January 2011

Until July 2, 1986, I felt comfortably detached from the current insider-trading scandal on Wall Street. That was the day I opened the business section of The New York Times and saw a photograph of a serious-looking young man above the caption, “Robert M. Wilkis, in 1976 photograph from the Stanford University Business School yearbook.”

Robert M. Wilkis? Bobby Wilkis! Bobby Wilkis and I grew up in the days recreated in the movie Diner, when every kid wanted to be John Unitas, no one had ever heard of Mitsubishi, and Ben Cartwright and his boys offered on “Bonanza” a weekly demonstration of the essential nobility of the American character. How in the world had Bobby Wilkis wound up with his picture in The New York Times under the headline 2 CHARGED IN BIG INSIDER CASE ?

In the land where all men are created equal, the Hudson Valley has been a special place where actual lords have presided over quasi-feudal manors, where industrialists have erected a string of chateaus as their country seats, where a landscape painter built himself a Persian castle on a mountaintop. The regal beauty of the river seems to have invited this attention. A tour of houses along its length, maintained as museums and open to the public, provides a panorama of successive generations of Americans rising to self-exaltation.

In the 1600s, when the Hudson was the road into a near wilderness, the Dutch in New Amsterdam and then the British in New York sought to populate the land by issuing feudal, European-style baronies on vast tracks up and down the river. The lord of a manor could lease plots of his land to tenant farmers, and the tenants could be required to pay stiff annual rents in perpetuity to keep their homes. A few of the old manor houses still survive.

Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.

Winsor McCay: His Life and Art Mary Todd Lincoln Lee’s Lieutenants Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie

On September 22, Abraham Lincoln issued the most important document of his Presidency: the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It promised that on January 1, 1863, those slaves living in unconquered Confederate states would be declared free.

The proclamation came as a surprise. Until then Lincoln had maintained that the Civil War was being fought solely to preserve the Union. Not that he believed in slavery. He had wanted to abolish it but feared doing so would be unconstitutional. In 1862, however, Lincoln read William Whiting’s The War Powers of the President , and it probably convinced him that as Commander in Chief he had the right to liberate the enemy’s slaves—but not those slaves in states already controlled by the Union. To have freed the latter would have dropped him into the “boundless field of absolutism,” Lincoln said. “The original proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification, except as a military measure.”

Theodore Roosevelt stepped from his Milwaukee hotel that October 14 on his way to deliver a campaign speech. The former President was undoubtedly flashing his trademark horsey grin at the waiting crowd when a fanatic lunged forward, raised a gun, and shot him in the chest. Slowed by thicknesses of coat, a glasses case, and a folded manuscript, the bullet fractured a rib and finally lodged near Roosevelt’s right lung. The blow knocked him to the ground. He coughed, collected himself, and scrambled to his feet.

Doctors were summoned, and they urged the colonel to get to a hospital, but he ignored their advice. “I will make this speech or die,” he said, not yet aware his wound wasn’t fatal. “It is one thing or the other.” Shortly after, Roosevelt stood before a stunned crowd at the Milwaukee Auditorium, holding a bloody handkerchief to his chest. “Friends,” he said, “I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. 1 don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

Making millions in America…

Rich may or may not be better, but it’s usually pretty interesting, and much of the next issue is given over to examining the history of wealth in this country. Among the stories:

The forgotten four hundred…

“There she stands,” Potter Palmer once boasted of his jeweled wife, “with two million on her.” Palmer was a Chicagoan, and in that vigorous city the Gilded Age wealthy had a vitality lacking in their Eastern counterparts. While the Newport set spent inherited money, Chicago’s aristocrats got to invent their society even as they made the money that fueled it. The result was an engaging, uninhibited, and occasionally scary group of individualists whose saga the historian Bernard Weisberger recounts.

How capitalism survived the twentieth century…

Your poll of how prominent persons would change the Constitution reflected a brilliant idea. But it was flawed in execution. You included Richard M. Nixon and gave him the lead position. How could you have done this?

This ongoing romance the country seems to be having with the most despicable liar and morally degenerate American of the century can be comprehended only when such as yourselves continue to pander to his apparent desires. The man who, but for the stupidity of his successor, would have been in jail (and should be as far as this writer is concerned) is a fine example to hold before the world as an ex-President.

I wish I could understand the press’s lack of morality in continually bringing Nixon before us. We’ve had more than enough of the man. We couldn’t believe him when he left the White House; how can we believe him now? Has he become moral since 1974? Hardly! He didn’t know right from wrong then and he probably doesn’t now.

While Mr. Herbert Mitgang is certainly entitled to his opinion, 1 am disappointed that American Heritage would print such a patently biased, even childish, comment on the Second Amendment. I happen to agree with that large body of constitutional scholars who disagrees with his interpretation.

It seems obvious that the word people which appears in the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments and in the Fourteenth as citizens refers to individual, not collective, rights. Certainly no one would argue that only groups could peaceably assemble, “be secure in their persons,” retain unenumerated rights, or have powers reserved to them. Why should protection of person, property, and state be different?

Additionally, in Article XIV it is obvious that any unjust laws shall not be made or enforced against individuals as well as collective bodies.

Your Constitution feature was fine. One time I can agree 100 percent with Jimmy Carter, even. I feel the Constitution is twenty-five to fifty years ahead of the average American politician and maybe 150 ahead of Herbert Mitgang. I doubt he knows that our Bill of Rights contains a lot of things that would be treason or heresy in large areas of the world. I also wonder if taking out the Second Amendment, as he wishes, would leave the less controversial parts open to assault by people who are after Today’s Relevancy and unaware of Tomorrow’s Needs.