July 1942. Winter in Wellington, New Zealand, brought long, slanting sheets of rain that drenched the U.S. Navy transports looming huge and dark along the city’s docks. The men of the 1st Marine Division labored around the clock to combat-load the ships. The artillery, tanks, and communications gear were distributed among all the vessels so that if one or more were sunk by enemy fire, no vital component would be irretrievably lost.
Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
SEARCH 75 YEARS OF ESSAYS!
January 2011
In May 1932, Louisiana’s flamboyant senator, Huey Pierce Long, told a throng of newspapermen to prepare for a headline-making announcement. After months of temporizing, he was finally ready to reveal whom he would support for his party’s presidential nomination at the upcoming Democratic national convention: his choice was the patrician governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They were an odd couple, and the decision was not one the Kingfish—a nickname borrowed from the popular “Amos ’n Andy” radio show—had come to easily. Five months earlier, he had said of FDR, “He ran too poorly with Cox in 1920, and he would be certain to be beat.” Even now, he told a pro-Roosevelt senator, “I didn’t like your son of a bitch, but I’ll be for him.” In this unpromising fashion began an improbable alliance that would soon be transformed into the stormiest political rivalry of the decade: the conflict between FDR and the Kingfish.
When people say that technology is a juggernaut dragging a helpless society along behind it, Thomas Hughes shakes his head. History shows otherwise, he says. In his landmark study Networks of Power, he tells how in Victorian England electrification was stopped cold for many years by apprehensive small-town councils. Such episodes—and the book describes many of them—have convinced Hughes that technology is quite tamable—if we keep close account of its past and present interactions with society. This is an exacting task, but Thomas Parke Hughes, age sixty-two, is ideally qualified for it: his bachelor’s degree is in engineering, his doctorate is in European history, and he was a passionate student of the history of technology long before its importance was widely recognized. Now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Hughes teaches such pioneering courses as “Inventors, Engineers and Entrepreneurs: Technology in American History.” And all across the country, universities once indifferent to the history of technology have begun offering courses in the field.
One of every four American homes is now said to house a video-cassette recorder. Mine became one of them last winter. A VCR takes some getting used to. I still find myself watching a good program and muttering that somebody should invent a way to record such things, only to remember too late that all I have to do is push the right button; my jumble of homemade tapes—what the merchandisers hope I’ll call my video library—includes the last halves of a lot of shows. I have had better luck renting prerecorded tapes at my local store, though that has its hidden dangers too; revisiting favorite old movies can be disillusioning. Citizen Kane holds up, but have you seen La Dolce Vita lately? Or Abe Lincoln in Illinois? Or even She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which I paid to see seven times on its first go-round in 1949?
Being a millionaire no longer counts for much if you’re consumed by the desire to be rich, and it counts for even less if you’re consumed by the desire to be famous. In the most recent figures I can find—from 1976—the Internal Revenue Service estimated that a quarter of a million Americans had amassed gross estates worth $1,000,000 or more. To get on Forbes magazine’s 1984 list of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States, you needed a minimum net worth of $150 million. That seems like a significant sum, yet it would be absurd to argue that a significant percentage of the people on the list are famous.
Lee lacocca’s first real taste of fame came when Henry Ford II fired him. The negotiations that saved Chrysler brought him additional recognition and, eventually, wealth, but Iacocca never would have become a celebrity if he had not chosen the best salesman he had—himself—to plug Chrysler’s cars on television.
Late last year, on its obituary page, The New York Times acknowledged the passing of a multi-millionaire Oklahoma businessman named Sylvan Goldman. SYLVAN N. GOLDMAN, 86, DIES; the headline read. INVENTOR OF THE SHOPPING CART.
Born before the turn of the century in what was still officially designated the Indian Territory, Sylvan Goldman fought in the Argonne during World War I and returned to join his brother and uncle in establishing a wholesale grocery venture.
In a career lasting almost 60 years, Joseph Stimson promoted Wyoming and other Western states in strong and spirited photographs. He was not the West’s first photographer, nor its most artistic, but his work perfectly expressed the optimism and belief in progress of this area in the early twentieth century.
Stimson started as a portrait photographer in 1889, and was later hired by the Union Pacific Railroad to publicize its huge, costly operation. He went on to take promotional pictures for businesses and industries, and to boost tourism for the state. When he died in 1952, Wyoming’s State Archives, Museums and Historical Department bought all his 7500 existing photographs—most of them from glass-plate negatives. Mark Junge has selected 227 of them for his forthcoming J. E. Stimson: Photographer of the West, from which our portfolio is drawn. The book will be published soon by the University of Nebraska Press.
—B.K.
My first—and last—sight of Sinclair Lewis was in Union Square. Lewis Gannett, the book columnist for the New York Herald Tribune in the 1930s, had somehow contrived to make himself a penthouse of sorts atop a factory there, and, one night, he gave a party at which Sinclair Lewis was the central fact. From Gannett’s windows, you could see down to the grubby commerce that surrounded the square. There was a good view of General Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette enshrined in the park as statues but looking somewhat out of place amid the tumult, for in those days Union Square Park was the favorite staging area for leftists of every shade accusing one another of betraying the revolution.