January 2011

On November 19 a dedication ceremony took place at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at the site of the recent Battle of Gettysburg. The featured speaker, Edward Everett, a Greek scholar and former senator, delivered a stirring two-hour oration. President Lincoln, invited to give “a few appropriate remarks,” read a suprisingly brief address that began “Fourscore and seven years ago. …”

The disastrous Union defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga left the Army of the Cumberland besieged at Chattanooga. Gen. Ulysses Grant and his troops came to the rescue, forcing open a supply line via Brown’s Ferry. The “cracker line” kept the army from starving as reinforcements trickled in.

Gen. Braxton Bragg committed a grave tactical error when he dispatched part of his force to retrieve Knoxville from Union hands. Thus diminished, the Rebel line partially encircling Chattanooga was ill prepared for the decisive battle to come.

The American musical scene was in a sorry state, according to the November issue of The Atlantic . An article entitled “A Warning Note” lamented that “The Wagner school of music has proved itself the arch enemy of the human voice. … The unnatural demands made upon the vocal organs through Wagner’s total ignorance of the art of singing, and the abnormal development of the orchestra through the impatient yearnings of his unquiet soul, have banished for the time all chance of melody in music.”

With almost one hundred thousand more votes than his opponent, incumbent President Grover Cleveland nevertheless lost to Benjamin Harrison in the November 6 election. Despite his slim majority, the distribution by state of Cleveland’s votes gave him only 168 electoral votes to the challenger Harrison’s 233.

Almost 50 years after Whittaker Chambers first told a government official that Alger Hiss was a communist, and 40 years after Chambers’ charge was finally made public, Hiss has written Recollections of a Life, billed by its publisher as “his long-awaited memoir.” No one’s frank memoir would be more welcome; many, even among those who believed Hiss innocent, also believe that he had been unable to tell the whole story in court.

Chambers, a pudgy, rumpled confessed ex-communist, first tried to warn the White House about Hiss, who was then a minor State Department official, shortly after the Nazi-Soviet pact had been signed in 1939. Nine years later, on August 3, 1948, Chambers repeated his accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Offices are not what they used to be. On a bulletin board in the office where I work, some mischievous soul has posted work rules said to have been written in 1852:

“1) Godliness, cleanliness and punctuality are the necessities of a good business. 2) This firm has reduced the hours of work, and the office staff will now only have to be present between the hours of 7:00 A.M. and 6:00 P.M. on weekdays. 3) Daily prayers will be held each morning in the main office....4) Clothing must be of a sober nature. The office staff will not disport themselves in raiment of bright colours....6) A stove is provided for the benefit of the office staff....It is recommended that each member of the office staff bring four pounds of coal each day during cold weather....8) No talking is allowed during business hours....10) Now that the hours of business have been drastically reduced, the partaking of food is allowed between 11:30 A.M. and noon, but work will not, on any account, cease. 11) Members of the office staff will provide their own pens....”

When a quirky genius who is also the greatest American architect of his time sets out to redesign the way people live, then the results are likely to be at the very least arresting. And Frank Lloyd Wright’s chairs and desks and inkwells are every bit as arresting as his houses.

It would be a shame to raise a handsome house only to fill it with ugly furniture. Wright was well aware of this, and early on he started creating not only walls and roofs but the tables, chairs, and beds that went into his houses. To guard against a distracted householder who might buy less than perfect porcelain or silver, he went on to design a host of implements. Just how well his notions have held up was proved in a recent Christie’s Park Avenue auction: a table lamp in geometric forms with a glass shade, which he designed shortly after the turn of the century, sold for more than seven hundred thousand dollars.

Initially, in fact. Harpers Ferry struck me as almost willfully picturesque and wholly remote from the world’s concerns. But the visitor who wants to find out what happened there will discover a place as disturbing as it is charming, for those steep, quiet streets hold an immense amount of history whose implications are very much with us today.

Harpers Ferry is compact and easily explored, and ringed with excellent trails. Town and trails are admirably set forth in A Walker’s Guide to Harpers Ferry , available in the town’s bookstore, where you can also get another useful booklet, John Brown’s Raid .

There is one hotel in Harpers Ferry, the big old Hilltop House, whose front windows have a thundering view (304-535-6321), and there are bed-and-breakfast places throughout the area; the West Virginia Office of Tourism (1-800-225-5982) can help with information on the closest places to stay. One bed-and-breakfast, the Gilbert House (304-725-0637), is a fine stone building from around 1760, extensively restored by its owners, who also tirelessly proselytize the little eighteenth-century village of Middleway, whose main street their house dominates.

1788 Two Hundred Years Ago 1813 One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago 1863 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago 1888 One Hundred Years Ago 1913 Seventy-five Years Ago 1938 Fifty Years Ago 1963 Twenty-five Years Ago

We were what we wore

Clothes have always been about more than staying warm and dry, and their progress in the New World has been as dramatic and unpredictable as the history of the United States itself. Beginning with Puritan efforts to ban fancy dress, ending with the string bikini, and in between showing the impact that mass production of garments had on the whole society, Ink Mendelsohn traces the career of clothing in America —and finds herself examining the fabric of our civilization. The story is accompanied by a portfolio of photographs in which Anne Hollander looks at what American men from Buffalo Bill to Marion Brando were wearing, and tells what they meant by it.

How the U.S. helped industrialize Russia

When my daughter is old enough to ask about Vietnam, my answer to the question “What should we tell our children about Vietnam?” will include many of the points assembled in Bill McCloud’s article. If she asks what I was doing then, I will tell her that I never fought there. Instead, in the early 1970s, I was having the educational time of my life in college, with a comfortably high draft-lottery number in the 300s. None of my friends or acquaintances went off to war.