January 2011

Awhile back we asked sixty eminent authors to tell us what was the one scene or incident in American history they wished they had witnessed. We published their responses in the December 1984 issue and subsequently in our thirtieth-anniversary anthology, A Sense of History . At the time, I promised to make a contribution of my own to the project but it has taken this long for me to settle on a choice. I owe it to Edward L. Beach’s wonderfully readable book, The United States Navy: 200 Years , to be published in May—specifically to his description of the Battle of Midway, which took place only six months after Pearl Harbor.

Automobile Arguments Automobile Arguments Automobile Arguments Mourning St. Nicholas She, Not He Phonography Who Liked Ike? Who Liked Ike? Cheerleader Huey Cutesy Wutsy Why Not Arkansas Captain of Clippers Anthony Memorial

Early in 1939, Robert Charles Benchley—Phillips Exeter Academy, 1908; Harvard, 1912—put on a paper hat and hoisted himself up onto a set of phony telephone wires strung between mock utility poles on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sound stage in Hollywood. He was filming one of the ten-minute comedies that were eroding his self-respect, while increasing his fame and income.

In this film, Dark Magic, Benchley was portraying a clumsy father who fiddles with a toy magic kit he bought his son and disappears in a puff of smoke. He is next seen balanced precariously on the telephone lines, still engrossed in the toy’s instructions. Benchley lay down on his stomach, stretching his six-foot, 200-pound frame across the wires, and brooded there uncomfortably while technicians adjusted their lights and camera. His wife of 25 years, Gertrude Darling Benchley, happened I to be on the set watching. “Remember how good in Latin I was in school?” Benchley asked her. “Well, look where it got me.”

Winslow Homer had been earning his living as an artist for nearly twenty years before he turned his hand to watercolors: like most of his contemporaries, he considered oil paintings worthier of serious attention. But beginning in 1873, whenever Homer left his studio for fishing trips in the Adirondacks and Quebec, the Bahamas and Florida, he took his watercolors along. At first he made the choice for practical reasons—the paraphernalia was easier to carry—but it proved wise on artistic grounds as well. Homer’s work in the medium ranks among the stunning achievements of American art.

An exhibition of Homer watercolors will be on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., until May 11, when it will travel to Fort Worth and then New Haven. The exhibit is accompanied by a book by Helen A. Cooper, curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery.

George Kennan and Paul Nitze first met, purely by chance, over lunch in the crowded dining car of a train bound from Washington, D.C., to New York City in the winter of 1944. Kennan had recently returned from diplomatic postings in Portugal and London and was on his way to become minister-counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Nitze was just about to leave his job in the Foreign Economic Administration to become a director of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. “We got into a discussion about the USSR in the war and the postwar world,” Nitze remembers. “I found he was interesting, brilliant, charming. I was very fond of him right away. I thought everything he was saying made very good sense.”

It was probably the last time that Paul Nitze and George Kennan would agree wholeheartedly about the Russians. When Kennan and Nitze met, the Red Army was still hundreds of miles east of Warsaw. The atomic bomb’s feasibility was still uncertain. The term cold war had not yet entered the lexicon of international diplomacy.

The only one of our presidents who retired to Washington after leaving office was Woodrow Wilson, and for all his celebrated professorial background he certainly did it in style. Ten of his friends chipped in ten thousand dollars each to cover most of the cost of a house of twenty-two rooms on S Street, just off Embassy Row. S Street was quiet and sedate then and it remains so. But once, on Armistice Day 1923, twenty thousand people came to cheer Wilson. They filled the street for five blocks. I have seen the photographs. He came out finally, tentatively, for his last public appearance. He stood in the doorway while they cheered and sang, a pallid, frail old figure wrapped up in a heavy coat, Edith Boiling Wilson at his side, the vibrant, assertive second wife, who, many said, secretly ran the country after his stroke.

On Sunday, January 17,1886, a 24-year-old Boston woman experienced searing, excruciating pain in her right lower abdomen. Her doctor prescribed applications of moist heat to her abdomen, an enema of warm water, and a dose of morphine, all to be repeated “as needed.” Two days later, the pain had subsided, but, by afternoon, it returned, this time afflicting the entire abdomen. The doctor increased the dosage of morphine, and the pain again let up. Over the next two days, the woman’s pulse ranged between 88 and 96, and her temperature hovered between 99 and 100 degrees. On Thursday, she was given castor oil and began to vomit. Vomiting continued the next day and her abdomen swelled. Her doctor—and two consultants who had been called in—now administered citrate of magnesia, calomel, and jalap—all purgatives—and an enema. On Saturday morning her pulse of 140 became almost imperceptible; her abdominal swelling increased, and her extremities went cold. Violent vomiting began again, and she died at 12:30 P.M.

On the surface, there was hardly a more unlikely spot for turn-of-the-century prosperity than the isolated community of Calumet. Located in the wilds of Michigan’s rugged Upper Peninsula, on a windswept finger of hardscrabble land that juts out into the cold waters of Lake Superior, it is a place that annually receives more than fifteen feet of snow, where winter begins at the end of September and seldom lets up until April.

But what briefly made Calumet one of the Midwest’s richest boomtowns was not found on the surface. It lay a mile underground: vast deposits of rich ore made the region the nation’s chief supplier of copper.

It was to be a historic moment, the opening of the very first authentic production of an Italian opera in America, in November 1825. A tall, gaunt old man, with dark eyes, a hawk-like nose, and sunken cheeks, nervously approached the New York hotel room of the Spanish tenor who would lead the performance, Manuel García. The old man had done great service to the cause of opera: He had written 36 librettos for the leading composers of Europe, including the words to three of the greatest operas of all time, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and The Marriage of Figaro. But that had been long ago, in another life; for 20 years, he had been living in relative obscurity in America. Perhaps García was no student of musical history.

García answered the old man’s knock, and the man introduced himself: ”I am Lorenzo Da Ponte.”

I was interested in the article “Susan B. Anthony Cast Her Vote for Ulysses S. Grant” in the December 1985 issue. May I invite your readers to visit the Susan B. Anthony memorial, her home of forty years, here in Rochester. It is the first National Historic Landmark in Rochester. The home is maintained, much as Miss Anthony left it, by the Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Inc. It is open to the public Wednesday through Saturday.