January 2011

by Douglass L. Brownstone; Facts on File, Inc.; 325 pages; $9.95.

Wherever Americans have gone in this country, they have left traces of their passing. Rusting railroad spurs, the particular slope of a hillside, faint traces of paint on the sides of brick buildings—all are eloquent of the past. The language they speak, however, is a subtle one. In this useful and clearly written guide, Douglass Brownstone shows how to become fluent enough to summon up from such diverse clues as discarded bottles, twists of barbed wire, and Greek Revival storefronts an accurate picture of how and when the people who came before us lived their lives.

1861 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago 1936 Fifty Years Ago

My grandfather, Connecticut-bred, was a saver. Nothing was willingly discarded: stamps, golf clubs with shattered handles, coins, clippings, top hats, toys from his childhood, and, toward the end of his long life, even aluminum TV dinner trays—scoured-out, nested, and tied with twine in bundles of a dozen.

He saved magazines too, neat stacks of them at the top of the attic stairs, covered with cloth to keep off the dust. Every issue of National Geographic was piled there. So was every copy of Life, and during one early visit I gravely decided that I would read through both runs in chronological order. I couldn’t stay with the Geographic: the early issues seemed drab and dispiriting, their gray glimpses of ruins and animals and remote tribes long superseded by better views in color published in its own pages.

I first heard of the “event that killed a city” (“The Calumet Tragedy,” April/May) many years ago in a song entitled “1913 Massacre” and written by Woody Guthrie, composer of “This Land Is Your Land” and many other songs. Here are the lyrics:

In “Ordeal by Touch” (April/May), Lawrence B. Custer examined the seventeenth-century practice in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of finding a murderer by requiring a suspect to touch the victim’s corpse. It is historically significant that a comparable phenomenon occurred in the Plymouth Colony in 1675.

It is alleged that King Philip of the Wampanoags ordered the execution of one John Sassamon, an Indian traitor. This was done. The colony, which had found Sassamon useful, rounded up several promising suspects and noted that, although Sassamon’s corpse had been interred for several months, it bled when one of the three suspects approached it. In George F. Willison’s Saints and Strangers , Dr. Increase Mather is quoted as reporting that Sassamon’s corpse “fell a-bleeding as fresh as if it had been newly slain, albeit it was buried a considerable time before that.” Naturally, this proof justified the quick hanging of all three Indian suspects.

Back in 1955, John Kenneth Galbraith called the Great Depression of the 1930s “the most momentous economic occurrence in the history of the United States,” and 30-odd years later that judgment, recorded in Galbraith’s bestseller, The Great Crash, still holds. Since then there have been more recessions, some quite severe, but nothing like what happened in the thirties. As dozens of economists and historians have shown, we now know, in theory, how to deal with violent cyclical downturns. We have learned what we should do to manipulate what Lester V. Chandler of Atlanta University has called “the determinants that influence the behavior of employment, output, and prices.”

This September, Harvard University will observe the 350th anniversary of its founding. It will do so with ceremony only somewhat less resplendent than the celebration of its tercentenary in 1936. For four days, indoors and out, oration and proclamation, festschrifts and fireworks, a brass band, a symphony orchestra, and a procession of crimson gowns and hoods will assert the ancience, the eminence, and the permanence of our country’s oldest, richest, and, some argue, foremost university. In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of the United States and son of Harvard, came up from Washington, D.C., to make the celebration national. This time, the invitation to the president of the United States has been turned down by a White House that many at Harvard view as ominously alien to the world of learning.

I was thoroughly amused by the tirades of Messrs. Kasper and Stein in your June/July “Correspondence” column. I recall, vividly, being besieged by similar tirades when, as a young first-time voter in New York City, I bravely wore my four-inch “I Like Ike” button and actually felt I was at risk of bodily harm from the likes of Kasper and Stein. They were certain then, as now, that their view of events was the only, the absolute, truth. Fortunately, those of us who know we were right to like Ike are legion.

Miller B. Zobel’s “Enlisted for Life” (June/July) recounts the famous anecdote of Oliver Wendell Holmes shouting at Abraham Lincoln on the parapet of Fort Stevens in 1864. Although Holmes himself was the source of this tale, having related it to several close friends in his declining years, its accuracy has always been questionable. Apparently the Justice said different things to different people: to Felix Frankfurter he implied that he had not recognized Lincoln, while to Harold Laski he evidently stated that he was the President’s escort. The dozen or so other eyewitness accounts of Lincoln under fire do not mention Holmes at all.

Whether accurate or not, this story further illustrates the remarkable affinity between Holmes and the Civil War that Judge Zobel has documented in his article.