An article that we published in August/September 1983 entitled “ The Age of the Octagon ” brought such a burst of letters from our readers that we ran a postscript in December of that year showing eight more of the appealing structures that our correspondents had called to our attention.
When the fog broke on the morning of October 2 six miles from Gonzales, Texas, Capt. Francisco Castaneda and his two hundred Mexican soldiers peered across the prairie and beheld a force of one hundred and fifty Texans ranged beneath a most provoking flag: upon it were painted a small cannon and the words COME AND TAKE IT . Captain Castaneda had in fact come to Gonzales to confiscate a six-pound brass cannon, given the town earlier by the Mexican government for defense against Comanches. But since then, according to a circular issued in the name of Mexico’s president Santa Anna, “The colonists established in Texas have… given the most unequivocal evidence of the extremity to which perfidy, ingratitude and the restless spirit that animates them can go.” They had taken arms against Mexico, angered by her unwillingness to grant them statehood, to reduce import duties, and to provide basic civil services.
The slavery question had been a focus of raging debate for years, but during the 1860 presidential election it blinded people to all other concerns. The Democratic party split over it into Northern and Southern factions; the Constitutional Union party was formed with the object of reaching a compromise on the issue; and, by thus weakening the opposition, the slavery question propelled the candidate of a recently established Northern party into the White House. On November 4 Abraham Lincoln was elected the first Republican President, winning the contest with only 40 percent of the popular vote but a strong majority in the Electoral College.
The November 22 inauguration of Pan American Airways’ Pacific route—the first commercial air transport available to the Pacific Islands—was a public relations extravaganza. Patriotic speeches were made, a letter from President Roosevelt was read, and the fervent comments of the governor of Hawaii and the president of the Philippines were relayed over short-wave radio. Nearly 150,000 people lined the shores of San Francisco Bay to watch the takeoff of the China Clipper , Pan Am’s flying boat, and the entire proceedings were broadcast around the world.
Liking Ike again…
Did you hear about the Dwight D. Elsenhower doll? You wind it up and it does nothing for eight years. That old joke pretty much summarizes the way historians viewed the President in the months following his second term. Ike’s great days had ended with World War II, they said; Eisenhower the President was weak, befuddled, none too bright—a leader who rarely rose to mediocrity, and whom a poll of scholars found to be among the nation’s ten worst Chief Executives. Just twenty years later, however, a similar survey placed him in the company of Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln. What had happened in those two intervening decades to so change the scholarly view? The Vietnam War had happened, along with a number of other national trials that put the calm and steady years of Elsenhower’s administration in a very different light. Steve Neal traces the rise of Elsenhower’s reputation.
Ashcan entrepreneur…
Geoffrey Ward’s fine story about President Roosevelt’s fight in the aftermath of polio (June/July) must have struck home to many reporters who worked in Washington in those days, including myself. I was a reporter for the United Press, much of the time at the Capitol. When the President delivered a message to Congress, we could look down on him from the press box as he stood at the lectern. With his speech in a folder lying before him, he would grasp the lectern with his left hand. With his right forefinger he followed his script as he spoke. In this way he could look up from his text to keep rapport with his audience and then return to the right spot in his text without stumbling or delay. I heard him on his return from Yalta when he spoke from his chair in the well of the House. He apologized for it, saying he knew his listeners would understand his wish to talk without the encumbrance of ten pounds of iron about him.
In tabulating the accomplishments of AT&T, “Breaking the Connection” omitted a unique and most important project: the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. This was a chain of some sixty radar stations designed and installed by a Bell System project team across Arctic North America, extending three thousand miles from northwest Alaska to the east coast of Baffin Island in eastern Canada. This passive defense system has served to detect attempted transpolar transgressions by alien aircraft since 1958.
In late 1952 the Department of Defense handed AT&T a secret study outlining a plan to detect the intrusion into North American airspace of subsonic aircraft. With it was a directive to design, procure, install, and test within two years a prototype installation to determine the feasibility of such a system.
If I ever kill anyone,” D. W. Griffith once exclaimed, “it won’t be an actor, but a musician.” He had been arguing with Joseph Carl Breil, his collaborator on the score for The Birth of a Nation. Griffith wanted to change some of the notes in the music they were planning to borrow, and Breil was outraged. “You can’t tamper with Wagner!” he cried. “It’s never been done!” But Griffith insisted that the music for his picture “wasn’t primarily music”; it was “music for motion pictures.”