January 2011

“The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day. …” Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on June 3.

The ballad hardly seemed destined for immortality, but a young comedian and singer named DeWolf Hopper rescued it from the dugout of time. In New York City, Hopper was appearing in a comic opera called Prince Methusalem . At a special performance before the New York Giants and the Chicago White Stockings, Hopper recited the ballad in the middle of the second act. So popular was his rendition that Hopper added it to his permanent repertoire. He recited the saga of Casey’s strikeout more than ten thousand times throughout his career. “Casey” has been reprinted countless times, set to music, and even produced as an opera, making it the most popular piece of comic verse in American letters.

On May 26 the House of Representatives established the Committee on Un-American Activities. Congress set up the committee primarily to investigate the activities of Soviet and Nazi agents in the United States. “We shall be fair and impartial at all times and treat every witness with fairness and courtesy,” said the chairman Martin Dies at the committee’s opening session. “The Committee will not permit any ‘character assassination’ or any ‘smearing’ of innocent people.”

In addition to Communist and Nazi infiltrators, HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) set its sights on labor unions, the Work Projects Administration, immigrants and minorities, and even Shirley Temple, who, along with other Hollywood celebrities, had sent a greeting to the leftist French newspaper Ce Soir . “They’ve gone into Hollywood,” said Harold L. Ickes, “and there discovered a great Red plot. They have found dangerous radicals there, led by little Shirley Temple. Imagine the great committee raiding her nursery and seizing her dolls as evidence.”

The most arresting figure in the 1904 Olympic games was a Cuban mailman named Félix Carvajal. Upon hearing that the third modern Olympic games were to be held in the United States, Carvajal, although he knew nothing about track or field, decided he would represent Cuba in the marathon. He raised money by running around a public square in Havana, drawing a crowd, and then begging for cash to get him on a boat. Arriving in New Orleans, he promptly lost his stake in a dice game and had to make his way to St. Louis by hitchhiking and working at odd jobs along the way. Somehow he got there, and on August 30, on a blistering ninety-degree day, Carvajal stood at the starting line, wearing street shoes, a long-sleeved shirt, faded trousers, and a beret. A New York policeman, Martin Sheridan, who would subsequently win the gold medal in the discus, took a pair of scissors and cut Carvajal’s pants off at the knees to give him some air.

Union Station in wartime Washington. A young man in a Navy uniform escorts a short, stocky blonde woman in her 50s along the crowded platform toward a waiting train. There is nothing especially striking about her, but she carries a big framed caricature of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt that attracts the attention of most of the people who pass on either side of her. “I’m just a peasant,” she says again and again to all these perfect strangers, her bright blue eyes rolling upward. “I won’t go anywhere without a picture of my king and queen!”

The woman was Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the eldest child of Theodore Roosevelt, and this incident was recalled for me recently by her long-ago escort, the son of a girlhood friend, who also remembered his own relief when he finally got her settled on her train.

It is an old joke in my family that my mother, the daughter of an immigrant tailor, never met a family poorer than her own until she met my father, who was lucky to get out of Germany in 1934 with the skin on his back. Only in America, as Harry Golden used to say, could the leap from the pushcarts of Orchard Street to the pages of American Heritage be accomplished in a single generation.

These thoughts are spinning through my head today because I just read a wonderful little book that deserves a wider audience. Irvin G. Wyllie’s The Self-Made Man in America, published in 1954, is a beautifully organized, carefully written study that covers more ground in a few words than almost any book I know. There are other good books on the subject, notably John G. Cawelti’s Apostles of the Self-Made Man and Richard M. Huber’s The American Idea of Success, but for simplicity, clarity, and brevity—those profoundly agreeable virtues—no one comes close to Wyllie.

I would like to apologize to my new Canadian friends for confirming their widely held suspicion that most Americans think of Canada as a great blank space to the north. For example, until lately I’d never even heard of Kingston, Ontario. I found out better last fall as I set out from Kingston for a six-day, 325-mile cruise along the St. Lawrence River to Quebec.

By the end of the journey I could fill in a lot of the blanks. I learned something about how Canadian history is tied into our own, and I found that the watery border we were traversing, far from being a line amicably drawn in some dim past, had in fact been forged by several centuries of war and diplomacy and even now shouldn’t be taken for granted. Overheard mutterings about the recently agreed upon Free Trade Agreement told me that once again things might be a little tense.

The Canadian Empress is the right ship in the right place. With a 30-foot beam and 108-foot length, it looks a little chunky at first sight. But it has distinctly homey charm that some of the larger cruise ships would be hard pressed to beat. It was the dreamchild of its owner, Bob Clark, a Canadian business, who wanted to draw overnight visitors, not just day trippers, onto the upper river. Clark envisioned a vessel that resembled those in use in 1908, one equipped with all the up-to-date conveniences. The result is an aluminum ship, launched in 1891, bearing such nostalgic touches as pressed tin ceilings, etched glass doors and light fixtures, and thick floral carpeting. On our trip meals were prepared in a little galley by a Scottish chef and her one helper. Particularly memorable was a lunch of perch that had been freshly caught on the river, accompanied by loaves of incomparable bread.

Brilliant colors, dashing form, and lots of chrome: that, as any American car manufacturer knew in the late 1950s, was what the public wanted, and in an age when more was better and most was best, it stood to reason that the grandest (and largest) of automobiles must also be the flashiest. The roads were open, the interstate network was growing, the suburbs were expanding, and in that lavish and somewhat naive world, a Cadillac was the reward of success.

The 1958 convertible on the opposite page, in fact, says it all. Sculpted by General Motors’ tremendously influential designer Harley Earl, it embodied his fascination with the wartime twin-boom Lockheed P-38. The fins at the rear, the wraparound windshield, the instrument panel—all was supposed to make the driver feel like a pilot. Indeed, the fin itself was the special mark of the Cadillac, the design element that at first differentiated it from all other General Motors cars, but then it turned out to be so popular that slowly it made its way throughout GM and the whole automotive industry.

1638 Three Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1738 Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1838 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago 1863 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago 1888 One Hundred Years Ago 1938 Fifty Years Ago

… In the Republic’s darkest hour he took command. In the black days after Bull Run he won West Virginia for the Union. He raised a magnificent army and led it forth to meet Robert E. Lee, an opponent he found “cautious and weak.” Why hasn’t history been kinder to Gen. George B. McClellan? Stephen W. Sears tells the peculiar story of a man it is almost impossible to underrate.