Recently I’ve been wondering why I’ve never joined any men’s clubs. This question, less momentous than those that usually agitate me, forced itself upon my attention when my wife was asked to write an article about men’s clubs for a magazine called The Executive Female .
“That’s a terrific subject,” I said. “If you were writing about men’s clubs for American Heritage, you could write about Cotton Mather. I think that America’s executive females ought to know more about Cotton Mather.”
Whether it is a ferry, a yacht, or an ocean liner, the sights and sounds of any passenger boat casting off from shore always call out to me. Last September, on a pellucid St. Louis evening, I was not merely an envious onlooker; I was aboard the luxurious steamboat Mississippi Queen . Traveling up the Mississippi River at about eight miles an hour, this stern-wheeler, built eleven years ago as a companion vessel to the sixty-one-yearold Delta Queen , was going to carry 350 passengers on a meandering 671-mile course from St. Louis to St. Paul. The journey was to last a week.
Peter Baida’s “The Man Who Raised Hell” (October/November 1986) captures the spirit of Henry George and his vision of a society in which the prosperity of some is not won at the expense of the abject poverty of others.
George, however, was decidedly proenterprise, not “one of the fiercest critics of business.” It seems misguided to conclude that George “remains a voice that American business would prefer to forget.” George distinguished—as too many economists fail to do—between honest gains of production and ill-gotten gains of special privilege. Capitalism’s incentive system had no stronger champion than George, nor exploitation a mightier opponent. Businessmen seeking to repair America’s loss of vitality at home and competitiveness abroad, far from forgetting George, would be well advised to look to his farsighted analyses for crucial ways to resolve these problems.
I am writing both to commend American Heritage for publishing Ronald H. Specter’s “What Did You Do in the War, Professor?” (December 1986) and to attempt to set the record straight with respect to two of his criticisms: that professors of the war lack direct experience and that they even lack knowledge of the conflict.
All of us who are in the business of teaching and writing on the Vietnam War can be grateful to Dr. Spector for calling attention to the growing interest in the Vietnam War on American campuses. Specter’s account of the personal odyssey of his own course over time and space presents a vivid glimpse into the shifting concerns that animate this interest.
April 5: The Army of the Potomac launches the Virginia Peninsular Campaign, but over the next few months it fails to take the Confederate capital of Richmond. Britain and France consider recognizing the Confederacy.
Near midnight on the clear, cold evening of April 14, the White Star liner Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The ship was not only the largest and most luxurious afloat; she was also called unsinkable. But two hours and forty minutes later, the Titanic up-ended and sank two miles to the bottom of the ocean, taking fifteen hundred people with her.
The Constitution: a celebration …
Two hundred years ago this summer a handful of genius-touched gentlemen farmers met to hammer together what has turned out to be the oldest written constitution still going. In the next issue we mark its bicentennial with a special section. Here are some of our offerings:
A few parchment pages two hundred years later …
The framers of the Constitution were proud of what they had done, but they would probably be amazed to find their words still carry such weight. In an essay that reflects his lifelong study of the great charter, the distinguished historian Richard B. Morris examines how and why the men who drafted it built so much better than they knew.
Taking another look at the constitutional blueprint …
Reading Peter Baida’s “A Happy Heart at Bloomingdale’s” (December 1986) recalled to me when department stores were in their heyday. To go to one was a real adventure. Rich’s in Atlanta was one store that my mother loved. When I was in college, Rich’s gave two girls from every college in the state free trips to the Metropolitan Opera when the opera was in Atlanta. This was two girls every night for six nights. Rich’s paid our train fare, taxi fare, hotel bill, and provided a chaperone.
Peter Baida neatly nips the nostalgia for once-upon-a-time amenities in his comment on the changing department store. An additional point is that the one-time slathering of service that ranged from “silence” rooms to plentiful personal attention was possible because of low wages and high markups. Decent pay for those who provide the services means the consumer has to decide, as Baida points out, if the cost is worth it. Someone does pay for free lunches.
A woman I know returned from a stay in India. When asked how difficult life must be in so poor a country, she replied that there was no problem because everyone has servants.
Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, one of the Confederacy’s most skilled professional soldiers, recognized an opportunity when he saw one. Retreating from losses in Kentucky and Tennessee, Johnston’s army of fifty thousand had hurried south, pursued by Ulysses S. Grant and his forty-five thousand men. In Corinth, Mississippi, Johnston received word that Grant had halted beside the Tennessee River not far north near a meetinghouse called Shiloh Church, encamped with few defensive precautions to await reinforcement by Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s army of twenty-five thousand. If the next encounter was to be a Southern victory, Johnston knew he would have to attack before Buell arrived. On the morning of April 6, the Southern general swung into his saddle and led his troops into the Battle of Shiloh. Before it was over, thirteen thousand Union men and ten thousand Confederates lay dead.