January 2011

He was born in 1841, in a Boston that took its water from backyard wells and its light from whale-oil lamps. He died 94 years later in a nation that the army pilot James Doolittle had just crossed in twelve hours. Between the birth and the death came a career and a renown few achieve, and 30 years of serving as one of the most brilliant, influential, and revered Justices of the Supreme Court. Here, Holmes reached what he himself regarded as the apogee of a lawyer’s power and service: “To set in motion principles and influences which shape the thought and action of generations which know not by whose command they move.”

Herman Melville’s great novel Moby-Dick has inspired dozens of books and thousands of articles and essays, but not one of them, so far as I know, has examined the novel as a case study in managerial failure—a portrait of an unsatisfactory chief executive officer.

To think about Moby-Dick as a business novel may seem strange, but anyone who has worked in a modern corporation is likely to have encountered graduates of the Captain Ahab school of management. And anyone who has worked for a corporate Ahab, or watched from afar as some half-crazed senior executive rushed toward ruin, will find much to ponder in Melville’s masterpiece.

Weather makes news headlines almost every day in some community in the United States. “The weather is always doing something,” said Mark Twain, “always getting up new designs and trying them on people to see how they will go.” On any day of the year, two or three weather systems are in action, dividing the country into distinct weather zones and producing what Twain called a “sumptuous variety” of conditions. A northeaster may be racing up along the Atlantic seaboard with gales and drenching rains, menacing ships and planes. At the same time, a stable high-pressure system might cause crop-threatening heat and drought in the Mississippi Valley. And a Pacific storm might be driving huge waves onto the fragile shoreline and hillsides of the West Coast, bringing flash floods and mudslides. Variety and violence are the usual fare offered by our weather.

RAIN MADE TO ORDER: PRELIMINARY EXPERIMENTS IN TEXAS PROVE SUCCESSFUL. The headline might be yesterday’s, but in fact it appeared in August 1891. At that time, an expedition funded by Congress was traveling through the drought-stricken Southwest trying to make rain by aerial explosions. Its early reports exuded optimism, as though the United States, its land frontier erased, had now begun the taming of the weather.

It hadn’t, of course. The experimenters’ lavish claims of 1891 would soon be discredited. And today, after more than two hundred years of theorizing and experiment, the weather is, for the most part, as uncontrolled as ever.

Nineteen thirty was an auspicious year for the fifteen-day fall meeting at New York’s Belmont racetrack. Gallant Fox, the “Bear from Belair,” had just become the second horse ever to win the Triple Crown, and William Woodward hoped his classic three-year-old would go on to make himself the richest racehorse in American history by winning the Belmont’s Lawrence Realization. Also scheduled was the $125,000 Futurity, the horse race with the highest purse in the world and host to a group of talented two-year-olds including Equipoise, Epithet, and Mate.

The Westchester Racing Association’s president, Joseph Widener, and its secretary, John Coakley, were especially eager to provide their bettors with clear skies and fast tracks. They took the highly unusual step of hiring a professional rainmaker to keep the clouds away.

It was nearly called Another Day . For a month it was Tomorrow Is Another Day , followed in quick succession by Tomorrow and Tomorrow , There’s Always Tomorrow , and Tomorrow Will Be Fair . But when it was finally published on June 30, it was called Gone With the Wind , and the 1,057-page novel set in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction became a phenomenal best seller overnight.

The world’s toughest flying …

“The Hump” was the GI name for the Himalayas, and during World War II American pilots flogged balky cargo planes across them from India to supply the Chinese armies fighting Japan. Hump pilots bucked some of the world’s worst weather, faced being eaten by tigers when they survived being shot down by Zeroes, and never forgot any of it. Richard Rhodes attended one of their reunions and gathered a pack of terrifying, hilarious, astonishing tales that are the collective memory of the Hump.

Yankee opium traders …

What a blow to find the word hosted in the otherwise wonderful piece on Robert Benchley in your April/May 1986 issue. It would have been so easy to say instead that Benchley “was host for a popular variety show on radio.” And how nice it would have been if an editor had made the change. Oh, I know, I know. The language changes, and the dictionary lists host as a verb, or so I’ve been told. I can’t bear to confirm it.

But if it’s now acceptable to use hosted in American Heritage, of all places, can gifting people and additional writing horrors be too far down the road?

When I was in school in the 1950s, audio-visual aids were still pretty primitive: jittery 16-mm movies shown on a battered pull-down screen, using an ancient projector whose eccentricities were understood only by the pale initiates of the AV club. Educational films were most often shown in science classes, usually lent free by industrial firms looking for recruits.

The big, gray cans of film turned up at the school on a tight, but mysterious schedule of their own, so that, just when we were about to begin dissecting frogs, we would take an unexpected hour out to see a movie on glassblowing or pouring molten steel. The classroom was dark and warm. The projector’s loud, steady whir was restful. Even the teacher often dozed—altogether a nice break.

The history films we saw were still less riveting: earnest, costumed playlets, usually, made on minuscule budgets. I remember one film in which Lincoln and Douglas debated the spread of slavery before an excited mob of three.

When I was a boy in Atlanta in the early twenties, my school, Marist College (grades six through twelve), taught history as Charles Eliot Norton and Byron Dobell (“Letter from the Editor,” February/March issue) would have it taught. We learned—interminably—about Atlanta, with major emphasis on the Civil War battles, ours being a military school. We used to collect Minié balls from the battlefield, which included my backyard; then proceeded slowly to Fulton and De Kalb counties, then Georgia; next the Confederacy; finally, shortly before graduation, the rest of the United States, North America, Europe, and remaining continents. Hope Mr. Dobell is reassured.