffin, his skin chemically darkened, posed as an itinerant black. He wandered the South, hitchhiking, seeking work, and talking and listening to people black and white. His journal of those weeks became a series of magazine articles and then a book, Black Like Me. In passionate first person prose it brought home to millions of American whites the misery and injustice daily endured by American blacks. It opened eyes and seized hearts and changed minds.
The hundreds of thousands of people who came to America aboard small, crowded ships did not have the luxury of taking much with them. Although furniture and household utensils had to be left behind, they could and did bring their traditions, arts, and skills. The immigrants not only adapted their native crafts and customs—their most precious cargo, as it turned out—to their new surroundings but often improved on them. In these virgin environs, where many settlers owned land and tasted political freedom for the first time, the urge to enliven, enrich, record, and leave one’s own mark for posterity was unquenchable.
I had planned to spend four days in Savannah last April and wondered if that might be too long. After all, the Historic District is only two and a half square miles (at that, one of the largest such districts in the nation). Surely I could walk it in a day. In the end the city’s attractions took up every bit of the four—and there was plenty left over for a future visit. In Savannah, two and a half square miles means more than 250 years of history set along a working waterfront, a nearly mile-long alley of oaks, twenty-one shady squares, and a feast of museums, churches, and restored houses. The city’s colonial history began in 1733, when Gen. James Edward Oglethorpe—member of Parliament, philanthropist, and shrewd promoter—sailed up the Savannah River with a group of 114 English colonists to a site he’d previously secured by agreement with Tomo-chi-chi, chief of the Yamacraw Indians. When Oglethorpe set up a temporary home in a damask tent on the river bluffs on February 12, 1733, Savannah was born.
Ask the Savannah Visitors Bureau for brochures on hotels and tours (222 West Oglethorpe Avenue, Savannah, GA 31499/Tel: 912-9440456). For more about Georgia, contact the state tourist office at 1-800-VISIT-GA or P.O. Box 1776, Atlanta, GA 30301. In Savannah you’ll find a rich selection of historic inns as well as the usual chains. I divided my stay between the East Bay Inn, a former cotton warehouse, and the Hyatt Regency, which occupies prime territory on the water (ask for a riverside room). The nonprofit Historic Savannah Foundation (P.O. Box 1733, Savannah, GA 31402/Tel: 912-233-7787) runs excellent tours, including one of the Victorian District. Various commercial companies cover much the same ground. Two special events to plan a spring visit around are an annual house tour (April 9-12) and one featuring hidden gardens (April 14-15).
Even without public-opinion polls, most of the country already knew what the sixty-nine members of the Electoral College would unanimously decide on February 4: that George Washington would be the first President of the United States. With an affectionate farewell “to domestic felicity, and with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations,” Washington accepted the office.
"Memoirs,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once told young Richard Goodwin, “are the most unreliable source of historical evidence. Events are always distorted by refraction through the writer’s ego.” Sage advice, duly reported, but not systematically applied in its recipient’s own memoir, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. Richard Goodwin’s ego suffuses his otherwise admirable book, which combines a persuasive and moving account of what it was like to serve two of the most interesting presidents of the century with an eloquent reminder that beneath the turbulence of the 60s breathed a humane, hopeful spirit that we dismiss at our peril.
A brilliant, driven Boston boy whose family had survived hard times in the Depression, Goodwin sped to the top of his class at Harvard Law, served as clerk to Justice Frankfurter, helped lay bare the quiz-show scandals of 1959 as a congressional investigator, and joined Senator John F. Kennedy’s staff—all by the age of 27.