January 2011

Early biographies of the great, independent women of the 19th and early 20th centuries were most often written by admirers so ardent that their pages of unrelenting praise now defy reading. “Sensitive by nature, refined by culture,” wrote the anonymous author of one biographical sketch of Clara Barton in 1876, “she has nevertheless taken unaccustomed fields of labor, walked untrodden paths with bleeding feet and opened pioneer doors with bruised fingers, not for her own aggrandisement but for that of her sex and humanity.”

True enough. There have been few more impressive, more courageous, more resourceful women in the history of any country. Barton richly deserved the nickname Angel of the Battlefield, given to her by the Union men for whom she cared during the Civil War. She created the American Red Cross and ran it for 22 years, helped persuade the United States to abandon its instinctive distrust of international treaties and sign the Geneva Treaty, brought help to the helpless from Antietam to Armenia, and ceaselessly advocated equality for women all the while.

In novels, movies, and television melodramas, money and power often are treated as if they were two sides of a single coin. In life, they are different currencies, and the effort to convert one into the other has produced some amazing tangles. I know of no better example than an all-but-forgotten scandal that involved a man who could buy everything he ever wanted —except the power that he wanted more than anything.

In the winter of 1904-5, the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst acquired some unusual letters. The letters had been written by John D. Archbold, vice-president of the Standard Oil Company, to various state and federal officials.

Hearst had been attacking America’s trusts for years. Archbold’s letters to Senator Joseph Benson Foraker, an Ohio Republican, especially interested him.

February 16, 1900

Mass-produced implements designed to make the owner’s life easier have long been a commonplace in the United States: already in the 1860s there were patent stoves giving more heat and mangles wringing more water out of newly washed clothes. Even the automobile, once Henry Ford produced the Model T, belonged in the category of utilitarian objects whose functioning could readily be understood; and then, just after World War I, came the radio.

Hesitantly at first—the earliest sets were anything but easy to listen to —and under the guise of being just another household gadget, the radio brought magic into the lives of most Americans. It provided entertainment, of course, a new kind of entertainment; it made the news readily and quickly available; and while it was at it, it went on to revolutionize politics. By the thirties this was a recognized fact, and so it stood to reason that what had come to be an essential object would be made to look handsome. The Air King radio on the opposite page embodied the latest in modern design.

Rich soil, warm days, and cool nights have shaped the history of northern California’s Napa Valley. Thirty-five miles long and one to five miles wide, this fertile valley has successively lured Indians, Mexican rancheros, American pioneers, and vintners to settle here. Today it also attracts some two and a half million tourists a year. Recently I was one of them and discovered that the Napa Valley has more to offer visitors than tours and tastings at its renowned wineries.

When George Yount was given an 11,814-acre land grant in the Napa Valley by the Mexican government in 1836, he became the valley’s first permanent resident, lord of a rich country of redwood forest and fields tall with wild oat and golden mustard. He hunted abundant game and befriended the Caymus Indians. But Yount was a sociable man and, wanting for neighbors, he invited other Americans to join him on his land.

Although the tourist office might maintain that any time of year is the right time for a trip to the Napa Valley, I recommend the spring when the weather is gentle and the crowds minimal; the autumn harvest has its own abundant attractions, but the valley is likely to be mobbed. Before you go, order Napa Valley: From Golden Fields to Purple Harvest , by Denzil Verardo and Jennie Dennis Verardo, from the Napa County Historical Society (707-224-1739). I found it the best history of the valley available. Try to find Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Silverado Squatters at a library; it gives an unparalleled view of Napa life in the late nineteenth century. Those indispensable walking guides can be obtained from most of the valley’s chambers of commerce. For further information, call the California Office of Tourism at 1-800-TO-CALIF.

1788 Two Hundred Years Ago 1838 One Hundred and Fifty 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

On April 13 a group of boys playing on the grounds of New York Hospital in New York City looked up to see a mischievous medical student standing at a window, waving a severed limb. One of the boys found a ladder and climbed up to the third-floor window. Peering inside, he witnessed what a local newspaper later called “a shocking shamble of human flesh”—a gruesome array of cadavers and body parts.

The unsettled child blurted something about his recently deceased mother. The medical student, John Hicks, Jr., picked up an arm and told the boy it was his mother’s. Horrified, the boy fled home and told his father about the morbid incident.

There had been talk of body snatching in New York City. Municipal law made no provision for the legal acquisition of cadavers for study, and the city’s medical students resorted to skulking about on moonless nights, exhuming corpses from fresh graves.

Calvin Coolidge, I’m afraid, agrees with John Kenneth Galbraith, not with Jude Wanniski.

Long before Smoot-Hawley was a gleam in its sponsors’ eyes, Calvin Coolidge was aware of the dangers of not only excessive speculation but prosperity itself. “History is littered with the stories of nations destroyed by their own wealth,” Coolidge warned the Union League of Philadelphia.

After Coolidge announced in 1927 that he would not seek a second term, a White House dinner guest asked him why not. Coolidge responded with characteristic silence, whereupon his wife let out, “Poppa says there’s a depression coming.”

What should we tell our children about Vietnam?…

That was the question an Oklahoma junior high school teacher named Bill McCloud sent out in a handwritten note to men and women who had been prominent movers or observers during the Vietnam War. Politicians and journalists and generals and combat veterans answered him. Secretaries of Defense answered him. Presidents answered him. In the next issue we present a selection of the most telling responses—from Ronald Reagan and Pete Seeger, William Westmoreland and Tom Hayden, and dozens of others. Taken together, their answers form a powerful and moving record of the national conscience.

The 1904 Olympics…

As a one-time contributor to “The Fred Allen Show,” I was intrigued by Neil Grauer’s “Forgotten Laughter: The Fred Allen Story” (February issue). One of my proudest accomplishments was the acceptance and broadcast of a complete script for “Allen’s Alley.”

Your readers may be interested in this typical excerpt from a letter written to me by Allen in 1946 (all in lower case, of course):

“we try to do good programs but the network censorship and policy rulings prohibit us from using political or important items as grist for our fun mill.

“radio has been active for over twenty-five years, it is still in its infancy, radio is the only mongoloid industry in the world.”