January 2011

On Good Friday fire engulfed New Orleans, leaving four-fifths of the town in ruins. The conflagration began at a private home, where candles burning unattended ignited the curtains. Church bells were customarily used to alert citizens to a fire, but, according to one account, local priests balked at ringing the bells on a holy day, thus preventing timely containment of the blaze. Driven by a robust south wind, the fire spread quickly. New Orleans had no official firefighting force, only soldiers and samaritans armed with water buckets; in the end, 854 of her 1,100 buildings were destroyed.

With Union ranks thinning due to casualties, discharges, and lagging voluntary enlistment, Congress passed the first national conscription act on March 3. The Enrollment Act rendered males between the ages of twenty and fortyfive eligible for compulsory military service. Draftees could avoid taking up arms by paying a three-hundred-dollar commutation fee or hiring a substitute.

The Great Blizzard buried New York City under snow on March 12. Harper’s Weekly reported: “The snow was fine and dry and copious, and was driven by gales from the west and north. The city had known higher winds and snowfalls as heavy, but never a combination which was so furious. At four o’clock in the morning the snow came so fast that five minutes sufficed to obliterate the footprints of a man or a horse in the streets. Car after car became stalled on the surface roads. At sunrise the city was snowed under…. Those who would open their front door in the morning without admitting a snowdrift of respectable size, poked their heads out for a moment and let their business run itself.”

In all, some four hundred persons succumbed to the storm, among them the former senator Roscoe Conkling. Walking from Wall Street to the New York Club at Twenty-fifth Street, the athletic Conkling sank into a snowdrift at Union Square. Though exhausted and nearly blinded, he eventually freed himself. Conkling never fully recovered from the strain of the exertion, however, and he died a month later.

More than five thousand suffragists paraded through the streets of Washington, D.C., on March 3, the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The suffragists held banners reading “Votes for Women” and “Tell Your Troubles to Woodrow.” A mob of angry counterdemonstrators broke through police barriers on Pennsylvania Avenue and nearly brought the parade to a halt.

In his inaugural address the following day, President Wilson mentioned such weighty issues as conservation, tariff reform, and better conditions for the working classes, but not women’s suffrage. “Men’s hearts wait upon us; men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do,” he said. “I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side.”

On March 28 former President Herbert Hoover returned from his first trip to Europe in almost twenty years. Hoover found the underlying mood there to be one of fear: “Fear by nations of one another, fear by governments of their citizens, fear by citizens of their governments and the fear of people everywhere that general war is upon them again.”

“In our adversary system of criminal justice,” said Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black on March 18, “any person haled into court who is too poor to hire a lawyer cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him. This seems to us to be an obvious truth.”

The year before, fifty-one-year-old Clarence Earl Gideon, a down-and-out electrician, sometime gambler, and onetime petty burglar, went on trial for breaking into a Panama City, Florida, pool hall. Gideon had asked for a lawyer and been refused. He had no choice but to conduct his own defense. Despite the rather flimsy evidence arrayed against him, he was found guilty and sentenced to five years in a state penitentiary.

My family came late to television, or so it seemed to me and my equally impatient younger brother. The first set I ever saw was in the home of a kindly couple named Bowersox who lived just up Ingleside Avenue from us in Chicago. Mr. Bowersox was retired and spent a lot of time in his bathrobe. Mrs. Bowersox sometimes baby-sat for us and must genuinely have been fond of children, for, at 4;30 in the afternoon, then the beginning of the broadcast day, I believe, we neighborhood kids were invited to the Bowersox apartment, served cookies and milk, and encouraged to gather in front of their set to watch “Howdy Doody.” I was eight or nine then, already a little too old to be fully captivated by the strident adventures of Buffalo Bob, Clarabell, and the other inhabitants of Doodyville, but riveted, nonetheless, by the simple fact of being able to see them all move around within that tiny, ovoid screen.

Just imagine that you have a chance to buy for $25 a stock whose potential earnings seem to you to justify a price of $30. Should you buy? It appears irrational not to. But wait. Suppose you also believe that the market is full of morons who will not recognize the value of your stock when you offer it for sale. “It is not sensible,” John Maynard Keynes writes, “to pay 25 for an investment of which you believe the prospective yield to justify a value of 30, if you also believe the market will value it at 20” when you decide to sell.

Keynes was not merely one of the most influential economists of the 20th century but also a fabulously successful investor. While breakfasting in bed, he devoted half an hour each morning to the stock market—earning a fortune for himself and increasing by 1000 percent the market value of the endowment of his college, whose investment portfolio he managed.

Before television, before color ads in the magazines, even before billboards, advertising, that mainstay of business in America, was already thriving. Of course, it took rather different forms: there was the ancestor of junk mail—the flier handed to people at street corners; there was the sandwich man, almost hidden between his two boards; and there was the weather vane.

We tend to think of weather vanes as purely ornamental objects—indeed, they are now eagerly collected as such—which also, while they were at it, showed you where the wind was blowing from. But, in fact, they were far more practical than that: at a glance, they told the consuming public what sort of an establishment they topped.

Driving around the island of Hawaii, I got a strange feeling that I was driving through all of time. At the famous Kilauea volcano I could watch the creation of theEearth (the volcano adds to the island’s size every year); farther along, I saw the vivid remains of a civilization that barely two hundred years ago got along without the wheel, the written word, or the notion that anyone else existed; I visited the spot where that society first collided with the modern West; and I ended up in a town where the Hawaiian people plunged from prehistory into the nineteenth century. The abruptness of that leap can still be felt.

I started out at Hilo, the island’s largest town and principal port of entry. An old-fashioned fishing town on the island’s quieter eastern coast, Hilo gives you a strong feeling that you’re in the real Hawaii—the one you’re not in when you’re at Waikiki. Behind the peaceful main streets, a long, lush plain rises gradually toward Mauna Kea, the highest peak in the state.